_And Then More Villagers_
... A meeting place for the few who are struggling ever and
ever for an art that will be truly American. An art that is
not hidebound by the deadening influences of a decadent
Europe, or the result of intellectual theories evolved by
those whose only pleasure in existence is to create laws for
others to obey ... an art, let us say, that springs out of
the emotional depths of creative spirit, courageous and
unafraid of rotting power, or limited scope ... an art whose
purpose is flaming beauty of creation and nothing
else.--HAROLD HERSEY, in _The Quill_ (Greenwich
Village).
Someone said today to the author of this book:
"How can you write about the Village? You don't live here. Live here a
few years and then perhaps you'll have something to say!"
It is by way of answer that the following little tale is quoted; it is
an old tale but, after a fashion, it seems to fit.
Once upon a time an explorer discovered a country and set about to
write a book concerning it. Then the people of the country became
somewhat indignant and asked:
"Why should a stranger, who has scarcely learned his way about in our
land, attempt to describe it? We, who have lived in it and know it,
will write its chronicles ourselves."
So the traveller sat down and shut the book in which he had begun to
write and said:
"Well and good. Do you write about your country, the land you have
lived in so long and know so well, and we will see what we shall see."
So the people of the country--or their scribes, a most gifted
company--began the task of describing that which they knew and loved,
and had lived in and with since birth. And after they were through
they took the fruits of their joint labours to an assemblage of kings
in a far-off place.
And the kings said, after they had read:
"This is beautiful literature, but what is the country like,--that of
which they write?"
So one of their chamberlains, who was a plain soul, said sensibly:
"Your Majesties, there is only one fault to find with the book written
by these people about their country, and that is that they know it too
well to describe it well."
Therefore one of the kings said, "How can that be truth? For what we
are close to we must see more clearly than others who view it from
afar."
So the sensible chamberlain took a certain little object and held it
close to the eyes of one of the kings, and cried, "What is this?"
And the king, blinking and scowling, said after a bit:
"It is a volcano!"
The chamberlain answered, "Wrong; it is an inkstand," and showing it
proved that he spoke truth.
Then he held another thing close before the eyes of another king and
cried again, "What is this?"
And this king, puzzled, said, "I think it is a little piece of cloth."
"Wrong," said the sensible chamberlain. "It is the statue of the
Winged Victory."
And this happened not once but many times until at length the kings
understood. And they made a law that no one should stand too close to
the thing he wished to see clearly. And they added their judgment that
only the visitors to a country could see it as it is.
So the traveller dipped his quill in ink once more and started writing
his book. It is not yet known how successful he was.
Travellers make terrible errors, and yet at times they bring back
fragments of truth that the natives of the land have left unheeded
scattered on the soil of the countryside. Sometimes their fragments
prove to be useless and without value, for there are travellers and
travellers, and some will be as stupid and as blind as the rest are
clever. If this book turns out to be written by one of the stupid
travellers--try to be generous, you Villagers--but then the Village is
always generous!
The studio life of Greenwich is really and truly as primitive, as
picturesque, as poverty-stricken and as gaily adventurous as the
story-tellers say. People really do live in big, quaint, bare rooms
with scarcely enough to buy the necessaries of life; and they are
undoubtedly gay in the doing of it. There is a sort of _camaraderie_
among the "Bohemians" of the world below Fourteenth Street which the
more restricted uptowners find it hard to believe in. It is difficult
for those uptowners to understand a condition of mind which makes it
possible for a number of ambitious young people in a studio building
to go fireless and supperless one day and feast gloriously the next;
to share their rare windfalls without thought of obligation on any
side; to burn candles instead of kerosene in order to dine at
"Polly's"; to borrow each other's last pennies for books or pictures
or drawing materials, knowing that they will all go without butter or
milk for tomorrow's breakfast.
If one is hard up, one expects to be offered a share in someone's good
fortune; if one has had luck oneself, one expects, as a matter of
course, to share it. Such is the code of the studios.
Anabel, for example, is sitting up typing her newest poem at 1
A.M. when a knock comes on the studio door. She opens it to
confront the man who lives on the top floor and whom she has never
met. She hasn't the least idea what his name is. He carries a tea
caddy, a teapot and a teacup.
