The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Djuna Barnes left the Village for Paris in 1921. She held herself aloof and apart there too, never learning much French in almost a decade in the city and making friends only among other English-speakers: Gertrude Stein of course, and James Joyce, Mina Loy, Kay Boyle, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Peggy Guggenheim. True to Powell’s lampoon of her, Guggenheim was a Medici of modernism, surrounding herself with artists and writers to whom she doled out just enough favors and funding to keep them around, if grumbling. Barnes did plenty of the latter, exasperating her benefactress on numerous occasions. She wrote her first novel, Ryder, in Paris, the thinly veiled story of a supremely dysfunctional family. It made the best-seller lists back home. She also created another illustrated book about her lesbian friends, The Ladies Almanack, banned in the United States. She met the love of her life, the sculptor Thelma Ellen Wood, who eventually not only broke her heart but led her down a path into alcoholism. Her novel Nightwood, on which her literary reputation rests almost entirely now, revolves, in its highly elliptical way, around the end of their affair. It was published in London in 1936 and in New York the following year, and while many of the great writers of her time professed to admire it, many also confessed to being confused by it. Barnes remained in France and England until 1939. “By the late 1930s,” her biographer Philip Herring writes, “Djuna Barnes was caught in a spiral downward into alcoholism, self-deception, and continual illness . . . Soon she would give up even the pretense of writing or painting or being sociable and just drink alone in her room.” She was prone to the usual drunkard’s list of illnesses, accidental injuries, and delusional outbursts. After Djuna’s failed suicide attempt in 1939, Peggy Guggenheim in effect had her kidnapped and thrown on a boat for New York, where friends and family tossed her into a sanitarium for a drying-out cure that didn’t stick. She returned to the Village and would spend the bulk of the 1940s battling alcohol, falling down, getting sick, writing little.

  Edna St. Vincent Millay left for Paris in 1921 as well and spent a couple of years traveling around Europe, having more of her carefree affairs. She returned to New York in 1923, in short order won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry—the first woman to do so—and married the middle-aged Dutch businessman and playboy Eugen Boissevain. They rented the miniature town house at 75 1/2 Bedford Street, touted by every Village tour guide as “the narrowest house in New York” at less than ten feet wide. They weren’t there much anyway. For their honeymoon they took an extended trip around the world, after which they bought a farm upstate. They remained together in an open marriage while he catered to her needs and managed her career, which burned bright into the 1930s. (Djuna Barnes once told Edmund Wilson a story in which Carl Van Vechten goes into a bookstore in some provincial town and starts dropping the names of all the famous authors he knows. When the dazzled bookman asks him who he is, Van Vechten airily replies, “Oh, I am Edna St. Vincent Millay!”) In the 1940s Vincent’s health and her poetic voice slipped away. Eugen died in 1949 and she followed the next year.

  Baroness Elsa also left New York bound for Paris in 1923. When she died in 1927, having left the gas on in her room as she went to sleep, it was not clear whether she’d intended suicide or was merely careless.

  In 1923 Anderson and Heap joined the exodus. Anderson took a new lover and made Paris her home for years, while Heap returned to New York in 1925, where she continued to put out The Little Review more or less quarterly, publishing Gertrude Stein, some of Hemingway’s first works, Gide, Cocteau, Picabia, Fernand Léger, Tristan Tzara. Heap made the magazine a New York outpost for European Dada, Mechanism, Futurism, and Constructivism and carried on the work begun at the Armory Show by organizing a Machine Age exhibition and “The International Theatre Exposition.”

  In 1929 Anderson and Heap decided to stop publishing the Review. “Our mission was accomplished; contemporary art had ‘arrived’; for a hundred years, perhaps, the literary world would produce only: repetition,” Anderson proclaimed. For the final issue they sent a questionnaire to contributors, asking, “What should you most like to do, to know, to be? (In case you are not satisfied.) Why wouldn’t you change places with any other human being? What do you look forward to? What do you fear most from the future?” Many made conscientious efforts to reply. Djuna Barnes simply wrote:

  Dear Little Review:

  I am sorry but the list of questions does not interest me to answer. Nor have I that respect for the public.

  While some Village expats to Europe, such as Anderson and Barnes, stayed away for many years, those like Heap—who filtered back in the early to mid-1920s, their Paris fling over—returned to a Village in its own années folles: the Roaring Twenties.

  PART II

  The Dry Decade, the Red Decade, World War II

  11

  The Prohibition Years

  IN 1929, WHEN THE MAYOR OF BERLIN VISITED NEW YORK CITY, he marveled at the skyscrapers, enjoyed tours around the various neighborhoods, then supposedly turned to Mayor Jimmy Walker and asked, “When does the Prohibition law go into effect?”

  Prohibition had been in effect for almost a decade by then, but you couldn’t blame the innocent visitor for not noticing. The nation’s great urban and industrial centers had never enforced the law with anything resembling the hoped-for gusto. And no locale, not even Chicago, flouted Prohibition with quite the elbow-bending, nose-thumbing vivacity of New York City. Throughout the era, Americans and foreign visitors who wanted a drink in relative peace knew they could get one in New York. New Yorkers from top to bottom, from the mayor to the immigrant laborer, from its hoodlums to its largely Irish constabulary, were determined to ignore Prohibition, get around it, or profit from it in some way.

  The legislatures in forty-six of the forty-eight states, including the state of New York, ratified the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, to go into effect in January 1920. To give it legislative teeth, Congress passed the Volstead Act. A federal Prohibition Unit, later renamed the Prohibition Bureau, was created to enforce the law. It was all the culmination of a temperance movement that went back to colonial times in its efforts to combat what were in fact ruinous levels of alcohol consumption in America. From the time of the first European settlers, America was, as a man remarked to Thomas Jefferson in the 1830s, “a nation of sots.” The millions of German, Irish, and Italian immigrants who arrived in the nineteenth century added their own love of beer, whiskey, and wine. Temperance originally meant just that: modifying one’s drinking. But by the 1840s it had come to mean total abstinence and prohibition. Among the drivers of the movement were the same aggrieved wives and mothers who steadfastly lobbied for women’s suffrage. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Amelia Bloomer (whose name, yes, was applied to the women’s garment) were all leaders in both movements. By the turn of the century temperance had also made strange bedfellows of rural conservatives and big-city reformers, Ivy League university presidents and tent revival preachers, steel barons and social workers, anti-immigrant groups in the northern cities and antiblack ones in the South, all brought together by the shared conviction that liquor was the source of the nation’s worst social ills. Twenty-six states were already dry to varying degrees when Prohibition became law; part of the point of a national ban was to halt the flow of alcohol from wet states into those dry ones. There was so much smuggling on Highway 25 linking dry Toledo to wet Detroit, for instance, that it was known as the Avenue de Booze. While New Yorkers and residents of other large cities flouted the new law throughout the 1920s, drinking in fact declined sharply in the rest of the country during Prohibition. After Prohibition ended in 1933 Americans in general drank less than they had before. (Though in this too, as we’ll see, Greenwich Village bucked the norm.)

  In New York City, which had been a hard-drinking, hard-partying town since before it was New York City, anti-Prohibition sentiments ran high. Congressman Fiorello La Guardia, born in Greenwich Village, vehemently opposed the Volstead bill and predicted that Prohibition would do nothing to lessen Ameri
cans’ drinking but much to promote criminal activities and disregard for the law. The son of immigrants, La Guardia also pointed out, correctly, that Prohibition was in some large measure an anti-immigrant movement aimed at the saloons that were central to the social life of the urban working class. He was still against it in 1926, when he observed, “It is impossible to tell whether prohibition is a good thing or a bad thing. It has never been enforced in this country.” In a city where twenty-three large breweries were steady employers, labor leaders threatened a general strike if beer was included in the new law. Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt believed in some government control of liquor but not an outright ban. After all, liquor taxes netted more than a quarter of New York’s state budget.

