The Restless Mecca

On a dusty table in the back room of a Greenwich Village antique shop lies an etching that pictures a mighty stand of oak being cleared to make way for the construction of a cabin. A few disconsolate figures, their heads bowed, mourn the vile encroachment of the metropolis. The title of the etching is The End of Greenwich Village and the date on it is 1859.

Greenwich Village ended, then, more than a hundred years ago. The crooked lanes of "Grenege," the Green Village, where small landholders grew tobacco and whence large landholders fled to avoid creditors, were being joined to the busy geometrical grid of Manhattan. "This pleasant and salubrious corner," this ancient Dutch settlement of Greenwijk which had appeared on maps as early as 1645, was dying.

It has been "dying" ever since, regularly. Each generation, the Village has had its Cassandras to cry its coming doom, and the present generation is no exception.The truth, of course, is that Greenwich Village is no longer as it was and never has been. A living organism, not a fossil, its restless change is the constant proof of its vitality. Today the Village remains an essential element not merely of the New York scene but of America's long love affair with the twin mistresses Freedom and Rebellion.

The importance of the Village as actual place and symbol of change and experiment in America is demonstrated by the pathetic letter sent off by a Village wife, Mrs. Melville, to her mother: "Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around."

The rumor did get around, alas for Herman, whose spouse passionately desired that he spend his time gainfully writing serial stories about whaling; Mrs. Melville bowed her head with oh! the shame of it, that her beloved Herman lay on his couch all morning, deceiving her with a muse; eventually Herman hired himself out as a salaried employee. But there has always been this small throbbing ventricle in the busy heart of New York where the poet might know honor and where the real shame for a wife would come if Herman stopped writing poetry. For all these years now, the inventors, composers, painters, poets, playwrights, and the various would-be and might-be geniuses have eventually floated upstream until they came to rest, at least briefly, in Greenwich Village, U.S.A.

They have sometimes been as respectable as Henry James, who later turned into a wooden-nosed Englishman, and sometimes as disreputable as Joe Gould, the shaggy Harvard-graduate hobo, author of the endless and unpublished Oral History of the World, a grinning gnome who lived on free cafeteria ketchup and national publicity, both of which are packed with vitamins and minerals. The geniuses have found inspiration in a certain lounging ease of life among an all-American stew of Italians, Irish, Chinese and Jews who lived in and around the Village simply because it was their neighborhood. As dogs have fleas, so the geniuses also found comfort in the hectoring company of the gaffers, cadgers, sexual experimenters, political evangels, and the doddering remnants of elegance near Washington Square and Fifth Avenue.

At its earliest beginnings, the Village was a trading post where Canarsie Indians bargained over hides with the Dutch settlers; there were springs of fresh water on Spring Street, and Minetta Brook wound along Minetta Lane, and wolves, panthers, moose, wild turkeys and heath hens inaugurated a tradition of good hunting which is carried on now only by the Continental-clad wolves who prowl the still-crooked streets of Minetta and Spring and the rest of the drained, lit, built-up and leveled-down Village of today. In those antique times, besides the Dutch and Indians, there came some English, some French Walloons, some Jews (a tiny pre-Revolutionary Portuguese Hebrew cemetery still slices into the barrage of real estate on Eleventh Street near Sixth Avenue); a number of Negro freedmen and escaped slaves took their best hold on liberty in the Village, and according to some authorities, a few Spanish pirates dropped their (continued on page 56) (continued from page 50) eye patches into the bounding main and retired to Perry Street. (Do they now model Hathaway Shirts? And is there really any buried treasure? Might be, beneath the pipes and cables and sewers and foundations upon foundations.)

All this began when the Green Village was a tidy little settlement insulated from the Manhattan colony, thanks to swamp, salt marsh, forest and cripple bush. Gradually the wild berries and nuts disappeared (later to reappear in health stores on Eighth Street, along with queen bee jelly and wheat germ); the English installed tobacco plantations; Sir Peter Warren owned almost the whole caboodle. He died in 1752, "removed by the Almighty from a place of Honour to an eternity of Happiness," and his various heirs began the continuous process of bickering and speculating, dividing and subdividing. On rainy nights bearded duffers warmed their backsides by the fire and grieved over the good old days of the Village.

Soon the skirmishes of 1776 came close; Aaron Burr galloped through the meadow where the Fifth Avenue bus turns around; history advanced. But advance as history must, New York City could never quite digest this winding knot of exception on its favorite island; Manhattan swallowed it down, it swallowed it up, but Greenwich Village would not be dissolved, straightened, tamed, numbed or numbered. And when it allowed itself partly to be numbered, it produced such examples of arithmetical chaos as an intersection of Fourth and Tenth Streets – a tribute to the old times of Indian trails, when "parallel" and "perpendicular" meant as little as "pension" and "job security" to the true Villager of today. The surveyors who laid out the map of Greenwich Village had irrigated their wits with birchbark wine.

