The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  The best house built above the ground was a two-room bungalow with well-matched boards, good flooring, beams and doorjamb true, good roofing and a good window. Inside, the wall was wainscoted halfway up. The wood used for this purpose consisted of very narrow lathes carefully cut and fitted together and stained green. The upper part of the walls was lined with cardboard and papered with white wallpaper, as was the low ceiling. The main room contained substantial shelves, the bedroom firm bunks. An old coal range, secured in return for assistance to a man who was moving, had been installed in one corner. A piece of linoleum covered the floor. At the windows, over the shelves and over the door to the second room were curtains. The walls were decorated with pictures drawn by one of the neighboring shack dwellers.

  A nearby gas station filled the men’s water pails and let only the white men use its restroom. They scrounged for food at the markets, worked odd jobs along the waterfront when they could find them, and panhandled.

  Artists in and around the Village were already used to being broke much of the time, but now the opportunities for work—illustrations for magazines, portraits of rich patrons’ children and pets—really dried up. John Sloan drew a cartoon of a banker leaping into a hole labeled “Depression,” only to find an artist already occupying it. Eleanor Roosevelt, a New York native who would move to the Village after Franklin died, held two benefit fund-raisers for artists at Romany Marie Tavern, and Marie herself ladled out a lot of free soup and chorba to her artist friends throughout the decade. In 1932 Gertrude Whitney and other well-heeled art patrons formed the Artists’ Aid Committee and organized a twice-annual Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit at which hundreds of downtown artists showed and hoped to sell their works for five or ten bucks apiece. At the first event in the spring of 1932 a twenty-one-year-old named Jackson Pollock exhibited still very traditional pictures, his first public showing. He didn’t sell any.

  It’s no coincidence that the 1930s came to be known as both the Depression era and the Red Decade. The Great Depression and the international rise of fascism combined to make the 1930s banner years for progressives, from FDR to the American Communist Party. It re-radicalized the Village. For many (though not all) Greenwich Village intellectuals and artists through most of the 1930s, the question wasn’t Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, but Stalinist or Trotskyist, the New Masses or Partisan Review. Only at the end of the decade, when Stalin’s barbarous excesses became public knowledge, would the infatuation fade.

  Decimated by the Palmer Raids and marginalized by the giddy prosperity of the 1920s, the CPUSA entered the 1930s with fewer than ten thousand dues-paying members. Toward the end of the decade it peaked at around a hundred thousand, and untold thousands more Americans were fellow travelers, who sympathized without actually joining. For many it was just a youth-rebellion fad, functionally equivalent to hanging a Che Guevara or Angela Davis poster in your dorm room forty years later. But many New York artists and intellectuals in the 1930s sincerely believed they had a duty to create a new culture that reflected the reality of proletarian lives and inspired revolutionary zeal in the masses. They were less sure about how to do that. As we’ve seen, many were middle- and upper-class Ivy Leaguers and aesthetes with only the haziest ideas about who the proletariat was. Others were first- or second-generation American Jews who’d rarely set foot outside the five boroughs of New York City and were largely unfamiliar with the rest of America and its culture. As Kenneth Rexroth later japed, “Nothing was sadder than the ‘proletarian novelist’ . . . the product of a sociology course and a subscription to a butcher-paper weekly, eked out with a terrified visit to a beer parlor on the other side of the tracks and a hasty scurry past a picket line. Nobody read him but other Greenwich Village aesthetes like himself.”

