The Shores of Bohemia

The Shores of Bohemia: A Cape Cod Story, 1910-1960
John Taylor Williams
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May 17, 2022), 348 pages
Kindle edition $16.99, Amazon Hardcover $29.99

I’m always happy to get my hands on a book about the literary and creative world, so I added The Shores of Bohemia to my to-be-read list when I saw it reviewed. I was not disappointed.

Today we think of Cape Cod as an upscale, elite place, but it was not always the case. It was at one time rural and inexpensive: that’s what attracted the “bohemian” types in the first place. As the subtitle indicates, the book covers half of the twentieth century. That was a span that covered two world wars and the Great Depression.

Among the first residents were playwright Eugene O’Neill and novelist John Dos Passos. In its latter days as a bohemian haven the likes of literary critic Alfred Kazin spent time there. Notable figures such as Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy (who for a time were married) lived there.

The book’s angle of vision is not limited to Cape Cod. O’Neill wanted, obviously, his plays to reach as large of an audience as possible. He developed some of his plays at Cape Cod, but then produced them in New York City. In fact, many of the Cape Cod bunch spent part of the year in New York. Author John Taylor Williams also shows us what many of the group did in Europe, especially during the two world wars.

Politics was a big part of these people’s lives. Many of them were sympathetic to the Communist cause, and some were members of the Communist Party of the United States. Many, however, became disenchanted with Stalin’s brutality and distanced themselves from Communism while perhaps still being sympathetic to socialist ideals.

If you think that sex and relationships were a big part of the lives of artists and writers in the first half twentieth century, this book will not disabuse you of that notion. There were relationships, marriages, extra-marital affairs, and divorces aplenty and The Shores of Bohemia documents many of them. There was no shortage of hanky-panky in that world.

One particularly poignant chapter near the end of the book discusses the children of this group. Obviously, the divorces and affairs had an effect on the kids, and the author takes the time to examine how that lifestyle affected them. That chapter is followed by a discussion of the Bauhaus and other schools of architecture, material that seemed somewhat out of place.

Ending the narrative in 1960 was not an arbitrary decision on the author’s part. It was a time when politicians began forming the concept of the Cape Cod National Seashore and when the remaining residential areas began to take on a suburban character. It was clearly the end of an era.

The Shores of Bohemia is a well-written look at a fascinating slice of American cultural history.

A Place in the World

A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home
Frances Mayes
Crown (August 23, 2022), 304 pages
Kindle edition $13.99, Amazon hardcover $23.99

I read the author’s Under the Tuscan Sun when it first came out in about 1997. I enjoyed her account of carving out a life in rural Italy. I therefore took notice of the publication of her latest book.

A Place in the World takes a much wider view of Mayes’s life and homes than did her Tuscan book. She writes about renting homes in Italy for the summer when she was an academic, a precursor to her purchase of the home in Tuscany with her husband Ed. She writes about the end of her first marriage and about how she and Ed kept returning to Italy when the other couple in the summer rental scheme dropped out. In the introduction she lists the various places she has lived, including a house on Hamilton Street in Palo Alto, a location I know well.

Mayes tells us about her childhood in Alabama, and about purchasing a home in North Carolina. We learn about the sale of the property, an in-town rental, and the purchase of another rural location in the area. She discovers the region was home to several distant relations about whom she knew nothing.

The author discusses family, holidays, and cooking. In one section of the book each chapter ends with recipes prepared on holidays and special occasions. She writes about life under COVID and how she and Ed had to return to Italy for the olive harvest under those conditions. She even tells us that early in her adult life she went to Provence to study cooking with Simone Beck (one of Julia Child’s two coauthors of Mastering the Art of French Cooking) at a time “before glorious farmers’ markets bloomed, before the nonstop master chefs, recipe blogs, and home cake makers trying not to look foolish on bake-offs, before the proliferation of excellent food websites.” And Mayes talks about the differences between American and Italian cooking: “I have never seen measuring spoons for sale in Italy.”

Mayes mentions the fact that Under a Tuscan Sun was made into a movie. I made a point of not seeing it, as I recall the reviews characterized it as a romance, something the book definitely was not. Mayes makes no complaints about the movie, however. I’m sure she collected a tidy sum for the movie rights.

I found A Place in the World highly readable and entertaining. It was an enjoyable diversion in these difficult days. In fact, Mayes tells us how to navigate difficult days:

Tune out, tune in. Unfollow those Facebook zealots who get on your nerves; even cat videos on Instagram are better. Víkingur Ólafsson on the piano or Joshua Bell on the violin or Yo-Yo Ma on the cello will justify the world every morning, raising your natural exhilaration and zest, rather than weighing the bloodstream with lead.

That’s advice I can pay attention to.