Among the Bohemians (28 page)

Going barefoot was all the more a statement of one’s allegiances.
Generally associated with abject poverty, the Bohemians who rejected footwear entirely declared themselves above material things, and attuned to nature.
Gwen Raverat would have envied the John or Bell children, or Igor and Baba Anrep who went barefoot all summer long.
Igor liked to maintain that they couldn’t afford shoes, but in reality he genuinely preferred going barefoot.
Rupert Brooke and his Neo-pagan friends felt themselves to be above boot-wearing – but their practice of removing them at all times fell
foul of Brooke’s landlady in Grantchester.
He had to warn his free-and-easy visitors that they would have to keep their boots on, otherwise she would throw him out.
In due course he left anyway, and took up residence at the Old Vicarage next door, whose owner didn’t seem to mind a barefoot poet sleeping under the stars in her garden.

*

The Neo-pagans, the group surrounding the poet Rupert Brooke, were particularly addicted to naked bathing.
Shedding one’s clothes seemed in those heady decades to be a glorious activity.
Brooke, Bunny Garnett, Ka Cox, the Olivier girls, the Raverats, Radfords, Cornfords and their friends pitched their camps by the seashore or rivers, where they could swim and dive in a state of nature.
Then they lit fires and talked about poetry and love.
Their bare bodies were imbued with a kind of innocence and an artist’s love of the human form.
Nakedness represented the ultimate emancipation – the breaking of a final taboo.
For in Victorian England there were even cases of married couples who had never seen each other naked.
Nina Hamnett saw her body unclothed for the first time at the age of sixteen; it was such a revelation that she immediately did a self-portrait.
‘Man has to undo the wrappings and the mummydom of centuries…’ insisted Edward Carpenter in
Civilization: Its Cause and Cure
(1889).
He saw the removal of clothes as a move towards enlightenment:

The instinct of all who desire to deliver the divine
imago
within them, is, in something more than the literal sense, towards unclothing…

Then, and only then…

… the meaning of the old religions will come back to him.
On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars…

Encouraged by Carpenter, and by the Freudians, who saw nudism as eradicating repressions, nudist camps were briefly popular in the twenties and thirties.
But there was something humourless and ultimately un-sexy about them to the majority of British people who, whether bourgeois or Bohemian, preferred to leave institutional nudism to the Germans.
Bohemian nakedness was exhilarating, and daring – Nina Hamnett danced naked to Russian balalaikas, Robert Medley cavorted in a figleaf at the Cave of Harmony, the composer Philip Heseltine stripped off unbidden in
Piccadilly Circus.
Heseltine’s displays of streaking were somewhat unhinged.
Naked, he would tear through village streets on his motorbike, or rip off his clothes in the Queen’s Hall.
Inhibitions were for the faint-hearted, and it was fun to upset Mrs Grundy.

*

Sadly the naked human form does not always live up to one’s hopes, and we live in a cold climate.
However, it was still possible to deliver the divine imago in yellow silk or emerald corduroy, in cheerful colours and flamboyant fabrics.
For Dorelia and her sister Edie much of their creativity was expressed in the clothes they sewed themselves, whose flowing lines were designed to their own pattern, and whose seams were brightly saddle-stitched on the outside in contrasting coloured silks – orange on blue, emerald on crimson.
They made all the children’s clothes too.
The boys wore pink smocks and brown corduroy knickerbockers (their picturesque appearance gained them the nickname ‘Persians’ at school), and the little girls wore miniature versions of the women’s dresses, which trailed on the floor and entangled their feet.

The emphasis was on fun, and on colour and beauty rather than fine workmanship.
Vanessa Bell would often seize her Singer and run up a skirt or a party dress for Angelica.
The result was gay but frequently relied on safety pins as fastenings.
Igor Anrep remembered his mother Helen’s full-length home-made dresses which she continued to wear when everyone else was going knee-length in the 1920s.
Their sewing machine only did chain-stitch, which meant that if a thread got pulled the whole seam would unravel, leaving Helen clutching at the sections of her skirt in panic until she could get home.

Being unable to afford clothes led to creative solutions.
Caitlin Thomas would make shirts for Dylan by hacking her way into a checked tablecloth.
It was easy to fold the thing in four, cut a hole for the head and a notch for the arms.
‘And, presto, that was it…’ Dylan was proud of his clever wife with her needlework, but Caitlin couldn’t help feeling embarrassed by her own ineptitude and Dylan’s absurd appearance in these garments.

