Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts
Elizabeth Wilson
275pp, I B Tauris
£19.95
Buy it at BOL

A Magick Life: A Biography of Aleister Crowley
Martin Booth
507pp, Hodder & Stoughton
£20
Buy it at BOL

At their best, bohemians are the heroic harbingers of change, sharpening their style and their poses as weapons against the ugliness and oppression of bourgeois existence. At their worst, they are wasters of time and talent, the clowns of art.

No one would seriously consider that Gérard de Nerval walking a lobster around the gardens of the Palais Royale was an example of the heroism of everyday life, but Nerval inhabited the same world of outcasts as the young people of the Swingjugend in Nazi Germany who turned their lives into an instrument of opposition by gathering in clandestine groups to listen to "decadent Jewish" jazz music and affecting long hair and English styles of dress.

At least, the consanguinity of these different characterisations of "bohemian" is Elizabeth Wilson's thesis, which is convincing if sometimes sketchy. Bohemia, she feels, grew up as "a myth that seeks to reconcile art to industrial capitalism". Industrialisation meant the size and complexity of life were seemingly a conspiracy against the sensitive and the despairing young. Bohemians were artists as valiant outsiders, challenging every aspect of conventional life but still, as Baudelaire complained, performers who suffered to amuse the hated bourgeois spectators like gladiators from ancient Rome.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the bohemians cultivated their difference from the dominant culture in dress, lifestyle and morality. "Bohemia" was also a number of geographical locations - of cafés, cabarets and cheap lodgings - though Montmartre, Soho and Greenwich Village had all become sideshows for tourists by the 1920s.

Wilson is strong on the women of bohemia, emphasising their role in relation both to their own circle and the outside world. The most commonly occurring types were the seamstresses, such as Mimi in La Bohème, who wore grey material which gave them their name: grisettes. The grisette was caught between her working-class status and the world of fashion that conferred an air of refinement without the social position to justify it. Not all artists warmed to the grisettes; Flaubert despised "their simpering, their cleanliness, their clothes consciousness and flirtatious mannerisms".

Women with sexually "bohemian morals" were welcome; female artists less so. That middle-class artists took grisettes as girlfriends was a denial of the notion that women themselves could be creative, showing how much the morals of bohemia were traditional and rooted in the bourgeois values supposedly being rejected.

The bohemian pose - giving the impression that all you really need to do to be an artist is drink absinthe and talk about art - led to many would-be artists settling for the pose alone, so their artistic output was dwarfed by the intensity of their bohemian lifestyle.

One of the most absurd was "the great beast" Aleister Crowley, who expended his talents in impressing or shocking people rather than refining his writing. His first book of verse, White Stains, was published by the bohemian pornographer Leonard Smithers and contained poems on such subjects as necrophilia, pederasty and sex with a menstruating woman. As soon as he was able, using money inherited from his family, Crowley set up in a flat in Chancery Lane, using whatever drugs he could get hold of to assist in such exercises as the raising of 316 semi-materialised beings to march round the apartment.

He devoted himself to the exercise of the will and magical rites: divination, the cabbala, clairvoyance and "skreighing [shrieking] in the spirit vision". This last was not to prove popular with the neighbours.

It was not all fun, however; there were such tasks as tending the human skeleton that he fed with blood and dead sparrows in a futile effort to bring it back to life. He was a champion of such weird stuff and the fact that, like his rival W B Yeats, he took it all so seriously, adds to the amusement provided by Martin Booth's biography.

Crowley had tremendous success with neurotic, bohemian women, whom he flattered by making common seduction into the supposed initiation into magical discourse. He would invite them to "Orgie and Incantations", which he promised would unlock their magical potential. These included taking opium (sacred to Jupiter), indulging in sodomy (sacred to Hermes) and enjoying Crowley's connoisseurship of sexual fluids which he graded by a scale of flavour.

Crowley married Rose, a woman adept at giving him just what he wanted from a relationship: on their honeymoon Crowley woke to find his beloved "hanging bat-like and naked from the mosquito frame over their bed" which he took as evidence that her soul was open to possession. Later on this eventful trip Rose led him to a funerary stele in Cairo Museum featuring Horus that had the exhibit number 666: the number of the beast. It was a sign for Crowley alone.

Martin Booth all too tentatively touches the truth about Crowley and his acolytes when he suggests that Crowley's wife made herself "magically" essential to him, in channelling spirits and other such tricks, not because she believed in them, but because if she did not play along with his magical ambitions, he would abandon her.

In the 1920s, debilitated by drugs, disease and poverty (he had long since squandered his inheritance in exotic travel), even Crowley suspected the truth, writing: "I have doubted as to whether I am such a great magician after all."

Crowley demonstrates how the self-centred nature of the artistic process can easily translate into personal selfishness - family, friends and society become less than the artistic vision. He further suffered a case of what we might call bohemian shift, where the artistic vision itself became less important than the egoism. Every person, every institution was soft and worthless, "a sovereign of suet, a parliament of putty, an intelligentsia of India rubber" - except Crowley himself with his indomitable will. Sadly, he never had the self-discipline to develop his genuine writing talents, nor the humility to subject himself to the discipline of a good editor.