"Sorry," he explains casually, "but I saw your light, and I thought
you'd let me use your gas stove to make some tea. Mine is out of
commission. Just go ahead with your work, while I fuss about. Maybe
you'd take a cup when it's ready?"
Anabel does, and he retires, cheerfully unconscious of anything
unconventional in the episode.
"Jimmy," calls Louise, the fashion illustrator, from the front door,
one day, "I have to have two dollars to pay my gas bill. Got any?"
"One-sixty," floats down a voice from upstairs.
"Chuck it down, please. I'll be getting some pay tomorrow, and we can
blow it in."
So Jimmy chucks it down. Louise is a nice girl, and would merrily
"chuck" him the same amount if she happened to have it. That's all
there is to it.
There is a great deal of nonsense talked about the wickedness or at
least the impropriety of Greenwich Village--and some of the talk is by
people who ought to know better. The Village is, to be sure, entirely
unconventional and incurably romantic and dramatic in its tastes. It
is appallingly honest, dangerously young in spirit and it is rather
too intense sometimes, keyed up unduly with ambition and emotion and
the eagerness of living. But wicked? Not a bit of it!
And the heavenly, inconsequent, infectious, absurd gaiety of it!
The Lady Who Owns the Parrot (Pollypet is the bird's name) appears in
a new hat; a gorgeous, new hat, with a band of scarlet and green
feathers.
"Whence the more than Oriental splendour?" demands in surprise the
Poet from the Third Floor, who knows that the Lady is not patronising
Fifth Avenue shops at present.
"Pollypet is moulting!" explains the Lady of the Parrot, with a laugh.
Dear, merry, kindly, pitiful life of the studios!--irresponsible,
perhaps, and not of vast economic importance, but so human and so
enchanting; so warm when it is bitter cold, so rich when the larder is
empty, so gay when disappointment and failure are sitting wolf-like at
the door.
A rich woman who loves the Village and often-times goes down there to
buy her gifts rather than get them from the more conservative places
uptown, told me that once when she went to a Village gift-shop to
purchase a number of presents, she found the proprietor away. She was
asked to pick out what she wanted, and make a list. She did. Nobody
even questioned her accuracy. The next time she went she had a friend
with her, who was, I imagine, more or less thrilled by the notion of
approaching the bad, bold city,--she was from out of town. The
shopkeeper was out in the back garden dressed in blue overalls and
shirt, hoeing vigorously.
"Is this the heart of Bohemia?" demanded the astonished provincial.
After their purchases were made and done up, they wanted twine. Don't
forget, please, that this was a shop.
"Twine?" murmured the picturesque proprietor gently. "Of course I
should have some; I must remember to get some twine!"
The sympathies are always ready there, the pennies too, when there are
any! A lame man, a sick woman, a little child, a forlorn dog or
cat,--they have only to go and sit on the steps of one of those
blessed studio buildings, to receive pity, help and cheer. And--ye
gods!--isn't the fact well known! And isn't it taken advantage of,
just! The swift, unreasoning charity of these Bohemians is so well
recognised that it is a regular graft for the unscrupulous.
But they keep right on being cheated right and left; thank heaven,
they will never learn to be wiser!
This difference between the Village view and the conventional
standpoint is very difficult to analyse. It really can only be made
clear by examples. As, for instance:
It is fairly late in the evening. In one of the little tea shops is a
group of girls and men smoking. To them enters a youth, who is hailed
with "How is Dickey's neuralgia?"
The newcomer grins and answers: "Better, I guess. He's had six drinks,
and is now asleep upstairs on Eleanore's couch. He'll be all right
when he wakes up."
They laugh, but quite sympathetically, and the subject is dismissed.
Now, there is a noteworthy point in this trifling episode, though it
may appear a trifle obscure at first. There is, to be sure, nothing
especially interesting or edifying in the fact of a young man's
drinking himself into insensibility to dull a faceache; the thing has
been known before. Neither is it an unheard-of occurrence for a
friendly and charitably inclined woman to grant him harbour room
till he has slept it off. The only striking point about this is that
it is taken so entirely as a matter of course by the Villagers. It no
more astonishes them that Eleanore should give up her couch to a male
acquaintance for an indefinite number of night hours, than that she
should give him a cup of tea. It is entirely the proper, kindly thing
to do; if Eleanore had not done it, she would not be a Villager, and
the Village would have none of her.
[Illustration: MACDOUGAL ALLEY.]
It may be further remarked that, if you should go upstairs to
Eleanore's studio, you would find that she takes the presence on the
couch as calmly as though it were a bundle of laundry. She is in no
sense disconcerted by the occasional snore that wakes the midnight
echoes. She works peacefully on at the black-and-white poster which
she is going to submit tomorrow. She does not resent Dickey at all.
Neither does she watch his slumbers tenderly nor hover over him in the
approved manner. Eleanore is not the least bit sentimental,--few
Villagers are. They are merely romantic and kindly, which are
different and sturdier graces.
Toward morning Dickey will wake and Eleanore will make him black
coffee and send him home. And there will be the end of that.
Conceive such a situation on the outside! Imagine the feminine
flutter of the conventional Julia. Fancy, above all, the hungry gossip
of conventional Julia's conventional friends! But in the Village there
is very little scandal, and practically no slander. They are very slow
to think evil.
And this in spite of their rather ridiculous way of talking. They do,
a number of them, give the uninitiated an impression of moral laxity.
Their phrases, "the free relation," "the rights of sex," "suppressed
desires," "love without bonds," "liberty of the individual" do, when
jumbled up sufficiently, make a composite picture of strange and lurid
aspect. But actually, they are not one atom less moral than any other
group of human beings,--in fact, thanks to their unquestionable ideals
and their habit of fearless thinking, they are, I think, a good bit
more so.
"While I lived in the Village," writes one shrewd man, "I heard of
more impropriety and saw less of it than anywhere I've ever been!"
Here is another glimpse:
The casual visitor to one of the basement "shops" climbs down the
steep steps and pauses at the door to look at the picture. It is
rather early, and only two customers have turned up so far. They are
sitting in deep, comfortable chairs smoking and drinking (as usual,
ginger-ale). One of the proprietors--a charmingly pretty girl--is
sweeping, preparatory to the evening "trade." When her husband comes
in she is going to leave him in charge and go to the Liberal Club for
a dance, so she is exquisitely dressed in a peach-coloured gown, open
of neck and short of sleeve. She is slim and graceful and her
bright-brown hair is cropped in the Village mode. She is the most
attractive maid-of-all-work that the two "customers" have ever seen.
When, pausing in her labours, she offers them her own cigarette case
with the genuine simplicity and grace of a child offering sweetmeats,
their subjugation is complete. Though they are strangers in a strange
land--they have only dropped in to find out an address of a friend who
lives in the Village--they never misunderstand the situation, their
hostess nor the atmosphere for a moment. No one misunderstands the
charming, picturesque _camaraderie_ of the Village--unless they have
been reading Village novelists, that breed held in contempt by Harry
Kemp and all the Greenwichers. Anyone who goes there with an open mind
will carry it away filled with nothing but good things--save sometimes
perhaps a little envy.
And, by the bye, that habit of calling at strange places to locate
people is emphatically a Village custom. Or rather, perhaps, it should
be put the other way: the habit of giving some "shop" or eating place
instead of a regular address is most prevalent among Villagers. A
Villager is seldom in his own quarters unless he has a shop of his
own. But if he really "belongs" he is known to hundreds of other
people, and the enquiring caller will be passed along from one place
to another, until, in time, he will be almost certain to locate his
nomadic friend.
"Billy Robinson? Why, yes, of course, we know him. No, he hasn't been
in tonight. But you try some of the other places that he goes to. He's
very apt to drop in at the 'Klicket' during the evening. Or if he
isn't there try 'The Mad Hatter's,'--'Down the Rabbit Hole' you
know;--or let's see--he'll be sure to show up at the Club some time
before midnight. If you don't find him come back here; maybe he'll
drop in later, or else someone will who has seen him."
Of course, he is found eventually,--usually quite soon, for the
Village is a small place, and a true Village in its neighbourliness
and its readiness to pass a message along.
Really, there is nothing quainter about it than this intimate and
casual quality, such as is known in genuine, small country towns.
Fancy a part of New York City--Gotham, the cold, the selfish, the
unneighbourly, the indifferent--in which everyone knows everyone else
and takes a personal interest in them too; where distances are slight
and pleasant, where young men in loose shirts with rolled-up sleeves,
or girls hatless and in working smocks stroll across Sixth Avenue from
one square to another with as little self-consciousness as though they
were meandering down Main Street to a game of tennis or the village
store! Sixth Avenue, indeed, has come to mean nothing more to them
than a rustic bridge or a barbed-wire fence,--something to be gotten
over speedily and forgotten. They even, by some alchemy of view point,
seem to give it a rural air from Jefferson Market down to Fourth
Street--these cool-looking, hatless young people who make their
leisurely way down Washington Place or along Fourth Street. People
pass them,--people in hats, coats and carrying bundles; but the
Villagers do not notice them. They do not even look at them pityingly;
they do not look at them at all. Your true Green-Village denizen does
not like to look at unattractive objects if he can possibly avoid it.
Of course, they do make use of Sixth Avenue occasionally, on their
rare trips uptown. But it is in the same spirit that a country dweller
would take the railway in order to get into the city on necessary
business. As a matter of fact there is no corner of New York more
conveniently situated for transportation than this particular section
of Greenwich. I came across a picturesque real estate advertisement
the other day:
"If you ever decide to kill your barber and fly the country,
commit the crime at the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth
Avenue. There is probably no other place in the world that
offers as many avenues of flight."
But nothing short of dire necessity ever takes a Villager uptown. He,
or she, may go downtown but not up. Uptown nearly always means
something distasteful and boring to the Village; they see to it that
they have as few occasions for going there as possible.
Anyway, uptown, for them, ends very far downtown! The fifties,
forties, thirties, even the twenties, are to them the veritable
wilderness, the variously repugnant sections of relatively outer
darkness.
Do you remember Colonel Turnbull who had so much trouble in selling
his house at Eighth Street because it was so far out of town? Here is
a modern and quite surprisingly neat analogy:
Two Village women of my acquaintance met the other day. Said one
tragically: "My dear, isn't it awful? We've had to move uptown! Since
the baby came, we need a larger house, but it almost breaks my heart!"
"I should think so!" gasped the second woman in consternation. "You've
always been such regular Villagers. What shall we do without you? It's
terrible! Where are you moving to, dear?"
"--West Eleventh Street!" sobbed the sad, prospective exile.
There are Villagers who while scarcely celebrities are characters so
well known, locally, as to stand out in bizarre relief even against
that variegated background of personalities. There is Doris, the
dancer, slim, strange, agile, with a genius for the centre of the
Bohemian stage, an expert, exotic style of dancing, and a singular and
touching passion for her only child. At the Greenwich masquerades she
used to shine resplendent, her beautiful, lithe body glorious with
stage-jewels, and not much else; for the time being she has flitted
away, but some day she will surely return like a darkly brilliant
butterfly, and the Village will again thrill to her dancing. There is
Hyppolite, the anarchist, dark and fervid; there is "Bobby" Edwards,
the Village troubadour, with his self-made and self-decorated
_ukelele_, and his cat, Dirty Joe; there is Charlie-immortal
barber!--whose trade is plied in sublime accordance with Village
standards, and whose "ad" runs as follows:
"The only barber shop in the Village where work is done
conforming to its ideals.... Four barbers in attendance
supervised by the popular boy-proprietor--CHARLIE."
There is Peggy, the artist's model, who has posed for almost every
artist of note, and who is as pretty as a pink carnation.
There is Tiny Tim--of immense proportions--who keeps the Tiny Tim
Candy Shop; an impressive person who carries trays of candy about the
Village, and who swears that he has sweets to match your every mood.
"If they don't express your character, I'll take them back!" he
declares. Though how he could take them back.... However, in the
Village you need not be too exact. There is "Ted" Peck's Treasure Box.
Here all manner of charming things are sold; and here Florence Beales
exhibits her most exquisite studies in photography.
There is the strong-minded young woman, who is always starting clubs;
there is the Osage Indian who speaks eight languages and draws like a
god; there are a hundred and one familiar spirits of the Village,
eccentric, inasmuch as they are unlike the rest of the world, but oh,
believe me, a goodly company to have as neighbours.
People have three mouthpieces, three vehicles of expression, besides
their own lips. We are not talking now about that self-expression
which is to be found in individual act or word in any form. We are
speaking in a more practical and also a more social sense. In this
sense we may cite three distinct ways in which a community may become
articulate: through its press; through its clubs or associations;
through its entertainments and social life. Greenwich has a number of
magazines, an even larger number of clubs and an unconscionable number
of ways of entertaining itself--from theatrical companies to balls!
Of course the best known of the Greenwich magazines is _The Masses_,
owned by Max Eastman and edited by Floyd Dell. It has, in a sense,
grown beyond the Village, inasmuch as it now circulates all over the
country, wherever socialistic or anarchistic tendencies are to be
found. But its inception was in Greenwich Village, and in its infant
days it strongly reflected the radical, young, insurgent spirit which
was just beginning to ferment in the world below Fourteenth Street. In
those days it was poor and struggling too (as is altogether fitting
in a Village paper) and lost nothing in freshness and spontaneity and
vigour from that fact.
"You might tell," said Floyd Dell, with a twinkle, "of the days when
_The Masses_ was in Greenwich Avenue, and the editor, the business
manager and the stenographer played ball in the street all day long!"
It is, perhaps, symbolic that _The Masses_ in moving uptown stopped at
Fourteenth Street, the traditional and permanent boundary line. There
it may reach out and touch the great world, yet still remain part of
the Village where it was born.
Here is one man's views of the Liberal Club. I am half afraid to quote
them, they sound so heretical, but I wish to emphasise the fact that
they are quoted. They might be the snapping of the fox at the sour
grapes for all I know! Though this particular man seemed calm and
dispassionate. "The Liberal Club Board," he said, "is a purely
autocratic institution. It is collectively a trained poodle, though
composed of nine members. The procedure is to make a few long
speeches, praise the club, and re-elect the Board. Perfectly simple.
But--did you say _Liberal_ Club?" He used to sit on the Board himself,
too!
A visiting Scotch socialist proclaimed it, without passion, a "hell of
a place," and some of its most striking anarchistic leaders, "vera
interestin' but terrible damn fools"! But he was, doubtless, an
eccentric though an experienced and dyed-in-the-wool socialist who had
lectured over half the globe. It is recorded of him that once when a
certain young and energetic Village editor had been holding forth
uninterruptedly and dramatically for an hour on the rights of the
working-man, etc., etc., the visiting socialist, who had been watching
his fervent gesticulations with absorbed attention, suddenly leaned
forward and seized the lapel of his coat.
"Mon!" he exclaimed earnesly, "do ye play tennis?"
Just what is the Liberal Club?
You may have contradictory answers commensurate with the number of
members you interrogate. One will tell you that it is a fake; one that
it is the only vehicle of free speech; Arthur Moss says it is "the
most _il_-liberal club in the world"! Floyd Dell says it is
paramountly a medium for entertainment, and that it is "not so much a
clearing house of new ideas as of new people"!
The Liberal Club goes up, and the Liberal Club goes down. It has its
good seasons and its bad, its fluctuations as to standards and
favour, its share in the curious and inevitable tides that swing all
associations back and forth like pendulums.
There is a real passion for dancing in the Village, and it is
beautiful dancing that shows practice and a natural sense of rhythm.
The music may be only from a victrola or a piano in need of tuning,
but the spirit is, most surely, the vital spirit of the dance. At the
Liberal Club everyone dances. After you have passed through the lounge
room--the conventional outpost of the club, with desks and tables and
chairs and prints and so on--you find yourself in a corridor with long
seats, and windows opening on to Nora Van Leuwen's big, bare,
picturesque Dutch Oven downstairs. On the other side of the corridor
is the dance room--also the latest exhibition. Some of the pictures
are very queer indeed. The last lot I saw were compositions in deadly
tones of magenta and purple. The artist was a tall young man, the son
of a famous illustrator. He strolled in quite tranquilly for a
dance,--with those things of his in full view! All the courage is not
on battlefields.
Said a girl, who, Village-like, would not perjure her soul to be
polite:
"Why so much magenta?"
And said he quite sweetly:
"Why not? I can paint people green if I like, can't I?"
With which he glided imperturbably off in a fox trot with a girl in an
"art sweater."
Harry Kemp says: "They make us sick with their scurrilous, ignorant
stories of the Village. Pose? Sure!--it's two-thirds pose. But the
rest is beautiful. And even the pose is beautiful in its way. Life is
rotten and beautiful both at once. So is the Village. The Village is
big in idea and it's growing. They talk of its being a dead letter.
It's just beginning. First it--the Village, as it is now--was really a
sort of off-shoot of London and Paris. Now it's itself and I tell you
it's beautiful, and more remarkable than people know.
"Uptowners, outsiders, come in here and insist on getting in; and, fed
on the sort of false stuff that goes out through 'novelists' and
'reporters,' think that anything will go in the Liberal Club! They
come here and insult the women members, and we all end up in a free
fight every week or so. All the fault of the writers who got us wrong
in the first place, and handed on the wrong impression to the
world...."
The studio quarters of the Village are located in various places--the
South Side of Washington Square, the little lost courts and streets
and corners everywhere, and--Macdougal Alley, Washington Mews, and
the new, rather stately structures on Eighth Street, which are almost
too grand for real artists and yet which have attracted more than a
few nevertheless. I suppose that the Alley,--jutting off from the
famous street named for Alexander Macdougal,--is the best known.
I remember that once, some years ago, I was hurrying, by a short cut,
from Eighth Street to Waverly Place, and saw something which made me
stop short in amazement. As unexpectedly as though it had suddenly
sprung there, I beheld a little street running at right angles from
me, parallel with Eighth, but ending, like a _cul de sac_, in houses
like those with which it was edged. It was a quaint and
foreign-looking little street and seemed entirely out of place in New
York,--and especially out of place plunged like that into the middle
of a block.
But that was not the oddest part of it. In that street stood talking a
girl in gorgeous Spanish dress and a man in Moorish costume. The warm
reds and greens and russets of their garments made an unbelievable
patch of colour in the grey March day. And this in New York!
A friendly truck driver, feeding his horses, saw my bewilderment, and
laughed.
[Illustration: A GREENWICH STUDIO. Choosing models.]
"That's Macdougal's Alley," he volunteered.
That meant nothing to me then.
"What is it?" I demanded, devoured by curiosity; "the stage door of a
theatre,--or what?"
He laughed again.
"It is just Macdougal's Alley!" he repeated, as though that explained
everything.
So it did, when I came to find out about it.
The Alley and Washington Mews are probably the most famous artist
quarters in the city, and some of our biggest painters and sculptors
once had studios in one or the other,--those, that is, that haven't
them still. Of course the picturesquely attired individuals I had
caught sight of were models--taking the air, or snatching a moment for
flirtation. Naturally they would not have appeared in costume in any
other street in New York, but this, you see, was Macdougal Alley, and
as my friend, the truck driver, seemed to think, that explains
everything!
As for the Mews, they are fixing it up in great shape; and as for
those Eighth-Street studios, they are too beautiful for words. You
look out on Italian gardens, and you know that you are nowhere near
New York, with its prose and drudgery. If for a moment it seems all a
bit too perfect for the haphazard, inspirational loveliness of the
Village, you will surely have an arresting instinct which will tell
you that it is just consummating a Village dream; it is just making
what every Villager lives to make come true: perfect artistic beauty.
As we have seen, dancing is a real passion in the Village. So we can
scarcely leave it without touching on the "Village dances" which have
been so striking a feature of recent times and have proved so useful
and so fruitful to the tired Sunday-supplement newspaperman. There are
various sorts, from the regular pageants staged by the Liberal Club
and the Kit Kat, to those of more modest pretensions given by
individual Villagers or groups of Villagers.
The _Quatres Arts_ balls of Paris doubtless formed the basis for these
affairs; indeed, a description given me years ago by William Dodge,
the artist, might almost serve as the story of one of these Village
balls today. And Doris, who, I believe, appeared on one occasion as
"Aphrodite,"--in appropriate "costume"--recalls the celebrated model
Sara Brown who electrified Paris by her impersonation of "Cleopatra"
at a _"Quatz 'Arts"_ gathering,--somewhat similarly arrayed,--or
should we say decorated?
The costumes,--many of them at least,--are largely--paint! This is not
nearly as improper as it sounds. Splashes of clever red and subtle
purple will quite creditably take the place of more cumberous and
expensive dressing,--or at least will pleasantly eke it out. Colour
has long been recognised as a perfectly good substitute for cloth.
Have you forgotten the small boy's abstract of the first history
book--" ... The early Britons wore animals' skins in winter, and in
summer they painted themselves blue." I am convinced that wode was the
forerunner of the dress of the Village ball!
The Kit Kat, an artists' association, is remarkable for one curious
custom. Its managing board is a profound mystery. No one knows who is
responsible for the invitations sent out, so there can be no jealousy
nor rancour if people don't get asked. If an invited guest chooses to
bring a friend he may, but he is solely responsible for that friend
and if his charge proves undesirable he will be held accountable and
will thereafter be quietly dropped from the guest list of subsequent
balls. And still he will never know who has done it! Hence, the Kit
Kat is a most formidable institution, and invitations from its
mysterious "Board" are hungrily longed for!
Every season there are other balls, too; among the last was the "Apes
and Ivory" affair, a study in black and white, as may be gathered;
then there was the "Rogue's Funeral" ball. This was to commemorate the
demise of a certain little magazine called the _Rogue_, whose
career was short and unsuccessful. They kept the funeral atmosphere
so far as to hire a hearse for the transportation of some of the
guests, _but_--
"We put the first three letters of funeral in capitals," says one of
the participants casually.
The proper thing, when festivities are over, is to go to
breakfast,--at "Polly's," the Village Kitchen or the Dutch Oven,
perhaps. Of course, nothing on earth but the resiliency, the electric
vitality of youth, could stand this sort of thing; but then, the
Village is young; it is preeminently the land of youth, and the wine
of life is still fresh and strong enough in its veins to come
buoyantly through what seems to an older consciousness a good bit more
like an ordeal than an amusement!
And yet--and yet--somehow I cannot think that these balls and pageants
and breakfasts are truly typical of the real Village--I mean the
newest and the best Village--the Village which, like the Fairy Host,
sings to the sojourners of the grey world to come and join them in
their dance, with "the wind sounding over the hill." My Village is
something fresher and gayer and more child-like than that. There is in
it nothing of decadence.
But, as John Reed says--
_"... There's anaemia
Ev'n in Bohemia,
That there's not more of it--_ there _is the miracle!"_
For still the Village is, or has been, inarticulate. Individually it
has found speech--it has expressed itself in diverse and successful
forms. But there remains a void of voices! A community must strongly
utter something, and must find mouths and mouthpieces for the purpose.
It was hard to find, hard to locate, hard to vocalise, this message of
the Village; eventually it came up from the depths and pitched its
tone bravely and sweetly, so that men might hear and understand.
The need was for something concrete and yet varied, which could cry
out alone,--a delicious voice in the wilderness, if you like! There
have been play-acting companies, "The Washington Square Players," "The
Provincetown Players," and others. But something was still wanting.
Sometimes it strikes us that wonderful things happen haphazard like
meteors and miracles. But I believe if we could take the time to
investigate, we would find that most of these miraculous and glorious
oaks grow out of a quiet commonplace acorn.
Richard Wagner once held an idea--perhaps it would better be termed an
ideal--concerning art expression. He declared (you may read it in
"_Oper und Drama_" unless you are too war-sided) that all the art
forms belonged together: that no one branch of the perfect art form
could live apart from its fellows, that is, in its integral parts. He
contended (and enforced in Bayreuth) that all the arts were akin: that
the brains which created music, drama, colour effects, plastic
sculptural effects--anything and everything that belonged to artistic
expression--were, or should be, welded into one supreme artistic
expression. He believed this implicitly, and like other persons who
believe well enough, he "got away with it." In Bayreuth, he
established for all time a form of synthetic art which has never been
rivalled.
Now Wagner has very little apparently to do with Greenwich Village.
And yet this big world-notion is gaining way there. They are
finding--as anyone must have known they would find--a new mood
expression, a new voice. And, wise, not in their generation, but in
all the generations, the Village has seized on this new vehicle with
characteristic energy.
The new Greenwich Village Theatre which Mrs. Sam Lewis is
godmothering, is--unless many sensible and farseeing persons are much
mistaken--going to be the new Voice of the Village. It is going to
express what the Villagers themselves are working for, day and night:
beauty, truth, liberty, novelty, drama. It is going, in its theatrical
form, to fill the need for something concrete and yet various,
something involving all, yet evolved from all; something which shall
somehow unite all the scattered rainbow filaments of Our Village into
a lovely texture with a design that even a Philistine world can
understand.
"Young, new American playwrights first," says Mrs. Lewis. "After that
as many great plays of all kinds as we can find. But we want to open
the channel for expression. We want to give the Village a voice."
And when she says the Village she does not mean just the section
technically known as Greenwich. She means--I take it--that greater
neighbourhood of the world, which is fervently concerned in the new
and thrilling and wonderful and untrammelled things of life. They have
no place to sing, out in the every-day world, but in the Village they
are going to be heard.
And I think the new Greenwich Village Theatre is going to be one of
their most resonant mouthpieces!
A LAST WORD
And after all this,--what of the Village? Just what is it?
"In my experience," said the writing man of sententious sayings,
"there have been a dozen 'villages.' The Village changes are like the
waves of the sea!"
Interrogated further, he mentioned various phases which Greenwich had
known. The studio-and-poverty Bohemian epoch, the labour and anarchy era,
the futurist fad, the "free love" cult, the Bohemian-and-masquerade-ball
period, the psychoanalysis craze; the tea-shop epidemic, the
arts-and-crafts obsession, the play-acting mania; and other violent and
more or less transient enthusiasms which had possessed the Village during
the years he had lived there. Not wholly transient, he admitted.
Something of each and all of them had remained--had stuck--as he
expressed it. The Village assimilates ideas with miraculous speed; it
gobbles them up, gets strong and well on the diet, and asks for more. It
is so eager for novelty and new ideals and new view-points that if
nothing entirely virgin comes along, it will take something quite old,
and give it a new twist and adopt it with Village-like ardour.
Oh, you mustn't laugh at the Village, you wise uptowners,--or if you
laugh it must be very, very gently and kindly, as you laugh at
children; and rather reverently, too, in the knowledge that in lots of
essentials the children know ever so much more than you do!
It is true that changes do come over the Village like the waves of the
sea, even as my friend said. But they are colourful waves, prismatic
waves, fresh, invigourating and energetic waves, carrying on their
crests iridescent seaweed and glittering shells and now and then a
pearl. The Village has its treasure, have no doubt of that; never a
phase touches it but leaves it the richer for the contact.
You, too, going down into this port o' dreams will win something of
the wealth that is of the heart and soul and mind. You will come away
with the sense of wider horizons and deeper penetrations than you knew
before. You will find novel colours in the work-a-day world and a sort
of quaint music in the song of the city. Some of the glowing reds and
greens and purples that you saw those grown-up children in the Village
joyously splashing on their wooden toys or the walls of their absurd
and charming "shops" will somehow get into the grey fabric of your
life; and a certain eager urging undertone of idealism and hope and
sturdy aspiration will make you restless as you follow your common
round. Perhaps you will go back. Perhaps you will keep it as a rainbow
memory, a visualisation of the make-believe country where anything is
possible. But in any case you will not forget.
Many a place gets into your mind and creates nostalgia when you are
far from it. But Greenwich Village gets into your heart, and you will
never be quite able to lose the magic of it all the days of your life.
THE END