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IMPROPER_BOHEMIANS

                                             December 23, 2008

   About Allen Churchill's
   "The Improper Bohemians" (1959)       1959?  Is this yet another
                                         attempt at cashing in on the
     The tale of Greenwich Village       Beatnik craze, after the year
     bohemia from 1910 or so, on         of "On the Road", 1957?
     to around WWII.

     Focuses on the stars of the scene --
     John Reed, Eugene O'Neill, Edna
     St. Vincent Milay -- but it also
     discusses many of the lesser leading      For example,
     lights, including some barely             "Babs", who
     remembered...                             lectured on
                                               the evils of
       Churchill never neglects to             prostitution,
       explain where the funding               and offered to
       came from, who the editors              fight it by
       were, and so on...                      having sex with
                                               any man present.


               I noted with some surprise
               that I knew next to nothing
               about the scene during the       The 1920s at least
               1900s and 1910s.                 I knew enough of to
                                                know I needed to know
               But the 1900s and 1910s were     more ("The Jazz Age",
               such a blank for me that I       "The Lost Generation").
               wasn't even much aware that
               there was a blank there...            (I've read very little
 BLANK_VERSE                                         Fitzgerald, knew very
               (I've probably read more              little about the Lost
               books from the 1860s than             Generation scene in Paris
               from the 1910s.)                      beyond Hemingway's "A
                                                     Moveable Feast", etc)...


    In broad outline:

    Allen Churchill describes a very
    serious, intellectual Greenwich Village
    bohemia, an underground where socialist
    politics were all the rage.

    A transition then happens where things
    go a little dada, things become a bit       Some of the former
    less serious, and the underground gets      residents then bail
    transformed into a tourist attraction       on the Village for
    of sorts.                                   Paris, becoming
                                                (or merging with)
    Then the 20s "spree" kicks in, and          the Lost Generation.
    everything, everywhere gets hyper
    and whacky.


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