Among the Bohemians (55 page)

O’Flaherty was fifty-three, and perhaps had reason to lament the disappearance of the world he had grown up in.
Arthur Ransome believed that, on the whole, Bohemia was for the young.
So where do old Bohemians go?

Too many of those beautiful Café Royal models were extinguished like candles, their fates as obscure as their nicknames.
‘Dolores’ was destitute when she was found dead in a basement aged forty.
Lilian Shelley killed herself.
Red-haired Eileen O’Henry was murdered by her jealous lover.
Buck-toothed ‘Bunny’ was strangled.
‘Puma’ died from an overdose of barbiturates.
The rigours of life for an artist could be very severe, and many succumbed.
Christopher Wood, ravaged by self-doubt, poverty and an irreversible opium addiction, lay down under a train at the age of twenty-nine.
For poor Nina Hamnett, it was a slippery slope.
Her glory days long past, she sank into alcoholism and in 1956 fell from the window of her second-floor flat in Paddington, landing on the railings below.
Many of her friends believed it was suicide.

None of Carrington’s friends agreed with the coroner’s verdict of accidental death, when, three weeks after Lytton Strachey’s death, she shot herself.
Carrington’s escape from her inhibited, prudish family had been motivated
as much by the pursuit of love as the pursuit of art.
A talented painter, love came first in her life; in a sense it was what her life was about, rewards, risks and all.
When Lytton died, Carrington wrote, ‘I write in an empty book.
I cry in an empty room.
And there can never be any comfort again.’

Mark Gertler struggled to find equilibrium after the bitter disappointment of his love affair with Carrington.
But depression and ill-health stalked him.
Dreadful, inexplicable headaches made it impossible for him to work, sometimes for days on end.
For one whose entire raison d’être was painting this was a disaster – ‘My work was my faith, my purpose.’ After the failure of an exhibition in 1939 things went rapidly downhill.
Gertler committed suicide.
He had staked everything on his art, and there was nothing left to live for.

Too many passionate, creative spirits were sent spinning off course through their own reckless appetite for experience.
Katherine Mansfield was only thirty-five, with everything still to live for, when she lost her battle with illness.
The threat of encroaching death (from undiagnosed gonorrhoea and TB) lent a passionate desperation to her longing for everything that health had to offer:

… the earth and the wonders thereof – the sea – the sun.
All that we mean when we speak of the external world.
I want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious, direct human being… I want to be all that I am capable of becoming so that I may be (and here I have stopped and waited and waited and it’s no good – there’s only one phrase will do)
child of the sun
.

For Mary Butts too, death came sooner than it should have.
After her extravagant youth, drug addiction and broken marriages she found stability for a while in a remote Cornish cottage, where she wrote, cooked, gardened and took up rug-making – ‘a nerve-soothing but creative pastime’.
When a friend asked her how she saw life after death, she replied gaily, ‘Oh, we’ll go on talking and laughing and walking together.
We’ll meet our friends and go to some heavenly pub.
And we’ll all be “copains”.’ But her fractured youth had taken its toll.
Mary’s drug use had aggravated her stomach, and she died of perforated ulcers at the age of forty-seven.

Laurens van der Post wrote of Roy Campbell: ‘Born on fire, it was as if his whole being had irrevocably accepted that he could only live by burning himself out.’ Campbell’s powerful constitution alone preserved him from self-immolation during the many years he spent wandering Europe, years beset with poverty, illness, self-doubt and bouts of heavy drinking.
Even
before his dramatic death in a car crash in Portugal at the age of fifty-six, Campbell was disintegrating.
But Mary outlived her husband by twenty-two years.
Her Catholicism gave her the strength to endure privation and old age (though even at eighty the relics of her beauty were still visible), while piously tending the flame of Roy’s memory.

Dylan Thomas’s intense appetite for life contributed to its brevity.
He was thirty-nine when he died after a bout of hard drinking in New York.
Soon after, the deification of the apostate began.
His sister-in-law, Nicolette Devas, offered her contribution to the Dylan legend:

Dylan planted seeds in people, and encouraged or not, the seeds sprouted and sent tendrils through the body and nourished the bloodstream.
With these germinating seeds the people were never quite the same again.
Though it is trite to say ‘Dylan lives after his death’ his influence persists in this way, quite apart from the influence of his written work.

