A country of the mind

Spectator, The, Nov 4, 2000 by King, Francis

BOHEMIANS: THE GLAMOROUS OUTCASTS by Elizabeth Wilson I.B. Tauris, 19.95, pp. 262

As the author herself acknowledges, the first problem faced by anyone setting out to write a book about Bohemia is to arrive at a definition. She has subtitled her book 'The Glamorous Outcasts'; but there was nothing glamorous about the vagabonds, jailbirds, brothel-keepers, tinkers and beggars who were among the many sorts of social pariah included in a definition of the French la boheme produced by Karl Marx in 1848.

Whether gulping down absinthe in the Cafe de la Rive Gauche or swilling gin or whisky in the Colony Room, Bohemians have always been associated with excessive boozing. When Beryl Bainbridge was told that Camden Town, her place of residence, was becoming London's Bohemia, she retorted indignantly, `Bohemian means getting drunk all the time, but everyone around here works bloody hard.' But the first writer to popularise Bohemia, Henry Murger, described his Bohemians as waterdrinkers - not from choice, admittedly, but for reasons of poverty.

Bohemians are rebels, but rebels not against political, judicial or religious systems but against convention. It is for this reason that they have usually derived from the middle and upper classes, since convention is something too trivial greatly to concern a needy and oppressed proletariat. If Bohemia, as one knew it in the old days of Chelsea, Hampstead and Soho - the first two now totally gentrified, the last transmogrified into a mixture of red-light district and theme park - has become virtually extinct, the reason is that so too have most forms of conventional behaviour.

I can best illustrate this with an example from my own experience. As a child, I was walking with my mother along the King's Road when Quentin Crisp, heavily made up and with bracelets jangling, shimmered towards us. I stared. My mother then grabbed my hand and jerked me after her. `Don't stare! Don't you know it's rude to stare? Anyway, it only encourages them.' Many years later I told Crisp this story. He responded sadly, `The trouble nowadays is that no one stares, however outrageous one's behaviour.'

Elizabeth Wilson, who has done a prodigious amount of research, is particularly good on the slumming of her aristocratic and/or wealthy Bohemians. The males among them would often make honorary Bohemians as well as bedfellows of robust working-class girls who arrived in Paris or London to earn their livings as artists' models, nightclub performers, barmaids or prostitutes. Women Bohemians had a propensity for black lovers - the most notorious example being Nancy Cunard, who would constantly urge her much putupon paramour Henry Crowder to be `more primitive', only to receive the plaintive answer, `But I ain't African, I'm American.'

Male Bohemians liked to view their black women as beautiful animals from the jungles of Africa. When I met Josephine Baker, the most famous of these enchantresses, in Finland many years ago, she struck me as a quiet, dignified, decorous woman, who would not have been in the least out of place having lunch at the University Women's Club. But to maintain her worldwide success, it was necessary for her to play up to her jungle image. With deft irony she once remarked, `People have done me the honour of believing I'm an animal. I love animals, they are the sincerest of creatures.'

One convention that male Bohemians rarely attempted to defy was that of woman being both man's inferior and his handmaiden. If a married couple both happened to be writers, artists or composers, then the woman was all too often expected to abandon her vocation, since it was assumed that it would certainly be less important than her husband's. Thus, before marrying Alma Schindler, Mahler sent her a letter demanding that she give up her music and live for him alone. Nicolette Devas, raised in Augustus John's kingdom of Bohemia, was a talented painter. What drove her to become a no less talented writer was that her two successive painter husbands, Anthony Devas and Rupert Shephard, did not in the least care for her rivalry in their own field.

John was, of course, the quintessential male Bohemian. Since the special usage of the word Bohemian derived from the misapprehension that it was from Bohemia that the gypsies originally came, it was appropriate that he was so eager to be recognised as an honorary Romany. One of the quintessential female Bohemians was Viva King, who, when we went around together, would become furious if anyone assumed her to be my mother. An uncommonly beautiful woman before she became stout and puffy, she and her husband Willie, of the British Museum, were more attracted by young gay men than by each other. In later years, one of her most cherished friends was April Ashley, who had emerged as a stunningly glamorous butterfly from the drab chrysalis of a lanky merchant seaman.

All too often Elizabeth Wilson's Bohemians put their genius into their conversation. That talented writer Julian Maclaren-Ross, depicted as X. Trapnel in Anthony Powell's Books Do Furnish a Room, tragically talked away both his life and his career as he held increasingly drunken court in the Soho Wheatsheaf or the nearby Scala restaurant. There was, as Elizabeth Wilson repeatedly demonstrates, a demon of self-destructiveness in most Bohemians. Only Augustus John's prodigious physique and talent enabled him to continue working into a productive, albeit still dissolute, old age.