In Our Time - Bohemianism

Episode Date: October 9, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 19th century Parisian philosophy of life lived for art. In 1848 the young Parisian Henri Murger wrote of his bohemian friends: Their daily existence is a work of genius…they know how to practise abstinence with all the virtue of an anchorite, but if a slice of fortune falls into their hands you will see them at once mounted on the most ruinous fancies, loving the youngest and prettiest, drinking the oldest and best, and never finding sufficient windows to throw their money out of. Then, when their last crown is dead and buried...they go poaching on all the callings that have any connection with art, hunting from morn till night that wild beast called a five franc piece. Bohemianism meant a life lived for art, it meant sexual liberation and freedom from social constraint, but it also meant dodging the landlord and burning your poems to stay warm. How did the garret-philosophy of the Parisian Latin Quarter take over the drawing rooms of Bloomsbury and Chelsea, and why did a French war with necessity emerge as a British life-style as art? With Hermione Lee, Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and biographer of Virginia Woolf; Virginia Nicholson, author of Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939; Graham Robb, writer and biographer of Balzac, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 1848, the young Parisian Henri Mouge wrote of his bohemian friends. Their daily existence is a work of genius. They know how to practice abstinence with all the virtue of an anchorite. But if a slice of fortune falls into their hands, you will see them at once mounted on the most ruinous fancies, loving the youngest and prettiest, drinking the oldest and best, and never finding sufficient windows to throw their money out of. Then, when their last crown is dead and buried,

they go poaching on all the callings that have any connection with art, hunting from mortal night, that wild beast, called a five-franc piece. In mid and late 19th century Paris, bohemianism meant a life lived for art. It meant sexual liberation and freedom from social constraint, but it also meant dodging the landlord and burning your poems to stay warm. But how did the Garrett philosophy of the Parisian Latin Quarter take over the drawing rooms of Bloomsbury and Chelsea? And why did a French war with necessity emerge as a British lifestyle as art?

With me to discuss the literature and reality of Bohemian in Life is Virginia Nicholson, author of Among the Bohemians Experiments in Living, 1900 to 1939. Hermione Lee, Goldsmith's professor of English literature at the University of Oxford and biographer of Virginia Woolf. And Graham Robb, the writer and biographer of Balzac, Victor Hugo and Rambo. Hermione Lee, the word bohemianism, where did it come from and when did it start to mean more than someone who came from Bohemia? As far back as I can go there, I think there was a tribe called the Bowie, who lived in a part of Central Europe, which then got taken over by Slavic Czechoshecs and got called Bohemia. And that kingdom of Bohemia eventually became part of Western Czechoslovakia, what was Czechoslovakia.

And emigrants from that part of the world were called Bohemians. until, you know, well into the end of the 19th century. Meanwhile, gypsies, from early on, from the 15th century onwards, gypses were travelling from Central and Eastern Europe into France, Germany, eventually into the British Isles, into Western and Northern Europe. And by the 17th century, these gypsies, these travellers, were being called Bohemia, Bohemians in France, either because they were thought to come originally from the Kingdom of Bohemia,

or because they travel through Bohemia on their way into northern and western Europe. And these gypsies who were nomadic and travelled in painted caravans and wore brightly coloured clothes and bartered and had packs and so on. These were often identified with other kinds of vagabonds, tramps, pickpockets, thieves. And so there was a criminal association, often. with the word bohemian used of gypses, which I think, you know, lingers on interestingly into later thoughts about bohemianism.

From the 1830s onwards, I think the first use is in 1834. The word bohemian started to be used in France to apply to young people who were living the kind of alternative lifestyle that you've just summed up, and obviously we'll talk about why they were living that kind of lifestyle. But the underworld associations lingered on,

so that when Milsger wrote scenes of Bohemian Life in the 1840s, he felt he had to very clearly distinguish his artistic bohemians from the criminal classes. He said, you know, they're not people who steal your watch. They're artists. But that criminal tinge to the word bohemian lingers on. I noticed that this week Thames Valley Police is having a crackdown on local burglars, and they've called it Operation Bohemian. Yes, so we have the gaudy dress, and we have the criminality,