That allegedly parallel streets should meet and cross perhaps helps to explain why Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and Edgar Allan Poe came to the Village in the early and middle Nineteenth Century; West Tenth Street and West Fourth Street persisted in meeting and crossing, an assignation which must be a love match since it is the despair of logical minds, and so Ada Clare (author of "the most beautiful poems in the language," according to the New York Atlas), also came to smoke (!), drink (!) and talk impertinently with men neither her father, brother nor husband (!). Artistic types like dear Ada, who somehow had a child without being married (due to too much smoking, drinking and conversation), and Henry Clapp, who found in Greenwich Village the gabled houses and the charm of Paris, began to gather the noise of Nineteenth Century art about their organizing spirits. Walt Whitman toured the streets with crumbs for the birds on his shoulders ("All the critters come to me," he said); Mark Twain, rescued from bankruptcy by a lecture tour, lived at 14 West Tenth Street and then, perhaps trying to escape that maddening intersection with Fourth Street, moved to 21 Fifth Avenue. Here he took the courage to write blasphemous books which were published only after his death.

There were the famous from all over the world, like John Masefield, or later, like Maxim Gorky, who had a secretary with whom he was not allowed to register in his hotel because he admitted freely that they took dictation together. There were also the generous, like Luke O'Connor, in whose tavern almost anyone could cash a check. Luke's place came to be known as "The Working Girl's Home" because a girl could enjoy a quiet glass under the amiable protection of Luke without being disturbed by the police. When Luke's place closed, the old times were over once again.

Now, of course, time really is moving fast; the 1960 "End of Greenwich Village" tramples down that Greenwich Village which subverts the Greenwich Village which preceded it; and again change destroys its "essential character." New high-rise apartment houses, replacing the handsomely decrepit fretwork tenements, give sign of the alteration in olde New York wrought by cold cash and hot mortgage. The restless spirit of consumership has discovered the charm of nonconformity, along with coffee houses, hi-fi, and girls in tight pants; but the new, prosperous, intelligent, gifted wageslaves who seek to recapture their perhaps never-was youth by moving to the Village want to nonconform in comfort, like everyone else, with built-in air conditioners, speedy silent elevators, and a rent they are not ashamed to murmur aloud.

In the process, some of the traditional Village landmarks – the old Brevoort Hotel, the gingerbread apartment houses, and the Waldorf Cafeteria, where Maxwell Bodenheim came to make fun of the junkies, and stayed and stayed – have disappeared. Many fine blocks full of wood-burning fireplaces have fallen under the builder's heartless ax, making way for central heating, low ceilings and high rent. The Village is very much a state of mind, usually centered at such landmarks as Washington Square, Sheridan Square, and a shifting few favorite restaurants, streets, places and events; unofficially – there can hardly be an official map for a tradition – the outlines of the Village begin to manifest themselves at Fourteenth Street on the north, the Hudson River on the west, Canal Street to the south, and Broadway on the east. But these are not firm outlines, merely hints and histories. Since there are Villagers living on Fifteenth Street, is this not the Village? And what about Sixteenth Street? And Seventeenth? And Eighteenth? No, Eighteenth Street is certainly lost to another style, but still, how many hairs make a beard and what does a neighbor street need in order to join the Village?

Now the traditional locus of the Village is being bulged outward by an American need to build a bigger, better headquarters for nonconformity: There is the chic Fifth Avenue Village, extended up East Eighth Street; there is the clean, new, monumental and boring Washington Square Village development, which replaced an old slum just south of Washington Square with a huge tenement cake of glass and aluminum (abstract expressionist paintings in the lobby); there are the rehabilitated Italian and Irish slums adjoining, and the refurbished dockside tenements, and a general groaning and heaving of the land as real estate developers rush in to discover "the charm of Village living." Some brilliant mice seem to have discovered a deep truth: Build a better people trap and the world will beat a path to your door. All you have to do is stand in front of a building in a suit with wide lapels and the crusted bricks come slipping down, thinking they recognize a builder.

The Village's first stock brokerage office has opened on Sixth Avenue, around the corner from the offices of The Village Voice, on ground hallowed by the tread of patrolling actors, artists, technocrats, ancient crones, homosexuals; it lies catty-corner across from the Women's House of Detention, a dismal warehouse in which prostitutes, shoplifters, junkies, molls, accessories-after-the-fact are kept in inventory. Occasionally the girls stored in their coolers grow restive, as growing girls will do; they lean against the bars and holler at each other, or bang their eating tools, screaming curses or impractical invitations into the street. Now the stroller below, wild with desire, can shout back up at them the bid and asked price on General Electric or A.T.&T., fresh off the tape.

Today the Village seems, to those for whom it was a part of their youth, like one of those jigsaw puzzles in which you put together the two hundred pieces and are rewarded with a vision of a sylvan glen and a perfect beauty dawdling from a rope swing, dressed only in her smile. Under "B" in the index of a book on the Post World War I Village, we find these entries: Babbittry; Basement tenements; Birth control clinics; Block, the, as a unit; Bodenheim, Maxwell; (continued on page 112) Restless Mecca(continued from page 56) Bohemianism, pseudo; Bohemians, out-and-out; Bookbinding; Bourgeois morality; Bourgeois-romantic family; Brick-layers; Broccoli; Butchers' shops.