Dylan’s legacy to his wife, Caitlin, was her lifelong obsession with their relationship, her writings about him, her violence and alcoholism, none of which was subdued by his death.
On several occasions she attempted suicide.
At last, in her sixties, Caitlin broke free of her dependency.
Her energies were absorbed by ‘open-air therapy’: swimming, bicycling, horseback riding, badminton, and teaching her son to dance.
Her final, cathartic memoir of Dylan,
Double Drink Story
(1998), was published four years after her death in 1994.

Another reprobate, Gaudier-Brzeska – the ‘Savage Messiah’ – achieved the status of unfulfilled genius after his death in the trenches at the age of twenty-three.
We shall never know whether, had he lived, this belligerent, maniacally talented sculptor would have gone the way of several of his contemporaries, and crossed over to join the ranks of what he called the ‘bloody bourgeois’.
It seems unlikely.

But then, who would have imagined that Jacob Epstein, the ‘Artist against the Establishment’ as his biographer dubbed him, would have accepted a knighthood in 1954?
Public acceptance came late, but not too late for the marginalised mistress, Kathleen Garman, to become Lady Epstein.
‘It was wonderful to hear her on the telephone ordering all those things from Barker’s, saying “This is Lady Epstein.” I was so happy for her,’ recalled their daughter.

It is perhaps more predictable to see Arthur Ransome becoming fat and forty, for in
Bohemia in London
he had already written, ‘Bohemia is only a stage in a man’s life, except in the case of fools and a very few others.
It is
not a profession.’ Thus at twenty-two he prophetically forestalled criticism of his own abandonment of the Bohemian cause.
Photographs of Arthur Ransome in his old age resemble nothing so much as a friendly colonel.
Bald, bespectacled, in tweeds and with a splendid white walrus moustache, he appeared every inch the old buffer.
Comfortably off, he now joined the Garrick Club and spent happy evenings playing billiards there with his cronies.
In summer he went to Lords to watch the cricket.
An honorary doctorate conferred by the University of Leeds in 1952 put the stamp on his respectability.

And yet a few indicators remained to suggest Ransome’s Bohemian youth.
His second wife was Russian.
The fiery Evgenia Shelepin had been Trotsky’s secretary; they had met when Ransome was in Russia covering the Revolution as correspondent for the
Daily News
.
His health too had been affected by the years of poverty and malnutrition.
He was not as robust as he appeared, and in his seventies Ransome found it hard to come to terms with age and decrepitude.
‘I’d always hoped to end respectably,’ he told an old friend.

Ransome’s contemporary, the painter C.
R.
W.
Nevinson, renounced Futurism in his art, reverting to more conventional types of painting.
But his touchy and pugnacious character found expression in his writings, and in his autobiography he dwelt as much on his personal enmities as on his quest for beauty in art.

Ethel Mannin didn’t resent the passing of youth, but she felt displaced in the post-War world of the 1950s with its ‘television and long-playing records’.
In old age her pleasures were correspondingly elderly – good wine, good books, and her roses.
Her robust impatience with humbug remained vigorous however.
She continued to travel, espoused Buddhism, and signed up to a variety of liberal causes.
Passion, she felt, was for the young, but ‘the unending struggle against injustice and barbarism in the world’ was perennial.

Viva Booth’s marriage to the homosexual Willie King gave the ‘Queen of Bohemia’, as Osbert Sitwell called her, a secure financial base to entertain her huge circle of artist friends.
The Kings moved to South Kensington and bought a Rolls-Royce, and Viva indulged her passion for collecting rare antiques.
But above all Viva retained throughout a long life her inexhaustible appetite for people.
She gamely took a lover half her age, and rallied round old friends like Nina Hamnett and Nancy Cunard who had fallen on hard times.
She continued to be as powerful a magnet for eccentrics, misfits and Bohemians as ever she had been in her rackety youth.

