Ultima Bohemia

The "Artist" Type Disappears From the Latin Quarter, Chelsea, and Greenwich Village

LOUIS GOLDING

THE Dodo of Bohemia! I have seen him! He survives! The phoenix has long since subsided into his own ashes. The mantichore and the griffin no longer belch fire and flap their wings. The salamander no more flickers in the red heart of flame. All the tufted, scaly, tusked beasts of mythology have given up the ghost. How should they trumpet their primeval mythical music when even the shy nightingale is seduced into the cynic webs of radio.

But the most monstrous, the most portentous of the beasts of mythology, survives. I saw him lately in the remotest corner of Europe. I am speaking of the Dodo of Bohemia—complete with his black felt hat, his velvet coat, his loose black bow, his coloured shirt and collar, his round shoulders, his incoherent fingernails. The perfect Bohemian of Puccini, of Murger, of the Yellow Nineties, of the Mauve Decade—there he was in all his dolorous panoply.

THE Cafe Royal no longer houses him in London. The Dome in Paris knows him no more. Should he make his appearance in the Casa d'Arte Bragaglia in Rome—that great rintrovo degli artisti, the meeting-place of the far wandered Italian artists assembled out of Genoa and Trieste and Ancona and Palermo —such merciless eyes would concentrate upon our little Dodo, such dynamistic, expressionistic, suprematistic pictures would clash their cymbals about his ears, that in five minutes you would see him reduced to a little inky streak upon the carpet. They know him no more in Greenwich Village, where the protagonists of their dramas are the keys of typewriters. Before he is absorbed into the limbo of unicorn and fish-tailed siren, hasten to see him, the last of his kind. But you must travel far; you must travel so far as the mysterious island of Favignana, off the northwest coast of Sicily, hard against the lovely and ignored sea-city of Trapani. There you will see the Dodo of Bohemia being too-utterly-Bohemian. It is hard to be Bohemian all by yourself, because it takes two to outrage a decency satisfactorily. To live in isolated sin is magnificent if you can manage it, but it must be very dull. Nevertheless, the dear creature is doing his best. In the correct Bohemian manner, he is engaged upon a series of poems alternating in form between the servitude of the sonnet and the insolent freedom of vers-libre, and the poems are to be collectively entitled Gangrene. He brews absinthe for himself at noon —he never gets up earlier—and for afternoon tea takes a little cocaine-on-toast. I can't tell you how inexpressibly Bohemian he is.

I want you to understand that I was very seriously disturbed to find him in the island of Favignana. I had gone there to listen to the surge and thunder of the Odyssey, to quote Mr. Lang. I wished to be alone except for a goat or two and the fishermen preparing the great nets for the tunny-fishing in early summer that dimples all the western Sicilian sea. New York had no use for him. London, as I have said, had eliminated him. I saw no trace of him in capital after capital of Europe. Berlin knew him not. Vienna scorned him. Budapest tip-tilted its Mongol nose. In Italy, the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus was a monster far more credible and up-to-date than the Dodo of Bohemia. Landing in Sicily, the thought of him became dim, farcical. I set out on foot westward over the glowing mountains, through fields of purple comfrey and pink asphodel. And at Trapani, where you will remember, according to the theory of Samuel Butler, a young lady produced the Odyssey so long misattributed to an old gentleman called Homer, my lateen sail was set for Favignana, the chief of the Aegadean Islands, which are the last corner of Europe. Make for the next island in those hyacinth seas, and but a few hours further away you are in Pantelleria, indisputable Africa.

Homeric scholarship, like medical science and patriotism, is a proprietary concern, and the Homeric scholars have always hated the Butler theory regarding the origin of the Odyssey with a desperate hatred. Being no Homeric scholar, no sooner did I set eyes on these Aegadean Islands than I was an ardent Butlerite. I knew I was at the very heart of the epic of Odysseus. I had no doubt at all that Favignana was the identical "wooded island abounding with wild goats off the coast of the savage Cyclopes," concerning which Odysseus, the Primal Tourist, sings: "When morning came we hunted the wild goats, of which we killed over a hundred, and all day long to the going down of the sun we feasted on them and the store of wine we had taken from the Cicons." '

NEVER a goat I saw. Odysseus was too modest to record how radical was the extirpation of them. But there, furtive and flat-footed, shuffling along those timeless sands, ousted from men's thoughts as completely as last Monday's evening paper, relegated to geological rather than historic time, like the mammoth and pterodactyl—there I saw the last side-whiskered, black-bowed, felt-hatted artist —the Dodo of Bohemia.

My first impulse was the same as the impulse Odysseus so bloodily acted on. I wanted to slay him, and all day long to the going down of the sun feast upon him and the store of wine I had brought from Trapani. I conquered it, so wistful he looked, so desperately he chewed his finger-nails, so forlornly mooed like a hornbill in the swamps under Kilimanjaro. Shall I not rather despatch the Martin Johnson expedition that braved the tsetsehaunted jungles to brave the more perilous siren-lures of the Aegadean Islands? Shall they not embalm him like an Egyptian Sovereign, the last of his long line, and present the Dodo of Bohemia to incredulous posterity?

For a new Bohemianism now lords it over the artistic populations of Europe and America, a bowler-hatted Bohemia, suave and decorous.

