A Coney Island of the Soul

...Yet over and over again throughout its history, as one aging generation mourned the passing of its particular era of rebellion, a younger, more hopeful group would be starting its own brave effort to transform both the arts and the world...

...Mabel Dodge's salons may have been pretentious and vapid, but "everybody" came, and the introduction to new ideas inspired a number of writers and thinkers like Reed, Wilson, Walter Lippmann, and Emma Goldman...

...He created a Whitmanesque persona of boisterous, expansive unconventionality...

...The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven posed for artists in bizarre outfits of her own devising...

...Who could determine the boundary between insanity and genius...

...Our 21 st-century intellectuals seem less prone than their forebears to mixing with the proletariat in picturesque slums...

...Overall, there could hardly be a better guidebook to the various movements—political, literary, artistic, and sociological— spawned by the Village during the half century covered in the pages of Republic of Dreams...

...1910-1960 (Simon & Schuster, 617 pp., $35.00), the late Ross Wetzsteon, an editor and drama critic at the Village Voice for many years, notes that by 1916 people were already lamenting that "Greenwich Village isn't what it used to be...

...My memories are of cockroach-ridden studios where the sound of orgies in the next apartment earned through thin walls and druggy panhandlers roamed the halls we had to pass through to reach the toilet...

...Once on top, they fired cap pistols, attached balloons to the parapet, and declared Greenwich Village "a free and independent republic...

...I notice the Provincetown, Massachusetts, 2001 Annual Report includes three poems by the late Villager Harry Kemp, once known as "the studious hobo...

...The delightful chapter on the Provincetown Players is a reminder that the Village established far-flung outposts of creativity— most notably on Cape Cod and in Taos, New Mexico...

...Part of the Village's attraction derived from its tight quarters fostering a genuine community, a small town surrounded by skyscrapers...

...The ethos of the place, Wetzsteon writes, was to "create a miniature society where personal idiosyncrasy could flourish through communal solidarity...

...The Village was as famous (or notorious) for its oddballs as for artists and writers...

...I had finally been exposed to the works of some living writers who still made the place home—like Djuna Barnes or Joseph Mitchell—and would have given much to meet them...

...In New York City, especially in Greenwich Village, down among the cranks and the misfits and the one-lungers and the has-beens and the might've-beens and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knowswhats, I have always felt at home...

...An important quality that allowed the Village to attract rebels and artists for so long was its inexpensiveness...

...But for the true bohemians, forging their brave new culture, any congenial setting can shine with the promise of fresh life and ambitions on the verge of fulfillment...

...Some of the genuine artists and literary figures, like Jackson Pollock and Djuna Barnes, behaved no less eccentrically...

...he explores how they reshape culture and partake of contemporary ideals...

...Today most of the Village has been turned into another Mall of America...

...His account of the relentless sexual experimentation of many Villagers paints a compelling sociological picture without being prurient...

...In an Afterword, Wetzsteon's daughter Rachel explains that her father died too suddenly, in 1998, to complete a last chapter on the Village of the 1950s, which would also have contained some musings on the future of bohemianism...

...Thus he writes that "Elinor Wylie was refused membership in the League of American Penwomen—presumably because she was a lesbian,' when the very heterosexual Wylie—a longtime Village resident and a fascinating poet—was ostracized for having abandoned her husband and baby to run off with a married man...

...Peacetime and the economic boom quieted all reservations about the viability of the American system...

...While at Bennington College, I sometimes went to New York for a Village evening...

...While the narcissistic Dodge was this milieu's supreme hostess, her sometime lover, John Reed, was its presiding genius...

...Wealthy Mabel Dodge held court at 23 Fifth Avenue, before an indiscriminate mixture of guests gathered to discuss such novel topics as "the Wobblies and Freud, cubism and free love, anarchism and birth control...

...The author also vividly recounts the disorderly yet stimulating editorial meetings at the Masses under Eastman...

...Guido Bruno offered sightseers a tour of a "real" garret...

...The final chapter, on Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists, is particularly enthralling...

...One might argue that a current version of Dawn Powell probably is checking her proofs at some mass-produced coffeehouse where portraits of O'Neill and Milky beam down at her from the walls, glossy books about Pollock lie on coffee tables, and the music of Charles Mingus or Philip Glass wafts through the sound system...

...Once, modeling for Charles Biddle, she placed "two tomato cans over her nipples andbetween them a small birdcage with "a crestfallen canary.'" The European aristocrat at one point cadged her way into a friend's apartment, then imperiously upbraided her host for not moving out so she could live there...

...At 139 Macdougal Street stood the Provincetown Playhouse, where amateur actors and fledgling dramatists made Broadway look stuffy and outdated...

...Back in the 19th century, when New York introduced the grid system, Villagers strongly rejected it, preferring to keep their crazy quilt of streets whose names and numbers seem to change with every turn...

...Their heritage lives on in peculiar ways...

...Now genuine artists congregate in overpriced cafés, where they are permitted to sit for hours without buying much...

...Four decades before Allen Ginsberg celebrated his "lost battalion of platonic conversationalists" in Howl, the perpetually enthusiastic Reed hymned his own generation in "A Day in Bohemia": Yet we are free who live in Washington Square, We dare to think as uptown wouldn't dare, Blazing our nights with arguments uproarious, What care we for a dull old world censorious, When each is sure he'll fashion something glorious...

...The only practical result of this incident was that the door to the base of the arch was henceforth locked...

...Characters change mates, make and lose literary and artistic reputations...

...Many Villagers had migrated from other parts of the country in search of a place where outcasts might feel accepted...

...Joe Gould, Boston Brahmin turned bum, claimed to be working on An Oral History of Our Time, a book that would be the ultimate record of New York life...

...Such lapses notwithstanding, it should be stressed that Wetzsteon generally displays a gift for capturing significant details...

...Indeed, he turned out overly polished little lyrics...

...Bruno, the "Barnum of Bohemia," staged the entire spectacle...

...The cramped streets bustled with activities meant to strike out against capitalism, bourgeois morality and outmoded art...

...They evoke a messy, anarchic, alcoholic environment that seems to bring human foibles to the fore...

...To scornful outsiders, the Republic of Dreams always looked like a seedy bar full of winos, psychos and other losers, or an arty venue designed to attract gapers on the order of Guido's Garret...

...In 1922 this radical visited the USSR where, in contrast to many of his liberal contemporaries, he foresaw the dangers of Stalinism...

...Neither eccentricity nor even madness debarred acceptance in this atmosphere...

...The retelling of Dylan Thomas' sordid collapse and death adds nothing new to other chronicles...

...And his remarks about the unintended effects of the sexual revolution in the teens and '20s suggest how deeply the author thought about its counterpart in the '60s and'70s...

...The bohemians found the democratic camaraderie and the unruliness stimulating, especially when most of the country still maintained rather rigid class barriers and morality was strict and reproachful...

...Alcoholic Max Bodenheim wrote his surreal poems on napkins, then sold them to tourists for 25 cents, uttering sentiments like "Greenwich Village is the Coney Island of the soul...

...Wetzsteon begins his account in 1917, when a handful of actors and artists, including Marcel Duchamp and John Sloan, climbed up the arch at Washington Square Park...

...Rich and poor, educated and unlettered, union organizers, merchants, poets, recent college graduates, painters, working-class immigrants—all were crammed into close proximity...

...Nevertheless, they can always cheer themselves up by recalling the stultifying pettiness of the small Ohio towns they fled...

...But the escapade typified the prevailing spirit of the area...

...Marks Place, during the very hot summer of 1966, even the Beatniks had decamped to the West Coast...

...Within a decade he was on the Right, but Wilson, no conservative, believed Eastman "perceptively challenged the philosophical premises of Communism...

...Vincent Millay, Eugene O'Neill and the Provincetown Players, Marianne Moore and Kenneth Burke of the Dial, et al...

...Village dwellers started artistic communities in both places, sometimes traveling back and forth, sometimes emigrating...

...Occasionally, too, Wetzsteon gets a story wrong...

...My high school classmates—reflecting the popular culture of the early 1960s—assumed I hoped to become a Beatnik poet in Greenwich Village...

...Louis, Jackson Pollock left Wyoming, Joseph Mitchell moved up from North Carolina, and Wetzsteon himself deserted Montana...

...While depicting Pollock as a tragic figure who inspired pity and terror, Wetzsteon offers some of his most profound insights into artistic movements...

...Discussing the collapse of the early feminist movement after women finally won the vote, he observes that during World War I, "the resurgence of patriotism meant the end of idealism...

...Injustice, oppression and exploitation, most Americans felt, had been swept away by the rise of prosperity...

...Who was to say what constituted genuine art in a culture devoted to breaking down conventions...

