POLITICS ::: THE ANARCHISTS :::
Hippolyte Havel did not arrive in Provincetown as somebody else’s eccentric anarchist cook. A Czech-born revolutionary, writer and editor, he had been imprisoned and expelled across Europe before joining Emma Goldman’s circle in the United States. He wrote for Mother Earth, edited several radical publications and argued that artists and anarchists were natural allies: both challenged conventional thought and imagined ways of living beyond the established order. With Paula “Polly” Holladay, Havel helped turn Polly’s Restaurant in Greenwich Village into a headquarters where radicals, feminists, painters, writers and performers gathered to eat, argue, dance and exchange ideas.
That community migrated to Provincetown during the legendary summer of 1916. At 592 Commercial Street, Havel became part of the combustible household surrounding John Reed, Louise Bryant, Eugene O’Neill and the emerging Provincetown Players. His role extended far beyond the kitchen. O’Neill had worked within Havel’s radical publishing circle and, through Havel, met the anarchist Terry Carlin, who brought him to Provincetown and introduced him to Players cofounder Hutchins Hapgood. Reed dubbed Havel the “kitchen anarchist” after Havel dismissed Reed as a “parlor socialist”—a joke that captured their rivalry while concealing how much of the cultural machinery connecting Greenwich Village to Provincetown Havel had helped create.
O’Neill later transformed Havel into Hugo Kalmar, the drunken anarchist of The Iceman Cometh, preserving his slogans while reducing his intellect to a theatrical caricature. The real Havel understood that culture was built through gathering places, small publications, shared meals, performances and difficult conversations. Provincetown did not simply provide scenery for that experiment. For one incandescent summer, it became the place where radical politics, modern art and experimental theatre occupied the same rooms—and where Havel’s belief in culture as a form of revolutionary community took physical form.