the vagamond idea, maybe a touch of the players around that. But we also, when did the idea of bohemians, talking 19th century now, becoming part of a revolutionary spirit, let's not say movement, but inside the behemians also a feeling that an idea of revolution as well as everything else. Well, I suppose that that kicks off in the, 1840s with Victor Hugo and Les Miserables and I hesitate

to say anything about Victor Hugo with Graham sitting next to me. So the idea of bohemianism as having a political agenda, as having to do with republicanism, with hostility to the powers that be with an anti-authoritarianism, is built into it in France pretty early on. And I think that

keeps on shifting and changing so that you will have bohemianism, identified with alternative politics, but not always later on. Sometimes bohemianism is a recoil from the public political world into a kind of individualism. It's interesting, incidentally, that in the definitions of bohemianism that you get in the OED and the Oxford Thesaurus, you get things like a gypsy of society or one who cuts himself off from society, someone who leads a free vagabond or irregular life. will go into definitions like avant-garde, hippie, even freak,

which all gets incorporated under the words Bohemian. Excellent. Virginia Nicholson, the passage I wrote in the introduction from Ori Mouge, he was the first to popularise interest in the bohemian lifestyle in Paris in the 1840s, the mine is referred to, with magazine articles, and then with his book, Scenes of the Bohemian Life, can you tell us something about Mouge and these scenes from Bohemian Life and why they had, which they did have, such an impact at the time?

Well, it was an intensely romantic image that Milshey created and it was very important because he did it from his own personal experience he himself lived out this, this Garrett existence in Paris in the early 1840s I think scenes from Bohemian life came out in 1845 and he himself came from a very humble origin really became fascinated by literature through his lot in with a group of poets and musicians and composers and philosophers

and lived in unbearable poverty. That was real, the poverty, wasn't it? Oh, it was real, all right. I mean, I don't know about burning your poems to keep warm. That may have been fantasy. But the poverty was real, and they would go for days without food, They would scrounge, beg, borrow, and maybe steal, who knows.

But that image that he creates of Schoenard and Colleen and Rodolf and Mimi is about his friends. It's about living out this poetic existence in a Parisian garret. And he was the first to do it. And since then it's been a blueprint for countless other versions. But let's stick with him at the moment in the 1840s, impoverished, not getting anywhere as a writer, this is the only thing we remember him by.

He wrote these scenes from Bohemian Life, and they were a great success at the time, so the public must have been waiting for them and wanting them. And the funny thing is, he made a lot of money out of it. As soon as he made money, he moved to the right bank, much to the disgust of his friends and comrades. But the life had taken its toll, and he became quite seriously ill and died in his 40s.

What, can you give us some idea, though, just a niggle away at this, sorry, about the influence it did have in the 184? How many editions did it go through? What sort of people were reading it? Did it have some, what sort of impact did it have? Graham, I think you probably know more about this than I do. Can I pass that again? Well, it was the original scenes of Bohemian life, which were just slices of his own life, were published in a very obscure, satirical newspaper. and in 1849, four years after the first scene had appeared, a young playwright got together with Mielshey,

made a play out of it called Le Ville de Boem, which was a huge success. No one read this newspaper, but thousands of people went to see the play. And the play was, obviously, ended sadly. Mimi dies in a picturesque garret and is mourned by all her friends. It was actually much more cheerful than the book, which came out two years later.

And the 1849 is a significant date in France because it's the year after the 1848 revolution in which young bohemians had played an important role. So all the bourgeois who went to see the play were greatly reassured and thought they're quite nice chaps after all these young tearaways. But when the book came out, instead of the bittersweet ending,

Rodolf, who's based on Mielgé, finds out that his girlfriend Mimi is ill returns to find that she's being cutted off to the hospital, turns up at the hospital, her body's in the wagon waiting to be taken to the common grave, and it's waiting outside a building marked Enfitteatre, which means that, like a lot of unclaimed corpses, she's being dissected in front of medical students.

So as Baudelaire said, when Milleux died in 1861, young people don't know how bitter and sarcastic Mulesi was when he talked about Bohemia. You talk about 1848, 1849, and that brings us to Les Miserables Victor Hugo. Now, the Bohemians, something that we touched on with the mind at the beginning, the bohemians there are represented as having a political characteristic. Can you talk about Hugo the minister? I'm trying to get the role of bohemianism going in mid-19th century France. So Hugo takes it up. Now Hugo's, at the furthest end,

what could possible be for Montserie. He is massively best-selling, massively established, massively respected, so and so forth. But he has Bohemians on the barricades in Les Miserables Arab. Yes, he does, and it's quite realistic because young people did it well as in May 68 did play a big role in French revolutions.

Hugo published Limézillab in 1862, so there was an element of nostalgia already about that. And even though Hugo was on the left politically, he wasn't a socialist, he wasn't an all-out revolutionary. So he's partly responsible for, as was Miorges, for sweetening the image of Bohemia. But it's certainly true that these people were considered by the French police

to be a major threat to national stability. And there were two-thirds of all students in, France went to Paris to study or just to be in Paris. There were 5,000 students and young men from somewhere else living in Paris in mid-19th century. So that did reflect a political reality. And when the image of the Bohemian first comes in in an artistic sense, probably with Balzac and some other romantic writers, they used that figure to complain about what Balzac called the gerontocracy, the rule of the old crumblies in France

who are preventing this jeanness from rising up. So we got the behemians coming in as part of revolutionary thing in Hugo. And then in Baudelaire, in Flood Dumas, he wrote the figure of the Flannard. We have the behemian as the nomad, the behemian back almost to the certain extent to do with the gypsy, the outside of the vagabond. Can you just refer to that for a second?

Well, that's Baudelae outside. of Bohemian is someone who knows, who lives in the city not because it's his place of work or because he feels comfortable there and there are all sorts of conveniences, but who knows how to turn the city into a kind of desert, a dangerous

place where unexpected things will happen all the time, where you have to be ready to face the unexpected and express it. But Baudelaire hated Bohemian life. He said to his mother, I'm sick to death this life of rented rooms.

He didn't want to be a bohemian, although he was... Is it real writers wore suits or something? Well, so the dirty clothes had nothing to do with genius. And he said, you know, I may be forced to live a bohemian life, but at least I'm still spending an hour every morning

on my nails. Can I just add something in about, that struck me thinking about Miljir and Hugo, which is that it's tremendously much to do with talk and and wit. I mean, it's not just, you know, trying to be an artist. Murgier divides his bohemians up into amateurs who are just slumming for fun

and real bohemians who are aspiring artists and hopelessly poor people who are never going to see the light of day. But the thing that links them is that they all love to, especially the men, really, love to badinage and exchange witticisms. And there's that too in Les Miserables, isn't there, that they talk about sarcasm, jest and foolery and a tumour. of talk. So it's a very talky kind of environment. But the point about that is, it's a point, it's about friendship, isn't it?

Absolutely. Male friendship. Male friendship. At a much later, at a later stage, female friendship as well. But it's about groups of people gathering, drinking, enjoying themselves in cafes, in the cafe mousse, or later in London in the cafe royal, later still in Paris, in the Dome, the select, the rotund. But we are actually talking, as Graham pointed out with his 5,000 students and he eats them as men, and you'd be talking about men talking

and yet women figure but as I think you've said Hermione they're models, mistresses and muses and they get the bad deal I mean the men are Bahean the women carry the can the child and so and so forth this takes us on very much to the

I don't know if you want to jump there but to the 1890s not yet I've got one more question I've got Rambor before you're in the 1890s very sorry about that that is very important in the 18 nights when you get Churby and Mimi in the opera or we can come back

I'm going to say a word about Rambo before you're 1890s. I mean, after all, 10 yards from this building, he and Valone worked, so we can't pass him up. And he was the young, for many of the archetypal bohemian, the 15-year-old boy, came up to Paris, thought they were all going to be really outsiders,

hated the fact that they were bourgeois, stabbed a poet because he didn't like his poems. I'll quite like that one. And then became an arms dealer. I mean, what are we talking about? Anyway, Rambo, can you just tell us, Graham, briefly, why Rambo it was so important as a representative bohemian, I was indeed a bohemian.