The non-"B" pieces of the puzzle, for those now suddenly middle-aged, also include the speakeasies, the old Nick's, Dixieland jazz, the anarchists and Communists and Martha Graham, the Waldorf Cafeteria, rent parties, the Masses, Howard Scott (founder of Technocracy), Floyd Dell and Joe Gould (founders of Floyd Dell and Joe Gould), Eugene O'Neill and a few dozen other of the dear departed, and the ageless troglodyte on every block who lived for some harmless madness of dress or manner or erotic preference. Gone, all gone; or if still there, so changed as to be occasion of deep deception to our nostalgia-bound visitor.

And yet, each piece in the eternal jigsaw game has its equivalent today, right now: the White Horse Tavern, the Five Spot for progressive jazz, the cooperative galleries on East Tenth Street which represent the avant-garde of the abstract expressionist habit, the beatniks and the hipsters and the dance students and the Actors Studio gangs, Jim Atkins' glassed-around short-order place on Sheridan Square, the Rienzi and the Figaro coffee houses, a host of vocal painters and sculptors, like Larry Rivers and Ibram Lassaw, and the poets a-reading of the jagged truth in the jazz-and-poetry emporiums like the Bizarre on West Third Street. And so our middle-aged visitor reconstructs the puzzle, every piece falling neatly into place. And yet the vision of a sylvan glen and ardent promise may elude his critical eye, for the crucial elements which give it all its excitement – the eye and hand and moiling heart of the puzzle-fitter – are irrevocably altered. The puzzle needs an organizing principle for its message to be unscrambled, and this principle seems to come from the hot blood within, that first sweet youthful discovery of freedom, passion and rebellion. And thus the word: "The Village isn't what it used to be."

But if those who came to the Village during the Depression utter this mournful complaint, so now do those who traveled toward Charles Street on or off the G.I. Bill after the war. They too, settled into the second marriage and third child, or into some combination of those elements, having taken on a permanent job and the habit of having habits, must mutter to their wives on their Saturday-night tour: "Ah, the San Remo is spoiled. Ah, what's happened to the old White Horse?"

"Yes, honey, and a bunch of lousydykes has taken the place of those divine lesbians."

"Yes, darling, and where is Death (the magazine which answered Life), and where, O where is Neurotica (the analysts have their journals, now it's time for the patients to have one)?"

Answer: the Village has always moved fast. A generation lasts only a few seasons. Death has died, honey, and the editor of Neurotica has moved to St. Louis.

But if these visitors look at the girls down from Sarah Lawrence, searching for the ghost of poor Dylan (whom they could have saved by pure love, of course) or the shadow of Jack Kerouac (who needs them, dig?), squired by boys remembering that they were Holden Caulfield in some other, better life, these veterans of old Village campaigns must see familiar faces – their own. The Village jumps tirelessly to its eternal role as the objective expression of an urge to rebel, strike out anew, break the barriers of convention and (very important) have something to shock the old folks about. And in one case out of ten thousand, of course, this "crise d'originalite juvenile," as a French psychologist named it, leads to that essential human crisis of discovery and creation. The habit and trapping of rebellion may involve rebellion in fact, and the destruction of worn-out ways of thinking, and the creation of works of mind and art.

For the remaining 9999, they have at least had a fling, some art movies and some pizza late at night, something to be nostalgic about in ten years, when "the Village has really changed, pal – we didn't used to have bomb shelters on Sullivan Street."

Like the mating salmon swarming up the Columbia River, the girls seeking freedom and "self-expression" rush down from the smart women's colleges; they head eastward from the big state institutions, their fins a jiggle and their gill slits pulsing; they foregather for adventure and true love in Manhattan, and a high percentage naturally finds its way to Greenwich Village. The result is a highly abnormal situation in many of the professions: an oversupply of lovely ladies. In the theatre, for example, there are more women than men to begin with; then if you subtract from the pool of available manpower – doing service at dinner and bed – those men who are already engrossed by one girl, and those who prefer non-girls, you have remaining a lovely turmoil of lovely lost ladies, wishing they know somebody. Because they work hard, they know few people outside the theatre. They spend many an evening walking the dog up and down Tenth Street, dreaming that somewhere in God's Green Village there must be a foot-loose heterosexual. Probably the loneliest girls in the world are theatrical beauties, alien as this idea is to the American fantasy of the wild life of actresses.

In days gone by, men went to the Village to hunt women. Now they go to be hunted; there is a remarkable contemporary tendency of the prey to track down the hunter.

A special example of Village devotion to Thespis is a girl we shall call Norma, a long-legged, creamy-skinned brunette with crisp dramatic gifts and a stubborn crush on Shakespeare and Shaw. Most actors, no matter what their preferences, take the jobs offered them. Norma, who has a degree in theatre from Carnegie Tech, fanatically refuses roles in musicals and contemporary plays because she doesn't want to risk a threat to her classic style. Therefore she makes her living, between productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Caesar and Cleopatra, by working as a skilled, albeit slightly sullen callgirl. This she does not consider corruption because only the theatre really matters and the particular act she puts on for certain out-of-town buyers does not affect her diction. Also she plies her trade in the midtown ex-pense-account belt which she holds in contempt; "real life" for her is located on Charles Street, where she remains a svelte young actress, taking her breakfast at lunch time in blue jeans in a drug store while she reads Eric Bentley on the theatre of Bertolt Brecht. She is considering broadening her repertoire.