  Prohibition didn’t go into full effect until January 1920 but a kind of practice lap, or dry run if you will, preceded it: starting on July 1, 1919, a Wartime Prohibition Act effectively barred the production and consumption of anything other than watery “war beer” that contained only about half the usual alcohol content. As the dreadful date loomed, New Yorkers went on a “liquor stampede.” Liquor stores ran ads like “Protect Against the Dry Days.” The night of June 30 was remembered as “New Year’s Eve in June,” as New Yorkers throughout the city crammed into every bar and saloon for a last night of full-bore whoopee. In the Village, the Brevoort opened its wine cellar at midnight and sold the contents at cost. Tipsy Villagers straggled across Washington Square cradling bottles in their arms. Some didn’t make it all the way before falling into the fountain or flopping down on the benches and uncorking their booty right there. New Year’s Eve proper six months later was said to be the wettest on record. Prohibition became law three weeks later.

  All of New York City disobeyed the drinking ban but Greenwich Village, as one might expect, was one of the most openly defiant neighborhoods. On the very first day the Wartime Prohibition Act went into effect, the first person in the city, and possibly the country, to be arrested for disobeying it was Barney Gallant, co-owner (with Polly Holladay, formerly of Polly’s) of the Greenwich Village Inn near Sheridan Square. A waiter had served a glass of sherry in full view of undercover lawmen and Gallant gallantly insisted on being the one punished. Like The Masses editors, he appeared before the lenient judge Learned Hand for sentencing. Judge Hand gave him ten days to get his affairs in order before serving a very brief sentence behind bars. Gallant returned from the hearing to a hero’s welcome at the inn, where the liquor continued to flow. Twenty thousand New Yorkers signed a petition in his support, setting a New York tradition of insubordination that continued throughout the dry years.

  Greenwich Village had always been a particularly wet neighborhood, with its more than fifty Irish corner saloons, its many Italian families who made their own wine, and its hard-drinking bohemians, wannabes, and tourists. Under Prohibition, the sociologist Ware wrote, “the principal industry of the Village . . . both in terms of the numbers of residents engaged in it and the income brought from it, was some form or other of bootlegging.” Villagers turned to brewing, fermenting, and distilling their own liquor. Moonshine and moonshiners had been around forever, but Prohibition boosted the backwoods pastime into a national industry. Data suggest that the number of illegal stills around the country increased an astonishing thousandfold in the first six months of 1920. The market for both large, industrial stills and small home models boomed. A large still could make a hundred gallons of alcohol a day, produced at a cost of fifty cents a gallon and sold on the instantly bustling black market for three or four dollars. New York newspapers ran ads for one-gallon home stills and hardware stores in Greenwich Village displayed them in their windows. The shelves of any public library held books and even helpful government pamphlets on how to use them.

  Early in 1920 the New York City administrator of the Prohibition Unit issued a call for all residents who owned stills to surrender them to his office, and when not a single citizen of the great metropolis complied he sent out his force of fewer than two hundred agents in a doomed search-and-seizure effort. Of course, as every backwoods moonshiner knows, stills sometimes blow up, making them dangerous appliances to have cooking away in apartments all over New York. Periodically through the 1920s a still explosion would make the news, including one in a West Eleventh Street kitchen that killed the owner’s infant son.

  In the Italian Village, people had always made wine for home use. Now they amped it up into a thriving cottage industry. “In the fall of the year, truckloads of grapes might be seen being unloaded in front of tenements or stores, the remains of mash purpled the gutters, and women grocery-store keepers apologized for the condition of their hands as they weighed their vegetables,” Ware reported. Every Italian-owned business in the neighborhood—grocer, bootblack, cigar store, or barbershop—sold wine. Any New Yorker who wanted vino with dinner knew to shop in the Village.

