Among the Bohemians (11 page)

Charlie and I take it in turns to sleep with Norah, which again I think is very kind of him.
The charwoman thinks it the most extraordinary thing she has ever heard of.
I forget how she found out… I think their married life is most successful.

*

Christine and Norah were behaving adulterously, but they had done nothing illegal.
Homosexual men ran more of a risk – but run it they did, with enthusiasm and conviction.
Far from discouraging homosexuality, the trauma of the Oscar Wilde trial in 1895 unleashed a gay stampede.

The seer Edward Carpenter was one who was undeterred by the fall-out from the trial, and his passionate advocacy of what he called ‘Uranian’ love brought him an equally fervent flock of followers, swayed by his idyllic vision of how mankind could live:

Once more in sacred groves will he reunite the passion and the delight of human love with his deepest feelings of the sanctity and beauty of Nature; or in the open, standing uncovered to the Sun, will adore the emblem of the everlasting splendour which shines within.

Above all, Carpenter believed that men and women could attain fulfilment through their sexual relationships.
In
The Intermediate Sex
(1908) he claimed that homosexuality was not a vicious warp of nature, but innate; it was, moreover, superior to heterosexual love, and we should all applaud its value to society, since according to him many artists – including Tennyson – were homosexual.
Carpenter practised what he preached.
He set up home with a charming working-class Derbyshire man called George Merrill, and together they tilled the soil, lived off fruit and nuts, and made their own sandals.
When not wearing them they allowed their feet to ‘press bare the magnetic earth’, living ‘the life of the open air, [in] familiarity with the wind and waves…’

Other feet meanwhile were pressing the stage of London’s Covent Garden, with equally liberating effect.
In 1911 Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes arrived in London after their
succès fou
in Paris of the preceding years.
The effect of Stravinsky’s music, Braque’s decors, Bakst’s costumes, Fokine’s choreography, and above all, Nijinsky’s dancing on the London art scene was incalculable.
Until Diaghilev ballet had been an entertainment largely aimed at the heterosexual male, who came for a titillating evening looking up the dancers’ skirts at the Alhambra.
Now ballet came out of the closet.
The new idiom presented androgynous creatures like Nijinsky’s
‘faune’
or
‘spectre de la rose’
with breathtakingly frank eroticism.
Male sexuality was dramatised to its utmost.
Ballet was never the same again, but neither were homosexuals.
Here at last, for many artists, was a medium which permitted them to experience prohibited emotions, and to exult in them as never before.
Vive
the spirit of Oscar Wilde – aestheticism was back with a vengeance.

Illegal it may have been, but the forbidden fruits were succulent.
Vanessa Bell took vicarious relish in dreamily conjuring up a vision of her old friend Maynard Keynes’s tasty indulgences, and warned him as she wrote that she intended to make her letter so pornographic that he would have to destroy it in case the servant saw it.
He didn’t.

Did you have a pleasant afternoon buggering one or more of the young men we left for you?
It must have been delicious out on the downs in the afternoon sun, a thing I have often wanted to do… I imagine you, however, with your bare limbs intertwined with him and all the ecstatic preliminaries of Sucking Sodomy – it sounds like the name of a station… How divine it must have been…

What
would
the parlourmaid have thought?

Today we are worlds away from the atmosphere of restriction and taboo which both ghettoised and intensified the sexual leanings of Bohemia’s homosexuals in those days.
Secrecy and stealth attended their movements.
Public toilets and the ever-available Guards’ barracks were known meeting-places; more aspirant types might attend the meetings of the Fitzrovian ‘Psychological Society’ that doubled as a pick-up joint for homosexual aesthetes.
The painter Robert Medley, born in 1904, grew up in a society where it was still deeply difficult to admit to being gay.
His entrée into Bohemia enabled him to recognise and accept his own sexuality.
Bit by bit, via Bloomsbury (he was kissed by Lytton Strachey), via evenings at the Ballets Russes, via an uncertain relationship with the young W.
H.
Auden, and eventually via Elsa Lanchester’s Cave of Harmony – a nightclub in
Gower Street – his initiation was complete.
It was there that he met the love of his life, the dancer Rupert Doone:

