Among the Bohemians (60 page)

Morrell, Lady Ottoline (1873–1938)
Married to the M.P.
Philip Morrell, the striking and unconventional Lady Ottoline held ‘Thursday evenings’ for a wide circle of cultural celebrities; during the First World War her home at Garsington, Oxfordshire was a sanctuary for conscientious objectors, artists and writers.
Ottoline’s remarkable appearance and personality inspired portraits by Augustus John and Duncan Grant, as well as fictional representations by D.
H.
Lawrence and Aldous Huxley.

Nash, John (1893–1977)
Younger brother of the more celebrated Paul, the painter John Nash (‘slight, witty and well-read’) fell in love with Carrington while at the Slade.
They corresponded during his time as an official war artist, and the relationship survived his ‘open’ marriage to Christine Kühlenthal, but John’s unrequited passion for Carrington remained an open wound until her suicide in 1932.

Nash, Paul (1889-1946)
Paul Nash trained at the Slade, worked briefly at the Omega Workshops, and became an official war artist in 1917; the paintings he did at that time established his reputation as an artist of visionary qualities.

Romantic and constitutionally unfaithful, he had a turbulent marriage with the exotic Bunty Odeh.

Nevinson, C. R. W. (1889–1946)
Nevinson studied at the Slade from 1908–1912, where he joined the ‘Slade Coster Gang’, who dressed eccentrically and terrorised the Soho neighbourhood.
Success as a war artist made him a celebrity.
Nevinson was a famous party-giver, connected throughout the London art world.
Touchy and imperious, he had ‘many endearing qualities, but modesty was not among them’.

Nicholson, Nancy (1900–1977)
An ostentatious feminist, the artist Nancy Nicholson smoked, rode a motorbike, and refused to take her husband Robert Graves’s name.
Their unsatisfactory marriage, beset by poverty and ill-health, ended after a crisis precipitated by Laura Riding.
Though she and Graves did not divorce until 1949, Nancy transferred her allegiances and four children to the poet Geoffrey Taylor.

O’Connor, Philip (1916–1998)
Introspective, prolific, alcoholic, the surrealist poet Philip O’Connor survived a disastrous upbringing.
Laurie Lee was an early friend.
O’Connor married six times and had nine children.
Memoirs of a Public Baby
(1948) describes his Bohemian existence in France and Fitzrovia, a hand-to-mouth life which brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Odle, Alan (1888–1948)
‘A curious blend of Bohemian and gentleman’, this habitué of the Café Royal was distinctive for his eccentric air of grandeur.
Extravagant, contemptuous and unwashed, the artist Odle suffered from tuberculosis.
In 1917 he met the writer Dorothy Richardson, who felt a maternal desire to care for him.
They married when he was twenty-nine and she was forty-four.

O’ Flaherty, Liam (1896-1984)
‘He has the inflated ego of the romantic’ – but also the romantic’s imaginative vigour.
Born on the Aran Islands, the writer O’Flaherty was encouraged to write by Edward Garnett.
He married but separated, became involved in the Irish republican movement, and travelled widely.
O’Flaherty published three volumes of memoirs.

Olivier, Noel (1892-1969)
The youngest of the four Olivier girls, Noel was a childhood friend of David Garnett whose family were close neighbours in Surrey.
Educated at Bedales, she was still a schoolgirl when she met Rupert Brooke, who fell in love with her.
Noel trained as a doctor and married a colleague by whom she had five children.

Otter, Gwen
Described by Ethel Mannin as ‘one of the last of the dying race of Bohemians’, Gwen Otter’s legendary glory as a Chelsea salon hostess was on the wane by the turn of the century but, despite deafness and reduced means, she still continued to entertain a rich variety of artistic luminaries.

Partridge, Frances (b. 1900)
Frances was educated at Bedales and Cambridge.
Her job at Birrell and Garnett’s bookshop in the twenties brought her into
contact with Bloomsbury.
The Carrington/Strachey/Partridge ménage à trois was complicated by Frances’s love affair with Ralph Partridge, whom she later married.
Since Ralph’s death in 1960 Frances has published a series of diaries which testify to her wide-ranging interests and friendships.

