Among the Bohemians (35 page)

She had never been outside all day.
The dinner was just perfect; all was cooked to a turn, and the Smiths spent the happiest evening possible, taking two and even three helpings of every dish.
Then Mr Smith sat in the dining-room easy-chair by the fire, while the young wife gracefully flitted about, folded the linen, put it in the press, refilled the salt-cellars and the sugar-basins.
Finally she brought in a handsome large china bowl with boiling water, and at a side table she washed the dinner ware, drying it with a soft white cloth.
It formed quite a picture…

Mrs Frazer’s first aid would have been a great help to Beatrice Campbell and Katherine Mansfield.
The Campbells spent a chilly weekend at a damp cottage that Katherine and Middleton Murry were renting near Chesham.
Their contribution to the catering was a rather dubious leg of mutton, and it was this that was their downfall.
Beatrice managed to cook the leg for dinner in the primitive cottage kitchen and, though not very nice, it was edible.
The meal over, these two middle-class women, brought up to expect kitchen operations to be invisibly dealt with by armies of competent domestics, struggled with its aftermath:

The grease from the leg of mutton… completely defeated us in the washing-up operations.
We had very little hot water and no washing-powder, and the grease was in thick layers over everything.
Even the outlet to the sink was blocked with it, and it was quite impossible to get it off the knives and forks.
I tried to make a joke of our predicament but Katherine was beyond jokes; she started to weep ceaselessly and hopelessly…

Katherine Mansfield’s life story presents greater tragedies than sinks blocked with mutton fat, but as Beatrice Campbell instinctively realised, the distress that this episode prompted went somehow deeper than the occasion itself merited.
‘I want lights, music, people!’ she cried out, and Beatrice remembered this
cri de coeur
as being the more desperate in being uttered with her wrists submerged in blobs of congealed grease.

*

There comes a time when one can’t stand the relentless round of shopping and preparing and clearing and washing-up any more.
One wants to head for the bright lights, and sit back in their sociable glow knowing that somebody else has done all the hard work.
At such a time, Taglioni’s, Quaglino’s and Boulestin’s were the gourmets’ choice.
After the austerity of the war years, their pampering atmosphere was irresistible.

Harold Acton became an obsessive diner-out, addicted to the sociable spectator sport of restaurant hopping: ‘Once one acquires that habit it is like a drug.’ He and his contemporaries were unanimous that for seeing, being seen, eavesdropping, arguing, flirting, meeting friends, doing deals, gossiping, wasting time or even eating and drinking, nowhere in London before or since has ever equalled the Café Royal.
It was a home from home for cultured, Bohemian and literary London; in a sense it
was
Bohemia.
At the Café you could get a four-course meal or just a snack at any time of day or night, a dozen of champagne or a cup of coffee, a quick steak after the theatre or a plate of chips for sixpence.
If Augustus John were there (and he usually was) he could be relied upon to foot the bill.

If he wasn’t he could probably be found at that other favourite Bohemian canteen, the Eiffel Tower.
Much has been written about this famous Percy Street establishment.
Nancy Cunard composed an ode in its praise, Michael Arlen thinly disguised it as the Mont Agel in his novel
Piracy
(1922), and in Seymour Leslie’s
The Silent Queen
(1927) it appears as The Big Wheel.
Hardly a memoir of the period appeared without some nostalgic reference to the great days of its proprietor, the Austrian Rudolf Stulik.
But it was not cheap.
This was the headquarters
of haut
Bohemia, a place to go when one
was in funds, or when somebody else was paying.
It was not somewhere for a struggling Bohemian artist like Robert Medley, who in the early thirties decided he really must return the frequent hospitality of his rich patron Sir Edward Marsh by taking him out to dine at the Eiffel Tower.
In preparation he went to the bank and withdrew ten pounds, trusting that this would amply cover the bill.
The evening was nearly a disaster, for as Medley watched Sir Eddie gaily working his way through all the most expensive dishes on the menu – soup, sole meunière, roast pheasant, dessert and coffee, all washed down with Chablis and an excellent claret – he found he could concentrate on nothing but the prospect of being unable to pay.
The tension was so oppressive that conversation became impossible.
He stammered, looked vacant and repeated himself.
Finally…‘sweating, I accepted the bill with trembling hand, and exhaled audibly with relief that the ultimate shame had been narrowly avoided’.

In Seymour Leslie’s novel
The Silent Queen,
illustrated by Nina Hamnett,
the Eiffel Tower is thinly disguised as ‘The Big Wheel’.

Luckily restaurants didn’t have to cost a fortune.
At the turn of the century dining out was on the increase, and food in a Soho bistro was astonishingly cheap.
But there was more to eating in such places than mere economy; foreign food in these Bohemian surroundings represented something excitingly risqué and ambiguous.
A Soho restaurant sent a sexy frisson down the
spine.
Parmesan and Chianti seemed saturated with sexual innuendo, hors d’oeuvres, steak and
vin de table
were permeated with Gallic romance.
Cheap as they were, these were the surroundings for seduction; the pink-shaded lamps on their tables invited intimacies.
H.G.
Wells and Somerset Maugham led their heroes and heroines astray in these gastronomic byways of Soho, to risk their reputations over rush-covered flasks of red or a glass of Asti: ‘every bit as good as champagne’.
A crème de menthe might go down well afterwards.

Such Bohemian haunts were tarnished with the dubious notoriety of their clientèle.
As the journalist Robert Machray (author of
The Night Side of London,
1902) commented, ‘Here you may certainly study types of men and women you will hardly behold outside of this district.’ But for him, the prices on the menu were more to the point.
Places like the Boulogne, where a meal cost 2s, or Guermani’s – only 1s 6d – were ‘amazing value’.
Dinner at the Florence cost 3s, at the Italie 2s 6d.
And they were good; though, as Machray reported, ‘you may suspect that some of the dishes on the menu are fearfully and wonderfully made… As for the wines, you can have what you are willing to pay for.’ The Lyonnais was cheapest of all, offering
‘soupe, 1 viande, 2 légumes, dessert, café, pain à discretion’
for 8d.
A cheap supper of frankfurters could be had at the German Schmidt’s; but Kathleen Hale’s favourite was always Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street, where a huge bowl of thick bean and pasta soup cost 6d.
‘I loved that place,’ she remembered:

Seeing and being seen in Bohemia (
Punch,
3 October 1934).

In those days it was just a long thin room with a hatch at one end, and the woman shouted the orders down the length of the room ‘DUE MINESTRA!’, and it resounded through the building.
There were marble-topped tables, and a Negro or two sitting quietly eating…

Yet even at these low prices a restaurant meal might well be a rare extravagance.
Arthur Ransome was painfully poor.
‘I lived once for over a week on a diet of cheese and apples – cheap yellow cheese and apples at twopence or a penny halfpenny a pound,’ he relates.
At the end of that week his fiiend, also reduced to the same diet by poverty, received an unexpected cheque for ‘TWENTY-FIVE POUNDS!’ Unshaven and irregularly dressed, the pair dashed to cash it before the banks closed, then headed for their favourite Soho restaurant ‘with an aim in life… to dine better that night than ever in [our] lives before’.
There they ordered the best from the bill of fare, ate sumptuously, drank copiously, and finished up with coffee spiked with rum.

[We] went out into the narrow Soho street.
Just opposite… was another of our favourite feeding places.
The light was merry through the windows, the evening was young, and – without speaking a word, we looked at each other, and looked at each other again, and then, still without speaking, walked across the street, went in at the inviting door, and had dinner over again – an excellent dinner, good wine, and rum in coffee as before.
Remember the week’s diet of apples and cheese before you condemn us…

*

Ransome was always either starving or bingeing.
Bohemian daily life was a switchback lurching from famine to feast and back again.
The unpredictability of the artist’s income made it hard to budget for a balanced diet.
In the world of the Bohemian garret one is far more likely to come across rare days of delicious over-indulgence, followed by brief periods when there is nothing at all to eat, and whole weeks when the occupant survives on a scratch diet of bread and apples, cheese, sardines and the occasional sausage, baked or mashed potatoes, mutton bones, toast, kippers, eggs and cheap meat pies.

In 1916 Nina Hamnett and her gloomy Norwegian husband, Edgar dc Bergen, were living in Camden Town and struggling to make a living by their art.
Their neighbour in the next-door attic was the Mexican painter Benjamin Corea:

He was even poorer than we were.
I would buy two pennyworth of bones twice a week and make a stew, and on this and porridge and margarine, we all three lived.
One day someone bought a drawing so I bought some real butter.
Edgar and I had a dispute about people with Victorian ideas, which I said he had, and he threw the plate and the butter at me.
I was so upset about the butter that I forgot to throw anything back.
I looked despairingly round and saw it sticking to the wall.
It was still, fortunately, quite eatable.

Best butter cost 1od a pound.
After weeks of surviving on subsistence rations, it must have been galling indeed to see such a hard-earned luxury being used as an aggressive missile to prove a point – a perfect case of convictions taking precedence over bodily needs.

These artists were physically undernourished because of a choice they had made.
Of course if you reject four meals a day in the cause of art you have only yourself to blame.
For many of the poverty-stricken masses, there was no alternative to hunger.
The great sociological surveys undertaken by Booth and Rowntree at the turn of the century demonstrated that under the glittering surface of Victorian and Edwardian England lay a vast, unsuspected substratum of degradation and want.
They testified to deaths from starvation, to alarming levels of malnutrition.
Would anyone in their right mind choose such an existence?
If what you wanted was a fall belly, you did not stake your all on painting and poetry unless you were prepared to go very hungry indeed.
It is perhaps all the more surprising, and in truth impressive, how many aspiring artists there were who were ready to make such a sacrifice – in some cases risking serious illness and even death for their ideals.

Jean Rhys, living in Paris in the twenties, wrote a cheerless and barely fictionalised short story entitled, simply, ‘Hunger’:

For the first twelve hours one is just astonished.
No money:

Nothing to eat….
Nothing!… But that’s farcical…

On the second day you have a bad headache…

On the third day one feels sick: on the fourth one starts crying very easily… A bad habit that; it sticks.

On the fifth day…

You awaken with a feeling of detachment; you are calm and godlike.
It is to attain to that state that religious people fast…

I have never gone without food for longer than five days, so I cannot amuse you any longer.

(from
The Left Bank and Other Stories, 1927
)

Kathleen Hale, who did not die until she was a hundred and two years old, looked back at her long life with the air of one perplexed at having survived: ‘I ought to have died long ago from malnutrition.’ Her escape from her middle-class background to become an artist in London in the early years of the century landed her almost immediately in serious financial hardship.
She often went without food – though ‘never actually for more than two days and nights’ she admitted.
At such times the delicious provisions for sale in the local continental shops tantalised her and she forced herself to stay indoors rather than pass a patisserie or coffee shop.
After two days of starvation she scraped enough money to treat herself to a bounteous breakfast at a Lyons café in the Tottenham Court Road, but the tray of porridge, cream, poached eggs, coffee, and toast and marmalade that was placed in front of her was so unwontedly rich that her stomach revolted and she fled from the premises.
Kathleen’s ‘normal’ diet was a nutritionist’s nightmare, consisting of boiled eggs, cheese and bread, while every so often a friend would treat her to dinner at Simpson’s or the Café Royal.
This erratic eating caused a duodenal ulcer that was to plague her for the next thirty years.