Intended as a group biography, Mr. Williams’s book is at times more 'group' than 'biography,' its pages popping with the names of the well-known and forgotten, from the free spirits of the first generation to the variously hued leftists and ex-leftists of the 1930s and ’40s to the academically employed sunseekers of the 1960s ... Mr. Williams’s account is as breezy as a spring day by the shore, an approach that honors the spirit of his seashore colony even as it occasionally disregards the facts ... what’s ultimately more interesting than how much these writers and artists partied is how much they got done anyway ... although The Shores of Bohemia is structured as a kind of lament for the golden days before the Cape was overrun by RVs and clam shacks, Mr. Williams’s own effort is evidence enough that the old fascination still sparkles.
... atmospheric, gossipy ... His interviews with several dozen longtime Cape denizens, combined with his firsthand knowledge of the area, give The Shores of Bohemia an engaging immediacy. Loving descriptions evoke the golden light that attracted generations of painters, the kettle ponds nestled behind towering dunes, the golden sands fronting the Atlantic. You can practically smell the fresh fish roasting and hear the clink of ice cubes at the annual beach party celebrating the Perseid meteor shower thrown by Jack Phillips ... the plethora of names he showers on readers is a mixed blessing ... It can be difficult to keep all those names straight as Williams’s very loosely organized narrative zigzags through the years and a large cast of characters ... His aim, achieved somewhat at the cost of coherence, is to convey these bohemians’ sense that it was all connected: artistic experiment, political activism, sexual freedom, and intoxication of every kind ... meandering, affectionate.
Nearly all seem to have been graduates of Ivy League schools. But their passion and urgency for social justice is vividly evoked in Williams’s book ... I was grateful for the education in the politics, culture, and social history of the 1910s and 1920s, especially since our current age seems to be mimicking those years in all sorts of frightening ways, including, almost to the year, a global pandemic. But the names begin to pile up. The crowding becomes even more intense as the founding generation pairs off, splits up, finds new arrangements, has children ... at some point Williams’s compulsion to summarize each life—a cataloging of ancestors, schools, lovers, children, and professional accomplishments—begins to overwhelm the narrative. Williams celebrates his subjects’ liberation from the constraints of conventional thought and living arrangements in a prose style that only a law clerk could love ... Only at the very end, when a personal note enters, did the writing become evocative for me.
As a comprehensive guide to every family and famous person who lived on the Outer Cape in the first half of the last century, their friendships, love affairs and lineages, the book is invaluable. But it’s also extremely dense, an over-floured chowder so packed with 50 years of names, names and more names that some paragraphs read like a telephone book. It’s partly a function of the book’s thoroughness, but it makes it hard reading — even for someone like me who has now spent 26 consecutive summers in exactly this part of the world, for many of the same reasons these men and women once did. But Williams does cite the prose of many of his subjects to convey the magic of the place.
A poignant chapter profiling the children of this milieu reveals the harsher side of gifted but often neglectful parents who lived primarily for art and alcohol. Erudite and evocative, this is an indelible snapshot of a time and place that inspired significant creative achievement.
... a generous, commodious portrait of the communities of artists and writers who flourished on the Cape from 1910 to 1960 ... Williams sets the inhabitants in historical and political context: women’s suffrage, labor strikes, the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, two world wars, the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, antisemitism, and a hunt for communists, all of which had an impact on their lives, loves, friendships, and work ... An intimate view of creative lives in turbulent times.
