A Charmed Life

by Mary McCarthy

Martha Sinnott returns with her second husband to the New England artists' colony she left behind seven years earlier when she divorced her first husband. The townfolk have remained much the same, including Martha's former husband, who has relocated nearby. Martha is in touch with her former friends, who are in touch with her former husband, so Martha should be able to see him as well, shouldn't she?

Genres: Fiction, American, Novels, Classics

324 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1955

About the author

People note American writer Mary Therese McCarthy for her sharp literary criticism and satirical fiction, including the novels The Groves of Academe (1952) and The Group (1963).

McCarthy studied at Vassar college in Poughkeepsie, New York and graduated in 1933. McCarthy moved to city of New York and incisively wrote as a known contributor to publications such as the Nation, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books. Her debut novel, The Company She Keeps (1942), initiated her ascent to the most celebrated writers of her generation; the publication of her autobiography Memories of a Catholic Girlhood in 1957 bolstered this reputation.

This literary critic authored more than two dozen books, including the now-classic novel The Group , the New York Times bestseller in 1963.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McC...

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange meandering view of a bohemian enclave in New England, sometime after the Second World War. A dramatist (a somewhat autobiographical image of the author) and her husband move back to the village after she left her previous husband there seven years before. The previous husband now remarried still lives there. He is a satirical portrait of Mccarthy's ex-husband Edmund Wilson. I enjoyed the itinerant detail, how the focus went from ensemble tics to the strange hearing in custody battle. There are bizarre ruminations on modern painting and nuclear physics, odes to erudition and homilies to the effects of alcohol. There was little to be considered conventional at play and the conclusion like much of the novel was entirely unexpected.

I actually finished this a few days ago in Serbia. Life was of a different color at that point.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like 3.5 stars. In a lot of ways, Mary McCarthy is like a female version of an intellectualized John Cheever. I feel alert to the weaknesses of "A Charmed Life" -- it is heavy on exposition and is sometimes indulgently philosophical. But it is ultimately so interesting, and brimming with such strong and clear sentences, I couldn't put it down. McCarthy is a master at narrating how money, sex, gender, and pseudo-intellectualism are used as tools of soft-focus manipulation and power plays. Honesty is a slippery thing.

[Rivse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neither as ambitious as The group nor as indelible as Memories of a Catholic girlhood, with a small cast of characters and somewhat exiguous plot perhaps more suited to a short story, A charmed life seems a decidedly minor entry in McCarthy's oeuvre, a waspish tone-poem on bohemian life in the New England sticks rather than a fully developed novel. Nonetheless it has many felicities--a prose style that tends toward the expository but has velocity and snap and dash, a withering eye for mendacity and self-deception, and caustic portraits of McCarthy's real-life acquaintances, ex-husbands, and friends, always one of the doubtful amusements of her romans à clef. (McCarthy once spoke of fiction as consisting of real plums baked in a fictional cake.)

The chief portrait on display here is that of Edmund Wilson as Miles Murphy, which manages to be devastatingly unflattering and yet somehow free of malice. McCarthy spares him the exacting moral accounting to which she interestingly subjects the female characters. Presented as a natural force of overwhelming intellectual and sexual egotism rather than a character with sins and foibles, Miles is somehow beyond accountability and ordinary moral reproach, like a predator that can't help but abuse and kill the weaker creatures that foolishly stray into his orbit. It is they who are at fault for failing to resist his centrifugal pull, McCarthy seems to suggest, and allowing his tentacular narcissism to engulf them and, in the case of Martha Sinnott, the novel’s protagonist and Miles’ former wife, lure them into bed.