Frances Partridge was a hundred years old on 17 March 2000.
In her great old age poor eyesight made reading difficult, but her mind was still acute.
She could still remember being taken on a suffragettes’ demonstration when she was nine, carrying a banner saying Votes For Women.
She could recall Bedales, Cambridge, her dancing days in the twenties, the happy and sad times at Ham Spray.
‘I sometimes think I have survived this long for no other reason than to be a kind of archive,’ she mused.
The irony of Frances’s longevity was intensified by premature loss, for she outlived both her husband and only son.
In the last thirty years Frances achieved national treasure status not so much by virtue of her survival, but through the publication of her diaries, through which her qualities of uncompromising truthfulness and integrity shine undimmed.

Cyril Connolly became a figurehead of the literary establishment, portly and prosperous.
And yet throughout his life this ugly, irascible man retained a passionate belief in art, and above all in poetry.
To his close friends it seemed that in Connolly the precocious, neurotic adolescent was still close to the surface.
Too patrician for the garret, yet too poetic for the Home Counties, the snob and the Bohemian in Connolly were never quite reconciled.
The blood still pulsed powerfully, though the arteries hardened around it.
In his sixties, living in Eastbourne, and into his third marriage, he had a late-life affair, clinging perhaps to a dream of romantic fulfilment that the humdrum reality of family life could not satisfy.

Robert Graves would never have been content to live out his days in Eastbourne, any more than his expatriate contemporaries Gerald Brenan and Bunny Garnett – a triumvirate of Grand Old Men who, in the 1970s were to be found, still vigorous and energetic, clinging to their respective rocks and drinking the wine of Southern Europe.

Robert Graves succeeded in his ambition to live by his pen.
On his island retreat in Mallorca the author of
I
,
Claudius
(1934) and
The White Goddess
(1948) became a ‘Grand Old Man’ par excellence, still, in his seventies, Apollo among a constellation of admiring muses.
He never faltered in his belief that poets are ‘a singular and heroic breed, set apart from other men’.
His dominating personality, his energy and magnificent appearance lent him an unmistakable distinction, but for the last five years of his life the mind behind those penetrating eyes was sadly confused and bewildered.

From 1920 Gerald Brenan was a permanent exile in Spain, where he was revered.
Years of energetic scholarship ensured his position as England’s foremost Hispanist, though it is arguable whether he is not more remembered in this country for his role in Carrington’s love life than for his literary achievements.
But Brenan himself did not live in the past.
He had an insatiable appetite for life.
‘I want drama and excitement and problems to solve, come what may.’ He was seventy-nine when his wife of thirty-eight
years died; within a few weeks he had a new, twenty-four-year-old girlfriend.

Bunny Garnett’s marriage to Angelica foundered; she was twenty-five years his junior and felt the néed to resolve many unanswered questions about her childhood and upbringing that now refused to lie dormant.
Bunny lived alone in south-west France for the last decade of his life, gardening, writing, cooking, enjoying many friendships.
‘Did he still have affairs?’ one young admirer asked him.
‘Not in the plural,’ was his reply.

The Grandest Old Man of them all was Augustus John, but serenity eluded him at the end.
Alcohol finally exacted its revenge.
Michael Holroyd’s unsparing biography lays bare John’s gradual degradation as he sank into old age, incapable of letting go of life.
He was a fighter, still outdrinking everyone else into his eighties, still feeling almost a duty to pounce on pretty women, still angry, still passionate, still Bohemian to the core.
And yet in later years the establishment clasped him to its collective bosom and heaped him with honours.
Dorelia suffered his insults and reproaches with quiet endurance, and tended him to the last.
After Augustus’s death she lived on at Fryern Court, looking after her increasingly uncontrollable garden.
In 1969 she died in her sleep aged eighty-seven.

Harold Acton was a rather different kind of grandee.
No ties of family or financial necessity constrained him from continuing to live the life of an unreconstructed aesthete to the end of his days.
His beautiful Florentine home adorned with opulent antiques and fine paintings, Acton cultivated the garden of high culture for his numerous visitors (including the Queen Mother), who were delighted to find their host making no apology for living in the past:

In the constant flux of those fashions and systems which the impotent try to foist on us I have kept my independence: I have not attempted to force fresh flowers from the modish manure and twist myself into the latest trendy postures.
We must be true to our vision of this world.