Beloved Community

Greenwich Village! Those two words conjure up a rush of images. Narrow, winding streets defiantly at odds with the grid pattern imposed on the rest of Manhattan in the early 19th century. Tiny theaters presenting plays no commercial producer would touch. Precariously financed magazines publishing articles so incendiary in language, so blunt that the contributors frequently found themselves in court. Smoky coffee shops crowded with people dressing and behaving in ways that would never have been tolerated in the hometowns they had fled.

For more than a century, the Village gave refuge to the nation’s misfits, enfolding them in a community that embraced individual eccentricity. This community may now seem fragmented, dispersed to New York City’s outer boroughs as rents skyrocket and the investment bankers move in, but fragmentation, dispersal and gentrification are nothing new. “Greenwich Village isn’t what it used to be,” critic and editor Ross Wetzsteon reminds us, was uttered as early as 1916.

Wetzsteon’s sweeping yet intimate history of America’s most famous bohemian neighborhood is, regrettably, both the first and last book he wrote. (He edited two collections of plays.) The intelligence, wit and shrewd analytical abilities that distinguish “Republic of Dreams” will be familiar qualities to those who read Wetzsteon’s theater reviews and essays in the Village Voice during the three decades before his death in 1998.

The structural flaws of the narrative’s second half may be attributed in part to the fact that he didn’t live to finish or revise the manuscript; his daughter Rachel’s afterword states that he planned a final chapter bringing the story up to the present. However, it’s unlikely that chapter would have resolved these technical problems, which spring from the author’s generous spirit and ambitious desire to encompass the entire Village experience. Like the rebels he profiles with such sympathy and acuity, Wetzsteon’s successes and failures are inextricably intertwined.

To begin with the good news, he has written the best account to date of the explosion of artistic and political energy between 1912 and 1917 that has been called everything from “the joyous season” to “the lyric years.” Wetzsteon achieves a delicate equilibrium of abiding affection and clear-eyed criticism as he examines such outsized personalities as Mabel Dodge, John Reed, Max Eastman, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Jig Cook and Eugene O’Neill, with long-overdue attention paid to lesser-known women like Crystal Eastman and Mary Heaton Vorse.

Through such seminal, though short-lived, institutions as The Masses magazine and the Provincetown Players, he argues, this generation gave shape to the amorphous notion of what it meant to be a bohemian in America and located its geographic center: “Young men and women dissatisfied with a small-town or middle-class life but only vaguely attuned to the insurgent sensibility began to hear tales of an almost mythical place called Greenwich Village ... where people pursued love and beauty and justice without having to respond to parental invocations of responsibility.”

Many writers, particularly academics, have condescended to the prewar Villagers’ exuberant but intellectually sloppy intermingling of socialism, feminism, Freudianism, modernism and any other -ism they could find. Popular histories such as Allen Churchill’s “The Improper Bohemians,” while more sympathetic, have tended to jovially trivialize the rebellion as a simple expression of youthful high spirits, which is hardly a full assessment of the risks of lengthy jail terms knowingly taken by Sanger when she disseminated birth-control information or by The Masses editors when they opposed in print the United States’ entry into World War I.

Wetzsteon avoids both of these traps. He’s well aware that his subjects “alternated between the frivolous and the fearless,” and he’s particularly shrewd on the role played by their well-publicized antics (climbing to the top of Washington Square Arch to declare the Village “a free and independent republic” is typical) in establishing “a common phenomenon of the twentieth century--success measured not by praise but by notoriety.”

But he values their espousal of personal liberation as a political principle, spotlighting it as an enduring trait of American dissidence in all its varieties: “Wasn’t heightened consciousness the path both to individual happiness and social justice? Change yourself and change the world--the agenda of the Lyrical Left in the prewar Village may have been naive but it was hardly modest.”