The novel offers a grim view of the possibilities for female agency--artistic, intellectual, sexual--in a world that, for all its bohemian trappings, adheres to stifling 1950s notions about women and domesticity and sex. While Miles, who has surrounded himself with a menagerie that permits him the domestic tranquility needed for sustained creative effort as well as the freedom for the occasional sexual dalliance, churns out book after book, Martha, in many ways his intellectual equal, fritters her energies away in home decorating, halfhearted efforts at writing a play, and attempts at pleasing her irritable cipher of a husband. Jane Coe, Martha’s foil, is a distasteful embodiment of the hollow, cynical wifeliness into which Martha might eventually devolve, while Dolly, the only female artist in the novel, is a spinsterish painter-manquée who busies herself with unadventurous still lifes and allows herself to be exploited by an impotent local lout—hardly an inspiring portrait of female artistic autonomy. The townswomen are a sad collection of lushes and cranks and unwed mothers. The novel charts, with mordant wit and satiric sparkle, Martha's floundering and doomed efforts to attain a life of integrity and self-respect in a sinister cultural milieu that offers an intelligent woman little prospect of becoming anything other than a doormat, shrew, drudge, or corpse.

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mary McCarthy sets her novels in small claustrophobic locations. In A Charmed Life a tiny community of unsuccessful artists crowd each other socially, artistically, even personally. They get together for dinners or play readings, are literary or experimental, or just plain cracked, but all harbor secret unpleasant opinions about each other. Husbands and wives manipulate each other through lies and half truths. If these omissions have consequences, they are not relayed in the novel, but make the reader uncomfortable and nervous.

Martha Sinnott is the exception. She is a former actress, a playwright, seven years into her second marriage and specializes in bad decisions. Along with her current husband John, she has moved back to New Leeds, where she had lived with her first husband, Miles. He is remarried but still in the area.

When Martha and Miles meet up again at a party, they reconnect in the worst possible way. The consequences wreak havoc with Martha's plans for her life with John. By the time this disaster is fully in place, I was weary of the characters, New Leeds, and the story. It could only end in tragedy.

McCarthy's use of the omniscient third person point of view is impressive. All the thoughts and emotions of each main character were fully exposed. After immersing her readers in everyone's heads, she then tortures us with a drawn out, suspenseful second half of the novel.

I did not like the end though I made myself wait to see what it would be. I could not admire a single character. I felt manipulated myself even to the point of grudging admiration for McCarthy's skill and wit. To one degree or another, everyone I know including myself has some of these characters' unlovely attributes.

[Aurora · Rating 3 out of 5]

È una lettura intensa e coinvolgente, mi ha lasciato un po' perplessa e delusa sul finale, tuttavia, mi è piaciuto lo stile narrativo della scrittrice, forse un po' meno come vengono trattate alcune tematiche delicate.
Non risulta chiaro se la protagonista sia stata violentata o meno, e il modo in cui è stata trattata la questione è stata un po' superficiale e poco trasparente , visto e considerato che da una narratrice donna ci si aspetterebbe forse più delicatezza e sensibilità nel trattare certi temi.
Va anche detto che il libro è stato scritto nel 1912, e già appare rivoluzionario per le tematiche trattate come l' aborto praticato illegalmente dalle donne.

[Carol Lanctot · Rating 1 out of 5]

Halfway through I cared not one iota about any of the characters, which meant, I decided, that it was time to put this book away. That does not mean others won't love it - it only means I did not.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my favorite McCarthy book (of the moment). Chapter 9 - which describes the famous sex scene between Martha and her ex-husband Miles (thinly veiled versions of McCarthy and her ex, Edmund Wilson) - is brilliant and heavily saturated with satire. McCarthy's characters, and the picture of life she paints about fictional New Leeds, are hilarious while being almost surgically precise in her rendering of detail. The way the characters rationalize their betrayals and their lies and their pettiness reveals an ugly - but true - side of human nature. In my opinion, better than The Oasis.

[Kevin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Found a 1964 Penguin UK paperback and thought, What the heck.

The book thrills for three chapters and then it and its characters go downhill quick and with a crash. At the bottom of it all is a pile of indulgent bores whose insularity sets them apart and renders them irrelevant, unless you consider yourself one of their number. Lucky you.

But that Mary McCarthy sure could write a fine sentence.

[abi · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh my GOD-- the ending?

[lisa_emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this is like being trapped at a dull dinner party hosted by someone who does not cook very well and all the guests are fascinated by their own eccentricities, which are charmless and tediously weird. The book starts off by possibly delving into the treacherous waters of marriage and its wreckage, but then veers off into numbingly dull denizens of New Leeds and their stagnant lives. Although the writing is not bad, the subject does not stand up under the passage of time.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really with this one until the ending. I suppose the end of the book is a product of its time though (the 1950s) but read now it just was a little eye-rolly.

[PMP · Rating 3 out of 5]

A less brutal Richard Yates.

[Neen · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF after 4 chapters I couldn't read anymore. It is rare that I don't finish a book. The characters are boring and I have no interest in what happens with them.

[Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written and gripping in it’s execution but just awful people to spend any time with, which I suppose is the point

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A claustrophobic, insightful, well-written story about the most self-absorbed and irritating people
imaginable.

This is about a small "artistic" community in a rural town on the East Coast of America, inhabited by flawed, self-indulgent human beings whose lives are malignantly entangled, and where gossip, pettiness, and mean-spiritedness reign under the guise of liberal progressiveness. Every person in this morally corrupt and smug community walks through their lives unconscious of the damage they
do in the lives of others. This is so brilliantly rendered by McCarthy, the "small-town" suffocation is so real, it was almost difficult to read. The awareness that she is skewering the pretensions of "the artistic" types did nothing to ameliorate my nausea. These people are so boring and self-absorbed that if I met them in real life I would simply run away as fast as possible.

She is an intelligent writer. Mary McCarthy is so successful in her characterizations that she repulsed me in real-time.

[Daniel Grenier · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5. J’enlève une trace d’étoile pour la fin un peu précipitée et facile. Cela dit, la dernière phrase est magnifique.

Les gens parlent beaucoup de Cheever, de Updike, ou de Yates, ces grands noms de la banlieue américaine satirique, mais en lisant McCarthy, c’est surtout à Baldwin que je pense. Elle a le même genre de regard pénétrant sur ses personnages, qui ne s’appuie ni sur la caricature ni sur la condescendance, quel que soit leur statut social ou leurs origines. Et les dialogues qui prennent leur temps sont aussi savoureux que ceux de Another Country ou Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone.

Dans ce roman de cachoteries et de non-dits, il y a quelques scènes d’anthologie tournant autour de l’extrême complexité de simplement mener à bien un mensonge, ce qui donne presque l’impression de lire un thriller. Il y a également une longue scène de v* s’éloignant du male gaze qui se révèle un tour de force (longue description du déni de l’agression chez l’homme; suivie d’une longue rationalisation et banalisation de l’acte chez la femme) pour une œuvre des années 1950.

[Paul Hoehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

An astonishing piece of narrative machinery filled with characters skewered in classic McCarthy style. Here, even as they are impaled on Ms. Mc’s nasty nib, their vulnerability becomes heart-rending. It’s Mary does Rhys… does Hawthorne… does Goethe.

[Reid · Rating 3 out of 5]

For the first half of this book, it was difficult to know what to make of it. Written in the mid-1950s, it appeared at first to be a period piece about—and a critique of—the laconic post-war malaise of middle class white people in a semi-decadent pseudo-bohemian enclave in rural Massachusetts. But there continued to be a nagging sense that it was about substantially more than that.

What one must decide (and a delicious decision it is) is whether the author loves her characters or has contempt for them. It's not all that easy to figure out, for the very simple reason that these folks are at the same time so thoroughly lovable and contemptible. They are naifs wandering aimlessly through the world one moment, quite cruel and class-conscious the next. What to make of a character who can say, "We all know we're superior to the ordinary person, mentally, anyway, and we all live more interesting lives"?

The question of the author's attitude toward her characters becomes more complex when McCarthy's biography is examined, for she was for most of her early adult life an avowed Communist, though in light of Stalin's excesses she had largely repudiated Communism by the time this book was written. Still, it would be surprising if she had entirely abandoned the idea of fair play for the masses. Her characters' arrogance and blindness to class prejudices could hardly have escaped her notice. At the same time, though, she was well-known as an autobiographical writer, and may well have lived in circumstances much like those described in this book.

So what to make of all this? As with most good writing, the answers are far from simple. The fact is, it seems to me, that she both loved and abhorred these characters, found them both charming and dull, stimulating and achingly self-involved. At one point, one of the characters refers to "the sheer dentist-drill boredom of listening to the arguments of the devil as a modern quasi-intellectual," signaling her contempt for this maundering, while unable to resist the urge to participate in it.