I think because from very early on there is this idea that some people are fake bohemians and some people are real bohemians. And the problem for either kind of bohemian is that if you decide to be a bohemian, that almost disqualifies you from being called bohemian. So Hohambo who didn't really care about literary fame, who in the end really just cared about making a profit. He was an intensely practical person. he looks like a real bohemian, the way he behaved when he went to Paris.

When he went to Paris, 1870, so about 10 years after Miltre's death, he thought he was going to the capital of Bohemia, the place where poets lived, and found these people who were technically bohemian, but who spent most of their time going to poetry readings, reviewing each other's books, wore suits, and were very polite. And so that explains his violent reaction. and they set him up in a room so that he could match up to this image of a bohemian poet who was like a little pet and they gave him pen and paper and so on

and the first thing he did was to smash the room up its first main example of room trashing and smashed the chamber pot and left a rather pungent calling card on his pillow and not being a complete full sold the furniture so he you know it was largely because he didn't care that later on he was seen as the archetypal bohemian. But a poet from the anecdotal excitements of his life, what was he representing that was so important to people? Well, he didn't, in his own lifetime,

he didn't really represent anything because so few people knew about him. But it's the freedom of his writing, which is particularly striking in French literature because French poetry was still governed by classical rules. So simply writing a prose poem was quite a daring thing. But it's mostly his life.

Didn't it help that he died young? Yes, although he probably didn't die as young as he should have done to be a... Really, bona fide. I mean, the problem with Rambour is that... I found this when I published the biography, that there is this image of Rambour the Bohemian, but when he was in Africa, he made a huge amount of money. He was living on the frontier.

He went to place where no European had been before and made a lot of money in the armstrait. You're obviously in Paris as your no end. I know, I should never have... I should never have... But it's so interesting the thing about him not being known and yet his life becoming known because there's no point being a bohemian

unless you're shocking someone or unless you're an exhibitionist. And so there's this very strange and interesting relationship which you get right the way through the 19th century between authenticity. You know, you've got to be the true person, you've got to live according to your idealistic lights and a kind of affectation, poser, you know, insincerity, exhibitionism, which has to do with how you dress

and how you look. to be showing off in a way to be a bohemian. But in a sense it's settled down quite quickly because in 1890s, we have La Boeem, Puccini, there it is, opera, everybody turns up, dressed up in really good suits this time, no dirty clothes. What you mean in the audience? In the audience, absolutely. So low life becomes high art in a way.

So what's happening there with the idea, Hermione? I think if you take Dumarier's novel Trilby, which is also mid-1890s, and Puccini's version of Mouge's bohem. What you get now is a kind of sentimentalizing or romanticizing a sort of gloss in a way on these earlier versions of bohemianism. So that in La Bohem, it's all about love and living for art and youthful high spirits. I mean, there are more recent productions,

of Puccini's opera, which have tried to build back in, the sense of real hunger and real illness and real suffering. But Mimi's death is a very gentle, romanticised death. I mean, what strikes me is very interesting about both Trilby, which is the story of the artist's model, the Grisette, the working class girl, who gets taken up as the model and then taken up by the evil Jewish hypnotist, Svangali, and turned into an opera singer, and when he dies, she loses her power and then she dies. in both those stories with Mimi's death and Trilby's death, it's the woman who is the victim. I mean, and the women seem to divide. There's the, as you say, there's the muse, there's the model.

I was quoting you. Yeah, well, thank you. The model is often also the person who mends the clothes and washes up. It's very interesting in Mougeé, that Mimi pours the soup for the bohemians and Mousette waters the flowers. and, you know, when there are children, of course, that's the next stage. They're never the artists themselves, are they? Very rarely, and if they are, they suffer for it. They're darning the men folks are.

