Voice of the Partially Alienated

A grape-eating contest at the First Church of the Amorphous Mush. A wedding ceremony under a pop portrait of the bride and groom seated in a spaceship. A comedy team from Group Banana breaking up the audience by sneezing under a blanket.

The nightmarish visions of a rapidly disintegrating mind? Not at all. These are happenings in Greenwich Village as reported by the eleven-year-old weekly Village Voice. Few Village fancies escape the attention of the Voice. No Village fad--from psychedelic shopping centers to erotic Christmas ornaments--is too eccentric to be ignored. As a result, the weekly has begun to show a modest profit. Its circulation has reached 56,000. Now that it has embarked on its first promotion drive, it expects to reach 75,000 by next spring.

Wary of Certainties. For all its enthusiasm for Village affairs, the Voice brings a touch of redeeming skepticism to its coverage. The caution may be a reflection of Editor Dan Wolf, 44, a recluse of sorts who closets himself in the second-floor office of the small Village Voice building in the busy center of the West Village. "His job," says Assistant Editor Jack Newfield, "is to orchestrate the obsessions of his staff."

It is Wolf who keeps the Voice from galloping off in support of the many causes that are constantly boiling up in the Village. "I carry fewer certainties than other people," he says. His paper often runs stories that take different sides of the same issue. It was no surprise that the Voice recently carried an article praising the New York World Journal Tribune and then one panning it --or that both of them were convincing.

Back in 1956, Wolf's tolerant eclecticism was challenged by one of the paper's founders, Norman Mailer, who thought the Voice was becoming too square. Mailer also suspected that Wolf was using typos to sabotage his column defending the hip way of life. When his phrase "nuances of growth" came out "nuisances of growth," Mailer quit the paper in a rage. The Voice's coverage of big local stories is often more balanced and thoughtful than the reporting in the dailies. The paper's criticism of the arts is also a match for the other city papers, though Film Critic Jonas Mekas tends to go overboard in his enthusiasm for the "underground movies" that are popular in the Village. In a recent ecstatic review of Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls, Mekas discerned not only an affinity to Victor Hugo and James Joyce, but also the very "essence and blood of our culture, the Great Society."

The Enemy: Bureaucracy. True to its ideal of detachment, the Voice avoids the excesses of partisan politics. Though it supported the Democratic reform movement in its battle to overthrow Tammany Chieftain Carmine De Sapio, it has derided the reformers for their self-righteousness. It backed John Lindsay for mayor, but does not hesitate to criticize his "waspishness." And the paper that claims to have discovered the New Left has recently discovered a New Right, rebelling against the upper-class gentility of Bill Buckley. To the Voice, individuality of any shade of Village opinion is to be cherished. The major enemy is mindless bureaucracy, or the bulldozing kind of urban renewal that threatens to reduce the Village to a uniform monotony.

No longer a rebel flaunting the ways of Greenwich Village in the face of the Philistines uptown, the Voice has become something of an establishment of the Left. Both Michael Harrington, author of The Other America, and his wife Stephanie write for the paper. Occasionally, both of Columnist Murray Kempton's children, Mike and Sally, do also. So does Susan Goodman, daughter of Utopian Anarchist Paul Goodman. Several other writers who got their start with the Voice have moved along to higher-paying jobs on the dailies and television. But despite the meager pay, other writers stay with the Voice because of the freedom it gives them.

Communist Pop. Nothing if not ambitious, the Voice wants to spread the Greenwich Village message to the rest of the world. Already, one-half of its circulation lies outside New York City. It has stepped up its foreign coverage, now has regular columnists in Paris and London. On a tour of Eastern Europe last summer, Pop Expert Richard Goldstein explained how U.S. pop culture was helping to erode youthful allegiance to Communism; on a jazz tour of Russia in September, Columnist Michael Zwerin filed some perceptive accounts of the drabness of Soviet life.

As the Voice goes international, it risks losing its ties to the Village and its unique New York flavor. Indeed, another paper, the East Village Other, has already sprung up to champion all those causes--from LSD to pansexual-ism--that the Voice views with skepticism. But the Voice is unworried. "EVO is for the totally alienated," says Jack Newfield. "We're the paper for the partially alienated."

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