The centerpiece of the book is a dinner party that doubles as a reading—in French—of a Racine play by a group of comfortable, middle-class white people, over-educated, narrowly focused, egotistical and underemployed, discussing the nature of the world and its people. They begin with the assumption that all of them speak French fluently enough to read, understand and comment on the play, itself an indication of their status as "serious thinkers". While the conversation devolves into tautologies and arrogant pronouncements, one of the participants criticizes George Bernard Shaw as a writer who could not write tragedy because "the tragic action turned into a discussion group." While the plot of this book moves toward tragedy, these unfortunate souls wallow in their own discussion group. The juxtaposition of this statement with the reality of the situation they are in cannot be merely coincidental.

In the end, this book turns out to be all of the above: it is about characters for which we feel both contempt and concern, an intellectual tour de force about quasi-intellectual self-indulgence, a period piece about post-war malaise, a treatise on the transitional period that came just before the great upheaval of the 1960s, and a very human tragedy. It is well worth reading.

[Bill FromPA · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much an ensemble piece with one star and seven other main characters. Wide-ranging in its themes and subjects, touching on theology, philosophy, and art as well as its main concern: human relationships, their deceptions, and self-deceptions.

The novel takes place in New Leeds, a fictional town on the New England seacoast populated by minor artists of various sorts, eccentrics, and alcoholics (not mutually exclusive sets). In one plot thread, which proves to have repercussions throughout the story, Miles Murphy buys a huge (6 X 11 ft) post-Cubist portrait of his ex-wife Martha from Warren Coe, a local artist whose paintings his neighbors consider something of a joke. Coe’s only other sales have been to his father-in-law, exchanges everyone has considered acts of charity under the guise of “purchases”.

Later, Martha and her current husband John speak to a local, known as “the vicomte” who knows the details of the sale. They are astonished to discover the price was $1800. Martha and John try to figure out how the price was determined:

“How did he arrive at it, do you think?” she wondered, turning to her husband. “By the yard,” he ventured. “Actually, it’s not a big price, by Fifty-seventh Street standards. A dealer would want two thousand, anyway, for a Pollock or DeKooning of that size.” “But Coe is an unknown,” virtuously objected the vicomte. “It appears to me that he took an advantage of his friend.” (71)

Of course in 1955, Pollock was still alive and productive. In a strange way, his death in a car accident a year later makes MCarthy's unexpected and otherwise unsatisfying ending more acceptable, a not uncommon end of bohemianism.

[Johann Guenther · Rating 3 out of 5]

McCARTHY, Mary: „Der Zauberkreis“, Wien 1954
Der Schauplatz dieses Romans ist ein kleiner Ort – New Leeds – an der Ostküste Amerikas. Hier leben Leute, die sich aus der Hektik der Großstädte New York oder Boston aufs Land zurückgezogen haben. Oft hoch gebildete Menschen, die dann einfachen Arbeiten nachgingen oder von ihren Rücklagen lebten. Im Buch hat man den Eindruck, dass alle Menschen ohne Arbeit leben. Ein „Bienenstock von Untätigkeit“ heißt es auf Seite 155. Viele sind Alkoholiker und Hobby-Künstler. Der Autor stellt seinem Leser aber ausgefallene Persönlichkeiten vor. Die Hauptpersonen sind mehrere Ehepaare, die aus verschiedenen Gründen zusammentreffen, Darunter auch geschiedene, die in Gesellschaften wieder ihre getrennten Partner treffen. Dies wird im Roman psychologisch aufgearbeitet. Etwas wie es Martha, die geschieden ist und mit einem netten Mann zusammenwohnt geht, wenn sie ihren getrennten Ehemann trifft. Nach einer Party, bei der sie alleine war und zu viel getrunken hatte bringt sie der Ex-Mann nach Hause und es kommt zu einem Geschlechtsverkehr. Sie wird schwanger und ist sich nicht im Klaren, ob das Kind vom jetzigen Mann ist oder vom Ex-Mann. Verzweifelt sucht sie nach einer Abtreibung. Ein Freund hilft ihr mit Geld und Abtreibungsadresse. Nach Übernahme des Geldes ist sie fröhlich und zuversichtlich alles mit der geplanten Abtreibung wieder ins Lot zu bringen. Auf der Heimfahrt kommt es zu einem Verkehrsunfall und sie stirbt. Sie stirbt mit dem Kind im Bauch.
Erst in den letzten 100 Seiten nahm der Roman „Fahrt auf“ und wurde abwechslungsreicher und interessanter. Action kam in die Langatmigkeit des Schreibers.
Es ist eine sehr langarmige und detailgenaue Erzählung, die wenig an Spannung besitzt.

[David Guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I got Miranday July’s novel All Fours for Christmas—at my request—it occurred to me that I might compare this generation’s notorious female with the corresponding woman from my mother’s generation, Mary McCarthy (1912-1989). I was up to the fourth novel in my reading of McCarthy, and A Charmed Life happens to concern midlife infidelity, like July’s.

I actually loved A Charmed Life and thought it in many ways the best of McCarthy’s first four novels, until the last paragraph. I won’t say that ruined the whole book, but it came close. Why an experienced writer would choose an ending like that, after all the work of producing a novel, is beyond me.

But the milieu here is right in McCarthy’s wheelhouse, an artist colony in New York state by the name of New Leeds, because she is first and foremost a satirist (and showed us that when she tore apart a utopian community in The Oasis). There are a few genuine artists in New Leeds, and our protagonist, Martha Sinnott—who has come there to work on a play, and also in the hope of starting a family with her second husband, John Sinott—is one of them; she’s a dramatist and a woman of the theater. Another serious artist, though we don’t notice at first, is a man named Warren Coe; he and his wife Jane are well-connected in the community, and are helping the Sinnotts settle in. Coe paints with the dedication of an established artist but doesn’t exhibit his work. A third is a scholar/writer by the name of Miles Murphy, but he is problematic for Jane, because he was her first husband, and they had a tumultuous relationship, which included Jane’s sudden exit in the middle of the night, the conflagration of a house that burned it to the ground, and the death of Miles’ child from an earlier marriage (after she had left). Miles’ presence in New Leeds is an argument for her not to return at all, and she avoids him early in her stay, but eventually realizes she can’t do that forever.

Miles is rather obviously based on Edmund Wilson, one of the intellectual heroes of my youth (he was a frequent reviewer for the New Yorker in those days), and he comes across as a brilliant man, hugely learned, but also an intellectual bully and an overbearing conversationalist who absolutely must hold center stage. Why he would choose to live in New Leeds is beyond me. He won’t find his intellectual equal there. He does like social events and is a big drinker, an activity that is central to New Leeds. For most of the artists in the colony, it is the major pastime, other than sleeping around and getting married yet again. Pretentious artists need pretenders surrounding them. There is no shortage of such people in New Leeds.

There is a wonderful interim passage in this novel in which a young woman artist named Dolly Lamb encounters one of the colony’s leading freeloaders, a guy named Sandy Gray who has a naturalist and also a bohemian air, has no manners whatsoever, starts bullying her and telling her what to do, and in general infiltrates her life, to the point where I couldn’t believe she would let him do it. He’s the kind of guy who nowadays would set up as a Life Coach (who the hell needs to be coached about life?). She later speaks for him in a custody battle with his fourth wife (spoiler alert: he loses), after which he goes back home, gets drunk, and finally gets down—it seems—to having sex with Dolly (except that he’s impotent. Naturally). This man embodies everything that is goofy and phony about New Leeds, and in that way is important to the satire. But in terms of our protagonist and her narrative, the passage doesn’t belong in the novel at all. I kept thinking, what’s this doing here?

I don’t know that I’ve ever read a novel which so much of the plot revolves around a single sexual act, between Martha and—as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now—her ex. They go together to a play-reading that the group is doing together, with Miles holding forth as usual about the historical background and various interpretations. Afterwards he had Martha are thrown together, or at least drift together; for once, he seems mildly charming (his wife is elsewhere, as is her husband), and we can almost see why Martha married him. We also see the seduction coming a mile away, especially because the booze is flowing. He agrees to take her home, and people at the party—especially Warren Coe—see what’s coming too. She invites him in for a drink (yeah, right), and the event happens.

