Read Online Among the Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson - Free Book Online
Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Tags: Social Science, History, 20th Century, Modern, Anthropology, Cultural, Art, Social History, Individual Artists, Monographs
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maintain rented establishments in London, Sussex and the south ofFrance.Yet Virginia Woolf asserted in her diary in 1930 that Vanessa and Duncan based their relationship on Bohemianism, and that this was what gave it its indestructibility.Angelica too regarded her mother as being an instinctive Bohemian, despite her upper-middle-class upbringing, which from time to time reasserted itself.Vanessa’s Sussex home, Charleston, has today come to epitomise the Bohemian lifestyle.Or take Augustus John, who by the 1920s was one of the highest-paid living artists in Britain, painting millionaires; one such portrait sold in 1923 for three thousand guineas.Yet still Augustus encapsulated the very image of the Bohemian in his manners and appearance.
The existence of a rich Bohemia presented artists with a difficult problem.The invasion of their inviolate territory by the moneyed world was in some respects welcome, providing as it did a market for creativity, and yet it was also deeply distasteful.It distorted artistic values.By the twenties rents in Chelsea had been driven so high by invading dilettanti that Ransome’s hard-up painters and poets had all been forced out.‘Art has now become a business, like the selling of stocks and shares or jam or motor-cars…’ lamented the cultured social commentator Patrick Balfour in 1933.The artist’s challenge to society was devalued by its reduction to the status of commodity; this was, and still is, a bitter pill to swallow.Yet there have always been some, like Philip Carey in Of Human Bondage, Mark Gertler, Arthur Ransome, Nina Hamnett, Kathleen Hale, Dylan Thomas and many others, who refused the palliative, remaining uncompromising in their choice of a way of life.
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Was it worth it?What if Nina Hamnett had settled for a safe life: the marriage market, babies, the conventional life of a middle-class ‘lady’?What if Mark Gertler had decided to join the family firm in the East End and become a furrier?Or if Kathleen Hale had done a secretarial course like her sister instead of going to art school?Would their lives have been more fulfilled?The answer is inevitably a mixed one.When Arthur Ransome, by then an elderly successful writer, looked back on his Bohemian days, his main emotion was one of nostalgia for his romantic youth:
It was certainly the unhealthy, irregular meals I ate, my steady buying of books instead of food, that brought about the internal troubles that have been a nuisance through most of my life.At the same time I doubt if any young man… can ever know the happiness that was mine at nineteen, dependent solely on what I was able to earn and living in a room of my own with the books I had myself collected.
One morning, six months before her death at the age of a hundred and two, I met Kathleen Hale, the author and illustrator of some of my favourite children’s books, about Orlando the Marmalade Cat.Her memoir A Slender Reputation (1994) had proved a rich resource in researching this book.I found Kathleen living in a small basement room in an old people’s home on the outskirts of Bristol.The walls of her room were adorned with her own drawings, lino cuts and metal compositions.Though rather deaf, she was vigorous and somewhat formidable.Her springy iron-grey hair was cropped short, and she wore a blue caftan top with a silver necklace.She talked about the past, but also about the present, and her relationships with the other ‘greyheads’ in the home, who to her surprise had turned out to be fascinating individuals.Halfway through our interview she mischievously produced an illicit bottle of gin which we drank from plastic cups.Encouraged, I said I thought that despite the extreme hardships of her early life, I was under the impression that she had enjoyed it:
‘Oh yes, it was absolutely wonderful, and not hard all the time by any means, and the difficult parts like having to stay indoors because you couldn’t face going past a bun shop, well, that was all
The existence of a rich Bohemia presented artists with a difficult problem.The invasion of their inviolate territory by the moneyed world was in some respects welcome, providing as it did a market for creativity, and yet it was also deeply distasteful.It distorted artistic values.By the twenties rents in Chelsea had been driven so high by invading dilettanti that Ransome’s hard-up painters and poets had all been forced out.‘Art has now become a business, like the selling of stocks and shares or jam or motor-cars…’ lamented the cultured social commentator Patrick Balfour in 1933.The artist’s challenge to society was devalued by its reduction to the status of commodity; this was, and still is, a bitter pill to swallow.Yet there have always been some, like Philip Carey in Of Human Bondage, Mark Gertler, Arthur Ransome, Nina Hamnett, Kathleen Hale, Dylan Thomas and many others, who refused the palliative, remaining uncompromising in their choice of a way of life.
*
Was it worth it?What if Nina Hamnett had settled for a safe life: the marriage market, babies, the conventional life of a middle-class ‘lady’?What if Mark Gertler had decided to join the family firm in the East End and become a furrier?Or if Kathleen Hale had done a secretarial course like her sister instead of going to art school?Would their lives have been more fulfilled?The answer is inevitably a mixed one.When Arthur Ransome, by then an elderly successful writer, looked back on his Bohemian days, his main emotion was one of nostalgia for his romantic youth:
It was certainly the unhealthy, irregular meals I ate, my steady buying of books instead of food, that brought about the internal troubles that have been a nuisance through most of my life.At the same time I doubt if any young man… can ever know the happiness that was mine at nineteen, dependent solely on what I was able to earn and living in a room of my own with the books I had myself collected.
One morning, six months before her death at the age of a hundred and two, I met Kathleen Hale, the author and illustrator of some of my favourite children’s books, about Orlando the Marmalade Cat.Her memoir A Slender Reputation (1994) had proved a rich resource in researching this book.I found Kathleen living in a small basement room in an old people’s home on the outskirts of Bristol.The walls of her room were adorned with her own drawings, lino cuts and metal compositions.Though rather deaf, she was vigorous and somewhat formidable.Her springy iron-grey hair was cropped short, and she wore a blue caftan top with a silver necklace.She talked about the past, but also about the present, and her relationships with the other ‘greyheads’ in the home, who to her surprise had turned out to be fascinating individuals.Halfway through our interview she mischievously produced an illicit bottle of gin which we drank from plastic cups.Encouraged, I said I thought that despite the extreme hardships of her early life, I was under the impression that she had enjoyed it:
‘Oh yes, it was absolutely wonderful, and not hard all the time by any means, and the difficult parts like having to stay indoors because you couldn’t face going past a bun shop, well, that was all
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