On Bohemia: The Code of the Self-exiled

Cesar Grana

en Limba Engleză Paperback – 30 ian 1990

Bohemia has been variously defined as a mythical country, a state of mind, a tavern by the wayside on the road of life. The editors of this volume prefer a leaner definition: an attitude of dissent from the prevailing values of middle-class society, one dependent on the existence of caf life. But whatever definition is preferred, this rich and long overdue collective portrait of Bohemian life in a large variety of settings is certain to engage and even entrance readers of all types: from the student of culture to social researchers and literary figures n search of their ancestral roots.

The work is international in scope and social scientific in conception. But because of the special nature of the Bohemian fascination, the volume is also graced by an unusually larger number of exquisite literary essays. Hence, one will find in this anthology writings by Malcolm Cowely, Norman Podhoretz, Norman Mailer, Theophile Gautier, Honore de Balzac, Mary Austin, Stefan Zweig, Nadine Gordimer, and Ernest Hemingway. Social scientists are well represented by Cesar Grana, Ephraim Mizruchi, W.I. Thomas, Florian Znaniecki, Harvey Zorbaugh, John R. Howard, and G. William Domhoff, among others.

The volume is sectioned into major themes in the history of Bohemia: social and literary origins, testimony by the participants, analysis by critics of and crusaders for the bohemian life, the ideological characteristics of the bohemians, and the long term prospect as well as retrospect for bohemenianism as a system, culture and ideology. The editors have provided a framework for examining some fundamental themes in social structure and social deviance: What are the levels of toleration within a society? Do artists deserve and receive special treatment by the powers that be? And what are the connections between bohemian life-styles and political protest movements?

This is an anthology and not a treatise, so the reader is free to pick and choose not only what to read, but what sort of general patterns are essential and which are transitional. This collection, initiated by the late Cesar Grana, has been completed and brought to fruition by his wife Marigay Grana.

Cesar Grana was, prior to his death, professor of sociology at the University of California in San Diego. Among his major books is Meaning and Authenticity, also available from Transaction. Marigay Grana was formerly an urban planner and designer in San Diego. She now is a free-lance editor living in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Cuprins

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; II: The Testimony of Bohemia; 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; 2: 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; 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; A Question of Survival; Selling Out; Invading Bohemia; Invading Bohemia; 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; 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; L’Art pour l’Art; The Peacock Feather; The Dandy; The First Night of Hernani; UbuRoi, or Hernandi AU 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; 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; 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