Norma feels only contempt for the commercial actresses, call them Marge and Jo, who live together in precarious amity. Marge makes a steady living doing all the baby voices for one of the radio networks while she awaits an appropriate Broadway part. Jo, less successful, wrote a book about Marge between jobs and sold it to a paperback publisher. Since it exposed baby-voiced Marge's love life in adult, adulterous and unadulterated detail, there was a strain between the two roomies which lasted almost a week. They took their meals in seperate rooms. Marge calls Jo a fake because she had her nose bobbed twice. Once is enough for an honest girl.

"But it wasn't short enough," wails Jo. "And it hung a little to one side."

"So does your bosom, sweets," says her dear friend.

At the traditional street fairs – the big Italian ones and the smaller Spanish one just north of the Village – the aging Village-lover can still find, almost unchanged, the elements which bewitched his youth: fat, savory sausages, fried crustaceans of mysterious varieties, sold cheaply on the street, brilliant colors, gambling and drinking and the penny-toss, Sicilian street singers crying in their broken tenors of lost, lost love, thick-ankled, thick-waisted beauties, with unbobbed noses, leaving streaks of lipstick on bar glasses. On these saints' days, no injection of tourists from uptown can dilute the amiable, loud, distracted calliope pleasure of carnival nights. The parrot tells your fortune for twenty cents, plucking a piece of paper in its horny bill: and what care you if the somber slender gentleman awaiting his future in line behind you is Montgomery Clift, and if the excited lady is Shelley Winters? The Village has room for disconsolate movie actors, too.

The Village, while still a place for the young and the undecided, is inhabited by Villagers – that is, people of all ages and conditions. The contrast between the Village and its recent rival for the hand of Youth – the North Beach area of San Francisco – tells the story clearly. The barefoot beatniks of North Beach make the staid diners at Chumley's on Bedford Street ("Patronized by Writers and Artists").look like elder statesmen. When the North Beach is invaded by middle-aged nostalgists, and the morose beatniks settle down to raising square babies, and there are memories and histories of "the way it was," and novelists, playwrights, poets' and painters have fixed the scene in their work, then the North Beach will be on its way toward becoming another Greenwich Village.

In the meantime, the Village still provides the American "capital of hope and paradise of misery." The more the Village changes, settles down, rebuilds, the more it remains the same thing. And perhaps its lack of respect for Village tradition is a sign of its continuing vitality as a reflection of the realities of American life. While the Village changes under pressure, it changes in directions molded not merely by pressure from the outside. The quintessential rebellious Village strikes back, and the rest of the world falters. An example of this lively, restless, spirited Village playfulness can be found in and around The Village Voice, a weekly newspaper which is less a newspaper than a cause to its editors and subscribers. Hip, unbeat, irreverent and comical, the newspaper has also sharpened and led a drive against Tammany Hall; with another head it has garrulously and energetically hollered on behalf of off-Broadway theatre; it has led a victorious and well-organized battle against New York City's all-powerful Commissioner of Parks, Robert Moses. This symbolic battle can very well stand for the low-level and personal and heartening struggle of the Village against the rampant force of commercialism.

Stately Washington Square, with its Frenchified Arch and charm one of the historical landmarks of the Village, had been under attack from several sides. New York University had spread around it, cracking up some fine old Georgian houses in its educational cobra's embrace; the police were shoving away the girls, the dogs, the hippies, the hobos, and the babies who played in the grass. Heavy traffic through the little stretch of park was poisoning the green. And then along came Moses. Unlike the Biblical Moses, who wanted to cross the desert,this bureaucratic Moses wanted to pro-duce a desert by widening the roadway through the Square, increasing traffic, renaming and widening a narrow Village street at the opposite end. In order to create "Lower Fifth Avenue," an address which would presumably suggest an increment of verbal prestige, he was willing to destroy the park. Apparently the developers of Washington Square Village, to the south of the Square, had been promised the Fifth Avenue label through some mysterious political process.

Here was a clear issue. It was historical tradition versus real estate speculation, lovers versus automobiles, folk singers versus trucks, green versus asphalt, the people of the Village against the arrogance of New York politicians. With great relish, The Village Voice led its tattered batallions into action. Mothers with baby carriages filled with gallant sucklings, united legions of liberal Democrats and progressive Republicans, students and artists and hip kids and off-Broadway geniuses and crones from Washington Mews whose cronish aunts remembered Henry James – all united behind a banner decorated by Jules Feiffer and the empassioned, sometimes grammatical rhetoricians of the Voice.