Kathleen Hale would save up to buy four art silk squares from Liberty’s:

They were big – and ever so artistic!
– reproductions of Indian patterns, and one of them would make the front of the tunic, and another the back, and then one for each of the sleeves, just like that!
I didn’t know anything about tucks or fitting.
I
thought I looked wonderful; they were the only things I could afford to make, and I couldn’t afford to buy any.

Iris Tree acquired yards of ethnic material and devised Gauguinesque sarongs… Sewing, hand-weaving and knitting, Bohemians were full of the spirit of improvisation, the human love of self-adornment triumphing over meagre means and narrow-minded standards.

Brilliant, exotic colour leaps out at one from the pages of contemporary memoirs, just as it does from the canvases of Augustus John, Vanessa Bell, Mark Gertler and their contemporaries.
Bohemian clothes weren’t intended to blend in.
At one of Ford Madox Ford’s tea parties three young writers seated on a divan caused their host anguish by their Fauvist ankles: ‘… clothed, as to the one in emerald green socks, as to the next in vermilion and as to the next with electric blue.
Merely to look in the direction of that divan was to have a pain in the eyes.’ Arthur Ransome tells in
Bohemia in London
how at the Algerian Café in Dean Street one might, if one was lucky, chance upon a Bohemian in emerald corduroy, smoking his pipe and talking poetry over his coffee; while a regular at the Café Royal was Betty May, dressed like a parakeet from top to toe:

I could only afford one outfit, but every item of it was of a different colour.
Neither red nor green nor blue nor yellow nor purple was forgotten, for I loved them all equally, and if I was not rich enough to wear them separately, rather than be parted from any one of them, I would wear them, like Joseph in the Bible, all at once!

As if to endorse Bohemia’s appropriation of vivid colour, the London fashion world was soon reeling from the arrival of Bakst and his splendid orientalism, let loose on the stage of Covent Garden in the Russian ballet’s
Schéhérazade.
Simultaneously, Paul Poiret’s sub-oriental collections, with their complex and voluptuous barbarity, rocked Paris.
Though such high-fashion extravaganzas were not for impoverished Bohemians, Poiret’s love of colour and ostentation was in tune with their approach to dress – the anti-taste approach.
In 1911, Turkish houris rubbed shoulders with purple shawls and black sombreros, Egyptian coiffures mingled with poetic locks in the auditorium of Diaghilev’s productions.
There was Edith Sitwell in green brocade and queer Chelsea types in flannel trousers and multicoloured pullovers, alongside the starchiest of boiled shirts and most resplendent of evening gowns – a colourful throng of the chic and the shabby; for fashionable, intellectual and Bohemian London were united in applauding the art of Nijinsky, Lopokova and Karsavina.
Russian-ness in all its forms now
became intensely fascinating to the cultured section of society.
There had been nothing like it before.

*

This was the great era of disguise and fancy dress; it was as if the combined corps de ballet of
La Boutique Fantasque, Carmen
and
Schéhérazade
had all joined hands and taken to the streets, dancing into every salon, dance hall and nightclub, and making their final entrance en masse at the Royal Albert Hall.
For this was the usual venue of the Chelsea Arts Ball, an unmissable event in the Bohemian calendar.

The Chelsea Arts Club had been founded in 1891 with an agreement that it should be ‘Bohemian in character’.
Men only, the Church Street premises provided a retreat for a prominent crowd of ‘devotees of the brush and mallet’, many of them leading lights of the art schools or Royal Academicians.
Whistler, Sargent, Tonks, Steer, Sickert, Brangwyn and Augustus John were all regulars who enjoyed the informal companionship of other artists that it offered.
Certainly the club was homely and raffish, and far from pompous, but in effect it eschewed the avant-garde and maintained a rather gentish, uncontroversial character.
This made it easy for more conventional people to approve of, and the ball became the moment when artistic and high society London united to let its collective hair down – its great innovation being that fancy dress was compulsory.

On Mardi Gras 1910, four thousand three hundred revellers arrived at the Albert Hall for the biggest motley extravaganza ever held in London, a whirling, dancing crush of crazy outfits.
Most of the artists had designed their own costumes.
Forty girl art students transformed themselves into an eighty-legged microbe – the ‘Flu Germ’.
Flashing its electrically lit red eyes, it wove past a cute little model
en travesti
astride an attenuated giraffe, while to the music of massed bands, Halley’s Comet took the floor with Joan of Arc, and an elephant turkey-trotted with a Sioux chieftain.
Meanwhile Romeo and Juliet shared a joke with a pair of cowboys, and teddy bean, red devils, mad hatters and toreadors danced till dawn.
‘The fun of it all!’ sighed one delirious party goer, remembering that phantasmagoric night.

