When Greenwich Village was a Bohemian paradise; an astute critic and amusing anecdotist, Ross Wetzsteon lovingly explicates the lives of eminent Villagers, the bohemians of New York City in the early 20th century

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 29, 2002 | by Rex Roberts

Like most in her set, Millay advocated free love and espoused sexual experimentation, yet she was disingenuous, even hurtful, in her relationships. The Villagers probably did more to establish the sexual candor we take for granted today, but these early practitioners were just as conflicted as their later acolytes. "In order to make Vincent a brazen symbol of sexual freedom, readers had to ignore her somber undertone of sexual unease," writes Wetzsteon. "She eagerly succumbed to the fever and frenzy, then dismissed it as unworthy, and for all her surface merriment and romantic yearning, she treated her lovers as partners in animality and dispatched them with post-coital hostility."

Millay came out, so to speak, as the ingenue in a forgettable one-act comedy mounted by the Provincetown Players. The troupe was founded by George "Jig" Cook, a playwright manque from Iowa, in a ramshackle wharf up in Cape Cod, but it became famous as the avant-garde Village theater dedicated to remaking the American theater. "Alternately ecstatic about his destiny and despondent about his life, Jig felt fated both to transform the American theater and to die unknown," writes Wetzsteon.

"The paradoxical fate of genius, according to Village mythology in the teens and for decades thereafter, was to fail in the realm of commerce in precise proportion to one's success in the realm of culture."

Cook introduced another tortured genius to the world, Eugene O'Neill, producing his first play, Bound East for Cardiff, as well as The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape. The son of an accomplished Broadway actor, O'Neill had drifted around the world as a deckhand before returning to New York and settling in the Village, where he distinguished himself as a drunk. "In later generations of Villagers there would be a skid-row sentimentality, a romance of the riffraff--authenticity of experience measured by degree of degradation--and in a sense Gene found his self-worth precisely in the extent to which his dissipation displeased his father" writes Wetzsteon. "But he gradually shifted from self-destruction to self-expression and, in finally articulating his pain, transcended it."

Wetzsteon lovingly explicates the lives of these eminent Villagers, each intimately intertwined with the others. An elegant writer, astute critic and amusing anecdotist, he adored the Village and all it stood for, while recognizing its foibles and pretensions. "It is the community where irresponsibility, naivete and self-indulgence are transformed into virtues," he admits. "... It is the refuge for social misfits. It is the home of poseurs, eccentrics and drifters, and a romantic alternative to mainstream society. It is a metaphor for iniquity."

New Yorkers will love this book, which lists the brownstones and watering holes where these bigger-than-life characters worked and played. The poet Hart Crane, for example, moved to a room at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, a street overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, where he worked on his epic The Bridge, and where unknown to him the architect of the monumental structure had lived during its construction. (The building was torn down, providing a view of the bridge to this reviewer even as he types.) There's great gossip in the book (Theodore Dreiser once asked his live-in lover to sleep in another room so he could have a one-night stand with a pickup) and some needed debunking of Village myths (what really happened the night Dylan Thomas supposedly drank himself to death at the White Horse Tavern).