Among the Bohemians (39 page)

Francis gave me a key to his flat so that I could have a bath… [He] arranged his house like ships and devised ingenious space economies.
I could have a bath in the kitchen, my privacy protected by a curved wooden partition… built on the principle of a ship’s hull.
Caitlin had a nasty habit of standing on the kitchen table to spy over the top of the partition at the person having a bath and would give a derogatory report on some physical aspect to those eating boiled eggs for breakfast.

*

Willing as Bohemia was to embrace stink and dirt, getting into bed with bugs usually resulted in swift disillusionment.
Itchy spots and swarming mattresses recur with dismaying regularity in memoirs of that period.
Because so many Bohemians had ‘dropped out’ of the middle classes, it seemed a short step from civilization and carbolic soap, to the terrors of lice and contagion.
A poor poet like Liam O’Flaherty would seem to Mrs Beeton to be dicing with death when he moved into his ‘evil-smelling hole in Charlotte Street… alive with bed bugs, if not vermin’.
Driven away by the invincible insects, O’Flaherty decamped to Chelsea, but it was worse: ‘low-lying… should have gone to Hampstead… Living in rooms is awful’.
He escaped to the west coast of Donegal, still wistful for Fitzroy Street – if only it weren’t for the ‘bed bugs and fetid air’.
Kathleen Hale was another Bohemian who emerged from the First World War homeless and broke, but managed to find herself a tiny squalid space to rent in Soho.
She too soon discovered that the room was crawling with bedbugs which bit her at night.
She demonstrated the evidence to her fat landlady, who reacted phlegmatically:

Blandly she assured me she would deal with them, heaving and rolling herself up the narrow stairs to stand the legs of my bed in saucers of paraffin.
This deterred the climbers but had no effect on those bugs which dropped from the ceiling.

The sad tale of Nina Hamnett’s descent over thirty years from talented, sexy art student to squalid, promiscuous lush reads like a Bohemian
Rake’s Progress.
Her personal nadir was a stinking flat in Howland Street, infested with lice and littered with rat turds, with Nina and some anonymous sailor drunkenly taking their pleasures on a creaking mattress.

*

Evidently, not cleaning has all sorts of advantages for artists, being cheaper, less time-consuming and also, importantly, confirming one’s sense of oneself
qua
artist.
Nevertheless there were those even among the ranks of Bohemia who regarded squalor with suspicion, as being rather an extreme way of making a point.
Being an artist might make one filthy, but being filthy didn’t necessarily make one an artist – it wasn’t that easy.
C.
R.
W.
Nevinson was one who on this basis preferred to keep clean, while muttering darkly about grotesque filthy so-called geniuses.
Richard Aldington felt that it wasn’t necessary to go to the extremes of grease, blood and fungus in order to get the message across.
Aldington felt himself to be Bohemian in
his sympathies, a bit frowsty at the edges perhaps, but he found it impossible to give up his nice clean pocket handkerchief and in particular his daily bath; in Paris this habit was regarded as so recherché that he became known at his lodgings as
‘le-Monsieur-qui-prend-le-tub’.
Aldington’s tolerance was tested by the squalid excesses of his dirtier friends.
There were limits.
Without becoming neurotic about cleanliness, few would actively choose to live in foulness, but where did one draw the line, and how did one keep the chaos at bay?

The answer, of course, was servants.
For those who could afford it, domestic help was an inevitable necessity.
It is impossible to overemphasise the fact that for the cultured middle classes of that period, having the housework done by others was something they regarded as an immutable fact of life.
And if housework was not to interfere with painting, or writing, then servants had to do it.

Today, with hindsight, people are embarrassed at the thought of the existence of an inferior class whose lives were dedicated to clearing up after their employers.
‘Too bad,’ was Naomi Mitchison’s flat reaction to such squeamishness.
Ethel Mannin agreed: ‘It was snobbish; it was class distinction; it was exploitation; but it worked.’

The domestic labour market seemed to her to be balanced evenly between employers and employees, with vacancies always available for any maid who wanted a new or better mistress.
Mannin was grateful for the system, yet she recognised that it was based on a fundamentally irreconcilable relationship.
When, years later, she ran into a woman who had once worked for her, Mannin confessed how ashamed she still felt at having treated her servants
de haul en bas,
but the ex-housemaid warmly reassured her to the contrary: ‘Oh, no, Madam!
You were sweet!’ She had spent years reproaching herself unnecessarily.

Guilt, angst and uneasy compromise are the themes of the servant problem, which runs like a plaintive refrain through both Vanessa Bell’s and Virginia Woolfs correspondence and diaries:

I won’t write any more about servants.
I’m feeling as if I’d rather do all myself than have these to-dos.
Their conversation is more exhausting than that of all the intellectuals in London…

(Vanessa Bell,
Letters,
3 July 1918)

Nelly Boxall, the Woolfs’ general servant, was like a thorn in Virginia’s side.
When she finally left the relief was overwhelming:

It is the freedom from servants that is the groundwork & bedrock of all this expansion… I say, as I walk the downs, never again never again.
Cost what it may, I will never put my head into that noose again…

(Virginia Woolf,
Diaries,
6 August 1930)

The Nelly years had driven Virginia almost demented, causing her to long for a ‘domestic establishment… entirely controlled by one woman, a vacuum cleaner, & electric stoves’.

This vision of happiness incorporates labour-saving devices that are now fundamental to our lives.
Instead of traumatic scenes with housemaids and cooks, might a tumble-dryer, a dishwasher and a set of Teflon frying pans have resulted in greater novels, more profound poetry, finer works of art?
The dream recedes, for housework must be done, and washing up, and laundry, even in Bohemia.

For Vanessa, anything that interfered with her desperate desire to paint was a torment.
Yet there were times when dealing with the servants became so dominating that everything else simply ground to a halt.
Writing woefully to Duncan Grant, she tried to explain why she couldn’t come up to see him in London.
There was Mrs Pitcher’s day off, and Nelly’s day off, and there were too many burdens on Nelly to leave her all alone with the children.
And Jenny the cook had recently quit, leaving a trail of disaster in her wake:

I have to listen to endless stories of the horrors Jenny left behind her.
In fact she did leave the larder in such a state that 1 had to spend all yesterday morning cleaning it out preparatory to Mrs P’s scrubbing it.
How I hate these domesticities.
I can’t conceive what the female mind is made of…

I haven’t been able to paint yet…

Vanessa’s break with her Victorian past was unresolved.
She felt an innate wish to have order and cleanliness around her, yet the conventional oppressed her.
She felt imprisoned by households such as Cleeve House, the home of her Bell parents-in-law in Wiltshire.
There the heavy oak panelling, stuffed wildlife, impeccable domestic staff, above all the unutterable dullness of the Bells themselves, seemed like a ‘swamp and fog’ around her, making her yearn to live differently, to throw off the trappings of so-called civilization.

But in the meantime one had to live in the real world.
As Vanessa found out, it was not possible to be an artist and keep up Victorian standards at the same time, particularly if one had a family.
The scrubbing of the kitchen stairs before breakfast had to take second place when the larder started
to pose a health risk, and wiping specks of dust off bookcases became a distant memory.
Time at one’s easel was way down the list of priorities.
Thus it was essential to have a reliable support system in the form of efficient, pleasant, prudent servants, who understood and tolerated her way of life.

There were of course no guarantees of getting a ‘treasure’.
Servants are human beings, with problems, failings and foibles.
The upper classes retreated from contact with their servants behind a cordon sanitaire of class status.
By contrast Bohemia felt, in theory at least, a desire to treat the domestic underclass with respect and consideration, and that meant contact with them.
Nina Hamnett took a special pleasure in charladies.
She often used this lowly breed as models, and saw them as belonging to a singular race: ‘Someone ought to do a book on charwomen with illustrations.
No one has I think done it, and there are so many funny stories…’

Occasionally, servants turned out to have undiscovered artistic potential.
Harold Acton spent his teenage holidays at a rectory near Brighton.
He whiled away many idle hours in the kitchen with Hetty and Mabel, the housemaid and cook, encouraging them to develop their considerable poetic gifts.
‘Sympathy’, ‘A Parting Token’ and ‘Midnight Fancies’ were among their outpourings.
They loved, too, to listen while Acton read aloud to them from Keats and Boccaccio.

Beatrice Campbell took on a servant who was inspired by her mistress’s paintings and started to draw.
Beatrice presented her with a paintbox, and she became very enthusiastic, neglecting the housework.
But she had to go when she started painting on top of Beatrice’s pictures.
The gift was later discovered shoved away in the boiler room – ‘she had given up Art’.
Beatrice’s memoir also gives one glimpses of a series of servants who turned the Campbells’ daily life into a procession of near-calamities.
There was the daily help who washed her hair in petrol and almost set the house alight when drying it in front of the fire.
Mrs Conybear boiled cods’ heads for her cat, and the stench was at times almost unendurable.
Another servant got pregnant, while her successor went mad and tried to kill herself by drinking disinfectant.
Then there was the cook’s unemployed sister who, unknown to Beatrice, came and squatted in the maids’ sitting-room sink for some days before she was discovered.

The close proximity of maids and mistresses could result in the build-up of volcanic pressures and stresses.
Some servants felt close to despair at the pointless, footling endlessness of their work, the ironing of newspapers, and even of bootlaces.
In Margaret Powell’s memoir
Below Stairs
(1968) we hear the other side of the story:

It was the opinion of ‘Them’ upstairs that servants couldn’t appreciate good living or comfort, therefore they must have plain fare, they must have dungeons to work in and to eat in, and must retire to cold spartan bedrooms to sleep…

But if ‘Them’ upstairs could have heard the conversations the parlourmaids carried down from upstairs, they would have realised that our impassive expressions and respectful demeanours hid scorn, and derision.

The housekeeper at Charleston, Grace Higgens, never uttered a word of complaint, and took pride in her standards of service, yet there can be little doubt that her employers exploited her loyalty.
The Charleston artists weren’t the easiest people to clean up after.
They brought clay from the pottery into the house on their boots.
A still life of a dead hare or a loaf of bread might not be disturbed though it putrefied on the sideboard.
There were jolly dinner parties that went on till late, with the company sitting at table and Grace unable to clear until they had all moved to the drawing room.
Once she returned from her annual summer holiday in Norfolk to find the entire week’s washing-up waiting for her piled up in the kitchen sink.
Grace’s husband, Walter, who gardened, was expected to keep himself and his wheelbarrow clear of the front garden while the family were in the dining room, so as to leave their view of the pond unimpeded.
Their son John was in hot water if he was spotted filching so much as a dangling pear from over the garden wall.
Many of the assumptions, if not the practices, of the nineteenth century were bred into Vanessa’s bone, and another generation was to pass before any middle-class matriarch with the resources to employ a servant felt capable of scrubbing a floor or cleaning a saucepan herself.
The wonderful freedom to be had, at so modest a price (when Grace retired in 1970 she was earning a mere £5 a week, plus her board), blinded Vanessa to this exploitation.
Her vision was reserved for her painting.

The twenties and thirties were a curious transitional period for women who were for a few decades free of the household chores which had been thought for so long to be women’s work…

commented Naomi Mitchison on this phenomenon.

Quite a number of women took advantage of this new freedom to write, paint, do scientific or historical research, become doctors, lawyers and so on.
I was one.
Clearly without domestic help I could not have had a family and been a successful writer.

To Naomi Mitchison this position was axiomatic.
Like Vanessa Bell she stood with a foot in each camp, straddling the centuries.
Part of her wanted to be a Victorian hostess with guests dressing for dinner, but another part wanted to forsake civilization and go to ground in cosy, squalid, dirty Bohemia, where she could kick off her shoes and write novels in peace.
Spotless furniture and punctual meals weren’t indispensable for her writing – Mitchison was often at her most productive on a train, riding round the Circle Line – but something in her required an orderly home.

This dilemma is one far more frequently experienced by women than men, but in his romantic youth Cyril Connolly was torn between Bohemianism and respectability.
Connolly the Bohemian found conventionality ugly and soul-destroying, and hankered after a life dedicated to the quest for Beauty.
Connolly the snob and socialite longed for a well-regulated home, and dreamed of sitting at breakfast with a wife ‘with two newspapers and the marmalade between us’.
The outcome was a messy compromise.
Connolly found it difficult to curb his natural untidiness.
His hosts commented on how he left dirty handkerchiefs lying about and unstoppered fountain pens open in books.
Attempting to ‘live for beauty’, he also succumbed to piggery.
Aldous Huxley was repelled by the ‘Bohemian disorder’ of the Connolly household, by the pet lemurs, ferrets and marmosets who, no more housetrained than their owners, were fed on raw bleeding meat by Cyril’s first wife, Jean, who then wiped her stained fingers down the front of her embroidered Chinese dressing-gown.
When another friend, Enid Bagnold, arranged for Cyril and Jean to take the tenancy of a house near to her in Rottingdean, she soon regretted it.
The property was left in a sordid state, the carpet holed and stained, the furniture damaged and ink-blotted, the paintwork yellowed and blistered by burning cigarettes.
It would appear that ‘living for beauty’ resulted in its antithesis.