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Title: My life and loves in Greenwich Village

Author: Maxwell Bodenheim


        
Release date: October 15, 2026 [eBook #79790]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Bridgehead Books, 1954

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79790

Credits: Tim Lindell, Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY LIFE AND LOVES IN GREENWICH VILLAGE ***




                              my life and
                                loves in
                               greenwich
                                village

[Illustration: _Wide World Photo_
Maxwell Bodenheim, selling his poems in Washington Square.]




                           my life and loves
                          in greenwich village

[Illustration]

                                   By
                           Maxwell Bodenheim

illustrations by a
group of his friends

[Illustration: _Bridgehead Books_: New York
1954]




                            Copyright, 1954

                                  _by_

                            BRIDGEHEAD BOOKS




foreword


When Maxwell Bodenheim was killed by a psychotic man who should have
been under confinement, there were many who saw nothing unnatural
in Max’s coming to a violent end. He was known to be an alcoholic,
sleeping in doorways, consorting with bums. But, truth to tell, bums
don’t usually kill anybody--they’re too preoccupied with stretching a
painful existence from one day to the next, and a more likely death for
Bodenheim would have been from starvation.

Among the shocking facts surrounding Max’s murder, so at variance with
his personality, one detail stood out, which typified him. He had been
reading Rachel Carson’s _The Sea Around Us_, a book of natural
wonders, serious and beautiful, thoughtful writing. Almost a bum, with
one foot in the Bowery, crowded into a five dollar a week room with his
mistress, Ruth Fagan, and an insane man, Bodenheim was calmly reading
one of the finest works of contemporary literature and scientific
writing--we say calmly, because there’s no other way to read that book.

At Max’s funeral the poet, Alfred Kreymbourg, read a tribute written
by Aaron Kramer. It spoke of Max’s love for life, the purity and
compassion of his viewpoint, of how poverty and suffering and rejection
never dimmed the freshness and sparkle of his creative urge. Hundreds
of Max’s old friends were there, appalled and overcome by the dreadful
event, at one in feeling that it was a shopkeeper’s culture, not
notable for supporting its poets, which killed Max, using the hand of
the psychotic. Everyone knew that he was destitute, but most of his old
friends were too poor themselves to be able to help him very much. Also
he was unable to stop drinking and he was very obstinate.

Some time before his death Max had been given office space, writing
materials, an advance on royalty and a small daily wage to come in
here and write whatever he wanted to write. These tales of Greenwich
Village life are part of a good deal of manuscript he produced while he
was here. The book was not brought out during his lifetime because he
considered it unfinished. He had always intended to come back and write
a general summing up of his personal life. Unfortunately his illness
prevented this.

At Max’s funeral, some of his artist friends who formerly exhibited
in Washington Square and along Sixth Avenue near Bleecker Street,
discovered that this book of memoirs was to appear. First one, then
another offered to create illustrations for it. Finally it was decided
that each one of the group should contribute what he or she wished
and all should remain anonymous, since it was felt that a long list
of illustrators would appear out of proportion. Therefore this book
appears, illustrated by a group of Maxwell Bodenheim’s friends.

_The Editors_




[Illustration]


 foreword                                  5

 the sultan’s wives                       11

 the grand moguls of poetry               21

 strange life at gonorrhea mansion        29

 cinderella of the arts                   39

 the lady with the glass bottom           47

 love and marriage in the village         55

 nymphs, satyrs and the stuffed gorilla   71

 caesar and other famous villagers        89

 bachelor mothers and female fathers     103

 artists and other career criminals      115

 gallery of queer nudes                  127

 the case of the 99th lover              141

 gertrude stein in macdougal alley       157

 a graveyard for dead souls              171

 village angels with boudoir eyes        185

 buddhists, nudists and feudists         195

 the village nut club: 57 varieties      207

 the village stands on its head          217

 the waldorf: a cafeteria a la einstein  229

 public bohemian number one              237

 the last phase of maxwell bodenheim     249




[Illustration]




[Illustration]




the sultan’s wives


During the middle and late Twenties in Greenwich Village, many unique
characters flourished. Among them was jaunty, bald, string-bean Bobby
Edwards and his cigar-box ukelele which he made and painted in gaudy
abstract designs. When he was not being impish or professionally
clowning, Bobby had a personality so shy that it almost flirted with
diffidence. His alcoholic imbibing was limited to a very occasional
glass of beer or wine.

Bobby wandered through the Bohemian night-spots, singing his own songs
to his own accompaniments. The songs were cutely frothy and mildly
witty. Here is the chorus of one of them:

    “Allah be kind!
    Allah be merciful!
    When the Old Man from the wars arrives,
    The Sultan’s wives,
    Will lose their lives,
    Through inadvertently contracting hives.
    A-al-la-ah!”

Once, after Bobby had finished one of his songs on the floor of The
Troubadore on West Eighth Street, a place precariously balanced between
debonair and uproarious elements, a drunken chap teetered up to Bobby
and said: “Shay old man, tash looks like a cigar box. Ish tash wash it
ish?”

“Yes, you’re right,” Bobby replied with a cool grin.

“An anosher thing--you look like a cigar,” the drunk continued. “You
look jush like a cigar. Do you know tash?”

“Well, maybe we both do look like cigars,” Bobby flipped, “but there is
just one difference, YOU’RE LIT UP AND I’M NOT!”

The gathering roared.

At another time in Romany Marie’s, Bobby and Romany Marie had a clash.

Romany said: “Say Bobby, I understand that you buy the ukeleles already
painted and fixed up in a little store on the outskirts of Hoboken, New
Jersey. Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s as right as the phony Gypsy costume that you’re wearing,
the one that you probably bought from one of those theatrical costume
shops just off Broadway,” Bobby rejoined in an amiable drawl.

“Oh yes? Well, I’ll have you know that I was born in Romania and that
my father was the respected Chief of our proud, roving, Gypsy tribe,”
Romany Marie said in a voice cracking with anger.

“To that I can only say one thing,” Bobby answered with a mild grin.
“I’ve heard Delancey Street on the East Side called a lot of things but
this is the first time that I’ve ever heard it called Romania.”

The patrons laughed and so did Romany Marie, herself.

At still another time, after Bobby had just finished a stint in The
Black Knight, a speak-easy conducted by Sam Schwartz, a beautiful
blonde girl in an evening gown of old-rose satin which revealed at
least half of the regal, effulgent, proudly creamy madness of her
bosom, walked up to Bobby as he stood in the middle of the dance floor
and promptly embraced and kissed him.

Then she stepped back, surveyed him and said: “Mr. Edwards, I think
you’re absolutely adorable. I really mean it, honey child. You’re the
sweetest boy and you sing and play simply wonderful. I really mean it,
honey, and it wouldn’t take much encouragement for me to fall right in
love with you.”

“Thanks a million,” Bobby replied. “I’d like to tell you how I feel
toward you too, darling, but I could only make such a confession
privately.”

“Privately? Why, honey?”

“Because the words I would use regarding the exhibition that you’re
putting on would be so sore and off color that I couldn’t possible say
them in front of an audience,” Bobby replied, with his invariable,
nicely balanced and coolly self-possessed grin.

The tuxedo-clad escort of the girl, who had followed her and was
watching close behind with clenched fists, relaxed and hauled his tipsy
lady off the floor and back to their table.

It must not be surmised that Bobby had spoken as he did from any
fear of the close-by male. Men who were deceived by Bobby’s subdued
manners and gentlemanly poise and strove to insult, push or annoy him,
promptly felt the hefty sting of his right uppercut or left jab.

Another character, a frank, ironical and gentle by turns, thin blonde
poet--called eccentric, insincere and even demented by his enemies, and
a truthful, unafraid paradox of unassuming pride by his friends--the
customary extremes of opinion bestowed on a strong and perhaps unusual
personality--was and still is the subject of hundreds of legends,
anecdotes and arguments. Here are a few of these exceedingly varied
tales:

The poet was always bored by off-color jokes--“Did you hear the one
about the house of prostitution and the policeman?” ... “So Rastus
said: Look here organ, if you is an organ”.... “Oh bartender, break two
more you son of a” ... and so on, in dreary profusion. Even when they
had a species of cleverness and an adroit eye-wink, he regarded them as
dull, dreary affronts to sex; or stories from shallow men and women to
whom sex was scarcely more than a glorified toilet; or, at rare times,
desperate and forlorn attempts, on the part of really sensitive and
imaginative people, to descend to the level of the common individuals
around them and become “regular guys and dames” reveling in an earthly
average.

When this poet happened to be at a convivial, imbibing studio or
apartment party, or night-spot table, where off-color jests were
tossed, it was his habit to wait for a while and then, after a pause
arrived, say: “Well, I’ve listened and as you’ve noticed, I haven’t
laughed. So now I’m going to give you a limerick that I once wrote.
I don’t think that you’ll laugh at my limerick, but I’ve listened to
your borrowed jokes, so I’m sure that you’ll return the compliment and
listen to my original one. At any rate, here goes:


Strange Lady

    Her tastes were exquisite and wavey,
    And she couldn’t stand spice in her gravy,
    But after ten sips,
    The words from her lips,
    Would have made Rabelais join the navy.”

After he had finished, a moment of cogitation usually ensued, followed
by some chuckles and titters, or by ruefully amused, facial twists. It
was as though solid and slightly spoiled meat had been followed by a
subtle dessert and the listeners could not decide whether they could
digest it, after having swallowed the other dishes and condiments.

When the poet, who mingled with an abundant variety of types, rendered
the limerick to a low-brow group such as a hack driver, a night-club
doorman, a bookmaker, a store clerk and so on, a thick, puzzled silence
always came, after which some one would observe: “Say, I don’t get it.
I don’t get it at all. Would you mind explaining that one, kid?”

Then the poet would reply in words to this effect: “Well, the
limerick’s about a woman who always pretended that she was a perfect
lady when she was sober. But this dame couldn’t hold her poison a
dime’s worth. So after she had had only one drink--in fact, not even
all of one drink--she changed from day to night. Now this Rabelais, he
was a writer of the past, and he tossed off stuff so strong that it
would make even a whore blush. But after one drink, this dame in the
limerick talked so damn dirty and rotten that, if Rabelais had heard
her, she would have made him swear off women for life and join the U.
S. Navy. Get it, boys?”

“Yeah, we get it now,” the relaxed low-brows would answer. “That chick
must have spouted worse than a sewer after she got polluted.”

Then often another would add: “And do you know, I’ve seen twists of
that kind lots of times. They’re one hundred per cent lilies when they
haven’t had it, but after they get pie-eyed--wow, what a difference!”

This poet at one time had a long bamboo Chinese pipe given to him by a
Chinese man with whom he had translated poems from Li Tai Po, a famous
Chinese bard of the past. He was fond of waving the pipe as he recited
one of the Li Tai Po poems which went as follows:

    “I drink a hundred bottles of wine
    And wash off a million years of grief.
    Stay with me, wine.
    This is a good evening for clear talking,
    And because the moon is clear, I cannot sleep.
    I lie upon the empty mountain top.
    The earth and the sky are my pillows.”

One afternoon in Washington Square, as he was sitting with a girl
friend, smoking the long pipe, an officious policeman walked up and
said that he was obstructing traffic. The poet promptly emptied the
brass bowl, extracted a rubber tip from his coat pocket, placed it over
the smoking end of the four and a half foot stem, rose with the girl
and debonairly stepped off, using the pipe as a cane, while the officer
stared after him in disgruntled, baffled surprise.

Again, at a Village hang-out, Paul’s Rendezvous, this poet was giving a
talk on contemporary verse. A man in the audience continually heckled
him with increasingly loud shouts, which finally rose to shrieks in
words such as: “What the hell do you know about poetry, you cheap dirty
libertine?”

“I wouldn’t use the stuff you write to wipe myself with!”

“I’ve read your poems to the dear sweet roses and violets and daisies,
and believe me, if you’re not a fag, then I’ve never seen one!”

“Yeah, I remember that poem that went, let’s see ... oh yeah ... ‘Oh
trees to whom the darkness was a child, scampering in and out of your
long green beards,’ and baby, if trees have got beards, then there sure
is something wrong with my eyesight!”

At the outset of the yelling, the proprietor, bouncer and manager had
started toward the crude offender, and the audience had broken into
indignant murmurs and protests, but the poet, hastening to the middle
of the dance floor from the band platform, had repeatedly gestured to
the proprietor, bouncer and manager to wait, and had placed a finger to
his lips several times, signalling to the audience to remain silent.

Then after the man was out of breath, the poet calmly walked up to
his table, faced him and said, clearly and distinctively but without
heat: “Say old fellow, why don’t you stop all of this whispering and
muttering and raise your voice a bit? Because really, I’d like to hear
what you were saying.”

Part of the audience laughed and the tension lessened, and at a signal
from the poet, the bouncer rushed up, grabbed the man and threw him out
of the place.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




[Illustration]




the grand moguls of poetry


Poetry was once Big Business in the Village. My own poems, nailed to a
fence in Washington Square South, often drew as high as a dollar from
the poetry brokers who were attracted to the Muses Exchange run by
the Raven Poetry Circle. This was a cartelized syndicate boasting of
members who could supply every variety of poetic need, from a jingle
celebrating the virtues of toilet soap to a Homeric epic glorifying the
heroism of Prometheus.

The Ravens may still be in business, but their fence and their
enterprising spirit are gone. The fence has given way to the facade of
a school for higher education where students perhaps are initiated into
the beauties of Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan bards, but the fence
poets had a timelessness and raciness about them which the polished
verses of Sydney, Drayton, Marvell and Milton lack.

There was a time when West Eighth Street was the Wall Street of the
poetry district with such houses as the Green Witch and the Troubadour
Tavern catering exclusively to speculators in the gold and silver of
Shakespeare, Keats and Browning. Henry Harrison was the J. P. Morgan of
the poetry world, and he branched out from West Eighth Street to all
the forty-eight states, printing anthologies of regional poetry for
which the poets themselves paid in hard cash.

Henry Harrison, Eli Siegel, Lou Ney, Mary Carolyn Davies, “Sir
John” Picorri and a score of others all ran poetry soirées that
were successful from the point of view of the muses if not from the
standpoint of money. Big entrepreneurs from such literary centers as
Flatbush, Yonkers and Astoria opened cultural inns in the Village where
the customers were given food for thought rather than frankfurters or
veal chops, although coffee and cake went with the recitation of free
verse and the demonstration of free love in the dark booths unlit by
candles or electric bulbs.

There were also free-for-alls, fist fights and brawls staged for the
edification of rubbernecks who came to the Village jungle for thrills
and got them with the compliments of the management. Many of these
culture taverns had arrangements with tourists’ bus agencies that
guaranteed gaping out-of-towners a free show beginning with poetic
recitations and ending with assault and battery.

Since poets must eat, they conspired to participate in these planned
brawls in return for sandwiches and coffee. Then there were poets who
charged as much as fifty dollars a lesson for initiating wealthy women
into the secrets of the muses. One of these ladies, the wife of a
banker, threatened to have her poems brought to public attention in a
privately printed book, and the husband was forced to pay the “vanity”
publisher five thousand dollars to confiscate all available copies. The
poems were so terrible that they would really have broken the bank.

Many Villagers made big money as vanity publishers of poems that
had the definite stamp of imbecility. It is amazing how many tie
manufacturers, brokers, admirals, beauticians, icemen, doctors, lawyers
and undertakers have been smitten by the muses and imagine that they
must write poetry or die.

To keep their readers from dying, some vanity publishers only
distribute a few dozen volumes of verse to the book shops, and then
throw the rest of the edition, bound or unbound, into the Hudson. The
District Attorney’s office frowns upon this practice; it may save the
sensibilities of perennial readers, but an obvious fraud has been
committed for which the vanity publishers are required to stay in penal
institutions for stated periods at the government’s expense.

Sometimes a book of poems is ghost-written by a competent Village poet
who receives a few hundred dollars for the secret product for his Muse.
Brains and creative talent are often bought, so that a President of
the United States, for instance, receives credit for an epigrammatic
or poetic style which was fathered by a press agent or out-of-work
journalist.

In one case, at least, a Village poet not only fathered a society
woman’s brain child but her physical child as well--both without the
knowledge of her doting husband.

The husband was a wealthy importer who lived in Washington Mews and
was a patron of the arts. He often ran literary teas at his home, for
novelists and poets whose books had recently been published. There are
many successful business and professional men in the Village who derive
a vicarious sense of aesthetic creation by associating with poets and
painters and throwing parties for them where the intelligentsia of New
York get together in an atmosphere of intimate carousal.

Both the importer and his wife took a fancy to a certain Village poet,
the husband for aesthetic reasons and the wife for reasons centered
below rather than above the diaphragm. The wife authored a book of
verse actually written by the young poet who looked like a blond
Adonis and made love like Don Juan. The husband was proud of his wife’s
vicarious achievement and did not suspect that the poems were written
by the blond Adonis, although he noted “a certain influence.”

He hired the grand ballroom of a famous uptown hotel to throw a
literary party for his wife, and the cream of America’s intelligentsia
was present. But his spouse chose the occasion to confess her
unhappiness because her mate was sterile. A physician, conniving with
the wife’s plans, suggested that he eat sea-food to stimulate his
virility, and he lived on a diet of lobsters, oysters and clams for six
months. His wife duly became pregnant and he was overjoyed by his good
fortune. He became the father of an eight-pound baby who to everybody
but him seemed the spittin’ image of blond Adonis. To the moment of his
death the importer never noted that particular “certain influence.”

The last of the poetry tycoons, Anton Romatka, was recently found
dead in his ramshackle studio on West Third Street. He had persuaded
me to recite my poems at one of his Saturday night soirées. His death
intervened before the reading could take place.

For a while there was danger of Romatka being buried in Potter’s Field.
He had subsisted on doughnuts and coffee for many years, and no one
came forth with the expenses for his funeral. Then a search of his
rooms, piled high with miscellaneous junk, boxes, books and broken
furniture, revealed a cache containing eight hundred dollars in the old
large-size dollar bills, dusty, moth-eaten.

In the chapel attached to the Bellevue Hospital morgue, Romatka was
eulogized by the poets who attended his Saturday night soirées. He was
laid out in a lavish coffin, banked with flowers and manuscript poems
written in his memory.

Dressed in natty evening clothes--he had worn rags during his life--he
looked like a prosperous business man going to his reward. About his
mouth played an ironic smile and behind those closed eyes there was a
light which shone from a distant star, a planet he had glimpsed during
his tormented life and where he had gone at last, leaving his body
behind to the dust it had always known.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




[Illustration]




strange life at gonorrhea mansion


Love in the Village was the Ark of the Covenant, the altar-piece of
a revived phallic religion. The ancient faiths dedicated to Isis and
Aphrodite placed the reproductive organs on an altar, the Lingam and
the Yoni becoming objects of pious adoration. When the daughters of
Moab taught the men of Israel that fornication was a divine command
necessary to fructify the earth and place them in tune with the
universe, they introduced them to the cult of the phallus which is a
hymn of praise, a thanksgiving to the sexual organs. The daughters of
Moab were legion in the Village, many of them residing at “Gonorrhea
Mansion,” one of Strunsky’s refurbished tenements on West Third Street.

Gonorrhea Mansion, like Vicki Baum’s “Grand Hotel”, was a universe, a
microcosm embodying the bohemia which is merely a distorted reflection
of the Moabite disease called civilization. As a rebel, I was drawn to
the wild daughters of Moab at Gonorrhea Mansion, which received its
name from the obvious fact that the incidence of venereal disease was
more frequent there than in other housing units of the Strunsky Empire.
When I finally got together enough dollar bills for a week’s rent in
the notorious tenement, I considered myself very lucky, imagining that
Gonorrhea Mansion was the Palace of Art, the beautiful Ivory Tower
where a poet could escape the cruel lashings of the God of Cash.

The only way for the mind to avoid decay is to grow, and I do not
regret my misadventures at Gonorrhea Mansion because they kept my mind
in a state of gestation until it blossomed like the English primrose.
Though delicate and frail, my mind, like the English primrose, was

    “Nursed in the whirling storms,
    And cradled in the wind.”

Plato’s advice to avoid the festering weeds of a plague-smitten pasture
is not, I believe, a psychological guide-post to follow with impunity.
The error of Plato, like that of Hobbes and Descartes, as well as Freud
himself, is the mistake of all idealists who imagine that they can
generalize about the passions of men by examining their own. We can
only learn, like our first parents, through bitter experience, through
sweat, blood and tears, by constantly falling into the pit with Jacob,
and climbing out, bruised and bleeding, but still eager for adventure.

When I took residence in Gonorrhea Mansion I was resolved like
Nietzsche to “live dangerously” but, unlike the prissy, pusillanimous
philosopher, I did not intend to reduce the blond beast within me to
a metaphysical abstraction. Convinced that the artist must be a great
lover in order to produce masterpieces, I launched upon my career of
Casanova, sowing my wild oats and realizing soon enough that they were
often dragon’s teeth, sprouting cruelty, sadism and egomanical pride.

To drum out the ghosts of my Southern upbringing I nailed my new pagan
creed to the pillar upholding the balcony of my “duplex” studio with
the fanaticism of Luther nailing his defy to Rome to the doorpost of
the Cathedral. With the help of Linda Dorrance, my first Village flame,
I decorated the tiny room with nudes, the gift offerings of artists who
came to visit us and share our meals. I was selling my poetic output
on the streets and in cafes and an occasional generous purchaser would
immediately turn a modest supper into a Lucullan banquet with a dozen
or more hungry bohemians packed into our small room to participate in
the festivities. On the pillar, decorated with phallic symbols by a
previous tenant, was a framed card containing this credo from Anatole
France:

    “The happy season of man is that of his desires and pleasures. The
    wise man does all he can to prolong it. For my part I would parody
    Descartes’ formula: _I love_, therefore I am; when I no longer
    love, I am no longer anything.”

It was only through nerve-shattering experience that I discovered the
shallowness of such a credo. The split between the idea of love and
carnal pleasure, between Agape and Eros, cannot be cured by the cult of
the wild body, the mystic priests of the orgasm. It is true, as Remy
de Gourmont says, that the Egyptians were sexually intimate with their
brothers and sisters, not understanding the Jewish-Christian dualism
between love and lust, and that in China the book _Tsin-Pi-Mei_
treats of “normal” coitus both with mother and sister. But centuries of
conditioning have instilled in us an instinctive horror of incest and
bizarre forms of sex experience which are equated in our minds with the
bestial and obscene. Just as Rousseau’s “noble savage” was a myth, we
cannot return to the innocence of Adam and Eve in the Garden and make
our carnal desires the only pivot of our love-lives.

Linda Dorrance was the daughter of a prominent California physician,
and had escaped to the Village because of the iron discipline she was
subjected to in her Puritanic home. Judge Lindsay tells us that the
obsession of sex is “one paramount evil of American civilization.”
But Judge Lindsay’s notion that this sex-mania can be cured by
removing the Puritanic taboos from sex-expression is a false one,
as well as extremely dangerous. The lesson I learned from Linda was
that there can be no freedom without discipline, that the bohemian is
more obsessed by sex than the Puritan, because he makes it the core
of his credo, and when his sex-fetish no longer intrigues him he is
cast into nothingness, into a “black hole,” as Linda called her state
of melancholia. The lingam is no Archimedean point of reference for
right living, and Linda dramatized the fact by clutching a stone penis
she had picked up in a tour of India and hurling herself out of a
third-story window into the street.

We demonstrate the truth or falsity of our lives by the manner of our
deaths; those who die in battle for truth and beauty and those who die
in a tavern brawl like Christopher Marlowe or in a fit of desperate
frustration like Linda Dorrance reveal in their violent deaths the
inner springs of their secret beings. Early in my affair with Linda
she began to reveal that headlong sadism and vindictiveness which she
finally turned against herself.

I first met her in the “shower line” on the third floor of Gonorrhea
Mansion: we all had to wait our turn for the single shower, and
when she squeezed her way into the line in front of me I protested
strenuously against this breach of ablutionary etiquette. Her tongue
lashed out at me and I answered in kind. She smacked my face, and that
was the beginning of our beautiful friendship.

My basic gentleness appealed to her sadistic nature and she never was
happy until she reduced me to tears by her attack upon me as a person
and as a poet. She pictured me as a Gargantuan Caliban who had a
fantastic desire to exchange his body and soul for the heavenly bliss
of a selfless, adoring Nirvana.

Linda on the other hand sought to transmute the base metal of her
life into the permanent orgasm of the nymphomaniac. From a rational
point of view we are animals who must remove any moral bias towards
sex-expression, but from a rational point of view twice two makes
four--a fallacy which Einstein exposed in his physics and Dostoyevsky
in his metaphysics. As Dostoyevsky says somewhere: “Twice two makes
four is already no longer life, gentlemen: it is the beginning of
death.”

Life in Gonorrhea Mansion was a state of life-in-death, because the
Village, using Freud and Lawrence as its scientific and literary
authorities, sought to rationalize sex, to place it wholly on a
biological level and reduce the Dionysian mysteries to mass fornication
on roofs and in subcellars, mass sex-action that brought out the riot
squad of the Police Department. The human being, despite Freud and
Lawrence, cannot be made whole on the sexual plane, because, as James
Needham, the British biologist points out, Homo Sapiens belongs to a
higher integrative level than the brute and he has social and moral
needs that place him in an organic category all his own. Man who is
human, all-too-human, has been placed by the theologians a little below
the angels, and the pull of the divine is as strong as the downward
drag of the beast.

Linda expressed her terror of the slime by repeating over and over
again in a maudlin alcoholic stupor, “I’m a bitch, I know I’m a bitch,
but I can’t help myself.” She regretted her infidelities, seeking in
the fixed star of a single love, a point of permanence in a world that
was sliding like the Gadarene swine into the abyss. When the disease
that lent its name to Gonorrhea Mansion finally overtook her, she was
smitten with panic, as if the frightful leprosy of our age had seized
upon her limbs and was about to burst them into rotting ugliness.
Caliban saw his ugliness in a mirror, and instead of howling, rejoiced
because ugliness was his destiny. But we who once knelt in the green
pastures of heaven and are the widows and widowers of God, long for the
Beauty which is our immortal heritage.

Linda once managed to save up bus-fare to see her doctor-father in
California, and she came back to Gonorrhea Mansion cured of her
physical but not her mental disease. She finally took up with a sadist
like herself, a young musician who used a physical as well as mental
whip, flogging her into a state of bliss which is the height of madness.

When she came to me like a frightened kitten, begging for a night’s
lodging, I let her share my garret. I could no longer see her as an
object of carnal desire but as a pitiful victim of her own weakness
and the world’s cruelties. Unlike the Chinese, we are not intergrown
and interblended with all creation; we lack the delicate balance that
enthralls us when we listen to a Beethoven symphony or stand before a
glorious nude by Renoir. We have separated the life of art from the
art of life--as in the mad aesthetics of Ezra Pound and the whirling
dervishes of the Ivory Tower--and weep like Job on the dung-heap of our
futilities. After Linda’s tragic death I sought like Oscar Wilde to
hold a whip-hand over my bad habits and never to sin to excess. I have
not been conspicuously successful.

Poor Linda made her final dash for freedom _via_ the window at
a time when I was in one of my more conspicuous states of financial
decline, and had no means of coming to her assistance. The event helped
to condition me more strongly against viewing the Sodomites who drove
her to her death as superior, aesthetic beings (a view held by Edward
Carpenter who has written extensively of the “third” or “intermediate”
sex) or accepting the bald view of Freudians like Dr. Brill who view
homosexuals as “normal” and tells us that we are all more or less
homosexuals. To me homosexuals are egocentric, depolarized persons
who engage in mutual masturbation because the love-instinct has died
within them and they can only assume a master-slave relationship to
each other, which often ends in sadistic, homicidal cruelty as in the
famous case of Loeb and Leopold, heirs of Gilles de Rais, the notorious
Bluebeard of the Middle Ages.

What fascinated me about a certain prominent Village homosexual was
the fact that he became bisexual in the Spring, when the young man’s
fancy lightly turned to girls who were blond, fragile and luminous like
a Corot landscape. Village girls often allowed “fairies” to bundle
up with them, since the true invert has a horror of sexual contact
with a member of the opposite sex. This young man, once invited to
the love-nest of a female fledgling who was still testing her ability
to fly off the sexual handle, committed a violent rape upon her, and
became the outcast of Gonorrhea Mansion, the Ishmael of the Village. He
added to his unpopularity by tagging the rumor of syphilis to youths
he wished to remove as sexual rivals, thus removing them from female
contact at one foul blow.

My inverted and perverted friend was, however, a genius at the fiddle,
and when Mr. Strunsky would knock at his door hell-bent on collecting
the rent, he would fiddle away with the heart-warming, bell-like tones
of a Heifetz or a Kreisler, and Strunsky would stand riveted to the
hallway floor, large tears rolling down his apoplectic face, his short,
barrel-like body trembling with the heavenly music issuing from the
violin. Then he would knock at my door and ask me to hand “the bum”
a dispossess notice. But the matter went no further than his verbal
request to put the non-paying tenant out.

I had a soft spot for the genius of the violin myself, and when he
was arrested for soliciting a detective, planted in a bar visited by
homosexuals, I got a lawyer to represent him in court. His mother, a
pious Orthodox Jewess wearing a ritualistic wig, appealed to the judge
to let her son go free.

“Do you know your son is a notorious homosexual?” demanded the judge.

“Yes, yes, of course,” said the illiterate mother proudly. “I always
knew the world would recognize him as a genius.”

Strunsky was in court and he had brought the youth’s fiddle along with
him.

“Your honor,” he said, “the boy is a good-for-nothing, a low-life, a
plain bum, but he can make heavenly music like the angel Gabriel.”

I can still hear the young virtuoso casting a spell on the court with
his playing as Merlin with his wand. The angelic choristers of heaven
seemed to have invaded the courtroom their wings tipped with music
vibrating like a flock of wild swans skimming the surface of some
enchanted sea.

The young man was dismissed by the judge, having redeemed himself by
his music. Twenty years later Gonorrhea Mansion was torn down to make
way for a college building, Strunsky was lying at peace in the bosom of
Abraham, but in the tangled ruins of brick and mortar I could hear the
voice of the violin matching the voice of Heaven, stirring the bones to
life, reuniting the broken and shattered remnants of Gonorrhea Mansion.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




[Illustration]




cinderella of the arts


Laura MacMillan (I am withholding her real name, for personal
considerations) was the literary Cinderella of the thirties. She rose
out of the dust and ashes of Greenwich Village obscurity to be hailed
by luminaries such as Theodore Dreiser, who proclaimed her a princess
of prose worthy to ride in the pumpkin-coach of fame with Katherine
Mansfield and Rebecca West.

She was feted and literary tea-ed by cultural groups and organizations,
including the Literary Guild which made her first opus a book club
selection. Then she disappeared suddenly from the literary firmament
like a meteor flashing across the sky and burning to ashes in the very
fury of its heat. Nothing has been heard from her for years, but it
is easy to suppose that Laura was destroyed by success just as other
writers have been destroyed by failure, as were Keats, and James
Thomson, the author of “_The City of Dreadful Night_.”

Laura set out deliberately to become a celebrity, marked the time on
her calendar and then proceeded to acquire fame as housewives proceed
to the grocery to buy eggs or cheese. _The Atlantic Monthly_ was
offering a prize for a book of non-fiction dealing with a phase of
American life and the diminutive Laura decided to win first honors in
the contest.

She went to a backwoods district, made a thorough study of the habits
and customs of the community, and got under the skins of the natives
by living with them. Then she took her vivid memories and notes to her
habitat in Greenwich Village and knocked out a really fine book.

Laura did not win the _Atlantic Monthly_ prize, for reasons
that are obscure to me, for she certainly deserved it. She may have
addressed her manuscript to the _Pacific Monthly_ of the United
States Daily, for Laura struck me as a little girl just out of boarding
school who had vague notions about the cultural landscape. One evening
she came to visit me at my Village studio and casually dropped the
remark that her book had been accepted by Viking and would be published
simultaneously by the Literary Guild.

“What is the Literary Guild?” she asked, bewildered.

When I told her that she was assured of fame and fortune as the
result of the Literary Guild’s action, she showed no enthusiasm and
nonchalantly munched at a peppermint drop.

“I’m a little behind schedule,” she said. “I expected to be a celebrity
in January and the book won’t appear until September. I can’t wait that
long.”

“Why don’t you ask your publisher to advance the publication date?” I
suggested.

“No, I better not,” she mused aloud. “I better spend the time
practising to be a celebrity. Do you mind taking me to a tea at Fannie
Hurst’s?”

Laura was aware of the fact that the literary teas given by Fannie
Hurst at her sumptuous duplex studio in Central Park West attracted
celebrities as thick as thieves in the Paris Flea Market. Here was her
chance to meet the celebrities in their native habitat and ape their
peculiar gestures and mannerisms.

The Great Depression had hit all classes of New York’s
population--except those who played bear instead of bull in the stock
market, and the impecunious Villagers who were on a starvation diet
even in the boom days of Coolidge and Hoover. Laura was one of those
Villagers who lived on a dead level of standardized hunger, but now
that she was about to enter into fame and fortune she was anxious to
mix with the stiff-shirted, cocktail-gowned celebrities at Fannie
Hurst’s.

Strictly speaking, of course, Laura was not yet a celebrity, and as
a starving Villager she had no place at a literary tea. But from the
point of view of Bergson and Einstein, who have knocked the conception
of time into a cocked hat, the future had already arrived, and little
Laura was already a celebrity with the huge responsibilities that
sudden fame entails.

I sent her to Fannie Hurst’s to serve her apprenticeship in the art of
being a first-class snob.

Laura was not impressed by the people she met there except for the
hostess, Fannie Hurst herself. Miss Hurst’s dramatic personality was
not confined to her theatrical make-up and her dark, velvety Parisian
ensembles. She had the habit of placing a vast chasm of space between
other persons and her imperial presence, a gaping void that could not
be bridged and which gave one the feeling of being drawn into the
treacherous center of a whirlpool.

At least that was the Fannie Hurst one met in Central Park West, where
the first impression of her was that of a stony-faced Cleopatra, poured
into a tight velvet gown like cement and smiling coldly down as she
wrapped her regal arms around a brace of Persian cats. This was not the
same Fannie Hurst who was an habitue of Romany Marie’s in the Village,
who laughed heartily at the scalding, satirical humor of Marie, who is
identified in many minds with the Village itself.

At Romany Marie’s, Miss Hurst was like the marble Galatea who was given
life by the touch of Aphrodite, the Venus-touch of the Village which
thawed many frozen statues and filled their veins with the hot blood of
experimental living.

My first glimpse of Miss Hurst was at the famous Life Cafeteria
in Sheridan Square. She looked more like Shaw’s Cleopatra than
Shakespeare’s, and when she saw cartoons a friend of mine had drawn
of her, she laughed hilariously, a wholesome hoyden, as far from the
pompous queen of Shakespeare’s imagination as a live volcano is removed
from an iceberg.

Unfortunately for Laura, she had never met Fannie Hurst in the Village,
and had nothing to correct her impression of a regal _grand dame_
moving about in haughty splendor through the vast spaces of the duplex
apartment in Central Park West. The duplex was cluttered with expensive
antiques, candelabra, icons and bronze statuettes that cast a gloom
about the place and made one think of a sumptuous funeral parlor, but
Laura was entranced by this luxurious Abbadon, the air-conditioned hell
for the beautiful and damned.

Laura felt that Fannie Hurst’s sepulchral studio gave her an air of
forbidden mystery, as if a queen, dead for three thousand years, were
seen moving about inside a pyramid, clasping a pair of dark Egyptian
cats to her velvety bosom. She studied every Hurstian gesture, every
icy stare and condescending smile, and paid especial attention to the
Hurstian make-up which turned her face into two black pools surrounded
by a field of virgin snow.

After three or four trips to Fannie Hurst’s, Laura felt that she was
ready to act as her understudy: all she needed was the money to buy the
expensive sheath gowns that emphasized the feminine curves and made
la Hurst look like a large vase dug out of the tomb of an Egyptian
Pharaoh. Laura, being tiny, could not hope to measure up to the
original vase in size, but she was more optimistic about the content.
She did not think much of Miss Hurst’s fiction, and was already at work
on the Great American Novel which would put Thomas Wolfe himself in the
shade.

It was Miss Hurst’s reputation as America’s most distinguished
clothes-horse that fascinated Laura. Being extremely feminine, the
pint-size writer was not satisfied with the impending plaudits of male
critics who would praise her for her genius rather than for her looks
and sex appeal.

I have known three or four prominent female novelists in the Village
who were more proud of their male conquests than of their fictional
achievements, preferring the substance to the shadow. Like George Sand,
they turned their lovers into printers’ ink, but they preferred their
men in bed.

Laura belonged to the George Sand school of thought, but I prefer not
to give credence to the Village gossips who traced Laura’s extreme
realism in fiction and non-fiction to her amorous adventures in
several states. Most of my erotic and exotic prose and verse have
been cerebral, and Laura had my reportorial instinct of delving into
the minds and characters of people for future use in fiction and
non-fiction. She once came to my room, pencil in hand, and began
firing questions at me about my private life. I resented being made a
guinea-pig and told her so. But she was hell-bent on making a study of
men and she succeeded in worming some intimate revelations out of me. I
doubt if there was much that would stop her when she wanted a story.

Laura must have got some fat advances from her publisher, for she
suddenly appeared in her Fannie Hurst outfit at the restaurant in the
free-meal hour and caused quite a stir among the impecunious dinner
guests. They did not understand why a girl who could pour herself into
such expensive clothing was in need of free dinners.

Of course there were young women eating there in silk and satin evening
gowns, but these they had received from affluent relatives who were
willing to donate their cast-off clothes although refusing to give
money. Laura, however, had no Park Avenue relatives and she was dressed
from head to toes in luxurious, eye-trancing togs. There was nothing
Woolworth about her, not even her hosiery, encasing trim little legs
that were ready to kick the world for a field goal.

When Laura MacMillan became a celebrity her desire to write about
American themes vanished along with her poverty. She became lost in the
social whirl, aping the manners of the upper crust. Writing had only
been a ladder to pull her by her boot straps to the glittering rarefied
strata of elegance and snobbishness. When the goal was achieved Laura
sank back into the velvet cushions of affluence and with it her once
meteoric talent fizzed into complacent sterility. I soon lost track
of her and never heard from her again. She had lost the desire to rub
elbows with the struggling word-smiths of Greenwich Village.




[Illustration]




[Illustration]




the lady with the glass bottom


I have known Villagers whose lives were linked by some curious atavism
with the ages of iron, bronze or brass. They collected scraps of metal
belonging to their primordial age and ransacked garbage cans and
backyards for cast-off antiques which had fallen in the estimation of
their owners to the status of junk.

Just as the primitive identifies himself with the stick or stone he
worships, there have been villagers who have announced solemnly that
they were brass candlesticks, bronze doorknobs or iron pokers. It is
hard to dispute their claim, and only a psychiatrist will undertake
to talk to a brass candlestick and convince it that it belongs to the
category of the human.

I have known an artist in the Village who was always seen carrying a
suitcase, and the rumor spread that it contained the dismembered body
of his model. Since he became my next-door neighbor I was curious to
find out whether he had homicidal tendencies, and I managed to examine
the suitcase in his absence. I was astonished to find that it contained
pieces of shattered glass, and wondered uneasily if he used them for
cutting throats.

I once saw him carry his suitcase into the Whitney Museum on Eighth
Street where a retrospective exhibit of his paintings was hanging. He
was famous in the art world and it seems that his glass mania did not
interfere with his work. I followed him inside and watched him dump the
suitcase on the floor in front of a self-portrait from his younger days.

Finally I whipped up enough courage to ask him what he had in his
suitcase. He paled, and as he seemed about to skip out of the gallery
with his mysterious black suitcase, I gripped his arm and said, “I know
what you’ve got in there. Broken glass.”

“Yes,” he admitted with obvious reluctance, “it’s pieces of a show case
I broke once. I was crazy drunk and I had a terrific brawl with my
model.”

“Have you saved the pieces as a memento of the brawl?” I asked, amused.

“It’s more serious than that,” he said.

“How do you mean?”

“My model was psychopathic,” he explained, “and thought that she was
made of shatter-proof glass. Nothing could break her. But when the
broken show window flew in all directions about her she thought I had
smashed her to bits, and screamed. For a moment she infected me with
her obsession, and I began picking up her pieces and later I stuffed
them into an empty suitcase I found in a back-alley.

“I dashed down Macdougal Street, imagining that the splintered body of
my model was in the suitcase. I hopped into a cab and was driven to
Grand Central Station. A few hours later I was in Woodstock with the
suitcase. I stayed there three years, and when I came back I brought
the suitcase along with me.”

“Do you actually think the broken glass body of your model is in the
suitcase?”

“Of course not. I have what my analyst calls a ‘compulsion neurosis.’
It’s all tied up with my guilt feeling, my sense of having killed my
model.

“She killed herself, and her suicide is on my conscience. If I hadn’t
gotten into a brawl with her and smashed the window in a moment of rage
she would be alive today.”

“But what makes you drag the suitcase along wherever you go?” I asked,
mystified. “Why don’t you leave the suitcase home, or better still,
deposit the old valise with the glass in a garbage can?”

“It’s the compulsion-neurosis,” he moaned. “I can’t do it without
falling deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of guilt. As long as
I have the suitcase with me I feel relieved. When I am aware of my
delusion, I laugh at my madness; when I am mad, I feel safe by keeping
the secret of my homicide in my suitcase.”

I was discussing the glass-obsessed artist with a friend who reads
widely in psychiatric literature and he said that such a psychosis
was not unusual. He gave me an old copy of a psychoanalytical journal
which discussed the strange case of a Mid-Victorian lady who had a
glass bottom, or at least she thought so. The details were highly
pornographic, but since I am not writing a “scientific” article, I
won’t discuss the anal-erotic contents of the Freudian monograph.

I was reminded of the model made of bullet-proof glass and the Freudian
monograph when I entered a Village restaurant recently and noticed a
stylishly dressed lady eating in a standing position from a shelf near
the kitchen. This was not a beanery but a famous bohemian eating-place
that attracted many successful artists--the owner himself was an
amateur painter and an art patron.

“How come?” I asked the proprietor curiously.

“She thinks she has a glass bottom,” he grinned, “and is afraid to sit
down because of her fragility. I’ve built a special shelf for her and
she eats from it.”

A few weeks later I met the lady at a party given by the Joe Hatch
Welfare Society. The Joe Hatch Welfare Society is run for the good and
welfare of Joe Hatch, who, despite his fame as an artist, shares his
bed with the proverbial wolf, which has not only passed through the
door but pre-empted his bed as well. He charges a dollar, and you can
have all the drinks you want, because you have brought your own.

I met the lady formally at Joe Hatch’s, but I did not get a chance to
discuss her strange obsession until a few days later, when I met her
riding on an Eighth Street bus and gallantly offered her my seat.

“No, thank you,” she smiled.

“Oh, yes,” I apologized. “You’re the lady with--”

She flushed crimson and got off at Fifth Avenue. So did I. It was a
sunny afternoon in October and we strolled into Washington Square. I
sat down on a park bench, but as she remained standing I rose and we
both leaned against a tree whose leaves above us spread their trembling
canopy of orange, red and gold in all the glory of autumn.

“You remind me of the pillar saints,” I said tentatively, “sworn to be
vertical forever and uphold the eternal verities.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I can be as horizontal as anybody. You
don’t suppose I sleep standing up.”

“No, no, of course not,” I stammered. And then I added casually, “I
suppose you’re seeing a psychoanalyst.”

“I _am_ a psychoanalyst,” she said, simply.

I was stunned and said nothing.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she smiled. “‘Physician, heal thyself.’
Well, I have, up to a certain point. I can sit normally every day but
Tuesdays and Fridays. You seem to run into me on my vertical days.”

She laughed gaily. She was a tall, blonde woman of Balzac’s “dangerous
age”--forty or so. Her mass of blonde hair fluffed over her fair brow
was like a halo, and her smile only intensified the grief of the Mona
Lisa face.

She was easy to fall in love with, but I had fallen in love with a
female analyst before, with disastrous results. The female psychiatrist
is bound to treat love in a Proustian manner, scrutinizing it from
every angle, weighing and measuring it, eyeing it through a microscope,
till it is no longer a primitive Rousseauian delight but a Freudian
bore.

I volunteered to rid her of her obsession, and she was not averse to my
egregious idea of being an analyst to an analyst, for she had consulted
her fellow psychiatrists with meager results.

She came to my modest studio, but I did not give her a taste of her own
medicine and tell her to stretch out on a couch. Since she showed up on
Monday and Sunday evenings she was able to sit normally, having freed
herself from her glass obsession on those days.

I prodded into her past and discovered that she had worked in her youth
as a professional witness for a lawyer, one of those shysters who can
manufacture evidence for his clients with the help of professional
witnesses. They happen to be present at every accident and are always
around when a man and someone else’s wife are found in bed _in
flagrante delictu_.

With the money she got from the lawyer for false swearing she was able
to work her way through college. Before she entered college she had
testified falsely for the busy lawyer five days a week, or at least
she coached others to testify falsely, having learned the fine art of
lying in a courtroom.

Her college work prevented her from appearing in court except on
Tuesdays and Fridays and it was obvious that she was obsessed by the
memory of sitting in the witness-chair and testifying to a pack of lies
after she had sworn to tell the truth and nothing but the truth--so
help her God.

She had a Puritan background--one of her ancestors was a noted
evangelist who rolled the hot coals of the Lord off his fiery tongue
and plunged unrepentant sinners into a flaming hell. Her father had
been a Fundamentalist Baptist preacher who had imbued her with the
terror of an angry God who punished fornication and false swearing with
eternal hell-fire.

She had seen no relation between her work for the lawyer and her
strange obsession, preferring to put a strict erotic interpretation on
her embarrassing handicap. But our house of dust--the body--becomes
a house of glass when we are plagued by a guilt feeling. We fret and
grieve in this glass house, fearful of our neighbors and ourselves.

The lady with the glass bottom has vanished into the mist of a mad
world and another lady has taken her place--one who sits down regularly
at the table, every day, including Tuesdays and Fridays!

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




[Illustration]




love and marriage in the village


In spite of the tragic girls like Camille--and there were many--I
believe that there are more happy marriages in the Village than
anywhere else in America. Of course legalized marriages are taboo,
but bootleg marriages exist in abundance, and if you look under the
mattress of Village studios you will even find marriage licenses issued
by the state of New York and other American commonwealths.

Marriage as an institution is in bad odor among bohemians who with
Bernard Shaw look upon it as legalized prostitution which only the
bourgeois indulge in. Therefore bootleg or common-law marriages are
considered proper and consistent with Village conventions. I know of
common-law marriages which have lasted for more than twenty years and
are actually perpetual love affairs which abide in the teeth of time
and the installment collectors.

These marriages last long because it is easier to separate from a wife
than from a mistress. If you are legally married there are always
the divorce courts to untie the nuptial knot. With the help of a
professional co-respondent you can always be found in a hotel bed with
a juicy blonde whom you have never met in your life before, naked or
clothed.

Even in New York, where divorces were once granted only for adultery,
you can now “annul” a marriage by “proving” that the marriage has not
been consummated. In Japan it was once the happy custom for three
to go away on a honeymoon, the third acting as an instructor for the
young couple, and so it was easy to prove consummation by means of a
third party. But since a honeymoon in America is usually perpetrated by
two only, the charge of non-consummation is hard to disprove, and so
marriages in New York City are being “annulled” by the hundreds.

Every third marriage in non-bohemian communities ends up in divorce
and annulment. And at least half of those who stay married do so for
economic reasons, the mother being dependent on her husband to support
her and her children out of his meagre earnings. But in the Village
where couples marry or bundle together because of love and love alone,
conscience is a great bulwark against marital failure. It is easy to
slam the door against a shrewish wife, but a love image is hard to
break away from.

A painter recently confided to me that he was planning to throw his
model out the window. His window faces Washington Square, and he often
posed his model against the second-story window, using the trees of the
park as a background. It would be easy for him to give her a slight
push and claim that she had fallen out the window while posing. The
fact that she was nude would prove his point, although I argued that in
the Village it would prove nothing. Besides, I warned him, a fall from
a second-story window would not necessarily be fatal, and I suggested
that he move upstairs.

Strangely enough he wished to destroy her because he loved her too much
and his fits of jealousy prevented him from painting. He would go on
“lost week-ends” that stretched into the following Thursday and he had
no time to paint except on Friday--which is a bad day for a creative
artist, the tail-end of time, as it were.

I suggested that he marry his model, or padlock her as the medieval
knights padlocked their fair ladies, and he took the second suggestion
seriously. With the connivance of a week-end painter who was a
locksmith by trade, he built a contraption that would guarantee his
model’s faithfulness. But the young blonde unfortunately refused to
wear a girdle of Venus made of sheet-metal with a sex-proof lock. She
registered her objection by going back to her parents in Salt Lake
City. He flew to Salt Lake and they were duly married by a Mormon
disciple of Brigham Young who believed in marriage so piously that he
took unto himself numerous wives and kept them constantly occupied with
bearing children.

Of course this artist hid his marriage license under his pillow, and
he still pretends that he is living in a state of sin and damnation.
Human nature is so perverse that we do not covet an object unless it
is forbidden--whether it is our neighbor’s wife or his car. The sense
of the forbidden makes a mistress more desirable than a wife, who,
protected by law, is anxious to bring little nitwits into a world
already crowded to the rafters with morons and high-grade imbeciles.

If we are to believe Schopenhauer, women are incapable of romantic
love and merely use man’s love hunger as bait to fish babies out of
the treacherous sea of matrimony. Of course Schopenhauer, who threw a
female servant down a flight of stairs, and was intimate with numerous
women he hated philosophically, is no unbiased witness to woman’s
unfathomable treachery. But it is true that many a romantic affair
in the Village ends up with a legal marriage when a model or poetess
finds herself conveniently pregnant. The Villager, in order to avoid a
bastardy proceeding, takes a Wasserman test and rushes to the marriage
license bureau with his conniving girl friend.

Females who trick a Villager into the holy bonds of wedlock are not
true Villagers, however. They always come from places like Boston or
Memphis. Rebelling against their conventional parents, they flock to
the Village and adopt the protective coloration of bohemians, engaging
in drinking parties, and sex orgies but retaining a deep-seated,
Schopenhauerian desire to trap a lover into marriage and a family.

V. F. Calverton, the noted Village sociologist, once wrote a book
announcing “the bankruptcy of marriage” in America, but Hymen is
far from bankrupt, especially in the Village. It is true that the
old marriage of convenience based on property, parasitism and an
instinctive desire to populate this vale of tears has received a rude
shock with the breakup of bourgeois family relations, as Calverton
maintains. Children have no interest in the home, except perhaps in
the television set and the thousand variations of Hopalong Cassidy.
But as the Village proves, those who rebel against the institution of
marriage, home and babies usually surrender to it, for it seems to be
an eternal design for living, as even the Russians discovered.

If we examine closely the pattern of Village marriage we discover
a desperate but unconscious effort to base marriage on love rather
than economics and to eliminate from it the odor of legalized
prostitution which made marriage anathema to Shaw--although he himself
was irretrievably a benedict. This was made possible by the growing
economic independence of women, who are thus able to choose their
lovers or husbands rather than bow to the god of economic necessity and
attach themselves to a meal ticket.

       *       *       *       *       *

We recently conducted a Gallup poll of our own in the Village to
discover the kind of women struggling artists and writers marry. We
were amazed to discover that twenty-one of the thirty artists we
interviewed were married to school teachers. The reasons for it are
three: propinquity, sympathy and iniquity.

Schoolma’ams were the first to break out of the iron circle of male
dominance by earning their own livelihood. In New York, until the
recent inflationary spiral, schoolma’ams earned salaries far above
stenographers and female office workers. They worked about nine months
in the year and had their week-ends off--which gave them plenty of
time for creative leisure. Many of them moved to the Village where
they dabbled with pen or brush or sought to become concert artists,
composers or dancers.

Here we have the element of _propinquity_ which the dictionary
describes as “the state of being near.” They were near the true
Villagers and they nearly absorbed their pattern of behavior, although
school discipline demanded that they keep regular hours and set
themselves up as paragons of virtue for the sake of the new generation
learning the three R’s.

The Village became filled with semi-bohemian schoolma’ams who were
sympathetic with the artists, either because they dabbled in the seven
arts themselves, or because educators, unlike business women or female
bankers, deal with the possibilities of the creative intelligence
out of which the aesthetic impulse springs. Here we have the element
of _sympathy_, the emotional attachment to bohemian folk and
folk-ways.

But it is the third ingredient--_iniquity_--that gives the kick to
the strange cocktail of marital bliss which the true Villager and the
schoolma’am drink together. The schoolma’am who moves from Flatbush to
Barrow Street or Cherry Lane is quite shocked at first when she finds
herself sleeping in the same bed with five or six people of assorted
sizes and sexes--tall, short, male, female, man-woman, woman-man and
strictly neuter. She never actually overcomes her guilt-feeling, her
sense of the forbidden, and she hungers for satanic evil with all the
passion of the beautiful and damned.

These Village bedrooms are of interest to the contortionist and
abortionist, but especially to the contortionist whose india-rubber
body is best fitted to squeeze into a Village bed that is fully loaded
with revolvers after an all-night debauch that has made legs useless
and immobile. A schoolma’am recently confessed to me that she found
herself pinned against the wall by a pair of miscellaneous legs,
belonging to a young man and woman, and in her state of nudity she felt
like a piece of chalk tracing a four-letter word on a blackboard.

In fact it is the four-letter word that is so shocking to the
prudery of the schoolma’am. It therefore lures her into sin with an
irresistible attraction. Like the verbal mumbo-jumbo uttered by the
priest in the Black Mass, the four-letter words seem to sizzle from the
torrid mouth of Satan himself. At a recent Village party I attended,
a tipsy artist whispered a three-word query into the ear of a prim
schoolma’am, the first containing two letters, the second, three, and
the third, four. The schoolma’am reeled in horror, like a ghost-haunted
mare, but then regained her nerve and slapped the artist’s face. A week
later they were living together; a month later they were married.

That’s how fast Village artists and schoolma’ams find themselves
nestling in the same marriage-beds. Since the Board of Education,
as well as Mrs. Grundy, can find no objection to a marriage-bed,
even though it appears in a Village studio, schoolma’ams prefer holy
matrimony to outlawed love affairs, although they enjoy the illusion of
living in sin and iniquity. There is something about a Village marriage
that gives it an aura of romance and poetry and touches it with a spark
of illicit fire that flares into a forbidden love affair.

The schoolma’am lives in a perpetual dream of love with her artist
lover. She only remembers that she is married to him when she goes
shopping for special maternity clothes at Lane Bryant and applies for a
leave of absence from the school room. The artist, on the other hand,
is happy to feel the marriage yoke, for he knows that his bread-winner
is always ready to chip in for paint, canvas and frames--necessary
items that are beyond his reach during a period of skyrocketing prices.
His wife’s money is as much a cue to their happy marriage as their
mutual love, although it is love, and love alone, that is the deciding
factor.

Sometimes the artist hits the jackpot and his canvases command fabulous
prices--or sums sufficient to enable the schoolma’am to retire from the
school system. But this does not happen often, for artists do not sell
their canvases for high prices until they are dead--when they have no
use for the money.

That is why the schoolma’ams love them and prefer them to men in the
business world who are too busy dying to live gloriously with all
the vital functions in a fever-heat of activity. The true artists do
not make sex a substitute for happiness and creative living, but, on
the contrary, sex to them becomes the Word, the great Yea-saying of
Nietzsche, the passion of Life itself.

That is why an artist’s wife usually radiates the joy of a woman who
supplements her husband with a lover: the schoolma’am married to the
artist feels she is living in sin with her husband who is also her
paramour! She commits adultery with her own husband--like Aphra Behn’s
masked wives who lured their husbands to bawdy-houses and embraced them
with all the shameless abandon of brothel inmates.

If you wish to observe the ecstatic faces of schoolma’ams married to
artists or writers, go to Woodstock or Provincetown in the summer,
where the schoolma’ams enjoy their ten weeks vacation with their
creative lovers who, paradoxically enough, happen to be their husbands
also. Many of the husbands wheel baby carriages along Commercial
Street in Provincetown or along Main Street in Woodstock with their
gay, happy-go-lucky wives tagging along, and a terrier or a tiny tot
bringing up the rear.

I have stressed the relationship between schoolma’ams and Village
artists because they focus attention on the true state of love and
marriage in the Village, a subject that Floyd Dell touched upon when he
wrote his stories on love south of Fourteenth Street.

It is possible to have love in marriage, but only on the basis of
organic, vital living. The Freudian pornographers who instruct husbands
and wives on the proper bedroom procedures are like the professional
trainers of elephants and seals: you can make an elephant dance or a
seal play “_Hail Columbia_” on a saxophone, but the dancing and
the music will have little relation to the arts as expounded by Martha
Graham or Mischa Elman. To live is to _love_, and those who have
lost their zest for life, the passionate quest for creative fulfilment,
become sterile and impotent.

That is why so many sex-hunters who come to the Village from all parts
of the city to catch a husband or wife are bound to leave Sheridan
Square without their precious quarry. Village marriage is a by-product
of love, and Villagers begin their marital relationships long before
they have said, “I do,” in answer to a clergyman’s usual query. They
often have the problem of checking their children with kindly neighbors
before going to the marriage license bureau, and at least one Villager
appeared before a surprised pastor with her little bastard in her arms.

Legalized marriage in the Village is unplanned and is due to whim or
unforeseen accident. As Bobby Edwards[1], the late Village Minstrel,
once sang at the Mad Hatter:

    “Because she wasn’t cautious,
    The poor girl became nauseous.
    Allah be merciful!”

[1] When the late Bobby Edwards revealed to a reporter that he was
a benedict and the father of a bouncing baby, he caused a flurry
of excitement among the bachelor girls of the Village. The perfect
bohemian had gone “bourgeois!”

Of course the abortionist often forestalls the stork or the marrying
pastor, but somehow there are a great many bastards born in the
Village, not mentioning those who are made so by circumstances. A
Village physician who runs an abortion mill in the Abington Square
section of the Village assures me that most of his patients are
non-Village women, debutantes and society ladies from Park Avenue,
where fornication is as popular as in the Village but where the arrival
of a bastard automatically eliminates the unmarried mother from the
Social Register.

Married women who belong to cafe society and make the Stork Club their
nesting-place are hostile to the stork because he threatens to demolish
their girlish figures. The abortionist helps them to preserve their
charm at an extortionate fee.

It is of course true that the economic factor plays an important
role in making the Village a flourishing center for the production
of bastards. Back in the thirties it was possible to attract an
abortionist with a fifty dollar fee, and there were wealthy artists
and writers who were always ready to help out an embarrassed girl,
especially when they were the cause of the embarrassment.

But today when the cost of living has zoomed sky-high, the cost of
preventing life has leaped into the stratosphere. At least this is so
from the point of view of the impecunious Villager to whom five hundred
dollars represents a king’s ransom and who often would rather bear her
child in a community where bastards do not lose social status but on
the contrary may be enrolled in the ranks of the great illegitimates
who have enriched the arts.

There is a French duchess in Washington Square, the widow of an
American tycoon killed on a flight to Brazil, who is engaged in a
strange sort of philanthropy. She hunts out Village girls who dread the
arrival of the stork and supplies them with sufficient funds to keep
the stork at bay. She is also a heavy contributor to foreign missions,
being a true Christian lady eager to save souls on the one hand and
destroy them on the other whenever they threaten to languish in this
Vale of Tears.

Female Villagers who do not know of this Lady Bountiful sometimes
try to perform illegal operations upon themselves--with terrible
consequences. One of these unfortunate girls I know was taken to St.
Vincent’s Hospital in a dying condition, and although she finally
pulled through, she is still a physical and emotional wreck.

Her grieving father, a Philadelphia clergyman, could not persuade her
to come home: she prefers death in the Village to life in Philadelphia.
And who can blame the poor woman?

One handsome lady--a semi-Villager--became sterile through constant
abortions (the last one was performed by an amateur who was more fitted
for the butcher’s trade) and entered into an amazing marriage agreement
with her husband, a Swedish exporter. She agreed to bear him children
by proxy, picking the future mother of her children from the lusty
Sicilian girls in the Village.

But the female Sicilians could not be persuaded to submit to her
husband’s embraces, even though the price offered was extravagant.
Village Sicilians frown upon the Village code of sex-ethics and still
believe in hell and damnation.

Finally an artist’s model was persuaded to conceive in return for a
promised trip around the world, all expenses paid. When the model
announced her pregnancy, the Swedish exporter and his wife were
jubilant and decided to take the global trip with the proxy mother.

The junket lasted about three months, and when the couple finally came
back to their Washington Square apartment they awaited with anxious
hearts the arrival of their first born by proxy. When the model
discovered beyond all doubt that the stork was on its way, husband and
wife drove her in their car to the nearest maternity hospital.

But the best laid plans of mice and men often hit a snag. When the
Village couple were ushered in to see the child their shock was so
intense that the proxy mother promptly fainted away. The child was
unmistakably a Negro.

It seems that the model, a belle from the Deep South, was living with
a prominent Negro painter. She was unknowingly _enceinte_ when
she had entered into the bizarre agreement with the childless couple,
and so there was no question of her honest intentions. But the couple
considered taking the matter to court until their attorney advised
against it. Judges and juries are unacquainted with Village folk-ways
and would frown upon such ideas as proxy mothers, although the idea of
proxy fathers through artificial insemination has become proper and
legalized in Britain and America--to a large extent, at least. Besides,
those seeking legal redress must come into court with clean hands, and
the couple’s hands were not legally scrubbed.

Sterilization in the Village is sometimes a masculine way of cheating
females cheaties who try to palm off their illegitimate children on
prosperous Casanovas. A famous physician and sexologist, who died
recently, performed the operation on many men who appear in “_Who’s
Who_,” many of them residing in the Village where the sex-hunt goes
on night and day.

I am particularly intrigued by the case of a professor at N. Y. U.
in Washington Square who became enamored of a strip-tease dancer who
did her nudist act in a Village night club on Sullivan Street. The
luscious blonde had a figure so voluptuous that it even attracted the
attention of the professor, who was so obsessed by ontological and
epistemological problems that ordinarily he would have failed to notice
a nude woman sitting on a bench in Washington Square.

Her grinds, bumps, contortions and convolutions would have aroused the
dead lusts of an Egyptian mummy, so the professor may be forgiven if he
found himself head over heels in love with this fair siren. When the
blonde was hauled into court for indecent exposure, the professor was
daring enough to testify in her behalf.

“The defendant,” he lied to the court, “is as great a dancer as Isadora
Duncan. She does not dance, Life dances for her, Life stripping itself
naked of all sham and prudery and leaping towards the ambit of the
singing stars.”

“Is that so?” said the judge ironically, ogling the blonde, who looked
more lewd in her clothes than she did without them. Her spheroid
breasts threatened to pop out of her tight velvet sheath and scandalize
the courtroom, but the magistrate was equal to the emergency. He
ordered the courtroom cleared, and persuaded the defendant to dance
before him as Salome danced in the court of Herod, so that he could
decide for himself as to whether she was a divinely inspired artist or
a harlot exhibiting her talents in public.

P. S. The strip-tease dancer was freed after her first few girations
before hizzonner, who could recognize art when he saw it. The dancer
moved into the professor’s bachelor quarters, but to guard himself
against any bastardy proceedings he visited the noted sexologist and
submitted himself to an operation that made it physically impossible
for him to father any progeny.

There are many professional virgins in the Village who assume a pose
of extreme modesty and decorum when they come up for inspection before
their worried parents who make annual trips to bohemia to check up
on their aesthetic-minded daughters. One of these I have known was
highly amused when her mother, a school teacher in Little Rock,
Arkansas, insisted that she get married promptly since she obviously
was suffering from sex-repression. The mother attributed her daughter’s
neuroticism to her chastity, when as a matter of fact the girl had a
horror of landing in the gutter because of her inability to control the
functions of her sexual glands.

Professional virgins in the Village often marry rich business men and
go off to live in Great Neck, Long Beach and other swanky spots on Long
Island. Sometimes they get only as far as Astoria. While in Astoria the
other day I recognized a notorious nymphomaniac from the Village who
had turned professional virgin and bagged an innocent bank official who
had taken a shine to her.

She had cashed in to the extent of a comfortable home and a pair of
twins who were in the baby-carriage she was wheeling. Places like
Astoria, Flatbush and Staten Island are full of ex-Villagers who have
found novelty and romance in the bourgeois pattern of marriage. When a
girl has had dozens of lovers she discovers the ecstasy of lying in the
arms of one man who has never heard of Aldous Huxley or Thomas Wolfe
but is on excellent terms with the landlord and the bill collectors
because of his magic bank account.

It is said that reformed harlots make the best wives and mothers
because they can focus their attention on one man, having tired of
the dead routine of multiple lovers. That is true of the numerous
nymphomaniacs I have known during my thirty years in the Village. Many
of them married, became mothers and grandmothers and are looked upon in
their communities as the pillars of decorum and conservatism.

But I doubt that these suburban marriages ever attain the degree of joy
which brightens the classic Village marriage which is sanctified only
by love.




[Illustration]




[Illustration]




nymphs, satyrs and the stuffed gorilla


The papers recently carried a story about an almost-nude dancer who was
arrested for doing a tango with a stuffed gorilla. The police claimed
that the dance was lewd, lascivious, lustful and calculated to arouse
illegal sensations in the regions below the diaphragm, the Mason and
Dixon line separating pure art from nympholeptic sensuality. The
judge, after a command performance, decided that the mauling, brawling,
sprawling dance with the stuffed gorilla was an artistic exhibition
despite the obvious simulation of vigorous sexual athletics.

The gorilla dance, which I am told originated on Montmartre in Paris,
first showed up in the Village on MacDougal Street at the Red Queen, a
show place frequented by “nymphos” and lesbians. I say “Red Queen” but
it may have been some other place named after the fantastic characters
invented by Lewis Carroll. The dance was performed by Aimée Cortez, the
Village Terpsichorean and madcap who had all the abandon of Isadora
Duncan though here the resemblance between the two dancers ended.

During the late twenties, Aimée Cortez was the reigning sensation of
bohemia. No Webster Hall ball could be a success without her dynamic,
eye-entrancing presence. She wore her nakedness like a queen’s robe
and when, in the excitement of the dance, she dropped her conciliatory
fig-leaf, even the police hesitated to put her into the patrol wagon.
Her nudity became her, and her rhythmic, erotic gestures were those of
a priestess of Venus, performing the sacred rites of the goddess of
Love.

Aimée Cortez was the unofficial Mayoress of the Village, but she was no
politician-dancer like Lola Montez, who broke into the throne room of
the mad King of Bavaria by way of his bedroom, making her nymphomania a
gateway to political power. Nor could she switch from Venus to Jehovah,
as Isadora Duncan did, the glorious Isadora, who shocked conservative
Boston by whirling her naked body across the stage, then stamping out
the rhythms of world revolution in a burst of red bunting and Messianic
fury. Aimée was the very incarnation of a wild, carefree bohemia.

Her dance with the stuffed gorilla was misinterpreted by the lesbians
and nymphos who had been driven into homosexuality by the imperious
demands of their erotic natures. Neurotic males, inhibited by the
sex-phobias of our Puritan culture, could not satisfy them, and their
occasional escapades with sailors, longshoremen, piano-movers and
safe-crackers appealed neither to their aesthetic tastes nor to their
sense of physical safety. Too many Village beds were filled with the
prostrate bodies of girls who had given themselves to the strange
embraces of homicidal sadists and Jack-the-Rippers. Aimée’s gorilla
dance symbolized to the Village nymphos the ultimate in virility, just
as the women of Robinson Jeffers’ imagination dreamed of coupling with
roan stallions breathing fire from their nostrils and holding the lust
of the world in their shuddering flanks.

What I saw in Aimée’s gorilla dance was an effort on her part to
link together the broken rhythms of Village lives, to weave and
stitch a Joseph’s coat of many colors and wrap it about the fleshless
skeletons of Village poets and painters. Aimée was no nympholept nor
nymphomaniac; she gave herself to the Village artists as a vicarious
offering to the god of Hunger, the flaming Moloch who devoured young
lives just budding into full manhood. She never extended her favors
to sterile, uncreative men, and the idea of sleeping with a banker or
shopkeeper would have been as abhorrent to her as engaging in an affair
with a daughter of Lesbos.

