Among the Bohemians (40 page)

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Caught between art and drudgery, Bohemia doubtfully, at times resentfully, and often incompetently confronted the ever-encroaching chaos.
As ever in those proto-feminist days, when it came to tackling the domestic enemy, women were on the front line.
It is true that some women were starting to question the assumption that their sole
raison d’ être
was to keep house for their menfolk.
In 1928 a public debate was held on the subject ‘Should the home be abolished?’ Mrs Cecil Chesterton was in favour of every girl’s right to that cherished possession, a home and family.
But Dora Russell argued fiercely that ‘shutting women up in brick boxes… will result in a surplus of empty-headed women who would become the curse of civilization’.
The
audience voted in favour of abolition, and the few men amongst them left complaining that they felt humiliated.

Nevertheless a reading of the correspondence of women artists of this period shows how completely the majority of women still accepted that domestic labour was their lot in life.
For such artists this burden was doubly damaging.
They suffered both from men’s selfish assumption that housework was women’s work, and from the intense frustration of being unable to work in their chosen field.

That Dora Carrington was able both to paint and to keep house for Lytton Strachey must in some part be attributed to her childlessness, for it fell entirely to her – with one living-in servant – to run their home, first the Mill House at Tidmarsh and subsequently Ham Spray near Hungerford.
Some have surmised that Carrington’s willing absorption in housekeeping was a tactic to avoid commitment to her art.
Gerald Brenan was less kind -he dismissed her as shallow:

Did you ever see a woman more absorbed in physical objects?
If one looks for her interests, her affections, her desires, one will find them not lying coiled up in her head but stuck on to the garden, the meals, the furniture, the hot-water bottle…

Brenan was, like so many of her admirers, consumed by the kind of jealousy which makes of its object a scapegoat.
For me, her correspondence betrays a refreshing focus on the detail of an artist’s daily life – that platform from which all creativity must be launched.

Carrington was a part-time Bohemian.
In London she was to be seen at the Café Royal wearing gypsy clothes and flirting with Augustus John.
In her personal life she upturned the conventions.
But away from Fitzrovia and the Cave of Harmony club, in Wiltshire where her heart lay, another side of Carrington emerges.
Devotion to Lytton extended to the care she took over the small particulars of their everyday existence.
She appreciated it when the chair covers were clean, she liked to fill her storeroom with bottled gooseberries and pickled pears.
Carrington was a surprisingly committed housewife – if that is an appropriate word to describe a woman keeping house for a homosexual man who was not her husband.
She tried to ensure that Ham Spray was clean and warm, she supervised Mrs Legg the cook, dug vegetables and made beds for their frequent visitors.
Occasionally, she complained:

Clive Bell and Mrs Hutchinson came here last weekend.
They aren’t my style.
Too elegant and 18 cent.
French; for that’s what they try and be… I had to make their
beds, and empty chamber pots because our poor cook Mrs Legg can’t do everything and that made me hate them, because in order they should talk so elegantly, I couldn’t for a whole weekend do any painting and yet they scorned my useful grimy hands.

Lytton’s attenuated white fingers were rarely expected to come into contact with anything more grimy than a volume of Voltaire, though his condescension in helping her when the servant was indisposed was noted with gratitude by the faithful Carrington:

What a horrid scene to see before one when one starts a letter to an orderly young gentleman
of taste
in Nottingham [she wrote to Lytton’s young Cambridge friend Sebastian Sprott].
Breakfast, lunch and tea mingled with fragments of Vita Wheat.
Jam on the plates, whiskey jostling with ink pots.
You see to what a pass I am reduced and my chamber pot is still unemptied and the beds NOT made, or is it merely an excuse for drawing a still-life après le grand matîre Monsieur Fry?
Who can tell, who indeed?
Olive is away in bed with lumbago, so Lytton and I have to cook for ourselves.
(Lytton is a first-class bed-maker.)

Carrington illustrates her letter to Sebastian Sprott with ‘a still-life après le
grand matîre Monsieur Fry’.

