1: The Long Furlough
After college and the war, most of us drifted to Manhattan, to the crooked streets south of Fourteenth, where you could rent a furnished hall-bedroom for two or three dollars weekly or the top floor of a rickety house for thirty dollars a month. We came to the Village without any intention of becoming Villagers. We came because living was cheap, because friends of ours had come already (and written us letters full of enchantment), because it seemed that New York was the only city where a young writer could be published. There were some who stayed in Europe after the war and others who carried their college diplomas straight to Paris--- they had money. But the rest of us belonged to the proletariat of the arts and we lived in Greenwich Village where everyone else was poor.
"There were," I wrote some years ago, two schools among us: those who painted the floors black (they were the last of the aesthetes) and those who did not paint the floors. Our college textbooks and the complete works of Jules Laforgue gathered dust on the mantelpiece among a litter of unemptied ashtrays. The streets outside were those of Glenn Coleman's early paintings: low red-brick early nineteenth-century houses, crazy doorways, sidewalks covered with black snow and, in the foreground, an old woman bending under a sack of rags."
The black snow melted: February blustered into March. It was. as if the war had never been fought, or had been fought by others. We were about to continue the work begun in high school, of training ourselves as writers, choosing masters to imitate, deciding what we wanted to say and persuading magazines to let us say it. We should have to earn money, think about getting jobs: the war was over. But besides the memories we scarcely mentioned, it had left us with a vast unconcern for the future and an enormous appetite for pleasure. We were like soldiers with a few more days to spend in Blighty: every moment was borrowed from death. It didn't matter that we were penniless: we danced to old squeaky victrola records---You called me Baby Doll a year ago; Hello, Central, give me No Man's Land---we had our first love affairs, we stopped in the midst of arguments to laugh at jokes as broad and pointless as the ocean, we were continually drunk with high spirits, transported by the miracle of no longer wearing a uniform. As we walked down Greenwich Avenue we stopped to enjoy the smell of hot bread outside of Cushman's bakery. In the spring morning it seemed that every ash barrel was green-wreathed with spinach.
It was April now, and the long furlough continued. . . . You woke at ten o'clock between soiled sheets in a borrowed apartment; the sun dripped over the edges of the green windowshade. On the dresser was a half-dollar borrowed the night before from the last guest to go downstairs singing: even at wartime prices it was enough to buy breakfast for two-eggs, butter, a loaf of bread, a grapefruit. When the second pot of coffee was emptied a visitor would come, then another; you would borrow fifty five cents for the cheapest bottle of sherry. Somebody would suggest a ride across the bay to Staten Island. Dinner provided itself, and there was always a program for the evening. On Fridays there were dances in Webster Hall attended by terrible uptown people who came to watch the Villagers at their revels and buy them drinks in return for being insulted; on Saturdays everybody gathered at Luke O'Connor's saloon, the Working Girls' Home; on Sunday nights there were poker games played for imaginary stakes and interrupted from moment to moment by gossip, jokes, plans; everything in those days was an excuse, for talking. There were always parties, and if they lasted into the morning they might end in a "community sleep": the mattresses were pulled off the beds and laid side by side on the floor, then double blankets were unfolded and stretched lengthwise across them, so that a dozen people could sleep there in discomfort, provided nobody snored. One night, having fallen asleep, you gave a snore so tremendous that you wakened to its echo, and listened to your companions drowsily cursing the snorer, and for good measure cursed him yourself. But always, before going to bed, you borrowed fifty cents for breakfast. Eight hours' foresight was sufficient. Always, after the coffee pot was drained, a visitor would come with money enough for a bottle of sherry.
But it couldn't go on forever. Some drizzly morning late in April you woke up to find yourself married (and your wife, perhaps, suffering from a dry, cough that threatened consumption). If there had been checks from home, there would be no more of them. Or else it happened after a siege of influenza, which that year had curious effects--- it left you weak in body, clear in mind, revolted by humanity and yourself. Tottering from the hospital, you sat in the back room of a saloon and, from the whitewood table sour with spilled beer, surveyed your blank prospects. You had been living on borrowed money, on borrowed time, in a borrowed apartment: in three months you had exhausted both your credit and your capacity to beg. There was no army now to clothe and feed you like a kind-hateful parent. No matter where the next meal came from, you would pay for it yourself.
In the following weeks you didn't exactly starve; ways, could be found of earning a few dollars. Once a week you went round to the editorial offices of the Dial, which was then appearing every two weeks in a format something like that of the Nation. One of the editors was a friend of your wife's and he would give you half a dozen bad novels to review in fifty or a hundred words apiece. When the reviews were published you would be paid a dollar for each of them, but that mightn't be for weeks or months, and meanwhile you had to eat. So you would carry the books to a bench in Union Square and page through them hastily, making notes---in two or three hours you would be finished with the whole armful and then you would take them to a secondhand bookstore on Fourth Avenue, where the proprietor paid a flat rate of thirty-five cents for each review copy; you thought it was more than the novels were worth. With exactly $2.10 in your pocket you would buy bread and butter and lamb chops and Bull Durham for cigarettes and order a bag of coal; then at home you would broil the lamb chops over the grate because the landlady had neglected -to pay her gas bill, just as you had neglected to pay the rent. You were all good friends and she would be invited to share in the feast. Next morning you would write the reviews, then start on the search for a few dollars more.
You began to feel that one meal a day was all that anyone needed and you wondered why anyone bothered to eat more. Late on a June day you were sitting in Sheridan Square trying to write a poem. "Move along, young fella," said the cop, and the poem was forgotten. Walking southward with the Woolworth Building visible in the distance you imagined a revolution in New York. Revolution was in the air that summer; the general strike had failed in Seattle, but a steel strike was being prepared, and a coal strike, and the railroad men were demanding government ownership---that was all right, but you imagined. another kind of revolt, one that would start with a dance through the streets and barrels of cider opened at every corner, and beside each barrel a back-country ham fresh from the oven; the juice squirted out of it when you carved the first slice. Then---but only after you had finished the last of the ham and drained a pitcher of cider and stuffed your mouth with apple pie---then you would set about hanging policemen from the lamp posts, or better still from the crossties of the Elevated, and beside each policeman would be hanged a Methodist preacher, and beside each preacher a pansy poet. Editors would be poisoned with printer's ink: they would die horribly, vomiting ink on white paper. You hated editors, pansi-poetical poets, policemen, preachers, you hated city streets . . . and suddenly the street went black. You hadn't even time to feel faint. The pavement rose and hit you between the eyes.
Nobody came to help, nobody even noticed that you had fallen. You scrambled to your feet, limped into a lunch wagon and spent your last dime for a roll and a cup of coffee. The revolution was postponed (on account of I was hungry, sergeant, honest I was too hungry) and the war was ended (listen, sojer, you're out of that man's army now, you're going back behind the plow, you gotta get rich, you son of a bitch). The war was over now and your long furlough was over. It was time to get a job.
In those days when division after division was landing in Hoboken and marching up Fifth Avenue in full battle equipment, when Americans were fighting the Bolshies in Siberia and guarding the Rhine---in those still belligerent days that followed the Armistice there was a private war between Greenwich Village and the Saturday Evening Post.
Other magazines fought in the same cause, but the Post was persistent and powerful enough to be regarded as chief of the aggressor nations. It published stories about the Villagers, editorials and articles against them, grave or flippant serials dealing with their customs in a mood of disparagement or alarm, humorous pieces done to order by its staff writers, cartoons in which the Villagers were depicted as long-haired men and shorthaired women with ridiculous bone-rimmed spectacles---in all, a long campaign of invective beginning before the steel strike or the Palmer Raids and continuing through the jazz era, the boom and the depression. The burden of it was always the same: that the Village was the haunt of affectation; that it was inhabited by fools and fakers; that the fakers hid Moscow heresies under the disguise of cubism and free verse; that the fools would eventually be cured of their folly: they would forget this funny business about art and return to domesticity in South Bend, Indiana, and sell motorcars, and in the evenings sit with slippered feet while their children romped about them in paper caps made from the advertising pages of the Saturday Evening Post. The Village was dying, had died already, smelled to high heaven and Philadelphia....
The Villagers did not answer this attack directly: instead they carried on a campaign of their own against the culture of which the Post seemed to be the final expression. They performed autopsies, they wrote obituaries of civilization in the United States, they shook the standardized dust of the country from their feet. Here, apparently, was a symbolic struggle: on the one side, the great megaphone of middle-class America; on the other, the American disciples of art and artistic living. Here, in its latest incarnation, was the eternal warfare of bohemian against bourgeois, poet against propriety---Villon and the Bishop of Orléans, Keats and the quarterly reviewers, Rodolphe, Mimi and the landlord. But perhaps, if we review the history of the struggle, we shall find that the issue was other than it seemed, and the enmity less ancient.
Alexander Pope, two centuries before, had taken the side of property and propriety in a similar campaign against the slums of art. When writing The Dunciad and the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, he lumped together all his enemies---stingy patrons, homosexual peers, hair-splitting pedants; but he reserved his best-considered insults for the garret dwellers of Grub Street, the dramatists whose lives were spent dodging the bailiff, the epic poets "lulled by a zephyr through the broken pane." These he accused of slander, dullness, theft, bootlicking, ingratitude, every outrage to man and the Muses; almost the only charge he did not press home against them was that of affectation. They were not play-acting their poverty. The threadbare Miltons of his day were rarely the children of prosperous parents; they could not go home to Nottingham or Bristol and earn a comfortable living by selling hackney coaches; if they "turned a Persian tale for half a crown," it was usually because they had no other means of earning half a crown and so keeping themselves out of debtors' prison. And the substance of Pope's attack against them is simply that they were poor, that they belonged to a class beneath his own, without inherited wealth, that they did not keep a gentleman's establishment, or possess a gentleman's easy manners, or the magnanimity of a gentleman sure of tomorrow's dinner:
Yet then did Gildon draw his venal quill;
I wish'd the man a dinner, and sate still.
Yet then did Dennis rave in furious fret;
I never answer'd, I was not in debt.
Pope was a far wittier poet than any of his adversaries, but the forces he brought against them were not those of wit or poetry alone: behind him, massed in reserve, was all the prejudice of eighteenth-century gentlefolk against intruders into the polite world of letters. He was fighting a literary class war, and one that left deep wounds. To many a poor scribbler it meant the difference between starvation and the roast of mutton he lovingly appraised in a bake-shop window and promised himself to devour if his patron sent him a guinea: after The Dunciad, patrons closed their purses. Pope had inflicted a defeat on Grub Street but---the distinction is important---he had left bohemia untouched, for the simple reason that Queen Anne's and King George's London had. no bohemia to defeat.
Grub Street is as old as the trade of letters---in Alexandria, in Rome, it was already a crowded quarter; bohemia is younger than the Romantic movement. Grub Street develops in the metropolis of any country or culture as soon as men are able to earn a precarious living with pen or pencil; bohemia is a revolt against certain features of industrial capitalism and can exist only in a capitalist society. Grub Street is a way of life unwillingly followed by the intellectual proletariat; bohemia attracts its citizens from all economic classes: there are not a few bohemian millionaires, but they are expected to imitate the customs of penniless artists. Bohemia is Grub Street romanticized, doctrinalized and rendered self-conscious; it is Grub Street on parade.
It originated in France, not England, and the approximate date of its birth was 1830: thus, it followed the rise of French industry after the Napoleonic Wars. The French Romantic poets complained of feeling oppressed---perhaps it was, as Musset believed, the fault of that great Emperor whose shadow fell across their childhood; perhaps it was Science, or the Industrial Revolution., or merely the money-grubbing, the stuffy morals and stupid politics of the people about them; in any case they had to escape from middle-class society. Some of them became revolutionists; others took refuge in pure art; but most of them demanded a real world of present satisfactions, in which they could cherish aristocratic ideals while living among carpenters and grisettes. The first bohemians, the first inhabitants of that world, were the friends of Théophile Gautier and Gerard de Nerval, young men of good family, bucks and dandies with money enough to indulge their moods; but the legend of it was spread abroad, some twenty years later, by a poor hack named Henry Murger, the son of a German immigrant to Paris.
Having abandoned all hopes of a formal education when he left primary school, and feeling no desire to follow his father's trade of tailor, Murger began to write mediocre verse and paint incredible pictures, meanwhile supporting himself by his wits. Soon he joined a group that called itself the Water Drinkers because it could rarely afford another beverage. A dozen young men with little talent and extravagant ambitions, they lived in hovels or in lofts over a cow stable, worked under the lash of hunger, and wasted their few francs in modest debauchery. One winter they had a stove for the first time: it was a hole cut in the floor, through which the animal. heat of the stable rose into their chamber. They suffered from the occupational diseases of poor artists---consumption, syphilis, pneumonia---all of them aggravated by undernourishment. Joseph Desbrosses died in the winter of 1844; he was an able sculptor, possibly the one genius of the group. His funeral was the third in six weeks among the Water Drinkers, and they emptied their pockets to buy a wooden cross for the grave. When the last sod clumped down, the gravediggers stood waiting for their tip. There was not a sou in the party.
"That's all right," said the gravediggers generously, recognizing the mourners. "It will be for the next time."
Spring came and their feelings rose with the mercury. One evening when his friends were making war maps in water color, Murger began unexpectedly to tell them stories. They listened, chuckled and roared for two good hours, till somebody advised him, seriously between gales of laughter, to abandon poetry for fiction. A little later he followed this advice, writing about the life of his friends, the only life he knew. Personally he hated this existence on the cold fringes of starvation and planned to escape from it as soon as he could, but for the public he tried to render it attractive.
In Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, he succeeded beyond his ambition. He succeeded not only in writing a popular book, one that was translated into twenty languages, successfully dramatized, candied into an opera, one that enabled its author to live in bourgeois comfort, but also in changing an image in the public mind. Grub Street, where dinnerless Gildon drew his venal quill, contemptible Grub Street, the haunt of apprentices and failures and Henry Murger, was transformed into glamorous bohemia. The unwilling expedient became a permanent way of life, became a cult with rituals and costumes, a doctrine adhered to not only by artists, young and old, rich and poor, but also in later years by designers, stylists, trade-paper sub-editors, interior decorators, wolves, fairies, millionaire patrons of art, sadists, nymphomaniacs, bridge sharks, anarchists, women living on alimony, tired reformers, educational cranks, economists, hopheads, dipsomaniac playwrights, nudists, restaurant keepers, stockbrokers and dentists craving self-expression.
Even during Murger's lifetime, the bohemian cult was spreading from France into other European countries. Having occupied a whole section of Paris---three sections, in fact, for it moved from the Boul' Mich' to Montmartre and thence to Montparnasse---it founded new colonies in Munich, Berlin, London, St. Petersburg. In the late 1850s it reached New York, where it established headquarters in Charlie Pfaff's lager-beer saloon under the sidewalk of lower Broadway. Again in 1894 the "Trilby" craze spawned forth dozens of bohemian groups and magazines; in New York a writer explained that the true bohemia may exist at millionaires' tables; in Philadelphia young married couples south of Market Street would encourage their guests: "Don't stand on ceremony; you know we are thorough bohemians." All over the Western world, bohemia was carrying on a long warfare with conventional society, but year by year it was making more converts from the ranks of the enemy.
When the American magazines launched their counteroffensive, in 1919, a curious phenomenon was to be observed. The New York bohemians, the Greenwich Villagers, came from exactly the same social class as the readers of the Saturday Evening Post. Their political opinions were vague and by no means dangerous to Ford Motors or General Electric: the war had destroyed their belief in political action. They were trying to get ahead, and the proletariat be damned. Their economic standards .were those of the small American businessman.
The art-shop era was just beginning. Having fled from Dubuque and Denver to escape the stultifying effects of a civilization ruled by business, many of the Villagers had already entered business for themselves, and many more were about to enter it. They would open tea shops, antique shops, book shops, yes, and bridge parlors, dance halls, night clubs and real-estate offices. By hiring shop assistants, they would become the exploiters of labor. If successful, they tried to expand their one restaurant into a chain of restaurants, all with a delightfully free and intimate atmosphere, but run on the best principles of business accounting. Some of them leased houses, remodeled them into studio apartments, and raised the rents three or four hundred per cent to their new tenants. Others clung faithfully to their profession of painting or writing, rose in it slowly, and at last had their stories or illustrations accepted by Collier's or the Saturday Evening Post. There were occasions, I believe, when Greenwich Village writers were editorially encouraged to write stories making fun of the Village, and some of them were glad to follow the suggestion. Of course they complained, when slightly tipsy, that they were killing themselves---but how else could they maintain their standard of living? What they meant was that they could not live like Vanity Fair readers without writing for the Saturday Evening Post.
And so it was that many of them lived during the prosperous decade that followed. If the book succeeded or if they got a fat advertising contract, they bought houses in Connecticut, preferably not too far from the Sound. They hired butlers; they sent their children to St. Somebody's; they collected highboys, lowboys, tester beds; they joined the local Hunt and rode in red coats across New England stone fences and through wine-red sumacs in pursuit of a bag of imported aniseed. In the midst of these new pleasures they continued to bewail the standardization of American life, while the magazines continued their polemic against Greenwich Village. You came to suspect that some of the Villagers themselves, even those who remained below Fourteenth Street, were not indignant at a publicity that brought tourists to the Pirates' Den and customers to Ye Olde Curiowe Shoppe and increased the value of the land in which a few of them had begun to speculate. The whole thing seemed like a sham battle. Yet beneath it was a real conflict of ideas and one that would soon be mirrored in the customs of a whole Country.
Greenwich Village was not only a place, a mood, a way of life: like all bohemias, it was also a doctrine. Since the days of Gautier and Murger, this doctrine had remained the same in spirit, but it had changed in several details. By 1920 it had become a system of ideas that could roughly be summarized as follows:
1. The idea of salvation by the child. Each of us at birth has special potentialities which are slowly crushed and destroyed by a standardized society and mechanical methods of teaching. If a new educational system can be introduced, one by which children are encouraged to develop their own personalities, to blossom freely like flowers, then the world will be saved by this new, free generation.
2. The idea of self-expression.---Each man's, each woman's, purpose in life is to express himself, to realize his full individuality through creative work and beautiful living in beautiful surroundings.
3. The idea of paganism.---The body is a temple in which there is nothing unclean, a shrine to be adorned for the ritual of love.
4. The idea of living for the moment.---It is stupid to pile up treasures that we can enjoy only in old age, when we have lost the capacity for enjoyment. Better to seize the moment as it comes, to dwell in it intensely, even at the cost of future suffering. Better to live extravagantly, gather June rosebuds, "burn my candle at both ends. . . . It gives a lovely light."
5. The idea of liberty.---Every law, convention or rule of art that prevents self-expression or the full enjoyment of the moment should be shattered and abolished. Puritanism is the great enemy. The crusade against puritanism is the only crusade with which free individuals are justified in allying themselves.
6. The idea of female equality.---Women should be the economic and moral equals of men. They should have the same pay, the same working conditions, the same opportunity for drinking, smoking, taking or dismissing lovers.
7. The idea of psychological adjustment.---We are unhappy because we are maladjusted, and maladjusted because we are repressed. If our individual repressions can be removed---by confessing them to a Freudian psychologist---then we can adjust ourselves to any situation, and be happy in it. (But Freudianism is only one method of adjustment. What is wrong with us may be our glands, and by a slight operation, or merely by taking a daily dose of thyroid, we may alter our whole personalities. Again, we may adjust ourselves by some such psycho-physical discipline as was taught by Gurdjieff. The implication of all these methods is the same---that the environment itself need not be altered. That explains why most radicals who became converted to psychoanalysis or glands or Gurdjieff(1) gradually abandoned their political radicalism.)
8. The idea of changing place.---"They do things better in Europe." England and Germany have the wisdom of old cultures; the Latin peoples have admirably preserved their pagan heritage. By expatriating himself, by living in Paris, Capri or the South of France, the artist can break the puritan shackles, drink, live freely and be wholly creative.
All these, from the standpoint of the business-Christian ethic then represented by the Saturday Evening Post, were corrupt ideas. This older ethic is familiar to most people, but one feature of it has not been sufficiently emphasized. Substantially, it was a production ethic. The great virtues it taught were industry, foresight, thrift and personal initiative. The workman should be industrious in order to produce more for his employer; he should look ahead to the future; he should save money in order to become a capitalist himself; then he should exercise personal initiative and found new factories where other workmen would toil industriously, and save, and become capitalists in their turn.
During the process many people would suffer privations: most workers would live meagerly and wrack their bodies with labor; even the employers would deny themselves luxuries that they could easily purchase, choosing instead to put back the money into their business; but after all, our bodies were not to be pampered; they were temporary dwelling places, and we should be rewarded in Heaven for our self-denial. On earth, our duty was to accumulate more wealth and produce more goods, the ultimate use of which was no subject for worry. They would somehow be absorbed, by new markets opened in the West, or overseas in new countries, or by the increased purchasing power of workmen who had saved and bettered their position.
That was the ethic of a young capitalism, and it worked admirably, so long as the territory and population of the country were expanding faster than its industrial plant. But after the war the situation changed. Our industries had grown enormously to satisfy a demand that suddenly ceased. To keep the factory wheels turning, a new domestic market had to be created. Industry and thrift were no longer adequate. There must be a new ethic that encouraged people to buy, a consumption ethic.
It happened that many of the Greenwich Village ideas proved useful in the altered situation. Thus, self-expression and paganism encouraged a demand for all sorts of products---modern furniture, beach pajamas, cosmetics, colored bathrooms with toilet paper to match. Living for the moment meant buying an automobile, radio or house, using it now and paying for it tomorrow. Female equality was capable of doubling the consumption of products---cigarettes, for example--that had formerly been used by men alone. Even changing place would help to stimulate business in the country from which the artist was being expatriated. The exiles of art were also trade missionaries: involuntarily they increased the foreign demand for fountain pens, silk stockings, grapefruit and portable typewriters. They drew after them an invading army of tourists, thus swelling the profits of steamship lines and travel agencies. Everything fitted into the business picture.
I don't mean to say that Greenwich Village was the source of the revolution in morals that affected all our lives in the decade after the war, and neither do I mean that big business deliberately plotted to render the nation extravagant, pleasure worshiping and reckless of tomorrow.
The new moral standards arose from conditions that had nothing to do with the Village. They were, as a matter of fact, not really new. Always, even in the great age of the Puritans, there had been currents of licentiousness that were favored by the immoderate American climate and held in check only by hellfire preaching and the hardships of settling a new country. Old Boston, Providence, rural Connecticut, all had their underworlds. The reason puritanism became so strong in America was perhaps that it had to be strong in order to checkmate its enemies. But it was already weakening as the country grew richer in the twenty years before the war; and the war itself was the puritan crisis and defeat.
All standards were relaxed in the stormy-sultry wartime atmosphere. It wasn't only the boys of my age, those serving in the army, who were transformed by events: their sisters and younger brothers were affected in a different fashion. With their fathers away, perhaps, and their mothers making bandages or tea-dancing with lonely officers, it was possible for boys and girls to do what they pleased. For the first time they could go to dances unchaperoned, drive the family car and park it by the roadside while they made love, and come home after midnight, a little tipsy, with nobody to reproach them in the hallway.
They took advantage of these stolen liberties---indeed, one might say that the revolution in morals began as a middle-class children's revolt.
But everything conspired to further it. Prohibition came and surrounded the new customs with illicit glamour; prosperity made it possible to practice them; Freudian psychology provided a philosophical justification and made it unfashionable to be repressed; still later the sex magazines and the movies, even the pulpit, would advertise a revolution that had taken place silently and triumphed without a struggle. In all this Greenwich Village had no part. The revolution would have occurred if the Village had never existed, but---the point is important---it would not have followed the same course. The Village, older in revolt, gave form to the movement, created its fashions, and supplied the writers and illustrators who would render them popular. As for American business, though it laid no plots in advance, it was quick enough to use the situation, to exploit the new markets for cigarettes and cosmetics, and to realize that, in advertising pages and movie palaces, sex appeal was now the surest appeal.
The Greenwich Village standards, with the help of business, had spread through the country. Young women east and west had bobbed their hair, let it grow and bobbed it again; they had passed through the period when corsets were checked in the cloakroom at dances, and the period when corsets were not worn. They were not very self-conscious when they talked about taking a lover; and the conversations ran from mother fixations to birth control while they smoked cigarettes between the courses of luncheons eaten in black-and-orange tea shops just like those in the Village. People of forty had been affected by the younger generation: they spent too much money, drank too much gin, made love to one another's wives and talked about their neuroses. Houses were furnished to look like studios. Stenographers went on parties, following the example of the boss and his girl friend and her husband. The "party," conceived as a gathering together of men and women to drink gin cocktails, flirt, dance to the phonograph or radio and gossip about their absent friends, had in fact become one of the most popular American institutions; nobody stopped to think how short its history had been in this country. It developed out of the "orgies" celebrated by the French 1830 Romantics, but it was introduced into this country by Greenwich Villagers---before being adopted by salesmen from Kokomo and the younger country-club set in Kansas City.
Wherever one turned the Greenwich Village ideas were making their way: even the Saturday Evening Post was feeling their influence. Long before Repeal, it began to wobble on Prohibition. It allowed drinking, petting and unfaithfulness to be mentioned in the stories it published; its illustrations showed women smoking. Its advertising columns admitted one after another of the strictly pagan products---cosmetics, toilet tissues, cigarettes ---yet still it continued to thunder against Greenwich Village and bohemian immorality. It even nourished the illusion that its long campaign had been successful. On more than one occasion it announced that the Village was dead and buried: "The sad truth is," it said in the autumn of 1931, "that the Village was a flop." Perhaps it was true that the Village was moribund---of that we can't be sure, for creeds and ways of life among artists are hard to kill. If, however, the Village was really dying, it was dying of success. It was dying because it became so popular that too many people insisted on living there. It was dying because women smoked cigarettes on the streets of the Bronx, drank gin cocktails in Omaha and had perfectly swell parties in Seattle and Middletown---in other words, because American business and the whole of middle-class America had been going Greenwich Village.
But the Village, when we first came there to live, was undergoing a crisis. People were talking about the good old days of 1916. It seemed unlikely that they would ever return.
The Village, before America entered the war, contained two mingled currents: one of those had now disappeared. It contained two types of revolt, the individual and the social---or the aesthetic and the political, or the revolt against puritanism and the revolt against capitalism---we might tag the two of them briefly as bohemianism and radicalism. In those prewar days, however, the two currents were hard to distinguish. Bohemians read Marx and all the radicals had a touch of the bohemian: it seemed that both types were fighting in the same cause. Socialism, free love, anarchism, syndicalism, free verse---all these creeds were lumped together by the public, and all were physically dangerous to practice. Bill Haywood, the one-eyed man-mountain, the Cyclops of the IWW, appeared regularly at Mabel Dodge's Wednesday nights, in a crowd of assorted poets and Cubist painters who, listening to his slow speech, might fancy themselves in the midst of the fight at Coeur d'Alène. During the bread. riots of 1915 the Wobblies made their headquarters in Mary Vorse's studio on Tenth Street; and Villagers might get their heads broken in Union Square by the police before appearing at the Liberal Club to recite Swinburne in bloody bandages. The Liberal Club was the social center of the Village, just as the Masses, which also represented both tendencies, was its intellectual center.
But the war, and especially the Draft Law, separated the two currents. People were suddenly forced to decide what kind of rebels they were: if they were merely rebels against puritanism they could continue to exist safely in Mr. Wilson's world. The political rebels had no place in it. Some of them yielded, joined the crusade for democracy, fought the Bolsheviks at Archangel, or volunteered to help the Intelligence Service by spying on their former associates and submitting typewritten reports about them to the Adjutant General's office. Others evaded the draft by fleeing to Mexico, where they were joined by a number of the former aesthetes, who had suddenly discovered that they were political rebels too. Still others stood by their opinions and went to Leavenworth Prison. Whatever course they followed, almost all the radicals of 1917 were defeated by events. The bohemian tendency triumphed in the Village, and talk about revolution gave way to talk about psychoanalysis. The Masses, after being suppressed, and after temporarily reappearing as the Liberator, gave way to magazines like the Playboy, the Pagan (their names expressed them adequately) and the Little Review.
After the war the Village was full of former people. There were former anarchists who had made fortunes manufacturing munitions, former Wobblies about to open speakeasies, former noblewomen divorced or widowed, former suffragists who had been arrested after picketing the White House, former conscientious objectors paroled from Leavenworth, former aviators and soldiers of fortune, former settlement workers, German spies, strike leaders, poets, city editors of Socialist dailies. But the distinguished foreign artists who had worked in the Village from 1914 till 1917, and given it a new character, had disappeared along with the active labor leaders. Nobody seemed to be doing anything now, except lamenting the time's decay. For the moment the Village was empty of young men.
But the young men were arriving from week to week, as colleges held commencement exercises or troops were demobilized.
One of the first results of their appearance was the final dissolution of the Liberal Club.
Its members had been resigning or leaving their dues unpaid. As a means of paying off its debts, the club voted to hold a dance---not an ordinary Webster Hall affair, but a big dance, uptown at the Hotel Commodore, with a pageant, and thousands of tickets sold, and none given away. But of course they were given away in the end. Everybody in the Village expected to be invited to every Village function, simply by right of residence, and the Liberal Club was forced to yield to a mass demand that was accompanied by threats of gate-crashings and riots.
On one of our free tickets we took with us a young lady who had just graduated from Radcliffe.
The dance at the Commodore was something new in Village history: there were so many youngsters, such high spirits, so many people not drinking quietly as in the old days, but with a frantic desire to get drunk and enjoy themselves. After midnight there were little commotions everywhere in the ballroom. Laurence Vail was deciding that people were disagreeable and was telling them so in a most polite way, but some of them didn't like being called smug---it took four detectives to throw him out, and he left behind him a great handful of bloodstained yellow hair. I noticed people gathering about the Radcliffe young lady admiringly, and later I saw them avoiding her; she had developed the habit of biting them in the arm and shrieking. Once, having bitten a strange Pierrot, she jumped backward with a shriek into a great Chinese vase. It crashed to the floor.
We never saw her after that night. She had met a copy-desk man and later I heard that he was asking the address of an abortionist; still later she wrote that she was married and had a baby. There were many people like that; they appeared in the Village, made themselves the center of a dance or a crowd, everybody liked or hated them and told stories about them; then suddenly they were gone, living in Flatbush, Queens or Keokuk, holding down jobs or wheeling baby carriages. But the vase was the end of the Liberal Club, the broken vase that cost so much to replace and the free tickets. The dance at the Commodore had been a great success and had emptied the treasury. After that the social centers of the Village were two saloons: the Hell Hole, on Sixth Avenue at the corner of West Fourth Street, and the Working Girls' Home, at Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street. The Hell Hole was tough and dirty; the proprietor kept a pig in the cellar and fed it scraps from the free-lunch counter. The boys in the back room were small-time gamblers and petty thieves, but the saloon was also patronized by actors and writers from the Provincetown Playhouse, which was just around the corner. Sometimes the two groups mingled. The gangsters admired Dorothy Day because she could drink them under the table; but they felt more at home with Eugene O'Neill, who listened to their troubles and never criticized. They pitied him, too, because he was thin and shabbily dressed. One of them said to him, "You go to any department store, Gene, and pick yourself an overcoat and tell me what size it is and I steal it for you." The Hell Hole stayed in business during the first two or three years of prohibition, but then it was closed and I don't know where the gangsters met after that. The actors and playwrights moved on to the Working Girls' Home, where the front door was locked, but where a side door on Christopher Street still led into a room where Luke O'Connor served Old Fashioneds and the best beer and stout he could buy from the wildcat breweries.
It was in the Working Girls' Home that I first became conscious of the difference between two generations. There were two sorts of people here: those who had lived in the Village before 1917 and those who had just arrived from France or college. For the first time I came to think of them as "they" and "we."
"They" wore funny clothes: it was the first thing that struck you about them. The women had evolved a regional costume, then widely cartooned in the magazines: hair cut in a Dutch bob, hat carried in the hand, a smock of some bright fabric (often embroidered Russian linen), a skirt rather shorter than the fashion of the day, gray cotton stockings and sandals. With heels set firmly on the ground and abdomens protruding a little ---since they wore no corsets and dieting hadn't become popular, ---they had a look of unexampled solidity; it was terrifying to be advanced upon by six of them in close formation. But this costume wasn't universal. Some women preferred tight-fitting tailored suits with Buster Brown collars; one had a five-gallon hat which she wore on all occasions, and there was a girl who always appeared in riding boots, swinging a crop, as if she had galloped down Sixth Avenue, watered her horse and tied him to a pillar of the Elevated; I called her Yoicks. The men, as a rule, were more conventional, but tweedy and unpressed. They did not let their hair grow over their collars, but they had a good deal more of it than was permitted by fashion. There were a few Russian blouses among them, a few of the authentic Windsor ties that marked the bohemians of the 1890s.
"They" tried to be individual, but there is a moment when individualism becomes a uniform in spite of itself. "We" were accustomed to uniforms and content to wear that of the American middle classes. We dressed inconspicuously, as well as we were able.
"They" were older, and this simple fact continued to impress me long after I ceased to notice their clothes. Their ages ran from sixty down to twenty-three; at one end of the scale there was hardly any difference. But the Village had a pervading atmosphere of middle-agedness. To stay in New York during the war was a greater moral strain than to enter the army: there were more decisions to be made and uneasily justified; also there were defeats to be concealed. The Village in 1919 was like a conquered country. Its inhabitants were discouraged and drank joylessly. "We" came among them with an unexpended store of energy: we had left our youth at home, and for two years it had been accumulating at compound interest; now we were eager to lavish it even on trivial objects.
And what did the older Villagers think of us? We had fresh faces and a fresh store of jokes and filthy songs collected in the army; we were nice to take on parties, to be amused by and to lecture. Sometimes they were cruel to us in a deliberately thoughtless way. Sometimes they gave us advice which was never taken because it was obviously a form of boasting. I don't believe they thought much about us at all.
But these differences in costume, age and mood were only the symbols of another difference. Though our paths had momentarily converged, they were not the same. "We" had followed the highroad; "they" had revolted and tried to break new trails.
"They" had once been rebels, political, moral, artistic or religious---in any case they had paid the price of their rebellion. They had separated themselves from parents, husbands, wives; they had slammed doors like Nora in A Doll's House; they never got letters from home. "We," on the other hand, had 'never broken with our parents, never walked stormily out of church, never been expelled from school for writing essays on anarchism. We had avoided issues and got what we wanted in a quiet way, simply by taking it. During the ten years that preceded the war something had happened to the relations between parents and children. The older Villagers had been so close to their fathers and mothers that, in a way, they had been forced to quarrel with and reject them. "We" had been placed at a greater distance from our elders; we liked and even loved them without in the least respecting their opinions; we said, "Yes, sir," if we were Southerners, "All right," if we lived in a Northern city, and did what we pleased.
"They" had been rebels: they wanted to change the world, be leaders in the fight for justice and art, help to create a society in which individuals could express themselves. "We" were convinced at the time that society could never be changed by an effort of the will.
"They" had been rebels, full of proud illusions. They made demands on life itself, that it furnish them with beautiful adventures, honest friendships, love freely given and returned in an appropriate setting. Now, with illusions shattered, they were cynics. "We," on the contrary, were greatly humble and did not ask of Nature that she gild our happy moments or wildly reecho our passions. We did not feel that our arguments on aesthetics should take place in aesthetic surroundings: we were content to sit in the kitchen, two or three young men with our feet on the bare table, discussing the problem of abstract beauty while we rolled Bull Durham into cigarettes and let the flakes sift down into our laps. We had lost our ideals at a very early age, and painlessly. If any of them survived the war, they had disappeared in the midst of the bickerings at Versailles, or later with the steel strike, the Palmer Raids, the Centralia massacre. But they did not leave us bitter. We believed that we had fought for an empty cause, that the Germans were no worse than the Allies, no better, that the world consisted of fools and scoundrels ruled by scoundrels and fools, that everybody was selfish and could be bought for a price, that we were as bad as the others---all this we took for granted. But it was fun all the same. We were content to build our modest happiness in the wreck of "their" lost illusions, a cottage in the ruins of a palace.
Among the furnishings of this cottage--it was more likely to be three upright coffin-shaped rooms at the top of an Italian tenement, with the walls painted green or tenement brown and sweating in winter when the gas stove was burning, while in summer the odors of thirty Italian suppers mingled in the hallway and seeped through the open transom---among the college textbooks, the crossed German bayonets, the complete works of Jules Laforgue, there was not much room for what I have called the Greenwich Village ideas. It was not so much that we rejected them: they simply did not touch us. The idea of salvation by the child was embodied in "progressive education," a topic that put us to sleep. The idea of self-expression caused people to be "arty"---it was our generation that invented the word. We might act like pagans, we might live for the moment, but we tried not to be self-conscious about it. We couldn't see much use in crusading against puritanism: it had ceased to interfere with our personal lives and, though it seemed to be triumphant, it had suffered a moral defeat and would slowly disappear. Female equality was a good idea, perhaps, but the feminists we knew wore spectacles and flat-heeled shoes. As for psychological adjustment, we were too young to have felt the need of it.
Later we should be affected by the Greenwich Village ideas, but only at second hand and only after they had begun to affect the rest of the country. The truth is that "we," the newcomers to the Village, were not bohemians. We lived in top-floor tenements along the Sixth Avenue Elevated because we couldn't afford to live elsewhere. Either we thought of our real home as existing in the insubstantial world of art, or else we were simply young men on the make, the humble citizens not of bohemia. but of Grub Street.
But there was one idea that was held in common by the older and the younger inhabitants of the Village---the idea of salvation by exile. "They do things better in Europe: let's go there." This was not only the undertone of discussions at Luke O'Connor's saloon; it was also the recurrent melody of an ambitious work, a real symposium, then being prepared for the printer.
Civilization in the United States was written by thirty intellectuals, of whom only a few, say ten at the most, had been living in the Village. There were no Communists or even rightwing Socialists among the thirty. "Desirous of avoiding merely irrelevant criticism," said Harold Stearns in his Preface, "we provided that all contributors to the volume must be American citizens. For the same reason, we likewise provided that in the list there should be no professional propagandists ... no martyrs, and no one who was merely disgruntled." All Village cranks were strictly excluded. But Harold Steams, the editor, lived in a remodeled house at 31 Jones Street. The editorial meetings were conducted in his basement while often a Village party squeaked and thundered on the floor above. And the book that resulted from the labors of these thirty intellectuals embodied what might be called the more sober side of Village opinion.
Rereading it today, one is chiefly impressed by the limited vision of these men who were trying to survey and evaluate the whole of American civilization. They knew nothing about vast sections of the country, particularly the South and the Southwest. They knew little about the life of the upper classes and nothing (except statistically) about the life of the industrial proletariat. They were city men: if any one of the thirty had been familiar with farming, he would have prevented the glaring pomicultural error made by Lewis Mumford on the second page of the book.(2) They were ridiculously ignorant of the younger generation. The civilization which they really surveyed was the civilization shared in by people over thirty, with incomes between two thousand and twenty thousand dollars, living in cities north of the Ohio and east of the Rockies.
As a matter of fact, their book was more modest than its pretentious title. They were not trying to present or solve the problem of American civilization as a whole. They were trying to answer one question that touched them more closely: why was there, in America, no satisfying career open to talent? Every year hundreds, thousands of gifted young men and women graduated from our colleges; they entered life as these thirty intellectuals had entered it; they brought with them a rich endowment, but they accomplished little. Why did all this promise result in so few notable careers?
It was Van Wyck Brooks, in his essay on "The Literary Life," who stated the problem most eloquently and with the deepest conviction:
What immediately strikes one as one surveys the history of our literature during the last half century, is the singular impotence of its creative spirit. . . . One can count on one's two hands the American writers who are able to carry on the development and unfolding of their individualities, year in, year out, as every competent man of affairs carries on his business. What fate overtakes the rest? Shall I begin to run over some of those names, familiar to us all, names that have signified so much promise and are lost in what Gautier calls "the limbo where moan (in the company of babes) stillborn vocations, abortive attempts, larvae of ideas that have won neither wings nor shapes"? Shall I mention the writers---but they are countless!---who have lapsed into silence, or have involved themselves in barren eccentricities, or have been turned into machines? The poets who, at the very outset of their careers, find themselves extinguished like so many candles? The novelists who have been unable to grow up, and remain withered boys of seventeen? The critics who find themselves overtaken in mid-career by a hardening of the spiritual arteries? ... Weeds and wild flowers! Weeds without beauty or fragrance, and wild flowers that cannot survive the heat of the day.
Nowhere else is the problem stated with such deep feeling. But the other contributors are conscious of it: each in his own field they make the same report. "Journalism in America is no longer a profession through which a man can win to a place of real dignity among his neighbors." As for politics, the average congressman "is incompetent and imbecile, and not only incompetent and imbecile, but also incurably dishonest. . . . It is almost impossible to imagine a man of genuine self-respect and dignity offering himself as a candidate for the lower house." In music, art, medicine, scholarship, advertising, the theater, everywhere the story is the same: there is no scope for individualism; ignorance, unculture or, at the best, mediocrity has triumphed; the doors are closed to talent. And what is the explanation?
Here again the thirty intellectuals have the same story to tell. "In view both of the fact that every contributor has full liberty of opinion and that the personalities and points of view finding expression in these essays are all highly individualistic, the underlying unity which binds the volume together is really surprising." The individualistic army has its own uniform. There were three or four who didn't wear it---thus, Conrad Aiken's essay on American Poetry is an appraisal, not an indictment, and has about it an air of final justice; Leo Wolman writing on Labor and George Soule on Radicalism are objective and critical, and analyze the weaknesses of these movements with an eye to the possibility of correcting them in the future. But most of the contributors may be treated conjointly and anonymously. One after another they come forward to tell us that American civilization itself is responsible for the tragedy of American talent.
Life in this country is joyless and colorless, universally standardized, tawdry, uncreative, given over to the worship of wealth and machinery. "The highest achievements of our material civilization . . . count as so many symbols of its spiritual failure." It is possible that this failure can be explained by a fundamental sexual inadequacy. The wife of the American businessman "finds him so sexually inapt that she refuses to bear him children and so driveling in every way except as a money-getter that she compels him to expend his energies solely in that direction while she leads a discontented, sterile, stunted life." She seeks compensation by making herself the empress of culture. "Hardly any intelligent foreigner has failed to observe and comment upon the extraordinary feminization of American social life, and oftenest he has coupled this observation with a few biting remarks concerning the intellectual anemia or torpor that seems to accompany it."---"In almost every branch of American life there is a sharp dichotomy between preaching and practice . . .the moral code resolves itself into the one cardinal heresy of being found out."---"The most moving and pathetic fact in the social life of America today is emotional and aesthetic starvation." And what is the remedy?
On this topic the chorus, so united in attack , becomes weak and discordant. Since the thirty contributors are city men, and for the most part New Yorkers, they feel that some good might be done by increasing the influence of the city at the expense of the small town, of the metropolis at the expense of the provinces. Since they are intellectuals and extremely class-conscious, they feel that the various professions should organize to better their own position and support intellectual standards. Being critics, they assume that criticism will help "in making a real civilization possible . . . a field cannot be plowed until it has first been cleared of rocks." They have a vague belief in aristocracy and in the possibility of producing real aristocrats through education. Beyond this point, their remedies differ. Van Wyck Brooks gives a moral lecture to writers, adjuring them to be creative. H. L. Mencken believes that our political life might be made over merely by abolishing the residential qualification for elective offices. Harold Stearns is inclined to cynicism. "One shudders slightly," he says, "and turns to the impeccable style, the slightly tired and sensuous irony of Anatole France for relief." On the whole, they question the efficacy of their own prescriptions. "One can feel the whole industrial and economic system as so maladjusted to the primary and simple needs of men and women"--that we ought to change the system? No, these arc sensible men, not propagandists, and they see no possibility of changing the system. Instead they bring forth a milder remedy---"that the futility of a rationalistic attack on these infantilisms of compensation becomes obvious. There must be an entirely new deal of the cards in one sense; we must change our hearts." But is this remedy really simpler? Is a change in heart any easier to accomplish than a change in the system?
The intellectuals had explored many paths; they had found no way of escape; one after another they had opened doors that led only into the cupboards and linen closets of the mind. "What should a young man do?" asked Harold Stearns in an article written for the Freeman. This time his answer was simple and uncompromising. A young man had no future in this country of hypocrisy and repression. He should take ship for Europe, where people know how to live.
Early in July 1921, just after finishing his Preface and delivering the completed manuscript to the publisher, Mr. Stearns left this country, perhaps forever. His was no ordinary departure: he was Alexander marching into Persia and Byron shaking the dust of England from his feet. Reporters came to the gangplank to jot down his last words. Everywhere young men were preparing to follow his example. Among the contributors to Civilization in the United States, not many could go: most of them were moderately successful men who had achieved security without achieving freedom. But the younger and footloose intellectuals went streaming up the longest gangplank in the world; they were preparing a great migration eastward into new prairies of the mind.
"I'm going to. Paris," they said at first, and then, "I'm going to the South of France.... I'm sailing Wednesday---next month---as soon as I can scrape together money enough to buy a ticket." Money wasn't impossible to scrape together; some of it could be saved from one's salary or borrowed from one's parents or one's friends. Newspapers and magazines were interested in reports from Europe, two or three foundations had fellowships for study abroad, and publishers sometimes made advances against the future royalties of an unwritten book. In those days publishers were looking for future authors, and the authors insisted that their books would have to be finished in France, where one could live for next to nothing. "Good-by, so long," they said, "I'll meet you on the Left Bank. I'll drink your health in good red Burgundy, I'll kiss all the girls for you. I'm sick of this country. I'm going abroad to write one good novel."
And we ourselves, the newcomers to the Village, were leaving it if we could. The long process of deracination had reached its climax. School and college had uprooted us in spirit; the war had physically uprooted us, carried us into strange countries and left us finally in the metropolis of the uprooted. Now even New York seemed too American, too close to home. On its river side, Greenwich Village was bounded by the French Line pier.
In the late spring of 1921, I was awarded an American Field Service fellowship for study at a French university. It was only twelve thousand francs, or about a thousand dollars at that year's rate of exchange, but it also entitled my wife and me to a reduction of fifty per cent in our cabin-class steamship fares. We planned to live as economically as a French couple, and we did. With the help of a few small checks from American magazines, the fellowship kept us in modest comfort, even permitting us to travel, and it was renewed for the following year. When we left New York hardly anyone came to the ship to say good-by. Most of our friends had sailed already; the others were wistful people who promised to follow us in a few months. The Village was almost deserted, except for the pounding feet of young men from Davenport and Pocatello who came to make a name for themselves and live in glamour---who came because there was nowhere else to go.