Among the Bohemians (13 page)

Sexual appetites were seen as disagreeable and destabilising, therefore they ceased to exist.
The Victorian denial of desire was above all made plain in its imposition of ignorance.
There was the curious fact, for example, that girls knew
nothing
about the facts of life and must remain virginally innocent until their wedding day, whereat, from the moment they left the church, they were omniscient.
Boys were barely more informed:

Sexually my education had been of the usual sort…

recalled the painter Adrian Daintrey in later life…

… a hair-raising ‘warning’ at Temple Grove of the results of masturbation, and a very shy, formal talk by my father.
Gentlemen, I learnt, ‘went straight’ until at some time in the very remote future they were in a position to marry.
The state of chastity, so difficult to maintain, carried with some people a fantastic importance: I once heard it said of some young man who had been killed in World War I, ‘He has been spared further temptation.’

With ignorance and propriety went puritanism.
Armies of rigid do-gooders formed committees with names like the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Friends’ Purity Committee, the National Social Purity Crusade, and many more, united by a common cause in favour of cold baths, healthy minds in healthy bodies, gentlemanly exercise, and ladylike restraint.
And not surprisingly, when nice, respectable, decent people like this ran up against Bohemians they regarded them with deep denial and suspicion.

During the First World War Lady Ottoline Morrell housed an assortment of artists and writers and conscientious objectors – Clive Bell, Mark Gertler, Carrington, Aldous Huxley and Lytton Strachey among them – at Garsington Manor.
During that time the painter Dorothy Brett brought her prim sister Sylvia to stay there for a weekend.
Whether the natives cranked the conversation up a notch or two to shock her is pure speculation, but if they did it certainly worked:

The C.O.’s are so awful – flabby cowards – over-sexed - undersexed – never normal – The conversation consists of depraved and curious conditions in life so that you long for an ordinary couple to come in and say ‘Well, we live an ordinary life, do ordinary things in the ordinary way and have ordinary children.’

At breakfast with your bacon and eggs you get a minute and detailed description of life
à la
Oscar Wilde… Oh it made me feel very sick inside… I tell you I had to have a mental bath when I got home, as well as a bodily one.

And the feeling of antipathy was mutual.
The advanced author Ethel Mannin declared that the ‘plague of puritans’ – the book-banners, the censors, the bishops and right-wing politicians, and even the B B C – were ‘rapidly making this country no fit place for a decent, intelligent person to live in…’

*

The Victorian fetish of purity was to some extent a protective stance against the burden on society inflicted by unwanted babies.
Some of the horror felt by respectable matrons and patriarchs at the new permissiveness was dismay at the thought of a generation who were having their pleasures and ‘getting away with it’.
Contraception, moreover, was a thwarting of God’s plan, and thus wrong.
But wrong or not, the new generation was leaping in with enthusiasm: ‘An army of girl-graduates descended on London, each with her contraceptives in her handbag and a grim determination to rid herself as soon as possible of her repressions…’ wrote Douglas Goldring in his book
The Nineteen Twenties
(1945).

The contents of those handbags were – by the time of which he was writing – varied and available to anyone who persisted.
Rubber condoms (made possible by the invention of vulcanization – a process which improves the elasticity and strength of rubber) were probably first available in the 1870s.
They were washable and you cleaned them up afterwards with carbolic soap.
Soluble pessaries came on the market in the 1880s.
Information about the use of contraceptives began to be widely disseminated.
The quaintly named
Wife’s
Handbook
(1887) by Dr H.
A.
Allbutt was in print for several decades and, despite attempts to prosecute its author for obscenity, reached its forty-first edition by 1910.
It was full of useful information about preventative measures in the form of sheaths, Dutch caps, sponges, tampons, and the like.
Imperfect though these methods were, they allowed a latitude of choice hitherto denied.
If the wages of sin were no longer necessarily a baby, it ceased to be a question of whether, but when, to launch into an active sex life.

Carrington finally ran out of excuses not to go to bed with Mark Gertler when he acquired a contraceptive device for her.
But she squirmed over the nastiness of trying to use it: ‘Really I did try that thing.
Only it was much too big, and wouldn’t go inside no matter what way I used it!
But I won’t be so childish any longer…’

‘That thing’ was probably a Dutch cap, used in combination with a
‘Volpar gel’; she might have had less of an excuse if she had used a Gräfenberg intrauterine ring, a device which had to be specially fitted and which Ethel Mannin described as being ‘to the Twenties what the Pill is to the Seventies’.
Though scrupulous doctors still interrogated those who came to them for contraception, it was now all the rage.
Marie Stopes opened the first birth control clinic in London in 1921, and a throng of reformists attended the Hammersmith Palais de Danse in 1924 for the Birth Control Ball.
The conservatives – like the pious Margaret Fletcher – could only look on and lament the onward rush of permissiveness:

Halls were engaged in London and public meetings held which were open to both sexes and all ages.
At these, preventive appliances were sold – ostensibly to the married – but in practice to anyone who described themselves as being so, without the smallest evidence… [There was] a new uncertainty in matters of right and wrong.
Times were changed…

Inevitably the ‘things’ went wrong however, or one couldn’t bear the mess, or one forgot.
Sex has consequences, even for romantic idealists, and not surprisingly there were casualties.

When Constantine Fitzgibbon’s girlfriend ‘Giselle’ became pregnant, he stood by her while they went through the nightmare of trying to procure an illegal operation abroad.
A friend lent them money and they visited a suave Parisian doctor who patronised them, refused to help, and charged them a large sum.
A friend in Montparnasse knew of an abortionist somewhere in the suburbs.
They found their way out there but quailed when they were admitted to a dingy drawing room; Constantine noticed a dirty teaspoon, and thought he heard groans coming from the next room.
A repellent crone drying her hands on a grubby towel agreed to do the operation immediately for cash.
They made their excuses and left – ‘Giselle cried all the long way back in the Metro.’ Constantine’s mother came to the rescue with money to support them, and they enthusiastically turned their attention to becoming parents, but at seven months Giselle miscarried, and the baby died.

When Dorothy Brett, Carrington’s contemporary from Slade School days, suspected herself to be pregnant by the writer John Middleton Murry, he was less supportive.
Brett found the implications terrifying:

I am afraid.
I have struggled through a terrible time of depression… The worry, the fear exhausts me… I feel, as I suppose every woman feels, that the burden is all left to me.
Murry can turn from one woman to another while I have to face the
beastliness of an illegal operation = or the long strain of carrying a child and perhaps death = not that I mind the last = it might be the best way out if I am not strong enough to stand alone.

Brett (who like Carrington had chosen to be known by her surname) confessed her fear to Murry, who reacted brusquely; an abortion was the only solution he could contemplate.

Such operations were not an easy option, being not only illegal, but expensive.
In the 1930s they cost about £100– They were also hazardous, and Brett may justifiably have feared death.
Murry was only prepared to help Brett make arrangements, while she waited powerlessly, agonised at the thought of what this would do to their relationship.
Doctors were put in train, pills were prescribed and a physician friend of Murry’s was prepared to persuade a colleague to carry out the operation, which, in the event, and to everyone’s great relief, turned out to be unnecessary.
Either the pills had worked or it had all been a scare; but during a time of intense anxiety Brett felt fearful, alone and betrayed.

*

In so many ways the reality didn’t live up to expectations, and going on living for art, being a twin soul, and fighting for the freedoms of the next generation was tough faced with the hard-to-eradicate sexism of the Bohemian male.
Although women in the first decades of the twentieth century were making inroads into traditionally male domains – universities, politics, professions – though they gained the vote in 1928 and were embattled upon the marriage question, they still had much to contend with in the form of unreconstructed male attitudes.
The largely unchallenged image still tended to be that of the masterful male artist, while ‘Egeria’ played the subservient role, yielding pride of place to the genius, and often trading her own talent for a life as housekeeper, brushwasher, model or muse.
Her reward was in the reflection of her master’s glory.
How blissfully contented Trilby was to spend a day sewing buttons on shirts, washing linen, and looking after the comforts of Little Billee and his male friends.
How cosily Katherine Mansfield and her friend Beatrice Campbell sat chatting by the fire, darning their menfolk’s socks.
And how wistfully the wayward Betty May admired Epstein’s redoubtable wife, Peggy, regarding her as the epitome of a superb domestic helpmeet – ‘What a pity every man of genius cannot have such a wife!’ Unfortunately some ‘men of genius’ seem to have regarded their phenomenal prowess as being an excuse for bizarre acts of sexism, Roy Campbell being one:

Striking the emotional bargain,
Punch
14 September 1932.

Though we were very happy, my wife and I had some quarrels since my ideas of marriage are old-fashioned about wifely obedience… To shake up her illusions I hung her out of the fourth-floor window of our room so that she should get some respect for me…

This was probably fantasy, but nonetheless illustrates Campbell’s attitude.
He claimed she liked it, just as he claimed that women expected to be beaten by their husbands for insubordination.

Mary Campbell, like Mary Gill, Peggy Epstein and others tended to take the line of least resistance, finding a certain satisfaction in subservience to the artistic ego of their husbands.
For others the sacrifice was greater, for it meant having their own artistic personality squashed by their husbands’ selfish attitudinising.
In some cases this was an irreparable loss in terms of the art they might have produced.

Edna Waugh, one of the most promising and beautiful students at the Slade School of Art in the late 1890s, appeared to have a brilliant career ahead of her.
When the barrister Willie Clarke Hall proposed to her, she anticipated their marriage as ‘the sweet interchange of mind, of spirit, of body’, and on their engagement Willie made her a promise that, as a painter, she need have no concern about domestic affairs – ‘I want you to consider Art your profession… We must have a housekeeper to do all that sort of
thing.’ But their marriage in 1898 nipped all her romantic and artistic hopes in the bud.
Willie was cold; he refused to discuss his life or thoughts with her, and his domestic expectations amounted to tyranny.
His promise broken, she was expected to be wife, mother, hostess and housekeeper – but artist, no.

Hilda Carline was another painter, bold, experimental, but patchy, an artist who might have achieved status in her lifetime – had she not been married to Stanley Spencer.
His genius dominated their lives together.
Although she appears not to have resented his success, domesticity left Hilda with no space for her own painting.
And marriage didn’t just stifle artistic creativity; the end of singledom meant the end of the exhilarating, liberating life of the unfettered Bohemian.
When Kathleen Hale exchanged poverty, ill-health and insecurity for marriage with a man who could give her comforts and a family, she also put behind her the good times.
Douglas McClean was literal-minded, humourless, controlling.
When he read her first
Orlando
book he reacted, ‘But Kathleen, cats don’t
do
those things.’ ‘When you married, your light went out,’ her old friend Viva King told her.

For some Bohemian women who knew what was good for them, marriage just meant giving up too much.
The painter Tristram Hillier’s girlfriend, Georgiana, got pregnant by him, but dug her ideological heels firmly into the ground when he suggested they get married:

‘Why are you… so insistent upon conforming to this archaic survival?
Marriage can make no difference to people’s relationship unless they are the slaves either of superstition or some stupid social code.’