On Bohemia: The Code of the Self-Exiled 0887382924, 9780887382925

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I: The Social and Literary Origins of Bohemia
The Ideological Significance of Bohemian Life
Bohemia as a Means of Social Regulation
The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter: Original Preface, 1850
Literary Beginnings
Murger’s La Vie de Bohème
The Parisian Prototype
Art and Society: A Marxist View
A New Theory of Bohemians
Bohemia: The Underworld of Art
Bohemia and Anti-Bohemia in Art
The Uses of History
The Diogenes Style
The Bohemian as a Social Personality Type
The Greenwich Village Idea
Towertown: Chicago’s Bohemia
Disaffection in England: The Outsider
The Social Role of the Literary Elite
The Idea of Bohemia in Mid-Victorian England
Bohemia: Its Ideology and Control
The Upper Bohemians
The White Negro
The Origins of the Beat Generation
The Beat Mystique
San Francisco’s Mature Bohemians
Beaten
On the Beat Nature of Beat
The Know-Nothing Bohemians
The Flowering of the Hippie Movement
Part II: The Testimony of Bohemia
Section One: The Canons of Bohemia
The Glory of the Senses
The Message of Bohemia
The Grisette
The Female Reformed: Henrietta Rodman’s Mädchen
Decor for a Bohemian Studio
Making Bohemia Safe for America
The Trilby Craze: Bohemia for All
The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy
Zen in Venice
The Greening of a NATO General
Section Two: A Troubled Dream
Bohemia
Bohemia as It Is Not
In Quest of Bohemia
False Gypsies
The Supreme Literary Illusion and Why It Persists
A Pustule on the Organism of Paris
A Place of Fear
Disenchanted Abroad
A Whiff of Chaos for the Bourgeoisie
Section Three: Baiting the Bourgeois
The Red Waistcoat
Bouzingos and Jeunes-France
Initiation at the Studio
Art Takes to the Streets: The Quat’z’ Arts Ball, 1893
Le Lapin Agile: Salon of the Avant-Garde
Upper Bohemia: Oxbridge and Chelsea
Professor Sea Gull
Section Four: A Question of Survival
Selling Out
Invading Bohemia
Bohemia at Home
The Model
Hunger Was a Good Discipline
The Selling of the Village
Economics and the Art Colony
Literary Begging on the Left Bank
Rebellion Goes Commercial
Getting By and “Making It”
Getting By on 40 a Week
Section Five: Making the Scene
The Cafés
The Sidewalk Café: Island and Outpost
The Café Procope
The Golden Sun
America’s First Bohemians: Pfaff’s Crowd
Looking for Bohemia in London
London’s Café Royal
The Viennese Kaffeehaus: Refuge from Angst and Reality
Bohemian Pastorale: The Old Latin Quartier
Rural Bohemia: Carmel, 1900s
An Artists’ Colony in Stockholm
Aue’s Keller: The Bohemian Café of Buenos Aires
A Semester in Berlin, 1900
Patroness of Rebellion: Mabel Dodge’s “Evenings”
Passing Through L.A.
Chez Marcel: Johannesburg, 1950
Bohemia East: ’Sixties London
Bivouac in the Piazza di Spagna
The Tender Termites: The New International Beatnikry in Paris
Making the Scene
The Figaro
Hippi at the Café Aramat
Section Six: L’Art pour l’Art
The Peacock Feather
The Dandy
The First Night of Hernani
Ubu Roi, or Hernandi All Over Again
Dinners of Bohemia, Ancient and Modern
Art for Art’s Sake in England: A Left-Wing View
The Other Culture
Essentials of Spontaneous Prose
Belief & Technique for Modern Prose
East Village Symphoneous
Section Seven: The Social Lie
Bohemianism in French Politics
Bohemia Betrayed: Sellout to the Social Register
A Remembrance of the Red Romance
From Bohemia to Revolution
Bloomsbury: A Bohemia Seen through Marxist Eyes
The World as Dada Cabaret
Notes On Fascism and Bohemia
Politics and the Beat: Youth Disaffiliated from a Phony World
Beatniks And Bolsheviks
Part III: The Continuous Demise of Bohemia
The Fall of Greenwich Village
Bohemia—or Vulgaria
Is Feminine Bohemianism a Failure?
The New Bohemia
Greenwich Village Tombstone
The Revolution in Bohemia
What Happened to Bohemia?
The Death of Hip
A Strange and Lonely Land: North Beach, 1961
We Few, We Happy Few, We Happy Bohemians: A Memoir of the Culture Before the Counterculture
Bohemia NOW: The Protoculture
From Bohemia to the Avant-Garde: Dissolving the Boundaries
Bibliography

Citation preview

ON BOHEMIA

ON BOHEMIA The Code of the Self-Exiled

Edited by

Cesar Grañ a and Marigay Grañ a

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 1990 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X 14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint o f the Taylor & Francis Group, an in forma business Copyright © 1990 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 89-20325 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data On Bohemia : the code of the self-exiled / edited by Cesar Gra ña and Marigay Gra ña. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-88738-292-4 1. Bohemianism—History— 19th century. 2. Bohemianism— —History—20th century. 3. Arts, Modern— 19th century. 4. Arts, Modern—20th century. I. Gra ña, C ésar. II. Gra ña, Marigay. NX650.B64B64 1990 306`.1—dc20 89-20325 ISBN 13: 978-0-88738-292-5 (pbk)

It does not bark and knows the secrets of the deep. —Gerard de Nerval

Contents Preface Acknowledgments

xv xix

Part I The Social and Literary Origins of Bohemia The Ideological Significance of Bohemian Life Cesar Graña Bohemia as a Means of Social Regulation Ephraim Mizruchi The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter: Original Preface, 1850 Henri Murger Literary Beginnings Malcolm Easton Murger’s La Vie de Boh ème V. S. Pritchett The Parisian Prototype Orlo Williams Art and Society: A Marxist View George Plekhanov: A New Theory of Bohemians Charles Astor Bristed Bohemia: The Underworld of Art George S. Snyderman and William Josephs Bohemia and Anti-Bohemia in Art Alfred Werner The Uses of History Walter Laqueur The Diogenes Style Kingsley Widmer The Bohemian as a Social Personality Type William I . Thomas and Florian Znaniecki The Greenwich Village Idea Malcolm Cowley vii

1 3 13 42 51 54 59 67 78 86 102 111 118 127 130

viii

On Bohemia

Towertown: Chicago’s Bohemia Harvey Zorbaugh Disaffection in England: The Outsider Colin Wilson The Social Role of the Literary Elite Barbara Chartier The Idea of Bohemia in Mid-Victorian England Christopher A. Kent Bohemia: Its Ideology and Control M a rk Benney The Upper Bohemians Russell Lynes The White Negro Norman Mailer The Origins of the Beat Generation Jack Kerouac The Beat Mystique Herbert Gold San Francisco’s Mature Bohemians Kenneth Rexroth Beaten Kenneth Allsop On the Beat Nature of Beat Frank A . Butler The Know-Nothing Bohemians Norman Podhoretz The Flowering of the Hippie Movement John Robert Howard Part II

139 143 148 158 168 174 185 195 203 212 219 223 234 245

The Testimony of Bohemia

Section One The Canons of Bohemia The Glory of the Senses Théophile Gautier The Message of Bohemia Louis Boury The Grisette Max Nordau The Female Reformed: Henrietta Rodman’s M ädchen Allen Churchill Decor for a Bohemian Studio George du Maurier

263 265 275 277 280

Contents

Making Bohemia Safe for America The Trilby Craze: Bohemia for All Albert Parry The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy Mildred Edie Brady Zen in Venice Lawrence Lipton The Greening of a NATO General Claude Clém ent, interviewed by Sandro Ottolenghi Section Two A Troubled Dream Bohemia Charles Sears Baldwin Bohemia as It Is Not Mary Heaton Vorse In Quest of Bohemia Edwin P. Irwin False Gypsies Charles Sears Baldwin The Supreme Literary Illusion and Why It Persists Raoul Auernheimer A Pustule on the Organism of Paris Thomas Craven A Place of Fear Francis J. Rigney and Douglas Smith Disenchanted Abroad Harold Stearns A Whiff of Chaos for the Bourgeoisie Anthony Esler Section Three Baiting the Bourgeois The Red Waistcoat Théophile Gautier Bouzingos and Jeunes-France Enid Starkie Initiation at the Studio W. C. Morrow Art Takes to the Streets: The Quat’z’ Arts Ball, 1893 F. Berkeley Smith Le Lapin Agile: Salon of the Avant-Garde Lisa Appignanesi

ix

282 286 290 297 301

307 310 313 317 320 324 343 348 354

359 364 370 374 380

x

On Bohemia

Upper Bohemia: Oxbridge and Chelsea Robert Graves and Alan Hodge Professor Sea Gull Joseph Mitchell Section Four A Question of Survival Selling Out Honor é de Balzac Invading Bohemia H. C. Bunner Bohemia at Home W. C. Morrow The Model W. C. Morrow Hunger Was a Good Discipline Ernest Hemingway The Selling of the Village Caroline F. Ware Economics and the Art Colony Mack Reynolds Literary Begging on the Left Bank Christopher Logue Rebellion Goes Commercial Allen Churchill Getting By and “ Making It” Lawrence Lipton Getting By on 40 a Week John Wilcock Section Five Making the Scene The Cafes F. Berkeley Smith The Sidewalk Cafe: Island and Outpost Guillermo de Torre The Cafe Procope W. C. Morrow The Golden Sun W. C. Morrow America’s First Bohemians: Pfaff’s Crowd Emily Hahn Looking for Bohemia in London Arthur Ransome

387 390

397 404 408 412 414 420 424 430 433 439 446

451 454 456 460 463 473

Contents

London’s Café Royal Steve Bradshaw The Viennese Kaffeehaus: Refuge from Angst and Reality Joseph Wechsberg Bohemian Pastorale: The Old Latin Quarter Max Nordau Rural Bohemia: Carmel, 1900s Mary Austin An A rtists’ Colony in Stockholm August Strindberg Aue’s Keller: The Bohemian Cafe of Buenos Aires Jorge Rivera A Semester in Berlin, 1900 Stefan Zweig Patroness of Rebellion: Mabel Dodge’s “ Evenings” Allen Churchill Passing Through L. A. Lionel Rolfe Chez Marcel: Johannesburg, 1950 Nadine Gordimer Bohemia East: Sixties London Charles Marowitz Bivouac in the Piazzi di Spagna George Armstrong The Tender Termites: The New International Beatnikry in Paris Olivier Todd Making the Scene Francis Rigney and Douglas Smith The Figaro The New Yorker Hippi at the Cafe Aramat Andrea Lee Section Six L’Art pour L’Art The Peacock Feather E. M. Forster The Dandy Charles Baudelaire The First Night of Hernani Anthony Esler Ubu Roi, or Hernani All Over Again Roger Shattuck

xi

477 486 494 497 505 510 513 519 523 534 538 540 542 549 559 563

573 576 580 586

xii

On Bohemia

Dinners of Bohemia, Ancient and Modern John Paul Bocock Art for A rt’s Sake in England: A Left-Wing View Dmitri Mirsky The Other Culture Barry Farrell The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose Jack Kerouac Belief & Technique for Modern Prose Jack Kerouac East Village Symphoneous John Gruen Section Seven The Social Lie Bohemianism in French Politics The Nation, editorial Bohemia Betrayed: Sellout to the Social Register G. William D om hoff A Remembrance of the Red Romance Malcolm Cowley From Bohemia to Revolution Daniel Aaron Bloomsbury: A Bohemia Seen through Marxist Eyes Dmitri Mirsky The World as Dada Cabaret Lisa Appignanesi Notes on Facism and Bohemia Harold Rosenberg Politics and the Beat: Youth Disaffiliated from a Phony World David McReynolds Beatniks and Bolsheviks Vassily Aksyonov Part III The Continuous Demise of Bohemia The Fall of Greenwich Village Floyd Dell Bohemia—or Vulgaria Atlantic Monthly Is Feminine Bohemianism a Failure? Emilie Ruck de Schell The New Bohemia An Old Fogey

590 597 601 618 620 622

633 638 644 649 664 668 673 679 684

693 705 708 715

Contents

Greenwich Village Tombstone Ben Hecht The Revolution in Bohemia Robert Dunavon What Happened to Bohemia? Paul Ableman The Death of Hip Marion Magid A Strange and Lonely Land: North Beach, 1961 Ralph J. Gleason We Few, We Happy Few, We Bohemians: A Memoir of the Culture before the Counterculture Michael Harrington Bohemia NOW: The Protoculture Richard Miller From Bohemia to the Avant-Garde: Dissolving the Boundaries Jerrold Seigel Bibliography

xiii

725 728 734 736 766

769 784 796 807

Preface Bohemia has been variously defined as a mythical country, a state of mind, a “ place of youth and disenchantment,” a “ tavern by the wayside on the road of life.” Thomas Mann defined it as “ nothing but social irregularity, a guilty conscience to be resolved in levity” ; Shakespeare called it a desert country near the sea. A less poetic definition suggests it is a social mechanism for absorbing excess population until adequate status opportunities become available. Clearly, to assemble a collection of writings on the subject requires a workable definition of what Bohemia is all about. But the characteristics of Bohemia are elusive. And although there is truth in all of these definitions, even the most poetic—not a few books, articles, poems have been written about that seacoast—Bohemia seems to take on different colorations depending on conditions in the greater society to which it is a response. In reviewing the literature for this anthology we were able to come up with only two characteristics of bohemianism which appear to hold con­ stant over the century-and-a-half of its recognized existence: (1) an attitude of dissent from the prevailing values of middle-class society—artistic, political, utilitarian, sexual—usually expressed in life-style and through a medium of the arts; and (2) a cafe. This definition perforce stretches rather thinly across a complex sociological phenomenon. Hence, perhaps it is more prudent to ask, much as George Plekhanov does in the selection from Art and Society included here: Under what social conditions does Bohemia emerge? What characteristics does it take on in response to those conditions? Under what conditions does Bohemia decline? The reader will discover that the papers in this anthology offer many different answers to these questions. Undeniably, Bohemia holds a fascination for those at whom its slings and arrows are directed: the bourgeoisie, the middle class, the Establish­ ment, the philistines, the squares—the epithet may change, if not the meaning. This fascination may be tinged with fear and even fury depending on the lengths to which the perpetrators may go to sucker their adversar XV

xvi

On Bohemia

ies—to épater le bourgeois. For example, audiences were enraged to the poing of fistfights at the stage productions of Hernani and Ubu Roi, but the theaters were reportedly sold out. Apparently the clientele of the German Kabarett could not get enough of the affronts hurled at them by the actors and singers from the makeshift stages. Popular cabaretiers of Montmartre acknowledged their guests by insulting each of them as they entered for the evening’s entertainment. The police of more than one country, and at many different times, have been kept busy breaking up activities which on the surface appear simple and harmless, but which are viewed as serious threats to the forces of social control. Thus, in 1913 when the Russion poet Mayakovski, dressed extravagantly in a flowing orange blouse and in the company of his bohemian buddies with painted faces and wooden spoons in their lapels, marched down a Moscow boule­ vard reciting futurist poems, the police had a near riot on their hands. In the 1960s, the mere sight of the cappeloni—the long hairs—sitting in the Piazza di Spagna was sufficient provocation to call out the Italian police wagons over and over again. Certainly the antics of Petrus Borel and his gang of Tartares back in the 1830s—particularly their penchant for appear­ ing before their neighbors in the nude and camping in the public gardens similarly unattired—kept the Paris police busy at the chase. And when a handful of bored Greenwich Villagers staged a declaration of independence of the “ Republic of Washington Square,” New York’s finest turned out for the event with machine guns and ambulances. Hence, it was quite predict­ able that one of the first actions of the Nazis on occupying Vienna was to close down the cafes—those obvious hatcheries of subversion and intrigue. Curiously, however, the other side of this fascination and fearfulness is a certain tolerance of the eccentricities of the artist. Ephraim Mizruchi, in his observations on bohemians included here, points out that for centuries society has accepted somewhat deviant behavior among those concerned with the arts—so long as it doesn't go too far. And it is this tolerance of eccentricity—a tacit acknowledgment of and admiration for the powers of creativity—which allows Bohemia to exist. Jerrold Seigel offers an inter­ esting example of this tolerance in his writing on the poet Paul Verlaine. Toward the end of his life, Verlaine was often found shuffling around the Latin Quarter shabbily dressed and sometimes sleeping in doorways. The commissioner of the Paris police, however, had given orders that Verlaine was never to be arrested, no matter what he did. It is certainly well known that few artists—at least few successful artists—spend much of their time in Bohemia. This would be the case were there no other reason than the requisite work and self-discipline of artistic achievement precludes spending much time sitting about a cafe. Nevertheless, Bohemia acts as a support group to the arts, and the

Preface

xvii

bohemian can take on the cloak of tolerance afforded the true artist by affecting the artist’s life-style. The somewhat off-balance individual, for example, can be redefined within Bohemia. (He is no longer nuts; he has become profound.) Political activists have long sought the shield afforded them within Bohemia, a place to develop and organize their activities. Since the boundaries of Bohemia are so loosely drawn, they easily overlap with those of other social movements, harboring and supporting dissidents who may have very different agendas from those of their bohemian hosts. Therefore, in our search for definitions it is important as well to determine what Bohemia is not. That bohemianism is primarily a circum­ stance of youth does not mean that other forms of youth protest—student activism in its many forms since the 1800s, antiwar advocacies, the dropout wanderers of Russia and Germany at the turn of this century, or the dropout hippies of the late 1960s and early 1970s—can necessarily be fitted into the definition we have given here. Bohemian dissent is evidenced in life-style and artistic expression. And that a cafe is requisite in which to forge its tenuous associations makes it almost invariably an urban phenom­ enon. Furthermore it needs the participation of a shocked and scandalized bourgeoisie as a foil. Hence whatever the critics may think of beatnik art, the beat generation can still claim membership in Bohemia. The hippies— and there are a few articles on them included here for comparison with the bohemian pattern—grew out of the negativism and drug-abetted frustration of the beat movement, and surely there is an overlap both of individuals and of time. But after the failure of “ flower power” to vanquish the Western military combine, the hippy response was to withdraw commu­ nally to the more remote corners of the planet—anywhere from Calaveras County to Kathmandu. Decidedly a most unbohemian thing to do. Nor is the artistic avant-garde necessarily a product of Bohemia, al­ though the roots of the two are often closely entwined. As Mark Benney points out in his Chicago lecture included here, Bohemians are incubators of social change, protecting radical ideas from interference from the outside society until their time is come. Hence, given the connection between bohemianism and the artistic life-style, it is often the case that avant-garde art both emanates from and is supported by Bohemia. Part I of this anthology presents historical and contemporary theories of Bohemia, some literary and some sociological. These provide a framework for the sketches, articles, and anecdotes of Part II. These, in turn, offer descriptions of bohemian life as well as reactions to that life both by bohemians themselves and by so-called bourgeois critics. Part III is composed of writings which predict the demise of Bohemia—a demise which seems to be continuously anticipated for as long as bohemianism has been acknowledged. Bohemia emerged as a distinct sociological phe

xviii

On Bohemia

nomenon at the height of the romantic movement in France, in the stance of antagonism and withdrawal of artists and writers from the complacent acceptance of national defeat after the Napoleonic Wars, from a disdain of the dehumanizing spirit of an industrializing society, and, undoubtedly, from the loss of aristocratic patronage, which had nurtured the arts and artists during the ancien regime. Hence the collection of writings in Part III may suggest to the reader questions about the future of Bohemia in a Western society much changed from those early origins. Some of the articles in this part argue that Bohemia will continue indefinitely, providing a necessary forum for creative intelligence ever straining against imposed standards of behavior. Others suggest that Bohemia is doomed by its very success—that is, its flaunting of rebellious behavior, its demand for selfdetermination and freedom from mindless conformity have altered the standards of the very class of society at which its jibes have been directed. There is a vast literature on the subject of Bohemia, only a fraction of which can be included here. Therefore, the selections have been chosen with the intent both of illustrating the contrarieties of response to the bohemian idea, and also of offering the reader some guideposts for exploring further into that literature. Where stories or articles have been given titles by their authors, those titles are retained. Many of the selections, however, are excerpts from longer works; in this case we have provided titles. The sources of all the selections are given in the Bibliography with the attributed title in paren­ theses. M. GRAÑA Santa Fe, 1989

Acknowledgments The editors gratefully acknowledge the following publishers and authors for permission to use previously published materials: Paul Ableman, “ What Happened to Bohemia?” ; George Armstrong, “ Ita ly’s Beatnik Summer.” These articles appeared in New Statesman, Janu­ ary 10, 1975, and September 15, 1967, respectively. Vassily Aksyonov, “ Beatniks and Bolsheviks.” The New Republic. Copy right © 1987. Lisa Appignanesi, The Cabaret. Copyright © 1975 by Lisa Appignanesi. Reprinted by permission of the author. G. William Domhoff, The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats. Reprinted by permission of the author. Emily Hahn, Romantic Rebels: An Informal History o f Bohemianism in America. Copyright © 1966 by Emily Hahn. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast. Reprinted by permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Company. Copyright © 1964 by Mary Hemingway. John Robert Howard, “ The Flowering of the Hippie Movement.” Re­ printed by permission of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Christopher A. Kent, “ The Idea of Bohemia in Mid-Victorian England.” Queen s Quarterly. Reprinted by permission of the author. Andrea Lee, Russian Journal. Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1981 by Andrea Lee. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. This piece originally appeared in the New Yorker. Richard Miller, Bohemia: The Protoculture Then and Now. Reprinted by permission of Nelson-Hall, Inc. xix

xx

On Bohemia

Ephraim Mizruchi, Regulating Society: Marginality and Control in Histor­ ical Perspective. Copyright © 1983 by the Free Press. Reprinted by permission of the Free Press, a division of Macmillan, Inc. Lionel Rolfe, Literary L. A. Panjandrum Books. Reprinted by permission of the author. Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris. Copyright © 1986 by Jerrold Seigel. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc. Joseph Wechsberg, Vienna, My Vienna. Copyright © 1968 by George Weidenfeld. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan Publishing Company. Kingsley Widmer, The Literary Rebel. Copyright © 1965. Reprinted by permission of Southern Illinois University Press.

I

The Social and Literary Origins of Bohemia Bohemianism such as it was sprang up in Paris. And that is sufficiently good reason for its failure in England. — A non ym ou s British editorial

The Ideological Significance of Bohemian Life

,

Cesar Gra ña 1964

The new literary ideals and the struggling, searching, voluble young men who were their natural protagonists joined together in Paris to make of intellectual discontent a cultural spectacle. They created la vie de boh ème as a means of intruding into daily reality their willful and unpredictable energies, their thrust for novelty, and their colorful contempt for the established spiritual order. The language of Bohemia, said Henri de M ürger (who was to make his reputation as the chief chronicler of the garret) was a paradise to experimentalists and a hell to classicists. And Alexandre Dumas, when he felt like posing as a Bohemian, at once assumed the idiom of self-dramatized and shimmering sensitivity and the air of unstable, pulsing intellectual excitement; “ a brush in one hand, a pen in the other, laughing, crying, scribbling.” 1Balzac, on the other hand, in A Prince o f Bohemia, saw Bohemian glamor and even Bohemian fun as the symbol of enforced failure, the spectacle of young intellectuals who had turned to iconoclasm and exhibitionism, because of their frustration before what he called the “ gerontocracy” of the Restoration and Orleanist periods. If the Tsar would buy Bohemia and set it down in Odessa, Odessa would be Paris within a year. There were, he said, writers, administrators, soldiers, artists, and diplomats in Bohemia “ quite capable of overturning Russia’s designs, if they but felt the power of France at their backs.” 2 Most writers who succeed in their work are, in the strict sense, unsatis­ factory Bohemians. True Bohemian sectarianism is usually carried on by people of excitable imaginations and modest talent, a combination which disables them for an ordinary existence and forces them, as consolation, to a life of dedicated unconventionality. For the really talented, as Balzac suggests, Bohemia is a stimulating interlude until the chance for real work arrives. Yet, Balzac knew that within Bohemia, as generally within modern literary life, there was a struggle between the most passionate ambition and the fear that success would mean only the kiss of death to freedom 3

4

On Bohemia

and integrity. As he put it in his curious piece of speculation about Paris and Odessa, even if Russia were thrown open to the intellectual coloniza­ tion of young Parisians they might not choose to leave “ the asphalt of the boulevards behind them .” 3 The point is that, although Bohemia has never been, as such, the house of the intellect, the spirit of intellectual vagrancy which it represents has considerable ideological significance and an affec tionately legendary place in the world of artists and writers. Every literary generation since the nineteenth century has had its Bohemian moment, and the inheritance shows in some detail of personal display, in the occasions of spiritual revelry and comradeship observed in the academy, the studio, and the newspaperman’s saloon, and in the paraphernalia and voluntary stigmata of Latin Quarters everywhere. The reason is that Bohemia embodies as a social fixture the burning and doomed enthusiasm for the life of the spirit, the daily battle against the powers of the modern world. As the founders of this tradition, the Parisian Bohemians created a fellowship which a young artist or writer could become a part of, invented the basic Bohemian manner, and named it appropriately with a variant of the French word for gypsy. For the Bohemian image has always been an intellectually uplifted version of the gypsy image as a community of chosen outcasts, claiming the spontaneous gift of creativity and willing to undergo great penalties to preserve their peculiar freedoms. By its very nature Bohemia was too impersonal, unbusinesslike, and lacking in unified goals to become an organized utopia in the sense of a Brook Farm or a religious community. But it did represent the intention to translate into daily experience the romantic code of existence for the sake of beauty, creative work, and the free individual who was the servant and, if necessary, the victim of such values. In other words, it created the sociological props for the literary existence as a “ subculture,” as a public way of life. One of the recurrent features of a period calling into question established social principle seems to be to drive young people into unexpected forms of defiance and unrest. The French Revolution, for example, had, as one of its aftermaths, the appearance of youthful gangs and coteries dedicated to the cultivation of special passions and adventures. Some, like the Unbelievables (Incroya bles) of the Thermidorian reaction, were aristocratic and monarchist and had as their purpose the terrorizing of their radical counterparts of the Jacobin Club. Their clothing identification (always a concomitant of youth groups) was expensive and precise—abundant lace, high cravat, tight trousers, a short velvet waistcoat with eighteen mother-of-pearl buttons, and artificial beauty marks. Their hair was cut short in the back and hung over the face in free locks. The style was a piece of macabre taunting called à la victime because it imitated the appearance of a person about to

The Ideological Significance of Bohemian Life

5

be placed under the guillotine. Others, like the Bousingots (one translation is the “ Hell-raisers” ) of the Restoration Period, were apparently recruited from among middle-class discontents and held radical-sounding, erratic political ideas which somehow were never followed by practical action. According to Balzac they could be recognized by their off-center cravats, greasy coats, long beards, and dirty finger nails.4 The Bohemians of the 1830’s and 1840’s were young, actually and ideologically; they claimed that youth itself was the collective expression of genius. It is exaggerating very little to say that Bohemians hoped to be seen as a band of intellectual raiders and freebooters, who routed convention everywhere and kept all contented souls in a state of dazzled alarm. In this, if we believe Mrs. Trollope, they succeeded only too well. In 1836, she wrote that, “ Young France,” (one of the Bohemian tags) had become a cabalistic figure of speech “ by which everybody seems to be expected to understand some­ thing great, terrible, volcanic and sublime.” 5 In all accounts of the Bohe mia of the Orleanist years, the first impressions have always to do with its ingenious techniques of social outrage. When Thackeray first came on the Paris Bohemia, he was astonished enough to make a careful record of their appearance—their ringlets, straight locks, toupees, English, Greek and Spanish nets, and the variety of their beards and jackets.6 The painter Pelletier went on walks accompanied by a pet jackal. De Nerval took a lobster on a leash through the Tuilleries gardens; “ It does not bark,” he said, “ and knows the secrets of the deep.” Th éophile Gautier’s red waistcoat staggered the bourgeois at the premiere of Hernani, though by Bohemian standards such apparel was in no way extraordinary. In the recollection of Hugo’s wife, the Hugoiste claque at this most storied of first nights also wore Spanish cloaks, Robespierre waistcoats, and Henry III caps.7 Obviously prankish as these things were, there stood behind them the effort to give manner and presence to the aristocratic credo of the new intelligentsia. However, as was pointed out in an earlier chapter, this credo did not represent a continuation or revival of the Old Regime’s learned courtliness. On the contrary, at least in the Bohemian case, the chosen gained a sense of their condition, either from the reverse pride of the citizen of an outcast world or from an identification with the glamorous aggression and egotism of the outlaw. For, in the sense that romanticism is a glorification of “ predatory efficiency” (the basis, according to Thor stein Veblen, of barbaric elites),8 Bohemian imagination was, above all, romantic, that is to say, filled with bandits, pirates, robber barons, and other such heroes who were at the same time aristocratic and primitive, splendid and threatening. It is not surprising, therefore, that in their farewell notes to the world the young Parisian suicides of Mrs. Trollope’s

6

On Bohemia

day would speak of yearning for a greatness that “ should cost neither labor nor care” and express “ profound contempt for those who are satisfied to live by the sweat of their brow.” 9 Of course, the aesthete’s war was bound to be a war of the imagination— a member of Gautier’s circle wrote that, while Saint-Simonians and Fouri erists attacked the bourgeoisie at the political and economic level, the artistic faction had as its weapons only “ the brush, the lyre, and the chisel.” 10 And perhaps for that reason, it was waged with a degree of psychological aggression which reached near-cultist proportions. Examin ing the dramatists of the 1830’s, Mrs. Trollope was taken aback by their infatuation with vice, poison, rape, murder, and blasphemy. Gautier himself spoke of the “ carrion novels” written by his contemporaries. “ Black humor” and talking “ graveyard stuff” (parler cadavre) became essential to the jargon of the Bohemians.11 The painters appeared to Chateaubriand to have, in addition to their alarming mustaches, heads full of deluges, seas, rivers, forests, cataracts, tempests, slaughters, and tortures. Their aim, he said, was to form a separate species between the ape and the satyr.12 The accuracy of this reading of the artist’s inner thoughts as a forecast of the character of the art itself is attested by the death, massacre, and battle scenes which became the staple of so much romantic painting.13 Just as Bohemians dreamed of themselves as the protagonists of pictur­ esque violence, so were their anecdotes and stunts symbolic acts of terror on society. Skeletons provided “ atmosphere” for many garrets and were sometimes used for such primeval apocalyptic gestures as the famous attempts by Borel, Gautier, and de Nerval to quaff sea water out of a human skull. Borel called his quarters “ The Tartar War Cam p,” and de Nerval pitched a nomad’s tent in the middle of his apartment. The Bousingots were said to eat wild boar (“ not digestible, but Gothic” ) and to hang their walls with tomahawks and “ poisoned” daggers. The consti­ tution of one student band, the Badouillards, required its members to be initiated at a night-long vigil, during which they guarded arms in the medieval fashion to show courage in fighting and proficiency in fencing and boxing. They took an oath of vengeance on the bourgeoisie, and had to display a repertory of obscene songs suitable for disturbing the peace.14 The following (a poem in prose translation), by Th éophile Dondey,15 is a typical document of the period. In the center of the room, round a blazing punch bowl whose prystmatic flames resemble a steamy lake, and whose size is the equal of the expanses of Hell, sit twenty young men, artists to the core, pipes puffing, sardonic of eye, their heads adorned with the Liberty Cap; the bearded Young France ready for the orgy.

The Ideological Significance of Bohemian Life

7

. . . In the morning these Fate-touched Young Men will revel in a river of wrathful madness, will grasp their daggers, pledge themselves to rip open the bellies of the money-counters, and swear to devote their lives to waging war against these barren times. . . .16

What Dondey offers us here is a short catalogue of Bohemian romantic hatreds and devotions: the chosen Young Man, beautiful, satanic, savage and sensitive; the witchcraft (and the burden) of genius; the soul-deprived world, languishing under the sterile tyranny of the merchant; the duty of the creative outcast to be reckless and free; the Avenging Angel of Art who will finally plunge the knife into the heart of bourgeois society—that is, its stomach. The dadaistic clowning and esoteric jokes which have always been hallmarks of Bohemia also flourished among these originals. In their stories women died laughing, while lovers tickled their feet. Their chapter headings were written in English, Latin, Proven çal, and Spanish. Their books had titles like On the Incommodiousness o f Commodes or On the Effect o f the Tales o f Fishes upon the Undulations o f the Sea. The preface to a book by Dondey read: Ah Eh he He! hi! hi! Oh Hu! Hu! Hu! Profession o f faith o f the author. 17

Yet all of this provocative tomfoolery was designed to furnish comic relief for a profound feeling of frustration and abhorrence. If Th éophile Don dey’s “ profession of faith” was a stammering of gibberish it was only because, as he wrote Borel, “ Like you, I despise society . . . and especially its excrescence, the social order.” 18 One cause of cynicism was political bewilderment. Gautier complained that his “ best enemies” advised him to be red one day and white the next (and out of boredom he concluded that “ poets, dreamers, and musicians had no business trying to be good citizens” ).19 Early in M ürger’s Vie de Boh ème, Rodolphe, the young artist, instructs the concierge in charge of his garret to awaken him every morning by announcing the day of the week, the day of the month, the quarter of the moon, and the form of the government.20 After two generations of revolution, war, propaganda, and countless panaceas, there were those who could only respond with ex­ haustion, hilarity, and contempt, or seek the respite of new forms of imagination. Yet it was precisely political confusion that permitted Bohe

8

On Bohemia

mian life to exist. For however the bourgeoisie might defile the life of the spirit, it lacked the ideological bone structure capable of placing all of society under the pale of one jealous and inflexible order. Bohemia, for its part, despite all of the burning bitterness of its anti-social feeling, was, almost by definition, politically powerless. What it caused to flourish instead was, in Dondey’s words, the “ arsenal of the soul,” the pursuit of purely ideal engagements. Of these the most typical and the most influen­ tial historically was the religion of beauty, l’art pour l’art, a kingdom whose integrity was free from the secular world, whose tasks arose only out of the individual’s own creativity and which, therefore, permitted the gratification of the romantic need to be at the same time significant and self-centered. Art for a rt’s sake was a saving vision. It was also a sectarian devotion exhibiting and accepting the martyrdom of philistine incomprehension, or as Chateaubriand called it, “ the pageant of the bleeding heart.” 21 What this meant to a generation without religious faith and incapable of social optimism may be seen in the theatrically sincere notes of office workers, law clerks, and minor fonctionnaires collected by the literary historian Ren é Maigron, in which obscure young men pay the symbolic homage of life and death to the romantic dream of redeeming beauty. One, written by a “ future litterateur” in 1836, says: I shall open my breast to the great wind of Art and my quivering heart will ecstatically exult while my ship, upon the wind of beauty will joyfully sail over the purple sea. Far, far and even farther, believe not in the abyss. Fly my beautiful vessel, far from the hated shore. Higher and always higher. We shall lull sweetly along, over the misty expanses, toward the enchanted dream.22

Another reads: Heroes die smiling in the flames, and like them, I go smiling to the funeral pyre. Divine Art, I carry you in my soul. Let me be worthy of you.23

For men so precious, so exacting, and so vulnerable, death appeared, understandably, as the only harbor open to lonely sensibility. Their books had titles like N écropolis, Philosophie du d ésespoir, Entre la vie et la m ort, M émoires d ’un suicide, and L ’Amour de la mort. According to Sainte-Beuve the ideal of the romantic generation was to be a great poet and to die. “ Never was death more loved than then,” said Maxime DuCamp speaking of the romantic years and the sensuous necrophilia of writers for whom death had “ the delicate aroma of flowers or perfume” bears him out.24 There were, in fact, some semi-serious efforts to formalize the suicidal

The Ideological Significance of Bohemian Life

9

ideal, such as The Suicide Club (originally called the Fed-ups Club) organized at the Sorbonne in 1846. The Suicide Club recruited its members between the ages of eighteen and thirty. It pledged them to show the bourgeoisie that nothing could be nobler than self-destruction. It excluded those wishing to end their lives because of disappointment in love, financial difficulties, or incurable disease. And it prohibited all suicide methods likely to cause disfiguration.25 Romanticism, which united art and life, art and self, and death and self, was also bound to unite death and art. It is, therefore, perfectly fitting that the poet Th éophile Dondey should choose the surroundings of grand opera as the ideal setting for his final moment. I would sit alone in a quiet box, and when the violins, the oboes, and the musical throats rise like sonorous arches before the admiring heart. I shall swallow a handful of some bliss-bringing opiate . . . as the chaste-sensuous music pours out its homage to my beautiful death.26

After the suicides of the young dramatists Escousse and Lebras, there was talk in the newspapers of self-killing as “ the devouring plague of the tim es,” and speeches were made in the Chamber of Deputies blaming the excesses of literary excitement.27 Still, one must not expect death as an ideal to be followed by death in fact. Goethe survived The Sorrows o f Young Werther and Rousseau La Nouvelle H élo ïse. Even de Senancour did not listen to his own suicidal advocacies in Obermann, though there would seem to be no retreat from them. The Suicide Club was, of course, an elaborately outrageous joke aimed chiefly at a succ és de scandale; only one suicide among its members was actually reported. But intellectually it was a testimony to death as “ the only airtight Bohemia.” 28 It warned against disfiguration so as to protect aesthetic pride to the last. And it taught that, just as ordinary contentment made life void and vulgar, commonplace forms of suffering, like money troubles, heartbreaks and ill health, rendered death spiritually meaningless. The Suicide Club and other necrophilic displays of Bohemia were, of course, linked to the fatuously masochistic side of romanticism. But they remind us all the same of de Lamennais’ observation that self-killing was essentially an act of self-worship and, as such, one of the chief signs of modern decay. In this respect, de Lamennais merely anticipated the theories of the classical sociologists. Compare, for example, de Lamen nais’ analysis with that of Emile Durkheim in the latter’s famous study, Suicide. According to de Lamennais: One can flatter pride with vain promises of independence, but one cannot cure the wound of the heart. As man moves away from order, anguish presses around him. He is the king of his own misery, a degraded sovereign in revolt against

10

On Bohemia

himself, without duties and without bonds, without society. Alone in the midst of the universe, he runs rather than seeks to run away into nothingness.29

De Lamennais is solemn and ironic; Durkheim is factual and brief. But their arguments are essentially the same. Durkheim writes: Therefore, the educated man who kills himself, does not kill himself because he is educated but because the religious society of which he is a part has lost its cohesion.30

This statement, however, is only part of Durkheim’s theory of suicide as a product of the moral watering-down of institutions of modern society. He comes closer to the relationship between suicidal ideas and the ailments of the modern literati when he points out that it was precisely the utopian intensity of their aesthetic and intellectual dreams that led to bitterness and demoralization. It should not be thought, of course, that, as a philo­ sophical argument, individualistic suicide was an invention of the nine­ teenth century. Montesquieu attacked European legislation on suicide as too severe; for, why, he asked, should a man who is poor, unhappy, or scorned by his fellows be compelled to remain within society?31 The psychologist and philosopher Baron Holbach argued simply that “ the pact that binds man to society . . . is conditional and reciprocal, and a society which cannot bring well-being to us loses all rights upon u s.” 32 In Montes­ quieu there is a dismissal of the old odium against suicide which saw in it always a defiance of man’s obligation to social membership regardless of subjective sufferings. Holbach speaks for the view of the Enlightenment that society was only a contract among individuals for the benefit of individuals, and thus turns suicide into a kind of civil right. But it is only with Durkheim’s description of suicide égoï te that we step into the atmosphere of modern literary motivations. Social man necessarily presupposes a society which he expresses and serves. If it dissolves, if we no longer feel its existence and action about and above us . . . all that remains is an artificial combination of illusory images and phantasma­ goria vanishing at the least reflection: that is, nothing that can be a goal for our action.33

For de Nerval, the potency of a released imagination had swept the mind of his contemporaries toward “ love” and “ poetry,” and away from the crowd and its greed. However, George Sand looking at the same state of mind, saw it as the spectacle of the anguish and fatigue created by a selfcentered intellectual ambition “ grown and stretched beyond m easure.” Durkheim, in speaking of “ vanishing phantasmagorias” and “ the artificial

The Ideological Significance of Bohemian Life

11

combination of illusory images,” suggests that the to u r d ’ivoire was also a tour de fo r c e which literary self-will could not in the end sustain. Ration­ alism had seen the emancipation of man from faith as a victory. The romantics may also have seen faith as defenseless before the analytical mind. But for them the consequence was self-defeat. In George Sand’s novel L élia, as the young poet nears suicide, he seems to voice the Durkheimian theory in the form of a literary outcry. I know . . . there is nothing true in man’s dreams, and that once truth is unveiled, there is nothing for man but the endurance of anxiety, the resolve to live with despair. And when I said that man can be gratified through his own powers I lied to others and to myself; for he who arrives at the possession of useless powers, to the exercise of energies without worth and goals, is nothing but a vigorous fool. . . .34 Notes 1. Cited in Grand dictionnaire du X IX e siècle, 17 vols. (Paris: 1867) II, 866. 2. Honor éde Balzac, La Comedie humaine, 53 vols. (Philadelphia: George Barrie and Son, 1897) XII, 79-80. 3. Ibid., p. 80. 4. Th éophile Lavallée, Histoire de Paris (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1852) p. 421. 5. Frances Trollope, Paris and the Parisians in 1835 (New York: Harper and Brothers 1896) pp. 58-59. 6. William Makepeace Thackeray, The Paris Sketchbook (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1870) pp. 58-59. 7. Orlo Williams, Vie de Boheme (London: Martin Seeker, 1913) pp. 29-30; Enid Starkie, Petrus Borel: The Lycanthrope (London: Faber and Faber, 1954) pp. 29, 83, 91; J. B. Priestley, Literature and Western Man (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960) p. 171. Dumas, Balzac, de Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, M érim é,e and Nodier were all present at Hernani’s opening. Stendhal was also there, though he was not friendly toward Hugo or his group. Hugo’s band from the Latin Quarter was of about four hundred. The rioting began almost with the first line. Jeering throughout the performance from his box was Scribe, the most successful (and the wealthiest) of the conventional dramatists. J. B. Priestley, Literature and Western Man (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), pp. 164-165. 8. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory o f the Leisure Class (New York: Modern Library, 1934) pp. 18ff. 9. Trollope, op. cit. p. 197. 10. Th éophile Gautier, Histoire du romanticisme (Paris: Biblioteque Charpentiere, 1874) p. 85. 11. Starkie, op. cit., pp. 56, 94, 112. 12. In Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (New York: Meridian Books, 1955) p. 61. 13. Among the titles of paintings noted down by Thackeray at an exhibit in the 1830’s are the following: “ The Massacre at Scio,” “ Medea Going to Murder Her Children,” “ Hecuba Going to Be Sacrificed,” “ The Grand Dauphiness Dying,” “ Zenobia Found D ead,” “ The Death of C aesar,” “ The Death of H ector,” “ The Massacre of St. Bartholomew,” “ Young Clovis Found D ead,”

12

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

On Bohemia

"Cain after the Death of A bel,” “ Death of Philip of Austria,” “ Death of Queen Elizabeth,” “ Death of Lucretia,” “ Death of Hym etto,” “ Death of Adelaide of Cominges.” Thackeray, op. cit., pp. 67-68. Orlo Williams, op. cit. p. 29; Starkie, op. cit. pp. 84, 86, 89. In keeping with the romantic attachment to the Scottish highlands, and the glamorous wildness of their nature and customs, Th éophile Dondey changed his name to Philotée O ’Neddy. O. Williams, op. cit. pp. 150-151; Starkie op. cit. p. 92. Williams and Starkie quote different portions of this poem. I have given a reconstruction in free translation of both portions. Cited in Starkie op. cit. p. 197. Cited in Louis Maigron, Le Romanticism et les moeurs (Paris: Honore Cham pion, 1910) p. 360. Ibid. p. 357. Henry M ürger, Sc ènes de la vie de boh ème (Paris: Michel Levy, 1874) p. 28. Rene Wellek, A History o f Modem Criticism, 2 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955) I, 16, 21. Cited in Maigron, op. cit. p. 81. Cited in ibid., p. 79. Starkie, op. cit. p. 60. Maigron, op. cit. pp. 341-342. Cited in Maigron, op. cit. p. 329. Trollope, op. cit. p. 197. The expression is Leslie Fiedler’s. An End to Innocence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), p. 183. F. de Lamennais, Oeuvres Completes, (Bruxelles: Hauman & Cie, 1839) Part I, p. 151. Emile Durkheim, Suicide (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1951), p. 169. De Montesquieu, Oeuvres completes, Edouard Laboulaye, editor (7 vols.; Paris: Barnier Fr ères, 1875), I, 254-257. Baron Holbach (M. Mirabaud, pseudonym), Syst ème de la nature (2 vols.; London, 1771), I, 329 f. Durkheim, op. cit. p. 213. George Sand, L élia (Paris: Garnier Fr ères, 1960), p. 288.

Bohemia as a Means of Social Regulation Ephraim Mizruchi, 1983

My thesis, it is well to restate, is that societies must provide sources of integration and social control in order to persist. Surplus populations are created not only by increased birthrates and survival rates but by contrac tions of positions in organizations that force formerly integrated people into marginal relationships. Such people are more likely to participate in collective protest. Elites recognize this and legislate in order to integrate and control the potentially dissident. But more subtle societal processes operate, as well, to absorb surplus populations. The expansion of com­ merce and industry, the outbreak of war, the undertaking of Crusades, and other phenomena are easily recognized. But the emergence of orga­ nized patterns that effectively absorb personnel also occurs unintention­ ally, at least with respect to the social-control function. This was true for the emergence of the monastic system and the Beguinages. The motives for participation in these patterns were surely complex, but it is clear that from the point of view of the actors the motives did not include efforts to control one’s dissident tendencies. That those in power both in the Church and the community realized that surplus men and women could be brought under control through religious participation is clear from my earlier analysis. But it was largely the participants themselves who made choices that led to their integration and regulation. The degree of regulation as a reflection of the processes associated with societal flexibility varied with historical conditions. But some roles emerged in society that allowed for more latitude in behavior than others. Thus the various mimes, minstrels, and other performers were recognized as more prone to deviance than monks or Beguines. This reflects a pattern of norm evasion that is toler­ ated, a tradition that, although reaching back into history, is less than institutionalized but nevertheless organized and persistent. Thus all socie­ ties recognize certain groups—what I have called “ parallel castes” —as being somewhat outside of conventional society, and so long as they do 13

14

On Bohemia

not pose too great a challenge to the behavior or mores of those in authority their ways will be tolerated. Because it is understood that some people in society can “ get away with m ore” than others, there is a tendency for pretenders to seek the cloak of protection associated with those committed to the tolerated life-style and thus derive sensual or material gains from this association. This was, as I have shown, true of the Beguines and minstrels, and probably of the itinerant monks as well. Throughout the historical literature there is a constant pattern distinguishing between the genuine adherents of a pro­ tected life-style and the pretenders. The pattern protrudes, as it were, out of the printed page toward the reader. In contemporary American Society bohemianism is a pattern that allows pretenders to enjoy the leeway accorded the artistic and literary cadres. But even though it includes pretenders it functions in a manner similar to that associated with the monks, Beguines, minstrels, and actors. That is, it is characterized by selfregulation of behavior through participation in organized groups. The French Revolutions I am not the only sociologist to recognize the connection between marginality and bohemianism. Cesar Gra ña noted the connection between the contraction of certain status vacancies resulting from the French Revolution and the creation of a surplus population of, among others, ex aristocrats who invaded the many garrets and other cheap rooms in Paris, establishing a colony of intellectuals and artists. The French Revolution and the subsequent dissolution of the social structure created new masses of rootless, undirected, and uncontrolled wanderers, including the sans culottes and migrant poor. In an earlier period the lack of opportunity for intellectuals was a factor in the outbreak of the Revolution. Particularly in Paris the roving intellectual and the spurious artist and writer were both ubiquitous and conspicuous, due, in no small part, to their relatively great numbers and suddenness of appear­ ance. According to Gra ña: “ Through the gathering of a large marginal population in a great city, the scarcity of ‘honorable’ occupations, and the professional ambiguity of the new literature, that peculiar version of the self-made man, the roving intellectual, had become a permanent feature of Parisian life.” 1 The pretenders had little difficulty passing themselves off as artists or intellectuals, since the forms of art and writing were, concomitantly, in a state of flux. The new patron of the arts was the bourgeoisie, but a mass audience, more generally, emerged after the French Revolution, enhancing

Bohemia as a Means of Social Regulation

15

an enormous expansion of literary and artistic effort—and ultimately income, too, for those whose output attracted the new consumers. The situation of the artist both under the Old Regime and after the Revolution was unpredictable. Though some support, in the form of free accommodations in the Louvre, was provided during the time of the monarchy, this was limited to a very small artistic elite. Later Napoleon expelled the artists from the Louvre. In general, enthusiasm for art was not great, and the artist both painted and behaved in a conventional way. But the rebellious posture associated with youth following the Revolution was soon reflected in the attitudes of young artists. Several simultaneous processes gave rise to the bohemian pattern, the changes in the conception of art, the drawing together of artists and writers, and the general idea that all creative people should assume a rebellious posture in their public behavior. But the idea that artists and other geniuses should be appreciated while nevertheless being kept apart from polite society persists. And no less a writer of prominence than Honor é de Balzac provided the lines that reinforced the idea of tolerable dissent for some members of society.2 Influenced in part by Saint-Simon, who included painters, sculptors, musicians, poets, and novelists in the category “ artist,” Balzac viewed the artist as a martyr, an unhappy servant to the cause of community. As such, the artist was to set himself and adhere to the highest standards.3 Balzac was thus inevitably inclined toward a somber view when it came to assessing the many pretenders and inept aspirants who haunted the boh­ emian paths of Paris. But he was no less hard on the genuine artist. In The Human Comedy he suggests that artists can be merciless and that they “ do not understand the true meaning of love.” 4 And further, being a successful artist may mean being a failure as a person. This characteriza­ tion, which, I feel, lends itself to reinforcement of the image of the artist as outside conventional society, is reflected in the following lines: “ We women ought to admire men of genius as one enjoys a play, but live with them—never!” 5 And this view that the artist should remain apart from society is reflected in Balzac’s reminder that the artist should remain unattached to the social and political theories that flooded the Parisian intellectual scene during the early and mid-nineteenth century. The real artist, in short, works in solitude and avoids the drawing room and the salon. But Balzac was aware of the emergence of a new alliance among the diverse artists—a response to the need to organize, to assume power over the creative process, and to establish and monitor what they alone deter­ mined to be the highest standards of artistic output. Thus the circumstance of increasing numbers of aspiring artists, marginal pretenders, and an exploding market triggered by the rise of the bourgeoisie provided for the emergence of exclusive groups of productive artists. These became the

16

On Bohemia

core groups, and those who were not let in remained sojourners. The sojourners were essentially bohemians, and one of their attributes was a tendency to include rather than exclude marginal youth. The most conspicuous characteristic of bohemianism is the pattern of imitation of the life-style of the artist. The poverty associated with the art student and the struggling artist was romanticized. The wearing of garish clothes, the midnight and early morning antics associated with the Left Bank, the bizarre behavior in general—all of these became part of the image that more conventional society conjured up when thinking of boh­ emians. And all of this behavior was possible because the degree of tolerance for deviant behavior was greater for artists and performers than it was for others in the community. The pretenders, who were for the most part not artists, gained from the wider latitude allowed the genuine artists. The writer who probably had the greatest impact on the formulation of a bohemian model was Henri Murger. His Vie de Boh ème6 and other writings romanticized the life of the Montmartre and Left Bank artists and pretenders, and influenced, among others, Giacomo Puccini, whose opera La Boh ème is a direct adaptation of Murger’s story. Murger, sometimes called “ the poet of youth,” 7 recognized the bohemian life-style as transi tory, as a youthful interlude on the path to success as a genuine artist or even in the commercial world. Being young provides the rationale for the direct and immediate gratification of impulses. It is important to enjoy oneself in youth, for by age thirty the bohemian garment must be shed and the struggle with the real world, if it has not already been overcome, must commence. Bohemia is a way station on the road to success as an artist. He who remains “ too long in Bohemia is doomed, or can escape only into the neighboring Bohemia of crim e.” 8 When Murger himself attained a measure of success he began to write justifications for the bohemian style. To make Bohemia appear respectable he traces the pattern, much as I have attempted to do here, to the “ unconventional and vagrant personalities in art and literature: Homer himself; Villon, ‘poet and vagabond par excellence’ . . . Molière and Shakespeare; Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” and others. He describes three types of bohemians: “ the dreamers, the amateurs, and the stalwarts—or ‘official’ Bohemians. Each class is described in detail. As to the first, Murger has more scorn for its conceit than pity for its sufferings; nothing but contempt for the second; and a real admiration for the third.” 9 He, of course, includes himself in the third category. The bohemian was, then, a pretender rather than a genuine artist, although some who participated in the bizarre behavior of the Left Bank and Montmarte youth later made their way into the cadres of genuine artists. But the latter, as both Balzac and Murger viewed them, were not

Bohemia as a Means of Social Regulation

17

idlers. Bohemianism was an imitation of what many youths thought was the artistic way of life rather than the pursuit of artistic activity. And the amorphousness of what was creative—and what was feigned reflection and ritualistic effort as differentiated from what was accepted by others as genuine art—enhanced tolerance for the behavior of many a pretender. But for the genuine artist, the admonition to abandon the bohemian way by age thirty involved constraints that required an unambiguous response. Was he to pursue the life of relative isolation, hard work, and insecurity that is associated with the quest for success as an artist or to find a place in the conventional world? Most chose the latter. And the pattern of choosing the “ straight” world after sojourning with other youthful boh emians has persisted into the present century. That the bohemians were perceived as being outside society, in a parallel caste, is clear. In commenting on the way journalists were viewed, during the Second Empire in France, Theodore Zeldin provides a telling obser­ vation. “ They were condemned as bohemians, who were redeemed only by their wit. They were placed on the same level as actors ‘whom people both despise and envy.’ ” 10The bohemian pattern was associated not only with painters and sculptors, but, as we know from Murger’s own life, with writers, actors, and others whose efforts were directed to public response. As performers of one sort or another their eccentric behavior did not go unnoticed. And because the distinction between the fake and the genuine remained blurred, those who sought to enjoy the benefits of greater license adopted the trappings of the artist’s life-style. That conventional society allowed youth to experiment, to find their way, enhanced involvement with the tolerable deviants but only for a limited time. And this has been a characteristic of the abeyance processes associated with times of rapid societal transformations. If the pattern became institutionalized, as in the case of the Beguinages, it was possible for a sojourner to become a core member. If the pattern remained only marginally associated with society, the sojourner was much more likely to seek reintegration into more conventional sectors of society. Bohemianism became, and for the time being remains, a pattern that is uninstitutionalized but persistent, in relation to which the expectation is that it will lead only to a return to more “ serious” life pursuits rather than to a new life-style. Contemporary Bohemianism The amorphousness associated with distinguishing genuine artists or writers from pretenders was a result of the romantic revolution led earlier by Victor Hugo. The idea that literary and artistic activity no longer required the old disciplines provided impetus to those with little or no

18

On Bohemia

talent to attempt to join those who were genuinely creative. To be sure, some without talent or skill may have been convinced that they might attain success in the arts. But others could participate in the life-style of the artist for other motives. Hugo’s message was dramatic: “ Tear down theory, poetic systems. . . . No more rules, no more models. . . . Genius conjures up rather than learns. . . . For talent to surrender . . . personal originality . . . would be like for God to become a lackey.” 11 By the 1830s the artist as well as the pretender had a rationale for rejecting conventional life-styles. The talented needed to be organized into a movement that would oppose, on intellectual and aesthetic grounds at least, the rising bourgeoisie and the remnants of the Old Regime. And in order to articulate the differences between young and old, and between those who create and those who attempt to control society, artists and pretenders together dramatized their divergent posture. Clothing styles became bizarre, public behavior became boisterous and impulse indulgent, and the atmosphere around the Left Bank and Montmartre was like the carnival, or Mardi Gras, rather than a work setting for serious students and aesthetes. And this model, adhered to by artist and pretender, persists to the present day. Richard Miller, in a recent book on bohemianism, attempts to tie the bohemian pattern to political activity.12 Although those youth who were involved in the unconventional behavior patterns of Paris in the 1830s and later were undoubtedly more prone to political activity, this tendency was not and is not inherent in the bohemian ideal. It is Murger’s model of bohemianism which has persisted to the present, and this image of the bohemian proscribes direct political activity. The artist and the bohemian both must influence society through creative activity rather than battering the barricades. That political activists associated themselves with artists and the bohemian life-style and that some men of genius participated directly in revolutions and what they perceived as “just wars” is true. The Revolution of 1830 and the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s attracted a number of prominent writers and artists. But it is more likely that their personal sensitivity to the political issues propelled them rather than adherence to bohemian patterns. An example from the 1960s may be instructive here. It probably is no accident that the radical youth of the 1960s adopted, at least superficially, the life-style of those bohemians called “ hippies.” It is also likely that calling themselves “ Yippies” was contrived as a device for obscuring the difference between those whose protest was social and symbolic (hippies) and those whose goals were political, directed toward altering the basic structure of the state (the Yippies: Youth International

Bohemia as a Means of Social Regulation

19

Party). Adhering to a similar life-style and choosing to be called by a similar name was strategically important. The movement for political revolution could then appear to the rest of society and to potential rebels as involving many more supporters than it actually did. Like the preten­ ders in France who used the greater latitude accorded artists to pursue their own goals, the genuine revolutionaries of the 1960s, in the United States, hid under the cloak of permissiveness alloted those youth who were sojourners, i.e., only temporary dropouts from conventional soci ety .13 The hippies, like other bohemians, tended to be apolitical. What was the nature of bohemianism following its rise in France and its diffusion in the nineteenth century to the United States? The French were not the only ones who read and found romance and inspiration in Murger’s Vie de Boh ème. Though a goodly number of young writers and aspiring artists of all sorts were already following a life-style similar to that of the French bohemians, it wasn’t until some of them had been to Paris and others had read Murger that they began to call themselves bohemians. In contrast Edgar Allan Poe, the most notable of those following that life style, adopted by American bohemians as a member of their special world, had seemingly never heard of Murger and the French bohemians. Yet his own life-style—his poverty, drinking and attacks on the Establishment of the time—provided a model for the mis èrables who aspired to great art while enjoying their collective poverty. The bohemians of Greenwich Village, beginning with a group who began to meet at Pfaff’s, a saloon, claimed Poe as one of their own, as they were later to make honorific profit out of the brief involvement with them of Walt Whitman. Though Poe could be used to legitimate the Pfaff’s group and the others to follow, he could not obstruct the Murgerian impulses reflected in the gaiety and romanticism of the Villagers. For Poe’s somberness, morbidity, and path­ ological tendencies could only be romanticized, and perhaps ignored, up to a point. His influence as a personal model was, ironically, greater on an important Frenchman than it was on the Americans, and this influence impacted upon other Europeans as well. Baudelaire’s succession to the mantle of morbidity passed on by Poe fostered a shift in posture among the continental bohemians. From a lighthearted and chiding approach to criticizing the bourgeoisie there was a change to bitter, snarling attacks. Even the Russians (as the work of Dostoevsky, for example, shows) were influenced by Poe and Baudelaire in their morbid soul-searching and their concern with evil. The lighthearted form of bohemianism prospered in both the United States and France during the nineteenth century in spite of some fluctua­ tion resulting from expansion and contraction of the labor force. As the diverse cadres of immigrants arrived, they too developed their own bo­

20

On Bohemia

hemian enclaves. And these prospered and waned as opportunities for integration into the new society fluctuated.14 From the mid-nineteenth century onward, Greenwich Village remained the model for bohemianism everywhere in America. Boston, Chicago, and other cities to a lesser extent all had their bohemians and Bohemias. But Chicago by the turn of the century suddenly gained preeminence through the sheer brilliance of those who assembled and established themselves there as artistic and literary figures. New York’s bohemians, after the turn of the century, began to drift toward political rather than symbolic-artistic rebellion. Marxism, accord­ ing to Parry, became the vehicle for the anti-bourgeois youth of Greenwich Village. This contrasted both with the historic thrust of the Village bo­ hemians and with the rebels who were assembled in Chicago. In the view of the latter, the battle against the philistines was to be fought over free verse and similar issues rather than free speech or political economy.15 Ben Hecht and Maxwell Bodenheim exemplified the light and cheerful tone of the Chicago experience. They and many others, including Carl Sandburg and Sherwood Anderson, came to be recognized as genuinely creative artists, and as such they legitimated the activities of the Chicago bohemians. In time Chicago became part of a shuttle from the Middle West to the East, conveying many of the great and aspiring-to-be-great to and from th e N ea r N o rth Side and the Village. By th e 1920s h eg em o n y over American bohemianism shifted back to New York, and the Village again became the undisputed leader of the war against the philistines. Malcolm Cowley, one of the many writers who participated in and observed the bohemianism of the 1920s, described the two kinds of rebellion alluded to above.16 Side by side were those whose commitment was to political radicalism and those whose attack was primarily on what Cowley dubbed “ puritanism.” 17 During World War I the Village was denuded of young men. Bohemianism, at least in terms of active engage­ ment, was on the wane. But the return of Cowley, and others like him, from Europe provided a marginal population that might have helped replenish the remnant groups of artistic rebels. Bohemianism and its ideal had become diffused through American society by that time, but it was only a small minority living in the Village who still thought of themselves as bohemians. The two cultures, the political and the aesthetic, survived the co-optation of ideals and symbols by the bourgeoisie. But the intimate connection between the arts and rebellion that was romanticized by Murger, and nurtured by the denizens of Pfaff’s and those who dwelt along the streets adjacent to Chicago’s Water Tower, was severely strained. Bohemianism was to become, for the most part, detached from serious artistic aspiration, only to appear and reappear as an amorphous alterna

Bohemia as a Means of Social Regulation

21

tive behavior pattern capable of enhancing permissiveness for the middle class without direct involvement with art or artists.18 What were these ideals which, for the most part, became part of the subterranean tradition? 1. The idea of salvation by the child. Each of us at birth has special potentialities, which are slowly crushed and destroyed by a standard­ ized society and mechanical methods of teaching. If a new educational system can be introduced, one by which children are encouraged to develop their own personalities, to blossom freely like flowers, then the world will be saved by this new, free generation. 2. The idea of self-expression. Each man’s, each woman’s, purpose in life is to express himself or herself, to realize full individuality through creative work and beautiful living in beautiful surroundings. 3. The idea of paganism. The body is a temple in which there is nothing unclean, a shrine to be adorned for the ritual of love. 4. The idea of living for the moment. It is stupid to pile up treasures that we can enjoy only in old age, when we have lost the capacity for enjoyment. Better to seize the moment as it comes, to dwell in it intensely, even at the cost of future suffering. Better to live extrava gantly, gather June roses, “ burn the candle at both ends.” 5. The idea of liberty. Every law, convention, or rule of art that prevents self-expression or the full enjoyment of the moment should be shattered and abolished. Puritanism is the great enemy. The crusade against puritanism is the only crusade with which free individuals are justified in allying themselves. 6. The idea of female equality. Women should be the economic and moral equals of men. They should have the same pay, the same working conditions, the same opportunities for drinking, smoking, and taking or dismissing lovers. 7. The idea of psychological adjustment. We are unhappy because we are maladjusted, and maladjusted because we are repressed. If our individ­ ual repressions can be removed—by confessing them to a Freudian psychoanalyst—then we can adjust ourselves to any situation, and be happy in it. (But Freudianism is only one method of adjustment. What is wrong with us may be our glands, and by a slight operation, or merely by taking a daily dose of thyroid medication, we may alter our whole personalities. Or we may adjust ourselves by some such psycho­ physical discipline as was taught by Gurdjieff. The implication of all these methods is the same—that the environment itself need not be altered. That explains why most radicals who became converted to psychoanalysis or gland therapy or Gurdjieff gradually abandoned their political radicalism.) 8. The idea of changing place. “ They do things better in Europe.” England and Germany have the wisdom of old cultures; and Latin

22

On Bohemia

peoples have admirably preserved their pagan heritage. By expatriating himself, by living in Paris, Capri, or the south of France, the artist can break the puritan shackles, drink, live freely, and be wholly creative.19 That these ideas had already become part of the world view of portions of the middle classes is not at all surprising. World War I had, for the first time, brought Americans into closer direct and indirect contact with the Continent. Some had gone to France to serve in the armed forces, while others received news and other descriptions of life abroad from those most directly involved. And, instead of the spread of a cosmopolitan view among the wealthy alone, the middle and working classes now developed a broader perspective on behavior than had hitherto been the case. Although they might have benefited in this regard from the many immigrant cultures that prospered in the large cities of the United States, this was not likely to be the case. For the immigrants were outsiders whose ways were to be changed or, more simply, ignored. In addition to the greater contact, under war conditions, which allowed for more deviant behavior patterns, the increasing prosperity and move­ ment within the United States dislodged the traditional patterns of con­ formity to older norms. These patterns need not be accepted as reflective of what Americans did in private, because deviant behavior is always present in society, but now there was an increase in general in the range of tolerable deviance observable in public. The 1920s, in short, was a period of change in public behavior and the bohemian ideals tended to be compatible with these new forms. But the toleration of behavior by the middle classes, the guardians of American virtue, that had formerly been associated primarily with those who were at the edge of conventional society deprived the latter of an important source of distinction. And this distinctiveness, which helped articulate and maintain the boundary between the bohemians and the bourgeoisie, ultimately lost its association with those who protested against the middle classes. The ideas that Cowley described had gradually diffused throughout American society. Some of them are clearly recogniz­ able today. If the doctrine which provided articulation of the differences between the bohemians and the bourgeoisie was no longer capable of doing so, what was to happen to bohemianism as Murger knew it? The post-World War I behavior patterns represented a sojourner phe nomenon. The movement of people from positions in rural areas, out of the armed forces, and away from conventional settings generally provided American society with a large marginal urban population. The previous sources of social integration—whether family, army, or occupational stat

Bohemia as a Means of Social Regulation

23

uses—were no longer capable of holding personnel and regulating them, or had thrust out their occupants, as in the case of the armed forces. The 1920s in the United States is a period during which behavior patterns were, in some institutional contexts, anomic. And as in the past, whether it was the decline of Rome or the transformations of the urban commercial patterns during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, older social forms had to expand or new forms emerge in order to provide a place for the marginal populations. As in the early and middle nineteenth century, to be more specific, many unintegrated people chose the bohemian setting and pattern as their way station en route to success in the arts or as a temporary opportunity to sow their “ wild oats.” Again, it is possible to observe the increase of amorphousness that accompanies the efforts of pretenders to squeeze under the cloak of tolerable nonconformity. The boundaries between the core members and the sojourners become blurred, at least in the eyes of the outside observer. The careerists and commercialists began to move in on Bohemia, opening stores and small shops that featured avant-garde styles and objects d'art. This was as true of the Village as it was of the Chicago Bohemias, as Caroline Ware and Harvey Zorbaugh have demonstrated.20 The bohemianism of the Village had for a long time been detached from artistic activity. By the 1920s the creative artists, according to Parry, only came by to make an appearance among those who, more than others, idolized them.21 The pattern of voluntary poverty that characterized the early monks and Beguines, and that Murger had romanticized, seemed to give way to a pattern of impulse indulgence more typical of the bourgeoisie than those who, in principle, opposed them. Had the Depression not arrived a decade later, the poverty aspect of bohemianism, voluntary or involuntary, would have disappeared. Bohemianism had, in sum, become a pattern that was shared by many urban Americans, some of them not even pretending to create art. By the 1940s and the 1950s the pattern became well organized and lodged in urban communal activities. In the 1960s the communal thrust, under the pressure of very large numbers of marginal youth, was directed to the rural setting of America. Communalism The idea of the “ crash pad,” as it was referred to in the 1950s and 1960s, had been part of Murger’s legacy. The poverty-stricken bohemian, whether his condition was voluntary or imposed by genuine destitution, could hardly refuse to share what little he had with his anti-bourgeois brethren. For it was the bourgeoisie who were the materialists; it was they

24

On Bohemia

whose consciousness was dominated by their possessions. The quest in common to present to society at large a higher set of standards unencum­ bered by sham morality and customs, as suggested by Balzac, made it impossible for the bohemian to refuse to share what little he had with his fellows. From the very beginning, bohemians in France, and later in America, lived communally both in cities and in the country. But the pattern of communal living was distinctly bohemian, rather than a pattern associated with creative artistic activities. For, as we noted above, the serious artist required solitude. This was particularly the case when he was engaged in intensive work. Bohemianism, being a highly social activity, was an obstructive pattern when genuine work was re quired. Because the communal life was detached from the life-style of the artist, it too assumed a pattern of its own independent of creative activity. The diffusion of some of the avant-garde ideas associated with the bohemians of Malcolm Cowley’s era, coupled with the increasing institu­ tionalization of the arts in America, enhanced the separation of life-styles noted by Murger and others in France half a century earlier. By the late 1920s and 1930s America’s artists declined for the most part to identify themselves as bohemians. The federal writers’ and artists’ projects of the Depression era were an aid to this tendency, but Cowley had already noted that many of the creative artists had begun to reject any connection with the bohemians. The communal setting became still another home away from home for the middle-class youth of urban America. Whether their homes were on the other side of the city, or “ uptown,” or in small-town rural America, the bohemian “ pad” could provide a temporary resting place away from the dependence and pressures to conform to middle-class norms at home. Whether through advertisements in newspapers or by word of mouth, young people who wanted to avoid the YMCAs and other settings that seemingly constricted their range of behavior found the way into urban bohemian enclaves in or near the Village in New York City or on the Near North Side of Chicago.22 Caroline Ware noted the pattern in her study of the Village. Certain houses, owned by a landlord whose reputation for befriending bohemi­ ans was known from coast to coast, housed most of these, although some were scattered in the garrets of unremodeled houses. In these apartments, no one was put out for failure to pay the rent, but was simply moved to smaller quarters or put in with another occupant. The landlord even went so far as to help out his tenants with money or food when they were badly off, or lent them typewriters. He recognized that many were shiftless and took advantage of him, that others lived from drink to drink, while others were really struggling and devoting themselves to artistic or literary pursuits. This group drifted in and

Bohemia as a Means of Social Regulation

25

out, but some members stayed on for years. The type and its habits remained constant from the earliest days of the Village until 1930, though the proportion whose artistic pretensions were real appeared to have dropped, and the homo­ sexual types became somewhat more prominent.23

What was important about these face to face groups living together was their willingness to accept almost all who wanted to share in the bohemian life-style. This inclusiveness was enhanced by the very high mobility associated with these youths and by the prescription, passed on from Murger, that Bohemia should be a temporary resting place and by age thirty the life-style should be abandoned. The pattern of physical mobility and provision of lodging noted by Ware in the 1920s persisted through the 1930s, when destitution was real rather than pretended, and it became an important part of the bohemianism of the 1950s and 1960s. The “ crash pad” was only another version of the communal thrust that had characterized Murger’s era in France. But unlike the bohemians of France, the Americans developed a pattern more in tune with the times. Not only were there those who made a fulltime commitment, for the duration of their typically short stay in Bohemia, but there were the part-time adherents as well. Called by Ware the “ pseudo-bohemians,” these became the weekenders of the post-World War II period; they included, as well, the “ teenyboppers” of the 1960s.24 Under the cover of literary and other aesthetic interests, the part-time refugees from what was to them a constricting, conventional life-style made excursions on weekends and midweek evenings to the Bohemias of New York, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco, to mention only the bestknown centers. The loci of poetry readings, lectures, discussions, and art shows were sometimes the unambiguously commercial restaurants and bars of Bohemia, or they might be a studio that sought voluntary contri butions from those who entered. Under the guise of aesthetic pretensions, the adventuresome, the lonely, and the naively romantic aspirants to inclusion among the community of urban artists congregated. Both verse and sexuality were loose and free, and it is probable that the latter represented a stronger motive than the former for engagement with those who pursued the joyous and abandoned life of the part-time bohemian. The old norms were being strained by excessive changes in society and the economy, and individualism was now a publicly rationalized, legitimate posture even if it was only practiced on weekends. Everybody under age thirty was welcomed, and sometimes even those who were older might be included. All that was required was willingness to share the pretense that art was everything, that materialism was not only nothing but that it was a threat to the pursuit of genuine human values. Under the conditions of

26

On Bohemia

rapid social change, the affluence of the post-World War I years, and the destitution of the Depression there was what Durkheim described as a concomitant of the anomic phenomenon: “ a search for the bizarre and novel.” 25 The search required little effort, for the pattern of bohemianism was readily available, and the cadres of the full-time swelled to include the sojourners. By the advent of World War II artistic activities had become further institutionalized. Foundations that had emerged in the 1930s—including, for example, the Ford Foundation—were now supporting artists, some of whom had been discovered by the federal artists’ and writers’ projects. To a greater extent than at any other time in American history youth became integrated into a vast organization for waging war. Bohemia, as in the period associated with World War I, was again denuded of youth. And it was not until after the war that reconstruction occurred. Bohemianism after World War II The dislocations that impacted on American society following World War I were repeated in the late 1940s. The sudden return of some ten to fifteen million men and women, and the contraction of certain kinds of industry and expansion of other kinds of activities, contributed to the existence of a massive surplus population. With increasingly rational awareness of the potential societal problems that could emerge under these conditions, political leaders forged the GI Bill. Diverse educational organ­ izations would be created and expanded to absorb the ex-GIs. Employers would be pressed and subsidized to “ hire the vet.” The abeyance process was now, perhaps more than ever before, necessary to soften the impact of these massive numbers on society and to extend over time the process of reintegrating the now-surplus personnel into occupational and kinship structures. Schools and colleges of all kinds emerged and expanded, ranging from technical training institutions to those providing a traditional academic program, and also including music and art schools. GI benefits were liberally applied for tuition and personal support, thus allowing not only for instrumental and academic education but for programs that enhanced efforts to pursue artistic studies. And many of the ex-servicemen selected the latter, seizing an opportunity that was unlikely to occur under ordinary circumstances. The cadres of all kinds of students expanded, and among them were included those who might now aspire to artistic success. With artistic aspirations extant in a greater portion of the student population than ever before, it was not surprising that the numbers of those who took on the bohemian life-style increased. Bohemianism during the postwar

Bohemia as a Means of Social Regulation

27

period proliferated through the urban areas of the United States, first in its relatively traditional form, at least manifestly associated with the arts, and later in a form that was more independent of aesthetic creativity or pretension. In Chicago, to use one notable example, bohemians concentrated in lodging houses all over the city rather than in the locus of the earlier bohemians, the Near North Side. For the area adjacent to the Water Tower had become, like Greenwich Village, commercialized and too costly for those of limited means and others who preferred voluntary poverty to the bourgeois life. Reminiscent of the houses described above by Caroline Ware, these tended to be like boardinghouses that catered to aspiring artists and to the sycophantic pretenders who were ever-present.26 But the many small groups spread about the city were not segregated from one another, not autonomous, and not without allies in their symbolic battle against the bourgeoisie. At a community art center in one part of the city, the South Side, and a commercial setting downtown (which on Saturday nights could be transformed into a large salon featuring African dance, avant-garde jazz, poetry readings, and similar activities), the rep resentatives of la vie boh ème congregated, communicated, and became integrated into a larger body. And though the walkers in the streets of downtown Chicago might appear quiet and restrained, those upstairs at what was called “ The Gaffers,” overlooking the Chicago River, were happy and boisterous, Murgerian. Some were bedecked in bizarre cos­ tumes, and others, though identified as bohemians and residents of the houses described above, dressed in expensive evening clothes or in the uniform of those in voluntary poverty: old clothes and blue jeans. To the observer, the bohemianism of Murger’s era had surely been resur­ rected. To the prophet, this was the thin facade of a pattern that would soon give way to a different form—a form that would nevertheless perform the same function. The bohemians would become the “ beats,” who would in turn give way to the “ hippies.” I refer again to the abeyance and control functions to which bohemian ism as a pattern has, from time to time, contributed. The surplus popula­ tions of the late 1940s and early 1950s were made up of (1) those ex-GIs who were continuing on in school or who, for diverse other motives, had not yet become integrated into the existing social structure and (2) more youthful cadres who were for the most part unattached to kin and peers other than the bohemians. Of those I observed in Chicago, many were from the small towns and cities of the Midwest. And their engagement with la vie boh ème was temporary and somewhat fortuitous. Some of these youth were also students, although not on the GI Bill, and others were merely finding a resting place on the way station to a

28

On Bohemia

career, although they were unlikely to admit that the goals of the straight world had any meaning for them. Still others might be called contemporary “ remissions men” and women, sent away to seemingly far-off places— modern counterparts to the British son who was shipped out to the colonies and provided with a stipend so long as he remained out of parental sight. Among these were some homosexuals whose behavior must have been perceived by the folks back home as a threat to the family’s status. The rooming houses, both communal and individual, helped keep them in place, off the streets, and, if only modestly, under surveillance and control. The bohemian life provided some degree of status and a feeling of being in a community. But because these groups were relatively deviant, they required rationalizations for their behavior and some degree of adherence to the ideologically based prescriptions that provided them with a raison d ’etre. The Murgerian code of anti-materialism and anti-philistin ism provided the anti-norms to which all were expected to adhere. Though strong commitment to the group and weak commitment to particular members was expected and adhered to, the tie between the member and the group was of relatively short duration. Bohemians over age thirty were rare, and of these there were at least some who seemingly did not fit into the larger society. Others were indeed aspiring artists, but those who were most adherent to the bohemian pattern seemed most equivocal about their com m itm en t to creativ e activ ity .

Sexual behavior, as in the earlier days of bohemianism in the United States, was relatively free. But adherence to the group’s expectations involved avoidance of exclusive sexual access to a particular partner. As Coser suggested in Greedy Institutions, commitment to a particular group member might intrude on and weaken one’s commitment to the group itself. This was illustrated time and time again when I observed that visitors to the group I studied in Chicago were allowed access to another’s usual sexual partner without competition, and seemingly without jealousy. This principle is illustrated also in an observation made by Laurence Veysey in a study of 1960s communal groups.27 On one occasion an authoritarian leader of a rural New Mexico com­ mune, ever watchful over group discipline, pressed one of the females into a public sexual act to which she submitted. His motive? She had been developing too strong and too exclusive an attachment to one of the other male members. The drama was played out to symbolize commitment only to the commune at large and not to particular people. That this principle became one of the cornerstones of modern bohemi anism should not come as a surprise. Possessiveness and uniqueness are, after all, associated with the bourgeois life and are therefore taboo. The corollary paradox that artistic activity in the West has in recent times, at

Bohemia as a Means of Social Regulation

29

least, been directed to the uniqueness of one’s creative acts is interesting in this context. For the idea of Gleichheit, or commonness of production, the extreme opposite of the bourgeois thrust toward uniqueness, is best exemplified in what is called “ socialist realism.” The bohemians in Amer ica, particularly those following the Murgerian prescriptions, seem to have fallen short in their anti-bourgeois communal thrust, particularly in the sphere of the arts. But as something to do while one decided where and how to become integrated into the larger society bohemian activity functioned as it did during Murger’s time. Verbally decrying careers in the straight world, and enjoying sexual latitude and romantic attachment to what appeared to be aesthetic activities, the surplus youth of the post-World War II decade simultaneously remained out of competition for a relatively limited number of status vacancies and under the controls associated with deviant-group membership. For, it is well to keep in mind, discipline is an important characteristic of deviant groups, as Veysey, for example, has shown.28 Discipline is, however, simultaneously a source of control and a precip­ itant of group dissolution, and the strain between these two attributes is one of the factors that enhances mobility between bohemian groups. The middle-class youth who flee to Bohemia are, in part, motivated by a desire to avoid regimentation, but attempting to survive as a group in a hostile world requires solidarity and boundary maintenance. Given the ephemeral nature of group attachment and the absence of early socialization into the norms and social roles associated with bohemianism, external means become the primary source of group cohesion. Common verbalized antag­ onism toward the bourgeois world becomes a major vehicle in this case. And, because members are for the most part temporary exiles from a life­ style into which they have been socialized, they must make an extra effort to avoid behaviors that might reflect the norms and values of “ the straights.” Bohemians have always been in a small minority, deviants in the midst of a society in relation to which they are ambiguously tied. And this ambiguity requires an ever-watchful eye over one’s own and others’ behavior lest it backslide into conventional paths. So bohemianism pro vided a temporary resting place and an opportunity for middle-class youth to sow their wild oats before joining the competitive world of conventional aspirations, kin obligations, and the diverse accoutrements of life in the now-proliferating suburbs. By the early 1950s the older bohemian forms were beginning to change. A joining of the bohemian life-style with the now-diffusing jazz culture and the language that characterized the subgroups of musicians provided the style which became known as “ beat.” The beatniks, led by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, emerged on the scene in San Francisco as a parallel

30

On Bohemia

form of bohemianism—a curious phenomenon in the view of the Village and the Near North Side bohemians. Through the 1950s they expanded slowly, developing a communal life-style on the beaches and in rural areas and a distinctive type of literature.29 The Beat Generation was the disillu­ sioned generation. The communal life-style now, for apparently the first time in the history of bohemianism, included the widespread use of drugs, one of the attributes of the life-style of the jazz musician. But drug use served not only as a means of dealing with the apparent disillusionment of the Beat Generation. Sociologically it functioned as a source of group integration, since it was experienced not in solitude but in common, reminiscent of the usages found among some of the North American Indians. And it served also as a symbolic means for distinguishing between the world of the “ squares,” or “ straights,” and those who were soon to be referred to as “ hip.” The “ squares” were distinguished by their usage of alcohol in more and more exotic, mixed-drink, forms.30 The life-style of the beats was less cheerful than that of the Murgerians, due, probably, to the combined soporific effects of drugs and a burden­ some outlook on the mordant aspects of life in the larger society and world.31 These were the first bohemians to face the truly great transforma tions that had occurred in Western societies and the attendant outcomes of bureaucratic impersonality and mass murder. On the whole, beat humor w as eclip sed by th e rising tide o f alienation rh eto ric , w hich receiv ed an

extra boost from the square intellectuals both inside and outside academia. Civil rights, Nixon, and disaffiliation from American society became issues that made it extremely difficult to concern oneself with humor, except in the form of satire or sarcasm. The solution was to “ drop out” of the square world, to rebuild a society on the basis of love and egalitarianism. The vehicle was to be the communal settlement, including the “ crash pad,” which could provide for the itinerant youths. By the 1960s, when the youth population in the United States swelled, during a lag in the expansion of status vacancies in colleges and in the occupational structures, the beats had become transformed into “ hip pies.” Many thousands of youths now took to the road, not unlike the wanderers of medieval Europe. And though the vast majority of them later became reintegrated into the straight world, some remained and still remain today in communal settlements, both rural and urban. The hippies were different from the beats in important ways. The Kerouacs, Ginsbergs, and Ferlinghettis who were now idolized by the younger bohemians, the hippies, had demonstrated intellectual and literary inclinations. Unlike the beats, the hippies contributed finally to the com plete segregation of art from bohemianism. The “ flower children” were for the most part anti-intellectual and anti-artistic.

Bohemia as a Means of Social Regulation

31

The use of drugs, which in the beginning simulated the Indian style and involved the sharing of a largely social experience, became more and more directed to what was called a “ cosmic” experience. Though drugs contin ued to be taken in groups, the inner experience was directed to a mental fusion with nature rather than with one’s fellows. The shift from marijuana to the use of LSD and other laboratory-created drugs was associated with a shrinkage in group size. Instead of passing around a “joint” among his or her “ tribe,” the drug user increasingly participated in two- and threeperson groups. But the most significant change, from my perspective, is the dramatic divergence from the earlier bohemian forms. By ignoring art, the umbrella that allowed for greater tolerance of life-style, the inclusion of some of the square segments of society in the bohemians’ activities became more difficult. The weekend visitors to Bohemia were now either out-and-out tourists or the very young. For the duration of their brief movement the hippies were in all-out war against the rest of American society. The pattern of voluntary poverty that had surfaced during the rise of Christianity was now resurrected. And the costumes that became de rigueur were reminiscent of the ones worn by the early Christians and others who pursued the via apostolica in medieval Europe. As to the nature of the communal group, Lewis Yablonsky’s description of the small groups that characterized the hippies lends itself to the perspective being developed here. Using the provocative but largely ig­ nored concept of “ near-group,” which he had formulated some years before in a study of gangs in New York City,32 Yablonsky contrasted hippie groups to “ true groups.” The near-group was placed, conceptually, mid way between an “ ill-defined mob of youths” and a cohesive group and had the following properties. (1) The roles of members were not precisely defined; (2) the organism had limited cohesion and tended to be impermanent; (3) there was a minimum consensus among participants about the entity’s norms; (4) the members and participants were constantly shifting; (5) leadership was often vague and con­ fused. All o f these factors are applicable to the smaller group organisms found in the overall hippie movement. Another dimension of the near-group concept applicable to the hippie scene is the fact that there are differential levels of commitment to the movement. There are core participants (complete drop-outs), and marginal participants (partial drop-outs). Most true groups have a greater consistency of commitment. Members are clearly committed and belong to the group. In near-groups there is a greater allowable range of involvement or commitment. In the near-groups of the hippie movement core or central participants would include the “ high priests” and

32

On Bohemia

“ novitiates.” In a more marginal part of the group would be teenyboppers and hippie fellow travelers. Members of the movement can be recognized or placed at different levels of commitment to the movement and being dropped-out from the society. For example, high priests are totally involved in the movement and totally droppedout of American society. Novitiates, even though they are living in the move­ ment, are still emotionally working out their status in their “ new” and “ old” world. Teenyboppers and fellow travelers are physically and emotionally mar ginal participants living both in and out of the movement.33

The remarkable similarity of conceptual scheme to the one I have been developing in this study, including the terminology, reflects the similarity of outlook that characterizes sociological perspectives and also the gener ality of the phenomena that I have chosen as my focus. Edward Shils’s perspective, alluded to in the analysis of the Beguines, similarly uses the concepts “ core” and “ periphery” with respect to centrality and institu tional dominance. What is similarly interesting is Yablonsky’s usage of a religious mode in describing degrees of commitment. He has, in effect, made the connection for me between the differential nature of group commitment within groups and the similarities between seemingly divergent forms: hippie groups and the religious organizations with which I dealt earlier. Although I heartily affirm Yablonsky’s view of the hippies at an organi zational level, I do not readily agree with his perspective on individuals and his explanation for their involvement in the hippie “ movement.” His view that “ personality structure” is an important factor in the drift toward participation in the near-group can help explain some but not all of the motives for participation. If those who have joined the movement have “ limited social abilities to perform adequately in the inclusive society,” 34 then what has happened to them since the 1960s? Surely thousands of those who were hippies have been reintegrated into the square world from which they emigrated. This is not to deny that the bohemian umbrella, to which I have often referred, provides a haven for those who do not fit into the conventional society. But it is necessary to explain the fact that the dropout phenomenon is a temporary one for most hippies and other bohemians. If we could trace their movement into another inclusive organization in which role performance was similarly undemanding, we would find the personality explanation more plausible. Though the colleges and universities do provide an alternative structure within which deviant behavior, to some extent, is tolerable, they, too, are only temporary havens from the demands of middle-class society. And, in addition, certain kinds of discipline are clearly required. Some former hippies did return to school; others took jobs that allowed a greater latitude

Bohemia as a Means of Social Regulation

33

in behavior than most jobs, including human services in the United States and abroad; and some have remained dropouts. But the majority are now older, adherent participants in the conventional world—more “ hip” in their views on life in society, perhaps, but integrated into the middle-class pattern much in the same manner as they would have been had the revolutions of the 1960s not occurred. But what of bohemianism in the 1970s? Youthful bohemianism declined with the relative expansion of colleges and universities during the 1960s and 1970s; simultaneously there were an increasing number of youths who could be integrated into higher-educa­ tional activities. As the abeyance function of formal educational organiza­ tions increased, their standards for admission and continued engagement in these activities declined also. Grading became easier, and a degree was consequently less difficult to attain. To be sure, there were ideological elements to justify this greater latitude. But, as I shall emphasize in the following chapter, the system of formal education reached out to these surplus youths and brought them under greater discipline, surveillance, and control. Since the colleges and universities now lag behind the contraction of the youth population, there are more status vacancies than personnel to fill them. But the imbalance has now shifted to the youths of the 1960s who have followed the path of formal education and are now a new surplus population, overeducated for the limited number of available positions. Society at large shows little concern with them, for they are relatively few as compared with the many uprooted youths of the 1960s, and they seem to pose no threat to the more conventional segments of society. Bohemianism now resides in the ever-present core group in the Village and Soho (New York City’s new residence for artists and pretenders), in San Francisco, and (in lesser numbers) in other places, including rural New England and the southwestern United States. The pattern remains, available for the next invasion of surplus youth, in the possession of the guardians of the Murgerian spirit. The rapproachment between the aes thetic creators and the pretenders is underway. The capacity of the bohemian umbrella to justify deviant behavior assures the persistence of the pattern.35 Abeyance and Bohemianism The somewhat greater latitude in behavior associated with the itinerant outsiders rests on the functions performed by their patterned activities. Whether these functions were consciously perceived, latent elites and masses have been willing, for the most part, to tolerate deviant behavior

34

On Bohemia

among actors, minstrels, troubadours, and other performing artists. While often berating these performers in public, elites have, for example, toler­ ated their behavior because they were reluctant to risk challenging the masses by depriving them of an important source of entertainment, as well as a safety-valve for letting off steam built up by pressures associated with Church doctrines. Itinerant outsiders have also been tolerated because they seemingly offered no competitive threat to the existing social struc­ tures that enhanced making a living. And they have been tolerated, too, because if the community could find no use for them, they could easily be encouraged to move on. In the examples we have chosen, the strictures against wanderers have come from two sources, one normative and the other manipulative. The medieval inclination to expect that there was a proper status and locus for everyone influenced suspicion and concern about all manner of people who were not clearly integrated into a discernible social structure. This impacted on the religious outsiders, including the Waldensians, for exam ple, and the Beguines as well as the minstrels and troubadours. To the extent that it was clear that these people were more or less integrated and under control, they survived to test the winds of fluctuating freedoms. But it was also the case, as Tawney and others36 have suggested, that more devious motives often lay behind the intolerance shown wanderers. The various regulations against vagabondage seem to have been correlated with shortages of labor, in England at least. On the whole, the occupants of the statuses associated with the perform­ ing arts have enjoyed a greater range of tolerance of their behavior, than others in society. Those who are designated as guardians of the sacred symbols and rites of a society enjoy, in contrast, considerably less personal freedom. Teachers, religious functionaries, and government officials are not only expected to lead exemplary lives but are also expected to be sanctioning agents for society in general. Bohemianism is a special phenomenon, but its contribution to society is nevertheless general and significant. Growing out of the greater range of tolerance associated with the arts, it became patterned and imitated as a sometimes closely attached concomitant of the life-style of the artist, and, more recently, sometimes detached from that life-style. Thus bohemian ism, following Murger’s model, has become primarily a Western phenom enon that provides both transitional and abeyance functions for middleclass youth. It is not typically a political phenomenon, although it is often the case that bohemians verbalize relatively radical viewpoints. It has become an alternative to what, in the past, was associated only with the well-to-do, who could travel in style, seeking experiences in foreign places, and sometimes casually pursuing formal education while deciding where

Bohemia as a Means of Social Regulation

35

to direct their adult lives. Thus it is another temporary holding pattern keeping young people “ out of trouble.” Like the monastic system and the medieval Beguinages, bohemian patterns provide opportunity for expan sion of status vacancies when a surplus of youth emerges and contraction when alternative status vacancies become available. Among the alternative status vacancies are those associated with formal education, which will be discussed in the following chapter. At this point, it is well to review the phenomenon of bohemianism and its predecessors in the context of my analytical scheme. Temporality The temporal norm associated with Murger’s model for true bohemians had clear implications for the organization of these itinerant outsiders. The prescription that the genuine aspirant to creative productivity should consider age thirty as the upper limit of engagement in the bohemian life­ style assured weak social organization. Bohemians were and are expected to be on the move and to attach themselves to an abstract, largely symbolic, cadre of youth. When organization does emerge, as in the case of the urban or rural commune, it is either excessively tight or, more typically, excessively loose. Either one gives up one’s individuality and autonomy to a leader, as in some contemporary cults,37 or one maintains a careful guard over his or her rights and prerogatives. The pattern of subordination to a leader is normatively incompatible with the Murgerian creed, but it demonstrates an effort to deal with a serious problem faced by communal bohemian groups: their tendency to dissolve after relatively short duration.38 This tendency is a direct result of the extreme sensitivity of bohemians to involvement with organized groups, which might conflict with their intense commitment to democratic, noncoercive social relation­ ships. It is escape from the coercion of the bourgeois life-style, after all, that bohemians claim is a major motive for their involvement in bohemian patterns. Thus, although the pattern has evolved over hundreds of years, any particular group of bohemians experiences a relatively short life. This is reflected in the extreme rarity of second-generation bohemians. Bohe­ mians do not seem to beget more of their own kind. In sum, bohemian organizations are relatively low on the temporality scale. When there is a surplus of youth, particularly middle-class youth, the pattern is available to justify nonadherence to normative expectations in the conventional world, in which, more often than not, there is a shortage of status vacancies and concomitant opportunities for societal integration. In marked contrast to the monk, for example, the bohemian’s engagement with other itinerant outsiders is relatively brief. La vie boh ème

36

On Bohemia

maintains its attractiveness for only a moment in the life course of the middle-class adherent. Commitment Since bohemianism is perceived by its adherents to involve only tempo­ rary relationships, commitment to the associated communal groups is relatively weak. The expectation that physical mobility will be frequent similarly weakens commitment to particular groups. The bohemian is the sojourner par excellence, in trite parlance, the “ rolling stone that gathers no m oss.” With the exception of a relatively small group of intensively committed artists who participate in a relatively free life-style, the bo­ hemian is a pretender whose commitment is limited and of short duration. After experimenting with behaviors that are, to the conventional youth, exotic, the bohemian is relatively smoothly reintegrated into straight American society. Because of a tendency toward undercommitment to the bohemian life­ style on the part of youths who assume this role, it functions well as an abeyance structure. The cadres expand and contract with relative ease as alternative status vacancies become available. A major alternative dating from the 1960s has been the system of formal education, but some exbohemians who have already completed their education have joined the Peace Corps, have taken jobs working with the underprivileged, and have gone into politics as a means of attempting to influence social change. The vast majority have become indistinguishable from the millions of others in their age cohort who never strayed from the conventional career pattern.39 Inclusiveness Anybody can become a bohemian and almost anyone in the appropriate age category can find a group that will accept him. Though bohemianism is largely a middle-class phenomenon, there are no barriers against those in relatively lower or higher classes. With respect to the lower classes in particular, and the ethnically and socially stigmatized, there is, further­ more, a definitely favorable bias based on a romantic orientation to those whom conventional society has rejected. By tradition and by deed, bo­ hemians have welcomed other youth so long as they verbally espoused criticism of the bourgeoisie and made some pretense at being artistically inclined. That both of these postures reflect pretense rather than reality is demonstrated by the short duration of commitment and the relative ease with which ex-bohemians become reintegrated into the straight world.

Bohemia as a Means of Social Regulation

37

Division o f Labor Like the monks and Beguines, bohemians tend to be unspecialized in their work. Pursuit of a career, except in the arts, was and is proscribed. Rather than pursue a task that might fit in with the extant system of productive labor, the bohemian attempts to create his own unique and innovative place in society. Since he typically has little or no training in artistic activities, he typically meanders from one art form to another. The bohemian who does in fact commit himself to a more serious pursuit of creative activity soon begins to drop out of the group’s more sociable activities and assumes greater solitariness. The discipline, furthermore, associated with creative artistic effort seems to be in short supply among the more typical bohemians. It is almost a matter of definition that those bohemians who become dedicated, disciplined, and skilled workers pass from the role of bohemian to that of artist. With respect to the more conventional society in relation to which the part-time bohemian may be integrated, the division of labor is again low. The part-time bohemian, if he is not engaged in full-time career activities in the artistic sphere, tends to seek those jobs that provide little more than subsistence. Thus the typical bohemian who works in the straight world will hold a menial job, preferably one that is associated with the romanti­ cized lower classes and castes. If a job should become linked to a career, the part-time bohemian risks rejection by his fellows. Institutionalization Bohemianism is low on the institutionalization continuum. Although it has been a clearly articulatable pattern for the past 150 years, it has remained outside of the normatively prescribed organization of Western societies. It is a tolerable life-style rather than one to be encouraged. Unlike the monastic and Beguine patterns, it does not benefit from its connection with a dominant institution. It is not a legitimate life-style and it is not manifestly perceived as being necessary to society or serving the public good. In short, bohemianism is a deviant pattern. But bohemianism illustrates well what is meant by patterned norm evasion. It is nonconforming behavior which is recognized by participants as within the range of tolerable deviance. The degree of stigmatization, in sharp contrast to that associated with the criminal or homosexual, is very low. Bohemians shuttle between the straight and deviant worlds with relative ease. The committed artist, however, though not perhaps viewed as a partici

38

On Bohemia

pant in the mainstream of life, is nevertheless not thought of as a deviant. Unlike the bohemian, the artist adheres to the work ethic and has some tangible product to legitimate his efforts. Art has, furthermore, become institutionalized in Western societies. Not only is there private support by patrons, as in the past, but foundations—and, as I will demonstrate below, governments—provide funds and facilities to enhance genuine artistic efforts. And the distinction between what is “ genuine” and what is pretense is often tantamount to the distinction between artists and bo hemians. Stratification The stratification pattern among bohemians is similarly weak. Bohemi­ ans are ranked by their manifest connections with artistic creativity and by their adherence to the ideals of poverty and anti-materialism. But poverty alone is insufficient for high rank. It is the poverty endured by those who dedicate themselves to artistic creativity which counts. The poor immigrants or the lumpenproletariat do not rank high except in a romantic sense: they symbolize the greed and materialism of the philis tines. Edgar Allen Poe, who never was or thought of himself as a bohemian, was adopted by the nineteenth-century bohemians as a model because he suffered great deprivation while struggling to produce his writings. The characters in Murger’s novel and Puccini’s opera starve, steal, connive, and suffer tuberculosis all for the sake of art. These are the prototypes of the high-ranking bohemian. But it should be kept in mind that since involvement with the bohemian groups is typically short-lived, there is, accordingly, a fluid system of ranks. By the time one attains recognition, it is often time to move on, and, more significantly, often time to return to the conventional world. So there is little to be gained from status attainment among bohemians and this enhances the abeyance process. With little to encourage strong and lasting attachments, the bohemian returns with ease to the unfinished business of finding a place for himself in conventional society. Albert Parry holds that bohemianism began in France because industri alization came more slowly to the French and the need for “ bright young men as managers, engineers, clerks, or entertainers” was less than in England, America, or Germany.40 Cesar Grana, writing about the period following the Revolution of 1830, suggests that it was the surplus of young, educated aristocrats who provided the personnel for bohemianism.41 Bohemianism required and continues to require surplus youth if it is to prosper. And these youth do not emerge on the scene simply as a result of

Bohemia as a Means of Social Regulation

39

biological factors. They become surplus because status opportunities contract or organizations fail to expand in time to absorb them. Bohemi anism, growing out of the amorphous attitudes of tolerance associated with the surveillants of artistic performers, is especially well suited to absorb for relatively short periods of time those youth for whom there are too few places in society. Notes 1. C. Grana, Bohemian versus Bourgeois (New York: Basic Books, 1964), p. 26. 2. Aspects of bohemianism are dealt with in a number of Balzac’s works. See, for example, Lost Illusions and The Human Comedy. Both G rana’s study and Malcolm Easton’s Artists and Writers in Paris (New York: St. M artin’s Press, 1964) provide excellent treatment of literary themes relevant to understanding the bohemian ideal. 3. Easton, Artists and Writers, p. 26. On Saint-Simon as a contributor to the emerging views of the artist, see Frank Manuel, The Prophets o f Paris (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), pp. 162-168. 4. Easton, Artists and Writers, p. 28. 5. Translated and quoted in Ibid. 6. Henri Murger, Vie de Boh ème, trans. N. Cameron (London: The Novel Library, 1949). 7. Easton, Artists and Writers, p. 113. 8. Ibid., p. 127. 9. Ibid., p. 127. 10. T. Zeldin, France: 1848-1945, Oxford History of Modern Europe, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 204. 11. Quoted and translated in Grana, Bohemian versus Bourgeois, p. 54. From Oeuvres Completes, vol. 1 (Paris: 1845), pp. 162-163. 12. R. Miller, Bohemia: The Protoculture Then and Now (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1977). 13. The suggestion about the use of the hippies as a device for pretending to have larger numbers was made by my friend and colleague Charles Willie in an informal discussion some years ago. 14. In this context see Albert Parry’s Garrets and Pretenders (New York: Dover Books, 1960, originally 1933). Parry’s work is, to my mind, the most significant historical study of American bohemianism to date. Still another useful book is Emily Hahn, Romantic Rebels (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1967). 15. Parry, Garrets and Pretenders, Chapter 16. 16. M. Cowley, Exile's Return (New York: Viking Press, 1968, originally 1934). 17. Ibid., p. 69. 18. Matza, “ Subterranean Traditions of Youth.” Although I accept Cowley’s view that the bohemian doctrine had an impact on the behavior pattern of Ameri­ cans, and his perceptive articulation as well, I am less inclined to agree that this represented a “ revolution in morality” (p. 63). The traditional pattern of morality may persist in a society or substructure at the same time that deviant behavior persists. Patterned norm evasion, to which I referred above, is one such category of behavior. Which “ morals” have changed since World War I and to what degree is problematic. Careful research, yielding unequivocal

40

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

On Bohemia

results, has not been forthcoming at this date. The best analysis of American values, to my mind, is still Williams, American Society. Cowley, Exile’s Return, pp. 60-61. Caroline Ware, Greenwich Village 1920-1930 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965, originally 1935); Harvey Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929). Cf. chapters 15 and 16 in Parry, Garrets and Pretenders. In my own research on bohemians in Chicago during the late 1940s and early 1950s, I found that several of the eighteen youths living in the particular house I studied had responded to an advertisement in the newspaper. Ware, Greenwich Village, pp. 251-252. Ibid., pp. 252-256. Émile Durkheim, Suicide, trans. G. Simpson (New York: The Free Press, 1951, originally 1897), p. 252. These statements are based on the observations referred to earlier. Included in these studies was participant observation among a group of eighteen residents of one of these houses and observation of the activities of associations of groups from the Chicago area. The latter were carried out in large settings allowing for the forging and reinforcement of a large subterranean community. L. Veysey, The Communal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). Ibid. My own observations here are reinforced by those described by Harry T. Moore, “ Enter Beatniks: The Boh ème of 1960,” in Parry Garrets and Preten­ ders, pp. 376-395; Lawrence Lipton, The Holy Barbarians (New York: Julian Messner, 1958); Francis J. Rigney and L. Douglas Smith, The Real Bohemia (New York: Basic Books, 1961); and John Gruen, The New Bohemia (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1967). With respect to the hippies and the San Francisco context, see Howard Becker, ed., Culture and Civility in San Francisco (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1971), and Miller, Bohe­ mia: The Protoculture. One of the best sociological works on the hippies is Lewis Yablonsky’s The Hippie Trip (New York: Pegasus, 1968). An interesting series of portraits appears in Leonard Wolf, ed., Voices from the Love Gener­ ation (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968). This point is one of several important themes in Harvey C. Greisman, “ Social Movements and the Mass Society: Requiem for the Counter-Culture,” in E. H. Mizruchi, ed., The Substance o f Sociology, 2nd ed. (New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1973). Although Jack Kerouac in his best-known book, On the Road (New York: Viking, 1957), holds that “ beat” is short for “ beatific,” most observers agree that the reference is to the disillusioned appearance of these youths. L. Yablonsky, The Violent Gang (New York: Macmillan, 1962). The hippies are dealt with in his The Hippie Trip (New York: Pegasus, 1968). The Hippie Trip, pp. 293-294. Ibid., p. 294. I have tended to ignore the economic aspects of the interplay between the core bohemians and the sojourners. It is well to keep in mind that the weekend and evening bohemians, many of them affluent, are an important market for the aspiring artist. The relationship is symbiotic, the bohemian artist providing the social pattern and inclusion of the temporary emigre from the bourgeois life and the sojourner providing the funds for the marginal artist’s survival.

Bohemia as a Means of Social Regulation

41

36. Tawney, The Agrarian P roblem ; see also Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage. 37. See Veysey, The Communal E xperience. 38. Since this writing Benajmin Zablocki’s Alienation and Charisma (New York: Free Press, 1981) has appeared. This extremely well-done and extensive work provides systematic data on some o f the issues raised here. A number of communal groups which are relatively longer-lived are treated in that study. My comments are limited, of course, to bohemian communes while his study deals with a broader spectrum. 39. Matza, “ Subterranean Traditions,” has suggested several patterns which aid in the integration o f bohemians into conventional society. 40. Parry, Garrets and Pretenders, p. XXII. 41. Grana, Bohemian versus Bourgeois.

The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter: Original Preface, 1850 Henri M urger , 1850

The Bohemians of whom it is a question in this book have no connection with the Bohemians whom melodramatists have rendered synonymous with robbers and assassins. Neither are they recruited from among the dancing-bear leaders, sword swallowers, gilt watch-guard vendors, street lottery keepers and a thousand other vague and mysterious professionals whose main business is to have no business at all, and who are always ready to turn their hands to anything except good. The class of Bohemians referred to in this book are not a race of to-day, they have existed in all climes and ages, and can claim an illustrious descent. In ancient Greece, to go no farther back in this genealogy, there existed a celebrated Bohemian, who lived from hand to mouth round about the fertile country of Ionia, eating the bread of charity, and halting in the evening to tune beside some hospitable hearth the harmonious lyre that had sung the loves of Helen and the fall of Troy. Descending the steps of time modern Bohemia finds ancestors at every artistic and literary epoch. In the Middle Ages it perpetuates the Homeric tradition with its minstrels and ballad makers, the children of the gay science, all the melodious vagabonds of Touraine, all the errant songsters who, with the beggar’s wallet and the trouvere’s harp slung at their backs, traversed, singing as they went, the plains of the beautiful land where the eglantine of Clemence Isaure flourished. At the transitional period between the days of chivalry and the dawn of the Renaissance, Bohemia continues to stroll along all the highways of the kingdom, and already to some extent about the streets of Paris. There is Master Pierre Gringoire, friend of the vagrants and foe to fasting. Lean and famished as a man whose very existence is one long Lent, he lounges about the town, his nose in the air like a pointer’s, sniffing the odour from kitchen and cook shop. His eyes glittering with covetous gluttony cause 42

The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter

43

the hams hung outside the pork-butcher’s to shrink by merely looking at them, whilst he jingles in imagination—alas! and not in his pockets—the ten crowns promised him by the echevins in payment of the pious and devout farce he has composed for the theatre in the hall of the Palais de Justice. Beside the doleful and melancholy figure of the lover of Esmer alda, the chronicles of Bohemia can evoke a companion of less ascetic humour and more cheerful face—Master Fran çois Villon, the lover of “ la belle qui fut haultmire.” Poet and vagabond, par excellence, is this latter, and one whose poetry, full of imagination, is no doubt on account of those presentiments which the ancients attributed to their fates, continually marked by a singular foreboding of the gallows, on which the said Villon one day nearly swung in a hempen collar for having looked too closely at the colour of the king’s crowns. This same Villon, who more than once outran the watch started in his pursuit, this noisy guest at the dens of the Rue Pierre Lescot, this spunger at the court of the Duke of Egypt, this Salvator Rosa of poesy, has strung together elegies the heart-breaking sentiment and truthful accents of which move the most pitiless and make them forget the ruffian, the vagabond and the debauchee, before this muse drowned in her own tears. Besides, amongst all those whose but little known work has only been familiar to men for whom French literature does not begin the day when “ Malherbe cam e,” Fran çois Villon has had the honour of being the most pillaged, even by the big-wigs of modern Parnassus. They threw them selves upon the poor man’s field and coined glory from his humble treasure. There are ballads scribbled under a pent house at the street corner on a cold day by the Bohemian rhapsodist, stanzas improvised in the hovel in which the “ belle qui fut haultmire” loosened her gilt girdle to all com ers, which nowadays metamorphosed into dainty gallantries scented with musk and amber, figure in the armorial bearing enriched album of some aristocratic Chloris. But behold the grand century of the Renaissance opens, Michael Angelo ascends the scaffolds of the Sixtine Chapel and watches with anxious air young Raphael mounting the steps of the Vatican with the cartoon of the Loggie under his arm. Benvenuto Cellini is meditating his Perseus, Ghi berti is carving the Baptistery doors at the same time that Donatello is rearing his marbles on the bridges of the Arno; and whilst the city of the Medici is staking masterpieces against that of Leo X. and Julius II., Titian and Paul Veronese are rendering the home of the Doges illustrious. Saint Mark’s competes with Saint Peter’s. This fever of genius that had broken out suddenly in the Italian peninsula with epidemic violence spreads its glorious contagion throughout Europe. Art, the rival of God, strides on, the equal of kings. Charles V. stoops to

44

On Bohemia

pick up Titian’s brush, and Francis I. dances attendance at the printing office where Etienne Dolet is perhaps correcting the proofs of “ Pantagruel.” Amidst this resurrection of intelligence, Bohemia continued as in the past to seek, according to Balzac’s expression, a bone and a kennel. Clement Marot, the familiar of the ante-chamber of the Louvre, became, even before she was a monarch’s mistress, the favourite of that fair Diana, whose smile lit up three reigns. From the boudoir of Diane de Poitiers, the faithless muse of the poet passed to that of Marguerite de Valois, a dangerous favour that Marot paid for by imprisonment. Almost at the same epoch another Bohemian, whose childhood on the shores of Sorrento had been caressed by the kisses of an epic muse, Tasso, entered the court of the Duke of Ferrara as Marot had that of Francis I., but less fortunate than the lover of Diane and Marguerite, the author of “ Jerusalem Deliv ered” paid with his reason and the loss of his genius the audacity of his love for a daughter of the house of Este. The religious contests and political storms that marked the arrival of the Medicis in France did not check the soaring flight of art. At the moment when a ball struck on the scaffold of the Fontaine des Innocents Jean Goujon who had found the Pagan chisel of Phidias, Ronsard discovered the lyre of Pindar and founded, aided by his pleiad, the great French lyric school. To this school succeeded the re-action of Malherbe and his fellows, who sought to drive from the French tongue all the exotic graces that their predecessors had tried to nationalize on Parnassus. It was a Bohemian, Mathurin Regnier, who was one of the last defenders of the bulwarks of poetry, assailed by the phalanx of rhetoricians and grammarians who declared Rabelais barbarous and Montaigne obscure. It was this same cynic, Mathurin Regnier, who, adding fresh knots to the satiric whip of Horace, exclaimed, in indignation at the manners of his day, “ Honour is an old saint past praying to .” The roll-call of Bohemia during the seventeenth century contains a portion of the names belonging to the literature of the reigns of Louis XIII. and Louis XIV., it reckons members amongst the wits of the Hotel Rambouillet, where it takes its share in the production of the “ Guirlande de Julie,” it has its entries into the Palais Cardinal, where it collaborates, in the tragedy of “ M arianne,” with the poet-minister who was the Robes­ pierre of the monarchy. It bestrews the couch of Marion Delorme with madrigals, and woos Ninon de l’Enclos beneath the trees of the Place Royale; it breakfasts in the morning at the tavern of the Goinfres or the Ep ée Royale, and sups in the evening at the table of the Duc de Joyeuse; it fights duels under a street lamp for the sonnet of Urania against the sonnet of Job. Bohemia makes love, war, and even diplomacy, and in its

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old days, weary of adventures, it turns the Old and New Testament into poetry, figures on the list of benefices, and well nourished with fat prebendaryships, seats itself on an episcopal throne, or a chair of the Academy, founded by one of its children. It was in the transition period between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries that appeared those two lofty geniuses, whom each of the nations amongst which they lived oppose to one another in their struggles of literary rivalry, Molière and Shakespeare, those illustrious Bohemians, whose fate was too nearly akin. The most celebrated names of the literature of the eighteenth century are also to be found in the archives of Bohemia, which, amongst the glorious ones of this epoch, can cite Jean Jacques Rousseau and d ’Alem bert, the foundling of the porch of Notre Dame, and amongst the obscure, Malfilâtre and Gilbert, two over-rated reputations, for the inspiration of the one was but a faint reflection of the weak lyricism of Jean Baptiste Rousseau, and the inspiration of the other but the blending of proud impotence with a hatred which had not even the excuse of initiative and sincerity, since it was only the paid instrument of party rancour. We close with this epoch this brief summary of Bohemia in different ages, a prolegomena besprinkled with illustrious names that we have purposely placed at the beginning of this work, to put the reader on his guard against any misapplication he might fall into on encountering the title of Bohemians; long bestowed upon classes from which those whose manners and language we have striven to depict hold it an honour to differ. To-day, as of old, every man who enters on an artistic career, without any other means of livelihood than his art itself, will be forced to walk in the paths of Bohemia. The greater number of our contemporaries who display the noblest blazonry of art have been Bohemians, and amidst their calm and prosperous glory they often recall, perhaps with regret, the time when, climbing the verdant slope of youth, they had no other fortune in the sunshine of their twenty years than courage, which is the virtue of the young, and hope, which is the wealth of the poor. For the uneasy reader, for the timorous citizen, for all those for whom an i can never be too plainly dotted in a definition, we repeat as an axiom: “ Bohemia is a stage in artistic life; it is the preface to the Academy, the Hotel Dieu, or the Morgue.” We will add that Bohemia only exists and is only possible in Paris. Like all callings, Bohemia admits of different degrees, various species which are themselves sub-divided, and of which it may not be useless to set forth the classification. We will begin with unknown Bohemians, the largest class. It is made up of the great family of poor artists, fatally condemned to the law of

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incognito, because they cannot or do not know how to obtain a scrap of publicity, to attest their existence in art, and by showing what they are already prove what they may some day become. They are the race of obstinate dreamers for whom art has remained a faith and not a profession; enthusiastic folk of strong convictions, whom the sight of a masterpiece is enough to throw into a fever, and whose loyal heart beats high in presence of all that is beautiful, without asking the name of the master and the school. This Bohemian is recruited from amongst those young fellows of whom it is said that they give great hopes, and from amongst those who realise the hopes given, but who, from carelessness, timidity, or ignorance of practical life, imagine that everything is done that can be when the work is completed, and wait for public admiration and fortune to break in on them by escalade and burglary. They live, so to say, on the outskirts of life, in isolation and inertia. Petrified in art, they accept to the very letter the symbolism of the academical dithyrambic, which places an aureola about the heads of poets, and, persuaded that they are gleaming in their obscurity, wait for others to come and seek them out. We used to know a small school composed of men of this type, so strange, that one finds it hard to believe in their existence; they styled themselves the disciples of art for a rt’s sake. According to these simpletons, art for art’s sake consisted in deifying one another, in abstaining from helping chance, who did not even know their address, and in waiting for pedestals to come of their own accord and place themselves under them. It is, as one sees, the ridiculousness of stoicism. Well, then, we again affirm, there exist in the heart of unknown Bohemia, similar beings whose poverty excites a sympathetic pity which common-sense obliges you to go back on, for if you quietly remark to them that we live in the nineteenth century, that the five-franc piece is the empress of humanity, and that boots do not drop ready blacked from heaven, they turn their backs on you and call you a tradesman. For the rest, they are logical in their mad heroism, they utter neither cries nor complainings, and passively undergo the obscure and rigorous fate they make for themselves. They die for the most part, decimated by that disease to which science does not dare give its real name, want. If they would, however, many could escape from this fatal denouement which suddenly terminates their life at an age when ordinary life is only beginning. It would suffice for that for them to make a few concessions to the stern laws of necessity ; for them to know how to duplicate their being, to have within themselves two natures, the poet ever dreaming on the lofty summits where the choir of inspired voices are warbling, and the man, worker-out of his life, able to knead his daily bread. But this duality which almost always exists amongst strongly tempered natures, of whom it is

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one of the distinctive characteristics, is not met with amongst the greater number of these young fellows, whom pride, a bastard pride, has rendered invulnerable to all the advice of reason. Thus they die young, leaving sometimes behind them a work which the world admires later on and which it would no doubt have applauded sooner if it had not remained invisible. In artistic struggles it is almost the same as in war, the whole of the glory acquired falls to the leaders; the army shares as its reward the few lines in a despatch. As to the soldiers struck down in battle, they are buried where they fall, and one epitaph serves for twenty thousand dead. So, too, the crowd, which always has its eyes fixed on the rising sun, never lowers its glance towards that underground world where the obscure workers are struggling; their existence finishes unknown and without sometimes even having had the consolation of smiling at an accomplished task, they depart from this life, enwrapped in a shroud of indifference. There exists in ignored Bohemia another fraction; it is composed of young fellows who have been deceived, or who have deceived themselves. They mistake a fancy for a vocation, and impelled by a homicidal fatality, they die, some the victims of a perpetual fit of pride, others worshippers of a chimera. The paths of art, so choked and so dangerous, are, despite encumber ment and obstacles, day by day more crowded, and consequently Bohe­ mians were never more numerous. If one sought out all the causes that have led to this influx, one might perhaps come across the following. Many young fellows have taken the declamations made on the subject of unfortunate poets and artists quite seriously. The names of Gilbert, Malfilâtre, Chatterton, and Moreau have been too often, too imprudently, and, above all, too uselessly uttered. The tomb of these unfortunates has been converted into a pulpit, from whence has been preached the m artyr dom of art and poetry. Farewell mankind, ye stony-hearted host, Flint-bosomed earth and sun with frozen ray, From out amidst you, solitary ghost I glide unseen away.

This despairing song of Victor Escousse, stifled by the pride which had been implanted in him by a factitious triumph, was for a time the “ Mar seillaise” of the volunteers of art who were bent on inscribing their names on the martyrology of mediocrity. For these funereal apotheoses, these encomiastic requiems, having all

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the attraction of the abyss for weak minds and ambitious vanities, many of these yielding to this attraction have thought that fatality was the half of genius; many have dreamt of the hospital bed on which Gilbert died, hoping that they would become poets, as he did a quarter of an hour before dying, and believing that it was an obligatory stage in order to arrive at glory. Too much blame cannot be attached to these immortal falsehoods, these deadly paradoxes, which turn aside from the path in which they might have succeeded so many people who come to a wretched ending in a career in which they incommode those to whom a true vocation only gives the right of entering on it. It is these dangerous preachings, this useless posthumous exaltation, that have created the ridiculous race of the unappreciated, the whining poets whose muse has always red eyes and ill-combed locks, and all the mediocrities of impotence who, doomed to non-publication, call the muse a harsh stepmother, and art an executioner. All truly powerful minds have their word to say, and, indeed, utter it sooner or later. Genius or talent are not unforeseen accidents in humanity; they have a cause of existence, and for that very reason cannot always remain in obscurity, for, if the crowd does not come to seek them, they know how to reach it. Genius is the sun, every one sees it. Talent is the diamond that may for a long time remain hidden in obscurity, but which is always perceived by some one. It is, therefore, wrong to be moved to pity over the lamentations and stock phrases of that class of intruders and inutilities entered upon an artistic career in spite of art itself, and who go to make up in Bohemia a class in which idleness, debauchery, and parasitism form the foundation of manners. Axiom, “ Unknown Bohemianism is not a path, it is a blind alley.” Indeed, this life is something that does not lead to anything. It is a stultified wretchedness, amidst which intelligence dies out like a lamp in a place without air, in which the heart grows petrified in a fierce misan­ thropy, and in which the best natures become the worst. If one has the misfortune to remain too long and to advance too far in this blind alley one can no longer get out, or one emerges by dangerous breaches and only to fall into an adjacent Bohemia, the manners of which belong to another jurisdiction than that of literary physiology. We will also cite a singular variety of Bohemians who might be called amateurs. They are not the least curious. They find in Bohemian life an existence full of seductions, not to dine every day, to sleep in the open air on wet nights, and to dress in nankeen in the month of December seems to them the paradise of human felicity, and to enter it some abandon the family home, and others the study which leads to an assured result. They

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suddenly turn their backs upon an honourable future to seek the adven­ tures of a hazardous career. But as the most robust cannot stand a mode of living that would render Hercules consumptive, they soon give up the game, and, hastening back to the paternal roast joint, marry their little cousins, set up as a notary in a town of thirty thousand inhabitants, and by their fireside of an evening have the satisfaction of relating their artistic misery with the magniloquence of a traveller narrating a tiger hunt. Others persist and put their self-esteem in it, but when once they have exhausted those resources of credit which a young fellow with well-to-do relatives can always find, they are more wretched than the real Bohemians, who, never having had any other resources, have at least those of intelligence. We knew one of these amateur Bohemians who, after having remained three years in Bohemia and quarrelled with his family, died one morning, and was taken to the common grave in a pauper’s hearse. He had ten thousand francs a year. It is needless to say that these Bohemians have nothing whatever in common with art, and that they are the most obscure amongst the least known of ignored Bohemia. We now come to the real Bohemia, to that which forms, in part, the subject of this book. Those who compose it are really amongst those called by art, and have the chance of being also amongst its elect. This Bohemia, like the others, bristles with perils, two abysses flank it on either side— poverty and doubt. But between these two gulfs there is at least a road leading to a goal which the Bohemians can see with their eyes, pending the time when they shall touch it with their hand. It is official Bohemia so-called because those who form part of it have publicly proved their existence, have signalised their presence in the world elsewhere than on a census list, have, to employ one of their own expressions, “ their name in the bill,” who are known in the literary and artistic market, and whose products, bearing their stamp, are current there, at moderate rates it is true. To arrive at their goal, which is a settled one, all roads serve, and the Bohemians know how to profit by even the accidents of the route. Rain or dust, cloud or sunshine, nothing checks these bold adventurers, whose sins are backed by a virtue. Their mind is kept ever on the alert by their ambition, which sounds a charge in front and urges them to the assault of the future; incessantly at war with necessity, their invention always marching with lighted match blows up the obstacle almost before it incommodes them. Their daily existence is a work of genius, a daily problem which they always succeed in solving by the aid of audacious mathematics. They would have forced Harpagon to lend them money, and have found truffles on the raft of the “ M edusa.” At need, too, they know

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how to practise abstinence with all the virtue of an anchorite, but if a slice of fortune falls into their hands you will see them at once mounted on the most ruinous fancies, loving the youngest and prettiest, drinking the oldest and best, and never finding sufficient windows to throw their money out of. Then, when their last crown is dead and buried, they begin to dine again at that table spread by chance, at which their place is always laid, and, preceded by a pack of tricks, go poaching on all the callings that have any connection with art, hunting from morn till night that wild beast called a five-franc piece. The Bohemians know everything and go everywhere, according as they have patent leather pumps or burst boots. They are to be met one day leaning against the mantel-shelf in a fashionable drawing-room, and the next seated in the arbour of some suburban dancing place. They cannot take ten steps on the Boulevard without meeting a friend, and thirty, no matter where, without encountering a creditor. Bohemians speak amongst themselves a special language borrowed from the conversation of the studios, the jargon of behind the scenes, and the discussions of the editor’s room. All the eclecticisms of style are met with in this unheard-of idiom, in which apocalyptic phrases jostle cock and bull stories, in which the rusticity of a popular saying is wedded to extravagant periods from the same mould in which Cyrano de Bergerac cast his tirades; in which the paradox, that spoilt child of modern literature, treats reason as the pantaloon is treated in a pantomime; in which irony has the intensity of the strongest acids and the skill of those marksmen who can hit the bull’s-eye blindfold; a slang intelligent, though unintelligible to those who have not its key, and the audacity of which surpasses that of the freest tongues. This Bohemian vocabulary is the hell of rhetoric and the paradise of neologism. Such is in brief that Bohemian life, badly known to the puritans of society, decried by the puritans of art, insulted by all the timorous and jealous mediocrities who cannot find enough of outcries, lies, and calum­ nies to drown the voices and the names of those who arrive through the vestibule to renown by harnessing audacity to their talent. A life of patience, of courage, in which one cannot fight unless clad in a strong armour of indifference impervious to the attacks of fools and the envious, in which one must not, if one would not stumble on the road, quit for a single moment that pride in oneself which serves as a leaning staff; a charming and a terrible life, which has its conquerors and its martyrs, and on which one should not enter save in resigning oneself in advance to submit to the pitiless law voe victis.

Literary Beginnings M alcolm E aston, 1964

The term ‘Boh èm e,’ in something like the sense intended by Murger, is almost certainly contemporary with the Preface to Cromwell, inspired (as Derôme once suggested) by some Romantic orgie de truands. Literary and artistic Paris of the 1830’s was crowded with rebellious and impoverished young men, and for its appositeness the word ‘gipsy’ was no doubt soon seized upon and given currency. George Sand, arriving in the capital shortly after the July Revolution, would early have been familiar with it. In succeeding years, her personal grievances led her to see in this ‘gypsy’ life of the artist a noble protest against the pettiness of convention: as, in La Derni ère Aldini, L élio declares: ‘An artist’s fatherland is the whole world, the great Boh èmia, as we say.’ In this novel, the word ‘Boh èm e’ occurs five times, and its importance is emphasized in the climax of the final paragraph: ‘L élio hesitated a moment, replenished his glass, and sighed deeply. Then, his beautiful dark eyes wet with tears, yet flashing youth and gaiety, he gave us, in a voice of thunder, a toast which we echoed as one man: “ Vive la Boheme!” ’ The setting of La Dernière Aldini is Venice, and its tale of grand passion has no obvious connexion with Paris of the 1830’s; but the author is certainly up-to-date in her use of the word ‘Bohemia’. On the other hand, the picturesque life of street dancers and singers was already attracting attention, and not only the attention of Daumier. The female ‘busker’ had acquired literary fame in Hugo’s Esmeralda, and had sat for her portrait, as the ‘Petite Mendiante russe’, to Émile Deroy, painter-friend of Baudelaire and Banville. Indeed, the feminine character of the ‘vie de boh ème’ and ‘vie boh émienne’ cannot but strike the reader rather forcibly, when, in Balzac’s Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et m is ères des courtisanes, these phrases are applied exclusively to the raffish existence of Coralie and Esther; just as the same aspect had always been dwelt on by Béranger in describing the follies of his grisette- rhyming 51

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Lisette. Rather than George Sand’s historical Venice, it is Beranger’s working-class Paris, his student-idylls and sentimental sermons on the girl of easy virtue, that lead in a direct line to the Bohemia of Murger. Yet neither he, nor (in the ‘legends’ attached to his lithographs) the observant Gavarni, uses the term ‘Boh èm e’ in quite the same sense. Balzac recognized its possibilities first. In 1839, he had invented that imaginary ‘c énacle’ of the Rue des Quatre-Vents which, though on a different social level, certainly anticipates the fanatical society of the Water-Drinkers: but the title ‘Boh èm e’ is not applied to it. When, in Une Fille d ’Eve and Un Prince de la Boh ème (originally, Les Fantaisies de Claudine ), he does give us a specific definition of Bohemia, it is not of a small, dedicated group that he speaks, but of the whole vast clearinghouse of worldly ambition, as it exists in Paris, crammed indifferently with amateurs and charlatans, stockbrokers and politicians, as well as with genuinely struggling poets and artists. Were the date given to Un Prince de la Boh ème in the Com édie humaine its date of first publication, it would seem strangely significant that this story, M usset’s Mimi Pinson, and Murger’s own first ‘scene’, Un Envoy é de la providence, all appeared in the same year, 1845. But Balzac’s title, (Un Prince . . .’, covers only minor alterations to a tale first published in 1840; so that his definition long precedes any references, implicit or explicit, by the other two authors to the idea of ‘Boh èm e’; a term, indeed, that, even as late as 1845, they had not yet begun to use. Balzac, by this reckoning, must also be three years ahead of Dennery and Grange, whose play, Les Boh émiens de Paris, is usually, and probably rightly, regarded as responsible for the general introduction of ‘Boh ème’, though without any artistic undertones, as a popular catchword. We must suppose that Murger took his cue direct from the great novelist, since Balzac is the only modern writer mentioned and approved in the Scenes de la Boh ème, and the notion itself of presenting his stories as ‘scenes’ must have come to him from the same source. While wider in scope, as we have noted, Balzac’s definition comes very close indeed to Murger’s: Bohemia [says Balzac] is made up of young people, all o f whom are between twenty and thirty years o f age, all men o f genius in their own line, as yet almost unknown but with the ability to become known one day, when they will achieve real distinction. Already you can pick them out at Carnival-time, giving rein to their superfluous high spirits— kept in check for the rest o f the year— in comic escapades o f one kind or another.

He continues:

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This word ‘boh èm e’ is self-explanatory. Bohemia possesses nothing, yet con trives to exist on that nothing. Its religion is hope; its code, faith in itself; its income, in so far as it appears to have one, charity. All these young people rise superior to their misfortunes: poverty they must endure, but their destiny they can shape for themselves.

Though the so-called ‘Boh ème galante’ of the Doyenne actually pre ceded Murger’s Bohemia, it did not receive its title till some years after the events recorded. To the veterans of Hernani, the society of the Cafe Momus and the Hotel Merciol must have represented a very degenerate version of their own little band—Houssaye, at any rate, gave it as his opinion, in 1845, that literary standards were becoming deplorable on account of the ‘progressive invasion of Bohemia.’ Yet Th éophile Gautier, looking back in 1848 at the group of the Doyenne, was quite happy to describe it as an ‘encampment of picturesque and literary Bohemians’. And in 1852 appeared G érard de Nerval’s recollections of the same group under the title of La Boh éme galante. Murger himself came only gradually to appreciate the force of the word ‘Bohemian’. In the first nine of the Scenes (leaving out the later, introduc tory tale) ‘boh ème’ occurs once. It is in the eleventh and twelfth, Un Caf é de la Boh ème and Une R éception dans la Boh ème that the term begins to appear frequently. These stories, it can be no mere coincidence, describe a ruse on the part of Rodolphe and his friends to whet the curiosity of Barbemuche, a simple-minded bourgeois. For his benefit, ‘Bohemia’ is paraded as an exclusive club, election to which is most desirable and difficult to achieve! Apart from this view, there are others often quite contradictory, which seem to slip out at times by chance. Thus, in the Flots du Pactole, Rodolphe speaks of Bohemia as a disaster to be avoided at all costs: yet, in D onec gratus, it is held up as worthy of the highest admiration. And in the Manchon de Francine we learn that the marks of a ‘true Bohemian of true Bohemia’ are industry and unselfishness. Jacques, this exemplary sculptor, had a less positive qualification: he was still under thirty. As we have noticed, Murger was always insistent on the importance of this age-limit, at which Balzac himself had hinted. In the Épilogue des amours de Rodolphe et de M l le Mimi, Marcel warns Rodolphe: ‘We are nearing our thirtieth year’—for, after that, no man of talent could afford to stay in Bohemia. But however early the word itself came into fitful use, its real acceptance must date from the first performance of Murger and Barrière’s play of 1849. According to the Corsaire’s dramatic critic, the audience at the Variétés had been a little puzzled to begin with, but by the end of the evening all doubts were dispersed, and everyone now understood exactly what was meant by the vie de Boh ème.

Murger’s La Vie de Bohème V. S. Pritchett, 1943

The English visitor to the Continent was always surprised by the part played by students in society and in politics. They had even become the subjects of music and literature by a sort of natural right which, I rather think, has never existed in England since the time of Chaucer. The drinking songs and the tales of Heidelberg, a book like Murger’s Scenes de la Vie de Boh èm e , have no parallel in England; and the explanation seems to be that the English universities preserved the monasticism of the Middle Ages but cut themselves off from the medieval spirit. A student tradition, one that goes back to Abelard and Villon, is not nurtured in seclusion; it depends upon poverty and mingling with the ferment of the town. This has not been in the character of any of our older universities. For us the student does not exist. We have never idolised youth. Our idol, oddly enough, has been the Public School boy, and when a Frenchman asks us for the parallel to Murger’s book, we are forced to hush up the fact that Charley’s Aunt is the only play about an undergraduate, and to divert his attention to the enormous importance of Tom Brown s Schooldays. Among the Anglo-Saxons it was the unsecluded Americans, rather than ourselves, who took to the Quartier Latin as ducks to water in the last twenty years. Like most English readers, when I was young I owed my first notions of the Quartier Latin to the sentimental and watered-down works of Thack­ eray, Du Maurier and W. J. Locke. These fanciful imitators of Murger were said to be harmless; while the sentiment, the tears and the picaresque farce of Murger were condemned as misleading. A Bohemia like his had never existed. Or, if it had, it certainly existed no more. Only lately I have read his Sc ènes de la Vie de Boh èm e , and I regret, as usual, that I did not go to the fountain head before. Some of it is tedious, but the sketches have very amusing moments. Murger had that acute Parisian sense of comic pose, a kind of wit of situation as well as a wit of words and ideas, that crisply feathers the surface of life as he skims along. But the interesting 54

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thing about La Vie de Boh ème is less the story than its success. Not entirely does Murger owe that to the accident of Puccini’s opera. Murger had already made a very successful play of the book before Puccini took it up. A suggestive light is thrown by a remark of the Goncourts which they put down in their Journal in 1856: “ When Murger wrote La Vie de B ohem e,” they said, “ he had no notion that he was writing the history of a social world which was to become a power within five or six years, yet that is the fact to-day.” The Bohemians, they say, bar the way to the well born who are damned as amateurs. “ The advent of Bohemia means the domination of socialism in literature.” If socialism does owe something to Bohemia, what Bohemia really did to artists and writers in the long run was, of course, to isolate them from society. Not socialism, but art for art’s sake came out of that fruitful myth and produced in figures like Gauguin, Verlaine and Modigliani an isolation more haggard and stark than anything the frittering Murger and his little circle ever knew. Murger went to seed among the obliging tears of a small Parisian clique. The Goncourts maliciously note his first tail-coat, and his official break with the hungry past when he set up at the Cafe Riche. He became a journalistic slave, and in the words of his own Rudolphe honestly said, as we all have: Je veux bien consenter à regarder le pass é, mais ce sera au travers d’une bouteille de vrai vin, et assis dans un bon fauteuil. Qu’est ce que tu veux, je suis un corrompu. Je n’aime plus que ce qui est bon.

He had, the Goncourts remarked, one of the largest funeral processions of his time, and among the mourners of the poet of hunger was Th éophile Gautier, who talked, not very suitably, of the influence of cattle-cake on the flavour of steak, all the way to the cemetery. Where the Goncourts’ sharp nose for tendency was right was in detect ing the enormous potential of publicity in the early idea of Bohemia. Murger, who was half-German, had given a halo to romantic disorder and, by the end of the century, Puccini and English best-sellers like Du Maurier and W. J. Locke, had carried the idea triumphantly into every vicarage and suburban villa. If you sat on the floor or boiled an egg unassisted you became a Bohemian. The romance of the 50’s had become the myth of the century. The English Bohemians of Du Maurier and Locke are no longer poor students. They are the sons of rich parents. The famous Trilby is a model, but she comes from one of the best Irish families! Du Maurier’s Laird—the only pleasant character in a dreadfully coy book—has his Broadwood and his furniture sent over from England to the Quartier Latin; and Locke’s heroes always belong to the best county families and are tired

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of their clubs. The strange thing is that we are shown the lives of poor artists no more, but the lives of people whose ambition is to throw up everything and become poor in order to be artists or to live near them. Middle-class society is kicking over the traces. It is in conflict with itself. Yet the conflict is, so far, not very profound. The illusion of the new Bohemia was that it could preserve the middle-class amenities while throwing over the irking conventions that protected them. And by the Twenties we had arrived at a paradoxical situation which would have soured the faces of Murger’s circle at the Cafe Riche: the bourgeois had been converted to art. All the world was bent upon becoming artistic. The Quartier Latin and Montparnasse had become the quarters of the rich. I remember my own early bewilderment in Paris. Brought up to believe that my intellectual emancipation depended on my finding a cheap room to live in on the left bank of the Seine, and that damnation awaited those who dwelt on the right, I gloomily remember I could not afford to be a Bohemian. Life was cheaper in Passy; one went to Montparnasse or the Rue de Seine to borrow money and to wonder what spirit of perversity and masochism had possessed the sons of rentiers that they must put on fancy dress and live among the worst drains of Europe. The Goncourts were right—Bohemia had become a racket, a greater racket than they could have guessed. No doubt I exaggerate. My nose, insufficiently Bohemian, has many times led me out of the pensions of the Mont St. Genevieve and so has closed a world to me except as a spectator. I recognise my own facial expressions in Murger’s picture of the bourgeois who used to go night after night to the cafe to watch with a craving he dreaded to reveal. There is, and will always be, the temporary Bohemianism like that of Murger’s Rudolphe; and always, no doubt, what Murger called the Bohemianism of the impasse. That gaunt man with the Christ-like face and the invalid’s straggling beard who sat all day over his cup of coffee and who looked as if he were starving, was a one-time silk salesman despite his “ artistic” appearance. But he was in fact starving, God knows why, and they picked him up half dead in the street. The Bohemians of the impasse were, as Murger said, chronically unproductive and garrulous. If I wish to visualise a Bohemian of this kind I always think of a middle-aged man who, as an alleged fashion journalist, spent his days with the mannequins of the Rue de la Paix and played the harmonium on Sundays at a Methodist chapel. Murger knew his subject. It was his only subject. He knew and illustrated in his own life and work the drift into finicking which the life of the clique encourages. The frenzied hunt for the p i èce de cent sous , the strangling estimate of whether the next meal lies north, south, east or west as you leave the door, are not the only enemies of the Bohemian; nor the hospital

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its final dread. The dreaded enemy is self-discovery. The inner terror which Murger described in another of his books is the fear not that the talent for which one suffers is insufficient, but that it simply is not there at all. Socialists—the most respectable of men—have come to attack Bohemia for its disorder and its philosophy of isolation; but I wonder whether those who do so really attack it from a rival Bohemia of their own, the equally ancient Bohemia of the exile and refugee. Political Bohemia from the time of Herzen and through the life of Marx, offers a story no less wretched and picaresque than the lives of students and artists. If the Bohemia of the artist had been taken over wholesale by middle-class society in 1931, and had gone, its place was taken by this revived Bohemia of the refugee. Colourless and despondent, watchful and suspicious, whispering in groups over the backs of chairs at the Coupole or the Dome, the exiles sat waiting for news from home, where the gaudy and gregarious figures of the earlier decade hoped they’d heard the last of it. And perhaps that is a portent. Mr. E. M. Forster has lately recommended a return to Bohemia for writers; but to-morrow independent political thought, not art, may be one of the seven deadly and unremunerative sins. Du Maurier’s Little Billee turned “ deathly pale” when he saw Trilby, a lady of one of the best Irish families, posing for “ the altogether” ; his grandson may crumple up if he catches her indecently exposing the charms of a minority mind to oblige a few friends. I have said very little about Murger’s sketches themselves. They have a boulevard wit and when, later on in life, Murger decided to give up the fastidiousness of art and to go after money in the theatre, he made the right decision. He was not a natural highbrow. His melancholy tempera­ ment was that of the clown, not of the poet; he was a born writer of farce and his young men have that too eternal youth of the theatre. His student wit is exact. And his sense of blague never fails him. The youth who paints a luxurious room on screens in lieu of furniture, the expert borrower who has noted down where he can get a free meal for every day of the month and, going out for it discovers his host has left and is on his way to see the borrower on the same mission—these are the brainwaves of the theatre. The light sentiment, the conventional Parisian irony, punctuated by an occasional real phrase taken from life, are agreeable enough in short snatches. And the Mimi of the book, whose life with Rudolphe is frankly, if rather cosily, described as a hell of jealousy and injudicious expense— hats and boots were Mimi’s weakness—is a good deal livelier than the Mimi of the play or the opera. The ornately facetious style is not the journalese of the comic writers, though I don’t know that that makes it any better. Really, there is no serious reproach which can be fairly made

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against Murger. He is simply a little writer, a brilliant dabbler in unreality, high spirits and sadness, whose very melancholy, as it ripples along, reveals a fundamental lack of seriousness. His letters, with their outcry against hunger and their hard tale of work, describe with bitter dignity a Vie de Boh ème which he glossed over with a phrase or two in the sketches. His own horrible death—his flesh was decaying; shortly before he died his lip fell off when he was shaving—and the death of the real Mimi, were the end of a story very different from his light elegy of lost youth.

The Parisian Prototype Orlo W illiam s , 1913

A new phrase properly fades as soon as the novelty of that which inspired it, but once it has appeared upon a single written page it has been given an artificial life of varying but incalculable duration. This artificial existence has been infinitely increased by the newspaper. The journalist, who has little time to think, is naturally loth to let a convenient label go, so that, long after its original parcel of ideas or beings has passed away, he will keep tagging it on to other parcels with a certain show of relevance which effectually conceals the fact that it ought long ago to have been filed for the etymological dictionary. A phrase which has thus lingered artificially in common use is the word “ Bohemian.” Nobody can deny that it is a useful label, simply because it is so vague, conveying as it does the sense of some deliberate divergence from the usages of polite society, without being in the least embarrassingly clear as to the degree or direction of that divergence. It is a term, so apparently specific, so really loose, equally capable of carrying blame and admiration, which people will go on applying to men and women, their lives and their clothes, without inquiring whether there is in fact any answering reality. It would be easy enough to confuse its simple users by a few questions. They might be asked, for instance, what a Bohemian is, when they would probably reply, in the slipshod phraseology of to-day, that he is an odd person who wears funny clothes and does quaint things. But then, it might be pointed out, a docker from Limehouse is equally odd and quaint from their point of view, though they do not call him a Bohemian; on which they will rather pettishly explain that they mean artists and musicians and so on, people who don’t “ work.” To help them out on this point, in fine, they mean people who potentially rank with the members of learned professions, but who choose to live a less respectable life, in which paying calls, dressing for dinner, and attending to the dictates of social morality are considered of small importance, though the exact 59

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degree of social unorthodoxy is left as undefined as the qualifying degree of artistic performance. The same lady will comprehend in the term the middle-aged civil servant who haunts studios of an evening, wears pale tweeds, but is otherwise a pearl of inartistic chivalry, and the scaramouch of a painter, whom she calls “ charming” because he is clever, and whose absorption in art has entirely ruined him as a social being. I propose another question. Why are Bohemians so called? The answer seems easy— because they live in Bohemia. And Bohemia? Again the label produces a difficulty. To pursue any geographical inquiries concerning Bohemia in a Socratic spirit would quickly produce exasperation in any catechumen, and I will presume the result without the method. The answers would generally amount to this: that it seems agreed, simply since the word is used, that there is a Bohemia, but its latitude and longitude are indefinable. It is not confined to Chelsea or St. John’s Wood, or even, of course, to England; apparently it transcends the ordinary differences of nationality, existing always and everywhere. The glamour of Bohemia, too, is projected from a paradox. On the assumption that it exists, those who wish to live in Bohemia idealize it; those who have lived in it boast of it; and those who might have lived in it, but did not, pretend that they did. Yet those who wish to live in it know nothing of it, and those who lived in it, for all their boasting, have left it. It seems to take shape, like a mirage, only in prospect or retrospect. There are witnesses to the distant glint of its magic towers in the rosy mists of sunrise or the golden haze of sunset, but of the light and shade within its streets there are none, for who might be supposed to be passing through its gates are strangely reticent, and seem mysteriously to lose the sense of their glorious nationality. A man may say with a thrill, “ I will be a Bohemian,” or with a glow, “ I was a Bohemian,” but of him who said, “ I am a Bohemian,” the only proper view would be one of deepest suspicion. He would certainly be a masquerader. Yet many people, at least in England, do so masquerade—people who affect Chelsea, slouch hats, and ill-cut garments, who haunt Soho restau­ rants, talk and smoke cigarettes in half a dozen studios, toady sham genius, flutter in emancipatory “ movements,” and generally do nothing on quite enough a year. Not long ago a distinguished artist, genially inspired by dinner at a club of Bohemian traditions and most respectable membership, gave utterance to the view that, though the velvet coat had disappeared before evening dress, the Bohemian still existed. Upon that a writer in an evening paper made the wise comment: There are people, it is true, who indulge in mild unconventionality; they feed in Soho, and talk o f cabarets. But these people are seldom artists and never

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Bohemian. The unconventionality o f these people is a mere outward pose, which compels any artist who wishes to preserve his individuality and good name to pay careful attention to the external forms. Bohemianism, such as it was, sprang up in Paris, and that is sufficiently good reason for its failure in England.

It might be supposed from the commonness of allusions to Bohemia and Bohemianism that the terms were contemporary, at least, with the intru­ sion of artists and men of letters into society, and that before the existence of the Bohemia whose capital is Prague the name of some other nation was, in the same way, taken in vain. However, this is not the case. The graeculus esuriens to whom the Roman poet so scornfully refers had no doubt many Bohemian qualities, but the emphasis of the taunt is laid on his foreign nationality, not upon his mode of existence. Even after the Bohemia of the atlas came into being it knew for many centuries no usurper of its name. Will Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, and the merry company of the “ Mermaid” tavern neither called themselves nor were called Bohemians. Samuel Johnson, Goldsmith, and the other less distin guished inhabitants of Grub Street suffered many verbal indignities, but not that. Coleridge and Charles Lamb might be alluded to as Bohemians now, but in their day the term had even yet not been invented. Murger’s preface to “ Sc ènes de la Vie de Boheme” proves that so late as 1840 a universal understanding of his title could not be taken for granted, since he begins by carefully distinguishing the geographical Bohemia from the artistic. The modern sense of the term originated, in fact, in Paris at the time of the Romantic movement, being only an extension of the meaning of “ gipsy” or “ vagabond” long attached to the word boh èmien in France. Our “ Bohemian” was introduced into the English language by Thackeray, who learnt it during his student period in Paris. This piece of etymology, nugatory as it may appear, is, in fact, very important. It is the first real delimitation of our inquiry. La vie de Boh ème is essentially a French term, and it is therefore fitting that we should examine its implications in that language. Murger in his preface is contra­ dictory, but his very contradiction is pregnant and valuable. At the outset he applies the term boh émien to the literary and artistic vagabonds of all ages. “ La Boh ème dont il s’agit dans ce livre n’est point une race nee aujourd’hui, elle a existé de tous temps et partout, et peut revendiquer d ’illustres origines.” Homer, he says, was the first Bohemian of Greek antiquity, and his tradition was carried on by the medieval minstrels and troubadours; Pierre Gringoire and Fran çois Villon, Clement Marot and Mathurin Regnier, Molière and Shakespeare, Rousseau and D ’Alembert were the leading citizens of their contemporary Bohemias. This brings

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Murger to his own day, of which he says: “ Aujourd’hui comme autrefois, tout homme qui entre dans les arts, sans autre moyen d ’existence que l’art lui-m ème, sera forc é de passer par les senders de la Boheme.” If Chelsea were here to make a triumphant interruption, it would have spoken too soon, for he proceeds to give the definition which serves as an epigraph to this chapter, and, without a word of warning, contradicts what he has said before in the sentence: “ Nous ajouterons que la Boheme n ’existe et n ’est possible qu’a Paris.” This is a highly serious matter. It leaves old Homer nothing but a Greek poet, and Chelsea—well—little more than Chelsea. However, I cannot imagine Homer objecting, and Chelsea must forgive me, if I accept Murger’s statement in the strictest possible way. Further, the Paris implied is the Paris of Murger’s own day. That this was so may appear more clearly in the sequel, but for the present it must suffice to say that the Paris of the Romantic period, which gave birth to Bohemia, was unlike the Paris of earlier days in many respects, and no Romantic had any conception of the cosmopolitan Paris of to-day. La vie de Boh ème, far from being a vague label, was a phrase packed with intimate meaning, meaning which at the time was not at all so fully manifest as under criticism and comparison it may now appear. It depended for its peculiar qualities upon the social and material conditions of Louis Philippe’s Paris, which have long since passed away. I put the classic period of la vie de Boh ème between 1830 and 1848, the exact period of Louis Philippe’s reign. At first sight the reign of this bourgeois prince would seem to have little enough connexion with the florescence and decadence of the very antitype of bourgeoisie , but this is only a further reason for not neglecting history. The Revolution of 1830 was of the highest importance for France: it was the inevitable explosion of dissatisfaction, both political and artistic, with the powers that ruled. What I wish to make clear is that, whereas before this date Bohemia, if it existed, was but an unconsidered fringe on the ancient student life of the Quartier Latin, after 1830 it not only received a population but became a force. The Revolution of 1830 was not only political, it was also artistic, and the artistic results were really the more permanent. This artistic revolution is generally known as the Romantic movement, about which so much has been written that I need not refer to it at length. Just as the Liberal spirit smouldered for many years against the Royalist oppression, so the Roman­ tic spirit smouldered against the restraints of the dead classic tradition of the eighteenth century. The process of combustion, beginning as it did with Rousseau, was a slow one, and, as it has been said, Romanticism only potentially existed, as a movement, before 1820. In that year Victor Hugo founded his journal, the Conservateur L itt éraire, gathering round

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him a brilliant company of writers. For ten years the movement grew in intensity, fostered by the institution of cenacles and the only too success­ ful proselytism of Victor Hugo, who disdained no recruit whom he could by flattery enlist. It is not too much to say that the youth of all France was fired by the revolt against classicism in poetry and drama. Every schoolboy wrote verses and every ardent soul longed to enter the very arena in Paris, where the perruques of the Institute were so signally defied. Paris became doubly desirable as the field on which political and artistic liberty were being won. The triumph came in 1830 with the performance of “ Hernani.” That victory of the Romantic army is now a commonplace, but in 1830 it was magnificently new, and it was, moreover, the public manifestation of la Boh ème. The effect of this double excitement was overwhelming. It literally tore the more intelligent among the young men of France from the roots of all their attachments and interests. To establish liberty, to revolu­ tionize literature, these were their dreams, in comparison with which all ordinary professional prospects seemed dreary and unworthy. So the year 1830 saw Paris harbouring in her garrets a host of enthusiasts, most of them very young, burning with ideals and flushed with apparently glorious victories. They felt themselves incorporated in one great brotherhood of defiance to established authority, so that those who mocked their poverty and lawlessness in the name “ Bohemian” were unconsciously justified, for a corporate name is the sign of a corporate existence. La Boh ème in 1830 was not a haphazard collection of dilettanti and artistic eccentrics; it was a fellowship inspired by similar enthusiasms and bound together by the struggle against similar misfortunes. Misfortunes, indeed, were not slow to come. Society is wonderfully quick to repair the breaches in its walls made by gallant assaulters, and the heroes who have been foremost in the attack find that their bravely made passage has closed behind them, and that they are left to be broken and starved into submission. So it was after 1830. Louis Philippe was at heart a Royalist who had little understanding of the Revolution. His great achievement was to keep on his throne for eighteen years by encouraging the moneyed middle class, thus laying the foundation of French industrial prosperity. Enrichissez-vous was the order of the day, an order ironically unsuitable to the reformers of Bohemia. Press laws were made doubly stringent, secret societies were prohibited, caricatures were exposed to a censorship, and the police was exceedingly vigilant. Above all, the bourgeoisie held firm. They were tasting prosperity and power, and had no desire to let political disturbance interfere with their enjoyment. Happy were those who could repent of youthful political excesses and return to comfortable homes and settled careers. Those who had no refuge but Bohemia came to know the chill of disappointment and

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repression. Their bright dreams faded away into grey reality; they found themselves suspects and outcasts, with the problem of subsistence, instead of being miraculously solved, only rendered more acute. They had no outlet for their energies, and those whom neither the barricades nor the cholera of 1832 carried off saw the fellowship of assault followed by the isolation of retreat. They drifted away in little bands to join the societies of social reformers like Saint Simon, Fourier, or P ère Enfantin. Consump tion, starvation, and suicide were the ends of many of them, and their traces gradually faded from Bohemia, which became identified purely with the lives of its literary and artistic inhabitants. The poets and artists of Bohemia survived longer, not only as individ­ uals, but as a united brotherhood, mainly because artistic rebellion cannot be put down, as it does not manifest itself, by force, and also because the campaign in which “ Hernani” was the central engagement really culmi­ nated in a lasting victory. For some years after 1830 there was plenty for the young band to do in reducing block-houses and chasing the persistent critics of the old school, who conducted a most robust guerilla warfare. Yet hardship and misfortune dogged their footsteps also. The Romantic victory of 1830 was won by an army; its spoils were shared by the few leaders—Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, de Vigny—who, as M. Henri Lar danchet has rather unkindly said, “ without a word of farewell or a motion of gratitude abandoned their army to famine.” To tell the truth, many of the devoted enthusiasts were young men of mediocre talents at a day when the standard was very high. Verses were a drug in the market, and he was a lucky man who could earn a few francs by filling a column or two in a little fashion paper boasting a few hundred subscribers. Journalism was not yet a commercially flourishing business, expenses were high, subscri­ bers few, and Press laws menacing. The starveling poets and dramatists of Bohemia fell upon lean years, in which the weaker and more utterly destitute were destroyed by their privations, like Elisa Mercoeur and H égésippe Moreau. Nevertheless, the Romantics were not crushed out of existence. The stout hearts of those who held out still beat to a common measure, and maintained artistic fellowship in an ideal as an essential element of la vie de Boh ème. Bohemia was glorious for a few years after 1830 as it has never been since because it proclaimed a creed, the creed of Romanticism. It was glorious then because, with Romanticism, Bohemia was a living force. Given this connexion, there was some point in the bravado, the extrava­ gances and conceits of Bohemian life. They were an irregular army, those young men, and they rejoiced in their irregularity. Épater le bourgeois was a legitimate war-cry when the bourgeois stood for all that was reactionary in art. To scare the grocer with a slouch hat and a medieval oath was not

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only a youthful ebullition, it was a symbolic act. The sombrero defied artistic convention as typified in the top hat; the medieval oath, in its contrast with the paler expletives of modernity, symbolized the return to life and colour in art after a century of grey abstraction. It was with the decline of Romanticism that Bohemia lost its living spirit. Unlike Republi­ canism, that gathered unseen strength in failure to blossom for a more worthy generation, Romanticism lost its vitality through its very success. It may be likened to some conflux of waters which to force from its way the inert mass of an obstacle rises to a mighty head: the obstacle is swept away, and the seething waters resolve themselves into a workaday river humbly serving the sea. So the Romantic movement has served literature for many decades now, and it was quietly flowing between the banks before Louis Philippe lost his throne. Success, it might be said, came to it too soon, especially as success in that day meant money. The dangers of Republicanism were staved off for the moment by force; the dangers of Romanticism were for ever discounted by payment. Authorship was made to serve a commercial end, and all was over. In 1836 Emile de Girardin founded La Presse, which was sold at a far lower price than any other paper. The inevitable followed. Circulation went up by leaps and bounds, contributors were paid respectable prices, expenses were defrayed by the profits of advertisement, and journalism in France was at once on a commercial footing, for other papers were not slow to follow. Literature, from being purely an art, quickly became a trade. The struggle for a new artistic ideal gave way to the struggle for loaves and fishes, which is contemporary with mankind. A man’s artistic creed went for nothing, when all the public asked was that he should make himself conspicuous before they gave him their countenance. Once artistic success became a matter of royalties it was an easy prey to bourgeois conditions, which were that art and literature should either be merely entertaining or point a respectable moral. Only a few Romantics were proof against this insidious influence. To those recalcitrants we owe the motto “ Art for art’s sake.” The effect of this change upon Bohemia is not difficult to imagine. La vie de Boh ème implies youth, so that its generations change as rapidly as those of a university. The generation of 1830 had either disappeared or become famous—that is, potentially rich—in a few years. The struggle which had convulsed all Paris was a thing of the past, and Romanticism was so far accepted, swallowed, and digested that by 1843 the necessity was felt for reverting to the classical tradition again, for a change, with the so-called école de bon sens. There was no longer any trumpet-call to which Bohemia could respond as a brotherhood, as Victor Hugo learned when, on wishing to enlist a fresh army to go into battle for “ Les Burgraves,” he was told “ il n’y a plus de jeunes gens.” The swaggering heroes of 1830

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were now writers of successful novels and comedies, or safely chained, as critics, to the careers of remunerative journals. Rebellion was impossible, for there was nothing to rebel against. Success depended more upon individual enterprise than common enthusiasm. There was nothing left, therefore, for the new generations of Bohemia but to fall back upon tradition. If there was no more certainty in ideals there was at least something definite in slouch hats and medieval oaths, in defying conven­ tions of dress and accepted table manners. So the symbols of Romanticism became the realities of Bohemia after all that they symbolized was as lifeless as a cancelled bank-note. Further, the population of Bohemia lost that great asset in life, personal pride. Their predecessors of 1830 were arrogant, no doubt, but with the arrogance of an advance-guard in a desperate venture. There was no desperate venture now toward, and advance meant, not progress, but prosperity. The poorer brethren of art who peopled Bohemia were now, inasmuch as they were not prosperous, failures. They had no sense of intellectual achievement to keep up their courage, when such achievement was measured in gold. It was inevitable that their moral should be affected; the recklessness, which was formerly that of bravado, became that of despair, and a less reputable atmosphere grew up round Bohemia which has never been dispelled from its tradition. Nevertheless, dead as the spirit was, the tradition of 1830 remained very strong, being kept alive not only by oral transmission, as all traditions are, but also by the art of the sturdy few who remained faithful to the uncompromising standard of disinterestedness in art which it implied. Gautier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, the de Goncourts, and a few others stood out unflinchingly against commercialism on the one hand and prosy doctrinairism on the other. Their struggle was not wholly effectual, but, so far as Bohemia is concerned, was important. After 1848, when everything had to have a social “ purpose” and art for its own sake seemed dead, they sat down, like the Psalmist, by the rivers of Babylon and remembered Zion. From their regrets the legend of la sainte Boh ème arose idealized and purified, and it was made immortal in pages of prose by Gautier and in de Banville’s “ Ballade de ses regrets pour l’an 1830.” This legend, tinged as it already was with sentiment, spread to the public, by whom it was resentimentalized, a fact of which other authors, Murger included, were not slow to take advantage.

Art and Society: A Marxist View G eorge P lekhanov , 1905

The problem of the relation of art to society has always played an important role in all literatures which have reached some measure of development. Generally this problem has been and continues to be solved in two diametrically opposite ways. Some have maintained that man was not created for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man: not society for the artist, but the artist for society. Art must further the development of human consciousness and contribute to the improvement of the social order. Others vigorously oppose this view. In their opinion art is an end in itself, and to convert it into a means for achieving other extraneous ends, no matter how noble, results in a lessening of its dignity. Of these two directly opposing views of the function of art which is to be accepted as correct? In attempting to solve this problem, one must note first of all that it is incorrectly formulated. It would be erroneous to approach this or other similar problems from the point of view of “ necessity.” For if the artists of a given country, in a given period, stand aloof from the vicissitudes and struggles of life and, at other times, eagerly throw themselves into such struggles and vicissitudes, their behavior is not the result of some myste­ rious force; it arises from the fact that in one social epoch they are overwhelmed by one kind of passion, and in another epoch by other passions. Thus it is that a sound consideration of the matter demands an analysis not from the viewpoint of what “ ought” to be in a certain epoch, but of what has been and what is. We might therefore reformulate the question as follows: Under what social conditions does the tendency toward art fo r a rt’s sake arise and find expression among artists and those concerned with art?

When we arrive at a solution of this problem we may be able to solve another closely related to it and no less interesting: 67

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Under what social conditions do artists and those concerned with art incline toward the so-called utilitarian view o f art, that is, toward regard ing works o f art as “judgm ents on the phenomena o f life” ?

The first of these questions compels us to recall Pushkin. There was a time, during the reign of Alexander I, when he did not avoid the struggles of life but actually immersed himself in them. At that time Pushkin did not feel that the people need content themselves with a rule of “ scourge, dungeon, halter, axe, and wheel.” On the contrary, in his Ode to Freedom, he indignantly exclaimed: Looking around I ever face Whips upon whips and fetters groaning, Laws’ peril in a world’s disgrace, And helpless slaves for ever moaning. Arrayed on every law I mark Dense superstition, fatal craving For fame, and genius for enslaving, And unjust power thunder-dark.1

But later, during the reign of Nicholas I, his attitude changed fundamen­ tally and he accepted the theory of art for art’s sake. What was the cause of this profound change in his point of view? The inception of the reign of Nicholas I was marked by the catastrophe of December 14, 1825, which exercised a profound influence not only upon the development of our “ society” but also upon the personal life of Pushkin. With the defeat of the Decembrists, there disappeared from the scene the most cultured and enlightened representatives of the “ society” of that time. This could not fail to result in a decline in moral and intellectual values. “ Although I was very young,” wrote Herzen, “ I can still remember to what depths the upper level of society fell, and with the accession of Nicholas I now abject and servile it became. Gone was the aristocratic independence, the military boldness of Alexander’s times—all disappeared with the year 1826.” Indeed it became unbearable for a sensitive and intelligent man to live in such an environment: “ Around us prevails an atmosphere of inertia and silence,” continues Herzen in another article. “ All is unaccountable, inhuman, hopeless, and extraordi­ narily prosaic, stupid, and superficial. One who seeks sympathy is met only with threats, fear, misunderstanding and ill humor, and sometimes even injury.” In Pushkin’s letters of the period in which the poems The Mob and To The Poet were written, there are constant complaints about the tediousness and triviality of both Russian capitals. But Pushkin suf­ fered not only from the society which surrounded him; he suffered even more from his relations with “ official circles.”

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Very widespread among us is the legend that in 1826 Nicholas I “ mag nanimously” forgave Pushkin all his political “ wild oats,” and that he even became the poet’s patron. This, however, is untrue. Nicholas and his right-hand man in such matters, Count Benckendorff, Chief of Police, never forgave Pushkin, and their “ patronage” brought him only unbeara­ ble humiliation. In 1827 Benckendorff reported to Nicholas: “ After a meeting with me, he [Pushkin] spoke of Your Majesty with admiration and had those who were dining with him at the English club drink a toast to Your Majesty’s health. Of course, he is quite hare-brained, but if we succeed in guiding his pen it will be greatly to our advantage.” These last few words reveal the secret of the “ patronage” accorded Pushkin. Wishing to make of him an apologist for the existing order of things, Nicholas I and Benckendorff sought to direct his once rebellious muse along the path of “ official m orality.” When, after the death of Pushkin, Field Marshal Paskevich wrote to Nicholas, “ I mourn the loss of the writer Pushkin,” Nicholas replied: “ I thoroughly share your grief, but it is his future we mourn, not his past.” 2 In other words, the Czar valued the dead poet not for what he had written during his short life, but for what he might have been able to write under careful scrutiny and political direction. Nicholas expected of him patriotic “ odes” in the style of Kukolnik’s drama The H and o f the A ll H ighest S aved the Fatherland .3 Even the celebrated poet, Zhukovsky, poet laureate to the court, endeavored to inspire in Pushkin a respect for morality. In a letter dated April 12, 1826, he wrote: “ Our children, because of their bad education, which does not help them in their struggle for existence, have become acquainted with your disturbing ideas, clothed in the charming vestments of poetry; the knowledge that you have caused irreparable injury to many should make you tremble. Talent is nothing; the important thing is moral stature.” 4 Finding himself in a situation where he bore the chains of such “ patron­ age,” and where he was forced to listen to such sermons on morality, Pushkin obviously could not help but try to evade all “ moral problem s,” disdain the “ profit” he could bring to art, and tell his counsellors and patrons: Begone, begone! What common feeling Can e ’er exist ’twixt ye and me?

In other words it was only natural that Pushkin should become an adherent of the theory of art for art’s sake, and exclaim to the Poet: Live, like a king, alone. The path o f free creation Pursue, where’er thy soul in freedom bids thee stray;

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If all this is correct, we may draw the following conclusion: The tendency tow ard art fo r a rt’s sake arises when discord exists between the artist and his social environment. It may be said that the example of Pushkin alone is not sufficient to arrive at such a conclusion. I do not propose to dispute this point. I shall cite other examples, from the history of French literature, the literature of a country whose intellectual currents had a profound influence upon European culture, at least until the second half of the past century. With few exceptions the French romanticists of Pushkin’s day were also ardent adherents of the theory of art for art’s sake. Th éophile Gautier, probably the most unswerving of them, thus admonished the supporters of the utilitarian conception of art: N o, fools, no, goitrous cretins that you are, a book does not make a gelatine soup; a novel is not a pair o f seamless boots . . . By the guts o f all the popes past, present, and future, no, and two hundred thousand times no! . . . I am one o f those to whom superfluity is a necessity— and I like things and persons in an inverse ratio to the services they render m e.6

In his biographical sketch of Baudelaire, Gautier praised the author of Flowers o f Evil because he defended “ the absolute autonomy of art, and

would not admit that poetry should have any end outside itself, or any mission to fulfill other than that of exciting in the soul of the reader the sensation of supreme beauty—beauty in the absolute sense of the term .” 7 The following quotation illustrates how completely Gautier failed to understand the relation of his “ idea of the beautiful” to social and political ideas: I would most joyfully renounce my rights as a Frenchman and a citizen to see an authentic picture by Raphael, or a beautiful woman naked— Princess Borghese, for instance, when she posed for Canova, or Julia Grisi entering her bath.8

Further than this one could not go. Yet all the Parnassians would probably have agreed with Gautier, though some of them might have made some reservations regarding the extremely paradoxical manner in which Gautier, particularly in his youth, expressed his demand for the “ absolute autonomy of a rt.” How did the French romanticists and Parnassians come to acquire such

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concepts of art? Were they also at odds with the society in which they lived? In 1857, in an article on the revival at the Th éâtre Fran çais of Alfred de Vigny’s Chatterton , Gautier recalled its first performance on February 12, 1836: The pit to which Chatterton declaimed his lines was filled with pale, long-haired young men who firmly believed that no more meritorious occupation existed than inditing poems or painting pictures— or art, as they used to say— and regarding the bourgeois with greater scorn than that in which the fuchse of Heidelberg or Jena held the philistines.9

Now who were these despised “ bourgeois” ? “ Almost everyone,” answers Gautier, “ bankers, stockbrokers, solici tors, merchants, tradesmen, and the like,—in brief, whoever did not belong to the mysterious cenacle [by which was meant the circle of the romanticists— G.P.] and earned his livelihood in a prosaic m anner.” 10 There is further evidence. In a note to his Odes Funambulesques, Th éodore de Banville confesses that he also hated the “ bourgeois” and describes the romanticists’ conception of a “ bourgeois” as “ . . . a man who worships only the five-franc piece, who has no ideals but the preser­ vation of his own skin, who in poetry loves the sentimental ballad and in art the chromolithograph.” 11 In mentioning this point de Banville asks his readers not to be surprised that in his Odes Funambulesques , which was published at the end of the romantic period, the bourgeois are presented as scoundrels though they are guilty merely of conforming to bourgeois standards and of not rendering homage to the genius of the romanticists. This testimony clearly demonstrates that the romanticists were in con­ flict with the bourgeois society of their time. But actually in this conflict, there was not the slightest threat to bourgeois social relations. Among the romanticists there were to be found young men of the bourgeoisie who, while having no basic objections to these social relations, were neverthe­ less disgusted by the sordidness, the utter triviality and banality of bour­ geois existence. The new art for which they were so enthusiastic was an escape from filth, tedium, squalor and vulgarity. Toward the end of the Restoration and in the first half of the reign of Louis-Philippe, that is, at the height of the romantic period, it was even more difficult for the youth of France to accustom themselves to bourgeois society, for at that time France had just undergone the terrific storms of the Great Revolution and the Napoleonic Era, which so deeply stirred all human passions.12 Once the bourgeoisie had come to occupy a dominant position in society, and their lives were no longer inspired by the struggle for libera­

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tion, there remained only one thing for the new art—the idealization of the opposition to the bourgeois manner of life. Romanticism became such an idealization. The romanticists endeavored to express their aversion for bourgeois respectability and mediocrity, not only in their art but even in their personal appearance. Gautier has already told us how the young men who filled the pit of the Theatre Fran çais on the opening night of C hatter ton wore long hair. And who has not heard of Gautier’s red waistcoat which used to horrify “ decent folk” ?13 Like their long hair, the young romanticists intended that their outlandish costumes serve to express their contempt for the despised bourgeoisie. The pallor of their faces was a protest against bourgeois gluttony. As Gautier says: At that time it was the vogue among the romanticists to cultivate a pale, livid, and slightly green countenance, somewhat cadaverous if possible. This lent a fatal, Byronic air, as o f a Giaour devoured by passion and remorse. It made one interesting in the eyes of women. . . .I4

Gautier also tells us that the romanticists were slow to forgive Victor Hugo his conventional appearance and that among themselves they would de­ plore this foible of the great poet, “ which brought him close to mankind, and even to—the bourgeoisie!” 15 It is worth noting that the attempts of people to affect an unusual appearance are a reflection of the social relations of a given epoch. Indeed, quite an interesting sociological study could be written on this subject alone. With such an attitude towards the bourgeoisie, it is obvious that the young romanticists would find the idea of “ useful art” repugnant, for to them “ useful” art meant art that served the bourgeoisie, whom they held in such contempt. Hence Gautier’s heated attacks upon the advocates of utilitarian art, whom he reviles as “ fools” and “ goitrous cretins,” and hence his paradoxical statement that the value of “ things and persons” is in an “ inverse ratio to the services they render.” These ideas are compa­ rable to Pushkin’s: Begone, begone! What common feeling Can e ’er exist ’twixt ye and me?

The Parnassians and the early French realists (the de Goncourts, Flau bert and others) also loathed the bourgeois society in which they lived, and ridiculed the detested bourgeoisie. If they had their work published, it was not, so they claimed, for the public at large but, as Flaubert says in one of his letters, “ for a few chosen, unknown friends.” They believed that only a writer without talent could ever achieve widespread public acceptance. According to Leconte de Lisle, success is conclusive evidence

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of a writer’s intellectual inferiority. It is hardly necessary to add that, like the romanticists, the Parnassians were strong supporters of the theory of art for a rt’s sake. Any number of such cases could be cited, but this is not necessary. We have already seen quite clearly that whenever artists are in conflict with the society in which they live, they incline to the theory of art for a rt’s sake. Let us analyze this conflict more closely. At the end of the eighteenth century, on the eve of the Great Revolution, the foremost French painters were also in revolt against the dominant “ society” of the time. David and his followers were opponents of the ancien r égime. This conflict could not be resolved because it was impossi ble for them to reconcile themselves to the ancien regime. Their objections to it, however, were incomparably more fundamental than the objections of the romanticists to bourgeois society. Whereas Th éophile Gautier and his circle, as I have already shown, were not fundamentally opposed to bourgeois social relations, but wanted merely to see the bourgeois social order divested of bourgeois manners and morals, David and his disciples strove to abolish the ancien r égim e.16 In doing so, however, they knew that behind them marched the solid ranks of the third estate, who were soon to become “ all,” according to the famous expression of Abb é Siey ès. Thus David’s opposition to the existing order was supplemented by sympathy toward the new society which was developing within the womb of the old order and which it was destined to replace. It was quite different in the case of the romanticists and the Parnassians; they neither expected nor desired any changes in the social order of the France of their day. Their conflict with society was therefore an altogether hopeless one.17 Pushkin did not hope for any change in the Russia of his time, nor did he desire it during the reign of Nicholas. His outlook therefore was fraught with pessimism. All this strengthens my previous conclusion and I can now affirm: The tendency o f artists and those concerned with art to adopt an attitude o f art fo r a rt’s sake arises when a hopeless contradiction exists between them and their social environment.

But that is not all. The example of our “ generation of the ’sixties,” who firmly believed in the imminent triumph of reason, and David and his school, who shared no less firmly the same belief, demonstrate: The so-called utilitarian concept o f art, that is, the tendency to regard the function o f art as a judgm ent on the phenomena o f life and a readiness to participate in social struggles, develops and becom es established when a mutual bond o f sym pathy exists between a considerable section o f society and those more or less actively interested in artistic creation.

The following historical fact will prove to what degree this formulation

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is true. When the invigorating storm of the February revolution of 1848 burst forth, many French writers who had previously advocated the theory of art for a rt’s sake now emphatically repudiated it. Even Baudelaire, whom Gautier subsequently cited as an example of an artist absolutely convinced of the unconditional autonomy of art, began to publish a revolutionary journal, “ Le Salut Public.” True, the publication was shortlived, but as late as 1852, in his foreword to Pierre Dupont’s Chansons, Baudelaire called the theory of pure art puerile, and declared that art should serve social ends. Only the victory of the counter-revolution caused Baudelaire and his confreres definitely to revert to the “ puerile” theory of art for a rt’s sake. The psychological significance of this reversion is clearly explained by Leconte de Lisle, one of the rising luminaries of the Parnas­ sians, in the preface to his Po èmes Antiques, which first appeared in 1852. “ Poetry,” says de Lisle, “ no longer engenders heroic deeds nor inspires social virtues because, as in every period of literary decline, its sacred language can give expression only to trivial personal experiences . . . and it is no longer worthy to teach m an.” 18 To the poets of his day Leconte de Lisle remarks that the men they once taught have now outgrown their masters, and the only function remaining for poetry is “ to give an ideal existence to those with no real existence.” 19 These profound words reveal the whole psychological basis of the tendency toward art for a rt’s sake. Later we shall again have occasion to refer to this preface by Leconte de Lisle. In order to complete this aspect of the problem, I shall add that every political regime, in so far as it gives the matter any thought, invariably favors the utilitarian concept of art. This is understandable, since it is to the interest of a political power to harness all thought to the cause this power is defending. Furthermore, since political power is only rarely in revolutionary hands, and more frequently in conservative or reactionary hands, it follows that the utilitarian concept of art is defended not only by revolutionaries or those with progressive ideas. It must not be thought that the rulers of Russia were the only ones to favor a political view of art. So typical a representative of absolutism as Louis XIV was equally convinced that art cannot be an end in itself, but must contribute to the moral instruction of man. All the literature and art of the famous epoch of Louis XIV give thorough evidence of this convic­ tion. Similarly Napoleon I considered the theory of art for a rt’s sake an invention of idle “ philosophers.” He, too, insisted that literature and art ought to serve moral ends. And he achieved much, for most of the paintings exhibited in the Salons of that time commemorated the military exploits of the Consulate and the Empire. His nephew, Napoleon III, followed in his footsteps, although with less success. He, too, desired to

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make literature and art serve what he called “ m orality.” This Bonapartist effort to achieve an art of moral edification was satirized by Professor Laprade of Lyons, who prophesied that a time would come when the “ Muses of the State” would subject human reason to military discipline, when no writer would dare to express dissatisfaction: One must be content, whether it rains or whether it shines Whether it is hot or whether it is cold. Have ruddy cheeks I detest these lean men o f pale mien; He who does not laugh deserves to be impaled.20

I may add in passing that because of this ingenious satire, Laprade was deprived of his professorship; the government of Napoleon III would not tolerate any jests at the expense of the “ Muses of the State.” But let us take leave of official circles. Even among the writers of the Second Empire there were those who rejected the theory of art for a rt’s sake, though not for progressive reasons. The younger Dumas, for exam­ ple, categorically declared that the words “ art for a rt’s sake” were meaningless. In his plays, Le Fils Naturel and Le P ère Prodigue, he pursued definite social aims. He considered it a duty to write plays that would lend support to the “ old social order,” which, in his own words, was collapsing on all sides. In 1857, Lamartine, in an analysis of the literary activity of Alfred de Musset, who had but recently died, deplored the fact that the latter’s works had not served to express the religious, social, political, or patriotic beliefs of his time. At the same time Lamartine reproached the poets of his day who were concerned less with the content of their work than with rhyme and metre. Finally, to cite a lesser literary figure, Maxime du Camp remarks on this obsession for form: Form is beautiful. Of course! when behind it there is idea! What is a lovely brow, without a brain?

He goes on to censure Delacroix, the leader of the romantic school of painting, saying: Like certain men o f letters, who have created an art for art’s sake, M. Delacroix has invented color for color’s sake. For him, history and mankind serve merely as an excuse for the combining of various well chosen hues.21

Art for a rt’s sake, said du Camp, has outlived its day. Lamartine and Maxime du Camp can be as little accused of “ destructive tendencies” as Dumas fils. They rejected the theory of art for a rt’s sake

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not because they sought to substitute a new order for the old but because they desired to retain and strengthen the old system of bourgeois social relations, which had been considerably shaken by the struggle of the proletariat for liberation. In this respect they differed from the romanti­ cists, and particularly from the Parnassians and the early realists, since they were better able to adjust themselves to the bourgeois mode of life. They were conservative optimists whereas the others were pessimists. From all this it follows indisputably that the utilitarian view of art finds acceptance by conservatives as well as by revolutionists. This view necessarily arises out of one condition: an intense and active interest in a given social order or social ideal, and it disappears when this interest, for one reason or another, ceases to exist. Notes 1. Pushkin: C ollected Works (in Russian), p. 354, Moscow, 1928. English transla tion by N. Jarintzov: Russian Poets and Poems, Vol. I, p. 109, Oxford, 1917.— Ed. 2. Pavel. I. Shchegolev: Pushkin (in Russian), p. 357, St. Petersburg, 1912. 3. Nestor Kukolnik (1805-1868), was a schoolfellow o f G ogol’s, and a popular writer of stories and dramas in the extreme romantic style— bombastic, unreal, and super-patriotic.—Ed. 4. Shchegolev: ibid., p. 241. 5. Pushkin: “ To the Poet” in C ollected Works (in Russian), p. 326, M oscow, 1928. English translation by Sir Donald MacAlister in “ Slavonic R eview ,” March 1926, Vol. IV, p. 691—Ed. 6. Theophile Gautier: M adem oiselle de Maupin, preface p. xxiv et passim, Paris, London, New York: Soci été de Beaux Arts: 1910 (Masterpieces o f French Literature)—Ed. 7. Theophile Gautier: Charles Baudelaire, p. 25, translated by Guy Thorne, London: Greening and Co.: 1915.—Ed. 8. M adem oiselle de Maupin, preface p. xxviii, editio cit.—Ed. 9. Theophile Gautier: H istoire du Romantism e, p. 153, Paris, 1874 (2nd. ed.). 10. Gautier: Histoire du Romantism e, p. 154. 11. Th éodore de Banville: Odes Funambulesques, pp. 294-295, Paris: Lemerre: 1874. 12. Alfred de Musset characterized this conflict in the following manner: “ Then they formed into two camps: on one side the exalted spirits, sufferers, all the expansive souls who had need o f the infinite, bowed their heads and wept; they wrapt themselves in unhealthy dreams and there could be seen nothing but broken reeds on an ocean o f bitterness. On the other side the men o f the flesh remained standing; inflexible in the midst o f positive joys, and cared for nothing except to count the money they had acquired. It was only a sob and a burst o f laughter, the one coming from the soul, the other from the bod y.”— The Confession o f a Child o f the Century, in The C om plete Works o f A lfred de M usset, Vol. VIII, pp. 16-17, translated by Kendall Warren, New York: E. C. Hill: 1905.— 13. This waistcoat which, as Brandes said, “ was to become a historic garment,”

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14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

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Gautier wore at the premiere of Victor Hugo’s Hernani, Jan. 2, 1830. Cf. Georg Brandes: The Romantic School in France in Main Currents in N ineteenth Century Literature, Vol. V, p. 289, New York: Macmillan: 1906.—Ed. Gautier: H istoire du Romantism e, p. 31, ed. cit. Ibid., p. 32. Th éodore de Banville states explicitly that the romanticists’ attack against the bourgeoisie was not directed entirely against the bourgeoisie as a class. (Cf. Odes Funam bulesques, p. 294, Paris: Lemerre: 1874.) Their revolt was really a conservative revolt because it failed to extend to the foundations o f bourgeois society. Some of our contemporary Russian thinkers (Ivanov-Razumnik, for example) have regarded it as a struggle against bourgeois ideology which in its breadth considerably exceeded the political and social struggles o f the proletar­ iat against the bourgeoisie. I leave it to the reader to judge the merit o f this opinion. Actually it proves that the men who study the history of Russian social thought have not, unfortunately, previously taken the trouble to study the history of western thought. The German romanticists were also distinguished by their negative conflict with their social environment, as Georg Brandes has so well shown in his book, The Romantic School in Germany, Vol. II of his Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (6 vols.), New York: Macmillan: 1906. Leconte de Lisle: Po èmes Antiques, p. vii, Paris, 1852. Leconte de Lisle: op. cit., p. xi. Victor Laprade: “ Les Muses d ’Etat,” in his Oeuvres Po étiques, Vol. Ill, pp. 57-58.—Ed. Cf. A. Cassagne: La Théorie de l’A rt pour l’A rt en France chez les Derniers Romantiques et les Premiers R éalistes, pp. 96-105, Paris, 1906.

A New Theory of Bohemians Charles A sto r B risted [C arl B enson , pseu d .], 1861

Last spring: the spring of 1860, I mean—if this communication waits as long as som e of mine have done, it may be spring before last, or spring before that, when it is published—in the spring of 1860, I say, it was rumored in New York that a club of Bohemians had been established on the European principle; an idea which provoked much ridicule from some of the Europeans settled among us. This set Carl Benson a-thinking (for he does perform that operation sometimes, and it was not the first time he had performed it on the very same subject) about the differentia of the Bohemian—what he is and what he is not, what properly constitutes him, and whether he is a specific product of a particular city, as the European critics alluded to seem to think, or one of all civilized countries. The name, if not invented, was at least fixed in circulation by Henry Murger. His “ Bohemian Life” was published some fifteen years since, and about half as long ago Carl Benson translated it in tutta la sua parte sana , according to the Italian editors’ phrase—that is to say, rather less than half of it—for the Knickerbocker , as some of the Knickerbocker's readers may or may not remember. The term was of course borrowed from the Gypsies, and his Bohemians led a precarious, Gypsy-like existence. Artists and authors (in intention at least) with no capital but their wits, they struggled on till they had fairly made their way into decent, taxpaying society, and were G ypsies o f A rt no longer, or else succumbed in the struggle and perished miserably. Never having read “ Friends of Bohemia,” or other English works, in which the same class is specially treated of, I am unable to say how closely this type has been followed by Anglo-Saxon writers, but I suspect they took substantially the same view of Bohemian life as the idealization of vagabondism. A light heart and a thin pair of breeches will go through all the world, my brave boys, as the old song had it a long while before Henry Murger. Or in the words of the German ballad, which you will find at the end of this treatise, The bore of 78

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life is fiddled, smoked and slept away. All very well for a time, but some day—generally before you have gone through all the world—the other side of the account book is turned over. Suppose Justice Oldmixon puts you in the stocks for a vagrant. Suppose there is no money to smoke with; for even the cheapest tobacco costs something. You may sleep, to be sure; and he who sleeps dines, on the authority of the French proverb; but does he who sleeps also smoke? Even the fiddle-strings will wear out in time, and you can’t “ rosin the bow” without the chino. So does insulted respectability find its revenges brought about by time’s whirligig. Bohemianism, then, we see considered by its first historians as a necessarily transient state, which men must get out of or be swallowed up by; a state of poverty, and incidentally of vice. I say incidentally of vice, because its inventors as a sta tu s , a m etier , were Frenchmen, and every thing in France must have a spice of vice about it. Now this I maintain to be a limited and inadequate conception of Bohemianism. It is not necessarily a state of poverty, (if by poverty you mean want of substantial comforts,) still less of vice, that is, of dissipation. It is not necessarily a transition state; on the contrary, people are born to it, and live and die in it. Sala, it appears to me, first hinted at the truth of the case when he talked of a Bohemian going home at ten o ’clock to read Plato and take water-gruel. Paradoxical it must have seemed to many of his readers, but nevertheless literally true. There are Bohemians who go home at ten o ’clock to read Plato and drink water-gruel. There are Bohemians with houses and lands and rent-rolls and government stocks. Nay, there are Bohemians who keep their accounts and their appointments with rarely deviating regularity. And Bohemianism, I repeat, is not a phase, a transitory period of a man’s life, but the whole of it. The Bohemian may be poor, and die rich, or vice versa: he is always a Bohemian. But who and what, then, is the Bohemian, you may ask. Define him at once, or we find it more difficult to tell who is not a Bohemian than who is. Well then, I proceed to my definition. A Bohemian is a man with literary or artistic ta stes , and an incurable proclivity to debt.

To many members of our mercantile community the second head of this definition would appear to be merely a natural sequence from the first. It has long been a doctrine on ‘Change that authors and artists and such people are bound to be in debt and difficulty and more or less risk of starvation all their lives. But this is a fallacy of juxtaposition and imperfect generalization which it is not worth while to confute seriously or at length. Look at a fashionable English portrait-painter, or indeed at an English artist generally. Can there be anything less Bohemian? How many Wilkies

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do we find for one Haydon? Look at our own literary men. How many Bancrofts and Prescotts and Everetts are there for one Poe! On the other hand, it is evident that the unfortunate propensity to run in debt, is not confined to literary men and artists, but is common to some of them with many men of all and of no profession, utterly innocent of any artistic or literary pretension or performance. This again is so obvious, that to enlarge upon it would be merely platitudinous. But why does the Bohemian get into debt, since it is not in virtue of his profession? The answer to this question will develop the constituent points of the Bohemian character. In the first place, the Bohemian is always a man with a hobby. He may have more than one, but one he must have, and that not a mere theoretic and speculative, but a substantial, material, money-costing hobby. It may be larger or smaller according to his means and position, but is very apt to be too large for those means, whatever they are. If he is a rich man, he may be fond of horse-flesh, which is not an illiterate taste as some over wise people would have you believe; or he may have a mania for collecting pictures, of which even good artists are not necessarily the best judges; or a weakness for fine furniture and jewelry; many great authors have run into such seemingly feminine extravagances. If poor, he will have some smaller weakness, but one equally fatal in proportion to his income. Men have ruined themselves buying pipes. La Brunie, who wrote under the name of Gerald de N erval , was in this respect perhaps the most finished type of the Bohemian. He had garrets full of curiosities and bric-a-brac , and no certain daily means of procuring a dinner. At last he was found hanging in one of his garrets. He would sooner part with life than part with his curiosities, or give up the habit of collecting them. Of course such manias are not the peculiar property of authors and artists; most readers of sporting literature are familiar with the story of the clerk who lived on offal in a granary-loft, that he might keep his hounds and horses, and a more common example is that of the inveterate gambler. But the Bohemian is a literary or artistic man with a hobby; though it must be observed that his hobby is not necessarily connected with literature or art. Moreover, it is necessary that his hobby, or weakness, or whatever you choose to call it—his “ vanity,” as Sam Weller would say—should not be a profitable one. The man who collects pictures, or books, or horses— curiosities or animals of any sort—with a view to selling them again, is the very reverse of a Bohemian. There are many such speculative collectors to be found; Paris is particularly flush of them just now. They are only a variety of Barnum. It is true that the real Bohemian’s reckless expenditure may sometimes, by pure accident, turn out to his pecuniary advantage. Thus there is a story of Balzac how he had once very absurdly furnished

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his parlor all in white satin with magnificent chandeliers, and some jolly friends dining with him had lighted up the chandeliers “ to see the effect.” Suddenly a publisher “ happened in,” and was so struck by (what appeared to be) the author’s daily luxury that he made him a huge offer for his next romance. But these are only accidental hits; the Bohemian’s hobby is necessarily an expensive and very likely a ruinous one. Now don’t fancy that 1 disapprove of hobbies. On the contrary, I believe in them immensely. Every man ought to have a hobby, provided he can keep it within bounds, and doesn’t ride it over other peoples’ toes. The misfortune is, that the Bohemian’s hobby can’t be kept within bounds, but is always tending to eat its own head off and outrun the constable. Here, then, we have the first reason why the Bohemian must and will get into debt. Secondly, the Bohemian is generous; free of his money when he has any, and sometimes when he has not. There are plenty of men who live “ about” on society generally, and contrive to support themselves at the expense of others; some of these are literary men, or soi-disant ones; there may be some quasi -artists among them too; but they are not Bohemians, (though sometimes erroneously confounded with the real article), they are only sponges. Thirdly, beside these particular debt-incurring traits, the Bohemian has a general inaptitude for business. Not merely a distaste for business details—this he may have and often has—but even if he has brought himself to conquer this dislike, nay, even if he has it not, (for there are Bohemians, rather methodical than otherwise, as we have already re­ marked), he always makes a mess of his business. This incapacity for business is by “ men of the world” and men of the ledger frequently attributed to all votaries of art and literature indiscrimi­ nately; and some literary men have accepted the imputation, and rather gloried in it. Thus, Alphonse Karr allows it as the most natural thing in the world that a novelist should know nothing of any other figures than those of metaphor, and he illustrates the position by some odd comparisons. The danseuse, he says, develops her legs at the expense of her chest; so the literary man develops his brains at the expense of his—chest, he probably would have said only the pun can’t be made in French. But this rule (as we also have had occasion to remark previously) is subject to so many limitations and exceptions that it cannot be considered a general rule at all. No doubt a lad who has been stuck into a counting-house at seventeen will know more of book-keeping and trade at twenty-one, than if he had passed that time at a university, or in an atelier. So too an author plunged suddenly into any business matter—made a consul, for instance— may find himself at first awkward in the routine. But it is a long jump from

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this to the conclusion that the scholar or the painter is ipso fa c to incom petent to manage his private business, or a reasonable amount of public business. Some scholars and writers and painters are, and these som e are the Bohemians. How many such young men have I seen put into, or putting themselves into, mercantile harness, working for years invita M inerva enough, GOD knows! but diligently and conscientiously, only at last to ruin themselves and others. And when they were ruined, and thoroughly given up to Bohemianism, they were happier than before; and the business world was happier too, to be rid of them. Their un-Bohemian period of life had been a dead loss to themselves and to society. If the phrenologists could only invent an organ of Bohemianism, and prevent such persons from being placed by mistaken parents upon counting-house stools, destined to be real stools of repentance; or placing themselves in “ firms,” which are anything but firm, what a blessing it would be to all concerned! But of course the phrenologists can’t, any more than they can do anything else of real practical utility. Having thus defined the subject of our investigation, we have next to consider whether the popular prejudice against him on the ground of vice is justly founded. Theoretically, and in the abstract nature of things, there is no reason why it should be. So far as a man is artistic or literary, he is pro tanto provided with resources and mental occupation, and is so far better protected against the temptations of gross animal vice than the mere man of business who has no intellectual resources outside of his ordinary occupation. A man’s taste, though it can never be a substitute for religion and morality, may often be a valuable auxiliary to them. True, we can imagine a man taking up vice artistically, plunging into the haunts of dissipation that he may be able to portray them graphically, or even deliberately committing sin in order to study its effect upon himself and his fellow-sinner. So Firmilian murders his friends and blows up the cathedral in order to realize and analyze the feelings of an assassin and incendiary. But the Firmilians are rare and monstrous exceptions, and can scarcely occur save in a thoroughly diseased condition of society. The source of the connection in the popular mind of one particular form of immorality with Bohemianism, we have already hinted at. The Bohe­ mian was first taken from the Parisian point of view, and all society taken from that point of view, (except perhaps some purely poetic and utopian state), is equally immoral. If M urger s artist tenants have their mistresses, the bourgeois landlord (a married man too) has his. This count of the indictment then we may summarily dismiss. Drunkenness is another vice charged upon the Bohemian, especially by those who, ignorantly or malevolently, confound jollity with drunkenness.

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Here again the exceptions are constantly made to serve for the rule; a Jarvis or a Poe is obstinately represented as the type of a whole class. A lot of laughers and quaffers are set down as an orgie , though their potations may be nothing stronger than L ager . This much I admit, that your true Bohemian generally has in him a potentiality of drink, not an energy or entelechy constantly acting, but a dynamis (how is our friend T. L., by the way?) enabling him to enjoy his liquor on proper occasions, though most nights he may go home early to his water-gruel (like Sala’s sample) or tea or orgeat. In tee-totalers’ eyes the Bohemian is lost and condemned. But we are not writing for tee-totalers. Smoking is another vice popularly attributed to the Bohemian. It cer­ tainly is a common Bohemian habit. The grave and important question, how far this practice is necessarily a vice, would demand a separate treatise. Let us merely remark that some of the usual objections to it are much the reverse of fact; as when it is said that smoking directly encour­ ages drinking, whereas the case is just the contrary. Nothing has done more to put down after-dinner tippling than the cegar. As to the excess of the practice, let us notice with special reference to the Bohemian, that the man who works or talks with interest , putting his whole mind into his work or talk, is much less likely, nay, much less able to smoke excessively than he who works mechanically, and whose mind is idle during the intervals of repose. A modern school of reformers do indeed maintain that drinking and smoking are always excesses; that there is no such thing as temperance in the use of wine and tobacco, all indulgence, however limited, in those articles, being intemperance, and tending to shorten life. Possibly, in a certain sense, they do so tend; and probably the creed of these philoso­ phers was never so pithily summed up as in the advice of Punch’s Scotchman to his son: “ Wear thick shoes, eat oat-meal porridge, and walk ten miles a day; thus you may live a hundred years, and enjoy the last year as much as the fir s t.” The question is, what such a man’s life is worth. He can hardly be said to have gelebt und geliebet. One vice, indeed, the Bohemian must have; it is an essential part of his character and definition. He must be normally and habitually in debt. A terrible thing to be in debt, no doubt, and a great theme to moralize on. One’s children, and society, and the bad example, and so forth. Unfortu­ nately, it is with some people a natural infirmity, perhaps an hereditary one; men are born to get into debt, and so born Bohemians, as I said. Now here again, if the wise phrenologists could only invent an organ of getinto-debtiveness—that and philippism, and a great many other propensities stronger than most of those in their charts, they have never been able to locate. Perhaps after all, though, it is as well that these unfortunates

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cannot be labelled for life beforehand, have hay put on their horns, (foenum in cornu), at the risk of being prematurely cut off. Well, go read “ Panurge’s Apology for D ebt,” and while you are looking for it in your “ Rabelais,” remember that I don’t more than half believe that dogmatic adage about “ being just before,” etc. I am not by any means sure that it is always better to be just (in the sense implied by the adage) than to be generous. There is Lamartine, one of the real kings of Bohemia, a man certainly not profligate, certainly not idle, but always in pecuniary difficul­ ties. That is a generous man. Now on the other side, take a Jew tailor; he is a just man in the mercantile sense, agrees with his laborers for a penny, or ten-pence a day, as the case may be, pays them that theirs is, and does what he likes with his own, as is lawful. Which would you rather be—I mean apart from all reference to the former’s literary reputation; merely looking at the conscience and feelings of the two men—Lamartine or the Jew tailor? One point remains, too important to be passed over in silence; the relation of woman to the Bohemian life. It is a delicate question. My own opinion (which I express with diffidence, and which to some readers will appear not the least novel position in my novel theory) is that women are not fit for Bohemians. They are flowers too delicate for the violent extremes of the Bohemian climate. They can’t stand the ups-and-downs. When women have to pass from luxury to privation (positive or compara­ tive), they are in danger either of losing their temper, or of going to the bad altogether. Moreover, it is difficult for a woman, without some loss of delicacy, to be very unconventional, and that is just what a Bohemian is apt to be. Indeed, it is so general a trait of the Bohemian character, that I had at first some thoughts of adding it to the definition, thus: “ A Bohemian is a man with literary or artistic tastes, an incurable proclivity to debt, and a strong disbelief in Mrs. Grundy .” I fancy women must believe a little in Mrs. Grundy. This unconventionalism is, after all, the crying sin of the Bohemian in many people’s eyes, because they vaguely imagine it to include and connote almost every possible vice. All things considered, I am inclined to think that when a man has the misfortune (for misfortune on some accounts it certainly is) to be a Bohemian born, it is better for him and for society that he should light upon a wife of rather antiBohemian tendencies to keep his house in order. I am well aware that not only the above opinion, but the whole theory of this essay, may be strongly contested. It may be considered an un­ founded pretension on my part to admission among the Knights of the— —what Table? No Table at all, most probably, like the soiree of Murger’s hero, where they could only sit down m etaphorically . Certainly I do claim to be a Bohemian, as a literary man by profession and (after a fashion)

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practice, and as never having been out of debt but twice since the age of sixteen. Once I recollect having had a balance at my banker’s; they stopped payment immediately after, which I accepted as a judgment and a lesson. Nevertheless, if any of Old Knick's readers refuse to accept my claim or my theory, and cling obstinately to the old pre-conceived type of Bohemian, let us present them with this ballad as a peace-offering in accordance with their own conception of the subject. It has already appeared once in print, but where the un-Bohemian portion of Knick's subscribers would hardly think of going to look for it; besides, it has received a few touchings-up for its new destination. Strike up, fiddlers! Hats off in front, and small boys will please to sit down. Don’t be frightened at the rhythm; it goes to an air from Wagner’s “ Music of the Future” : T h e T h r e e G y p s ie s

from the German of Lenau Once I came upon Gypsies three, In a green spot together, As my carriage dragged wearily Over the sandy heather. One in his hands a fiddle had got, All to himself—more pity! The evening sun shone round him hot, As he played a fiery ditty. The second had a pipe in his mouth; He looked at the smoke, as jolly As if upon earth, from north to south, All else to him was folly. The third on e’s banjo hung on a tree, The wind o ’er its strings was sweeping; A dream swept over his soul, while he Beneath lay cosily sleeping. For clothes the three had around them curled Mere tatters and rags most various; But they laughed no less at all the world, Its honors and joys precarious. Three-fold they showed me, as there they lay, How those who take life in the true sense, Fiddle it, smoke it, and sleep it away, And trebly despise its nuisance. As I went on I had to look back, Watching those curious creatures, Watching their locks of hair, jet black, and their merry dark-brown features.

Bohemia: The Underworld of Art G eorge S . Snyderm an and William Josephs, 1939

Bohemia, meaning “ the home of the good,” was the name, originally, of a Balkan state whose members were scattered about Europe following the Hussite Wars (1419-1431). Because of these wanderers, bohemian became synonymous with gypsy and beggar. It was in the latter sense that Scott used the word in Quentin Durward ,1 so it is probable that Balzac, when he introduced the term in his Prince o f Bohem ia ,2 intended it as an epithet to be translated as: “ The vagrant students of the Latin Q uarter.” However, the word was promptly adopted as filling a need. Murger confirmed the usage in his Sc ènes de la Vie de Bohême and in its new connotation the word quickly became part of the vocabularies of Europe and America. Its success and permanence indicate that the group thus described was sufficiently unique and important to require a title, and that its relationship with other groups was so ambiguous as to prevent its inheriting or borrowing a name. There was in fact a new group. It was a coalition of several types of individualists following the fortuitous formation of a highly favorable psychical, social, and economic milieu on the part of the artists. The pleasure-seeking type found a new province of anonymity and unconven­ tionality. Dissenting liberals and romantics discovered an asylum and headquarters; and this asylum was shared by psychopaths who saw in bohemia a camouflage for their eccentricities. The esthetic group desired intimacy with creative activities; for here, of necessity, were the artists who had established this mode of life, together with the dealers, the poverty-stricken, and the purveyors who were indigenous. Finally, there were “ the professional bohemians” and the curiosity seekers, who for one reason or other flocked to this environment with which they had no true affinity, and to whose make-up they contributed little. Altogether, this particular combination of atmosphere, philosophy and types was decidedly unique. 86

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But it was more than a social group: bohemia itself is an ideal and a legend. It is a literary tradition, a dreamland El Dorado of Youth, an intellectual pose of the artistic lamb, a philosophy composed of one part idealism, one part eccentricity and one part opera bouffe heroics. It was explored by Henri Murger, Du Maurier and Balzac; yet it is searched for by thousands annually—by the youthful, the credulous, and the naive. To them it is a paradise. They make their pilgrimage in reverential awe, with fastings, magnifications and ceremonies. They never discover bohemia, but sometimes they create it. In age, the immature form the largest contingent of bohemians. For one thing, the individualistic attitude comes naturally to youth. Again, idealism and romanticism, irresponsibility, love of adventure, and the novel, phys­ ical resiliency and mental receptivity powerfully motivate the young re­ bels. Conversely the passing of these adolescent traits automatically removes the mature. Much that is typical of bohemia may be laid to youthful irresponsibility: the tales of Murgeria are an index of childish pranks. The charm of this world is the tang of promise and vigor and high ideals: the sunny realm of adolescence. Here people taste life and do not find it bitter. The golden loves, the floating beauty, the gallant dreams of men were never sung by the realists, the middle-aged and the old; and that is why the mature man leaves bohemia. He will publish his Swan Song at twenty, his biography at thirty, and his treatise at forty-five. The predominant element determining the nature of the bohemian legend is individualism. With the advent of the industrial revolution the artist lost the patronage of the aristocracy and was forced to sell his wares on the open market. He became a merchant with something to sell, and in this financial competition there was a value set on uniqueness. Individuality, therefore became a requisite of art, and individualism an artistic trait. Twin brother of individualism, liberalism grew at large as individualism grew in art; both romantic in appeal, they were destined to make their home together. The spirit of rebellion flowered in the French Revolution, and its contagion was felt in other nations. There was revolt both in arms and in spirit.3 “ The romantic movement headed by Delacroix was part of a world-wide revolt of youth against official tyranny in government and art. The French Romantics drew their fire from many sources: from Scott, Byron, Constable and Bonington; from Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven and Goya. They were not bohemians, they were men with a program. . . . But most of them and three in particular—Byron, Goya and Delacroix—were spectacular figures whose weaknesses were of the sort which inferior minds seize upon as the criteria of artistic behavior.” 4 Bohemianism, the practice of individualism, combined so naturally with

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the artist’s mode of life that they were destined to appear together. The artist had learned to work without proportionate reward, to dispense with most of the necessities and institutions; he faced the loss of social class and ties, and made an honor of the antagonism, or worse, the indifference, of an uncomprehending public; in short, he could live in squalor and maintain his self-respect. The artist had demonstrated a practical method of surviving though d éclass ée and the individualists hastened to profit by his example. Therefore bohemia, though originating in answer to specific needs of the individualists, took over entirely the incidents of the artist’s life and made them its own practices. The sole change made in these institutions was a gradual concession of the fact that they were no longer circumstantial but traditional, which manifested itself in a growing empha­ sis on the theatrical, the romantically effective aspects. The presence in bohemia of such trumpery as Little Tea Shoppes, interminable debates, and rowdyism has puzzled commentators who failed to realize that these traits were borrowed directly from the true artist’s life where they were a natural and unpretentious development. From their error is derived the conclusion that bohemianism is quite as purposeless as its own institutions, supposing one to originate in the other. As has been pointed out, however, bohemianism is a genuine and widespread mood; and the traits it borrowed and distorted were nevertheless a very definite need if bohemia were to exist in fact. The feminine bohemian is in some degree a reaction and overflow from the professions, since bohemianism is in part inculcated as a manner of life by the growth of woman’s self-reliance and economic freedom. Psy­ chopathic disabilities account for the presence of a number. The exploita­ tion of bohemia as a “ pleasure center” provides a large contingent of hangers-on; with these may be grouped the matrimonially inclined who frame themselves in this romantic background. Few women, however, are permanent inhabitants of bohemia: the life is less kind to them than to men. Few, for that matter, care to burn their bridges to a final picturesque degree. On the contrary, the women are more likely to be filling with plans the impractical dream world of the men. They do not forget that “ many women have as much difficulty getting back into the home as her sister of a decade ago experienced in breaking away.” 5 As a group, bohemia is geographically, temperamentally, and economi­ cally heterogeneous—unlike other city groups. Inevitably there are estab lished numerous geographical, temperamental, and economic levels, and a caste system results. Though the divisions of caste in bohemia are deter mined by the factors mentioned, the rank in the various divisions is a result of artistic prestige and liberalism. The highest places are occupied by those who have achieved a success marked by maximum publicity, and

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who look with favor on bohemia. These individuals are ordinarily true creative artists flattered to be chosen the patrons and defenders of bohe­ mia.6 They are, of course, bohemia’s argument to the world. “ You admire this man: he is one of us: tolerate us, and we will produce more like him. You may even treat us with the respect due our coming honor.” Among those who have paid their sentimental respects to bohemia are such outstanding producers as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Floyd Dell, Lincoln Steffens, Franklin Booth, and so on. In addition to the glamor of the free, dreamy interludes of bohemian life as popularly conceived, bohemia is a necessity to certain types. It is the asylum of the starved egoist. For the opportunist it appears to be the most direct road to intimacy with the brilliant and creative and even the most ordinary occasions combine the cultured atmosphere with the unconven­ tional. All extremes meet in bohemia: no level of society, race, religion, politics or thought is barred. In contradiction to society, a premium is put upon individualism, physical or psychological; freaks and psychopathic cases are held in esteem for no other reason than their infirmities. An individualist is one who does not, perhaps cannot, satisfy the requirements of a particular group; he differs from the established and expected norm of behavior or opinion. If this hinders free social inter­ course in the comparatively strict groups of society, it is no hindrance at all in a group which possesses no accepted norm and makes no demands. Just such a group, unconventional in the most narrow sense, is formed by the union of the individualists themselves. Although an individualistic group may seem a paradox, it must be remembered that the individualist is not necessarily nongregarious, and by participation in a noncritical group he increases his own freedom of variation. Hence such a group is not only possible, it is probable—circumstances permitting. The basic circumstance is the presence of a “ parent group,” because an individualist group whose members are responsible to no one, whose purpose is to defend that irresponsibility, and which has no other common purpose, can have no organic life of its own. Disorganization cannot be a principle of organization. Lacking the means of spontaneous articulation, then, the individualists can become a group only by selective accretion to a non-individualistic one already in existence, which thus becomes the parent group. In order for such an accretion to occur the parent group must possess three qualities: it must be large and nonexclusive, because small groups can discriminate against their members, while a set of membership require­ ments would prevent any great number of individualists (who have few qualities in common) from entering any one parent group; it must be unable to impose responsibility upon its members, since the ability to

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discipline the individual would at once exclude the individualists; finally it must foster an active social life, as it is only by social contact that accretion can occur, when the individualist plays no active part in the parent group. These qualities are particularly exemplified in the artist group, which has come to be the most popular of hosts; but they may appear in any of several groups. Further, the characteristics which have remained constant in the history of bohemia, the parasite of the artist group, are the charac­ teristics which may be predicted of any individualist group—we may therefore say that any individualist group is a bohemia.7 Because there are no common qualities except individualism, the mem­ bers are mutually tolerant in the sense of disinterestedness. There is a freemasonry based on similar needs and the prestige of the host. They do not derive from any particular race, nationality or culture, or economic or social level, although because of the emphasis placed on individuality, these particulars are used as distinguishing qualities and so give rise to ethos worship. Finally, the manner of its origin makes bohemia urban, cosmopolitan, and transient. Aside from the defense of the group, the cornerstone of individualistic philosophy is the right of the individual to develop emotionally, intellectu­ ally, and spiritually as he sees fit. The individualist premises this right upon the incommensurability of the soul: the inherent fallacy of allying concrete standards with an ineffable and delicate quality. With this principle he attacks the practice of society of arriving at corporate behavior by endorsing group thoughts and types: a process he disparages as “ standardization.” As it happens, the individ ualist is not a victim of standardization himself—conformity is precisely what he is incapable of. In any case his behavior will be atypical. But he objects to being the only one out of step: every instance of standardization is for him an instance of exclusion; and his solution of the predicament is for everyone to be out of step. Hence the tenets of individualistic philosophy are determined least by their value in a rational program of behavior, and most by their possibilities as propaganda, i.e., it is dogma. The dogma consists of a collection of attitudes and doctrines which further the kind of society in which the individualist can best exist. The social habits developed by the bohemians to fit their own needs are necessarily at variance with those of society. The result is a tension amounting to opposition, and the brunt of this opposition is carried by the social institutions because it is through these ordinarily that public opinion becomes coercive. As the disciplinary method varies from one institution to another so also does the reception in bohemia. For instance, no attitude can circumvent the direct and inescapable force of the law. On the other

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hand, the merely suggestive guidance of art and education, imposing no restriction upon behavior, provokes little response to them as institutions. But the Church, the State, the community and the family are met with a psychical resistance in the form of nonconformist dogma. Because these institutions are powerful and omnipresent, the reaction to them is pro­ found. It is not a case of academic dissent, but of individual welfare: the most anonymous of individualists must feel and fight their pressure. Therefore, bohemian dogma is aimed particularly at these institutions, criticizing them on the one hand, and on the other replacing in Murgeria, those that are indispensable with forms in which they are unable to foster discipline. In short, the bohemian aims at a practical anarchy. He finds that social opinion is manifested chiefly in institutions, where it is inescapable inas­ much as the function of the institutions is indispensable. But social opinion, though closely associated with the functions, is not strictly necessary for the efficacy save that it assures the permanency of the institutions providing them. It is possible as the act of a small minority to divorce the functions from social control, provided the public weal is assured by an adherence to social discipline on the part of a responsible majority. Thus the individualist finds that in a law abiding group a furtive anarchism is feasible. He believes that he has set up a novel improvement on the social mechanism, that he has demonstrated the practicability of individualism as a form of society. As a matter of fact he has merely nullified for himself the necessity of accepting responsibilities upon whose recognition by others, however, he continues to rely for his privileges. The sum effect is to set up within the group an equivalent social mechanism duplicating the orthodox institutions, but without their authority. The chief quality of this social life is its unconventionality—its lack of discipline. It is plain that the popularity of bohemia is based upon an objection to discipline and its implications: conventions, standards, and values. But why is this objection so strong and so lasting that it can create a whole group? How can it be so universal that it takes its members from every rank of every nation, yet so particular that it leaves the vast majority either untouched or prejudiced against it? We believe the answer to these questions may be found in the concept of the defective personality. A personality defect may be no more than lack of initiative or a physical infirmity; it may be pyschopathic. Regardless of degree or permanency, if such a defect is a hindrance to free, gregarious social intercourse, the person concerned may be said to have a defective personality. Assuming all people desire to lead a gregarious life, it follows that individualism originates in a personality defect; i.e., individualism is the rationalization of the impossibility of social conformity. The attraction of bohemia, then,

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is the attraction of a social life for those to whom it is denied in groups of more definite mores and demands. It is the guild of the crippled spirit. Given this theory of bohemianism, we are in a position to make the following definitions: Bohemianism is a form o f social life which occurs when large, nonexclusive groups provide frequent social intercourse without having the p ow er to enforce social discipline, standards or values. A Bohemian is one whose need, (because o f a personality defect), o f the unhampered social life thus provided accounts fo r his presence in the group providing it. Esthetic Bohemianism is such a life provided particularly by the artist group. (This is usually considered bohemianism per se, but since bohemi

anism could occur in any of several groups, we classify it as a historical phase.) That each bohemia takes its institutions, interests, viewpoints, and vocabulary from its parent group does not require argument. But it happens, under present urban conditions, that a given bohemia is fre­ quently fostered by several groups simultaneously: it may include esthetes, radicals, and hobos, each with its parent group. The contacts thus pro­ vided suggest an explanation of the chaotic dogmas of Murgeria: the institutions of one bohemia tend to become the institutions of every bohemia; but no one group maintains all the institutions or traditions. This situation could only occur in a group having an organic life of its own: it is additional evidence that bohemia is a parasitic social group. The ideal bohemian, if there were one, would show many definitely psychopathic traits, melancholia, satyriasis, claustrophobia, hyperethesia, apathy, dyspepsia, and chronic alcoholism. Such are the leading charac­ teristics of the traditional idols of bohemia: Goethe, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Wilde, Verlaine, Baudelaire, and the decadents on down to Van Vechten, Bodenheim, Hecht, and O’Neill. Much as the babbling of the village idiot is regarded by the illiterate as divinely inspired, so the incontestable work of genius or talent is traced directly, in bohemia, to such symptoms of psychological infirmity as we have listed. It is the final phase of Rousseau’s romanticism—the theory of a “ natural man” : unham pered, original, spontaneous, as he was in the Garden of Eden and as he is in Kirkbride. In addition to this uncritical sympathy, the casual, anonymous social life makes bohemia an attractive asylum for the psychopath. Many are accordingly found there who are definitely deranged or perverted, although hitherto so harmless as not to draw the attention of the authorities. Next to the sex group, the most common derangement in bohemia is megalomania: delusions of grandeur. It has been suggested that all arts

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rest on this disease; that the writer cannot write or the artist paint without believing that he can do it much better than anyone else. In any case, classic instances of this phenomena are not hard to find in bohemia. Although bohemia and Liberalism exist separately, each having a struc­ tural integrity and purpose, they have sufficient qualities in common to form an overlapping area inhabited by the bohemian liberal. The members are drawn from both groups, and the common qualities of bohemianism and liberalism which created this area are, inevitably, its dominant char acteristics. Chief of these characteristics is the challenge to conventional social forms; both the individualist and the resurgent element find common cause in the fight against the status quo. Both redeem the extreme character of this position, which logically implies an idealization of barba rism, by professing an advanced humanitarianism. Both renounce pomp and circumstance. Neither accepts either the logical consequences or the responsibility of his position. Generally they fall in the same economic and social level. Nevertheless, the liberal bohemian differs according to his source. Perhaps there is no pure representative of any group, but the sum of values and attitudes in any one instance will usually serve to distinguish in degree the bohemian turned liberal from liberal turned bohemian. What they have in common is the mood of revolt, of disruption; they wish, quite simply to rebuild their lives—and the world—a little closer to the heart’s desire. But they do not continue to a common conclusion. The liberal lives in a realistic world whose values are strictly objective, and the changes he proposes are based on facts and realities. The bohemian on the other hand, lives in an unreal world built of subjective values and individ­ ualized concepts: his revolt is correspondingly abstract, amounting to no more than an imponderable change of emphasis in his ideology. Briefly, the distinction is between the rebellion of extroverts and that of introverts. Thus Plato, in such a mood, writes a Republic; Lycurgus, in a similar mood, founds one. The contrast is naturally most evident in the field of politics, quite often in the labor movements. Here the practical liberal shades gently from the suave parliamentarian to the dynamic agitator. Equally the romantic liberal declines from the social-reform worker to the sentimental sympathizer. For the romantic bohemian the radical movement is a ready made background. It supplies him with a dramatic raison d ’être. Hence, much bohemian art takes its flavor from politics, especially as the liberals are not blind to the value of building up a representative culture and propa ganda. The “ Cultural Front” of the leftist groups provides an appreciative public and therefore is inviting to the bohemians. In many cases this hack writing of propaganda is as near as they are likely to come to artistic

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success, and the dissemination of political principles is a small price to pay for an audience. Moreover, the subject allows of unlimited posturing and self-dramatization, at the same time imparting in its importance as a subject a fictitious dignity to the particular artistic effort. This is the general tone of the “ Cultural Front,” perpetrated in the traditional bo hemian manner under cover of a few genuine creative liberals such as Barbusse, Rolland, Gorky, Rivera, Odets, Kirkland, Caldwell, etc. Besides the bohemian who makes an attempt at creative activity, those who are merely in attendance are often drawn by the left wing movements to combine their esthetic interests with political ones. The function of the typical public in this case is to support this aspect of the liberal program by attendance and money. The genuine liberal appears in bohemia for various reasons. In the first place, he seeks converts—among acquaintances, naturally, and because of the contacts of the two groups, bohemia is likely to include a large number of his acquaintances. Secondly, he enters bohemia as part of his social survey: it is his principle that a group must be inspected before it can be judged. Thirdly, he realizes the potentiality of bohemian talent in the production of propaganda. Even when they do not join the movement a permanent bias may be given to their views which will cumulatively contribute to the prestige of the leftists. In toto, the liberal seeks from bohemia whatever it can contribute to the success of the movement. The Pleasure Seeker is a universal type: he is at the same time a dominant type in bohemia and by his multitudinous presence has given a definite turn to the life and habits of the region. He is attracted by the anonymity and moral freedom which flavor his indiscretions. His indul­ gences usually involve women, because this type of pleasure seeking requires the most social atmosphere. The other vices are either condoned in home surroundings or are not safe even in bohemia, so the pleasure seeker usually appears here in a sexually predatory role. In order to maintain the social round on which he depends, the pleasure seeker provides the economic backing for various enterprises. He either “ throws” his own parties, or has his friends do so, provides meals, tickets, liquor and other conveniences, and in addition purchases productions of art, backs movements and organizations, or loans money directly. Over a period of time the pleasure seeker usurps the whole bohemian district: to meet the demands of his presence rents rise, cafes flourish at steep rates, shops catering to a well-to-do clientele displace the local enterprises, and eventually the group becomes composed chiefly of pleasure seekers who pursue within their circle the whole purpose of their presence with very small dependence on the bohemian element. The latter are replaced with “ nam es” : successful illustrators, writers, playwrights, professors, etc.

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The studio gives way to the salon; the easel is replaced by the bed. Finally, bohemia moves to new quarters; the pleasure seeker once more makes his appearance and the whole process is repeated. The fact that most bohemias are in geographic, economic, and social contact with other groups and levels of society insures a constant stream of transients. As the “ Back-door of the A rts,” professional and esthetic contacts perhaps predominate. There are also those who look for diver sion, license, and anonymity. These are the sponsors and financial sup porters of “ studio parties.” In this group especially are the various circles of perversion: the marihuana, homosexual, hard drinking, or sex obsessed rings. Other transients are found in the clique of disciples surrounding each artist or writer of any consequence; in the husband-hunting girls who use all social occasions such as are abundantly supplied by bohemia; in the “ professional bohemians” who live on their glamour as ex-soldiers live on their wounds; in the students, merchants, landlords who make up the background of bohemia. Not the least of the occasionals are the teashoppe, book-shoppe, art-shoppe, and studio-apartment speculators who cater less to the inhabitants than to the visitors.8 Bohemia provides a tolerant social life for those whose personality defects have excluded them from the social groups. But there are other groups who also find bohemia a social haven: not, however, because they suffer from personality defects but because their contacts with the perma­ nent groups of society are temporary, haphazard, or unsatisfactory for any reason. The easy entree to bohemia is sure to be used to advantage by these, and it often becomes a doorway to more rigid, responsible groups. Foreigners and immigrants make the fullest use of this entree, account­ ing for much of the “ International House” flavor of bohemia. It is also used by people whose birth, economic level, or means of livelihood do not give them contact with groups whose cultural level they have come to value by hearsay or inherent taste. Often, too, the interest in the superior group is not entirely idealistic: the social climber and those who prey upon the monied classes are to be found in this type. For these people, bohemia is not a necessity; they could never create it, as do the true bohemians, out of their own psychological needs, and they rarely remain when they have once been admitted to more stable groups. We therefore classify them as occasional bohem ians , always recognizing, however, that their presence is not a meaningless geographical accident but a definite functioning of the social mechanism. The transient bohemians as a rule add little more than numbers to the group. They make no special contributions and merely use bohemia as a convenience. On the other hand, the number in which they are present places considerable emphasis on these conveniences and to a certain

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extent obscures the reasons for existence of the remainder. Frequently, also, it is the transient who secures publicity for the group, by reason of the status he or she has in the more stable groups of society. So far as our analysis is concerned, they are types which it is important only to identify and dispose of in order to bring into their true degree of importance the other types which generate and determine the nature of bohemianism. So long as society produces individuals whose social life it cannot accommodate, so long will there be bohemians and with them bohemia; with bohemia its converts, intruders, and imitators. What social change may dry this source is a contingency beyond our scope—the potential effects on the social structure and its unit, the individual, by the sociolo­ gist, the psychoanalyst and the alienist, with their arts of diverting person­ ality into the narrow path, would seem to be the most promising factors here; but their cumulative result is unpredictable even by themselves and will not serve a general speculation on the future. Meanwhile, until a possibility of change in this direction is proven, one cannot reasonably assume the passing of bohemianism. The force which disrupts bohemia is its own excessive popularity. The size of the group is necessarily limited and numerical increase is fatal to its solidarity, because overdevelopment is accompanied by a breakdown into many exclusive and antagonistic groups; while the formation of a broad zone of semibohemianism obscures the old prestige and depreciates morale by destroying the hard distinction between bohemian and nonbohemian. Again, with overcrowding there is a rise in rents and a dissipa tion of conveniences, a reversal of the very conditions in which the group has its origin. The sum effect is decentralization through increase in numbers. The most dangerous aspect is the decentralization of the interrelated artist group. The decentralization of the artist group, carried to completion, is nec­ essarily fatal to esthetic bohemianism. To lose oneself in a crowd one must have a crowd. If the artists no longer form one, the journalists or radicals may not prove as captious, and a transition from the esthetic to some other form of bohemianism may therefore be expected. But as it happens the decentralization of the artists is not completed and probably never will be. Many of them hesitate to forego the business advantage of being on the ground; this fact alone assures an art district. Again, no matter where the artist personally chooses to live, his profession must always center about certain fixed points: for example the schools, the publishers, or the galleries. Finally, by virtue of their interests, the artists tend to gather at such institutions as the concert or the theatre, and social groups are fostered by these occasions. Decentralization is nevertheless in progress; if the bohemians are not precisely pushed to the wall they have at least felt

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the pressure to the extent of executing in part the transition we considered probable under such circumstances: they have begun to seek new patrons. The labor movement appears to be the chief of the prospective hosts. It is true that liberals have long been associated with bohemia because of the sanctuary to be found there; it is also true that the Marxists and Murgerites being, respectively, objective and subjective critics of the present order, hold parallel views on the necessity and nature of social revaluations: for example, the denial of religion. In fact, this historic association has helped to make the class struggle a bohemian dogma. But at no time have the two merged. The labor movement is an explicit, continuous cumulative and direct effort: precisely the opposite of bohemianism. The essential contradiction lies in the fact that the class struggle, though fertile of individuals is not an individualistic movement. It correctly describes itself as a conscious mass movement; it is not only social, it is social in that impersonal sense we ascribe to the State. The labor movement, therefore, cannot but be completely incompatible with bohemian individualism. Its association is due to linkage through individuals, not to congeniality. The individuals generated by the movement, may and frequently do, reside in bohemia; they may be, and frequently are, individualists; but they cannot carry individualism into the movement. In short the relationship of the individualist to the class struggle is identical with his relationship to art: parasitic. Since we have called the latter type the esthetic bohemian, we may call the former the liberal bohemian. Moreover, since humanitarian economics represents an attitude toward life equivalent in scope to that of art, we see no reason why the change from the esthetic to liberal bohemianism may not be a true transition implying a distinct change in form without a loss of essential qualities. Our definition of bohemianism, required as a condition of its presence a large group affording frequent social contacts without having the power to enforce discipline over them. This was true of the artist group; it is even more true of the labor movement, which must work through individual contacts whose organizational routine is carried on by the group in frequent conference. More, it has been a policy to extend the patronage of the group to whatever social activities are compatible in the belief that by providing a complete social life for the members in the name of the movement, the movement will become an integral portion of their lives. This principle is not novel; it had been used for centuries by the Church. But the discipline achieved by the Church is replaced in the movement by a general indifference where the welfare of the movement is not con­ cerned—certainly an ingratiating attitude, and a dangerous one. The

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intent, of course, is to produce an apparent consistency between their conventions and their attitude of social criticism. It is not intended to extend this slovenly life to genuine activities; here the group has the definite advantage, (of being completely self-aware) over the artists on similar occasions. As organizations, the liberal parties know precisely what is required of their members to insure success, and they can set up and justify standards. Unfortunately they cannot extend these standards to the private lives of their members. As with the artists, it is precisely where bohemianism occurs that the liberal parties are powerless. The greatest change which can occur to bohemia is a transition from one phase to another, i.e. it is the greatest change which can occur without destroying the essential qualities of bohemianism. Because the labor movement is rapidly becoming a more favorable host than the artist group, we believe that a transition from esthetic to liberal bohemianism is immi nent. It remains to be considered what lesser changes are probable. Since changes less than transition must happen in the present phase, and since any disturbance of the essential qualities of bohemianism must result in a transition to a less disturbed phase, we may limit the subject at once to variations in the surface phenomena of esthetic bohemianism. The most potent source of surface change has been the re-evaluations of bohemia and society which became necessary as various aspects of bohemianism were adopted by the public. For instance, it is no longer possible to describe the group as the vanguard of modernism, because the revolution of thought and manner so described is already firmly established with the public at large, at least in the urban groups. The popular mind has become fully as aware of and receptive to innovation as is bohemia itself. The new knowledge, the new thought, is common property; Freud and free-verse, Ibsen and cubism, Joyce and the Ballet Mechanique have begun to date even in the hinterland of Philistia. It is no longer certain that the culturally sensitive person must die of asphyxiation in the middle-class atmosphere. The erstwhile coldly conservative public could scarcely take more to heart the twin pleas for tolerance and unconventionality. Bohemia still promises a new freedom of morals, but one wonders what remains from which to be freed? As the first wave of modernism, bohemia has disappeared in the tide. The glamor of bohemia has also been revalued downward. The artist himself has ceased to be a legendary figure: the line of Byron and Degas and the other great romantics has not survived a century of training in objectivity and our exaltation of the paths of science. The laboratory is found to be quite as fascinating as the studio, and the asceticism of an Arrowsmith replaces the romance of Rudolph and Mimi. Even the practice of art is nearer to the people—from the grammar school on, frequent

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opportunity is given to those who feel the creative urge, and acquaintance thus secured with the arts makes for a more sincere respect but weakens the romantic prestige they formerly enjoyed. On the whole, the increase in literacy and opportunity and the emphasis placed upon science struck a powerful blow at bohemia by diminishing the glory reflected upon it by the arts. Finally, there have been internal re-evaluations. The desirability of being a bohemian is not described in the former terms, for these have changed inexorably. The “ professional advantages” lessen as opportunities multi ply with the development of markets; and as orthodox approaches are formulated by the impersonal but efficient agencies, “ contact” and “ inside pull” become less essential. The sale of fiction, for instance, is not necessarily facilitated by a “ made in Greenwich” label; and a drinking bout with the editors appears to be less of an indispensable preliminary to submitting the manuscript. Paintings and sculpture, though sent from darkest Minnesota, are accepted for exhibition without discrimination because of their origin, and receive due attention. Attendance upon teach­ ers and academies does require an urban residence, it is true, but these sources become less and less tributary to bohemia as the schools increase in authority and discipline. Especially is this the case since universities and colleges have entered this field of education and demonstrated their tested method of control and direction. The wild-cat studio, beloved of the rebels, suffers serious competition from art centers run as community enterprises. The abler men are drained off by the spread of professional clubs and unions, who in turn slowly impose standards upon their unorgan­ ized colleagues. This is bohemia’s loss in terms of sanctioned irresponsi­ bility. It will be noticed that the tenor of these re-evaluations is loss of influence. In some instances the public has overtaken the parade; in other ones it refuses to be interested. It seems inevitable that this should happen as the public judges bohemia over a long period of experience, and it is possible that we have here the inherent flaw that will account for the passing of any phase of bohemianism, other things being equal. That is, if a parasitic group such as bohemia exists by virtue of pretense, it can exist only so long as the pretense is still effective. The present depression has vitally influenced bohemia by upsetting its economic relationship with the balance of society. Bohemianism itself has remained unchanged, but the conditions governing the existence of the group have had numerous reversals. The first effect, when the demand for art production declined, was for the successful artist to draw on the less profitable customers, hitherto left to the newcomers, in an effort to enlarge a dwindling clientele. The newcomers and mediocre artists were therefore

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forced out of the game between this high quality competition and the decreasing market. The broad band between artists and bohemians was soon thinned out as the mediocre artists and talented bohemians turned to more certain sources of income. The gap thus left was filled in, however, by the successful artists themselves, who were being forced down rapidly to the financial level and expedients traditional to bohemia. But in general this did not lead to a commingling of the group such as had occurred hitherto. The formerly successful artists did not have the habit of bohemi anism and retained as far as possible the high qualities of behavior to which they were accustomed. In their new straightened circumstances there was less social activity among the artists, and fewer occasions, therefore, for contact with bohemia. Meanwhile, the advent of Federal Assistance, providing work for artists, unexpectedly furnished a criterion for the bohemian art output. An authentic record of genuine activity or study was required of the bohemian and some were able to supply such credentials. As a result, many bohemians were put to work, besides artists of recognized ability. A number of bohemians so placed under actual productive discipline have made good. With the latter there has been an increase of morale which has virtually lifted them out of the bohemian group. In proportion, those who have been unable to qualify for such work have lost caste even among their brethren; many of them have given up their former haunts in Murgeria. The sum effect of these cross-currents has been to produce a less erratic atmosphere; there is more actual work, more regular hours, more discipline, and less social life. There is also more definite organization; of late this group has formed such leagues as the A rtists’ Union, the New Theater, the Theater of Action, The Degeyter Club, and other art circles, all more or less interre­ lated and politically conscious. These groups now foster regular schools wherein drama, art and music are co-ordinated with political philosophy and taught at proletarian prices. Such are the main trends of bohemian change; we will make no further predictions. As to the inclusive question, What will become of Bohemia? We can only repeat that while there are individuals whom society cannot accommodate in its regular groups, there will always be a bohemia, whether in Paris or Towertown or Taos, whether in the name of art or in the name of socialism, or in the name of anything that will permit of a free, gregarious life for those to whom it would otherwise be denied. Conclusions drawn in this article are the result of the study of several hundred cases. Notes 1. Chapter VI: “ How! o f no country?” repeated the Scot. “ N o ,” answered the Bohemian, “ o f none. I am a zingaro, a Bohemian, an Egyptian or whatever the

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Europeans in their different languages choose to call our people. But I have no hom e.” Honore de Balzac, Un Prince de Boh ême (1840). John M. Murray, Countries o f the Mind, p. 118. Thomas Craven, “ Bohemians of Paris,” Harpers, Feb. 1933, p. 342. Nancy Evans, “ Goodbye Bohem ia,” Scribner’s, June, 1930, p. 643. Harvey W. Zorbaugh, The Gold C oast and the Slum, pp. 87-88. All individualists do not join groups; therefore, all individualists are not bohem­ ians. Consequently, there is no single “ bohemian personality” or “ bohemian type”— there are many distinct personalities. See Latin Quarterly, September 1933, p. 1 for interesting advertisements, e.g. Albert Strunskey’s (Bohemia’s Landlord) “ Cute Cubicles for Creative Workers. Balconied Boudoirs for the Denizens of the Latin Quarter. See me if you want to live like struggling artists.”

Bohemia and Anti-Bohemia in Art A lfred Werner , 1962

There have always been painters and sculptors who, by their most unorthodox manner of living, baffled their contemporaries. The Renais­ sance goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, and after him, the painter Michelan­ gelo Merisi da Caravaggio managed, through their brawls with fellow citizens and their skirmishes with the authorities, to shock even a society far more accustomed to displays of ferocity and brutality than ours. But these two, and similar high-spirited characters, were not bohemians in the sense that the term is now used. According to the Concise Oxford D iction­ ary, bohemians are socially unconventional persons of free and easy habits, manners, and sometimes morals, especially artists; the American College Dictionary defines them as persons with artistic or intellectual tendencies who live and act with disregard for conventional rules of behavior; W ebster s Collegiate Dictionary wisely brings out the point that they adopt a mode of life in protest against, or indifference to, the common conventions o f society, especially in social relations. (italics mine). In the sense it is used here, the term is only a little over a hundred years old, for it became popular through Henri Murger’s novel, Scenes de la Vie de Boh ème (1851). While there have always been painters, poets, philoso phers who deliberately detached themselves from society and its obliga tions so that they could devote all their strength to their self-imposed tasks, the emergence of artists and intellectuals forced by society to live and work in isolation is a relatively new phenomenon. The mass alienation of the creative man from society did not begin until the last century, when, with the dwindling of the traditional sponsorship of the arts by church and aristocracy, the free-lance writer and the free-lance artist emerged, unaided by powerful patrons, both free to act and produce in accordance with their aesthetic and political preference, both free to sleep under bridges. Among the artists, the last group that tried hard to live in accordance 102

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with the rules of a very bourgeois society that had little room for them were the Impressionists, all born approximately between 1830 and 1840. Nearly all of them married, raised families, and worked feverishly to be able properly to shelter, feed, and clothe themselves and their families. Monet, father of a one-year-old son, was so desperate for the lack of patrons that he attempted to drown himself; but he thought better of it, continued to work and, in his old age, succeeded in getting both wealth and fame. For many years the Pissarros, who had seven children, were poverty-stricken. Camille Pissarro was convinced that artists had to work “ with absolute freedom ,” and that, for this reason, society ought to get rid of “ the terrible constraints of Messrs. Capitalist Collector-Speculators and Dealers.” He favored bringing artists together to co-operate in defend ing their own interests, and therefore was the staunchest adherent of a loosely organized group that came into being in 1874 under the name of “ Societé anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc.,” but soon became better known as the “ Impressionists.” He even suggested— though unsuccessfully—that it should be a co-operative modeled on a professional bakers’ association he had studied, and he wanted every member to be given equal access to good wall space in the group’s exhibitions. But the next generation was different in its attitude towards society. Gauguin and Van Gogh ran away from Paris to Arles, and Gauguin fled to the South Seas, rather than try to find comfortable niches for themselves within a hostile or, at best, indifferent civilization. Their stories are too well known to need repetition here. Less familiar are the reactions of the Impressionist group to these adventurers, especially to Gauguin (for Van Gogh was largely treated as a madman, whether he was harshly rejected by the outspoken Cezanne, or handled with the kindness one musters up for an insane friend by the gentle Pissarro). Learning of Gauguin’s depar­ ture for the South Seas, Renoir observed, with irony, “ One can paint so well in the Batignolles section” —a reference to the Parisian district where Renoir and his family had been living for years in modest bourgeois comfort. Pissarro, talking with Gauguin after the younger man’s return from his first Tahitian trip, scolded the colleague who had once been his pupil for seeking freedom and strength in the tropics, among the savages, instead of finding it in himself. The battle between “ Bohemia” and “ anti-Bohemia” was, of course, not confined to painters. Literary men, too, were divided into two camps. There were those who avenged themselves by defying society’s moral code and by living in a hedonistic, self-destructive way as if they wanted to take their fellow men down the road of destruction; and there were others who, though highly critical of society, wished to reform rather than

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to destroy it, or, at least, to preserve their own strength fully for the creation of the noble and the good. Typical is the reaction of a hard working, somewhat puritanical literary man to the proto-beatnik Maupas sant. After receiving from Maupassant a letter filled with descriptions of erotic excesses, Flaubert said: “ I am going to make my answer severe. The young man gives himself too good a tim e.” He thereupon wrote to Maupassant: “ In the interest of literature I urge you to slow down. Watch out! Everything depends on the goal one wants to attain. A man who has set himself up to be an artist no longer has the right to live like other people.” 1 Maupassant, as is commonly known, was committed to a lunatic asylum after he had attempted to cut his throat, and, suffering from progressive paralysis (the result of a syphilitic infection), he died there wretchedly a year later. In a funeral oration Emile Zola conceded to men of Maupas­ sant’s type the perfect right to produce their kind of superrefined esoteric literature, but added that from the “ momentary debauch,” the “ sumptu ary banquet” these provided, mankind “ must always return to a simple and clear art, as we always return without satiety to the nourishment of our daily bread.” Oddly, the very Murger who had coined the term “ Boheme” and somehow contributed to the glorification of the ancestors of our beatniks by fashioning, from observed life, the garret characters of Schaunard and Marcel, Rodolphe and Mimi, eventually grew bitter about those who would not leave Bohemia and art pour l’art to lead lives of worldly success and creature comfort. Courage (“ the virtue of the young” ) and Hope (“ the wealth of the poor” ) might be sufficient for one who is twenty, he argued, but could not possibly be enough for a mature man. We do not know how he reacted to Baudelaire; if he read the reviews severely attacking Les Fleurs de M al, he must have approved of them, particularly of this one: “ His [Baudelaire’s] trouble is that he lives in a fantastic world peopled with unhealthy shadows. Let him begin a normal life and he will be father of a family, will publish books he can read to his children. Until then, he will remain a schoolboy, an arrested development.” I have mentioned, and will continue to mention, literary figures because they, through their words more than through their example, provided the atmosphere in which artists lived their bohemian or anti-bohemian lives. Modigliani, Pascin, and the other paintres maudits of the 1910-1930 era were direct or indirect disciples of those poetes maudits who, earlier, had tried to open the gates to paradise by means of such keys as adventure, sex, alcohol, and drugs. Repelled by the matter-of-factness of bourgeois society, the automatization of the machine age, these poets had attempted to break through the limits of everyday experience to a higher reality, to

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attain to the essence of things. To make the excursion into the world of the unknown, the mind had to be freed of the shackles of reason; it had to be whipped into a paroxysm by any means available. Let the body be wrecked, let the individual be viewed as a criminal by polite society—it was more important to extend the range of one’s sensation, to remove the blinders called normal intelligence. Rimbaud had advocated the “ long, immense, and deliberate derangement of all the senses,” had declared it the duty of the poet to exhaust “ all forms of love, suffering, insanity.” There was widespread antagonism to this school, not among the philis tines (who hardly took any notice of them), but among many creative men. A book that caused a great stir when it first came out in 1893 but is now long and unjustly forgotten, was Degeneration , by Max Nordau. In it the physician and essayist warned that degenerates need not be criminals in the narrow sense, that they could be brilliant artists and writers, and that they might be geniuses: Unfortunately, the degenerate genius often exercises a profound influence, and that influence is always evil. They want sybaritism and we want work. They cultivate flightiness and idle talk. We strive for attention, observation, knowl­ edge. Here is the criterion by which all can recognize the true moderns and distinguish them unfailingly from the imposters . . . [ : ] he who preaches revolt against discipline is an enemy o f progress, and he who adores his “ I” is an enemy o f society. For the foundation of society is the love o f on e’s neighbor.

Nordau had his blind spots, and nobody was quicker than George Bernard Shaw to point them out right after Degeneration had appeared in print. After all, the painters and poets of the fin de si ècle were very much progressive forces insofar as they extended and expanded far beyond the customary frontiers subject matter and technique, cognition and appercep tion. But they were also fundamentally selfish men, recognizing no duties towards society, pursuing no interests save those of art (their art), and being indifferent, if not hostile, to religion, morality, education, political principle, social improvement. Their sole aim was self-expression at any cost to the self (and to society as well). They did not try to break down the barrier between themselves and society, to share and benefit others with their findings; they had camped outside in the vain hope of being able to live in a realm of pure aesthetics. It is not society alone that is to be blamed for the wretched death in a Parisian charity of the painter Amadeo Modigliani at the age of thirty-five. Much of the blame can be placed on his philosophy—BaudelaireanNietzschean-Rimbaudian—which, put into practice, was bound to destroy this frail, vulnerable, oversensitive individual. He was only seventeen when he wrote to an artist friend that life should be fully lived, without

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concern for obstacles, but with definite, purposeful intent, and sometimes even in pain, in order to “ save one’s own dream .” He urged his friend to cultivate sacredly all “ that can exalt and excite your intelligence,” and to “ seek to provoke . . . and create . . . these fertile stimuli, because they can push the intelligence to its maximum creative power.” In another letter he wrote: “ The man who does not know how to release new desires continually from his energy, to release an almost new individual destined always to express himself by laying low all that is old and rotten, is not a man, he is a bourgeois, a real knave. . . . ” Shall we dismiss all this as manifestations of juvenile exuberance? We would do so, if we did not know that the “ m ature” man did not feel differently at thirty. As an adult he resorted to alcohol and drugs in order to proceed farther toward that freedom of which he had dreamed in his boyhood letters. Alcohol, hashish, and sexual promiscuity were a means of liberating himself from the legacy of Leghorn, his provincial native city, and its middle-class mentality. But another immigrant of his generation, Pablo Picasso, did not need the stimulation of excess, and is still active at the age of eighty. Nothing is more absurd than the legend that either alcohol or hashish made Modigliani “ invent” the characteristic features of his mature style. The problem that concerns us here is whether this was the only possible road Modigliani could take to achieve what he wanted, and whether that achievement was worth all the suffering, all the sacrifice. Of course, we have an answer in the form of his drawings and paintings that have survived—but it is only a partial answer. For while there is much in his work that is most admirable, one may speculate whether the tiresome sameness in style might not be attributed to the malady of a mind unable to develop new concepts, images, thoughts; and whether vice in all forms (intellectual vice being the worst) did not stifle the growth of an artist far greater than the Modigliani we know. Jules Pascin poses the same problem, with slight variations. Seemingly, the gods had showered all gifts upon him. Unlike Modigliani, he had never any financial worries. At twenty, he was already a well-paid contributor to a German satirical magazine. In Paris, artists ten or twenty years older watched the clever Bulgarian with admiration and envy, as he sat outside the Café du Dome, making, with a few subtle lines, drawings of an unmatched strength of observation. His oils of nudes sold at high prices and would have allowed him to live like a grand seigneur. Yet he had no home—only a barren, comfortless studio. He had a wife, he had mis­ tresses, but he lived all alone. He took friends and hangers-on to expensive restaurants, always footing the bill, but amidst merriment and laughter he remained lonely. He drank so much that he developed cirrhosis of the liver, yet had not the strength to obey the doctor’s prohibition of any

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alcohol. The skill which allowed him to produce an impeccable picture in a short afternoon never left him, but he was not satisfied with his work, despite the praise lavished on it by critics. Keeping on repeating himself, he commented sarcastically on the fact that his pictures were so much in demand that dealers paid for canvases by size before they were painted. Finally, one day in June, 1930, he hanged himself in his studio. To make sure that he, who (in his own opinion) had bungled everything he had done so far, would succeed in his very last act, he also slashed his wrists. In our time, we had the sad case histories of the painters Arshile Gorky (1905-1948) and Jackson Pollock (1912-1956). The Armenian immigrant Gorky, who came to be one of America’s widely acclaimed surrealistabstract painters (but not during his lifetime), suffered from a combination of bad luck and instability of character that led to his tragic end. Aban­ doned by his wife and children, inactive, sick, and lonesome, the artist hanged himself in his home before his alarmed friends, Peter Blume, Malcolm Cowley, and others, could come to his rescue. Gifted he was, no doubt, but without the inner strength required for the production of truly original work. His enemies were his facility, dexterity, and versatility—he looked too long at Picasso, Leger, Miró, and many others, borrowing from them so unabashedly that the sources from which many of his concoctions (some very delicious) are derived are obvious. There was a great deal of fervor in Wyoming-born Jackson Pollock. His paintings are explosions of pigment, dripped, sprayed, and flung on the studio floor. He was a little over thirty when he became famous, and his work is still hotly discussed. Yet though he did not lack outward satisfaction, he was seemingly dissat isfied—mostly with himself. When he reached forty, he virtually stopped working, stilling his anxiety by constant drinking. In a state of intoxication, he took his car for a wild ride with his wife and a woman friend. The car crashed and the driver was killed. If there is any link between all the artists mentioned here (and those many others who might also have been cited), it is the notion of disaffilia­ tion that they have in common. Basically, they were antisocial nihilists, bored with life, defiantly living on the fringes of society. They had greater gifts than the vast majority of those who emulated them by drinking a lot, sleeping in doorways, consorting with bums, and eventually themselves becoming bums of a sort. But they betrayed and destroyed the tremendous gifts fate had put at their disposal. Reproached for having compromised their art, all of them would have given a reply very similar to the one the late Maxwell Bodenheim gave to a friend who had severely criticized his attitude toward art: “ What do you mean by my art? Living my life is the only art I know anything about.” Bodenheim’s statement was honest, but it also revealed, most tragically,

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his limited outlook and the confusion that prevailed in his circle. For art is not identical with life, but a creation beyond and above it. Art is not “ acting-out internal conflicts and needs,” as a psychologist would describe the doings of Bohemia, but the creation of something aspiring to the Eternal, the Divine, something to serve as guide to the perplexed. Art is not black tights, unruly beards, and irresponsible talk under the influence of stimulants, but the hard, unselfish, day-to-day struggle for perfection. Art is ceaseless work—and constructive dissatisfaction with oneself. One should remember Cezanne’s endless complaints about not being able to “ realize” his pictorial aims. The dealer Vollard sat for him one hundred and fifteen times for one portrait; when they had to part, Cezanne declared that he was not displeased with the front of the shirt. About two years before his death, when he had at last been acknowledged by the more progressive critics and when he felt that he had managed to “ realize” some of his goals, the sexagenarian wrote to the same Vollard: I am working obstinately; I am beginning to see the Promised Land. Shall I be like the great leader of the Hebrews or shall I be able to enter it? . . . I have made some progress. Why so late and with such difficulty? Is art indeed a priesthood which demands the pure in heart, completely dedicated to it?

In the very year, 1906, in which Cezanne breathed his last in the city of Aix, in Paris young Picasso made Gertrude Stein sit eighty times for her portrait. Dissatisfied, the artist wiped out the face before leaving for his summer vacation, to paint a new face without again viewing his model upon his return to Paris in the fall (the picture is now one of the prized possessions of New York’s Metropolitan Museum). Though he belonged to the feverish generation of Utrillo, Modigliani, and Pascin, the Spaniard refused to become part of the boh ème of Montmartre or Montparnasse, leading, instead, an austere life “ completely dedicated” to his profession. Studying in Paris in 1906 and 1907, the American, Max Weber, lived on the Left Bank, but did not participate in the self-destructive mode of living that had begun to blight the artists’ quarter. “ Wildness was not for m e,” he told this writer. “ There were no escapades. I suppose that, whenever I was tempted to do something of that sort, I felt a sense of shame, thinking as I did of my parents.” Residing in Greenwich Village after his return from Paris, Weber did not waste himself in dissipation, but, instead, poured his energy into rebellion against rigid academicism, staying poor for many years, yet living, like his idol, Cezanne, pure in heart, with all his thoughts centered on the latest, unfinished canvas in his studio. With a shrug, Weber dismissed the beatniks of our days—not because of their loose morals, but because of their incapacity to work, and he even

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scolded me for whatever parallel I might suggest between the genuine artists of La Rotonde and the half-artists of Cedar Bar (Jackson Pollock’s favorite Greenwich Village hangout). For men like Modigliani and Pascin did not only ruin themselves systematically; they also worked. In their own ways, they wanted to achieve perfection. True, they worked quickly and short hours, but so much artificially enhanced energy would be used in an afternoon’s intensive work that thereafter the artist might collapse in a cold sweat. They drank and worked themselves into early graves. In a novel, the hero of which is modeled after Modigliani, the French writer Michel Georges-Michel has the chief character reply to a doctor reproach ing him for too much drinking: I need a flame in order to paint, in order to be consumed by fire. My concierge and the butcher boy have no need of alcohol, especially if it does them harm. They must conserve their precious lives. . . . But as for me, my life, it is important only because o f what I put on my canvas. . . . So what difference does it make if I give an instant o f my life, if in exchange I can create a work that, perhaps, will last.

At first sight, Modigliani, or rather the hero of the novel, seems entirely justified. But it can be proven that alcohol or drugs have, at points, lowered the quality of the production of great artists (vide some of the work Toulouse-Lautrec created towards the end of his life). Leopold Zborowski, Modigliani’s dealer-friend, who spent time and money trying to keep the painter from wrecking his life, or the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, who begged him to be less self-destructive, were not Babbits. Neither were Pascin’s American friends who, noting the painter’s deterioration during his second stay in New York, implored him—vainly—to see a psychiatrist. They all felt that an artist had a duty to society as well as to himself to preserve his life and that art could only profit by the fulfillment of that alone. Anti-bohemianism, then, is not necessarily identical with prudery and reaction. Often it is sanity, and that real and effective rebellion against sluggish society that, throughout the centuries, has changed and improved humanity’s face. The anti-bohemians know that in literature the irrespon­ sible F. Scott Fitzgerald made a lesser contribution than Flaubert, who believed in living like a lamb in order to be able to write like a lion. In art, they find less to admire in the so utterly passive reliance of the Action Painters upon whatever creative powers the Unconscious Mind may have than in the conscious pursuit of perfection by a Cezanne who, a month prior to his death, summed up his philosophy in these touching lines to a younger artist friend:

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I am continually making observations from nature, and I feel that I am making some slight progress. I should like to have you here with me, for my solitude always oppresses me a little; but I am old, ill, and I have sworn to die painting rather than sink into the nasty corruption that threatens old men who allow them selves to be dominated by degrading passions.

Note 1. On another occasion, Flaubert wrote to Maupassant: “ You are living in an enfer de merde, I know, and I pity you from the bottom o f my heart. But from five in the evening to ten in the morning all your time can be consecrated to the muse, who is still the best bitch of them all. . . . What you lack are “ principles.” Say what you will, one has to have them; it is a question o f knowing which ones. For an artist there is only one: sacrifice everything to Art. Life must be considered by the artist as a means, nothing more, and the first person he should not give a hang about is him self.” By this, Flaubert did not mean that creative persons should allow their bodies to be ruined. His was an attack upon the narcissistic, hedonistic manner o f living so frequent among artists in his time— and in our time.

The Uses of History Walter Laqueur, 1968

Hippies and the New Left of Yesteryear Some time ago it was reported that a group of young people headed by a man with the singular name of Muck Lamberty went from town to town calling the people to contemplation, urging them to wake up to life, to combat the decay of society, to be gay. How was all this to be accom plished? By singing, dancing and lectures on the “ Revolution of the Soul.” His followers, like the early Christians, shared all their worldly possessions and were vegetarians and abstainers. Muck Lam berty’s favorite word was “ swinging” : things were swinging if a community was united in peace and joy. In his speeches he castigated urban civilization and its evils, the loss of all communion with life and with the spirit of nature, the new one-dimensional man. His group was called the New Band and its attire was a little strange. These long-haired boys and girls walked barefooted or sandaled; usually they had not washed for a long time. They carried guitars, sometimes practiced free love and always adored flowers. In their meetings, wreaths with thousands of flowers were displayed—a veritable sea of asters. . . . The year, of course, was 1919; the scene, central Germany, and the chief actors, members of the German youth movement, the so-called Wandervogel. It was the heyday of new fashions, political and philosophi cal, sexual and sartorial alike. Tagore’s gospel, “ Love—not power,” found many enthusiastic disci ples. Some new prophets preached Chinese philosophy or Indian mysti cism. It all sounded very profound and various gurus had great acclaim, even though their parables were hardly applicable at a time of political and social crisis to a people with an entirely different cultural tradition in the heart of Europe. So far, I have been plagiarizing myself. My description of Muck and his 111

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movement comes from a book I wrote seven years ago entitled, Young Germany: A H istory o f the German Youth M ovement, 1896-1933. I called it a “ historical study” and said in conclusion that today the movement had ‘receded into the distant past with its guitar playing, folk songs and folk dancing, with its interminable controversies and its lunatic fringe of groups dedicated to eccentric, if sometimes engaging, futilities.’ Recent personal experience in the United States, Sweden, Germany and elsewhere has convinced me that this obituary was premature. At first, I confess, I was reluctant to accept this. Historical parallels and analogies can be notoriously misleading; the general situation in America now is so very different from the conditions prevailing in Central Europe during the years just before and after World War I. Berlin is far from Greenwich Village and Weimar from Haight-Ashbury. It seemed to me farfetched that what confronts us today is a new version. But a closer look shows that more is in question than some striking if superficial similarities. Sometimes there is a specific textual identity in the attacks made by the old and the new youth movement on society and its conventions, its artificiality and materialism, its lack of human warmth and sincerity. (Sincerity, in fact, was the key word then as it is now.) The attacks on established norms in school and university and the demand for sweeping reforms and a sharing of control on the part of the students are virtually the same. The members of the old youth movement were romantics, but romantics with a developed social conscience. On the part of their elders, there was a tendency to belittle these manifestations of protest, but they deserved to be taken more seriously. For the young generation of 1910 tried spontane ously, if awkwardly, to alter the human condition at a time when philoso phers and sociologists were already writing about the “ alienation of m an,” the “ atomization of society,” the lessening of contacts between human beings; when the anonymity, the impersonality and the vulgarity of life in modern societies, the loss of vitality in individuals and the growing social torpor, were already themes of contemporary social criticism. All this may sound like some present-day spiritual leader—minus, of course, the current psychosociological jargon. It is, in fact, what the leaders of the generation of 1910 were shouting from the rooftops. The German youth movement came into being around the turn of the century, its heyday was in the years immediately before and after World War I and it petered out during the early 1930’s. Numerically, it was small—it had never more than 100,000 members—and it was solidly middle class in origin. It contained a multiplicity of groups, some of them strongly in favor of political commitment, especially after World War I. Others—the eternal

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W andervogel —amiable beatniks, aimless drifters, decided to opt out of society. Hermann Hesse and others have written about them. Those who chose commitment did not necessarily all go in the same direction; only the left was in favor of school reform, against repression, sexual and otherwise, and for the ‘class struggle of the young generation.’ . . . The year the first Wandervogel group met in Berlin (1896), Art Nouveau came into fashion; in Germany, it was appropriately called Jugendstil— youth style. When the youth movement reached its apex in 1910, the Italian Futurists were publishing their revolutionary manifestoes and two young Frenchmen, writing under the pseudonym ‘Agathon,’ created a furor (and established a trend) with a little book called Young People o f Today. . . .

Reactions varied from group to group and from country to country. Some accepted pessimism and degeneracy with delight (at least as a literary pose); others preached love of action and moral earnestness. Sometimes the erstwhile prophets of decadence ended up as superpatriots, such as Barr ès in France and the flamboyant D’Annunzio. Some were opposed in principle to industrial society and the urban (suburban it would be now) way of life; others like the Italian Futurists, raved about the beauties of airplanes, racing cars, fast trains and modern architecture. Underlying these beliefs was a common, antibourgeois denominator: pessimism about the future of present-day culture; the assumption that liberalism, humanism, tolerance and all the traditional ideals of the En lightenment were out-of-date. The rebels were firmly convinced that the generation of their parents had landed the world in a mess and that a radical new beginning was needed. . . . The basic beliefs and even the outward fashions of the various groups that constitute the present-day revolutionary youth movement in the United States, Germany, Holland, Sweden, and elsewhere go back almost without exception to the period before World War I. The sincerity and the long hair, the guitars and the folk songs, the flowers and the hitchhiking, the demand for school and university reform were part and parcel of the German youth movement. The “ Happening” was born in Italy; avant-garde art in France and Austria. The Futurists arranged soirees in the spring of 1910 in Trieste, Parma, Milan and other Italian cities. There were public recitals of poems the like of which had never been heard before. Manifestoes were read, ultramodern paintings exhibited. The public participated actively, there were shouts and jokes and a shower of rotten eggs. The police intervened, and the modern Happening was born. . . . The impact of Art Nouveau on the 1960’s hardly calls for documenta tion. One need only compare the posters of Mucha or the School of Nancy

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with present-day psychedelic art. The cult of youth, the idea that youth is a virtue in itself, originated in Italy, France, Germany more or less simultaneously. The Futurists proposed to exclude from the supreme political body in their ideal state everyone over 30 and Giovinezza (youth) became the anthem of Italian facism. Experimenting with drugs to extend the frontiers of sensibility was the common thing to do among French fin de siècle revolutionaries from Mallarm é to Huysmans, though Baudelaire had already voiced doubts: Le fou qui prend du hashish contract une fo li qui chasse l’autre. Their British contemporaries advocated greater sexual freedom. The idea that patriot ism was unreasonable was widely accepted in these circles; the chief critic of the decadents, Remy de Gourmont, said it in so many words: “ We are not patriots.” As for the specifically political outlook of the young generation, the avant-garde of 1910 did not have a unified political philosophy. Not all were equally interested in politics, and those who committed themselves eventually went, as I have already indicated, in opposing directions. But they did have in common a strong element of violence in their utterances, a great urge for destruction. After the 1890’s, the conviction that only by destroying the old order could a new world be born had rapidly gained ground among left and right. The French anarchists, with their indiscriminate assassinations and bomb ings, found many admirers, even among the right-wing Futurists. “ What matter the victims, provided the gesture is beautiful,” a poet wrote, though he happened to be one of the victims. This was the esthetic approach; the Russian anarchists around 1905 took the passion for destruction more seriously. They declared open war on society, endorsing every deed of violence however rash and senseless. Little groups of Bezmotivniki sprouted, advocating ‘motiveless terror,’ partisan warfare, open street fighting of every possible type. They threat ened to burn down whole cities and their news sheets featured diagrams for the preparation of homemade bombs. Their practice, admittedly, lagged behind their theory, but the urge to destroy was intense. . . . “ Down with Democracy!” was the anarchist slogan. Tolerance was thought to be the source of all evil and morality to start at the barrel of a gun. This, with a few exceptions, was the credo of the political avantgarde of 1910. Their subsequent careers are known. Most of them went to war with great enthusiasm and became fervent nationalists or national socialists. After the war they drifted away from politics—or into political extremism. . . .

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What Affluence Has Wrought Today Then came an interlude of four decades until, in the ’60’s, a new movement of protest sprouted among a new generation. It was not a conscious revival. Hardly anyone in the new movement knew about its predecessors—certainly not in America, where the new movement came therefore as a terrible and wholly inexplicable shock. How indeed to explain the antics of the established authorities: patriot­ ism, morality, the family, the school? In Europe, at least, a few remem­ bered that something very similar had happened once before in living memory. The pre-war German youth movement had clearly identifiable, obvious targets: the authoritarian structure of family, school and life in general. American schools and middle-class families could hardly be accused of a surfeit of authoritarianism. Parents were nonplused: Why did these boys and girls protest? Didn’t they have everything they could possibly want? They had indeed every thing—except the possibility of giving vent to the revolutionary spirit of youth. Money meant little to them; they came from a middle-class back ground. The rebellion can by psychologically explained, not in pseudo-Marxist terms with reference to economic grievances. On the contrary, it occurs only at a time of prosperity after a prolonged period of uninterrupted economic growth. That a youth movement of protest did not develop in 1930 or in 1946 is no accident. In a real crisis, few people have the time and inclination to ponder the discontents of civilization and cultural pessimism becomes a luxury few can afford. There are more urgent tasks to be faced, such as the question of physical survival. The restlessness of youth, its innate revolutionary spirit, its unwillingness to accept established norms is a natural part of the human condition, but it can manifest itself in the particular way we are now experiencing only in times of relative peace and prosperity and only in a bourgeois milieu. Many of the ideas may be half-baked and the politics little better than an acting out in real life of the theater of the Absurd. But some of the forces which drive these young people are noble, and if they display an excess of romantic fever and utopianism, the world would be a poorer place without these impulses. The ills and the injustices of society are compared not with society as it was, or with other societies. Youth in revolt is exclusively concerned with what society ideally should be. But then the sense of proportion (and of history) is not at its most developed at the age of 19. The utopian mood is

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not open to argument. Awareness of the problems and difficulties involved, and, ultimately, disillusionment, will come all too soon. . . . The ideas that spread around the turn of the century encountered stiff resistance. Even before the fin de si ècle mood had reached its height, Max Nordau, a literary critic living in Paris (now mainly remembered as one of the founding fathers of modern Zionism), launched a savage attack against it in a huge tome which he called Degeneration. Unlike other contemporaries, he took the new apostles seriously: ‘books and works of art exercise a powerful suggestion on the masses. It is from these productions that an age derives its ideals of morality and beauty. If they are absurd and antisocials, they exert a disturbing and corrupting influence on the views of a whole generation.’ Nordau condemned all modern art (including Nietzsche, Zola, and Ibsen), interpreting the pessimism, the ennui, the vehement emotionalism in terms of mental disease. He explained it on the background of impres­ sive statistics about the growing consumption of alcohol and tobacco, the suicide rate, the general decline in health. He was worried in particular about the effect of the constant vibrations undergone in railway travel on the nervous system. The details of his case are ridiculous but his basic idea, the effects of the ever more hectic urban way of life on the peace of mind, cannot easily be dismissed. Nordau and other conservatives failed to appreciate that the spirit of revolt, the search for new content and form in life and art alike, was a psychological necessity. The revolt of 1900 was inevitable, as its successor today is. Greater comfort does not necessarily create greater happiness, and prolonged periods of a quiet, orderly, uneventful existence invariably generate boredom, a feeling of suffocation and the fervent wish for a radical change. To oppose a priori such a movement is futile: to display a permissive attitude toward all its manifestations is impossible. Wild men in Holland and Sweden will probably not do much harm and may do some good. It is different in a country such as Germany, where the plant of freedom, of tolerance, of the recognition of the inalienable rights of human beings, has as yet but tender roots. In conditions like these, undermining all authority might have disastrous consequences. Anarchist attacks inevitably provoke a strong authoritarian countermovement which will eventually get far more political support than the attackers for its claim to be saving the country from destructive elements. It has all happened before, and it is not only in Germany that the danger looms today. Today’s revolt has surprisingly much in common with the youth move­ ment of 1910, but it is, of course, not a mere repetition. In 1910, there

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were several movements propagating very different aims—militarists and pacifists, left-wingers and rightists, symbolists, poets and athletes, drug addicts and teetotalers—so much so that any attempt to find a common denominator will do, at least to some of them, a grave injustice. In 1967, there is more politics and far greater uniformity. Now it is largely a student protest movement (certainly in America and Germany, less so in other countries). The old youth movement was, on the whole, anti-intellectual and never had a strong foothold in the universities. There was nothing comparable to the Vietnam war in 1910. The earlier movement was a protest against outworn traditions but it also created new ideas and new forms of expression. The new movement has been less strong on the creative side so far; admittedly, it has become much more difficult to be original in our age. There is a limited choice of ways to demonstrate protest. But many of these manifestations are new to America. Drawing the balance sheet of the old youth movement before its succes­ sor had arisen, I wrote that it developed in its members qualities of sincerity, decency, openmindedness and idealism. Its adherents tended to shake off petty egoism and careerism; they were opposed to artificial conventions, snobbery and affectation. But their confused thinking, their inability to accept industrial society, their profoundly antidemocratic and intolerant outlook and their irrationalism made them an easy prey of philosophical charlatans and political demagogues preaching all kinds of eccentric doctrines. What, one wonders, will future historians say one day about the “ move m ent” of the 1960’s?

The Diogenes Style K ingsley W idm er , 1965

The Cynics of the Greco-Roman world, represented by Diogenes of Sinope and his successors, show major parallels with modern literary rebels which may illuminate some of the peculiarities and purposes of even the most recent literature. Though the Cynic does not reveal certain of the self-conscious and syncretistic modern gestures, he does suggest the archetypal pattern of our literary rebels. While there is considerable variation, historical and individual, in the commitment to rebellion, nonetheless, some generic patterns remain. When, for example, we read the commentaries on Diogenes of Sinope and his followers in Greek and Roman writings, and then read commentaries on contemporary American literary rebels, the arguments seem almost paraphrases of each other. Take the basic image of the literary rebel that was somewhat misleadingly popularized in the 1950’s under the rubrics of an American coterie, the Beat Generation or Beat Movement—now the almost world-wide figure of the Beatnik. It shows a rather aging youth, usually with long hair and a beard, in the uniform of the disinherited, obviously contemptuous of cleanliness and decorum. While the beggar’s cloak and wallet of the Cynic have been replaced, as signs of office, by jeans and paperback book, the rest of the lineaments, and the essential gestures, remain much the same. In prodigal appearance, in casual domes ticity, and in outraging taste, both Cynic and Beat seem similar in the ways in which they rebelliously affront the pretensions of the society at large to “ gracious living.” So, too, with the language of Cynic and Beat which, in and out of literature, fuses the vulgar and the intellectual in a striking melange of vivid colloquialisms and highbrow abstractions that persist­ ently violates formality and geniality. Certainly such speech has intrinsic functions, beyond modishness and group identification. For instance, the yoking of terms of obscenity with those of salvation—a Beat stylization which is also one of the most ancient forms of blasphemy—seems part of 118

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a demand that we perceive the incongruities in our ordering of the world. “ Forbidden” language, used more or less seriously, serves not only to shock but to re-emphasize natural functions and exalt “ common” aware ness. Done with skill, curses can provide defiant prayers, obscenity a poetry of outrage. Indeed, a literary rebel whose language does not achieve some such sort of violation in itself is neither very poetic nor very rebellious. Let us characterize further the archetypal rebel—the shape common to many Cynics, Beats, and others—with particular attention to the Cynics not as an historical phenomena but as a style of defiance. Many of the Diogenes anecdotes, such as that of his carrying a lamp in the daylight because he was looking for a real or honest man, achieved near universal recognition. In being a tragic comment on mankind, yet given a witty twist and presented with burlesque dramatization, it has the distinctive rebel quality. The same style of didactic verve appeared in Diogenes’ dramatic emphasis upon perversely free choice in which he matched his metaphors with direct actions. The reader of “ existentialist” literature will be struck by the pertinence of the Cynic’s insistence that he was a criminal, a debaser of the official coinage (including the currency of conventional standards), a defender of moral violations such as incest (which were never examined), and an exalter of his role as both actual and internal exile. In his quest for authenticity, Diogenes made what a cultivated society consid ered both buffoonish and felonious gestures, being intentionally crude and outspoken. The Cynics were noted for their obscenity, in act as well as word, and they reportedly were willing to “ be natural” about fornicating and defecating, anywhere. Their notorious “ shamelessness” was both part of their lesson and part of a way of life. Many of their self-conscious violations of commercial, bureaucratic and upperclass morals and manners suggest the Cynics as the first to intentionally épater le bourgeois. Put in this perspective, we may see such favorite rebel defiance as neither bohemian high-spirits nor part of nineteenth-century class conflict but as a more universal effort to dramatically mock complacent and restricted awareness. Diogenes had a radical dialectic for every part of his personal life. He went about unkempt, dressed in the uniform of a beggar, slept almost anywhere, scornfully took what food came to hand, refused to work, condemned anxious luxuries but not direct pleasures, and was committed to the simplest sort of life. Even his famed bad manners were as much principle as temperament. “ Other dogs bite their enemies, I bite my friends—for their salvation.” He was an anarchist when it came to political authorities, a libertarian when it came to social customs, and a cosmopol itan when it came to loyalties (“ The only true country is that which is as

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wide as the universe” ). His dog’s life, physically mean and rough, intellec­ tually tough and biting, was an outrageous dramatization of radical aware­ ness. Plato reportedly called Diogenes a “ Socrates gone m ad.” But Plato was an authoritarian who refused to recognize tragic absurdity, either by allowing the poets in his republic or in understanding the witty buffoonery of a Diogenes. The Cynic, a better judge than the rational idealist of some parts of human nature, said, “ Most men are so nearly mad that a finger’s breadth would make the difference.” Diogenes would seem plausibly credited with certain literary tradi­ tions—mordant satire of things as they are and a popular dialectic of moral discontent. But the dialectical extremity that he lived may be more important, for he was one of the first to dramatize some rather important values: equality, even with rulers and women; freedom, even from the gods and the economic system; self-sufficiency, even to living a dog’s life and masturbating freely; and directness, even in public speech and philos­ ophy. Rather more than Thoreau—one of his descendants—and in the city, he attempted to embody individualistic autarchy and immediacy. His “ simplicity” took the form of witty denials of superstitutions, conven tions, authorities and ideologies. Naturally, part of Diogenes’ significance is confined to the peculiar conditions of his time. As a rebel against Athenian education (a usual dissident focus), he battled over the Greek definitions in the various schools of “ virtue,” “ nature,” “ reason,” and so on. The antiquarian interest in Cynicism’s role as “ hard primitivism” or as a sort of left-wing Stoicism need not concern us here. The historical Cynics also display a naïveté about “ rational” argument and “ virtue” which can be related to the Sophists and Socrates but which strikes us as quaint and would certainly be antipathetic to most modern rebels who find their “ reasons” in the irrational in an over-rationalized world. Similarly, Diogenes’ literal insistence on doing all “ according to nature” hardly appears so clear anymore since various romanticisms and sciences have inevitably complicated our responses, and faith, in the natural orders. Of more permanent importance are other curious qualities of the Cynics. For instance, they were harsh realists, yet also some of the earliest “ Utopians” with an exotic dream vision of a world where simplicity and directness reigned: the Island of Para—perhaps the secularization of sacred myths, later desecularized by less rigorous prophets. Then, too, the Cynics have a special claim on our attention in being one of the few groups of teachers (really unteaching in the Socratic manner) not subsi dized by state, church, commerce or their own hierarchy, and also one of the few groups of teachers not submissive to those powers. But more important to the modern view is the clear extremity of the Cynics rebel role. For Diogenes, civilization was to be corrected solely by

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the individual (that ruled out organizations and politics), in active and iconoclastic confrontation (that ruled out snobs and mystics), in the streets and going institutions (that ruled out esoterics and revolutionaries), and with intense scorn (that ruled out the stupid and bland). We may suppose that the only reason Diogenes was not against bureaucratic authority, mass genteel education-entertainment, the Bomb, etc., was that our technologi cal nihilisms had not yet been invented. Since Diogenes’ literary works, apparently outrageous dialogues and burlesque tragedies, have not sur vived we can see that his greatest creation was a nullifidian style. This philosophical tramp (he usually went south in the winter) and wise buffoon (there must have been some natural appropriateness for all the wisecracks fathered on him), set standards for the perennial rebel’s defiance of how most men believe and live. Most of the direct history of the Cynics, extending from Diogenes, which appears to continue for at least half a dozen centuries, mocks the conventional successes and anxieties of a period marked by fatuous imperial styles and the pervasive sense of meaninglessness. The Cynics answer was to demonstrate that life could be based on very little, or on a lively nothingness. Thus worldly failure was shown as a choice and a victory—the greatest blasphemy to those in power—and an alternative to the dubious “ necessities” and compulsions. But there is more to this style of rebellion. The admirably humane Crates, Diogenes’ follower, appears to have been a secular saint—the first of the modern saints without a god that we know of. He gave up his wealth and lived as a simple and compassionate wiseman and teacher. He also mocked the official peda gogy, wrote parodies of accepted morality, and maintained the tradition of contempt for inequality and conventional restrictions. Most delightful of all, Crates made one of the few passionate and equal marriages we hear of in antiquity. Hipparchia, an attractive girl from a “ good family,” pursued outcast Crates. He honorably tried to dissuade her, finally presenting himself stripped naked in warning that he would provide nothing but a life of honest beggary. Miraculous woman, she accepted, and thus became the first lady philosopher. Their daughter, as a logical result, is one of the first reported sexually emancipated women. Saintly Cynics father pleasure as well as freedom. And much else, for even with the sketchy known history of the Cynics there is a provocative roll-call: Bion, the preaching tramp with a flair for metaphor and arrogance; Menippus, apparently the creator of a major form of satire; Dio Chrysostom, one of the many examples of the wandering Cynic critics of the Roman emperors; Oenomaus, the polemical atheist; and many others. They testify to the greatest creation of Diogenes: the secular prophet. Not Plato in his coterie, not Aristotle in his academy, not the poets at the games and courts, certainly not the

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priests and magicians, but the Cynic wandering and arguing in the streets is the true forerunner and antitype of the individualistic “ outsider” literary intellectual. In the similar denunciations applied to such rebels in both classical and contemporary writings they are attacked for being outside civilization. Actually, they are right at the heart of it, not only in creating styles of life and intellectual confrontations but literally. Though unpatriotic, except perhaps to the purlieus of the cultural capitals where most often found, they take ideas with both passion and wit. Loafers, culture-bums, hangerson, parasites, immoralists? Though more or less cultured, rebels do not primarily function as performers or merchants of the arts, institutional intellectuals, or even in most ordinary senses as producers of art and edification. The rebel refuses subordination to social function in assertion of the freely human. He remains “ unemployed” —even when working—or as close to it as he can manage for both defiance and self-definition. As a member of the discontented or true leisure class he spends time around about the arts, but many rebels avow that their interest in the arts is secondary to ways of life and states of feeling. That only few rebels are artistic should have nothing of accusation about it, unless one is a pietist to a petty pseudo-religion of art. Why should the rebel produce much art or edification? His vocation is denial and defiance. The rebel, of course, busies himself with the m ystique of rebellion, rather more than with the muses. Outside organizational conventions and the usual rationalized self-interests, he justifies himself with his nagging and arrogant “ why not?” Main principles, from Cynics to Beats, seem to be claims for individuality, voluntary poverty, simplicity, spontaneous feeling, ingenuous communication, intense sense experience, and a general heightening of immediate life. These qualities the rebel supports with considerable invective against official society. The mark-of-the-kind may be that when asked for his identity, the rebel most often defines himself by attacking the nonidentity of the prevailing others. The official society, in turn, often displays an irritated fascination with the rebel, taking much righteous delight in what it calls his barbarism, crudity, immaturity, sickness, immorality and perversity. Most of our knowledge of the Cynics (as with Christian heretics and later rebels, through the Beats) comes from the perplexed or denouncing reports by the unrebellious. These public apologists insistently attack—perhaps with the morality of envy—the rebel’s economic and sexual libertarianism. It is curious also that while official teachers scorn the rebels for their lack of significant productivity and for their corrupting effects, the accusers as a group are most open to those very charges. If there were no rebels, public apologists would have to invent them.

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At a common-sense level, the attacks on rebels for economic parasitism and lack of social productivity seem the most irrelevant. Even a meager economy could tolerate the simple needs of a rather considerable number of bearded malcontents. Our ornate modern Western societies could, and do, comfortably support vast numbers of people who fit no simple rational needs for goods and services. The hostility of official rhetoricians (and police, employers, welfare services, etc.) to rebels, of course, has little to do with economics or social utility. Similarly, in societies with varied or changing erotic ways, the rebel’s views—usually uncoercive demands for sexual directness—do not require more than a modest tolerance. Since rebels, in obvious fact as well as almost by definition, are small in number, why the insistent fuss about their ways in such things as work and sex? Could it be that which hardly any of the contemners of rebels grant: much of the society despises its meaningless labors and burns against its arbi­ trary restrictions? Many of the other charges against rebels, from Cynics to Beats, seem equally curious. For example, the recurrent disgust with the rebel making an exhibition of his failure and maladjustment must be based on the requirement that one be miserable only in standard ways. The argument that the rebel denies “ civilized life” often rests on some weird definitions of “ civilized” which give primacy to impersonal powers, social anxiety, individual repression, warfare, and similar sorts of “ progress.” The awe­ some fear that rebels, unless put down, will encourage vast numbers to throw off work and orderly life is more a condemnation of the society than of the rebels. For real defiance of conventions and their conveniences is usually too arduous for all but a few strong souls, and if vast numbers really seem ready to imitate the rebel mode the social order is about to flip-flop anyway. Surely a surplus of bearded bad poets is more desirable than a surplus of clean-shaven bad policemen, even to pietists of the conventional authorities. The “ universalist fallacy” —the argument that goes by way of “ What if everyone were a rebel?” —is usually sheer anxiety or fraud. Some anti-rebel arguments have considerable merit. When the rhetori­ cians of things-as-they-are, for example, attack rebels for being tediously noisy little failures who are not really very rebellious, the contemners are using, and thus justifying, real standards of rebelliousness—and the more candid will learn from them. And the quite true charge that the rebel style attracts a number of the pathetic, the incompetent, the pathological and the fraudulent, provides an admirable discriminatory emphasis even more applicable to the commercial and political and academic styles of life. Equally useful is the persistent anti-rebel contention that the latest mani­ festation of defiance repeats the same old stuff, not really new or original.

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Perhaps so, for the first modern literary rebels, the Cynics, may have been an essential part of the first full civilization in our Western traditions, and such rebellion thus remains a positive continuity of civilized tradition. Literary wildmen and arch-bohemians hold as permanent a part in our heritage of response and understanding as the supposedly more honorific roles of humanistic and scientific and political hero types. Though often discussed as mere bellwethers of artistic faddishness, the gropings of the young, and moral and political discontent, the significance of the rebels seems rather greater than the topical issues they raise in the public minded. The rebel’s style and distinctive identity remains, and becomes its own justification, an existential choice for meeting the comic incongruities and tragic absurdities. But confronting what is said against literary rebels could be endless; there might be more pertinence in emphasizing what is said by the rebels themselves. The difficulty here may be found in the somewhat perplexed relation of the rebel to literature. The Cynics were called “ philosophers,” and their simple vagrant life, polemics against convention, dialectical buffoonery, long hair, and careless dress provided a dominant image of the philosopher for some centuries. That such rebels would not be called philosophers today might be taken as a damning comment on the Cynics’ antagonism towards science, epistemology, metaphysics and grammar. Put with other emphasis, it might also be a damning comment on the genteel technologism of much contemporary philosophy. Almost certainly anyone fitting the Cynic image would now be popularly identified as a stock “ artistic” or “ literary” figure. Men of letters the Cynics certainly were, though not in the debased polite sense which the phrase acquired in the eighteenth century. Diogenes and Crates were known for paradoxical dialogues and perverse tragedies. Other Cynics may have created, and certainly practiced at length, the diatribe, the satiric sketch, the anticonventional fantasy (often a descent into Hades), the idiosyncratic pot pourri (the sort of satiric scrapbook later called Varronian), and, of course, all sorts of parody and outrageous anecdote. The so-called “ great” or “ major” literary forms—epic, tragedy, formal lyric, history and complex tale—were obviously not for them. Since epic is based on a warrior aristocracy, tragedy on a perplexed religious questioning of the universe, formal lyric on a refined class society, history on faith in an unfolding order, etc., the forms themselves are in good part antithetical to the spirit of radical revolt. Aesthetes still charge rebels with failing in the literary forms of established society, of shockingly violating the great artistic canons, quite missing the point that the rebel view must (even if uncon­ sciously sometimes) invert and twist most of the accepted literary forms. A true rebel could hardly do a “ straight” job on a tragedy, an elegy, a

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social novel or a hymn, even if he were so inconsistent as to want to. Granted that rebels, confused by accepted literature, the critics and the powers that disseminate literary materials, sometimes attempt the unrebel lious forms; however, the results generally turn out to be inversions or burlesques of the accepted and official modes. For rebellion, like any other fundamental commitment, is not just an argument or taste but a whole way of engaging reality, including the literary organization of it. Though we have very little of the Cynics’ literature—history usually being no more kind to them than they were to history—the evidence seems clear that many of them wrote much. Yet they were not literary as dedicated artists but rather as dedicated rebels. They lacked aesthetic emphasis, if that means a form of contemplation of form, since they contemplated immediate life and denied most of the forms. And they were also not literary in directly making money, fame or identity from the profession of writing as such. Apparently for the Cynics, literature was largely a homiletic and iconoclastic supplement to rebel teaching and living. With certain important qualifications that would still seem to be largely true of rebel literature. Like other teachers, rebels often fall into repetition, over-insistence, lesson mongering, insular monologues and professional self-pity. And as with all forms of intellectual assault, icono­ clastic force often overrides finesse. These characteristics point to the inevitable weaknesses their role put upon their literary efforts. For litera­ ture was part of the expression of their function, though perhaps less “ self-expression” in the modern sense than counter-expression. Critical and aesthetic theories rarely give sufficient place to the impetus to mock, confute, overturn, outrage and defy as actual and important artistic principles. But theories of literature, rather more than the practice of literature, tend to be justifications of conventional responses and authori­ ties, even at their best making moral and moderate the more extreme ways of thought and feeling. While there are many positive artistic virtues—as well as fundamental truths—to rebel literature, what needs first emphasis is the quite special and peculiar expectations appropriate to the literary rebel as rebel. Both the merits and limitations of rebel literature will be, and often have been, confused, covered up or explained away by the simple application of unrebellious literary standards. Nor is the distortion of the literary rebel merely the work of modern institutional intellectuals. For example, in his orations on Cynicism—“ To the Uneducated Cynics” and “ To the Cynic Heracleios”—the Emperor Julian (called the Apostate by Christians) pretty clearly “ purifies” the Cynic heritage, as one would expect from a sympathizer in power. So, it would seem, does that polite philosopher Epictetus in the moral pedagogy of “ On the Calling of a Cynic.” More recent discussion, I suspect, also

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give the Greek austerity in which Diogenes propounded his anticonven tional and libertarian defiance an undue puritanic emphasis, which does not really fit the tone of the literary fragments we have. Though there are naturally some corruptions appropriate to Cynicism, such as notorietyseeking, the renunciation of direct individual gratification should not be primary. Or put it this way: keeping the rebel emphasis in mind, the modern terms for what is usually translated as the “ pleasure,” “ luxury” and “ honor” which Diogenes attacked could be “ blandness,” “ security,” and “ ambition.” The rebel has always been opposed to the stolid world, above all.

The Bohemian as a Social Personality Type William

I. Thomas and Florian Z naniecki, 1958

The definiteness of attitudes attained in character and the corresponding schematization of social data in life-organization admit, however, a wide scale of gradation with regard to one point of fundamental importance— the range of possibilities of further development remaining open to the individual after the stabilization. This depends on the nature of the attitudes involved in the character and of the schemes of life-organization, and also on the way in which both are unified and systematized. And here three typical cases can be distinguished. The set of attitudes constituting the character may be such as practically to exclude the development of any new attitude in the given conditions of life, because the reflective attitudes of an individual have attained so great a fixity that he is accessible to only a certain class of influences—those constituting the most permanent part of his social milieu. The only possi­ bilities of evolution then remaining open to the individual are the slow changes brought by age in himself and by time in his social milieu, or a change of conditions so radical as to destroy at once the values to whose influence he was adapted and presumably his own character. This is the type which has found its expression in literature as the ‘‘Philistine.’’ It is opposed to the “ Bohemian,” whose possibilities of evolution are not closed, simply because his character remains unformed. Some of his temperamental attitudes are in their primary form, others may have become intellectualized but remain unrelated to each other, do not consti tute a stable and systematized set, and do not exclude any new attitude, so that the individual remains open to any and all influences. As opposed to both these types we find the third type of the individual whose character is settled and organized but involves the possibility and even the necessity of evolution, because the reflective attitudes constituting it include a tendency to change, regulated by pains of productive activity, and the individual remains open to such influences as will be in line of his preconceived development. This is the type of the creative individual. 127

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A parallel distinction must be made with regard to the schemes of social situations constituting the life-organization. The ability to define every situation which the individual meets in his experience is not necessarily a proof of intellectual superiority; it may mean simply a limitation of claims and interests and a stability of external conditions which do not allow any radically new situations to be noticed, so that a few narrow schemes are sufficient to lead the individual through life, simply because he does not see problems on his way which demand new schemes. This type of scheme constitutes the common stock of social traditions in which every class of situation is defined in the same way once and forever. These schemes harmonize perfectly with the Philistine’s character and therefore the Philistine is always a conformist, usually accepting social tradition in its most stable elements. Of course every important and unexpected change in the conditions of life results for such an individual in a disorganization of activity. As long as he can he still applies the old schemes, and up to a certain point his old definition of new situations may be sufficient to allow him to satisfy his claims if the latter are low, although he cannot compete with those who have higher claims and more efficient schemes. But as soon as the results of his activity become unsuccessful even in his own eyes, he is entirely lost; the situation becomes for him completely vague and undetermined, he is ready to accept any definition that may be suggested to him and is unable to keep any permanent line of activity. This is the case with any conservative and intellectually limited member of a stable community, whatever may be his social class, when he finds himself transferred into another community or when his own group undergoes some rapid and sudden change. Opposed to this type we find an undetermined variation of schemes in the life of all the numerous species of the Bohemian. The choice of the scheme by a Bohemian depends on his momentary standpoint, and this may be determined either by some outburst of a primary temperamental attitude or by some isolated character-attitude which makes him subject to some indiscriminately accepted influence. In either case inconsistency is the essential feature of his activity. But on the other hand he shows a degree of adaptability to new conditions quite in contrast with the Philis tine, though his adaptability is only provisional and does not lead to a new systematic life-organization. But adaptability to new situations and diversity of interest are even compatible with a consistency of activity superior to that which tradition can give if the individual builds his life-organization not upon the presump tion of the immutability of his sphere of social values, but upon the tendency to modify and to enlarge it according to some definite aims. These may be purely intellectual or aesthetic, and in this case the individ

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ual searches for new situations to be defined simply in order to widen and to perfect his knowledge or his aesthetic interpretation and appreciation; or his aims may be “ practical,” in any sense of the term—hedonistic, economical, political, moral, religious—and then the individual searches for new situations in order to widen the control of his environment, to adapt to his purposes a continually increasing sphere of social reality. This is the creative man. The Philistine, the Bohemian and the creative man are the three funda mental forms of personal determination toward which social personalities tend in their evolution. None of these forms is ever completely and absolutely realized by a human individual in all lines of activity; there is no Philistine who lacks completely Bohemian tendencies, no Bohemian who is not a Philistine in certain respects, no creative man who is fully and exclusively creative and does not need some Philistine routine in certain lines to make creation in other lines practically possible, and some Bohemianism in order to be able to reject occasionally such fixed attitudes and social regulations as hinder his progress, even if he should be unable at the time to substitute for them any positive organization in the given line. But while pure Philistinism, pure Bohemianism and pure creativeness represent only ideal limits of personal evolution, the process of personal evolution grows to be more and more definite as it progresses, so that, while the form which a human personality will assume is not determined in advance, either by the individual’s temperament or by his social milieu, his future becomes more and more determined by the very course of his development; he approaches more and more to Philistinism, Bohemianism or creativeness and thereby his possibilities of becoming something else continually diminish.

The Greenwich Village Idea M alcolm C o w ley , 1934

In those days when division after division was landing in Hoboken and marching up Fifth Avenue in full battle equipment, when Americans were fighting the Bolshies in Siberia and guarding the Rhine—in those stillbelligerent days that followed the Armistice there was a private war between Greenwich Village and the Saturday Evening Post. Other magazines fought in the same cause, but the Post was persistent and powerful enough to be regarded as chief of the aggressor nations. It published stories about the Villagers, editorials and articles against them, grave or flippant serials dealing with their customs in a mood of disparage­ ment or alarm, humorous pieces done to order by its staff writers, cartoons in which the Villagers were depicted as long-haired men and short-haired women with ridiculous bone-rimmed spectacles—in all, a long campaign of invective beginning before the steel strike or the Palmer Raids and continuing through the jazz era, the boom and the depression. The burden of it was always the same: that the Village was the haunt of affectation; that it was inhabited by fools and fakers; that the fakers hid Moscow heresies under the disguise of cubism and free verse; that the fools would eventually be cured of their folly: they would forget this funny business about art and return to domesticity in South Bend, Indiana, and sell motorcars, and in the evenings sit with slippered feet while their children romped about them in paper caps made from the advertising pages of the Saturday Evening Post. The Village was dying, had died already, smelled to high heaven and Philadelphia. . . . The Villagers did not answer this attack directly: instead they carried on a campaign of their own against the culture of which the Post seemed to be the final expression. They performed autopsies, they wrote obituaries of civilization in the United States, they shook the standardized dust of the country from their feet. Here, apparently, was a symbolic struggle: on the one side, the great megaphone of middle-class America; on the other, 130

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the American disciples of art and artistic living. Here, in its latest incar nation, was the eternal warfare of bohemian against bourgeois, poet against propriety—Villon and the Bishop of Orleans, Keats and the quar terly reviewers, Rodolphe, Mimi and the landlord. But perhaps, if we review the history of the struggle, we shall find that the issue was other than it seemed, and the enmity less ancient. Alexander Pope, two centuries before, had taken the side of property and propriety in a similar campaign against the slums of art. When writing The Dunciad and the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, he lumped together all his enemies—stingy patrons, homosexual peers, hair-splitting pedants; but he reserved his best-considered insults for the garret dwellers of Grub Street, the dramatists whose lives were spent dodging the bailiff, the epic poets “ lulled by a zephyr through the broken pane.” These he accused of slander, dullness, theft, bootlicking, ingratitude, every outrage to man and the Muses; almost the only charge he did not press home against them was that of affectation. They were not play-acting their poverty. The thread bare Miltons of his day were rarely the children of prosperous parents; they could not go home to Nottingham or Bristol and earn a comfortable living by selling hackney coaches; if they “ turned a Persian tale for half a crown,” it was usually because they had no other means of earning half a crown and so keeping themselves out of debtors’ prison. And the sub stance of Pope’s attack against them is simply that they were poor, that they belonged to a class beneath his own, without inherited wealth, that they did not keep a gentleman’s establishment, or possess a gentleman’s easy manners, or the magnanimity of a gentleman sure of tomorrow’s dinner: Yet then did Gildon draw his venal quill; I w ish’d the man a dinner, and sate still. Yet then did Dennis rave in furious fret; I never answer’d, I was not in debt.

Pope was a far wittier poet than any of his adversaries, but the forces he brought against them were not those of wit or poetry alone: behind him, massed in reserve, was all the prejudice of eighteenth-century gentlefolk against intruders into the polite world of letters. He was fighting a literary class war, and one that left deep wounds. To many a poor scribbler it meant the difference between starvation and the roast of mutton he lovingly appraised in a bake-shop window and promised himself to devour if his patron sent him a guinea: after The Dunciad , patrons closed their purses. Pope had inflicted a defeat on Grub Street but—the distinction is important—he had left bohemia untouched, for the simple reason that Queen Anne’s and King George’s London had no bohemia to defeat.

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Grub Street is as old as the trade of letters—in Alexandria, in Rome, it was already a crowded quarter; bohemia is younger than the Romantic movement. Grub Street develops in the metropolis of any country or culture as soon as men are able to earn a precarious living with pen or pencil; bohemia is a revolt against certain features of industrial capitalism and can exist only in a capitalist society. Grub Street is a way of life unwillingly followed by the intellectual proletariat; bohemia attracts its citizens from all economic classes: there are not a few bohemian million­ aires, but they are expected to imitate the customs of penniless artists. Bohemia is Grub Street romanticized, doctrinalized and rendered selfconscious; it is Grub Street on parade. It originated in France, not England, and the approximate date of its birth was 1830: thus, it followed the rise of French industry after the Napoleonic Wars. The French Romantic poets complained of feeling oppressed—perhaps it was, as Musset believed, the fault of that great Emperor whose shadow fell across their childhood; perhaps it was Sci­ ence, or the Industrial Revolution, or merely the money-grubbing, the stuffy morals and stupid politics of the people about them; in any case they had to escape from middle-class society. Some of them became revolutionists; others took refuge in pure art; but most of them demanded a real world of present satisfactions, in which they could cherish aristo cratic ideals while living among carpenters and grisettes. The first bohem ians, the first inhabitants of the world, were the friends of Theophile Gautier and G érard de Nerval, young men of good family, bucks and dandies with money enough to indulge their moods; but the legend of it was spread abroad, some twenty years later, by a poor hack named Henry Murger, the son of a German immigrant to Paris. Having abandoned all hopes of a formal education when he left primary school, and feeling no desire to follow his father’s trade of tailor, Murger began to write mediocre verse and paint incredible pictures, meanwhile supporting himself by his wits. Soon he joined a group that called itself the Water Drinkers because it could rarely afford another beverage. A dozen young men with little talent and extravagant ambitions, they lived in hovels or in lofts over a cow stable, worked under the lash of hunger, and wasted their few francs in modest debauchery. One winter they had a stove for the first time: it was a hole cut in the floor, through which the animal heat of the stable rose into their chamber. They suffered from the occupational diseases of poor artists—consumption, syphilis, pneumonia—all of them aggravated by undernourishment. Joseph Desbrosses died in the winter of 1844; he was an able sculptor, possibly the one genius of the group. His funeral was the third in six weeks among the Water Drinkers, and they emptied their pockets to buy a wooden cross for the grave. When the last

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sod clumped down, the gravediggers stood waiting for their tip. There was not a sou in the party. “ That’s all right,” said the gravediggers generously, recognizing the mourners. “ It will be for the next tim e.” Spring came and their feelings rose with the mercury. One evening when his friends were making war maps in water color, Murger began unexpect­ edly to tell them stories. They listened, chuckled and roared for two good hours, till somebody advised him, seriously between gales of laughter, to abandon poetry for fiction. A little later he followed this advice, writing about the life of his friends, the only life he knew. Personally he hated this existence on the cold fringes of starvation and planned to escape from it as soon as he could, but for the public he tried to render it attractive. In S c ènes de la Vie de Boh ème, he succeeded beyond his ambition. He succeeded not only in writing a popular book, one that was translated into twenty languages, successfully dramatized, candied into an opera, one that enabled its author to live in bourgeois comfort, but also in changing an image in the public mind. Grub Street, where dinnerless Gildon drew his venal quill, contemptible Grub Street, the haunt of apprentices and failures and Henry Murger, was transformed into glamorous bohemia. The unwilling expedient became a permanent way of life, became a cult with rituals and costumes, a doctrine adhered to not only by artists, young and old, rich and poor, but also in later years by designers, stylists, trade paper sub-editors, interior decorators, wolves, fairies, millionaire patrons of art, sadists, symphomaniacs, bridge sharks, anarchists, women living on alimony, tired reformers, educational cranks, economists, hopheads, dipsomaniac playwrights, nudists, restaurant keepers, stockbrokers and dentists craving self-expression. Even during Murger’s lifetime, the bohemian cult was spreading from France into other European countries. Having occupied a whole section of Paris—three sections, in fact, for it moved from the Boul’Mich’ to Montmartre and thence to Montparnasse—it founded new colonies in Munich, Berlin, London, St. Petersburg. In the late 1850s it reached New York, where it established headquarters in Charlie Pfaff’s lager-beer saloon under the sidewalk of lower Broadway. Again in 1894 the “ Trilby” craze spawned forth dozens of bohemian groups and magazines; in New York a writer explained that the true bohemia may exist at millionaires’ tables; in Philadelphia young married couples south of Market Street would encourage their guests: “ Don’t stand on ceremony; you know we are thorough bohemians.” All over the Western world, bohemia was carrying on a long warfare with conventional society, but year by year it was making more converts from the ranks of the enemy. When the American magazines launched their counteroffensive, in 1919,

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a curious phenomenon was to be observed. The New York bohemians, the Greenwich Villagers, came from exactly the same social class as the readers of the Saturday Evening Post. Their political opinions were vague and by no means dangerous to Ford Motors or General Electric: the war had destroyed their belief in political action. They were trying to get ahead, and the proletariat be damned. Their economic standards were those of the small American businessman. The art-shop era was just beginning. Having fled from Dubuque and Denver to escape the stultifying effects of a civilization ruled by business, many of the Villagers had already entered business for themselves, and many more were about to enter it. They would open tea shops, antique shops, book shops, yes, and bridge parlors, dance halls, night clubs and real-estate offices. By hiring shop assistants, they would become the exploiters of labor. If successful, they tried to expand their one restaurant into a chain of restaurants, all with a delightfully free and intimate atmosphere, but run on the best principles of business accounting. Some of them leased houses, remodeled them into studio apartments, and raised the rents three or four hundred per cent to their new tenants. Others clung faithfully to their profession of painting or writing, rose in it slowly, and at last had their stories or illustrations accepted by Collier s or the Saturday Evening Post. There were occasions, I believe, when Greenwich Village writers were editorially encouraged to write stories making fun of the Village, and some of them were glad to follow the suggestion. Of course they complained, when slightly tipsy, that they were killing themselves— but how else could they maintain their standard of living? What they meant was that they could not live like Vanity Fair readers without writing for the Saturday Evening Post.

And so it was that many of them lived during the prosperous decade that followed. If the book succeeded or if they got a fat advertising contract, they bought houses in Connecticut, preferably not too far from the Sound. They hired butlers; they sent their children to St. Somebody’s; they collected highboys, lowboys, tester beds; they joined the local Hunt and rode in red coats across New England stone fences and through winered sumacs in pursuit of a bag of imported aniseed. In the midst of these new pleasures they continued to bewail the standardization of American life, while the magazines continued their polemic against Greenwich Village. You came to suspect that some of the Villagers themselves, even those who remained below Fourteenth Street, were not indignant at a publicity that brought tourists to the Pirates’ Den and customers to Ye Olde Curiowe Shoppe and increased the value of the land in which a few of them had begun to speculate. The whole thing seemed like a sham

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battle. Yet beneath it was a real conflict of ideas and one that would soon be mirrored in the customs of a whole country. Greenwich Village was not only a place, a mood, a way of life: like all bohemias, it was also a doctrine. Since the days of Gautier and Murger, this doctrine had remained the same in spirit, but it had changed in several details. By 1920, it had become a system of ideas that could roughly be summarized as follows: 1. The idea of salvation by the child . . .—Each of us at birth has special potentialities which are slowly crushed and destroyed by a standardized society and mechanical methods of teaching. If a new educational system can be introduced, one by which children are encouraged to develop their own personalities, to blossom freely like flowers, then the world will be saved by this new, free generation. 2. The idea of self-expression . . .—Each man’s, each woman’s, purpose in life is to express himself, to realize his full individuality through creative work and beautiful living in beautiful surroundings. 3. The idea of living for the moment . . .—It is stupid to pile up treasures that we can enjoy only in old age, when we have lost the capacity for enjoyment. Better to seize the moment as it comes, to dwell in it intensely, even at the cost of future suffering. Better to live extrava gantly, gather June rosebuds, “ burn my candle at both ends. . . . It gives a lovely light.” 4. The idea of paganism . . .—The body is a temple in which there is nothing unclean, a shrine to be adorned for the ritual of love. 5. The idea of liberty . . .—Every law, convention or rule of art that prevents self-expression or the full enjoyment of the moment should be shattered and abolished. Puritanism is the great enemy. The crusade against puritanism is the only crusade with which free individuals are justified in allying themselves. 6. The idea of female equality . . .—Women should be the economic and moral equals of men. They should have the same pay, the same working conditions, the same opportunity for drinking, smoking, taking or dismissing lovers. 7. The idea of psychological adjustment . . .—We are unhappy because we are maladjusted, and maladjusted because we are repressed. If our individual repressions can be removed—by confessing them to a Freud­ ian psychologist—then we can adjust ourselves to any situation and be happy in it. (But Freudianism is only one method of adjustment. What is wrong with us may be our glands, and by a slight operation, or merely by taking a daily dose of thyroid, we may alter our whole personalities. Again, we may adjust ourselves by some such psycho physical discipline as was taught by Gurdjieff. The implication of all these methods is the same—that the environment itself need not be altered. That explains why most radicals who became converted to

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psychoanalysis or glands or Gurdjieff gradually abandoned their politi cal radicalism.) 8. The idea of changing place . . .— “ They do things better in Europe.” England and Germany have the wisdom of old cultures; the Latin people have admirably preserved their pagan heritage. By expatriating himself, by living in Paris, Capri or the South of France, the artist can break the puritan shackles, drink, live freely and be wholly creative. All these, from the standpoint of the business-Christian ethic then represented by the Saturday Evening P ost , were corrupt ideas. This older ethic is familiar to most people, but one feature of it has not been sufficiently emphasized. Substantially, it was a production ethic. The great virtues it taught were industry, foresight, thrift and personal initiative. The workman should be more industrious in order to produce more for his employer; he should look ahead to the future; he should save money in order to become a capitalist himself; then he should exercise personal initiative and found new factories where other workmen would toil indus­ triously, and save, and become capitalists in their turn. During the process many people would suffer privations: most workers would live meagerly and wrack their bodies with labor; even the employers would deny themselves luxuries that they could easily purchase, choosing instead to put back the money into their business; but after all, our bodies were not to be pampered; they were temporary dwelling places, and we should be rewarded in heaven for our self-denial. On earth, our duty was to accumulate more wealth and produce more goods, the ultimate use of which was no subject for worry. They would somehow be absorbed, by new markets opened in the West, or overseas in new countries, or by the increased purchasing power of workmen who had saved and bettered their position. That was the ethic of a young capitalism, and it worked admirably, so long as the territory and population of the country were expanding faster than its industrial plant. But after the war the situation changed. Our industries had grown enormously to satisfy a demand that suddenly ceased. To keep the factory wheels turning, a new domestic market had to be created. Industry and thrift were no longer adequate. There must be a new ethic that encouraged people to buy, a consumption ethic. It happened that many of the Greenwich Village ideas proved useful in the altered situation. Thus, self-expression and paganism encouraged a demand for all sorts of products—modern furniture, beach pajamas, cos­ metics, colored bathrooms with toilet paper to match. Living fo r the m om ent meant buying an automobile, radio or house, using it now and paying for it tomorrow. Female equality was capable of doubling the

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consumption of products—cigarettes, for example—that had formerly been used by men alone. Even changing place would help to stimulate business in the country from which the artist was being expatriated. The exiles of art were also trade missionaries: involuntarily they increased the foreign demand for fountain pens, silk stockings, grapefruit and portable typewriters. They drew after them an invading army of tourists, thus swelling the profits of steamship lines and travel agencies. Everything fitted into the business picture. I don’t mean to say that Greenwich Village was the source of the revolution in morals that affected all our lives in the decade after the war, and neither do I mean that big business deliberately plotted to render the nation extravagant, pleasure-worshipping and reckless of tomorrow. The new moral standards arose from conditions that had nothing to do with the Village. They were, as a matter of fact, not really new. Always, even in the great age of the Puritans, there had been currents of licentious ness that were favored by the immoderate American climate and held in check only by hellfire preaching and the hardships of settling a new country. Old Boston, Providence, rural Connecticut, all had their under worlds. The reason puritanism became so strong in America was perhaps that it had to be strong in order to checkmate its enemies. But it was already weakening as the country grew richer in the twenty years before the war; and the war itself was the puritan crisis and defeat. All standards were relaxed in the stormy-sultry wartime atmosphere. It wasn’t only the boys of my age, those serving in the army, who were transformed by events; their sisters and younger brothers were affected in a different fashion. With their fathers away, perhaps, and their mothers making bandages or tea-dancing with lonely officers, it was possible for boys and girls to do what they pleased. For the first time they could go to dances unchaperoned, drive the family car and park it by the roadside while they made love, and come home after midnight, a little tipsy, with nobody to reproach them in the hallway. They took advantage of these stolen liberties—indeed, one might say that the revolution in morals began as a middle-class children’s revolt. But everything conspired to further it. Prohibition came and surrounded the new customs with illicit glamour; prosperity made it possible to practice them; Freudian psychology provided a philosophical justification and made it unfashionable to be repressed; still later the sex magazines and the movies, even the pulpit, would advertise a revolution that had taken place silently and triumphed without a struggle. In all this Greenwich Village had no part. The revolution would have occurred if the Village had never existed, but—the point is important—it would not have followed the same course. The Village, older in revolt, gave form to the movement,

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created its fashions, and supplied the writers and illustrators who would render them popular. As for American business, though it laid no plots in advance, it was quick enough to use the situation, to exploit the new markets for cigarettes and cosmetics, and to realize that, in advertising pages and movie palaces, sex appeal was now the surest appeal. The Greenwich Village standards, with the help of business, had spread through the country. Young women east and west had bobbed their hair, let it grow and bobbed it again; they had passed through the period when corsets were not worn. They were not very self-conscious when they talked about taking a lover; and the conversations ran from mother fixations to birth control while they smoked cigarettes between the courses of luncheons eaten in black-and-orange tea shops just like those in the Village. People of forty had been affected by the younger generation: they spent too much money, drank too much gin, made love to one another’s wives and talked about their neuroses. Houses were furnished to look like studios. Stenographers were on parties, following the example of the boss and his girl friends and her husband. The “ party,” conceived as a gathering together of men and women to drink gin cocktails, flirt, dance to the phonograph or radio and gossip about their absent friends, had in fact become one of the most popular American institutions; nobody stopped to think how short its history had been in this country. It developed out of the “ orgies” celebrated by the French 1830 Romantics, but it was intro duced into this country by Greenwich Villagers—before being adopted by salesmen from Kokomo and the younger country-club set in Kansas City. Wherever one turned the Greenwich Village ideas were making their way: even the Saturday Evening Post was feeling their influence. Long before Repeal, it began to wobble on Prohibition. It allowed drinking, petting and unfaithfulness to be mentioned in the stories it published; in illustrations showed women smoking. Its advertising columns admitted one after another of the strictly pagan products—cosmetics, toilet tissues, cigarettes—yet still it continued to thunder against Greenwich Village and bohemian immorality. It even nourished the illusion that its long campaign had been successful. On more than one occasion it announced that the Village was dead and buried: “ The sad truth is,” it said in the autumn of 1931, “ that the Village was a flop.” Perhaps it was true that the Village was moribund—of that we can’t be sure, for creeds and ways of life among artists are hard to kill. If, however, the Village was really dying, it was dying of success. It was dying because it became so popular that too many people insisted on living there. It was dying because women smoked cigarettes on the streets of the Bronx, drank gin cocktails in Omaha and had perfectly swell parties in Seattle and Middletown—in other words, because American business and the whole of middle-class America had been going Greenwich Village.

Towertown: Chicago’s Bohemia H arvey Z orbaughy 1929

The Towertown of today . . . is largely made up of individuals who have sought in its unconventionality and anonymity—sometimes under the guise of art, sometimes not—escape from the conventions and repressions of the small town or the outlying and more stable communities of the city. Some of these individuals have a genuine hunger for new experience, a desire to experiment with life. They run the tearooms and art shops and book stalls of the “ village,” or work in the Loop by day and frequent its studios and restaurants by night. Perhaps, like Collie, they keep a little red notebook with a list of the things they have always wanted to do, and strike them off as one experiment in living after another is completed. Most of these experimenters are young women. For Towertown, like Greenwich Village, is predominantly a woman’s bohemia. . . . It is the young women who open most of the studios, run most of the tearooms and restaurants, most of the little art shops and book stalls, manage the exhibits and little theatres, dominate the life of the bohemias of American cities. And in Towertown the women are, on the whole, noticeably superior to the men. But these genuine experimenters with life are few. Most of Towertown’s present population are egocentric poseurs, neurotics, rebels against the conventions of Main Street or the gossip of the foreign community, seekers of atmosphere, dabblers in the occult, dilettantes in the arts, or parties to drab lapses from a moral code which the city has not yet destroyed. . . . “ Self-expression” is the avowed goal of “ village” life. And where talent is lacking, self-expression runs to the playing of roles and the wearing of masques, sometimes of the most bizarre sort. . . . *

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The villager is usually content with assuming an eccentricity in dress or manner, an indifference to opinion that is far from real, a contempt for 139

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Rodin, Debussy, or Shakespeare, or a pose as the prophet of some new movement in drama, poetry, music, or painting. Once the role is adopted, or perchance thrust upon one, the whole “ village” plays up to it, and a personality is crystallized. The Neo Arlimusc recently held an exhibit for “ Chicago’s primitive artist.” This primitive artist is P------ , a conventional, small business man o f sixty-two, who a year ago suddenly began to paint. He had been a clothing peddler in the ghetto, had earned a very mediocre living, but had managed to save a little and had retired. One day the old man dropped some papers from his pocket on which a friend saw some sketches. The old man was much embarrassed, but the friend insisted on taking them to W------ , who exclaimed, “ This man is a genius, a primitive artist!” P------ had never had a lesson in his life, and paints very crudely. With this encouragement P------began to paint more crudely than ever. Then it was arranged to give P------ an exhibit. Only his own things were hung. They had an art critic from the University who came and discussed P------ ’s primitive technique, and a psychiatrist who probed back into P------ ’s primitive unconscious for the explanation of his turning to painting at so late an age. De K------ got up, and pointing to some Jewish sweatshop scenes painted on old cardboard, exclaimed: “ See that? The artist’s expression will out! Poverty stricken, he seizes on the only medium available.” Then P------ was sent off to New York, where Greenwich Village hailed him as the exponent o f a new art form. Under this definition by the group, P------ has ceased to be the timid clothing peddler, sketching and secreting his sketches, having constantly to be reassured he is an artist and has a place in the world, and has accepted the role created for him as the creator of a new and primitive art, and continues to paint more and more crudely.

Behind these masques which the “ villagers” present to one another and to the world one usually discovers the egocentric, the poseur, the neurotic, or the “ originality” of an unimaginative nature. Occasionally, however, one finds behind these masques young persons who are struggling to live out their own lives, to remake the world a bit more after the fashion of their dreams—young persons who have come from north and west and south, from farm and village and suburb, to this mobile, isolated, anony­ mous area of a great city where they imagine they may live their dreams. It is these occasional dreams behind the masque, and the enthusiasms, intimacies, disillusionments that are a part of the living out of these dreams, that lend the “ village,” despite its tawdry tinsel, a certain charm. . . . *

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Transient but intense personal contacts are characteristic of this “ bo­ hemian” life of “ studio” and “ tearoom .” Combined with the unconven­ tional tradition of the “ village,” its philosophy of individualism, and the

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anonymity which its streets afford, these contacts give rise to unconven­ tional types of sex relationship. Moreover, Towertown’s debates on free love and its reputation for promiscuity, coupled with its unconventionality and anonymity, attract to its studios many individuals who are not bo­ hemians, but who seek in Towertown escape from the repressive conven­ tions of the larger community. Many of them become hangers-on of bohemia, but others isolate themselves in its midst. *

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The anonymity and unconventionality o f “ village” streets attracts to them many who merely want to be “ let alone.” I was talking one night, near “ Bughouse Square,” about life in the “ village.” Afterwards a girl came up to me and said: “ Why can’t social agencies let us alone? There’s at least a year in everybody’s life when he wants to do just as he damn pleases. The ‘village’ is the only place where he can do it without sneaking off in a hole by him self.” Plenty of individuals do use the anonymity o f “ village” life, however, to sneak off into holes by themselves. Business and professional men use its studio apartments to keep their mistresses. B------ and her mother live in a beautiful apartment, with Japanese servants and every luxury. B------ is supported by a wealthy business man, married, with a wife and family, who spends occasional week-ends with her. Intervening nights she entertains an army officer, a penni­ less adventurer, to whom she even gives money. G------is a well-to-do lawyer, and bachelor and keeps his mistress in the village. There are many such cases, especially o f young men, “ philistines” through and through, who nevertheless like the laissez faire o f bohemia. R------ is a wealthy dilettante in the arts whose elaborate studio parties are celebrated for the fact that all the women present are his mistresses— past, present, and prospective. Distorted forms o f sex behavior also find a harbor in the “ village.” Many homosexuals are among the frequenters of “ village” tearooms and studios. A friend of mine was asked by an acquaintance to accompany him to the studio of a well-known “ villager” to Sunday afternoon tea. There was a large group there. The men were smoking and talking in one end o f the room, the women in the other. There was a good deal of taking one another’s arms, sitting on the arms o f one another’s chairs, and o f throwing an arm about one another’s shoulders. But he thought it was merely that the group were old friends. He was asked to tea again a few weeks later. This time he remained in the evening. Soon the men were fondling one another, as were the women. A man he had met that afternoon threw an arm about him. He got up, went over to the acquaintance who had brought him, and said, “ I’m leaving.” When they got out on the street he asked, “ What sort o f a place was that, anyhow?” “ Why, I thought you knew ,” his companion replied, “ the best-known fairies and lesbians in Chicago were there.”

The intimate and artistic life of the “ village” is passed unnoticed by the rest of the city, to which Towertown stands only for these bizarre garret and stable studios, long hair, eccentric dress, and free love. This is due

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largely to the fact that certain shrewd individuals were not slow to see possibilities in the commercialization of bohemia. Some of these individ­ uals were of bohemia themselves. A group of young women writers in Towertown organized “ Seeing Bohemia” trips, at seventy-five cents a head, and conducted curious persons from the outside world through tearooms and studios bizarrely decorated for the occasion.

Disaffection in England: The Outsider Colin Wilson, 1958

Our age is essentially unheroic. Heroism is individualism. We live in an age of numbers and labels, workers clock-in and clock-out, and discuss the football results or last night’s television programmes. At the same time, it is not an age of oppression and general poverty. The improvement in social conditions has brought about an increase of leisure, which is a freeing of vital energy. Our leisure has underlined once again the problems of meaning and purpose: and has underlined it, not only for the socially privileged (as in Ancient Greece or the Middle Ages) but for the average worker, the mere ‘social unit’. The basic human craving for a sense of purpose reasserts itself as a desire to re-create the heroic; to re-create it indiscriminately in the heroes of Everest and Kon-Tiki, in the film star or popular crooner, the ‘rebel without a cause’ (in its original meaning, the juvenile criminal). My ‘Outsider’ fitted neatly into the pattern of obsession; consequently, like Scott Fitzgerald, I have found the age ‘bearing me up and flattering m e’ for providing it with a catchword, a symbol, such as James Dean has provided in the fifties, or Rudolph Valentino in the twenties. I have no basic objection to this: for I have also believed that the Outsider is the heroic figure of our time. There is chaos. The Outsider faces it and attempts to have his life on its recognition. The Insider deliberately pushes it into his subconscious mind, and fills his consciousness with a selected ‘order’. He is afraid of the chaos. And if it were true that the chaos has the last word, he would be right to be afraid of it, to base his life on a refusal to recognize it. Recognition would mean annihilation—or at least, lowered efficiency. (This is why the maturing artist is usually an inefficient, floundering being in the world of the bourgeois.) But the careers of the Beethovens, the Van Goghs, the Dostoevskys, give the lie to this low-spirited view. They affirm that man can be greater than he realizes by launching himself into the sea of chaos. They affirm that by turning his back on ‘worldly values,’ by 143

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summoning an apparently suicidal courage, man can achieve a new plane of the heroic, a further step towards the god-like. This is the lesson of the Outsiders—a lesson of deliberate loneliness and reaction against the values of the mass, a revolt against the mob-conditioned desire for security. Naturally, this revolt is not the last word. If it were, it would be no more than the romantic revolt of Schiller’s R obbers , where Karl Moor praises anarchy but longs secretly for order—a superhuman order maintained by godlike men. No, beyond the Outsider’s contempt of security lies the simple business-man’s principle: nothing ventured, nothing gained. The Outsider’s suicidal courage creates a world of value so much higher than the world we have made for ourselves that it seems supernatural, the world of Beethoven’s last quartets, of M ozart’s Zauberflöte, of The Brothers K aram azov , or the last act of Back to Methuselah. The romantic ring of this is deceptive. All real romanticism is the beginning of classicism (as it was with Goethe). All real humanism is the beginning of a new religious attitude. ‘If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise’. Romanticism is only distinguished from realism by its character of velleity. If a shopgirl dreams of marrying a millionaire, she is a romantic. But if she deliberately sets out to catch a millionaire and succeeds, she is no longer a romantic but a realist. The child with a longing for the moon is a romantic, like the child who longs to see ancient Troy. But the child who grows up with an interest in space travel has become a realist, like Heinrich Schliemann, who went out and dug up ancient Troy because of a childhood dream. The Outsider with a longing for the infinite, for perfection, is a romantic. But the Outsider who sets out to find a discipline to discover infinity, perfection, is a realist. My reason for rejecting the label ‘romantic’ for myself can be expressed in a few sentences. I believe that our civilization is in decline, and that Outsiders are a symptom of that decline. They are men in reaction against scientific materialism; men who would once have found their orientation in the Church. I believe that when a civilization begins to produce Outsi ders, it has received a challenge: a challenge to produce a higher type of man, and give itself a new unity of purpose, or to slip into the gulf after all the other civilizations that have failed to respond to the challenge. The ‘Outsider’ is the individual who attempts to respond to the challenge. I have stated my belief flatly, and I do not intend to adduce evidence in its support at this point. For the evidence, I can only recommend the reader who has not already done so to study The Decline o f the West and Arnold Toynbee’s A Study o f H istory. In the course of this essay I will attempt to explain my belief more fully. *

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The Outsider needs an escape from himself. The case of T. E. Lawrence made this clear. Tolstoy’s madman says: ‘I am running away from some thing dreadful and cannot escape it. I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor. . . . Neither the Penza nor any other property will add anything or take anything from me; it is myself I am weary of, and find intolerable and a torment. I want to fall asleep and forget myself, and cannot. I cannot get away from myself’. Lawrence said: T did not like the “ myself” I could see and hear.’ The Outsider’s personality is a prison and a torment. One would be justified in saying: But millions of people feel like that. Tired housewives or business men say: ‘I am going to the cinema to get away from myself for a bit,’ and we hear it said of a good book or film: ‘It takes you out of yourself.’ And this is perfectly true. The human person ality is like a room. To a large extent, we build this room ourselves; but circumstances, environment, help to make it too. We also furnish the room: with human beings—or rather, their images—familiar places and actions. When you have lived in the same room for years, it becomes all you know: ‘Five windows light the caverned man; through one he breathes the air. Every deep emotional or intellectual experience is an enlarging of the room; has a ripening effect, a maturing effect on the personality. This is a commonplace. But new experiences cannot reach us while we are still in the room. That is why people want to ‘forget themselves’. Without self-forgetfulness, there is no development; men and women would remain crabbed and undeveloped; their energies would stagnate. Most of us manage to adjust ourselves to our ‘rooms’. We get used to them. By the time we die at 75 or so, we have accepted the room. We think it is us. We identify ourselves with it completely. The young men of genius—the young Shelley or Rimbaud or Fitzger ald—is still busy drawing up plans for building his room. He is determined it will be vast—so vast that he will never get tired of being in it. He is determined to furnish it with all kinds of intellectual and emotional recreations, so that he can never be bored. Usually, he is determined not to get tied up with any single person—a wife or lover—because he reserves the right to change the furniture completely every now and then. His room is, in fact, a huge blueprint, full of possibilities. Above all else, the man of genius wants to be the supreme architect of his personality. And he realizes that, if he is to continue to grow and mature as he gets older (and not simply stagnate, as most people do) he must never allow the desire for comfort and warmth to overcome the urge to make himself grow spiritu­ ally. This desire constitutes his integrity.

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The Outsider is a man whose instinct is towards spiritual growth, but who has allowed his room to encase him tightly. He does not understand what is troubling him. He doesn’t even know he is in a room—he thinks he lives ‘in the world’, like all other human beings. He identifies him self with the room. He begins to hate himself—that is, hate the room. Every thing he sees, he sees through its grimy windows. He breathes its bad air. No experience reaches him in his room—or if it does it reaches him so filtered and diluted that it does no good. Gurdjieff pointed out that no human being can live without a continual ‘food’ of experience, impressions. We can live for weeks without food and water. We can live for minutes without air. But we would die if our food of impressions were cut off, even for a second. If this is true, it follows that to live on diluted experience which has been filtered through the dirty windows and thick walls of personality is as bad as drinking malarial water or eating food out of dustbins. Its effect is a spiritual indigestion. The spiritual health of the individual—and therefore of the community— can only be guaranteed by making sure that he can escape from his room periodically—or at least open the doors and windows, and let some air and sunlight in. Using this analogy, the problems of the Outsider become clearer. While the Outsider—the George Fox or Ramakrishna or Dostoevsky—was shut up in his personality, he was miserable. When his spiritual agony had given him enough strength to dare to smash one of the windows, he became a healthy man again. Nevertheless the room we live in is not a prison. It can become a prison, and often does. But it is there to protect us. None of us could bear an everlasting bombardment of experience; it would drive us insane in twentyfour hours. So we want a room into which we can lock ourselves tightly, and barricade the windows and bar the doors. Then experience pounds harmlessly outside, like volleys of wind, and we can sleep. Too much experience is spiritual death. Rimbaud and Gauguin illustrate this. The complexity of modern experience has driven us all—quite impercep tibly—to strengthen our personalities—to get extra shutters for the win dows and bars for the doors. We have perfected a gadget for cutting all noises from the outside world—nobody wants to hear the everlasting clatter and clamour of a modern city all the time. And our room becomes more like a fortress every day. A fortress is a prison. Our modern civilization is doing this to us. Its complexity defeats us. When T. S. Eliot gave up editing The Criterion in 1939, he confessed that it was because the times had ‘induced in myself a depression of spirits so different from any other experience of fifty years as to be a new em otion’; and it was Eliot who had earlier used the phrase ‘the gigantic canvas of

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anarchy and chaos that is our age’. And yet if the artist cannot remain serene and unaffected by his age—in his work at least—who can? In his moments of deepest insight, the Outsider and the visionary knows that there is only one purpose: to intensify life, to create more vitality, to change men into supermen. In all his thinking, he begins from that point. He rejects mere social remedies—democracy, fascism, communism, anar chism—because he knows that they will not supply motive and purpose to the highest type of man for any length of time. He does not dismiss them; but he regards them as secondary. There must be greater aims than shortsighted social aims to fight for. The answer points again to individual men; the Outsider. I do not believe that there is any obvious and immediate measure to be taken — except by the artists and writers —especially the writers. The artist represents the highest consciousness of the age, and he attempts to extend that con sciousness to other people. The first step: for the artists to become conscious of what has happened to our civilization since the days when the artist and law-giver were one. It demands, in other words, a historic consciousness on the part of writers. Secondly, and not less important, it demands a metaphysical consciousness (of the kind that Sartre proved he possessed in La N ausée, and Camus in The Myth o f Sisyphus). This is the consciousness I tried to outline in The Outsider. The artist must cease to be the limp, impassive observer. He must become actively involved in the task of restoring a metaphysical consciousness to our age. This would be the first step to healing that ‘bifurcation of nature’ that Whitehead recog­ nized to be the sign of our age’s decay.

The Social Role of the Literary Elite B arbara C hartier , 1950 The period from 1912 to 1925 has been termed an American Renais­ sance. It was a period characterized by increased interest in literature and by an entirely new group of writers whose interests, backgrounds, and sympathies differed radically from those of their predecessors. This change in the composition and ideology of the literary elite originated in, and reflected, the changing patterns of social relationships within the total social structure. Such changes were rapid during the period. The growth of industry and the tendency toward urbanization created a prosperous middle-class group not rooted in any section of the country which could ignore the opinions of neighbors and enjoy the anonymity of the apartment house. The result was an increased cosmopolitanism and spread of knowl­ edge which, coupled with mobility and urbanism, destroyed much of the basis upon which old, genteel traditions had been built. The new social stratum thus produced was the breeding ground for a new intelligentsia. A product of social structure and an interpreter of society in terms of his own social position, the artist of the twenties reflected, as had previous groups, the changing balance of social and economic forces. This was the period of Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Ernest Heming way, and Eugene O’Neill: the period of Bohemia and the “ Revolt Against Gentility.” 1 Its close can be dated by the award of the Nobel Prize to Sinclair Lewis in 1930. The standards against which these writers protested were those of Victorian morality, American optimism, and reverence for European “ Cul tu re.” As members of a new rising middle class not bound by family or region to the old traditions, but having access to literature and education, these writers rebelled against conventions which did not fit their lives. Freeman Champney has caught the spirit of the revolt in these words: Those who raised it [the intellectual-aesthetic outcry against the machine in the twenties] were aware o f some o f the devitalizing effects o f industrialism on the 148

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individual soul. But they were primarily concerned with enlarging their personal freedom and opportunities for “ self-expression.” What they had to express was usually a revolt against the pre-machine culture and folkways from which they were fleeing. They wanted no part of the stabilities and normative disciplines of this pre-machine America.2

Sinclair Lewis himself wrote in his Introduction to Main Street that his purpose was to expose “ our comfortable tradition and sure faith,” to “ betray himself as an alien cynic,” and “ to distress the citizens by speculating whether there may not be other faiths.” Most of the literature of the period was pessimistic in mood and reflected the author’s disillusionment with American values. It attacked industrial­ ism, preached regionalism and rural values, and in some cases, as those of A. E. Robinson and Robert Frost, seemed almost to ignore modernism and retire into a world of private meanings. Some of the writers such as Dreiser and Anderson devoted their sympathies almost entirely to the proletariat. Others such as Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and T. S. Eliot retreated back into the world of aristocratic values, a world which they had never completely left behind. For some of this group the return was marked by entrance into the Anglican church with its traditional aristo­ cratic associations. “ Most authors belonged to a class that was caught in an iron contradiction.” 3 Brilliant though this period was, it proved exceedingly short lived, and by 1930 every writer in the group had been severely criticized by a new and rising elite which differed in its conception of literature and society. All from well-to-do families, these writers, rejecting society and the ideal of reform, turned to art for a rt’s sake. The group included E. E. Cum mings, Robert Hillyer, Foster Damon, Malcolm Cowley, Elizabeth Rob erts, Glenway Westcott, Thornton Wilder, Archibald MacLeish, Joseph Krutch, Paul Engle, T. S. Eliot, Dudley Fitts, and many others, all of whom accepted what pleased them in society and ignored the rest. This shift from social to private values and interests reflects partly their disillu­ sionment with the war and partly their isolation from the activities and interests of the masses of the American people. The writers of the new generation broke with middle-class values, fled from their middle-class associations, and as the final assertion of their new freedom turned to the Bohemianism of Greenwich Village. Unable to force the acceptance of their standards, they repudiated society, cut their functional ties with all classes, and frankly proclaimed that the world of private meanings was the author’s only true province. Such an attitude was the inevitable result of their intellectual and emotional isolation from the rest of society. As a result the intellectual fell a victim to modern rootlessness and com part mentalization, the very currents and forces which were basic to his unrest.4

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The inevitable result of their withdrawal was the formation of small groups of writers, each with its own symbols and allusions, its own theory of art, its own technique. The official organs for the expression of these theories were the little magazines among which were such titles as Broom , Secession, C ontact, SN 4, G lebe, The Fugitive, Others, Palm s, Voices, Sm oke, The Little R eview , and many others. All in all over 600 such

publications have appeared in this country since 1912. These magazines, which have been termed “ the advance guard,” have introduced and sponsored every noteworthy literary movement in the past 30 years.5 They introduced 95 percent of the post-1912 poets and 80 percent of the critics, novelists, and story-tellers for the same period.6 There was good reason for the existence of such literary outlets in the simple fact that no respectable editor of a large publication could or would accept the litera­ ture of the group for publication inasmuch as most of it violated the codes and standards of his readers. A second group of writers grew up during this period who either came originally from lower-class families or had been catapulted into the lower classes by the depression of 1929. These writers espoused the revolution­ ary doctrines of Marxism and during the thirties created a sizable body of proletarian literature. The group had its own little magazines and its own critics. Instead of abandoning the fight for social reform, these writers actively championed the class struggle and in 1932 the League of Profes­ sional Groups for Foster and Ford drew up a statement signed by 52 intellectuals, endorsing Communist Party candidates. Michels’ article well describes the nature of this particular movement. Having, however, some expectation of socio-economic advance, the intellectual proletariat constitutes a transition class and reflects its characteristics. When this element is impatient or loses hope of improvement it may be absorbed by the lower classes. Poor persons of education become consciously antagonistic to the educated well-to-do. They furnish the yeast for social revolutions and champion the masses in the class struggle, which in part becomes a struggle for power o f two economically differentiated, educated classes.7

Although published in 1948 the following editorial comment from the newly-organized proletarian magazine, M asses and M ainstream, admira­ bly illustrates the stand taken by the revolutionary artist. Our specific intention is to fight on the cultural front, in the battle o f ideas. This is not a peripheral front. The American thought-controllers no less than the German book-burners want to beat into supine obedience the creative artist, the scientist, the educator. Honesty and independence o f intellectual judgment, already banned in the monopoly controlled cultural media, are to be hounded out o f American life. . . . We do not view our position as purely defensive. For

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the people’s resistance movement must also assert in a positive form the values of a progressive culture. . . . An art rooted in American reality must oppose the banalities and false images of cash-register culture. . . . To the cult of brutality and unreason we will counterpose a concern for people and for truth. Against the barbarisms of Jim Crow and Anti-Semitism we will set our passion for justice.8

II Such, briefly, was the development of American literature up to the second World War. The rise and fall of elite groups seem to have reflected the main economic and political currents of the times and the writings of authors and poets have been largely the expression of emerging social tensions. In this way it appears that the intellectual is but one manifestation of the working out of the social process. He is but one of many phenomena all of which express the forces of social change. The artist then cannot make change or produce revolutions, but, by virtue of his ability to articulate and interpret his own social experience, he performs the role of social catalyst and may act to speed or retard those changes which are already taking place. We may turn now to a description of the personality of the modern artist and the immediate conditions under which he has chosen to live and work. Both are related to his social origins and both interact to further influence the character of his work. The modern artist as an intellectual has been cast in the role of social critic. This fact has implications both for his personality and for his way of life. The artist is one who has cut himself off from the rest of society because that society failed to satisfy his own personal needs. Although a product of social conditioning, he is nonetheless an individual reacting in terms of a social situation as he interprets it and as it affects his private interests. As such he is a part of the dynamic element in social change. Champney appraises the personality traits of the intellectual as follows: The American intellectual as a type is largely devoid of enduring roots and stabilities in his country, among his fellow men and within himself. In terms of geography and family he is the restless son who went off to the big city and who can’t go home again. In terms of the social and cultural fabric o f national life he is the nonconformist, the critic, the dissenter, sometimes the crank or screwball. In terms o f his personal life he is a creature o f unstable integration and violent but impermanent commitments, with special occupational infirmities resulting from getting on and off bandwagons and playing crack the whip at the uncom­ fortable end of a party line. He lacks the securities and the organic bonds which he found it necessary to forsake and to break through in order to fulfill his destiny of becoming an intellectual. Lacking enduring social ties he also lacks enduring stabilities within himself.9

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These traits are marks of adolescence and identify the intellectual as one who is socially immature and who possesses in over-abundance the qualities of individualism, romanticism, idealism, irresponsibility, and love of adventure so characteristic of youth. They indicate that the artist is one who has been unable to satisfy the requirements of his society, who differs from the accepted norm and has fled to participation in a non-critical group which values his infirmities. Perhaps individualism is but “ the rationaliza tion of the impossibility of social conformity.” 10 If this is the case Bohemia should provide a type of social life congenial to those to whom such a life is denied by groups of more definite mores and dem ands.11 The style of life of the intellectual and artist is an adaptation as is that of any group, but in the case of the artist the adaptation is largely in terms of his own psychic needs rather than in terms of social functions and pressures. This is true in two ways: first, because the position of the intellectual in society is one of an outsider, society affects the patterning of his life style only insofar as it defines that which he is revolting against and thus refuses to imitate; secondly, because the chief value of the elite group is individualism, the individual has a much greater freedom of action even within his own group than does for example the school teacher or member of the clergy. In this way the life style of the Bohemian (and hence Bohemia) is much more a product and reflection of the personalities of individuals than it is the traditional accretion of time and custom. This peculiar quality of the group is also attributable in part to the fact that its membership is unreservedly open to any and all whose peculiarities, no m atter how bizarre, have made them misfits in their native social milieu. A discussion of Bohemia as the life style of the literary elite is not meant to imply that every artist is a dyed in the wool nonconformist. Although a great many writers have spent years as members of a Bohemian society others have not, and many who began their careers in a Greenwich attic have yielded to the temptations of fame and fortune and moved to a Connecticut farm house. However, the life of Bohemia is typical of the artist and an understanding of the artist’s relations to society is impossible without reference to Bohemianism as his style of life. Bohemia was not a new phenomenon in the twenties. It had had its origin nearly one hundred years before with a group of French romantic poets centering about Theophile Gautier and Gerard Nerval who sought to escape from middle-class standards and create a private world of immedi ate satisfactions.12 The life of these artists was immortalized by Murger’s Scenes de la Vie de Boh ême which later became the basis for the opera La Boh ême and served to popularize and glamorize into cult and doctrine the values of this protest group. The rise of Bohemianism also had its roots in the breakdown of the

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patronage system and this one factor has strongly influenced the status and role of the artist intellectual who can no longer count on a definite audience as he could in the past and is therefore both economically and psychologically insecure.13 For the modern artist Bohemia represented a practical means of survival in the face of his loss of class ties and promise of definite economic reward. It provided a means whereby he could live in squalor yet maintain his self-respect, in isolation from and opposition to society, yet with the esteem of his associates. Bohemia originated as a practical answer to the specific needs of individualists; it made an honor of the antagonism or indifference of an uncomprehending public.14 Bohemians are, generally speaking, recruited from two social areas. There are those who grew up in metropolitan areas, are for the most part members of minority groups, and come from proletarian or lower middleclass hom es.15They supply the membership of a large part of the ideologist groups of intellectuals and are faced with a severe conflict of ideals which cannot easily be resolved by compromise measures. As artists their chief values are those of individualism and self-expression. If Communists, they are tied to the uncomfortable end of a party line. This conflict of values has split the intellectual group into two opposing camps. The one has declared with more vehemence than ever that the artist must remain free of all political entanglements while the other looks toward the day when “ the dichotomy between poetry and politics will vanish and art and life will be fused.” 16 According to Wolpert17 the ideologists may be marked off into concentric circles shading from the dark red core of party members to the lighter pink of the missionary fellow traveler, and each taking in a larger area of American social structure. The central group is recruited from among the Bohemians of urban lower-class origin. Members of the second group who may, for example, occupy academic posts or pass as liberal journalists are drawn chiefly from the second important source of Bohemian recruitment, the small towns of the American heartland “ where native talent, be it genuine or illusory, is stifled by provincialism. Both lower and upper middle class recruits come to Bohemia from these towns. In their own class the bourgeois Bohemians are a tiny minority. It is a class in which conspicuous leisure and consumption makes possible the patronizing of arts and the intellect.” 18 Bohemians of middle and upper-middle class origin, while they may begin their free-lance careers in the Village as penniless social critics, may and often do, wind up on the staffs of large publications. If and when this shift occurs, these individuals abandon Bohemia and its style of life and acquire the manners, dress, and attitudes of the upper class graduates of fashionable Eastern colleges who form the nucleus of the staffs.19 Recruited from these major social areas, the avante guard Bohemian

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intellectuals, in the interest of survival, have formed well defined commu­ nities of their own in such cities as New York and San Francisco. “ Mar­ ginal men, the Bohemians, are paradoxically enough an elite proletariat in the original sense of the word. Outside the minuscule world of their shared values and manner of life, they are regarded either with benign philistine amusement or as a threat to faith and m orals.” 20 Attached to the artists and intellectuals who make up the heart of Bohemia are numerous hangers-on and fellow-travelers who for one reason or another find the atmosphere congenial or the environment useful. Among these are the pleasure seekers who find in Bohemia a freedom of action lacking in a more staid milieu—social climbers, seeking a way up on the social ladder, professionals seeking contacts, art dealers and restaurant owners out to make a killing on the tourists, and maladjusted of all kinds whose peculiar habits demand a more tolerant environment. From this discussion it becomes apparent that Bohemia is no ordinary group. In fact it differs from most groups precisely in those qualities by which groups are generally identified, in their ability to enforce social discipline and to impose standards and values. It is a group “ whose members are responsible to no one, whose purpose is to defend that irresponsibility and which has no other common purpose. . . .” 21 It is a heterogeneous rather than homogeneous group in many respects yet its disunity appears largely in the more obvious aspects of its nature. Actually there are many forces making for group cohesion and many traits, though perhaps not easily apparent, which are shared by its members. The very determination to be different is part of a code of behavior which makes individualism the group’s primary virtue. A second unifying element is their liberalism which is the natural result of the intellectual’s position as outsider and his consequently intense need for approval in a hostile world. This need also acts as a powerful motivator behind group loyalty and solidarity. Thus the group serves to perpetuate those qualities which characterize its incoming members and to provide both environment and technique, whereby the social dissenter may achieve a sense of dignity and social importance. The result has often been a sort of charlatanism, the affectation of a romantic pose, and the stereotyping of certain bizarre forms of behavior. The criteria for such patterns are not a rationally composed set of standards but tend to be merely a negative response to a rejected environment.22 The result is “ the emergence of modist cults and the over-estimation of mediocre talents.” 23 But Bohemia was not only a place and style of life, it embodied a doctrine which Cowley summarized as (1) the idea of salvation by the child (via modern education), (2) the idea of self-expression and creative individuality, (3) the idea of paganism, the body as the temple of love, (4)

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the idea of living for the moment, (5) the idea of liberty, a revolt against all conventions, (6) the idea of female equality, (7) the idea that repressions cause maladjustment and thus unhappiness, and (8) the idea of European artistic superiority.24 These ideas and the practices in which they found expression gradually worked up through the “ upper layers” of society where they gained prestige, then down and into the conventionally ori ented middle classes. The picture which emerges from this discussion is one of a constantly changing but ever-present elite group whose members are in declared opposition to many of the accepted and institutionalized values of their times. For many, intellectual elite status is but a temporary and youthful interlude followed by a return to convention, but elite status as such remains, and the social function of those by whom it has been temporarily or permanently occupied corresponds to what Max Weber in the fields of religion and politics called the charismatic leadership of society.25 The intellectuals are the self-styled interpreters of society, heralders of social change, foretellers of doom, the ralliers of progressive forces everywhere. Their leadership is not based upon expert knowledge. They are the holders of specific gifts of mind and spirit which are not accessible to the ordinary individual. The artist speaks from an inner compulsion, hence his insis­ tence upon freedom of speech and his refusal to undergo the discipline of party or doctrine. The following quotation admirably reveals the charis­ matic nature of the attitude which the poet takes toward himself and toward his work: “ Disfranchised by his lack of residence in any fixed constituency, wandering faithlessly in the no man’s land of his imagination, the poet cannot, without renouncing his essential function, come to rest in the bleak conventionalities of a political party.” 26 He addresses himself to society as a whole but more specifically to the small group of followers who are reached by the little magazines. He rejects pecuniary gain that is methodical or rationally acquired and would rather work in semi-starvation than engage in steady and respected employment. Never will the “ true” intellectual or artist exploit his charisma as a source of private gain, and the true Bohemian has a certain contempt for those of his fellows who align themselves with the commercial interests of uptown New York. The artist and intellectual can assume such a position successfully only because he stands outside the ties of the more mundane world, free from occupa­ tional routine and social obligations. In essence charismatic authority is unstable. The intellectual knows no legitimacy other than that provided by the recognition of his followers. Should this recognition fail, his position is lost, for he cannot deduce his authority from code or statute. He must constantly prove himself anew to his followers. His polemics against society must be comprehensible in

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terms of the life experience of at least a segment of society’s members. His followers are loyal to this inner vision of society and not necessarily to him as a person and certainly not to his office or position. Weber pointed out that it is the fate of charisma whenever it comes into contact with the permanent institutions of a community to give way to tradition, rational socialization, and discipline.27 The chief factor determin ing this routinization of charisma has been the desire of a particular social strata or interest group to legitimize and thus preserve their privileged position. Prestige and influence which were charismatically acquired are legalized and rationalized into a cosmos of acquired rights, duties, and functions. Allegiance no longer adheres to the individual but to his office or social position. That such rationalization has not taken place in the case of the intellectuals is largely due to the accessibility of intellectual status and the fact that intellectual leadership has so generally been in opposition to social restraints of any kind. In addition the social position of the artist intellectual has seldom been one which it would be to his great advantage to preserve and the artist by very definition has never been a practical man of affairs who would undertake its systematic institutionalization. It is precisely because the intellectual artistic elite have never been a governing or administrative group that they have escaped internal discipline and have as a group maintained their charismatic authority. Notes 1. Foreword by Malcolm Cowley in A fter the Genteel Tradition, American Writers Since 1910, ed. by Malcolm Cowley (1937), pp. 9-25. 2. Freeman Champney, “ The White Collar Man’s Burden,” Antioch Review, 1 (December 1941), p. 468. 3. Granville Hicks, The Great Tradition (1933), p. 213. 4. Champney, op. cit., p. 468. 5. Charles Allen, “ The Advance Guard,” Sewanee Review, 51 (July 1943), p. 410. 6. Ibid., p. 413. 7. Robert Michels, “ Intellectuals,” Encyclopedia o f the Social Sciences Vol. 8 (1930), p. 22. 8. M asses and Mainstream, 1 (March 1948), pp. 3 -4 . 9. Champney, op. cit., p. 463. 10. George Snyderman and William Josephs, “ Bohemia: The Underworld o f A rt,” Social Forces, 18 (December 1939), p. 192. 11. Ibid. 12. Malcolm Cowley, Exiles Return (1934), p. 65. 13. J. T. Wolpert, “ N otes on the American Intelligentsia,” Partisan Review, XIV (1947), p. A ll. 14. Snyderman and Josephs, op. cit., p. 188. 15. Wolpert, op. cit., p. 479. 16. Joseph Freeman in introduction to Proletarian Literature in the United S tates (1935), edited by Granville Hicks, p. 28.

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Wolpert, op. cit., p. 483. Ibid., p. 479. Ibid., p. 482. Ibid., p. 477. Snyderman and Josephs, op. cit., p. 190. Wolpert, op. cit., p. 478. Ibid. Malcolm Cowley, Exiles Return, pp. 69-71. For the discussion o f charisma upon which this judgment is based, see Max Weber, “ The Sociology of Charisma,” in From Max Weber: E ssays in Sociol ogy (1946), edited and trans. by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, pp. 245250. 26. Herbert Read, “ Art and the Revolutionary Attitude,” Southern Review, 1 (1935), pp. 239-40. 27. Gerth and Mills, op. cit., p. 253.

The Idea of Bohemia in Mid-Victorian England Christopher A . K en t , 1973

Bohemia is not just an artistic and literary phenomenon: it is a social phenomenon as well. But whoever looks for a definition of it in the Encyclopedia o f Social Sciences looks in vain. Such a significant omission makes one hesitate. Have the distinguished arbiters of social phenomena decided that Bohemia does not exist? Is it then so nebulous as to defy any attempt at analysis? The disappointed student turns to the Oxford English Dictionary with relief, for it directs him to a passage in Thackeray’s Philip (1862) where Bohemia is described as . . . a land of chambers, billiard rooms, supper rooms, oysters, a land o f song, a land where soda flows freely in the morning . . . a land o f lotos eating . . . a land where men call each other by their Christian names; where most are poor, where almost all are young; and where, if a few oldsters do enter, it is because they have preserved more tenderly and carefully than others their youthful spirits, and the delightful capacity to be ideal. I have lost my way in Bohemia now, but it is certain that Prague is the most picturesque city in the w orld.1

It is unmistakably the author’s voice speaking, and indeed Thackeray provides an excellent starting point for an examination of the Bohemia of mid-Victorian England. One point emerges particularly clearly from his definition—that Bohemia is a generation phenomenon: it is a country of youth. Thackeray’s nostalgic tones remind us also that most definitions of Bohemia are offered in retrospect by retired Bohemians. This accounts for a common theme in their definitions—that Bohemia no longer exists. A Westminster Reviewer in 1863 assures us that Bohemia is no more, while most recently in the August 1972 issue of Esquire , Michael Harrington mournfully proclaims that Bohemia died sometime around 1960—at about the time, we are not surprised to discover, that he reached the age of 158

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thirty. It seems that regular obituaries are the surest sign that Bohemia still lives. The origin of the term is of course French—Bohemia being, by French tradition, the homeland of the Gypsies (English tradition places their origins in Egypt). And it was in the 1830s, under the philistine monarchy of Louis Philippe, that it was adopted by the struggling young artists and writers of Paris whose life style, like that of the Gypsies, repudiated the norms of conventional society. Balzac was apparently the first to give the new term literary currency in his Un Prince de Boh èm e , but artistic Bohemia entered the consciousness of the general public with the publi­ cation of Henry Murger’s immensely popular Sc ènes de la vie de Boh ème in the 1850s. Thackeray, resident in Paris during the 1830s and well acquainted with its artistic and literary life, was among the first to import the term into England, using it in Vanity Fair , for instance. By the 1850s it was becoming fairly well established in English usage. In speaking of the English Bohemia, as of the French, we must distin­ guish between the myth and the reality. Much of the mythology of Bohemia is a literary commodity, valuable stock-in-trade to be purveyed by its inhabitants, especially to the bourgeoisie. This was certainly the case with Murger, who made a modest fortune from the transaction. The success was repeated in the 1890s by du Maurier with his nostalgic, semiautobiographical novel Trilby. The Trilby craze which ensued was a huckster’s delight: its residue remains with us in a type of hat. Another boom in the selling of Bohemia came in the 1920s, as Malcolm Cowley has recounted in his E x ile ’s R e tu rn . It is tempting to account for the cyclical nature of Bohemia by constructing a socio-economic model in which Bohemia and the bourgeois world seem to coexist in an uneasy symbiosis, with Bohemia much the more dependent partner, however. The one’s function is to defy, the other’s to provide the conventions, and to be shocked at defiance of them. The periodic crises in Bohemia occur when it has been oversold, and the bourgeoisie as a result of literary overexposure temporarily abdicate their responsibility of being shocked and begin to partake of Bohemia, though in a highly commercialized way. Certainly Bohemia has become a stimulus to consumption of a very different kind from that which it was associated with in the last century. Of course the myth and the reality are not so easily separated since the analysis must depend to a considerable extent on literary evidence. One may commence by asking who were the Bohemians of mid-Victorian England? The term “ Bohemian” is rather like the term “ intellectual,” a value-loaded one (indeed, they have an interesting overlap). The typically Bohemian professions are literature (including journalism), art and the theatre. The social analyst may be tempted loosely to denominate as

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Bohemians all who practise these professions, for the purposes of objec­ tive general classification. While this definition has its advantages from the macrocosmic viewpoint and also has validity insofar as it represents a commonly held view in society at large, it obscures the important fact that many writers, artists and actors would strenuously object to being called Bohemians. The phenomenon of artistic anti-Bohemianism is itself signifi­ cant. The obvious way of identifying the self-styled Bohemians is to commence with the biographical literature of Bohemia, which is quite extensive in the case of Victorian England. Books such as G.L.M. Strauss’s Reminiscences o f an Old Bohemian (1882) or George Sim’s Sixty Years Recollections o f Bohemian London (1917) are representative. Ram bling, inaccurate, often mendacious autobiographies of this type were often the last shot in the locker of old writers with indulgent publishers. But they rhyme off the names of artists, actors and writers, mostly quite forgotten, whose names, however, turn up regularly in Boase’s Dictionary o f English Biography , since their journalist friends usually managed to place an obituary in some journal or other, from motives of piety and profit, whence they entered Boase’s file. Indeed the work might aptly be called the “ Dictionary of Bohemian Biography” such is its value to the prosopographer of Victorian Bohemia. By following up these names one can begin to reconstruct their milieu. Their favourite geographical metaphor was Shakespeare’s celebrated blun­ der, the seacoast of Bohemia. This coast, such as it was, lay along the Thames, for England’s Bohemia was London. More specifically the equiv­ alent of the left bank was Soho and the area immediately north of it: Charlotte Street and Fitzroy Square were especially favoured by artists. Writers and journalists tended to congregate further east in Holborn, and around Fleet Street of course. The Inns of Court were a favoured habita­ tion for writers, one reason being that they were relatively quiet, shut off from the din of the streets, and barred to the street musicians who plagued the lives of many whose work demanded mental concentration. Colonies of theatre people existed in Islington, in Lambeth, and, further west, in Brompton. In my researches I have attempted to establish the topography of Bohemia by collecting the addresses of its inhabitants, but these changed very frequently. Impermanence of residence was part of their life style: sponging houses and debtor’s prison were also Bohemian addresses, as were their antidotes, Calais and Boulogne. But most permanent were the taverns and clubs where they congregated for social and professional purposes. The club is perhaps the quintessential institution of Victorian Bohemia. Of the great number that once existed some still remain—the Savage, the Garrick and the Arts. Of course Grub Street had its coffee house clubs in

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the eighteenth century, but in the nineteenth the club phenomenon ac­ quired a new dimension, becoming not only a semi-formal aid to convivi­ ality, but also a socio-economic appurtenance of gentility. The new clubs which sprang up after 1815, with their spacious clubhouses, libraries and dining rooms, were, as Bulwer-Lytton remarked in England and the English, an application of cooperative principles by the upper and middle classes to the improvement of their living standards. Thus a man with £200 a year who belonged to the Athenaeum could “ command the luxuries of a man of £5000” within its splendid confines.2 Not that the mid-Victorian Athenaeum, that intellectual Pantheon, was in any way Bohemian, though it had been specifically founded as a “ rendezvous for literary men and artists,” and most of its early members were by no means as eminent or prosperous as their successors. Similarly the Garrick, as it grew and prospered, acquired a considerable dignity. The newly founded Savage was the arch-Bohemian club of the 1860s: but by its twenty-fifth anniver sary the Prince of Wales was a member—technically, at least, a mark of respectability. Clubs reflected the change of a generation as their member ships grew older and more fussy in their standards. Younger men would found their own clubs, perhaps calling them “ the Junior.” The value of these clubs was considerable, even before the Licensing Acts of 1864 and 1873 enforced closing hours of first one a.m., then midnight on London public houses. Quite apart from unrestricted drinking hours the club provided a reasonable place to dine in a city notoriously short of restau­ rants until the end of the century. But it also afforded other psychological amenities useful to the existence of a gentleman—access to deferential servants, a decent postal address, a certain privacy, and even the dignity of property ownership, since each member was a shareholder in the club. Bulwer suggested that the club principle of cooperative living arrange­ ments might usefully be extended to the lower classes, and that flat-type dwellings with communal dining facilities, properly managed, were a possible way of improving their living standards. He particularly suggested that the less prosperous artists and writers, because of the irregular nature of their habits and their characteristic improvidence, would benefit from such arrangements. The idea was never put into practice, but Douglas Jerrold, one of the most interesting figures of early Victorian Bohemia and a prolific initiator of clubs, founded the Whittington Club in the 1840s as a social centre for city clerks and young men articled to the professions— employments which were notable breeding grounds for literary and artistic aspirations. One of its most striking features was that it admitted women members, thus answering the common criticism that clubs were disruptive of family life and even tempted men to remain single by affording them most of the domestic amenities of marriage.

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But most of the Bohemian clubs were only dining clubs; and some maintained only a private room or two at a hotel as their clubhouse (often provided free in return for regular patronage). Foreign literary observers such as Alphonse Esquiros and Julius Rodenberg almost inevitably re marked at length on the club phenomenon when writing of English society, being impressed by the peculiarly English combination of social solidarity and individualism which it represented. They frequently observed that the prevalence of such clubs reflected the absence of a sociable cafe and boulevard life which rendered such clubs unnecessary on the continent. Since clubs are rightly regarded as a significant element in the Victorian conception of the gentleman, one is led into the important issue of the connection between the gentleman and Bohemia. A revealing cause c é lebre of Victorian Bohemia was the expulsion of Edmund Yates from the Garrick in 1858.3 Yates, a clever young literary man on the make, and one of Dickens’ shield bearers, wrote in his small weekly journal Town Talk a gratuitously offensive character sketch of Thackeray, a fellow member of the Garrick. A short and acrid correspondence followed, in which Yates refused to apologize, so Thackeray instituted proceedings to have him expelled from the club for the ungentlemanly practice of retailing for gain the private conversation of fellow members, thus violating the sanctity of the club which Thackeray, a devout clubman, cherished deeply. The other members were sharply divided on the issue, which was further intensified by Dickens’ open support of his protege. Most of the older ones, the retired Bohemians, apparently took Thackeray’s side, while the younger tended to rally around Yates and Dickens (also a Garrick member, though not particularly active). Thackeray eventually won, but the bitterness created by the affair disturbed the short remainder of his life. Quite apart from the eminence of the principals involved, the affair is of interest because it illuminates a number of the tensions within Bohemia—genera tion conflict, conflicting social values, and the problem of social status of the Bohemian professions. The Garrick had been founded in 1831 ex pressly, according to its constitution, as a sort of social meeting place, a bridge between the professions and the gentlemen. Its artistic and literary members were particularly self-conscious about their own status, which it was part of the club’s raison d ’etre to elevate. Central to the Bohemian idea—certainly as first formulated in France under the July Monarchy—is a state of conflict between Bohemia and the bourgeoisie. Here again it is necessary to remain conscious of definitions, since “ bourgeois” is the technical term of a specific ideology, a widely used synonym for the middle class in general, and an artistic term connot ing vulgarity, insensitivity, and lack of imagination—to name but three of its most common uses. This third usage is particularly relevant to our

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concerns, but we must bear in mind that because this cultural stereotype, antithetical to artistic values, is largely the creation of Bohemia itself, the idea of a necessary conflict between Bohemian and bourgeois is in a sense tautological. Nevertheless the sometimes violently anti-bourgeois art, lit­ erature and theatre of French Bohemia were significant in volume and influence. This was much less true in England, where the gentleman ideal seems to have been an important mediating influence in the sense that, on the whole, the Bohemian professions and the middle classes in their different ways accepted it as worthy of emulation. It could be argued that such acquiescence in gentlemanly standards by the Bohemian professions tended to deprive them of self-respect, and inhibited the formation of a clearly defined and independently prestigious social position, such as was supposed to exist among artists in France. Certainly this was a view which Charles Dickens tended to promote. Thackeray and Dickens were the real antagonists in the Garrick affair, since the two leading literary figures of the age in a sense represented the polarities of Victorian Bohemia. Dickens, in particular, was the idol of young Bohemians, as Balzac was in France. His social origins, his brilliant success, his warm sympathies for less successful writers (witness his fund raising activities), his patronage of young writers as editor of H ousehold Words and All the Year Around (G. A. Sala in one of his books of reminiscences tells of Dickens periodically arriving like Father Christmas amongst the colony of young English journalists in Paris and taking them out to swell dinners)—all this contributed to his remarkable prestige not only among writers, but artists and actors as well. Yet in many ways Dickens was hardly a Bohemian, nor had ever been one. His philistine streak has often been remarked on, especially his attitude towards art. His earlier novels are cheerfully preoccupied with a manageable middle-class world of which he became increasingly uncertain as the tones of his later novels progressively darkened and, as Ellen Moers suggests, he became increasingly conscious of his own social position, and began to ask the dread question, “ Am I a gentleman?” 4 In the mid-1850s he was a leading propagandist of the Administrative Reform Association, that striking man ifestation of middle-class consciousness which erupted in indignation over the aristocracy’s mishandling of the Crimean campaign. He was even accused of preaching class antagonism in his speeches and writings. The extent of his commitment is underlined by his bitter comment to Macready, when the movement quickly fizzled out: “ We have no middle class . . . it is nothing but a poor fringe on the mantle of the upper.” 5 It was at this time that the so-called “ grey men” were beginning to appear in his novels—the isolated, declasse gentlemen such as Skimpole in Bleak House and Gowan in Little D orrit , both of whom, significantly, were artists: the

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former was an intentional caricature of the Bohemian Leigh Hunt; the latter possibly embodied references to Thackeray and to Dickens’ Bohe mian artist friend, Wilkie Collins. Both characters bear the stamp of the author’s disapproval, both are irresponsible, parasitical, dilettantish fig ures—Gowan, for instance, is a painter who “ sauntered into the arts at a leisurely Pall Mall pace.” To the limited extent that Bohemia appears at all in Dickens’ novels, it is a mean, anemic, rather disagreeable place, quite unlike the robust, generous and rather jolly Bohemia of Thackeray’s Pendennis, The Newcom es and Philip. Most of Thackeray’s Bohemians are gentlemen by birth and education: Arthur Pendennis, Clive Newcome and Philip Firmen, who reflect aspects of Thackeray himself, and minor characters like Fred Bayham (the name is a probable pun on Boh ème) or Foker, both portraits of Thackeray’s acquaintances. Unlike Dickens, Thackeray was strongly committed to the gentleman ideal; he did not believe that the artist or writer was entitled to exemption from its code (as he interpreted it). Thus in Pendennis George Warrington, Thackeray’s ideal literary gentlemanBohemian, bluntly cries out, “ A fiddlestick about men of genius. I deny that there are so many geniuses as people who whimper about the state of men of letters assert there are. . . . If an author fuddles himself I don’t know why he should be let off a headache next morning.” 6 Thackeray’s own view of Bohemia was somewhat ambivalent: since it was part of his own youth he could not disown it, yet he could not view it as the sine qua non of art. He had been fortunate and talented (and hard-working), yet he could not forget the less fortunate or less talented whom Bohemia had beguiled and destroyed. Thus in The N ew com es, J. J. Ridley, the modest, lower-class art student works diligently in the studio while Clive is out carousing in Bohemia, and it is he, not Clive, who becomes a great Academician. At the very time Pendennis was appearing Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton were organizing the abortive Guild of Literature and Art, which aimed at elevating the independent status of the literary and artistic professions by an effort of communal self-help. Thackeray rejected its premise that the artistic professions formed a special caste, let alone one with peculiar claims on popular sympathy. This was an affront to the dignity of his own ideal of the artist as gentleman. The relationship between Bohemia and the middle classes was not as clear-cut as the French model, with its assumption of built-in conflict, suggests. Dickens was a significant indicator of its middle-class polarity, but there were identifiable forces drawing it towards the middle classes. One of these was politics. English Bohemia did not renounce politics in disgust: it was actively involved not simply because politics were a dominant element in Victorian culture (and many of the literary Bohemians

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earned their livelihoods as parliamentary reporters and political journalists whose task it was to satisfy the enormous public appetite for political information). But the distinctive political interests of Bohemia actually coincided at important points with the ideology of middle-class liberalism: free trade in the theatre (the ending of the theatrical patent monopoly, licensing and censorship restrictions), free trade in knowledge (the aboli­ tion of the newspaper stamp and paper duties) and even free trade in art (criticism of the privileged Royal Academy). These causes were promoted with the same rhetoric of independence and laissez-faire as the more exclusively middle-class issues. Liberalism was the dominant political creed in mid-Victorian Bohemia, as Gladstone was to show by his open courtship of it. Even Thackeray when he stood for Parliament at Oxford in 1857 did so as a fairly advanced liberal. Bohemia was not immune to the commercial activities of middle-class life either. It is notable that in his “ Bird’s Eye View of Bohemia” the journalist J. G. Bertram speaks of a “ Commercial Bohemia,” a world of stock promoters and business speculators which half-repelled, half-fasci­ nated the artistic mind.7 This fascination lay in the realization that here too was a realm of the imagination inhabited by daring visionaries, and littered with shattered conventions. Business was not all a matter of brick warehouses, smoking chimneys and dissenting morality. A number of city financiers were members of the Bohemian Savage Club—perhaps because no respectable club would have them. It was the railway boom of the mid1840s that really introduced Bohemia to the financial arts; Bohemians were closely involved, because of the role of journalism in promoting the boom. Thomas Littleton Holt was one such Bohemian journalist who made a speculative fortune in the boom, founding the Iron Times , a railway finance journal, to ride its crest. Both fortune and journal disappeared in the subsequent collapse. The economics of Victorian journalism—especially after the abolition of paper duties—were very encouraging to Bohemian entrepreneurship. Journals were founded on as little as £5, and though they rarely succeeded, there was always the success of Punch and the Illustrated London News to lure the hopeful. Artistic Bohemia was also a beneficiary of commercial enterprise from the 1850s onward, with the explosive growth of illustrated books and journalism. A large body of artists were employed in drawing on wood (to say nothing of the engravers, many of whom like W. J. Linton or Walter Crane were artists as well) and such were the rates of pay that even leading academic artists were not averse to this commercial art form. The letters of George du Maurier provide an insight into this highly competitive area of Bohemia, whose great names were John Gilbert, John Leech and Charles Keene. The social insecurity of middle-class life was the standard

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butt of Victorian illustrated humour, typified in Punch , and here of course the middle class both provided the raw material and cheerfully consumed the product (which did not, however, have any of the savagery of the French school of social illustration). But the loftier realms of high art also benefited from joint stock capital­ ism. The Limited Liability Acts of 1855 and 1862 did a great deal to liberate the fortunes of successful industrialists from the financial demands of their own enterprise, thus terminating the ascetic stage of English capitalism. No longer compelled by the legal stringencies of full ownership or partner­ ship to keep their wealth locked into their firms, no longer necessarily burdened by the psychic strain of unlimited liability, they could now indulge themselves if they wished. Some of this liberated money flowed into the art market, where under the stimulus of flamboyant art dealers like Gambart, who quickly appeared to take advantage, a speculative boom was set of in the art market which, unlike many such booms, benefited contemporary painters. One of the most interesting artistic phenomena of the 1850s is the alliance between the avant-garde and wealthy North-of-England industrialists manifested in the patronage of the Pre-Raphaelite innovators by solid businessmen like T. E. Plint of Leeds, George Rae of Birkenhead and James Leathart of Newcastle.8 But at the same time that middle-class wealth was increasing its pull on Bohemia the opposing polarity of the gentlemanly ideal was reinforcing its attraction as well, with the appearance of university men in significant numbers in the Bohemian professions, particularly journalism. At this point one definition of Bohemia not mentioned in my introduction is perhaps relevant—the official Marxist definition which describes it as essentially a phenomenon of the intellectual proletariat.9 Whether there existed in Victorian England that surplus of educated men which is the precondition of such a proletariat is difficult to determine, and a matter of scholarly controversy today.10 It was also a lively issue at the time, when many conservative intellectuals nervously pointed to Germany and France, where intellectual over-production was believed to exist, and where under-employed, over-educated young men supposedly congre­ gated in their Bohemias to nourish their discontent, and to foment unrest. Certainly in England the expense, exclusiveness and physical isolation of Oxford and Cambridge encouraged neither the impecunious scholars, nor the unofficial student penumbra which existed under the more open university systems of France and Germany. The fact that London, unlike most continental metropolises, was not really a university city, was clearly important to the character of Bohemia and helps to account for its being more professionally oriented, and less speculative. The reform and expansion of the old universities from mid-century on

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did, however, send a growing number of young gentlemen into literature and the arts in search of a profession. A young Oxford man, Edward Burne-Jones, found assurance in The N ewcom es that the artist’s profes sion had its dignity.11 Graduates with journalistic inclinations were not drawn only to the stately Times and Saturday Review ; self-consciously Bohemian magazines like Fun and Tomahawk, which set themselves up in the 1860s against the middle-aged Bohemianism of Punch, had a surprising number of university and public-school men on their staffs, though many were amateurs in that they also held civil-service clerkships. Overcrowding is a traditional professional complaint in the arts, as elsewhere, but the university men were apparently absorbed quite easily, because the econ­ omy of mid-Victorian Bohemia was fairly prosperous. I am inclined to agree with the Marxist contention that a significant intellectual proletariat did not exist in England at this time, though without accepting the necessary Marxist conclusion that Bohemia itself did not, therefore, exist. For on the evidence of its inhabitants, it did, and the young university gentlemen, with their well-polished, anti-middle-class snobberies helped to counteract the dangerous attraction of middle-class values for Bohemia, thus contributing to its continued existence. Notes 1. W. M. Thackeray, Works (New York: Scribners, 1911), X, 221. 2. E.G .E.L. Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English (London: Saunders & Otley, 1840), p. 257. 3. See Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The A ge o f Wisdom (New York: McGrawHill, 1958), pp. 279-90. 4. Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1960), p. 230. 5. See Olive Anderson, A Liberal State at War: English Politics and Economics During the Crimean War (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 107, 123. 6. Thackeray, Works, III, 524. 7. [J. G. Bertram], Glim pses o f Real Life as seen in the Theatrical World and in Bohemia: Being the Confessions o f Peter Paterson, a Strolling Comedian (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1864), p. 282. 8. William Gaunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1942), p. 70. 9. Albert Parry, Garrets and Pretenders (New York: Dover, 1960), p. xxiii. 10. See F. Musgrove, “ Middle Class Education and Employment in the Nineteenth Century,” The Economic H istory Review, 12 (1959), 99; also H. J. Perkin’s criticism o f this article, Ibid., 14 (1961), 122; and Musgrove’s rejoinder, Ibid., 321. For the situation in Europe see Lenore O ’Boyle, “ The Problem of an E xcess o f Educated Men in Western Europe, 1800-1850,” Journal o f Modern H istory, 42 (December 1970), 471. 11. [E. Burne-Jones] , “ The N ew com es,” Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, I (January 1856), 56-57.

Bohemia: Its Ideology and Control Mark Benney, 1955

I picked up recently a novel by Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim. Mr. Boden heim, you will remember, was murdered in Greenwich Village a few years ago. I was sufficiently interested in Mr. Bodenheim to read it, whereupon I had a most traumatic experience. It was a novel about life in a Chicago Bohemia. Ten years after this was written I had written a novel about life in a London Bohemia. The reason it was such a traumatic experience to read Mr. Bodenheim’s book was that both books were appallingly bad. Both books dealt with exactly the same theme, with exactly the same mythology underlying it. How could I, an unknown inhabitant of a London Bohemia come up with exactly the same cheap, shoddy view of life as Mr. Bodenheim? Mr. Bodenheim deals with a noble thief who has literary ambitions, goes through an upper-middle-class Bohemia and marries a virtuous prostitute. And so does my book. Both of them on the way contrive to produce a kind of contrast between the virtuous peasant who had a spontaneous appreciation of poetry and literature and a sophisticated upper-class woman. Both elements are necessary for the poet’s sexual experience, but only one can really be the mistress of his soul. This was in Mr. Bodenheim’s book, and there it was in almost the same words in my book. What was there about modern civilization, the arts, the city, that could produce two such very different urban congregations, such marked similarity of mood, style, and myth? This was one problem that kept Bohemias on my mind. Simultaneously, and more important for the seminar, I met a Chicago journalist who told me that this summer there will be thirty-two art fairs held in and around Chicago. Five years ago there may have been one. Something has happened in the Chicago complex to make art fairs a blooming new institution. This seems to be something that should be investigated. Now, art has always been related to Bohemias and I started thinking of them in a slightly broader context. I ’ve had on my mind all 168

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year the idea that the social sciences should take advantage of this wonderful opportunity to study some of the problems of what produces new institutions in our society, if the art fairs can be called a new institution! We might follow the old tradition of going out to see what is happening. One of my hopes is that I can use this occasion to interest some of you in doing some research during the summer. Everything else I have to say is really in the nature of very tentative and unsystematic thinking on the subject. It seems to me that we can make excellent use here of [Robert E.] Park’s frame of reference of the city by regarding Bohemia as one of the natural areas. But it obviously won’t carry us very far. In the few comments which I have read, he thought of Bohemia in a good middle-class romantic way. He uses phrases like “ the place of youth and disenchantment” to describe it. He mentions Bohemia whenever he mentions the concept of the natural area, but he never says much about the functions it performs. One of the definitions of the natural area, as contrasted to an unnatural area, is that it performs one of the permanent functions which arise out of the basic coming together of people in large groups. While we should look at Bohemia as a natural area, the functions that Park seems to suggest for it, of providing a place of gay experimentation for poor young people who can’t afford anything better, is not really an adequate approach to the subject. Cities are instruments as well as effects of social change. Mr. Hughes has made us aware that before we can have any social change there has got to be a change in individual behavior. There have to be changes in the role definitions of institutions that are either growing or decaying. Provision for changes of role definition in various areas becomes one of the necessary functions of city life. I want to suggest that the function of the metropolitan Bohemia is to provide a relatively segregated laboratory where experiments in role definition and role playing occur with minimum effect on the world until a social need arises for them. The Bohemia of the modern city plays the same kind of role in our economic and political life that Weber tells us the monastery played in medieval times. It’s a place where the currency of role change can be kept in reserve until need arises for its more general circulation. I want to pursue this a bit further and suggest that if we look at the recruitment of Bohemias, we see that the coin of the individual role has two faces. The public face shown to the outside world tends to be the face of art, which is the acceptable definition of role change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A very strong part of the public image of Bohemia is that it is a place where artistic enterprise can go free and untrammeled. How this definition of the artist arose, though not unrelated to Bohemia, is a separate strand of the story. I want to suggest that the real function of Bohemia, which goes on behind the façade of art life, revolves around the

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two poles of sexual redefinition of roles and politico-economic redefinition of roles. Bohemia essentially consists of three kinds of people: people who have new political economic ideas and are working them out into a style of life, people who are experimenting in new sexual relationships and are working them out, and the artist, the poet, and the playwright who exist in the total picture as an acceptable front which allows the general public to tolerate the existence of this laboratory, because art must always be encouraged. This allows the function of role playing to proceed almost unnoticed. I say almost unnoticed because if one looks at such a place as Greenwich Village over the years you see that at one time it becomes popularly interesting; at another abhorrent, because it’s the place of socialistic theory. The M asses and the New M asses were both products of Greenwich Village. If we look at these respective faces, we find that they don’t occur simultaneously. If we pursue this line of thought we can see that the existence of a group of painters, writers, and poets don’t make a Bohemia. I think perhaps the best example of this is the attempt in Philadelphia in the late 1890s by good Philadelphians to produce a Bohemia of their own. There is a wonderful periodical that I ran across recently called the Bohemian. It begins with a kind of manifesto saying that essentially the bohemian is a jolly good companion and this is what we want more of in Philadelphia. H e’s a good talker and a patron of the arts. Now Philadelphia has always been the center of artistic enterprise in the U.S. But within about six issues, the Philadelphian bohemian has been given a kind of sexual definition. In the last and sixth issue we find that a good bohemian is a person of refinement, who believes that only the bad conventions should be broken and not the good ones, and that essentially bohemianism is not something for girls to play around with. Bohemianism should be redefined as that period of the life of the bachelor when he drinks beer out of cups, put his feet on the mantle piece, and talks till two in the morning. With that, the Bohemian folded up, and we’ve heard the last of Philadelphia Bohemia. If you look to see where and in what circumstances in the city Bohemias arise, you find that they occur in what Park and Zorbaugh called the Gold Coast area. People go into Bohemias to find an audience, not an audience in Bohemia but an audience outside of it. The politicos are looking for an audience in the discontented masses. The sexual experimentalists are looking for lonely middle-class people, and the artists, God bless them, are looking for rich patrons. There are very few parts of the city where you find a natural collocation within easy distance of all three types. The areas where slums and gold coasts occur are usually divided by rooming houses where lonely isolated middle-class victims of the industrial order tend to live, and this is true of the Chicago Bohemia, of Greenwich Village,

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of London, and of Paris. There is also a tendency for it to be located near a university. Greenwich Village had its university. Soho in London didn’t really become a Bohemia until London University was founded nearby. Paris had the Sorbonne near the original Bohemia though not near the new one. Chicago Bohemia was also adjacent to a university. There is a fascinating history attached to the Bohemias of older cities. In both Paris and London the areas that were ultimately settled upon as Bohemias seem to have arisen out of the old medieval liberties, where the legal organization of small cities of the day were in conflict with their neighbors. It became an obviously worthwhile thing to do if you were in any way a deviant or a criminal, to live in one jurisdiction and to work in another. If you look at the distribution of crime in London, you find the heaviest concentration in four areas surrounding the old city boundaries, which were the chief rival jurisdictions of the City of London. Very early these areas have been associated with criminal settlements. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre was situated on the right side of the city, outside its boundaries, because the Puritans in their anti-fun-loving way, forbade theaters within the city and sent these criminal play actors into rival jurisdictions. We also find that playwrights and scribblers of all kinds tend to move into the old monastic tenements, which were then taken over by lay landlords. They fought hard and long to preserve the legal sanctuary that most such property had in London and other cities. Places which had been church property became the centers of a new literary brotherhood. There is a tendency in reading literary history to confuse Grub Street with Bohemia. I think we have to reject this idea because of the audience they were addressing. The writers who lived around the Sorbonne were all addressing an aristocratic audience and felt like inferiors. The later Bohe mia addressed the bourgeoisie and did so in an accepted way, as somehow in their own field superior to their audience. This makes for many of the characteristics of free behavior which we associate with Bohemia. A subsequent stage both in London and in Paris was the mass political migrations of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. As cities grew they developed foreign quarters. These were areas in which all behavior was strange. It was difficult to distinguish between foreign behavior and new behavior. It was from these quarters that the political theorists came so that the definition of Soho, which wasn’t associated in any sense with older Grub Street, arose out of the new foreign immigration into London, and gave Soho its particularly political emphasis. Of all the Bohemias that are around, the London Bohemia is the most cerebral and the least exciting. Foreign immigrants chose the poorer quarters of the city. Once painters and playwrights were released from their aristocratic

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patrons and had to seek more-popular patrons, they too had to look for poorer quarters. They had to live much more on the streets than they had done before. The economic allocation of art and foreignness became almost inevitable. Again, this seems to be true of Greenwich Village. We have, it seems to me, three or four conditions before a Bohemia can be established in any city. One is a well-marked area of foreign immigration. Another is the presence of political refugees. A third is the more general one of loneliness and dissatisfaction with the sexual roles imposed by an industrial culture. Albert Parry makes the point that American Bohemias take off from du Maurier’s Trilby. Within about four or five years of publication, Trilby cafes opened in every little city of America. Women leave home and take a studio apartment. This is one of the very few books whose direct effects upon patterns of social change can be verified. Now Trilby in a very romantic way emphasized the sexual aspects of Bohemia. Within a year or two Bohemia became the great battle ground of the “ new woman” in her behavior to the old man. The reaction against bohemianism apparent in the 1900s was very much oriented towards its sexual freedom. Ten years later when Greenwich Village became the undisputed Bohemia of the U.S., its political experimentation mattered most. In both cases, the justification of Bohemia is always in terms of art: we m ustn’t attack the bohemians because after all they produce poetry, they produce painting and novels, and this is good. The problem for the “ new woman” is the possibility of art without sexual experimentation. The problem for the young man is art without political experimentation. The bohemians, each in their turn, answer no. The popularist in his turn answers yes, and the struggle goes on. Although I ’ve given a very passive role of front man to the artist, I don’t think that’s true so much in Europe as in America. Soho sheltered Karl Marx for a long time. The Paris Bohemia sheltered a whole string of sexual deviants and had a great effect on the sexual morality of Paris and all of France. Painters by and large played very little part in this. I think in America one can see many more clear-cut effects of Greenwich Village throughout the country. I ’d be prepared to defend the thesis that the reason there are black wire magazine racks in Cincinnati homes is because poor people in Greenwich Village had to experiment with the nearest discarded materials at hand in furnishing their cold-water apartments. This is to be seen in almost any American home, whether you look at the solid cushions on the settees or the studio couch in the guest room or even in the layout of magazines people read. There are many more clear-cut effects than you can see in Europe. By and large European artists have not been bohemian. In England the poets, playwrights, and novelists have been members of the upper-middle classes and have lived normal respect­

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able lives. In France the painters have lived for a period in the Sorbonne. Certainly French dramatists moved out of bohemian circles as fast as they have been able to. The typical bohemian cafes in which you meet the more renowned artists were always away from the bohemian areas and nearer the theaters. Now all this is very tentative and generalizing. I ’m looking for forms in a difficult complex subject. I would agree with Park that Bohemias are great centers of change. Oddly enough, the only people who have given serious attention to Bohemias have been the Marxists. Both Lenin and subsequent theoreticians took Bohemias very seriously, in part because they had to experience them. The only body of social theory that has an integral place for the Bohemia is in Marxist theory. This is exemplified by the fact that the article on Bohemia in the Encyclopedia o f the Social Sciences is a very meager and almost nonexistent one. In the Russian encyclopedia which came out in 1930, there is a forty-page article on them, very elaborately theoretical. But certainly, there seem to be grounds for proposing that as a source of social change Bohemias are worth our closest attention.

The Upper Bohemians Russell Lynes, 1953

In a twilight zone in our society, neither below the aristocracy nor above the middle class, lives a somewhat ornamental and by no means inconse­ quential group of Upper Bohemians. They are a reasonably constant element in a social structure that has some of the qualities of a feather bed. In the center of the bed lies the great body politic, and when this body rolls over slightly, as it does from time to time, our society takes on a new shape. No matter how conscientious may be our efforts to be classless, the leveling off process when it pushes down a social tuft here pushes one up over there. For a nation that prides itself on the democratic premise that one man is as good as another, we produce a remarkable number of aristocrats and a remarkable variety of aristocracies. Unlike the upper classes of Europe which maintain some kind of permanent if uneasy tenure even when their fortunes are impaired, our upper classes constitute a highly fluid aristoc­ racy with its feet in quicksands and its head in storm clouds. Today’s aristocracy is more than likely to be tomorrow’s middle class, and our middle class is constantly tossing up new and somewhat astonished aris­ tocrats. When, for example, we lopped off the heads of the old moneyed aristocracy by taxes, we produced an expense-account aristocracy to take its place; when we more or less laughed out of countenance the old aristocracy of breeding, we nurtured a new one of industrial tycoons. Just now we are beginning to see the rise of an entertainment and communica tions aristocracy which embraces not only the Goldwyns and the Skour ases, the Sarnoffs and Luces, the Bentons and Bowleses, but also the cream of the talent that serves them in their movies, television, radio, publications, and advertising empires. The Upper Bohemians regard this ebb and flow of aristocratic tides with detached amusement because they consider themselves to be genuinely unconcerned with the social ladder. I should like to venture briefly into 174

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their twilight zone and look at their habitat and their mores. I do not believe that they have been defined before, and it is my hope that this preliminary invasion of their privacy may tempt some qualified social scientist, who is endeavoring to make the quixotic structure of our society seem reasonable, to find a handy pigeonhole for some of my best friends— who least like to be pigeonholed. In Bohemian society it is the convention to look upon all conventions, all codes of behavior, and all rules of taste as matters never to be taken for granted. Conventions by their very nature are regarded with suspicion, for on the surface they seem to have been devised only to obscure and make palatable man’s basic inhumanity to man. It is the convention of Bohemi anism to say, “ To hell with all that; we live by the rules of our own m orality.” Traditionally the Bohemian is a romanticist with his eyes raised to the higher truths of art and nature, a walking protest against social sham and all sorts of rules of behavior. He is a man in search of the truth who finds it in the cold north light of a studio garret. There he makes love and poetry and song and worries about his soul; he does not fret about tomorrow or yesterday or about wealth or position or any of the cushions of life that we now group under the unromantic heading of Security. This is the “ Vie de Boh èm e” or simon-pure kind of Bohemianism of song and story, of the old Left Bank and the old Greenwich Village, of Murger and berets and beards. It is a far cry from the Upper Bohemianism of today, though some of the romanticism remains, some of the soul-searching, some of the manner isms of social revolt, or at least of social eccentricity. The Upper Bohemi ans look down on the new aristocracies, or perhaps they look sideways at them. In either case they couldn’t exist without them. But let me explain, if I can, who they are and what place they occupy in our social panoply and what their function is. Perhaps I can best do this by introducing you to a few of them at the risk of your already knowing them as well as I do or better. Mr. and Mrs. U. B. happen to live in New York, though you might as easily meet them in Cincinnati or Chicago or Los Angeles; you are not apt to find more than a handful of their like in smaller cities or towns. Their house is a remodeled brownstone, possibly somewhat modernized on the outside but still largely indistinguishable from the other houses in the block. If you were to peer through the living-room window, you would notice that they indulge in rather definite and slightly odd colors on the walls, have rather more than the usual number of books, some drawings and probably a painting or two—one an abstraction and one a somewhat unconventional landscape—and possibly a mobile. Their house is not in a

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currently fashionable part of town; it is not close to Park Avenue, for instance; but neither is it in an unfashionable district, nor a socially improper one. They live, one might say, not quite on the fringe but, rather, on the verge. The twilight of residence between the fashionable and the worthy is their natural habitat out of conviction. They do not want to be classified. Mr. U. B. is a publisher, though he might as easily be a lawyer, or writer, or an architect, or an editor, or, but less likely, a business man. If he is in business, the chances are that he is in advertising or some other form of communications, though there are a few Upper Bohemians in any big business, free spirits who are models of buttoned-down-collar conform ity on the job but quite independent of their business associates and deportment from five o ’clock on. In his professional life Mr. U. B. usually moves in and out of the arts or near them, but in any case he calls them by their pet names and is alive to their latest alarums and excursions. He is aware of what exhibitions are on 57th Street, what plays are current and imminent, and he has definite convictions about which ones he will bother to see and which he will eschew. The same might be said of his attitude toward current books, motion pictures, and ballet. He is culturally hep, but he is not a cultural hepcat. Many things interest him but few things “ send” him. He is a sophisticated patron of the arts, so sophisticated that for the most part he lets other people gamble on them. His discriminating taste in paintings and books and furniture has nothing, he is convinced, to do with fashion; it has only to do with permanent quality. He is not likely to be a collector in any orderly or elaborate way; that sort of thing he leaves to the aristocrats who collect under the guidance of a dealer and who have, he believes, no taste of their own. He is merely an acquirer of miscellaneous items of artistic or literary interest. For this reason his house is customarily furnished with a chef’s salad of a few modern pieces and a good many old, “ amusing” ones—nineteenth-century Gothic, for example—and just plain comfortable and unclassifiable and well-made upholstered pieces that by no standards of taste are “ objectionable.” Mr. U. B. wouldn’t be caught dead reading House and Garden or House Beautiful. He is not in the least worried about his taste or concerned with being told what is chic. He might, on the other hand, subscribe to an architectural magazine because he is interested in changes in style. He makes a sharp distinction between fashion and style. Anyone can follow fashion, he believes; only a man of taste can distinguish style. His wife, Mrs. U. B., shares this attitude, as is evidenced most clearly by her manner of dress. She isn’t above peeking into Vogue or Harper s Bazaar though it is usually to complain about what she finds there. She dresses in her own style, which is likely to be a slightly eccentric version

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of what other women are wearing and may even be a “ thing” she has picked off the rack at Klein’s or Ohrbach’s and endowed with her own touch. Her costume jewelry is “ Victorian heirloom” or extravagantly fake in order that it may make no pretense of looking like real jewelry. Ideally she would like a piece of brass cut into a mobile by Alexander Calder, big and bold and defiant, but short of that, a chunk of Mexican silver or even small jadeite rocks or something that looks like an old bedspring will suffice. But whatever it may be, it is not a cheap copy of something expensive. Expensive conventional jewels, like expensive furs, are, she believes, a mere matter of publishing one’s bank balance on one’s person. That is for the socially pretentious or the socially insecure, not for her. Furthermore she discards garments that merely have what she derisively calls a “ well bred” or a “ ladies’ club” look. She owns a hat (“ In case I need it for a funeral or something . . .” ), but never wears it if she can help it, which she usually can. Her husband’s dress is not eccentric, but it is casual. The tweed jacket and slacks as a costume for office wear were almost surely introduced not by sportsmen, who are strong adherents to the conventional costume for the proper occasion, but by Upper Bohemians who put comfort and casualness before routine propriety. The Upper Bohemian would not, however, wear the loud be-palmed and be-flowered sport shirt with its abbreviated tails hanging outside his slacks; his country play clothes are more likely than not to be the true countryman’s work clothes. Not long ago I saw on a railroad platform in rural Connecticut what I consider the quintessence of Upper Bohemian male attire—army shoes, a red-andblack checked woolen shirt, and dungarees. From the wearer’s watch pocket hung a Victorian gold chain dangling a Phi Beta Kappa key. From their outward appearance you will see that Mr. and Mrs. U. B. are more confident and more free-and-easy about their taste than are the members of the various aristocracies who depend on decorators to give consistency and style to their homes (or rely on accepted conventions) and couturiers to embellish their persons. But how do they live? What goes on in these somewhat eccentric houses and in these unconventional clothes? II Let us look first at some of the more superficial aspects of Upper Bohemian life before we attempt to see what lies beneath the casual surface. The surface, first of all, is casual; life in the Upper Bohemian household is studiedly informal. It might almost be said that an Upper Bohemian will always sit on the floor in preference to a chair in any room

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where a group is gathered, no matter how many chairs there may be. He also prefers his dinner on a card table in the living-room to sitting at a dining-room table conventionally accoutered. His attitude toward servants (though he would be unlikely to refer to anyone as a servant, lest the word sound patronizing) is cozy rather than pretentious. He doesn’t care a fig about maids in black dresses and white aprons: that is merely sham for sham’s sake. He would always rather have a rough and ready type who is “ an instinctive cook” than a trained maid who understands the art of waiting on table. He wants his meals when he wants them, and he has a special intolerance of anyone whose life is dictated by what he calls “ a tyranny of servants.” In his mind the only justification for service is to make life more relaxed, not more formal, though if he happens to be well off (which he not infrequently is) his parties may be well staffed and rather quietly elegant. This relaxed attitude toward convention is typical of the Upper Bohe­ mian and basic to an understanding of his behavior. But there is in his mind always a good reason for unconventionality, for he is not sloppy in his manners. He merely thinks of manners of all sorts as an expression of good will, not of good training. He treats his friends in a somewhat offhand and casual way which he expects them to accept as a sign of affection. He assumes that they are perceptive of his moods and do not need to be treated like strangers or children; they should know that if he disliked them he would be elaborately polite to them. Only rarely, only when provoked, and only to a member of one of the aristocracies, would he be elaborately rude. If he is a true Upper Bohemian and a serious one, he scarcely dares to let down the bars that separate him from the conservatism of the new aristocracies or from what he would call the “ middle-class moralities.” His horror of the philistinism of Main Street is exceeded only by his amusement at the cultural pretensions of Park Avenue and Beverly Hills and Westchester. He looks upon all culture but his own, all other standards of behavior, and all other measures of success with tolerant suspicion. Other people are likely to underestimate the importance of the Upper Bohemians, the Upper Bohemians are likely to overestimate themselves. Their number is not legion, and yet there are more of them than one might suspect from a superficial look at one’s own community or one’s friends. I have suggested that they are most likely to be found in fairly sizable and large cities, but you will find them also wherever there is an academic community, such as, for example, Princeton, New Jersey, which is within difficult but possible commuting distance of a metropolis. Some of the Upper Bohemians in such a community are directly connected with the university, but many others have moved there because they like the

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pleasant breeze of intellectualism that blows off such an academic reser voir. They enjoy the opportunity to number among their friends those whose profession requires them to think in large and abstract terms about the arts or about the state of the world, and they like to mingle with others who put, often perforce, the satisfactions of the mind and spirit ahead of those of social status. While there is social status within a university (indeed, there may be no other society save the Army so rigidly classified), the scholar is to the world outside the university a classless man, and so the Upper Bohemians find him congenial. You are unlikely to find the Upper Bohemian in the suburbs which closely surround big cities; if he is a suburbanite (a name he would abhor) he lives in the more inaccessible and peripheral suburbs, so that he and his wife can enjoy the freedom of the country without fear of being observed over the back fence by neighbors. They want to sunbathe stark naked if they feel like it. You will not, however, find them in a remote suburb in which there are no others of their own kind. Upper Bohemians are no less gregarious than most people, though they are strong in their protestations of independence and confident of their ability to keep them­ selves entertained. They are not joiners and are likely to shun country clubs, ladies’ clubs, civic organizations, and all other forms of what they consider artificially contrived social media. It doesn’t occur to them that the fact that they run in droves, that any party they may go to is likely to consist of the same dozen or so couples making the same kinds of conversation (art, politics, music, books) over the same kinds of drinks (martinis, bourbon, wine and soda) is very like the country-club pattern without the country club. Wherever an Upper Bohemian may travel in this country or abroad he will, if he sticks to the sizable cities, always land with his own kind. There is a sort of unacknowledged and unofficial grapevine by which he travels, and if he goes from New York to Denver or San Francisco, for instance, he finds himself with letters of introduction to a business-man-poet or a physician who paints, and he will soon be taken to the bosom of the local Upper Bohemia. Furthermore he will discover that nearly everyone he meets knows a friend of his or a friend of a friend. This same grapevine will lead him to his own kind in London, Paris, and Rome; he can go anywhere without ever leaving Upper Bohemia more than a day’s journey ahead or behind. The Upper Bohemian might be willing to concede that he is something of an intellectual snob. He does, after all, set more store by intellectual pursuits than does any other class except the professional academics and the artists. If he lives geographically in a sort of social no man’s land, he also lives in a sort of intellectual neutral zone. He thinks of himself as a

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bridge between the bright light of intellectualism and the artificially illumi nated world of affairs. His conversation bears this out. Unlike most peoples’ conversation which proceeds from the general to the specific, from “ How’s business?” to the price of gaskets, his is apt to go from the specific to the general. A casual remark about a tomato is likely to end in a heated discussion of the comparative values of organic gardening, or a reference to a Buick to a speculative argument about the state of American industrial design. The Upper Bohemian likes to see things in the large and to savor their implications. The same might be said of his attitude toward his children. Children are problems before they are people, and as a parent he is full of theories about the rounded development of the complete personality. For this reason he inclines toward progressive schools and away from traditional institutions. He encourages his children to call him and his wife and their friends by their first names, and to engage in adult conversations which as often as not mystify and benumb them. This is part and parcel of his theory that every child is a little adult whose mind should be stretched and whose interests should parallel his parents’. This forced growth and over-insis tence on intellectual interests in some cases breeds hardened little Philis tines and in other cases monstrous little prodigies; it also breeds its fair share of average children. The Upper Bohemian attitude toward sex may be summarized as openminded. He is not a defender of promiscuity, but he maintains such a tolerant attitude toward other people’s behavior that he often finds it exceedingly difficult to make clear-cut decisions for himself. When an Upper Bohemian talks about his doctor, it is a safe guess that he is as likely to be talking about his psychiatrist as about his physician, but his readiness to seek psychiatric advice is probably sound. Because the Upper Bohemians recognize the uses of psychiatry, I doubt very much if the incidence of mental breakdown among them is as high as it is among the aristocracies or the middle classes, who think of psychiatrists as witch doctors. There may, however, be a quite different reason for this stability. The Upper Bohemian is essentially secure in his social position. He is more likely to be interested in keeping even with “ the people” than up with the Joneses. Ill To understand this we must retrace our steps for a moment and consider the origins of the Upper Bohemian. What is it that endows him with this

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sense of security that makes it possible for him to stand apart and look at other strata of society, to consider their mores, and to fashion a style of living and a code of belief out of his distrust for theirs? L et’s see where he came from and how he has got where he is. The Upper Bohemians do not lend themselves to statistical analysis (at least they do not lend themselves to me for this purpose), but they come mainly from two socially secure segments of society. It would be my guess that the largest number are the sons and daughters of the professional classes, the offspring of the law and medicine, of academics and clergy­ men. They have been brought up in an atmosphere in which the achieve­ ments of the mind have been put ahead of the achievements of the bank balance—if not actually, then at least conversationally and by precept. It is well, in this connection, to remember that there is always in the back of the mind of the professional man the comforting thought that if he is not a financial success he can without losing face be an “ interesting intellec tual” ; no one holds it against an intellectual that he hasn’t made money; on the contrary, it is unfashionable for him to do so. When, however, a professional man makes a great deal of money, as writers and architects occasionally do and lawyers do far more often, he is likely to regard this bonanza as something over and beyond his real satisfactions in life and not essential to them. In this respect he is obviously quite distinct from the business man who, when he has accumulated his wealth, then looks around at the cultural ornaments of life and decides in which ones he would like to indulge. So it is out of professional families that I believe the largest number of today’s Upper Bohemians have come. They have been brought up to mistrust the kind of life in which money and the ostentation that it can buy are all-important. During the past ten or fifteen years the status of the intellectual in America has risen considerably in the social scale, as I have pointed out in another essay,1 so that today’s progeny of yesterday’s intellectuals have a newly built-in social position. In order to maintain this status and not let it become confused with other and to them less distin guished social groups they have formed their own . . . though they would be the last ones to recognize how neatly stratified they have become. Also into the Upper Bohemian group have migrated the intellectually inclined sons and daughters of the rich who are embarrassed about Father’s lack of what they would call “ any real culture.” They come from a socially secure group well versed in the gentle amenities of decorous behavior and well able to give their children all of what are known as “ the advantages.” These scions of wealth and manners are refugees to Upper Bohemian from the upper classes, seeking sanctuary from aristocratic stuffiness.

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The third main reservoir of recruits for Upper Bohemia is more difficult to define because it has no single character and no clear edges. It might be called the Pool of the Arts, for it is fed by streams from all the social classes. Into it flows a steady trickle of moderately to considerably successful, intellectually respectable, and socially perceptive writers, art­ ists, academics, and architects, along with a few actors. Many of them are “ bright young things,” extremely clever, extremely ambitious, and already at a tender age self-made. Acceptability in Upper Bohemian circles is to them the achievement of a social ambition. To them Upper Bohemia is a desirable sort of aristocracy to which to belong, and of all the Upper Bohemians they are the most conscientiously and cautiously Bohemian. IV It cannot be denied that the Upper Bohemian serves a useful purpose in our cultural and civic life. Since he believes that his interests are not identified with those of any special social or economic class he serves as a minor social, political, and cultural balance wheel. He is a believer in social progress but, as he is not a faddist, he is suspicious and scornful of dogma; sometimes his beliefs and his suspicions cancel each other out and leave him inert. This is not to say, however, that he is a middle-of-theroader; he is far more likely to be on one side of the road on some questions and on the other side on others. In general, however, you will find that the Upper Bohemian inclines to take the side of the labor aristocracy against the business aristocracy, inclines to the Freudian interpretation of behavior, and the Keynesian interpretation of economics, and a free-thought interpretation of religion. He goes overboard about none of these. His deepest belief is in personal and intellectual freedom. He is not a theorist, though he enjoys theory, any more than he is a realist (as the business man uses that word) though he is a respecter of the realities. Where the arts are concerned he keeps what he dearly hopes is an open mind. He believes in freedom of expression and he resents the recent political incursions into arguments about the arts. He will argue violently on one side or the other of such a question as whether the main current in painting today is abstractionist, but the question is of far less moment to him than whether or not there seems to be vitality in the arts in general. He deplores the commercialism of television, and settles this problem for himself either by not having a set or by using one with fastidious discrimi­ nation. He considers the movies an art form and his attitude toward them, as toward other arts, stresses the honest, as he calls it, against the pretentious.

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Not all of his behavior in relation either to the arts or to the world around him is aloof. He likes to mix with the other classes, to partake in causes in which he believes, even to do menial jobs in a political campaign (part of his pride is in making it quite clear that he doesn’t think he is better than other people . . . just different), so long as he can escape into his own comfortable Bohemianism when he is through with his job. He does not really want to be one of the boys any more than Lady Bountiful wants to be one of the girls, but while he is with them he wants to be identified as one with the people though not quite one of them. One of the characteristics of Bohemianism has always been its question able respectability in the eyes of the community. It is looked on by all classes of society as something not quite real—by the poor as an affecta tion of poverty by people who could be better off if they wanted to be, by the middle classes as darn fools and dreamers who are free and easy in their morals and have no fear of God or the Treasury Department, and by the Upper Classes as quaint. But the real strength of the Bohemians and their vital function, both of which are out of all proportion to their numbers, has been rooted in their eagerness to flaunt convention for the purpose, sometimes sincere and sometimes affected, of fostering new ideas and bringing about the destruction of sham and flummery. In this the Upper Bohemian believes, and if he is caught in a kind of sham and flummery that is all his own, he is not aware of it. If he were aware of it, it is unlikely that it would bother him, because, remember, he is not only a social introvert but an observer and in some ways a selfappointed policeman of the social scene. He is not above casting a critical eye upon himself, though when he does he is inclined to be pleased with what he sees. Whether his tribe is on the increase or the decrease at this moment is difficult to tell, though recent events tend to indicate that middle-class morality rather than intellectual independence and agility are generally on the rise. The pressures for conformity, by the same token, are strong, and the tide is running against the free-wheeling individual who declines to accept this as the greatest of all possible societies. Dr. Pangloss rides again. On the other hand, there has never been a Bohemianism so essentially respectable as this one. To its fold may flock more and more men and women who wish to identify themselves with the side of revolt against what they consider to be the false standards of the new aristocracies and the dreary conventionality of the middle classes. There is always a reser voir of eager spirits who wish to enjoy the titivation of flaunting conven tion, and who at the same time never want to stray far from the warmth of a secure social hearth. There are always those who believe that they can take convention or leave it. Those who leave it with a flourish are true

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Bohemians. It is those who manage both to take it and leave it who are the true Upper Bohemians. Note 1. “ Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” Harper s M agazine, February 1949. If you are familiar with these categories, you will have recognized that Upper Bohemia is peopled entirely by Highbrows and Upper Middlebrows.

The White Negro Norman Mailer , 1957 I The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it. For if tens of millions were killed in concentration camps out of the inexorable agonies and contractions of superstates founded upon the always insoluble contradictions of injustice, one was then obliged also to see that no matter how crippled and perverted an image of man was the society he had created, it was nonetheless his creation, his collective creation (at least his collective creation from the past) and if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature? Worse. One could hardly maintain the courage to be individual, to speak with one’s own voice, for the years in which one could complacently accept oneself as part of an elite by being a radical were forever gone. A man knew that when he dissented, he gave a note upon his life which could be called in any year of overt crises. No wonder then that these have been the years of conformity and depression. A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve. The only courage, with rare exceptions, that we have been witness to, has been the isolated courage of isolated people. II It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist—the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry), if the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senes 185

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cence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short, whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory of planned intention, the life where a man must go until he is beat, where he must gamble with his energies through all those small or large crises of courage and unforeseen situations which beset his day, where he must be with it or doomed not to swing. The unstated essence of Hip, its psychopathic brilliance, quivers with the knowledge that new kinds of victories increase one’s power for new kinds of perception; and defeats, the wrong kind of defeats, attack the body and imprison one’s energy until one is jailed in the prison air of other people’s habits, other people’s defeats, boredom, quiet desperation, and muted icy self-destroy­ ing rage. One is Hip or one is Square (the alternative which each new generation coming into American life is beginning to feel), one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed. A totalitarian society makes enormous demands on the courage of men, and a partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands for the general anxiety is greater. Indeed if one is to be a man, almost any kind of unconventional action often takes disproportionate courage. So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. But the presence of Hip as a working philosophy in the sub-worlds of American life is probably due to jazz, and its knife-like entrance into culture, its subtle but so penetrating influence on an avant-garde generation—that post-war generation of adventurers who (some consciously, some by osmosis) had absorbed the lessons of disillusionment and disgust of the Twenties, the Depression, and the War. Sharing a collective disbelief in the words of men who had too much money and controlled too many things, they knew almost as powerful a disbelief in the socially monolithic ideas of the single mate, the solid family and the respectable love life. If the intellectual antecedents of this generation can be traced to such separate influences as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Wilhelm Reich, the viable philosophy of Hemingway fits most of their facts: in a bad world, as he was to say over and over again (while taking time out from his parvenu snobbery and dedicated gourmandise), in a bad world there is no love nor mercy nor charity nor justice unless a man can keep his

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courage, and this indeed fitted some of the facts. What fitted the need of the adventurer even more precisely was Hemingway’s categorical impera­ tive that what made him feel good became therefore the Good. So no wonder that in certain cities of America, in New York of course, and New Orleans, in Chicago and San Francisco and Los Angeles, in such American cities as Paris and Mexico, D.F., this particular part of a generation was attracted to what the Negro had to offer. In such places as Greenwich Village, a m énage-a-trois was completed—the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life. If marijuana was the wedding ring, the child was the language of Hip for its argot gave expression to abstract states of feeling which all could share, at least all who were Hip. And in this wedding of the white and the black it was the Negro who brought the cultural dowry. Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger from his first day, and no experience can ever be casual to him, no Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk. The cameos of security for the average white: mother and the home, job and the family, are not even a mockery to millions of Negroes; they are impossible. The Negro has the simplest of alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger. In such a pass where paranoia is as vital to survival as blood, the Negro had stayed alive and begun to grow by following the need of his body where he could. Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm. For jazz is orgasm, it is the music of orgasm, good orgasm and bad, and so it spoke across a nation, it had the communication of art even where it was watered, perverted, corrupted, and almost killed, it spoke in no matter what laundered popular way of instantaneous existential states to which some whites could respond, it was indeed a communication by art because it said, “ I feel this, and now you do too.” So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro. To be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself—one must know one’s desires, one’s rages, one’s anguish, one must be aware of the

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character of one’s frustration and know what would satisfy it. The over civilized man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it quickly for the next chic. To be a real existentialist (Sartre admittedly to the contrary) one must be religious, one must have one’s sense of the “ purpose” —whatever the purpose may be—but a life which is directed by one’s faith in the necessity of action is a life committed to the notion that the substratum of existence is the search, the end meaningful but mysteri­ ous; it is impossible to live such a life unless one’s emotions provide their profound conviction. Only the French, alienated beyond alienation from their unconscious could welcome an existential philosophy without ever feeling it at all; indeed only a Frenchman by declaring that the unconscious did not exist could then proceed to explore the delicate involutions of consciousness, the microscopically sensuous and all but ineffable frissons of mental becoming, in order finally to create the theology of atheism and so submit that in a world of absurdities the existential absurdity is most coherent. In the dialogue between the atheist and the mystic, the atheist is on the side of life, rational life, undialectical life—since he conceives of death as emptiness, he can, no matter how weary or despairing, wish for nothing but more life; his pride is that he does not transpose his weakness and spiritual fatigue into a romantic longing for death, for such appreciation of death is then all too capable of being elaborated by his imagination into a universe of meaningful structure and moral orchestration. Yet this masculine argument can mean very little for the mystic. The mystic can accept the atheist’s description of his weakness, he can agree that his mysticism was a response to despair. And yet . . . and yet his argument is that he, the mystic, is the one finally who has chosen to live with death, and so death is his experience and not the atheist’s, and the atheist by eschewing the limitless dimensions of profound despair has rendered himself incapable to judge the experience. The real argument which the mystic must always advance is the very intensity of his private vision—his argument depends from the vision precisely because what was felt in the vision is so extraordinary that no rational argument, no hypoth­ eses of “ oceanic feelings” and certainly no skeptical reductions can explain away what has become for him the reality more real than the reality of closely reasoned logic. His inner experience of the possibilities within death is his logic. So, too, for the existentialist. And the psycho­ path. And the saint and the bullfighter and the lover. The common denominator for all of them is their burning consciousness of the present, exactly that incandescent consciousness which the possibilities within death has opened for them. There is a depth of desperation to the condition which enables one to remain in life only by engaging death, but the reward

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is their knowledge that what is happening at each instant of the electric present is good or bad for them, good or bad for their cause, their love, their action, their need. It is this knowledge which provides the curious community of feeling in the world of the hipster, a muted cool religious revival to be sure, but the element which is exciting, disturbing, nightmarish perhaps, is that incom patibles have come to bed, the inner life and the violent life, the orgy and the dream of love, the desire to murder and the desire to create, a dialectical conception of existence with a lust for power, a dark, romantic, and yet undeniably dynamic view of existence for it sees every man and woman as moving individually through each moment of life forward into growth or backward into death. Ill It may be fruitful to consider the hipster a philosophical psychopath, a man interested not only in the dangerous imperatives of his psychopathy but in codifying, at least for himself, the suppositions on which his inner universe is constructed. By this premise the hipster is a psychopath, and yet not a psychopath but the negation of the psychopath for he possesses the narcissistic detachment of the philosopher, that absorption in the recessive nuance of one’s own motive which is so alien to the unreasoning drive of the psychopath. In this country where new millions of psycho­ paths are developed each year, stamped with the mint of our contradictory popular culture (where sex is sin and yet sex is paradise), it is as if there has been room already for the development of the antithetical psychopath who extrapolates from his own condition, from the inner certainty that his rebellion is just, a radical vision of the universe which thus separates him from the general ignorance, reactionary prejudice, and self-doubt of the more conventional psychopath. Having converted his unconscious expe­ rience into much conscious knowledge, the hipster has shifted the focus of his desire from immediate gratification toward that wider passion for future power which is the mark of civilized man. Yet with an irreducible differ­ ence. For Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle, and so its appeal is still beyond the civilized man. If there are ten million Americans who are more or less psychopathic (and the figure is most modest), there are probably not more than one hundred thousand men and women who consciously see themselves as hipsters, but their importance is that they are an elite with the potential ruthlessness of an elite, and a language most adolescents can understand instinctively for the hipster’s intense view of existence matches their experience and their desire to rebel.

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Before one can say more about the hipster, there is obviously much to be said about the psychic state of the psychopath—or, clinically, the psychopathic personality. Now, for reasons which may be more curious than the similarity of the words, even many people with a psychoanalytical orientation often confuse the psychopath with the psychotic. Yet the terms are polar. The psychotic is legally insane, the psychopath is not; the psychotic is almost always incapable of discharging in physical acts the rage of his frustration, while the psychopath at his extreme is virtually as incapable of restraining his violence. The psychotic lives in so misty a world that what is happening at each moment of his life is not very real to him whereas the psychopath seldom knows any reality greater than the face, the voice, the being of the particular people among whom he may find himself at any moment. Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck describe him as follows: The psychopath . . . can be distinguished from the person sliding into or clambering out o f a “ true psychotic” state by the long tough persistence o f his anti-social attitude and behaviour and the absence o f hallucinations, delusions, manic flight of ideas, confusion, disorientation, and other dramatic signs of psychosis.

The late Robert Lindner, one of the few experts on the subject in his book R ebel Without a Cause—The H ypnoanalysis o f a Criminal P sycho path presented part of his definition in this way: . . . the psychopath is a rebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program: in other words, his rebelliousness is aimed to achieve goals satisfactory to himself alone; he is incapable o f exertions for the sake o f others. All his efforts, hidden under no matter what disguise, represent investments designed to satisfy his immediate wishes and desires. . . . The psychopath, like the child, cannot delay the pleasures o f gratification; and this trait is one of his underlying universal characteristics. He cannot wait upon erotic gratification which convention demands should be preceded by the chase before the kill: he must rape. He cannot wait upon the development o f prestige in society: his egoistic ambitions lead him to leap into headlines by daring performances. Like a red thread the predominance of this mechanism for immediate satisfaction runs through the history of every psychopath. It explains not only his behaviour but also the violent nature o f his acts.

Yet even Lindner who was the most imaginative and most sympathetic of the psychoanalysts who have studied the psychopathic personality was not ready to project himself into the essential sympathy—which is that the psychopath may indeed be the perverted and dangerous front-runner of a new kind of personality which could become the central expression of human nature before the twentieth century is over. For the psychopath is

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better adapted to dominate those mutually contradictory inhibitions upon violence and love which civilization has exacted of us, and if it be remembered that not every psychopath is an extreme case, and that the condition of psychopathy is present in a host of people including many politicians, professional soldiers, newspaper columnists, entertainers, art­ ists, jazz musicians, call-girls, promiscuous homosexuals and half the executives of Hollywood, television, and advertising, it can be seen that there are aspects of psychopathy which already exert considerable cultural influence. What characterizes almost every psychopath and part-psychopath is that they are trying to create a new nervous system for themselves. Generally we are obliged to act with a nervous system which has been formed from infancy, and which carries in the style of its circuits the very contradictions of our parents and our early milieu. Therefore, we are obliged, most of us, to meet the tempo of the present and the future with reflexes and rhythms which come from the past. It is not only the “ dead weight of the institutions of the past” but indeed the inefficient and often antiquated nervous circuits of the past which strangle our potentiality for responding to new possibilities which might be exciting for our individual growth. Through most of modern history, “ sublimation” was possible: at the expense of expressing only a small portion of oneself, that small portion could be expressed intensely. But sublimation depends on a reasonable tempo to history. If the collective life of a generation has moved too quickly, the “ past” by which particular men and women of that generation may function is not, let us say, thirty years old, but relatively a hundred or two hundred years old. And so the nervous system is overstressed beyond the possibility of such compromises as sublimation, especially since the stable middle-class values so prerequisite to sublimation have been virtually destroyed in our time, at least as nourishing values free of confusion or doubt. In such a crisis of accelerated historical tempo and deteriorated values, neurosis tends to be replaced by psychopathy, and the success of psychoanalysis (which even ten years ago gave promise of becoming a direct major force) diminishes because of its inbuilt and characteristic incapacity to handle patients more complex, more experi­ enced, or more adventurous than the analyst himself. In practice, psycho analysis has by now become all too often no more than a psychic blood letting. The patient is not so much changed as aged, and the infantile fantasies which he is encouraged to express are condemned to exhaust themselves against the analyst’s non-responsive reactions. The result for all too many patients is a diminution, a “ tranquilizing” of their most interesting qualities and vices. The patient is indeed not so much altered

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as worn out—less bad, less good, less bright, less willful, less destructive, less creative. He is thus able to conform to that contradictory and unbear able society which first created his neurosis. He can conform to what he loathes because he no longer has the passion to feel loathing so intensely. The psychopath is notoriously difficult to analyze because the funda­ mental decision of his nature is to try to live the infantile fantasy, and in this decision (given the dreary alternative of psychoanalysis) there may be a certain instinctive wisdom. For there is a dialectic to changing one’s nature, the dialectic which underlies all psychoanalytic method: it is the knowledge that if one is to change one’s habits, one must go back to the source of their creation, and so the psychopath exploring backward along the road of the homosexual, the orgiast, the drug-addict, the rapist, the robber and the murderer seeks to find those violent parallels to the violent and often hopeless contradictions he knew as an infant and as a child. For if he has the courage to meet the parallel situation at the moment when he is ready, then he has a chance to act as he has never acted before, and in satisfying the frustration—if he can succeed—he may then pass by sym bolic substitute through the locks of incest. In thus giving expression to the buried infant in himself, he can lessen the tension of those infantile desires and so free himself to remake a bit of his nervous system. Like the neurotic he is looking for the opportunity to grow up a second time, but the psychopath knows instinctively that to express a forbidden impulse actively is far more beneficial to him than merely to confess the desire in the safety of a doctor’s room. The psychopath is ordinately ambitious, too ambitious ever to trade his warped brilliant conception of his possible victories in life for the grim if peaceful attrition of the analyst’s couch. So his associational journey into the past is lived out in the theatre of the present, and he exists for those charged situations where his senses are so alive that he can be aware actively (as the analysand is aware passively) of what his habits are, and how he can change them. The strength of the psychopath is that he knows (where most of us can only guess) what is good for him and what is bad for him at exactly those instants when an old crippling habit has become so attacked by experience that the potentiality exists to change it, to replace a negative and empty fear with an outward action, even if—and here I obey the logic of the extreme psychopath even if the fear is of himself, and the action is to murder. The psychopath murders—if he has the courage—out of the necessity to purge his violence, for if he cannot empty his hatred then he cannot love, his being is frozen with implacable self-hatred for his cowardice. (It can of course be sug gested that it takes little courage for two strong eighteen-year-old hood lums, let us say, to beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper, and indeed the act—even by the logic of the psychopath—is not likely to prove very

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therapeutic for the victim is not an immediate equal. Still, courage of a sort is necessary, for one murders not only a weak fifty-year-old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act, it is not altogether cowardly.) At bottom, the drama of the psychopath is that he seeks love. Not love as the search for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it. Orgasm is his therapy—he knows at the seed of his being that good orgasm opens his possibilities and bad orgasm imprisons him. But in this search, the psychopath becomes an embodiment of the extreme contradictions of the society which formed his character, and the apocalyptic orgasm often remains as remote as the Holy Grail, for there are clusters and nests and ambushes of violence in his own necessities and in the imperatives and retaliations of the men and women among whom he lives his life, so that even as he drains his hatred in one act or another, so the conditions of his life create it anew in him until the drama of his movements bears a sardonic resemblance to the frog who climbed a few feet in the well only to drop back again. Yet there is this to be said for the search after the good orgasm: when one lives in a civilized world, and still can enjoy none of the cultural nectar of such a world because the paradoxes on which civilization is built demands that there remain a cultureless and alienated bottom of exploit able human material, then the logic of becoming a sexual outlaw (if one’s psychological roots are bedded in the bottom) is that one has at least a running competitive chance to be physically healthy so long as one stays alive. It is therefore no accident that psychopathy is most prevalent with the Negro. Hated from outside and therefore hating himself, the Negro was forced into the position of exploring all those moral wildernesses of civilized life which the Square automatically condemns as delinquent or evil or immature or morbid or self-destructive or corrupt. (Actually the terms have equal weight. Depending on the telescope of the cultural clique from which the Square surveys the universe, “ evil” or “ immature” are equally strong terms of condemnation.) But the Negro, not being privileged to gratify his self-esteem with the heady satisfactions of categorical con­ demnation, chose to move instead in that other direction where all situa­ tions are equally valid, and in the worst of perversion, promiscuity, pimpery, drug addiction, rape, razor-slash, bottle-break, what-have-you, the Negro discovered and elaborated a morality of the bottom, and ethical differentiation between the good and the bad in every human activity from the go-getter pimp (as opposed to the lazy one) to the relatively dependable pusher or prostitute. Add to this, the cunning of their language, the

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abstract ambiguous alternatives in which from the danger of their oppres­ sion they learned to speak (“ Well, now, man, like I ’m looking for a cat to turn me on . . add even more the profound sensitivity of the Negro jazzman who was the cultural mentor of a people, and it is not too difficult to believe that the language of Hip which evolved was an artful language, tested and shaped by an intense experience and therefore different in kind from white slang, as different as the special obscenity of the soldier which in its emphasis upon “ ass” as the soul and “ shit” as circumstance, was able to express the existential states of the enlisted man. What makes Hip a special language is that it cannot really be taught—if one shares none of the experiences of elation and exhaustion which it is equipped to describe, then it seems merely arch or vulgar or irritating. It is a pictorial language, but pictorial like non-objective art, imbued with the dialectic of small but intense change, a language for the microcosm, in this case, man, for it takes the immediate experiences of any passing man and magnifies the dynamic of his movements, not specifically but abstractly so that he is seen more as a vector in a network of forces than as a static character in a crystallized field. (Which, latter, is the practical view of the snob.) For example, there is real difficulty in trying to find a Hip substitute for “ stubborn.” The best possibility I can come up with is: “ That cat will never come off his groove, dad.” But groove implies movement, narrow movement but motion nonetheless. There is really no way to describe someone who does not move at all. Even a creep does move—if at a pace exasperatingly more slow than the pace of the cool cats.

The Origins of the Beat Generation Jack Kerouac , 1959

This article necessarily’ll have to be about myself. I’m going all out. That nutty picture of me on the cover of On the R oad results from the fact that I had just gotten down from a high mountain where I’d been for two months completely alone and usually I was in the habit of combing my hair of course because you have to get rides on the highway and all that and you usually want girls to look at you as though you were a man and not a wild beast but my poet friend Gregory Corso opened his shirt and took out a silver crucifix that was hanging from a chain and said “ Wear this and wear it outside your shirt and don’t comb your hair!” so I spent several days around San Francisco going around with him and others like that, to parties, arties, parts, jam sessions, bars, poetry readings, churches, walking talking poetry in the streets, walking talking God in the streets (and at one point a strange gang of hoodlums got mad and said “ What right does he got to wear that?” and my own gang of musicians and poets told them to cool it) and finally on the third day M ademoiselle magazine wanted to take pictures of us all so I posed just like that, wild hair, crucifix, and all, with Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg and Phil Whalen, and the only publication which later did not erase the crucifix from my breast (from that plaid sleeveless cotton shirtfront) was The New York Times , therefore The New York Times is as beat as I am, and I ’m glad I’ve got a friend. I mean it sincerely, God bless The New York Times for not erasing the crucifix from my picture as though it was something distasteful. As a matter of fact, who’s really beat around here, I mean if you wanta talk of Beat as “ beat down” the people who erased the crucifix are really the “ beat down” ones and not The New York Times , myself, and Gregory Corso the poet. I am not ashamed to wear the crucifix of my Lord. It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to it. I am sure no priest would’ve condemned me for wearing the crucifix outside my shirt 195

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everywhere and no m atter where I went, even to have my picture taken by M adem oiselle. So you people don’t believe in God. So you’re all big smart know-it-all Marxists and Freudians, hey? Why don’t you come back in a million years and tell me all about it, angels? Recently Ben Hecht said to me on TV “ Why are you afraid to speak out your mind, what’s wrong with this country, what is everybody afraid of?” Was he talking to me? And all he wanted me to do was speak out my mind against people, he sneeringly brought up Dulles, Eisenhower, the Pope, all kinds of people like that habitually he would sneer at with Drew Pearson, against the world he wanted, this is his idea of freedom, he calls it freedom. Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty. In fact who knows but that it isn’t the solitude of the oneness of the essence of everything, the solitude of the actual oneness of the unbornness of the unborn essence of everything, nay the true pure foreverhood, that big blank potential that can ray forth anything it wants from its pure store, that blazing bliss, M attivajrakaruna the Transcendental Diamond Compassion! No, I want to speak fo r things, for the crucifix I speak out, for the Star of Israel I speak out, for the divinest man who ever lived who was a German (Bach) I speak out, for sweet Mohammed I speak out, for Buddha I speak out, for Lao-tse and Chuang-tse I speak out, for D. T. Suzuki I speak out . . . why should I attack what I love out of life. This is Beat. Live your lives out? Naw, love your lives out. When they come and stone you at least you won’t have a glass house, just your glassy flesh. That wild eager picture of me on the cover of On the R oad where I look so Beat goes back much further than 1948 when John Clellon Holmes (author of Go and The Horn) and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent Existentialism and I said “ You know, this is really a beat generation” and he leapt up and said “ T hat’s it, that’s right!” It goes back to the 1880s when my grand­ father Jean-Baptiste Kerouac used to go out on the porch in big thunder storms and swing his kerosene lamp at the lightning and yell “ Go ahead, go, if you’re more powerful than I am strike me and put the light out!” while the mother and the children cowered in the kitchen. And the light never went out. Maybe since I’m supposed to be the spokesman of the Beat Generation (I am the originator of the term, and around it the term and the generation have taken shape) it should be pointed out that all this “ Beat” guts therefore goes back to my ancestors who were Bretons who were the most independent group of nobles in all old Europe and kept fighting Latin France to the last wall (although a big blond bosun on a merchant ship snorted when I told him my ancestors were Bretons in

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Cornwall, Brittany, “ Why, we Wikings used to swoop down and steal your nets!” ) Breton, Wiking, Irishman, Indian, madboy, it doesn’t make any difference, there is no doubt about the Beat Generation, at least the core of it, being a swinging group of new American men intent on joy. . . . Irresponsibility? Who wouldn’t help a dying man on an empty road? No and the Beat Generation goes back to the wild parties my father used to have at home in the 1920s and 1930s in New England that were so fantastically loud nobody could sleep for blocks around and when the cops came they always had a drink. It goes back to the wild and raving childhood of playing the Shadow under windswept trees of New England’s gleeful autumn, and the howl of the Moon Man on the sandbank until we caught him in a tree (he was an “ older” guy of 15), the maniacal laugh of certain neighborhood madboys, the furious humor of whole gangs playing basketball till long after dark in the park, it goes back to those crazy days before World War II when teenagers drank beer on Friday nights at Lake ballrooms and worked off their hangovers playing baseball on Saturday afternoon followed by a dive in the brook—and our fathers wore straw hats like W. C. Fields. It goes back to the completely senseless babble of the Three Stooges, the ravings of the Marx Brothers (the tenderness of Angel Harpo at harp, too). It goes back to the inky ditties of old cartoons (Krazy Kat with the irrational brick)—to Laurel and Hardy in the Foreign Legion—to Count Dracula and his smile to Count Dracula shivering and hissing back before the Cross—to the Golem horrifying the persecutors of the Ghetto—to the quiet sage in a movie about India, unconcerned about the plot—to the giggling old Tao Chinaman trotting down the sidewalk of old Clark Gable Shanghai—to the holy old Arab warning the hotbloods that Ramadan is near. To the Werewolf of London a distinguished doctor in his velour smoking jacket smoking his pipe over a lamplit tome on botany and suddenly hairs grown on his hands, his cat hisses, and he slips out into the night with a cape and a slanty cap like the caps of people in breadlines— to Lamont Cranston so cool and sure suddenly becoming the frantic Shadow going mwee hee hee ha ha in the alleys of New York imagination. To Popeye the sailor and the Sea Hag and the meaty gunwales of boats, to Cap’n Easy and Wash Tubbs screaming with ecstasy over canned peaches on a cannibal isle, to Wimpy looking X-eyed for a juicy hamburger such as they make no more. To Jiggs ducking before a household of furniture flying through the air, to Jiggs and the boys at the bar and the corned beef and cabbage of old wood-fence noons—to King Kong his eyes looking into the hotel window with tender huge love for Fay Wray—nay, to Bruce Cabot in m ate’s cap leaning over the rail of a fogbound ship saying “ Come aboard.” It goes back to when grapefruits were thrown at crooners and

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harvestworkers at bar-rails slapped burlesque queens on the rump. To when fathers took their sons to the Twi League game. To the days of Babe Callahan on the waterfront, Dick Barthelmess camping under a London street-lamp. To dear old Basil Rathbone looking for the Hound of the Baskervilles (a dog big as the Gray Wolf who will destroy Odin)—to dear old bleary Doctor Watson with a brandy in his hand. To Joan Crawford her raw shanks in the fog, in striped blouse smoking a cigarette at sticky lips in the door of the waterfront dive. To train whistles of steam engines out above the moony pines. To Maw and Paw in the Model A clanking on to get a job in California selling used cars making a whole lotta money. To the glee of America, the honesty of America, the honesty of oldtime grafters in straw hats as well as the honesty of oldtime waiters in line at the Brooklyn Bridge in Winterset, the funny spitelessness of old bigfisted America like Big Boy Williams saying “ Hoo? Hee? Huh?” in a movie about Mack Trucks and slidingdoor lunchcarts. To Clark Gable, his certain smile, his confident leer. Like my grandfather this America was invested with wild selfbelieving individuality and this had begun to disappear around the end of World War II with so many great guys dead (I can think of half a dozen from my own boyhood groups) when suddenly it began to emerge again, the hipsters began to appear gliding around saying “ Crazy, m an.” W hen I first saw th e h ip sters creep in g around T im es Sq u are in 1944 I

didn’t like them either. One of them, Huncke of Chicago, came up to me and said “ Man, I ’m beat.” I knew right away what he meant somehow. At that time I still didn’t like bop which was then being introduced by Bird Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and Bags Jackson (on vibes), the last of the great swing musicians was Don Byas who went to Spain right after, but then I began . . . but earlier I ’d dug all my jazz in the old Minton Playhouse (Lester Young, Ben Webster, Joey Guy, Charlie Christian, others) and when I first heard Bird and Diz in the Three Deuces I knew they were serious musicians playing a goofy new sound and didn’t care what I thought, or what my friend Seymour thought. In fact I was leaning against the bar with a beer when Dizzy came over for a glass of water from the bartender, put himself right against me and reached both arms around both sides of my head to get the glass and danced away, as though knowing I’d be singing about him someday, or that one of his arrangements would be named after me someday by some goofy circumstance. Charlie Parker was spoken of in Harlem as the greatest new musician since Chu Berry and Louis Armstrong. Anyway, the hipsters, whose music was bop, they looked like criminals but they kept talking about the same things I liked, long outlines of personal experience and vision, nightlong confessions full of hope that had

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become illicit and repressed by War, stirrings, rumblings of a new soul (that same old human soul). And so Huncke appeared to us and said “ I ’m beat” with radiant light shining out of his despairing eyes . . . a word perhaps brought from some midwest carnival or junk cafeteria. It was a new language, actually spade (Negro) jargon but you soon learned it, like “ hung up” couldn’t be a more economical term to mean so many things. Some of these hipsters were raving mad and talked continually. It was jazzy. Symphony Sid’s all-night modern jazz and bop show was always on. By 1948 it began to take shape. That was a wild vibrating year when a group of us would walk down the street and yell hello and even stop and talk to anybody that gave us a friendly look. The hipsters had eyes. That was the year I saw Montgomery Clift, unshaven, wearing a sloppy jacket, slouching down Madison Avenue with a companion. It was the year I saw Charley Bird Parker strolling down Eighth Avenue in a black turtleneck sweater with Babs Gonzales and a beautiful girl. By 1948 the hipsters, or beatsters, were divided into cool and hot. Much of the misunderstanding about hipsters and the Beat Generation in general today derives from the fact that there are two distinct styles of hipsterism: the cool today is your bearded laconic sage, or schlerm, before a hardly touched beer in a beatnik dive, whose speech is low and unfriendly, whose girls say nothing and wear black: the “ hot” today is the crazy talkative shining eyed (often innocent and openhearted) nut who runs from bar to bar, pad to pad looking for everybody, shouting, restless, lushy, trying to “ make it” with the subterranean beatniks who ignore him. Most Beat Generation artists belong to the hot school, naturally since that hard gemlike flame needs a little heat. In many cases the mixture is 50-50. It was a hot hipster like myself who finally cooled it in Buddhist meditation, though when I go in a jazz joint I still feel like yelling “ Blow baby blow!” to the musicians though nowadays I ’d get 86d for this. In 1948 the “ hot hipsters” were racing around in cars like in On the R oad looking for wild bawling jazz like Willis Jackson or Lucky Thompson (the early) or Chubby Jackson’s big band while the “ cool hipsters” cooled it in dead silence before formal and excellent musical groups like Lennie Tristano or Miles Davis. It’s still just about the same, except that it has begun to grow into a national generation and the name “ Beat” has stuck (though all hipsters hate the word). The word “ beat” originally meant poor, down and out, deadbeat, on the bum, sad, sleeping in subways. Now that the word is belonging officially it is being made to stretch to include people who do not sleep in subways but have a certain new gesture, or attitude, which I can only describe as a new more. “ Beat Generation” has simply become the slogan or label for a revolution in manners in America. Marlon Brando was not

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really first to portray it on the screen. Dane Clark with his pinched Dostoievskyan face and Brooklyn accent, and of course Garfield, were first. The private eyes were Beat, if you will recall. Bogart. Lorre was Beat. In M, Peter Lorre started a whole revival, I mean the slouchy street walk. I wrote On the R oad in three weeks in the beautiful month of May 1941 while living in the Chelsea district of lower West Side Manhattan, on a 100-foot roll and put the Beat Generation in words in there, saying at the point where I am taking part in a wild kind of collegiate party with a bunch of kids in an abandoned miner’s shack “ These kids are great but where are Dean Moriarty and Carlo Marx? Oh well I guess they wouldn’t belong in this gang, they’re too dark, too strange, too subterranean and I am slowly beginning to join a new kind of beat generation.” The manuscript of R oad was turned down on the grounds that it would displease the sales manager of my publisher at that time, though the editor, a very intelligent man, said “ Jack this is just like Dostoievsky, but what can I do at this time?” It was too early. So for the next six years I was a bum, a brakeman, a seaman, a panhandler, a pseudo-Indian in Mexico, anything and every thing, and went on writing because my hero was Goethe and I believed in art and hoped some day to write the third part of Faust, which I have done in D octor Sax. Then in 1952 an article was published in The New York Times Sunday magazine saying, the headline, “ ‘This is a Beat Genera tion’ ” (in quotes like that) and in the article it said that I had come up with the term first “ when the face was harder to recognize,” the face of the generation. After that there was some talk of the Beat Generation but in 1955 I published an excerpt from R oad (melling it with parts of Visions o f Neal) under the pseudonym “ Jean-Louis,” it was entitled Jazz o f the B eat Generation and was copyrighted as being an excerpt from a novel-inprogress entitled Beat Generation (which I later changed to On the R oad at the insistence of my new editor) and so then the term moved a little faster. The term and the cats. Everywhere began to appear strange hepcats and even college kids went around hep and cool and using the terms I ’d heard on Times Square in the early Forties, it was growing somehow. But when the publishers finally took a dare and published On the R oad in 1957 it burst open, it mushroomed, everybody began yelling about a Beat Generation. I was being interviewed everywhere I went for “ what I m eant” by such a thing. People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the “ avatar” of all this. Yet it was as a Catholic, it was not at the insistence of any of these “ niks” and certainly not with their approval either, that I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood (one of them), Ste. Jeanne d ’Arc in Lowell, Mass., and suddenly with tears in my eyes and had a vision of

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what I must have really meant with “ Beat” anyhow when I heard the holy silence in the church (I was the only one in there, it was five p . m ., dogs were barking outside, children yelling, the fall leaves, the candles were flickering alone just for me), the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific . . . There’s the priest preaching on Sunday morning, all of a sudden through a side door of the church comes a group of Beat Genera tion characters in strapped raincoats like the I.R.A. coming in silently to “ dig” the religion . . . I knew it then. But this was 1954, so then what horror I felt in 1957 and later 1958 naturally to suddenly see “ Beat” being taken up by everybody, press and TV and Hollywood borscht circuit to include the “juvenile delinquency” shot and the horrors of a mad teeming billyclub New York and L.A. and they began to call that Beat, that beatific . . . bunch of fools marching against the San Francisco Giants protesting baseball, as if (now) in my name and I, my childhood ambition to be a big league baseball star hitter like Ted Williams so that when Bobby Thomson hit that home-run in 1951 I trembled with joy and couldn’t get over it for days and wrote poems about how it is possible for the human spirit to win after all! Or, when a murder, a routine murder took place in North Beach, they labeled it a Beat Generation slaying although in my childhood I ’d been famous as an eccentric in my block for stopping the younger kids from throwing rocks at the squirrels, for stopping them from frying snakes in cans or trying to blow up frogs with straws. Because my brother had died at the age of nine, his name was Gerard Kerouac, and he’d told me “ Ti Jean never hurt any living being, all living beings whether it’s just a little cat or squirrel or whatever, all, are going to heaven straight into God’s snowy arms so never hurt anything and if you see anybody hurt anything stop them as best you can” and when he died a file of gloomy nuns in black from St. Louis de France parish had filed (1926) to his deathbed to hear his last words about Heaven. And my father too, Leo, had never lifted a hand to punish me, or to punish the little pets in our house, and this teaching was delivered to me by the men in my house and I have never had anything to do with violence, hatred, cruelty, and all that horrible nonsense which, neverthe less, because God is gracious beyond all human imagining, he will forgive in the long end . . . that million years I ’m asking about you, America. And so now they have beatnik routines on TV, starting with satires about girls in black and fellows in jeans with snapknives and sweatshirts and swastikas tattooed under their armpits, it will come to respectable m.c.s. of spectaculars coming out nattily attired in Brooks Brothers jeantype tailoring and sweater-type pull-ons, in other words, it’s a simple change in fashion and manners, just a history crust—like from the Age of Reason, from old Voltaire in a chair to romantic Chatterton in the moon

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light—from Teddy Roosevelt to Scott Fitzgerald . . . So there’s nothing to get excited about. Beat comes out, actually, of old American whoopee and it will only change a few dresses and pants and make chairs useless in the livingroom and pretty soon we’ll have Beat Secretaries of State and there will be instituted new tinsels, in fact new reasons for malice and new reasons for virtue and new reasons for forgiveness . . . But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Genera­ tion means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality . . . woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don’t understand history and the yearnings of human souls . . . woe unto those who don’t realize that America must, will, is, changing now, for the better I say. Woe unto those who believe in the atom bomb, who believe in hating mothers and fathers, who deny the most important of the Ten Commandments, woe unto those (though) who don’t believe in the unbelievable sweetness of sex love, woe unto those who are the standard bearers of death, woe unto those who believe in conflict and horror and violence and fill our books and screens and livingrooms with all that crap, woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! Woe unto those who are the real dreary sinners that even God finds room to forgive . . . woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back.

The Beat Mystique Herbert Gold, 1958

In Greenwich Village a dreamy young beggar in a tattered Ivy League summer suit and a buttondown collar with both buttons missing turns on an uptown couple to ask, “ Gimmie a quarter for a Cadillac, hey?” In New Orleans a pretty little department store model approaches a man at a party, takes off her sweater, then her bra, and says, “ L et’s ball, dig,”—by which she means, L et’s try a new far-out sound on the hi-fi. If he reaches out to touch anything but the tone arm, she will say, “ You’re through, frantic boy. You are sawed off.” He disappears from future guest lists. In Denver a gaggle of young lads, not knowing what to do on a warm spring evening, steal a car each, drive them to the other side of town, park, steal a few more, drive back to the starting point, park, and then settle down to giggle about the confusion of the owners and the police. Silence. Return of boredom. Yawn. Finally one says softly, “ Pops, why didn’t we think of picking up on some chicks?” In St. Louis a girl and her friend, who used to be a drummer with a wellknown quintet, both of them suffering withdrawal symptoms—he has been working to support their habits by pimping for the girl—beg an old pal to put them up with bed and fridge for a few days. While the friend is away at work, they telephone a friend in San Francisco, give him the bit, and after gassing awhile, suggest that they both just keep the connection and leave the telephones off the hook. Their friend won’t get the bill until they are gone, far gone. Why do this to him? H e’s square, so square, m an.” In Detroit a hi-fi engineer clucks sympathetically at the plight of a young couple in college. It’s true love, but they have no place to go. The back seat of a car is for puppy love and sprained backs. OK, they can use his apartment. What they don’t know is that there is a microphone concealed in the mattress. Their friend invites them to a party where he plays the tape before strangers. 203

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In San Francisco a group of young poets announces Religious Poetry Night, attracting a hall full of the plump, mournful ladies (purple hats, veils, heaving freckled bosoms) who adore such things. The first poet gets up to read. “ C------S-------!” he shrieks at the audience. On State Street in Chicago a frozen-faced drifter stops a passer-by, pushing out his hand and murmuring, “ What you say, pop? Give me a piece of skin.” “ I ’m sorry, I don’t know you.” “ I don’t know you either, man, but you like to have a party?” He slides off and away with a passive dreamy girlish look which has nothing sweet about it: it plots impossible meanness, anything to make him feel some­ thing. He doesn’t know anybody, and says “ man” to everybody because he can’t be bothered remembering names. In midtown Manhattan a writer, Jack Kerouac, prepares for his inter view on TV. “ We’re beat, m an,” he says. “ Beat means beatific, it means you get the beat, it means something. I invented it.” For the television audience he announces, “ We love everything, Bill Graham, the Big Ten, rock and roll, Zen, apple pie, Eisenhower—we dig it all. We’re in the vanguard of the new religion.” Jack Kerouac likes to write of Charlie Parker as God and himself as the Prophet. These are hipsters. Who is the hipster, what is it? The pure beast is as hard to track as the pure “ student” or “ midwesterner,” but let us follow the spoor of history and symptoms. We will probably find that “ pure hipster” is a phrase like “ 100% American” —an unstable compound with an indefinite content. Hipsterism began in a complex effort of the Negro to escape his imposed role of happy-go-lucky animal. A few highly self-conscious urban Negro men sought to imitate “ white” diffidence, or coolness, or beatness. They developed a style which was both a criticism of their Bible-shouting and jazz-loving parents and a parody of the detached, uninvolved city ofays. They improvised on an unstated theme—like bop—and if you weren’t with it, with it and for it, you heard nothing but jangle. The horn rims of the intellectual came to be known as bop glasses. They blew fine abstractions. The joke was a good one. Then their white friends took up the fashion, complicating the joke by parodying a parody of themselves. Cool music was the artistic expression of this hypertensive chill. However, in order to keep from dancing, keep from shouting, keep from feeling, a further help was needed and it was found in heroin. Some of the earlier hot musicians had used marijuana, many drank; these were springs toward jumping high in a group. There was a strong prejudice against the cats who went on junk, expressed in the superstition that you might mainline a fatal bubble of air into your veins.

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Uh-uh, no baby, they said: and in practice they found that the junkie blew lousy drum or horn, no matter what he thought he was blowing. The new generation preferred super-celestial private music, however. Heroin dissolves the group and each man flies alone all the way to Barbados. And without flapping his arms. Many other young Americans felt beat, wanted to keep cool, and so into the arms of the first hipster society, that still unravished bride of bop quietness, ran three angry herds: 1. Mainstreet thugs with their sideburns, their cycles, and their jeans; 2. college kids and a few literary chappies, finding in the addict’s cool stance an expression of the frustration of fluiddrive lives in which the juicebox had gone dry; and 3. Upper Bohemia, tired of Van Gogh, Italian movies, charades, and sex, and so ready to try anti-art, anti-sex, anti-frantic non-movement. These latter comprise the Madison Avenue hippies, models who strip merely to express their hatred of fashion magazines, admen and lawyers who marry call girls, a host of Ivy League symbol-manipulators, bloated with money and debt, pink with General Electric sun tans and shame, who express their benzedrine blues by wigging at night near a blasting rig. “ Well, you know . . . Albert Schweitzer doesn’t make me climb the wall . . . Is it true he eloped with Kim Novak?” “ Everyone says,” remarks the pretty girl who seeks to please, “ that I’m exceptionally fastidious, but would you like me to do something nasty for you? I really wouldn’t mind. My name is Grape Nuts, what’s yours?” Let us now move in closer to the hipster’s harried heart. When the hipster makes it with a girl, he avoids admitting that he likes her. He keeps cool. He asks her to do the work, and his ambition is to think about nothing, zero, strictly from nadaville, while she plays bouncy-bouncy on him. When the hipster makes it with boys, it’s not because he’s a homosexual and cares for it—it’s for money, a ride home, pass the time of night while waiting for the band to come back on. When the hipster steals a car, he doesn’t keep it or sell it; he hides it where the squares will have trouble finding it, and writes “ Mort a Louis A” in soap on the windshield. When the hipster digs music, Proust, or religion, it’s to talk over, it’s to carry around in his jeans, it’s to hit his buddies with; it makes no sense or feeling, and the weirder it is, the cooler the kick. In other words, the hipster is a spectacular instance of the flight from emotion. He is like a sick refrigerator, laboring with tremendous violence, noise and heat, and all for one purpose—to keep cool. This refrigerator is powered by crime without economic need; an editor to one of the hipster writers complains, “ Jeez, when I slept on park benches and boosted from the A & P, I did it because I had to. My kick was that I needed sleep and food. I didn’t do it to tell people about.” The refrigerator is powered by

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sex without passion; the sole passion is for the murder of feeling, the extinguishing of the jitters. The refrigerator is powered by religion without faith; the hipster teases himself toward the black battiness of oblivion, and all the vital refreshment which religion has given the mystics of the past is a distraction from the lovely stupor he craves. Unlike Onan, who spilled his seed upon the ground, the hipster spills his brains and calls it piety. He also wears music, art and religion as a kind of badge for identification. Instead of the secret handshake which got him into Uncle Don’s Boys’ Club or the Orphan Annie Secret Society, he now says, “ You dig the Bird? Proust? Zen?” “ I’m hip,” says his friend. This phrase means: No need to talk. No more discussion. I ’m with you. I got you. Cool. In. Bye-bye. The language of hipsterism is a means toward noncommunication, a signal for silence. The truest lingo is narcotics, because this more than anything gives Little Boy Beat what he wants—release from imagination and the body—an illusion not of omnipotence, as we are sometimes told, but of a timeless browsing in eternity. In other words, a cool simulation of death. The sentimental and sensational talk about drugs producing sex maniacs is nonsense. The man on a habit needs nothing more than his fix. Quiet, quiet. He may perform terrible violence to get the drug, but not sex; pleasure has nothing to do with the dreamy high of heroin. The pale soft face of the addict, with his smudged passive eyes and his drooping mouth, is almost ladylike in its sweetness. It has no fight or love in it. Heroin enables the hipster to stand guard over his soul, dreaming of cool nothing, beautiful beat nothing, while his feet go ratatat and he strokes a switchblade, a hand, or a copy of Swann’s Way. Needless to say, the proto- and quasi-hipsters do not usually go all the way to the perfection of heroin. The current fad for the hipster—his language, manners and attitudes— indicates that he is, as that fearful phrase goes, “ no isolated phenome non.” Jack Kerouac proclaimed, “ Even the Ivy League is going hip.” Emerging out of bop, narcotics, and the subtle rebellion of the Negro against the charge of being “ happy, excitable, emotional,” the hipster takes one of his chief public models from that most authentic American source, the movies. He ignores the injunction of the pious 13th Century moralist, John of Garland, who wrote: “ Be not a fornicator, O Student! Stand and sit upright, do not scratch thyself!” The Stanislavsky hipsters scratch as if their soul’s unease were actually juicy fleas, slouch as if leaning to catch Marlon’s word from earth or Jam es’ from vaulted heaven. The movie shadow of Dean or the Brando of The Wild One is a part of the image of the hipster, whether he be the smooth pink Ivy League meta hipster, staring at himself in the mirror of one of those shops where they

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apparently do operations to remove the bones from men’s shoulders, or the long-chinned hairy proto-hipster with a girl jiggling on the behind seat of his Harley-Davidson “ 74.” In many theatres where The Wild One played, there was a lineup afterwards in the men’s room, the cyclists in their nail-studded black jackets scowling with adoration into the mirror as they rehearsed their public roles. Each man was Brando, distant and violent. Each man was Marlon, cool and beat. They stood in a row without shame, almost without vanity (so pure it was), like neophytes for sacrifice in their penitential leather, silver trim, sideburns, and duck-ass haircuts. Scratch not, O Hipster! And so the hipster’s lines of communication spread from a four-bit movie-house in a small town of the midwest to the chic saloons of New York and the Coast. He reminds us of the teddy-boys of England, the breaking-loose wild brats of defeated Japan, the existentialist zazous of Paris, toottling the petrified dixie they learned from old Beiderbecke records. His apologists, particularly the literary hipsters of San Francisco and New York, are fond of reaching back into history to invoke the criminal gods of French poetry—Rimbaud, who mysteriously vanished into Africa, Villon, who ended up dancing on the gallows, Genet, who is now a poet and playwright hero of Paris after a career of thievery, blackmail, and male prostitution. The very important difference between the American literary hipster and his foreign models is that the great artistcriminals were true outcasts from society: they did not pick themselves up by the seat of their own pants and toss themselves out. They were driven by class differences and economic pressure. A few of the Americans have performed spectacularly—mostly in the loony-bin; one even played Wil liam Tell with his wife and blew her head off—but these are individual troubles, not the product of any vast and windy guilt of society. Who ain’t got personal troubles? I dig yours, man; but I got mine too. In any case, the 1958 hipster is not the bold medieval troubadour prince of song and con, nor the romantic adventurer poet of later times, nor the angry driven Depression stiff: he is the true rebel without a cause. No, of course he has a cause—his charred self, but a self without connection or need. He is a reticent boyo with a yen for thuggery, a reluctant visitor to the affairs of men, a faintly girlish loiterer near the scenes of violence. If he can’t be a big boom-boom hero in a war, like Gary Cooper, at least he can take the muffler off his rod, like Marlon. Mainly he is afflicted with the great triumvirate disease of the American male—Passivity, Anxiety, Bore dom. Individualists without individuality, a sleepy brawl of knowing non thinkers, the lonely crowd at its grumbling loneliest, the hipsters fall naturally to the absolute submission of a marriage to heroin. Like the submission to boredom in television and all the other substitutes for

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personal creativeness in American life, narcotics involve an abdication of good sense by men deprived of the will to make their own ways. “I dig everything, man “ What do you want to do now?” “ I don’t know, man. Get some kicks somehow.” If the description of the hipster as “ passive” strikes you as harsh, look up the dictionary definition of the word: “ Med. Pertaining to certain morbid conditions characterized by deficient vitality and reaction.” The word hipster came in with bop, which is a way of keeping cool musically, at the same time as narcotics addiction burgeoned—a way of keeping cool sexually. The drug-taking hipster is not a sexual anarchist; he is a sexual zero, and heroin is his mama, papa, and someone in bed. (The pusher in A Hatful o f Rain is called “ M other.” ) Not every quasi hipster mainlines into the tattoo on his arm, of course, but the style of life is set by those who do. The coolest boys call each other “ daddy-o,” as if their passivity extends to thinking of every man as a potential guardian father. Of course, the traveling musician also cannot be bothered to remember names, so everyone is “ m an,” “ pops,” “ daddy-o.” They worship the purple fantasy of torn-tee-shirted masculinity created by Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and others who have invented a new theatrical type—the male impersonator. Adorably brutal, stripped of the prime attributes of manliness—intelligence, purpose, control—they are the curvaceous Mae Wests of popular melodrama. Having died, James Dean and Charlie Parker are defined as immortal. Living and growing up a bit, Marlon Brando is a traitor to this myth of saintly suicide by sports car or heroin. They might have forgiven his giving up the bongos, but his receding hairline is a disgrace to the cause. The strong silent hero must also be weak and pretty. One of the curious bypaths of hipsterism leads to their far-out religious camp. Jack Kerouac says, “ We’re in the vanguard of the new religion,” which is a little like the monk in the story who claimed that he was the world champion for humility. They picked up on St. John of the Cross for a time, Catholic ritual, St. Francis of Assisi (they were St. Frantics); then they moved on toward Byzantine, Greek, and Orthodox fantasies, with ikons and incense; they made the Dostoievsky scene. In recent years some have taken to calling themselves Zen Hipsters, and Zen Buddhism has spread like the Asian flu, so that now you can open your fortune cookie in one of the real cool Chinese restaurants of San Francisco and find a slip of paper with the straight poop: “ Dig that crazy Zen sukiyaki. Only a square eats Chinese food.” Promiscuity in religion stands, like heroin, for despair, a feverish embracing of despair, a passive sinking into irrationality. Zen and other religions surely have their beauties, but the hipster dives through

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them like a side show acrobat through a paper hoop—into the same old icy water of self-distrust below. The religious activities of the hipsters cure their unease in the world the way dancing cheek to cheek cures halitosis. No wonder the hipster says, “ Nada, I’m beat—I’m right in there, see— I’m the most religious, the most humble—I’m swinging, m an.” He stam mers because something is missing, a vital part, the central works. His soul, sense of meaning, individual dignity (call it how you like) has been excised as unnecessary by a civilization very often producing without good purpose. He feels that love is not love, work is not work, even protest is not protest anymore. On the consumer’s assembly line, in the leisure time sweatshop, he pieceworks that worst of all products of anxiety— boredom. This is the response of retreat from the cold inanities of his time payments, luxurious discomfort, dread of the successful future. Boredom is a corollary to anxiety. As the middle-class man now buys a brick for the new church (Does God need that basement bowling alley?), so the hipster tries to find himself in intuitions of meaning through the Anchor edition of Zen tales, or through some other fashionable interior decoration. Naturally he stammers, “ Cool, mon, real cool.” He wants to stop moving, jittering, flittering. He displays himself as exemplary because he has no wife, children, responsibilities, politics, work. The middle-class man both has and does not have these things. Who can call moving bits of paper a job? Most Americans are paper-movers. How is love of wife and children more than a social habit when a man feels qua man (not as husband or father) that he has no authority except in his own home? When a man’s house is his only castle, then he has no castle. Both smugness and ambition are characteristics of human beings, not of animals, though rats and rabbits can be taught despair by repeated electric shocks. Faced by the threat of absolute manipulation, the hipster mobilizes himself for a last stand—and hops about the cage, twitching his tail, bumping the charged wires. The cliche which tells us that Americans love Things, Possessions, does not go far enough. Americans also demand experiences of power, one way or the other, in person or out of the picture tube. This seems normal enough to be a condition of life, but not when the starved mirage of power crowds out the quietness which gives experience meaning and organizes a man to face his private issues of working, loving, having children, dying. Certain experiences lead away from rather than tow ard , and faster and faster we go: the experience does not help; we try wilder experience; this does not help; still more wild, wilder. The extreme of a flatulent submis sion to the mass media eventually stops all experience in its tracks, in the guise of giving perfect experiences which make it possible to carry on. Television as a medium of entertainment is not the villain any more than

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good whiskey is a villain; they can both be good friends. It is the bleared submission by depleted souls which destroys. Relaxation is one thing— sharing experience vicariously is a great experience to which the imagina tion entitles us. To be stunned is another matter entirely. Despair by electronic shock. Sensitive to all this, the hipster has decided to quit—resign—have no more of it. Instead of being part of a mass audience before the picture tubes, he becomes an audience of one before the hypo. He gives up on the issue of being human in society. He decides that the problem does not exist for him. He disaffiliates. The man who cares is now derided for being “ frantic.” But of course the hipster is still a part of a bewildered America in which Tab Hunter confides to an interviewer that he can only sleep with his Teddy bear in bed with him. The hipster is victim of the most hopeless condition of slavery—the slave who does not know that he is a slave and is proud of his slavery, calling it “ freedom .” Incurable? Nearly. The posture of negation and passivity thinks it is religion and rebellion; instead it is a mob phenomenon. These Nihilists sail dreamy down the Nile of throughway America, spending many a sleepless day figuring out some­ thing real cool to do at night, and end up trying to convince themselves, as Jack Kerouac does, that Charlie Parker is God. Kerouac’s birdmen in his novel, On the R oad , search for coolness within their beatness, hipness within their jeans-and-dirty-hair dream of quickies with marvelous girls (who also wear dirty hair and jeans). Occasionally, as in the Kerouac variety of superfrantic sub-hipster, sex takes the place of dope. This is a kind of sex which also takes the place of sex. The way some men gloat over possessions, he keeps score of his hero’s erotic blitzes, forgetting that—if you are the trooper who uses sex as a weapon—every notch in a weapon weakens the weapon. The hipster is a street-corner, bar, and partying phenomenon, a creature of mobs. One Rimbaud may be a genius; a crowd of them is a fad. An earlier fad for psychoanalysis had this in favor of it: Freud believed in the prime value of emotions, but in a necessary control by the intelligence. In other words, he valued society despite the discontents of civilization. The hipster gives up society, gives up intelligence, and thinks he is doing this in favor of the emotions; but he has already, without making a decision about them, let his feelings seep away through a leaky personality. What is left is a spasmodic jerk, though some of the individual spokesmen also have vivacious talent. No wonder that the madhouse is seen as the refuge of their “ best m inds.” Catatonia, here we come. These shrill moonbirds turn out to be rigid earth satellites, rocketed by bureaucrats beyond their ken into the air of reality, where they circle in a

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pattern determined without choice, give out a diminishing signal, draw to earth and burn, crumble, vanish. When Yeats looked into the future to find a terrible savior, an evolution up from animality into something strange and wonderful: What rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

—he did not mean James Dean. Perhaps, as they claim, the tunneling hipster’s avoidance of feeling can lead to a new honesty of emotion. Perhaps a ground hog might someday learn to fly, but man O man, that will be one strange bird.

San Francisco’s Mature Bohemians Kenneth Rexroth, 1957

It is gradually getting around that a special kind of regional renaissance has been under way in San Francisco ever since the war. Back in 1947 there was a brief flurry of interest at its borning. Journalists for the class magazines discovered that the city was the capital of what they called “ the new anarchist bohemianism.” In the past ten years the anarchists have become more anarchistic, the bohemians more bohemian, the city has come to play an even more capital role. People are always asking me, “ Isn’t this the sort of thing that exists in other cities? Every place has its coteries of poets, little magazines, little hand presses, little bohemian bars and jazz jo in ts.” Yes and no. It is true that all over the world a new kind of youth is growing up, with a new social outlook and new patterns of behavior. In France they used to call them existentialists; in Moscow they call them hooligans. In London they have yet to penetrate Bloomsbury and Chelsea, but hang out by the Elephant and are called Edwardians— “ Teddy B oys.” In Tokyo they make movies. In Budapest they have made history. But something different is going on in San Francisco. What Lipton has called our underground culture isn’t underground here. It is dominant—in fact almost all there is. This can be understood only if other than purely literary factors are taken into account. First the setting. The mild climate makes living a lot easier than in New York or Chicago. Ocean, forests, mountains are all at hand. Although San Francisco is as supersaturated as New York, it is easy to escape into any desired degree of wilderness. Even the air is kept clean by the sea breeze. The social base of the city is made up of migratory agricultural workers, seamen, longshoremen, other categories with a high degree of mobility— independent and skeptical. Life is far less competitive than in most American cities. It is easy to get by. Even the poorest have a little of the debonair spirit, and maritime workers, harvest stiffs and lumberjacks are 212

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notoriously the bohemians of the working class. This has a special rele­ vance. Most San Francisco poets are literally members of this working class, not one is a professor. Wages are high and it is easy to “ beat the system .” From British Columbia to San Diego the West Coast is sprinkled with canny flies who have learned to ride the fly wheel. Forest watchers, clam diggers, fruit pickers, fishermen in the summer, they make a pile and take it easy. It doesn’t take the writer long to catch on. One trip to the Arctic Ocean and Allen Ginsberg had enough money to go to Mexico and Europe. It is self-evident that this will produce a literature considerably different from what is done on a job parsing the seven types of ambiguity to seminars of born idlers. It also makes a political difference. All during the depression period of Communist influence in literature, many young San Francisco writers were, not “ proletarian w riters,” but actual proletarians. They didn’t argue in coffee shops about “ contact with the m asses,” they didn’t visit picket lines to write feature stories—they were on them because they worked at the job being struck. For this reason, when the great disillusionment came with the Moscow Trials and the Spanish Revolution, they simply walked away. Very few became professional anti-Stalinists of the Astor Place variety. Important to intellectuals with no grip on their environment of actual physical work, the factionalism of decaying Bolshevism seemed like more of the same thing to the man on the job. San Francisco has a larger Mediterranean population than most Ameri­ can cities. The whole feeling of the city is Mediterranean. Tradition is not something you learn in a course in “ The English Tradition, 237A” ; it is in the substance of a society like sap in the tree. The traditions of Britain and New England simply aren’t here. Until the war the city supported both Italian and French stock companies, as well as three Chinese theatres. You couldn’t see Shakespeare or Noel Coward except at rare intervals— but Racine or Mimi Agulia (whom Van Vechten once called America’s greatest actress) were readily available. The attitude toward life is defi nitely laissez faire, if not dolce fa r niente. The best hotels have side entrances for your discreet female guests. The town is no longer wide open—the Army closed it up—but it is far from tight shut. It is not just that you can indulge in the minor vices undisturbed. Far more important to the writer is the consistently permissive social atmosphere. Nobody cares if you visit a brothel, and nobody cares if you write free verse. A society like this acts to a certain extent as its own selector. Henry Miller and Kenneth Patchen migrated out here, but I doubt that any of the Neoantireconstructionists of the Southron Metaphysical group would care to be found dead in the place. There have not been any racial conflicts in the city for fifty years. Political chauvinism gets scant shrift. Congressional

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witch hunters don’t just meet with “ un-cooperative w itnesses.” A few more decibels of un-cooperation and it would be accurate to say that they are run out of town. The literary market place is far away in New York. Its cocktail parties and scalping expeditions and log rolling bees might as well be on the moon. Writers and artists here gain nothing by pushing each other around, and so within the limits of personalities, they are all friends. Its very remote­ ness helps make the city cosmopolitan. London and Paris are as important and almost as accessible as New York. Oriental interests come naturally, with none of the unwholesomeness of the occult. Several young San Francisco writers read Chinese and Japanese, more are interested in Buddhism. In many cases they got that way “ shipping out” to the Orient. So much for background. There is also a special recent historical factor. Just as the city has filled up with ordinary people who came through on their way to and from war in the Pacific, liked what they saw and stayed, so the ranks of the intellectuals have filled up with conscientious objectors who were quartered in camps in nearby forests and mountains during the war. In the city disillusion with Stalinism had led to rejection of the State and all political action, rather than to conversion to some other Social Democratic sect. The anarcho-syndicalist heritage of the IWW, once so powerful on the West Coast, was reasserting itself. In the mountains, meanwhile, innocent Christians and followers of A. J. Muste were becom ing disillusioned with their leaders and with the fraudulent trap which the CO camps turned out to be. Many—in fact most of my own friends— walked out and went voluntarily to prison. They were mostly quite young—with their mark still to make, in literature or anything else. But only in San Francisco did any writers who had already arrived in the radical avant garde become war resistors or conscientious objectors. When the war was over these two groups merged, to form a new intellec tual climate. For several years the city had a functioning anarchist group—the largest such group in the world—of young people of American ancestry. Two New Yorkers, representatives of the official “ movement,” arrived to take over, and in a matter of weeks the group withered away—a lot faster than Lenin’s state. Today, if absolutely cornered, most young San Francisco writers would submit they were anarchists, but the general attitude seems to be that there isn’t anything very anarchistic about calling yourself an anarchist and belonging to a “ movement.” Anarchism, conscientious objection, war resistance, were more popular with young English writers than with the Americans, and there was considerable contact during and just after the war between San Francisco and London. Writers like Alex Comfort, D. S. Savage, George Woodcock,

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Herbert Read were widely read. The first magazines to publish the new San Francisco school were Horizon, Poetry Quarterly, Poetry Folios. This has all died out, not because the Californians have changed, but because the British have. A kind of hopeless inertia—atomphobia—has settled upon the British avant garde. In France are several groups with similar ideas. The “ Tour de Feu” is one. But ideas are not enough. The level of artistic accomplishment is so low among postwar French writers that contact is not very fruitful. Several of us have contact of one sort or another with the better ones—Rousselot, Char, Frenaud, Seghers, Cadou, Prevert, Queneau—but they could not be called very close ideologically. Artaud and Michaux would be more at home here, but one is dead and the other never writes to anybody. By and large we let Henry Miller represent West Coast culture to the French. That brings up the question of personal influence. Miller, Kenneth Patchen and I are all living here. It would be hard to think of three people who write less alike. We may not even think alike, but however we have thought we have come to a number of common conclusions about life, society, art and politics. The popular picture of Henry Miller staring at his navel on a mountain top around the base of which slops a sea of long haired men and dirty girls in orgone boxes is an invention of the professorpoets and the gutter press—but he has certainly had his influence. Roger Caillois once wrote a book of literary controversy, Babel, without a proper name in it. I have not said anything about specific writers so far because I have wanted to give a clear picture of a social or cultural movement first. What these people have in common is what distinguishes them sharply from their contemporaries elsewhere. Edmund Wilson real ized this when he wrote of an older generation of realistic California novelists—Steinbeck, Saroyan, Hans Otto Storm and the rest. His Boys in the Back Room still has a certain relevance to the current scene, although most of his writers are dead or moved away. There are only two writers of fiction who could be called part of the contemporary San Francisco group—Henry Miller, who stays to home in Big Sur, and Jack Kerouac, who lives here only occasionally. Kerouac is a lot like Miller, a lot like Celine of Guignol’s Band, a little like Lawrence Durell’s Black Book, a little like Samuel Beckett, a little like Nelson Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side —only a good deal more so. This is the literature of disengagement, but it is a wildly passionate disengagement. Kerouac calls himself a Buddhist, but he is certainly the most excited Buddhist I have ever heard of. Sometimes he lapses into pages of terrifying gibberish that sounds like a tape recording of a gang bang with everybody full of pod, juice and bennies all at once, Miles Davis or Perez Prade on the phonograph and crazy people beating on the floor. At its best his prose

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is what they call a smashing indictment. Kerouac may be a member of the “ b eat,” but he is far from being a member of the “ cool” generation. He is too frantic at times for even my middle-aged taste. Behind all the jive he is really an outraged Puritan, an angry Hebrew prophet, Elisha sicking on the bears. Most young San Francisco writers are poets. The bulk of this piece has been taken up in describing a community in which it is possible for poetry to have social effectiveness and widespread prestige. It may be difficult to believe, but I hope I have made it at least not incomprehensible. Poetry readings to large and enthusiastic audiences are at least weekly occur rences—in small galleries, city museums, community centers, church social halls, pads and joints, apartments and studios, and at the very active Poetry Center at San Francisco State College, which also imports leading poets. The role of poetry out here has been compared to that of jazz in Chicago of the twenties, or to the heroic age of bop in New York. That is true, though jazz itself is a big factor in the literary life of San Francisco— another long story. Poetry out here, more than anywhere else, has a direct, patent measurable, social effect, immediately grasped by both poet and audience. This is far more important to us than publication in book or magazine on the other side of the continent. Many local writers never think of such publication. Instead, reputations are built through readings, local magazine publication, eventually a book on a small hand press, often run by the poet himself. Such books sell at least as well as poetry issued by commercial publishers. I have published three books locally, one at fifteen dollars, one at seventy-five cents. I have made as much money out of them as I have from any one of ten others published in New York. In addition, I am in living contact with my audience. It is impossible to do more than list most of the people out here writing good verse of one sort or another. I shall describe briefly a half dozen poets whom most of us would consider the best—leaving aside national reputations like Kenneth Patchen, who should be known to everybody. When William Everson’s The Residual Years was published by New Directions, he accused me of presenting him as “ Honest Bill The Pome Splitter.” Such a characterization would be unjust; still there’s something to it. His work has a ruggedly honest unliterary quality that is engaging. It has the ultimate, agonized sincerity that makes for a great, truly personal style. When the book came out both James Laughlin and I hoped that we were launching a new leader for a badly-needed poetic revolution. The book got good, if somewhat puzzled, reviews and eventually sold out. But the revolution took place west of the Sierra Nevada. Most of those poems were written while Everson was an inmate of a CO camp in the Oregon woods. Since then he has become a Dominican friar and now writes,

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mostly for the Catholic Worker, under the name of Brother Antoninus. He has printed, on his own press, two superlatively beautiful books, A Privacy o f Speech and Triptych fo r the Living. I make bold to say that he is, as a printer, the equal of Victor Hammer or Eric Gill, and he is one of the best religious poets of the century. Robert Duncan has published quite a number of books, among them, Heavenly C ity , Earthly C ity , Fragments o f a Disordered D evotion , Cae sar s Gate. He is more typically a member of the international avant garde than most San Francisco writers and has been influenced by the develop ment of that idiom, from Gertrude Stein to Henri Michaux. His work has been accused of rhetorical excess. I should say that it was rhetoric in the service of illumination, comparable to the work of the English poets, George Barker and David Gascoyne. Like them, he is concerned largely with the mystery and tragedy of love—a kind of Denis de Rougement stood on his head. Allen Ginsberg has slain, with one little book in the Pocket Poet Series, H owl , any number of stuffed Goliaths. San Francisco seems to have liberated Ginsberg. When he came here he was a rather conventional poet, torn between Morningside Heights and Times Square or MacDougal Alley. He met people who thought Henry James was pretentious snobbery, who dug Lennie Tristano’s odd chords, but were so cool they not only didn’t smoke marihuana, but were fathers of families. He cut loose with a spate of verse of unbelievable impact. It may be, from one point of view, “ social,” but it makes the past generation of proletarian poets look like ignorant bumblers. Technically it represents the first attempt since the early Carl Sandburg to handle the natural rhythms of American speech in a long strophic line. Ginsberg runs the danger of turning into a popular entertainer—he affects an audience much as Louis Armstrong affects French bobby soxers. Perhaps that’s all right. It hasn’t hurt Louis—much. Philip Lamantia has published one book, Erotic Poems (the Divine Eros, presumably), but he has written a considerable amount of poetry which, overly-strict in his standards, he has withheld from publication. A Catho lic, he too was a CO during the war. A few years ago he was associated with the surrealists—he was an editor of View —but he seems to have outgrown them. His work has a fiery clarity and integrity that goes beyond most surrealist verse. Lawrence Ferlinghetti publishes the Pocket Poets Series, including his own Pictures O f The Gone World , biting ironic verse which somewhat resembles the work of Raymond Queneau. Michael McClure has recently published a small collection of poems, Passage. As they say, the others are too numerous to do more than mention. James Broughton, Holly Beye, James Harmon, Madeleine Gleason, Paul Dreykus, Victor de Suvero, Leslie Hedley, Rosalie Moore, Richard Em

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erson, Sanders Russell have all published books, and there are others as interesting who have not: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Thomas Parkinson, Richard Moore, Eleanor Hesthal, Alice Paula, Jeanne McGahey, Murrey Hargrove, William Margolis, Jack Spicer, Christopher Maclaine, Eve Triem, George Leite—all of them better than most writers to be found in an average issue of the literary quarterlies. Of course there are local poets who do not fit into any sort of San Francisco group—especially Josephine Miles and Yvor Winters. I suppose as long a list could be made up in any area of about a million population. The point is that these people are all a vital part of the community—a real leaven in the lump. In addition, they are singularly unlike the cautious, unmotivated, academic poets now so common else where in the country—which is why, I guess, they are a potent social leaven in their community.

Beaten Kenneth A llsop , 1959

Passing through London last week was a founder-member of America’s Beat Generation, Mr. Kenneth Rexroth, poet, painter and innovator of the experimental poetry-jazz movement which is currently being imported here into the Third Programme and the Royal Court by our Mr. Christo­ pher Logue and the Tony Kinsey Quintet. But Mr. Rexroth is no downycheeked rebel. At fifty-three, he has for thirty years been a fixture on the San Francisco cultural landscape and is one of the elder statesmen of the much-publicised ‘California Renaissance.’ In the early days of the beats he was their Daddy-o. Now there seems to have occurred the classic Freudian schism between father and sons. In fact Mr. Rexroth appears to be more and more in monolithic isolation in his artistic standpoint. His long poem “ Thou Shalt Not Kill” (published here in his In Defence o f the Earth ) includes a detailed obituary column of old comrades who brazenly sold out, furtively conformed, or wrote everything off in disgust. ‘Where is Sol Funaroff?’ asks Mr. Rexroth ominously. ‘What happened to Countee Cullen?’ And many other names are named. He proceeds to put on record without any fooling exactly what did happen to them all. One ended up in skid-row poverty with lice in his armpits and crotch. Among the flock of suicides were a couple who drowned themselves in a bath, and a girl who soused herself in petrol and ran blazing into the street. Another buddy died of syphilis, and one of the girl-friends of the old gang ‘went up to Harlem, took on thirty men, came home and cut her throat.’ Those were the times (you might well be saying), the dear, dead days of yesteryear when all true-hearts took the honourable way out of putting a match to themselves or finishing it off with a bang in Harlem. But Mr. Rexroth still has to deal with the deserters from these Flanders Fields of the American arts. He continues blisteringly: How many stopped writing at thirty?

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One name that does not, and quite properly does not, figure in the drumhead roll-call is that of Kenneth Rexroth. Mr. Rexroth has stubbornly stuck to his aesthetic guns and has become an implacable one-man literary terrorist movement, raking the fat flanks of American gracious living with his small-arms fire—but no longer a beat generation guerrilla. In the early days of the go-go-go cult Mr. Rexroth seemed content to be lumped together with Clellon Holmes, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac and the rest of the hobo existentialists who became identified as the Beat Generation, or beatniks for the convenience of headline-writers. But a year ago, when I first met Mr. Rexroth at a poetry-jazz session in a Bowery rendezvous called The Five Spot, the empathy seemed to be withering. Then Mr. Rexroth said briskly in reply to the question if he was himself actually a beatnik: ‘An entomologist is not a beetle.’ Shortly before, on a TV programme, Kerouac, author of the high school best-seller On The R oad , had declared, rather hurt, that he had been thrown out of the Rexroth home. Mr. Rexroth confirmed this schism in the beatnik camp. ‘He arrived with a gallon of muscatel inside him and I didn’t find him amusing com pany,’ he explained. Last week Mr. Rexroth was briefly visiting Britain from Aix-en-Prov ence, where he has been living with his wife and two small daughters all winter on two grants worth together 2,000 dollars. When I met him in London I observed that he had gone native as far as his headgear—a dark blue beret—but, for the rest, was still in Californian Renaissance uniform: baggy suit, chocolate shirt and string tie. He has a pugnacious snub face, pistol-point blue eyes, a moustache and grey hair cropped to a thin turf. ‘I’m no longer especially interested in the beatniks,’ he told me. ‘I ’m a poet and an abstract painter in my own right and my own idiom. The beats, I think, have gone. When my London publisher brought out my poems I told him not to take the beat angle, not to get hung up with an overstock of Davy Crockett caps. ‘Ten years ago I was the only critic saying it wasn’t true that every American writer was a conformist businessman or a college professor, and that there was a generation in revolt, and a new literature arising compa

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rable with juvenile delinquency. I kept repeating that the feeling of revolt was so intense that the problem was to keep these youngsters from committing emotional suicide once they got into print. ‘No one else was willing to champion them. I did—and ever since I ’ve had them round my neck. The trouble was that this was just what Madison Avenue wanted. They turned it into a craze, like goldfish-swallowing or pole-squatting. There aren’t many of the beatniks who can stand out against that sort of publicity. I think Ginsberg is probably the best of them—he’s become a kind of folk hero, like W. H. Davies—but I’m not sure that he hasn’t written himself out. ‘The truth about the beatniks—like your Angry Young Men—is that they basically have bourgeois appetites. They know America’s at a point of satiation—that you can only swallow so many commodities. But they hanker for the goods of Mammon while at the same time they’re sickened with them. Some try to counteract this by owning nothing you can’t leave out in the rain and not keeping appointments. Well, you can play at being a beatnik in America because it’s so damned prosperous. But the fallacy is exposed by the fact that if you tried to be a beatnik in Italy or France you’d drop dead of starvation or typhus before anyone noticed. ‘Certainly Kerouac’s books have had an influence on the teen-age set. Every small town in American has girls in black stockings just waiting to hitch-hike to Greenwich Village. But the whole thing is based on a discredited idea that a lot of American writers abroad are still propagat­ ing—that you can’t live as an artist in America. That’s thirty years out of date. Thirty years ago if you went into Iowa anything you said would be incomprehensible to the local Babbitt. But now he and his wife talk about Kierkegaard or Francis Bacon’s paintings. The administrative and techni cal class in America are now the great retail culture-buyers of the world. They have the money and the leisure, and they’re hungry for books and art. ‘You don’t have to exist like a bum—or a beatnik—if you’re a writer in America. Whatever Kerouac and the crowd say, the artist is respected and lives well. I know one poet who gets 15,000 dollars a year at a university and another who collects sports cars. I don’t personally want those sort of things. I live like a European—the sort of life the average English free lance lives. I find it very easy to live, and also much easier to write for the bourgeois ‘kept’ press. The New York Times don’t care what you write as long as it’s well written and entertaining. And they pay five times as much as the highbrow magazines. ‘But I believe I know what I ’m doing. I can handle it. The beatniks don’t seem to know what a dangerous position they’re in. It’s true that the feeling—the hopelessness of the world of Strontium 90—exists in a bona

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fide way. But the truth of all revolutions is not that they turn into counterrevolutions but that they become boring. Already people are bored with the beatniks. And what will happen to them then? They’ll vaporise and be no m ore.’

On the Beat Nature of Beat Frank A, Butler , 1960

These beatniks are right about a few things: the world is a tough place for art and artists; materialism is largely a damned shame; politics are hard on the nerves; revolt is fun. I suppose it is easy enough to suck a kind of non-life from such aged lemons. I have known many a misled sensitivity to go sour in squeezing out one of sorts. But art is made of sterner stuff than whines and jargon, and it is hardly nurtured by the sentimental, the lazy and the naive. It is too bad that the Beat Generation is this absurd and that it is this conventional. There is always room for honest fury, whether high art or not. Nonconformism and impertinent nonsense have always had their gadfly place, although only when specific, and only when articulate. But the elusive strength of individual vision is not to be found among the flotsam of Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s North Beach. Indeed, its absence is the surest proof that the Beat Generation was truly beaten before it began. I would be sympathetic if I could. When face to face with the man himself—hipster or hobo, adman or Adventist—it had better be hard not to be sympathetic. Across the coffee shop table from some pathetic and limited escapist, as on a visit with your bland old uncle, you have to avoid the facile labels or go under in some comparably vacant fashion yourself. But I do not believe that it is mockery of human beings to try to destroy the pretense that the Beat Generation represents a movement of any artistic validity whatsoever. I think I understand what is eating them. I am their contemporary; we have sought and feared and lost much the same things. We even agree on superficialities. It is in the more active depths, those of discovery, where we differ, and where I am incensed. I fled the home town in 1947. I had despised high school for three years, its teachers, teams, dating customs and, without realizing it, its diseased 223

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attitude toward education. The home town itself, I sensed, had little to do with me. And so I hitchhiked the states without aim; nights I walked my Wolfean streets, and summers I dug my traditional ditches. Off and on for the next ten years I piddled about New York cold-water flats, fooling with dreams and love, attempting and failing to become a student and perhaps a teacher, and, of course, finding Good Jobs to walk out on in a few weeks or months, each time terrified of what it might do to me. None of this was very original, and I soon met my compatriots of the foul circumstance. But I could never yield to their hung-up world; to join their club and adopt their passwords was to accept their pit. Some obtuse pride kept me free, and some old arrogance kept me even optimistic— toward myself, which was all I could afford to worry about in those days. It was a matter of my survival, and simply by coming to know these others for what they were, that became no problem at all. Dissatisfaction might lead to construction, sane or hysterical adjust­ ment, or merely to deeper dissatisfaction. I wanted to write, and finally I did. It was no noble decision, although I tried to believe so. The ignoble failures at the demands of ordinary life were also hard at work in my choice. In another age such dissatisfaction might have led to political or even to adventurous expression. But our last frontiers these days are art and science, and science, alas, is no longer free. I found that writing was how I could most be myself and whatever I was likely to become. Once I accepted this as a necessity—which took the usual years of attempting one schizoid self or the other—I learned that I was alone, within a self too volatile to be contained without creative labor, and that I was stuck there, once and for all. There was no longer a choice, if there really ever had been. This was where I was and where I could only hope I belonged. I suspect that our time makes this aloneness a fundamen tal demand of any writer. It was not and it is not easy. But why in the world should it be? My first writing was largely tenacity in the face of failure, of ignorance of the youthful sort, and the old temptation of the pay check. I had scorned creative writing outfits, and I had an irrational disdain for others who were supposed to be young writers. But until I did learn just how to twist a portion of myself down on paper, the sheer work at least gave me some perspective toward those incessant talkers up and down MacDougall Street in Greenwich Village. It became clear to me that for these a dissatisfaction very similar to my own had led only to talk to endless parties and feuds, and to personal incompetency toward the simplest demands of life. I have never known so many people with so much time at their disposal. I have never known such panic at the thought of privacy, such frenetic fear of being caught alone.

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Totally without the concept of responsibility, life had become for them one continuous adolescent indulgence. This was a long time ago, as time goes in my life. Initially charmed by the easy totality of their alienation, the very luxury of their petulant clubbiness, I became ever more repulsed by the lax self-pity that waste itself seemed to engender in each of them. Eventually the bohemian romance became tarnished by the grubby facts of self-shattered lives, and, at last, I came to mere pity. It no longer mattered that the poetry shoved upon me was barely literate, the prose sprawling and empty, the abstract paintings without character or control. By then I expected nothing but truculent trash, and to this day I have found very little else. But I recognized a fragment of myself, and of us all, in their purposeful destruc tion, and I wanted to seek it out, so that I might use it one day as I chose. Communication was still there. From Bird Parker’s jazz to the pathos of the New Outcast, we could agree upon the anti-human forces that had added such precarious forms of beauty and despair to our staggering world. Whenever a fellow said to me, “ Man, I can’t make it,” I knew what he meant. But I also knew that I could, or that I would die trying; words such as “ disengagement” irritated me. Finally, I did not believe that any youth in good health had the right to make such a statement. And I did say “ right.” For does any sane man pretend that free will entirely nullifies responsibility? The beatnik actually does. Ask one. “ Sanity” is for him just another vicious word invented by squares to persecute the cool. Yet these are important people to me, or I would not be writing this, as a plea to a few of them, at least, to return to life. Yes, I admit that I have persons in mind. They are so many, after all, and they each represent some good gone fruitlessly wrong. The listless morons among them—and, literally, there are many—do not matter here. Too many bright youngsters certainly have not “ made it” for the Beat Generation, as a group of people, to be a sneering matter. Some amusement at their spurious art movement is as normal as toward the shallows of Soviet art. But it would be foolhardy to ignore their assumptions. For as pure, negative existence, the beatnik is as alarming a creature in American life as the duck-tailed delinquent. Indeed, the former is no more than an intellectualized version of the latter. Laughter alone could never do them in. The beatnik, or more aptly here the hipster, relishes the popular confu­ sion between himself and the jazz artist. Why shouldn’t he? His lingo is lifted from jazz as well as from the underworld and he is as likely to play with bongo drums as to be a petty thief (a fact that the group’s middleaged mother hens prefer to ignore in their defensive articles). But the hipster is typically untalented in jazz or crime—except as, say, a basement hobbyist. In fair fact, the beatnik does not often claim talent except in

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literature, which is the easiest art to fake, requiring the minimum of formal training. But on the whole, even the beatnik poetic poseur represents a rare compromise with his own creed of absolute disengagement. The beatnik is not then a phony in the usual sense of that understandably popular epithet. He is usually much too indifferent to effort of any sort to put forth a really convincing front of fakery. He is more the imitator of attitudes than effects. And it is jazz and literature that are the principal sources of his attitudes. Bird’s* music was sad and elegant, yet of a wild joy in its creation that was somehow as pure as its sweet despair, and as honest. Like Dylan Thomas, or any great artist, he was a phenomenon. But also like Thomas, he makes an apt hero for anyone more concerned with the emotional life of the man than with the art of the artist. For art implies individuality of a sort so stark that all Togetherness must be left behind. To appreciate such geniuses as these with any comprehension beyond the banal should imply an ability to appreciate others of comparable gifts. But the beatnik dares not see that Dylan Thomas’ poetry is no less controlled than that of A. E. Housman. In his tastes he is as limited as your grandmother. He too has his comfortable heroes, and he wants no bugging standards of quality—much less of tradition or learning—to inter fere with either the simple idiocy of his response to them or his lazy dismissal of all others. In place of that quality the beatnik reader is stuffed fat-brained and fat-hearted by sentimentality—I call it unearned emotion— in all its dreary and turgid forms. Now there is nothing wrong with this, as far as it goes. If Dylan Thomas or Mrs. Lindbergh is the only poet who has meaning for a man, or if Bird Parker, or Pat Boone’s croons for that matter, makes Mozart unnecessary for him, so be it. One must attempt a tolerant shrug, swallow his tirade, and go his own way. But art without form or originality is a flat contradic tion. Whenever limited standards of any sort become rampant among those who presume to call themselves poets or writers, human exchange itself is threatened. It then becomes time for a twentieth-century Dunciad to hurl them into that very oblivion which they crave. (I wish Auden would try it!) For even when the beatnik scrawls out his gummy poems, he scorns the effort it takes to say a thing well. Even at that most sacred task he continues to reject the tools of the ages, the accumulated skill and wisdom of man. It is not then that little of worth has been produced by the Beat Generation, but rather that the means are clearly not there. Nothing could be sillier than that naïve try at literary liberalism which says, “ Well, at *Charles Parker, known as “ Bird.” Jazz musician, 1920-1955.— Ed.

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least something’s going on, and th a t’s good.” This is error. For no good can come of such a self-limiting world. These are rebels without a cause if ever there were any. They have nothing new to say, and, what is far worse, they poorly reiterate that nothing. From Milton to Blake to Thomas himself, the poetic innovator has been a master of that very voice which he seeks to change. Ginsberg’s “ Howl” is by this measure only a shrill yap—Walt Whitman multiplied by Jean Genet and divided to a fraction by the personality of a masturbatory child. If Mr. Ginsberg were nineteen, his wild venom might be of hopeful interest. But he is thirty-odd, and my bet is that his future is merely to become the North Beach Maxwell Bodenheim of 1985. The story is little better in beat prose, although Jack Kerouac is a writer surpassing all the other beatnik literati put together. Throughout On The R oad , at least, the humor and objectivity of a real writer lighten his dreary, one-track confessional. Kerouac is here no more “ a hipster being himself” than Marilyn Monroe’s comedy is merely “ acting natural like the dumb blonde she is.” No art works this way. Kerouac’s prose might sound pretty silly out of context, but within this one work it often meets the supreme test of carrying off that context with astonishing success. This is a matter of knowing when to use the hip talk, when to damper it, and when to toss it out altogether—frequently all in one paragraph. He does have that much control (even though he dutifully denies it). But his talent extends no further, nor shall it, I fear, so long as a somewhat inspired gush is sufficient for him, and such concerns as characterization, structure and conflict are deemed irrelevant. This is why judging the Beat Generation by its very best, which is only fair, still leaves no hope of any future maturity of expression. That very phrase, being antinihilistic, would make the true beatnik fuss and fume and flip. A random issue of the Evergreen Review should suffice for typical utterances. In a rambling poem by Frank O’Hara, a poet not entirely without a meager derivative talent, there are such lines (stanzas? para­ graphs?) as: . . . Beards growing, and the constant anxiety over looks. I’ll shave before she wakes up. Sam Goldwyn spent $2,000,000 on Anna Sten but Grushenka left America. One of me is standing in the waves, an ocean bather, or I am naked with a plate of devils at my hip. Something going on? I submit that this is balderdash, and that there is nothing else to say about it. In a pettish memoir about El Paso there are these two sentences: “ Because only geographically the Rio Grande, which in the Southwest is

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a river only part of the time and usually just a stretch of sand along the banks of which sick spiders weave their webs, divides the United States from Mexico. Only geographically.” I submit that this is incompetent (as well as uninformed); an expository article is not the place to play Faulk ner—or someone—and in this case “ only geographically” is repeated simply because the writer senses that the reader has surely forgotten his point by the end of the tortuous statement. Here and there the same writer attempts straight writing and his skill-less pretension to narrative becomes clear in his dependence for originality upon such weary tricks as “ youngmen” and “ sadfaced,” “ Theyre” and “ wasnt”—the trivial fishbones of the twenties. Also, in a translation of a seventh-century description of a Chinese poet are these sentences: “ His face and body were old and beat. Yet in every word he breathed was a meaning in line with the subtle principle of things, if only you thought about it deeply.” I submit that this is North Beach bird-brain mysticism and not a translation from the Chinese at all. In a recorded poem by one Lawrence Ferlinghetti (a beatnik business­ man and promoter) about a statue of St. Francis in San Francisco, complete with propping progressive chords and a reiterated swipe from Keats, is the wistful description of a passing nude, “ Wearing only a very small bird’s nest in a very existential place.” Is it any wonder that such retarded adolescents have found no audience but themselves? There is such fine unintentional comedy throughout the works of the beatnik coterie. The greater absurdity would be only in taking the works themselves seriously. I suppose there is no reason why the Evergreen Review should not give space to these people if it wishes. It is a handsome and varied magazine for all this garbage, and perhaps more purposefully controversial than adulatory in these unfortunate publications. This same issue includes a lucid essay on Zen by Daisetz Suzuki, an excellent translation from the French by Richard Howard, and a decent first story about two boys hunting a porcupine and their night’s lesson of charity. There is no need to fret about editors; they know well enough that they stand or fall by what they print. The question is in the fearful choice, and it is up to each editor to make his own. It is forever axiomatic among the untalented, unpublished and unread that the publishing industry is a racket run by Presbyterians born between 1820 and 1870 who despise ability and who pervert it whenever they are able—that, in short, it is the rest of the literary world that is a clique. In N ew World Writing II, Kenneth Rexroth, amidst such quaint words as “ reactionary” and “ underground,” seriously accuses literary America of

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“ a conspiracy of bad poetry” since about 1930—approximately, I take it, when Mr. Rexroth entered upon his literary career. I only hope that the editors of New World Writing were as amused as their readers at Mr. Rexroth’s advice that we read Parker Tyler, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson and himself—appalling derivatives of Ezra Pound, Whitman or W. C. Williams, every one, and none worth one sweet line of Theodore Roethke, Donald Hall, Edgar Bowers or—to name a relative unknown—Edward Field. The great influence other than that of Pound, Whitman and Williams is, of course Japanese poetry, which thus far has only proved the extreme difficulty of mastering a tone quiet alien to that of one’s own language and tradition. I have no doubt that this is in itself an inevitable and salutary development. But when such achievement arrives it will come from a more profound sensitivity than one absorbed by the clubby superficialities of West Coast Zen. Playing a role among admirers might make one look and feel poetic, but discovering the voice of the poet is rather a matter of solitary absorption. After all, it took the lonely Yeats, not a communal Pre-Raphaelite, to restore magic to its high place in poetry. The trouble is not only that the beatnik resides in a cave of narrow emotional and intellectual dimensions, but that he is comfortable there only with the filthy furniture of arrogance and hatred. It is this violence and this dirt, rather than the foolish works or people themselves, which enrage me. Here pity—a feeling applicable to the human spirit or to animals—seems misapplied. A genuine avant-garde (which seems of no earthly use to most of us today anyway) must by its nature be belligerent, but it is always primarily original. It is the very thinness of the beatnik critique that makes ludicrous the need for any general critique of American letters at all, and it is its essential obscenity that gives its sole motive—terror—quite away. For the beatnik is driven by nothing so much as a stark fear of life in all its challenging complexity and in all its infinite forms—including, for that matter, literature itself. He is thus the only doubter that this is as healthy an age as any artist could desire so far as activity and variety are concerned. Perhaps a few writers long for the static haze of some Golden Age, but only the beatnik craves the perverse anarchy of a junky’s dream world. Yet Mr. Rexroth finds it necessary to scream exactly like a third-rate poet at literary quarterlies, creative writing groups, poetry workshops and—you guessed it— Time. In each case he demonstrates that his is a myopic condition. He beats up on John Crowe Ransom and company as though all writers who do not hang out at the City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco’s

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bohemia still hide dusty little New Criticism shrines under their book­ shelves. Now just how dated can you get? By the time I knew what was going on, the consensus was that this skirmish was long concluded and that the valuable tools of the New Critics, without their various pedantic lapses, had already been absorbed. Who’s angry now? Only Mr. Rexroth, the beatnik oracle. The rest of us, young and old, realize that considerable good was done by the New Critics along with the bad and that probably nothing at all would have come of their particular efforts without the dry force of a certain academic stress. Even pedantry may have a value exceeding that of nincompoopery. It is no news that the quarterlies run the danger of stuffiness. Indeed, a Partisan R eview table of contents often sounds like a parody of itself. Some of the lesser university reviews are so thick with mythological unravelings as to sound like Jesuit schoolmen debating the angels and pinhead trick. But, after all, the dullest scholarship, when accurate, plays its legitimate role, and when it is merely foolish, who in the world cares? Partisan , for example, has published an enviable list of sound work, both creative and critical, over the years, while consistently representing a clear point of view of active social engagement. Now, it so happens that this point of view rather bores me as a cause, but the reason I respect it is not so much that there are people who do believe in such self-conscious participation, but that by any standard at all the Partisan attitude is intelligent, particular and useful. Of far greater importance than these quibbles is that Partisan is evidently far more interested in publishing, as often as possible, such a major young writer as James Baldwin than the cautious essays of any English instructor. I feel sure that if there were a Baldwin among the Beat Generation he would have the good sense to submit to Partisan , or to any of the better quarterlies, rather than to, say, Origin , and that he would find in these attentive offices a happy reception. For the point is that these editors are literate people. They are not cultish at all. After all, they have grown up with the age and are learning right along with everybody else. Talk to a few of them and you will hear ready agreements to “ Too much criticism; poetry’s chill as stone; fiction’s dry” —and a wry request for work that is not. They know better than anyone that fiction and poetry are being too much written in the universi ties and that much of it must suffer that inevitable prissy influence. They do feel, however, that this situation provides no argument for turning utter junk loose upon the world. Like the rest of us, they wait for the sure works to emerge, and do the best they can with what comes in. Hudson Review and its editor. Frederick Morgan, have done as much for me as a young writer could hope for from any publication. I have never

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heard a word of academic advice from Mr. Morgan. Indeed, he is no more the type to give it than I. Instead, I have been favored by the sort of harsh talk that helps and the sort of specific respect that comes only from those who know and care. I do not like all of Hudson 's essays or poetry or fiction; nor have I been asked to join a club that would swear such foolishness of me. It should not be necessary to point out, in this personal manner, that the only conspiracy in literary America, from the quarterlies to book publishers and even to the slicks, in their admittedly commercial way, is good writing. True, everyone makes mistakes. P layboy, for one example, is frankly riding the beatnik fad for all it is worth in undergraduate circulation. But the blitherings of the beatniks would have one believe that anyone who has been to college or who loves beauty in literature is as subversive to art as Madison Avenue. One is asked, in effect, to condemn the passing poetic trickeries and slick fictional genres as somehow danger­ ous, to attack with furious pamphlets the dishwater prose and pale meters of the academies, and to tear into the adman malignancies as though anyone of sense paid them serious attention. And this request comes from the palest talents and most fanatic faddists—and by far the most talented self-publicists—of them all. To these I answer, “ Well, man, I couldn’t make it with the schools and Madison Avenue either, but I think it’s O.K. for a writer to go to Harvard—or even Oxford—if he still writes good— you know, man—cool.” As for the creative writing centers and poetry workshops (alas, I am one with the lowliest beatnik in despising that word), no one but a dean, maybe, would pretend that any classroom could fashion a literary master from a daydreaming sophomore. Perhaps these groups do some good; perhaps, in the long run, very little. I am thankful that I never fell into one while starting out, but why make an issue out of that? Such outfits as Paul Engle’s Iowa Center fill a harmless, fashionable demand at worst; at best, they might help some worthy youth along. Again, why fret? Not one could possibly do injury to real talent, simply because nothing in this world ever has. Nor is even Time quite the devil the bohemians make out, beatniks and elite sympathizers alike. The bright boys in Rockefeller Center are quite capable of spotting unique literary value, and for all their lively sins have a better record at it than just about any other popular publication, except­ ing, perhaps, that nasty old enemy countess, the New Yorker. Time , by the way, has paid serious attention to the young English writers, Angry or not, I take it, simply because beneath their revolt against the Establishment (as lovely a new word as I know!) they yet seek to make sense out of that bewildering new England of theirs. For Osborne and

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Amis and Braine are still dealing with the world of coping and integrity, the eternal issues of character and ideals. Their crudity, or their ultimate value, is thus here beside any point at all, for it is their insistence upon rage-as-process that places them squarely in the mainstream of today’s literature. There has been considerable haggling these last years over whether revolt or conservatism should be the order of the day. I say “ haggling” because such a distinction is critical rather than artistic. It is not an active question to any true artist—even a Joyce—while he is at work. From the classical Nabokov to the labyrinthine Beckett, the good writer knows that his success depends not upon his technique but how much he knows what to do with it. For myself, as I have implied, experimentalism for its own sake holds little interest. Not today. Those wars against the Victorian barriers seem as distant from our concerns as Hastings. Nothing could be more irrelevant to the world-wide barriers of the heart than Mr. Rexroth’s outrageous blather that the avant-garde must go on, come what may. Perhaps it would be a different story if the Beat Generation did indeed represent an avantgarde of any consequence rather than a derriere-garde of only casual and negative interest. For the movement serves no purpose commensurate with that human condition in which we all forever move, suffer and dream. Revolt or conservatism? These are abstractions; the issue feasts on air. For if the proof is, as I have said, forever in the pudding, it does not appear probable that the Beat Generation shall ever bake an edible one. Our age demands something more than alleyway feuding; the times are entirely too rough for playing the games of the mannerists. Literary ranting is not needed so much as literate wisdom, and beatnik bathos becomes a clear crime when compassion is so demanded by the awful circumstance of our grave day. It is time to catch up with fifty years of technique and bring literature back to the depths of the mind, and of the heart. This is being done by those who consider experimentalism to be an out-dated luxury whose monuments were probably ultimate of their type, by those who know—with Joyce or Dickens—that the central problem of literature is forever moral, and one not likely to be elucidated by the gibble-gabble of rear-guard eccentrics. One suspects that the beatnik would allow Dos toevsky to share the pantheon with Henry Miller, Genet and Pound only because he was also a rebellious fellow. Left as square would be that blazing moral core of The Brothers K aram azov , or the ethical tragedy of Raskolnikov. We see the costumes, we hear the talk, suffer the intolerance, the pose and the fury of the rebel, but where is the rage-as-process? The beatnik battle is waged by an anti-intellectual, anti-artistic gang of sentimental

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dabblers and semi-criminal nihilists, devoted to destruction, motivated by pettiness, and equipped with mediocrity. It is waged against stilled contro­ versy and passing fads; against obvious materialism and poor old politics; against mind and beauty in art, and against all life’s learning and wisdom; against—oh, so furiously against!—the decent jerk in the street and anyone at all with hope. In place of these universal conditions, these human values and their lapses, we are offered nothing by the Beat Generation but personal laxity and collective squalor, a Togetherness of filth and the solace of marijuana. Within this arrogantly grubby world, the thief is a hero, the hobo a saint and the junky the Holy Ghost itself. Its mysticism is in reality a petulant romance; its sole activity the continual leisure of the sensualist. The next Dante or Shakespeare will be the first genius to speak to the entire world, to East as well as West, and it will be the traditional values and complex understandings from which he shall surely speak, utilizing all that we have learned, in this collapsing century, for his construction of that inevitable bridge. It is no job for a Zen hobbyist, or for a mouther of anarchistic trash, or for a hophead enemy of mankind itself. No more is it for these than for a writer of hymns and Mom and milk. The danger from each is, I judge, about equal. When the time is ripe, the needed job will be done. After all, it always has been. Until then, the John the Baptists prepare the ground as best they may, seeking sense amidst the irrational, searching out whatever good that the remnants of the West might salvage to lug into that shotgun marriage to come. I am not discussing some One World Utopia, or even progress, neither of which I believe is within man’s capacity. I mean nothing more than that art must make clear the same old business all over again once the race turns the next corner back upon itself, and that that will be a hard enough task for anyone. I do not believe that this is quite the work for hatred but for love, and rather less for fury than for thought; in short, that the writer’s task today does not seem to be cut out for beatniks at all, but for artists. “ Wearing a bird’s nest in a very existential place” indeed! May the Beat Generation dissolve into its froth, and may its members find something sane to do with themselves.

The Know-Nothing Bohemians Norman Podhoretz, 1958

Allen Ginsberg’s little volume of poems, H owl, which got the San Francisco renaissance off to a screaming start a year or so ago, was dedicated to Jack Kerouac (“ new Buddha of American prose, who spit forth intelligence into eleven books written in half the number of years . . . creating a spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature” ), William Seward Burroughs (“ author of Naked Lunch, an endless novel which will drive everybody mad” ), and Neal Cassady (“ author of The First Third, an autobiography . . . which enlightened Buddha” ). So far, everybody’s sanity has been spared by the inability of N aked Lunch to find a publisher, and we may never get the chance to discover what Buddha learned from Neal Cassady’s autobiography, but thanks to the Viking and Grove Presses, two of Kerouac’s original classics, On the R oad and The Subterraneans, have now been revealed to the world. When On the R oad appeared last year, Gilbert Milstein commemorated the event in the New York Times by declaring it to be “ a historic occasion” comparable to the publication of The Sun A lso Rises in the 1920’s. But even before the novel was actually published, the word got around that Kerouac was the spokes­ man of a new group of rebels and Bohemians who called themselves the Beat Generation, and soon his photogenic countenance (unshaven, of course, and topped by an unruly crop of rich black hair falling over his forehead) was showing up in various mass-circulation magazines, he was being interviewed earnestly on television, and he was being featured in a Greenwich Village nightclub where, in San Francisco fashion, he read specimens of his spontaneous bop prosody against a background of jazz music. Though the nightclub act reportedly flopped, On the R oad sold well enough to hit the best-seller lists for several weeks, and it isn’t hard to understand why. Americans love nothing so much as representative docu­ ments, and what could be more interesting in this Age of Sociology than a 234

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novel that speaks for the “ young generation?” (The fact that Kerouac is thirty-five or thereabouts was generously not held against him.) Beyond that, however, I think that the unveiling of the Beat Generation was greeted with a certain relief by many people who had been disturbed by the notorious respectability and “ maturity” of post-war writing. This was more like it—restless, rebellious, confused youth living it up, instead of thin, balding, buttoned-down instructors of English composing ironic verses with one hand while changing the baby’s diapers with the other. Bohemianism is not particularly fashionable nowadays, but the image of Bohemia still exerts a powerful fascination—nowhere more so than in the suburbs, which are filled to overflowing with men and women who uneasily think of themselves as conformists and of Bohemianism as the heroic road. The whole point of Marjorie Morningstar was to assure the young marrieds of Mamaroneck that they were better off than the apparently glamorous luftmenschen of Greenwich Village, and the fact that Wouk had to work so hard at making this idea seem convincing is a good indication of the strength of prevailing doubt on the matter. On the surface, at least, the Bohemianism of On the R oad is very attractive. Here is a group of high-spirited young men running back and forth across the country (mostly hitch-hiking, sometimes in their own second-hand cars), going to “ wild” parties in New York and Denver and San Francisco, living on a shoe-string (GI educational benefits, an occa sional fifty bucks from a kindly aunt, an odd job as a typist, a fruit-picker, a parking-lot attendant), talking intensely above love and God and salva tion, getting high on marijuana (but never heroin or cocaine), listening feverishly to jazz in crowded little joints, and sleeping freely with beautiful girls. Now and again there is a reference to gloom and melancholy, but the characteristic note struck by Kerouac is exuberance: We stopped along the road for a bite to eat. The cowboy went off to have a spare tire patched, and Eddie and I sat down in a kind o f homemade diner. I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world, and here came this rawhide oldtimes Nebraska farmer with a bunch o f other boys into the diner; you could hear his raspy cries clear across the plains, across the whole gray world o f them that day. Everybody else laughed with him. He didn’t have a care in the world and had the hugest regard for everybody. I said to myself, Wham, listen to that man laugh. That’s the West, here I am in the West. He came booming into the diner, calling Maw’s name, and she made the sweetest cherry pie in Nebraska, and I had some with a mountainous scoop of ice cream on top. “ Maw, rustle me up some grub afore I have to start eatin m yself or some damn silly idee like that.” And he threw himself on a stool and went hyaw hyaw hyaw hyaw. “ And throw some beans in it.” It was the spirit o f the West sitting right next to me. I wished I knew his whole raw life and what the hell he’d been doing all these years besides laughing and yelling like that. W hooee, I told my soul, and the cowboy came back and off we went to Grand Island.

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Kerouac’s enthusiasm for the Nebraska farmer is part of his general readiness to find the source of all vitality and virtue in simple rural types and in the dispossessed urban groups (Negroes, bums, whores). His idea of life in New York is “ millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves . . . grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island C ity,” whereas the rest of America is populated almost exclusively by the true of heart. There are intimations here of a kind of know-nothing populist sentiment, but in other ways this attitude resembles Nelson Algren’s belief that bums and whores and junkies are more interesting than white-collar workers or civil servants. The difference is that Algren hates middle-class respectability for moral and political reasons—the middle class exploits and persecutes—while Kerouac, who is thoroughly unpolitical, seems to feel that respectability is a sign not of moral corruption but of spiritual death. “ The only people for m e,” says Sal Paradise, the narrator of On the R o a d , are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars. . . . ” This tremendous emphasis on emotional intensity, this notion that to be hopped-up is the most desirable of all human conditions, lies at the heart of the Beat Generation ethos and distinguishes it radically from the Bohemianism of the past. The Bohemianism of the 1920’s represented a repudiation of the provin ciality, philistinism, and moral hypocrisy of American life—a life, inciden tally, which was still essentially small-town and rural in tone. Bohemia, in other words, was a movement created in the name of civilization: its ideals were intelligence, cultivation, spiritual refinement. The typical literary figure of the 1920’s was a mid westerner (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Eliot, Pound) who had fled from his home town to New York or Paris in search of a freer, more expansive, more enlightened way of life than was possible in Ohio or Minnesota or Michigan. The political radical­ ism that supplied the characteristic coloring of Bohemianism in the 1930’s did nothing to alter the urban, cosmopolitan bias of the 1920’s. At its best, the radicalism of the 1930’s was marked by deep intellectual seriousness and aimed at a state of society in which the fruits of civilization would be more widely available—and ultimately available to all. The Bohemianism of the 1950’s is another kettle of fish altogether. It is hostile to civilization; it worships primitivism, instinct, energy, “ blood.” To the extent that it has intellectual interests at all, they run to mystical doctrines, irrationalist philosophies, and left-wing Reichianism. The only art the new Bohemians have any use for is jazz, mainly of the cool variety.

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Their predilection for bop language is a way of demonstrating solidarity with the primitive vitality and spontaneity they find in jazz and of express­ ing contempt for coherent, rational discourse which, being a product of the mind, is in their view a form of death. To be articulate is to admit that you have no feelings (for how can real feelings be expressed in syntactical language?), that you can’t respond to anything (Kerouac responds to everything by saying “ Wow!” ), and that you are probably impotent. At the one end of the spectrum, this ethos shades off into violence and criminality, main-line drug addiction and madness. Allen Ginsberg’s po­ etry, with its lurid apocalyptic celebration of “ angel-headed hipsters,” speaks for the darker side of the new Bohemianism. Kerouac is milder. He shows little taste for violence, and the criminality he admires is the harmless kind. The hero of On the R oad , Dean Moriarty, has a record: “ From the age of eleven to seventeen he was usually in reform school. His specialty was stealing cars, gunning for girls coming out of high school in the afternoon, driving them out to the mountains, making them, and coming back to sleep in any available hotel bathtub in town.” But Dean’s criminality, we are told, “ was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of America joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long acoming (he only stole cars for joy rides).” And, in fact, the species of Bohemian that Kerouac writes about is on the whole rather law-abiding. In The Subterraneans , a bunch of drunken boys steal a pushcart in the middle of the night, and when they leave it in front of a friend’s apartment building, he denounces them angrily for “ screwing up the security of my pad.” When Sal Paradise (in On the Road) steals some groceries from the canteen of an itinerant workers’ camp in which he has taken a temporary job as a barracks guard, he comments, “ I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief” —which, of course, is a way of turning his own stealing into a bit of boyish prankishness. Nevertheless, Kerouac is attracted to criminality, and that in itself is more significant than the fact that he personally feels constrained to put the brakes on his own destructive impulses. Sex has always played a very important role in Bohemianism: sleeping around was the Bohemian’s most dramatic demonstration of his freedom from conventional moral standards, and a defiant denial of the idea that sex was permissible only in marriage and then only for the sake of a family. At the same time, to be “ promiscuous” was to assert the validity of sexual experience in and for itself. The “ meaning” of Bohemian sex, then, was at once social and personal, a crucial element in the Bohemian’s ideal of civilization. Here again the contrast with Beat Generation Bo hemianism is sharp. On the one hand, there is a fair amount of sexual

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activity in On the R oad and The Subterraneans. Dean Moriarity is a “ new kind of American saint” at least partly because of his amazing sexual power: he can keep three women satisfied simultaneously and he can make love any time, anywhere (once he mounts a girl in the back seat of a car while poor Sal Paradise is trying to sleep in front). Sal, too, is always on the make, and though he isn’t as successful as the great Dean, he does pretty well: offhand I can remember a girl in Denver, one on a bus, and another in New York, but a little research would certainly unearth a few more. The heroine of The Subterraneans, a Negro girl named Mardou Fox, seems to have switched from one to another member of the same gang and back again (“ This has been an incestuous group in its time” ), and we are given to understand that there is nothing unusual about such an arrange­ ment. But the point of all this hustle and bustle is not freedom from ordinary social restrictions or defiance of convention (except in relation to homosexuality which is Ginsberg’s preserve: among “ the best minds” of Ginsberg’s generation who were destroyed by America are those “ who let themselves b e ---------in th e --------- by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love” ). The sex in Kerouac’s books goes hand in hand with a great deal of talk about forming permanent relationships (“ although I have a hot feeling sexually and all that for her,” says the poet Adam Moorad in The Subterraneans, “ I really don’t want to get any further into her not only for these reasons but finally, the big one, if I’m going to get involved with a girl now I want to be permanent like permanent and serious and long termed and I can’t do that with her” ), and a habit of getting married and then duly divorced and re-married when another girl comes along. In fact, there are as many marriages and divorces in On the R oad as in the Hollywood movie colony (must be that California climate): “ All those years I was looking for the woman I wanted to m arry,” Sal Paradise tells us. “ I couldn’t meet a girl without saying to myself, What kind of wife would she make?” Even more revealing is Kerouac’s refusal to admit that any of his characters ever make love wantonly or lecherously—no matter how casual the encounter it must always entail sweet feelings toward the girl. Sal, for example, is fixed up with Rita Bettencourt in Denver, whom he has never met before. “ I got her in my bedroom after a long talk in the dark of the front room. She was a nice little girl, simple and true [naturally], and tremendously frightened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me prove it, but I was too impatient and proved nothing. She sighed in the dark. ‘What do you want out of life?’ I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.” This is rather touching, but only because the narrator is really just as frightened of sex as that nice little girl was. He is frightened

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of failure and he worries about his performance. For perform ance is the point—performance and “ good orgasms,” which are the first duty of man and the only duty of woman. What seems to be involved here, in short, is sexual anxiety of enormous proportions—an anxiety that comes out very clearly in The Subterraneans , which is about a love affair between the young writer, Leo Percepied, and the Negro girl, Mardou Fox. Despite its protestations, the book is one long agony of fear and trembling over sex: I spend long nights and many hours making her, finally I have her, I pray for it to come, I can hear her breathing harder, I hope against hope it’s time, a noise in the hall (or whoop o f drunkards next door) takes her mind off and she can’t make it and laughs— but when she does make it I hear her crying, whimpering, the shuddering electrical female orgasm makes her sound like a little girl crying, moaning in the night, it lasts a good twenty seconds and when it’s over she moans, “ O why can’t it last longer,” and “ O when will I when you do?” “ Soon now I b et,” I say, “ you’re getting closer and closer— ” Very primitive, very spontaneous, very elemental, very beat. For the new Bohemians interracial friendship and love affairs apparently play the same role of social defiance that sex used to play in older Bohemian circles. Negroes and whites associate freely on a basis of complete equality and without a trace of racial hostility. But putting it that way understates the case, for not only is there no racial hostility, there is positive adulation for the “ happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of Amer ica.” At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night . . . I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a “ white man” disillusioned. All my life I’d had white ambitions . . . I passed the dark porches o f Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices were there, occasionally the dusky knee o f some mysterious sensuous gal; and dark faces o f the men behind rose arbors. Little children sat like sages in ancient rocking chairs.

It will be news to the Negroes to learn that they are so happy and ecstatic; I doubt if a more idyllic picture of Negro life has been painted since certain Southern ideologues tried to convince the world that things were just as fine as fine could be for the slaves on the old plantation. Be that as it may, Kerouac’s love for Negroes and other dark-skinned groups is tied up with his worship of primitivism, not with any radical social attitudes. Ironically enough, in fact, to see the Negro as more elemental than the white man, as Ned Polsky has acutely remarked, is “ an inverted form of keeping the

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nigger in his place.” But even if it were true that American Negroes, by virtue of their position in our culture, have been able to retain a degree of primitive spontaneity, the last place you would expect to find evidence of this is among Bohemian Negroes. Bohemianism, after all, is for the Negro a means of entry into the world of the whites, and no Negro Bohemian is going to co-operate in the attempt to identify him with Harlem or Dixie land. The only major Negro character in either of Kerouac’s two novels is Mardou Fox, and she is about as primitive as Wilhelm Reich himself. The plain truth is that the primitivism of the Beat Generation serves first of all as a cover for an anti-intellectualism so bitter that it makes the ordinary American’s hatred of eggheads seem positively benign. Kerouac and his friends like to think of themselves as intellectuals (“ they are intellectual as hell and know all about Pound without being pretentious or talking too much about it” ), but this is only a form of newspeak. Here is an example of what Kerouac considers intelligent discourse— “ formal and shining and complete, without the tedious intellectualness” : We passed a little kid who was throwing stones at the cars in the road. “ Think of it,” said Dean. “ One day he’ll put a stone through a man’s windshield and the man will crash and die—all on account of that little kid. You see what I mean? God exists without qualms. As we roll along this way I am positive beyond doubt that everything will be taken care of for us— that even you, as you drive, fearful o f the wheel . . . the thing will go along o f itself and you w on’t go off the road and I can sleep. Furthermore we know America, w e’re at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it’s the same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every sid e.”

You see what he means? Formal and shining and complete. No tedious intellectualness. Completely unpretentious. “ There was nothing clear about the things he said but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear.” Somehow. Of course. If what he wanted to say had been carefully thought out and precisely articulated, that would have been tedious and pretentious and, no doubt, somehow unclear and clearly impure. But so long as he utters these banalities with his tongue tied and with no comprehension of their meaning, so long as he makes noises that come out of his soul (since they couldn’t possibly have come out of his mind), he passes the test of true intellectuality. Which brings us to Kerouac’s spontaneous bop prosody. This “ pros ody” is not to be confused with bop language itself, which has such a limited vocabulary (Basic English is a verbal treasure-house by compari son) that you couldn’t write a note to the milkman in it, much less a novel. Kerouac, however, manages to remain true to the spirit of hipster slang

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while making forays into enemy territory (i.e., the English language) by his simple inability to express anything in words. The only method he has of describing an object is to summon up the same half-dozen adjectives over and over again: “ greatest,” “ trem endous,” “ crazy ,” “ m ad,” “ wild,” and perhaps one or two others. When it’s more than just mad or crazy or wild, it becomes “ really mad” or “ really crazy” or “ really wild.” (All quantities in excess of three, incidentally, are subsumed under the rubric “ innumerable,” a word used innumerable times in On the R oad but not so innumerably in The Subterraneans.) The same poverty of resources is apparent in those passages where Kerouac tries to handle a situation involving even slightly complicated feelings. His usual tactic is to run for cover behind cliche and vague signals to the reader. For instance: “ I looked at him; my eyes were watering with embarrassment and tears. Still he stared at me. Now his eyes were blank and looking through me. . . . Something clicked in both of us. In me it was suddenly concern for a man who was years younger than I, five years, and whose fate was wound with mine across the passage of the recent years; in him it was a matter that I can ascertain only from what he did afterward.” If you can ascertain what this is all about, either beforehand, during, or afterward, you are surely no square. In keeping with its populistic bias, the style of On the Road is folksy and lyrical. The prose of The Subterraneans , on the other hand, sounds like an inept parody of Faulkner at his worst, the main difference being that Faulkner usually produces bad writing out of an impulse to inflate the commonplace while Kerouac gets into trouble by pursuing “ spontaneity.” Strictly speaking, spontaneity is a quality of feeling, not of writing: when we call a piece of writing spontaneous, we are registering our impression that the author hit upon the right words without sweating, that no “ art” and no calculation entered into the picture, that his feelings seem to have spoken themselves, seem to have sprouted a tongue at the moment of composition. Kerouac apparently thinks that spontaneity is a matter of saying whatever comes into your head, in any order you happen to feel like saying it. It isn’t the right words he wants (even if he knows what they might be), but the first words, or at any rate the words that most obviously announce themselves as deriving from emotion rather than cerebration, as coming from “ life” rather than “ literature,” from the guts rather than the brain. (The brain, remember, is the angel of death.) But writing that springs easily and “ spontaneously” out of strong feelings is never vague; it always has a quality of sharpness and precision because it is in the nature of strong feelings to be aroused by specific objects. The notion that a diffuse, generalized, and unrelenting enthusiasm is the mark of great sensitivity and responsiveness is utterly fantastic, an idea that comes from

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taking drunkenness or drug-addiction as the state of perfect emotional vigor. The effect of such enthusiasm is actually to wipe out the world altogether, for if a filling station will serve as well as the Rocky Mountains to arouse a sense of awe and wonder, then both the filling station and the mountains are robbed of their reality. Kerouac’s conception of feeling is one that only a solipsist could believe in—and a solipsist, be it noted, is a man who does not relate to anything outside himself. Solipsism is precisely what characterizes Kerouac’s fiction. On the R oad and The Subterraneans are so patently autobiographical in content that they become almost impossible to discuss as novels; if spontaneity were indeed a matter of destroying the distinction between life and literature, these books would unquestionably be It. “ As we were going out to the car Babe slipped and fell flat on her face. Poor girl was overwrought. Her brother Tim and I helped her up. We got in the car; Major and Betty joined us. The sad ride back to Denver began.” Babe is a girl who is mentioned a few times in the course of On the Road; we don’t know why she is over­ wrought on this occasion, and even if we did it wouldn’t matter, since there is no reason for her presence in the book at all. But Kerouac tells us that she fell flat on her face while walking toward a car. It is impossible to believe that Kerouac made this detail up, that his imagination was creating a world real enough to include wholly gratuitous elements; if that were the case, Babe would have come alive as a human being. But she is only a name; Kerouac never even describes her. She is in the book because the sister of one of Kerouac’s friends was there when he took a trip to Central City, Colorado, and she slips in On the R oad because she slipped that day on the way to the car. What is true of Babe who fell flat on her face is true of virtually every incident in On the R oad and The Subterraneans. Nothing that happens has any dramatic reason for happening. Sal Paradise meets such-and-such people on the road whom he likes or (rarely) dislikes; they exchange a few words, they have a few beers together, they part. It is all very unremarkable and commonplace, but for Kerouac it is always the greatest, the wildest, the most. What you get in these two books is a man proclaiming that he is alive and offering every trivial experience he has ever had in evidence. Once I did this, once I did that (he is saying) and by God, it m eant something! Because I responded ! But if it meant something, and you responded so powerfully, why can’t you explain what it meant, and why do you have to insist so? I think it is legitimate to say, then, that the Beat Generation’s worship of primitivism and spontaneity is more than a cover for hostility to intelligence; it arises from a pathetic poverty of feeling as well. The hipsters and hipster-lovers of the Beat Generation are rebels, all right, but not against anything so sociological and historical as the middle class or

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capitalism or even respectability. This is the revolt of the spiritually underprivileged and the crippled of soul—young men who can’t think straight and so hate anyone who can; young men who can’t get outside the morass of self and so construct definitions of feeling that exclude all human beings who manage to live, even miserably, in a world of objects; young men who are burdened unto death with the specially poignant sexual anxiety that America—in its eternal promise of erotic glory and its spiteful withholding of actual erotic possibility—seems bent on breeding, and who therefore dream of the unattainable perfect orgasm, which excuses all sexual failures in the real world. Not long ago, Norman Mailer suggested that the rise of the hipster may represent “ the first wind of a second revolution in this century, moving not forward toward action and more rational equitable distribution, but backward toward being and the secrets of human energy.” To tell the truth, whenever I hear anyone talking about instinct and being and the secrets of human energy, I get nervous; next thing you know he’ll be saying that violence is just fine, and then I begin wondering whether he really thinks that kicking someone in the teeth or sticking a knife between his ribs are deeds to be admired. History, after all—and especially this history of modern times—teaches that there is a close connection between ideologies of primitivistic vitalism and a willing ness to look upon cruelty and bloodletting with complacency, if not downright enthusiasm. The reason I bring this up is that the spirit of hipsterism and the Beat Generation strikes me as the same spirit which animates the young savages in leather jackets who have been running amuck in the last few years with their switch-blades and zip guns. What does Mailer think of those wretched kids, I wonder? What does he think of the gang that stoned a nine-year-old boy to death in Central Park in broad daylight a few months ago, or the one that set fire to an old man drowsing on a bench near the Brooklyn waterfront one summer’s day, or the one that pounced on a crippled child and orgiastically stabbed him over and over and over again even after he was good and dead? Is that what he means by the liberation of instinct and the mysteries of being? Maybe so. At least he says somewhere in his article that two eighteenyear-old hoodlums who bash in the brains of a candy-store keeper are murdering an institution, committing an act that “ violates private prop erty ”—which is one of the most morally gruesome ideas I have ever come across and which indicates where the ideology of hipsterism can lead. I happen to believe that there is a direct connection between the flabbiness of American middle-class life and the spread of juvenile crime in the 1950’s, but I also believe that juvenile crime can be explained partly in terms of the same resentment against normal feeling and the attempt to cope with the world through intelligence that lies behind Kerouac and

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Ginsberg. Even the relatively mild ethos of Kerouac’s books can spill over easily into brutality, for there is a suppressed cry in those books: Kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause. How can anyone in his right mind pretend that this has anything to do with private property or the middle class? No. Being for or against what the Beat Generation stands for has to do with denying that incoherence is superior to precision; that ignorance is superior to knowledge; that the exercise of mind and discrimination is a form of death. It has to do with fighting the notion that sordid acts of violence are justifiable so long as they are committed in the name of “ instinct.” It even has to do with fighting the poisonous glorification of the adolescent in American popular culture. It has to do, in other words, with being for or against intelligence itself.

The Flowering of the Hippie Movement John Robert Howard, 1969 The greatest fo o l in history was Christ. This great fo o l was crucified by the com m ercial pharisees, by the authority o f the respectable, and by the m ediocre official culture o f the philistines. A nd has not the church crucified Christ more deeply and subtly by its hypocrisy than any pagan? This Divine Fool, whose imm ortal com passion and holy folly p laced a light in the dark hands o f the world. — C ecil C ollins, The Vision o f the Fool

This article is written for people who, in future years, may want to understand something of the hippie movement. To that end, I have (1) described the hippie scene as an anthropologist might describe the culture of a South Sea island tribe, (2) reviewed some of the more prominent “ explanations” for the movement, and (3) advanced what seems to me to be a useful theory of the hippie phenomenon. The data for this article were drawn from literature by and about hippies and other Bohemians in American society, and from extensive informal participation in the hippie movement. The Hippie Scene I first heard the term “ hippie” in the Fall of 1966. I had gone to the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco to hear a rock musical group, one of a number which had formed as a result of the smashing impact of the Beatles upon youth culture. The Fillmore previously had presented mostly black performers, but, increasingly, white rock groups were being fea­ tured. A new cultural style was evolving and was on display that evening. The rock group blasted its sound out through multiple amplifiers, the decibels beating in on the room like angry waves. Above and behind them, a 245

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melange of colors and images played upon a huge movie screen. Muted reds and somber blues spilled across the screen, shifting and blending, suddenly exploding like a burst of sunlight let into a dark room, then receding slowly like a gentle tide. Bright images and jagged shapes leaped out from the screen, only to be washed away by the colors before appearing again. Image and color fused and swirled, then melted apart. Film-clips of old serials played on two smaller screens suspended high on the walls of either side of the hall, while shifting multi-colored lights illuminated the dancers, the shafts of yellow and blue and red seeming to leap and bounce off the frenetic dance floor. The total effect was that sought by the Dadaists in the early 1920’s, a breaking up of traditional linear habits of thought, a disconnection of the sensory apparatus from traditional categories of perception. Late in the evening, I fell into conversation with a gaily dressed couple, and, in the course of an exchange of remarks, the girl referred to the persons at the dance as “ hippies.” I had not heard the term before and asked them of its derivation but they had no idea how it had originated.1 As we parted, neither they nor I realized that within nine months, there would be no hamlet or haven in the United States that would not have heard of hippies. Within a year, young people by the thousands were to stream to San Francisco—hippie heaven—while little old ladies in Des Moines trembled at this new evidence that the foundations of the Republic were crumbling. The Life and Death of Haight- Asbury Before the rise of Haight-Asbury, the aspiring writer or artist from the Midwest fled to Greenwich Village. By the summer of 1967, Haight-Asbury had replaced the Village as the place to go, and, indeed, people were leaving the Village to move to San Francisco. The words of Horace Greeley, “ Go west, young m an,” had rarely been so diligently heeded. The Haight-Asbury area was for many years an upper-middle-class neighborhood. Haight Street was named for Henry Haight, a conservative former governor of California, who would be appalled could he have foreseen that his name was to be associated with the “ love generation.” As the city grew and the residents of the area prospered, they moved out and rented their property. Eventually, the expanding black population began to move in and, in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, were joined by beatnik refugees from the North Beach area of the city. Eventually, in this relatively tolerant community, a small homosexual colony formed. Even before the hippies appeared, then, Haight-Asbury had become a kind of quiet Bohemia.

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“ Hippie” is a generic term. It refers to a general orientation of which there are a number of somewhat different manifestations. In the following section, I shall discuss four character types commonly found on the hippie scene: (1) the visionaries, (2) the freaks and heads, (3) the midnight hippies, and (4) the plastic hippies. The Visionaries

The visionaries gave birth to the movement. It lived and died with them in Haight-Asbury. Let us attempt here to understand what happened. The hippies offered, in 1966 and 1967, a serious, though not wellarticulated, alternative to the conventional social system. To the extent that there was theory of change implicit in their actions, it might be summed up by the phrase “ transformation by example.” 2 Unlike political revolutionaries, they attempted no seizure of power. Rather, they asked for the freedom to “ do their thing,” that is, to create their own social system. They assumed, implicitly, that what they created would be so joyous, so dazzling, so “ groovy” that the “ straight” 3 would abandon his own “ uptight” life and come over to their side. A kind of anti-intellectual ism pervades hippie thinking; thus, their theory of change was never made explicit. The essential elements in the hippie ethic are based on some very old notions—the mind-body dichotomy, condemnation of the worship of “ things,” the estrangement of people from each other, and so on. Drasti cally collapsed, the hippie critique of society runs roughly as follows: Success in this society is defined largely in terms of having money and a certain standard of living. The work roles which yield the income and the standard of living are, for the most part, either meaningless or intrinsically demeaning. Paul Goodman, a favored writer among the young estranged, has caught the essence of this indictment. Consider the men and women in TV advertisements demonstrating the product and singing the jingle. They are clowns and mannequins, in grimace, speech, and action. . . . What I want to call to attention in this advertising is not the economic problem of synthetic demand . . . but the human problem that these are human beings working as clowns; and the writers and designers o f it are human beings thinking like idiots. . . . “ Juicily glubbily Blubber is dubbily delicious and nutritious — eat it, kitty, it’s good.4”

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Further, the rewards of the system, the accouterments of the standard of living, are not intrinsically satisfying. Once one has the split-level ranchtype house, the swimming pool, the barbecue, and the color-television set—then what? Does one, then, measure his progress in life by moving from a twenty-one-inch set to a twenty-four-inch set? The American tragedy, according to the hippies, is that the “ normal” American evaluates himself and others in terms of these dehumanizing standards. The hippies, in a sense, invert traditional values. Rather than making “ good” use of their time, they “ waste” it; rather than striving for upward mobility, they live in voluntary poverty. The dimensions of the experiment first came to public attention in terms of a number of hippie actions which ran directly counter to some of the most cherished values of the society. A group called the Diggers came into existence and began to feed people free in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and in Constitution Park in Berkeley. They themselves begged for the food that they prepared. They repudiated the notion that the right of people to satisfy their basic needs must be mediated by money. If they had food, one could share it with them, no questions asked. Unlike the Salvation Army, they did not require prayers as a condition of being fed; unlike the Welfare Department, they did not demand proof of being without means. If a person needed lodgings, they attempted to make space available. They repudiated the cash nexus and sought to relate to people in terms of their needs. Free stores were opened in Berkeley and San Francisco, stores where a person could come and take what he needed. Rock groups such as Country Joe and the Fish gave free concerts in the park. On the personal level, a rejection of the conventional social system involved dropping out. Given the logic of the hippie ethic, dropping out made sense. The school system prepares a person for an occupational role. The occupational role yields money and allows the person to buy the things which society says are necessary for the “ good life.” If society’s definition of the good life is rejected, then dropping out becomes a sensible action, in that one does not want the money with which to purchase such a life. By dropping out, a person can “ do his own thing.” And that might entail making beads or sandals, or exploring various levels of conscious ness, or working in the soil to raise the food that he eats. They had a vision of people grooving together, and they attempted to remove those things which posed barriers—property, prejudice, and pre conceptions about what is moral and immoral. By the summer of 1968, it was generally felt by those who remained that Haight-Asbury was no longer a good place. “ It’s pretty heavy out there on the street,” a former methedrine addict remarked to me as we talked

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of changes in the community, and his sentiments were echoed in one of the underground newspapers, The San Francisco Express Times: “ For at least a year now . . . the community as a common commitment of its parts, has deteriorated steadily. Most of the old crowd is gone. Some say they haven’t actually left but are staying away from the street because of bad vibrations.” In those streets, in the summer of 1968, one sensed despair. Signifi­ cantly, the agencies and facilities dealing with problems and disasters were still very much in evidence, while those which had expressed the elan and hope of the community either no longer existed, or were difficult to find. The Free Clinic was still there, as was the shelter for runaways, and the refuge for persons on bad trips; but free food was no longer served in the parks, and I looked for several days before finding the Diggers. Both external pressures (coercion from the police and various agencies of city government) and internal contradictions brought about the disinte gration of the experiment. Toward the end of this paper, I shall discuss external pressures and why they were mounted. At this point, I am analyzing only the internal contradictions of the hippie ethic. Stated simply, the argument is as follows. The hippies assumed that voluntarism (every man doing his thing) was compatible with satisfying essential group and individual needs and with the maintenance of a social system in which there was an absence of power differentials and invidious distinctions based on, for example, wealth, sex, or race. That assumption is open to question. Voluntarism can work only where the participants in a social system have a sufficient understanding of the needs of the system to be willing to do things which they do not want to do in order for the system to persist. Put somewhat differently, every system has its own needs, and where voluntarism prevails, one must assume that the partici­ pants will both understand what needs to be done and be willing to do it. Let me clarify by way of illustration. I asked one of the Diggers why they were no longer distributing food in the park. Well, man, it took a lot o f organization to get that done. We had to scuffle to get the food. Then the chicks or somebody had to prepare it. Then we got to serve it. A lot of people got to do a lot o f things at the right time or it doesn’t come off. Well, it got so that people weren’t doing it. I mean a cat wouldn’t let us have his truck when we needed it or some chick is grooving somewhere and can’t help out. Now you hate to get into a power bag and start telling people what to do but without that, man, well.

By refusing to introduce explicit rules designed to prevent invidious power distinctions from arising, such distinctions inevitably began to appear. Don S., a former student of mine who had moved to Haight-

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Asbury, commented on the decline of the communal house in which he had lived. We had all kinds o f people there at first and anybody could stay if there was room. Anybody could crash out there. Some o f the motorcycle types began to congregate in the kitchen. That became their room, and if you wanted to get something to eat or a beer you had to step over them. Pretty soon, in a way, people were cut off from the food. I don’t mean that they wouldn’t give it to you, but you had to go on their “ turf” to get it. It was like they had begun, in some very quiet and subtle way, to run things.

In the absence of external pressures, the internal contradictions of the hippie ethic would probably have led to a splintering of the experiment. Significantly, many of the visionaries are trying it again outside the city. There are rural communes throughout California. In at least some of them, allocation of task and responsibility is fairly specific. There is the attempt within the framework of their core values—freedom from hang-ups about property, status, sex, race, and the other furies which pursue the normal American—to establish the degree of order necessary to ensure the per sistence of the system within which these values are expressed. The visionaries used drugs, but that was not at the core of their behavior. For that reason, a distinction between them and more heavily drugoriented hippies is legitimate. The public stereotype of the hippie is actually a composite of these two somewhat different types. Let us now discuss the heavy drug users. F rea k s a n d H e a d s

Drugs are a common element on the hip scene. The most frequently used are marijuana and hashish, which are derived from plants, and Lysergic Acid Diethylamine (LSD) and methedrine, which are chemical derivatives. Much less commonly used are opium and heroin. The plant derivatives are smoked, while the chemicals are taken orally, “ mainlined” (shot into a vein), or “ skin-popped” (injected under the skin). To account for the use of drugs among hippies, one must understand something of the mythology and ideology surrounding their use. Marijuana is almost universally used by the hip and by hippies.5 For some, it is simply a matter of being “ in” ; others find it a mild euphoriant. A sub-group places the use of drugs within a religious or ideological context. Both freaks and heads are frequent users of one or more psychedelic agents; the term “ freak,” however, has negative connotations, suggesting either that the user is compulsive in his drug-taking, and therefore in a

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“ bag,” or that his behavior has become odd and vaguely objectionable as a result of sustained drug use. The mild nature of marijuana is suggested by the fact that, among drug users, one hears frequent mention of “ pot heads” but never of “ pot freaks.” LSD and methedrine, on the other hand, seem to have the capacity to induce freakiness, the “ acid freak” and the “ speed freak” being frequently mentioned. In 1966 and 1967 in Haight-Asbury, the drug of choice for those who wanted to go beyond marijuana was LSD. An elaborate ideology sur rounded its use, and something of a cult developed around the figure of Dr. Timothy Leary, the former Harvard professor who advocated it as the answer to the world’s problems. The LSD Ideology

The major tenets of the ideology may be summed up as follows. (1) LSD introduces the user to levels of reality which are ordinarily not perceived. The straight might speak of “ hallucinations,” suggesting that the “ acid” user is seeing things which are not real. The user admits that part of his trip consists of images and visions, but insists that part also consists of an appreciation of new and more basic levels of reality. To make the straight understand, some users argue that if a microscope had been placed under the eyes of a person during the Middle Ages, that person would have seen a level of reality for which there was no accounting within the framework of his belief system. He possibly would have spoken of “ hallucinations” and demanded that microscopes be banned as dangerous. Some users speak of being able, while on a trip, to feel the rhythm and pulse of the earth and to see the life within a tree. They contend that the trip leaves them with a capacity to experience reality with greater intensity and greater subtlety even when not high. (2) LSD develops a certain sense of fusion with all living things. The tripper speaks of the “ collapse of ego,” by which he means a breakdown of the fears, anxieties, rationalizations, and phobias which have kept him from relating to others in a human way. He also speaks of sensing the life process in leaves, in flowers, in the earth, in himself. This process links all things, makes all things one. The ideology can be expanded, but these are some of its essential elements. Three things account for the decline of “ acid” use in Haight-Asbury: (1) personal disillusionment on the part of many people with Timothy Leary, (2) a rise in the frequency of “ acid burns” (the sale of fake LSD), and (3) the rise of methedrine use.

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Let us deal with the decline and fall of Timothy Leary. Leary was, in a sense, the Johnny Appleseed of LSD. He was hailed by some as a new Christ. When the unbelievers began to persecute him, however, he had need of money to fight various charges of violation of drug laws which carried the possibility of up to thirty years in jail. Possibly for that reason, he embarked upon what was, in essence, a theatrical tour. His show (billed as a religious celebration) was intended to simulate the LSD experience. It was bad theater, however, and consisted mostly of Leary sitting crosslegged on the stage in front of candles and imploring his audience, which might have had to pay up to $4.00 apiece, to commune with the billionyear-old wisdom in their cells. Leary’s tour coincided in time with the beginning of his decline among hippies, and probably contributed to it. Additionally, the increased demand for LSD brought on traffic in fake “ acid,” the unsuspecting would-be tripper possibly getting only baking soda or powdered milk for his money. In 1967 methedrine replaced LSD as the major drug in Haight-Asbury. There is no evidence that marijuana is physically harmful. The evidence on LSD is open to either interpretation. Methedrine, on the other hand, is a dangerous drug. It is a type of amphetamine or “ pep” pill and is most commonly referred to as “ speed.” Taken orally, it has the effect of a very powerful amphetamine. “ It uses up body energy as a furnace does wood. . . . When it is shot [taken in the blood stream] it is said to produce an effect of watching the sun come up from one hundred miles away. And the user is bursting with energy.” In an interview which I conducted in July 1968, a former “ speed freak” discussed the effects of the drug. You’re really going. You know you can do anything when you’re high on speed. You seem to be able to think clearer and really understand things. You feel powerful. And the more you drop the stuff the more you feel like that. It kills the appetite so, over time, malnutrition sets in. You’re in a weakened state and become susceptible to all kinds o f diseases. I caught pneumonia when I was on speed. But I couldn’t stop. I was falling apart, but it was like I was running so fast I couldn’t hit the ground. It was a kind o f dynamic collapse.

The use of methedrine seemed to have leveled off in mid-1968 and was even possibly in decline. From 1966 through 1968, there was a discernible pattern in drug use in Haight-Asbury, a pattern which has relevance in terms of the effectiveness of drug laws. I would advance as a proposition that the volume of use of a drug is determined not by the laws, but by the effects of the drug. If a drug is relatively harmless (as with marijuana), its use will spread, irrespective of severe laws. If it is harmful, its use will be limited, despite more lenient laws (as with methedrine). That heroin, cocaine, and the like have not

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penetrated Haight-Asbury can probably be explained in terms of the fact that their deleterious effects are well known. Methedrine was an unknown, was tried, and was found to be dangerous; thus, one frequently hears in Haight-Asbury the admonition that “ speed kills.” In summary, then, the pattern of use probably reflects the effects of each drug. Marijuana, being relatively mild, is widely used. LSD is much more powerful; a person may have a good trip or a very bad one; thus, its pattern of use is checkered. Methedrine is dangerous; consequently, powerful sentiment against it has begun to form. Hippies, then, are very much predisposed to go beyond tobacco and alcohol in terms of drug use, and if what has been said here is correct, the pattern of use should be seen as a realistic response to the effects of the drugs available to them. The Plastic Hippie

Everybody is familiar with the story of King Midas who turned whatever he touched into gold. Ironically, this faculty eventually brings tragedy to his life and, with it, some insight into the nature of love. In a strange kind of way, the story of Midas is relevant in terms of the hippie movement. The hippies repudiate the values of conventional society, particularly as these relate to work and commerce. They decry the consumption mania— the ethic and passion which compels people to buy more and more. They grieve that so many people are locked into the system, making or selling things which other people do not need, and buying from them equally useless things. The system is such that every man is both victim and victimizer. Their repudiation of conventional society brought notoriety to the hip pies, and, ironically, they themselves became a marketable item, another product to be hawked in the market place. And the more they defamed the commercial process, the more they became a “ hot” commercial item. Those who used the hippie phenomenon to make money appealed in part to an audience which wanted to be titillated and outraged by revela­ tions about sex orgies and drug parties, and in part to adolescents and young people were not inclined to drop out, but who viewed wearing the paraphernalia of the hippie—love beads, headbands, Benjamin Franklin eyeglasses, leather shirts, and the like—as daring and exciting. These were the plastic hippies. Any movement runs the risk of becoming merely a fad, of being divested of substance and becoming mostly style. Symbols which might at one time have powerfully expressed outrage at society’s oppression and absurdity become merely fashionable and decadent. By the spring of 1968, the plastic hippie was common in the land, and leather shirts and trousers sold

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in Haight-Asbury shops for more than $100. Some of the suits at Brooks Brothers did not cost as much. In April of 1968, I interviewed Deans of Students at four Bay Area colleges—San Jose State College, Stanford University, Foothill Junior College, and the College of San Mateo. The research, financed by the United States Office of Education, focused on students who dropped out of school to live the hippie life. Uniformly, the deans indicated that, despite appearances, there were very few hippies on campus. Despite long hair and beads, most of their students were as career-oriented and gradeconscious as ever. They wore the paraphernalia of the outsider, but were not themselves outsiders. The plastic hippies have, unintentionally, had an impact on the hippie movement. First, in one important respect, their behavior overlaps with the core behavior of the true hippie—many are users of marijuana. By the summer of 1968, the demand for “ grass” had become so great that there was a severe shortage in the Haight-Asbury area. Beyond the obvious consideration of price, the shortage had two consequences. The number of “ burns” increased, a “ burn” being the sale of some fraudulent sub stance—alfalfa, oregano, ordinary tobacco, and the like—as genuine ma rijuana. And a synthetic marijuana was put on the market. The “ pot squeeze” and the resulting burns, along with persistent but unsubstantiated rumors that “ the Mob” (organized crime) had moved in and taken over the lucrative trade, contributed to what was, by the summer of 1968, an accelerating sense of demoralization in the Haight-Asbury community. The M idnight Hippie

Most hippies are in their teens or early twenties. There are a significant number of people, however, who share a whole complex of values with hippies, but who are integrated into the straight world to the extent of having families and careers. Most of these people are in their thirties. They were in college during the 1950’s and were nonconformists by the stan dards of the time. Journalists and commentators of the 1950’s decried the apathy of youth and spoke of a “ silent generation.” These people were part of that minority of youth who were not silent. They were involved, even then, in civil rights and peace and the other issues which were to engage the passions of youth in the I960’s. There was no hippie scene into which these people could move. They could have dropped out of school, but there was no Haight-Asbury for them to drop into. Consequently, they finished school and moved on into the job world. Significantly, many are in professions which can accommo

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date a certain amount of Bohemianism. They teach in colleges and univer sities and thus avoid working the conventional nine-to-five day, or work as book salesmen on the college and university circuit. Relatively few are in straight occupations such as engineering or insurance or banking. They are in jobs in which there is some tolerance for new ideas and which facilitate trying out various styles of life. The midnight hippie provides an important link between straight society and the hippie world. The straight finds hippies strange, weird, or disgust­ ing. Therefore, he views any action taken against them as justified. The midnight hippie, on the other hand, looks straight. He has a straight job, and does not evoke the same immediate hostility from the straight that the hippie does. The midnight hippie’s relative social acceptance allows him to articulate and justify the hippie point of view with at least some possibility of being listened to and believed. Hippies, Beats, and the “ Lost Generation” How may we account for the hippie phenomenon? Is it simply the traditional rebellion of youth against parental authority, or does it have more profound implications for the society and greater consequences for those who take part in it? I am inclined to view it as more significant than previous youth move ments. Hippies differ in important ways from the beats of the 1950’s or the “ lost generation” of the 1920’s, two groups with whom they have often been compared. In attempting to account for the movement, I have developed a theory of social deviance which identifies its unique features and yields certain predictions with regard to its future. Vertical and Lateral Deviance The literature of sociology is rich in theories of deviance. Some focus on “ cause,” as, for example, the delinquency theories of Cloward and Ohlin which suggest that lower-class boys, in the face of inadequate opportunities to realize middle-class goals, resort to various forms of unlawful behavior. Others deal with the process whereby a person learns to be a deviant, Howard Becker’s paper “ Becoming a Marijuana User” being a major example. In the approach taken here, neither cause nor process is the focus. Rather, I identify two types of deviance: vertical and lateral. The dimen sions of each type seem to be useful in differentiating the hippies from earlier Bohemians, and in reaching conclusions about their future. Vertical and lateral deviance occur in the context of social systems in

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which differentiations according to rank exist, that is, officer-recruit, teacher-student, adult-child, boss-employee, or guard-convict. Inevitably, certain privileges and prerogatives attach to the superior ranks. That is one of the things which makes them superior. Adults can smoke, consume alcoholic beverages, obtain drivers’ licenses, vote, and do a host of other things which are denied to children or teen-agers. Vertical deviance occurs when persons in a subordinate rank attempt to enjoy the privileges and prerogatives of those in a superior rank. Thus, the ten-year-old who sneaks behind the garage to smoke is engaging in a form of vertical deviance, as is the fourteen-year-old who drives a car despite being too young to get a license and the sixteen-year-old who bribes a twenty-two-year-old to buy him a six-pack of beer. They are attempting to indulge themselves in ways deemed not appropriate for persons of their rank. Lateral deviance occurs when persons in a subordinate rank develop their own standards and norms apart from and opposed to those of persons in a superior rank. Thus, the teen-ager who smokes pot rather than tobacco is engaging in lateral deviance, as is the seventeen-year-old girl who runs away to live in a commune, rather than eloping with the boy next door. Lateral deviance occurs in a context in which the values of the nondeviant are rejected. The pot-smoking seventeen-year-old, wearing Benjamin Franklin eyeglasses and an earring, does not share his parents’ definition of the good life. Whereas value consensus characterizes vertical deviance, there is a certain kind of value dissensus involved in lateral deviance. Let us explore the implications of these two types of deviance. Where vertical deviance occurs, power ultimately remains with the privileged. The rule-breaker wants what they have. They can control him by gradually extending prerogatives to him in return for conforming behavior. They have the power to offer conditional rewards and, in that way, can control and shape the deviant’s behavior. The sixteen-year-old is told that he can take the car if he behaves himself at home. Where lateral deviance occurs, the possibility of conditional rewards being used to induce conformity disappears. The deviant does not want what the privi­ leged have; therefore, they cannot control him by promising to let him “ have a little taste.” From the standpoint of the privileged, the situation becomes an extremely difficult one to handle. Value dissensus removes a powerful lever for inducing conformity. The impotent, incoherent rage so often expressed by adults toward hippies possibly derives from this source. A letter to the Editor of the Portland Oregonian exemplifies this barely controlled anger. Why condone this rot and filth that is “ hippie” in this beautiful city o f ours? Those who desecrate our flag, refuse to work, flaunt their sexual freedom,

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spread their filthy diseases and their garbage in public parks are due no charitable consideration. The already overloaded taxpayer picks up the bill. If every city so afflicted would give them a bum’s rush out of town, eventually with no place to light, they might just wake up to find how stupid and disgusting they are. Their feeling of being so clever and original might fade into reality. They might wake up and change their tactics.6

The second implication follows from the first. Being unable to maintain control via conditional rewards, the parent, adult or other representative of authority is forced to adopt more coercive tactics. This, of course, has the consequence of further estranging the deviant. What constitutes coer­ cion varies with the situation, and can range all the way from locking a teen-age girl in her room to setting the police on anyone with long hair and love beads. Lateral deviance has a certain potential for polarization built into it. To the extent that polarization takes place, the deviant becomes more committed to his deviance. The third implication follows from the first two and allows us to differ­ entiate hippies from earlier Bohemians. Bennett Berger, the sociologist, contends that the Bohemians of the 1920’s and the hippies of the 1960’s are similar as regards ideology. Borrowing from Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return , he identifies a number of seemingly common elements in the thinking of the two groups, and, following Cowley, suggests that Bohemi ans since the mid-nineteenth century have tended to subscribe to the same set of ideas. The ideology of Bohemianism includes: the idea of salvation by the child, an emphasis on self-expression, the notion that the body is a temple where there is nothing unclean, a belief in living for the moment, in female equality, in liberty, and in the possibility of perceiving new levels of reality. There is also a love of the people and places presumably still unspoiled by the corrupt values of society. The noble savages may be Negroes or Indians or Mexicans. The exotic places may be Paris or Tangier or Tahiti or Big Sur.7 I would dispute Bennett Berger’s analysis and contend that the differ ences between the hippies and the lost generation are quite profound. The deviant youth of the 1920’s simply lived out what many “ squares” of the time considered the exciting life—the life of the “ swinger.” Theirs was a kind of deviance which largely accepted society’s definitions of the bad and the beautiful. Lawrence Lipton contrasted values of the lost genera tion with those of the beatniks, but his remarks are even more appropriate in terms of the differences between the lost generation and the hippies. Ours was not the dedicated poverty of the present-day beat. We coveted expensive illustrated editions and bought them when we had the ready cash, even if it meant going without other things. We wanted to attend operas and

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symphony concerts, even if it meant to sit up under the roof in the last gallery or ushering the rich to their seats in the “ diamond horseshoe.” . . . We had disaffiliated ourselves from the rat race . . . but we had not rejected the rewards o f the rat race. We had expensive tastes and we meant to indulge them, even if we had to steal books from the bookstores where we worked, or shoplift, or run up bills on charge accounts that we never intended to pay, or borrow money from banks and leave our co-signers to pay it back with interest. We were no sandal and sweatshirt set. We liked to dress well, if unconventionally, and sometimes exotically, especially the girls. We lived perforce on crackers and cheese most o f the time but we talked like gourmets, and if we had a windfall we spent the money in the best restaurants in town, treating our friends in a show o f princely largess.8

Could they have been more unlike the hippies? The lost generation was engaging in vertical deviance. They wanted the perquisites of the good life but did not want to do the things necessary to get them. They were a generation which had seen its ranks severely decimated in World War I and, having some sense of the temporal nature of existence, possibly did not want to wait their turn to live the beautiful life. Their deviance was at least comprehensible to their elders. They wanted what any “ normal” person would want. From 1957 through 1960, the beat movement flourished, its major centers being the North Beach section of San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York. The beat movement and the hippie movement are sufficiently close in time for the same individual to have participated in both. Ned Polsky, writing about the Greenwich Village beat scene in 1960, indicated that “ the attitudes of beats in their thirties have spread rapidly downward all the way to the very young teen-agers (13-15).” 9 It is not unlikely, then, that some hippies began as beats. There are several reasons for suggesting beat influence on the hippie movement. The beat indictment of society is very much like that of the hippies. Lipton recounted Kenneth Rexroth’s observations on the social system and its values: As Kenneth Rexroth has put it, you can’t fill the heads of young lovers with “ buy me the new five-hundred-dollar deep-freeze and I’ll love you” advertising propaganda without poisoning the very act o f love itself; you can’t hop up your young people with sadism in the movies and television and train them to commando tactics in the army camps, to say nothing o f brutalizing them in wars, and then expect to “ untense” them with Coca Cola and Y.M .C.A. hymn sings. Because underneath . . . the New Capitalism . . . and Prosperity Unlimited— lies the ugly fact o f an economy geared to war production, a design, not for living, but for death.10

Like the hippie a decade later, the beat dropped out. He disaffiliated himself, disaffiliation being “ a voluntary self-alienation from the family

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cult, from moneytheism and all its works and ways.” He spoke of a New Poverty as the answer to the New Prosperity, indicating that “ it is important to make a living but it is even more important to make a life.” Both the hippie and the beat engage in lateral deviance. Their behavior is incomprehensible to the square. Why would anyone want to live in poverty? Given the nature of their deviance, they cannot be seduced back into squareness. Lipton recounts the remarks of a beat writer to the square who offered him an advertising job: “ I’ll scrub your floors and carry your slops to make a living, but I will not lie for you, pimp for you, stool for you, or rat for you.” 11 The values of beats and hippies are virtually identical: the two move ments differ principally with regard to social organization. Hippies have attempted to form a community. There were beat enclaves in San Fran cisco and New York, but no beat community. The difference between a ghetto and a community is relevant in terms of understanding the differ­ ence between the two movements. In a ghetto, there is rarely any sense of common purpose or common identity. Every man is prey to every other man. In a community, certain shared goals and values generate personal involvement for the common good. Haight-Asbury was a community in the beginning but degenerated into a ghetto. Significantly, however, more viable rural communities have been established by hippies in response to the failure of urban experiment. The beats had neither any concept of community nor any dream of transforming society. Given their attempt to establish a viable community, the hippies will probably survive longer than the beats, and should have a more profound impact upon the society. As has been indicated, if a society fails to seduce the lateral deviant away from his deviance it may move to cruder methods (police harassment, barely veiled incitements to hoodlums to attack the deviants, and the like). A functioning community can both render assis­ tance to the deviant in the face of these assaults and sustain his commit­ ment to the values which justify and explain his deviance. The beats, then, have influenced the hippies. Their beliefs are very similar, and there is probably an overlap in membership. The hippies’ efforts to establish self-supporting communities suggest, however, that their movement will survive longer than did that of the beats. In summary, the hippies have commented powerfully on some of the absurdities and irrationalities of the society. It is unlikely that the straight will throw away his credit cards and move to a rural commune, but it is equally unlikely that he will very soon again wear the emblems of his straightness with quite so much self-satisfaction. Notes 1. During the 1950’s the term “ hipster” was used by beatniks and those familiar with the beat scene. It had several meanings. The hipster was an individual

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4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

On Bohemia whose attitude toward the square world (a steady job, material acquisitions, and the like) was one o f contempt. He shared with beats an appreciation o f jazz-cum-poetry, drugs, and casual sex. The hipster might also be a kind o f confidence man, sustaining his participation in the beat scene by some hustle practiced on squares. The word “ hip” identified these orientations. “ H ip” and “ hep” were common words in the jive-talk of the 1940’s; both indicated familiarity with the world of jazz musicians, hustlers, and other colorful but often disreputable types. I suspect that the word “ hippie” derives from “ hipster” which, in turn, probably derived from “ hip” or “ hep.” Interestingly, Martin Buber, in Paths in U topia, suggested that the example of the kibbutz might transform the rest of society. The values of the kibbutzim and those of the hippie movement are not dissimilar. We shall have occasion to speak frequently of “ straights.” The derivation of the word is even more obscure than that o f “ hippie.” At one time, it had positive connotations, meaning a person who was honest or forthright. “ H e’s straight, man” meant that the referent was a person to be trusted. As used in the hippie world, “ straight” has a variety of mildly to strongly negative connotations. In its mildest form, it simply means an individual who does not partake of the behavior of a given subculture (such as that of homosexuals or marijuana users). In its strongest form, it refers to the individual who does not participate and who is also very hostile to the subculture. Paul Goodman, Growing Up A bsurd (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), pp. 2 526. Marijuana, also known as “ w eed,” “ p ot,” “ grass,” “ maryjane,” and “ reefers,” has not been proven to be physically addictive. It is one o f a number of “ natural” hallucinogens, some o f which are found growing around any home: Jimson weed, Hawaiian wood roses, common sage and nutmeg, and morning-glory seeds. There are claims in Haight-Asbury that the dried seeds o f the bluebonnet, the state flower of Texas, have the same property. In California, the bluebonnet is called “ Lupin” and grows wild along the high­ ways, as does the Scotch broom, another highly praised drug source. Letter to the Editor, Portland Oregonian, July 31, 1968, p. 22. Bennett Berger, “ Hippie Morality— More Old Than N ew ,” Trans-action, Vol. 5, No. 2 (December 1967), pp. 19-20. Lawrence Lipton, The Holy Barbarians (New York: Grove Press, 1959), pp. 284. Ned Polsky, “ The Village Beat Scene: Summer 1960,” Dissent, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Summer 1960), p. 341. Lipton, op. cit., p. 150. Ibid.

II

The Testimony of Bohemia What he saw were those Bohemian horizons to which distance lends enchantment: romantic p o v erty , freedom from rule and restraint, liberty, absence o f discipline, lack o f responsibility, risk, adventure, daily encounters with the unexpected, escape from the dom estic round, from the endless scram ble o f fam ily life and the dullness o f its Sundays, the voluptuous m ystery o f the fem ale m odel, work without drudgery, the privilege o f wearing fancy-dress the whole year through, as though always celebrating Carnival. Such were the images and enticem ents which the austere, exacting career o f art aroused in him.

—Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, M anette Salomon

One The Canons of Bohemia In winter I ’m a Buddhist In summ er I'm a nudist.

—Joe Gould

The Glory of the Senses Théophile Gautier , 1836

I am one of those to whom superfluity is a necessity—and I like things and persons in an inverse ratio to the services that they render me. I prefer a Chinese vase, strewn with dragons and mandarins, and of no use to me whatever, to a certain utensil which is of service to me, and of my talents the one I esteem the most is my incapacity for guessing logogriphs and charades. I would most joyfully renounce my rights as a Frenchman and a citizen to see an authentic picture of Raphael, or a beautiful woman naked—Princess Borghese, for instance, when she posed for Canova, or Julia Grisi entering her bath. I would willingly consent, so far as I am concerned, to the return of the anthropophagous Charles X, if he brought me back a hamper of Tokay or Johannisberger from his Bohemian castle, and I would deem the electoral laws sufficiently wide if some streets were more so and some other things less. Although I am no dilettante, I would rather have the noise of fiddles and tambourines than that of the bell of the President of the Chamber. I would sell my breeches for a ring, and my bread for preserves. It appears to me that the most fitting occupation for a civilized man is to do nothing, or smoke analytically his pipe or cigar. I 263

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also highly esteem those who play skittles and those who make good verses. You see that the utilitarian principles are far from being mine, and that I shall never be a contributor to a virtuous journal, unless, of course, I become converted, which would be rather comical. Instead of offering a Monthyon prize as the reward of virtue, I would rather, like the great but misunderstood philosopher Sardanapalus, give a large premium to any one inventing a new pleasure; for enjoyment appears to me to be the end of life and the only useful thing in the world. God has willed it so; He who has made women, perfumes, light, beautiful flowers, good wines, frisky horses, greyhound bitches and Angora cats; He who did not say to His angels, “ Have virtue,” but “ Have love,” and who has given us a mouth more sensitive than the rest of our skin to kiss women, eyes raised on high to see the light, a subtle power of smell to breathe the soul of flowers, sinewy things to press the sides of stallions, and to fly as quick as thought without railway or steam-boiler, delicate hands to stroke the long head of a greyhound, the velvety back of a cat, and the smooth shoulders of a creature of easy virtue, and who finally has granted to us alone the triple and glorious privilege of drinking when without thirst, of striking a light and of making love at all seasons, a privilege which distinguishes us from brutes far more than the custom of reading papers and fabricating charters.

The Message of Bohemia Louis Boury, 1911

The age of analysis and investigation is upon us! Science is in the ascendant, and all that cannot prove itself must perish. Fairyland, that delightful realm of extraordinary happenings and happy improbabilities, is deemed fit only for the minds of children. Natural science has denied the awesome dragon and picturesque griffon to give us in their stead the ugly mastodon. The pool which inspired Ponce de Leon to marvellous deeds has been proclaimed but a figment of soaring imagination. Reason has annihilated utterly the charming terror which the mischief of pixies and brownies once held for us. The telescope of the astronomer has uncompro­ misingly shown that broomstick-mounted witches do not in reality careen through the skies to sweep them clean. The world of fancy shudders and retreats before the merciless cry for proof, until even the heroes and gods of Olympus remain but a gorgeous memorial of marble and legend to a splendour that might have been. Reality binds us with molten chains to a leaden ball of unyielding fact, nor is there any escape. In all the world but one fairyland remains undemolished: Bohemia! That none can deny. Bohemia exists. It is in the world about us. It is real; yet quite magical— its fairyland, its reality, its fact, its vari-hued imagery. Life for the vast majority arranges itself in greys and drabs and browns, flecked here and there with pleasures of pale yellow, and girt about with a sombre border of black. In Bohemia it is not so. Bohemia, more than anything else, represents the colour element of present-day existence. Its pleasures are scarlet and gold and magenta, its moments of quiescence soft greens and silver, its thoughts rose-tinted, and even its tragedies are wrought not in black but in majestic, throbbing purples. The arrangement may be fantastic, but still it is fascinating; and though there be those who scoff, and those who envy, and those who are even a trifle shocked, still there are none who pass it by altogether. Regard it how you will, fairyland will not be utterly ignored. It was Henri Murger and George Du Maurier 265

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who first discovered this magic realm for the world at large. It was these two also who irrevocably linked it in the public mind with artists. And so today it is to the artists that one must turn for an explanation of the life that it represents. Yet among the myriad American painters of the present there is not a single one who has devoted himself undividedly to this phase of existence. So delicate a task is it to interpret this elusive kingdom that only here and there can be found artists who have dared touch upon it at all. But there are a few. To them it has spoken. In terms of their own attitude, it may be—but still, it has spoken. Pre-eminent among this little company is Alson Skinner Clark. With delicate, feeling strokes this artist has recorded his impressions of the Bohemian quarter of cities innumerable. Their vivid sensationalism and their somnolent contemplation both find expression on his canvases in nicely calculated blendings. Having passed in review the Bohemia of wellnigh all sections of America, he loves it all; but if a choice had to be made in favour of any one corner of it, Mr. Clark would be inclined to select the Bohemia of New Orleans as the most appealing. “ It is so remote that it is distinct,” he offers in explanation. “ The Bohemia of practically all other cities is more or less the same, but in New Orleans there is a more resigned attitude, less striving and less energy, and an absence of that undercurrent of discontent which in other places sometimes lifts Bohemia out of its normal self. The mingling of nations fast losing their power lends to it a certain pathos; but, though it has this sadness, it is never sordid. The desire for money is not in it, and possibly it is for this reason that it does not enter into competition—is, in fact, actually unaware of competition. This fact, coupled with its remoteness, renders it self-sufficient. It does not exactly dream, but it lolls contentedly. “ Possessing a rich Latin inheritance of sympathy and understanding, it is more truly the artist in temperament than the Bohemia of almost any other city, while its enjoyment of the smallest things is at times almost childlike—its appreciation of them truly beautiful. In its atmosphere any definite line of ownership becomes non-existent. Possibly this is accounted for by the negro influence, but however that may be, a thing belongs to the being who needs it. There is a distinctly poetic side to the nature of Bohemia in New Orleans, and it possesses a soul for colour. With an abandonment that is almost tropical and a sort of Marcus Aurelian philos ophy as to the unimportance of the morrow, it throws itself into the present with a sublime contentment, living only for the moment, with no heed for past nor future. And in it all there is no pose: It is genuine, every bit of it. Even the little restaurants which have become famous and are known to the travelling world make no distinctions. Workmen and tourists

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sit side by side. All of Bohemia fraternises, sensing the best in all types so sympathetically that its message could be summed up no better, it seems to me, than in the words, T appreciate.’ “ And this m essage,” goes on Mr. Clark, “ is most eloquently echoed in the externals of Bohemian New Orleans. The climate, making flowers possible the year round, accounts in part for the difference between Bohemia there and in Northern and Western cities. The inherited architec ture of balconies adds another note. The class which built these charming old buildings no longer inhabits them. But the present dwellers have entered without destroying. There does not seem to be the same pathos in them which appears in the abandoned grandeur of the great cities of the North. Here the new generation has moved in without disturbing the places. They are somewhat like the gypsies who lived so long in the Alhambra without really harming it. They are like cuckoos, these Bohe­ mians; they have found good nests and appropriated them. They possess a capability of adjustment, I might say, and the manner in which they utilise this only goes to accentuate their capacity for appreciation. Nothing could more adequately convey their message than their architecture. That good-natured contentment, that philosophic acceptance of the present as it is, that appreciation and sympathy which creates a harmonious ensemble in their sagging, wandering buildings and their pleasing ease of street life is the embodiment of this thought.” This picture of a delightful languor and comprehension is, however, as Mr. Clark so truly says, quite local to New Orleans and quite remote. As one fares farther to the North and the West Bohemia inevitably takes on something of the more highly strung, complexly organised, impatient attributes of the localities in which it finds itself. It is still distinct because it is Bohemia, but it ceases to be local. The inherent differences of Bohemia in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, or Denver become almost negligible. It is part of the fairyland of it that it refuses to be limited by the mere boundary lines of townships and municipalities. Among those who have touched upon this more universal, and for that reason probably more typically American, Bohemia is George Bellows, a painter of bold robustness and vigorous execution which seldom fails of its mark. When broaching the matter of Bohemia, however, he is inclined to wax cynical. He likes to fence with the subject, delivering lively rapier thrusts on all sides before he touches centre. “ After all,” Mr. Bellow asks quizzically, “ what is a Bohemian? The first answer is apt to be, ‘A man who is creating something—an artist.’ But I am an artist, and I certainly do not consider myself a Bohemian, while a great many people who do consider themselves Bohemians are not

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creating anything. Modifying this a little, one might try, ‘An attractive, clever person’ as a definition. Still this does not fit. Any number of society people, for instance, to mention only one class, are attractive and clever; but one couldn’t call them Bohemians. On this basis, remembering the habits attributed to them, it might be suggested that Bohemians are people at the far extreme of polite society. But this would have to include the highwayman, the robber, and the tramp, whereas unquestionably they have no place in Bohemia. Perhaps, then, a Bohemian is simply one who lives for pleasure and excitement only; but if that were the case the ordinary voluptuary and the racetrack tout and the ‘sport’ would have to be granted admittance; yet these are people with whom Bohemia is scarcely on bowing terms. Still this seems to be coming nearer the mark. It hints of the flowing bowl, which is so essentially a part of Bohemia as I understand it. From it one might suppose that a fair test of Bohemianism would be to place a group of people about a table and let them drink for a couple of hours. At the end of that time all those who got up sober could qualify as Bohemians. This might not be a bad criterion, if it weren’t for the fact that such a test would make a number of sailors and barbers and tailors the greatest Bohemians of them all. “ And yet the Bohemian possesses some of the characteristics of nearly all of these. However, you cannot catalogue him as a composite of all types, not only because that is too indefinite, but also because ‘all types’ would include workers, and work is a thing that is not for him. Where work enters into Bohemia it seems incidental and generally trifling. The business—the real aim—of the true Bohemian is pleasure, yet his is not the pleasure of the society man, the voluptuary, or the sport. The differ ence appears to m e,” sums up Mr. Bellows, “ solely in that the Bohemian brings poetry into his pleasures. Bohemia is the poetry of raising the devil—no other term exactly fits my meaning. Bohemians are the living poets of devilment, and their lives are their odes, their days their cantos. “ Their natural habitat is the Italian restaurant, the brilliant studio, and the parkway when the moon is bright and the arc light shines gracefully across the grass. They must always be at play to be themselves, just as their play must always be poetic. They are care-free and light-hearted to a degree. W hether their pockets are empty or bursting with the proceeds of a newly cashed cheque makes no difference. While the cup still bubbles over with wine all is joy. Their message, in so far as there is one, sounds to me very much like: ‘Nothing m atters.’ ” It is not surprising to find Mr. Everett Shinn, who belongs to the same artistic school as does Mr. Bellows, approaching Bohemia in very much the same spirit shown by the latter in the foregoing words. But Mr. Shinn, who learned of Bohemia in its capital, Paris, and from there traced its

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labyrinthian course through this country, seems to probe rather deeper beneath the surface. And surely there is no one better qualified to speak on the subject than he—no one who has painted it more often, who has better caught the spirit of it all, or more attractively revealed that spirit in paint. Yet at the outset even Mr. Shinn feels it obligatory to apologise for the Bohemian. “ In the popular acceptance of the term ,” says he, “ it isn’t a particularly fine thing to be. Most people when they employ the word do so more or less as a term of contempt. To them it signifies loose morals and loose living. In that sense I don’t suppose any one—except perhaps a few very youthful individuals—would care to have the name applied to themselves. I’m sure I shouldn’t. Personally, I conform to decent, accepted standards of living and conduct, and a Bohemian is the last thing I consider myself, or should want any one else to consider me. And yet in the broader, more unrestricted sense, isn’t ninety per cent of America Bohemian? “ Who can say where the strict proprieties begin and where they leave off? For instance, in New York not long ago a restaurant was opened where after six in the evening no one was allowed unless in dress clothes. That restaurant closed its doors almost before it had well opened them. The public—not only New Yorkers, but the hundreds of thousands of visitors from every quarter of the United States who passed through the city during the brief life of that resort—refused to patronise a place which imposed such a restriction upon them. Yet evening clothes after six are what the highest propriety demands. In London, for example, no one would think of dining at one of the better restaurants in any other costume, nor is any law necessary to bring about that condition there. So, in its widest application, that test would tend to prove that pretty nearly the whole nation over here was composed of Bohemians. “ As a matter of fact, that’s probably a trifle too general,” Mr. Shinn hastens to qualify. “ A vast number of people down on the docks and in the slums would be included in such a Bohemia for the simple reason that they couldn’t help themselves. They really don’t belong there. Much as the word has been misused, one still associates brain and intelligence with Bohemia. And right there, I think, is where one comes down to an understanding of Bohemia in its best sense. It is nothing but an informal meeting of minds. “ By informal I don’t necessarily mean undignified. The true Bohemian must have it in him to be as formal and precise as the most finicky could desire. But two people can be formal with each other—remain on the ‘Socharmed-to-see-you’ basis—for a lifetime without really knowing anything at all about each other. It’s the same way with business. You don’t get to know what a man actually has inside of him through a business relation­

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ship. When people substitute ‘Come on in, old man’ for ‘Delighted to have you with us this evening’ and slap one another on the back in preference to shaking hands with studied grace, then they’re beginning to get on. They’re reaching a footing where each one will have the best drawn out of him, and that is really where progress begins. To say or imagine that people are going to make beasts or fools of themselves (and some unfor tunate persons seem to suppose that one must do one or the other to be classed as a Bohemian) is simply to say that they are utterly lacking in restraint and in the instincts of common decency as well. Of course, such people cannot hope to enter this Bohemia of which I am talking. “ It would be just as silly to attempt to limit Bohemia to artists—it would be narrow. Any collection of men and women all of whom follow the same occupation is absolutely certain to begin sooner or later to ‘talk shop.’ That isn’t progress. It’s more like prejudice. For the realisation of the best sort of Bohemia all classes of minds are desirable—painters, writers, musicians, lawyers, brokers, bankers—all kinds—with the qualifications that I ’ve intimated. But when you get such a group together in any place that is conducive to a stripping off of the formalities and a spontaneous intercourse of minds, there is the truest Bohemia. To the types who are fitted for this atmosphere Bohemia extends a warm, hearty hand and says: ‘Glad to know you.’ ” The fellowship which Mr. Shinn here indicates has its other side, however—the side where the slapping on the back becomes paramount. Although this has no part in the Bohemia which he depicts, it has, in some strange, perverted manner, come to be associated with it. Bohemians of this order, so rated, perhaps, because they so insistently apply that classification to themselves, form at once the support and raison d ’etre of the “ Tenderloin” of every great city. Where corks pop loudly and ice chinks enticingly against glass, where white-aproned waiters bustle obse­ quiously and the shrill laughs of painted women punctuate the strains of a rollicking orchestra filling all the air with the strains of the latest musichall song “ hit”—there they are to be found. Almost no painter has derived inspiration from this tawdry life, but some of the illustrators have found occasion to turn to it. Of these none has more strikingly summarised it than James Montgomery Flagg. Mr. Flagg is conceded to be the most popular of present-day illustrators, and his studies of this “ white light” Bohemia are among the best things he has ever done. But his opinion of the subject of them is not exalted. “ To accuse Bohemians of having a message,” he thinks, “ seems terribly paradoxical, but if their life may speak for them their message would decidedly seem to be: ‘L et’s pretend.’ This applies equally to both sorts of Bohemians. The ultra-artistic, studio types are trying to impress the

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world with the idea that they are great artists and famous men or women. The ‘white light’ Bohemian—who is every bit as distinctive and probably much more numerous—is trying to create the impression that he is a wellknown man of fashion or person of wealth. The two things represent the highest ambitions of the two types—but in neither case do they ever attain to the standing they crave. They are always imitations. Their every movement and action is a pose, and consequently a form of falsity. They are a colossal hoax—so big a one, in fact, that sometimes they dupe even themselves. “ The Bohemian of white lights is perfectly contented with life if only a head waiter calls him by name. As long as he can ‘flash a roll,’ as he would himself express it, and cause the eyes of beholders to bulge he feels that he is really accomplishing something. He desires nothing better than to move from restaurant to restaurant without pause, preferably in company with some gaily bedecked girl who will attract attention. To have the spotlight of notice directed always at himself, that is his great desire, and anything which will further that end justifies itself to him. But, having nothing within him to compel notice and attention, he must continually pose and appear something which he is not to command even the cheap attention which satisfies him. Thus he lives always in a world of preten sions—an atmosphere in which nothing is what it seems. He never pro duces anything, because he has neither the inclination nor the ability; he never really feels anything, because he is too utterly shallow, too much lacking in any sort of mentality. He simply plays at life. He just pretends.” To this there could be no greater contrast than that Bohemia which John Sloan sees. Mr. Sloan’s view of life is almost panoramic in its scope. In it is that breadth and bigness which is bred only of sympathy—of that true feeling of humanity which calls all men brother. His painting is strong, forceful, and unafraid, and in its wide sweeps is something strangely compelling. Viewing all things on the broad basis which this necessitates, Bohemia to him represents a psychological state, a stage of mental and ethical development, indigenous to no place, allied to no particular epoch. The orgies of midnight life, the chatter of the atelier, the flowing tie, the warm drip of carmine wine—these are not hallmarks of Mr. Sloan’s Bohemia. To him that magic kingdom may build its citadel in the heart of the millionaire or be incarnate in the soul of the vagrant, wandering friendless through dew-jeweled fields as he munches the crust of charity. In drawing his word picture Mr. Sloan prefaces it with a sketch of that much-discussed individual, the average man. John Sloan sees the latter merely as the counterpart of the man next door, the replica of the man across the street. He is like a chromo cast which is turned out from a mould with thousands of others and differs no whit from any of them.

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With him money, beginning as a means, has become an end in itself—a veritable god. Lacking individuality, he is a slave to all conventions, all popular theories and prejudices. In fact, the most abject of all slaves, since his fetters are fashioned from out the brass of his own commonplaceness. “ Now, whatever they may think of him ,” declares Mr. Sloan, “ all people must admit that the Bohemian is above everything else unconven tional. The very essence of him is his difference from the ordinary. He stands in everything at the opposite pole from the average man. So, if I am correct that the average man is simply a slave, then the simplest definition of a Bohemian is: A free man. And, because simplest definitions are always apt to be the most comprehensive, there you have the spirit of all Bohemia. “ Denying, as the free man must, all the ideals of the slave, his life will necessarily differ in all respects from that of the latter. Thus all the external differences of his conduct become nothing more than the outward, visible manifestations of the spirit of liberty within him. Beholding, the average man says: ‘It ’s all very unique and interesting, I dare say.’ As a matter of fact what really holds and interests him is the sight of a free man. But at the same time the average man looks down condescendingly upon the Bohemian, and there is patronage in his tone when he mentions him. He has so ordered his life that he must scorn true liberty. “ This attitude on the part of the average man causes the Bohemian to pay a price for the freedom for which he contends with convention. Money, being neither his god nor his aim, is usually scarce with him, so that it comes about that he lives mostly in cheap, crowded quarters, cooking nearly all his meals in his own room, since he can seldom afford to patronise a restaurant, and showing in his often prematurely haggard face the marks of the conflict which he wages.” From the suggestion there arise visions of wheezy, uncarpeted stairways and sparsely painted corridors leading up, up to some such miserable hole as Mr. Sloan has shown in the accompanying painting where wearied beings make shift as best they may and between whiles dream of a brighter to-morrow. It is not a pretty picture, this which Mr. Sloan records; but there can be no gain-saying that it is at least part of the truth. It represents the shadow of that same phase wherein Mr. Bellows seizes upon the light. “ It does not apply to the lives of all Bohemians,” admits the artist, “ because persons in almost any walk of life or of any income may elect to live freely; but I think that it is a fair statement of the portion which society allots the great majority of Bohemians. Bohemia’s message to the world, however, lies behind all this—behind any externals. It is summed up in that state of mind which makes it possible for people to endure such conditions in order that they may continue to live their own lives in their

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own way. It seems to me that that message is: ‘Let there be real life; let there be real liberty.’ ” In thus regarding Bohemia solely as a thing of the spirit and the mind Mr. Sloan finds a companion in F. Luis Mora, albeit the latter finds no place for the grim accompaniments which so insistently occupy the other. Mr. Sloan looks upon a Bohemia at war with society, retiring loweringly unto itself; Mr. Mora’s Bohemia, on the other hand, rests upon a super­ structure of exalted sympathy. He has painted the toreadors of Spain— strong, picturesque men whose lives are as full of variety and colour as a poppy bed—and on his canvas have also appeared studio gatherings whereat polite young ladies sip tea and nibble almond-studded cakes with polite young men, discussing Nietzsche and tentatively playing at being “ artistic” and “ unconventional.” He has done these things lightly, dain tily, yet at neither extreme does he find his ideal of true Bohemia. “ For th at,” he says, “ I should take you, I think, into some German restaurant—some quiet place where the light was soft. In it I would show you two calm, settled Teutons at a side table lingering with unhurried pleasure over their tall steins. For perhaps an hour they would sit without the exchange of a syllable. At length one would raise his head and, nodding gravely, meet the eye of his companion. The latter would gaze steadfastly back for a moment and, nodding in return, would heave a long sigh and mutter, ‘Yah!’ The first would echo the monosyllable softly, together they would nod a little more—then all would relapse again into silence. And that would be Bohemia. As I regard it, it would be the highest possible type of Bohemia—one founded upon a great sympathy, a pervading harmony. “ For an hour those two men would have been talking to each other and ultimately they would have reached an agreement upon whatever topic had been under consideration. And they would be perfectly aware of the agreement. Perhaps this is rather an extreme example, but it illustrates better than almost anything else could what Bohemia means to me. “ Most people,” continues Mr. Mora, “ associate Bohemia with artists and persons of artistic tendencies; and it may be that those two Germans of mine hold the explanation of this. An artist—a person engaged in any sort of creative work—necessarily must possess a more subtle mind than the average man following some routine occupation. He is more sensitive to atmosphere, receives impressions more readily, and is quicker to attune himself to the moods of others or bend them to his own. A big, broad harmony of spirit is possible among creative minds where, from the nature of things, it would be out of the question for others. “ By this,” he is quick to amend, “ I do not wish to seem to plead for any exaggerated aestheticism or thing of that sort. I do not mean to

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indicate groups of people who spend their time listening to weird music and holding soul conversations in perfumed rooms. They must appreciate Chopin and Beethoven, but they must like George Cohan once in a while as well to be the sort of Bohemians I have in mind. The best Bohemia must have that refinement of sympathy which makes for understanding. That is Bohemia’s message to me: ‘I understand.’ “ The breadth of such a message inclines to exclude the element devoted to spaghetti parties and that sort of thing. That element may rise to my idea of Bohemia some day—may, indeed, be already on the way—but they have not reached it yet. Personally the most perfect Bohemia that I have ever encountered was about the table of my father. The atmosphere there had nothing of the wild or unsettled in it, either. It was a calm, even, tolerant atmosphere, based upon that sympathy I have mentioned. Its keynote was harmonious and its evidence a tremendous, wide, all-embrac ing understanding.” And in the last analysis does not this message which Mr. Mora receives epitomise it all? Is not to understand to “ appreciate” as well? Is not poetry the very language of understanding, and where there is understand­ ing in its best sense does “ anything m atter” ? Including, as it needs must, imagination, does not understanding look down upon those struggling along the way which it has already traversed and, helping them along their circuitous path, murmur sympathetically, “ L et’s pretend—just for a little while anyway” ? Is not, too, the very being of real life and real liberty a fine, large-souled understanding? And though some may degrade and many scorn it, is not a mode of life which can offer this message to one who chooses to hear worth cultivating and worth knowing? Is it not truly the very present fairyland of maturity, the dream of the idealist, the realm where, like shapes in some delicate, gauzy mist, things dissolve into one another and the many are one?

The Grisette Max Nordau, 1890

The grisette of the “ quartier latin” was a working-girl that toiled all day at sewing or flower-making, and anxiously looked forward to the approach of evening that should bring her the friend, who had not wasted his time either, who had spent the day in the class-room or over his books. That was the rule in those times. The student was, during the day, “ piocheur,” that is, an assiduous worker, and procured himself thereby the rights to enjoy himself in the evening, to “ rigoler,” as he called it. And they enjoyed themselves in such a simple manner! The grisette knew no exaggerated pretentions. She put up with a scanty dinner that was seasoned by good humor, and, for a week beforehand, anticipated the pleasure of an evening at the theatre, passed in the gallery of the Od éon. When they longed for extra amusement, they went to a “ café chantant” in the evening and accompanied the singers in bawling and screeching their tunes, thence betook themselves to the “ Closerie des Lilas,” danced for an hour the mad “ chahut,” from which the commissioner of morals, who was always present, good-naturedly turned his eyes that he might not be obliged to interfere; and then went homeward, singing and frolicking along the dark streets, embracing everybody they met, drooly apostrophizing the lampposts, practising a thousand merry tricks without fear of annoying a peevish philistine, being sure of never meeting one in those latitudes. A summer expedition to Asnières, an excursion to Versailles to the “ grandes eaux,” signified the climax of this cloudless life of love, and left a memory in the hearts of the participants, full of poetry and sunshine, a memory that a whole lifetime could not extinguish. And the grisette knew no sentimentality. She lived only for the day, and thought no more of the future than a bright-winged butterfly sporting in the sunshine on a midsum mer day. The moment sufficed her, and she never bothered with the question: “ What hereafter?” Three, perhaps four years, she jogged along through life at the side of her friend; then the moment came when his 275

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studies were finished, and he must enter the ranks of the Philistines. She understood that they must part. She shook hands with him without many phrases, embraced him a last time, wished him very, very much success, and then lost sight of him, perhaps forever. Some suppressed tears, some sleepless nights, some sorrowful days—then all was past, and she looked for a new friend to whom she confided the whole undiminishable capital of tenderness whose usufructuary another had been for years. All that I am saying here, is certainly very heathenish; but it lacks neither beauty nor poetry.

The Female Reformed: Henrietta Rodman’s Mä dchen Allen Churchill, 1959

The Liberal Club was, of course, kept in almost constant turmoil by its most ardent member. This was still Henrietta Rodman, the Candide with bobbed hair, meal-sack dress, and sandals who had moved the club downtown. Miss Rodman espoused dress reform, women’s suffrage, equal rights for women, and a hundred other feminist causes. Her group of militant young followers, many of them high school teachers and a few high school pupils, vociferously proclaimed that tight corsets, long hair, and general subordination to men gave women the rawest of contemporary raw deals. Returning from daily toil to Village apartments, H enrietta’s group would don emancipated attire in emulation of their chief and head for the Liberal Club, the upstairs location of which offered them a special advantage. At street-level restaurants, Village girls often experienced trouble of the kind Harry Kemp pictured on the day he looked to find a group of urchins in the doorway, jeering— “ H e y , fe lla s , th e r e ’s a w o m a n in th e re s m o k in ’ a c ig a r e tte !” “ —P ip e th e b ig g u y w ith th e b e a r d ! ” “A L L th e w o m en a re s m o k in ’!”

Another sensitive male who suffered embarrassment through Henriet­ ta’s girls was the Barrymore-profiled poet Scudder Middleton. Enjoying a brief romance with Nina Wilcox Putnam, one of H enrietta’s dedicated followers, he called one night at her Washington Square apartment to suggest a trip to the Brevoort Cafe. He found the vibrant Nina willing, but lamenting the fact that none of her party dresses struck a proper blow for dress reform. Then, swiftly, she strode to the windows over-looking the Square and yanked down the draperies. Carrying them to her bedroom she soon reappeared with the curtains pinned around her like an evening dress. At the same time they contrived to suggest a brave new world in female 277

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attire. Nina Wilcox Putnam was proud as any peacock, but for sensitive Scudder Middleton the evening that followed was embarrassing. To her female acolytes in the Liberal Club, Henrietta Rodman painted a glowing picture of the New Order for the female sex. “ Out of us women will come a great generation of young, free women,” she would passion ately assert. “ These free young women will wear skirts to the knees, or maybe knickerbockers. We girls have achieved much already by discarding corsets and wearing loose clothing, not to mention the trouble of having long, thick hair that brings headaches in the summer. Yes, they laugh at us now, but the day will come when all women will wear their hair short.” Yet even in her most exalted moments, Henrietta Rodman had pricks of annoying doubt. A highly intelligent person, she labored under few illu sions about the female of the species and feared that as time went by the majority would wear her type of attire because it was fashionable rather than because it was comfortable. It was her oft-stated conviction that to do something solely because others do it is “ the most immoral act I can conceive.” Henrietta Rodman’s flock of females, dressed in meal sacks or knickers, were also visible at so-called dinner parties held in her top floor Village apartment. Harry Kemp recalls reaching this eyrie as “ mounting to each weary landing of interminable about-and-about stairways . . . up, up.” Henrietta’s rooms comfortably held some twelve or fourteen guests, but she habitually invited twenty or more. Half an hour before the hungry horde was to arrive, she would have made no preparations whatsoever. Only when the faithful Harry Kemp appeared did she commence by thrusting a five-dollar bill into his hand and dispatching him down intermi nable stairs to buy “ four or five loaves of bread . . . about fifteen cans of spaghetti, large size . . . three pounds of butter, and when you come back you can take the big tin water pail down for beer.” With this provender finally on hand, Henrietta would announce, “ In a few minutes we’ll have a dinner fit for anyone.” Guests would be in­ structed to pull out long boards and wooden horses which could be made into commissary-type tables. As the possessor of a top floor apartment Miss Rodman was especially fortunate in summer, for then she could take her guests to the roof, there to picnic under the twinkling stars. At such times the hostess, a lady not conspicuous for humor, would indulge in perhaps her only light remark. “ Coming up to my apartment is like the progress of the soul,” she would declare. “ A long tortuous climb, difficult step after step, but at the top you burst out into the sky—” Guests who attended Henrietta Rodman repasts considered the conver­ sation more inspiring than the food. At a typical dinner, abstract painters, social workers, teachers, newspaper reporters, artists, poets, and assorted

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feminists would argue heatedly over such subjects as syndicalism, Social­ ism, morals and ethics, the writings of Havelock Ellis, the theories of Dr. Freud. At such gatherings, Miss Rodman was ever solicitous of her younger disciples, warning them in advance of the wiles of practiced lechers like Harry Kemp. With the more mature girls under her influence, she was an ardent disciple of premarital privileges of women (Free Love) and the right, once a suitable sexual mate had been found, to dwell together without the blessings of the sacrament (Free Union). “ Many of the unions formed at the Liberal Club were beautiful and some were perpetual honeymoons,” one former member has written. However true this may be, Henrietta Rodman and other Free Union partisans were so violent in their beliefs that numerous Village couples who married hid the fact from her. Those who did marry-and-tell would attempt to deflect the wrath of Henrietta and her kind by using double names. Thus Mrs. Ernest Hol combe steadfastly continued to use the name Grace Potter. When Max Eastman and Ida Rauh married, both names were on the bell of their Charles Street apartment. These two ardent believers in equal rights did not need Henrietta Rodman to spur them on, and on the bell Ida Rauh’s name was placed first. This promptly attracted a reporter for the New York World, who wrote a story headed NO “ MRS.” BADGE OF SLAV ERY WORN BY THIS MISS WIFE.

Decor for a Bohemian Studio George du Maurier , 1894

It was a fine, sunny, showery day in April. The big studio window was open at the top, and let in a pleasant breeze from the north-west. Things were beginning to look shipshape at last. The big piano, a semi-grand by Broadwood, had arrived from England by ‘the Little Quickness’ (la Petite V itesse , as the goods trains are called in France), and lay, freshly tuned, alongside the eastern wall; on the wall opposite was a panoply of foils, masks, and boxing-gloves. A trapeze, a knotted rope, and two parallel cords, supporting each a ring, depended from a huge beam in the ceiling. The walls were of the usual dull red, relieved by plaster casts of arms and legs and hands and feet; and D ante’s mask, and Michael Angelo’s alto-rilievo of Leda and the swan, and a centaur and Lapith from the Elgin Marbles—on none of these had the dust as yet had time to settle. There were also studies in oil from the nude; copies of Titian, Rem brandt, Velasquez, Rubens, Tintoret, Leonardo da Vinci—none of the school of Botticelli, Mantegna, and Co.—a firm whose merits had not as yet been revealed to the many. Along the walls, at a great height, ran a broad shelf, on which were other casts in plaster, terra-cotta, imitation bronze: a little Theseus, a little Venus of Milo, a little discobolus; a little flayed man threatening high heaven (an act that seemed almost pardonable under the circumstances!); a lion and a boar by Barye; an anatomical figure of a horse, with only one leg left and no ears; a horse’s head from the pediment of the Parthenon, earless also; and the bust of Clyde, with her beautiful low brow, her sweet wan gaze, and the ineffable forward shrug of her dear shoulders that makes her bosom as a nest, a rest, a pillow, a refuge—the likeness of a thing to be loved and desired for ever, and sought for and wrought for and fought for by generation after generation of the sons of men. Near the stove hung a gridiron, a frying-pan, a toasting-fork, and a pair 280

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of bellows. In an adjoining glazed corner cupboard were plates and glasses, black-handled knives, pewter spoons, and three-pronged steel forks; a salad-bowl, vinegar cruets, an oil-flask, two mustard-pots (English and French), and such like things—all scrupulously clean. On the floor, which had been stained and waxed at considerable cost, lay two cheetah-skins and a large Persian praying-rug. One half of it, however (under the trapeze and at the end farthest from the window, beyond the model-throne), was covered with coarse matting, that one might fence or box without slipping down and splitting one’s self in two, or fall without breaking any bones. Two other windows of the usual French size and pattern, with shutters to them and heavy curtains of baize, opened east and west, to let in dawn or sunset, as the case might be, or haply keep them out. And there were alcoves, recesses, irregularities, odd little nooks and corners, to be filled up as time wore on with endless personal nick-nacks, bibelots, private properties and acquisitions—things that make a place genial, homelike, and good to remember, and sweet to muse upon (with fond regret) in after years. And an immense divan spread itself in width and length and delightful thickness just beneath the big north window, the business window—a divan so immense that three well-fed, well-contented Englishmen could all lie lazily smoking their pipes on it at once without being in each other’s way, and very often did!

Making Bohemia Safe for America Albert P arty, 1933 I was once in Philadelphia, but it was closed.

—Fred Allen

There flourished in Philadelphia another group of free spirits that spoiled their performance by the consciousness of it. They called themselves Bohemians and tried to act like a chaste edition of Montmartre. They insisted on bringing women into their organization, but these women were their prosaic wives. They even included their kiddies in the touching picture. Most of these people were newspapermen and illustrators. They had their Pen and Pencil Club at 1026 Walnut Street. They were fond of arranging “ Sour Kraut Soirees,” also “ Yuletide Days in Bohemia for Ladies and Children,” also masquerades devoid of naughtiness. Yet, they considered themselves the real article in vagary and always grumbled about the spread of pretenders throughout the city. Henry Starr Richardson, editor of the Daily N ews and president of the Pen and Pencil Club, complained jealously in an article that almost every young Philadel­ phian wanted to be a madcap, or already counted himself such, on the flimsiest of pretexts. The youth on the threshold of life, unawed, though kindly disposed toward the world exclaims: “ Conventions! Rot, I want to be a Bohemian!” The romantic girl, undecided between the stage and the convent, has a conviction that she is destined for Bohemia. The clerk— heaven prosper him; he is the merchant, the proprietor o f tomorrow!—frequents the incoherent cafe, where a vile concoction passes for claret, and an equally specious talent and freedom are accepted as genius, and is cocksure he is of the elect.

Richardson was not against the free ways of the actors, newspapermen, or musicians of Philadelphia “ who do not care to live a regular life in the 282

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manner of the great majority” though he doubted that they were “ born” Bohemians. But what gave him his most roaring laugh was when “ even the young married couple of eminent respectability, aglow with their new experiences and the sense of their important integral part in the grand scheme of society, cordially invite you to visit the newly-made nest, and, conscious of the fact that it includes a ‘cosy corner,’ and that the sideboard contains a decanter of whiskey and a siphon of seltzer, explain: ‘Don’t stand on any ceremony; you know we are thorough Bohemians!’ ” Being an editor with a penchant for statistics, Richardson calculated that in Philadelphia, in the early 1900s, the Conventionalists were outnum bered by the Bohemians two to one. He waxed sarcastic, exclaiming, “ What an army it is, these mighty legions of Bohemians! Pale and tremble, Conventionalists! Do you not fear the assault? No, alas! I know you do not; for our army is only a make-believe. . . . ” So great was the fad for Bohemianism in the 1890s and 1900s that in many cities some restaurant owners made much money by hinting that they had just the atmosphere. Magazine publishers tried to create a special Bohemian press and thus gather some shekels. But they were timid, inexperienced publishers; amateurs rather than professionals. They lacked vision and acumen. It remained for the allegedly sleepy city to surprise the world by an example of such acumen. It was in Philadelphia that some live wires decided to put pep into the garrety press and make money thereby. In 1904, Bohemia made its appearance in the city of Brotherly Love. Its editors called it a magazine, but in reality it was a mixture of a de luxe almanac and a testimonial address on a grand scale. The first issue had over four hundred pages and scores of photos, cartoons, lithographs in color, articles, poems, and quips. It was printed and bound most hand somely and marked Volume I. The editors promised Volume II, but so far as I know, it never came about. The first volume was so gorgeous and sentimental, was so skilfully managed, that it brought all the subscriptions, contributions, and money the promoters ever hoped to get. The perfor­ mance could not be excelled or even repeated, and its sponsors perhaps suspected as much. Newspapermen and politicians of much experience were responsible for the venture. Chief among them was Colonel Alexander K. McClure, who proudly called himself one of the founders of the Republican party and an authority on Lincolniana. From 1873 to 1900, he was editor-in-chief of the Philadelphia Times and at one time he held the post of prothonotary of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. He was suave and energetic, and together with his assistants he milked subscriptions to Bohemia from President Roosevelt, King Leopold of Belgium, President Loubet of France, Dictator

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D íaz of Mexico, His Holiness the Pope Leo XIII, and Potentate Khoula lonkorn of Siam. From some of these he succeeded in getting letters ringing with praise to the commendable aim of Bohemia, and he printed them in the almanac on resplendent paper, together with full-page portraits of their exalted authors. There were also subscriptions from senators, congressmen, governors, mayors, generals, admirals, newspaper publishers, theatrical managers, and businessmen. Many of these sent their articles. All felt in duty bound to contribute money or talent or both, since the Philadelphia Bohemia was the official publication of the International League of Press Clubs for the building and endowment of the Journalists’ Home. The editors explained in their ch ef d ’œuvre that Bohemia meant largely goodfellowship. The element of improvidence and lack of conventionali ties, these part and parcel of Bohemia, were not stressed by them. Various writers of the almanac strove to prove that almost everybody was a Bohemian. Advocate-General Samuel C. Lemly contributed an article on the sailor of the American navy, then still the hero of Cuba and the Philippines, describing him as the Prince of Bohemians because “ he is a born story teller, witty, apt in repartee, and has an abiding faith in the truth of his own fabrications, which, however wonderful, are never malicious,” also because he is patriotic as well as “ happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care—God bless him with all his faults!” Ada Cable, publisher of the Bradford, Pennsylvania, Sunday Herald, sent in an essay wherein she maintained that Bohemia was neither an idle dream nor a cloudland of inspired imagination in poetry and song, but that Bohemia was a glad reality in the oil fields of Pennsylvania. She said: “ Real Bohemia is to be found in the oil country. The rich man and the poor drill a well together, and their social relations are identical. The pauper of yesterday is the millionaire of today and he may be broke tomorrow. Snobbery and arrogance are not cultivated in the land where the oil flows.” One pictures John D. Rockefeller as a gay Bohemian, merrily prancing in the Pollyanna-ish realm of the derricks! The Honorable Charles F. Warwick, ex-mayor of Philadelphia, nodded his enthusiastic assent: “ Dynasties and nations may rise and fall, empires decay and pass away, but Bohemia is always. It is the only true democracy in the world—the safest, merriest, jolliest state in all Christendom.” His honor, the ex-mayor, spoke of Bohemians in the tenderest tones. Why, his best friends were Bohemians! But Lawyer A. H. Hummel was more choosy. He would not associate with bad eggs who besmeared the idealis tic name. He warned his friends and readers to steer clear of the Bohemia of slums and sewers. It was a false Bohemia, he said, and it led foolish

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youth to perdition. Mr. Hummel would have nothing to do with any youngsters when he wanted his Bohemia. “ The true Bohemia tempts mature men into its magic circle, shows them new pleasures, teaches them sound lessons. Bohemia is the land not necessarily without morals or sodden with drink—so I sought it—so have I found it.” Another high-born contributor approved of this aversion to sewers and rags. This was the day of electricity, he wrote in Bohem ia , the day of cheap and universal comforts and even luxuries. There was no excuse for rags and dirt as there was, in fact, no poverty. A Bohemian could be now a Bohemian in heart and mind only. True, very true, agreed Julia Ward Howe, the celebrated author of “ The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” now penning her article on “ What and Where is Bohemia?” She found Bohemia neither unshaven nor unwashed. Bohemia, thank Heaven, was impecunious no more. “ It desires to conform to all the healthful decencies of life, to all social ordinances which are truly refining.” No wonder Dorothy Dix and Laura Jean Libbey felt safe to contribute to Bohemia. Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy was represented in Bohemia by a discourse on Christian Science, while Edward Bok wrote on Henry Ward Beecher. There was a lively contribution by William Jennings Bryan, and another by that famous merchant and agriculturist of California, David Lubin. There were articles on telephone, electric business, merchant marine, commercial education, law, railroad accounting, and polygamy. Even this last topic was discussed in connection not with the Bohemians but with the Mormons. There was a drawing representing some Murgerites of Philadelphia eating supper on a barrel in a garret, but their dress and expression were quite bon ton. It was a Kiwanian jest rather than a scene from everyday life. A cartoon by Thomas Nast sent to Bohemia a few days before his death felt a bit lonely in the fashionable company of all this Crème de Boh ême. The Philadelphia Bohemia was the first definite and elaborate American attempt to elevate Bohemia into good morals and big money. The attempt met with favorable response. There was apparently demand for such a Bohemia or at least for literature extolling it. The next year, James Clarence Harvey came out in New York with his one-man almanac devoted to Bohemia and there he boldly asserted that Bohemia may exist at millionaires’ tables. He listed almost all of the swanky restaurants of New York as unmistakably Bohemian. His In Bohemia laughed at some peo­ ples’ notion that the Latin Quarter was anything approaching genuine Bohemia. “ There are those who mistake rudeness, soiled linen of table or person, sour wine and a loosely tied neckerchief for Bohemianism,” he exclaimed. “ Bohemia is not synonymous with license, nor intoxication, nor immorality!”

The Trilby Craze: Bohemia for All Albert Parry, 1933

In 1894, with almost no warning, like a bolt of lightning out of placid skies, Bohemianism became the sensation and the rage of America. Suddenly, it became respectable and highly desirable for the young and the old alike. Everyone talked about it and strove to be considered a Bohemian; one might say that children cried for it. This colossal epidemic was brought on by no other aesthetic soul than Henry James. On a clear morning he took a walk along an English country road with the aging Du Maurier. The Frenchman casually told the American a story of indolent life in Paris in the ’Fifties. He sentimentalized over some English artists who four decades before had been his friends in the Latin Quarter; he was slightly derisive about Whistler, and he invented a girl model who was touchingly virtuous even in her sin and in her subjection to that diabolic, dirty Jew, Svengali. Du Maurier suggested to Henry Jam es’ pen all these figures and a certain supernatural, tear-evoking plot. But James was moved by the possibilities of the idea and the generosity of Du Maurier. He insisted that Du Maurier write this story himself, and waxed eloquent over its potential success, with Du Maurier’s illustrations, among the Americans. James perhaps remembered the whilom success of Murger’s book in America, and thought the time ripe for a sprightly successor to that worn-out favorite. Thus, Trilby was written and ran as a serial in Harper s M onthly , from January to August of 1894. It was a tremendous hit from the very start. By the time it appeared in book form (September, 1894), the whole country seemed to take to sighs over poor Trilby and to longings for Paris attics. Throughout the years of 1894 and 1895 Trilby walked the theater stage, the concert stage, and the drawing-room floors of America as a melodrama, as a series of “ Scenes and Songs from Trilby,” as a theme for literary debates. In New York, a Trilby entertainment—scenes and music—was 286

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given at Sherry’s for the benefit of St. Luke’s Home for Indigent Christian Females, under the auspices of the Daughters of the Revolution. In San Francisco, a concert of Trilby songs was given under the management of the ladies of the Mercantile Library Auxiliary. The Mercantile Library of New York was compelled to put one hundred copies of Trilby in circulation, so heavy was the demand. In Chicago, the Public Library had only twenty-six copies, but it was estimated that the demand would have warranted two hundred and sixty copies. There was a parody, Billtry , issued between boards closely resembling the covers of Trilby, but the author of the parody, Mary Kyle Dallas, hastened to preface her effort with a statement that no offense was meant, but that she, like the rest of the American people, felt the greatest possible respect for Trilby, Du Maurier, and studio life in general. There was also a respectful parody in verse, entitled Drilby R e-versed , by Leopold Jordan. In the Garrick Theatre and elsewhere, Trilby was burlesqued, but these jests, too, were good-natured and full of inherent respect for Du Maurier’s creation. In Florida there was a railroad station, obscure under the name of Macon, which boomed into a prosperous town as soon as Henry B. Plant, the railroad magnate and a Du Maurier fan, renamed it Trilby. Tourists craned out of the Pullman windows to see the station of this unusual name. The press and the realtors spread the glad word about Trilby, Florida. The realtors took their hint from Plant and named the streets of the new town after the heroes of Du Maurier’s studio. A foreboding spider web was the well-known symbol of the book, signifying the dirty work done by Svengali to poor Trilby. Now, the town of Trilby, Florida, had a Svengali Square, with a net of railroad tracks right in the middle, a subtle reminder of the spider web. In memory of the three musketeers of Paris garrets there were streets named Little Billee Street, Taffy Street, and Laird Lane. Business men, the country over, rushed to cash in on the craze. A Broadway caterer in New York made “ Trilby Foot” ice-cream, a Chicago firm made Trilby shoes, a Philadelphia concern issued Trilby Sausage, brazenly advertising it as a fulfillment of a long-felt want. Other wideawake gentlemen christened a scarf-pin, a cocktail, a bathing-suit, a cigar, a cigarette, and a restaurant after Trilby. There were many yachts with “ Trilby” proudly lettered on their sterns and bows. Not only shoes and boats, but other articles having to do with feet, such as stockings, socks, shoe laces, garters, corn cures, and bunion chasers, were named Trilby. Respectable folk hastened to protest, in letters to editors, this vandal exploitation of their new Parisian idol. They felt that Trilby was too holy to be thus exploited. J. P. Morgan bought the holograph of Trilby for his collection of artistic rarities.

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James Huneker warned the good people of the land that Trilby was bogus Bohemianism. Huneker had lived in Paris and he knew. But his voice was lost in the chorus of loud sentimental sighs and huzzahs. The question of Trilby’s morals and Du Maurier’s degree of Christianity was taken up by preachers in Boston and other cities. In Brooklyn, a matron broke her husband’s head with a jar in an argument over the morals of the young model. But such sermons and arguments were rather an exception. The country, on the whole, settled itself to admire Trilby without any reference to her sins. H arper’s Weekly wrote in connection with “ An Evening with Trilby,” a literary and musical entertainment at which gentlemen of Omaha read their papers on various phases of Trilby and Bohemianism: “ It is a pretty far cry from Paris to Omaha, but Trilby’s voice seems to have carried that distance without the least trouble. It is worth remarking that these Omaha gentlemen made seven ‘papers’ about her without finding it necessary to discuss her m orals.” Thomas Dunn English, the ancient author of “ Ben Bolt,” the song prominently figuring in Trilby, was discovered by alert reporters to be in the slumbers of New Jersey. He was brought to New York and feted and toasted amid great gatherings. Du M aurier’s illustrations of Taffy, the Laird, and Little Billee were carefully studied on this side. Soon the replicas of their dress and manner isms began to appear on the streets of New York. It was about the same time that fond mammas began to dress their protesting little boys in replicas of dear little Lord Fauntleroy attire. The little boys hated the sissy Fauntleroy frills; there was a wail throughout the land. Not so with the big boys. They needed no fond and persistent mammas to force them into the frills of English Bohemians of Paris. The American language, as well as dress, owed a certain debt to the Trilby psychosis. Since so much was made in the book of Trilby’s foot, “ trilbies” came to mean feet. “ The altogether” came to mean a model’s nudity not unlike the nudity practiced by gay, brave Trilby. “ Trilbies” for feet disappeared by the dawn of the century, but “ the altogether” for nudity stuck in the language, coming safely down to our age. In some mysterious way, as Thomas Beer rightly observed, “ Trilby had something to do with woman’s independence; suffrage got tangled up with the question of nude a rt.” Girls rushed out of their parents’ homes to establish their own studios and to call themselves bachelor maids. Some of them, indeed, got jobs and became self-supporting, for the appearance of Trilby coincided with that phase of America’s industrial development where woman’s labor was needed en masse in business offices, editorial rooms, and behind the sales counters. Saint Gaudens said: “ Every other woman you meet thinks she could be

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an artist’s model.” But the thinking did not go farther than thinking, because there were not enough artists in the country to demand so many nudes, because not all the aspirants had the exquisite Trilby foot and figure, and because to undress before a strange man, be he even an artist, was really an immoral act. American girls wanted to be Trilbies without undressing; they wanted to be Bohemians and yet remain virgins. A few years after Trilby had excited the country, one D. A. King summed up the chaste American ideal of La Boh émienne in the following verse: She cares not for lovers, as most o f them do, She laughs at them all, both at me and at you. Yet, as a friend, she is loyal and true, The best and the dearest that ever you knew. She never was born, but like Topsy, she “ grew” Like a gracious wild flower, prized by the few, She cares not for fashion, for style not a sou. She’s a thorough Bohemian, through and through.

The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy M ildred Edie Brady, 1947

Californians are telling each other confidently that the bulk of our young people is sound and that the new bohemia in our midst is simply another manifestation of the fringe that has always seemed to cut a little deeper into West Coast communities than elsewhere. Quite naturally, since the ways of bohemia furnish lively dinner table talk, there is a good deal of anecdotal conversation about them; but the talk is light, for the most part, and the socially accepted attitude toward the phenomenon is summed up in some such generalization as: “ After all, it’s only a small minority and this is the postwar. You’ve got to expect something like this after a war. It always happens. Remember the twenties.” For their part, the young intellectuals and literati who are the benefici­ aries of such an admirable tolerance agree heartily on their minority status. In fact, they insist on it. How could it be otherwise? Whenever was the vanguard of the artistic and intellectual world a majority? Here in northern California they are shaping up the cultural mecca of the twentieth century. This is “ the new Paris.” No longer does the young writer head for New York or the Left Bank. This time the modern, the new, the truly creative, will ride out the coming depression in the coastal hills of California. And as you drive along the coast, up state highway number one, you can see, if you look for them, the shacks, even tents, where literary immigrants have already set up typewriters. They are scattered over a wide area extending some twenty miles or more below Carmel which is, in turn, two to three hours below San Francisco. Their jerry-built cabins are not yet an obvious rash on the countryside, hidden as they are in shrub­ bery and scattered along such a long stretch of road. It is dramatically beautiful country they have settled in. The highway winds in and out along cliffs that drop sheer to the Pacific where deep arroyos, dark with ever green, sweep down between the hills. Here and there the road straightens inward to cut under towering redwood forests. This is the Big Sur country, 290

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the Continent’s End of Robinson Jeffers. It has long been one of Califor nia’s many prides and the town of Carmel, just above it, has been host to the nation’s retired, or vacationing, artists for years—the ones with money. But these newcomers are a different crowd. They don’t have money and most of them are young, with no clamoring public to hide from nor any agent to drum up a demand for their stuff. When you first come upon them in their countryside shacks they are a surprise. You recognize them instantly, for even here in this forest by the ocean the stamp of young bohemia is as unmistakable as a trade mark. But it is their apparent isolation that bothers you. Their beards and sandaled feet, their corduroys and dark shirts; the barren clutter in the one or two uncarpeted rooms: abstract paintings against rude board walls, canned milk and pumpernickel on a rough table, ceramic ashtrays and opened books on a packing box— all this is familiar. Except for the bright daylight and the absence of city soot and noise, you’d think you were in a Greenwich Village apartment of twenty years ago. But it is decidedly unlike young bohemia to turn hermit or to take upon itself the disciplined demands of rural self-sufficiency. It doesn’t fit. The key to this puzzle is simple, almost too obvious to grasp. It lies in that greatest of California boasts—the mild coastal climate. These new settlers, it turns out, are as gregarious and dependent on urban services as their ancestors in Paris or New York. It is simply that they, with an enviable instinct that has characterized bohemia the world over, have been able to find the spot where, during a nation-wide housing shortage, a mild climate makes an amateur shack adequate year-round shelter, and where highways free of snow in an automobile-owning age offer year-round transportation via the thumb. Along the California coast a sweater and a fireplace will keep you warm in a cabin minus foundations, or even a floor, and the highway by your door is never stilled by snow or ice. Thus a rural, hitchhiking bohemia enjoys the beauty of a vacation country plus the services of the city and not so much as a nickel for subway fare is required to get to the center of town. It does take time to get to San Francisco, but the few hours on the highway, once a week or so, are no hardship, and the generosity of the highway can usually be counted on. The town of Carmel is close by and in the city, either in San Francisco or Berkeley, there are concerts, book­ stores, restaurants, and galleries to collect around. There are also kindred spirits there who haven’t yet found a hut in the hills and whose apartments afford meeting places for poetry-reading sessions and parties. Also in the city are the girls, the seekers who have come west this time from Wiscon­ sin or Illinois to read proof or take dictation by day; but to spend their

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evenings, and not infrequently their earnings, in earnest nurturing of new genius. The parties are not plush affairs, as a rule. Neither food nor drink is lavishly plentiful. And the poetry-reading sessions are serious and solemn occasions. They are held weekly in both San Francisco and Berkeley, where thirty or forty at a time can be found crowded together listening gravely to language patterns that are all but incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Poetry is far and away the most popular medium of these young writers, and their poems make no compromise with old standards of communication. Poetry, they hold, “ transcending logic, invades the realm where unreason reigns and where the relations between ideals are sympathetic and mysterious—affective—rather than causal.” Remember that word “ affective.” It, along with a few others like “ fecund,” “ orgastic,” “ magical,” “ fluid,” and “ natural,” reveal the distinguishing mark which binds them, ardent individualists though they are, into a group as definite as the bobby-soxers. For, while not all of them wear beards and some of them live in the city and still others live in the Russian River country (another vacation land about as far north of San Francisco as Carmel is south) and some of them write and others paint, and some just talk or listen, and others simply hang-on, and some pay the bills and others panhandle, and all are split into tiny, ingrown cliques— there is a substratum view of man and art and the nature of the world we live in that binds them into a fraternity. You could describe it, in brief, as a combination of anarchism and certain concepts related to psychoanalysis which together yield a philoso phy—holding on the one hand that you must abandon the church, the state, and the family (even if you do it, as James Joyce preached, “ by treachery, cunning, and exile” ); and on the other offering sex as the source of individual salvation to a collective world that’s going to hell. Your first reaction to all this is almost sure to be: “ Anarchism! I suppose we’ll all be playing mah jongg next,” or, “ Sexual salvation, heaven help us, this is where I came in a quarter of a century ago.” But to dismiss it simply as nothing more than a stale replica of the twenties, a kind of intellectual measles that every generation has to go through, is to overlook some differences. If it is indeed true, as some are inclined to believe, that what we are witnessing out here on the coast is the characteristic pattern of the postwar bohemia of World War II then it is also true that bohemia has changed its party line to produce a somewhat different spirit from that which sent cultural pioneers after World War I to the grimy walkups in New York’s Greenwich Village. For one thing, these builders of the new Paris in the nineteen-forties would profoundly shock their agnostic predecessors of the twenties with

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their sentimental mysticism; for bohemia today is proudly religious. Its creeds, however, would certainly terrify any good Methodist. It is not their frank and frequent verbal testimonials of faith in a supreme being that would disturb the more orthodox, although such free and easy references to a religious faith fall strangely on the ear today. Nor would their use of such phrases as “ the outer reality,” “ the great oneness,” “ the life source,” or “ the vital core” bother you unduly. For if you have ever been a part of any religious group, if only a Middle Western Sunday School, you can usually follow the deity through their synonyms without too much difficulty. But when they turn on the word “ love” your Sunday School background falls down on you no matter how many times you may have sung “ Love Lifted Me” in a Billy Sunday revival. Even less would a sojourn in the Greenwich Village of the twenties prepare you for love as “ the ecstasy of the cosmos” or for “ the sexual sacram ent” as the acme of worship. Back in the postwar of World War I, sexual emancipation was stoutly defended and practically furthered by the younger generation, to whom bourgeois morality was unquestionably a shameful stigma—but it never got mixed up with the deity. Sex in those days was a strictly worldly affair and nobody’s business but your own. “ The great oneness,” however, is an intimate participant in the sexual emotions of his worshippers. In fact, he reveals himself fully only in the self-effacing ecstasy of the sexual climax. This, they hold, is the moment of deepest spiritual comprehension of “ the outer reality,” the one moment when there is living communication between “ the vital life source” and the individual. And it is quite a different flavor from the revolt of the twenties—this lofty inner objective which turns every sexual encounter into a religious rite and gives us, in this day of scientific agriculture and contraceptives, a modern version of ancient fertility cults. It is not on behalf of the oranges and avocados, however, that “ the source of all creation” is offered such intense pantomimes of worship. The fertility sought is an inward one and the fruits desired are those of personality—the achievement on the part of the worshipper of intellectual and emotional vitality, the status of a “ fecund being.” Here is where psychoanalysis comes in supporting faith with argument. The ultimate authority is no longer Freud, nor Jung (who stands high, nevertheless), but one who—in his own words—now wears the mantle of Freud: Wilhelm Reich, whose Function o f the Orgasm is probably the most widely read and frequently quoted contemporary writing in the group. Even at the poetry-reading sessions you are likely to find someone carrying a volume of his turgid and pretentious prose. Reich’s thesis, briefly, is that all physical and spiritual ills, from cancer to fascism, stem

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from “ orgastic impotence” ; and he is the creator of that phrase, which means inability to realize sufficient pleasure in the sexual orgasm. The pleasure-paralyzing inhibitions which are responsible for this general sub standard sexual gratification have their source, it seems, in “ the patriar chal family” and its “ compulsive morality.” And the social and political institutions of the modern world are nothing more than a projection of this mass sex starvation. Thus civilization itself—civilization as we know it today—turns out to be a kind of elaborate dog-in-the-manger device through which sexual starvation is foisted upon the young by the bitter old. Born into this selfperpetuating stricture, a man’s chances of achieving orgastic potency (and that means the ability to experience the full measure, biologically possible, of sexual pleasure at high quality) are, of course, slim indeed. But unless he does achieve it, an individual’s creative energy goes down the sink of unavoidable neurosis, and he becomes prey to all the perverse evil that his own, and everybody else’s unconscious can generate. And make no mistake about it, the dark forces generated in the pleasurestarved unconscious of the orgastically impotent are as powerfully evil as any demon of ancient times. In this modern swamp of “ sexual m isery” only a few orgastically potent ones do survive, but from their benign, pleasure-fed, subconscious there flows a stream of psychic energy as pliant and good as the obverse is demanding and diabolical. Quite obviously, then, a creative artist minus orgastic potency is in a bad way and also, quite as obviously, if he has it he will be a misfit in a society fashioned by, and for, orgastic cripples. As a m atter of fact, for all its devotion to a supreme mystical force in the universe, the core of the philosophy of this new bohemia rests in the sexual thesis, from which their anarchism stems, not vice versa; and the emphasis on religion derives, in turn, from the anarchism. It goes some­ thing like this: if by strange and splendid chance you happen to be one of the few orgastically potent, you are (it follows) one of the few “ normal, natural, healthy human beings” left in a world peopled by terrified and frustrated neurotics pitifully matching mass masochism to dominant sa dism. How you determine your membership in this biological elite is, unhappily, not easy to demonstrate objectively. It is necessarily a subjec­ tive realization for the most part. It’s something you know about yourself. But there are some guiding indications. First of all is your ability to surrender to love. Then you will note your unusual aliveness and physical well being—your high color, your moist and elastic skin tone, and the full blooded healthiness of your genitals. You will also be aware of your exceptional drive for creative work, your capacity to self-regulate your

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sexual behavior without dependence on “ unnatural social or legal compul sions.” W hat’s more, you’ll find that you don’t want to force these unnatural compulsions on anybody else; you instinctively grant the right to love to others without requiring that they follow any rules that interfere with a free expression. And finally, your healthy subconscious will automatically reject such neurotic activities as holding down a bookkeeper’s job, or working like a dead cog in a machine on an assembly line—or anywhere else, for that matter, where your living body and soul would be whittled down to the sick demands of a dying world. In other words, you are very much all right if you are orgastically potent. Your desires are good; your acts, beneficent; and your life is in tune with the great, cosmic, vital force that is the natural law of the universe. The sad thing is the rest of the world. If everybody else were only as healthy as you, instead of suffering from the psychic plague as most of them are, there would be no need for artificial compulsions, legal prohibitions, or for any of the oppressive machinery of the state. Everybody would be wholesomely self-regulatory. All would respond to “ the natural biological law” freely and spontane ously. In other words, through widespread orgastic potency, through a gonadal revolution, we would achieve the philosophical anarchist’s ideal world. The place of religion in this view of mankind follows easily. Once in tune with the vital force of the universe, who could help but recognize it and then worship? Then too, this young bohemia is a learned crowd—or, at least, a wide-ranging bunch of readers. Religion, like sex, they find as they read history or philosophy is a natural, ever-present, human striving. And religion seems to them a logical counterpart of political anarchism. They often quote Herbert Read on the point. He is much admired—not that he holds to the sexual analysis above, but rather that he is a leading spokesman for the intellectual anarchists in England and the California literati are free borrowers. Read expresses the relationship between anar­ chism and religion as follows: “ I call religion a natural authority . . . the only force which can hold a people together—which can supply a natural authority to appeal to when personal interests clash. . . . For religion is never a synthetic creation. . . . A prophet like a poet is born.” The fact that Wilhelm Reich spurns religion while Read preaches it matters no whit to these philosophical improvisers, who also toss into their pot, along with these two, D. H. Lawrence, Emma Goldman,

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Madame Blavatsky, Henri Bergson, William Blake, and even Ouspenski of Tertium Organum, to name just a few. There is, of course, nothing especially new in all this except orgastic potency, and even that is just another term for an idea that centuries ago the mystics of India expressed in more poetic symbols. But out of this mixture, various combinations and emphases allow room for individual embroidery and on this score some imaginative patterns have been worked out. There is, for example, one small group of Gnostic anarchists weaving together the elaborate mysticisms of the Gnostic heretics of the second century A. D . and the philosophies of both Kropotkin and Wilhelm Reich. The devils of the Manicheans and the devils of the subconscious race together in dream symbols through their writings; for this group, too, is largely made up of poets. They are currently preparing a magazine to embody their views which has been named A rk , and which they are slowly printing by hand on an old press housed in a San Francisco basement. There are other groups who combine vegetarianism, ballet dancing, cooperative handcrafts, anarchism, and sexual mysticism. Still others are held together by a co-operative search for orgastic potency in the closest approximation to a primitive tribal group they can contrive, in which all social, economic, and physical attributes, assets, and liabilities, are shared in common, and the ultimate objective is self-improvement. It might be presumed, logically, that while orgastic potency is eminently desirable from one point of view, its possession in this sick world would confront the healthy ones with a problem. How can they fit in, what are they to do with their lives? It turns out, however, that it’s no problem at all, for another benefit that flows from a relaxed subconscious is sureness of purpose and relief from tearing doubts. It is inescapably clear to the potent what their role in the present civilization is. In a doom-struck world, rotting in chain-reactive decay, it is their solemn mission to pre serve the essence of man through the descending holocaust. And since it is the mysterious quintessence of humankind, the very seed itself, that must be spored through the deluge—art, and only art, is the business of those pioneers for the New Israel. So they write poetry. They paint. They write philosophy. They go to galleries and concerts. Only in art, today, can the fettered, mechanically burdened soul of man speak out his revolt against the dead hand of rationalism. Only through art is it any longer possible to reach that all but buried spark of natural life dying under the intolerable weight of modern man’s sadistic super-ego. And only through art will man find a path back to his spontaneous, natural creativeness. Here again you are apt to hear Herbert Read quoted, though sometimes not credited, for he has put this part of their view most clearly. “ Poetry,” he writes, “ in its intensest and most creative moments penetrates to the same level as mysticism.”

Zen in Venice Lawrence Lipton, 1959

It wasn’t anybody’s idea in particular, a poetry wedding service by the ocean at night; everybody had heard about such unofficial ceremonies. Tanya Bromberger told of a couple she knew that got married on top of a mountain somewhere in Idaho— “ alone, just the two of them, a million miles from nowhere, man, was that a gas!” Chris Nelson said he’d always thought it would be great to get married in the Fun House on the Ocean Park Amusement Pier, but his wife wouldn’t go for it. Gilda herself had suggested a Buddhist temple wedding at first; she knew somebody who had gotten married in the Buddhist temple in Los Angeles—the man was brought up a Catholic and the girl was Jewish, and they didn’t want a priest or a rabbi, so they settled for a Buddhist ceremony. But Itchy wanted something closer to the kind of primitive ritual we had been discussing so much lately and everybody agreed that in Venice it had to be the ocean, what else? Hadn’t the Doges of Venice married the sea every year with a ring? Crazy! We were walking along the seashore, Itchy Gelden and I, on our way to Angel’s pad. The Venice ocean front—land’s end for the old people who came to it, and the promise of a fresh beginning for the young who could accept the challenge of sea as Itchy and Gilda were promising themselves to do. Not in the sun but at midnight, for the night seemed more in keeping with the pagan, lunar thing they wanted their love-union to be. Morning weddings, noon weddings, that was for squares. For the hip, for the cats, nothing but midnight would do. They were the night people. Itchy looked out across the sandy beach and blinked at the bright sunlight over the ocean. The light of day or any bright house-lighting hurt his eyes—a common complaint among pot heads and other narcotics users—yet despite the example of many jazz musicians, he was not wearing sunglasses. He was in one of his barefoot, barebreast Nature Boy moods, and any kind of glasses seemed unnatural. 297

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“ You know what?” he said. “ It’s gonna be like going back home to mama to ask for her blessing. I mean the real mama, the ocean, the mama of the whole race of man. And this bit of me marrying the ocean with a ring. You know what this is, man? It’s the old Oedipus bit, ain’t it? Incest! But, hey, man, I just happen to think—what is it gonna be for Gilda?” He puzzled over that for a minute. “ Yeh, I know, she’s marrying her old man, the old man of the sea. Crazy!” He walked along silently after that, and I could see that he was pondering the solemnity of the idea and the godlike feeling it gave him to think he was cast for such a role. He had come out of his usual slouch and was walking ramrod erect. He must have felt ten feet tall, and he wasn’t potted up, either. Sex was the creative principle of the universe . . . what were the vestal virgins but mystical brides of the gods . . . Bacchus . . . Priapus . . . Dionysus . . . the Shechina, the feminine emanation of Jehovah, hovering over the marriage bed on the Sabbath night . . . the agape, the early Christian love feast—what was it but communal love in its pure orgastic form . . . faked up by the Church into Christian fellowship with Sunday chicken and dumplings . . . the vaginal chalice and the phallic cross sublimated into empty ceremonials . . . and isn’t it a fact that the gods were conceived of in their pure primitive form as androgynous . . . hermaphroditic? . . . and isn’t it just a taboo, this prejudice against homosexuals and Lesbians? . . . and wasn’t Henry Miller right when he wrote—and Andre Gide—and Pierre Gordon in his book Sex and Religion which I had loaned Dan to read and which they had dipped into together and talked about . . . how else was one to experience the numinous enlightenm ent. . . nirvana . . . satori . . . except by going far out? . . . the irrational . . . wasn’t that the whole idea? . . . and how could you know in these other ways of knowing unless you explored your unconscious . . . disassociated . . . broke up, and through, and beyond . . . far out . . . through pain . . . through sex . . . through pot . . . Benezedrine . . . anything . . . everything ? . . . since the whole idea was to experience holiness . . . the beatific vision . . . orgastic release . . . the crucifixion of the flesh . . . (The Scene: Same as above, an hour later. A L et’s Pretend conversation game has started. It is a hipster adaptation of the Socratic dialogue with Talmudic and Scholastic elements in it, and the inevitable touch of Zen Buddhism. Chuck Bennison has joined the circle. He [Chuck Bennison] seats himself on a hassock with a lamp behind his head, the lamp shade simulating a halo.) C h u c k : Dig me, man, I’m God! A n g e l : Are you Jehovah, Adonai, Elohim— are you Spinoza’s God or H illel’s or

Aquinas’ or Billy Graham’s or Uncle Tom’s?— .

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C h u c k : I resign. (He yanks the lamp shade off the stand and plops it down on

Angel’s head.) A n g e l : I don’t want to b e God. C h u c k : You’re elected. I make you Pope. Peter, Jesus, God, The works. A n g e l : Then what are yo u ? C h u c k : I’m Satan, Mephistopheles, the Devil. I’m your alter ego. Everything is

chaos, all the pieces are lying around in the big storehouse o f Tohu and Bohu Incorporated and you ’re the Great Producer— . A n g e l (shouting): Liar, and Prince of Liars! You know it’s all a big shuck. Like if I’m God now, I’m God o f Now. Not yesterday or last year or the last millennium or fifty millenniums.

(He stands up and spreads his arms in a godlike gesture of command.) A n g e l : I abolish Time. I abolish Death— no, wait, I take that back. Abolish death?

Make everything— everybody— immortal? No. Like the idea is horrifying to me. C h u c k : If you create death then you permit murder. Life feeds on life. You put the power of life and death in every man’s hand, his own life and everybody else’s. A NGEL: Then I create Justice. Checkmate, Satan! Man is created with certain inalienable rights— how does it go? life, liberty and the pursuit o f happiness. D a v e : That’s a shuck too, man. H e’s got life only as long as you, God, want him to have it, and in the end he always loses it. H e’s got liberty if he fights for it, and sometimes he has to give his life for it. Happiness? He doesn’t even know what it is. Like the cat is drugged behind the scene nine times out o f ten every time he tries to decide what he wants, what he really wants, to make him happy. It’s a drag, man, a sad drag. Why don’t you put all the goodies in his hand and say: Here, man, help yourself. You want to live forever? Crazy! And you, you over there, you want to die?— early, late— fine! Make it your way. Like everybody makes it his own way, the best way he knows how. That would be freedom, man.

(Tanya gets up and does a little marching dance, pretending to carry a placard like a striking picket and shouting “ Freih eit! Freiheit!” Others take up the cry.) A n g e l (trying to make himself heard above the din): All right! All right! You’ve

made it. It’s all yours. I abdicate. Anyone who wants the job can have it. B o b : Wait a minute. You can’t do that. A n g e l : Why Not? I’m God, ain’t I?

BOB: All right. Then you’ve got to have a reason— an infallible reason. A n g e l : I abdicate because I don’t believe any more. I’m an atheist. I don’t believe

in the existence of man! C h u c k : Then the world is abolished and w e’re back again where we started. Man

no longer exists— God has become an atheist and no longer believes in the existence o f man. God no longer exists— there is no man to invent him. We’re back with old Tohu and Bohu, Inc., again. Anybody else want to take a crack at the God business?

(As if in miraculous answer to his summons, the door opens and Ron Daley walks in—well, not just like that—he opens

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the door a crack and peers in, opens it a little wider and looks around, then he tiptoes in and stands by the door waiting for an invitation. We all know his habits and beckon to him to come in and join us. It is Ron’s little private ritual. He is the Zen philosopher of Venice West. I explain to him what the game is and tell him the job of God is open. He sits down, gracefully, in his fairy way—not swishy, although he is homosexual—just gracefully—in the yogi posture.) A NGEL: G o o n , c rea te a w orld . R o n : What for? What do you need it for, man?

A Zen master once gave this sermon to his monks: “ You are all like those who, while immersed in the ocean, extend their hands crying for water.”

(He takes a book from his pocket and reads.) Zen recognizes nothing from which we are saved. We are from the first already “ saved” in all reality, and it is due to our ignorance of the fact that we talk about being saved or delivered or freed. So with “ escap e,” etc., Zen knows no traps or complexities from which we are to escape. The traps or com plex ities are our own creation. We find ourselves, and when we realize this, we are what we have been from the very beginning of things.

(Other conversations in the room break off and everybody moves over to join our circle. Ron continues reading pas­ sages from his book.) We think Nature is brute fact, entirely governed by the laws o f absolute necessity; and there is no room for freedom to enter here. But Zen would say that Nature’s necessity and Man’s freedom are not such divergent ideas as we imagine, but that necessity is freedom and freedom is necessity. . . . Our inner life is complete when it merges into Nature and becom es one with it. . . . The whole universe which means Nature ceases to be “ hostile” to us as we had hitherto regarded it from our selfish point of view. Nature, indeed, is no more something to be conquered and subdued. It is the bosom whence we come and whither we go.

The Greening of a NATO General Claude Clement, interviewed by Sandro Ottolenghi, 1971

A publisher might reject a fantasy-satire about a general in NATO who retires to become a hippie and run rock festivals. Everyday life accepted the preposterous idea: General Claude Clement, 65, veteran of the French Foreign Legion, paratrooper, commander of the 151st brigade in the Italian and Alsatian campaigns of World War II, batallion commander at Hoa Binh in Vietnam and in Algeria after that, and finally the commander of NATO forces in Southern Europe, suddenly sprouted into a flower child. After retiring from the French Army, he organized the Saint-Pons Pop Festival in 1970, established an art center for hippies in southern France, and wrote a book entitled Make Love and N ot War Anymore. Known to legions of European hippies as ‘General Pop’, Clement is currently waging a war to convert his ‘straight’ sons to the cause. The interview below by Sandro Ottolenghi is translated from Milan’s respected weekly, L ’Euro peo.

Q.: If you’ll excuse me saying this, General, I find it hard to believe that a man who has reached the age of 65 after a life such as yours could become a hippie. I just can’t understand how you could do such a thing. A.: You’ll be able to tell for yourself if I’m crazy after we’ve finished talking. I ’ll show you that I am indeed a confirmed hippie. Q.: Agreed, General. A.: Very well then, ask me some questions. But don’t ask me why I’m not wearing wild clothes or long hair and a beard instead of this grey suit and waistcoat—with a Legion of Honor ribbon in my buttonhole. I ’ll tell you right away: my hair stopped growing a long time ago. I wear more informal clothes in the summertime. And, anyway, clothes and hair are not what make a real hippie. Q.: It’s the spirit, General. On that we’re agreed. But what I would like to know is how you happened to throw away your uniform if not for a hippie costume then for a civilian suit—how, in other words, this conversion of yours came about. 301

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A.: My uniform is still hanging in the closet; I haven’t thrown it out. And I admit that I had a brilliant military career. This makes it easier to explain that in fact I left because of a disagreement with De Gaulle. There were several aspects of policy on which we did not see eye to eye; he did not approve of some of my attitudes, and in particular he took a dim view of my attending the marriage of a high official he had pushed to the sidelines. I’ve always been a nonconformist even in the army; I’ve always felt that making love would have been a much better occupation than fighting in all the wars I did. And much more fun too. So one fine day I just walked out, and since I loved music I organized a music festival at Aix-en-Provence. Classical music, not yet pop music. It was only last year that I had my hippie revelation and realized I had to change everything in my life. Q.: How did it happen, General? A.: I discovered young people. I discovered, first of all, that this pop music is their cry, their hymn. I became so excited about it that I decided to declare war on classical music and organized a pop festival at Saint-Pons. And you can’t imagine what happened then. War was declared on me; they did everything they could to stop me—advice from “ on high” , warning that “ it wouldn’t do” and threats. But I succeeded in putting on the festival all the same and it was a success. Q.: An economic success, General, it was indeed. L et’s say then, hippie by conviction or revelation, but also for economic self-interest. A.: Are you kidding? I still have debts to pay off for that festival! But it doesn’t matter. What counts is that I felt myself a true hippie then and I decided to continue on that road. Young people have aspirations and their music is a symbol of these aspirations. But who listens to the young people, who pays any attention to the hippies? The young people don’t want this society and they are right; they don’t want jobs as they are conceived of today and they are right; they don’t want war and they are right. I am convinced that youth needs people of my age as well, who understand their aspirations and want to help them understand the goals to be reached. They don’t want to be slaves but they need someone to liberate them from slavery. Q.: They need a general, a prophet. A.: I don’t pretend to be that. I want to be one of them, share their aspirations. I too want to put flowers in the barrels of guns, to drop petals on those who drop bombs, smile at those who insult. You talk of prophets. But don’t you see that the hippies are like the first Christians, that they have the same vocation? And don’t you realize that the first, the true prophet of the hippies was Jesus Christ? But let’s return to ‘General Pop’: What would you like to know?

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Q.: The other stages of your conversion. And your plans. And what you do to feel like a true hippie. A.: After the festival I made a film about the protest against life as it is today, seen through the eyes of a young man, a hippie. It uses the SaintPons festival as its point of departure, and it also features Bob Dylan, the battle of Amman, rugby games, N asser’s funeral, the May 1968 riots and the Rolling Stones. The film tries to show the hippies’ pacifism, their goals of liberty and serenity. And then I wrote a book, Make Love and N ot War Anym ore. It is somewhat the story of my own life, how General Clement became ‘General Pop’, as well as an analysis of the world of young people and hippies. You see, I have discovered in the course of my life that even legionnaires in the Sahara or paratroopers in battle can be hippies. When a human being loves art, loves creativity and happiness, then he can be a hippie no matter what he does or how old he is. Because happiness is everything: it is art, love, even physical love, and it is participation. In a society such as ours, all these things are forgotten, passed over, ignored. Work and technology must be demystified, because work, if it means exhaustion, is not made for man, and technology is the diametric opposite of imagination and creativity. Therefore our life today, or rather the life of those who are not hip, cannot be a happy life. Do you follow me? Q.: Well enough, General. Even if some of your former colleagues in the Foreign Legion or the paratroopers, those who fought with you in Indo­ china and Algeria, aren’t entirely in agreement with you. A.: They don’t agree with me. But when I move in official circles—and I still do from time to time to meet old friends—they smile at me, it’s true. But I think they smile out of affection, not from any other feelings. Of course some of them have declared war on me as the good bourgeois of Aix-en-Provence did last year. But I intend to respond with flower petals. No, my friends have a lot of affection for me, and I’m sure someone will be able to “ convert” them before long. I tried it myself yesterday with someone very high up in the government: I told him that France lacked only one minister, a Minister of Love. He told me he would consider my proposal seriously. Q.: Your friends do have affection for you, General. But what about your family? You have a wife and sons. How do they take to having a hippie husband and father? A.: Things aren’t going too well with the family. At first my wife, who comes from good and pious bourgeois stock, thought I was crazy. But then she came to the pop music festival, and she is no longer scandalized when I come home with a group of young hippies dressed like gypsies. But with my sons it’s another story; they are incorrigible technocrats who think only about money and their careers and no matter how hard I try I

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can’t convert them. This is terrible, but one must be patient. Yes, my children are abominable advocates of this society we oppose, this society that spends hours upon hours sitting in cars or on the subway wolfing down a sandwich at lunchtime and then is always too tired or too preoc­ cupied to think about real life. Or to make love. Q.: General, you are probably waiting for my next objection and that is that the epoch of flowers in guns seems to have been over for some time now and that the youth of today prefer other means of expression. Tolerance, non-violence, liberty and serenity are things one doesn’t see very often anymore. I wouldn’t like to see you, General, as the last, incorrigible hippie, arriving somewhat late on the scene. A.: The hippie movement has perhaps undergone a crisis. But only in Europe and only in its exterior manifestations. In the Anglo-Saxon world, especially in America, the era of violence has already ended. Protest did not sweep away the hippies, who as you recall were the ones who started protest going in the first place, peaceful protest. They kept on the sidelines for a while, waiting for the barbarous and unproductive storm to pass. And now they are returning. The spirit created by the hippies resists and lasts and has left a mark on young people that will never be erased. Perhaps some things among the hippies will change, but not the basic idea, the idea that I have already explained to you. The real hippies are against politics, they feel they cannot sacrifice any part of their life to politics. Just as one cannot sacrifice oneself for work or money. One must work, yes, but only enough to eat and have a bed to sleep in. Q.: And, as the American ‘High Priests’ say, enough for an LSD trip and a birth control pill. A.: On the Pill I couldn’t agree more: love, free love without any worry is at the basis of hippie philosophy. But drugs, no. I suppose in this respect I’m an abnormal hippie: I can’t stand drugs. I tried them in Morocco when I was in the Legion: everyone smoked hashish and I tried it too. But now I am fighting drugs; I am determined to fight the addicts; I kicked them out of our festival last year. I feel drugs are not necessary for a hippie, as, on the other hand, love is. Drugs are only an artificial means of escaping from boredom. Q.: Tell me honestly, General, have you attained what you are advocating? A.: I have found everything I was looking for. I have had a life that allowed me to develop my imagination and my creativity. Now I have reached happiness. Now I am a hippie and what’s more, I want others like me to be able to have the same thing. I want young people to understand and learn. I want everyone to become a hippie. Q.: A noble aim, General. A kind of crusade. How do you plan to achieve this?

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A.: By publicizing ‘hippyism’. Publicizing it in a new kind of way. Next year I am starting a ‘Hippie World Center’ in the South of France which will be a place where people who feel themselves to be hippie can meet to do what they want, things they can’t do elsewhere. Meet together, listen to music, watch plays, dedicate themselves to a craft, discuss, make love, read. It will be a center of happiness open to all, free for everyone, where anyone with the hippie spirit can express his personality without the restrictions, the ties, the prohibitions, the taboos of today’s society. It will be the first nucleus of a hippie society which will conquer Europe and then the world: a society of peace and serenity whose faith will be in ‘flower power’. Q.: Do you really think that, General? You hear these things said so often, don’t you think? Everyone wants peace and happiness, it would seem. Even the generals who then make war and not love. A.: On these generals, on the army of conformism, technocracy and ambition, ‘General Pop’ hereby declares war. Have you written that down? Q.: Yes, General.

Two A Troubled Dream In the days o f my youth In the days o f my youth I lay in West Tenth Street Writhing with truth.

—E. B. White

Bohemia Charles Sears Baldwin, 1903

Bohemia has been for a hundred years a figure of speech. Is the figure an allegory, a myth perhaps embodying a vision; or is it only a stale fiction? It began, at least in error. The French language had fathered upon earnest Bohemia the footloose, whether nomads or vagabonds, who trans gressed boundaries. English literature added another error, famous be cause it was adopted by Shakespeare. In the Winter’s Tale he gives to Bohemia a seacoast. The real Bohemia has no sea-coast. Neither has the metaphorical Bohemia, that fabulous home of those who will have no home. What have nomads in vans or tents or garrets to do with harbors? A port ends the voyage. Bohemians hate to lay a course. The metaphor holds for a port as a way out. Women especially, when they yield to gypsy yearnings, find that the land of homelessness has no sea-coast. They cannot readily sail away; and the men who welcomed them as adventurers cannot help them as travellers. Whether or not this ought to be so, it is so. But the difficulty of escaping from escape is dangerous enough for men 307

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too. For either women or men the entry into Bohemia is without passport, and the sojourn at their own risk. Men are still permitted by society to risk more or longer; but they too find that risk prolonged is only habit after all. For him who cannot sail away, as for her, there is no sea-coast. Bohemia has no sea-coast because it has no geography—except for those who trade. They, indeed, for their trade wish us to believe that it is bounded by the Moulin R ouge , the Chat Noir, the Frère Perdu , and the Théâtre des Folles, within which they stimulate and satisfy curiosity at rates above the market. But you could not live there without discovering that the people whom you guessed to be irregular artists and naughty poets are either tourists or third-rate actors who cannot find better parts. Bohemia has, indeed, a commercial geography; but it has no other. We fancy it must have a local habitation on Montmartre because we live in Passy. Since obviously it is not on Amsterdam Avenue, we hope it is in Greenwich Village. When we cannot find it in Ohio, we sneer at the Middle West and seek Bohemia in France. We might better seek castles in Spain. That young dream is less troubled. The dream of Bohemia is troubled because it is false. It pretends that relaxation can be prolonged, even fixed. Relaxation on the contrary is rhythmical, the unbending of the bow, the slackening of taut muscles and nerves, the mind’s unfixing. Its function is to store energy for bending again, for tightening, for return to focus. Recreation prolonged artificially brings its own staleness. When the indoor routine of towns threatens to stun and blunt us, we stir our bodies in the open, tramping and camping as Americans, not subscribing to Bohemia. For Bohemia is even more un­ healthily indoor. It can endure neither fresh air nor sunlight. Cliff-dwellers will not gain by cave-dwelling. The release of the mind, beyond what is given by the escape of the body, comes through imagination. Imagination, though stirred more by Bohemia than by moving pictures or fat clubs or board walks, is not developed. It relapses when the first excitement is prolonged in patterns repeated by tired souls. To set it free for growth is a function of art. Architecture itself, not the random habits of Beaux Arts tyros, is to give our daily living vision. Painting, not the whims of painters, would reveal a new earth if we did not leave it to schoolgirls, tourists, and professional critics. Here is music; and Bohemia offers instead spasms of dubious exotic noise. Here is poetry; and Bohemia invites us to gossip at round tables with poetasters. For release why choose this blind alley? Because it is blind; because it does not lead. Art will lead us on to stretch and supple imagination, that we may re-enter the human scene more observantly, more sympathetically, and so in the end more actively. Bohemia tempts us to let somebody else excite us, that we may forget.

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The devil is in it. Yes, the ultimate cause is moral. To dispel the Bohemian illusion through art demands more than art. Man shall not live by bread alone. What he needs further, says the devil, is escape from bread-winning to Bohemia. But what he really needs further is to open himself more and more to every divine utterance. The term paradoxides bohemicus, though not applied by science to the illusion of Bohemia, irresistibly suggests to the sage an old germ at last isolated, and gives his cursing appropriate diction. For imaginative preci­ sion trust your scientist. Paradoxides! No one else could have so damned in a word.

Bohemia as It Is Not Mary Heaton Vorse, 1903

There is a Land of Cockayne where all the world is merry, and at whose frontier cause and effect cease to have power; where vice is always innocent and never ugly; where men when drunk become inspired; where everyone is witty, or, if not that, then as gay as Mimi Pinson. No one grows old in this country, and those who are old already are endowed with an immortal youth of spirits. To be a true citizen of Cockayne one must starve now and then, but the Cockaynians, when they lack food, like the saints of old, always chance on a raven to bring them a Chateaubriand aux pom m es , or, perhaps, are miraculously assisted to a dinner by a lion. It is always Christmas in the Land of Cockayne, and when it is not Christmas, it is summer. Good Fellowship is the patron saint of the people; everyone loves everyone else, or, if they don’t, they have such quaint ways of hating one another. The houses are all attics, and every attic has the most beautiful view, generally over the Luxembourg Gardens, while just across in the next mansard is the daintiest little sempstress in the world. You can see her in a little ruffled corset-cover and silk petticoat, getting a meal for her bon ami any time you look out of the window. What gaity over the way! Of course that silk petticoat is her only one, and perhaps it is only near-silk, but what matter, her joyousness is real! Newcomers in this happy land always are jealous of the happiness in the opposite attic, so they go to a cafe or stroll down the Boul’ Mich’, and next time you see them they are provided with the sweetest Mimi Pinson of a girl, with a name ending in “ ette” or “ ine” —there are conventions in the Land, and this one concerning terminations is binding; it has been broken but once by a young person with a name ending in “ lby.” They are young, these Ettes and Ines, as pretty as they are young, and as innocent as they are pretty—an indigenous sort of innocence, different from ours, unmoral, the Cockaynians call it. Then, too, they are so refined; one is glad to know that these gentle little pagans—whose pretty thumbs 310

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are always at their noses, mocking deadly respectability—are refined. It must be an essential trait, for the people who write about the Land always make a point of this. The name of this country is Bohemia. When anyone comes back from there he always writes a book about it. That is how one comes to know about the gaiety and Louisette and the attic. There was once a big, burly man with a personality, who made a creed of irregularity. He was as punctual to his irregularities as a New England farmer to his dinner at twelve, and it was he who founded the Land of Cockayne, as sure as George Washington was the Father of our country; there are some who say he even invented it. It was he who turned rioters into Bohemians, who made debauch respectable; he popularized revolt, and was the first to put decency on the dunce’s stool for the diversion of the people. Before his day, decency had been on occasion politely ignored; but it was one of his laws that all Bohemians should make a point of saluting decency with a thumb to the nose. Then he made literature of La Vie de Boh êm e , and said the last original word that could possibly be said on the subject. That was sixty years ago. Alphonse Daudet speaks of a glimpse he had, as a lad of eighteen, of “ a world apart, with a language of its own, a world with strange morals. A world,” he says, “ which to-day has disappeared, and is almost entirely forgotten.” He wrote that more than fifteen years ago. Since then there has been a pale recrudescence of Murgeria. A parcel of students playing the pranks of youth, and some older men aping youth’s license, have been lovingly observed by pathetic foreigners of Puritan ancestry. These went home and wrote with reverence descriptions of this Bohemia which they fancied they had seen. They fancied, too, that they were writing original stories, when, after all, it was only Murger done into the American tongue which they had given to the world. And so we have the old stories dressed up in a variety of forms. Now it is called The Latin Quarter, or Lizette of the Quarter, or Anything Else One Chooses of the Quarter, or of Montmartre, and if a girl happens to be the author, the name of the book may be “ Edges.” Black cats stalk through the pages, and wicked little pierrots of girls dance alluringly through the books, and every little while one stops to sigh, “ Poor little Ette!” “ Poor little Ine!” In each one of the books one is dragged through a number of studios and Moulin Rougish places, all innocently indecorous. The Philistine reader may perhaps become fatigued with so much royster ing, and wonder wherein the merrymakings differ so much from the reception and dinner in his own country, except that in Philistia there is not quite so much noise and more ventilation. Another thing which puzzles him is, why immorality should be so innocent and spring-like in Bohemia.

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It is because Bohemia is like Christian Science: there is no sin, there is no pain, there is no death. Well, Murger is dead. He died an acknowledged leader of letters, crowned by the Institute. We are told that late in life he used to return to the kingdom of his invention to receive the homage of these subjects whom he had actually created. They owed him a deep debt of gratitude, for they did not know that they were Bohemians until he told them. After he died they went on telling each other that they were Bohemians, and their children’s children to-day repeat the old proud name. After all, it was a kingdom that has existed more between the covers of books than anywhere else. It was not a very interesting world except in description. It was—and is—burdened by too many conventions. For the punctilio of irregularity has been followed so minutely that even the proud wearers of the name have to rush out now and again for a refreshing breath of respectability. One can be respectable in many original ways, but Bohemianism has its canons laid down, and walk in them the Bohemian must, and even then he cannot be sure at this date that he is a Bohemian. For was there ever a real Bohemia? Wasn’t it after all called into fictitious life by its sponsor? or if it ever had a flesh-and-blood existence, didn’t the first blighting breath of self-consciousness kill it? We cannot answer, we only know that it has an active existence on paper; and that each year many books are written about it—books that have a little wistful note which implies, “ Here you have an account of what I hoped to find,” and one guesses after all the author had found only the formal informalities of a world which perpetually junketed according to some set rules. Many young people are impressed by these books, and they go on a quest for the Land of Cockayne; they knock, and the doors of a thousand greasy table-d’h ôtes open to them; they seek and they find clerks from department stores reciting “ Take Me Somewhere East of Suez.” Youth hates defeat, so he calls what he has found “ Bohemia,” and unless he has a very honest mind, he reads that which he has read into what he sees, and then, perhaps, writes another book. There is something sad about it all—the search of youth for a gay and lawless country. It is the old search for the ideal in other terms. Bohemia has had many incarnations in the world’s history. It used to be called “ Arcadia,” and court ladies dressed themselves up as Shepherdesses, and had many pastoral emotions. Dream ers speak of it as the Golden Age, and Idealists look forward to it as the Millennium, and in all these various dreams, even in smoke-laden Bohe mia, the ideal of youth and gaiety reigns.

In Quest of Bohemia Edwin P. Irwin, 1906

On these latter days, when so much of life is made up of work and care and responsibility, it is not to be wondered at that all the world is ever ready to reach out eagerly for anything that seems to promise even momentary relief from the weary burden that it is the part of all the human race to bear. What wonder that so many people living in the land of the Everyday, where the sun shines but occasionally and the heavy fog of monotony hangs with dreary persistency, look across with hungry eyes toward that mysterious country where every day appears bright and cheerful and the warm sun of Sans Souci shines alike upon the just and the unjust? And so, like children chasing the ever vanishing end of the rainbow, weary mortals, straining at the leashes of ennui, struggling to escape from the deadly monotony of life-emptiness, set forth in search of the fair land of Bohemia. In that land, they have been told, care and responsibility are unknown, freedom and pleasure reign. In the land of the Everyday, that which one would he must not, and that which he would not, that he must do. In Bohemia, May and Must are unknown, and the dwellers in that happy country are guided only by their own wishes and impulses. Toward it, then, do the world-weary turn their longing eyes, and they set out to gain it, little dreaming that once they have reached its boundaries they may not be permitted to enter. For it is not every one to whom the gates of Bohemia open, nor do the dwellers within those gates stretch out their arms in welcome except to the chosen few who have the password. There are certain requirements to be fulfilled, certain qualities necessary. This many of the seekers after Bohemia know, but few know what they are. Some think they know, but do not. And there are those who, having, like Moses, had a glimpse of the promised land, think they are already entered therein, and proceed to conduct themselves in strange and peculiar ways. They believe that if they are not natives of the country, they are at 313

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least citizens by adoption, not knowing that the exclusion laws are rigid and strictly enforced. The prevailing idea concerning the nature of Bohemianism seems to be that it is essentially unconventionality. Those who think thus believe that if they dare to violate to a mild extent the unwritten laws laid down by society, they are Bohemians. And it is so delightful to do things that seem just a little wicked, especially if one can shock one’s friends mildly by telling of it afterward. How delightfully Bohemian it is to visit the Latin Quarter, don’t you know, and dine at one of the funny little restaurants, and perhaps smoke a cigarette. All true Bohemians smoke cigarettes. And it’s so awfully jolly and unconventional. Those who think thus fail to recognize one of the cardinal laws of Bohemia. Conventions are the unwritten laws laid down by society for the guidance of its members. They may be wise or otherwise, but they are laws, and those who violate the conventionalities are transgressors of the law. Where conventionalities are recognized, they must be obeyed. There are those who fail to conform to them because they are reckless or want to be a little odd. And there are others for whom certain conventions of general society do not exist. Conventionalities are not the same in all lands. Bohemia has its own laws, the same as any other country, and its inhabitants must live in accordance with those laws. But the foreigner fails to understand that the laws of Bohemia are not the same as those of his native country, and so he believes that Bohemians are of necessity uncon­ ventional. When the fact is that the Bohemian is merely living in accord­ ance with the laws of his own country. Bohemianism is not unconvention­ ality. Not long ago, at one of the foreign restaurants, of which there used to be so many in the San Francisco Latin Quarter, before the Quarter was destroyed, a party of four, two men and two women, all of whom bore the indefinable but unmistakable air which stamps the real Bohemian, were seated at a table together. They seemed to be having a good time, laughing and joking, sipping their wine and telling stories. At an adjoining table were seated two women, evidently not of the class peculiar to that section of the city, and still more evidently not Bohemians. They were tasting their food gingerly, as if it were more of a curiosity than something to be eaten, while their amused examination of the place itself and of the others present, showed that they were there for the first time. Their stares had all the supercilious insolence of those of the members of a slumming party. At the first table a dispute arose over some question, and finally one of the men turned to the two ladies and asked their opinion on the matter. They stared at him coldly, and believing that they had not understood, he repeated his question.

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“ Sir,” said one of them, frigidly, “ I did not come down here to be addressed by men whom I do not know.” The man hastily apologized, and turned away, but the outraged feelings of the woman were not to be thus easily satisfied. They called the proprietor and complained that they had been insulted. “ It’s a sham e,” said one of them, “ that we can’t come down here to study these queer people without being spoken to by strange m en.” The proprietor tried to explain that it was taken for granted by all his patrons that any one who came there was all right, and that no insult had been intended; it was merely the custom of the place for those who frequented it to feel at liberty to speak to any one else there without the formality of an introduction. But the two women arose in chilly dignity and swept out with the crushing remark that it was the last time they would ever come to such a place—a remark which was accepted as a crumb of hope by the other diners. The women did not consider themselves rude. They were merely seekers after the land of Bohemia—but they could not talk the language of that country. There was in San Francisco, before it was destroyed by the fire, a certain restaurant which was widely known as being “ very Bohemian.” No tourist could feel that he had really taken in all the sights of the city until he had sat at one of its tables and eaten of the very indifferent fare served there, and dropped his cigar ashes on the sawdust covered floor. And the women, when they wanted to do something just a little shocking, were sure to wish to go there to dine. They thought that they were getting a peep into Bohemia. They were confident that all of the other diners must be real Bohemians. The chances are that most of them were merely other sightseers cherishing the same delusion. But when one is in Bohemia, one must do as the Bohemians do—which sometimes gives rise to amusing incidents. On a Saturday night when the place was filled, mostly with searchers after Bohemia, a young lady lighted a cigarette. Instantly every woman in the room looked at her—and promptly ordered cigarettes, and in five minutes all of them were puffing. Many of them evidently had never done so before, as could easily be told by the way they went at it, but they concluded it was the thing to do, and they must be Bohemian if it killed them. To the desire to attain that state of bliss which is so undoubtedly the part of all true Bohemians must be attributed much of the poor art and poorer literary productions which decorate the walls of many homes and burden the editorial waste basket. For all artists and writers, good, bad and indifferent, are commonly supposed to be dwellers in the pleasant land and to live a life of happy carelessness and irresponsibility. And so

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Agnes takes a few lessons in drawing and painting and sets up a studio in the attic—fearfully and wonderfully decorated with ham-and-egg sunsets and pale pink cows and burnt leather sofa pillows—and pesters father and Uncle Ben into sitting for her. And she invites her friends up to drink chocolate and eat Welch rarebits in her den, and they all say that Agnes is “ so Bohemian in her ways, and isn’t it jolly?” And Mary rushes into spring poetry and delightful negligee, and assumes pensive ways and pink thoughts, and a carelessness as to whether or not her hat is on straight, and Aunt Margaret asks mother why she doesn’t “ break that girl of her Bohemian ways. It’s simply spoiling her.” Clarence lets his hair grow, and wears a velveteen jacket and flowing tie, and speaks mysteriously of his ideals—and mother fears that he has fallen in love. All these people are searchers after Bohemia. Some of them may find it—but not until they have found themselves. For Bohemia is not what they think it is. Bohemianism does not consist in wearing long hair and unusual costume, eating unsavory foreign messes in dirty or disreputable restaurants, or drinking strange and wonderful drinks. The man who acquires a jag on absinthe or Punci alla Tuscano is not any more necessar ily Bohemian than the one who gets drunk on steam beer or straight whiskey. The artist who can paint a wonderful picture may be less of a Bohemian than the clerk behind the ribbon counter. For Bohemia is not a place nor a condition. It is rather a state—not of being, but of feeling. It is not necessary to go in search of it. It exists within one—if it exists for him at all. No man or woman can be a true Bohemian in whose soul the spirit of Bohemia is not. Bohemianism is the ability to get the most out of life—and to take life as it comes, the good with the bad, the bitter with the sweet, brushing aside the unpleasant things and cherishing those that are better. The Bohemian is not, as popularly supposed, partial to two-bit table d ’hote dinners and Dago red. He would prefer to dine at the best place in town, and would get more satisfaction out of doing so than would another. But when he can’t get what he wants, he takes the next best things, and is just as happy. It is chiefly a matter of temperament. Responsibilities rest upon the shoulders of the Bohemian as they do upon other men’s, but he possesses the ability to do his work without appearing to be crushed beneath it. He looks on the sunny side of life, shrugs his shoulders cheerfully when things do not go to suit him, and is sure that everything will be all right to-morrow. If you would go in quest of Bohemia, search your own soul. You need look no further, for if you do not find it there, it does not exist for you. But if you do find it, then you are to be counted among the blessed.

False Gypsies Charles Sears Baldwin, 1903

One of the best restaurants in New York, and one of the most exacting for young purses, had once its vogue among discontented youths of irrepressible individuality. There they found, on happier days, some pop ular tenor, an approachable merchant from Martinique, a talkative boule vardier, or some other incarnation of their Mistress France. At least they found one another. When plain William had failed once more to vend his erotic verse, and the undoubted distinction of Edward’s black mane had not yet sufficed to palm off his impressionism, and Herbert had a thing for Town Topics, not quite finished, it was a distinct solace to leave work for condolence in the pose of the Latin Quarter. You sauntered into the cafe, saluted the very business-like woman at the counter, found a loose French weekly, and sat beside a marble-topped table at the window. The others would arrive; and together you would drink toward a serener view of life. To have hope rather than faith, to be idle under the guise of research into humanity, to indulge a smattering of French and a taste for spirits, to talk dispassionately of vaudeville—these made you eligible; this was Bohe mian. Deux M azagrans , said with quiet assurance, was almost equivalent to conversation. If you expatiated upon symbolism without boggling at the absinthe, you were a Bohemian professed. What have cigarettes and uncooked criticism in a French restaurant to do with Bohemia? Something, no doubt. Bohemia may be entered by the Pass of Discon­ tent. Revolt from the conventional, as it may happily lead into generous enthusiasm for whatever asserts individuality, may arise from the assertion of one’s own individuality. Only, the assertion is not tolerable for long without proof; and merely to put on the manner of Bohemia is a conven tion, like any other. Alas! for the perpetual youths at the marble-topped table it was the cloak of indolence, sham Bohemia dissipating the alms of Philistia. A murky basement not far away showed franker stuff. The company that met with friendly nods by the long table had already weighed 317

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the price of freedom. Each held his half-success in what he loved and believed, and the fellowship of those that measured life so, worth a hall bedroom, and plain, irregular meals. The cutting away of pretense, instead of bringing a crop of cynicism, left the ground clear for the best of talk, for a criticism of life which, though sometimes thin, was never unreal. They were not artists and poets, nor even journalists, but second-rate illustra tors, story-writers, and essayists in the dear leisure of a newspaper day, serious students of ideas—ideas barren enough, it might chance, but still ideas. So dinner was an unaffected gayety—the higher if there had been no luncheon—asking no stimulus beyond the cheap ordinary wine and the man across the table. The low room clashed with conversation and laughter, reeked with pipe-smoke; but there was no other intemperance. Until the foothold was gained, the mastery won, this for them was life. Brave travelers, they chose Bohemia for their crossing. And Bohemia repaid the choice. At the long tables one was free to wear his own guise without apology, and sure of the welcome he gave. It was the code that you might not address a novice, however promising he, however talkative you, until he opened the way; but that you might smoke your rat-tail cigar on the back of a friend’s chair, or on the table after the apples and cheese. When music came in from the street, harp or guitar and violin tucking themselves between tables against the wall, the whole roomful would sometimes chink the measure on glasses, or sing a chorus from Trovatore. On one supreme evening the taciturn Colonel left his spaghetti, flung a coat-tail over each arm, and with a fine decorous abandon danced up and down the midst, precisely nimble. There was a roar of applause at this hyperbole of the spirit of the place; but the Colonel, having had his fling, resumed his fork without word or smile. He had expressed himself. Withal it would have been hard to find a tavern stricter. The few women that came were reporters, eager sometimes in talk, smoking when they chose, but rarely expansive, and commonly in the sober dignity of middle age; or minor singers with their husbands, a hard-working few, less adept in conversation. Of drinking there was very little. Money was too hard won, and this was distinctly a place to eat in. When an Italian impresario and his presumable patron stumbled in by chance one evening and talked tipsily loud—no more—Teresa was in from the kitchen, ordering them from her house in brave Italian and broken English. The company silently approved, and they never came again. For its little while, the time of passage, this was a solace in discipline. To be free, to be worthy of your neighbor’s keen question, to give and take the ease of simple gayety that you might the better work for yourself, it is a colored life. But not for long. Rather, “ Woe is me that I have my

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habitation among the tents of Kedar.” They that dwell in Bohemia because they have unlearned the way forth suffer dreary and repulsive decline. An old gypsy is tolerable only if he be a real gypsy, not in choice or lapse of will, but in the blood. This is the race whose journey has no end, for whom life and all the world is Bohemia, only a space for travel. Moving always on the highway, stopping always short of the city, these are no shiftless tramps in wagons, but a race doomed to make no progress except in physical distance, and to make that always, to kill time. For any but the blood to spend a lifetime on the road is an unnatural as for this blood to keep house. The real gypsies are happy, doubtless, as the nomads of the world’s childhood. Perpetual youth is perpetual limitation; once the limi­ tation is seen, intolerable to any zeal for manhood. To us others, not of the blood, even to the least conventional of an elaborate civilization, Bohemia must be a country of inns—inns for the poor adventurous young, responsive to the freedom in others which they must have in themselves. Like the actual Switzerland, it is only for our summer. A careless while to have no home is to some men, fewer women, an exhilaration. To let slip the hope of home is a cowardice or a curse. Clap pack on back, then, or ship as stowaways for the seacoast of Bohemia. But be ready for random fare and a truss of hay; be ready also to go on, or else to return, even to Philistia, not ungrateful for memories.

The Supreme Literary Illusion and Why It Persists Raoul Auemheimer, 1922

One of the significant manifestations of ignorance respecting literary life is faith in the existence of “ Bohemia.” There is not a great capital in the world to-day without its purely imaginary and invented “ Bohemia”—by the way, the very use of this word is evidence of an old-fashioned simplicity—and in this “ Bohemia” are supposed to dwell the “ Bohemi an s.” There never was such a place even in the conventions of literature. It is now and always has been as mythical as More’s “ Utopia” or as the gardens of the Hesperides. The “ near” genius who first wrote of it did not believe in it, and yet it remains the supreme literary illusion of the uninformed. The cause of so unique and so persistent a delusion, which no amount of exposure can quite dispel, is set forth by the clever Austrian critic, Raoul Auernheimer, in the Vienna Neue Freie Presse. Fundamentally, the mistake arises from failure to perceive that success in literature, like success in any art, in any impression, in any business, implies hard work and devoted study. There is no such thing as success in literature based upon “ genius” only, upon inspiration only, upon oppor­ tunity only. The toil is terrible. Well have the French critics of literature, after much recent discussion, come to the conclusion that the writer must be a writer and nothing else if he means to win fame and fortune. The “ outsider,” the Philistine, the dilettante, fancies a sort of fairyland in which princes of the pen dash off immortal tales between love affairs. The student of literature at home or at school is fed upon the romantic episodes in the lives of poets until it is inferred that there is nothing but song and love and feasting in the career. Upon the basis of this superstition—it deserves no better name, accord ing to the keen Austrian critic- Murger first established the kingdom of Bohemia in the purely literary sense. His “ Vie de Boheme” is in reality a second-rate performance, although it made its publisher rich and immor 320

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talized its author. It corresponded to no reality whatever. Murger wrote many other books and one cannot disparage them more justly than by saying they are as second rate as is his best-known volume. The work of Murger on Bohemian life is no brilliantly constructed unit from which a single chapter cannot be extracted without destroying the whole. Its personages are not ably differentiated. They do not even live for us. The reader who gets acquainted with the poetaster Schannard, the paintermusician, knows the painter Marcel just as well, to say nothing of the writer Rodolphe. He who falls in love with the irresponsible Mimi need not change his attitude in the least to be able to adjust himself to the inconsequential Musette. What is the source of the charm in this picture of Bohemia? The mere fact, replies the gifted Austrian commentator upon it all, that we read about Murger’s world when we are young and inexperienced. We learn about this “ Bohemia” when we leave school and are intoxicated by the fancies of a sentimental nature that overpower us at sight of a slim waist, if we be masculine, or a mysterious elocutionary voice, if we be feminine. The fancy of the adolescent turns at certain period to dreams of military conquest, to adventures in the style of Gil Blas, to exploration of a new world of science. Not until we fall under the spell of a first love do we turn to the Bohemia of which we have read. We are poets ourselves at least potentially and we long to leave family, duty, responsibility and all the rest of it to immortalize ourselves in the Bohemia where the poet has no duties and his lady love is light and sweet and careless of tomorrow. This world of Bohemia beckons us and into it we rush—at a certain age saturated with the atmosphere of illusion. The “ poets” are not famous— no. They are the great misunderstood. They never work. They borrow. They live precariously, having no talents to exploit, upon what they can filch or borrow from the unsuspecting Philistine who invades these regions under the misapprehension that these poor, half-mad denizens of the cheap lodging house and the back stairs have “ genius.” It all seems so like the truth as set forth by Murger in his book! The Frenchman must be permitted the convention of his art. He must be allowed to assume that when one vagabond scribbler sleeps in a garret with a dauber who has failed in life, a third vagabond will show up flourishing a gold coin. They are “ apaches,” as they say in Paris, or hooligans as Londoners call them, but quote a line from Racine or spout a bit of criticism about art and these poor devils become men of “ genius,” sure to write an immortal book in a year or paint an effect greater than anything achieved by Rembrandt. The thing is so utterly preposterous that its persistence would be inexplicable if we did not take into account the moonstruck madness of the Philistines who take it all so seriously. The denizens of this “ Bohemia” are sometimes too

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crazy themselves to know what frauds they are, yet they must themselves be amazed at times to perceive how seriously they are taken by people who do not know what grim and persistent labor is necessary to succeed even in a moderate way as a poet or prose writer. As for the women one finds in this Bohemian world, the facts in their cases are often too pathetic for recital. They must forget their bright and pretty pasts—when they had happy homes and people who loved them— and work for a lazy cigarette-smoker who could not produce a line of real poetry if he wanted to—and it is doubtful if he ever wanted to. The “ Bohemia” that really exists, then, is not literary or artistic at all and the creator of it, Murger, really knew nothing about any such place. His book is not a transcript from experience, despite the misstatements on this subject into which certain ill-informed “ historians of literature” are be­ guiled. Murger, with an affectation of learning that is characteristic, has the audacity to declare in a preface that “ Bohemia” has always existed, that Homer lived in it as well as Shakespeare and Molière. Of Homer we know too little to be able to assert that his mode of life was irregular. It may be that the life of Shakespeare had its too unconventional aspects, but there is not a shadow of foundation for the belief that he was any such unkempt, idle, dissolute vagabond as we find haunting the cheap restaurants of big cities today. Molière was no Bohemian—quite the contrary. These immor tal writers of the past were not Bohemians because the conditions of their day permitted no such masquerade by serious workers. The illusion of a literary “ Bohemia” could have arisen only from the peculiar economic conditions of the nineteenth century. These permitted for the first time an actual and active circulation of cash among a class of people who hitherto got their wage only in kind. A free exchange of commodities set in with the industrial revolution and it became possible for the literary worker to see himself marketed as a commodity for the patronage of the masses. The talent that previously was exploited by a patron was now served up in the “ m arket.” In a sense the man of genius became “ free,” but in another sense he became the slave of the “ m arket.” He did not have to suit the whim of a patron, but he had to cater to the taste of the mob. He had to work much harder than ever he did before, but his reward was infinitely richer from the pecuniary standpoint. The prosti­ tution of talent and of genius for a commercialized end became a familiar spectacle. Those who refused to cater to the mob in this fashion had to live in garrets on a pittance obscurely, but only the raw Philistine infers that these characters populated “ Bohemia.” They lived solitary lives of hard work, as we know from the career of Balzac, which is typical, and Balzac is the

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one who warns the young writer to beware of the idleness which is so characteristic of “ Bohemia.” Nothing that can live was ever written in “ Bohemia,” and every writer of genius knows this well. Hence the emancipation of the writer from the “ patron” of past ages did not make “ Bohemia” anything more than the supreme literary illusion it has long been. It never existed outside the fairyland of fancy, but it seemed plausible to the “ outsider” when there had emerged a class of men known as “ writers” —mysterious and inspired from on high. Shakespeare and Molière were not writers in the “ Bohemian” sense. They were theatrical managers who incidentally wrote plays. Even a genius as recent as Goethe was a tutor to princely families or at best a theatrical director. Schiller was a professor of history. Much later than the era of the latest of these began that speculation in his own genius which may be said to comprise the foundation of every artist with pen or brush, every writer who has his own way to make in the world. The situation was novel, sufficiently novel to enable Murger to foist his fancy off upon the Philistine as a reality. Men of sense actually supposed that masterpieces of literature were shaken out of the sleeve of genius between orgies without preparation or study. The writer was too new a figure in the world to be understood. Not only is this “ Bohemia” a myth, its tradition is “ bad form” among men of genius who succeed in the arts—poetry, painting, sculpture, the play. The genius may still fail or his recognition may be delayed, but he is often an amazingly respectable character. He has “ conscience,” to use the word applied to a brilliant French critic to the sum of all the feeling with which a true genius regards his art. He feels the “ sting of conscience” when he is false to his art, and in this fundamental fact we have the secret of the impossibility of any such “ Bohemia” as now survives in the misguided minds of the Philistines. “ Bohemians” who feel no sting of conscience because of their idleness in Murger’s unreal world are not artists, but humbugs, and those who take them seriously are the victims of humbugs. The painters and poets of our day live lives of regularity at least on the surface. They emerge from bourgeois circles into the world of their art and find it conventionalized enough. They may preach communism, but they marry wealth. Even those men of talent who wed no heiresses can go into the homes of the rich and powerful as guests, and they like to have it inferred that they are perfectly at home there.

A Pustule on the Organism of Paris Thomas Craven, 1933

“ There is something of Madame Bovary in every French woman,” said Taine. There is something of the gypsy in every artist. To these two human frailties, in conjunction, we owe the existence of Bohemia; and to Bohemia we may attribute the popularity of Paris, the ascendancy of French culture, and the tragedy of modern art. Paris is youth! How often have we heard that enchanting cry! It echoes in the hearts of young and old in every corner of the globe. It is accepted as a universal truth. Bohemia is the artificial prolongation of youth—youth extended beyond its brief romantic span, youth corrupted by that dreadful infirmity of mind which consents to no development and no maturity. The history of Paris is the history of the struggles to preserve the spirit of youth. If one must go to Paris, it is well to go when one is young and susceptible to the fabricated glamour of a prearranged setting. To remain there is a confession of indolence or incapacity; to acknowledge no laws of growth and development; to prolong the gasconading antics of youth into a fixed state of routine pretension. The genius with which Paris has promulgated and made permanent a certain attitude towards life—a jo ie de vivre distinctly and uniquely her own—is one of the world’s great wonders. Historically, Paris, the selfcontained metropolis in the most self-contained of nations, is one of the oldest of modern cities. More than eight centuries ago Paris was the seat of learning for all Europe, with an established polity and a well-defined culture, when the average Englishman was Gurth, the swineherd. Accord­ ing to the Spenglerian system of mutations, she should long ago have been a graveyard. Yet here she is, in the year 1933, up to her old tricks again, and with only a handful of roving Americans to be fleeced and fed, enjoying life in the grand manner, rehabilitating her time-honored cafes, exhibiting her mannikins of fashion and of art, manufacturing limousines for her choicest cocottes, and valorously preparing for war. 324

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The face of the city has been altered a dozen times, but the temper of the people remains unchanged and unchangeable. Even the oldest struc­ tures, which seem to be ancient scars and wrinkles on the face of the newer Paris, are rendered picturesque and inviting by the addition of a cabaret, or shop, and the presence of accessible girls. Even the oldest and most degenerate of vices are rendered tantalizing to youth when practiced by youth in quaint surroundings. Paris is always refurbishing her gaudy charms, scattering perfume on decaying flowers, applying the cosmetics of culture to every form of activity. Against these gay and patriotic rituals I have nothing to say ; nor have I anything to say against the morals of Paris, or of France. That France, as Balzac wrote, should be so jealous and proud of the blood of her sons, but should care nothing for the honor and integrity of her daughters” is not my affair. That France should have survived centuries of turmoil and suffering, that she should stand to-day as the most solidly based of nations is sufficient proof that she knows what is best for her. No one can honestly say that she has forfeited her old qualities of courage and foresight, her high spirits and clear intellect, her instinct for decoration, and her hankering for glory and power. My chief concern is with her art and those essentially French characteristics which have identified art with Bohemianism. Paris owes her supremacy among French cities to a number of causes: her geographical position; the early foundation of the University, with its affiliated unit, the Sorbonne, in the heart of the Capital; her industrial and political life which, after the Revolution had made her the absolute mistress of France, reinforced her leadership in art and learning; her traditional authority in matters of taste and breeding; her women, and her inimitable spirit. Paris is the head of France not only by right of intellect but by right of commerce, a condition which concentrates there the brains and energy of the whole country. Paris owes her position as the international center of enlightenment to her cultural tradition; her polished, but at the same time, realistic and businesslike, ministration to the sensational cravings and romantic fevers of man; her women; and her Bohemia, nourished with profound knowledge of human weaknesses, advertised by sons and lovers the world over. The elements composing the dual supremacy of Paris—the national and inter national, the economic and cultural, the mercenary and Bohemiancannot be categorically divided; they mingle and overlap, forming, in the aggregate, the distinct and seductive organism on the Seine. But from Louis XIV onward, the culture of Paris was gradually withdrawn from works of art—from the objective achievements which normally produce culture—and in the course of time, became a thing apart—a nationalistic religion, an economic asset, a tool for self-glorification. And since the time

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of Delacroix certain propensities of France, deeply rooted and productive of her noblest works, have been polluted by Bohemianism, diverted into anti-social channels, debauched by raffish malcontents and wastrels living, for a rt’s sake, in segregated districts of Paris. Before considering the Bohemian incubus, let us glance at the characteristics which do great honor to Paris and the French civilization. II In the infancy of Paris the cafe appeared, a form of public life destined to become the most popular and influential of French institutions. The caf é is the great, the indefeasible blessing of Paris. From the time of Abelard, cafes, or their equivalents, have abounded: first, the taverns—there were four thousand in Villon’s day; in the seventeenth century, taverns and cafes; in the eighteenth, cafes and salons; in the nineteenth, cafes, salons, and cabarets; in the twentieth, cafes, nightclubs, bars, and “ dancings.” There are to-day, and have always been, cafes for all classes of people: for dilettantes and fashionable loafers, for cosmopolites and expatriates, for scholars and poets, artists and authors, politicians and prostitutes, bour­ geois families, crooks, mechanics, jockeys, and scavengers. The effect of these innumerable haunts is to give Paris a color and tone, a unique atmosphere of charm and relaxation, and more: to create within all classes a high degree of sociability, a sense of public spirit and superior civic decency. Thus the Parisian, molded by public life, sharing from childhood the surprises and enchantments of the cafe and boulevard, loves his city and takes care that her magnetic brilliancy shall not be tarnished. Thus is propagated a pride that knows no equal, a pride so great that it impels the Parisian, as an Italian visitor remarked, “ even to hate with commiseration, to consider his enemies sufficiently punished by the fate which caused them to be born where they w ere.” Maintaining, from her foundation, her countless centers of public life, Paris, in all justice, is entitled to her acknowledged eminence as the most civilized of cities. Her eminence in this particular field or that may well be contested, but in those attributes which distinguish man, the sensitive, social animal, from the dull-witted rustic, in all those things which come from urbanity and appeal to urbanity, she is still the mistress of the world. In original ideas, Paris has never excelled; but in borrowing, tailoring, garnishing, and adapting: in receptiv­ ity to the ideas of others she has had no rivals. Everything that passes through her fingers bears the stamp of taste and culture, the transmuting touches of inventive magic, the unmistakable trademark of delicacy and distinction. The principal business of Paris is living, not laying up treasures

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in heaven. And to the adornment of living she transfers the creative fervor reserved by other peoples for the arts alone. In fact, the fine arts in Paris are adjuncts of fine living, and are practiced as seriously and with the same intensity as the arts of fashion, cookery, and prostitution. All things work together for the enthronement of reason and the civilized gratification of desire. The spirit of Paris, I believe, is the fruit of a highly organized social life in which men and women assemble in public to exchange ideas, to exhibit and compare and discuss achievements, to observe human tastes and needs; in which friends and families of high and low degree drink and dine in public places, and are encouraged to adopt a more civilized decorum, to discard the toothpick, and to relieve the tension of their sordid homes. Masterpieces of art are conceived and executed in solitude, but the materials composing them are gathered from human relationships. Art is essentially a social phenomenon, urban generally, communal always; and it would be hard to name a French painter of any merit who has not profited by his social excursions. The salon, originally an aristocratic affair, became in the nineteenth century an important factor in the appre ciation of art. Under the direction of clever and charming women, the salon was the meeting ground of the artist and an intelligent public, according the artist the social recognition denied him by stupid bureau­ crats. And every painter and writer was known by the cafe he frequented. Even old Daumier, by nature a solitary, would wander, after a debauch of toil, to a cafe to drink a bock with a few cronies. Degas, a confirmed recluse whose studio was impregnable, found the old cafes of Montmartre soothing to his wretched nerves. And Manet, a Parisian of the old school who lived with the most rigid propriety in a house furnished in the Empire style, walked the boulevards daily and was a familiar figure at Tortoni’s. The traditional spirit of Paris, her color and charm, her frank acceptance of all good things, and the freedom of social intercourse as promoted by her cafés—these together have brought into French art and letters a celebration of the physical world—a worship of le monde visible —unex ampled since the Venetians; have produced such masterpieces of paganism and of simple gaiety as Gautier’s “ Mademoiselle de Maupin” and Renoir’s “ Le Moulin de la G alette.” Ill Bohemianism in art is a perversion of the spirit of Paris. In its remote beginnings it was only a means to an end, and as such, a healthy manifes tation of social instincts. In its restricted sense it is an end in itself, and thus flourishing from the time of Murger may be held responsible for the

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disintegration of French art. Bohemianism is a disease indigenous to the Latin Quarter, a term originally meaning only the precincts of the old University entered by the Rue Galande, the ancient Roman road from Paris to Lyons. In the Second Empire the Quarter suffered severe disloca­ tions by the building of the Boulevard St. Michel and the Boulevard St Germain, and to-day, roughly speaking, may be said to extend from the Seine to the Boulevard du Montparnasse, from the Halle aux Vins to the Beaux Arts. The Quarter in its early history was called the Pays Latin for the reason that Latin was the language of the classroom—not the pure idiom of Cicero, but an easy colloquial jargon—and remained the official language until the close of the reign of Henry IV. To-day the Quarter is a babel of voices, a mixture of all the tongues of the world—except Latin. At the opening of the twelfth century Peter Abelard, magnificent in address and in the exposition of his dialectic, attracted the youth of all Europe to the cloisters of Notre Dame. The Cite overflowing, schools and students migrated to the mainland on the left bank; and in 1215, by a consolidation of forces, the University of Paris was founded, and the Latin Quarter became a teeming reality. During the thirteenth century students of all nations swarmed the Rue St. Jacques and the Rue de la Harpe, drawn to Paris by the great schoolmen of the University and the Sorbonne. Those ancient quarters, which seem so quaint and picturesque to modern artists, were not regarded with romantic levity by their first inhabitants. The streets were undrained and unlighted; the houses filthy and disreputable. The students were poverty-stricken and ill-fed; many of them begged for bread, starved, or froze to death in the winter—a form of death threatening most modern Parisians. But they were all inflamed by a common purpose— a zeal for learning—and were willing to endure any privation to attain that end. They made shift to drown their hardships in various diversions. There were fierce rivalries and nationalistic clashes, the French lads being stigmatized as “ proud, soft, and womanish” —adjectives not altogether inapplicable to-day to a large and increasing sect of Parisian males, when contrasted with the strapping matron behind the cash box. They wore berets, roistered in the streets, drank and danced in the taverns. They consorted with harlots, those of more fortunate estate keeping mistresses. Already the dominion of la fem m e was beginning, and we have the wails of students writing home “ of being seduced into pleasure.” With Villon the Middle Ages may be said to have ended. Paris, bled by wars, was desolated, the prey of wolves, plagues, and famines. Tavern life, however, was not diminished; and the University, despite the evil times, boasted of forty-two colleges and twenty-five hundred members—tatter demalion starvelings from France and afar. One of the members, Fran çois Villon, has been crowned and toasted by each succeeding generation of

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pretenders as the King of the Bohemians, an insult, I am prepared to say, to his tough masculinity and his poetic powers. If to gamble, drink, and ravish girls are Bohemian pastimes; if to enter the lowest of occupations, that of the pimp, and to brag about it in verse; and to spend one’s time between the hovel and the tavern, and the brothel and the prison—if these are the credentials of the Bohemian, then Villon is the foremost of the confraternity. He was the first Frenchman to win immortality by pursuing, from instinct and choice, the path of crime, and I may add, the last. He was not playing at life, not living by precedent; he was an independent and imaginative rascal with a rapacious insight into the bitterness of hard facts. The taverns he favored—the Fleur-de-Lys, the Swallow, the Golden Lion, and the Scarlet Hat—despite their poetic signboards, were dens of obscenity. He did not pretend that they were romantic or essential to his art. The girls with their pretty names, Margot, Denise, and Rose, were not fairer than their modern analogues of Montparnasse, Gaby, Kiki, and Sporty, who prefer to be whores to artists rather than registered peddlers. He did not pretend that they enhanced his spiritual freedom; he took what he could get from them, knowing that “ into the night go one and all.” He took and gave, crying cynically, “ Tout aux tavernes et au xfilles.” He saw before him, as the consequence of his actions, not a life fallen into desuetude—not the bleak futility awaiting those who live for art’s sake— but the gibbet of Montfaucon. In the fifteenth century the taverns associated with the University began to tempt outside talent—free-lance artists and writers; by the middle of the sixteenth, the taverns had multiplied beyond enumeration, spreading from the Latin Quarter to the right bank and to all parts of Paris. In 1635 a group of unattached poets christened their favorite rendez-vous—a hillock crowned with inns and windmills—Montparnasse; in 1685, the Procope, the first established cafe, opened its doors opposite the old Com édie Fran çaise. The dirty tavern which drove Erasmus to Flanders with the remark, “ I carried nothing but a body infested with disease and a plentiful supply of vermin,” gave way to the less pestilent cafe, and the cafe was never superseded. The Pomme de Pin, known to Villon and Rabelais, was host to Boileau, Molière, and Racine. One could write much of the history of Paris round the old Procope: the erratic Rousseau came there, and Diderot, the preacher; Voltaire, at eighty-two, attending rehearsals of “ Ir èn e,” sipped a new beverage called coffee; the leaders of the Revolution foregathered in its dark rooms— Marat, Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulins, and Napoleon Bonaparte; in the next century, Balzac, snatching a few moments from his volcanic labors, discussed chastity with Gautier; then the giant Flaubert with his pupil Maupassant; then Taine, Turgenev, Jules de Goncourt, and Renan; in the

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Nineties, Verlaine, sprawling in Voltaire’s chair, drank his wormwood liqueur, and minor Symbolistes droned their bloodless versicles. In the nineteenth century, from 1830 to 1860, we enter the golden age of the Latin Quarter. The completion of the École des Beaux-Arts in 1839; the prosperity of the University (in 1838 the School of Medicine alone enrolled four thousand students, and an American traveler wrote home that “ carts arrived daily, pouring out a dozen or so of naked men and women, as you do a cord of wood, upon the pavement” ) and the name and fame of Murger’s Sc ènes de la Vie de Boh ême; these, in collaboration, put the Latin Quarter on the map, as we say—the map of Paris. But the most potent agency was Henri Murger, a garret-dweller and journalist of the left bank. Murger’s novel and play, extolling the fabulous and romantic aspects of the Quarter—largely imaginary—fixed the name, Bohemia, and its physical background, once for all, and spread far and wide the contagion of gypsy indolence and childish masquerade so captivating to unformed art students. About 1860 European outsiders came to taste the poison, and in the early Seventies, the first Americans. Whereupon, the more estimable French painters, old conservatives resenting foreigners, declared it was time to get out. “ The Latin Q uarter,” they avowed, “ is all right for amateurs and costumed idiots and rabble students, but serious men must work in peace.” So they fitted out studios atop and around Montmartre and for many years lived in peace, substantiating their existence by good works. IV At present, Montmartre is a pustule on the organism of Paris, but striking and picturesque in its virulent decay. Rich in memories, the Hill has seen a motley procession pass down its zigzag slopes into history: monks and priests, kings and soldiers, shepherds and husbandmen, poets, artists and assassins, and talented derelicts. Hospitable to spiritual and bestial dissipations alike, it has found room, among its nefarious caverns, for the Sacr é-C œur, a bastard Roman pile exceeding, in pretentiousness, all modern basilicas with the possible exception of Saint John the Divine, in New York. Its most lucrative industry is catering to the worst appetites of the spendthrift sons and daughters of the Prohibition Republic. When the separating walls were torn down and Montmartre was incor­ porated with the city, artists, as I have said, found the streets leading to the Butte an invigorating contrast to the hoodlum romance of the Latin Quarter. They were not, let it be understood at once, Bohemians. There was never a painter less Bohemian than Renoir, never a man more firmly anchored to the sterling simplicities of French life. In his canvases all that

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is finest in a ripe civilization has its radiant embodiment: the voluptuous woman, undraped and unashamed; the charm of unspoilt children; the sap of the grape and the flesh. And crabbed old Cezanne, awkward in all company, resentful and shrinking, tempered his spiritual rancours in the society of the intelligent men. They were hard workers, the first men of Montmartre, and at the Cafe Guerbois, in the Avenue de Clichy, they met to talk things over. Far from being Bohemians, they were so sober and conventional that Cezanne, who joined them only occasionally, com­ plained that they took themselves too seriously and “ dressed like a pack of lawyers.” Manet dominated the group which included, besides the painters Pissaro, Degas, Puvis de Chavannes, Fantin-Latour, Forain, Monet, and Signac, the composer Berlioz, and the novelists Hugo and Zola. After the Franco-Prussian War the Guerbois was abandoned for the Nouvelle Ath ènes, the renown of which is described by a distinguished writer, then a young and sensual Irishman who tried so hard to be a Frenchman and a painter, and failed in both. The seeds of Bohemianism were planted in Montmartre in 1881, the year of the founding of the Chat Noir by Rudolph Salis. The expansive Salis undoubtedly had a warm regard for the arts, but he was at heart a showman, and showmanship in art leads to Bohemia. The Chat Noir was followed by the Rat Mort (a dead rat in the beer pump suggested the name), L ’Ane Rouge, and other cafes of sinister titles. In its first period the Chat Noir—the name was taken from Poe’s tale, or more likely, from the little beast in M anet’s picture of odious memory—was a closed circle of artists and writers, some famous, some on the make; but in a few years it was soliciting its clientele from the fashionable world. Bernhardt acted all over the place; Catulle Mend ès exhibited his empty elegance, and Verlaine unwittingly lent his incorrigible thirst to the prestige of the shop. Poor Verlaine! Everybody pitied him, yet none would have had him otherwise than he was, an inspired sot. The French are not reformers. By the end of the next decade Montmartre was beyond redemption. The Moulin de la Galette, now a low-class dance hall for soldiers, working men, shopgirls, and laundresses—the girls in waists and skirts, hatless, and all under twenty, the men in caps and tight trousers—appealed to dissolute painters on the hunt for color and the coarser forms of sexual commerce. The other Moulin, the Red Mill, was in the heyday of its glory, already the center of lesbianism, as young Will Rothenstein discovered to his horror. Among the habitues was a descendant of one of the most ancient families of the French noblesse, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, of whom we shall have more to say hereafter. The Chahut dancers, Jane Avril, La Goulue, and Nini Patte-en-l’Air, split themselves asunder to the applause of artists, homosexuals, and sedate fathers out to escape the

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boredom of home and family. Close by, in his own crowded cabaret, Aristide Bruant, the first of the performing stage apaches, dressed in black velvet with top-boots and a red shirt, shrieked his low songs of the underworld. One of the singers at the Moulin Rouge rose to fame over night. She was very young, pale and slender, with the breasts of a boy and the chaste, wondering eyes of a child. Her name was Yvette Guilbert, and her songs were lewd and witty. She was a sensation. How the French love the spectacle of children executing salacious dances or piping the double entente! No better proof of the decadence is needed than the jealousy which Montmartre began to arouse among the partisans of the left bank. For a while the rivalry was active and none too polite. Numerically, the Latin Quarter was incalculably superior, but the Butte had a stronger flavor and artists of unquestionable distinction. There was nothing on the left bank to compare with the Moulin Rouge, and every spring the students of the southern Quarter trooped across the city to the Mill for their annual Quat’z ’ Arts orgy. The old guard fought a losing fight. The Hill was doomed to Bohemian ruin. In 1913 the last fete was held, and demimondaines, grisettes, women of fashion, artists, writers, musicians, and tradesmen lamented the collapse of the “ Independent Republic of Mont m artre.” During the War the night life was temporarily checked, but before the armistice was signed the Place du Tertre was overrun with British and American soldiers; and every aged Frenchman not in uniform opened a wine shop. To-day Montmartre means the Place Pigalle and the Place Blanche, Zelli’s—with gigolettes expectantly guarding unopened bottles of poor and costly champagne, and Madame Zelli guarding the cash—and dives for the gratification of every form of iniquitous desire. The last place on earth, we need hardly say, for the cultivation of art. The attitude of the French towards a quarter they had commercialized and debased long before the War is summarized in the following notice taken from a newspaper: “ Two more shiploads of savages arrived at Cherbourg to-day. Make Ready, M ontm artre.” V We have reserved for the last the effect of Bohemianism on art. The relation of the true convivial spirit of Paris to its by-product, the infatuate lawlessness of the Latin Quarter, we have shown; the origin, fame, and continued fascination of the Latin Quarter, we have also shown; and we have surveyed the growth of a rival Bohemia on the historic slopes of Montmartre. It now remains to analyze the conditions which forced art

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into the gutter, or more graciously, which encouraged artists into a way of living least conducive to the health and vitality of the creative mind. The romantic movement of 1830, headed in France by Delacroix, was part of the worldwide revolt of youth against official tyranny in government and in art. The French Romantics in art and letters—the exponents of free speech embattled against conservatives fighting desperately for academic authority—drew their fire from many sources: from Scott, Byron, Consta ble, and Bonington; from Goethe, Schiller, and Beethoven, and from Goya. They were not Bohemians; they were men with a program and a generous philosophy; they were taking the last stand for art—the rights of the individual against political jobbers. But most of them, and three in particular, Byron, Goya, and Delacroix, were spectacular figures whose weaknesses were of the sort which inferior minds seize upon as the criteria of artistic behavior. It was by no means an accident that Murger’s book should have appeared at this dramatic moment. His work is a reflection of the attitude of the small-fry, or Bohemian artists, toward the bourgeoisie whom the big and great men had charged upon without quarter or compunction. For the eternal enemy of art in France is the bourgeois mind—this, in spite of the fact that most of her worthy artists are of middle-class origins. In asserting the organic rights of free men, their temperament, and I may add, their genuine sensitivity, the Romantics had attacked the dullness, the porcine complacency—the whole social structure—of the middle classes. It is not hard to see how this gospel of emancipation was welcomed by the artists of the Latin Quarter, little men, but not totally devoid of sensitivity, and eager to uphold the position of intellectual aristocracy attained by Delacroix and the leaders. The sum and substance of the philosophy of these lesser artists was to insult the conventions of the bourgeoisie. That was a sign of superiority. Lacking convictions, they affected idiosyncrasies; lacking courage, they shirked the burden of hard constructive toil for the ignominious ease of the mendicant. In short, they became parasites, or Bohemians, using art as an excuse for laziness and incompetence, as a means to pursue the grosser pleasures. And then an ironical thing occurred: the academic painters, the boys from the Beaux-Arts and the schools, succumbed to the Bohemian way of living; and in the course of time, Bohemianism perme ated all forms of art and was esteemed by students—and teachers— everywhere as the most essential factor in the training of the artist. At the end of the nineteenth century the most dissolute and reckless, the softest and most affected of the apprentices of the Quarter were the pupils of Gerome and Bouguereau, and that old fraud, Julian. Hence it came about that when painting lost its social function, the

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artist, thrown entirely upon his own irresponsibility, retired to the world of Bohemia where he might flaunt his individual conceits to his heart’s content, and sport a mode of living every detail of which was calculated to affront the bourgeois society that had cast him out. In the Latin Quarter the field was already prepared, the stage was set. The Quarter was steeped in legends of the old hallowed days when idealists lived together amicably; and the quaint and disorderly surroundings were congenial to the singular ities which the artist fancied his profession demanded. The Bohemia of Murger was probably a gayer world than Montparnasse of the present time: there were not so many outsiders, and the game was newer. The more romantic joys and the lovely grisettes existed only in Murger’s imagination, but the irresponsibility of the artist and his contempt for the working classes were faithfully recorded. One of the most persuasive champions of the world of make-believe was that arrant American, Whistler. He was the ambassador from Bohemia to the Anglo Saxons. In his student days in Paris he was a typical Bohemian: at night he caroused and argued, during the day he loafed and argued, worked fitfully and made himself conspicuous; he kept a mistress, dressed like a fairy, and behaved, in short, as Degas once said to his face, “ as if he had no talent whatever.” Growing older and perceiving, after it was too late, that he had diligently avoided most of the difficulties of drawing and composition, he went to London where he won inordinate notoriety by his eccentricities and his controversial brilliancy. There was no one in London to take him down, and he caught Ruskin when the old warrior was addled and bedfast from overwork. Whistler had a piercing intelligence, make no mistake about that—as a press agent he was fifty years ahead of his time— and he had, in a certain small way, his own conception of art. But it was a Bohemian art, a thing of compilations, without guts or substance. As a defense for his limitations Whistler erected one of the most ingenious philosophies ever put forth by a painter, and confirmed his theories by his outrageous behavior. With mutilating wit and disarming cleverness, he exalted, not the free artist, but the snob artist. He pleaded for the expatriate, denied the existence of any national art, abused the British and Americans alike, and placed the artist apart from, and above, the social codes governing ordinary mortals. His pictures have faded into indistinguishable delicacies of tone, but his personality is still vividly alive. He set the standard among Anglo Saxons for the Bohemian artist, the scintillant tramp, the rootless aristocrat of the world, bound by no laws, exempt from human knowledge and human decencies. His example has endured. Practically all artists feel the necessity of proclaiming their business by singularities in dress and by flouting social conformities. So solid a man as Epstein, not content to let his sculptures signalize his

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individuality, must wear a beret to separate himself from Philistines and shopkeepers who have admitted from the first, with no small anxiety, that he is neither of them nor like them. “ Paris,” Elie Faure publicly confessed, “ is no longer the center of art, she is the center of the painting industry” —an astonishing statement from a Frenchman, astonishing because it was made in America and aimed at a rich monopoly that Americans have largely supported. To-day, in these troubled times, there are forty thousand artists in Paris. Not all, of course, live in the Latin Quarter: some maintain show studios in Montmartre, and a few live in the fashionable suburbs and drink at the Ritz Bar. Others, living in the Quarter, waste their time at the old academic charnel houses or at Lhote’s new academy where American girls are taught to draw in the modern manner—that is, to map out the planes of the back and buttocks of a female nude or to rearrange a French sailor into a little mannikin. But the tone and tendency of modern international art are dictated by the leaders of the left bank, or more specifically, by the colony in Montpar­ nasse. It is plain that Americans do not go to Paris to see the most significant and original manifestations of contemporary art—if such were their objective they would go to Mexico. It is equally plain that they do not go to study. They sometimes think they do, but most of them are too young to understand the psychological forces relating technic, a form, to experience and environment; and those who remain never mature. They are lured by the magic spell of Bohemia, by glittering legends of gaiety and romance; in other words, they are lured by the prospect of loose living in a special world created by Paris in the name of art and spiritual freedom, and fostered as a source of revenue. VI Life in this world would be insupportable without the women. The cardinal tenet of the Bohemian creed is that men and women should participate in life on the basis of absolute equality: that sexual freedom, or promiscuity, is not only a biological necessity, but a pleasurable stimulus to good work; that only the Puritan is inhibited and the Puritan produces no art; that the artist, being, p er s e y a more sensitive man, needs a woman as a constant companion to share his sorrows, intensify his moments of ecstasy, whet his desires, and complete his social function; that in a community where the companionship of women is traditional and axio matic, where all things conspire to the release of his creative energy, the artist begins his career under the most propitious circumstances—unham pered by bourgeois restraints and regulations, a free agent in body and

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soul. Theoretically, this is fine and sound; in practice it does not work, does not produce art. I have no moral objections to the system of compulsory cohabitation existing among the artists of Paris: the system is thoroughly democratic and without hypocrisy; it is certainly better and more honorable than the covert habits of the shamefaced artist of New York who, if he keeps a girl, conceals her from his friends and the world in a private brothel, after the fashion of the cheating husband and his stenographer, or the banker and his chorus girl. But as it pertains to art, the effect of the system is to amuse and divert the painter, not to ennoble him; to debase his better impulses; to make him totally dependent on women, and to hold women in cynical disesteem. The girls of Paris have long been famous. Villon penned a ballade to them, and down the centuries, in song and story, their charms have been exposed and magnified. So great is their prestige that men everywhere have a secret hankering for the Parisienne whom they credit with a unique talent for the more mischievous and poignant arts of love. It is not my intention to dispute her charms; I only wish to point out that the fame of the French girl as an accessory to the fine arts is fictional and operatic. It is not beyond belief that in times past she may have been more philan­ thropic than the modern practitioners of love and selfless devotion. Mur ger’s mistresses, it seems, were content to eat and to run out to Versailles for the day; but their influence on the artists of the time was none the less pernicious—always on the side of frivolity, always in the direction of laziness, cheapness, and vulgarity. The grisette, the delicious little moron, ready for any m an’s love and any m an’s bed, whom legend has honored with so prominent a role in the lives of artists, has lately been discredited. Indeed, I am sorry to say, French traducers have gone so far as to swear that she was evolved from the libido of sentimentalists like Pastor Sterne, or from the ink-pots of half-starved romancers paid to invest commonplace intrigues with the charm and excitement of devotional naughtiness. The traditional grisette caught the American eye as far back as 1840. “ I have seen,” wrote our American traveler, “ multitudes of bouncing demoiselles, with nymphlike faces, caps for bonnets, and baskets in their hands, running briskly to their work in the morning, and strolling slowly homeward towards evening, with a smile for every gentleman that passes. These are the grisettes. They are very pretty and have the laudable little custom of falling in love with one. A grisette in the Latin Quarter is a branch of education. If a student is ill, she nurses him and cures him; if he is destitute, she works for him; and if he dies, she dies with him .” This pretty conception, I find, still animates the fantasies of American students who have never seen Paris.

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In the present century, shortly after the old habitues had abandoned Montmartre, the raconteur Bayard circulated a questionnaire among the most celebrated Bohemians of Paris for the purpose of gathering historical material on the grisettes. The results were disappointing. The verdict against the grisettes was unanimous. “ I have heard of such creatures,” was the answer, “ but on my honor, I have never seen or known one.” From this we are not to conclude that the girls of Paris are incapable of true comradeship, that they have never shown a disposition to suffer, starve, or die for their men. Francis Carco, the best informed of living Bohemians and the most truthful, relates many tragic stories of the insane loyalty of women to poets and painters who were not worth saving. In the low brasseries of the Rue Lepic, with their damp walls, greasy counters, and slippery floors, the girls were good sports—they always asked for the cheapest wine and drank it. Sometimes there was but a single room for the whole company and, drinking deeply of bad liquor, they piled into one bed, as many as eight of them, men and women together, to forget their miseries in a drunken stupor. He also describes the end of some of the martyrs in “ low, leaky rooms by the Seine, where coughing women, holding dressing gowns tight around them, waited for sailors and sewer cleaners.” Carco does not romanticize the life. Nor does he uphold and recommend it. He admits frankly to certain vicious tastes which he satisfied at a frightful price. But the most heroic example of self-immola tion was Modigliani’s mistress, the Kidney Bean, whose loyalty bordered on dementia and ended in suicide. Such cases are exceptional, but if they were the rule, and every girl on the left bank a paragon of devotion, my original contention that the system of cohabitation contributes nothing to art would not be impaired. There are all sorts of girls in the art quarters of Paris: girls from all nations; students, models, and wild Americans—very young and asserting their advanced ideas by running from one man or woman to another; and a sprinkling of demoralized expatriates who hang around artists and sometimes write about them. The French girls, as we should expect, constitute the great majority. They are no better and no worse than girls of the same station in other countries: better companions in indolence, possibly; better harlots, certainly—they have the advantages of traditional culture and training. These girls, with their irregular faces and irregular lives, “ have never,” the French tell us, “ the stamp of the proletariat—they are always aristo crats.” We grant it. They sedulously avoid work; and their keepers, the intellectual aristocrats, follow their example, persuaded that the world owes the artist a living. It is much more comfortable to sit in a cafe with one’s girl and to talk about art than to hold one’s self to the grinding labor

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without which no art ever came into being. The girls know this, and craftily they play upon the romantic weaknesses of the artist, relying upon his feeble will to hold him to a way of living, and a profession, that he can neither relinquish nor conquer. The French girls have no greater love for art than other prostitutes, but they give a more convincing imitation of it. Their affectionate prattle is a sham, an incantation; their high spirits a pose, a matter of business. Their main purpose is to lead a lazy, animal existence among more generous and indulgent and playful clients than they could hope to snare, with their nondescript charms, in other quarters of Paris. There are exceptions, of course. Some have an eye to respecta bility—to a safe marriage and two legitimate children—and occasionally are successful in their ambitions. A few, like the insuppressible Kiki, develop unusual talents and become the pets of celebrities. But the rank and file follow the way of all bartered flesh. The effect of the Parisian system, in summary, is this: Woman is the curse of the artist. She no longer inspires, she dominates him. The artist, being weak, impressionable, and incapable of self-disci pline—in other words, Bohemian—inevitably acquires the tone and char acteristics of the stronger personality, the prostitute. The artist is losing his masculinity. The tendency of the Parisian system is to disestablish sexual characteristics, to merge the two sexes in an androgynous third containing all that is offensive in both. If you doubt the growing effeminacy of the artist, you have only to examine the perform­ ances of the modern École de Paris. The school is fundamentally sexless, from Picasso to Laurencin and Dufy. In exteriors it often appears harsh and brutal, but the harshness is factitious—the acid face and dominating toughness of the professional woman. In essence it is an emasculated art, an art of fashions, styles, and ambiguous patterns. VII That the romantic spirit of youth should have its fling is only natural; that artists, struggling in a world which neither cares for their works nor condones their follies, should band together to discuss their aims and difficulties is healthy and sensible; that artists are entitled to their fun and to a measure of eccentricity is taken for granted. But the first has dwindled into a spirit of incurable childishness and sentimentality; the second into an obsessional horror of loneliness and sedentary application, and into everlasting cafe chatter; the last into hideous license and rabid freakish­ ness. The War did not shake the Bohemian nonsense out of the artists; it served to make them beggars of life more intent than ever before on the prosecution of their whims. And it brought to the art colonies an influx of

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outsiders, nominally artists and writers, actually the dregs and misfits of disorganized America, whose presence has aggravated the Bohemian pestilence. We know them well. Not their own art but the art of Heming­ way has made them famous. The ancient mother of the tribe has called them “ a lost generation.” They have also been called “ the children of lost illusions.” They are lost beyond reclamation; they will never be anything but children; but they have not lost their illusions. Their sustaining belief is that art is self-generating; that it is produced by art; that it lives and flourishes and flowers in an environment destructive to the sensibilities of the creator. They are all alike, these Bohemians; they all gang together in a common effort to get rid of emptiness and boredom, to escape the hopeless uniformity and dullness of their transplanted lives. Appendages to the French cultural tradition, wheedling votaries of French art, they strive to mix art with gaiety and convivial rapture. Their so-called gaiety is a misnomer, a forced and pitiable levity, the mask of sadness and defeat. Once they contract la v érole M ontparnasse —the pox of the Quarter— they are proof against regeneration. Their nerves must be violently shaken, their senses unduly agitated. They crave more spectacular excitements; they become jaded and perverse and, famishing for new stimulants, advance into abnormal lecheries. Eventually they lose all sense of values; and their lives and their art, if distinguished by any one thing, are distinguished by the total absence of good sense. They are now ready for Gertrude Stein, Sur-Realism, and the infinite subdivisions of abstract art. What used to be sensational or shocking in their art is now only silly; what used to be the innocent fondling of French styles is na ïve no longer—it is babyish. Their art having no voice, they are obliged to speak for it over the cafe tables and in the printed word. Their writings are chuckling tributes to the higher freedom or meaningless descriptions of their states of mind, never intelligible comments or objective facts. They found magazines in which their insecurity is attested by the continual insulting of America—the cosmopolitan touch—and their originality by incoherent nastiness, hymns to homosexuality, and pleas for miscegenation. There is no evidence that the experiences of many of them are worth mentioning. An immense and vicious sentimentality lies at the bottom of their lives. They profess to be above normal experiences; they are not concerned with the joys and sorrows of humanity. Instead, they exploit, in paint, stolen patterns and futile hypotheses; and in print, their private grievances, envies, grudges, and debaucheries. They are avid of French approval, treasuring the venal praise of critics who have never held a brush. In this they are typically French. For all the French, Daumier excepted, have coveted official

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decorations. Even Verlaine sought election to the Academy; and foolish Paul de Kock, the favorite of the masses, at seventy-four, weeping over his disappointment, wrote twenty pages to prove that he was not hurt because he had been turned down for the Legion of Honor. I do not advocate a return to respectability nor a truce with the bourgeoisie. France is controlled by the bourgeoisie, and the bulk of her art—all that is cheap and prurient and trivial—is the reflection of the tastes of the petty merchant. Every French artist of merit has been the enemy of the bourgeoisie, and Daumier, forswearing his youthful illusions of popu­ lar, or mercantile, sovereignty, smote them hip and thigh with his satire. Nor do I advocate the high-toned life of the fashionable faubourgs, a form of social smartness playing into the hands of the dealers and politicians. My point is that the artist, having affirmed his individuality and published his contempt for grubbing merchants, should have the courage of his convictions. If he is truly an individual, as Rembrandt was, and Hogarth, Daumier, Degas, Manet, Cezanne, and many others, he should stand alone, capable of social adjustments which would enable him to have his say without sacrificing a single belief. Bohemia has had artists, numbers of them, but they are small and unimportant. The lyric cry of Verlaine is clear and genuine, but most appealing to self-conscious sinners. Verlaine, a truly religious man, was always repenting, always making fresh starts in life, longing for some sylvan, visionary nook in which he might dream of nymphs and sing the virelays of old France. But he was utterly wanting in force of will, and Bohemia was the swiftest road to destruction. The greatest, by far, is Toulouse-Lautrec, whom the misfortune of physical deformity converted to a sadistic philosophy. This sinister figure believed in the innate depravity of the human race, a bitter faith in any man, and only possible to the artist whose life is spent in certain quarters of Bohemia. Lautrec’s mature life and art were confined to the dens and cabarets of Montmartre; and the depravity of that small, convulsive world which he loved with satanic conviction he transferred to all mankind. There is no compassion in his art, no posing, no moral sop. It excludes the noble in man, and it excludes the tragic. It deals only with the decayed. VIII Leaving aside the main body of pretenders and cosmopolitan roisterers, what shall we say of the serious students who are neither dissolute nor lazy, who work day after day, generally under the greatest hardships, faithfully concocting ineffectual studies in the belief that they are making art, or at least learning how art should be made? We shall say that they

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too are lost, they too are tarred by the Bohemian brush. However earnest and talented they may be, soon or late they lose their identity. The odds against them are too heavy. They all fall in line, adopt the culture of the Quarter, get themselves in that morbid state of mind which holds them forever to the most useless expenditure of time and talent that has ever been devised—the attempt to make art out of other art. They are all doomed. With the best of intentions, with appalling fixity of purpose, they resign themselves to the lifelong occupation of manufacturing pictures that have no reason for existence, no connection with realities, and no connec­ tion with anything save the sources from which they are compounded. The left bank is cluttered with the living tragedies of forlorn souls who can neither make art nor leave it. The most deadly curse of Bohemia is that it transforms the artist into the stereotype. Instead of being a stage in the development of the artist, it is an end in itself, a career, an isolated world in which men and women are prisoners of art, not conquerors. Living in a vitiating atmosphere of art, breathing and talking art from morning till night to the exclusion of healthy experiences, looking at French art for years, the Bohemian cannot look realities in the face. His habits, in truth, are more conventional than those of the despised bourgeoisie. In Paris he does the expected thing: paints like this man or that, picks up a set of painting tools, becomes a painting machine; nowadays, a modernist machine. There are perceptible variations in the painting habits of the Bohemians, but they are largely mechanical. Schools are founded on these variations—vanity, as well as youth, must be served. Schools are founded also on incompetence. It is said that a young student, having difficulty in learning to paint like someone else, asked this of Picasso: “ I do not seem to know how to draw. Should I go to school?” “ N o,” answered the master, “ you should not go to school; the thing for you to do is to found a school.” The Spaniard had tried both. It is this sort of life that transmits modern art to the rest of the world. Every new idea, to gain the allegiance of artists, collectors, critics, and dealers, must be ground through the Bohemian mills of Paris. Even Cezanne who loathed Bohemia, whose art is a mighty protest against Bohemia, has been ground into harmless patterns, sterilized and softened for universal consumption, by the mills of Paris. It is this sort of life that captures American youth and emasculates American art. Paris is youth, Bohemia the artificial prolongation of youth. There is nothing on earth more pathetic than the behavior of artists who persist in being young, unless it is the bleat of expatriates too proud to return home. It has been said by one of them that the artists of Paris are willing to sacrifice their lives for spiritual freedom, to die for their ideals. It is remarkable that no signs of this mysterious freedom have appeared in their

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art! It is hard indeed to be a martyr to one’s own ideals, but to be a m artyr to second-hand ideals, to sacrifice one’s life to borrowed habits, is the crowning humiliation imposed by Bohemia on the prisoners of art. “ Bohemia,” Murger said, “ exists and is possible only in Paris.”

A Place of Fear Francis J. Rigney and Douglas Smith , 1961 The Bohemians are human beings. This is hardly a startling conclusion, but it is one that is necessary to reiterate. They are not freaks. They are individuals with the same needs, hopes, fears, and foibles as the rest of mankind. They are not “ islands unto themselves” ; they have the need common to all of us for others with whom to communicate. And they do have ways to communicate. Most important is their widespread interest in things esthetic and intellectual. This interest is felt by many of them to be an essential ingredient in their sense of identity as a community; this interest was repeatedly demonstrated by the psycholog­ ical tests. Further, many spoke of an “ urge,” “ need,” “ push” to express themselves in the arts. One summed it up so: “ I feel all full inside, and have to let it out.” The best way to “ let it out,” to establish contact, was by creating something. They described creativity as “ the attempt to make an honest effort in any of the arts or crafts, mainly to satisfy the self.” Another, a painter, and also a schizophrenic, declared, “ It is an attempt of the brain to explain itself.” Others used different language, but the theme is the same: “ Stamp your reaction to life with your own personality . . .” ; “ An individual projection from within” ; “ A unique personal expression. . . . ” The most poetic definition was, “ The fire that burns within oneself that is love.” And in still another language, they spoke of their need to see order in disorder, to reconstruct, even radically reshape, the world about them, as they experienced it. Many declared a faith that intuitively, even totally without reason, they could generate an order. For example, Lawrence Ferlinghetti described the Beach poets’ response to society, and their attempts to reorder our vision: The trouble with poetry for the last twenty years is that it was not saying anything of great importance except to other poets. It was poetry about poetry. 343

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. . . T hat’s why we’re getting an audience. We’re seeing the world again. Our poems make you say, “ I never saw the world like that before.”

As we have seen, 46 of the 51 declared themselves not only as interested in but also as having some sort of artistic outlet. They were asked to rate each other as “ artists” in their declared fields. When the ratings were studied it was apparent that they had tried to be fair. They could and did express severely critical opinions about their fellow Bohemians’ efforts; however, they tried to be selective and discriminating. Among our 51 subjects, two composers, two jazz men, three painters, one writer, and four poets were considered by their fellows to be better than “ good,” even near “ great” ; contrariwise, a few writers, a dancer, one jazz musician, and one actor were considered “ poor,” “ hopeless” ; the majority fell between these poles of judgment. How accurate these verdicts were will depend on the judgments of history. What is more important is that there was a spread rather than either blanket praise or blanket criticism. These ratings were more honest than many (already noted in earlier chapters), than those of outsiders who have peremptorily dismissed their efforts as trash. Some have asked, “ Well, what great works have come out of Grant Avenue?” as though it were the duty of these Bohemians to become immortals. (Considering how many Parisians it took to “ produce” a Utrillo or a Picasso, it would be a statistical miracle if even one “ Somebody,” let alone a “ G iant,” emerged from this tiny colony.) One final note: When their ratings were matched against their diagnoses, it was easily apparent that “ giftedness” was randomly distributed, not the property of any one type, whether the dedicated well or the lonely sick. Our next conclusion: They were Bohemians in the true, historic meaning of the word. Not so gay perhaps as the Bohemians of the 1920’s, but not so different either, seen from the vantage point of one hundred years of American Bohemianism. This Bohemianism, whose beginnings have been traced to Edgar Allan Poe, has seen the rise and fall of colony after colony, has seen periods of lively joyousness and heavy sadness. Albert Parry, in his classic study of American Bohemianism, Garrets and Pretenders, put it so: “ Poe started in America the tradition . . . of vitriolic criticism . . . of making taverns rendezvous of the arts . . . of dying delirious in a gutter, an attic. . . . ” The new Bohemians also share elements of the description of a Bohe­ mian written more than one hundred years ago by Ada Clare, queen of the Pfaffians, America’s first organized Bohemian colony: “ A cosmopolite, with a general sympathy for the fine arts, and for all things above and beyond convention . . . [he] is not a victim of rules and customs. . . . ” An

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anonymous writer noted in 1854 “ He is a wanderer, with no particular attachment to any abiding place . . . [he] has no debts, because no one will give him credit. . . . ” And they have wandered to North Beach for the same reason that all Bohemians have clustered together: most Bohemian colonies have been places of low rents, cheap food, and accepting company, where each Bohemian could conduct his private search for identity and communica tion. Parry said, of Henry Clapp, “ king” of the Pfaffians, that his letting his family know of his literary ambitions resulted in “ ruthless persecu tion.” And like some in our group, Clapp also spent time at sea, and at odd jobs, before emerging as a writer. “ And when he finally emerged . . . he became known as the greatest hater of brownstone respectability of his time. . . .” Having arrived in North Beach, today’s Bohemians feel some sense of release, but not enough; and their continuing demands for more freedom are well known. Here is a recent example (1959) from the Publisher’s Note in the third issue of Beatitude (dated May 23, 1959). It is a “ Poet’s Manifesto” : Thus poets, though now relegated mostly to the lower strata of society, belong at the topmost top. . . . Doctors, scientists, engineers and other groups have started movements to run things their way. Why shouldn’t poets? They have more imagination, feeling, compassion, than others, also a way of going right to the point. At the very least they should not be under control of these others, and should have their say. . . .

But why this cry for more freedom? The answer is simple; they are not free. Two kinds of enemies haunt them, internal and external. First, the internal enemies. These are the crippling, self-sabotaging aspects of their own personalities. Sickness stalks the Beach. The largest number in our group were found to be lonely, depressed, anxious, only occasionally able to work despite, in the cases of some, real gifts. They seek contact via sporadic creative efforts, but more often via talk, drunken camaraderie, or poignant and painful sexual relationships. The rebellious men and “ angry” women, tormented by their own hostilities, oftentimes are too preoccupied with acting out their internal conflicts to express themselves in more harmonious ways. The passive carpers can only occasionally muster up the energy to accomplish something. For some, drugs—especially alcohol—originally taken for relief, take a heavy toll. But unlike many communities, they do not conceal these problems. They know they are sick, they openly discuss “ flipping out.” (They scored “ high” on those aspects of the psychological tests which indicated psychic

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and physical distress.) They know they are not functioning efficiently, that often their searches for meaning or for love lead up blind alleys, that their attempts to create may be sterile, and that some relationship has gone sour. Yet they stubbornly want to struggle on; they do not want outsiders to “ push” them into “ health.” (They also scored “ high” on tests indicat­ ing “ self-acceptance.” ) Significantly, in 1854 Ada Clare defined a Bohe­ mian as someone living “ with an easy, graceful, joyous unconsciousness,” even though, in her group, there were two suicides, an opium addict, and deaths from neglect. However, when offered help on their own terms, they are more than willing to seek it. Some were routed to clinics, others were treated privately or in hospitals. In short then, these Bohemians have created a combined artistic and therapeutic community whose inhabitants are trying to help themselves, but only in their own way. But these attempts were foredoomed. The external enemy, society at large, was not to allow them to try this experiment. The methods these Bohemians used set off a violent reaction in the outside onlookers. Society at large has never been fond of Bohemians. The Times in 1858 warned against “ falling into the company of Bohemians . . . [they are not] useful members of society . . . [they] are artists or authors whose special aversion is w ork.” Even harsher were these words from the Wilmington, North Carolina, Herald (1860): “ They meet at the lager beer saloon . . . never wash themselves . . . live idle, lazy, thriftless [lives] . . . and die unregretted.” We have quoted from today’s press and magazine descriptions of Bohe­ mians; the wording has hardly changed. And publicity brought the tourists and the police with the dismal effects already described. This quote from 1907 (by Charles Peters) also shows how the more things change, the more they remain the same: “ Has the reader ever watched persons . . . essentially conventional try to be Bohemian? They sit [trying] to enjoy it. If [the wife] is caught in an unconscious moment with a shocked expression on her [face] she will take another sip with an ‘I-am-just-as-Bohemian-as-you toss of her head.’ ” But why this interest, why this simultaneous fascination and repug­ nance? We feel the answer lies in the outsider. These Bohemians’ behavior in many ways represents an exaggerated and prolonged version of the dynamics common to everyone. They are experiencing, albeit in intensified and even distorted forms, that search for identity and contact with others which all have experienced, especially during adolescence. It is the inten­ sity—real or fancied—which disturbs the onlooking outsider: the open sexual or angry material that threatens the stabilized attitude systems and

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defenses of those ordinarily hiding their own such impulses. (But the ability to hide problems is not synonymous with health.) More specifically, certain behaviors are most provocative: the ostensible indifference to values about money and cleanliness, the sexual activity, the use of certain drugs, and last, but definitely not least, the indifference to American taboos about interracial relationships, especially miscegena­ tion. What followed was catastrophic to the Bohemians. Their own attempts to solve their difficulties, however ill-advised or ineffectual at times, were strongly put down by society: the distant critics, the local press, and the law, with tourists as a Greek chorus, assaulted the Bohemians and turned North Beach into a combination show piece and jail. Ironically, the Bohemian is even accused of being a play-actor in a spectacle actually written by the non-Bohemians. But they carry on, despite the internal isolation that walls them off from others, despite the problems that make the Beach the grave of many high hopes, and despite the attacks that have turned the Beach into a place of fear. Pierre Delattre expressed the essence of these problems in the last lines of his “ To a Woman in a Bohemian Bar” : If she could know love, Witness the tumbling walls Then disappear. I would proclaim An exit from the tomb. Then I could cease This daily walk of fear, For she would Meet me in the street With Easter in her hair. Conclusions of a study of fifty-one residents o f the N orth Beach com m unity, I960.— Ed.

Disenchanted Abroad Harold Stearns , 1962 My English friend meant to be polite. But clearly he was puzzled. “ Why do all my young American friends invariably ask me if I know of any job they can get in England or Europe? Last month in Paris I saw hundreds of men who had been in the American army who had gone back home to be discharged and had then scraped together enough money to enable them to take the first steamer back to France. All your younger journalists and writers seem to be planning just one thing—how to get out of this country by hook or by crook. Yet you know how impossible Europe’s economic condition is to-day compared with America’s. For a young man without independent means even to make his own living in Europe to-day is an onerous task. But your countrymen come over by the boat-load in spite of all the difficulties. Why is it?” Half apologetically I said something about intolerance and bigotry. “ I understand that,” he said, “ even an outsider can not help seeing certain things. Nevertheless you have, in your phrase, all the ‘making’ of a great country and a great civilization; you have national youth, abundant re­ sources, an enormous fund of goodwill and vitality. The war has not crippled you as it has us. The world lies before you. America is still the land of opportunity. I should think it would be a challenge to your young men. And as for the unpleasant things—I should think the obligation to fight these evils would be a stimulus. Instead, we have the spectacle of a young and vigorous nation sending more and more of its best young manhood to a civilization that quite literally is dying. Youth rushing to live with senility. Why is it?” Now to the average American I daresay my English friend’s question will seem unreal. He will think of the score of young men he knows who haven’t the slightest desire to leave the country, the hundreds more who hope to buy a motor car and own a stucco home in the suburbs, and he will probably conclude that the Englishman had in mind only writers, 348

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artists, and other strange fish of that fry, who in the nature of things might perhaps be expected to be discontented, but who really don’t matter very much one way or the other. Indeed, the average American’s personal opinion is likely to be that the country will be just as well off without these troublesome and impertinent youngsters anyway. The strong, the alert, the efficient are all staying: by the light in their eyes any one can see that some of them will eventually get to Wall Street and sell oodles of fake oilstock to greedy suckers. No, says Mr. Average American, the real young men are not going. And from his point of view he is right. But to the intelligent foreigner, who can hardly be expected to share our amiable American prejudices in these matters, the steady denudation of the United States of its imaginative and adventurous and artistically creative young men is a sight which may well make him question the validity of many of our complacent assumptions about our so-called civilization. Those who take the trouble to keep in touch with that small part of the younger American generation which regards its condition and quality as of something higher than a piece of animated lard, know with what frank and disconcerting eagerness these young men look forward to escape from these shores. They know well enough that the Englishman’s question is strictly relevant. Of course the young highschool graduate of Topeka, Kansas, has no desire to get away, for he hopefully anticipates a prosper ous career of real-estate speculation, and is well content to let a monstrous regiment of women in the Mississippi Valley tell him that he shall not drink a bottle of wine in cosmopolitan New York, nor smoke a cigarette in rural Nebraska, nor read “ Les Chansons de Bilitis” anywhere north of the Rio Grande. If the young Topekan finds the repressions and regulations getting too much for him, he can with a slight degree of effort organise a little lynching party and let off steam that way. Certain members of the esteemed Turkish nation have followed this technique for years, in Arme­ nian atrocities the Turk has found a first-class compensation for the emotional aridity of his teetotalism, and while we unfortunately haven’t our Armenians handy to exterminate, we had excellent substitutes during 1917 and 1918 in the pro-Germans, and during 1919 and 1920 we have done pretty well with the “ Reds,” and of course there are always our coloured citizens to fall back upon. No, what is pleasantly termed the “ backbone of the country” will not go. They never do. But what William James once said of his university is equally true of his country—our irreconciliables are our proudest product; and it is precisely our irreconcilables who are going. Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilization when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for

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experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civiliza­ tion which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America to-day that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organ­ ised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification. (I recall a fine passage of Plato wherein he says that one of the real virtues of youth is its ability to be shocked at things as they are.) In industry, commerce, science— especially in so vital a subject as educational psychology where any real revolution will be begun—in medicine and law, and in the game of hoodwinking morons (otherwise known as politics) the field in America is open and the opportunities are great. But in literature, art, music, the labour-movement, the theatre—in brief, in all those activities where the creative instincts of youth have freest play, science alone excepted—the field in America is closed. Even in science the exception is more apparent than real. Big business has somehow managed to identify science, and psychology along with it, as a mysterious ally of efficiency, economy and all the other shibboleths of what it assumes is the summum bonum of life, increased production. Big business is willing to subsidize universities and laboratories and research because it thinks that money so given will return enriched pragmatically, if not in hard cash, an hundredfold. Perhaps it will, but when the financiers discover that the best psychologists are working for an educational revolution that will exorcise from the minds of our children their inhibitions and fears, and will enable them to think straight enough to know how to go about changing our present economic system, perhaps they will not be so generous with their cash. For any development of the true scientific spirit will be fatal to the present wasteful order of things. But to-day the number of men, either in business or in the universities who see the implications of endowing research, psychological research in particular, are but a handful. The successful business man regards such endowment as a graceful way of capping his career, as well as the fulfilment of an ethical obligation; he is seldom intelligent enough to contemplate the consequences. The university man, too, is equally blind in most cases; he shares all the current prejudices and clings to the current taboos. Even in our science schools, as in all the rest of our civilization, there is no concession to the spirit of youth.

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At this point the practical person will be sure to point out that youth resents whatever lack of opportunity there may be, chiefly in what may be called, for convenience sake, the amenities of life. America, the practical person admits, is to-day a strong, materialistically-minded country, but he says, we must not be too harsh with her simply because the more gracious aspects of life have not yet been fully developed or because the artist feels himself crushed by the hardness and unmalleability of his environment. That is precisely the point. Youth is not interested, and rightly not interested, merely in material success or in a career that commands the respect of his neighbours. Youth does not care, and rightly does not care, merely to make money, merely to “ get on.” Youth wants to savour life, to enrich its quality if he may and if he can, to feel and experience something of its range and depth—youth wants to make over civilization so that others may in increasing measure do likewise, for that is the glorious way of youth. Youth is not content, and rightly not content, with shaping its life to conventional ends alone—to marry, “ settle down,” mow the lawn, drive its own Ford, read the popular magazines, join a lodge, go to the movies, drink grapejuice, vote blatherskites into political office, listen to incompetent preachers holding forth on doctrines in which no one with an ounce of grey matter any longer believes, send its children to schools and colleges to have their minds devastated with bad philosophy and worse economics, and get its only excitement occasionally out of the vicarious thrill which accompanies Babe Ruth’s feat of knocking a home run. To accept life as it is and make the best of it, may be an admirable quality in middle-aged men, as it is a lovable quality in old men, but it is a horrible thing in a young man. The intransigeant spirit of youth focuses its aspiration upon the quality of life. It demands something richer and more varied than is thought good for it by the W.C.T.U. of Centreville, Ohio. It demands also that it shall have the opportunity to help make over into something finer than we now know, the civilization of which it is a part. But in America youth is permitted to do neither one thing nor the other. The other day in an unguarded moment, Mr. Mark Sullivan let the cat out of the bag in a dispatch to the Evening Post of New York. Mr. Sullivan was giving a post-mortem explanation as to why the ruling clique to the Republican Party has settled upon Senator Harding as a candidate, rather than upon any of the other men who were equally acceptable to the ruling powers. He cited several reasons, and then picked out the human motive which made the choice irresistible. Senator Harding, he explained, was a man after their own hearts, a mediocrity like themselves. The Old Guard could be comfortable with him; if any of the boys met him on the Main Street of their “ dismal” home-towns, they could talk to him free and easylike with no self-consciousness or embarrassment.

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Now the adjective “ dismal” is not mine, but Mr. Sullivan’s. And although, if his attention were called to it, Mr. Sullivan might describe it as an inadvertence, the word is unerring and deadly. The dispatch was probably written in haste with little chance for careful revision, which makes the choice of that particular word all the more revealing of what the writer really thought. As a matter of fact, nothing could be more exact. That is precisely the trouble with these home-towns. They are dismal, dismal beyond the endurance of men who, after all, are the children of those who once built real civilizations, and among whom, on occasion, must be a youth who remembers. In these “ dismal” places there is no art, no music, no drama, no intellectual life, no festivals and gala days that are not a mockery of gaiety, no religion that can summon and cleanse emotion, no concept of morality except a rancid, superficial Puritanism combined, as is usually the case, with an inward sordidness and hypocrisy, no sense of the joy of life, no graciousness, no urbanity. These home-towns are rural in a bad sense, through and through, self-complacent, envious and intolerant of what they do not understand, successful enough materially but living a life that is wholly dominated by a conventional fear of the worst kind—a fear of what people will say. This is an indictment, and it is meant to be an indictment. The same idea is vulgarly expressed in the popular song, “ How Are You Goin’ to Keep ’Em Down On the Farm, After They’ve Seen Paree” —a song which contains much homely wisdom and may be commended to the attention of all bishops and pastors. Before the war, of course one could escape from this rural horror by migrating to the cities, and most young men who possessed the imagination of a minnow took full advantage of their opportunities. But to-day the big city has been made over into the likeness of the home-towns. The home­ town has always been jealous of the city, and now at last it has succeeded in making the city nearly as uncivilised and dismal as itself. In plain truth, the whole country is engulfed in a flood of petty regula­ tions of all kinds, and energetic organizations, devoted to the task of meddling with everything and seeing that everybody is as dull and stupid as themselves, to-day hold the whip hand. The Eighteenth Amendment is but a symbol of the times. It stands, in fact, for the prohibition of everything. What we Americans are insanely trying to do is to make our civilization fool-proof. The chances are it can not be done, yet in so far as we succeed, we shall discover that we are making it genius-proof as well. Civilization can not be justified if it does not cherish enough freedom to permit a man to go to hell in his own way. And in twentieth-century America the chances are becoming slimmer and slimmer every day of leading any other kind of life than the monotonous majority-ruled, unimag­

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inative existence of the great average. Youth is gradually awakening to this dreary fact and is properly resentful. Yet youth of the real sort would gladly stick it out if the opportunity to change the environment in any appreciable way were offered. No man wants to abandon his own country if it is humanly possible to avoid doing so. We are home-loving animals, that simple, natural patriotism for the soil from which we sprang—quite unlike the artificial patriotism for the national state, with which it is generally confused—is rooted deep down in all of us. But in these days what opportunity has a young man to effect any such appreciable change in his American environment? Practically none at all. All doubts on this score will be dissipated in a moment by reading a few typical commencement exhortations of this present year. What is the burden of all of them? “ Gentlemen of the graduating class, we stand at a great crisis in civilization. The rest of the world is in the grip of chaos and Bolshevism. America stands as Gibraltar against the onrushing tide of anarchy! We must return to those great principles on which our country was founded. We must create a new reverence for the immortal instrument, the American Constitution (cheers), struck off by those great minds in 1787 . . .”Think of it!— 1787, over 130 years ago. Our form of government is to-day one of the oldest among modern states, as it is the most conservative. Yet the appeal to our youth is always to throw all its vitality behind the preservation of that ancient form. The same strain runs through all the business, professional and moral exhortations to the youth of America. Art and literature are seldom mentioned of course, and then only in a half-apologetic manner and with a gibe at “ the vagaries of the present day.” In short the institutional life of America is a combination for the blackjacking of our youth into the acceptance of the status quo not of 1920, but of the late eighteenth century in government, of the early nineteenth century in morals and culture, and of the stone age in business. If the young man of to-day still has enough native vitality and intellectual power to attempt to break these chains he will be made to pay too high a price. If his interest is in literature, he must either become popular or starve, if in art, he must choose between flattering the vanity of silly rich people or enduring misunderstanding and neglect; if in the theatre, he must reach lowest common denominator of Broadway or the movies or put all his energies into the struggle to make a bare living. Of course there are exceptions, but the point is that they are exceptions. These exceptions are not accepted generously; they are merely tolerated, and even then with some impatience. Every social influence in the country is against them. Small wonder then that they look with such eager eyes towards Europe.

A Whiff of Chaos for the Bourgeoisie Anthony Esler, 1971

Every year tens and hundreds of thousands of prosperous Americans took ship for Europe. In 1928, 437,000 people sailed for the Old World—a great many of them young.1 They went to live for a time the life of the expatriate, as glamorized for them by Fitzgerald and Hemingway. They went to Paris, to see what flaming youth was really like in the land of its birth. For when all was said and done, the Europeans were the old professionals at this business of being young and insurrectionary. The youngest and most enthusiastically anti-social of all the European youth revolts of the early twenties was the dazzling, baffling, totally anarchistic phenomenon that went by the incomprehensible, oddly disturb­ ing name of Dada. DADA. Dada? the most sophisticated young American in Paris might ask. What is Dada? “ D ada,” he might be cheerfully informed, “ is a virgin m icrobe.” Or: “ Dada, acknowledging only instinct, condemns explanation a priori.” Or, more volubly, from the little Rumanian, Tristan Tzara, who seemed to be the international impresario of Dada: “ Dada is life without carpetslippers or parallels . . . without discipline or morality and we spit on humanity. Dada remains within the European frame of weaknesses it’s shit after all but from now on we mean to shit in assorted colors . . .” 2 Shitting in assorted colors was hardly Scott Fitzgerald’s thing, or even Ernest Hemingway’s. But it made a circus for the young of half the capitals of Europe for half a dozen years after the war to save civilization. If you asked to be taken to their leader, you would be happily informed that “ the Dadaist Movement has three hundred and ninety-one presidents and . . . anyone can become a president without the slightest trouble.” 3 If you asked for a Dada manifesto—all youth movements have manifestos, 354

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after all—you might be shepherded to the Dada demonstration at the Grand Palais des Champs Elysées, at which no less than six Dadaist manifestos were read aloud simultaneously to a grand chorus of boos, cheers, laughter, and inarticulate howls. If, in desperation, you demanded to know the history of Dada, you might at least learn a few facts—trivial though such things seemed to the Dada masters. You might learn that the movement had been founded at the Café Voltaire in Zurich in 1916 by a handful of exiles from warring Europe; that it had reached Berlin in 1918 and Paris in 1920; that it also had representatives in Cologne, Hanover, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and New York. And that Dada stood foursquare against “ Honor, Father land, Morality, the Family, Art, Religion, Liberty, Brotherhood,” and all the other allegedly sacred abstractions of the older generation.4 It was harder to find out just what Dada was for. Tzara included among the movement’s goals “ the abolition of logic” and “ the abolition of the future.” The painter Hans Arp, another of the founders, asserted that “ Dada stands for art without sense. . . . Dada is without meaning, as Nature is,” adding proudly: “ The Dadaist gave the bourgeois a whiff of chaos.” 5 More concretely, Dadaists indulged in painting without subject matter, poems without words, sculpture purchased “ ready-made” at the hardware store, and, of course, their fantastic cabaret and concert per­ formances, featuring completely cacophonous “ noise” music, readings rendered totally inaudible by the continuous ringing of an electric bell, and countless other “ happenings” of all sorts. They painted in a trance, composed poetry by scattering bits of newsprint at random over a table. In Paris, they regularly started riots in the theaters. In Germany, they were arrested for threatening to blow up Weimar. If it was shit, it was certainly polychromatic shit. And young shit too: there was scarcely a single Dadaist over thirty. Dada, of course, was a protest, part and parcel of the youthful rejection of the shattered world, “ leaky, red hot, threatening to blow up,” their parents were foisting on the young. America’s contribution to the international revolt of the younger gener­ ation had been typical of America’s contribution to most things in those days: it was a matter of sheer size. The American contingents, fueled by mass education and unparalleled affluence and leisure, quickly outnum­ bered all others. It was a purely quantitative contribution, the sort of thing Babbitt himself might have been proud of. But for sheer depth of disgust at the way the world wagged, for depthless contempt for their elders’ universe, European youth still held the edge. There was an abyss of bitterness in Brecht’s Berlin, a savage glee in the Paris of the Surrealists that no American flapper, however hipped on

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Freud, could match. Above all, the war had scalded the psyche of bright young Europeans far more horribly than it had the fresh-faced youth of America. Compare Hemingway’s quietly understated account of the deval­ uation of old values by the war, for instance, with Erich Maria Remarque’s savage assault on the conventional wisdom that had sent his generation out to the death fields. Toward the end of All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque describes a German military hospital, with its acres of smashed young bodies and unquantifiable fields of pain: . . . abdominal and spine cases, head wounds and double amputations . . . lung wounds, pelvis wounds, wounds in the joints, wounds in the testicles. . . . How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must all be lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands.6

It was this bitterness against the war and the Victorian blindness that had brought it on that powered the Dada assault upon the world at large. The Dadaists, as they themselves have amply testified, were “ revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War” —“ beside ourselves with rage and grief at the suffering and humiliation of mankind” —horrified at “ four years of senseless slaughter, in which many friends had died on both sides . . .” It was not they who had gone mad, they giggled as they dribbled their bits of newspaper over the table top, but the nations of the world, “ association[s] of psychopaths who, like the Germans, marched off with a volume of Goethe in their knapsacks to skewer Frenchmen and Russians on their bayonets.” 7 That people who loved Goethe and Voltaire and Tolstoy could do such unspeakable things to each other proved one thing to these young anti-intellectual intellectuals and their youthful audiences: the world was totally senseless, without rhyme or reason, direction or indwelling purpose. Dada “ gave the bourgeois a whiff of chaos” because, for Dadaists, “ the principle of dissolution and anarchy” was the one great truth about the universe.8 The world made no sense: why should art or ideology? They tried to keep it light, like “ Eggboard,’ a sport and social pastime for the top ten thousand, in which the players, covered from head to foot with egg-yolk, leave the field of play . . . ” Tristan Tzara blasted his magic klaxon with its “ three successive invisible echoes” at the audience, and the howling crowd responded with insults, eggs, pennies, and even raw beefsteaks.9 It was the revolt against reason, the abolition of logic, Ubu and pure idiocy triumphant. And yet, time and time again, even when they submitted to the direction­ less discipline of automatic writing, the thrust of their rejection would out:

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Their rubber hammer strikes the sea Down the black general so brave. With silken braid they deck him out As fifth wheel on the common grave.10

Beneath Fitzgerald’s gyrating flappers, beneath the giddy hilarity of the Jazz Age and the mad high jinks of Dada, there yawned a Baudelairean abyss. These were in a real sense spiritually crippled generations—cas­ trated, like Hemingway’s Jake; doomed creatures of enfeebled will, like Fitzgerald’s Dick Diver of Tender Is the Night. The old-fashioned values they rejected now were, after all, the values they had themselves imbibed with their m others’ milk. The war, by destroying these values, had smashed a gaping hole in the psyche of the youth of the 1920’s. These were the generations of hollow men—crow’s feet, stuffed with straw—whom T. S. Eliot described. Their febrile gaiety masked a clear vision of the Wasteland within: When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone . . . O O O O that Shakespeherian rag— It’s so elegant So intelligent “ What shall I do now? What shall I do now?” “ I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street “ With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow? “ What shall we ever do?” 11

Fitzgerald cracked up. Hemingway shot himself. Eliot clawed his way back to religion. Tristan Tzara ended by cramming his anarchistic soul into the rigid strait jacket of Communist Party discipline. Less serious, less perceptive young people reacted less violently to the new vacuum in the realm of values—but they, too, felt the void, the emptiness at the heart of the fun culture. Hedonism might be the only philosophy for the thinking man, but it had its drawbacks too. “ I’ve done all the things I ’ve been told not to ,” sighed one vaguely perplexed young flapper, “ and they aren’t so amusing as they looked. There’s a screw loose somewhere. I am beginning to be bored—and that’s ghastly.” 12 They had launched a whole nation on the rocky road to sexual, social, and spiritual emancipation. They set America on the way to pre-eminence in the burgeoning Youth Revolution. But the psychic cost had been immense: the claim that sin was boring was surely a Freudian substitution for some far darker malaise.

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Notes 1. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday : An Informal History o f the NineteenTwenties (New York and London, 1931), p. 175. 2. Tristan Tzara, “ Memoirs of Dadaism,” Appendix to Edmund Wilson, A xel’s Castle: A Study o f the Imaginative Literature o f 1870-1930 (New York, 1931), p. 243; André Breton, in Elmer Peterson, Tristan Tzara: Dada and Surrational Theorist (New Brunswick, N. J.), 1971, p. 29; Tzara, “ Seven Deadly Manifes­ to s,” in Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (New York, 1951), p. 75. 3. Tzara in Wilson, p. 241. 4. René Lacôte, Tristan Tzara (Paris, 1948), p. 18. 5. Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (London, 1965), p. 37. 6. All Quiet on the Western Front, translated by A. W. Wheen (London, 1929), pp. 286-287. 7. Arp, Janco, and Richter, in Richter, pp. 25, 122; Richard Huelsenbeck, En Avant Dada, in Motherwell, p. 23. 8. Richter, pp. 37, 48. 9. Richter, p. 38; Wilson, p. 242. 10. Hans Arp, “ The Guest Expulsed 5,” Richter, p. 52. 11. The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York, 1934), pp. 39, 34. 12. Mary Agnes Hamilton, “ Where Are You Going, My Pretty Maid?” Atlantic Monthly, September, 1926, p. 301.

Three Baiting the Bourgeois “Madam, it is the duty o f the Bohemian to make a spectacle o f himself.” —Joe Gould

The Red Waistcoat Théophile Gautier, 1871

The red waistcoat! It is more than forty years since I wore it, yet people still speak of it, and will go on speaking of it in days to come, so deep did that flash of colour penetrate the public’s eye. If the name of Théophile Gautier happens to be spoken in the presence of a Philistine, even of one who has never read a line of prose or verse of mine, he knows me at least by the red waistcoat I wore at the first performance of Hernani, and he says, with the self-satisfied look of the man who knows what he is talking about: “ Oh, yes. You mean the young fellow with the red waistcoat and the long hair.” And that is the way I shall go down to posterity. My books, my verse, my articles, my travels will be forgotten, but men will remember my red waistcoat. That spark will go on shining when everything else of mine will long since have been lost in night, and it will set me apart from those of my contemporaries whose works were no better than mine, but who wore dark-coloured waistcoats. Nor am I sorry to leave this impres­ sion behind me; it has a certain grim haughtiness about it, and in spite of some youthful lack of taste, exhibits a not unpleasant contempt for public opinion and ridicule. 359

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Any one acquainted with the French character will readily acknowledge that the mere fact of showing one’s self in a theatre where what it is the custom to call tout Paris is assembled, with hair as long as Albert D ürer’s and a waistcoat as red as an Andalusian torero’s muleta, calls for far more courage and strength of soul than is required by a man storming a redoubt bristling with death-dealing guns. For in every war numberless brave fellows perform that easy fear without having to be urged, while up to the present but one single Frenchman has been found daring enough to cover his breast with a piece of stuff of so aggressive, unusual, and dazzling a colour. Judging by the imperturbable disdain with which he affronted the glances of the audience, it was easy to see that, if he had been in the least degree egged on, he would have turned up at the second performance in a daffodil-yellow vest. The utter amazement of the public and the persistence of an impression that ought not to have lasted beyond the close of the first act, must have been due less to the startling colour of the garment than to the heroic madness that thus exposed itself, with consummate coolness, to the sarcasm of the women, the pity of the old men, the contemptuous glances of the dandies, and the coarse laughter of the bourgeois. I did try to tear off that waistcoat of Nessus that clung to my skin, and failing to do so I bravely put up with it in spite of the fancy of the bourgeois, who can never think of me as dressed in any other colour, in spite of the negrohead, bronze-green, maroon, iron-gray, soot-black, Lon don-smoke, steel-gray, rotten-olive, bad-pickle, and other tasteful shades of overcoats in neutral tones, such as may be discovered, after long meditation, by a civilization that has no sense of colour. The case is the same with my hair. I have worn it cut short, but in vain— it was always assumed to be long; and even had I exhibited in the orchestra stalls a hairless, ivory-coloured skull, shining like an ostrich’s egg, people would still have maintained that great waves of Merovingian locks flowed down upon my shoulders. Most ridiculous! So I have allowed the little I have to grow as it pleases, and it has turned the permission to account, the traitor, and given me a little bit the look of a Romanticist Absalom. I stated at the outset of these reminiscences, how it was that I came to be recruited by Gerard into the company of Hernani in Rioult’s studio, and how I was intrusted with the command of a small squad that answered to the password Hierro. That evening was to be, in my opinion, and rightly too, the greatest event of the age, since it was to inaugurate free, youthful, and new thought upon the debris of old routine; and I therefore wished to solemnise the occasion by a specially splendid dress, by an eccentric and gorgeous costume that should do honour to the Master, the school, and the play. At that time the painter student still prevailed in me over the

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poet, and I was much preoccupied with the interests of colour. As far as I was concerned the world was divided into flamboyants and dullards, the former the object of my love, the latter of my aversion. I wanted a return to life, light, movement, audacity in thought and execution, to the fair times of the Renaissance and real antiquity, so that I rejected the faint colouring, the thin, dry drawing, and the compositions that looked like groups of lay figures, which the Empire had bequeathed to the Restoration. These distinctions applied to literature also in my mind. Diderot was a flamboyant for me, Voltaire a dullard, just as Rubens and Poussin were similarly contrasted. But I had in addition a special taste, love for red. I adored that noble colour, now dishonoured by political fury, for it is purple, blood, life, light, and heat, and it harmonises admirably with gold and marble. It was therefore with genuine grief that I saw it disappearing from modern life and even from painting. Before 1789 a man might wear a scarlet mantle braided with gold, but now, in order to get a glimpse of the proscribed colour, I was reduced to watch the Swiss guards relieving sentries, or to look at the red coats of English fox-hunters in the windows of printsellers. Did not Hernani offer a sublime opportunity to restore red to the position it should never have lost; and was it not proper that a young, lionhearted painter student should declare himself the champion of Red, and flout the detested colour in the faces of the Grays, of that crowd of Classicists equally hostile to the splendours of poetry? These oxen, I resolved, should behold red before their eyes, and should hear the verse of Hugo. I do not intend to attempt to correct a legend, but I am bound to say that the waistcoat was, as a matter of fact, a doublet cut on the pattern of the Milanese globose breastplates and the Valois doublets, busked to a point on the stomach and ridged down the centre. I have been told that I possess a very full vocabulary, but I cannot find words to express the amazed look of my tailor when I described the kind of waistcoat I wanted. “ He remained speechless,” and Lebrun’s studies in expression, at the page marked “ Astonishment,” have no faces with eyes wider open, eyebrows more uplifted, and more wrinkles at the top of the forehead, than the face of my worthy Gaulois—such was his name—at that moment. He thought me crazy, but respect prevented his giving voice to his feelings, and of deference to a family he thought highly of; he merely objected in a timid voice: “ But that is not the fashion, sir.” “ Well, it shall be the fashion, once I have worn it,” I replied with a coolness worthy of Beau Brummel, Nash, Count d ’Orsay, or any other celebrated dandy.

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“ I do not understand the cutting of it. It is more of a theatrical costume than a town suit, and I may make a mess of it.” “ I am going to give you a pattern in gray linen, drawn, cut, and basted by myself. You can fit it. It hooks down the back like the waistcoats of the Saint Simonians, but is in no wise symbolical.” “ Very well, very well. My fellow-craftsmen will laugh at me, but I shall do what you want. Now, of what stuff is this precious garment to be made?” I drew from a coffer a splendid piece of cherry or Chinese vermilion satin, and triumphantly unfolded it before my terrified tailor, with an air of calm satisfaction that revived his fears that I was out of my mind. The light shimmered and gleamed upon the folds of the stuff, which I rumpled in order to bring out the play of light and shade, making it run through the warmest, the richest, the most ardent, the most delicate shades of red. In order to avoid wearing the infamous red of ’93, I had admitted a slight admixture of purple in the dye, for I was very desirous not to be suspected of any political intention. I was not an admirer of Saint-Just and Maximilian Robespierre, as were some of my comrades, who posed as the Montag­ nards of poetry, but I was rather a medieval, steel-clad feudal baron, ready to intrench myself against the invasion of the age in the stronghold of Goetz von Berlichingen, as was proper in a page of the Victor Hugo of that day, who had also his tower in the Sierra. In spite of the easily understood repugnance of worthy Gaulois, the doublet was duly made, was hooked behind, and, save for the fact that it was the only one of that cut and colour in the theatre, became me as well as a fashionable waistcoat. The rest of my dress consisted of trousers of a very light sea-green, with a black velvet band down the outer seam, a black coat with very broad velvet facings turned well back, and a full gray overcoat lined with green satin. Round my neck I wore a moire ribbon, which answered the double purpose of a shirt collar and a necktie. I am bound to confess that this costume was well devised to irritate and scandalise the Philistines. Nor are you to imagine that I have improved on what the costume really was. My description is strictly accurate. In “ Victor Hugo’s Life told by an Eye-Witness” are these words: “ The only eccentricity was in the costumes, and for that matter, it was sufficient to horrify the occupants of the boxes. People pointed with horror to M. Théophile Gautier, whose flaming waistcoat blazed that evening above a pair of light gray trousers, with a black velvet stripe, and whose hair escaped from under the broad brim of a flat hat. The impassibility of his pale, regular features, and the coolness with which he looked at the respectable people in the boxes showed to what depths of abomination and desolation the drama had fallen.”

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Yes, verily, I did look at them with contempt, these larvae of the past and of routine, at all those foes of art, of idealism, of liberty, and of poetry, who sought to close the gates of the future with their palsied hands, and in my heart burned fierce desire to scalp them with my tomahawk and to hang these trophies at my belt. In trying to do this, however, I should have run the risk of getting more wigs than heads of hair, for if the Classicist school gibed at the long hair of the modern school, it displayed, on the other hand, round the balconies of the ThéatreFrangais a collection of bald heads comparable to the chaplet of skulls of the god Dourga. This fact was so self-evident that at the sight of these yellow skulls uprising from between the triangular shirt-collars, with flesh tones of colour of rancid butter, and malevolent in spite of their paternal look, a young sculptor of much wit and talent, who has since become famous, and whose witticisms are as admirable as his statues, shouted amid the tumult; “ Guillotine all those knee-caps!”

Bouzingos and Jeunes-France Enid Starkie , 1954

In 1831 Petrus Borel and his followers migrated from the Latin Quarter to the heights of Rochechouart—now Boulevard Rochechouart—to imitate Saint Simon who had settled with his own disciples on the hill of Ménilmontant. As he could not afford a whole house, he rented a large room opening on to a garden, at the corner of the Rue d ’Auvergne, and called his settlement ‘Le Camp des Tartares’. Its members were the former Petit Cénacle—Célestin Nanteuil, Bouchardy, Jehan du Seigneur, Philothée O’Neddy, Gérard de Nerval and Théophile Gautier. They were soon however to change their name to Les Jeunes France, intending to indicate that they were the youngest, most advanced and most adventurous spirits in France. They declared that they were pledged to fight against philistin­ ism in all its aspects, and against the new order of Louis Philippe. Gautier has given us a description of the headquarters of the association. Since the Tartares were poor their room was only scantily furnished—especially in the matter of chairs—so most of the guests were obliged to sit on the floor. But the absence of furniture was redeemed by the originality of the decorations. Devéria and Boulanger had embellished the walls with mural paintings, and Jehan du Seigneur had contributed sculptured medallions; on the mantelpiece stood two antique and very precious Rouen vases, always filled with flowers, and they flanked a grinning skull which took the place of the customary clock in the centre—some part of a human skeleton was an essential accessory for every Tartare. It was at this time that Gérard de Nerval, at a dinner at the restaurant of Le Petit Moulin Rouge, produced a skull for use as a drinking vessel, claiming that it was that of his father killed at the Battle of the Beresina—he was, as it happened, very much alive and flourishing at the time. When this strange goblet was produced Célestin Nanteuil called out to the waiter: ‘Bring us some sea w ater.’ Théophile Gautier asked in astonishment the wherefore of this order and he answered ‘Don’t you remember that Hugo, in Han d ’Islande, 364

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made his hero drink sea water from the skulls of the dead? Let us follow his example. Garçon une eau de mer!’ On the heights of Rochechouart Borel and his band of Tartares followed the nudist teaching of the Évadistes and sat in their garden in the summer without any clothes, but they were not left in peace to enjoy their cult, for the neighbours complained to the police that they could see them from their windows, and they were then forbidden, under threat of arrest, from continuing this ‘outrage aux moeurs’. They however found other ways of being a source of annoyance and scandal to their neighbours. Sometimes they would drape a dressmaker’s dummy which they possessed in a shroud and fling it into the street saying that it was a corpse which they had dug up in the nearby cemetery. At other times they gave concerts in their garden, with a band consisting solely of brass wind at which none of them was proficient so that the result was cacophony. They were constantly in clash with the police who did not at all know how to deal with them. One evening, after they had eaten and drunk too well, they were charging, arm in arm, down the hill towards the city, and shouting lustily to acclaim one of their number: ‘Vive Bouchardy! Vive Bouchardy!’ This was less than a year after the July Revolution and the crowd thought that they were shouting: ‘Vive Charles X: Vive Charles X!’ and tried to silence them. The Jeunes France defended themselves vigorously and the police rushed forward to quell what they thought was another riot—there had been many since Louis Philippe had seized power—and Gérard de Nerval, the mildest and most inoffensive of the band, but also the easiest to apprehend, was marched off as the ringleader to prison where he was incarcerated for a month. He has given an account of this experience in Saint Pélagie. The behaviour of the Jeunes France eventually wore down the patience of their neighbors and the landlord gave them notice. Then Petrus Borel rented a tiny house consisting of one floor and a basement in a street in the Latin Quarter most appropriately called La Rue d ’Enfer—perhaps indeed that was why he chose it—and there he gave one of the most notorious parties of the age as a house-warming—a parody of Dumas’ famous fancy-dress party. Ice-cream and custards were served in skulls and the punch was so strong that many of the guests succumbed to its effects and were carried down to the basement which was used as an improvised casualty station, where they were left lying on the floor to recover. M ustard’s new Galop Infernal was danced that evening and since the room was too small for its wild career the front doors were opened and it finished in the street outside. When the festivities were over Petrus Borel was dubbed ‘Prince des audaces et maitre supreme des étonnements’. In the Rue d ’Enfer the Jeunes France persisted in their notorious

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behaviour of shocking the public and calling attention to themselves in every possible way. Well known are Gérard de Nerval’s perambulations in the Tuileries Gardens with a lobster on a pale blue lead, when he used to say that crustacea pleased his reflective turn of mind, for they do not bite like a dog, nor chatter like children when he wished to meditate. He used also to pitch a tent in the middle of the room and live inside like a primitive man from the bush; or else he would take a large Renaissance bed with him when he went to visit his friends and then, so greatly did he respect it, would sleep beside it on the floor as its devoted slave. For a time the Jeunes France continued to attend Nodier’s Sunday literary evenings at the Bibliothèque de L ’Arsenal, but they scandalised the more respectable elderly members of this gathering so much by their noisy behavior and the extravagance of their dress—Gautier came in his red doublet of Hernani fame and Borel wore the waistcoat which he alleged was the colour of Polish blood, and his hat with the torrent of motley ribbons flowing down his back. The older men protested to Nodier who explained to the Jeunes France that they were a cause of offence, and henceforth they ceased to attend. Philothée O’Neddy has given a good picture of the wildness and eccen­ tricity of the group in his poem Pandaemonium from his collection, Feu et Flamme. Et jusques au matin, les damnés Jeunes Frances Nagèrent dans un flux d ’indicibles démences, —Echangeant leurs poignards—promettant de percer L ’abdomen des chiffreurs—jurant de dépenser Leur âme à guerroyer contre le siècle aride.— Tous, les crins vagabonds, l ’oeil sauvage et torride, Pareils à des chevaux sans mors ni cavaliers, Tous burlant et dansant dans le fauve atelier, Ainsi que des pensers d ’audaces et d ’ironie Dans le crâne orageux d ’un homme de génie!

Soon after settling in the Rue d ’Enfer, Borel’s followers ceased calling themselves Les Jeunes France and adopted the name of Bouzingos. The epithet had been hurled at them as a term of abuse but they had picked it up joyfully and wore it with pride. One evening, during one of their frequent clashes with the police, they had been singing loudly as they cavorted through the streets a song whose chorus ran: ‘Nous allons faire du bouzingo, du bouzingo, du bouzingo!’ Those who heard them began calling them contemptuously ‘les bouzingos’, but they pretended to be pleased at this distinction, and adopted the name proudly, saying that henceforth they would be known by no other. They even planned to bring

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out a joint collection of short stories under the title Contes du Bouzingo, but only Gérard de Nerval ever carried out the project and his tale, Main de Gloire, Conte du Bouzingo, was published separately, since there was no collection, in the Cabinet de Lecture in September 1832. Soon the word Bouzingo came to mean anything that was noisy, undisciplined and extrav­ agant. There was even published in Le Figaro a satiric biography under the title Biographie du Bouzingot. The final ‘t ’ should however not have been added as is clear from Philothée O’Neddy’s letter on the subject. The number and extent of the articles which appeared for a year in the Figaro indicate the notoriety of the Jeunes France and Bouzingos during the early eighteen-thirties. They occupied almost all the available space in the paper. Between August and October 1831 seven articles were devoted to the Jeunes France and, when they had taken the name of Bouzingos, between January and June 1832, there were twenty articles and frequent allusions to them. All these contributions were in a satiric vein but they were not at all exaggerated. According to them the houses of the Bouzingos are extraordinary for their walls are covered with weapons of every descrip­ tion. One sees notices which say ‘Do not touch, this is a poisoned dagger!’ or else ‘a poisoned arrow’. Or else it is a wolf-trap, a poisoned shirt, a tomahawk, or the scalp of a native chief. The chances are that on the mantelpiece there stands a bowl in which the foetus of a child is preserved in spirit. At dinner, says the Figaro, the Bouzingo eats wild boar or peacock with its long tail. ‘That’s right, strong man, eat wild boar, it’s indigestible but it’s gothic. Peacock is revolting, but it spreads its tail to the sun. Waiter, peacock for four!’ In political opinions the Bouzingo is a Republican and against all law and order. He demands liberty, absolute liberty, boundless liberty; liberty to make a row at night and prevent other people from sleeping, liberty to transgress the laws of the land, and to break windows. The mildest Bouzingo, says the Figaro, is incapable of writing the shortest note without speaking of death and damnation. He drinks punch from the skull of a dearly loved mistress and stirs the beverage with the shin-bone of a close friend who has died young. He takes his pleasures sadly. ‘Sa gaieté est putride’ says one of the articles. His favourite pastime is to spend the day in the catacombs, in a cemetery or in a dissecting room. To his lady-love he says, as he shows her a bone, ‘You are like this under your ribbons, silks and laces. You walk linked to a skeleton, hugging death close to your heart.’ Yet he is wise to behave thus for all modern girls fall in love with the Bouzingo. Their hearts flutter at the sight of the Byronic and ‘fatal’ lover whom Fate has destined for them. ‘See, my sister, how beautiful he is in

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poetic pallor,’ cries one of them, ‘how interesting he is! He has Satan’s eyes. I love Satan!’ The best and most vivid picture of the Jeunes France and Bouzingos is the fictional account given by Théophile Gautier in a collection of sketches which he published under the title of Les Jeunes France. They were written satirically at a later date when he himself had outgrown the extravagance of his youth. In the main story in the collection, Daniel Jovard, we see the hero progressing from normality to extravagance, and it gives a vivid picture of the behaviour of advanced literary young men during the years which followed the Revolution of 1830. At first Daniel is a conventional and old-fashioned young man but he is converted by his close friend, Ferdinand de C., to more progressive views. We are intro­ duced to Ferdinand sitting in his rooms; they are furnished with renais­ sance pieces, eastern china, strange weapons and fantastic pictures repre­ senting scenes of witches’ sabbath; there are as well many objects whose use is impossible to imagine—hookahs and other implements for smoking. In the midst of these Ferdinand is seated, wearing a dressing-gown orna­ mented with dragons, with embroidered slippers on his feet which rest so high on the mantelpiece that he is almost sitting on his head, and he is nonchalantly smoking a Spanish cigarette. He is horrified to discover that Daniel has never smoked and does not know how to dress. He undertakes his education and teaches him how to assume a mediaeval air in order to give himself personality. He makes him throw away his respectable clothes, and orders for him a red waistcoat and a coloured coat. He also makes him grow a long beard and learn by rote anatomical terms so that he could with facility ‘parler cadavre’. When we read the dialogue in the writings of Borel, O’Neddy and Janin, we realise how little Gautier has had to exaggerate in order to make his hero ridiculous. After his lessons Jovard is able to write: Par l’enfer! je me sens un immense désir De broyer sous mes dents sa chair, et de saisir, Avec quelque lambeau de sa peau blanche et verte, Son coeur demi-pourri dans sa poitrine ouverte.

His first task, when emancipated, was to find a suitable name since his own was too common and would not look well as the signature to a sonnet or a picture. After six months of labour he managed to concoct one. The Christian name ended in ‘us’ and the surname had so many ‘k ’s and ‘w ’s that it was impossible to pronounce. Having adopted his name he thought of how to make it famous and of selecting an art in which he would shine. At first he decided on painting

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and produced pictures which were very advanced in the eighteen-thirties but which to-day might please modern schools of art. His best picture was one of a man with a tiny face partially covered by a long beard, with an abnormally high forehead—that was fashionable in advanced circles and Daniel shaved his in order to make it seem exceptionally high—very little hair and eyebrows meeting below his eyes as was customary amongst Byronic heroes. Fame however did not come quickly and he deliberated for many weeks on whether he should commit suicide so that his name should appear in the papers. At last he read the press report of the trial and death sentence of a man accused of murder and he then considered assassinating someone so that he could reach fame by being publicly guillotined. In another story, Celle-ci et celle-là, Gautier wrote of a young man called Rodolphe who decided that his next mistress should be as green as an unripe lemon, that her eyebrows should be artificially raised so as to give her a permanently surprised look. Her eyes were to be veiled with eastern melancholy, her nose Jewish, and her hair to be of the same green hue as her face. Rodolphe, like Baudelaire, after him, had a passion for cats and he always had several of different sizes and breeds, who used to come and lie in bed with him. He loved them better than anything else in the world—more even than his mistresses. Rodolphe however ended tragically. One day hearing the bell ring he went down to open the door and in his hurry forgot to remove his nightcap, the badge of the bourgeois, to find his mistress waiting to be admitted. His pride could not survive such a disgrace and shortly afterwards he threw himself into the Seine, reflecting, as he sank to his death, that he would make a beautiful corpse.

Initiation at the Studio W. C. Morrow, 1900

Among the others who entered Gérome’s atelier at the same time that Bishop did was a Turk named Haidor (fresh from the Ottoman capital), a Hungarian, a Siamese, an American from the plains of Nebraska, and five Frenchmen from the provinces. They all tried to speak French and be agreeable as they entered the atelier together. At the door stood a gardien, whose principal business is to mark absentees and suppress riots. Then they passed to the gentle mercies of the reception committee and the massier within. The massier is a student who manages the studio models, and masse money. This one, a large fellow with golden whiskers (size and strength are valuable elements of the m assier’s efficiency), demanded twenty-five francs from each of the new-comers—this being the masse money, to pay for fixtures, turpentine, soap, and clean towels, et pour payer a boire. The Turk refused to pay, protesting that he had but thirty francs to last him the month; but menacing stools and sticks opened his purse; his punishment was to come later. After the money had been collected from all the nouveaux the entire atelier of over sixty students, dressed in working blouses and old coats, formed in line, and with deafening shouts of “ A boire! a boire!” placed the nouveaux in front to carry the class banner, and thus marched out into the Rue Bonaparte to the Café des Deux Magots, singing songs fit only for the studio. Their singing, shouting, and ridiculous capers drew a great crowd. At the café they created consterna tion with their shouting and howling until the arrival of great bowls of “ grog Américain,” cigarettes, and gâteaux. Rousing cheers were given to a marriage-party across the Place St.-Germain. The Turk was forced to do a Turkish dance on a table and sing Turkish songs, and to submit to merciless ridicule. The timid little Siamese also had to do a turn, as did Bishop and W______, the American from Nebraska, who had been a cowboy at home. After yelling themselves horse and nearly wrecking the café, the 370

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students marched back in a disorderly mob to the École. Then the real trouble began. The gardien having conveniently disappeared, the students closed and barricaded the door. “ A poil! a poil!” they yelled, dancing frantically about the frightened nouveaux; “ a poil les sales nouveaux! a poil!” They seized the Turk and stripped him, despite his desperate resistance; then they tied his hands behind him and with paint and brushes decorated his body in the most fantastic designs that they could conceive. His oaths were frightful. He cursed them in the name of Allah, and swore to have the blood of all Frenchmen for desecrating the sacred person of a Moslem. He called them dogs of infidels and Christians. But all this was in Turkish, and the students enjoyed it immensely. “ En broche!” they yelled, after they had made him a spectacle with the brushes; “ en broche! Il faut le mettre en broche!” This was quickly done. They forced the Turk to his haunches, bound his wrists in front of his upraised knees, thrust a long pole between his elbows and knees, and thus bore him round the atelier at the head of a singing procession. Four times they went round; then they placed the helpless M. Haidor on the model-stand for future reference. The bad French that the victim occasionally mixed with his tirade indicated the fearful damnation that he was doubtless dealing out in Turkish. A circle was then formed about him and a solemn silence fell upon the crowd. A Frenchman named Joncierge, head of the reception committee, stepped forth, and in slow and impressive speech announced that it was one of the requirements of the Atelier Gerome to brand all nouveaux over the heart with the name of the atelier, and that the branding of the Turk would now proceed. Upon hearing this, M. Haidor emitted a fearful howl. But he was turned to face the red-hot studio stove and watch the brandingiron slowly redden in the coals. During this interval the students sang the national song, and followed it with a funeral march. Behind the Turk’s back a second poker was being painted to resemble a red-hot one. The hot poker was taken from the fire, and its usefulness tested by burning a string with it. Haidor grew deathly pale. An intense silence sat upon the atelier as the iron was brought near the helpless young man. In a moment, with wonderful cleverness, the painted poker was substituted for the hot one and placed quickly against his breast. When the cold iron touched him he roared like a maddened bull, and rolled quivering and moaning upon the floor. The students were frantic with delight. It was some time before Haidor could realize that he was not burned to a crisp. He was then taken across the atelier and hoisted to a narrow shelf fifteen feet from the floor, where he was left to compose himself and enjoy the tortures of the other nouveaux. He dared not move, however, lest he fall; and because he refused to take anything in good-nature, but glared

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hatred and vengeance down at them, they pelted him at intervals with water-soaked sponges. The Hungarian and one of the French nouveaux were next seized and stripped. Then they were ordered to fight a duel, in this fashion: they were made to mount two stools about four feet apart. The Hungarian was handed a long paintbrush dripping with Prussian blue, and the Frenchman a similar brush soaked with crimson lake. Then the battle began. Each hesitated to splash the other at first, but as they warmed to their work under the shouting of the committee they went in with a will. When the Frenchman had received a broad splash on the mouth in return for a chest decoration of his adversary, his blood rose, and then the serious work began. Both quickly lost their temper. When they were unwillingly made to desist the product of their labors was startling, though not beautiful. Then they were rubbed down vigorously with turpentine and soiled towels, and were given a franc each for a bath, because they had behaved so handsomely. Bishop came next. He had made up his mind to stand the initiation philosophically, whatever it might be, but when he was ordered to strip he became apprehensive and then angry. Nothing so delights the students as for a nouveau to lose his temper. Bishop squared off to face the whole atelier, and looked ugly. The students silently deployed on three sides, and with a yell rushed in but not before three of them had gone down under his fists did they pin him to the floor and strip him. While Bishop was thus being prepared, the Nebraskan was being dealt with. He had the wisdom not to lose his temper, and that made his resistance all the more formidable. Laughing all the time, he nevertheless dodged, tripped, wres­ tled, threw stools, and did so many other astonishing and baffling things that the students though able to have conquered him in the end, were glad to make terms with him. In this arrangement he compelled them to include Bishop. As a result, those two mounted the model throne naked, and sang together and danced a jig, all so cleverly that the Frenchmen were frantic with delight, and welcomed them as des bons amis. The amazing readiness and capability of the American fist bring endless delight and perennial surprise to the French. The rest of the nouveaux were variously treated. Some, after being stripped, were grotesquely decorated with designs and pictures not suit­ able for general inspection. Others were made to sing, to recite, or to act scenes from familiar plays, or, in default of that, to improvise scenes, some of which were exceedingly funny. Others, attached to a rope depend­ ing from the ceiling, were swung at a perilous rate across the atelier, dodging easels in their flight. At half-past twelve the sport was over. The barricade was removed, the

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Turk’s clothes hidden, the Turk left howling on his shelf, and the atelier abandoned. The next morning there was trouble. The director was furious, and threatened to close the atelier for a month, because the Turk had not been discovered until five o ’clock, when his hoarse howls attracted the attention of the gardien of the fires. His trousers and one shoe could not be found. It was three months before Haidor appeared at the atelier again, and then everything had been forgotten.

Art Takes to the Streets: The Quat ’z ’ Arts Ball, 1893 F. Berkeley Smith, 1901

Often after an annual dinner of one of the ateliers, the entire body of students will march into the “ Bullier,” three hundred strong, and take a good-natured possession of the place. There have been some serious demonstrations in the Quarter by the students, who can form a small army when combined. But as a rule you will find them a good-natured lot of fellows, who are out for all the humor and fun they can create at the least expense. But in June, 1893, a serious demonstration by the students occurred, for these students can fight as well as dance. Senator Beranger, having read one morning in the “ Courrier Français” an account of the revelry and nudity of several of the best-known models of the Quarter at the “ Quat’z ’ A rts” ball, brought a charge against the organizers of the ball, and several of the models, whose beauty unadorned had made them conspicuous on this most festive occasion. At the ensuing trial, several celebrated beauties and idols of the Latin Quarter were convicted and sentenced to a short term of imprisonment, and fined a hundred francs each. These sentences were, however, remitted, but the majority of the students would not have it thus, and wanted further satisfaction. A mass meeting was held by them in the Place de la Sorbonne. The police were in force there to stop any disturbance, and up to 10 o ’clock at night the crowd was held in control. It was a warm June night, and every student in the Quarter was keyed to a high state of excitement. Finally a great crowd of students formed in front of the Café d ’Harcourt, opposite the Sorbonne; things were at fever heat; the police became rough; and in the row that ensued, somebody hurled one of the heavy stone matchsafes from a café table at one of the policemen, who in his excitement picked it up and hurled it back into the crowd. It struck and injured fatally an innocent outsider, who was taken to the Charity Hospital, in the rue Jacob, and died there. 374

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On the following Monday another mass meeting of students was held in the Place de la Sorbonne, who, after the meeting, formed in a body and marched to the Chamber of Deputies, crying: “ Conspuez Dupuy,” who was then president of the Chamber. A number of deputies came out on the portico and the terrace, and smilingly reviewed the demonstration, while the students hurled their anathemas at them, the leaders and men in the front rank of this howling mob trying to climb over the high railing in front of the terrace, and shouting that the police were responsible for the death of one of their comrades. The Government, fearing further trouble and wishing to avoid any disturbance on the day of the funeral of the victim of the riot in the Place Sorbonne, deceived the public as to the hour when it would occur. This exasperated the students so that they began one of those demonstrations for which Paris is famous. By 3 p . m . the next day the Quartier Latin was in a state of siege—these poets and painters and sculptors and musicians tore up the rue Jacob and constructed barricades near the hospital where their comrade had died. They tore up the rue Bonaparte, too, at the Place St. Germain des Près, and built barricades, composed of overturned omnibuses and tramcars and newspaper booths. They smashed windows and everything else in sight, to get even with the Government and the smiling deputies and the murderous police—and then the troops came, and the affair took a different turn. In three days thirty thousand troops were in Paris—principally cavalry, many of the regiments coming from as far away as the center of France. With these and the police and the Garde Républicaine against them, the students melted away like a handful of snow in the sun; but the demonstra­ tions continued spasmodically for two or three days longer, and the little crooked streets, like the rue du Four, were kept clear by the cavalry trotting abreast—in and out and dodging around corners—their black horse-tail plumes waving and helmets shining. It is sufficient to say that the vast army of artists and poets were routed to a man and driven back into the more peaceful atmosphere of their studios. Of all the balls in Paris, the annual “ Bal des Quat’z ’ A rts” stands unique. This costume ball is given every year, in the spring, by the students of the different ateliers, each atelier vying with the others in creation of the various floats and cort éges, and in the artistic effect and historical correctness of the costumes. The first “ Quat’z ’ A rts” ball was given in 1892. It was a primitive affair, compared with the later ones, but it was a success, and immediately the “ Quat’z ’ A rts” Ball was put into the hands of clever organizers, and became a studied event in all its artistic sense. Months are spent in the creation of spectacles and in the costuming of students and models. Prizes

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are given for the most successful organizations, and a jury composed of painters and sculptors passes upon your costume as you enter the ball, and if you do not come up to their artistic standard you are unceremoni­ ously turned away. Students who have been successful in getting into the “ Quat’z ’ A rts” for years often fail to pass into this bewildering display of beauty and brains, owing to their costume not possessing enough artistic originality or merit to pass the jury. It is, of course, a difficult matter for one who is not an enrolled member of one of the great ateliers of painting, architecture, or sculpture to get into the “ Quat’z ’ A rts,” and even after one’s ticket is assured, you may fail to pass the jury. Imagine this ball, with its procession of moving tableaux. A huge float comes along, depicting the stone age and the primitive man, every detail carefully studied from the museums. Another represents the last day of Babylon. One sees a nude captive, her golden hair and white flesh in contrast with the black velvet litter on which she is bound, being carried by a dozen stalwart blackamoors, followed by camels bearing nude slaves and the spoils of a captured city. As the ball continues until daylight, it resembles a bacchanalian fete in the days of the Romans. But all through it, one is impressed by its artistic completeness, its studied splendor, and permissible license, so long as a costume (or the lack of it) produces an artistic result. One sees the miseen-scene of a barbaric court produced by the architects of an atelier, all the various details constructed from carefully studied sketches, with maybe a triumphal throne of some barbaric king, with his slaves, the whole costumed and done in a studied magnificence that takes one’s breath away. Again an atelier of painters may reproduce the frieze of the Parthenon in color; another a float or a decoration, suggesting the works of their master. The room becomes a thing of splendor, for it is as gorgeous a spectacle as the cleverest of the painters, sculptors, and architects can make it, and is the result of careful study—and all for the love of it!—for the great “ Quat’z ’ A rts” ball is an event looked forward to for months. Special instructions are issued to the different ateliers while the ball is in prepara­ tion, and the following one is a translation in part from the notice issued before the great ball of ’99. As this is a special and private notice to the atelier, its contents may be interesting: B al

des

Q u a t ’z ’ A r t s

Moulin Rouge, 21 April, 1899 Doors open at 10 p . m . and closed at midnight. The card of admission is absolutely personal, to be taken by the committee before the opening of the ball.

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The committee will be masked, and comrades without their personal card will be refused at the door. The cards must carry the name and quality of the artist, and bear the stamp of his atelier. Costumes are absolutely necessary. The soldier—the dress suit, black or in color—the monk—the blouse—the domino—kitchen boy—loafer—bicyclist, and other nau­ seous types, are absolutely prohibited. Should the weather be bad, comrades are asked to wait in their carriages, as the committee in control cannot, under any pretext, neglect guarding the artistic effect of the ball during any confusion that might ensue. A great “ feed” will take place in the grand hall; the buffet will serve as usual individual suppers and baskets for two persons. The committee wish especially to bring the attention of their comrades to the question of women, whose cards of admission must be delivered as soon as possible, so as to enlarge their attendance—always insufficient. Prizes (champagne) will be distributed to the ateliers who may distinguish themselves by the artistic merit and beauty of their female display. All the women who compete for these prizes will be assembled on the grand staircase before the orchestra. The nude, as always, is PROHIBITED!?! The question of music at the head of the procession is of the greatest importance, and those comrades who are musi­ cal will please give their names to the delegates of the ateliers. Your good-will in this line is asked for—any great worthless capacity in this line will do, as they always play the same tune, “ Les Pompiers!” THE COMMITTEE— 1899 For days before the “ Quat’z ’ A rts” ball, all is excitement among the students, who do as little work as possible and rest themselves for the great event. The favorite wit of the different ateliers is given the task of painting the banner of the atelier, which is carried at the head of the several corteges. One of these, in Bouguereau’s atelier, depicted their master caricatured as a cupid. The boys once constructed an elephant with oriental trappings—an elephant that could wag his ears and lift his trunk and snort—and after the two fellows who formed respectfully the front and hind legs of their

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knowing beast had practised sufficiently to proceed with him safely, at the head of the cort ége of slave girls, nautch dancers, and manacled captives, the big beast created a success in the procession at the “ Quat’z ’ A rts” ball. After the ball, in the gray morning light, they marched it back to the atelier, where it remained for some weeks, finally becoming such a nuisance, kicking around the atelier and getting in everybody’s way, that the boys agreed to give it to the first junk-man that came around. But as no junk-man came, and as no one could be found to care for its now sadly battered hulk, its good riddance became a problem. What to do with the elephant! that was the question. At last the two, who had sweltered in its dusty frame that eventful night of the “ Quat’z ’ A rts,” hit upon an idea. They marched it one day up the Boulevard St. Germain to the Café des deux Magots, followed by a crowd of people, who, when it reached the café, assembled around it, every one asking what it was for—or rather what it was?—for the beast had by now lost much of the resemblance of its former self. When half the street became blocked with the crowd, the two wise gentlemen crawled out of its fore and aft, and quickly mingled, unnoticed, with the bystanders. Then they disappeared in the crowd, leaving the elephant standing in the middle of the street. Those who had been expecting something to happen—a circus or the rest of the parade to come along—stood around for a while, and then the police, realizing that they had an elephant on their hands, carted the thing away, swearing meanwhile at the atelier and every one connected with it. The cafés near the Od éon, just before the beginning of the ball, are filled with students in costume; gladiators hobnob at the tables with savages in scanty attire—Roman soldiers and students, in the garb of the ancients, strut about or chat in groups, while the uninvited grisettes and models, who have not received invitations from the committee, implore them for tickets. Tickets are not transferable, and should one present himself at the entrance of the ball with another fellow’s ticket, he would run small chance of entering. “ What atelier?” commands the jury “ Cormon.” The student answers, while the jury glance at his makeup. “ To the left!” cries the jury, and you pass in to the ball. But if you are unknown they will simply, “ Connais-pas! To the right!” and you pass down a long covered alley—confident, if you are a “ nou­ veau,” that it leads into the ball-room—until you suddenly find yourself in the street, where your ticket is torn up and all hope of entering is gone. It is hopeless to attempt to describe the hours until morning of this

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annual artistic orgy. As the morning light comes in through the windows, it is strange to see the effect of diffused daylight, electricity, and gas—the bluish light of early morning reflected on the flesh tones—upon nearly three thousand girls and students in costumes one might expect to see in a bacchanalian feast, just before the fall of Rome. Now they form a huge circle, the front row sitting on the floor, the second row squatting, the third seated in chairs, the fourth standing, so that all can see the dancing that begins in the morning hours—the wild impromptu dancing of the moment. A famous beauty, her black hair bound in a golden fillet with a circle wrought in silver and studded with Oriental turquoises clasping her superb torso, throws her sandals to the crowd and begins an Oriental dance—a thing of grace and beauty—fired with the intensity of the innate nature of this beautifully modeled daughter of Bohemia. As the dance ends, there is a cry of delight from the great circle of barbarians. “ Long live the Quat’z ’ Arts!” they cry, amid cheers for the dancer. The ball closes about seven in the morning, when the long procession forms to return to the Latin Quarter, some marching, other students and girls in cabs and on top of them, many of the girls riding the horses. Down they come from the “ Moulin Rouge,” shouting, singing, and yelling. Heads are thrust out of windows, and a volley of badinage passes between the fantastic procession and those who have heard them coming. Finally the great open court of the Louvre is reached—here a halt is made and a general romp occurs. A girl and a type climb one of the tall lamp-posts and prepare to do a mid-air balancing act, when rescued by the others. At last, at the end of all this horse-play, the march is resumed over the Pont du Carrousel and so on, cheered now by those going to work, until the Od éon is reached. Here the odd procession disbands; some go to their favorite cafés where the festivities are continued—some to sleep in their costumes or what remains of them, wherever fortune lands them— others to studios, where the gaiety is often kept up for days.

Le Lapin Agile: Salon of the Avant-Garde Lisa Appignanesi, 1975 By the time the century had turned, the cabaret had been in existence in Paris for some twenty years. Throughout its history it had served both as a centre for spectacle and as a meeting place for artists. Now, in these years whose imaginative exuberance was to give direction to art for the next half-century, the cabaret became increasingly a salon for the avantgarde, a place where ideas were hatched, and hoaxes concocted. The cabaret was a natural environment for the avant-garde. Spectacle was of its essence, and the avant-garde needed to make a spectacle of itself in order to be heard. Its artistic dissent paralleled the cabaret’s parody of entrenched values, both social and artistic. Humour—ranging in kind from a comic childlikeness to biting satire—marked both; and both seriously exploited the popular elements in art. Finally, the nature of the cabaret programme, its discontinuity supplemented by ironical commen­ tary, reflected the basic composition of the experimental work. This kinship of cabaret and the early twentieth-century avant-garde was a twoway dynamic: one created the other and was in turn influenced by it. The painters and writers who flocked to the cheap living quarters of Montmartre at the turn of the century extended the definition of artist so that it incorporated the entirety of the individual’s life-habits. Following in the notorious footsteps of Rimbaud and Ubu-Jarry, their lives became as much an example of their art as the works they produced. Their pranks, their banquets and festivities, had the same imaginative source as their poems and paintings. With a humorous élan, they interiorized the cabaret spectacle and lived it out on life’s stage. And the main headquarters for the planning of far-ranging artistic schemes was Le Lapin Agile. Situated at the junction of the steeply-sloping rue St. Vincent and the rue des Saules, just across from the cemetery where some three hundred Communards lay buried, the Lapin Agile is still much unchanged today, though its clientele has become one of museum hunters rather than artists. 380

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In the Symbolist period, the locale was called Le Cabaret des Assassins, suggesting the nature of many of its frequenters. Purchased by Aristide Bruant, who wished to preserve this landmark from the rapidly encroach­ ing city, its speculators and inflationary prices, the cabaret became the Lapin Agile when a punning painter, A. Gill, created a signboard for it consisting of a large rabbit popping out of a frying pan: Là peint A. Gill or the Lapin Agile. The cabaret was leased from Bruant by Frédéric Gerard, known as Frédé, a kindly, hirsute, guitar-touting inhabitant of the Butte, who freely extended credit to his impoverished artistic customers. For some ten years the cabaret served as a central meeting ground for artists, some of whom tower in the annals of European art, others who have been forgotten except in the obscure pages of memoirs: Picasso, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Francis Carco, André Warnod, Utrillo, Pierre Mac Orlan, Roland Dorgelès Marie Laurencin, André Salmon, Jules Dépaquit, and Joachim Raphael Boronalis. The path to fame of this last artist testifies to the imaginative ingenuity of the Lapin Agile group. The writer, Roland Dorgelès, later to become an established literary figure, was then a struggling artist well-known on the Butte for his red sweater and tight-fitting black jacket which gave him the air of a ‘grasshop­ per in mourning’—and for his pranks. Dorgelès had decided to settle a score with the Cubists, who were ‘on and off’ members of the Lapin Agile circle. He considered that the Cubists had become a pretentious bunch, and furthermore, their chief spokesman, Apollinaire, refused to answer any queries or criticisms of the movement. In order to mock the Cubists and to prove how easy it was to achieve fame in fashion-conscious Paris, Dorgelès invented an artist called Boronali, who declared himself head of a new artistic school: Excessivism. Boronali published a manifesto pro­ claiming the aims of the school. The manifesto was a perfect parody of Futurist prose and, given the Italian name of its investor, seemed quite believable to the Paris public. Having launched a controversy about the merits of all the painterly ‘isms’, Dorgelès went in search of his artist. The Lapin Agile’s Frédé, who looked like a cross between a Canadian trapper and a Corsican bandit, kept a donkey called Lolo, an essential addition to the cabaret’s rustic ambience. It was in this donkey that Dorgelès found his fashionable artist. Having discovered his ‘artist’ Dor gelès made a bet with all his ‘snob’ friends and those present at the Lapin that at the next Salon des Indépendants he would exhibit a painting more original and provocatively revolutionary than any other. In the presence of a bailiff brought to witness the proceedings, a paint brush was tied to Lolo’s tail, and tubes of paint of different colours provided. Frédé looked on warning that his good donkey was not to be

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harmed. Lolo was fed capaciously and his natural response to a hearty dinner was to wag his tail. As Lolo wagged, the paint brush dipped into a variety of colours did its work on a large canvas held by André Warnod. Gradually the canvas assumed some rather curious and not uninteresting effects. The next step was to find a name for the painting, and after some discussion Dorgelès came up with the title which was to set the Paris critics talking: Et le soleil se couche sur I’ Adriatique (And the sun sets on the Adriatic), by Joachim Raphael Boronali. Lolo’s masterwork was finished just in time for the Salon des Indépen­ dants, and Dorgelès placed himself discreetly near the painting in order to hear the reactions of the spectators. They were exactly what he had breathlessly hoped for. The public and the critics, most of whom men­ tioned the work in their reviews, were divided as to the value of the painting, but their comments on it did not differ appreciably in kind from those directed at the work of Van Dongen, Matisse and Roualt, all of whom exhibited at the same Salon. Dorgelès was ready to launch his bombshell. He told the papers of his hoax and the headlines read: ‘Un Âne, Chef d ’École’ ‘Donkey Heads Artistic School’. Lolo was a sensation! The Salon had never had so many visitors . . . As Dorgelès reminisces, the Salon’s new viewers could still not distin­ guish which painting belonged to the donkey Boronali, and which had been executed by the future greats of the century. A score of potential buyers appeared and Lolo, with a few swishes of his tail, became a very rich artist, not to mention an immortal one. Benezit unknowingly notes him in his reference work on painting as an Italian painter. Legend has it that during the World War, several years after he had been celebrated by the Paris beau monde, Lolo—bored by his country retirement home— committed suicide in the river of Saint-Cyr-sur-Morin, like a true artist ‘in a fit of neuresthenia’. Dorgelès’s pranks tested the supposed connoisseurship of the artist world, sending up the hypocrisies of fashionable taste. They signalled that emphasis on vivid originality which was both the genius and occasionally the fraudulence of the avant-garde. Pranks— artistic gestures or artistic products—none, the avant-garde proved, could be met with the usual set of evaluative criteria and thus stand accounted for. Another of Dorgelès artistic activities gives an example of the inventive disruptiveness of the Montmartre group. In order to unveil the idiocy of apparent art-lovers, Dorgelès smuggled a bust, sculpted by a friend, into the Louvre’s antique gallery. No one noticed the unusualness of this presence amongst the world’s acclaimed ‘classics’ until Dorgelès and his friend arrived one day to claim it. Paris was scandalized both by Dorgelès and its own lack of perception.

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It is no wonder then that in a climate rife with such hoaxes, the emergence of Cubism might be suspected as another ingenious fraud perpetrated by the half-starved dreamers of the Butte. Indeed Cubism could be seen as one of the spectacles invented within the precincts of the Lapin Agile, a humorous antic which, like so many in the tradition of modernism, grew into a serious imaginative project. At the turn of the century the distance between the Lapin and the famed Bateau Lavoir—a sprawling ramshackle residence, named for its resemblance to washer­ women’s barges, which housed Picasso and Max Jacob and entertained some of the greatest talents of the century—was as short as the difference between ingenious hoaxes and significant artistic discoveries. In his De Montmartre au Quartier Latin, Francis Carco recounts how the Lapin Agile served as the imaginative laboratory of modernism. Here the poet and impressario of the avant-garde, Guillaume Apollinaire, held forth on a variety of subjects: pure poetry, Negro art, Cubism and Orphism. Here the mathematician Princet introduced his artist friends to the ‘mathematics of the fourth dimension’. Here Picasso is said to have uttered, ‘Lorsque tu fais un paysage, il fa u t d ’abord que ça ressemble à une assiete.’ (When you create a landscape, it must first of all resemble a plate.) And here too an important encounter with primitive African art took place. Max Jacob’s brother, known as the ‘explorer’, came back from Africa with a portrait of himself. The group immediately noticed that Max’s brother’s golden jacket buttons were not where they should realis­ tically have been, but situated in halo formation around his head. This discovery of the dissociation of objects may have inspired Picasso’s statement soon afterwards, ‘Si tu peins un portrait, tu mets les jam bes à côté sur la toile.’ (If you paint a portrait, you place the legs next to it on the canvas.) The Lapin Agile served as a salon not only for the new art, but also of literature. Pierre Mac Orlan, later to write Quai des Brumes, frequented the cabaret when he was not away on fortune-seeking ventures to the four corners of the globe. Dressed either as a cowboy or an English sportsman, he would recount those humorous anecdotes of adventure which shape his narrative style. These monologues were part of the Lapin’s spectacle. Max Jacob, mystic and humorist, who earned his living telling fortunes in fashionable salons, was a constant participant in the Lapin’s evenings. The two rhymes he inscribed in Frédé’s guestbook reveal that whimsical play-on-words which foreshadows surrealism. 9 heures du soir Trouver la rime à Frédéric, Voilà le hic!

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A translation cannot hope to capture Jacob’s clever puns, verbal and imagistic associations: ‘à bord’ means on board as well as at the edge, here of a book. A. Bord is also the name of a French piano firm. By playing on these associations, and stressing drunkenness, Jacob arrives at the image of the sea and its drunken motion. 9 in the evening To find a rhyme for Frédéric, T hat’s the hic! I’d rather wait to be in a drunken state To register aboard your book. 2 in the morning On board! Piano A. Bord. Logbook! The sea, which thinks, brings This evening to the edge of your door O publican of the Quai des Brumes, Its bundle of sea-scum.

Less well-known now, the poet Jules Depaquit was also a regular at the Lapin. He would always hide himself away in sombre corners, unseen unless one moved numerous objects to get to him. Suddenly, out of this obscurity, he would begin reciting a song about a street organ in a rusty, groaning, yet comical voice. C’est la musique incomprise, Qui fait vomir et qui grise et qui tue . . . A la fin on s’y habitue. It’s music which isn’t understood, It makes one tipsy and grey and vomit away, And it kills . . . At the end one gets used to it.

Depaquit was the bard of mediocre dramas and the petty annoyances of existence. He sang of the obscure and ridiculous; and called his volume of

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poems, Les moments perdus, lost moments, since as he said, no editor has wanted to find them. Depaquit’s lack of self-confidence, his timid little m an’s approach to life is evident in this anecdote which is told about his visit to Alphonse Allais. Apparently Allais, impressed by his work, had invited him to call for lunch. However, when the concierge of the building asked him his business and he replied he wished to see Allais, she sent him to the servants’ entrance. The cook answered the door and after Depaquit had announced his name, she told him that it was a bad moment to call, since Allais had an important luncheon date. Depaquit was asked to wait in the kitchen. The servants were agitated because Allais’s guest did not seem to be arriving and they proceeded to serve the meal. Finally Depaquit was invited to share the servants’ food and when Madame Allais came into the kitchen and asked who he was, he whispered, T didn’t want to disturb anyone . . .’ Personally unprepossessing, Depaquit did however gradually win acclaim on the Butte for the persistent excellence of his verse and its bitter wit. Francis Carco, whose numerous books provide an almost daily chroni­ cal of life on Montmartre, was perhaps the Lapin’s most devoted fre­ quenter. Having come to Paris like so many others, a poor provincial in search of a place in the artistic world, he found in the Lapin both a refuge and a stimulant to artistic activity. The business of earning one’s living was never very easy for these young artists and often Frédé would generously provide them with their only sustenance for the day. The poverty of these bohemians was often as great as that of the other clients of the Lapin—vagrants, rogues, petty criminals, with the girls they had picked up at the Moulin de la Galette or at one of the numerous ‘bals’ of the Butte. Indeed, it was often mere chance which distinguished between those who would leave their names in the annals of art from those who would end up in police files. Meanwhile, the Lapin provided antics, gaiety, poetry, song and discus­ sion. Walls were filled with the works of the frequenters: Utrillo, who sketched for drink; a blue period Picasso harlequin; a large Christ sculpted by Wasley, which served as a coatrack. From time to time Bruant would drop in and sing, and on evenings of exhibition openings the whole group would gather and talk into the small hours of the morning. But danger and an underlying despair were never far away. The poet, Gaston Couté, author of Chansons d ’un gars q u ’a mal tourné, could often be seen lying dead drunk on a bench, and his occasional groans would remind the group of their own situation. Frédé’s pistol was always at hand and his songs, with their mixture of dream and desolation, might be interrupted by shots ringing through the window. For the most part poets and vagrants got on well. Occasionally, however, those ‘guests’ whom

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Fr éd é had refused entry would unload their pistols on the Lapin. One such outburst of violence resulted in the death of Fr éd é’s son, Victor. Victor was idolized by all the girls who came to the Lapin and they would entangle themselves in a variety of escapades to win his love. Their men were jealous, and it was probably by one such jealous lover that Victor was murdered one night. Fr éd é never quite recovered from the shock. Indeed, in many ways Victor’s death signalled the end of an era. Many of the Montmartre regulars led by Apollinaire, began leaving the Butte for the Quartier Latin. The time for youthful escapades was over and with them the playful cabaretistic spirit of the Lapin Agile passed away. War was on the horizon. But the cabaret had served as headquarters of an epoch in which, as Apollinaire testified, ‘We learned to laugh.’

Upper Bohemia: Oxbridge and Chelsea Robert Graves and Alan Hodge , 1941 Oxford and Cambridge were two main hubs of advanced recreational fashion: they were not merely suburbs of London, as they afterwards became. Such novelties as the canary-yellow hunting waistcoat, green velveteen trousers, suede shoes, were initiated there. The famous widebottomed trousers, ‘Oxford bags’, which superseded the conventional pegtop variety in 1924 and set a fashion for the whole world, are said to have started at Cambridge two years previously. The elaborate type of hoax was another Oxford borrowing from Cambridge. For example, a number of dons attended Dr. Emil Busch’s well-advertised psychological lecture and many were impressed by his foreign accent, stimulating argument, and complicated vocabulary. He was an undergraduate in a false beard. Then there was the duel in November 1923 at Godstow near Fair Rosamund’s Tower between cloaked figures armed with pistols. After the first exchange one duellist fell bleeding, and doctors ran up to bandage him. The subject of the duel was reported in the London Press to be an ‘undergraduette of Somerville’, and great excitement was aroused. But no names came out; and the blood was only red ink after all. There was a fashion at both universities for eccentric clubs. In 1921 there was an Oxford University Hide-and-Seek Club that had one very successful meet on Boar’s Hill, in and out of the gardens of the professors and prominent literary people who had made it the most distinguished hill in England. At Cambridge, on the other hand, there was a University Pavement Club, whose members united in agreeing that there was too much rush in modern life. One Saturday, at midday, members of the club sat for an hour on the pavements in King’s Parade, passing the time with tiddley-winks, noughts and crosses, marbles and nap, reading and even knitting. While they were so engaged, a Proctor passed and they had to break the rules of the club in order to stand in his presence while he took their names; he was so sympathetic that after he had gone the club 387

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unanimously elected him their president. They then bound themselves to sit for another hour next week and carried a resolution that lunch-baskets should be brought. All passers-by were invited to join in, ‘in order to secure the unanimity which is essential to pavement life’. Then there was the Oxford Railway Club, formed to popularize the pleasure of drinking on trains at night. A party of a dozen young men in full evening dress would board the Penzance-Aberdeen express at Oxford and travel on it as far as Leicester; they would return at once by the Aberdeen-Penzance express. On the outward journey they would dine, and on the way back make speeches. Both universities had climbing clubs, the members of which did a number of extraordinarily dangerous night-climbing feats on colleges, libraries, and museums, causing much damage to ancient roofs. Almost every year at Oxford someone performed the classic climb up the M artyr’s Memorial to stick a chamber-pot on top. Usually the police shot it down with a rook-rifle, but if it was enamel they had to rig up scaffolding, at great expense. Those were still the days of the long-standing war between the hearty and the aesthete—the hearty being the man who was up chiefly in the hope of getting a Blue, and the aesthete being a literary fop. At Oxford on Election Night, 1923, a prominent aesthete in evening dress (who had introduced sideburns into Oxford, carried about a pet monkey on his shoulder, and persuaded Gertrude Stein to lecture to an undergraduate society) was mobbed by a crowd of drunken hearties; in self-defence he felled a Rugger Blue with a loaded stick. Hitherto aesthetes had been expected to undergo debagging and having their rooms wrecked without protest or compensation—and to like it. This same aesthete resented the invasion of his room by drunken hearties after a ‘binge’ so sincerely that he drew a sword and cut off a thumb of one of the invaders. In younger London Society neither the literary aesthete nor the hearty came much into the picture. The correct thing to do, for intelligent young people with a fixed income and no particular vocation, was to call them­ selves ‘artists’ and live in Chelsea studios. There they gave ‘amusing’ parties and played at being Bohemian. Bohemianism was understood to mean a gay disorderliness of life, cheerful bad manners, and no fixed hours or sexual standards. One sign of the perfect Bohemian was to use imple­ ments for unconventional purposes: for instance, to spread butter with a cut-throat razor, drink tea out of a brandy glass, or use a dish-swab as a hair net. These people pretended to paint but had little or nothing to show for their pretensions, and their chief influence on art was to make the rents of studios rise so high that real artists could no longer afford them. Pseudo­ studios were chiefly furnished with brightly coloured cushions, strewn about the floor or on divan beds— chairs were out of fashion. The Daily

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Dispatch hit off this kind of life, under the headline ‘Not Artists at all, but Arty People’, with: ‘They just talk about drawing and painting and their studios are only used for dressing-up for parties and for dances— “ do’s ,” they call them .’ Real painters were going abroad to work—at first to Montparnasse in Paris, until the arty people followed them there and raised rents and forced them south to Cassis and Cagnes, or west to Brittany. When these places had also been invaded, they went as far as Spain and Portugal, or back again to some country part of England. If they gave up the struggle and consented to become London social parasites, there were always Mayfair hostesses who would delight to show them off at mixed parties, along with actors and musicians, as ‘latest discoveries’. Indeed, artists who did not cultivate such connection had a difficult time; for in Mayfair, the best market for contemporary art, people had uncertain standards of value and bought the paintings of impressive young men whom they had met at parties, rather than paintings they really liked. In general, the more intolerably assured, ill-tempered, and tyrannical a painter seemed to be, the higher the prices he could command. The same was perhaps also true of architects and interior decorators.

Professor Sea Gull Joseph Mitchell, 1942 Joe Gould is a blithe and emaciated little man who has been a notable in the cafeterias, diners, barrooms, and dumps of Greenwich Village for a quarter of a century. He sometimes brags rather wryly that he is the last of the bohemians. “ All the others fell by the wayside,” he says. “ Some are in the grave, some are in the loony bin, and some are in the advertising business.” Gould’s life is by no means carefree; he is constantly tormented by what he calls “ the three H ’s” —homelessness, hunger, and hangovers. He sleeps on benches in subway stations, on the floor in the studios of friends, and in quarter-a-night flophouses on the Bowery. Once in a while he trudges up to one of Father Divine’s Extension Heavens in lower Harlem and gets a night’s lodging for fifteen cents. He is five feet four and he hardly ever weighs more than ninety-five pounds. Not long ago he told a friend that he hadn’t eaten a square meal since June, 1936, when he bummed up to Cambridge and attended a banquet during a reunion of the Harvard class of 1911, of which he is a member. “ I’m the foremost authority in the U.S. on the subject of doing without,” he says. He tells people that he lives on “ air, self-esteem, cigarette butts, cowboy coffee, fried-egg sandwiches, and ketchup.” Cowboy coffee is black coffee with­ out sugar. After finishing a sandwich, Gould customarily empties a bottle or two of ketchup on his plate and eats it with a spoon. The countermen in the Jefferson Diner, on Village Square, which is one of his hangouts, gather up the ketchup bottles and hide them the moment he puts his head in the door. “ I don’t particularly like the confounded stuff,” he says, “ but I make it a practice to eat all I can get. It’s the only grub I know of that’s free of charge.” Gould is a Yankee. His branch of the Goulds has been in New England since 1635, and he is related to the Lowell, Lawrence, Storer, and Vroom families. “ There’s nothing accidental about m e,” he once said. “ I ’ll tell you what it took to make me what I am today. It took old Yankee blood, 390

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an overwhelming aversion to possessions, four years of Harvard, and twenty-five years of beating the living hell out of my insides with bad hooch and bad food.” He says that he is out of joint with the rest of the human race because he doesn’t want to own anything. “ If Mr. Chrysler tried to make me a present of the Chrysler Building,” he says, “ I’d damn near break my neck fleeing from him. I wouldn’t own it; it’d own me. Back home in Massachusetts I ’d be called an old Yankee crank. Here I ’m called a bohemian. It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.” Gould has a twangy voice and a Harvard accent. Bartenders and countermen in the Village refer to him as The Professor, Professor Bloomingdale, Professor Sea Gull, or The Mongoose. He dresses in the castoff clothes of his friends. His overcoat, suit, shirt, and even his shoes are all invariably two or three sizes too large, but he wears them with a forlorn, Chaplin-like rakishness. “ Just look at m e,” he says. “ The only thing that fits is the necktie.” On bitter winter days he puts a layer of newspapers between his shirt and undershirt. “ I ’m snobbish,” he says. “ I only use the Tim es." He is fond of unusual headgear—a toboggan, a beret, or a yachting cap. One summer evening he appeared at a party in a seersucker suit, a polo shirt, a scarlet cummerbund, sandals, and a yachting cap, all hand-me-downs. He uses a long ivory cigarette-holder, and a good deal of the time he smokes butts picked up off the sidewalks. Bohemianism has aged Gould considerably beyond his years. He has got in the habit lately of asking people he has just met to guess his age. Their guesses range between sixty-five and seventy-five; he is fifty-three. H e is n ever h u rt by this; he looks upon it as p ro o f o f his su p erio rity . “ I

get more living done in one year,” he says, “ than ordinary humans do in ten.” Gould is toothless, and his lower jaw swivels from side to side when he talks. He is bald on top, but the hair at the back of his head is long and frizzly, and he has a bushy, cinnamon-colored beard, which he says he trims every other Easter. He has a squint, and while reading he wears a pair of spectacles which slip down to the end of his nose a moment after he puts them on. He doesn’t use his spectacles in the street and without them he has the wild, unfocussed stare of an old scholar who has strained his eyes on small print. Even in the Village many people turn and look at him. He is stooped and moves rapidly, grumbling to himself, with his head thrust forward and held to one side. Under his left arm he usually totes a bulging, greasy, brown pasteboard portfolio, and he swings his right arm aggressively. As he hurries along, he seems to be warding off an imaginary enemy. Don Freeman, the artist, a friend of his, once made a sketch of him walking. Freeman called the sketch “ Joe Gould versus the Elem ents.” Gould is as restless and footloose as an alley cat, and he takes long hikes about the city, now and then disappearing from the Village for weeks at a

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time and mystifying his friends; they have never been able to figure out where he goes. When he returns, always looking pleased with himself, he makes a few cryptic remarks, giggles, and then shuts up. “ I went on a bird walk along the waterfront with an old countess,” he said after his most recent absence. “ The countess and I spent three weeks studying sea gulls.” *

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Even though Gould requires only a few drinks, getting them is some­ times quite a task. Most evenings he prowls around the saloons and dives on the west side of the Village, on the lookout for curiosity-seeking tourists from whom he can cadge beers, sandwiches, and small sums of money. Such people are scarce nowadays. If he is unable to find anyone approach­ able in the tumultuous saloons around Sheridan Square, he goes over to Sixth Avenue and works north, hitting the Jericho Tavern, the Village Square Bar & Grill, the Belmar, Goody’s and the Rochambeau. He has a routine. He doesn’t enter a place unless it is crowded. After he is in, he bustles over to the telephone booth and pretends to look up a number. While doing this, he scrutinizes the customers. If he sees a prospect, he goes over and says, “ Let me introduce myself. The name is Joseph Ferdinand Gould, graduate of Harvard, magna cum difficultate, class of 1911, and chairman of the board of Weal and Woe, Incorporated. In exchange for a drink, I ’ll recite a poem, deliver a lecture, argue a point, or take off my shoes and imitate a sea gull. I prefer gin, but beer will d o .” Gould is by no means a bum. He feels that the entertainment he provides is well worth whatever he is able to cadge. He doesn’t fawn, and he is never grateful. If he is turned down politely, he shrugs his shoulders and leaves the place. However, if the prospect passes a remark like “ Get out of here, you bum ,” Gould turns on him, no matter how big he is, and gives him a frightening tongue-lashing. He is skilled in the use of the obscene epithet; he can curse for ten minutes, growing more shrill and scurrilous by the minute, without repeating himself. When aroused, he is fearless. He will drop his portfolio, put up his fists, and offer to fight men who could kill him with one halfhearted blow. If he doesn’t find an audience on the trip up Sixth, he turns west on Eleventh and heads for the Village Vanguard, in a cellar on Seventh Avenue South. The Vanguard was once a sleazy rendezvous for arty people, but currently it is a thriving night club. Gould and the proprietor, a man named Max Gordon, have known each other for many years and are on fairly good terms much of the time. Gould always hits the Vanguard last. He is sure of it, and he keeps it in reserve. Since it became prosperous, the place annoys him. He goes down the stairs and says, “ Hello, Max, you dirty capitalist. I want a bite to eat and

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a beer. If I don’t get it, I ’ll walk right out on the dance floor and throw a fit.” “ Go argue with the cook,” Gordon tells him. Gould goes into the kitchen, eats whatever the cook gives him, drinks a couple of beers, fills a bag with bread crumbs, and departs. Despite his shyness, Gould has a great fondness for parties. He is acquainted with hundreds of artists, writers, sculptors, and actors in the Village, and whenever he learns that one of them is giving a party, he goes, friend or enemy, invited or not. Usually he keeps to himself for a while, uneasily smoking one cigarette after another and stiff as a board with tenseness. Sooner or later, however, impelled by a drink or two and by the desperation of the ill at ease, he begins to throw his weight around. He picks out the prettiest woman in the room, goes over, bows, and kisses her hand. He tells discreditable stories about himself. He becomes exuber­ ant; suddenly, for no reason at all, he cackles with pleasure and jumps up and clicks his heels together. Presently he shouts, “ All in favor of a oneman floor show, please say ‘A ye,’!” If he gets the slightest encouragement, he strips to the waist and does a hand-clapping, foot-stamping dance which he says he learned on a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota and which he calls the Joseph Ferdinand Gould Stomp. While dancing, he chants an old Salvation Army song, “ There Are Flies on Me, There Are Flies on You, but There Are No Flies on Jesus.” Then he imitates a sea gull. He pulls off his shoes and socks and takes awkward, headlong skips about the room, flapping his arms and letting out a piercing caw with every skip. As a child he had several pet gulls, and he still spends many Sundays on the end of a fishing pier at Sheepshead Bay, observing gulls; he claims he has such a thorough understanding of their cawing that he can translate poetry into it. “ I have translated a number of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poems into sea gull,” he says. Inevitably, at every party Gould goes to, he gets up on a table and delivers some lectures. His lectures are brief, but he gives them lengthy titles, such as “ Drunk as a Skunk, or How I Measured the Heads of Fifteen Hundred Indians in Zero Weather” and “ The Dread Tomato Habit, or Watch Out! Watch Out! Down with Dr. Gallup!” For a reason he has never been able to make quite clear, statistics of any kind infuriate him. In the latter lecture, using statistics he maintains he has found in newspaper financial sections, he proves that the eating of tomatoes by railroad engineers was responsible for fifty-three per cent of the train wrecks in the United States during the last seven years. When Gould arrives at a party, people who have never seen him before usually take one look, snicker, and edge away. Before the evening is over, however, a few of them almost always develop a kind of puzzled respect for him; they get him in a corner, ask him questions, and try to determine what is wrong with him. Gould

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enjoys this. “ When you came over and kissed my hand,” a young woman told him once, “ I said to myself, ‘What a nice old gentleman.’ A minute later I looked around and you were bouncing up and down with your shirt off imitating a wild Indian. I was shocked. Why do you have to be such an exhibitionist?” “ Madam,” Gould said, “ it is the duty of the bohemian to make a spectacle of himself. If my informality leads you to believe that I ’m a rum-dumb, or that I belong in Bellevue, hold fast to that belief, hold fast, hold fast, and show your ignorance.” *

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. . . After seven months of reservation life, Gould ran out of money. He returned to Massachusetts and tried vainly to get funds for another headmeasuring expedition. “ At this juncture in my life,” he says, “ I decided to engage in literary work.” He came to Manhattan and got a job as assistant Police Headquarters reporter for the Evening Mail. One morning in the summer of 1917, after he had been a reporter for about a year, he was basking in the sun on the back steps of Headquarters, trying to overcome a grappa hangover, when the idea for the Oral History blossomed in his mind. He promptly quit his job and began writing. “ Since that fateful morning,” he once said, in a moment of exaltation, “ the Oral History has been my rope and my scaffold, my bed and my board, my wife and my floozy, my wound and the salt on it, my whiskey and my aspirin, and my rock and my salvation. It is the only thing that matters a damn to me. All else is dross.” Gould says that he rarely has more than a dollar at any one time, and that he doesn’t particularly care. “ As a rule,” he says, “ I despise m oney.” However, there is a widely held belief in the Village that he is rich and that he receives an income from inherited property in New England. “ Only an old millionaire could afford to go around as shabby as you,” a bartender told him recently. “ You’re one of those fellows that die in doorways and when the cops search them their pockets are just busting with bankbooks. If you wanted to, I bet you could step over to the West Side Savings Bank right this minute and draw out twenty thousand dollars.” After the death of his mother in 1939, Gould did come into some money. Close friends of his say that it was less than a thousand dollars and that he spent it in less than a month, wildly buying drinks all over the Village for people he had never seen before. “ He seemed miserable with money in his pockets,” Gordon, the proprietor of the Vanguard, says. “ When it was all gone, it seemed to take a load off his m ind.” While Gould was spending his inheritance, he did one thing that satisfied him deeply. He bought a big, shiny radio and took it out on Sixth Avenue and kicked it to pieces. He

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has a low opinion of radio. “ Five minutes of the idiot’s babble that comes out of those machines, he says, “ would turn the stomach of a goat.” *

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Gould’s opinion of contemporary writing . . . is low. Occasionally, at the Public Library, he takes out a recently published history and sits down with it at his favorite table in the genealogy room. Almost immediately he begins to grunt and groan and curse the author. “ The hell you say,” he is apt to exclaim, smacking the book with his palm and startling the other people at the table. “ Who told you? It simply isn’t true! Garbage, garbage, ten tons of garbage! And they saw down beautiful trees to make paper to print this stuff on! The awful waste! Oh! Oh! I just can’t endure it!” Gould’s outspokenness has made him a lone wolf in the Village; he has never been allowed to join any of the art, poetry, or ism organizations. He has been trying for ten years to join the Raven Poetry Circle, which puts on the poetry exhibition in Washington Square each summer and is the most powerful organization of its kind in the Village, but he has been blackballed every time. However, the Ravens usually let him attend their readings. Francis Lambert McCrudden, a retired Telephone Company employee who is the head Raven, claims that Gould is not serious about poetry. “ We serve wine at our readings, and that is the only reason Mr. Gould attends,” he once said. “ He sometimes insists on reading foolish poems of his own, and it gets on your nerves. At our religious-poetry night he demanded permission to recite a poem entitled ‘My Religion.’ I told him to go ahead, and this is what he recited: In winter I’m a Buddhist, And in summer I ’m a nudist.

And at our nature-poetry night he begged to recite a poem entitled ‘The Sea Gull.’ I gave him permission, and he jumped out of his chair and began to wave his arms and leap about and scream, ‘Scree-eek! Scree-eek!’ It was upsetting. We are serious poets and we don’t approve of that sort of behavior.” In the summer of 1942 Gould picketed the Raven exhibition, which was held on the fence of a tennis court on Washington Square South. In one hand he carried his portfolio and in the other he held a placard on which he had printed: “ JOSEPH FERDINAND GOULD, HOT SHOT POET FROM POETVILLE, A REFUGEE FROM THE RAVENS. POETS OF THE WORLD, IGNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR BRAINS!” Now and then, as he strutted back and forth, he would take a leap and then a skip and say to passers-by, “ Would you like to hear what Joe Gould thinks of the world and all that’s in it? Scree-eek! Scree-eek!

Four A Question of Survival A Bohemian is the only kind o f gentleman permanently in temporary difficulties. —H. C. Bunner

Selling Out Honoré de Balzac

“ My dear fellow,” said Etienne, looking at the toes of Lucien’s boots (they were the pair he had brought from Angoulême, and he was wearing them out), “ I strongly recommend you to black your boots with ink to save blacking, to turn your pens into tooth-picks so that when you take a walk in this picturesque alley after eating at Flicoteaux people will think that you have dined well, and to take any job you can get. Become a bailiff’s under-clerk if you have a weak heart, or a shop assistant if you have a strong back, or a soldier if you like military music. You have the makings of three poets; but before you become known you will have had time to die of starvation six times over, if you are hoping to live on your poetry. Now I gather from your highly unsophisticated discourse, that you are hoping to earn a living by writing. I am not criticising your poems— they are a good deal better than all those volumes of verses that are taking up shelf-space in the booksellers’. The elegant nightingales that are sold for a little more than the rest because they are printed on hand-made paper generally end up on the bookstalls beside the Seine, where you can go and study their verses if you ever feel inclined to make an instructive pilgrimage 397

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to the Quais between old Jérom e’s bookstall on the Pont Notre-Dame and the Pont Royal. There you will find all those Essais poetiques and Inspira­ tions and Elevations, all the Hymnes and Chants and Ballades and Odes, in fact the entire brood hatched during the last seven years. There are all those muses, covered with dust, spattered with mud from the passing cabs, violated by every passer-by who only wants to look at the vignette on the title-page. You know nobody; you have no influence with any newspaper—your Marguerites will remain as chastely closed as they are at this moment; they will never expand in the sun of publicity, on pages with wide margins, decorated with all those daring little flowerets that the illustrious Dauriat, King of the Wooden Galleries, who publishes all the well-known poets, scatters so liberally. My poor young poet, I came to Paris, like you, full of illusions, impelled by the love of art, and by an unconquerable desire for glory; I discovered the realities of the literary world, the difficulties of publication, and the hard facts of poverty. My lofty ideals—which I now have well under control—my first youthful enthusiasm—prevented me from seeing the workings of the social machin­ ery; I was compelled to see it in the end by bumping against its wheels, knocking into its shafts, getting covered with its grease, and hearing the constant clatter of its chains and fly-wheels. You will have to learn, as I did, that behind all those fine things we once dreamed of there are human intrigues, and passions, and necessities. You will find yourself involved, willy-nilly, in the horrible struggle of book against book, man against man, party against party, and you must fight your way systematically unless you want to find yourself deserted by your own party. These mean contests are disillusioning. They leave you exhausted and depraved, and all to no purpose, because more often than not you will have expended your efforts to crown a man whom you dislike, a writer of second-rate talent whom you are obliged to put forward as a genius whether you like it or not. “ A great deal goes on behind the scenes in the literary world. Success— whether it comes as a result of chance or of merit—that is what the public applauds. But the preparations—and they are always ugly, what with the minor actors in the drama, the hired claque, and the scene-shifting—all that goes on behind the scenes. You are still in the front of the house. There is still time—turn back before you set your foot on the first step that leads to the throne of fame, for which so many ambitions are contending, and do not dishonour yourself as I have had to do in order to live” —and there were tears in Étienne Lousteau’s eyes as he spoke. “ Do you know how I make a living?” he went on in passionate tones. “ The small sum of money that my family could afford to give me was soon used up. I had just had a play accepted by the Théâtre-Français when I

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found myself without a penny. At the Théâtre-Français you may have the influence of a prince, or a First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, but that will get you nowhere; the actors will not lift a finger for you unless you are in a position to damage their reputations. If you have the power to spread a rumour that the leading actor has asthma, or that the leading lady has a fistula wherever you please, or that the soubrette has foul breath, your play will be put on tomorrow. I do not know whether in two years’ time your humble servant will be in a position to exert such power: one needs too many friends. Where, and how, and by what means, meanwhile, am I to earn enough to live on?—that was the question I often asked myself, under the stress of hunger. Well, after trying a number of things—I wrote an anonymous novel for which I was paid two hundred francs by Dogu ereau, who did not make much out of it either—I came to the conclusion that journalism was the only means of livelihood open to me. But how was I going to get into that shop? I will not bore you with an account of all my vain attempts, all the snubs I encountered, and of the six months I spent as a free-lance on a paper, where I was told that I scared subscribers away, when as a matter of fact I sent the sales up. We will pass over these insults. At this moment I am being paid almost nothing for doing the plays at the Boulevard theatres for Finot’s paper—Finot is that big fellow who still lunches two or three times a month at the Café Voltaire (but you never go there). Finot is the chief editor. I live by selling the free tickets that the management of these theatres give me to secure my good will (for what it is worth) on the paper, and by selling the review copies sent me by the publishers. And lastly, I do a trade in the gifts in kind from tradesmen (when Finot has taken all he wants) for whom, or against whom, Finot permits me to write paragraphs. Eau Carminative and Pâte des Sultanes and Huile Céphalique and Mixture Br èsilienne are willing to pay twenty or thirty francs for a facetious article. “ It is my business to run down publishers who don’t send in enough review copies—the paper likes to have two, that Finot sells and I need two, which I sell. A publisher who is stingy with review copies may bring out a masterpiece, but he will still get bad notices. It is a low trade, but I manage to make a living by it, like plenty of others! And you needn’t imagine that political journalism is any better—everything in these two spheres is corrupt; there is not a man in that world who does not either offer bribes or receive them. “ If a publisher is bringing out a work of some importance, he pays me, so that I shall not attack it. So that my income varies according to the publishing lists. When the prospectuses burst out like a rash, money pours into my pocket, and I can buy drinks for my friends. When nothing is coming out, I dine at Flicoteaux.

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“ The actresses will pay you for good notices, too, but the clever ones pay for criticism; what they fear most is silence. The best thing, from their point of view, is a notice that starts a discussion; it is worth more to them, and they will pay more for it, than for a simple puff that is forgotten the next day. Controversy, my dear fellow—that is the pedestal of all celebri ties. I make fifty crowns a month as a hired gangster, trading in commer­ cial, literary, and theatrical reputations; I could get five hundred francs for a novel, and I am beginning to have the reputation of being a man to be reckoned with. Some day, instead of living with Florine at the expense of a druggist who fancies himself as a milord, I shall have a place of my own, and a column in a big newspaper; and then, my boy, Florine will become a great actress. What I shall become I don’t know; a minister or even an honest man—all things are still possible!” He raised his humiliated head and looked up at the leaves with an expression of despairing self-contempt terrible to see. “ And once I had a tragedy accepted! And among my papers I have a poem that will not live! And I was a good fellow! My love was pure, once— and now I have an actress at the Panorama-Dramatique for my mistress— I, who once dreamed of noble loves, for distinguished women of the great world! And now, if a publisher refuses to send a copy of it to my newspaper, I am prepared to run down a book that I think is good.” Lucien was moved to tears, and clasped Etienne’s hand in his. The journalist rose to his feet and walked in the direction of the wide Avenue de l’Observatoire, where the two poets walked up and down, as if to breathe more freely. “ Outside the literary world,” Lousteau continued, “ there is no one who has the slightest idea of the terrible Odyssey by which writers reach what is called vogue, or fashion, or reputation, fame, celebrity, public favour— all these are different rungs on the ladder that leads to glory—for which, however, they are a poor substitute. This moral phenomenon, brilliant as it is, is the product of a thousand accidents that vary perpetually, so that two men have never been known to arrive by the same route. Take Canalis and Nathan, their stories are utterly dissimilar, and neither of them will ever be repeated. D’Arthez who wears himself out with work, will become famous by some chance or other. “ This fine thing reputation that is so much desired, is nearly always crowned prostitution. Yes, the lowest forms of writing are like those poor creatures who freeze at street-corners; second-rate writing is the kept woman who has managed to get away from the evil haunts of journalism and lives at my expense; and successful literature is the brilliant insolent courtesan who has her own property and pays income-tax, who entertains lords, treating or ill-treating them as she pleases, who has her carriage and

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her livery, and can afford to keep her thirsty creditors waiting. Ah! Those who see her as I once did, and as you still do at this moment, as an angel with diaphanous wings, clad in immaculate white, with a palm of virtue in one hand and a flaming sword in the other—a sort of cross between the mythological abstraction who lives at the bottom of a well, and the virtuous poor girl of the suburbs, who refuses to grow rich at the expense of chastity, and who makes her way by the efforts of a noble courage, reascending to the skies without a stain on her character (always supposing she does not end her days soiled, despoiled, polluted, and forgotten on a pauper’s bier)—men like that, whose brains are helmeted in bronze, whose hearts remain still warm under the snows of experience, are seldom met with in the country that now lies at our feet,” he said, indicating the great city, with its smoke rising into the evening sky. A vision of the circle of the Rue de Quatre-Vents passed rapidly before Lucien’s eyes, and he was moved at the thought of them; but he was carried away by Lousteau, who continued his appalling lamentation. “ They are few and far between in that great fermenting vat, as rare as true lovers in the amorous world, or as fortunes honestly come by in the financial world, or as men with clean hands in journalism. The experience of the first man who said to me what I have just said to you was thrown away on me, as no doubt mine will be on you. It is the same story, year after year—the same eager rush to Paris of ambitious young fellows from the provinces, who arrive—more of them every year—their heads erect, their hearts full of high hopes, to take Fashion by storm—Fashion! She is like Princess Tourandot in the Mille et un Jours, and they all hope to be her Prince Calaf. But not one of them guesses the riddle. They all tumble into the slough of misfortune, into the filth of journalism, into the mire of publishing. “ Poor beggars, they pick up a living by writing biographical articles, Paris news items, odds and ends, or books commissioned by those astute dealers in blackened paper, who would rather publish trash that sells out in a fortnight than a work of genius that will take some time to make its way. These caterpillars are crushed to death before they ever turn into butterflies. They live by shame and dishonour, equally ready to tear to pieces or cry up a budding talent at a word from a Pasha on the Constitu­ tionnel or the Quotidienne or the D ébats, at a hint from the publishers, or at the request of a jealous rival, often just for the sake of a dinner. Those who surmount these obstacles forget the struggles of their early days. Take myself, for example—for six months I put my best ideas into a series of articles for a scoundrel who passed them off as his own, and who on the strength of these samples has been given a job as sub-editor; he has not

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taken me on, he has not given me so much as a hundred sous, and yet I cannot afford to refuse to shake hands with him whenever we m eet.” “ Why not?” Lucien asked indignantly. “ Because I might want to put a dozen lines into his newspaper one day,” Lousteau replied coolly. “ In fact, my dear boy, hard work is not the secret of success as a writer, but knowing how to exploit the hard work of others. The newspaper proprietors are the contractors, we are the bricklayers. And the more second-rate you are the sooner you will suc­ ceed; for you have to swallow insults, to be utterly thick-skinned to play up to all the little base passions of these sultans of literature—like Hector Merlin, who came from Limoges a little while ago. He is already the political correspondent of a Right Centre newspaper, and he writes on our little paper as well. And I have seen that man pick up the hat that a chief editor had dropped! By never giving offence, that fellow will always manage to slip between rival ambitions, leaving them to fight it out. “ You are sorry for me. I see in you myself as I was, and there is nothing more sure than that, two years from now, you will be what I am now. You think there is some secret jealousy, some personal motive, behind this bitter counsel. But it is dictated by the despair of the damned who can never again leave hell. Nobody will dare to tell you these things that I have spoken out of the bitterness of my soul, like Job among the ashes, showing his sores!” “ But whether I fight in this field or elsewhere, fight I must!” said Lucien. “ Then be sure of this!” Lousteau continued. “ If you have talent, it will be a fight to the death, for your best chance is to have none. At this moment your conscience is clear, but it will give way before those who hold your success in their hands; when a word from one of them is a m atter of life and death to you, and he will not say that word. Believe me, the successful writer is more insolent, more hard-hearted towards new­ comers than the most ruthless publisher. The publisher is only afraid of losing money, but the author is afraid of a possible rival; the publisher shows you the door, but the author will crush the life out of you. To write good books, my poor boy, you must draw tenderness, vitality, the sap of life, from your own heart’s blood at every dip of the pen, and put your very soul into the passions, sentiments, and phrases of your work. Yes supposing you write instead of acting, sing instead of battling with the world, and put all your loves and hates into your books; supposing you keep your wealth for your style, your money and fine clothes for your characters, while you walk about the streets of Paris in rags, happy to think that you have rivalled the Registrar of Births by bringing into existence an individual called Adolphe, or Corinna, or Clarissa, or René

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or Manon; when you have ruined your life and your digestion in order to give life to this creation of yours, you will see it condemned, betrayed, sold, and swept into the back waters of oblivion by the journalists, and disregarded by your best friends. Will you be able to wait for the day when your work will emerge again into the light of day? Who will resurrect it, and when and how? There is a magnificant book, the very heart-cry of unbelief, Obermann , lost in the wilderness of the bookshops, shelved among the nightingales, as the publishers so ironically call them: when will its Easter come? Who knows! For a start, just try and find a publisher who will venture to print the M arguerites —not pay you anything for them, mind you, but simply print them. If you do, you will see some curious things.” This brutal tirade, uttered in the accents of all the diverse passions that it expressed, descended like an avalanche of snow upon Lucien’s heart, leaving a sense of glacial cold. He remained standing in silence for a while; and then, as if inspired by the horrible poetry of difficulties, his spirit caught fire. Lucien grasped Lousteau’s hand. “ I will triumph!” he exclaimed. “ Good!” said the journalist. “ One more Christian going down to the arena to offer himself to the lions.

Invading Bohemia H. C. Bunner, 1896

One day a good many years ago an old gentleman from Rondout-onthe-Hudson—then plain Rondout—was walking up Broadway seeing the sights. He had not been in New York in ten or twelve years, and although he was an old gentleman who always had a cask of good ale in his cellar in the winter-time, yet he had never tasted the strange German beverage called lager-beer, which he had heard and read about. So when he saw its name on a sign he went in and drank a mug, sipping it slowly and thoughtfully, as he would have sipped his old ale. He found it refreshing— peculiar—and, well, on the whole, very refreshing indeed, as he consider­ ately told the proprietor. But what interested him more than the beer was the sight of a group of young men seated around a table drinking beer, reading—and—yes, actu­ ally writing verses, and bandying very lively jests among themselves. The old gentleman could not help hearing their conversation, and when he went out into the street he shook his head thoughtfully. “ I wonder what my father would have said to that?” he reflected. “ Young gentlemen sitting in a pot-house at high noon and turning verses like so many ballad-mongers! Well, well, well, if those are the ways of lager-beer drinkers, I’ll stick to my good old ale!” And greatly surprised would that honest old gentleman have been to know that the presence of that little group of poets and humorists attracted as much custom to good Mr. Pfaff’s beer-saloon as did his fresh, cool lager; and that young men, and, for the matter of that, men not so young, stole in there to listen to their contests of wit, and to wish and yearn and aspire to be of their goodly company. For the old gentleman little dreamed, as he went on his course up Broadway, that he had seen the first Bohemi­ ans of New York, and that these young men would be written about and talked about and versified about for generations to come. Unconscious of this honor he went on to Fourteenth Street to see the new square they were laying out there. 404

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Perhaps nothing better marks the place where the city of New York got clean and clear out of provincial pettiness into metropolitan tolerance than the advent of the Bohemians. Twenty-five years earlier they would have been a scandal and a reproach to the town. Not for their literature, or for their wit, or for their hard drinking, or even for their poverty; but for their brotherhood, and for their calm indifference to all the rest of the world whom they did not care to receive into their kingdom of Bohemia. A Bohemian may be defined as the only kind of gentleman permanently in temporary difficulties who is neither a sponge nor a cheat. He is a type that has existed in all ages and always will exist. He is a man who lacks certain elements necessary to success in this world, and who manages to keep fairly even with the world, by dint of ingenious shift and expedient; never fully succeeding, never wholly failing. He is a man, in fact, who can’t swim, but can tread water. But he never, never, never calls himself a Bohemian—at least, in a somewhat wide experience, I have known only two that ever did, and one of these was a baronet. As a rule, if you overhear a man approach his acquaintance with the formula, “ As one Bohemian to another,” you may make up your mind that that man means an assault upon the other man’s pocket-book, and that if the assault is successful the damages will never be repaired. That man is not a Bohe­ mian; he is a beat. Your true Bohemian always calls himself by some euphemistic name. He is always a gentleman at odds with fortune, who rolled in wealth yesterday and will to-morrow, but who at present is willing to do any work that he is sure will make him immortal, and that he thinks may get him the price of a supper. And very often he lends more largely than he borrows. Now the crowd which the old gentleman saw in the saloon—and he saw George Arnold, Fitz-James O ’Brien, and perhaps N. P. Shepard—was a crowd of Bohemians rather by its own christening than by any ordinary application of the word. They were all young men of ability, recognized in their profession. Of those who have died, two at least have honor and literary consideration to-day; of those who lived, some have obtained celebrity, and all a reasonable measure of success. M ürger’s Bohemians would have called them Philistines. But they have started a tradition that will survive from generation unto generation; a tradition of delusion so long as the glamour of poetry, romance, and adventure hang around the mysteriously attractive personality of a Bohemian. Ever since then New York has had, and always will have, the posing Bohemian and his worship­ pers. Ten or fifteen years ago the “ French Quarter” got its literary introduc­ tion to New York, and the fact was revealed that it was the resort of real Bohemians—young men who actually lived by their wit and their wits, and

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who talked brilliantly over fifty-cent table-d’hôte dinners. This was the signal for the would-be Bohemian to emerge from his dainty flat or his oak-panelled studio in Washington Square, hasten down to Bleecker or Houston Street, there to eat chicken badly braisé , fried chuck-steak, and soggy spaghetti, and to drink thin blue wine and chicory-coffee that he might listen to the feast of witticism and flow of soul that he expected to find at the next table. If he found it at all, he lost it at once. If he made the acquaintance of the young men at the next table, he found them to be young men of his own sort—agreeable young boys just from Columbia and Harvard, who were painting impressionless pictures for the love of Art for A rt’s sake, and living very comfortably on their paternal allowances. Any one of the crowd would think the world was coming to pieces if he woke up in the morning to wonder where he could get his breakfast on credit, and wonder where he could earn enough money to buy his dinner. Yet these innocent youngsters continue to pervade “ The Q uarter,” as they call it; and as time goes on, by much drinking of ponies of brandy and smoking of cigarettes, they get to fancy that they themselves are Bohemi­ ans. And when they get tired of it all and want something good to eat, they go up to Delmonico’s and get it. And their Bohemian predecessors, who sought the French fifty-cent restaurants as their highest attainable luxury—what has become of them? They have fled before that incursion as a flock of birds before a whirlwind. They leave behind them, perhaps, a few of the more mean-spirited among them, who are willing to degenerate into fawners on the rich, and habitual borrowers of trifling sums. But the true Bohemians, the men who have the real blood in their veins, they must seek some other meeting-place where they can pitch their never-abiding tents, and sit at their humble feasts to recount to each other, amid appreciative laughter, the tricks and devices and pitiful petty schemes for the gaining of daily bread that make up for them the game and comedy of life. Tell me not that Ishmael does not enjoy the wilderness. The Lord made him for it, and he would not be happy anywhere else. There is no class in society where the sponge, the toady, the man who is willing to receive socially without giving in return, is more quickly found out or more heartily disowned than among the genuine Bohemians. He is to them a traitor, he is one who plays the game unfairly, one who is willing to fill his belly by means to which they will not resort, lax and fantastic as is their social code. Do you know, for instance, what “ Jackaling” is in New York? A Jackal is a man generally of good address, and capable of a display of good fellowship combined with much knowledge of literature and art, and a vast and intimate acquaintance with writers, musicians, and managers. He makes it his business to haunt hotels, theatrical agencies,

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and managers’ offices, and to know whenever, in his language, “ a new jay comes to tow n.” The jay he is after is some man generally from the smaller provincial cities, who has artistic or theatrical aspirations and a pocketful of money. It is the Jackal’s mission to turn this jay into an “ angel.” Has the gentleman from Lockport come with the score of a comic opera under his arm, and two thousand dollars in his pocket? Two thousand dollars will not go far toward the production of a comic opera in these days, and the jay finds that out later; but not until after the Jackal has made him intimately acquainted with a very gentlemanly and experienced manager who thinks that it can be done for that price with strict economy. Has the young man of pronounced theatrical talent arrived from Keokuk with gold and a thirst for fame? The Jackal knows just the dramatist who will write him the play that he ought to star in. Does the wealthy and important person from Podunk desire to back something absolutely safe and sure in the line of theatrical speculation? The Jackal has the very thing for which he is looking. And in all these, and in all similar contingencies, it is a poor Jackal who does not get his commission at both ends. The Jackal may do all these things, but he may not, if he is treated, fail to treat in return. I do not mean to say at all that Jackaling is a business highly esteemed, even in darkest Bohemia, but it is considered legitimate, and I hope that no gentleman doing business in Wall Street, or on the Consolidated Exchange, will feel too deeply grieved when he learns the fact. But where have the real Bohemians fled to from the presence of the toowell-disposed and too-wealthy children of the Benedick and the Holbein? Not where they are likely to find him, you may be sure. The true Bohemian does not carry his true address on his card. In fact, he is delicate to the point of sensitiveness about allowing any publicity to attach to his address. He communicates it confidentially to those with whom he has business dealings, but he carefully conceals it from the prying world. As soon as the world knows it he moves. I once asked a chief of the Bohemian tribe whose residence was the world, but whose temporary address was some­ times Paris, why he had moved from the Quartier Latin to a place in Montmartre. “ Had to, my dear fellow,” he answered, with dignity; “ why if you live over on that side of the river they’ll call you a Bohemian!"

Bohemia at Home W. C. M orrow , 1900

I don’t believe that one can find in all Paris a more bizarre or gayer home life than that of the sculptor Simaise. Life in that house is a perpetual festival. At whatever hour you arrive you hear songs, laughter, the sound of a piano, of a guitar, of a tom-tom. If you go into the studio it is rare that you don’t fall into the middle of a game of shuttle-cocks, of a waltz-time, of a quadrille arrangement, or better still, among the preparations for a ball, the scraps of tulle, ribbons lying next to the side of the roughingchisel, artificial flowers hanging from busts, spangled skirts that are spread out on a group that is still damp. It is all because four older girls are there aged sixteen to twenty-five, very pretty, but very cumbersome; and when these maidens whirl, their hair falling on their backs with waves of ribbons, long pins, showy brooches, one would say that instead of four there are eight, sixteen, thirty-two Simaise maidens each as frisky as the other, speaking loudly, laughing hard, all having this boyish air peculiar to artists’ daughters, workroom gestures, an art student’s aplomb, and being skilled without compare in how to brush off a creditor or scold the rather insolent tradesman for presenting his bill at an inopportune time. These young persons are the veritable mistresses of the house. The father works from dawn, sculpting, modeling without respite, for he is not rich. In the beginning he was ambitious, exerted himself to work well. Some successes at an exposition presaged a certain glory for him. But this demanding family to nourish, to dress, to launch enforced him in the mediocrity of the metier. As for Madame Simaise, she troubled herself about nothing. Very beautiful at the time of her marriage, with a wide circle of friends in the artistic world where her husband took her, she condemned herself to at first being only a pretty woman, and later a formerly pretty woman. Of Creole origin, so she claims—although I am assured that her parents never left Courbevoie—she spends days from 408

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morning to evening in a hammock hung, in turn, in all the rooms of the apartment, fans herself, takes a siesta, with a profound disdain for the material details of existence. She has posed so often for her husband as Hebe, as Diana, that she imagines herself going through life with a crescent on her brow, a chalice in her hand, loaded with emblems for all sorts of work. Also, one must see the disorder in the house. You could search for an hour for the least items. “ Have you seen my thimble? . . . Martha, Eve, Genevieve, Madeleine, who has seen my thimble?” The drawers, where books, powder, rouge, spangles, spoons, fans, lie helter-skelter, are filled to the rim, but contain nothing useful; besides, they cling to bizarre, curious, incomplete, damaged furniture. And the house itself is so peculiar! Since they move often they haven’t the time to get settled, and this joyous home always has the air of waiting for the indispensable, complete putting things in order which follows upon the night of a ball. Only it is lacking so many things that it isn’t worthwhile to arrange things, and provided that one has a little toiletry, that one moves about in the streets with the burst of a meteor, a semblance of chic and appearance of luxury, honor is safe. Encampment holds nothing which disturbs this tribe of nomads. Through open doors, poverty let itself be seen all at once in the four empty walls of an unfurnished room, in the mess of a crowded bedroom. It is the life of bohemia at home, a life of the unforeseen, of surprises . . . At the moment of sitting down to table, they notice that everything is missing and that they must rather quickly look for lunch outside. In this way, the hours pass rapidly, agitated, idle; but then that has its advantages. When one lunches late, one doesn’t have dinner; they are free to sup at the ball, where they go almost every evening. Often, these ladies, too, give soirees. They take tea in bizarre receptables, goblets, (vidercomes), Japa­ nese shells, everything chipped by the bric-a-brac, corners broken off in numerous movings. The serenity of mother and daughters in the middle of this distress is something admirable. My God! they have so many other ideas in their heads beside housework. One is plaited like a Swiss girl, the other curled like an English baby, and Mme. Simaise, deep in her ham­ mock, lives in the beatitude of her former beauty. As for father Simaise, he is always enraptured. Provided that he hears the lovely laughing of his daughters about him, he joyously burdens himself with all the weight of this disconcerted existence. It is to him that they address themselves coaxingly: “ Papa, I need a hat . . . papa, I need a dress.” Sometimes winter is rough. One is so well known, one receives so many invitations. . . . Bah! father gets off by getting up two hours earlier. They make a single fire in the studio where the whole family gathers. These girls cut,

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sew their dresses themselves, while the hammock rope squeaks regularly and while father works perched on his step-ladder. Have you sometimes met these ladies in company? From the moment they enter, there is a buzz. One has known the two eldest for a long time; but they are always so adorned, so spruced, that anyone could take them for dancers. They have as much success as the younger sisters, almost as much as the mother formerly; moreover, a grace in wearing chiffons, stylish jewels, a nonchalance so charming, the foolish laughter of badlyraised children, the way of fanning themselves like the Spanish. . . . In spite of everything, they are not married. Never had any admirer been able to resist the spectacle of this singular homelife. The confusion of useless expenses, the lack of dishes, the profusion of old tapestries with holes, antique chandeliers all taken to pieces and ungilded, the drafty doors, the ring of the creditors, the neglect of these maidens in slippers and in hanging dressing gowns of a furnished apartment, put the best-intentioned in flight. What do you want? Everyone isn’t resigned to hanging near to oneself the hammock of an idle wife for life. I am well afraid that the Simaise girls will never marry. They had, however, a magnificent and unique opportunity to do it during the Com­ mune. The family took refuge in Normandy, in a small, very litigious town, full of attorneys, notaries, business agents. The father, barely arrived, looked for work. His renown as a sculptor helped him; and as there was a statue of Cujas by him in the public square of the town, the notables of the place vied with one another for who would commission him for a bust. Immediately, the mother hung up her hammock in a corner of the studio, and those girls organized small parties. They quickly had much success. Here at any rate poverty seemed an accident of exile, the air of installation in it had a raison d ’etre. These lovely ladies of fashion themselves laughed very loudly at their poverty. They had left without taking anything. From a closed-off Paris nothing could come. For them, it was one more charm. It made one think of gypsies in transit who comb their beautiful horses in a barn and quench their thirst in the brooks. The less poetic were comparing them in their spirit to the exiles of Coblentz, to the ladies of the court of Marie-Antoinette who left quite quickly, without powder, or hoop-petticoats, or lady’s maids, compelled to all sorts of devices, learning how to serve themselves, and retaining the frivolity of the courts of France, with a smile so sharp from disappeared beauty marks. Every evening a crowd of astonished advocates filled the Simaise studio. With a hired piano, all the company did the polka, the waltz, the Scottish dances—they still do the Scottish dances in Normandy. “ I will wind up marrying one of them ,” old man Simaise was saying to himself; and the fact is that, the first gone, all the others would have followed. U nfortu-

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nately, the first hasn’t left, but she was quite close to it. Among the numerous waltzers of these girls, in this ballet corps of attorneys, of deputies, of notaries, the keenest for the dance was a widower, who was very attentive near the oldest girl. In the house they called him “ the first dancing attorney,” in memory of Molière’s ballets; and surely, to see the gusto with which this chap whirled, Papa Simaise based the greatest hopes on him. But business-men don’t dance like everyone. That one while waltzing thought of some small considerations: “ This Simaise family is charming . . . Tra la la . . . La la la . . . but they are rushing me in vain . . . La la la . . . la la first . . . I will not conclude anything before the gates of Paris are reopened . . . Tra la la . . . and I have been able to make my inquiries . . . la la la . . .” Thus thought the first dancing attorney; and, in fact, as soon as the barricades were lifted from Paris, he inquired about the family, and the marriage failed to come off. Since then, the poor children have failed at many others. But that has in no way troubled the gaiety of this singular household. On the contrary, the more they proceed, the happier they are. Last winter, they moved three times, they were sold up once, and they nonetheless gave two grand masked balls.

The Model W. C. Morrow, 1900

Few of the women models remain long in the profession. Posing is hard and fatiguing work, and the students are merciless in their criticisms of any defects of figure that the models may have—the French are born critics. During the many years that I have studied and worked in Paris I have seen scores of models begin their profession with a serious determi­ nation to make it their life-work. They would appear regularly at the different ateliers for about two years, and would be gratified to observe endless reproductions of their graces in the prize rows on the studio walls. Then their appearance would be less and less regular, and they would finally disappear altogether—whither? Some become contented compan­ ions of students and artists, but the cafés along the Boul’ Mich’, the cabarets of Montmartre, and the dance-halls of the Moulin Rouge and the Bal Bullier have their own story to tell. Some are happily married; for instance, one, noted for her beauty of face and figure, is the wife of a New York millionaire. But she was clever as well as beautiful, and few models are that. Most of them are ordinaire, living the easy life of Bohemian Paris, and having little knowledge of le monde propre. But, oh, how they all love dress! and therein lies most of the story. When Marcelle or Hélène appears, all of a sudden, radiant in silks and creamy lace petticoats, and sweeps proudly into the crowded studios, flushed and happy and hears the dear compliments that the students heap upon her, we know that thirty francs a week could not have changed the gray grub into a gorgeous butterfly. It is a short and easy step from the studio to the café. At the studio it is all little money, hard posing, dulness, and poor clothes; at the cafés are the brilliant lights, showy clothes, tinkling money, clinking glasses, pop­ ping corks, unrestrained abandon, and midnight suppers. And the studios and the cafés are but adjoining apartments, one may say, in the great house of Bohemia. The studio is the introduction to the café; the café is 412

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the burst of sunshine after the dreariness of the studio; and Marcelle determines that for once she will bask in the warmth and glow. . . . Ah, what a jolly night it was, and a louis d ’or in her purse besides! Marcelle’s face was pretty—and new. She is late at the studio next morning, and is sleepy and cross. The students grumble. The room is stifling, and its gray walls seem ready to crush her. It is so tiresome, so stupid—and only thirty francs a week! Bah! . . . Marcelle appears no more. All the great painters have their exclusive model or models, paying them a permanent salary. These favored ones move in a special circle, into which the ordinaire may not enter, unless she becomes the favorite of some grand homme. They are never seen at the academies, and rarely or never pose in the schools, unless it was there they began their career. Perhaps the most famous of the models of Paris was Sarah Brown, whose wild and exciting life has been the talk of the world. Her beautiful figure and glorious golden hair opened to her the whole field of modeldom. Offers for her services as model were more numerous than she could accept, and the prices that she received were very high. She was the mistress of one great painter after another, and she lived and reigned like a queen. Impulsive, headstrong, passionate, she would do the most reck­ less things. She would desert an artist in the middle of his masterpiece and come down to the studio to pose for the students at thirty francs a week. Gorgeously apparelled, she would glide into a studio, overturn all the easels that she could reach, and then shriek with laughter over the havoc and consternation that she had created. The students would greet her with shouts and form a circle about her, while she would banteringly call them her friends. Then she would jump upon the throne, dispossess the model there, and give a dance or make a speech, knocking off every hat that her parasol could reach. But no one could resist Sarah. It was she who was the cause of the students’ riot in 1893—a riot that came near ending in a revolution. It was all because she appeared at le Bal des Quat’z ’ Arts in a costume altogether too simple and natural to suit the prefect of police, who punished her. She was always at the Salon on receiving-day, and shocked the occupants of the liveried carriages on the Champs-Elysees with her dancing. In fact, she was always at the head of everything extraordinary and sensational among the Bohemians of Paris. But she aged rapidly under her wild life. Her figure lost its grace, her lovers deserted her, and after her dethronement as Queen of Bohemia, broken-hearted and poor, she put an end to her wretched life—and Paris laughed.

Hunger Was a Good Discipline Ernest Hemingway, 1964

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people are outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l’Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way. After you came out of the Luxembourg you could walk down the narrow rue Férou to the Place St.-Sulpice and there were still no restaurants, only the quiet square with its benches and trees. There was a fountain with lions, and pigeons walked on the pavement and perched on the statues of the bishops. There was the church and there were shops selling religious objects and vestments on the north side of the square. From this square you could not go further toward the river without passing shops selling fruits, vegetables, wines, or bakery and pastry shops. But by choosing your way carefully you could work to your right around the grey and white stone church and reach the rue de l’Odéon and turn up to your right toward Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and on your way you did not pass too many places where things to eat were sold. The rue de l’Odéon was bare of eating places until you reached the square where there were three restaurants. 414

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By the time you reached 12 rue de l’Od éon your hunger was contained but all of your perceptions were heightened again. The photographs looked different and you saw books that you had never seen before. “ You’re too thin, Hemingway,” Sylvia would say. “ Are you eating enough?” “ Sure.” “ What did you eat for lunch?” My stomach would turn over and I would say, “ I ’m going home for lunch now.” “ At three o ’clock?” “ I didn’t know it was that late.” “ Adrienne said the other night she wanted to have you and Hadley for dinner. We’d ask Fargue. You like Fargue, don’t you? Or Larbaud. You like him. I know you like him. Or anyone you really like. Will you speak to Hadley?” “ I know she’d love to com e.” “ I’ll send her a pneu. Don’t you work so hard now that you don’t eat properly.” “ I won’t .” “ Get home now before it’s too late for lunch.” “ They’ll save it.” “ Don’t eat cold food either. Eat a good hot lunch.” “ Did I have any mail?” “ I don’t think so. But let me look.” She looked and found a note and looked up happily and then opened a closed door in her desk. “ This came while I was out,” she said. It was a letter and it felt as though it had money in it. “ W edderkop,” Sylvia said. “ It must be from D er Querschnitt. Did you see Wedderkop?” “ No. But he was here with George. H e’ll see you. Don’t worry. Perhaps he wanted to pay you first.” “ It’s six hundred francs. He says there will be m ore.” “ I ’m awfully glad you reminded me to look. Dear Mr. Awfully N ice.” “ It’s damned funny that Germany is the only place I can sell anything. To him and the Frankfurter Z eitun g.” “ Isn’t it? But don’t you worry ever. You can sell stories to Ford,” she teased me. “ Thirty francs a page. Say one story every three months in The Transatlantic. Story five pages long makes one hundred and fifty francs a quarter. Six hundred francs a year.” “ But, Hemingway, don’t worry about what they bring now. The point is that you can write them .”

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“ I know. I can write them. But nobody will buy them. There is no money coming in since I quit journalism .” “ They will sell. Look. You have the money for one right there.” “ I ’m sorry, Sylvia. Forgive me for speaking about it.” “ Forgive you for what? Always talk about it or about anything. Don’t you know all writers ever talk about is their troubles? But promise me you won’t worry and that you’ll eat enough.” “ I prom ise.” “ Then get home now and have lunch.” Outside on the rue de l’Odéon I was disgusted with myself for having complained about things. I was doing what I did of my own free will and I was doing it stupidly. I should have bought a large piece of bread and eaten it instead of skipping a meal. I could taste the brown lovely crust. But it is dry in your mouth without something to drink. You God damn complainer. You dirty phony saint and martyr, I said to myself. You quit journalism of your own accord. You have credit and Sylvia would have loaned you money. She has plenty of times. Sure. And then the next thing you would be compromising on something else. Hunger is healthy and the pictures do look better when you are hungry. Eating is wonderful too and do you know where you are going to eat right now? Lipp’s is where you are going to eat and drink too. It was a quick walk to Lipp’s and every place I passed that my stomach noticed as quickly as my eyes or my nose made the walk an added pleasure. There were few people in the brasserie and when I sat down on the bench against the wall with the mirror in back and a table in front and the waiter asked if I wanted beer I asked for a distingué , the big glass mug that held a liter, and for potato salad. The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink. The pom m es à l’huile were firm and marinated and the olive oil delicious. I ground black pepper over the potatoes and moistened the bread in the olive oil. After the first heavy draft of beer I drank and ate very slowly. When the pom m es à l ’ huile were gone I ordered another serving and a cervelas. This was a sausage like a heavy, wide frankfurter split in two and covered with a special mustard sauce. I mopped up all the oil and all of the sauce with bread and drank the beer slowly until it began to lose its coldness and then I finished it and ordered a dem i and watched it drawn. It seemed colder than the distingué and I drank half of it. I had not been worrying, I thought. I knew the stories were good and someone would publish them finally at home. When I stopped doing newspaper work I was sure the stories were going to be published. But every one I sent out came back. What had made me so confident was

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Edward O ’Brien’s taking the “ My Old Man” story for the Best Short Stories book and then dedicating the book for that year to me. Then I laughed and drank some more beer. The story had never been published in a magazine and he had broken all his rules to take it for the book. 1 laughed again and the waiter glanced at me. It was funny because, after all that, he had spelled the name wrong. It was one of two stories I had left when everything I had written was stolen in Hadley’s suitcase that time at the Gare de Lyon when she was bringing the manuscripts down to me to Lausanne as a surprise, so I could work on them on our holidays in the mountains. She had put in the originals, the typescripts and the carbons, all in manila folders. The only reason I had the one story was that Lincoln Steffens had sent it out to some editor who sent it back. It was in the mail while everything else was stolen. The other story that I had was the one called “ Up in Michigan” written before Miss Stein had come to our flat. I had never had it copied because she said it was inaccrochable . It had been in a drawer somewhere. So after we had left Lausanne and gone down to Italy I showed the racing story to O ’Brien, a gentle, shy man, pale, with pale blue eyes, and straight lanky hair he cut himself, who lived then as a boarder in a monastery up above Rapallo. It was a bad time and I did not think I could write any more then, and I showed the story to him as a curiosity, as you might show, stupidly, the binnacle of a ship you had lost in some incredible way, or as you might pick up your booted foot and make some joke about it if it had been amputated after a crash. Then, when he read the story, I saw he was hurt far more than I was. I had never seen anyone hurt by a thing other than death or unbearable suffering except Hadley when she told me about the things being gone. She had cried and cried and could not tell me. I told her that no matter what the dreadful thing was that had happened nothing could be that bad, and whatever it was, it was all right and not to worry. We would work it out. Then, finally, she told me. I was sure she could not have brought the carbons too and I hired someone to cover for me on my newspaper job. I was making good money then at journalism, and took the train for Paris. It was true all right and I remember what I did in the night after I let myself into the flat and found it was true. That was over now and Chink had taught me never to discuss casualties; so I told O’Brien not to feel so bad. It was probably good for me to lose early work and I told him all that stuff you feed the troops. I was going to start writing stories again I said and, as I said it, only trying to lie so that he would not feel so bad, I knew that it was true. Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story after losing everything. It was up in Cortina d ’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I

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had to interrupt to go on assignment to the Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called “ Out of Season” and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel some­ thing more than they understood. Well, I thought, now I have them so they do not understand them. There cannot be much doubt about that. There is most certainly no demand for them. But they will understand the same way that they always do in painting. It only takes time and it only needs confidence. It is necessary to handle yourself better when you have to cut down on food so you will not get too much hunger-thinking. Hunger is good discipline and you learn from it. And as long as they do not understand it you are ahead of them. Oh sure, I thought, I’m so far ahead of them now that I can’t afford to eat regularly. It would not be bad if they caught up a little. I knew I must write a novel. But it seemed an impossible thing to do when I had been trying with great difficulty to write paragraphs that would be the distillation of what made a novel. It was necessary to write longer stories now as you would train for a longer race. When I had written a novel before, the one that had been lost in the bag stolen at the Gare de Lyon, I still had the lyric facility of boyhood that was as perishable and as deceptive as youth was. I knew it was probably a good thing that it was lost, but I knew too that I must write a novel. I would put it off though until I could not help doing it. I was damned if I would write one because it was what I should do if we were to eat regularly. When I had to write it, then it would be the only thing to do and there would be no choice. Let the pressure build. In the meantime I would write a long story about whatever I knew best. By this time I had paid the check and gone out and turned to the right and crossed the rue de Rennes so that I would not go to the Deux-Magots for coffee and was walking up the rue Bonaparte on the shortest way home. What did I know best that I had not written about and lost? What did I know about truly and care for the most? There was no choice at all. There was only the choice of streets to take you back fastest to where you worked. I went up Bonaparte to Guynemer, then to the rue d ’Assas, up the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to the Closerie des Lilas. I sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in the notebook. The waiter brought me a café crème and I drank half of it when it cooled and left it on the table while I wrote. When I stopped writing I did not want to leave the river where I could see the

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trout in the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it. But in the morning the river would be there and I must make it and the country and all that would happen. There were days ahead to be doing that each day. No other thing mattered. In my pocket was the money from Germany so there was no problem. When that was gone some other money would come in. All I must do now was stay sound and good in my head until morning when I would start to work again.

The Selling of the Village Caroline

F. Ware, 1935

The reputation which the Village enjoyed during these years was not a single one, but a series of different reputations falling roughly into two more or less competing groups, those which featured “ atm osphere” and “ charm ” and those which stressed freedom, exoticism, intellectuality. Each, moreover, successively reflected a current climate of opinion. Real estate dealers, property-owners, and business people were the most active publicists for each of the reputations in turn. First to be featured was the Village’s “ colonial charm .” The metropoli­ tan press, local news sheets, and even books containing specially prepared historical accounts and illustrations, called attention to its quaint corners, its high-ceilinged rooms, and its handsome old doorways. One of the first corporations formed to rebuild old dwellings in an “ attractive m anner” announced that its members knew the district’s charm and sought to retain it,1and the successive remodeling of other groups of red-brick houses was featured, with stress on the same element of “ charm .” 2The state of public opinion which created the enormous market for antiques, led museums to open American wings, and made a fetish of the “ early American” style, created excellent advertising copy for Greenwich Village. Shops dealing in antiques, handwrought jewelry, and peasant wear moved into the locality to make the most of this kind of local fame. As demolitions and rebuilding proceeded, the typical press article about the Village began to be devoted to the passing of old landmarks—effective reminders of the quaintness which had been proclaimed.3 When the “ early American” reputation had more or less run its course, and the combination of cheap rents and attractive surroundings had brought a group of artists and thinkers to the locality, the artistic and intellectual features were the next to be stressed. The development of this reputation coincided with the burst of original American expression which followed the close of the War and the Village spokesman claimed credit, 420

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not only for such of the successful writers as had struggled in poverty in Village garrets, but for the many intellectuals from other places who gravitated to the Village when passing through or visiting the metropolis. From a “ charming bit of early America,” the district became the “ cradle of modern American culture.” This was the phase out of which the tea rooms made the greatest capital, advertising that famous characters were their patrons and could be seen at their establishments. The fact that many of the intellectuals at the time were living in furnished rooms or non-housekeeping apartments made them frequent patrons of eating-houses, which in turn became their hang­ outs or informal clubs. Trailing behind these were the “ pseudo” tea rooms, where “ poets” recited their verses by candlelight, and the gullible or curious absorbed “ a rt.” These places made the candle positively a Village symbol. These dimly lighted, “ arty” dens helped to carry the Village’s reputa­ tion on from its intellectual to its bohemian stage. In the early 1920’s, the Village was the Latin Quarter of New York, America’s bohemia, where flourished free love, unconventional dress, erratic work—if any—indiffer­ ence to physical surroundings, all-night parties, crowding, sleeping where one happened to be, walking the streets in pajamas, girls on the street smoking, plenty of drink, living from moment to moment, with sometimes a pass at creative work but often not even that. Girls from conventional homes could spend a daring evening in the Village and might screw up their courage to ask, in wide-eyed awe, “ Do you really believe in free love?” More adventurous young people were attracted to the Village by the lure of the excitement and daring of bohemian life, and especially by the opportunity for sex experience and experiment. This new phase corresponded with the burst of “ flaming youth” which made the elders’ hair rise on end in the mid-twenties. Because the most picturesque and most easily capitalized, the bohemian became the most tenacious of all the reputations which the Village ac­ quired. The bohemians were conspicuous. Sightseers could see them, and sight-seeing buses added the Village to their nightly routes. One of the Catholic priests found that he created a sensation whenever he met a tourist bus, “ the guides have just told them what a den of iniquity Greenwich Village is and they almost lose their eyes at a religious walking around the streets.” Cabarets joined in the effort to make money out of the Village’s exotic flavor. The tea room or studio which had served in the last phase as a place featuring artistic atmosphere, now developed into a “ pick-up jo int.” As sex taboos broke down all over the country, and sex experimentation found its way to the suburbs, the Village’s exoticism could no longer rest

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on so commonplace a foundation. Again, the shift of current interest supplied a basis for a new phase in the Village’s reputation. When public attention had been called to homo-sexuality by the suppression of “ The Captive” and “ The Well of Loneliness,” the Village became noted as the home of “ pansies” and “ Lesbians,” and dives of all sorts featured this type. As the conventional form of unconventionality called increasingly for violation of the liquor law, it was not surprising to find speakeasies concentrating in and becoming distinctive of the locality. By 1930, the gangster was added to the Village picture and sight-seers were assured that they could observe notorious underworld characters in the appropriate speakeasies. While each of these successive characters was attributed to the Village by publicity agents backed by real estate men, restaurant-owners, and antique dealers, others set up a counter-current in an attempt to put down the more extreme of these reputations and to win fame for the area on other counts. By 1920, a tax-payers’ association was already conducting a clean-up campaign to establish the respectability of the district. The houses of prostitution which had been located south of Washington Square were raided and the property facing the Square was developed for highclass residential use. Certain of the tea rooms and night clubs were also raided at the instigation of the same group. As the Village had never been an extensive red-light district, it did not take much to clear out the actual disorderly houses. From this time on the same association made consistent and repeated efforts to achieve respectability for the area. With the construction of up-to-date apartments in 1929-31, the victory of respecta­ bility seemed assured. But the exotic reputation persisted. While the conservative press in 1931 was carrying articles on the passing of the old Village landmarks and the extent of building activity, the “ wicked Village” still was good copy for the tabloid press.4 Those who sought to capitalize the changing reputation of the Village were, of course, most aware of its existence. The new residents included those who agreed that the Village had charm and regretted that the construction of apartments was destroying it, those who either relished or resented its reputation for boheminism, some who defended or refuted its claim as an intellectual center, and some who insisted upon its essential respectability. Out of a small sample of fifty who expressed themselves directly on whether or not they were glad to see the building of new apartm ents, twice as many expressed regret as satisfaction. Only a few were wholly indifferent to its fame or notoriety. The ones with a most nearly “ neighborhood” attitude were the professional or artistic people who had lived there for some time and had known most of the other

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residents of the same type in the days when their number was few, who had been attracted by the “ colonial” charm, resented the stamp of bohemianism, and, to some degree, identified themselves with the com­ munity as they conceived of it in these terms. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

N ew York Times, May 23, 1915. Ibid., March 28, 1920. N ew York Times, October 31, 1920. N ew York Evening G raphic, September, 1931. Series o f articles on Greenwich Village.

Economics and the Art Colony Mack Reynolds, 1963

There were Woodstock, up in the Catskill mountains, and, by a coinci­ dence of names, Woodstock, Vermont. There was Provincetown in Mas­ sachusetts, the French Quarter in New Orleans, and Carmel and Laguna Beach in California. And there was Taos, New Mexico, where one could rent an adobe house for twenty dollars a month and, living on the type of food eaten by the Taos Indians and local Spanish-Americans, get by on a shoestring. There were a good many more. Almost every state had its art colony, certainly every section of the nation did and every large city. Through the twenties and thirties they particularly thrived. But with the coming of the Affluent Society, the boom of the second industrial revolution, the American art colony began to wither. The reason was twofold. First, although the income of the average man-in-the-street increased considerably, that of the artist and particularly that of the apprentice artist did not. Second, with the new influx of wealth through the land, the pseudo-artist, the would-be Bohemian, and the seeker of the live-it-up atmosphere multiplied geometrically. The present writer has, in his time, lived in Woodstock, New York (for eight years), in the Vieux Carre of New Orleans (a year), in Taos, New Mexico (three years), and in various art colonies abroad, and has seen the following happen again and again. The artists find their beauty spot at bargain prices and settle down to work. Their homes are simple, their food the cheapest of local products, their drink usually the local applejack, home-made wine, or beer, their clothes denim pants and chambray shirts. A local bar, usually the least pretentious, becomes the hangout, and by and by someone opens an art shop for supplies and someone else a little gallery. An art colony is under way. Far too soon the word gets around. A new bargain paradise has been found. The far-out elements begin to zero in on the new colony. The 424

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homosexuals, the cocktail-party writers who are always too busy to write, the “ painters” who wear berets and paint bespattered clothing but some­ how spend little time with an easel, the poets who can’t get published because nobody understands them. The cheaper rentals already begin to disappear. Then come the well-to-do hangers-on who just love artists and who simply adore associating with Bohemians. They buy up some of the choicest real estate and build homes, houses such as the simple little farming or fishing town never dreamed of before. To serve them, new stores go up, and a small nightclub or two. Before the original colony realizes it, Life, Look , H oliday , or one of the other national magazines does an article on the bargain paradise art colony, and suddenly all is lost. The influx of newcomers becomes a tidal wave, and prices run up so quickly and so high that the artist on a shoestring is submerged. In the past, it was simply a matter of the real artists leaving and finding a new beauty spot at bargain basement prices. No country in the world so abounds in scenically superlative localities as does the United States, and our spread of climate covers everything from the Arctic of Alaska to the tropics of Hawaii, from the ruggedness of the Maine coast to the easy warmth of Florida, from the mountains of Idaho to the deserts of Arizona. When Greenwich Village became saturated with the pseudo- set, and prices for a third-rate flat rivaled those of expensive suburbs, the working artist left for such towns as Woodstock. When Woodstock in its turn overflowed with elements looking for “ some real Bohemian life,” what­ ever that is, the working artist drifted away and took to such towns, further off the main routes, as Taos. But even Taos lasted but a decade or two before it became a tourist shrine. American art colonies sprang up in Mexico, Spain, North Africa, Italy, France, Greece, and elsewhere. We say American because although these colonies invariably contain artists of other nationalities as well, Americans predominate in those upon which we will touch. One of the greatest impetuses to the growth of the art colony abroad was the G. I. Bill of Rights. Literally hundreds of thousands of young Americans of both sexes, though predominately male, took advantage of the opportunity to further their education at the expense of Uncle Sam. Many of these—figures are obviously not available—had little interest in the studies themselves, but only in the years of leisure and freedom from work that the subsidizing would give them. A number discovered that studying one of the arts was a manner in which they could remain on the government dole with a minimum of effort. “ A rt” schools spring up everywhere, teaching everything from the dance to abstract painting. A considerable percentage of the G. I. Bill students had served abroad

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and acquired a taste for foreign ways. They had also discovered that though it was possible to exist on the government allotment in the States, it was possible to live in comparative luxury on the same amount in Mexico or certain of the nations of Europe. Since the bill allowed for study abroad, the flood began. But, as we have said, though many of the G. I. Bill students, and particularly those supposedly studying the arts, were spongers on the American economy, there were also a considerable number, perhaps a majority, who were completely sincere. The years that they were able to pursue their studies abroad were fruitful, and the nation is now profiting as a result. For a lengthy period following the Second War and later the Korean War, and while the veterans were still eligible for the G. I. Bill benefits, the numbers of Americans in Paris, Rome, Mexico City, and other centers where recognized schools existed were in the tens of thousands. But as time went by, the number slacked off. However, something else had occurred. These young men and women had not been of the wealthier class which in the past was in a position to journey abroad, but average man-in-the-street Americans. They learned to travel, to speak foreign tongues, to learn the ropes of living in a foreign atmosphere, to eat the food, enjoy the drink. For the first time in the history of our country, a really considerable segment of our population, and a highly articulate one at that, had gone abroad and remained abroad for a lengthy period, in times of peace. They took their information home with them and shared it with neigh­ bors, friends, relatives, and colleagues on the job. A trip or even a sojourn abroad lost its mysterious qualities. Some urged elderly parents to con­ sider retirement in Mexico or Spain rather than in Florida or California, the living costs being so fabulously different. Others recommended to neighbors that they spend that lengthy vacation, or sabbatical leave, abroad, rather than in touring America. Students who went on to graduate work sought Fulbright, Guggenheim, and other grants which would allow them to return to lands overseas. A good many of the G. I. students who took their studies abroad never returned. They had found a new home. Some had sufficient income to exist without work, some found jobs abroad, some opened businesses, small or large. The number of these is considerably higher than is usually suspected. In Paris alone it is estimated that more than ten thousand Americans who originally entered the city as students, on either the G. I. Bill or one of the foundation scholarships, have remained in France, a considerable number of these for ten years or more. They have, in short, become expatriates.

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Of all the lands that magnetically draw the American artist, Mexico stands head and shoulders the highest. Indeed, it is possible that she alone attracts more than all European countries put together. There are Ameri­ can art colonies in Mexico City, San Miguel de Allende, Ajijic, Chapala, Jocotepec, Morelia, and Taxco. Actually, this doesn’t exhaust the list. Others emerge almost yearly, some to grow overly popular and finally almost as expensive as the States. Two of these are Acapulco and Cuerna­ vaca, which now boast thousands of expatriates, but few artists of the shoestring variety. Possibly as classic an example of the art colony abroad as can be found is San Miguel de Allende, in the State of Guanajuato, 6,400 feet high in the mountains and with a population, including expatriates, of approximately 15,000. The climate is such that it is never so hot but that a man can wear a sport jacket, never so cold that he needs more. During the short rainy season, in the winter, it rains daily, between the hours of two and four in the afternoon, almost as though by clockwork. San Miguel de Allende, about a five-hour drive north of Mexico City, is an old Spanish Colonial city which has been declared a national monument by the government. In somewhat similar fashion to Williamsburg in Virginia and the Vieux Carre of New Orleans, a building owner must ask permission to make any alterations on his house. No neon signs are allowed, and the streets are still cobblestoned and narrow. There are no modern buildings in the town proper. Any new construction taking place on the outskirts must conform to the colonial tradition. In spite of rulings about plate glass and commercialism, the town has as wide a variety of up-to-date grocery stores, drug stores, book and photog­ raphy shops, movies, sport facilities, and such Yankee-inspired comforts as are to be found in any city of twice the size in Mexico. Excellent sewerage, a 25-bed hospital, and a wide variety of apartment and house rentals are also attractions. San Miguel first began to attract the American artist as far back as 1937, but its growth, at first, was slow. At the time, a small house could be purchased for a few hundred dollars, modernized with electricity and workable plumbing, and furnished American style for a few hundred more. Sterling Dickinson, American writer, bought several acres of land on a small stream that flows through town and the ruins of an old mill and tannery. The cost was infinitesimal. Over the years, love and labor has transformed it into one of the showplaces of Mexico. The extensive gardens run along both sides of the stream and up the hills from it. The mill has become an exquisite home. Some of the tannery buildings have been changed into orchid hothouses, other into pools for ducks and other birds and for fish. Speakers from Dickinson’s hi-fi set are spotted strategi

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cally throughout the gardens, so that at his parties the music reaches over the entire estate. From what the owner himself has told us, we doubt that more than five thousand dollars has been spent on this establishment, and also doubt that it could be duplicated now for twenty-five thousand in Mexico, or three times that in the States. As American artists and writers, bitter over the rising prices in their own country and the over-running of former art colonies by the pseudo set, began to settle in town, art supply stores, an American library, and a couple of hangouts for the expatriates came into being. And not long after, an art school, the Instituto Allende. The first school was located in a former religious building, a Spanish Colonial period nunnery. Begun with enthusiasm, its early teachers in­ cluded even such masters as Orozco, and during the stay of the present writer in San Miguel, Rufino Tamayo spent a period at the Instituto, finishing a mural for a Texas airport. Unfortunately, already the far-out crowd had begun infiltrating the new art colony. There was a scandal at the school involving three of the students, two men and a girl, and one was shot. It seems as though the girl resented the love affair between her husband and the other man. The Mexican government stepped in, and the school was closed. However, through the efforts of Sterling Dickinson and a former gover­ nor of the State of Guanajuato, a new school was opened in what was once the hacienda of one of Mexico’s largest landowners, the Condes de La Canal. The G. I. Bill students saw it through its earlier days, and by the fifties it was without doubt the most flourishing school of its type in Mexico, offering courses in painting, photography, Spanish and English, drama, ceramics, sculpting, creative writing, lithography, textile design, and various handcrafts. It wasn’t only the climate, the scenic beauty and charm of the Spanish Colonial city that made San Miguel de Allende the classic example of the American art colony abroad. It offered just about everything the working artist wanted. To give a quick example, this writer gave a party at his home on New Year’s Eve in 1953, for approximately seventy-five persons. There was a small, three-piece mariachi band for entertainment and dancing. Besides our usual two servant girls, we hired two more and a bartender. Food included 250 tamales, huge bowls of guacamole (avocado salad), tacos, enchiladas, and fritos, as well as sandwiches and cakes for those who disliked Mexican food. The drinks included two gallons of Bacardi rum, a gallon of tequila, a gallon of gin, cases of Coca-Cola and beer, and various minor amounts of other spirits and cordials.

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The total cost, including band and extra servants, came to just a bit more than twenty-five dollars. The house we occupied at that time was part of a small development which included four other houses and was fenced in and had a gateman and night watchman. Our part of the estate took in approximately three acres which were largely in trees and gardens. We had two full-time servant girls and a part-time laundress and shared the expense of a gardener. The house was on three levels, the bottom level of which was the living room. As an indication of its size, the ten-foot-wide fireplace was so large that to sweep the mantel, the maid had to stand up on it. There was also a fountain, with water running down over a picturesque rock into a fishpool, inside the living room. As I have said, we entertained as many as seventy-five people at a time in it, and could have used the place for a skating rink. On the second floor were two bedrooms, two baths and a study. On the third level were the kitchen, breakfast nook and dining room, and roofed-over terraces where one sat in the sunny after­ noons. The house was furnished with Spanish colonial antiques, including “ santos” paintings, and even a few art objects going back to pre-Spanish Indian times. There had been a swimming pool in front of the house, but the former tenants had children and were afraid of an accident, so the owner had the pool filled in. The rental for this place? About $32 a month. Our total costs of living, including rent and servants? An average of about $100 a month.

Literary Begging on the Left Bank Christopher Logue, 1957

Off Rue de Rennes, behind the Café Royal, is Rue X. It’s ugly and dark and it smells. Halfway down on the right is a fancy junk shop; tom-toms, canoe paddles, shark’s tooth necklaces, blue beads and yellow beads, dead kings in marble, big combs, and so forth. But the proprietor went to the States leaving his girl in charge and she never unhooked the shutters after taking up with George; all the same, they used the phone a lot. Nobody could live in the shop. The law forbade it, and the concierge, a blind half-gone, who never washed but loved her three fat yapping dogs, wouldn’t hear of it. Behind the shop was a store-room: ten metres by five, concrete floor, no windows but the door had a glass fan-light. It was empty and of no fixed rent. Under the storeroom was a cellar that got flooded when the Seine came up to the Zouaves’ medals on Alma Bridge, covering the floor with a grey mucus, one inch deep and alive, so we decided to grow mushrooms. The concierge said she didn’t know about the storeroom. George’s girl bribed her and we moved in. There were five of us, not counting the women. We had a magazine, we all wrote—four prose, one verse, the women were in charge of Artwork, and now we had lodgings: the one essential item for living on as little as possible. Before that some of us had jobs. Jasper was English Assistant at a state school, I ’d been teaching at a language school. The store-room looked secure, so we quit. Nessie Dunsmuir, now Sidney Graham’s wife, put me on to the language school. It wasn’t bad like Orwell’s hotel kitchen, still, that lad had a taste for punishment. They paid you 200fr. an hour; talking French was forbid­ den. The lessons were private, like this: bells rang and you waited, standing, in a cubicle about the size of a giant’s coffin for your pupil— paying near 450fr.—who, usually poor and very eager, his homework done, came promptly for your whole attention during the next 55 minutes; after five m inutes’ break, the common-room two minutes away with a 430

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picture of James Joyce—famous ex-teacher—on its wall but only one lavatory, the bells rang again and you did your fourth hour of it. Sometimes new pupils would ask about the little red box on the wall. But you couldn’t tell ’em it was a microphone for the Inspector to listen in, making sure you spoke no French, because they didn’t speak English yet; when they did it was too late. You see, the language school kept a monopoly over newcomers who must work in order to stay. Work-cards are only given to those doing jobs for which Frenchmen are ineligible. The school says you can only teach your mother-tongue. Also, government students get cut rates. They had it made. Having secured your lodgings food comes next. This is less difficult. Somebody always has coffee; at lunchtime with five francs worth of bread you can often find a recipient of the GI Bill to fill it with cheese or ham. Provided you understand how Western freedom assures a writer, counting sales after standards, seven to ten years’ bad diet, you’ll last; but if you’re the sort of trouble-maker who estimates the abasement of a man’s soul by the angle of his body, in the evening you’ll have to eat in John’s off Place Od éon. The meat is all horse; however, you can fill up on bread and mustard while waiting. Jasper—he used to be a swimming champion—ate two whole basketfuls each Friday to weather the weekend; we had to smile hard and move places for this. When I couldn’t swallow my horse, he’d eat that too— until we met Susie and Amy. As the native girls of Britain fill art or drama schools between eighteen and marriage, so their American counterparts with richer and more gener­ ous fathers come for a year to Paris, France. On the average they get $200.00 a month; two can manage very nicely on that. Susie and Amy had troubles. Their parents had fixed them up, first class, at a clip-hostel for young ladies in Montparnasse. First night out they picked up a GI who insisted on entering the Hall and vomited all over the floor. The Principal phoned home and the girls were to leave for New York next week, unless they could find an apartment and a responsible landlady chaperone to convince, by letter, the family. Did we know one? Indeed we did. Jasper had just dissolved his union with a Canadian painter. Obviously, two serious people cannot live in the same house, they said. W hat’s more the painter was off to Tangier ‘for a rest’. While Japser fetched the luggage I wrote the necessary letters and the girls moved in. 20,000 francs a month, two big rooms, bath, use of kitchen, not bad, eh? For a whole year our diet, eked out by enormous food parcels from the Mid-West, allowed us to entertain and publish the magazine. Tension in the cellar decreased. Several books got written. Somehow 450,000 francs had to be found each quarter. French printers

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double the rate for foreign languages. We needed more money to continue. It was winter and in addition to occupational hazards like suicides to be rescued and young ladies aborted, we had Brendan Behan using the cellar between bouts. Then we got our historic idea. We had published Beckett, but he didn’t sell till the Sunday Times reviewer got wind of his genius; what if we published De Sade, unexpur­ gated, in English, cheap edition, illustrated. . . . Obviously, The Bedroom Philosophers was the book. A had just finished translating it; beautifully done, good eighteenth-century prose, imaginative scatology. We printed subscription-forms and prepared for long Spring holidays. A, who has a developed sense of responsibility, decided that all involved must know the infernal contents of the book. So, one night we all gathered in the cellar to hear him read aloud. About ten of us were admiring the salacious punish­ ment conferred on a mother by the daughter she had come to rescue, when there was a great knocking on the door. Who could it be but the Police? The State Department had flooded the Quarter with spies. None of us had identity cards. Sade was banned even in Paris. We composed ourselves, hid the MSS, and opened up. A finely dressed, good-looking man, no more than thirty, came in and asked if he could sit down. We made room for him among the women. Everybody has to make sacrifices. He knew what we were doing and asked if we under­ stood the risks or had the money. Avoiding the first we answered the second question truthfully, no. Then your project is impossible? Well, yes. But, he had an alternative, bigger and better, much riskier, of course; naturally there were more profits. Why, even the magazine could be financed. So for an hour he talked about a publishing firm he proposed to found. He required books, good books mind you—nothing cruel like the Marquis, gentle books to charm the huge celibate armies of the West, soft books. No high-flown rubbish, mark you, no social realism, and no middle-class agonies, just books. Of course we agreed. Within three months he had ten books. We needed the money.

Rebellion Goes Commercial Allen Churchill, 1959

Possibly the embattled editors of the M asses , returning from court in the late summer of 1918, may have paused in the center of Washington Square for a look around as newly free men out from under an indictment for sedition. Doing this, they would—with the clear new eyes of freedom— note that quite a few changes were taking place in their beloved Village. For one thing, there seemed to be greater numbers of uptowners arriving at the Washington Square terminus of the open-top Fifth Avenue buses. For another, visitors to Bohemia no longer seemed to fan out vaguely in search of quaint restaurants such as the one where the waiter sneered “ Bourgeois pigs!” at inoffensive diners. After clambering down from the tops of the buses, most of these trippers seemed to walk with purposeful stride to 58 Washington Square South, where a compelling sign noted the location on the top floor of Bruno’s Garret. This—the M asses editors would undoubtedly learn—was the headquar­ ters of Guido Bruno, middle-aged, Prussian-looking, with a bluff, plausible manner and a florid manner of speech. “ I, Bruno,” he liked to call himself. No one seemed to know exactly where Bruno hailed from—and, later, no one knew where he went. To some Bruno confided that he was a Serbian, to others he was an Italian, and to a select few he passed the word that he was a former officer in the Hapsburg armies. In keeping with his Teutonic appearance, Bruno was brash, loud, and insensitive. Concerning his position in the Village a literary historian has written: “ One approaches the subject of Guido Bruno with skepticism and am usem ent.” A true Villager of Bruno’s era would agree wholeheartedly with the need for skepticism, but it would be hard to find anyone who regarded him with amusement. For Guido Bruno was the original Village charlatan, the first to realize that uptown New Yorkers and visitors from the hinterlands might find painters and writers exciting to look upon. Or, in other words, that Greenwich Village might conceivably be made to rank with Chinatown as a tourist attraction. 433

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For this, Bruno won the undying hatred of most Villagers, prominent among them the editors of the Quill. That mildest and most amused of magazines had harsh words for few, but Guido Bruno was paramount among them. Next in earning the Quill's scorn were the people Guido Bruno attracted to the Village. According to Bobby Edwards, these credulous folk were in search of an impossible locality called Greenwich Thrillage. He brusquely dismissed them as Thrillage Hounds. Having conceived the brilliant idea of turning the Village into another Chinatown, Bruno started off in a manner which made Villagers ponder another question. Why, with such promotional gifts, had Bruno progressed in middle years only as far as a Washington Square garret? Already Village real estate men led by Vincent Pepe had joined with Hearn’s department store on Fourteenth Street to publicize the Village and its Bohemian aspects. Some fifteen thousand dollars had been spent on a newspaper campaign calling attention to Village desirability and low rents, but despite this outlay of hard cash Guido Bruno’s singlehanded efforts seem to offer a better example of how to promote a Bohemian district. Bruno did it largely by publishing a bewildering succession of little magazines, all brightly colored, attractive, and featuring the name Bruno in the title. Of these unaccountable publications, one was termed simply Bruno’s , while others bore such names as Bruno’s Chap Book , Bruno’s Bohem ia , Bruno’s Review o f L ife , Love and Literature , Bruno’s Review o f Two Worlds , Bruno’s Scrap Book , and Bruno’s Weekly. Those provocative little maga­ zines were strenuously hawked uptown, where the gay and immoral Bohemian life pictured within made buyers itch to journey southward. Nor did any who felt this itch need wonder where to go in the Village for tantalizing, Bohemian atmosphere. Strewn through the verses and prose efforts in Bruno’s magazines were endless repetitions of the address of Bruno’s Garret. Bruno lay in wait for the tourist horde in quarters transformed into a layman’s dream of the artist’s life. Gaudy, dirty, crammed with easels bearing half-finished works of impressionist art, the Garret was populated with artists’-model types of girls and hot-eyed young men who declared themselves poets, writers, and painters. To these Bruno gave food and sparse sleeping room. In return, they behaved during working hours like artistic freaks—or just as uptowners thought the crazy Villagers acted. Bruno’s bearded young men and smock-clad young women flamboyantly read verse, intoned prose, and displayed riotous paintings before the Thrillage Hounds beating a path from the Fifth Avenue bus to Bruno’s Garret. For this Bruno charged admission—ten cents or twenty-five cents, depending on the verisimilitude of the show inside. Someone called his premises a First Aid Station for Struggling Artists and Bruno was en

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tranced. Dropping the word station, he began publicizing Bruno’s Garrett as “ First Aid for Struggling A rtists.” Bruno’s friends and discoveries comprised a strange assortment of the sublime and ridiculous. He met Sadakichi Hartman, the crossbreed Japa nese-German later glorified by Gene Fowler in Minutes o f the L ast M eet ing. Hartman told Bruno of visiting Walt Whitman and cooking eggs for the old man while the two shouted verse at each other. On the basis of this alone Bruno decreed Hartman a genius, and permitted him to declaim his poems aloud in the Garret. For a time, Bruno’s closest friend and sup­ porter was perhaps the least likely Village Bohemian of all. This was Charles Edison, son of the inventor of the phonograph and the motion picture camera. Later, Charles Edison became Governor of New Jersey, but now he functioned as an ardent Villager. Edison was particularly interested in experimental theater and subsidized the tiny Thimble Theater on Fifth Avenue opposite the Brevoort, where plays by Strindberg and Chekhov were produced. At first he and Bruno were partners in the quaint little Thimble Theater, and on nights when the stage was not given over to drama Bruno would offer free concerts of phonograph music. The audi­ ence always paid in the end, however, for Bruno stood at the doors browbeating all who entered or left into buying his chapbooks and scrapbooks. Later, Edison took over the Thimble Theater on his own, after which it passed into the hands of unkempt Harry Kemp, who there reached one of the several artistic peaks in his life by offering the public Biblical verse plays of his own authorship. Guido Bruno has been called the Superb Pretender in a Garret. So great was his skill with publicity, and so convincing his resonant self-praise, that many came to consider him a true patron of the arts. But Greenwich Village knew Bruno cut corners. “ This on a strictly non-commercial basis—I, Bruno, seek nothing,” the plausible man would declare. Yet he was always surrounded by rumors that girl poets gave him money to publish their verse in his publications. When the girls (or their lawyers) demanded to know why publication day never arrived, Bruno would blandly state that of course he had slept with the girls in his Garret— “ I, Bruno, sleep with all girls”—and surely they did not wish the world to know this. Girls and lawyers had a habit of fading away after this. Bruno was never sued. Yet for all his racketeering on tender talents, Bruno achieved some good. He kept numbers of artistic young men and women temporarily alive, and among these a few had talent. Solely by accident, it was he who published the first poem of young Hart Crane. He also briefly fostered Alfred Kreymborg, who one night climbed the platform of Bruno’s Garret to chant in a weak voice his small poetic growths called M ushrooms. For this

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an audience of some twenty-five people paid ten cents a head, and in a rare gesture Bruno turned the gross receipts over to Kreymborg. In time Kreymborg became a notable Village poet, one of the few with any kind of outside following. Some of this may have resulted from the help of Guido Bruno, but a more immediate boon was that Kreymborg’s appearances at Bruno’s Garret brought Village eminence. As a result, he soon met a Village girl and rapidly fell in love. For her he wrote the nicest Mushroom of all: Till you came— I was I.

The changes wrought by the likes of Guido Bruno were easily visible to the naked eye. But as they occurred more subtle developments were taking place, for the end of the First World War had brought the end of an era to the Village—and elsewhere. It now appeared that the period from 1912 to 1918 had been the truly creative, or “ serious,” phase of New York’s Left Bank. Yet ironically, so far as national prominence was concerned, the years following, especially the Roaring Twenties in the Village, would win more fame. Not all changes in Greenwich Village were in manners and morals. Suddenly there were physical changes. Out from the basements behind piled ashcans that John Sloan and Glenn Coleman painted now burst a rash of tearooms. One reason for this was the success of Polly’s, the Village landmark under the Liberal Club. As the war ended, and a new world came a-borning, Polly moved to larger, more elegant quarters on West Fourth Street, near Sheridan Square. The financial success of Polly’s restaurant interested many young girl Villagers and Polly’s personality did the rest. For like Polly, most of the girls arriving in Bohemia came from wholesome Midwest surroundings. Running a tearoom with wooden benches, candles, and sketches on the wall was an endeavor their upbringing had fully equipped them for. Further, tearooms appeared to be exactly what young Villagers of the era desired. Later generations of Bohemians might find themselves unable to conduct intellectual discussions without one foot propped on a bar rail. Early Village Bohemians seemed perfectly content to foregather abstemi­ ously in a succession of tearooms—some of which in time became restau­ rants and even dancing spots—named the Mad Hatter, the Purple Pup (“ Montmartre Removed to New York—Make it a HABIT, not an OCCA­ SION” ), Pig ’n ’ Whistle, the Klicket, the Crumperie (run by Miss Crump), the Dutch Oven, the Wigwam, the Samovar, the Vermilion Hound, the Pollywogge, the Open Door, the Mouse Trap, the Black Parrot, Three

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Steps Down, Aladdin Attic Tea Room, and—the only one remaining today—the Jumble Shop. Of the upheaval attending the tearoom era in Greenwich Village, one commentator has written: “ The staid Victorian houses trembled. The grave, substantial dwellings were turned into book nooks, curio shoppes, Mary Virgin tearooms, and whimsy night clubs.” In the Quill, the tireless Bobby Edwards quipped, “ In the Village everyone has two businesses— her neighbor’s and a tearoom .” Nonetheless, some of these tearooms became important Village institutions, one of the first was the Mad Hatter, started by the sculptress Edith Unger. Over the doorway she lettered the legend “ ELOHTIBBAR EHT NWOD,” and the walls inside bore such observations as “ We’re All Mad Here—I’m Mad, You’re Mad. You Must be or You Wouldn’t Have Come H ere.” A giant stone fireplace and wooden benches added to the atmosphere and the Mad Hatter soon became a favored gathering spot for the new intelligentsia. As such it attracted the attention of the everpresent neighborhood Irish and Italian boys who began standing outside to jeer at the bobbed-haired, batik-clad girls self-consciously puffing cigarettes within. After this palled, the young toughs began tossing dead cats down the rabbit hole. This proved too much for Edith Unger, who sold out to a vivid girl named Eliza Helen (“ Jimmie” ) Criswell, whose dark hair matched the deep black of the bow around the collar of her smock. The motto of the Mad Hatter under Jimmie Criswell is remembered variously as “ Cake, Coffee, and Candelight,” or “ Candlelight, Coffee, and Conversation.” Soon it attracted as regular patron a rotund Dutchman named Hendrik Willem Van Loon, who drank coffee endlessly and talked as much as he drank. To any who listened, the accented, rubicund Van Loon propounded his theories on the origin and history of many. In illustration of points, he drew sketches on the tables and walls of the Mad Hatter. In time, Van Loon’s opinions and drawings became The Story o f Mankind , one of the top-selling books of the twenties. By that time, bobbed-haired Jimmie Criswell had become Mrs. Van Loon. On Washington Square South, just a few houses from John Reed’s early lodgings at 42 Washington Square and Bruno’s Garret an impressively handsome woman named Romany Marie opened a tearoom which featured fortune telling and other gypsy trappings. An ardent anarchist in her time, a younger Romany Marie had been an usher at Emma Goldman meetings. Now she decided that running a tearoom was a safer enterprise. A woman of shrewd native wisdom and a pithy slant on life, Romany Marie was much cherished by Villagers. It was in front of sightseers from uptown, though, that the picturesque woman really shone. Dressed to flamboyant fashion, she would heavily intone: “ I was born in an inn on the fringe of a

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great forest in Moldavia. My mother kept the inn. She met my father in the depths of the forest. He had a red kerchief about his neck. He was wild-eyed. He was full of song.” Despite the intense conviction carried by these words, Villagers professed to believe that Romany Marie had actu­ ally been born on Delancey Street on New York’s lower East Side. It made no real difference. Whatever her origins, Romany Marie’s talents were sufficient to allow her to function in the Village through Prohibition, depression, and World War II, to become one of the truly durable Village landmarks. Across Sixth Avenue, in what was loosely called the Sheridan Square area, the first Greenwich Village night club had opened at 8 Christopher Street. This was the Pirates Den, operated by an enterprising young man named Don Dickermann. Doormen, waiters, and musicians were all dressed as frightening buccaneers, even to round gold-hoop earrings dan­ gling from ears. Cutlasses and other piratical paraphernalia festooned the Pirates Den walls, while outside the sign over the entrance was in the shape of a coffin—a fact which bothered local clergymen who as yet were not accustomed to such irreverence in the Village. On Third Street, the long-haired men and short-haired girls could go to Mama Bertolotti’s for her famed Fifteen Cent Lunch which comprised of three items: thick minestrone soup with copious bread and butter, a glass of red wine; a nickel tip for the dirty-aproned waiter. Soon Mama Bertolotti’s place would be rivaled by a more elegant establishment run by her son, Bill Bertolotti. Thus the Bertolotti clan became the Village restaurant dynasty.

Getting By and “Making It” Lawrence Lipton, 1959

The question of poverty and wealth came up often in interviews. Most often it was confined to speculations on the best way to make out with a minimum of income, rather than with dreams of personal financial success or marrying wealth. The ideal aim is a viable, voluntary, independent poverty, preferably with a marriage or shack-up partner who is willing to work for a living, at least part time. Chris Nelson, who holds a full-time job and supports his wife and children and does his poetry writing and painting evenings and week ends, is the exception. Usually it is a working sweetheart or wife who is the chief provider. Where both write or paint, it is the wife who is the Sunday painter or writer. Separations when they occur are not due as a rule to dissatisfaction with this financial arrangement but to other causes. Dedicated poverty is taken for granted, so much so that it is seldom a subject for discussion. What is frequently discussed are ways of “ making it.” Tricks of the trade, you might say—the “ trade” of getting by with as little commercial work as possible, or, ideally, with no commercial work at all. (The Scene: Angel Dan Davies’ pad. Angel has just been served with an eviction notice, after six months nonpayment of rent. He is discussing the situation with Itchy Dave Gelden, Chris Nelson, Chuck Bennison and Dean Murchi­ son, a visitor from San Francisco who was formerly a Greenwich Villager.) D a v e : Man, what a drag. I thought the cat was satisfied with you painting the outside o f the house for him. A n g e l: Sure, man, but it’s six months now. And I haven’t even finished painting

the place. Guess I got kind o f hung up. Fact is I had to use up most o f the paint painting my pictures. D ave: That comes first. A n g e l: Naturally. But what I mean is, what do I do now? What do I tell the cat? C h u c k : Tell him anything. Tell him you’ve sold a picture and you expect to collect for it next month, or something. Tell him your publisher is in Europe and

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D a v e : You could take a thing like that understand. ANGEL: Yeh, if you’ve got something to DEAN: I wouldn’t do anything. Sit tight. ANGEL: But suppose— I don’t want the

to the bank, man, and get a loan on it— I

show for it. No kidding, what do I do? Take it cool. heat coming around— they might not like some of the books I’ve got here, or smell pot or something. DAVE: That’s right. (He broods silently for a minute.) Did you say you had a roach stashed away somewhere?

(Angel fishes around back of some books on the shelf and comes up with the charred half end of a marijuana cigarette. He lights up, takes a drag on it and passes it around. Dave has been going over a pile of jazz records. He find what he’s looking for and puts it on the box. Thelonious Monk’s Brilliant Corners.) DEAN (Stretched out full length on the floor, relaxed and reminiscent): I lived in

Manhattan once on nothing a week. D a v e : W hat did you do, m an, beg? D e a n : N o. D a v e : Y ou’re an animal, m an, you have to eat. DEAN: Well, I scrounged a place to live, I lived in a different place every week. I

would go to the landlord and say I want this place and I can’t pay you any money till next week. I might have to hit ten or twelve places before I found a landlord who would let me live in the place and I would live in it for a week or so and when he came around for the rent I would be gone. I didn’t have anything to move in and nothing to move out. I had two pairs o f dungarees, two nylon shirts and a pair o f sandals. (Long pause) But I wasn’t happy. Didn’t get a damn thing done. No painting, no writing, nothing. CHRIS: I saw a cat once carrying a big cardboard box, and I said, “ What you got there, man?” And he said, “ I’m carrying my bed around on my back.” He used to make it up to Hoffman’s at the Red Barn, and sleep on the stairs. He said you shouldn’t think ahead more than a half hour, you know, live in the present. CHUCK: Like I say, now is the time. This is the only moment we have, now. Right at this split second. Past, present and future all in one. ANGEL: You can talk man, like you’ve got it m ade. Your old lady’s pad, you can always go back there. But I’ve got all this stuff here, and Margot laid up with the flu, and the kids. What’ll I tell the landlord?— DAVE: H e’s a Christian, let him share with his fellow man. Like they say— it’s good for the soul. DEAN: I wouldn’t tell him nothin’. I’d move out and to hell with the joint. You’ve had six months o f it. It’s time to give some other landlord a chance. There’s plenty o f pads with FOR RENT signs hanging out. ANGEL: Yeh, but you’ve got to be able to pay at least one month’s rent in advance. DAVE: I’ve got some loot. It’s my next month’s rent but I’ll lay it on you, if you think that’ll do it for you. ANGEL: I already sounded him on that, but he wants all the back rent, six months. And besides, h e’s already served this eviction notice.

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D ave: Hey, I got an idea. I’ll move into your pad and you can move into mine.

And when the agent comes around my pad looking for the rent, tell him I’m working in Detroit, in one o f the auto factories— expert consulting job, or something fancy like that— and I’ll be back with the loot in a couple months, and you’re taking care o f the place for me so no one will bust in and damage his fuckin’ property. If he raises a stink you can lay a month’s rent on him— A n g e l: But if I do that, what’ll you do for rent to pay my landlord. H e’ll want at least a month’s rent in advance. D ave: I’ll tell him I’ll finish painting the outside of the joint for him. It looks like hell now, half fresh paint and the other half peeling off like old wallpaper. H e’ll be able to rent it this way.

(General approval of the idea all around) A n g e l: Hey, you know something? It might work!

(Note: It did.) The dedicated independent poverty is an art, but it is also a science of survival. It has its strategies and logistics. Those who choose manual labor soon find out that, so far as the trades are concerned, breaking into the ranks of labor is neither easy nor cheap. Joining the proletariat is like trying to join an exclusive club and often quite as expensive, what with trade union initiation fees and numerous qualifications and restrictions. For the most part the beat generation disaffiliate is confined to the fringe jobs in the labor market, like small house painting jobs if he is an artist trying to find part-time work to pay for his colors and canvases and keep some canned goods in the larder. Some painters in the Los Angeles area have occasionally found cartooning jobs and sculpting on a part-time basis in the studios, particularly at the Walt Disney Studio. Ceramics has provided some income for artists, as well as costume jewelry designing, free lance or in the employ of some small businessman. Frame making can be a source of income. And some artists do not mind teaching a few hours a week at some art school or as private tutors. In Venice West some have made it for a while as typewriter repairmen, postal employees and arts and crafts teachers—“ occupational therapy” — in mental hospitals, or attendants in the mental wards, or psychology assistants giving Rorschach tests. In San Francisco they sometimes ship out with a crew for a few months and come home with a bank roll, or join a road construction gang in Canada or Alaska. Allen Ginsberg financed a trip to North Africa and Europe that way. The lumber camps of the Northwest sometimes serve the same purpose for a while. Some part-time jobs are to be found as laboratory technicians, X-ray technicians and the like, if one is willing to spend a few months preparing himself for the job. In New York there are jobs that offer an opportunity to work in odd-

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hour shifts, much desired by the beat, as art gallery guards, deck hands on ferryboats, and for those who seek solitude and plenty of time to think, goof or write, the job of barge captain is the answer. Those who are polylingual or have traveled abroad can find part-of-the-year employment as travel guides, either self-employed if they have a little organizing ability or in the employ of travel agencies. In Greenwich Village there are some who make it by doing hauling in small trucks, and some by delivering packages and messages. New Yorkers also find good pickings at the many openings and prem ières in art galleries and other places—to say nothing of pickups, but for this racket you have to own at least one good party suit, unless you can pass for a painter or an interesting “ character.” New York is also good for free-lance manuscript reading jobs for publishers and part-time jobs reading proof for publishers or printers. Musicians who are making the beat scene do copy work for composers and music publishers, or compile “ fake books” containing melodies and chord symbols, with or without words, and peddle them to commercial musicians in a kind of under-the-counter deal, sometimes on the union hall floor and other hangouts for musicians in New York and Hollywood. In Venice West and elsewhere there is always the possibility of an occasional hitch with the gas and electric company as a meter reader. There is clerking in bookstores and now there are a few jobs in espresso coffeehouses. For those who live near a university there is library work on an hourly basis. Landscape gardening is a year-round possibility for West Coast beatniks. Some of them have made it as counselors for juvenile delinquents, in the employ of the city or county. The job of shipping clerk is a popular one. When you have saved all the money you think you are going to need for a while, you quit and pass the word around to your friends to go there and apply. In this way a job is “ kept in the family,” just as the pads are kept in the family by being passed on from one tenant to the next, with the landlord often none the wiser—or richer. Job opportunities are always more numerous for the girls, of course. They can always find work in dress shops and department stores, with the telephone company and the telephone answering services. As doctors’ reception clerks and dental assistants. If they have had some dancing school they can find part-time jobs as dancing teachers in private schools and summer jobs in girls’ camps. There are any number of office jobs a girl can fill. There is manuscript typing and other free-lance typing work. In Los Angeles some find jobs as script girls in the TV and movie studios. Comparison shopping and the sub rosa job of starting whispering cam­ paigns in the subways for commercial products is strictly for the “ angleshooters” among the Village chicks in New York. Modeling is open to

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those who have the face and the figure for it. The job of B-girl in the taverns is very much sought after because it pays well and the hours are desirable, but rarely do the chicks of beatland double as call girls or do a week-end stint in the whorehouses. That is a monopoly of respectable working girls and housewives in need of extra money to support their families or expensive tastes in clothes and cars. It is no part of the beat scene. The musically inclined among the girls seek jobs in record shops and with music and record publishers. The artistically talented among the chicks sometimes make it as dress designers, window dressers and interior decorators, but here they run into competition with the beat homosexuals. Homosexual writers and artists are the most hard put to it to find—and hold onto—employment of any kind. If all else fails there are always the foundations, the Huntington Hartford Foundation near Venice West, where one can find food and shelter for three months (renewable for three months longer) if he is judged eligible and comes properly recommended, and, on the East Coast, Yaddo and the McDowell colony. Some have been the recipients of Guggenheim fellow­ ships or other grants. There are windfalls now and then. An industrial firm or a university will let it be known that it needs guinea pigs for some research test, like the sleep tests at the U. of C., or some other research problem. One beatnik I know made it for some months as a sweater. He sweated so many hours a day for a cosmetics firm testing a new product. And there are the standard jobs for itinerants and occasional workers— cab driving, dish washing, bus boy work, filling station work, and, for the girls, jobs as car-hops in drive-in restaurants or waitresses. In Venice West there are jobs for girls on the Pacific Ocean Park Amusement Pier. Some of the younger chicks who are still going to college—or can keep up a reasonable appearance of doing so—get money from home. If you are older and have children to support and no visible means of support, the county will come to your aid. With all that, there are still many problems. Poverty is not easy to manage. It requires some planning and some conniving. The pressure is toward conformity, with regular working hours and consumer spending in ways and in quantities that will make the American Way of Life look good in the Labor Department reports and the Department of Commerce statistics. Buying a secondhand suit for five or ten dollars at a Windward Avenue uncalled-for clothing store or a three-dollar secondhand dress at an East Side rummage shop does nothing for the statisticians or the Chamber of Commerce. Sponging, scrounging, borrowing and angle-shooting are too undepend

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able as a regular source of income, and street begging takes too much time, as Henry Miller has shown, with inspired documentation, in Tropic o f Cancer. Pushing pot is too hazardous and peddling heroin is a one-way ticket to the penitentiary, if not to the grave. Shoplifting is only a stopgap measure at best. It is an art that takes long practice to master if one is to make a living at it, and is better left to those who have a talent for it. One amateur I know found herself confronted one day with an ideological, if not a moral, problem. The supermarket where she sometimes shoplifted a quarter of a pound of butter—more as social protest when butter prices took a sudden jump than from any actual necessity—was being picketed by strikers. Out of sympathy with the striking union she went across the street to the little independent grocer and did her shoplifting there till the strike was over. Inheritances sometimes provide a few valuables to be divided among the needy in true communal fashion. Somebody who has wigged out and been committed to a mental institution for a while, or been busted for pot for the third or fourth time and sent up for a long stretch, will leave behind a pad with household effects, furniture, clothes, books, phonograph records, pictures and hi-fi equipment. The accepted practice is that such stuff becomes community property. If a cat moves out of town he sometimes wills such things to his friends quite informally rather than try to tote them with him or go to the expense of having them shipped. When he comes back he will find any pad open to him, or can divide his guesting between several of his choosing. It is the traditional hospitality of the poor, one of the few traditions of the square that the beat honor scrupulously. “ Why don’t more of them simply marry rich women?” I heard a square ask one evening at a party in one of the Venice West pads. Chuck Bennison took it upon himself to answer. “ It’s a full-time jo b ,” he said. *

*

*

Angel Dan Davies had a problem. When his unemployment insurance payments had ended some weeks before and he had to start looking for a new gig, he tried to make it with the beard, instead of shaving it off as he had always been obliged to do before. After a few turndowns— “ and the ad kept running in the papers, so I knew it must be the beard, like, what else could it be, man?”—he tried trimming it a little, then as the turndowns continued, a little more, till he finally shaved it all off and landed a job as a shipping clerk. Now that three weeks had elapsed and the boss showed no sign of firing him for goofing on the job or showing up late for work or any of the other infractions that go with poetry writing, jazz and pot into the early morning hours, he was letting the beard grow again, and the boss

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was beginning to notice and look at him “ with that look, dig?” —and a new crisis was in the making. “ Like, it isn’t just the beard, Larry, it’s the pressure of conformity, it’s Who says I can’t have a beard if I want it? or sandals if I want to wear them on the gig—like who would ?—you could get your toes chopped off if one of those boxes ever fell on them—it’s a matter of utility, shoes, but a beard . . . who the hell cares if I tote boxes and shipping crates with a beard? Is it as if the customers might ask questions, me stuck back there in that black hole of a shipping room off the alley and never seeing anybody except truck drivers, so what’s the big crime, what the hell difference should it make to that square? So—I ’m thinking—is it worth it, the gig, I mean? Or do I start trimming again, or settle for just the mustache like I did on that godawful car-selling gig, that I lost anyway when I didn’t shuck the customers enough to please the crook who was running the car lot. I mean when does it end —?” “ I don’t know,” I said. “ How did it begin?” “ Begin? You mean my beard?” “ Yes, your beard. How, when did you first happen—” “ Oh, that , sure, I’ll tell you when. Very simple. The first beard I started was for the Seder, the first Seder away from home, in my own home, like I was very religious at the time and it was a kind of ritual, you might say, and then I had to go out and look for a gig and I found I had to shave it.” “ You were conforming with an ancient Jewish religious custom, isn’t that right? So it wasn’t nonconformism but conformism that started you on your first beard.” “ Right. So it isn’t conformism or nonconformism the squares are worried about—so what is it? Don’t tell me—let me think. It’s what they associate it with at the time. Right now beards are being worn by young people who reject the rewards of the goddamn dog-eat-dog society, who hole up in pads in the slums and listen to jazz music all night and get high on pot and violate all their sexual taboos and show up late for work in the morning or stay home all day if they’ve got a poem eating away at them to get itself written or a picture to be painted. It’s putting all these other things first —man! That’s what scares the shit out of them—”

Getting By on 40 a Week John Wilcock, 1963

For most of the 18 months since he arrived in New York, a young artist named Robert Cowan has lived in a third-floor walk-up near Second Avenue—spending his time walking, talking, painting, and loafing, in a manner usually thought of (by non-Villagers) as being typical of young Village artists. Here in the United States only by grace of a student visa, Cowan, who is 26, has not been allowed to take a job, but he has managed to get by fairly well on a weekly allowance of $40 from his indulgent father, a lawyer, in Toronto, Canada. At the end of next month, unfortunately, Cowan’s idyllic life is to end, for Cowan senior has announced that he’ll finally call it quits and present the inevitable ultimatum: find a job or else. On the whole, however, Bob’s life in the Village has been a memorably carefree one, and though his story may not be at all typical, even for the Village, it surely serves as an outline of the way that many people, here and elsewhere, think they would like to live. Forty dollars a week (after NO taxes) is nowhere near starvation level, of course, and many people (including myself) live on less. But it’s a figure that does necessitate a certain amount of budgeting and allows few extravagances even if—as Cowan feels—this is amply compensated for by the freedom of being able to work when one feels like it. Or not work at all. Before meeting Cowan, I exchanged a couple of letters with him, and in one of them he wrote: I do get up when I feel like it (about 10:30 in the morning or later); I do not work when I feel like it, for this is against the law for me at this time, unfortunately; but I paint when I feel like it. I sit around in the evening, quite often at the Montmartre or Rienzi’s, wasting time and money. I more or less live a life o f leisure but I like to think that my painting makes life worthwhile and it does. If this sounds dull as hell, it may be—but here I am and here I intend to stay.

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At that time I hadn’t asked him why he came to this particular area to live, I gathered from what he said that it was for pretty much the same reasons that have attracted younger people for the past three or four decades: cheap rents, a quaint dissimilarity between Village streets and the rest of Manhattan, a general air of creativity—off-Broadway theatre, little galleries, craft shops—and a greater-than-usual tolerance for eccen­ tricities of dress and behavior. Whatever the case, early in 1955 Robert Cowan, graduate of the Ontario College of Art, erstwhile picture framer and potential fulltime artist, came to New York, enrolled in Hans Hof­ mann’s art class on West 8th Street, and began to look for an inexpensive apartment. “ I walked up and down Fifth Avenue, taking the side streets methodi­ cally and knocking on almost every door,” he recalls. “ Eventually I got wise and began to follow the newspaper ads, acting on them as soon as the papers came out.” He landed the unheated, third-floor walk-up in which he now lives far east on 5th Street. The rent is $30 a month, and to keep it warm in winter he uses an old trick: turning the oven up high and leaving it on. Furniture? “ The Salvation Army will let you have a whole raft of stuff for five bucks—and they’ll deliver, too.” What they delivered in his case was a couple of old tables, a gooseneck lamp, and a garbage can. The remainder of his furnishings include a Japanese screen, sent by a friend in Korea, shelves and a chest of drawers made out of covered 30-cent orange crates, some low stools ($5 apiece), an old-fashioned radio “ of hideous design but with a beautiful tone,” picked up on the Bowery for $10. He doesn’t have a telephone and when I first tried to get in touch with him I called up a girl in the same apartment house and left a message. Later I found out that that is what everybody does when they want him. He has an amicable exchange with a girl in one of the downstairs apart­ ments: she uses his apartment occasionally, as a studio—it is very light with the windows facing north—and he uses her telephone. “ I used to pay half the bill,” he explained, “ but she hasn’t mentioned it lately.” I tried to explain to him that his life, whether “ typical” or not, in some ways represented a pipe-dream for a good many people and I felt they might be interested in how he spent his time. And money. For example, how had he passed the previous day? This was a Sunday, about three weeks ago. We decided to retrace it, step by step. “ L et’s see,” he said, “ I got up about 10 o ’clock, as usual, and skipped breakfast, also as usual. I’ve been trying to do some cartooning lately, and far no particular reason I suddenly remembered an idea I’d had about a month before.

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“ I had been thinking about expressions that could be taken literally, and the one I decided to draw showed a woman shaking her fist at a man and saying: ‘Don’t you shout at me, you old goat.’ The man, of course, looked like a man except that instead of a man’s head, he had the head of a goat.” He smiled apologetically, as if he realized that it was corny, adding that his main aim in drawing the cartoon was to improve his technique on that kind of work. He hadn’t been able to sell either that or any of a handful of other cartoons, nor had he had any success with some science-fiction covers and magazine illustrations. It hasn’t bothered him much because he did them mainly for practice. What he really wants to do is fine art. “ Fine art?” I prompted. “ Yes,” he replied. “ Pictures, non-objective works—not commercial art. Painting is what I ’m serious about—and what runs away with most of my money. I buy my paints and brushes and things at the Central A rtists’ Supply, on 3rd Avenue; that’s about the cheapest place because it’s always having artists’ sales. Even with canvases at $2 apiece, though, the price adds u p .” “ Do you ever sell anything?” I asked. “ Yes, sometimes. About two months ago I sold a picture from the show at the City Center. They have an exhibit every month and I usually enter— it only costs $2. The picture I sold brought $50. That pays for a lot of paint.” After he had finished the cartoon, he said, he went uptown to visit some of the galleries. “ And after looking round the galleries?” “ And after that I went back home and cooked up something to eat. T hat’s an important point to make, I guess, if you’re recording what I do every day. Most of my eating I do at home to save money. Seven dollars a week is what I put aside for food. I buy most of it at that market at First Avenue, near 9th Street.” “ Any particular attempt to balance your diet?” “ No balance. Lots of potatoes, and yogurt and sour cream and things like that. If you’re going to stress how to save money, though, you should mention things like buying day-old bread and pastries for half price—and the free meals you can get in White Rose bars for the price of a 10-cent beer. Pickled foods—things like herring and potato salad. Not very excit­ ing, but filling.” “ Did you ever go to the Provincetown Landing?” I asked. “ It’s a bar south of the Square where they used to put on free buffet every night. I don’t know if they still do.” “ Well, as a matter of fact,” Cowan said, “ I was there last night for the

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first time. A woman I met in the Riviera bar took me there. Oh, but I’ll tell you the thing in order.” After he had eaten he walked as he does almost every day. “ I looked in the [San] Remo, the Rienzi, and the Montmartre. Nobody there I knew either, so I didn’t stay. In the Limelight I found a couple of guys. I talked with them a while . . . what about? Oh, I guess the usual things. Most people complain about the general state of affairs, but I’ve often thought that the people who complain the most are the ones who have the most security and money.” “ How about the contented ones?” I asked. “ I don’t think I ’ve met many contented ones.” Cowan tilted his head back, hitched up his blue jeans (he was also wearing a brown shirt, open at the neck, and a light jacket) and continued: “ Well, these two guys and myself went over to the Riviera, had a few beers and met this brunette. She was sitting by herself and we got talking to her. Turned out she’d come down to the Village to get away from things, as she did occasionally. She was married, but it wasn’t her husband she wanted to get away from. Just things. “ She took us over to the Provincetown Landing—I hadn’t seen it before—and we had a few more beers before I got bored and walked home, about 1 o ’clock.” “ And that’s a typical day?” I asked. “ About average, yes. There are other things I do occasionally and most of them don’t cost much. There’s a jazz at the Central Plaza on weekends. It’s two bucks, I think, and you can take your own liquor or not. Just as you like. Sometimes I go to the Café Bohemia. A beer there costs you 90 cents but you can stand at the bar with it all night and listen to top jazz men. And Ted Joans of the Galerie Fantastique has Dixieland parties on Second Avenue every Friday night, I believe; I ’ve never been there, but I hear they’re pretty good. A dollar—and take your own booze.” “ And it’s all over now?” I asked. “ You’re going back to Canada next week?” “ Yes, I ’m going back,” Cowan said. “ I ’m going to teach art for a couple of months near Parry Sound. But I’m also going to apply for a work permit so that I can come back to the Village in the fall. As a matter of fact, I ’m keeping up my apartm ent.” “ Things will be different though? I mean you’ll be working and earning some money?” “ Well, I ’ll try to get a job, but it’s by no means certain that I ’ll have any money—or any more than I’ve got now, anyway.”

Five Making the Scene Bohemia . . . a doctrine adhered to not only by artists, but also designers, stylists, tradepaper subeditors, interior decorators, wolves, fairies, millionaire patrons o f art, sadists, nym phom aniacs, bridge sharks, anarchists, women living on alimony, tired reformers, educational cranks, econom ists, hopheads, dipsom aniac playwrights, nudists, restaurant keepers, stockbrokers, and dentists craving self-expression.

—Malcolm Cowley

The Cafés F. Berkeley Smith, 1901

One finds every type of restaurant, tavern, and café along the “ Boul’ M ich.” There are small restaurants whose plat du jour might be traced to some faithful steed finding a final oblivion in a brown sauce and onions— an important item in a course dinner, to be had with wine included for one franc fifty. There are brasseries too, gloomy by day and brilliant by night (dispensing good Munich beer in two shades, and German and French food), whose rich interiors in carved black oak, imitation gobelin, and stained glass are never half illumined until the lights are lit. All day, when the sun blazes, and the awnings are down, sheltering those chatting on the terrace, the interiors of these brasseries appear dark and cavernous. 451

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The clientele is somber too, and in keeping with the place; silent poets, long haired, pale, and always writing; serious-minded lawyers, lunching alone, and fat merchants who eat and drink methodically. Then there are bizarre cafés, like the d ’Harcourt, crowded at night with noisy women tawdry in ostrich plumes, cheap feather boas, and much rouge. The d ’Harcourt at midnight is ablaze with lights, but the crowd is common and you move on up the boulevard under the trees, past the shops full of Quartier fashions—velvet coats, with standing collars buttoning close under the chin; flamboyant black silk scarfs tied in a huge bow; queer broad-brimmed, black hats without which no “ types” wardrobe is com­ plete. On the corner facing the square, and opposite the Luxembourg gate, is the Taverne du Panthéon. This is the most brilliant café and restaurant of the Quartier, forming a V with its long terrace, at the corner of the boulevard and the rue Soufflot, at the head of which towers the superb dome of the Panthéon. It is 6 p . m . and the terrace, four rows deep with little round tables, is rapidly filling. The white-aproned garçons are hurrying about or squeezing past your table, as they take the various orders. “ Un demi! un!” shouts the garçon. “ Deux pernod nature, deux!” cries another, and presently the “ Omni­ bus” in his black apron hurries to your table, holding between his knuck­ les, by their necks, half a dozen bottles of different apéritifs, for it is he who fills your glass. It is the custom to do most of one’s correspondence in these cafés. The garçon brings you a portfolio containing note-paper, a bottle of violet ink, an impossible pen that spatters, and a sheet of pink blotting-paper that does not absorb. With these and your apéritif, the place is yours as long as you choose to remain. No one will ask you to “ move on” or pay the slightest attention to you. Should you happen to be a cannibal chief from the South Seas, and dine in a green silk high hat and necklace of your latest captive’s teeth, you would occasion a passing glance perhaps, but you would not be a sensa­ tion. There is no phase of character, of eccentricity of dress, that Paris has not seen. Nor will your waiter polish off the marble top of your table, with the hope that your ordinary sensibility will suggest another drink. It would be beneath his professional dignity as a good garçon de café. The two sous you have given him as a pourboire, he is well satisfied with, and expresses his contentment in a “ merci, monsieur, m erci,” the final syllable ending in a little hiss, prolonged in proportion to his satisfaction. After this just

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formality, you will find him ready to see the point of a joke or discuss the current topics of the day. He is intelligent, independent, very polite, but never servile. As it grows late, the taverne becomes more and more animated. Every one is talking and having a good time. The room is bewildering in gay color, the hum of conversation is everywhere, and as there is a corresponding row of tables across the low, narrow room, friendly greet­ ings and often conversations are kept up from one side to the other. The dinner, as it progresses, assumes the air of a big family party of good bohemians. The French do not bring their misery with them to the table. To dine is to enjoy oneself to the utmost; in fact the French people cover their disappointment, sadness, annoyances, great or petty troubles, under a masque of “ blague,” and have such an innate dislike of sympathy or ridicule that they avoid it by turning everything into “ blague.” If you have finished dinner, you go out on the terrace for your coffee. The fakirs are passing up and down in front, selling their wares—little rabbits, wonderfully lifelike, that can jump along your table and sit on their hind legs, and wag their ears; toy snakes; small leaden pigs for good luck; and novelties of every description. Here one sees women with baskets of ecrivisse boiled scarlet; an acrobat tumbles on the pavement, and two men and a girl, as a marine, a soldier, and a vivandière, in silvered faces and suits, pose in melodramatic attitudes. The vivandière is rescued alternately from a speedy death by the marine and the soldier. Presently a little old woman approaches, shriveled and smiling, in her faded furbelows now in rags. She sings in a piping voice and executes between the verses of tottering pas seul, her eyes ever smiling, as if she still saw over the glare of the footlights, in the haze beyond, the vast audience of bygone days; smiling as if she still heard the big orchestra and saw the leader with his vibrant baton, watching her every movement. She is over seventy now, and was once a premier danseuse at the opera.

The Sidewalk Café: Island and Outpost Guillermo de Torre, 1961

Any proper account of the European coffee houses would have to begin with an appraisal—analytical and symbolic—of the sidewalk terraces of these establishments. And, for my part, I believe that such an appraisal might as well be put in the form of an eulogy. The meaning of the sidewalk terrace goes beyond the mere externals. It is something more than a maze of tables, chairs, patrons, overflowing with faces, voices, gestures. Its admirable singularity resides in the essential ambiguity of its character. The sidewalk terrace is the coffee house and it isn’t. Its clients resemble the dwellers of a city fortunate enough to inhabit the city’s center and its environs (borderlines are such delights!) They do not renounce their haven as a shelter against cold or heat, but, by advancing a few feet toward the pavement, they are able to keep watch over the universe beyond and to venture outside the confines of their own selves. They remain isolated from the crowd’s disorder, but still belong to the world of the street as from their outpost they survey what happens and who happens by. In this manner too the terrace dweller becomes simultaneously observer and actor in the urban spectacle. Whether he rests, or chats or daydreams, he never lets go of the life around him, never fails to capture some moment in the flux and diversity of the city. Is there anything sadder, anything more “ inhum an,” than those coffee houses bereft of a sidewalk beachhead, of those others in which the customers sit with their backs turned to the street, blind to the changing human horizon without? Sidewalk cafés cannot be mounted, “ staged,” indiscriminately in any place whatever (even though they can endow even the most trivial of locations with a certain dramatic (interest). Ideally they demand a setting consecrated in some measure by time, and a human fauna possessed of a superior sense of idleness. The archetypal sidewalk café is a gazebo discreetly perched above the street. But, if not that, it must at least front on a stage of richly leafed trees or stand before a façade so weather-cured 454

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that time may be told by the sunlight upon it without benefit of clocks. Above it should have the atmosphere of a shoreline which embraces the sea without imprisoning it. For that sea, the crowd, must always be observable, through trees, windows or columns, as it flows in slow motion, adjusting itself to the rhythm of the terrace-dweller’s gaze. Please note that I call them dwellers, not visitors, since in order to become a terrace sitter one must first leave behind all ordinary urgencies and make the “ life” of the place one’s own. The genuine dweller of the sidewalk café has nothing in common with the sorrowful company of those who bide their time in public squares or in the waiting rooms of railroad stations. His stay in the terrace is joyously temporary but while it lasts it must have the quality of being permanent. He sits at his table, not to await but to be. Friends may or may not arrive, but he is there, keeping first his own company and then that of others. For the terrace sitter is above all the dweller of an island shore, whose chief spiritual occupation is to contemplate the shifting, lapping waters about him as to scan the distant coastline of the world beyond.

The Café Procope W. C. Morrow, 1900

In the short busy little street, the Rue de l’Ancienne-Comedie, which runs from the Boulevard St. Germain, in a line from the Théâtre National de l’Odéon and connecting with the Rue Mazarin, its continuation, the heavy dome of the Institut looming at its end, is to be found probably the most famous café in Paris, for in its day it has been the rendezvous of the most noted French littérateurs, politicians, and savants. What is more, the Procope was the first café established in Paris, originating the appela tion “ café” to a place where coffee is served, for it was here that coffee was introduced to France as an after-dinner comforter. Tacked to the white pillars are numerous copies of Le P rocope , a weekly journal published by Théo, the proprietor of the café. Its contributors are the authors, journalists, and poets who frequent the café, and it publishes a number of portraits besides, and some spirited drawings. It is devoted in part to the history of the café and of the celebrities who have made it famous, and publishes portraits of them, from Voltaire to Paul Verlaine. This same journal was published here over two hundred years ago, in 1689, and it was the means then by which the patrons of the establishment kept in closer touch with their contemporaries, and the spirit of the time. Théo is proprietor and business manager, as well as editor. The modern gas illumination of the café, in contrast to the fashion of brilliant lighting that prevails in the showy cafés of the boulevards, must nevertheless be a great advance on the ancient way that it had of being lighted with crude oil lamps and candelabra. But the dim illumination is in perfect keeping with the other appointments of the place, which are dark, sombre, and funereal. The interior of the Procope is as dark as a finely colored old meerschaum pipe. The woodwork, the chairs, and the tables are deeply stained by time, the contrasting white marble tops of the tables suggesting gravestones; and with all these go the deeply discolored walls and the many ancient paintings—even the caisse, behind which sits Ma456

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dame Théo, dozing over her knitting. This caisse is a wonderful piece of furniture in itself, of some rich dark wood, beautifully carved and deco­ rated. Madame Théo is in black, her head resting against the frame of an old crayon portrait of Voltaire on the wall behind her. A fat and comfortable black cat is asleep in the midst of rows of white saucers and snowy napkins. The only garçon, except the garçon apprentice, is sitting in a corner drowsing over an evening paper, but ever ready to answer the quiet calls of the customers. For in the matter of noise and frivolity the Café Procope is wholly unlike the boulevard cafés. An atmosphere of refined and elegant suppression pervades the place; the roystering spirit that haunts the boulevards stops at the portals of the Procope. Here all is peace and tranquility, and that is why it is the haunt of many earnest and aspiring poets and authors; for hither they may bring their portfolios in peace and security, and here they may work upon their manuscripts, knowing that their neighbors are similarly engrossed and that intrusion is not to be feared. And then, too, are they not sitting on the same chairs and writing at the same tables that have been occupied by some of the greatest men in all the brilliant history of France? The Café Procope was founded in 1689 by François Procope, where it now stands. Opposite was the Comédie Française, which also was opened that year. The café soon became the rendezvous of all who aspired to greatness in art, letters, philosophy, and politics. It was here that Voltaire, in his eighty-second year, while attending the rehearsals of his play, “ Irène,” descended from his chaise-a-porteur at the door of the Café Procope, and drank the coffee which the café had made fashionable. It was here also that he became reconciled to Piron, after an estrangement of more than twenty years. Ste.-Foix made trouble here one day about a cup of chocolate. A duel with the proprietor of the café was the immediate result, and after it Ste.Foix, badly wounded, exclaimed, “ Nevertheless, monsieur, your swordthrust does not prevent my saying that a very sickly déjeuner is une tasse de chocolat!” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, after the successful representation of “ Le De­ vin de Village,” was carried in triumph to the Procope by Condorcet, who, with Jean-Jacques on his shoulders, made a tour of the crowded café, yelling, “ Vive la Musique Française!” Diderot was fond of sitting in a corner and manufacturing paradoxes and materialistic dissertations to provoke the lieutenant of police, who would note everything he said and report it to the chief of police. The lieutenant, ambitious though stupid, one night told his chief that Diderot had said one

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never saw souls; to which the chief returned, “ M. Diderot se trompe. L ’ame est un esprit, et M. Diderot est plein d ’esprit.” Danton delighted in playing chess in a quiet corner with a strong adversary in the person of Marat. Many other famous revolutionists assembled here, among them Fabre d ’Églantine, Robespierre, d ’Holbach, Mirabeau, Camille Desmoulins. It was here that Camille Desmoulins was to be strangled by the reactionists in the Revolution; it was here that the first bonnet rouge was donned. The massacre of December, 1792, was here planned, and the killing began at the very doors of the café. Madame Roland, Lucille Desmoulins, and the wife of Danton met here on the 10th of August, the day of the fall of the monarchy, when bells rang and cannon thundered. It was later that Bonaparte, then quite young and living in the Quai Conti, in the building which the American Art Association now occupies, left his hat at the Procope as security for payment for a drink, he having left his purse at home. In short, the old café of the Rue des Fosses-St.-Germain (its old name) was famous as the meeting-place of celebrities. Legendre, the great geometrician, came hither. One remem­ bers the verses of Masset: “ Je joue aux dominos quelquefois chez Pro­ cope.” Here Gambetta made speeches to the reactionist politicians and journalists. He engaged in more than one prise de bec with le pere Coquille friend of Veuillot. Coquille always made sprightly and spirited replies when Gambetta roared, thundered, and swore. Since then have followed days of calm. In later times Paul Verlaine was a frequenter of the Procope, where he would sit in his favorite place in the little rear salon at Voltaire’s table. This little salon in the rear of the café, is held sacred, for its chair and table are the ones that Voltaire used to occupy. The table is on one side of the small room. On the walls are many interesting sketches in oil by well-known French artists, and there are fine ceiling decorations; but all these are seen with difficulty, so dim is the light in the room. Since Voltaire’s time this table has become an object of curiosity and veneration. When celebrated habitues of the café died, this table was used as an altar, upon which for a time reposed the bust of the decedent before crêpe-covered lanterns. During the Revolution Hébert jumped upon this table, which had been placed before the door of the café, and harangued the crowd gathered there, exciting them to such a pitch that they snatched the newspapers from the hands of the news venders. In a moment of passionate appeal he brought down his heavy boot-heel upon the marble with such force as to split it. In the café are three doors that are decorated in a very interesting fashion. On the panels of one, well preserved in spite of the numerous transformations through which the establishment has gone, M. Théo

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conceived the happy idea of inscribing in gold letters the names of the illustrious who have visited the café since its founding. Many of the panels of the walls are taken with full-length portraits by Thomas, representing, among others, Voltaire, Rousseau, Robespierre, Diderot, Danton and Marat playing chess, Mirabeau, and Gambetta. There are smaller sketches by Corot, d ’Aubigny, Vallon, Courbet, Willette, and Roedel. Some of them are not fine specimens of art.

The Golden Sun W. C. M orrow , 1900

At the foot of the stairs were half-glass doors curtained with cheap red cloth. A warm, thick, suffocating gust of air, heavy with the fumes of beer, wine, and tobacco, assailed our cold faces as we pushed open the doors and entered the room. For a moment it was difficult to see clearly, so dense was the smoke. It was packed against the ceiling like a bank of fog, diminishing in density downward, and shot through with long banner-like streamers of smoke freshly emitted. The human atmosphere of the place could not be caught at once. A stranger would not have known for the moment whether he was with thieves or artists. But very soon its distinctive spirit made its presence and character manifest. The room—which was not a large one—was well filled with an assortm ent of those queer and interesting people some of whom Bishop had entertained at the studio, only here their characteristics were more pronounced, for they were in their natural element, depressed and hampered by no constraints except of their own devising. A great many were women, although it could be seen at a glance that they were not of the nymphs who flitted among the glittering cafés, gowned in delicate laces and sheeny sculptured silks, the essence of mignonette pervading their environment. No; these were different. Here one finds, not the student life of Paris, but its most unconventional Bohemian life. Here, in this underground rendezvous, a dirty old hole about twenty feet below the street level, gather nightly the happy-go-lucky poets, musicians, and singers for whom the great busy world has no use, and who, in their unrelaxing poverty, live in the tobacco clouds of their own construction, caring nothing for social canons, obeyers of the civil law because of their scorn of meanness, injustice, and crime, suffering unceasingly for the poorest comforts of life, ambitious without energy, hopeful without effort, cheerful under the direst pressure of need, kindly, simple, proud, and pitiful. 460

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It seemed that nearly all of them were absinthe-drinkers, and that they drank a great deal—all they could get, I was made to understand. They care little about their dress and the other accessories of their personal appearance, though here and there they exhibit the oddest finery, into whose possession they fall by means which casual investigation could not discover, and which is singularly out of harmony with the other articles of their attire and with the environment which they choose. As a rule, the men wear their hair very long and in heavy, shaggy masses over their ears and faces. They continually roll and smoke cigarettes, though there are many pipes, and big ones at that. But though they constitute a strange crowd, there is about them a distinct air of refinement, a certain dignity and pride that never fails, and withal a gentleness that renders any approach to ruffianism impossible. The women take a little more pride in their appearance than the men. Even in their carelessness and seeming indifference there abides with nearly all of them the power to lend them­ selves some single touch of grace that is wonderfully redeeming, and that is infinitely finer and more elusive than the showy daintiness of the women of the cafes. As a rule, these Bohemians all sleep during the day, as that is the best way to keep warm; at night they can find warmth in the cabarets. In the afternoon they may write a few lines, which they sell in some way for a pittance, wherewithal to buy them a meal and a night’s vigil in one of these resorts. This is the life of lower Bohemia plain and simple—not the life of the students, but of the misfit geniuses who drift, who have neither place nor part in the world, who live from hand to mouth, and who shudder when the Morgue is mentioned—and it is so near, and its lights never go out! They are merely protestants against the formalism of life, rebels against its necessities. They seek no following, they desire to exercise no influence. They lead their vacant lives without the slightest restraint, bear their poverty without a murmur, and go to their dreary end without a sigh. These are the true Bohemians of Paris. Other visitors came into the Soleil d ’Or and sought seats among their friends at the tables, while others kept leaving, bound for other rendez­ vous, many staying just sufficiently long to hear a song or two. They were all of the same class, very negligently and poorly attired, some displaying their odd pieces of finery with an exquisite assumption of unconsciousness on its account, as though they were millionaires, and cared nothing for such trivial things. And the whimsical incongruities of it! If one wore a shining tie he either had no shirt (or perhaps a very badly soiled one), or wore a frayed coat and disreputable shoes. In fact, no complete respecta­ ble dress made its appearance in the room that night, though each visitor had his distinctive specialty—one a burnished top hat, another a gorgeous

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cravat, another a rich velvet jacket, and so on. But they all wore their hair as long as it would grow. That is the Bohemian mark. The mystery of the means by which these lighthearted Bohemians sustained their precarious existence was not revealed to me; yet here they sat, and laughed, and talked, and recited the poetry of their own manufac­ ture, and sang their songs, and drank, and smoked their big pipes, and rolled cigarettes incessantly, happy enough in the hour of their lives, bringing hither none of the pains and pangs and numbing evidences of their struggles. And there was no touch of the sordid in the composite picture that they made, and a certain tinge of intellectual refinement, a certain spirituality that seemed to raise them infinitely above the plane of the lowly strugglers who won their honest bread by honest labor, shone about them as a halo. Their dark hours, no doubt, came with the daylight, and in these meetings at the cabaret they found an agreeable way in which to while away the dismal interval that burdened their lives when they were not asleep; for the cabaret was warm and bright, warmer and brighter than their own wretched little rooms au cinquieme—and coal and candles are expensive luxuries! Here, if their productions haply could not find a larger and more remunerative audience, they could at least be heard—by a few, it is true, but a more appreciative few, and that is something of value equal to bread. And then, who could tell but what fame might unexpectedly crown them in the end? It has happened thus.

America’s First Bohemians: Pfaff’s Crowd Emily Hahn, 1967

Charlie Pfaff appreciated the support he got from [Henry] Clapp’s crowd, especially as his place, recently started with limited means, had nothing showy to recommend it. The basement in which he had set up business was unusually large, and opened out to a cavelike space directly under Broadway’s sidewalk, where stood the long table occupied every evening by the Bohemians. Pfaff’s waiters and waitresses served food and drink late into the night, and the provisions were good, but those who wanted plushy surroundings did better at Delmonico’s at the corner of Chambers and Broadway—and paid much more. Among the regulars of the Bohemians, or the Cave Dwellers as they also called themselves, were Edmund Clarence Stedman, George Arnold, William Winter and Edward G. F. Wilkins. Occasional visitors included Bayard Taylor, Fitz-James O’Brien and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. “ Artemus Ward” dropped in, but his visit has been mentioned with such bated breath by many chroniclers that it is obvious he made only one appearance. The regular who was to become most famous was Walt Whitman, in the 1850s a controversial figure. As yet he had only a few champions, one of them Henry Clapp. “ Leaves of G rass,” printed in 1855, was severely trounced in New York (“ Muck and obscenity” ) as well as Boston (“ Bom­ bast, egotism, vulgarity, and nonsense,” “ Exulting audacity of Priapusworshipping obscenity” ), and if it hadn’t been for Em erson’s warm praise and Clapp’s stubborn faith, even Whitman’s self-confidence might have suffered. As it was, the staff of the Saturday Press made him a cause, publishing his work and declaring his genius. Of course the big, bearded poet clung to the Bohemians. Though not by temperament a clubbable man, during those years he behaved clubbably. Later he explained to someone that he went to the Cave “ to see, talk little, and absorb,” but no doubt his main absorption was badly needed comfort and encouragement. He even liked having the much-discussed girls around—such actresses as 463

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Daisy Sheppard, Jenny Danforth, and Anne Deland—though it was under­ stood that Whitman was no womanizer. Adah Menken admired him enough to write poems in imitation of his. Adah was new to the city when she first visited Pfaff’s, and having a thin time. The story of her life has been written by Bernard Falk (The N aked L a d y, N.Y., 1934), not without difficulty, because Miss Menken told a dozen life-stories about herself and all are different. It seems probable, however, that she was born in 1835, in New Orleans. Like Ada Clare she broke away from her native South. Like Ada she wrote poetry. Unlike Ada, she had little formal education, and her people were poor. Mr. Falk was unable to discover her real maiden name, but Adah has supplied several choices, sometimes declaring that her father was an aristocratic Sephardic Jew and at other times describing him as a Spanish bullfighter. Quite often, when it suited her, she signed her name “ Dolores Adios Los F uertes.” Why not? She danced in the corps de ballet of the New Orleans French opera house. She acted in small-town theaters, posed for a sculptor, and did trick-riding in a circus. She learned a bit of several languages. She painted, she sang, she yearned to be a second Rachel or Lola Montez—and then, at twenty-one, she married a Cincinnati business­ man named Alexander Isaac Menken. For several months they lived in Galveston, Texas; then Adah deserted her husband and went back to New Orleans. For a while after that she gave literary lectures and printed a good deal of her verse, which was even slushier than Ada Clare’s, in the Cincinnati Israelite, under the name she used—most of the time—for the rest of her life: Adah Isaacs Menken. With indifference she received the news that her husband was divorcing her. Her mind was set on New York, and she bent all her efforts toward saving enough money for the ticket. In 1859 she got there, but found the going tough. Even when she managed now and then to get a job on the stage, her notices were bad. She was playing in Albany in the early summer of 1861 when an impresario named Captain John B. Smith approached her with an offer. He was staging M azeppa, a melodrama of ancient vintage based, more or less, on a romantic poem by Byron, the story of a Cossack caught in flagrante delicto with a Polish lady of high degree. The climax of the drama occurred when Mazeppa was bound to the back of a fiery charger and the horse, helped on by a sharp blow from Mazeppa’s captors, galloped off into the wild hills. Smith’s lead having just dropped out of the cast, the impresario was inspired with the idea of putting Adah Menken in the title role. The fact that Mazeppa was a man merely made it all that much more exciting. Besides, Adah had been a circus rider; she could ride the stallion herself, where in the past they’d had to use a dummy.

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The secret of her success, if the word “ secret” is appropriate, was that she wore flesh-colored tights for the part. Admittedly, the tights were not all. She wore a tunic as well which covered her down to the thighs, and in the many pictures that survive of Adah as Mazeppa she looks, to the modern eye, pretty well bundled up. There is more nakedness to be seen today on any beach of America or Europe, even in prudish Portugal. But this was in the Sixties, when men stood around on windy street corners all afternoon in hope of stealing one glimpse of a feminine ankle. Seeing Adah’s legs gave people a tremendous thrill. She became known as “ The Naked L ady,” and this made her more thrilling then ever. People came from miles around to look at her, even when she was playing some other part than Mazeppa: wickedness and glamour still clung to her when she was clothed. Adah loved it all. She earned money and she spent money, or gave it away, at a great rate. From the rich mining center of Virginia City, Nevada, came urgent offers. Adah thought them over and decided that a tour of the Golden West was indicated. Pfaff’s was to see no more of Adah Menken, but her sojourn among the literary Bohemians of the Cave beneath Broad­ way had left an indelible stamp on her. In spirit she would always be one of them. *

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Everyone at Pfaff’s was proud of Ada Clare for her rebellious principles, her beauty and her spirit. Many of the unattached Bohemians fell in love with her and wrote poems about their passion, until people outside whispered scandalous rumors about the café. Drink! Women! Orgies! They shuddered in delighted horror, but the stories were untrue, and showed gross ignorance of the habits of intellectuals. Pfaff’s was not in the least orgiastic. The prevailing vice of a crowd like that is conversation. Though Ada had love affairs she was no devidasi. Her function at Pfaff’s was more that of a socially prominent clubwoman in some small town: she organized literary contests, reminded the members of each other’s birthdays, and when money was needed for such community celebrations it was Ada who passed around the hat. When the circle was not tearing some recent publication to pieces, or making clever puns, it sometimes discussed the nature of the Bohemian, and Ada wrote out her personal definition of the animal: “ The Bohemian is by nature, if not by habit, a cosmopolite, with a general sympathy for the fine arts, and for all things above and beyond convention. The Bohemian is not, like the creature of society, a victim of rules and customs; he steps over them all with an easy, graceful, joyous unconsciousness, guided by the principles of good taste and feeling. Above

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all others, essentially, the Bohemian must not be narrow-minded; if he be, he is degraded back to the position of a mere worldling.” Yet, with due respect to Ada, not all the Bohemians at Pfaff’s were joyous all the time. Unremitting joy would have been out of character, just as Poe’s somber gloom, unrelieved, strikes a wrong note at the other extreme. The young Englishman William North was an early tragedy in the group’s annals—a writer who quarreled bitterly with Fitz-James O ’Brien, accusing him of plagiarism, and in revenge wrote him up as a burlesque figure in a novel. In 1854, when North was only twenty-eight, he drank prussic acid and died, an action his friends attributed to unhap­ piness over a love affair. In an envelope on his desk he left twelve cents and a note saying that this was all he had to show for a life’s work. *

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Pfaff’s Bohemia stimulated comment, a good deal of which was adverse. As a result, the public began going there to see the sights. The more lurid the rumors, the more they came. A number of youthful malcontents, feeling that Pfaff’s crowd represented what they were looking for, moved into the neighborhood, taking rooms in adjacent boardinghouses. This aroused and alarmed the Philistines. Newspapers printed editorial denun­ ciations of Bohemia. Respectable Americans preferred to forget how much they had enjoyed that book of Murger’s that started the whole thing, seeing now that such ideas, though all very well in France, could not be allowed to flourish at home. Some Cave habitués defended themselves, wrote solemn expositions of their creed, and attempted to deflate the wilder rumors of what Bohemia really was, but as an early example of public relations the attempt was ineffective. It is to be doubted if the Cavemen’s hearts were in the work, anyway. Ada Clare, for one, would not be inclined to abandon her favorite pastime of shocking the middle class. The bad press went on, but Pfaff’s Bohemia enlisted friendly spirits too, like William Winter. He was a young newspaperman of Boston who grew impatient with the smug spirit of the “ modern Athens” and went to New York. There Henry Clapp took him on as a sub-editor of the Saturday Press. Winter loved the work and the evenings at Pfaff’s and considered himself a thoroughgoing Bohemian. One feels that in this he was mistaken, though it is not easy to say why—perhaps it is because his Bohemianism was so obviously a mere phase of youth. At any rate he was an ardent member of the Clapp crowd and has left us warm words about its leader. Because of Clapp’s gray beard and general appearance the others called him the Oldest Man, though in 1858 he was only forty-six. He was small and slight, with a thin, incisive voice; he had a brilliant mind, was impatient of the commonplace

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and intolerant of “ smug, ponderous, empty, obstructive respectability.” He was reckless of public opinion and loved to shock “ the commonplace mind.” Withered, bitter, a good fighter and a kind heart—“ he was the Prince of our Bohemian circle,” said Winter. And the Saturday Press was a fine, stimulating paper, added the writer; piquant and pugnacious and full of jibes at unworthy—and, alas, occasionally worthy—reputations. Clapp was belligerent and hasty, but he was witty, too. Probably the most famous of his jibes is that on Horace Greeley—“ a self-made man who worships his creator.” When asked what a certain smug clergyman was doing at the time, Clapp said, “ Waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.” The Press suspended publication at the start of the Civil War when satire seemed to have no place in the scheme of things, but Clapp resuscitated it, though only for a short time, in 1865, explaining in his first issue, “ This paper was stopped in 1860, for want of means; it is now started again for the same reason.” In 1900, years after Clapp’s death, William Dean Howells published a section of his memoirs in a book with the title Literary Friends and Acquaintances , in which he described how in 1860, as a young man who had contributed a few things to Eastern magazines, he came on a pilgrim­ age to the Atlantic seaboard from his home town of Columbus, Ohio. His first port of call was Boston; he had decided even before seeing the modern Athens that here, and not New York, was his spiritual home. “ I suppose there is no question but our literary centre was then in Boston, wherever it is, or is not, at present,” he said. There, every meeting with great minds left him more starry-eyed, more convinced that he was right in his preference. It was part of his plan to visit New York and the office of the Saturday Press nevertheless; he had sold to the Press and had heard of Pfaff’s and Ada Clare. But he knew from the beginning that he wouldn’t care for the city as he did for Boston. Oliver Wendell Holmes forewarned him against what he might read in the Press about Boston, which, said Holmes, was “ the New York bohemian view.” (Naturally the New En­ gland connotation of that adjective was pejorative.) Howells visited the Press in Spruce Street and learned immediately that Holmes was right, for Clapp lost no time in violently attacking Boston’s fair name. The editor walked up and down the room as he talked, shocking William Dean Howells the more with every statement, though, admittedly, it was never difficult to shock Howells. Even in retrospect Howells was scathing about New York’s Bohemia: “ a sickly colony, transplanted from the mother asphalt of Paris, and never really striking root in the pavements of New York; it was a colony of ideas, of theories, which had perhaps never had any deep roots anyw here.” Howells could not condemn the Saturday P ress , a clever, witty paper in

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which young writers were eager to appear even though they were seldom paid. Still, Clapp had said dreadful things, and the young man came away seething with retorts he had been too refined to utter. Just who were these so-called Bohemians anyway? What made them so special? He determined to give them a last chance to prove their quality by visiting Pfaff’s that very night. He did so, and found the Cave company dull and disappointing. Everything “ went but slow for an orgy,” he declared, though two men who came in late declared that they had hangovers after a fearful debauch. If this is Bohemia, said Howells to himself, I have had enough of it. He says that he got up to go, but was hailed on his way out by an acquaintance who presented him to Walt Whitman. Heretofore, says Howells, he had disapproved of Whitman, accepting the dictum that he was eccentric, immoral and vulgar: besides, the Press supported the poet and that was condemnation in itself. But Howells found Whitman, surprisingly, per­ fectly charming. “ The apostle of the rough, the uncouth, was the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp, translated into the terms of social encounter, was an address of singular quiet.” It took William Winter eight years to publish a retort to Howells in his memoirs, but when he got around to it he assailed the other elderly man with as much vigor and ferocity as if they were still youths. Howells’s account of that meeting with Whitman, said Winter, was twisted: in fact, the man from Ohio had gone to Pfaff’s with the one idea of being presented to Whitman, and it was all arranged beforehand. “ Walt, at that time, affected the Pompadour style of shirt and jacket—making no secret of his brawny anatomy—and his hirsute chest and complacent visage were, as usual, on liberal exhibition.” In fact, Winter did not share the other Cavemen’s admiration for Whitman. He says he once asked Whitman to define “ the Poet,” and got the answer, “ A poet is a M aker.” “ But Walt, what does he make?” “ He gazed upon me for a moment, with that bovine air of omniscience for which he was remarkable, and then he said: ‘He makes Poem s.’ ” Whitman apart, said Winter, Howells’s reference to hangovers was the unfairest thing of all, for Pfaff’s Bohemians didn’t go in for debauches. Even at Clapp’s birthday party that year they pledged his health in simple beer. “ Those old comrades of mine were not sots, nor were they given to ‘debauchery.’ Most of them were poor, and they were poorly paid. . . . Revelry requires m oney.” Certainly they were poor. War was on the way; the economy was disrupted. The artist’s or writer’s income, uncertain at the best of times, was at its lowest. “ A precarious vocation,” recalled Winter, looking back on those days from a more prosperous time. Still, he remembered that he was happy. The high point of his Bohemian days was his friendship with

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the Irishman Fitz-James O’Brien, who had inherited a fortune in his native land, then squandered it within two years in London. In 1852 the twentyfour-year-old O’Brien came to America. He started out living high: be­ cause of his good looks and charm he was a great social success, but soon he had spent every penny of the remains of the Irish money, and started to write for a living. Clapp took him on the Saturday Press staff, but regular jobs were not to Fitz’s taste, and he soon went back to free lancing. He published a good deal, but could never hold on to his earnings. A hard drinker, in his cups he would become recklessly pugnacious, and his beauty was ruined by a pugilist he challenged in a bar, who flattened his nose. When William Winter met him in 1859, Fitz was on bad terms with most of the world and often hadn’t the means to pay for a room. One day he asked if he could come home with Winter for the afternoon to do a spot of work. Winter did better than that, and fixed up a bedroom for the visitor in his flat on Varick Street. There O’Brien stayed, working hard, for thirtysix hours on end, during which time he refused to eat or drink, and slept four hours at most. On the third morning, waking early, Winter found his guest standing by the bed, a roll of manuscript in his hand. Frigidly polite, O’Brien said, “ I wish you good-morning,” and walked out of the house. That afternoon at four o ’clock, Winter dropped in at Delmonico’s and found Fitz transformed, in new clothes, uproariously standing treat to everyone in the place. He had sold the poem written at Varick Street, “ The Sewing Bird,” to Harper s magazine for the staggering sum of $150, and all was sweetness and light once more. Noisily, he insisted on lending money to Winter. There were plenty of stories about Fitz. Once he came bustling into Pfaff’s with a new poem and a black eye. Brushing off all reference, however jocular, to the mouse, he sat down at the table, brought out a small bottle from which he extracted a leech, applied the leech to the bruised eye, unrolled the script, and began declaiming his poem. In later days, Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote to Winter, “ I half smile as I recall how hurt I was on an occasion when O’Brien borrowed $35.00 from me to pay a pressing bill, and, instead of paying the bill, gave a little dinner at Delmonico’s to which he did not invite me! Arnold and Clapp were there, and perhaps you. I gave that dinner!” Of course Fitz enlisted in the army as soon as war was declared; he and Thomas Bailey Aldrich happened to apply for the same post on the staff of one General Lander. The General got Aldrich’s letter first, and tele­ graphed to say that he had been accepted, but Aldrich didn’t get the telegram. After waiting vainly for the reply, the General appointed Fitz-

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James O ’Brien instead. Soon afterwards Fitz was wounded in the shoulder, the wound went septic, and the Irishman died of lockjaw. “ Aldrich was shot in O’Brien’s shoulder,” said Clapp. *

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After the war Pfaff’s Cave was never the same. The Saturday P ress , its mainspring, limped along for only a short time, then died for good, and Clapp resorted to writing for other papers. He was drinking, more and more heavily, but unlike most drunks he refused to sponge on friends when he needed money, and was often in want. At least once he entered a home for inebriates, but the cure did not last. By 1875, when he died, the old crowd had long since come apart. Some of them became successful and automatically stopped being Bohemian. Others died young. Walt Whitman served as a nurse during the war, and afterwards got a govern­ ment job in Washington. Slowly, step by step, with many a disappointment on the way, he achieved recognition in the great world. He never reas­ sumed a café existence, and this seems reasonable, for it had always been incongruous for him. Charlie Pfaff prospered, though his first clients were gone. He moved his place up to Twenty-Fourth Street, where it acquired a conventional elegance unknown to it in the Bleecker Street days. Now and then a survivor from Clapp’s crowd dropped in for a visit, but Ada Clare was not among them. Her income stopped when the South was vanquished, and in 1864 she took little Aubrey to San Francisco, to make a new life in the West. There she hoped to meet Adah Menken, supposedly still on a western tour, but in this she was disappointed, for Adah had already moved on to fresh triumphs in England. Still, there was a ready market for Ada Clare’s writing in the Golden Era , a literary weekly edited by Bret Harte, and, as always, she quickly became the center of a group of admirers, with Charles Warren Stoddard at their head. Stoddard, still dizzy from the heady effects of Adah Menken, was completely bowled over by Ada Clare— “ in my eyes a remarkable woman.” Trailed by this adoring youth Ada moved about the city, visited Hawaii, returned, and, disastrously, decided to star in a play at one of the local theaters. Worse: unabashed by the fact that she had flopped in New York, years earlier, she chose for a start to play the title role in Camille. Many experienced actresses have come to grief as Camille, and Ada was only an amateur. She was booed off the stage. San Francisco, then, was finished for her, and she packed her bags and sailed to New York, determined to make money by writing a novel. Only a Woman's H eart appeared in 1866, and was greeted on all sides by hostile reviews. The historian Albert Parry thinks the critics were against Ada

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because she had so often dealt out harsh reviews to other writers, but it is possible that they simply thought it a bad novel, that America had outgrown her style. Deeply hurt, she made up her mind to cut her losses. She changed her name and went away again, this time to Memphis, Tennessee, where she joined a stock company as an actress. No more did she insist on starting at the top of the ladder: she took whatever part she was offered, and learned to act the hard way. Like Adah Menken, she was annoyed at being given male roles, but it couldn’t be helped. She married a man named Noyes who was in the same troupe, and after that the couple toured and worked as a team, with reasonable success. Noyes adopted Aubrey, and Ada gave birth to another son, but he died in infancy. One day when she was visiting friends, sitting on the porch, their pet dog suddenly jumped at her and bit her in the face. Nobody realized how grave the situation was. Ada’s preoccupation was with her appearance; for a while she was afraid that she would be too badly scarred to go on with her work. She was happy when the wound healed and she wasn’t disfig­ ured. Then the disease struck: the dog had been rabid. It was far too late to do anything for the poor woman, even if the doctors had known what preventive measures to take. After suffering for several days, alternately delirious and lucid, Ada Clare died raving mad. “ The queen is dead; but who shall cry ‘Long live the Queen!” in her stead?” wrote Stoddard in mournful retrospect. “ Are there no more queens of Bohemia, I wonder, and is the Bohemia of that day a thing of the past, dead and gone forever? Of course it is gone . . . ” *

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For the rest of his life William Winter spoke proudly of his Bohemian days, but long after Clapp’s crowd was dispersed the prejudice of alarmed Philistines survived. Bayard Taylor, when he was an elderly, honored man of letters, felt compelled to protest that he hadn’t gone to Pfaff’s so very much. Charles Godfrey Leland went further and became quite agitated when someone mentioned him as an habitué of Pfaff’s in the old days. In 1893 he published a disclaimer in his M em oirs: “ There was . . . in the city a kind of irregular club known as the Bohemians, who had been inspired by Murger’s novel of that name to imitate the life of its heroes. They met every evening at a lager-beer restaurant kept by a German named Pfaff. For a year or two they made a great sensation in New York. . . . Now I must here specify, for good reasons, that I held myself very strictly aloof from the Bohemians, save in business affairs. This was partly because I was married, and I never saw the day in my life when to be regarded as a real Bohemian vagabond, or shiftless person, would not have given me the horrors.” This sounds

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strange, considering it was written by a man who devoted a large part of his life to following, living with, and writing about gypsies, and who became, as Van Wyck Brooks said, “ something more than a second Borrow.” Moreover, in his youth Leland, who referred to his birthplace Philadelphia as “ pleasant sunny Philistia,” had written a novel in French that was so shocking that no Parisian editor would publish it. That such a man should be afraid of the appellation “ bohemian” shows what had happened to it in the public mind. “ The gypsy camp is broken,” said Winter sorrowfully. “ The music is hushed. The fires are put out. The gypsies are all gone. There is no Bohemia any more, nor ever will be except in luxury’s lap or imagination’s dream .” Like Stoddard, Winter was growing old: his own Bohemia had long since vanished. And yet, even before Clapp died, new campfires caught and began to smolder.

Looking for Bohemia in London Arthur Ransome, 1907

There are a dozen flippant, merry treatises on Bohemia in London, that talk of the Savage Club, and the Vagabond dinners, and all the other consciously unconventional things that like to consider themselves Bohe­ mian. But these are not the real things; no young poet or artist fresh to London, with all his hopes unrealised, all his capacity for original living unspent, has anything to do with them. They bear no more vital relation to the Bohemian life that is actually lived than masquerades or fancy dress balls bear to more ordinary existence. Members of the Savage Club, guests of the Vagabonds have either grown out of the life that should be in my book, or else have never lived in it. They are respectable citizens, dine comfortably, sleep in feather-beds, and find hot water waiting for them in the mornings. It is, perhaps, the unreality of their pretences that makes honest outsiders who are disgusted at the imitation, or able to compare them with the inhabitants of the Quartier or Montmartre, say that there is no such thing as Bohemia in London. But there is; and anyone who considers the number of adventurous young people fresh from conventional homes, and consequently ready to live in any way other than that to which they have been accustomed, who come to town with heads more full of poetry than sense, must realise how impossible it is that there should not be. Indeed, it is likely that our Bohemia, certainly in these days, is more real than that of Paris, for the Quartier is so well advertised that it has become fashionable, and Ameri­ cans who can afford it go there, and almost outnumber the others who cannot afford anything else. Of course, in London too, there are people who are Bohemians for fun; but not so many, because the fun in London is not an organised merriment that anyone may enjoy who can pay for it. Visitors to London do not find, as they do in Paris, men waiting about the principal streets, offering themselves as guides to Bohemia. The fun is in the life itself, and not to be had less cheaply than by living it. 473

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I wanted to get into my book, for example, the precarious, haphazard existence of the men who dine in Soho not because it is an unconventional thing to do, but because they cannot usually afford to dine at all, and get better and merrier dinners for their money there than elsewhere, the men who, when less opulent, eat mussels from a street stall without unseemly amusement at the joke of doing so, but as solemnly as you and I eat through our respectable meals, solacing themselves meanwhile with the thought of high ideals that you and I, being better fed, find less real, less insistent. Bohemia is an abominable word, with an air of tinsel and sham, and of suburban daughters who criticise musical comedies seriously, and remind you twice in an afternoon that they are quite unconventional. But the best dictionaries define it as: “ (1) A certain small country; (2) The gypsy life; (3) Any disreputable life; (4) The life of writers and painters” — in an order of descent that is really quite pleasant. And on consulting a classic work to find synonyms for a Bohemian, I find the following: “ Peregrinator, wanderer, rover, straggler, rambler, bird of passage, gada­ bout, vagrant, scatterling, landloper, waif and stray, wastrel, loafer, tramp, vagabond, nomad, gypsy, emigrant, and peripatetic somnambulist.” If we think of the word in the atmosphere of all those others, it is not so abominable after all, and I cannot find a better. I suppose Villon is the first remembered Bohemian poet. He had an uncomfortable life and an untidy death. Hunted from tavern to tavern, from place to place, stealing a goose there, killing a man here in a drunken brawl, and swinging from a gibbet in the end, he is a worthy example for the consideration of all young people who wish to follow literature or art without any money in their pockets. But even his fate would not deter them. Indeed, when I was setting out, I even wished to emulate him, and was so foolish as to write to an older friend that I wanted to be such another vagabond as Villon, and work and live in my own free way. The conceit of it, the idiocy—and yet, it is something to remember that you have once felt like that. My friend wrote back to me that of all kinds of bondage, vagabondage was the most cruel and the hardest from which to escape. I believe him now, but then I adventured all the same. Looking from Villon down the centuries, Grub Street seems to be the next important historical fact, a street of mean lodgings where poor hacks wrote rubbish for a pittance, or starved—not a merry place. And then to the happy time in England, when the greatest English critic, William Hazlitt, could write his best on a dead player of hand fives; when Reynolds, the friend of Keats, could write a sonnet on appearing before his lady with a black eye, “ after a casual turn up,” and speak of “ the great men of this age in poetry, philosophy, or pugilism .” Then we think of the Romantics in France. There was the sturdy poet,

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Petrus Borel, setting up his “ Tartars’ Camp” in a house in Paris, with its one defiant rule pasted on the door: “ All clothing is prohibited.” There was Balzac, writing for a fortnight on end without leaving his garret. There was Théophile Gautier, wishing he had been born in the pomp of ancient days, contenting his Grecian instincts by writing M ademoiselle de Maupin in six weeks in a big, bare room, with foils and boxing gloves lying always ready for the other Romantics who shared the place with him, and played the Porthos and the Aramis with a noble scorn for the nineteenth century. There was the whole jolly crowd that clapped Hernani into fame and lasted bravely on through Murger’s day—Murger, with his Scènes de la Vie de Bohèm e , and his melancholy verdict, “ Bohemia is the preface to the Academy, the Hospital, or the Morgue.” And now, to-day, in this London Bohemia of ours, whose existence is denied by the ignorant, all these different atmospheres are blended into as many colours as the iridescence of a street gutter. Our Villons do not perhaps kill people, but they are not without their tavern brawls. They still live and write poetry in the slums. One of the best books of verse published in recent years was dated from a doss-house in the Marshalsea. Our Petrus Borels, our Gautiers, sighing still for more free and spacious times, come fresh from Oxford or Cambridge, write funny sonnets lamenting the age of Casanova, and, in a pleasant, harmless way, do their best to imitate him. Our Reynoldses are mad over football, and compose verse and prose upon the cricket field. Our Romantics strut the streets in crimson sashes, carry daggers for their own delight, and fence and box and compose extravagant happy tales. Grub Street has broken up into a thousand garrets, but the hacks are still the same. And, as for Murger’s young men, as for Collin, as for Schaunard with his hundred ways of obtaining a five-franc piece, why, I knew one who lived well for a year on three and sixpence of his own money and a handsome borrowing face. “ Where are they all?” you ask. “ Where is the Quartier?” It is difficult to give an answer without telling lies. For London is more unwieldly than Paris. It is impossible to draw a map, and say, pointing with a finger, “ Here are artists, here romantic poets, here playwrights, here writers of polemic prose.” They are scattered over a dozen districts, and mingled all together. There are only a few obvious grouping points. The newspapers, of course, are in Fleet Street, and the writers find that much of their life goes here, in the taverns and coffee-houses round about. The British Museum is in Bloomsbury, and students take lodgings in the old squares and in the narrow streets that run up to the Gray’s Inn Road. The Charing Cross Road is full of bookshops where all, when they can afford it, buy. Soho is full of restaurants where all, when they can afford it, dine. And

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Chelsea, dotted with groups of studios, full of small streets, and cheap lodgings, is alive with artists and writers, and rich with memories of both. Bohemia is only a stage in a man’s life, except in the case of fools and a very few others. It is not a profession. A man does not set out saying, “ I am going to be a Bohemian” ; he trudges along, whispering to himself, “ I am going to be a poet, or an artist, or some other kind of great m an,” and finds Bohemia, like a tavern by the wayside. He may stay there for years, and then suddenly take post-horses along the road; he may stay a little time, and then go back whence he came, to start again in another direction as a Civil Servant, or a respectable man of business; only a very few settle down in the tavern, forever postponing their departure, until at last they die, old men, still laughing, talking, flourishing glasses, and drinking to their future prosperity.

London’s Café Royal Steve Bradshaw, 1978 . . . it is always wise to enter a city by night. . . . —Arthur Symons, Cities and Sea Coasts and Islands

If he had been an English painter, Monet felt he would have liked to stay in London forever. Although there were no friendly Bohemian cafés where you could meet other artists, Monet was fascinated by the river, the parks, the smoky light of the city landscape. Many French artists found London the most evocative symbol of the vast, sprawling, industrial metropolis. It was the ‘vie brumeuse, nuit sans fin’ of Rimbaud. For Baudelaire its complex poetry was summed up by Whistler’s etchings of the Thames. They saw London in terms of poetry, art, or aesthetics. Most of the English artists who shared this reaction liked to meet in the café whose blue cigar smoke, hazy light, blue pillars, gilt mirrors, red seats and marble tables reminded them of the Bohemian life of Paris. At Daniel Nicols’ Café Royal they could believe they had no more to do with this grim society than the beautiful girl who sat in a corner, drinking pernod, dressed like a nun. A portly, bearded man, Daniel Nicolas Thévenon, five gold coins in his pocket, together with his wife, a fellow Burgundian peasant, who had two more coins hidden in her handbag, arrived in a second-class carriage at the New Victoria Station, leaving almost nothing in Paris except a chain of bankrupt wine stores and the promise of a gaol sentence with hard labour. After changing his name to Nicols to confuse les agents d'affaires, Daniel bought an oilcloth store off Regent Street and opened it in the spring of 1865 as a café-restaurant where the English could forget their flat beer and stale food and enjoy the gastronomic luxury of Paris, and its liquor. Already the old chop-houses and taverns seemed slightly dull to many 477

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Victorians, especially those nouveaux riches who felt there must be more refined ways of enjoying their wealth. If they looked for an example they found it most often in France. They drank claret, not port, and liked the gay, new, expensive cult of champagne. They also liked Regent Street with its shops full of French charm and luxury. The West End was far more fashionable now than Covent Garden, site of the old social clubs, coffee-rooms, and the fruit market to which Madame Nicols took the Café Royal handcart every morning. But in the 1860s there were few cafés or restaurants in the French style in the West End. As Daniel extended the Café Royal, its Gallic atmosphere and reputation for good food and wine tempted not only the passing French traveller but the local residents from Soho or Mayfair. The Café was on the frontier of two social worlds. On the east side of Regent Street were the riff-raff of Soho, the foreigners, émigrés, to be followed soon by Communard refugees who like Monet or Verlaine had failed to find any kind of café society in London, but who still formed a Bohemia centred on a few public houses like the Duke of York near Gray’s Inn Road, the bar at 5 Old Compton Street or the Café de la Sabonnière et de Provence off Leicester Square. As a Royalist, Daniel loved to play host to like-minded exiles from the Republic. As a business man he was just as happy to entertain the anarchists who stocked their lofts with dynamite or les agents who came to spy on them. Across Regent Street were the fashionable town-houses of Mayfair on whose finely trimmed lawns the elite of London society would entertain guests as famous as the Prince of Wales. And like the raffish Prince, whose fastidious palate helped set the trend for French food, many of the less prudist residents of Mayfair relished the Bohemian atmosphere of the Café Royal. And so before long the Café was crowded with con-men, money-lenders, revolutionaries, boxers, blackmailers, bankrupts, stylish pimps, pornogra phers or bookmakers in chess-board suits like Tarbox Tommy, or Kennedy Knight, who laid recalcitrant clients flat with a poker. Or there was the Butcher, the Hook and Eye, Billy Stomachache, and Chicken (alias the twelfth Duke of Hamilton, the third Lord Vivian, the Marquess of Ailesbury, and Sir John Hartrop), who like other renegades from the aristocracy were called Boy-Ohs. And there were the untitled rich like George Baird, who ran through three million pounds, for example by having a £500 musical box built to play ‘Phwat are They doin’ in the Name of Casey’, then smashing it with a poker swearing it played the wrong tune. Most were members of the Pelican Club, who once served the club parrot to a man who demanded ‘a bird’ in high July. Not even the three guineas they charged for this treat could stave off the bankruptcy which prompted them to write in the bar:

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NOTICE Members who have reason to believe that Writs, Judgements, or any other legal Blisters are out against them, are warned against Washing etc. as t h e c l u b LAVATORY IS FULL OF BAILIFFS.

Or there were criminals like Antonio the dance-club owner, later locked up like Dreyfus on Devil’s Island for killing Michel, ‘King of the White Slave Traffic’. Michel, at least, was barred from the Café when his sobriquet became widely known, but the managers were usually content to warn its more respectable clients off any ‘denizen of the underworld’ while making sure that stakes for the domino matches, which might run as high as one hundred pounds, were settled in the cloakroom. By the 1880s the Café consisted of a Grill Room, a restaurant, private suites, and a Masonic temple, which may have played a surprising part in its success; and the elegant Bohemian paradise of the Domino Room. Only in this slight ersatz version of a Paris café would the managers have allowed a Spanish girl to dance on the tables and throw soda bottles at waiters while the customers roared with delight. All the sham dignity of the Second Empire, from which Bohemians had been trying to escape for so long, was distilled in the lurid décor of the Domino Room. Although it was based on the Café de la Régence it looked as if it had been designed by one of the less original imitators of Bougu ereau or Lefebvre. Delicate chandeliers, cut from Bohemian glass, dripped from a turquoise ceiling on which nude cherubs and goddesses floated between masses of gilt. The black cloaks and silk hats of the customers trailed from blue pillars wreathed with tarnished gilt vine leaves. At the top of white columns gilt caryatids looked down on the crowd. A few silent customers would be reading the papers or books sold in the lobby under the marble stairs, where you could buy Zola, if not philosophy like Taine, or more spicy novels on demand. Others would be writing with the café paper and pens or drinking wine, brandy, maza grins alone. Most of the customers would simply sit on the red plush seats and talk. All this was reflected endlessly by long mirrors in the cloudy light, full of smoke from chafing dishes, fog from Regent Street, and the fumes of oriental cigarettes. ‘When my French friends come to London,’ wrote Arthur Symons in 1918, ‘they say to me: Where is your Montmartre, where is your Quartier Latin? We have no Montmartre (not even Chelsea is that), no Quartier Latin, because there is no instinct in the Englishman to be companionable in public. Occasions are lacking, it is true, for the café is responsible for a good part of the artistic Bohemianism of Paris, and we have no cafés.’ Many of his friends, for whom Paris was a necessity as well as a fashion,

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had tried ‘desperate experiments’: some young writers met in taverns, while the poet Ernest Dowson had even taken to ‘cabmen’s shelters as a sort of supper-club.’ All had failed. ‘In London we cannot read our poems to one another, as they do in Paris. . . . This lack of easy meeting and talking is certainly one of the reasons why there have been in England many great writers but few schools.’ Only in the Café Royal would English artists forget their native insularity for a while. Although Symons made only a passing exception for the Café, he always recalled ‘the hot nights and the heated noons’ of the Domino Room in his most rapturous and effusive prose. Many years later he would still poke his silver hair and long bony face round the door, revelling in his memories of long discussions ‘on the Beauty of absinthe and on the exotic beauty of Iris on Serpents, Gypsies, the Russian ballets, Giorgone.’ Is there a meaning in your mystery, Strange eyes, so cold, so mirror-like, whose smile Lures, but declares not. . . .

But Symons, like his friends Wilde, Moore, Harris, and the other aesthetes and poets of the nineties, found the Café Royal by far the most sympathetic place to meet other artists in London. If the artists of the last two decades of the century formed more of a school than was usual for the surly English it was partly because of the Café Royal. Most hopeful artists went to the Café for its Bohemian ambience rather than for any common ideology they might find there. And like the young French Decadents they naturally liked to gather round some leader or hero. One possible candidate was the French illustrator Gustave Doré, a famous and hospitable member of the haute-Bohème , who was one of the first artists to visit the Café. He must have found it a solitary and Parisian contrast to the mysterious city he sketched in the late 1860s for his book of etchings called London. His work put the people who mingled in the Café in their native terrain, ladies in crinolines at a Chiswick fête, tired faces huddled around barrel organs in the mist, anonymous crowds that flocked down the narrow streets like sheep. Doré might drink in the Café at night but he would also wake before dawn to see the derelicts queuing at the dismal coffee stalls. If Monet showed how fog transformed light and colour, Doré portrayed its effects on the minds and lungs of the people. In the East End he wandered around the weird and terrible Bluegate Fields, looking at the ribbon of grey sky over the dark tenements, stepping round pools of black water that reflected the dim gas-lamps, sketching figures like skeletons who jeered from the doorways and shouted for gin. Nobody else from the Café Royal went there. Alone with his bodyguard Doré

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looked as unlikely a figure in this squalor as Edouard Manet had done on those nights he left Tortoni’s for the slums of Paris. Most of the sinister images of D oré’s London had been formed by only three decades of rapid and unfettered industrial growth. So recent was the rural past that the ground lease of the Café Royal forbade the shooting of grouse on Sundays. Now the only game were the thousands of rats the managers hunted in the cellars at night. As the boom began to slow down in the seventies, the first decade that British industry began to lose markets to its competitors, there was a wave of interest in the proper distribution of this wealth. As Socialism revived, many of the leading habitués of the Café Royal liked to think of themselves as liberals or radicals. But they also thought of themselves as artists. And they found it hard or impossible to fuse these two dreams in their work. Morris and Ruskin, for example, had both tried to define or practise an art that would fight capitalist values. At its most banal this meant Morris designing wallpaper for the wealthy while Ruskin organized the building of a road by intellectuals. Neither project was widely discussed in Bluegate Fields. If the slumdwellers had any interest in politics it was in the first street lighting, sanitation and slum clearance plans. But for the habitués of the Café Royal this mundane reformism had little bearing on Art. And few if any recalled that Monsieur Doré had been one of the first distinguished clients of M. Nicols. All the same the Bohemian style of the Café Royal was hardly isolated from the industrial economy. As British capitalism became less frenetic it was also more complex and refined. By the 1880s there was less scope than before for entrepreneurs like Daniel, who had made enough money to live in a Surbiton mansion with its own deer park. Personal capital was being soaked up by the Stock Exchange, family businesses were immersed in remote companies, and industrial capitalism was rapidly being stripped of its visible social context. ‘Profit for Profit’s sake.’ This was a fertile situation for the French concept of l’A rt pour l’A rt, which so far had not been very influential in England but which would soon be wildly promoted, and often parodied, in the Café Royal. Once converted to l’A rt pour l’A rt it was far easier for a radical artist to sip his mazagrins without feeling uneasy about the slums a few miles away. And so in the heady Gallic atmosphere of the Café Royal writers and painters liked to argue over the work of French artists from Gautier to Verlaine. According to Symons, Verlaine himself knocked back a few kirschs or absinthes, but it was only a passing visit. A more familiar customer was George Moore, who arrived in 1880 locked in his memories of the Nouvelle Athènes. No one would do more to inspire an Anglo-Saxon Bohemia than Moore, with his endless stories of Impressionism, Montmar­ tre, Verlaine. But his books, like his Confessions, were more effective

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than his personality. His demure manners were less of a curiosity in London. Moore put hot water in his wine, rarely bought anyone a drink, and often stalked out of the Café if anyone looked drunk. ‘You surely don’t expect me to pay for what you’ve had?’ he told an American publisher he had invited to the Café. T did not ask you to have anything!’ ‘Why, certainly, Mr M oore,’ said the American, undaunted, ‘I’ll pay for my own drink, and I’ll invite you to have another on m e.’ But the naive Irishman had already left. Moore was about as suitable a leader for a school of artists in the Café Royal as Walter Pater, the monkish Oxford don who insisted that Art should make the soul burn with a ‘hard gem-like fla m e’ which would probably have been extinguished by the draughts of the Domino Room, or Algernon Swinburne, the effete imitator of Baudelaire whose idea of Bohemian life was to dance on a pile of silk hats taken from the cloakroom of the Arts Club. A more likely candidate was another ém igré , James McNeill Whistler, who also had fond memories of Impressionist café society. His affection for Bohemia had matured into a quirky, waspish elegance. Whistler was a dandy. He had a monocle, a small chin beard, a cane, and a white Pomeranian dog which he kept in his studio till it ate his trousers. At the Café Royal in the 1870s he liked to entertain his friends in a specially screened corner, signing his bills for Croûte M allard , like his paintings, with the mark of a butterfly. He would be as disagreeable as Moore, from malice instead of innocence, but he was sociable, witty, and often gener­ ous. Anyone who was more socially adroit than Whistler had to be something of a genius. ‘W ho’s the smock-faced Irishman, Jim?’ asked the lawyer Theodore Watts-Dunton at one of the famous Sunday breakfasts to which Whistler invited the young men he met in the Café. They were looking at a tall, relaxed young man with a heavy jaw, grey eyes shaped like almonds. Whistler did not recognize him. ‘You gave him a general invitation to your breakfast,’ said WattsDunton, in his best court-room manner, ‘and he has at once taken you at your word.’ ‘Amazing! Yes, you’re quite right. . . .’ ‘And by the end of next season, when you know one person in society the Irishman will know ten. Meanwhile Whistler remained the social lion, the resident wit and the sardonic emperor of the Domino Room. Apart from his pedigree as a Bohemian in Paris, Whistler was respected because of his work, lyrical if sombre portraits of the London riverside. In the sixties Doré had roamed

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around the black coal quays of Limehouse and sketched the hopeless vagrants of the riverside; Whistler’s etchings of the Thames had made dockland look quaint and serene. In 1871, as Monet set up his easel by the river, Whistler began his romantic ‘Nocturnes’, refining even more detail from his pictures than his old colleague. By painting the river as if it was the shore of an industrial Byzantium, he obscured the squalor which Doré found so hard to avoid, while offering his English admirers a refreshing change from the vivid minutiae of the Pre-Raphaelites. As the Impression­ ists had studied broken masses of colour by painting reflections in water, Whistler achieved all this by painting the waterfront at dusk, or lit by fireworks at night. If the Café Guerbois had been a refuge from his fear of twilight, it was in the Café Royal that his paintings of London at dusk finally won him his own circle of friends and admirers. Since it was English, the Bohemia of the Café Royal had to obey certain discreet rules. If Verlaine had been English he would hardly have been allowed the informal freedom from arrest that he enjoyed in Paris. The basis of this code was that Bohemians or unorthodox artists like Whistler should not try to influence anyone beyond their own introvert café society. Whistler broke this rule by asking the courts to defend his work. His ‘Nocturnes’ had proved as hard to evaluate by normal professional standards as ‘Déjeuner sur l’Herbe’. Although Whistler avoided any overt rejection of realism by painting at dusk, his offence seemed violent enough to most people. The famous art critic John Ruskin, who loved both hard labour and detail, thought Whistler was flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face, and in 1877 Whistler sued him for saying so. ‘How soon,’ asked the Attorney General, after one of the ‘Nocturnes’ had been brought into court upside down, ‘did you knock it off?’ After the laughter, Whistler recalled that it had taken two days. ‘The labour of two days then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?’ ‘N o,’ said Whistler, ‘I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.’ Despite this legendary reply Whistler’s friends at the Café were dis­ turbed to hear he had been awarded only a farthing in damages and no costs. The American retreated to Venice and brooded in the Café Florian while bailiffs held a forced sale of his paintings and anything else they could find. Whistler had effectively told the court that he should be allowed to define the aesthetic and financial value of his own work. An artist had no obligation to society, and society had no right to put a price on his work. The effect of the verdict was simply to translate this independence into the language of the society he pretended to ignore— exile , bankruptcy. His friends in the Café were right to be concerned. Anyone else from the

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embassy of Bohemia who broke his diplomatic immunity was liable to the same fate. A year later Whistler was back at the Café Royal. He set up his easel in the dimly lit studio across the road in Regent Street and took his friends out to lunch if he could afford it. Soon after his return the conversation in the Café began to sparkle with the precious jargon, refined jeu d ’esprit, the theatrical manners of a distinctively English kind of I’A rt pour l’Art. Aestheticism was the style of an intense and affected adoration of Beauty—of loose, flowing gowns, peacock feathers, vague mysticism, ‘good taste’, Culture, or of anything that was ‘too utterly utter’. The high priest of this effete cult was the young Irishman whom Whistler had unwittingly entertained to breakfast. He was so well known by W histler’s return from Italy that no one was surprised if a passerby muttered, ‘There goes that bloody fool, Oscar Wilde.’ ‘It’s extraordinary,’ as Wilde would tell his companion, ‘how soon one gets well known in London.’ A few Café dinners, or Sunday breakfasts, later Wilde and Whistler were firm friends. So far there was no doubt who was the senior partner. One night when Robert Sherard, Wilde’s biographer, dined at the Café with both men, Whistler, still broke, ordering cheap claret with his frugal grill, began to snarl his way through his usual list of grievances. A talk with the American, Sherard told Wilde later, was ‘an excellent substitute for bitters as an aperitif’. But for Wilde, Whistler was still ‘a grand old Virginia gentleman’. And, he warned Sherard, ‘one does not criticize a James McNeill W histler.’ One could copy him, however. At one dinner Whistler delivered one of his carefully wrought epigrams which Wilde had so far not had a chance to steal. ‘Jimmy, I wish I had said that.’ ‘You will, Oscar, you will.’ Assuming the flamboyant dress of a Pre-Raphaelite Byron, silk stock­ ings, loose collar, knickerbockers, Wilde translated I’A rt pour l’A rt into a style of behaviour suitable for the Café Royal. As far back as the 1830s the concept of Art as a luxury appreciated only by the sensitive had a special attraction for nouveaux riches with no aristocratic heritage as a way to express their social status. By claiming an affinity with Art it was possible to distinguish yourself from the rest of the crowd beneath the striped awnings of some Mayfair lawn. Wilde was the first person to exploit this potential for his own fame and profit. Art became known as a condition of the soul which prompted young men to walk down Regent Street with a distant gaze and a sunflower in their hands. If this was too like hard work they would call in at the Café for a glass of absinthe. Whistler blamed

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Wilde and said so in his famous ‘Ten O’Clock Lecture’ of 1885. Afterwards their rivalry soured into acrimony. If one saw the other in the Domino Room he would choose a table on the far side of the room. As far as the leadership of this ersatz and opulent Bohemia was concerned, Whistler was the loser. He was starting to wilt. ‘It must be very tiring to keep up the role of a butterfly,’ Degas had told him. ‘Better to be an old bull like m e.’ The role of a wasp was even more exhausting. Apart from his refusal to be implicated in the domestication of Art, Whistler simply lacked the stamina that helped his old admirer dominate the Café Royal. ‘There is a young man here, Mr W histler,’ said a friend at the Arts Club one day, ‘who admires your work tremendously and would like to meet you. He wants to be an artist.’ ‘Poor devil,’ said Whistler, stalking off. If there had never really been a School of James McNeill at the Café, there would certainly be a School of Oscar. Wilde was hardly ever so brutal with his young admirers. In Dublin he had held his fellow school kids spellbound with his crazy stories. At Oxford he charmed into submis­ sion the bullies who came to vandalize his rooms. At the Café Royal he outshone the finest story-tellers of his time, handing out instructions, books, advice, in the languid intervals between his dazzling fables and paradoxes: ‘Time is a waste of money’. . . . ‘The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible; what the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.’ . . . ‘My favourite reading is Bradshaw’. . . . ‘Mr Bernard Shaw has no enemies but is immensely disliked by his friends’ . . . and no one in the Café seemed to think it strange that the hero of this English Bohemia was an editor of The Woman s World who had just asked Queen Victoria if he could publish her poetry.

The Viennese Kaffeehaus: Refuge from Angst and Reality Joseph Wechsberg , 1968

Kolschitzki’s first coffee-house was established in Vienna in 1684, one year after the Turkish siege and eighteen years after the first local opera performance. Both the opera and the coffee-house have baffled Viennese historians by their apparent indestructibility. Admittedly the coffee-house had long periods of decline, and its fall was often predicted, but after two hundred and eighty-four years the institution is still gloriously alive. Somehow it has remained, an island of free thought and free speech, an oasis of solitude or companionship, of meditation or conversation, the haven of the individualist and the refuge of the non-conformist, the last catacomb where Man can go underground with his secret thoughts and inner aspirations. The coffee-house is not a Viennese invention. The first coffee-house was opened in Constantinople in about 1540, and from there the pleasant institution came to Europe, in about the middle of the seventeenth century. Oxford had its first cafés as early as 1650. Two years later, one Daniel Edwards, a merchant, opened a coffee-house at St Michael’s Alley in London. Later, writers and dandies would meet at Tom’s and Button’s or at F arr’s and Will’s. The oldest café in Paris is the Café Procope in the Rue des Fosses-Saint-Germain; it still exists and is popular with students from the Sorbonne. In Venice the first coffee-house was opened in St M ark’s Square. But the Viennese coffee-houses were to become the most famous of all. Sixteen years after Kolschitzki had started the trend, there were already thirty such establishments in Vienna. The owner needed an Imperial privilege but quite a few people served Turkish coffee illegally. In 1704 a chronicler wrote, ‘Vienna is full of coffee-houses where the novelists . . . get together, read the news in the papers, and talk about it’. Billiard tables were added in 1780, and signs informed the patrons that smoking was 486

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permitted. One Johann Evangelist Milani opened his coffee-house in Kohlmarkt and put up chess tables. Among the habitués was M ozart’s brilliant librettist, the poet Lorenzo da Ponte. Milani was always there, cutting a splendid figure in his white tails, with Dreispitz and pigtail, and looking like Guglielmo or Ferrando in da Ponte’s and M ozart’s Cos ì Fan Tutte. ‘One studies, one plays, gossips, sleeps, negotiates, barters, in­ trigues’, writes a chronicler. ‘At night, Milani wants to close and implores the guests, corpo dio m aledetto , to leave, but no one does.’ Ladies were served ‘frozen cream ’ in the ‘garden’, a section of the sidewalk in front of the coffee-house, separated from the street by a low barrier and a couple of potted trees. Unlike the French sidewalk café which merges with the street the Viennese coffee-house always likes to preserve the illusion of privacy. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Viennese coffee-house had become the cradle of Vienna’s literature; ever since, ‘coffee-house’ and ‘littérateurs’ have remained synonymous in this city. There has always been one outstanding literary café—only one. Writers and scientists first met at the dim, shabby, bohemianlike Kram er’s Coffee-House in Schlossergassel, near Graben. Here, according to Friedrich Nicolai, one could read newspapers from Hamburg, Frankfurt, Bayreuth, Cologne, Leiden, and also Hungarian and English papers. The first local literati —Ayrenhoff, Blumauer, Alxinger, Ratschky, Retzer, Rautenstrauch—met there to read each other their works and to discuss them. They were not exactly men of modesty. The Biedermeier created the ‘Nobelcafé’, a luxurious place for rich bourgeois where even archdukes might occasionally drop in. At the Café Jüngling, ‘Christians, Jews and Macedonians’ were seen sitting together. A string trio under young Joseph Lanner played music, and later a young man named Johann Strauss played second fiddle. But Vienna’s poets felt nothing but contempt for the elegant Nobelcafés which were bright and ostentatious. Ideally, a coffee-house should be gemütlich and comfortable but must never ‘look new’; it must have a special atmosphere but not necessarily crystal chandeliers. During the Vormärz days, a new generation of writers and composers moved to Ignaz Neuner’s Café at the corner of Spiegelgasse and Planken­ gasse. ‘At Neuner’s men of spirit found their real home and a second reality, a world of the printed word, of unwritten masterpieces talked into the air and the cigar smoke, an empire with its own laws, a classless society’, writes Hilde Spiel, the contemporary coffee-house historian and novelist. Grillparzer, Lenau, Raimund and Stifter regularly went to Neu ner’s, and less famous scribes gathered round the luminaries. Here all the fixtures were made of pure silver; there were silver door latches and silver

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coat hangers and seventy-two silver hat-hangers, and silver-rimmed meer­ schaum pipes for the habitués. There was also a special ladies’ room with red damask walls where smoking was not permitted. After the 1848 revolution Neuner’s closed. To the authorities the Kaffee haus had always been suspect. Austrian intrigues and Balkan revolutions have been plotted around Vienna’s coffee-house tables. M etternich’s se­ cret police always searched the coffee-houses first when they had reason to expect some trouble. (Ninety years later, Hitler’s Gestapo almost ruined the coffee-houses where Vienna’s Catholics and Jews, clericals and liber­ als, and other ‘enemies of the régime’ would gather to hear the latest or to digest disturbing rumours.) In 1873, Ferdinand Kürnberger, a writer, reported that Vienna’s news­ papers sent free copies to all the coffee-houses and bribed the headwaiters ‘to put them into the hands of the habitués’. By 1900 there were over seven hundred coffee-houses in Vienna. Around the fin-de-siècle the ‘Young Vienna’ circle—poets, satirists, essayists, critics, actors, politicians— gathered at the Café Griensteidl, at the Herberstein Palais, near the Hofburg. It was the meeting place of littérateurs and their hangers-on, ‘well-bred burghers’ sons whose thinking was concerned with aesthetics, not with ethics; the idea was to find the form since the subject was given; the subject was forever Vienna’, write Julius Bab and Willi Handl. But there were some real writers too. Around 1890, one could have met there on almost any afternoon Arthur Schnitzler, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Felix Dormann, Felix Salten, and perhaps young Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Hermann Bahr from Linz, Upper Austria, became the leader and spokes­ man of the ‘M oderne’, an impressionist-psychological group of poets and philosophers. Richard Specht, the music critic, and a member of that august discussion group, later wrote, ‘If someone had written down their conversations and published them as a book, he might have created one of the most candid, charming, artistically fascinating documents of the mod­ ern psyche.’ The atmosphere of the Café Griensteidl was beautifully and satirically described in its epitaph. Until 1897, when the Palais Herberstein was turned into an apartment building and the Café Griensteidl had to be closed, Karl Kraus—critic, moralist, essayist, playwright, who has been called ‘Vienna’s Rochefort’—had been one of its habitués. Like many ‘genuine’ Wiener , Kraus came from Moravia. He was a short, slim man with very bright blue eyes, who often wrote for Viennese newspapers under the nom-de-plume ‘Crêpe de Chine’. Later he became a purist, a fanatic of good writing and of the German language, the violent partisan of Shakespeare, Nestroy and Offenbach. He broke with his erst-while friends at the Griensteidl when he published his famous essay ‘The

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Demolished Literature’, a brilliant, satirical obituary on the great coffeehouse, which he called a literary traffic centre . . . where even the Marqueure took part in the literary activities of their guests. . . . They seemed to be members of the writers’ union rathers than the waiters’ union. . . . Head waiter Franz could even remember the face o f a passant [a passer-by who dropped in once in a while, not several times a day, like an habitué]. Franz would always hand any guest the right newspaper, even if he had not seen the guest for twenty years. He had been a friend o f Grillparzer and Bauernfeld; he remembered how naturalism had come from Berlin directly to the Café Griensteidl, where it was triumphantly greeted as a strong reaction against aesthetic defeatism. . . . Since then the waiters had loved modern art, serving strange colour compositions o f ice creams and parfaits, and introducing absinthe. . . .

Realism was soon followed by symbolism, the era of ‘clinically observed conditions of the psyche [Seelenzust ände], the escape from urgency, the interpretation of life. . . . According to Karl Kraus the Griensteidl must have been a unique place. It had ‘mountains of newspapers’, and a complete set of Meyer’s Konversations-Lexikon, the famous Germanlanguage encyclopaedia. This made visits to the café obligatory for writers doing some research. They also used the café’s writing paper, but appar­ ently many of them did not bother to order anything. (‘There was the poet who would say to the headwaiter, “ Don’t give me anything” , and after a while Heinrich, the headwaiter, would say to the underwaiter, “ Herr Doktor has nothing as usual”’, writes Kraus.) In the same obituary Kraus wrote sarcastically about ‘the gentleman from Linz’ (Bahr) whom he called ‘a sort of latter-day Goethe . . . his popularity is limited to the first four tables. Beginning with the left mirror table his popularity wanes. . . .’ Kraus also attacked Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler (‘When he writes about death, do not get frightened—his pistols are loaded with apathy . . . to die is nothing but to live and not to see anything is everything’). Kraus also wrote about ‘those who carry theatri­ cal gossip from one table to the next while others imitate the Parisian bohemian. . . . And now all of them are thrown out and our literature enters a period of homelessness’. It was not really that bad. Even during the final years of the Griensteidl some writers had already moved into the nearby Café Central in Herren gasse, which became the headquarters of Egon Friedell, Alfred Polgar, Franz Blei and Anton Kuh. Friedell once claimed that he accomplished more at the coffee-house than a businessman did at his office. Satirists, essayists and journalists met in a large, vaulted room of the Central which was called the ‘Arkadenhof’. The Griensteidl had been the home of neo-

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romanticism and impressionism. The Central became the breeding ground of expressionism. Its great commentator was Alfred Polgar, who described the Central’s geographic location ‘at the latitude of Vienna and the longitude of solitude’, and called the Central ‘not a coffee-house but a Weltanschauung [a philosophy of life]. . . . Its inhabitants are mostly people whose antipathy to other people is as strong as their yearning for human beings. They want to be alone but always need company. . . . In this blessed place even faceless people are credited with personality. At the Central the prominent writers were always surrounded by nonde­ script ‘bohemians’ whom Kuh, a super-bohemian, scorned as ‘bank clerks with an ethical background’. And there was a generous assortment of ‘Viennese Schopenhauers’, such as the Hungerk ünstler Ottfried Krzyzanowsky who could go without solid food for days, and was nourished by the stale coffee-house air. He became a local legend but never wrote a line. Into this ‘refuge from A ngst and reality’, as it has been defined, there came such sturdy realists as Dr Sigmund Freud, unafraid of A n gst , and Dr Theodor Billroth, the celebrated surgeon and a great friend of Johannes Brahms. Also present were Victor Adler (profession: Socialist) and Adler’s political enemy, Karl Lueger (profession: demagogue and mayor of Vi­ enna). At a rear table, somewhat removed from the undercurrents of local political and literary life, there might be Professor Thomas Garrigue Masaryk and Karl Kramá ř who, as Anton Kuh said, ‘were manufacturing k. & .k. [Imperial-Royal] high treason against the k. & .k. monarchy’. (Masaryk later became the first president of Czechoslovakia; Kramá ř was sentenced to death for high treason, was pardoned, and became Czechos­ lovakia’s first prime minister.) In the chess room, a gloomy Russian conspirator by the name of Bronstein played endless games with local virtuosi. Later he went to Switzerland and became world-famous under the name of Leon Trotsky. When the October revolution in Russia was reported to Count Czernin, the Austrian foreign minister, he refused to believe it. ‘It can’t be true,’ he said. ‘Who could have made the revolution in Russia? Could it be Herr Bronstein from the Café Central?’ While the literati lived and quarrelled at the Café Central, the painters congregated at the Café P öchhacker near the old K ünstlerhaus and also at the Café Museum near the Secession. Actually, most of these so-called ‘painters’ were cartoonists and caricaturists, just as many of the self-styled ‘poets’ were satirists and essayists. The Café Museum had been decorated by the great Adolf Loos; it is still popular with artists and musicians in Vienna. Even before the Café Central died in 1925, the habitués had moved to the nearby Café Herrenhof, just a block down in Herrengasse. Between the two world wars the Herrenhof became the refuge of many a

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hopeless talent or gifted creator of Galgenhumor, the cynical ‘gallows humour’ that was brought to perfection there. It was a strange, unreal time. The intellectual sons of wealthy Jewish businessmen talked about literary magazines which they were going to, but never did, publish; of marriages that never took place; of books and plays that were ‘planned’ but never written. ‘The Schwebezustand [a feeling of being suspended in space and time] so dear to the heart of the Viennese was here perfected’, remembers a chronicler. The Herrenhof became a waiting room between the end of the monarchy and the beginning of ‘the next epoch’ that many people were expecting after the rise of National-Socialism in neighbouring Germany. Everybody was afraid of the future and no one did anything about it. No one at the Herrenhof wanted to face reality; everybody escaped into their unreal world of bizarre humour. Only Hungerkünstler Krzyzanowsky was no longer with them. While the people at the Central thought he was at the Herrenhof and the Herrenhof habitués thought he was at the Central, he had literally died of hunger in his small, cold, rented room. Between the two world wars, in 1925, there were over 1,250 coffeehouses in Vienna. Some of them had been banks and savings institutions which had failed, whereupon the premises were turned into coffee-houses. There were special coffee-houses for pianists and others for string players, for operetta composers and for serious composers, for stamp collectors and court councillors, for radicals and conservatives. Almost each selfrespecting soccer club had its coffee-house, and almost each unrespected ministry. Coffee-house life in Vienna ended abruptly in March 1938 when the Nazis took over. They preferred the atmosphere of German-style beer gardens and of prison canteens. During the second world war the coffeehouses were almost deserted. There were no people worth meeting, no newspapers worth reading; many habitués had been taken to concentration camps. Many light bulbs were turned out. There was no heat. Both the atmosphere and the coffee had become ersatz . After the war, an effort was made to bring the Café Herrenhof back to life, but it had lost its will to survive. Perhaps it sensed that it was now out of tune with the post-war generation. (Vienna’s coffee-house habitués have always agreed that a coffee-house is a living organism with a ‘soul’ of its own.) It cannot have been an accident that Vienna’s writers, painters, artists, bohemians and hangers-on moved into the small, shabby Café Hawelka in Dorotheergasse, a quiet side-street of Graben. The Hawelka had once been the afternoon refuge of the Kleinrentner (small pensioner) who could afford just one small cup of coffee and who spent the whole afternoon there reading the papers. Its owner, Leopold Hawelka, a man

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with artistic ambitions, began to collect paintings, to subscribe to ‘moun tains of newspapers’, and to attract the ‘men without qualities’, as Musil would have said, the human beings without identity. The Hawelka is the perfect place for them, looking as it does like the stage set from a Genet play. But into this non-existentialist place there came the novelists (Doderer, Lernet-Holenia, Czokor), satirists (Qualtin ger, Weigel, Merz), painters (Moldovan, Fuchs, Lehmden), and some aristocratic art patrons (Schwarzenberg, Sayn-Wittgenstein, Czernin). Only the Burgtheater actors, an exclusive folk, prefer the more elegant Café Savoy. But they are not really missed at the Hawelka. During the final days of the Habsburg monarchy, the great era of the Viennese coffee-house, there was one in every town of the remote prov­ inces of Austria, from Trieste to Cracow, from Czernowitz to Prague, from Budapest to Innsbruck, from Troppau to Temesvar. There was the same aroma of freshly made coffee, the latest issue of the Neue Freie P resse , the local gossip and the news from Vienna. But there was a difference between a Viennese coffee-house elsewhere and one in Vienna. The café’s visible appurtenances—comfortable benches, marble tables, soft lights, dark walls stained by generations of smokers—could be exported, but somehow not its inimitable atmosphere. The coffee-house was a strong colonising influence throughout the Habsburg empire, but the original remained in Vienna. ‘The Viennese’, writes Hilde Spiel, ‘led a Scheinexistence at the coffee-house; one was not at home yet one was not outside in the fresh air. One was “ reachable” but one could leave any time. One could invite friends but one was not responsible.’ Stefan Zweig once called the Viennese coffee-house ‘our best educa­ tional establishment for all that is new’. The coffee-house always stimu­ lated new ideas; it was Vienna’s club that anyone could join who had the money for a cup of coffee (or at least a friend who would pay for his coffee). This modest due entitles the guest to hours of solitude or compan­ ionship, whichever he prefers. There is no time limit; after a while the ‘piccolo’, an apprentice waiter in a midget’s tuxedo brings a tray with several glasses of fresh water, and removes the earlier tray from the table—a friendly gesture imported from the bazaars of the Balkan, a sign of hospitality, not a subtle hint that you should vacate your table. It offers living space and privacy, light and heating (which some habitués cannot always afford in their own home during the winter), reading matter and a discussion partner, card and chess games. It is the guest’s message centre and mailing address, a place for his business appointments, and a powerful erotic catalyst. It is a place where the guest can feel at peace with himself, surrounded by privacy and anonymity, clouds of smoke and piles of newspapers, understanding and tolerance. At a time of widespread A n g st ,

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when the pleasure of conversation has become almost extinct, the coffeehouse conveys a reassuring sense of the past, a feeling of permanence beneath the change, of comfort and security in the midst of recurrent disaster.

Bohemian Pastorale: The Old Latin Quartier Max Nordau, 1890

People who take pleasure in using archaisms still speak, now and then, of the “ quartier latin.” But is there really a “ quartier latin” nowadays? What is so called, is a prosaic district, in no wise differing from the rest of Paris. The region between the Seine and the Odéon, between Rue Dau phine and Boulevard St. Michel was formerly a world by itself; a romantic island in the midst of an ocean of philistinism. But it has long since lost its character; and if Paul de Kock and Henri Murger should leave their graves to-day, and return to this upper world, they would seek in vain their beloved “ Latin land” with its ever-trilling, light-hearted grisettes and its extravagant bohemians, full of genius. Forty, thirty years ago, the “ quartier latin” had a characteristically provincial air. The lanes were narrow, winding, dark and dirty; the houses, built in a fantastic style, were partly small and humble, with a pointed gable of altogether rural effect, partly stately, with a noble front and a spacious court planted with trees; former convents and abbeys that the revolution had turned to secular use. In every house lived a few youths who, with their female “ friends” set up a household. For it was one of the traditions of the “ latin land” that every student who was devoted to his work, should be lovingly supported in his studies by a female “ friend” ; an “ étudiante.” There existed, on this side of the water, a code of morals and customs quite different from that of the vast Paris on the opposite shore of the Seine. As soon as the student crossed the “ pont neuf,” he swept prudishness and conventionality from his soul, like a coat of dust, and indulged, without restraint, in the exuberant caprices and passions of a youthful heart. The “ quartier latin” was a kind of Paphian grove without lawn and trees. It would be difficult to decide whether Apollo, the leader of the muses, or Venus, the tender, was there more worshipped as the local deity. It was surely a paradise for the young people, and a hell for the husbands of pretty and not too stale wives. Childless couples, or those 494

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who had already provided for their progeny, removed with preference into these quarters to enjoy the rejuvenating warmth that merry, joyous youth radiate about them. Parents, however, with young daughters, fled betimes these regions, in which the naive, reckless enjoyment of life was the dominating philosophy, and where even the best guarded virtue suc­ cumbed to the numberless temptations. The “ quartier latin” was almost exclusively occupied by the students of the various professions, and that multitude of existences of all categories that, wherever a university is found, follow the studying youth as dolphins, or other fish of prey, a shoal of herring; working girls who find the loneliness of their attic too dreary and like to warm their wretched existence with a little love; usuers who lay snares for squandering, care­ less, hot-blooded youth, in the form of an easy, unscrupulous credit; business people of all descriptions whose first principle is to lend money freely and with good grace, and who, despite their ever-smiling urbanity, harvest rich profits; finally, the unsuccessful aspirants to the learned professions who prolong their wretched existences by the crumbs falling from the tables of good-hearted youth. Among these “ declassés” were original characters, as the “ répétiteur,” an ever-uncouth, ever-tipsy old blade that has, after twenty years of university life never desecrated by a trivial examination, become a scholar by sheer force of habit, as it were, and utilizes the knowledge acquired rather in the dram shop than in the class room, by preparing, at a moderate price, backward youngsters for the examinations that an inimical fate had always prevented him, the examiner, from passing; or the antiquary who had dreamed, perhaps in the spring of his life, of occupying some day one of the forty fauteuils under the cupola of the academy, and who finally, in old age, saw his relations to literature reduced to the prosaic level of dealing in old, wormeaten parchments. Everybody was acquainted with everybody in the “ quartier.” You lived at “ mère Anne’s,” dined at “ père Pierre’s,” were clothed at “ papa Paul’s,” and borrowed a napoleon from “ oncle Alphonse.” The young blood who came to the “ quartier latin” from the depth of the far-off province, to pursue his studies there, found himself at once as warm and comfortable as in his native village. The newcomer was surrounded by beaming faces. Friendships were established in the first quarter of an hour, after two days he was on terms of closest intimacy with hundreds of youths of his age, and it was a miracle if, in the end of the first week, some “ amie” of a friend did not whisper in his ear that she had a nice friend who was dying of ennui “ la-bas” and would be happy to make his acquaintance. Nobody believed more fervently in the truth of the biblical

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dictum that it is not good to be alone, than the students in the “ quartier latin.” It was considered a most natural thing and accepted, without contradiction, as such by parents and guardians that a student should associate with the already mentioned “ étudiante.”

Rural Bohemia: Carmel, 1900s Mary Austin, 1927

The Mission San Carlos Borromeo looks inshore up the valley of Carmel to the lilac-colored crests of Santa Lucia; off shore, the view just clears the jaws of Lobos along the sunpath between it and Cypress Point. Full in the crescent bay the sea lifts in a hollow curve of chrysoprase, whose edge goes up in smoking foam along the hard packed beaches—ever and ever, disregardful of the nondescript shacks, the redwood bungalows and pseudo-Spanish haciendas crowding one another between the beach and the high road. But when I first came to this land, a virgin thicket of buckthorn sage and sea-blue lilac spread between well-spaced, long-leaved pines. The dunes glistened white with violet shadows, and in warm hollows, between live oaks, the wine of light had mellowed undisturbed a thousand years. Sterling’s first choice was the delectable point at the turn of the road toward Sur, on the Carmel side of Harry Leon Wilson’s “ Ocean Hom e,” giving directly upon the sea. This proving too far from the final town site, he built at last upon a similar point of pines, all but islanded by meadow, looking toward Santa Lucia and Palo Corona. To reach it from the town one climbed a piney hill, threaded the close encinas, skirting a lovely lake of herd grass all afoam with flowers, and then went along a ravine made secret by dark, leaning bays. James Hopper owned it after Sterling, and afterward it went up in fire, somehow an appropriate end. George was the last man in the world to have wished the house where his happiest years were passed to become a gaping place to the penny curious. The heart of the Sterling house was a long room overlooking the woodland prospect, with a huge square fireplace at one end, which it was the poet’s pride to keep well filled with fat pitch-pine backlogs; but George could seldom be found there by daylight. We achieved, all of us who flocked there within the ensuing two or three years, especially after the fire of 1906 had made San Francisco uninhabitable to the creative worker, 497

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a settled habit of morning work, which it was anathema to interrupt. But by the early afternoon mail one and another of the painter and writer folk could be seen sauntering by piney trails, which had not then suffered that metamorphosis of asphalt, concrete and carbon monoxide that go in the world of realtors by the name of “ improvements,” to sun themselves along the town’s one partially cleared passage to the sea, and make delightful impromptu disposals of the rest of the day. It was the simplest occupations that gave the most pleasure, and yielded the richest harvest of impressions, observations and feeling-response, which are the stuff of the artist life and the envy and hate-edged amaze­ ment of the outsider. Sterling’s greatest pleasures were those that whetted his incessant appetite for sensation—the sting of the surf against his body, the dangerous pull of the undertow off the Carmel beaches, or gathering seafood among the “ undulant, apple-green hollows” of the Mission Cove. He also delighted to go striding, ax on shoulder, over the Monterey hills looking for pitch pine, or for bee-trees, or whatever arduous and practical simplicity restored him to that human touch, from which it was his weakness to fall away, or perhaps never quite to attain in any other relation. Of all our walks he loved best the one on Point Lobos, no poet’s stroll, but a stout climb, dramatic, danger-tipped, in the face of bursting sprayheads torn up from primordial deeps of sea gardens, resolved into whorls and whorls of lambent color. Interrupting or terminating such excursions, there would be tea beside driftwood fires, or mussel roasts by moonlight— or the lot of us would pound abalone for chowder around the open-air grill at Sterling’s cabin. And talk—ambrosial, unquotable talk! How shall one account for the charms of life lived solely for its creative values, a charm that holds over to the mere recital of it, even for those who have never entered into its subtle simplicities? Yet one must account a little to explain why there gathered such a company at Carmel, at the furthest geographical remove from the distributing center for creative work. I had already tasted life in the Latin Quarter of Paris, and at Florence, among the “ prairie dogs”—you know, those pensive ladies who sit in cafés with elbows on the table, and paws adroop, propping their chins, and mouths slightly open to receive wisdom—when Gordon Craig was their prophet, and people used to follow Isadora Duncan respectfully in the streets—young Isadora who could dance—merely to enjoy the subtle motions of her walking. I had been entertained at the dingy, eternally hopeful resorts of Soho by English novelists, who had happily survived them, and lived two years in Greenwich Village two floors under Hendrik Willem Van Loon, before he became a best seller, when Jimmy managed the Mad Hatter, coming to rest finally at the foot of Cinco Pintores Hill,

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where the diversions of creative activity range all the way from dancedrama of the Stone Age to taking tea with John Galsworthy and Sinclair Lewis at the same time. But none of these experiences keeps so fresh a savor as the eight or ten years at Carmel when George Sterling was easily the most arresting figure. There was beauty and strangeness; beauty of Greek quality, but not too Greek; “ green fires, and billows tremulous with light,” not wanting the indispensable touch of grief; strangeness of bearded men from Tassajara with bear meat and wild-honey to sell; great teams from the Sur, going by on the highroad with a sound of bells; and shadowy recesses within the wood, white with the dropping of night-haunting birds. But I think that the memorable and now vanished charm of Carmel lay, perhaps, most in the reality of the simplicity attained, a simplicity factually adjusted to the quest of food and fuel and housing as it can never be in any “ quarter” of city life. And very much more than we at that time realized, it nearly all derived from George Sterling, between whom and the environment there was a perfection of suitability that mediated for even the clumsiest the coveted level of simplicity. The Sterlings were an old Sag Harbor seafaring family. The poet’s father had been a physician, and George had played pirate, robbed orchards, and hunted Captain Kidd’s treasure. At the age of seventeen he was converted to the Roman Catholic faith, along with his father. As a result he was transferred to St. M ary’s College, Maryland, where there had been some idea of putting his already pronounced literary taste to the uses of the priesthood, for which he later proved to have no vocation. Priest he was to beauty, and altogether logical to his mystical, rum-drinking, humanitar­ ian, Catholic, Puritan, 100% American line. Nothing else so explains a poet of Sterling’s austere exoticism. The story of his life happenings is as meager as Hawthorne’s or Whit­ tier’s. While still a youth he went adventuring to California, but no further than a desk in the office of his uncle, Frank C. Havens, a realtor of importance in the transbay regions of San Francisco. In his twenties he married Caroline Rand, a stenographer in the office where he was clerk. The high points of his own rating were his acquaintance with Ambrose Bierce and Jack London. Bierce, whom he met about the time he began to write, directed his reading, which never quite made up the lack of formal education. If, as the poet admitted, Bierce also formed his taste, it was at least a taste which, left to itself, never faltered to either side of a narrowly classic line. Never having seen Bierce but once, at Sterling’s house, and having known him only through young people who had passed under his hand, I judged him to be a man secretly embittered by failure to achieve direct

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creation, to which he never confessed; a man of immense provocative power, always secretly—perhaps even to himself—seeking to make good in some other’s gift what he himself had missed, always able to forgive any shortcoming in his protégés more easily than a failure to turn out according to his prescription. I thought him something of a posturer, tending to overweigh a slender inspiration with apocalyptic gestures. I am sure he left as many disciples sticking in the bog of unrealized aspiration as ever he drew out on firm ground; but Sterling, who carried loyalty to excess, never faced the precise values of his association with Bierce. Which leads me to suspect that he did not feel altogether sure of their surpassing character. In the end they drifted into an attitude of slightly veiled antagonism over George’s acceptance, chiefly on the authority of Jack London, of Jack’s version of Socialism. It was Sterling’s humanitarianism which led him in that direction, for he was not really informed on the subject. He was a little touched too, or perhaps it was only his admiration for Jack made it seem so, with London’s sense of the importance of the Nordic in the scheme of things. But his true devotion was to beauty, in which he found the supreme reality and the final test of excellence in art—the test, too, of his own personal metal. For no Puritan could more cleanly have excised out of his work all that any hide-bound Puritan would have found unacceptable in his behavior. It was the keenest criticism of his own life, and of our work, that Sterling could have made; all the more biting because he was, I think, quite unconscious of making it. If George took his sociology from Jack, it was not without recompense. At that time one found him reading manuscript and proof for London with a meticulous interest that never flagged; his diction was irreproachable, and his feeling for the fall of a sentence and the turn of a figure peculiarly sensitive. The two of them used to talk over their literary projects with even exchange. If Jack developed themes of George’s originating—for Jack had that pliability of genius which enabled him to work freely in anybody’s material—he stinted neither credit nor kudos. Moreover, I have always suspected that London’s open buying of plots for short stories from any writer with more plots than places to bestow them was chiefly a generous camouflage for help that could not be asked or given otherwise without embarrassment. Jack took an aesthetic pleasure in displaying the open hand, but never, to my knowledge, with the least tinge of patronage. Nor did Sterling ever withhold anything that one poet could ask of another. I recall once his coming to me to borrow fifty dollars—Jack, usually his banker for such accommodations, being then on the voyage of the Snark —not for himself, but to lend to one he judged more necessitous. “ But George,” I protested, “ that man can never say anything bad enough

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about me; it would be poison to him to take my money.” “ That’s w hy,” explained the poet ingenuously, “ if you lend it to me and I lend it to him, he’ll never know.” George expected generosities like that of other people, and achieved them, too, for, though he had sharp hates and quick resent­ ments, he could never be faithful to them to the extent of doing less than justice—and very often, indeed, a little more than justice—to the other man’s work. Jack London and I had to shake down a bit before we began to get on together. There was the difference in type, for one thing, and the con­ stantly dissolving and reforming ring of Jack’s admirers, inclined to resent my being unimpressed by Jack’s recent discovery of Darwinian evolution. Nor could I ever take London’s pronouncement of the Social Revolution so seriously as did his adorers—and who of the younger set in those days was not an adorer of Jack London? But in time, largely by way of Jack’s new wife Charmian, we arrived at a Platonic exchange. They were to me, these two—Jack and George—the first professional literary men that I had known, a source of endless intellectual curiosity. They were, for example, the first people I had known who could get joyously drunk in the presence of women they respected. For in the outlying desert regions where I had lived this was not done. Partly because of this novelty and partly because I myself had developed a psychological and physiological resistence to alcohol far in excess of its reported de­ lights, I gave myself with enthusiasm to discovering what the others got out of it. That it was for Sterling the apparatus by which all his energies were stepped up to the creative level there is no manner of a doubt. By what slip of inheritance he found himself stripped of that natural alterna­ tion of psychic levels, which enables some men to pride themselves on their virtue, who can say? Always he was ridden by restless impotencies of energy, which only by sharp exaggeration of sensation would find their natural outlet in creative expression. He could not give himself either to composition or to intellec­ tual exposition of an idea, nor even sit and lounge comfortably, until by one of three ways his genius had been eased into its appropriate path. When he had been plunging about for an hour in the stinging surf, or wrestling pine knots with an ax, or pounding abalone which had just been strenuously gathered from the rocks, or have several drinks in him—then would talk pour from him gloriously. Striding through the woods at a longlegged pace that few could follow, as one could see him of afternoons, tramping the hills in company with Jimmy Hopper, Sterling’s tall figure always a little in advance, had the same high effect on him. Jack, who was, by the time I began really to know him, sagging a little with the surfeit of success, preferred the lounging drift-wood fire or the

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pitch-pine blazing hearth. And we talked, as I recall it now, of every aspect of this problem of creative release but one. Jack had much to say, as he says it in “ John Barleycorn” and in “ Martin E den,” for which George served as hero. That was before the terminology of psychoanalysis now on everybody’s tongue had got into the current speech; but we approached the problem well enough as the handicap of genius on its way to creative expression, along with another idea, of which it seems appro­ priate now to speak. I mean the liability of men of genius to find their subjective activities, on the way to fruition, so largely at the mercy of the effect on them of woman—or to be more exact, of a particular woman. I say men of genius. When I said that we talked of every aspect of release but one I meant the one involved in my never needing either a drink or a love affair to unlock the fountain of the deep-self. Neither did Norah May French, for that matter, who was the only other woman in our circle whose work came near to the class of London and Sterling. So I am left in doubt if, seeing I had no such problem, it never occurred to them that I might know the reason why, or if it was the profound, accustomed indifference of the male to what goes on in the mind of any woman who has not personally stirred him. They were, at any rate, willing to admit me intellectually to this and similar problems, including the reason why women in general are so sharply attracted to men of creative capacity. Jack London thought—and Jack had material enough, God wot, upon which to base a conclusion—that the assault that men of genius yielded to or withstood, according to their particular natures, was the biological obligation of women to mate ascendingly, preferring, he insisted, a tenth share in a distinguished man to the whole of an average one. Knowing primitive women as I did, I thought that there might be something in this, but I also found an element less excusing in the assiduity of women of all degrees to come into what they themselves called “ inspirational” relations to men of exceptionally creative ability. I thought this disposition was due, in part, to the psychic indolence of women, perhaps the fruit of their long parasitism and their failure to produce creative gifts of their own, which they tried to compensate by the illusion of “ being an inspiration.” I say illusion because what I couldn’t help seeing was that what served was chiefly the accelerated vibration of an “ affair,” raising the poet’s plane until he volplaned off into creative achievement. So we argued and ana­ lyzed until Jack in his second marriage had accomplished what we, for all our sakes, determine to call an ideal mating, one in which no other woman than the mate is worth the turn of a hand to him, writing less and less well as the old tensions of unhappiness relaxed. But for the poet there was the inevitable spring of recurrent beguilement,

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the spirit’s impregnated flight carrying with it, as the queen bee trails the entrails of her mate, too often the pride and peace of the Muse’s under­ study. What I made of it, looking on, was a problem with which all our morals are incompetent to deal: for the incurable defect of most of our morals is that they are not geared to the obligation to produce and to keep on producing. Sometimes, recalling that the one possibility that never seemed to occur to either Jack or George of a naturally self-releasing psyche, beyond the reach of wine and women, it occurs to me that these were both, amorousness and alcohol, devices of the Great Experimentor to bridge the gap of evolution in His own unperfected experience. This being an entirely new idea to both of my friends, they regarded it hopefully. Sterling made, at the last, a kind of life philosophy of his dependence upon women for his fruitful contacts with that terrible and august lady whose names are Truth and Beauty and Poesy, but without ever realizing, I suspect, his chief incapacity, namely, his inability as a man to enter participatingly into the psychic life of women, not even that of the gracious and lovely woman who bore his name and whose pride and happiness were swept from under her in the backwash of one of his own outlived—and least profitable—adventures. It was the same pagan lack of perception of certain widely human aspects of reality that induced the manner of Sterling’s death. For death was to him the dark mother, in which life finds only the relief of oblivion. As there was no capacity in him to conceive the less personal plane of existence, so he failed of realizing the validity of experience unrelated to the pain-pleasure principle by which he lived. He knew nothing whatever of the plane of mystical, creative capacity, to which neither cup nor kiss could lift him. For periods of years, when I knew him, he was never without the means of death, of which he feared nothing but that he should come to fear it. He had a dread of living on until age or disability should rob him of the power to lay down his life of his own volition. He had at times a touch of morbid fear that he should sometime come to suffer pain, though, so far as I ever knew, he had no ailment but youth incurable. What I have said here was what it was agreed among us three that I should sometime say. Withal, he had this abiding virtue, that he lived so sincerely with himself and so vitally that even his failings were contributive and informing. It was not Sterling and Jack London only who established the literary tradition of Carmel. The house that Robert Louis Stevenson lived in at Old Monterey, and the walks he took, had not then been “ improved” out of existence, and there were still people who remembered another tall, stooping figure, with his black hair tossed backward and his long hands forever busy with a cigarette. Charles Warren Stoddard, bridging the Bret

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Harte period to our own, made his home in the old Spanish Capital, and Rollo Peters, the “ one other” of Whistler’s painters of nocturnes, had his studio on the hill overlooking the scimitar sweep of Monterey Bay. The year of the earthquake and fire brought us, for brief intervals, Will Irwin, Jesse Lynch Williams, Henry Milner Rideout, Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens and a score of lesser names. Harry Leon Wilson made his home there, first at Carmel and, after his marriage, five or six miles down the Sur Coast, and for a time Mike Williams, incomparable talker, Irish and fey, and destined, though none of us suspected it, to become the editor of the most intellectual Catholic weekly in America today. Laffler of the Argonaut came often, generous of appreciation and wistful of his own just-baffled creative gifts. Whether Fremont Older was ever actually a visitor or not, of which I am not certain, he was too well known among us, as we all vibrated more or less between Carmel and San Francisco, not to have contributed to the cheerful atmo­ sphere of literary affairs. Professor folk from the Universities of California and Leland Stanford made their summer homes in the village, and contributed a pleasant note of scholarship, though Vernon Kellogg was probably the only one who was ever completely accepted in the Sterling circle. Norah May French, whom George never ceased to regard as the most promising of women poets, died at his house, though not, as the penny-a-liners would have persuaded the public, by his fault—unless she took unawares the contagion of his suicidal trend. She died, literally, as Heaven knows how much of genius dies out of our unregarding society, because between frail health and poet sensitiveness she could not afford to live. But the penny-a-liners and the near-literary who flock wherever genuine talent is to be found, as though it were to be scooped up there like honey-dew from Heaven, would have sensation or nothing at all. Much that got into the press about affairs at Carmel had no more fidelity to fact than an item reported by a recent visitor there, in a guide book, to the effect that my house at Carmel had a cow’s tail for a bell-pull. The truth is that my bellpull was a strand of ancient Spanish hair rope, at the other end of which hung a bell which the rope had once supported around the neck of the bell-camel that came with the herd imported by Jefferson Davis for domestication in the American desert. The bell was of bronze, and bore an inscription in Arabic to keep off the evil eye. It had been given me by the m ajor domo of the man who had carried the news of the discovery of gold to Washington in ’49. This reduction of an article of authentic use and beauty to an absurdity is symbolic of the major misap­ prehension of Americans in general as to the inwardness of the artist life. There were a good many such, “ cows’ tails” hung upon the names that made of Carmel-by-the-Sea an unforgettable experience.

An Artists’ Colony in Stockholm August Strindberg , 1913

There was no doubt of its being spring in the little settlement, consisting of three cottages snugly nestling among elders and apple trees, and sheltered from the north wind by the pinewood on the other side of the high road. The visitor was regaled with a perfect little idyll. A cock, perched on the shafts of a water-cart, was basking in the sun and catching flies, the bees hung in a cloud round the bee-hives, the gardener was kneeling by the hot-beds, sorting radishes; the warblers and brand-tails were singing in the gooseberry bushes, while lightly clad children chased the fowls bent on examining the germinative capacity of various newly sown seeds. A brilliant blue sky spanned the scene and the dark forest framed the background. Two men were sitting close to the hot-beds, in the shelter of the fence. One of them, wearing a tall, black hat and a threadbare, black suit, had a long, narrow, pale face, and looked like a clergyman. With his stout but deformed body, drooping eyelids, and Mongolian moustache, the other one belonged to the type of civilized peasant. He was very badly dressed and might have been many things: a vagabond, an artisan, or an artist; he looked seedy, but seedy is an original way. The lean man, who obviously felt chilly, although he sat right in the sun, was reading to his friend from a book; the latter looked as though he had tried all the climates of the earth and was able to stand them all equally well. Turning back he strolled towards the hut on the right-hand side of the road, coming from town. The door leading into a large room—once a bakery—from an entrance-hall the size of a travelling trunk, stood open. The room contained a bed-sofa, a broken chair, an easel, and two men. One of them, wearing only a shirt and a pair of trousers kept up by a leather belt, was standing before the easel. He looked like a journeyman, but he was an artist making a sketch for an altar-piece. The other man was 505

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a youth with clear-cut features and, considering his environment, wellmade clothes. He had taken off his coat, turned back his shirt, and was serving as the artist’s model. His handsome, noble face showed traces of a night of dissipation, and every now and then he dozed, each time reprimanded by the master who seemed to have taken him under his protection. As Falk was entering the room he heard the burden of one of these reprimands. “ That you should make such a hog of yourself and spend the night drinking with that loafer Sellén, and now be standing here wasting your time instead of being at the Commercial School! The right shoulder a little higher, please; that’s better! Is it true that you’ve spent all the money for your rent and daren’t go home? Have you nothing left? Not one farthing?” “ I still have some, but it won’t go far.” The young man pulled a scrap of paper out of his trousers’ pocket, and straightening it out, produced two notes for a crown each. “ Give them to me, I’ll take care of them for you,” exclaimed the master seizing them with fatherly solicitude. Falk, who had vainly tried to attract their attention, thought it best to depart as quietly as he had come. Once more passing the manure heap and the two philosophers, he turned to the left. He had not gone far when he caught sight of a young man who had put up his easel at the edge of a little bog planted with alder trees, close to the wood. He had a graceful, slight, almost elegant figure, and a thin, dark face. He seemed to scintillate life as he stood before his easel, working at a fine picture. He had taken off his coat and hat and appeared to be in excellent health and spirits; alternately talking to himself and whistling or humming snatches of song. When Falk was near enough to have him in profile he turned round. “ Sellén! Good morning, old chap!” “ Falk! Fancy meeting you out here in the wood! What the deuce does it mean? Oughtn’t you to be at your office at this time of day?” “ No! But are you living out here?” “ Yes; I came here on the first of April with some pals. Found life in town too expensive—and, moreover, landlords are so particular.” A sly smile played about one of the corners of his mouth and his brown eyes flashed. “ I see,” Falk began again; “ then perhaps you know the two individuals who were sitting by the hot-beds just now, reading?” “ The philosophers? Of course, I do! The tall one is an assistant at the Public Sales Office at a salary of eighty crowns per annum, and the short one, Olle Montanus, ought to be at home at his sculpture—but since he and Ygberg have taken up philosophy, he has left off working and is fast going downhill. He has discovered that there is something sensual in a rt.”

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“ W hat’s he living on?” “ On nothing at all! Occasionally he sits to the practical Lundell and then he gets a piece of black pudding. This lasts him for about a day. In the winter Lundell lets him lie on his floor; ‘he helps to warm the room ,’ he says, and wood is very dear; it was very cold here in April.” “ How can he be a model? He looks such a God-help-me sort of chap.” “ He poses for one of the thieves in Lundell’s D escent from the C ross , the one whose bones are already broken; the poor devil’s suffering from hip disease; he does splendidly when he leans across the back of a chair; sometimes the artist makes him turn his back to him; then he represents the other thief.” “ But why doesn’t he work himself? Has he no talent?” “ Olle Montanus, my dear fellow, is a genius, but he won’t work. H e’s a philosopher and would have become a great man if he could have gone to college. It’s really extraordinary to listen to him and Ygberg talking philosophy; it’s true, Ygberg has read more, but in spite of that Montanus, with his subtle brain, succeeds in cornering him every now and again; then Ygberg goes away and reads some more, but he never lends the book to M ontanus.” “ I see! And you like Ygberg’s philosophy?” asked Falk. “ Oh! Its subtle, wonderfully subtle! You like Fichte, don’t you? I say! What a man!” “ Who were the two individuals in the cottage?” asked Falk, who did not like Fichte. “ Oh. You saw them too? One of them was the practical Lundell, a painter of figures, or rather, sacred subjects; the other one was my friend Rehnhjelm.” He pronounced the last few words with the utmost indifference, so as to heighten their effect as much as possible. “ Rehnhjelm?” “ Yes; a very nice fellow.” “ He was acting as Lundell’s model?” “ Was he? That’s like Lundell! He knows how to make use of people; he is extraordinarily practical. But come along, let’s worry him; it’s the only fun I have out here. Then, perhaps, you’ll hear Montanus speaking, and that’s really worth while.” Less for the sake of hearing Montanus speaking than for the sake of obtaining a glass of water, Falk followed Sellén, helping him to carry easel and paintbox. The scene in the cottage was slightly changed; the model was now sitting on the broken chair, and Montanus and Ygbert on the bed-sofa. Lundell was standing at his easel, smoking; his seedy friends watched him and his

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old, snoring cherry-wood pipe; the very presence of a pipe and tobacco raised their spirits. Falk was introduced and immediately Lundell monopolised him, asking him for his opinion of the picture he was painting. It was a Rubens, at least as far as the subject went, though anything but a Rubens in colour and drawing. Thereupon Lundell dilated on the hard times and difficulties of an artist, severely criticised the Academy, and censured the Government for neglecting native art. He was engaged in sketching an altar-piece, although he was convinced that it would be refused, for nobody could succeed without intrigues and connexions. And he scrutinised Falk’s clothes, wondering whether he might be a useful connexion. Falk’s appearance had produced a different effect on the two philoso­ phers. They scented a man of letters in him, and hated him because he might rob them of the reputation they enjoyed in the small circle. They exchanged significant glances, immediately understood by Sellén, who found it impossible to resist the temptation of showing off his friends in their glory, and, if possible, bring about an encounter. He soon found an apple of discord, aimed, threw, and hit. “ What do you say to Lundell’s picture, Ygberg?” Ygberg, not expecting to be called upon to speak so soon, had to consider his answer for a few seconds. Then he made his reply, raising his voice, while Olle rubbed his back to make him hold himself straight. “ A work of art may, in my opinion, be divided into two categories: subject and form. With regard to the subject in this work of art there is no denying that it is profound and universally human; the motive, properly speaking, is in itself fertile, and contains all the potentialities of artistic work. With regard to the form which of itself shall de fa cto manifest the idea, that is to say the absolute identity, the being, the ego—I cannot help saying that I find it less adequate.” Lundell was obviously flattered. Olle smiled his sunniest smile as if he were contemplating the heavenly hosts; the model was asleep and Sellén found that Ygberg had scored a complete success. All eyes were turned on Falk who was compelled to take up the gauntlet, for no one doubted that Ygberg’s criticism was a challenge. Falk was both amused and annoyed. He was searching the limbo of memory for philosophical air-guns, when he caught sight of Olle Mon tanus, whose convulsed face betrayed his desire to speak. Falk loaded his gun at random with Aristotle and fired. “ What do you mean by adequate? I cannot recollect that Aristotle made use of that word in his Metaphysics.” Absolute silence fell on the room; everybody felt that a fight between the artists’ colony and the University of Upsala was imminent. The interval

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was longer than was desirable, for Ygberg was unacquainted with Aristotle and would have died sooner than have admitted it. As he was not quick at repartee, he failed to discover the breach which Falk had left open; but Olle did, caught Aristotle with both hands, and flung him back at his opponent. “ Although I’m not a learned man, I venture to question whether you, Mr. Falk, have upset your opponent’s argument? In my opinion adequate may be used and accepted as a definition in a logical conclusion, in spite of Aristotle not having mentioned the word in his Metaphysics. Am I right, gentlemen? I don’t know, I ’m not a learned man and Mr. Falk has made a study of these things.” He had spoken with half-closed eyelids; now he closed them entirely and looked impudently shy. There was a general murmur of “ Olle is right.” Falk realised that this was a matter to be handled without mittens, if the honour of Upsala was to be safeguarded; he made a pass with the philosophical pack of cards and threw up an ace. “ Mr. Montanus has denied the antecedent or said simply: nego m a­ jorem ! Very well! I, on my part declare that he has been guilty of a posterius prius; when he found himself on the horns of a dilemma he went astray and made a syllogism after ferioque instead of barbara. He has forgotten the golden rule: Caesare cam estres festino baroco secundo; and therefore his conclusion became weakened. Am I right gentlemen?” “ Quite right, absolutely right,” replied everybody except the two philo­ sophers who had never held a book of logic in their hands. Ygberg looked as if he had bitten on a nail, and Olle grinned as if a handful of snuff had been thrown into his eyes; but his native shrewdness had discovered the tactical method of his opponent. He resolved not to stick to the point but to talk of something else. He brought out everything he had learned and everything he had heard, beginning with the Criticism of Fichte’s Philosophy to which Falk had been listening a little while ago from behind the fence. The discussion went on until the morning was nearly spent. In the meantime Lundell went on painting, his foul pipe snoring loudly. The model had fallen asleep on the broken chair, his head sinking deeper and deeper until, about noon, it hung between his knees; a mathematician could have calculated the time when it would reach the centre of the earth.

Aue’s Keller: The Bohemian Café of Buenos Aires Jorge R ivera , 1971

To a certain extent, Argentina’s turn-of-the-century writers led a public life. Their center of operations—still the Spanish custom now as then— was the café, or more specifically, the discussions which went on in the café. The café permits the exchange of ideas among participants holding often divergent ideological and aesthetic views—without too much fric­ tion. Rubén Dario’s center of operations was Aue’s Keller, a restaurant operated by a German named Haemmerling, located at Number 650 Piedad, between Maipú and Florida. Among the visitors to Dario’s table at Aue’s were Manolo Argerich, Carlos Becú, Julio Piquet, Bartolito Mitre, Ambrosetti, Correa Luna, Leopoldo Diaz, Escalada, Lugones, Rouquaud, Diaz Romero, Nirestein, the bohemians’ physician, Doctor Reibel, Payró, Ingenieros, Ghiraldo, Lamberti, Soussens—inventor of the famous phrase “ L et’s go get a chop at Aue’s” —Berisso, Fernández Espiro, Miró, etc. Aue’s was a microcosmic image of the intellectual life of Buenos Aires. There one could encounter aspiring modernists like Becú, romantics like Lamberti and Fernández Espiro, pillars of La Nación like Piquet, political activists like Payró and Ghiraldo, impenitent bohemians like Soussens. Hence this no man’s land of talent hailed by many as a landfall in the dull gray sea of fin-de-siècle Buenos Aires, was full of charm and wit in comparison to the Atheneum world of the traditionalist poets. The subject of these all-night discussions was predictable: The last gasps of romanti­ cism fanned by the first flames of modernism. The premises were an arbitrary mishmash of Renan, Nietzsche, Guyau, Schopenhauer, Kropot­ kin, along with the ideas of theosophy. Darío would say years later in his A utobiografia , that sobriety was not the principal virtue of the discussions at Aue’s. José Leon Pagano perceptively summed up the situation: “ Much has been said about these gatherings and their colorful irregularities. But 510

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neither the truth nor the fictions about them can deny them a beneficial reality. Those who took part in them certainly gained no small amount of knowledge, and many of them became familiar with the authors and the great representative works of European literature. The discussions and readings, bruited between glasses of cognac, converted Aue’s into a literary academy, and also perpetuated the erroneous notion of the great poet who improvises his sonnet inspired by the indispensible glass of alcohol. Thus we have the notion of Dar ío at one of the tables creating the verses of Responso and sketching out many of the ideas for Prosas profanas.

At these gatherings Darío would fascinate his circle of admirers with stories of his brief stay in Paris where his mentor was the Spaniard, Alejandro Sawa (presumably the inspiration for Valle-Inclan’s Luces de bohemia). Poets who had died young, like Juan Chassaing, Jorge Mitre and Matias Behety, as well as poets who were ill or otherwise unfortunate, like Gervasio Mendez or the venerable Ricardo Gutierrez, Dominguez, Andrade, Obligado and Guido, lived on in the minds of the bohemians, consecrated by the canons of romanticism. With brilliant wit, Dar ío would describe the innovative ideas of those eccentric poets and their world—of Samain, of Regnier, of Verlaine, the “ pauvre Lelian” (who actually had not treated him with much cordiality). He would conjure up visions of Montmartre under an ash-gray light, stories from Le Chat N oir , clippings from the Mercure de France and the Revue Blanche , anecdotes about Rachilde, Laurent Tailhade, Ghirland, Ghil and Laforgue, aesthetic im­ pressions of Mallarmé. For Dario’s fascinated fellow bohemians, it was a question of transposing “ Los Raros” for “ les Poètes Maudits,” and especially of discovering Verlaine in their own Dominguez. Although the traditionalist poets of the Atheneum were content to venerate the great archetypes of Western literature—the Don Juans, Fausts, and Hamlets, (reserving a modest place for national figures like Santos Vega)—the bohemians of Aue’s Keller envisioned a life of hedon­ istic pleasures, refined and decadent. Such was the life of Huysman’s Jean Des Esseintes, D’Annuncio’s Andrea Sperelli, and Wilde’s Dorian Gray, whose extravagances Dar ío would exalt daily. Some of the group, for example, Antonio Lamberti and Roberto Payró, listened to all this with skepticism: “ When Rubén Dar ío appeared to be such a know-it-all, he didn’t strike me as very agreeable,” said Lamberti. Certainly he seemed from the beginning to be an exceptionally talented man; but I didn’t like it that he spoke of the great men of our country with such disdain. However one day I saw him in Aue’s Keller, proffering his opinions to his circle of admirers. I recited to him a hostile verse with that animosity which the gaucho feels when he hears a country man from another region singing

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well. Dar ío responded with another verse, ironic but at the same time friendly. The crowd at Aue’s Keller—the literary salon of Buenos Aires— noisily celebrated our verses with embraces, libations and toasts. . . . ” Payró and Ceppi warned the acolytes against the temptations of imita tion, but without finding fault with the master: “ There are some who attribute to Dar ío the crazy infatuation with the literary notion of l’azur. But such attributions are excessive. It is as if he were imprisoned by the idea like a drunkard making a scandal in the public street.” Groussac declared D ar ío the “ herald of the pseudo-talented decadents.” But younger people, with Miró at their head, defended him passionately at the Atheneum, in the press, in literary reviews, and in the discussions in the cafés. The teachings of Darío went beyond merely postulation of a new aesthetic, or elitist pontificating, or the revelation of a refined and decadent style. During his stay in Buenos Aires, Dar ío the bohemian helped many young writers to realize that poetry is indeed a profession, and that disciplined work methods are a necessity. He insisted on the importance of style and the exigencies of study, and in general a more thoughtful and systematic attitude toward literature. For some, Dario’s influence, exemplified by his stirring lectures and appearances, was positive and creative. Thus it was for Carlos Bec ú and Lugones, and for the pleiade of young writers who were active around the turn of the century. Others were oppressed by the rhetoric, by the artificiality and extravagance, without adequately understanding the real contributions and innovations of the movement. Still, there was no lack of those who, seduced by the superficialities of decadent imagination, merely continued to emulate D es Esseintes. In December 1898 Dar ío left Buenos Aires, sent to Spain as a correspon­ dent for La Nación. Having arrived in Argentina with an entourage of diplomats—from whom the fluctuations of Columbian politics soon parted him—he departed as a correspondent of the Mitre family’s newspaper. Thus he ended five years of residence in Buenos Aires, returning only briefly in 1906 and 1912. Pagano maintains that Dar ío left Buenos Aires because the city was indifferent to him. “ An elite was certainly not lacking, and there were clear-minded men of discrimination. But they created neither a spiritual atmosphere, nor formed a cohesive nucleus characteristic of the great cultural centers which create the art of an age, and where each generation leaves its fervent testimonials.” The Dar ío who returned in 1906 would be the mature author of Cantos de vida y esperanza; the Dar ío of 1912 was already a taciturn and introspective man living with the presentiment of death. Far from Buenos Aires, a nostalgic Dar ío would recount those days in Aue’s in his Versos de Año Nuevo.

A Semester in Berlin, 1900 Stefan Zweig, 1943

Of course I had no intention of “ studying” in Berlin. As in Vienna, I went to the university only twice during the semester, once to enroll for the lectures, and the second time to secure a certificate of my supposed attendance. What I sought in Berlin was neither colleges nor professors, but a higher and more complete sort of freedom. In Vienna I still felt myself tied to my surroundings. The literary colleagues with whom I associated were nearly all from the same Jewish bourgeois class as myself; in the constricted city, where everyone knew about everyone else, I was always the son of a “ good” family, and I was tired of the so-called “ good” society. I even longed for a pronouncedly “ bad” society, an unforced, uncontrolled kind of existence. I had not even looked in the catalogue to see who was teaching philosophy at the university in Berlin; it sufficed for me to know that the “ new” literature was more active and impulsive there than at home, that one might meet Dehmel and the other poets of the younger generation there, that magazines, cabarets and theaters were constantly being started—that, in a word, “ something was doing.” As a matter of fact I came to Berlin at a very interesting historical moment. Since 1870, when Berlin had changed from the rather small, sober, and by no means rich capital of the Kingdom of Prussia into the seat of the German Emperor, the homely town on the Spree had taken a mighty upswing. But the leadership in artistic and cultural matters had not yet fallen to Berlin; Munich, with its painters and poets, was considered the real center of art, the Dresden Opera dominated the music field and the small capitals drew valuable elements to themselves. Vienna above all, with its century of tradition, its concentrated power, and its innate talent, was still predominant over Berlin. But of recent years, with the rapid economic rise in Berlin, a new page had turned. The large concerns and the wealthy families moved to Berlin, and new wealth, paired with a strong sense of daring, opened to the theater and to architecture greater oppor 513

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tunities than in any other large German city. The museums enriched themselves under the patronage of Emperor Wilhelm, the theater found an exemplary director in Otto Brahm, and just because there was no real tradition, no century-old culture, youth was tempted to try its hand. For tradition always means repression. Vienna, bound to the old and worship­ ing its own past, was cautious and non-committal with respect to young men and daring experiements. But in Berlin, which wished to form itself more rapidly and more personally, novelty was sought after. So it was natural that the young people of the entire Reich and even Austria thronged to Berlin, and results proved to the talented among them that they were right. The Viennese Max Reinhardt would have had to wait patiently for two decades to achieve the position in Vienna that he assumed in two years in Berlin. It was just at this period of its transition from a mere capital to a world city that I came to Berlin. Coming after the lush beauty of Vienna, inherited from great ancestors, the first impression was rather disappoint­ ing. The exodus to the West End, where the new architecture was soon to become manifest as against the pretentious houses of the Tiergarten quarter, had but just begun, and the architecturally tedious Friedrichstrasse and Leipzigerstrasse, with their clumsy ostentation, were still the center of the city. Suburbs such as Wilmersdorf, Nicolassee, and Steglitz were only accessible by a tiresome journey on the street cars, and it was almost an expedition in those days to reach the lakes of the Mark with their sharp beauty. Other than the old Unter den Linden there was no real center, no promenade like our Graben and, thanks to the old Prussian thrift, there was no suggestion of general elegance. Women went to the theater in unattractive home-made dresses, and everywhere one missed the light, deft, and lavish hand which in Vienna, as in Paris, could create an enchanting abundance out of very little. In every detail one felt the closefistedness of Frederician husbandry. The coffee was thin and bad because every bean was counted, the food was unimaginative, without strength or savor. Cleanliness and rigid and accurate order reigned every­ where instead of our musical rhythm of life. Nothing seemed more char­ acteristic to me than the contrast between my landladies in Vienna and in Berlin. The Viennese was a cheerful, chatty woman who did not keep things too clean, and easily forgot this or that, but was enthusiastically eager to be of service. The one in Berlin was correct and kept everything in perfect order; but in my first monthly account I found every service that she had given me down in neat, vertical writing: three pfennigs for sewing on a trouser button, twenty for removing an inkspot from the tabletop, until at the end, under a broad stroke of the pen, all of her troubles amounted to the neat little sum of 67 pfennigs. At first I laughed at this;

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but it was characteristic that after a very few days I too succumbed to this Prussian sense of orderliness and for the first, and last, time in my life I kept an accurate account of my expenses. My Viennese friends had given me a whole series of introductions, but I did not deliver a single one of them. After all, it was the real intent of my adventure to evade any assured and bourgeois atmosphere and, freed of this, to be entirely dependent upon myself. I wanted to meet people exclusively through my own literary efforts, and the most interesting people at that. I had not read La Boh ème for nothing, without wishing, at twenty, to live a similar life. It did not take me long to find such a wild and casually assorted crowd. While still in Vienna I had collaborated on the leading paper of the Berlin “ m oderns,” which not without irony was named Society and was run by Ludwig Jacobowski. This young poet, shortly before his early death, had founded a club which bore the alluring name of “ The Coming Ones” and which met once a week on the second floor of a café in Nollendorfplatz. In this huge circle, fashioned after the Parisian Closerie des L ilas , the most heterogeneous throngs gathered, poets and architects, snobs and journalists, young girls who styled themselves sculptresses or art experts, Russian students and snow-blond Scandinavians who wished to perfect themselves in the German language. Germany itself was represented by all its provinces; strong-limbed Westphalians, sober Bavarians, Silesian Jews: all these mixed in wild discussions with complete freedom. Occasionally poems or plays were read aloud, but the main thing for all was getting to know each other. In the midst of these young people who played the Bohemians sat an old gray-bearded man much like Santa Claus, respected and loved by all because he was a true poet and a true Bohemian: Peter Hille. With his blue dog-like eyes the septuagenarian looked gently and innocently around at this amazing crowd of children, always wrapped in his gray greatcoat which covered a very ragged suit and very dirty linen. Gladly he yielded to our entreaties, and brought forth crumpled manu­ scripts from his coat pockets and read his poems. They were uneven poems, actually the improvisations of a lyric genius, but too loose, too casually formed. He wrote them down in pencil in the streetcars or the cafés, forgot them then, and had great difficulty, while reading them out loud, in finding the words again in the stained and blurred scraps of paper. He never had any money, but it meant nothing to him. He would sleep here and there, as he was invited, and his forgetfulness of the world and absolute lack of ambition were touchingly genuine. We did not quite understand when and how this good man of the woods had happened into the large city of Berlin and what he sought there. He wanted nothing, he had no desire to be famous or celebrated and, thanks to his poetic

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dreaming, he was more footloose and carefree than any person I ever knew later on. The ambitious debated and out-shouted each other around him; he listened quietly, argued with none, sometimes lifted his glass with a friendly word toward one, but hardly ever entered into the conversation. We had the impression that throughout the wildest tumult within his disheveled and rather weary head verses and words were seeking each other, without ever touching or meeting. The genuine and childish quality that emanated from this naive poet— who in Germany today is almost forgotten—perhaps diverted my attention from the elected chairman of “ The Coming O nes,” and yet he was a man whose words and ideas were to be formative in the lives of many people. In Rudolf Steiner, whose disciples were later to build magnificent schools and academies for the propagation of the teachings of the founder of Anthroposophy, for the first time since Theodor Herzl I approached a man to whom destiny had given the mission of guiding millions of people. Personally he was not so much of a leader as Herzl had been, but he was more engaging. A hypnotic power lay in his dark eyes and I listened to him better and more critically when not looking at him, for his ascetic, thin face, carved by spiritual suffering, was well disposed to be convinc­ ing—and not only to women. At that time Rudolf Steiner had not yet formulated his theories, he was still seeking and learning. On occasion he recited for us commentaries on the color-theories of Goethe, whose portrait, as he drew it, became more Faustian, more Paracelsian. It was exciting to listen to him, for his education was stupendous and quite different from our own, which was confined to literature alone. I always returned home from his lectures, and from many good, private conversa­ tions, both enraptured and somewhat depressed. However, if I ask myself today whether I would have foretold for that young man his great philo­ sophical and ethical effect upon the masses, I must admit, to my shame, that I would not. I had expected great things from his questing intellect, and I would not have been in the least astonished to hear of some important biological discovery which his intuitive spirit had accomplished; but when many years later I saw the grandiose Goetheanum in Dornach, this “ school of wisdom,” which his pupils had founded as a platonic academy of anthroposophy, I was rather disappointed that his power had run to material and sometimes even into the commonplace. I do not claim any judgment of anthroposophy, for even today I am not quite clear as to what it seeks or means, and I believe that on the whole its seductive power is bound up not with an idea, but with the fascinating personality of Rudolf Steiner. Nevertheless, meeting a man of such magnetic personality at so early a stage, when he yielded himself to the younger people around him in friendship and without dogmatizing, was an incalculable gain for me. In

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his fantastic and at the same time profound knowledge I realized that true universality, which we, with the overweening pride of high school boys, thought we had already mastered, was not to be gained by flighty reading and discussion, but only by years of burning endeavor. But in that receptive period, when friendships are easily made and social or political differences have not yet hardened, a young man learns the most important things better from those who strive with him than from his superiors. And again I felt—but on a higher and more international plane than in the Gymnasium —how fruitful collective enthusiasm can be. Whereas most of my Viennese friends had come from the middle classes and nine-tenths of them from the Jewish bourgeoisie, which meant that we merely duplicated or multiplied our inclinations, the young people of this new world came from directly opposite classes, from above and from below, one a Prussian aristocrat, another the son of a Hamburg shipping man, the third from Westphalian peasant stock. Unawares, I found myself in a circle where actual poverty existed, with torn clothing and worn-out shoes, a sphere which I had never touched in Vienna. I sat at the same table with heavy drinkers, homosexuals, morphine addicts. I shook hands—quite proudly—with a fairly well-known swindler who had been in jail, and who because of his published memoirs had become one of us. All the seemingly impossible characters of realistic fiction pushed and thronged together in the small cafés and drinking places into which I was introduced, and the worse a man’s reputation was, the more eager my interest to meet its bearer. This particular love or curiosity for men who live dangerously has accompanied me throughout my entire life; even in the years when it would have been fitting to be more selective, my friends berated me for associating with such immoral, undependable and compro­ mising persons. Perhaps it was just the substantial sphere from which I came, and my feeling that I too was burdened to a certain degree with a complex of “ security,” that caused me to be fascinated by those who were wasteful and almost disdainful of their lives, their time, their money, their health, and their good name, these passionate individuals whose only mania was mere existence without a goal; and perhaps you may notice in my novels and short stories my predilection for all intense and unruly natures. To this was added the attraction of the exotic, the foreign; nearly every one of them contributed to my eager curiosity from a strange world. In the artist E. M. Lilien, the son of a poor orthodox Jewish wood turner from Drohobycz, I encountered for the first time an Eastern Jew, and a Judism which in its strength and stubborn fanaticism had hitherto been unknown to me. A young Russian translated the most beautiful portions of The Brothers K aram azov , then unknown in Germany. A young Swedish girl showed me my first pictures by Munch. I frequented the studios of

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painters (although poor ones) to observe their methods. One of the faithful led me to a spiritualist séance—in a thousand forms and aspects I experi­ enced life, and could not get enough. The intensity which had spent itself in the Gymnasium in mere forms, in rhymes and verses and words, now hurled itself against men; in Berlin I was constantly with new and with different people, enraptured, disappointed, and even swindled by them. I believe that I never enjoyed so much intellectual companionship in ten years as I did in that one short semester in Berlin, my first in complete freedom.

Patroness of Rebellion: Mabel Dodge’s “Evenings” Allen Churchill, 1959

Edwin Dodge had flowed out of her life when so much else flowed in, leaving her free on weekday afternoons to be at home to assorted guests, among them always [Carl] Van Vechten and Hutchins Hapgood, her two most faithful friends. But one afternoon Lincoln Steffens appeared and, astonishingly, no one else. The brisk, steel-like little man with bangs enjoyed a cup of tea before the glowing fire in the white marble fireplace. Then, taking advantage of his rare good fortune in finding his hostess alone, he began to study her through his rimless spectacles. “ You have a certain faculty,” he said. “ It’s a centralizing, magnetic, social faculty. You attract, stimulate, and soothe people, and men like to sit with you and talk to themselves! You make them think more fluently, and they feel enhanced. . . . Now why don’t you see what you can do with this gift of yours? Why not organize all this accidental, unplanned activity around you, this coming and going of visitors, and see these people at certain hours. Have Evenings!” Lady Mabel could scarcely credit her senses. No less than Hutchins Hapgood, Steffens was known to be the entrenched enemy of anything planned, organized, or conventional. She mentioned this to Steffens, who blithely waved her words away. Oh, I don’t mean that you should organize the E v e n i n g s ,”he stated. “ I mean, get people here at certain times and let them feel absolutely free to be themselves, and see what happens. Let everybody come! All these different kinds of people that you know, together here, without being managed or herded in any way. Why some thing wonderful might come of it! You might revive General Conversa tion!” So were born the famed Mabel Dodge Evenings which operated enor­ mously to project the fame of Greenwich Village beyond its borders. For where the Liberal Club on MacDougal Street afforded a means for the 519

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various Village groups to coalesce, the Mabel Dodge Evenings (usually held on Wednesdays, but sometimes on Mondays or Thursdays) brought the Village a national reputation as a place of intellectual ferment. In those simple days artists and aesthetes made news and—difficult as it may be to believe in the Space Age—Mrs. Dodge’s salon for Bohemians and intellec­ tuals proceeded to achieve a contemporary fame only slightly less than that of the explosive Armory Show. The idea of writers, intellectuals, artists, eccentrics, philosophers, Suffrages, Single Taxers, politicians, birth controllers, newspapermen, editors, Socialists, and anarchists meet­ ing one night a week in an elegantly furnished Fifth Avenue apartm ent, to engage in what the average citizen considered seditious talk, set fire to the curiosity in na ïve American minds. At the Mabel Dodge Evenings young Harvard Socialists like Walter Lippmann argued with Bohemian Socialists like Max Eastman. There were successful journalists like Steffens and unsuccessful ones like Hutchins Hapgood. Effete critics like Van Vechten contrasted with renegade critics like the American-born Englishman Frank Harris, who had a rotund voice, unctuous manner, and lampblack glinting in his hair. At newcomers to the Evenings, Harris bellowed, “ I am Frank Harris, the son of man!”—then as if forces deriving from a strict upbringing rose in his throat to choke him, he added— “ and the son of God!” Soubrettes from Broadway musical shows, brought by Carl Van Vechten, glared disapprovingly at alert, bobbed-haired Village girls, many of them young high school or grade school teachers in the Henrietta Rodman manner. Mothers-of-four like Neith Boyce met birth control advocates like Margaret Sanger. Free love partisans like Henrietta Rodman were bested by disciples of ever freer love like an attractive girl remembered only as Babs who, after a lecture on the evils of prostitution, had proceeded to fight the evil by giving herself without charge to any man who asked. Hobo poets like unkempt Harry Kemp joined Harvard poets like the pale, intense Alan Seeger, who before his death in the first World War would write I Have a Rendezvous with D eath , to blend into such scenes as: Kemp thunders anarchism, and is wrecked On a sharp flint from Lippmann’s intellect— Who Socialism in turn expounds . . . Seeger and Kemp each twangs his lyric lute And Poetry disdainfully dispute.

For her Evenings, Mrs. Dodge affected long white dresses and wrapped herself in such materials as emerald chiffon. She filled her white drawing room with fragrant white lilies, salmon snapdragons, and blue larkspur.

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Extra life was brought to the walls by paintings by Marsden Hartley and Arthur B. Davies, for though Lady Mabel had done much to promote French Moderns, she still preferred American Moderns for herself. Ever the one to let It decide, she made no effort to introduce her motley guests, or to see that they mingled or had a good time. At her Evenings she seemed as removed from what was going on as she had been from the battles of her father and mother in Buffalo. “ I had a little formula for getting myself through the hours without any injury to my shy and suspicious sensibilities,” she would say. “ As people flowed in, I stood apart, aloof and withdrawn . . . ” This, though, was deceptive. In some magical way, Mabel Dodge con­ trived to manage her Evenings without appearing to. With more than one hundred people packed into her white drawing room, she alone largely performed the exceptional feat of keeping the talk more or less on one subject. In part, she did this by matching her Evenings with developments in the news, picking as subjects the things people would be discussing anyway. Even this required great skill, so that no one was conscious of being directed—or flowed into, as she herself would say. Yet Mrs. Dodge did it. Max Eastman has recalled how guests first dismissed the hostess as merely a woman of wealth. But shortly these same guests felt pulled back to her. There was always something going on inside Mrs. Dodge, Eastman decided: “ Something that creates a magnetic field in which people become polarized and pulled in and made to behave very queerly. Their passions become exacerbated; they grow argumentative; they have quarrels, diffi­ culties, entanglements, abrupt and violent detachm ents.” Perhaps the secret of Mrs. Dodge’s strange power lay in the fact that she was having the most wonderful of times. Beneath her inscrutable surface she congratulated herself on becoming a myth in her own lifetime, adding correctly that this was no mean achievement. Into her life had come much of what she, with her individual vocabulary, had begun to call boom! “ Don’t let’s miss the boom!" she would cry before the excitements of an Evening began, and such was her skill as a hostess that she missed not the mildest boom occurring in her drawing room. Mrs. Dodge viewed her Evenings as “ One stream where many currents mingle together for a little while.” Again she wrote: “ The new spirit was abroad and swept us all together.” But, as always, she saw things in a somewhat personal light. “ They are of a kind of propaganda for free speech,” she told one of the many reporters who flocked to interview her about the Evenings, “ with my own views about free and speech. I want to try and loosen up thought by means of speech, to get at the truth at the bottom of people and let it out, so that there will be more understanding. Understanding! That’s the one thing men go on trying for all through the

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changes of the world, quarrying it out of one material or another as time passes. . . . ” Toward this end, conversation at the Evenings roared and swirled like an angry ocean. Listening to it one night, Hutchins Hapgood was reminded that William James had said to him at Harvard, “ I cannot understand this mad, unbridled lust for the Absolute.” To Hapgood it seemed that every­ one present would lust for it until he died—and with all due respect to Mrs. Dodge’s charged personality and ambitious aims it must be conceded that much of the success of her Evenings came from this fact. Up to 1913 such topics as Sex, Psychoanalysis, Birth Control, and even Trade Union­ ism were considered shocking and undiscussable. Psychoanalysis was new and terrifying. Sex was unspeakably taboo. Birth Control was against nature and indecent. To show sympathy for the underprivileged or for striking workers branded a person an outright Anarchist. So perhaps the most notable feature of the Mabel Dodge Evenings became the fact that such forbidden Absolutes were loudly and aggressively discussed by a colorful group of intelligent, emancipated souls. Those present at Mabel Dodge Evenings jubilantly brought into the open a wide range of forbidden subjects and their feelings as they did this are hard to imagine today. As in later years jet pilots would break through the sound barrier, so participants in the Evenings had the miraculous feeling that they were bursting through the conversation—and even the morals—barrier.

Passing Through L.A. Lionel Rolfe, 1981

After the 1906 earthquake, the Bohemian community was forced to abandon San Francisco. Some moved to Carmel, which became the nucleus of a flourishing literary scene that included such giants of Ameri­ can literature as Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, Robinson Jeffers, and—only a little less directly—John Steinbeck, and finally, the King of the Beats, Jack Kerouac. At the same time, the emerging city of the south—Los Angeles—was becoming a part of the circuit of the wandering Bohemians. The Carmel colony was founded shortly before the 1906 earthquake by George Sterling and Mary Austin, minor writers but not minor characters. Sterling was a close friend and champion of a great many important writers. Mary Austin authored some thirty-five books in her lifetime, and was often compared with her friend (and my godmother) Willa Cather. Sinclair Lewis’s female protagonist in Main Street had her origins in Austin’s A Woman o f Genius , and Theodore Dreiser’s The Genius also owed a debt to the Austin volume. In her day she was regarded as an intellectual heavyweight. Before going to Carmel she had been part of the literary circle around Charles F. Lummis, who was, among other things, Los Angeles City Librarian. (He was also a great entertainer of artists and intellectuals from all over the world. His adobe house—on the Arroyo between Pasadena and Los Angeles—is a state monument today.) The only book of Mary Austin’s which you’ll find in most libraries now is The Land o f Little R ain , written about the mountains and deserts that form the northern boundaries of the Los Angeles basin. Austin left the region in 1903 and avoided returning to Los Angeles. She had developed a strong distaste for L.A., in part because of the way in which the City of the Angels stole the water from the Owens River Valley on the east side of the Sierra Nevada, where she had lived for some years. In the Victorian age, the Bohemians were the apostles of hedonism of 523

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all kinds, known for their unconventional behavior in matters of sex, inebriation, and general good times. An underlying aspect of the Bohemi­ ans, however, was their social conscience. Even the very conservative Ambrose Bierce, who rejected the Carmel colony as a “ bunch of anar­ chists,” was a marvelous social critic, and his outrageous cynicism was put to this use in such works as The D e v il ’s Dictionary. The Bohemians were not always the soul of consistency—neither was their godfather Mark Twain, for that matter. Some were revolutionary socialists; others were unreconstructed reactionaires. Most, however, were irreligious and disreputable, at least in the eyes of their contemporary society. A surprising number seem to have died as a result of suicide. Yet a few were mystics and puritans, and many were concerned with nature and made it the motif of much of their work. An important writer in George Sterling’s charmed circle was Theodore Dreiser. When Dreiser came to Los Angeles for a three-year stay in 1919, he had not yet written his most famous and successful work, An American Tragedy. Dreiser was living with his cousin and companion of many years, Helen Richardson, whom he didn’t make Mrs. Dreiser until the end of his life. About midway through their L.A. stay, Dreiser and Richardson went north to meet Sterling. Being like-minded rebels and pessimists, Sterling and Dreiser quickly took to each other. Sterling also took to Helen, whom he amused by taking off his clothes and swimming into a lake to retrieve some dripping water lilies. Born in 1871 in Terre Haute, Indiana, Dreiser was as well known for being the brother of songwriter and Tin Pan Alley mogul Paul Dreiser—for whom he wrote the lyrics to the song, “ On the Banks of the Wabash” —as for his novel, Sister Carrie. Sister Carrie had been a controversial book when it was published in 1900, and hadn’t done well. Dreiser was an extreme mechanist who thought that everything was determined by biol­ ogy and environment. He wrote in a hard, cheaply journalistic style at times, for he had made his daily living as a newspaper and magazine writer. In recent years Dreiser has fallen out of favor with American critics and readers, but the scope of his storytelling and his unremitting realism gave him a place in America’s literary pantheon which no one can take away. Nonetheless, his life was often messy. When Dreiser left Gotham to come to L.A. in 1919, he was doing so to avoid his wife (from whom he was separated) as well as publishers anxious to know how his writing—for which they had advanced him money and then seen very little—was going. Dreiser wouldn’t even give his close friend H. L. Mencken anything more than a post office box in Los Angeles. At first he and Helen lived in a rented part of a private home on Alvarado Street. After that, according to

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W. A. Swanberg’s biography, D reiser, the couple moved often. They lived in a bungalow on Sunset Boulevard and a cottage in Glendale. Helen, an actress, was speculating in real estate, like almost everyone else. Mencken despaired of ever seeing his friend again. He wrote, “ Dreiser is in Los Angeles. What he is doing there I don’t know. I have heard that he is being kept by some rich wench.” In fact, Helen was not doing all that badly. She had a couple of supporting acting roles, including one in Rudolph Valentino’s first flick, The Four Horsemen o f the Apocalypse. Dreiser seemed bored and resent­ ful of her success. He called L.A. “ the city of the folded hands.” He was flagrantly unfaithful to Helen. After three years in L.A. Dreiser was convinced that the city was no place for an artist. He had, however, put aside The Bulwark and tentatively begun An American Tragedy, his big book. When he returned to New York, with Helen abandoning her career to follow him, he finished An American Tragedy, but then had a long fallow period. By 1935 he wanted to go back to L.A. again. He had a close friend, George Douglas, who worked on the Los Angeles Examiner. He moved in with Douglas, and Helen rented a room nearby. After a while, Dreiser and Helen rented an apartment on Rosewood and moved in together again. They didn’t stay there long, however: they returned to New York. Dreiser wanted to go back to Los Angeles the following year, but Douglas had died. It wasn’t until 1939 that Dreiser and Helen got back together and moved permanently to L.A., taking an apartment at 253-A West Loraine Street in Glendale. The second time Dreiser made Los Angeles his home it did not help him out of his fallow period. He continued working on The Bulwark and The Stoic, books that dated way back in his career. But the going was rough, and both books were only published after Dreiser’s death here in 1945. Los Angeles had helped him out of a bind once before, but Dreiser and Helen were not living well at the beginning of the second L.A. years. For a while they had an apartment at 1426 North Hayworth, just off Sunset Boulevard. Dreiser was so ashamed of the place that when his old friend Sherwood Anderson came to town, Dreiser didn’t bring him back to the apartment. He took Anderson out to eat in a restaurant near the Figueroa Hotel. Later, things improved a bit; the couple moved to a place they had purchased at 1015 N. Kings Road, near Santa Monica Boulevard, and they added a new couple to their social life—Charles and Oona Chaplin, who also were good friends of Upton and Mary Sinclair. Dreiser, however, suffered from deep intellectual confusions. One day he drove out to Torrance to consult a fortuneteller. Another evening he and Helen went to a seance in Pasadena at the home of the Sinclairs. The

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political conflicts of the day inflamed him: he was as bothered by corrup­ tion in City Hall as he was by the bad news from the Spanish Civil War. On the one hand he became a member of the Communist Party; at the same time like such other mystics as Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, he was serious about yoga and contemplated a trip to India. He was no longer able to produce a single, powerful vision of things. Perhaps this was because he wasn’t a twentieth-century writer so much as he was a writer who bridged the two centuries. And perhaps it was because he was such a Bohemian. Usually when people talk about Bohemian writers in Los Angeles, they think of the Garden of Allah, where F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley, and Dorothy Parker drank and partied and lived through some of the Depression years while earning fabulous salaries from the nearby Holly­ wood dream factories. Writers like Somerset Maugham, Dashiell Ham mett, and S. J. Perelman were frequent visitors to the Garden of Allah. Hemingway met Gary Cooper there, and they became great friends. Had he been around in those days, Mark Twain could easily have been the king of the roost there, for Hollywood was attracting people from all over with its own kind of gold rush: a celluloid rush. But Twain, of course, was dead by then, and the Garden of Allah is no longer to be seen, except as a model display on the grounds of the savings and loan that displaced the famed residence-hotel at the corners of Sunset and Laurel Canyon boulevards. Twain would probably have been uncomfortable at the Garden of Allah anyway, since it was primarily a hangout for Eastern writers who regarded the natives as baboons and yahoos. This Eastern chauvinism would not have been Twain’s cup of tea at all, although oddly enough the worst of the Eastern chauvinists was the most Bohemian of the writers there, Dorothy Parker. Parker, in fact, was the most Twain-like of the group. She was a great wit, the star of the famed Algonquin Hotel group from the ’20s in New York City. In retrospect, it appears that her greatness as a writer was underestimated because of her wit, and this also happened to Twain. Parker left no novels; her output was comprised mainly of literary essays, short stories, and very quotable and funny poetry. Yet those short works, which have been reissued by Viking Press as The Portable D orothy Parker , show that her writing compared favorably with Hemingway’s. Despite this, it seems as if her reputation will forever record her a originator of the line, “ Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.” At her husband’s funeral, when an acquaintance asked her if she needed anything, she snapped, “ Yes. You can get me another husband.” The acquaintance was shocked, and asked Dorothy Parker if she really had meant that. Parker’s reply: “ Then get me a ham sandwich and hold the m ustard.” Her wit was as quick against her friends as it was against her enemies.

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She lived much of her life in a New York Bohemian milieu, and many of her friends were undoubtedly “ authors and actors and artists and such.” Yet in her poem “ Bohemia” she wails that “ People Who Do Things exceed my endurance; God, for a man that solicits insurance.” To Dorothy Parker, Hollywood was a zoo in which she happened to have lived for nearly two full decades, off and on. She regarded her bosses in the studios as cretins, which they probably were, so she had funny things to say about Hollywood. And very true things. But the Garden of Allah was more interesting than important in Los Angeles’s literary tradition. In 1976 Tom Dardis wrote Some Time In the Sun, which put forth the revisionist theory that ultimately Hollywood didn’t do so badly by people like Fitzgerald, Faulkner, West, and Huxley. He also noted that these and other writers made their contribution to Hollywood in such classic films as The Big Sleep, Jane Eyre, The African Queen, To Have and H ave N ot and Pride and Prejudice.

Dardis argued that Hollywood aided these men financially and crea­ tively. His argument about Fitzgerald is worth considering. Fitzgerald’s last years in Hollywood were not as bad as they have been portrayed, Dardis maintains. Fitzgerald’s reputation and creative powers had plum­ meted by the middle of the Depression and it was only after he had come to Hollywood that he finally found “ something new to write about.” The L ast Tycoon was his California book, and his publishers were every bit as excited by it as they had been during his glorious days in the ’20s. Dardis does not deny that Fitzgerald was drinking, but even that has been exaggerated, he argues. Dardis says that the “ ultimate source for all these ‘ruined, shattered man’ descriptions” of Fitzgerald was Budd Schulberg, of What Makes Sammy Run? fame. Schulberg had worked with Fitzgerald on movie jobs, and had drunk with him; Fitzgerald had also recommended Schulberg’s book to Random House. But Fitzgerald did not think that Schulberg w as talented, and Dardis suggest the latter might thus have had some motiva­ tion to paint Fitzgerald as a failure. To my mind, Dardis is a little less convincing in the case of William Faulkner. Over a period of time Faulkner spent more than four years in Hollywood. His best known effort on a script was The Big Sleep, and his main influence here seemed to be the addition of a Southern feeling to a Southern California setting. Considering that a good part of L .A .’s popu­ lation emigrated from the South, he might have been onto something. Faulkner, however, did not take his writing duties in Hollywood as seriously as did Fitzgerald, for example. He wasn’t paid as well, either. He couldn’t afford to stay at the Garden of Allah, so the great Faulkner

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lived in shabby hotels and took long, solitary walks on downtown L .A .’s grubby streets. And he drank like crazy, for he wanted to go home to Oxford, Mississippi. Dardis argues, however, that ultimately the Holly­ wood money enabled Faulkner to write his great books, and that the Hollywood influence is to be seen in some of them. Then there was the case of Evelyn Waugh, who spent a short while in Los Angeles and went back to England to write The L oved One. Dardis didn’t write about him, but we will here. Waugh was a rather typical English gentleman who took his Church of England background so seri­ ously that he later converted to Catholicism. On his short visit to the City of the Angels, what he was most taken with was the L.A. way of death, at least as it was represented by Forest Lawn. As one Waugh biographer put it, The L oved One was a satire on “ the decline of religious belief and practice in the twentieth century, as evidenced in the California burial customs Waugh had observed while in Hollywood.” Waugh was also writing about the English-in-exile in Hollywood. To my mind The L oved One is a rather good book, but falls short of being a major contribution to literary Los Angeles. It’s been suggested that Aldous Huxley did a better job on the themes of death and California in his A fter Many A Summer D ies The Swan.

It was not the muse of the movies that drew John Steinbeck to Southern California at the nadir of the Great Depression. Steinbeck was not yet a successful writer when he moved to the L.A. area at the beginning of 1930. But not too many years later, he would don the mantle of the great California writer with such books as Tortilla F lat , Grapes o f Wrath , and Cannery Row. Steinbeck grew up in the Carmel-Salinas area, which became known as “ Steinbeck country.” Yet at a point in his life, perhaps when he was still looking for the muse, he moved south. His novel Cannery Row is about Monterey, but there is a chapter in it about Tom and Mary Talbot, a writer and his wife, which was actually based on two periods of Steinbeck’s life when he had moved away from the Northern California coastal region in which he grew up. In Cannery Row Mary is always trying to keep Tom’s spirits up when the rent is overdue and the electricity is about to be turned off and there is no money in sight. M ary’s gaiety is infectious and usually keeps her husband from getting despondent. “ We’re going under,” Talbot says. “ No, we’re not,” she replies. “ We’re magic people. We always have been. Remember that ten dollars you found in a book—remember when your cousin sent you five dollars? Nothing can happen to u s.” Talbot was, of course, Steinbeck, and Mary was Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol. They were married in Los Angeles in 1930. Steinbeck described their “ shack” at 2741 El Roble Drive in Eagle Rock as a “ cheap place to

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live.” They paid fifteen dollars per month for the place, which had, among other things, a thirty-foot living room with a giant stone fireplace, and a sleeping porch. Steinbeck enjoyed having people come and visit him, and he wrote to his friends from out of town suggesting that they come and “ sit in front of a fire and talk, or lie on the beach and talk, or walk in the hills and talk.” Later he would write in a letter to a friend: “ Remember the days when we were living in Eagle Rock? As starved and happy a group as ever robbed an orange tree. I can still remember the dinners of hamburgers and stolen avocados.” According to Mike Spencer, who worked as a publicist for the Lung Association, Steinbeck was doing clerical work at the Association to keep alive. He was broke and not yet famous, still working on his second book, To a G od Unknown , which didn’t do well when it was finally published. Steinbeck’s stay in L.A. began in January of 1930 when there was lots of rain and cold, which made the fireplace an object of worship. But by August, not only was the light company about to turn off the juice, but Steinbeck was also complaining that it was “ pretty hot down here now and my mind seems more sluggish than it usually is.” The crowning blow came when the landlord, admiring all the fixing-up the Steinbecks had done on the house, evicted them so he could give it as a wedding present to his daughter. At this point, all the Steinbecks could think to do was get in their car and drive as far as their gas would get them. They ended up going back to Salinas, where Steinbeck’s father and mother lived. His father gave the couple a small living allowance and a house in nearby Pacific Grove. Three years later, Steinbeck had apparently forgotten the August and September heat of the Southland. He and Carol moved back to another outlying L.A. community—this time they lived at 2527 Hermosa Avenue in Montrose. By then Steinbeck was working on the final drafts of To a G od Unknown. Again the time came when the rent was due and the utilities were about to be turned off. At this point, however, Steinbeck’s mother became very ill, so the couple went up north for the final time. Steinbeck would later write magnificently of the poverty of the Dust Bowl Okies in Grapes o f Wrath, but his own bottom-of-the-Depression stories occurred in Los Angeles. Hollywood—the movie industry, that is, not the town—played only a minor part in drawing Henry Miller to Los Angeles. Miller, of course, spent the first and most productive part of his writing career as an expatriate from Brooklyn living in Paris during the Depression. On the eve of World War II he came back to his own country and his place in it, a process described in his book The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, which was about an automobile trip across the country. The book expressed Miller’s

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rather dismal view of American culture, but it also indicated his belief that California was the only place where he saw any hope. Critics do not now regard The Air-Conditioned Nightm are as one of Miller’s great books, but in Los Angeles of the 1950s and ’60s it was one of the treasured books of the young disenchanted intellectuals. Miller’s philosophy was a curious combination of apolitical anarchism and resolute devotion to joy and happiness. His zest for life was expressed in his style, no matter how negative his intellectual perceptions of things. Miller arrived in Hollywood in 1941 and began his early drafts of the book during his stay at the Gilbert Hotel, a seedy fleabag that is still there. He wasn’t happy during his Hollywood stay, and he ended up going back to New York to finish the manuscript. But it wasn’t long before he left New York forever to return to California. Here he discovered Steinbeck’s biologist friend in Northern California, Ed Ricketts. In Southern California he had such friends as the famous British author Aldous Huxley and the no-so-famous artists Margaret and Gilbert Nieman, who lived in a rundown place on Bunker Hill. Miller liked visiting the Niemans, from whose porch he swore downtown L.A. looked like Paris—at least at night. Miller also used to hang out with the artist Man Ray in an apartment house across the street from the Hollywood Ranch Market on Vine Street. When Miller returned to California for good, he lived for a while in L .A .’s Beverly Glen Canyon. Then he moved up to Big Sur, where he lived for some years. In the early ’60s he returned to the Southland, purchased a house in Pacific Palisades, and spent the last two decades of his life there, writing books that were mostly published by Capra Press, a small press in Santa Barbara. Although Miller lived in L.A. a long time, it must be admitted that much of his important work was done in the first part of his life. The AirConditioned N ightm are represented a bridge, and in the chronicle of his drive westward we are getting more than a simple travelogue. The most interesting person he met in those travels was an old desert rat from the Barstow area. The desert rat talked a lot about automobiles, which he said were not only senseless killers, but had changed the country—in some ways for the better, but mostly for the worse. The desert rat talked about living in the desert with the stars and the rocks, “ wonder ing about creation and that sort of thing.” He uttered words that Miller obviously regarded as prophetic in 1941. “ I figure,” he said, “ that when we get too close to the secret, nature has a way of getting rid of u s.” Miller anticipated a lot of ’60s consciousness when he wrote about the Indians of the desert, whose life he contrasted favorably with the mundane, commer­ cial, trivial, and brutal culture of white America. In Barstow it was too hot to go on right away. Miller discovered,

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however, that he couldn’t just linger in a restaurant without ordering food or beverage, which had been his habit in Paris. So, realizing that it was M other’s Day, he went to the railway station to send his mother a telegram. That completed, he sat under a tree at the railway station and suddenly fell into a reverie, for this was the same old railway station that he had seen in 1913 when he made his brief visit to the Southland. That was the time he ended up in Chula Vista, “ burning brush all day in a broiling sun,” and in San Diego hearing a speech by Emma Goldman. It was a speech that changed his life, he said. He also spent time during his 1913 visit looking for a job as a cowboy on a cattle ranch in the San Pedro area. By the time he got to Burbank, these memories of Southern California not long after the turn of the century had been doused. “ I tried to summon a feeling of devotion in memory of Luther Burbank, but the traffic was too thick, and there was no parking space. Perhaps they had named it after another Burbank, the king of soda water or popcorn or laminated valves.” (Actually, Burbank was named after a dentist who was one of the city’s founding fathers.) The first night in Hollywood, Miller ended up at a millionaire’s party. He didn’t like the assortment of businessmen, aged strike-breakers, foot­ ball players, and flag wavers he met there. One drunken, garrulous lout especially annoyed him. The lout asked Miller how he liked California. So Miller went on and on explaining that this wasn’t his first visit to the Golden State. He said that he’d been here once before, doing a stretch at San Quentin for attempted murder. He explained that he hadn’t known the revolver was loaded when he took a potshot at his sister and luckily missed her. He complained that the judge hadn’t understood the circumstances of the shooting and had sentenced him to prison. As Miller’s story got more and more bizarre, the lout got more and more uncomfortable, and finally disappeared. Not much later, Miller was walking north on Cahuenga Boulevard toward the hills, “ looking up at the stars when a car came up behind me and ran into a lamppost. Everyone was killed. I walked on ‘irregardless,’ as they say.” Interesting to ponder is the encounter between L.A. and Jack Kerouac, who was the very soul of the restless wanderer in the 1950s. Kerouac was known as the King of the Beats, although it was not a title he had sought out and, in fact, he tried to reject it. Restlessness was a hallmark of such California writers as Jack London, Mark Twain, and Robinson Jeffers. But usually they came to terms with their wanderlust and found a piece of the planet with which to identify at the end. Kerouac never did. He was the eternal wanderer. The most clear-cut influence on Kerouac was California’s own Jack London, who wrote a book of hoboing experiences called The Road. The

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book that made Kerouac famous was On the R oad , published in 1951. In Lonesom e Traveler , which appeared in 1961, Kerouac was still writing about wandering. Oddly enough, Lonesom e Traveler begins with a descrip­ tion of Kerouac coming into Los Angeles on a freight train in 1951, and On the R oad begins with Kerouac riding a freight train away from Los Angeles. In both cases he was riding the “ Zipper”—the fast Southern Pacific night freight—but one was southbound and the other northbound. Although he was cold, riding as a hobo in an open car, Kerouac felt a tremendous sense of aliveness and even health as the Zipper flew past Santa Barbara, past Surf, and onward to Guadalupe and Oceano in On the R oad. In Lonesom e Traveler , Kerouac was riding in the Zipper’s heated caboose, legally, because he had worked as a brakeman in the Southern Pacific’s Texas division; but he was suffering from a virus. As he headed toward L.A. he was so miserable that he was unable to “ appreciate a good ride” as the train “ flashed past the snowy breaking surf caps at Surf and Tangair and Gaviota on the division that runs the moony rail between San Luis Obispo and Santa B arbara.” When Kerouac arrived in downtown Los Angeles in Lonesom e Traveler , he checked himself into a hotel on Main Street and treated himself nicely by taking “ bourbon lemon juice and Anacin” for twenty-four hours and looking out the window at the “ hot sunny streets of L.A. Christm as.” After a while he bestirred himself and checked out the pool halls and shoeshine places on Skid Row, just to kill time. He was due to go down to the L.A. harbor at San Pedro, to meet his friend Deni, who was due in on the S.S. Roam er. (It is probably not coincidence that London owned a boat called The Roam er.) Deni had promised Kerouac he could get him a job on the S.S. R oam er , and on the strength of that, Kerouac had come across the country to Los Angeles for this evening. It was Christmas night, 1951, in San Pedro. The Roam er came in and Deni got off. Deni first wanted to go up to Hollywood and see the stars and have some fun. “ After a fast hike of about twenty minutes along those dreary refineries and waterskeel slaphouse stop holes, under impossible skies laden I suppose with stars but you could just see their dirty blur in the Southern California Christmas,” Kerouac and Deni arrived at the Red Car tracks, where they would be whisked up to Hollywood. First, however, Deni wanted to go into the hotel in downtown San Pedro across from the Red Car stop. “ Someone was supposed to meet us with the blondes,” Deni told Kerouac. “ The hotel had potted palms and potted barfronts and cars parked, and everything dead and windless with the dead California sad windless smokesmog,” Kerouac noted. Kerouac’s further descriptions of the hotel indicated that the vacuous young men and women of today’s glitter generation were with us even then. So were the “ hotrod

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champion sons of aircraft computators of Long Beach, the whole general and really dismal California culture.” They decided to look for a quick beer. Deni warned Kerouac to avoid places with lots of Mexicans: “ They’re pachucos, they just like to beat up on people for the hell of it.” Kerouac replied that when he was in Mexico it didn’t seem to him that the Mexicans were that way. Deni agreed that Mexicans were different in Mexico, but somehow turned it around so he was accusing Kerouac of being the kind of person who worried about the starving multitudes of Europe. Then Deni realized they had better catch the last Red Car if they were going to see the “ glitters of Los Angeles if possible or Hollywood before all the bars closed.” The last train, however, had just pulled out. Deni insisted on hiring a taxi to catch up with it, but the taxi driver wasn’t fast enough. The Red Car clipped along at over sixty miles per hour “ towards Compton and environs of L .A .” and also seemed to tow the reader on into the next chapter and yet another installment of the Kerouac cosmos. Deni—predictably enough—had no job for Kerouac aboard the Roamer. And no money to lend Kerouac. As the Roam er pulled out of San Pedro harbor, Kerouac watched it go and didn’t seem terribly sad at its departure without him. For suddenly he had a strong vision of the Roam er as a floating metal prison. He shrugged and headed down Mexico way. Kerouac’s view of L.A. was obviously that of someone just passing through. But there is something of the “just passing through” quality in Steinbeck’s and even Miller’s encounters with the place. Perhaps there was a kind of synergistic relationship between L.A. and writers; the combination of restless authors and an ever-changing, transitory town helped produce a new vision in American literature. For Kerouac, there was nothing in L.A. that reached out and asked him to stay, as there had been for Miller and maybe almost for Steinbeck. Still, the fact that Kerouac opened both of his books with L.A. suggests something of the city’s lodestone qualities for a writer. L.A. was a sort of literary, if disillusioning, Eldorado.

Chez Marcel: Johannesburg, 1950 Nadine Gordimer , 1953

Marcel’s Cellar was, as the name implies, the nostalgia of a group of restless young people for the Left Bank Paris of the brief experience of one or two and the imagination of the others. In the idea of the place there met, vaguely as could only happen thousands of miles away from the actuality, the garret of Mimi and Rudolph in the eighties and one of the cafés where Sartre characters talked. Even the name of the “ owner” was in character, if out of date—but this was pure fortunate coincidence that Marcel du Toit’s name, common among Afrikaans South Africans with their mixed Huguenot-Dutch antecedents as Smith or Robinson among people of English descent, should be so appropriately romantic. He himself was a willowy, shady character, who with less pretensions would have been running a side show in a traveling fun fair, and, indeed, he presided over his cellar with an air of extreme languid dissipation that was clearly his underworldly bohemian version of the robust flourish he would have used for The Greatest Show on Earth. How he had come by the place, no one seemed to know. As I have said, it was the idea of seven or eight young people who decided to find some cheap convenient place in town where they could be private from any but their own kind and sit talking and perhaps drinking a little cheap wine until one o ’clock in the morning. Each would pay a share of the rent, and this levy would serve as a subscription, so that the whole thing would be a kind of club. They dragged in some old mattresses, lit up the cobwebs with a few candles in bottles, and were probably as cosy as children playing besieged Indians. Unfortunately, they enjoyed themselves so much that they told their friends, and their friends began to come along, too, and bring their friends’ friends, and in no time the original group found their m attresses and their Jeripigo taken over by medical students who had picked up with vaguely arty girls, young men who worked as window dressers or clerks and wanted to paint or write—the whole shoal of 534

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restless, vaguely Leftist, mostly innocent Johannesburg youth which es­ caped to another unreality from the neon and air-conditioned unreality of the cinemas and the shops of their daily lives. It must have been then that Marcel saw his opportunity, and, like the Wolf dressed up as the Grand­ mother, put on his velvet jacket and relieved the bewildered group of the responsibility for the rent. The great thing about the place was that it really was a cellar. This was an inestimable advantage that Marcel must have been quick to see. Instead of driving out to a roadhouse or going to a shiny Greek tearoom or a plushinsulated hotel where a trio played blearily from Show boat , we drove down to the area of darkened warehouses. There, where the cement and the paving rang like iron beneath the street lights, almost opposite the central police station which was only a name or a vaguely disquieting joke to us in our white skins and middle-class security, was the old building which once had housed a wholesale liquor business. We went in through the old-fashioned door of an empty shop whose windows were hung with hessian and then down a rickety wooden stair for which a hole had been made in the rotting wooden floor, into the cellar. It looked and smelled like the workshop of a garage, and we stood looking round with the suppressed giggles of curiosity while Herby was engaged in some sort of argument with an official-looking blonde sitting at a kitchen table. She was flanked by a couple of very young men who established their status as habitués by the extreme casual untidiness of their clothes—no one could be so haphazardly rumpled anywhere but at home. As the place had no license, no charge could be made for admission, but apparently this snag was circumvented by the rule that patrons had to pay a “ subscription” which varied on the blonde’s assessment of what they looked as if they might pay. Even when Herby had put down a note and we were officially in, one of the young men sauntered up to the women of our party and said: “ Wouldn’t any of you like to give us a donation— ? Anything—a piece of your jewelry?” The girl froze terrified as if it had been suggested that she leave her virginity at the door, and Jenny and I burst out laughing at the idea of gravely presenting our “jewelry” —a Zulu bead collar she had bought for 5/6, and a pair of cheap oxidized silver earrings that I wore. “ —She’ll leave her wedding ring with you on her way out—” said John, ushering Jenny past. “ W here’re we going to sit ourselves . . .?” Herby was looking briskly out over the dark, bare place where here and there a candle threw huge shadows on the rough whitewashed walls and the huddles of people with their voices lowered to the dark as if he were entering a restaurant where an obsequious maître d ’hôtel would come up to lead us to a white-covered table. All the mattresses on the floor were fully occupied with murmurous

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burdens and the few wooden forms round the walls were clustered with people sitting and standing, so we all laughed at him. “ It’s exactly like an air-raid shelter,” Jenny was saying. “ If they’d ever lived in England it wouldn’t be their idea of pleasure. Exactly like a shelter, even the mat­ tresses.” Herby had dashed on ahead and, the perfect host, found a vacant mattress for us, or rather an almost vacant mattress—someone’s coat claimed a corner of it but the owner was not there. As we settled ourselves down, the group around the radiogram near the stair broke away like a football scrum, and a French tango, scratchy, passionate, the musical equivalent of the breath of sweet wine and garlic, swung out. At once I liked the place; it was ridiculous, self-conscious, pathetic in its attempt to be dramatically sordid, but it was fun: an amusing parody of a kind of life which did not exist in Johannesburg. I was watching the couples who were getting up all around us to dance on the part of the cracked concrete floor that was kept clear, and the tall figure that Herby had pointed out as Marcel, moving about with a way of arresting his head, lifted momentarily in the advantage of a flicker of light, so that you could see his pointed golden-colored beard and the curl of smoke round his head from the long holder in his mouth and the nimbus of his golden-brown velvet jacket. I saw that, rather pointlessly and harmlessly, since the place was so dark, people of diverse talents had been allowed to contribute some wall decorations—just behind our heads there was a horrifyingly emaciated Christ, represented as an African, with the half-finished background of the hovels of Shantytown, and over above the bunch of dancers, where a candle in a tin holder was hung on a nail, a tremendous female figure, bulbous in the magazine manner, covered half the wall. The radiogram, too, was magnificently vulgar and incongruous; a great thing of shiny veneered woods, zebra-striped in imitation of fancy grains—the kind of machine that can only be bought on hire purchase. But Jenny and John were regarding the place perfectly seriously; I could see that. They were looking around just as they did when by some chance they found themselves in a typical “ nice” middle-class home in one of Johannesburg’s fashionable northern suburbs. “ It’s hardly the sort of thing to interest progressive people—I mean, I should think that if they have any politics at all they’re likely to be anarchist and antisocial.” “ These are the children of Market Street merchants, I ’ll bet. Papa makes a hundred thousand in soft goods, there’s a swimming pool and a tennis court and two Buicks, and the kids start up this sort of thing. Petit Trianon of the bourgeois. But you’ll notice it’s not the rousing drinking songs, the lively dancing and the open-air eating places they try to re-create. Those are in their racial memory, too, but they want to forget them. Their fathers want to forget those; they’ve spent thirty or forty years piling up money

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to put them at a distance from everything that was in their lives when they were simple oppressed people in Europe. But their suppression of the working-class origin creates a guilt feeling in the kids which goes the usual way—it manifests itself somewhere else.

Bohemia East: ’Sixties London Charles Marowitz, 1963

Eight pennies and 30 minutes away from the heart of London lies the winding, rustic borough of Hampstead. It is to London what Greenwich Village is to New York and Montparnasse to Paris. It’s all there. The art gallaries, the coffee bars, the blue-jeans, turtleneck sweaters, and copper jewelry, the scent of free love and the unmistakable atmosphere emitted by practicing intellectuals. Each year Hampstead conducts a gala Arts Festival during which local thespians, musicians, painters, photographers, and sculptors all strut their stuff. Although there is no rash of West End theatre here, there is a bristling interest in off-beat drama (Genet, Ionesco, Beckett), and every so often the Everyman Cinema, center of Hampstead’s artistic life, locks up its art films and gives itself over to the living theatre. Outwardly, the resemblance between Hampstead and Greenwich Village is astounding. Here, the European expatriates and itinerant American Bohemians jog beer mugs in outdoor pubs. Here exaggerated dress, beards, sideburns, and long hair never get the sideways second look. Here the little magazines glut the innumerable stationers’ shops. But once the initial resemblance has been noted, one realizes that there is a very great difference between the two quarters. In the Village, art, besides being the chief topic of conversation, is also the leading occupation of most of the denizens. Here, one feels art receives more idolatry than it does industrious application. The art which is produced is predominantly imitative and splendidly second-rate. Conver­ sation is the great pastime, and when that begins to pull it gives way to Skiffle, the English equivalent of our folk-song hootenannies. On a summer’s night Hampstead Heath, a great stretch of green hills tastefully broken up by waters, is almost as popular as Washington Square Park. By day it is a sylvan retreat strewn with picnic wrappings and horizontal thinkers; by night, a lustful lover’s lane populated by bundling 538

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Britons and the ubiquitous peeping Tom. It is unpatrolled by police. Near the Heath is the Vale of Health, so named because during the Black Plague it was the only spot miraculously free of infection. Just as Greenwich Village is an amalgam of three distinct sects—the Bohemians, the professionals, and the artlessly residential—so Hampstead has its factions. The most noticeable is certainly the artistic; however, as in the Village, the majority of Hampstead’s citizenry fall into the artlessly residential class—a lot of displaced Kensingtonians who enjoy a suburban retreat that still retains close proximity with the city. The professional class here is just as imposing as the one found in the Village, and, again as in New York, it exerts the least tangible influence on the community. To the professionals, Hampstead is simply a place of residence; to the youngsters, it is a Bohemian Valhalla bristling with intellect and electrified by art, the best of all possible worlds. The Hampstead Bohemians tend to be much younger than their New York counterparts. Despite their youth, they lack initiative and vitality. They seem to be constantly occupied in trying to simulate a Bohemian existence. Their passions, for the most part, are American. There is a naive enthusiasm for jazz (“ It’s so primitive; so emotional!” ) and a reactionary appreciation of American writing (“ Oh that Steinbeck man is so earthy!” ). As for the theatre, they revere The Method with a superficial ardor rather than an artistic understanding. They prefer to talk of Brando’s rebelliousness rather than his approach to acting. Their praise for the “ reality” of the American theatre is always coupled (and cheapened) by similar kudos for the sloppiest and phoniest externalism of the West End stage. It becomes aggravating to hear the work of Strasberg and Kazan equated with the drippiest products of the J. Arthur Rank organization. To the extent that the British youth is playing any characterization, it is that of the “ angry young m an.” Originated by a brilliant but overwritten play by John Osborne called “ Look Back in Anger,” and subsequently propelled by Colin Wilson’s O utsider , it has become fashionable to grouse in the abstract, hurl invectives upon society, or slump into the corner of a coffee-bar and sit with a dazed, myopic, this-life-is-for-the-birds expres sion on your face. It is significant that T. S. Eliot is still the most widely read and most nauseously quoted poet in Hampstead. After a few visits to Hampstead, one gets the idea that Bohemian London is a culture in search of a culture, a multicolored maze of art, literature, and free love straining to achieve some singular identity consis­ tent within itself. Hampstead’s trouble is England’s trouble: a modern cast in a dated play.

Bivouac in the Piazza di Spagna George Armstrong, 1967

There has been no “ Vietnam Summer” in Italy. Europe’s largest com­ munist party dispersed itself to the beaches or the mountains, with the party big-shots getting their reward-holidays among the baroque comforts of Marienbad or Yalta. This was fortunate for the Italian police, who then were able to devote their full attention to the growing summer menace of teenage subversion, whose agents they have learned to recognise by their long hair and extravagant attire. The right-wing press campaign in Italy against the capelloni (the long-haired), which began about two years ago with the first beatnik arrivals from over the Alps, has finally paid off. In Milan, Florence and Rome, Italian security police this summer made daily raids on the beatniks, mostly the home-grown variety, kids of the new Italian middle class, who have left the provinces for the brighter lights and tighter pants of the big city. Once it was Rome’s right-wing daily, Il Tempo, which urged the city’s wholesome youth to rise up and rid the city of its beatnik cluster (a fascist youth club obediently tried a punitive expedition and was properly clobbered by their seemingly effeminate prey). Now the job of harassment has been taken over by the police. (In Sardinia this year: 19 murders, 11 kidnappings—but that is another story.) In Milan’s Piazza del Duomo, in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria, the boys and girls have been loaded into police vans and “ held for question­ ing” for several hours. They are then usually released if their documents are in order. Sometimes parents are notified that their child is keeping bad company, though the basis of the police’s judgment is purely aesthetical— they just do not like the style of the hair and the clothes. Foreigners, traditionally well tolerated by the police, are asked for their residence permits. That requirement, like so many Italian laws, is an inheritance from the fascist code, and the Interior Ministry is quite frank in telling “ respectable” foreigners that they need no longer bother acquiring a permit. It is still useful to have, however, if one dresses unorthodoxly. 540

Bivouac in the Piazzi di Spagna

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Some foreign capelloni do not even get past the frontier guards. Mr. Muggeridge’s once-expressed desire to conduct Jesus on a tour of the Vatican could hardly be fulfilled today unless He returned with a crewcut and wearing a button-down collar unhidden by a beard. A 25-year-old street-sweeper from a town on the slopes of Mount Etna claims he was hauled to the police station 12 times during his first holiday in Rome. He wore a Mephistophelian beard and a leather wristband. He will have strange tales to tell his wife and four children during the winter months ahead. The complaints against the capelloni , some coming from the merchants who think they scare away the old crows who flock to Rome with wings made of travellers’ cheques, are that they are unwashed, seek alms and congregate in conspicuous places. The bivouac area in Rome is what is called, though only in English, “ the Spanish Steps,” because they end in the Piazza di Spagna. They were a gift to Rome from a French diplomat, a certain M. Gueffier. Earlier this month, Allen Ginsberg, the bearded beatnik poet, was seated on the steps with other capelloni , reciting his poetry not far from the window of the bedroom where Keats died. A police van pulled up and agents came charging up the steps “ shouting obscenities” (according to Ginsberg). The Cowboys soon surrounded the Redskins and held them in the Sheriff’s office for three hours of “ questioning.” Since all were in order, they were released and most of them went back to the steps. Some told Ginsberg that it had happened to them 20 or 30 times during the Beatnik Summer. Whatever M. Gueffier meant his steps to be, they have always been a gathering place for eccentrics. Dickens said that the steps were in his time “ a great place of resort for the artists’ model” and described some of the odd-balls he met there. “ And the cream of the thing is,” he concluded, “ that they are all the falsest vagabonds in the world, especially made up for the purpose, and having no counterparts in Rome or any other part of the habitable globe.” Maybe that’s the rub. The Rome beatnik scene is unoriginal, a cheap copy of something foreign, and it will inspire no future Dickens. Other­ wise, the capelloni might have come under the tutelage of the National Tourism board, which has an ample fund for subsidising groups who dress in peasant costumes and dance the tarantella to amuse foreigners and, hopefully, deceive them into thinking that Italy has not lost its sense of the “ bella figura” , its sense of true aesthetic values.

The Tender Termites: The New International Beatnikry in Paris Olivier Todd, 1965

“ I stand in front of a metro map and when an American tourist comes up to look at it I ask, ‘Could you spare a dollar for a compatriot who’s broke?’ ” “ Then what do you do?” “ Go back to Popoff’s .” Clint is nineteen. Thin, nervous, a New Yorker, he has a long pale face, brilliant black eyes and a tic in the left eyelid. He arrived in Paris ten days ago with his pal Bob, who has the shoulders of a stevedore though Clint is obviously the leader. They spend their time at Popoff’s and its environs. Chez Popoff is located at the northern extremity of the Latin Quarter, in the shadowy rue de la Huchette, amid odors of fish and couscous. It is to the left, just before you reach the rue du Petit Pont. On the counter, a vase filled with spices and wheat; on the wall, a print of Picasso’s Don Quixote and an ad for Byrrh. Scattered tables, benches and wooden stools give the room the atmosphere of a PX canteen or a waiting room in a deserted station. All year long, but especially during spring and summer, you meet an amazing number of foreigners between the ages of eighteen and thirty—not to mention habitues from the neighborhood: French, North Africans, Negroes, Indochinese. . . . The back room is heaped with ditty bags, knapsacks, duffels, baskets, suitcases, blankets and sleeping bags. The customers have come, direct or round-about, from San Francisco, Dusseldorf, Helsinki. Hitchhikers, trav­ elers on one-way Pan Am tickets, stowaways on freight trains, hands on freighters (like Clint and Bob), all plop down at Chez Popoff and stick there. You can stay for days or months without ordering a drink. “ Seen the Louvre . . . Sainte-Chapelle?” Dangling a ring of rusty keys an English boy named Jailer replies: “ No. 542

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What for? Climb the Eiffel Tower just to see where I was before? Stones and old iron everywhere. Ugh!” With his long hair, which he has slicked back with water in the m en’s room at Popoff’s, Jailer looks as though he had just emerged from the Ganges. Behind him are two Germans from Hamburg with equally long hair, as curly as their beards. The girls here wear ponchos and like as not go barefoot, their ragged espadrilles or sandals slung over their shoulders. They wear their hair either very short or very long. Like Jailer, many Popoffians sport one, two or three insignias of organi­ zations which are against nuclear weapons. Some never stop playing the guitar or harmonica. To many passers-by they are dirty, disturbing and corrupt: “ Where do these bums come from?” “ The girls are all diseased. You can have one for a liter of wine.” This disorderly but harmless horde is as peaceful as it is pacifist; nevertheless it is vilified. Concealing their anxieties within the group but revealing them in individ­ ual conversation, most of these drifting rebels have cast anchor at Popoff’s. They are disgusted with money, success, Time magazine, television, the Johnsons and the Erhards, and pathetically assert “ the rights of the heart and body.” “ Dirtiness” is their way of saying no to the antiseptic, plastic, electronic world which they flee—for three weeks, three months, three years or more. They are mostly Anglo-Saxons, Germans and Scandinavi­ ans. “ Germany’s more like America than any other country,” says Klaus. “ Norway’s a bore,” Ute explains. “ It’s so . . . clean. Know what I m ean?” All have made a cult of poverty. They think they are starting from scratch. Without the aid of any middleman or youth hostel, they have created an international in which all classes mingle. Swedish students chat with Berlin workers, Canadian clerks with Guadaloupean skin-divers, an unemployed Algerian with a dancer who was once in the Marquis de Cuevas’ ballet company. “ It’s swell here,” says a French boy. “ Nationality and race don’t count. We share everything.” True, they pass around hard-boiled eggs, bits of bread or Camembert which they savor like the Host. Liberty: they believe they are completely free, without obligations or responsibilities, masters of their fate, soul and knapsack their only bag­ gage. Equality: they’ll let any well-heeled girl treat them to coffee or ciga­ rettes, often bought singly.

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Fraternity: they keep saying, “ Everyone here is kind, ten d er.” “ Tender” is the key word. They hold on to one another like lost children, console one another, cheer one another up. “ Lost children, my foot!” say the skeptics. “ They’re necking.” They may be necking a little, too, but mostly it’s plain camaraderie. Many have been bumming around the Latin Quarter all night. Now in the morning, dead tired, they sleep with their heads resting on a shoulder, the wall or a table. Others drink diabolos-menthe or wine. Prices are reasonable at Popoff’s: beer twenty cents, a glass of red wine seven cents. Some hope it will make the blood of Van Gogh or Hemingway flow in their veins. No genuine Popoffian wears a watch. Space he annihilates by reducing it to this Latin Quarter dump, by crossing neither the Seine nor the rue Soufflot. Time he annihilates by never asking himself any questions more important than: “ Where will I sleep tonight?” “ What will I eat?” “ W hat’ll I drink?” Still, once in a while someone stirs. A Finnish boy gets up. “ Going out for cigarettes?” “ No, I’m going to Tangiers.” One group huddles over a Michelin guide to Europe. They discuss Greece. They decide to go to Nice, but blithely give up the idea fifteen minutes later. Ah, just think of those families who map out every stage of their trip to Lavandou, Atlantic City or Bergen months in advance! Friendly and calm (“ real sweethearts,” say the Popoffians in fifteen different languages), Popoff, together with his wife and daughter Monique, watches over this shelter. Minors under eighteen and those without papers are kept out, as are the ones v/ho have been in scrapes: X, who has borrowed too many cars to go play the gigolo in Cannes and who is pacing back and forth outside; Y, who filches too many books from the neighborhood book stores; Z, who slips into jewelry shops and makes off with necklaces or rings. So, too, those who are troublesome; at Popoff’s you can be high but not drunk. Callow or experienced, gentle or tough, illiterate or trying to escape into a different culture, the Popoffian is no troublemaker. Solemn and bald, wearing suspenders, checked shirt and rayon tie, Popoff maintains order while his wife and daughter, in smocks, serve and wipe up. He helps you get checks cashed. He makes Klaus put his shoes back on. The Popoffs may or may not be brilliant business people, but they certainly know how to reassure and comfort their customers, and with an amazing economy of words they beat by a long shot all other bartenders as well as chaplains, scoutmasters and leaders of Socialist youth groups.

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At one moment, in a limp silence broken only by the strumming of a lightly plucked guitar and muted voices, you feel you are in the midst of a colony of termites. Immediately afterwards you are thrust into a beehive of interminable, complicated discussions carried on in four or five lan­ guages. Clint, his battery recharged by a second diavolo, recommences: “ All you’ve got to do is make up your mind. Either you hit the road or you live the way your family wants you to live . . . ” For most of them the choice is bourgeois or Popoffian. Clint rambles on for two hours under Bob’s sleepy gaze. He returns to his starting point: “ I ’ll never set foot in America again. Never, never . . .” It is eleven in the morning. They go out. The afternoon they spend sitting in a group in front of the Eclaireurs de France, on the rue du Petit Pont—a stone’s throw from the police station. You’d say that this human magma had dried on the sidewalk; the young men and girls squat there, impervious to the stares of strolling Parisians or busloads of tourists. Suddenly the magma liquefies, speaks, rises. Another place of rest during the day is the square of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. Flat on their backs on the ground, feet up “ for circulation,” they wriggle their toes at the towers of Notre Dame. Some go to the Anglo-American library on the rue de la B ûcherie, where they can bring food. Sunk in armchairs and sofas, they read John Dewey, the New York Times or D er Spiegel. But what most of these non-Latins like best is a Mediterranean type of stroll in this neighborhood where the buildings are so dark that the tenants are forced into the streets. They amble along and encounter one another in the alleys ten times a day. And ten times a day they say, “ How are you?” as if they hadn’t met for five years. In the later afternoon they return to Chez Popoff. They stay there until seven-thirty, when Popoff closes. In threes and fours they set out for the Abraham Center, opposite the church of Saint-Severin—a hundred yards as the crow flies. Seven-thirty is the only landmark in the day. At this hour the volunteers who work at the center, often assisted by Popoffians, serve soup to the old tramps who come down from the Place Maubert. The kids line up and exchange news: “ The cops arrested thirty guys last night.” “ The Germans made six dollars apiece with their drawings at the SacreCoeur.” “ Jailer’s disappeared.” With childish pleasure they band around a puppy they have found and adopted. They gulp their soup in the cloister. The spot is exceptionally peaceful. Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, a Martian—anybody in the world—could appear. There is a hint of a rural club about the place: temporarily flush

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Popoffians who eat elsewhere come to visit friends and keep them com­ pany. From behind the iron fence, curious passers-by peer at the “ wild beasts.” Sometimes fights begin between the old tramps and the Popoffians. The old easily fall prey to chauvinism. They believe that though they are retired, they still have their rights. When they get a couple of glasses of wine under their belts they become insulting: “ Foreigners . . . Good-fornothing bums . . . Why don’t you go back where you came from?” When sober, the old men realize that these youths are generous. The tramp Bouboule, a kind of mascot, says: “ You must admit that, when they have anything, they give . . . ” Incessantly the old insult and abuse the young, who are infinitely more patient, understanding and indulgent than the most dedicated social worker. Night fallen, they continue bumming around. Nothing can really take the place of Popoff’s. Some return to hotel rooms that would make you wish you lived in a slum. Sometimes six or seven Popoffians manage, what with one ruse and another, to crowd into a single room. Others gather at La Rotonde. Not the famous Rotonde in Montparnasse but the little allnight café at the end of the rue St. Jacques. At the Rotonde prices are graduated. A glass of red wine costs fifteen cents until ten p . m ., thirty cents until two and thirty-five cents until dawn. The number of empty glasses on some of the tables proves that certain customers aren’t always as broke as they claim. Take, for example, these two young ladies who clearly come from good families. They have parked their car around the corner on the Boulevard St. Germain and made sure they have small change so that they won’t be seen flashing hundred franc notes. In blue jeans and old pullovers, they come to take their daily dose of bohemianism. By eleven p . m . Clint has denounced the United States even more thoroughly than he did during the morning—America’s finished, dead, liquidated. He can go on talking for twelve hours solid, thanks to mari­ juana. It is peddled in the area at two dollars for a matchbox full (the matchbox serves as a measuring spoon). One boxful makes six or seven cigarettes. Hashish is prohibitively expensive. For keef one has to go to Tangiers. The French who haunt these dives don’t feel obliged to tell you why they are there; it’s the foreigners who feel the need to talk. Stomachs empty despite the soup, they tackle any problem: God, free enterprise and socialism, sociology, theosophy, Zen, anthropology, the infinite, psychoanalysis, the Absolute, Christ as the first beatnik . . . They often claim to be beatniks. They swear by Ginsberg, Kerouac and sometimes Miller. But most of these kids have not read their authors

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thoroughly. They’re sort of rear-guard beatniks. The rejection of contem­ porary American society, industrial civilization, advertising or the Bomb— to be found in the work of the great beats and especially of Ginsberg— these themes are largely foreign to the Popoffians. They have the veneer but not the wood. They talk a lot about Poetry, but back and fill when it comes to specifics. They are even oblivious to the fact that while it’s hard to be beat in the United States, it’s almost too easy to be beat in Paris. Clint’s eyes are shining, his nostrils pinched; sweat runs down his forehead. H e’s had five reefers in twenty-four hours: “ Beatnikism is not a movement. It’s a society, a sub-culture. It’s a be-all and end-all . . .” “ It’s completely subjective,” says Bob. “ No, completely objective . . . ” Back from Montmartre the Germans celebrate the francs they earned with their chalk drawings on the sidewalk, They offer everybody a drink. They hand out coins to Bouboule and the other tramps, who mob the Rontonde. Money stinks—you’ve got to get rid of it. “ Prosit!” They toast the English, who got up a group and played the guitar in the afternoon and evening outside cafés. They tramp up to the deep fry vat, bring French fries back to the tables and break their egg sandwiches in half. They are continually being bawled out by the owner. To keep awake till dawn they swallow pep ills by the handful. Kinotrine (forty tablets for thirty cents) is very popular. It also allays hunger pangs. The evening is still young; my neighbor is on his twenty-seventh Kinotrine. And he never stops filling his pipe. If you run out of tablets, if you haven’t slept for four days, if you share a room with six people who have the blues, you finally stagger off toward the quays. You carry a raincoat, blanket or sleeping bag. Preferably you settle down next to someone else. But for a few days they have been spread out as on a battlefield, some venturing as far as the Austerlitz Station; for the police have been raiding. Beatniks, both fake and real, together with a few serious students who have gone broke at the end of their stay in Europe, are scattered along the embankment—to the disappointment of the passengers on the bateaux mouches. It used to be that the searchlights on the boats would pick out groups of sleepers who had bedded down early in the evening. From the banks the Popoffians would jeer at the passengers, whom they envisioned as provided with stores of Kleenex, travelers checks and clear con­ sciences: “ Capitalists!” “ Bourgeois!”

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The supreme insult—a malediction howled by Germans, English, Turks or Swiss as well as by Americans—was: “ Goldwater for President!” When the weather is nippy and you’re not worn out or warmed by good red wine, a night on the quays sounds more picturesque than it is. Someone always bothers you when you are sound asleep. Guys try to sneak under your blanket, the cop wants to check your identity, some joker shakes you and says: “ Come on! Come on, let’s go get a drink!” The smell of urine wafts beyond the bridges. There are also bad dreams and nightmares, to judge by the cries and groans of the sleepers. Couples are seldom left alone . . . Do they want to be? At this hour, Clint is pacing La Rotonde like a sleepwalker: “ I ’m fed up. I’m going back.” “ Popoff’s isn’t open yet.” “ I mean to New York.” For each one who holds out for several months, nine decide to quit. At dawn the young people who have taken over this corner of Paris, together with the real tramps and a few streets weepers, wait for Popoff’s to open. They begin the same routine: Chez Popoff, Eclaireurs de France, the soup line, La Rotonde, the quays. In their desire to escape complicated rituals, they have created a simple one. The only crisis they have to survive is when Popoff closes for vacation.

Making the Scene Francis Rigney and Douglas Smith, 1961

San Francisco’s upper Grant Avenue residential area is known to most San Franciscans as North Beach. To the Bohemians it is known as “ The Beach.” Geographically, North Beach is that part of the city that lies between Telegraph and Russian hills, in the northeast corner of the city; the valley is Columbus Avenue. The boundaries of North Beach blend inextricably with Chinatown on the south and the top of Telegraph Hill to the west, with the waterfront on the north and Russian Hill to the west. Many Italians and Chinese live in North Beach. The Beach is cut in half by Upper Grant Avenue, a narrow, crowded, shabby, north-south street lined with small art galleries, bookstores, art shops, Chinese dressmaking factories, and a variety of bars and restau­ rants. Most of the restaurants are family-style Italian. It is on and around Grant Avenue that the social life of Bohemia is centered. Here, then, is the “ Scene” —and to “ make the Scene” means to participate in this social life as an insider. Some of the gathering places for the Bohemians have become familiar to a wide public through the pages of Life and Time: the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, for example, at the intersection of Grant Avenue and Green Street. This small combination delicatessen and bar is the brunch wagon for members of the community. The bar runs lengthwise along the room; behind it, the word “ Co-Existence” is lettered foot-high on a green-gray wall. The rear walls are covered with posters announcing long-past jam sessions, poetry readings, painting exhibitions. A large mural on a wall near the entrance doors presents a paranoid Pierrot in a diamond-patterned suit, seated on a bench he shares with a harlot, his mother. The Bagel Shop’s customers are jammed together at the small tables, drinking beer, sipping coffee, reflectively munching sandwiches. The chess-players are oblivious to the clatter around them. Here, “ scenes” are often first concocted. 549

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Poetry readings are a popular scene. By August 1959 as many as three readings a week were being held in the Bread and Wine Mission, the Coffee Gallery, and The Cellar. The Gallery, across the street from the Bagel Shop, is a combination bar and art gallery which serves as the community town hall. The walls carry posted notices, public announce­ ments; meetings are held there, and once, a locally produced operetta was performed. The Cellar is a small, dark, downstairs, 25-cent cover charge night club on Green Street, just around the corner from the Bagel Shop. The Bread and Wine Mission, high on Telegraph Hill where Grant Avenue climbs upward, is the medieval church of this community, a refuge for the hunted, a place for craftsmen to gather, and the setting for abstruse theological discussions. It consists of a large central room furnished with scattered chairs, stools, sofa cushions, two thousand books, and many paintings, including a grim, racked crucifixion scene, and many small rooms—a meditation room, a printing office, a kitchen, and an office for Pierre Delattre, its pastor. The poetry readings, which began in San Francisco and have since spread to the Bohemian centers of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, are solo performances lasting from one to two hours, with breaks. Attendance is related to reputation or hope of controversy; it runs from one to two hundred. The settings have certain things in common: semidarkness, rows on rows of silent listeners, sometimes candlelight. The poets’ voices differ: some whisper, some shout; some are sardonic and critical, others lyrical and mystical. Some poets roar defiance; others plead a “ cause.” Ferlinghetti’s voice is gentle and New England-like as he reads about the Great Chinese Dragon that swallowed young Chinese—and wore Keds. Lamantia is sardonic, grimacing, mincing, teasing; Anderson is earnest and steady, speaking complex and delicate metaphor. Meltzer is intellec­ tual, intense, almost staccato; in contrast there is Kaufman, roaring his audience jarring lines: “ Oh, who killed the Pope? . . . the Pope is a Protestant . . or, in a different mood, a tremulous poem about another poet’s experience in a mental hospital. If the poet is bad, the audience moves toward the nearest exit. Jazz is played at only two places; The Cellar has its own instrumental group; at The Coffee Gallery music is played by impromptu ensembles. Usually the group consists of a drummer, a pianist, a bass player, a saxophonist, and often a trombonist or a trumpeter. The instrumentalists play en masse, then each take a solo turn, improvising on the basic theme of the song being played. The drummer keeps a fairly fixed beat except when performing his own solo. The audience is quietly attentive—few

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people keep time or clap in accompaniment, although good solos are followed by sporadic applause. “ Blabbermouth Nights” are held every Monday night at a bar called The Place, a tiny hole-in-the-wall on Grant Avenue, a few blocks north of the Bagel Shop. Legally it holds thirty-eight people; on Monday nights there are apt to be seventy-five. The “ Nights” are public debates on various themes. The participants, leaning on a box labeled “ Soap,” address the audience from a balcony. The “ official” themes are posted on a blackboard behind the bar. Each speaker is allowed three minutes in which to present his ideas. More commonly, the themes serve as a takeoff point for more immediate personal interests. The “ formal” address is followed by a question period and a rebuttal, and a winner is declared. Sometimes the debates are real and even violent. The two most famous, however, were “ Where would the world be today if Joan of Arc had had a miscarriage?” and “ The superiority of the bagel as a contraceptive.” The intimate social life in the Beach consists of spontaneous, sometimes impulsive, events which usually take place at a pad; but sometimes a neighborhood bar, or even the street, can serve as well. For example, one such event was held in a writer’s pad, a block from Grant Avenue. The guests, avoiding the tiny, dirty, unused bedroom and filthy kitchenette, assembled in the large living room. The living room walls were splashed with blobs of paint, and miscellaneous slogans: Donald Duck is a Jew; Mona Lisa is a p l a i n clothes q u e e r ; j e s u s s a v e s — green stamps; Berlioz was a Beatnik; Minnie Mouse is a Mulatto. There were nine persons present. A man had passed out, and lay face down in the corner. A couple, completely dressed and very drunk, lay on a mattress near the wall; the man was reflexively making copulatory movements; the woman was almost unconscious, paying no attention. One guest sat in the corner, drinking steadily from a wine bottle. The host, a pale-faced writer wearing a shabby suit, was wandering about in a daze, insistently turning up the record player to create a fearful din. One out-oftowner who had wandered in leaned against the kitchenette bar, bemusedly surveying the whole scene. Another, more awake couple was necking on the couch. Rigney was almost completely ignored, except by the host, who exchanged good-natured banter with him. The party was ended by the police— “ Turn down that noise”—and the guests scattered. Another party was held in this pad a week later. Less wine was consumed, but it was a much livelier affair. At first, there was nothing but the usual chatter typical of any party, but as the inhibitions disappeared the amount of commotion increased. A jazz musician began to tease a poet by jumping on his back; the poet was making passes at the drummer’s girl friend. Finally the poet got up and started to hurl obscenities at his annoyer

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who, in turn, laughed uproariously and teasingly tugged at his victim’s shirt. Others joined in and peeled the shirt off. The poet, then, half angrily, half jestingly, bellowed and took off the rest of his clothes. The annoyer, not to be outdone, rapidly did the same. They then chased each other around the room, snapping belts at each other’s buttocks. Cheered on by some, ignored by others, and surrounded by smoke and din, they contin­ ued the war-whooping horseplay until finally, the victim threw the annoy er’s pants out the window. Things now were “ serious.” A concerted rush to the window— “ Christ, why did you do that?” etc.—amidst the laughter. Everyone peered out, but saw no trousers! Then someone looked out and up; the trousers had sailed outward and upward onto the telephone wires. Rescue plans were offered. Finally, after a woozy debate, one very drunken man staggered out into the street, brandishing a ten-foot-long board. Spurred on by the others, he negotiated the telephone pole; with a great deal of wild batting about, he brought the trousers to earth, to receive a chorused cheer. The trousers were returned, the attacker again snatched them and threw them farther out on the wires; they were again recovered. The gladiators retrousered, and the party began to sink into a stupor. Again, the police called curfew. Not all parties were so chaotic. In another case, people assembled for a jam session via grapevine rather than invitation: “ L et’s go t o _________,” “ There’s a session a t _________.” They gathered in a small, nearly barren three-room apartment above Grant Avenue. By midnight about thirty people had arrived, as had the first instrumentalists, and the session had begun. Most of the guests were quietly attentive; there was almost no accompaniment. Here and there groups talked, ignoring the music. A self-appointed beer and wine commit­ tee circulated at intervals, asking for donations—“ something in the kitty for the b eer.” The “ com bo” included a saxophonist, a pianist, a drummer, and a bass player. The drummer, somewhat tight, was playing his head off. The pianist was removed—“ no heart” —and was replaced by a small, wiry fellow, so loaded that he had to be helped to the piano. He slumped over the keyboard, his head resting on his flexed left arm. Even a jazz novice could notice the improvement; he was able to extract more rhythm and feeling playing right-handed than the first player had done using both hands. This was the party: listening to music and drinking, the room filled with smoke clouds. Then all the lights came on; the police had arrived: “ All right, all right, break it up, the party’s over.” They hustled us down the

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stairs; someone rescued the drums. Little groups of sullen people gradually ambled off, watched stonily by the police. Not all of the Beach’s music is jazz; conga and mambo drums are also popular. Pounded incessantly, these are hard to resist; take, for example, a lively night at Eric’s Pad, which was, in its day, a kind of combination USO and private home, a two-story warehouse located in the produce district. The lower floor was divided into a large, nondescript foyer and a smaller kitchen. To the right, after entering, was a narrow flight of stairs leading to an upper room. Fifty feet long, the room was almost completely barren. It was ringed by two day beds, ten mattresses, and a double bed. The arrangement displeased the Fire, Health, and Police Departments, who said it was a firetrap, a health hazard, a source of juvenile delin­ quency, and further, an unlicensed night club: True, Nord asked a donation of one dollar on admission, and it was somewhat difficult to get in without making the donation; otherwise, Eric’s Pad was not a disease source, there was little to burn, and a uniformed policeman stood at the door, checking I.D. cards. When Rigney arrived one night, the upper room was almost pitch dark; three couples were barely identifiable in the gloom. A young man plopped down next to him, wondering aloud when “ things were going to start swinging.” Their conversation was laconic, noncommunicating; the man left. More people drifted in; the air grew staler. Then three Negro conga drummers arrived. Almost instantly an air of expectancy replaced the apathy. There was a certain bustling about; then the drummers began to beat. The effect was like adding kerosene to quiescent embers. Couples and individuals began to dance. (One plump, hat-wearing male danced alone for about an hour—eyes preoccupied with space.) As the tempo increased, the nondancers gradually formed an arc facing the mattress on which the three drummers kneeled. One drummer stripped to the waist, and even in the gloom his skin glistened. The rhythms, mambo-like, undefinable, continued relentlessly. Finally, a striking-looking Negress, smooth-bodied in a black cocktail sheath, jumped up from her group and began to dance in a provocative, primitive fashion. The group in the arc began clapping in rhythm; she began to arch and writhe more violently. Two men—one wearing only blue jeans and gleaming with sweat, one in correct, “ Ivy League” clothes— danced alternately around her, front to front, back to back, and side to side. The onlookers began to cry, “ Go! Go! Go!” some moaning, some chanting the words; others only made sounds. The woman seemed beside herself. In a hedonistic fury, she tore at her own body, stroked herself; her hair, her breasts, her thighs. Gradually she

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sank to her knees, still swaying in time. She arched her body back, and the semi-nude man arched over her. Both then, in time with the drum beat, imitated copulation, never once actually touching. Everyone in the arc was now shouting, “ Go! Go! Go! Go!” It was all over. She slumped to the floor; the man straightened out, danced away a few steps, and, in turn, slumped against the wall. They had danced for an hour without pause. The drummers played on after that scene, but in increasingly desultory fashion. One by one, two by two, people drifted out; the “ party” was over. At another party dominated by the congo drums, not too much drinking went on. The party was held in a large, five-room apartment, a block from Grant Avenue. It was hard to realize that it was inhabited. The total furnishings consisted of two mattresses, one in each bedroom, each covered by ragged blankets and dirty sheets. There were no additional signs of habitation other than beer cans, broken bottles, and debris in the kitchen sink. At least sixty people passed through this party. Some of the guests were strangers; college boys, Fillmore District Negroes, and a few tourists who managed to get in. Most of the guests were jammed into the little kitchen; the light came from a glaring, naked, overhead bulb. The guests jockeyed about, strug­ gling with wine jugs and paper cups. It was noisy in the kitchen, but there were pockets of withdrawn silence in the living room. A jazz sax player did his stint for a time, then disappeared. Then a conga drummer arrived. He sat in the darkest corner of the living room, pounding out a complex, syncopated, “ neo” -African rhythm; his playing caused a hush to settle over what now became an audience. A thin shaft of light came in from the kitchen, accentuating the darkness. Into the center of the room and into this spotlight undulated a young man with close-cropped hair, who began a dance—not an African dance or any kind of known dance, but a series of complex poses akin to Balinese postures, yet more akin to catatonic movements. Without missing a beat, he twisted, jerked, froze, unfroze, twisted, flexed, weaving an unending series of poses which faded abruptly when the drum went silent. The Spanish guitar is a soulful instrument. It can be used for quiet meditative solos; but three guitars at once, plus hand-clapping, in a tiny living room present another matter. About forty people were jammed into this little room. They could hardly move. People threaded their way with great difficulty back and forth to the wine jugs and the bathroom. Most were talking, some were singing, others were accompanying the guitars. The din was overwhelming. The Italian landlady, dressed in her nightgown, poked her head in the door, “ Hey, cut dis out, go hom ’, go hom’.” Ignored, she returned with

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reinforcements: three squad cars, with eight policemen. As they pulled up in front, they were spotted. People began to disappear up the stairs, out the rear window, like leaves in a windstorm. Eight guests rode off in the paddy wagon— “ disturbing the peace”—another party was over. Not all scenes were ended by the police. Some events just seemed to spring into existence, bloom, and abruptly fade away. One autumn night, for example, at the tavern “ Mr. Otis’s,” an English spring fever set in. With increasing excitement, a group began to assemble in the center of the open area of the bar. One person stood in the middle; around him swirled a laughing, singing group, trying as best they could to remember English madrigals. The owner, laughing, bellowed, “ Hey, no dancing! It’s illegal.” It was pointed out that this was not dancing, but rather was ritual activity around a human Maypole. The Maypole ring dissolved. It rapidly re-formed as a new circle: now a laughing, tumbling mass of people managed to struggle through “ Farmer in the Dell,” missing an animal or two, but winding up, if somewhat chaotically, at least triumphantly with, “ The cheese stands alone, the cheese stands alone. . . . ” And on a summer evening, a party came into being because of a twentydollar bill, the “ rent m oney.” A girl asked her lover, a poet, to get some groceries; “ Two dollars’ worth is the limit, and I mean it!” (Rigney was sent along to “ make sure.” ) At the first grocery store a dollar went in a flash for a jug of wine; two more promptly followed for candy, canned hors d ’oeuvres, and potato chips. Rigney’s protests were ignored; the poet said, “ Shut up and hold the wine.” In and out of three more groceries; “ They don’t have exactly what I w ant.” Load was added to load. They were ten blocks from home, uphill from them. With an air of utter insouciance N signaled for a taxi. “ Take us to Grant and Greenwich.” Slowly the taxi crawled up Grant Avenue; in the rear sat two passengers and four huge, full paper bags. As the cab passed the Bagel Shop, N shouted greetings to one and all, yelling, “ Hey, Beatniks!” The taxi driver grinned, speeded up, and reached Greenwich. N paid the fare, annoucing, “ Keep the paper, I don’t need change.” Inside, the girl friend was staggered. She burst into tears. “ My God, the rent; what did you spend?” There were six dollars left. Still, the ending was happy. A fine dinner was prepared: spreads, salad, an elaborate casserole, desserts, and wine. It was, everyone agreed, a “ great blowout.” And the inadvertent hostess brightened up; “ I ’ll get another twenty; I ’ll work, or something. It was worth it, you only live once.” Another time, after an evening of group drinking and talking in the Bagel

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Shop, one girl suggested that about eight people go to her apartment for hot chocolate. The whole group piled into her pad; they draped themselves over the furniture and on the floor. She started preparing the chocolate. One of the guests, a poet, was pretty high and in no mood for chocolate. Everything seemed quiet until the hostess discovered this poet hidden in the closet, halfway through a bottle of her gin. He emerged and, clutching both gin and his kimono (he was also wearing a Spanish conquistador’s helmet and shorts), began berating poets, writ­ ing, and art. At this point another writer present implied he had a pretty limited range of reading to be “ spouting off” so. In a burst of anger, the poet got up and asked for silence. He then rendered lengthy passages from T. S. Eliot with such vigor and impact that afterward the whole group could only sit in awed silence. Most of the time, though, people in the Beach stay at home and live their lives: cooking meals, working on projects, seeing friends, etc. When they gather together they talk, play records, sing, or have a drink. There is no trouble; these are “ peaceful scenes.” One such was in the home of a gentle, full-bearded painter, who lives with his wife and child in a Victorian relic that they had converted into a communal boarding house. Their living quarters consist of a living roombedroom furnished with a huge mattress (covered by a colored Hindu bedspread), a couple of camp stools, a box, and a three-inch-high circular coffee table on which stands a candelabra; there were no rugs. The other living room is bare, except for a sagging sofa. On the walls of both rooms hang examples of the owner’s works: some paintings and a few prints. The kitchen—a standard one—was somewhat in disarray; the two living rooms were neat. About twenty-five people were present. An earnest group gathered in the kitchen and, over the wine, debated art: critics, styles, and schools. In the bedroom-living room the guests were seated on the low mattress bed and on the floor. The room was illuminated only by the candles, burning in the holder on the coffee table. A man with a guitar sang folk songs—Bessie Smith, Josh White, Leadbelly—some doleful, some poetic. People arrived, others drifted away. There was a sense of timelessness, of no beginning or end, just a slice of a flowing stream. On another evening, nine people had drifted gradually into a painter’s battered pad: three tiny rooms, a clutter of small table, art objects, canvases, cans, bottles, utensils. An “ extended moment” began when a Japanese record was put on the machine. For the next fifty minutes the nine remained so quiet that they could be described as “ Still Life with Human Figures” ; in this densely packed room the haunting wailing of the Kabuki music seemed to have so transfixed them that the only permissible motion was the raising of a jelly glass for another sip of wine.

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Special occasions on the Beach—births, weddings, even national holi­ days—are all celebrated. For example, a Thanksgiving dinner was held in a poet’s pad, a comfortable one with a well-lighted front living room, two bedrooms, a work room, and a modern kitchen and bath. It was furnished sparingly, but neatly: day beds and a dresser in the bedrooms; in the living room, an ottoman, a bucket chair, a four-inch-high circular table, miscel­ laneous objets d ’art including handsome mobiles, and a large record collection. There was much scurrying about as the guests gathered. Bubblings and sizzlings were heard in the kitchen. The men gathered in a bedroom for hors d ’oeuvres; they sat in a circle and smoked marijuana. One cigarette was lighted at a time; the butt was passed from person to person, each person taking a deep puff. Then, at last, the cry, “ Dinner!” Everyone gathered in the living room around the low table; most of the guests sat on the floor. Before them were turkey, cranberries, stuffing, corn on the cob, candied yams, and mashed potatoes. One of the guests was asked to carve; this took some doing, since the only cutlery available was a dull, four-inch Bowie knife and a dinner fork. Hack by hack, the turkey was carved; it looked ragged, but it disappeared quickly. Later the company mused quietly as Lotte Lenya sang about Surabaya Johnny and Mack the Knife. On one autumn day, a poet and his girl were married. The groom, a tall, full-bearded man wearing eyeglasses, looked like a bookish professor; the bride, straight-haired, her pale face free of makeup, looked waiflike. At about 5:45 a . m . the wedding guests began to gather near Sutro Park in San Francisco. Some, ready for work, were in business suits; others wore dungarees, blue jeans, sandals; some were bearded. Some looked very sleepy; this was an off-hour for Bohemians. (The wedding had been set for 6 : 0 0 a . m . s o that only invited guests would be present; there are no places in San Francisco where an outdoor wedding of Bohemians could take place without curiosity seekers.) By 6 o ’clock about thirty people had gathered at the entrance to the park. The bride’s parents, at first somewhat shy, were introduced around; the ice was broken. The whole group then strolled into the heart of the park. An alcove, bordered and banked by large pine trees, was chosen. The cellist set up her chair and cello; the minister took his place under the trees. The bridal pair stood before him. She held her recently born son; tucked into his blanket were tiny blue flowers picked by her friends. The setting was complete. The dawn light chased away the remnants of the darkness; the Pacific Ocean made a soft shush-shush sound in the distance. The morning light

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awakened the birds. The cellist began softly, then sonorously, to play a Bach sonata. The ceremony started. “ We are gathered together today to celebrate the marriage . . but the wording had its own poetry—the familiar ‘I do’s,” but nothing about “ obey” or “ death.” The ceremony ended not with the usual, “ by the authority, . . .” but simply with, “ because you are in love, I now pronounce you man and wife.” The groom and bride embraced— “ Watch out for the baby!” She was tearful, the baby was smiling. The new husband proudly waved his mar­ riage certificate; the bride dried her eyes with fresh grass which stuck to her face; the serious mood dissolved in laughter. Everyone was relaxed. The working guests left for their day ahead; the bridal party set off for Enrico’s for a champagne breakfast. The park was again empty, except for the bird life; the first lights were coming on in nearby apartments.

The Figaro The New Yorker, 1960

One evening last week, the uproar about coffeehouses in Greenwich Village having died down, we headed for the Figaro, on the corner of Bleecker and Macdougal, to get the latest on caffe espresso. The streets were teeming when we arrived—motorcycles, sports cars, Cadillacs, Larks, bicycles, tricycles, little kids, bigger kids, boy gangs, man gangs, girl gangs, young couples, old couples, middle-aged couples, loners, blackgarbed Italian ladies in their seventies, panhandlers, book carriers, and Beats of various shapes, sizes, and natures. Paperback books, handwrought jewelry, antiques, sandals, pottery, straw objects, paintings, simmering Italian sausages, onions, and pizzas, and freshly boiled sweet corn were being marketed in neighboring stalls and shops, with enough customers, apparently, for everybody. Out of this festival, like a ghost, there suddenly loomed a distinguished and formerly subdued artist we know, who was now wearing boots and a T shirt (a fancy kind, with an inlaid panel at the throat). “ Greetings,” he said coolly. “ I have just moved down here from the upper East Side. If you want to see something peculiar, go to the Cedar Street Tavern, on University Place. It’s full of painters.” “ You Beat?” we asked. “ It’s a legitimate thing to be a Beatnik, even though most of the time it’s the provincial thing,” he said. “ It draws me. It’s the power of innocence.” Inside the Figaro, the power of innocence was going full blast—a jukebox playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, two espresso machines hissing, a white-aproned, blond-bearded dishwasher playing chess with a customer, an old Chaplin film flickering on a movie screen in a corner, abstract paintings hanging on the walls, a collection of Tiffany lamps hanging from the ceiling, a grand piano (quiet) to one side, the customers brooding, reading, or buzzing with discussions, polemics, and 559

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harangues on faith and life. It drew us. We cornered Tom Ziegler, the owner, a clean-cut man of thirty-one, whose hair was slicked back on his head with water, and whose T shirt showed faintly under a conventional white one, open at the collar. “ We’re sometimes called the square coffeehouse, but we don’t mind, because we know we’re not square,” Ziegler told us. “ It’s simply that when you come here you have to behave. We don’t permit the weekend tourist Beatniks—a lot of them come down from the Bronx sporting dayold beards—or any would-be Beatniks who read about press-createdimage Beatniks and try to be like them, to work out their psychic difficulties here. Look around. You’ll see plenty of Beatniks, but they’re nothing like the exhibitionists exploited in stories in the N ews. Our Beatniks are the real, true, old-fashioned, wonderful bohemians. There’s been some harassment of coffeehouses that didn’t meet fire-law standards, despite the fact that hundreds of eating places in town with the same conditions weren’t bothered. But I maintain that the market for coffee­ houses is unlimited. This is just the beginning of the boom. It’s going on all over. In London two years ago there were two hundred coffeehouses; now there are twice the number. In 1956, when my wife and I started the Figaro, there were a few coffeehouses around, and I wondered whether the Village could stand another coffee place. Last month, there were more than two dozen new ones since we’d started, and I’ve stopped counting. The coffeehouse fills a real need; people have to congregate. There are two possibilities for a young girl, say, who comes to New York and doesn’t know anybody—Y.W.C.A dances and coffeehouses. She doesn’t want to make the bar scene. For a young man, a coffeehouse is a place for him to sit down and talk to people without being jostled by drunks. One of the things we enjoy is Europeans who find their way here. Americans they’ve met in Europe tell them the best place for a stranger to go is to the Figaro. Here they have a place they feel they belong in, where they can exchange ideas, talk, carry on a social life. In a way, it follows the high-school corner drugstore for a lot of kids. Where did I go when I was eighteen? I went up to Hell’s Kitchen and hung out on street corners and eventually got into trouble. Here we keep an eye on the teen-agers. They play chess or checkers, or just talk, and we get them to drink milk. And we don’t let them hang around too long. Some of them I ration to three visits a night. Look around. See them? Nice kids.” Mr. Ziegler drew a deep breath and did some looking around himself. “ Coffeehouses have been under attack down through history,” he said, turning back to us. “ I recently came across an article that reported there was hostility to coffeehouses at Oxford in the seventeenth century. They were criticized as being gathering places of students and teachers, who

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consequently lost respect for each other and frittered away their study time. I don’t agree. I’m sure there were people then who benefited tremendously from coffeehouse life, as there are now.” We asked Mr. Ziegler for his coffeehouse background. “ I didn’t know a thing about it, and neither did my wife, when we started,” he replied. “ It was probably a good thing that we didn’t have any restaurant experience, because to run a coffeehouse as a restaurant is impossible. We got into the business to make some money to pay my way at N.Y.U.; I started college when I was twenty-five. I’ve lived in the Village all my life—except for two years in Hell’s Kitchen—and I went to school here. My father is a painter. One thing I know—in the Village, you can find somebody who knows about anything. Originally, the Figaro was in a former barbershop across the street. That’s how it got named. I bought it from a friend for three thousand dollars that I borrowed. H e’d had it a couple of months and was tired of it, or so he told me. We put another two thousand dollars into it across the street, and then we took this corner, the site of two former stores—drygoods and instrument repairs. I practically built the place with my own broken hands—put up the walls with a friend who is a writer, who also helped me put in this floor. Marble scraps. My own idea. Cost me twenty dollars, and the marble man I bought the scraps from thought I was crazy. I bought the furniture at auction. I dropped out of college when I discovered that the coffeehouse was more complicated and more enjoyable than I had expected. We filled the place up with chess players during the week and made our money on weekends. My wife and I worked a sixty-hour, seven-day week. We invested an additional twelve thousand dollars here. We had trouble finding an old espresso machine, because these machines haven’t been made since the nineteen-forties. The Italians don’t like them, and now make those hydro-compression ones, which I think are ugly. I got a beautiful old one through a bookie who had a brother-in-law in the old-style Italian coffeehouse business. Now there are about a dozen wholesale places that import newfangled pushbutton machines in Italy. We have twelve waitresses and two waiters, from all parts of the world. Our dishwasher is from Texas. H e’s a writer. One of my managers is a high-school English teacher who likes working here better. We have other people who should be out building their careers but can’t stand doing that. I make it a point to avoid hiring any girl who just left home to get away from her parents or her husband. I don’t mind boasting that each of our waitresses is an adult woman, even though she might be only twenty-two years of age. By that I mean they all have plenty of understanding of themselves and of other people. On Sundays, we have afternoon chamber-music concerts that cost a hundred dollars and that I lose money on, but I don’t care.”

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The conversation was interrupted by a mime in whiteface, selling flow­ ers. “ H e’s a pretty good mime, but there’s a better one at the Café Wha?, on Macdougal,” Ziegler said. “ There are all kinds of coffeehouses, with all kinds of attitudes. The venerable ones, the Rienzi and the Manzini, cater to tourists. The Phase 2 and Limelight don’t cater to tourists, but if you’re a tourist you’re acceptable anyway. The upper West Side has the First Born, at Amsterdam and a Hundred and Eleventh; the East Side has the Right Bank, at Madison and Sixty-ninth. In between, at Orsini’s, you have to wear a necktie.” We were joined by Ziegler’s wife, a pretty girl with bangs, whom he introduced as Royce, and by one of his part-time assistants, a wide-eyed young man named Alan Eisenberg. “ Royce and Alan can testify to the fact that we’re known as the only swinging coffeehouse,” Zielger said. “ This place is what Beatism is all about,” Royce said. “ It’s an authentic old-fashioned bohemian place, the kind of place Edna St. Vincent Millay would have liked.” “ A truer bohemia than the Montparnasse of the late twenties,” a chess player next to us threw in. “ I hate to use the word ‘rapport,’ ” Eisenberg said, “ but that’s what we have here. After all, what is true Beatism but an awareness of life? It sounds corny, but that’s what the basic meaning is. Trying to feel things. Instead of getting all tied up with things that distort the meaning of life. People come here to look at us and laugh, but we’re laughing right back. There’s a Beatism that’s destructive, but that should have a different name. The coffeehouse is a life line against compromise, which some people think is a great thing. Compromise to me is a synonym for defeat. Admittedly an anti-conformist, adolescent attitude, but a good one.” “ Alan is a lawyer,” Royce said, “ but he can’t stay away from the Figaro.” “ Look around,” Ziegler said. “ What you see is a young society react­ ing.”

Hippi at the Café Aramat Andrea L ee , 1960

Yesterday, around three o ’clock in the afternoon, I was standing waiting for Misha in front of the Manège, near the Kremlin. It was a dark, wet afternoon with a fine sleet in the air; Russians of all ages crowded up the steps of the Manège, a huge yellow building that was formerly the imperial riding school and now holds exhibits of contemporary art. Misha and his friends were supposed to come by and take me to a café, the Aramat, near Gorky Street, and they were late. I scanned the crowd and thought once again how much nicer Russians looked dressed for cold weather: they are ungainly and ill at ease in their badly cut summer clothes, but winter in Moscow means fur, rich fur, everywhere, spangled with melting flakes of snow. Suddenly a slight start went through the crowd. People paused to look, an old woman nearby said “ Gospodi!” (“ My Lord!” ), and a police­ man standing in front of me turned his head thoughtfully. It’s them, I thought, and, sure enough, I saw Misha waving his big hand as he made his way nonchalantly toward me. Behind him came a little troop of six men and women dressed as he was, their long hair blowing in the sleety wind, their bells and beads tinkling and rattling. “ Hi!” Misha said in English, cheerfully taking my arm. “ Hi!” I said. “ You forgot the shuba today, huh?” This is a joke we have. A shuba is a heavy fur coat. Whenever I see Misha, I reprimand him for his light clothing, and he promises he will dress in furs for the next meeting. Today, he wore his usual outfit: a thin purple jacket embroidered with the English words “ Love” and “ Rock Explosion,” and a pair of tattered orange pants. The others had gathered in a circle around us, and Misha began to make introductions. “ I would like to present you,” he said, quite formally, “ to some more of our people, nashi hippi ” As always, it seemed strange to hear the English word “ hippie” used in a Russian sentence. Misha and his friends, however, are adamant about their identity. They are hippi (for 563

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them, the word is a collective plural and is pronounced “ heepee” ), and their adoption of the word suggests their fascination with Western culture. Misha took me around the circle: “ This is Petya, Kolya, Vitya, Natasha . . . ” Looking at the austere young faces, the beads, the long, tangled hair, and the bright clothes gave me a sharp thrill of nostalgia; I thought of the streets of Philadelphia, Rittenhouse Square in 1968, when I, too young to join in seriously, had watched the hippies drifting by— knights and their spacey ladies bound on some quest I burned to under­ stand. But this was Russia, ten years later, and the dated look of the whole assemblage was almost ludicrous. I felt like a traveller who has chanced upon an outpost in India where Victorian England still survives. We set off down Gorky Street, leaving a wake of stares, turning heads, and muttered comments in the afternoon crowd. The public reaction was rarely hostile; it was more one of unabashed curiosity, which Misha and his friends blandly ignored. “ Russians never get used to anything,” Misha had told me earlier. “ There have been hippi for years now. But still they stare like peasants, and still babushki stop me on the street to scold me about my hair.” I was walking with Misha and his girlfriend, a Lithuanian named Aldona, who had a cherubic face and a mass of frizzy brown curls, with a narrow black band tied around her forehead. Misha was telling me about travelling; he talked very loud and fast, and made the rest of us scuttle to keep up with his rapid, bouncy walk. Misha is from Orenburg, a city in the Urals. He is nineteen, tall and thin, with long, stringy hair, a pimpled face, and an expression of genial astonishment at the rest of the world. He left Orenburg a year ago, because it was boring and because his parents did not understand his desire to be a hippie. Since then, he’s been hitchhiking around the Soviet Union, moving from Central Asia to the Baltic with his little migratory flock of friends. He spent the summer living in a tent near the Black Sea, then came to Moscow, where he’s been staying with friend after friend. “ But it’s getting too cold here,” he said, tugging down his sleeves. Soon it will be time to move on to Kiev, and from there to Samarkand, with its sun and melons and that famous Central Asian hash. I asked Aldona how she became a hippie. In a small, shy voice, she told a nearly classic story. She is seventeen and has been away from home for four months. A little while ago, she was living with her family in Vilnius, attending an institute for advanced study of English. She was bored and unhappy; her father had recently remarried, and his new wife hated Aldona. “ I couldn’t stand it,” she said. “ I heard about the life of hippi, and I decided to leave hom e.” Like Misha and the rest of her friends, she has a strong, if vague, reverence for Tolstoy—whom she has never read. She and a friend left Lithuania and hitchhiked to Yasnaya Polyana,

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Tolstoy’s estate, near Tula; she had heard rumors that a great hippie gathering would take place there to celebrate the hundred and fiftieth birthday of the author. The gathering took place, but the two hundred hippies who showed up were denied entrance to the estate, because of their hair and clothing. They paid homage to their idol by setting up camp for two days in the woods outside the gate. Here Aldona met Misha and his friends. “ It was a paradise,” she said. “ Such gentle people, so loving and kind. I left my friend, and when the hippi came to Moscow, I came, too.” Now Aldona wears a bell around her neck and a pair of Soviet jeans with English words embroidered on the knee. “ It says T his Little Light of M ine,’ ” she told me. “ A spiritual. Mahalia Jackson. Ah, so beautiful.” In Russian and in English, “ beautiful” is one of Aldona’s favorite words. “ And what will you do in the next few years?” I asked. Aldona gazed at me uncomprehendingly, and I was struck by the beauty of her wide brown eyes and childish mouth. She pulled her short velvet jacket tighter around her. “ Well, I guess I ’ll be a hippie for the rest of my life,” she said. “ And do you know what my father says? He says that I am right—that if he were younger, he’d be a hippie to!” By now, we were rounding the corner onto Tverskoy Boulevard, with its central strip of iron-railed park, which looks like Paris. The brown leaves left on the maple trees were rattling with sleet, and a keen wind had started to blow. Taxis swooped by, splashing through puddles. The Café Aramat is near the square where Herzen Street intersects the boulevard; there are two churches there, and the magnificent Art Nouveau house where Gorky once lived. The café itself is a hole in the wall which you go down two steps to get into. Inside are five or six round tables and a counter where a surly old woman sells tea and buns. As the seven of us piled inside, blowing on our cold fingers and stamping our wet feet, she called over to us, “ So you’re going to buy something today, are you?” Misha said, “ Yes, Grandmother, we’ll drink tea all afternoon.” To me he whispered, “ They hate for us to come here. Often, in the evenings, they get the police to throw us out.” I had heard bad things about the Café Aramat. Friends had told me it was a place that foreigners should stay away from, because of police surveillance and frequent raids. Misha and his friends are very fond of the Aramat. Their name for it is Vavilon, or Babylon, because they claim that, like the ancient city, it is a meeting place of all nations. “ Here you can find hippies from all over the Soviet Union,” Misha once bragged to me. “ Sometimes from all over the world!” The place looked innocent enough, with its pink walls, half-empty tables, and students and middle-aged people reading newspapers or chat­ ting. We sat down, and Misha started lecturing me in a whisper about the

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police. Russian hippies have the same obsession with the police which American hippies once displayed; hippi and militsiya have a dependent, almost symbiotic relationship of mutual irritation. Misha’s friends speak of their police skirmishes with the expert fabling of soldiers who have seen action. One of the first questions Misha ever asked me about the United States was how the police are there. He laughs with delight whenever I tell him rude words for “ cop” : “ pig,” “flic." By this time, we were clutching hot cups of tea. Misha and his friends all added many lumps of sugar and drank greedily, sharing a few small buns. I reached for my bag and offered a carton of milk I’d just bought. At first, everyone declined scornfully, but then Aldona reached out shyly for the carton. In a few minutes, they were all passing the carton around and gulping down the milk; I guessed that for most of them it was the first meal of the day. I studied the faces around me and saw that every one of them— except Aldona’s, with its radiant young complexion—was blemished and haggard from lack of food and sleep. I thought of Misha’s queer elusive­ ness when he is asked where he lives in Moscow—“ With friends, with friends,” he always says—and tried to imagine the life of transients here: panhandling; sleeping on splintery floors, on sagging chairs, in the bleak, high-ceilinged vestibules of Soviet apartment houses. An interesting thought is that in the Soviet Union such a life style isn’t as much a rebellious departure from a social norm as it was for hippies in the United States. Even middle-class Russians are always putting friends up for the night, always borrowing or lending money for living expenses. The com­ munal life forced on most Russians by the housing crisis makes the hippies’ close-knit groups seem like a continuation of, rather than a break with, tradition. Besides, the Protestant ethic has never quite caught hold here. The Russian nature seems to hold fewer reserves of guilt about not working or about living off someone else; characteristic generosity and interdepen­ dence have placed such situations almost in the common run of things. I know a number of older Russians whose lives are as precarious as the hippies’. Inevitably, we started to talk about America. Misha and his friends have the typical Soviet fascination with things Western—especially the counterculture of the sixties. The talk quickly became an interrogation. Allen Ginsberg—w hat’s he doing now? What about Jerry Rubin? Jane Fonda? Eldridge Cleaver? What are American hippies doing now? Do young people still live in communes? Hitchhike? The faces of the group bent in toward me, their eyes searching mine ravenously. I felt a curious embar­ rassment as I tried to describe to them the changed temper of the seventies. It was a near-sad feeling, as if I were the bearer of tidings to an isolated group of believers that their leaders had lost the faith. They laughed at me

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in open disbelief when I said that Rubin had married a rich woman and was living with her in a luxurious apartment in New York. “ What about the revolution?” asked Petya, a young man wearing a hood. “ Most American radicals from the sixties have decided to work for change within the system ,” I answered glibly. There was pause. Misha pushed back his hair and lit a cigarette. (On his wrist I could see one of those woven-yarn charms that I myself used to wear nine or ten years ago—good karma.) “ I understand that most of those people are old now,” he said. “ Almost our parents’ age. But what about the hippi?" “ There are not very many hippies anymore. There are people who have decided to live in a different way. But they are not hippies.” “ But what is the youth doing?” he asked. “ It’s dancing in discothèques and hoping to get into law school,” I said. The dark afternoon had got darker, and the fluorescent lights in the café came on. The babushka had several times waddled over to us to say threateningly that if we weren’t going to order more tea we’d better go. The group at our table was a fluid one, with people constantly arriving and leaving, new arrivals bearing little gusts of cold air on their coats. One of these new arrivals, a beautiful girl with a cascade of hair under a drooping felt hat, whispered to Misha that we could go to the apartment of a friend of hers. The place was just off Gorky Street; we jogged the short distance, hurrying to get out of the sleet. I found that this is the way that Misha spends most of his days in Moscow: migrating between the Aramat and various ap artm en ts.

The place belonged to a young artist named Slava. He was a slight young man with a beard and a mild, sarcastic smile. We all sat down around a table in a small room with peeling walls and a bed heaped with clothes in one corner. By a window were some examples of Slava’s work, which was very bad: psychedelic pastel drawings alternated with murky religious scenes, apparently painted with a stick. We drank more tea, and Misha, Petya, and Aldona started teaching me how to panhandle. “ Hey, man, can you give me ten kopeks?” The group doubled up with laughter at my repetition. Slava put a Jefferson Airplane tape on a very fancy West German machine. He had a huge collection of tapes, mostly American jazz or sixties rock. He grinned when he saw that I was impressed. He borrowed Western records wherever he could, he said, and a friend at a music store taped them. We were all talking about the problems of the hippi with the urla , their name for working-class toughs. These men, short-haired young factory or construction workers, like Western hard rock but hate hippies and Hare Krishnas. (Yes, there are Hare Krishnas in Moscow.) Everybody

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seemed to know somebody else who had just been beaten up by the urla. I was interested in the stories about the urla , and still more interested in what Misha had to say about drugs. It seems that Soviet hippie culture places a lot less emphasis on drugs than the American hippies of the late sixties and early seventies did. It’s obvious why: scarcity and strong government suppression have left most Russians unexposed to drugs. (Just recently, a student friend asked me whether I’d ever “ shot up” marijuana and whether I was all right after the experience.) Misha and his friends have smoked marijuana—which they call trava (“ grass” )—and hashish a fair number of times; they say it’s not hard to get hold of either in Central Asia. Harder drugs—cocaine, heroin, LSD—they have not tried. The group laughed knowingly about different names for marijuana, but it was clear that getting stoned means very little in their lives. It was strange for me to see and hear all around me vestiges of the American drug culture of a decade ago—the psychedelic drawings, the fantastic clothes, Grace Slick wailing on the tape player—and to know that the core of the experience was missing. This seemed like one of the latest examples of Russia borrowing from but not content from the West. Misha and his friends like being crazy more than being stoned. Their vision of the ideal state of things is the universal hippie dream of a kind of gentle anarchy, where every mortal does his own divinely inspired thing in an atmosphere of peace and brotherhood. Because present normality accepts violence and repression, it follows that the insane must be on the right track. In the course of the afternoon, Aldona said to me, “ I want to be crazy. I hope I am .” A pretty typical desire, I thought, remembering our own adolescent crowning of insanity in the sixties. But it became a sad joke when I found out that Misha and two of his friends had spent time in insane asylums—a popular Soviet method for controlling intractable young people as well as older dissidents. Being locked up was a convenient— perhaps a deliberately courted—fate for these young men, since it helped them avoid the mandatory military service at age eighteen. But aside from a few jokes about haircuts and lack of knives they wouldn’t talk about the experience. “ Was it bad?” I asked Misha. For a minute, his face lost its expression of vague good will. “ Yes, very,” he said. Aldona stared at him with wide eyes. As it got later, we started to talk about dissent. Misha and his friends discuss political protest against the Soviet government with the same vague, eager enthusiasm with which they talk of any rejection of conven­ tion. In the same way, they—and most of my other young friends—are religious. They wear crucifixes and go to church regularly, partly because

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the Russian Orthodox Church provides the kind of pageantry that hippies are drawn to, and partly because church attendance is an act of noncon­ formity. Even church lingo has become an in thing. Misha mockingly crosses himself when something surprises him, and some of his friends say goodbye by raising a hand and intoning, “ God be with you, children.” The double attraction of pageantry and rebelliousness also draws the hippi to the culture of the pre-Revolutionary past. They adore anything old: peasant huts, the crumbling mansions near Arbat Streets, icons, jewelry. In politics, things are simple. There are the good guys—the young, the crazy, the gentle fans of Western music and culture. And there are the bad guys—the K.G.B., the Komsomol, parents, policemen. Misha and his friends are fuzzy on the Jewish question, and disapprove of violence, but they applaud any kind of dissident behavior as moving toward the new Eden they envision. “ Overthrowing the Party would mean happiness here,” Misha told me, leaning across the table with a beatific smile. “ Everyone could do what he wanted.” Certain incidents have become symbols or touchstones for them the way Kent State or the Chicago riots did for American youth. One of these is the folk-rock-concert demonstration that took place last summer in Len­ ingrad’s Palace Square. Petya had been there, and he described how Voice of America and the Leningrad newspapers had announced that Santana, Joan Baez, and the Beach Boys were coming to Leningrad on July 4th; how hundreds of kids—workers, students, hippies—had made their way to the city from all over the Soviet Union; how when the concert, without explanation, failed to occur, the angry and disappointed crowd began chanting and refused to disperse. (I found out later from American friends that the concert had been aborted early in the planning stages by Soviet officials, who quite naturally disapproved of anything having to do with Western music, youth, and the American Independence Day. The an­ nouncement in the Leningrad press was a profound error, which must have cost some journalist his job.) “ We were right under the windows of the Winter Palace,” said Petya, running his fingers through his hair. “ It was a real nation of youth. And do you know what happened? We were all angry and determined to stay. I was there with my good friend. We had been chanting ‘Santana! Santana!’ Then, farther up in the crowd, they started chanting ‘Down with the party!’ After that, we all started to yell it, and then the militsiya came with fire hoses.” “ Did you get beaten up?” I asked. I had heard five or six versions of this story, with and without chanting and fire hoses. “ Of course,” Petya said modestly. Next, the group took turns telling me about Kaunas, Lithuania. This is a city that has gone down in dissident lore as the scene of two days of

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rioting in May of 1972, after the funeral of Romas Kalanta, a Lithuanian Roman Catholic who had set fire to himself to protest Soviet rule, espe­ cially the suppression of Catholicism. “ Thousands of young people marched through the streets,” Aldona told me. “ The police beat them up, and arrested hundreds. The Russians sent in parachute troops and K.G.B. units.” “ And what do you think about that?” I asked, remembering that most Lithuanians I know are fiery patriots. Aldona gave me her lovely, naive smile. “ I think freedom is a beautiful thing,” she said. I had to go, and said so, but Misha pressed me to stay for a minute. “ We have something to show you,” he said. He reached into his shoulder bag and produced a large school notebook. He opened it and said, “ This is our book.” It was a neatly kept scrapbook of the American youth movement in the late nineteen-sixties. There were pictures of Rubin, of Leary, of Peter Fonda squinting over motorcycle handlebars, of Joplin, of Hendrix, of the archetypal hippie girl, with beads and cascading blond hair. The neatly clipped pictures were grainy and distorted—culled, I was sure, from the most improbable sources. The Cyrillic lettering under each picture was large and childish. Looking at this curious monument to the sixties, I felt amused and a little melancholy. Misha and his friends walked back to Arbatskaya Metro station with me. The sleet of the afternoon had turned into a stinging hail; the lights of the cars coming up Arbat Street showed up the pellets whirling through the dark. “ My God!” said Misha, trying to pull his collar up around his ears. “ What a wind!” “ It’ll soon be time to move on to Central Asia, right?” I said. “ You’re right. There’s still sun there. And melons.” Beside us, Aldona scurried along silently, her red cheeks buried in her fur collar, and her hair streaming out under her headband. Petya was taking long strides ahead of us, clutching his ragged hood and talking to a girl named Tanya about Bulgakov. In front of the Metro (the brick-colored entrance near the Praga Restaurant), we stopped and said goodbye. Rushhour crowds came shouldering by us and paused to stare at the hippi, with their fanciful clothes and bedraggled hair. “ How do you like our café and our people?” asked Misha. “ I like both very m uch,” I said. Aldona gave me a kiss, and a blond boy with a steel tooth said, in English, “ I dig it the most!” Then all the members of the group, much to my dismay, and much to the intense curiosity of the subway crowd, raised their hands and gave me a peace sign. I watched them, and wondered how this graft of the American

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past on the Russian present would survive. I wondered, too, about their future under the system—these children whose clothes and behavior can win them a stint in a mental hospital. But I couldn’t just stand there, so I raised my hand and returned the sign, wondering what, exactly, I meant by it.

Six L’Art pour l’Art One might describe him as a dandy strayed into Bohemia . . . his eyes colored like tobacco o f Spain. . . . A s to the mouth in which the teeth were white and p erfect it was seen under a slight and silky mustache which screened its contours . . . a fa c e painted by Leonardo da Vinci, the nose fine and delicate, with quivering nostrils, seem ed ever to be scenting vague perfum es.

,

—Théophile Gautier, A description of Baudelaire

The Peacock Feather E. M. Forster , 1959

A work of art, we are all agreed, is a unique product. But why? It is unique not because it is clever or noble or beautiful or enlightened or original or sincere or idealistic or useful or educational—it may embody any of those qualities—but because it is the only material object in the universe which may possess internal harmony. All the others have been pressed into shape from outside, and when their mold is removed they collapse. The work of art stands up by itself, and nothing else does. It achieves something which has often been promised by society, but always delusively. Ancient Athens made a mess—but the Antigone stands up. Renaissance Rome made a mess—but the ceiling of the Sistine got painted. James I made a mess—but there was M acbeth. Louis XIV—but there was 573

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Phèdre. Art for art’s sake? I should just think so, and more so than ever

at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our muddling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths; it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden: c ’est le meilleur tém oignage que nous puissions donner de notre dignité. Antigone

for A ntigone’s sake, M acbeth for M acbeth’s, “La Grande J a tte” pour “La Grande J a tte .”

If this line of argument is correct, it follows that the artist will tend to be an outsider in the society to which he has been born, and that the nineteenth-century conception of him as a Bohemian was not inaccurate. The conception erred in three particulars: it postulated an economic system where art could be a full-time job, it introduced the fallacy that only art matters, and it overstressed idiosyncrasy and waywardness—the peacock-feather aspect—rather than order. But it is a truer conception than the one which prevails in official circles on my side of the Atlantic—I don’t know about yours: the conception which treats the artist as if he were a particularly bright government advertiser and encourages him to be friendly and matey with his fellow citizens, and not to give himself airs. Estimable is mateyness, and the man who achieves it gives many a pleasant little drink to himself and to others. But it has no traceable connection with the creative impulse, and probably acts as an inhibition on it. The artist who is seduced by mateyness may stop himself from doing the one thing which he, and he alone, can do—the making of something out of words or sounds or paint or clay or marble or steel or film which has internal harmony and presents order to a permanently disarranged planet. This seems worth doing, even at the risk of being called uppish by journalists. I have in mind an article which was published some years ago in the London Times , an article called “ The Eclipse of the Highbrow,” in which the “ Average Man” was exalted, and all contemporary literature was censured if it did not toe the line, the precise position of the line being naturally known to the writer of the article. Sir Kenneth Clark, who was at that time director of our National Gallery, commented on this pernicious doctrine in a letter which cannot be too often quoted. “ The poet and the artist,” wrote Clark, “ are important precisely because they are not average men; because in sensibility, intelligence, and power of invention they far exceed the average.” These memorable words, and particularly the words “ power of invention,” are the Bohemian’s passport. Finished with it, he slinks about society, saluted now by a brickbat and now by a penny, and accepting either of them with equanimity. He does not consider too anxiously what his relations with society may be, for he is aware of something more important than that—namely the invitation to invent, to create order, and he believes he will be better placed for doing this if he

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attempts detachment. So round and round he slouches, with his hat pulled over his eyes, and maybe with a louse in his beard, and—if he really wants one—with a peacock’s feather in his hand. If our present society should disintegrate—and who dare prophesy that it won’t?—this old-fashioned and démodé figure will become clearer: the Bohemian, the outsider, the parasite, the rat—one of those figures which have at present no function either in a warring or a peaceful world. It may not be dignified to be a rat, but many of the ships are sinking, which is not dignified either—the officials did not build them properly. Myself, I would sooner be a swimming rat than a sinking ship—at all events I can look around me for a little longer—and I remember how one of us, a rat with particularly bright eyes called Shelley, squeaked out, “ Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” before he vanished into the waters of the Mediterranean.

The Dandy Charles Baudelaire , 1863

The man of wealth and leisure, who, even though weary of it, has no other occupation than the pursuit of pleasure; the man brought up in luxury and accustomed since his youth to the obedience of other men; the man, in short, who has no other profession but that of elegance, will always have a distinctive appearance, one that sets him utterly apart. Dandyism is an institution as strange and obscure as the duel. It is very ancient, for Caesar, Catilina and Alcibiades were amongst its most brilliant representatives; and it is very widespread, for Chateaubriand has found it in the forests and on the lake-shores of the New World. Dandyism, an institution above laws, has laws to which all its represen­ tatives—whatever extravagance or independence of character they may otherwise permit themselves—are strictlysubject. The English novelists, more than any others, have cultivated the novel of “ high life” ; and French authors, such as M. de Custine, who specialize in love stories, have always been careful, and very wisely so, to endow their characters with fortunes vast enough to enable them to pay without hesitation for all their fancies. These characters are therefore free from the need to follow any profession. They have no other purpose than to cultivate the idea of the beautiful in their own persons; to satisfy their desires, and to feel and think. They therefore possess, ad libitum and in huge measure, the time and money without which fancy is reduced to a daydream scarcely translatable into action. It is, unfortunately, quite true that without leisure and money love can be nothing but a plebeian orgy or the fulfilment of a conjugal duty. Instead of being a burning or fantastical caprice, it becomes a loathsome utility . My reason for speaking of love in connection with dandyism is that love is the natural occupation of the leisured; but the dandy does not make love his special aim. Similarly, my reason for mentioning money is that money 576

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is indispensable to people who make a cult of their desires; but the dandy does not wish to have money for its own sake; he would be content to be allowed to live indefinitely on credit; he leaves the coarse desire for money to baser mortals. Dandyism is not even, as many unthinking people seem to suppose, an immoderate interest in personal appearance and material elegance. For the true dandy these things are only a symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his personality. In his eyes, therefore, which seek, above all, distinction, the perfection of personal appearance consists in complete simplicity— this being, in fact, the best means of achieving distinction. What, then, is this ruling passion that has turned into a creed and created its own skilled tyrants? What is this unwritten constitution that has created so haughty a caste? It is, above all, a burning need to acquire originality, within the apparent bounds of convention. It is a sort of cult of oneself, which can dispense even with what are commonly called illusions. It is the delight in causing astonishment, and the proud satisfaction of never oneself being astonished. A dandy may be indifferent, or he may be unhappy; but in the latter case he will smile like the Spartan under the teeth of the fox. It will be seen that, in certain aspects, dandyism borders on spirituality and stoicism. But a dandy can never indulge in anything vulgar. If he committed a crime, he would perhaps not be too upset about it; but if this crime had some trivial cause, his disgrace would be irreparable. The reader should not be scandalized by this serious devotion to the frivolous. He should remember that there is a greatness in all follies, a strength in all extravagance. What a strange spiritual cult! For those who are at once its priests and victims, all the complicated material conditions to which they submit themselves—from the impeccable care of the person to the most dangerous forms of sport—are simply a gymnastic exercise designed to fortify the will and discipline the soul. Indeed, I was not far wrong in regarding dandyism as a sort of religion. The most rigorous monastic order, or the absolute rule of the Old Man of the Mountain, who commanded his intoxicated disciples to kill themselves, was not more despotic, nor obtained stricter obedience, than this creed of elegance and originality. It, too, imposes on its ambitious yet humble devotees—men, often, of mettle, passion, courage and contained energy— the terrible formula: Perinde ac cadaver! Whether the name they win for themselves be Corinthians, swells, bucks, lions or dandies, their origin is the same. They all have the same characteristics of oppositon and revolt. They all represent the best element in human pride—that need, which nowadays is too uncommon, to combat

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On Bohemia

and destroy triviality. This is what gives the dandy his haughty attitude, the attitude of a caste whose very reserve is a provocation. Dandyism arises especially in periods of transition, when democracy is not yet all-powerful and aristocracy is only partially tottering or brought low. In the disturbance of such periods a certain number of men, detached from their own class, disappointed and disorientated, but still rich in native energy, may form a project of founding a new sort of aristocracy, which will be all the more difficult to break because it will be based on the most precious and indestructible of human powers—on those celestial gifts that neither toil nor money can bestow. Dandyism is the last gleam of heroism in times of decadence. The fact that a type of dandy was discovered by a traveller in North America does not invalidate this statement; for there is nothing to prevent us from supposing that what we call the “ savage” tribes are the debris of great vanished civilizations. Dandyism is a setting sun. Like the great sinking star, it is superb, cold and melancholy. But alas! the rising tide of democracy, overwhelming and levelling everything, is day by day drowning these last champions of human pride, washing the waves of oblivion over the traces of these prodigious myrmi­ dons. In France the dandy is becoming more and more rare; although amongst our English neighbors the social conditions and the constitution (that true constitution, which expresses itself in daily life) will for a long time yet leave a place for the heirs of Sheridan, Brummell and Byron—if, that is to say, worthy heirs present themselves. All this may have seemed to the reader a digression, but in fact it is not one. The reflections and moralizing fancies provoked by an artist’s work are often the best introduction to them that a critic can offer. All the suggestions that an artist makes to us are the offspring of a begetting idea; and by describing each of these suggestions severally, one may convey a notion of the idea itself. Need I say that, when Mr. G. sets one of his dandies down on paper, he always gives him his historical character—his legendary character, I would venture to say, were it not that we are here concerned with matters of the present time, and with matters that are commonly regarded as objects of mirth? You can find everything there: that alertness of bearing; that certainty of behavior; that simplicity in the air of supremacy; that manner of wearing a coat or managing a horse; those attitudes always serene but indicative of strength—all the things that cause us to reflect, when our eye lights upon one of those privileged beings in whom the gracious and the formidable are so mysteriously compounded: “ There goes what may be a rich man, but is certainly a resting Hercules!” The characteristic beauty of the dandy consists, above all, in his air of

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reserve, which in turn, arises from his unshakeable resolve not to feel any emotion. It might be likened to a hidden fire whose presence can be guessed at; a fire that could blaze up, but does not wish to do so. This is what is so perfectly expressed in Mr. G .’s pictures.

The First Night of Hernani Anthony Esler, 1971

The Romantic Bohemians began to gather outside the Théàtre Français as early as one o ’clock in the afternoon that chilly February day in 1830. They were supposed to be admitted early, at Monsieur Hugo’s own request, so that they could seat themselves strategically before the pay­ ing—and presumably hostile—audience arrived. They came at one, but they were not actually admitted to the theater until three. For two hours, therefore, a crowd of several hundred of the author’s special friends from the Left Bank milled about in the rue de Richelieu , blowing on their hands, laughing and joking—and creating a spectacle that was the talk of Paris long before the next day’s papers were out. For two hours that celebrated afternoon, the good burghers of Paris had a look at “ those people” from beyond the Seine, the writers and artists of the Latin Quarter. The solid citizen could only stare open-mouthed at this astonishing eruption of the apostles of the new art into the decent parts of the city. The young Romantics were proud to acknowledge Victor Hugo as the leader of their school, and they came to the premiere of his new play, Hernani , dressed to do him honor. At first glance, one might have thought it was a fancy-dress ball—increasingly popular in the 1830’s—or perhaps carnival season. These artistic revolutionaries had, of course, no use for the dark, swallow-tailed coat, the somber vest, the top hat, high collar, and cravat that constituted the bourgeois uniform. The bearded, longhaired Bohemians came resplendent in satin and velvet, brightly colored and cut to fantastic patterns out of history, fiction, and art. There were “ Robespierre” waistcoats and Renaissance capes, doublets out of Rubens’ paintings and Spanish cloaks out of every young Romantic’s dreams. Revolutionary themes and the more colorful periods of history predomi­ nated. It was a gaudy crowd that gathered that afternoon for the premiere of 580

The First Night of Hernani

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Hernani , “ an invasion of young Shakesperian barbarians” that the middle-

class, middle-aged majority of Paris play-goers was not going to like at all.1 It was to be an almost unique occasion in theatrical history—a first night when the audience upstaged the play. Victor Hugo had labored long and hard to get this drama on the stage. There had been the usual interminable wrangles with the royal censor. There had been arguments too with the star actress, Mademoiselle Mars, who had objected loudly to some of the “ unclassical” lines she was asked to recite. The reason, as she candidly admitted, was the generation gap: she was fifty years old, and she still loved the neoclassical plays she had starred in when she was young. Hugo, with a shrewd sense of the dramatic (and perhaps of the commer­ cial possibilities), had closed all rehearsals to the press. Public curiosity was thus whetted beyond anything in recent memory. As the last days of February approached, and the ice began to break up on the Seine, all playgoing Paris waited to see if the author of the shocking “ Preface” to Cromwell —the literary manifesto of the French Romantics—could prac­ tice what he preached. Or, more precisely, if he would dare to practice such preachments. One formality remained: the question of the claqueurs. The Paris cla queurs were the hired cheering section without which no play dared open. Every dramatist employed them during the first few nights of a play’s run, to get the piece off to a good start. Hugo, unconventional as usual, decided not to hire any. Or, more precisely, he refused to make use of the professionals who were readily available. New art, he blandly declared, requires a new audience. He would invite his own claque—the poets, playwrights, novelists, painters, sculptors, architects, composers, and musicians who thronged the cafés, artists’ studios, and cheap lodging houses of the Left Bank. Almost to a man, they were members of the younger generation. Some, like Hugo himself, were almost thirty, mature men soon to put youthful things behind them. Others, like Théophile Gautier, a leading light and contemporary chronicler of the new youth, were barely twenty, members of the budding generation of the 1830’s. But whether their young manhood was just ending or just beginning, “ in the army of the Romantics,” as Gautier nostalgically recalled in later years, “ everybody was young.” 2 The Romantic Self-Image Incarnate At three o ’clock, the somewhat distressed management finally let them in. Jostling, cheerful, enthusiastic despite the cold and the inconvenience,

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On Bohemia

the garishly dressed young Bohemians deployed themselves strategically about the theater. They had hours to wait before curtain time, but they had come prepared. They had their dinner with them, and wine to go with it. They made a noisy, boisterous picnic, there in the cathedral twilight of the empty theater. They talked enthusiastically about the play, which “ Victor” —as they casually referred to their most celebrated member—had read aloud to some of them. They sang songs, Hugo’s own poems and others perhaps less elevated in tone. One minor problem marred their pleasure: the public toilets were locked, and there was no one around in the afternoon who had a key to open them. Not overly concerned with the lack of such amenities, the young Bohemians relieved themselves in a far corner of the balcony. With noise and laughter and horseplay, the hours passed. Seven o ’clock approached. The gaslights were lit, and the paying customers filed in. The barbarians from the Left Bank gave them an exuberant welcome. Pretty young women in particular, sweeping down the aisle bejeweled and bare-shouldered, were greeted with enthusiastic applause that flushed the faces of their escorts. Gentlemen and ladies alike rolled up their eyes and turned away shocked noses from the scattered remnants of the picnic lunch, the telltale odor from a corner of the balcony. It was all quite enough, as a frantic manager informed Monsieur Hugo, to ruin the play before the curtain even rose. Rise it did, however, and the play began. Or rather, it made every effort to begin. But the “ Battle of Hernani ’ commenced with the first lines spoken on the stage, and few lines after that were heard through to their conclusion. Few lines, in fact, were ever heard at all. The play of Hernani was a showcase for all the Romantic heresies. It was a historical melodrama, like so many of the famous early Romantic productions. As such, it stressed local color, the brilliant pageantry of the High Renaissance, far more than the eternal verities and conscience crises of French Classical tragedy. The classical unities of time and place were cheerfully ignored: the action spanned several months of time (instead of the traditional twenty-four hours), and leaped from one side of Europe to the other. The structure of the verse—and alert French audiences had ears trained to catch verse rhythms—was loose and free, far too much so by neoclassical standards. Altogether it was a gaudy, freewheeling, and totally unclassical piece, sure to rouse the enthusiasm of the Romantic and the ire of the traditionalist. Above all, Hernani himself, the Spanish bandit who is the hero of the play, was certain to stir the souls of the younger members of the audience. Hernani was the Romantic self-image incarnate. A man of mystery and passion, a doomed outlaw in a society that refused to recognize his true

The First Night of Hernani

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greatness, he was everything the typical young writer or artist of the Latin Quarter imagined himself to be. The Bohemians could not help but see themselves reflected in this story of the mysterious Hernani’s doomed love for Doña Sol and his desperate feud with the Emperor of Spain. Each long-haired youth saw himself as a similarly proscribed outsider in bourgeois society. Each willingly, fer­ vently confessed to being, like Hernani, the slave of his own dark passions. Each imagined himself to be just such a man of unacknowledged greatness, a genius unrecognized by an unjust world. And many of them felt a perverse pleasure in the notion that they too were damned, doomed souls, victims of forces in themselves they hardly understood. When death comes at last for Hernani—on his wedding night—every young heart pounded with the shock of recognition. Don’t Laugh, Lady—Your Teeth Are Showing Or would have done, if any significant portion of the play had been heard, by the Bohemians or by anyone else. But with the first words of the first act, pandemonium broke loose: Can it be he? ’Tis surely someone on the secret Stair . . .3

This was rank enjambement, the running over of a clause or phrase into the second line, and it was strictly against the rules of classical prosody. It may seem a small thing to the modern ear, but it was as blatant a sin in the theater of those days as, say, sloppy cutting or camera work to a modern moviegoer. It brought snorts of derision from more than one neoclassical partisan in the boxes. This in turn stirred the champions of the new art to vocal defense of the piece. And the battle was on. “ Ridiculous! The man can’t write, that’s all!” “ Can’t write?” a long-haired, garishly clothed youth would swivel in his seat to answer. “ Why, any fool can see the author’s purpose here— ” Angry disputes broke out all over the house. Other spectators shushed them at first, then were sucked into the arguments. Argument itself broke down, gave way to insult. One society lady laughed shrilly all through the intensely moving “ por­ trait scene.” “ Don’t laugh, lady,” a young Bohemian shouted with brutal candor, “ your teeth are showing!” “ Tattooed savages!” sneered the bald-pated classicists. “ Mummies!” howled the hairy youth.

584

On Bohemia

All communication broke down in the polarized house. There was only the clash of sound, the boos and hisses and jeering laughter of the old and orthodox against the cheers and bravos of the young Romantics.4 The premiere had been everything the establishment press could desire, and they emptied the vials of their scorn on the wild men from the wrong side of the river. Victor Hugo, they said, had dragged in “ spectators worthy of his play, a kind of bandits, ragged and uncultivated, scraped up from God knows what disgusting slum, who proceeded to turn a respecta­ ble hall into a nauseating cellar . . . ” The Left Bank claque had sung “ obscene” and even “ sacrilegious” songs. They had “ given themselves up to an orgy” which had “ prophaned the temple of Melpomene forever.” 5 Thereafter it became a fad in fashionable circles to go “ have a laugh at Hernani .” 6 Elegant playgoers sat reading their newspapers ostentatiously throughout the play. Some sat all evening with their backs to the stage, conversing loudly with their friends. Some simply rose in the middle and stomped disgustedly out of the theater, slamming the doors behind them. The play’s supporters, supplied with free tickets, continued to come night after night to answer the Philistines in kind. And if sufficient provo­ cation was not forthcoming, the younger generation was more than willing to take the offensive themselves. “ Four of my janissaries offer their services,” a friend charged with ticket distribution among the artists’ studios wrote Hugo. “ I guarantee my men. They are the sort that would chop off heads to get at the periwigs.” 7 Students at the university and even in the secondary schools were excited by the controversy. News of the continuing struggle between Romantic and classic, youth and the establishment, spread even into the provinces. At Toulouse, one young enthusiast fought a duel over Hernani. For many, the “ Battle of Hernani” was probably no more than a game, and, of course, a chance to bait their enemies in public. But for some, at least, this was a genuine cause, a clash of high ideals. Given the Romantic temper of this artistically inclined band of social drop-outs, Théophile Gautier perhaps did not exaggerate when he called it a “ beginning of free, young, and new thought,” the rallying point of a whole generation of “ young men . . . mad for art and poetry.” 8 Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Théophile Gautier, H isto ire du rom an tism e (Paris, 1927), p. 102. Ibid. Victor Hugo, H ernani (Boston, 1900), lines 1-2. Adèle Hugo, V ictor H u go ra co n té p a r un tém oin de sa v ie , (Paris, n.d.), II, 342349; Gautier, H isto ire du rom an tism e, pp. 2, 97 ff; and Alexandre Dumas, M y M em oirs, translated by E. M. Waller (London, 1908), IV, 23-26.

The First Night of Hernani 5. 6. 7. 8.

Adèle Hugo, 11, 341. John E. Matzke, Introduction to Victor Hugo, Hernani, p. xxvii. Gérard de Nerval to Victor Hugo, quoted in Adèle Hugo, II, 349. Gautier, Histoire du rom antisme, pp. 93, 101, 117-119.

585

Ubu Roi, or Hernandi AU Over Again Roger Shattuck, 1961

[Alfred] Jarry finally had his way about the production, after carrying Ubu like a cancer inside him for eight years. Two excellent actors were found for the roles: Firmin Gémier, borrowed from the Comédie-Fran­ çaise, and Louis France. All literary Paris was primed for the event. Jarry’s friends saw to it that every critic was present at the générale , and the old Théâtre Nouveau in the Rue Blanche was filled to the last seat with partisans and enemies, with symbolists, decadents, naturists, indepen­ dents, and the Mercure faithful, to hear the enormity Jarry had perpe­ trated. Loyal subscribers scarcely knew what they were in for. December 11, 1896, the opening night, is worth describing in detail. There had been nothing like it since the wild prem ière of Victor Hugo’s Hernani in 1830, when Théophile Gautier and Gérard de Nerval carried the day for roman­ ticism by highly organized demonstrations. Before the curtain went up, a crude table was brought out, covered with a piece of old sacking. Jarry appeared, looking dead white, for he had made himself up like a streetwalker to face the footlights. Nervously sipping a glass of water, he spoke in his flattest, most clipped tones. For ten minutes, he sat in front of the explosive crowd, thanking the people who had helped in the production, referring briefly to the traditions of the Guignol theater, and mentioning the masks the actors would wear and the fact that the first three acts would be performed without intermission. He concluded in a more properly Ubuesque vein. In any case we have a perfect décor, for just as one good way o f setting a play in Eternity is to have revolvers shot off in the year 1000, you will see doors open on fields of snow under blue skies, fireplaces furnished with clocks and swinging wide to serve as doors, and palm trees growing at the foot o f a bed so that little elephants standing on bookshelves can browse on them. As to the orchestra, there is none. Only its volume and timbre will be m issed, for various pianos and percussion will execute Ubuesque themes from back­

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stage. The action, which is about to begin, takes place in Poland, that is to say: Nowhere.

In these earnest nonsense lines Jarry was already insinuating that the play is more than it appears, that the true setting of farce is (like Poland, a country long condemned to the nonexistence of partition) an Eternity of Nowhere, and that contradiction is the mode of its logic. The speech did not exactly insure a sympathetic reception. Jarry vanished with his table; the curtain went up on the set—the handiwork of Jarry himself, aided by Pierre Bonnard, Vuillard, ToulouseLautrec, and Sérusier. Like every other feature of this performance, the set has been described countless times. Arthur Symons, one of the few Englishmen present at this “ symbolist farce,” as he calls it, recalled every detail. . . . the scenery was painted to represent, by a child’s conventions, indoors and out o f doors, and even the torrid, temperate, and arctic zones at once. Opposite you, at the back o f the stage, you saw apple trees in bloom, under a blue sky, and against the sky a small closed window and a fireplace . . . through the very midst o f which . . . trooped in and out the clamorous and sanguinary persons of the drama. On the left was painted a bed, and at the foot o f the bed a bare tree and snow falling. On the right there were palm trees . . . a door opened against the sky, and beside the door a skeleton dangled. A venerable gentleman in evening dress . . . trotted across the stage on the points of his toes between every scene and hung the new placard on its nail. (Studies in Seven Arts)

Gémier, swollen and commanding in his pear-shaped costume (but without a mask, despite Jarry’s campaign), stepped forward to speak the opening line—a single word. He had not known how to interpret the role until Lugné-Poe had suggested he imitate the author’s own voice and jerky stylized gestures. The midget Jarry truly sired the monster Ubu. In a voice like a hammer, Gémier pronounced an obscenity which Jarry had appro­ priated to himself by adding one letter. “ M e r d r e ”, Gémier said. “ Shite.” It was fifteen minutes before the house could be silenced. The m ot de Cambronne 1 had done its work; the house was pandemonium. Those who had been lulled by Jarry’s opening speech were shocked awake; several people walked out without hearing any more. The rest separated into two camps of desperately clapping enthusiasts and whistling scoffers. Fist fights started in the orchestra. The critics were on the spot, their reactions observed by both sides. Edmond Rostand smiled indulgently; Henry Fouquier and Sarcey, representing the old guard, almost jumped out of their seats. A few demonstrators simultaneously clapped and whistled in divided sentiments. Mallarmé sat quiet, waiting to see more of the “ prodi­

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gious personage” to whose author he addressed a letter the following day. Jarry’s supporters shouted, “ You wouldn’t understand Shakespeare ei­ th er.” Their opponents replied with variations on the mot of the evening. Fernand Hérold in the wings startled the audience into silence for a moment by turning up the house lights and catching people with their fists raised and standing on their seats. The actors waited patiently, beginning to believe that the roles had been reversed and they had come to watch a performance out front. Finally, Gémier improvised a jig and sprawled out on the prom pter’s box. His diversion restored enough order to allow the action to proceed to the next “ m erdre,” when the audience took over once more. The interrup­ tions continued for the rest of the evening, while Père Ubu murdered his way to the throne of Poland, pillaged the country, was defeated by the king’s son aided by the czar’s army, and fled cravenly to France, where he promised to perpetrate further enormities on the population. The story of Ubu Roi is no more than this.2 Père Ubu and Mère Ubu use language more scatological than erotic, and Rachilde maintains that the audience whistled because they “ expected this Punch and Judy of an Ubu to function sexually” and were disappointed. The curtain rang down that night and the next on the only two performances of Ubu Roi until it was revived by Gémier in 1908. For the Théâtre de l’Œuvre it was the catastrophe that made it famous. Also present in the house was a young Irishman by the name of William Butler Yeats. Despite a very limited knowledge of the language, his description of the performance is worth repeating. I go to the 1st performance o f Jarry’s Ubu Roi, at the Theatre de l’Oeuvre, with Rhymer who had been so attractive to the girl in the bicycling costume. The audience shake their fists at one another, and Rhymer whispers to me, “ There are often duels after these performances,” and explains to me what is happening on the stage. The players are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like wooden frogs, and I can see for m yself that the chief personage, who is some kind o f king, carries for a sceptre a brush o f the kind that we use to clean a closet. Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have shouted for the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I am very sad, for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more. I say, after S. Mallarmé, after Verlaine, after G. Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God. (Autobiography)

No event marks more clearly than this the close of one era and the imminence of another. Yeats did not have to understand French to perceive the significance of Ubu, natural off-spring of the turbulence of the nineties.

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Notes 1. One o f Napoléon’s officers at the Battle o f Waterloo, General Cambronne, heard a report that one of his companies of guards was surrounded. His heroic response o f “M erde” became the m ot de Cambronne. Subsequently, the word achieved a paradoxical existence as an acceptable talisman of good luck said to a friend going on a journey. Still, public utterance o f the word was, in 1896, unthinkable. 2. One obvious and neglected source o f the action is the libretto o f Chabrier’s comic opera Le roi malgré lui, which concerns a fictitious king o f Poland, Laski, his grand palatin (out of which title Jarry & Co. forged the three palotins or “ palatoons” ), and a generally farcical sequence of events. The opera had its widely discussed prem ière in 1887, just the year before Jarry entered the lycée in Rennes. The circumstances o f the rout o f Ubu may well have been lifted from Brillat-Savarin, one of whose “ Examples of Obesity” in P hysiologie du goût relates the scene perfectly. “ In the case o f the King of Poland, his obesity came close to causing his death, for having fallen among the Turkish cavalry before whom he had been obliged to flee, he was saved by his attendants.”

Dinners of Bohemia, Ancient and Modern John Paul Bocock , 1901

The author of the immortal “ Ballad of Bouillabaisse” remembered that he had often and often, in his airy flights to the good times of antiquity, “ cut off great collops of the smoking beeves under Achilles’ tent, and sat down to a jovial, scrambling dinner along with Penelope’s suitors at Ithaca.” That was going as far back in the lore of gormandizing as was possible for even such an expert as Thackeray. Beef, mutton, bread, salt and wine were, perhaps, as well prepared as aptly served in Penelope’s well ordered household as they were, two thousand years later, by the varlets of William the Conqueror. From Homer to Spenser, the art of dining stood still— except in Greece and Rome, in the age which Horace illuminated and Lucullus disgraced. The barbarian conquerors of the Imperial City soon turned the hands of the dinner clock back to the time of the Trojan war. Here is Pope’s description of a typical feast in the tent of Achilles: Patroclus o’er the blazing fire Heaps in a brazen vase three chines entire; The brazen vase Automedon sustains Which flesh of porker, sheep and goat contains. Meanwhile, Patroclus sweats the fire to raise, The tent is brightened with the rising blaze; Then, when the languid flames at length subside, He strows a bed of glowing embers wide; Above the coals the smoking fragments turns And sprinkles sacred salt from lifted urns; With bread the glittering canisters they load. The first fat offerings, to the immortals due, Amidst the greedy flames Patroclus threw, Then each indulging in the social feast His thirst and hunger soberly represt.” 590

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From which it appears that there was, first, braised meat, and then grilled bones, over which the salt was sprinkled, just as they were snatched, with the fingers, from the glowing coals. The wine of Samnium was served in embossed silver loving-cups; there was no drinking to speak of until the eating was done. Horace, the greatest name in the annals of ancient Bohemia, takes up the art of dining where “ the blind old bard of Scio’s rocky isle” left it. None better than this wonderful Roman, whose light-hearted lyrics defy the ages, “ knew and studied the cheap philosophy of life.” He was as gay, as eloquent, as witty in the palace of Maecenas on the Esquiline Hill as in his own villa on the Sabine Farm. His genius won him the friendship of the Emperor, and his songs of love and battle, of the fountain of Bandusia and the death of Cleopatra, come home to the heart, even after twenty centuries. Turned loose in the streets of Rome, after the battle of Philippi, without money, his patrimony and his political influence lost in the downfall of his patron Brutus; unknown, save as the son of a freedman, Horace might readily have fallen to the dissolute level of his immortal brother and successor, Villon. He showed himself the greatest of all Bohemians, scorning a dishonorable action, relying on his own resources, seeking the favor of those who could help him, not by pitiful whining, but in such manly fashion that the choice spirits of the famous Augustan era speedily welcomed him to the brotherhood. Virgil, Pollio, Plotius, Varius and Maecenas became his friends. Some years later, they accompanied him on that most famous of historical revels, the journey to Brundusium. “ While in my senses,” he declared, when he met them at Sinuessa, “ nothing can I prefer to a pleasant friend.” Thereupon, the glorious Romans set out to make a night of it; not one night, but fifteen nights and days, they turned into a frolic, as they staged it along the Appian Way for three hundred and twelve miles. “ Dinner is the meal of the body, supper the repast of the intellect,” some modern Horatian has said. That was a notable supper, at the villa of Cocceius, seven days out from Rome; the rival clowns entertaining the company with their quips, as the authors of the Odes and Eclogues clinked goblets over the table, and laughed the hours away. Horace says: “ Jucunde coenam produximus.” Yet it was not for over-indulgence that they pro­ longed the pleasures of the table. At the Sabine Farm, to which Horace did not hesitate to invite such a fashionable beauty as Tyndaris, his own favorite “ prandium,” or mid-day meal, consisted of “ onions, pulse and pancakes,” his “ coena,” or dinner, when he was alone, of “ pot herbs and a hock of smoke-dried bacon.” But, when a friend came, “ or a neighbor, or an acceptable guest,” the genius of Bohemia flashed from the Bandusian fountain. “ We lived well,” says the poet, “ not on fishes fetched from the

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city, but on a pullet, and a kid, then some dried grapes and nuts, with a large fig.” That was the first course dinner on record, a well chosen repast. Then Ceres smoothed with wine the melancholy of the contracted brow— “ Explicuit vino contractae seria frontis” —the right function of the juice of the grape; after which, the poet continues, “ it was our diversion to have no other regulation in our cups, save that against drinking to excess.” No wonder Dean Milman depicts Horace as “ the most sensible and delightful person to be encountered in Roman society.” The “ coena,” or dinner, as generally served in the houses of wealthy Romans, consisted of a great number of courses, sometimes beginning with oysters, as do the conventional dinners of to-day. Then came one course of fish after another, one dish of birds or game, in great silver forms, or salvers, following another, but slightly different. The turkey was unknown, as was the terrapin. There were ducks; perhaps as good as the canvas-back; such a water-fowl, stuffed with a partridge, in which was a lark, stuffed in turn with a fig-pecker, constituted a not unusual game course. Two thousand song birds were served in one dish to Apicius, and one can imagine how easily he spent a fortune of nearly five million dollars on his cuisine. In that time of wanton luxury, which some moderns are said to emulate, soup was unknown. Ice had no place in the household except to cool wine, to which it was applied with great ingenuity, a lump of ice being actually frozen in a glass jar about which the Falernian wine was poured in a larger vase. The linen and silver and gold plate were magnificent. Down the succeeding ages of darkness comes no ray of the true light until we reach the Tentmaker of Nishapur, Omar Khayyam. That gifted Persian was studying under the Imam Mowaffak when William of Nor­ mandy was winning the battle of Hastings. Learning the Koran, by his side, sat Hasan, the future Old Man of the Mountains, whom the first Crusaders learned to fear. “ A book of verses” —which may have been the Carmina of Horace, for all we know, “ a jug of wine, a loaf of bread,” and the particular Persian maid whom he addressed as “ Thou,” were Omar’s inspiration. William conquered England; Omar went on drinking wine. Hasan and his schoolmates rose to public power and fortune; Omar went on writing verse. The roses withered in his garden; Omar tarried beneath the vine and looked forward to the spring: His quatrains will not be forgotten, “ pace” Andrew Lang: While the rose blows along the river brink.

From Rome to Persia, from Persia to France flits the genius of Bohemia, to whom time and space are as nothing, and, one morning in the year 1431,

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breathes upon the new-born François Villon, the “ sad, bad, mad, glad brother” of all the poets. The man and his times have been admirably reconstructed by Stevenson, who if he had had health, would have been a prince in Bohemia, in “ A Lodging for the Night,” and in “ François Villon, Student, Poet and Housebreaker.” Mürger’s Bohemians, a disreputable crew, took Villon for their model, even in his disgraces. For his were the love of beauty and of wine, a healthy and continuing appetite, and no money to speak of. A Villon Dinner, in Bohemia, a . d . 1450: the snow flying over the housetops of Paris; the piercing wind howling down the bleak alleys; the wolves prowling in the suburban forests, threatening new incursions into the very streets themselves, scantily lighted by the wine-shop windows; homeless women freezing to death in the church doors; the poet and his companions shivering in a garret, starved since yesterday, waiting to rob a rectory, until honest folk have gone to bed; Villon scratching away at a Ballade of Roast Fish, which has occupied his muse for days. Regnier de Montigny whispers in Villon’s ear, slips downstairs and returns in a few minutes with a bag of charcoal lifted bodily from the shop around the corner. As he and Villon pile the brazier high, and start the flames to playing and the coals to glowing, Colin de Cayeux proposes that they all three go foraging. In less than an hour, they are back home with a wealth of booty: Du Poisson: A hamper full, sent by the fishmonger, as he supposed, to the Seigneur de Brisetout, whose menial Villon represents himself. Villon, accom ­ panying the fishmonger’s boy, meets, on the way to the Maison de Brisetout, a Friar in whose ear he whispers: “ This, my poor brother, is a lunatic; he raves always o f money; can you not confess and comfort him?” The Friar agrees. Villon goes to the boy, takes the hamper, and whispers: “ There is the Seigneur’s treasurer, go to him and he will pay you .” Villon and the fish have disappeared, while the Friar is trying to quiet the “ lunatic” who persists in demanding his money. Des Trippes: festoons o f it, seized in the confusion caused by Colin de Cayeux’s kicking a stray dog under the tripe-stand, and so exciting the market woman’s angry passions that she neglects everything else to belabor the unfortunate cur; while Colin and the tripe vanish. Du Roti: Regnier de Montigny has been pricing meat, when Villon saunters loftily into the butcher’s shop, and affects to take offense at the airs o f Regnier, who is monopolizing the butcher’s attention, forsooth. They quarrel; fall to blows; the butcher runs out to look for the watch, and Colin steals off with a roast, while Villon and Regnier pursue the game o f fisticuffs until safely around the corner; then they follow Colin to the garret. Du Vin: a great jug o f white wine de Baigneux, one o f two facsimile jugs owned by the Villon menage. One o f these is filled with water; the other has been sent

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to the Pomme du Pin for wine, to be paid for on approval. Villon tastes the wine, says it is not what he ordered, and indignantly orders it back to the Pineapple Inn; the jug o f water having been deftly substituted for the jug o f wine while he and the garçon are wrangling. Du Pain tendre: fresh bread, delivered to Villon, around the corner (they never receive goods in their own garret), by the baker’s boy, who is bid to hurry back and get “ another panier full” and collect for them both on his return.

Two hundred years later, the Three Musketeers of Dumas, eating much the same food as Villon, drinking no less wine, entered the Kingom of Bohemia and possessed it. The wines of France were already famous; the cooking and service, which speedily became the universal standard, were then growing in delicacy and precision. Yet, when D ’Artagnan dines with Aramis, on the eve of the re-establishment of their famous brotherhood in arms, he cuts up fowls, partridges and hams with small regard for prece­ dence or garnishment, and quaffs the white wine of Anjou and the red wine of Beaune with equal zest. There was no suggestion of white wine with white meats and red wine with dark; nor was the chicken served with artichokes or potatoes, the game next with cauliflower, and the ham last, with the salad, as a French chef would probably advise, and perhaps insist upon, in our time. Yet the dinner was in the home of Aramis, who was familiar with all the refinements of the courts of Louis xv and of the two great Cardinals. And there were no two men of subtler spirit, with souls more quickly set to music by the song of the sword or the swish of the petticoat. The French chef had been developed by the aid of olive oil, truffles and mushrooms, with a spray of garlic, when Napoleon came on the scene, a hundred and fifty years after the times of Athos and Porthos, D ’Artagnan and Aramis. The product as well as the creator of the art of dining, this chef gave to his creations the names of famous victories, eminent artists and composers of music. We know that Napoleon ate chicken “ à la Marengo” the night after that bloody battle; what the chef served to him the night before Austerlitz we do not know, except that it disagreed with him. Art is yet to set its seal of approval on a dish which will beget great thoughts, a sauce full of masterful purposes, a wine effervescent with lofty inspirations. One man drinks champagne and beats his wife; another, under its promptings, will write poems, like Schiller. Dryden did not reveal, if he knew, what food and wine were served at Alexander’s Feast. History declares Alexander the Great carried the Iliad about with him in a golden box, and was “ fond of eating and drinking—what? Tennyson ate boiled beef while he wrote the “ Idylls of the King.” The relation of brawn to brain has not been determined.

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“ Every man of capacity,” said Lord Shaftesbury, “ holds within himself two men, the wise and the foolish; each of them ought freely to be allowed his turn.” Having vainly offered his services to Dickens as an illustrator of the Pickwick P apers , “ in 1837, Thackeray decided to take a turn in the Capital on the Seine, and see if he could prosper better by his pen than by his pencil. The world knows him, now that he has been dead thirty-eight years, as a spectacled lecturer, a sedate English gentleman, the brilliant author of Vanity Fair and Henry Esm ond , Pendennis and The Virginians , one of the fathers of Victorian fiction. But Paris knew him as the wisest of “ gourm ets,” the most artistic of “ bons vivants,” the most critical of connoisseurs of the “ cuisine,” the rollicking genius at whose knock Parisian Bohemia opened its doors and owned its master, from the Boule­ vard to the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs. Could Horace, or Villon, have excelled this: This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is— A sort o f soup or broth, or brew, Or hotpotch o f all sorts of fishes That Greenwich never could outdo; Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffern, Soles, onions, garlic, roach and dace, All these you eat at Terré’s tavern In that one dish o f Bouillabaisse. Where are ye, old companions trusty, Of early days, here met to dine? Come, waiter, quick, a flagon crusty— I’ll pledge them in the good old wine; The kind old voices and old faces My memory can quick retrace; Around the board they take their places And share the wine and Bouillabaisse. Ah me, how quick the days are flitting! I mind me o f a time that’s gone, When here I’d sit, as now I’m sitting, In this same place— but not alone. A fair young form was nestled near me, A dear, dear face looked fondly up And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me —There’s no one now to share my cup. I drink it as the fates ordain it, Come, fill it, and have done with rhymes; Fill up the lonely glass and drain it In memory of dear old times.

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Art for Art’s Sake in England: A Left-Wing View Dmitri Mirsky, 1935

Earlier, in the youthful stage, the flowering stage, of British capitalism, the situation was quite different. The intellectuals made no attempt to think independently of their class, but rather were proud of belonging to it. In short, there were no intellectuals—no intelligentsia—as a special class. There were simply the “ educated classes,” absolutely identical with the propertied classes, and they were the “ liberal professions” or, as they are called in English, just plainly “ the professions.” For these professions a tranquil little corner had from time immemorial been reserved in English bourgeois society. So long as freedom, initiative and competition ruled in the economic life of Britain, the liberal professions, such as the medical or the legal, basked in an atmosphere of privilege and monopoly, which assured them a share of the profits much in advance of what prevailed on the other side of the Channel. The learned intellectuals of the old univer­ sities were even still better off. They were in an especially privileged position, as they were recipients of immense revenues from properties which they had been busy accumulating since the middle ages. Up to the end of the nineteenth century their bonds with the church were very real ones. This favoured position of the intellectual classes of those days is to be explained, firstly, by the fact that the British bourgeoisie came to power by compromise with the aristocracy, and, secondly, by the circumstance that while Great Britain did not maintain a large bureaucracy, and kept a comparatively small army, it was possible to let its intellectually qualified members enjoy the part of the profits which in continental countries were absorbed by civil service and army. As a result of that the professions were not more advanced, but more reactionary than their mother class, and acted not as mouthpieces of the bourgeoisie pure and simple, but as mouthpieces of the common interests of bourgeoisie plus bourgeoisified 597

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aristocracy—that is to say, of capitalists together with landed families who maintained their position by turning capitalists too. Together with the church, which in England is also regarded as a profession, they made themselves defenders of the exploiter block taken as a whole and the mere notion of “ independent thinking” never entered their heads. The engineering and scientific section of the educated classes stood outside this solid square of conscious, brazen, privileged ruling-class professions. But as the demand for this section was constantly ahead of the supply, it was possible for them, as a class, to be satisfied with a minimum of professional training and so, being devoid of any serious general education, to remain extremely limited in their degree of intelli­ gence; and the same condition of excess of demand over supply also had as result that they were sucked down into the general mass of the bourgeoisie with such rapidity that, one might say, they had no proper chance even of realising they were a special group. Indeed, the only group which did at that time exhibit some signs of intellectual independence was that of workers in literature and the arts. It is possible, even at this early period, to distinguish the intelligentsia type among writers, journalists and artists. Thus we can have no doubt about there being intelligentsia traits in Carlyle, in Ruskin, or in the pre-raphae lite movement. But nevertheless there was no independent bohemian class in Britain till the ’eighties and ’nineties, and those individual examples of the type of people who achieve “ independent thinking” make no differ­ ence to the general picture of the complete absorption of the class of educated people in the one class of the bourgeoisie. One might well say that throughout the “ golden age” of British capitalism—that is, from the Repeal of the Corn Law (1846) and the defeat of chartism (1848) to the crisis of the ’eighties, the absorption was complete. The parasitic bourgeoisie developed early in Great Britain, but right to the end of the nineteenth century in ideas remained under the influence either of the aristocracy or of the industrial bourgeoisie. The aristocratic tradition meant a dislike of modernism—the industrial bourgeois tradition, the puritan tradition, spoke against all that was free and bohemian or “ loose” in morals. Thus British estheticism in the Victorian period was not so much a matter of the creation of anything new as of collecting old masters, principally Italian. To this tendency the museums of Great Britain owe a collection of pre-raphaelite paintings equal to no other in the world, and out of that ambience came a cult characteristic of the late nineteenthcentury esthetes—the cult of Botticelli. The principal exponent of that estheticism was Walter Pater, who was completely retrospective and recognized nothing later than Leonardo da Vinci. For reasons given above in the first chapter, Great Britain at this

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time was to all intents devoid of bohemians, and of the more bohemian, freer estheticism which should accompany the estheticism of the dividenddrawing class we only find a thin trickle, oozing out at last in the form of a handful of pre-raphaelites, and especially in Whistler, artist and epigram­ matist, founder of British art decadence. It is striking, too, that the founders of the British bohemia were both foreigners—Whistler, American by origin and Parisian by upbringing, and Rossetti, son of an Italian émigré (and revolutionary poet). The crisis of the ’eighties signalised by Engels as of such importance in the internationalisation of Great Britain is also a stage of prime importance in the formation of a British bohemia á la française. English literature is suddenly filled with quite un-English figures, not at all like either the decent respectable figures of the preceding period or the social literature of the first years of the twentieth century. These were the “ ’nineties” in which the trunk of British capitalist culture, yesterday still so healthy, suddenly became mottled with the strange rash of a “ French pox.” This new estheticism scornfully spurned aside the moralising optimism of the Victorians, decked itself out most demonstratively in raiment which was quite offensive to the philistines of Great Britain, put on real airs about its foreign nature, proclaimed “ Art for A rt’s Sake,” and combined a cult of beauty with laudation of vice and perversion and with poetisation of disease and abnormality. The favourite pose of these British decadents became one of wearied cynicism. In literature this new movement produced the esthetically naturalistic novels of George Moore, a Flaubertist, and the no less Flaubertian estheticism of Wilde’s Salome spiced with naughty-naughty paradoxes. The most finished example of British decadentism is to be seen in the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, which created a sort of canon on interna­ tional decadence and spawned imitators throughout eastern Europe, from München to Moscow. But British decadentism as a living thing was cut rudely short by the trial and fall of Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s crash and imprisonment carried him from cheap posing and snobbism to real human tragedy in his sole [sic] surviving work — The Ballad o f Reading Gaol. His fate showed that it was still early to try to triumph over the fortress of British bourgeois morality, and the details of his biography show us how precociously exaggerated was that mottled foreign cult of the ’nine­ ties. The disease those decadents cultivated with such attachment, and flaunted the sores of, was still too weak—or the resistance of the bourgeois body too strong—for it to become endemic. It was necessary for those poisons to go on developing and to eat deeper into the organism of Great Britain, and be drawn into every cell, before the disease could become an

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organic one, and when that time came the patients would be able to dispense with artificially inoculated French variants. But even at this early stage the elements of decay in British cultural life were by no means confined to these decadents. Side by side with them were a variety of other forms of revolt against the preceding epoch— catholic mysticism deeply soaked in reminiscences of the continental counter-reformation, in the poetry of Francis Thompson, gloomy Zolaesque naturalism in the work of George Gissing, rebel rhetorics in that kind of provincial Scottish Rimbaud, John Davidson. And as proof that such phenomena were not fortuitous we have the work of writers as firmly rooted in the tradition of English literature as Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman. These two are very characteristic of their period. In them a note of cosmic pessimism quite new in English literature sounds with striking clarity.

The Other Culture Barry Farrell, 1967

I knew in advance that the evening would consist of “ new works” by composers who refuse to compose—that was fine by me. I was working at the time as a music critic, an apprentice music critic accustomed to learning on the job. At first I had stalled for time, confining my column to blues-singing sharecroppers and Ukrainian rhythm bands while working furiously at night to patch up my musical education. Now, settling into my free aisle seat at an obscure recital hall in the warehouse district of Lower Manhattan, I was reaching out and up for a new high run on my nervous ladder—aleatory music, or the music of chance. A glance at the manifesto in the program notes was enough to inform me that only a man of tremendous conviction and aplomb, or else a great kidder, would dare call himself a “ chance com poser.” Instead of writing music in what they call the traditional “ fascist” manner, chance compos­ ers shake dice or consult Tarot cards or count cracks in the pavement— anything to avoid the temptation to “ intervene” in the music by dreaming it up themselves. Some produce elaborate scores in which every note has been found by exhausting, magic means. Others give the performers nothing more than a little poem or maxim which each is to interpret for himself—out loud, of course, and all together. I had not thought of composers as fascists before, nor of music as something tamed and spoiled by the meddling of musicians—intriguing ideas to a rookie critic. But then the curtains parted and, with an appalling electric shriek, the music began. An abject girl, looking wan in a party dress, sat sawing at an amplified violin. A pianist lashed at the keyboard with elbows and fists while six matching radios were tuned to play six different stations at top volume. An unsmiling young sadist—the composer himself—stood as close as he could to the microphone, the better to rub balloons together. The music thundered and swelled into a kind of ultrasonic treatment, and within a 601

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matter of seconds I slipped into the grip of an angry boredom that moaned in my brain like a cello. Foolishly, I had taken a seat up front, so escape would require some daring. I looked around, hoping to spot the departing figures of my colleagues—fellow critics storming out in suffering equal to mine. But all I could make out in the dark was an imposing number of attentive faces— the faces of clansmen and believers, perhaps, but serious faces, disturb­ ingly serious faces. Then, in the din, an unwelcome thought crossed my mind: none o f these people was hearing what I heard. Here I was, with pad and earnest pencil, straining my ear to judge the talents of a musician who only rubbed balloons together. Did he rub badly? Well? Was it pretty? What did it mean? In mounting embarrassment, I perceived that I alone was listening for the answers to these dogged questions, that the others were listening for something else. I tried to let my eyes glaze over in some new way, hoping to apprehend the racket around me in the spirit of the evening. A couple of times I thought I was possibly getting it. I heard a squeak or two I liked, an interesting scream. Still, when intermission came, I gratefully slipped away carrying with me an uneasy feeling that lasted for days. I had evaded the New Arts for a long time. On the few occasions when I happened across some avant-garde affair or an indecipherable modern novel, I came away with nothing but a vague sense of exile, as though some committee had met in secret to cancel my library card, my museum pass, my increasingly pathetic bachelor of arts degree. I was barely five years out of school and already nostalgia was replacing curiosity as my dominant attitude toward the arts. But the chance concert struck me as a bit much—it challenged my education and my job. Joylessly, but with a sense of self-improvement, I made up my mind to go a step beyond my customary balk and learn what had happened to the arts in the years I had spent looking backward. It was a terrible concert and I resented it, but with it began a very adventurous time for me—my discovery of the world of art known as the Underground. The Underground —the name carries a nice romantic ring, but it hardly describes terrain as traveled as this has become. “ The Network” would be more like it, for this is the electronic age and the madmen too have telephones. A vast mosaic of Underground friendships reaches around the world, linking intentions and ideas, putting distant people in touch with each other. Since many Underground obsessions are illegal, or at least officially immoral, the movement reveals itself slowly—you approach it like an artichoke. But what it amounts to is a culture unto itself, the Other Culture, all over the world.

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Paris, May 1965

Axes and hammers tear into the car. The car is being sacrificed. Then a roar, and the crowd is running, pushing, laughing, dodging the roar—a motorcycle. The girl on the back of the motorcycle is nude. She clings to the driver, gasping, gasping, eyes clammed shut. The motorcycle cuts through the crowd, roaring, rolling fast. People fall and scramble away. The girl jumps down, the motorcycle spurts up a ramp to the stage. Actors and audience merge—the Happening has turned the auditorium into an arena, and the action is all around. The girl is chased through the crowd, and men in the crowd join in the pursuit of her. The lights go out—shouts and louder laughter in the dark. A spotlight flashes back to the car, dying now like a beached whale in the center of the crowd—axes and hammers have been at it in the dark. Another girl, a blonde, face hidden by a white paper death mask, kneels on the car’s crushed roof, and a boy stands on the hood: working like a sculptor, kneading, shaping, he covers her body with spaghetti. Sorbonne professors are present, Americans living in Paris with no address, an anonymous open-faced collection of students—they strain in the crowd, peer, reach out to touch the spaghetti. The girl scrapes cold pasta from her shoulders and flings it in clumps into the crowd. People turn squinting faces bravely up to receive splotch or splat— ‘“Ici! Ic i! A m oi!” Boys begin to rock the car, and the girl shouts and kicks at them. Her shoulders, fragile and bony, shake and flutter—she is laughing beind the mask. There is a small balcony overlooking the hall where 50 people sit watching, safe from spaghetti, witnesses pure and simple. Among them is David Davis, director of the American Students and Artists Center and host to the Happening taking place below. The center is like an intellectual Y.M.C.A. and Davis is like an intellectual Y.M.C.A. director, baldish and friendly, the man with the key to the ping-pong balls. “ I guess I just really don’t get it,” he says. “ Art has to be ghastly to be any good? If you enjoy something or understand it, it’s lousy and you’re a square? I have only one consolation. This god-awful festival will finally be over tonight.” David has hardly slept—he is the victim of his balanced good intentions. Freedom and Art are matters he takes seriously, and his hatred of censorship has impelled him to overcome his forebodings and invite JeanJacques Lebel, the leading European happener, to use the Students Center for his second annual Festival of Free Expression. Davis is sure he warned Lebel that “ certain lurid moments” in the first Festival the year before had disgusted him, that this year “ utter outrageousness wouldn’t do. But Lebel cannot recall this conversation, and now, at the Happening, the nudity-and-spaghetti bacchanal strikes Davis as an insulting doublecross.

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Angrily, he says he should have been tougher the night before, when a Happening staged by some artists from Nice who called themselves Le Groupe Panique went to such lengths that a live chicken was crucified. Instead, Davis had hurried to the center that morning to strike a bargain with Lebel, whom he found in the auditorium cleaning up a carpet of chicken feathers, blood and tomato pulp. The festival can continue, Davis proposes, only if Lebel agrees to let two or three gendarmes stand in the back of the hall for the evening. “ Oh, wow, God! Impossible to even get started thinking about it,” Lebel replies, laughing at what he chooses to take as a joke. So, absolutely no deal—and that leaves Davis in a quan­ dary. “ If I stop it now,” he says, “ there will be about 28 times the scandal there already is.” Davis restrains himself well. He sits through that evening’s events, holding himself firmly in his chair. A childbirth film is projected backward, causing the squalling red infant to go head-first back where he came from, with doctor pushing hard to help, mother finally backing pregnant out the door. Fidel C astro’s voice unaccountably booms forth as two girls in cabbage-leaf costumes dance down from the stage, inviting the crowd to salad and producing a happy stampede. A couple inside a burlap bag begin to bounce in the motion of love as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, visiting Ameri­ can beat and contributor to the festival, reads from his latest work: . . . I’m sorry officer I’m sorry mother That’s the only word I know that works It’s a word of love daddy. . . .

The all-at-once rush of events is too swift to follow—a barrage of images flashing across the mind unsorted, melting and mixing, as in a Coney Island dreamscape where visions collide like bumper cars. The atmosphere is playful, yet noticeably too intense to be merely playful. It is as if the crowd’s own alchemy had worked upon it, taking all but the most resistant back into some bygone evolutionary cycle; those who participate seem deeply affected, even transported. The Happening ends with a final fling at the car. It is beaten and torn until even the cylinder block is laid open, and people go triumphantly out in the rain bearing spark plugs and pistons, portaging fenders like broken canoes. Davis needs a drink, so he watches impatiently for the last happener to quit the premises, locks up, then follows the crowd down the Boulevard Raspail to La Coupole. La Coupole is a cafe as big as a blimp hangar, a

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cafe that appeals to beatniks, tourists, people with romantic feelings about Left Bank cafe life, celebrity lovers, a dense and exciting casbah of beer and coffee drinkers—artists, intellectuals, students, happeners. Between 10 p . m . and 2 in the morning, the place is like a train station in wartime. Davis finds a table and is dismayed to be greeted immediately with claps on the back that salute him as the Happening’s real hero. He smiles weakly as people stop to compliment him on his courage and taste. “ All week long people I thought were fairly normal have come to me and said they thought it was simply wonderful, very important, a great thing for the center to have done,” he says. “ I must be missing the message. I know the world is in a mess. I know about the Bomb. I know about violence in the streets of New York. But why does art have to be as bad as life? I just don’t see how this kind of thing helps.” Lebel enters with his flushed and happy crew, a big vaulting smile gleaming out from behind his beard. “ S a lu t ! S a lu t !” he calls to his friends, and his friends call back, “ S a lu t!” Even bourgeois diners at the formal tables look up from their meals and stare across the crowd at his entrance. His sky-blue glasses and sargasso of hair and beard identify him unmistak­ ably as a culture guerrilla, but such a thriving specimen of libidinous eccentricity that the sight of him is enough to bring certain solid types to the point of making an on-the-spot citizen’s arrest. In street demonstra­ tions, Lebel carries a sign that announces across-the-board rebellion— “ HANDS OFF VIETNAM, TIBET AND LSD!” But now it is the beautiful girl on his arm, his king-of-the-mountain manner that make him an arresting presence, a man not to be ignored. Lebel is jubilant, elated, exhausted, broke. His Happenings are by no means spontaneous improvisations, and he has worked without a distrac­ tion for a good two months to bring this night to being. Since his field of vision and his means of expression are limited only by his chronic lack of money, putting a festival of Happenings together is an undertaking that tests him in many different ways. He performs as actor, painter, sculptor, writer, producer, planner of details, signer of IOUs; he rallies other happeners—hard men to rally—bringing them in from all around the European avant-garde axis: London, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Ibiza, Tan­ gier; he builds and paints the props, finds film projectors and strobe lights, rehearses half a dozen casts, harangues his way into places such as the Students Center, churns out the blizzard of manifestos that signals the arrival of each of his public appearances. Beyond this, he serves as psychic test pilot for his circle of friends and admirers, and he goes through his festivals tuned up to electric sleepless­ ness by the steady ingestion of various psychovitamins. He comes down from these periods giddy and totally debilitated, like a man gone miles

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outrunning a pack of dogs. His Happenings reach a pitch of demonic energy that can touch and trace all the ancient animal movements of the mind, and on stage Lebel is a witch doctor, a man of big magic. Away from it, though, the footing grows more treacherous and, at 28, he lives, as he says, “ on the verge of physical extinction, like a suicide or a criminal.” “ C ’est la guerre totale!” is a phrase Lebel includes in nearly all his letters and broadsides—a river of words plunging through the mails in French and perfect hipster American. He has a stamp for the envelopes that reads: WITH THE AFFECTIONATE GREETING ( ) THE RESPECT ( ) THE CONTEMPT ( ) OF JEAN-JACQUES LEBEL. The letters he sends to the Thought Police at Le Figaro or Le M onde go clearly marked CONTEMPT. Lebel is like a man at war in the way things thrill or infuriate him, the extravagance of the loyalties and hatreds he feels. But his Happenings exist to give form and flight to all extremes of hallucination and erotic fantasy, and by making these things public and palpable—the genuine shared experience of a group—Lebel lays out his revolutionary proposals with admirable clarity: the end of repression, the birth of an age of gentle and ecstatic anarchists. This is an old dream of a revolution, of course, the peach of revolutions. But it is rare to run across a revolutionary as buoyant and intrepid as Lebel, even in the Underground, and when I saw my first Lebel mani­ festo— “ To Conjure UP the Spirit of C atastrophe,” it was called—I wanted to meet the author right away. I was new in Paris and timid about my French, but the envelope said RESPECTS and I knew that Lebel had lived in New York as a boy. All the same, I worked out a few preliminary questions on my way to his studio, figuring out the verbs in advance, running the words over my tongue. But from the time he pulled open the door to his amazing studio—a workshop-warehouse full of spilled papers and paints, a bunker-archive of fugitive ideas—Lebel was off and running at a clip that scarcely allowed for any questions. He was accustomed to talking to journalists—expert at it, in fact—but his friendly enthusiasm surprised me, considering his dark opinion of the press. He knew all the Underground books, all the sources, all the people to see, and he took weeks away from his work to lead me around, hurrying the pace like a guide bursting to show off the wonders of his wonderful town. He started me off with the basic argument behind all Underground thought and art: “ Art shouldn’t be something to rest on—an ‘arm chair,’ as Matisse said it was. It’s supposed to change life. It asks you to be an active person. But culture has become something that asks just the

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opposite. It wants only to control people. It’s anticonsciousness, a means of silencing us. It consolidates, taboos instead of destroying them. It has nothing to do with the life of the mind.” The principal aim of Underground art is to destroy what Lebel would call “ the feudal game of art”—the notion that becoming “ cultured” consists of learning what to look for in art and how to admire it. “ I used to have the idea that you could say things in painting—the naive idea,” he says. “ I’ve given up on that now, like a lot of us who can no longer accept the masquerade of playing ‘artist.’ “ People are taught to think they can live art by collecting it, but they can have a Van Gogh in their living rooms and it won’t change a thing in their lives. I think art is supposed to provoke a crisis that will change a person’s whole idea of himself. But most people are put off by art. They avoid it, they feel insulted by it. This is a result exactly contrary to the intentions of modern artists, who are saying, ‘Don’t worship art—let it happen to you.’ The truth is that art is just the experience. The way you feel at a Happening, the way you evade it or participate in it—these things make up your portrait. And your portrait is the work of a rt.” So Lebel is entitled to the mission-accomplished mood that sweeps over him now that he has brought another Happening into being. He has been hounded by the police, attacked in the papers, glared at in the sanctum of his own cafe. But the juices are running—the unspeakable has been said. “ Those girls who were naked,” he says exultantly, “ it did them a lot of good. It gave them a chance to communicate with others on the level of their fantasies and dreams. The subconscious isn’t just something that’s there— scared. It’s something you can dive right into. It doesn’t matter if what you do is art or not as long as it touches people in their deepness. Who cares if it is beautiful or horrible? If it gets across on the level of deep experience—there! That’s it!” Tokyo, December 1965 Japanese happeners are known throughout the world Underground for their unblinking attention to pornography. This is true of Japanese living abroad as well as those at home—it is something that stays with them in all climates. I was unaware of this when I arrived in Japan, and I filled my first notebook with a forest of exclamation marks. Then it dawned on me that the Japanese Underground, just as the French or American, is only the child of the culture it protests and is shaped and focused accordingly. In Japan, as elsewhere, “ repression” is the enemy; but the Japanese take the word quite literally to mean the thing that makes them stutter, the big national hang-up, and as a consequence they work in heavy brush strokes.

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The Zero Dimension Group, an ideological action team of 20, is setting up for a Happening at the Modern Art Center of Japan. An impatient crowd has gathered. The Zeroes come from the industrial city of Nagoya and their feelings of provincial inelegance are magnified by the knowledge that here in Tokyo they are commonly spoken of as the Bare-Bottom Group, a slander that Kato, their leader, dismisses with a bare-shouldered shrug. The Zero Dimension philosophy, Kato explains, is outlined in a 5,000page manual, and he can hardly run down the whole thing just now, with minutes to go. But the basic idea is that the nature of things can be perceived only by those who fix their attention on all that is considered vulgar over a long period of time—two or three years, at least. The Zero people rarely let an hour pass without absorbing themselves in some forbidden thought or deed. Militant members carry vulgar flash cards to consult on buses and trains. Three celebrated artists are in the audience—Tadanori Yokoo, Tatsumi Hijikata and Masso Adachi. Only Yokoo appears to be enjoying himself, nodding and smiling at friends in the milling crowd. Yokoo’s life is scrupulously proper. He and his family dress neatly and well, and they live in a house that will not embarrass their parents when they come to call. Yokoo is 29, and in his polished shoes and sober tie, he could pass for a certified public accountant. But in his work as a poster designer—his real work, the work he does when the rent is paid—Yokoo is wonderfully, wickedly inspired. Even an occasional commercial poster turns into such a savage and articulate caricature that his client has to send friends fanning out over Tokyo, ripping them down from telephone poles and fences. “ A good poster should disturb people or rebuke or nauseate them ,” Yokoo says, “ To me, art that pleases people is sabotage because it confirms the society’s faith in itself.” Yokoo’s posters do not yet reveal his streak of Zero Dimensionism, but his prime ambition is to overcome the embarrassment he feels at using the very dross of life in his work. Things flapping around in gutters and floating past piers—these are the things that absorb Yokoo, that explain this smile of anticipation as he sits sipping whisky from a paper cup, waiting for the Happening to begin. Hijikata, however, is bored—he stands looking absently out the window of the smoky gallery, a handsome, impressive, lonely-looking man. What sets Hijikata apart from other artists is his raging belief that he alone is working seriously and well, and when he speaks of his isolated genius, he hammers the table and grabs at his heart. Hijikata works full-time the year around with his company of 100, and

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the lot of them stay alive on the profits of a stew shop they own and operate. The work that goes on in the all-day dance class is on a par with the assembly of Swiss watches, but the delicacy and precision of Hijikata’s work are usually lost on audiences who see only the sex and dirt and rolling around. This depresses Hijikata profoundly, but it does nothing to shake his idea of where art lies—in “ things from life, yet not the things one sees.” Hijikata’s vision of such unseen events usually runs to something along the line of transvestites dressing—he wants to get to the fleshy heart of things. Not long ago, as a gesture against censorship, he stationed two nude dancers atop a downtown office building, had them assume the posture of love, then flooded the scene with spotlights zeroed in from across the street. The extraordinary public spectacle that resulted brought riot police, who arrived in jeeps, carrying gas masks, sticks and bullhorns. Now, as a Zero Dimension man blows cold shrieks through a saxophone while another chants “ Life-Is-One-Big-Dirty-Picnic,” Yokoo and Hijikata move forward to the edge of the crowd. Adachi, though, is plainly dis­ gusted, and he sits by a wall festooned in chains of foam rubber objects, smiling his menacing smile, looking steadfastly away. Adachi is a filmmaker. His one full-length work, N o-Sex , is the talk of the Japanese Underground, the local Flaming Creatures. But the censors have been at it and Adachi considers it ruined. “ It seems like a cheap sex movie now,” he says. “ That’s just the opposite of what it was—an argument against the idea that sex is necessary to eroticism. The girl in the film has no sex but the b oy lo v e s her a n y w a y . T h e p oin t o f this is that o b sc e n ity en ters w ith

the girl’s gratuitous wish for a sex like everyone else’s.” Adachi glares as the Zero dancers strip, shakes his head despairingly as 12 naked dancers fling themselves into a pile of sawdust to receive a pillowwhipping from Kato, their boss. Lighted candles protrude from several bottoms, dripping globs of hot wax. A grave girl in a black leather coat mounts a stepladder above the boys and begins tossing eggs down on them. The eggs do not break at first, and the girl hurls them harder and harder, leaving egg-shaped welts; one of the boys sobs into the sawdust as eggs assail him. “ This kind of people—I can’t even describe them ,” Adachi says. “ They’re a messy bunch of masochists with a sadistic boss. I’m getting ready for a good punch-out, and I’ve got the gang from No-Sex here to pitch in. That would be a real Happening—getting these bare bottoms out into the street and kicking them around a little.” Hijikata is more forbearing. Even when the Zeroes light fumigation bombs that fill the crowded room with balsam smoke so thick that the prone dancers disappear under a noxious white cloud, he smiles tolerantly, like a father at Games Day. “ I think what they’re doing is interesting, as

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far as it goes,” he says carefully, “ but it’s so superficial I can hardly believe it.” Yokoo smiles and coughs, nods his head yes, yes. Adachi begins throwing Coke bottles out the third-floor window “ to express the natural hostility I feel against the voyeur”—in this case the crowd queued up in the street below, waiting to get in. All windows are flung open but still the smoke is too thick to bear. The crowd pushes through French doors to a cold terrace, and soon the Zeroes themselves give up and come out into the weather, stepping barefoot on the pebbled asphalt, a couple of candles burning gamely still. Kato points out the dark, imposing silhouette of Fujiyama, a rarely seen eminence of shadow behind the jagged black Tokyo skyline. “ Seeing Fuji-san makes this a real Happening,” he says in high humor. “ Do they have Happenings this good in New York or Paris?” New York, January 1966 Ed Sanders has been arrested—it was only a question of time. Sanders is a poet, a thorny presence to the police. He is 27, the leader of a bodyrock singing group called the Fugs and the proprietor of the Peace Eye Book Store, a foxhole for psychic revolutionaries on the Lower East Side. But mainly Sanders is notorious as editor and publisher of a poetry journal whose cheerily obscene name provokes in the reader a revealing crisis: can he, will he, speak it out?—or is he the prisoner of what Sanders calls “ the emotional and sexual maladies of the race,” what others might call “ good taste” ? Sanders began publishing four years ago and at first he operated from a floating mail drop, distributing his mimeographed journal free and by hand. But as his list of contributors grew to include the likes of W. H. Auden, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen and Norman Mailer— causing a half-dozen universities to subscribe despite the impossible title— Sanders assumed it was safe to surface at the Peace Eye. Wrong. The police strike, confiscate all copies of the magazine, charge Sanders with outraging public decency. Free on bail, Sanders sends out an appeal to friendly addresses in Europe and the U.S., warning friends in the move­ ment that he is about to be “ freaked off the scene” by the authorities. Then, settling down at the Peace Eye, looking vigorous and happy in GIsurplus clothes and blond Zapata mustache, Sanders tells about his ar­ rest—for him a classic study in cultural hypocrisy: “ The cops were rolling around on the floor in the station house, screaming with laughter. All these cops, reading these big bundles of magazines they’d taken out of my store, and here I am in the next room being interrogated by the cancer cop who arrested me. He kept showing

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me things from the magazines and, trembling with rage, he’d say, ‘What about this? Is this O .K .?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, certainly. And, sir, if you’ll turn the page you’ll see a poem by the associate curator of the Museum of Modern Art which is a perfectly valid literary work.’ I told him that as soon as I got out I would have a big party and invite him to it. And I meant it—I mean it. I think the best thing to do with cops is to subtly instruct and teach them. Hating them doesn’t do any good. You have to work with them. You have to try to be as gentle as possible and instruct them through example and discussion.” All the same, Sanders’ magazine was a true test of any censor’s cool. With extravagant profanity—high-board double-gainers of profanity—he came out for free love in the streets, for “ dope law defiance” and the protest-boarding of nuclear submarines. Like a young, unsubdued Allen Ginsberg, Sanders was becoming something of a guru. So the police reached out and snuffed him—or tried to. Even with a criminal charge pending against him, Sanders is calm in the knowledge that the American Civil Liberties Union will not be alone in his defense. The opinions of at least two Supreme Court justices approximate his absolutist notion of free expression, and to judge from the shelves of many popular bookstores, the tide is running fast in his favor; every day it gets more difficult to say something obscene. On the other hand, every day it gets easier to turn on. The drugs— marijuana and especially LSD—have recently unplugged great numbers of young people from their middle-class connections, and they have drifted naturally into the Underground, becoming the most visible part of it. Stores have sprung up in a half-dozen cities that deal strictly in incense, water pipes, mandala charts, things to improve your trip; several new Underground newspapers carry homemakers’ columns that give recipes for hashish cookies, aspic of mescaline, “ pot-seed pancakes for a groovy breakfast high” ; bars and auditoriums are thriving on psychedelic light shows designed to induce drugless experiences that counterfeit the real thing. There is a psychedelic school of painting, there are hordes of bands with the “ acid sound,” with the mystical raga sound, Top Ten songs about drugs, an unbelievable market for buttons that say I SMOKE POT or STONED IN THE STREETS—in short a whole commercial boomlet based on a genuine or vicarious fascination with drugs. This cash-on-the-barrelhead curiosity is something the Underground is completely unaccustomed to—a luxurious new problem. There is a proces­ sion of art movements reaching back 50 years that invented every major Underground idea including the obsession with visionary drugs: the Da daists, the Surrealists and the Beat Generation said it all. But none could have guessed at the size of the audience the Underground presently

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commands, the strange new turnings of “ in group” taste. Some artists, like the ingenious Andy Warhol, have hurled themselves headlong into the honeypot while hardly altering the aim of their art, thus cleaning up deliciously on movies that last eight hours, on masochist song-and-dance acts, whatever they’re buying uptown. Others have gone into the equivocal business of staging “ happenings” for supermarkets and political rallies, venturing back into the culture for the money and the laughs. And there are others still working, as always, outside the current of events, quiet and alone. But there remains the large and growing number of young people who are simply hanging around the Underground’s permissive edges, using drugs to calm whirlwind confusions, to make the sun keep coming up. They gather in colonies of reassurance where the talk is mainly of India and the perilous struggle to stay high in New York— O, Krishna, guide us today, ’cause the cops could come kicking through the door. There is a huge amount of unused spiritual energy floating around in these circles, an obvious need to grab onto somebody’s oar. After a while, it even becomes unsurprising to hear talk drift to a wistful little fantasy everyone seems to share: it would be wild to turn your parents on! You’d go back home and you’d wait for your moment and then you’d say, “ Hey, mom, dad, I ’ve got something here and I want you to try it.” London,January 1966 Alexander Trocchi is typing furiously—he doesn’t look up as I enter. Around him are books, torn letters, old papers, a clean little bottle of heroin. Taped to the wall is the dust jacket of his one important novel, C a in ’s Book, a spare and barren account of his misadventures as a junkie in America. Alongside it is a map of Greater London marked in Trocchi’s crimped hand: Topolski Kernal Outpost, Ego-Optik M k2, arrows cutting in from all directions. A printed sign over the map says, “ Men with no history dropped in thru a trapdoor.” Trocchi types. At last he jumps up from his chair. “ Time! Time! I never have any time now that Sigma is going as it is. I ’ll just be a minute now” —and with that he goes to work on an oddly exhibitionistic fix. His arm is like a moon­ scape. Trocchi’s double misfortune is to be the world’s second most famous junkie; the first is William Burroughs, author of the Underground classic N aked Lunch, who gave up drugs years ago but carries on in legend as the junkie. Trocchi is a brilliant Scot, over 40 now. He has worked in the Underground since the early ’50s, and that is a very long time to spend in Trocchi’s shoes. It has earned him hardly more fame than money, and now

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his energies are focused on a scheme to organize all Underground forces all over the world. In his cold, depressing little flat he is founder and director of Project Sigma, “ the invisible insurrection of a million m inds.” “ We’re coming along at a perfect tim e,” he says. “ Society is declining in its energies, falling off from its old mastery. It is now completely unable to control the quality of people’s lives, and there is great discomfort in conventional circles everywhere. People don’t know how to cope with the kind of life we’re approaching. What Sigma has put together is a thin veneer of people all over the world, people who up to now haven’t realized their vital contemporaneousness.” Sigma caused great excitement when Trocchi launched it four years ago. But now people are beginning to wonder about his technocratic zeal for organization and planning, his combat mentality, his tendency to tell every friend and visitor that a man such as he must follow the path that Joyce assigned to Stephen Dedalus— “ . . . silence, exile, cunning.” Jeff Nuttall has become absorbed in other things. Nuttall is a writer, cartoonist and schoolteacher with an eerie resemblance to Dylan Thomas. He also puts out a mimeographed literary journal called My Own M ag , the principal mouthpiece for William Burroughs. Nuttall publishes Burroughs’ letters, his literary memoranda and his experiments in “ cut-up writing,” a technique of dissecting words from news items which, Burroughs believes, reveals truths beyond the range of conscious thought. Nuttall goes along with Burroughs unfailingly, even though, like everyone else, he is often unsure of what Burroughs has in mind: “ Burroughs is a multileveled character and it’s virtually impossible to bring him down to rooted detail. Certainly he believes in the complete annihilation of the status quo, and he can be terrifyingly absolute about it, sort of shruggingly dismissing over half the human race. But he wants as a man what so many of us want—to drift into some area of hallucinatory delirium where there are some optimistic possibilities. Burroughs at­ tempted to achieve this delirium through various experiments with drugs, experiments with the manipulation of his life and instincts. Finally he discovered himself hung up and his whole fundamental intention made impossible by heroin—and I’ve never heard a man speak so savagely against heroin, nor so searchingly and accurately as well. “ Still, Burroughs, all of us—we’re decaying men, for God’s sake. We’re all decaying, clearly. Playing around with drugs, playing around with every possible sexual deviation. Really, previous ages of decadence would look upon the modern avant-garde with amazement and admiration. We’ve outdone the lot of them. But the curious, impressive thing is that so many artists are able to go through these things as intelligent men—not as totally unprincipled sensual men. If you go through these things to some purpose,

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it can be even noble. It’s as if, with your own rot, you refuel and invigorate—you fertilize this very scorched earth for those yet to com e.” London, September 1966 What appears to be the agitprop section of the Art Is Dead movement has gathered in London to attend the first international Destruction in Art Symposium, a five-day talkathon and Happenings festival for 40 artists from the Undergrounds of 10 countries. A1 Hansen, the collagist and happener, and Ralph Ortiz, the piano smasher, are here from New York and Lebel is in from Paris. Creative vandalism movements such as the Provos in Amsterdam and the Zaj group in Spain have sent delegates to discuss their most notable work—burning cars, starting street fights, making the police reach for their sticks. This sounds unwholesome until Herman Nitsch takes the stage to describe his occasional blutorgie in Vienna. The blood orgies are crowd-punishing events in which Nitsch eviscerates lambs tacked to white canvases, sloshing and splattering every­ one’s clothes with blood. Nitsch is small and round and monotone in black shirt, black suit and black humor. He seems to have made his life into a running Peter Lorre act, and no one quite knows how to take it when he angrily complains: “ Any stupid medical student can get all the cadavers he wants, but I—an artist! I can get none.” Lebel is delighted and intrigued, and in excited conversations with Nitsch unconsciously pays him the compliment of calling him “ Nietzsche.” Hansen and Ortiz grow restless with the string of lectures and semi­ nars—the atmosphere is academic, even parliamentary, and it strikes them as absurdly European. “ They don’t understand how spontaneously and beautifully we do things in New York,” Hansen says. Ortiz smashes an overstuffed chair with an ax before a small but entranced audience, and the next day Hansen sets fire to an abandoned motor-scooter. John Latham, a Londoner who builds towers of books— “ Skoob Towers” —in order to burn them impressively in public, explodes a set of Chambers’s Encyclopedia in a crowded vacant lot. People are beginning to yawn, and it is not until the Salad Happening of Otto Muhl that the festival is saved. Muhl is ready in raincoat and socks when the crowd arrives at St. Bride Foundation Institute, a narrow, churchlike community hall whose audito­ rium he has rented for the evening. Muhl is no kid—he is 40 and a veteran of all the many kinds of misunderstandings a man can get involved in when his motto is “Die Orgie ist E x is te n z - S a k r a m e n t.”So he listens carefully as the London law for public spectacles is explained to him—only to discover a moment later that the question of insisting upon nudity has become academic: the girl he has found to assist him is a music teacher at

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a Catholic grammar school and she has asked to remain in her underwear throughout. Muhl is a good sport about it, and when the girl comes into the arena of folding chairs, she is veiled in a gauze, and she also wears a graceful smile. She lies down on a bed of moss placed in the center of the room. Muhl shadow-boxes privately under the bright spotlights. Gunter Brus, Muhl’s partner from Vienna and the ideological sprecher of the evening, circles the room screaming German curses at the crowd. “ Wow! The real concen­ tration camp thing!” says a spectator. Then Muhl comforts the girl in vegetables. Her body is smeared with flour, tomatoes, beer, raw eggs. Melons are smashed inside a gunny sack and Muhl pours the runny results artfully down on the twisting figure. Then comes dry cereal, wheat paste, milk, half-chewed carrots. Volunteers rise from their seats to come forward and chew carrots. Muhl chants and pours in bright powdered paints as he stamps and dances in the spreading salad. Finally he flings himself into the animal-vegetable marriage, embrac­ ing the girl, lapping up the milk and beer. An appealing mood of harvesttime merrymaking descends upon the room—the audience is spellbound, the girl is radiant at the bottom of the stew. It is her first Happening—an experience! “ At first you’re scared and em barrassed,” she says, “ but afterward it’s just so great." Clearly, Muhl is a man working the mother lode. In spilled groceries he has lucidly revealed a number of the Underground’s most difficult and ambiguous directions. There is the element of psychodrama, the jocular sado-masochism, the destruction, the libidinous innocence, the signifi­ cantly popular choice of primitive ritual as a means of mapping modern thought. It is powerful stuff, and the critics who happened to see it are uniformly impressed. The Sunday Times concludes an appreciative review of the festival with a doomsday bell for criticism—always good news to the Underground: “ The arts today, and especially the visual arts, are a kind of brothel of the intellect, and nobody can write a report on a brothel while standing primly outside the door. The idea that he knows precisely what art is, and what it is not, is, it seems to me, the only one which the conscientious art critic cannot afford to give a hearing to .” New York, February 1967 I spend a lot of time walking around on the Lower East Side. It’s a long subway ride downtown from where I live, as long a ride as you can take between the comfortable middle of Manhattan and its hard island edges. But the cultural distance it covers would make far more of a journey seem

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short—20 minutes of subterranean screech erases the skyscraper dream, and you emerge in a country of long-haired immigrants from all the Kansas Cities in the world. The East Village, as the colony is called, is a collage of eastern slum and western boom town. The streets have a great capacity for change and their winter look is infinitely bleak, despite the crowds, the blocks of eccentric little shops that gleam like gold teeth from the tenements. Walking along, I pass a group of pea coats sitting on a stoop and I feel the bad eye boring in on me. My necktie is estranging me. This is to be expected. What the Underground offers is, first of all, a dramatic new life-style, and I have visibly not accepted it. Thus, to the Underground eye I am a two-culture yo-yo at best and quite possibly the fuzz—someone to be approached with caution. Barriers stand between us, but still I feel a strong affinity for the Underground or, rather, for the whole Other Culture. Three years ago, when I first approached it, I felt duty-bound to suppress my hostility toward the Underground, remaining elaborately neutral, like a clergyman on a nightclub tour. But I couldn’t maintain the distance—I liked the people too much. I liked them for their flamboyance, their talent for living without money, their spiritual energy, their undis criminating humanity toward each other. They are gentle, scroungy, loose and free, the only society around with poet-kings, and for these reasons also I liked them. So, next I tried to suppress my affections—I wanted to study the art objectively, theoretically. But this was impossible, for Happenings exist only as experiences, moments in which art is torn away from the context of culture to become a part of life. Happenings are the extreme last step in a half-century of art during which the significant discoveries have been renunciations: beauty, uniqueness, excellence, complexity—all these qual­ ities have been abandoned, by succeeding generations of artists, like the crockery and winter coats of fleeing refugees. But it is hard to break the habit of searching for some object in art, and so I persisted, through a dozen Happenings, trying to judge the artists as artisans—craftsmen of some new and terrible technique. It was not until Lebel made his point—“ your portrait is the work of art” —that I gave up taming these evenings with my notebook and pencil. I began to let the Happenings happen to me, and from that point forward it has seemed to me a waste of words to ask if Happenings are art. There are few painters and sculptors in the Underground, and not many writers of prose. It is performers’ turf—poets, happeners, actors, show­ men, musicians. The best means of judging them is by their intentions;

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and the best way to understand them is to think of them as cultural revolutionaries. The one universal intention of Underground artists is to open new areas of perception by clearing away taboos, to make the secret psychic drama the collective experience. This is their revolutionary proposal, and it should be taken seriously as such; it is a utopian dream and people are jumping the wall to embrace it. Whether or not you approve depends, of course, on who you are and how well you like the life you’re leading. Meanwhile, an alarm bell is ringing, and we’re deep in our beds, complaining about its vulgar, brutal tone.

Essentials of Spontaneous Prose Jack Kerouac , 1958

S e t - u p The object is set before the mind, either in reality, as in sketching (before a landscape or teacup or old face) or is set in the memory wherein it becomes the sketching from memory of a definite image-object. P r o c e d u r e Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketch­ ing language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret ideawords, blowing (as per jazz mucisian) on subject of image. M ethod N o periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas—but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)— “ measured pauses which are the essentials of our speech”—“ divisions of the sounds we hear” —“ time and how to note it down.” (William Carlos Williams) S c o p in g Not “ selectively” of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swim­ ming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement, like a fist coming down on a table with each complete utterance, bang! (the space dash)—Blow as deep as you want—write as deeply, fish as far down as you want, satisfy yourself first, then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaningexcitement by same laws operating in his own human mind. L a g in P r o c e d u r e N o pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatalogical buildup of words till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to a thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing. T im in g Nothing is muddy that runs in time and to laws of time — Shakespearian stress of dramatic need to speak now in own unalterable way or forever hold tongue — no revisions (except obvious rational mis­ takes, such as names or calculated insertions in act of not writing but

inserting). 618

Essentials of Spontaneous Prose

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C e n t e r o f I n t e r e s t Begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at m oment or writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion—Do not afterthink except for poetic or P. S . reasons. Never afterthink to “ improve” or defray impressions, as, the best writing is always the most painful personal wrung-out tossed from cradle warm protective mind—tap from yourself the song of yourself, blow! —now!—your way is your only way— “ good”—or “ bad—always honest, (“ ludicrous” ), spontaneous, “ confessional” interesting, because not “ crafted.” Craft is craft. S t r u c t u r e o f W o r k Modern bizarre structures (science fiction, etc.) arise from language being dead, “ different” themes give illusion of “ new” life. Follow roughly outlines in outfanning movement over subject, as river rock, so mindflow over jewel-center need (run your mind over it, once) arriving at pivot, where what was dim-formed “ beginning” becomes sharp-necessitating “ ending” and language shortens in race to wire of time-race of work, following laws of Deep Form, to conclusion, last words, last trickle—Night is The End. M e n t a l S t a t e If possible write “ without consciousness” in semi trance (as Yeat’s later “ trance writing” ) allowing subconscious to admit in own uninhibited interesting necessary and so “ modern” language what conscious art would censor, and write excitedly, swiftly, with writing-ortyping-cramps, in accordance (as from center to periphery) with laws of orgasm, Reich’s “ beclouding of consciousness.” Come from within, out— to relaxed and said.

Belief & Technique for Modern Prose Jack Kerouac , 1959

List of Essentials 1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy 2. Submissive to everything, open, listening 3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house 4. Be in love with yr life 5. Something that you will find its own form 6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind 7. Blow as deep as you want to blow 8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind 9. The unspeakable visions of the individual 10. No time for poetry but exactly what is 11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest 12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you 13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition 14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time 15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog 16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye 17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself 18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea 19. Accept loss forever 20. Believe in the holy contour of life 21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind 22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better 23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning 24. No fear or shame in the dinity of yr experience, language & knowledge 25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it 26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form 620

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27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness 28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better 29. You’re a Genius all the time 30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

East Village Symphoneous John Gruen , 1966

SHRIEK! SHRIEK! Announcing THE FUGS!!!!

Bob Dylan? Old hat! Barry McGuire? Too wrapped up in “ square” causes! The Byrds? Strictly for the! Donovan? This, too, will pass! Sonny and Cher? They’re putting you on, man! The Beatles? They were adorable! But the Fugs!!!! They are the one authentic group of singers that has emerged from the New Bohemia, and when their voices are lifted in song . . . well, those old four-letter words never had it so good, and that old rock-and-roll beat was never so gaudily sounded. They hold forth every weekend at the Astor Playhouse on Lafayette Street. Here is a recent announcement about them: THE FUGS! An unbelievable group o f singers featuring Tuli Kupferberg on farto-phone, Brillo Box, finger cymbals, and various percussion instruments: Ed Sanders on organ, sex organ and Harmonica; . . . Ken Weaver on snare and big stomp Buffalo hide drum; and guest stars, Dances, dirty folk spews, rock & roll, poetry, Amphetamine operas, and other freak-beams from their collective existence. These creeps barf from an unbelievable bag. There has never been anything like the FUGS in the history o f western civilization.

And here is “ What Are You Doing After the Orgy?,” one of the Fugs’ songs, music and lyrics by Tuli Kupferberg: 1. What what what what What what what what Whatta ya gonna do After the orgy I wanta make friends with you After the orgy I wanna be friends with you After the orgy. . . . CHOR: I wanna be your friend

622

East Village Symphoneous I wanta be your friend I wanta be your friend I wanta be your friend After the orgy ends I wanta be your friend I wanta be your friend I wanta be your friend I wanta be your friend I wanta be your friend After the orgy ends I wanta be your friend I wanta be your friend I wanta be your friend 2. What are you gonna do After the orgy I wanna read Blake with you After the orgy I wanta eat something too After the orgy CHOR: I wanta be your pal I wanta be your pal I wanta be your pal I wanta be your pal After we pet and ball I hope that w on’t be all I wanta be your pal I wanta be your pal I wanta be your pal I wanta be your pal After we pet and ball Why don’t ya give me a call I wanta be your pal I wanta be your pal 3. What are you gonna do After the orgy I wanta go dancin too After the orgy What are you plannin to do After the orgy Take me along with you After the orgy CHOR: I wanna be your mate I wanna be your mate I wanna be your mate I wanna be your mate D on’t care who else you date I wanna be your mate I wanna be your mate I wanna be your mate I wanna be your mate

623

624

On Bohemia I wanna be your mate I wanna be your mate I wanna share your wate & fate I wanna be your mate I wanna be your mate 4. I wanna be your friend I wanna be your friend I wanna be your friend I wanna be your friend After the orgy ends I wanna be your friend I wanna be your friend I wanna be your friend I wanna be your friend When the orgy ends I wanna be your friend When the orgy ends When the orgy ends I wanna be your friend When the orgy ends When the orgy ends I wanna be your friend

The insouciant lyrics, and others—notably “ Jack Off Blues,” “ I Feel Like Homemade Shit,” “ Wet Dream Over You,” and “ Caca Rocka” — are available in the mimeographed booklet, The F ugs’ Song Book!, for sale at the Peace Eye Book Store on East Tenth Street, a shop only the New Bohemia could have invented and only the East Village could contain. The Fugs seem an inevitable phenomenon of the New Bohemia musical scene. Unlike the ambiguous approach towards sex and other rock-androll groups, the Fugs openly satirize fantasies of epic potency. The whining sentimentality and self-pity of most commercial pop music are made blatantly ridiculous by the Fugs who, in keeping with the Combine Generation’s attitude towards freedom from repression, have the wit to recognize that sexual idiocies are as much an enemy as is humorless puritanism. Since both the idiocies and the puritanism already form the basis for most pop songs, the Fugs have decided to translate them into the vernacular that is implied in any case. Thus, their message is as overt verbally as the rock-and-roll beat (and the dances that are synonymous with it) is musically. Or, to put it in the vivid language used in the introduction to The Fugs’ Song Book!: The Fug-songs seem to spurt in to five areas o f concentration: a) nouveau folk-freak b) sex rock and roll

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c) dope thrill chants d) horny cunt-hunger blues e) Total Assault on the Culture (anti-war/anti-creep/anti-repression) . . . The meaning of the FUGS lies in the term BODY POETRY, to get at the frenzy of the thing, the gropet hing . . . The Body Poetry Formula is this: The Head by the way o f the Big Beat to the genitals The Genitals by way o f Operation Brain Thrill to the Body Poetry.

What it all means is this: The rock-and-roll beat equals SEX, the total body experience. And this total body experience represents the Holy Grail of the New Bohemia’s obstacle-ridden quest for a life of non-dichotomized identity, a quest hardly restricted to the East Village. But the New Bohemia, in keeping with its idea of total assault via the arts, uses the clichés of the pornographic to attack obstacles, conventions that it finds truly “ dirty.” The Fugs are a perfect and clear-cut example of the process. While they found their first audience in the East Village, their message and style have attracted the attention of some very proper outlying institutions. Late in 1965, for example, the Fugs made a cross-country tour that took them into what might have been considered outposts of culture in the hinterlands of repression: they performed before assemblies of the Universities of Mis­ souri, Kansas, Ohio, and Indiana and at Antioch and Dickinson College. The college-level student, with his need for protest, finds that the Fugs and other such “ protest” performers are smog-clearers. As one of the Fugs reported upon his return to the East Village, “ Our reception was fantabulous!” More tours are planned. Like the Beatles, the Fugs write their own music and lyrics. Folkways Records have already immortalized them on LP and a new recording company, ESP, has recently taken them under its wing. In talking of the Fugs, or of any rock-and-roll group, it is necessary to consider the character of their sound itself. Whether attending a disco­ theque or a rock-and-roll-fest, no one is spared the assault of total noise. Volume per se has become the equivalent of darkness in a movie house. Sound, used to envelop the listener physically, becomes a manufactured environment. Having a quiet chat in even the remotest corner of the largest discotheque is like attempting a conversation under water. It is a moot point whether the rock-and-roll craze could have reached its present gargantuan proportions without electronic amplification. In effect,

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On Bohemia

current rock-and-roll may be thought of as a phenomenon of electronics, stemming from the public’s intoxication with hi-fi equipment and its insistence that performers duplicate the prefab sound and volume that such “ home entertainment centers” afford. It is no news that rock-and-roll has been around a long time, but minus the amplification gigantism e. Hillbilly music, folk music, and gospel music have all been lifted out of their small picture frames and blown up to billboard size. Time was when you simply turned up the volume button on your radio of Victrola in order to hear things better and to immerse yourself privately in what then seemed a glorious self-indulgence. Today, the opposite seems true, and to listen to music at an intimate volume has become tantamount to a sneaky pleasure. The aggression of sound, its use as an environment, its insistent imme­ diacy, its power as an equalizer, all these factors have quickened the kinetic responses to fever pitch. The link between the full volume of rockand-roll music and the frenzy of rock-and-roll dancing is, by now, an inescapable fact. The overwhelming accentuation of rhythm via electronic amplification, having categorically eliminated verbal communication, com mands physical participation. Not even the lyrics of the songs are deci­ pherable under the deliberate distortions of style and volume. Indeed, the entire notion of amplification may be looked upon as a vehicle of assault on habitual response based on “ who” you are, verbally. The self must now be defined in physical action, but it is no longer the embrace of a dancing partner that defines the physical self. Since amplified sound touches all, equally, partners need not embrace while dancing; sound becomes the real partner. Amplification has proved to be a launching pad for inter-self flights. As such, it may be placed on a par with drug-taking. As an all-enveloping stimulant, it can create an atmosphere akin to that of the drug “ high” or function like an aural LSD. Moreover, the extraordinary response to the throbs of these Vistavision sounds has taken on the overwhelming aspect of a massive and worldwide “ home” addiction to electronic media. In short, it seems to answer an obvious need for the “ enlarged” experience, quite removed from any consideration of the use of drugs to do the enlarging. Aside from the plugged-in aspects of rock-and-roll, the proliferation of electronics is rampant in all the arts, but, as we shall see, rarely in and of itself. While electronic music has become one of the major playgrounds of avant-garde composers, electronic sound, in the avant-garde sense, has almost nothing to do with its “ commercial” counterpart, and even Mr. Theremin has been left at the starting post. The electronics-oriented

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composer uses electronics as a self-sufficient musical medium, creating a vocabulary of sounds that cannot be duplicated on traditional instruments. He does this creating in sound laboratories, by means of highly complex transformers and converters. The “ product” is a tape on which the composer can further “ compose” by editing: splicing for unusual rhythmic patterns, slowing down, speeding up, reversing, repeating, inverting, etc. Electronic music, like automation, does away with the performer. Al­ though the electronic composer will upon occasion write a piece for tape and orchestra, the purists of the New Bohemia look upon such composi­ tions as virtue sullied. Electronic music, stereophonic music, electrophonic music, musique concrète , and just plain music are no more than so many stultified conven­ tions to the serious Combine Generation composer. To him electrically stimulated sound serves as an adjunct, and only as an adjunct. There is, as yet, no catchall name for the kind of music he writes. His source material includes all of the arts, and then some. Like the New Bohemia film-maker, he wants to synthesize and disrupt simultaneously. This entire musical scene represents a return to nature, to nature as it is now , including everything in it: people, things, feelings, industry, science, electronics, the arts, all media of communication, philosophy, psychology, religion, politics, anthropology, mathematics, oceanography, semantics, inner space, outer space, etc.—in short, the gigantic intellectual, emo­ tional, and sociological stewpot we all swim around in. As far as American music is concerned, John Cage was one of the first to spread the message of creation through destruction and recombination. Music as we have known it has reached the end of the line, and other music must be found. We must look to the other sounds, sounds that must be approached and used within new frameworks, frameworks that should be as variable and chancy as is life itself. The return to nature and the redefinition of nature become a return to sound in nature, a redefinition of sound as musical expression. Cage has even forced us to hear silence, and in so doing has revealed the fact that there is no such thing. But Cage was not solely interested in redefining music itself. He has also redefined the role of the performer, as well as the role of the audience. He has shown how the techniques of the other arts may be applied to music. He has made clear that “ presentation” should consist of more than a comely entrance, should in fact involve visual elements integral to perfor­ mance, elements which may, of themselves, be “ musical.” He has in­ sisted, again and again, on the validity of the visual as an essential. He has so thoroughly paved the way for musical reorientation in American avantgarde circles that he is now considered a classicist of the genre. Having cleared a new domain, having given preferential treatment to

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elements heretofore considered unusable—not to say contradictory or even destructive to serious music—Cage has enthroned chance and varia­ bility. They reign still and command the voluntary, fanatical allegiance of scores of young knights-errant the world over. These are the composers and performers of the Combine Generation, a group that includes many nationalities. Some of them found their first audiences in the East Village, although since the late fifties they, too, have had the same kind of small but dedicated European following enjoyed by the new cinema and the experimental theater. Today, the notion of “ un­ derground” anything is valid only if one conceives of it as an international subway system. Among the American contingent of New Bohemia composers who studied with John Cage when he held classes at the New School for Social Research in the late fifties, are A1 Hansen, Richard Maxfield, Dick Higgins, George Brecht, and Allan Kaprow. They found his teachings both stimu­ lating and eye-opening and readily accepted his views on indeterminacy and the autonomous behavior of simultaneous events (a lot of unrelated things going on at once). Through him they were able to confirm and extend their own areas of interest, including the notions that music should be anti-virtuosity, anti-entertainment, anti-set-performance, anti-set-con tent, and anti-set-duration. The majority of the New Bohemia composers have had extensive musi­ cal education and training. Many of the most “ outrageous” ones were music students of extraordinary brilliance and accomplishment. In other words, their preoccupation with this highly offbeat approach to music has nothing to do with incompetence. Here is Incidental M usic , a composition by George Brecht, a most gifted artist-composer: Five Piano Pieces, any number playable successively or simultaneously, in any

order or combination, with one another and with other pieces. 1. The piano seat is tilted on its base and brought to rest against a part of the piano. 2. Wooden blocks. A single block is placed inside the piano. A block is placed upon this block, then a third upon the second and so forth, singly, until at least one block falls from the column. 3. Photographing the piano situation. 4. Three dried peas or beans are dropped, one after another, onto the keyboard. Each such seed remaining on the keyboard is attached to the key or keys nearest it with a single piece of pressure-sensitive tape. 5. The piano seat is suitably arranged and the performer seats himself. This is the extent of the composition. Sound is a matter of pure accident. L adder , another of Brecht’s compositions, goes like this:

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Paint a single straight ladder white Paint the bottom rung black Distribute spectral colors on the rungs between

Brecht’s Saxophone Solo has but one instruction: Trumpet

The Japanese Yoko Ono is another highly esteemed New Bohemia composer. Her compositions have the transcendental quality of haiku poetry: W o o d P ie c e

Use any piece o f wood Make different sounds by using different Angles o f your hand in hitting it. (a) Make different sounds by hitting Different parts o f it. (b) W a l k i n g P ie c e

Walk in the footsteps o f the person in front. 1. on ground 2. in mud 3. in snow 4. on ice 5. in water Try not to make sounds. L a u g h P ie c e

Keep laughing a week. C i t y P ie c e

Walk all over the city with an empty baby carriage. V o ic e P ie c e f o r S o p r a n o

to Simone Morris Scream. 1. against the wind 2. against the wall 3. against the sky D a w n P ie c e

630

On Bohemia Take the first word that comes across your mind. Repeat the word until dawn.

Miss Ono defines her work as “ insound” or “ instructure.” Insound, as she put it, is a practice as much as a form of music, and most of the insound pieces are spread by word of mouth. In effect, they are to be read to others or to oneself, thought about, and, if possible, performed. The “ score” is the instruction itself. Instructure is described as “ Something that emerged from instruction and yet not quite emerged—not quite structured—never quite structured . . . like an unfinished church with a sky ceiling.” A far more elaborate set of instructions, intended for definite perfor­ mance, was followed at a recent concert at the Bridge Theater in the East Village. This was a work entitled D on't Trade Here by Giuseppe Chiari. Again, the “ score” comprises three pages of instructions written in pseudo-verse form, as follows: You must repeat 122 times the sentence: D O N ’T TRADE HERE! . . . OWNERS OF THIS BUSI­ N ESS SURRENDERED TO THE RACE MIXERS. At every repetition draw a mark on a long table in view o f the public; The marks can have any shape you like and be different the one from the other. These repetitions last altogether 10 minutes. Immediately. At the end o f the 122 repetitions rub out the table. Write, with violent gesture: MILANO TEATRO LA SCALA SOIUZ SOVETSKICH KOMPOSITOROV S.S.S.R . KOMIS SIJA MUZIKALNOI KRITIKI SOVETSKAJA MUZIKA TEORETICESKIE I KRITICESKIE STATI THE NAM E OF THE PERFORMER LOVE Afterwards Shout. Complain. Like a beast. Take a microphone. Bring it near your throat. Play with the intensity level o f three amplifiers. Arriving alternatively and simultaneously at such high level as to cause very sharp frequencies in this loud speaker. Reduce to lowest the level o f the amplifier. Vomit. Or cry Cause the vomiting or the tears mechanically or chemically.

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Silence. Cause grave disturbance in one o f the sets by means o f an irregular contact. Afterwards. Take on oscillator. Transmit in the hall a sinusoidale wave on a frequency of 20.000 cycles every second. Turned toward the audience, announce: “ A sinusoidale wave on the frequency of 20.000 cycles every second, sent by an oscillator, is circulating in this hall.” “ The wave can not be heard by man.” “ Gradually lessen the waves frequency until it reaches a zone. —between 16.000 and 14.000 cycles approximately— where it will be heard.” “ The hearing is in inverse proportion to the age o f the audience. It lessens as the age increases.” Stroll amongst the audience. Slowly lessen the frequency. Do not speak. No expression on your face. Do not answer possible reactions or interference from the audience. Confine yourselves to inform on the lessening o f the frequency every thousand units. “ 19.000 . . . 18.000 . . . 17.000 . . . 16.000 . . .” Arrived at 12,000 cycles shut off the broadcasting.

Chiari’s D on ’t Trade Here was not a howling success, but the audience sat attentively through it. One of the most prolific and inventive of the New Bohemia composers is Nam June Paik, as active in music as he is in the new cinema. His compositions are charged with typical New Bohemia audacity. Here are two works. Y o u n g P e n is S y m p h o n y

. . . curtain up . . . The audience sees only a huge piece of white paper stretched across the whole stage mouth, from the ceiling to the floor and from the left to the right wing. Behind this paper, on the stage, stand ten young men ........................................................................................ ready. . . . .after a while. . . . The first sticks his penis out through the paper to the audience . . . The second sticks his penis out through the paper to the audience . . . The third sticks his penis out through the paper to the audience . . . The fourth sticks his penis out through the paper to the audience . . . The fifth sticks his penis out through the paper to the audience . . . The sixth sticks his penis out through the paper to the audience . . . The seventh sticks his penis out through the paper to the audience . . . The eighth sticks his penis out through the paper to the audience . . .

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On Bohemia The ninth sticks his penis out through the paper to the audience . . . The tenth sticks his penis out through the paper to the audience . . . Expected world premier abut 1984 a . d . Ref. Taiyono Kisetzu: Ishihara SERENADE FOR ALISON Ta k e o f f a p a ir o f y e l l o w p a n t i e s , a n d p u t t h e m o n t h e w a l l . Ta k e o f f a p a ir o f w h i t e - l a c e p a n t i e s , a n d l o o k a t t h e a u d i ­ ence thro ug h t h e m

.

Ta k e o f f a p a ir o f r e d p a n t i e s , a n d

put

them

in

the

v est

pocket o f a g e n t l e m a n .

Ta k e o f f a p a ir o f l i g h t - b l u e p a n t i e s , a n d w i p e t h e s w e a t o f f THE FOREHEAD OF AN OLD GENTLEMAN. Ta k e o f f a p a ir o f v i o l e t p a n t i e s , a n d p u l l t h e m o v e r t h e HEAD OF A SNOB. Ta k e o f f a p a ir o f n y l o n p a n t i e s , a n d s t u f f t h e m i n t h e m o u t h OF A MUSIC CRITIC. Ta k e o f f a p a ir o f b l a c k - l a c e p a n t i e s , a n d s t u f f t h e m i n t h e m o u t h o f t h e s e c o n d m u s ic c r it ic .

Ta k e o f f a p a ir o f b l o o d - s t a i n e d p a n t i e s , a n d s t u f f t h e m i n THE MOUTH OF THE WORST MUSIC CRITIC. Ta k e o f f a p a ir o f g r e e n p a n t i e s , a n d

make

an

om elette-

SURPRISE W ITH THEM. . . . . CONTINUE. . . .

If

p o s s ib l e , s h o w t h e m t h a t y o u h a v e n o m o r e p a n t ie s o n

.

Seven The Social Lie They draw nude women fo r The Masses, Thick, fa t, ungainly lasses. How does that help the working classes?

—Bobby Edwards

Bohemianism in French Politics The Nation, 1871

The sentence passed on Rochefort—imprisonment for life in a fortress— excited a good deal of surprise in other countries, and especially in this, by its severity. It has since been commuted to banishment from France, owing partly to the intercession of friends, but principally, we suspect, to the painful evidences, revealed on the trial, of the man’s utter feebleness of character. He broke down completely when arraigned before a courtmartial and put in peril of his life, and had nothing better to falter out in defence of the lying articles in which he assailed the Versailles Govern­ ment, during the reign of the Commune, than that their follies and falsehoods were due to “ a nervous way of writing he had.” The rigor of the court-martial was, however, fully approved by the French public, and for reasons all of which do not appear on the surface, and the weightiest of which have no relation to Rochefort personally. Rochefort really was by no means the worst of those concerned in the late trouble; indeed, he may be said to have been one of the best, and to have earned during the siege the thanks of the friends of order and decency. Nor were his literary 633

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labors under the Commune anything extraordinary in the matter of bitter­ ness and unscrupulousness. His misfortune, or his crime, was that he appeared before the military tribunal as the representative of what has been called the “ Bohemian element” in the Commune; or, in other words, the chief of the band of broken-down litterateurs, lawyers, doctors, and students who did so much through their speeches at the clubs, and their articles in the p etite p re sse , to make the Commune possible, and who played so large a part in carrying it on after it was set up. The more that is known about the Commune, the stranger it seems; and there was, perhaps, nothing so strange and startling in its history as the appearance in it of a swarm of adventurers from the Quartier L atin , with pretensions more or less well founded to education, and who had nothing in common with the working-classes, for whose benefit the Commune professed to be established, except poverty. A remarkable paper on the part played by this low literary element in Parisian society in the late troubles, from the pen of M. Caro, of the Institute, appeared in the Revue des Deux M ondes of July 15, and it is worth reading by anybody who wants to understand the hatred with which men of Rochefort’s stamp are now regarded by the conservative portion of French society—that is to say, by four-fifths of it. To be a “ Bohemian,” in the French sense of the term, as originated, we believe, by Henri Murger, who was the original Bohemian, one has not only to be averse to regular industry, unable or unwilling to follow any regular vocation, fond of physical enjoyment, indifferent to all the things which constitute “ respectability,” but also to be, ostensibly at least, a worshipper of “ a rt” —that is, of an ideal standard of excellence, whether in painting, music, or literature. Every great city contains a large number of persons of this stamp, but Paris a far larger number than any other, for several obvious reasons. The condition of the French professions and of French commerce is such that failure to root one’s self at the outset in a fixed calling is almost irretrievable. The barriers between one pursuit and another are rarely surmountable, and society is singularly intolerant of anything like enterprise or fertility of resource; and the spirit of adventure, which at one time sent its restless spirits out to found new states, or make great conquests, has been completely dead for over a century. Then, it must be admitted that the tendency to “ loaf” which is the besetting sin of all persons whose work is completely in their own hands and may be done at one time as well as another, displays itself strongly in the French character. The frequency with which all through the provincial towns one finds the husband playing dominoes at the café, at broad noon, while the wife is attending the store, is a familiar illustration of it. Then, the drift of young men to Paris to seek their fortune, as well as to study, and the obstacles to anything like quiet and persistent devotion

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to a calling which Paris life has for the last twenty years more particularly offered, are things the like of which is not seen in any other capital. The failures of all professions gather there, and they are met by all the vaguely ambitious, the idle, the lazy, the greedy, and the envious, and the goodfor-nothing of all kinds, and the whole of them devote themselves to two things—writing for the press, painting pictures, and making love to sewinggirls. We published in the N ation , three years ago, some articles descrip­ tive of life among the art students, which gave a vivid picture of the singular, and many people would say the awful, moral condition of the whole Bohemian world; the complete extinction among them of belief in anything, but “ a rt” and material luxury. They were not even proud of being Frenchmen, but of being “ very civilized.” In the beginning, Bohemians were simply poor and unsuccessful, so that though, according to their own account, nearly all that was heroic or genuine in French society, and all the insight in art, and literature, and philosophy which Providence had allotted to the people, had taken refuge among them, the problem which mainly occupied their minds when they got up in the morning was the means of finding a dinner or paying for their lodging. Out of this phase, which, as it appeared in their literature, lasted about ten years, they passed into the envious and malignant phase, and devoted themselves to reviling the successful in all walks of life, especially in art and literature, and accounting for it by disgraceful events in their career. Under the Empire, for the first time, Bohemia turned its attention to politics and sociology, and, from hating successful artists and authors, took to hating all well-to-do people, and all people who had established themselves in any walk of life, and the “petite p r e s s e d as it was called, appeared, consisting of a swarm of little papers, mostly short-lived, filled with scandalous stories of and attacks on persons occupying respectable positions, and revelling in the sense of discomfort and alarm they spread through the community. It was evident they were now making war on society as a whole. In the latter days of the Empire, however, they turned their attention to the crapulous and unclean horde of courtiers and specu­ lators who had gathered round the Tuileries, and delighted the Parisian world for some months by the incisiveness and brutality of some of their exposures, and even seduced many into the belief that the Bohemians were going to turn moralists. About this time, Rochefort, who was one of them, came to the surface with his L antem e, and devoted himself wholly to the Emperor and his family, sparing neither age nor sex, and rapidly grew, to the disgrace of French society, into a political personage. His filthy libels and lampoons did more to shake the Empire than all the eloquence and labor of the opposition in the Chambers. But the Bohemians never really appeared above-ground till the clubs were opened in 1868-9.

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When the meetings began, it was remarked that the workingmen who appeared at them as orators, and who, wild as many of their notions were, were really in earnest, were far outnumbered by seedy-looking “ doctors” and “ advocates” and elderly “ law and medical students,” the editorial corps of papers which never got beyond No. 1, all of whom began to devote themselves, as M. Caro says, wholly to “ transcendental politics and humanitarian regeneration.” There appeared with them a considerable force of female lecturers, or, as he calls them, “ c o n f e r e n c i e r e s ”, who maintained with great fierceness that the failure of the first Revolution was due to its neglecting the emancipation of woman. Several of these started little papers, and developed a new type of journalist—the “journaliste c o m m u n e u s e ”. M. Thiers had no more ferocious enemies than these; according to them, the old rascal was always “ drunk with the people’s blood and sweat.” What made their adhesion to the cause of the Commune all the more singular was, that they have been shockingly treated by some of the leading male socialists. Proudhon has cruelly castigated them, but none of the sect has been so unrelenting as Bebel, the great German apostle of the Communists, who says, “ as to woman, with very rare exceptions, she can be of no use in the reconstruction of society. The slave of every prejudice, tainted with all sorts of diseases, moral and physical, she will be the stumbling-block of progress. Towards her it will be necessary to employ—morally, certainly, physically , perhaps —the peremptory argument used with the inbred slaves— the s tic k .” The M arseillaise , perhaps, marked the highest point reached by Bohe­ mian journalism. One of its “ staff,” Paschal Grousset, was made Minister of Foreign Affairs by the Commune, and amused himself and the world by sending despatches to the Prussian commander and notifying Europe of his accession to office. Scores of others of the tribe became magistrates, inspectors, judges, and commissioners, and had a brief taste of power and luxury, enough to console them probably for years of penury and obscu­ rity. The descent of the Positive philosophers into the arena, many of whom were tickled by the Commune’s contempt for majorities, gave the farce a curious air of science which sat oddly on many of the Bohemians. Raoul Rigault, a licentious rascal, who acted as Procureur of the Com­ mune, talked flippantly on spontaneous generation, a theory which greatly delighted him, just as he was going to execute the unfortunate hostages at La Roquette. “ It makes creation completely useless,” said he, “ and God, if he existed, would be good for nothing, except to be shot.” We ought to add that M. Caro ascribes a good deal of influence on the course of events to the Bohemians’ love of absinthe, which they drink regularly, and of the deleterious effects of which on the brain tissues doctors are now fully satisfied. But, in spite of the general and hideous

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absurdity of the performance, there was in it a certain method, from the Bohemian point of view. They realized in the Commune a thoroughly Bohemian dream of riches and power acquired without labor, and retained simply by continuous and incoherent talking, and it ended, like a splendid theatrical finale, in a glorious and exciting scene of flame and blood. There was one incident in the story which is hardly short of delicious in its pathos and simplicity. The Communist Minister of Public Instruction published, during his brief tenure of office, a periodical at the public expense, in which he printed the articles which he had for years offered in vain to the brutal editors of the old society. He at least had his revenge, and saw the dawning of the better day.

Bohemia Betrayed: Sellout to the Social Register G. William Domhoff, 1975

Originally, being a good Bohemian was supposed to require even more than participation and appreciation. It was having the carefree, unconven tional spirit of the vagabond or struggling artist. It was a way of “ being.” Specifically, it was being like the mythical “ Bohemian” artist celebrated in American letters since the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the origins of the Bohemian Club* can be traced directly to this romantic literary and cultural current, for the club’s founders were much taken with its major figures and their writings. “ Bohemian,” as the name for the unkempt, half-starving artist who is creative in spite of his dire circumstances, comes from the centuries-old French folk belief that European gypsies were originally from the country of Bohemia. American artists searching for a life style picked up the term while lounging in the Paris cafés of the 1850s. They returned to the United States to paint a picture of Parisian Bohemianism which has made the artists’ colony there the envy of American artists and university students ever since. They also set up their own Bohemia in New York, writing poetry and novels, painting, and engaging in literary criticism. Romantic spirits around the country became enamored of these New York Bohemians. Journalists, authors, and artists in San Francisco were no exception, and in 1872 they joined together to embody their carefree fantasies and creative urges in the Bohemian Club. It was to be a club for “ the promotion of social and intellectual intercourse between journalists and other writers, artists, actors and musicians, professional or amateur, and such others not included in this list as may by reason of knowledge and appreciation of polite literature and the fine arts be deemed worthy of membership.” 1By these criteria, businessmen, lawyers, and other worldly *Of San Francisco.—Ed.

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types were to be admitted only if they had special knowledge or apprecia­ tion of the arts. The Bohemian Club struggled mightily to establish its ties with “ real Bohemianism.” Ambrose Bierce, later to be one of the fathers of West Coast Bohemianism, and the author of such scary semiclassics as The D evil’s D ictionary , was an early member. So was poet Charles Warren Stoddard, who in 1876 had gained great notoriety by accompanying New York’s so-called Queen of Bohemia, Ada Clare, on a sightseeing trip in Hawaii. Bret Harte and Mark Twain were made honorary members. George Sterling, a prosperous real-estate man who became one of the leaders of Western Bohemianism when he turned to poetry, joined the club in 1904. Even socialist author Jack London, who resisted the label of Bohemian for that of vabagond, was acceptable for membership at the turn of the century, although there was some concern expressed over his radical ideas and his fancy white silk shirts with long, flowing ties.2 Alas, despite the high hopes of the San Francisco admirers of “ real Bohemians” who first dreamed up the Bohemian Club, the Bohemian spirit had to be compromised from the first. “ The members were nearly all impecunious,” wrote a not-so-impecunious charter member, Edward Bosqui, in his late-nineteenth-century diary, “ and there was much diffi­ culty in devising means to furnish the rooms and to defray current expenses. It was soon apparent,” continued Bosqui, “ that the possession of talent, without money, would not support the club; and at a meeting of the board of directors [here ten names are listed] it was decided that we should invite an element to join the club which the majority of the members held in contempt, namely men who had money as well as brains, but who were not, strictly speaking, Bohemians. As soon as we began to act upon this determination the problem of our permanent success was solved.” 3 So the calculating rationality of the marketplace had to be part of the club’s ethos almost from its founding, and some of the richest men in San Francisco were soon enjoying membership. The club became known as a socially elite organization. While not considered as high status as the Pacific Union Club, it was listed in the Elite Directory (1879), the San Francisco Blue Book (1888), Our Society Blue Book (1894-95), and other social registers of that era. By 1879 one in every seven members of the very exclusive Pacific Union Club was also a member of the Bohemian Club, with the figure climbing to one in five by 1894 and one in four by 1906. In 1907, the first year for which the California Historical Society in San Francisco has copies of the yearly San Francisco Social Register that is still in use today, 31 percent of the regular local Bohemian Club members were listed in its pages. Solving the financial problems of the club had its price, of course. In

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1880, only eight years after its founding, a group of painters and writers protested that “ the present day is not as the past days, the salt has been washed out of the Club by commercialism, the chairs are too easy and the food too dainty, and the true Bohemian spirit has departed.” 4 Around the turn of the century one early member anonymously decried this change in spirit in a little booklet on “ Early Bohemia.” “ The entering of the moneysocial element has not benefited the Club, as a Bohemian Club,” he claimed. Now the club had “ social aspirations which means death to genius and a general dead-level m ediocrity.” Elsewhere he noted, “ In the beginning, rich men were absolutely barred, unless they had something of the elements of true Bohemianism (could do something). . . . Now they get in because they are rich.” 5 The tension which sometimes flared between the rich and the talented members also was experienced by the most famous artist member of the 1880s, Jules Tavernier. Tavernier became so annoyed at one point that he drew an extra cartoon for a Jinks night, which he displayed in the clubhouse without the permission of the Jinks Committee. “ It was an allegorical cartoon,” reminisced a long-time member in 1907, “ the artist’s idea being: Bohemia is fallen into the hands of the Bourgeois—weaving spiders have spun their nets over Bohemia’s halls—the Owl has taken flight from Bohemia. In effect, the cartoon represented a Bohemia where trade and barter were followed, and where there were money changers, as in the tem ple.” This unexpected addition to the evening’s entertainment greatly offended many wealthy members, which is said to have pleased Tavernier greatly. Usually the cartoons painted by artist members were hung on the walls, but Tavernier took this one away at the end of the evening, proudly announcing that it was “ too good for the Bourgeois.” 6 Thus, by the time George Sterling wrote his 1907 Grove play, The Triumph o f Bohemia, in which the spirit of Bohemia triumphed over the spirit of Mammon, the opposite had long since occurred within the halls of the Bohemian Club. “ [Sterling hadn’t] noticed,” says Albert Parry, a somewhat cynical student of the history of American Bohemianism, “ that [the] happy sprites and Bacchic fauns whom he so proudly commanded in is onslaught of Mammon were in reality fat businessmen of San Francisco out on a summer picnic, ready to be amused and flattered by Sterling’s plays.” 7 In 1927, when the club excluded modern art from its annual art exhibit because it was “ in radical and unreasonable departure from laws of a rt,” there was hardly a stir, although a few artist members threatened to resign and start a new club under a “ no censorship” banner. People by then expected that the president of the highly respectable Bohemian Club would say, “ The line must be drawn somewhere between what is and what is not

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a rt.” 8 Nor was it shocking a year later when the club changed its mind about membership for the great comedian Will Rogers because (1) he stole the show at the Grove and (2) told a reporter the encampment was “ a form of week-end divertissement for tired business men from which it took them about two weeks to recover.” 9 This latter remark was clearly gossip unbecoming a gentleman. Besides, Rogers’s remarks were thought by some to be harmful to the candidacy of that swinging Bohemian, Herbert C. Hoover, who was running for the presidency on a “ dry” platform. Unconventionality and a devil-may-care attitude, then, are not the spirit of the Bohemian Club. Avant-garde artists and authors like Jules Tavernier and Jack London are no longer welcome even as guests at the Bohemian Grove. Art Linkletter, Bing Crosby, Ray Bolger, Herman Wouk, and George Shearing are more typical of the artists and authors invited to mingle with the anointed. The real spirit of this Bohemia is a quid pro quo arrangement between the rich and the talented. The rich patrons, through their wealth, provide a setting within which the creative members can exercise their talents and enjoy the amenities of a first-rate men’s club. Then too, the artists can find customers for their paintings, performers can make connections that lead to engagements at private parties and other social events, and professors can cultivate financial backing for new projects. In return for their patronage, the wealthy are handsomely enter­ tained by the talented members at the Grove and the clubhouse. They also have the privilege of rubbing shoulders with people of very different abilities from their own, which enhances both their self-image and their public image. Some even develop fast friendships with the artistic and professorial members, friendships they never would have developed if the Bohemian Club and its Grove hadn’t provided an institutional setting in which the rich and the talented were able to interact on a cooperative and fraternal basis. The way in which the club aids talented members is nicely documented in the case of Professor Ernest O. Lawrence, the Berkeley physicist who developed the cyclotron so important in the early phases of atomic and nuclear research. Lawrence’s work in the 1930s was supported financially by the university and foundations, but he needed even more funds to develop a larger cyclotron: [Lawrence] had got all he could hope for from the University budget, but he saw an untapped spring in the Regents personally. Most of them belonged to an Elk’s Club of the very rich called the Bohemian, which maintained a wonderful rustic lodge on the Russian River fifty miles north o f Berkeley. . . . Invitations were coveted; there was no more intoxicating distinction than to wash dishes at the Bohemian Grove while President [Robert G.] Sproul [of the University of California] dried them. Sproul supported Lawrence as faithfully at the Grove as

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at board meetings. He helped Lawrence to a jovial kitchen-sink intimacy with two of the most influential Regents, John Neylan and William Crocker.10

As a result of this kitchen-sink intimacy, Neylan made himself the chairman of a special regents’ subcommittee to look after the needs of Law rence’s radiation laboratory. Crocker, chairman of the university regents, gave Lawrence $75,000 in 1937 for a new building to house the bigger cyclotron. The arrangement between the rich and the talented, then, is advanta­ geous to members of both groups; each gets something it wouldn’t other­ wise have. The anonymous author of Early Bohemia comprehended some of the mutual benefits in his turn-of-the-century complaint: Things have changed; now the simply rich become members because it is fashionable to say, “ I am a member o f the Bohemian Club,” and they imagine that some o f the reputed brightness o f the Club will be reflected on them. The poor artist or literary man gets in, by hook or by crook, because he thinks he may be able to sell some of his brains to the merely rich. So both are satisfied, in a way; but neither w holly.11

The Bohemian Club, bringing together as it does the wealthy and the talented, is an unusual club. However, the Bohemian Grove, with its twoweek retreat for a nationwide clientele is not only unusual but utterly unique within the American upper class. Notes 1. Fletcher, The A n n als o f the B ohem ian C lu b , Vol. I, pp. 26-27. 2. Richard O’Connor, Jack L on don : A B iograph y (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), p. 151. London liked the Grove very much and seldom missed an encampment. 3. Edward Bosqui, M em oirs o f E d w a rd B osqu i (Oakland: Holmes Book Com­ pany, 1952), pp. 126-127. 4. Albert Parry, G arrets a n d P reten d ers: A H isto ry o f B oh em ian ism in A m eric a (New York: Dover Publications, 1933, 1960), p. 226. 5. E arly B oh em ia (no author, no date), pp. 4 -5 . This small, privately printed book is available in the California Historical Society in San Francisco. 6. Jerome A. Hart, “ Tavernier, Artiste-Peintre,” March 2, 1907. In “ Oversized San Francisco Miscellaneous, Bohemian Club,” California Historical Society, San Francisco. 7. Parry, G arrets a n d P reten d ers, pp. 238-39. Sterling was given a free room in the club. He lived there from the early 1900s until he died by his own hand in 1926. 8. “ Bohemians Torn Over Art” (N ew York Tim es, February 20, 1927), Section II, p. 4. 9. “ Won’t Name Will Rogers: Bohemian Club Sponsor Quits, San Francisco Paper Says” (N ew York Tim es, November 23, 1928), p. 22. 10. Nuel Pharr Davis, L a w ren ce a n d O ppen h eim er (New York: Simon and Schus

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ter, 1968), pp. 69-70. In 1942 the Bohemian Grove was the site at which leaders of the atomic-bomb project decided which experimental nuclear plants to build in their search for a usable atomic weapon. I am grateful to John Van der Zee, author o f Power at Ease: Inside the G reatest Men s Party on Earth (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), for calling this reference to my attention. 11. Early Bohemia, p. 5.

A Remembrance of the Red Romance Malcolm Cowley, 1956

My first impression was of hot yellow light, noise, excitement, and clutter. Coats lay in heaps on kitchen chairs. Young men, mostly in cottonflannel shirts, stood arguing in groups, or leaned over chessboards, or sat in corners reading the New M asses. There were a few older men, a few Negroes, but no women—and where, I wondered were the representatives of that oppressed majority? If women had been there, they might have insisted on sweeping the floor, which was deep in dust and calico-patterned with cigarette stubs and torn paper. As I stood watching, still more young men came tramping up the stairs, some of them looking like Russian workers with caps perched back over shocks of hair. They glanced around for friends, and either found them or tramped down again. Though nobody was drinking anything stronger than coffee, always in paper cups, I could not help thinking of the Café du D ôme in 1923. For the men of a new generation, the John Reed Club had become “ the place.” The club had been founded in October, 1929, the month of the Wall Street crash, by a group of contributors to the New M asses. Its aim, they announced, was to “ clarify the principles and purposes of revolutionary art and literature, to propagate them, to practice them .” That was why it was given the name of the only American, and almost the only poet, who was buried with the heroes of the Russian Revolution, under the Kremlin wall. Soon there were John Reed Clubs in other American cities besides New York. In November, 1930, the parent organization sent half-a-dozen delegates to the Congress (or “ plenum” ) of Revolutionary Writers that was then assembling in Kharkov. The Russians scolded them for “ insuffi­ cient political development,” for “ remnants of petit-bourgeois ideology,” for not being truly proletarian in their work, and for neglecting “ cultural activity among the Negro m asses.” Nevertheless, the John Reed Club was accepted as the American section of the International Union of Revolution­ ary Writers. 644

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When the delegates came home, they carried with them a special Program of Action for the United States, which, as they boasted in the New M asses, was “ intended to guide every phase of our work.” They solemnly resolved that it should be “ realized in life.” In many respects this program imposed on them by Russian literary bureaucrats was gro tesquely unsuited to American life, as it was to our language, but still the club continued to grow in spite of Russian misdirection and its own abundant errors. It grew because writers and artists had been rebelling against the illogic of capitalism, and because it was the only haven to which the younger ones could turn. The younger ones were those who had been graduated from college, or forced by poverty to drop out of college, in the period from 1927 to 1932. Perhaps they were the least fortunate of all the “ generations” that had begun to succeed each other every five or ten years. The artists among them had almost no hope of selling or even exhibiting their pictures. Some of the writers were able to publish their work in little magazines, of which there were even more at the time than during the Twenties, but—with a few exceptions like The New Republic —the magazines that paid their contributors had stopped looking for new ones. Book publishers, whose volume of business had been reduced by sixty percent in three years, no longer offered advances against royalties to unknown authors. The younger men could see no way of supporting themselves by their chosen profession, and neither could they go to Paris and live cheaply while waiting to be famous, as the men of the Twenties had done. That sort of life, cheap as it was, depended on checks from home and these had stopped coming. The young men of the early Thirties had to stay close to home—often with their parents, who could at least give them shelter—and had to support themselves by whatever unskilled and miserably paid work they could find. In the evening they went to a public library or sat alone in a lunchroom brooding over a cup of coffee until it had turned as cold as fate. It was the life that Alfred Hayes recorded in one of the more impressive poems of the period. In a Coffee Pot: I brood upon myself, I rot Night after night in this cheap coffee pot. I am twenty-two I shave each day I was educated at a public school They taught me what to read and what to say The nobility o f man my country’s pride The men the names the dates have worn away The classes words the books commencement prize Here bitter with m yself I sit Holding the ashes o f their prompted lies.

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For such young men, if they joined the John Reed Club, it became not only a meeting place but a career. It gave them warmth, excitement, friends, and a forum in which to express their opinions about art and revolution. It gave them a chance to hear about cheap places to live, and possible ways of earning money, and parties to which girls would be coming: “ We’re having a party on Saturday night to raise money for the magazine. Why don’t you come and bring your own bottle?” Much more than that, the club gave them self-respect by giving them work—unpaid, to be sure, but still the sort of work they were training themselves to do. The painters were invited, almost commanded, to make posters for mass meetings and for the May Day parade. The fledgling politicians learned to address workers’ clubs. The writers edited and contributed to little maga­ zines, of which almost every branch of the club published one of its own. Among them were Partisan Review and Dynamo in New York, one devoted chiefly to criticism and the other to proletarian poetry; Leftw ard in Boston, The H am m er in Hartford, Left R eview and R ed Pen in Philadelphia, New Forces in Detroit, Cauldron in Grand Rapids, Left Front in Chicago, Left in Davenport, Iowa (it died after two issues), and Partisan in Hollywood, besides a number of allied magazines like Blast in New York, K osm os in Philadelphia, and Anvil in Moberly, Missouri, all three of which specialized in the proletarian short story. To unknown writers, especially those with a working-class background, such magazines provided almost the only op­ portunity to see their work in print, to have it criticized in a helpful spirit, and to prove themselves as soldiers in a revolutionary crusade. Meanwhile the party was having trouble with amateur politicians in every local branch of the club. Some of the members wanted to be young Robespierres intriguing for power and consigning their opponents to the scaffold. It was the politicians who did most of the talking in May, 1932, when the John Reed Club held its first national convention in Chicago, with delegates representing ten of the local clubs. The hottest argument was about the attitude to be adopted toward established writers like Theodore Dreiser, Edmund Wilson, and Waldo Frank, who had revealed their sympathy for the revolution. Two delegates who spoke for the editorial board of the N ew M asses, Joseph Freeman and Mike Gold, thought that such writers should be treated as honored guests. One of the principal functions of the John Reed Club, they said, was winning their firm support. The young Robespierres didn’t agree. “ We must not cringe in our approach to these intellectuals,” one said. Another dismissed all professional writers as “ part and parcel of the middle class,” soon to be liquidated by the revolutionary writers. However, the John Reed Club did not consist merely of writers and painters who couldn’t write or paint. It also included a fair proportion of

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talented beginners eager to do their best. One of them were Richard Wright, for whom a first visit to the Chicago clubroom was the beginning of a new life. On that occasion—he tells us in the chapter he contributed to The G od That Failed —he was introduced “ to a Jewish boy who was to become one of the nation’s leading painters, to a chap who was to become one of the eminent composers of his day, to a writer who was to create some of the best novels of his generation . . . ” The Chicago club was remarkable for the number of soon-to-be-published novelists among its members. If Wright had gone instead to the New York clubroom, he would have found more of the semiliterate politicians with whom Freeman was exasperated, but he would also have found more poets, critics, and future playwrights. The battles in the John Reed Club, besides having a political aspect— like everything else at the time—were also part of the old war between literary generations. Writers in their twenties are always tempted to regard writers in their thirties as natural enemies. I suppose that the great sin of the older men is simply to be there, standing as apparent obstacles in the path of younger men who are trying to enter an overcrowded and highly competitive profession. In the course of becoming established in the profession, the older men probably will have made concessions and compromises. The younger ones will make them later, but they haven’t been tempted as yet, and hence they enjoy a feeling of moral superiority that makes them still angrier at their want of success. One must add that each new generation has been shaped by a different sort of childhood. The work of the older men does not express what the younger ones feel to be their particular sense of life—so down, they say (always choosing the current epithet), with those lost leaders, those philistines, those uptown smugs, those middlebrows, or those squares, and hurrah for our own truths, however crudely or violently expressed. Not a few of the twenty-year-olds in the John Reed Club were the sort of artists, or hangers-on of the arts, who begin by adopting extreme principles to affirm their own identities. If they had been born sooner or later, the principles would have been different. Coming of age in 1920, they would have been Dadaists; in the late Forties, Existentialists; in the Fifties, Beats or Zen Buddhists or Action Painters. In 1932 those who pictured themselves as forming an avant-garde were almost all proletarian writers (or painters or politicians). The new doctrine called Proletcult, which is the telescoped Russian term for proletarian culture, gave them a new vocabulary for attacking established writers. If these lived as respect­ able citizens, they were “ rotten with bourgeois hypocrisy.” If they flirted at cocktail parties, it was because they “ aped the moral decay of the owning classes.” If they wrote for magazines that tried to earn a profit,

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they became “ the lackeys and running dogs of capitalism.” If they remained liberals, they were beneath a revolutionist’s contempt. Even if they joined the Communists, but still counseled tact and moderation—as Gold and Freeman had done at the Chicago convention—they could be charged with “ clinging to petit-bourgeois illusions.” It was hard for anyone who had started publishing in the Twenties, to escape the guilt, in the young men’s eyes, of being ten years too old. And what happened afterward? Briefly, the vision would persist for many years, but Proletcult and the John Reed Clubs were destined to have a relatively short life; both of them would be abolished in 1935 on orders from the Communist International. The orders were based not on a whim of Stalin’s, but on the new international situation. In 1932 the Russians were hoping for a proletarian revolution in Germany and even in the United States. But the American revolution was indefinitely prorogued, and though the German revolution took place in the Winter of 1932-33, almost on schedule, it was led by Adolph Hitler. The Communists waited month after month for his empire to collapse. By 1935, however, Russian policy had begun to be based less on hope and more on apprehension; now it seemed that Russia might be invaded by Hitler’s new armies, which—it was feared in Moscow—might be aided by the British and French imperi­ alists. The obvious countermeasure was to form a new alliance with Western liberals, a People’s Front, so-called, that would be supported in every free country by a voting majority bent on halting the advance of fascism. By 1935 the moment had passed for revolutionary agitation in the United States or for encouraging angry young men in caps and leather jackets. The new slogan would be “ Communism in twentieth-century American­ ism .” The new literary sympathizers whom the Communists tried to win over would be established writers with a wide audience. No matter how sound were the reasons for this change in the party line, it could hardly be welcome to young rebels whose magazines were being suppressed, whose clubs were being abolished, and whose theories of art were being ridiculed as “ leftist infantilism” at the very moment when the established writers, whom they had recently cast aside as “ part and parcel of the middle class,” were being praised and wheedled in the party press. Some of the John Reeders submitted to party discipline, but others, perhaps a majority of the leaders, deserted the Communists while still holding fast to their revolutionary dream.

From Bohemia to Revolution Daniel Aaron , 1961

Since 1912, a polarizing process had been under way which divided the Bohemian from the revolutionary. The rebel could no longer encompass all varieties of intransigence, conduct simultaneously a private and a public war against the established order. The time was near at hand when he would feel impelled to choose between gratifying his personal compulsions or serving “ the party of humanity.” The dedicated socialists who wrote for The Liberator had to make a decision in the early twenties. Not many years would pass, however, before a group of young writers, hitherto apolitical or anti-political, would conclude that anarchist defiance, “ ivory towers,” and escape from respon­ sibility—what Floyd Dell called “ intellectual vagabondage” —offered no permanent satisfactions. Gradually the mood of gay and sometimes deper ate hedonism passed away to be replaced by a new attitude of social seriousness. The exiles were becoming partisans. A windfall had come to The Liberator late in 1921 when Postmaster General Will H. Hays refunded $11,000 to the magazine and restored second-class mailing privileges, which had illegally been denied by Wil­ son’s administration. Unfortunately, this timely restitution was offset when the bookkeeper ran off with $4,000. By 1922, the overworked staff, finding it hard to pay themselves or their contributors, was issuing appeals for assistance to the friends and subscribers of the magazine. On the surface, The Liberator reflected the “ amiable and pointless life” of the Village. Each issue continued to be put together as casually and as haphazardly as ever. Famous and talented people like Charlie Chaplin or H. G. Wells were constantly dropping in. E. E. Cummings came once to discuss his poetry with Claude McKay, and Elinor Wylie, enigmatic and elegant, also chatted with McKay in his office. A more frequent and less predictable visitor was the futurist poet Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, “ gaudily accoutred in rainbow raiment, festooned with barbaric 649

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beads and spangles and bangles, and toting her inevitable poodle in gilded harness,” who would read her bizarre poems to any available listener. And yet the magazine began to show a toughness and militancy in its social attitudes that bore out Michael Gold’s revolutionary convictions. “ Socialists,” he said, “ are being asked to take over the management of the world’s muddled affairs, and they must train themselves for the task.” His own fiery reports of the Pennsylvania coal strikes and the bloody battles between scabs and striking coal miners in Herrin, Illinois, illus­ trated this trend, as did the stories from Russia sent in by John Dos Passos and Anna Louise Strong. McKay and Jean Toomer dramatized the humili­ ations of the Negro, and a writer who signed himself Edmund Wilson, Jr., contributed a brutal story of a veteran whose dreams of revenge against his captain are turned against the “ red agitators.” Among all the literary magazines, only The Liberator spoke up in behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. If it “ made the m istake,” as [Joseph] Freeman put it, “ of ignoring T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which appeared at this time but which we did not review,” it tried to deal with the larger social issues that mattered little to most of the other literary magazines—wage cuts, revolutions, crusades. The Liberator, in short, was doing a good job, and yet by the fall of 1922, it was already beginning to lose its momentum and to reflect the uncertainties and divisions in the minds of its editors. Working against its success were the times and the temperaments of artists and writers who created it. The new postwar prosperity and the “ normalcy” installed by the H ar­ ding administration withdrew attention from the outrages chronicled in the pages of The Liberator, and the radicals themselves, who in 1919 and 1920 had confidently expected the spread of socialism throughout Europe, now abandoned their revolutionary hopes. Even in Russia, the period of mili­ tant Communism had given way to the New Economic Policy, a program that seemed less an adjustment to economic realities than a capitulation. What middle-class support the magazine had enjoyed fell away as [Max] Eastman, the chief fund raiser, left for Europe in the spring of 1922, as Floyd Dell retired to Croton, as Boardman Robinson consigned the art work to youngsters like William Gropper, as Robert Minor left the drawing board for practical radical politics. What Freeman described as the “ arguments, compromises, postpone­ m ents” that had always kept the editorial staff in a turmoil now deepened into real rifts. Gold and McKay, appointed by Eastman as joint executive editors in 1921, had never liked each other. McKay felt that his colleague wanted to turn The Liberator into “ a popular proletarian magazine, printing doggerel from lumberjacks and stevedores and true revelations from chambermaids.” Although not against getting “ material out of the

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forgotten members of the working class,” he wanted to preserve the old literary standards. Their differences almost ended in a fist fight, and McKay, deciding he could never cope with “ Gold’s social revolutionary passion,” resigned. Gold, as McKay noted, “ was still battling up from the depths of proletarian starvation and m isery,” and he particularly resented Floyd Dell’s allegation that he, and indeed all The Liberator editors, were middleclass. “ Comrade M ike,” Dell said, “ is a literary man, an intellectual, and a member of the salaried middle class.” This was nothing to be ashamed of. “ But Comrade Mike is for some obscure reason ashamed of not being a workingman. At least, I deduce that from his conversation and writings. And so he is in awe of the workingman when he meets him, and says extravagant things in praise of him .” What Gold did not understand, Dell said, was that workers are “ properly envious” of the middle class and wanted to join it. Dell could understand this desire because he wanted the workers to have more leisure. But Gold, who worked as hard as any proletarian, was subject “ to a peculiar middle-class emotion. I mean the shame at enjoying the leisure thus provided by somebody’s hard work. . . . He falls down in prayerful awe before Steam and Steel and Mother Earth, and Mud, and Heat, and Noise, and such things.” Like Eugene O’Neill, who in The Hairy A pe mistook “ a minor poet” for a “ typical working m an,” Gold, Dell concluded, “ has come back from the stoke-hold talking about how beautiful Strength and Steam and Steel and Noise and Dirt are. If so, I say, why abolish capitalism?” Dell humorously exaggerated and was not being quite fair to Gold, but there was enough truth behind his joking to hurt. The term “ middle-class” was a “ fighting phrase” to Gold, and he never concealed his disgust for “ aesthetes” in the habit “ of sitting around and talking” or his admiration for hard-fisted miners or steelworkers, who took on the proportions of the proletarian demigods pictured in the cartoons of Fred Ellis, Robert Minor, Boardman Robinson, and William Gropper. Gold might well have been influenced by Eden and Cedar Paul’s Prolet cult (1921), the first extensive discussion of this portmanteau word mean­ ing “ proletarian culture.” The authors defined it “ as a fighting culture . . . based upon the conception of the class struggle . . . its fundamental aim, in the prerevolutionary phase, is to render the workers class-conscious, and thus to give them both the knowledge and the fighting impetus which will enable them to achieve their historic mission . . . ” Gold’s “ proletari anism” seems to have been in 1920-22 a composite of the humanist view of culture as propounded by Lenin’s Commissar for Education, Lunachar­ sky, and the more explicitly Marxist proletcult views of Poliansky, Direc­ tor of Advanced Education in 1921, who wished to purge the minds of

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masses of “ petty bourgeois and anarchistic sentiments” and of “ capital istic bourgeois culture.” It also reflected the extreme views of A. A. Bogdanov, who demanded a distinctive proletarian culture constructed upon an entirely new ideological foundation. It was not, at bottom, the personal frictions among the literary staff that finally killed The Liberator, but the still-unsettled war between art and revolution, between the free, undisciplined writer and the disciplined, responsible party member. The magazine’s commitment to Bolshevism meant that pure art, pure poetry had less justification than ever. Proletcult in its prerevolutionary phase was intended to be primarily “ a fighting culture,” a means of helping the proletariat to tear down the old order. The conception left no room for bourgeois nostalgia or aestheticism, and the party writer was expected to subordinate himself to the class war. One way to solve the dilemma was to follow the path of John Reed, already fading into legend, or of Robert Minor, the cartoonist-turnedorganizer: to renounce art for practical politics. Communist Party func­ tionaries felt rather contemptuous of “ intellectuals” and their creative work. Their disdain mattered less to the editors of The Liberator, however, than the feeling that they were “ cut off,” as Freeman said, “ by political differences from the official literary world.” That is why they decided to turn The Liberator over to the Communist Party in the fall of 1922. Max Eastman had urged this move, rather than allow the magazine to disappear. The request to do so came from Robert Minor, but the decision was the combined staff’s (minus Mike Gold, who had left for California), and until 1924, two editorial staffs, one political, the other artistic, managed the magazine. The split was symbolic. Whereas Eastman, Dell, and Reed had com­ bined political commentary with poetry and happily quarreled in public, each proud of his idiosyncrasies, the less important artists, under party direction, had to leave editorial policy to the politicos. In The M asses and the old Liberator, art and politics were fused; now they were mechanically joined. Party leaders acknowledged, of course, that creative writers like Upton Sinclair and Jack London helped the movement. Had not Karl Radek and Trotsky hailed The Iron Heel? But the radical literati lamented the growing politicizing of the magazine even though they blamed them­ selves for clinging to their petty-bourgeois loyalties. Writing from Califor­ nia in the spring of 1923, Gold begged Freeman not to stop fighting for the artists and to keep The Liberator ’ s columns open to the poets. At the same time, he was berating California writers for taking it easy in “ the fattest, laziest, hungriest, richest, cheeriest, reactionary state in the Union” and writing nothing worth reading. After The Liberator had been turned over to the Workers’ Party in 1922,

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the executive editors, Robert Minor and Joseph Freeman, moved the magazine over to the headquarters of the party on East Eleventh Street, to the un-Bohemian section east of the Village where the trade-union workers lived. The transfer, as Freeman belatedly recognized, was “ a turning point of the utmost importance in the history of the radical and liberal writer in America.” Hitherto, the radical magazines of literature and art (including The Com rade, The M asses, and The Liberator) had been managed and directed by the artists themselves. As independent radicals, they did not hesitate to criticize Socialist or Communist policy when it offended them. Now for the first time, “ a radical magazine of arts, letters and politics was owned and directed by a radical party” ; and this party itself differed from previous radical parties because of its relation to the Communist Interna­ tional. At the time, the artists and writers had no quarrel with the party line. But having no interest in a purely political magazine, they gradually withdrew. Many of the former contributors to The M asses and The Liberator, however, still hoped to revive the old M asses in a new form, or at least to provide a substitute for the older publications. Upon Sinclair as early as 1923 had considered starting a radical magazine and had asked Mike Gold if he would like to assist him. Gold had already given some thought “ to a literary magazine of the revolution,” but he hesitated to collaborate with his ascetic friend. Gold also raised some practical questions about the prospects of radical journalism in the early twenties. What audience did Sinclair have in mind? Did he want to compete with the Socialist Party pietists? They had their organ, as did the Communists and the Wobblies. It took large amounts of money to support a nonpartisan Left magazine, and Gold saw no point in Sinclair’s trying to duplicate The Nation, a strongly backed and effective journal of opinion. Nor did he want to have anything to do with a “ personal magazine” in which Sinclair would play “ the solo of a single virtuoso.” Such a notion clashed with his idea of revolution. He could see a powerful editor dominating a magazine, “ but when he gets mistaking himself for a public movement I want to kick him in the pants.” What sort of magazine, then, did Gold have in mind? He would like to think of Sinclair and himself as editors of a “ group paper” whose duty it would be to nurse and bring forth “ something fine and big into life out of the materials of the world around u s.” Since The M asses, no experiment of this kind has been tried “ to develop revolutionary artists—poets, fictioneers and draughtsmen.” There was hardly a place, in fact, “ where a fiction story with a strong revolutionary or working-class implications” could be printed in America. The Liberator had become a party organ. No

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magazine except Mencken’s American M ercury reached the college boys and the young intellectuals. Here was Sinclair’s chance “ to make a bright, artistic, brilliant magazine that would captivate the imagination of the younger generation and rally them around something real—not the sterile mockeries and gibings at the boobs that Mencken has taught them. No one else, said Gold, had such influence with young thinkers as Sinclair; no one else combined the artist and the revolutionary so admira­ bly. If Sinclair pitched his appeal to those people who wanted to feel, to laugh, to live colorfully, his magazine “ would be more a possible success than the independent Marxian sheet I fear you are planning.” Did this sound like Greenwich Village talk? He hoped not. He was simply “ reflect­ ing much of what is going on in Germany, Russia and other countries,” simply insisting that “ artists are a vital part of a revolution, and the intellectuals.” Only American Marxists considered poetry a vice. What Gold had in mind, as he made clear in “ a supplementary word” to Sinclair, was a periodical “ to conduct a cultural defense of the revolu­ tion” and to establish a haven for young artists and intellectuals “ wanting to do and say something to solve the bloody mess we all are in.” For them, the sneers of the Menckenians, the “ mystical withdrawals from life” of the Sherwood Andersons, and the “ pattern-makers escape” of the Amy Lowells and other poets were no solutions at all. They hungered for a program based “ on reason, social life and struggle, mass a rt.” At present they shied away from the capitalist realities, because they were afraid to sound like propagandists. The new magazine would give them a home, would hail, as The M asses had done, “ every new star on the horizon— every sight and portent.” Nothing came of Sinclair’s magazine project, as Gold must have ex­ pected. He loved and admired him as a fighter who stuck to his guns, whose life had purpose, who wasn’t “ a lousy dilletante,” but deplored his puritanism; he admired his splendid indignation, but accused him of loving “ some ideal you have formed” of the working class, not the workers themselves. Sinclair’s revolutionary magazine would have been juiceless and joyless; Gold’s ideal magazine gay and tolerant. And so he could say to his crusading friend, Attack the filthy, the blood-stained luxuries of rich all you want to, but don’t moralize against the poor little jug o f wine and hopeful song o f the worker. It helps him to live and fight. The little pleasure I get out o f this wretched world helps me to live and fight. I love humor, joy and happy people; I love big groups at play, and friends sitting about a table, talking, smoking, and laughing. I love song and athletics and a lot o f other things. I wish the world were all play and everybody happy and creative as children. That is Communism; the communism of the future. Meanwhile there is a lot o f dirty work to do and a dirty world to live in. L et’s do it as communistically as we can.

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The magazine Gold had so exuberantly outlined for Sinclair began to seem less remote in the late spring of 1924. Writing to Sinclair from New York, Gold spoke of the old veterans of The M asses and The Liberator who were “ crazy to be talking out again” and who were convinced that an audience was “ waiting for the stuff.” Hugo Gellert, Scott Nearing, and Gold, it appeared, might get “ a big bunch of money to start a new free non-partisan revolutionary Masses in New York.” This time, Gold told Sinclair, they wanted to go after a mass circulation, to print the sheet “ in newspaper style like the old Appeal to Reason. . . . This fooling around with a 15,000 circulation among extremists and ‘tired and radicals’ and intelligentsia is the bunk.” Gold had no desire to edit the paper. At this time his heart was set on becoming a playwright and producer, but he and his friends continued to agitate for a new magazine, and by February of 1925, the projectors had received hearty encouragement from scattered and isolated radicals of all persuasions. “ I am absolutely with you,” wrote John Dos Passos, “ and would gladly do anything to help. The M asses was the only magazine I ever had any use for.” “ There are many of u s,” wrote Susan Glaspell, “ who have never ceased to mourn The M asses , and I see no reason why your venture should not be to this time what The M asses was to those good old fighting days.” Eugene O’Neill and Carl Sandburg sent their best wishes, as did Sherwood Anderson, John Howard Lawson, Elmer Rice, and Stuart Chase. “ Perhaps the old M asses hasn’t been killed yet!” wrote Lewis Mumford. The magazine owed its materialization indirectly to a young graduate of Harvard College, Charles Garland, “ who celebrated his majority by dedi­ cating his paternal inheritance to the service of the radical cause.” In the fall of 1925, the American Fund for Public Service, which administered the Garland bequest, released the first installment of a $17,000 grant to the Executive Committee of The New M asses after months of delicate negotia­ tions. These negotiations began in March when a group of writers and artists approached the Garland Fund and requested “ a one year endowment for a magazine to be known, tentatively, as ‘Dynamo.’ ” With this request they submitted a prospectus, an itemized budget of $50,000, and a collec­ tion of letters from well-known artists and writers who favored the project. More than half of the backers belonged to the M asses-Liberator group. In the light of subsequent charges that the Communist Party controlled the magazine from the start, the following facts cannot be too strongly empha­ sized: 1) the overwhelming majority of the organizing committee were liberals or independent radicals; 2) the sponsors of the magazine clearly

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intended to keep it free of any party label; 3) the directors of the Garland Fund knew this when they granted the appropriation. The prospectus, written by Joseph Freeman after “ repeated discus­ sions” with his colleagues, affirmed in less rhapsodic language what Michael Gold had written to Upton Sinclair several years earlier. But it also revived the spirit of cultural nationalism; it spoke of “ new creative forces” at work in America which were quite as fundamental in their way as the vast economic and political changes. Echoing the manifestoes of Emerson and Whitman, of Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks, it called upon American artists and writers to face up to America’s “ potential riches” and its problems. To express these neglected aspects of the American scene did not imply adherence to a single party or program. All parties and all programs, the prospectus continued, would get a fair hearing if they presented their ideas vividly. As for the magazine itself, it must avoid propaganda. It “ must never take itself too seriously. It must be interesting above everything else; fresh, vivid, youthful, satirical, brave and gay; an expression of intelligent American youth.” While maintaining the highest standards, “ it must also be sympathetic to any crudeness which is the expression of something young, vital and as yet groping and undeveloped.” The new magazine, in short, would share certain points of view with news weeklies critical of “ the present social order” ( The N ation , The New R epublic , The N ew L eader , The Survey ), but it would be livelier, funnier, more satirical. It would be less negative than The American M ercury , more national-minded than The D ial , more concerned with “ that larger Amer­ ica” than The Little R eview was or Vanity Fair and The N ew Yorker (“ mere intellectual fashion journals” ) were. The planners promised to fill half the pages with cartoons and drawings, to keep the articles and stories short, to publish poetry “ favoring vigorous expression of positive ideas and ideals,” and to reserve ample space “ for the type of discussion of spiritual values for the younger generation of which Waldo Frank has been the exponent.” Of course controversies would never be one-sided. If Robert Minor had something to say about “ the spiritual values of Communism,” he would be heard, and Gorham Munson, and others. The twenty-three associate editors elected Waldo Frank editor in chief, Edwin Seaver associate editor, Helen Black business manager, and John Sloan and Hugo Gellert art editors. Then they waited for the decision of the Garland Fund. The directors of the fund were cautiously receptive. They agreed to supply $17,000 if the friends of the magazine raised $8,500 and set up a businesslike working staff. But over the summer, Waldo Frank and Edwin Seaver resigned, and the planners dropped the name “ Dynamo” for “ The

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New M asses.” The whole enterprise seemed vaguer than it had appeared to be in the spring, and the fund at first hesitated to release the $1,500 promised for promotional purposes. Thanks to friendly board members like Freda Kirchwey, who worried about “ the poor things . . . clamoring for their m oney,” the fund accepted Gold and Freeman as substitute editors, and in October, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the fund secretary and at this time an anarchosyndicalist, notified Freeman that the $1,500 had been released. Although news of the grant and the proposed magazine was announced amid considerable fanfare in December, with well-publicized hosannas from Eugene O ’Neill, Sherwood Anderson, John Haynes Holmes, Alfred Kreymborg, Waldo Frank, Bernard Shaw, H. L. Mencken, William Allen White, Max Eastman, Clarence Darrow, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and other notables, the $8,500 to be raised by the friends of the magazine was not collected until February of 1926. Rex Stout, not yet the famous author of detective stories, pledged $4,000 of that sum and donated the office furniture. A new slate of editors, Freeman, James Rorty, and Egmont Arens prepared the first issue. In May 1926, The New M asses , as big and almost as gaudy as its illustrious namesake, reached the newsstands of New York. *

*

*

But if we consider the intellectual gropings of these writers between the time when [Floyd] Dell began his pieces on the “ vagabonds” and 1929, usually designated as the year of the great swing leftward, we find that collectively they were less detached or apathetic than their social-minded accusers made them out to be and that most generalizations about their social indifference must be qualified. This could be said not only of the few authentic literary radicals like Paxton Hibben and John Dos Passos but also of others whose intransigence was less under control or less purposely directed. One is struck, first of all, by the rage and bitterness that emanates from their attack against “ Americanism” and its products. According to Wil­ liam Carlos Williams in 1924, America had become “ the most lawless country in the civilized world” a panorama o f murders, perversions, a terrific ungovemed strength excusable only because o f the horrid beauty of its great machines. Today it is a generation o f gross knownothingism, of blackened churches where hymns groan like chants from stupified jungles, a generation universally eager to barter permanent values (the hopes o f an aristocracy) in return for opportunist material advantage, a generation hating those it obeys.

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In the same year, Glenway Westcott confessed that an “ indignant population” surrounded American writers and that “ all writers are spiri­ tual expatriates. Their position in this commonwealth is that of a band of revolutionaries or a cult of immoralists. They exist by sufferance, by their willingness to endure poverty, or by ‘protective coloration.” ’ Ludwig Lewisohn described America as a haven for “ fat-paunched” magnates, fundamentalist preachers, and baseball players, a country inhabited by a “ duped and stupified populace.” When Eugene Jolas, editor of Transition (published in Paris), asked a number of American expatriates in 1928 why they preferred to live outside America, some of them voiced the familiar complaints against American prudishness, that tyranny of the machine, and the tastelessness of mass culture. Kay Boyle wrote: Americans I would permit to serve me, to conduct me rapidly and compe tently wherever I was going, but not for one moment to impose their achieve­ ments upon what is going on in my heart and in my soul. I am too proud and too young to need the grandeur o f physical America which one accepts only at the price o f on e’s own dignity. I am making a voyage into poverty because I am too proud to find nourishment in a situation that is more successful than myself.

Other comments were less personal if equally explicit. America, said Gertrude Stein, was the best country to have been born in, but not the best country to live in. It was much better to live in a country that had already attained civilization than in one which had not yet attained it. E. E. Cummings put it more succinctly: “ France has happened more than she is happening, whereas America is happening more than she has happened.” Another complained that in America there were “ no facilities for the enjoyment of leisure or apparatuses for reflection. . . . Considerable time must be wasted in self-justification both verbally and introspectively and many questions settled which are otherwheres taken for granted.” In sum: writers preferred Europe because they could live in a leisurely way and not feel guilty, because Europe had not accepted the spirit of the machine, because Europe was cheaper, because it was easier and cheaper in Europe to see and hear and produce art, and because if Europe was rotten and decadent, the United States had the “ blight and decay” of green fruit. An American contributor summed up these opinions in the following poem: Why wasn’t I bom with a different face, In a different age and a different place? I’d much rather have been the bastard of Dante and Beatrice

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Than the legitimate son of Whittier and Barbara Frietchie.

But replies to some other questions of Jolas suggested a more serious concern for the artist and his society. “ How do you envisage,” he asked, “ the spiritual future of America in the face of a dying Europe and in the face of a Russia that is adopting the American economic vision? . . . What is your feeling about the revolutionary spirit of your age, as expressed, for instance, in such movements as communism, surrealism, anarchism? . . . What particular vision do you have of yourself in relation to twentieth century reality?” What is interesting and characteristic about these questions raised by Jolas was his juxtaposing of Communism and surrealism (the latter signi­ fying “ freedom ,” the former “ authority” ) and his implication that a dying Europe was flanked by two dynamic cultures guided by the same economic vision. He himself believed social conditions determined art, that the artist could not escape from the collective influence, but he opposed any industrial system, capitalist or communist, that flattened individuality under the pretext of making life more hygienic and comfortable. Let the artist, he said, express his sympathies for the working class but not at the expense of his individuality: “ What determines the inspirational and conceptual development of a vision is the individual impulse. It is for this reason that the great artist is in advance of his age, since he works instinctively against mass impulsions and psychoses.” By 1928 Jolas and some of his American contributors no longer felt immune to the appeal or the threat of Bolshevism (depending upon how they looked on Russia), and the same could be said for other American writers in and out of the United States. Perhaps a few of them closely resembled the sick and self-absorbed irresponsibles described by Dell, but the evidence contained in the books and magazines of the period suggests that the rebellious avant-garde were excited and disturbed by the challenge of events in America and Russia even though they contemplated Russia without rapture. The execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 seemed to illustrate, said Matthew Josephson, “ the perfect impotence of Individual­ ists in the face of mass-realities,” and yet not many writers were ready to accept the revolutionary program of Michael Gold, who, with Joseph Freeman and others, had founded the radical but not yet Communist literary magazine The New M asses in 1926. Josephson by this time had lost some of his Dadaist jauntiness but reflected the political uncertainty of the still-uncommitted writer out of sorts with capitalism yet very suspicious of the Russian state. Reporting from America in 1928, he pointed out that prosperity had undercut the

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Reds (“ the people vote for General Motors!” ) and that in the “ vast Coney Island” of America the artist was the chief casualty. He likened the artists to soldiers in the front lines or aliens never absorbed into mass life. “ Under the more bitter effort to survive, envying luxury or power, the problems of the individual, of the human identity in fact, assume a more immediate and absolute character. Whether through self-defense or oppo­ sition, the artist finds himself by natural stages led to nourishing and cultivating his specific differences at all costs.” But Josephson saw the American situation as the result of “ social collectivism,” and he suspected the sufferers “ from moral uniformity and regimentation” would find life as unpleasant in Russia as in the United States. The detached and the disinterested, “ all in short to whom the derisive term ‘intellectuals’ is applied, “ simply could not function in a mass society. Confronted by this standardized world given over to Economics and the Machine, the artist retreated into a cul-de-sac of “ pure art” or “ aesthetic mysticism” or lost his soul in the vast collectivity of Demos. Neither course was inevitable nor desirable; it was time, Josephson concluded, for the artist to cease being the “ pariah” and to essay more ambitious roles. “ Childish to think of ‘fighting the machine!’ He must com pete.” What course, then, was open to the writer? A number of volunteer guides were ready to point in different directions. It was the poet’s function, Jolas preached, to subvert the existing order or overthrow the capitalist system. He recommended revolt in its most “ terrible” form, the expression of individual vision “ through the word.” Addressing himself to his Communist correspondent in America, he wrote: “ You demand of me that I vow myself to activism, that I oppose the life of contemplation, that I plunge headlong into a struggle for the humanity.” No, he answered, politics led only to sterility. The only job the poet has is to create. “ I shall oppose mass-action, mass-feeling, mass-ideas with all my power, as long as there is breath in m e.” Ezra Pound, no longer expecting the risorgimento he had so confidently predicted in 1913, still maintained that art had no place in a mechanized culture. But he had never countenanced the cult of the artist-against-the world nor advised the writer to avoid social themes. “ A work of a rt,” he wrote in Patria M ia , “ need not contain any statement of a political or of a social or of a philosophical conviction, but it nearly always implies one.” Only minor artists, he said on another occasion, do not see the importance of “ social problems” ; it was the virtue of the classics, he continued, that people could interpret the symbols in them “ as equivalent of some current struggle which they are unable to treat more directly.” He had warned the writer, nevertheless, not to embroil himself in “ civic campaigns” or “ dilutions of controversy” —advice, unfortunately, he later

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failed to heed—and he had never ceased his campaign against the central­ ized state. “ The problem of civilization,” he wrote in 1922, “ is to keep alive a sufficient number of individuals who can and will not be subjected to machines, or to the clichés of tyranny; a non-exploitable minimum of men who give, but who cannot be milked, who are neither afraid, nor yoked under ideas.” The artist had to resist the state: One ought alm ost to say it is the job o f a great art to keep government in its place, i.e., to kick it out o f life, and reduce it to its proper, and wholly mechanical functions: street cars, water-mains, et cetera, a convenience, as your gas range is a convenience. This is not a cry for propagandist art, which means a touting one form of government in opposition to some other. It means an exclusion of politics, fads, crankisms from art; a driving them out o f the minds o f the few individuals who can, in their excess o f natural energy, combine and form a civilization, in the midst o f the unconscious and sem iconscious gehenna . . . The present plague o f democracy is that we have lost the sense o f demarcation between Res Public, the public business, and the affairs o f the individual.

Now in 1928, as tyrannies, institutions, restraints seemed to be closing in on the freethinking, mobile, and heterodox individualist “ in the name of frothy social theories or the deplorable slave morals of the gospels,” Pound delivered a series of pronouncements to the young writer. First, he must get out of himself and begin to study the world around him: The young American writer (as apparent in mss. rejected by this office) suffers from lack o f perception. Concern with his own, often quite uninteresting interior, cd. be with advantage replaced by observation o f his milieu, not merely its otiose factors but the members o f it having organic social function . . . no undergrad need lack a subject-matter while we still have congressmen. I strongly suggest our “ fiction” writers occupy themselves with portraits o f the types of humanity now permitted to govern America, congressmen, members o f state assemblies, lobbyists, etc. As in Greek tragedy, the fate o f kings was of more import than the fate o f a slave, so now the type o f critter whose stupidity or lucidity functions in the social organism to the benefit, but more usually the malefit o f his milieu is better literary matter than affairs o f a few tired bar-flies and bar flutter-boys.

Lenin, for example, ought to be of interest to the serious writer apart from his social importance: “ He never wrote a sentence that has any interest in itself, but he evolved almost a new medium, a sort of expression halfway between writing and action. This was a definite creation, as the Napoleonic code was creation.” Second, the writer must work to eradicate the stupidities in governmental administration. He must oppose censorship,

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passports, State Department officials, and major parties as well as bad prose. All bureaucrats, especially, were to be dispensed with; in fact, “ all bureaucrats ought to be drowned. All interference in human affairs by people paid to interfere ought to be stopped.” Pound never explained how the writer was to escape political entangle­ ment by engaging in a private war against the state. The writer simply had to be politically antipolitical or antipolitically political. But in the opinion of Michael Gold, who had begun to carp at Transition about this time as a magazine “ full of furious anarchistic spirit which has too few roots in world realities,” the young writers had no such choice. Not only did he agree with Josephson that the writers must drop their aesthetic poses and abandon Bohemia; he also called upon them “ to aspire to strength and discipline, in a world rapidly dividing into two great camps of Fascism and Communism!” To this invitation, few responded in 1927 and 1928. Why, he was asked, must we assume that only Communists can achieve strength and discipline, and not Bohemians and aesthetes? Any old mountebank, for that matter, might “ turn from wealth, acclaim, and affection, and suffer untold agonies in order to foist upon the world a profitless nostrum .” Gold was merely offering one pulpit gospel for another, “ a political doctrine supported, like the political doctrines of Plato, Jesus, the Stoics, Judge Gary . . . by a profound faith in the value of individual rectitude . . . the doctrine of general wellbeing through personal salvation.” Josephine Herbst, who would soon switch to Gold’s camp and then depart again, sardonically rejected his utopia as well as Josephson’s as late as 1929: All in all, I find the position o f Mr. Josephson singularly like that o f Mr. Gold. Both are hell bent toward a banalium, one communistic, the other mechanistic. Both utter hoarse cries to loyal cohorts, both point the finger o f derision at other Pathfinders or rather deny that there is more than one Path. Pathfinder Joseph son and Pathfinder Gold both paint enviable pictures o f the promised land. Both have such jolly cohorts, such enthusiastic, robustious, forward looking compan­ ions in their steady tread toward the Soullenium. I can’t make up my mind which gent is the better bet. Both are undoubtedly sound. There’s not a question in my mind but that w e’re all headed toward some sort of bolognyum. Yours for the Aluminium.

Another cynic, Robert Sage, pretended to see Gold’s Communism as merely the latest literary fashion, and mockingly sketched the passage of the artist from the “ Wildian esthete . . . with the silk knee britches, chrysanthemum and package of paradoxes” to the proletarian writer. His was a less serious history of intellectual vagabondage. The Bohemian, said Sage, “ wore a big black chapeau d ’artiste, a flowing

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tie, a corduroy suit with pegtop pants, and a cape. He always froze in the winter, he lived on breadcrusts and coffee all the year around. . . . But how that boy could turn out masterpieces that were worth a million after he was dead!” Unfortunately, this type did not fit very well into practical America, and “ with no other adequate model, the potential American artist was in a bad way for a while.” Then Floyd Dell came. “ Here was an article that was at the same time hot stuff and perfectly practical.” Dress didn’t matter so much, as long as it was careless: the important thing was to be out o f tune with the environment. One revolted against parents, religion, morals, the movies, the newspapers— anything that the simple-minded burghers held in respect. One saw strange powerful beauties in the things the other folks thought were ugly. One flirted with intellectual girls and discussed with them suffragism, birth control, the single moral standard and the outworn institution of marriage. One read a great deal o f poetry and studied Marx and Freud. And one wrote about the intimate complaints o f on e’s soul.

Now, said Sage, a new model has been unveiled: the artist as Commu­ nist. Mr. Gold reveals to young men that if they want to be artists they must be workingmen. Anyone who reads the New M asses already knows, o f course, that all workingmen have hearts o f gold and are just so many diamonds in the rough, while the hypocrites who wear white collars are a pack o f scoundrels. Therefore it follows that one has to go Left before one can have any serious hope o f being an artist. One must have both feet on the ground, his shoulder to the wheel, his nose on the grindstone and his head anywhere but in the clouds. This new artist o f Mr. Gold’s is going to hop out of his cot in the morning, full of vigor, don his work-stained clothes and dash off to the job to work shoulder to shoulder with other Reds who are doing big vital things, things that count. At night he will return reeking with sweat, heavy with fatigue, but happily drunk with inspiration. He will sit down at his bare table and, writing at top speed, turn out page after page o f virile lyric literature— the real stuff. His works will come straight from the guts and he will scorn that attention to form and polish that those dillettantes over in Paris think so important. Here, says Mr. Gold, is the future artist o f America, the coming Jack London or Walt Whitman!

Abandoning his jocular tone, Sage concluded with an admonition of his own. The real artist, he said, will ignore any orders “ to go left, right, forwards, backwards, up or down.” And so it turned out even for the writers who became Communists or Communist sympathizers. The majority, the talented and the untalented alike, never goose-stepped to party orders, but in the next decade a good many accepted uncritically and emotionally the party’s diagnosis of soci­ ety and world politics and were led, if not driven, by the party gods into red pastures.

Bloomsbury: A Bohemia Seen through Marxist Eyes Dmitri Mirsky, 1935

The atmosphere of Bloomsbury is extremely aristocratic, the atmo­ sphere of gentlemen in well-furnished studies. Bloomsburians live amid books, “ great minds” of the past (as assessed according to their outlook, of course), and move in the best intellectual and esthetic circles (as assessed, etc.) of the day. They avoid all extremes and abnormalities, though they treat everything which is original and “ inspired” with great respect. Their rationalism and liberalism mark them off very sharply from the common or garden esthetic bohemians of modern times, and also very sharply from the Russian modernism of the opening of the century. Being theoreticians of the passive, dividend-drawing and consuming section of the bourgeoisie, they are extremely intrigued by their own minutest inner experiences, and count them an inexhaustible treasure store of further more minutious inner experiences. They have a high opinion of Dostoiev­ sky and of Freud. But even these writers are taken by them without any trace of common bohemian gluttony. They are agile-minded, and of Freudian concepts they make a very special kind of mental discipline; I may say that a prominent bloomsburian once told me how he had trained himself, every time he wakes in the night, be it only for a single minute, immediately to take up his pencil and record all dreams experienced up to that point. Yet the interest these people show in Dostoievsky and Freud is quite equalled by their interest in Voltaire and Spinoza. They believe (or should I say, they hope?) that reason plus education will some day bring an age in which people will be enlightened ladies and gentlemen much like themselves, and there will be no more wars or revolutions. But it must not be thought that they are in the least degree democrats. They see civiliza­ tion as the privilege of people who are well brought up and enjoy leisure. 664

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Having “ one’s own room ” in which one can escape from the outer world and its racket is, so we are informed by a book written by Virginia Woolf on the emancipation of women, the first condition of civilised creative work. And Clive Bell has written a book which constitutes a kind of manifesto. It deals with “ Civilisation.” He informs us that the only civilised epochs in history have been the age of Pericles in Athens, the Italian Renaissance, and the Eighteenth Century in France (les salons!). He lays it down that the indispensable condition of this civilisation (in the given periods), was that there was an “ enlightened class” which was relieved of earthly cares by having an income for which it did not have to work. The favourite, one might almost say the national, authors of Bloomsbury are—Proust and Chekhov. It goes without saying that the first would satisfy them. His passive but so persistent and well-disciplined introspec­ tion, free from any wild fantasy, is a perfect expression of the psychology of the “ enlightened” dividend-drawer. The cult of Chekhov is a little more unexpected. Chekhov reached Great Britain as the last word in Russian literature, and was judged against a background of Tolstoy and Dostoiev­ sky. This explains it. Bloomsbury had found a Russian writer who was completely bourgeois, completely devoid of those distressing rough cor­ ners in which, as a result of serfdom, Russian writers used to abound, and when they read him they felt quite at home. Moreover, what was especially attractive in Chekhov was his technical perfection, the discreet lyricism of his art, and the way in which he built up his story from passive experiences and kept action outside. Finally, in Chekhov they discovered an ethical system which was just like that gentleman ethical system of Samuel Butler, only expressed with far more discretion and finesse. The influence of Bloomsbury has passed far beyond its confines. The chief propagandist of Bloomsbury, Middleton Murry, is a person in many respects the very opposite of all that Bloomsbury holds dear. The creative influence of Chekhov was particularly marked in Middleton M urry’s short­ lived wife, the talented New Zealand writer, Katherine Mansfield. But we should say that in the real bloomsburians we do not find so much an influence of Chekhov as a spiritual identity. The study of Chekhov did not begin till after the war, but the pre-war novels of two exemplary bloomsbu­ rians, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, are completely chekhovian in spirit. Of these two Forster is the less true to type. He first published in the nineteen-hundreds, in the period of the social-realistic novel, and the construction of his novels is more reminiscent of Tourgeniev than of Chekhov. The liberalistic individualistic chekhovian psychology appears

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in them in rather a naive form. Forster is a modest, direct writer who has not soaked himself in Proust and does not care a damn about estheticism. But that element of psychological hair-splitting runs like a thread through all his work. Everything is reduced to a matter of personal relationships, of human kindliness and delicacy. The most interesting of his novels is the latest one, A Passage to India (1924), a typical colonial novel of a bourgeois intellectual, in which the relationships between the colonisers and the natives is brought down to a question of personal decency in the treatment of others. The principal figure in the book is an Indian intellectual, a character sketched with real goodwill, but yet all the time from the lofty standpoint of European greatness. But Virginia Woolf may be described as the principal literary expression of Bloomsbury. She is unquestionably a great artist. She has created her own method, a lyrical kind of exposition of her leading characters—what might be described as an esthetisation of the method used by Chekhov in The Three Sisters. Virginia Woolf is even more thin-skinned than Forster is, and she experiences the suffering of others acutely. But the sufferings with which she deals are limited to purely physiological suffering, as that of a woman growing old, and to individual psychological sufferings caused by the breakdown of personal bonds. Wherever they do appear as socially conditioned sufferings, they are, as in Proust, without exception the sufferings of the parasitic cream of the bourgeoisie. One of the lyrically most powerful passages in her work is one describing the inward experi­ ences of a society woman who accompanies her husband to a lunch with another society woman—to which lunch she is not invited. But what is most striking in Virginia Woolf is the purpose of her lyric method. This is devised in order to master the particular suffering and dissolve it away. The suffering is wrapped up in self-contained rhythms and sublimated from the world of reality to a world of esthetics. Her lulling rhythms are a fine example of the narcotic function which art takes on in the hands of liberal esthetes, who turn it into a new and more perfect form of dope, though of course one not intended for the people. We have a much smaller artist, though no less typical of Bloomsbury, in Lytton Strachey, author of “ artistic” biographies (Victorian Portraits and Queen Victoria). Strachey’s method is simply the irony of an esthete looking down with amusement from his highbrow eminence on the mari­ onettes of history. Strachey is full of respect for poets and dreamers, but scornfully condescending to all practical activity, especially political. The irony with which he represented Victoria did for a time do somewhat to diminish the public estimation of that lady, though it did not contain a trace of a revolutionary spirit, nor even of a dem ocrat’s attempt to indicate

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the truth. And in his orgy of irony at the cost of political men who take themselves seriously Strachey falls easy prey to a charm he finds in political cynics and charlatans clever enough to supply the grinning sneer themselves. Thus in his Queen Victoria he makes the most attractive character none other than the cynical father of British imperialism— Benjamin Disraeli. After these experiments in the esthetics of irony Strachey proceeded to artistic esthetics, and, in his Elizabeth and E ssex , attempted to serve up to the British public a queen more in keeping with their imperial hearts than one who was completely wrapped up in her world of industrial capitalism. Thus did the liberal estheticism of Bloomsbury reach the season of moulting; its ironical feathers disappeared and the world beheld it in a banal senile coat of imperialist worship of “ greatness” and “ grandeur” and “ the picturesque.” But then, that end was only to be expected, since the cultured leisure of those enlightened children of the bourgeoisie is ensured them by what shekels come in from colonial and other dependent lands.

The World as Dada Cabaret Lisa Appignanesi, 1975

Zurich, the Noah’s Ark of World War I. International centre for emigrés: those who objected to war outright, and those who had had some experi­ ence of the front and were fleeing its butchery. At various periods during those years, Zurich played host to James Joyce, Stephan Zweig, Romain Rolland, Lenin and Krupskaya, to name only the most illustrious. Along with the others came a young German poet, Hugo Ball, who had been acquainted with Berlin’s early Expressionist circles, Munich’s theatre groups and Kandinsky’s Blaue R eiter school. In 1914 Ball had volunteered for war service, but quickly recognized the unheroic nature of battle, and was discharged after half a year for health reasons. He fled to Zurich with his mistress, the singer and poet, Emmy Hennings, and there, in 1916, he convinced Herr Ephraim, the owner of a somewhat seedy bar, the Meierei, to permit him to run a cabaret on his premises. Herr Ephraim’s motivation was Ball’s promise that the sales of beer, sausage and rolls would rise dramatically with the help of a literary cabaret. This is how the Cabaret Voltaire was born. Voltaire, that great enlight­ ener could smile his loftily ironical smile of reason on the madness of war; but since his ‘reason’ had degenerated into the common sense of the burgher and led to the irrationality of war, the goings-on in the Cabaret Voltaire would experiment with a new kind of unreason in order to develop a sanity more appropriate to the moment. The tactics—illuminism—were the same, the means radically different. After a successful opening night for the Cabaret Voltaire, on which Emmy Hennings sang chansons by Bruant and others accompanied by Ball at the piano, Ball inserted the following announcement in a number of Zurich newspapers: Cabaret Voltaire. Under this name a group o f young artists and writers has formed with the object o f becoming a centre for artistic entertainment. The Cabaret Voltaire will be run on the principle of daily meetings where visiting

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artists will perform their music and poetry. The young artists o f Zurich are invited to bring along their ideas and contributions.

Almost overnight there gathered a group of young artists and poets, from everywhere in Europe, and the cabaret was filled to overflowing. Hans Arp, painter and poet, contributed his own graphic work, as well as some Picassos, to the cabaret’s decor; Marcel Janco, a Romanian artist, donated huge archangels which stood out significantly amidst Futurist posters; Tristan Tzara was there, the poet whose untiring energy was to be one of the driving forces of the movement. The Ukranian, Marcel Soldki, de signed the poster for the Cabaret Voltaire. As if by magic, a movement was born: Dada. Who invented the name? What did it mean? The answers are as different as the members of the group. Dada, the Slavic affirmation, a grand ‘yes’ to life and to freedom? Dada, ‘c ’est mon dada,’ the French hobbyhorse, an individualized pursuit for individualistic enthusiasts? Dada, daddy? Dadadadada, a madcap, nonsense syllable, a child-like discarding of any attributable meaning? Dada was all these things, an incarnation of the unsystematizable spirit of creativity. It defied the conventional art of museums, rebelled against history and that art and language which, perhaps unintentionally, had played into the hands of war-makers, and it shocked the good Swiss burghers. If it propagated anything, it was liberation through laughter. It blossomed in the Cabaret Voltaire, and bore fruit throughout Europe and America. Some thirty-two years after the event Hans Arp wrote in Dadaland: Revolted by the butchery o f the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages, and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness o f the age, and a new order o f things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell. We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way o f deadening men’s minds.

The Dadaists wanted to create an art which was anti-war and negated the very spirit that had produced war. What they created at the most fundamental level was life: a boisterous, extravagant series of happenings. Like life at its highest pitch, their art represented a constant process of creation. In the cabaret the Dadaists found for a brief moment their natural environment and vehicle. Pictures were not meant to be gazed at with exalted awe in dusty museums, but to be part of an intimate space in which one lived, laughed and shouted. Books were objects from which their makers had departed, leaving only the dead letter of language.

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Theatre was a state institution in which one politely applauded distant creatures who mouthed the sentiments of others. But the cabaret was alive: creators were physically present as performers, close to spectators who could be provoked into becoming part of the spectacle at any moment. The programme itself was an unsystematic collage whose various pieces could be randomly rearranged and altered, in an ongoing process of creation. So the Cabaret Voltaire staged a disparate programme: performances by French, Russian, German and Swiss poets and writers; songs by Bruant; a balalaika orchestra; Rubenstein playing Saint-Saëns; poems by Max Jacob, Erich Muhsam, van Hoddis; the auctioning of a doll. Any variety of combinations was possible. And of course, as the days passed there were the personal creations of the Dadaists themselves. Hans Richter, who joined the Dadaists in August 1916, describes Tristan Tzara’s performances in this way: He declaimed, sang, and spoke in French, although he could do so just as well in German, and punctuated his performances with screams, sobs and whistles. B ells, drums cow-bells, blows on the table or on empty boxes, all enlivened the already wild accents o f the new poetic language, and excited, by purely physical means, an audience which had begun by sitting impassively behind its beer mugs. From this state o f immobility it was roused into frenzied involvement with what was going on. This was Art, this was Life, and this was what they wanted!

The Cabaret Voltaire performance was one marked by audience provoca­ tion and protest. Surprise or shock tactics, the use of bruitistic elements, poetry or prose which was aggressively anti-logical, experiments with masks, costuming and dance which were radically anticonventional—all these played a part in the Dadaists’ unprogrammed attempt to liberate the imagination from the shackles of tradition. Tristan Tzara wrote in one of his manifestoes: ‘I smash drawers, those of the brain and those of social organizations; everywhere to demoralize, to hurl the hand from heaven to hell, the eyes from hell to heaven, to set up once more, in the real powers and in the imagination of every individual, the fecund wheel of the world circus.’ If the Cabaret Voltaire was an imaginative circus, then the poet and psychiatrist, Richard H ülsenbeck, was its ringmaster. As Richter recounts, the arrogant H ülsenbeck would chant his ‘Phantastische G ebete’ (Fantas­ tic Prayers) accompanied by the sound of his riding crop rhythmically swishing through the air, and ‘metaphorically onto the public’s collective behind’. These modern prayers were also accompanied by the primitive beat of a tom tom.

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This is how the world is The bladder o f the swine Vermilion and cinnabar Cru cru cru The great art o f the spirit Theosophia pneumatica poème bruitiste performed the first time by Richard H ülsenbeck Dada or if you want to, the other way around birribumbirribum the ox runs down the circulum

For a variety of the cabaret’s performances Marcel Janco produced ab­ stract primitive masks which reinforced the Dadaists’ search for the fundamental elements of the imagination, language and sound. These masks, which recalled the Japanese or antique theatre masks, seemed to have their own in-built character and demanded from their wearers appro­ priate gesture and costume. ‘Inspired by their Protean individuality’, Ball writes, the group invented dance steps and music which would express the masks’ essence. ‘Flycatching’, ‘Cauchemar’, ‘Festive desperation’, such were the names given to the resulting spectacles. The teamwork of the group also resulted in the creation of simultaneous poetry, such as the well-known ‘L ’amiral cherche une maison à louer’ which was performed by H ülsenbeck, Janco and Tzara as a ‘contrapuntal recitative’ in which their voices simultaneously spoke, sang, whistled, and made noises, all in a variety of recognizable and unrecognizable languages. As Tzara was quick to point out, the poèm e simultané was a poetic recreation of what the Cubists had done in painting, and it permitted each listener to associate freely with whatever elements in the poem struck a chord for him. The Cabaret Voltaire was forced to close its premises at the end of 1916. The good citizens of Zurich had begun their own protests and the police were far more inclined to believe that this suspiciously noisy international group was a bevy of spies, rather than the quiet, scholarly Herr Lenin, who lived across the street and spent his days in the public library. Dadaist activity continued, however, in the numerous exhibitions which introduced modernist art to Zurich and through a series of Dada evenings, akin to Cabaret Voltaire performances. The evenings were Gesam tkunstwerke , total art works, and included theory, manifestoes, dance, music, poems, pictures, and theatrical sketches, all bearing Dada’s particular experimen­ tal stamp and insulting the audience either directly, or because it was puzzled by the nature of what was happening on stage. It was at one of these evenings that Hugo Ball gave the climactic performance of his Dada career.

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Wearing a Cubist costume, designed by Janco and himself, Ball was literally encased in a ‘tight-fitting cylindrical pillar of shiny blue cardboard which reached to my hips so that I looked like an obelisk. Above this I wore a huge cardboard coat collar, scarlet inside and gold outside, which was fastened at my neck in such a way that I could flap it like a pair of wings by moving my elbows. I also wore a high, cylindrical, blue-andwhite-striped witch-doctor’s hat.’ So dressed, Ball recited, then chanted the first abstract, phonetic poem: gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalom ini. . .

A storm broke in the audience and luckily Ball, who was immobilized by his costume, just managed to calm his hearers by proceeding to a liturgical crescendo. Then, bathed in perspiration, he was carried off the stage. Ball explained the reasoning behind abstract poetry in his diary. The human figure is progressively disappearing from pictorial art, and no object is present except in fragmentary form. This is one more proof that the human countenance has become ugly and outworn, and that the things which surround us have become objects of revulsion. The next step is for poetry to discard language . . . In these phonetic poems we want to abandon a language ravaged and laid barren by journalism. We must return to the deepest alchemy o f the Word, and leave even that behind us, in order to keep safe for poetry its holiest sanctuary.

On 9 April 1919 Zurich Dada held its final soirée. The format was much the same as on other evenings. But this time, despite an enormous uproar during the second act in which some members of the enraged audience went so far as to brandish a piece of the balustrade, the final part of the programme was accepted with relative calm. Metamorphosed into a mob, the audience had suddenly seen the face of its own irrationality. Dada’s conscious use of unreason had provoked a momentary illumination. The evening’s huge takings, together with the audience’s final acceptance of the programme, signalled the end of Dada’s ‘live’ impact. The avant-garde, like the cabaret, cannot outlast that shock effect, that dissent which gives it life. Dada was, however, to travel to new locations, take on new problems, and be given different shapes by other artists. The far-ranging possibilities which its radical negation of the past and its experimentation had opened in the domains of performance style, music, design, not to mention graphics, are too well documented to need attention here.

Notes On Fascism and Bohemia Harold Rosenberg, 1944 “ You don ’t have a taste, sir, fo r the Sublime—or the Ridiculous?” “P erhaps,” Rowe said, “I prefer human nature pla in .” —Graham Greene, The Ministry o f Fear

Modern Man—An Object of Suspicion That Modern Man could turn Nazi—this is the Sphinx that challenges every moralist and psychologist of our day. It is not that Nazism suddenly made one aware of the human capacity for crime. After all, this generation had been nourished from infancy on daily dispatches of murder, rape, individual and mass lynching, atrocities. New territories of Man’s viciousness—sadism, real and symbolic—were as familiar to us as ghosts and witches to our ancestors. Not increased familiarity with viciousness but a revelation of the vicious­ ness of the familiar was with the Nazi contribution towards making Man once more an object of suspicion. That a nation, a whole society— milkmen, mothers, schoolboys, policemen—should have given itself up easily to a community policy of blows and torture, seemed proof that the monster is lurking in the average and everyday. In this respect the triumph of the Nazis in Germany paralleled, on a more obvious and threatening plane, the disclosures of Dr. Freud. Thus, at first glance, a certain reassurance seems offered in the expla­ nation of Konrad Heiden’s D er Fuehrer that the Nazi uprising was the revolution of a special group, “ the armed bohem ians.” We think of “ bohemians” as social outsiders, inhabiting small isolated pockets, and generally consider them to be eccentric and far from typical people. Commonly, the word designates artists and late sleepers, who live in odd 673

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neighborhoods of big cities. Heiden uses the term in a broader meaning: with him, as with Karl Marx, “ bohemian” means the offscourings of all classes—gangsters or international café adventurers, as well as poets and left-wingers. Even in this broader application, however, the “ bohemian” is still, to use an ugly journalistic word, a “ misfit.” It would indeed be a good thing, then, if these bohemians, this gang of outlaws, pseudo-aristocrats, cracker-box philosophers, free lovers, unem­ ployed, and poets, whom everyone has long suspected anyway, were convicted of the crime of fascism and humanity itself were absolved. But just to pin things on this human flea market will not do, apparently, for Heiden’s definition is deep as well as broad. The bohemian, he says, is an “ intellectual” who has not found his place in society. And an “ intellec­ tual” ? He is the “ type of the pragmatical and mechanistically minded modern man, product of mass education [and who isn’t], whose sole criterion is: Will it work?” According to this, the “ intellectual” is practically everybody who has gone to school—the exceptions would be certain rare individuals who were educated privately and who shun the test of utility, or measure it in turn by some system of higher values. Heiden’s intellectual is Moderr Man, and he is a bohemian or potential bohemian, while only the exceptions are not bohemians—for Man does not have a private tutor. So the bohemian won’t do as a scapegoat, after all, and humanity itself is once more under suspicion. Heiden’s image of the bohemian villain who springs out of cultural conditions bears certain resemblances to that of the sociological Freudian, Erich Fromm, whose alienated and divided modern personality inevitably contains the dangerous “ outsider” within the depths of his self. But Fromm does not make Heiden’s mistake of dividing society into more than one basic psychological type . . . A: It is Modern Man, then, that has tendencies toward fascism? B: Well, only under certain conditions— unemployment, social upheavals. The monster is there, o f course, but— we keep to the Freudian parallel— he com es out only in black weather. A: But the positive source o f evil is still the nature o f Man himself, who, if his order breaks down even momentarily, reaches for the ax? C: Through all psychological theories of Man, the fascist, runs the thread o f Original Sin and the belief that society is charged with the function o f restraining the evil nature o f Man. Once we grant this, the whole democratic movement, the entire spirit o f the French and the American revolutions, the educational crusade begun by Rousseau, the socialist and anarchist ideals of a stateless society— all these are admitted to have been idle and fairly vulgar illusions. For they depend on the belief that man is inherently capable of leaving behind murder and slavery.

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A: But Fromm in E scape From Freedom places the blame for the fascist drives on modern social institutions. Once these are corrected the drives will disap­ pear. C: It’s true that to Fromm Modem Man is twisted by the pressures o f modern social relations and that he will rise into a higher life once a truly creative democratic society is achieved. Yet even Fromm seems to me to go too far in linking fascism with the contemporary soul. For it has not been demon­ strated that the fascist State was created by Man’s desires, however neurotic. On the contrary, everything points to the fact that it was the result o f a conspiracy and that the so-called mass-following o f the Nazis did not repre­ sent the common man in Germany. The outstanding moral fact in the history of fascism is that Hitler, despite unemployment, despite the paralysis o f all political opposition, despite the Storm Troopers and the connivance o f Reichswehr officials, despite the big money, was unable to win a majority or enough dynamic support to capture the State by force as genuine revolutions do. That Hitler could take power only through a coalition arranged behind the scenes by the ruling groups o f Germany proves that it was “ society” that corrupted the people, not the people who ran amuck against social values. A: You must admit, though, that Fromm contributes a great deal towards our understanding o f why some people joined the Nazis and the others lacked the strength and the will to resist fascism more effectively. C: Even if Fromm does throw light on what made fascism able to win converts and seize the State, his theory does not explain what caused fascism. A concrete political movement does not arise from the general moral condition o f Man at any given moment— democracy, for instance, did not come into being because man suddenly became good or eager for freedom. The positive causes o f fascism are to be discovered by analyzing objective political, economic and social relations, as well as our cultural past— rather than by defining an image o f some type o f individual through psychological or metaphysical speculation.

Class Sociology or Bohemian Monster Heiden borrows from Marx one-half an idea—or rather, the shadow of an idea. The idea is Marx’s conception of the economic class structure of modern society, and the shadow is his notion that each class exudes certain elements that separate themselves from the class—e.g. bankrupts from the middle class, lumpenproletariat from the workers. Heiden rejects the idea but preserves the shadow—he is not interested in economic classes but tries to explain fascism on the basis of economic classlessness! But if the presence in society of businessmen and workers does not determine historical events, how can history be determined by the pres­ ence of bankrupt businessmen and unemployed workers? According to this view, only those who drop out of a class are effective politically. Sociologically, as by definition, classlessness is simply a negation of class. The bohemian fights against all classes—as politician, in order to achieve power; as poet, to reach the infinite.

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But power and the infinite are empty, and the bohemian’s act derives it substance from what it opposes (e.g. the realistic imagery of “ halluci nated” poetry). The core of Hitler’s politics was propaganda against class. Classes stood in his way, except the class he couldn’t see at first because it was too far above him, the hereditary aristocracy. “ There was one place in Germany in which there was no class division. That was the front-line company. There no one ever heard of a bourgeois and a proletarian platoon; there was just the company and that was the end of it.” It is entirely accurate to say that the Nazi party was formed out of bohemian personnel. For instance, Leudecke, one of the early familiars of Hitler, told without a trace of self-consciousness that he became a Nazi only after it was no longer possible to get money from rich American women. But just because the Nazi movement was an uprising of the classless, its history is inseparable from the inner history of Germany’s classes, their political consciousness, their economic collapse and moral apathy. Tremendous fluctuations occurred in the Nazi movement up to the final consolidation of State power. The party of the classless was constantly being drained and refilled through rhythms in the depths of each class in Germany. The very existence of the Nazi party was dependent on these organic processes taking place outside itself. The peculiarity of fascism as a parasitic growth lies precisely in this inability to develop from within but only through absorbing the secretions and evacuations of the whole social organism. No doubt this has something to do with Hitler’s sense of identity with the German folk. But this dependent character of Nazism places definite limits on the meaning of H itler’s own acts and ideas—many of which are eccentric and quite lacking in political significance. A good starting point for the biogra­ pher interested in the political form of Hitlerism and the essential contri­ bution of the Fuehrer would be Marx’s comments on Louis Bonaparte: “ The Society of December 10 [Bonaparte’s bohemian army] belonged to him, it was his work, his very own idea. Whatever else he gets hold of is put into his hands by the force of circumstance; whatever else he does the circumstances do for him or he is content to copy from the deeds of others.” The facts in Heiden’s book show that Hitler’s sole consistent strategy was to keep his gang intact and to remain at the head of it, until power was “ put into his hands.” That this gift actually descended upon him is his Miracle which he never fails to call upon in his State speeches. Heiden fails to uncover the class sources of the life streams of the Nazi party. Conceiving classlessness as a thing in itself, as a category describing a certain modern psychological attitude, Heiden traces the adventures of

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Hitler only against the background of surface political events, such as the French policy in the Ruhr or the maneuvering of Hindenburg. Thus he tells us in sum that the Nazis were a strange rabble; that their policy was improvised out of a wide range of clichés and the absurd, noxious and romantic notions of several nineteenth-century provacateurs, xenophobes, and theoretical world conquerors; that this policy was changed at will— and that through a series of accidents, brutalities and conspiracies this Hitlerite Noah’s Ark finally emptied its contents into the offices of the German State. The blocks of generalizations concerning the nature and history of bohemians which Heiden intersperses throughout his narrative do not indicate why classlessness was victorious in Germany. The Genius of Der Fuehrer Some of Heiden’s conclusions about the personality of Hitler seem inescapable, in view of the literary style of Mein Kampf. To understand Hitler we must probably start with the contradiction put forward by Heiden that Hitler is a gray, colorless, empty character—“ the void, it might be said, disguised as a man”—who, at the same time secretes in certain areas of his ego an immense strength. Most likely we ought to shave off a bit from the stature which Hitler has taken on in Heiden’s mind, and analyze more sharply the cultural meaning of Hitler’s constant babbling about “ the artist” and his habit of pronouncing the last word on every subject, from how women react in the theatre to the need for superhighways. There are executives in all countries today who decide on such matters, after listening to the conflicting opinions of experts, without knowing more about them than Hitler. It may be that one of the things that gave Hitler his “ nerve” was an early discovery that, with strong enough backing or forceful assertion, almost any opinion can, apparently, be put over, especially in matters of taste and theory. A mediocre artist? Kill the highbrow critics, then who will know? Perhaps it is not the “ intellectuals” who are responsible for Hitler, even indirectly, but the unintellectuality, the enmity toward intellect, promoted by modern “ men of affairs” . . . After all, France, which had a larger proportion of intellectual bohemians than Germany, never yielded to the fascist bait—and I see no reason for denying some credit for this restraint to the Left Bank sophistication as well as to the rational tradition of French culture. “ Damn the intellec­ tuals!” is a slogan not inconsistent with fascism. It would also be possible to go deeper than Heiden into the relation of Hitler’s personal experiences to his political stresses if one were not burdened by Heiden’s pseudo-aristocratic (another synonym for bohem

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ian?) prejudice that Hitler is “ a pure fragment of the modern mass soul.” Both the emptiness and the strength of Hitler are more characteristic of the visionary neurotic than of the average man, who is a class man, moulded and limited by social participation, and has never had his ego wiped out and released by ecstasy. Heiden passes too lightly over Hitler’s testimony concerning his “ ecstatic feeling” in the trenches, “ in the night when the roaring of twenty-one-centimeter cannons suddenly began to speak and illumine the horizon with lightenings.” It is worth pursuing the hypothesis that this frontline experience, which contains all the psycholog­ ical conditions of conversion, fixed in Hitler’s consciousness the image that changed him, once for all, into the furious Maker of Soldiers—which, in the last analysis, is both the chief content of his politics and his supreme service to the rulers of Germany.

Politics and the Beat: Youth Disaffiliated from a Phony World D avid Me Reynolds, 1963

Discussions of the beat generation remind me very much of blind men trying to tell what an elephant is like. This is so because on the one hand so many of those discussing the beat generation really don’t know what they are talking about, and on the other because the beat generation itself is a very complex animal. It is a generation which consists of jazz festivals, Zen Buddhism, peyote, a return to Catholicism, early marriage, no mar­ riage, marijuana, street gangs, poetry, and general confusion. It is there­ fore both a safe and a dangerous subject to treat with. Safe in that anything you say will be partly true, and dangerous in that anything you say will be correctly termed an over-simplification. To make my job easier I am limiting my comments to what might be called the “jazz-poetry section” of the beat generation. The beat generation has withdrawn itself from organized society. Its drive is not a revolutionary drive toward a new society but simply a rebellious break from the existing society, a drive to discover personal reality and meaning outside of a social framework which the hipster finds unreal and meaningless. Mort Sahl, for example, devastates the existing social system with almost every word he speaks. The man is dynamite. But all he is really saying is NO. The disturbing thing about this younger generation is its refusal to even try changing the world—i.e., the world is phony and politics is a drag. There are three reasons that help account for a generation of youth who have “ disaffiliated” from society. First is the Bomb. Young people all over the world are born and grow up knowing there may be no tomorrow. Not simply no “ personal tomor­ row,” but no tomorrow for the human race. The last act is almost over, the curtain is about to come down, the play wasn’t very good anyway, and now the younger spectators are getting restless in their seats. A recent poll 679

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of teenagers, being asked what they thought caused juvenile delinquency, turned up the fact that almost half felt the “ world situation” was one reason—a feeling perfectly expressed by a young girl who said: “ After all, the kids feel they have nothing to lose. We’ll all be blown to bits anyway.” We train our school children to hide under desks and flatten against walls in simulated bomb attacks, and then wonder that they lack a sense of social responsibility when they get a little older. Kids are too wise. Only adults—and only government officials at that—are foolish enough to be lieve in Civil Defense. The kids know better. The second factor is that youth today emerges into a society that is in a state of profound and ceaseless change. This is the age of technology and the human race hasn’t even begun to adjust to it. The old patterns of culture, of family relationships, of regional ties—all are loosened or swept away. Outside of our immediate circle of friends there is no real sense of community. Our relations with others fire a constantly shifting series of impersonal contacts. Things are too big or too far away. Politics is something in the N ew York Times or Washington, D. C. We are a crowd in which no one is going anywhere in relation to anyone else. We do not know one another, our faces having become shifting masks and abstract shadows. Youth feels alienated from contemporary society. They emerge into it without being able to identify with it. In that same survey on juvenile delinquency, one student said: “ We live in the world, yet we have no say as to what should or shouldn’t happen.” The third factor is that in the midst of all this tremendous change in the social framework, we have lost our sense of moral values which might possibly have sustained us in a period of such profound upheaval. Both the U.S. and Soviet Russia are led by power groups which are patently dishonest, and every bright high-school student knows this. The “ free world” of John Foster Dulles includes Franco, Chiang, Rhee, Trujillo— and until very recently Batista and Jimenez. The “ people’s dem ocracy” of the Communist bloc is a morbid farce underlined with the blood of tens of thousands of Hungarian workers. Nor is this all. Students who know history begin to feel that the present governments don’t even allow a decent interval between lies. For example, Russia was viewed as a brutal dictatorship until 1942, at which point Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Henry Luce discovered it was a democ­ racy—a fact of which the Russian people were themselves totally una­ ware—and it remained a democracy until 1945, when it suddenly reverted to a dictatorship. On the other hand, Germany and Japan were, in 1945, so morally depraved that we vowed to reduce Germany to a land of farmers and wrote into the Japanese constitution a clause against Japan’s ever

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having an army again. By 1950 our government was pleased to report that the Germans and Japanese had undergone a most wondrous spiritual transformation—they had not only became democratic but were now so peace-loving that we insisted they re-arm (over the vigorous protests, let it be noted, of the majority of both the German and Japanese public). On the Communist side of the fence we have Marshal Tito undergoing the fascinating metamorphosis from hero to counter-revolutionary to hero to deviationist. These points simply illustrate the basic issue. In the nineteenth century we had substituted for faith in God a faith in the inherent goodness and rationality of man. This faith was mortally wounded by World War I, and then buried by the senseless murder of millions of Jews under Hitler and by the bloody miscarriage of the Russian Revolution. Having lost faith in God, we now lost faith in ourselves. Lacking any moral absolutes, we drift about in a tepid sea of “ relative values.” Youth is again wiser than adults—they know too well that a set of “ relative values” which not only permits and tolerates but demands the building of hydrogen bombs is not a set of values at all, but a rationale for insanity. The hipster is desperate to find some meaning in life. The social framework does not offer this meaning—he must conduct the search for real values on his own. The “ future” having no meaning as a concept in a world preparing for suicide, the hipster can only define reality by actions in the present—by a series of personal and direct experiences. Seen thus, peyote, marijuana, and the series of disjointed and seemingly irresponsible actions of the beat generation take on a new meaning, for these actions are all part of the search for reality, all part of the effort to engage in conscious personal actions in a world where conscious personal actions become increasingly difficult. The only “ real” reality for the hipster is the cool scene, the cool sound, and the ability to be aware of oneself and to prove one’s existence by personal actions. In a recent issue of The Voice , James Wechsler was appalled by the “ flight and irresponsibility” of the beat generation. However in point of fact it is Kerouac and Ginsberg who are operating at the deeper level of reality. When Wechsler complained that life is complicated enough without turning it into a poem, the answer of the beat generation is that unless we can turn human life into a poem it has no meaning, no value. As Kenneth Patchen put it: “ Gentle and loving, all else is treason.” The beat genera­ tion has a better “ sense of the times” —their fear of war is not an abstract fear of eventual conflict. It is an immediate concern, expressed by Law­ rence Ferlinghetti, about “ any stray asinine second lieutenant pressing any strange button anywhere far away over an arctic ocean thus illuminat­ ing the world once and for all.”

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But what meaning does the beat generation have for those of us who are not beat, who are politically involved, who conceive of a future and have faith in the ability of the human race to evolve beyond mass murder? And what of the beat generation itself—where is it going? Taking the last question first I have a strong feeling that no sensitive person can remain sane if he believes in nothing but himself, his own immediate experiences and sensations. These members of the beat gener­ ation who as a consequence of rejecting the existing social system remain burned in upon themselves must ultimately become religious or go mad. Without a sense of values of some kind, life becomes impossible. This accounts, I think, for the surge of interest in the cult of Zen, and the attempt through religion to find meaning in life. However, other members of the beat generation are taking a different and healthier direction. Some who began as rebels seem to evolve slowly into writers who want to do more than protest—who want to change society. There is an awareness that one can find an existential meaning to life through involvement in social struggle, a realization that even if “ the issue is in doubt” regarding man’s fate, the struggle itself has meaning. The writers and poets of the beat generation begin to make political sounds. In Ferlinghetti’s recent poem, “ tentative description of a dinner to promote the impeachment of president eisenhower,” there is a warning that even the hipster is about to leave the coffee table and engage himself in the task of changing the social order—particularly in the following lines: And some men also despaired and sat down in Bohemia and were too busy to come. But other men came whose only political action during the past twenty years had been to flush a protesting toilet and run. And those came who had never marched in sports car protest parades and those came who had never been arrested for sailing a protesting Golden Rule in unpacific oceans.

The beat generation itself may not be able to play a direct or responsible role in politics. For all the sophistication of its members, they are naive in political terms, too easily equating the necessary compromise of political action with the unnecessary betrayal of moral values which they sense so deeply in the present situation. But the beat generation by its very existence serves notice on all of us who are political that if we want to involve youth in politics we must develop a politics of action. The beat generation can understand Gandhi much better than they can Roosevelt. They can understand Martin Luther King much better than they can understand Hubert Humphrey. They can understand the Hungarian workers much better than they can understand Mikoyan.

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The beat generation is not yet political, but it knows what many of us who are political do not know—that neither the liberal nor the radical movements have any significance for human values if we do not learn to base our politics on the individual human being. The future has hope and meaning only if we learn to act with integrity in the present.

Beatniks And Bolsheviks Vassily Aksyonov , 1987

In the stream of insults that Nikita Khrushchev brought down upon us in the winter of 1963, the American word “ beatnik” constantly popped up. It’s not out of the question that this word attracted the leader’s attention because of its somewhat Russian sound. It would be difficult to imagine the leader of progressive mankind insulting young writers and artists with the word “ existentialist.” Much more likely that he would choose “ beatnik” ; with a little imagination, it could be construed as an abbreviation of bitiy chaynik or “ dented teapot.” I quote myself from The Burn , not out of vanity or impudence, but because I haven’t been able to imagine the general secretary’s perspective more clearly since then. The distinguishing marks o f a wicked beatnick, “ pidarast and apstractionist,” were well known to the Boss from descriptions provided by his officials. The wicked beatnik always wore a sweater and glasses, had a little beard, loved noisy “jast m usic,” and laughed at Stalinists . . . Thus the wicked beatnik will get to our culture, too, and will undermine the very foundations o f our culture with his venomous sarcasm . . . Here he is, the dangerous subversive, the perfidious word spinner who had unlocked the hearts o f Soviet youth with the skeleton key o f decadence, the leader o f the beatnik horde, who had caused clouds to gather over the socialist Motherland! They must be given a kick in the teeth before it was too late, they must be rooted out; there was already a whiff of smoke in the air that had an uncomfortably Hungarian smell to it.

That is how the Boss envisioned the army of beatnik-revisionists. Where did this word come from? Who were these beatniks? In 1963 we, meaning those branded with this label, didn’t understand it very clearly. It’s not inconceivable that Khrushchev knew better who the beatniks were: he had an entire staff of researchers who had access to Western literature. We didn’t have a clue. Information gleaned from Soviet magazines was frag­ mented, although it was carefully amassed, as was everything Western. In 684

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the magazine Foreign Literature somebody wrote something about James Dean and his movie R ebel Without a C ause , to the effect that he was rebelling against bourgeois morality. In the same magazine, or maybe it was in In Defense o f P eace , mention was made of certain coffeehouses in San Francisco where youngsters in denim (the word “jeans” didn’t exist yet) would get together, listen to jazz, read scandalous poetry. Strangely enough, such news caused me to look not to the West but to the East, to my own hometown in the not-so-distant past. In 1952 a youth commune had come into being in Kazan. Without any idea that beatniks existed elsewhere, we went to Komsomol meetings in deliberately torn sweaters. We met in lairlike apartments, listened to jazz, read scandalous poetry (imitations of the futurists and other “ slappers in the face of public taste” ). About 15 years later we learned that we had been on the brink of arrest. As the ringleader and the son of famous “ enemies of the people,” I was especially suspect. The Kazan secret police had collected evidence; we would have tumbled head over heels into the interrogation rooms if Svetlana Alliluyeva’s daddy hadn’t kicked the bucket. By the beginning of the ’60s, again from articles by various Soviet “ Americanists and internationalists,” we already knew the names of the San Francisco ringleaders; Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso. Their names sounded like pure silver to Western­ izing Russian ears. In fact these writers really didn’t have to write anything at all to go over big in Eastern Europe. I remember the girls of Bratislava in 1965 rolling their eyes and tossing their teased hairdos and sighing, “ Oh, Gregory C orso.” Little did they know that Gregory wasn’t into girls. Generally the American beatniks were older than us by a decade. They were closer to those Soviet writers who were called the “ front-line soldiers” : Bondarev, Baklanov, Vinokurov, Pozhenyan. As far as I know, however, none of these American writers took part in the war; and so, when Ginsberg was in Moscow in 1964, he sought the company not of the front-line soldiers, but of our gang. He found it. We gladly hung out with him, because we were interested in finding out who exactly he was. The sleeve of Ginsberg’s jacket was intentionally ripped, just as ours had been when we were teenagers in Kazan. Yet for us he wasn’t (and never became) an indisputable apostle of sin and nonconformity. The manner of this 40 year-old struck us as a strange manifestation of infantil­ ism. His revelations (extravagant and constantly inebriated) seemed even more infantile, particularly when he began to attack his own CIA. Still, everybody liked him, maybe even because of his childishness, his gabbing about drugs, his Indian chants. In short, he didn’t make an outstanding impression on anyone, and was overshadowed by the “ giant” Yevtu­ shenko. We were quite surprised to learn of his incredible success in

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Prague, where crowds of youngsters trailed him and he was chosen king of the spring holiday. The official Soviet view of the American beatniks was very amusing. They were sort of OK, on the one hand, as shakers of the foundations of bourgeois society, and as promoters of our cause. On the other hand, they expressed merely a petit bourgeois protest, that is, they didn’t promote our cause enough, they even distracted youngsters from the social strug­ gle. In any event, at least some grains of their work began to appear in the Soviet press at the time of the “ first thaw” in 1962—first, excerpts from Ginsberg’s famous poem “ Howl,” with a preface about five times the length of the excerpts themselves, then excerpts from Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road. The Soviet view turns out to be a curious mirror image of an American view, or so I recently learned from an article by the American conservative (excuse me, neoconservative) Norman Podhoretz. It seems that the town council of Lowell, Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac’s hometown, decided to create a monument in Kerouac’s memory. This decision came as an unpleasant surprise to the neoconservative. Podhoretz questioned whether Kerouac actually brought any good to his hometown, whether he didn’t actually mock the way of life of towns like Lowell, whether he didn’t in fact consider life in a place like Lowell a form of spiritual death. According to Podhoretz, Kerouac’s principal virtue was that toward the close of his life (which was ended by booze in 1969, when he was 47) he settled down and turned to the right politically. Alas, sighs Podhoretz, he’s not remem­ bered for that. Kerouac is too wild for American neoconservatives and for soviet commissars. He believed that only people outside the system can be considered alive: the loafers, the cheats, the bag people, the prostitutes, and those who were lucky enough to be born with dark skin. Podhoretz adduces an eloquent passage from On The R oad that glorifies the “ mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” But Podhoretz doesn’t consider Kerouac a great writer; he couldn’t create memorable images or spin gripping stories. This is how the neoconservative estimates literary greatness. Note that if you were to judge literature according to Podhor etz’s standard, the numbers of “ great writers” doesn’t decrease, it in­ creases. Of course, Kerouac produced not literary works, strictly speaking, but highly charged, narcissistic monologues of the type that Ginsberg came to call “ spontaneous prasods of bop.” They were formless and disconnected,

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and should be judged not from the standpoint of literary merit but socially, as the expression of a rebellious generation. About this Podhoretz is essentially right. He is also right to observe that in a short time the very anti-values that the beatniks raised against the Middle-American establish­ ment were elevated and accepted as the “ orthodox dogma” of the coun­ terculture. But Podhoretz pays attention only to the destructive nature of the beat movement. He holds Ginsberg’s collected poems at arm ’s length and with two fingers, as if it were a dead iguana, because it may corrupt a new generation. “ All in all,” he writes, “ Kerouac and Ginsberg at one time played a great role in the destruction of a great number of young lives, having influenced youth with their aversion to the norm and to general decency.” He begins to speak almost the same language as Khrushchev. Finally the beat finds himself in the middle ground. There were chronological coincidences and hasty parallels between the Western beat movement and the Soviet “ New Wave,” as two Danish scholars, Inger Lauridsen and Per Dalgaard, have noted. The ’50s in both the United States and the Soviet Union, were considered boring, material­ istic, and conformist, whereas the ’60s were the decade of protest. In the ’60s, as these scholars explain it, the standard of living in the Soviet Union improved, televisions and telephones were made available to the masses, the growing middle class began to drive around in their little ladas (which are baby zhigulis). There was freer access to the classics and to Western literature, and it was easier to travel around the country and even the bloc. These scholars also note that the subculture of the ’50s set the stage for the outburst of a powerful “ counterculture” of the ’60s as it did in the West. Taking advantage of the liberal atmosphere of the “ thaw ,” the young subculture in the big cities of the Soviet Union seized the chance to express itself in poetry, prose, music, and the visual arts. All of this became the “ New Wave.” Our Danish scholars correlate American beats with their Russian coun­ terparts. Am ericans: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Wil­ liam Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and so on; Russians: Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrey Voznesensky, Bella Akhamadulina, Vassily Aksyonov, Anatoly Gladilin, Bulat Okudzhava, Andrey Bitov, Vladimir Vysotsky, Ernst Neizvestny, Andrey Tarkovsky. Both groups, they say, spoke for the generations that experienced the horrors of war, and of “ cold w ar,” generations keenly alive to the possibility of nuclear destruction. Both represented generations that were fed up with manipulation by synonymous capitalist and communist socie­ ties, and that yearned for a romantic, anarchic revolt against their socie­ ties. Both denied the importance of the state and public institutions,

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emphasizing instead the importance of inner freedom. These generations, East and West, insisted on the importance of one’s own path in life, whatever it may be—drinking, traveling, smoking, jazz, making love, talking about Buddha or Jesus, and so on. Such comparisons, however, provoke this member of one of the groups. The comparisons work only if you don’t take into account events such as the Hungarian counterrevolution and the workers riot in Novocherkassk in 1960—that is, if you overlook the fact that by the beginning of that happy decade of the ’60s the liberation movement in the Soviet bloc was already history. The point is, we’re talking about different types of freedom. What kind of horrors of war did the American beatniks experience if none of them served in the army, if none took part in military action against Germany and Japan? The majority of those listed in the Russian group also did not participate in any military action with the exception of Okudzhava and Neizvestny. But we did experience bombings, evacua­ tions, starvation. I doubt that the American beatniks experienced even an interruption in their supply of Coca-Cola. One more point about the war: despite its horrors, it was a source of great inspiration for Russians. The war brought a feeling of spiritual community to Soviet people for the first time, an understanding that people could unite not only out of common fear but also in a struggle for human dignity. The real horror that our generation experienced came not in the form of the war, but in the form of Stalinism. Parents or close relatives of all the above-mentioned Russians went through torture chambers, prisons, or camps. Overcoming that terror is what fundamentally distinguishes us from our American counterparts. They were fortunate not to have known such things; but as long as we’re on the subject, it’s not out of place to remind those who bring up McCarthyism that the senator’s committee didn’t destroy a hundredth of the number of lives that our “ organs” put away in a single day. As for the “ cold w ar,” you could also say that the two groups had different psychological approaches. The Western rebels thought that their government created all kinds of NATO-like organizations out of purely militaristic motives, or to undermine the trust between nations. It is obvious to the majority in our group (and maybe even to all, in the depth of the soul) that the issue was really one of opposition to total perfidy, or, if you please, to the “ class approach.” The “ cold war” not only brought an end to the “ hot war” ; it also codified a conception of democracy. Capitalist and communist societies didn’t look nearly so synonymous to us. And we were less anarchistic than our hirsute and often tunic-clad Western brothers. We drank more, they smoked more, and none of our

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group happened to be gay (or as we say, joined the ranks of the “ blue division” ). As for jeans: the beatniks started to wear them as a symbol of rejection of Western society, but we wore them for exactly the opposite reason, to demonstrate our allegiance to Western society. Anyway we were less into fashion. We took talk about Christ more seriously; we were also very interested in books by emigré Russian religious philosophers, which suddenly were made available to us. The American beatniks were not exposed to the same level of repression that we were; some of us, myself included, were forced out of our own country. We felt a certain closeness to these people who had given their establish­ ment the finger, because we wanted to do the same to our establishment. But just as their establishment was different from ours, so was our giving it the finger. The problems that the American beatniks grappled with in the 1950s had been addressed by the young geniuses of Russia’s Silver Age in the 1910s. The Americans’ search for open forms was a forward movement, but for us that search was in many ways a backward move­ ment, to the smothered but not completely annihilated Russian avantgarde. At the end of the ’50s and the beginning of the ’60s, we opened the literary warehouse that the Stalinist bastards had nailed shut. We extracted Khlebnikov, Mandelstam, Bely, Platonov, Oberiuti . . . there was no end to the treasures of our recent past. The influence of this rediscovered avant-garde, this art of yesterday (sometimes we even thought of these people as our older brothers), was much stronger than any Western influences, even Hemingway. The American beatniks had a revolutionary position and tried to break a specific tie. Although our “ wave” did break with socialist realism, we did it with much disdain that we didn’t consider it much of a break; our main concern, the pathos of our movement, was the restoration of a tie, the attempt to mend the broken chain of our avantgarde tradition. The deliberate departure from politically significant themes: that is what finally distinguished our development from the beatniks’. Needless to say, all Western types of liberation struck us as whimsy; but we shunned our own democratic movement too, which gave rise to talk, about our own comformity. Only later, when the repression gained strength, was there a schism among us: some of the New Wave joined the domestic rights campaign, others supported Western pacifism and blamed the West for the neutron bomb. (Imagine the courage required for that!) As the great Bella Akhmadulina has said: I believe that a poet cannot be political— not in the literal sense. But a poet doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Events do concern you; you are a part o f them

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anyway. There comes a time when you have to say yes or no. That can be very hard. You have to heed your conscience, which at some point may say: “ I can’t go on like this” or “ I fear God’s grace will be taken from m e.” Talent— that is, the grace o f God— is connected, alas, with the grace o f external circumstances. Often those poets who are most favored by God are least favored by circum­ stances. The longer I live, the better I understand that I had to head in my own direction, that I had to leave the group. I’m glad that we were once a group, and glad that we now exist individually, each on his own path. God grant us all success.

We’re older now and it’s harder to talk about groups and movements without a little humor. Some of our crowd are gone. Vysotsky left behind a cult following unprecedented in the history of Russian poetry. Tarkovsky left behind a shrill note of artistic perfection. Gladilin rode the wave of Jewish emigration. Yevtushenko and Voznesensky are major champions of Gorbachev’s “ glasnost” . . . Lord, enlighten me. These things we call generations, are they random? Or will we settle, finally, with our friends, in a faraway gathering of souls?

Ill

The Continuous Demise of Bohemia W hatever else Bohemia m ay be It is alm ost always yesterday.

—Village Guidebook

The Fall of Greenwich Village Floyd Dell, 1926

This Greenwich Village, this dingy slum where “ needy men might flee” for peace from the victorious hosts of a huge robber-civilization too ready to enslave them to its dull tasks—this tiny refuge for desperate young lovers of beauty, in the midst of the rushing metropolis—this fragile respite of theirs was already doomed. Greenwich Village could not remain forever islanded amid the roaring tides of commerce. Already the barriers were being broken down; Seventh Avenue was being extended southward, the new subway was being laid; in a little while the magic isolation of the Village would be ended. The tangle of crooked streets would be pierced by a great straight road, the beautiful crumbling houses of great rooms and high ceilings and deep-embrasured windows would be ruthlessly torn down to make room for modern apartment-buildings; the place would become like all the rest of New York City—its gay, proud life would be extin guished. This was inevitable. . . . But a worse and swifter doom than we could guess was to fall upon Greenwich Village. It was to become a side show for tourists, a peep-show for vulgarians, a commercial exhibit of tawdry Bohemianism. Let me briefly set forth the causes of that catastrophe. Little restaurants, of which Polly’s had been the first, sprang up to minister to our comforts, tucked away in basements and garrets, gay with varicolored furniture, named with odd, childish, playful names. Here did the serpent enter Eden, demonstrating again the dear old doctrine of economic determinism. Restaurants can scarcely cater exclusively to the impecunious élite—though an honorable few bravely did so, till overtaken by the Day of Reckoning; a quixotic example that was not widely imitated. These little restaurants served to advertise the Village to the people from up town, who presently began to come on sightseeing tours, with their pockets full of money and their hearts full of a pathetic eagerness to participate in the celebrated joys of Bohemian life. The restaurants re­ 693

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sponded by laying on villagy quaintness in thick daubs, to tickle the fancy of the visiting bourgeoisie; and every day new restaurants and tea-shops sprang up underfoot and overhead to meet the demands of this new clientele. As for the Villagers, they left these restaurants as fast as they were invaded by the up-town crowds; they found new eating places, as yet unknown to the invaders—only to be forced sooner or later to flee from these in turn! It was partly a question of finances; good food at a cheap price was not what the up-towners desired—they wanted atmosphere; and the restaurateurs concentrated on atmosphere to the neglect of cuisine, in deference to their whim. But it was not merely a matter of food; a certain Village snobbishness was also involved. These up-towners, like all foreigners, were judged inevitably by their worst representatives—and some of them were pretty bad. Too many of them had no manners: they flocked in to stare and giggle and make loud remarks; and they tried, half enviously and half contemp­ tuously, to buy their way into Village companionship. They thought nothing of intruding upon a private party, introducing themselves, asking to be shown about, and offering genially to pay for everything! It was rather pitiful, this anxious desire, on the part of people who had worked respectably all their lives, to be shown how to play; but it was very tiresome. And what could we do about it? There they were; we could not put them out of our Village! We could only, if it came to that desperate pass, go away ourselves. We had left one thing out of our calculations: the fact that we had something which it seemed all bourgeois America—sick to death of its machine-made efficiency and scared respectability—wistfully desired to share with us: we had freedom and happiness. And these fellow-citizens of ours had the money with which to buy, as they fondly hoped, freedom and happiness. And with that golden key they did, indeed, open the door to our citadel. Confession is good for the soul. I was one of those who, with the best of intentions, assisted in that betrayal; for I was one of a committee which went about looking for a place to hold the first Greenwich Village ball, and discovered Webster Hall. Those balls finished the process which the restaurants had begun. Yes, and it was I who furnished, out of my Roget’s “ Thesaurus,” that name, “ Pagan R out,” so potent in its appeal to the fevered imaginations of the bourgeoisie! The first of these Village balls were, perhaps, all that the credulous up-towner could have dreamed; they were spontaneously joyous and deliberately beautiful—focusing in a mood of playfulness that passion for lovliness which had after all brought us to the Village; but the later balls were likely to be dreadful, being given

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merely to make money. It pays to advertise some things, but not freedom and happiness; it is too easy for the ignorant purchaser to accept a cheap substitute. We had, in fact, shown the more commercially enterprising among us another way to make money out of the bourgeoisie. The Villagers were beginning to leave the village for the suburbs; and those that still remained were hard to find, so closely did they secrete themselves. And now, to fill the gap left by their disappearance from their old haunts, appeared a kind of professional “ Villager,” playing his antics in public for pay or profit. Doubtless it is necessary for people to make a living; and perhaps this method was as honest as most others; still, there was something shocking about it—to a Villager. It was a bitter thing to have to look at these professionals, and realize that this was the sort of person oneself was supposed to be! Perhaps the imitation, like a malicious caricature, was too close for comfort; and the foundations of a future settled respectability may have been laid in the heart of many a careless inhabitant of the Village by seeing just some such mawkish counterfeit, and having to ask himself, “ Do I really seem like that?” There was one—I will call him Willy the Wisp. He went about from table to table, in the Village restaurants, selling his candies—“ psychic candies,” he called them, in the line of patter which accompanied the sale. “ They are the color of your psyche,” he would say gently. “ Yes, dear lady, I have looked into your subconsciousness, and seen its secret need, and these are especially for you!” The visiting bourgeoisie, vastly enter­ tained, sat attentively listening to his whole speech from beginning to end—flattering themselves perhaps that they were being inducted into the mysteries of Village psychology. It pleased them, too—looking at his frail slip of a body, so utterly useless in the mills of industry from which they drew the profits they were out spending tonight—it pleased them, no doubt, to pay him a quarter for a handful of sweets. Perhaps they had a sense of patronizing the arts! Perhaps, in finding somebody in the Village to patronize, they were triumphing over it, asserting the final superiority of their own respectable virtues over its wayward freedoms. . . . But why did I suffer when I saw Willy the Wisp come into a restaurant?—why did I writhe in my chair as he delivered his pretty little speeches?—why did I turn away, and wish I wasn’t there, and try not to hear or see him? Was it, indeed, as some cynical person might say, that he was too much a symbolic figure nakedly revealing the state of all the arts to-day, of all the artists, and even of my haughty and scornful self?—offering the bourgeoisie, in our poems and pictures and plays and stories, “ psychic candies,” and saying gently, “ Yes, dear lady, I have looked into your subconsciousness, and seen its secret need, and these are especially for you!” —then pocket ing the reward with a shameless smirk. Oh, I have no doubt Willy the Wisp

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despised the bourgeoisie as much as ever I did! I applaud his enterprise in selling bonbons for top prices; and perhaps bonbons were the very utmost of his creative capacities. Yet he was to me a half-tragic and utterly painful figure, filling me with a sense of shame and futile rage. I suppose I wanted Willy the Wisp, for the honor of Greenwich Village, to bang that fat profiteer over the head with his tray, and go, free and happy, off to jail! The idea must have occurred to him more than once, but no doubt he dismissed it as absurd. And Greenwich Village was no longer as absurd as it used to be—it was becoming more practical every day; even in its apparent madnesses there was good sound business method. That was perhaps the trouble with it. And there was another thing, which I will touch upon lightly. It was impossible to escape some association with those barbarians from up town. Sooner or later one got to know them. The most chauvinistic and prejudiced Villager was sooner or later caught speaking to them. And, of course, it was then discovered that all up-towners were by no means such impossible folk! In fact, the more one saw of them, the more one felt them to be not so different after all from one’s precious self. Some of them, indeed, were very nice. Could this be because oneself was becoming bourgeois? Perhaps! For one could hardly possess a talent and exercise it in the Village for several years without attracting some notice from the outside world and beginning to reap some worldly rewards from it. And gradually one discovered in oneself certain bourgeois traits—the desire for, say, a house in the coun try, and children, and a settled life—for one becomes tired even of freedom! Then let the bourgeoisie take Greenwich Village, by all means! We would move to the country, and be respectable! And yet—not all of us moved to the country, and settled down, and became respectable. Concerning these different fates which might befall a Villager, let me tell a story, which I shall change only enough to avoid giving pain. In those days when our Village, though doomed, still brightly lived—in the latter days of that time of dreams which now seems like a dream—four young men sat at a table in the Purple Purp. At ten in the morning on that winter day, the Purple Purp was a leisurely place—so leisurely that the young man who brought us our ham and eggs and coffee paused to join with us in an argument about vers libre; and the blue-smocked, bobbedhaired girl in charge had time to dance with us in turn, to the music of the phonograph. We were the only patrons of the Purple Purp at that untimely hour. We were breakfasting after a long night of talk and a few hours’ sleep in some one’s studio. There had been a party, and much drinking of hot

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mulled wine; and of the dozen who still lingered after the rest had departed, nobody wanted to go home in the snow; so the obliging host and hostess pulled mattresses from various couches and made one vast divan across one end of the studio floor, upon which the exhausted revelers might fall and sleep. The party danced and played and quarreled and made up about us unheeded, rose to its climax of friendly racket and hullabaloo, and died down at last into the peace of stupor—except for us in our corner, who still raised our voices noisily in the silence, shouting eager speech to each other. And then, toward dawn, weariness suddenly came upon us; and after briefly considering going out through the snowy streets to our own beds, we flung ourselves down wherever we could find room. Our argument had become rather maudlin toward the last, not from drink but from sleepiness. Heaven knows how, we had got on to the subject of children, and their relation to the artistic life. Julian had said an artist had no right to have children; Ben remarked impatiently that in the future the community would take care of children and not leave them to the private enterprise of parents; and Paul suggested that children might enjoy and profit by the candor of a Bohemian home. I remember that discussion, because just as I was dropping off to sleep a few moments later, a door off the studio opened, and two children entered, a boy and a girl, about three and four years old, clad in their nightgowns and very wide awake. They did not seem to be surprised at seeing the sleepers on the floor; they wandered curiously about, looking at our sleeping figures by the pale light of city dawn that filtered in through the skylight. They were regarding us with that air of respectful deference with which children view the proceedings of adult life. “ That’s Mrs. Doe, and here’s Mr. Doe,” said the little boy. It was odd to hear these two friends of mine described as Mr. and Mrs.—as though they were grown-up people, and not the most delightful and irresponsible artist-children in the world! So they went about, identifying us, calling us by the titles of our adulthood. “ That’s father over there,” said the little boy, pointing to our gay and whimsical host. I became more sharply aware of the identity of the lovely madcap on the divan to my right, whose tangled curls fell about her sleeping head—and I waited for these children to give her presently her due rank and title in the world in which, according to them, she belonged. The little girl paused thoughtfully in front of her. “ And here’s mother!” she said. Somehow it seemed both sad and funny that she should be that! There was an incongruous and pathetic dignity in the term. I smiled with closeshut eyes, and her son and daughter passed on, tiptoeing so as not to wake these men and women whose privilege it was, as rules of the great world, to stay up all night and go to bed at dawn. And then I slept, and awakened

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in broad daylight in the disheveled studio, and went with my three friends to the Purple Purp for breakfast. And now the discussion that had gone on all night was resumed again—to last all day, until late in the evening. I had known these three others for some time, but it so happened that yesterday was the first time we had all met together. To-day, as we sat at the table, drinking our endless cups of coffee and smoking cigarettes, the differences that had made us clash all night in argument began to seem less interesting than the fundamental likeness beneath those differences; and we began to talk of that, and to celebrate it, jestingly and yet with a kind of wonder. We were different enough in our histories. Julian had been the spoiled and tyrannized son of rich parents; they had tried to make a business man and a respectable citizen out of him. He wanted to be a poet; and he had just mustered up the courage to leave his business—and his wife—and come to Greenwich Village to write poetry and starve. Of course, no one ever did quite starve in Greenwich Village; it was one of the beautiful things about the place that no one who thought he could write or paint or make music need ever go hungry if he were not too proud to share the hospitable poverty of his friends. Here Julian was; and the path which had led him to us was strewn with ruins. Paul there, leaning back in his chair and flicking his ashes to the floor with a nervous gesture, was a young reporter who had rashly thrown up a good newspaper job and come to New York to write short stories full of brutal and uncompromising realism. He had been here a year and had yet to sell his first story. But he wrote on. There was no discouragement in his face; and if there seemed to be a brooding melancholy in his dark eyes, it may have been over the difficulty which, even in Greenwich Village, attends upon the having of too many love-affairs at one time. He made a precarious and uncertain living, just enough to keep him going; I remember his telling me afterward that a loaf of bread left in his room, after a party we had had there one evening, had been his food for the next three days. And his emotional life was by far the most irregular, at this period, of all our lives; while the mood of the Village was now lapsing into domesticity of a sort, he still maintained a fierce and complicated freedom. And yet, in spite of all this economic and emotional wretchedness, he had an air of earnestly pursuing some deliberated course of action; there was, I remem ber Julian saying laughingly, a kind of perverse puritanism in Paul’s Bohemian habits. Ben, my third friend, had been a tramp, and was now involved in revolutionary politics. He looked a little of the vagabond still, a kind of Gypsy-man, with his thin muscular body decked out in corduroys and flaming necktie and flannel shirt, and his queer-shaped laughing face and

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rumpled hair. It was an accident, of a career diversified by many accidents, that had brought him here. He laughed at Greenwich Village, he despised it—he regarded us as idlers, triflers, butterflies of a summer’s day; or, as he liked to put it, children playing on the edge of a volcano. He lived in a world of violent realities—of strikes and jails and the untold atrocities of the continual vendetta between militant capitalism and the militant prole­ tariat—and, beyond that, in a world of violent hopes and fears, of world wars, of famine, pestilence, and class massacre. But, though he scorned us as the butterflies of a day, the thought of our impending extinction in the world cataclysm moved him, I think, to love us all the more and make the best of our society while yet he might. In a sense I was the bond between the three, for I could understand them all. In our long night of splendid and useless argument, in which they had come no nearer agreement than a mere friendly contempt for each other’s illusions, I had agreed with each of them in turn. Julian believed that the world needed beauty, Paul that it needed candor, and Ben that it needed the cleansing flame of revolution. And meanwhile the world re­ mained deeply indifferent to all our efforts on behalf of beauty, truth and the future. That neglect was the bond which drew us together. In howso ever different ways, we all scorned the world we lived in. But, as it seemed at this moment, the strange thing about our compan­ ionship was not that we had by devious individual paths come together at last, nor that, coming together, we had been able to recognize beneath these surface differences of opinion the same deep disdain of the accus tomed ways of the world; no, the strange thing was that it should have taken us so long to find each other. Oddly enough, Paul had once worked as a reporter in the town in which Julian grew up; and they had met and despised each other. That was more astonishing now than complete unawareness of each other’s existence would have been. It was not circumstances merely that had kept them apart; it was ignorance and fear. And, as if to complete the irony, Ben had chanced to be in that same town, years ago, for a few days, as a tramp. “ I remember,” he said, “ that some kind gent gave me a dime on Christmas day—and maybe that kind gent was one of you two boys! Anyway, I was about starving, and that dime helped me to the biggest free lunch in tow n.” They began to orient their memories with reference to Ben’s sojourn in that town. They fixed the time, seven years ago, and reckoned up their ages at that date. What were they all doing that Christmas eve? “ I had just come home from college for the holidays,” said Julian. “ I was covering a story for the ‘Record,’” said Paul. “ And I,” said Ben, “ was sleeping under a railway trestle.”

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“ I might have been spared years of misery if I had known you boys then,” said Julian wistfully. “ I thought I was all alone in that tow n.” “ I, to o ,” said Paul. “ I hadn’t a friend in the world—except Flaubert. With a live man to talk to, I might have made the break sooner.” “ I was lonely enough,” said Ben. And they had none of them, in their loneliness, suspected that the town might hold friends—friends that were to be—and yet never now, perhaps, such friends as they might have been then when most they needed each other. They played for a while with the fancy of what would have happened if they had all met that Christmas eve—say, downtown in a barroom; would they have had a true word to say to one another? “ If you think I ’d have told the truth, in the presence of an enterprising young reporter,” said Julian, “ you are very deeply ignorant of the psy chology of protective coloration! I’d have been afraid to open my m outh.” “ And I ’d not have failed to remem ber,” said Paul, “ that your father was one of the stockholders of the dirty sheet I worked for. Give myself away in front of you—no, thank you!” “ You were pretty scared of each other !” said Ben. “ That’s how America managed to keep us apart so long,” said Julian; “ by making sure we’d never know each other if we did chance to meet. And a pretty good job it was, too. It’s taken us a good many years to find each other. But we fooled ’em, after all. Here we are—safe in Greenwich Village!” Yes, here we were; and it seemed as though something ought to be done about it—something adequate to mark the occasion. But—after all, we had not triumphed over the hostile world; we had merely escaped from it with our lives. We were still to perform those deeds which would justify our revolt. But we were still young; give us seven years more! We began to talk of those next seven years—not quite as noisily as we had talked of the seven gone before. For all our bravado, the mystery of an unknown future oppressed us. What would happen to our lives in those seven years? What would we have accomplished, in our chosen realms of the Beautiful, the True and the Utopian—what found or failed to find— what “ of despair, of rapture, of derision” ? Ah, well! When those seven years were over—then we would know. And we could tell each other then. So it was that, lingering late in the evening at that table, we planned to meet again in seven years. We fixed the date in our minds. It would be in December of the year 1924. At the same place—at the same hour—at the same table. That evening in December, 1924 came.

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I went to the Purple Purp—now under another name; things had changed in Greenwich Village, as all over the world. I went, though I knew the meeting we had planned could not be held. Paul might be there—if he remembered, and if he cared to come. Fortune had changed for Paul in the meantime; and perhaps Paul himself had changed. I did not know; I had not seen him for a long time. But I knew he was very successful, very prosperous. He might not care to attend so melancholy a memorial as this. For Julian was dead, by his own hand. And Ben, for the sake of his opinions, was in prison. I had been dulled to tragedy, I thought. So many had died—more nobly, doubtless, than Julian—but death of one’s friend is different. It strikes into one’s own personal life, throwing its shadow into every little corner of one’s daily thoughts. It afflicts with the poignant ache of unanswerable questionings. And yet it was not the dead I mourned; Julian was at peace; it was his living and suffering self of yesterday that had, as a debt paid too late, my praise and pity. Must one’s friend die before one can know how much one loved him? Nor, perhaps, need I mourn for my friend in prison. He knew well enough what prison meant, and he need not have gone; he might have been out in the sunshine to-day. But prison was a part of the career he had deliberately chosen for himself. His mind was braced to meet it. And yet— can any one be so utterly prepared as to face without regret the loss of liberty, of friends and love? These things were as dear to him as to any man alive; and I must wish them for him, even though he had heroically put them by. Ten years?—I told myself it would not be so long. But it had been nearly a year already that Ben had been in prison. How many years, I wondered, would it be before I saw him free? Another year? Two more years? These things were not agreeable to think about; and therefore I had to think about them. The pain of these thoughts was a debt I owed, if to nothing else, at least to friendship. Julian and Ben—I had seen them both many times since that day when we talked so gayly together. I had bidden Ben good-by on his way to prison, and I had seen Julian only a few days before his self-willed death. I had reproached myself afterward for not having somehow saved him; if only I had been with him that day! For it was a mood; and (who should know better than I!) such moods pass. Yet some men—and Julian was one of them—are ruled by their moods. Who was I to have hoped to stand between my friend and his dark wish? I knew something, and could guess more, of the motives which had irresistibly impelled him to his act. And, as I thought of his life, it seemed to me that I ought to have known all along to what end it was shaping itself.

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The determination of events is so clear in retrospect! Seen so, his death was as inevitable—had been as inevitable that day when we sat so gayly talking at the little table—as plain for a prophetic eye to read, as the fate of Ben. And perhaps (I began to think) those other fates, Paul’s and mine, had been on the cards, too! I found, when I came into the restaurant, that I had done Paul an injustice in doubting that he would come. He was there, waiting for me at the little table. We found it at first hard to talk to each other. It seemed absurd to carry out our old promise and tell what had happened in those seven years to us. It would have been too smug a mockery of those two friends of ours, for whom destiny had no sweeter gift than the prison and the grave. So I was thinking when presently Paul leaned back in his chair, flicked with that nervous gesture of his tiny cigarette-ash to the floor, and, with the old look of brooding in his eyes, began to speak. “ I suppose,” he said, “ under the circumstances, I ought to be ashamed of being so—successful. Well, I’m not. The truth is, I don’t care.” “ I tried,” he went on, “ to do the thing I wanted to do—tell the truth. People don’t want to hear it. They may, some day—in that future Ben was always talking about. They may; but I doubt it. They prefer lying dreams— and probably they always will. I’ve learned, you see—and it’s taken me long enough—what the human mind is really like. And it’s nothing to cry about. I’ve always been clever enough at telling lies; and I might as well lie for the magazines at twenty cents a word as for the newspapers at space-rates.” I said something, but he paid no attention, and went on. “ The other night Bilkins gave a party. Bilkins,” he explained, “ is a suburban neighbor of ours, a commonplace and unimportant cog in the machine of big business, whose income is nevertheless considerably larger than that of the President of the United States. We were invited, my wife and I; and we went. I have been working hard, lately, and not going to any suburban parties, so my impressions were fairly sharp. I remember that I contrasted this party with the one that time here in the Village, you remember, when we talked all night with Julian and Ben. The great difference, of course, was that at this party there wasn’t any talk, and there was all the booze in the world. In Greenwich Village, as I remember it, we were all young idealists. If we kissed the girls, we did it on principle; we didn’t have to get drunk to do it, so that we wouldn’t remember it next morning and be ashamed of ourselves. In fact, if we ever did get drunk, it was an accident; we didn’t do it on purpose—we didn’t need to get drunk, because we were never ashamed of anything we did. The more I associate with the bourgeoisie, the more I marvel at our young innocence here in

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Greenwich Village. We were all so damned noble! Even the cruel things we did, were done as—as Shelly might have done them. But I think we of the bourgeoisie—for I count myself one of them, now—are wiser. We know it isn’t any use to be noble. There’s nothing to be noble for. We aren’t fooling ourselves about Art or Revolution or Truth. We know that we’re out to have a good time. Well, I drank champagne that night, which left me clear-headed. I didn’t particularly enjoy kissing the girls in cor ners—that’s a relic of my Greenwich Village training; I am disgusted at people’s doing things they think are wrong. Nevertheless, I had a good time. And that’s what I want to tell you about.” He lighted another cigarette. “ I had just been reading in the papers about another famine somewhere in the world. I’ve come near enough to starving, myself, to know what it must feel like. I thought about those starving people while I was eating Bilkin’s dinner. I thought also of Ben, in his prison stripes; I was wearing a very jaunty suit of evening-clothes. I thought about Julian; I was drinking champagne, and dancing with some lovely girls. And those thoughts didn’t interfere with my enjoyment. Any one would say that thinking about such things would make me miserable. But I wasn’t at all miserable. Because life is like that.” “ Ben in prison, for telling the truth. People don’t like the truth; no wonder they put him in prison! But why should Ben be in prison for such people? Why not here at Bilkin’s party, drinking champagne and dancing with some lovely girl?” “ And Julian—he thought the world wanted beauty: he found out that it didn’t. But why commit suicide because of that? Julian was too sensitive. He should have kept his beauty here,” —Paul struck his breast lightly— “ as I keep my truth.” “ No—I danced, and felt that it made very little difference where one was—in the grave like Julian, or in prison like Ben, or here at Bilkin’s party. It was all the same. I wasn’t sorry for Ben, or for Julian. I wasn’t even sorry for myself.” “ Life goes on, you know. And we go on with it. And in a very real sort of way, we enjoy ourselves. I had a very good time at that party. I have a very good time, all round. It’s a mistake to suppose that one can’t be happy in a meaningless world. Because at the end of all one’s thinking is the question, ‘Well, what of it?’ And there isn’t any answer, and there’s nothing to do but live and enjoy life. After all, that’s what we’re built for.” His talk shook me more than I wished to show. It seemed to me that Paul’s doom was more akin to Ben’s and Julian’s than I had realized. Success like his was an extreme like the prison or the grave. And yet—I could understand how Paul felt. And I respected him, in some odd way, for feeling as he did. Whoever has once lived for unreal things, such as

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without any disrespect one may call Beauty or Truth or the Future, can never in an utterly simple way be at home among life’s realities, however good and innocent these realities may be. He can only try to—and remain an alien. Paul put out his cigarette. “ You’ve never been out to my place, have you? Come, and bring your wife. Helen will be delighted to show off her two lovely babies.” We shook hands, and he went away. I sat alone at the table for a long time—and then went out to wander about the Village. Perhaps I was seeking for something to assuage my loneliness. I went into the old places. I saw no one I had ever known, and all was changed. The Village—our Village—was dead and gone. Here were young people, as young as we once had been, as gay and eager. They were the new Greenwich Villagers. They did not mind the changes, because they had never seen our Village. And perhaps they had a healthy insensitiveness to all this uglification and pretense. Under the aegis of our legendary gayety, they were enjoying themselves, in their fashion. Perhaps they were more robust than we had been. Doubtless they knew already all the things we had so painfully learned. For them the world would never suddenly go blank of meaning. They were accustomed to its not having any meaning. I saw ourselves, in retrospect, as touched with a miraculous naivete, a Late-Victorian credulousness, a faith, happy and absurd, in the goodness and beauty of this chaotic universe. These young people knew better. Well, it was their Village now; let them have it, and make it what they chose! I went out from the noise and smoke into the crisp December air, feeling old. Presently I felt older than that—I felt dead. A ghost, I walked about the midnight streets, meeting other ghosts—friends and comrades and sweethearts of those lost, happy years. Together we revisited those glimpses of the moon.

Bohemia—or Vulgaria Atlantic Monthly, 1909

There is a real as well as an ideal kingdom of Bohemia; but ever since Shakespeare gave the real kingdom an imaginary seacoast, Bohemia has meant more to the imagination than to geographical science. The sea coast,—let it stand for the touch of romance with which Bohemia is transfigured. For the romancer has always been busy with Bohemia, from Shakespeare’s day to our own: busy with its facts, still busier with its memories. What if it is to-day more sidewalk and restaurant and studio than seacoast? What if we do not draw so sharp a line between Philistia and Bohemia as did our fathers and fathers’ fathers?—at least the line is drawn. It is a good place to read about, this capital of art and good fellowship; for Bohemia is indeed the capital to-day, and no longer the resort of shipwrecked captains accompanied by ladies in borrowed trou sers. The conditions have altered, but the place abides; abides, at least, as a convention, the “ property” of novelist and story-teller. Traditionally, it is the serf of dessicated proprieties, the unimaginative victim of the stereotyped in society and in ideas, who never could gain the keys, the freedom, of this city-state. Though he supped late, perhaps, the fact that there was money in his pockets, or that he had a job, was always enough to keep him from sparkling like the garret-genius, who dreams when his pockets are flat, and drinks when they are full. But where are— not the snows, who cares about them!—where are the dreams of yester day? I too have always hankered after the chimeras, and Bohemia is one of them. Where is Bohemia? In books, but not in life, alas; not in New York, nor London, nor Paris. I have tried to find it; sometimes with pockets full, more often with pockets empty. It has vanished. It defies discovery. Did it ever exist, Bohemia? If so, it must have been in those wonderful Thirties, in the Paris of Gautier and Hugo and Musset and George Sand. Yet even Gautier’s flaming waistcoat was never so red as it was painted; 705

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and as for Baudelaire,—to-day we know that the secret of his scandalous green locks was the loss of hair and the use of an unguent restorer to bring it back in full force. They, too, craved a Bohemia; being geniuses, more or less, they created it. For a moment it lighted up their lives, then faded out, though only after their books had caught the reflection for all time. Bohemia is still more than a geographical concept, thanks to the narrative of the performances of Hernani; it glows in the letters of George Sand; in the lives of some actors in the Com édie Humaine. And that is all,—but that its reflection shines, half sad, half gay and careless, in the tales of Murger. The finding of a Bohemia for ourselves is conditional on certain alterna tives; and here they are. Either we must be very young and very unexact ing, or else very old and blessed with a genius for gilding gorgeously our recollections of a tawdry past. Thus is Bohemia discovered,—thus and in no other way. Hazlitt, poor fellow! murmured on his death bed that his life had been happy; Rousseau derived belated pleasures of imagination in living over and ennobling, so far as he was able, the amorous passages of his youth. “ Impassioned Recollection” is the critic’s word for Hazlitt’s faculty, and Rousseau’s. And with that faculty each of us may build him a Bohemia—long after the event. Yes—and there is one other, an ignoble, manner of finding a Bohemia for others. As hungry journalists we may, if we like, glance round our bare hall-bedrooms, survey the chop-house or the Latin Quarter restaurant (one of the Rendezvous des Cochers, at a pinch), and proceed to metamorphose our Midionette into Graziella, her callous hands into long, tapering fingers, the daub on our canvas into a masterpiece, a barren existence into the artist’s life. Thus do we write a book of the Under-world of Art that will make you, amiable and wellnourished reader, water at the mouth. Afterwards, we will dine alone for one-franc-fifty,—for thirty cents. For most Bohemias are gas-light Vulgarias, tenanted by less vigorous Elbert Hubbards. We wink at what we don’t like; we tell only of that prospect which does please (when the sun is out), and we forge our documents. Imagination—it is far more the power not to see what is there than that to build one castles in Spain. The inhabitants of Bohemia—how gracious in fiction, even in the novels of W. J. Locke! I do not know them. I have seen dirty Americans playing poker in a Montparnasse cafe that artists use; were they Bohemians? I have seen revolting performances on Christmas Eve—perhaps they could be shaped into romance if one had the stomach for the work? Frankly, the Bohemians of literature are the Vulgarians of real life whose unpleasant qualities have been elided or even quite erased,—this in the interest of the Contributors’ Club. Did they ever exist in real life, these

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characters? If so, you would never have given them a bow. The personages in Trilby were not Bohemians; you remarked the fact, perhaps, that they took cold tubs? Take the uninspired, dead-eyed art student of these degenerate days; give him a velvet jacket if you like; retain his finger-nails as a picturesque bit of realism; add then to his person the charms that only some respecta­ ble Philistine ever had,—stir determinedly,—presto! there stands your Bohemian of fiction. Sometimes, however, the more observing reader will remark that refinement and dirt do clash; that the manner of life and the results (for he is bound to succeed, this fellow,—in fiction) are almost as contradictory. And then the Bohemian will be revealed to you, as to me— and both of us are well-intentioned persons—revealed as the product of vulgarity and the protagonist of the disgusting.

Is Feminine Bohemianism a Failure? Emilie Ruck de Schell, 1898

The last decade of the nineteenth century, made memorable by its wars and tempests, its stirring political campaigns and financial crises, will give to posterity at least one memento that shall not soon be forgotten—a wholly emancipated woman. We call her the bachelor girl, the crisp, selfsufficient woman who has put aside the Hebrew tradition of her origin, and has come to be—at least in her own estimation—the backbone of society. In the days of our grandmothers the ultimate desire of a normal woman’s heart was to be sought in marriage by some worthy man, to live for and through him. But a generation has arisen that is wiser than its predeces sors, and the fallacy of the old saw, “ It is not good that man—woman— should be alone,” has been exposed. The sacred institution of marriage has been assailed by both sexes alike. Problem novels have been choked down people’s throats. The pulpit has too often forgotten its high calling of saving men’s souls, and has turned to the more interesting task of withdrawing the hymeneal curtains and letting the morbid, sensation-seeking world stare in. Shall we wonder then that the educated girl of to-day, to whom almost every avenue of human activity has been opened, shrinks back appalled at the threshold of that chamber of horrors, and prefers to walk her way alone? If we trace the relative conditions of man and woman from primeval barbarism to the civilization of the present, we cannot fail to observe that man, created in the image of his Maker, has kept practically the same place, while woman, by a series of almost revolutionary changes, has been constantly rising. Chivalry first elevated her to the side of man in the social world. It accomplished this end by thrusting her far above him and then permitting her to settle down to her proper place of unquestioned equality. Intellectual emancipation was the next upward step for woman. Here woman, not man, struck the blow to social prejudice and achieved the 708

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greatest victory the sex has as yet won. The bluestocking, homely, severe, devoid of sentiment and tenderness, waged her grim fight against a timehardened idea, in order that the women who came after her might enjoy an intellectual freedom such as was impossible for those that preceded her. The society woman of to-day does not have to be entertained with light gossip and bonbons. She has gone through college shoulder to shoulder with the men who seek her companionship. Her ready wit and ingenious philosophy can interest the profoundest among them. The severely intellectual woman, who made it possible for her modern sister to become what she is, was neither loved nor admired. She sacrificed herself for the good of her sex. Perhaps the bachelor girl is following in her footsteps, an unconscious m artyr to the cause of female emancipation. The world must admit that she is playing her part, not always well perhaps, in the social drama of to-day, and when the throes of the birth of a new century are past, though she may be forgotten, her influence will be indelibly stamped on the women of the next generation. Marriage is not so nearly universal as it was a score of years ago. Nor does the term “ old maid” retain its erewhile stigma. Our bachelor girl celebrates without a blush her thirtieth birthday. She might have married any one of a dozen men; but she is doing the kind of work they used to do. Her labor brings her a cash return, and she likes her liberty. The simple delights of a home—ministering to the wants of an often ungrateful, always self-centered husband; enduring periodically that experience which Hypa tia said is fit only for slaves—possess no charm for her. Yet her sensitive nature cannot yield to boarding-house luck such as is taken quite as a matter of course by the men she strives to emulate. Her fertile genius has devised a way of escape both from the limitations of the home and the barrenness of the boarding-house, and Bohemianism, as we now have it, has come into being. We are not now concerned with the familiar type of Bohemianism that has long existed in the Quartier Latin of Paris, but rather with that phase of it that is affecting our own land—nay, the women of our land. The average man is by nature a Bohemian until his deeper being is awakened by the touch of a woman’s hand. The loose, irresponsible life of the college chapter-house or the club-room possesses a fascination for him that is irrestible until he becomes satiated with its shams and its follies. Sometimes it leaves scars that he carries deep in his heart, and memories that he would fain destroy. But the man who has drunk the last dregs of Bohemianism is the man who will select the purest woman for his wife and the most sequestered nook for his home. What is to become of his Bohemian sister when she is “ sick unto death” of struggling alone with this awful problem of living? She would scorn the advances of an unso

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phisticated man, and for the man of the world she has been divested of her charm. The great outside world sees only the jolly, chafing-dish side of female Bohemianism. Girls of refinement and ability, who earn their own living, comprise the majority of the Bohemians of our great cities. Their apart ments are tastefully, often elegantly furnished. No chaperon is present to see that the arbitrary laws of social form are strictly observed. The men who frequent these cosy dens find in them a combination of royal enter tainment and untrammeled freedom such as they can find nowhere else. Painters, poets with more soul than business ability, musicians whose reputation is yet to be made, take to the Bohemian life. When genius has been put into harness and compelled to drag the plow through productive soil, the taste for this unconventional life will doubtless be lost. Financial success usually sounds the death-knell to sentiment and independence. But female Bohemianism has not lived long enough to reveal what will be its effect on the women who really succeed. As yet it is only an experi ment. We have spoken of the free, delightful side of Bohemianism. The man who has participated in the creating of a Welsh rarebit and has tossed his cigarette-stumps into the grate while he told ludicrous stories, sometimes with a bit of ginger in them, needs no exposition of this side of the question. He perhaps never dreams that those same girls who know how to entertain so royally and laugh so merrily, know, too, how to conceal an aching heart beneath a mask of smiles. A single day from my own experience will illustrate this point. My companion in tribulation is an artist whose genius is inversely commensurate with the appalling parvity of her purse. I had been doing space work for a daily newspaper at four dollars a column and getting my novel ready for publication. We discovered one morning that we were approaching the line where the two sides of the bank account balance, and, in a frenzy of apprehension, I staked everything on a political paper that I thought decidely clever. An Eastern journal that was using a variety of political stuff seemed to be the proper place for my little satire. “ Agnes, if this doesn’t go,” I remarked grimly as I folded the typewrit ten sheets, “ and if Mr. Brown doesn’t pay you for that portrait, we are going to starve.” Three days passed and that never-to-be-forgotten day dawned. The postm an’s ring awakened us. Three letters he thrust under the door, two for Agnes and one for me. As she tore open the first she remarked: “ I hope the old chump is satisfied with his wife’s portrait and has sent me a cheque.” In a moment she lay back on her pillow with a groan of disgust.

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“ Something wrong with the left eye; must have another sitting,” she remarked dismally. The other envelope contained a bill for her art lessons. At the sight of my own letter my heart had sunk so low that I had not yet summoned sufficient courage to tear open the envelope. I had grown accustomed to welcoming home the adventurous children of my fancy— the “ reader” somehow knows why two red stamps are enclosed—but this time I had hoped my manuscript would not be returned. There was a polite little note from the editor informing me that my article was good, but that his last political issue had just gone to press. He was sure I could place my manuscript elsewhere. Something desperate had to be done. We could not go to our relatives and appeal for help. That were treason against Bohemianism! An influential friend had promised to go with me that morning to the editor of one of the evening papers, with a view to obtaining for me a position on his staff. I called at the gentleman’s office at the appointed time. He was out—had probably forgotten the engagement, the stenogra pher told me. Choking down my disappointment, I went to the office of the paper to which I had been a contributor. The Sunday editor informed me that there would be no room in the next Sunday’s issue for my customary love story. I was too proud to tell him that I needed the five dollars that story ought to bring me; but he saw the distress in my eyes. After a moment’s reflection he said: “ Here, you take this out to my friend Smith. He sometimes uses stories in his paper.” I left the office with my two pieces of manuscript, and as I walked out into the street a mute appeal for help and courage went up from my heart. The editor glared at me out of a pair of whiskey-bleared eyes as I meekly told him the purpose of my visit. “ Got no time for literary work. Can’t use anything but political stuff now. Come in after the election and I may find time to talk to you,” he growled. There was a great lump in my throat, and my lips quivered; but the case was too desperate to permit my feelings to be taken into consideration. “ I have some political stuff that I believe you will like,” I ventured to say. “ Oh, you women are a nuisance! I can’t bother with your stuff!” And he bolted from the room. “ Don’t mind him ,” the city editor said sympathetically. “ He is worried with this campaign and is unusually gruff. I believe you can sell your political article to our morning paper. But I would advise you not to go to the editor-in-chief. He will treat you worse than our man did.”

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“ I have had some experience with the man Eugene Field made the hero of one of his brightest poem s,” I said, “ and I would rather face a lion in his den than face him.” As I was leaving the office I remembered that the editor of the leading monthly magazine had asked me to do some translating for him. I called at his office, but he was busy. “ Come in after the election,” he said rather brusquely. I summoned all my courage for the next call. As I entered the office of the associate editor on our wealthiest newspaper, I found, sitting at his desk, my b ête noire, the editor-in-chief. I will not relate my experience with him. Poor wretch! He found life unbearable and ended it with the dying year. Suffice it to say, I left his presence crushed and humiliated. Still I did not give up. There was a spicy little magazine in town that sometimes used political stuff, and I called upon its editor. “ Sorry, but we have just slipped into the Irish Sea and have suspended publication,” he said politely. On the street I met a friend. “ I saw the directory man last night and he said he had a piece of work for you,” he told me. At last help had come! With a heart full of gratitude I hurried to the directory building. The work was simple enough. Eight thousand enve­ lopes to be addressed. The work must be done at the office and done with a pen. The price to be paid was seventy-five cents a thousand. I figured out the cost of car-fare and luncheon and found that I could earn thirty cents a day by working ten hours. I had not yet come down to sweatingshop labor, so I thanked the clerk and went my way. It was not yet five o ’clock, but the atmosphere seemed thick and black around me, and a great cloud of despair settled down over my spirit. When I reached home, Agnes had not yet returned from her painting lesson. I was alone and I thought I should go mad. Out into the street in the twilight I fled, not caring whither my steps led me. The first person I met was an artist who had spent many a jolly evening in our den. He had seen the sketches Agnes had made of me, and he needed a model. “ You have exactly the figure I need, and I will pay you three dollars a day to pose for m e,” he said. “ But not in the nude?” I said, doubtfully. “ Why, of course,” he laughed. “ You pose for Agnes, why not for m e?” This proposition from a friend whose respect I thought I had never forfeited, humiliated me, and there was just a shade of indignation in my voice as I declined. This last incident in my “ dark day” leads me to speak of another pitfall for the Bohemian girl. City-bred girls are comparatively safe in the hands of even the most unprincipled men, for they have been trained in the ways

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of the world and know how to take care of themselves. But the girls who fall into Bohemian ways are too often gifted girls whose country or village homes have denied them scope for the exercise of their talents. The glowing cheeks and fresh, unsophisticated manners of these daughters of a purer atmosphere cannot but be attractive to the blase man of the world. A little delicate flattery begins the game. Next comes a stolen caress in the dark hall. Then she smokes a cigarette with him, or sips a glass of wine— he has noticed that she is looking pale of late and needs a harmless stimulant. So one by one the barriers are broken down. If she stands on a foundation of firm principle, he will be cautious and reverential, awaiting his opportunity. She fondly imagines that he loves her, and she is weary of the endless struggle and the bitter disillusions of her Bohemian existence, and longs for the sweet repose of a home. She is ready to fling the dream of glory back into the night from whence it sprang and live only for him. When he has brought her to this point he invites her to accompany him to the theatre. He has done so often before. Then there is the usual elegant supper, finished off with a glass of champagne. On the way to the car he remembers a bit of pressing business that ought to be attended to at once, and begs her to stop with him just for a moment. “ The man is busy, but will be called. Just step into the reception-room,” the porter says; and without a shadow of suspicion she walks into the trap that has been set for her. The door is shut, and she is told that she is in a private assignation-house. To resist were folly; to cry out, worse than vain, for there is no one to hear. If she is sensitive and high-souled she flings her polluted body into the river next day, and nobody charges that man with her murder. If she is “ of the earth, earthy,” she becomes his mistress, and, in time, joins the great army of lost women, and nobody charges that man with the murder of her soul. O mothers, do you realize the anguish, the hopelessness, into which you are sending your defenseless children? The girl who is physically and morally strong may go through Bohemia unscathed, but woe unto the sensitive and the frail! Did God, after all, know what He was about when He ordained that man and woman should become one flesh; that woman should ever be the tender, clinging companion, and that man should be her protector? We are prone to cry out that our civilization is all wrong, and that we must revert to barbarism in order to get a right start. Yet what seems a fatal mistake may really be a part of a wise plan for the ultimate good of humanity. How many precious lives have been sacrificed for every victory the world has won! The girl who has had a glimpse of this seamy side of human nature can

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never become a simple, trusting wife; but she may be a more enlightened companion and a wiser helpmeet because of her own experience. Surely she will be a wiser mother than her own mother was. Her children will be few, for she will marry when her prolific period is past; but they will be all the world to her. She was quaffed the foaming glass of life, and, alas! she knows that there are bitter dregs at the bottom. Her daughters will find in her a sympathetic companion. Her sons will look upon her, not as an innocent little mother who can be duped by all sorts of ingenious tales, but as a wise counsellor who can guide them through the perilous path of their adolescence. We are living in an age not only of history-making, but of problemsolving. The maids of to-day will be the mothers of to-morrow—the mothers of our statesmen and philosophers. Then shall we not place in their hands the torch of knowledge ere they pass the perilous boundary of Bohemia?

The New Bohemia An Old Fogey, 1902

Something more than a quarter of a century ago, before I went out to help my uncle Benjamin as a tea-planter in Assam, I used to know a little about the Bohemian circles of the town. It was rather a fashion among young fellows from Oxford and Cambridge in those days. The Thackeray tradition was still with us, and at that time we used to read “ Pendennis” and “ The Newcomes” and “ The Adventures of Philip.” I am told that people do not read them any longer, preferring the polished compositions and chaste fancies of certain later novelists. It may be so. We are apt to fall a little behind the current of popular literature in the remoter East. At any rate, we youngsters in the seventies knew our Thackeray, with our Dickens, our Clough, our Tennyson and other now perhaps obsolete writers, and came up to London emulous of the brave life which those gallant heroes, Warrington and Pen and Clive Newcome, led so dashingly among the taverns and the theatres, the men of the quill, and the brothers of the brush and palette-knife. Like most other things, the reality proved hardly equal to the illusion. We had hummed over the famous lines— Though its longitude’s rather uncertain, And its latitude’s doubtful and vague, That person I pity who knows not the city, The beautiful city of Prague.

So we young fellows went for it “ bald-headed” —to use the elegant expression which I cull from the pages of one of the most cultured American authors of the day—and were never so happy as when spending an evening in the company of our Bohemian friends, who, to do them justice, being a hospitable set, were not averse to see us. They were a jovial crew, who worked hard, and amused themselves in a 715

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roystering, companionable fashion. I am bound to say that already, when I first came upon the town and took chambers in Hare Court, Temple (dingy old Hare Court, whose venerable buildings have now been pulled down and replaced by structures which appear to have been designed in Chicago) the glories of the older Bohemianism, as painted by our great novelist, had somewhat waned. The singing and suppers of the famous Black Kitchen lived only in the regretful memories of the elder men. You remember Thackeray’s description: “ Squads of young apprentices and assistants, the shutters being closed over the scene of their labors, came hither for fresh air, doubtless. Rakish young medical students—gallant, dashing, what is called ‘loudly’ dressed, and (must it be owned?) somewhat dirty—were here smoking and drinking and vociferously applauding the songs. Young University bucks were to be found here, too, with that indescribable genteel simper which is only learned at the knees of Alma Mater; and handsome young Guardsmen, and florid bucks from the St. Jam es’s Street clubs—nay, senators, English and Irish, and even members of the House of Peers.” There were men, we knew, who had assisted at these revels—men who numbered Mr. Hoolan and Mr. Doolan among their intimates, who had written for the “ Dawn” and the “ Day,” hobnobbed with the original of Captain Shandon, and received guineas from the firms of Bacon and of Bungay; and albeit we had fallen upon somewhat soberer days, they did their best to maintain the Back Kitchen precedent in certain resorts and coenacula, to which they were often good enough to give admission to us youngsters. Well do I recollect one particular club to which I had the honor of being elected a member, on the introduction of my journalistic friend and patron of those days, poor Bob Ireson. Everybody knew Bob at that time, and to be taken up by him was an introduction to the more esoteric circles of Fleet Street and the Strand. He was a gentleman and a scholar, was Bob—or, at least, had been the former, and was still the latter, when sober. He had been at St. Quentin’s College, Oxford, took his “ first” in “ M ods.” and “ G reats,” was proxime for the “ H ertford,” and would almost certainly have got the “ Ireland,” but for the fact that he had been seduced into a little game of cards and a late supper-party the night before with young Lord Rupert Deloraine, who subsequently, as everybody knows, held one of the highest offices in the councils of the Queen, but was at that time a somewhat too convivial undergraduate at Quentin’s. Owing to this festivity Bob was by no means in his best form at the Examination Schools, and his Greek iambics were not up to their usual standard. A similar accident deprived him of the Fellowship on which he had reckoned; and so Bob came to town and joined the Corporation of the Goose-Quill. When I knew him he had been

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in it some fifteen years, and was the most brilliant, unreliable, wellinformed and erratic contributor who ever plagued or delighted an editor. He had a wife and half a dozen neglected children stowed away in a back street in Holloway, to which suburb he occasionally retired when no other opportunity of spending an evening presented itself. I have reason to believe that his domestic life was not luxurious; and Mrs. Bob, who was understood to be distantly connected with his laundress at Oxford, did not frequent literary or other society. Bob himself preferred associating with his male companions in that congenial quarter of the town in which he pursued his fitful avocations. I do not know where or when he wrote, but somehow or other he contrived to cover an enormous quantity of copy-paper. He would write leaders, reviews, dramatic criticisms, savage lampoons in prose or verse (he was never happier than when he was reviling his old college boon companion, Lord Rupert, who by this time had long since ranged himself, married an American heiress and lived in great splendor at Rutland Gate), librettos for burlesquers and pantomimes, or, in fact, anything for which he was paid. He earned a good deal of money, according to the compara­ tively humble standard of those days, but I do not think that much of it found its way out to Holloway. He had in him the root and essential quality of Bohemianism. When he had done pretty well and was flush he was ready to stand a bottle of champagne and a dinner to any friend—or, for the matter of that, to any enemy, for Bob was the most placable of men, and would eat and drink with anybody. When he had a run of bad luck he consumed sausages and gin-and-water in those appalling dark taverns and cook-shops, which have been replaced by the mammoth restaurants and garish cafes of a more civilized generation. Sometimes he would vanish for a month or so, and nobody knew what became of him; but in due course he turned up again at our club, jovial, impecunious, reckless as ever, equally ready to play billiards with the racing tout of a sporting newspaper or to discuss Aristophanes with a professor of Greek. At length he disappeared definitely, and came back no more; and the rumor went about that he had been found in a condition of utter destitution in poor lodgings at a minor seaside resort, and had been taken to the local workhouse infirmary. So we made up a little purse for him at the club, and sent him out on a sea voyage to Australia, with strict injunctions to the steward of the vessel that he was to be served with nothing stronger than soda-water on the journey. But Bob never reached Melbourne. He died at sea; and his body rests quietly, deep down some­ where in the Indian Ocean. When a few friends came to look into the affairs of the establishment at Holloway they found that poor Mrs. Bob was in a very bad way indeed; and so another subscription had to be

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raised, and many good fellows who had known Bob in his prime were willing enough to put their guineas to it. A sad ending; but many of our jolly Bohemians did finish rather mourn­ fully. Still they were uncommonly good company while they lasted. Those evenings at our club were amusing enough and something more. We used to meet in two or three shabby rooms somewhere off the Strand. There were faded carpets on the floor, threadbare curtains at the windows, battered, old, comfortable leather-seated arm-chairs and horsehair-cov ered sofas of primeval antiquity. The fastidious appointments of the modern club had not entered into the imagination of our members. Sam, the butler, a very Ganymede in the bearing and compounding of drinks, wore the same shirt for a week; so by the way did some of the members. There was a cupboard in which you could wash your hands, but I do not think it was often used. The menu was more satisfying than pretentious. You could get an excellent steak, a sufficient chop, kidneys grilled to a nicety, potatoes smoking hot in their jackets, kippers, bloaters, soft roes on toast, devilled bones of a fiery potency; and gin and whisky, and brandy-and-water hot, and stout and bitter, flowed in a never slackening stream. On occasions, too, there would be a vast bowl of punch, brewed by Mulligan, the cunning of hand, who had a skill in that decoction which was famous throughout Bohemia, and had penetrated even to the United States. There was dinner, cost you 2s., on the table at six o ’clock every evening—Irish stew, boiled mutton, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and other viands of a simple and satisfying nature. If you dropped in to this meal you would find some twenty men, more or less, gathered round the board, prepared to do full justice to the provisions. For our Bohemians, as I have said, were, as a rule, hard-working folks, and they did little at luncheon, and would have scorned afternoon tea and muffins if anybody had been prepared to supply them with those delicacies. The food eaten and the cloth cleared, clay pipes and briars were produced—it was before the day of cigarettes, and many of us could not afford cigars—a tumbler of spirits or perhaps a small bottle of port or claret was before each man, and the company settled itself down steadily for conversation. And how they talked! They were the last survivors, some of them, of a great conversational age, a time when men met together, as they used to do in the days of Addison and in the days of Johnson, as in those of Scott and Hazlitt, for the purpose of exchanging ideas. It is a custom that seems to have vanished while I have been growing tea in Assam. Nowadays I am told there is no conversation. It is l ’eternel fem inin which has destroyed the practice. Women are everywhere, and you can’t converse with women. Besides, there is no time to talk. People

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are too busy in playing games, or seeing plays, or performing them. But my elder cronies of the old shabby club did not go into society, and would no more have thought of putting on a dress-coat, and listening to music in a lady’s drawing-room, than they would have played battledore and shut­ tlecock with school girls across a dining-room table. In the intervals of their work, they liked to discuss matters with one another, amid clouds of tobacco and the fragrance of much alcohol. I do not say the talk was always of the best kind. It was apt to be too full-fleshed, too ribald, a little (shall we say?) too virile. There was old Ventregris, the doyen of the coterie, a prosperous accountant, I believe, whom we all regarded with considerable respect, because he was known to live in affluence somewhere in the neighborhood of Weybridge, with horses and carriages, and gardens and many servants to wait upon him. He was the patron and financial adviser of the club, and I believe its appointments would have been even dingier than they were but for the occasional cheques from him. The hoary old reprobate preferred the ginsodden atmosphere of our pothouse to all his suburban splendors, and was never so happy as when sitting there listening to the most atrocious stories invented for his delectation by some ingenious follower of the theatrical art. But the talk was not always, or even usually, of that kind. Much of it, of course, was “ shop,” and you were not long in that society before you knew exactly how much or how little was to be acquired at the precarious trade of letters, or the still more precarious pursuit of journalism. You could learn what publisher was good for an advance on royalties and what editor could most safely be planted with copy. But often we got far away from these subjects. Literature, art, politics, philosophy, all these things would be discussed and considered and debated by men who, if they were Bohemians, were also in many cases students and thinkers and readers, with a knowledge of the world and books; and I can recall some midnight symposia in those close and murky chambers in which mind had clashed with mind, and perhaps even for a moment the deep places of the soul had been unveiled. So with these recollections upon me, grave and gay, I have naturally not been averse, since my return to town, to seeing something of the Bohemi anism of the younger generation. I find things have changed a good deal in the last quarter of a century. The successors of the careless wits and jovial viveurs of my earlier days are, I must admit, a much more decorous body of persons. The other day, for instance, young Grubbins, the son of my old friend, Joe Grubbins, whom you will recollect as one of Bacon and Bungay’s favorite and most successful bookmakers, came to make ac quaintance with me. Grubbins p ére was a very sedulous exponent of the literary art. Every

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few months he was in the habit of publishing a substantial volume, “ Half Hours with the Twelve Apostles,” “ The Homes of Queen Elizabeth,” “ The Private Life of the Emperor Tiberius,” “ Ten Thousand Household Cookery Recipes,” and so on. Nothing human came amiss to him if he received a publisher’s permission to write about it. He had written a History of the World, illustrated, which was sold in sixpenny parts with woodcuts of a spirited character, and he had written a treatise on Domestic Medicine. Withal, he was a fellow of infinite resource and a mass of curious information, and he worked ten hours a day, and lived in a small house in Brixton with an excellent thrifty wife, who put the antimacassars on the chairs in the back drawing-room when visitors were expected, and otherwise sat with Joe in the front room, which was parlor, dining-room and study all in one. Here the talented author composed his valuable works and pursued his researches when he was not at the British Museum Reading-room. Young Joseph is a literary gentleman also, but he seems to have hit upon an easier and more lucrative branch of the profession than his father. I have not been able to discover the names of any books that he has published. When I questioned him on the subject he replied, “ Books, no fear, sir! They don’t pay. The old dad had enough of that, and it don’t suit m e.” Questioned more particularly as to the precise nature of his compo sitions, I discovered that Mr. Grubbins devoted himself to that department of journalism which used to be known as personal. An enterprising newspaper that has come into existence since my migration to the East, is the favorite vehicle for what he calls his pars, which are mainly concerned with the comings and goings, and the private affairs of members of fashionable society. On the strength of this pursuit Grubbins junior is apparently regarded as a member of quite elegant exclusive circles himself, has chambers in Jermyn Street, dines not infrequently in Piccadilly and Park Lane, and is on familiar terms with various personages, whose affluence and distinction have penetrated to me even in the recesses of Asia. Invited by this young gentleman to spend an evening with him at the Jolly Beggars’ Club, I accepted with avidity, a trifle surprised to find that the entertainment was to take place, not as I might have expected at a tavern in the Fleet Street region, but in the “ Byzantine Saloon” of the Megatherium Hotel. I was somewhat doubtful as to whether one ought to wear evening dress or not, for in the old days these garments were little in favor with our set; but I concluded that as a stranger and a visitor I should do no harm to err on the right side and array myself in the usual dinner costume. It was well I did so. I drove down to Picadilly in a pleasantly anticipatory frame of mind. The name of the club had an attractive sound about it. With the

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Jolly Beggars methought I might count on a rollicking evening, perhaps too rollicking for my sedate middle age, but full of mirth, wit and gay boon companionship. The reality was a little different. When I arrived somewhat late, in the radiant banqueting-hall of the Megatherium, I found a great company assembled, some three or four hundred of both sexes. The male guests were to a man arrayed in what the novelists of the good old times used to call faultless evening costume. The ladies, to my unaccustomed eyes, seemed to be attired in all the luxury of the latest fashion. The chairman of the Jolly Beggars was a severe gentleman of solemn aspect, who presided over the festive board with magisterial dignity. The guests of the evening were that eminent archaeologist, Professor Chumpchop, whose researches into the dietetic peculiarities of the Marquesas Islanders have gained deserved applause. Beside him sat a lady, decorated with many diamonds, whom I ascertained to be a popular writer of current fiction. The company, as a whole, was not unworthy of these distinguished personages. There were actors, journalists, men of letters, who all behaved with the rigid and unbending gravity so pleasantly characteristic of English society in its hours of relaxation. I found myself placed alongside of a severe person, a contributor to some of the leading reviews of this capital, who drank mineral water throughout the evening and entertained me with a serious discourse on the cost of living in the western portions of the metropolis, and the incidence of parochial rates in South Kensington. I found on subsequent inquiry that a considerable number of the Jolly Beggars were resident in this or similar eligible localities. Instead of the shabby establishments in Holloway and Camden Town and those other quarters in which my older Bohemian friends abode, I discovered that these younger men lived in unimpeachable middle-class respectability at Bayswater or Earl’s Court. Their wives were At Home on the second and fourth Thursdays, and they themselves were in the habit of giving dinnerparties, attended by colonels and baronets. They take their families to the seaside in August, they play golf, they live in an atmosphere of Philistine calm. They are churchwardens, guardians of the poor, some perhaps have sunk to the county councillors. I turned into our club the other Saturday evening. It has changed its location and many other things. Gone are the shabby chairs and sofas, the threadbare carpets. The rooms looked clean and prim under the shaded electric lights. The “ Times” was on the table, servants in livery ministered to your wants, blameless water-colors and photogravures on the walls had replaced the furious caricatures and Rabelaisian sketches contributed by some of our artistic members. It was supper-time, and supper on Saturday night used to be a scene of riotous revelry, a Babel of unruly talk into the

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small hours. One veteran, I recollect, was wont to say that he never left the club on a Sunday morning till it was time to take in the milk. His successors keep better hours. I found some dozen languid members about the table. They were mostly in evening dress, and they ate their kippers, and drank a modest quantity of whisky and water, to a subdued hum of intermittent conversation in duets. There was no general chatter, and if you did not “ know” your neighbor he regarded you with the frozen suspicious glare of polite society. In the old days we should no more have asked for an introduction than for a certificate of baptism. However, I found a man with whom I was slightly acquainted, and was permitted to take part in the discussion on the Vaccination Acts. Then there was a frigid interval of silence, and somebody began to talk in a broken whisper of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. I paid my bill to the butler—a dignified functionary no more like unto old Sam “ than I to Hercules” —and left in good time to catch the last ‘bus westward. I went to another Bohemiam club the other day, which I am assured is very much in the movement. It bears the name of a mediaeval writer whose works, I understand, are chiefly to the glorification of self-indul gence. But there was nothing riotous in our merry-making. A gentleman from, I believe, Mincing Lane was good enough to read us a paper about Mrs. Hannah More. We discussed the personality and literary merits of this author for three hours with suitable gravity. One speaker, an eminent lawyer, made several jokes; but his levity I think rather jarred on the feelings of the assembly, which had clearly met in a praiseworthy spirit of mutual improvement and edification. The majority of the members seemed bored, and I wondered why they came. But on opening my daily newspa per the next morning I found it on record that “ The---------Club had a meeting last evening at the---------Restaurant, under the presidency of Mr.---------. Among those present were Messrs.--------- etc.” The old Bohe­ mia seldom “ got into the papers.” The new Bohemia appears to spend its life, not unsuccessfully, in being paragraphed. It is much too busy in this way to have leisure for enjoyment. Indeed it takes its pleasures rather sadly. On the other hand, it is always interviewing itself and publishing its own portrait in the illustrated newspapers, and giving descriptions of its own wives and books and private pursuits. I have lately made the acquaintance of a leading member of the new school. He is a very active person who has founded a number of literary clubs. The attention of the world is not infrequently invited to his doings. “ Mr. Vincent Ropemin will preside at the monthly House Dinner of the Asterisk Club on Thursday.” “ Mr. Vincent Ropemin will read a paper before the Society of Typewriters on Literary Copyright in Venezuela, with special reference to the rights of British authors.” “ Mr. and Mrs.

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Vincent Ropemin gave a delightful reception at their charming home in Brompton Crescent the other day. The pretty rooms were crowded with literary and theatrical celebrities, among whom I noticed, etc. The hostess looked lovely in pale blue with sequin trimmings.” “ Mr. Ropemin informs us that his latest journalistic venture, the ‘Ladies Rattle,’ is proving a phenomenal success.” “ Mr. Ropemin has gone to Constantinople to work up the materials for his new novel on the subject of the Empress Theo­ dora.” With all these preoccupations, Mr. Ropemin is not a vivacious companion. He is a wearied gentleman, prematurely bald and gray, with anxious eyes, and he presides at the sparkling entertainments just alluded to, with all the gaiety of a mute at a funeral. When I dine with him in serious state in Brompton, with a grizzled bejewelled lady on my right hand, and on my left the portly wife of Sir Haver stock Hill, that noted City magnate, I realize that many things have changed since I left England when Lord Beaconsfield was Consul. Literary people, journalists, actors, are no longer declass és; they are respectable, and often prosperous men of business, as regular in their habits as if they bought shellac or sold indigo. I suppose there are still unsuccessful, out-at-elbow penmen, who haunt low taverns, and borrow half-crowns, and pawn their clothes and enjoy themselves in low dissipation. But my friends of the old Bohemia strain were not of that kind at all. They were for the most part hard working, and not always ill-paid craftsmen in the factory of letters; only they had inherited a tradition of dislike for the ways of the bourgeoisie. Their successors, being wise men in their generation, have allowed them selves to be quietly drafted into the great disciplined army of the “ profes sional” classes, and order their lives like unto their fellows. On the whole, I suppose one ought not to regret the disappearance of the old Bohemia. The modern variety is in many ways the better of the two. The young fellows—I perceive that during my absence everybody under three-score has grown young—are in essential respects better than their fathers, at least in some of those matters which make for happiness in private life and good repute in public. They pay their way, they earn their living in a steady fashion, they indulge themselves I dare say in a more innocent manner, and they certainly cause a good deal less trouble to their wives and other belongings. One recollects Captain Shandon in the Fleet Prison, and the manner in which that gentleman occupied himself when a casual stroke of work put a few pounds in his way. “ Mrs. Shandon sadly went on with her work at the window looking into the court. She saw Shandon with a couple of men on his heels run rapidly in the direction of the prison tavern. She had hoped to have had him at dinner herself that day; there was a piece of meat and some salad in a basin on the ledge outside the window of their room, which she had aspected that she and

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little Mary were to share with the child’s father. But there was no chance of that now. He would be in that tavern until the hour for closing it; then he would go and play at cards or drink in some other man’s room, and come back silent, with glazed eyes, reeling a little in his walk, that his wife might nurse him .” Yes, perhaps the new Bohemians are a more reputable set than their predecessors; but one cannot help thinking that they are a great deal duller.

Greenwich Village Tombstone Ben Hecht, 1941

Tread reverently here. Once youth rode the unicorn in these winding streets and once upon a time, within the memory of man, the lamps of Arcady twinkled behind these dusty windows—a lean and hungry Arcady, flyblown and garrulous. Here was the court of Humpty Dumpty too, and here the ragged gallants of Bohemia once sang in the gutters. I lived far away at that time, in the daffy metropolis of Chicago—hog butcher for the world, and dusty as the inside of the moon. But I came on visits to these streets. I sat in a restaurant called Fortunio’s. My friends were Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, a roaring gentleman in overalls yclept Bob Chanler, a lady with fascinating earrings hight Djuna Barnes. Around them of an evening pranced a ragtail squadron in threadbare pants and seraphs’ hats. New wine flowed, and the nights were full of lust and disorder. The Seven Arts were being bastinadoed on every street corner, and the thousand shapes of beauty were being made over to the accompaniment of a mighty lot of argument and alcohol. It was a cornucopia of a world out of which were to come fluttering the boons and emancipations of tomor­ row. Alas, you will find the modernism for which it fought and drank itself under tables decorating chiefly the department-store windows of the town, and the new syntax for which it gave its youth’s blood animating chiefly the pens of our present-day advertising copywriters. But this is not the full record of its achievements. A little of its noise and vision and bawdiness seeped into the soul of the town. And some of the cracks its Bohemian hatchets made on the walls of platitude still remain. The winding streets are still here. And in a few musty corners this old Bohemia still sits, not bellowing but sighing. For the most part this one­ 725

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time mart of Mumbo Jumbo is the home today of insurance men, brokers, advertising wizards, office workers, and their honorable wives. The old houses that knew the ghosts of Twain, Janvier, Ericcson, Draper, Patti, Luks, and Norris, and that echoed with the revels of the last vers-librists, cubists, vorticists, Nietzscheans, and Salomes, have been made bright with paint and plumbing, rebuilt, and fumigated. Rents have gone up. Communism has turned the soul of youth to higher things, and the saturnalia of MacDougal Alley is in the hands of the boss and his stenographer. There is a ghost over these pavements almost as large and sad as hovers about the meadows of Flushing. A fair world was once here. If you prowl the winding streets long enough you will come to the keeper of the Greenwich Village ghost. This is Major Earl von Brandenburg, burly at sixty-four, and toiling mightily to wangle one more flute solo out of the shade of Bohemia. The major is executive secretary of the Greenwich Village Art Galley and Museum. He presides, grand and lonely as the vanishing yak, in a former stable at 150 West 4th Street. And if you come to him, he will sound for you the battle cries of the past. There are 212 artists in his association, he will tell you. Count them and mark you Arcady is not dead. The Village is coming back. It has been carefully reorganized by a group of hardy survivors. On Monday nights, the Raven Poetry Society meets in these headquar­ ters. It is run and financed by Francis Lamberton MacCrudden, a retired executive of the telephone company and author of the world-famous work The Harp o f the Minettas. Bards come from everywhere, from the Bronx and Hoboken and Ozone Park, to chant their compositions. Among these weekly troubadours is Jack Sellers, former light-heavy weight champion of the navy. There is also a great Indian renaissance. Innumerable Cherokees, the most intellectual of the Redskins, have brought their tepees to the Village. Outstanding among them is Jan Vluska, authority on mystic Indian sym­ bols. There is also Swift Eagle, greatest of the Indian dancers and highly esteemed as an artists’ model. All these new glories of the Village the doughty major will recite for you. He will give you proudly the addresses of the six new galleries where hang the canvases of today’s Parnassians. But ten feet away from where the major sits and keeps the ghost, Bohemia dies. There are young men to be seen hurrying to basement lunches. But they have been graduated from the tumults of the past. They are, most of them, fevered with the New Thought. They butter their bread not with dreams but with the Russian panacea.

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Occasionally visitors drift into the silent little streets. They walk, equipped with a brochure called The Strangers Path, given them by the incorrigible major. They wander about for an hour, see nothing, hear no echoes, come upon no bacchanal, and return politely to the major’s headquarters. They ask a sad question: “ Where are the snows of yesteryear?”

The Revolution in Bohemia Robert Dunavon, 1958

A generation ago young men or young women with an artistic bent were also likely to be possessed by the yen to be a “ Bohemian.” And w hat’s more, they said so. Today it is pretty hard to find anyone at all who will come right out and admit to such a description. A social revolution of sorts has taken place in that Limbo world. In trying to discover the extent of this revolution I have made the discovery that few persons can any longer agree on what the term means; certainly dictionary definitions no longer seem to apply. Bohemia is defined in the Reader’s Encyclopedia, for example, as, “ Any locality frequented by journalists, artists, actors, opera-singers and other similar characters.” What has become of such “ characters” ? The average newspaperman today is a part of the “ communications industry,” and he is the very picture of middle-class respectability. Actors have deserted the place for suburbia. And as for the opera-singers: Bohemia to them is an off-key word. Things were not like that at the golden turn of the century when George DuMaurier’s Trilby was a run-away best seller. It sold for $1.75 in 1894 when $1.50 was considered top price for a novel. Book stores couldn’t stock enough copies to supply the demand for a good story set in the Bohemia of Paris. It was awarded that ultimate of accolades: a sausage was named for it. Not long ago a housecleaning in the St. Louis Public Library brought to light no fewer than four hundred well-thumbed copies of Trilby. And as late as the giddy Twenties, Robert W. Service was still able to stir free spirits with his Ballads o f a Bohemian. By 1924, however, the reaction was beginning to set in; Louis Golding’s Seacoast o f Bohemia sold well, but it was, significantly, a parody. Today if a social historian wants an idea of what the sophisticated American thinks of the Bohemian he need only examine the cartoons in the New Yorker, where the Bohemian has degenerated into a ridiculous, 728

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slightly paranoiac bum. Actually, the portrait of a true Bohemian is a good deal more subtle than that. I would say that the Bohemian might be defined as a person who feels a compulsion to lead a life that is the complete antithesis of the unhappy one he was made to lead as a child. Now, many persons are moved by this compulsion but not everyone becomes a Bohemian. The Bohemian is one whose protest has followed a specific configuration, involving the symbols of artistic creation, which has been built up by the literature of the past two centuries. (The true artist, whose origins are often identical with those of the Bohemian, follows this configuration more out of convenience than the Bohemian’s neurotic compulsion.) But what happened to the Bohemian? Why is he no longer a conspicuous member of the art world? In the first place, the Bohemian’s attitude of rebellious defiance which was once so unique and, to some, so shocking, has been made to look like routine schoolboy stuff by comparison to the doings of present-day juve­ nile delinquents and cafe society. The Bohemian finds it difficult to shock anyone these days. His antics are anticlimatic. Certainly his art no longer startles. The Armory Show of 1913 caused a near riot; the American premiere of Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique in 1930 was sensational. But nothing the Bohemian can do now will raise an eyebrow. Furthermore, the general flight to the suburbs has produced in the average suburbanite the very alienation from society—and from himself— for which he used to castigate the Bohemian. The would-be Bohemian who has also moved to the suburbs or the outlying art colonies is drearily preoccupied with his own isolation and singularity. In the city he was once assured of the inspiration of museums, galleries, libraries, and bookshops. By casting aside the city as the spiritual center of culture the Bohemian abandoned a heritage which goes back to the taverns of Elizabethan London and of the later coffee houses that brought together men like Addison and Steele, and Johnson and Boswell; he left behind any further hope of achieving what once burst from the salons of royal Paris, and the cafes of its republican times; he rejected the citadels of the exciting groups which once flourished in Boston, Chicago, and New York. The traditional role, as well as the props and the scenery, of the Bohemian have been taken over by a new group: the avant-garde (some­ times called the highbrows, sometimes the Upper Bohemians). Someone, probably Max Beerbohm, once defined the Bohemian as a person who uses objects for what they were never intended. It was an apt definition because only the Bohemian would think to use a wine bottle to hold a candle, a brandy sniffer for a fish bowl, or an orange crate for a bookcase.

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In Beerbohm’s younger days the Bohemian had a near monopoly on this kind of eccentricity. Today, however, the avant-garde has encroached on these Bohemian prerogatives. The use of Chinese irons for ash trays, and milking stools for cocktail tables are all a part of avant-garde “ casual” living. The Bohemian doesn’t stand a chance against this kind of competi tion. Probably all men are slaves to some dead philosopher. The Bohemian’s attitudes were largely dictated to him by Jean Jacques Rousseau, who died in 1778. Rousseau has been the Typhoid Mary of the philosophical world. His doctrine of “ the natural goodness of man unsoiled by civilization” provided the germ by which the spoiled children of each subsequent generation have justified their behavior. He spread notions already preva­ lent that “ the noble savage” led an ideal existence free of the social obligations, conventions, and stifling conformity of his own highly cultured society. He was responsible for the “ love of nature” and romanticism that was to dominate nineteenth-century art and literature. By 1830, the Ro­ mantic Movement was in full swing, and the young artists of Paris were looking about for objects, ideals, and images to call their own. They took up the vogue for the gypsy. The gypsies have always had a strong appeal to the imaginative Europe­ ans. They first appeared in Europe in the fifteenth century and they accepted whatever local name was given to them without knowing or caring what it meant. In the Netherlands they are known as Heidenen (heathens) and in Egypt as Harami (robbers). The Germans called them Hungarians or Tartars. When a tribe of them first arrived at we gates of Paris, by way of Bohemia, in 1427, they struck the French as being a crowd of rather unsavory characters, and they were now allowed to enter the city. The French called them Bohemians. It was during that period usually referred to as the Industrial Revolu­ tion—the period extending roughly from 1750 to 1850—that the gypsy, or Bohemian, configuration of romantic images and ideals was adopted as a rationale by those persons who had been made to feel that the recent changes in society had left no place for them. The early Bohemians often went in for the brigand hat, the red sash, and cape; they discarded the neckband. The gypsy’s impassioned style of music was the jazz of the period. The configuration suited the neurotic malcontent because it af­ forded him a theatrical means by which he could exhibit his rebelliousness and his defiance of convention; it provided a form for his restlessness. And, at the same time, it suited the true artist because the unfortunate truth was that he actually had become something of a left-over. For this was the age of Rationalism and the quantitative method. Whatever was measurable or quantitative was real; all else was unreal and

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therefore beneath serious consideration. Spectacular achievements in bi ology, chemistry, and physics gave credence to the theory that the physical sciences could solve all the world’s problems. The resultant materialism fostered a strong prejudice against feeling and emotion; those affections were thought to stand in the way of cold reason and clear understanding. Thus, in a world where intuition and emotion came to be disparaged as minor attributes of human nature, art, too, was disparaged. From the ancient period when art was expected to improve on nature by delineating forms of ideal beauty, to an intensely religious period when art was employed to impress the beholder with striking images and strong ca dences, art had provided people with a common set of symbols of their inner feelings, it served as a constant reminder of their ideals and their aspirations. But now the only ideal was money; the only aspiration was for power. Art was relegated to the function of ornament and recreation; and the artist found himself sharing the same category with society’s misfits and parasites. And, when a person feels he has no place in society he rebels. The juvenile delinquent of the 1950s has adopted the configuration of the outlaw. The artist, and the would-be-artist of that era chose the gypsy. Less than a century separates Henri Murger’s 1848 novel Vie de Boheme from Cyril Connolly’s The Rock Pool of 1936. By then the only evidences of Romanticism in Bohemia were the left-over symbols: the bizarre studio, the oddments converted to a different use from which they were intended, the shaggy hair, and the vagabond life. World War I had given Rousseauism somewhat the same stimulus the French Revolution had given it. The surrealism of the Twenties was not merely a contrivance designed to gain attention; surrealism was an alarmingly accurate reflection of how people of sensibility felt about a world gone awry. Cultures that were even more primitive than the gypsy’s were searched for and found in Africa and the Pacific Islands. To replace the pale primitivism of gypsy music a truly savage expression was found in jazz. In the meantime the Romantic Movement in America had disclosed the frontiersman, a “ noble savage” indeed, whose restless wanderings were enough to satisfy any gypsylike instincts. The frontiersman and his brother, the sourdough, with their anti-social ways, added their bit to the pattern of the American Bohemian. (The outcome of this can be seen in the present day Bohemian’s use of the cowboy’s denims, the “ lumberjack ,” the T-shirt, and the sourdough beard.) The break with Europe was beginning. It was during the Thirties that the Communists took away the last bit of fun that was left in Bohemianism. They heaped ridicule and abuse on the

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Bohemian because, they insisted, the Bohemian was merely “ a middleclass phony” who was pretending to be one of the gentry by aping the upper-class gentleman’s freedom from routine and regular work. What the Communist could never afford to admit was that his own ideas on “ class struggle” and his own Jacobin anarchism came from the same source as the Bohemian’s romantic sensibility. Communist talk of “ class antagonisms,” “ the down-trodden m asses,” and the “ proletariat,” deprived the Bohemian of the essential part of his configuration and left him with nothing but the bleak fact that he was poor. It was the Communist, with his insistence on “ social significance” in art, who made the artist feel guilty for any Bohemian tendencies. As it had been in earlier revolutionary times, there was a feeling in the air that the duty of the artist was not to portray the world but to change it. By the Nineteen Forties the rugpulling was complete; few persons would admit being a Bohemian; and the real artists quietly scattered to work alone. Even the Philistines of Suburbia were better than the Communists. Looking back on it all, one must give the Bohemian credit for one thing: at least he tried. His intentions were good. As Irving Babbitt has said, “ The establishment of a sound type of individualism is indeed the specifically modern problem.” But Rousseau led the Bohemian up a blind alley. From the start his movement of emotional naturalism was tainted with a harmful kind of eccentricity and a defiance that had become an end in itself. It bred the wrong type of individualist—the person who has repudiated outer control without achiev ing inner control. In our own day this amounts to the fact that the outward form of Bohemianism no longer corresponds to what the contemporary creative personality is trying to do inwardly. Does this mean then that the Bohemian has disappeared completely? Hardly. As long as Bohemia exists in the minds of artistic people there will always be those who will happily fashion their lives according to the old Bohemian stereotype. Bohemia as a place seems to have shifted steadily westward for the last century. Its latest center is San Francisco. Karl Shapiro was right when he said, “ San Francisco is the last refuge of the Bohemian rem nant.” Just as New York is crowded with refugees from Europe, San Francisco is crowded with refugees from America. San Francisco has often acted as a weather vane to indicate which way the cultural wind will blow in the rest of the country. If the weather vane is still accurate, it would seem to indicate that two important changes are about to take place in America. The first one is the matter of a climate of creativity: the wind is blowing in a most favorable direction. The second one is a change in the artists themselves. While it is true that a frenetic, old-style, Bohemia is centered in San Francisco, it is significant that in

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that city there is growing to maturity another, quite different group of artists and writers who have been quietly brewing a revolt of their own. The New Artist—and for the moment this is the only appropriate name for him—is rebelling against the very anarchy and nihilism which has characterized the old Bohemian. It is too soon to determine anything definite about this new movement but in general it seems to be taking the form of a search for a set of common standards of civilization or common moral values; in painting, it appears to be a search for a stronger, deeper communication between modern man and the environment in which he now finds himself. This search is probably as old as mankind, but the distinction that gives this one a special importance to us is its new orientation. The Bohemian’s thinking was always strongly influenced by Europe—it still is. But the serious artists and intellectuals of America have rejected Europe as a model; it is no longer the source of their inspiration and guidance. The New Artist is looking toward the Orient. What sort of configuration does the New Artist follow? So far it has taken the form of the tweedy informality and the neatly-trimmed beard of the person who has become aware that the conscious pose of style is no less sincere and no less alien to human nature than the equally conscious pose of Naturalism. It is the task of the artist to construct for us that mileau of symbolic sounds, words, and images which complements our natural environment, and which gives us a more satisfactory participation in that environment. This task can only be achieved by the public’s acceptance of the artist’s role. And there are signs to indicate that this development is taking place. The false notion of the artist as a Bohemian, an irresponsible rebel, who manages to create works of art by spontaneous inspiration alone, is finally dying out. The Bohemian served a useful purpose in his day, and, while we may sigh over his passing, we are just as glad his day is over because it means that we are finally on the way to producing that cultural climate in which the Bohemian will be unnecessary and the artist will take his place as a useful and respected member of society.

What Happened to Bohemia? Paul Ableman, 1975

It was last seen in Dean Street, just north of Old Compton Street, in a club called the Caves de France, and wonderful evenings we had there. True, not every customer was a painter or a poet but the crowd was thickly sprinkled with them. Dylan Thomas drank and cavorted there. So did Brendan Behan. Today it’s a strip club. Of course London still has establishments catering for everyone from lords to layabouts but it’s doubtful if any of them could really be described as Bohemian. That special atmosphere compounded of guilty superiority to the earthbound and genuine enthusiasm for the arts can be breathed no more in the capital. Of course, Bohemia was really a way of life and even more an attitude to society. When did it arise? Thomas Chatterton, the boy poet, died in a garret in London in the year 1779. That statement contains two character­ istic terms: poet and garret. Does it refer to Bohemia? Not at all. Chatter ton was an unfortunate lad of genius who, failing to find recognition or patronage, poisoned himself in cheap digs. Byron expressed in his life and work many of the classic Bohemian views but he would have repudiated any suggestion that he was not an integral part of the society he flailed. And that is the crucial attitude of Bohemia: separatism. As the Romantic revolution bent his quest inwards, the artist’s calling became a lonely one. Setting out to write or paint was different from setting out to be a lawyer or mason or a prime minister. The other activities inherited a body of codified knowledge and precedent, as the arts once had; but from about the mid-19th century onwards, the artist had to pick his way in an unexplored wilderness. Bohemia was the camp-site in the forest, where the explorers would meet to exchange travel notes before forging out again into the unknown. The historical peak of the artist’s self-conscious divorce from the greater society came a little before the turn of the century. This was when Montmartre was at its most influential and, in London, when the Cafe 734

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Royal formed, according to Thomas Burke, ‘a centre for nightly gatherings of art and letters . . . so identified with the new movements . . . that it was almost a symbol of them ’. This was the Bohemia of the ‘decadent’ poets such as Ernest Dowson, and of Aubrey Beardsley. After the first world war Bohemia moved north and, in the Thirties, established itself in places like the Three Horseshoes tavern on Tottenham Court Road where, on Wednesday evenings, Tambimuttu marshalled his poets and, as the painter Conroy Maddox recalls, the English surrealist group met at the same time. Maddox, who still exhibits regularly, is the last survivor of a school which included E. L. T. Mesens, Banting and Edith Rimmington. In the Fitzroy Tavern, another Bohemian citadel, the smoky, boisterous atmosphere made serious talk difficult and fostered the fistfights which were a regular feature there. After the second world war a rump Bohemia persisted in taverns just north of Oxford Street such as the Black Horse, where John Heath-Stubbs presided, and the Wheatsheaf. In the Sixties, the dwindling fraternity crossed Oxford Street to colonise the York M inster, the Colony Room and the Caves de France, all in Dean Street. Today most of the Old Bohemian meeting places still exist but a visitor to any of them would be unlikely to flush a poet or painter. Bohemia has shut up shop. Why? Partly because the artist is emerging from his century-long walk in the wilderness. Whatever its significance for their future, a new professional­ ism and media-fostered social integration has begun to characterise the arts. For its part, the bourgeois world, tutored by Freud, has incorporated into its social and even political thought some of the insights derived from the subconscious. The old polarity has thus been largely resolved and nowadays radical thinkers are perhaps more likely to be found outside the arts than inside them. Most important of all for the decline of Bohemia is probably the apocalyptic nature of the nuclear world. When the physical survival of the planet is a daily gamble, it is hard to believe that talk of art and style holds the key to salvation. Thus, although traces of the old gypsy kingdom linger on in places like Dublin and Barcelona, in the classic sites—Montmartre and Montpar nasse, Chelsea and Soho, Greenwich Village—Bohemia is extinct. It’s a pity really. We had some brave nights in the Caves de France.

The Death of Hip Marion Magid, 1965 It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist—the hipster, the man who knows that i f our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled . . . i f the fa te o f twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms o f death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives o f the self. . . . —Norman Mailer, The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster

That was eight years ago. In quest of the present state of hip and/or its descendants, we set out last January on a trip to Europe. It was a wayward odyssey which proceeded mostly by improvisation; we moved ahead in fits and starts, following all sorts of leads, many of which led nowhere, for at the time we had no way of knowing which were the false leads and which the true ones. That the quarry was so elusive, and the quest so synthetic, that we did not know precisely what we were looking for, made no difference in the end. Asking the wrong questions, we frequently got the right answers, for hip carefully chooses its masks to confuse the pursuer, only to shed them with unexpected generosity at moments when he is least prepared for it. Serious people were against the enterprise in general, and the speed of it in particular—so typical of American journalism, they said. How on earth can you find out anything about a city, flying in and out of it at that 736

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rate? But they were wrong. There is a profundity to be found in surfaces, a depth to the aerial view which should not be derided—fly high enough and fast enough and you will get intimations of connections, correspon­ dences, congruencies, that are not available to you otherwise. I do not like mysticism, and never have. When I see that wandering smile that betokens occult preoccupations, when I catch sight of the esoteric emblem of the initiate, I have an impulse to grab my hat and run for the hills. Yet at the end of those thirty airborne days, courtesy of B.O.A.C., and of the profoundest disorientation, I was prepared to pay grudging tribute to that passion for the total and comprehensive, even if momentary, vision that leads men to grow their hair long and lie down on beds of nails, to end their days on the remotest peaks of the Himalayas— or in the madhouse. Something new and strange is in the air—but that did not become clear until the end. Starting from the East Village in New York, we had only one clue to go on—the suggestion of a girl in black leotards at the Dom, recently returned from her own odyssey along the Tangier-Ibiza-Paris route: “ I don’t know exactly what you’re looking for,” she said, “ but follow the pot, and you’ll find it. . . .” London Riding in from the airport at seven in the morning, confused by six hours of passage without motion and further confused by weather unseasonably warm for January, we peer dazedly from taxi windows, clutching our copies of Advertisements fo r M yself and fighting down a growing sense of absurdity. Eight minutes in Europe and not a hipster on the horizon. What are we supposed to do now? Stop the car at Buckingham Palace and wait around for Prince Philip to appear? Mentally we rehearse the characteris tics of hip—that intangible, indefinable, and ineffable entity we are seek ing—in the first of many such rehearsals that will ensue in the course of the journey. The taxi pulls up before the Strand Palace Hotel near Charing Cross, a triumph of Thirties Modern, as we note upon entering. We have our first illumination of the journey which is at the same time a metaphysical insight applicable in other areas; hip, though indefinable positively, is nonetheless definable negatively. Though disagreement is possible about what and where it is—there is no disagreement possible over where it isn't; it isn’t at the Strand Palace Hotel. Hip devolves in one way or another upon extreme moments; at the Strand Palace moderation holds sway. The Queen on her charger smiles from the picture-postcard rack; the bellhops lounge about the lobby like the timid, though insolent manservants in Russian

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novels; the hall porter lifts his eyebrows very slightly when we ask for a match. Now and then, however, magical boys slim as penknives glide past the front entrance, their shoulder-length hair bobbing in the wind. Could they, perhaps, be in quest of the “ rebellious imperatives of the self” ? Mods, the hall porter sniffs contemptuously; there are, then, intimations of disorder in the wind. For the first two days we reconnoiter, crisscrossing London in great arcs, for though we do not know precisely what we are doing, there is safety in movement, and as long as we are looking, we are bound to find something. We pool our slender resources which consist, apart from the essays of Norman Mailer, of names accruing from diverse sources. There is the Commentary-Partis an Review-Encounter axis and The Village Voice axis, as well as oddments from here and there. Accordingly, we talk to poets and literary critics, to B.B.C. producers, to visionaries and an occasional certified public accountant. We go wherever we are sent, for in the absence of a specific object, any subject seems equally fruitful. Names and telephone numbers gradually accumulate on the paper napkins, matchbook covers, theatre programs, backs of envelopes that serve us for notebooks. The picture that emerges is less than encouraging: hip does not exist; hip exists everywhere; hip exists only in Warsaw; it is all a semantic problem; it is a socioeconomic problem; it is a fraud and in any case neither photographable nor possible to interview. It was once, in fact, to be found in Chelsea, but what with the real-estate hanky-panky, it has been forced to flee elsewhere. Where? Fulham, where they say William Burroughs is wont to stay when in London. So we got to Fulham—why not?—and the Empress Hotel which looks like a seaside resort off-season; there are potted plants in the parlor and fringed curtains at the window. Is there a well-known American writer on the premises? we inquire of the chambermaid. “ Smashing fellow, Mr. Burroughs!” she replies enthusias tically, but, regretfully, he has not been by for at least two years now. We exchange farewells—she, at least, is hip. However, we are not as discouraged as we might be; though hip remains problematic, certain recurrent themes are beginning to emerge. After two days in London we find in our notes references that are unexpected in the most reasonable country in the West: Artaud, the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche, even that arch-hipster himself, the Devil. (“ There is a chic satanism in the wind,” said Jonathan Miller; “ There is a Luciferian strain in all of this,” said Anselm Hollo.) And there are also intimations of anarchy in a lighter mode—hair, for example: The Observer, we hear, in response to the growing concern over why so much of English youth is now wearing its hair long, has issued a special supplement on the question. Happenings: those antic spectacles, halfway between circus and psycho­

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drama, designed to batter the spectator into new realms of awareness, are proliferating daily. What does it all mean? Alexander Trocchi, visionary of long standing, could conceivably pro vide a clue. At the end of a long idyllic drive through the sunny morning, we find him emerging from the doors of his house in Bayswater with a milk can in one hand; greeting us over his shoulder, he runs off after the milkman, whose retreating bell still lingers on the air. Alexander Trocchi in a curiously wrought Moroccan leather cap, rushing down a sunny London street in pursuit of the milkman. Does it mean anything? We don’t know, but it remains a gratifying image in the mind. Later, drinking Nescafe and eating figs, Trocchi talks about SIGMA, a project in which he is immersed, and whose aim is the establishment of a kind of academy of consciousness. Its purpose is research into the connection between drugs and awareness—it has already enlisted the support of countless writers, artists and psychiatrists. We add SIGMA to our unsolved puzzle and, bemused, continue on our way. On the fourth day, there is a break in the case. It is provided by Harold “ Doc” Humes, late of New York, currently of London, where we find him in a yellow house that belongs “ to some ambassador cat.” Hip, he informs us with an air of dismissal, is “ last year’s gig”—something new is in the wind. Sipping whiskey, and now and then flicking cigarette butts into the fireplace, he evokes images that seem on the face of it apocryphal: a tribe or assortment of nomads, a new gentle army, stretching as far as the eye can see: kids of all countries and all persuasions who have outdone all their predecessors in the matter of disaffection. They have opted out totally, they have seen through the con, they make previous styles of rebellion seem tame by comparison. Sitting in a room somewhere between Knightsbridge and Chelsea in London, we are suddenly aware that we are in the presence of a new folklore—the folklore of pot. “ Two of them, within two hours of arrival by foot in Leningrad, succeeded—in Leningrad, dig?—in scoring for pot within two hours, and without even knowing Russian.” And have they some earthly habitation, we ask, some place where they can be seenl “ A couple of bars in Soho, the northeast corner of Trafalgar Square, here and there, once in a while. . . . ” By which devious route we come to Finch’s pub on Goodge Street, one of several such way stations (though we do not know it yet) whose nature we will learn to recognize by the special silence that falls when we appear. Although the hipsters do not score here, it is a silence that could be compared to the one that occurs in the Western when the lone rider appears on the deserted main street. Every eye is upon us at Finch’s and we return the compliment, for we have never seen anything quite like it. All the hair in the Commonwealth seems to have been gathered under one

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roof in order to create a kind of panorama of English history. At the door, it is clearly Stonehenge—craggy faces framed by Cro-Magnon haircuts, suggestions of the brutish, the not-quite-evolved. Further inside, however, at the bar and sitting at the tables, the prospects brighten—the scene is lusty and Elizabethan, we are with Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh. And at the outer edges are even some dandies of the Mauve Decade. We make our way to the bar, order a brown beer and with unconvincing nonchalance place our feet on the railing, thereby attracting the notice of a small group standing nearby. At its center is a youth of striking de­ meanor, red-bearded and with an abundance of red curls, wearing a top hat, and one earring; he is addressed by his companions as Rory and, to judge by his accent, hails from Ireland. Within seconds of coming into his ambience, we discover the second negative definition of hip: indefinable, untranslatable, and ineffable as it is, it nonetheless makes itself felt by a quickening in the spectator. Whatever hip is, Rory-the-Irishman, twentythree, from Dublin, by way of Ibiza, Tangier and points south, whose last name or precise occupation will never be known to us, who left his family at the age of fourteen to live by himself in the mountains near Dublin— Rory is hip. Now he addresses himself to the matter of our arrival, called upon to do so, it is clear, as much by natural curiosity as by an unwritten law of the establishment. Though he does not believe in private property, it is by an even older statute, his turf we are on—and there are formalities to be got through and settlements to be negotiated. We are accordingly questioned briefly, though efficiently, under the eye of his adjutants as to our origins, destinations and purposes. Our answers prove adequate, it appears, for we are permitted, at the conclusion of the interview, to buy a round of drinks. The group includes Graham, twenty-one, from Sheffield (“ where your silverware comes from” ), Graham’s girl friend, Penny, Penny’s friend Carol and a preoccupied youth with a dark, haunted gaze. He is given to enigmatic utterances that hover perpetually on the brink of coherence without quite achieving it; one listens to him with a kind of desperate attention, always alert for some word, some missing link that might make sense of it all. The others treat him matter-of-factly, accepting his oddity as they accept everything else. When the drink is over the group disperses temporarily, leaving us at the bar, though clearly in a changed status. We are no longer intruders to be suffered; we are travelers passing through. It is a status conferring the highest honors at Finch’s—for they are all, as we are to learn, travelers. Now and then Graham reappears, to issue an abrupt bulletin about how he is feeling. He is of that special company who keep constant watch on their inner lives—issuing reports of its changes in the manner of commu

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niqu és from the front lines. (“ I hate to be alone; not even for a minute; I can’t even go to the store alone! Is that human?” ) At first we are taken aback by the intensity of these messages and the high drama with which they are uttered; later on we learn that there is a good deal of self-mockery in it. Of them all, he is the sanest, the sturdiest, the most straightforward; he calls to mind images of that noble proletariat the founders of socialism once dreamed on. His speech, like the speech of all of provincial England, is beautiful. He does not understand this, nor does he believe it. “ What do you think of England?” I ask him. “ England,” he replies, “ doesn’t even know I exist.” Now and then Rory glides by, under the benign gaze of the bartender, for he is among that company who secure automatically the devotion of landladies and publicans. It is a special breed. He leaves his clothes at Finch’s, he shaves at Finch’s, he gets mail at Finch’s. These facilities are of the utmost importance to him for though, on the face of it, he is homeless, penniless and unemployed, he is a man of elaborate and com plex affairs. I ask him how he managed to get by all alone in those mountains near Dublin when he was fourteen. “ Under the mistaken impression that I was some kind of an artist,” he replies, “ the people contrived to take care of m e.” They all “ take care” of each other—that is the most unexpected thing about them. Their living arrangements are at once stable and transitory— they are a group, though its members can be replaced. A few of them have rooms and they share them with the others; the rest of them sleep where and when they can—in abandoned houses, churches, barns. Their system of communications is highly intricate; the information they need in order to get by—about where to sleep for a night, how to pick up some money— is relayed with the utmost efficiency. All of these institutions have been evolved in order to facilitate and further the one state which is the beau ideal of their lives—the state of being “ high.” And conversely, the worst thing that can befall them is to be “ brought down” from high to low, from exaltation to mere conscious ness. The bringer-down is a “ drag,” a bore, they are desperately eager not to offend one another in the matter of boredom. Penny, Graham’s girl friend, hovers perpetually in a delicate anxiety about having inadvertently “ brought him down.” Their literacy is spotty and erratic—though they are not, as has been alleged of them, philistine or anti-intellectual. It is rather that they remem ber, as Joyce once wrote, only the things pertaining to their own state. Thus, in addition to Ferlinghetti and Corso and Ginsberg and occasionally Burroughs, some of them have also read—or at least heard about—Artaud. For children of their age they show a curious intimacy with death, which

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is frightening. Their talk is sprinkled with references to those dying young—scarcely ever sentimental but very matter of fact, at times clinical; for they are adept in a particular kind of medical lore—the workings of chemicals on the liver, spleen, and pancreas; they take a certain relish in these things. But sometimes the bravado falls away: a suety businessman from Manchester is standing at the bar in Finch’s. His wallet is stuffed with bills, his hands are all over the girls, for he “ likes young people.” Twice he has proclaimed the view that when a man reaches his age he has the right to “ enjoy himself.” Now he proclaims it yet a third time and looks to Graham for confirmation. “ I’m not going to reach your age,” Graham replies, with deadly quiet. “ Oh, and what do you intend doing about it?” “ I intend dying. . . .’’ It comes out a scream. . . . On the last night before we are to leave London, they throw a party for us. We are to meet at Finch’s and proceed from there to Penny’s “ pad,” temporarily shared by Graham. “ Take up thy bedroll and follow m e,” says Rory. It is an antic journey during which we learn, among other things, how to use the London Underground without paying carfare. We arrive at the bed-sitter in Porto Bello Road which is our destination and tiptoe up the stairs, in order not to wake the other tenants. The room is small and very tidy, with a framed print on the wall and a copy of Clancy Sigal’s Weekend in Dinlock on the dressing table. We are eight at first: Penny and Graham and Rory and another Irishman; Carol and Betty and the photographer and me; in a few minutes we are joined by Ian who has been summoned via a shower of pebbles on his window, for it is he who owns the only phonograph. He arrives, bearing it, but it is temporarily out of order. While he is repairing it with a shilling, Rory begins to roll the cigarettes. They are as fat as cigars—the procedure is different in England. The phonograph is finally fixed, the lights are put out, a candle is lit, the sound of Bob Dylan fills the room. The only sounds are the music and an occasional ripple of laughter from Rory. He is growing happier and happier. Isn’t this better than anything else? asks Graham softly. One by one the others are falling asleep while Carol, who arrived from a town near Cornwall only a few days before, is throwing up quietly over the washba sin. Finally, only Rory and the photographer and I are left awake. The photographer and I get up to leave—we have a morning plane to catch for Paris. “ Rory, are you hip?” I ask. “ Ay, and if we knew how to be hip,” he replies, “ then we’d be saved, wouldn’t we?” Paris We have scarcely bolted down our first croissant when we spot them from a distance, a band of troubadours, hair flying, scarves fluttering in

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the wind. A guitar is propped up against a nearby railing; on the pants knees of one of them is to be discerned the insignia—the size of a small saucer—of the Ban-the-Bomb movement. We shed other plans for the morning and change direction in midstream. (Let hip, like Grace in the economy of Calvinism, accumulate without our will—we follow an un known trail.) ‘T h e y ’re not French,” I insist as we draw closer. “ The French don’t go in for that sort of thing.” But I am proven wrong. There are five of them and Alain is their spokesman. He knows English best, the guitar belongs to him. He is no more than nineteen—slender and a bit fragile. He looks, notwithstanding his combat fatigues, like a young knight from a medieval tapestry—high-born, as they say in the ballads. The others are more down to earth, though with their scarves, berets, turtlenecks and other standbys of French panache, they, too, have a flair that was absent on Goodge Street. While we confer with Alain they look on affably, munching chocolate bars, savoring the morning, passing a Gauloise from hand to hand. It is less a matter now of discovery than confirmation. Like a couple of tyro safecrackers, we test our new tools: the doors swing open. Yes, they have heard of Goodge Street, yes, they know Rory— “ Rory-the-Lion” they call him—no, they have not been to India or Ibiza, but many of their friends have, and yes, bien stir, they are familiar with the works of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, though Alain, not without a touch of pedantry, points out that Edgar Allan Poe and John Steinbeck are the really important American writers. (Not without satisfaction we note that the new brotherhood of the road has not entirely obliterated national distinctions. Erasmus, in paperback, peeps from the pocket of one of them; Alain borrows my notebook to inscribe in a meticulous L yc ée hand the author and title of a work he wishes to call to my attention.) Intellectual distinctions notwithstanding, their hearts are with America; they call themselves The Ramblers, they play their guitars and sing in the Paris Metro; their favorite music is rhythm and blues for, says Alain, pointing to his heart, “ It is about the way I feel.” We save our trump card for last, though by now it is hardly necessary. Have they ever heard of a place called Chez Popoff’s, a place that came highly recommended at Finch’s? But of course they have—they are en route there at this very moment. As elated as explorers within sight of a new continent, we fall in step beside them along the rue de la Huchette. Chez Popoff’s proves, despite the comic overtones in its name, to be strikingly unfunny. It combines the sinister aspect of a waterfront dive with the dolor of those shabby little workers’ cafes one finds in the fishing villages along the Mediterranean. It is neat, plain, unadorned, a smallish, dim room with rows of tables along two walls and a bar in the middle.

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Behind the bar stands Madame Popoff, wife of the proprietor, through whose intervention we come to apprehend yet a third negative property of whatever-it-is we are looking for: it tends to shy away from the press. Madame Popoff is polite, though regretful. We are okay, but the Leica, no. Monsieur Popoff is called in to advise. He is spare, dignified, he wears suspenders. He suggests, somehow, that he is dressed in his Sunday best. Through a lucky accident, it transpires that he and the photographer share common Greek origins; the matter is cordially resolved. The transaction has taken place, I notice suddenly, under the concerted gaze of a brigade of vivid Apache types, who have sat, unmoving, throughout. Becoming aware of them, I become aware, as well, of the dualistic principle that animates Popoff’s. The room is divided in two: one segment—The Ram blers and their friends—occupy a large table in front which has no seats, but a bench alongside of it. Wedged in next to one another, they look like students at a youth hostel, or children at a summer camp. With their guitars, their CND buttons, their boxes of colored chalks for painting imitation Rouaults on the streets, they come to represent, so to speak, the communal spirit. The others, however, are clearly the spirit of individual­ ism rampant. That the two groups are related in some way is clear to even the most casual observer. The tie, it would seem, is an ancient mercantile one—the relation between buyers and sellers, suppliers and demanders, havers and needers. One becomes aware at Popoff’s of a kind of subliminal buzz, an arrangement of signals to which the outsider is never made privy ; yet its signs are in the air to be discerned: an excessive amount of looking at wristwatches—an air of waiting. We sit with Alain and his friends, the Australian who has just returned from India, the American, Tony, who has just returned from Iceland and who is en route to Madrid, and the rest of them—whose duffel bags are in the back, who wash and save at Popoff’s in the morning after a night spent here or there, whose political sentiments are echoed in a sign scratched in the bathroom (Non a la Bombe, oui à la vie!)—and we cannot keep our eyes off the ones in the corner. Are they, perhaps, the authentic thing we are looking for, poised on the frontiers of awareness? Or are they merely small businessmen—as dreary as other small businessmen—though in an unusual line? We have no choice but to follow the Ramblers (if only because the others are unapproachable), and they lead us to unlikely places and unlikelier juxtapositions: a deserted villa on the street of N ôtre-Dame-desChamps in which they have been living for some time as squatters. They are especially proud of its good address, for like our friends in London who meditate on the eventualities of “ turning Buckingham Palace o n ,” they feel not enmity for the establishment, but rather a kind of hilarious

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unbelief at its doings. The house is sealed and boarded up; entry is by way of a second-story window. Housebreaking, we decide on the instant, in quest of the ineffable is not punishable by law, whereupon we take our turn scaling the wall. Inside, there is an atmosphere of the London Blitz. (“ When death is near as it was in those days,” said a friend of mine of an older generation, a painter, standing on a balcony and looking out over the classic view of Paris, “ perhaps the proportions are more real. When it is far away, perhaps one attempts to induce the sense of it by the use of drugs. . . .” ) An arrangement of wooden planks on the stairs serves as a booby trap to warn of intruders; sleeping bags, guitars, paintboxes are scattered about. The candlelight flickers, Alain begins to strum on his guitar, six Germans, one Australian, one American and five Frenchmen smoke pot and sing We Shall Overcome . . . in a deserted house in Paris on the street of Our Lady of the Fields. Follow the pot, said the girl at the Dom, but on occasion (although all who smoke pot would seem to be hip, not all hipsters necessarily smoke pot) the problem seems rather to be one of escaping it. We flee, accord­ ingly, for sanctuary to George Whitman, proprietor of the American bookstore in the shadow of Notre Dame, custodian of a more stately tradition with no pot in its past. What do you make of them? we ask. “ To me, they are as thistles blown upon the wind,” he replies, “ but I may be wrong—I’m a bookseller—I come from a different tradition.” By way of reply comes a mocking echo from somewhere in the back room: “ Spiders under the influence of LSD have been known to weave abstract webs. . . . ” The back room discloses yet another outpost of youth-in-transition, though in a suaver mode. The authority on spiders proves to be Adrian, twenty-one, a calmly confident youth from Denver, recently returned from three months in Tangier (“just to see what was going on” ). He informs us that he is at work on “ the first American alchemical novel,” and intro­ duces us to his friend, Russell, author of “ a very wiggy play, so far in, the change of pronouns doesn’t bother you anym ore.” Alex, in his early twenties, from South Africa (the world grows smaller, we note in the margin of our pad), has recently completed “ a giant pornographic novel,” and foresees a totally “ drug-oriented, bisexual world.” Familiar motifs in unlikely juxtaposition cleave the air: Nietzsche, Judith-and-Julian, the Cafe Cino, Wonder Woman comics, the Bleecker Street Cinema. In the back ground, for counterpoint, an instructor of philosophy belabors a gentle Australian boy, who has just returned from India, on the failings of his generation: what use is it, he keeps insisting, what meaning can it have, all this aimless wandering with no learning, no education, nothing to back it up? Our intellectual convictions tend toward the professor, but our hearts are with the boy, blond, bearded, sandaled, with the face of one of the

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apostles, who sits by, mute and dreamy, only half attending and offering no word in his own defense. Fearing the necessity of taking a stand, we flee into the night—in search of the mysterious three-tiered nightclub operated by Maurice Girodias, creator of Olympia Press. Surely he, veteran of that fabled time when it all started, present at those mythic caves where they sat—the crowd, Sartre and Simone and Raymond Queneau and Camus and all the rest, listening to Juliette Greco sing the lyrics of Pr évert—surely he would know some thing. But Girodias, eating black bread and cabbage soup in the club, does not want to talk about Paris—Paris is dead, “ poor little whitewashed Paris.” The grand days are over; a timid, frightened bourgeoisie, afraid of its own shadow, holds sway over Paris: the Gendarmerie have closed down the upstairs room of his club where Mabel Mercer used to sing; they have taken his play off the boards—afraid of the poor old Marquis de Sade, it seems. So Girodias, veteran of Paris, is off, in fact, to New York. We stand up and take our leave. The balalaika orchestra plays to an all but empty house. Against a backdrop of crimson-velvet hangings, Girodias looks like the last of the Romanovs. What is a hipster? Several devotees of the Café de Seine look up, incredulous. It is another one of those way stations like Finch’s, or Popoff’s, but sparer and more sharply etched. Travel news and notes hang constantly on the air (“ . . . then take the bus sixty kilometers to Cordova and when you get off, ask for Kevin” ). “ I never liked the spelling of that word,” says John Esam of New Zealand, “ the P-S-T lying there next to one another always got on my nerves.” He looks like John the Baptist in blue denims. He is a dancer and a poet, but the greater part of his time is spent listening to music too high for the ordinary human ear. He is given to pronouncements like: “ Man, he’s gone and taken the percussion out of the drumming.” Now he puts his head down on the table only to raise it again, for he cannot resist pursuing a subject to its outcome even when it is antipathetic to him. Various ironic definitions are entered from nearby tables—whereupon we discover in succession two further principles of hip: Those who are, do not like to talk about it; but eventually they do. Accordingly, when it has grown silent, a West Indian writer called Lindsay Barrett addresses himself to the problem of defining hip. Various names are invoked along the way— Genet, Villon, John F. Kennedy, M. Teste; various definitions are tried out: “ to refuse to accept despair . . .” “ a step beyond art-for-art’s sake . . . ” “ to live inside a vision. . . . ” With each foray into the meaning of the word he seems to grow more intense, more concentrated, so that in the end, after he has left, it remains a mysteriously memorable picture in

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the mind: Lindsay Barrett, in a red woolen cap with a pompon, defining hip one night at the Café de Seine. The following day we are taken by John Esam—assistant-at-large for all quests—to see Dixie Nimmo, a West Indian writer, who has lived in Paris for many years. The subject turns to the past, as it does everywhere, but more frequently, it seems, in Paris. There was a hotel where they all lived once—Burroughs, and Harold Norse and Bryan Gysin and others—on a street with a name as sad as a song by Edith Piaf—rue G ît-le-Coeur (street where the heart lies). But the hotel has been torn down, it no longer exists. . . . Where are they now? You could try, says Dixie Nimmo, to find the last hipster of them all—his name is Ollie Harrington and they say he’s somewhere in East Berlin, but who knows? He used to draw the Bootsie cartoon for the Amsterdam News—ask around, the musicians will know. It is all sad and mysterious in the fading light. “ Meet me later,” says John Esam to Dixie, “ around the rue de Seine.” “ But where exactly? We might miss each other?” “ No, we won’t ,” replies John. “ It’ll be dark out.” Amsterdam Amsterdam is below sea level. The cabdriver mentions the fact en route from the airport, and so will many others throughout our stay. And how do you like our city, the hotel porter asks, taking our bags. “ Oh, very much, I like it very m uch.” “ It’s below sea level—did you know that?” he replies. The fact takes on mysterious significances with constant reiteration, particularly if you are not too sure of what sea level is. Walking the streets one finds oneself eyeing the horizon, conscious of the low sky, the lowering clouds, of the city held in, contained; it is not unpleasant—on the contrary, it lends Amsterdam an odd poignance. The houses, the cafes, the fat cheeses and eiderdowns and rich burnished wood—all the bourgeois comforts that are slightly reprehensible elsewhere are allowable in Amster dam because they have been wrested from the sea. But it has its other sides as well. After a few days in Amsterdam, one finds oneself meditating on the possibilities that the location of Amsterdam has its psychic effects. There seems to be a certain madness in the air, a tendency to drive matters to their logical conclusion which perhaps, like the midsummer madness of the Scandinavians, could be attributed to exigencies of latitude, longitude, water pressure. On the eighth floor of the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel, Jan Cremer, twentysix, in blue jeans, Beatle haircut and black turtle-neck sweater, prowls the room, stopping now and then to sip a Coke that has been sent up by room service or to look over the shoulder of the architect engaged in drawing up

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plans for his house. Photographs, posters, blowups heaped around the room indicate that he is more than a man, he is an industry: author, singer, painter, street urchin, he is, apart from all these, an all-purpose celebrity who is impresario of himself. As the evening continues, it is clear that he does not distinguish between the creative and the publicizing principles. The jacket of his book, I , Jan Cremer (dedicated to Jayne Mansfield and Jan Cremer), shows his picture in a leather jacket astride a HarleyDavidson. Across the top is a banner reading “ the unconditional best seller.” The banner, he points out, was his own idea, conceived before the book had come off the presses. So, too, was the idea of issuing a goldplated facsimile of the book after it had sold its first hundred thousand copies. He shows a record he has cut: Jan Cremer, The Amsterdam Noise. The quality, he explains, is mediocre—but that does not lessen his pride in the marketing principle demonstrated. Across the top is the banner of the Jan Cremer enterprises: unconditional best seller. His children, too, bear the Cremer brand. Their names all begin with C: “ Claudia Carmen Crem er,” he intones; “ Cassidy Clinton Cremer; Clifford Caleb C rem er.” As the evening proceeds, the room becomes a gigantic Jan Cremer montage. Photographs of him pile up on the divan, on the floors, on the table. Jan Cremer, soapy, emerging from a bathtub; Jan Cremer, a sullen street urchin leaning against an Amsterdam tenement; Jan Cremer, noble, silhouetted against the sagebrush. As more and more photographs, stick­ ers, labels, pasteups issue forth from a trunk in the middle of the room, he becomes, improbably enough, more and more engaging. His egotism takes on the stature of a metaphysical principle. It is, so to speak, selfless: that he is, himself, the product of his own creation is secondary; the main thing is the principle involved—celebrity raised to its ultimate. Even without the American flag draped over a bureau in the com er, it is evident where his allegiances are. “ I ’m going to the United S tates,” he reports. “ I ’m too much for Europe.” But the actual journey hardly seems necessary. Like so much that we are to see in Amsterdam, he outdoes America at her own game. (Later, we ask a self-styled member of the “ older generation” his opinion of Jan Cremer’s book. It is not, he concedes, without a certain energy—though his own tastes in prose run to the London Observer.) “ High” is the favorite word of Simon Posthuma, painter, visionary and organizer of the Pot Art Company, an inevitable designation when you come to think of it. His next favorite word is “ beautiful,” which he pronounces beautyfooool, drawing out the final syllable. He is airborne. He does not enter rooms so much as come in for a landing, being himself his own aircraft, his own passenger list, his own pilot. Like a pilot, he is in a state of constant readiness—keeping a weather eye out for signals. He is

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of that number who find omens and portents in all things: accidental meetings, coincidences. He is concerned above all with the mechanics of time. He cannot meet a friend on the street half a block away from where he lives, en route perhaps to buy a sausage, without finding in this encounter some larger significance. He is given to constant musing about the future, drawing analogies from technology the way the medieval alchemists did from nature; he has a temperamental affinity with things to come—taking man’s progress in a technological age as a matter of his personal concern. He is consequently a veritable encyclopedia about the future. Zooming about rooms, he issues communiques about the way things will be at any minute: “ I have it in my mind, man—what can I do?—that computers will reproduce themselves from granite, from sea water . . . but you know more about that than I do—you come from across the lake, there, man, from America. . . .” It follows that English, the mother tongue of modern technology, is his favorite language. Most of his paintings have English titles: Everything is All Right; Talking; Rose Lee Baby, Pink Goes Wild. . . . Yet for all his concern with the future, he calls to mind images out of the past: in skintight trousers and high-cut jacket, his hair tapering to a V in back, he looks like a slightly tattered, though still elegant, recruit in the American Revolutionary Army—not without battle scars, notably a miss­ ing tooth brought about, he confides, by an encounter with an American girl some time in the past. At the “ pad,” in the company of other members of the Pot Art movement, Simon explains its origins and ultimates. The organization, it turns out, is only five days old, though it has had predecessors on the Amsterdam scene like the Universal Moving Artists. The Dutch, we begin to gather, have a penchant for organizing themselves into companies— due, perhaps, to their ancient mercantile tradition. The previous compa nies, however, were limited in scope, while Pot Art is to involve nothing less than a general revolution in consciousness. Its manifestations are to be felt in every area of human endeavor—from the governing of nations to the design of a teacup; its membership is to range from the most obscure to the most powerful, not excluding Lyndon B. Johnson. Its day is in the offing, yet—paradoxically—it is already here. “ For,” says Simon, execut ing a splendid turn, “ everything is possible! This is the time! When I set out to do something, a minute later I meet someone on the way to helping me do it!" Simon is the visionary of the movement, Olivier is its tactician, strategist and ideologue. He commands a startling body of recondite lore on the subject of drugs and can spell out its history all the way back to the twelfth century. He is as reasonable and urbane as Simon is ardent. Like a lawyer

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defending a client, he argues the case for the human benefits of drugs— succeeding in some disarming way in merging the alleged benignity of the holy weed with the benignity of Amsterdam itself, about whose history he is equally informed. It is a holy city, he points out, that has an honorable past, a haven for the persecuted, cited in the rabbinical writings as Makom Aleph—the first city of the Jews next to Jerusalem. The very room we are sitting in is part of the old quarter, where the Jews of Amsterdam lived before the war. (In Amsterdam, for the first time since we left the United States, we come upon recollections of the war. Is it a characteristic, perhaps, of the lowlands to store their memories? One recalls Mailer and the two referrents of the modern hipster: Auschwitz and Hiroshima.) Perhaps, through Olivier’s persuasiveness, the procedures of what Simon calls “ the high scene” look more natural in Amsterdam than they have elsewhere. They look right, the Pot Art members, holding their clay (sic) pipes, in this room, with vases of flowers by the windows and bars of chocolate on the sturdy low table. As they sit there, their faces luminous in the late-afternoon sun, they suggest a painting by Vermeer. So obliging is Amsterdam to travelers, there is even a trial in progress: the Holy Weed vs The State. The defendant is Simon Vinkenoog, critic and translator, author of many novels. He is charged with selling marijuana to an office clerk. Compared to the scene we witness, the average American courtroom is a welter of confusion. In the U.S. the clutter of chairs and tables, the profusion of people on the podium make it hard to follow the proceedings. Here, in a sparsely furnished chamber, beneath the portrait of the Queen of the Netherlands, the defendant stands with his back to the spectators, facing a bar of five solemn, robed judges, flanked on the left by the State Prosecutor, on the right by his lawyer. It is a straight, literal representation that is breathtaking. As the proceedings get under way, Olivier and Simon translate for us— for they, too, are present, friends and disciples of Simon Vinkenoog. The vocabulary of the drug world, however, is growing universal, and now and then a clue emerges through the impenetrable clickety-clack of the Dutch language to enable us to follow on our own: creativitat . . . junkie . . . international. . . opium. . . . Winding sinuously through it all, a mysterious Eastern presence among the sibilants and gutturals of the Dutch language, is the magic word itself, more beautiful in its original than any of the local pet names for it. The president of the court, in pronouncing it, makes that slight hesitation by which one acknowledges a foreign word in one’s own language. Then he renders it, with scrupulous accuracy: mari-hwana. . . . There are moments of comedy. A uniformed policeman brings in a sealed envelope; he hands it to the president of the court; the president of

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the court breaks open the seal and peers into the envelope, his face registering elaborate curiosity. The other judges lean over to join in the inspection: they all seem to be enjoying their appointed roles in the charade: the pillars of the community confronting the foreign element in their midst. There is laughter in the courtroom: the president of the court has allowed himself the small indulgence of a joke. He says, writes Olivier, in the margin of my notebook, that this is the first time he has ever seen it. The uniformed policeman returns to fetch the envelope. Once again there is laughter. The president of the court has made another joke: “ He says,” writes Olivier, “ ‘You see—we take better care of it than you do. For the most part, the defendant stands erect and silent, but now and then a dialogue is enjoined between him and the president of the court. Vinkenoog argues the nontoxic, nonaddictive properties of marijuana. The president of the court looks by turn stern and quizzical. The judgment is lighter than expected—a fine and a warning. It is interpreted by Simon’s friends as a moral victory. “ It’s cool for Simon,” says Posthuma, giving news of the verdict. It is not their rhetoric, however, which tempts one to accept their cause, but rather their high-spiritedness. Their exuberance finds many outlets: a generous passion for America, a yearning for new modes and orders, a love for printing up programs, manifestos, directives, or, for that matter, anything susceptible of being printed up. They show us a three-by-five card they have produced: it entitles the bearer to “ see the artists in their pads,” and offers him a guided tour. Did anyone take them up on it? we ask. Only a handful of German tourists, they admit, but it was okay, it was beautiful, it was all high for a day. It is all so benign—yet at the outermost end of it there is a dimension of terror. “ Only two revolutionary events have transpired,” says Olivier, “ since the dawn of civilization. They are circumcision and trepanation. The benefits of circumcision are apparent to the world—it has become a convention. So far as trepanation goes, its benefits are known but to a few.” “ And w hat,” we ask, “ is trepanation?” Olivier explains that it is the boring of a hole into the skull—usually through the middle of the forehead, an inch or so above the eyes—in such a way as to affect the blood’s pressure on the brain. It is a practice of modern surgery, but it has also been known for some centuries to Eastern mystics, who used it as a means of achieving added insight or, otherwise put, of remaining constantly stoned. And in the West? Ah, says Olivier, a start has been made—haven’t we heard about Bart Huges and his third eye? We reply that we had assumed the designation to be metaphoric—a reference to something like second sight or a sixth sense. But we turn out to have been mistaken. Bart

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Huges, one of their friends, a graduate of medical school, though not yet a licensed doctor, after some prior experiments of a less radical nature, had in fact drilled a hole in his head with a dentist’s drill—a scant month or so before. And what is more, it works! He spent time in the hospital, to be sure, but that is the price one pays in our society. He feels fine, he no longer smokes pot, for that has been rendered supererogatory. The unveil ing of Bart Huges’s third eye, moreover, comprised the larger part of Amsterdam’s most successful “ happening” to date—“ Stoned in the Streets.” (The effect was generally disappointing, we are later told by an eyewitness. Half the audience knew about it and therefore didn’t care; the other half didn’t believe it, so they didn’t seem to care either. . . .) Berlin Berlin is different—less through an inherent difference than through the expectations it raised in the spectator. I spent a year once in Berlin, ostensibly advancing my education (“ Expressionist Drama—Its Origins and Ultimates” ), but really walking the streets trying to probe the faces of the passersby; sitting in the cafes pretending to read paperbacks, but actually waiting for a Significant Encounter, the answer to some ques­ tion—as girls on Fulbrights are wont to be waiting in any case, but somehow more intensely in Berlin. At the end of the year I was rewarded by a whimsical obscenity burbled in my ear by a dotty old gent straight out of Christopher Isherwood: Paul pinselt Paula, he crooned, and then whisked himself away, leaving me to explain to the iron-jawed waitress that he had sat down, uninvited, at my table, and I had no intention of paying for his Dortmunder. It seemed at the time a cautionary parable: woe unto them who talk about listening, for they shall hear what they deserve to hear. But then, everything in Berlin seemed like a cautionary parable, which was part of its fascination. Arriving at Tempelhof I am suddenly quite certain that the procedures we have all but perfected so far, like a couple of sleuths, will not work in Berlin—the magic words will not open that first door which then leads to all those other doors. Berlin is too big, too cut off, too isolated. The air is too saturated with prior deposits to conduct the frequencies to which hip responds. Then, by way of confirming my suspicions, the customs men, for the first time since we have arrived in Europe, go through our bag gage—mine made ridiculous by now with some thirty pounds of avantgarde manifestos. They eye these with some dubiety (Stoned in the Streets, Anti-Proces), then wave us on—people come to Berlin for strange reasons. “ It’s too cold for hipsters in Berlin,” says my friend Klaus sensibly,

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behind the wheel of his Mercedes. “ African students, yes, chamber music, yes, spies, yes, but no hipsters. For hipsters you should have gone to Munich.” The trip in from the airport seems to bear out his opinion. Berlin: cold, iron grey, massive, the streets laid out with severe Teutonic regularity, very wide, no alleys, no dark, twisting side streets; here and there, islands of steel and plate glass, the new banishing the old from memory; now and then a ruin that has escaped the vigilant eye of the municipality—its secrets buried with whoever once lived there—grass pushing up through the cracks. (“ Marijuana can be grown at home,” said Olivier Boelen, “ but only in rather warm, friendly climates. . . .” ) Nonetheless we are committed, so we set out for Kreuzberg, the center, we have been told, of some kind of new bohemia. On the face of it, it seems right enough, fulfilling all the requirements. It is far away from the center of the city, a neighborhood without charm or beauty, not even squalid, only dreary: squat, two-story buildings silhouetted against the yellow street lights—these are the neighborhoods that house the new bohemian outposts in all the cities of Europe, so why not here? And on the face of it, too, the Leierkasten is the right bar. The requisite silence descends upon our entry: Rosie, the steely-eyed Wirtin, looks up from her card game with Kurt Mühlenhaupt, beggar king of Kreuzberg—interior, this time, by Brecht. And in the corner there is even to be found the toogentle boy with all the insignia of the traveling kind—the khaki clothes, the hair falling into his eyes, the look at once rapt and faintly stupefied. We go to see him the following day in his room and it, too, is the right room: a shabby basement cell with faint cultic overtones in the decor: there are travel posters on the wall (Istanbul), and other suggestions—in the stickers on the baggage, the postmark on a letter lying nearby—of wide and courageous travel. The signs go oddly with this gentle country boy’s demeanor. What, what did he see on that voyage? How is it, we wonder, that all these rooms look the same—have they seen each other’s rooms? In every city, at the end of long cellar passageways, at the top of long flights of stairs, always that same room as ascetic as a monk’s, the knapsack or duffel bag always nearby, the one slightly esoteric book lying by the bed, sometimes the portable typewriter or box of colored chalks— and the photograph of a Swedish girl. These rooms which have the look of college dorms in parody, which evoke Salinger and the Bhagavad-Gita in about equal measure, by what spontaneous generation have they come into being, crystallized out of the plumes of perfumed smoke? We take Peter and his friend Wulff to a café where they eat backwursts and tell all the stories we have heard once before—Tangier, Ibiza, Stock­ holm, an American girl and I, we worked in a fish factory in Morocco, she taught me about jazz, we don’t believe in borders, we want everybody to

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be together, love is the only thing that counts. But in Berlin, they are less compelling than elsewhere, the traveling kids, they are too gentle, too docile, one wants something harder, more crystalline, one wants some­ thing relevant. In Berlin, politics is more interesting than art. A political scientist at the University knows instantly what we are looking for, though he hasn’t heard the word hipster before. The subject interests him and, inclining his head, he gives it the benefit of his fine attention, his mind seeming to probe it with the delicate questing touch of a surgeon. He is fastidious, reticent, prone to a slightly excessive courtesy by which he guards himself from intrusion; everything about him suggests a seeking after insulation—the softness of his cashmere scarf, the mildness of his voice, the cushions of his car, even the purple clouds of pipe smoke that wreathe his head as he ponders the nature of hip in Berlin. (He was a captain in the Tank Corps on the Eastern Front—then, rumor had it, a bad case of nerves; after the war, he became a student for the first time, choosing Germany for his subject; now he is a professor, with all the benefits that accrue thereto in a country which so honors the status that professors’ wives are given precedence in the delicatessen. Nonetheless, there is a quality of aliena­ tion, of nonparticipation about him; like a number of people one meets in Berlin, he seems, though perfectly respectable, to be living underground. Such people admit you to their houses with a slightly conspiratorial air, their voices are pitched slightly lower than is normal, there is the sugges­ tion that after they have admitted you, they have taken a quick look behind the door before shutting it again.) In Berlin, I say to him, it all seems somehow beside the point. Quite so, he agrees, quite so. In Berlin, of course, one would be in quest of something else. One would want, in Berlin, to take account of a society already unnaturally alerted—this hip that is being discussed would thrive best, would it not, in a so-called “ normal” society, whereas Berlin is not that—it is a society already living by its nerves, one in which the normal is so bizarre that merely coping with it in the ordinary ways entails behavior that in other societies would seem, let us say, hip, which is to say unnaturally responsive. Thus, we arrive eventually at a concept that could conceivably come to be known in German as the Mauerritter, or Wall Hipster, a species of entrepreneur endemic to divided cities; one who, for purposes idealistic or mercantile or both, chooses to brave the frontiers not of consciousness, but of national states. The concept called to mind the name of Ollie Harrington, that Last Hipster we had heard about in Paris, said to be living in East Berlin. Jimmy Woode, who is playing at the Blue Note in West Berlin, does not

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know Ollie Harrington personally, but he certainly knows Bootsie and wishes us luck in finding him. It is one of many such messages we have been given along the way, for Bootsie, we have come to learn, is another one of those things that every American Negro knows about and very few white Americans do. We have messages for other people also—some cryptic, some funny, some sad—intended mainly for people whose where­ abouts are unknown from people whose whereabouts are always changing. It follows that going to East Berlin necessarily takes on the aspect of a pilgrimage. Physically, the trip is ordinary enough, consisting of five stations on the Berlin elevated, followed by a brief, though trying, encoun­ ter with German bureaucracy at its most highly developed. Politically, it is a trip to another country that is, at least on the face of it, awful; spiritually, it is yet another journey to self-revelation in the course of which you discover, with surprise, a totally new sensation—one familiar to prisoners, Negroes in Mississippi, hipsters, perhaps—the sensation of standing, for the first time in your life, in a criminal relation to the law. The man in the uniform is the enemy, as are all his accomplices filling out the forms: they are to be feared, to be scorned, to be—when possible—outwitted. (An accompanying insight: it is not easy to outwit people who carry guns.) We arrive at the Friedrichstrasse station and proceed to the Presse Café in East Berlin’s foreign-press center. The somber mood is dispelled; a spirit is abroad, if not precisely hip, then certainly antic. It could all have been arranged by Lubitsch: lunatic spy movie. Everybody madly eyeing everybody else, swarthy men in corners: the DDR seems to have cornered the market on Levantine types—briefcases everywhere, sudden depar­ tures, inexplicable returns. At least once a day the telephone breaks down—rumors of buggings and counter-buggings. One grows susceptible; the moustached waitress is obviously not a waitress at all, but an Egyptian waiter with a radio receiver in her cap; the kindly Toilettenfrau so grateful for the twenty-pfennig tip is obviously Martin Bormann. We go to the phone booth and look up the name of Oliver Harrington, more by way of a gesture than anything else. Incredibly, it is listed. We call—but there is no answer, so it is not that simple. Now there is a feeling of disappointment; the phone book is three years old, the chances of its accuracy are slight. The odds against finding him are considerable. We don’t know where he works or what he does after work or whether he is, in fact, still living in Berlin. And if he is, but will not see us—then what? It seems very chancy now, this idea that sounded so winning in Paris, and East Berlin is very drab and very cold and not a place in which to while away time. What to do? We decide to take a taxi to where he lives but the driver refuses to take us there—it is too far away, all the way out in the country. A second driver says the same thing. It seems doubtful suddenly

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that Ollie is in Berlin at all. Berlin is a way station—it is not a place where anyone remains. We return to the Presse Café and call Ollie Harrington once again, but there is still no answer. At nine o ’clock, morose, over backwurst and potato salad, we decide to give the whole thing up. And now—the principle of cause and effect having proven ineffectual, the principle of chance intervenes suddenly in the person of a bearded youth in a turtle-neck shirt and a silk ascot who loves Louis Armstrong. Loving Louis Armstrong, he loves America; loving America, he takes pity on Americans in distress; taking pity on Americans in distress, he offers his services. What is the problem? We explain it. Having heard it out, he insists that under no condition are we to abandon the search which has piqued his fancy— perhaps Ollie Harrington knows Louis Armstrong? He will undertake to locate Ollie Harrington for us and notify us if and when he has done so, via a cable. (There is no telephonic communication between East and West Berlin except possibly via the Arctic Circle.) We return to the West, mysteriously heartened. The following morning a cable arrives. So it came to pass one dreary morning in late January that two Esquire reporters far from the home office made the troubled journey from West to East once again, passed once again under the stony gaze of border guards, rode once again in an ancient Packard taxicab and in due course arrived, hearts beating wildly in anticipation, in the dining room of Fewa Hotel, a large, slightly shabby though still elegant hostelry, reminiscent of Budapest, there to make the discovery in the nature of a reproof to the press in quest of novelty, that those who are called the last of the hipsters want, like most other people, friends and a place to work in that has enough light, that hip wears no specific costumes but can frequently be dressed in the rumpled tweed of a professor of the humanities, that more often than not it walks, not flies, across the room with the solid tread of a man at home in his library, that— in short—as the old parable has it, life is a fountain. “ I ’m afraid,” said Ollie Harrington calmly, pouring himself another cup of coffee, “ that by modern hipster standards, Bootsie is terribly oldfashioned.” (Bootsie, I learned upon my return, appears in the Pittsburgh Courier, a barbed version of life among the Negro middle class.) Whatever happened to hip, Ollie? “ Once upon a time there was a small café called the Tournon, just a little old French café, that became the headquarters of a group of people who gathered there—Dick Wright was one of them and Chester Himes was another and there was a third one, a painter called Beauford Delaney, and there was a fourth, a Nigerian called Slim Sunday, who dressed only in black leather and whose pet hates were Englishmen and tourists of any

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kind. . . . There was ‘Destroyer’ Haynes who was six feet, four inches tall. And there were others around too. Well, this group of people would sit around and swap tales at the Café Tournon, which became kind of a place of refuge for them. There was a wonderful woman who ran the place, called Madame Alazard, and it became a real family pad. . . . But then the death knell began to sound; Art Buchwald wrote a column on the place, and before very long the tourists would come and just sit around and stare at the real live hipsters and eventually the place, I understand, turned into something quite different—Slim Sunday just disappeared, Dick Wright is dead, Beauford Delaney is still in Paris, I don’t know what happened to the others. . . . Madame Alazard eventually sold it and retired to a life of splendor in the French countryside. . . . And me? I’m in East Berlin because after a lot of wandering it turned out to be a place where I could work as an artist. And not as a Negro artist . . . I’ve been invited to come teach at the University in Ghana, and maybe I’ll end up there. . . . But find Matty Peters, she’s in Copenhagen, she’ll tell you . . . she’s as hip as hip could be. . . .” Who else is hip—Is Lyndon B. Johnson hip? Johnson might have made it, if he’d traveled in the right circles. . . . Copenhagen “ Find Matty Peters,” Ollie had said, “ everybody in Copenhagen will know her.” So we start looking from the moment we arrive—but the hotel clerk, eager as he is to help, does not know Matty Peters and moreover sees little point in looking for anything or anyone in Copenhagen. He breathes in a languid displeasure with all things Danish, confides daily in his longing to be elsewhere, if possible in Amsterdam, for whose tulips he has a mysterious longing. We take up the Copenhagen telephone book, but Matty is not listed under her maiden name and about her married name we can remember only that it ends in s-e-n. We proceed to the Drop-Inn, whose praises have been sung throughout our journey. It proves equal to them, full of mysteriously beautiful people, rapt in the lamplight, black and white in diverse combinations, and that slight hint of danger which is the mark of places not frequented by family groups. On the wall are posters of the painting avant-garde, but pop in Denmark, as elsewhere in Europe, proves too streamlined, too elegant, lacking in the necessary crudity of the original. At the Drop-Inn, too, there are portents of future difficulty with the sociology of Denmark: what appeared to be a clear-cut hipster proves instead to be an Impressionist painter who left New York in protest against abstract art; what appeared to be a definite Ibiza-Tangier-Paris veteran is, as the waiter informs us, a

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distinguished Copenhagen architect. We are, however, undaunted, still under the spell of arriving in Copenhagen after Berlin—calm teak and silver, no “ prison m atrons” in the airport bathrooms. Good-bye KrafftEbing, hello Hans Christian Andersen. The musicians, Ollie had said, are sure to know her and accordingly we head for the Montmarte, headquarters of jazz in Scandinavia and possibly in all of Europe. All along the way it has been described as a special place, a place apart, the good place in the north and not just a necessary place you hit on a tour. And we get the point instantly upon entering—having first pushed our way through the crowds waiting to get in. It is a religious sacrament that is in progress. We have been to jazz clubs all along the way, but nowhere have we found that rapt concentration, broken now and then by a soft sigh of wonder, that total attention that is to be felt at the Montmartre, while Ben Webster plays the saxophone. One does not interrupt a sacrament with impunity. The waiters are tearing back and forth at breakneck speed, the man behind the bar is taking orders, the audience is in a trance. We screw up our courage and pluck the sleeve of a man standing at the bar who looks knowledgeable. He is somewhere off on his own, however, and informs us with reverence that the bass player has been invited more than once to join Count Basie’s band, but is too young to go to America. Dazed, we head for the back where, according to a general rule of show business, information is always more plentiful than in front. There is a man bellowing into a pay phone in the corridor and we succeed in eavesdropping on the tail end of his conversation. Both his matter and manner suggest a Chicago newspaperman. He proves, in fact, to be a Chicago newspaperman. He has lived in Copenhagen for several years. His name is Jack Lind, he does, indeed, know Matty Peters who is, at the moment as it happens, in Helsinki, but is expected back that very day. He is Danish-American and switches back and forth between the two languages, lies uneasy in the mouth of a Chicago newspaperman. Jack Lind gets us a seat on a bench in the passage between the kitchen and the club—something of a privileged location, as it turns out. Though it is still early, the action has already started, in the form of one of those symbolic allegories that seems to have been worked up expressly for the benefit of visiting journalists—never again to transpire, and never before to have taken place. A Danish girl in leotards and a turtle neck, apparently unencumbered by any trace of a superego, is in the process of delivering up the entire contents of her unconscious mind to the company at large. Back and forth she weaves, clutching a bottle of Tuborg, and addressing herself to the position of women in Denmark, the role of the presidency in American life, the state of Danish church attendance. Most particularly her monologue concerns the race question—which she has worked up into

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a simple but basic routine: blackwhitewhiteblack (full stop); whiteblackblackwhite (full stop); I am white and you are black; you are black and I am white (full stop); blackhairblackeyesblackskin (full stop); blondehairblueeyeswhiteskin (full stop). Fearful of impending violence we look around, only to discover that no one is paying very much attention. The object of her address, a South African Negro of surpassingly gentle demeanor, dressed in a white skiing sweater, eyes her now and then with amusement which changes to mild concern as she shows signs of falling on her face. Eventually her voice is stilled and she disappears in quest of her odd destiny somewhere into the darkness of the club. The tempo of life in the corridor has by this time speeded up appreciably; there is a brisk parade to and from the men’s room, now and then the owner glides by swiftly, cloaked in a mysterious Northern melancholy, looking more like a divinity student than a jazz impresario. Fragments of mysteriously signifi cant conversations hang in the air: “ . . . I didn’t mean to push the kid—I didn’t know he was a musician.” The corridor has gradually become thronged with people, clearly the insiders, more than casual celebrants of the rite in progress: wives, mistresses, friends of the musicians; amateur photographers, amateur tape-recording buffs, amateur hi-fi buffs; and, in a separate category, the pretty girls who are to be seen in analogous clubs all over the face of the earth, drawn thereto by the same force that draws the salmon upstream, the lemmings to the sea, the moth to the flame. In Copenhagen, though, there appears to be more than the usual number of them, and they are more than usually pretty and more than usually cool. The group does not remain intact, but keeps dispersing and reassembling as one or another of its members is lured back through the doorway, drawn by some change in the sound issuing from the next room. Now and then the current is reversed when one of the musicians leaves the band­ stand and passes through the corridor on his way to the dressing room or the kitchen. At such times there is to be discerned a kind of collective yearning in his direction. The heads of the pretty girls seem to be bending on their stalks. “ Is it always like this?” I ask Jack Lind. He observes that the imminent arrival of Duke Ellington in Copenhagen seems to have increased the vibrations somewhat, though the atmosphere at the Mont­ martre is seldom workaday. The following morning, in quest of further information, we go to the American Art Gallery, which, surprisingly enough, is run by Americans. We are welcomed by Walter Steinberg, assistant to the owner, whose observations abound in that brisk economy characteristic of Americans living abroad. “ It’s a cool country,” he says, “ the climate is cool and the women are cool and the cops walk around with their hands behind their backs.” Concerning that Kierkegaardian melancholy allegedly in the air,

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he is willing to concede that the Danes—the women in particular—make a pretense of bumping themselves off, but most of the time they do not succeed. His reasons for being so far from home are extremely simple: “ I like sex better than sunshine,” he reports winningly, with a smile which, on anyone but a boy from Philadelphia of “ a very religious family,” would be described as a satyr’s. For weightier observations he recommends us to Niels Holt, Danish anarchist and member of the avant-garde. The taxi pulls up before a house that looks familiar in some larger sense—which is to say that if it were in New York it would most likely be found around Eighth Street and Third Avenue. We mount a flight of steps and are met at the door by a slight, wiry man who bears a startling resemblance to George Bernard Shaw. Bidding us enter, he hands us each a pair of sandals, urging us to leave our shoes at the door. My heart sinks—but there is nothing for it. The house rule is not to be broken. Fainthearted, I add my shoes to the collection on the floor and flap along behind our host to a large airy room lined with paintings. There are no chairs or tables—rather two platforms of approximately equal height deployed at opposite ends of the room. The first is smooth and bare and serves as a table; the second is a kind of sandbox arrangement lined with a shaggy Finnish rug and apparently serves for recreation. I perch with great discomfort on the edge of the fur-lined sandbox while the Danish artistic scene begins to unfold. Within moments, the old familiar motifs are heard in the room and I am seized by that sensation of déjà vu which, by the time we have reached Copenhagen, has attained hallucinatory proportions. Everything we hear we have heard before with certain varia­ tions; though it is only we, custodians of all those talks in diverse rooms in the late afternoon all over Europe, who are in a position to know it. Gradually all the familiar themes are sounded—the enhancement of con­ sciousness which is the final goal, the new attitude toward certain drugs, the importance of “ happenings” as a form which involves the spectator. Now and then, the stately rhythms of some Latin term are to be heard, for in the course of our progress north, the straightforward longing of our friends at Finch’s for oblivion has come to be replaced by a more scientific spirit; so that we have grown familiar by now with Cannabis Sativa for morning-glory seeds and marijuana. These twice-told tales are soothing as is the beautiful late-afternoon sunlight of the North. But what is there for an anarchist to do in Copenhagen, where there are no slums, no poverty, no unemployment and not even a bourgeoisie to épater, for the ladies on shopping tours are all smoking little black cigars. “ Within five years,” says Niels, “ Denmark will be a police state.” It is a showstopper. Is it one of those odd Scandinavian jokes beyond the reach of outsiders? No, it is all meant seriously and he ticks off supporting

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evidence: the treatment of the Greenlanders in Denmark; the necessity for passports when crossing the border; the existence of police records—and, finally, the ominous passivity of the Danes as shown by their refusal to cross against traffic lights even when no traffic is in sight. I make a pretense of arguing the case, but my heart is not really in it, for I am overwhelmed suddenly by a great tenderness for the rebels of Denmark who must look so far for something to rebel against. In the course of the next few days it becomes clear that in the air of Copenhagen there is a faint longing—if not precisely for disaster, then at least for drama. It is all very pleasant, easy, permissive, reasonable. If the air in Berlin is so thick with tension you can almost feel it as a palpable presence, the air in Copenhagen seems correspondingly thin; it does not seem altogether fair that the industrious, plodding Germans should perpet­ ually be summoned to some catastrophic rendezvous with history, while the Danes—who really look the part, who are so patently cut out for high deeds—should be, so to speak, all dressed up with no place to go. Perhaps that is why they go to the Montmartre and perhaps that is why the Negroes come to Copenhagen. The relationship is reciprocal: the Negroes supply in their persons and in their music the drama—the Danes supply the peace. Ed Reeves, who is on the staff of the Chicago Daily Defender, drinks tomato juice at the Drop-Inn, being hung over from the Ellington concert the night before. “ This city is at least eight hundred years old,” he says. “ You’ve had a joint going for eight hundred years, there’s nothing to get startled about—they’ve seen and done everything twice. There’s an attrac­ tion of light for dark, dark for light—so what?” Jo Banks, formerly of Chicago, now of Copenhagen, photographer, proprietor of the Purple Door, while stroking a Siamese cat, assays a series of descriptive facts which gradually fall into cadences—on the subject of hip: “ Hip was a word used to describe anyone who was able to survive with stature and the respect of his immediate environment, in a difficult and often contrariwise world. . . . Hip meant not a clever lawyer, or a man who was skilled as a poet. It meant he was knowledgeable and aware of the manipulations needed to live on the fringes of the law Perhaps a great deal outside of the law/ He knew at what time of the day he could get a pot of greens/ He could look at his watch,/that he perhaps did not buy/and tell you what time the patrolman was coming around. . . ./ He could make a car start without a key/ He had certain amatory successes/ He could do the shag or the Lindy hop/ Hip: meaning to be aware/ Hip was an exalted area of thought, a way of relating to the world

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On Bohemia In that period of space and time and history a hip cat was one who found a way to live outside the social norm It could be that a person was legitimate and hip/ But this was a jewel beyond compare. . . . The data-gathering process that produced the hipster was not to be found in the field of legitimacy. . . ./ Then time passed and hip changed its meaning/ As has been the case with most jive words, it crossed the borderline of color And its original gamy flavor became dispersed. . . .

But the last word on hip comes from Matty Peters, of the fabled Peters Sisters Trio, toast of the Folies-Berg ère and points East and West. We eat, yes, chitlins at her house (“ call it lower intestinal tract in the magazine, honey . . .” ) in Copenhagen, and drink Scotch; we listen to stories about the old days threaded through by fabled names; we listen to the records of Moms Mabley; we are— right there, only to discover it doesn’t matter anymore. That was in another country. A copy of the Paris Herald Tribune lies on the table. Five Hundred Negroes Arrested in Selma, Alabama, says the headline. “ Who the hell cares about whatever happened to hip,” says Matty. “ Why don’t you write about that instead. . . . ” We had started at Finch’s and we ended up at Matty Peters’; we had begun with the new and arrived back at the point of departure. All during the journey there was that same contrast to be seen. The older generation: adventurers come to port, some even in quiet, lamplit rooms lined with books. Still cool, still with it, still conscious. That was old-style hip. The old were with it, the young are out of it. There are, to be sure, certain similarities: there was pot then and there is pot now, but then it was a means to some other end and now it is become an end in itself. Follow the pot, said the girl at the Dom, and we did—to find post-hip or para-hip or beyond-hip or hip-hypostasized, the moment of awareness turned inward upon itself in rapt endless contemplation. We found them first in London, thinking we had stumbled on an accidental enclave only to discover, as we proceeded on, that these enclaves were to be found in every city, headquarters of what could be called the marijuana culture, with institutions, an ideology and an ethic of its own. And the inhabitants of these outposts, despite their differences of origin, have in common a curious stoicism, combined with courage—the courage of desperadoes without their passion. (Penny, Graham ’s girl friend, as fragile as a bird, who looked like the smallest dancer in the ballet class, spent three months “ on the road,” wandering the English countryside—a stray waif lost from the High School of Performing Arts with her long black stockings, her bohemian hair, her immense carryall. “ Were you

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ever scared?” I asked her. “ I suppose I w as,” she replied, “ but I don’t remem ber.” ) Who are these kids? What do they mean? Before returning to New York, we stop in London—in accordance with the old mystic principle of closing the circle. One late Saturday afternoon we find ourselves accordingly before a greystone house on Wimpole Street, waiting to be admitted to the office of Dr. R.D. Laing, a Scottishborn psychoanalyst. He is reputed to be a pioneer in the study of con­ sciousness, in the use of drugs and other kinds of radical therapy for the cure of mental illness. Along the way we have frequently heard him referred to as a member of the New Wave of psychoanalytic practice. Dr. Laing comes to the door. He is a slender, strikingly good-looking man in his late thirties or early forties who looks at first sight more like an actor or a musician than a doctor. After a few moments one grows aware of a faint air of mystification about him—something abstracted, self­ enclosing in his manner. He seems to be listening for something from within, though now and then he breaks in upon his own concentration to turn outward toward the visitor. Would we like to see what the office of a London psychoanalyst looks like? he asks, a trifle sardonically. We say we would. He beckons, and we follow him down a corridor at the end of which is a simple square room that could be the spare room in someone’s house in the country. A simple cot with a corduroy spread thrown over it serves for the psychoanalytic couch. In one corner is a desk. Chairs are scattered here and there in no particular order. Leaning against the wall, with his hands in his pockets, he talks about the room. The objects, he explains, are deployed in such a way as to make of it a kind of improvisa tional theatre where the encounter between doctor and patient can take place spontaneously, along no previously ordained lines. His dark Glasgow accent lends all he says a portentous quality, so that he seems to be evoking—while describing the simple arrangements in the room—some new order of human encounter as well. What about that box of Kleenex on the table?, I ask. Does a lot of crying go on in the room? “ Unfortu nately,” he replies, “ there aren’t many tears left in the world—are there?” He is still leaning against the wall, looking up with a mocking, enigmatic smile. He crosses over to the desk and from a bottom drawer takes out a sheet of cardboard that he hands to me; on it is traced an emblem of three interlocking circles, all of which contain within themselves a series of spirals that look like circles in motion. What does it look like to me?, he asks. Like Jacques Tati on a bicycle, I reply. He laughs—then explains that it is an ancient Druidic symbol, and I can keep it if I wish. Suddenly, he turns brisk—isn’t it time to have lunch? He puts on a sheepskin jacket, which makes him look more than ever like an actor en route to a reading,

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and we tear off in his Minicar at an incredible rate to a small Cypriot restaurant nearby. At the restaurant he once more grows moody and preoccupied; he does not particularly want to talk—or in any case not about subjects like youth or drugs or their relation to one another. His silence is an implied reproof— though against what I am not entirely sure, for he seems to have forgotten about me and to be off on some train of thought of his own. He drinks Retsina and looks off into the distance, while I wonder just what was the answer I had come looking for. Abruptly, he breaks the silence, seeming suddenly—under the influence of the wine perhaps—to have come to a decision. Do I know what a mantra is?, he asks. I reply that I know vaguely that it has some Eastern associations, but I am not too clear on what they are. With that same enigmatic, slightly mocking air, he begins to expound the doctrine of the mantra—a mystic paragraph in Hindu writings which, mastered with sufficient concentration, invests the initiate with new powers. A sculptor in London, he mentions matter of factly, was able through having recited a mantra 300,000 times to turn from homosexual to heterosexual. He returns to the wine. Did he, a psychoanalyst, really believe that such transformation could occur via the imbibing of a mantra?, I ask. He replies, straight and serious, no longer mockingly, that he does. It seems a paradox—a Freudian analyst who is at the same time a devotee of Eastern mysticism. What precisely occurs, for example, I ask, when one recites a mantra 300,000 times? “ You begin to feel a quickening in yourself,” he replies. “ All of these things were known to other times and other cul­ tures—there are secrets incorporated, for example, in Zen and in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. All of these routes to new realms of experience from which we have cut ourselves off. We stumble along, dim, half blind,” (Suddenly I remember the boy in Copenhagen with a rapt open face who described what it felt like to eat two hundred morning glory seeds: “ It was as though my eyes,” he said, “ had been washed—I could suddenly see.” ) I recall all those quiet rooms full of huddled, somnolent children that we have seen along the way—could they be described as in pursuit of new areas of experience? The doctor replies quietly that they could: “ These kids are trying to break through the new realms . . . to experience inner space and tim e.” He relates what they are looking for, too, to some larger purpose. “ Exploration of inner space would dissolve artifices of national boundaries, color, all of that. These kids are not interested in them—when they turn on in this way through drugs or deep breathing, they actually experience themselves as being brothers one to another. . . . ” The discussion has taken a curious turn. To the observer they seem entirely unrelated to any sort of community—the kids. But as he talks

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about them, they come to seem like an army of innocents attempting to make good in their own generation what has been destroyed by previous ones. “ There’s probably a biological necessity to discover it,” he con cludes. “ We’re all fingers of the one hand. As one loves oneself, so one loves one’s neighbor. The only possible alternative to destroying ourselves is to experience ourselves as myriad fragments of the one reality. . . . ” In the failing light of a late January afternoon, the doctor looks like a man who has come back from a long journey. For one who has not himself made that journey, there is no way of judging or understanding it. Yet it cannot be denied that for a moment there, in that Cypriot restaurant, one longed to take his word for it. Like most ideologies, the ideology of the higher consciousness is on the tedious side when its benefits are advocated rationally. But when it reveals itself as a mystic vision of a mystic unity, it is more compelling than one likes to admit. Back in New York, the old certainties and the old distinctions reassert themselves: the two-party system, the spirit of rational inquiry, the saving mediocrity of the everyday, the ego wrested from the very teeth of the id. Yet the ancient Druidic symbol given to me by Dr. R.D. Laing, affixed to the wall, spirals endlessly, enigmatically, mockingly, always in motion, through an ancient optical illusion: Jacques Tati on a bicycle with an army of kids on the handlebars. Where are they off to? What will they find at the end of that journey to “ new realms” of experience? Is there a chance— as the doctor said—that they will come back from that country with a message that could save the rest of us? Having almost succeeded in doing itself in, has the time come for the West to take a lesson from the East? Or is that bicycle taking them all to some jeweled land of no return from which there is no message but silence, the silence of beatitude, or of madness? Or yet again, in that final dissolution of barriers which is envisioned in the furthest reaches of the mystical unity—is madness itself only another, no less valid form of consciousness?

A Strange and Lonely Land: North Beach, 1961 Ralph J. Gleason, 1961

A full U. S. Grant beard, luxurious and flecked with grey, provided Bill the Beatnik with a supplementary income during his several years in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, home of the original Beats. Photographed—for a fee—by a tourist against the wall of the CoExistence Bagel Shop, the Coffee Gallery, or any telephone pole on Grant Avenue, Bill was the living symbol of modern American urban dissent, proof positive to the folks back home that the tourist had seen a Beatnik in the flesh. Last year Bill went to Veterans’ Hospital for repairs. He came back to the Beach this spring, his beard a hospital casualty. But it didn’t matter really because, for Bill, North Beach is now a strange and lonely land. The tourists still throng the streets, but the regulars have gone like the ferries from the Bay. “ What happened? Everybody’s split,” Bill complained on his first night back On the Scene: “ All the joints are closed. W here’s everybody?” Now beardless, Bill is no longer even in demand as a model. “ There’s nothing to do but sit in somebody’s car and dig the tourists,” he says resignedly. Bill’s dilemma symbolizes what has happened to North Beach, locale of Beat Generation literature from Kerouac and Ginsberg to The Connection. The Beatnik in his native form has all but disappeared from its alleys and cafes, like the Model T Ford from the roads of the U.S. When you see a vintage Model T now, it’s owned by a vintage car club member. Any surviving Beatnik belongs to the entrepreneurial minority making a living off the tourists, selling sandals or running guided tours for Little Old Ladies from Dubuque. Or they are amateur Beats, fleeing part-time a dull office. The situation illustrates a sort of Gresham’s Law of sociology which was once articulated by a New Orleans madame named Countess Willi 766

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Piazza. Some forty years ago she dramatized a not entirely different amateur-professional dichotomy when she remarked: “ the country club girls are ruining my business.” Madame Piazza’s territory of nonconform­ ity, Storyville, and Beatnikland met the same fate. They attracted too much publicity and too many amateurs—and the cops closed them down. The weekend commuters to Bohemia and the tourists increased in strength until the San Francisco police reacted. North Beach, like Storyville, had, in the words of the Beat hipsters, “ blown its cool.” The great diaspora began like chunks of ice slipping away from an iceberg entering warm waters, a few at a time and then a grand rush. They went to Big Sur, to Monterey, down the coast to Santa Monica and Venice: westward. They moved to other neighborhoods in San Francisco—the Fillmore, Potrero and Russian Hills. They went upcoast to Bolinas and inland to the Sierra. Mostly they went to New York. Kerouac and Ginsberg had already left by the time the tourists and amateurs took over (though both returned for brief visits in 1960). Bob Kaufman, known as Bomkauf and author of the Abominist Manifesto, went to New York; Pierre deLattre, the Beatnik priest, whose Bread-andWine Mission was a landmark but is now a laundromat (“ Pierre got tired of being a housemother to the Beats, on call any hour of the night” ), went to the country to write a novel. Grant Avenue now is as dark and lonesome at night as any neighborhood street. The Cassandra (Zen soup—20 cents) is a record store. The Place is an artgoods shop; the Coffee Gallery is open only occasionally (“ They have events now,” an old timer says disgustedly); the Co-Existence Bagel Shop is a sandals-and-jewelry shop, and the Jazz Cellar is dark and empty. The end was really heralded when the whole of Grant Avenue burst into brief flame last year with a series of tourist traps. The Surplus Store added berets and turtleneck sweaters to its staples of sweatshirts, blue jeans and GI clothing. A leather goods shop offered “ sandals for beatnik dogs.” Henri Lenoir hired Hube-the-Cube Leslie—one of the authentic originals, who in recent years had existed at survival level by serving as a human guinea pig at hospital laboratories—to sit in the window of the Cafe Vesuvio, an earnest of the cafe’s authenticity. The City Lights Bookstore, owned by poet-businessman Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and featuring an extraordinary collection of paperback books and magazines, began to remain open to two and three in the morning. “ The tourists buy books all night,” says Shig Mauro, whose corduroy jacket and full beard behind the counter fit the late-night bookstore mood. The Place, which originated Blabbermouth Night, where the customers could rise and speak at will, was the first to topple. Leo Kerkorian, the owner, recalls it as “ the kind of a joint where I had a bartender once took

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off his pants and worked all night with no pants. Some places he couldn’t do that but in my place it was all right.” The Co-Existence Bagel Shop lasted until this winter when, under continual police harassment (once a cop even ripped down a poem from the window), its proprietor, Jay Hoppe, universally known as Jay Bagel, gave up. Jay Bagel is only one of the colourful names of Beats. Others are Reverend Bob, Dr. Fric-Frac, Linda Lovely, Barbara Nookie, Mad Marie, Lady Joan, Big Rose, Groover Wailin’, Taylor Maid, and The Wig. “ I ’m tired of dealing with a psychopathic police departm ent,” Hoppe said when he closed the Bagel Shop and left town. Hoppe also credits the police with being the basic cause of the others leaving. “ Bob Kaufman gave up when he was arrested on his birthday,” Hoppe says. “ Everybody got tired of being rousted by the cops. In New York City, San Francisco poets are treated like visiting celebrities.” But the tourists still come; and Bill the Beatnik, a vestigial remnant of a departed era, alternates between parked cars in the day and the window of the grocery store on Broadway, across from the Expense Account Row of restaurants, at night. “ They got TV in here,” he says, “ and I can watch it with one eye and catch the Passing Parade with the other. But it’s not like it was. All the old-timers are gone and the cops never bother the tourists.”

We Few, We Happy Few, We Happy Bohemians: A Memoir of the Culture Before the Counterculture Michael Harrington , 1972 In a frenzy of youthful discovery, I found the seacoast of Bohemia on the banks of the Mississippi River in the late 1940’s, when I was a Jesuiteducated son of the Irish middle class. The port of entry was a bar called, obviously enough, Little Bohemia, on a side street just above the levee in St. Louis. I had already learned enough modernist lessons that, to the horror of sober burghers, I used to push Alexander Calder’s mobile at the Art Museum to set it dancing. So it was an epiphany to join the painters and the other regulars in the back of the room at Little Bohemia where they talked about art and psychoanalysis and the motherland of Greenwich Village. There was a business and warehouse district outside and, of a summer’s evening, the streets seen through the door were always lonely and deserted, perfect decor for beer and romanticism and the lyric violin passage from Falla’s “ El Amor Brujo” on the jukebox. Sometimes there was a party later on in an apartment painted black, with mattresses instead of furniture, and no doors, not even on the bathroom. I had encountered Bohemia in about the one hundred and twentieth year of its existence and on the eve of its death. Bohemia could not survive the passing of its polar opposite and precondition, middle-class morality. Free love and all-night drinking and art for art’s sake were consequences of a single stern imperative: thou shalt not be bourgeois. But once the bour­ geoisie itself became decadent—once businessmen started hanging nonobjective art in the boardroom—Bohemia was deprived of the stifling atmosphere without which it could not breathe. The point is not simply that executives have co-opted modernist painting (particularly when they saw a chance to make a capital gain on the art market). That is only one symptom of a much more profound sea change. 769

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All of the middle-class verities—that God is in his heaven, Adam Smith’s invisible hand kindly guides the market and the nuclear family is the one true way to live, to cite but a few—are either in doubt or in shambles. An entire culture is now more lost than the Lost Generation ever was. That is why the counterculture freaks falling off the margin of society have such a difficult task. They have no Babbitt to tell them who they are not; they lack that solemn sense of anti-values which was at the center of Bohemian irreverence. For Bohemia, even as it dressed with “ aggressive political untidiness” (the phrase is Isherwood’s), was always a conserva­ tive place. It appeared in France in the 1830’s during the middle class monarchy of Louis-Philippe when bankers ruled for the first time in their own name. Baudelaire wrote of those years that as riches came to appear as the final goal of the individual, beauty and charity disappeared and debauchery was the only decent alternative. So the original Bohemians— the French thought that all gypsies came from Bohemia and that artists were becoming gypsylike—protested outlandishly in the name of artistic tradition against a boorish ruling class. That is why Baudelaire, as he smoked hashish, thought of himself as an aristocrat, a dandy in an age of upstarts. Never has immorality been so moralistic. From Baudelaire’s time until a few years ago there were all kinds of Bohemias: of aristocrats, workers, American Negroes, frauds, geniuses, dilettantes on swinging tours of poverty, and many more. Bohemia was generally left-wing in France and sometimes right-wing in Germany ; it was a bitter necessity for the outcast artists in late-nineteenth century Paris and a lark for Mabel Dodge as she featured Wobblies like Big Bill Haywood and anarchists like Emma Goldman in her Lower Fifth Avenue salon before World War I. At the University of Chicago in 1948 there was even a graduate student Bohemia, spread out through a decaying interracial neighborhood with appropriately seedy rooms for rent (it has since been urban-renewed into academic gentility). There were bookstores, like the Red Door, which sold the littlest of little magazines, and campus organi­ zations would raise funds by showing obscure classics of the surrealist films or documentaries on the Bolshevik Revolution. There were, of course, bars, those perpetual town meetings of any Bohemia, where blacks and whites drank together a generation ahead of the fashion and sang about the Spanish Civil War rather than of happy college days. One couple I knew kept the complete works of Trollope in the bathroom for browsing and the husband regularly broke into stream-of-consciousness monologues about the most intimate details of his marriage while his wife listened serenely. Everyone I knew at Chicago had a poem or a play or a novel in process and one history student was carefully and falsely documenting his life so

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that, if he ever became famous, he would drive his biographers mad. Lindy, the first girl whom I dated there, was sufficiently typical of the place. She lived with relatives and, after listening to romantic music— Sibelius’ “ Swan of Tuonela” was a favorite—typed her novels in the bathroom in the middle of the night. Her books were primarily about people at the university, dealt candidly with their sex lives, and sometimes used real names, a fact which enlivened meetings of the Creative Writing Club where manuscripts were read. It also brought a letter from a New York editor who rejected her novel but invited her to dinner. When we agreed, with some unpleasantness, to stop seeing one another, she threat­ ened to write a novel about me. Several years later I learned that Lindy had killed herself. But at the time that dark denouement and the ambiguities which were to afflict the rest of us were not yet apparent. We practiced the established rites of nonconformity of the academic underground found in places like Antioch, Sarah Lawrence, Bard, Black Mountain, Reed, and Bennington. The night most of the M aster’s candidates in English literature stood on mailboxes along Fifty-fifth Street could thus be explained as a not particularly imaginative exercise in collegiate Dada. But what made Chicago unique was that all this was done under the patronage of Aristotle and Aquinas. Robert Hutchins, the guiding genius of the university, abolished inter­ collegiate football in the Thirties and, with one stroke, appealed to that tiny minority who saw college, not as a four-year beer bust or a middleclass trade school, but as a Left Bank of the mind where ideas, like the poems and paintings of Bohemia, were their own excuse for being. Hutch­ ins then added insult to injury by sponsoring an Aristotelian-Thomist revival in the middle of a Depression when most fashionable thinkers were turning toward a superficial Marxism. There were, to be sure, some people at Chicago who were studying law and even business administration. And by an incredible irony the Manhattan Project conducted the first controlled nuclear fission in the history of mankind at Stagg Field; the end of intercollegiate football had facilitated the creation of the atom bomb. Yet the dominant mood at the university was Aristotelian-Thomist Bohemian and there were fierce and beery discussions of whether Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral was really a play according to the criteria of The Poetics. As long as there was an iconoclastic regard for standards and a contempt for middle-class utilitarianism, Bohemia could assimilate any content, the revolutionary as well as the conservative, the romantic and the realist, and, at Chicago in the late 1940’s, even the Graeco-Medievalist. One December evening in 1949, I was walking home to cram for a crucial exam the next day and bought a copy of Joseph Conrad’s Victory on the way, a book which had nothing to do with the test or any other course of

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mine. When I got to my room I decided to read a few pages of the novel before I got down to the serious business of studying. At four in the morning I finished Conrad’s poignant account of how a man cannot hide himself from life and love. That was the spirit of Chicago in those days; there were even some students who waited for months to go to the Registrar’s to find out their grades on the grounds that a professor’s opinion of their work was an irrelevance. And there was a rage to talk, to discuss, to articulate, that surged through bars and drugstores and love affairs. Our Aristotelian-Thomist Bohemia was not, however, a bizarre Shangrila in the Midwest. It was also a part of a major cultural movement in the America of the Thirties and Forties. There was no basis for a right-wing Bohemia in this country because there was no feudal past with which the opponents of middle-class morality could identify. Instead there was the spiritual domination of white, small­ town, Protestant America, the rule, not of a bourgeoisie which was bad enough, but, in Mencken’s word, of a booboisie, which was worse. So in the years before World War I the political and cultural revolutionaries were comrades. In Greenwich Village there was a promiscuous confraternity of dissidence: of free love and free verse, socialism and anarchism, John Reed’s radical journalism and Eugene O’Neill’s realistic theatre, of pain­ ters from the Ashcan School and muckrakers, of Max Eastm an’s Masses with its anti-capitalist cartoons and Margaret Anderson’s Little Review with its imagist poems and Ezra Pound’s latest European discovery. But by the Thirties all that had changed. The Stalinization of commu­ nism had poisoned the political as well as the literary left. Indeed, it turned out that Babbitt and Stalin had quite similar views on the arts: they wanted symphonies that could be whistled and paintings that told stories with morals. They only differed as to what nonartistic values art should serve, the one favoring Midwestern boosterism, the other Russian totalitarianism. It was a group of intellectuals around Partisan Review who, in keeping with Bohemian tradition, rose up against the new Philistines of the left in the name of high standards. They simultaneously defended Marxism in politics and nonrepresentationalism in the arts; they admired T. S. Eliot, the self-proclaimed classicist, royalist and Anglo-Catholic, and Leon Trot­ sky, the organizer of the October Revolution. Some years later, in 1952, I got a glimpse of the twilight of that Partisan Review world. There was a party at Dwight Macdonald’s apartm ent in an old brownstone on the eastern fringe of the Village. There was intense literary political talk, but the feature of the evening was a tiny opera company under the direction of Noah Greenberg—once the leader of a Trotskyist faction in the seaman’s union, later the founder of the Pro

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Musica, a group which specialized in Renaissance music—which per­ formed Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in the living room. This synthesis, in which the lions and lambs of Marxism and high culture lay down together, was breaking up even as I observed it at that party. For instance, Macdon ald, who had edited the anarcho-pacifist magazine, Politics, was now writing for The New Yorker. But it had dominated the best of American intellectual life in the Thirties and Forties and it was one reason why the Bohemian style and Aristotelian-Thomist content at Chicago were not so contradictory after all. I was not looking for historical trends on the evening in 1949 when I first arrived from Chicago—then, as always, the second city—put down my bags, and went out to find Greenwich Village. I wandered in and out of a few bars around Sheridan Square and then drifted into a place called Cafe Bohemia on Barrow Street. It was in a lesbian phase (the police and organized crime, which jointly supervised such things in the Village, rarely allowed a homosexual haunt to run for more than a few years) and, like all straight young men from the Middle West, I found that fascinating. I got into conversation with an attractive young woman, but then her girl friend appeared, angry with my heterosexual poaching. “ You don’t belong here, buddy,” she said. “ You’re a San Remo type.” The next night I went to the Remo and found out that she was right. The San Remo was an Italian restaurant at the uneasy intersection of Greenwich Village and Little Italy, with bad, yellowed paintings over the bar and the E ntr’Acte from Wolf-Ferrari’s Jewels o f the Madonna on the jukebox. In 1949 it was the united front of the Village. There were a few old Bohemians, like Maxwell Bodenheim, the poet and novelist who dated back to the pre-World War I ferment in Chicago and was now a shouting, mumbling, drunken, hollow-eyed memory of himself. (Bodenheim and his last wife, Ruth, were to be murdered by a psychotic a few years later.) There were seamen on the beach, the most important single contingent from working-class Bohemia. Some of them had fought in Spain; one had been a leading Communist in the National Maritime Union, but he broke from the Party and was later expelled from the union. They all combined two seemingly antagonistic life-styles: the militant and the vagabond. At that time, most of the radical seamen were being driven out of their jobs by the loyalty program and had plenty of time to drink and reminisce about Spain in the Remo. Among the other regulars there were heterosexuals on the make; homosexuals who preferred erotic integration to the exclusively gay bars then on Eighth Street; Communists, Socialists and Trotskyists; potheads; writers of the older generation, like James Agee, and innovators of the future like Allen Ginsberg, and Julian Beck and Judith Malina, who were to found the Living Theatre. There was only one really important

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element from the Village missing: the painters, like de Kooning, Klein and Pollock, who at that moment were taking over the artistic leadership of the world from Paris, along with some of the Black Mountain Poets. The Remo was, of course, interracial, as far as that was possible in the late Forties. One night after I had been in residence for about a year I brought the fiancée of a friend of mine in St. Louis to see the “ real” Village in the San Remo. As we walked into the bar I could feel her stiffen. It was not because there were obvious homosexuals, both male and female, or because some of the girls were barefoot or there was a hum of four-letter words. “ Are those two white girls over there,” she asked with some agitation, and oblivious of the exotic flora and fauna around her, “ on a date with those Negroes they’re sitting with?” There were only a few remittance men among us, so the strategies for survival varied: over the years I worked doing articles for The Columbia Encyclopedia, as a writer trainee for L ife, as a soda jerk hiring out by the day, as a machine operator in a shop owned by socialist friends where the bosses and the workers discussed the Russian Revolution at lunch break, as a functionary in a civil-liberties organization, and as a free-lance writerresearcher for a foundation. When one was forced into the workday world there was always the anticipation of the joys of socialized Bohemianism to come: unemployment insurance. I called my twenty-six weeks on the dole my Thomas E. Dewey Fellowship in honor of the Governor and spent it studying the Italian Renaissance. Later on one friend made some money on the side by appearing on the quiz show, “ The $64,000 Question,” and proved something about middle-class morality by being the only partici­ pant to quit when he found out that it was rigged. And there were crews of Village jocks, alcoholics and repatriated expatriates who provided the most raffish moving-van service in the world. The object was to avoid the routine of nine-to-five, to find a space in which to think, to write, perhaps to dribble away a life. In the afternoons the sweet smell of pot perfumed the balcony air of the Loew’s Sheridan, perhaps the only commercial movie house in New York where a passing reference to Leon Trotsky could provoke a small ovation. Sometimes the conversations literally lasted until dawn. Every night at the Remo, Tony, who ran the tiny after-hours joint in the rear of a luncheonette around the corner, came in for his ice and we sometimes followed him back at four in the morning. On Third Street there was another speak-easy, a marvelous demimonde of mobsters, call girls and transvestites. They charged $1.25 for a beer, the standard extortion in the Mafia bars of the period, so we used to sneak in a last bottle from the Remo under our coats and drink it while watching the customers, the best floor show in the Village. I remember one party with over a hundred people in a huge loft, all

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naked. The party was in honor of Winny, a striking black woman who, legend had it, had once indulged her penchant for public disrobing by boarding a Sixth Avenue bus in the nude. She had, of course, stripped to receive birthday greetings and it seemed to her guests that it was the gentlemanly and ladylike thing to follow her example. So it was that when the police arrived to check out a noise complaint they found a milling mass of drinking, chatting, naked people. In one of the most extreme demon­ strations of official aplomb I have ever witnessed they did not once refer to that extraordinary fact. But as they left the officer winked. At Winny’s party one could meet a good portion of the Bohemian cadre in New York. For the Village—and I stress now one of the crucial differences between Bohemia and the counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies—was small, organized on a human scale. Take a not untypical chain of circumstances. Through friends at the Remo (whom I still see from time to time, more than twenty years later) I met a young woman, Barbara Bank. She invited me to a party at Norman Mailer’s huge loft over on First Avenue where, only two years out of St. Louis and goggleeyed, I talked with writers and painters and gallery owners and even saw Marlon Brando. Mailer—and I mean no harm to his image as an enfant terrible—is one of the nicest men I have ever known, with a marvelous memory for names of young nobodys from St. Louis. In the world which he dominated I became friends with Dan Wolf and Ed Fancher, who were to found The Village Voice; met Susan Sontag, who was teaching philoso­ phy then, and the playwright, Maria Irene Fornes and the poet, Denise Levertov; and glimpsed visiting celebrities, like Alberto Moravia and William Styron, across the room at crowded parties. We were a handful of voluntary exiles from a middle class which itself was still fairly small. But then in the Sixties three major trends intersected: the post-World War II baby boom began to come of age; there was a relative affluence which gave the new armies of the young more economic independence than any generation in human history; and there was the near collapse of almost every institution of social control, including the church, the family and, for a significant number, the discipline of the labor market, where it was no longer true that he who does not work shall not eat. As a result, the freaks of the Sixties and Seventies came in hordes and rebelled in confusion against liberal permissiveness. The clothes, the hostility to middle-class values, were very much like those of Bohemia. But they were a mass movement on an uncharted social frontier; we, who preceded them by only ten or twenty years, had been a self-appointed saving remnant within the citadel of traditional banality. So Christopher Jencks was wrong when he wrote, “ Instead of one Greenwich Village in New York, populated by a handful of rebels from

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traditional homes, America developed scores of campus Villages populated by young people whose values were shaped by the ideals espoused by their liberal parents.” That is to miss one of the most crucial and Hegelian of truths about contemporary culture: that increases in quantity eventually become a change in quality, that a Bohemia that enrolls a good portion of a generation is no longer a Bohemia. My point, for reasons utterly beyond my control, is elitist. It could not, alas, have been otherwise. When the great majority of people were kept in the cultural darkness and the rulers were tasteless makers of money, the enclaves of art had to be the refuge of an outcast minority of aesthetic aristocrats even when some of them were starving. One of the virtues of that cruel necessity was that the Bohemian scale was intimate. To recog­ nize, and even celebrate, that fact is not to apologize for the outrageous maldistribution of economic, and therefore spiritual, resources which gave rise to it. A love of Renaissance painting and sculpture hardly makes one an accomplice of the Borgias. So it was good that, on a warm Sunday afternoon in the early Fifties when the folk singers were performing over by the fountain, I would know half of the people in Washington Square Park on sight. (In 1961 we even took on the police in the “ Folk Song Riots” to defend their right to sing.) The Village was large enough to have a sense of community, of society, and small enough for everyone to remain an individual. It is something else again—and not Bohemia—when hundreds of thousands of young people gather at a Woodstock Festival to listen to highly paid super-stars in commercialized and collectivized rites of liberation. That does not mean that I want to go back to the old injustices where the many were hungry and the happy few could be sensitive. I fought for the social programs which freed those young people to go to Woodstock and I do not think the laws we won went halfway far enough. But that does not change the fact that, in preparing the way for something utterly unprecedented, a mass counterculture, they destroyed the possibility of Bohemia. Do I romanticize that sheltered little nonconformist world of my youth? Here is William Gaddis’ bitter description of the San Remo in The Recog nitions: “ And by now they were at the door of the Viareggio [the Remo’s pen name in the novel], a small Italian bar of nepotistic honesty before it was discovered by the exotics. Neighborhood folk still came, in van­ quished numbers and mostly in the afternoon, before the two small dining rooms and the bar were taken over by the educated classes, an ill-dressed, underfed, overdrunken group of squatters with minds so highly developed that they were excused from good manners, tastes so refined in one direction that they were excused from having none in any other, emotions so cultivated that the only aberration was normality, all afloat here on

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sodden pools of depravity calculated only to manifest the pricelessness of what they were throwing away, the three sexes in two colors, a group of people all mentally and physically the wrong size.” Mary McCarthy was not quite so unflattering. She toured the Village for the New York Post in the Winter of 1950 and found the Remo to be an American Café de Flore. (The Flore was the cafe in Saint-Germain-desPres where Sartre and de Beauvoir held existentialist court right after World War II.) But still she did not find much substance in the Village, but only a place “ where young people throng for a few years before settling down to ‘real life,’ where taxis full of tourists pursue the pleasure-principle outside of ordinary time, as on a steamer, where bands of teen-age nihilists, outside of everything, from nowhere rove the streets like a potential mob, and where certain disabled veterans of life, art, and politics exercise mutal charity and philosophies all night long, as though already translated into the next world.” Gaddis and McCarthy were partly right and utterly wrong, having failed to understand one of the most crucial single truths about Bohemia. There were certainly “ overdrunken squatters” around the Village then even if the “ sodden pools of depravity” are a bit melodramatic. And there were “ disabled veterans of life, art, and politics.” But those things are obvious and inevitable. In Bohemia throughout its history the poseurs, the failures, and the frauds have always overwhelmingly outnumbered the serious artists. Théophile Gautier, that quintessential literary man of the age of Baudelaire, had identified one of the Remo types almost a century before Gaddis and McCarthy noticed him: “ In admiring beauty, he forgot to express it, and whatever he felt deeply, he believed that he had given form .” Indeed it is a cruel truth of the history of all art and literature that most would-be poets, writers and painters fail. The genuine man or woman of real talent is rare, the born genius rarer still. For every book that survives the merciless judgment of time, there are nine hundred and ninety-nine rotting unread in libraries and nine thousand and ninety-nine which were never written in the first place. It is thus an insight of no particular value to say that most of the conversations at the Remo were, at best, cultured superficialities and usually not even that good. It could not have been otherwise. And yet—here again the contrast with the counterculture is marked— our phoniness had high standards. We postured about the first-rate, about Proust and Joyce and Kafka, the later Beethoven quartets and Balanchine choreography, Marx and Lenin. So there was always the possibility that the sophisticated inanities could become serious and substantial, that one would hear or say a truth or even be incited to create. The proof is in the

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production. Over the years the people I knew in the Village worked to considerable effect. I think, for example, of the writers and performers I knew when I went to the White Horse, the Remo’s successor, every night for more than ten years. At first glance the saga of the Horse in those days confirms the worst fears of Gaddis and McCarthy. It was a party that lasted longer than a decade. In the early Fifties it was the haunt of Irish longshoremen, Catholic liberals and radicals, socialists and Communists. Norman Mailer used to hold Sunday afternoons there for a varied assortment of writers like Vance Bouijaily, Calder Willingham and William Styron. A little later on Dylan Thomas began telling audiences that he drank there and every English major in the Northeast corridor began to make a pilgrimage to the White Horse. Still later on it became a rollicking hangout for folk singers. It was a party in the sense that on any given night, or week, or month, you knew you would see the same people. In the middle of that public bar, even when it was jammed on a post-Dylan Thomas weekend, there was an invisible space which the regulars inhabited like a London club. Pretty girls could enter it rather easily, men much less so, and the faces changed slowly. We had our tabs, our phone messages, even our mail, and 1961 was not that different from 1951. So the White Horse fulfilled a classic Bohemian function; it was, to borrow from a German writer, “ a kind of organization of disorganization.” The women were sexually liberated in the Twenties’ and Thirties’ sense of the word: they recognized their own erotic needs and slept with men whom they loved, or just liked. If a couple left the Horse together at closing time it was taken as probable that they would share a bed; if they drank together two nights in a row they achieved the social status of—to use the period’s favorite cliche—a relationship. In the early Fifties you would sometimes meet a Wilhelm Reichian in search of the ultimate orgasm—though it often seemed to me that the Reichian girls were trying to shout down their own tightness and timidity with incantations to the uncontrollable rhythms of life. But for all the casual intimacy of those days the scene was not depraved or sluttish and it actually produced a fair number of marriages. Now, of course, our daring experimentation is the sexual orthodoxy of college students. For some that ten-year party was a moral disaster, an amusing waste of life. (Our own legend had it, with some truth I suspect, that one group moved from their table in the front room of the Horse to the South of France without interrupting their conversation and musical beds.) For others it was, just as Mary McCarthy said, an episode, a prelude to entering the world of “ real life.” For instance I used to drink in the White Horse with Bernard Cornfield, then a socialist, later the ill-fated financial

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genius of Investors Overseas Services. But there were also a significant number for whom the Horse was a place to relax after serious work. I think of just a few of them, some regulars, some occasionals, all part of the scene; there were writers like Mailer, James Baldwin, Dan Wakefield and Richard Farina; musicians and performers like The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, Bob Dylan, Carolyn Hester, David Amram; poets like Joel Oppenheimer and Delmore Schwartz. I know my own case best. I was in the Horse during more than ten years every night I was in New York. As the people of Königsberg were said to set their clocks by Immanuel K ant’s walks, you would see me, punctually dissolute, appear on weeknights at midnight and on weekends at one o ’clock. At two in the morning you could usually observe me engaged in an intense conversation of no great importance and at a distance I must have seemed one of Gaddis’ squatters. But if I slept until eleven or noon every day, I worked for twelve hours after I got up, reading, writing or doing socialist organizing. The late night was a gregarious, potentially erotic release from a disciplined existence. The world of nine-to-five was a routine; of twelve-to-twelve a choice. There were obviously a good number of people in the Village following the same kind of internal schedule on the inside of a seemingly discombob ulated life. In addition to the portion I’ve already mentioned there were Dan Wolf and Ed Fancher who created a new style of journalism at The Village Voice; José Quintero, Ellen Stewart and Ted Mann, who were part of the Off-Broadway theatre renaissance; and the painters one would see around the Cedar—Pollock, de Kooning, Klein, Rivers—who helped make New York the art center of the world. And there was Dylan Thomas. The White Horse was his home away from home when he was in New York and, from the point of view of the regulars, the fame he brought to it was calamitous with crowds. Old Ernie, the owner, even stopped giving out the chess sets. Anyone with a vision of the poet divinely drunk upon the midnight might ponder Thomas’ final evenings at the Horse. He was a slobbering, incomprehensible man slumped over the table and surrounded by a retinue of sycophants and young girls who wanted to go to bed with immortality. (“ These little maggots,” he had written in a denunciation of his own Bohemianism in 1934, “ are my companions for most of the tim e.” ) That last night at the Horse he was half carried out and taken to the Chelsea Hotel where he began to die the death he had been so long preparing for himself. Old Ernie took up a collection for Thomas’ widow and one longshoreman gave and another didn’t. “ W ho’s that for?” said the one who didn’t. “ O h,” his friend answered, “ some drunk who used to hang around here just died.” But the non-Bohemian world was not always as indifferent, or even

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tolerant, as those longshoremen. Malcolm Cowley was right in the Thirties to notice that the traditional American mores were being subverted and to argue that the destruction of middle-class mortality would mark the end of Bohemia. He was, however, a generation premature. In the late Forties and the Fifties the basic institution of American righteousness—belief in God, family and the holy destiny of the nation—were still intact. Old Ernie asked me one night if we couldn’t sing more of the radical songs in German and French rather than English so the other patrons couldn’t understand the words. It was less amusing on another night when a group of us sat singing labor songs in a working-class bar around the corner from the Horse. Eventually management phoned the police to protect our exit from a back door. We had persuaded the trade-union regulars there, not of our solidarity with them, but that we were Communists. And on a number of occasions during the Joe McCarthy years Irish working-class kids from the neighborhood made fist-swinging, chair-throw­ ing raids on the Horse. They used to scream that we were Commies and faggots, the latter epithet expressing their fury that we were always in the company of good-looking and liberated women while they drank in the patriotic virility of all-male groups. Jimmy Baldwin suffered most from this hostility. One night Baldwin, Dick Bagley, the cameraman who made On The Bowery and a regular at the White Horse, and two girls were drinking at the Paddock, a bar up the street. Some of the working-class patrons were furious to see a black man sitting next to a white woman and they jumped Baldwin and Bagley. Some years later, in Paris in the Winter of 1963, Baldwin and some friends and I were talking of the black movement in the States and he went back in horrified reminiscence to that night in the Paddock. He remem­ bered how, as a man tried to kick him in the genitals, he tried to squeeze himself into a ball in the dirt under the bar. It was, he said, a terrible confirmation of his knowledge that he would never be safe in white America, that someone was always lying in wait. In Jane Jacobs’ account of the neighborhood in The Death and Life o f Great American Cities—she lived a few doors down from the Horse—all these tension are omitted and the street life of the place is praised for making it safe. She apparently did not realize that the friendly tavern across from her, The Ideal, was nicknamed The Ordeal by the White Horse regulars who used to go there when Ernie closed early. It was the scene of tense confrontations between Bohemia and square America. But then, somewhere around the early Sixties, America lost that faith in its own philistine righteousness and Bohemia began to die. One of the beginnings of that end, I now realize, was the night a young gawky kid named Bob Dylan showed up at the Horse in a floppy hat.

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Robert Shelton, a regular and then the folk-music critic of the New York Times, had been among the very first to recognize Dylan’s talent. Once quite late after the Horse closed, we all went over to McGowan’s on Greenwich Avenue and, at Shelton’s urging, Dylan gave an impromptu concert. I heard the future and I didn’t like it. Dylan’s singing had a difference, a studied artlessness, which was, I suspect, one of the reasons for his impact upon his generation. But it was lost on me, at least at first. (Later, standing before the State House in Montgomery in the last day of Martin Luther King J r.’s Selma March and listening to “ Blowin’ in the Wind” speak for that vast multitude, I learned with a shiver to appreciate his genius.) Indeed, Dylan’s singing was like the speechmaking in Students for a Democratic Society in the early years. At the time I privately called it the stutter style. It assumed that any show of logic or rhetorical skill was prima facie proof of hypocrisy and dishonesty, the mark of the manipula­ tive. The sincere man was therefor supposed to be confused and half articulate and anguished in his self-revelation. By that standard the fact that Dylan did not have a good voice in any conventional sense of the word was one of the highest recommendations of his singing. To be sure, Dylan, particularly in the first period of his fame, looked back to Woody Guthrie and the tradition of the political vagabond. That impulse was very much alive in the Village when he arrived. I remember on Sunday afternoon in 1961 over at Sheridan Square when Guthrie’s friends and admirers—Freddy Hellerman and Lee Hays from The Weav­ ers, Oscar Brand, Will Geer and Logan English and many others— gathered around him. He sat, slumped and emaciated and dying, while they sang him a farewell in the words of his own songs. Dylan had, of course, absorbed that Guthrie spirit and it infused his early work and even his life-style. But even then his calculated indifference was a portent of the Sixties rather than an echo of Guthrie’s passionate Thirties. It was no accident that so many of his contemporaries mistook him for a major poet. Modernism, which had always had its links with Bohemia, was proud of the demands it made upon its tiny public. Now, however, popular songs were to be regarded as high poetry, much as ecstasy was thought to be all rolled up in a pill or a joint. Perhaps Allen Ginsberg was even more symptomatic of that change than Dylan. He had been around the Remo when I arrived in 1949, but I did not meet him until 1964 when he and Peter Orlovsky and another friend came to our apartment to see my wife, who was then on the staff of the Voice. They had just been picketing in the snow in front of the Women’s House of Detention as part of their campaign to legalize marijuana. I was working on a book review of a study of cannabis and, after having hung his socks

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on the radiator to dry, Ginsberg sat there and cited court decisions, official inquiries and academic analyses with the authority of a scholar and the enthusiasm of a militant. For Ginsberg has deep roots in American tradition. He traces himself back, of course, to Walt Whitman and he has obvious affinities with the Bohemia of personal exploration typified by Henry Miller. But his pen­ chant for organization and detail—he functioned as sort of an international address book and courier for the Beat Generation—was part of his radical political background. So in one aspect Ginsberg is a literary-political rebel on the model of the pre-World War I Villager, an innovator in art, social attitudes and lifestyle. The young who turned him into a guru tended to ignore his traditionalism and critical standards. They imitated only the flamboyant and mad poet chanting mantras or casually incanting a descrip­ tion of homosexual orgasm before a large crowd. The one-sided reading of Ginsberg was part of a new sensibility that Irving Howe has brilliantly defined: “ It is impatient with literary structures of complexity and coherence, only yesterday the catchwords of our criticism. It wants instead works of literature—though literature may be the wrong word—that will be as absolute as the sun, as unarguable as orgasm, and as delicious as a lollipop.” Without getting too McLuhanesque about the point, I wonder if the mass counterculture may not be a reflection of the very hyped and video­ taped world it professes to despise. As early as 1960, Ned Polsky, the sociologist of deviance, discovered that the Beats around the Village had a quality that set them off from all previous generations of Bohemia: they did not read. More recently, Theodore Roszak, the theorist of the counterculture, had rejected all of the mainstream assumptions of the West since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Roszak’s emphasis is upon personal experience, mysticism, drugs. The intricacies of literature and symbolism have as little a place in that universe as they do in the instantaneous world of the media. As Don McNeill, the brilliant participant observer of the counterculture who died tragically at twenty-three, wrote of the East Village: “ The transient rut is not a creative way. It is a fertilizing, procreative experience for a few. It is an interim for a few. For more, it is a long road down, laced with drugs, especially amphetamine. Many dig the descent; oblivion can be seductive. There is a fascination in being strung out for days on amphetamine, a fascination in Rolling Stones echoes, a fascination in the communal chaos of the Lower East Side, as far removed from W estchester as is India. If you wade in too deep, you may learn that the East side undertow is no m yth.” Bohemia died in that undertow. Walking around the East Village in the

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Summer of 1966 was like attending a huge Halloween party. The streets were alive with frontiersmen and guerrillas and painters from the 1830’s. There were bearded homosexuals aggressively holding hands, girls with long straight hair walking barefoot on filthy sidewalks to prove their organic oneness with nature, and teen-agers panhandling or sitting and staring blankly, strung out on drugs. Gangs of Puerto Ricans and blacks sometimes clashed with the flower children and the brutal law of the drug pushers was already in evidence. The aging Russians and Ukrainians whose lives had once centered upon Tompkins Square Park were bewil­ dered by all these comings and goings and terrified by the “ love” the young offered them (it was, to paraphrase a remark of Paul Goodman’s, love spoken through clenched teeth and the flowers they sometimes pressed upon the startled, old people there might as well have been bricks). Now all that is gone. Within five years the myth died because it never had very deep roots. There are fewer runaways and no one in that East Side jungle with its ubiquitous junkie ripoffs believes in love anymore. Roszak had talked of the proclamation of “ a new heaven and a new earth,” but Woodstock turned into Altamont in a matter of months and the community was witness not to love but to a murder. In 1970 my wife and I were on our way to The Village Voice Christmas party. Once those annual get-togethers were held in Ed Fancher’s railroad flat on Christopher Street and had been the celebration of a family. But now the Voice had become a successful national institution. Its friends and employees needed the vast space of Howard Moody’s Judson Memorial Church for their revels. As our cab crossed Bleecker Street toward Washington Square we passed the corner where the Remo had stood. It had become a Howard Johnson’s.

Bohemia NOW: The Protoculture Richard Miller, 1977

What is the protoculture? Elusive as it seems, can we induce its patterns from its traits, from its attitudes and its beliefs? The protoculture is determined to be nobody’s Nazi and nobody’s nigger. It wears the freedom-sex clothes of the romantic in preference to the role-status clothes of its technocratic siblings and its bourgeois parents. It rejects coercive education. It is as interested in the accomplishing as in the accomplishment, in the producing as in the product. In a sharp inversion of standards, it regards blue-collar work as more respectable than white-collar. The protoculture believes no one should be classified or bred into a role; it does not believe in careers but sees employment as a temporary exchange of time for money, as the payment of dues, at best as an unavoidable submission to authority. The culture understands that the locus of freedom is off the job where, as in the arts, oneself is the author of both the project and the way of carrying it out. For it, competition is internal and personal, seldom external and public. In it each person seeks not normality—which in our society means sharing in the conventional neuroses—but excellence, to become perfectly him/her self. The protoculture believes that the old left is a symbiotic part of the established order, a belief confirmed in 1968 when the Communist leaders joined Charles de Gaulle in suppressing revolution in Paris and when the Soviets crushed the Czechoslovakians. It shares Bohemia’s belief in the intense moment and Bohem ia’s commitment to cenacles—affinity groups—as the basic community. It subscribes to ad-hoc leadership, having such confidence in its own abilities as to believe that each situation creates its own coordinators who moderate group action and then fade back into the people. Although drawn to export versions of Hinduism and Buddhism, even to Pentecostal Christianity, its religion is really a panthe­ ism quite without dogma in which it senses that God—conceived as a lifeforce—is everywhere, both within and without. 784

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This combines with belief in the occult power of love and music. And all of this in a manner consistent with the attitudes toward reality taken by contemporary science. The protoculture is sensitive to the paradox of apparency/transpar­ ency—that what we sense is only real in the special proportion of our size, location, and physical design. Enlarging or contracting changes the image of reality. Only a small segment of the electromagnetic spectrum is visible to the human eye. Through the microscope or telescope the apparent becomes transparent and another reality just as real appears. With the time dimension added, the apparency diffuses to energy/matter, itself transparent, being the organized nothing—the noncontained/contained turbulence which is in fact the ultimate reality. The protoculture follows the native American radical tradition: anarchy, believing that because man is basically good (loving and constructive) and because no supernatural conscience sanctions his behavior, man should be free to do and say what he pleases and that power should be diffused to a maximum among the people. It assumes that people hate and destroy only when hangups or general uptightness (which is to say symptoms of fear and anxiety) prevent them from loving and building. If you can’t kiss, you kick—or even kill—because you must relate somehow. The protoculture scorns the weapons of the state in favor of its own: intelligence, imagination, compassion, honesty. It rejects nationalism and imperialism, particularly the American brand. The nation of today’s youth is not America or France or Japan or Colombia or Germany, but all the youth of the world. The protoculture is innocent of concepts represented by that of the efficient biological nation—in Hitler’s words “ that substance of flesh and blood we call the German people.” In fact, the Freikorps, the Nazi SS, and the mentality they embody bear the same relation to the bohemians that Charles Manson and his family bear to the protoculture and that the Nixon gang bears to the American people. The protoculture’s heroes are not Napoleons of power and glory, nor are they virtuosity figures like sports stars, nor Christs nor Buddhas, for these are the creation of their own followers, nor yet even the underground man so dear to academics. If it can be said to have any model at all, that model is the David figure with emphasis on sensuality, humor, intelligence, love, and harp playing. The culture knows Goliath is there; it knows what Goliath is, and it accepts the necessity of killing him—by rendering him transpar­ ent. In the protoculture, the American Dream is coming true. The melting pot has melted. The Utopian hope of educating all the people is at last being achieved. Across this vast and populous continent youth has re­ ceived an education built around the rhetoric of liberty and justice for all,

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an education recently supplemented for many by the realities to be learned in the school of the streets and that of the jails, and supplemented once more by Watergate and economic distress. Consequently, the protoculture looks not to gods or führers or parents or science or mystic process or even to outer space for salvation, but in full awareness of its fragile mortality, to itself alone. This, the generation reared on Mad magazine and by Doctor Spock, the generation sharing the early memory of hiding under school desks in drills preparatory to atomic attack, is the first generation in history that knows it may be the last. In the words of one young woman: “ Many people have come to an intense awareness of life’s inherent insecurity. We are mortal and alone. The vast responsibility for our lives and ‘salvation’ is in our own hands. One result of this has been a deep feeling of alienation, the personal realization that we are living a life (on a planet) that we don’t at all comprehend, that seems isolated, absurd, futile, that we have grown up on panaceas and lies and that even our minds and hearts are strangers.” Cultural forms persist long after the original content has vanished. The Christian content of our culture has seeped into the sand, but in the American establishment as in the SS State, the forms persist. The Nazi, the lifer, the organization man—all submit to the führer principle, in each case the will of something else having replaced the will of God. Christian thought is either-or thought. In it everything must be judged as either commensurate with the will of God or contrary, ergo sinful. Christian thought sees life’s drama as the struggle of good and evil for the soul of each man, of Everyman, who in consequence walks through life alienated and alone, cleaving to the sunshine of holy grace, waiting for the release of death. Since sensuality is evil and must be repressed, the ideal is the sexless angel in the other world and the anchorite, suffering and sacrificing to earn salvation, in this. Like the Christian, the bourgeois struggles through each day, fantasy fixed on a resplendent future. Christian thought conceives of man as basically evil, as a depraved soul imprisoned in loathsome flesh, whose only hope is to be saved from himself. Transitional types that they were, the Founding Fathers thought that not only are all men created equal but that all men are created evil. Traditional thought rests on Aristotle’s cause-and-effect logic, the notion of separate identity, and his concept of the prime mover—that in the beginning was a point of rest. It analyzes, it specializes, it fragments, it classifies: it fractures perception and experience. It analyzes every situation into an antagonism, one half, good, the other, evil. In transitional form—better and worse— this is the Marxist dialectic. Christian thought posits that part of life is

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superfluous. When you extirpate evil, all will be good. Its central energy is fear and guilt; it teaches: repress now, submit now, and live later—after you’re dead. The old way of thinking relates all existence to a point: God, a führer, a prime mover. The protoculture, pantheistically, sees meaning as appar­ ency/transparency, that the way you perceive it is the way you conceive it, but in an aura of previous conceptions and extrapolations, in the awareness that all conceptions are, in fact, metaphors. This relates to the concept of field as understood in science. You can think of an area of concentration in a field and think of something real. But to think of a point, a line, a plane is to consider a fiction. In its several forms the old mode of thought perceives analytically, scanning the field (itself deceptively orga­ nized in relation to an artificial vanishing point) for some point of concen­ tration and in so doing imposes a preconceived order on the perceived. Field-thinking, like acid, reduces to a minimum the preliminary structure/ interpretation that analysis and the culture impose on perception. Fieldthinking is passive perception. It submits to being ordered by the environ­ ment, by what is really there, but with a sense of the extrapolations created by apparency/transparency and by metaphor. What you really see here . . . is black marks on white paper.

While in both the traditional and transitional orders the predominant mode of thought is essentially analytical, the protoculture seeks synthesis. Its whole-earth thought knows the fish is also the water and that mankind is the crew of a single spaceship. The old way of thinking is dualistic. Not only does it dichotomize, but it recognizes two independent orders of existence: a sensed world and a world insensible: Earth/Heaven—Matter/ Mind—Body/Soul—It/Me. Dualism splits us away from earth. It conceives of a sharp split between the conscious and the unconscious rather than sensing that one blends down into the other and that that, in turn, blends into all nature. Consciousness, it would follow, is neither separate identity nor a point. The soma (body/mind) radiates the environment; the environ­ ment suffuses the soma. We make our days and our days make us. Consciousness is a focus of the cosmic field. Field-thinking is monistic and syncretic. Visually it is manifest in the yin-yang symbol, subsuming the occult but bereft of mystic connotations. Opposites are not separate identities nor are they contentious. They are harmonious, and illusory, for what appears to be in sharp opposition is in reality an expression of the whole underlying circle, the greater unity, the Tao. Not either/or, but both/more, again: apparency/transparency.

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The protoculture’s ethic is one of compassion in an aesthetic field. You accept others as they are and affect them, not by advising them, or commanding them, but by helping them and by showing a good example. Value is aesthetic: if it’s good art, it’s good. The protoculture’s standard of right action is an aesthetic standard: essentially, its ethic is an aesthetic ethic, one always seeking to harmonize unlikes, each of which is perfectly itself, and at the same time exists in the radiant field of the other. The protoculture uses analysis and cause-and-effect logic, but it relies on paradox and probability logic, and this less for control than for adaption. Traditionally in Euro-American culture, some philosophers and pure scientists apart, the only people who have consistently tried to see life whole are the very same people around whom Bohemia grew—the painters and the poets. What the Dada painter Hans Richter wrote about the Dada painter Kurt Schwitters might well have been said about the ideal of them all: He was: a totally free spirit, ruled by Nature.

The psychological model of traditional culture displays a pattern of God’s omnipresent will, moving all, revealing itself through providences, this in a field composed of the effects of the minute free-wills of individuals harmonizing with God’s will (flowing with the führer principle) or under pressure from Satan (the instrument of God’s antiwill) defying God’s will and producing discord. Transitional culture presents as its psychology a behavioristic-Freudian model. The first relates to a crude mechanical typology in which all people are rats whose behavior can (and should) be modified by manipulation of the stimuli. The second teaches that we are mainly if not completely the effects of past causes and that the more complex civilization becomes the more we must of necessity accept rigorous discipline of our natural inclinations because it is from such repression that civilization derives the structure prerequisite to its existence. The most to which we can aspire is to advance from the oral through the anal to the genital stage and, on the way, internalize authority. Every man his own führer, so to speak, and that in a civilization whose structures stand in defiance of the larger patterns of Nature, one whose personnel must of necessity repress them­ selves or be repressed. The protoculture presents as its psychology a gestalt/existential/human­ istic model, sometimes called third-force psychology, which teaches we are more than rats, that we are mainly our relation to the field of the now,

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and that civilization derives the structure necessary to its existence from the larger patterns of nature, the cosmic field. Hence we must strive to open ourselves to the present, both external and internal, so that we may be at this instant in harmony with the cosmic natural patterns, both with each other and within ourselves, be free spirits ruled by Nature. To do this we must free ourselves from the patterns imposed by the past and from anticipations of the future, from reverie, calculation, and repression. The more open we are, the more intense being—or is it becoming?—becomes. Marijuana, alcohol, LSD, and other dopes are artificial means of liber­ ating consciousness from cultural inhibitions and accomplishing this inten­ sity of experience or the illusion of having done so. They help us break the chains bound round us by the behavioristic-Freudian culture in which we live. Painful and dangerous as they may be, they liberate us momentar­ ily from self-repression and bring us closer to the ideal, crudely expressed as drunk without booze, stoned without acid. In this field psychology, sanity can be understood as that condition in which all systems of the soma are working in full harmony with each other instead of against themselves and one another, a condition fully attainable when these systems, working in complement, are also working in reso­ nance with the large systems of nature. Victor Hugo’s romantic army (itself an old-fashioned concept) marched under a banner emblazoned EPATEZ LES BOURGEOIS, an attitude expressed in more recent argot by blow their minds. Epatez les bourgeois has been a theme among artists and bohemians ever since. It is the parade back from the Bal des Quat’z ’ Arts of 1899; it is the essence of Dada, a facet of the Beats, the center of Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. And its object is the liberation of the bourgeois from their bourgeois programming, if only for an instant, so as to make them sense new synchs—that is, see alternative patterns or, better still, none at all. But above this in gilded letters the standard of the first bohemians bore L ’A R T POUR L ’A R T —Art for Art. Not art for fame, art for money, art for status, art for power, art for education, art for politics, but art for its own intent/content, art for its own experience—the liberation of the artist (and of the observer) from his programming so he can sense it all fresh and whole and live it like it is. “ Activity can be enjoyed either intrinsically, for its own sake, or else have worth and value only because it is instrumental in bringing about a desired gratification. In the latter case it loses its value and is no longer pleasurable when it is no longer successful or efficient. More frequently, it is simply not enjoyed at all, but only the goal is enjoyed. This is similar to that attitude toward life which values it less for its own sake than because one goes to Heaven at the end of it.

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So says Abraham Maslow, the father of third-force psychology, in his Toward a Psychology o f Being, a book which is, as the lawyers say, herein incorporated by reference. Maslow sees two orders of motivation. The first, Deficiency Motivation, that described by the Freudian model, obtains when we act to overcome discomfort caused by needing something normally supplied by environ­ ment, be it food, shelter, or some more subtle gratification. But when all of the deficiencies are satisfied we do not, says Maslow, fall into torpor. Instead, a new order of motivation suddenly obtains. We now act toward self-realization, toward making our immediate experience-of-being aesthet­ ically perfect. We try to make real—to realize—the unfulfilled potential of our humanity. The greater our Being Motivation is in proportion to our Deficiency Motivation, the saner, the happier, the more human we are. The more intrinsic and the less instrumental our behavior, the more alive we are. In this conception, art-for-art reveals itself as the focus of life-for-life. Life-for-life is the pan-value of the protoculture. . . . as it is of the Romantic Nazi.

The qualitative difference between these two is that distinguishing action-for-action from art-for-art. As in societies dominated by the old-fashioned bourgeoisie or by the bourgeoisie’s modern mutation, the Bureaucratic Nazi, where Deficiency (instrumental) Motivation predominates, the society itself is mentally ill. Seen in this context, Bohemia’s is the story of the rise of a BeingMotivated community in the context of a Deficiency-Motivated civiliza­ tion. The story abstracts from the stories of those who shrink their needs to the minimum, in recent years doing so in defiance of emotional advertis­ ing, which, by creating bogus needs and inflating real ones, presses toward the embourgeoisiement of everybody. But this is no new trick. Napoleon once said, “ I rule men with toys.” Bohemia’s is the story of the way of life generated by those who look within themselves and not to others for evidence of personal worth, by those who choose creation over comfort, by those who, as with serious artists—or Thomas Edison for that matter— would rather work than eat. Such are the teachings of humanistic/existential/gestalt/third-force (field) psychology and some of the implications. To this I would add that, biologically speaking, humans are the least specialized of creatures. Thus, relative to all other forms of life, human behavior is free of physical determination and increasingly so as the technological extension of our bodies and nervous systems makes it possible for us to live underwater,

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fly to Mars, and, ultimately, via genetic control, to make of ourselves whatever we want to be. Can you imagine taking your energy directly from the sun or being young forever or being an intelligent sphere—or field—exploring the uni­ verse?—itself, an intelligent field, or an infinite regression/progression of black-hole quasars! Can you imagine that anything you can imagine can happen? By removing its biological base we may be able to overcome Deficiency Motivation completely and by so doing become truly independent. As constituted today, the core of the human is energy, an energy capable of countless modes of expression. The behavior of the human is con­ strained by the forms which channel that energy—forms we recognize by names such as human nature, custom, tradition, convention, civilization, personality, culture—forms from the past imposed by necessity or even accident and which become incarnate in our nervous circuitry. As our awareness intensifies and our technology advances, it becomes progressively more evident that the looser these forms are, the freer we humans are to relate and react to present reality, to be free spirits ruled by nature. In sum, this new way of receiving life represents a cultural mutation. In it the Freudian and behavioristic models are replaced by the humanistic/ gestalt/third-force/existential model. Man is no longer evil, but good—and beyond that, neither. As with the Attic Greeks, Beauty, Truth, Good, are but three names for the same value. We are ethically obligated to purify the aesthetic of ourselves and our communities. Man is no longer the fortuitous result of his primal forces expressed through a restraining pattern formed in infancy and childhood, no longer a product of the cause and effect of the past. He can break out of the cultural program and reprogram himself. He can create himself. This altered sense of m an’s place in the biosphere, liberated as it is from tradition vide cultural programming vide synapse control, is the affirmative orientation that has been developing in the bohemian community since its inception in 1830. Placed in the context of history, it forms a new psychology of history, a field history. This field history sees three great periods in the story of man, a paradigm it holds in common with anthropology. First, having no conception that he might or could change his environment to make it more hospitable, man lived in precarious balance with nature. His characteristic orientation was accommodative with undertones of placation, and thus traditional thought has remained. Next, man conceived that environment could be changed to make a more hospitable context and by doing so he entered a second period of history. Awareness acting on environment accomplished the

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taming of plants and animals in the Neolithic Revolution, and then, in the Industrial Revolution, it accomplished the taming of chemical and electri­ cal energy. From this grew transitional thought, the orientation of which is typically exploitive. This thought conceives of everything outside the ego, even members of the family, as objects to be manipulated in the deficiency interests of me. The cultural DNA with its double helix of art and science is mutating again. The protoculture rejects the exploitation of men and earth and scorns the profit motive. This third period of history is one in which, essentially, the reconstruction of environment has been completed, albeit in conformity with plans prepared by an incompetent, and the reconstruc­ tion of man is about to begin. We are entering a new period of history when through genetic control man can reconstruct his own body thus realizing at last the New Man: Pygmalion 2000 a .d . For most people, this thought is still as unthinkable as was for so many millennia the thought that we can reconstruct environment to make it more hospitable to our being. This new period is also the time of the computer called the universal Turing machine, a reconstruction of mankind in projection which can reproduce and evolve. But now, before all that is upon us, we can orient toward remodeling our new house, our reconstructed environment, toward reconciling it with the Nature from whose wounds it was tom . The protoculture neither asserts nor placates; it reconciles. It tells us to suffuse into the present and be. And in so doing arrive at last where the I and the me become the nexus of the it, where art’s intent and experience are the same and art—and life—is for a rt’s sense and we are ready to meet the danger and accept the promise of this mutating future. But the I and the me are not yet the nexus of the it; life’s intent and content are not yet the same and life is not yet for life’s sense. Mainly in transitional form, the old way of thinking is still in power. It is bringing about a society in which the premier object of organized activity is the public image it creates, a phenomenon increasingly manifest in institutions as various as universities and police. The established mode of thinking and its institutions cannot accommodate to the reality that production has achieved an efficiency sufficient to satisfy the material needs of man. Although once roughly suited to circumstances, the old way of thinking is now anachronistic and so destructive as to be suicidal. By creating bogus needs, by wasting vast quantities of production on them, on mass murder, on planned obsolescence, and by inflating the bureaucracies of murder, of money and control, it grinds down the quality of experience. Based on scarcity assumptions, it creates a counterfeit scarcity of goods and an artificial scarcity of sensual gratification. In a world where each is mutually dependent on every other, to preserve itself the old mode of understanding

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preserves the nation-state system with its built-in supreme court of war. In a world where four hundred million people are starving, it feeds the grain that could save them to livestock. In an ecosystem pushed to the edge of catastrophe by analytical exploitation, it preserves in both its capitalist and socialist manifestations the economic system and technology that do the pushing. If the old way of thinking remains in power the only question left to answer is: will the catastrophe that exterminates mankind be primarily ecological? biological? or thermonuclear/radiological? In its post-Christian form the old way of thinking produced the American organization man and his military counterpart: the push-button killer. Mixed with romanticism it produced the Manson family and the SS State. It created the executives of the multinational oligopolies and the C.I.A ., J. Edgar Hoover, and the Nixon gang, Nazis all, exemplars of technologi­ cal man, men without ethics who ask how but never why. Though on the edge of mutation, all these groups have been rendered psychotic by their preservation of the old Christian forms after the content of the forms and, along with it, their reason for being have vanished. The protoculture leaves room in its world for everybody, even Nazis and anticommunists. Conversely, the Nazis and antis, concerned with scarcity, with Lebensraum, would exclude most of us, using, if necessary, the final solution. The revolution that brought transitional culture to power expressed its social ideal as Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

In the course of two centuries this social ideal has been refined. Liberty, meaning the absence of physical restraint, has transformed into liberation, meaning the absence of physical, mental, emotional, cultural, and even biological restraint—of somatic (mind/body) restraint. This ideal, positively rendered, is Autonomy. The concept of Equality has been secularized. Fraternity is better understood as social democracy in the context of Community. The social ideal of the protoculture is the field: Autonomy/Equality/Community.

The inverse field is Authority/Hierarchy/Alienation—and for its own sake because there is no divine or other suprahuman sanction. So alienated did the citizens of the SS State become that they dared not

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confide in friend nor child nor spouse. Excluding the physical, the citizen’s most intimate way of relating to his most intimate associates was up through some Nazi symbol and down again. Love, trust, and field psychology equate with the Autonomy field; hatred, suspicion, anxiety, repression, oppression, and Deficiency-Moti vation psychology with the Authority field, a field whose structure per­ fectly accommodates those trained, like Hitler, to be at once self-reliant and submissive. Because, in a hierarchical system, all relationships are those of domi­ nance/submission, of master/nigger, each person being the nigger of some­ one else, at the top something else, no one can stay in such a system and remain human. Fortunately, the transitional order as currently constituted in the United States and some other countries is pluralistic, perforated with interstices, and puffed with empty spaces. The protoculture, there­ fore, by occupying these vacuums, can and does disassociate from the sado-masochistic components of the transitional order. If “ society” means a group of beings held together by mutual depen­ dence, mankind is in fact a single society, but one in which national sovereignties, somatic repression, Deficiency Motivation concentrated into the profit motive, and threats of mass murder alienate the constituent parts. The society of mankind is structurally defective. It does not com­ prise the common institutions and shared ideology requisite to the harmo­ nious interaction of its components. By simile with a single human being, it appears as if in the largest sense society is insane and, because it cannot be institutionalized for its own good, is moving toward self-destruction. Here is a world society half of whose million scientists and engineers work at the invention and improvement of killing machines, guided, in the U.S.A., by a policy of Mutual Assured Destruction—MAD. Here is a world society whose most powerful state uses weather and germs as weapons against the crops of other states and, as an instrument of policy, threatens the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Because to harmonize oneself with an insane society is to become insane, no person can be sane unless a member of some autonomous community, some Bohemia, which bears the same relation to the larger society that the pearl does to the oyster. What do we see when we cut a bicentennial cross section through this process? What, today, is the state of American youth? American youth no longer believes in the old myths and it struggles to compose the new. “ The old myths have been sucked through the vanishing point of no return.” American youth is between myths with little to guide

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it but its own experience. It is mired in “ a miasma of boring, sweaty expectations,” as Anders Edvard Smiltens observes and experiences it, being at once watching it and in it. “ T h is place is boring. . . .’ ‘Friday night . . . or Saturday night could be good . . . or M onday.’ ‘This place is boring. . . .’ ‘W here’s the party?’ ‘W here’s the action?’ ‘Boulder maybe.— ’ “ Consider amphibians thinking ‘fish’ while their lungs fill with water and they sputter to the bottom . . . ‘a wasted generation’ and remember ‘the lost generation’. . . . The reliance upon the anachronistic vestigial culture-patterns, the old gills, the old tricks and games . . . the frayed ganglia in the sweaty backwaters form a red-neckalia bohème. . . . Koestler sees the ‘greening’ on the whole as a ‘pinking’ which means partial combustion, loud-sputtering, much internal friction and inevitably little traction, movement for more. . . . Waning energy-levels, the gasps of action-for-action, a cultural energy crisis. . . . I sum-up the affliction of redneckalia in the amphibian metaphor, ‘misanthropically,’ the new man breathes.” The pioneers of the protoculture, the prototype of the only culture offering to mankind a real chance for survival, live mainly in the large society but, and by definition, cannot conform to it. Their relations with the large society and their unsuccessful experiments hurt and distort all of them, cripple or kill some of them, but, nevertheless, their courage maintains, their numbers increase, hope intensifies, and reason enjoins us to give them all the help we can.

From Bohemia to the Avant-Garde: Dissolving the Boundaries Jerrold Seigel, 1986

The unexampled slaughter on the battlefields of World War I, combined with the success of Revolution in Russia after 1917, gave rise to a potent mix of revulsion against existing society and—for some—faith in the possibility of its transformation. The resulting mood had parallels with the period of the 1840s. For many people, the pessimism of the fin de siècle was dissolved by the possibility of new forms of action. Cultural innovation and revolutionary politics were drawn together more powerfully than at any time since the demise of Romanticism. The Dada movement, born in Zurich in 1916, most fully embodied the spirit of unbridled revolt, drama­ tizing the new animosity toward bourgeois society and culture. Some of that spirit was welcomed into France after the hostilities ended, when the leading Dada figure, Tristan Tzara, arrived in Paris. But the power of Dada in France ebbed by 1922, as many of those who had supported Tzara declared their independence from the movement’s undiluted negativism. These French writers, led by André Breton, gathered under the banner of Surrealism. Neither Dada nor Surrealism was properly a Bohemian movement. Neither one explicitly invoked Bohemia as an antecedent; members of both would have found reasons to object to the connection. Yet, they belong at the end of our history, for they represented in their time a relationship between cultural innovation and Bohemianism similar to the one Baudelaire had embodied in his: the attempt to define the task of art under modern conditions led them to share ground with Bohemia whether they wanted to or not. Like Baudelaire and Rimbaud, they brought a cult of multiplied sensation into the center of artistic practice. In their activi­ ties, the artist’s work as a producer of objects was fused with—in part dissolved within—a life devoted to marking off distance from conventional society. 796

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As it happens, the moment of transition between Dada and Surrealism in Paris corresponded with the hundredth anniversary of Murger’s birth, in 1922. The Dadaists and Surrealists did not notice, but ceremonies were held both at Murger’s tomb in Montmartre cemetery, and at his bust in the Luxembourg Gardens; articles appeared in several newspapers—some devoted to aspects of Murger’s life, some supplying new documents. One theme predominated: that Bohemia was at an end. Modern life had become too serious, too demanding, too much invaded by what one writer, Lucien Descaves, called the worm of politics, to allow for the old lightheartedness and spontaneity. Murger’s own abandonment of Bohemia had become his most imitated example. Perhaps the young were still tempted by the old vision of a free life, Descaves suspected, but society as a whole offered little scope for it.1 The Murger centennial was followed by a wave of valedictory nostalgia. Two books about Paul Verlaine appeared in 1923, one a new edition of Cazals’s memoir about Verlaine’s last years (first published in 1911), the other Lucien Aressy’s The Last Bohemia; Francis Carco edited a series of books under the general rubric La vie de Bohème during the next few years, including Rachilde’s biography of Jarry. As before, the conviction that Bohemia could be assigned to the past was premature, but it reflected some important shifts in Bohemia’s meaning. Some of these changes are suggested by glancing for a moment at the one group in Paris who would have stoutly denied that Bohemia was finished in the early 1920s: the American “ exiles” who flocked there in the years after the war. To that famous generation, chronicled by Matthew Josephson and Peggy Guggenheim, the cafés and boulevards of Montpar­ nasse seemed full of Bohemians. Fleeing New York or the Middle West, these Americans gave a powerful stimulus to the myth of Paris as a center of Bohemia, swarming with people who lived sexually free and economi­ cally shaky lives in the name of art or literature. Not since Puccini’s opera La Bohème in the 1890s had any foreigners done so much to popularize the image of Bohemian Paris. These Americans were separated from their French hosts by many contrasts and barriers, however. They were able to survive—in some cases, to live well—in Paris on what seemed to them relatively little money, because of the favorable exchange rate. They knew little of French life; most of them (Josephson was one exception) spent their time among other Americans. These Yankee Parisians exemplified one of the most favorable conditions for the continued vitality in the twentieth century of something like the original Romantic Bohemia: expa­ triation. Americans in Paris were natural Bohemians: free of ties to the surrounding society and culture, ready to devote their lives to their own self-development, able to participate in the city’s pleasures while acting

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out their independence from tradition and convention, and predisposed to a life of liberated fantasy by virtue of having left their everyday identities, with their attendant restrictions, on the other side of the Atlantic.2 Paris still had its stock of traditional Bohemian types, of course: young artists, students, eccentrics, down-and-outers, marginal people of many kinds. But to interpret their own lives in Bohemian terms could no longer carry the significance it had for a Charles Pradier, a Privat, an Aimé Cournet, a Goudeau, or even a Francis Carco, formed in the atmosphere of Montmartre before the war. One reason was the “ worm of politics” Lucien Descaves mentioned in his article on the Murger centenary. Young bourgeois who felt estranged or excluded from their own surroundings and destinies had to confront the issues raised by the war and the Russian Revolution, and the hard question of political commitment made the softer, more ambivalent postures native to Bohemia less meaningful. Some people had experienced a similar displacement of Bohemia at earlier moments of political crisis—notably Jules Vallès after 1871. By the end of the war, feelings of estrangement or ambivalence that had once received expression in Bohemian terms were finding other outlets. *

*

*

The fusion of art and life proclaimed by vanguard artists in the early twentieth century had deep roots in Bohemia. It was not the imitation of life by art in the traditional sense of holding up a mirror to nature. Nor was it the simple inversion of this relationship posited, for instance, by Oscar Wilde when he asserted that London fogs were coming to look like Impressionist paintings. The vanguard union of art and life was a substitu­ tion of actions and gestures that dramatized a self-conscious separation from existing life for the activity that fashioned objects. In Dada and (less uncompromisingly) Surrealism, the artistic object was rejected in principle, even where it partially survived in practice. The theater of fum ism e replaced, at least in part, the poems and paintings it had once advertised. This exchange reached perhaps its highest point in the career of Marcel Duchamp. His substitution of “ ready-mades” for traditional art objects led finally to an abandonment of painting and sculpture after 1923. Ceasing to be a practicing artist became a central action in defining Duchamp’s career as a paradigmatic avant-garde figure: the very gesture of abandoning art was now able to claim and be accorded artistic significance. Duchamp’s career summed up the evolution of art we have been observ­ ing, replacing the production of objects with the self-dramatization of the artist, as the representative figure of a society unable to set clear limits for the identities and activities of its members. It is here that the Bohemian theater of ambivalence proved to be prophetic of the shape artistic practice

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itself would assume in the twentieth century. The traditional figure of the artist as a maker of texts or images was absorbed in a new role, as explorer of marginal states of being and consciousness. The avant-garde took over from Bohemia the redefinition of the artistic vocation as challenging the limits of individual and social existence, distilling and concentrating the task that modern society in principle sets for all its members, even while it gives only a few the tools and the leisure to pursue it. Not all vanguard artists followed Tristan Tzara in equating this task with social dissolution. Many felt estranged from society, but sometimes the boutades of aggression covered an effort to explore deep layers of personal ambivalence and anxiety—as the cases of Jarry, Satie, and Apollinaire all reveal. Some avant-garde activities that seemed devoted to challenge and provocation of their audience contained attempts to question the practice of artists, too, as we saw both in Roland Dorgelès’s trick of having Frédé’s donkey paint a picture, and in Cocteau’s project for the ballet Parade. The avant-garde shared with Bohemia not only its challenge to existing life, but also its practice of self-examination and—more often than as been recognized in both cases—self-criticism. The Surrealists placed limits on how far their rebellion extended, fearing the possibility of personal dissolution that was opened up by their descent into the unconscious. This inward limit was matched by an external one: the sense that the world outside art was the source of energies that artists could tap nowhere else. Apollinaire’s fascination for the vital powers being released in modern life was characteristic of much modernist practice. For Satie and the Surrealists, even advertising was a realm that could be colonized in the service of their transformative project. Jules Vallès, too, had seen the commercial world as a reservoir of energy that attracted him when the traditional aspirations of literature seemed hollow; he described the activities of the stock exchange as the sacred poetry of modern life. As I have suggested, by 1900 it had become very difficult to separate the gestures best calculated to advertise artists from those that set them apart from the everyday world of commerce and utility. What made art magnetic and fascinating—in a time when it no longer offered reassurance or support for what were once shared communal values—was its identification with those spheres of experience that a highly organized and (as Max Weber put it) disenchanted society made difficult of access. Edmond Lepelletier’s observation that many good bourgeois desired to live subjectively in Bohemia was one contemporary recognition of this, seconded by Carco’s understanding that the thrill of danger had a power of attraction, drawing people from respectable backgrounds like his to the threatening yet liber­ ating depths of Montmartre. More recently, André Chastel has suggested that the phenomenon of the artiste maudit has served an important

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function for society as a whole, providing a kind of sacred and sacrificial figure who performs for others both the extravagant celebrations of life, and the ritual subjection to destructive and irrational feelings that in primitive cultures were the subject of periodic rites of carnival, magic, and exorcism.3 All these considerations suggest that the avant-garde, like Bohemianism, was seldom simply a rejection of the bourgeois world it declared to be its enemy. Renato Poggioli has resorted to paradox in describing the relation between modern society and the art it produces. The art of a bourgeois society, he proposes, seems to be necessarily antibourgeois, defining itself through hostility to its own matrix and audience.4 The relations between the avant-garde and Bohemianism suggest that this was often an opposition from within; the energy modernists drew on to mount their attacks flowed at least as much from the ground they, sometimes unconsciously, shared with other members of society, as it did from their ability to inhabit different regions. Such an image of how modern art is related to society contrasts with two visions of cultural history that have many followers among historians and critics of our own time. Both neoconservatives and critical Marxists share a notion of modernist art as fundamentally out of tune with the society around it. According to the first, perhaps best represented by the sociologist Daniel Bell, “ a culture which is concerned with the enhance­ ment and fulfillment of the self and the ‘whole’ person” contradicts modern society’s basic organization around roles and specializations jus­ tified by some kind of functional utility. Social needs and cultural forms “ lead people in contrary directions.” Bell believes that modern culture, triumphing over society, has produced a destructive hubris exemplified in “ the refusal to accept limits, the insistence on continually reaching out” for the nonexistent.5 That Bohemia and the avant-garde were both concerned with values beyond the reach of specialization and utility, as well as with the question­ ing of established limits, is a point often confirmed in these pages. But those concerns were not so far from the needs and meanings posited by underlying social relationships as Bell’s view suggests. Modern society has required that individuals accept a limited role defined by functional needs, but it has also claimed that by opening careers to individual merit and ability, its economic organization allows for levels of personal devel­ opment and satisfaction not possible in earlier and more traditional social forms. If there were—and are—contradictions between the demand for discipline and work and the promise of satisfaction, they arise from within society, and not from a supposedly separate realm of culture. As Jurgen Habermas has observed, Bell’s formulation “ shifts onto cultural modern­

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ism the uncomfortable burdens of a more or less successful capitalist modernization of the economy and society.” 6 Both culture and the econ­ omy were, at different moments, sources of social integration and of dissolution. To portray activities contributing directly to the economy onesidedly, as pure sources of stability, and to attribute disorder and instabil­ ity to artists and Bohemians, was already a well-developed tactic of conservatives in the nineteenth century. Then as now, they refused to recognize how much the forms of culture they rejected perform vitally necessary tasks of resolution and reconciliation for a society whose sponsorship of self-development for the sake of economic individualism creates constant moral dilemmas for its members. By drawing them into the open, cultural practice sought to resolve such tensions as often as it aimed to make them more explosive. Baudelaire’s admitted hatred for utility certainly separated him from the values many good bourgeois proclaimed. But his rejection of spontaneity in favor of hard work and his attempt to locate his aesthetic practice between jouiss­ ance and travail tied him much more closely to many of those same bourgeois than either he or they wanted to recognize. From the beginning in the days of Murger’s Water-Drinkers, Bohemia contained a current of stoic or puritanical discipline and self-denial, often in opposition to the spirit of indulgence and the search for quick satisfactions present in society at large. Privat ’s portraits of the métiers inconnus depicted a world much more in harmony with the dominant ideals of work and utility than conservatives of the period suspected; the combination of imagination with discipline and determination to succeed helped make the underside of Paris a place where Privat could pursue his need for personal selfdiscovery. Even Verlaine pointed to the link between Bohemia and hard work, a connection in which Francis Carco saw a remedy for the dangers he knew lurked in Bohemia. Appolinaire’s image of the new painting as an antidote to the diffusion of personal boundaries he feared brought the Baudelairean determination to counter vaporisation with centralisation into the era of Cubism. The Marxist view presents the discord between modern society and modernist culture similarity, but regards it in a different light. Culture is the bearer of values that repeatedly call dominant social practices into question, but it is unable to effect their transformation. Modernist art and literature seesaw back and forth between revolutionary challenges to existing life, and their subsequent reabsorption or recapturing, submitting to the power of commerce or weakened by the contradictory attitudes of artists themselves. This pattern conforms to the larger Marxist vision of modern history as shaped by social conflicts whose normal outcome would be revolutionary change, but whose potential for deep transformation has

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somehow been denied or defeated. To place the history of Bohemia and the avant-garde in this frame is to associate their critical thrust with energies that, if fully liberated, would lead to a different form of social order. The failure to carry the critical project through to the end appears as an abandonment of the revolutionary possibilities inherent in it, or a sign that the identification with them was never wholehearted or complete. The avant-garde thus turns out—much as in the neoconservative view—to have promoted a practice that was inauthentic, essentially empty, or purely negative and destructive. These images derive from some formidable figures—not only Marx himself, but the members of the Frankfurt School that came out of Weimar Germany, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and their many followers.7 This view of where the energies that power Bohemia and the avantgarde come from, and what they signify, needs to be challenged, too. To regard modernist visions as portents of a radical social transformation is to mistake a tension whose presence has been a source of renewal in modern society for an impulse to undermine or overcome it. Many artists have been irritated by the power of sheer wealth in the modern world, but we have seen how self-consciously figures like Courbet, Satie, Breton, and Aragon were able to turn the forms of commerce and publicity into materials for constructing their own projects. The Surrealists sought to draw energy from the reservoirs of psychic tension they found all around them; their ties to existing life included recognizing their own membership in the bourgeoisie and seeking to exploit collective experience to release individual mental powers. The neo-Marxist view reminds us that hopes for a better social world beyond the bourgeois order still survive, even in the absence of a revolu­ tionary actor to replace Marx’s vision of the proletariat. That modern life creates such aspirations, through its puzzling and disorienting combination of injustice and oppression with the promise of liberation, is a truth that has been present throughout our story, from the generation of 1848 who first experienced it down to the Surrealists. But alongside the strength of those expectations has been the reality of their continual disappointment. There may be little reason to applaud that outcome, yet perhaps it has not been without its compensations. The form of life we may call bourgeois today would hardly be recognized by those who defended it a century ago. If we still yearn for a different kind of existence, we can no longer be so confident that we know what the limits of bourgeois experience are, much less that they have already been reached. Bohemia has been one, but not the only, force operating against the assumption that bourgeois social relations can create new possibilities only by preparing their own destruc­ tion. Marx himself had others in mind when he acknowledged, ten years

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after the failure of the Revolution he hoped would put an end to the bourgeois world, that “ no social order ever perishes before all the produc­ tive forces for which there is room in it have developed.” 8 In the end, Bohemia cannot fulfill the promise of utopia for which it alternately served as foretaste and substitute. But if its history has any­ thing to teach us, it is that individuals in modern society can explore forms of action and experience, enter new territories of personal and social life, without the cataclysm of revolution. Whether we wish to inhabit those territories or not, we are often enriched by their discovery. It was this that Apollinaire—who knew the anxieties and disappointments of Bohemia as well as he knew its joys—pointed to when he insisted that the seekers after adventure were not the enemies of order. Their pioneering exploration of new worlds aimed to enlarge and enhance the old one, bringing back to it . . . new fires . . . colors never seen A thousand imponderable phantasms To which reality must be given.

Bohemia has not remained within the confines of the country that gave it birth, spreading quickly outward from Paris to colonize other places. London, Milan, Munich, and Greenwich Village all became theaters of Bohemian life before the end of the nineteenth century. The new Bohemias took on the characteristics of their locales, but they also followed larger patterns by now familiar to us—nurturing themselves on the mixture of art and life, merging rebellion with ambition, simultaneously sponsoring real artistic vocations and appropriating the artist’s image to dramatic ambiva­ lence toward the beckoning destinies of ordinary social existence. Nor did Bohemia’s history end with Surrealism in the 1920s. As recently as the 1960s, one could still discern an element of Bohemian politics within the mix of radicalism spurred by the antiwar movement on both sides of the Atlantic. For many in those days—Yippies and Situationists come easily to mind—political action was part of a drama of individual liberation so intense that solidarity with a cause and withdrawal into indifference or isolation seemed to issue from the same impulse. Meanwhile, new avantgardes—pop art, action painting, minimalism—have discovered their own ways to identify art with the liberated spontaneity of those who live in the name of it. Blaque and fum ism e have remained part of their practice. Yet the distance from Bohemia already visible in Surrealism has grown greater in those more recent movements. In some ways, the ground of Bohemian life seems to have slipped away. Barr ès’s observation about how much money Bohemian life requires has become ever more true. The free spaces—both real and metaphorical—once occupied by Bohemia have

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become narrower and harder to find. Politicization has taken on new forms, shaped first by the Cold War polarization after World War II, and more recently by a politics that challenges individuals to define themselves in relation to collective causes like feminism, ethnicity, or homosexuality. The very success of the campaign in our day against rigid social and moral standards has made some traditional challenges to bourgeois limits less relevant. Gestures and practices once commonly linked with Bohemia have by now broken out of the marginal spaces that once confined them. Unusual styles of hair or dress, drug usage or experimentation, unconven tional sexual behavior, are becoming features of ordinary life. This may be occurring most rapidly in the United States, where the weight of convention and tradition is lighter than across the Atlantic. But its effects are visible in European countries as well. These developments seem to reduce both the scope and the need for the Bohemian dramatization of ambivalence. The fact that Bohemia’s history has not been ended by these changes suggests that what has declined since the 1920s is only one particular form of it. We may now call it the classic Bohemia, corresponding to the classic phase in the history of modern bourgeois society that extended between the French Revolution and the First World War. In that period, the new social forms linked to modern industrial capitalism and liberal democratic politics spread into more and more areas of life. But they were seldom unopposed; forces of tradition and resistance—institutions, people, val­ ues—still offered serious and dogged opposition. In the twentieth century, those forces inherited from the Old Regime have more fully succumbed to the fate often predicted for them. The result has been, as François Furet points out, that many of the issues placed at the center of political and social controversy by the French Revolution, and which continued to dominate public debate into our own century, have begun to lose their power.9 With them, the tensions between Bohemia and the rest of society have diminished, too, permitting the migration of once Bohemian practices toward the center of social life. More recently, the classic modernist tension between art and society may have relaxed, too, with the growing recognition that modernism belongs to our culture much in the way earlier styles belonged to theirs, the appearance of forms and movements that are self-consciously postmodernist, and the accompanying proclamation of the end of the avant-garde. In this perspective, the classic Bohemia seems a phenomenon of the past. Yet, if its spaces become less inhabitable and its gestures no longer serve the same needs, its lineage is not extinct. New spaces have been discovered and new styles appropriated or invented. The need to reconcile individuality with social membership is still a source of tension, as new

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layers of subjectivity are liberated, but in a society that continues to make rigid demands on its members. The obituary of Bohemia has often been written, but so far at least always too soon. When it is finally required, it will not be enough to say with Murger’s Rodolphe, “ O ma jeunesse! c ’est vous qu’on enterre!” A whole form of life will have passed away. Notes 1. Lucien Descaves, “ La conversion de Murger,” U Intransigeant, March 26, 1922. Other articles include Francillon, “ Trente ans de Bohème,” Le Gaulois, July 1, 1922; Gustave Simon, “ Henry Murger: Lettres inédites à Victor H ugo,” Le Temps, April 18, 1922; Pierre Dufay, “ Des buveurs d ’eau à la ‘vie de Boheme,’ ” Mercure de France, April 1, 1922; Georges Montorgueil, “ À la maison de M urger,” Le Temps, March 10, 1922. 2. Matthew Josephson, Life among the Surrealists (New York, 1962); Peggy Guggenheim, Out o f This Century (1946); also John Glasco, Memoirs o f M ont­ parnasse (New York, 1970). 3. André Chastel, “ Le jeu et le sacré dans l’art m oderne,” Critique, May-June 1955, cited by Raymonde Moulin, Le marché de la peinture en France, 55. 4. Renato Poggioli, The Theory o f the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1968). Poggioli’s view seems to me to assimilate the whole of the avant-garde too much to the Futurists, and not to recognize the limits many figures set up against the qualities of “ nihilism, agonism, futurism and decadence” he invokes to characterize it. But readers who know his book will recognize many similarities between its perspective and the one employed here. It still seems to me a more adequate account than the ones referred to below. 5. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions o f Capitalism (New York, 1976), 14, 15, 49-50. For a similar view, see Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? (New York, 1984). 6. Jürgen Habermas, “ Modernity vs. Postmodemity,” New German Critique 22 (1981), 7. 7. For the classic statements of the Frankfurt School point of view, see Theodor W. Adorno, “ On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listen­ ing,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York, 1982), 270-99; Herbert Marcuse, “ The Affirmative Char acter of Culture,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston, 1968); also the collective volume Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor, with an afterword by Fredric Jameson (London, 1977). The debates about modern culture within critical theory are discussed very well in Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982). For a recent attempt to reformulate the perspective, Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt/ Main, 1974), translated by Michael Shaw as Theory o f the Avant-Garde (Minne­ apolis, 1984). Bürger’s views about avant-garde agree with those presented here in making the fusion of art and life a central theme. But whereas he believes this project implied a dissolution of the forms of artistic practice characteristic of bourgeois society, the history of Bohemianism suggests that it flowed smoothly out of a reconstruction of artistic identity that had been proceeding since 1830. Bürger’s views have been criticized from quite a different viewpoint by some of the contributors to “Theorie der Avantgarde”: Antworten a u f Peter Bürgers

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Bestimmung von Kunst and bürgerlicher Gesellschaft, ed. W. Martin Lüdke (Frankfurt/Main, 1976). Current art historians who continue this tradition in English include T. J. Clark, in his various writings, explicitly in “ Clement Greenberg’s Theory of A rt,” Critical Inquiry IX (1982), 139-56; and Thomas Crow, “ Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual A rts,” in Modernism and Modernity, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh et al. (The Vancouver Conference Papers, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1983). For a different sort of objection to these views, see Michael Fried’s reply to T. J. Clark in the same issue of Critical Inquiry. There are some similar comments on Right and Left accounts of the avant-garde to those made here in Poggioli, 168ff. 8. The statement is in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique o f Political Economy: see Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in One Volume (New York, 1968), 183. 9. François Furet, “ The French Revolution Is O ver,” in Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Foster (Cambridge, England, and Paris, 1981), 1-79.

Bibliography Titles in parentheses also appear in the Table of Contents. They have been given by the editors to excerpts from longer articles or books. Aaron, Daniel. “ From Bohemia to Revolution.” Writers on the Left. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961, pp. 91-118. Ableman, Paul. “ What Happened to Bohemia?” New Statesm an, January 10, 1975, pp. 54-55. Aksyonov, Vassily. “ Beatniks and Bolsheviks.” The New Republic, No vember 30, 1987, pp. 28-32. Allsop, Kenneth. “ Beaten.” The Spectator, March 13, 1959. Appignanesi, Lisa. (Le Lapin Agile: Salon of the Avant-Garde); (The World as Dada Cabaret). The Cabaret. London: Studio Vista, 1975, pp. 64-71; 75-81. Armstrong, George. (Bivouac in the Piazza di Spagna). “ Italy’s Beatnik Summer.” New Statesm an, September 15, 1967, p. 313. Auernheimer, Raoul. “ The Supreme Literary Illusion and Why It Per­ sists.” Current Opinion, vol. 73, July 1922, pp. 103-5. (Based on an article in Die Neue Freie Presse.) Austin, Mary. (Rural Bohemia: Carmel, 1900s). “ George Sterling in Car­ mel.” The American Mercury, vol. 11, no. 41, May 1927, pp. 66-71. Baldwin, Charles Sears. “ Bohemia.” The Dial, vol. 80, June 1926. ______. “ False Gypsies.” The Atlantic M onthly, vol. 91, no. 1, March 1903, pp. 415-17. Balzac, Honoré de. (Selling Out). Lost Illusions. Translated by K. Raine, London: John Lehmann, 1951, pp. 254-63. Baudelaire, Charles. (The Dandy). The Essence o f Laughter. Edited by Peter Quinnell. New York: Meridian Books, 1956, pp. 46-50. Benney, Mark. “ Bohemia: Its Ideology and Control.” Unpublished semi­ nar lecture, University of Chicago, December 8, 1955. Bocock, John Paul. “ Dinners of Bohemia, Ancient and M odern.” Current Opinion, vol. 31, July 1901, pp. 69-71. “ Bohemia—or Vulgaria.” Contributor’s Column. Atlantic Monthly, vol. 104, July 1909, pp. 142-43. “ Bohemianism in French Politics.” Editorial. The Nation, no. 328, Octo­ ber 12, 1871, pp. 237-38. 807

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