Among the Bohemians (51 page)

Gertler’s worst exploit was carried out in company with Koteliansky –’Kot’.
Monty Shearman, who admired Gertler, had given him the key to his rather
soigné
apartment in the Adelphi.
One evening after dining with Kot and Beatrice and Gordon Campbell, Gertler suggested they go round to Shearman’s.
There they found the place decked with flowers, while decanters of wine and delicious food were laid out ready for Monty’s return
with a large party from Diaghilev’s ballet company.
Gertler and Kot, ‘for some extraordinary reason which has never been explained’, went berserk.
First they ate and drank everything in sight, then they started hurling the cushions and flowers around the room.
Kot seized an Omega tray and smashed it over Gertler’s head, where it remained decorating his shoulders like a ruff.
Undaunted, he grabbed a bottle of eau de Cologne and started shaking it about everywhere.
Then Kot rushed to the pianola and began to play it fortissimo, at which point a neighbour appeared and furiously intervened.
Still drunk, and high on outrage, they left and went on to another party.
A day or two later Gertler got a letter from Shearman politely asking for the return of his keys; the destruction was never mentioned.
^*

As in some sermonising morality tale, the dark side of that wonderful vitality was always threatening to engulf its victims.
Unshackled from the demands of a nine-to-five existence, the daily life of the Bohemian often teetered on the brink of chaos, while parties and pubs tempted the artist to run headlong into irresponsibility.
Thus late hours, noise, alcohol, and sometimes also drugs, took their toll both of work and health.
Among those of the artistic community brought low by alcohol were Stephen Phillips, Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, Augustus John, Francis Macnamara, Roy Campbell, Nina Hamnett, David Tennant, Nancy Cunard, Sylvia Gough, Jean Rhys, Philip O’Connor, Constant Lambert, Constantine Fitzgibbon, and Malcolm Lowry.

Over-indulgence seemed all the more permissible because it had a heroic history.
Back in Murger’s Golden Age of Bohemia, or so it seemed, the carefree Parisian poet, carousing with his comrades, his inhibitions released by consumption of cognac, might find himself inspired to new heights:

Quand le bourgeois dort,

II fait soif encor,

Passons la nuit à boire!

*

Boire est le vrai bien!

Après, il n’est rien!

Rien, sinon boire encore,

En attendant l’aurore…
^*

In the same way, experimentation with mind-altering substances had a lurid but fascinating pedigree among artists, the attraction increased by its notable success in
épatant le bourgeois
.
The writings of Coleridge, de Quincey, and in due course Cocteau gave opium-eating a questionable mystique, while the reputations of Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier and their comrades of the Club des Haschichins glamorised the taking of hashish, making it seem an experience no self-respecting artist should miss.

Those windows through which one glimpsed the Infinite, those extraordinarily precise yet phantasmagoric perceptions were surely the proper preserve of the artist who seeks Beauty and Reality, not to say the Fourth Dimension.
Mescaline could transfigure one’s perceptions of the visual world:

To a painter a rubbish dump is potentially as beautiful as the Garden of Eden [wrote the surrealist artist Julian Trevelyan].
I have, under Mescaline, fallen in love with a sausage roll and with a piece of crumpled newspaper from out of the pig-bucket.
I have also looked at pictures by Picasso, Van Gogh, Michelangelo, and others, and have rejected them all as ‘ready-mades’.

Until a regulatory law was introduced in 1920, opiates were a popular home remedy easily obtainable from compliant chemists over the counter.
During the First World War cocaine could even be bought at Harrods: ‘A Useful Present for Friends at the Front.’ Cannabis and mescaline were also available from pharmacies in the form of patent medicines.
The problems associated with drug-taking occurred in a tiny minority of cases, and hardly anyone thought about after-effects or addiction.
Augustus John described
how he and Iris Tree took spoonfuls of hashish mixed into jam at intervals through the course of an inspiring evening:

In the silence one seemed to hear the tick-tick of the clockwork of the Universe, and voices reached one as if from across the frozen wastes between the stars.
Ping!
A shifting of the slats of time and space!… Is it a new dimension we have entered?
Can we be approaching ultimate Reality?

Augustus was an occasional user.
One bad experience had made him cautious, and he concluded, ‘I don’t recommend Cannabis Indica to the careless amateur.’

Kathleen Hale should certainly have been more careful when she went to a party given by Philip Heseltine.
He presented all his guests with tiny parcels of lavatory paper and instructed everyone to wash them down with a draught of beer; Kathleen was unaware that the parcel she was swallowing contained hashish.
One by one the other guests passed out on the floor.
Philip took Kathleen to bed with him but was perhaps too incapacitated to take advantage of the situation.
She spent a horrendous night dreaming of ‘colossal and malign elephants’, and was never tempted to repeat the experience.

In 1919, under the pseudonym of Leda Burke, Bunny Garnett published a potboiler romance entitled Dope Darling.
His hero Roy is mesmerised by the flapper, Claire:

She was always asked to all the parties given in the flashy Bohemian world in which she moved.
No dance, gambling party, or secret doping orgy was complete without her Under the effect of cocaine, which she took more and more recklessly, she became inspired with a wild frenzy, and danced like a Bacchante, drank off a bottle of champagne, and played a thousand wild antics.

Claire is recognisably Betty May, whom Bunny knew well.
Betty herself admits that she was powerfully attracted by drugs from the outset: ‘Compared with cocaine, all other pleasures seemed flat… it was wonderful.
I shall never forget the incredible deliriums of pleasure and excitement which I got first of all when I began taking drugs.’

Betty became seriously hooked on cocaine.
She made several suicide attempts, and had a terrifying withdrawal before she could free herself from addiction.
Dope Darling
is a banal tale, but one which nevertheless reveals an awareness of the dark side of drugs.
Abuse of opium certainly contributed to the disintegration and early death of the painter Christopher Wood, while
others such as Mary Butts, Brenda Dean Paul, and Aleister Crowley were to varied extents victims of their drug habits.
Nevertheless, despite their easy availability, only a minority did more than experiment.

*

As the drop-outs of their time it is not surprising that Bohemians got their fair share of disapproval.
Accusations of subversion, arrogance and élitism are automatically levelled at coteries, though as this is surely true of any social grouping which includes some and excludes others, we should all beware.
Fascinatingly, those accusations come as often from within Bohemia as from without.
For exponents of individualism, being labelled was anathema.
Kathleen Hale was scornful of being called ‘Bohemian’ – ‘I hate that description.
It’s so
silly
!’ And yet she failed to come up with a different epithet to describe that group of which she herself was so indispensable a member.

Inevitably, as familiarity with the new social landscape increased, Bohemia found itself once again in sickened retreat from the scene, appalled at the abuse of its hard-won liberty.
The ‘tavern by the wayside’ was, it seemed, being invaded by intellectual scavengers, parasites, ‘tea-party tigers’, each out for what they could get.
How was it that these maggots, these charlatans could occupy the same ground, claim the same privileges, as the true artist?
Dylan Thomas wrote indignantly to a friend in 1933:

The Arty Party
The type of party you describe – and you describe it very well indeed – is a menace to art, much as I dislike the phrase .… Still do seedy things in their mother’s pyjamas enthuse over some soon-to-be-forgotten lyrist, or some never-to-be-heard-of painter of nature in the raw and angular.
Neuter men and lady tenors rub shoulders with ‘the shams and shamans, the amateur hobo and homo of Bloomsbury W.C.I’, while their hostess, clad in scarlet corduroy, drinks to their health in methylated spirits.

Certainly there were components of the Bohemian party which lent themselves to parody – and Dylan Thomas in an ill-fitting dressing-gown with bloodshot eyes popping out of his head after a week’s drunken dissipation was himself no great advertisement for the poet’s life.

Ethel Mannin, another
soi-disant
Bohemian whose commentaries are very much from the inside, displays similar distaste for the degeneracy of her own world in
Ragged Banners
.
Mannin takes her idealistic hero Starridge on a progress through London’s Bohemia in the company of his friend Lattimer.
Somewhere, their taxi pulls up outside a house where a party is in progress.
Lured by the babble of voices and strains from a gramophone they make their way up to the top floor.
Now Mannin’s camera moves unsteadily round the room, documenting its occupants, coming to rest on a couple dancing like somnambulists, clasping between them a sheaf of lilies, moving on to record the young man in a blue suit who is suddenly revealed as a woman; now close up on a bearded man lounging behind him, heavily rouged and powdered.
The men’s shirts are vivid blue, green, and open-necked.
Starridge is accosted by a tattered woman who asks him whether he is an imagist poet.
Lattimer reappears.
Starridge casts about desperately for escape:

‘I want to go home.’

Lattimer laughed.
‘This passion for going home – positively indecent.
This party hasn’t really started yet – it’s not much past one yet, and it will go on till breakfast time.’

‘I don’t care if it goes on till doomsday, I’ve had enough.’

But Lattimer is adamant.
He produces Liana, a blonde nymph dressed in chiffon and rosebuds – ‘she moved in an aura of perfume and her eyes were a masterpiece of make-up’.
Revolted, Starridge allows himself to be led by her between hermaphrodites and cigar-smoking women in monocles, to a corner where she drapes herself on a blue divan: ‘Do tell me all about yourself.’ Starridge sees that the only way to get out of Liana’s clutches is by pretending to be queer; he runs away leaving her bleating with dismay.

‘I shall never go to another party again as long as I live,’ Starridge declared violently.
‘Parties are the last word in futility and inanity.
You meet all the people you don’t want to know and none of those you do’…

It is probable that each advancing wave of social change contains within it the undertow of its own decadence – but what wonderful copy those blighted lives made, too.

*

With hindsight it is easy to judge the dizzy immaturity of the Bohemians.
Their dissentient stance on life can seem like a waste of energy, ineffective and ruinous to those who adopted it.
And yet that very gypsy outlandishness and bravado which we associate with
la vie de Bohème
expresses a profound human imperative – the desire to live, to love and to create freely and
truthfully.
Many among the artistic community paid the price for their own inner vitality and idealism:

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

The creation of immortal poetry is not the only justification for living.
The Bohemian experiment in ‘making it new’ embraced life as well as art.
If we place a high value on social change, on liberty, on emancipation from tyrannous and unnecessary controls, then the Bohemian enterprise can be seen as worthwhile and important in itself.
We have to recognise that we owe many of our present assumptions about life to the people who, sometimes in very small ways, but motivated by revolutionary ideals, hope and defiance of convention, stood up to the establishment a hundred years ago.
Sobriety and caution are not virtues which feature largely in the annals of Bohemia, because they are not the ones which prompt people to treat life as an adventure, a journey into the unknown.
True, many of them lost their way, succumbing to poverty and other pressures.
But even for these, the strains of gypsy guitar music, the popping corks, the chopped jazz rhythms and cannonades of laughter that accompanied their descent into defeat may have made it seem more like victory.
They did not go gentle into that good night.
For they were with friends, and perhaps for a moment, as they danced, drank and loved, young and fall of ideals, they believed they knew what life was for.

‘To live one must always be intoxicated with love, with poetry, with hate, with laughter, with wine – it doesn’t matter which…’ wrote Roy Campbell.
Intensity was all.

Today we can conduct relationships with people from any social class without fear of ostracism, while deploring oppressive, stratified societies.
Our choice of friendships and love affairs are our own.
The idea of chaperon-age makes us laugh; women are independent.
We recognise that children have potential that must not be squashed.
We take it for granted that society is fluid, that informality will prevail.
We do not expect to behave like marionettes at any social gathering.
We are hatless, relaxed and on first-name terms with people we barely know.
Red paint, ratatouille and yellow corduroy brighten our lives.
Etiquette, manners and rules are observed empirically rather than imposed.
There are fewer taboo subjects of discussion than ever before.
We live in a society which most people’s great-grandparents would hardly recognise.