Among the Bohemians (7 page)

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘Shopkeepers,’ she said, ‘are parasites on society.
The important thing to know is that they are snobs.
Never be mean.
If you want a small bottle of eau-de-cologne, you can’t put it on the bill.
Buy a pint of Chanel.
Don’t drink beer.
Order champagne; by the dozen at least.
We Artists are the aristocrats of the world.
But we must behave like aristocrats.’

Auntie Helen’s extravagant philosophy didn’t survive the Wall Street Crash.
Those who, like her, lived on credit, were the first casualties.
Calder-Marshall got an urgent message one morning to call at her house with the biggest suitcase he could carry.
He managed to get there before the bailiffs, and carried away with him her best books, her precious candlesticks and her incense burner before the Philistines could get their hands on her ‘lovely things’.
Auntie Helen fled with what she stood up in.

*

And yet, despite a general ineptitude with money, some Bohemians renounced Chanel and champagne, while still managing to survive on very little indeed, and sometimes on almost nothing.
Economies could be made, changes to one’s way of life; one could retreat to less expensive locations, or even emigrate.
Living experimentally was all too often a by-product of being forced to live economically.

When Mary Garman (sister to Kathleen, Epstein’s mistress) married the poet Roy Campbell, she was making ends meet by driving a bread-delivery van.
Roy’s father cut off his allowance for marrying without his consent, and the couple were living in rags.
In the early days of their marriage they survived as artists’ models and for a while Roy was able to make a living as an acrobat for two pounds a day.
But being shot backwards out of a gun and chewing glass in front of an audience couldn’t last, and Roy and Mary were sick of city life.
They moved to deepest Wales where Roy set out to demonstrate that you
could
live on poetry and nothing else.
This was in 1921.
The stable they rented cost
£
1 16s a year.
Five pounds a month paid for everything else, though books accounted for half of this budget.
That left about 12s 6d a week for all their bodily needs – in other words, next to nothing.
They had no earnings at all.
The very small sums they now required for the rent were provided by an anonymous well-wisher; this proved to be Roy’s father, who had relented and reinstated Roy’s allowance at a minimal
level.
The couple settled down in their mud-floored stable to read Dante, Rabelais, Milton and the Elizabethans – ‘living on the continual intoxication of poetry for two years’.
Roy, who had tremendous caveman instincts, went trapping for rabbits and game for the pot, and they collected gulls’ eggs from the cliff face.
He poached and scavenged, and sometimes the locals would bring them gifts of potatoes or fuel.
It was a heady life, and cheap.

Soon after Roy and Mary’s two daughters were born the family moved to France, lured by the romance of Provence, bullfights and troubadours, but also by the favourable exchange rate then prevailing.
In 1925 you could get over a hundred francs to the pound; in the late twenties George Orwell rented a room in Paris for two hundred francs a month, and found he could live – just – on six francs a day.
It was this fact as much as the inspiring quality of the Mediterranean light, the intoxicating conversation of the Montparnasse cafés, or even the wonder of seeing Florence or Rome, that led many artists like Roy Campbell to forsake England and find a place where it was, quite simply, cheaper to live.
Fact and fiction, tell us how, with the post-war exchange rate at its most favourable for years, the exodus to the Mediterranean was irresistible, because you could live in the sunshine for half what it cost to live in England.
Even after the crash, one could still get over eighty francs to the pound, and a prix fixe menu cost six francs; while in Italy in the 1930s for example, the exchange rate was nearly sixty lire to the pound.
Aldous Huxley found that he could live ‘in comfort’ there on
£
300 a year.
‘The worst is however that I haven’t got
£
300 a year…’

In her novel
Ragged Banners
(1931) Ethel Mannin’s hero the young poet Starridge shakes the gloomy poverty of London from off his feet and, with an artist friend, heads for the Riviera.
After paying for third-class travel to Italy they have
£
12 left between two: ‘We can live on that for six weeks at least… We’ve really nothing to worry about.
The gods, anyhow, will take care of their own…’

This deeply held assumption that one would never really have to go hungry died hard.
The Campbells, Huxley, and the fictional Starridge all came from educated middle-class backgrounds, and adapting to poverty was hard for them.
Such people, brought up to expect a certain level of comfort, might well be loath to scrounge drinks and borrow money because they were too broke to stand a round.
Their asceticism was often nominal, and having to be stingy went against the grain.
Recalling his youth in the 1920s, the writer Douglas Goldring summed it up:

No one who has not actually been through the experience of dropping suddenly from middle-class comfort to the income level of a farm labourer, can understand
its effect on men old enough to have acquired certain regular habits, such, for example, as changing occasionally into evening clothes, taking cabs… In 1919 I used to be genially mocked by Alec Waugh:…‘Look at Douglas!
If he’s only got half-a-crown in his pocket, he hails a taxi.’… Going abroad broke the shock.
Cheap hotel accommodation, cheap – and delicious – food and even cheaper drinks also made it possible for the depressed
intelligentsia
to enjoy for a while the indulgences and
menus plaisirs
to which, in pre-war days, they had been accustomed.

For despite the strong imperatives that kept Bohemians poor – idealism, artistic status, rejection of materialism, contempt for wealth – Bohemia often proved in the end a dispiritingly necessitous place in which to live.
For a group of people who to some extent defined themselves by their denial of the moneyed world, they were indeed noticeably obsessed with it.
It could be very hard, if you were a painfully impecunious artist, not to feel that the rich world was undeserving.
Living with the consequences of a difficult choice can strain one’s powers of endurance.
Indeed, a sense of monstrous injustice that ‘they’ should have all the money and none of the capacity truly to feel or appreciate the finer things, burned in many breasts.
It was quite simply unfair that the rich should be so rich, when there was no money left in the kitty, and one’s tiny hand was frozen, and one was burning one’s poems to keep warm… The artist Dora Carrington (who chose to be known by her surname) had been painfully poor in her time, living off soup and unable to afford tram fares; still in financial difficulties after her marriage to Ralph Partridge, she longed for her parents-in-law to die and solve their problems: ‘It makes one’s blood boil that R’s parents should be such shits and such rich shits…’ she moaned, but when ‘old Perdrix’ finally did die they weren’t much better off:

At the most we shall gain
£
60 by old Perdrix’s death… I wish some malignant disease only to be contracted by middle aged – middle class parents would sweep through England,… and swallow them all up.

Uncharitable emotions perhaps, but understandable.
Meanwhile, she and Ralph continued to be dependent on the better-off Lytton Strachey, who was unfailingly generous in subsidising those who were dear to him.
Even before he had much money himself, Strachey was supportive to needy artists, like Carrington’s ex-lover, the painter Mark Gertler.

Mark Gertler was the son of an impoverished immigrant Jew; for a while his father supported the family of seven on 12s 6d a week earned by smoothing walking-sticks with sandpaper.
They lived in one room in
Whitechapel.
Stubborn and obsessive, Gertler grew up with a powerful sense of the injustice of their lot.
Vital, mercurial and determined to become a painter, he overcame his father’s reservations and gained assistance to attend the Slade School of Art.
It was there that he fell passionately in love with the elusive Carrington, and it was also at the Slade that this almost uneducated prodigy crossed a class barrier into a world of incongruous, exciting new values.
But his lack of money caused him deep frustration:

No one loves comfort more than I do… [but] I am continually struggling against being overcome by the sordidness of my surroundings and family and by poverty.
How I loathe poverty!

Gertler had no desire to live out a fantasy, and by 1916 was totally disillusioned.
He wrote to Strachey:

Yesterday I drew my last
£
2; in about a week I shall be penniless… To be a good artist one must have an income.
Believe me that is true.
The starving artist in the garret is a thing of the past.
To paint good pictures one must have a comfortable studio and
good
food – a garret and crust of bread isn’t good enough.
Let no person come and tell me that poverty is good for an artist!

Strachey did his best to rally friends around, encouraging them to make contributions or buy Mark’s pictures, and many helped where they could.
But all his life Gertler never really escaped from the scourge of money worries, not helped by the black depressions to which he was prey.
He contracted tuberculosis, partly brought on by poor diet and living conditions.
Later, marriage and a child increased his sense of responsibility.
Through the thirties Gertler kept anxious accounts of income and expenditure in which the settlement of hospital fees, and doctor’s and whisky merchants’ bills feature alongside laundry, rates and electrical repairs.
In 1939, aged forty-eight, worn out by the years of unequal struggle, he turned on the gas tap and lay down to die.

*

Inevitably, perhaps, the Bohemian artists’ attitude to wealth and poverty led them into a perplexing maze.
‘I am an artist, therefore I despise wealth,’ runs the argument.
‘Though I cannot earn money by my art, I need money to live, but I hate materialism because materialism destroys art.
Art can only nourish where material things are absent.
The seriousness of my artistic purpose is thus defined by my poverty.
But I am sick of living off hard-boiled
eggs, and freezing, and it is making me ill, and if I don’t have food and clothing and medicine I will die… and if only I had five shillings, or five pounds, or five hundred pounds a year and a room of my own…’ Poor Caitlin Thomas did her best to be penniless and proud of it in her artistic life with Dylan, but every so often her resolve broke down when she thought of how things might have been if Dylan had capitalised on his fame instead of squandering every penny on booze: ‘Just think of the money: wads of lovely crackling cracklers to do with just as one pleases…’ It’s a
cri de coeur,
from one who has never had enough.

In his search for the meaning of life, Gerald Brenan’s fictional hero Jack Robinson is less emotional, more analytical, in reaching the same conclusion: money is indispensable.
It has taken him an investigative odyssey via the vagabond Kelly, the world of gypsies and vagrants, sleeping rough and scraping coppers from the gutter, to discover that life in the abyss is base and barbaric:

I had looked poverty in the face; those features, if touching and tragic to a cursory glance, were on a more lengthy inspection merely stinted and meagre… Off then with these rags!
I must henceforth make it my aim to acquire money.

In parallel with his character, Gerald Brenan himself also suddenly found himself possessed of a grown-up income – unearned in his case.
He was briefly overwhelmed with conflicting feelings of gratitude and guilt at the betrayal of his early ideals, but self-interest emerged the winner and he hurried out to purchase a fast car.

*

Does being rich disqualify one from Bohemia?
Obviously, poverty is not the sole qualification for joining the club – love of art and scorn of convention can also arise in the rich man’s breast.
In fact some artists and
soi-disant
Bohemians were quite well-off with private incomes, while retaining their anti-materialist ethic intact.
Frances Partridge, a committed art-lover with Bohemian allegiances, has always maintained that ‘money is the most ghastly form of snobbery’.
She had married Ralph Partridge after Carrington’s death, and he now kept the couple comfortably off through his money market speculations.
The phenomenon of the rich Bohemian has arisen since Henri Murger’s time – to him it would have been antithetical – but it nevertheless demonstrates that the notion of Bohemia is more than the sum of its parts as portrayed in the
Vie de Bohème
model.

Even in the late nineteenth century, when awareness of garret-Bohemia was at its highest, a parallel Bohemia existed of comfortable, clubbable old
roués in soft collars with their actressy female companions, keen to spend an evening knocking back claret and admiring each other’s pen portraits.
Such far from penurious art- and literature-loving chattering classes of the day had their own publication,
The Bohemian
(founded 1893) – ‘An Unconventional Magazine’ – which regaled them with reviews, music-hall gossip and risqué fiction.
They disported themselves at the Bohemian clubs, the Sketch or the Savage.
A typical habitué of such clubs is described in H.
G.
Wells’s ‘succés de scandale’
Ann Veronica
(1909): the heroine is courted by an eminently ‘suitable’ young man, Hubert Manning, for whom she feels friendship but no passion.
Mr Manning writes her a most reasoned and persuasive proposal of marriage, laying before her his prospects and advantages, these being of such transparent merit that the pompous young man has little doubt of being accepted:

I come to you a pure and unencumbered man.
I love you.
In addition to my public salary I have a certain private property and further expectations through my aunt, so that I can offer you a life of wide and generous refinement… I have a certain standing not only as a singer but as a critic, and I belong to one of the most brilliant causerie dinner clubs of the day, in which successful Bohemianism, politicians, men of affairs, and cultivated noblemen generally, mingle together in the easiest and most delightful intercourse.
That is my real milieu, and one that I am convinced you would not only adorn but delight in…