Among the Bohemians (50 page)

I think the Tower shall go up to heaven

One night in a flame of fire, about eleven.

I always saw our carnal-spiritual home

Blazing upon the sky symbolically…

If ever we go to heaven in a troop

The Tower must be our ladder,

Vertically

Climbing the ether with its swaying group.

God will delight to greet this embassy

Wherein is found no lack

Of wits and glamour, strong wines, new foods, fine

looks, strange-sounding languages of diverse men –

Stulik shall lead the pack

Until its great disintegration, when

God sets us deftly in a new Zodiac.

In the days of his prosperity, Rudolf Stulik, the Viennese proprietor, made his restaurant irresistible to London’s ‘illuminati’ – Beaton, Sickert, Gilman, Firbank, Iris Tree, Eddie Marsh, Horace Cole, Nina Hamnett, Viva King, Anthony Powell, Marchesa Casati, Tallulah Bankhead, Brenda Dean Paul.

‘On all sides one would hear “Augustus, Augustus” ‘for John was there more often than not, the places at his favourite table expanding to accommodate friends who paused for a drink, and stayed to enjoy his convivial company.
The restaurant was an alternative community.
‘I was always bound to find people I knew there,’ remembered Viva King.
Stulik himself was a caricature patron – fat, his black moustachios waxed at the ends, he spoke with a guttural Austrian accent.
He infringed the licensing laws with impunity, and the restaurant stayed open so late that his waiters often missed the last bus and had to walk home.
Charming and generous, Stulik stood drinks to friends, and was cavalier with debts.
Augustus John lunched there one day and blew up when he found he had been charged
£
43 for two.
‘Is not for lunch only,’ explained Stulik sweetly.
‘Little Welshman with curly hair… he come here.
He stay two weeks and eat.
He says you pay.’ – ‘Dylan!’

Eventually the restaurant fell badly into arrears.
More than once Augustus John rescued poor Stulik, but his decline was inexorable.
The writer John Davenport had to pay up-front for eggs with which to make the omelette he had ordered.
The waiters grew surly and bent, and Stulik took to making half-hourly sorties to the Wheatsheaf round the corner, followed by his little dog, Chocolate.
As the evening wore on both he and Chocolate became steadily more confused.
The restaurant finally went bankrupt in 1938; Stulik did not live to see a solution to his problems.

Until its decline in the 1950s the Café Royal was the centre of the Bohemian universe.
For more than five decades it was as essential to London’s cultural life in the twentieth century as the Café Momus had been to Parisian Bohemia in the nineteenth.
Guy Deghy and Keith Waterhouse have chronicled its glory days in their vivid book
Café Royal: Ninety Years of Bohemia
(1955).
For Betty May the Regent Street premises were to become less a Café, more a way of life, and she looked back on the nights she spent there before the First World War with acute nostalgia:

The lights, the mirrors, the red plush seats, the eccentrically dressed people, the coffee served in glasses, the pale cloudy absinthes – I was ravished by all these and felt as if I had strayed by accident into some miraculous Arabian palace…

No duck ever took to water, no man to drink, as I to the Café Royal.
The colour and the glare, the gaiety and the chatter appealed to something fundamental in my nature…

Betty sat there every day, making a coffee last as long as she could to justify her presence, longing and hoping for a look from her gods, John or Epstein.
At last she was noticed.
Epstein walked over; invited her to his table.
Before long she was modelling for him:

Of course after that I met everybody of any importance at all who came to the Café, as Epstein knew absolutely everybody there was to know.
And this was the manner of my introduction to the Bohemian fraternity.

Soon Betty herself became a Café celebrity, famous by association, a star among the galaxies of great suns and lesser lights who sparkled amid the rococo excesses of that much-loved interior.
Here Bohemia celebrated, fought, philosophised.
Great stories went the rounds about goings-on at the Café.
There was the one about the washed-up scrounger known by his sobriquet ‘Iceland’ – his real name was Haraldur Hamar – who outrageously took C.
R.
W.
Nevinson for a ride.
Iceland waylaid Nevinson’s lunch date, an American journalist, and, pretending to be the great artist, not only consumed a four-course meal and several bottles of Burgundy in his name, but gave the influential journalist a full and frank interview.
Meanwhile the real Nevinson was impatiently waiting in the lobby.
When soon afterwards he visited the United States, he was horrified to find
The New York Times
lambasting the arrogance of ‘certain English artists’ who held the American public in contempt.

There was D.
H.
Lawrence’s famous farewell dinner which ended with Koteliansky breaking the wineglasses and Lawrence being sick on the tablecloth.
On another memorable occasion a brawl broke out after Philip Heseltine insulted an eminent music critic who had given a hostile write-up to a friend’s composition.
The unfortunate critic ended up supine while the Mexican painter Benjamin Corea bounced up and down on his stomach.
From time to time artists found themselves banned from the Café, when the clientèle would revert to its usual assortment of political exiles, bookies, prostitutes, blackmailers, hacks, and assorted bon viveurs in boiled shirts.

But Bohemia always came back there.
A pretty girl could get a pound a day if she could catch the eye of a painter or sculptor looking for a sitter.
Betty May was not the only hungry model who used the Café in this way.
There was the saucy ‘Chiquita’, the mysterious ‘Dolores’, black-haired Lilian Shelley, ‘Bunny’, Euphemia Lamb, Eileen O’Henry, ‘Puma’, the blonde dancer Jessica Valda, each perhaps immortalised in some gypsy pose, in demand so long as they remained beautiful.

For others the Café was a home from home, peopled by such curious characters as the artist Alan Odle, who ‘dressed like a dustman and carried himself like a duke’.
Odle was a dilapidated, unhealthy individual, who
drank heavily, and was remarkable for his extraordinarily long hair, which he coiled around the top of his head like a kind of toupee.
Ronald Firbank was usually to be seen there, his affected manner reminiscent of the nineties aesthetes.
Effete to the point of eccentricity, he survived on champagne and little else, though he had been seen to eat violets, and occasionally a pea.
The well-known charmed circle of Philip Heseltine, Bernard van Dieren and Cecil Gray were regulars too.
The Heseltine table was always a magnet to those who found his ribaldry and invective entertaining.
The Café’s acknowledged king was of course Augustus John, remembered by Osbert Sitwell as presiding there ‘like some kind of Rasputin-Jehovah’.
Mellow with brandy, Augustus would grow talkative; he would charm, amuse and usually pick up the bill too.

When the Café was renovated in 1928 it lost much of its atmosphere; the old gilt and mirrors were replaced with a jazz age decor.
Nevertheless it continued to be a focus for cultural London until Charles Forte took it over in 1951 and turned the Café into a restaurant.
As such it ceased to function as a place for table-hopping, poetry-reciting, or just wandering in hoping to find a friend.
Frances Partridge remembers feeling a real sense of deprivation.

When it died everyone was in despair.
It was the kind of place you could go to at any time of day – after the cinema or a concert – and the waiter in his long apron would say, ‘Oh Mr John’s here tonight,’ if they thought you’d be interested.
I nearly always found lots of friends there.
It was informal – I suppose artists lead less arranged lives than ordinary conventional people, and they do things on the spur of the moment – and it was always full.

*

The decline of the Café Royal contributed to the rise of pubs as meeting places for the artists of the thirties.
As Constantine Fitzgibbon points out in his biography of Dylan Thomas, public houses had hitherto been the preserve of the working class, but the economic depression changed all that.
This period saw the rise of Fitzrovia as an artistic Mecca.
Impoverished Bohemians resorted to the ‘rough’ haunts of the neighbourhood, such as the Duke of York, the Fitzroy Tavern (also known as Kleinfeld’s after its proprietor), the Marquis of Granby, the Wheatsheaf, the Bricklayer’s Arms and the Black Horse – a string of pubs down which a determined boozer like Dylan could crawl from Goodge Street nearly as far as Oxford Street.
According to Fitzgibbon there were other advantages, too, to be gained from hanging around the proletariat:

The poor young who wanted to write or paint were… almost all of left-wing views.
They believed that their and the world’s future lay with the workers, and though they came almost entirely, like Dylan, from the middle class, ‘bourgeois’ was the dirtiest French word in their English dictionary.
To go to the pubs, to mix with the workers, was therefore not only economically attractive but also politically virtuous.

