Among the Bohemians (12 page)

Men ‘stooping to conquer’ was nothing new, indeed it was almost regarded as an obligatory rite of passage for young eighteenth– and nineteenth-century blades to test their prowess on available girls of the lower class; but Bohemia brought a new twist to the tradition.
Carrington’s capriciousness caused her lover Gerald Brenan endless heartache and loneliness, which he assuaged by the obsessive picking-up of shopgirls or homeless teenagers from off the London streets.
They would go for long mournful walks together, eat fried eggs in workmen’s cafés, and stagger back to Brenan’s flat in the early hours for stimulating proletarian sex sessions.
Later, when Carrington married Ralph Partridge, one aspect of the
ménage à trois
– consisting of Lytton Strachey and the Partridges – was that Ralph liked heterosexual sex and Carrington didn’t.
However, it was important for Carrington to keep Ralph within the ring-fence in order to secure Lytton’s all-important happiness – for he was in love with Ralph.
Carrington thought Ralph would stray if his lusts were unrequited, so, according to Frances Partridge, she colluded in providing him with a spot of extra sex:

When they were living in Tidmarsh there was a very juicy girl called Annie who worked for them, blonde… and Carrington was quite capable of egging Ralph on to make up to Annie in order to get something done, or to soothe her down after she’d had too much to do, or too many people’s sheets to change… and he would certainly give her a kiss… Carrington loved secrets, and I think the situation of the mistress of the house egging him on tickled them both.
I don’t think he minded at all; she was always encouraging him to have affairs, because the worry was that otherwise he would leave Lytton…

Laclos’s
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
(1782) was a favourite Bloomsbury text; its depiction of a sexual laboratory where dilettante scientists carried out combustible experiments on unsuspecting victims exactly suited the Blooms-bury spirit of mischief.
They loved the intrigue and gossip which made an aphrodisiac of daily life.
‘What a pity one can’t now and then change sexes!’ lamented Lytton Strachey.
‘I should love to be a dowager Countess.’ ‘You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing’ (quoted by Arnold Bax in his memoirs) could have been a Bohemian motto, were it not that even those taboo activities were tried by some of the freer-spirited among their number.
The conventional world was fall of confining prohibitions, unmentionable acts, undoable deeds, but Bohemia was emancipated from limitations; yet even in this there was a kind of morality, almost a political correctness.
The matter-of-fact Naomi Mitchison took the line that it was wrong to condemn; she was way ahead of her time in this.
What married middle-class lady writer would be as relaxed as she was when asked by a friend to tie him up and beat him…‘… which I did, making fierce faces and quite enjoying it myself but not, I expect, hurting him as much as he might have preferred.
Why should we insist on certain patterns of conduct?’

Ethel Mannin’s broadmindedness was stretched to its limits however when the obese and repellent Dr Norman Haire, who had made a fortune from fitting intrauterine devices and was secretary of something called the ‘World League for Sexual Reform’, asked her whether she had ever tried bestiality: ‘In response to my reaction of horror [he] asked calmly, “Why not?” and added, with an unusual smile, “They say you can train a peke to do anything!”’

The sculptor and typographer Eric Gill is now known to have had incestuous relationships with all three of his daughters, and yet, as his biographer has demonstrated, there was almost a spirit of innocent experimentation at work in him.
The Gill daughters appear to have been psychologically   undamaged,   and   perhaps   this   was   owing   to   their   father’s
unexploitative, unthreatening approach.
He wanted to know, to prove, to explore, to celebrate; he saw no moral contradictions in marital infidelity, in being a Catholic who disapproved of birth control and of homosexuality, yet indulged in incest, troilism – and bestiality.
His capacity for egocentric delusion on the grand scale was quite extraordinary, and yet relatively harmless.
Gill’s erotic art speaks of a man guiltlessly in love with the sheer wonder and beauty of sex and the human body.

