Hayden Herrera - Upper Bohemia

My father and mother in the British Virgin Islands, 1935

In addition to their numerous love affairs, my father and mother were each married five times. They believed in the importance of pleasure, of living life to the hilt. To follow their own desire was a moral imperative. Repression, sacrifice, and compromise were cowardly. What our parents desired was not always in the best interests of their children. If they fell in love and had to pursue a new lover, they did not hesitate to stash their children with some friend, relative, or boarding school. Children were secondary to the leading of a passionate life.

What I want to understand is how could our mother have behaved the way she did? And what made the parents of our friends be impervious to their childrens needs? Why did our father think it was acceptable to live in another country and to turn up now and again with a different wife? And why, if they ignored us, were Blair and I so captivated by our parents?

Our mother called her friends upper bohemians. Most were artists or writers living in Manhattan and the Outer Cape (Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown) and most were born between 1908 (the year of both my parents birth) and 1920. These so-called upper bohemians had privileged childhoods but rebelled against their parents way of life. They rejected convention and insisted upon personal liberty. Their lives were full of adventure and drama, mixed with chaos. The flush of excitement that came with a new love affair made a marriage worn down by progeny seem dull. The sense of security and continuity, of duty fulfilled, that might have come from sticking with a spouse for the sake of the children was not enough to hold them back from the thrill of the unknown.

In a way, these upper bohemians constituted a second lost generation. They did not directly experience the horror and pointlessness of World War I, but they were affected by its aftermath, the upheaval of traditional value systems, the feeling that life is cheap and death is around the corner, so you might as well live it up. Coming of age in the late twenties, my parents absorbed that decades disenchantment and the concomitant insistence on having fun. Unhampered by Prohibition, they were part of an alcohol culture. The cocktail hour was sacrosanct. It loosened inhibitions, allowed people to follow their impulses.

During Prohibition breaking laws became habitual. If one law could be broken, why not all? Women, who had not been welcome in saloons, joined the fray at speakeasies. Womens status changed in the 1920s. They were less submissive, more outspoken, freer to choose their own lives. For my mother and her friends, defying all norms of proper behavior was fashionable. Conformism was beneath contempt. When my mother spoke of family values or togetherness you could hear the disdain in her voice.

My mother, c. 1940

My father, 1948

The Great Depression cast a pall on the madcap modes of the 1920s. When my parents family wealth was lost or diminished after the 1929 stock market crash and after the 1932 collapse of the Swedish Match company (a Ponzi scheme controlled by Swedish investor, the so-called Match King, Ivar Kreuger), my father and mother had to change their way of life. They changed their worldviews as well. Now nothing was permanent. Life was precarious and impecunious, but never boring. Since nothing could be taken for granted, life was an invention.

Because they were born into a world of privilege and they belonged to what my mother called good families (meaning upper class), they had the gift of confidence. My parents did not have to earn confidence by achievement. Self-esteem was bestowed upon them by birth. My father, John Charles Phillipss first American ancestor, Reverend George Phillips, was educated at Cambridge University in England and came to this country in 1630 aboard the Arbella, the flagship of the Winthrop fleet. His descendants founded Phillips Exeter and Phillips Andover Academies.

My mother, born Elizabeth Cornell Blair, couldnt have cared less about her forebears, but she did once tell me proudly that she had Native American blood and that she was related to King John the Bad. When she had an exhibition of her paintings in Mexico City in 1949, she told a newspaper reporter that she was descended from John Paul Jones, a Scottish-born naval officer who, after killing two subordinate seamen in two separate incidents of rage, joined the Continental Navy and became a hero of the American Revolution. That her great grandfather, Ezra Cornell, founded Cornell University did not seem important enough to tell me. (Her more class-conscious younger sister made sure that Blair and I knew.)