Among the Bohemians (38 page)

There are moments when I desire squalor, sinister, mean surroundings, dreariness and misery.
The great unwashed mood is upon me.
Then I go out from luxury… The thoughts sit in the park sometimes, but sometimes they go slumming.

In Bohemia
nostalgie de la boue
was never far off.
Dylan Thomas lived in a pigsty.
A nomad in London, he nevertheless possessed a mattress, which he laid on the floor of whoever chanced to lend him a room.
For a while he parked this mattress with three painters who lived off the Fulham Road.
The flat was a festering repository for their belongings, without so much as a silk dressing gown to redeem it from squalor.
One of his flatmates remembered: ‘For yards around me I can see nothing but poems, poems, poems, butter, eggs, mashed potatoes, mashed among my stories and Janes’ canvasses…’

Animals and ashtrays wreaked havoc in the simulacrum of a Fitzrovian pub inhabited by the composer Constant Lambert and his wife, Flo, where untidiness was endemic.
Their cats roamed through the piles of empty bottles, newspaper cuttings and dead cigarette ends like refugees from a bomb blast; the relics of some rather good pieces of antique French furniture protruding through the debris.
The Lamberts’ less fastidious Bohemian friends felt as comfortable at Trevor Place as they did in the Wheatsheaf.

For Nicolette Macnamara and her friend Nancy Sharp, who, as Slade students in the 1920s shared a disgusting flat in Adelaide Road, the decision to dispense with cleanliness was utterly conscious:

We lived in squalor.
The beds were like old dog baskets.
Our dirty washing and laundry piled up in a corner for weeks on end, in an emergency I washed a vest and a pair of stockings in the bath with me; this was an old geyser bath that we shared with the rest of the house.
The stews were wreathed in fungus and the food rotted in the saucepans.
The washing-up fouled the sink until we washed up in desperation so that we could eat.
Our clothes hung on hooks from the wall when they were
not on the floor among the canvases and empty beer bottles left over from parties.
The mice approved of our way of living and multiplied.
We were terribly happy.

Nicolette and Nancy had no qualms about their way of life, it didn’t bother anybody else, and they certainly weren’t wasting their time wiping specks of dust off bookcases, they were painting.

How can one reconcile pigsties such as these with art and beauty?
The answer is that tidiness and cleanliness can be oppressive, while mess released one from bourgeois imperatives like tidying up.
Poverty and high ideals didn’t necessarily mean you had to be uncomfortable, however.
The gentle settling of dust and grime on books and ornaments gave a kind of frowsy snugness to the Bohemian interior.
It bespoke artistic priorities as opposed to bogus pride in the home.
Robert Medley felt instantly at ease visiting the Carline family in Hampstead, whose sitting-room was hung on every side with a melee of Victorian and modernist works of art, and full of ‘innumerable cabinets, bibelots, sit-down chairs and family bric-a-brac, [with] the cosiness of the seldom dusted…’ This was somewhere you could relax, be yourself, and stop worrying if you dropped your ash on the rug.
Nobody would notice, or mind.

*

When artists set out to rewrite the rules, personal hygiene was often rejected from the new constitution.
The equation of dirt with liberty is one that recurs in the annals of Bohemia, for it is in the tradition of gypsies to hate water.
Genuine gypsy communities felt a strong aversion to washing, and soap was for centuries practically unknown to them.
So too there were those among their followers who felt that soap and water would dilute their artistic purity.
To wash was considered by many to be conventional, an activity associated with the over-civilised.
When Eliza Doolittle is raised from the gutter to be turned into a ‘lady’, the first thing she has to have is a bath.
So, taken to its logical extension, filth meant freedom from oppressive bourgeois standards.

I hankered for sordidness – sordidness of situation, sordidness of act – because I thought that that would help to wash away my sheltered upbringing and to plant me more firmly in reality…

wrote Gerald Brenan.
This was surely liberty of a kind.
There was something thrillingly anarchic about declaring war on hygiene – it went with long hair and sexual licence.
The threat posed to 1960s society by hippies, with their shaggy and dirty appearance, was identical to that posed by the Bohemians
of the 1920s.
The critic James Agate complained about the invasion of his habitual Cafe Royal table by brigades of ‘corduroy trousers… with unwashed Bloomsbury fingers… I expect young people to come knocking at my door.
But why are the knuckles they knock with invariably filthy?’ It sounds as familiar as the outraged correspondents who wrote to newspapers in 1968 about indecency at pop concerts.