The hideous lust that pervaded the air of the Village in the
late twenties and early thirties was the miasma generated by the
frustrations of many young lives huddled together in the Village and
recruited from a thousand Main Streets throughout the country. Girls
found it easier to sleep with boys, and boys with girls, than to probe
into the political and economic cancers that were ravaging the body and
soul of Lincoln’s America, the bodied dream of the pioneers.

When the Marxists arrived in the Village with their cultural and
political panaceas, Aimée Cortez was already dead, exhausted
physically, morally and sexually before she had reached twenty, a
time when young girls are just beginning to live. She died by her own
hand just before the Great Depression, when young people discovered
that there was plenty of room for everything in the world except human
beings. She danced with the stuffed gorilla to vent her ironic anger
against an age that veered from the human and divine towards the
bestial and sordid.

Today when the world is falling apart like scattered beads from a pearl
necklace that once graced the lovely throat of existence, the bestial
side of man’s nature is revealing itself more blatantly both inside
and outside the Village. There are people everywhere who belong to no
cause, no dream, no faith, no hope, and who come to bohemia to mix with
the desperate fraternity of the damned.

Many of these despairing souls come from the higher income brackets,
men and women who are trapped in the frustrations of narrow aims and
ideals. They are like human currents that have changed poles and find
themselves shooting through the high-tension wires of moral and sexual
perversion. Or they have become completely depolarized, their electric
energies gone, their human potentials dissipated, spiritual and erotic
neuters who vibrate no longer to the stimuli of triumphant living. They
have smashed their lives against the Great Question: _What shall it
profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?_

A two-family house whose back windows face beautiful gardens, bringing
a breath of nature to the crooked, choked streets and lives in the
Village, is a notorious _maison de rendez-vous_, where society men
go for erotic adventure, for a vicarious sense of living through the
revival of the ancient Greek orgy. Some of the nation’s best-stuffed
shirts visit the place to give expression to the erotic kinks in their
twisted natures. Women whose husbands are too ancient or too sexually
fastidious, refusing to wander through the intricate labyrinth of
sexual expression are frequent visitors at the place, where they meet
polished men and women equally eager to give vent to their sadistic,
masochistic or homosexual images.

The mistress of the _maison de rendez-vous_ is a declassed
noblewoman of French-Italian parentage who ran similar institutions in
Paris until the occupying Nazis ousted her when she refused to cater
to the lusts of the enemy. She gave the top brass of the Nazi army the
brush-off, and was packed away to a concentration camp as a result of
her patriotic fervor. Believing the venery or perversion was a natural
pastime for Americans as well as the French, she purchased the house in
the Village and embellished it with sumptuous furnishings as befits an
establishment catering to the elite.

But there is a room on the second floor facing the garden which is
called the “Bastille” and is deliberately designed to imitate the
horrific conditions of a Parisian or Manhattan slum dwelling. The
yellow wallpaper crawls with vermin, the broken furniture is covered
with dust and filth, the single bulb hanging from the center of the
cracked ceiling casts ghastly shadows across the room cluttered with
instruments of torture collected by connoisseurs of cruelty, masters in
the art of self-inflicted torment.

The “Bastille” is a Freudian clinic in reverse: instead of curing
sick minds, or making futile efforts in that direction, it seeks to
satisfy the implacable demands of perverse natures banished from
the living fires of creative behavior and doomed to the dead light
of pathology. As the night birds sing in the moonlit trees of the
garden, stifled screams can be heard from behind the barred window of
the “Bastille”--some man or woman feeling the lashing anguish of a
horse-whip across a naked back already ridged with the livid welts of
previous floggings. These are ordered deliberately as the _maison de
rendez-vous_ clients order champagne cocktails, Pernods, Calvados
and Martinis at the luxurious bar in the more public room downstairs.

Recently a naked lady with the face of a Botticelli angel was seen
stumbling beneath the green canopy of trees in the gardens, a silent
witness to the fact that the umbilical cord between nature and human
nature has been sundered and that the rank weeds of pathology are
choking out the roses, sunflowers and phloxes in the garden of sense
and sensibility. The lady, overcome by her self-willed agony, had
crashed through the window of the “Bastille” and in a delirium of
terror and anguish staggered bleeding through the dusk, as if a dryad
had burst out of the confines of its maple and blundered into the
twilight of our human world.

It took a lot of political wire-pulling to hush up the story of the
Park Avenue heiress who had been whipped almost to death by a gentleman
of parts whom she had met for the first time at the _maison de
rendez-vous_, or the palace of a thousand forbidden pleasures that
teeter between impossible delights and exquisite torments reserved for
the elite exclusively.

One of the clients who intervened in behalf of the bizarre
establishment is a midwestern judge, an important figure in national
politics. He flies every week-end to New York and an empty room next
to the “Bastille” is reserved for him. There is no furniture in this
narrow, tomb-like room except a broken bed-spring whose jagged edges
make it appear like the bed of nails upon which a Buddhist fakir lies
to expiate the crime of living and testify to man’s capacity for
extreme physical anguish.

The honorable judge luxuriates in an uncomfortable week-end, stretched
out on his excruciating bed-spring like a Trappist monk dedicated to
the delights of slow death and piercing torment. The mistress of the
house feeds him personally with bread and water as if he were a felon
confined ‘in solitary’ for some heinous breach of prison discipline.

I am told that the judge has chosen this method of self-torment
because he had condemned an innocent man to death: the actual killer
showed up a year after the execution and confessed. Knowing a little
about the judge’s life, I have another explanation for the self-torture
of this native of the broad prairies.

Men like the judge have narrowed their spiritual space by the constant
hunt for money and political power until their sick souls are confined
to the tomb-like dimensions of the torture chamber in that Village
house. The judge is an avowed atheist, a total non-believer without
faith in God or Man. To be narrowed in Christ, as Saint Paul preached,
is to broaden and expand into the vastness of the universe, feeling the
pulse of every blade of grass and the throb of every star.

The radical (derived from _radix_, a root) digs his roots into
the central core of Godmanhood, the soil of expanding life, and finds
himself growing into the sun of knowledge and spiritual intuitions,
together with the saint and the prophet. Tories and money-grabbers like
the judge, however, ground their rootless lives on the barren soil of
their contracting manhood and often find themselves entombed in their
own condensing inadequacies. These are the men who are candidates
for the masochistic bedspring, the living grave of the contrite and
desperate soul.

The mistress of the _maison de rendez-vous_ employs some Village
girls who are engaged in the strangest occupation this side of hell and
damnation. They are “call girls” in a sense not ordinarily understood.
They call upon clients of the French noblewoman, whose elegant manners
and language are beyond reproach, and heap verbal insults upon them
until they collapse into a sweating blob of humiliation and abasement.
I know a young Village painter who earns her rent money by going from
office building to office building, bursting into the august presence
of a prominent executive and calling him a dirty so-and-so to his face.

Every time she insults a bigwig professionally she gets a ten-dollar
bill, and she nets fifty or sixty dollars a week. Of course there
are certain hazards that go with her peculiar profession. A young
lady on the payroll of the French noblewoman once burst into the
office of a newspaper publisher and insulted him viciously, according
to instructions, but she had the misfortune of insulting the wrong
publisher.

She was taken to Bellevue for observation, but her employers, using
her political connections, got her out of the jam and the possible
straitjacket. There are wealthy psychopaths who become sexually active
under a barrage of insults fired from the voluptuous lips of an angry
blonde. They are like extinct volcanoes that suddenly shoot into
destructive life, drowning the surrounding countryside in a flood of
fire, brimstone and molten lava.

The meek, self-effacing lamb who becomes a ravenous wolf under the
incessant lash of vituperation is a special problem to the call-girls
whose stock-in-trade is the mere list of four-letter words. Those who
do not include rape within the scope of their duties insist on a large
bonus when they have aroused the bestial in men by seeking to demolish
their human dignity, their sense of divine kinship with the gods that
hover in the shadows of trees in rose-bushes. They consider themselves
engaged in a hazardous occupation involving assault and possible murder.

Our own crushed lives often sit beside us, staring at us with sharp,
accusing eyes, like vengeful ghosts seeking retribution for foul
murders committed at a time of delirium and terror. The sadists and
masochists at the _maison de rendez-vous_ have murdered love
beneath the elms of impossible desires, and yearn to flog love back to
life again as a desperate peasant flogs back into a semblance of life a
poor nag about to drop dead.

To live without love is impossible, and so the loveless man or woman
seeks an _ersatz_ passion, like extreme hate or cruelty with
which love is inextricably woven as a treacherous swamp is part of a
cosmic scheme that includes the pastures of Paradise. Farce and tragedy
blend at the _maison de rendez-vous_, as in the world outside, but
in an intensified form, like a Walpurgis night of dread filled with the
laughter of clowns and the cackles of assassins making merry over their
victims.

No one has yet described the inner torment of people whose emotions
swing between the two sexes, and in the process of finding their sexual
identities are at their rope’s end, swinging like felons from trees
while the vultures hover above them ready to spring at their expiring
prey. The mistress of that strange house in the Village is an adept at
making her clients feel at home in the bizarre No Man’s Land of their
sexual dubiousness.

Between cool glasses of Pouilly or Dubonnet she lectures to them on the
strange vicissitudes of sex, casting the blame on an effete culture
that tears the primitive instincts out by the roots, bars the bestial
in us from self-expression, and scrambles the sexes so that men behave
like women and women like men. She is a disciple of D. H. Lawrence, and
looks upon civilization as a conspiracy of the sterile mind against the
creative instincts from whose ample womb all that is beautiful in life
emerges.

“I myself,” she tells her clients, according to a female friend of mine
who was one of her call girls: “I myself am a double-reflective homo
caught in a tangle of contradictory sex emotions. This female body of
mine has a male psyche, but this male psyche is homosexual hungering
for men rather than women. I long to be the man in me, but the man in
me wants a man also, so I became ‘normal’ by means of a double sexual
somersault.”

This rather confused explanation of her erotic blind alley causes
a great deal of amusement. And then she demonstrates her peculiar
sexual pattern by picking one of her male clients and proves that it
is possible to enjoy the delights of abnormal love through a normal
relationship with a man: it is merely a matter of deliberately balling
up your erotic emotions, entangling your love-life as a Chinese puzzle
is made difficult so that its solution will register as a great
triumph of the mind. The French noblewoman demonstrates her double
sexual somersault in such an elegant manner that it passes off without
comment, like Einstein demonstrating one of his intricate equations
before a group of distinguished physicists.

Women who make sex a profession are often capable of putting a touch of
exquisite refinement to the most vulgar erotic gestures, and the French
noblewoman contributes many centuries of aristocratic decorum to her
most lascivious postures, elevating them to artistic perfection. Common
harlots who strut about in the naked costumes of their profession have
a way of looking fully clothed even when stark nude, and the mistress
of the _maison de rendez-vous_ has taught her female clients to
retain their Social Register Dignity when their last under-garment has
been removed.

She also puts her female patrons at ease by indulging in a type of
classic humor worthy of Moliere or Rabelais. She has evolved a brand of
erotic sermon with texts taken from popular novelists rather than from
the Bible.

Thus, for instance, she will quote a sentence from _The Moon and
Sixpence_: “My first husband, Captain Johnson, used to thrash me
regularly. He was a man!” Or she will adduce Noel Coward as a witness
to prove that “Women, like gongs, should be struck regularly.” Then she
will sermonize on woman’s basic need to be thrashed, mauled, pounded,
beaten and whipped, and she will call upon volunteers to serve as
beaters and beatees. There is a rush of sadists and masochists to the
front of the room and when a woman receives a black eye she screams
with delight. She wears it as if it were a badge of honor.

The pious flagellants of the Middle Ages also looked upon their scars
and welts as the medals bestowed upon them by a pathological Lord.

While serving snacks to her patrons she will offer a piece of Brie
cheese to a dubious female with the remark: “Take it, my dear; Brie is
a real he-man’s cheese.”

“But I feel perfectly feminine today, Countess,” the lady will protest,
grinding her hips and swaying in a feminine manner to prove her point.

“In that case,” the Countess will say, “you must have a slice of this
elegant Pont l’Eveque. It was the favorite cheese of Marie Antoinette.”

“I’ve suddenly switched,” the lady will reply in a gruff voice. “I feel
masculine again.”

“I see,” the Countess will say affably, “from A. C. to D. C. Here’s
your Brie, my dear.”

The French noblewoman, despite her aristocratic manners, has a
bourgeois respect for the cash register, which means security, home,
prosperity and gems: she has a peculiar passion for rubies and wears
a coronet set with them. The cash register is always active in the
Countess’ front room, the drawer shoots out like the tongue of a
dragon, and when the register rings up a large sum, the Countess hums a
tune from _Carmen_ or _La Bohème_.

Having been a refugee herself, she knows the value of money in
redeeming a person from the fate of the Wandering Jew, the eternal trek
along the edge of an abyss where the lonely soul is face to face with
death and disaster leaping forever out of the gathering dark. Lacking
the Messianic will to change the world, she accepts our pathological
society as normal, and considers herself a humanitarian by catering to
the perverse needs of her genteel clients, treating their peccadillos
with impeccable tact and aplomb.

There is the case of the wealthy importer, for instance, who
specializes in religious articles and has an expensive collection of
jeweled icons and crucifixes. He is a White Guard Russian and among the
Russians in New York he is known as a religious fanatic, praying daily
for the restoration of the Czar and the Czar’s Palace Guard in which he
held an honorary rank of Captain.

But despite his obvious piety the Russian is cursed with a demonic
desire to ravish a nun, and the Countess dresses up one of the
nymphomaniacal clients in nun’s garb to give him the illusion that
he is committing assault upon a bride of Christ. One of her rooms is
fitted up like a convent or monastery, with a Gothic stained-glass
window and altar bathed in the sepulchral glow of candles niched in the
corners of the chamber.

It is in this room that the pious importer, caught in a spasm of
satyriasis, falls upon his willing victim, rips off her cloistral garb,
flings her cross away and commits the imagined sin against the Holy
Ghost--the violent rape of a “nun.”

Then there is a German baroness who has presented the French noblewoman
with an assortment of fancy uniforms that would have made the late
Hermann Goering green with envy. Having counted kings, dukes, generals,
admirals and diplomats among her lovers, she seeks to recapture her
illusion of regal splendor by insisting that her lovers in America
retain the same grandeur as her paramours on the continent.

The idea of loving a man in a business suit, or in the overalls of
a proletarian worker, would make the German baroness break out in
goose pimples and cause her mind to crack under the conviction that
the democratic idea had triumphed in the realm of sex as well as in
the domain of social relations. Whenever the baroness arrives at the
_maison de rendez-vous_ she is greeted by a gathering of synthetic
kings, princes, archdukes, five-star generals and admirals, who parade
before her in the dazzling uniforms she has provided for the occasion.

There is a rumor that the gigantic doorman of one of the night clubs in
the Village who looked like a Russian grand-duke in his splendiferous
gold-braided uniform, once crashed the exclusive _maison de
rendez-vous_ and joined the group of uniformed aristocrats parading
before the ecstatic baroness as her tall, handsome soldiers once
marched and countermarched before the man-crazy Catherine the Great.
The baroness picked the night-club doorman as her lover for the
evening, impressed by his regal bearing and imperial manners.

When the baroness discovered the hoax it was too late to combat it, for
she had already given herself to the Russian proletarian. He had been
Leon Trotzky’s bosom companion when the co-founder of Soviet Russia
planned revolutionary strategy in the tea-rooms of Greenwich Village
and the “coffee-pots” of the Bronx. At first the baroness accused the
_gouvernante_ of perpetrating an insult to her honor, but then she
reconciled herself to the fact that the proletarian doorman was a great
lover, and she made him an honorary aristocrat, as some Nazi leaders
made their Jewish mistresses honorary Aryans.

The baroness discovered with Catherine the Great, Messalina, Semiramis,
Marguerite of Navarre and other royal nymphomaniacs that Eros laughs
at the artificial barriers of class and caste. He accepts the potent
doorman in preference to the impotent duke, the common sailor and
soldier to the men of pomp and power who ride on horseback but are
feeble equestrians in the difficult course of milady’s boudoir. This
was the theme of D. H. Lawrence in _Lady Chatterley’s Lover_, and
the baroness may have become a Lawrencite with or without the prompting
of the French noblewoman who considered Lawrence another Zararathustra,
Moses or Buddha who, like Freud, discovered God in the genital organs.

In any event the high-tensioned baroness married the night-club
doorman, who received as a wedding present a wardrobe of fancy uniforms
that would have delighted the eye of such royal dandies as Nero and
Heliogabalus. The baroness, wedded to the dream of royal grandeur and
aristocratic flummery, has found in her Gargantuan, bullish doorman an
open-sesame to the Land of Cockaigne, the dear lost land of luxurious
idleness, perpetual orgasm, and constant parades, marching under a
blaze of colorful flags floating in the ecstatic rose-scented air.

The problem of the Village artist or writer who is plagued by the
demons of nymphomania or satyriasis is more serious than the perpetual
sexual crises that haunt the denizens of Mayfair or the golden
bohemia of Central Park West, many of whom visit the _maison de
rendez-vous_ in the Village.

The sex-obsessed artist is no longer a free agent, and, having lost
control of himself, he can no longer manipulate the media of his art
and shape them into things of beauty and aesthetic delight. There are
many young ladies in the Village with but a single talent, a horizontal
gift that absorbs all their waking hours, and despite the fact that
they consider themselves writers or painters, they can show very little
to back up their artistic pretensions. They are would-be worshippers
of the Muses who have been shunted off into the paths of Venus, though
many of them show signs of great artistic gifts.

I know a woman in the Village who in the course of a decade had written
five short stories only, each one of which was a masterpiece and
has appeared in many anthologies. She had transferred her aesthetic
emotions to the animal kingdom, and her tales of wild life in the
jungles and forests were said to rival Kipling’s. Drink and sex
kept her from indulging in her passion of aesthetic creation, and I
discovered the cause of her nymphomania only after she was found
dead on a Washington Square park bench, a victim of malnutrition and
exposure to the bitter November blasts.

At twenty she had undergone an ovarian operation that made it
impossible for her to bear children, thus frustrating her natural
desire to satisfy herself in biological creation. Aesthetic creation
loomed in her mind as a weak substitute for biological fulfillment,
and so she drank and whored to cover an aching void in her psyche. She
loved with an erotic frenzy born out of frustration, and there was only
one satyr in the Village who was able to satisfy her boundless desire
for impossible delights.

He too was a short-story writer, but he confined himself to the
commercial magazines and received as much as three thousand dollars for
a short story--when he was able to write it. This was extremely seldom,
for his satyriasis, nursed and stimulated by alcohol, kept him in a
constant horizontal position--in the gutter or in a brothel. He spent
all his earned money on women and liquor, and when he lacked sufficient
funds he did not hesitate to steal.

All the Village nymphs and satyrs remind me of that stuffed gorilla
Aimée Cortez danced with. When Man still clung to his simian ancestry
he was a primordial gorilla in tune with the wildness of nature and the
bestial longings of his own blood. But now he can’t come home again, he
can’t make contact with the caveman within him, having been shattered
on his dream of God and Man, the dream that has sundered him from his
bestial self.

And so he dances with the stuffed gorilla which is himself, this ape
of God who is now forced to recall the rhythms of his dead beasthood,
having lost the vision of his divinity whose vibrations he once felt in
a prayer or in a song. Godless and songless, western man dances with
the stuffed gorilla through all the blind alley of a dead-end world.




[Illustration]




[Illustration]




caesar and other famous villagers


When I first met Raymond Duncan, the brother of the famous dancer
Isadora Duncan, I had been treating myself to an extensive reading
binge on the days of ancient Rome and I was living in the first century
in the midst of Roman Senators, wearing purple-striped togas, in their
world of chariots, circuses and gladiatorial shows. Then a friend of
mine took me to a house-party in the Village and introduced me to a man
wearing a Roman toga.

“Meet Mr. Duncan,” he said.

For the rest of the evening Mr. Duncan and I moved into first-century
Rome and discussed our contemporaries--Tiberius, Jesus, Caligula,
Philo, Seneca and Saint Paul. I thought the flowing white toga became
him, and I was seriously thinking of turning my bed-sheet into a Roman
robe like Duncan’s. Then another guest appeared, sporting a toga and
moving about the room in buff sandals, the replica of Duncan’s.

He shuffled over to our corner and joined our discussion without
introducing himself.

“Glad to meet another contemporary,” I said, half in jest. “I suppose
you remember the time when Caligula appointed Herod Agrippa king of the
Jews?”

“No, I don’t,” he snapped. “I died in 44 B. C. and was reincarnated in
this century--in 1910, to be exact.”

“I see,” I said, as he smoothed the folds of his toga with a soft,
almost feminine hand. “I suppose you knew Julius Caesar?”

“I _am_ Julius Caesar,” he growled, as if peeved at the thought
that I did not recognize his august, imperial presence. He strode
off in a huff and started to chat with a notorious Village hussy who
married a lecturer on eighteenth-century France and was deluded into
thinking that she was Madame Du Barry.

“That man is cracked,” said Mr. Duncan with absolute assurance. “He is
a concentration-camp victim. He fought in the French underground and
was caught with nine of his comrades. The Nazis tortured them all and
hanged them by their boots, upside down like German Jews in the Middle
Ages. For some reason the Nazis decided to spare him--their sadistic
humor, I guess. They removed the rope from his legs and then forced him
to lick the boots of the dead men--the ultimate insult to his human
dignity. To compensate for his loss of honor he decided to be Julius
Caesar, the conqueror of the world.”

Duncan, strangely enough, stepped back into the twentieth century when
Hitler’s maniacs moved into Paris. He saved many Jews from the Gestapo
by hiding them in his Paris studio until they were rescued by friends.

“How did you get away with it?” I asked, intrigued.

“They thought I was cracked,” he smiled. “They didn’t think that a
citizen of the first century would have any interest in the affairs
of the twentieth. My toga not only saved my own life but the lives of
dozens of others.”

Duncan is extremely rational despite the fact that he sports a toga,
trots about in antique sandals and graces his long, flowing hair with a
chaplet of ivy-leaves. He lives in an unobstructed Einsteinian universe
where time and space have been pushed back and a man can pick his own
century and make his dreams come true.

When life collapses, only the dream of life remains, the private dream
that is more precious and real than the arid logic of the psychiatrists
whose mental horizon is confined to their own middle-class world, a
world that artists like Duncan refuse to recognize. These artists have
their own secret dreams, their own languages, their own goals, and
because they cannot fit into the mold of a business society they are
called mad.

Perhaps they are, but as Santayana put it, it is “the normal madness”
of people who seek refuge in the past or future from the shambles of
the present.

Although Duncan and other bohemians put a Carlylean emphasis on
clothes, it is not actually necessary to don a costume to take flight
from the present. The Village is full of refugees from the twentieth
century who wear the coonskin hats and leather jackets of Daniel Boone,
the whiskers of Walt Whitman, the coiffure of Madame Pompadour or the
breeches of Joan of Arc, but these obvious disguises are the exception
rather than the rule. It is the psychological clothes Villagers wear
which makes them fascinating to me.

There is an ex-Harlem Negro, for instance, who once walked the streets
of the Village in the lavish garb of an Indian Rajah, wearing a Moslem
tarboosh of a bright red color to show off the deep black of his face
and to synchronize with the red caste mark on his brow. He was invited
into the best bohemian society, not because of his doubtful costume,
which reflected his sartorial ignorance of India, but because he was an
excellent sculptor, specializing in Hindu motifs.

When his Hindu-fixation became a gesture of his inner being, he
no longer needed his garish Indian costume decked with Woolworth
jewelry, and he could pass as a Hindu even in a Buddhist temple.
Psychologically, he had substituted Bombay for Harlem, the Ganges for
the Hudson, sacred elephants for pink elephants, and he could even
convince a fellow-Negro that he was a full-blooded Aryan who had been
darkened by the hot sun of India.

Then there is the fierce-looking evangelist on West Eighth Street
who decorates the sidewalk in front of the Village Barn with chalked
sermons threatening hell-fire to those who walk the primrose path of
sin. It is not necessary for him to tell you that he is a reincarnation
of Jonathan Edwards who places the soul of Man in the palm of an
angry God and consigns all Village sinners to the burning doom of the
Sodomites.

He wears the invisible garment of his wrathful God and breathes the
fire and brimstone of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
when men believed fervently in hell and damnation. Now Villagers laugh
at his antics, though many of them carry a thousand hells in their
heads and hearts.

As Villagers and out-of-towners stagger out of the gin-mills on
Eighth Street, they are apt to collapse upon a white-chalked Bible
text scrawled in huge letters upon the sidewalk or gutter. The other
Saturday night a bibulous Villager fell upon an appropriate text from
Deuteronomy. I copied the text from the gutter blackboard, although
some of the chalked words were smeared by the drunk’s clothes and made
them hard to decipher.

The text read: “Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed
shalt thou be when thou goest out.... The Lord shall cause thee to
be smitten before thine enemies.... In the morning thou shalt say,
Would God it were even! And at even thou shalt say, Would God it were
morning!”

In this mutilated text (none of my Village friends possesses a Bible,
and mine was stolen by a Villager who mistook it for a pornographic
work, after reading the story of Lot’s daughters) we find a remarkable
recognition of the fact that time is psychological rather than
chronological. To overcome the agony of time, the dark morning and the
shooting flames of midnight, Villagers create their own private time
which even landlords and restaurant owners recognize.

At Chumley’s, for instance, there was a sign on the wall which read:
“Breakfast served till 5 p.m.” Few people outside of the Village have
their breakfasts at 5 p.m.--the hour when non-Villagers stop work
and subway home for dinner. In England five-o’clock tea is a fixed
institution like the Derby, but in Greenwich Village where tea is as
rare as a virgin, breakfast at five is quite common. I had breakfast at
five for many years, talking volumes all night and sleeping all day,
like a true Villager.

(To be exact, my five-o’clock breakfasts were confined to the late
twenties, when, as a young poet, with a passionate desire for life,
I fell in with the prevailing Village idea that revolt, no matter
how blind and misdirected, was better than cowardly surrender to the
_status quo_.) My friends were young Village artists who, like
Degas, were bewitched by movement, the wild flux of things.

“It is the movement of things and people,” said Degas, “which amuses me
and ever consoles me. If the leaves of trees did not move, how sad the
trees would be, and we too.” This Heraclitian hunger for movement has
developed a whole school of Peripatetic Philosophers in the Village.
Their disciples follow them from hang-out to hang-out and from bar to
bar, as the ancient Greeks tracked the footsteps of Socrates, who was
kept so busy at tongue-wagging that he had no time to immortalize his
thoughts in writing and left the job to Plato.

By some strange process of migration and transmigration, a Village
philosopher who expounds Spengler becomes “Spengler” himself and a
man who elucidates Freud becomes “Dr. Freud” to his disciples. All
the centuries meet in the Village, and there are great men from every
century who rub elbows in the bars, diners and cafeterias.

A long-distance telephone operator once chirped to me: “A call for the
Duke of Buckingham from Trenton--is this a gag?”

“Not at all,” I said, and I called the Duke of Buckingham to the phone.
The Duke was a successful commercial artist, working for one of the
large advertising agencies, and no one in the Village challenged his
decision to exchange his proletarian identity for that of the famous
Englishman with the royal background. Only once did he suffer loss of
face: he ordered a Village painter who did his portrait to daub in his
coat-of-arms--an imperial lion flanked by the Union Jack. The artist
daubed in a braying jackass instead.

P. S. The Duke of Buckingham refused to pay for the portrait until
it was graced by proper coat-of-arms. The painter thought it unwise
to sacrifice a thousand dollars for the sake of his little joke, and
satisfied the Duke’s demands.

Of course not all Villagers who decide to become famous by the simple
process of assuming the names of celebrities actually believe that they
have stepped into the bodies of the geniuses whose names they purloin.
Although the Duke, for instance, sported a wax mustache and aped the
elegant manners of Post-Restoration England, no one in King Charles’s
court would have recognized him, for he wore modern clothes, made to
order by Fifth Avenue tailors. He never would have dreamt of sporting
the costume of Beau Brummel, and at bibulous moments he joked about his
self-elevation to Dukedom.

The same was true of such Village celebrities as William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare was merely a Shakespearean actor who was nicknamed
Shakespeare until his original appellation was lost in the fog
of bootleg whisky and Prohibition applejack. The other day I met
Shakespeare in the New York Public Library, and he addressed me as Lord
Beaconsfield.

“Lord Beaconsfield?” I asked in amazement. I had forgotten that in
the late twenties I had been fascinated by the life and career of the
great Jew who became Prime Minister of England and presented Queen
Victoria with an empire as a mark of his respect for the royal lady who
worshiped him as a divinity.

There are other reasons why bohemians wake up some bright morning
to discover that they are Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great,
Michelangelo, Carmen (a favorite identity with romantic artists’
models), Rodin, Bach or Stravinsky. The true artist is obsessed by a
Gidean refusal to be defined and tied down to a surface reality which
to him is merely a nightmare generated by a business civilization
from which he is self-exiled. He goes out of his mind and body in an
effort to establish a mythical identity that will best reflect his true
estimate of his creative genius.

When a Village painter tells me that he is Picasso, I know that he
has abolished the limitations of his body and mind and exchanged his
identity for an artist who is world-famous. He has created a Pirandello
world for himself where nothing exists except his own mythological
being. The psychiatrist will call him mad, but it is this madness that
enables him to keep on painting while the world refuses to recognize
his genius.

When a painter tells me that he is Picasso I do not confront his
egomania with a cynical smile: I merely agree with his estimate of
himself, and this encourages him in his Sisyphus labor of rolling
the stone of art up the hill only to feel it crashing on his head.
Sometimes the man who calls himself Picasso belongs to a mutual
admiration society, nine or ten, all of whom call themselves Picasso,
or as good as Picasso, and they give group shows which the art critics
usually condemn as mediocre or damn with faint praise.

The art critic of the New York _Times_ recently applied
Einsteinian physics to the problem of reality and fancy in art.
Reality, as Einstein said in a remarkable paradox, is exclusively
composed of fancies, and the artist is an Einsteinian who refutes
the Newtonian notion that reality is concerned only with objective
sensations or cash-register truth. Even Newton, as Einstein points out,
recognized that “space and time are just as real things as material
points.” The artist’s estimate of himself may be truer to facts than
the critic’s, and only time--and space--can tell who is delivering an
accurate judgment.

I say “space” because there have been American painters and writers
who had to be discovered abroad before they became favorites in the
country. Henry James, Upton Sinclair, Walt Whitman and Whistler
are only a few examples. Great Village poets like Hart Crane were
recognized only when they reached the other side of the grave, seeking
a suicide’s bridge between the time-space of frustration and artistic
recognition. I once asked an unknown Village painter why he admires
Russia so much.

“Russia can recognize a great artist immediately, without waiting for
his death,” he said.

“How do you figure that out?” I asked curiously.

“Twenty of my paintings are in Russian museums,” he explained, without
also explaining that Russia’s interest in him was mostly political.

John Sloan, who for years occupied the beautiful George Innes studio
in Washington Square, also was aware of the time-space _continuum_
in relation to art. I once asked him why he never left America and
sought to establish himself in Paris or London.

“Swift had the answer,” he explained. “In America I am a Brobdignagian:
I appear colossal among a lot of Lilliputians. In Europe I’ll be only
a Lilliputian among a lot of Brobdignagians.” Although I believe that
Sloan has an assured place in the history of painting, regardless of
time and space, his emphasis on the relativity of art and art criticism
is a good one. If John Smith tells me he’s Picasso, I prefer to believe
him, and if I had thousands I would back up my belief with the coin of
the realm.

Sloan also told me that there is no objective yardstick by which to
measure the worth of a painter, which is exactly how I feel about
writers. I have discovered that literary critics express their own
private judgment only, and I am no longer terrified at the thought
that a critic will lynch a book of mine in the hope of stopping the
dangerous thought it contains. To back up his opinion that the merit of
a painting is relative to the observer, Sloan for years sponsored the
exhibits of the Independents at the Grand Central Palace or some armory.

Week-end painters, including housewives, truckmen, clerks, delicatessen
owners, doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs, bootblacks, bank presidents
and professors, were all given a chance to prove they were Picasso or
Poussin, Cezanne or Velasquez, Rubens or Sloan himself.

In fact Sloan’s influence on _genre_ painting in America has been
so great, his style and subject matter have been copied to such an
extent, that I often come across paintings in galleries that appear to
be genuine Sloans.

But the week-end painters who exhibited with the Independents received
Sloan’s blessing, even though he may have disagreed with a Flatbush
housewife or Harlem bootblack that their canvases were as good as
Manet’s, Monet’s or Rousseau’s. The fear of self-praise is one of the
causes that lead many an artist into a suicide’s grave, and when an
artist has no money to buy food, he should at least be allowed to dream
himself into Rembrandt, just as many men have overcome the world by
stepping into the crucified body of Jesus, the Redeemer.

“To disturb, that is my role,” said André Gide. The artist’s role is
to disturb, to cause a divine unrest in the human heart, whether he
uses the medium of politics or paint, words or sound. The man of “the
golden middle” may keep out of trouble, and his name will never show up
on any subversive lists, but he will never be remembered by historians
of human culture. The artist must cultivate the extremes, maintain
a precarious balance between sanity and madness, and if I sometimes
become bored when a Village poet insists that he is Keats or Shelley,
I never doubt his judgment of himself. I leave that to the hardboiled,
disenchanted critics.

Nietzsche took pride in the fact that he was an immoralist, living
_beyond good and evil_, beyond the frontiers of bourgeois
sanity. I have never dared to do this myself, because of my inherent
Puritanism, but I can sympathize with Nietzschean souls like Gide who
believed that every principle has its opposite and that the saint can
only arrive at sainthood by plunging through all the damned circles of
hell.

In the twenties I sometimes was identified with Christopher Marlowe or
Shelley, and this feeling of mine was fostered by certain newspaper and
magazine critics who went all out for my tempestuous emotional poems at
a time when the sterile and effete T. S. Eliot was ruling the poetic
roost. I remember the time when Shakespeare, Milton, Swinburne and
Whitman recited their poems at a Village tavern and someone addressed
me as Christopher Marlowe.

I was quite charmed, and offered to write a special poem dedicated to
my admirer, who ran another poets’ night club.

