QUEENS OF BOHEMIA AND OTHER MISS-FITS

By Darren Coffield

The History Press. 352 pages. £25. ISBN 978-1-80399-574-8

Reviewed by Jim Burns

Bohemia? Does it still exist? And, if so, where is it and who are its current inhabitants? And if it doesn’t exist anymore, except as an idea, a memory, a dream, then why is it no longer somewhere we can identify and locate in specific areas where at one time it seemed to flourish. Some would argue that Soho, Greenwich Village, and Montparnasse are shadows of their former selves. You might find an advertising executive, a tired businessman, two or three tourists, or someone from the media propping up a bar, but not many poets and painters. They’ve been driven out by high rents and commercial ventures that go against the grain of bohemian living.  It costs a lot to be poor these days. There’s also the problem that Marianne Faithfull refers to in her nostalgic introduction to Queens of Bohemia when she reflects on her experiences in bohemia : “Art was more intense, purer.....And there was a genuine intellectual bohemia instead of the hipster-lite culture we have today”.

One thing is for sure, though. If bohemia does still have a definable existence it’s to be hoped that it’s a better place for women when compared to the past playgrounds of the artistically-inclined. I’ve read quite a few accounts of life in the areas referred to in the previous paragraph, and they might well be summed up by the title of one of them, Floyd Dell’s  Love in Greenwich Village.  There we have it, a man writing about his time in one of the famous haunts of bohemians. I’m not suggesting that some women didn’t also produce memoirs  about their days in bohemia, but they weren’t as prevalent as those by men, and on the whole they were less likely to be too open about their indiscretions. Someone is sure to refer me to Anais Nin, who didn’t seem to mind who knew what she did, but she was an exception to the rule that women stayed in the background in these matters. A man who had a reputation for seducing a large number of women was seen as “a bit of a lad”, whereas a woman who liked to sleep around was sure to be given a label as a slut or, more politely, a nymphomaniac I suspect It’s still that way, even in our supposed liberated times.

What is noticeable in most acounts is the way in which many women were treated in bohemia. Darren Coffield’s entertaining, if sometimes disturbing, book covers a period, roughly 1920 to 1960, and mostly focuses on a relatively small number of people, wiih a selection of others coming and going, And all of them functioning in a relatively small area of London, namely Soho and Fitzrovia. It can be narrowed down even further to a limited number of pubs, clubs, restaurants, and private houses. There are moments when the action shifts to Chelsea or “Little Venice” in Paddington, but on the whole Soho/Fitrovia is where people came together. The title of an exhibition at the Parkin Gallery in 1973 was “Fitzrovia and the Road to the York Minster”, with Ruthven Todd (he’s mentioned more than once by Coffield) acting as guide to the route to be followed to get from the Fitzroy Tavern in Charlotte Street, across Oxford Street, and down to the York Minster, or the French as it was better known, in  Dean Street. There were other pubs on the way.

The French is usually associated with its landlord, Gaston, the son of Victorienne and Victor Berlemont who were Belgians despite the York Minster being known as The French. It was a popular meeting place for French servicemen in London during the Second World War. One of the regulars at The French was the artist Nina Hamnett, though she had also frequented the Fitzroy Tavern. Coffield doesn’t mention it but in a 1931 novel, Ragged Banners, by Ethel Mannin there is a scene in a pub clearly based on the Fitzroy in which there is a reference to a woman “with glazed eyes, and her tawdry clothes, a ruin of a woman”. It was obviously a portrait of Hamnett, and it has to be said that little in Queens of Bohemia helps to dispel this notion of her as a dirty and dishevelled drunk forever cadging drinks off anyone she thought likely to pay for them.

