Among the Bohemians (75 page)

constraints on behaviour of,
251

dress,
152

education,
84–5
,
91

and housework,
192–3
,
194–6
,
210–20

and marriage,
53

present-day independence,
279

and sexual freedom,
33–5

smoking,
154–5

subservience,
59–60

see also
feminism

Wood, Christopher,
233
,
276
,
281

Woolf, Leonard,
146

Woolf, Virginia:

on congenial spirits,
253

in
Dreadnought
hoax,
146

employs servants,
207–8

on food and eating,
163–4
,
167

helps support T.S.
Eliot,
18

openness about sex,
33

on Vanessa Bell’s and Duncan Grant’s

Bohemianism,
29

Orlando
,
264

A Room of One’s Own
,
163

Wordsworth, William: ‘Resolution and Independence’,
4

World League for Sexual Reform,
51

Wyndham, Dick,
18
,
28

Wyndham, Olivia,
28
,
273

Yates, Dora (‘the Rawnie’),
129

Zadkine, Ossip,
227

^*
Worth around
£
7,000 today; however, rather than indicate modern values for every sum mentioned in this book, I recommend the reader to refer to Appendix A on
page 291
for an easy conversion table.

^*
Myth has it that one of Nina’s few properly paid jobs was as art critic of the
Licensed Victualler
journal.

^*
Crowley, who claimed to be the Beast from the Book of Revelation, had set up a community in Sicily where abominable practices were carried out.
Cats’ blood was alleged to have been drunk.
One member of the community – Raoul Loveday, third husband of Epstein’s model Betty May – died.
Nina had referred to this in print, and Crowley sued alleging defamation.
However Crowley lost his case, and both Nina and Betty became household names overnight.

^*
Max Beerbohm estimated over ninety-nine.
Even the children themselves got bewildered.
Romilly, the sixth child to be born to Augustus, wrote an autobiography entitled
The Seventh Child
(1975) on the grounds that he was the seventh ‘officially’; (although Henry, born 1907, was born after Romilly, he was legitimate while Romilly was not).
He was apparently much teased about this.

^*
A popular exercise using light weights

^*
Fry’s commitment to good design extended to drawing up the architectural plans and supervising the building of his own house, Durbins near Guildford – which incorporated such original features as a double-height hall with frescoed alcoves overlooked by a gallery, central heating, huge windows, and a classical French-style facade enlivened with brick pilasters.

^*
Why weren’t they huge?
Probably many of them were; Vita Sackville-West hazarded that wealthy Edwardians’ yearly trips to Marienbad and Baden-Baden took care of the surplus in the same way that the vomitorium dealt with overeating in Rome in the first century BC.
Houses were colder too, and keeping warm burnt more calories.
For the rest, poverty and the necessity of walking everywhere probably kept people thin.
It was not until the late 1920s – at a time when meals were gradually becoming lighter – that people started to become obsessed with slimming and the newly discovered vitamin supplements.

^*
This sheds light on Evelyn Waugh’s indignant diary entry (August 1930) in which he notes, while staying at the Sitwells’ family seat Renishaw, that Osbert’s breakfast consisted of large slices of pineapple and melon.
‘No one else was allowed these.’

^*
Campbell recounted the elaborate legend of how Gray had poisoned one of his housemates with a decomposing kipper sandwich.
The mere sight of this ancient and phosphorescent fish had brought about instant death to the unfortunate victim, whose ghost then appeared to him, commanding him first to paint its portrait ‘and after that to go forth in the world seeking the bereaved and painting their portraits’.
Whatever the truth, Gray himself lived on, painting odd pictures in white paint on lino scraps; he inhabited Kathleen Hale’s basement, and survived on a harmless diet of tinned sardines.

^*
The servants themselves, incidentally, were allowed one bath a week if they were lucky.
At Charleston the Higgens’s bath night was Friday; apart from that they washed in the kitchen sink, where there was no privacy.
‘When I think about it now we must have honked a bit in the hot weather,’ remembers Grace Higgens’s son John.

^*
London, underground stations had public conveniences, but many felt squeamish about using such proletarian facilities.
When Selfridges opened in 1909 they took the enlightened step oi installing public lavatories, and other large stores soon followed suit.
Relief was in sight.

^*
The Ukrainian writer S.
S.
Koteliansky was by contrast extremely adept at laundry – he did all his own, even including the blankets, according to his friend Beatrice Campbell, but this was so surprising and foreign as to deserve special mention.
Kot was intensely houseproud, and was apparendy an expert polisher, having learnt a special method from Russian servants who tied dusters to their feet and slid across the floorboards; his hall floor was so highly polished that guests lost their footing and had to cling on to the banisters to get through the house.

^*
Women were finally offered ‘Social Membership’ of the Chelsea Arts Club in 1966.

^*
In her memoirs Beatrice Campbell says that Kot was full of remorse afterwards.
She also records that years later Monty Shearman approached Kot for help with arranging a posthumous exhibition of Gertler’s paintings: ‘Kot admired him very much for never mentioning the “incident” and not bearing any ill-will about the destruction of the Russian Ballet party.’ One can’t help wondering why Shearman was so tolerant.
Was he simply a very forgiving person, or could it be that, as a mere collector, and not an artist, he felt somehow disqualified from judging a ‘genius’ of Gertler’s stature?

^*
From the poem ‘Les Rôdeurs de nuit’, in
Chansons parisiennes
by Femand Desnoyers, quoted and translated, in
The Bohemians – ha Vie de Boheme in Paris 1830-1914
(1969) by Joanna Richardson:

When the bourgeois sleeps

We are thirsty, still;

Let’s drink the night through!

*

Drink is the real pleasure!

There’s nothing after!

Nothing, except to drink again,

While we wait for the dawn to rise…