Among the Bohemians (59 page)

Hope-Johnstone, John (1883–1970)
‘One of those delinquent upper-class Bohemians who leaven the English class-system’, the romantically good-looking Hope-Johnstone was for a while tutor to Augustus John’s children.
In 1912 he set out with his young friend Gerald Brenan on a never-completed adventure walking to China.
Learned and well read, he was also a master of arcana, from calligraphy to cookery.

Howard, Brian (1905–1958)
Described by his Oxford contemporary Evelyn Waugh as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, Brian Howard was a notorious dandy and aesthete who inspired the character of Ambrose Silk in Waugh’s
Put Out More Flags
(1942).
Nancy Cunard published Howard’s poetry, but he never realised his potential as a writer.
He committed suicide by a drugs overdose.

Hunt, Violet (1866–1942)
As famous for her scandalous liaison with the married Ford Madox Ford as for her literary salon in pre-war London, Violet Hunt was also a prolific novelist.
Violet’s emphasis on propriety was at odds with Ford’s more relaxed Bohemianism; but she was an important cultural catalyst.
‘I have to live always in the boiling middle of things,’ she wrote.

Hutchinson, Mary (1889–1977)
A cousin of Lytton Strachey, married to the barrister St John Hutchinson, and close friend of T.
S.
Eliot and Aldous Huxley, the elegant and sophisticated Mary entertained artistic society in London and at her country home in Sussex.
She often visited Charleston with Clive Bell; their affair lasted thirteen years.
Mary’s
Fugitive Pieces
was published by the Hogarth Press in 1927.

Huxley, Aldous (1894-1963)
The author of
Brave New World
(1932) suffered from near-blindness.
During the First World War Huxley often stayed at Garsing-ton.
His novels
Crome Yellow
(1921) and
Antic Hay
(1923) depict contemporary Bohemian society.
In the 1920s and 30s Huxley and his wife, Maria, lived in Italy and the south of France, where D.
H.
Lawrence and Sybille Bedford became close friends.

Huxley, Juliette (1896–1994)
Juliette Baillot came to Garsington in 1915 as Swiss governess to Ottoline Morell’s young daughter Julian; she later left to educate the children of the Ranée of Sarawak (Brett’s sister).
In 1918 she married Julian Huxley, brother to the novelist.
Her memoir,
Leaves of the Tulip Tree
(1986), gives a valuable portrait of Garsington and its guests and inhabitants.

John, Augustus (1878-1961)
Born in Wales, John studied at the Slade 1894–1898.
Spectacularly talented and attractive, he was King of the Café Royal at this period, but was equally fascinated by gypsy life.
In 1901 he married Ida Nettleship, and soon after began a lifelong relationship with Dorothy McNeill, ‘Dorelia’.
Only five of John’s innumerable children were legitimate.
Despite alcoholism he continued painting to the end of his life.

John, Gwen (1876–1939)
After Gwen’s death Augustus John prophesied that ‘fifty years from now I shall be known as the brother of Gwen John’.
Having studied at the Slade, she settled in France, becoming Rodin’s model and mistress.
In 1913 Gwen became a Roman Catholic.
She lived reclusively, painting and looking after her cats, and died mysteriously in Dieppe.

John, Ida (1877–1907)
Ida Nettleship enrolled at the Slade in 1892; there her closest friends were Edna Clarke Hall and Gwen John, through whom she met her husband, Augustus.
Sentimental and idealistic, Ida’s romantic dreams of love were shattered by Augustus’s infidelities, domestic cares, and frequent childbearing.
She died of puerperal fever in Paris.

John, Romilly (1906–1986)
‘I needed time to recover from my childhood,’ wrote Augustus and Dorelia’s son in
The Seventh Child
(1975).
Romilly’s full-time education ended when he was twelve; nevertheless he went to Cambridge and married while still an undergraduate.
After a spell in the army and as a civil servant he decided to devote himself to literature.

King, Viva (1893–1978)
Warm-hearted and permissive, Viva Booth was dubbed ‘Queen of Bohemia’ by Osbert Sitwell; her ‘court’ included Kathleen Hale, Nina Hamnett, Nancy Cunard, Nevinson, Wyndham Lewis, the Epsteins.
She was briefly secretary to Augustus John, and had a tempestuous affair with Philip Heseltine.
In 1926 she married the homosexual Willie King.
Her Thurloe Square salon became a mecca for artistic society.

