ancient cities

80 Bohemian
well-received stage adaptation and eventually serving
as the source material for Giacomo Puccini’s opera
La Bohème. From these romanticized works one
may glean many enduring ideals of the bohemian
lifestyle: the vaunted bonhomie, the balance of
hedonism and self-sacrifice, the rejection of bourgeois
values of instrumentality and security, and
the primacy of art pour l’art (art for art’s sake).
By the end of the nineteenth century, the hillside
village of Montmartre began to displace the Latin
Quarter as Paris’s bohemian center of gravity.
Montmartre was particularly notable for the lively
café and cabaret nightlife found there, frequented
by both bohemian participants and slumming
members of the bourgeoisie. The presence of such
exotic nocturnal diversions, serving as platforms
upon which bohemians would enact their often
spectacular lifestyle innovations, has become an
especially important feature of the bohemian district
in subsequent iterations.
The American Bohemian
In the early decades of the twentieth century, New
York’s Greenwich Village would emerge as the
United States’ own bohemian center, drawing on
the European example and incorporating European
expatriates such as Marcel Duchamp and Mina
Loy. In Greenwich Village, an ethnic working-class
section of lower Manhattan, avant-garde artists
and writers mingled with political radicals, including
John Reed, Max Eastman, and Emma Goldman.
Among the distinguishing features of the Greenwich
Village bohemia was the new attention to feminist
politics and the expansive role played by women
such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Djuna Barnes,
and Margaret Anderson within the milieu. Uptown,
the segregated African American district of Harlem
was simultaneously experiencing a cultural flowering,
demonstrating that bohemia was not solely the
property of Whites.
After World War II, a new bohemian style
known as “beat” came to the fore. The term is credited
to Jack Kerouac, whose novel On the Road is
the most prominent example of beat literature, in
which he described himself and his friends as a
“beat generation,” similar to the “lost generation”
of post–World War I writers such as F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein.
Other prominent beat writers include Allen Ginsberg,
Lawrence Lipton, and William S. Burroughs. As
with prior bohemian movements, these artists and
affiliated lifestyle adherents favored particular urban
districts, including North Beach in San Francisco,
Venice Beach in Los Angeles, and Greenwich Village
in New York.
While Parisian bohemians rejected the emergent
conventions of bourgeois utilitarianism, members
of the beat generation pitched themselves against
the blandness of postwar consumer society, especially
as represented by the middle-class suburbs
and their presumed conformism. The beats were
inspired by cultural innovations that they gleaned
as coming from the African American community,
especially jazz. In 1959, Norman Mailer penned a
manifesto of beat bohemianism that he titled “The
White Negro,” advocating that White hipsters
take their cultural cues from urban Blacks, whose
experience he viewed as an authentic alternative to
that of the suburban White square, “trapped in the
totalitarian tissues of American life, doomed willy
nilly to conform if one is to succeed.”
Though beat is mainly regarded as a literary
movement, in an account of the Greenwich Village
beat scene in 1960, the sociologist Ned Polsky
noted that the scene was crowded with participants
who lacked literary ambition and were best
distinguished by fondness for jazz and deep antipathy
to gainful employment. These adherents
came to be known by the generally pejorative designation
beatniks and were identified by a presumed
affinity for goatees, berets, and bongo
drums.
Bohemia Since the 1960s
An examination of the Parisian prototype, the
Greenwich Village bohemia, and the beat movement
of the postwar decades reveals both evident
continuity in the bohemian lifestyle and the ways
in which it takes particular forms depending on
distinctive historical periods and urban locales.
Trends in the last half of the twentieth century
further illustrate this point.
The explosion of the youth counterculture during
the 1960s marked a new turn in the articulation
of bohemian lifestyles. The 1960s hippies
continued to be associated with the urban milieu,
most particularly San Francisco in the United
States. There were clear lines of descent connecting
the new counterculture with their beat predecessors;
On the Road was required reading for