Among the Bohemians (29 page)

The youthful, inexperienced person
Who finds that he can write in verse on
Passion and moonshine keeps his hair
Uncut, to show he is that rare
Superior kind of thing, a poet,
And wants his fellow men to know it.

St John Adcock

A Book of Bohemians
(1925)

Even more emphatic was the wearing of beards.
Long associated with radical opinions, the beard was, in the first decades of the twentieth century, such an anti-fashion statement as almost to constitute an affront to decency.
Wedded to his rituals, the middle- and upper-class male was condemned to half an hour each morning with a cut-throat razor, stropping, frothing, ‘One of the prophets’.
Illustration by Fred scraping and blotting.
The whole performance was quite needless if you grew a beard.
Soon there was no keeping them down, for there was the great role model Augustus John flaunting his red one down the King’s Road, terrifying the cab drivers – he claimed to have been the only officer in the British army to wear a beard apart from the king.
They wagged in the auditorium of the Russian ballet, and sprouted like fungus between the ornate pillars of the Cafe Royal’s Domino Room.
There were beards at Garsington, beards in Letchworth Garden City, beards in the Fitzroy Tavern, such an outbreak indeed that the sport of beard-spotting soon became a popular craze.
It was called ‘Beaver’, and it went on for years.
Two people walking down the street competed to collect points.
The first to spot a beard cried ‘Beaver!’ and scored, but you got extra points for white ones, and there were bonuses for rare and unusual varieties of beard such as forked ones or very long ones.
But the objects of this ridicule banded together and in solidarity formed the Secret Society of Beavers, who solemnly swore never to appear barefaced and to wreak vengeance upon anybody who mocked beards.
Their heroes were George V and George Bernard Shaw.

‘One of the prophets’.
Illustration by Fred
Adlington to A Book of Bohemians.

In
Antic Hay
Aldous Huxley exploited the Beaver craze to farcical effect with his hero Gumbril Junior’s fake beard escapade.
Gumbril’s friend Cole-man persuades him that a ‘Beaver’ can be very seductive:

‘You hear someone saying, “Beaver,” as you pass, and you immediately have the right to rush up and get into conversation.
I owe to this dear symbol,’ and he caressed the golden beard tenderly with the palm of his hand, ‘the most admirably dangerous relations.’

‘Magnificent,’ said Gumbril…

Gumbril acted on the hint.
Not long after, equipped with a ‘stunning… grandiose’ false beard, he picks up Rosie.
Bowled over by his artistic, ‘Russian’ appearance, she invites Gumbril back to Her flat for tea.
Rosie is soon down to a pink kimono, and the pair exchange tickly embraces.
The situation only becomes Feydeau-esque when Gumbril discovers that Rosie is married to his friend Shearwater, whom he then encounters on the stairs.

Eric Gill, whose beard was quite real, was perhaps its most forceful apologist.
In
Clothes
he deconstructs the whole issue of facial hair at length, concluding that ‘the beard is the proper clothing of the male chin, and the all-sufficing garment of differentiation’.
Women, however, were now setting out in their turn to break with convention, and that meant blurring those distinctions as far as they possibly could.
Here, from Gilbert Cannan’s
roman-à-clef, Mendel
(1916), is an exchange between the eponymous hero (alias Mark Gertler) and a friend about Greta Morrison (alias Dora Carrington):

‘Did you know that Greta has cut her hair short?’

‘Her hair?’ cried Mendel.
‘Her beautiful hair?’

‘Yes.
She looks so sweet, but the boys call after her in the streets.
All the girls are wild to do it.’

‘Her hair?
Her beautiful hair?
Why?’

‘Oh!
She got sick of putting it up.
She is like that.
She suddenly does something you don’t expect.’

‘But she must look terrible!’

‘Oh no.
She looks too sweet.
And if all the boys at the Detmold [Slade] wear their hair long, I don’t see why the girls shouldn’t wear theirs short.’

Several women claimed to have been the first to do it.
Whether it was Dorothy Brett, Nina Hamnett, Ida Nettleship or Carrington, the look caught on.
Iris Tree cut off her golden plait while travelling on a train and left it behind on the seat.
They were known as the Slade cropheads, the Bloomsbury Bunnies, the ‘top-knots’ – their bobbed hair declaring that they were unambiguously emancipated.
It was so low-maintenance, too,
compared to those elaborately dressed Edwardian coiffures which, even after they were dismantled, needed a hundred strokes of the brush every night.

As explicitly as hair, hats sent out clarion clear messages about the wearer’s allegiances.
This was an age when hats were universal.
You wore hats for luncheon, for tea dances, in town and in the country.
A woman without millinery was regarded as having forsaken the human race.
Carrington caused shock waves because she went bareheaded; even Sickert was scandalised at the sight of a hatless Nina Hamnett emerging from the Fitzroy Tavern carrying a mug of beer.

When they did wear them, artists took hats seriously.
Perhaps more than any other item of Bohemian regalia they put a spin on the individual who wore them.
Big-brimmed and black, the felt sombrero or Austrian velour was the accepted Bohemian headgear in an age of stovepipes and bowlers.
Augustus John’s came from Paris.
Wyndham Lewis wore his all the time, indoors and out.
Ezra Pound was aggressively sombrero’ed.
Katherine Mansfield wore one like a man, over her bobbed hair.
Expansive, floppy, but at the same time rather threatening, these hats were positively bulging with self-expression.

And then there were the ties.
The wearing of a coloured tie was loaded with meaning in a man’s monochrome world.
Bow ties, flowing ties, cravats, neckerchiefs, political ties, poet ties and painter ties, art ties and no ties… Above all, brightly coloured ties, which, blazoned across Bohemian breasts, betrayed the protest that burned within.

‘I used to wear a scarlet tie…’ remembered Stephen Spender of his student days at Oxford.
One night a gang of philistine ‘hearties’ came to Spender’s rooms armed with buckets and bludgeons, determined to teach the ‘arty’ poet a thing or two.
Spender deflected them by quoting Blake, and the gang retreated in confusion, convinced that the poetic pansy was probably mad.
But the red tie had inflamed the bullies; later they returned and, finding the offending neckwear, cut it into little shreds which they festooned over the frames of his Post-impressionist reproductions.

Spender may have got more than he bargained for, but the contretemps was symbolic, like seizing the enemy’s standard.
Ties meant so much more than just ties.
The sight of Lytton Strachey in his dark red tie in the Savile Club in 1912 stirred up an agitated discourse in Max Beerbohm’s mind.
Who was this man?
Why did he dress like that?
What did it all mean?
He noted every detail of Strachey’s appearance, the long beard, the soft shirt, the velveteen jacket.
What was this man trying to say?
In the end Beerbohm felt honestly compelled to admire him: ‘Hang it all,’ I said, ‘why
shouldn’t
he dress like that?
He’s the best-dressed man in the room!’

One of the aspects of Strachey most noticeable to Max Beerbohm was the softness of his garments.
For a hundred years the well-dressed man had been carapaced in tailored suits and tight collars.
They were starched and pressed, padded and interlined.
Bohemia reacted to the discomfort and rigidity of this kind of wear by choosing clothes in fluffy, comfortable fabrics.
Strokeable and inviting, these shaggy tweeds, velveteens and rich corduroys implied in their plushy depths of colour the freedom, licence and liberality of the wearer.
The fact that these sensual materials quickly became shabby only added to their rather abandoned lustre.
The Slade School of Art was full of dandies like John Fothergill in blue velvet jackets, not the most practical choice for a painter one might suppose, but the emphasis was on artistic status, not suitability for dry-cleaning.
Arthur Ransome became famous for his corduroy suit which acted like a beacon to his admirers – Clifford Bax dreamed of wearing one to be like him.
Artists appeared so frequently in corduroy trousers that Iris Tree eventually used the word as a sobriquet for herself and other such ‘rag, tag and bobtails’: they were the ‘corduroys’.
Tweed too, if sufficiently hairy, also carried Bohemian connotations.
Osbert Sitwell was impressed by the clothes worn by Monty Shearman’s guests at his Armistice night party at the Adelphi.
Those who had fought came to the party in uniform, but a proportion who had been conscientious objectors came in their ‘ordinary’ clothes…

… if ordinary is not, perhaps, a misnomer for so much shagginess (the suits, many of them, looked as if they had been woven from the manes of Shetland ponies and the fringes of Highland cattle in conjunction), and for such flaming ties as one saw…

But the decisive clue for the Bohemian-spotter was an ostentatious pair of checked trousers or a checked suit, which cropped up like the measles wherever artists gathered together.
These dazzling chequerboards of Op art squares danced down the legs of poets, painters and poseurs from Chelsea to Paris.
Paul Nash dashed off an illustration to Carrington, showing himself squared up like a bistro tablecloth: ‘I have just got a check suit that will stagger humanity.
My word it is a check suit.’ They were really very loud – the point being, that nobody could mistake you in a crowd.
The
Punch
cartoonist who wanted to depict a Bohemian artist invariably tricked out his legs in check.
When he became more confident, Gertler wore them instead of evening clothes, while the painter Michael Wickham teamed his with an orange-sprigged waistcoat.
Sickert got himself up to look like a bookie in checks and a bowler.
Evelyn Waugh overdrew at the bank to
purchase a pair of checked trousers in 1925, and Dylan Thomas dressed in loud check suits because he thought they made him look like a successful scriptwriter.
My father, Quentin Bell, used to wear blue and white checked trousers bought from a cooks’ outfitters in Old Compton Street, but the pattern gradually disappeared beneath incrustations of plaster.

*

And what about the female of the species?
For women a turning point was the radicalism of trousers.
Bobbed hair was an approach to androgyny, but trousers went much further.
In H.
G.
Wells’s
Ann Veronica,
the heroine clashes with her father over his refusal to allow her to attend an art students’ fancy-dress ball.
For Mr Stanley and his timid, craven sister the idea of a respectable girl consorting with liberated ‘arty’ types is anathema, but Ann Veronica is determined to go to the dance.
In a chapter entitled ‘The Morning of the Crisis’, our suburban Cinderella goes for a walk to ponder her course of action while the aunt goes snooping in her room on behalf of Mr Stanley.
There she finds a Zouave velvet jacket and an overskirt:

The third item she took with a trembling hand by its waistbelt.
As she raised it, its lower portion fell apart into two baggy crimson masses.

‘Trousers!’
she whispered.

Her eyes travelled about the room as if in appeal to the very chairs.

Then she reverted to the trousers.

‘How
can
I tell him?’ whispered Miss Stanley.

The resulting fracas drives Ann Veronica into a bid for freedom, and she flees to London, where she becomes a suffragette and has an affair with a married man.
Clearly the trousers presaged the depths of sin to which this prodigal daughter was prepared to sink.
Would she become like that wicked authoress George Sand who went about dressed as a man?
– but then she was French.

Legs were still very much taboo.
A few ‘new women’ like the unconventional children’s author Edith Nesbit wore bloomers for cycling, but the pre-war Slade girls shamelessly wore corduroy knee breeches or calico peg-tops, indoors or out.
In the early days, not being used to trousers, Dorothy Brett admitted she found them vexatious; they were unpredictable and wouldn’t stay up.
At first Brett had her breeches made for her by a tailor.
Being measured was a solemn ordeal, the man putting his tape measure
up her skirt without a smile.
It was a relief to find in Paris ‘… a marvellous shop where
les pantalons d’ouvriers
hang up by the thousand = I bought a pair promptly’.
She got some for Carrington too, and when she got back the pair drew cartoon likenesses of themselves looking like a couple of demented yokels with their button breeches and straw-like hair sticking out from under their hats.
Twenty years later fashion caught up with trousers, and bathing belles on the Côte d’Azur adopted floppy pyjamas as regulation, but for many years after that women in trousers anywhere but on a beach continued to scandalise.

Depending on how you wear them, trousers can either disguise or enhance your sexuality.
A poetess in tight white buckskins could look far sexier than Brett in rustic cord breeks; but for some women, fed up with overt femininity, male attire was a refuge from the sex war.
Mannish dress could also help to define your sexual orientation if it didn’t happen to be orthodox.
In the twenties and thirties Bohemia was overrun with cross-dressing ‘Sapphists’ in a caricature of male business garb: double-breasted jackets, severe ties, waistcoats, and shingled hair.
Oddly, they quite often wore skirts under all this.
Viva King was utterly bewildered when she was taken to hear a band in Chelsea and the leader, ‘Dicky’, stood up from behind the piano at the end and revealed herself to be female.
‘We had not seen the like until then.’