Among the Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson Read Free Book Online Page A

well into the evening, by which time both women were back to their usual penniless state.
    In her autobiography Nina rather wistfully reflected that her reckless attitude to money came about from her middle-class upbringing – ‘being brought up as a lady and taught never to mention money’.Unfortunately, such artlessness had dire consequences.Poverty is bad enough, borrowing could suffice as a means of struggling by, but serious grown-up debt was no laughing matter.
    For one proud spirit debt was a way of life.When he was at Oxford the young writer Arthur Calder-Marshall became friends with an eccentric spinster known to him and his fellow undergraduates as ‘Auntie Helen’; they attended her tea parties and sat at her feet while she expounded to them on poetry and philosophy.In due course it dawned on Calder-Marshall that Auntie Helen was practically starving.He gently offered to give her some money.The old lady was indignant; she had learnt over a lifetime how to survive on nothing, and she was not going to start compromising now:
    ‘… I don’t want your money and I’ll tell you why.As an Artist who will have to fight the Philistines all your life, the sooner you learn this the better.Remember: PROVIDED YOU ORDER THE BEST, THERE’S NO NEED TO PAY FOR IT .’
    ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
    ‘Shopkeepers,’ she said, ‘are parasites on society.The important thing to know is that they are snobs.Never be mean.If you want a small bottle of eau-de-cologne, you can’t put it on the bill.Buy a pint of Chanel.Don’t drink beer.Order champagne; by the dozen at least.We Artists are the aristocrats of the world.But we must behave like aristocrats.’
    Auntie Helen’s extravagant philosophy didn’t survive the Wall Street Crash.Those who, like her, lived on credit, were the first casualties.Calder-Marshall got an urgent message one morning to call at her house with the biggest suitcase he could carry.He managed to get there before the bailiffs, and carried away with him her best books, her precious candlesticks and her incense burner before the Philistines could get their hands on her ‘lovely things’.Auntie Helen fled with what she stood up in.
    *
    And yet, despite a general ineptitude with money, some Bohemians renounced Chanel and champagne, while still managing to survive on very little indeed, and sometimes on almost nothing.Economies could be made, changes to one’s way of life; one could retreat to less expensive locations, or even emigrate.Living experimentally was all too often a by-product of being forced to live economically.
    When Mary Garman (sister to Kathleen, Epstein’s mistress) married the poet Roy Campbell, she was making ends meet by driving a bread-delivery van.Roy’s father cut off his allowance for marrying without his consent, and the couple were living in rags.In the early days of their marriage they survived as artists’ models and for a while Roy was able to make a living as an acrobat for two pounds a day.But being shot backwards out of a gun and chewing glass in front of an audience couldn’t last, and Roy and Mary were sick of city life.They moved to deepest Wales where Roy set out to demonstrate that you could live on poetry and nothing else.This was in 1921.The stable they rented cost £ 1 16s a year.Five pounds a month paid for everything else, though books accounted for half of this budget.That left about 12s 6d a week for all their bodily needs – in other words, next to nothing.They had no earnings at all.The very small sums they now required for the rent were provided by an anonymous well-wisher; this proved to be Roy’s father, who had relented and reinstated Roy’s allowance at a minimallevel.The couple settled down in their mud-floored stable to read Dante, Rabelais, Milton and the Elizabethans – ‘living on the continual intoxication of poetry for two years’.Roy, who had tremendous caveman instincts, went trapping for rabbits and game for the pot, and they