Paul Madonna, the well-known San Francisco artist who beautifully illustrated my book A Writer’s San Francisco, was recently seriously injured in a car accident. I am wishing him a very speedy recovery and wanted to share with you a few pieces from that book that he enriched so much.]
San Francisco and Paris are sister cities. They are not connected by architecture, class structure, or climate. They are not connected by their shellfish preferences (in San Francisco it is crab, in Paris it is mussels), their history (Wild West provincial versus urbane royal), or their museums (San Francisco has no Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, or even Pompidou). They are connected by being two of the world’s very few bohemian meccas. Each is an important, well-marked stop on the bohemian international highway.
In “The Beat Generation and San Francisco’s Culture of Dissent,” Nancy Peters explained:
The idea of bohemia caught the imaginations of writers in early San Francisco with Henri Mürger’s Scènes de la Vie Bohème (1844), which depicted life in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Although class society in San Francisco bore little resemblance to that of Paris, the city’s writers were not blind to the obvious attractions of la vie bohème and reveled the nights away in Montgomery Street bars and restaurants. A bohemian community developed in the 1880s and 1890s around the intersections of Pacific, Washington, Jackson, and Montgomery Streets. When the Montgomery Block building emptied out, artists and writers moved in. Over the years, more than 2,000 of them have lived there, among them Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Frank Norris, Margaret Anderson, and Kenneth Rexroth.
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The bohemian ideal hardly parses, since it is made up of contradictory urges. There is the urge to feast and indulge, the urge to wildness. At the same time, there is the urge to witness for the culture and to speak truth to power, the urge to seriousness. There is the garret urge for solitude and the café urge for messy interaction. But even if these urges clash, producing a novelist who would love to witness for the culture if he weren’t currently blacked out from vodka or a poet who would love to be capturing grace on her laptop if she didn’t have Grace in her lap, a coherent picture emerges, as coherent as a Cubist painting.
It is a picture of a wild, serious bohemian with few natural habitats, one of which is Paris, one of which is San Francisco. To be sure, she may have to spend years in some uncongenial place in order to tend to her dying father or pursue her nonwriting career, she may fail to break free of her birth community and never leave the confines of her town, she may be seduced into living here or confused into living there—in short, she may find himself far from her natural habitat, pacing her cage like a lion in a zoo. But she knows where she ought to be.
The tourist says, “I love San Francisco! Fisherman’s Wharf, you know, and the sourdough bread! Oh, and the Golden Gate Bridge!” The writer says, “I love San Francisco” and then shakes his head. What he loves are its traditions and permissions. He loves what City Lights Bookstore represents, its history as a Beat supporter and safe haven that is at least as poignant as Paris’s Shakespeare & Company’s. He loves the roasting coffee smells of North Beach and the fact that he can write freely here, that his freedom is protected, if not guaranteed.
He loves the iconography of the Summer of Love and the Free Speech Movement, the protests, the tear gas, the symbolic rebellion, the rock and the jazz, the Jefferson Airplane, the radical energy that, unlike its Parisian expression, was not dogmatic Communism but the expression of basic constitutional principles of the sort that terrify politicians. It is now fashionable for almost everyone, hippies included, to shake their heads at that period and say, “Bad trip, man!” Revisionist history has it that there were no principles involved, just acid, debauched sex, and a kind of extended spring break. But revisionist history has it wrong. For a little while America had partisans.
The writer loves the fog as it pours in; he loves the sun when the fog pours out. The rest of California is Beach Boys country, but San Francisco has that moody thing going, those blues notes wrapped in moisture, an atmosphere that tempers California dreaming and makes life more real. But he loves the sun, too, that Frisbee-tossing, forehead-baking golden sun that prevents the loss of eight months of the year to winter. The fog brings reality, but it is still a California reality, one spent outdoors the whole year round.
Maybe he can’t say what he loves—maybe it is just a feeling in his heart. It is a feeling that a writer gets in Paris, so powerful that I felt compelled to write a book about it. It is a feeling that a writer gets in Greenwich Village, on a bench in front of Keats’s house in Hampstead in the north of London, in the darker parts of any city where outsiders and artists roam, in places where a pen is a sacred object and not something to be feared or scorned. It is a feeling essentially about freedom; secondarily about creation; and together about the freedom to bleed art.
There is a bohemian international highway whose rest stops are separated by long distances and legions of philistines. All along the way writers will wave to you and cry, “Say hello to San Francisco when you get there!” They know that you are going home. It is their home, too, one of their homes, and more like home than the place where they currently reside. It is certainly possible to live in a place where diversity means two or three kinds of orthodoxy. We have all lived in such places for as long as we could tolerate them. But how we itch to escape them and return home to a place like San Francisco.
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