Greenwich Village Bohemia: A Winter Wonderland Turns Into An American Renaissance(Part III).
slumped over the table and surrounded by a retinue of sycophants and young girls who wanted to go to bed with immortality. ("These little maggots," he had written in denunciation of his own Bohemianism in l934, "are my companions for most of the time.") That last night at the Horse he was half carried out and taken to the Chelsea Hotel where he began to die the death he had been so long preparing for himself. Old Ernie took up a collection for Thomas' widow and one longshoreman gave and another didn't. "Who's that for ?" said the one who didn't. "Oh," his friend answered," some drunk who used to hang around here just died." (7)
The implications of both alcoholism and drug addiction are fairly apparent. The list goes on and on, but there were other factors that led to the demise of bohemia in the village. Social-environmental factors way beyond the artist's control were also at work in the village in the 50's and 60's. As the village grew, rents became more expensive and store owners attempted to attract a different clientale, preferably personages with more money than the average starving artist might be able to afford. As the old buildings were torn down, and replaced by new businesses, it became more difficult to be a struggling artist against the mainstream of the avant guard. Many artists simply moved out or changed the art forms to fit more comfortably with conventionalism. Also, as Joan Dideon loves to point out in many of her essays, it becomes rather depressing watching your friends overdose, or end up in psychiatiric wards or hospitals. Michael Harrington also points to a deeper problem that has often been ignored, and would have been impossible for a beat poet to notice at the time he was producing his or her poetry. Culture in America had developed in such an opposite fashion from European culture, due in a large part because of its' democratic instiutional origins, that there was not real chance for a bohemia to continue. To have a real bohemia, Harrington explains that a small snobbish aristocratic elite is needed to produce such a bohemia culture that sits on the fringe of the mainstream. This is impossible in America, for once a real cultural movement takes hold of the inner cultural psyche, it is immediately absorbed by the mainstream subconscousness. Like some mad trains running throughout the night, it roars out of control across an aesthetic landscape of unknown design. Pity the poor artist who gets in the way. Some artists, especially poets, just do not
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