Among the Bohemians (14 page)

Tristram finally prevailed upon Georgiana for the sake of the baby, but she had to be dragged to the altar, eight months pregnant.

*

All too often those who tried to bypass the stupid codes were thwarted not so much by social opposition as by their own insecurities and insurmountable feelings of jealousy.
Attempts to make the open marriage work were seldom successful.
Dick and Naomi Mitchison were sadly a rare case.
That theirs survived was thanks to qualities of remarkable tact and also to their mutual fortune in finding equally compliant and tactful lovers.
When two people decide to have extramarital affairs their position is dangerously inflammable, and the possibility of a conflagration is compounded by the number of participants, each one of them a smouldering ember of live emotions.

The great sex guru himself, Havelock Ellis, made superhuman efforts to come to terms with his wife Edith’s lesbian infidelities.
He professed not to grudge her happiness with Claire, the third party in the triangle, and claimed that he did not feel the slightest jealousy, but Ellis’s claims started to ring hollow when he admitted that he could no longer endure Edith’s coldness to him, and her extensive absences.
He owned up to an ‘obscure restless discontent and unhappiness’; ‘I was suffering, and Edith could not fail to detect the cause.’

When John Nash first made love to Christine Kühlenthal they made a ‘freedom pact’; they would be ‘as one, yet free’.
It was under the terms of this pact that Christine had confidently resumed her lesbian affair with Norah during John’s absence in the trenches of France.
But after their marriage the situation was less satisfactory; John was gloomily preoccupied by his old passion for Carrington, and this so undermined their relationship that it came close to fragmenting.

The poet Stephen Spender struggled to suppress his anguish at his first wife’s infidelity.
He and Inez were in love, and their marriage seemed strong enough to withstand a little buffeting; he felt unthreatened at first by her bantering ‘I love you and shall love you always, but I might leave you…’ which didn’t at the time seem worth taking too seriously.
In any case he felt it beneath him to make possessive demands on her:

I was jealous and I made scenes, but I did not demand that she should act against her inclination… [our love] would go on existing beyond the vows which we had made so unreflectingly in the Register Office…

As Inez was frightened, she did not behave in a way which would strengthen my confidence, and there were hours when I simply became a prey to the most stupefying anger and jealousy…

We separated in the early summer of 1939.

Idealism combined with artistic temperament put Bohemian relationships under intolerable pressure at times.
Artists are both the most fascinating and the most unstable individuals, but they are also sensitive plants, easily battered.
When Viva King met Philip Heseltine (the composer, whose pseudonym was Peter Warlock) it was love at first sight.
Though he was married to the model Bobby Channing (‘Puma’), this was irrelevant to Viva, who was mesmerised by his fascinating pallor, his black clothes and air of aloofness.
After their initial encounter at the Café Royal they staggered home, Viva very drunk, accompanied by a sculptress friend, Jackie:

[I] had almost to be carried up the stairs.

Jackie found a bed to get into, and Philip and I sat together by the piano, on which he played now and again as we talked through the night to morning.
Jackie kept an inquisitive ear to the wall, and when she heard me cry ‘No!
no!’ she thought the worst.
In fact it was my natural response to Philip’s nihilism.
On and on he talked of the futility of life – nothing mattered and he (and all of us, I gathered) would be better dead.
But who, I thought, was better equipped than myself to pull him out of his slough of despond with my love?
This was a mission that I had been waiting for all my life…

We did not go to bed together – our love was on a higher plane; so high in fact, that there was only one way it could go, and that was down!

For the next few months the pair were on an emotional roller-coaster.
They would part, then accidentally meet, when a moment of passionate eye-contact would send their hearts racing again.
Heseltine followed Viva to Paris where they celebrated Bastille Day for three days and nights without sleeping, after which they finally fell into a passionate embrace.
Then Heseltine left without a word.
Viva was again in shock.
They met again, once, after she had married; the old electricity kindled, and then died.
But no love of Viva’s could have helped Heseltine; a few weeks later she read of his suicide in the newspaper: ‘He gave his cat to the landlady, shut the doors and windows of his basement room and turned on the gas, which put him to sleep for ever.
He was thirty-six.’

Certainly, Heseltine was unbalanced, his capacity for happiness distorted by depression.
He was a victim; his own inspiration and passions were forces beyond his control, and they finally derailed him.

