Among the Bohemians (25 page)

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However, Bohemia instinctively shunned anything that smacked of luxury.
Easy chairs in warm rooms were good, expressing liberalism, tolerance, even culture – but a hatred of empty show was at the heart of the Bohemian philosophy.
Luxury was expensive and, as we have seen, Bohemia’s attitude to money was deeply anti-materialistic.
You could be sensual, glorious, exotic, but if your choices were motivated by a desire to display your wealth you were despicable.
In her novel
Sounding Brass
(1925) the prolific Ethel Mannin confronts the issue of materialism versus Bohemia in her usual full-frontal fashion, with home furnishings as the battleground.
Mannin’s hero Rickard is tempted by Bohemia, but eventually capitulates to capitalism.
Here, Rickard spends the weekend chez Pringle, the nouveau riche business client who he hopes will underwrite his fortunes:

The Pringles called their exceedingly ugly and aggressively new house The Manor, and it was full of costly furniture.
John Pringle was never tired of telling people how much he had given for every individual piece… [He] was intensely proud of his collections of furniture, pictures, china, rugs, and he knew the price of every single object and quoted it with a naive delight in which there was no snobbery.
He had never got over being able to pay high prices for things.
He was obsessed with Things.
Purchases.
Possessions.
Prices.
And everyone of his possessions he loved with a deep and intense passion because of its full-blooded monetary value.

Ottoline Morrell’s biographer states that Garsington was not luxurious.
Nevertheless many visitors felt that the house was ‘preposterous’, and that all that gilt and plumage was over-sumptuous and palatial.
Bohemia wanted to feel set apart from ornate grandeur, from the stuffiness and sterility of the Pringles and their costly Manor House.
Nobody could possibly accuse
Ottoline of being dull, but her tastes were certainly expensive, as she herself recognised:

We had a great discussion on riches.
Logan said it was unbecoming and did not produce happiness… Like all these questions it is so intricate.
I think very often we might be happier if we gave up Bedford Square.
It gives an impression of grandeur and wealth, too gorgeous for what we are or wish to be…

What a foolish, childish dreamer I have been, always thinking of beauty and piling up colour.
Shall I do it again and again, I wonder?
I heap up beautiful things, oriental cloths, old embroideries, Italian damasks, painted silks.
The same ungoverned love of beauty… I wish I could feel it wrong.
On the contrary, I really feel the dreary, ugly rooms I see in other people’s houses to be all wrong…

Ottoline felt herself to be treading a fine line between empty ostentation and genuine splendour, and in her insecurity feared that she might be criticized for having delusions of grandeur.
She had reason to be apprehensive.
Many of her artist friends were quick to judge, their aesthetic antennae particularly sensitive to evidence of philistinism and self-aggrandisement.
For example, Vanessa Bell visiting the American art historian Bernard Berenson’s Italian home, I Tatti, was caustic:

The house is luxurious to a degree – private sitting rooms and bathrooms, comfortable beds, endless servants, huge motors, roses everywhere, chairs, sofas, old furniture in all the bedrooms, all very American I suppose, and one can’t help feeling if only they had got in an ordinary Italian workman from the village to tell them what colours to use, how different it would have been.
Colour is simply non-existent as it is.

Vanessa’s use of the word ‘American’ is utterly damning, conjuring up everything that the Bohemian home – for all its shortcomings, its squalor, its severity, its insanitariness – was not.
The garret dweller was hors de combat in the competition to appear costly, just as his country counterpart distanced himself from the property rat-race by choosing the rural equivalent, a cottage.

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Poverty among artists was widespread.
The back-to-the-land movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was particularly popular among painters and poets who were losing the battle for survival in the harsh metropolis.
Such free spirits rediscovered the simple life, and even if they
weren’t exactly building their dwelling places in the nooks of hills, there was a quite noticeable cult of the cottage around the turn of the century.
Increased urbanism in the wake of industrialism, and the subsequent rural depression, meant above all that little damp cottages were cheap – about five shillings a week to rent, or as little as
£23
to purchase in the years before the First World War.
You furnished them with deal tables, pine chairs and a bucket, or maybe just with packing cases; and if there were roses round the door, so much the better.

‘Yes, yes, I will come and live in a cottage…’ Carrington wrote to Christine Kühlenthal from rural Hampshire, where on a country walk she had discovered a tumbledown dream in ruins, with the ghost of a garden and a wonderful view: ‘Christine, be brave and live with me there… Even if the remaining roof falls in on us, we shall at least die together!’

The reality of the rural idyll was often less romantic.
The draughts entered through every cranny, the mud encroached steadily, and the damp got into your very bones.
Stella Bowen, Ford Madox Ford’s lover, endured it for several winters before insisting they emigrate.
A painter herself, she was quite unable to work while looking after their baby daughter, minding pigs, and coping with Ford’s botched attempts at carpentry.
Having acquired a job-lot of old oak floorboards, he employed them to construct first a pigsty (the pig caught cold and died), and then a kind of ‘cock-eyed lean-to’ outside the back door.
Here they housed their temperamental oil stove, which was in the habit of spewing black smuts all over the kitchen: ‘When Ford’s oak cook-house was finished, there was just one spot where you could stand upright as you tended your stew pots.
When it rained, the floor became a puddle bridged by an oak plank…’

Moons, sunsets over poppy fields, wood fires, and a beautiful view were barely a compensation:

You can almost live upon a view.
Almost.
Ford and I subsequently lived in all sorts of places and with all sorts of drawbacks, but they all had beauty of one sort or another.
It was more necessary to us than comfort and convenience, and generally, as a commodity, cost less.

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The Bohemian home is easy to recognize on sight, but less easy to encapsulate in a phrase.
It moves through apparently disparate incarnations, its style shifts, sometimes leading, sometimes following the prevailing fashions, but there is nevertheless an intelligibility about its underlying intentions.
Though
the scene keeps changing, the look of these interiors was fundamentally determined by the rebellious, modern, unconventional individuals who lived in them, not by external requirements.
Their choice of surroundings was a rejection of a whole way of life.

Yesterday’s design revolution is today’s tired revival.
Many late twentieth-century and contemporary trends are in themselves tributes to the influence of the Charleston artists, to the Diaghilev ballet designers, to the aesthetes, to Omega, and to the makers of the Arts and Crafts movement.
The modern fashionable interior pays homage to a creative surge among a relatively small sub-section of society in the early decades of the twentieth century.
So much of what those artists did has been assimilated and re-assimilated, that one should not be surprised that their tastes are yet again being re-cycled for the ‘World of Interiors’ readership, even if their origins are not always acknowledged.
But what the imitator of ‘Bohemian’ style cannot hope to do is shock.
Copying Charleston is already passé, blue china no longer makes us feel queasy, and a red front door is just a red front door.
If we want to be astonished, disturbed or excited we must look to today’s artists.

5. Glorious Apparel

What do one’s clothes tell people about one’s beliefs? – Does one have

to wear what other people wear? – Must one wear sober colours? –

evening dress? – corsets? – Which is more important, comfort or

appearance? – Must women wear skirts? – Must men be

clean-shaven? – Is jewellery wrong for men? – Do clothes

have to be expensive to be beautiful?

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Balkan and Eastern European gypsies were on the move.
They travelled in their painted horse-drawn wagons into Poland and Germany: the Kalderasà, or coppersmiths; the Ursarì, or bear-leaden; the Lovarà, or horse-dealers; the Boyas, or gold-washers; and many others from those swarthy tribes known as Rom.
Western Europeans had seen nothing like them in living memory.
Some penetrated into Belgium and France before being driven back.
The Kalderasà were among the most determined.
They pitched their camps in Holland, and in 1868 one group came across to England.
Still more reached these shores in 1886, coming from Serbia, Bulgaria and Rumania, and early in the twentieth century the Lovarà arrived here from Germany.
By 1913 Kalderasà gypsies were to be seen in encampments outside towns and villages across the British Isles.
Though they didn’t stay – many were on their way to the Americas, and others returned whence they had come – their arrival dazzled and alarmed all who saw them.

