Among the Bohemians (44 page)

Cyril Connolly’s only novel,
The Rock Pool
(1947), is a cynically observed account of the arty flotsam and jetsam who, like Connolly himself, adopted the Cote d’Azur as their second home.
His hero Edgar Naylor finds himself broke, owing six hundred francs for a picture.
Naylor’s friend Rascasse, who understands the natives and their ways, advises him to continue living on credit and post-dated cheques for as long as he can:

‘I’ll tell them you’re a regular guy and they’ve got to trust you.
If you have to borrow, remember there’re only three people with any money in this joint.
Foster, the Corsican, and Eddie-from-the-top.
They support most of the population.
If you prefer to borrow from a woman, Ruby gets her alimony about the middle of the month, and Duff and Varna turn the till out at the beginning.
Well, well, so you’re broke, eh!
Remember, it’s no good trying to get tick from the natives,’ he went on, ‘they’re pretty shy by now, and if you have to skip, skip on foot and catch the slow train at three in the morning.’

In
The Rock Pool
Connolly dissects the fecklessness and instability of these ‘sad rebels’, but he also betrays an admiration for their ‘refusal to conform, their independence, their moral courage’.
The novel describes expatriate life in microcosm, and though not deep, it is nevertheless a suggestive account of that washed-up sector of society competing for survival in a stagnant backwater which its title prompts: too many fish in an undersized pond.

*

Wanting to live like a native while socialising with one’s own kind was a balancing act.
For Bohemians it was exacerbated by close proximity to the type of English who settled in the sunny climes of Mallorca, Venice or Cannes, but brought their own particular brand of Surrey along with them.
Ethel Mannin was virulent about these ‘Blimps’.
The Englishman abroad, she wrote, is ‘the most disliked traveller in the world’.
He is determined not to learn any foreign languages or eat foreign food, and is always on the look-out for an English newspaper.
Dressed in plus-fours or a dinner jacket, he thinks it is virile to be loud and aggressive; his wife has an equally penetrating voice, but swoons at the smell of garlic or the sight of a bidet.
Why couldn’t such people stay put in the Home Counties instead of coming and ruining beautiful places for those who truly appreciated them?
If’one’s own kind’ was represented by these golf-playing arrested adolescents, it was surely time to move on.

But by the late 1930s the problem for Bohemia was already prefiguring our own tourist explosion.
It was now beginning to seem impossible to escape from dilettante Bohemia-watchers.
More and more people were going on foreign holidays.
Tours and cruises were no longer reserved for the rich.
And many of these people wanted, by their choice of exotic location, to identify themselves with the avant-garde.
Beauty was becoming debased by its accessibility.
Venice was tarnished by Eurotrash in white beach pyjamas who danced and drank all night, and a layer of suntan oil floated on the Adriatic.

The natural desire to write about unspoilt places had to be resisted, since it contributed inexorably to their destruction by tourists.
Douglas Goldring’s book
Gone Abroad
(1925) described a lotus-eating summer spent swimming in crystal waters and drinking Spanish brandy with the locals of an unknown fishing village in Mallorca.
The ensuing rash of American bars and vulgar hotels that sprang up on the Puerto de Pollensa seafront made Goldring feel he had betrayed a precious secret.

The pioneers moved on, but the camp followers were close behind.
Spotting a trend, business hastened to cash in.
One enterprising firm in Paris even arranged for tourists to be escorted around ‘Bohemian’ studios.
The manager of Le Boeuf sur le To ît shrewdly persuaded Jean Cocteau to go into partnership with him, enabling him to serve champagne and caviare at inflated prices to pseudo-Bohemian Cocteau-watchers.
Other managements followed suit.
The Rotonde in Montparnasse profited from the far-flung fame of old habitués like Modigliani, and added a smart restaurant, cocktail bar and dance floor to attract star-struck Americans who wanted to visit ‘the real Bohemia’.
Across the road at the Dôme a crowd of disgruntled
Londoners watched their bogus rivals drinking gin slings at the tables once occupied by Derain, Apollinaire and Picasso, who had now decamped to the Deux Magots and the Flore.
But the Dôme became commercialised in its turn.
Nina Hamnett was so disillusioned when she saw its
patron,
M.
Chambon, serving grapefruit and shredded wheat to American tourists (it ‘seemed… like sacrilege’) that for the first time in her life she felt happy to return to England.
Roy Campbell was disgusted at the whole phenomenon: ‘Thousands of “painters”… infested the cafés, discussing day and night the paintings they never did… The Vie de Boheme of Murger had become a universal trade or industry.’

Thus the merry-go-round of Bohemia in Paris mirrored the circuitous pilgrimages of Chelsea and Fitzrovia from Paris to the Côte d’Azur, from Berlin to Munich, from Rapallo to Venice, Florence to Amain, Mallorca to Barcelona, and back to Paris again.
Just occasionally, in some unfrequented spot, the writer or artist might find a forgotten corner of the world – cheap, lovely, conducive to musing and meditation.
Liam O’Flaherty, paying a peppercorn rent for a charming isolated cottage on the West coast of Donegal, wasn’t going to fall into the trap of telling the world about his private heaven.
In July 1927 he confided to his friend and editor Edward Garnett:

You said something – a long time ago – about writing a guide book.
My dearest friend, that’s dangerous.
Tourists might find this place, and places like it.
Nobody has found this place yet.
It is glorious to think that few strangers have looked on the brave, strong legs of these peasant women walking on the bog, and one can look for a whole day at a crab gallivanting in his pool without being disturbed by a human being.

As O’Flaherty understood, travel writers have a lot to answer for.

*

Montaigne wrote: ‘It is the journey, not the arrival, which matters.’ Hopes of a promised land may indeed be dashed when one gets there to find a hell of sunburnt bodies and trashy souvenir shops.
And though even Paris never lives up to the memories of youth, wanderlust remains insatiable.
The thrust of pistons, the throb of engines, had the power to tantalise and stimulate.
While still moving, one was still hoping, one remained in that aroused, pleasurable state that precedes the climax and the inevitability of post-coital melancholy.
Motion seems to suspend time; one proceeds at the world’s pace.
Put the brakes on and the sun starts finally to set, night comes.
On the road south, Cyril Connolly felt nearest to ecstasy:

Somewhere after Vienne, around Tain and Tournon, in the fields where the cicadas begin, and the Hermitage ripens, and the light becomes green and yellow behind the Cevennes.
Valence, Montélimar, Pierrelatte, and, dear to geographers, the gap of Donzère… Here expectation is most intense, and reality most seducing, as the heart unwinds on the winding asphalt.

And so you set out, hope triumphing over experience.
You woke your lover one morning and said ‘Let’s go to Paris!’ No need to pack more than a toothbrush and a clean pair of socks; the boat train left at ten.
You relished a perfect omelette and a bottle of wine in the restaurant car, as orchards, sunlit rivers and picturesque villages flashed by.
Anticipation was the true thrill.
The painter C.
R.
W.
Nevinson described the wagons-lit as his ‘spiritual home’.

For the young artist Julian Trevelyan the joy of travel was inextricable from the often gruelling reality.
With very little spare money, Bohemians like him travelled third or fourth class, and expected to sit up all night, in great discomfort.
Feeling sick, being squashed in a carriage with smelly peasants, sharing their food with them just as they shared their fleas and their crying babies and their life histories was all part of the bargain.
Cramp, despair and exhaustion were its necessary conditions.
A night journey sitting up could be an ordeal by suffocation, backache and reeking strangers who hogged all the space.
But for the true romantic, a ‘luxury rapide’ would have been a betrayal of what travel was supposed to be about.
Being soaked to the skin, or having to sleep on a railway station heightened the experience, and increased the romantic glow in memory.
Drunk soldiers, ticket queues, officialdom, dysentery and bugs were all transcended by the view of the hyacinth sea, by the sound of strange tongues, by the scent of mimosa.
If you couldn’t cope with a little discomfort en route you hardly qualified as Bohemian.