*

The nineteenth century made strenuous efforts to keep the cauldron of emotion, sex, desire and art from boiling over.
Suppression took different forms – in vain the guardians of society sweetened the brew with sentimental sugariness, clamped on the lid with puritanical measures, denounced and denied; but illicit loves and lusts spilled forth from a vessel that could no longer hold them; it has never been closed again.
We can still hear the echoes of that torrent – the clamour of spurned and exploited women, the shouting matches, the smashing of crockery thrown by Tristram Hillier’s lover, the shots that rang out when Peggy Epstein took an antique pistol and shot her husband’s mistress in the arm.

And yet still palpable beneath all these turbulent emotions is that profound idealism about love which Isadora Duncan expressed so passionately in her
paean to Gordon Craig.
Viva King’s love was ‘on a higher plane’; Stephen Spender’s faith in love outweighed in the end his disillusionment.
Remember that the contemporary climate of bigotry and puritanism made Bohemia a ghetto.
Embattled Bohemians clung all the more tenaciously to their ideals, and in that sour, repressive age only love and art seemed capable of expressing the highest human aspirations.
The plunge when it came was all the more dire.

*

By 1918 Rosalind Thornycroft’s Bohemian idyll lay in ruins.
When the euphoria passed she discovered that Godwin was a philanderer, and succumbed to uncontrollable feelings of jealousy.
They had two small children; with Godwin away at the war Rosalind fell into the arms of a former admirer, Kenneth Hooper, and was soon pregnant by him.
Rosalind’s idealism brought her now to the brink of an irrevocable step – divorce.
She could not contemplate continuing to live in a loveless marriage with Godwin, who seemed fatally susceptible to other women, despite his protestations that these were trivial flirtations.
Rosalind’s father-in-law, a pious non-conformist, lamented the bitter blow: ‘The H.
G.
Wells atmosphere has vitiated their home life; if it had been based on loyalty and love to Christ; shown in work for others, this might not have happened.’ He probably had
Ann Veronica
in mind.
But although Rosalind, like Wells’s heroine, was an abandoned woman, nevertheless she behaved with extraordinary courage in agreeing to have her lover, Kenneth Hooper, cited in their divorce case as co-respondent.

In 1921 when Rosalind’s divorce case came before the aptly named Justice Horridge, the divorce laws were still Victorian.
Only one ground was acceptable for divorce, and that was the biblical one: adultery.
The disgrace that attached to public accusations of adultery was extremely damaging.
If Rosalind had sued Godwin for divorce, the scandal might have wrecked his chances of pursuing a successful career as a doctor; yet she must have agonised over the decision which she eventually made, in agreeing to be the guilty party.
For the daughter of an eminent Royal Academician to run the gauntlet of the press with such an admission caused her to quail within.
Rosalind decided to leave the country.
The Thornycrofts, left behind to face the music, were traumatised by the lubricious coverage of their daughter’s case, in which her love letters to Kenneth Hooper were extensively quoted, and headlines reading ‘Feminist Divorced’ strapped across the columns of the
Daily Mirror.
Sir Hamo Thornycroft’s brother’s family refused ever to speak to their niece again after her vulgar divorce.
Rosalind, with
little Bridget, Chloe and the baby, Nan, lived in Italy for the next four years, and did not return until the scandal had died down.

Between 1900 and 1930 the divorce rate rose more than six-fold.
The avant-garde had raised the stakes very high in pursuit of personal fulfilment and individualism, and there had to be a reckoning.
The composer Constant Lambert, inquisitive, libidinous and insatiable, committed adultery once too often.
There was a series of terrible rows, and Flo Lambert finished by throwing her wedding ring into a lake.

But Bohemia could also be a sanctuary for the abandoned.
Returning to find an empty flat after his wife had packed her bags, the writer Peter Quennell contemplated the reduction of his domestic existence to a bed, a chair, a table and a candle in a bottle philosophically: ‘Indeed, I rather enjoyed my odd bohemian existence, and certainly did not regret the neat and elegant setting that had vanished never to return…’ And like the good new Bohemian that he had become, he wasted no time in finding a replacement: ‘My new friend willingly joined me; she was a true bohemian herself, and our love affair seemed all the more enjoyable because it flourished in such sparse surroundings.’

For Quennell the wilderness was ‘Paradise enow’ – for a space, while the affair lasted.
For many Bohemians there were moments of bliss, moments when the Isadora vision became a reality in those garrets and studios and basements, when, entwined in one’s lover’s arms, with the smell of paint and turpentine to send the soul eddying off into the heights, a composition or a verse could inspire transports of passion all the more intense because one was hungry and poor and defiant… And when the moment passed, there remained the thrill of fighting the battle for emotional and sexual liberty that raged in this country from the late nineteenth century onwards.
It was an exhilarating time to be alive.
Though they were often beaten back, it was a fight in which the Bohemians were on the winning side.
Their romantic ideology was stronger than that of their opponents.

*

Perhaps, after all, happiness wasn’t the point.
In 1907, in a scene straight out of Puccini, Augustus John’s young wife, Ida, lay dying of puerperal fever in the boulevard Arago after the birth of her fifth child, Henry.
Augustus’s mistress Dorelia was looking after the other children not far away.
There was a tremendous thunderstorm as Augustus sat by Ida’s bedside, and towards the end she was feverish but out of pain.
As day broke over the rain-washed city of Paris, Ida was sufficiently conscious to drink a toast with her husband – ‘to Love!’ The end was close now.
As the hours passed she subsided again
into delirium, unconsciousness, then death.
As soon as it was over Augustus ran out of the hospital in a fever of excitement; he was almost high on relief.
‘I could have embraced any passer-by.
I had escaped the dominion of death at last and was free.’ The city was intensely beautiful; he felt almost as if he was hallucinating: ‘unbelievable – fantastic – like a Chinese painting…’ Then with a sense of triumph the bereaved husband proceeded to go out and celebrate; Augustus spent the next three days drunk.
Perhaps it was the only possible reaction for someone who so powerfully wanted life for the living, who wanted to believe more than anything in art and beauty, and refused to be vanquished by death’s inevitability.
He knew he had worn Ida out with his infidelities, she was drained and weakened by repeated pregnancies, deprivation and emotional exhaustion – but faced by her death, and his complicity in it, Augustus set out to live life to the full.

3. Children of Light

What is it like to be brought up in Bohemia? – Should children be kept

clean and tidy? – Should children be given rules and punishments? –

How do you bring up a creative child? – Should children be

educated, and if so, how?

Ida John’s death left five children motherless.
In the six years of her marriage to Augustus, life had been tough for this once promising art student.
There was very little money, and one after another the babies kept appearing: David first, then Caspar, Robin, Edwin, and Henry.

Like many other women, Ida discovered that after the comparative serenity of bringing up one baby, the contrast when a second arrives can be shocking.
After Caspar’s birth the Johns could no longer afford a nurse, and Ida now found herself submerged in the babies’ needs.
The day began at five-thirty or six in the morning, and she was unceasingly on the go from that time until the infants could be put to bed at seven-thirty in the evening.
She then had ‘a delightful island’ of three hours before the night session began, for Caspar was a wakeful baby.
Ida was dropping with exhaustion after several months of this.
Her friend Mary Dowdall’s letter to her husband describing the chaos of the Johns’ life at their home at Matching Green in Essex makes it seem all too present:

Mrs John is beating the baby to sleep which always amuses me and appears to succeed very well – she is so earnest over it that the baby seems to gather that she means business… The baby is simply roaring its head off and no one paying any attention – it is in another room… You would hate to be here.
Mr Augustus looks sometimes at the baby and says ‘Well darling love – dirty little beast’ at the same time… I think [Ida] must have sat on the baby – it has suddenly stopped crying.

After the family moved to Paris in 1905 the only thing that kept Ida sane was the presence of Augustus’s mistress, the divinely calm Dorelia, who soon had two babies of her own – Pyramus and Romilly – and more than shared the burden of bringing up six little boys under the age of five.
Dorelia took outbreaks of measles in her stride; she wheeled the pram, and helped feed, bath and dress the multitude.
It was no small task.
There was one living
room and one bed for the whole family, who were otherwise accommodated between an assortment of boxes and baskets.
Quiet lasted at best for ten minutes; then the whining, grumbling, howling, or all-out yelling would begin again.
When Augustus was away the children were particularly unruly.
One day David took a pair of scissors to his own and Caspar’s hair, turning them into cropped convicts.
Ida referred to her offspring as ‘the acrobats’; they roared, rolled, tumbled and somersaulted.
Eventually the neighbours could stand the racket no longer and had them evicted.
When John’s friend and patron Will Rothenstein visited the family he was appalled: ‘I felt terribly sad when I saw how the kiddies were brought up, though anyone may be considered richly endowed who has such a mother as Ida.
Ours seem so clean and bright compared with them just now…’ he wrote to his wife Alice.