THERE USED TO be an old man with a mole on the end of his nose and a paper cup strung around his neck, standing on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, playing the violin. Several weeks ago he disappeared. He was subsequently found to have died of indigestion in a hotel room in the South Village.
The fiddler left very little to remember him by—a few sticks of furniture, some pornographic photographs, and a fleeting immortality in several unpublished novels. In a way, he was symbolic of Greenwich Village. As of summer 1958, they were both dead, and nobody could properly recall when they started dying.
A peripatetic observer, traipsing the slow mile of gift shops, bookstores, and bars between Rienzi’s (where you take your friend from Chicago) and the White Horse Inn, is bound to get depressed. Bohemia has become a tourist attraction. That careful decadence of dress which used to be the uniform of the literateur has become Fifth Avenue fashion. Whether the reason for or the result of this change, Village creativity is at low ebb in everything but drama. The painting is bad and expensive; the poetry is stale and academic; the tablecloths are all checkered; and little magazines litter the streets.
People go to Greenwich Village today to escape from art instead of to it. There are, of course, the visitors. Long-drawn, tweed-beaten, and corn-twanged Idaho sophomores, who couldn’t tell flamenco guitar from a Jew’s-harp, are shortening the coffeehouse circuit and getting strummed to death. Pre-med Kentucky studhorses come down for a weekend to see what goes on on the other side of the Baptist church. But the permanent residents fall readily into ready-made categories.
First of all, there are my friends (they used to be my friends). They are a splintered group. The guy who flunked out of Harvard at the end of his sophomore year because he sat up all night writing dirty poetry; Bennington girls who left college to do something earthy; NYU poets who need haircuts; college newspaper editors who couldn’t land a job with the Times; magnas in English literature who don’t want to teach and can’t quite see returning to Des Moines to work for the water company.
Besides my friends, there are other people in Greenwich Village. Walk into any bar, and the first thing you notice are the homosexuals. The Village has become the place to go if you want to rub knees with local expatriates in the Age of Aberration. The classified ad for apartment-sharing “with a congenial young man” (Village address) is a classic form of journalistic pimping. Barroom and street-corner solicitation is commonplace, partly because there are a number of such people who hang out in the Village, and partly because there are a number of people who go to see them—to see what happens to their libido when confronted by something more substantial than that man’s hand on your knee in the New Haven bus station.
The Village is one of the few publicized habitats of the lesbian. Red-faced lumberjack women with straight hair, men’s ties, and a business suit, buying drinks for their sweet young things, peer with a weary omniscience at the coeds and pickups plying their trade. Pickups, too, have a way of gravitating toward the Great White Arch, although the game is more dignified today as free love and physical self-expression. As one of the former psychology majors explained it: “A community of total tolerance tends to the pornographic. You have to have standards or you engender the obscene.”
Real estate values in the Village have skyrocketed. Studio apartments which used to go for ten dollars a week can’t be bought for ninety a month. Many a genuine avant gardiste has had to content himself with a New Jersey boarding house or a West Side basement.
Patrons today are paying their bills. Mama Gagliano, a grocery store proprietress in the shadow of the marquee, had this to say: “I used to have to carry some of the boys. They couldn’t pay for groceries. They’d always ask me to wait awhile, and I would wait. Today, everybody pays. I carry nobody. And they buy more food.”
Village shops have tripled their prices for handcraft and chinaware and clothes. On biweekly Thursday nights Manhattan secretaries rush with their paychecks to purchase ninety-dollar coats and twenty-dollar sweaters—for Friday’s evening at the theater.
All of which has created a new kind of Village citizen. We are all familiar with the old stereotypes, and they still abound. The wistful Dadaists, the Serious Young Men, who regard Art as a craft, literature as a mental discipline, creativity as a form of calisthenics, and the role of the Artist as a poignant blend of anguished genius and popular messiah. These are the poets living on their parents’ allotment checks, waging battle in dozens of little magazines. They are formalist or antiformalist. Their irony has the convolutions of a pretzel. Life is a matter of chamber music, peeled grapes, and a theory of aesthetics. (Almost everybody has either written his own or replied to somebody else’s theory of aesthetics.) They prowl the streets, they let their hair grow long, they wear black turtleneck sweaters and dirty white tennis shoes. They scowl frequently, gesticulate elaborately, drink heavily, and live crudely. Their rebellion is in clothes and conduct, not creativity. And it is not long before those clothes—leather-patched, moth-eaten, tawdry, and inexpensive as they may be—become a uniform, a badge by which the manikin inside seeks to say: “I am writing a novel; I think about existentialism; I have read Henry James; I don’t have enough money to make it to the Left Bank.”
Nobody ever told Morris that needing a haircut, a shave, a bath, and a new suit doesn’t make you Rimbaud, or even Thomas Wolfe. The only thing Gladys (who writes sonnets) learned from Radcliffe is not to comb her hair. And she’s still wearing the same raincoat. Gladys and Morris never produced anything worthwhile, and they never will. They are the dregs of each college generation for whom bohemianism solves the problem of what to do with themselves.
They live, together, in a cold-water flat with cracked plaster and empty flowerpots (unless they’ve planted peyote). They’ve scoured the five boroughs for enough orange crates to hold their books. The floor is strewn with French novels whose pages have been slit but seldom read, trinkets from Chinatown, old college notebooks, and yellow paper. There’s a portable typewriter, the Times literary supplement, and a half-finished essay on Virginia Woolf. A couple of cockroach colonies maintain the atmosphere of decadence and the myth of suffering. But Gladys and Morris go to bed with full stomachs.
The new citizen is of a different ilk. It’s often difficult to distinguish him from the college crowd and the Book-of-the-Month and afternoon bridge brigade that comes to the Village to see what starving Bohemians are all about, and spends most of its time in fashionable restaurants, masqueraded to the earlobes in costumes considered appropriate, looking at each other in simulated excitement and secret disappointment. The new citizen is something different.
Compton is a public relations agency hack or a Madison Avenue adman. He writes thirty-second jingles for a new margarine and depletes the watercooler to lubricate his tranquilizing pills. He graduated with a liberal arts degree, never eats the olive in his martini, and aspires someday to write the suburban or the Organization novel. But he generally returns home from his nine-to-five sojourn too tired for anything but a gin and tonic. Compton lives in the Village (he can afford the rent); his books are hardcover; and his laundry is clean.
What Morris, Gladys, and Compton have in common is their arid little community. In most of the coffeehouses the jazz is so well-modulated that you can’t hear it, so far out that it’s gone. It serves as a sort of Muzak background for conversational patter and dream interpretation. The imported Italian coffee is forty cents a throw, and usually cold by the time it arrives. You amuse yourself by watching two fellows with beards resolve their existentialist dilemma and despair each evening until midnight, when they probably go to bed together.
The whole Village is one big Hayes-Bick, and it’s always two in the morning.
Apathy is the latest religion. Even poetry-and-jazz was a flop in Washington Square.
From the coffeehouses there’s no place to go but the bars, where the drinks are about as expensive and as watered as anywhere else. Or spots like Rocky’s, with checkered tablecloths, sawdust, cobwebs, bad paintings, and Chianti bottles.
There used to be a time when John Reed and Lincoln Steffens lived at the same Village address, when Mama Gagliano “carried the boys” until that publisher’s commission came through. No more. Even Wolfe went to live in Brooklyn. The Village today is populated by the smug, the self-conscious, and the literary sycophants. The bars depend on the tourist trade. The aberrants depend on the college students. The shops depend on the secretaries. The best thing to come out of the Village in a quarter century is Jules Feiffer, and he’s certainly the only reason for reading either of the two weekly papers distributed locally. The most absorbing issue of conversation since Jack Kerouac has been the traffic in Washington Square Park.
America’s great bohemian subculture still languishes in the corpulent shadow of its European counterpart. We are imitators. We have imitated their knee-socks and their coffeehouses, their existentialism and their morals. We have failed to affirm or deny anything in our own experience. We have failed to realize that the scowl and the furrowed brow and the hofbrau philosophizing of the Continent had its roots in a real dilemma, in war and social upheaval. The American Bohemian, Beat, Tired, Brown, or Silent, is a pampered child shaking his rattle, the spoiled spawn of college literary magazines, dissatisfied because America is something more than a whorehouse and something less than a Christmas tree. And all he’s creating is noise.