BOOKS:
A Village Upon a Hill

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910–1960 by Ross Wetzsteon

Ross Wetzsteon.
Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910–1960.
Simon & Schuster. 617 pages. $35.00

I know a guy in New York City, a brakeman’s son from Grand Junction, Colorado, who tells a true story about the Great American Lettuce Train. Each day at dawn, according to the brakeman’s son — and he knows, he says, since his father has worked on this train — a locomotive sets out from Stockton, California bound for New York City with dozens of cars, several reserved for lettuce, some for tomatoes, one or two for carrots — the whole brilliant range of American vegetable produce. This train has near-mythic powers of right of way — signalmen from Grand Island, Nebraska to Reading, Pennsylvania know that unless it’s an Army train, it’s got to get out of the way for the lettuce. Amtraks have to pull over for turnips. Thirty-six hours after departure — and just before dinnertime the next day — the lettuce train arrives in the grimy freight sections of Penn Station and, the brakeman’s son says, fourth-tier assistant chefs from all New York’s finest restaurants cluster to buy the best, freshest American vegetables.

New York’s culture — the dynamism of it, the uniqueness of it — has never been a topic to want for printed matter. This is particularly true in the current American moment: You can buy good paeans to New York at better rates than a dime a dozen. This new, posthumous book by the Village Voice’s career critic Ross Wetzsteon adds to the pile, sometimes delightfully. Its ambition is to use a long series of character sketches to delineate — more than explain — the mythic cultural centrality of Greenwich Village: how that once-ratty Italian immigrant neighborhood became a worldwide cue-word for bohemianism, artistic and intellectual ambition, and New York’s position as the world’s edgiest cultural capital.

But wetzsteon’s account, like so many books about New York, can be frustratingly parochial. Republic of Dreams reads, after a hundred pages or so, as a rather crowingly long list of the life stories of artistic celebrities linked not by common inspiration or theme or even time period but by the simple fact that they had lived substantial periods of their adult lives in the same physical space, Greenwich Village. And so this very New York book has a very New York flaw: It forgoes substance for triumphalism and celebrates the city’s cultural dynamism so much it refuses to acknowledge New York’s cultural dependence on the rest of the country.

Theodore Dreiser and William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane may have lived or partied in Greenwich Village at roughly the same period, but they were from Chicago and New Jersey and Cleveland, and their art had less to do with their Village experiences than with the wherever-they-came-from. Housing artists isn’t the same as creating them. When Wetzsteon tries to make claims for the liberating (usually sexually) or inspirational effect the Village had on one of his figures (Edna St. Vincent Millay, say, or Eugene O’Neill), he usually undermines himself when he gets around to fuller biographical explanation. Liberation and inspiration, for most of Wetzsteon’s characters, predate their moves to the Village: If something dynamic was going on in New York, it was dependent on the underground dynamisms of Iowa, Maine, and Rochester to sustain it. Ideas travel by lettuce train, too. The lettuce may arrive in New York eventually, and be put together there in strikingly pretty arrays, but it is California lettuce, after all.

This is an error with some pretty deep implications for Ross Wetzsteon’s book. He tries to keep his text light and narrative, which is all right up to a point, but Wetzsteon passes that point quickly. He ends up describing Greenwich Village as a rule-less playpen for the intellectual elite, populated by the eager and nubile, a fantasy waiting to be personalized. Wetzsteon misses a chance to take a real look at the culture of artistic ambition and genius, and to say something more complex about artists in America than: Unappreciated, they tend to cluster in this lower Manhattan ghetto and, in between spurts of genuine brilliance, act very silly indeed. The book starts out promisingly enough, but ends up reading like a celebrity gossip sheet for the modernist movements, a sort of proto-Wild On.

I’m a native New Yorker, and Greenwich Village really is a wonderful place. The streets seem clean, quiet, and personal without sacrificing any of the city’s essential energy. Wetzsteon isn’t concerned so much with that Village, but a more mythic place: home not just to artists and writers and political radicals, but the home of the feminist movement, sexual liberation, human liberation in general, decadence wrought into fashion, and general, fetter-free flamboyance. It’s a more compelling place than the geographic Greenwich Village, but it’s not clear it ever really existed.

Wetzsteon died before he could finish this book; we’re told, in an epilogue written by his daughter, that he planned to write a chapter covering the period from 1960-1998. There’s a lot of meat in those 40 years: Larry Kramer and act up, a real-estate market that has made those narrow streets inaccessible to all but New York’s jogging classes — television producers and investment bankers. Other reviewers have caged their treatments of Republic of Dreams, saying they would have loved to see Wetzsteon take on those subjects, issues, and events he actually lived with.

Not me. Republic of Dreams covers, in time span, the period from 1910-1960, but Wetzsteon’s real joy is very evidently with the formative Village, the period from 1910-1930. During this period, Wetzsteon makes a pretty fair claim that criticism of mainstream American culture was embodied by the Village’s inhabitants and its institutions, and so when he uses a history of those people and institutions to shape a narrative of the American counterculture, his arguments are pretty credible. This was a period when, Wetzsteon says, New York’s cultural and political life was dominated by two institutions reflective of the sensibilities of the moment. First, Greenwich Village was dominated by The Masses magazine, with its deeply, cynically socialist perspective. Then, in the twenties, the Village’s key institution was the Provincetown Theater Company, through which Wetzsteon watches the Village move from cynicism to irony to absurdism, from politics to theater, and eventually, in the 1930s, to nothing at all.

These are far and away Wetzsteon’s best sections, when he gets to concentrate not on isolated, individual efforts but on collective projects. He’s got a good sense of humor, a strong eye for character, and a feel for the dynamics of the creative collective enterprise. When he argues, for example, that the sexual longings of a lonely Irish secretary kept her attached to the Provincetown Players in its early years and, because of her talent for organization and bookkeeping, functionally kept the theater company afloat, it’s a credible read.

He’s got a good eye for event and symbolism as well. Here’s Wetzsteon describing a moment at the trial of five editors of the influential left-wing journal The Masses for treason — publishing nasty anti-war cartoons during World War i:

A Liberty Bond rally was taking place in the square below and the proceedings had hardly begun when a band outside the window struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The Masses’ business manager, Merrill Rogers, stood at rigid attention in a solemn and somewhat disingenuous display of patriotism. Judge Hand, realizing he had no choice, reluctantly rose to his feet, whereupon the entire courtroom, including the seditious defendants, reverently followed suit. Twenty minutes later, as the prosecution was explaining its indictment to the jury, the band once more struck up the national anthem, Rogers once more shot to his feet and once more Judge Hand and the courtroom followed his lead. When it happened a third time, Judge Hand, while joining Rogers in pious ritual, stared down at the patriot with something close to exasperation. And when it happened a fourth time, and nearly everyone in the courtroom strained to hold back their laughter, Judge Hand announced rather testily, “I think we shall have to dispense with this ceremony from now on.”

Max [Eastman, editor of The Masses], to whom Merrill’s canny charade was erroneously attributed in later years, regarded it as a disaster. By rising to his feet he was submitting to the “religion of patriotism” he had so vehemently denounced, abandoning the very position for which he was on trial. But by refusing to stand he would have offered the jury the spectacle of one stubbornly seated figure in a courtroom of standing patriots — he might as well have thrust out his arms and accepted the handcuffs. “I did get up, of course — reluctantly, and no doubt with a very solemn expression,” he recalled, “for my thoughts were concerned with the relative merits of different ways of murdering Merrill Rogers.”

When Wetzsteon writes like this it does more than entertain and give good insight into the character of radical culture — it makes you wish for a brass band outside every courtroom.

But after about a hundred usually thrilling pages of stuff like this, the Village’s reputation grows, every cultural figure from Djuna Barnes to Philip Rahv to Willem de Koonig appears, and Wetzsteon spends the rest of the book looking for a good way to sort the resultant material. He doesn’t find it. Instead he rehashes biographic material that has been done more thoroughly elsewhere. When he’s talking about reasonably obscure figures like Max Eastman, this is all right — a four-page synopsis is probably about what Eastman’s life warrants. But when he shifts over to Delmore Schwartz, and Dylan Thomas, and Jackson Pollock — we’ve read those biographies, and Mr. Wetzsteon’s Cliff Notes version grows frustratingly inadequate.

All of this is a shame, because there’s compelling material here. It’s easy to write Greenwich Village off as a fetish, a place that considered the most slight, trite, and rambunctious behavior to be existentially significant. Mr. Wetzsteon nearly gets there himself: His essays on the Village’s assorted brilliants tend to mock them for their various indulgences and releases (whether Theodore Dreiser’s needy sexual profligacy or Edna St. Vincent Millay’s needy sexual profligacy or Jackson Pollock’s booze-fueled, needy sexual profligacy) — and he gets a lot of comic mileage out of poking fun at how adolescent all of this seems.

But geniuses don’t flock in such number just for a good time. There’s something more to Greenwich Village than that, and more too than the ripe bohemianism that Mr. Wetzsteon celebrates with an alternately indulgent and prudish descriptive eye, like an excited librarian peeking into a bordello. What’s spurred the artists and writers who’ve lived in Greenwich Village has not been the abandonment of existent social rules or norms — all that did was change the hours which they spent in bed and the terms of what they did there. What’s significant about Greenwich Village is the mythic centrality that it inhabits in America, the sense that living there (or in a place like it) is an essential experience for anyone who wants to be an artist or a writer — for anyone, that is, who pretends to have a deep sense of what life is really about. The idea of Greenwich Village came to stand in not just for sexual liberation or general artistic giddiness but as the American place where lives are most deeply lived and complex artistic conceptions of the world are formed. The real story of Greenwich Village involves the corruptions, inspirations, and shifts which that giddy sense of artistic centrality inspires.

Mr. Wetzsteon’s book has a whiff of this, and sometimes a little more. But it’s hard to take too seriously a text which measures all the most complex permutations of genius and madness, happiness and artistic productivity, in the raw numerical data of sexual partners and booze consumed.