Christine Stansell's American Moderns

...By the early 1960s, historians were giving Greenwich Village serious scholarly attention, depicting the pre-war period as "the first years of our own time"—as Henry F. May called it in the subtitle of his magisterial work, The End of American Innocence (1959...

...Only those who hoped for more could be so deeply disappointed...

...And although the story has been told many times before, Stansell's account of the Villagers' ultimately failed efforts to live what Bourne called "the experimental life" has particular poignancy because of the seriousness with which she takes their original hopes for sexual freedom and equality...

...THE BAR has been set pretty high, in other words, for anyone approaching this subject for the first time, especially as an episode in the history of ideas or expressive culture...

...Is it not this compensatory optimism, more than anything else, that makes Stansell's Greenwich Village a Bohemia for our time...

...Free love and egalitarian friendships ended in a relegitimation of heterosexual monogamy as "companionate marriage" or, worse, as "male feminism with a vengeance...

...Along with contemporary books on the same period in Europe and Great Britain, such as H. Stuart Hughes's Consciousness and Society (1957) and Raymond Williams's Culture and Society (1958), these studies of Village radicals convinced younger readers that ideas mattered, that intellectuals had played a role as significant historical actors, and—beyond that—that the rich idealistic and historicist currents in trans-Atlantic thought of the turnofthe-century period represented an alternative to the positivistic, behavioralist, and formalist tendencies that had dominated the social sciences and the humanities in American universities since the end of the Second World War...

...It invited the taint of the vulgar, the cheap, the immoral...

...American Moderns devotes pages to the efforts of Villagers to make connections in the publishing world, to produce a muckraking literature that "fed the bottom the line," to break into the big time at the New Republic, and to perfect new techniques of publicity and self-promotion, while it remains virtually silent on the pragmatism of James and Dewey, the American reception of Nietzsche and Freud, the debates between ethnic pluralists and cosmopolitans, the tensions and affinities between Morrisites and modernists in the arts, and the efforts by Villagers to transcend the division between "high" and "low" in new genres of cultural expression...

...In a characteristic move, Stansell shows how Goldman's influence reached to Margaret Anderson's Little Review, a journal long renowned for its modernist poetry and aesthetics, but which appears in this book primarily as a forum for anarcho-feminist radicalism...

...Alfred Kazin wrote of his thrill in discovering Bourne and Brooks in the late 1930s, as his recoil against the nationalist pieties of the Popular Front pushed him back toward their more compelling intellectual stance...

...Independentminded thinkers—who tried to join autobiography and polemic, cultural and political criticism, modernism and libertarian socialism, the personal and the political—made their way to the example of mythical Villagers such as Bourne, Stieglitz, Van Wyck Brooks, Mable Dodge, Crystal and Max Eastman, Emma Goldman, and John Reed in search of a usable past...

...How Bourne would hay* howled at such an uplifting eulogy...

...Previous accounts of modernity, she acknowledges, have explored the impact of "machines, speed, electricity, explosions, abstraction, the autonomy of language, the autonomy of paint, the death of God, and the divided self...

...CASEY NELSON BLAKE is professor of history and director of the American Studies program at Columbia University...

...AMERICAN MODERNS: BOHEMIAN NEW YORK AND THE CREATION OF A NEW CENTURY by Christine Stansell Metropolitan Books, 2000 432 pp $30 ATTORNEY GENERAL A. Mitchell Palmer had barely begun his roundup of foreignborn radicals when alumni of the Greenwich Village "Little Renaissance" of the 1910s began to write the movement's epitaph...

...For the postwar left, Greenwich Village invited celebration and condemnation simultaneously...

...It was the fight to speak publicly about unpopular ideas that united members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), anarchists like Goldman, birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger, champions of frank talk and explicit writing about sexuality, the socialist editors of the Masses and other dissident publications that drew the heavy hand of government repression during the First World War, and modernists Anderson and Ezra Pound, whose publication of James Joyce's Ulysses prompted one of the most important censorship trials of the century...

...Throughout the left intelligentsia," she writes, "the emancipated woman stood at the symbolic center of a program for cultural regeneration...

...She also regrets that so many of the moderns were indifferent to new tendencies in popular culture and belittles their appeal for a reinvigorated high culture as a strategy for assimilation into elite publishing circles...

...120 n DISSENT / Summer 2001...

...One cannot understand why friendship mattered so DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 119 BOOKS deeply to these women and men without knowing their beliefs—drawn from romantic and republican sources—that friendship could counter the cold rationalism of a secular culture and ground an otherwise anonymous civic identity in fellow feeling...

...For Goldman, "a sympathetic view of popular culture— and of the polyglot American energies it embodied—was unthinkable," Stansell complains...

...Her best sections are on the free love movement, the experiments in "open" romantic relationships among the Villagers, and the earnest efforts of women and men to forge Goldman's ideal of "true companionship and oneness" in love and friendship...

...Waldo Frank's Our America (1919) set the tone for much of what was to come...

