BOHEMIAN PARIS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21159, 16 April 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

BOHEMIAN PARIS.

BY GRAHAM HAY.

EXPOSURE FROM INSIDE.

To start to read a hook and then find that the author is only twenty-one is a very disheartening experience. The wisest thing is to put the book down and take up another. Long experience has taught me this. Literary twenty-one is such a trying age. It is so curious about the things that have become tedious commonplaces to anyone over tlie age of twentyfour. It is self-conscious about strong drink, and sex, and the claims of youth. It believes in cleverness, unmindful of the evidence that no great writers have been clever. Whoever called Dickens, or Hardy, or Conrad clever? On the other hand, plenty of people have been struck by the cleverness of Arnold Bennett, which makes one doubt his eventual eminence.

It makes a cult of profanity, a shamefaced parade of obscenity, and believes it almost indecent to be sober after lunch. In fact, a tiresome, yeasty, commonplace age, which its elders perfectly understand and tacitly avoid. What made me persevere with " The Compelled Hero " by a twenty-oner called Richard Heron Ward [ cannot understand, unless it was the large print. Because it threatened to be even worso than its fellows, and, moreover, it is set in Bohemian Paris. It opens with two young egoists being witty —very immattirely wittv—in hot baths. When it is said that it was precisely the kind of wit any two clever youths would indulge in in hot baths if saves the fatigue of reading a very dull chapter.

Having dried and dressed, it seems that one of them is about to throw a party—surely this cliche is a little worn —which means that he has acquired a sufficiency of potent liquor to drink and a table to dance on and a floor to sit on. 1 hen as soon as everyone is reasonably drunk —vodka is the best for this—someone throws a bun at the head of someone else and the party begins. The thing is for the men to be gloomy and elemental and the girls to talk like bargees, or else become coldly passionate, and someone who is no musician plays the piano with such savage abandonment of negroid ecstasy that everyone weeps. At this party an erratic genius called Janus gave such free vent to his ego that he vomited right into the middle of it. The party, drunk though it. was, demurred, and fastidiously shook the carpet out of the winflow. Love and Disgust. At this point the hero did a startling thing—be fell in love! Not maudlinly in love, but the real thing. Tn the Latin Quarter love .and falling in love, marriage and giving in marriage, are as unknown as perspiration at the Pole, strangled at birth. Both men and women have so unsexed themselves that a part of their imagination has become atrophied for lack of nourishment. They have become rather nasty little animals who know not love of the spirit. But our hero achieved the impossible and fell in love, and suddenly saw this party as an outsider, and was shocked and disgusted with what he saw. Nothing so devastating has ever been said of that supreme folly of youthful selfishness which has been called Bohemianism

than this insider says when he suddenly finds himself judicially jerked outside while still all hot and smoking from the ferment engendered within. Let him speak for himself. " I had

never doubted that we were a collection of brilliant and original, if misunderstood, people, that we were unconventional and free, that we lived bravely according to out opinions, and that we enjoyed ourselves. Now T suddenly saw how deep I was sunk in the quag of artificiality. To be different was our ambition. Most of us hated many of the niesssy, stupid things we did, but we went on doing them because they were part of the Bohemian's stock-in-trade. IS'o ono could become a true Bohemian and bo received by us unless he were known to be as immoral, as irregular, as unpunctual, as lazy, as rude, as eccentric, as promiscuous, as vicious, as drink-sodden as possible. And if one could produce some really original vice ... so much the better." Later the girl he is in love with says, "It sends us all a bit crazy, I think, this terrible atmosphere of clever talk and clever people. It's one long pose-"

Just a phase, someone says, the ebullience of youth. But youth should be lovely, the spring-time of existence. A tiino of high spirits, of eager curiosity, a time to gain experience—yes. But what experience is gained by mixing youth with vodka, by sprawling on promiscuous floors? Let us look at the picture again. And wo were all so dam'-clever. Dam'-cleverness was our disease. I had no concrete reason to suppose that I was such a mighty fine composer. 1 subsisted entirely on self-flattery and inane conversation. Actually I was a nobody, and a fool at that. Under the impulse of my revelation I took exquisite pleasure in telling myself so."

Irreparable Harm. But it does irreparable harm, this carousal of the ego in Bohemia Paris. Tt vitiates the budding talents of people who have them. This going about in crowds is definitely harmful to artistic development. In all crowds there is a ruling spirit, and this ruling spirit dictates the course of art for all his lesser disciples. There boconies a fashion in art, which should be impossible. The art of the Latin Quarter is almost wholly a matter of copying and imitating. When was art developed thus? Once more our hero speaks. " So long as an artist keeps with what is rather wellnamed the herd he will be quite unable to be himself, and therefore quite unable to work properly. And Bohemianism comprises a herd with rules of (he strictest freemasonry. Herds have a passion for creating restricting standards, but they create nothing else. Freedom is only to be found in loneliness, sometimes in (lie loneliness of two people, but more often in the loneliness of one. And loneliness is only to be found in personal liberation from I he hord."

As lie passes from froth to substance Mr. Ward's writing most accurately reflects bis mind. It comes alive, lie ceases to trouble himself with stained and grubby marionettes and learns an interest in real people. His mind opens like a flower which basks in the sun. as in the scents and sounds of the French village it leaves behind the muddy little trickle of the Latin Quarter The Plaintive Conclusion. Eheu ! These Bohemians of I'ifVis and London, what are they? Spoiled American (laughters with excess of emotions; exotic libertines of old-world ultra-cul-ture; pretty littlo dandies and lazy vampires. That is the hotbed which our twenty-one-year-old hero found there. What happens to our colonial youths of bright promise who go Home full* of happy expectancy, attracted like moths to the lamp of art. A promising flutter soon after they arrive, a gadding about in Die very latest of sophisticated art circles, and what? Nothing; loss of personality, identity, a shrivelling up in a milieu too big and sudden for them. One becomes a Katherine Mansfield. She copies nobody, works alone along her own lines of genius. One shudders to think how many are to bo swallowed up in trying to copy her. Genius finds itself by climbing out of the swim, not by plunging in. There never was a more bitter and cruel indictment of tho unwholesome and nasty colony which inhabits Montparnasso under the excuse of studying and practising art than this book by one of themselves, a clever young man of twenty-one.