Among the Bohemians (9 page)

That celebratory sense of liberty, the feeling of bursting from bonds, was almost tangible at times: ‘I want to kiss people, copulate with them, dance, drink, ride in racing motor cars, climb trees, camp out…’ confided the young David Garnett to his diary.

Divesting oneself of virginity without more ado was the first thing to do – like the young Enid Bagnold, who left her stuffy parental home in the suburbs, went to live in Chelsea, and in very little time had taken the irrevocable step with literary Lothario Frank Harris:

‘Sex,’ said Frank Harris, ‘is the gateway to life.’ So I went through the gateway in an upper room in the Café Royal…

As I sat at dinner with Aunt Clara and Uncle Lexy I couldn’t believe that my skull wasn’t chanting aloud: ‘I’m not a virgin!
I’m not a virgin!’

They were drunk on new delights, this unrepressed band of New Women, and they felt no shame, no need to conceal their liberation.
They wanted to cry it from the rooftops.
Nina Hamnett wanted a plaque on the house where she had been deflowered.
There was a sense of fun about the new-found freedom.
Sex was natural, loving, an expression of spontaneous lusts,
preordained for human ecstasy.
What was to stop one making love on a clifftop in broad daylight?
Why resist, why hold back?

Kathleen Hale in her old age was indignant at the suggestion that she and her friends were dissolute or promiscuous.
She regarded herself as deeply in love, committed, and quite open in her affairs.
It was all-important to her that she had profound feelings about her lovers, and it was this that gave her and Bohemians like her their moral validity.

For the pioneers of free love had more than their natural inclinations and lusts to support their cause.
The Bohemian romantics were steeped in the ideal of truthful living and truthful loving.
They were passionately certain in their belief that sex should be seen as a mystic state released from the prison of social expectations.
Today such beliefs may appear naive, but the ideal of free love was revered with almost spiritual fervour by a generation of Bohemians.
This idealism was fuelled by an equal sense of the profanity and barbarism of contemporary society, which not only condemned women and many men to a life sentence of never-to-be-realised longings, but prostituted women in a degraded transaction called marriage.
When the author Grant Allen wrote his novel
The Woman Who Did
(1895) it was a best-seller.
Although its language and sentiment read somewhat mawkishly today, the heroine would find many latter-day sympathisers in her single-minded determination not to marry cynically.

The beautiful Herminia Grey wears simple Pre-Raphaelite-style clothes and white roses in her hair – she is clearly all soul.
To her rather more conventionally minded suitor Alan Merrick this virginal goddess is irresistible.
Their conversation is on a higher plane, their hearts unite, and Alan asks Herminia to be his wife.
But his plane is not as high as hers, for Herminia has made up her mind never to marry.
Instead she proposes that they should be ‘very dear, dear friends, with the only kind of friendship that nature makes possible between men and women’.

I know what marriage is – from what vile slavery it has sprung; on what unseen horrors for my sister women it is reared and buttressed; by what unholy sacrifices it is sustained and made possible… I can’t be untrue to my most sacred beliefs.

Alan takes some persuading, but at Herminia’s insistence eventually agrees to live unmarried for the sake of her principles.
A dramatic confrontation ensues when Merrick senior, Alan’s wealthy father, finds out.
Spluttering with revulsion at his son’s disgusting defiance of decency, he promptly disinherits him.
Soon after, Herminia becomes pregnant.
Rather shamefully, they go to Italy to have the baby in Perugia, and there Alan regrettably dies
of typhoid contracted from bad drains.
Herminia is left a penniless unmarried mother.
She returns to England and, as a fallen woman no longer acceptable to society, is faced with a struggle for survival.
In her hour of need a kind editor gives her a small sum for some journalism; with hard work and a few friends she manages to scrape a living for herself and her child.
Déclassée, bereft of respectability, soiled goods, yet still refusing to compromise those ‘sacred beliefs’, Herminia finds a natural home in the only community tolerant enough to give her refuge – Bohemia.
A hospitable country, it had long permitted freedom of choice in sexual matters.
Its doors had always been open to sexual transgressors, to unmarried mothers, to the unrespectable, the unfortunate or the plain immoral – all the casualties of bourgeois censoriousness.
Although Herminia is a victim, ostracised and outlawed, by giving her unshakeable convictions Allen claims moral pre-eminence for his heroine.