The bug scourge recurs so frequently in travellers’ memories that one must account it part of the endurance test.
Viva King had only to set foot over the Channel to run up against battalions of the beasts.
As often as she changed her hotel the bug armies followed her.
It seemed they waited to attack until she was deeply asleep; then woke her with vicious itchy bites.
Fleas and mosquitoes were frequently a problem too.
Rosalind Thornycroft became adept at catching fleas using a piece of wet soap, a complex procedure which she described to her daughter:

When you feel the animal, remove nightgown and gradually turn back bed-clothes holding soap in one hand (and candle in other if in Ireland or other primitive places).
Turn nightgown inside out with lynx eye, pouncing on flea when seen.
If the nightgown proves empty after examination throw out of bed.
Be sure no flea lurks on naked body (unlikely) and continue search of bed-clothes… Also examine under pillows.
Once creature is embedded in soap he is easily disposed of in a basin of water, there to perish.
Repeat operations later in night if necessary.

*

Travel like this was not to the taste of the respectable British traveller, the Cooks’ tour-subscribing, Baedeker-carrying, P&O-sailing, Bradshaw-scrutinising globe-trotter.
When the bowler-hatted gentleman went abroad he went well-prepared, bringing with him a travel thermometer, indiarubber hot-water bottles, opium in case of seasickness, Earl Grey tea, ginger biscuits, a mackintosh square and a reliable guidebook.
He and his wife were careful when travelling by wagon-lit not to emerge from their berths in a half-clothed condition, they were wary of getting into conversation with fellow passengers in trains, and never made friends with strangers in hotels without being sure of their social status first.
They travelled heavy.
Sixteen suitcases was not unusual, often augmented en route by bulky purchases such as candlesticks, marble ornaments, and gilded picture frames.
Their baggage was painstakingly labelled.

Bohemia’s suitcases, by contrast, were packed with necessities for the mind and spirit.
Frances Partridge remembers setting off on holiday with a rucksack containing all eight volumes
of Clarissa
and little else.
Gwen John and Dorelia took mainly painting equipment and a minimum of personal belongings for a walking trip round France.

Gerald Brenan and his friend John Hope-Johnstone negotiated long and hard about what to take on their eastward journey overland to China.
Brenan had with him six books (mostly poetry), a notebook, a change of clothes, and a packet of drugs, including two pounds of galingale, a lump of hashish, and a phial of attar of roses.
He was initially appalled at the plethora of belongings piled up on Hope’s bed.
He had a paintbox and a large bundle of canvases, and some books to read, plus a considerably larger number of grammars and language books.
Hope made the case that he intended to take up painting, and that they would need one grammar for each country that they proposed to travel through en route to China.
On that basis they went through his proposed library.
Brenan conceded manuals on Arabic, Persian, Italian, Serbian, Greek and Osmanli Turki, but could see no justification for Bulgarian, Russian, Kurdish or Armenian.
Hope argued that they might lose their way or be carried off-course, but gave in (apart from the Armenian):

‘And is this book on one of the dialects of Balkan Romany really necessary?’ I inquired, holding up a tattered volume in French.

‘We can’t possibly leave
that
behind,’ he answered.
‘Why, who knows, we might want to settle down for a bit with one of the gipsy tribes.’

Hope was persuaded to compromise over the necessity of bringing the Gospels in a wide variety of languages for which no grammar existed:

‘Only three hundred families speak Vogul,’ I said, ‘and they live in northern Siberia.’

‘I know,’ he answered.
‘They sound an uncommonly interesting people and I should very much like to meet them and learn their ways.
But I agree with you that we can leave these books behind.
After all, we have to be practical.’

Then, with their library packed into a sack tied with rope, they headed south.

The first leg of this journey from Paris to Valence was accomplished by train, after which the friends acquired a donkey cart, and set off through Southern France.
Through Italy the donkey was urged on with lines from Shelley’s
Epipsychidion.
It rained, and they camped in old railway tunnels and barns.
On the Italian–Yugoslav border their vagrant appearance caused them to be arrested and thrown into gaol.
They were released after five days, and got through the border at Trieste, but it was December, and their money had nearly run out.
Hope-Johnstone cracked, and decided to go back and winter in Venice.
Brenan continued alone into the inhospitable Dalmatian interior, begging lodgings at farms, starving and almost penniless.
His shoes had disintegrated, it was snowing, and he heard wolves howling.
Brenan’s extraordinary journey is recorded in detail in the first part of his autobiography,
A Life of One’s Own
(1962).

Despite terrible vicissitudes, he managed to hold fast to his private philosophy, the outcome of much youthful pondering on the purpose and meaning of existence: