It Takes a Village

...everything is in the fact of being a decadent poet...

...People didn't stay there once they'd had it...

...This area was really an extension of the Lower East Side and what would later become Little Italy...

...It is a place where they can change themselves, escaping the rules that apply in their own neighborhoods...

...Here one can see the change effected in the culture by Eliot's influence...

...It meant books...

...Toward Seventh Avenue, first and second generation immigrants lived in a place where the priests gave services in Italian...

...the Village belonged as much to the Irish youths who went east to fight Jewish gangs for turf along Houston Street as it did to Henry James, who went north to visit Edith Wharton...

...While it would be easy to say we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us...

...he codified what has become the received image of Greenwich Village— one of wild nights spent violating the Eighteenth Amendment while consorting with bohemian temptresses...

...The Greenwich Village Reader excerpts from his diaries and writings on the 1920s, which anyone interested in the neighborhood should read in their entirety...

...After the war, younger writers drawn not by the life of the neighborhood but by the legend created by St...

...Tourists and students, whether from Wyoming or Berlin, come here to exhibit themselves and indulge base appetites...

...Vincent Millay and Broyard experienced it while reading Kafka, but that does not make it a different moment...

...important because in them and in a long memoir of Edna St...

...This sort of bohemianism (Wilson thought sitting on the floor to be a very bohemian act) reigned until the 1940s...

...the defining figure of the period is probably the poet Delmore Schwartz...

...His generation didn't even notice the disintegration of the old Italian and Irish populations that had held together the community in which the bohemians flourished...

...Many of the Village's best writers, such as Marianne Moore and Dawn Powell and some of the European emigres who formed the early staff of the New School, stand somewhere apart from these groups, but none of them did Tim Marchman, who is working on his first novel, is a lifelong resident of Brooklyn and a regular contributor to the New York Sun...

...they simply stayed long enough to meet their replacements...

...This is something that only a young person could feel, and while it registers a change from earlier generations (although it would be incorrect to say that Anatole Broyard cared more for books than Edmund Wilson, or less for nightlife), it shows how the neighborhood had failed to mature...

...It would be fatuous to complain that there are no more artists, and that the place has fallen into the hands of bobos and basketball players and hoodlums who attend New York University and think war is wonderful because it gives them something to define themselves against: The question is not only how the Village has come to this, but whether it was ever really any different...

...Eliot—that to be a poet was to be the impersonal vessel of an unseen force, that one had to live a life of dissolution to become its servant...

...For all that is wrong with the Village (as Ross Wetzsteon writes in Republic of Dreams, "disaffection from the middle class became an end in itself . . . irresponsibility [became] a sign of authenticity"), it has been for ninety years a place where young people—and not only young people—come into contact with culture...

...This is the context in which Edmund Wilson's portraits of late-night parties with midwesterners and exotics and artists are set...

...Mark Twain (or whoever), the story usually goes, may have lived there, but only for a few months...

...The typical figure of that time is probably LeRoi Jones, a middle-class black man posing as a ghettoized radical...

...The walls are bare), it is not life but the illusion of it that is the center of interest for people writing about Greenwich Village...

...They are desperately trying to have an experience that defines them...

...Among writers who found a physical and spiritual home in the Village, few write of school, or work, or family...

...The Village is for these reasons generally more notable for who lived there than for the work they did there, or the work it inspired...

...This is where Henry James was born, and where Cynthia Ozick first read Partisan Review...

...O. Henry lived there...

...Thelonious Monk played with John Coltrane there at the Five Spot, and Coltrane played with Eric Dolphy at the Vanguard...

...There was a belief among serious people in those days— before anyone had been reared on T.S...

...What lives on, however, is the moment it represents, the moment when a person defines himself in relation to culture...

...The Village was an oddly appropriate place to do it: neatly cleaved by Sixth Avenue, it was a place where two separate neighborhoods bled into one another...

...These bohemians drank and stayed up to all hours and enjoyed vigorous sex lives, consciously rejecting the still-forming mores of the American middle class...

...First, the artistic community there was never large compared with the broader population...

...It is at once a provincial and maddeningly theatrical sort of place...

...Bohemia did not mean to him, or to James Agee or Philip Rahv or the others associated with the Partisan Review, just sexual liberation and indulgence in alcohol and sleep deprivation...

...eighty years ago you would have had to knock on the thick oak door and give a special password to get in...

...second, it was populated mostly by third- and fourth-rate writers and by people whose work went into making themselves conspicuous...

...Their blindness is one they share with their subjects, all too few of whom looked down from the windows of the parties they attended to the streets below...

...Books," he writes, "were our weather, our environment, our clothing...

...Vincent Millay, the Partisan Review crowd, and that of the Abstract Expressionists...

...The bohemians were living in a place where high and low culture were neighbors...

...Treating the Village as if it were the territory of the republic of letters, and not as the southern lip of a growing city, a place where the bohemians lived but also a place where poor immigrant families were trying to raise their children, is a mistake made by both The Greenwich Village Reader and Republic of Dreams, but probably an unavoidable one...

...In Kafka Was the Rage, probably the best memoir written about the neighborhood, Broyard writes about how people sought defining moments not in one another but in literature...

...There are plenty of fakers, but also people who genuinely value or at least wish to value literature and music and art...

...Vincent Millay and Wilson and others created something more concentrated and sustainable...

...Republic of Dreams operates by a principle of selection which dictates that only those who were particularly associated with the Village are written about, and so most of these figures (with exceptions, such as Hart Crane and Jackson Pollock) are either second-raters like Djuna Barnes or wholly frivolous grotesques like Maxwell Bodenheim, a drunken bum who sold for a quarter poems Ezra Pound had praised...

...Melville, Hemingway, Faulkner, and both Cranes lived there...

...By that time the Village had been a writer's neighborhood for twenty years...

...The neighborhood's decline, which neither book addresses, began in the late 1950s, with new residents less concerned with culture than abstract notions of authenticity...

...If the writing in this anthology is fixated on this moment of self-realization, it is partly because the community celebrates such mirror-gazing, but also because the Village's reputation for doing so attracts those who are searching for such an experience...

...Wilson went there at least in part because of the reputation it already enjoyed...

...And yet it was his account of the Village that became the synecdoche for an entire generation...

...To find the place you pass through the courtyard of an apartment building...

...much past the 1950s...

...BY TIM MARCHMAN Greenwich Village has long been a neighborhood of which New Yorkers are slightly ashamed, and indeed there is something unseemly about it...

...From the beginning, with people like John Reed and Harry Kemp (author of "A Poet's Room," which opens I have a table, cot and chair / And nothing more...

...Toward Broadway were the town-houses of the gilded aristocracy: This was where Henry James was born, on Washington Square Park, and it was a sort of southern annex to Union Square and Gramercy Park...

...It has to do with a few people—generally privileged ones—in the hot nights of their youth drinking and going to jazz clubs and raving to one another about the authenticity of it all, astounded by the fact that they are living a life they have always dreamed of, and by the particularities and peculiarities of that life, its every gesture and twitch...

...like William Dean Howells and Theodore Dreiser, he wrote about the bohemians (a word at that point only about thirty years old...

...For many people, though—maybe most—to think of the Village is to think of the 1920s...

...When greater figures—Saul Bellow, Nathanael West, Henry Roth—appear in this history, they do not stick around...

...The writing most associated with the Village has nothing to do with the quotidian life of the neighborhood...

...There is a bar on the west side, Chumley's, now frequented mostly by tourists, that was once a speakeasy...

...Anatole Broyard, an obscure young man fresh from the Army, met Dwight MacDonald and Delmore Schwartz and Dylan Thomas and Anais Nin there...

...As the artists drove up the rents, these groups drifted south and into the boroughs, and into the void they left came a million faceless artists and professional students and self-aggrandizers, none of whom were suited to the routines that keep a neighborhood whole...

...Through the 1920s and the 1930s one sees the sort of artistic community that is associated with the Village, but it is largely artificial, quantitatively and qualitatively...

...Through The Greenwich Village Reader, one sees the same moment being described over and over: Wilson experienced it in the arms of Edna St...

...This is not surprising in a writer like Reed, who when not being buried in the Kremlin was busy writing lines like Muse, you have got a job before you,— / Come, buckle to it, I implore you...

...Vincent Millay, who deflowered him ("One cannot write about Edna Millay without bringing into the foreground of the picture her intoxicating effect on people...

...It is surprising in Edmund Wilson...

...we became them...

...They are embarrassing, but important: embarrassing because it can be nothing else to see the writer of Axel's Castle trust the same facile myths as Harry Kemp...

...The Greenwich Village Reader, an anthology edited by June Skinner Sawyers, divides the writers and artists whose achievements earned the Village its current reputation into four generations: the Communists and late feminists, the cohort around Edmund Wilson and Edna St...

...We didn't simply read books...

...And yet, the Village has always been brimming with poseurs and self-indulgent dilettantes, even during its heyday...

...Nin told him about the weird crush Edmund Wilson had on her and reminded him of what he called "melancholy Paris hotels of expatriate writing...

...The Village is still a place where artists and intellectuals live, but these artists sell their paintings for hundreds of thousands of dollars and these intellectuals reside in university-subsidized housing...