The Woman Who Did
made an eloquent if rather over-effusive plea for the values of tolerance and freedom in love, but perhaps their most sensational manifesto came with H.
G.
Wells’s
Ann Veronica
(1909).
It is hard now to understand quite how affronted polite society was by this novel, but the reaction was one of implacable hostility to the book’s liberal message, and Wells had to endure humiliating persecution from public and critics alike.
The book tells the simple story of its eponymous heroine, a ‘new’ woman (largely based on Amber Reeves, H.
G.
Wells’s mistress at the time).
As the daughter of a dull suburban business-man, Ann Veronica is impatient with the dreariness of her safe, sheltered middle-class life.
Her aspirations of independence – (‘I want to be a human being; I want to learn about things and know about things…’) – become reality when she runs away to London.
There she experiments with various emancipated movements – Fabianism, the suffragettes – but discovers true freedom only in the arms of her college tutor, Capes.
Together they flee to Switzerland.
Despite, or because of, the hostile reaction to the book, thousands of readers were mesmerised by Wells’s daring in depicting this love affair, in which the hero and heroine seemed to breathe the purer air of a parallel morality:

‘If individuality means anything it means breaking bounds – adventure.
Will you be moral and your species, or immoral and yourself?
We’ve decided to be immoral.’…

‘Look at our affair,’ he went on… ‘No power on earth will persuade me we’re not two rather disreputable persons.
You desert your home: I throw up useful teaching, risk every hope in your career… all our principles abandoned… Out of all this we have struck a sort of harmony… and it’s gorgeous!’

‘Glorious!’ said Ann Veronica…

Later they loitered along a winding path above the inn and made love to one another…

For a time they walked in silence.

‘I wonder,’ she began presently, ‘why I love you – and love you so much?
I know now what it is to be an abandoned female.
I
am
an abandoned female.
I’m not ashamed – of the things I’m doing.’…

In their Alpine sanctuary the lovers feel invulnerable from the condemning, conventional world, able to celebrate their new-found liberty beyond the reach of ‘the established prohibitions of society’, the tattling busybodies; ‘We’re the rarest of mortals…’

This sense of superiority to common humanity is most exaltedly expressed by the dancer Isadora Duncan, describing her first meeting with the actor and theatre designer Gordon Craig:

Here stood before me brilliant youth, beauty, genius; and, all inflamed with sudden love, I flew into his arms with all the magnetic willingness of a temperament which had for two years lain dormant, but waiting to spring forth.
Here I found an answering temperament, worthy of my metal.
In him I had found the flesh of my flesh, the blood of my blood…

… Hardly were my eyes ravished by his beauty than I was drawn towards him, entwined, melted.
As flame meets flame, we burned in one bright fire.
Here, at last, was my mate; my love; my self – for we were not two, but one, that one amazing being of whom Plato tells in the Phaedrus, two halves of the same soul.

This was not a young man making love to a girl.
This was the meeting of twin souls…

Despite the Mills & Boon flavour of this encounter, in the context of pre-permissive society there is something courageous about Isadora’s certainty and idealism, her radiant belief in complete emotional, spiritual and sexual fulfilment.

Rosalind Thornycroft was born in 1891.
Her father, Sir Hamo, was an eminent sculptor many of whose busts and figures still stand to commemorate the great and the good of past centuries.
The Thornycroft family lived comfortably in Hampstead; Sir Hamo and his wife, Agatha, were involved in the various liberal movements of the day – Fabianism, positivism, coeducation.
They were ‘arty’, despised Philistines, and brought their children
up in an ‘advanced’ way.
When Rosalind – a fresh-faced ‘stunner’ of sixteen – met the magnificent Godwin Baynes at a Wagnerian singing party, she was bowled over by his Siegmund; soon afterwards there was a great snowstorm and Godwin took Rosalind tobogganing on Hampstead Heath.
How could she resist when he picked her up in his strong arms and carried her over a snowdrift?

Isadora Duncan: ‘When she appeared we all had the feeling that God was present.’

Love flowered.
There were trips to the Russian ballet, a holiday with Arnold Bax soaking up the Irish twilight in the mountains of County Kerry, and happy Sunday afternoons with their Bohemian friends, laughing and singing – ‘everyone was either musical or literary or an art student’.
Then they became engaged.
Rosalind felt their love to be transcendent, and her faith in this was so powerful that she was able to persuade her parents to allow the pair to go – unmarried – to Paris together in the summer of 1912:

I think [my parents’] ‘free’ attitude was based on an absolute belief in the pure and innocent behaviour of anyone brought up in the way I had been by them.
I agreed with this view, but, convinced that we were a special case by virtue of our perfect love on the lines of German romanticism – (Wagner’s Ewig Einig Ohne Ende) – we felt we were justified in becoming complete lovers.
I did not, however, confess this ‘marriage’ to Mother, although it was a way of life that was lived by many of our contemporaries of advanced people among Fabians and students.

Back in England the pair set up home in Bethnal Green, where Godwin practised as a doctor, with his sister Ruth as ‘chaperone’.
They were not legally married for another year.

*

The romanticism of Herminia Grey and Ann Veronica in fiction, or of Isadora Duncan and Rosalind Thornycroft in real life, runs like a seam of gold through Bohemia’s attitude to love, just as the same romantic idealism informs their attitude to money and poverty.
Bohemia had its libertines, undoubtedly, but on the whole their motives were coloured by a kind of uncynical naiveté.

Augustus John, as so often in Bohemian circles, set the pace.
He was promiscuous, but not afflicted by guilt; his promiscuity had a happy-go-lucky quality, a well-meaning delight in the newness of fresh sex.
Though he strayed, he always returned to his chief love Dorelia, and he never meant anyone to get hurt.
Augustus’s entire personality exuded an irresistible aura of sex, like a force of nature.
Women found him magnetically virile in his youth, swaggering, long-haired, earringed, talented, the male sex symbol of his day.
Michael Holroyd, his biographer, roughly classified John’s conquests into ‘occasional models’, ‘chief mistress’, and ‘grand lady’, but did not attempt a complete tally of Augustus’s groupies.
When Viva King went to stay at Alderney Manor, the Johns’ home in Dorset, Edie (Dorelia’s sister) recommended her to shove a chest-of-drawers against her bedroom door.
Not that it would have prevented him if he had tried, according to her.
Viva claimed to have been one of the few who managed to repel him.
One day, reading aloud to him from the works of sexologist Havelock Ellis, Viva became aware that Augustus, excited by the passage, was starting to emit strange sounds – ‘like a sea elephant coming up for air’…

[I] realised it was Augustus starting some ‘funny business’; but when told to, he returned quietly to his chair.
When I was married he would whisper that he would like to give me a child.
I am told he proposed this to many women.

Augustus’s secretary Kathleen Hale was less resistant to his powerful masculinity:

I felt a frisson whenever he came into the room.
Sometimes there would be mock battles between us, when he would try to ‘rape’ me, scuffles that always began and ended in laughter – hardly the atmosphere for passion.
I have always found laughter as good as a chastity belt.
Once, though, out of curiosity, I allowed him to seduce me.
The sex barrier down, this aberration only added a certain warmth to our friendship.

There was something almost endearing, if preposterous, about Augustus John’s determination to ‘have a go’ whatever the circumstances, and few could resist.

Dylan Thomas fell into much the same category as Augustus John, though most accounts agree that physically he was unattractive.
But according to Constantine Fitzgibbon Dylan’s sexual susceptibility was disarming to the strings of women he slept with: ‘His interest in women was normal, and he satisfied it in a manner that was quite accepted and acceptable in the Soho of his youth… he just liked girls, and he told them so.’ There was at least no hypocrisy about it.