Among the Bohemians (2 page)

Dylan and Caitlin Thomas,
c
. 1938 (Nora Summers/Jeff Towns, Dylans Book Store Collection, Swansea)

Line Drawing Acknowledgements

p.
15, ‘Immortal Augustus’ by Dorothea St John George from K.
Hare:
London’s Latin Quarter
, 1926; p.
19, ‘Most wondrous and valiant Brett’; p.
140, p.
214, by Carrington, courtesy Frances Partridge; p.
32 from George du Maurier,
Trilby
, p.
37, Isadora Duncan by Abraham Walkowitz, courtesy of Zabriskie Gallery, New York; p.
52, ‘Earth Receiving’ by Eric Gill from
Procreant Hymn
and p.
140,
Clothes
, © courtesy the artist’s estate/Bridgeman Art Gallery; p.
69, ‘Pyramus sleeping’ by Augustus John (private collection/ © courtesy of the artist’s estate/Bridgeman Art Library); p.
97, ‘My parents have a theory…’ by Pont (Graham Laidler), from
Pont
by Bernard Hol-lowood, © Miss Kathleen M.
Laidler and the Proprietors
of Punch;
p.
98, ‘Children’ by Gwen Raverat, © estate of Gwen Raverat 2002, all rights reserved DACS; p.
108, ‘First Russian Ballet Period’ by Osbert Lancaster from
Homes Sweet Homes
, courtesy Anne Scott James; p.
119, ‘Mrs John’s Window Sill’ and p.
156, ‘Images of Dorelia’, from
The Glass of Fashion
, © courtesy estate of the late Sir Cecil Beaton; p.
184, ‘Eiffel Tower’ and p.
256, ‘Armistice Day’ by Nina Hamnett from
The Silent Queen
, 1927, private collection/© courtesy of the artist’s estate/Bridgeman Art Library; p.
148, ‘Poetry’ by Fred Adlington from St John Adcock,
A Book of Bohemians
, 1925; p.
195, ‘Ukanusa Drudgee’ by Christine Bell from Mrs J.
G.
Frazer,
First Aid to the Servantless
, 1913; p.
241, ‘Paul Nash and Bunty Walking’ by Paul Nash, © estate Paul Nash/Tate Gallery, London; p.
247, woodcut by Ray Garnett from David Garnett,
The Grasshoppers Come
, courtesy Richard Garnett; p.
258, ‘The Can Can’ by Ethelbert White in
La Boutique Fantasque
, in ‘The Dancing Times’, 1919; p.
290, ‘Betty May in the Fitzroy Tavern’ by Nina Hamnett from
Betty May, Tiger-Woman – my story
, 1929, private collection/© courtesy of the artist’s estate/Bridgeman Art Library

Introduction

I know that I am not alone in my partiality for trivia.
Nowadays, thousands of people flock to see the kitchens in stately homes when they could be admiring the portraits on the walls.
Tourists visiting an ancient Roman site are delighted to turn a corner and discover a row of holes side by side along a stone bench – communal lavatories.
Hugely successful museums like Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts now feed this public taste by employing actors to play out the homely everyday lives of the Pilgrim Fathers – gardening, washing and preparing meals.

Too much reverence can estrange us from the object of our worship.
I for one, love to be brought up close – to touch, to taste, if possible to smell the lives of people from the past.
I want to know how they coped.
I want to compare my life with theirs.
I want to feel I could have known them.
This appetite for identification with history is important.
A sense of contact brings with it a sympathy which helps us to understand our own links with the past.

But it can be hard.
A visit to Mozart’s birthplace in Salzburg demands strenuous efforts of the imagination to overcome the distancing effects of glass cases and trooping tourists with ‘Audiokaisers’ jammed to their ears.
One retreats into the seething Getreidegasse with all sorts of burning questions still hanging: what was the life of this child genius really like?
How did the young Mozarts get fed, washed, educated?
How did Anna Mozart run the house, do the washing, clean the sheets?
Too many centuries have passed since Wolfgang was born there in 1756 for the best efforts of museum curators to succeed in providing satisfying answers to such questions.