And lo, David slew Goliath. Not only did the Village win its battle to keep the Square undiminished, but then it also attacked and eliminated all traffic through Washington Square. The park was preserved for its stoic pursuits – chess on the permanent concrete-and-tile chessboards (Where bundled and huffing old men study the board even through the long winter), love, philosophy, the tranquil digestive functioning of dogs, bongo artistry, and all the etceteras of a city park. Robert Moses beat a sullen, screaming retreat; Tammany Hall, re-sponsive to the pressure of bona fide, licensed, curried and voting voters, even joined The Village Voice in its cam-paign, once victory seemed inevitable.

A small victory? Perhaps. But important as a gesture of defiance against the march of the superhighway and the de-veloper. It gave courage to the Save-the-Village movement a-borning. And on Washington Square the bongos and the guitars, their friends and their fellow travelers, can still idle away a summer evening.

Partly as result of the Save-Washing-ton-Square, Save-the-Village, Save-Our-Geniuses campaign, mostly for its five-year-old championing of the new hip Village, The Village Voice has taken the title of Spokesman for the Village away from the experimental little magazines of an earlier period. It is in the pages of the Voice that the various states of mind of Village youth find their public masks. In a time of consumership, the Village way is very much, at its most banal, a way of dressing. Village Ivy, typified by Casualaire, is the absolute iviest – no shoulders at all, just a slight thickening at the base of the neck, and pants so tight that they drive a man's dangling participles someplace up near his belt, and the tie stuck to the Adam's apple with a small, invisible thumbtack. Village jeans are either the Actors Studio variety, white at the knees from praying for failure in deep Tennessee Williams scenes, or stained like an unsigned Jackson Pollock canvas. Subsidiary Village costumes include the students' heavyknit sweaters and corduroy, the bulldykey or rough trade's black-leather jackets, studded with nails, and the sailor suits wandering down Fourth Street, looking for professional company on strip row.The Village Voice appeals to these costumes and to the occasional human beings within, giving special emphasis to the hipsters and their faded, anemic cousins, the beatniks. It also parodies itself, as in this want ad: "rent a beatnik for your party. Reasonable rates."

The flavor of The Village Voice, and through it, of the changing Village of the Sixties, can be indicated by a quick review of one issue taken at random.Onthe front page there are photographs showing the actors and actresses of the Circle in theSquare moving to a new theatre on Bleecker Street. Reason: a new apartment development will replace the theatre, Louis' Tavern and other historic monuments on Sheridan Square. There is also a news story about a quarrel between Tammany Hall and Greenwich Village Democrats. On page two there is a feature story about a Villager who once walked a few blocks east of the Village to make a famous documentary film, On the Bowery, and then went several thousand miles away to make a film about apartheid in South Africa. Also a cartoon by Jules Feiffer, an advertisement for a lecture on "Love, Justice and Adultery" at the Village Liberal Church, an advertisement inviting us to "Consult famed hindu" ("Astrologer and Teacher of Yoga"), and offers of jobs to mandolin players, and an invitation to tour Scandinavia by motorcycle. Sometimes in this section young men, "handsome, intelligent, strong," offer to show lonely women the Village for a moderate fee. Page three contains the news flash that Allen Ginsberg, author of Howl, has gone to the University of Conception. Chile, to represent the United States at a writers' conference. He is quoted as saying that there is a difference between the Chilean university and a beatnik Hilton coffee shop in Dallas, to which he had refused an invitation. On page four there is another Feiffer cartoon about a man who suffers all sorts of ailments, and therefore thinks he has become dangerously neurotic; turns out that he has a cold. A long article mourns the death of Albert Camus. On page five, with more about Camus, there are also advertisements for a lecture on James Joyce (Headline: James Joyce!), an advertisement for burlap to decorate your pad, and a clothing store cutely advertising a cloth called Lad Clad, which you just paint on like aftershave; it's the iviest, mon. "But in the meantime, we are also putting out all our cloth suits at special prices..." On page six, we find a review of a beat magazine called Exodus, announcement of a lecture on "Hitler! The Artist As Fiend.

The Nazi Movement as Beat Generation," to be given at the New School. Then follow a couple of pages of theatre reviews, a page of sports car and hi-fi poop, an advt for the New York Telephone Company, headed We were Trapped In The Wilderness 70 Miles from times square. The last pages are devoted to miscellaneous material and the classified advertisements which provide the Voice's most imaginative prose: they offer opportunities for folk singers, male models, female models, and pretty girls who "wish to sink teeth into non run of the mill job." Also motor scooters, guitar lessons, used men's clothes. Also acting lessons, escort services, books by Henry Miller. Also ski equipment, detective services, and free cats for cat lovers.

The Village Voice specializes in exploration of the new mental and physical geography of the Village. It provided one of the first boosts given The Connection, a "jazz play" written by twenty-seven-year-old Jack Gelber and performed by the Living Theatre, a group of living actors over on the north end of the Village at living Fourteenth Street. The play has no conventional plot; it includes, among its actors, an instrumental group which occasionally takes time out from the diddling movement of the play to make a bit of dawdling jazz; the situation is that of a group of junkies waiting, just waiting for its fix. When Cowboy, the connection, finally arrives, and gives an injection of heroin on stage, strong men blanch – or so the publicity says – and strong girls want to run up on stage to help. "That's the way it is, that's the way it really is, man," intones a sepulchral voice at intervals during the evening.

