BOHEMIA

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The Kingdom of Bohemia ceased to exist in 1918, when it was absorbed into the new Republic of Czechoslovakia. The people of the various lands which now constitute the Czech Republic were all referred to by the English as Bohemians, and the Czech language as Bohemian, until the term ‘Czech’ became more prevalent in the twentieth century. However, the defunct kingdom is immortalized, for purely accidental reasons, in the current usage of the word ‘bohemian’ to denote the lifestyle of impoverished artists: unconstrained by convention, sexually free, voluntarily poor; a life devoted to art and love. The word is now used almost exclusively in this sense.

The accident was merely that the Romani people of France were thought to have entered Europe through Bohemia. Bohème was the name the French gave to the Roma, just as the English by a similar misconception called them Gypsies, believing their origins lay in Egypt. The word carries the full range of connotations generated by outsider perceptions and misperceptions of the Roma people; wandering and adventure; poverty and laziness; dirtiness and immorality; exoticism and possession of arcane mysteries.

Charles Baudelaire’s poem ‘Bohèmes en Voyage’ in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) is a case in point. To Baudelaire the Roma represent everything foreign and exotic. They remind him of his voyage to India; they remind him, perhaps, of himself, self-exiled from the bourgeoisie and thus from family. To him they are ‘the prophetical tribe, that ardent-eyed people’ (trans. William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954). Their women breast-feed openly, and their men watch over them with ‘gleaming weapons’ and ‘eyes rendered heavy / By mournful regret for vanished illusions’. They represent fertility and ferocity, and are watched over by the Anatolian-Phrygian mother goddess Cybele, who ‘Makes the desert blossom, water spurt from the rock / Before these travelers for whom is opened wide / The familiar domain of the future’s darkness.’

The Bohemians had arrived in France from the fifteenth century onwards; now their misnomer would be appropriated by a new tribe, and Bohemia would become, not a country or a people, but a state of mind.

In post-revolutionary, early nineteenth century France, artists and poets started moving into cheap working class areas in Paris, often areas where the Roma had settled, and before long the term ‘Bohème’ had transferred itself to those who adopted a version of the gypsy life style and aspects of their dress. Indeed Romani culture reportedly regards cultural attitude, Romani spirit (called romanipen or romaimos) as more important than ethnicity in determining membership of the tribe. An ethnic Rom, for example, who does not exhibit romanipen is considered gadjo or non-Romani; and likewise a gadjo who shows romanipen may be considered Romani. From mid-century the word ‘bohemian’ also enters English to describe the unorthodox lifestyles of artists, poets, musicians and actors in cities across Europe.

These bohemians were apostates of the bourgeoisie who renounced security, orthodoxy, and social convention. The bohemian abjures the narrowness of the bourgeois vision, its kitsch denial (and refusal ever to speak of) the uncontrollable and disturbing aspects of life; bohemianism is an attempt to embrace life in all its fullness, including, of course, sexuality and death. It mirrors the Romantic aesthetic, founded not on beauty but the sublime – an aesthetic experience which transcends beauty and ugliness, and life and death, and which overwhelms the observer, inducing a primitive awe and reducing his personal existence to insignificance. Since experiences of the sublime are (by definition) rare, the bohemian tends compulsively to seek self-immolation in sexual passion and alcohol or drugs – opium and hashish in nineteenth century Paris, and of course absinthe – to render the mundane sublime.

The bohemian artist is detached from his middle or upper-class roots and finds a greater sense of belonging among the poor. Of course a devotion to art is, de facto, a renunciation of money, though shadowed by dreams of recognition and wealth. Artists who become wealthy can only do so as a by-product or side-effect of their art; no one goes into art to make money; anyone who does is gadjo, no part of this tribe. The bohemian accepts poverty because he aspires to something richer than wealth. The mystery he sets against bourgeois banality, the arcane enlightenment that sustains the literary gypsy, is more than status or wealth; it is art. The goddess that breaks the rock for him and makes the desert bloom is not Cybele, but his model or Muse.

As for love, the poets and painters of Montmartre, the Latin Quarter and other bohemian haunts found their anima in the idealized figure of the grisette – the poor working class girl who cheerfully combines prostitution with her work as a seamstress, a flower seller, or a milliner’s assistant. The title role in Giacomo Puchini’s opera La Bohème (1896), beloved of the bourgeoisie across Europe and indeed the world, is is a composite of Francine and Mimì from Henri Murger’s loosely structured novel, Scenes de la Vie de Bohème (1851), in turn based on the character sketches he wrote while living in Paris. The composite character Mimì is a seamstress, but all the other main characters are artistic bohemians: Rudolfo is a poet, Marcello a painter, Musetta a singer, Schaunard a musician, Colline a philosopher, and so on. The cast is made up with students, working girls, townsfolk, shopkeepers, street-vendors, soldiers, waiters, children… and this is the bohemian milieu.

Forty years later Tennessee Williams beautifully evokes a similar urban milieu in his play A Streetcar Named Desire, set in New Orleans. In Williams’ cast there is no poet – that role is subsumed into the lyricism of the author’s stage directions, and the madness of his alter ego, Blanche Dubois. But Elysian Fields thrums with jazz musicians, sailors, working men, street-vendors and prostitutes. For the bohemian poet or the New Realist playwright, these people are real in ways that those trapped in the illusions of the secure, respectable life are not.

The life-style is not sustainable, of course, and there are only two ways out of Bohemia: fame or death; apotheosis or self-destruction. And there are so many ways to take the latter road: drink, drugs, disease, starvation, madness. Although unknown at the time of his death, the young poet Thomas Chatterton, who killed himself in 1779 at the age of seventeen, became a Romantic icon when the Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis immortalized him in his painting of 1856, which inspired a rash of copycat suicides by other would-be Parisian artists jealous of his posthumous fame.

Others were less rash. After the success of his novel, Henri Murger moved out of the city and spent the next ten years re-cycling stories of people he’d known in the far-off country of Bohemia.

The bohemian meme spread across Europe and the English-speaking world, surfacing in the Shelley menage on Lake Geneva, and the pre-Raphaelite group in London, which created a powerful visual style that later made millions for the owner of the Biba chain of clothing stores and myriad other Carnaby Street entrepreneurs. Via Andy Warhol, Lou Reed and Nico, Leary and Huxley, the Grateful Dead and the Doors, eventually it found its way into my naive provincial skull, whence I would never be able to extricate it, or even want to.

I grew up in the cathedral city of Winchester in southern England, the ancient capital of Wessex and now a pleasant dormitory town an hour from London. My father was an advertising man who worked for the oldest agency in the country, traveling up to Berkeley Square every day; an educated man of taste – the ad man who never sold himself, and still managed to make a long and cumulatively successful career in the business.

As a teenager, I gravitated not towards London but towards Bohemia. I found some of the poets, musicians and painters who nested in this provincial town, such as the great Duncan Tweedale, a Northerner who lived on benefits and practically without furniture, but owned an ancient hand-operated printing press on which he laboriously cranked out editions of the underground magazine Black Eggs. I remember the faces, paintings and poems – and I remember the magical midsummer’s night we all spent on top of St Catherine’s Hill outside of the town, the site of Stone Age ritual labyrinths, crowned by a stand of tall hornbeam trees. We lit a fire and jammed and smoked and entwined until dawn, when I literally rolled down the hill and found my way home.

Captured by the rip-tide of bohemianism, but still under the control of my (very lovely) parents, I somehow found myself studying at Oxford University, where after a few miserable and misplaced months I found a band to play drums in, started by two friends who had recently graduated and were now squatting a beautiful, dilapidated house in Iffley Village, a mile or two along the river — it was the old Mill House, which had previously been owned by a Professor of Botany at the University. The extensive gardens, overgrown but full of rare plants and trees, sloped down to the sluice gate, where we would hurl our bodies against the rush of water at night, and always be beaten back. There was a tall tulip tree, with its magnolia-like flowers; clearing a nettle bed we found rare snake’s-head orchids. Since the professor’s death the house had stood empty; another rock band occupied the upstairs, and the ground floor was John and Allan’s. We spent hours and days working on our music, playing Grateful Dead and Beatles, Stones and Steely Dan until our live sound was tight as a studio recording. We gigged at colleges in town sometimes, but as time went on we took to just throwing parties. That way we could leave our gear permanently set up in the enormous front room with its double sets of French windows opening on to the overgrown lawns. People came, bringing drugs and wine; they spilled out into the gardens, and later the river. This was where I experienced my first LSD trips, wandering off across the river and into the dark countryside for hours. There were many that year – far, far too many – but I managed to pull out of my psychedelic trance in time to study for a week or two and pass my first year exams.

You could call us hippies – which was merely a new name for bohemians, though I now understand that there were powerful influences manipulating things. I dropped into college occasionally for tutorials, but apart from that I spent most of my time at the Mill House. The locals hated us, of course, and sometimes threw bricks through our windows. Staying in the house with a girlfriend one cold New Year, we found that the tulip tree had been cut down by the local council, and workers had sawed the trunk and branches into neat logs, some of which we lugged inside and burned in the fireplace, all night, tripped out of our minds and transported by the sweet smoke of the rare, perfumed wood.

Our bohemian bliss survived until the end of my second year, when the two guitarists moved to London to try their luck. I moved back into college and my studies. This was ’78. By 1980 it was as if I was waking from a dream, or some great experiment I’d been part of that was finally being shut down. Nothing by now but a doe-eyed, disoriented lotos-eater, I had no idea how to deal with the world or the future. I didn’t know what direction to take, and after I graduated I found myself marrying my girlfriend, moving to London, and taking temporary labouring jobs while I wrote poems and struggled to resist increasing pressure to decide what to do with my life. Of course I’d known, for a long time, what to do with it. But somehow, now, I forgot.

The music and the fashions seemed to have changed overnight. Reagan and Thatcher came to power. There were new cults – of the body, of money, of ‘lifestyle’. The bohemian meme was not dead in me but slept like a recessive gene. I got to grips with London, searching for a viable career, and soon, starting a family.

Murger’s health never recovered from his years of deprivation, and nor could any of his subsequent work match the success of Scènes de la vie de bohème. He died, penniless, in a Paris hospital in 1861.

That same year, a new mutation of the meme surfaced thousands of miles away across the Atlantic, when the San Franciscan journalist Bret Harte created his ‘The Bohemian’ persona for his column in The Golden Era newspaper. The name ‘bohemian’ had been appropriated by journalists of the new commercial style; young, cultured newspaper columnists in the big cities called themselves bohemians, and when the Civil War started they spread out across the country to cover the conflict, their roving lifestyles and dependence on the pen giving them some imaginary congruence with the archetype. A number of them of them built humorous, self-admiring print personas for themselves; the life of the journalist became the tangential subject of the journalism, just as in a later re-incarnation of this style, the ‘gonzo journalism’ of Hunter S Thompson.

Living by their wits and their pens, these journalists glamorised their roving, unattached lifestyles, and no doubt part of the attraction was the subtext of roving, unattached sexual possibility which is synonymous with dreams of travel. Harte’s column was wildly  popular, and — like Murger — he republished them in book form after the war, as The Bohemian Papers. (This time nobody made an opera.)

On the East Coast, Junius Henry Browne entertained the public in The New York Tribune and Harper’s magazine with pen-portraits of ‘bohemian’ journalists (such as himself) and accounts of some of their adventures on the road. It’s a watered down version of the bohemian ideal; I suppose the American fascination with the sheer size of their acquired continent and the adventures to be had on it explains the phenomenon; the experiences of these adventurers seemed essentially romantic to the new American bourgeoisie.

In 1872, when a group of journalists and aficionados of the arts in San Francisco established a club for cultural pursuits, looking to introduce some of the ‘sophistication’ of the East coast to the West, they called it, inevitably, The Bohemian Club. Many of the Club’s members were prosperous, respectable businessmen – and now the ‘Bohemian’ tag expanded to include wealthy, sociable bon-vivants. The Club quickly acquired some extraordinarily prime real estate in the form of 2,700 acres of ancient redwood forest in Sonoma County, where from 1879 it held an annual retreat in the woods, called The Bohemian Grove –- and it was at the Grove that a dark form of high (aristocratic) bohemianism re-emerged. More Thelème than Bohème, it would have shocked even Baudelaire, and made de Sade weep with envy.

 

3 thoughts on “BOHEMIA

  1. Hahaha I knew you were a hippy! Very interesting article. I didn’t know much about Bohemian culture, now I can get the general idea. Keep up with your entries
    – Jeon

  2. Just waiting for my glue to dry and enriching myself , with pleasure , reading another gem you have written .
    It makes me remember people I have known , other times .
    I got a job plastering painting labour , in a synagogue being converted into the Hungarian cultural center . Lunch for me was Fly Me To The Moon baklava and strong coffee , and I spent lunch hour carving a mandolin . There were two Roma metalworkers who told me ” You , work with us ” . apparently they liked me , said stick with them , there is going to be trouble here , the boss is a crook . They were right .
    One hot Friday , I decided to just walk the miles home . Dry from plaster dust , tired and hungry , I chanced across a Spanish stuccoed place , with wrought iron and an iron studded Spanish door . I entered , it was dark and cool inside . I took a seat . Two men were sitting far from me speaking Spanish . Ten minutes passed . Fifteen . I was going to leave . One of them then got up and came over to me . Good . I will eat . A menu ? What will you have ?
    But he said to me ” Young man . Do you play the guitar ? ”
    A little . He said wait , and went to the corner and got a guitar from the chair it was sitting on , came back and gave it to me . `Play , he gestured . . I played a South American song while he stood listening . Good . Otro . Play again . I played something from Sabicas .
    ” Bien . Young man . You play good ” . He took the guitar from me , went and placed it back in the chair , returned and asked , would I like something to eat . We have omellette or fried squid . I had both , and when I got up to leave , and asked for the bill , the answer was ” De la casa ” . On the house . This was a special place I thought , I will come back , so I insisted to pay .
    That was Juan ,born and raised on the same block where Torres made his famous guitars , who became my good friend , and many nights were spent there until the morning stars .
    I met many Roma there , and discovered a people who are not as they are thought to be .
    To reiterate what I started with , thank you .

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