At the Jefferson Market Library, the weekly poetry workshop discussed the writers and the small publications from the Greenwich Village. I brought photocopied samples of work from the first quarter of the Twentieth Century that included poetry by ee cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Maxwell Bodenheim, Djuna Barnes, Robert Clairmont, Peggy Bacon, Theodore Dreiser, Josephine Bell, Max Eastman, Mary Carolyn Davies, Harry Kemp, Helen Louise Merritt, Alfred Kreymbourg, Lola Ridge, Eli Siegel, and Kay Boyle; and pages from presses that published poetry such as Bruno’s Bohemia, The Quill, Egmont Arens’s Playboy, and The Masses.
We traced the transformation of the Masses into the Liberator and the New Masses. We followed the editor of The Quill, Arthur Moss. Upset with Prohibition, he left the U.S. and Greenwich Village for Paris and the left bank where he published another bohemian literary magazine he called Gargoyle.
My friend P.J. (Paul Johnston, 1899-1987) was a fine press printer who arrived in the Village shortly after the First World War. He recalled how Edna St. Vincent Millay challenged the sexual mores of the nation in the days before she left Greenwich Village for Paris.
My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light.
(Millay in "A Few Figs from Thistles" 1920)
P.J. lived across the street from the Jefferson Market Library in an apartment that in 1920 belonged to his friend, the publisher of the first Playboy (1919), Egmont Arens.
Playboy 1919
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