Book Review: The Coast of Bohemia

Charmian looked at her gloomily. “You strange creature!” she murmured. “But I love you,” she added aloud. “I simply idolize you!”

Cornelia said, half-laughing, “Don't be ridiculous,” and pulled herself out of the embrace which her devotee had thrown about her. But she could not help liking Charmian for seeming to like her so much.”

I read William Dean Howells’ The Coast of Bohemia years ago, but inexplicably didn’t post about it at the time, but I reread it this week and now I intend to make up for lost time.

The thing to understand about this book is that it is braided from three parts, two of which are delightful and one of which is the plot. The delightful parts are the parts about our heroine Cornelia’s life at art school at the Synthesis in New York, and her friendship with her fellow art student Charmian, who in their very first conversation informs Cornelia, “It must have been your pride that fascinated me at the first glance. Do you mind my being fascinated with you?”

Cornelia does not mind Charmian being fascinated with her, although she doesn’t exactly return the fascination. This does not in the least deter Charmian, who has decided that Cornelia is her beau ideal and spends the rest of the book adoring her.

The first time she visits Cornelia in her rooms, for instance, “Charmian pushed impetuously in. She took Cornelia in her arms and kissed her, as if they had not met for a long time.”

(It should be noted that they saw each other just the day before at the Synthesis.)

Then, the first time that Cornelia visits Charmian at her home, “The man held aside the portière for [Cornelia] to pass, but before she could pass there came a kind of joyous whoop from within, a swishing of skirts toward her, and she was caught in the arms of Charmian, who kissed her again and again, and cried out over her goodness in coming.”

Charmian, you will perhaps be unsurprised to learn, has fitted out one room in the luxurious apartment where she lives with her stepmother to look like her ideal of a bohemian artist’s studio, complete with stretching a cunningly painted sheet diagonally down from the ceiling so that the room looks like a garret. It seems to me that Charmian has missed her mark in trying to become a painter (she is, as she cheerfully admits, not very talented in that line), and ought to attempt set design and costuming.

Around here, however, the plot begins to intrude, and by plot I of course mean Cornelia’s romance. Charmian’s stepmother hires a painter, Ludlow, to paint Charmian’s portrait, and as Ludlow is a friend and mentor of Cornelia’s, he suggests Cornelia should paint Charmian too.

The first time I read this book I groaned and settled in for the love triangle, but in fact there is no love triangle at all: Ludlow’s affections remain fixed on Cornelia, and Charmian is totally uninterested in Ludlow, possibly because she’s just uninterested in men all around. As she comments earlier in the book, upon observing a spoony engaged couple, “I shouldn't care for the engagement… That would be rather horrid. But if you were in love, to feel that you needn't hide it or pretend not to be! That is life!”

(I leave it to the reader’s discretion whether Charmian “I love you! I simply idolize you!” Maybough has ever hidden a feeling in her life.)

Anyway, Charmian is thrilled with the romance of it all when Ludlow fails to paint a good portrait of Charmian - because he keeps accidentally making her look like Cornelia. A surefire sign that a painter is in love!

Cornelia, on the other hand, paints a beautiful portrait of Charmian, and Ludlow acknowledges, “She could have a career; she could be a painter of women's portraits. A man's idea of a woman, it's interesting, of course, but it's never quite just; it's never quite true; it can't be. Every woman knows that, but you go on accepting men's notions of women, in literature and in art, as if they were essentially, or anything but superficially, like women.”

Howells is quite aware that this applies to his own writing, too, although it has to be said that he does a far better job of capturing Charmian than Ludlow does. “At first, when I wanted to do her as Humbug, you wouldn't stand it, and now, when I've done her as Mystery, you laugh,” Ludlow complains to Cornelia, who does indeed just laugh at him: she’s been painting Charmian as a human being, with charms and faults, rather than an abstract representation of anything, and that is why Cornelia’s portrait is so good (and why Howells’ portrait is so loveable).

And Cornelia, too, is lovely - outside of the Ludlow/Cornelia romance, wherein she is so trapped by 19th century romantic conventions that she spends most of the book actively fighting against her love of Ludlow. Not because it would get in the way of her artistic career; the book touches on this fact, but it’s not Cornelia’s motivation. She’s acting on a sense of delicacy so very delicate that she thinks she’s unworthy of Ludlow because an odious traveling salesman once courted her. They were not engaged! She was not in love! The fact that he paid court to her and she did not repulse him is, in itself, enough.

Of course Ludlow finds out about this amour in the worst way possible, when said traveling salesman sends him a note that insinuates that Cornelia is far more compromised than she is. Cornelia decides that it is impossible! incompatible with her honor! to clear up the misunderstanding! Charmian solemnly upholds her in this choice.

“Now—now—we can live for each other, Cornelia. You will outlive this. You will be terribly changed, of course; and perhaps your health may be affected; but I shall always be with you from this on. I have loved you more truly than he ever did, if he can throw you over for a little thing like that. If I were a man I should exult to ignore such a thing. Oh, if men could only be what girls would be if they were men! But now you must begin to forget him from this instant—to put him out of your mind—your life,” Charmian exults. “We will take a little flat like two newspaper girls that I heard of, and live together. We will get one down-town, on the East Side.”

But then Ludlow comes round the next morning to clear up the misunderstanding, and Charmian (who really as an excellent wingwoman, quite against her own interests) keeps him around, talking to him about how Cornelia is SO wonderful and truthful and just the soul of honesty, until Cornelia herself comes in and they talk the thing over and Ludlow says what the reader has been screaming all along, which is that the traveling salesman doesn’t matter a bit.

So they marry! Happy end! At least as long as you were not deeply invested in Cornelia’s artistic career, which may or may not continue. The woman’s career ends, the book notes, “in most of the many cases where artists had married artists,” but Ludlow “held that it had happened through the man's selfishness and thoughtlessness, and not through the conditions.” Will Cornelia beat the odds? Who knows!

But one thing is certain: Cornelia's friendship with Charmian will continue. When the honeymooners return to New York, Charmian throws them a real bohemian supper, although she complains that her stepmother ruined it by taking the ladies away to coffee instead of leaving them to smoke with the men. “I should—if I could only have seen Cornelia Ludlow smoking—I should have been willing to die. And now—now, I'm afraid she's going to be perfectly respectable!”