It had been Edna St. Vincent Millay’s idea: Relaxing on her daybed, she told her would-be lover, literary critic Edmund Wilson, to hug her lower half, while she instructed poet John Peale Bishop, another ardent admirer, to hold on to her upper one. Who had gotten, the three wondered, “the better share”? Millay’s little experiment was, joked one of her biographers, a perfect example of “burning the candle at both ends” (a phrase Millay had made famous in her poem “First Fig”). It also recalled an arrangement she inaugurated earlier that year, when she asked Bishop and Wilson to visit her in Truro, Cape Cod, on alternate weekends—a practice that would not have raised eyebrows. That’s at least the impression conveyed by John Taylor Williams’s “The Shores of Bohemia,” a chronique scandaleuse of bad or baddish behavior on the Cape during the first half of the 20th century. For it seems that burning the candle at both ends was what everyone—writers, artists, architects and activists—did back then, with a vengeance.
Mr. Williams’s Bohemians gravitated to the narrow upper portion of the peninsula, the “outermost of outer shores,” in the words of naturalist Henry Beston. “Between two seas a strip not wide / Splits ocean side from harbor side,” rhymed Wilson in an unpublished poem, seeking to capture the urgency artistic Cape Codders felt as they settled, on tiny incomes and great expectations, in a landscape that looked as if it had been only provisionally squeezed from the sea. In 1930 a powerful storm washed Eugene O’Neill’s house, once owned by arts patron Mabel Dodge, into the sea. No one was surprised.
Known as “Ike” to clients and friends, Mr. Williams, a Boston lawyer and literary agent, represented many of the more recent figures who once camped out on the Cape. The title of his book springs from what some consider Shakespeare’s biggest blunder and others a daring plot device—the attribution, in “The Winter’s Tale,” of a seacoast to the landlocked terrain of Bohemia. If Shakespeare’s fantasy kingdom was a wasteland roamed by bears, Mr. Williams’s realm is densely populated (though perhaps no less feral). Against the backdrop of the ubiquitous, unforgiving ocean, human desires appeared magnified, larger than life. In Mr. Williams’s description, the Cape Cod Bohemians’ drinking and lovemaking was athletic rather than recreational, a fierce competition with no clear winners. Provincetown was their oceanside Babel, “Greenwich Village sunburnt,” according to Floyd Dell, an editor of the socialist monthly the Masses. Many locals happily participated: During the prohibition years, the Portuguese fishermen of Provincetown outran the coastguard to supply the booze that kept the parties buzzing. Remoteness—the ferry from Boston ran only in good weather—bred intimacy, and nicknames proliferated: Edmund Wilson was “Bunny,” the handsome socialist Max Eastman the “Sleepy Adonis,” the novelist John Dos Passos simply “Dos.”