Dunbar's Bohemian Gallery: Foreign Color and Fin-de-Siecle Modernism.(Paul Laurence Dunbar)

What's more elementary to 20th-century American bohemia than a studied, conflicted hatred of the bourgeoisie? According to this bohemia's most compelling recent historian, the answer is a few modest but theatrical restaurants. In American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (2000), Christine Stansell bypasses the Provincetown Theater, Mabel Dodge's drawing room, and other familiar Greenwich Village landmarks in the hunt for bohemian ground zero. The source of the "lyrical left" milieu of Manhattan's 19-teens--fusing sexual, political, and writerly radicalisms with a hedonism that left nostalgia cannot forget--is instead tracked down esoteric alleyways to Schwab's, Mould's, and Maria's, long-leveled Village dives of the 1890s. "The seedy crowds [there] harbored brilliant students of the latest European ideas," Stansell reports, "and the garish light and deep shadows made a stage where all rules were suspended: workers might expound upon Nietzsche, ladies could go unchaperoned, and gentlemen could speculate about the coming revolution, as everyone drank steadily and ploughed through great heaps of spaghetti, or bratwurst, or brisket" (11). The morning after such symposia yielded more than the knowledge that European free thought and American free manners blended less painfully than brisket and whisky. With greater volume than the Parisian salons and cafes they emulated, Stansell's Village eateries introduced non-starving artists to a "'conversational community' ..., o that ..., opened out to a range of speakers, interlocutors, and topics," feminists and intellectual workers not excluded (Stansell 84). Over flowing spirits and family plates, downtown bohemia chatted its way to a counter-public sphere more expansively democratic than the coffee-fueled bourgeois seminar theorized by Jurgen Habermas. Call the leading political product of this counter-public sphere a saloon (rather than a salon) socialism, a declaration of independence from the class insularity of otherwise revered bohemian Paris, where mutinous pockets of the French middle sort had been talking, playing, and dramatizing ambivalence toward their birthrights largely to themselves since the 1830s (Siegel 11). And call the most significant aesthetic product of this counter-public sphere the Harlem Renaissance, which Stansell casts as the fruit of the New Negro's belated appearance within Manhattan bohemia's imagined community of outsiders, an arrival forced by the Great Migration but secured through the mechanism of inclusive debate and gossip erected at the turn into the twentieth century.

Two decades before Harlem Renaissance vanguardists Claude McKay and Jean Toomer took seats at noisy Village tables, however, the writer whom Booker T. Washington honored as the "Poet Laureate of the Negro race" had elbowed his way into a grander, less localized conversation about bohemian styles and economies. In his 1899 collection Lyrics of the Hearthside, composed as nonconforming crowds filled Schwab's, Mould's, and Maria's, Paul Laurence Dunbar offered a compact gallery of self-dramatizing bohemian portraits. Eight poems in, just past "A Sailor's Song" and a hymn to "The Mystic Sea," came the first of these portraits, a short lyric given the definitive title of "The Bohemian." Employing a never-spoken dialect of Standard English, the poem's six tart pentameter lines read as follows:

 
   Bring me…