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Such, at least, proved to be the true for most of the commune-dwellers who figure in Timothy Miller's "The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond." For this, the second volume of a projected trilogy, Miller and his research assistants conducted several hundred interviews with former and current communards. The author, a professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas, is palpably sympathetic with the movement (which no doubt loosened tongues during those interviews) and intent on finding out why, with rare exceptions, '60s communes were such fleeting things.

The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond By Timothy Miller Syracuse University Press, 576 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America By Ann Powers Simon and Schuster, 288 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

Starry eyes were unquestionably a factor, and Miller recognizes the, shall we say, dippiness of so many hippies. Yet he painstakingly harks back to the predecessors of the '60s movement (he chronicled these early communitarian efforts in the first volume of his trilogy, "The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America") and cites cases in which embryonic groups took over old ones rather than starting afresh. This emphasis on wise continuity scants, I think, the brave-new-world mentality that shaped so much '60s rebelliousness. Most of us who reviled the presidents and the Pentagon, ducked out of the money-grubbing rat race, disdained matching china, used marijuana and LSD as passports to countries of the mind, strapped on backpacks and took to the trails, lived defiantly in what used to be called "sin" or "perversion," helped make celebrities of the utterly untalented or the marginally gifted (Tiny Tim, Andy Warhol) just to flex our baby-boomer power and outrage our elders -- most of us wanted no truck with the past. Half the fun of doing anything in those days was making it up as you went along.

Which could mean that you might suddenly find yourself living in a Seattle Victorian with four or five decent sorts -- a woman who stayed up half the night consoling callers to the Rape Crisis hotline, a man who was trying to cobble together a living by leading walking tours of the city, a woman who worked for the Lutheran Church but was savvy enough not to proselytize her housemates, a straight couple so adamantly leftist that they supported the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia -- along with a creepy guy who inhabited the basement, ate nothing but a vegetarian mush that left residues impossible to dislodge from a saucepan and poured his energy into a cult centered on mutual excoriation (you and a co-cultist sat down and systematically ripped each other's ego to shreds).

The line between a tight group house and a commune was so slender as to be almost indistinct, but in either case the enduring clusters in Miller's survey tend to be ones that laid down rules, respected individual privacy and screened applicants. Accepting any loser who showed up seeking admission was almost a surefire recipe for early breakup. As one member of a failed commune told Miller:

It is said that happy people do not volunteer to go to War. Neither, I say, do they join Communities. The roots of this unhappiness may lie in either themselves, or their world. We at Sun Hill did not know how to determine one from the other, and so we hardly tried; we accepted virtually all who came. But I think that we at Sun Hill tended to assume that each other's various inadequacies to live in the Mass-Society were due to the faults of that Society, and not to those of the individuals in question. Therefore, we of course, assumed that such inadequacies (or "hangups") would straighten themselves out within the "healthy" context of our Utopia. This -- needless to say -- was naive.

Another investigator, cited by Miller, concluded that close sharing, "supposedly the essence of what communes are all about," in fact shortened communal life spans: "The level of sharing typically diminished over time if the group survived. In essence, modern communards were always individualists more than communalists."

Next page | Today's bohemians: Shrewd, steely-eyed manipulators of the system