Reviews

In this idiosyncratic, meandering memoir, Gold ( Travels in San Francisco ) recounts his experiences in bohemias ranging from his adopted hometown, San Francisco, to New York City, Jerusalem and Paris. Gold offers anecdotes, not an anatomy, and his book is thin as a guide to such places as Greenwich Village and the Left Bank. Most noteworthy are those experiences involving literary figures: as a college freshman in 1943, Gold attended a party held by poets in New York and was nearly seduced by Anais Nin; in Paris some 15 years later, he looked on as novelist William Burroughs used a sink as a urinal. Gold is no romantic: in 1991, while he was visiting his three college-age children on Manhattan's Lower East Side, a stabbing nearby reminded him that their new bohemia ``is not one of pure gaiety and charm.'' Describing bohemia as ``an autonomous zone,'' he concludes that ``the world seems to need this moral ventilation system.'' (Apr.)

Gold, who won the 1989 Sherwood Anderson prize for fiction, explores the concept of bohemia as he wanders through bohemian quarters from North Beach to Greenwich Village, from Paris to Budapest to Tel Aviv. He reports conversations with James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg and describes the antics of a host of lesser-known noncomformists--all marching to the beat of a different drum. There are some amusing anecdotes here, such as Gold's accounts of meeting with Anais Nin and William Burroughs. On the whole, however, Gold somehow manages to make bohemianism dull. His ruminations, better suited for a notebook or travel journal, fail to make an interesting and coherent book.-- William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY