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SF_BOHEMIA_1860S

                                              February 02, 2019


Ben Tarnoff's "The Bohemians" (2014):

             "What made the bohemian experiment so extraordinary was
             that it happened where it did.  On a distant frontier barely
             removed from its days of gold digging and gunfighting,
             a literary scene emerged that invigorated the region,
             fascinated the country, and, through Harte and Twain,
             gave America two of its most popular writers.  The Bohemians
             showed that great writing could grow anywhere; that its
             origins could be remote, its subjects crude, so long
             as it told stories worth telling.  They helped awaken
             America to the fact of its bigness, to its infinite
             canvas of incident and character and slang."  p255


   
             "Harte made an unlikely Bohemian.  The word referred to    
             a tribe of penniless artists seen around the seedier       
             districts of Paris and New York.  They drank to excess,    
             contracted venereal diseases.  They shivered to death in   
             drafty garrets toiling over materpieces that would never   
             be printed.  But in Harte's hands, 'Bohemian' became       
             more than just a byword for wild living.  It came to       
             represent a creative alternative to the mundane and the    
             mercenary in American life, a way to overcome              
             California's crude materialism and fulfill Thomas Starr    
             King's call to build Yosemities in the soul.  'Bohemia     
             has never been located geographically,' Harte wrote,       
             'but any clear day when the sun is going down, if you      
             mount Telegraph Hill, you shall see its pleasant valleys   
             and cloud-capped hills glittering in the West like the     
             Spanish castles of Titbottom.'"   p.42                     
                                                                        
                                                                        
             "What connected them was their contempt for custom,        
             their restlessness with recieved wisdom.  They belonged    
             to Bohemia because they didn't belong anywhere else."  p.43



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