Book of the week: Republic of Dreams

SAN DIEGO, July 16 (UPI) -- "The Republic of Dreams Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960" by Ross Wetzsteon. )Simon & Schuster, $35.00, 570 pages.)

This history of Greenwich Village by Ross Wetzsteon is packed with details and anecdotes about an area of New York, and its denizens that has long fascinated people. Artists and actors, writers and bums -- some were both -- were drawn to this New York neighborhood, in search of freedom, companionship and adventure.

For 32 years an editor and drama critic of the Village Voice and a resident of the famed Village himself,

Wetzsteon knows what he is writing about.

Wetzsteon decided to write about it when he first heard the expression, "The Village isn't what it used to be." What was the Village all about? And had it really changed?

As one magazine put it, "Whatever else bohemia may be, it is almost always yesterday."

As much as state of mind as a physical location, the Village epitomized the search for liberated self-expression, not so much the creation as the re-creation of Eden, an escape from narrow-mindedness and the pursuit of wealth. Did it succeed or, as one Villager sarcastically put it, did it die as they grew old?

This is what you find out when you read the meticulously researched history of people who came into New York from all over the United States in search of personal freedom and self-expression.

The Village became a refuge from the Puritanism and capitalism of Middle America, a mecca for artists denied recognition by the establishment, and a crucible for such talents as Eugene O'Neill and Jackson Pollock.

The chapters are organized around a central character, such as Max Eastman, Jig Cook or Edna St. Vincent Millay, giving us a chronological history as well as a look at the different spheres of expression: the press, the theater or the visual arts.

Although bohemian in character, these artists needed subsidizing to survive. After all, an actor needs a stage and a painter needs canvas and paint, so all these penniless rebels relied on subscriptions and donations from the very rich against whom they were rebelling.

From Mabel Dodge's salon to Max Eastman's celebrated paper, "The Masses," to Jig Cook's foray into theater with the Provincetown Players, they all threw themselves energetically and passionately into their new endeavors: finding new and unconventional talent, providing a forum for displaying that talent, and giving voice to those willing to take a chance and experiment, be it socially, romantically, artistically or politically.

At Dodge's salon one might encounter Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood, or trade unionist Big Bill Haywood, Paris-based author Gertrude Stein or, the famous journalist and writer, Walter Lippman.

"The Masses'" message was as varied. It shocked, outraged and informed its readers.

It linked "free love to proletarian revolution, alternated nude drawings with pro-WWI cartoons, birth control editorials with anti-business harangues, and, in its advertising, sex manuals with Marxist tracts."

The Villagers' rebellion was as much against their families as their government, Puritan ethics and mores as capitalism and the exploitation of the workers.

Over the years, the Village may have changed, but what the original Villagers protested against has not. Jack Reed wrote in 1917, in protest against WWI, "The country is rapidly being scared into a heroic mood. The workingman will do well to realize that his enemy is not Germany, nor Japan; his enemy is that 2% of the people of the United States who own 60% of the national wealth, and are now planning to make a soldier out of him to defend their loot."

Their opinions and positions often got them into trouble with the authorities, and "The Masses" eventually went out of business, but not before it had succeeded, as Wetzsteon notes, "in creating the demand for change and in awakening the vision that must precede any genuine transformation of social policy."

In theater, as in other branches of the arts, the Villagers experimented in both form and content and, most fortunately for him, as well as for generations of theatergoers, discovered Eugene O'Neill. The future

Pulitzer Prize winner was living in a shack on the beach with a celebrated drunk, Terry Carlin, when Susan Glaspell, herself a writer, asked him if he didn't have a play for them.

"No," Terry said. "I don't write, I just think -- and sometimes talk."

But he had a friend with whom he was sharing a cabin on the dunes who had "a whole trunk full of plays." "What's your friend's name?" asked Susan. "O'Neill," said Terry. "Gene O'Neill." "Well," she said, "tell O'Neill to come to our house tonight at eight and bring some of his plays." And the rest, as they say, is history.

Among the many causes championed by the Villagers was feminism. Both women and men campaigned for suffrage, birth control, and equality in all areas of life, including free love, although their motivation in that last case could be seen as self-serving.

Young women today would do well to note Crystal Eastman's statement while still a teenager. "The trouble with women, "wrote the teenage girl, "is that they have no personal interests. They must have work of their own, first because no one who has to depend on another person for his living is really grown up: and, second, because the only way to be happy is to have an absorbing interest in life which is not bound up with any particular person. Children can die or grow up, husbands can leave you. No woman who allows a husband and children to absorb her whole time and interest is safe against disaster."

Other female luminaries included Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Emma Goldman, and Neith Boyce. They embodied the New Woman, the one who could, according to Wetzsteon, "have careers beyond home without inspiring antagonism, they could have sex outside of marriage without eliciting condemnation, they could drink, smoke, wear nonconstricting clothing."

What is truly awe-inspiring is the dedication of all these women, the lengths to which they were ready to go to support their causes, and their far-sightedness. They saw beyond the need to vote; they saw the real problems with the society in which they lived, and whether they were campaigning for birth control or workers' rights, they were ready to go to jail or be deported, as in Goldman's case. They were vibrant, courageous women, sexually active, sometimes even voracious, refusing to be cast in the role of the demure, asexual, "angel of the house" that society expected them to play.

As time went by, the character of the Village changed, much as did the character of its inhabitants. As Wetzsteon noted: "Its original goal had been the freedom of the individual from political, social, cultural, and moral constraints -- which the Villagers believed, would lead not to the chaos of unrestrained impulse but to justice, social harmony, cultural creativity, and moral honesty. But by the twenties, these noble and naïve aspirations deteriorated into self-interest. Cynicism replaced idealism, self-consciousness replaced spontaneity, the Village ideal of self-expression was left without the higher purpose that had given it validity."

One could say that the Village finally stopped fulfilling its role when the entire country began its narcissistic and self-centered quest for self-expression. "Find yourself," "find your inner child," and "15 minutes of fame" became more important than changing the world and benefiting society.

Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwartz, Jackson Pollock -- everyone in the Village seemed to live and die in a haze of alcohol and drugs, bent on self-destruction more than on self-expression. Maybe they couldn't bear to live in the New York that Thomas described as "a nightmare."

He found the rest of America even worse: "This vast mad horror, that doesn't know its size, or its strength, or its weakness, or its barbaric speed, stupidity, din, self-righteousness, this cancerous Babylon."

As his daughter, Rachel, explains in her afterword, Wetzsteon would have written a last chapter, but he died of complications from heart surgery before completing his task. His tale stands complete even without closing comments.

As his daughter points out, the beginning is more important than the end, and Wetzsteon understood what brought all these people to New York, to the Village. Like him, they were on a journey of discovery. Some of them didn't particularly like what they found, but their tale is fascinating, and Wetzsteon tells it supremely well. His enthusiasm is contagious, and I found myself wishing that I had been around in 1910-20.

But then, as Rachel noted, "the Village was more a state of mind than a spot on a map." The dream lives on.