CALIFORNIANS are telling each other confidently that the bulk of our young people is sound and that the new bohemia in our midst is simply another manifestation of the fringe that has always seemed to cut a little deeper into West Coast communities than elsewhere.

 

Quite naturally, since the ways of bohemia furnish lively dinner table talk, there is a good deal of anecdotal conversation about them; but the talk is light, for the most part, and the socially accepted attitude toward the phenomenon is summed up in some such generalization as: “After all, it’s only a small minority and this is the postwar. You’ve got to expect something like this after a war. It always happens. Remember the twenties.” For their part, the young intellectuals and literati who are the beneficiaries of such an admirable tolerance agree heartily on their minority status. In fact, they insist on it. How could it be otherwise? Whenever was the vanguard of the artistic and intellectual world a majority?

 

Here in northern California they are shaping up the cultural mecca of the twentieth century. This is “the new Paris.” No longer does the young writer head for New York or the Left Bank. This time the modern, the new, the truly creative, will ride out the coming depression in the coastal hills of California; and as you drive along the coast, up state highway number one, you can see, if you look for them, the shacks, even tents, where literary immigrants have already set up typewriters. They are scattered over a wide area extending some twenty miles or more below Carmel which is, in turn, two to three hours below San Francisco.

 

Their jerry-built cabins are not yet an obvious rash on the countryside, hidden as they are in shrubbery and scattered along such a long stretch of road. It is dramatically beautiful country they have settled in. The highway winds in and out along cliffs that drop sheer to the Pacific where deep arroyos, dark with evergreen, sweep down between the hills. Here and there the road straightens inward to cut under towering redwood forests. This is the Big Sur country, the Continent’s End of Robinson Jeffers. It has long been one of California’s many prides and the town of Carmel, just above it, has been host to the nation’s retired, or vacationing, artists for years-the ones with money.

 

But these newcomers are a different crowd. They don’t have money and most of them are young, with no clamouring public to hide from nor any agent to drum up a demand for their stuff. When you first come upon them in their countryside shacks they are a surprise. You recognize them instantly, for even here in this forest by the ocean the stamp of young bohemia is as unmistakable as a trade mark. But it is their apparent isolation that bothers you. Their beards and sandaled feet, their corduroys and dark shirts; the barren clutter in the one or two uncarpeted rooms: abstract paintings against rude board walls, canned milk and pumpernickel on a rough table, ceramic ashtrays and opened books on a packing box—all this is familiar. Except for the bright daylight and the absence of city soot and noise, you’d think you were in a Greenwich Village apartment of twenty years ago. But it is decidedly unlike young bohemia to turn hermit or to take upon itself the disciplined demands of rural self-sufficiency. It doesn’t fit.

 

The key to this puzzle is simple, almost too obvious to grasp. It lies in that greatest of California boasts--the mild coastal climate.

 

These new settlers, it turns out, are as gregarious and dependent on urban services as their ancestors in Paris or New York. It is simply that they, with an enviable instinct that has characterized bohemia the world over, have been able to find the spot where, during a nation-wide housing shortage, a mild climate makes an amateur shack adequate year-round shelter, and where highways free of snow in an automobile-owning age offer year-round transportation via the thumb. Along the California coast a sweater and a fireplace will keep you warm in a cabin minus foundations, or even a floor, and the highway by your door is never stilled by snow or ice. Thus a rural, hitchhiking bohemia enjoys the beauty of a vacation country plus the services of the city and not so much as a nickel for subway fare is required to get to the center of town.

 

It does take time to get to San Francisco, but the few hours on the highway, once a week or so, are no hardship, and the generosity of the highway can usually be counted on. The town of Carmel is close by and in the city, either in San Francisco or Berkeley, there are concerts, bookstores, restaurants, and galleries to collect around. There are also kindred spirits there who haven’t yet found a hut in the hills and whose apartments afford meeting places for poetry-reading sessions and parties. Also in the city are the girls, the seekers who have come west this time from Wisconsin or Illinois to read proof or take dictation by day; but to spend their evenings, and not infrequently their earnings, in earnest nurturing of new genius.

 

The parties are not plush affairs, as a rule. Neither food nor drink is lavishly plentiful. And the poetry-reading sessions are serious and solemn occasions. They are held weekly in both San Francisco and Berkeley, where thirty or forty at a time can be found crowded together listening gravely to language patterns that are all but incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Poetry is far and away the most popular medium of these young writers, and their poems. make no compromise with old standards of communication. Poetry, they hold, “transcending logic, invades the realm where unreason reigns and where the relations between ideas are sympathetic and mysterious-affective-rather than causal.”