Among the Bohemians (8 page)

Any heroine worth her salt would refuse such a complacent stuffed shirt, and of course Ann Veronica does.
But the interesting thing about this is that even some wealthy asses like Hubert Manning felt that Bohemia gave them a certain creditable standing, so long as it was of the ‘successful’ sort.
One didn’t want to come into too close proximity with the garret.
That was for fiction, or for failures.

Ruin lurked around every corner, and a fellow-traveller like Mr Manning preferred to take no risks with his public salary or expectations, since even for a successful writer there were no guarantees of security.
The name of Stephen Phillips is virtually forgotten today, and yet in his day the young poet made a small fortune by his writings, which were compared favourably by critics with those of Sophocles, Shakespeare and Milton.
More than 21,000 copies of his verse drama
Paolo and Francesca
were printed and sold, and for some time Phillips was receiving about
£
500
a week.
Phillips was tall and well-built, and women idolised him, but he loved and married a lowly actress whose father was a builder.
While May was pregnant she had a riding accident; the baby was born prematurely and died young.
Phillips took the
blame on himself.
That was the end of his happiness; he became bitter and started to drink heavily.
The money slipped through his fingers; he lived out the Bohemian myth
à la
Murger, spending it on ‘ruinous fancies… drinking the oldest and best…’ – which he believed would inspire him, but as his life collapsed, so did his reputation.
Nevertheless he continued to throw money away in munificent gestures.
Once in freezing weather he bought a fur coat for a hundred and fifty guineas, and the very next day gave it away to a tramp.
(The tramp, afraid to be accused of theft, returned it.) Recklessly generous, Phillips gave his last five pounds to an old actor friend who was out of work.
At last even May left him, hastening his disintegration.
He died at fifty-one.

Safer far to look after the investments while enjoying the social laxity that Bohemia seemed to offer.
One well-heeled example is Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who used the substantial profits from his production of George du Maurier’s
Trilby
(another Bohemian garret love story) to build Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket; high up in an inner sanctum of the theatre’s dome he and his wife Maud gave opulent first night supper parties to the élite of ‘High Bohemia’.
This artistic milieu was the natural territory of their daughter Iris, a socialite art student whose original appearance and gregariousness brought her a wide circle of friends and admirers, many of them from the upper echelons of society.
With Lady Diana Manners and Nancy Cunard, Iris formed a kind of ‘Mayfair troika’, the centre of ‘Haut Bohemia’ in the twenties.
A swarm of moneyed acolytes gathered at their table at the Eiffel Tower – here were to be seen the likes of ex-debutante turned small publisher Allanah Harper, society photographer Cecil Beaton, chronicler of the inter-war period (and, probably, one-time lover of Nina Hamnett) Anthony Powell, soldier and landowner turned writer and painter Dick Wyndham, or the sapphist descendant of the Duchess of Westminster, Olivia Wyndham.
These ‘Bohemians’ were a far cry from Mimi and Rodol-phe, or the ravenously hungry Arthur Ransome, or the desperately dependent Mark Gertler, but despite their financial means, they still fall within the definition.
It expands to encompass them.

Or take Bloomsbury – most of its members were comfortably middle class, with private incomes and support systems which – compared to the garret dwellers – placed them well outside the confines of famine-and-feast Bohemia.
Clive Bell was a bon viveur with extensive financial resources from his parents’ coal-mining interests.
His wealth supported Vanessa Bell’s ménage, paying for the upbringing not only of his own children but also of Vanessa’s daughter by Duncan Grant, Angelica.
They had servants and were able to maintain rented establishments in London, Sussex and the south of
France.
Yet Virginia Woolf asserted in her diary in 1930 that Vanessa and Duncan based their relationship on Bohemianism, and that this was what gave it its indestructibility.
Angelica too regarded her mother as being an instinctive Bohemian, despite her upper-middle-class upbringing, which from time to time reasserted itself.
Vanessa’s Sussex home, Charleston, has today come to epitomise the Bohemian lifestyle.
Or take Augustus John, who by the 1920s was one of the highest-paid living artists in Britain, painting millionaires; one such portrait sold in 1923 for three thousand guineas.
Yet still Augustus encapsulated the very image of the Bohemian in his manners and appearance.

The existence of a rich Bohemia presented artists with a difficult problem.
The invasion of their inviolate territory by the moneyed world was in some respects welcome, providing as it did a market for creativity, and yet it was also deeply distasteful.
It distorted artistic values.
By the twenties rents in Chelsea had been driven so high by invading dilettanti that Ransome’s hard-up painters and poets had all been forced out.
‘Art has now become a business, like the selling of stocks and shares or jam or motor-cars…’ lamented the cultured social commentator Patrick Balfour in 1933.
The artist’s challenge to society was devalued by its reduction to the status of commodity; this was, and still is, a bitter pill to swallow.
Yet there have always been some, like Philip Carey in
Of Human Bondage,
Mark Gertler, Arthur Ransome, Nina Hamnett, Kathleen Hale, Dylan Thomas and many others, who refused the palliative, remaining uncompromising in their choice of a way of life.

*

Was it worth it?
What if Nina Hamnett had settled for a safe life: the marriage market, babies, the conventional life of a middle-class ‘lady’?
What if Mark Gertler had decided to join the family firm in the East End and become a furrier?
Or if Kathleen Hale had done a secretarial course like her sister instead of going to art school?
Would their lives have been more fulfilled?
The answer is inevitably a mixed one.
When Arthur Ransome, by then an elderly successful writer, looked back on his Bohemian days, his main emotion was one of nostalgia for his romantic youth:

It was certainly the unhealthy, irregular meals I ate, my steady buying of books instead of food, that brought about the internal troubles that have been a nuisance through most of my life.
At the same time I doubt if any young man… can ever know the happiness that was mine at nineteen, dependent solely on what I was able to earn and living in a room of my own with the books I had myself collected.

One morning, six months before her death at the age of a hundred and two, I met Kathleen Hale, the author and illustrator of some of my favourite children’s books, about Orlando the Marmalade Cat.
Her memoir
A Slender Reputation
(1994) had proved a rich resource in researching this book.
I found Kathleen living in a small basement room in an old people’s home on the outskirts of Bristol.
The walls of her room were adorned with her own drawings, lino cuts and metal compositions.
Though rather deaf, she was vigorous and somewhat formidable.
Her springy iron-grey hair was cropped short, and she wore a blue caftan top with a silver necklace.
She talked about the past, but also about the present, and her relationships with the other ‘greyheads’ in the home, who to her surprise had turned out to be fascinating individuals.
Halfway through our interview she mischievously produced an illicit bottle of gin which we drank from plastic cups.
Encouraged, I said I thought that despite the extreme hardships of her early life, I was under the impression that she had enjoyed it:

‘Oh yes, it was absolutely wonderful, and not hard all the time by any means, and the difficult parts like having to stay indoors because you couldn’t face going past a bun shop, well, that was all part of it, all part of the general plan I had of how to live.
But oh, my dear, it was freedom, it really was, it was bliss.’

2. All for Love

What is wrong with talking about sex? – What is wrong with sex

outside marriage? – Why shouldn’t self-expression extend to the

bedroom? – Is homosexuality wrong? – Must relationships be

confined to members of the opposite sex, and the same class and colour?–

Is marriage a meaningful institution? – Is there

such a thing as free love?

In a desert of Victorian values, Bohemia was an oasis where anti-permissive rules had no force.
Sexual licence in an artistic environment was a powerful combination, both threatening and alluring, and part of the irresistible fascination for the general public of
la vie de Bohème
was the passionate abandon represented by Murger in his portrayal of that life, by Puccini in his opera of the book, and by George du Maurier in his best-selling love story
Trilby
(1894).

In
Trilby
three young Englishmen (fairly well-heeled) go to Paris to play at being Bohemian.
They adopt suitable camouflage – artistic berets and blouses – go in for interesting salad dressings, and generally disport themselves in the city of sin.
The handsome one (rather disconcertingly named Little Billee) falls madly in love with a charming Irish laundry-maid, formerly an artists’ model, named Trilby, and is overjoyed when she agrees to enter an engagement.
This ‘entente’ causes mayhem when Little Billee’s mother, Mrs Bagot, finds out.
Mrs Grundy incarnate, she storms across the Channel, and when she discovers Trilby’s former profession, promptly intervenes and breaks up the relationship.
Little Billee is grief-stricken:

I want –
her – her – her,
I tell you – I must have her
back
… do you hear?…
Damn
social position… Love comes before all-love and art… and beauty… Good God!
I’ll never paint another stroke till I’ ve got her back… never, never, never I tell you – I can’t and I won’t!…

But Trilby is cast out, and takes up with Svengali, whose name has entered popular phraseology as the hypnotic magus with sinister powers.
Trilby falls under his spell and takes the world by storm as a singer.
She returns to Little Billee at the end when it is too late, and dies – but not before Mrs Bagot has had time to repent of her harsh words.

This novel, which became a huge popular success, had all the elements most calculated to titillate an appreciative British readership.
There was the ingénue heroine whose sexual downfall makes her a victim, dying a ‘tragic’ operatic death.
There was the romance of the mysterious seducer, irresistibly ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ – Lord Byron, Casanova, Don Juan and the Marquis de Sade rolled into one.
There was also studio life: ‘… happy days and happy nights, sacred to art and friendship… Oh, happy times of careless impecuniosity!’ This beguiling melodrama was to become a romantic prototype for a thousand aspirant Bohemians, appearing again and again in nostalgic memories of youth, like those of Viva King:

I had long yearned for the sort of studio life described in
Trilby.
Walking alone in Chelsea, I would gaze up at the large windows and see myself among crowds of artists and musicians.
There was little work going on in the studio of my imagination.
It was mostly fun and conversation, with me a listener to all the intellectual talk, a spiritual helpmeet or Egeria of some great man.
But I was Martha as well as Mary, ready in a day-dream to work myself to the bone to further the genius of the man I loved.
I was a little dashed when Father described
Trilby
as ‘a boring book about three English prigs’, even though by now I had moved on to Murger’s
Vie de
Bohème…

Trilby, the romantic prototype

In 1900s Bohemia we are in a time of wide-eyed romanticism.
Little Billee, Viva King and their contemporaries now seem appealingly innocent, unworldly and unmaterialistic, but ‘Love comes before All – Love and Art’ and ‘Free Love’ were mantras for their time.
The new generation was sloughing off the dead casings of the nineteenth century, emerging in a fresh skin, to rediscover Love and rediscover Sex.

It was probably in 1908 that Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa, and Lytton Strachey found they could talk about sex.
The story has been often repeated, but it still stands as a mythic moment in the history of twentieth-century liberation:

… the long and sinister figure of Mr Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold.
He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa’s white dress.

‘Semen?’ he said.

Can one really say it?
I thought & we burst out laughing.
With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down.
A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us.
Sex permeated our conversation.
The word bugger was never far from our lips.
We discussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of good.
It is strange to think how reticent, how reserved we had been and for how long.