The sea coast of Bohemia
HIPPIES D. W. BROGAN
When my Italian-American taxi-driver took me from San Francisco airport to my hotel, he was even more touchy than most American taxi-drivers are. He commented on the bad planning of Candlestick Park, the baseball stadium whose Princes Street winds make the game a matter of great hazard. But what had really got under his skin was the reception of Twiggy, whom he had seen arrive a day or two before. 'If that's what girls are coming to be like, I am going in for boys.' This dislike of taxi-drivers for any variation from the norm seems to be general in San Francisco. So when I asked a driver to take me to Haight-Ashbury, the new centre of San Francisco Bohemia, he expressed complete disgust with the inhabitants of this centre of alienation, and bellowed, 'They ought to be run out of town.' But he did take me to this capital of 'the love generation,' and I was able to inspect the latest youth move- ment in the traditionally rebellious Bohemian city of San Francisco.
The city is going through a series of up- heavals and provoking a series of reactions from the squares. The 'Fuzz,' that is the police, are reported to be cracking down, morally and physically, on rebellious youth. And not every- one is as convinced as is ex-President Clark Kerr of the University of California, that the days of student revolt, of sit-ins, teach-ins, sit- downs are over. But the most marked mani- festations of the alienation of the young have moved from the campus to a rival centre of education, the semi-slum area round the cross- ing streets, Haight and Ashbury.
In the years immediately before the war, the centre of Bohemian San Francisco had moved from 'south of Market' and from the old Barbary coast, to the North Beach. North Beach is not actually beach—at any rate in its modern form—but it is close to the Bay, to the Golden Gate—and to Alcatraz. In these remote days, 'the hungry i' was designed for hungry intellectuals—at least, it was cheap. There I first heard Mort Sahl before his fame had circled the world (where is he now?). I was in San Francisco when Alan Ginsberg published Howl and when the City Lights bookshop was really like one of the little pioneer bookshops of the Latin Quarter.
Now the North Beach is, if not a tourist trap, a tourist attraction. There seem to be no genuine Bohemians or Bohemian restaurants there. The one restaurant I went to was very expensive indeed for its not very striking merits, and the main attraction of the quarter is the much displayed supply of topless wait- tresses in various bistros. The waitresses are, of course, not really topless. They are merely naked from the waist up. They are not naked, really naked, either:- they wear 'pasties,' little postage-stamp affairs which conceal the nipples and make everything decent. There are, of course, semi-naked young women parading up and down and doing 'bumps and grinds' under powerful lights, but they entirely lack the art of the old striptease artists like Gipsy Rose Lee and Anne Corio, and they look remar- kably undernourished. To see this very dull entertainment one pays a great deal for ex- tremely bad champagne cocktails, and one has the pleasure, if such it is, of seeing ladies whose breasts have been artificially expanded into monuments of pneumatic bliss by the use of silicone. All this was, to me, tame and ex- pensive compared with the great days of the Minsky Bw-lesk, when in addition to very talented artists of the Corio type one could see people like the Marx Brothers in their pre-film days. An Italian singer belted out the popular melodies of the 'twenties and 'thirties into a microphone, and they were taken up by the mainly though not exclusively male audience in a manner reminiscent of the Players' Club. Altogether, the North Beach is not what it was—not what, I am told, Soho is.
Haight-Ashbury is another cup of tea (or 'pot). It is mainly inhabited by young men and women, presumably living in sin since there are a good many babies, who are pro- testing by their manners, diets and costume against the rule of California under Governor Reagan. The protests can take some simple forms. Buttons can be bought asserting that 'Ronald Reagan is a Lesbian.' But one of the chief manifestoes of Haight-Ashbury firmly states that he is not, as there is no evidence that he has undergone an operation turning him into Rhonda Reagan.
The Governor and the legislature of the most populous state in the Union seem to be devoting almost as much time to putting down toplessness and the suppression of porno- graphy, as they are devoting to dealing with the sad financial situation of the Golden State or the manifold troubles of the University of California. The obsession of the American male with the female breast (a great source of income for such philosophical periodicals as Playboy and its imitators) no doubt has some deep pathological explanation. Perhaps it is 'momism' in a new form? Perhaps it is a method of protest against the threatened clean- up of California by the other organs of conformity? But, as few people under my age seem to remember, there was far more of such wickedness in the 'twenties than there is now and far less fuss about it.
In the 1964 campaign, the mother of William Buckley, the Charles Maurras of the Radical Right, launched a campaign of 'Mothers for Moral America' protesting against topless per- formances and issued a film showing what kind of exhibitionism was ruining the country. This particular campaign collapsed in laughter; and it was asserted that the film was at once snapped up by Elks clubs, and that Ecdysiast was not paid for her trouble. But, nothing daunted, the moralists—the 'wowsers,' as Mencken used to call them—are hard at work again.
Haight-Ashbury is not merely sexual exhibi- tionism. It is not merely an agglomeration of smokers of pot and perhaps users of LSD. When I first entered this Alsatia, at first sight I thought it was no more extravagant than King's Parade in Cambridge, but as I walked farther along the streets I was convinced I had been wrong, First of all, there was the smell. The city author- ities are cracking down on the ground that the 'pads' in Haight-Ashbury are manifestly in. sanitary and they certainly smell like it. But some of the resisters are setting the city a good example by cleaning up the streets themselves.
Although the 'hippies' seem dirty, they do• not seem particularly unhealthy. The young women were in fact more amply clad than they are in Cambridge, England, in saris and ponchos and sacks and blankets. The young men were in all kinds of exotic costumes, and both sexes had dirty feet in very open sandals. (A silly high school principal has turned girls out of the school for going to it wearing sandals, even if their feet are clean: obsta principiis.) But I see no reason to doubt that a good many of the in- habitants of this enclave are genuinely protest- ing against the Vietnam war, racial discrimina- tion, the behaviour of the police, persecution of dissent, etc. There are paradoxes. l saw a very exotic, rather dirty, and fantastically clad couple pushing a 'baby buggy' along the street in which was a very healthy child of twelve months which was 'wed happed up,' as they say in Scotland, basically looking remarkably like members of the public on King's Parade, Cam- bridge.
There are art stores and fancy drug stores and coffee bars but few saloons in this strange new world. Some of the art stores have on ex- hibition works of art which would excite the disapproval of the London police, not to speak of the Edinburgh police, and are inconceivable in Madame de Gaulle's Paris. There are mani- festoes of all kinds, all of them against the American way of life as it is interpreted in, let us say, Los Angeles.
But San Francisco is a very tolerent city, although Mayor Shelley, an old acquaintance of mine, is attacked as a tyrant by some of the most vehement protesters of 'the Haight-Ash- bury.' The regular municipal bus lines were diverted lest children should be brought into proximity with this centre of corruption, but private enterprise stepped in and bus lines now run tourist buses into the infected areas although they do not stop lest the passengers be corrupted by actual contact with the rebels. Parents do complain, not only of the incidence of drug-taking, but of their alienation from their children. I know of one case in which an independent young woman would not meet her parents in Palo Alto where Stanford Univer- sity is situated, but would meet them only at Sausalito across the Golden Gate, where she arrived complete with guitar and consented to receive money from her uncomprehending begetters.
No doubt there is a great deal of nonsense, pretension, and exhibitionism in the activities of the young. The economic basis of Haight- Ashbury must be very largely provided by in- dignant and alienated parents. But, in a way, the city is proud of its rebellious children, many of whom are immigrants from less tolerant regions. After all, few things are hap- pening in San Francisco today that did not happen in more extravagant forms a century ago. And through the crowded streets of the new Alsatia move silently and quietly the Chinese of San Francisco, as inscrutable as they were in the days of An Sing. But behind and around the young rebels is the immensely powerful and seductive force of American society. Perhaps all that is going on at Haight-Ashbury is a rite de passage and the rebels will soon settle down to suburban con- tent—and discontent—and perhaps to adultery and peace. But the protest may have other mean- ings too, and perhaps something good and new and really rebellious will come out of the osten- tatious defiance of the American way of life which is more than an attraction for the San Francisco tourist trade.
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