Among the Bohemians (21 page)

Ransome, Hale, and Gaudier were wretchedly poor.
There are many more examples – the youngJacob Epstein sleeping on newspapers, the Johns’ bare-boarded apartment in Paris, Dylan and Caitlin Thomas’s furniture
improvised from piles of books, the painter Sophie Fedorovitch’s humble room where she slept on a chair for lack of a bed, too poor to have the broken window mended.
And it wasn’t always romantic and liberating.
Young and hard-up in London, the writer Sybille Bedford got ‘a strip of a room’, a slice of greasy carpet and a single awful curtain, the whole smelling of trapped air and badly cooked breakfast.
Dorothy Richardson’s St Pancras slum accommodation was so damp that her belongings grew fungus.
These rooms were plain and unembellished, but they were also grim – from need as much as choice.
Typically, the Bohemian was too busy living for art to notice the filthy mess, which was, in any case, probably part of a still life.
The pigsty interior carried messages of rebellion, distaste for decorum, and determination to live outside the conventions.

Living the Bohemian legend was not for everyone (
Punch
, 12 March 1924).

Nevertheless, the reduction of living to the essentials had an element of pride.
According to one Bohemian writer all you needed to support life was a camp bed, a table, a chair and some poetry books.
Damp and shivering, needy artists felt reassured that their Spartan surroundings expressed their very sense of themselves, as individuals for whom things of the soul, the mind, and art were more important than appearances and material possessions.

*

It follows that Bohemianism, though it adopted many styles, was not about style at all.
When people like Arthur Ransome or Kathleen Hale set out to ‘decorate’ the spaces in which they lived, they were not shopping for a ‘look’, they were expressing their own convictions.
The interiors of Bohemia are as motley, as various as their inhabitants, but what unites them is a set of attitudes.
Walk through the door marked ‘Bohemian’ and whatever is beyond makes the same set of unequivocal statements:

I do not value what money can buy.

If I choose decorations and colours, it is for their beauty, not because they flatter my social status.

My environment reflects the life I’ve led, the places I’ve visited and the people I’ve loved.

I’m not afraid of being thought tasteless, because I make my own taste.

It can be a filthy garret or a comfortable studio, a white cell or a treasure trove of knick-knacks, but a room that communicates these attitudes is recognisably Bohemian, and it doesn’t come off the peg.

*

These attitudes were, of course, a reaction to the recent past, the nineteenth century.
Kathleen Hale was one of many Bohemians who recollected with disgust the smothering interiors in which they had grown up and from which they were now released.
Augustus John remembered with a shudder the ‘respectable’ home of his childhood – he grew up in a ‘mortuary’ of rubbish – stuffed birds under glass domes, mahogany veneer furniture, fake majolica, fake Old Masters, macabre ornaments.
Above all he objected to their inauthenticity.

And those houses seemed so boring.
The immemorial stasis of the English home is captured in Lesley Lewis’s memoir
The Private Life of an English Country House
1912-1939 (1992).
The interiors that she describes have a dullness that could be from almost any age, right up to the present.
There was the book-lined smoking room, and the front hall, sombre, oak-panelled, with dark curtains and Persian rugs.
There were the ‘good’ antiques – a Queen Anne chair, a walnut table with cabriole legs.
Flower arrangements in the house were always unmixed, sweet peas or peonies, but never both.
The dining room (redecorated only once in fifty years, with top-quality eau-de-Nil paint) was dominated by a portrait of Lesley’s great-uncle in full regalia as Master of Foxhounds, on horseback.
More horses appeared
depicted on the walls of her mother’s bedroom, whose mantelshelf bore bronze dogs and a china goat.
Such a house had nothing to do with fashionable interiors and everything to do with the immutable standards set by conventional society.

The gentleman’s establishment was expected to be correct in all details, for it was the plain duty of every middle – and upper-class household to set an example to its inferiors.
At the time of Ursula Bloom’s country rectory upbringing it was vital to understand the semiology of silver cutlery, lace pillow-slips, and Spode dessert services, because everyone was catalogued by their possessions.
But these possessions were only on show when guests came.
The rest of the time the family made do with inferior articles.
Grandmamma’s ivory-handled knives were only brought out for company, the shamrock embroidered linen was preserved for special lady guests, and the drawing-room fire was only lit for visitors:

We never used the room when we were to ourselves, for patches of blue mould had spoilt the wallpaper, and one always shivered there.
But nobody must think of us as anything but drawing-room folk…

For decades the home had been a showcase for wealth and the best place to demonstrate your standing in society.
The architecture, and the entire internal disposition of the upper – or middle-class home, had been determined with social rituals in mind.
From the moment he arrived in front of the perfectly whitened doorstep, the Victorian visitor was in no doubt as to the status of his host.
A suitably attired parlourmaid would usher him into the hall – which acted as a holding area while the mistress of the house exercised her prerogative to be ‘at home’ or ‘not at home’.
Of course if he was a tradesman or business caller he was provided with a dedicated door -at the back.
The internal hierarchy of the house ranged from drawing room and dining room to private chambers, offices, servants’ quarters, attics.
At the pinnacle of social aspiration stood the drawing room: ‘This is, par excellence, the lady’s room… and the character of the lady herself may be told by inspecting that one room…’

How vital it was to get it right – what if somebody should notice the mouldy wallpaper?

Elegant refinement should reign predominant, cheerfulness should go hand in hand with taste.
Easy chairs are here a
sine qua non
… Tables must be placed here, there and everywhere, and yet not seem in the way; flowers or plants in vases, scattered about; and a variety of ornaments, simple or costly, as the case may be… But the
drawing room will not be complete, nor yet have its properly comfortable look about it, unless there are plenty of books to be found on the tables, and these should be readable and entertaining volumes of prose and poetry, illustrated works, and magazines, which will not only serve their original purpose, but also supply subjects for conversation at all times, and more especially during that
mauvais quart d’heure
which precedes a dinner.

(Lady Colin Campbell,
Etiquette of Good Society
, 1898)

A few years later a book of rules for home decoration appeared entitled
Our Homes and How to Beautify Them
(1902).
Its author, Mrs H.
J.
Jennings, was polite but firm in her insistence on what she called the ‘Grammar of Decoration’.
This is her ideal drawing room:

The general effect should be restful, even, and devoid of any startling distractions by way of ornament… it wants judgment, well-considered care, a reverent taste, a nice sense of colour, and a knowledge of what goes with what… However precious a thing may be in itself, however notable as a work of art, it must be ruthlessly banished if it spoil the picture…

Lady Colin Campbell and Mrs Jennings seem to have been unaware of the profound change and social upheaval convulsing English life in those years before the First World War.
In her novel
The Edwardians
(1930) Vita Sackville-West observed the old order as it gave way to a new, racier, more adventurous future.
With a keen eye for detail she observes Lady Clementina Burbidge, a superannuated relic of a bygone age, seated in her overcrowded drawing room, where silver bibelots jostle family photographs, potted palms and aspidistras fight for space amongst forests of occasional tables, and buttoned satin and fringed damask drape and festoon the windows and furniture: ‘The whole effect was fusty, musty and dusty.
It needed destruction, it needed air…’ Comfortably oblivious among her knick-knacks and fetid upholstery, Lady Clementina was living, literally, in the past, unaware of a new generation of artists and thinkers who felt stifled by this hothouse existence.
The home-beautifiers had had their day.
There was a strong reaction in favour of plainness and simplicity.

William Morris led the way in the rejection of all things varnished, tasselled, and flounced.
Not far behind him came such adherents to the cause of minimalism as Edward Johnston and Eric Gill, who started the radical Housemakers’ Society to set new standards for modern house design.
Architects like Voysey, Lutyens and Gimson aimed to bring their buildings back into a sympathetic relationship with nature, using traditional materials
and old crafts.
Edward Carpenter was another who hated the excess and flamboyance of the nineteenth century.
For such as these the time had come to question the way contemporary man was living, and simplicity was their watchword.
The Utopian Carpenter fondly imagined the dawn of a day when ‘we shall build our houses… so simple and elemental in character that they will fit in the nooks of the hills… without disturbing the harmony of the landscape or the songs of birds’.
Morris himself took a cool look at the average drawing room, ripped the drapes off the piano legs, and mentally eliminated three-quarters of its contents, leaving a bookcase, a table, some chairs, a bench and a cupboard.
Decoration consisted of some pictures and a bunch of flowers, but nothing else.
In
Ragged Banners
Ethel Mannin’s young poet Starridge lives a pared-down existence in a recognisably Morris-style garret:

He liked this bare room with its tall window and pale walls and bookshelves and the divan with the hand-woven blue and yellow striped linen cover, and the weathered oak chair with the rush seat, and the blue-painted table and the rush-mat… It somehow reduced the business of living to the simplicities…

Thus the Arts and Crafts movement appealed strongly to the Bohemian who rejected grandeur and opulence:
I
do not value what money can buy.

*

If I choose decorations and colours, it is for their beauty, not because they flatter my social status.
In those early years of the twentieth century, no decor or colour scheme seemed more beautiful to the eye of the artist than the explosive new look introduced by the great metteur-en-scène himself, Diaghilev.
His influence was felt as much in the salons of Mayfair as the garrets of Bohemia.
This was the development described by the satirist and cartoonist Osbert Lancaster in
Homes Sweet Homes
(1948), with characteristic superciliousness, as ‘First Russian Ballet Period’.
Self-consciously scandalous and Bohemian, the young Iris Tree was one of numerous art students and dilettanti with just enough money to adopt for themselves the most thrillingly exotic style to hit Britain’s shores for a century:

I have a studio in

Fitzroy Street, red and

white floor in checks,

black velvet sofa

black velvet blinds

blue cups and plates

red rimmed looking

glass red table –

The ostentatiously gaudy details picked out in her word-picture tell us that Iris was among those in thrall to Bakst’s and Benois’s colourful costume and set designs for Diaghilev’s ballets.
No respectful eau-de-Nil walls for her; this room would have been an affront to Edwardian canons of taste.
Note the blue plates, for example, which would have had tremendous shock value when this was written around 1916.
Even in the twenties debutantes like Mary Clive and her friends were scandalised by the ‘aesthetic’ young men at Oxford – apparently they lay about on
divans
all day and went in for
blue
china – ‘enough to make anyone feel queer’.
For young ladies from the shires brought up amongst oak panelling and silver epergnes, such tastes would have seemed deviant, heretical.

The studios of Bohemia now began to resemble sultan’s palaces or Moorish pavilions.
Osbert Lancaster’s illustration shows us such an attic.
A beaded and bandana-ed Iris Tree-type is seen lounging on, sure enough, a striped divan, her languid outstretched arm wafting an immensely long cigarette holder.
An aesthetic-looking male is playing, one suspects, Debussy at a grand piano draped with fringed Chinese shawls and adorned with a Buddha.
Behind him is a large framed portrayal of Nijinsky in the role of Faun, while on the floor a Petrushka puppet lies abandoned.
The air is full of the perfume from sticks of incense mingling with the vapours from the lady’s Pera cigarette.
The walls are most probably painted orange or emerald green.
The components of this seraglio scene were replicated in a multitude of attics, studios and salons by upper-class balletomanes and Bohemians alike.