Among the Bohemians (36 page)

For Arthur Ransome, you could only qualify as a Bohemian by being poor, but in Bohemia one could be blissful on a sandwich and a couple of bananas, which in his nostalgic memory ‘seemed a supper for a Shakespeare’.
Ransome conceded that he was undernourished at the time and, like Kathleen Hale, attributed digestive problems in later life to malnutrition in youth.
He survived euphorically on haddock bought in the King’s Road.
This he cooked in his kettle while reading a chapter of his book, by which time it was ready and would sustain him for the next twenty-four hours.
When the price of haddock was too steep, he lived off eggs at a penny each.
Convenient, cheap and nourishing, the role of eggs in the lives of artists may well have been unrecognised.
How many masterpieces owe their existence to the omelette?

Ransome described an average day in the life of an artist at the turn of the century.
The model ‘Serafina’ keeps up a gentle chatter while the painter is absorbed by his canvas.
Eventually he tires of his brush and she of her pose.
It is then her job to slip down from the model’s throne and light a little oil stove in the corner of the studio, take eggs, milk and butter from a cupboard and set about cooking
‘oeufs brouillés,
the favourite dish of half the studios in the world’.
The literature of the time bears this out.
The egg is a leitmotif in the kitchens and studios of numerous artists, whether in sandwiches, scrambled with haddock, fried, poached or boiled.
Today’s nutritionists would probably disapprove of this egg-dependency, but nobody could fault its convenience.
For the artist reduced in circumstances, with no
more than a gas ring and a frying pan, and no experience of cookery, what could be easier?
The egg is nature’s fast food.

Another simple solution was the bones-and-vegetable concoction (otherwise known as
pot-au-feu
) adopted by Caitlin Thomas and Nina Hamnett, which could be a cheap and sustaining alternative to the omelette.
In his spartan Fulham studio the impoverished sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska lived on something similar.
His friend Horace Brodsky visited him there.
Judging by his description it is astonishing that Gaudier didn’t meet his end from food poisoning several yean before his untimely death in the trenches: ‘I knocked, and the door was presently opened, and my nose and eyes experienced queer sensations.
There was a whiff of a most nauseating smell, suggestive of stale cooking…’ The source of the stink turns out to be Gaudier’s
pot-au-feu.
Invited to join him for dinner, Brodsky tactfully declines.
Undeterred, the sculptor tucks into the foul-smelling concoction with gusto, while cheerfully explaining his labour-saving solution to the food problem.
Once a week, it appeared, he bought provisions and boiled them up in a pot together.
Then all he needed to do every time he was hungry was reheat the contents.
When they were finished he would start again.

On this particular evening the strength of the odour told me that it was not freshly made.
Possibly, too, Brzeska’s meat and vegetables were not of the best.
Also I am sure he was not a good cook.
In any case, it was not important to him.
It filled his belly and kept him alive, which was all he troubled about.

The demons that controlled Gaudier’s creativity were not concerned with the state of his digestion.
Perhaps he had developed an immunity to food poisoning.
That was certainly Roy Campbell’s theory about the diet of the ex-lawyer Stewart Gray, an extraordinary character who had given away all his money and taken up squatting in empty Mayfair houses with the flotsam of models and washed-up artists of London’s pre-war Bohemia.
In his autobiography Campbell propagated the myth that Stewart Gray lived on scraps from restaurants sandwiched between slices of linoleum.
^*
One would rather go hungry.

Ransome, Gaudier-Brzeska, Kathleen Hale and Stewart Gray were all painfully poor.
Nourishing themselves was a question of scraping by, but in all these cases the ideal is palpable through the hunger.
In his autobiography Ransome looked back on the hungry days of his Bohemian youth, full of nostalgia for his penurious but idyllic existence.
Kathleen Hale saw the lack of mealtimes as a liberation rather than a deprivation.
For Gaudier good food was for the ‘bloody bourgeois’.
Such an ideological stance towards life took some of these rebels to the brink of starvation.
No sanctuary stood between penury and an early grave, and it was far from unknown for penury to be the artist’s lot.
This theme provided the opening of George Moore’s realist novel
A Modern Lover
(1889) in which the author follows the fortunes of his artist hero, Lewis.
Here, the hungry Lewis feels his ideals collapsing around him:

For two days he had not left his miserable room, but had sat working at the drawings that Bendish now refused to buy at any price.
He had lived on a few crusts and a little tea, afraid to spend his last shilling.
And now, as he walked wearily, he took it out of his pocket and looked at it: it was all that remained between him and starvation… his resources were exhausted, his clothes were pawned, and he did not know who would lend him a sixpence…

‘Surely,’ he asked, ‘I am not going to die, like a rat, of starvation in the middle of this enormous city?’

The river beckons; to drown himself might be the answer, but the thought of little Gwynnie, the neighbouring tenant in his shabby lodgings, who loves him, keeps him from finally giving up hope.
The next day Lewis persuades a dealer to offer him a commission – but there is no advance:

‘Three pounds isn’t much, he ought to have given me five; but never mind, let’s have some supper on the strength of it… I have a shilling tonight… and I shall have three pounds on Monday; it is all right, we can have a couple of sausages and a pint of porter.’

… In a few minutes Gwynnie returned with the eatables; she added a couple of baked potatoes to the sausages; there was no cloth to lay, and they had only to push aside the paints and brushes.

The sausage supper is a turning point in Lewis’s fortunes.
Revived, he sets to work, the commission is well received, and soon he starts to make money – poor devoted Gwynnie however is forgotten.
Her heartless lover rises
over the course of three hundred-odd pages to become President of the Royal Academy, and the days of hunger are forgotten along with her.

*

One cannot live on dreams.
The Bohemian dilemma impales its victims with sadistic consistency: ‘As an artist I am above material things; this defines me.
I resent giving time to keeping alive when I want to give time to Art.
But if I don’t feed myself I shall die…’ One can’t just live on egg variations.
‘I
am
tired, my dear… tired… of eating hard-boiled eggs out of my hands and drinking milk out of a bottle,’ complained Katherine Mansfield.
But what were the alternatives?
For, ideologies apart, eggs, bones and cheap cheese were the unromantic reality of the garret.

Day after day, meals of some kind had to appear on the tables ofBohemians and bourgeois alike, an inescapable round of shopping and cooking and clearing up afterwards, and inevitably the brunt of this fell on women.
Who else would work all day cooking and doing housework unless driven to it by economic dependency?
Preparing meals for a middle-class family was so laborious and time-consuming that cook-generals were expected to work a sixteen-hour day, with one day off a month.
How could one do that, and be an artist?
If one had other priorities in life – painting, or poetry perhaps – one had to fight for them, otherwise daily life threatened to become measured out with potato peelings.

Ida John’s delight in cooking was short-lived, as domesticity closed in on her.
She felt that she had been made for better things, but that children and washing and meals and shopping had come to dominate her daily life.
Occasionally ‘the curtain seems to lift for me a little…’ and she glimpsed something of the idealist she once was.
‘The other days I simply fight to keep where I am… I can understand the saints and martyrs and great men suffering everything for their idea of truth…’ Ida’s sufferings at that time seem too humdrum to be identified with martyrdom; but only two years later she was dead in childbirth, her resources stretched and weakened beyond their limits.

The one-time star of the Slade – Ida John’s friend Edna Waugh – was virtually extinguished when she married Willie Clarke Hall.
He betrayed their agreement that she would be left free to paint, and abandoned her to the kitchen.
Her biographer writes that ‘Willie’s praise was no longer for Edna’s genius for art but for her’ ‘genius for cooking”.’ The sexual revolution had failed to keep pace with revolutions in art; almost a hundred years later it is still the woman who stirs the sauce in most households.

The indignity and betrayal of domestic servitude were not reserved for the virtuosi of art and literature.
In 1922 a painter called Christabel Dennison found herself pregnant by her lover John Adams, a writer.
Dependent on John, and locked into a masochistic and servile relationship with him, Christabel gave her baby away to a friend who brought up the child.
Many years later the daughter, Jane Spottiswoode, discovered her mother’s diaries and embarked on a quest to find out about Christabel.
The sad book that resulted,
Christabel Who?
(1998) reveals a picture of a woman’s life stunted and blighted by domestic pressures.
Her artistic aspirations and daily domestic reality were fundamentally incompatible.
But although it seems extreme – Christabel’s relationship with John is a pitiable apology for a love affair – her everyday life is one that in its constituents was surely typical.
How many forgotten women can have found themselves as trapped by their decision to live unorthodox lives, as their more conventional sisters were in their suburban villas with servants?
Christabel had no time to do her own work.
She had no money, no space of her own, no leisure – and of course, no cook.
A typical diary entry:

Friday…

Me ‘Will you give me some money then, I have none?’

John ‘No I will not.’

Me ‘Then I shall have to borrow.’

John picked up that new unopened two pound jar of marmalade and threw it across the table.
I dodged and it hit the mantelpiece and crashed on to the floor.
I whispered fatuously, ‘Oh Honey, you mustn’t throw the marmalade about.’ He jumped up and seized me by the throat saying, ‘I’ll kill you.’ He hurt me.
I was frightened and started to shiver.
He stopped and I ran out of the kitchen into my room and locked the door.

When he’d gone I went back to the kitchen and saw the mess of broken glass and marmalade under my chair.
I wonder if he just wanted to frighten me or if he really meant to kill me… I cleaned up the mess of marmalade and glass.
Washed up, made a pudding, stewed some figs and tidied all the house.
It seemed impossible to go…

And so it goes on.
We see John burning the toast, Christabel bemoaning her cramped kitchen – ‘never anywhere to put anything down’, Christabel scrubbing potatoes and scraping uneaten food off plates into dustbins, Christabel deciding to leave John, but making him a rice pudding first, and
then coming back again.
We see John slumped in his armchair waiting for Christabel to get supper, or make his toast, we see her slaving over a dinner party to entertain his friends – ‘a wretched day… It isn’t civilised to have to spend the whole day getting a meal ready… I have been tormented with the fatigue of meals since I was twelve years old.’ Few and far between are the intervals of happiness – one rare morning John kisses her in bed, ‘the first time in over a year’; another day the beauty of early celandines stirs the artist in her.
More often she records, ‘I feel as if I can never be happy again.
As if I’ve lost the key.
I spend my life by the gas fire, getting meals at the same time every day with no lightening of the heaviness in my heart.’

In 1925 Christabel Dennison fell ill; at the age of forty-one, worn out, death released her from the treadmill.
A few black and white illustrations, including a haunting self-portrait which her daughter reproduces in her book, hint at the sensitive artist she might have been.
Christabel paid a heavy price for refusing to be a slave to convention.
The essence of her predicament is still relevant, still unresolved.
One can only guess at the numbers of submerged women who, like her, were defeated by domesticity.

7. New Brooms

Must women give all their time to housework? – How can one cope

with housework without modern machinery? – Is an experimental

lifestyle compatible with having servants? – What are the advantages

of remaining dirty? – Must one have baths? – Can one admit to

the existence of lavatories? – Must creativity be sacrificed for

the sake of cleanliness and order? – Does domesticity have

any value for the artist?

Mrs Beeton described housekeeping as ‘the linch-pin of life’s daily round’.
That bible of the middle classes, her
Book of Household Management,
left nothing to chance in its seventeen hundred pages of domestic commandments:

The cleaning of the kitchen, passages, and kitchen stairs must always be over before breakfast.

Once a week the stairs will need a thorough clean, the stair-rods must be removed, two or three at a time, and the carpet underneath carefully brushed.
Paint-work must be washed, and the banisters and hand-rail polished.

It is not enough in cleaning furniture to pass lightly over the surface; the rims and legs of tables, and the backs and legs of chairs and sofas should be rubbed vigorously daily; if there is a bookcase, every corner of every pane and ledge requires to be carefully wiped, so that not a speck of dust can be found in the room.