Picture a nation ruled over for decades by one elderly mourning widow, who dies as the new century dawns.
At her funeral all London dons crape.
Only white faces are visible under a sea of black hats, as the old queen goes to her last rest.

Now, against this, visualize a parrot-rabble of the gaudy Rom – women in abundant ragged skirts, shawled and patched, into whose unkempt tresses are woven gold coins that cascade and jangle over their bosoms.
Their menfolk are no less fine and fantastical – baggy colourful trousers are tucked into top-boots, their shirts are gay and tawdry, their coats and waistcoats mended, but decked with lines of huge silver buttons.
Their white teeth and dark eyes glint like the brass rings in their ears.
To the British public in their mourning such people presented an alarming threat.
The gypsies
brought the barbarity of foreign lands and strange ways to the outer-city wastelands of England.
In Wandsworth you might come across them, or in Liverpool.
You might follow their trail into Wales or across the south, always seeking the remains of a campfire, the trace of a foreign tongue, the locals’ report of the passing of a group of gaudy wayfarers, from whom children and belongings must be protected.
For they were not to be trusted.

Yet to the artist, the poet, the free spirit of whatever calling, the gypsies carried with them romance in the raw, and a liberation from the black tyranny of the past.
For them, these people represented something profoundly free, and profoundly true.
They were human beings released from the restraints of civilization.
They could be who they wanted, say what they felt.
They belonged to no country, obeyed no laws, and revered no leader.
They submitted to no system, paid no taxes, and lived outside the worlds of politics and capitalism.
At their death, their belongings were burnt with them.
Their language and customs bonded them to like-minded spirits across national divides, yet they answered to none save nature and their own people.
All this made them threatening to the establishment because they did not answer to the establishment’s rules.
It also made them exotic, sexy, mysterious, dangerous, endlessly inspiring.

George Borrow externalised all the yearnings of nineteenth-century gyp-sophilia in
Lavengro
(1851) and
The Romany Rye
(1857).
Borrow’s books, half novels, half memoirs, delved deep into the gypsy world, telling of the campfire, the horse fair, of gypsy history and customs, citing songs and snatches in Romany, while his characters Mr and Mrs Petulengro seem drawn from life.
Borrow was, as far as anybody could be, an insider of the gypsy world; a generation of Bohemians lived and breathed his books.
Arthur Ransome taught himself Romany from them, and took himself off to the nearest encampment where he sang and drank with the gypsies and learnt from them how to pick pockets.

Another gypsy-insider was the curious figure of John Sampson, the University Librarian of Liverpool.
This complex, learned, much respected academic, with a passion for ancient languages, made it his life’s work to trace and analyse the dialect of the Welsh Romanies.
Sampson fell under the gypsy spell, and though he managed for years to cover his tracks, he lived a double life.
For months on end he would leave his wife and family and take to the road, and with his devoted disciple Dora Yates (‘the Rawnie’) by his side they would live like the gypsies.
An excerpt from W.
H.
Hudson’s
Hampshire Days
(1906), selected by Sampson for his ‘gypsy anthology’
The Wind on the Heath
(1935), captures the essentials of gypsy life:

The blue sky, the brown soil beneath, the grass, the trees, the animals, the wind, and rain, and sun, and stars are never strange to me; for I am in and of and am one with them; and my flesh and the soil are one, and the heat in my blood and the sunshine are one, and the winds and tempests and my passions are one.
I feel that ‘strangeness’ only with regard to my fellow-men… when I look at them, their pale civilized faces, their clothes, and hear them talking eagerly about things that do not concern me.
They are out of my world – the real world.
All that they value, and seek and strain after all their lives long, their works and sports and pleasures, are the merest baubles and childish things; and their ideals are all false…

Augustus John met Sampson in 1901 when he took a post at the Liverpool School of Art, and it was through him that Augustus became increasingly obsessed with the world of gypsies.
The pair went off on jaunts to the encampments outside Liverpool, where they would listen bewitched to the gypsy harps, and absorb the magic of their poetic language.
The sight of the painted wagons, the horses, the campfires and the wild-eyed children who played around them stirred Augustus’s blood in a way he could hardly explain.
He felt akin to these ancient, free, outlawed peoples, and he longed to be one of them.