  As Prohibition shut down roughly four out of five of the city’s fifteen thousand licensed taverns and saloons (the remaining few stayed open serving nonalcoholic fare), more than thirty thousand speakeasies took their place. Already a nightlife destination before Prohibition, Greenwich Village filled up with them. Toffs, tourists, and celebrities who could afford watery champagne at a hundred dollars a bottle patronized midtown clubs in and around Times Square, but the average citizen or college boy out for a ramble on a more limited budget headed to the less pricey Village. John Sloan commented that where there’d been a saloon on every corner of the Village in the 1910s, now there were ten speakeasies on every block. Many were dark hole-in-the-wall dives run by the neighborhood’s Italian and Irish street gangs, who were taking their first steps to becoming full-fledged mafiosi. These tended to be like the classic speakeasy of lore, “stowed away with utmost secrecy,” Ware writes, “and entered only with knock and password by those who were known.” What they sold as gin, scotch, or bourbon was often just industrial or grain alcohol flavored and colored to a loose but potent approximation of the real thing. Patrons who drank too much of the swill were often poured into a waiting taxi at the end of the night, driven over to the dark waterfront, and rolled for their remaining cash. Poisoning from bad alcohol could be deadly; by the end of the decade more than six hundred New Yorkers a year were dying from it.

  Classier speakeasies were more like cabarets or nightclubs, featuring a wide variety of entertainments along with the bad liquor. Some were so far from secret that they were world famous, their addresses listed in every tourist guide, and the only people the lug behind the door refused to admit were those he had very good reason to suspect were law enforcers. Sheridan Square was thick with this type of speakeasy geared for the tourist trade, early examples of the theme bar. At the Pirate’s Den a doorman dressed like a buccaneer let tourists in. Staff costumed as sea dogs staged mock battles with cutlasses in a warren hung with rigging and clanking chains, all dimly lit with ship’s lanterns. Nearby were the zany Nut Club, something like a forerunner to today’s comedy clubs; the Indian-themed Wigwam; and the Village Barn, a basement on West Eighth Street featuring square dances, hoedowns, and live turtle races. The Barn would long outlive Prohibition as a legitimate, if hokey, club.

  In 1925 the perpetually broke and peripatetic Henry and June Miller moved to Greenwich Village to try running a speakeasy. It was in a tiny basement apartment they rented in the brick house at 106 Perry Street, where Henry had to make himself scarce when June brought her wealthy admirers over. June, the bisexual wild child, had been a taxi dancer when they met in 1923. It was at her prompting that he quit his job at the “Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company”—Western Union—to try to make it as a writer. In their time together they lived in, and were often thrown out of, numerous apartments in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. The speakeasy-and-sugar-daddies arrangement on Perry Street was one of their many failed moneymaking schemes. In Plexus Miller writes, “To run a speakeasy . . . and to live in it at the same time, is one of those fantastic ideas which can only arise in the minds of thoroughly impractica
l individuals.” The apartment was two small rooms and a kitchen. One room held a pool table, with windows always shut and heavily curtained against law enforcement’s prying eyes. By morning, when they tried to get to sleep, the stench of stale beer, spilled wine, and tobacco smoke was awful. “No doubt about it, if the enterprise proves a success we’ll have tuberculosis.” It wasn’t a success. They thrived briefly at first, mostly because June’s well-heeled admirers were customers. But they soon drifted off and within a few months the clientele was mostly Henry’s impoverished bohemian pals. “On the kitchen wall is a long list of names,” he records in Plexus. “Beside the names is chalked up the sums owed us by our friends, our only steady customers.” By 1926 they’d been evicted, the end of their brief Village fling. In 1930, deep in debt and driven crazy by June’s affairs with men and women, Henry would leave for Paris. June would follow, and the two of them and Anaïs Nin would soon have their triangle. Henry and June separated in 1932 and divorced in 1934.