Greenwich Village Bohemia: A Winter Wonderland Turns Into An American Renaissance(Part III).
Like a sneak thief you will return secretly some evening and you will look up the dear old places. But the charm will be gone. Even the Caravanserie on Thirty-first Street and the Zukunftstatt on Seventy-seventh Street will close their portals to you. Then you have lost your illusions, your enthusiasm and your idealism. Greenwich Village is a spiritual conception and shopkeepers are not interested in dreamers. The Village is the rallying point for new ideas. Its spirit reaches the heathenish belly worshippers of Harlem, even nature fakers near the Zoo in the Bronx. The Bronxite points proudly to Poe's cottage, but come to the Village, young man, caro mio, and I will point out to you "Grub Street" where another iconoclast, Thomas Paine, earned his bread and his fame in daily struggles with the economic devil." (2)
As the Greenwich Village scene developed, the fun and freedom that the early poets had found when they first came to the city had begun to show a dark side to their cultural underbelly. Joan Dideon pointed out many times in several of her essays in the eighties that after the seventies most of her friends had either ended up in detox institutions or had died in various ways, either through suicide or accidental deaths. Car accidents, substance abuse, and self-inflicted wounds caused many deaths in the sixties and seventies. The plague of self-destruction seemed to be running rampent among the artistic community during that period. Gregory Corso would write several poems about the village during this period, many of them carryng recollections of darker periods in his life. "Greenwich Village Suicide" portrays a commonality in the city. Death seemed to surround the beats at times. The obvious implications of this could not help but to emerge in the imagery of the poetry of Greenwich in the l950's.
"Arms outstretched hands flat against the windowsides She looks down Thinks of Bartok, Van Gogh And New Yorker cartoons She falls
They take her away with a Daily News on her face And a storekeeper throws hot water on the sidewalk." (3)
"St. Luke's Service for Thomas" is not different,
"The White Horse innkeeper Leaned nervously against the stained-glass; He shifted his feet, and Cummings mourned by. A sightseer whispered into a sightseeing ear. And a Swansea woman entered..... Two neo-villagers underarmed her; Sat her down in the first row. She raised her head, and peered .....The body wasn't there. The service ended in illimitable whispers. A
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