Bohemian Girl

TWO FLAMBOYANT FATHERS by Nicolette Devas. 287 pages. Morrow. $5.

This is a sprightly documentary memoir about the way of life and state of mind known a long time ago as bohemia. The bohemians, now as extinct as bimetalists and phrenologists, flourished in the 19th and early 20th centuries in a setting of red wine, turpentine, bawdy songs in beery baritones, long flowing skirts for the women, and a general clamor for free love, free thought and freeloading. Bohemians were a very different tribe from today's subcultural exponents of acid, pot, Zen, odd sex, no-war and not-much-art. The bohemians bellowed defiance at the Establishment and their rules, paradoxically, were harder to live by than those of the Establishment itself. A republic of art rather than a state of trance was their aim.

Walking Paintings. It is a wise child that knows its own father. Nicolette Devas, 55, British painter and novelist (Nightwatch, Bonfire), had two of them: her natural father, Francis Macnamara, best described as a genius-at-large, and her adoptive father, Augustus John, painter, patron of English gypsies, and uncrowned king of bohemia.

Brought up in the west of Ireland on savage libertarian principles derived from Jean Jacques Rousseau, Nicolette went barefoot, often swam naked in the freezing Atlantic. When her fearless father Macnamara led her across the peat bogs, he was accustomed to throw her across the wider draining ditches. After that cuckoo County Clareman walked out on Mother and the Macnamara brood, they were given house room by Augustus John.

The John house in Dorset was liberty hall, in which all the liberties were enjoyed by the patriarch painter. Wives, models and mistresses ("Augustus's paintings walked about") shuttled to and fro in various states of concubinage. Pooh-bahs of the literati strutted through the rooms. Nicolette recalls William Butler Yeats as a "Sacred Great Man" revered for his poetry, but also as a ham self-consciously impersonating his own image. T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) lost his mythological status because of the "cringing, obsequious" way he called Augustus John "Master." Besides, after he bragged to the children that he lived on a daily handful of raisins, Lawrence's icebox was discovered to be stuffed with chicken, meat, butter and jam.

Candid Obit. As for the children, there were only two ways of defeating bohemia: to become a complete square, like Caspar John, who turned his back on the turpentine turmoil, joined the British Navy and rose to become First Sea Lord; or to go Dad one better, as did Nicolette's sister Caitlin, who married Dylan Thomas and enthusiastically embraced his pub-and-pad life style. Nicolette herself became an artist, because "art" was the only thing she could do, and married an artist--Anthony Devas--because artists were the only people she knew. But she had the good luck or good sense to pick a nonflamboyant type with solid talent who achieved a modest success as a portrait painter, with no impulse to live it up, sleep around or hurl defiance at the bourgeoisie who bought his pictures.

Nicolette's memoir is a candid but affectionate obituary of an era in the arts in which foolishness flourished, but which achieved things of great value. John's painting is not much regarded today, but he was an immense character. Seen from close up by Nicolette's appraising eye, he is not as admirable as he appears in his own autobiographical fragment, Chiaroscuro, or as bogus as in Aldous Huxley's satirical portrait of him as "John Bidlake" in Point Counter Point. Nicolette writes well, with a painter's eye for places and faces and a feminine instinct for character. These qualities plus Irish wit lend a novelistic point to her portraits of some great period figures.

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