Inspiring Older Readers
Among The Bohemians: Experiments in living 1900 - 1939 by Virginia Nicholson
This must be one of the most disappointing books I’ve read for some time. Although it is sub-titled ‘experiments in living 1900 – 1939’ and has so much fascinating material to deal with, the author – daughter of Quentin Bell and Virginia Woolf’s great-niece – seems intent on skating on the surface and keeping the content as frothy as possible.
Not so long ago Victoria Coren Mitchell presented her exploration of Bohemian culture on BBC4 and managed to produce a couple of programmes that adroitly mixed an assessment of their artistic output with plenty of tittle-tattle and gossip to spice up the story. Nicholson’s book, by comparison, seems completely obsessed with lifestyle and expends no effort at all worth talking about on the art.
Nicholson is dealing with an extraordinary cast of characters and most of them have been paid plenty of biographical attention in their own right and so there probably isn’t much new to say about their domestic lives and sexual intrigues. If a book like this is to have any purpose it’s not to reheat this old stuff but to explain how their chosen lifestyle – their Bohemianism - shaped their artistic output. Augustus John, Eric Gill, pretty much all of the Bloomsbury Group certainly had colourful lives but their choice of clothes, food and entertainment were always going to be, for me, the least interesting things about them. Irritatingly, we learn very little about how a Bohemian philosophy helped to create or was at least reflected in their artwork and writing.
In many ways the book comes across as an attempt to set out a ‘handbook’ of Bohemianism with each chapter asking a series of questions - ‘Why is poverty so romantic?’ , ‘What is wrong with talking about sex?’, ‘How can one recognise a Bohemian interior?’ , ‘Must one eat English food?’ – which sets the tone for what is to follow. However, you won’t find any substantial political or social detail to disturb the feeling that you’re reading an article in Country Life rather than a serious cultural analysis. The author seems oblivious to issues of social class which scream at you from every page and it’s blindingly clear that the desire to embrace poverty for arts-sake is a decision that only the middle class can make. If plunging into poverty, forgoing food and having a complex set of sexual relationships lie at the heart of Bohemianism I can only assume that there were thousands of unacknowledged working class Bohemians who ran more of a risk of being arrested than being feted as indulging in ‘experiments in living’.
I went to this book in the hope that I would discover some common intellectual hinterland to the concept of the Bohemian lifestyle. What were their towering artistic achievements and how have those influenced the generations that came after? It’s clear that there was a common philosophy that bound together those who saw themselves as essentially engaged in a counter-cultural lifestyle and it was their commitment to their art that marked out the ‘real’ Bohemian from the rich, fashionable dilettante mock-Bohemians who saw the route to social non-conformity as one which was smoothed by money and social position.
There’s a great book to write about Bohemianism and its contribution to the culture of the early twentieth century – this isn’t it.
Terry Potter
August 2016