Read Among the Bohemians for Free Online

world.If this failed they could always borrow from a friend.
    *
    Bohemia’s position on borrowing money was startlingly distinct from that of conventional society, and it still is.Most people in the early twentieth century subsisted on cash; bank accounts were only for the better-off.Lady Troubridge, author of The Book of Etiquette (1931), categorised ‘borrowing[ing] even the smallest sum of money’ alongside unpunctuality, putting one’s feet on the chairs or sneezing in public.This was, indisputably, ‘Conduct which is incorrect.’ To offend against Polonius’s famous injunction ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ had been regarded for centuries as taking the slippery slope to perdition.The easy-come easy-go, sometime-never attitude to borrowing which existed in Bohemia was worlds away from the condemnatory stand of Lady Troubridge and her ilk, and yet the anecdotal evidence is that hardly anyone was hurt by it.
    This was because in Bohemia you didn’t borrow ten pounds to last you the month, you borrowed your twopenny bus fare home.You hung around Augustus John till he stood you a drink.On the whole the borrower was straight: ‘I am asking you to send me fifty pounds,’ wrote the South African poet Roy Campbell to a friend, C.J.Sibbett.He was in dire need.‘I shall never be able to repay it.I am asking it as a gift.’ Sibbett sent twenty-five pounds straight away, and another twenty-five soon after.No doubt there were scroungers and spongers, but it was a two-way process, and the Bohemian community took a different attitude to helping out needy comrades.Viva King, for example:
    [My mother] thought [Francis Macnamara] a sponger…
    she wrote in her piquant autobiography, The Weeping and the Laughter (1976), recalling her curious platonic relationship with one of Augustus John’s closest friends:

‘If you want to see English people at their most
English, go to the Café Royal where they are
trying their hardest to be French,’ wrote Beer-
bohm Tree.Augustus John was the Café’s
acknowledged king.
    Perhaps because I have always been a rock for spongers to cling to, I have never understood why scorn is heaped upon those who are often clever enough to take with grace what is usually freely given.
    Viva, a Bohemian celebrity in her own right (though never an artist) had experienced poverty but married wealth; her sympathies, however, remained with the poor and she strongly appreciated Francis Macnamara’s Irish gaiety and wit.Viva generously forgave his sponging habits in return for the pleasure they had together – trips to the zoo and strolls round antique shops in the Brompton Road – while taking the view that artists are exempt from the rules; you lent money to them out of the goodness of your heart, understanding and forgiving them whether they were geniuses or not.Above all, there was a tacit understanding that you didn’t expect to be repaid.
    For Francis Macnamara the word ‘lender’ was synonymous with ‘giver’, and his children were brought up with this assumption.His daughter Nicolette grew up between her own family and the Johns (Augustus was a second father to her).It was they who influenced her belief that money represented only one thing – freedom of action – while entailing noresponsibilities.Neither she nor anyone she knew had ever ‘earned’ money.Francis wrote; Augustus painted.This they did from innate talent.‘Money was a secondary consideration.’ When needed it would appear as if by magic from some patron or rich relation.Failing this, borrowing was the obvious solution.When Nicolette married the painter Anthony Devas she discovered to her astonishment that his family did not see things in the same light – ‘With the Devases, borrowing was to be avoided except in an emergency.’ It took Nicolette much painful adjustment to come to terms with the conventional Devas approach to money, where borrowing and not returning money was seen as bordering on theft.
    For