Among the Bohemians (10 page)

Here too, Bohemians felt themselves to be standing on the moral high ground in relation to society in general.
They were revolted by humbug and pusillanimity, by prudery combined with furtive promiscuity.
The ‘illicit’ nature of sexual liaisons during that period both made a statement and added hugely to the excitement.
The sense that the terrain on which they were so joyously cavorting was really a public lawn sternly labelled keep off, made the Bohemian sex pioneers almost inebriated with their own wickedness.
For Vanessa Bell, mentioning the word semen was only a start.
Painting ‘really indecent subjects’ was another way to get Mrs Grundy running for her policeman’s helmet.

I suggest a series of copulations in strange attitudes and have offered to pose [she wrote to Roger Fry in 1911].
Will you join?
I mean in the painting.
We think there ought to be more indecent pictures painted…

Bawdy was fun; Nina Hamnett would regale a pub full of regulars with smutty jokes and limericks:

I sometimes wish when I am tight

That I were an hermaphrodite

And then, united to a black

Deep-bosomed nymphomaniac

We’d be wafted up to heaven

In position forty-seven.

Being shocked was for prudes and old maids.
Where was the kick in being genteel?

By the time Marie Stopes’s book
Married Love
was published in 1918, there was no stopping the onward rush of what Douglas Goldring called the New Morality.
For in it Stopes pointed out – to married and unmarried alike – the importance of mutual orgasm, and directed her readers to a little-known part of the female anatomy, the clitoris.
This, she explained in the most tactful language, could, by arousal, consummate a woman’s desires.
She also advocated such consummation as beneficial and valuable quite apart from the useful, procreative function of sex.
In order to achieve this desirable result, it was permissible to have sex without having children, and Stopes explained how to do it.
Her book came, as Goldring said, like the answer to a prayer.
Equally liberating were the newly published writings of Freud.
The literate and semi-literate eagerly pounced on his psychoanalytical theories, which, with their new-found vocabulary of ‘repressions’, ‘complexes’, ‘release of inhibitions’ and ‘unconscious desires’, provided a persuasive rationale for more or less doing what you wanted to do.
And now the plaguey Puritans could protest in vain, for the gateway was flung wide, and the way was paved for an adventure of the senses, a voyage of experimentation with Bohemia off to a flying start and free-thinkers of all colours tagging along behind.

*

Now it no longer seemed to matter if you branched out into unconventional permutations; for artists, self-expression was all, and as in art the spirit of modernism was blowing away the shreds and tatters of conventional representation, so in love and sex the rules were toppling, giving way to imaginative refractions and reinterpretations of the norm.
For example, was the conventional couple mandatory?
What law proscribed living with more than one woman, or more than one man, or a man and a woman?
As it happened bigamy had been illegal in Britain since 1603 and homosexuality was only legalised between consenting adults in private in 1967, but Bohemia is a country with a more relaxed attitude to these transgressions, and its inhabitants were undeterred by laws beyond their frontiers.
The
ménage à trois,
or occasionally
à quatre,
was not uncommon.
Not that these relationships would have constituted an offence against the law, for in most cases the
individuals were only married to one of the partners in the household, the other being brought in as an accessory live-in mistress.
The complexities of these households could become labyrinthine.
The Bloomsbury Group was once described as ‘a circle of people who lived in squares and loved in triangles’.
But the phenomenon was by no means confined to Bloomsbury, which for all its infamous reputation was restrained compared to some set-ups.

The young Helen Maitland came to Europe from the west coast of America in 1909; in Paris she fell in with the artistic community that revolved around Augustus John, who had been living there since 1905.
Helen became mistress to Augustus’s friend Henry Lamb, who had recently parted from his wife, Euphemia.
When that affair turned nasty she re-attached herself to the talented and dashing Russian mosaicist, Boris Anrep.

She started living with my father Boris in about 1910 [recalled their son, Igor]… and they were very happy in Paris together – but, he had a wife.
He always had two wives, all his life, which of course made for difficulties.
He had married Yunia in Russia – she was a young lady of a respectable family and he was caught in bed with her, and he was made to marry her… and she was living in the house when my father took on my mother, and they lived in a
ménage à trois
in Paris for quite some time.