...Revolutionary, playwright, poet, and future author of Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), he seemed the incarnation of a new spirit of defiance...

...You knew your neighbors, shopped at the same markets, frequented the same bars, and strolled the same parks...

...The section on Gould is primarily a rehash of Joseph Mitchell's Joe Gould's Secret...

...they were just as apt to be found in other cities or on college campuses across the country, "part of the increasing popularity of bohemia across the nation, culminating in the counterculture of the '60s...

...In reality, these "struggling artists" were hired actors (their pay was use of the garret and an occasional meal...

...After all, they had moved there because, in the words of the Masses editor Max Eastman, "We wanted to live our poetry...

...he could quote long chunks by heart, but it turned out he had never written any of it down...

...She then adds: "Even in its glory days (as this book demonstrates over and over) the Village was more a state of mind than a spot on a map...

...Posters and manifestos and sketches lined the walls, jugs of wine sat on the windowsills, dirty dishes littered counters, mattresses were strewn on the floor—the middle-class image of the artists' gay and irresponsible life...

...Americans often confuse the two, which are in fact usually in opposition—and the Utopian thinking of the early teens instantly gave way to the jingoism of the War...

...He is best when stepping back from mere narrative to analyze a situation...

...He portrays the embrace of the abstract expressionists by Life magazine—once arbiter of middle-class values—as an attempt to domesticate the Village itself, to tame it into "a charming community of American eccentrics, at once irrelevant and prophetic, as if everything it stood for could be both rejected and absorbed, as if all the Villagers'efforts to subvert American ideals could be made to conform to them...

...The New York novels of Ohioan Dawn Powell produced "the best record of the Village landscape," in Wetzsteon's view...

...They were only half right: Being more retro in my tastes, I dreamed of emulating the Villagers of the '20s and '30s, that golden generation of John Reed, Edmund Wilson, Edna St...

...Wetzsteon understands as well how Left-wing factions often jockey for dominance, instead of making common cause, and how that infighting only helps to maintain the status quo...

...Wetzsteon quotes an unidentified Villager saying, "We were radicals devoted to anything, so long as it was taboo in the Midwest...

...But Louis Untermeyer said Kemp wrote "every kind of poetry except the kind one might imagine Kemp would write...

...Soon I was convinced that the Village was more appealing in the pages of books than firsthand...

...The weaker parts of Republic of Dreams are the least original ones...

...In Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia...

...As long as there are restless rebels and determined dreamers, there will be a Republic of Dreams...

...Another Midwest transplant, Kemp was more a poseur than a poet...

...The offices of the Leftist Masses, one of the most influential literary-political journals of the day, were at 91 Greenwich Avenue...

...A chapter devoted to Djuna Barnes condenses much of the excellent 1995 biography by Phillip Herring into an excessively gothic speculation on her weird sex life...

...Strangely, Wetzsteon does not mention this telling description, although he covers Gould extensively...

...In his final pages, however, the author does remark that by the late '50s, abstract expressionist painters and Beats were no longer confined to the Village...

...Wetzsteon describes last century's teens and '20s with gusto and charm...

...An autobiographical piece by Gould began, "In my hometown I never felt at home...

...But as I found during my abortive visit in 1966, though rents remained low, pricey boutiques and tourist restaurants were beginning to drive out the old dives...

...Rachel Wetzsteon writes that "it's hard to imagine Dawn Powell checking proofs of her new novel while sipping café latte on a plush couch at Starbucks, or Maxwell Bodenheim jotting down ideas for his latest mad poem on a napkin at superslick Xando...

...Once, weekend bohemian wannabes swarmed to Minetta's Tavern, the Brevoort or the Cedar in hopes of meeting real poets or painters in what a satirical magazine of the teens had already dubbed "Greenwich Thrillage...

...Mabel Dodge grew up in Buffalo, John Reed in Oregon...

...Even Americans who have remained hostile to the Village have been fascinated by it because it has been a kind of laboratory in which a nation at once dedicated to militant individualism and to middle-class conformity could witness attempts to overcome that paradox...

...I stuck out...

...At that point, Amiri Baraka and Andy Warhol seemed to be on every corner...

...After paying a quarter for admission, they could gawk at "bearded young men contemplating their half-finished paintings and bob-haired young women in smocks and sandals declaiming their imagist poetry...

...By the time I actually got to spend several weeks on St...

...Later, Hart Crane forsook Cleveland, Marianne Moore decamped from St...