Bohemia without rhapsody

Darren Coffield is a painter of no small repute in the generation of the 1990s known as the YBAs (Young British Artists: he once notably did a heroic portrait of Arthur Scargill in the medium of coal dust). In Tales from the Colony Room (2020), he collated oral history and memoirs of a notorious drinking club on Dean Street in Soho. In Queens of Bohemia he focuses on the women who were artists, muses, club hostesses or companions in the years of classic bohemianism in Soho and Fitzrovia, from the 1920s to the 1950s.

It’s a big canvas, from the age of flappers, through café society and wartime mavericks, right to the leading edge of the Swinging Sixties. Figures range from impoverished artists to showbiz stars such as Hermione Baddeley, but Coffield feels that too often the light has fallen chiefly on the men. Women, he says, were the “dark matter holding bohemia together and keeping its stars in their orbit”. But, struggling to be seen and hampered by legal inequality, they “posed political, moral and existential challenges to authority and gave rise to a new way of living”.

With remarkable energyhe has scanned memoirs, interviews, news reports and oral history for women’s voices and accounts of their lives. He presents them as a fragmented soundscape, a vast anecdotal chatter of tales in a few short lines. One voice – oddly not distinguished as the actual narrator – is Coffield’s own, the overall conductor of a raffish or alarming orchestra. So between Cecil Beaton or Quentin Crisp and Ironfoot Jack or Elisabeth Lutyens, up pops the author himself, sometimes with an implied opinion about their behaviour, but more frequently just passing on some startling extra gobbet of gossip.

The author was born in 1969, when the world that fascinates him was well and truly over. Gathering 120 years’ worth of ghosts around him, he displays the symptoms, as many British people do, of a case of prenatal nostalgia. Bohemia is safer that way, fixed in amber – especially for women and homosexual men, who got the sharp end. The rather woo-woo foreword by Marianne Faithfull gushes with enthusiasm for “the old bohemia – art was more intense, purer, sex was hotter too – more repressed. And there was a genuine intellectual bohemia instead of this hipster-lite culture we have today”. She does have a point about the inauthenticity of today’s floaty-dress Primrose Hillbilly boho culture, but the words “intense” and “purer” make the eyes roll. For, once you dive into the book itself, the sheer moral and physical squalor of it creeps into your head like toxic mould.

For all the gleeful defiant mischief, all the seedy Jeffrey Bernardery of Soho legend and chat-show anecdote, Coffield’s collection offers a world of women undervalued, sidelined, used and abused as accessories or slaves or sexual conveniences. Perhaps we should blame the First World War for throwing aside old notions of gentlemanliness, chivalry, self-control and family life, but the fact is that the men in this social and artistic world emerge as pigs.

Some were extreme, such as the Satanist Aleister Crowley, a regular at the Fitzroy Tavern when not persuading Nina Hamnett’s friend Mary to join him in goat-related bestiality “during which Crowley cut the animal’s throat and it bled to death over Mary’s back”. Some were just sexually incontinent patriarchs such as Lucian Freud or Augustus John, who at the age of eighty climbed into bed to try to rape his own daughter, but luckily was impotent by then. Even more luckily for the nation’s real welfare, his son Caspar rebelled against the whole squalid scene, joined the Navy, served in the Atlantic convoys and became the First Sea Lord. Caspar’s brother Henry also tried to break out of it all, training for the Jesuit priesthood, but after falling in love with “a frivolous flapper” he was turned down when his girl saw a vision of the Virgin Mary and went celibate, whereupon he went for a walk and fell off a cliff.

The whole rambling collection of voices evokes a world of misogyny and scorn and abuse of females, regularly defined in history by the men to whom they were useful. The book’s real value lies in reminding us of that. The progress of Hamnett – barstool queen of the Fitzroy Tavern and plainly a considerable wit – sets the scene. A passionate painter refused exhibitions by respectable galleries in the 1920s, she modelled for Walter Sickert and Roger Fry, but was forced to scratch out a living in Fry’s workshop. In Paris she drank absinthe with Picasso and helped Jacob Epstein to pull the tarpaulin off Oscar Wilde’s tomb; back in London she lived broke, exploited by creeps such as Augustus John and Fry, who like many of the men of the time thought with an interesting lack of logic that male promiscuity was to be celebrated, but women’s was filthy prostitution.

There are a few likeable figures; more among the women, from Kathleen Hale, creator of Orlando the Marmalade Cat, to a strongwoman known as the Mighty Mannequin, who tore telephone directories in half and bent a poker round a man’s neck. Tallulah Bankhead seems an amiable toughie, as does the eccentric hotelier Rosa Lewis, who was once kind to a “morose” little boy among the Churchill family called Winston. She turns up fictionally in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. There are far fewer to like among the men, though it is good to remember the brave and witty Crisp and to hear of the 1950s bookseller and publisher David Archer, described by Henrietta Moraes as “gently born, eccentrically orientated, altruistically minded, hysterically tempered, kind, perceptive, a left-wing fascist and patron saint of the 40s and 50s poets”. But his kindness used up all his money, so his father, Major Archer, had to sell off the family estate while the genial publisher was “bled dry” by “pilfering poets, like George Barker”, and died broke.

The book ends with a regretful account of how, after the Sexual Offences Act 1959, prostitution went indoors, and a more cheerful reflection that the women of that bohemian world were responsible for preparing the ground for feminism. That may be news to hundreds of quieter-behaved scholars, scientists, politicians and teachers, but never mind. From Jacob Epstein to Dylan Thomas, Walter Sickert to Lucian Freud, the boho artistic impetus is too often mixed either with callous insouciance about women and children or with morbid and creepy perversion (mistress’s aborted foetuses in pickle jars under the bed, coprophilia, etc). Maybe Darren Coffield has chosen the worst of bohemia, and could with equal justice have given it a bit more of a forgiving shine. But this record is not unimportant.

Libby Purves is a novelist, journalist, Times columnist, theatre critic and former BBC radio presenter

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