The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Edmund Wilson, known to friends as Bunny, also arrived on the scene from serving in France. He was a short, plump, rosy-cheeked young man with the dolphin-browed dome of an intellectual and a high, thin voice, shy and aloof in manners and emotionally distant. Cummings called him “the man in the iron necktie,” and his second wife’s mother told him he was “a cold fishy leprous person.” Growing up in the town of Red Bank on the New Jersey shore, he’d suffered through an affluent but bleakly WASPy youth. As a boy his knowledge of the greater world came largely through books. He studied at Princeton, where he met and became friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose work he would critique for him. He believed, reasonably enough, that his friend had a great facility with words and romance but was an intellectual lightweight who drank way too much ever to think great thoughts. He nicknamed This Side of Paradise “This Side of Paralyzed.” After Fitzgerald died in 1940, Wilson edited The Last Tycoon and The Crack-Up for posthumous publication.

  He first moved to the Village in 1916, taking an apartment on West Eighth Street with two friends. His father supplemented the fifteen dollars a week he made as a cub reporter, so that despite the Grub Street job Wilson could cut a swell figure in the Village, always nattily dressed, carrying a stick, the visual antithesis of the bohemians around him. He and his roommates hosted genteel cocktail parties, complete with oboe music. Like many Village intellectuals Wilson was against America’s entering the war in Europe, but when it did he volunteered and served with military hospital and intelligence units. He returned to the Village in 1919 and shared a place—and a West Indian cook—with two friends at 114 West Twelfth Street. He’d bounce around to various addresses in and out and back in the Village through the 1920s, then move up and out, but still summer with the old crowd in Provincetown. After writing and reading all day, he launched himself into the drinking and carousing nightlife of the 1920s Village with the determination of a young man who had a very straitlaced background to overcome. Previously abstemious, he took right to drink; his sexual adventurism developed more slowly.

  In the first volume of his journals, published posthumously as The Twenties, Wilson records slipping shyly into a pharmacy on Greenwich Avenue to buy his first condom. The helpful pharmacist blew one up like a balloon to show him how it worked. It burst, which he later—after suffering “many of the hazards of sex,” including “abortions, gonorrhea, entanglements, a broken heart”—took as an omen. When he met Edna St. Vincent Millay in 1920 he was as dazzled as everyone else. According to his biographer Jeffrey Meyers, Wilson at twenty-five was still a virgin when Millay made him one of her many lovers. Wilson later wrote that she “ignited for me both my intellectual passion and my unsatisfied desire, which went up together in a blaze of ecstasy that remains for me one of the high points of my life.” He notes his “subsequent chagrin and perplexity, when I discovered that, due to her extreme promiscuity, this could not be expected to continue.” He proposed marriage—lots of men did—and forlornly dogged her to Paris, where he found she’d taken a new lover. His ardor dashed, he felt like he was “staring into the center of an extinct volcano.” From the ashes of that dead affair rose what Meyers calls “one of the great literary fornicators of all time.” Wilson astonished his contemporaries with the volume and variety of his conquests—actresses, poets, chorines, working girls, socialites—and writes in his notebooks with a sometimes giddy joy about his many sexual experiences. He’d go through four wives and cheat on them all.

  For all that, Wilson possessed a disciplined mind and was a prolific writer, both as a journalist—at Vanity Fair, then the New Republic, and starting in the 1940s at The New Yorker—and as an author of many books. An astute and probing literary critic Wilson was one of the first in America to grasp the significance of Joyce, Eliot, and the other moderns; his Axel’s Castle, published in 1930, was a seminal overview and analysis of the movement. It came out just as the Depression and rise of fascism put the modern era on pause. He went on to be one of the century’s preeminent men of letters, writing about the Depression itself (The American Earthquake), the history of socialism (To the Finland Station), the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Iroquois nation, the cold war, the injustice of the income tax—whatever inspired his catholic interests and curiosity.

  Thomas Wolfe, twenty-three years old, came to the Village in the winter of 1924 to teach English at NYU. He’d grown up in Asheville, North Carolina, a town he would scandalize with his autobiographical novel Look Homeward, Angel, crowded with thinly veiled portraits of the citizenry. He started out writing plays and earned a master’s degree in playwriting from Harvard. But when he showed his work around Broadway, producers told him his plays were just too long to stage. So in the mid-1920s he turned to writing novels, which also tended to be huge. But then so was Wolfe—six-foot-five and powerfully built—and so were his energies, neuroses, and appetites.

  He took a room for twelve dollars a week at the residential Hotel Albert on University Place between East Eleventh and Twelfth Streets. It was not the cheeriest place. Most of the other residents, he would write in Of Time and the River, “were old people with a pension, or a small income, which was just meagerly sufficient to their slender needs. Some of them, widowed, withered, childless, and alone were drearily wearing out the end of their lives here in a barren solitude . . . [They] stayed in their rooms and washed their stockings out and did embroidery, or descended to the little restaurant to eat, or sat together in one corner of the white-tiled lobby and talked.”

  NYU was going through one of its growth phases when he arrived. From around four thousand students before the war it was up to sixteen thousand. Its main campus was actually not in the Village at this point: it had been moved to University Heights in the Bronx in the 1890s. (That campus would be sold to the City University of New York in the 1970s.) Downtown, the school demolished the original building and constructed a new one to house the undergraduate liberal arts program. There, Wolfe collided with a large influx of students, many of them Jewish and Italian boys and girls from the Lower East Side. The more Wolfe, still very much a southern boy, struggled to repress an inbred and deep-seated anti-Semitism, the more it expressed itself in tortured ways, including an almost overpowering combination of lust and terror inspired by “the proud and potent Jewesses with their amber flesh . . . skilled in all the teasings of erotic trickery.” He also developed a mighty grudge against the college, blaming his crushing workload as a teacher for not getting any writing done.

  In 1925 he lit out for a trip to Europe. On the ocean liner coming back he met his own personal erotic Jewess, Aline Bernstein. A New York native, she was the daughter of a respected Shakespearean actor and a successful theatrical designer in her own right. She was also the wife of a wealthy stockbroker, a mother of two teenagers, and twenty years older than Wolfe. They began a powerfully sexual and emotionally tumultuous affair. They rented a garret in the Village together, a dreary fourth-floor walkup at 13 East Eighth Street, a block north of Washington Square Park. She set up her drafting table in the front room and spent her days there while, unbeknownst to her family uptown or to Wolfe’s employers at the university, he lived in the back, giving the Harvard Club as his address if asked. They later gave it up for a larger, better-appointed apartment at 263 West Eleventh Street. With Aline playing a combination of lover and mother (she cooked lunch for him, cleaned up after him, supported him financially, and scolded him when he got lazy or undisciplined), he went to work on what became Look Homeward, Angel. The longer he labored over it and the longer it got, the more difficult he became. Sometimes he’d fly into jealous rages, accusing her of being a whore and a sex-crazed Jew; sometimes he’d beg her to get a divorce and marry him. He liked it when she introduced him to famous writers she knew, including Carl Van Vechten and, on a trip to Europe she financed, James Joyce, but he could turn surly and pugnacious around her other friends. Sometimes he proudly showed her off to his younger cohort, at others he wondered if they mocked him as a middle-aged
woman’s boy toy. She stuck with him and kept him at his work. When he finished the novel’s enormous first draft, Aline took it around to publishers, who rejected it as too prolix and formless. When Charles Scribner’s Sons published it in 1929, the editor Maxwell Perkins, who also edited Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dawn Powell, had cut it down by sixty thousand words.

  Wolfe dedicated it to “A.B.” Then he screwed every attractive literary groupie who gravitated his way once the favorable reviews came out, and he made sure Aline knew it. It was his way of beginning to extricate himself from the relationship, a process he dragged out over a few years. She didn’t want him to leave and bore every cruelty and humiliation he doled out as he pried himself away from her an agonized bit at a time. When he finally moved to a place of his own, in Brooklyn in 1931, she responded with a suicide attempt. Even then the cruelties didn’t stop. Once, he asked her to bring him five hundred dollars. When she got to Brooklyn she found his mother had come to visit him. Wolfe’s mother, noting that Aline’s daughters were closer to her son’s age than Aline was, told her she considered any relationship between them other than a merely friendly one “illicit.” Wolfe took his mother’s side, and when Aline left in utter mortification the two of them sniggered anti-Semitic remarks.

  Wolfe’s sprawling second novel, the autobiographical Of Time and the River, took up where the first one ended. It was a best seller in 1935. He was widely feted as the country’s new literary genius and enjoyed many more groupies. Few were unimpressed; one of them was Dawn Powell, whose skills as a wit and satirist were matched only by Dorothy Parker’s at that point. She reduced the eight-hundred-page novel to a scathing eight-line ditty:

  Oh Boston girls how about it

  Oh Jewish girls, what say

  Oh America I love you

  Oh geography, hooray

  Ah youth, ah me, ah beauty

  Ah sensitive, arty boy

  Ah busts and thighs and bellies

  Ah nookey there—ahoy!

  In 1938 Wolfe was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the brain and died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, supposedly with Aline’s name on his lips. He left a vast store of manuscript materials; over half of his published work, including the novel You Can’t Go Home Again, appeared posthumously. The year he died, Knopf published Aline’s novel The Journey Down, based on their relationship. She died in 1955.