  Those who were CPUSA members could at least take their cues directly from the Comintern (Communist International) in Moscow. The party entered the decade with a hard-line policy condemning all other left and liberal movements as “socialist-fascist” and declaring itself the only true revolutionary party. It took a similar purist stand on culture, denouncing all arts and entertainments made by and for the masses as counterrevolutionary and hopelessly corrupted by individualist and capitalist ideas. To the party’s Daily Worker, magazines like Liberty and Collier’s were “flourishing weeds” and “dope-peddlers,” and folk music was “complacent, melancholy, defeatist . . . intended to make the slaves endure their lot—pretty, but not the stuff for a militant proletariat to feed on.” The New Masses tagged jazz “pseudo-music” and condemned Hollywood as “a gigantic propaganda factory for every feeble and vicious and half-false way of life.” The New Masses’ most vitriolic critic of American popular culture was the editor Mike Gold, born Itzok Granich on the Lower East Side. (Many radicals used pseudonyms, a tradition that went back to Vladimir Lenin, born Vladimir Ulyanov, and Leon Trotsky, born Lev Bronshtein.) Gold did his first writing for Max Eastman at The Masses in the 1910s, helped start up the New Masses in 1926, and pushed it toward the hard-liner stand it adopted in the 1930s. In 1929 he drummed Floyd Dell out of the publication for being too bourgeois and complacent. He targeted modern literature, charging Gertrude Stein with “literary idiocy,” ridiculing Proust as the “master-masturbator of the bourgeois literature,” and rebuking Carl Van Vechten’s debasement of black culture into nothing but “gin, jazz and sex.” He showed the way he believed proletarian literature should go in his autobiographical novel of the Lower East Side Jews Without Money, published to great success in 1930 and still in print today. Unlike many 1930s leftists, Gold would proudly retain his Communist Party membership right up to his death in 1967.

  Not all efforts to create “Proletarian Culture” (or Prolecult) were as successful as Gold’s. The CPUSA in New York sponsored a Workers Music Alliance and a Composers Collective, tasked with creating new, revolutionary “music for the masses.” But the collective’s composers Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein were academy-trained aesthetes (both had studied under Nadia Boulanger in Paris), modernists and avant-gardists with very vague ideas about what might inspire revolutionary zeal in the masses, to whom Copland referred, with unconscious condescension, as “peasants.” Their early efforts had no impact outside concert halls filled with like-minded aficionados.

  At the same time that the hard-line Marxists were excoriating populist American culture, a few Village iconoclasts were championing it. John Hammond, the Yale-educated great-grandson of William Henry Vanderbilt, moved to Greenwich Village in 1931 and began avidly promoting, producing, and recording that most American of musical forms, jazz. In 1938 he would organize an immensely important concert at Carnegie Hall, “From Spirituals to Swing.” He wanted to show that jazz was art, not just dance music—thus the Carnegie Hall setting—and that it had roots that went back through the blues and gospel to Africa. The concert was a great success, even though many of the performers were unknown in New York at the time. They included Lux Lewis, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Lester Young, Sidney Bechet, James P. Johnson, Count Basie, Big Joe Turner, and Sonny Terry. Hammond became a legendary producer at Columbia Records, instrumental in the careers of many other artists, including Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman, Ida Cox, Big Bill Broonzy, and Bob Dylan.

  In 1933 the musicologist John Lomax took his son Alan and an enormous disc-recording phonograph, then state of the art, on a tour of the South, recording the work songs, blues, and ballads of prisoners and field hands, mostly black. In Angola Prison in Louisiana they met Huddie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly, serving time for murder. From him they first heard the songs “Goodnight, Irene” and “Midnight Special” and many others. When Leadbelly was released from prison the following year he joined the Lomaxes in Greenwich Village.

  In 1934 the Comintern in Moscow abruptly announced a broad reversal in policy anyway. With Stalin’s agrarian and industrial reforms failing miserably, and fascists taking over in Germany and Italy, the Soviet Union and international Communism needed all the friend
s they could get if they were to survive. The Comintern now directed Communist parties around the world to seek alliances with all left and liberal groups to present a united Popular Front. The new policy forced an overnight about-face among New York’s radical intellectuals. The Composers Collective disbanded and the Marxists now embraced folk music as passionately as they had been rejecting it the day before. Copland began incorporating traditional material like “Old Paint” and “Camptown Races” into his compositions. The party published Songs of the People, half of it devoted to approved popular tunes. Collective cofounder Charles Seeger, who’d written a piece damning folk music in the Daily Worker, now moved his family, including his sons Pete and Mike, to Washington, D.C., to work in building the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Music.

  Several key figures from the Popular Front folk music movement would settle in Greenwich Village. They included Pete Seeger, who dropped out of Harvard, joined the CPUSA, and devoted himself to music. He helped found a loose collective who called themselves the Almanac Singers. They lived and played in several houses in the Village; the best-known “Almanac House” was at 130 West Tenth Street, hard by the Women’s House of Detention. At various points Almanac House was home to Leadbelly, Alan Lomax, Cisco Houston, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Burl Ives, the actor and activist Will Geer, and Woody Guthrie. They staged hootenannies and charged thirty-five cents admission. College kids gathered for sing-alongs on pleasant afternoons in Washington Square Park. What the Almanac Singers started at the end of the 1930s would blossom in the late 1950s and early ’60s into the Greenwich Village “folk music revival” that produced so many stars including Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary.

  Toeing the party line got more difficult as the decade wore on. News of the Great Purge, in which Stalin imprisoned and/or executed a million perceived enemies between 1936 and 1938, shook the faith of leftists worldwide. Max Eastman declared Stalin a “gangster god.” Two young Village bohemians, William Phillips (originally Livitsky, born in the Bronx) and Philip Rahv (born Ivan Greenberg in the Ukraine), began as loyal party members and edited nine issues of Partisan Review as a party organ. Then they broke free and established PR as a platform for anti-Stalinist political theory as well as for modern literature and art, attracting many of the best writers and thinkers of the time: Delmore Schwartz, Hannah Arendt, Edmund Wilson, James Agee, Lionel Trilling, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Randall Jarrell, Dwight Macdonald, Clement Greenberg, and Mary McCarthy, the sole female in the grubby Union Square office, who wrote caustic theater reviews.

  It’s an indication of how far PR drifted away from the party that its star writer was not a political figure but a literary one, Delmore Schwartz. His Romanian father, Harry, had sailed steerage to the Lower East Side, where he quickly got rich selling sometimes dubious real estate to his fellow immigrants. As an adult, Harry’s firstborn son liked to spin alternate tales to explain how he got the goyish-sounding given name Delmore. The simple truth was that a neighbor named her son that, and Mrs. Schwartz liked it so much that she gave it to her boy too. The family bounced around to various Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn while the parents fought constantly and viciously, until Harry left. Mrs. Schwartz raised her two sons in the then-Jewish area of Washington Heights in upper Manhattan. By twelve Delmore was reading philosophy and sending poems to the best literary magazines of the day, once getting a kind rejection note from H. L. Mencken at the American Mercury. He was determined to become a great poet or philosopher, or both, and prone to the attacks of self-doubt and anxious melancholy such grandiose dreams are prey to.

  In the summer of 1935, before going on to Harvard graduate studies in philosophy, he rented a gloomy room on Greenwich Avenue in the Village and wrote the short prose piece “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” Highly modernist in structure, it occupies a gray area somewhere between a short story and autobiographical prose. Its emotional tone, meanwhile, is uniformly bleak. In a dream on the night before his twenty-first birthday he goes into a movie theater and watches a silent film of his parents in their youth, in 1909, on the day his father took his mother to Coney Island and proposed. Before the day is out they have a big fight, at which point Delmore jumps out of his seat and shouts at the screen, “Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.”

  At Harvard Schwartz got to be friendly with fellow students Leonard Bernstein and Robert Motherwell. But Harvard, like other Ivy League schools, had a quota on how many Jews could attend and he never felt comfortable there. In 1937 he left so abruptly he never returned the books he had out of the library or paid his university bills. He and his younger brother took a room in a Village boardinghouse at 73 Washington Place, half a block from the park. It sounds almost like a parody of the bohemian garret: “Their room,” Schwartz’s biographer James Atlas writes, “an attic loft with low rafters above Bertolotti’s Italian Restaurant, could be reached only by climbing a ladder.” In quick succession his poems and stories began appearing in the best literary magazines like Poetry and in the 1937 anthology from New Directions, the hot new literary publisher of the time, where he appeared alongside work by Cummings, Gertrude Stein, and Henry Miller. That same year Phillips and Rahv made “In Dreams” the lead piece in their first issue of Partisan Review. New Directions published a collection of his stories and poems under the title In Dreams Begin Responsibilities the following year. Just turning twenty-five, Schwartz was feted as “the American Auden” and as the preeminent voice of the young Jewish-American intellectual—a voice querulous with existential angst and historical melancholy, crying out for a generation steeped in “emptiness and depression,” alienated from both the old world and the new, the Jewish and the American. (Woody Allen would later mine the same vein of anxiety for comic effect.) In his short verse play Shenandoah—Shenandoah was a name he gave his fictional alter ego—he portrays the striving, stultifying world of middle-class Jews who, for all their attempts at assimilation among Americans, remain outsiders.