Fitzrovia in the thirties thus became a promised land for rootless Bohemians who drifted boozily from one drinking hole to another.
Now mapped in literary guidebooks as places of pilgrimage, even in the thirties Kleinfeld’s was becoming famous, with Nina Hamnett always ready to act as tour guide for the price of a few drinks.
On one occasion an acquaintance sought out Nina to assist a pair of sightseers who wanted to see ‘Bohemia’, hoping it would provide them with some lurid spectator sport:

The first thing they said was: ‘Are there any dope fiends here?
We have been looking all over London for them.’ I said, feeling and, I suppose, looking rather startled: ‘Good gracious, no, the people in this quarter when they have a few pennies and want to feel excited only drink beer, or, if they can afford it, gin and whisky.
I think that you had better go back to Mayfair if you want to find people who take drugs.’

This rather deterred them and they looked round with an air of disappointment at the occupants of the Tavern, who were laughing, talking and regaling themselves with beer.

Over time Kleinfeld’s became invaded by ‘tenth-raters’ and ‘might-have-beens’, and the front line were driven to seek their drinks elsewhere.
Thus it was in the rather quieter surroundings of the Wheatsheaf one evening in April 1936 that the Welsh painter Augustus John is reputed to have introduced the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas to Caitlin Macnamara.
Caitlin’s ‘tawney mane and wild blue eye’ had already proved too tempting for the priapic John.
While she was still in her teens he seduced her, and continued to pounce on her for some years after.
Caitlin later recalled the inevitability of the meeting with Dylan in a pub: ‘Ours was not a love story, it was a drink story.’ It was said that within minutes of being introduced Dylan and Caitlin were in bed together, and didn’t re-emerge for several days.
Typically, they booked themselves into a room at the Eiffel Tower where, yet again, Dylan charged everything to John’s account.

Like unruly hooligans, Dylan and Caitlin stand for everything that the bourgeoisie most disapproved of.
They were penniless, dirty, drunk, dis orderly,
debauched.
But their vitality was dependent on such conditions.
Caitlin would reach a point in the evening’s intoxication when the last vestiges of self-consciousness would break down and something inside her would rise up and compel her to dance:

Of its own accord, without my volition, it suddenly broke loose, leapt into the air, and furiously struck out.
My painfully strapped-in limbs, kept too long in a standing or sitting posture, struck out blindly, wildly, jubilantly… And I didn’t care a damn what anybody thought…

This wild vitality and indiscipline can appear as reckless irresponsibility, or simply as the behaviour of mischievous delinquents finally let off the leash.
Bent on pleasure, regardless of consequences, Dylan and Caitlin and their crew threw out the rule book, and opened the floodgates to a tidal wave of misrule, of drunkenness, wantonness, gatecrashing and theft.
Over the laughter, song and thrumming guitars can be heard the sound of splintering furniture, the shrieks and curses of injured guests, the crackle of flames and the crash of breaking glass.

*

It sometimes seemed that nothing was off-limits.
Bohemians lit indoor bonfires, got uproariously drunk, fought each other.
Jacob Kramer’s hair caught light in the gas-jet at one of Roy and Mary Campbell’s studio parties, causing panic.
There was blood on the carpet after Philip Heseltine’s model wife, ‘Puma’, viciously stabbed a party-goer in the leg.
David Tennant gave a patty at which a fracas developed; tatters and tufts were ripped from Allanah Harper’s frock and hair.
‘Only one fight,’ complained Evelyn Waugh after one of Olivia Wyndham’s infamous parties – ‘It was not enough of an orgy.’ Mark Gertler was one of the worst offenders.
At one of Lady Ottoline’s Thursdays he smashed a fellow-guest’s glasses, kicked one of the Stracheys so hard that her foot bled, and bruised the arm of a young Belgian woman who was there.
Clearing up after an evening of friendliness had got out of hand must have seemed at times like clearing up after a tornado.