The Great War was the reductio ad ab- surdum et ad divinum of the old follies, and when the painters and poets and musicians returned, they neither wanted to scale those heights again nor to plumb those depths. If in the studios of the Latin Quarter and Chelsea and Greenwich Village they pigged it before the war in a welter of bloaters and tubes of paint, the welter of mud and blood during the war was even more hilarious. If before the war no Bohemian was worth his salt if he did not arrive for his meals an hour or two after his host had invited him, during the war he was lucky if he arrived at all, or with his full complement of arms and legs. All of which, when he returned, made arriving at 7-30 for dinner, when he had been invited to dinner at 7.30, a far wilder and dizzier adventure than his old murky fecklessness. The pre-war furniture of his studio was a number of greasy cushions and bolsters. He found a post-war kitchen chair kinglier than a throne. He really thought in the old days he liked opium and hashish. He was to discover the celestial odour of a Lucky Strike, and how a pan of sausage was more seductive than all the spices of Abyssinia.

THAT is why, in point of fact, le Bohemien de JIOS jours would far sooner live in Clapham or the Bronx than in Chelsea or Soho. He feels far more in his element there. There he can humbly imitate the indigenous inhabitants of those regions in the sedulous cult of the aspidistra. There he can replace his cubistic curtains with curtains of demure lace or dimity. Pink silk bows may decorate his furniture, and he may read the verses of the late lamented Ella Wheeler Wilcox aloud and solemnly to the group of artists gathered around him to do that lady honour. How very recently it was that Oxford, home of not-quitelost causes, still harboured the yellow Bohemian, who still mouthed moonily his affection for Cynara in the Ernest Dowson fashion. And, indeed, had I beheld in the cloisters of Magdalen rather than on the Odyssean beach of Favignana the Dodo of Bohemia, I had been less amazed. For a sprightly young Frenchman, by name Jean Fayard, only a few years ago a cynical guest at that University, still found a carnation and a canary-yellow waistcoat an appropriate decoration for its young men, and such phrases as "wonderful mauve pyjamas" and "fascinating young creature" appropriate language upon their lips. (Consult his engaging novel, Oxford et Margaret.) And in Oxford now, the young elegant who provides no antimacassars for his chairs and no wax-fruit for his mantelpiece—poor youth, he may as well return forthwith to his provinces and juggle with his vorticist hangings. Oxford has no use for him. An attempt was made last year to hold an exhibition of wax fruits, antimacassars, bowler hats, and such like modernistic objets de vertu in Oxford. It is sinister and significant that the exhibition was absolutely vetoed by those proctors who are alleged to have the moral well-being of Oxford in their hands, and whose duty it is to keep Oxford floundering in the back-waters of antiquity. Nowhere in Europe or America (saving only in that minute island I have spoken of) does the yellow or mauve Bohemianism survive. As for the English and American travelling salesmen who foregather in the Latin Quarter —the first thing they do is to rush off to a fancy-dress store and equip themselves with velvet coats, flapping bows, and the rest. I assure you they will find them nowhere else. Then they make for the Dome. Then they look anxiously for the Parisian artists, and listen for the music of the bows as they flap. But nothing meets their disillusioned eyes save a vista of bowler hats, like an avenue of chimneys in a mining town. And they look sadly one upon the other and say "Gee!" or "Bah Goom!" And they wonder why they left home, and each to the other says "Gee!" or "Bah Goom!" more sadly than before. Let even the father of Dadaism come their way, the great Tzara himself, and they will see nothing more than a welldressed young man, small, gentle, debonair. And in his eye an eye-glass, looking blandly upon them, wondering from what entombed century these demoded garments have been resuscitated. And Tzara will pursue his Dadaistic way, his yellow gloves and ebony cane meticulously poised.

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Or take the arch-Futurist, Marinetti, that whistling meteor out of Italy. Would you imagine that even the loose liberty of the old Bohemian clothing was too constrictive for so impatient a genius? Would you imagine his dress looks forward to Methuselah, and consists less of dress than the platonic idea of dress, some simplified symbol like the tabloid food which some day is to usurp in our desiccated bodies the lovely functions of melons, and steak, and roast quails, and Peche Melba? But the dome of Saint Paul's is no more rigid than his, the supreme, bowler hat of Europe. And he wears so tall, so unremitting a stiff linen collar that even a factory chimney looks more skittish. I never realized how art and artists are your only true internationals so strongly as in the Galerie Van Diemen in Berlin, not long ago, upon the occasion of an exhibition there of advanced Soviet art I was to be introduced to two of the most furious of the artists represented there, and braced myself up stalwartly. I anticipated young men lurching like moujiks and bearded like Landru. I apprehended crude ties flapping like banners about their heads, and kneeboots climbing monumental thighs. Need I once more rack my brains and your patience by finding metaphors to express the austerity of their bowler hats and the correctness of their footwear?

Perhaps you lament the passing of Bohemia? Perhaps you grieve to think that the very word fortifies from day to day its Czecho-Slovak connotations and loses its aroma of Chelsea and the nineties, Puccini and the Latin Quarter? Then hasten, I bid you, to the peacock seas of Sicily and the dim beach of Favignana, where the west wind blows! Hasten! If the Dodo of Bohemia has not yet penned his last poem for the collection of poems to be called Gangrene, you may still catch a whisper upon his lips. He will not linger long. Pass round the bowler hat that the peasants of Favignana perform his obsequies worthily.