Then at the beginning of the War I was born, and my mother thought it better to go back to England.
They took a cottage in Gloucestershire, and Yunia came too – in fact she helped my mother with the children.

With Boris away in Russia, there was little reason for Yunia to remain, and she went back to Poland.
When Boris eventually returned in 1917 he brought with him a substitute, his brother’s sister-in-law, a beautiful seventeen-year-old called Maroussia, who moved in with the family, by then living in Hampstead:

One tended to go round a corner and find my mother in floods of tears, not because she was jealous of Maroussia, but because Boris and Maroussia had been having a terrific row – Russians are given to shouting at one another – and they shouted their heads off”such a lot that it upset my mother, who really didn’t like high emotions… Boris was pretty unfaithful, not only with Maroussia but with numerous other people, and my mother got a bit tired of it.
She left him for Roger Fry.
My father cut up terribly rough, and he threatened to tar and feather Roger Fry, and Roger took this terribly seriously and went out and bought himself a pistol, but the pistol was not to shoot Boris, it was to shoot himself if he was tarred and feathered!

Helen duly settled down with Roger Fry as his wife in all but name (for he had a living wife, tragically certified insane), while Boris and Maroussia continued their tempestuous relationship.

But this was nothing compared to the tortuous intricacies that played havoc with the marriage of Robert Graves and Nancy Nicholson.
The American poetess Laura Riding had entered the Graves’s lives in 1926; her advent precipitated upheavals in the marriage, which was already showing signs of strain.
The couple’s financial situation was perilous, Graves was shell-shocked, and Nancy was struggling to keep the family afloat.
However Laura’s powerful personality acted like a rudder on the ménage, and by 1929 comparative peace reigned in the Graves/Nicholson/Riding household at ‘Free Love Corner’ in Hammersmith.
For Laura they were a wonderful ‘Trinity’, invested with a mystical aura.
It was the arrival of number four, an obscure poet and entomologist named Geoffrey Phibbs who wrote under the pseudonym Geoffrey Taylor, that tipped the balance into anarchy and farce.
Phibbs was in thrall to Laura’s eccentric theories of ‘The Four’, but Laura’s mystic creed was impenetrably confusing…

R = L   >N   >R

L = G   >R   >N   >L

L = N   >G

N = G   >L   >R

… and he found himself struggling to make sense of his own position in this convolute quadratic equation.
Laura had taken charge; she was the crazed vivisectionist of his destiny.
It is hard to imagine today how potent and overwhelming the experience of sex must have been in those early decades of the twentieth century, when orgasm seemed an experience like the discovery of radium.
Its impact was incalculable, dizzying; no wonder it drove people like Laura Riding over the edge.

Years later, David Garnett described the ensuing melodrama in a paper given to Bloomsbury’s Memoir Club; his own incidental involvement came about because he had had a passionate affair with Phibbs’s wife Norah – but she is peripheral to the story:

Geoffrey was tall, dark, immature, adventurous and very nice.
Like Shelley he believed in Love and Freedom and Free Love and hated his conventional Anglo-Irish fishing and shooting family…

Robert Graves and Laura Riding formed a group… they welcomed Geoffrey Phibbs with delight.
He made them into a real group of poets.
They were engaged
in publishing their works, thoughts and pronunciamientos under the name Seisin… Becoming one of a group with Robert Graves and Laura Riding… was all rather terrific and a change for Geoffrey after living alone with Norah in a cabin in the Wicklow Mountains.

And it was still more terrific when Laura Riding took him as her lover and drove him all the way from Hammersmith to the Burlington Arcade in a taxi where she bought him an immensely expensive pair of black silk pyjamas for him to wear in bed with her.
She had the bill sent to Robert Graves, explaining to Geoffrey that [T.
E.
Lawrence] would provide the money… He had been sent providentially to help in the great work.
Laura Riding had everything planned out.
And her plan was to shake the Universe itself.

… One day, quite unexpectedly, Geoffrey Phibbs sent me a telegram saying that he was coming to stay with Ray [Garnett’s wife] and me at Hilton Hall.
He wanted advice…

I spent almost all the time of his visit discussing the predicament in which he found himself and his future and giving him advice.
The trouble was that he was scared of Laura Riding.
She had told him, as a great secret, that she was going to stop TIME, and that his help was necessary for this operation.
Stopping time was carried out in bed.
Robert was all right in bed and she loved him and admired him – but he had proved no good as a time-stopper.
[Geoffrey] discovered that she really believed that with the assistance of this vigorous new young lover she was going to break the frame of the universe.
What was more, she was dead nuts on doing it.

‘Time has been going on long enough,’ she would say earnestly.
‘We can break through and stop it.
Not just move about in it as Donne has shown is possible, but smash it up altogether.’ She expected him to do his share of the work.
No shirking was allowed.
She had a timetable.

… Geoffrey had decided that on no account would he go back to live with Laura.
It was not that he was afraid that she would prove right and that he would suddenly find himself an Immortal… suspended in a timeless universe.
No.
It was not the
consequences
that scared him but the
process
designed to bring it about.
He could not and would not face it any longer…

Meanwhile Graves and Laura had tracked Geoffrey down to the Garnetts’ home in Huntingdonshire.
There were flurries of telegrams:

‘Will never return to Laura.’

‘Laura cannot live without you.
Robert.’

‘Absolutely refuse to return to Laura.
Geoffrey.’

‘Am coming to fetch you.
Matter of life and death.
Robert.’

A desperate Robert Graves then hired a car and drove to Hilton to fetch Geoffrey back; Graves issued threats.
Compromises were negotiated.
Geoffrey departed; but within twenty-four hours he was back again, wild eyed and on the verge of an emotional collapse.
Laura had threatened suicide; but still Geoffrey refused to live with her.
She argued and implored.
Laura had then hurled herself from the fourth-storey window fracturing her spine.
By a miracle she survived and was able to walk again.
Geoffrey squared the circle by soon after taking up with Nancy, who by this time was feeling a bit left out, and went off with her to look after the Graves children.
Laura and Robert left the country.

*

Assuredly, the nuclear family was not the only way; in Bohemia one could, and did, live differently.
To dismiss this as self-indulgence is to miss the ideological rationale, the belief that sexual freedom was on a higher plane that guided much of their behaviour, bungled and flawed though it probably was.
Maybe it is our loss.
Certainly that behaviour appears to have been fired by hope and by a belief that one can conduct one’s relationships in a truly unpossessive and co-operative manner.

Henry Lamb tentatively suggested a commune to include Dorelia John (with whom he had also been conducting a passionate affair) and Augustus, Ottoline and Philip Morrell, Helen Maitland and himself; the proposal was not adopted, probably because Augustus was unlikely ever to agree to any formal arrangement.
His own ménage at the time, consisting of himself, his wife Ida and his mistress Dorelia, achieved a precarious stability because the two women were devoted to one another, and because Ida was reluctant to play the jealous wife role.
‘I shall never consider myself a wife – it is a mockery,’ she wrote to Dorelia.

David Garnett, aggressively heterosexual by temperament, nonetheless succumbed to the dangerous allure of a three-way ménage at Charleston during the First World War, consisting of himself, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.
The household at Ham Spray – Lytton Strachey, Carrington and Ralph Partridge – has inspired several books, and a notable film; but not so much is known about Carrington’s friend Christine Kühlenthal, wife of the painter John Nash, herself a talented ex-Slade student.
Christine adopted the Bohemian posture towards life – her cropped hair and Dorelia-style dresses identifying her firmly with the younger generation of freethinkers and breakaways.
Growing up in Gerrards Cross, Christine’s bosom
companion was another artistic ‘crophead’, Norah; together they communed with nature in the wooded glades of suburbia, dressed in corduroy breeches and floppy blouses.
They were flatmates until 1917, but a source of local gossip ended when Norah left to become a landgirl.
Missing her, Christine became engaged to John Nash, who was sent to the trenches as a war artist.
Meanwhile Norah married her boyfriend Charlie.
Christine visited them frequently and wrote to John of their happy new state of affairs: