Among the Bohemians (41 page)

Never have I felt so happy and sufficient.
I have washed my clothes and spread them on the lawn to dry.
Prettily the thin white lies upon the luxuriant grass scattered with dull yellow leaves…

I have scrubbed the scullery and whitened the door steps and the stone of the copper.
While I scrub, I think of nothing but the pleasure of the red wet tiles.
Keeping things bright and clean is the pleasure of old maids.

The artist in Christabel couldn’t help relishing the picturesque qualities of a simple activity.
Humble household jobs can have a certain aesthetic satisfaction, even becoming a creative outlet for the frustrated individual.

Anna Wickham, for example, was a talented singer who had the misfortune to marry a dominating man with no interest in her as an artist.
After their marriage she gave up her musical career, had four sons, and played the role of model wife until it became suffocating.
Eventually she began to write poetry in secret, but when her husband found out he was outraged and forbade her to write any more.
A violent row broke out, Anna smashing her hand through a glass door, at which her husband had her certified insane.
She was forced to spend two months in a mental asylum.
Afterwards, she returned to her husband and children and continued clandestinely to write
poetry.
Thwarted as an artist, she vented much of her energy and passion on needlework.
Betty May visited her and was bewildered to hear Anna declaiming about books and writers while furiously knitting.
On another occasion Nina Hamnett arrived and was amazed to find every surface of the room festooned in garlands of boys’ socks, full of holes, waiting to be mended: ‘there must have been about one hundred’.
Anna was sitting in their midst, darning like a demon, confident that the entire job would take no more than three hours.

Seemingly monotonous jobs can be very soothing.
A ball of wool and a clutch of knitting needles by the Charleston fireside recall Vanessa’s after-dinner habit.
As her family and their friends waxed argumentative about art and socialism, knitting socks helped her to wind down from the pressures of the day.
Robert Graves remarked on how quiescent the turbulent poet Edith Sitwell could become, spending a quiet weekend with him and Nancy sitting on the sofa hemming handkerchiefs.
D.
H.
Lawrence was given to sudden rages.
He would rave, roar, beat the table and abuse everything and everybody.
There was great relief all round when the table-banging subsided and he settled down to some therapeutic needlework, hemming for preference.

Such useful toil was more than calming, it was economical, an important factor for many artists.
Before the Second World War the ‘make do and mend’ ethos was still a primary consideration.
Sheets were always repaired, buttons sewn on.
Nobody could afford to throw out a pair of socks just because it had holes.
The socks had to justify their expenditure, and time had to be dedicated to making them last as long as possible.
Over such gentle thrifty tasks women through the ages have woven intimacies, remembenng, dreaming, and hoping, stitching their loves and longings into the ravelled sleeves of worn-out woollies.
Those were the happiest, the most peaceful evenings that Beatrice Campbell always treasured from her friendship with Katherine Mansfield, as the pair sat by the fire darning their husbands’ socks, talking of their homes and childhoods, reliving the anticipation before a party, or recollecting their families across the sea – before it was up with the lark again to battle with the bedclothes and saucepans and pails and the endless, endless washing-up.

*

Rebecca West denounced housework as ‘rat-poison’, and fiercely defended the right of women to do as little of it as possible.
Needless to say, there are certain risks attached to never cleaning the lavatory or allowing food to moulder, but there is nothing intrinsically wrong in neglecting housework.
The conflation of moral values with hygiene has led to misdirected accusations of depravity around a sector of society that had no cause for shame in that respect.
Liam O’Flaherty fiercely defended the right to be dirty:

I know people who never cleaned their teeth or took a bath and were yet more interesting and fundamentally moral than the cleanest city clerk, who cleans his teeth after each meal and takes a bath twice a day.
I loathe uniformity…

Unluckily the charge, like mud, stuck.
The definitions of words like slattern and slut are blurred between slovenliness and sexual promiscuity.
Bohemia’s ‘fault’ has been in devoting more energy to the activities associated with art than to those associated with cleanliness; and in protesting at the exaggerated standards expected by the moral majority, which just seemed an absurd waste of time.

When Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant visited the painters Nan Hudson and Ethel Sands in Normandy in 1927, their two house-proud hostesses outraged the Bohemian in Vanessa.
‘Please,’ she begged Roger Fry in a letter, ‘send us a glimpse of ordinary rough and tumble, dirty everyday existence.’

I am beginning to collapse from rarefaction here.
The strain to keep clean is beginning to tell.
Duncan shaves daily – I wash my hands at least 5 times a day – but in spite of all I know I’m not up to the mark.
The extraordinary thing is that it’s not only the house but also the garden that’s in such spotless order.
It’s also impossible to find a place into which one can throw a cigarette end without its becoming a glaring eyesore.
Ethel goes out and hunts snails till there are practically none left.
Old men come in and polish the floors, women come and cut the grass, others come and wash, Nan makes muslin covers to receive the flies’ excrements (I don’t believe Nan and Ethel have any – they never go to the W.), everything has yards and yards of fresh muslin and lace and silk festooned on it and all seems to be washed and ironed in the night.
No wonder they hardly ever paint…

Vanessa was desperate to get back to her ‘home dirt’.

Women like my grandmother were privileged in being able to pursue their careers liberated from the sink and the washtub.
If only on this front, the tale of the twentieth century is a tale of progress.
Such women were not prepared to punish themselves running around all day with a Ukanusa Drudgee.
Impressive paintings resulted, many of them domestic in their subject matter.
The Tub
(painted 1918) is innovatory in its simple, highly Post-Impressionistic treatment of three fundamental motifs – naked woman,
bathtub, vase.
Vanessa loved to paint the simple objects around her -kitchens, cups and saucers, fruit and vegetables.
Removed from the duties connected with them, she felt able to celebrate the quotidian, the daily matter in which our lives are rooted.
Carrington’s letters and diaries, ever-attentive to the issues of washing-up, food and servants, are also surely a remarkable testimony to the aesthetic rewards of domesticity.

In her illuminating study of early twentieth-century women’s fiction,
A Very Great Profession
(1983), Nicola Beauman makes a convincing case for domesticity as a fruitful topic for the novel, in that it touches on preoccupations that are of absorbing interest to a female audience.
She points out that a tradition of male-dominated criticism has expelled works that depict the everyday details of women’s lives from the canon of durable art.
Today the clichéd sneer ‘Aga-saga’ still attaches with regrettable ease to works of fiction which dwell on the trivia of life.
Nicola Beauman speaks for many women who are left cold by ‘important issues’, and seek ‘with a desperate and almost perverted yearning for a mere crumb of everyday reality’, something with which they can wholeheartedly identify.
The hard-won freedom for artists to recollect domesticity in tranquillity is something to celebrate.

8. The Open Road

Is it necessary to stay in one place? – What is the purpose of travel? –

Is it preferable for English people to live in England, or is France

better? – How does one differentiate the true traveller from the

tourist? – What does one need to pack? – Is it necessary to

have a roof over one’s head? – Is the love of speed a

symptom of creativity?

In Autumn 1908, Kenneth Grahame published his classic children’s story,
The Wind in the Willows.
His great creation, Mr Toad, epitomised the growing passion for what might be called Bohemian travel:

[Toad] led the way to the stable-yard… the Rat following with a most mistrustful expression; and there, drawn out of the coach-house into the open, they saw a gipsy caravan, shining with newness, painted a canary-yellow picked out with green, and red wheels.

‘There you are!’ cried the Toad, straddling and expanding himself.
‘There’s real life for you, embodied in that little cart.
The open road, the dusty highway, the heath, the common, the hedgerows, the rolling downs!
Camps, villages, towns, cities!
Here to-day, up and off to somewhere else to-morrow!
Travel, change, interest, excitement!
The whole world before you, and a horizon that’s always changing!…

‘You surely don’t mean to stick to your dull fusty old river all your life, and just live in a hole in the bank, and
boat?
I want to show you the world!
I’m going to make an
animal
of you, my boy!’

Exactly at the time of
The Wind in the Willows’
first appearance, Augustus John, who shared certain Toad-like characteristics, was dreaming of uprooting his family and taking to the road in his newly painted bright blue caravan.
‘The call of the road is on me.
Why do we load ourselves with the chains of commodities when the trees live rent free, and the river pays no toll?’ By spring 1909 they were ready to set off.
As well as the bright blue caravan, they had a yellow cart, six horses, a couple of tents, and a crowd of ragged bare-footed children to complete the picture.
Thus equipped the convoy made its ramshackle progress through the Home Counties, scandalising the
respectable elements of society and entrancing their disreputable counterparts, in due course arriving in a field outside Cambridge where their appearance caused wonder and consternation among worthy dons and townspeople alike.
The family were gypsies for four months.
Of course, it turned out to be a most uncomfortable life: the children all caught whooping cough, the horses died, and September saw Augustus back in Chelsea.
But he never lost his taste for the open road, that addictive thrill that accompanies departures and embarkations for foreign shores.

*

By the turn of the century 18,680 miles of railway track linked destinations across England.
These were the great early days of the commuter.
In 1900 these bowler-hatted gentlemen started work at ten, and were probably on the five o’clock train home to Metroland, in time for some healthful outdoor recreations, before changing for dinner.
The commuting life was not such a chore as we may imagine.
With the electrification of the suburban railways around London, travel by train improved each year.
Some of the trains were luxurious; seated in upholstered easy chairs one was served with tea or alcoholic refreshments by uniformed attendants.
The railway companies sought to make long journeys as painless as possible, providing civilised restaurants, commodious toilet compartments, perfumery and shoeshine facilities.
A person would hardly know they had left home.

But this kind of airtight, shut-in travel was the antithesis of those mythic journeys for which the free spirit hungered, the wanderings of Ulysses, Aeneas, the tribes of Israel.
Undiscovered countries beckoned the Bohemian; to be an artist was to be a gypsy-at-beart, dreaming of the wind on the heath, of odysseys, of limitless horizons.
A whole world stood waiting to be explored.

For centuries travellers from this island race have sailed the seas, scaled peaks, explored and circumnavigated, driven by missionary zeal, avarice and scientific curiosity.
Continental Europe was familiar to those young men whose parents sent them to experience culture and sexual initiation on the ‘Grand Tour’.
But the kind of travel bug that infected Toad and Augustus John was different.
Its symptoms had started to appear in an acute form among artists and writers during the early nineteenth century.
Although there were very specific political and personal reasons why poets like Keats, Shelley and Byron went abroad, their later wanderings in Italy left a legacy of rhapsodic imagery.
The imagination was stirred by Byron’s Venetian infamies, by Shelley’s tragic end on Tuscan shores, by Keats the youthful genius wasting away in  Piazza di Spagna,  by Browning’s Renaissance
duchesses and lovers in the Roman Campagna.
And then how powerfully Stevenson appeals to the restless nomad: ‘For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.
I travel for travel’s sake.
The great affair is to move These wanderers stirred up uneasy longings for flux and bustle among rats and moles who felt stuck in their fusty river bank.
Something enchanted and fascinating seemed to emanate from those southern skies and ancient civilizations, something our chilly grey climate could never inspire.

Bohemian means gypsy.
Insofar as the artist had already made the mental journey to that other, notional country of Bohemia, he was implicitly a traveller, and it only remained to set out.
The true artist could never be content to rot interminably in Chelsea or Fitzrovia; as a Bohemian it was one’s duty to explore in search of truth and sensation, to roam the surface of the earth seeking new colours, new voices, new tastes.

Cattle-throwing in Provence, bull-fighting in Spain, taming wild horses on the Russian steppes, joining the Gypsies or the Apaches for the life of a lawless vagabond, bathing naked in phosphorescent waters, climbing mountains in Connemara to faery lakes: these were the kind of exotic experiences that fed the Bohemian imagination.
Imprisoned for pacifism in 1918, Bertrand Russell wrote a lyrical travel brochure of his fantasy life to Ottoline Morrell: