Doing research on Forteans at UC Riverside. And while traveling, read Parry's classic account of American Bohemias, which was excellent, and relevant to Fortean history, since so many Forteans were associated with one Bohemia or another. Here's my review:
This was a really fun survey. It’s not academic or rigorous, but I learned a lot anyway.
Parry became well known as an expert on Russia, but he wrote this before he went to graduate school, after he had immigrated from Russia and become a journalist. Early chapters appeared, as he notes in the prologue, as a series of magazine articles, many of them published by H. L. Mencken. And the book reads like an extended magazine article, with a thesis lightly suggested but not fully developed.
So, what is bohemia? There’s George Sterling’s definition—quoted here—that it involves poor artists. Robert W. Chambers—again, quoted here—is more skeptical of this definition, worried that such artists might become supercilious: “What is Bohemia? If it is a pace where a number of artists huddle together for the sake of animal warmth, I have nothing to say against it. But if it is a place where a number of artists come to scorn the world, then it is a dangerous thing.”
In typical journalistic fashion, Parry suggests more than states out right. He agrees that bohemianism is associated with the relatively poor—usually drop outs from the middle class, rather than the working class—creating art, challenging art. But in the best cases that art needs to be allied with progressive politics—Greenwich Village in the years around 1920s is his ideal, with Chicago during its renaissance a runner up. Importantly, though, Parry measures Bohemia against scale of authenticity: if there are too many slumming rich people, in his judgment, or it is too closely allied with the powers that be, he marks it as made up of pretenders (hence the title), rather than real Bohemians.
Parry starts his story with Poe, who was the model for later Bohemians, although he himself was not a Bohemian. He belonged to no community. And for Parry Bohemia did not really exist—as an ideal—until after it migrated from Paris in the wake of the 1848 Revolution. And so the first American Bohemia was in antebellum New York. He spends a long time on this subject—three or four chapters—mostly, it seems because he was proud of rediscovering these Bohemians. These are not the most interesting chapters, though.
In a series of chapters arranged both thematically and chronologically, he then spreads out through America, looking at how Bohemia declined in the years immediately after the Civil War, was reborn in the 1890s, but modishly, which meant not authentically—it was a sales point for lots of restaurants, for example—and how it burbled up in different places around the country.
Parry points at, but does not explore, the sociology behind Bohemia. In Boston, for example, with its rigid hierarchy, blue noses, and small scale, Bohemia could not take root. Something similar occurred in Philadelphia. And presumably Ls Angeles. There were Bohemian outposts in the so-called southwest, particularly Texas, but here it was oddly allied with conservative politics and Christianity.
The looser social structures of San Francisco, Taos, Carmel, and Chicago allowed authentic Bohemias to develop in those places, although they were almost all played out by the time Parry published, in 1933. San Francisco’s Bohemia Club was home to the city’s provincials. Taos became a tourist destination. Chicago, with its vigorous theater and writing scene, dried out by the mid-1920s, when most of its Bohemians relocated to New York.
Parry spends a lot of time on the Greenwich Village scene. He lived this, as he did the Chicago Renaissance. He was especially impressed by how these Bohemias were dedicated to liberal politics, often socialistic if not communist. He ends with a look at Ezra Pound and the scene that developed around him on Paris’s Left Bank.
The book includes several bits written much later, but these do not add a whole lot. The best of them is Paul Buhle’s introduction, which references most of the recent literature, excepting Schorske’s Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture. The chapter on Geenwich Village in 1948, written by Parry, is scattered and inconclusive. The last chapter, written by Harry T. Moore, on the Beats, tends toward old-person get-off-my-grassism, with his constant sniffing that the Beats are too self-involved.
This version is a reprint, and it should be noted that some of the pages are cut off on the edge.
It stands out that Parry was willing enough to confront some of the issues of Bohemia often un-discussed at the time, even if not always positively. He notes that there is some anti-Semitism in the club; and he mentions the homosexuality, though he is none too happy about it. He discusses the heavy drinking, the drugs, the sex. The timing of the book, though, too, leads him to miss some developments in Bohemia—California after the Civil War (which he admits in the addenda); Milwaukee, even as an extension of Chicago; the surrealists, especially in New York; and Henry Miller (which is touched on in Moore’s chapter).
Plus, there are lots of fun stories, including one that probably best describes Bohemia both as a real place inhabited by real people, but also as an object of desire—that push and pull of authentic exhibition and hopes to just be in its shadow. Joaquin Miller, the poet of the Sierras, travelled to Boston. The city itself was not won over by this bear-skin wearing wild man. But he had his fans. As he wrote:
“When I met here in the lobby of the hotel she invited me immediately to her house. When we arrived at the door, she said, ‘This is to be no formal meeting, I have loved and admitted you, your poetry, and your photographs.’ She invited me upstairs and introduced me to two young lady friends. I thanked the Lord that I was a lion in strength that day. . . . I never saw any one of the three women again. I know nothing of two of them, not even their names.”
An anonymous ménage à quatre—in 1882!
Parry became well known as an expert on Russia, but he wrote this before he went to graduate school, after he had immigrated from Russia and become a journalist. Early chapters appeared, as he notes in the prologue, as a series of magazine articles, many of them published by H. L. Mencken. And the book reads like an extended magazine article, with a thesis lightly suggested but not fully developed.
So, what is bohemia? There’s George Sterling’s definition—quoted here—that it involves poor artists. Robert W. Chambers—again, quoted here—is more skeptical of this definition, worried that such artists might become supercilious: “What is Bohemia? If it is a pace where a number of artists huddle together for the sake of animal warmth, I have nothing to say against it. But if it is a place where a number of artists come to scorn the world, then it is a dangerous thing.”
In typical journalistic fashion, Parry suggests more than states out right. He agrees that bohemianism is associated with the relatively poor—usually drop outs from the middle class, rather than the working class—creating art, challenging art. But in the best cases that art needs to be allied with progressive politics—Greenwich Village in the years around 1920s is his ideal, with Chicago during its renaissance a runner up. Importantly, though, Parry measures Bohemia against scale of authenticity: if there are too many slumming rich people, in his judgment, or it is too closely allied with the powers that be, he marks it as made up of pretenders (hence the title), rather than real Bohemians.
Parry starts his story with Poe, who was the model for later Bohemians, although he himself was not a Bohemian. He belonged to no community. And for Parry Bohemia did not really exist—as an ideal—until after it migrated from Paris in the wake of the 1848 Revolution. And so the first American Bohemia was in antebellum New York. He spends a long time on this subject—three or four chapters—mostly, it seems because he was proud of rediscovering these Bohemians. These are not the most interesting chapters, though.
In a series of chapters arranged both thematically and chronologically, he then spreads out through America, looking at how Bohemia declined in the years immediately after the Civil War, was reborn in the 1890s, but modishly, which meant not authentically—it was a sales point for lots of restaurants, for example—and how it burbled up in different places around the country.
Parry points at, but does not explore, the sociology behind Bohemia. In Boston, for example, with its rigid hierarchy, blue noses, and small scale, Bohemia could not take root. Something similar occurred in Philadelphia. And presumably Ls Angeles. There were Bohemian outposts in the so-called southwest, particularly Texas, but here it was oddly allied with conservative politics and Christianity.
The looser social structures of San Francisco, Taos, Carmel, and Chicago allowed authentic Bohemias to develop in those places, although they were almost all played out by the time Parry published, in 1933. San Francisco’s Bohemia Club was home to the city’s provincials. Taos became a tourist destination. Chicago, with its vigorous theater and writing scene, dried out by the mid-1920s, when most of its Bohemians relocated to New York.
Parry spends a lot of time on the Greenwich Village scene. He lived this, as he did the Chicago Renaissance. He was especially impressed by how these Bohemias were dedicated to liberal politics, often socialistic if not communist. He ends with a look at Ezra Pound and the scene that developed around him on Paris’s Left Bank.
The book includes several bits written much later, but these do not add a whole lot. The best of them is Paul Buhle’s introduction, which references most of the recent literature, excepting Schorske’s Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture. The chapter on Geenwich Village in 1948, written by Parry, is scattered and inconclusive. The last chapter, written by Harry T. Moore, on the Beats, tends toward old-person get-off-my-grassism, with his constant sniffing that the Beats are too self-involved.
This version is a reprint, and it should be noted that some of the pages are cut off on the edge.
It stands out that Parry was willing enough to confront some of the issues of Bohemia often un-discussed at the time, even if not always positively. He notes that there is some anti-Semitism in the club; and he mentions the homosexuality, though he is none too happy about it. He discusses the heavy drinking, the drugs, the sex. The timing of the book, though, too, leads him to miss some developments in Bohemia—California after the Civil War (which he admits in the addenda); Milwaukee, even as an extension of Chicago; the surrealists, especially in New York; and Henry Miller (which is touched on in Moore’s chapter).
Plus, there are lots of fun stories, including one that probably best describes Bohemia both as a real place inhabited by real people, but also as an object of desire—that push and pull of authentic exhibition and hopes to just be in its shadow. Joaquin Miller, the poet of the Sierras, travelled to Boston. The city itself was not won over by this bear-skin wearing wild man. But he had his fans. As he wrote:
“When I met here in the lobby of the hotel she invited me immediately to her house. When we arrived at the door, she said, ‘This is to be no formal meeting, I have loved and admitted you, your poetry, and your photographs.’ She invited me upstairs and introduced me to two young lady friends. I thanked the Lord that I was a lion in strength that day. . . . I never saw any one of the three women again. I know nothing of two of them, not even their names.”
An anonymous ménage à quatre—in 1882!