  THE FRENCH-BORN AVANT-GARDE COMPOSER AND CONDUCTOR EDGARD Varèse and his wife, Louise, a noted translator of Proust and Rimbaud, arrived in New York in 1915, fleeing, much like Marcel Duchamp, the war in Europe. By the mid-1920s he too was settled in the Village where, except for a return to Paris from 1928 through 1932, he lived until his death in 1962, much of that time at 188 Sullivan Street, one of William Sloane Coffin’s MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens town houses. Contrary to later myths that would paint Varèse as a lonely avant-garde hero who toiled in obscurity in culturally benighted America, he was received in New York with open arms and adored by critics from the start. Following his American debut as a conductor in April 1917, at the gigantic and gaudy Hippodrome auditorium in the theater district, critics hailed him as a genius. Being French at a time when the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and other patriotic bastions of symphonic music were cleansing their programs of German conductors and compositions didn’t hurt. (President Wilson declared war on the Germans four days after the concert.)

  In the late 1920s one critic called Varèse a “new god” among modern composers and compared his innovative genius to that of Leonardo da Vinci. Although his celebrity in New York did dim in the 1930s and ’40s, partly due to his return to France in that period, an entire new generation of American composers and critics rediscovered him in the postwar years and, as one music historian has put it, he “rose again as a well-established deity.” He was a well-liked presence in the Village through the 1950s, especially admired by the jazzmen Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, and David Amram, who heard parallels between jazz and Varèse’s experiments with atonal and electronic sounds. Back in the 1920s Varèse had disparaged jazz as “a negro product, exploited by the Jews,” but bebop and free jazz appealed to him, and he’d go to Village clubs to hear it. He even conducted a free jazz workshop in 1957 with musicians including Mingus, Art Farmer, and Teo Macero. Free jazz is said to have inspired his Poème Électronique, an eight-minute tape of electronic whoops, bleeps, and whistles created for the Philips Pavilion of the 1958 world’s fair in Brussels. He arranged for its U.S. premiere to be “not at Carnegie Hall but at the Village Gate,” Amram recalls. “He said, ‘I want to have it here where my friends can come and not have to take out a mortgage, and be able to see me afterwards and not have to break through a phalanx of guards.’ He was the most genial, warm, hamische guy.”

  After Jane Heap returned to the Village in the mid-1920s, she was instrumental in bringing the Romanian avant-garde architect and designer Frederick Kiesler to the neighborhood. She’d seen an exhibit of his theater designs in Paris and teamed with the Provincetown Players, the Theatre Guild, and the Greenwich Village Theater to invite both the exhibit and Kiesler to New York. He was soon commissioned to design the city’s first theater dedicated solely to film. At the time, movie theaters still featured live entertainment, so along with screens they had stages, curtains, and proscenium arches. The Film Guild Cinema opened in 1928 at 52 West Eighth Street, above the Village Barn and just down the block from where Gertrude Whitney was about to open her art museum. It was a dazzling wonder of the brand-new International Style, both the exterior, which looked like a Mondrian painting, and the ultra moderne auditorium, which had a screen that could dilate to different dimensions depending on the film to be projected. The coming of the Depression ended the experiment, but redesigned and reopened as the Eighth Street Playhouse it went on to be a cherished Village institution almost to the end of the century.

  The Village got a larger International Style building around the same time, when the New School for Social Research moved there from Chelsea. A handful of progressive scholars uncomfortable with the militarist, nationalist trend at Columbia University left and founded the school in 1919. They included the historian Charles Beard, the economist Thorstein Veblen, and the philosopher John Dewey. They ran their New School as an academy, with lectures and free discussion, open to any interested adult, and no grade system. Reorganized along more traditional university lines in the 1920s, the school bought and demolished some old houses on West Twelfth Street near Sixth Avenue. In their place, Joseph Urban—previously known for creating the stage sets and theater for Ziegfeld’s Follies—designed a new home, a modern banded box of a building, rearing up from the middle of a block of brick town houses, which startled the Village when it was completed in 1930. Thomas Hart Benton and José Clemente Orozco painted large, beautiful murals for inside. In one, Benton added the figure of a young man who was studying under him at the Art Students League named Jackson Pollock.

  13

  The Red Decade

  BEFORE THE CRASH OF OCTOBER 1929, NATIONAL UNEMPLOYMENT stood at around 3 percent. By early 1930, according to some estimates, it had already increased tenfold. In New York City a million adults lost their jobs in the first few years of the Depression, and two hundred thousand a year were thrown out of their homes, some starving to death on the streets. In the Village and on the Lower East Side, the already crowded tenements got even more so as families doubled up and took in lodgers. Others built their own makeshift homes. By 1931, Greenwich House’s Mary Simkhovitch recorded, the homeless had built shanty jungles, aka Hoovervilles, all over the city. One such jungle was near the waterfront, on a block of West Street the New York Central Railroad had cleared for its tracks, knocking down old houses to leave open, unfinished cellar pits. Several hundred homeless men threw tin roofs over these pits or built shacks above them. Only men lived there, those with families having sent them away while they stayed in the city and tried to find work. They grouped themselves by race, white men on one
side of the tracks, blacks on the other, and a small Latino group off to one side.

  Some of the men knew they were there for the long haul.