Book Review: The Bohemians

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature
Ben Tarnoff
Literature, biography

The Bohemians isn't a bad book, but it's not original or insightful enough to be a great book. It's another IYTTSMSIYPETB. The big problem is that it wouldn't exist without Mark Twain, and Mark Twain does not lack for previous literary coverage. Without Twain, the three remaining Bohemians would consist of Bret Harte--briefly famous, now obscure--and a couple of (from a literary viewpoint) nonentities. It was Mark Twain who reinvented American literature; the others were "and supporting cast".

Okay, maybe that's a little harsh towards Harte. At the outset he was far better-known than Twain. He was the first to crack the eastern literary establishment, and he was a friend and mentor to Twain when the latter first fetched up in San Francisco. He didn't launch Twain's career by himself, but he played a part. So, too, did the city of 1860s San Francisco itself--its roaring debauches, its raw frontier cosmopolitanism, its outrageous Western characters, its sprung-from-nowhere ambiance, its boosterism. The city is a character in The Bohemians, one that Tarnoff limns particularly well.

If Tarnoff had stuck to the relationship among Harte, Twain, and San Francisco, this would be a more focused and more interesting read. No doubt his other two protagonists--Ina Coolbrith and Charles Stoddard--have a moral right something more than obscurity, but obscurity is what they have, and The Bohemians gives us no reason to think it should be otherwise.

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Justin Martin's Rebel Souls is about the first American Bohemians--the New York set centered around Walt Whitman. There, too, there's the problem that one member of the cast completely obscures the others. I thought it was more enlightening than Tarnoff's book, though, in part because the New York Bohemians made a somewhat lasting impact as a group.