Among the Bohemians (61 page)

Tree, Iris (1897–1968)
Daughter of the actor and impresario Sir Herbert Beer-bohm Tree, Iris wrote poetry and bobbed her hair; ‘haut’ Bohemia was her world.
Her close friends were Nancy Cunard and Diana Manners.
Iris joined the roll-call of Augustus John’s girlfriends; she married American interior designer Curtis Moffatt.
This marriage, and her second one, ended in divorce.

Trevelyan, Julian (1910–1988)
Trevelyan’s parents, who were on the fringes of Bloomsbury, encouraged their son’s interest in art and poetry; he grew up defiant and uncompromising: ‘Painters must of necessity be anarchists, ruthless egotists.’ Trevelyan exhibited at the Surrealist show in 1936; his circle included Roland Penrose, Eileen Agar and Stanley Spencer.
His memoir Indigo Days was published in 1957.

Waugh, Evelyn (1903–1966)
Novelist and chronicler of the inter-war generation, Waugh had a conventional upbringing and education; at Oxford and in the early twenties he directed his energies more to his social life and hard drinking than work.
For a brief period he flirted with the Bohemian life of an art student, before becoming first a schoolmaster and then a writer.

Wells, H. G. (1866–1946)
The reputation of this hugely successful novelist was tainted in the ‘respectable’ world by his espousal of left-wing, Utopian and feminist causes.
Ann Veronica (1909) caused a scandal by his portrayal of a ‘New Woman’ who runs away with the man she loves.
Wells himself had many extramarital affairs with, among others, Rebecca West and Dorothy Richardson.

Wickham, Anna (1884–1947)
Marriage and domesticity curtailed Anna Wick-ham’s singing career; despite her husband’s reluctance she achieved acclaim for her poetry.
Bohemia became a second home; ‘she preferred the hard-up to the well-off, the doomed and unknown to the rich and successful’.
At the Crab Tree and the Café Royal her circle included Augustus John, Epstein, David Garnett and D.
H.
Lawrence.

Wood, Christopher (1901–1930)
The painter Christopher Wood spent a significant proportion of his brief life in Paris and on the Continent with his lover, the Chilean socialite Tony de Gandarillas.
Although his work was admired, Wood was trapped by poverty.
Psychotic tendencies, drug abuse and disappointment in love combined to cause his suicide under a train in 1930.

Notes on Sources

In this book I have drawn on a multitude of sources – published and unpublished writings, periodicals and archives, social history, conversations, anecdotes and personal memories.
The text gives dates of any specific works mentioned, but below is a resume of other principal sources consulted in each chapter.
For further reading please turn to page 325 for a select bibliography.

1. Paying the Price

There are two authoritative biographies of
Robert Graves, Martin Seymour-Smith’s Robert Graves – His Life and Work
, and Miranda Seymour’s
Robert Grapes – Life on the Edge
.
Both give full accounts of ‘the Poets’ Store’.
Scènes de la Vie de Bohème
by Henri Murger is the basis for Puccini’s opera
La Bohème
, and was first written in 1845.
Many would agree that W.
Somerset Maugham’s autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage is also his masterpiece.
The Maugham family has inspired a number of works, not all of which agree about the death of Harry Maugham.
The most recent is Bryan Connon’s
Somerset Maugham and the Maugham Dynasty
.

Gerald Brenan’s novel Jack Robinson, written under the pseudonym George Beaton, is not a very good book; but as an attempt to reconcile conflicting ideologies it is interesting.

For an authoritative and comprehensible history of prices and earnings I recommend John Burnett’s
History of the Cost of Living
.
Ursula Bloom’s lively and amusing account of her vicarage upbringing Sixty
Years of Home
brought the facts to life.

I highly recommend Michael Holroyd’s funny, encyclopaedic and deeply sympathetic biography of
Augustus John
.
John’s own highly idiosyncratic memoirs
Chiaroscuro and Finishing Touches
proved useful too.
Equally often 1 turned to Arthur Ransome’s Bohemia in London, a most companionable resource.

Epstein’s model Betty May put her name to a ghosted memoir entitled Tiger Woman – My Story which was to become another fascinating source book for Bohemia.
Likewise, Nicolette Devas’s memoir of her unconventional youth with the John family, Two Flamboyant Fathers, was full of revealing detail.
Through the Minefield is a Rake’s Progress through the thirties by Dylan Thomas’s biographer and close friend Constantine Fitzgibbon.

Denise Hooker’s biography
Nina Hamnett – Queen of Bohemia
presents its subject’s
colourful life in all its diversity, and is much more readable than Nina’s own maddeningly staccato memoirs,
Laughing Torso and Is She a Lady?
I found Arthur Calder-Marshall’s memoir
The Magic of My Youth
and Geoffrey Grigson’s
Recollections
useful, while Roy Campbell’s pugnacious, sexy and wildly poetic personality emerged from
Broken Record and Light on a Dark Horse
.

Douglas Goldring is one of those minor authors whose writings are of more social than literary interest; particularly
The Nineteen Twenties
.
Both Carrington’s wonderful Letters with their charming illustrations, edited by David Garnett, and Gretchen Gerzina’s sympathetic biography
Carrington
have been referred to extensively, as has Mark Gertler’s Selected Letters edited by Noel Carrington, and John Woodeson’s
Mark Gertler
–
Biography of a Painter
.

H.
G.
Wells’s
Ann Veronica
is still, despite its rather ambiguous messages about feminine liberation, a wonderful read, with some brilliant characterisation.
It caused scandal when it was published in 1909.
The story of the forgotten Stephen Phillips is recounted in Clifford Bax’s memoir
Some I Knew Well
.

Caitlin Thomas’s angry, despairing voice makes itself heard throughout this book –
Leftover Life to Kill
came out soon after Dylan’s death;
Double Drink Story
–
My Life with Dylan Thomas
was published posthumously.

2. All for Love

This chapter relied principally for background on three studies: Ronald Pearsall’s riveting
The Worm in the Bud
, Peter Fryer’s stimulating investigation of English prudery
Mrs Grundy
, and Leonore Davidoff’s excellent analysis of nineteenth-century society
The Best Circles
.
Here and elsewhere in the book Lynn Garafola’s
Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes
has also been enlightening.

It takes an effort today to comprehend how George du Maurier’s bestseller
Trilby
so inspired its readers; it now seems impossibly dated.
So too does
The Woman Who Did
by Grant Allen – a
succès de scandale
in its day.

Quentin Bell quotes Virginia Woolf’s memoir of ‘Old Bloomsbury’ and its bawdy conversation in his biography
Virginia Woolf
.
It was first read to the Memoir Club in 1922.
Enid Bagnold’s racy youth is described in her
Autobiography
; Isadora Duncan’s romance with Gordon Craig is described in
My Life
.

Chloë Baynes pieced together her mother Rosalind Thornycroft’s life from letters and memoirs; her book
Time Which Spaces Us Apart
was privately printed, but has provided this book with a rich resource.

One of the joys of research is finding memoirs with ever more whimsical titles.
One of my favourites in every way is the flamboyant Viva King’s
The Weeping and the Laughter
.

The published letters from Vanessa Bell quoted throughout come from a selection
edited by Regina Marler.
A long conversation with Dr Igor Anrep provided the material about his parents’ ménage à trois.
Richard Garnett kindly passed me his father’s sensational memoir about the Graves/Riding ménage in Hammersmith.

In First Friends Ronald Blythe has richly added to the texture of the period by publishing a memoir of Carrington and her friends Christine Kühlenthal and the Nash brothers.
Robert Medley’s reminiscences Drawn from the Life are frank and vivid.

Miranda Seymour’s biography of Ottoline Morrell, Life on the Grand Scale, has been indispensable.
‘Black Man and White Ladyship’ is reprinted in Nancy Cunard – Brave Poet, Indomitable Rebel edited by Hugh Ford.

Gerald Brenan describes his relationships and sex life in Personal Record; Naomi Mitchison is equally frank in her invaluable memoir You May Well Ask; Fiona MacCarthy exposes Eric Gill’s extraordinary proclivities in her landmark biography Eric Gill.

Though not a first-ranking author from a literary point of view, Ethel Mannin’s novels, journalism and memoirs, above all Confessions and Impressions, and Young in the Twenties, leave a fascinating and valuable record of her times.
Wyndham Lewis’s memoir Blasting and Bombardiering is worth reading for descriptions like the Campbells’ wedding.

The all-pervasive Lady Diana Cooper’s upper-class upbringing comes into The Rainbow Comes and Goes.
Adrian Daintrey considers male chastity in his memoir I Must Say, and Sean Hignett lays bare the life of Dorothy Brett in Brett: From Bloomsbury to New Mexico.
For Constantine Fitzgibbon see
Chapter 1
.
Alison Thomas has meticulously uncovered the lives of four lesser-known Slade artists, including Edna Clarke Hall, in Portraits of Women – Gwen john and her Forgotten Contemporaries.

The painter Tristram Hillier takes first prize for whimsical memoir titles: Leda and the Goose.
Runner-up Peter Quennell wrote The Marble Foot – An Autobiography.
Both had broken marriages.
My Life, Havelock Ellis’s autobiography, though less memorably titled, is painstakingly frank.
A biography of Stephen Spender is currently due; I relied on his own intelligent and reflective autobiography, World Within World, for memories of his first marriage.

3. Children of Light

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s educational treatise Emile provided this chapter with important background, while understanding the progressive school movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would not have been possible without Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s comprehensive study The Public School Phenomenon.
Boys and Girls, the history of the co-educational school Bedales, edited by Avril Hardie, was also very helpful.

For the section on the John family, see notes on Holroyd’s biography (
Chapter 1
).
Rupert Brooke’s letter about the John children is printed in Pippa Harris’s edition of the Brooke/Olivier correspondence,
Song of Love
.
I have also referred to Romilly John’s enjoyable memoir of his eccentric upbringing,
The Seventh Child
.
Reading Margaret Kennedy’s
The Constant Nymph
was sheer self-indulgence.

The first volume of David Garnett’s autobiography,
The Golden Echo
, tells of his free Surrey childhood.
A contrasting childhood is described by Ursula Bloom (see
Chapter 1
).
Ford Madox Ford reflects on the Victorian rule of terror in Volume 5 of his refreshing and opinionated memoirs,
Memories and Impressions
.

Miranda Seymour was again (see
Chapter 1
) my source for Robert Graves; (for Dorothy Brett, see notes on
Chapter 2
).
Deceived with Kindness
by Angelica Garnett is a lucid and deeply felt account of my aunt’s Bloomsbury childhood.
I have also referred to Quentin Bell’s version of events, for which I had access to his unpublished autobiography as well as his memoir
Elders and Betters
.

Philip O’Connor’s provoking, almost deranged autobiography
Memoirs of a Public Baby
proved a goldmine.
Much of my information on the Sirwells comes from John Pearson’s fine biography
Façades
; though Volume 4 of Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography,
Laughter in the Next Room
, was also a useful source.

Jacob Epstein’s daughter Kitty Godley generously spent time telling me her memories of her mother Kathleen Garman, as well as giving me access to her cousin Anna Campbell Lyle’s privately printed memoir of Roy Campbell,
Poetic Justice
, which describes her childhood in Provence.
For Nicolette Devas’s memoir, see notes on Chapter I.

Death of a
Hero by Richard Aldington is one of the most embittered novels to come out of the First World War; but it is also revealing about the pre-war social scene.
C.
R.
W.
Nevinson describes his awful schooling in his combative autobiography
Paint and Prejudice
– a marvellous source book for twentieth-century art.
Evelyn Waugh’s misery at Lancing comes into
A Little Learning
; Acton’s prep school days are described in his
Memoirs of an Aesthete
– one of the books which made researching this one such fun.
For Diana Cooper’s education, see notes on
Chapter 2
.

Julia
by Frances Partridge is a memorial to her fascinating and original friend Julia Strachey.
Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography, Volume II, describes the tribulations associated with setting up Beacon Hill School, and quotes correspondence between himself and A.
S.
Neill.
Richard Garnett’s hilarious account of his days at Beacon Hill are unpublished.

I owe the accuracy of my account of the Bells’ education to much laborious research done by my mother, Anne Olivier Bell.
Much other material about my grandmother and Charleston has been gleaned from Frances Spalding’s excellent biographies Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, from unpublished sources, and from personal knowledge.