Virginia Nicholson: Among the Bohemians

When I started this book – well and interestingly divided into sections on all aspects of the history and nature of aspects of Bohemian living such as Child-rearing, Cookery & Food, Clothing, Housework, Sexuality & Relationships - my initial reaction was simply of just great pleasure and enjoyment at getting these fascinating insights into a completely different way of living (although many, many aspects of our lives now were precursed by these free-thinking individuals). This wiser and wider-ranging view of the subject was hinted at by the first chapter which explored the fascination and romanticisation of poverty with seminal Murger’s Scenes de la Vie de la Boheme (Puccini’s source)

However, by the end, the feeling that was strongest was a celebratory one – that these people could be like cats, and not ‘give a f**k’ what society may think and admiration for them being able to live their lives as they saw fit – and the longer term social impact of this so that much of what they did and lived is now in the mainstream. However, it is also made clear, by the end of the book, that the success and ability to do this was, for very many people, cushioned by one or both of two factors - family wealth and the unspoken and often unacknowledged support of an unseen support system – This was, sadly, particularly the case for women (many of whom, wishing and intending to ‘live the Bohemian life’ found themselves dragged down by housekeeping and childcare). Very often if they were in a relationship with a male Bohemian (not so much the case if in a lesbian relationship, perhaps because in very many of those cases both came from moneyed backgrounds) and so they had to give up their personal artistic desires and be a wife/companion to the man. – and if they could find artistic fulfilment, then it was because of the support of the servant class. Just reading about the surface life of these people is like looking at the plantations of the Southern USA – what we see is only one third of the iceberg. The bulk is unseen but utterly necessary for the third that we do see. Women and servants were that two-thirds for the Bohemians and the popular and seductive image of them in the media and common mind, slaves were that two-thirds for the image of the south in Gone with the Wind.

However, also by the end of the book, there is a strong sense of sadness as well for wasted lives (although the people themselves would not have seen it like that) and amazement that some survived for a vastly long time after that, brief era. Most notably for me was Katherine Hale, illustrator-creator of Orlando the Marmalade Cat – a vividly remembered book from my childhood. I had no idea of the madly Bohemian life she had led – and the fact that the Orlando books spanned almost 40 years! A Frances Partridge was another whose eye-popping memories tell us so much about this time and these places and people. And of course, the massively looming figure of Augustus John, the ‘capo di tutti capi’ who epitomized the movement and who also was massively generous in supporting the indigent, the feckless and the frankly incompetent at living. And we must not forget that for every Dylan Thomas there were countless other mundane versifiers who were not in the poetic or artistic pantheon.

The book is very well written in an easy-to-read style that belies the great amount of research that must have gone into it – although the author has an almost classic textbook Bloomsbury/Bohemian heritage – father Quentin Bell who was a nephew of Virginia Woolf, and her grandmother was Vanessa Bell! Some pedigree!