The New York herald., 1922-10-01


nuts off"
In common with many others that
guard believed that much Of the popula-
ton Of Greenwich Village is made up of
those unfortunates commonly referred to
as nuts" But he was mistaken. The
real ones. and the real men Of genius.
either died in another and more glorious
age or have been put away where their
idiosyncrasies will not annoy hard headed
practical citizens.
You point to our more flamboyant Vil
layers. 1 answer: Are they genuine? In
the memory of persons still living, as the
biographers say, there is Jean the Wild
Girl, who would go out late on cold winter
nights attired in flimsy garments and roller
skate up and down lower Fifth avenue
But this hobby was not the outcropping
of mad genius. Rather it was the re-
suit of hope that somebody would be
shocked. If she had lived uptown she
would have been dismissed as mere
fiapper.
About those stories of the doings of the
long haired young men who live in base
ments in the Village without heat and with
little food. the squalid life is the result Of
shiftlessness and nothing else.
The question of the eccentric artist
painter, sculptor or writer-was taken to
David Edstrom, the Swedish sculptor. who
has known and observed nuts" in New
York, Paris. Stockholm and Florence. He
says the number of the genuine in New
York is negligible.
professional nuts there are" said Ed
strom. They have read that one of the
markings of genius Is eccentricity. and so
they deliberately set about to cultivate
their foibles. When a man begins to show
signs either of genius or of being crazy he
lands in an asylum"
But this subject is fippant only where
the bogus are being discussed. Otherwise
it is pathetic and leads into the lives of
the great geniuses, who. through Ill health
and poverty and their distorted imagina-
tions were misunderstood and their
careers cut short. The most notable Amer
lean case that comes to mind is that of
the late Ralph Albert Blakelock His death
in 1919 ended a life of almost unbelievable
misfortune. When he was doing his best
work he was unable to earn enough to
support his wife and nine children, and
his genius was recognized by few until he
had been for long time in the State Hos
pital for the Insane at Middletown. And
when friends procured his release the old
fire never was able to assert itself again
Before his breakdown he painted on the
lids of cigar boxes and sold the originals
to a frame maker in Forty-second street
for fifty cents each.
And one of Blakelock,s hallucinatons
was that he was a man of wealth.
Lafcadio Hearn, besides being a chronic
invalid, sometimes conceived a terrible
hatred for his dearest friends and imagined
that they were planning to ruin him; WILL
lam Cowper showed symptoms of melan-
cholia, and his attacks of suicidal mania
led to his confinement in sanitariums:
Rousseau's life was made miserable by
delusions of persecution. And there are
hundreds of other examples. Peculiarities
run through many degreesAharmless &C.
centricity, paranoia and hopeless insanity.
David Edstrom's simple explanation is
that alterations are the result of power
full Imagination being distorted or impaired,
usually by sickness or poverty. He says:
I'VE all adore reading the masterpieces
of Balzac, Strindberg or a Shakespeare,
but we do not realize that the terrible
mental anguish such as August Strindberg
describes In his Inferno" is more or less
1,.,opoor IN all ganiua