120 Charles Street, The Village: Journals & Writings 1949-1950 by Holly Beye, Bottom Dog Press, 2006
In every age and culture, young, idealistic artists have wrestled passionately with themselves, their work, and the society that spawned them, fiercely dedicated to making a better world. Greenwich Village had its heyday as a hotbed of culture and revolution, and this volume of daily journal entries by Holly Beye gives us a tactile, gritty, moving portrait of one year in that singular strata of Village life.
The four volumes of Holly's journals that make up this book, covering October 1949 to October 1950, were lost for over fifty years. When she found them, she writes, "I sat back in my chair, overwhelmed with emotion. I could hardly believe what I had been reading." Now in her eighties, she had come face-to-face with herself as a bright, earnest, spunky 27-28 year old. It's easy (especially if you can look back on your twenties) to identify with Holly, a writer, and her painter-printmaker husband David Ruff, living in a dilapidated $30/month basement apartment. They are pennies from destitution at every turn. Yet they remain hopeful: surely, just next week her stories or his prints will sell and they will be rescued. Against a backdrop of Cold War, Korean "Police Action," and McCarthyism, and with the White Horse Tavern as their anchor, Beye and Ruff and their spirited gaggle of creative pacifist friends live anything but a safe, consumerist American dream. Among their closest friends who make regular appearances are the influential writer/artist Kenneth Patchen and his wife Miriam, plus Jonathan Williams, later to be among the most important publishers of the avant-garde. The journals end with Holly and David's exodus from NYC, heading for "sunnier skies" in San Francisco.
The journal form reveals life as it really is: day by day, the sublime and the mundane are equal. Along with Beye's astute, deeply-felt explorations of the creative process and the aims of art, we learn each day's weather, meals, pleasures and discomforts. Both the constant battle with poverty and the rousing tumult of social life among the hordes of NYC are persistent themes that Beye captures in lively, economic, unself-conscious prose. The entries abound with the kind of concrete detail that speaks truth; passages often left me full of a mixture of excitement, inspiration, camaraderie, and sadness.
Since moving to Woodstock, NY in 1955, Holly has stayed politically and artistically active. She helped found the Kingston, NY chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality and participated in demonstrations. She won writing awards and saw her plays produced in NYC, San Francisco, and Woodstock. She directed numerous performances of two actor's troupes, the Heads and Holly's Comets. Suffering a serious accident in 2004 which left her unable to walk, Holly now lives in a nursing home, where she writes, works on The Tibetan Center newsletter, and leads a meditation group for residents.
In more than half a century, life has changed dramatically in so many details, but the fundamental truths of human existence have altered very little. Lives lived with honesty and courage, like Holly Beye's, are an example to us all.
120 Charles Street, The Village can be ordered on the web from Amazon.com or at http://members.aol.com/Lsmithdog/bottomdog, or ask for it at your local bookstore.
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