Among the Bohemians (3 page)

Bohemia was a hospitable country, and a new sense of kinship grew up amongst those people who felt themselves, as artists, to be on the margins
of repressive, post-imperialist society.
As social sub-groups go, it was small, and a remarkable number of such people all knew each other and interwove their lives in the four decades before the Second World War.

They came mostly, but not all, from the educated middle-classes.
There were some eminent names among them.
But it seemed one didn’t have to achieve immortality as an artist for Bohemian aspirations to express themselves, and in many cases there seemed little to remember these figures by other than perhaps their outré conversation, their wayward lifestyle or exotic appearance.
Few people today have any perception of, for example, Viva King, Stuart Gray or Jacob Kramer.
Who were Godwin Baynes, Christabel Dennison and Mary Butts?
They don’t appear in the standard companions and dictionaries cataloguing the achievements of the twentieth century.
Yet though their contribution to history may appear insignificant, cumulatively their humble domestic breakthroughs amount to victory.

We have a tendency to judge artists by the durability of their creations.
My approach is to judge them by the quality of their daily lives.
Many of the names that appear in this book are those of second-rank painters and inferior writers, artists’ models and hangers-on.
Some of them had affairs with or married into Bohemia.
Others remain enigmatic footnotes in the memoirs of their more illustrious contemporaries.
But nearly all of them were in some respect idealists and rebels, pioneers of the everyday.
These Bohemians not only revered Cezanne and worshipped Diaghilev, they sent their children to co-educational schools, ate garlic and didn’t always bathe.
They went hatless and shoeless, painted their front doors red, slept on divans.
They became tramps or took off in caravans.
Flamboyant and subversive, they read Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis and
Ann Veronica
.
They were trying out contraception, imagism and Post-Impressionism.
They were often drunk and broke, sometimes hungry, but they were of a rebellious spirit.
Inhabiting the same England as colonials, Etonians, peers and puritans was a parallel minority of moral pioneers, travelling third class and coping with faulty fireplaces.
Often their idealistic experiments went disastrously wrong, and sometimes they felt cast adrift on the sea of new freedoms.
And yet gradually, imperceptibly, they changed society.
This book testifies to that quiet revolution.

Thus the choices made by Bohemians are its subject, not their achievements.
I have not attempted to examine the period chronologically; partly because the rich seam of material I discovered defied historical analysis, and partly because a thematic approach seemed to me altogether more revealing.
Thus the ensuing chapters set out to describe in some detail the essence of their domestic innovations, examining the facts of living in poverty, the
breakdown of sexual and emotional barriers, Bohemia’s radical approach to the upbringing of children, self-expression in the home, in clothes and in food, the realities of housework and hygiene, the romance of travel, and last but not least the spirit of celebration that has always animated Bohemia at its best.
Brief biographical details of the extensive cast list of characters appear in Appendix B on page 292.

Seventy years on we may well look back upon our grandparents’ generation as naive, selfish, sexist and politically incorrect.
However a little historical perspective easily puts these misassumptions right: in the context of the times, and of the challenges they were taking on, these people were a sincere and courageous minority.

Unfortunately the avant-garde has always had to live with the awkward fact that, sooner or later, it creates a following, and that its lonely journey into the unknown can start to seem a little well-trodden after the passage of a few years.
Bohemia’s greatest achievement may well have been the complete assimilation by today’s society of its victories against the establishment.

There is a paradoxical consensus that the function of art is to challenge.
We look to artists to break new ground and attack the status quo, but over time they themselves become the objects of society’s admiration – fashion leaders, celebrities, originals.
The aristocrats of talent – albeit in soap opera and sport – have come to replace the aristocrats of birth in our allegedly class-free society.
Where they lead, we will follow.
Like the Bohemians, we now condemn puritanism, segregation, sexism, intolerance of minorities.
We are no longer inhibited by rigid etiquette.
Today, the Bohemians’ emphasis on a new, informal way of living, with friendship for its own sake, the right to personal liberty, sexual freedom, feminism, deviations in dress and manners, foreign food, experimentation with interior decoration are all taken for granted.
They have, in their battle with the establishment, created the norms of a new establishment.

1. Paying the Price

Why is poverty so romantic? – Why do artists despise money?

– How does one survive while producing something that no one

will buy? – What does an artist do who runs out of money? – Does

being rich disqualify one from Bohemia? – If being Bohemian

means being poor, is the gain worth the pain?

A couple of years after their marriage in 1918, the writer Robert Graves and his painter wife Nancy found themselves unable to make ends meet.
They were living on the outskirts of Oxford at Boars Hill, and had two small children; Graves had sworn, after the war experiences described later in his famous book
Goodbye to All That
(1929), never to be under anyone’s orders again.
He was determined to live by his pen – an inadequate resource with which to pay for the needs of his household.
It was Nancy’s idea to start a shop.

At first ‘The Poets’ Store’ seemed too good to be true; a carpenter erected a charming hut to Nancy’s design and outside it they hung an attractive Celtic sign.
The shop was to be a general store, and they stocked it with all the necessities from washing powder to tea leaves.
The community in which they lived brought them some valuable publicity, for their closest neighbour – and landlord – was the poet John Masefield, then at the height of his fame, and Mrs Masefield could buy her soapflakes from them.
Another poet, John Nichols, also lived nearby; and there was a sprinkling of Oxford writers and academics in the village, all of whom could be supplied with back bacon, pipe tobacco and cheese.
The
Daily Mirror
duly carried a headline ‘Shop-Keeping on Parnassus’, which Graves hoped would encourage custom.

It soon proved to be a disastrous enterprise.
Robert had to abandon his writing in order to serve behind the counter.
Nancy quarrelled with the nursemaid and sacked her, so she had both to look after the children and bicycle round the area taking and delivering orders.
The Graveses’ humanitarian instincts were bad for business – they undercharged their poorer customers and allowed them to run up debts.
The book-keeping was hopelessly mishandled, and Robert went down with influenza.
‘We decided to cut our losses.’ They tried to sell the whole business to a local firm of grocers.
However, here Mrs Masefield proved intransigent.
The
shop was on her land, and although she had been sympathetic to Robert and Nancy as struggling artists, she appeared reluctant to allow her neighbourhood to become tainted by vulgar commerce.
The shop’s depreciating stock was sold off at bankruptcy prices to wholesalers, and the charming hut was taken apart and sold for timber at a loss of
£
180.
After a lawyer had worked to mediate their debts, they were left owing
£
300
^*
.
The family were now faced with homelessness and destitution.
Graves’s father-in-law helped as best as he could with a gift of
£
100.
The remainder came to them from the extraordinary generosity of Graves’s friend T.
E.
Lawrence.
He gave them the first four chapters of his great account of the Arab Revolt,
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
and the sale of these for serial publication in America fetched the final
£
200.
They were out of debt, but penniless, and the whole episode had proved an unmitigated calamity.

Optimism, impracticality, and in the end, terrifying dependency all feature in this cautionary tale of a pair of artists utterly unsuited for a commercial venture.
The Graves’s salvation came not from social security or unemployment benefit, but from helpful friends and relatives; in the 1920s the Poor Law provided assistance only for those who could not support themselves by any other means, including friends, family and charity.
Robert and Nancy’s improvident behaviour had brought them to the brink of starvation.

There is something improbable about the story of the Poets’ Store which tempts one to laugh.
But beneath the absurdity lies a simple fact of life for those who wanted to live and work as artists before the Second World War: it took courage to make such a choice, and sacrifices had to be made.
When the artists and would-be artists who are the subject of this book set out on their chosen career, none of them knew whether those sacrifices would prove to be justified in terms of their work.
Fifty years on we may judge that Dylan Thomas’s poverty was noble, while Nina Hamnett’s was senseless.
But a minor artist with no money goes as hungry as a genius.
What drove them to do it?