  O the whole of history

  Testifies to the chosen people’s agony,

  —Chosen for wandering and alienation

  In every kind of life, in every nation.

  To the wider intellectual and literary world his was the voice of the despair and pessimism they were all feeling in 1938 as the Depression dragged on and they saw the rising tide of Nazism and Fascism, on the one hand, while, on the other, the Soviet Union fell into its own brand of genocidal barbarism and a cataclysmic war loomed. No one was more of a pessimist than Delmore Schwartz. Even the high praise he was receiving from all quarters—from T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Vladimir Nabokov—depressed him; he worried that it was premature and he’d flame out early. Only when surrounded by fellow writers whom he liked and respected, drinking too much, did he momentarily brighten.

  Another Village writer who was never swept up in the Marxist trend wrote what’s now considered one of the classic descriptions of Depression hardship, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It wasn’t so highly regarded in its time, however. Not published until the end of the era, it flopped and was forgotten until after the author’s death.

  James Agee grew up in suburban Knoxville, Tennessee. His mother’s family was well-off, arty, educated, and piously Anglo-Catholic, a branch of Anglicanism with Roman Catholic leanings. According to family lore they were related to Walt Whitman, whose writing Agee would later dismiss as “generally half-assed.” His father came from mountain folk, a nonreligious drinking man. He died when Agee was six, driving the family car off a country road at night, alone at the wheel, possibly drunk. Like his father, Agee would be a heavy drinker and die in a car. From his mother he inherited a preoccupation with sin and guilt that would often pitch him headlong into sloughs of suicidal remorse and self-hatred.

  He arrived in New York City in 1932, the depths of the Depression, to write
for Fortune, the magazine of big business that Time’s Henry Luce, with impeccably bad timing, had launched a few months after the crash of ’29. Agee moved with his first wife to a basement apartment at 38 Perry Street in the Village. Over the next decade he would move around, with a second and then a third wife, finally settling on Bleecker Street in 1941. In Fortune’s offices high up in the dazzling new Chrysler Building he joined writers such as the Lost Generation poet Archibald MacLeish and the Trotskyist Partisan Review contributor Dwight Macdonald, gritting their teeth while penning paeans to capitalism yet grateful to have any job at all.

  Even Fortune had to admit there were hard times out there and its editors sent Agee twice to the Deep South on Depression-related assignments. The first trip was to write about the Tennessee Valley Authority. Then, in the summer of 1936, the magazine sent him and the photographer Walker Evans to get a story on dirt-poor sharecroppers in Alabama. When he returned to New York Agee found it impossible to write about his experience in any way that Fortune would publish. He labored for the next three years on his book, a feverish prose poem with echoes of both Faulkner and Melville, almost hallucinatory in its physical descriptions of shimmering heat and sounds and smells, biblical in its surging bound-for-glory spirit.

  By the time Agee delivered the manuscript to Harper & Row in 1939, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath had told in effect the same story in fiction, the Depression was winding down, and the publisher, feeling the moment for Agee’s epic and difficult tome had passed, rejected the book. Houghton Mifflin published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with Evans’s stark and haunting photos throughout, in August 1941. But the Depression was now history, America’s entry into World War II was just a few months off, and a harsh review in the New York Times (“arrogant, mannered, precious, gross”) helped spike the book. The publisher sold just six hundred copies and remaindered the rest.