It is an act which a woman in the 21st century would call a rape. Mary McCarthy’s generation didn’t call it that, and I don’t think mine would have either. Martha had let Miles kiss her and begin fooling around, but she resisted the actual act for quite a while, while Miles was—even I would say this—forcing himself on her. That was all part of foreplay in those day; the woman resisted a little to prove she was a good girl. There was a sex scene very much like this one in McCarthy’s first novel. In this case, Martha really didn’t want to, but she finally gave in because it seemed less trouble than resisting. She doesn’t enjoy the act, and by that time Miles probably didn’t either. It all seems perfunctory and depressing.

That, naturally, is the month when Martha gets pregnant, and she spends the rest of the novel trying to decide what to do. She doesn’t have anyone to talk to or confide it; the community is terrifically gossipy, and the whole place would know immediately. She doesn’t even know the local doctor (and in the mid-forties, there’s no telling how sympathetic he’ll be). Abortion is illegal, of course, but (as Diane Di Prima showed us) it’s also rather common. There’s a moment when Martha actually argues to herself that abortion to be the more moral alternative; there’s a switch, I thought to myself. She’s afraid that the baby will come out looking like Warren, or have his red hair, which would be a dead giveaway. She’s also haunted by the idea that she might never know whose child it is. That bothers her more than anything else.

I found this a fascinating moral dilemma, one well worth basing a novel on. What bothered me was the way it resolved itself. I won’t reveal that, but if you’re thinking of reading this novel—I can’t remember ever saying this before—I’d read the last paragraph first. You won’t be let down at the end. And you can enjoy one of McCarthy’s most biting satires.

www.davidguy.org

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm interested in Mar McCarthy, partly because of the length of her career and partly because of the effect her Catholicism had on her writing. This novel has some brilliantly drawn characters, especially the protagonist, Martha Sinnott. As we follow her mental processes, she is frustratingly dedicated to discovering her "truth." But, clearly, as we view the activities of the other characters, she is misled by her past experiences, by her misreading of the veracity and good will of her husband and friends, and by her own talents as a playwright. Art, criticism, and how one determines the value of artistic effort, are all examined in this painfully articulated novel. I liked it, even though there were parts of it that were over my head (the play-reading of Racine's Berneice).

[Anne]

I like Mary McCarthy generally for her extremely detailed depictions of extremely specific and yet somehow recognizable personality types and tropes. A lot of description, not a lot of action set in a quite contained, claustrophobic narrative and setting. I generally enjoyed, although there were moments of tedium tinged with an unpleasant sense of foreboding. I eventually had to read the last few pages just to take the edge off. Lots of food for thought for those who gravitate to the expression "plus ca change..."

[Sarah Steed · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably a 3.5, but that's not an option. An early Mary McCarthy set among a Cape Cod community of what can only be described as 1950s hipsters. Seriously, these people are artists who drink out of jars and eschew electric stoves in favour of making toast on an open fire. It's a slow burn but with the supporting characters and subplots just as well drawn as the main ones, it became a page turner. And I was completely blindsided by the ending.

[Fionnuala · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up for a buck in a second hand shop and rather liked it. Very funny descriptions of New England proto drop outs, ghastly and plausible. Not a major novel, but smart, wry and well-written. How I do love 1950s books...

[sdrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd never heard of Mary McCarthy before - found her on a shelf in a beach house. Perfect book for Summer. Reminded me of Wallace Stegner - in terms of the characters. Can't get the last page out of my mind. Enjoyed it and looking forward to reading more by her.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loving all things Cape Cod and having just read Hayden Herrera’s forthcoming memoir about the 40s and 50s in bohemian Wellfleet, I was cruising through this book, enjoying the wit and language. And then...that ending. That ending!!!?!???

[Kristina]

The Memory of Running

[Jean Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun poke at a little town of 'bohemians' and their foibles.

[Marko]

I have the german edition: Verzaubertes Leben?