[PREV - ACT_ONE]    [TOP]

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, and knew
               (I've probably read more              only a little about the
               books from the 1860s than             Lost Generation scene in
               from the 1910s.)                      Paris from Hemingway's "A
                                                     Moveable Feast"...)


    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 residents
    less serious, and the underground gets      then leave the Village
    transformed into a tourist attraction       for Paris, becoming
    of sorts.                                   (or merging with) the
                                                Lost Generation.
    Then the 20s "spree" kicks in, and
    everything, everywhere gets hyper
    and whacky.


--------
[NEXT - GREENWICH_SECEDES]