The Brazen Age by David Reid

Author:David Reid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

A tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak

hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone

streets still left in downtown New York

crying out in a shrill soundless giggle:

War is the health of the state.

In the freezing winter of 1917–18, with bohemia divided and besieged, and its flagships going down, Dorothy Day, an assistant to Max Eastman and Floyd Dell at the Masses and then the Liberator, often spent the evening drinking hard with her friend Eugene O’Neill at the Hell Hole, a rough place on Sixth Avenue at the corner of West Fourth Street patronized by teamsters, gangsters, gamblers, streetwalkers, and sometimes by actors from the nearby Provincetown Playhouse and some of the more adventurous younger writers and artists. Rumor said the owner kept a pig in the cellar, which he fed with scraps from the free lunch.

As a teenage suffragist, Day had gone to jail for picketing the White House, and proclaimed herself a socialist just as that was becoming a dangerous avowal. (She turned twenty in November 1918.) “The gangsters admired Dorothy Day because she could drink them under the table,” recalled Malcolm Cowley, “but they felt more at home with Eugene O’Neill, who listened to their troubles and never criticized. They pitied him, too, because he was thin and shabbily dressed. One of them said to him, ‘You go to any department store, Gene, and pick yourself an overcoat and tell me what size it is and I steal it for you.’ ”

Day and O’Neill shared a thwarted religiousness, which he enacted by endlessly reciting Francis Thompson’s incantatory poem “The Hound of Heaven,” to the bemused but respectful patrons of the Hell Hole. “I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; / I fled Him, down the arches of the years…” After closing time, the two would head to the waterfront, stopping for more drinks at sailors’ bars along the way. Sometimes, they were accompanied by their friend Irwin Granich, a young truck driver with literary ambitions and political passions, who had met Day after he began placing the occasional poem or piece in the Masses, singing:

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