Bohemia in America, 1858–1920 (review)

For aficionados of "hip," the well of available studies on the subject does not exactly run deep. While various cultural studies about the influence of hip and cool and the counterculture on youth and consumer culture do exist, most follow John Leland's Hip: The History (2004). These studies are about "the waves that ripple through the big pond, not the composition of the stone that causes the wave" (Leland 2). But to this small yet fascinating field we can now add a rather large boulder, Joanna Levin's Bohemia in America, 1858–1920, a book that analyzes the cultural waves of early American bohemia as much as it does the minerals, elements, and geologic features of the rock that caused them.

Levin's book takes the reader from antebellum Greenwich Village and Pfaff 's saloon—hangout of such proto-bohos as Walt Whitman, Ada Clare, and Henry Clapp Jr.—to postbellum San Francisco and the Bohemian Grove back to Greenwich Village in the early 1900s, all the while navigating the numerous textual and geographic spaces bohemia inhabited while teasing out the nuanced interplay between bohemians and the haute bourgeoisie. This is no small task, given the "always portable and shapeshifting" nature of bohemia (5). But Levin counters the slippery nature of bohemia's definition and its practitioners (as opposed to its poseurs)—as well as its often overlapping, liminal interplay with its opposite, the bourgeois—by providing an extensive analysis of bohemian writings and adherents. Indeed, part of what makes Levin's book so interesting—and, dare I say, fun, especially for those interested in the nonconformist tendencies of writers such as Whitman, Bret Harte, and even Mark Twain—is the author's compelling use of contextual research gleaned from long defunct periodicals (New York Illustrated News, anyone?), analysis of relatively lesser known works (Whitman's unfinished "The Two Vaults," about Pfaff 's Saloon), and evaluation of less familiar historical figures (such as Clapp).

For scholars of the West, particularly those interested in the cultural particulars of the topic, Bohemia has much to offer. Levin spends an early chapter discussing how bohemia moved to the "west of the (west of the) West, a never closing frontier" through an analysis of Harte, whose columns for San Francisco's Golden Era—written, appropriately enough, under the pseudonym "The Bohemian"—"promot[ed] the increasingly potent, and popular, ideology of the alienated, unconventional bohemian artist—an ideology that writers such as Harte and the Pfaffians used to express and renegotiate their relation between artists and their culture" (71, 5). But Levin doesn't stop at analyzing how western bohemians like Harte negotiated the aesthetic and cultural contours of an increasingly bourgeois, industrial—though still Wild—West. Rather, she links this divide to a much bigger opposition between states of the East and West through the analysis of late nineteenth-century magazines such as The New Bohemian, which posed the question, "Why should the mighty West, unmindful of its strength, forever bow its head in the lap of the Delilah of the East?" (267).

Because of Levin's depth of research and polished prose, Bohemia in America offers readers an incredibly rich look at a fertile period in American arts, a time when, as Mark Twain wrote, "Bohemianism was respectable—ah, more than respectable, heroic" (119). One could make the same assessment of Levin's work here. As long as discontented souls seek la vie bohème, Levin's book should stand as a cornerstone of counterculture criticism.