This engaging history by Village Voice
drama critic Wetzsteon, who died in 1998, will appeal most to readers unfamiliar with the many previous books and memoirs by the rebels, dreamers and plain old nut cases who have found refuge from conformism in New York City's most famous neighborhood for more than a century. Organized as a series of portraits in roughly chronological order, the text focuses largely on the Village's first golden era, the years just before WWI, when "justice and poetry seemed complementary goals." Movers and shakers from this period include legendary hostess Mabel Dodge, The Masses
editor Max Eastman and such boundary-shattering "New Women" as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Margaret Sanger. By the time we've moved through profiles of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hart Crane, Thomas Wolfe and Djuna Barnes, we're still reading about the 1930s. Coverage of the '50s is mostly limited to the sad later years of Delmore Schwartz and Dawn Powell; the book closes with a chapter on Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists that barely reaches 1960. "Greenwich Village isn't what it used to be," a comment made as early as 1916, is a principal theme of Wetzsteon, who stresses that "from its very birth, bohemia seemed to exist in the past," a mythical moment before the tourists and poseurs moved in. They were always there, as his sympathetic sketches of cranks like Joe Gould and Elsa von Freytag suggest: "the essence of the Village was to create a miniature society where personal idiosyncrasies could flourish through communal solidarity." Though the progression of stories seems to lack a driving narrative line, perhaps this collection of affectionate set pieces truly approximates the freewheeling Village spirit. 16 pages of b&w photos. (June)