Paul, Brenda Dean (b. 1907 d.?)
Brenda Dean Paul rose from studio Bohemia to become ‘an acknowledged beauty of the party-world’.
She trained as an actress and played the lead in Firbank’s The Princess Zoubaroff, she also travelled widely.
In the twenties Brenda became addicted to opiates, and was briefly imprisoned for illegal possession.
Her memoir My First Life was published in 1935.

Powell, Anthony (1905–2000)
The author and critic Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume tour de force, A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–1975), is a close-up portrait of English society in the twentieth century; many of Powell’s contemporaries are recognisable through the fiction.
Powell lived and married within the upper classes, but had several close brushes with Bohemia, including an affair with Nina Hamnett.

Quennell, Peter (1905–1993)
Born into the educated middle classes, after Oxford Quennell became a writer and editor whose charm and talent guaranteed him a place in ‘haut’ Bohemian society.
A welcome guest of the Connollys, Dick Wyndham, the Sitwells and at Garsington, Quennell married five times.
He wrote two volumes of autobiography.

Ransome, Arthur (1884–1967)
‘[Bohemia] is not a place but an attitude of mind,’ wrote Arthur Ransome in Bohemia in London (1907).
He made this observation at the age of twenty, when he set out to live for art in Chelsea.
Many years later, a successful children’s author, Ransome recalled the joys, poverty and friendships of his Bohemian life with intense nostalgia.

Raverat, Gwen (1885–1957)
Gwen Raverat, the granddaughter of Charles Darwin, studied painting at the Slade School, but was to become principally a wood-engraver.
In 1911 she married her fellow-student Jacques Raverat.
Late in life she published Period Piece – A Cambridge Childhood (1952), which she illustrated herself – a surprise success.

Rhys, Jean (?189O–I979)
Jean Rhys came to England from the West Indies in 1907; she later moved to Paris.
Several of her novels reflect her experiences as a chorus girl as well as her masochistic relationships with various men, one being her patron and editor Ford Madox Ford.
Recognition came late in life after the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).

Richardson, Dorothy (1873–1957)
‘I lived for years on end on less than
£
1 a week’; despite this, Dorothy Richardson felt encouraged to write by such luminaries as H.
G.
Wells, with whom she had an affair and a miscarried pregnancy.
She later married the artist Alan Odle.
Some critics now regard her as a literary pionéer equal to Woolf and Joyce.

Riding, Laura (1901–1991)
American poet and critic, the charismatic but inflexible Laura Riding became Robert Graves’s ‘muse’ in 1926.
The ensuing dramas caused the breakdown of his marriage to Nancy Nicholson.
Their affair ended in 1939 after Graves met Beryl Hodge; Riding turned her attentions to another married man in America, while becoming increasingly venomous towards Graves.

Rosling, Theodora (1916–1991)
The beautiful Theodora Rosling was brought up by her grandmother in Ireland and was convent educated.
Her memoir
With Love
(1982) describes her emergence as an actress and model, and her Paris love affair with the photographer Peter Pulham; she later married Constantine Fitzgibbon, and became a well-known cookery writer under her married name.

Russell, Bertrand (1872–1970)
Noted philosopher and campaigner, Russell came into contact with the world of the arts largely through his relationship with Ottoline Morrell and his friendship with D.
H.
Lawrence.
His stature as a pacifist, a thinker and mathematician brought him a wide readership, and the school that he founded with his second wife, Dora, adopted progressive principles dear to the Bohemian heart.

Russell, Dora (1894–1986)
Dora Black met Bertrand Russell in 1916; however her feminism and belief in sexual freedom deterred her from marrying him until 1921.
Dora was a prominent birth-control campaigner and her progressive ideas on education were put into practice at Beacon Hill, the co-educational school she founded with her husband.

Sackville-West, Vita (1892–1962)
The writer Vita Sackville-West portrayed her privileged background in
The Edwardians
(1930), which also gives glimpses of pre-war Bohemia.
Vita’s unorthodox marriage permitted both her and her husband, Harold Nicolson, many kinds of amorous manoeuvre.
She had affairs with Violet Trefusis, Virginia Woolf and Mary Campbell among others.
Woolf’s
Orlando
(1928) was inspired by their relationship.

Sitwell, Edith (1887–1964)
Cyril Connolly wrote: ‘The Sitwells were not really happy people.’ The poet Edith Sitwell was a conspicuous figure in the British art scene between the wars.
Her indefatigable patronage of modernism (she encouraged Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, William Walton, Dylan Thomas, and T.
S.
Eliot among others), and her exotic appearance (which inspired many portraits) ensured her public renown.

Sitwell, Osbert (1892–1969)
Like his sister Edith, Osbert Sitwell became an outspoken opponent of Georgian poetry and ardent advocate of modernism.
His prominence provoked fictional caricatures by Huxley and Wyndham Lewis.
Osbert’s five-volume autobiography –
Left Hand! Right Hand!
(1945) and others – gives an illuminating portrait of his times and a riveting portrayal of the Sitwells’ exasperating father, Sir George.

Smith, Eleanor (1902–1945)
The aristocratic Eleanor Smith gave up a career as a gossip columnist to write novels about her passion: gypsies.
A debutante friend of Evelyn Waugh’s, she was alleged to have initiated the rage for treasure hunts that featured in many parties held by the Bright Young People in the twenties.
Eleanor died suddenly at the age of forty-three.

Spender, Stephen (1909–1995)
A key figure among the generation of politically engaged inter-wars poets that included Auden, MacNeice and Isherwood, Spender played out the role of ‘mad Socialist poet’ to great effect, and to the chagrin of his relatives.
In his autobiography World Within World (1951) Spender describes the artistic groups in which he moved, including Bloomsbury and Garsington.

Strachey, Julia (1901–1979)
Stylish, funny and acutely intelligent, Julia Strachey (niece of Lytton) was brought up by her great-aunt, Bertrand Russell’s first wife Alys, and was educated at Bedales, where her best friend was Frances Marshall.
Virginia Woolf described Julia as a ‘gifted wastrel’, whose writing talents were never fully realised.
Both her husbands, Stephen Tomlin and Lawrence Gowing, were artists.

Strachey, Lytton (1880–1932)
Eccentric in voice and appearance, ostentatiously homosexual, Strachey was at the core of the Bloomsbury Group.
His iconoclastic biographical collection Eminent Victorians (1918) brought him overnight fame.
In 1915 the painter Dora Carrington fell in love with Strachey and remained with him in a ménage à trois with her husband, Ralph Partridge, until his death from cancer.

Stulik, Rudolf (d. approx 1938?)
The patron of the famous Eiffel Tower restaurant in Percy Street was a Viennese Jew who had acquired the restaurant in 19TO.
Adored by his clientèle, his personality was inseparable from the restaurant itself; outspoken and demonstrative, he was also over-generous, and in 1938 the restaurant was forced to close.

Taylor, Geoffrey (1900-1957)
Geoffrey Phipps adopted his mother’s name as a poetic pseudonym.
Described by David Garnett as ‘tall, dark, immature, adventurous and very nice’, Taylor left his wife to join the four-way ménage of himself, Robert Graves, Nancy Nicholson and Laura Riding.
After this catastrophic episode he settled down with Nancy and her four children by Graves.

Thomas, Dylan (1914–1953)
Notoriously hard drinking and spendthrift, Dylan Thomas epitomised the feckless Bohemian of the thirties, but his poetic genius was undeniable.
Born into a middle-class Swansea family, Dylan moved to London in 1934, and in 1937 married Caitlin Macnamara, whose memoirs record their tempestuous, alcoholic relationship, with its violence and numerous infidelities.
Dylan died in New York.

Thornycroft, Rosalind (1891–1973)
‘Cool and flower-like’, the daughter of the eminent sculptor Sir Hamo Thornycroft was brought up on progressive
principles.
Rosalind’s first marriage, to Godwin Baynes, a key figure in the Neo-pagan group, ended in divorce.
She sought exile with her children in Italy, where she had a brief affair with D.
H.
Lawrence; she remarried in 1926.

Todd, Ruthven (1914–1978)
An ‘unhealthy-looking grey oddity’, this Fitzrovian ‘character’ clung to the rocks of fame: MirÓ, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Nina Hamnett and Geoffrey Grigson were his cronies in the Cafés of Paris and pubs of Soho.
Ruthven (pronounced ‘Riven’) wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose but was usually penniless.
He died in Mallorca.