Among the Bohemians (42 page)

There never was such a place as prison for crowding images – one after another they come upon me – early morning in the Alps, with the smell of aromatic pines and high pastures glistening with dew – the lake of Garda as one first sees it coming down out of the mountains, just a glimpse far below, dancing and gleaming in the sunlight like the eyes of a laughing, mad, Spanish gypsy – thunderstorm in the Mediterranean, with a dark violet sea, and the mountains of Corsica in sunshine far beyond – the Scilly Isles in the setting sun, enchanted and unreal, so that you think they must have vanished before you can reach them, looking like the Islands of the Blest, not to be achieved during this mortal life – the smell of the bog myrtle in Skye…

Russell was no Bohemian, but he was intensely susceptible, driven by powerful desires, and resolutely unconventional.
His yearnings give shape to the amorphous romanticism of a generation who, like him, felt locked up by a narrow-minded society.
Those enchanted islands in the sea embodied the aspirations of the artist for whom the average British holiday – a day out in Epsom or a week in lodgings at Broadstairs – held all the appeal of a cold rice pudding.
Savour life, they seemed to say, drink deep, breathe a purer air!
Away from the oppressive conventions of English society, which frowned so
ferociously on bare feet, on beards, on homosexuality, on defiance and nonconformity of all kinds, you could be who you really were.
In foreign lands000 you could glory in feeling yourself to be a misfit.

Ethel Mannin identified powerfully with the nomad.
Her series of essays
All Experience
(1937) is a hymn of praise to wanderlust by one who from an early age nurtured dreams of seeing oranges growing on trees, and vineyards, and houses with green shutters: ‘Going aboard a steamer by night; coming into a foreign port in sunshine… blessed are they who know the thrill, for theirs is the adventure of living, the colour of the world, and the glory.’ For her, non-travellers were guilty of apostasy:

When people tell me, ‘England’s good enough for me,’ I always feel like crying to them, ‘My God, don’t you realise that one day you’re going to die, and that there’s the whole of this amazing world to see…’

Mannin felt set apart from such stuck-in-the-muds.
People content to stay in one spot didn’t deserve to be alive – people like Jessica Mitford’s father, Lord Redesdale, who exemplified English insularity and hatred of Johnny Foreigner:

According to my father, outsiders included not only Huns, Frogs, Americans, blacks and all other foreigners, but also other people’s children, the majority of my older sisters’ acquaintances, almost all young men – in fact, the whole teeming population of the earth’s surface, except for some, though not all, of our relations and a very few tweeded, red-faced country neighbours to whom my father had for some reason taken a liking.

Xenophobia was rife among the ruling classes.
Lord Redesdale was not untypical of his generation, which had seen the expansion of the British Empire in lands beyond Europe, and which, from its lofty position as imperial ruler, regarded most foreigners as contemptible and indecent.
‘Abroad’ was ‘unutterably bloody’, a place fit only for perverts and pmkos; if you didn’t fall foul of the bad drains you were liable to be shot by anarchists or buggered by dagos.
It was a place where people spat in railway carriages, where the food was full of nasty garlic and grease, and where you were lucky if you just got away with flatulence and rancid indigestion.

For the Victorians, the Continent was a place of banishment, or refuge, depending on your point of view.
Offenders against the law or social conventions took themselves off” to some small French or German town where they mouldered for a season or two and hoped that their faux-pas
would be forgotten by the time they returned.
Only the colonies could be worse than such an imposed exile.
Even writers of fiction preferred to remove their principal characters from British soil when they were too flagrant in their contraventions: Herminia Grey has her illegitimate child in Perugia, Ann Veronica runs away with the married Capes to Switzerland.
These were lands – like Bohemia – where English conventions held no sway.
The disgraced Oscar Wilde lived out his days in Paris after his release from prison; later the tolerant atmosphere of Berlin was to make it a haven for homosexual artists and writers.
Violet Hunt, after her scandalous affair with the married Ford Madox Ford, became unacceptable in polite society.
Her closest friends begged her to stay away from London for everyone’s sake: ‘Do be wise,’ implored the novelist Mrs Clifford, ‘and live abroad for a few years… I would do a good deal for you but I should simply quake if you came here on Sundays, and I believe other people would walk out.
–
Go away for three years !’

Rosalind Thornycroft, when her marriage to Godwin Baynes collapsed, did exactly that.
In 1920 she decided to go, with her children, to Italy.
It was a hard decision to leave her supportive family, but her resolve was strengthened by the thought of how damaging the publicity attendant on her divorce would be to them if she stayed.
Rosalind was immensely helped in the practicalities of her self-imposed exile by her friend D.
H.
Lawrence, who was eager to leave England for different reasons – he was angry at the suppression of his novel
The Rainbow,
and felt drawn by sun and by the south.
Lawrence was marvellous.
He knew about visas and consulates.
He checked the exchange rate for the lira, and told Rosalind how to get her heavy luggage sent out via a carrier in Pangbourne who would have it shipped to Rome.
He advised her against sailing via Genoa, since Genoa harbour was on strike, and recommended that she go by train from Charing Cross to Turin (‘22 hours only’), thence to Florence or Rome.
He would go on ahead and meet her, either at Turin or Rome.

On arrival in Italy, Lawrence set about making strenuous enquiries on Rosalind’s behalf for somewhere to live.
An old family friend of the Thornycrofts who lived in a remote Abruzzese village was willing to help, but when Lawrence went to see the place it turned out to be quite unsuitable.
To get there one had to ford icy rivers and climb craggy paths.
The house proved to be ‘staggeringly primitive’.
Chickens wandered in and out, ‘the ass is tied to the doorpost and makes his droppings on the doorstep and brays his head off’.
The natives resembled brigands, and were unintelligible.
There was no bath, and the children would have to be washed in the tub used for boning pigswill.
On his advice, Rosalind prudently opted not to live in this
mountain fastness, but chose instead Florence.
How unaccountable it is to think of the author of
Women in Love
as this kindly and competent travel agent – but so it was.
In Florence D.
H.
Lawrence was as conscientious as ever in his research and recommendations.
He worked out that the little family plus their nanny could live in a nice
pensione
overlooking the Arno for less than £5 a week.
And he knew all the train times from Paris to Pisa, and how to change at Pisa for Florence.

Soon after arriving there Rosalind took her three small daughters to Fiesole, where they lived in a succession of rented villas.
Lawrence would come to visit them there.
Always helpful, he cooked them English Sunday lunches and played with the little girls.
In Frieda’s absence he and Rosalind became very close.
The Italian air was full of romance.
Strolling through cypress woods and marjoram-scented hillsides, Lawrence and Rosalind talked about sex and poetry, sucked sorb apples and spat out the skins.
Then they watched the sun go down over Florence, and kissed: ‘My heart jumps with joy.
We sit there until it is quite dark, our hands held together in union.
And so to bed.’ You couldn’t get away with it at home.

*

Meanwhile, England at the turn of the century stood isolated from the cultural ferment that was happening on the Continent.
French literature and art, Russian novels and drama, the works of Ibsen: all were regarded as depraved, insofar as they were regarded at all.
The rage, mockery and sheer incomprehension that greeted Roger Fry’s first Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1910 was in part an expression of British narcissism and xenophobia in the arts.
Conservatives saw the permeation of such foreign influences from beyond the Channel as a pretext for the suppression of ‘degenerate’ anti-English culture, particularly after the outbreak of the First World War.
The Defence of the Realm Act (1914), popularly known as DORA, gave the government powers of censorship over publications ‘likely to cause disaffection or alarm’, thus making it possible for the authorities to deflect modernist ideas from the Continent.
Meanwhile DORA also introduced passport regulations for travellers departing from or arriving in this country.
Those regulations were never repealed after the war, and Fortress England was fast becoming impregnable.

The more the authorities – purity crusaders, bishops, Mrs Grundys and members of parliament – shored up our island defences against all things alien, the more beleaguered Bohemians were determined that nothing should prevent their escape.
Feeling themselves to be surrounded by hostility in their own country, artists who valued what Europe had to offer were
overwhelmed by a sense that England was fast becoming an intolerable place to live.

How was modernism to stand a chance against Kipling and Morris dancers, Masefield and ‘beer-swilling young men on reading parties’?
complained Cyril Connolly.
To read George Orwell’s accounts of England in the twenties and thirties is to picture a country with a divisive class system, a malign education, intolerant politicians, and a corrupt press.
It had ghastly food, hideous houses, ugly inhabitants, corrosive poverty.
Its intellectuals were full of ‘advanced’ humbug, while its working classes were social climbers and snobs.
The only solution was to get away – to France – to Italy – or best of all, in those early years of the twentieth century, for true artistic and personal salvation, to Russia.

‘Everything Russian was fantastically moving to me,’ remembers Frances Partridge.
‘I was thrilled by the novels, translated by Constance Garnett, who was known to be the best; and I remember someone brought a Russian Prince to our country house in Surrey, and of course he wasn’t really very glamorous, but anything Russian was so marvellous… Then my sister Ray went there in 1912, when I was only twelve, and she returned with photographs, and a book for me… And at the same sort of time I got taken to Diaghilev’s ballet and we sat in a box and saw
La Boutique Fantasque
in the Coliseum.’ Compared with the imperial territories of India, Africa and the Far East, Russia was still relatively unknown to the British traveller.
The excitement of discovery was palpable.
The glamour of droshkies and moujiks, the Bolshoi and the Nevski Prospekt seemed boundless.
Bohemia was intoxicated by Russian literature, Russian cigarettes, Russian clothes, and of course the Russian ballet.
Lydia Lopokova, Boris Anrep, S.
S.
Koteliansky, the painter and stage designer Pavel Tchelitchew and the sculptor Ossip Zadkine were familiar figures of London’s Bohemia, and special cachet attached to people like Nina Hamnett, Bunny Garnett and Frances’s sister Ray Marshall who had actually been there.

In 1904, when he was twelve, Bunny was taken by his mother, Constance, for an extended trip to Tsarist Russia; they went first to St Petersburg, where Bunny was most impressed by the sight of a fashionable lady seated in an open troika beside a large bearcub.
In Moscow he learnt to plait birch-bark and to play the balalaika.
Then they stayed on a country estate in Tambov province where Bunny made friends with the boys who herded the horses, sharing their kasha and stampeding with them across the prairies.
Back on the Surrey Weald, his parents kept open house for political exiles, many of them Russian revolutionaries.
When Bunny met his future wife, Ray Marshall, it was the fact that she had travelled to the Caucasus and followed
the course of the Volga to Nizhni Novgorod that made her unusually attractive in his eyes.

*

But Nizhni Novgorod was a long way to go in pursuit of artistic lustre.
Across the English Channel, a few hours away by train and steamer, France challenged the Bohemian to ignore her.
It was a challenge few could resist.
Nowhere could be easier, for one could be in Dieppe by teatime, and Paris by dinner.

‘Paris!
Paris!!
Paris!!!’ – for Du Maurier’s young artist in
Trilby
the word was magical, a name to savour, the embodiment of all his longings and dreams.
Paris – that talisman for artists, that Mecca for the free spirit and the lover, that Bohemian country of the heart.
If the notional Bohemia had any tangible existence, it was surely here, indisputably located on French territory, and comfortably separated from this island by plenty of water.
For, of course, France was full of wicked and sinful French people, like George Sand, like Rodolphe and Mimi, like Nana or Baudelaire, Madame Bovary or Marie Duplessis.
Fact mingled with fiction in British minds, but for most Paris was Babylon, the city of Sin, a sink of iniquity where men and women did unspeakable things, caught horrible diseases, and generally behaved with no regard for the decencies.
The fears went deep.
French political instability, memories of the Terror, ancient enmities, dread of social and philosophical subversion, instilled in British breasts a powerful disquiet about life on the other side of the Channel.
At the same time, life in France held out dangerous and tempting promises of sexual liberty, fashion, and debarred pleasures.
Its language was a code for secrets and intimacies, its food an aphrodisiac.
Such a powerful combination made the French capital a place of alarming significance.
For Mrs Grundy, Paris was like a malign blister.
Not content with their tranquil middle-class life, she and her fellow-puritans became inflamed with a kind of fury against the French, affronted yet fascinated.

In 1928 a tour group from the Lord’s Day Observance Society, chafed beyond endurance, set off to see for themselves.
They did a European tour, including Sundays in Ostend, Montreux and Paris, and returned horrified by the appalling infringements of the Sabbath that they witnessed: people drinking alcohol in pavement cafes, theatres and cabarets playing to packed houses, ‘frivolity – hilarity – betting – gambling – excitement – and revelries… Our Sunday in Paris was a Day of Desecration we shall never forget’.
No good could come of it.
In
Trilby
the quivering Mrs Bagot attributes her artist son’s immoral liaison with a laundress to his residence in ‘this accursed city’: