ABSTRACT
I picked up recently a novel by Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim. Mr. Bodenheim, you will remember, was murdered in Greenwich Village a few years ago. I was sufficiently interested in Mr. Bodenheim to read it, whereupon had a most traumatic experience. It was a novel about life in a Chicago Bohemia. Ten years after this was written I had written a novel about life in a London Bohemia. The reason it was such a traumatic experience to read Mr. Bodenheim's book was that both books were appallingly bad. Both books dealt with exactly the same theme, with exactly the same mythology underlying it. How could I, an unknown inhabitant of a London Bohemia come up with exactly the same cheap, shoddy view of life as Mr. Bodenheim? Mr. Bodenheim deals with a noble thief who has literary ambitions, goes through an upper-middle-class Bohemia and marries a virtuous prostitute. And so does my book. Both of them on the way contrive to produce a kind of contrast between the virtuous peasant who had a spontaneous appreciation of poetry and literature and a sophisticated upper-class woman. Both elements are necessary for the poet's sexual experience, but only one can really be the mistress of his soul. This was in Mr. Bodenheim's book, and there it was in almost the same words in my book. What was there about modern civilization, the arts, the city, that could produce two such very different urban congregations, such marked similarity of mood, style, and myth? This was one problem that kept Bohemias on my mind.
