Have you ever tried repeating your own name until the sound of it became utterly strange and mysterious to you? Do you remember the queer sense of separation from self which your own name induced? Visiting England has the same sort of effect on me. Everything so utterly familiar, everything so utterly odd. We were over for the weekend visiting Carol's sister and brother-in-law in the little Sussex town of Lewes. All I knew about Lewes was that every Guy Fawkes night they traditionally burn an effigy of the Pope on a bonfire. Personally, I find such displays of Ye Olde Englishe Bigotrie less than attractive. However, November 5th was not for another month, so we would presumably be spared the worst excesses of Catholic-baiting. [The "rabidness" of Protestantism has always been a matter of enormous curiosity to me. I can't help thinking of it as a sort of mass-psychosis instigated and harnessed for cynical political ends, a kind of 16th century Cultural Revolution. The trouble is that, once the genie is out of the bottle, it does as it wills, and fear and loathing are unleashed upon the world. There will always be always a sizable constituency for a "tabula rasa" policy, which allows people to dress up their negative instincts as the path of whatever "righteousness" is currently in vogue. Smash, burn, destroy - we are creating a New Jerusalem. Lord have Mercy.]
However, modern-day Lewes is innocent enough. In fact, it is deeply and improbably quaint, as though reconstituted exclusively from architectural and social clues gleaned from an Agatha Christie novel. In my estranged psychological state, walking round the town, I felt like an invisible time-traveller witnessing the hypnotised populace unconsciously act out a dream of being English. It was eery, as though a veil had been accidentally drawn aside and I had been granted a momentary glimpse of the horror of sleeping humanity self-satisfiedly playing out a fantasy, while unwittingly serving a cosmic purpose indifferent to either its joys or its sufferings. As for myself, I had no grounds for smugness. Clearly, my own thoughts, emotions and actions were governed in an equally automatic way by hard-wired inner attitudes and fantastical notions about myself. To be a conscious human being requires, it seems to me, an acceptance of the fact that I am not "special", that I too act and think in sleep, that I do not know who or what I am. At that moment a new possibility arises...

We visited Charleston, the little farmhouse which effectively became the country annex of the Bloomsbury set. "Bloomsbury set" - as difficult, almost, to write as to say, without a certain ironic sneer. E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell et al- a bunch of well-heeled pansies and neurotics playing at being bohemian. And yet they were at the forefront of an extraordinary changing of the cultural guard, the effects of which continue to mark the world today. They were the avant-garde of a whole movement which rejected the stuffy conventions and rigid formality of the Victorian England in which they had been brought up. That women and homosexuals were over-represented in the group is hardly surprising: they were the ones most obviously oppressed by the prevailing conformity. Their manifesto favoured a freer, happier life, in which intelligent conversation was more greatly admired than material wealth, and artistic sensibility more highly valued than social status. Difficult to argue against, really! Charleston was ultimately marked by tragedy. Vanessa Bell's son, Julian, was killed in the Spanish civil war where he had volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver. Vanessa, it seems, never really got over it. She sank into a state of more or less permanent depression. Her sister, Virginia Woolf, of a similarly melancholic disposition, drowned herself.

Inevitably, Charleston had its own teashop and bookshop attached. Succumbing to temptation, I acquired a copy of "Among the Bohemians - Experiments in Living 1900-1939". The author was Virginia Nicholson, Vanessa Bell's granddaughter. There is a corner of my psyche which has continued to nurture a secret hankering after the bohemian life of the artist. Let the superficial, materialistic values of society go hang! We (it requires a group) will live, love, create, paint, make music, write poetry, live in a commune, explore new ways of living, travel the world, have fantastic parties, drink wine, laugh and be happy, our minds free from the mental slavery which "straight" society seeks to impose! This is the the theory. In practice, an inner instinct has always recoiled from the pretence, affectation, hypocrisy and downright snobbery which so often emanates from Bohemia's self-appointed exponents. Plus ça change...

"Among the Bohemians" is a light read, full of gossipy trivia and insightful background. What emerges very clearly is that pre-social security bohemia was often the real thing. People actually could, and did, starve in freezing garrets. The author's more serious intent is revealed in a series of questions which she lists under each chapter heading, for example:

Paying the Price. Why is poverty so romantic? - Why do artists despise money? - How does one survive while producing something that no one will buy? - What does an artist do who runs out of money? - Does being rich disqualify one from Bohemia? - If being Bohemian means being poor, is the pain worth the gain?

Or New Brooms. Must women give all their time to housework? - How can one cope with housework without modern machinery? - Is an experimental lifestyle compatible with having servants? - What are the advantages of remaining dirty? - Must one have baths? - Can one admit to the existence of lavatories? - Must creativity be sacrificed fro the sake of cleanliness and order? - Does domesticity have any value for the artist?

I sometimes think that the ability to question what it is we do and why we do it is what makes us truly human. What frightens me about today's society is that even our questions have somehow been subsumed into the omnivorous monster of consumerism. If every thing, every idea, every dream can be bought and sold in the market-place, is it actually possible to revolt against the God of Shopping? Does anyone dare, unironically, I mean, to ask who we are and why are here, if not just to shop?