...When communists gave 116 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 BOOKS the Randolph Bourne Award to honor those advocating peace during the years of the HitlerStalin pact, the "realist" appropriation of Bohemia collapsed into cynicism...

...He is writing a book on the politics of contemporary public art in the United States...

...Stansell's goal is to show how the "conversational community" that was Bohemian New York was born from overlapping struggles for free speech...

...Even friendship and conversation receive clumsy treatment here...

...Biographies of Bourne, Dodge, Goldman, and Reed, studies of the Stieglitz-O'Keeffe group and the Masses and Seven Arts circles, monographs on the Patterson strike pageant and Armory Show of 1913, and a small library's worth of reassessments of pragmatism and its critics provided an Americanist counterpart to the outpouring of books by former New Leftists who dug through Lukács, Gramsci, Benjamin, DISSENT / Summer 2001 n I 17 BOOKS Adorno, and other western Marxists in pursuit of ancestors and answers...

...The turbulent romances of John Reed and Louise Bryant and of Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce serve Stansell (as they have previous authors) as cautionary tales of sexual modernism...

...Stansell peoples her "conversational community" with individuals who lived for "free-thought talk," as Max Eastman called it, and who believed that honest conversation between women and men about politics, literature, love, and (especially) sex was the means to self-realization and a more vital culture...

...Performance, connections, self-promotion, talk for its own sake: this is Bohemia as the Renaissance Weekend retreat favored by the Clintons in their glory days, a Bohemia for a neoliberal age that has learned to contain unsettling memories of utopias past...

...May's book and Christopher Lasch's study of the emergence of intellectuals as a "social group," The New Radicalism in America (1965), remain the best guides to the ideas that inspired the Village renaissance—the intoxicating mix of Whitman, Ruskin, Morris, James, Dewey, Bergson, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Freud, Ellis, Marx, and Wells—that provoked young writers and artists on both sides of the Atlantic to pronounce the coming of a new social and sexual dispensation...

...Stansell draws heavily on a quarter-century of work by historians of women and the working class to recast the story of Greenwich Village as a social movement of sorts and makes use of the work of previous intellectual biographies to liven her account with finely drawn portraits of that movement's most vivid personalities...

...Goldman may have been a master performer, Bourne may have lived and died for friendship, but they and other Villagers were people who were passionate about ideas, who were literally drunk on ideas, and any serious account of their lives must ultimately work through those ideas and assess them...

...Along the way, Stansell revives the breathtaking promise that feminism held for women and men alike in Village circles...

...What Lasch characterized as an "estrangement from the middle class," an "identification with other outcasts," and a "confusion of culture and politics" explained both what was valuable in a tradition that ran from Mable Dodge to the young Norman Mailer, as well as its irrationalist and self-destructive impulses...

...Not that all twentieth-century intellectuals acquiesced in the postwar separation of cultural and political radicalism...

...The great achievement of Greenwich Village was its fusion of political and cultural radicalism—epitomized by the work of the brilliant critic Randolph Bourne, whose early death from influenza in December 1918 marked the end of a moment of extraordinary promise...

...Warren Beatty's 1981 film epic about John Reed and Louise Bryant, Reds, was Hollywood's contribution to this genre, with "the teens" standing in for "the sixties" as a site for boomer self-reflection (and self-congratulation...

...Stansell is no exception...

...But as much as she seeks to rehabilitate what was utopian in Greenwich Village, the net effect of her approach is ultimately deflationary...

...When she tells us that it was a yearning for "a dash of the `other'" that led WASP Villagers to seek out contact with immigrants (if not African-Americans), that "everywhere, writers wanted to turn literary life into something big, loaded with transformative possibilities," or that Bourne made "Dewey's faith in civic life into some thing much more personal and playful—even sexy," one winces with the knowledge that intellectual matters of life-and-death significance to the moderns have been reduced to catchphrases...

...Yet she also closes with the reassurance that Bourne's is a patriotic story of sorts, and that "America, for all its fits and starts of memory, never quite forgets those who held the country to its grandest, most encompassing possibilities...

...May, Lasch, Williams, and Hughes cleared a path through the thicket of cold war academic professionalism to an earlier period that, if carefully assessed, promised political and intellectual tools for future innovation...

...Christine Stansell's American Moderns makes its contribution by changing the frame for discussing the Greenwich Village moment...

...This indictment of the cultural "elitism" of intellectuals, when confronted with commercialized amusements, is now the reigning orthodoxy at elite universities...

...The men who listen to [Alfred] Stieglitz have not yet...

...With him gone," Frank lamented, "the political and artistic columns of advance—Life and the Machine are again severed...

...It's here that Stansell's book is most disappointing...

...Traditional male privileges per118 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 BOOKS sisted, and indeed intensified, in an atmosphere of sexual experimentation...

...Goldman emerges here as a consummate activistperformer whose contribution to American modernism lay in her savvy use of spectacle and her public enactment of a new identity for women...

...There was the voice I recognized, the vocation I loved," Kazin wrote of the young Brooks of the teens: "I wanted to see a radical slashing insurgency of spirit take over in everything, so thSt life would be purified and beautiful and everyone would live . . . in the radiance of cultural truth...