One or two couples took the floor.
I was a good dancer and I decided to show off with Elsa in a tango.
I had obviously gone too far in my apache role for, holding me at arm’s length, she suddenly announced in her clear voice.
‘The trouble with you, Robert, is that you don’t know what sex you are!’ As everybody had been looking on, the only reply to this deadly shaft was to take off all my clothes and demonstrate the facts.
This unpremeditated exhibition was greeted with a round of applause.
It was evidently what was needed to get the party going and I was not allowed to get dressed again…

Among the spectators a blond young man with an unmissable air of self-possession caught Robert’s eye.
The circumstances were propitious, and Robert had nothing left to conceal.
The couple went soon after this to Paris, where ‘under French law nobody had the right to interfere with our relationship’, but returned in due course to London, founded the Group Theatre, and settled into cosy domesticity in Hammersmith.
Robert was unswervingly loyal to Rupert for the rest of their lives together.

Only in Bohemia could their relationship be acknowledged and accepted.
The shock-absorbing effect of such latitude made homosexuality into something blithe, camp, and often comic.
Racy stories did the rounds, like the one about choreographer Frederick Ashton’s intense sexual experience with an eviscerated melon, later apparently served up by his mother as a delightful treat for supper.
Naomi Mitchison’s friend was given a guardsman for his birthday.
Evelyn Waugh told a risqué tale of a judge trying a sodomy case who went to consult an eminent colleague on his sentencing policy: ‘Excuse me, my lord, but could you tell me – what do you think one ought to give a man who allows himself to be buggered?’ ‘Oh, 30s or £2 – anything you happen to have on you.’

The unmasking of homosexuality demanded a new slang.
Viva King and her circle bluntly referred to the homosexuals amongst their friends as ‘so’, short for sodomites.
‘Fairies’ was American, and ‘pansy’ was just for the ladylike.
By the thirties words like ‘queer’, ‘pouffe’, ‘tapette’ or ‘he-vamp’ were also prevalent, while the extremely manly Roy Campbell was revolted by what he referred to as ‘Peters’.

It takes some perspective to place this homosexual current in the context of its time.
The Oscar Wilde trial had left British society reeling and divided by the ‘disgusting’ revelations which had brought him to his knees.
In its aftermath you could not sit on the fence.
Oscar was too much of a celebrity,
his nemesis too violent, to permit any equivocation.
From the moment his sentence was pronounced, aestheticism was a dirty word.
Experimenters with absinthe and dabblers in Swinburnian verse burned their green carnations and dived for cover.
The First World War brought the nation’s puritanical homophobia even more to the fore; a fear of’unclean acts’ went alongside a hatred for the effete and decadent art by then inescapably associated with them.
Homosexuality was seen as an infection, sapping the nation’s manly strength that was needed to kill Germans in the trenches; by the same token, modern art turned men into perverts, cowards and traitors.
We still live with the vestiges of this anti-art homophobia, but in those days it took unusual courage to challenge it.

The pursuit of love was less risky for lesbians, for lesbianism was not illegal.
When the law was amended in 1885 to clamp down more firmly against male homosexuality, those seeking royal assent for the statute were thwarted by the prospect of having to explain to Queen Victoria
how
women could have sex together.
But that was not to say it was sanctioned either.
For the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner it felt good to live dangerously.
‘Feeling safe and respectable is much more of a strain…’ she sighed, after a blissful morning lying in her lover Valentine’s arms, ‘… listening to the wind blow over our happiness.’ For Sylvia, here was fulfilment beyond her wildest dreams.
Like Robert Medley, she too remained faithful until Valentine died, and mourned away her final years aching for her lost love.

Then in 1928 Radclyffe Hall’s book
The Well of Loneliness
was banned for obscenity.
This brought the issue of lesbianism to public notice.
Instantly identifiable from the trial pictures, there was now no mistaking the Radclyffe Hall lookalikes in manly tailored suits and shingled hair who frequented Chelsea and St John’s Wood.
Roy Campbell was as dismissive of these degenerates as he had been of the ‘Peters’: ‘I… object to the dismalness of the English Lesbian, her grey, frowsy outlook, her grim puritanical dress, and her atmosphere of a psychoanalysis class.’