Koteliansky, S. S. (1882–1955)
Koteliansky was a Ukrainian Jew who came to England in 1911 and remained.
Despite his bad English he earned his living as a translator, and encouraged appreciation of such authors as Chekov and Gorky by persuading the Woolfs to publish them at the Hogarth Press.
His close friends included Katherine Mansfield, D.
H.
Lawrence and Beatrice Campbell.

Kramer, Jacob (1892–1962)
Born in the Ukraine, Kramer was brought up in Leeds.
He gained assistance to attend the Slade School in 1912.
A drinking companion of Roy Campbell and Augustus John, he joined Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist movement, and with him helped decorate the Eiffel Tower Restaurant.
He later returned to Leeds, where he dominated its Bohemian sub-culture.

Kühlenthal, Christine (1895–1976)
Though she was poised and accomplished, Christine’s German parentage made her the victim of prejudice during the First World War.
Her contemporaries at the Slade were Brett and Carrington.
Christine’s own painting talent was jeopardised by bad eyesight.
She married the painter John Nash in 1918, but under the terms of a ‘freedom pact’ struggled to allow him emotional liberty.

Lamb, Henry (1883–1960)
Henry Lamb abandoned his medical training to paint.
Through his brother Walter he met the Bloomsbury Group, including Lytton Strachey (of whom he painted a memorable portrait).
Stanley Spencer
was a close friend.
His first marriage, to Euphemia Forrest, was unsuccessful; and despite their mutual passion, he failed to detach Dorelia McNeill from Augustus John.
In 1928 he married Lady Pansy Pakenham.

Lambert, Constant (1905-1951)
‘Very good-looking and a non-stop talker’, this precocious composer and conductor was a Sitwell protégé and friend and collaborator of William Walton.
Lambert’s appetite for fast living and his unconventionality made him welcome in Fitzrovian society.
His friend Anthony Powell based ‘Hugh Moreland’ on Lambert in A
Dance to the Music of Time
(1951–75).
Alcohol hastened his early death.

Lanchester, Elsa (1902–1986)
Dizzily charming, the red-haired actress who ran the Cave of Harmony nightclub in Charlotte Street with Harold Scott married Charles Laughton in 1929, and later became a renowned film star.
Her best-known role is probably in Bride of Frankenstein (1935); she also starred in the film version of The Constant Nymph.
Elsa became a US citizen in 1950.

Lawrence, D. H. (1885–1930)
The working-class author of
Sons and Lovers
(1913) was introduced by Ford Madox Ford into literary and intellectual circles; his friends included the Huxleys, David Garnett, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Middle-ton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and Dorothy Brett.
After his marriage to Frieda Weekley he spent much time abroad.
Lawrence died in France of tuberculosis.

Lee, Laurie (1914–1997)
Laurie Lee’s account of his rural Gloucestershire boyhood, Cider with Rosie (1959), is his main claim to immortality.
In the thirties Lee travelled in Europe; his passionate affair with Lorna Wishart (sister of Mary and Kathleen Garman), by whom he had a daughter, brought him into contact with Bohemian London.
He eventually married Lorna’s niece Kathy.

Lett-Haines, Arthur (1894–1978)
For sixty years the partner of the painter Sir Cedric Morris, ‘Lett’ sacrificed his own talents to promoting those of Morris.
The pair loved bizarre parties, and entertained frequently in Fitzrovia.
Mischievous, bisexual, good-looking, he was depicted by Kathleen Hale (who had an affair with him) in her ‘Orlando’ books as the ‘Katnapper’, an irresistibly magnetic personality.

Lewis, Wyndham (1882–1957)
A leading figure of the pre-war avant-garde, the founder of Vorticism trained at the Slade.
Friends for a time with Augustus John and Ezra Pound, Lewis was notoriously energetic, talented and quarrelsome; his satire The Apes of God (1930) savages many of his contemporaries.
He has been described as ‘one of the loneliest figures in the intellectual world of the thirties’.

Lopokova, Lydia (1892–1981)
Lopokova trained as a ballerina in Russia and came to London in 1918 with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
Her gaiety and charm captivated Maynard Keynes and in 1925 they married; she became an incongruous, but festive, element in Bloomsbury celebrations thereafter.
At their Sussex home, Tilton, she and Keynes were close neighbours of Charleston.

Macnamara, Caitlin (1913–1994)
Voluptuous and impetuous, the daughter of Augustus John’s drinking companion Francis Macnamara was largely brought up with John’s children.
Caitlin never succeeded in her ambition to be a dancer; in 1936 she met the poet Dylan Thomas, and their tempestuous marriage was undermined by poverty and alcohol addiction.
After Dylan’s death Caitlin lived abroad.

Macnamara, Francis (1884–1946)
‘To know Francis was to know sorrow.’ Poet and philosopher, scion of an ancient Irish family, Francis Macnamara became one of Augustus John’s closest friends.
Macnamara was serially unfaithful to his wife Yvonne Majolier, and to his second wife, Edie McNeill, sister of Dorelia.
By Yvonne he had four children, including Nicolette Devas and Caitlin, who married Dylan Thomas.

Mannin, Ethel (1900–1984)
Born into a humble background, Ethel Mannin became a journalist and prolific novelist, who wrote over a hundred books.
In her memoir
Confessions and Impressions
(1930), ‘angry with the humbug of conventional morality’, she set out to shock the older generation.
A confirmed pacifist and indefatigable traveller, her close friends included Douglas Goldring and the educationist A.
S.
Neill.

Mansfield, Katherine (1888–1923)
The writer Katherine Mansfield came to London from her native New Zealand in 1903.
A short-lived marriage was followed by the birth of a stillborn child by another man in 1909.
In 1918 she married the literary editor John Middleton Murry.
Their circle included D.
H.
Lawrence, Beatrice Campbell, Ottoline Morrell and Virginia Woolf.
Undiagnosed gonorrhoea hastened Katherine’s death from tuberculosis.

Marsh, Sir Edward (1872–1953)
Much of London’s Bohemia had reason to be grateful to Eddie Marsh, a rich and respected civil servant, and private secretary to Winston Churchill.
A connoisseur and patron of modern painting, he bought work by Gertler, the Nash brothers, and Stanley Spencer.
He also edited the five volumes of
Georgian
Poetry
(1912–22), including poems by Brooke, D.
H.
Lawrence and Graves.

Marshall, Ray (1892–1940)
The first wife of David Garnett, Ray bore him two sons, Richard and William.
Ray was an illustrator, and her love of nature and timid, enigmatic qualities inspired David Garnett’s best novel,
Lady into Fox
(1922).
Her woodcuts adorn this and several of his other works including
A Rabbit in the Air
(1932).
Ray died of cancer.

Maugham, W. Somerset (1874–1965)
Though his books and plays were to bring him fame and fortune, Maugham drew on his impoverished Bohemian youth in his masterpiece,
Of Human Bondage
(1915), which depicts from first-hand the life of a young art student aspiring to the life of
Trilby
in Paris, and the hard-up struggles of Maugham’s Bohemian contemporaries in London.

May, Betty
Her luxuriant beauty and flamboyant clothes made Betty a prototype Bohemian.
Born in London’s East End, she modelled for Epstein, joined the Parisian underworld, and became a cocaine addict.
She and her third husband, Raoul Loveday, got tragically entangled with Aleister Crowley’s cult in Sicily.
‘I am sure that I am born for adventure,’ she reflected in Tiger Woman (1929).

McNeill, ‘Dorelia’ (1881–1969)
Augustus John was enthralled by Dorothy McNeill’s Mona Lisa looks, rechristened her ‘Dorelia’, and immortalised her unmistakable ‘aesthetic’ image in numerous portraits.
Their relationship survived her affair with Henry Lamb, and John’s infidelities.
She bore him four illegitimate children and was serene mother-figure to Augustus’s other offspring, and to many of their rambling household of guests.

Medley, Robert (1905–1994)
Medley studied at the Slade and in Paris; his education and training brought him into contact with W.
H.
Auden (who was his lover for a time), and also with Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia.
His lifelong partner was the dancer Rupert Doone.
Together with Isherwood and Auden they founded the Group Theatre.
In 1983 Medley published his autobiography, Drawn from the Life.

Mitchison, Naomi (1897–1999)
Naomi Haldane grew up in a distinguished academic family and, after her marriage to barrister Dick Mitchison, combined writing with her socialist commitments.
She was a political and social pionéer, and a compulsive traveller, while bringing up her five children.
The Mitchisons’ wide circle of friends included W.
H.
Auden, the Huxleys, the Stracheys and E.
M.
Forster.