Among the Bohemians (31 page)

I really looked a shocking outsider.
Almost anything else in the world – sky-blue taffeta trimmed with spangles, or even the skirts of a ballet dancer, would have been more in keeping with my surroundings than the garments I was attired in.

It was all very complex, for despite this the true Bohemian was temperamentally unfitted to conformity.
He had to be vigilant if he didn’t want to end up looking like a music hall parody of an artist, or be mistaken for a poseur.
In Paris it was only the gullible Americans who dressed up in velveteen and
bérets Basques
and got their photographs taken
en bohème.
And as Chelsea became inexorably gentrified in the 1920s, the old, cheap studios were invaded by bogus ‘John’n’Dorelia’ lookalikes.
Even the popular press denounced them:

– the moneyed dilettanti who love to ape the ways of the Bohemian, to dress in bizarre colours, with barbaric jewellery, big earrings, crimson bedknobs, clashing necklaces of strange stones, jazz frocks and cushions borrowed from the Russian ballet, and pseudo culture stolen from anywhere.

The Star, 1924

Then again, there were complex gradations between the disciplines.
A novelist didn’t want to be mistaken for a poet – at least Ford Madox Ford didn’t.
In his view, poets, with their ‘flowing locks, sombreros, flaming ties, eccentric pants’ were treated prejudicially, and novelists didn’t want to be in the firing line.
The poet Roy Campbell eventually lost all patience with the accusations and counter-accusations:

Mr.
Peter Quennell recently took me to task for being a professional poet.
‘Most poets look like business-men,’ he says…

He objects to a poet’s behaving like a poet: and he objects to myself as a ‘professional poet’.
He would have me go jousting and bullfighting and galloping about in a top-hat, spats and a dickey, looking like a black-beetle, and carrying one of those black umbrellas.
Why should one write in the garb of ‘business’?
He might as well ask one to copulate and make love ‘like business men’… A poet should be an imaginative, creative being…

Artistic temperament being what it is, it would seem to have been a minority of Bohemians who preferred to look like ‘trouser lads’ or city men with their black umbrellas and bowler hats, despite Peter Quennell’s citing of T.
S.
Eliot and Paul Valéry to support his case.

*

One workmanlike, cheap and egalitarian solution to the problem of looking like an artist in fancy dress, was to dress in the clothes of the proletariat.
These had the advantages of being cheap, durable and ideally suited to any messy medium such as oil paint or clay.
And there was something appealingly humble about looking like a plumber or a bricklayer, when really you were a genius.
Round the artists’ colony of St Ives, the painters were often indistinguishable from the fisher-folk.
Locals ‘in the know’ could point out to visitors some rugged type in blue overalls and whisper that he was really the ‘brilliant Mr X’ whose pictures hung in the Academy, or identify a face in a street of shawled women as being that of one of the foremost watercolourists of the day.

The writer Gerald Brenan’s father was a military man of the old guard whose fetishistic correctness made him intolerant of his son’s ‘sartorial eccentricities’.
Fed up with the rows caused by his long hair and collarless shirts, and searching for a new ideology, Gerald determined to run away from home.
He made careful plans, and decided that the best way to escape detection was by disguising himself as a gas fitter; unfortunately his expensive education and upper-class upbringing had left him ignorant of a gas fitter’s
actual appearance.
Rummaging in second-hand clothes stores he managed to get a wing collar, a purple bow tie, and a high black hat for a shilling.
He also packed a false moustache and some hair dye,
The Oxford Book of English Verse,
and the latest issue of
Gas World.
It was not until he got to Paris and met up with his co-fugitive John Hope-Johnstone that Brenan realised how ill-considered his choice of disguise had been – for by now, with indelible black hair dye staining his neck, he was getting odd looks wherever he went, and was further embarrassed by the warm attentions of a tart, whom he fobbed off with the purple bow tie.
As soon as possible he dispensed with the gas fitter outfit, and he and Hope-Johnstone went out and purchased glorious new disguises.
They reappeared wearing the uniform of the Parisian navvy, as appropriated by Bohemia: blue cotton jackets and trousers to match, with colourful sashes round the waist, and on their heads floppy Breton berets.
‘No one looked at us.
I was enchanted to think that I was at last dressed in a way that was both inconspicuous and beautiful.’

In truth, proletarian camouflage answered to many artistic ideals, but only in France could navvies and poets alike carry it off with such romantic swagger.
People like Brenan had every reason to feel that wherever the true Bohemia might be, it was not in England, for English society would seem to have been particularly intolerant about unconventional dress.
Down on the Côte d’Azur nobody bothered if one sat in the Café de la Rade at Cassis in shirtsleeves and sandals, or even in a dirty singlet and a pair of patched cotton trousers.
Such spectacles were not uncommon, and it was yet another reason why British artists felt more appreciated on the Continent than they did at home.

But by 1940 the pioneer sexual psychologist Havelock Ellis was able to look back on his life and feel that even in England many of the battles his generation had fought for were being won:

A new graciousness has become interfused with life, a faint perception that living is an art.
I cannot see now a girl walking along the street with her free air, her unswathed limbs, her gay and scanty raiment, without being conscious of a thrill of joy in the presence of a symbol of life that in my youth was unknown.
1 can today feel in London, as in earlier days I scarcely could even in Paris, that I am among people who are growing to be gracious and human.

*

In 1976 my father, Quentin Bell, published a new edition of his theoretical treatise on fashion
On Human Finery.
In it, he argued that one day fashion
may well vanish altogether.
Perhaps he was aware that this was wishful thinking, for in the foreword he admitted that ‘we should all be happier if we could wear that which suits us best’.
He himself did pretty much that.
His checked trousers, carelessly fastened, his shabby clay-covered jerseys, their sleeves unravelling and burnt in places by dropping ash from his pipe (to my mother’s perpetual despair he regularly failed to notice whether he was wearing some old rag or his best lambswool in the pottery), his cheerful ties donned with a blithe disregard for their state of cleanliness or harmony with whatever frayed shirt he had put on that morning, his comfortable old slip-on sandals, his unkempt beard – all betray the Bohemian artist that, in his sympathies, he felt himself to be.
Quentin had grown up with the smell of turpentine in his nostrils.
Wherever the family lived the house was always full of painters.
Sickert drew him, Picasso was on close terms with his father, many luminaries of the British art scene were his friends and associates.
Bohemia was his world.
Though Quentin was no maverick, and stoutly claimed that he just wanted to be comfortable, his appearance linked him to a way of life which was at its most powerful among his parents’ generation, the Bohemians of the early twentieth century.
I do not think he would object to my associating him with such a group.
The creation of an alternative set of sartorial aesthetics by those Bohemians was empowering.
It was a break from the past and a celebration.
Our outlook at the beginning of the twenty-first century can seem confined and limited by comparison.

6. Feast and Famine

Must one eat English food? – Are table manners important? – Must

one eat meat? – What are the alternatives if one can’t cook? –

dine out? – Is it possible to eat on an artist’s income? –

Why must women prepare meals?

The scene, the great dining-hall of Newnham College, Cambridge.
The date, 20 October 1928.
Virginia Woolf, invited to lecture on ‘Women and Fiction’, was dining there with the students and staff, an occasion immortalised in her famous polemic
A Room of One’s Own
(1929):

Here was the soup.
It was a plain gravy soup.
There was nothing to stir the fancy in that.
One could have seen through the transparent liquid any pattern that there might have been on the plate itself.
But there was no pattern.
The plate was plain.
Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes – a homely trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening, and women with string bags on Monday morning.
There was no reason to complain of human nature’s daily food, seeing that the supply was sufficient and coal-miners doubtless were sitting down to less.
Prunes and custard followed.
And if anyone complains that prunes, even when mitigated by custard, are an uncharitable vegetable (fruit they are not), stringy as a miser’s heart and exuding a fluid such as might run in miser’s veins who have denied themselves wine and warmth for eighty years and yet not given to the poor, he should reflect that there are people whose charity embraces even the prune.
Biscuits and cheese came next, and here the water-jug was liberally passed round, for it is in the nature of biscuits to be dry, and these were biscuits to the core.
That was all.
The meal was over.

And we may as well all abandon hope… But Virginia Woolf’s typically extravagant evocation has a propagandist function.
This meal – this mean, functional, anti-life dinner which makes the spirits droop and the taste buds wither – demonstrates why the deprived, underfunded women’s colleges can never be as great as the men’s, and why oppressed women must fight against the odds to bring forth their creativity.
A grudging meal like this can
never inspire flights of poetry or a song in the heart, only the flattest, drabbest prose.
The feminist, the artist and the aesthete in Virginia Woolf rebelled.

The British were then, and still are, deeply equivocal in their attitude to food.
On the one hand we are patriotic about our traditions of beef, beer and apple pie; on the other we nurture puritanical feelings that it is self-indulgent to enjoy food.
If we are not feeling that eating well is a sinful luxury, we are feeling guilty because it makes us fat.
It seems we are incapable of conducting a straightforward relationship with what we eat.

In
Today We Will Only Gossip
(1964), Beatrice Campbell’s preposterously titled memoir of the Bohemian milieux of her youth, she recalls the uninspiring food of her childhood.
Her mother dismissed the children’s complaints about the eternal mutton chops on which she fed them with an airy wave: ‘You have the trees, the birds and the flowers.
Food is not important.’ When as an adult Beatrice went on holiday to Italy with her Swedish friends Harry and Signe Eriksson, Harry’s absorption in food astonished her.
She had never before encountered someone who gave themselves over so utterly to the eating experience.
Harry explained: ‘A person like you, with luck, may have a few odd moments of ecstasy in your entire life.
As for me, if I can get the right food, I can have a moment of ecstasy every twenty-four hours.’

He was right.
Moments of ecstasy were not inspired by meat and two veg, the joyless English food that so many of our parents and grandparents grew up with.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes…

The sad fact was that English food was usually uninspiring; dull but plentiful.
The copious and unending regularity of middle-class meals stunned Sybille Bedford when, after a childhood spent between Sicily, the Tyrol and Tunisia, she was thrown into a vast Midlands household full of remote relatives and a panoply of female servants.
Middle England lived like this:

Main meals [were] a steady rotation; after wishy-washy soup and a bit offish, beef and mutton, hot joint, cold joint, mince, cutlets, hot joint, cold joint – pickles, bottled sauces, dispirited salads, custards, vegetables… puddings… Drink was water, soda water or barley water.
Tea was offered again at bedtime.

For such households Mrs Beeton’s magisterial
Book of Household Management
(first published 1859-60) was holy writ.
Its author sternly warns her readers that ‘most cooks like to work only with fresh materials, a practice which
must be carefully guarded against’, and she follows this with a disheartening litany of ways to use leftovers, mostly comprised of hashes, moulds, curries and ‘rissolettes’.

There was likewise a fearful rigidity about the eating habits of the upper classes.
Vita Sackville-West’s re-creation of her childhood home Knole,
The Edwardians,
dwells on ‘those meals!
Those endless, extravagant meals’ at which the aristocracy partook of ortolan, quail and truffle.
Guests at Edwardian house parties were served up a suffocating superabundance of food.
All day long one was crammed.
^*
Navigating one’s way through the excess was not easy.
The young architect Clough Williams-Ellis took to reading the menu card at the beginning of each meal and deciding in advance what courses to skip.
At the end of a weekend, oppressed by superfluity, he was thankful enough to return to his habitual diet of kippers.

English food could seem particularly offensive to those with European tastes.
Harold Acton was sent to prep school in England after a Tuscan childhood.
Reading Acton’s memories of the meals he endured there is a stomach-turning experience.
The ‘hairy brawn and knobbly porridge’ fed to him at this institution was so nauseating that the young Harold slid as much as possible off his plate and into his handkerchief, to be later flushed away down the lavatory.
Aesthetes do not just respond to the visual sense.
He could never forget the taste of the ‘blotched oily margarine’ that accompanied every meal.
When he went on to Eton the meals were at best ‘indifferent’.
The insipid pap that passed in England for pasta insulted his memories of the genuine article.
He shuddered with horror at seeing boiled macaroni dished up on toast with tomato ketchup, or cooked to a pulp with milk and sugar like a tapioca pudding.