That all-encompassing ethos reemerged during the 1960s, and Wetzsteon (who arrived in the Village early in that decade) clearly shares it. He knows the difference between a visionary and a crank, but he understands that the Village has been shaped by both, and he refuses to leave out the cranks. This decision, in many ways admirable, has an ultimately unfortunate impact.

The book’s first half, perfectly balanced between individual lives and communal endeavors even in its chapter titles (“Mabel Dodge’s Salon,” “Max Eastman and The Masses”) closes with a characteristically astute portrait of Edna St. Vincent Millay and the shift in mood during the 1920s, when new residents saw the Village primarily as a place where they could lead their unconventional lives unmolested by the bourgeoisie, rather than a staging ground for social and sexual revolution.

Had Wetzsteon stopped there, he might well have produced the definitive history of Greenwich Village’s most culturally significant period, with suggestive foreshadowings of how 20th century bohemianism would be altered by the mass media.

That’s not what he wanted to do. From Millay he moves on to a chapter called “Eminent Villagers,” which showcases his gift for vivid thumbnail sketches and his mounting difficulties in controlling the material. This chapter takes charlatan Guido Bruno (“the Barnum of Bohemia”), genuine nut case Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (famous for bizarre costumes that several times got her arrested for indecent exposure), wealthy dilettante Robert Clairmont (whose open-door parties went on for days) and “hobo poet” Harry Kemp (first of the great Village self-mythologizers) and tosses them together with more substantial figures who are hardly Villagers at all.

Margaret Anderson paused there with The Little Review for a few years en route from Chicago to Paris; Willa Cather lived there from 1906 to 1932 because it gave her “order, comfort, security, and especially privacy--the very things most young people came to the Village to escape”; and Theodore Dreiser stayed there not because he found a community but, like the Abstract Expressionists several decades later, he found a neighborhood of “low rents, cheap bars, and willing women.”

Wetzsteon’s point, made with increasing insistence as his chronology becomes choppier, is that the Village “was a community in service of individuality.” He doesn’t flinch from showing that as individualism came to the fore, eccentricity often degenerated into neurosis, and the celebration of difference became the cult of failure.

When elderly writer Djuna Barnes, asked for her ID in order to cash a check, loftily declares, “Do I look like the sort of person who would have a driver’s license?” it’s a hilarious moment that subtly demonstrates how many Legendary Village Characters happily brandished their inability to deal with modern society instead of aspiring to change it.

But as the characters grow more self-obsessed, both they and the author’s well-articulated themes are more tenuously related to Greenwich Village. Hart Crane and e.e. cummings both came to dislike Village bohemians; Dylan Thomas was a foreigner who made them an audience for his self-destructive theatrics. Thomas Wolfe was as crazy in Brooklyn as in downtown Manhattan; Delmore Schwartz as alienated on college campuses as on Greenwich Avenue. Wetzsteon’s decision to thread his narrative through personalities, which worked well at first, begins to seem like a mistake.

From time to time--in solid chapters on Maxwell Bodenheim and Joe Gould, a tender one on Dawn Powell--he persuasively reforges the Village link. But the book closes, running out of steam rather than wrapping up with the Abstract Expressionists, who in Wetzsteon’s words “never really regarded themselves as Villagers at all.”

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the author ends his account in the days just before he came to the Village; as he notes in the introduction, “from its very birth, bohemia seemed to exist in the past.”

There is much to like about this admittedly flawed book. It’s a consistent pleasure to read prose studded with such marvelous sentences as these, “The Village is the only community in America where Edgar Allan Poe could score drugs in the 1840s and Henry James could stroll past grazing cows in the 1890s,” and “Village women ... soon learned that many men all too enthusiastically encouraged them to throw off their clothes along with their shackles.”

Wetzsteon has sympathetically articulated a crucial tenet of bohemianism--the insistence that personal and political change go hand in hand--and gently identified some of its pathologies, in particular the cult of failure and self-destruction. Anyone who cares about American culture should read “Republic of Dreams.” Its contradictions are our contradictions, and its largeness of heart is something that has been sorely lacking in our public discourse for several decades.