For anyone who disapproved, adjusting to Bohemian squalor could be a learning curve.
When in 1916 Ottoline Morrell went to see Katharine Asquith at her home, Mells Park in Somerset, her visit to this beautiful, conventional, orderly home with its perfect garden was entirely coloured for Ottoline by the devitalising, depressing character of its occupant.
Non-plussed, she fled the following weekend to Suffolk where she visited Vanessa Bell and her unconventional household at Wissett Lodge.
The contrast to Mells Park was striking – Wissett was ‘dark and damp and exceedingly untidy’, but its occupants were ‘nice and real’ and free and full of gaiety.
Ottoline was forced to realise that she would have to retrain her ‘proper’ notions of cleanliness and orderliness, and learn to welcome untidiness as something creative and life-enhancing.
All it took was a little open-mindedness, a little vision.
Everyday life didn’t have to be subjected to Mrs Beeton’s despotic regime; and Bohemia has always been resolutely anti-authoritarian.

*

Can it even be that filth is a precondition of art?
There were those who claimed that it was.
Tristram Hillier was invited by a rich patron to spend time painting at his lovely villa on the French Riviera.
He accepted gratefully and soon moved into his host’s purpose-built studio, where he was left alone to enjoy the luxurious surroundings, and to eat the punctual meals served by silent servants.
The expectation was that at the end of two months he would produce a masterpiece – but somehow nothing happened.
Hillier’s well-meaning patron was devastated to find that the perfect environment he had provided had, after two months, inspired no more than a tiny drawing of a dead mouse:

Like the flower that thrives upon a dung-heap…

wrote Hillier,

… the artist draws inspiration from disorder, and thus it is that, as a compromise to my dual nature, I am often compelled to abandon the comfortable but simple studio
in which a part of me is content and fulfilled, in order to spend long periods in the sordid surroundings of some dirty little inn where, spiritually, I can feed upon that squalor in which I find nourishment as a painter.

How can we reconcile the godliness of cleanliness with the spirituality of dirt?
Artists who renounced cleanliness committed a kind of heresy which demands a complete reversal of our standards.
This was a moral revolution, where dirty was clean, vice was virtue, Hell was Heaven.

In his fable
Jack Robinson
(1933) Gerald Brenan’s hero transgresses all the accepted norms of behaviour in his quest for happiness and true living.
His first act of defiance is to become a vagrant.
One of the earliest discoveries he makes, in a tramps’ hostel, is that a dirty and vile life can also be a life of personal fulfilment and self-realisation:

The old unwashed clothes I could not change became as familiar as close relations… I slept more luxuriously on a truckle bed whose single sheet was stained with grease and blood than on the feathery mattress of my little bedroom.
Going farther I even lay listening with secret delight to the hoarse coughing and spitting and scratching that went on in the crowded restless dormitory till nearly dawn.
The acrid pungent stench, the lack of air, the itching from fleas gave me through my irritation and discomfort a kind of spiritual ecstasy…

Against the dirt, lack of food and sleep, and general discomfort I felt my own distinct character and existence outlined more vividly…

Here, the individual’s very identity is bound up with dirt and discomfort.
Compared to the unscathed, vacant nonentities of the bourgeoisie, the artist is like his own canvas.
He is smeared, daubed and befouled with the accretions of living; but he embodies the vital complexity of a creative personality.
At its most extreme the artist who chose this form of self-expression could clear a space for himself at any gathering.

Richard Aldington remembered Gaudier-Brzeska as ‘probably the dirtiest human being I have ever known.
[He] gave off horrid effluvia in hot weather.’ So when Gaudier came visiting one warm summer day, the Aldingtons took good care to seat him at the opposite end of the room from themselves.
Unluckily they were joined soon afterwards by Ford Madox Ford, resplendent in formal morning clothes.
The only available seat was on the couch next to Gaudier and, plainly overwhelmed, Ford soon left.
The next day he returned to reprimand Aldington for allowing such a noxious creature into polite company.
However, Aldington noticed that as the weather cooled Gaudier was promoted to the guest list for Ford’s At Homes,
and Ford even went so far as to install the artist’s phallic statue of Ezra Pound in his front garden.