One presumes that Roy did not include his own wife Mary in this category; he was probably referring to her lover Vita Sackville-West, more recognizable in the ‘frowsy puritanical’ portrait he sketches.
Mary was beautiful and glamorous, but her marriage to Roy nearly broke up when she embarked on a passionate affair with Vita, who had lent the pair a cottage on her Kent estate.
Vita appears to have exercised
droit de seigneur
over her tenant’s lovely wife – Mary, however, being more than willing to be swept off her feet by the enchanting aristocrat.
Her landlady was also her goddess, her mother-figure; they made love, read sonnets together, and sent each other passionate billets-doux:

Is the night never coming again when I can spend hours in your arms, when I can realise your big sort of protectiveness all round me, and be quite naked except for a covering of your rose-leaf kisses?

wrote Mary to Vita.
Roy was furious, and took savage revenge on Vita in his long poem
The Georgiad
(1931):

Her gruff moustaches dropping from her mouth,

One to the North, the other to the South,

Seemed more the whiskers of some brine-wet seal

Than of a priestess of the High Ideal –

Vita always did her best to keep any whiff of scandal under wraps; she was far too lofty an aristocrat to enjoy the feeling of openly shocking the bourgeoisie.

But for Bohemians sexual and emotional intensity could be heightened by a feeling that one was breaking class taboos as well as gender ones, and there were Utopian ideals at stake as they hurled themselves over social barriers with kamikaze recklessness.
Drearily conventional concepts like suitability, rank, and caste were thrown overboard in the dizzy descent.
D.
H.
Lawrence introduced the ‘gamekeeper-fucks-Lady’ element into British literature with
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(1928) (another notorious banning), but one senses that Lawrence was cranking up his own erotic sensations in writing about Constance’s secret slumming with Mellors, as much as those of the characters.
Lady Chatterley may have been drawn from life.
Ottoline Morrell’s biographer Miranda Seymour hazards that Lawrence was portraying her subject’s real-life affair with a young gardener called Lionel Gomme (‘Tiger’) who was working at Garsington in 1920.
Ottoline’s lover brought her ‘simple love’, ‘across the great gulf of the world, conventions and positions…’; the fact that ‘Tiger’ was mainly interested in football and cars did nothing to lessen his attractions.
Sleeping with members of the working class offended every convention of the time; Nina Hamnett made no secret of how turned on she was by boxers, building labourers and sailors.

Even more defiant in their breach of accepted behaviour were the women who, like Nancy Cunard, had sex with black men.
According to Douglas Goldring the daring jazz-obsessed female acolytes of ‘Haut Bohemia’ were notorious for ‘their attacks on the virtue of [the] Negro artists’ who danced and sang in London’s revue shows.
There were some narrowly averted public scandals, but the participants were, it seems, getting their kicks by deliberately tempting fate.
Nancy was a class rebel who delighted in pushing
out the boundaries.
This included having a long-term sexual relationship with a black man named Henry Crowder, to the predictable outrage of her mother, Lady Cunard, and her upper-class cultured friends.
One day Lady Asquith dropped in to luncheon with Lady Cunard, and making small talk over the meal chanced to refer in a rather barbed manner to her friend’s errant daughter.
How is Nancy?
she asked ‘… what is it now – drink, drugs or niggers?’ Lady Cunard found herself utterly embarrassed; advisers rallied round, Sir Thomas Beecham was enlisted to pen an admonitory letter to Nancy, detectives and policemen were put on the case.
Nancy meanwhile wallowed in the notoriety which attached itself to her, and retaliated by publishing a lengthy open letter to her mother entitled ‘Black Man and White Ladyship’, in which she sounded off over pages on colour prejudice and class, and revelled in the unconscious double entendres into which her White Ladyship had floundered:

With you it is the other old trouble – class.

Negroes, besides being black (that is, from jet to as white as yourself but not so pink), have not yet ‘penetrated into London Society’s consciousness’.
You exclaim: they are not ‘received!’ (You would be surprised to know just how much they are ‘received’.)

But the episode was not just a peccadillo; Nancy Cunard’s relationship with Henry endured.
She also dedicated herself for years to compiling an exhaustive ‘Negro Anthology’.