Never perhaps has so much mileage been extracted from the dressing-up box as during those flamboyant early decades of the twentieth century.
The year 1910 saw possibly the most outrageous example of exotic stunt-dressing, if one can call it that, when His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Abyssinia and his suite arrived to inspect the flagship
Dreadnought
at anchor in Wey-mouth harbour.
None of the officers on board suspected their real identities: Duncan Grant, Anthony Buxton, Guy Ridley, Virginia Stephen and (in
plain clothes as their interpreter) her brother Adrian Stephen.
The instigator of the hoax, Horace Cole, pretended to be an official from the Foreign Office.
Clarkson’s, the theatrical costumiers, from whom they had hired their Eastern robes, were brought in to dress them and apply their make-up and false beards.
Despite a few close misses – as when the rain threatened to wash away Duncan’s moustache – the impersonators remained undiscovered.
A few days later the
‘Dreadnought
Hoax’ hit the headlines of national newspapers, and the Admiralty realised it had been shamefully humiliated by a group of posers got up in fancy dress and sunburn powder.
For a while the Navy was the laughing-stock of the press and the music halls; questions were even asked in parliament.
Eventually the episode slipped into history, and mythology – a milestone among masquerades.

Perhaps the
Dreadnought
hoax figured in Virginia Woolf’s memory of that year when she later wrote, ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’.
Her husband, with more characteristic caution, cited Freud, Einstein, Proust, Joyce, and the Post-Impressionists as being among the writers and artists who made pre-war London feel like the most exciting place on earth to be alive.
Modernist camp followers needed to feel that their external guise was of a piece with their experimental art, and that it expressed their ideal of authenticity as opposed to the fake, gutless complacency of the bourgeoisie.
They were determined to stand apart from the herd, to cast a new sense of identity.
What was wrong with tennis pumps under evening dress, with breaking the rules in a black wedding dress, with walking down the Tottenham Court Road in odd shoes and coloured stockings, if they showed you were original?

But, paradoxically, unconventional dress was also a kind of camouflage, for those natural exhibitionists were also a companionable crowd.
Bohemian dress conferred a sense of belonging, and protective colouring:

A man does not set out saying, ‘I am going to be a Bohemian’

… explained Arthur Ransome,

… he trudges along, whispering to himself, ‘I am going to be a poet, or an artist, or some other kind of great man,’ and finds Bohemia, like a tavern by the wayside.

… and, looking into the tavern, [he] catches glimpses of a hundred others as extravagant as himself… [and] tells himself with utter joy that here are his own people, and, being like everyone else a gregarious creature, throws himself through the door and into their arms.

For without wanting to belong to the anonymous masses, there has always nonetheless existed a kind of freemasonry between artists, and it had some unmistakable badges of office.

*

How could one fail, for instance, to understand the explicit declaration carried by an unconventional hairstyle?
In the Edwardian era all serious men wore their hair ‘short back and sides’.
It was greased with brilliantine, and you were daring indeed if you braved a right-hand or centre parting.
But from the early days of French Bohemia shaggy locks had denoted genius.
W.
M.
Thackeray wondered at the ringlets, curls and scented tresses worn in the artist quarter of Paris when he visited it in the 1830s.
For Théophile Gautier long hair was an article of faith: ‘Make no mistake, if you cut your hair or your moustache, you cut off part of your talent…’ for, like Samson, long hair was a symbol of potency, artistic or otherwise.
The aesthetes of the nineties went in for abundance of hair, emphasising their sensitive pallor, their refined emotions.
Augustus John allowed his hair to grow, and soon the camp following – Henry Lamb, Lytton Strachey, John Currie, John Fothergill and Mark Gertler – were growing theirs in his wake.
Arthur Ransome was impassioned in his defence of such unconventionality.
He pointed out that the need to shock one’s relatives went deep.
In growing his hair long, the Bohemian showed that he was ‘one of the prophets’, and demonstrated his horror of ‘being indistinguishable from among the rest of the human ants around him’.
Unfortunately this attitude was painfully easy to send up: