Greenwich Village Bohemia: A Winter Wonderland Turns Into An American Renaissance(Part III).
how soon our laughter becomes defensive ! O my coevals ! we cannot die too soon. Art is sad and life is vapid. Can we thumb our nose at the very sea ?" (6)
Near the end of the Greenwich Village scene, the Beat writers seemed to be suffering from what is commonly known as the James Dean complex. It is known to inflict movie stars in large numbers. The best example is James Dean who ended up actually attempting to live the legend that had been created by hollywood on the movie screen, when he was killed in a car accident. Of course, noone can actually live the life of a rebel against the system a rebel without any cause, but in hollywood, people do not really die. In real life, they never wake up, but the media seems to forget this, often creating legends inside the American mythos. Bela Legosi was another victim of the James Dean complex. In later years, he actually began to think that he was a vampire. Near the end of his career, he had sold all of the furniture in his house on his heroin addiction, as he attempted to sustain his fantasy of becoming a real life vampire. Visitors reported that Legosi would wander around his estate dressed as a vampire, hissing at them in a heroin stupor. Luckily for Begosi, hollywood decided to save his career by placing him in some cheap B movies that later became classics. The American public never knew the difference, and the great movie actor was able to die a peaceful death. The same cannot, unfortunately be said for some of the beat writers living in the Village in the l950's. Many of those poets met tragic deaths. Their endings were not so spectacular. Dylan Thomas is the best example of what can happen to a poet, who forgets the differnce between the magic of poetry and life. In his essay, "The Death Of Bohemia", Michael Harrington describes the death of Thomas. Like a King surrounded by his court, Thomas passed away in an alcohol induced state during a drinking game.
"And there was Dylan Thomas. The White Horse was his home away from home when he was in New York and, from the point of view of the regulars, the fame he brought to it was calamitous with crowds. Old Ernie, the owner, even stopped giving out the chess sets. Anyone with a vision of the poet divinely drunk upon the midnight might ponder Thomas' final evenings at the Horse. He was a slobbering, incomprehensible man
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