He had Village stooges in his place who dressed up as Napoleon,
Washington, Oscar Wilde, Calamity Jane or some other celebrity to
attract the tourists and rubbernecks, who were unaware that they were
witnessing a planned masquerade. Villagers were earning their bread
and cheese by posing as lunatics, and sometimes, as in the case of the
Pirandello king, they felt their madness become them, and they actually
went out of their minds.

“I don’t want you to write me any poems; there’s no money in that
racket,” said the patron of the arts, my ardent disciple. “I want to
make you really famous.”

“I want you to play the role of Christopher Marlowe. You come to my
tavern and get into a real brawl. You can break all the dishes and
chairs you want--it’s all on the house.”

“Do you know what happened to Marlowe in the brawl?” I demanded.

“Of course,” he shrugged. “He was killed.”

“What happens if I’m killed?”

“I’ll pay all your funeral expenses.”

I pursued the subject no further.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




[Illustration]




bachelor mothers and female fathers


The great Village institution of Free Love between men and women seems
pallid and conventional beside another and more peculiar system of
unions.

Penthouse gardens atop tall buildings are not uncommon in Manhattan,
and if you look closely from an adjacent roof you may spot rows of
neat flower beds, rambler roses and barberry bushes, with box turtles
crawling through the lush grass and sky-kissed flowers. It is as if
someone has lifted his dream of beauty up to the very heavens and
sought to match the loveliness of the Milky Way.

There is such a penthouse garden atop a skyscraper apartment building
in lower Fifth Avenue near Washington Square. But that would not make
it worthy of mention in this chronicle except for the fact that the man
who occupies the penthouse is the bachelor mother of a six-year-old
girl, blonde and lively like Goldilocks in the fairy tale.

The man is a prominent architect who has designed some of the most
beautiful structures in and outside of Greenwich Village. But his own
design for living is as bizarre and Daliesque as any of the modernistic
buildings that have sprung up out of his vivid creative imagination. He
is “married” to a handsome young man, a modernistic composer who has
waged a life-long war against the tonal scale and the strange notion
that music is somehow related to melody and counterpoint.

Having assumed the role of “wife” in a marital relationship that
is quite common in bohemia, the architect became obsessed with the
laudable ambition of becoming a mother. But this task was quite
difficult because of the fact that, anatomically speaking, he was
unmistakably of the masculine gender. His “husband,” fortunately
enough, was bisexual and became the father of the little dream-girl by
one of his female piano students during a love-interval that rose from
pianissimo to fortissimo and allegro.

After a terrible scene during which the enraged “wife” threatened to
fling his two-timing “husband” from the penthouse paradise to the base
of the Washington Square Arch, they finally kissed and made up. The
architect “wife” agreed to become the “mother” of the child, which
suited the biological mother perfectly. The erring piano student was a
young lady who had just emerged from a convent school in Switzerland
and she looked as pure and lily-white as a young nun or novice herself.
She had come to America to destroy the tonal scale, with the help of
her charming instructor, perhaps because her pietistic parents had
jangled the melody of her own life and jarred it to the cacophony of
modern music.

If you ever stroll through Washington Square park on a bright spring
morning you will see the architect “mother” on a bench fussing over
his child, arranging and rearranging her pretty blonde curls, cleaning
her ice-creamed mouth with a napkin, helping her feed her doll or put
her to sleep, and doing the countless chores that doting mothers are
accustomed to do.

If you stay long enough you will see the psychic obverse of the
homosexual coin: the young, brawny woman who is the “father” of
her child. You will see the female “father” pushing a modernistic
baby-carriage through the welter of bow-legged Sicilian kids dashing
down like tiny human waves from the fountain which sparkles in the June
sun. Beside the female father is her “wife”, a young, giddy girl from
Ohio who is proud of being “married” to a successful short story writer
and novelist.

The story of the female “father” is one of those sagas of the Village
which have interesting turns and twists, sudden changes of direction,
like many of the Village streets which join in an Einsteinian equation.
Gus (let us call her that) was at one time a Village taxi driver
whom every man respected because of her strong right arm and sharp,
masculine features which held the lurking menace of a bullfighter,
forever living in the hour of decision, the hour of death in the
bull-ring.

She was stocky and stout, but every inch of fat on her had turned into
brawn, and when the cows appeared at the Country Fair in the Washington
Mews she looked like a young bull in search of his bovine mate. Gus was
the transmission belt between the Pennsylvania Railroad and Greenwich
Village, and many a Westerner, green to the ways of the Village, was
given the low-down in her cab as it sped into the purlieus of Sheridan
Square.

It was Gus who filled Strunsky’s tenement “duplex” studios with
non-paying tenants from the Dakotas and the Rocky Mountain regions.
The password was: “I am an author” or “I am a painter.” Strunsky never
had the heart to nip creative genius in the bud. He always had a
three-dollar duplex studio ready for the young poet from Main Street
who was a Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters rolled
into a single gift-package. Strunsky sometimes threw the gift-package
into the street and blamed Gus for deluding him, but they remained
friends to the end.

The bullet-headed Gus, with her crew hair-cut, cigar-smoking habits and
masculine stance, couldn’t ever have been mistaken for a Powers model
or Hollywood beauty, especially when her mouth opened and words growled
out that put blushes on the cheeks of other taxi drivers. But as Gus
found out to her sorrow, you can never tell what is going to prove
attractive to a man deep in his cups.

Gus lived on Jones Street, and one night the apartment next to hers
was raided as a crap-shooting establishment. It seems that a Village
painter had solved the difficult problem of satisfying his landlord
(not Strunsky) by renting his apartment out as a gambling den in
the afternoons when he was busy painting in an old rickety loft in
Chinatown. The policeman who was guarding the “pinched” apartment had
been beguiling the interval with a bottle. He eyed Gus as she rumbled
up the stairs at two in the morning. Gus looked good to him.

He pushed her into the unholy apartment and tried to get her on the
couch. Then began a battle royal that resembled the Dempsey-Firpo fight
even in its culmination. Gus landed a right in the cop’s solar plexus,
followed by a left to the jaw, and he sailed straight out the window,
crashing through the glass. Unfortunately for Gus, the window was on
the fire escape, and the cop staggered back into the shambles of a
room, flourishing his gun and using his nightstick.

Gus blacked out when the nightstick struck her amidships. The next day
she found herself in her own bed and a young girl was applying cold
compresses to her aching head. Gus, too proud to report the matter,
fearful of the jibes of her fellow hackies, buttoned up her lips even
when she found herself pregnant.

An abortion was out of the question, since to reveal her predicament
to the abortionist would make her the laughingstock of Villagers who
fondly referred to her as “The Village Blacksmith,” mighty of brawn and
always ready to strike with her hammer-like arm.

The young girl who had acted as her nurse turned out to be one of Gus’s
fares whom she had taxied into the Village. Gus persuaded the girl to
join in her compulsory exile somewhere in Maine, where Gus occupied
her time writing a fictional account of her life as a cabbie in New
York. Before her child was born the book was published and got on the
best-seller lists, though few knew the “male” author of the novel was
actually Gus.

When Gus and her girl friend reached the Village they were
duly “married” and took up housekeeping together. The child, a
bright-looking infant, had some resemblance to Gus’s “wife,” and it was
not hard for Gus to fancy that her “wife” had mothered the baby while
her share in his birth was that of the doting father. The female father
retired from hacking and supported the household with the profits from
her stories, which were written in the hard, hairy-chested manner of
Hemingway, O’Hara and Cain.

       *       *       *       *       *

How we look upon these whose sexes have been scrambled like a Spanish
omelette is a matter of philosophic and religious bias. Those who
possess with Unamuno a “tragic sense of life” may mourn the sterility
of a relationship that reflects the barren wasteland of our age which
T. S. Eliot explored with ironic detachment in his famous poem. The
Judeo-Christian moralist may call upon the wrath of Jehovah to blast
the sinners of Sodom who have turned love into lust and creation into
obscene perversion.

The Freudian, with the mystical bent of Jung, may conclude that there
are wounds in the soul which the love of a man or a woman cannot heal,
and that the homosexual is sick unto death with the spiritual leprosy
of our times. The Marxist will blame the inner decay and collapse of
the bourgeois mind, and bar lesbians and “fairies” from their party
councils. True Villagers, on the contrary, look upon homosexuality as a
matter of taste and see no reason why men and women cannot change sexes
as they change their clothes or their style of haircut.

This may be an exaggeration, but it is quite certain that homosexuals
are taken for granted in the Village, just as no one raises an eyebrow
when a white woman and a black man are seen walking hand-in-hand,
making their way to a tea-room or bar. But even in the Village there
are designs for living which can shock, by their audacity, the most
blasé bohemian, accustomed as he is to look upon perversion as merely a
higher form of normality.

There is, for instance, the bizarre partnership of three, made up
of the secret lesbian who is married to a successful merchant or
professional man and the “house-maid” or “governess” who is the
lesbian’s actual love-mate. Married lesbians who become the mothers of
children to sidetrack their husband’s suspicion are a common phenomenon
in the Village, and perhaps beyond Fourteenth Street as well. Looking
upon a husband as a sexual enemy who at the same time is necessary for
her economic comfort, the lesbian, like a general, uses diversionary
tactics to throw dust in the enamored eyes of her spouse.

The unsuspecting husband not only takes his wife’s female lover under
his own roof--but gives her a salary besides! His children are at the
tender mercy of a lesbian governess who hates his guts because she
must share his wife with him.

The newspapers often record cases of nurses of governesses who try to
poison or strangle their tiny charges, and in some cases, no doubt, a
jealous lesbian has in this manner given vent to her repressed fury
after seeing her sweetheart in the arms of the trespassing husband.

One such “governess” I knew actually had a habit of peeking through the
keyhole of the bedroom when the husband performed his marital duties.
She was driven furious with jealousy, and, pursuing the peculiar
reasoning of the lesbian, she berated her sweetheart for submitting to
the legal embraces of her husband.

She wanted her girl friend to run off with her to the Caribbean, where
she had heard that one could live with tolerable comfort on bananas
and other tropical fruit. Her opportunistic sweetheart relished her
bourgeois comfort too much to go off to Guadeloupe or Jamaica, and
characterized her banana dream as “banana oil.”

This was like waving a red flag in front of a bull, or rather
“bull-dyke” as the male surrogate of the lesbian duet is called in the
Village. By sheer will power she cultivated feminine curves and charm,
put on a Hollywood glamour face with the help of the beauticians, and
successfully maneuvered her way into the unsuspecting arms of the
husband, who had grown tired of his frigid wife.

This time it was the irate wife who kept her eyes glued to the bedroom
keyhole, and what she saw made her rush post-haste to a divorce lawyer.
Her two-timing girl friend had robbed her of her mealticket and she
appealed to the court for redress. She wanted alimony for herself and
financial support for her two children.

Two surprise witnesses showed up, and their scandalous testimony forced
the judge to clear the courtroom. A notorious Village invert testified
that the complaining wife had paid him to break his homosexual code
and father her two children, since her husband had insisted upon
progeny. There is a strong camaraderie between lesbians and “fairies”
in the Village, and the invert insisted that he was willing to have
sexual relations with the scheming wife for nothing, regardless of the
humiliation involved, but she had insisted upon payment.

Then the “governess” threw another bombshell in the courtroom by
exposing her intimate relationship with the plaintiff. The judge was so
shocked by the testimony that he called a recess to catch his breath
and “take a shower,” as he put it. The case was thrown out of court,
with excoriating remarks directed to all parties concerned.

There is another type of “partnership for three” which springs out of
the social taboos that follow in the wake of homosexual relationship.
There are quite a few true Villagers who earn a decent living as
professional wives or husbands to people who occupy important
government posts or earn their living in occupations or professions
that invite public scrutiny.

A prominent state official, for instance, who, anatomically speaking,
belongs to the female sex, has a legal husband who gets a weekly wage
for acting as a front for his employer’s homosexual activities. The
official keeps a girl friend in the same Village apartment who poses as
her maid and secretary.

Sometimes this strange design for living is splotched with the mud
of scandal. The professional husband must somehow satisfy his normal
sex-urge, and the lesbian’s girl friend is often bisexual, living with
the hard-boiled, muscular lesbian for economic reasons mainly. Since
the professional husband and the girl friend are parasites living on
a common host, the check-writing lesbian, they often two-time the
hardworking lesbian who sweats to keep up her peculiar mènage.

I once saw a lesbian lawyer barge into Life Cafeteria in Sheridan
Square and publicly horse-whip her young, pretty girl friend whom
she suspected of having relations with her professional husband. The
papers, of course, assumed that it was a case of the jealous wife
who objected to a third party breaking into her domestic bliss, not
suspecting that this was a “partnership for three” affair that had
somehow gone on the rocks.

Confirmed homosexuals frown upon this “partnership for three” pattern
of domestic bliss, and look upon the partners as immoral opportunists
who prostitute true love for the sake of pelf and respectability. I
have known homosexuals who live together with a devotion rarely equaled
by so-called “normal” couples, and can only be paralleled by the
passionate inverts described by Plato and other ancients.

There is a homosexual couple in the Village who intrigue me not only
by their life-long devotion to each other (they have been together
for more than thirty years) but because they have reversed the usual
conception of husband and wife. We think of a husband as wearing
trousers and of a wife as sporting a dress, although in a metaphorical
sense we speak of a domineering wife who “wears the pants” in her
mènage.

But the homosexual couple I have referred to do not follow the usual
sartorial or erotic pattern in their strange design for living. She is
a lesbian and he is a “fairy” and she obviously looks upon herself as
the “husband,” while her spouse is the “wife.” She usually appears in
Village restaurants in slacks; and while he never actually wears skirts
in eating places, his exaggerated feminine gestures are such that
you are shocked to notice trousers below his waistline. He sometimes
appears in a beautiful evening gown at private parties, and when I saw
him in his younger days he had a striking resemblance to the Great
Garbo.

Both are hard-working craftsmen (they are famous for their hand-wrought
metal jewelry), and though he has an independent income, she always
pays the restaurant check and takes care of the monthly bills. He still
looks beautifully decorative, despite his graying hair, and when in
female costume can easily be mistaken for a Park Avenue dowager with a
laudable penchant for the proprieties.

The Village boasts of even stranger designs for living--partnerships
of four and more, for instance, but I shall reserve these remarkable
anomalies for another chapter. What is important is the fact that the
art of love, like music and drama, requires a performer before it
can exist exoterically, and sometimes the performer, as well as his
performance, is unique, so that we are at a loss to discover whether we
have strayed into the Palace of Art or blundered into a lunatic asylum.

We are told that the sex activity of a hippopotamus is of interest only
to a fellow-hippopotamus, and perhaps this is also true of homosexuals.
Their form of rococo love-art, however, outrages my Puritan conscience;
I confess to a strong bias for the outmoded sex-norm of Adam and Eve
which the true Villagers scorn as an Hebraic invention, a vestige of
the primitive Jahweh.

True Villagers insist upon organizing their experiences artistically,
verbally and sexually without the help of “bourgeois” critics. Since
I am incorrigibly bourgeois in matters of sexual expression, I cannot
decree damnation of the Village homosexuals. They are damned without my
help, although most of them seem to enjoy their private hells more than
the harp-filled heaven of the saints.

Sex, to them, is a matter of taste, and the witches’ broth of inversion
and perversion is so delectable to them that they will not exchange it
for the ichor of the gods.




[Illustration]




[Illustration]




artists and other career criminals


There is a close connection between the art of murder and the murder of
art. Although the homicidal Borgias patronize the arts, culture must
exist within the framework of the human, and when the framework is
removed the arts collapse into nihilistic terror and barbarism. When
the arts go down to destruction the artists perish with them, finding
their last resting-place in Potter’s Field or Hollywood.

But the process of death is a slow one and Village artists are not
killed outright. They are murdered by being kept alive, as Poverty, the
Unseen Assassin, exacts from them the last full measure of agony before
they sink into physical or spiritual death. In a commercial society
artists are looked upon as career-criminals dedicated to the hostile
god of aesthetic creation, predestined heretics who must be rounded up
in their bohemian attics and choked into conformity to the _status
quo_. It is then that many artists become actual criminals, pursuing
some favorite racket to keep body and soul alive.

A hundred years ago Henri Murger mourned over the fate of the Parisian
artist who spent most of his time in pursuit of the elusive animal--the
five-franc piece. Great souls like Zola and Cezanne lived in dire
poverty and begged, chiseled and stole from each other and from the
hated bourgeoisie until their enemies recognized them as men of
genius. Then their exile miraculously came to an end; their loneliness
dissolved into popular acclaim and they were no longer career-criminals
but pillars of bourgeois respectability, moneyed buttresses supporting
the structure of a profit universe.

As Thomas Mann put it: “The artist is never lonely after he has
achieved success.” Mann, who in his novels declared open war against
the bourgeois world he was born into, became a respectable bourgeois
himself, for the artist had become the money-maker and Murger’s animal
was bagged at last. But dollar chasing in the Village is still the
favorite indoor and outdoor sport, and sometimes the path of the chase
branches off into blind alleys of crime and scoundrelism.

The example of Francois Villon, the poet-crook and assassin, is
followed by many Villagers, some of whom are blessed with a genius that
approximates that of the famous French bard who attracted the attention
of Stevenson and Swinburne. One of them was Lester Cain (a fictitious
name, of course) who achieved a reputation as the Village’s greatest
wit. Cain’s wisecracks and aphorisms became common currency in the
Village: they were exchanged at every Village tearoom and speakeasy for
the true coin of cosmic wisdom. Whenever a Villager stunned you with
a clever witticism the chances were that he had filched it from the
tongue of Lester Cain.

When Cain was not writing poetry or translating the poems of the French
decadents--Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire and the rest--he was busy
hunting down the fox-like dime or dollar to keep him fed or liquored.
His means of income could not bear legal scrutiny. Whenever a Villager
missed his typewriter the chances were that it had sprouted legs and
found its way into Cain’s studio. He would turn the typewriters into
cash, and I once found myself in the anomalous position of bargaining
for a used typewriter that had been stolen from me the week previously!

Cain developed a unique _mystique_ that rationalized his thefts
on aesthetic grounds. He did not argue, with Proudhon, that “property
is theft” and that the robber was merely taking what was his due. This
smacked too much of political consciousness, and Cain was an aesthete
to the bone--the funny-bone. To him most Villagers were assassins who
murdered art with the help of their typewriters and paint brushes, and
by depriving them of their lethal instruments he was fostering the
cause of American culture.

No one complained of his larcenies to the police, because most
Villagers were either dodging the cops or hating them as Cerberuses,
three-headed dogs guarding the gates of the bourgeois Inferno called
law and order. The young writer who paid for his groceries with forged
checks did not dare to contact the police who were looking for him. Nor
did the bearded bohemian who skipped out of the Village hotels leaving
behind him valises filled with bricks and telephone directories.
As for the others, their code was: “_Don’t snitch, or you’re a
son-of-a-bitch!_”

Whenever Lester Cain appeared at a house party everything portable was
nailed to the floor, including chairs and tables. Sometimes he would
walk off with useless articles like discarded suspenders, belts or
bolts, and the rumor was bandied about that Cain was a kleptomaniac.
This was partially so, for the man who develops an itch for collecting
other men’s property sometimes falls a victim to his obsession which
becomes a mania that cannot be controlled. It is not the cash value of
the article that counts but the article itself.

Cain collected everything from used razor blades to slightly used wives
and mistresses. It is rather unfortunate that the legs of a girl cannot
be nailed to the kitchen floor in the same manner as the legs of tables
and chairs. Women are portable even when not expendable, and it is hard
to keep them in one place except when they are locked up in closets.
But Bluebeard’s resourcefulness is not favored by those whose art of
murder is confined to art itself. De Quincey and Roughead, who relished
the art of murder, confined their enjoyment to literary expression, and
that is true of all true Villagers, Cain included.

But Cain did not hesitate to assassinate his women spiritually and
to extract the last thrill of torment from his female adorers who
shuddered deliciously beneath the whip of his sadism. Those who have
a terror of the law succumb to the law of terror, and Cain, pivoting
himself upon this dialectical fact, first turned his women into
lawbreakers and then enslaved them to his merest whim. Once the poison
of submission has entered a woman’s soul she becomes a pliant tool of a
clever nihilist who uses total terror to impose total humiliation upon
his victims.

Like Siegfried, Cain wore a psychological _Turnkappe_, a ghostly
helmet which made him invisible to the police. He committed his
larcenies _in absentia_, through his vicarious instruments, the
girls who adored him for his art and his beauty--his dashing figure,
flashing eyes, and vivid Oriental face made him look like a robber king
out of the Arabian Nights. When Cain ventured beyond the Village he
hardly filched a collar button with his own hands. He used the soft,
deft hands of his female slaves instead.

I remember a hue and cry raised in front of a department store on
East Fourteenth Street, a shout of rage and a scream of fright as a
heavy-set man pursued a slip of a girl through the congestion of Union
Square. I caught a glimpse of the girl as she dashed into the subway:
she was one of Cain’s sweethearts who had attracted the attention of a
store detective. He gave up the chase when she vanished like smoke in a
subway car--blotted out like the mist-folk in the _Nibelungenlied_.

I met the girl later in the Village. She had the empty, drugged
expression of a cataleptic, staring vacantly into space as she sipped
a cup of coffee, with a mechanical, puppet-like motion, like a wax
doll in a toy-shop. Then Cain strutted into the cafeteria, and she
became all animation, recalled to vibrant life by the mere sight of his
presence. He made some remark and she burst into laughter, like white
foam skimming the surface of a tidal wave.

She was apocalyptic fire resurrected from the ashes of her life by
the magic touch of his presence. She did not exist except as an evil
principle in Cain’s demonic brain, and when he appeared, this evil
principle took on flesh and blood, forming an equation that reunited
victor and victim. “_The sacrifice is not complete without the
willing assent of the victim_,” said Baudelaire, who understood the
doomed passion of a lover kneeling at the feet of the executioner, the
expiatory lust of the damned.

Like Svengali, Cain focused his hypnotic eyes on Village Trilbys who
were doubly trapped at the sound of his melodious voice which could
grind into harsh, guttural speech when he suspected psychological
treason on the part of his love-slaves. One of them, an ex-teacher of
physical training in a western college sought to break his spell--but
she was broken instead. He reported her to the police as a shoplifter,
and she thrust her blonde head into a gas-stove until she suffocated.
The next evening I met him in the Village arm in arm with a brunette.
He was wearing an expensive overcoat, fur-lined, with a great fur
collar that made him look like a Russian in the wilds of Siberia.

“Where’d you get the swell coat?” I asked casually.

“At the Café Royal,” he said with an expressionless face, as if a
restaurant was the proper place to acquire an expensive overcoat.

“Where’d you get the dame?” I ventured to ask further.

“Same place,” he grunted, and the couple vanished in a gale of female
laughter.

The following Saturday night I was eating apple strudel at the Café
Royal, the center of Second Avenue bohemia. I asked the famous
headwaiter, who collects gossip as other men collect postage stamps or
pipes, whether any of the Yiddish-speaking bohemians had reported a
wife missing.

“_Nu_,” he said, “Garfinkel doesn’t say a word about a wife, but
he’s making a story” (row, a fuss, a scene) “about an overcoat he’s
missing.”

I went to Garfinkel’s table (I am referring to a famous actor of Second
Avenue, “the Yiddish Broadway”--of course Garfinkel is not his name)
and asked him why he was wearing a tragic mask: he looked like King
Lear moping over the treachery of his daughters.

“Why shouldn’t I be sad?” he moaned. “Some _gonif_ walked in the
other night and stole my overcoat. My wife, too, but he can have her.
What’s a Yiddish tragic king without a Russian fur coat? It’s been in
the family for generations. You have to be _great_ to wear that
coat.” Tears rolled from his eyes, and they were not gelatin as critics
have more than hinted.

For the first time in my life I acted as informer, and Garfinkel got
his priceless overcoat back. He insisted that his wife belonged with
Cain. He renounced her with a stage gesture and the earthy Yiddish
phrase which, freely translated, means “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

       *       *       *       *       *

There are Villagers who have rich parents living on Park Avenue and
Central Park West but prefer to starve for the sake of art. They are
under the delusion that a well-fed poet or painter is a psychological
freak and that the flower of genius must necessarily sprout from the
soil of hunger and privation. Great art often springs from an abundance
of vitality and victuals, and men create not because of want, but
_despite_ the gnawing pangs of famine.

I have no sympathy with Villagers who sponge on poverty-stricken
artists and writers, or steal pennies out of piggy-banks when for the
price of a subway ride they could feast in a sumptuous dining room,
served by butlers in fancy livery.

I have in mind the bearded son of a Park Avenue corporation lawyer,
worth millions, who chiseled dimes and quarters, and when a friend
of my wife’s took us to a restaurant, invited himself, promising to
eat nothing but “an apple.” However “an apple” was a broad term that
embraced anything from a chicken dinner to a sirloin steak and a bottle
of wine.

The Beard (let him be anonymous) earned a few dollars posing as Jesus,
but it was his father rather than he, who was crucified. He often
solved the problem of living without money by having his girl friends
“hustle” for him, taking a leaf out of his friend Cain’s book of
scoundrelism. He refused the filthy “bourgeois” money of his father,
but he did not hesitate to appropriate the wages of prostitution. He
also forged checks, skipped out of hotels and fooled merchants into
extending credit for everything from groceries to shoes.

His father, of course, had to pay through the nose to avoid the scandal
of having a jailbird in the family. The Beard went to his palatial
home every Friday to take a bath and change his linen, and during
these excursions into bourgeois comfort his father tried to persuade
him to give up poetry for law or business. Instead of going bourgeois
he persuaded his younger sister to go Village and put her up in the
apartment of a girl friend whose main article of furniture was a cash
register. This sardonic touch was copied from Lester Cain, who stood at
the register as bourgeois “Elks” entered his girl friend’s apartment
and rang up the proceeds of her shame with an air of bravado, as if to
say: “You dirty bourgeois so-and-so’s, look how a poet can beat you at
your own game of crass, crooked commercialism!”

When the Beard’s parents appealed to a psychiatrist, he suggested that
they turn their palatial home into a bohemian hangout, allowing their
children to invite their Village friends and letting them raise as much
hell as the law--and the neighbors--allowed. The distraught parents
thought it was an excellent idea--the bourgeois mountain going to the
bohemian Mahomet to the tune of jazz and boogie-woogie. The Beard had
the use of the family limousine, as well as three or four other cars,
and the true Villagers motored to Park Avenue in grand style, hell-bent
for a wild party--with all expenses paid.

When the psychiatrist called the father next morning the man was
furious.

“Those bums walked off with my wife’s jewels, the silverware and a
lot of rare books worth thousands! You must be in on the racket!” he
stormed.

The Beard’s sister degenerated into a “call girl,” an occupation that
has a peculiar bohemian twist. The idea is to call up a total stranger,
pretend that you have the wrong number and then engage him in a verbal
flirtation that ends up in date. An experienced call girl rarely
gets into trouble, for she knows what men are safe prospects for a
profitable evening. Some confine themselves to professional men, others
call up celebrities who are eager to avoid scandal and are anxious to
pay to prevent disclosure.

The Beard’s sister, however, was a rank amateur, and at the second
or third call she contacted a detective who was a member of the Vice
Squad! He took her to a Village hotel room and then flashed his badge.
It cost the lawyer a pretty penny to hush up the matter, but a Villager
who earns a few dollars by supplying a gossip columnist with tips was
responsible for the publication of the story, although no names were
mentioned. The gossip columnist merely asked: “What prominent lawyer is
having trouble with his delinquent daughter who dated up a member of
the Vice Squad and found herself in hot water?”

Villagers often find themselves in hot water, from poverty, perversity
or downright preference. The Marxists stress the factor of poverty, and
no doubt crime and corruption find a fertile breeding ground in hunger,
the hunger for bread and the bread of life. Moralists, being Pelagians,
believe in free will and emphasize the importance of religious training
and spiritual discipline. Calvinists, following Saint Augustine,
point to the Old Adam in us, steeped in original sin and cursed with
the primal impotence of our first parents who, in a sense, were true
Villagers experimenting with their lives in the hope of escaping the
boredom of Paradise.

It is this effort to escape boredom that turns sinners into saints and
saints into sinners. The Jacob’s Ladder in Washington Square is heavy
with two-way traffic: those climbing to heaven and those descending
into hell, but those who aspire to be angels often lose their bearings,
and, climbing to the pearly gates of Paradise, they find Satan waiting
for them with a whip in his heavy hand and mocking laughter on his lips.

The artist does not intend to make a career of crime and
double-dealing, but he lives in a world he never made and he slips into
sin as he sometimes blunders into virtue.




[Illustration]




[Illustration]




gallery of queer nudes


In his _Age of Reason_ Sartre depicts his lackadaisical Lola who
took heroin as a form of relaxation. The true Villager indulges in
drink, sex and dope in an heroic effort to stab himself into a sense of
vital living. He does not seek relaxation but stimulation, and if he is
a painter he projects his passion for life upon canvas.

I have known Village painters who specialized in nudes only, although
the market for nudes is mostly confined to museums and the bedrooms
of effete bachelors who cannot worship Venus without the erotic
stimulus of undraped women on their walls. Sometimes these artists
are sex-obsessed, and they pose their nude models in obscene postures
which reflect the lewdness of their brothelized universe. But usually a
painter sees in the nude what Cezanne saw in an apple: the beautiful
solidity of life in a world dissolving into chaos.

The nudes of “Boris Tobenkin,” however, transcended the flesh and
probed to the very souls of the models who posed for him gratis. Boris
never sold his paintings except to an occasional museum. The naked
flesh of his females was merely gauze behind which were revealed
the spiritual wounds and scars of his models. His brush was like a
Proustian scalpel that cut into the cancerous tissue of the Village
lesbian who to him symbolized the loveless sterility of modern life.

Every woman is born to love: that is a law of nature as rigid as
the codes of the Medes and the Persians. Boris agreed with his
favorite writer Artzibashey that woman’s interest in science, art and
politics was merely a dodge for absorbing the passion of man into her
ever-hungry womb and turn rapture into the flesh and blood of children.
All his lesbian nudes revealed the agonized frustration of the female
bohemian burning with an unholy fire that could never be quenched this
side of damnation.

One of Boris’ models, Mildred, had a girl friend, Martha, who was
extremely jealous of the painter and hounded him with accusations of
rape and seduction. Martha and Mildred were both married to bourgeois
gentlemen who never suspected their relationship. They had married for
economic and opportunistic reasons, using their marital status as a
screen behind which they pursued their lesbian love affair. Mildred
posed for Boris with an expression of languid ecstasy like a temple
harlot just emerging from the strenuous rites of Isis or Astarte.
Martha was certain that Boris had induced Mildred’s emotional state by
something more than a verbal directive.

Her Mona Lisa smile, caught on canvas, was to Martha a confession of
secret intimacy with Boris, and Martha one day barged into his studio
determined to have it out with him. Mildred was posing at the time,
and, joining forces with Boris, succeeded in convincing Martha that
their relationship was purely that of artist and model. As a goodwill
offering, Martha, big, blonde, robust and masculine, like one of
Michelangelo’s nudes, offered to pose for the flabbergasted painter,
short and slim and terrified at her mere monumental presence.

Boris had a brain-wave. Why shouldn’t the two girls pose together on
the broad studio couch--at a respectable distance, of course, to avoid
the censorious eye of Mrs. Grundy? Martha fell in with the idea, her
erotic mind weaving voluptuous images of flesh stretching out avidly
for ecstatic fulfillment and caught eternally upon canvas. But Boris
painted her like a naked Medusa hacked out of marble, hard, cruel and
remorseless, with glaring eyes that turned her lesbian lover into her
own substance--heartless, impenetrable stone.

It took three months to complete the large mural-like canvas. Martha
found a sensuous delight in posing with Mildred, the few inches of
space that separated their nakedness serving as a stimulant to her
imagination. She felt for the nonce like one of Lawrence’s heroines
who gave up the futile bodies of men for the sacred loneliness of her
own inner shrine whose Apollo-fire burst intensely with masturbatory
delight. When Boris would leave his easel for a moment to answer the
door-bell or prepare coffee, she would fling herself upon Mildred’s
nudity with the violence of a bacchante devouring the flesh of Dionysus.

When the canvas was completed, Martha was outraged by the Medusa head
Boris had placed on her broad, naked shoulders. The lesbian, or sexual
deviant, is not aware of her spiritual eccentricity: she often combines
sadism and pathology in the bedroom with normal behavior, affability
and social grace in the drawing-room and at the cocktail lounge of a
swank hotel. Martha considered herself a beautiful woman who could
still attract members of the opposite sex when she slipped into
normality to satisfy her basically female nature. But Boris had drained
the eternal feminine out of her face and figure, made her look huge
and angular, giving her stone face a centripetal power like a magnetic
mountain, drawing all humanity into ruin.

“I was thinking of Gorky,” said Boris as he unrolled the large canvas
before my startled eyes. “He makes one of his characters say that God
always makes things round--the earth, the sky and everything visible to
the naked eye. The sharp angular things are the works of men who have
broken away from the roundness and unity of Nature’s God and are mere
angular fragments of body, mind and soul. Martha is a fragment of a
stone mountain--jagged rock that has assumed the shape of an Amazon.”

“But you have made Mildred an angular rock as well,” I protested.

“Not altogether,” said Boris. “As a mythic character in Ovid, she
is in a state of metamorphosis. Look at her breasts: they are still
beautiful, soft and well rounded, like two moons flashing white in a
tropic midnight. Martha’s Medusa-eyes are fixed on Mildred’s breasts
where her female nature has taken refuge. The rest of her is rock like
Martha, but her soul is barricaded behind her breasts and in her eyes
which still burn with the fire of the human.”

“The painting is remarkable, Boris,” I enthused. “It should be
exhibited.”

“How can I do it?” he moped. “It requires a large frame, and I haven’t
the money to buy one.”

The large, ramshackle studio seemed to ape the gesture of his despair.
It was cluttered with unframed canvases which probably would net him a
fortune--after his death. There is no good Indian but a dead Indian, we
are told by the grandsons of men who have been scalped, and the same
holds true of dead artists. The best way for a talented painter to
sell his canvases is to commit suicide--but only his widow and children
can benefit by this strategic action. But Boris was unmarried and,
though given to Russian mysticism, he did not think that suicide could
solve the problem of hunger.

I happened to know a French Countess who at one time was married to a
sculptor, and I induced her to visit Boris’s studio on Morton Street
in the Village. The Countess was amazed at Boris’s paintings, which
had the sculptural solidity of Epstein’s massive assyrian statues. She
thought that the study of the two nudes was a masterpiece of sculptural
painting that Michelangelo would have been proud to claim as his own.

Living on a modest income, she was in no position to help Boris
financially, but she gave him enough money to frame twenty of his best
canvases, and promised to pay the expenses of a one-man show. Then she
got in touch with the publicity director of the Park Avenue hotel where
she was staying. The skyscraper hotel was half empty (the rich at the
time were jumping out of hotel windows), and the management was willing
to use any means to attract guests to their expensive suites.

As a result, Boris’s massive painting, depicting the two lesbians
on the couch, appeared on the wall of the hotel lobby, taking the
place of an alleged Gainsborough. Strangely enough, the guests hardly
paid any notice to the painting, which had been drained of erotic
content by Boris’s sculptural technique. To the uninitiated, Boris had
merely painted two nudes trapped in stone and containing less erotic
excitement than the figures carved on an ancient sarcophagus.

To save the situation, the Countess herself appeared in the hotel
lobby, eyed Boris’s painting gracing the central wall, and fell into
a calculated swoon. Luck and the publicity director of the hotel
conspired together to have reporters present when the Countess fell
into a dead faint. When she was revived, she raged and stormed at the
management for daring to exhibit the “lewd and indecent” painting in
a hotel that was famous for the refinement and fastidiousness of its
guests.

“You have turned this place into a Bowery dive,” she screamed in her
best French accent to add sauce to her complaint. “I am moving out this
minute, messieurs, this very minute!” And with a flourish of her silk
cocktail gown and a toss of her aristocratic head, she dashed into the
elevator and was whisked up into her thirtieth-story suite where her
French poodle greeted her with a wag of his clipped tail.

The Countess’ outbreak made all the front pages of the New York
newspapers and was carried on the wires of the Associated Press. For
days the hotel exhibiting Boris’s nudes became the Mecca of New York
art lovers, and tourists’ guides, steering the rubbernecks to places of
interest, made sure the customers saw the nude before they were driven
to the Metropolitan Museum and Chinatown. Boris, like Byron, woke
one spring morning to find himself famous, but newspaper interviews
and gaping crowds do not butter an artist’s bread. Boris’s canvases
were still gathering dust on the newly built shelves and he still was
subsisting on coffee and doughnuts--except when his landlady invited
him to dinner. Fortunately for Boris, he had a species of landlady
which flourishes only in the Village. They take out their rent in love,
establishing an intimacy with some of their impecunious tenants which
precludes any desire on their part to press them for the money.

It was Boris’s doting landlady who introduced “Flying Bill” Yates
to him. Flying Bill had made a lot of money in the old days when an
airplane was a mere crate with wings and aviators could barnstorm
through country circuses doing death-daring stunts as their fragile sky
wagons plunged and dipped above the gaping crowds. But Yates had fallen
on lean, evil days: he drank like a fish and needed money to carry on
his bibulous occupation.

Yates had seen Boris’s notorious painting, and his circus mind worked
fast. His plan was to rent a small theater on Broadway, exhibit Boris’s
nudes, making his two lesbians the _pièce de resistance_, the
chief concoction among the aesthetic dishes to be served to the hungry
art lovers of Broadway. A chef, or rather barker, decked out in an
artist’s smock and beret, would stand in front of the theater, which
would be converted into a gallery of nudes. The admission fee would
be a dollar, for which the customers would be allowed to feast their
eyes on female nudity like pious Turks devouring the naked houris of
Paradise.

Boris was to get twenty percent of the gross profits while other
Village painters who contributed nudes to the Broadway gallery were to
be thrown a few bones also. Boris put up strong objections at first:
his artistic integrity was at stake, his honor as a man and as an
artist. What finally made him relent was his landlady and his ulcers.
She threatened to separate him from her bed as well as his own, and the
doctors prescribed certain dietary remedies for his ulcers which only
money could buy.

The man chosen to pose as an artist in front of the Gallery of Nudes
was an ex-pug with cauliflower ears who dreamt of becoming a painter
and thought the best way was classes I attended was composed mostly
of elderly spinsters who thought it was “oh, so ducky” to meet the
wild-haired bohemians face to face.

The ex-pug jumped on the model stand as if it were a prize ring, but
forgot he was posing without his fighting trunks or without even a
fig-leaf to clothe his utter nakedness. He coiled his horny hands into
fists and struck a posture reminiscent of a Greek boxer or the classic
Gene Tunney swapping punches with Jack Dempsey. His muscled virility
impressed the spinsters present who drew and painted him with almost a
sense of awe at his Tarzan-like figure.

Then an embarrassing accident happened. One of the nervous spinsters
suffered from a facial tic that affected her right eye muscles, causing
her to wink spasmodically and giving strange men the impression that
it was a flirtatious gesture hinting a possible intimacy. The ex-pug
had never seen the spinster before, and her nervous wink lit an erotic
spark in his brain which registered dramatically in another section of
his anatomy. The spinsters fled in horror from the art class while the
ex-pug was stunned by the sudden exodus from the studio.

Now the ex-pug, sporting a green smock and blue beret was haranguing
Broadway art lovers to patronize the “gallery of queer nudes”--adding
the word “queer” at the suggestion of Yates, who knew the broadwayites’
artistic interest in perversion. Sailors gladly and even eagerly
planked down their dollars on the box-office sill, imagining that they
were about to witness a burlesque show of undraped chorus girls in the
manner of the French Follies.

They walked out with despondent expressions, eyeing once more the nude
photographs in the theater lobby and shaking their heads in dismay
as they realized that the photos represented paintings rather than
peroxide blondes. Some of the irate customers protested to Yates, but
he referred them to the theater marquee which advertised “The Gallery
of Nudes.” He was running an art gallery, not a burlesque show, and
lowbrows whose art sense was debased to the level of the brothel should
not blame him for elevating the aesthetic tastes of Broadway.

For this praiseworthy work Flying Bill Yates grossed about five
thousand dollars a week. Boris’s share was a thousand a week, but he
received only a fraction of the money, for Flying Bill had to take care
of the police and the Broadway touts who muscled in on his racket.
Flying Bill claimed that he netted a measly thousand a week and gave
Boris two hundred, which to Boris represented a king’s ransom.

Then the blow came. Martha and Mildred who had abandoned their
husbands to live together in the paradisiacal freedom of Tahiti, in
the manner of Gauguin, came back to New York and found themselves
being scrutinized naked on a couch in a Broadway peep-show. Boris was
demolished by Martha’s titanic wrath, although few Villagers recognized
the Medusa-face on the canvas as her own.

Yates was forced to return the prize painting to Boris, who gave
it to Martha, who cut it into small pieces and threw them down the
incinerator. But Flying Bill suffered no loss in the removal of the
painting: on the contrary he gained by it, for many hungry painters in
the Village rushed to him with nudes to fill the breach.

Boris, like Proust, had distilled homosexuality into beauty through the
alembic art, but the nudes that Yates received from starving Village
artists catered frankly to the lewd demands of Broadwayites. They had
never seen the inside of an art gallery until “The Gallery of Nudes”
appeared on the Great White Way and attracted the attention of those
eminent art critics, the keyhole-gossip columnists. Then there was a
stampede for Flying Bill’s gallery of nudes, and the inevitable verbal
reaction--“lousy!”

But the new canvases Yates collected from the Village attics really
hit the jackpot. The obscene nudes of “Jean Bourget,” which only
third-class brothels and saloons in the Village had dared to exhibit,
found a prominent place on the gallery walls. Queues of art lovers
lined up before them as if their spread-eagle thighs calling to passion
in loud red and pink pigments must be touched to be truly appreciated.

Chekhov makes the following notation in his scrapbook: “A woman with
money, the money hidden everywhere, in her bosom and between her
legs.” Chekhov in this manner sought to depict the close relation
between greed and venery, and the Gallery of Nudes, with Boris’s
canvases removed, became a plague-spot of obscenity masquerading as art.

There were a few exceptions. One was the canvas submitted by “Louise
Horn” whose nudes I first had seen in the Woodstock Gallery. A
meek-eyed lesbian, she painted nudes that were as abstract and unsexed
as herself, nudes with microscopic breasts and thin angular thighs that
appeared as fragile as spun glass. The Broadway art lovers skipped her
chaste nudes to focus their attention on the flamboyant Bourgets and
some of the others which were even more suggestive of hot “Cleopatra
Nights” stewing in the sweat of immemorial lusts.

Boris went back to his doughnuts, which, according to doughnut
specialists, are an “impulse item.” Eighty-five percent of New Yorkers
are said to eat doughnuts on impulse, and fifteen percent out of
economic necessity. In the Village the statistical tables are reversed
eighty-five percent dunk because of poverty and only fifteen percent
because of a strange preference. (There is no accounting for tastes.)

Yates was finally reduced to a doughnut dunker himself, and he couldn’t
take it. He jumped off the top of the Empire State Building at a time
when such gymnastics were popular and engaged in by all classes of
people. The New York papers ran long obituaries and editorials on
Flying Bill, centering their attention on his romantic barnstorming
days in the West--but not a word was said about the Gallery of Queer
Nudes and Yates’s connection with it.

It was Boris who first brought my attention to Chekhov’s
_Notebook_, where smart off-the-record remarks are made that
strike home like silver bullets. The other day I bumped into Boris in
the fur district of Manhattan--he is now a furrier dealing with minks
rather than with nudes--and he flew into a rage over the American
intelligentsia, including artists and writers.

“I suppose that means me, too,” I said.

“He attacked all high-brows,” said Boris. “Listen to this--I quote from
memory: ‘The intelligentsia is good for nothing, because they drink a
lot of tea, talk a lot in stuffy rooms, with empty bottles’.”

“It wouldn’t be so bad if the bottles could be filled,” I remarked.

“It’s not their bottles but their brains that must be filled first,”
Boris retorted. “You bohemians are just bums.”

After ten years he had changed into a hard-boiled, wealthy furrier as
his lesbian nudes had slipped into blocks of stone. He had lost his
soul but he thought he had a firm grip on his soul’s identity, the
“single hound” described by Emily Dickinson.

Perhaps he is right. To change from doughnuts to dollars is not a bad
idea after all.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




[Illustration]




the case of the 99th lover


It was an axiom of Théophile Gautier that the vanishing primitives,
hunted by the silk-hatted keepers of civilization, inevitably take to
the mountains, where they find refuge in the wild bosom of nature.
Woodstock is Greenwich Village with mountains, and it was in the high
Chayo that I first met the Village primitive whom I shall call Magda.

Magda, an artist’s model, had been posing in the nude in a green glade
surrounded by tall birches. The artist who had lured her into the
forest was a notorious Woodstock wolf who met the New York bus as it
arrived on the Bearsville road and offered modeling to any pretty girl
he took a fancy to. But Magda was a professional model and she was
naive enough to believe that the artist was taking her to the woods on
a strictly-business trip.

After posing for an hour our Little Red Ridinghood slipped into her
bathrobe and casually glanced at the canvas the artist had set up
on his field easel. The lush grass, white birches and blue-green
lattice-work sky were all there--but Magda was missing from this
beautiful dream of sylvan peace and paradisiacal calm. Magda wanted to
know, How come? She had been posing on one foot while the flies, bugs
and ants had made merry at the expense of her naked, tormented flesh.
She was fit to be tied, and she expressed her anger by slapping the
Wolf’s grinning face.

This gave the Wolf his grand opportunity. He tore her robe from her
body, flung her on the lush green grass and raped her. To make matters
worse, he walked off with her clothes, including her torn bathrobe. Now
Woodstock models have been known to walk down Main Street practically
naked, but the scandalized natives had punished such an outburst of
brazen nudity by a decree of banishment.

Magda liked Woodstock, that magic valley surrounded by the grandeur of
virgin hills and mountains, and so, naked and bleeding, but not wishing
to be banished, she was scouring the bushes for her underwear, when I
came upon the scene--a shining Sir Galahad on a white horse which I
had borrowed from the Tuck stables. Someone had recommended riding a
horse as a means of overcoming my mounting nervousness over a domestic
smash-up. But the remedy was only increasing my distress and when I saw
the naked nymph dashing towards me, I thought I was ready to consult a
psychiatrist.

The diminutive Magda almost covered herself with her long blonde hair,
and for a moment I had a vision of her riding like Lady Godiva on my
white horse and shocked natives being too nonplussed--and intrigued--to
call up the state troopers. But my good nature got the best of me and
I offered her my shirt, which reached nearly to her shins. Then we
scoured about for her clothing and found every item except her panties,
which made her fairly well dressed--for Woodstock, at least.

It seemed for a while that the violent rape was the best thing that
could have happened to Magda, whose lesbian girl friend had remained in
the Village, forced to work for an interior decorator to keep herself
in food and clothes. When Magda went back to the Village at the end of
the summer season, she was completely normalized, having had fleeting
affairs with a dozen men, including a professor of Greek, an art
critic, and a priest who enveloped her blonde head in a luminous halo
and was ready to renounce the church to marry her.

“In more ways than one,” said Saint Augustine, “do men sacrifice to the
rebellious angels.” Magda was a rebel angel to whom the priest brought
the sacrifice of his faith, seeing in her a higher religion, the cult
of Venus whose shrine Baudelaire decked with the flowers of evil waving
ecstatically before his crucified eyes. After wrecking the man of God,
Magda plowed through the sea of nymphomania with the lawless abandon of
Captain Kidd after he hoisted the pirates’ flag over his trading vessel.

Sex indulgence, as Verlaine’s Pierrot discovered, is a disease which
can neither be resisted nor endured. Magda, whose parents died when
she was a child, had been conditioned to a lesbian pattern of love
while spending her adolescent years in an orphan asylum. Female orphans
often express their revolt against Fate and asylum discipline by
lesbian practices in the sanctuary of bedrooms. But such orgies are
like the night-blooming cereus that opens its gay, fragrant petals
in the darkness only, and Magda had endured many gray days, barren
and flowerless, sucked into the aching void of her life. When she
discovered _Men_, all the joyous blossoms of heaven fell upon her
life in a shower of rose petals.

When I met Magda in the Village, a few years later, she confessed to me
that she had appropriated her ninety-eighth lover, a shy, ineffectual
tie-salesman who had joined an art class not to study art but to study
the artist’s model, whose naked proximity had given him a sense of
“living dangerously.” But Magda was already tiring of her poor little
salesman, and ready to proceed to a bolder companion.

Half in jest I volunteered to be her next lover, her ninety-ninth, as
she flourished a broom-handle as if it were a tally-stick, bearing
notches to commemorate her multiple lovers. She promised to take me
into her ardent arms when she was ready for her hundredth bedmate,
holding me spellbound with that gay twinkle in her blue eyes which had
drawn the priest to his ruin.

My interest in her was more paternal than carnal, and I warned her
against the possibility of falling into the hands of some degenerate
in whom the death of love and the love of death had combined into a
homicidal mania, a passion to destroy the slim nakedness of a girl who
submitted herself to alien embraces. Village girls who blundered into
strange bedrooms usually engaged in perilous adventure.

Balked love often manifests itself in sadistic fury, the desire to
torture being a symptom of sexual repression which finds in cruelty a
keen erotic enjoyment, as Baudelaire maintained. Men who must buy the
passion of a woman with cash or a trip to a night club often give vent
to their sense of frustration by humiliating, degrading, insulting,
whipping or strangling their female victims in the midst of a love-bout
that becomes the scene of a shocking murder. It was hard for a Village
girl to appraise the erotic pattern of a candidate for her arms.

As I was warning Magda, I had in mind the case of a young woman who
thought she could reach the Broadway stage by way of a producer’s
bedroom, and found herself face to face with a naked maniac who greeted
her with a horsewhip as she opened the door of his Washington Square
studio.

But the pint-sized Magda assured me that she was capable of handling
any emergency, regardless of a man’s size or the shape of his
perversion. Perversion, in fact, had a vestigial fascination for her,
and she had learned more about the art of love than harlots plying
their cold, calculated profession in Parisian and Oriental brothels.
To her the sex act was like the world-ancient dance step in Arabia,
always the same, yet possessing infinite variations by a sudden switch
in posture, a sly glance, a smile, a burst of laughter short-circuited
into an electric shock of passion; a tremor of hips and an ecstatic
rush of desire that glides into languorous ecstasy.

Magda was ready for any erotic nuance--and she got it. But she never
lived to tell the story of her ninety-ninth lover, although the police
were deeply interested. A Jack the Ripper who may have been a man of
polished manners outside of a boudoir, strangled her in a hotel bed.
Her lovely body, which so many artists had translated to canvas, was
carted to the icy gloom of the morgue, and finally claimed by her
lesbian girl friend, who must have looked upon the model’s death as an
act of poetic justice.

I do not claim that I am able to predict the ultimate fate of erring
girls in the Village, though I had had a lurid dream about Magda,
similar to those recorded by Professor Dunne in his “_An Experiment
with Time_.” It is Professor Dunne’s contention that we can see the
convolutions of the _future_ as well as the past in a dream: the
coils, whorls and windings of nightmare trail the path of tomorrow as
well as yesterday, and the gypsy who sees the face of death at the turn
of a card is trapped in a daydream of future doom. I had seen Magda
strangled in a hotel room before she was murdered, and when I cautioned
her against her ninety-ninth lover, it was because I had clearly seen
his face though it was nondescript, like the face opposite one in the
subway.

I am highly skeptical about Professor Dunne’s thesis, and I have my own
explanation for my future-centered nightmare. For years I have been
fascinated by Wedekind’s heroine Lulu, the German dramatist’s symbol
for the lust of the earth, the eternal womb forever bursting with the
passion for creation, for absolute ecstasy taking the shape of Man. But
Man--especially modern Man--is the great Destroyer, and Lulu’s wild
nymphomania finally meets its match.

The female zero who sought to elevate herself to human significance in
the algebra of existence found herself in bed with a male cipher whose
lust for life was even greater than hers. Both were ardent devotees
of the ancient Goat-Gods, symbols of naked, brute passion that seeks
to destroy the thing it loves and loves the thing it destroys. “The
desire for destruction,” said Bakunin, “is at the same time a desire
for creation.” Magda, pulling her lovers into the abyss of nihilism,
was herself dragged, naked and bleeding, into the roaring pit of
destruction. She is the symbol of our nihilistic age.

       *       *       *       *       *

Despite Magda and her doomed sisterhood, the cult of the Goat-God
still exists in the Village. In the ancient Biblical days the lovesick
Jewish maidens sacrificed their virginity on the altar of brute lust,
and the great god Pan reeled in a drunken fury through the minds of
the primitive pagans. Today in bohemia the cults of Pan and the divine
Dionysus still hold sway over the true Villagers.

The triumph of Dionysus in Rome was assured after the physical, moral
and spiritual exhaustion that followed in the wake of the Punic wars.
Today America is experiencing a similar depletion of vital powers due
to the two world wars and the threat of a third, an exhaustion that is
felt more keenly in the Village where the tired people of all the Main
Streets in America whip up their spent emotions in one tremendous cry
for Life. And so, as in ancient Rome, we have the revival of the Greek
bacchanalia where the two-souled Dionysus staggers in an orgy of lust
and license and at the same time decrees death to those who pursue
life in the form of wine, women and song.

Dionysus bears the brand of the Indian god Siva, the Destroyer, and I
could list dozens of bohemians who came to the Village with the fires
of creation burning in their bright eyes and then felt the ashes of
disillusionment seep through their drunken, sex-delirious brains. Let
me cite another case which reveals the treachery of the god Dionysus,
the deity whom Nietzsche worshiped, substituting him for the dead God
of the Jews and Christians who left Nietzsche as His “widower.”

The case of Gale Goodyear (the name, of course, is fictitious) can
be called “_The Case of the 99th Lover_.” For Gale’s design for
living was not a partnership for three or ninety-nine but a corporate
venture that envisaged erotic contact with every sexually potent male,
regardless of age, faith, color or previous condition of marital
servitude. Unlike Magda, whose total score of lovers was cut down by
death and a finicky preference for the intelligentsia, Gale chose her
men from all classes--wits, half-wits and no wits at all.

Gale also enjoyed an advantage over Magda in the fact that she was
married to a fellow-novelist and poet who not only tolerated her
adulteries but actually hunted up the men to make the infidelities
possible.

According to the Freudians a husband who is kind enough to supply his
wife with a _potpourri_ of assorted lovers, like bonbons in a
luxurious candy-box, has a pathological, rather than an ethical motive.
Goodyear, the Freudians would argue, was an unconscious homosexual
who, by a feat of psychic legerdemain, substituted himself for his
wife when he piloted poets, peasants, professors, politicians, peanut
vendors, painters and pawnbrokers through his wife’s sybaritic bedroom,
which was lined with mirrors to multiply the fantasy of infinite lust
practised by a human zero. (I have confined myself to the “P” category
of Gale’s lovers, but her gamut of temporary bed-mates ran from A to Z.)

To refute this Freudian thesis is the bald fact that Gale Goodyear’s
husband was not an unconscious homosexual but a conscious one, his
bisexuality being well-known in the Village. I discovered it myself
when I attended a radio debate between him and a famous British
novelist and found them in a compromising position while they were
waiting for their cue to appear before the microphone.

The subject was “_Morals in Anglo-American Fiction_,” and Goodyear
was to argue the point that Puritan morality was dead and therefore the
novelist should not be constrained by a dead code of behavior. Perhaps,
like the ancient cynics, Mark Goodyear was demonstrating his belief
through scandalous action.

It is fairly certain that Goodyear did not provide paramours for
his wife because of the homosexual twist in his nature, but on the
contrary, he sought to normalize himself by retaining the love of his
wife, the only woman he had established a satisfactory relationship
with. Gale to him was the divine Aphrodite herself, and when he
discovered that Venus could not be satisfied with a single lover, no
matter how much she adored him, he agreed to this strange polyandrous
relationship with his wife.

King Solomon, we are told, had a thousand wives, and Gale Goodyear
was a sort of King Solomon in petticoats, with conjugal help and
encouragement. Although Mark Goodyear was a philosophical anti-Semite
(as Nietzsche and Wagner were), he did not hesitate to lure a bearded
cantor into his wife’s boudoir. The Orthodox Jew was told that Gale
had heard him hum a tune at the grocery on the block and that she was
smitten with his voice. When Gale began making passes at him he fled
in horror, for he was the father of nine children, and a God-fearing
Israelite.

Mark Goodyear had no idea that he was marrying a nymphomaniac when he
and Gale went through an excruciating religious ceremony to satisfy
her father, a deacon of a Methodist church and a pillar of New England
respectability. Gale’s novels, like Jane Austen’s or George Eliot’s,
were conceived in the framework of Puritan morality and mid-Victorian
convention. She never moved her creative sights from morals to
aesthetics and pathology, in the manner of Proust or D. H. Lawrence,
and she displayed a bias for Catholicism by writing about nuns and
convents and tagging virginity as the supreme virtue.

Goodyear was attracted by Gale’s chaste classic style, and misled by
the Balzacian belief that a writer’s style is his blood, he fell in
love with the author through her books and began writing her love
letters. He was tired of the amateur harlots in the Village and the
professional virgins who adjusted their sexual behavior to suit the
demands of bourgeois gentlemen with strong mother-images. Gale,
according to the photographs, was beautiful to look at, her face
being suffused with the stunned innocence of Virginia Woolf and the
aristocratic pride of Rebecca West. Goodyear wrote letters of ardent
admiration for the novelist and the woman, not quite daring to hope
that she would reply. She did.

Thus began a passionate correspondence between Gale and Goodyear, in
the manner of the Browning-Barrett letters. Goodyear had a reputation
in literary circles as a Casanova, a lady-killing wolf, and this helped
his cause, for Beauty is forever attracted to the Beast. When Gale
wrote that she longed to visit him in his Village studio, Goodyear (as
he told me later) planned his courtship as a general plans a battle.

Like Napoleon he was at Waterloo but he did not know it. He imagined
that Gale was another Marie Bashkirtseff, the Beauty who met the Beast
Maupassant and was horrified when her ideal blonde beast acted in a
bestial manner and proceeded to tear off her clothes. He would not
repeat Maupassant’s blunder: he would garb the beast in the clothing
of a gentleman and follow the dicta of Emily Post rather than Rasputin.

When Gale arrived in the Village he took her to dine at the Jumble
Shop, that respectable Village inn which is haloed with Village
tradition, striking a happy compromise between the “inner check” of
the conservative humanists, the dinner check of the Stork Club and the
proletarian meal check of the Village cafeterias and beaneries. They
talked art and drank beer until midnight and then Goodyear taxied her
back to his studio, where he showed her the galley proofs of his latest
book “_The World’s Knowledge at a Glance_.” Goodyear was prolific
in his writings, operating a literary mill that turned out fiction
and non-fiction at an amazing pace. Dumas was a one-book author by
comparison.

After Goodyear had switched the conversation from Planck and the
quantum theory of the Hegelian triad, Bergson’s Vital Impetus and
Freud’s Libido, Gale suddenly exclaimed: “Now we’re getting somewhere.
When are we going to bed?” Goodyear was too stunned to believe his
ears, and Gale actually had to undress to the skin to prove that she
was not laying a trap for the Beast who was posing as a pillar saint.
He discovered her nymphomania that first night, and reveled in it,
for Gale could have opened a school of love and enrolled Semiramis,
Messalina, Cleopatra, Ninon de l’Enclos, Lucrezia Borgia, the Duchess
of Cleveland, Catherine the Great, Peggy Joyce and Mae West as
enthusiastic students.

To Goodyear, Gale was the ideal mate, the supreme Aspasia whose
physical beauty and intellectual graces approximated perfection. She
worshiped him and he adored her, and out of the reciprocal idolatry
sprouted a passion-flower that was hardy enough to withstand any
blighting winds. So he thought, and, propelled by this conviction, he
proposed marriage. She accepted his proposal with avidity.

A year after their marriage, Goodyear found himself in a hospital
as the result of a mysterious disease which gossips in the Village
insisted was of venereal nature. But a true Villager cannot conceive of
an ailment that cannot be stamped a venereal, and if one is suffering
from lumbago, migraine or whooping cough, eyes begin to wink and
lips to wag, forcing the sufferer to plead innocent of syphilis like
patients in Butler’s “_Erewhon_” when they were tried on the
charge that they had contracted tuberculosis. Whatever the doctors
discovered in their diagnosis and prognosis, Goodyear’s disease was
transformed into a malady of the soul when he left the hospital and
heard his wife read the riot act in his presence.

The scene took place at Goodyear’s seven hundred acre farm in New
Jersey. His wife confessed all and invited a fight with no holds
barred. While he had been tossing on his bed of pain, she confessed,
she had been cushioned on a bed of roses, a Queen of Sheba inviting
the whole countryside to share with her the world’s delight, the ardor
of her passionate lips. The farm became the Mecca of all aspiring
Casanovas, rural and urban, from New Jersey and New York. They had come
with empty hearts like empty buckets and she had filled their great
emptiness with the inexhaustible passion of her flesh.

Goodyear refused to believe it, and she handed him a record book
listing numerous names, many of them belonging to notorious characters
in the Village. It seems that one of the farm hands she slept with had
used a station-wagon to shuttle the true Villagers from New York to the
wolds of New Jersey. One of the Village wags had painted “The Cuckold’s
Express” on the side of the station-wagon, and the glaring red of the
paint lit a torch in Goodyear’s brain that flared into madness.

Goodyear seized his wife’s legs and pulled her along the furrowed
earth like a plow, seeking to destroy the last remnants of her dignity,
reducing her to a human zero, a rusted piece of metal that had once
been a golden trophy shining over the bright hearth of New England
culture. Then one of the farm hands struck Goodyear in the jaw, sending
him to the hospital where for another six months he had time to chew
over the Solomonic remark that a woman’s womb, like love itself, is
inexhaustible. Instead of contradicting the wisdom of Solomon he
came to look upon it as a decree of nature that he, as husband, must
obey. He must accept his role as a cuckold with pride, for obedience
to nature’s laws is obedience to God. He would serve God and Gale by
feeding the fires of her nymphomania, the Moloch that demanded the
sacrifice of his masculine jealousy in behalf of a higher law, the law
of Life.

A few months ago I met a sailor in a Village bar-room who waxed
confidential over his bourbon.

“You look like a writer,” he said.

“I try not to,” I said. “I suppose writers look crazy to you.”

“No, but they _act_ crazy.”

“How do you mean?”

“Do you know a writer by the name of Goodyear?”

“Slightly,” I confessed.

“Well, the damnedest thing happened here last night,” he said.
“Goodyear invited me over to a party at his house, but I said I
wasn’t an artist and I’d feel out of place. ‘I can’t keep up with
them artists,’ I said. ‘Artists, hell,’ he said. ‘This is a party for
sailors only. _My wife likes sailors._’ I thought it was a gag but
I took him up on it. Would you believe it, Mac?”

“Believe what?”

“The house was full of sailors, and the wife was on a sailor’s knee
when I came in. She called for a Scotch, and Goodyear poured one for
her. The party got real gay. The sailors went in and out of the
bedroom and she was in there, ready for all comers. Can you beat it, a
husband inviting men to sleep with his wife?”

“Did you take your turn?” I asked curiously.

“Yes, by God, like a dog in a line.” He gulped his bourbon and looked
vicious. “I’d like to take one of youse apart, just to see what makes
you tick.”

“Take it easy, sailor,” said the bartender, reaching for the bat.

I got out of there in a hurry. But I keep wondering, what does make
the artist tick? What alienates him from the rest of mankind and makes
him a foe not only of society but of himself? Like Ivan the Terrible
he is “a rebel in his own realm,” destroying the human which he should
glorify and elevate to the stature of Godhood.

Thomas Mann in his novels has emphasized the eternal war between the
bourgeois and the artist, cold cash and the creative passion, the
will to destroy and the will to build the future out of the bricks
of the human spirit. But artists like the Goodyears surrender their
birthright to the Destroyers, the nihilists whom the artists have
fought throughout the ages, for they care neither for beauty nor truth,
love nor justice, virtue nor honor.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




[Illustration]




gertrude stein in macdougal alley


There were two great cultural forces in the thirties which collided
with each other and sought to occupy the intellectual vacuum which is
charitably called the bohemian mind. They were Gertrude Stein, who
ruled the Village by remote control from Paris, and Albert Strunsky,
the Village landlord, whose benevolent despotism extended beyond the
frontiers of Sheridan Square.

When Strunsky knocked at your door on a cold, wintry morning, it
was like a knock on the door of Macbeth, fraught with supernatural
doom, evil-laden and irresistible because it was the echo of Heaven’s
judgment itself.

Strunsky was the pre-Marxist tutor of the impecunious Villagers, who
taught him to place the gold of the marketplace before the gold of
poetry, to put money before the Muses. At the same time Strunsky did
more than any man in America, perhaps, to make the Village the cultural
capital of the country.

This was the paradox of Strunsky: the sworn enemy of the arts who
did more for its advancement than a flock of learned societies hoary
with age and prestige. The true Villagers were “bums” to him, but
whenever I have met any of these successful “bums” in California, New
Mexico, Maine or Illinois, the first person they mentioned in their
conversation was Albert Strunsky.

Strunsky, like Gertrude Stein, had seen the pathetic bird in the grass
and cried out, “Alas! Alas!” From his bench in Washington Square park
he had eyed the bleeding pigeon of the soul rise to new life on the
wings of art, and the “bums” became prophets of the spirit to him,
evangels of the creative future.

Strunsky, like a good father, punished with one hand and healed with
the other. He was capable of ripping the hinges off your door in the
dead of winter, forcing you to move out with your goods and chattels,
including your mistress, and then, driven to desperation by your girl’s
calculated weeping, he would slip you a ten-dollar bill “for breakfast”
and assail you as a fool for having taken him seriously.

“The damned mortgages are bothering me,” he would apologize, his
rotund, apoplectic face redder than ever. “How do you expect me to hold
on to my property if you bums don’t pay your rent?” (He died penniless,
a victim of his pity and the “bums” he secretly envied.)

While he continued to rave on, vowing vengeance on all Villagers
and threatening a forced exodus from the hundreds of rooms and
studios in the Washington Square area, you boldly moved back your
belongings--including your girl friend--to your room, while he looked
on with impotent rage, yelling about his high blood pressure and his
bloodthirsty, dastardly, intractable, cannibalistic, insolent tenants.

You knew that Strunsky had seen the bleeding pigeon in the grass and
that the yoke of pity had descended upon his neck, forcing him to tread
forever in the path of Abel, his brother’s keeper.

There were times when Strunsky’s god of real estate impelled him to
break with the Muses altogether and choke the angel of mercy within
him. I remember one bleak dawn in November when the streets around
Washington Square looked like a scene staged by an earthquake, with
the help of a hurricane blowing from the Gulf of Mexico. Odd pieces
of furniture, valises, trunks, pianos, bedding, caged parrots and
songbirds, dogs, cats, pet monkeys, praying Buddhas, hat-boxes,
canvases, statues, typewriters, models and manuscripts were piled high
on the sidewalks, while the owners milled about in a state of utter
confusion.

While the true Villagers were making the rounds of the bars,
tea-rooms and cafeterias, Strunsky had hired a crew of huskies who
had done a thorough job of dumping their belongings into the street.
They had ambled bleary-eyed and pixillated to their homes in the
Washington Square area, expecting to get a little “shut-eye” in
their not-so-comfortable beds. Far from getting any sleep they found
themselves a part of a living, surrealist landscape that would have
rivaled the grotesque imagination of Dali himself.

The homeless and woebegone held an emergency meeting on the Macdougal
Street sidewalk and it was decided to send a delegation to Strunsky,
pleading for grace and pardon. As at the convention of mice, the vital
question arose, Who is going to bell the cat? The feline Strunsky was
driven out of bed by the riotous clamor in his dispossessed kingdom,
and he finally was persuaded to let the Village move back into its
cramped rooms and studios.

The bleeding pigeon in the grass had dropped a trickle of blood on
Strunsky’s conscience, forcing him into the sacred precincts of pity,
where humanity and the humanities hold sway over the human heart.
Perhaps Gertrude Stein’s bird had nothing to do with the humane
emotions out of which the classical arts spring, and perhaps Miss Stein
was the hard-boiled, granite-like woman she appeared to be in person,
but Mr. Strunsky exhumed a deep philosophy out of her bird-in-the-grass
exclamation.

Mr. Strunsky first came across Gertrude Stein by receiving a review
copy of one of her books, _The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas_,
which was actually the personal memoirs of Miss Stein herself. Strunsky
was not a literary reviewer, although his illiteracy led cynics like H.
L. Mencken to believe that he actually wrote many book criticisms under
assumed names.

It so happened that many aspiring authors in the Village, turned
critics, would often pay their rent with discarded review books instead
of greenbacks. Strunsky’s basement apartment was cluttered with review
copies of the latest books which he vowed he never read, but he often
dipped into this “trash” surreptitiously, for he had a secret thirst
for the very culture which he identified with spiritual and mental
pauperism and degeneracy.

I had often discussed the significance of Gertrude Stein with
Mr. Strunsky who was fascinated and amused by her echolalia or
word-repetitions. He thought her language imitated the babble of
children in Washington Square park, or the alcoholic blather of Village
poets who assaulted him with demands for better living quarters when
they failed to pay for their old ones. Whenever he felt a spark of
meaning in the slag of her disjointed and circuitous sentences, his
face lit up with a triumphant smile, as if he had entered into the
great mystery of Art itself.

I thought that Miss Stein catered to the artist’s need for revolt at a
time when the political, economic and moral solutions to the problem
of a decadent and collapsing culture were alien to him. “The eunuchs
of the arts,” to use a phrase of Thomas Wolfe, who had once been
Strunsky’s tenant, sought to overcome their impotent lust for life by
alcoholic, sexual and aesthetic stimulants, brawling, squalling and
falling under tables to register their protest against a business
society that had not room for artists who deviated from its norm of
profit hoarding.

Greenwich Villagers who rebelled against language with Miss Stein were
aesthetic revolutionaries who, like the logical positivists today,
imagined that the world crisis was a problem in semantics, and that if
the right four-letter words were used there would be a closer harmony
and understanding between nations and peoples.

Of course Miss Stein was responsible for the Hemingway school of
writing in America with its elaborate, complicated efforts to achieve
simplicity in literary expression, but simple words embodying the
stupidities of modern fiction did not in any way retard the decay of
our Puritan culture fashioned by Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne and Poe.

Strunsky would listen to my exposition of Gertrude Stein and then he
would rattle off a page of Steinian prose, repeating the Hebrew word
“_Messhugeh_” (crazy) till he fell into a Steinian mood and broke
up his already broken English into a jumble of words and phrases that
signaled his initiation into the Steinian universe where nonsense
achieved the gravity of classical sense.

When Miss Stein visited America after an absence of many years (this
was in ’33) she was greeted like a conquering hero, for the American
intelligentsia was still under the delusion that our literature could
be saved by a revolution in style, even though its body had been
drained of its intellectual and moral contents, deprived of its guts,
and filled with the embalming fluids of Freudian pathology, like a
corpse barbered, waxed and dressed for the inspection of relatives.

Miss Stein was staying at the Algonquin, the Mecca for visiting
celebrities, accompanied, as usual, by her secretary and _alter
ego_, Alice Toklas. A literary tea and book action was arranged by
some friends with Gertrude Stein as guest of honor. Strunsky was my
private guest, and when Miss Stein appeared and sat down in granite
silence after a flurry of applause, she reminded me of Hawthorne’s
“Great Stone Face,” grim, masculine and forbidding. Her grey-white
hair cut to a mannish bob looked like a Colonial wig, and her dull,
nondescript sweater added to her masculine appearance.

Strunsky nudged me and whispered, “She looks like George Washington
at Gettysboig,” meaning Valley Forge, perhaps. I myself was thinking
of the Lincoln Memorial in Potomac Park. When she rose and spoke the
effect was tremendous, as if a statue had come to life. The chairman
was so unnerved that he introduced the celebrated Miss Stein as “Albert
Einstein.” Immediately, of course, he gabbled an improvised cover-up
for his blunder: “--er--ah--Miss Stein had caused a revolution as great
as Einstein’s revolution in physics.” There was not the mirth you might
have expected, at the slip of the tongue. I daresay the identification
with some heroic or revered image was fairly general and too impressive
for laughter.

Miss Stein, not at all surprisingly to me, spoke like any other
sane person, in simple English that bore not a trace nor a hint
of the pathological. Max Eastman, in his essay _The Cult of
Unintelligibility_, tried to prove that Miss Stein’s style
originated in a madhouse, and that in her heroic effort to achieve
simplicity of speech and purity of emotion she was doing her bit to
plunge the English language into the snake-pit of insanity. At the
tea party, however, Miss Stein was as logical and coherent as, at
least, Hemingway, expressing that perfect absence of ideas marking the
aesthete who has nothing to say and says it very lucidly.

However she gave us one Steinian repetition that was all to the good.
She said that the artist should be helped to tide over the depression,
and she had done all she could in Paris to keep the wolf from the
artists’ door. She said it some dozen times and sat down to thunderous
and rapturous applause. I certainly did not disagree with her, but
could not help thinking of the general seriousness which greeted
Coolidge’s statement to the effect that the depression was due to the
fact that millions were unemployed and that prosperity would return
when there was more cash in the pay envelopes.

The book auction was a lively affair, though a prim spinster, bidding
for an “autographed copy” of Miss Stein’s _Three Lives_ got what
proved to be a copy of _Fanny Hill_, wrapped in the jacket of the
Stein opus. Strunsky had contributed many of the books to the auction,
and I suspect that the embarrassing mistake was caused by his peculiar
sense of humor. The edition was a particularly flagrant one with the
juicy drawings by the Village’s Madonna-eyed female illustrator. It
was like the pornographic statue in Chekhov’s story, that everybody
chuckled at, then passed on to somebody else as quickly as possible, by
whatever ruse was necessary. One couldn’t have that thing around, even
in Greenwich Village.

A few days later Alice Toklas and Gertrude Stein drove down to the
Village to observe the operation of the denizens. Trying to entertain
them, I suggested that we go to the Village Magistrate’s Court, then
held in the historic and picturesque architectural oddity, called
variously a monstrosity and a masterpiece, at Tenth Street and Sixth
Avenue. Strunsky had been hauled before the judge for “insulting” one
of his female tenants. When we arrived, Strunsky was “telling it to the
judge.”

“It’s an outrage, your honor,” he expostulated. “I didn’t lay a finger
on the girl.”

“The charge is not assault but defamation,” the magistrate explained.

“Defamation?” Strunsky queried. “Why I only called the bum a two-bit
whore.”

“Mr. Strunsky,” said the magistrate sternly. “The complaining witness
maintains that she is a respectable model.”

“Your honor,” said Strunsky. “Posing for artists is no fun. It’s hard
work. And that kind is not what you call bums--and worse in Times
Square. But this kind, they call themselves models--in the Village we
call them _horizontalists_: they make their living lying down.”

“Now, Mr. Strunsky,” the magistrate remonstrated, “I must remind you
that you were at fault, legally, accepting a woman whose profession you
thought to be what you have specified, as a tenant.”

“Tenant?” said the fabulous landlord. “Oh, that’s only in a technical
sense.”

“How can that be?”

“Well, according to the dictionary a tenant is ‘a person who pays rent
for the use of a building or an apartment.’ I always read that to the
bums, but they won’t even believe Webster. They figure that a tenant
is a person who sticks a landlord as a sucker, then goes around as a
bum pretending to be an artist or a model. A real Strunsky tenant is
anybody trying to get a studio rent-free.”

There had been much hilarity in the courtroom, properly rebuked by
the magistrate. Miss Toklas had smiled continuously, had giggled, but
Miss Stein had sat looking like one of the stone lions in front of the
Public Library. At this point she whispered to Miss Toklas: “It’s right
out of _Three Saints in Four Acts_.”

“Mr. Strunsky,” the judge inquired, “why do you let these ‘bums’ as you
call them--more or less appropriately--occupy your premises rent-free,
sometimes for long periods, as I know?”

“Genius is not like measles,” Strunsky explained. “It doesn’t break
out all of a sudden. It must be nursed and taken care of like a tender
plant. Sometimes I guess right and the plant grows into a beautiful
bush with blossoms. But usually the plant is just a stinkweed and I get
disgusted. When I’m disgusted I say things that I don’t mean.”

“I see,” said the judge, with a look of genuine benevolence. “Is that
why you moved the complaining witness back into her room after you got
an order of the court to dispossess her?”

“Of course,” the landlord agreed. “When I called her a two-bit whore I
meant it as a compliment. At least she had the common sense to charge
something for laying. Most of her Village friends go to bed with a man
if he offers them a cheese sandwich. Or they’ll go to bed with anybody
for nothing, just because they’re bored. They are tired, pathetic
doves. ‘_A bird in the grass; alas, alas!_’”

Miss Stein’s face suddenly glowed with human warmth, and she exploded
with hearty laughter.

When the case was dismissed, Miss Stein, Miss Toklas, Strunsky and
I made a personally conducted tour of his domain, inspecting the
celebrated “Gonorrhea Mansions.” Miss Stein was fascinated by the
famous “duplex” studios. Strunsky explained that he had added the
balconies and wooden ladders to the tiny rooms in order to accommodate
an extra bed, so that a boy and girl could pool their finances and pay
Strunsky a couple of dollars now and then without having to share the
same studio couch.

Strunsky told Miss Stein that a young man or woman who broke the taboo
and climbed the ladder to the roommate’s bed would be dealt with
summarily by true Villagers. There was a young woman, for instance, who
posed as a lesbian, but often climbed the ladder into a strange man’s
bed. Usually she got away with it, the flesh being weak, but once when
she scaled the ladder, she found some unknown girl had been ahead of
her. The jealous girl pushed her over the balcony, and she sustained
serious injuries.

Miss Toklas climbed the ladder, with a sense of curiosity and
adventurous excitement. She got considerably more than she was
bargaining for. When she reached the last rung and peered between the
wooden stakes of the balcony she screamed bloody murder and hurried
down.

“There’s a tiger up there!”

In the hallway, when she had more or less composed herself, she asked,
“What’s the meaning of this, Mr. Strunsky?”

“Oh, one of my tenants.”

“I thought you said the room was unoccupied.”

“I meant there wasn’t a man on the balcony. And there shouldn’t have
been a tiger. It’s only a cub, anyway. There’s a young lady who makes
a living buying animals for zoos, and when she comes to New York from
the jungles she always stays in one of my palatial Washington Square
studios. I ordered her to get rid of the cub, and she must have hidden
it up there till she could find a home--or parking space--for it.”

We went then to the Jumble Shop, where Miss Stein and Mr. Strunsky
engaged in an argument about the nature of art. Mr. Strunsky rather
hogged the floor, after a couple of cocktails. He had no use for ivory
tower art, he thought that the homosexuals who painted or wrote in
the Village symbolized the sterility of art divorced from life; he
advocated the artificial impregnation of lesbians--that would restore
them to true feminine creativity: “Make them have babies.”

After a good deal of this, Miss Stein and Miss Toklas excused
themselves.

Strunsky was an Old Testament character, every bit a patriarch, imbued
thoroughly with the Scriptural idea that generation was in obedience to
the highest law and the respective organs should be devoted to that,
not to degenerate and obscene abomination. Besides, lesbians were
rather more inclined than other amorous couples to burn cigarette holes
in mattresses! (I do not see that, but he was in a position to know.)

Yes, Strunsky, the Greenwich Village landlord, who was pauperized by
his pity, was the true artist, working with the shreds and patches of
blasted lives in an effort to weave a human pattern of being that would
somehow be a copy of Man made in God’s image.

It is to be hoped we shall some day rediscover his prototype and then
there will be many Strunskys who have made art a rhythm of thought and
action rather than a framed canvas to be exhibited for sale to tourists
idly staring at the Washington Square Open Air Art Show.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




[Illustration]




a graveyard for dead souls


There is a Village undertaker on Bleecker Street who often has called
me to identify bodies that have been laid out in the rear of his
undertaking parlor where the potted plants cast green shadows upon the
marble-topped tables and yellow-waxed floor. I rarely fail to identify
any of the old timers, male or female. Relatives are contacted by
phone or telegram and the body is claimed by a weeping parent, aunt or
perhaps a husband whom death has reunited with his erring, prodigal
wife.

The last body I examined proved to be a premature corpse. The Italian
mortician was shocked to see the female body, which he considered to
be a corpse, get up and walk across the green carpet of the dimly lit
parlor, but his horror was tempered by the fact that in the Village
anything could happen--to almost anyone. He is a bit of a bohemian
himself, and was attracted to undertaking because an Italian funeral
is a gay, colorful affair, drowning the world’s sorrow in a torrent of
music and roses. It is the gayest of professions in Little Sicily.

The female body belonged to a middle-aged woman whom I knew in the
Village as “Camille” twenty years ago. In those days it was popular for
girls to call themselves after the heroines of their favorite dramas,
and many a Mollie or Minnie from a distant Main Street blossomed out as
seductive “Camille” in the vicinity of Sheridan Square.

Of all the “Camilles” I knew, the Camille who almost became a complete
corpse was the wildest and most obstreperous. Strunsky, the famous
Village landlord who pensioned off his non-paying tenants, offered
her the fare to the North or South Pole, but she chose a better
spot--Paris, no less. After a dozen years of voluntary exile in the
Parisian Latin quarter, she came back to the Village.

Fast living had aged her at thirty-five; drink and hectic night life
had eaten into her soft, rounded features, obliterating her face
and leaving a red, pulpy substance instead, sticky and porous like
a decayed cactus plant. Edna St. Vincent Millay, the famous Village
poetess whose studio in Cherry Lane I once occupied, had eulogized the
Camilles of the Village in her celebrated burn-the-candle-at-both-ends
poem. But Miss Millay forgot the important fact that Death often
rejects those who have decided to live a short life and a merry one.

Death can be as ironic as Life itself, and compel a decayed bohemian
to live on borrowed time in a twilight zone of existence that cannot
actually be defined as living or dying. Russians like Gogol, Tolstoy
and Gorky have described these vitiated lives as “dead souls,” “living
corpses” or “ex-men.” The Camille I had discovered at the undertaking
parlor (she evidently was suffering from syncope, which simulates death
in every detail), was an ex-woman who had joined the numerous living
corpses in the Village moving about the crooked, coffin streets of
bohemia, forgotten by life and death and only remembering themselves in
the orgiastic nights that glow like hot embers in the ashes of their
souls.

What kept this Village Camille alive was the memory of her nights in
Paris when the very air she breathed was fragrant with the perfume of
Babylonian vice, and naked satyrs and nymphs twined ecstatically in
the dim rose-light shedding their pink veils over the soft cushioned
divans; the sort of “Cleopatra Nights” that Gautier and Gourmont
celebrated in purple prose, redolent with nostalgia for the mythical
pagan past when world-conquerors like Caesar were consumed with passion
for the Serpent of the Nile.

The Village Camille found an expatriate who had come back to the
Village after many years of debauchery in Paris. Paralyzed from
the hips down, the decaying Casanova pooled his memories with the
middle-aged Camille and the two immured themselves against death by
erecting walls of conversation cemented with the gay lovers they had
slept with under the bright stars of Montparnasse. Every day at noon,
with alarm-clock regularity, the graying Camille would wheel the
paralyzed Casanova to Washington Square Park, lift him like a sack of
wheat, place him on a park bench and then animate him to a semblance of
life by blowing at the sparks of memory in the ashes of his soul.

Like Proust, they locked themselves into the vault of time and lived on
“remembrance of things past.” When physical or mental exhaustion has
destroyed the present and the future, the past alone assumes a vital,
frenetic existence in the memory. When no memories exist they are
manufactured by the need of the dead soul for romantic experience, to
counteract the knowledge that the present and the future are emptied of
high adventure and ecstasy. On the park bench the Village Camille would
invent an affair with an Italian prince and the petrified Casanova
would place himself in the arms of the same titled lady who later
married D. H. Lawrence.

Both the ossified Casanova and the female nympholept who draw the rich
fluids of life from the veins of memory, can still be seen in the
Village, the dead soul pushing the half-dead body, crucified in the
wheel-chair, the two as bound together as Hero and Leander.

Hero, it will be remembered, was a priestess of Aphrodite at Sestos,
visited nightly by the enamored Leander, who swam the Hellespont to
reach her. Leander was drowned and Hero cast herself into the sea.

There are many priestesses of Aphrodite in the Village who, like Hero,
die in the sea of time but miraculously keep themselves alive on the
tidal waves of memory, buoying up their dead Leander. They are kept
from the ultimate depths of oblivion by grasping at the flotsam and
jetsam of remembered hours of bliss, moments of Paphian rapture that
retain the glow of immortal life.

The juices of memory begin to flow when a dead soul has stabbed
itself to life with the help of alcoholic stimulants or drugs such as
heroin or hashish. There is a sign over the bar at a favorite Village
restaurant and café which reads: “We Reserve the Right to Refuse that
Last Drink.” This is tough on the dead souls who need that last drink
to burst out of the nightmare of the present and future and plunge
into the paradise of the past skied with the rosy memories of Cyprian
delights.

Like the Ancient Mariner, the “plastered” old-timer whose lips have
been loosened by alcohol will insist on telling you the most fantastic
adventures in the Village, many of which are fabricated on the spur of
the moment. But if you discount fifty percent of the tales there are
enough Arabian Nights stories that can easily be verified by referring
to the newspaper or police files, or to Joe Gould, the peripatetic,
periphrastic and imperishable Villager who has been writing, or rather
talking, his “_Oral History of Our Times_” for the past forty
years.

Joe Gould, who with his tonsured head, piebald ecclesiastical beard and
bent, shrunken frame, looks like a fugitive from a medieval monastery,
is a connoisseur of dead souls in bohemia whom he has incorporated in
his “talking” history. Some day his oral history of the Village (which
to him is the world) will appear on Victor or Decca records and they
will sound as fabulous as the Homeric tales or the primal myths of the
Niebelungenlied. If you are flush enough to keep Joe Gould’s glass
never empty of his favorite ale, he will regale your ears with a few
chapters of his oral history; otherwise you can always engage a dead
soul in a revealing conversation without spending a dime.

One of these dead souls or ex-men was at one time a famous novelist
and Hollywood script writer who was obsessed by a Flaubertian passion
to translate life into fiction and drama. He planned wild orgies and
drinking bouts with the same care that travel bureaus plan trips to
South America and the Orient, taking care of minute details of drink
and decor. While the orgy reeled from room to room, finally ending in a
burst of naked passion in his four bedrooms, he would take mental notes
of the wild party. He finally transcribed them into a pocket notebook
while the merry-makers rioted about him, too drunk to notice that their
obscene and ludicrous actions were being recorded for posterity.

Hidden dictaphones preserved the conversation of the revelers. The
bedrooms, which were ceilinged and walled with mirrors to multiply the
sense of revolting nakedness and orgiastic lust, gave forth tidbits
of intimate talk that could have shocked the brothel-keepers of
ancient Rome who were casehardened to obscenity in speech and manners.
The recorded conversations and exclamations were typed by a prudish
secretary, who herself was a piece of mechanism registering the
demands of her boss and executing them with automatic regularity.

Their tongues unhinged by liquor and sex, the revelers supplied the
novelist and movie writer with numerous plots for stories and plays,
revealing secrets that none would ever dare disclose when sober. Then
the novelist’s fiction would pour out of the presses with the usual
disclaimers: “All the characters in this novel have no relation to any
person living or dead; it is purely a work of the imagination.”

The Village novelist had a “stable” of chorus girls at his estate on
the outskirts of Woodstock, the famous artists’ colony near Kingston,
N. Y. These chorines, temporarily out of work, found gainful summer
employment in the strangest of occupations--wagging their tongues!

Of course the chorines were unaware of the fact that their cottages
on the large estate were wired for sound. They thought the novelist
was a wolf with a penchant for blonde Broadway chicks, or a Caliph of
Baghdad-on-the-Hudson who could afford the expense of an elaborate
harem. Not to disillusion them, the novelist, who was really an
anchorite in his habits, living only for his art, would make occasional
raids on his harem and “rape” a chorus girl--with her tacit consent.

A spate of short stories, spouting with the patois and asininities
of Broadway chorus girls appeared in American magazines for many
years--all originating from the Woodstock “stable” where the chorines
were put through their verbal paces by the Village novelist and
dramatist. Dramatized versions of these stories also appeared on
Broadway and on the screen. The Village dramatist had dug gold out of
the blonde gold-diggers who thought they were gypping their patron.

The crash came when an irate stockbroker discovered his wife
misbehaving in one of the Villager’s realistic novels. The broker’s
wife used a favorite code word during her amorous moments and it was
hard for the novelist to maintain that the highly charged code word was
the product of his own fruitful brain. The novelist finally admitted
that the broker’s wife frequently attended his wild parties and that he
himself had participated in her nympholeptic activities.

The broker avenged his honor with a bullet which merely scraped the
novelist’s shoulder but which plowed its way through the stomach
of scandal until it shrieked on the front pages of all America’s
newspapers. The bullet, by some sort of sympathetic action or ballistic
osmosis, seemed to have penetrated the novelist’s will to write and
broken it to neurasthenic bits. He preferred to sit in a dark corner
of a Village bar in lonely conversation with a bottle of Scotch, a
dead soul chewing the cud of memory with maudlin repetition like the
pathologic echolalia of Gertrude Stein.

The novelist we have in mind was not a creative artist but a
statistician who added and subtracted conversations from his
dictaphones, and then melted all down into the false currency of
popular fiction or imbecilic movies dressed up in technicolor to give
them a simulated glow of life. He was a pseudo-craftsman who was
extremely proud of his craft, but the angry bullet put an end to his
pretensions.

A celibate who could only be a spectator at his own Paphian orgies,
with occasional lapses into sin, he found no more reason for continuing
his own abstemious existence, for he lacked faith in God, Man or the
Devil--or even in himself. A dead soul, he has been seeking a slow
physical death in drink, but somehow his flesh is indestructible and he
has been sunk in an alcoholic stupor for years.

Merely as an addendum, it is interesting to note that his prudish
secretary has been translated into Hollywood, where she is one of the
bright stars in the celluloid firmament. Her bosom is as famous as
Betty Grable’s legs, and the vogue of the plunging neckline has put
her in the same class with Faye Emerson, the television siren.

Why the mammary glands should become a fetish to the American male is
still a puzzle to this ex-secretary who lived in the Village for many
years and contracted a strong bias against the cow-like protuberance
which any fairy will tell you makes a woman look clumsy and bovine.
A Villager I know once showed me a short story called “The Breasts
of Patricia” in which he attributed a young lady’s suicide to her
squeamish attitude towards her bosom, which convinced her that her body
was obscene and therefore should be destroyed.

But the real Patricia suffered no such violent end. Making frequent
trips to Hollywood with her employer, she was spotted by a director
whose erotic universe revolves around the female mammae and who has
frequently clashed with movie censors because of his bosomy stars. The
director immediately promoted her to stardom, and her breasts, which
had been the bane of her existence, have now become a huge box-office
attraction.

A New York columnist who displays a fantastic, infantile delight in
the Bosom Beautiful recently interviewed Patricia in a towel and waxed
ecstatic over her bosomy beauty which he assures us was exposed to his
reportorial gaze. The ex-Villager assured me, however, that the story
was merely a piece of publicity concocted with her consent to excite
her public. She rarely takes baths in the presence of reporters--or in
their absence, either. She made a public statement denying the naked
truth of the interview, or rather the truth of the naked interview
covered only by a Schiaparelli bath-towel. This satisfied the Mrs.
Grundys and the bluenoses--so everybody was happy.

D. H. Lawrence described the dead soul as a man or woman who has lost
the sense of wonder because of Western education which produces a
grand sum-total of boredom, infinite ennui. The vitality of man or
the universe is not based on the rational intellect but flows from the
emotions and the love-passion distilled from our primitive sense of
wonder, our animal curiosity in the face of the cosmic Sphinx.

But the dead souls in the Village are not victims of
over-intellectualization, as D. H. Lawrence claimed. On the contrary
they collapse when their bohemian world falls under the cloud of the
Great Depression and they are compelled to seek solace in drink or
drugs. An aesthetic world-outlook is not enough to explain the problem
of hunger amidst plenty, and when an artist finds himself trapped in a
world he never made and cannot remake, he is driven to drink and drugs
as a duck gravitates towards water.

Just off West Third Street there is still a bohemian flophouse run by
a Villager who calls himself a doctor of philosophy and psychologist
and has diplomas from many correspondence schools to prove his claim.
The huge space he occupies is cluttered by a thousand varieties of
junk--he has a mania for collecting everything from handbills to
Malayan blowhorns and women’s discarded brassieres--and you will find
it difficult to plow through the waves of metal, stone, wood and paper
to reach the Village derelicts in the rear.

None of these ex-men and ex-women have lost their contact with living
reality because of any keen Einsteinian cutting through the last veil
of illusion. On the contrary, these are the disciples of Lawrence who
sought redemption by giving full rein to their instincts--especially
the sex-instinct. They had no organic grasp of life, their minds
and souls becoming rusty from disuse and their naked bodies moving
towards each other with tropistic fatalism, making fornication not a
delight but a slow dance of death, like the almost-dead lovers in a
concentration camp.

They lie stretched out on bug-infested mattresses in the rear of the
loft, men and women, naked, half-naked or fully clothed, wooing
Morpheus the god of slumber, still dreaming of the great poem, novel,
play, painting or composition that will put them in the same class
with Milton, Dreiser, Shaw, Rembrandt or Beethoven, all titans of the
creative imagination.

The philosophic owner of the flop-house bolsters up their spirits by
promising them fame or fortune, but he becomes wrathful enough to
burst a blood vessel if any of his “roomers” cannot pay the quarter
for the privilege of swallowing dust and being devoured by bedbugs. He
is usually pacified by a promise to add to his collection of junk--a
three-legged chair in which Hart Crane once sat, a battered highboy
once used as a writing-desk by the gigantic Thomas Wolfe, or a liquor
glass that once touched the lips of a Messianic Village poet who
graduated into psychoanalysis on the profitable end.

Collecting junk is one of the occupational diseases of many Villagers
who seek to bless themselves with some worldly goods when they lack
the basic necessities of life--food, clothing and shelter. When a
Villager is reduced to the status of an ex-man--a mere cipher in the
trigonometry of existence--he often seeks to recoup his manhood with
the “bourgeois” mania for possession which in his sane moments he
condemns and excoriates.

Dispossessed from life, he becomes in his imagination a man of great
possessions--like the aberrated millionaire who was found dead behind
a barricade of junk that protected him from a world which threatened
his sense of security. I have known many dead souls in the Village who
still hungered vaguely for life and feared to die though they were,
to all appearances, dead, merely going through the puppet-gestures of
mortality. Most of them had the collector’s mania, their curios ranging
from collar-buttons and cats to ladders, shattered glass and myopic
professors broken on the wheel of fate.

Many professors, dismissed from America’s colleges for showing
independence of mind and spirit, have wound up as derelicts in the
Village, ex-men living on handouts from charitable friends, or eking
out a bare livelihood by posing as Jesus for a religious painter or
teaching the mechanics of poetry to a fat, sloppy night-club hostess
who suddenly developed a yen for the higher things of life.

One of these professorial ex-men was living in the flophouse run by the
psychologist with numerous degrees from correspondence schools, but he
managed by some miracle of love to become the paramour of a Washington
Square heiress whose father had made millions in bootleg liquor during
the Speakeasy Era. But he evidently tired of his penthouse luxury, or
the heiress tired of him, for he found himself back in the flophouse
with the bedbugs. Being an entomologist, he perhaps speculated on the
bedbugs and conceded their rightful place in the cosmic scheme of
things.

He finally went to live with an ex-woman who had a fantastic passion
for cats of all sizes, colors and breeds. She thought, lived, wrote
and philosophized over cats with the fervor of the ancient Egyptians
who dreamt their cats into gods and worshiped them with exaggerated
awe. The professor was not interested in cats, but he needed a place to
sleep, for he lacked even a quarter for a night’s lodging.

One day the professor was found dead with all the ex-woman’s cats lying
around him in a gas-filled room. She had been away searching for more
cats, no doubt. She wailed like Antigone or the chorus lamenting the
doom of mankind. Her precious cats were dead, the professor was a fiend
for falling asleep while gas was leaking from a broken jet.

On the obituary pages, however, the professor received a whole column.
He had had quite a career before the university let him go because of
the suspicion that a distant relative of his had once contributed to an
organization not in favor of General Franco.




[Illustration]




[Illustration]

village angels with boudoir eyes


In the hierarchy of the Village an “Elk” (a member of the bourgeoisie)
is put a little below the belly of a cockroach unless he is an Art
Patron. Next to God, the Art Patron is the highest being in the scale
of being; the critic is the lowest. The critic is a balked artist,
a blinded Samson who breaks his chains only to topple the temple of
beauty and hurl the aspiring artist into the wreck of his own dreams.
The art patron, on the contrary, is a Maecenas whose largesse is like
the ichor of the gods, the precious fluid of life itself.

Strunsky was an art patron against his will; he hurled the wrath of
Jehovah upon the art and culture of the Village and looked upon them
as the slag and offal blown into the twentieth century from Sodom
and Gomorrah. But the yoke of pity bowed him to the ground and he
tossed his shekels among the artists because they were suffering human
beings who shared with him the weaknesses of the flesh. A cantor and a
herring were sufficient indulgences for him, and he looked upon modern
knowledge as the process of unlearning the infinite wisdom of God.
Tolstoy’s peasant and Dostoyevsky’s idiot, however, were not his ideal
type of human: he was eager for knowledge, but it had to have some
relation to human betterment, though, paradoxically enough, he did not
think that human betterment was possible. Man the eternal idiot was
here to stay.

There were art patrons in the Village, however, who looked upon artists
not as “bums” but as chosen children of Nature, geniuses who made the
hidden beauties of life manifest in paint, stone, words, song and dance
rhythms. Some of them were prominent artists themselves, tycoons of the
business world who had studios in the Village and bought canvases from
painters to feed their stomachs as well as their vanity.

The female art patron is a peculiar fauna in the Village; she
flourishes in the cracks and interstices of our business civilization.
Like female transvestites--women who wear men’s clothes and borrow
masculine psychologies--it is hard to recognize them as patrons of
the arts. The pederasts in antiquity had secret means of mutual
recognition, and artists have their own ways of spotting a female
patron which cannot be fathomed by the uninitiated. Just as in
homosexuals, according to Dr. Iwan Bloch, there is a lack of
correspondence between peripheral sexual organs and the centers in
the brain which govern activities of these organs, the average female
patron thinks she is in love with art but is actually in love with the
artist who embodies her secret hate of a commercial civilization which
gives her nothing but a fat bankroll--money usually earned by her dead
or half-dead husband or father.

There is a lack of correspondence between the conscious and unconscious
motivations of the female art patron. Many a young lady has come from
Park Avenue to bohemia, under the misapprehension that it was the
poet’s poetry which interested her, when it was really the poet’s
person.

A certain society debutante, whom I shall call Ninon de L’Enclos,
because she reminded me of the famous French beauty who made Paris
blush with her escapades, was sick of the sterile life of her Stork
Club friends and decided to make art her great goal. She rented a
lavish studio in Washington Square from Mr. Strunsky and invited
some Village artists to instruct her in the mysteries of painting.
Mr. Strunsky always pampered and kowtowed to rich tenants because
they helped him ward off the bank wolves who were always threatening
to start foreclosure actions because of his mortgages and his high
blood pressure. The high blood pressure contributed to Strunsky’s
troubles, because no banker likes to be called “bum” and a “no-good
crook”--a banker not being a bohemian without social status. By a
fatal coincidence, Ninon’s father was one of the nefarious bankers
Strunsky was dealing with, and Strunsky had to shut his eyes to Ninon’s
wild parties. But when Ninon rented a horse from the McDougal stables
and drove it up two flights of stairs to her studio, Strunsky became
alarmed and notified her father.

She was disowned by her parents and ended up by starving with
her latest lover in a Village garret, eating occasional meals at
some cafeteria. She claimed she was an artist “by inclination and
impregnation,” but since she could show no samples of her work, she
had to wait on tables to earn her meals. Her only earthly possessions
were her evening clothes, which she refused to pawn, for sentimental
reasons, perhaps. She would arrive in some breath-taking creation by
a Parisian modiste, her twenty-cent Woolworth stockings intensifying
the bizarre nature of her sartorial mélange. Just as the original
Ninon stripped her sleeping lover of his uniform and strutted about in
his fancy grenadier’s outfit, the Ninon of MacDougal Alley seemed to
be mocking Park Avenue as she served bean soup dressed in the fancy
clothes of the Vanderbilts and the Astors.

Ninon was an art patron who was stopped by her libido or an over-active
thyroid from engaging in charitable work among the artists. I have
known many female patrons, however, who used their husbands’ money to
support art and artists without any suspicion on the part of their
meal-tickets that woman’s interest in a painter’s art must inevitably
extend to the artist himself. The truth is sometimes discovered in a
dramatic fashion. Government agents breaking into a Village studio
in search of drugs some time ago found the wife of a prominent steel
baron nude in bed with a well-known Village painter. The naked angel,
in a panic of dread, rushed to the bathroom, locked herself in, and
swallowed some deadly poison.

Bourgeois wives who are caught _in flagrante delictu_ with their
artist lovers sometimes engage in fantastic explanations for their
adulteries. A furrier from Flatbush once assured me that his wife had
become _enceinte_ by gazing intently at the rainbow colors of a
Renoir, and he wanted to sue Renoir for breaking up his marriage. This
reminds me of the mystic conception which resulted in the birth of
the first Chinese Emperor. A Chinese maiden, it seems, while walking
through a field of poppies, was embraced by an amorous rainbow; she
conceived and gave birth to the first Emperor of China. The furrier,
who loved his wife dearly and gave her every luxury imaginable, could
not believe that his wife was using his money to keep three or four
love-nests in the Village.

Women, says Dr. Forel, the famous French sexologist, have been turned
into ignoble erotic caricatures by their bourgeois husbands who regard
them merely as objects of sexual enjoyment and as the breeders of
their children. The bourgeois attitude was expressed by Bernard Shaw,
who, despite his literary radicalism, was a confirmed bourgeois with
regard to his attitude towards money and sex--he deified the first and
disparaged the other. “Love,” said Shaw, “is the most impersonal of all
human emotions.” The female art patron who goes to live with the artist
she supports believes that sex and beauty are a single flame that
lights the darkness of the soul. Sex is the most personal of all human
emotions: Coventry Patmore, the English Catholic poet, even compared
the nuptial orgasm to mystic union with God.

There is nothing stable in our dissolving culture: even sex, the Holy
Grail, has become dust and ashes. The female art patron, if she is
sincere, is looking for the Holy Grail, the cupped beauty of the world
which was lost with the arrival of our industrial era, the rootless
and ruthless epoch of the “cash-nexus,” and mechanized sex-relations
symbolized by the bull market in contraceptives. Sex union was once
the Highest Peak of the soul--the Panamtina of the Hindus, the Atta of
the Buddhist, the Siri of Islam, the “Highest Mansion” and spark of
the Christian, the divine Solomonic rapture of the ancient Hebrew. But
to us sex activity has been reduced to Freudian mechanisms, and sexual
positions in bed have become of greater importance than the postures of
the mind and soul.

It is against this vulgarization of sex that the female art patron
protests strenuously. The Bali woman who walks naked down to her navel,
and proudly displays her beautifully formed breasts, has no need for
instruction in sex relations because she is in tune with the organic
whole of life, and the sex-act is as natural to her as breathing or
singing. Sex is really the song of the spirit as well as the flesh, and
the female art patron in her effort to recapture the melody of life
often confuses it with the goat-song, the raucous noises of bestial
copulation.

“Eating, drinking and sexual intercourse are the greatest of all human
instincts,” said Confucius, but the sex instinct differs from the rest
in that it is organically related to our love for God and Man, as Saint
Augustine, the ex-libertine, discovered centuries ago. A female art
patron once told me: “I expect to eat, drink and wench until I’m ready
for the scrapheap.”

“Then you ought to stop this minute,” I snapped, and she looked at
me, bleary-eyed, a sorry caricature of a woman who had sought to lift
herself up to the level of her lover and had dragged him down to her
own pit of frustration and despair. She was tracing with her fingers
a replica of the sacred vase of the Sueti who worship the female
principle and symbolize their faith by a right angle bisected by a
line. But she herself violated the female principle by her dominant
role in the sex-act, turning her lovers into Hoggar tribesmen who hide
their faces behind female veils and reverse positions with their wives,
remaining beneath them sexually as well as socially.

Among the Trobizanders, anthropologists tell us, a commoner man married
to a noble woman is not allowed to be physically above her in sexual
intercourse, and this proud art patron from Beekman Hill aped a sex
pattern that was copied from the noble lady of the Trobizanders. There
are many female art patrons who either physically or psychologically
see themselves above the artists they are keeping, and this unnatural
reverse of the role of the sexes, this denial of mutuality in sex-life
as well as in spiritual being, is the cause of a great deal of
pathology in bohemia.

“All things have a price,” said Kant, “man alone has dignity.” Human
dignity is the soul of man and woman, and the woman who chokes the
pride of the artist by making him a tool of her libido commits murder
on the body of life itself.

Happily, not all the angels with boudoir eyes followed the path of the
Beekman Hill Trobizander. Many a female art patron went back to her
husband a wiser and happier lady. And, no doubt, her husband got good
return on the investment.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




[Illustration]

buddhists, nudists and feudists


A prominent Village poet and _bon vivant_, John Gilroy (I am
merely hinting at his name), once dashed out of an abandoned cellar
night-club on Macdougal Street where bohemians were hibernating with
the permission of Albert Strunsky, the philanthropic landlord. It was
in the dead of winter, a blizzard was blowing across Washington Square,
but Gilroy ran stark naked through the snow and wind until he was
stopped by a policeman.

“What’s the big idea?” growled the cop.

“I’ve been robbed!” yelled Gilroy. “I’ve been robbed!”

When he was taken to Bellevue, wrapped in a canvas bag, he still
screamed, “I’ve been robbed!” Gilroy was symbolic of the many Village
poets and painters who were robbed of their senses and whirled about in
a squirrel’s cage of Buddhism, nudism and feudism. They fought society
by drinking themselves under tables, and ripped their clothes off in a
spasm of cosmic frustration. Lacking all social and moral direction,
they could only shout with Gilroy, “I’ve been robbed!”

Joe Gould, the Village historian and wit, is responsible for a jingle
which casts a searchlight on the dark recesses of the bohemian’s soul.
The jingle reads:

    In the summer I am a nudist.
    In the winter I am a Buddhist.

Gould should have added: “In the spring I am a Feudist.” There is a
close relationship between Buddhism, nudism and feudism. Psychologists
point out that the philosophy of despair leads to an effort to escape
into a Buddhistic Nirvana, a blissful nothingness, through drink,
sex or Ivory Tower art. Since there is no place to hide in a world
threatened with atomic annihilation, the Buddhist-minded bohemian, in
a spasm of fear and panic, strikes out in all directions with a blind
wrath against his real or unreal enemies.

Buddhism inevitably leads to Nihilism, as you can see by reading
the _New American Mercury_. The writers in this magazine, some
of them Villagers, engage in blind, vicious assaults on everything
in American life--New Dealism, Communism, Trumanism, gangsterim,
Quakerism, homosexualism, vegetarianism, night-clubism and cubism.
The _American Mercury_ has no positive philosophy except what it
calls “Americanism,” but this is a polite screen to cover the fascist
“revolution of nihilism” that it advocates. All values, cultural
and moral, are reduced to zero, and the human soul is cast into a
Buddhistic vacuum where it strangles for lack of air.

A typical Village poet in the late twenties and early thirties was Eli
Siegel. Siegel came to the Village from Baltimore after his bizarre
poem “Hot Afternoons Have Been In Montana” had won the _Nation_
poetry prize. I remember that when I first read “Hot Afternoons” I blew
up and wrote an indignant letter to the editors of the _Nation_.
Later, I changed my mind about it.

I changed my mind when I realized that “Hot Afternoons” gave perfect
expression to the Buddhistic despair that had seized upon the Bohemians
of America, whose Hellenic recipe of “wine, women and song” was
beginning to pall on them. Siegel had taken Nietzsche’s Buddhistic
theme of “eternal recurrence” to voice the sense of circular,
Spenglerian futility which rotated in the brains of true Villagers
caught in Walter Lippman’s “Kingdom of Whirl.”

Hot afternoons have been in ancient Babylon, Egypt and Rome, sang
Siegel. Hot afternoons have been in Renaissance Venice, Paris, London,
etc., etc., etc. Hot afternoons have been in Montana. “Hot Afternoons”
was a “hot” poem, hot off the griddle of contemporary despair, and was
as timely and appropriate as “Ecclesiastes,” written by the Hellenized
Hebrew cynic who saw life as “vanity” and a “chasing after wind.”
Uncentered from God and Man, the bohemian must inevitably fall into the
mood of Buddhistic nihilism and futility.

The Buddhist must of necessity break into acts of violence when he
is seized with panic and aroused by demagogues who manipulate his
social ignorance to their own advantage. In the Village this violence
took the form of sexual sadism or verbal feuds in tea-rooms or at
parties--tongue-lashings that sometimes ended up with uproars and
brawls that attracted the attention of the police.

The sex-pattern evolved by Rimbaud and Verlaine is still common in the
Village. Love is conceived in the nature of an assault upon the lover,
a vicious verbal attack followed by physical violence, and in rare
cases, as with Rimbaud and Verlaine, knives or guns are used, as well
as whips and brass knuckles. Homosexuals are often bound together with
the chains of sadism and masochism, the will to inflict pain and the
passion to suffer, so that every agony becomes a triumph--a perversion
of the Christian martyrs.

These acts of sexual terrorism are of course inflicted on the nude
bodies of their willing victims, so that feudism and nudism go hand in
hand in bohemian circles, where aggressive sadism has usurped the place
of true love in the psyche of many a Villager.

A few years ago I met a college girl in a Village tea-room who
took a fancy to me because I was able to discuss the philosophical
implications of Einstein--he had been a complete mystery to her. I took
her out a few times, and then tried to drop her because she was half
my age and seemed like an obvious virgin who was eager to cross the
Rubicon of erotic experience--with my help.

She admitted, to my amazement, that she was a member of the
naked horizontal cult in the Village, and that she had had a
sadistic-masochistic relationship with many men and women, showing me
the welts on her shoulder to prove it. She was almost whipped to death
by a big, muscle-bound, lantern-jawed Amazon, and it was this horrible
experience that loosened her from her sexual obsession. She had gone
to the other extreme and made a vow of eternal chastity. She invited
herself to my studio--but only with the purpose of listening to me talk
on Einstein.

Sometimes the Buddhistic poet, like the late Hart Crane, the famous
Villager, seeks to bridge the chasm between himself and the world of
sanity. In his great poem “The Bridge” Crane sought for some modern
symbol, some all-embracing myth that would reintegrate him with
humanity, breathe God back into his soul, and overcome his cosmic
frustration. But the Brooklyn Bridge is no substitute for the medieval
Virgin which Henry Adams embraced as the living, integrating symbol
that would overcome the cruel, insentient Dynamo.

Hart Crane committed suicide by leaping off a ship in mid-ocean: the
Buddhistic poet finally found the bridge that led to death rather than
to life, a bridge of sighs thronging with skeletons. But most true
Villagers, until the latest Marxist vogue, sought to build a bridge
between their isolation and the primitive instincts of man, as D. H.
Lawrence did. But this renunciation of reason in favor of brutalizing
instinct only led them into the nudist cult of the horizontalists who
experienced their casual orgasms while puffing away at their marijuana
cigarettes and quoting T. S. Eliot.

I remember the shock I received when I stepped into the Troubadour
Tavern years ago and was sucked into a roaring chaos of fists and legs,
banging at tables, knocking into chairs, and kicking everything in
sight. Flying saucers ricocheted against the walls, spoons and forks
dashed against the ceiling and cups were splintered on the carpeted
floor, while amidst the din Eli Siegel was reciting Vachel Lindsay’s
“Congo.”

The “Congo” was Lindsay’s protest against an effete business
civilization that had mechanized the soul of man and cut him off from
his vital primitive being, but Lindsay was a Christian evangelist
rather than a primitivist. He did not “bang on the table as hard as he
was able,” or lash out at the assassins of the human spirit with the
jawbone of an ass. He was a mild, guitar-playing bard, a minnesinger
who strummed the strings of his heart and evoked melodies that stabbed
the dead soul of Puritan America back into life again. He was the poet
of our Heartbreak House called industrial civilization, seeking to
weave a bridge of song between madness and sanity.

But Siegel merely contributed to the madness of our age. He rolled his
eyes, twitched his face, foamed at the mouth, banged on the table,
gave a good imitation of an epileptic about to fall into a fit, and
then emitted unearthly, Paleozoic shrieks that caused the non-bohemian
customers (the poetry sessions were held on the balcony) to rush up and
join in the fun, adding to the hellish din. The “Elks” from the Bronx
and Queens thought that Eli himself had authored “The Congo” because it
was his _pièce de résistance_ at every poetry _soirée_ held
at the Troubadour or elsewhere in the Village.

The artist as Buddhistic aesthete must somehow give vent to his sense
of futility by a nihilistic display of temper, primitive horseplay or
sadistic assault upon the object of his affection. He is like the man
who carefully cuts all the telephone wires and then tries to call up
God, Man or his distant neighbor. He has lost contact with the cosmic
or social universe, and in an agony of self-defeat he starts banging at
tables, knocking at closed doors, or shrieking his futility through all
the dark caverns of his frightened soul.

Siegel, as I gather from newspaper ads, is now lecturing on the
therapeutic value of aesthetics on Fifty-seventh Street, where
Buddhists, foreign and American, foregather to listen to swamis
expounding the Sevenfold Path to Nirvanic bliss. Siegel has become the
swami of a new post-Freudian cult which substitutes art-appreciation
for clinical analysis of the libido.

This is all to the good, for Freudianism takes the dismembered and
disrupted soul of man and cuts it into tiny, palpitating pieces of
neurosis and psychosis which are then catalogued and cross-indexed, so
that an analyst can pull out your complex at the drop of a hat.

But what neurotics need today is not analysis but synthesis--a sense
of the Whole. The Buddhist, by contemplating his navel, removes the
fragmented world about him from his consciousness, and he can be lifted
into cosmic wholeness by an act of will. The members of the Siegel
cult can be reintegrated into wholeness by looking at a painting by
Rembrandt, listening to Beethoven, or reciting Keats’s “Ode to a
Grecian Urn.” But only the magic of politics and faith can actually
gather the pieces of our world together, and give it wholeness and
permanence in a world of fantastic change.

I know a female Buddhist in the Village who is the mother of
five famous daughters who have distinguished themselves in the
arts--including the art of love. They are painters, sculptors,
musicians and _bonnes vivantes_, well-known in London and Paris as
well as in New York.

Mrs. “O’Brien” was born an Irish Catholic, but she has decided that
this was a karmic error which she must rectify before her next
incarnation. She has shed her faith and her race and is now of pure
Indian blood, though she sometimes reminds me of a wild tomahawking
Sioux rather than a follower of the gentle Buddha who contemplated
Man’s fate beneath the fabled fig-tree.

Mrs. “O’Brien” is convinced that I am half a Buddhist myself, because
I am always talking about the need for organism and wholeness in life,
in the manner of Professor Whitehead and Waldo Frank. I have lectured
on Smuts’ philosophy of “holism” and have even looked upon Marxism as a
holistic philosophy, seeking to make the world whole through political
and economic action. Mrs. “O’Brien” insisted that I meet a friend of
hers, a Village swami who heads a small Buddhist cult holding meetings
in the Washington Square area.

Romany Marie’s was designated as the place of meeting. It so happened
that the previous week I was struck on the head by a missile that
was intended for a professor who had been expelled from his mid-west
college as a Red and had come to the Village to preach the true faith.
This professor, tall, gaunt, with a straggly goatee, was addressing a
crowd from a soap-box in Sheridan Square, and it seems that his lecture
was unpopular with his out-door class, made up largely of a strange
but numerous species of hooligan pietists who are convinced that
violent acts of bigotry will tend to square things for them with Saint
Peter.

I was interested because he was expounding the philosophy of organism
and holism in terms of Marxian dialectics. The professor, I learned
later, had turned to modernistic painting, but unlike Eli Siegel he did
not think that humanity can be made beautiful and sane by contemplating
the rainbow nudes of Renoir. (I am not so sure it can’t, at that.)
While I was enjoying his talk, I was suddenly struck by a stone hurled
by some indignant David who by a weird process of magnification seemed
to have mistaken me for Goliath. I was given a few stitches at Saint
Vincent’s Hospital and my head swathed in bandages when I complained of
suffering a cosmic headache.

The night of my appointment I was still wearing heavy bandages that
looked like towels. I sat down at a table in Romany Marie’s and waited
for Mrs. “O’Brien” and her swami. It seems that Mrs. “O’Brien” and
her swami had been drinking a little, a concession, perhaps, to their
Village milieu. In any event, the swami mistook my bandages for a
Buddhist headgear, for he rushed over to me and greeted me like a
long-lost brother-in-the-faith.

“Are you from Bombay?” he asked exuberantly.

“No. I’m from Brooklyn,” I said, since I was temporarily living in
Brooklyn Heights--bohemia across the bridge.

The swami failed to make a Buddhist of me, and Mrs. “O’Brien” gave
vent to the Irish in her by throwing some pamphlets by Krishnamurti
at my wounded head. Buddhism is a philosophy of peace and quietism,
and Mrs. “O’Brien” is perhaps the only fighting Buddhist in America.
Her daughters are not Buddhists but nudists, belonging to the naked
horizontal cult of the Village, in which women seek salvation from
boredom by lying on their backs.

Mrs. “O’Brien” is no puritan, and believes that sex is a form of divine
recreation, as all Buddhists do. But Mrs. “O’Brien” does not believe
that fornication is the true way of salvation and has given the swami a
room in her house in Minetta Lane so that he can have a salutary effect
on her girls.

One of her daughters, who had been banished from Paris for her
wildness, has reported to me about the swami’s sex habits. She thinks
that he is a Latin in disguise, because “he’s a lousy lover.” I haven’t
heard from the other gay daughters, but it seems that Mrs. “O’Brien’s”
scheme of luring her daughters from the primrose path to the Seven-fold
Path of Wisdom has proved a failure.

They fight and quarrel and fornicate as usual, and Mrs. “O’Brien” has
decided to become a man in India in her next incarnation, so that she
will never again undergo the trials and tribulations of a mother of
five wild daughters--geniuses and madwomen all!

Buddhism, nudism and feudism: this is the unholy trinity that lures
so many young people to Greenwich Village, the heartland of America’s
bohemia. But as the youth of the country becomes aware of the fact that
the problems of life can only be solved on the social and religious
level, bohemianism will become as _passé_ as red woolen underwear
or boater hats.

Or will it? Just as Bernarr Macfadden, the octogenarian athlete, can
parachute from a plane into the Hudson in his red woolen undies, and
just as some men still insist on sporting those ugly stiff straw hats,
there will always be a lunatic fringe who will shy away from all
political, economic or religious solutions to the problems of life.

These are the true bohemians, the predestined heretics who, like Mrs.
“O’Brien’s” five wild daughters, prefer to remain horizontal rather
than vertical, and have placed a damask couch at the very center of the
cosmos.




[Illustration]




[Illustration]




the village nut club: 57 varieties


For years the Nut Club in Sheridan Square has been the Mecca of Elks,
Shriners, Rotarians and Babbitts who have sought release from boredom
at the shrine of bohemia where the clown and the zany take the place
of the temple priest and the sacred harlot. At the Nut Club Momus, the
god of laughter and irresponsible mockery, squats on his tinsel throne,
and Rotarians from Denver and Oklahoma City Salaam before him as their
Philistine ancestors bowed before Dagon.

Dagon, through an etymological error, has been pictured as half man and
half fish, but there is no doubt about the piscatorial nature of the
out-of-towners who flock to Sheridan Square and West Third Street on
Saturday nights, seeking baptism in the alcoholic waters of bohemia.
They are suckers but, as the late Texas Guinan discovered, they are
happy to be fleeced if they can ride back to Main Street and tell the
home folks of the wild nights they spent in America’s Sodom.

The Nut Club is a respectable place of amusement for non-Villagers,
but it is considered “out of bounds” for true bohemians who cannot
afford to pay night club prices for the privilege of having a few good
laughs. The same holds true of Café Society in Sheridan Square, which
by its very name precludes the small-income or no-income set of bohemia
who manage to laugh their heads off without paying a cover charge.

It is cheaper to throw a party than to go to the fifty-seven varieties
of Nut Clubs in the Village where baffled Americans lay aside sense for
nonsense and let joy be unrefined. In the old days such true Villagers
as John Schwartz, Lee Harrett and Zero Mostel climbed up to Olympus and
brought down the tables of hilarity which broke into the mad humor that
made the Village famous for conviviality.

It is symptomatic of the times that a villager became the publicity
director of Café Society (Uptown and Downtown) while Mostel (whose
strange tag “Zero” was just a publicity idea) became a professional
clown for Café Society’s soup-and-fish, mink-coated customers, and then
went to die in Hollywood in blood-and-thunder gangster roles. He once
painted landscapes for a theoretical living; now he is one of the big
money men in Hollywood, thanks to a press agent, the ex-Village-clown
who is now in the upper brackets himself, though he keeps contact with
bohemia through his summer home in Woodstock.

Perhaps age is creeping up on me, but the private night clubs run by
true Villagers in their homes are dull places now compared to the days
when Lou Ney was the Mayor of the Village and bohemia wore an air of
delightful lunacy. These days, the class war often replaces erotic and
alcoholic discussions and drives the party into the tight corner of
political and economic argument.

To overcome the lag in erotic interest, enterprising Villagers and
outsiders operate commercial culture clubs, the “culture” being
confined for the most part to “scientific” discussions of sex. Long
before the Freudians arrived in the Village, true Villagers discovered
the value of sex discussion as an aphrodisiac, more powerful than
hashish or marihuana. They literally talked themselves into bed,
breaking down the barriers between the sexes with the help of
four-letter words, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot and erudite pornography.

Today, however, a bourgeois veil of decency has been cast over lewd sex
discussion in the name of Freud and psychoanalytic “science.” I became
aware of this legitimization of verbal pornography when I attended a
lecture at the Greenwich Village Historical Society where I first met
Juanita Clivette, the Village “Sappho” whose parents were active in the
organization.

The Greenwich Village Historical Society is an exclusive club made up
of old Villagers whose ancestors lived in the Washington Square area
long before Henry James immortalized its staid, respectable residents
in a novel. When the Village blossomed into the nation’s bohemia, the
Historical Society became the Hysterical Society, and dowagers who
blushed at the mention of legs, except in relation to tables, began to
view with alarm.

Although they put a plaque on a building in Sheridan Square to honor a
local resident, Tom Paine, they were unaware of the fact that he was
“a dirty atheist,” as Teddy Roosevelt called him, a radical incendiary
who preached the “divine” right of revolution (he was actually an
Eighteenth Century Deist).

They perhaps knew that MacDougal Street and MacDougal Alley were
named after a New Yorker who whipped up the revolutionary fury of
Manhattanites against George III and was jailed for his radical
views and deeds. But Tom Paine and MacDougal belonged to an era when
revolution was respectable and men and women did not change sexes as a
proof of their revolt against “bourgeois” morals.

When a bi-sexual Village girl invited me to take her to an open meeting
of the Historical Society, I thought that was her idea of poking
fun at the Victorian old ladies who once were driven in broughams
and victorias through the ambling length of Minetta Lane. But I was
shocked to find a Freudian sexologist discussing in minute detail
the physiology and mechanics of married love while the ancient men
and women listened attentively to his exposition of proper bedroom
techniques.

You might have thought he was telling them how to behave in a
drawing-room _a la_ Emily Post instead of a bedroom _a la_
Freud, Stekel and Rank.

The Chinese and Japanese artists drew pictures of fantastic obscenity,
decorating their prints with elaborate, shameless designs of lingams
and yonis, but in Puritan countries such masterpieces of Oriental art
have been taboo--except perhaps on the walls of men’s rooms. But when
Freud dignified obscenity with the magic word “science,” novels, plays,
paintings and conversation assumed a deep phallic tinge, and even the
Greenwich Village Historical Society bowed to the new age.

My bi-sexual girl friend was a collector of men and women who
distinguished themselves in the arts, and after getting the
sexologist’s telephone number she added him to her collection, the
Ovidian art of love ranking high in the hierarchy of her preferences.
It is the art of love rather than the love of art that draws hundreds
to the “culture” clubs that were once Village lofts where Italian
seamstresses labored over nightgowns, panties and brassieres.

A distant cousin of mine recently came in from a small Southern town
in search of a husband. I thought I would introduce her to some of
the Village “culture” clubs where respectable girls like herself come
to listen to Freudian speakers, while they appraise the males present
for a possible catch. When I first entered one of these culture clubs
without a female escort, I was assaulted by a battery of female eyes,
and I had to make a dash for the nearest exit before I could listen to
the grave debate: “Are Latin lovers really lousy?” I was really using
my cousin for a protection, although I thought she might pick up a
possible date or at least get some masculine attention.

The place I chose for her first introduction to the Village was the
Village Forum on Sixth Avenue at Tenth Street. It is on the first floor
of a loft building which is now devoted to the arts. The loft has
been converted into a lecture hall that seeks to achieve the intimacy
of a studio but with negative results. In the old days “Sir John”
Pecorri (his father was an East Side tailor) presided over a studio
in Sheridan Square that for elegance and taste could only have been
matched by Lady Blessington’s salon in London where Disraeli, Byron and
other celebrities foregathered. Although he charged an admission fee
for his intimate soirées, they struck a magic bohemian note without a
cash-register obligato.

Not so at the Village Forum or any of the other “culture” clubs now
rampant in the Village. Freudian biology has taken the place of
aesthetics, the veil of Maya has been lifted and sex is discussed with
anatomical details down to the last hypogastric and pubic minutiae. Sex
denuded of its poetic glamour is like a cynical Restoration comedy that
has the odor of a stale garment cast aside in a brothel.

My girlish cousin, blushing all over, seized my arm as a “professor”
and a “doctor” debated the all-important subject: “Should bachelors
be taxed?” The topic was merely a springboard for a dive into the
muddy waters of Freudian pathology with long digressions into that
classic of disguised pornography, “_The Sex Habits of the American
Male_”--read mostly by virgins and spinsters for possible clues to
the masculine psyche. My Canadian cousin was finally driven out by the
barrage of erotic and sub-epigastric statistics, and I promised to make
amends by taking her to another “culture” club in the Village where the
patrons picked their own subjects for discussion.

This “culture” club proved even more meretricious than the Village
Forum, whose pseudo-debates have made the respectable pages of the New
York _Compass_. Patrons were grouped around various tables, which
were tagged “Philosophy,” “Fiction,” “Poetry,” “Music,” “Painting,”
“Politics,” “Psychology,” “Psychoanalysis” and “Sexual Relations.” Each
table had a leader who spark-plugged the discussion. The bearded leader
at the philosophy table, alone and unnoticed, looked with envy at the
table marked “Sexual Relations,” which was as crowded as the Macy
basement during the price-war rush.

He looked like Socrates--in reverse. The patrons did not follow
him but, on the contrary, sought to avoid him as if he were the
bubonic plague. A loud-speaker announced that his subject was
“Existentialism”--but there were no takers. Then the loud-speaker
announced that the subject had been changed to “Sexual Philosophies in
the East and West, with special emphasis on Freud and Jung,” and his
table began filling with deserters from the other tables, especially
the one on “Sexual Relations.”

My cousin, in a sudden spurt of derring-do and virginal bravado,
stepped over to the table marked “Sexual Relations,” but was driven
back by a cannonade of obscenity that caused her to reel on her high
French heels. “My God!” she gasped, “they’re discussing their private
sex relations as if they were cabbage or tomatoes.”

The leader, a young female with bedroom eyes, tried to give the talk
a thin veneer of Freudian “science,” throwing a few Oedipus and
castration complexes into the brash discussion, but the narratives got
out of hand and assumed a straight smoker or stag flavor, a sort of
verbal fornication as a build-up for Cyprian delights.

My cousin, an amateur painter, finally went to the table marked
“Painting,” but the young men and women there were talking about
painting the town red and little about Picasso, Renoir or Cezanne. She
vowed never to go to the Village again, but the eccentric and bizarre
have a powerful attraction, even for Southern virgins, and she was
forever urging me to take her to some of the MacDougal dives where the
lesbians and the fairies engage in their saturnalian revels.

These dens of iniquity are real “nut” clubs, in the pathological sense
of the word, and, despite my logical understanding of homosexuality, I
shy away from the homosexuals who crowd the bars on MacDougal and West
Third Streets. My cousin had to go back to her home town without seeing
the “nut clubs” frequented by the “third sex.”

J. George Fredericks, the inveterate Villager, has for years run the
Gourmet Society, which takes its members around the world in New York
restaurants where they are served exotic dishes, from Armenian to
Zulu. This is a “nut club” that is confined strictly to cultivating
stomach ulcers. Stomach specialists are enthusiastic supporters of the
club--and for obvious reasons.

But there are few bohemian “nut clubs” in the Village that confine
themselves to food, since exotic dishes are expensive, and beyond the
reach of true Villagers who subsist on hamburgers--and love.

“I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby,” is the international anthem
of all bohemias on the left bank of the Seine or the Hudson. But love
is still the most precious thing in the world, and for want of it
America is strangling in the stale air of Freudian pathology which
seeks to pin love down on a couch and force it to give up its secrets.

The suckers at the Village “culture” clubs who come to discover
the meaning of love as practised in the Village are given Freudian
_ersatz_ sex which has little relation to the romantic life of
bohemia. Your true bohemian does not merely talk about love--he lives
it.




[Illustration]




[Illustration]




the village stands on its head


Some time ago the inveterate Villager, Tom Boggs, collected and edited
the works of Lewis Carroll, the author of _Alice in Wonderland_.
Perhaps Boggs was influenced by the topsy-turvy world he lived in to
concentrate his attention on the Einsteinian mathematician Dodgson
who wrote his fantasies under the name of Carroll and who sought to
convince us that two and two are five. In any event, the true Villager
lives in an Alice-in-Wonderland universe where it is normal to stand on
your head and to be riotously happy while doing so.

This is how Max Beerbohm pictured Bernard Shaw in his famous caricature
of the late Irish wit. But, from the point of view of the true
Villager, Shaw was a “bourgeois” charlatan who stood on his head
merely to attract an audience and then cashed in at the box-office to
the tune of a million dollars. When it came to business matters he
stood planted on both feet, like the horde of “Elks” who have invaded
the Village and whose contact with New York’s bohemia is mainly
geographical and erotic.

For the benefit of the uninitiated, an “Elk” is a man who lives in
Flatbush or the Bronx but who is attracted to the Village by its
reputation as “the Devil’s Playground.” The “Elk” stands on his head
only when he reaches the neighborhood of Sheridan Square, but he
does so consciously and awkwardly like the merry-making parvenus at
the “Nut Club,” and other resorts catering to the outlanders. He is
not a bohemian but a refugee from the staid, middle-class boredom of
Flatbush or Washington Heights; his high jinks and wild caperings have
an odor of the Freudian clinic about them: they smell of complexes and
fixations. When the “Elk” gets back to the alleged sanity of the Bronx
or Flushing he looks upon the Villagers as a bunch of bums.

Of course there are many New Yorkers who, like Bernard Shaw, try to
strike a balance between their bohemianism and their sound business
sense. They protest loudly against the sterilities of a commercial
civilization, but are not averse to raking in the shekels while they
go in pursuit of Utopia or some artists’ model who has struck their
aesthetic fancy. They try to achieve the miracle of standing on their
heads and on their feet at the same time. The resulting gyrations often
wind up at the Charles Street Police Station where a Flatbush furrier
is pulled in for parading in women’s clothes or a Park Avenue tycoon is
booked on the charge of soliciting a sailor in an Eighth Street café.

Homosexuality is often the badge of the true Villager, but he wears it
outward, like a carnation in his buttonhole, while the pseudo-bohemian
hides his inversion from public scrutiny as if it were the shameful
mark of the leper or the syphilitic. The true Villager, standing on
his head at all times, sees homosexuality through the eyes of Edward
Carpenter, the English poet and essayist who proclaimed the superiority
of the third or “intermediate” sex and pointed to the long list of
creative geniuses from Leonardo to Oscar Wilde who were “blessed” with
perverted sex-habits.

Just as the men-women in primitive jungle-lands become honorary and
functional members of society, engaging in priestcraft, knitting and
rug-weaving, the Village artist with homosexual leanings is considered
a normal citizen of his community. That is why he resents the
“bourgeois” homosexual who is not a functional part of Village life and
seeks to stand on his head with creative inverts, thus making them look
ridiculous and eccentric--biological and psychological freaks.

Sometimes this resentment assumes the violent form of murder: an alien
“Elk” may find himself dead in his hotel bed while his irate assassin
may be drowning his sense of guilt in quarts of gin in a MacDougal
Street bar where the “fairies” congregate as in a Synagogue of Satan.
Other Villagers, less homicidal in nature, may wreak their vengeance in
the form of blackmail, and a Wall Street broker may find himself paying
through the nose for daring to behave like a true bohemian.

Economic necessity will often compel a true Villager to seek the
company and the patronage of “Elks” whom he despises in his heart as
members of the degenerate bourgeoisie. There are many true Villagers,
for instance, who run art classes in their homes for male and female
“Elks” who pay as much as the traffic will bear. The cult of art has
had an irresistible attraction for the _nouveau riche_ who buys
paintings by the Old Masters as a form of “conspicuous waste” and can
be induced to cough up real money for canvases by unknowns if the
artists blow their horns hard enough. The Village artist, with the help
of his wife or mistress, can often persuade a rich “Elk” that he is
discovering another Van Gogh or Picasso, and he will happily pay from
fifty dollars up--fabulous prices to the True Villager--for the most
meaningless daubs. These art classes are really bait for bigger game
when the “art students” are dragooned into the artist’s one-man show
and they are forced to buy--or else.

For the “art classes,” it may be confidentially revealed, are often
the scene of sybaritic orgies where the male and female “Elks” stand
on their heads with the true Villagers--and often land in a horizontal
position, a posture that interests the divorce courts. We know a
sloppy, mink-coated blonde from West End Avenue who is a perpetual “art
student” at ten dollars a lesson and is forced to buy canvases from
artists who have taught her more than the trick of painting a purple
cow or a portrait in cubes and triangles. Her cloak-and-suit husband
is glad of her growing art collection, which is more related to the
science of blackmail than to the profession of Rembrandt and Cezanne.
When a buyer visits his sumptuous apartment the cloak-and-suiter
joyfully exclaims: “Look at Mollie’s latest--a masterpiece!”

The “Elks” flock in droves to Washington Square when the outdoor art
exhibit blossoms out with the spring. There are some genuine buyers,
but many female artists have complained to us that the “Elks” are
more interested in their telephone numbers than in their canvases
or water-colors. The open-air show affords non-Village homosexuals
an opportunity to become acquainted with Village inverts; male and
female wolves are on the prowl for starving artists who are offered a
Park Avenue love-nest in return for a Village attic, steeped in the
dreariness of frustrated ambition, with a notice from the landlord
slipped under the door.

Female “Elks” well-known in the world of business, law, medicine
and education, are now keeping girls who once propped their chaste
landscapes against the trees, walls and picket-fences of Washington
Square. The true Villagers look upon the kept painter or poet as a
traitor to the Muses, and the “class war” between the “Elks” and the
bohemians is waged vigorously.

Of course it cannot be argued that those who stand on their heads are
less sane than those who stand on their two feet: it is all a matter
of relative norms, as Einstein would insist. Dr. Samuel Schmalhausen,
a noted left-wing psychoanalyst, once electrified Village audiences
by lecturing on the subject: _Is the Normal Mind Sane?_ Visiting
“Elks” were shocked to hear that they were actually crazy, while the
Villagers to whom they gave hand-outs were the normal ones, since they
sought to adjust themselves to the creative world of the future when
the artist, instead of the “Elk” would rule the roost. What Santayana
has called _normal madness_ was the proud possession of every
true Villager whose abnormality sprang from the rational norm of the
future when the “Elks” would be liquidated and the poets would become
the _acknowledged_ legislators of mankind, to amend the phrase of
Shelley.

With the advent of Freud it became easier for the true Bohemian to
prove that sanity and insanity were merely a matter of taste and that
Baudelaire was right when he said that the only sane people are locked
up in madhouses. Dr. Abraham Brill, who introduced Freud to America,
as a result of private polls, concluded that New York was “over-run”
with inverts who belonged to all classes of the population, including
the clergy. In other words, to stand on your head sexually is a normal
erotic posture, but the true Villager has a contempt for the “Elk” who
does so, for in every other respect he stands on his two bourgeois feet.

A few years ago I inadvertently became companion to a millionaire
“Elk.” He was in the hands of a psychiatrist with advanced Freudian
views who also admired my poems. The ailing shoe manufacturer, who was
in his early forties, had a habit of locking himself up in his bedroom
and literally trying to stand on his head. He lived in the Village but
he was in no sense a Villager, for his interests ran to horses and golf
rather than to artists or art.

But his psychiatrist had evolved the interesting theory that the
millionaire “Elk” sought to do in reality what the true Villager did
metaphorically--to reverse earth and sky and stand on his bald head.
He had inherited the shoe factory from his father and he detested the
futile task of piling up millions, although he could think of nothing
else to do. The fact that he lived in MacDougal Alley, surrounded by
well-to-do bohemians, was a tacit admission that he was hankering for
the topsy-turvy world of the true Villager whose experimental life
he secretly envied. He saw the Villager standing on his head, and
confusing fancy with fact, actually tried to imitate him in the privacy
of the bedroom.

I used to encourage the pitiful millionaire to balance himself on his
cranium and I’d applaud when he wagged his legs like signal flags in a
storm. The foolishness of his upside-down posture was gradually brought
home to him and he became satisfied to remain on his bourgeois feet.
He moved back to Scarsdale where he had a large estate and a private
golf course that absorbed all his leisure hours. He was able, like his
father, to find security again in the good, solid middle-class earth
and he no longer had the urge to stand on his head and kick the futile
air with his feet.

But not all the bohemia-haunted “Elks” are as fortunate as the shoe
manufacturer from Scarsdale. Some have suffered disaster in their
heroic effort to balance themselves on their occiputs; their desire
to become total bohemians ended only when they became total wrecks
and were shipped off by relatives to distant sanitaria. The part-time
bohemian who serves both Art and Mammon may save himself by commuting
between Wall Street and Greenwich Village. But the “Elk” who decides to
go all-out in pursuit of the fauns, satyrs, hippogriffs, unicorns and
dryads of Washington Square usually winds up in the observation ward of
Bellevue.

The true Villager is blessed by the knowledge that he is in no mortal
peril of getting rich and he therefore builds up a dog-in-the-manger
attitude towards the rich man who tries desperately to achieve his
state of contented poverty in the midst of gin bottles, Sibelius
records and artists’ models draped over couches and wing-chairs. He
gags at the hysterical efforts of the “Elk” to substitute the touch of
beautiful things for his Midas-touch, to exchange his gold pieces for
the gold of Apollo or Venus. It is only when the rich “Elk” is reduced
to the abject poverty of a heatless attic that the true Villager warms
up to him, encourages him in his efforts to paint or to write sonnets
to the moon and shares everything with him--except his girl.

It is not hard for a man of wealth to go broke in the Village and
become incorporated in the fraternity of the true bohemians who
drink toasts to My Lady Poverty--until they hear the sirens’ call of
success and go off to die in Hollywood at the edge of a sumptuous
swimming-pool. We have seen repentant “Elks” drop a fortune within
a single week: drinking and feasting are expensive, especially when
hundreds are engaged in the festivities. At the advent of a rich “Elk,”
relatives of true Villagers begin to die in droves as if stricken
by small-pox, and the Villagers are given railroad fare to go to
Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, New Orleans, San Francisco and Los Angeles
to attend the “funeral.” Then there are female Villagers who suddenly
discover that they need abortions, and the penitent “Elk” hands out
hundred-dollar bills with the same zest as a politician buying his
election to Congress.

Tom Boggs has written the amusing biography of a Village poet who
inherited a fortune and then set out to squander it in the Village
gin-mills and hot spots--with the help of a horde of Village friars
more interested in the bottle than the Bible. These Rabelaisian monks
and friars ran through the poet’s money-bags like a horde of mice
through slabs of cheese, and the poet soon found himself happily broke,
ready to received hand-outs in turn from compassionate Villagers.

Converted “Elks” who give up their cash-registers for pens, brushes
or typewriters have no trouble in reducing themselves to a state of
abject poverty that they may stand on their pates and kick their legs
against the futility of modern life. True Villagers are always ready to
sacrifice themselves in behalf of Art and empty the pockets of a humble
initiate at the shrine of Apollo.

We recently discovered the sad fate of a Bronx “Elk” who decided to go
Village on a full-time basis with dire consequences to himself and his
family. Seeking to stand on his head as a full-fledged bohemian, he is
now pushing up the daisies while his wife is in an up-state asylum,
hopelessly insane. This “Elk” was the sole owner of a large printing
plant that catered to the big publishers and magazine magnates. He thus
came in indirect contact with America’s intelligentsia, and he began
trying his hand at writing and painting.

He finally achieved a national reputation as a landscape painter,
projecting upon canvas all the wild anguish of his troubled mind
divided between the will to profit and the passion to stamp his emotion
upon nature and transform it into his aesthetic ideal. Every day at
three he quit work at his printing plant and motored to a secret
hide-away in the Village. In a loft studio next to the old Pirates’ Den
on Christopher Street, he painted away until dark while his secretary
or wife sought vainly to discover his whereabouts.

His studio had no telephone, and he thought he had severed contact with
the outside world, but he fell in love with one of his models and she
caused his ruination.

She persuaded him to give up his Jekyll-and-Hyde existence and become
a true, full-time Villager who looks upon the area north of Fourteenth
Street as “out of bounds.” He withdrew his money from the bank and
squandered it on the futile orgies which the Greeks originated in an
effort to drum out the terror of existence with wine, women and song.
Broke, beaten and disillusioned, he finally went back to his business,
but it was already on the rocks and his wife was suing him for divorce,
naming the artists’ model as corespondent.

Unable to gather up the scattered fragments of his life to achieve a
rational design for living, he shot himself in his private office, and
his wife, feeling responsible for his suicide, went insane.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Village stands on its head and the true Villager looks upon his
upside-down posture as normal, for civilization has reversed the
processes of nature and has subdued art and life to the profit-motive.
But the beauty-haunted “Elk” does not always succeed in standing on his
head, and, unable to remain on his bourgeois feet, he floats like a
stray balloon into the illimitable void.

But there are hard-boiled New Yorkers who look upon Greenwich Village
with an eye for real-estate values rather than aesthetic standards
and literary codes. These are the solid citizens to whom art is an
excrescence, a wart on the face of Father Knickerbocker. They have tom
down large sections of bohemia, especially in the Washington Square and
Minetta Street areas, and are building homes for people who stick to
the status quo and prefer to stand on their feet.

Slowly but surely the Village that stands on its feet is pushing out
the Village that stands on its head. But the possibilities of life can
only be gauged by the behavior of eccentrics and madmen who dare to
challenge the existing manners and customs. Therefore we are chiefly
concerned with the true Villagers who live between two worlds. These
Villagers see no solid ground anywhere, and in a dissolving universe
they seek through the magic of art or drink or politics to find the
Blessed Isle of safety in an age that is disintegrating before their
eyes.

To see them standing on their heads is no laughing matter: we might
as well laugh at Jesus nailed to the cross. For theirs is a form of
modern crucifixion: the inability to place our feet on solid ground and
march towards the goal of self-realization. If we lock ourselves in our
bedrooms and try to kick at the ceiling, it is because we are seeking a
foothold in a gyrating and dissolving world.

Not only the Village but all mankind is now standing on its collective
head, and by observing the mad antics of the true Villagers we
ourselves may find a new force like gravity to pull us back to our
collective feet.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




[Illustration]

the waldorf:
a cafeteria a la einstein


The true Villagers who stand on their heads are like the denizens of
Mars who would feel alien and uprooted if they landed in Manhattan
with the help of the space-ships provided by the exuberant authors of
science-fiction. They must have a familiar meeting-place, a microcosm
that shall reflect their world-picture of things with macrocosmic
overtones. _The heart is a lonely hunter_, as a fine young woman
novelist, Carson McCullers, has told us; it forever seeks other hearts,
trapped in isolation, unable to join in the wild chorus of being.

Villagers for the past thirty years (as long as we can remember)
have always pooled their loneliness in a centrally located cafeteria
somewhere between Sheridan Square and Washington Square. Back in the
middle twenties, when I upset the critics by comparing the moon to “a
spilling glass of gin” and somebody else said it was a gong tolling
the doom of civilization, the nerve-center of the neurotic Village
was Hubert’s Cafeteria in Sheridan Square. It was torn down in the
thirties to make room for a bank building--a prophetic reminder that
the Village was fated to go bourgeois and bow to the god of Real
Estate. But in the late twenties Bobby Edwards, the Village minstrel,
was strumming away at his cigar box ukelele:

    In Hubert’s Cafeteria
    The girls all suffer from sex-hysteria.
    They drink a glass of gin or wine
    And make a dash for Bodenheim.

When Hubert’s Cafeteria gave way to the bankers’ world of dollars
and cents, Village group life moved across the street where the Life
Cafeteria beckoned the lonely, the insulted and the damned.

The class war between the true Villagers and the owners of the
Village eating-place was waged with sound and fury at Life Cafeteria.
Unfortunately the owners of the huge self-service restaurant and
the true Villagers differed materially on the meaning of the word
“cafeteria.” It is a problem in semantics which the Village has not
solved even today.

According to the proprietors of “Life” the cafeteria was a business
venture and not a philanthropic experiment. They had established a
restaurant, not a public meeting-place for true Villagers to weave
endless carpets of conversation, embroidered with strange designs for
living taken from Sappho, Buddha, Plato, Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot,
Tolstoy, the Marquis de Sade and Spengler. (Villagers discovered Marx
in the thirties during the Great Depression.)

They were serving not manna from heaven, but food that must be paid for
with cash. The rest rooms were built for certain biological functions,
and not for romantic assignations between members of the third or
intermediate sex.

The true Villagers argued that the owners of “Life” had made a grievous
semantic mistake. A cafeteria, in the esoteric language of the Village,
was primarily a refuge for talkers, not eaters, and if the talk ended
on an erotic note, the rest rooms were the proper places to celebrate
the rites of Venus or Priapus. If a true Villager could not pay the
sum punched on his meal-check, he had the right to wait an hour or
twenty-four hours until he was “bailed out” by a compassionate “Elk”
whose heart was as open as his purse to the call of hunger. Finally,
a true Villager had the divine right to filch a meal-check from an
adjoining table, order up a dollar’s worth of food on it and then
present his own blank check to the cashier, while the “Elk” searched
high and low for his missing pasteboard. Self-preservation, argued the
true Villager, is the first law of nature.

The owners of “Life” insisted on their semantic definition of
“cafeteria” and called in the police to back them up. But a cafeteria
with a policeman at every table is not exactly a pleasant place to dine
in (we might hazard a terrible pun and call it an “Arrestaurant”) and
Life Cafeteria was emptied of all its customers--paying and non-paying.
It was forced to shut down and was broken into many store units that
sell everything from boloney to books.

We do not know who persuaded the owners of the Waldorf chain of
cafeterias to open one of their low-price eating-places on Sixth Avenue
near Eighth Street. No doubt he was fired after the tragic event, for
he caused the Waldorf owners to inherit a headache bequeathed by the
proprietors of Hubert’s, “Life,” Stewart’s and other restaurant men
who discovered that a Village cafeteria was not an eating-place but a
meeting-place where people chewed the rag, roasted the latest poet or
painter and made love _sub rosa_ in the rest rooms.

The Waldorf people sought heroically to save their lavishly appointed
restaurant which the true Villagers looked upon as a cosmic cafeteria
where spoons were used to point a moral and saucers flew in the
direction of a philosopher to indicate a rejection of his private
universe. The first innovation was to introduce a pay-as-you-eat system
so that no true Villager could manipulate meal-checks or occupy a seat
for hours until he was “bailed out” by an accommodating “Elk.”

The rest rooms were nailed up, striking a blow at true Villagers with
certain physiological or amatory propensities. The cash register was
placed on the counter as warning to the true Villagers that they had
entered a cash-register universe where the counter-men rang up dimes
and quarters instead of rhymes and quirks of the creative imagination.
“No smoking” signs were tacked to the walls in an effort to discourage
talkers who brought their sandwiches and cigarettes from their studios
and managed to bum a dime for coffee.

Many true Villagers cannot talk or reminisce without blowing circles
of smoke towards the ceiling, and this prohibition against smoking
was challenged as a breach of a natural right--but the ban against
cigarettes was strictly enforced.

Then a short-story writer who had once practised law insisted on
breaking the ban against smoking, and the manager called in one of
New York’s finest to have the culprit ejected. As the cop stood
open-mouthed in amazement, the ex-lawyer quoted from the code dealing
with the duties of restaurant owners, and the bluecoat had to admit
that a diner had the legal right to put a Camel or a Chesterfield
between his lips during or after meals. The Waldorf management was
forced to remove the “no smoking” signs, and the semantic battle
between the true Villagers and the Waldorf was switched from the
tobacco to the erotic front.

An artist’s model who owned a frayed mink-coat--a family heirloom--was
commandeered by some Villagers who had heard of the famous
Venus-in-furs, with a view to bringing a blush to the managerial cheek.
When she removed the coat she had on nothing but her bare skin and a
pair of green pumps. The management, however, did not blush but called
the police instead. The girl was carted off to Bellevue and there we
hope that the staff of learned psychiatrists was able to teach her how
to distinguish between the bed room and the market place; that each
locale has its own decorum and special proprieties not the least of
which is the choice of suitable raiment.

Before we leave Life Cafeteria and its hoary chronicle let us give to
it one more nostalgic _huzzah_! And hail to the Waldorf which
whatever its original intention to establish an eatery of elegance has
nobly acquiesced to bohemia.

[Illustration]




[Illustration:]




[Illustration]

public bohemian number one


He is the most ill-natured of people, but I’ve never come to him with a
complaint without receiving the fullest and most patient hearing.

I would hardly call him generous--he doles out payment for work as if
he were not an employer but a benefactor, but he does pay and pays
promptly.

The most unconventional of all Villagers, he has been, in turn, a
constant husband, a responsible father, and a doting grandfather.

He has been in more jails and prisons than any professional criminal I
have ever met; yet no one I know is more scrupulous about living up to
the letter of the law.

Of all American publishers, none of whom is an object of affection to
authors, he is the most hated. But he is the only publisher I ever
heard of who financed the translation of a book for a rival publisher.
The translator didn’t get a large enough advance from the rival to
enable her to complete the job, and he paid for her food and shelter
until the translation was completed.

This is Public Bohemian Number One--Samuel Roth.

Bohemians like Roth--who has squeezed this book out of me piece by
piece and day by day--understand the dialectical relationship between
Life and Art, the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty.
Roth realizes, as Aristotle and Heine did, that the life excellent
consists in the realization of all life’s possibilities. It has led
him unto many roads lit by many strange fires. Many a jail still rubs
its eyes from having held him. He has lived in a private dream, an
imperious vision of reality that drove him so far off the track of his
real nature as to cause him to publish his _Jews Must Live_, for
instance, which Nazis quoted with fervor, thereby throwing another Jew
into the furnace. Heavens! Roth is a Zionist. If he has criticisms of
his fellow-Jews he is certainly not baiting, much less trading with the
enemy. I first came across his name when I read _Now and Forever_,
an important work of Jewish apologetics, placing the Jew in the
vanguard of Western thought and achievement.

I wonder whether the editorial writers who roasted Roth because Nazis
quoted him--and who knows how they distorted his meaning?--were
not obsessed by a private hurt which they had to get into print to
vindicate their honor as men and citizens of a civilized community. I
have often wished to nail certain figures, insults to my human dignity,
to the cross of the world’s contempt, but I could not interest a
publisher. Roth has the fortune or misfortune to be his own publisher,
and he can rush into print while his passion is still red-hot and
flaming with moral indignation.

The Second Avenue intelligentsia drove Roth from his table at the Cafe
Royal because they thought that critics thought that the Nazis thought
that Roth was saying something he wasn’t. No doubt it is a grave error
to say anything at any time. But Roth’s violent personality, obeying no
command but his inner sense of right and wrong, is bound to conflict
with the behavior of time-serving writers and critics who are whited
sepulchers, clean and polished on the outside and all corruption within.

I think this explains the tempestuous career of Roth, the stormy petrel
riding the seas of that outlawed world called bohemia. There is also
the additional fact that Roth is an amphibious creature, a human beaver
who gravitates between the sacred waters of the arts and the dry land
of cut-throat business activity.

His immoderate passions have sometimes betrayed him into actions that
have been condemned by both the Practical Man of Business and the
Impractical Man of the Arts. Although both types of Americans have
located the good and the goods of life in the present, they balk at the
idea of an artist engaging in sordid commercial activity, such as book
and magazine publishing. Business and art are like fire and water to be
mixed only when the intention is that both be destroyed.

But Roth is not made of the stuff of martyrdom, and he refused to be
nailed to the cross of poetry for the sake of the Muses. All the nine
sister goddesses of song and poetry and of the arts and sciences could
not convince him that crucifixion in an attic was the logical reward
for a life devoted to Apollo. He decided to remain a poet and aesthete,
hiding behind the stained-glass windows of Chartres while making
constant excursions in the market-place, picking up an uneasy buck in
publishing or mail-order bookselling.

That is how Roth has got into trouble with Big Business and the
politicians, working through the Post Office officials, who frown
upon any written matter that seeks to substitute the aesthetic for
the practical vision, the naked flesh for the clothed images of
bribe-taking Congressmen and politicians. In the end Roth will prove to
have been more practical than the most earthy of his adversaries. The
record will read: Roth had to take a few jail sentences during which
he produced some of his best writing. But in the process of appealing
from his convictions at the hands of magistrates he purged the laws
governing the publication of books, in the higher courts.

There are few of us who can call our souls our own; we are forced to
make compromises in a world we are dragged into by the scruffs of our
necks--a world that is as alien and strange to us as the topography
of the moon observed through one of those gigantic telescopes on
Forty-Second Street. Roth is one of the few bohemians I know who has
been consistent in his inconsistencies, logical in his contradictions
and contradictory in his logic.

A Practical Man who is at the same time highly impractical--I fear
him as much as the politicians do, but for the opposite reasons: I
dread his Toryism rather than his radicalism, his clinging to a dead
world rather than a world that is striving to be born, to use Matthew
Arnold’s famous image. I have known him for thirty-five years, and
he is as unpredictable now as he has ever been--even more so. He
recently shocked me with the announcement that he was about to give up
publishing to sell pills, just to make peace with the Post Office!

The times were out of joint, he said. As a patriotic American he
wanted to make a compromise with his government which was engaged in
a life-and-death struggle for survival. Unlike Hamlet, he did not
feel called upon to organize life into a pattern of meaning that
outraged the politicians’ sense of order and decency. He was going
to manufacture pills for our national belly-ache, and he went into
rhapsodies over a patent medicine that had cured his own nervous
stomach and was destined to cure the stomachs of millions.

Roth as a manufacturer of pills would have been as fantastic as an
announcement by Mae West that she was about to enter a Carmelite
convent and devote herself to contemplation and glorification of God.

I doubt whether the Post Office would have been happy to hear that he
had been suddenly converted to pharmaceutical propriety. It has looked
upon him as Public Bohemian No. 1, a man whose book advertisements
and circulars were calculated to corrupt Main Street, and induce Mrs.
Grundy herself to buy novels too hot for the mails to handle.

I suspect that the Post Office officials would have found life
exceedingly dull if Roth had abandoned book-publishing for
pill-dispensing, just as God must be bored now that His eternal enemy
the Devil has been reduced to a neurotic bundle of complexes by the
psychoanalysts. The combat between good and evil makes for drama and
aesthetic excitement, as Sophocles knew, and the Post Office world
would have been as commonplace as our modern universe without its
particular Mephistopheles, the cold, scoffing, relentless, crafty,
malevolent, foul fiend who has introduced spinsters to the works of
James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and other “pornographic” writers.

I am particularly glad that Roth relinquished his notion of giving up
publishing for pills. Although I am a Puritan, indifferent to sensual
things, I try to write as sensually as the Song of Songs, seeking in
the mystery of the flesh a key to the kingdom of the spirit. Roth is
the only publisher who has allowed me to write as I please, damning my
politics but encouraging my flair for the exotic and the erotic, my
Pater-like hunger to fuse body and soul into a single flame lighting
the path of man’s creative fulfillment. “What are we given, what do
we take away?” asks Masefield. “Five little senses startling with
delight.” My sole possession is my five senses, and Roth permits me to
deck them out in the regalia of prose and exhibit them before my often
astounded readers.

The language of delight is God’s language, as every saint knows who
seeks to talk in that tongue whose syllables are mystic ecstasies and
whose words are aflame with the vital passions that transcend Art and
are fused with Life itself. I believe that Roth shares my intuitive
feeling that in our commercial society vitality is confined to the
arts, and that through Dionysiac revolutionary politics our routinized,
dead society may be shocked into the exotic life of the Ivory Tower
where vital existence is preserved precariously as in a hot-house.
But I am a Pelagian who believes that human nature can be transformed
by personal effort and social change, while Roth is an Augustinian or
Calvinist who assumes that Man is damned forever regardless of the
nature of his milieu.

Man, damned eternally by the Beast within him, must inevitably destroy
every Utopia he builds to house his soul--that is Roth’s creed,
according to the bitter arguments I have had with him on the problem of
Man’s fate. He is not opposed to Utopia but is quite positive that it
cannot work out in practice; hence his Toryism. But in his eagerness to
relieve the agony of Man, he is not opposed to any aesthetic effort,
whether it is Utopia-building, word-spinning or image-weaving in the
form of painting or music.

Roth does not care what I write as long as I excite the reader to a
sense of vital experience through the vicarious medium of art. “Not
the fruit of experience but experience itself is the end,” said Walter
Pater. This aesthetic creed, shared by Roth, jars with the moralistic
credo of the censors in the Post Office who still cling to the form
of our Puritan culture though its substance has long ago dissipated
itself in the frenzied activity of huckstering and profit-grabbing.

Because Pater’s aesthetic creed sprouts “hands and feet,” to use
Hegel’s image, when Roth publishes a book of his own or another’s, the
Post Office begins to view it with alarm, and sets the machinery of the
law in motion to stop the circulation of the work as “pornographic.”

The Post Office censors have a unique method of deciding what is
pornographic and what is not. They follow the critics as the Supreme
Court follows the election returns. There has been a recent epidemic of
homosexual novels, written by homosexuals, recommended by homosexuals
for publication, and praised to the skies by homosexual critics, many
of whom are true Villagers. These novels create a cultural climate
of sexual and moral degeneracy that presages the rise of Hitlerite
reaction, as was the case in pre-Nazi Germany. Despite their deadly
effect upon the mass mind, the censors, in and out of the Post Office,
have made no effort to stop their circulation.

On the other hand, if an artist, trained to look without bias upon
everything under the sun, should describe normal sex activity in plain
and vivid language or color, the charge of obscenity is immediately
raised and the publisher or originator of such a work may find himself
behind iron bars, an outcast of society. Normal fornication is taboo!

With the breakdown of our Puritan culture, the censors no longer
dread the perverse and pathologic in art, since our established order
is collapsing and making way for a new order that has room for the
pathologic and perverse. Puritanism is now in bad odor, but since it
still holds sway over the mass mind, the description of normal sex
activity becomes a subject for Post Office scrutiny.

Roth was recently prosecuted for publishing an innocuous book dealing
with the love affairs of women chronicled like Homer’s catalogue
of ships--a mere listing of prosaic love-moments without erotic or
emotional content. Zola complained that he was being charged with
pornography when he merely tried to describe the life of Paris, and
Roth argued in the same manner that the book placed on the Post Office
Index was merely a transcript of erotic life in New York written with
the cold objectivity of a Sears Roebuck catalogue.

The book lacked the slightest trace of literary merit and was not
embroidered with filthy four-letter words like Hemingway’s _Over
the River and Through the Trees_--words that have become the holy
stigmata of artistic integrity and creative genius, according to our
Tory critics. It was a sincere, honest chronicle, dull to the point of
arousing thoughts of suicide on the part of the patient reader. Yet
Roth was stupidly summoned to court for publishing an “obscene” book
that had less obscenity than the telephone directory where some names
are listed that might arouse activity in the sexual glands.

Roth master-minded his own defense and had a prim young lady read the
small, innocuous volume before a mixed jury of men, women and invisible
gods who filled the courtroom with the laughter of Olympus.

The jury, of course, exonerated the publisher of printing a
pornographic book, but the mystery still remains why Roth was dragged
to court in the first place. It can only be solved on the supposition
that the Post Office looks upon him as Public Bohemian No. 1, the poet,
who despite his reactionary politics and conservative family life, is a
threat to every kind of social order--right, left or center.

The cult of beauty without social responsibility is a threat to
civilization as we know it, and Roth as Rousseauian is in unconscious
revolt against those political or economic values in our society which
he eulogizes in his arguments with left-wingers. Beauty and truth are
identical, as Keats preached, and just as Tolstoy was a great artist
despite his assault on art, the poet is by the very nature of his craft
a dangerous revolutionary who by his immediate act of creative vision
exposes the barren waste of our profit society where the bleached bones
of love have been ground to bitter dust.

I have seen Roth take time off from his multifarious business
activities to write and publish an epic poem which he no doubt realized
would be a financial flop. It would be read by only a handful of
enthusiasts, a baker’s dozen of beauty-addicts, concerned, as he was,
with the immediacy of aesthetic experience. A practical business man
may think Roth crazy for investing a few thousand dollars in a book of
poems which he knows no one will read. But to me his foolhardy action
is the ultimate in logic and common sense--as well as thrift. He purges
himself of the madness of our schizoid society through a song that
embodies the wholeness and sanity of the creative future.

Until recently Roth conducted Friday night soirées on Grove Street in
the Village, gatherings that were as famous as the Wednesday night
get-togethers at the Lambs’ in London. Just as Charles and Mary Lamb
were democratic in the selection of their guests, inviting a dope fiend
like Coleridge, for instance, Mr. and Mrs. Roth had a _potpourri_
of celebrities ranging from arsonists who turned writers to zoologists
who knew the nature of wolves intimately, being wolves themselves.

I remember sitting next to a counterfeiter who told me his
twenty-dollar bills looked so genuine that he even fooled J. Edgar
Hoover. To prove his point, he showed me a twenty-dollar bill. It
certainly looked like the real thing. Later on, I discovered why:
he had extracted it from the wallet of another guest. There were
jail-birds Mencken had boosted into literary fame by printing their
stories in _American Mercury_: one ex-lawyer who while serving in
Sing Sing was prison librarian--he ghost-wrote the warden’s memoirs
and went to Hollywood, a real criminal!

Of course there were many writers at the Roths’ who had never been
in jail but should have been. One, a prolific author who turned out
best sellers with machine-gun rapidity, was given to slinging verbal
pornography at the fair guests. Once he called up Roth’s daughter Chig
and began giving her his line. Nauseated, she beckoned her father to
the phone.

Roth, furious, seized his cane and sped to the author’s hotel in a
taxi. But face to face with the Village Aretino, he merely brandished
the cane and had recourse to his tongue--a far more effective weapon.
Cicero did not do half the job on Catiline, and before Roth was
through, the blatherskite was on his knees, begging pardon.

Roth’s political conservatism extends to his private family life. He is
a Puritan who detests Puritanism and abides by the Ten Commandments. He
reminds me of the Hellenic Jews in Philo’s Alexandria who, though never
deviating from the Lord God Jehovah, nevertheless put on their hats to
Lady Aphrodite.

At some future date when society has advanced to an enlightened degree,
the blue-nosed censor will have been discarded and dumped into the
attic along with other manifestations of antiquated Puritanism. Then
perhaps the soul of Samuel Roth will be hovering near at hand and
chuckling with the satisfaction of ultimate triumph over the brute
forces of ignorance and prudery. Meanwhile Roth must still face the
Post Office censors who live in the present and enforce the morals of
the past.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]

[Illustration]

the last phase
of maxwell bodenheim


He never raised his voice, either in emphasis or anger. His hesitation
between words suggested thoughtfulness rather than the stammer he had
learned to control. Neither modesty nor uncertainty entered his speech
or manner. That was Bodenheim as I first met him thirty seven years
ago, in Romany Marie’s. And that was Bodenheim until the terrible,
fantastic end of his life.

That first evening he was trying to sell me the current issue of _The
Little Review_. It was hard for him to get my attention. Standing
in a doorway was a tall, blonde young woman (Dorothy Day, who had
already written _The Eleventh Virgin_, and who was to become the
most spectacular of modern evangelists). She was holding a bottle of
gin upturned to her mouth and she didn’t change her position until the
bottle was empty. Showing no effects whatever, she put it down and
asked for another.

When I could force my fascinated eyes away from her, I turned to
Bodenheim and _The Little Review_. “Suppose you give me one good
reason why I should buy your magazine,” I said to Max after I had
looked at it.

“Because I make my living by selling it,” he replied. He was, as usual
for him, penniless; he was also gently arrogant, quietly obtrusive and
immensely self-possessed.

Having known Bodenheim in his earlier days it was possible to penetrate
to the strength of his character and integrity even in his last phase,
when he was externally a wreck. Never a great poet, he had nevertheless
a very fresh and vivid insight. In his youth, while he produced much
verse that was grossly artificial, he wove into it some of the genuine
astonishment with which he and his generation were eyeing the newly
discovered emotional levels of Japanese and Chinese art. He was a
poet for youth. Young people in high school and colleges are still
cherishing his collected works, and as a young man he was a strong
influence on others.

Max became a contributor to my first magazine, _The Lyric_, and
often used to visit my Poetry Bookshop, at West Eighth Street and Sixth
Avenue. There he met an employee of mine, a certain Young Poet, who
had just printed at his own expense his first collection of verse,
entitled _To L.S._ It had all the freshness, naivete and charm to
be expected in young poets and young virgins, plus a set of controls
which bode an interesting maturity. Over this talented young person
Bodenheim exercised a deadly fascination. The Young Poet was prevailed
upon to destroy his work without even sending it out for criticism.
And he dedicated the rest of his life to an imitation of an art which
was scarcely born and only half understood.

As for Max, he quickly forgot this easy conquest and went on his merry
way, satisfied with his ability to write a poem a day and barter it for
bed, board and a drink or two before the ultimate, feverish sleep. His
brief, huge success as a novelist was a literary accident. He never
tried to be a best-seller. It happened to him. And when it was over
it left him baffled, but essentially unaltered. He was still a poet,
untouched by commercialism.

More than a generation after our association on _The Lyric_
Bodenheim began again to write regularly for me. A New York newspaper
columnist announced that Max was broke and desperate; unless some
publisher would respond he intended to commit suicide. Although I was
not among the many publishers who had profited from Max’s work, mine
was the only reply. An early appointment was arranged.

Two shocks were in store for me when Bodenheim finally arrived.
First was his thin haggard appearance. Second was his companion, a
very beautiful young woman whom he introduced as Ruth Fagan, his
wife. To the extent that he seemed dead, she was alive. His total
unattractiveness as a human being at zero point was completely offset
by her compelling charm and virility.

He was provided with necessary facilities for writing, including the
means to procure an apartment for himself and Ruth, and Max vowed he
was embarking on a new life. He worked at this office and at the end of
the day Ruth would come to fetch him. Often they would have dinner with
my wife and me and come home with us afterwards for a chat.

On one of these evenings the former Young Poet, on whom Bodenheim’s
influence had been so disastrous, was invited to join us. The
Young Poet has since become a business man and the encounter
proved interesting. Shabby but calm, Bodenheim, with the young and
beautiful Ruth Fagan at his side, was the same slowspoken, easily
contriving, judiciously differentiating lord of his peculiar domain.
The Poet-turned-Businessman, who was accompanied by his exceedingly
respectable middle-class wife, made a bitter attack on Max, accusing
him of having compromised his art by bartering it in the streets of the
Village.

Max merely glanced at his accuser, who has grown a little fat in his
comparative prosperity and asked: “What do you mean by my art? Living
my life is the only art I know anything about.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Max would arrive at our office for his daily stint somewhere between
eleven in the morning and noon. As the elevator opened for him it
seemed to spew out the staleness of a thousand nights. He was bent
forward and his eyes, gray almost to whiteness, were half closed.
His hands continually twitched as if trying to recapture something
they had held the previous night, which had been lost in the fog of
drink. Settled at his typewriter, he would sometimes rest his head
on it before starting to pound away on the white sheet placed there
for him. Often he would take the sheet out of the machine and fill it
with his tiny pencilled scrawl before handing it over to my assistant,
the novelist, David George Kin, who laboriously copied and edited the
material.

This arrangement continued with few interruptions for some time, and
hope was felt that Bodenheim was well on the way to resuming his
career. In spite of poor health and his inability to stop drinking, he
was turning out a considerable body of work during this period. But
Ruth Fagan quarrelled with Max and ousted him from the apartment which
had been obtained for them. Deprived of this degree of comfort and
stability Max began to make his appearances more and more infrequently.
Finally he ceased coming altogether, leaving us with the manuscripts we
had contracted with him for, in various stages of completion.

Although it now seemed evident that Max no longer had the strength to
sustain a full length piece of work, he continued to write poems to his
last day--poems which were simple, honest and alive, more significant
than the elaborate work of his early days of fame.

       *       *       *       *       *

Max and Ruth made up their quarrel, but their life became almost
vagrant. Night after night they could be found in the Waldorf Cafeteria
he described so vividly, which seemed to be the nearest thing they had
to a home, and always Max had a new poem for sale. And always his gaze
would be concentrated on Ruth, as if he had a premonition of what was
to happen to them, as if he were enjoying the dregs of the glass of
beauty which he enjoyed most in his shattered but courageous life.

S. R.

[Illustration]




                          Transcriber’s Notes

 New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
 public domain.

 Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.

 Inconsistencies in capitalization, hyphenation and compound words have
 been maintained as printed.



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