I’m not blaming Coffield for the largely negative view of Hamnett that is in evidence in his book, and he does indicate that she once had a reputation as a talented painter. But most of the reminiscences of her do tend to stress how far she had fallen from her glory days in  Paris when she had known Modigliani, Braque, and Picasso. Her autobiography, Laughing Torso, originally published in 1932 is worth reading. A second volume, Is She a Lady?, which came out in 1955, isn’t quite as good, but it does have some drawings from 1954 which show that she could still apply herself to her work when she chose to. She died in 1956 when she fell forty feet from an upstairs window. It occurs to me to suggest that more rounded portraits of her can be found in Denise Hooker’s Nina Hamnett: Queen of Bohemia (1986) and Alicia Foster’s Nina Hamnett (2021).

Hamnett had been a student at the Slade School of Art, and a later generation of women artists included Elinor Bellingham-Smith and Nicolette Devas. the sister of Caitlin Thomas, who became famous for being the wife of the poet, Dylan Thomas, and like him had a penchant for alcohol which caused both of them to argue, often violently, in public. As for Bellingham-Smith, she came from a comfortable background and had trained as a ballet dancer until an injury put paid to her ambitions in that direction. While at the Slade she met Rodrigo Moynihan. They married and had a son, John, who later wrote a book, Restless Lives: the Bohemian World of Rodrigo and Elinor Moynihan (2002) which documents the ups and downs of their relationship as they established reputations in the art world. Rodrigo became a successful portrait painter (of Princess Elizabeth and the then Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, among others), though he also experimented with “objective abstraction”, while she concentrated mostly on landscapes.

Both appeared to have had various affairs, with Rodrigo eventually leaving to live with the artist, Anne Dunn, who previously had an affair with Lucien Freud and became pregnant by him. Coffield refers to “sleeping with Elinor Bellingham-Smith” becoming, “ a rite of passage for many young male artists, such as Michael Andrews”. And to John walking in “on his mother shagging his school friend”. I have to admit that throughout Queens of Bohemia the non-stop bed-hopping often left me confused about who was sleeping with who, especially when I read that Elinor also somehow bedded the resolutely homosexual John Minton and shortly after “stole” his boy-friend.

I don’t think Coffield is condoning these activities, just recording them, and he does say that “growing up in a bohemian household badly affected Elinor’s son, John”. Elsewhere in his book he mentions the children of other bohemians, such as the sons of George Barker and Elizabeth Smart who, in their mother’s absences, were often looked after by the “two Roberts”, the Scottish painters, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde. Talking about the Garman sisters, (Mary married the poet Roy Campbell, Kathleen had an affair with the sculptor Jacob Epstein, and Lorna was the wife of Ernest Wishart, “the publishing wing of the British Communist Party”), he says: “Kathleen and her sisters may have pioneered a progressive lifestyle, but their children paid the price. Like her sisters Kathleen and Lorna, Mary opted out of taking any responsibility for her children too.....They were feral. Nits could be seen crawling in their hair, they often went hungry and their clothes were torn; they were seriously neglected”.  

Although Queens of Bohemia focuses on the women it’s inevitable that it also contains a fair amount of information about the men, most of who seem to have behaved badly. Augustus John helped set the style for the “roaring boy” image of a bohemian and attempted to have sex with any female he encountered. According to Coffield he was like his friend Eric Gill and saw his own daughters as suitable objects for his attentions. The list can be extended. Lucian Freud had a reputation for taking up with any number of women, and ditching them when someone else came along. When Anne Dunn married Michael Wishart, Coffield says, “Lucian didn’t attend the wedding “because he felt a bit awkward, having slept with the bride, the groom, and the groom’s mother”. Coffield adds, “Despite claiming he was besotted with the beautiful Caroline Blackwood, Lucien still found time for liaisons with Caryl Chance, Henrietta Moraes, and the feminist icon, Simone de Beauvoir, whom he’d met at the Gargoyle”. The latter establishment, located in Dean Street at its corner with Meard  Street, was one of the drinking clubs favoured by the bohemians.