...The failure of Greenwich Village was its lack of political seriousness, and Cowley—then moving into the orbit of the Communist Party—was quick to counsel artists to give up modernist excess for the class struggle...

...joined him in their mind with the example of Bill Haywood...

...Stansell ends her book with the government crackdown that crushed the IWW, sent Goldman into exile, drove Reed into the arms of the Soviets, and led Bourne to despair about the broken promise of American life...

...Her book gives less attention to the intellectual history of the pre-war "Little Renaissance" than to its social history, particularly its connections to the turn-of-the-century labor and feminist movements...

...The depiction of Bohemia as a "conversational community," initially so attractive as a retelling of the Village story, itself becomes a tiresome refrain once divested of its connection to the political philosophies that made public speech a vehicle for radical-democratic hope in the teens...

...And the readers of socialistic pamphlets have not heard of '291...

...For the moderns, friendship as lived experience was inseparable from shared reflection and argument about the meaning of friendship...

...it was an adolescent experiment in radicalism that had to be transcended by a more rigorous politics...

...It was not only making friends that mattered to people like Bourne, as much as they liked good company...

...Writers who had not themselves experienced the pre-war moment moved quickly from a wistful lament for lost Bohemian hope to either world-weary estheticism or Bolshevik militancy as the only serious alternatives to youthful romanticism...

...Shorn of its substantive ideas, Bohemia looks a good deal less attractive...

...May and Lasch rightly saw the Village experiment as the dawn of an American modernist culture and (in Lasch's case, especially) the first glimmerings of a style of radical politics that was attracting a mass following, even as they wrote, in the emerging student left...

...The ideal of friendship becomes a search for the right connections, the hope for self-fulfillment degenerates into a crass quest for self-aggrandizement, the experimental life provides an excuse for male prowling, and radicalism becomes talk, talk, and more talk...

...Living for the moment," "female equality," "changing places," "self-expression," and other tenets of the Village counterculture were not so much blows against Victorian repression as they were the final nails in the coffin of small-scale proprietary capitalism: all such ideas fit perfectly, Cowley claimed, with "a new ethic that encouraged people to buy, a consumption ethic...

...Whatever the benefits of this social-historical approach, American Moderns is unsatisfying as a new interpretation of its subjects precisely because of its neglect of ideas...

...STANSELL ' S ARGUMENTS about the other limits of Bohemia likewise reveal her indebtedness to recent work in social history...

...All true, and yet this first full-blown generation of American moderns experienced the imperatives of the age as plainer, if no less complex: the pressures of democracy and the claims of women...

...The communist-leaning New Masses that began publication in 1926 promised a more hard-boiled, "scientific," reconstruction of the Village's left-bohemian Masses...

...Malcolm Cowley's classic memoir of 1934, Exile's Return, looked back in anger at the Greenwich Village legacy that had inspired his own avantgardism in the 1920s and concluded that the values of Bohemia were those of a burgeoning consumer capitalism...

...Subsequent accounts only vindicated Frank's observation about the divergence of modernist and leftist energies...

...Artistic modernists and leftist revolutionaries went their separate ways...

...A reckoning with Greenwich Village became a rite of passage for the "New York Intellectuals" around Partisan Review and Dwight Macdonald's politics, the Beats, proto-New Leftists C. Wright Mills and Paul Goodman, and second-wave feminists...

...FVER SINCE Greenwich Village collapsed under the combined pressure of official ‘ suppression and internal psycho-sexual combustion, intellectuals have dusted off the myth of Bohemian New York and enshrined it as a usable past for their own aspirations...

...Optimism is often compensatory," he warned, "and the optimistic mood in American thought may mean that American life is too terrible to face...

...Not surprisingly, when the radicalism of the sixties and early seventies subsided, Greenwich Village provided the template for historical writing that tried to sort through what was and was not still valuable in the "new radicalism...

...She takes more seriously than previous scholars the apocryphal tales of Bourne's hounding by federal spies and gives this man who loved women and despised liberal hypocrisy pretty much the last word in her history...

...It's a strange book about intellectuals that inquires so little into what they were thinking...

...Attentive to issues of race in ways that many of her predecessors were not, Stansell makes the necessary point that the color line still held even in this most expansive of conversational communities...

...WITH THEIR BOOKS, May and Lasch not only made Greenwich Village newly available as a point of departure for discussions about the cultural politics of "our own time," they also reinvigorated the study of intellectuals and the history of ideas...

...After all, weren't the conservatives who gathered around William Buckley's National Review in the mid-fifties also good talkers...

...By such lights, wouldn't the Goldwater-Reagan right qualify as a "conversational community...

...She traces the roots of Greenwich Village to downtown immigrant saloons in the 1890s, rather than the tony dining halls of Harvard's famous class of 1912, reminds us of the role of anarchism in stimulating unconventional thinking in public and private affairs, and restores Emma Goldman to her place of honor as godmother of an entire cultural movement...