The recent past is another story.
So much still survives, in the form of tangible ephemera, photographs, writings, and the living memory of grandparents and survivors, that one has only to reach out and grasp it – furniture, food, bedrooms, bathrooms and all.
Here where I live in the south of England the small museum of Charleston (home of my grandmother the painter Vanessa Bell) still survives as it was when she lived there, down to the smallest detail.
The homes of other famous names from the last century or so – Freud, Proust, G.
B.
Shaw, Kipling, Monet, Cocteau – are still furnished with the possessions of their occupants, making it possible to fantasise that they have merely stepped out for a brief stroll and will shortly return.

Bohemia provided inexhaustible material for
the irreverent cartoonists of
Punch
(18 January
1933).

The sense of contact with artists and thinkers of the last hundred and fifty years brings with it an awareness of the momentous times through which they were living.
Prompted by inquisitiveness, I started on an exploration of what was to become this book: a close-up examination of the daily life of ‘Bohemia’ in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, signalling its relevance to life today.

I soon discovered what an ever-expanding project I had embarked upon.
I reread memoirs and biographies, talked to ‘survivors’, and sought out novels of the period which commented on or illustrated their own times.
I read about my great-aunt Noel Olivier, with whom Rupert Brooke was in love.
There were riches too in my aunt Chloë Baynes’s memoir of her mother, Rosalind Thornycroft, who had an affair with D.
H.
Lawrence.
I drew on my own memories of my uncle David Garnett, and I corresponded with my aunt Angelica Garnett.
I spent hours chatting with our old family friend Frances Partridge.

Soon it became obvious that I had to spread the net much wider, and here I owe a special acknowledgement to Michael Holroyd and to his
magisterial biography of Augustus John.
After a total immersion course in Augustus and Dorelia, the material came thick and fast.
I found out about all their friends and rivals, from Kathleen Hale to Nina Hamnett, Jacob Epstein to Betty May, Edna Clarke Hall to Wyndham Lewis.
Augustus was like a seductive spider to whose huge web every butterfly or beetle seemed to cling.
Just beyond its snare hovered yet more exotic winged creatures: the Garman sisters, Theodora Fitzgibbon, Gwen Otter, Alan Odle, Tristram Hillier, Allanah Harper, Philip O’Connor and many, many more.

I held a magnifying glass over the habits and domestic lives of artists and writers in this country for the forty-odd years before the Second World War, and it revealed tendencies, overlaps, above all, aspirations in common among an entire subsection of society, that set them apart from the vast mass of conventional British people.
This tiny, avant-garde minority possessed a special cohesiveness that went beyond movements and styles in art.
Their daily lives seemed touched with an artistic consciousness that bore vivid witness to an ideal about how one should live.

We have become wary of ideologies today, but there was a heroic, starry-eyed quality to much of their stance towards life which I found immensely engaging.
I found I admired these people for their enviable commitment and courage in challenging the conformity of their age.
They were idealists, romantics, libertarians and sensualists, contemptuous of material wealth and conventional propriety.
They espoused freedom in sexual relationships, they emphasised friends above family, they believed in ‘true’ living and ‘true’ loving, and worshipped nature.
They had an adventurous spirit, and adopted an extravagant visual style, in their clothes and their surroundings.
These principles were all latent in the writings and memories of my grandmother’s generation and the one that followed it.
Sometimes just a couple of these ‘signature’ characteristics were enough to identify their affiliation to the group as a whole.
In other cases one recognised and applauded the fully paid-up card-carrying disciple.
As one decoded the audacious messages communicated via emerald corduroy and hand-crafted sandals, pink distemper and blue china,
daube de boeuf
and
vin de table
, the character of this tribe became implicit and familiar – and yet its disparateness made it curiously hard to identify.
It seemed best to adopt the label used so loosely and extensively by the chroniclers and autobiographers themselves: Bohemian.

Bohemia is a hard country to place, and yet it was utterly familiar to the people who inhabited it from the turn of the century until the outbreak of the Second World War, a place where to be different was to be accepted.
Here they felt at home and among friends: an incongruous, eccentric club
of artists, some rich, some poor, talented and untalented, who believed in friendship more than family and who by their very differences proclaimed themselves to be part of a confederacy.

The curious slippery adjective ‘Bohemian’ goes back to ancient times.
We now translate the French word ‘Bohémien’ as ‘Gypsy’, but the original
Boii
were refugees from the area known until recently as Czechoslovakia.
From the early days of the Roman Empire until the Middle Ages waves of these displaced persons fled into Western Europe.
Many of them, it appears, threw in their lot with disreputable groups of wandering minstrels, mostly unfrocked priests and monks; and from that time the term ‘Bohemian’ seems to have attached itself to nomadic groups of like appearance.
When the first genuine Romanies appeared in France from central Europe with their vagabond habits and colourful array, they were identified -with the previous arrivals, and by the late sixteenth century all gypsies were indiscriminately labelled Bohemian, regardless of their exact origin.
Right from the start, the country of Bohemia was located wherever its inhabitants were to be found.

The idea of
Bohemia
is immensely powerful.
It has attached itself to individuals as disparate as Jesus Christ, Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes, and everybody has a mental pigeonhole into which the imaginary Bohemian more or less fits.
For many this takes shape as a garret, the refuge of the lonely genius.
For others it is a tavern where gypsy-clad people drink and dance.
Some conjure up with distaste the Parisian zinc cluttered with untalented phoneys – dirty, poor and smelly.
A closer look reveals that the natives of Bohemia are not just painters and poets, but must also include vegetarian nature-lovers living in caravans, poseurs in velvet jackets drinking absinthe in the Café Royal, earnest lesbians in men’s suits and monocles, kohl-eyed beauties in chiffon and emeralds.
If there is a definition of Bohemia it has, somehow, to accommodate all these, for all have travelled in their minds to that notional country; each has made some corner of it their own, each has found in that varied terrain some special attribute that makes of them, too, Bohemians.

And so I made my own voyage into Bohemia.
I am not an academic, but a researcher.
I make no apology for my fascination with the laundry-list view of history.
Knowing that Roy Campbell had a recipe for bouillabaisse or that Dorothy Brett bobbed her hair is the kind of detail I find not only revealing but indispensable to understanding their lives.
Gradually, as the fuller picture emerged, I began to realise how in advance of their times many of these lives seemed.
And without being an historian, I felt instinctively that Bohemia had, over those four decades from the death of Queen Victoria
until the outbreak of the Second World War, changed the way we live now.
The more I found out about the period, and the ways in which it contrasted with the preceding century, the more this instinct was validated.

Though the social edifice of the nineteenth century could be tyrannous, the Victorian age was also one of great upheavals and profound questionings.
Religion, romantic love, psychology, science, political structures, were all dissected by the great thinkers of the nineteenth century, found wanting, and turned on their heads.
The last bastion to crumble was the family.
By the 1890s even this revered institution was coming under attack and ridicule.
Some Victorian attitudes proved hard to eradicate.
However, as the twentieth century dawned the romanticism of the nineteenth century was evolving into a fundamental challenging of the bases of society, above all the role of women and the foundation of the family.

Buoyed up by the radicalism of the great, late Victorians, the Bloomsbury Group was merely among the first to ride the crest of a wave which was gathering force at that time, a wave which swelled with ideas of suffrage, feminism, pacifism, vegetarianism, spiritualism, independence and free thought of all kinds.
Artists and writers of all colours were rebelling against their precursors, staking out a new territory where honesty and experimentation in intellectual, artistic and sexual matters became the priorities.

The early decades of the twentieth century were an exciting time to be an artist, for modernism was on the rampage.
Ezra Pound coined their artistic war-cry, ‘Make it new…’ The traditional novel was under attack; the Ballets Russes changed everything they touched; Post-Impressionism convulsed the bourgeoisie.
The artistic community in England and else-where was embarked upon an imaginative attempt to dismantle society as they knew it, and remake it in a new image.
In their daily lives as in their art, these people lived experimentally, in what amounted to a domestic revolution.

As the new ideas gained ground, a growing number of fugitives from conventionality sought refuge in Bohemia.
In this country of the mind, such artistic refugees found acceptance, absolved by their ‘genius’ from the rules of normal behaviour.
There these outlaws might remain for life or, as their fortunes changed – as success, marriage or conformity claimed them – they might return to the world outside.
There were those who, though not indigenous, formed alliances with this country; others came as tourists, to gasp and wonder at its excesses.
Like all territories, it had a changeable climate, a varied landscape.