People pop in and out of Coffield’s story. The old Etonian Robin Cook, who wrote The Crust on its Uppers, and, as Derek Raymond, popular crime novels. had a girlfriend named Veronica Hull. She produced a novel called The Monkey Puzzle, “which lifted the lid on the philosopher Freddie Ayer’s sexual activities with his female students....and the ensuing scandal caused Veronica Hull’s mental breakdown”. The noted critic William Empson and his wife, Etta, make an appearance, with Empson seemingly encouraging her affairs with other men: “In his poem, ‘The Wife is Praised’, he seems to claim many men desire to share their wives with other men and, from here on, Hetta took male lovers who inevitably became part of the household”. According to Simon Duval Smith (Hetta’s son by Peter Duval Smith), “William’s unorthodox views of relationships and sexuality shaped his literary criticism”.  Empson himself kept active, in more ways than one, and students referred to his major work, Seven Types of Ambiguity as more likely, Seven Types of Infidelity.

Because there is so much about the sexual escapades and general misbehaviour of the bohemians in this book it’s sometimes easy to overlook the nuggets of information about  forgotten books and  overlooked writers and artists in its packed pages. Jill Neville’s name crops up and  it reminded me that I met  her at a literary event in, I think, the 1970s. Does anyone now read her novels? Paul Potts is mentioned more than once, though often in a similar way to Nina Hamnett. People remember their bad habits and, unkempt appearances, and forget their past achievements. And to be honest when I saw him in The French one night he was much like he’s described in Queens of Bohemia. But I still think Dante Called You Beatrice, and a few of his poems, deserve remembering. Bobby Hunt, a one-time student of the ill=fated artist John Minton, was very much a fixture on the bohemian scene in the 1950s and was still frequenting the French in the 1970s when I had a conversation with him about Charlie Parker and the tune, “A Night in Tunisia”.

The painter Matthew Smith, whose “uniquely turbulent style and subject-matter of still lives, landscapes, and unhibited nudes” I’ve alway found of interest, has his place here. Coffield suggets he was less than fair in his dealings with Mary Keene, his model and mistress, though Malcolm Yorke, in his 1997 biography of Smith, refers to him bequeathing a large collection of paintings and other materials to her when he died in 1959. There are so many others I’d liked to have looked at. Joan Rodker, who helped organise the Sheffield Peace Congress in 1950 when the Labour Government banned quite a few of the delegates from entering the country. David Archer, the well-to-do bookseller who spent all his money supporting poets, and ended his life poverty-stricken in a doss house.

Not everyone who spent time in bohemia stayed there. Coffield notes that the actor Norman Bowler, the second husband of Henrietta Moraes, “knew that he had to leave bohemia to survive”. He did and was soon a “household name on Brtitish television”. He later said, “Soho in the Fifties became a myth....Forgotten are the suicides, the attempted suicides, the spitefulness, the bitterness and the loneliness. But it produced a talented period in England like no other”.  

Queens of Bohemia is a fascinating book if, like me. you find the chronicles of bohemia of interest. The booze and the breakups weren’t the whole story, and good work was done,  even if it was only a part of what was being turned out around the country generally. Coffield’s concern is mostly with London, but in painting, for example, artists in St Ives were rightly attracting national and international attention. Bohemia was alive there, too, and was satirised by the artist Sven Berlin in his novel, The Dark Monarch. Focusing on the sex lives and the misbehaviour of artists and writers isn’t the whole story, and It would be possible to construct a book about bohemia around the little magazines, small presses, bookshops, poems, and novels linked to it in one way or another. But it might not attract the kind of attention that the scandalous usually does.

It’s worth adding a note about Coffield’s  approach to the structure of his book. He builds up his narrative with excerpts from interviews, memoirs, and other sources, and only inserts his own voice to provide a linking commentary or offer some additional information. It’s a form he used succesfully in a previous publication, Tales From the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia (2020), and it works just as well in Queens of Bohemia.There are notes, illustrations, short biographies, and a useful bibliography.