Greenwich Village Bohemia: A Winter Wonderland Turns Into An American Renaissance(Part III).
not have the foresight to remove themselves from the tracks. Of course, it is easier for critics of literary works, for we are given the gift of historical hindsight, but for an artist caught in the movement of an era, the future is sometimes difficult to see, and the consequences are often seen across the headlines of the daily news. Harrington again on the decline of the Village,
"We were a handful of voluntary exiles from a middle-class which itself was still fairly small. But then in the Sixties three major trends intersected: the post-World War II baby boom began to come of age; there was relative affluence which gave the new armies of the young more economic independence than any generation in human history: and there was the near collapse of almost every institution of social control, including church, the family and, for a significant number, the discipline of the labor market, where it was no longer true that he who does not work shall not eat. As a result, the freaks of the Sixties and Seventies came in hordes and rebelled in confusion against liberal permissiveness. The clothes, the hostility to middle-class values, were very much like those of Bohemia. But they were a mass movement on an uncharted social fronteir; we, who preceded them by only ten or twenty years, had been self-appointed saving remnant within the citadel of traditional banality.
So Christopher Jencks was wrong when he wrote, "Instead of one Greenwich Village in New York, populated by a handful of rebels from traditional homes, America developed scores of campus Villages populated by young people whose values were shaped by the ideals espoused by their liberal parents." That is to miss one of the most crucial and Hegelian of truths about contemporary culture; that increases in quantity eventually become a change in quality, that a Bohemia that enrolls a good portion of a generation is no longer a Bohemia." (8)
Greenwich Village was a dream wrapped in so many illusions, that soon those who had created did not recognize their own creation. As the years passed, many of the artists that remained became victims of their own success. Irony had indeed paid a sort of poetic justice on the artists living in Greenwich at that time. For those who could not change or adapt, or move on as a Joan Dideon, there were fates too horrible to imagine. Irony often holds little justice but it does lead to
Latest Articles