To have got away with such preposterous behaviour for as long as Gill did and remain married – which he did – indicates an unusual degree of compliance on the part of Mary his wife.
But Mary was more than just tolerant; she believed herself blessed with incredible fortune in being married to a man of such talent, and even after nearly twenty-five years of putting up with Gill was able to write devotedly to him, ‘I am simply bubbling all over with pride at the thought of being your wife.’ For her, geniuses were absolved from the normal rules of behaviour.

‘Earth Receiving’.
A wood engraving for
Procreant Hymn
, 1926, by Eric Gill.

*

The ideal of truthful living and truthful loving was a potent one.
The old-fashioned institution of marriage stood little chance against it, and yet it could not be jettisoned overnight.
Edwardian society was gripped by ‘the
marriage question’; it was a burning issue that touched on women’s rights and on the entire basis of society itself.
The public debate was constantly aired in the correspondence columns of daily papers, while intellectuals, playwrights, novelists and politicians all made exhaustive mileage out of it.
Thus any free-thinking Bohemian worth the name who was considering plighting their troth to their beloved found themselves at the cutting edge of public controversy.
If you were a feminist, marriage seemed like a legalistic concession to the tyranny of patriarchy.
If you were an artist, were you to regard conventional marriage as incompatible with your way of life, or as simply irrelevant?
Did you try what became known as ‘the modern experiment’ or ‘companionate marriage’, and go ‘Lawrencing off together’ into the sunset?
You were forced to take a stand on the matter.

Arthur Ransome was unequivocal: ‘The door into the registrar’s office is the door out of Bohemia.’ But others saw matrimony as a great excuse for an unconventional party
à la Bohème,
like that of Roy Campbell and Mary Garman in 1922.
The bride wore a long black dress and a long golden veil; the groom managed to borrow a frock-coat from a waiter at the Eiffel Tower, but his shoes were full of holes.
Wyndham Lewis was one of the guests at the Harlequin nightclub in Beak Street, Soho:

The marriage-feast was a distinguished gathering, if you are prepared to admit distinction to the Bohemian, for it was almost gypsy in its freedom from the conventional restraints.
It occurred in a room upstairs.
In the middle of it Campbell and his bride retired.
The guests then became quarrelsome…

The Ukrainian Jewish artist Jacob Kramer appears to have picked a fight with Augustus John over the size of his biceps, at which point Roy Campbell, disturbed by the fracas, abandoned his nuptial bed, re-entered the room in pyjamas and threatened to throw Kramer out of the upper-floor window: ‘You let my guests alone, Jacob.
Don’t let me hear you’ve interfered with John again.
Mind I’m only just upstairs, Jacob.
I’ll come down to you!’ He then went back to bed.
‘This was a typical “post-war” scene,’ claimed Wyndham Lewis.
‘This is how, in the “post-war”, you were married and were given in marriage…”

For the Campbells, matrimony was to be a rocky ride, a test of endurance by poverty, alcoholism and infidelity.
It was in the hope of finding creative stability that some couples resolved to run their relationships along rational lines.
The idea of the open marriage or partnership appealed strongly to those high-minded individuals who saw themselves as logical yet instinctive, egalitarian yet passionate.
In Bohemia one lived for higher things – art,
music, poetry; one ought to be able to conduct one’s relationships, too, on elevated principles.
People like Naomi Mitchison imagined themselves living a free artistic life unhampered by petty possessiveness, infidelity and accusations.
And she and her husband, Dick, were scrupulous in examining their motivations in agreeing to be unfaithful to one another.
Having consented to that principle, they worked hard to stick to their self-imposed rules.
There was to be no jealousy, no casual promiscuity, no hurtful comments.
Affection and respect were to remain the bedrock of their marriage, which expanded to permit new channels of communication.
It wasn’t always easy to cut loose from their guilt-laden upbringing, but Naomi believed powerfully in the need to do so: ‘I sometimes hoped I was fighting for more freedom, for a whole generation of women.
My daughters perhaps?’ They were high hopes indeed, and Naomi Mitchison felt buoyed up by the sense of a turning tide.
She envisaged a happy future when her grandchildren might be the offspring of several fathers, ‘uncensured’, when the defences built by a doomed patriarchy might be smashed by the unstoppable flood of true sexual liberty.

Her dream has of course come true – we are surrounded today by the lapping waters of the permissive society – but it is surely not the one she hoped for.
Naomi Mitchison was aware that feelings of occasional guilt or jealousy tainted her ideology; considering the world in which she and her generation had been brought up, how could it be otherwise?
Their dreams of free love were on a collision course with bourgeois ethics, with repression, ignorance and unthinking tradition.
These were the ‘false’ lives and ‘false’ loves that Bohemia turned its back on, and it is not hard to see why.

*

It is worth reminding ourselves of the fact that Victorian society prohibited unmarried men and women from meeting alone, a rule that was upheld by the strait-laced until well into the twentieth century.
Chaperones were there to enforce these rules.
At balls, a girl might not dance more than three dances with any one partner.
On the face of it, there is something preposterous indeed about the notion that two young people of the opposite sex will instantly commence sexual gropings unless accompanied by a married gentlewoman or a servant.
But chaperones were seen as necessary for vetting the social suitability of potential suitors, as much as for preventing illicit fumbling.
Seen anthropologically, chaperones were not so much the Mrs Whitehouses of their day, prudes shocked into fainting fits by the thought of sex, as society’s watchdogs, constantly on the alert for class transgressions.
Their golden rule was avoidance of scandal.
For adventurous spirits it felt
stifling to be so constantly nannied and scrutinised, with things you mustn’t do, mustn’t be, mustn’t express.
And it was the bourgeoisie that mutinied, for the propriety ethic was overwhelmingly middle class.
Artists felt indignant that licentious behaviour should be the preserve of the aristocracy, as it had been hitherto.
If toffs with handles to their names could behave permissively, then so could artists, who felt themselves to be equally far above the common herd.

Aristocratic circles had always regarded themselves as exempt from pettifogging ordinances – the seventh commandment for example.
It was understood amongst the élite – without having to be spelt out – that the hostess of an Edwardian house-party would, with the utmost tact, so dispose the guests’ bedrooms as to accommodate ‘recognised’ lovers within easy reach of each other.
One’s strait-laced housekeeper would disapprove, but duchesses were above censure.
In Vita Sackville-West’s novel
The Edwardians
(1930), based on her own memories of an upper-class upbringing, the nineteen-year-old hero, Sebastian, has an adulterous liaison with Sylvia, the wife of Lord Roehampton; all is well until scandal threatens, then the affair breaks up.
Vita herself became passionately involved with the tempestuous Violet Trefusis, who was the daughter of Edward VII’s mistress.
Although ‘everybody’ knew about these illicit entanglements, nobody spoke about them in public.
As Mrs Patrick Campbell once famously said, ‘I don’t mind where people make love, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.’ Meanwhile the rules had to be seen to be observed – and there were so many of them:

I was still forbidden to be alone with a man except by chance in the country.
A married woman must bring me home from a ball.
For walking and shopping and even driving in a taxi, a sister or a girl was enough protection.
I could go to the Ritz but to no other London hotel.
But generally there was more freedom…

remembered Diana Cooper of her upper-class upbringing just before the First World War.
Nice girls were also banned by their mothers from large areas of London, Belgravia being regarded as the only completely safe neighbourhood.
In the 1930s writers on social etiquette were still counselling against the sharing of taxis, the expression of affection in public places, and unmarried women living on their own.

With these acknowledged rules, there went an unwritten codification of conduct and customs associated with ‘loose living’; the smallest sign could spell volumes to the vulgarity vigilantes.
Coloured notepaper, especially mauve, was ‘fast’, thin stockings a sign of lax morals, dyed fur, scent or –
God forbid – make-up was damning.
A kiss – even to a friend – was in questionable taste.