Postcard of Polly’s Restaurant, Greenwich Village (ca. 1917) | Jessie Tarbox Beals / Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Miss Mathilde Mourraille, 1938
This past October, the New York Public Library launched Becoming Bohemia: Greenwich Village, 1912–1923, an exhibition documenting one of the most impactful countercultures in American history. The show includes rare editions of literary journals, including the April 1920 issue of the Little Review, which led to the obscenity trial for James Joyce’s Ulysses; original photographs of Village personalities, like Tiny Tim and Romany Marie, and famous locales, like the Washington Square bookshop; first-edition books by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Gertrude Stein, and Emma Goldman; John Reed and Louise Bryant’s personal accounts of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution; and as an assortment of playbills, advertisements, sketches, and costume designs.
Michael Inman, the Susan Jaffe Tane Curator of Rare Books at the NYPL and curator of the exhibit, sat down with Mary Karmelek, a New School MA candidate in Creative Writing, to discuss the legacy of the Greenwich Village avant-garde. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Mary Karmelek: What brought this exhibition about?
Michael Inman: We have really rich, deep collections of materials related to Greenwich Village, especially dealing with this period of the Village’s history. When the wider public thinks of Bohemias or avant-garde settings, especially from that time period, the early twentieth century, their thoughts might gravitate towards Paris in the 1920s, or Berlin and London, cities better-known for their avant-garde or political activity. But the Village still basks in the afterglow of its Bohemian past, even though today it’s certainly a very toney, upscale area that most artists or starving writers couldn’t afford to live in. So I thought it was important, now a century later, to return where much of that story began—a history of the Village as a center of political and artistic innovation. Many of the issues that activists, artists, and writers were grappling with at that time—everything from reproductive freedom to freedom of speech, as well as the role of women or immigrants in American society—are still very important today.
Karmelek: Can you talk a little bit more about the significance of the small presses and all the literature that was coming out at the time?
Inman: Many of the poets who were active in the Village would go on to be very highly regarded figures in American literature—and become canonical figures, in a lot of cases. But at the time, they were not well-known writers; they were scrounging around to earn a living and get their first works into print. The Village was a very open environment and conducive to artists who were trying new things, who were very much attuned to the avant-garde in art and literature, especially as in terms of events that were taking place in Europe, trying to integrate these stylistic innovations into their own works. The Village was a great place for them to work because it was very accepting. It was off the beaten path at that time—literally, almost, but also in terms of American culture, and it gave them that artistic license and freedom to innovate.
Hand in hand with the individuals working on developing forms of literary expression, you had the rise of small magazines, many founded by the writers themselves. These were small magazines with small circulations, but they were very well regarded. Magazines like the Dial and the Little Review weren’t as venerated as they are today, but they certainly were very important in assisting the rise of avant-garde literature and modernism in the United States.
Karmelek: Is there a modern or a contemporary equivalent? Social media works in a similar vein of creating community, yet it commodifies a lot of this—like the idea of bohemianism. But do you see any parallels today?
Inman: I would say that certainly the rise of the internet has changed the publishing landscape writ large, but also especially in terms of these kinds of publications. But you still do see actual physical publications being issued, underground sorts of publications. Zines, for example, would be one of the closest analogs to that time, in terms of being magazines that are published very cheaply, very often, and have small circulation numbers and small audiences. One of the questions I asked myself is, Does this exist or could it ever exist again? Has technology superseded all that or rendered it, not obsolete, but just provided other avenues for the dissemination of avant-garde literature or art or political thought?
Karmelek: A piece in the exhibit mentioned tourists visiting Greenwich Village looking for the real bohemian experience. Even then the experience was being commodified as something that people could come and experience.
Inman: It did strike me how quickly that took place. This was really the first large-scale bohemian setting in US history, and it was rather pervasive in the press for a while. There were stories in mainstream publications about the activities of these crazy bohemians in the Village and their escapades and their questionable morals—but certainly also their experimental works.
The commercialization of the Village led to the demise of that initial wave of avant-garde bohemian activity. It set the precedent for what you see born out again and again, not only in New York but in other settings as well across the US and beyond, where you have a group of artists, writers, activists who move into an area, usually because the real estate prices are depressed and they can afford to live there. And also perhaps it’s off the radar of middle America, and they can kind of go about their artistic work or their political work quietly. But then eventually word starts getting out and other people think, I want to be a part of that as well. So more people move in, and as that happens, the scene becomes more and more watered down in a sense, and the real estate prices then start to go up and it becomes, as you were saying, more commercialized: people trading on the notion of Bohemia rather than adhering to the original ideas or precepts of that particular scene. Eventually the original artists and activists move out and go somewhere else and set up shop, and the process repeats.
This was probably the first time in American history that we really see that pattern established. It becomes a caricature of itself; you have it flowering again a few years later in the sixties with the rise of the hippies and the counterculture, and then in the seventies with the downtown scene, the eighties. And you see these waves of artistic or bohemian life take place in the village, a life cycle take place again and again.
Karmelek: I was one of those young writers not from the city, who thought I needed to get there. Now that I’m here, I have this cognitive dissonance between what my idea of Greenwich Village always was and what I’m experiencing: this mixture of the very richest and the very poorest of people coexisting. I’m curious if there are any places currently in the Greenwich Village area that you feel like still hold onto some of this bohemianism or the very essence of the spirit that was part of this original group.
Inman: So much of the Village’s physical locations are gone. A lot of these buildings were derelict at the time—we’re talking about the 1910s—and so they just haven’t survived. It’s also just the way it goes in the city, a building gets knocked down and they put up a new super-tall skyscraper.
I think there are glimmers of that spirit in Washington Square itself, a community space meeting room, where you see people on any given day just doing their own thing, waving their own flag or marching through their own beat. Walking around the village, there still are places. There’s the house famously where Edna St. Vincent Millay lived—supposedly the narrowest apartment building in New York City. Some places like that do survive.
Karmelek: Is there an author or activist in the exhibit you are most drawn to?
Inman: I loved them all for various reasons. They’re all such interesting characters and most of them went on to quite illustrious careers. But the one who to my mind is most emblematic of the avant-garde aspect of Village life at that time is the Baroness Elsa Von Freytag. She’s a character who I think we’re still trying to come to grips with. I think she was years and years ahead of not only her contemporaries but most of us today. I don’t know if you had an opportunity to see photos of her in the many costumes that she wore. I mean, she would catch people’s eye on the streets today in New York, which is saying something.
Karmelek: I kept thinking, How is there not already a TV show about this specific period and location in New York?
Inman: They were enmeshed in each other’s lives, which makes for interesting storytelling. Certainly, many of them went on to very important careers in art, literature, politics, and more. To look at them during this formative period is very interesting, set against the backdrop of when we entered the First World War, and for a period of about 19 months or so, the country lost its collective mind. It went off the deep end of things. It was a dark period in American history, and as noted in the exhibition, any tolerance of dissent or non-conventional behavior vanished overnight.
The war itself was one of the things that led to the ultimate decline of the Village. You had people who previously had been very friendly with one another suddenly taking sides, and those who spoke out against the war were often dealt with very harshly by the government and others in both the private and public sectors. And then there were those who joined the war effort. It created this tension, this lack of unity, whereas before there had been this collective spirit—an “us against the world” mentality, as Villagers.
One movie that comes to mind is Reds, the Warren Beatty film from 1981. A lot of the characters who feature in this exhibition are mentioned, such as Eugene O’Neill, Emma Goldman, and of course John Reed and Louise Bryant. But that’s really the one movie or TV show I can think that actually really focuses on this period in the Village. So I think your idea is a good one. We should get together and write the script for that.
