ABSTRACT
In a frenzy of youthful discovery, I found the seacoast of Bohemia on the banks of the Mississippi River in the late 1940's, when I was a Jesuit- educated son of the Irish middle class. The port of entry was a bar called, obviously enough, Little Bohemia, on a side street just above the levee in St. Louis. I had already learned enough modernist lessons that, to the horror of sober burghers, I used to push Alexander Calder's mobile at the Art Museum to set it dancing. So it was an epiphany to join the painters and the other regulars in the back of the room at Little Bohemia where they talked about art and psychoanalysis and the motherland of Greenwich Village. There was a business and warehouse district outside and, of a summer's evening, the streets seen through the door were always lonely and deserted, perfect decor for beer and romanticism and the lyric violin passage from Falla's “El Amor Brujo” on the jukebox. Sometimes there was a party later on in an apartment painted black, with mattresses instead of furniture, and no doors, not even on the bathroom.
