Among the Bohemians Read Online Free PDF Page B

sentence: ‘I never starved but I was always hungry.’
    In the following decades, Arthur Ransome’s Bohemia was unconsciously replicated by a generation of hard-up artists in the basements and studios of Chelsea, Fitzrovia, Camden Town and Bloomsbury.Their priorities, like his, were not financial:
    The men who really care for their art, who wish above all things to do the best that is in them, do not take the way of the world and the regular salaries of the newspaper offices.They stay outside, reading, writing, painting for themselves, and snatching such golden crumbs as fall within their reach from the tables of publishers, editors and picture-buyers.They make a living as it were by accident.It is a hard life and a risky…
    Literature was Ransome’s passion.Rather than lose the chance of buying two leather-bound volumes of The Anatomy of Melancholy for seven-and-sixpence, he preferred to go without dinner and walk home to Chelsea.
    One can’t help sympathising with this kind of spontaneous improvidence, uncalculating and naive as it is, just as it’s hard to resist, against one’s better judgement, applauding Augustus John for crazily investing £ 300 in the construction of primitive aeroplanes by a French crank called Bazin.There is no evidence that anything became airborne as a result.John’s friend and rival Jacob Epstein – who never learnt how to sign a cheque – used to arrive at his mistress Kathleen Garman’s house once a week laden with apricots in brandy, exotic flowers and fruit.‘I wish he could have given us something for the housekeeping,’ recalled Kathleen’s daughter sadly.The actress Brenda Dean Paul and her mother never failed to deck their studio with gardenias and tuberoses, even when all they could afford to eat was a boiled egg.Such grand gestures would furnish further proof to the bourgeoisie of artistic foolhardiness.
    *
    ‘Not taking the way of the world’ often meant serious hardship; clearly Bohemia’s poor had to find other sources of income than painting, poetry and prose.All too often, they were dealing in unsaleable commodities.Luckily, their powers of invention were not wasted in coming up with ideas for keeping themselves afloat.A well-disposed dentist appears to have accepted paintings in return for dentures in St Ives.Nina Hamnett kept herself in drinks outside pub hours by painting murals on the walls of the Jubilee Club. * Lilian Bomberg started a greengrocer’s shop which foundered through lack of custom: the strait-laced locals were deterred by the sight of Bomberg’s Bohemian garb as he perched on a ladder painting the sign to hang above it.And the poet Liam O’Flaherty took up catering:
    [We’re] setting up ‘tea-rooms’ in this house, giving teas to tourists.Crowds of people come up to see the mountains in summer, so they will probably make the thing pay.Margaret will cook, Adelaide will serve, and I will be on the premises armed with a monstrous axe to club the bourgeoisie if they become impertinent or fail to pay their bills.I hope we make some money in the business because it seems there is very little hope of making money any other way.
    And in a lucid moment between drugs, apache lovers and absinthe, Epstein’s luscious model Betty May decided to start a sweetshop in the country, making all the confectionery herself.Rather to her surprise it was a success, but she was forced to give it up by her current husband and his disapprovingfamily who thought ‘Miss Betty’ should not be engaging in retail trade.Mortified, she was on the next train back to the Café Royal.There was always a familiar face there who would stand her a drink.
    The Café Royal was a good place for a spot of wheeler-dealing too.When times were hard Betty or her fellow Bohemians might make the price of a glass of absinthe by supplying gossip or copy for an exhibition critique to the Fleet Street hacks who flocked around its tacky but opulent interior hoping for morsels from the art