Yes, that's right. So the women tend to be exploited, I think, in this camaraderie of bohemians. Did this sentimental, would you say, did this sentimentalization, as mine is outlined in Virginia, did this become a set view of bohemianism? at the end of the 19th century. Was that the view? That it was somehow, in the end, quite nice? Yes, I think that this romantic image that Hermannes described

was a blueprint for countless people who wanted to lead the artistic life, who wanted to, you know, throw over the traces and join this kind of very glamorized studio life. And there are very many memoirs where people said, I'd read Trilby, I'd read Sendele de Boem. I wanted to be part of that life because it's so glamorous, it's so attractive. It's sort of, there's a marvellous account in Somerset Morms of Human Bondage

where the young Philip Carey is carried away with enthusiasm for that picture of life which was so squalid and so picturesque. And so he goes off to Paris and lives out the reality of it. But of course he finds out that it's actually rather different and that poverty isn't such a lot of fun and a very close friend of his, herself and it all becomes there's a darker side to it. But they're going to Paris by particularly younger

English men who'd be going to Paris for quite a long time when we weren't hammering each other on the battlefields and for all sorts of reasons, most of them obvious. But the allure of bohemianism was quite strong then, wasn't it? The actually artistic lifestyle image was part of the way. Very much so. I think that for young men like the fictional Philip Carey and for countless real true people going to Paris and living out the studio, Garrett, existence,

was a kind of right of passage. You didn't count as an artist unless you'd lived it. I mean, I was thinking very much she was talking about Oscar Wilde, who goes to Paris in 1883, and literally follows in the footsteps of Gautier and, you know, is fascinated by Baudelaire, and then writes Salome in French and says, you know, it's hopeless for an artist in England,

there are all these prescriptions, and in fact, Salome can't be published in English. So that the Wildean trip to Paris is very important. And Paris was the centre. of bohemian existence. I mean, if the notional bohemia had any real existence, surely it was on the left bank. And that was Bohemian territory.

Graham, can you tell us what Oscar Wilde did with this, then? Amain has brought him up, and Salomey wrote in French, and he went to Paris and so. And what turn is he giving to this? He's part of the British, Irish, who off he went to Paris. And as Virginia said to the left bank, which became so. So what does he, what's he delivered? He really shows both sides of,

of Bohemia at the end of the 19th century, because the last time he went to France, it was as an outcast after his trial. So he was using Paris and France as an escape route, as many people did. But before that, he was, as usual, with Wilde, an exception, because he was very well connected. When he went to Paris, he had letters of introduction

to all sorts of French writers. and that's probably reflecting the fact that now Wilde's plays and poetry are even more highly regarded in France than they are in Britain but here's the exception I mean the thing that strikes one about the English bohemians who went to Paris is how little they mixed with French writers and that's perhaps not surprising because if you feel that you're misunderstood in your own country it's quite safe to to go to a country where no one's going to understand you anyway because they don't speak your language.

So it's consoling. And also you meet other exiles, don't you? I mean, other people who are misunderstood. So they're misunderstood get together on the left bank. Exactly. And Thackeray talks about a hotel called the Hotel Calmey that was there. Next to the audio. That's a cheap and tawdry place.

And said, if you want to go to Paris and your desires of fleeing your compatriots, go to the Hotel called May when none of them ever penetrate. But for the next 50 years, there's a constant stream of English bohemians going through this hotel. And at the same time, the same hotel appears in a lot of French stories.

Balzac was there, Baudelaire was there, just whatever you can think of. And yet, no one seems to have met the other side. They just passed on the staircase. Of course, it wasn't just a desire to go to Paris because of what it had there. It was also because of what it represented to British people here,

so that you were, by going to Paris, you were setting out to Epate the bourgeois, to shock the gerontocracy, as you put it. And, of course, for English people here, for normal, decent, god-fearing English people, Paris represented all sorts of rather terrifying things, and those fears went very deep, and political insecurity, and the terror and philosophical subversion. And sexual infection. And absolutely.

This language was this kind of aphrodisiac. It was about sort of exciting, illicit things like Nana, like Vodalel, like Marie Duplessi and so on. And it's Protestantism versus Catholicism in a way, isn't it? It's that highly coloured Carpe Diem, you know, sin for today and you'll get forgiven on your deathbed, versus the idea of living a good life and being sober and domestic. And so with what you said at the very beginning, there's still the gypsy element, the feeling of gaudy clothes and the criminality which you must have to do that. Sure, and that goes.

With the idea that literature and art can be more candid, I mean, over and over again, over a century, you get, you know, Elizabeth Barrett Browning saying, you know, the Prude, Anglaterre is never going to feel at home in Paris. And you get Virginia Woolf saying, I couldn't be frank about Roger Fry's bisexualism, whereas André Gide can write his memoirs and be completely open. So there's a real difference in censorship, I think. But also what's beginning to solidify. the idea that true artist is the person who lives in a garret does not pursue a life of money and gain. That becomes one very, one, but one very powerful image of what a real artist is like.

You're not supposed to have property. You must have left home. You shouldn't have parents around. If possible, you shouldn't be married, and it doesn't help to have children. And those are the rules. You're striving towards the definition, humanity, but I've found over the years I've been...

Yes, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. It's one of those impossible amorphous concepts. And bohemianism, one tries to pin it down, but it slips from one's grasp. And that is because it comes out of romanticism, and romanticism changes with the time that you're dealing with and the people you're dealing with and perceptions.

And yet there is a concept, and there is a kind of philosophy. And even if you can't say exactly what a bohemian is, you can say what disqualifies you from being seen as a bohemian. That's a very good way of putting it. Can I just, bookend the Oscoisle

because he went as a a splendid young, brilliant man and he went back and as it were and he lived

the life of the Mouje in a way he was Garrett he was Garrett penned broke cadging and so on

so he still but he found Paris the place to do that to be the outsider the Dipsy as it were

well it's he really gave the lie to the myth that Paris was a tolerant place because some writers did draw up a petition calling for Wilde's release from Reading after his prosecution for sodomy and most writers refused to sign it including writers who were thought by the English to be producing all these dirty books like Zola so he you know he ended sadly but he also went back to Paris because it was the closest big city to London. It was

cheap, and it's also small compared to London. We went Humbold and Valen, came to London and lived as Bohemians. They were lost in this, this huge sea of filth, but in Paris you knew you would always run into people you already knew, you can walk across it in the morning, so there were also

practical reasons. Okay, and so we say far well to Paris and begin to move to where we are now to London, sorry about that, I'm on, you begin to move to London at the beginning of this century. Virginia, how How did these Parisian attitudes come over here? Let's assume they percolate, let's assume it took time, everything 20 years earlier,

you think, and I don't know. But at the beginning of the 20th century, they're beginning to come over here, these ideas, and beginning to be taken up. Now, can you just say who gets hold with them and who runs with them? Well, I think the best person to talk about is, oddly enough, the author of that lovely children's books, Swallows on Amazon's, Arthur Ransom.

And it was a great surprise to me to find that he'd written a book called Bohemia in London about his, again, It's autobiographical. It's about his own experience. It's a kind of traveller's guide to Bohemia, as he saw it, in London, in 1907. And he describes not only the bohemian forebears, who are the Londoners of his time, the Carlisles, the Dickens even. But he talks about his own generation, and it's about Grub Street. It's about a time when, he says,

sandwich and a couple of bananas seemed a supper for a Shakespeare. It's about going down the Taring Cross Road and spending your last penny on books so that you can't have that supper. It's about living on packing cases in Chelsea, which was the Bohemian Heartland. It's about the studio life and how everybody lives off scrambled eggs. And he paints this wonderful picture, very romanticised. But looking back many years, later. He says, you know, he would never have not done it. He had no regrets about it. Was he consciously

taking on the French ideas? Was he consciously saying they did that time doing that? Because that's the right way to do it. He recreates it for London. He doesn't really talk about the French model, but it must have been at the back of his mind. Amina, he comes in, it goes from Ransom, and then we move into what

we call Plumsbury. Well, I was thinking, as Virginia was talking, it's very interesting that we concentrated so far on the city. And of course, yes, the Bloomsry Group, if you're going to define them as bohemians, and I've got some problems with that. We think of them because of the name as, you know, being in the middle of London. But actually, it's the more I thought about English bohemianism,

the more I began to think of it as pastoral rather than city. Of course, yes, there's Fitzrovia, there's the pubs, there's the, you know, there's writers like Patrick Hamilton and so on, sort of locking into that underworld. later on. But there's also, everywhere you look, there's people saying, let's go to the open road, let's be like 20th century gypsies, there's Augustus John with his brood of children going off in gypsy caravans, there's... Even though he's the richest painter in English time. It's quite interesting, isn't it? He is the highest paid. His paintings face more than anybody else, says he still goes in the caravan horses. But he wants to be like a gypsy, yes. And there's Rupert Brooke and his group, which are made. any sort of Cambridge derived.

There's a kind of strong Cambridge derivation for the near opinion. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be in a caravan with five children? Absolutely, which is rather bizarre. I don't know he would get them from. And so that's vegetarianism, you know, living in tents going off with a knapsack on it. I mean, Carr Cox, who was one of Rupert Brooks' acolytes, actually used to stride around with, you know, like Dick Whittington, little sort of coloured knapsack in a stick on her back and turn up to see Virginia like this.

And Virginia would think, oh, help you colic. skinny dipping as well Skinny dipping Rightfully important At the least provocation Watching to see if somebody got an erection When they were jumping in the water And there was all that

Sorry Well we haven't got to Augustus John properly yet Or Eric Gill I mean Eric Gill's We're in the building Is Eric Gill decorated Absolutely Did they know? Did they know

I'm asking Eric Gill's life With this sort of amazing You know Catholic monastic idea On the one hand Sort of big rustic Refectory tables

on the Welsh border and carving all the hours. God sends. He's also making love to his sisters, his daughters, even the dog, I think, as an expression, ultimate, free expression of... I didn't know when he commissioned him to do these things in the BBC. So there's a sort of partial,

bucolic, free love side to this as well as the city, would you knit that into the idea, lock that into the idea of bohemianism, Hermione? I mean, it's been a wonderful It's a wonderful aria you've done then. But let's get back, I know mutants.

Would you not lock it into the bohemianism? I think the key word is utopianism. I think what links it, what links it back to Les Miserables or even Sendeleu de Bohem is the idea of creating a better life in the teeth of what already exists, of imperialism, of Victorianism,

of the patriarchy, of the family structure. So the utopian idea, which, for instance, D.H. Lawrence will pursue with Rannanim, you know, a community of like-minded artists and free thinkers who will go off and live in a little commune and make the world a better place. Not only that. That was the idea behind Letchworth Garden City. It was the idea behind all sorts of communities,

lesser-known, sort of vegetarian, knicker-bocker-wearing, sandal-wearing people who jolly well created their own schools. It was the idea behind Beedales, for example, co-education, digging rather than doing maths. Well, the whole educational thing is very fascinating. Mr. Rudolf Stina's school, is that sort of thing. But you, Hermione and Virginia, have sidestepped the Bloomsbury Group. I can't think why.

They're both probably world experts on it. No, no, we'll do it. But nevertheless, I want to come back to the idea of the Bloomsbury's taking over the French idea. With this quotation, Graham, which you'll know, and I'm reading. Virginia Woolf in a 1924 essay, Mr. Bellet, Mrs. Brown, wrote, on or about December 1910 human character change. She was referring to the Post Impressionist exhibition and so on.

And it seems to me that you can see there with Fry and Gene Uwolf taking that up a taking on of the French romantic bohemian idea, planting it across here. Of course it becomes English. Of course it becomes a different class. Suppose it comes a different thing.

But Puccini had made it a different thing but Mougei so I would see it as not so much a progression, but but certainly not outside, not outside the spectrum of bohemianism as we began to talk about it 40 minutes ago. What should you say to that? Well, it's true that it seems to be a much more social and friendly kind of movement in England. And if human character did change in 1910, I'm not sure which day it changed on, presumably she meant it became more radical

or people started seeing things in new ways so it does suggest that bohemianism was also becoming a broader social movement whereas in France there was always that element of political protest built into it um no Marley no no no no I don't want to get in but you continue around

for another few sentences but then they'll have to fight back Yeah. But even in France, there is that social aspect to it. And it's interesting that bohemianism as a concept comes along at about the same time that it becomes possible for a writer or a painter to earn a living by his pen or his brushes, although difficult but not impossible. So you can also see it as writers creating a trade for themselves. Every trade at that time, you immediately knew who did what, Baker looked like a baker, and a factory worker, but what did a writer look like? And so there was a kind of bohemian costume, bohemian uniform that extended quite widely,

and it's the profession asserting itself, and even though there's this lack of confidence in what it's doing, especially if it's doing something original and groundbreaking, there is also the sense that it has a role in society, that bohemians belong to society as much as Milkman and, Baker's.

Amani, couldn't you say that the blooms are good? You know, you say. Yeah, I did want to come back to 1910 because, of course, it's such a key moment. And I think what she means has to do with the suffrage movement, which is tremendously active and important

in 1910 and in which she is involved, and she looks back on that involvement later in a very, you know, it's very important to perhaps more important retrospectively than at the time. Virginia, the wolf, that is. There's also the post-impressionist expression, which is crucially important in terms of shifting

English, British artistic culture where all these Gorgans and Cisans and manis and Picasso's start flooding in and are greeted with howls of execration by the British critics. They say, you know, it's the output of a lunatic asylum, it's a case of pathology, a child of seven or eight could do it, all the classic, you know, Philistine reactions to modern art are there. And then...

And don't forget the Ballet Rousse. And the Ballet Rousse, which is exactly the same... hit London by storm and really can't be underestimated. But the other thing of 1910 is this absurd little event of the Dreadnought hoax, which is always trotted out when people want to say Bloomsbury was bohemian. I think it was at that moment, which is when the young Bloomsbury's get dressed up in full hired costume as the Emperor of Abyssinia and his troop and send a telegram ahead to one of Britain's great new warships of Dreadnought. and are given a red carpet full honours acclaim

and pretend to be Abyssinians. This included Virginia who was blacked up and had a turban and a moustache and went round the ship saying bunga bunga. Talk, pretend Abyssinia. That's right. And they played the... Cod Latin. Sort of chok-a-choy and things like that.

And then they played the Zanzibar National Anthem because nobody could remember what the Abyssinian... I mean, it depends to a breathtaking degree on ignorance of all things African. And then Horace Cole, it was the ringleader, leaked it to the press, and there were questions asked in Parliament. and so, and it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, empire, at, it's a moment, I think, a silly moment, too. Do you think the bohemianism, ran further through the century, Virginia? Oh, yes, absolutely. I think, you know, you can

carry it probably up to the present day. I mean, I'm the wrong generation now, I'm far too middle-aged to know whether bohemianism is going on, but I fervently hope so. I think it's a romantic impulse. I think it's underlying very many movements towards wanting to be more artistic, more creative. There is an innate problem with bohemianism, which is that it depends on some bourgeois to a paté, and we have inherited so much of what those early bohemians did, that we almost take it for granted. We've almost become bohemian today ourselves. I mean, here we all are, some of us without collars and ties, calling each other by our first name, some of us have never met before. I mean, drinking, isn't it?

It's pretty shocking. We take so much of this for granted. We eat French food, we drink red wine, van derives. These are things that are in direct line. It doesn't make us bohemians. It doesn't make us bohemians, but I'm talking about the debt we owe to that generation. Where can we go in order to shock? We have to, we've entered an era where to shock has become the new standard.

Well, didn't people at time of Bloomsbury find Elliot a bit shocking because he wore a suit and worked in a bank? Well, yes, you had to come in France. But Antonio Kroger, Thomas Mann writes very well about that when Elizabeth says, why'd you dress like a bank clerk? He said, well, I've got enough problems going on without, so I dress like to make it easy and almost a disguise. There is a case of somebody saying, I dress like that in a lot. order not to be mistaken for an artist. But it's so interesting about dressing because, you know, I don't think of Virginia and Leonard Wolfe as bohemians at all.

They had very regular hours. They worked incredibly hard. And they had a, you know, they had a marriage which was actually very stable. And Virginia says things about the younger generation, you know, the car cocks lot. I could never wear trousers. The idea of wearing trousers or, you know, having crop heads or sharing my partners in this way is alien to them.

I would rule Virginia Woolf out. I think, well, Virginia Nefferson is right when she says that in one sense we've all become bohemians because it's much easier to have a lifestyle if you're being taken care of by society and people now don't say they live in London, based in London. Thank you all very much.

We're all bohemians. Now, if you'd like to add your contribution on the subject of bohemianism, there's a new comment board on our In Our Time website. Next, the next group of discussing the East-West schism, Orthodox and Catholic churches split in the Middle Ages.

Thank you to Hermione Lee, Virginia Nicholson, Graham, Rob, and thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.ukuk forward slash radio 4.