Among the Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson Read Free Book Online

better-off.It was the compassionate Viva King who set up an appeal to rescue her old friend Nina Hamnett from utter destitution.
    Nina Hamnett had spent a lifetime only just keeping her head abovewater – or perhaps, in her case, whisky.A splendidly buoyant and sociable character, she appears in innumerable memoirs of the period; she was the Ur-Bohemian, uncrowned ‘Queen of Bohemia’, first lady of Fitzrovia.In 1911 she rebelled against her middle-class background, and scraping by on the fifty pounds advance on a legacy from her uncle, plus two shillings and sixpence a week donated by some kindly aunts, she launched into the London art world with a vengeance.Her exuberance and spontaneity won her a wide circle of friends at the Café Royal, including Augustus John, Walter Sickert, Roger Fry and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and she soon conquered Paris, where she became an habituée of the left bank cafés, a friend of Modigliani, Picasso and Cocteau.She was an admired painter, but her real gift was for living life to the full.By the thirties Nina, a fixture in the Fitzroy Tavern, was virtually a tourist attraction in her own right.Yet she was always penniless.There are endless stories of her getting stranded in Paris unable to pay for her hotel, sitting in bars waiting for acquaintances to turn up to pay her mounting drink bill – though often she would have preferred a square meal.Ruthven Todd helped out when she couldn’t afford clothes by printing a circular for her which read WHAT DO YOU DO WITH YOUR OLD CLOTHES ?Do you give them to the SALVATION ARMY or the poor?If so, DO NOT REMEMBER NINA. But as her youthful resilience waned, the issue of her poverty began to get more serious.
    Her talent had degenerated but she never lost her good spirits
    wrote Viva King.
    The smallest happening in her life was enlarged to happy proportions.About 1937 I heard she was living in extreme poverty and a friend and I started a fund to help her…
    They sent a circular to all Nina’s friends suggesting that everyone should contribute half a crown a week to keep her going.The fund got off to a good start, but after a while the goodwill started to wear thin as it became clear that there was no other remedy for Nina’s poverty.Eventually only Viva herself and one or two others were still loyally keeping the bailiffs at bay.Viva acknowledged that Nina, despite her dissolute ways, was capable of giving great joy, and saw no reason why she should be abandoned by the old friends who had had such good times in her company over the years.
    For Nina, despite having to live in bug-infested rooms with at times onlyboiled bones and porridge to keep her from starvation, was munificent when she had money.As a true Murger-style Bohemian, Nina would blow any money that came her way on ‘ruinous fancies’.Her name had become well known in the newspapers after she had been sued for libel by the notorious diabolist Aleister Crowley in 1934. * One day after this when Nina was sitting in the Fitzroy Tavern, Ruthven Todd walked in with a copy of a popular paper, and pointed out to her a photograph captioned ‘Miss Nina Hamnett, artist and author… takes a walk in the Park with a gentleman friend’.The caption was inaccurate, for the lady with the unnamed male friend was in fact Betty May.Nina jumped up, borrowed the newspaper and half a crown for a taxi, and dashed to Fleet Street where she demanded settlement for libel; to avoid trouble the paper promptly gave her twenty-five pounds.Before long she was back at the Fitzroy Tavern where she opened a tab for all comers.When Betty May walked in Nina instantly plied her with whisky; the astonished Betty wondered where all the largesse was coming from, and as soon as she found out she too was on her way to Fleet Street threatening writs.The paper obliged, forced to admit that their photograph of her was wrongly captioned, and she was soon back at the party with another twenty-five pounds.The celebrations went on