I believe that such people were not only choosing art, they were choosing the life of the artist.
Art offered them a different way of living, one that they believed more than compensated for the loss of comfort and respectability.
They reinvented daily life, and brought about changes that are with us to this day.

*

The image of the starving Bohemian artist did not originate in the twentieth century.
The prototype had been laid down in Paris in the 1840s, in Henri Murger’s hugely successful book,
Scènes de la Vie de Bohème.

Scènes de la Vie de Bohème
was autobiographical.
Born in Paris in 1822 of humble origins, Murger struggled to turn himself into a writer.
He shared rooms with three artist friends in the rue des Canettes.
They lived in unutterable poverty: ‘We are aching with hunger,’ he wrote in 1843.
‘We are at the end of our tether.
We must find ourselves a niche, or blow our brains out.’ When they could scrape together twenty sous the group would gather at the Café Momus, which soon became the centre for a group of Bohemians attracted by cheap coffee and stimulating conversation.

In 1845 Murger drew on his experiences with the Café Momus crowd to produce a series of short articles for the magazine
Le Corsaire.
Over the next four years his own life and that of his friends – including his liaison with a factory girl called Lucile, who was probably the inspiration for Mimi – provided the copy for his only claim to immortality, the
Scènes de la Vie de
Bohème.
This tells the story of the romance of Rodolphe and Mimi, ending with her melodramatic death.
It paints a heart-warming picture of garret life with their Bohemian friends that still has power to captivate.
The work went through various incarnations – articles, a stage play and a book – but was immortalised in 1896 as Puccini’s opera
La Bohème.

Because Murger’s book was drawn from life, we should trust his account of the rigours of Bohemia.
In its preface he wrote:

Bohemia bristles with… poverty and doubt… [Bohemians are] incessantly at war with necessity… they know how to practise abstinence with all the virtue of an anchorite, but if a slice of fortune falls into their hands you will see them at once mounted on the most ruinous fancies, loving the youngest and prettiest, drinking the oldest and best, and never finding sufficient windows to throw their money out of.
Then when their last crown is dead and buried, they begin to dine again at that table spread by chance, at which their place is always laid, and, preceded by a pack of tricks, go poaching on all the callings that have any connection with art, hunting from morn till night that wild beast called a five-franc piece.

In other words, it was a recklessly hand-to-mouth existence.
And yet as the book demonstrates, this existence had a kind of gay romantic irresponsibility that made it intensely powerful as a role model.
Romanticism propagated Bohemianism, and Bohemians and Romantics have much in common; both were driven by headlong intemperance and a desire to live for the moment.
But for both there was a price to pay.

We poets in our youth begin in gladness;

But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.

William Wordsworth’s lines in ‘Resolution and Independence’ probably allude to the poisoning by arsenic of the boy poet Thomas Chatterton, who was reduced to despair by poverty.
The image of garret life still exerts a powerful hold on many of us, but it is blurred by that very romanticism, while the sheer beauty of some of the poetry and music that has come out of that period beguiles us into a comforting sense that it was not real.
When today’s opera audiences applaud as Mimi gasps her last in Rodolfo’s arms, it may be hard for them to appreciate that Mimi and Rodolfo, Schaunard and Marcello had many real counterparts in nineteenth-century France, real Bohemians in real garrets who genuinely had not enough to eat, whose health was destroyed by poverty and despair.
Murger’s preface again:

[The Bohemians] die for the most part, decimated by that disease to which science does not dare give its real name, want…

The Bohemians of early nineteenth-century Paris, as Murger knew only too well, died younger than any other sector of society at that time, their ranks depleted by insanity, typhoid, tuberculosis and sheer starvation.
In his own case, despite his success with the publication of
Scènes de la Vie de Bohème,
the years of poverty undermined his health, and he died at the age of thirty-eight.