The revolting revolution was no less than a war against all things hygienic and clinical.
The more the English became obsessed with tidying up and warding off odours, the more squeamish and deodorised they became, the more vulnerable they were to the smell and dirt offensive waged by Bohemia.
There was a time, it seemed – a more primitive, honest era – when people scratched and spat and farted with a kind of coarse candour, and when manure was recognised as being what it is, the source of fertility; but the trajectory of the twentieth century was heading ever closer to a cleansed, odourless condition, where everything pungent and poetic – garlic, attar of roses, sweat, shit, Turkish tobacco – was negated and abolished.
The poet Roy Campbell was appalled by the number of advertisements he was beginning to see in the thirties promoting products to deal with bad breath, armpit odour, constipation and so on, which he interpreted as a denial of natural functions.
Sex, likewise, was linked with horrible rubbery devices, health linked with medicine.
Society was like a vast hospital full of doctors trying to cure the disease of Life.

It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Bohemia had any kind of lavatorial fixation; but one of the many differences between the inhabitants of those two worlds, Bohemia and the bourgeoisie, was Bohemia’s willingness to recognise that our bodily emissions are no more frightening or embarrassing than breathing.
Whether interesting or dull, chamber pots and lavatories and the things one did in them were back on the list of topics one could discuss.
Could one afford to have a water closet installed as opposed to an earth closet?
Wasn’t emptying chamber pots a nuisance?
Was French plumbing inferior to English?
(– almost certainly).
Why indeed were the French so neurotic about evacuation, and wasn’t it ghastly the way French sailors relieved themselves on the beach?
How satisfactory to have a pleasantly disinfected earth closet with a wooden seat and a nice shovel to cover up one’s excrement ‘like a cat’, and how unsatisfactory to have only a ground floor lavatory and ‘not a po in the house!’ Not obsessive, smutty exchanges; speculations, more; curiosity, openness, and dismay at the prevalent hypocrisies of conventional society.

So with smells: the Bohemian nose was as acclimatised to natural human odours as it was to turpentine and tobacco.
Given the very impractical realities of early twentieth-century plumbing, one should not wonder that people weren’t queuing up to get clean.
Remember, personal hygiene could be a battle – a time-wasting, elaborate, depressing process; and many people with better things to do just gave up the unequal fight.
Thus while messy,
muddly Bohemia was a fertile territory for the arts, it was often also a breeding-ground for bad smells and insanitary habits.

Top of the Unwashed League after Gaudier-Brzeska comes Mark Gerder – who grew up without a bathroom and could only be persuaded to bathe when good friends, like Eddie Marsh or Brett, could provide him with the facilities
and
wash his back for him.
‘I do not wash much: I think it is a waste of Labour.
I only wash when I look dirty’ was his position on the matter.
Christabel Dennison comes a close second – she didn’t bathe for weeks, and believed that nobody would notice that she hadn’t washed her neck if she wore high-necked jerseys.
‘I don’t smell,’ or so she claimed.
And then there was Ottoline Morrell, who generally dispensed with bathing and made do with a rudimentary wash in a basin.
Apparently she took a ‘proper’ bath only twice a year.

Getting clean was disagreeable and wearisome.
Many accounts tell of artists’ rudimentary, infrequent ablutions under a cold pump or in a bucket.
At Charleston the bathroom was ‘cramped and primitive’, the leaky pipes lagged with yellowing newspaper.
An attempt to give the worn-out enamel tub a facelift was unsuccessful – the paint congealed into a sticky mess and bathers found themselves emerging with patches of Chinese white stuck to their bottoms.
Hot and cold running water was often unreliable, and gas geysers could be explosive and leaky.
If one lived in lodgings, the prospect was gloomy: one carried towel and robe down two floors to a chilly bathroom shared with maybe three or four other occupants of a building, fed a geyser with pennies, and waited for a pitiable trickle of lukewarm water to emerge from the cistern.

In the early days of their marriage Anthony and Nicolette Devas lived in Regent’s Square and tried to keep clean in a house with only one tap to serve the twenty-five occupants.
A few doors away lived Nicolette’s father, the poet and philosopher Francis Macnamara, who sublet a room to his other daughter Caitlin: