Venice West [Hardcover]

John Arthur Maynard (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In the late 1950s, Venice was southern California's answer to Greenwich Village and North Beach. Maynard interweaves the bohemian colony's history with the lives of its two most prominent literary denizens: Stuart Perkoff and Lawrence Lipton. Perkoff, the quintessential beat poet, lived simply, took drugs, and was dedicated to his muse. Lipton, despite his rabid rejection of materialism, seemed doomed to become its victim. His book, The Holy Barbarians , brought a wave of publicity that all but drowned the real concerns of the beat movement, shifting the focus of attention from beats to beatniks. Maynard's book, begun as a dissertation, is meticulously researched and a pleasure to read. A major work on bohemianism, this is highly recommended.
- William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Ponderously serious book about a California cult upheaval that prefigured the better-known rage of hippie bohemianism. Applying the full academic treatment, self-described historian Maynard, a Californian, delivers a defeating book that seems always to be promising a breakthrough for its beatnik subjects--and yet releases them only in death. There are some fast pages midway where the beatniks of Venice West attain a single season in the sun, but the public appetite for fads moves on, and the town goes into a long, lingering death rattle that cannot lift Maynard's literary sociology into brilliance and great humor. Venice was founded in 1905 ``as a genteel retreat for esthetically-minded Los Angeles businessmen'' and quickly became ``the Coney Island of the West.'' The ocean-front town was built in imitation of Venice, Italy, with a Grand Canal, Bridge of Sighs, miles of canals, and imported Venetian gondolas. It was much in decay by the late 1950's (Orson Welles used it as the vile bordertown in 1958's Touch of Evil), when Lawrence Lipton was readying his research on his fellow Venice bohemians, to be called The Holy Barbarians. Lipton--who seems to have been an oddly repulsive fellow--surrounded himself with callow, unformed poets, wanted to make a big statement of his opinions, and chose to ride his friends as a hobbyhorse for his breast-beating and tub-thumping. Alas for Lipton, the Kerouac/Ginsberg axis stole much of his thunder, and Venice West never achieved quite the recognition of Haight Ashbury. Despite some early ink in Life magazine and time on TV, which suddenly threw a hot spotlight on Venice, the town soon closed up as a beat enclave and its greatest literary lights (dim bulbs all) could not survive drugs, cancer, madness, or old age. What should have been a lively, eccentric book wilts under a pall of dreary sociology. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 253 pages
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press; First edition. edition (April 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813516536
• ISBN-13: 978-0813516530
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,661,235 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Beat Generation: Perception and Reality, October 7, 2000

By 

Stephen C. Wylder (Elkhart, IN, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Venice West: The Beat Generation in Southern California (Paperback)

"Here, down in Venice West, we have a new kind of beat, the real beat, the Beat Generation of the Future. I have called them by their true title, 'The Holy Barbarians,' and the report I have just finished making about them will be called by that name," said Lawrence Lipton to a British reporter. John Arthur Maynard, in his study of the Venice West beat community, writes of Lipton's 1959 book: "Its photo essay, verbatim conversations with 'real beatniks,' and handy glossary of hip jargon, made it a kind of do-it-yourself guide to the Beat Generation." It also provided thousands of Americans with an image of the Beats. And when Time, Life, Look, or ABC News wanted to do a beatnik story, they usually headed not for Greenwich Village, or the North Beach of San Francisco, but to Venice West in Los Angeles. Maynard's study of the Venice West bohemians (who didn't think of themselves as Beats) is a fascinating study of the people who created many of our perceptions of what Life's Paul O'Neil called "The Only Rebellion Around." The Venice community, writes Maynard, consisted of only two dozen or so writers and artists, of whom only one, poet Stuart Perkoff, was truly original. Lipton, says Maynard, tried to make the Venice Beats in his own image--his "holy barbarians" who will storm the gates of civilization "not with the weapons of war but with the songs and ikons of peace." Maynard provides brief biographies of the Venice West principals, including Lipton and Perkoff, and details the saga of the Venice West Cafe' Expresso (sic), where Perkoff had painted "Art is Love Is God" on the back wall. The last chapters chronicle the decline of the Venice West bohemian community in the 1960s and into the 70s. Most scholarly studies of the Beats focus on Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs--three very original writers. But they were perhaps too original for the news media of the 1950s. To understand America's perception of the Beats, we need to go to Venice West. John Maynard has allowed us to do just that.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars in protest of Kirkus review, May 8, 2004

By 

"shaggynorville" (Bakersfield) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Venice West: The Beat Generation in Southern California (Paperback)

I am an ex-student of Dr. Maynard's and have since graduated from the Cal State system. I feel that the statement by the Kirkus book reviewer that Maynard is a "self described historian" to be belittling and misleading. John Maynard is a a professor of History and his class on Modern California was excellent (I finished with an "A" in the class.) That a History professor would, in fact, refer to him/herself as a "historian" is a logical step and this is why it irks me that someone would insinuate otherwise in an attempt to undermine Maynard's work on the Beat movement in Venice. The review fails to mention Maynard has a doctorate in History and specializes in the Beat and Hippie California cultures. Because of this ommission, Kirkus gives Maynard an amateur-WWII-buff type of spin instead of his props.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond the Propaganda, June 18, 2008

By 

Brian Chidester (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Venice West: The Beat Generation in Southern California (Paperback)

John Arthur Maynard's book on the bohemians of Venice, CA in the 1950s is one of the most unique tomes in Beat Generation non-fiction lore. Maynard got all of the gritty details on a community of self-taught artists that were disillusioned enough with the "good life" to see past their own creative limitations, and to carve out an existence built on earnest self-discovery. Those guys found that living and expressing was almost microbiotic to being alive. I really admire what Maynard did here... not sure if people give him enough credit for this book. It lays out just how intense Venice was, because before, after and in spite of any promotional "beatnik" shuck, they lived a true nomadic lifestyle. Unlike the bohemians of Left Banke Paris or even the deified beats of Greenwich Village/North Beach, the men and women of Maynard's book are all the more powerful because of their lack of pretense.

In Greater Los Angeles, the beach town of Venice saw the most intense conglomerate of writers later dubbed "beatniks," who in reality despised the label. Venice was simply a cheap place to live out of the spotlight, with a long history of seediness and urban decay. At this edge of land's end, a small group of self-taught poets and artists experimented with art, drugs and their own survival in a way that was never flashy, while the results were more harrowing than most want to realize. This is what makes John Arthur Maynard's book so powerful to read.