Historic novel peers into origin stories of ‘The Bohemians.’
Author Jasmin Darznik dives into 1920s North Beach artists’ colony in latest novel
“The Bohemians”
By Jasmin Darznik (Ballantine Books; 352 pages; $28)
Conversations with Authors Series: Jasmin Darznik:
Book Passage virtual event. 4 p.m. April 17. Free. Registration required at www. bookpassage.com.
As a teenager living in Marin County in the early 1990s, Jasmin Darznik loved driving into San Francisco to wander North Beach. Like so many aspiring writers before her, she’d spend hours in City Lights bookstore and nurse espressos on Columbus Avenue, enamored with the neighborhood’s storied artistic past.
“It was my own bohemia,” Darznik writes in the author’s note to her new historical novel, “The Bohemians,” out Tuesday, April 6. It’s a captivating comingofage story of Dorothea Lange before she was a worldfamous photographer, and a portrait of complicated postWorld War I San Francisco.
Darznik only learned much later, as a successful author and creative writing professor at California College of the Arts, that 70 years before her high school excursions, and decades before the Beats, North Beach was home to an extraordinary group of artists in the 1920s — including Lange and her troubled first husband, landscape painter Maynard Dixon.
“The Bohemians” animates Lange and Dixon, as well as Imogen Cunningham, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, a young Ansel Adams and Chronicle staff photographer Consuelo Kanaga, all of whom congregated, worked and played at an artistic hub in the same fertile corner of the city.
A few years ago, Darznik noticed the phrase “Monkey Block” in one of her student’s nonfiction essays about San Francisco history. She said it was the first time she’d come across the nickname for the bustling fourstory artists’ colony on Montgomery Street that had thrived at the site of today’s Transamerica Pyramid.
“It was this incredibly fortuitous discovery, and I was totally captivated by it,” Darznik told The Chronicle from her home in Larkspur, noting that she was searching for a followup subject after her 2018 debut novel, “Song of a Captive Bird,” which imagined the life of Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad.
“It seemed inconceivable to me that there had once been this place, a bohemian heart of the city, that had sheltered 800 artists and writers. I knew I wanted to write about this building and about the ’20s, so I went scouting for people who’d been connected to the artistic world centered there,” she continued. “When I realized that Dorothea Lange had a connection to Monkey Block, I realized I’d found my girl.”
Darznik brings to vivid life in “The Bohemians” Lange’s origin story, how this young woman, who was disabled from polio, arrived in San Francisco in 1918, 23 years old and penniless. She found a city that was reinventing itself a decade after the 1906 quake and fires.
Lange — whose Depressionera shots of migrant workers would become some of the most enduring photos of the 20th century— opened one of the first femaleowned portrait studios in the country at 540 Sutter St., with the help of her Chinese American assistant whose name has been lost to history. Darznik named her “Caroline Lee” in the novel and admits, “I wanted to know this woman’s story, most likely because I’m an immigrant myself and think about the ways we often haven’t been included in literature or had our stories thought worthy.” (Darznik’s family moved from Iran to the Bay Area when she was 5.)
“Writing historical fiction, I’m always looking for the untold parts of a story, so when I find what feels like a rupture or glaring absence, that’s where I stop and really pay attention,” she said. “This book came to life for me when I read about Lange’s assistant being critical to her early success.”
In her research, Darznik found many haunting parallels between 1920s San Francisco and today: Lange arrived just four months before the Spanish flu pandemic reached the city. Racism, xenophobia and antiAsian violence were also on the rise. In fact, former San Francisco Mayor James Phelan ran for reelection to the U.S. Senate in 1920 on the platform “Keep Cali
fornia White.”
The title “The Bohemians” refers to the freespirited group of visionaries like Lange, but also to Darznik’s belief that artists are crucial to a city’s life force, and that something vital is lost when they’re priced out.
“It almost seems like a fairy tale that once a young woman could come and make a life for herself here as an artist. There’s a sad disconnect between that and the San Francisco we’ve seen in the last decade or so. I teach young artists at CCA, and none of them can afford to stay,” she said.
“The novel is elegiac in a way, but it’s also a celebration of the city’s artistic spirit. Looking back gives us an opportunity to think how we can bring that spirit back because it’s been such a vital part of our history and who we are.”