San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Photographer’s story a bit underdeveloped
In Jasmin Darznik’s “The Bohemians,” a young Dorothea Lange arrives friendless and broke in 1918 to a city that is still trying to figure out how to rebuild after the 1906 earthquake. To read this book today is an unsettling reminder of just how much history repeats itself. San Franciscans of the 1910s live in fear of a pandemic (the Spanish flu) and experience massive income inequality. Vast swaths of the city fall victim to a terrifying wave of antiimmigrant violence and discrimination, against Chinese Americans in particular.
It is in this historical moment that Darznik aims to show us how Dorrie from New Jersey becomes the famous Farm Security Administration photographer Dorothea Lange. She doesn’t do a very good job at it. The author is strongest at describing Lange’s often horrific childhood — felled by polio, she was paralyzed for a year of her young life and came out of the ordeal with a club foot and an intense introversion — but as the book progresses, it feels more and more like historical fiction lite.
Though Lange would ultimately go on to take some of the most arresting images of Depressionera America, that part of her life isn’t covered in “The Bohemians.” Darznik never manages to get into the mind of Lange, who I am reasonably sure never said something as banal as “to take a truly good picture you have to learn to see, not just look.”
It’s far too common for female protagonists in historical fiction to come off as wideeyed and plucky heroines, even if they’re not. When Dorrie, 23, arrives in San Francisco, she is so immediately gobsmacked by its hills and fog that she becomes the easy target of a handsome pickpocket before she even leaves the pier. Naive, tired, hungry and broke, she is rescued within 24 hours of her arrival by the mostly conjuredupbyDarznik character of Caroline Lee (a.k.a. de Modes), an enigmatic charmer she meets on the street who loans her an elegant silk gown and plies her with pasta and red wine.
Lange’s developing relationship with the half Chinese, half American Caroline is truly the focus of this book. In fact, so much space is devoted to Dorrie gushing about her new friend’s appearance (”Caroline swept in smelling of lilac, her nails freshly lacquered … I thought she looked magnificent”) that I was sure the two were going to become romantically involved. (Lange was married, albeit not very happily, to the painter Maynard Dixon in 1920.)
But this book wasn’t supposed to be about Dorothea’s bestie. I wanted to learn more about the Barbary Coast (located where Montgomery meets Pacific downtown), which is where “The Bohemians” centers itself. I was waiting for writing that would bring the area, its history and its denizens to life. We never get a sense of what had to be a notoriously lawless and rowdy place. It all feels oddly sanitized, as if Darznik’s book had been censored by San Francisco’s thenMayor James Rolph, who infamously crusaded against prostitution, alcohol and homosexuality.
There’s been a growing body of historical fiction that romanticizes even the darkest periods of history and turns them into what feels like Lifetime movies. I’m thinking in particular of Kristin Hannah’s “The Nightingale,” with its unsettling depiction of the French Resistance during World War II. And just in the last two months, two novels set around the 1906 earthquake (Carol Edgarian’s “Vera” and “The Nature of Fragile Things”) venture through the seedier side of old San Francisco.
If you like that sort of thing (as gazillions of people clearly do), then you’ll probably like “The Bohemians.” But Lange’s trajectory was better served by Linda Gordon’s 2009 biography, “Dorothea Lange: Life Beyond Limits.”