Heroin seems to replace politics as subject for talk in the Village of 1960, though just as there were always more fellow travelers than Communists, so there are more beatniks than genuine, hypo-carrying hipsters. (Colonel Rudolph Abel, who eked out his living as a Russian spy, was eccentric even for the Village, and his paintings were objective, square.) Like the gossipaceous politics of the Thirties, the hipnik movement provides something to talk about for a large group of bored Villagers. Most are too cool to fall up to the Cafe Bizarre, where the poetry is read to the jazz, mon, and too bored by teenage chicks to go to the Figaro on Bleecker, where the floorshow seems to consist of interracial checker playing; but espresso-shop society has proliferated rapidly south along Mac-Dougal Street, penetrating even the Italian south Village, where the strolling amorist has his choice of many plain and fancy mausoleums – Le Petit Coin, the Cough, etc. – where to sit with a girl for a long slow evening. At the Cafe Rienzi, for example, there are French, Italian, German and Swiss newspapers available for free browsing with your Java, and if you are really far out, equipped with the lingo of finance, they also carry copies of The Wall Street Journal. The Rienzi is split-leveled, split-sexed, and carries a bulletin board and exhibitions of photographs.

MacDougal Street is the hub of life for the couples known as Bronx Bagel Babies and A-Trainers – the home-based kids who come down for excitement in the Village and the Harlem tourists who help to give it to them. The latter arecalled A-Trainers because they take the Independent subway back at the end of the day.

If you invade the scene on foot and wander down Waverly Place of a soft spring evening, the following acts might succeed each other in rapid succession on the stage of the Village: there is that solemn, sallow, cinematographically evil chap who perpetually waits in a doorway, selling what? numbers or ponies or marijuana; a man ambles by wearing one earring – two would be square; a male begger asks, "Gimme a quarter, mister, so my wife can buy a Dior dress"; a load of abstract expressionist paintings is being carried into the Manufacturers Trust bank, where they will be exhibited along with naturalistic dollars; one of the moving men has a copy of Andre Gide's Theseus in his back pocket – moving men are among the intellectual aristocrats of the Village, and it's a chic way for a muscular actor or writer to supplement his income and also keep in condition; a model walks toward Washington Square, where she has a date to meet under the Arch – so skinny she looks as if she has been stretched on a rack: and there is ubiquitous, bearded Sam Kramer again, the psychoanalytic jewelry maker, buying cream cheese, and a certain practicing psychologist, the rack himself, walking to meet the model.

Then if you happen to have reason for ducking down the subway entrance and emerging in midtown Manhattan, all is hurry, hurry, hurry, and you see why people love to dwell near where Sam Kramer buys his cream cheese and that psychologist does his best to fatten up skinny models.

All these varied societies – hipsters, beatniks, Harlem, Bronx and Brooklyn adolescents. Madison Avenue middleclassniks, artists and actors, jowly rakes, Italian old-timers, sailors, college students, cream cheese buyers – meet and mill about together on the crowded weekend streets of the Village. If we walk into the Cock and Bull, we may almost think ourselves in an oldfashioned ice cream parlor. It is a large barnlike room which used to be a bookstore and now sells sundaes with fancy names like "Orgy," costing as much as $2.50 for enough ice cream to choke your maw for keeps. But unlike the oldfashioned ice cream parlor, the jukebox blares far-out numbers by the Coasters and the walls are decorated with posters from off-Broadway plays and the kids wear faces of premature cunning and boredom. The girls are mostly jailbait chicks, radically underage and looking it in their baby fat, pedal pushers, unskillful mascara, and ponytails. The men are hungry chaps who may be as old as forty. The Cock and Bull seems to specialize in men who like girls who like ice cream. On the bulletin board in back there are notices about sharing apartments, buying Vespas, providing secretarial services. One poetry-loving chick offered to type poetry free, a small charge for prose.

The great current intellectual fad, all over the Village, is the beatnik convulsion. The beatniks have been described by an acute English observer, Malcolm Bradbury, as "Nihilism's Organization Men," since like all corporate types, they tend to convene and stratify. The Village is their Eastern headquarters, just as the North Beach area in San Francisco houses the main Western office. There has been much confusion about hip and beat; this confusion can be examined in objective detail on the streets of Greenwich Village at night.

The hipster was a man who fled emotion through the use of narcotics, keeping cool, floating in his high; the beatnik is an imitation hipster, wearing the clothes and loitering at the door of the club. Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Rexroth, the most original of the hip writers, generated a small literary following, including Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and Norman Mailer, and attracted admirers among those who looked at jeans and fast driving and said, "Here is Real Life! Wow!" Alternating between San Francisco and New York, the hip and beat publicists recruit the kids into wearing free-form jewelry and saying "man" to each other. While the Village has its marvelous charm of irregularity, this should not be confused with the sort of passionate independence which provides the seedbed of genius. An avant-garde is always egotistical, selfdevoted, convinced: it raises its voice, angrily and even shrilly, in order to be sure that it is heard. The pseudo avant-garde, like the hipster writers, has a distracted self-regard, troubled to be alone, weak-egoed rather than egotistical, and raises its voice desperately, like a deaf man, in order to make sure it has a voice. Not to be heard, but to be reassured.

As the naturalist Fabre wrote of the Sacred Beetle, it is sometimes worshiped by the easily awed, "a veritable living gem, shining like polished metal," but nevertheless its main activity consists in collecting great balls of dung, rolling them about, occasionally stealing from a friend, and finally, in some dark hideaway, proudly dining. These stercoriculous beasties clear the fields and serve good purpose; perhaps we praise them so exotically because they destroy their handiwork by eating it – unlike the beat rhapsodists, they are satisfied to hide it from our exploring nostrils.

Perhaps the most successful work of art produced by the hipsters, after Allen Ginsberg's exciting vaudeville Howl, is the campy movie Pull My Daisy, which stars Ginsberg (Playing a beat poet), Gregory Corso (Playing a beat poet), and Peter Orlovsky (playing a beat poet), plus the painter Larry Rivers and others, with a narration spoken (gargled, mumbled, yawped) and written (improvised, he says) by Jack Kerouac, the beat prose writer. A distinctly Village product, it was photographed in the lower Village by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, beat photographer and beat painter, respectively; and it shows the whole beat crew just goofing in a cold-water flat among all kinds of cockroaches – "sugar cockroaches," intones Kerouac, "bread cockroaches... peanut butter cockaroaches" – while various human accidents occur, such as the arrival of a "Zen bishop" with his mother who carries an American flag between her legs, a bit of wrestling among the poets, and a fight between a man and his wife, who objects to the poet's' just fagging around underfoot all the time. Whether intentionally or not, the film is funny and has an in-group charm.

Despite their futile gab, or perhaps because of it, the hipsters and their fleas give a strong flavor to the Village, like their allies, the homosexuals. Something relatively new in America, there is now open professional solicitation of men in the area around the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, with a full assortment of blondined boys and leather-jacketed rough trade. Very late at night, when the hazard of true love seems to give way to the certainties of cash money, the male prostitutes stand waiting in the doorways, like chippies everywhere, gossiping with each other, falling silent when a possible mark strolls by. They murmur Rodgers-and-Hart show tunes, substituting the pronoun "he" for "she"; they lift their delicate heads; they stroke their cheeks and stand very close to their pants; they push forward their bellies in a parody of the model's pelvic pout.

Then in the morning, at Pam-Pam or Jim Atkins', they take long leisurely breakfasts, standing like Air Force officers in a hundred familiar movies, discussing their missions of the night before, the successful raid and the downed flight, checking with the queens from friendly squadrons, loitering over the third cup of coffee and blinking in the smile of sun through the window. Occasionally, confusingly, a beautiful girl joins them for breakfast, an actress or a model, secure in the sanitary devotion of men who want nothing from a woman but praise.

And sometimes at breakfast a tender mixed couple, man and woman, rising late after the night before, holding hands at the counter.

And sometimes a handsome Village mother, wheeling her baby carriage, doing the shopping after sending her husband off to paint in his studio, or write, or sell space.

The Village has set sail for the future,like all of unanchored America, set sail or set adrift, take your choice. A visit to the Village always provokes a crisis of nostalgia in those who have moved on but do not want the Village to move on. The lovely, long-legged blonde girl who used to be seen strolling with Sam Kramer, the bearded jewelry maker – gone. The Waldorf Cafeteria, where the bums and the junkies and Maxwell Bodenheim convened all night over moldy prunes and coffee – gone, replaced by a bank. Roman Marie, who used to feed the wild and the artistic – very quiet. Djuna Barnes and e e cum-mings – in seclusion. (It is said that a group of beat poets made a pilgrimage one night to cummings' house on Patch-in Place. "We're poets! We're poets!" they shouted, and a ghostly voice issued from a window: "Go away.") And Bo-denheim himself, poet of delicate wit and ribald enthusiasm: he went down to drink and died of blows on the head, strokes with a knife, administered by the crazy thug with whom he shared – it seems – both bottle and wife. The Bre-voort Hotel, home of elegant artists in moments of triumph – gone, replaced by a boring luxury apartment house. The Rhinelander Gardens – also raped by an apartment house. Joe Gould – dead. Max Eastman – rich. The Group Theatre – disappeared.

And yet ...

Young Boris, proprietor of the old Borsch Bowl, dispenser of philosophy and black bread, is gone. But long live Boris! Grayer, plumper, presiding over a new Borsch Bowl, Boris lives on, garrulously, offering black bread.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, who once inhabited the narrowest house in New York, at 73 Bedford Street, has finished burning her candle at both ends, but next door another artist works late into the night. This new poet of Bedford Street inhabits a book-lined study; his lovely slim wife stands by with coffee as he works; they can both be seen from the street, bending over his desk, he fretting, she peacefully confident, watching with a halfsmile on her face, until she taps him gently on the shoulder: "It's very late, dear." (It turns out, alas, that this nocturnal creator is the author of one of the important comic strips.)

And there is another long-legged blonde who can be seen strolling with Sam Kramer, the still-bearded jewelry maker – the same beard, a similar blonde.

And there are coffee houses which have Sunday-afternoon chamber-music recitals. And some eccentric ones which merely serve coffee.

And Charlie Van Doren, the defrocked quiz star, quietly writing a novel (a play?) which everyone supposes will deal with a simple, true-hearted, slightly greedy young quiz star who, nearly cor-rupted by the mass media, receives a letter from a little old lady named Checkers, just in time to keep him from perjuring himself before a Congressional committee ... In Jim Atkins' eatery the olds are against his starring in the movie version.

And the lovely fashion model who transmitted a small crablike infestation to a whole group of poets – "like that's her protest against the whole sex-oriented system, dig," explained one of them, scratching. And the eager virgin who makes a hobby of suggesting that she and her date go back to his place so that she can take a shower – and then she takes a shower. And carries a switch-blade to make sure that her date keeps the peace. And the girls who live by remittances from home while they find their souls, and seem to find them, for they usually disappear into social work after a year or two. And the girls, girls, girls. Italo Calvino, a distinguished Italian novelist, declared that the most monumental, splendid, and architecturally efficient structure he found in America was not a skyscraper but a small flexible device; it was first modeled for him in Greenwich Village: "Change my whole life! the dee-ah-fragum!"

There are no more rent parties, at which you paid a small admission to dance the Charleston, eat cheap spa-ghetti and drink bathtub gin so that your host could keep body, soul and furniture off the street, but there are shindigs like the Stomp out bobby breen party (at Madame Irma's Dancehall on Second Avenue) to which you are asked to bring your own booze, although the mimeographed invitation assures you that "Beer, Music, Ice Cubes, Paper Cups, The Hall, Moxie and General Funkiness are provided by the Management." You are also warned; "This party is by invitation only ... don't bring your friends ... don't bring good old Harry who lives in Queens but is a nice guy ... nor your Aunt Lucy who has always wanted to go to a Real Village Party ... don't hip the Bronx ... if your girl is the kind who locks herself in the can at parties to weep, don't bring her ... if you insist on singing, forget it ... if your idea of a good time is charades, we don't want you ... no marrieds except the unhappily ... don't tell Life magazine ... wear a funny hat if you like, but no costumes!" There are other parties for little companies of off-Broadway players, who offer Gallo wine and corrosive martinis in the hope that you may write a check to help support their production of a symbolic drama by lonesco, Adamov, Ghelderode, or the omni-present revival of Winterset. The actors now have pads (or live with their hip parents in Forest Hills), and worry about unpaid parking tickets rather than the grocery bill, but the theatre than the grocery bill, but the theatre needs a stage, brother, and the uniongives us lip. Those uptown bankrollers who used to say "nix" to the avant-garde have now learned to say "Bug off, Buster." It turns out that many of us need our daily dose of anxiety. If we can't worry about our own landlord, we'll fret about the bourgeois proscenium type who holds the keys to the Circle in the Square.

And so it goes in the eternal Village – that impossible, actual American dream of freedom through bohemia. Amid all the open possibilities of American dream of freedom through bohemia. Amid all the open possibllities of American life, which permits a young man to select any variety of togetherness he chooses, there are many who feel constricted. They ask. Why this? Why not that? And perhaps even, Why not the other thing? Why not try my impulse, try my luck, try my talent, try my skills at loafing and self-generating labor? They are squeezed in the direction of declared rebellion, abstention, disaffiliation.

These patient and impatient yearners after truth, beauty and easy living will always float toward the Village – the artists and the art-lovers, the worshipers of sex, the sick and the spoiled, the young and the special and the adventurous, all making common cause in the pleasure of their differences. In 1960, when the pressure to do like others is high in America, the Village takes a new shape, molded by money. It is becoming an elegant bohemia in which radical politics are replaced by the hip and the beat: the bearded poets are crowded to one side by the bearded advertising men with sports cars sold them by bearded salesmen. Though it changes as it mirrors the times, the Village is still necessary. It is that bottle in which Americans put whatever the suburbs and the colleges and the middle-class family cannot happily contain.

So listen, Herman, tell Mrs. Melville to get in line. Come back to the Village and write poetry if you like. Open the bottle and free the djinn – yourself – into the carousel whirl of Greenwich Village, where change is everlasting and the permanent never remains the same. There's a fellow over on Cornelia Street who looks like a homesick Canarsie ghost returned to sell wolf pelts and otter meat on his ancient lands. In fact, of course, he is a peaceable, poetry-loving Arab weaver, a frequent tea drinker, who grows irate if you call him beat. "I'm a member of the Post Beat Generation," he says with quiet dignity, shuckling his hands in his embroidery. "The difference between us and the beats, man, is... Well, like we're different. Like we affirm, man. I mean, like we protest."

Apparently, affirmative protest is here to stay. Greenwich Village may have ended at twelve o'clock this evening, but it has begun again at midnight.