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PATCHIN
PLACE is a short alley containing only ten nineteenth-century dwellings in the
heart of Greenwich Village, New York City, used as rooming houses and
apartments. It has changed remarkably little since it was built and is a
popular attraction for tourists as well as a site of pilgrimage for admirers of
the writers e. e. cummings and Djuna Barnes, who were long-term residents,
living there for 38 years and 42 years respectively. John Reed lodged there
when he wrote Ten Days That Shook the
World, his eye-witness account of the Russian revolution. Indeed, it has
been home to a remarkable number of writers, particularly during the early
years of the twentieth century when the Village was the centre of American
bohemianism and at the heart of developments in modernist literature.
Devotees
of John Cowper Powys and Llewelyn Powys are aware that the brothers lived in
Patchin Place in the 1920s. John Cowper set up home there with Phyllis Playter
for the first time, and Llewelyn met both his future wife Alyse Gregory and his
lover Gamel Woolsey there. Their sister, Marian Powys, had set up a successful
lace business in Manhattan and was a frequent visitor. Their time in the alley
was significant for their writing careers. This was due in part to the connections they formed through the small literary magazines, particularly The
Little Review and its ‘foreign editor’ Ezra Pound, and The Dial, where Gregory was briefly managing editor. Cummings was John Cowper’s neighbour in the top floor of number 4.
This
is the first book to be dedicated to Patchin Place. Its aim is to fill that gap, to provide a history of Patchin Place from its construction to the present day, and to locate the alley within the history of New York bohemianism and artistic life more generally in the years of the twentieth century up to the Second World War. It draws upon contemporary accounts and census data to provide a picture of what life was like in Patchin Place and in Greenwich Village during those years. It portrays the lives of writers, journal editors, critics, publishers and patrons who had connections with the alley. Connections extend to writers in America and abroad, including Samuel Beckett, Kenneth Burke, Hilda Doolittle, Theodore Dreiser, T. S. Eliot, Edna St Vincent Millay, James Joyce, Marianne Moore, as well as editors and literary patrons such as Margaret Anderson, Bryher, Scofield Thayer and John Quinn.
RAY
CROZIER, PhD is currently Honorary Professor in the School of Social Sciences,
Cardiff University and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Prior to
his retirement he was Professor of Psychology in the University of East Anglia
and Cardiff University. He has published widely on the social psychology of
shyness and blushing and on artistic creativity, and his books include Manufactured Pleasures: Psychological
Responses to Design, 1994, Blushing
and the Social Emotions: The Self Unmasked, 2006, Coping with Shyness and Social Phobia, with Lynn Alden, 2009, and
the edited book, The Psychological
Significance of the Blush, with Peter J. de Jong, 2013.
A keen
reader of novels and biography, he has been a long-term admirer of the novels
of John Cowper Powys, and a member of the Powys Society. He is fascinated by
the creative achievements of so many members of the Powys
family. His interest in Patchin Place was triggered by visits there to see
where Powys and Phyllis Playter lived before moving to upstate New York, when
he realised how little he knew about their time there, how little had been
written about the alley, and the paucity of detail that was available in any publications
that he could find.
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