Bohemians are portrayed as unbridled, carefree rebels of the established order. American artists at the turn of the century may have sought out an arcadian paradise, but they brought the obsessions of making a serious art, and serious art in their time was tragedy.
Greta Wiesenthal by Rudolf Jobst. Image from Wikipedia Commons.
George Sterling: The King of Bohemia
“He was the proton around which the rest of us revolved as electrons.” Vernon Kellogg
Successive waves of claims by artists and individuals have been made on the Big Sur area. George Sterling is responsible for establishing the artists colony in Carmel. From Sterling came Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller escaping Paris at the dawn of WW II, Jack Kerouac and the Beats, The Big Sur Folk Festivals, Ansel Adams, Aldous Huxley, Fritz Perls and tourists from every corner of the earth.
George Sterlings move from San Francisco to Camel is the place to begin a look for the artistic claims on the Genius Loci of Carmel and Big Sur.
Cheap rent and affordable food
Bohemians in San Francisco at the turn of the century flocked to the Montgomery Block where rents were low in the abandoned offices and spaghetti houses like Coppa’s offered inexpensive food and wine. Poppa Coppa provided artists with meal chits that could bridge them financially between sales of paintings and poetry. George Sterling held court many evenings at Coppa’s Restaurant with the writers, poets, painters and anarchists living in the area. Working with his uncle, a real-estate developer in Oakland, Sterling’s real aspiration was to be a poet.
Felix Piantanida And Poppa Coppa Standing At The Bar In Coppa's Restaurant
Coppa's restaurant in the old Montgomery Block, c. 1910, Photo: San Francisco Historical Society
Original Coppa’s Restaurant was located in the Montgomery Block (aka “Monkey Block”) in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. Coppas was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake but Montgomery Block was not. Today the Transamerica Pyramid occupies its former location.
Coppa’s was famous for it’s murals that were described in The Coppa Murals by Warren Unna, A Pageant of Bohemian Life in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century, The Book Club of California 1952
I think of one who tried like that to unfold
the margin of his life where it was curled,
to see into the shadows shot with gold
that lie in iris hues about the world.
Because he dared to touch the sacred rim,
does God resent this eagerness in him?
Poem fragment: George Sterling by Jack London
In late June of 1905, Sterling arrived in Carmel-by-the-Sea with two friends from San Francisco, who helped him build his home. While they constructed his house, they all lived in a tent. The Sterlings’ bungalow was in the Arts and Crafts, or Craftsman Style, with a wood-shingled exterior and a porch. In the woods behind his house, he created a “pagan altar”, made of cattle or horse skulls, which were hung on trees.***
There was no town at Carmel then; nothing but a farm or two, one or two graceless buildings, and the wild beach and sunny dunes.
Sterling delighted to go striding, axe on shoulder, over Monterey hills looking for pitch pine or bee trees or whatever arduous and practical simplicities restored him to the human touch…or the lot of us would pound abalone for chowder around the open-air grill at Sterling’s cabin…*
The Carmelites’ picnic on Point Lobos, Gale cartoon from article by Wright, Willard Huntington, "Hotbed of Social Culture, Vortex of Erotic Erudition," Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1910. Left to right: Jack London, Alice MacGowan Cooke, Upton Sinclair, Xavier Martinez, Mary Austin, George Sterling, Lucia Chamberlain, Fred Bechdolt, James Hopper, Fra Henry Lafler.
*Romantic Rebels by Emily Hahn, quoting Mary Austin
***Carmel-By-The-Sea, the Early Years (1903-1913): An Overview of the History ...By Alissandra Dramov
A Wine of Wizardry
Without, the battlements of sunset shine,
’Mid domes the sea-winds rear and overwhelm.
Into a crystal cup the dusky wine
I pour, and, musing at so rich a shrine,
I watch the star that haunts its ruddy gloom.
Now Fancy, empress of a purpled realm,
Awakes with brow caressed by poppy-bloom,
And wings in sudden dalliance her flight
To strands where opals of the shattered light
Gleam in the wind-strewn foam, and maidens flee
Sterling’s poetry can be sentimental harkening back to Shelley and Keats, but he could also muster the dark power realized by Poe and Baudelaire and his reverence for nature experienced - as opposed to nature idealized anticipates the writings of poet Robinson Jeffers.
italics: George Sterling's 'Wine of Wizardry' sparked a clash of critics, Essay by Geoffrey Dunn on sfgate.com 2007
A Wine of Wizardry and Other Poems by George Sterling can be found on Google Books.
George Sterling wreathed with a Laurel Crown on the wall of Coppa’s Restaurant.
George Sterling’s legacy lies not in his poetry, all his written work is out-of-print. He is remembered, however, as the catalyst to the creation of the artists colony in Carmel. A gentler Prospero conjuring magic in the moonlight on hoary cypress and rocky shoreline.