We’ve already seen that, geographically, the distribution of Forteanism across the Bay Area correlated with the areas of Bohemianism.  So now, let’s look a little closer at Bay Area Bohemianism, its history, its traits, and its structure.

San Francisco had an established Bohemian culture in the 1890s, much of it revolving around Ambrose Bierce, whose ghost stories, especially, would much influence the weird writers of the 1920s.  (And whose disappearance in Mexico inspired Fort’s musing that perhaps someone was collecting Ambroses.)  As we have seen with Kenneth MacNichol, there was concurrently a small arts colony in and around Carmel.  In the wake of the 1906 fire and earthquake, much of San Francisco’s bohemia moved south.

The doyenne of this Carmel was George Sterling, a poet who had been mentored by Bierce.  Sterling wrote, “There are two elements, at least, that are essential to Bohemianism.  The first is devotion or addiction to one or more of the Seven Arts; the other is poverty.  Other factors suggest themselves: for instance, I like to think of my Bohemians as young, as radical, in their outlook on art and life, as unconventional, and, though it is debatable, as dwellers in a city large enough to have the somewhat cruel atmosphere of all great cities.”

Sterling seemed to have known Kenneth MacNichol at a time when MacNichol was very interested in New Thought.  He also encouraged the work of Clark Ashton Smith, second only to H. P. Lovecraft as a writer of weird tales during the 1930s.  Eventually, Sterling moved back to the Monkey Block of San Francisco, which he had left.  In 1927, he killed himself in a room in the Bohemian Grove.

That same year, the poet Kenneth Rexroth arrived in San Francisco after a peripatetic life had taken him across the country, to Paris and back.  Rexroth would become one of the central figures in the Bay Area arts scene and shaped the form of Bohemianism.

He had been in Greenwich Village during the years after World War I, and in Paris as well, where he was exposed to the cynical Bohemianism of the time.  Rexroth’s thoughts ran in a different direction.  He was interested in mysticism and occultism—occasionally his lectures would devolve into conspiratorial harangues about the Freemasons.  After having been in what was then considered the center of civilization—New York and France—Rexroth saw San Francisco as a backwater, untouched by modernism, and so fertile ground for a new kind of approach to the arts and life.  He stood against consumerism and, as World War II broke, the permanent war state.  He was interested in Orientalism and translated a number of Asian poets.

He also established some of the foundational structures of Bay Area Bohemianism.  He formed a Libertarian Group which held meetings Wednesdays on San Francisco’s Steiner Street.  As many as 200 people might attend these meetings of “philosophical anarchists.”  Among the group was Lewis Hill, a pacifist who founded the Pacifica Foundation in 1946 and then KPFA in 1949, the country’s first listener-supported radio station, broadcasting from Berkeley.

In addition, other outlets for avant-garde thought were opening up.  George Leite and the Manhattan Project-physicist Bern Porter published together the journal Circle and Porter alone put out Berkeley: A Journal of Modern Culture.  Leite also ran a bookstore in Berkeley, daliel’s—a;ways with the little d—where Bohemians congregated.

In the months after World War II ended, a recognizable group came into being, with Rexroth as a distant guru, and characterized most especially by three young poets, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser.  These writers some themselves as inheritors of all of modernism—they all were devoted to Ezra Pound—and Romanticism.  Their work combined intensely intellectual poetry with homosexual desire—and this became the mark of the Berkeley Renaissance, as they named their movement.  The Berkeley poets also maintained an interest in mysticism.  Robert Duncan had been raised a theosophist before he vagabonded across the country, and Rexroth encouraged him to return to those roots.  Spicer claimed to be descended both from Native Americans and Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the New Thought Christian Science Church.  He read science fiction, read Crowley, and practiced the Tarot.

Philip K. Dick, who lived with Spicer for a time, remembered that Berkeley culture of the late forties ‘required you to have a really thorough grounding in the classics.’  (SF fandom, by contrast, he thought was overrun by “trolls.”)  This was the culture—the mixture of heady intellectualism and mysticism—that nourished Polly Lamb Goforth and Anthony Boucher, among others.

This Berkeley Renaissance spread across the Bay Area, the seed of what would become the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat movement, which, in turn, would feed into the later Hippie and Free Love movements.  These developments depended upon San Francisco as a place, and also as an idea—Herb Caen’s Baghdad by the Bay.

In terms of place, San Francisco Bohemian culture was coming into its own.  Philip Lamantia remembered, “San Francisco was terribly straight-laced and provincial, but at the same time there were these islands of freedom—in North Beach at bars like the Iron Pot and the Black Cat, where intellectuals met to talk.  There was a whole underground culture that went unnoticed by the city at large.”  Returning GIs, displaced by the war, and Conscientious Objectors released from camps in Oregon, rounded out these movements, helped them grow.  As historian Richard Candida Smith notes, to the surprise of many, returning soldiers did not only tap into the GI Bill for vocational education, but for more broad, liberal, and arts-related education, too.

There was also the myth of San Francisco itself, as an enchanted place, which charged the Bohemia there.  This was not a jaded old world, but a new one, ready to be molded by the artist.

The quintessential art movement to emerge out of this moment was abstract expressionism.  Abstract expressionism had its roots in the earlier surrealist movement, but whereas surrealists tried to plumb the individual psyche for universal—though still weird—symbols, abstract expressionism turned toward individual experience.   The art was confessional and personal—both of which can be seen in relation to Forteans and weird tales, which also tended toward the confessional and personal, and against the universal.  San Francisco artists, generally speaking, stood against determinism and the force of history.  Often inspired by Buddhism, they argued that humans had limitless potential and so the chief job of the artist—be it painter or poet—was to reflect upon experience and find the meaning in it.

Smith again: “The imagination, manifested in its highest form in the aesthetic act, became the most stable source of personal freedom in a world otherwise deterministic and frightening.  An absolutized privacy, no matter what the costs, turned out to be the most radical defense against the claims of public order.  Bohemian enclaves developed a repertoire of self-images that proived to have appeal to the collective imagination far beyond the limited boundaries of the art and poetry worlds.  As feelings of powerlessness spread, the aesthetic avant-garde provided an antidote.”

These ideals, matched with the influx of older, more experienced (and in the case of CO’s, more idealistic) individuals helped to create the Bay Area scene.

As I have already suggested, the Fortean community was interwoven with this larger art world.  Boucher had a radio show at KPFA, for example, and knew Philip K. Dick from Dick’s job at the record store (and later as his editor).  Circle was discussed in the San Francisco Chronicle’s book review column just before Boucher took that job.  Henry Miller was Fortean and also a key figure in the extension of the Bay Area Renaissance onto the Monterey Peninsula.  He published in Circle, and new many of the area artists.  His writings, too, exemplified the turn toward the confessional.

It is also possible to see in the art world itself an interest in things Fortean.  The best example is a project by Clay Spohn at the California School of Fine Arts (in San Francisco).  The installation was “The Museum of Unknown and Little Known Objects”—the very name of which is Fortean.  Spohn saw his work—very much as Fort did—as “philosophical prankism,” a way of testing the boundaries of what was known by showing what was unknown.  In all, the Museum contained 42 pieces, made up of scrap metal an unusual pieces of trash that Spohn had been collecting, including a watch on a wire, the starter for a rat race, a hat tree for a neighborly garden, and “bedroom fluff”: things he picked out of a vacuum cleaner.

Philip K. Dick is best known as the author of science fiction classics such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Man in the High Castle, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which became the movie “Blade Runner.”)  But he also wrote a number of mainstream novels that went unpublished until his science fiction made him famous.  One of those novels is Puttering about in a Small Land; it’s not a great novel, but it is diverting—about Roger Lindahl, who feels constrained by his cold wife and colder mother-in-law, has an affair with a woman who represents all the best in women (freedom, connection to life), is caught, constrained even more, and ends the story by lighting out for Chicago.

Puttering was written in 1957 (but not published until 1985) and set in Los Angeles, mostly, with glances at Washington, DC.  But, Dick’s biographer, Lawrence Sutin, suggests that the novel was really about Berkeley in the 1950s, and this seems true.  And so the book might be useful for getting sense of the area—not only because Dick was a local (he was), but because he frequented the Bohemian fringes.  I don’t know that he was a Fortean, per se, but he certainly ran with some of the same crowd.

One theme that runs throughout the book is the increasing importance of technology and consumerism to everyday life.  In the aftermath of the War, Americans had to re-adjust and re-build a society that was oriented not around manufacturing so much as selling services.  Roger epitomizes this by opening a radio—later, radio and television—shop, which evolves from a place the offers repairs (a small land where he can putter bout) into a an appliance store that runs on sales—a store that no longer had a place for Roger.

Interestingly, hanging over much of the novel is not the joyous effusion that is usually associated with the end of War, but a sense of displacement and depression.  That probably reflects Dick’s own vision—a record store played an important role in his life and shows up in much of his fiction, for instance—and is certainly necessary to the story—this is not a comedy—but also gives a glimpse into the sense of dislocation that was there at the time, but is often not remembered.  For example, Dick makes a point of mentioning the EC comics, then popular among children, and seems to suggest that consumerism was corrupting youth.  He does cut against this somewhat, though, suggesting that the horror and stories—though mass produced—might create a world where magic remained, and the mundanities of a consuming life was kept at bay.

Some vignettes:

82-3: “It seemed to her that the long hours of work at the aircraft plant [read: docks] made both of them excessively tired.  They became quarrelsome, like the people in the bars.  Both of them became thin—they had arrived thin enough as it was—and somber.  Most of their free time was spent lined up at the supermarket, buying groceries, or at the launderette waiting for their clothes.  In the evenings they listened to the radio or walked down to the corner for a beer. ….

The war came to an end by stages; the aircraft plants began to discharge groups of employees and cut down the number of shifts, the overtime, the seven-day week. ….

Near their wartime housing village a colony of stores had come into existence, clustered around the supermarket.  First, after the launderette, appeared a shoe repair shop, then a beauty parlor, a bakery, two bar-and-grills, a real estate office.”

84-5: “They had finished the war in a sprint, an ordeal lasting night and day, without humor and certainly without idealism.  Now it had come to an end; they lay on the couch or washed a few things, or sat around discussing what to do with their money, which opportunity to take advantage of.  They had earned their money.  The servicemen had begin to return; they had little or no money and many of them wanted to go to school on the G.I. Bill or they wanted to get their old jobs back—saved for them by law—or they spent that time with their wives and children, glad to be able to do that and nothing else.  For the warplant workers something more was required, something tangible.  They had got used to having something in their hands, some real object. …..

How high property prices had gone in the last year.  A house that had sold for five thousand dollars now sold for ten.  New tracts, subdivisions they were called, had started to advertise; each had a picturesque name.”

100-1: Roger “had a vision of crooks, swindles of every kind; he saw up into the office buildings and the crooked activity going on, the wheels, the machinery.  Loan offices, banks, doctors and dentists, quack healers preying on old women, Pachucs smashing store windows, defective equipment, food with filth and impurities in it, shoes made of cardboard, hats that melted in the rain, clothes that shrank and ripped, cars with broken motor blocks, toilet seats running with disease[,] germs, dogs carrying mange and rabies throughout the city, restaurants serving rotted food, real estate under water, phony stock in nonexistent mining companies, magazines with obscene pictures, animals slaughtered in cold blood, milk contaminated with dead flies, bugs and vermin and excretion, rubbish and garbage, a rain of filth on the streets, on the buildings and houses and stores.  The electric machines of the chiropractors crackled, the old ladies screamed, the patent medicine bottles boiled and exploded . . . he saw the war itself as a stupendous snow-job, men killed for fat bankers to float loans, ships built that went right to the bottom, bonds that could not be redeemed, Communism taking over, Red Cross blood that had syphilis germs in it.  Negro and white troops living together, nurses that were whores, generals who screwed their orderlies, profits and blackmarket butter, training camps in which recruits died by the thousands of bubonic plague, illness and suffering and money mixed together, sugar and rubber, meat and blood, ration stamps, V-D posters, short-arm inspections, M-1 rifles, USO entertainers with corks up their asses, motherfuckers and fairies and niggers raping white girls . . . he saw the sky flash and drip; private parts shot across the heavens, words croaked in his ears telling him about his mother’s monthlies; he saw the whole world writhe with hair, a monstrous hairy ball that burst and drenched him with blood . . .”