Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap came to the Village from Chicago in 1917 hoping to participate in the golden age but quickly sensed they’d come too late. Born in Indianapolis in 1886 to a middle-class household Anderson, like so many other eventual émigrés to the Village, had known from early on that she was different, an outsider who would never quite conform to bourgeois values. “I have never felt much like a human being. It’s a splendid feeling. I have no place in the world—no fixed position. I don’t know just what kind of thing I am,” she writes in her first volume of memoirs, My Thirty Years’ War. She escaped to Chicago in 1908 and joined the Chicago Renaissance crowd. She started her own literary magazine, The Little Review, in 1914. In its fifteen years it was on the forefront of modern and avant-garde literature and art, American and European. Upton Sinclair canceled his subscription early on, claiming he couldn’t understand a word in it. She started publishing work by her Chicago contemporaries and fanned out from there. As the third issue was being readied, “I heard Emma Goldman lecture and had just time to turn anarchist before the presses closed.” Her pro-anarchist editorials lost her advertisers; in response, “I donated a page to every firm that should have advertised and didn’t—a full page with a box in the centre, explaining why that particular concern should have recognized us.” She and Goldman became friends. “Emma Goldman surprised me by being more human than she had seemed on the platform. When she lectured she was as serious as the deep Russian soul itself. In private she was gay, communicative, tender. Her English was the peculiar personal idiom favored by Russian Jews and she spoke only in platitudes—which I found fascinating.” As the magazine reduced her to bohemian poverty, Anderson wrote bad checks at the grocer’s—“But I didn’t say it was good,” she explained to the exasperated man—and once sent her printer, “in an elaborate envelope, all the money we had at the moment—five cents.”
Jane Heap had fled Topeka for the Chicago Art Institute, where she had her first lesbian love affair and helped to start the Chicago Little Theater that so inspired Cook and Dell. She accentuated her stoutly masculine looks by wearing men’s clothing. She and Anderson “formed a consolidation that was to make us much loved and even more loathed,” Anderson writes. In 1917 they moved to New York, as all those other Chicago Renaissance figures had before them. After landing at the Brevoort they took a basement on West Fourteenth for their office and an apartment on West Sixteenth Street over an undertaker and an exterminator. After a few years they moved to West Eighth Street, above the Washington Square Book Shop.
Anderson reports being disappointed by the Village of 1917. Mabel Dodge’s Evenings had ended; the Village’s intellectual heyday seemed over; the conversations at parties bored her. She met young Village newcomers who still spoke about politics and the revolution but to her it just sounded like they were parroting cant. She writes of “one young girl with gaunt eyes and the earnestness that would prevent anyone from achieving anything. She was writing stories about the miseries of miners and other tragedies of mankind in which she had never participated.”
Anderson and Heap struggled to put the Review out monthly. “From this time (1917) until 1923 there was almost never a week when the morning coffee was assured,” she writes. “As the Little Review became more articulate, more interesting, its subscription list became less impressive. It is much easier to find a public for ideals than for ideas.” The magazine’s New York contributor base expanded. Djuna Barnes got some of her work published in it. When Ezra Pound agreed to be the Review’s “foreign editor” in 1917, the magazine stepped up to the leading edge of international literature, publishing contributions by Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, and Wyndham Lewis. In October of that year it had its first brush with official censorship for publishing a chilly existentialist story by Lewis, “Cantelman’s Spring-Mate.” It was about an army officer who woos a country girl and abandons her pregnant. The U.S. Post Office found this obscene and seized and burned four thousand copies of the issue.
In 1918 Pound sent the Review a section from an unpublished novel he doubted it would publish because he was sure it would get the editors in trouble with the American censors again. Anderson loved it, and over the next three years The Little Review ran James Joyce’s Ulysses in installments, its first appearance in print anywhere. Reactions were not positive. The critical establishment stood mute. Readers wrote furious letters complaining about the “filth.” Four times over three years issues of the magazine were seized and destroyed. In 1921, in response to complaints from the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Anderson and Heap were brought to trial on obscenity charges over Leopold Bloom’s erotic fantasies. The lawyer John Quinn agreed to represent them in court. Quinn was an enthusiast of avant-garde art and literature; he’d been involved in the Armory Show, was a friend and fan of Ezra Pound, and had warned Anderson and Heap about publishing the potentially troublemaking sections of Ulysses. Villagers flocked to the courtroom to be amused by the stilted proceedings. The funniest moment came when the three judges refused to allow the defense to read the offending passage aloud, because there was a young lady present, that is, Anderson. “But she is the publisher,” Quinn pointed out. “I’m sure she didn’t know the significance of what she was publishing,” a kindly judge replied. Not a single New York newspaper rose to the magazine’s defense. The defendants were found guilty and fined a hundred dollars. Anderson later regretted not going to jail, which she felt might have been good publicity. She also rued that when Sylvia Beach published the first edition of Ulysses from her little bookshop in Paris the following year, the entire literary world acclaimed what it had ignored the three years it was appearing in the Review.
The Review also published several poems by one of the most strikingly odd characters in the Village, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The Baroness’s poems trampled the fine line between Dada and doggerel. The first one printed in the Review, dedicated to Marcel Duchamp, began:
The sweet corners of thine tired mouth Mustir
So world-old tired to nobility
To more to shame to hatred of thineself
So noble soul so weak a body
Thine body is the prey of mice
Other poems freely mixed various languages real and invented, private puns, and raw sound. From a lament:
Narin—Tzarissamanili
(He is dead)
Ildrich mitzdonja—astatootch
Ninj—iffe kniek—
Ninj—iffe kniek!
Arr—karr—
Arrkarr—barr
Readers were violently divided about them, some hailing the Baroness as an avant-garde genius, others begging the editors to stop printing her indecipherable gibberish.
For a few years the Baroness was a Village legend and fixture. Everyone wrote about her (she’s Frau Mann, the Duchess of Broadback in Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood), gossiped about her, drew and painted and photographed her. Since the 1990s feminist art scholars have been at some pains to renovate her reputation from that of a mere eccentric to a pioneering new woman and a neglected artist who played a pivotal role in the Dada movement. In her 2002 biography Baroness Elsa, Irene Gammel pieces together a portrait from numerous fragmentary sources. The Baroness married into the title. She was born Else Plötz in 1874 in a small German town. Her father was a master mason and an abusive drunk who drove her mother mad. As a teenager Elsa escaped to Berlin, a vibrant arts scene in the 1890s, where she studied art, cultivated androgynous fashions, posed in flesh-colored tights for racy vaudeville tableaux vivants, was a chorus girl, and threw herself into a whirlwind of sexual relations that left her with syphilis. Exploding on the avant-garde art and literary circles in Berlin and Munich as a model, mistress, and provocateur, she “exploited men financially, physically, and spiritually, and created a great deal of misfortune,” an artist who knew her recalled. She and her second husband, the bisexual writer Felix Paul Greve, friend of Gide and H. G. Wells, lived and traveled on money given him
by a former gay lover, who had Greve jailed for a year on fraud charges. On his release Greve’s novels Fanny Essler and The Master Mason’s House, both based on Elsa’s life, were published. The former was a tell-all roman à clef about her sexual adventures among the aesthetes and literati (“very talentless and a bit mean,” one of them sniffed), the latter a thinly veiled narrative of her earlier life. In 1909, to escape crushing debts, they faked his suicide and fled to America, ending up in rural Kentucky, where he abandoned her. He reemerged in Canada with a new identity, the novelist Frederick Philip Grove, whose background wasn’t uncovered until years after his death in 1948.
Elsa meanwhile made her way to New York City, where in 1913 she married the Baron Leo von Freytag-Loringhoven. She was thirty-nine, gave her age as twenty-eight on the marriage license, and concealed the fact that she was still married to Greve. Leo was twenty-eight, a former army officer and fallen scion of a noble Westphalian house. They honeymooned at the Ritz, then he returned to his job as a busboy. When the Great War broke out the following year he sailed for Europe to fight for the Fatherland, but his ship was taken by the French before it reached harbor and he sat out the war a prisoner. He never fired a shot until 1919, when he put a bullet through his brain.
When the Baroness moved to the Village her behavior became increasingly, often desperately, bizarre. Visitors to her tenement hovel on West Fourteenth Street described the filth and stench, with varying numbers of stray dogs and cats prowling among the clutter of objects she brought in from the streets to use in her sculptures and outfits. She also shoplifted art supplies from various department stores, resulting in several arrests. As her personal hygiene grew lax, “a reek stood out purple from her body,” according to William Carlos Williams. Over time no soiree or Webster Hall frolic was complete without an appearance by the Baroness in one of her strange getups. When she first walked into the Review’s office she was wearing a bolero jacket, a kilt, spats, a multitude of dime store bracelets, two old tea balls hanging from her breasts, and a black tam-o’-shanter with ice cream spoons dangling from it. On that first visit the chronically impoverished Baroness stole five dollars in stamps. She later stole silverware from Jane Heap and raided the Review’s mail for subscription payments. For hats she wore peach baskets, wastepaper baskets, and, once, a wedding cake. She attended a costume ball at Webster Hall wearing parrot feather eyelashes and wouldn’t leave the stage until she was awarded a prize. She carried small dogs and large sculpted penises as props. At a reception for the British opera diva Marguerite d’Alvarez, she “wore a trailing blue-green dress and a peacock fan,” Anderson recalled. “One side of her face was decorated with a canceled postage stamp (two-cent American, pink). Her lips were painted black, her face powder was yellow. She wore the top of a coal scuttle for a hat, strapped on under her chin like a helmet. Two mustard spoons at the side gave the effect of feathers.” She greeted the famous coloratura with regal condescension. When d’Alvarez proclaimed that she sang “for humanity,” the Baroness loudly scoffed, “I wouldn’t lift a leg for humanity!”
Women on the scene tended to admire the Baroness’s bold individuality and frank sexuality. The men tended to be traumatized by her feral advances. The artist George Biddle recorded that he fled from her in terror when she tried to kiss him, and the poet Wallace Stevens reputedly wouldn’t venture below Fourteenth Street after she made a pass at him. Evidently only Williams, the hunky obstetrician and poet from New Jersey, was man enough to go toe to toe with her. He met her after she was released from the Jefferson Courthouse jail for shoplifting an umbrella. The Baroness conceived a ferocious desire for him, and when he demurred she stalked him in print, in New York, and in New Jersey, where she physically attacked him. On their next meeting, in Central Park, he punched her in the mouth, knocking her flat. Police hauled her away. Her heart broken, the Baroness shaved her head and lacquered it vermilion, then “stole the black crepe from the door of a house in mourning and made a dress of it,” Anderson recalled.
JOE GOULD CAME TO THE VILLAGE IN THE LATE 1910S AND MATCHED the Baroness for ubiquity and eccentricity, like her providing Villagers with plenty of both amusement and annoyance. “Joe Gould was an odd and penniless and unemployable little man who came to the city in 1916 and ducked and dodged and held on as hard as he could for over forty-five years,” The New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell writes in the opening of his famous profile “Joe Gould’s Secret.” Gould was a scion of the New England Goulds, a graduate of Harvard, but like so many who found their way to the Village he could not get by out there in the normal world. Years before Mitchell wrote about him he was a Village legend, a highly intelligent and impeccably educated bum who slept on park benches, cadged change in all the bars, appeared at all the parties to wolf down the cocktails and canapés. At five-foot-four and a hundred pounds, with wildly frizzy hair (he looked rather like Larry Fine of the Three Stooges) and rumpled clothes, he was by turns elfin and silly or taciturn and imperious. He entertained Villagers for decades with a surprisingly small repertoire of parlor tricks, the two best known being his imitation of a seagull and his recitation of the couplet “In the winter I’m a Buddhist, / In the summer I’m a nudist.” For a very long time he had the whole Village convinced he was a cracked genius in the rough, and that he was working on a gigantic tome, An Oral History of Our Time, written in scores of notebooks squirreled away in secret spots all over New York and New Jersey. Mitchell believed it when he wrote his first profile of him, “Professor Sea Gull,” for The New Yorker in 1942. Gould’s “secret,” revealed by Mitchell after Gould’s death in 1957, was that he was delusional, probably schizophrenic. The scant notebooks that turned up were filled with either endless repetitions of a few autobiographical anecdotes or mundane diary entries. Like the Baroness and some other Village fixtures over the years, Gould was the bohemian equivalent of a celebrity, famous for being infamous.
In 1918 twenty-one-year-old Dawn Powell arrived in Manhattan, another émigré from the small-town Midwest. She lived at first on the Upper West Side, cobbling together a small income writing for anybody who’d publish her. In those days, with the city’s fifty daily newspapers in various languages, more than two hundred weeklies, and several hundred magazines, a writer who hustled and wasn’t picky could get by. She would go on to write several plays and a few film scripts and more than a dozen novels, as well as keeping voluminous journals. She soon met and married another recent arrival, ad man Joseph Gousha (pronounced Goo-SHAY). They were never bohemians, but they lived just as unconventionally and often as impecuniously, and they never abandoned the Village the way some others did. They moved there in 1924 and were soon drinking and carrying on with Dell, Dreiser, Bodenheim, Cowley, and the rest. Joseph went too far with it and disappointed her by becoming, as she put it, a “crushed, hunted, half-defiant, half-cringing” drunk and depressive. They’d remain together through the rest of his life and most of hers, but in a loose arrangement that allowed her many lovers and one best drinking buddy, a bon vivant magazine editor named Coburn “Coby” Gilman, who moved into their duplex at 35 East Ninth Street, a doorman building across from the Lafayette Hotel, in the 1930s. This led to the impression that they indulged in a ménage à trois—probably a misperception, according to her biographer Tim Page, but not bad for her reputation among Villagers.
For years Powell held court from a corner table at the Lafayette’s café, collecting the anecdotes, gossip, quips, and characters that went into the series of witty New York novels she wrote from the 1930s on, including The Happy Island, The Wicked Pavilion, and The Golden Spur. They weren’t always appreciated in their time, most sold poorly to moderately (although Pavilion briefly made the best-seller list in 1954), and most were out of print when she died in 1965. Starting in the late 1980s her friend and fan Gore Vidal engineered a reappraisal, and the novels are back in print, now enjoyed for Powell’s unromantic, sometimes pitilessly satirical insights into her downtown milieu. Her characters might be bohemians or
Babbitts, straight or gay, fresh newcomers or old hands. Some are thinly veiled caricatures of actual people—Hemingway becomes a blowhardy author, Clare Boothe Luce a phony, Peggy Guggenheim a wealthy art patron whose carefully doled out support “gave her a fine philanthropic reputation, dictator rights and the privileges of the artist’s bed and time.” What marks them all as New Yorkers is the way every interaction is some sort of transaction—for love or sex, for money or standing, or just for a free drink or an invitation to a promising party. For all their antic hijinks and drunken bonhomie they’re often, as an unhappy New Yorker reviewer once put it, “a pretty worthless and ornery lot of people,” all loners and outsiders drawn to the Village like iron filings to a magnet, misfits who seem incapable of dealing with the America outside their little magic circle.
AFTER THE WAR, BETWEEN THE UPWARDLY CREEPING RENTS, THE start of Prohibition, and the carnivalization of the Village, many artists and writers, of both golden era and second wave, as well as many who would have become Villagers earlier in the 1910s, headed not just uptown or up the Hudson but across the sea, to Paris. Some went for a few months or years, others stayed a decade or more, still others treated it as a kind of long-distance Provincetown, a place to spend their summers. What the Village had been to the 1910s, Paris was to the ’20s, but on a grander scale. Parisians called the 1920s les années folles, the crazy years. Paris in the postwar years was hedonist and cosmopolitan and avant-garde and wide-open in ways even Greenwich Village couldn’t match. It was an international free zone for sex in any flavor, liquor that didn’t come from a gangster’s bathtub, drugs of all kinds, and the leading edge of every art form. And given a marvelously favorable exchange rate of the postwar franc to the dollar, for Americans all the decadence and freedom came exceedingly cheap. Americans of small means—writers, painters, jazz musicians—could live like swells. You could rent a studio or romantic garret for three or four dollars a month. You could take your friends to dinner, party all night afterward, and not spend ten dollars. For wealthy, wild Americans, such as the seriously promiscuous Harry and Caresse Crosby, the lesbian Natalie Barney with her salons and backyard Sapphic temple, and the bisexual romantic Cole Porter, Paris in the 1920s was a moveable feast fit for kings. Berlin was just as wild and cheap during the same period—and more politically radical, more openly gay, and more intellectually bracing. It attracted its Audens and Isherwoods and Sally Bowleses. But Berlin was a bit too desperate and apocalyptic for most of the Lost Generation, who preferred the more genteel decadence of Paris.
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