With the objectivity of the true artist, Carrington notices things.
She can create a still life from a messy table, just as she can make one feel her dismal rage at the unreliability of anthracite stoves.
One admires her stoicism at having to carry pails up to the attic to catch the drips that ooze through the library ceiling after a winter gale has blown the roof tiles off.
One sympathises with her frustration at the perversity of inanimate objects – ‘motorcars refuse to start, scissors disappear and gloves walk off and hide themselves’.
How close to the real texture of everyday nuisances and vexations these accounts
bring one.
But Carrington is not downtrodden.
Here is a life one can identify with.
Her letters, adorned as many of them are with charming illustrations, testify to a wealth of absorbing interests – literature, painting, love affairs, friendships, parties.
Carrington had her own interests, and she had Mrs Legg.
She felt supported in her enterprise.

It is harder to envy Stella Bowen, a painter in her own right, living with the novelist Ford Madox Ford.
While he wrote, she ran the house:

My painting had of course, been hopelessly interfered with by the whole shape of my life, for I was learning the technique of quite a different role; that of consort to another and more important artist.
So that although Ford was always urging me to paint, I simply had not got any creative vitality to spare after I had played my part towards him and Julie [their daughter], and struggled through the day’s chores…

Pursuing an art is not just a matter of finding the time – it is a matter of having a free spirit to bring to it.

Stella claimed that she was happy and grateful at the time to be housemaid and moll to the great man, but she recognised that this was at the expense of her own creativity.
She saw painting as incompatible with cooking meals and doing chores.
Certainly, there was not room for two obsessive artists in that small Sussex cottage.

The biographies and memoirs of the twentieth century are littered with the casualties of artistic male egos.
What kind of contortionists were women expected to be?
Placed on the customary pedestal, woman was also required to reach down and polish her worshipper’s boots.
It should not be forgotten how many artists have been supported by unpaid housekeepers – scullions, cooks, laundry maids, and muses all rolled into one.

There was Ida John mopping up after a squad of children, and Dorelia who gradually sacrificed her own talent to the demands of Augustus’s rambling household.
There was Edna Clarke Hall giving up art for motherhood and housekeeping, and Caitlin Thomas borne along in the wake of Dylan’s drunken disorderliness, gasping to keep her head above water, cook, wash and bring up the children.
Nancy Nicholson had to compete with Robert Graves for time at her easel, while he increasingly objected that her housework intruded on the space he needed to write.
Hilda Carline’s desire to paint was squashed out of her by the demands of keeping house for Stanley Spencer, and poor oppressed Christabel Dennison’s hands got sore with washing-up after her ungrateful lover.
And not all of them were as patient with their lot as Stella Bowen.
Katherine Mansfield was appalled to find herself a skivvy to John Middleton Murry.
It didn’t fit with her idea of
herself at all and, desperate with frustration and desire to get on with her writing, she berated him for his selfishness:

I hate hate
hate
doing these things that you accept just as all men accept of their women… I walk about with a mind full of ghosts of saucepans and primus stoves and ‘Will there be enough to go round?’… and you calling (whatever I am doing)
‘Tig,
isn’t there going to be tea?
It’s five o’clock’ as though I were a dilatory housemaid.

I loathe myself, today.
I detest this woman who ‘superintends’ you and rushes about, slamming doors and slopping water – all untidy with her blouse out and her nails grimed.
I am disgusted and repelled by the creature that shouts at you, ‘You might at least empty the pail and wash out the tea-leaves!’ Yes, no wonder you ‘come over silent’.

… All the fault of money, I suppose.

Chained to the sink by tyrannical, unthinking men, one can but wonder that any works of art were produced by women at all.

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One may search in vain for accounts of British male artists rubbing, scrubbing or ironing.
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For them, the laundry was a no-go area.

Few of the gifted men of that era emerge as having any awareness of how their shirts and handkerchiefs got washed and ironed at all.
Dylan Thomas scorned to bother with washing clothes.
If he needed a clean shirt, he took one from a friend.
Constantine Fitzgibbon found it difficult to imagine the poet taking his things to a laundry, and ‘impossible to envisage his retrieving them or even remembering where the laundry was… all that sort of thing was left to women’.

If emancipation meant being let off wash-day, it would surely get most women’s vote.
But sending the laundry out could be prohibitive.
In 1911 the Epsteins’ quarterly laundry bill came to £2 3s 2d, and when such costs threatened to dominate the Johns’ erratic budget Ida decided to take charge of the washing herself.
In her pregnant state she found a certain maternal
satisfaction in the results of a laborious washday: ‘It is such a proud moment when one puts on one’s self washed drawers and nightdresses.
And the muslin curtains are a picture.’

But for very hard-up artists the possibilities of keeping one’s clothes clean and smooth in the approved manner were undoubtedly limited; cheap studios rarely had hot water.
The model Betty May remembered having only one dress, which she would wash herself and then put on wet, having nothing else to wear.
Kathleen Hale proudly recalled her expedient for laundering her own handkerchiefs, which, once washed, she would spread out on her small looking-glass, where they would dry beautifully flat ‘as if freshly ironed’.
Iris Tree had a bath in her dress which she soaped and rubbed and then hung up to dry while she rinsed herself.

But far more Bohemians went about soiled and grubby, just because it was easier.
A lot of art is messy; it stains and it smells of turpentine.
Also, artists felt that their lives should be conducted on a higher plane than that of the kitchen sink.
The glimpses that we get of artists striving to keep abreast of the housework are few and far between, for housework is trivial and degrading, and relegated where possible to servants.
Kitty Garman never saw her mother, Kathleen, do a stroke of housework.
A down-at-heel charwoman was all she could afford, and if Mrs Mop didn’t do the work, nobody did.
‘I never saw my mother in an apron.
She didn’t even know what oven gloves were for.’ Kitty herself was indignant when her husband, the artist Lucian Freud, expected her to sweep the studio floor: ‘I felt made for better things.’ Rendered semi-helpless by their upbringing, none of the Bohemian women who attempted the job themselves matched up to ‘l’Allegra’, even had they wanted to – which Caitlin Thomas didn’t:

I knew how to do nothing in the house, none of the domestic things that most normal women learn as they are growing up.
1 thought that proved that I must be different, set apart, meant for ‘better things’ than being the abandoned housewife of a famous poet.
Even when I was not abandoned, the very term ‘housewife’, as applied to me, made me squirm with disgust.

Kitty and Caitlin were raised as Bohemians; they had a relaxed attitude to squalor.
But women who had been brought up with upper-class standards of cleanliness, utterly reliant on servants, often got a nasty shock when they emerged into the outside world entirely unable to look after themselves.
Nancy Mitford won a hard-fought battle to go and be a Bohemian writer in a bedsit, but to her sister Jessica’s disgust returned home ignominiously after only a month:

‘How
could
you!
If I ever got away to a bed-sitter I’d never come back.’

‘Oh, darling, but you should have seen it.
After about a week, it was knee-deep in underclothes.
I literally had to wade through them.
No one to put them away.’

Others of necessity submitted to doing the chores with a good grace.
We even get glimpses of ‘l’Allegra’ in Ida John, who at one stage goes ‘mad on polishing furniture’.
We see Dorothy Brett helping Mark Gertler sort out his belongings; she devotedly dusts all his books ‘and did many things which I shouldn’t have thought of myself.
Kathleen Hale in the new-found independence of her ‘beautiful, shabby’ Fitzroy Square room, is consumed with pride at the purchase of her first slop pail – ‘I’d wake up in the morning and see it there and think “It’s mine!’ ”.
Betty May spent a brief period playing house with one of her many husbands, rearranging the furniture and whitewashing the walls, but before long it was back to Bohemia: ‘the pleasures of housekeeping grew stale as fast as the other pleasures of this provoking world’.
Poor Christabel Dennison remains as ever submerged in ghastly domestic tasks.
She lives in a kind of nether region, a sub-Bohemia colonised by dripping laundry, unwashed saucepans and incontinent cats.
But just occasionally ‘l’Allegra surfaces reluctantly even from these cheerless depths: