Among the Bohemians (43 page)

‘My son was as innocent and pure-minded as any girl… I could have trusted him anywhere – and that’s why I gave way and allowed him to come
here,
of all places in the world – all alone.
Oh!
I should have come with him!
Fool – fool – fool that I was!’

Although it sanitised and romanticised the
vie de Bohème,
the massive popular success of
Trilby
only served to enhance the allure of Parisian life.
Beatrice Campbell cherished hopes of going there to study under Rodin, but it was not to be.
Her father was adamant that ‘going to Paris’ was the road to ruin.
Nothing would convince him otherwise, and he had the last word with: ‘If you go to Paris it will break your grandmother’s heart.’ Beatrice caved in under pressure and for the time remained in Dublin, a Bohemian outpost of its own.

But Paris remained the great Bohemian vortex, ‘the laboratory of ideas in the arts’, according to Ezra Pound, and magnetic pole to the ‘lost generation’:

Intellectually Paris was the capital of the world, and the judgement of Paris was final [wrote Harold Acton].
The Entente Cordiale in the fine arts had never been stronger.
Bloomsbury was only an extension of Montparnasse, and its prophet Clive Bell wrote in a language that was nearer French than English… English painters borrowed French eye-glasses for their landscapes, nudes and still lifes.
Our standards were increasingly Gallic…

Johns, Lambs, Anreps and Bells colonised the Left Bank.
Connolly, Acton, Christopher Wood, Robert Medley, Nancy Cunard, Mary Butts, Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Stella Bowen, Julian Trevelyan, Edith Sitwell, James Joyce, David Gascoyne and countless other British artists and writers all made the city a second home.
When Mark Gertler went to Paris for the first time in 1920 he reported that in one day he had seen Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, St John Hutchinson, Jacob Epstein, Iris Tree, Curtis Moffatt, and Nina Hamnett.
By the twenties you could hardly move for the flocks of Bohemians jostling the pavements of Montparnasse under the plane trees, clogging up the bar at Le Boeuf sur le Toit, crowding the tables at the Dome, the Select or the Rotonde.
In the post-war period those Montparnasse cafes seemed the hub of the world to the international riff-raff of poets, painters and tarts who frequented them.
They stayed open all night, and the saucers which acted as a drinks tally would still be stacking up till three or four in the morning, before somebody paid and a group would stumble off to the Jockey or the Bâteau Ivre to dance.

Paris was the fount of everything new and modern, not just in the arts but in everyday life.
Sisley Huddleston, author of
Bohemian Literary and Social Life in Paris
(1928), credited Paris -with the introduction of, among other things, underground railways, Cubism, Bolshevism, football, tennis, one-way streets, coloured photography, cinemas, cocaine, silk stockings, safety razors, beauty parlours, monkey glands, Freudianism, quick divorces, unnatural vices, wirelesses, Citroen motor-cars, and of course cocktails.
For Huddleston, the cocktail was a symbol of Parisian society, a melting-pot of classes, categories and colours, in which the old divisions had broken down, and comediennes sat next to princesses, cabaret-keepers beside diplomats, and Americans beside everyone.
Here ‘the very cabmen lived for Art’, and one could savour the lees of life in its apache bars and brothels.
The streets of Paris were literally and metaphorically crackling with electricity.
Neon and naphtha lit the streets and cafés, the Eiffel Tower blazed like a beacon across the Parisian night, while a stream of brilliant life flowed festively along illuminated boulevards.

Those images of Paris had the profound impact of first love on its visitors, with something of the melancholy attached.
Its glorious past stimulated powerful feelings of nostalgia.
Richard Aldington went there before the First World War; he responded passionately to a people he saw as ‘intelligently in love with life’, peaceful and yet vivacious.
‘Shall we ever see again the peace and the vivacity?’ he mourned.
But Stella Bowen was equally infatuated by the post-war city: ‘Alas!
There will never again be anything like the Paris of the nineteen-twenties in our life-time… from England in 1940 it looks like a remote and unbelievable Heaven.’ Stella Bowen’s love affair with France was a perfect marriage of minds.
The French way of life charmed her in all its aspects – its precise language, its realism, its generous appreciation of femininity, its food, climate and rates of exchange.
(She only took a dim view of French doctors, who neglected her lover Ford in the throes of bronchitis.) Her spirits never failed to lift the moment that beloved coast came into view from the Channel steamer.
Mary Hutchinson, lover of Clive Bell, was another smitten devotee.
Writing on board the feny as it steams into Dieppe she picks out the joyful reds and blues of the houses, windowboxes, fluttering washing, flags and reflecting windows glinting in the sunshine.
She even notices brooms painted emerald and scarlet.
Mary is captivated by France’s colourfulness and sense of
douceur de vivre:

‘So it is throughout,’ philosophises the traveller; ‘the French show you their wares, their tastes, their thoughts, and are proud to enjoy them.’ In the heart of France there is a furnace; men are warm there, they are solid and certain, they believe in
their great men as they do in their wine – and just as they understand that there are ways to cook and to arrange a shop window, they understand that there are ways to write and to paint.
‘Admirable land,’ sighs the traveller, ‘land of pleasure and sense; everywhere banners of good-humour!’

Such almost idolatrous francophilia was not uncommon.
Wearied by the constant struggle to live and work as an artist in England’s philistine environment, many regarded France as a panacea.
The poet Liam O’Flaherty escaped to France as ‘the only country where there is a profound respect for the human intellect in itself.
Therefore I choose it as a sanatorium for my sick mind.’ Vanessa Bell recognised in France that she was taken seriously as a painter ‘not only by fellow artists but by the landlady and the man in the street’.
For her it was an article of faith that the French were better than the English at cooking, dressmaking, mending cars, manufacturing paint, easels and stretchers.
The French were practical, refined and enlightened.
She only conceded that their plumbing was inferior.

Apart from Paris, the Midi was above all a magnet for artists.
Those journeys to the south of France were saturated in romance, from the moment of scrambling through the barrier at Victoria Station to catching the boat-train to Dover or Newhaven, to a weary dawn awakening with the mist lifting over the Rhone valley.
The seasickness, the endless clanking French trains, and the awful necessity of tipping importunate porters, remained imprinted on the memories of those southern fugitives.
At the Gare du Nord one had the choice of alighting, piling into a cab and seeing all the main sights in eighty minutes before rejoining the train at the Gare de Lyon, or remaining in one’s compartment while the train slowly dragged its way around the
‘ceinture’
that encircled the city.
At the Gare de Lyon rugs could be hired to tuck around the knees if one could not afford a wagon-lit.
A more expensive option was that embodiment of romance, the Blue Train, inspiration for Diaghilev’s ballet
Le Train Bleu,
in which you could ‘sleep your way from the City’s fogs to the Riviera sunshine’.
One boarded this marvellous conveyance at Victoria Station.
At Dover the entire train was uncoupled and loaded on to the ferry; passengers remained in the carriages for the Channel crossing.
At Calais the train was reassembled before heading south.
But all the weariness of the journey evaporated as dawn broke over a sun-loved land, studded with cypresses and olive trees, a land of ‘horizons unbounded by all the little dreams men set their hearts upon’.

When Stella Bowen and Ford Madox Ford first went to live in Ville-franche they were overwhelmed by the radiant landscape that met their eyes; but above all it was the sunny perfection of the climate that filled them
with gratitude.
Stella was elated to find no mud, no rain, no fog.
It was dry.

Climate is one of the few things in life that really matter.
Other things, friends, fame, or fortune, may elude or disappoint you, but a good climate never lets you down.

The critic Paul Fussell argues convincingly that the twentieth century embraced sun-worship – ‘the new heliophily’ – with obsessive fervour; parasols, veils and solar topees being thrown aside in favour of suntan oil, art deco sun motifs, and vitamin D.
Under unambiguously blue skies it was felt that honesty and sincerity in human relations could flourish.
At the same time the leitmotifs of the Mediterranean holiday began to gain common currency – cheap wine in colourful cafés, garlicky meals, painted fishing boats, boules, siestas, melodious guitars played by brown-skinned natives.
As Fussell says, this has become ‘our version of the pastoral’.
Gaudy melon-flowers have replaced buttercups, Matisse has superseded Constable.

Irresistibly lured by this southern Utopia, flocks of Bohemians alighted like seabirds all along the Côte d’Azur, colonising the sunny resorts of Villefranche, Nice, Antibes, Juan-les-Pins, Cannes, St Tropez, Le Lavandou, Toulon, Sanary-sur-Mer, Bandol, Cassis, Marseilles, Martigues.
They boozed in the port cafés, painted and partied, fell in and out of love, and bed, ran out of money and ran up debts, while from every gramophone poured the treacly notes of ‘My Blue Heaven’.

There was the camp scene at Toulon, a real sailors’ port, where an English crowd of Bohemian balletomanes congregated around Cocteau – Frederick Ashton, Sophie Fedorovitch, Edward Burra, Constant Lambert.
Sybille Bedford spent her teenage years at Sanary, which was presided over by the Huxleys, though largely inhabited by a German Bohemian contingent.
Cannes was a kind of expatriate Chelsea, though fast being infiltrated by Mayfair.
For Augustus John and Roy Campbell the magnet was Martigues, near Saintes Maries de la Mer, site of a bullring where the locals played the
‘jeu de cocarde’,
and a sacred place of pilgrimage for gypsies.
Cassis was Bloomsbury-sur-Mer; the Bells leased their house there from a retired colonel who had abandoned his wife and set up house with his mistress – he had no qualms about unconventional society.
All the artists came to the Colonel’s
vcndange
lunches, where they were regaled with lavish amounts of food, wine and home-made brandy.
Down by the port in the Cafe Liautaud one might bump into Clive Bell or Julian Trevelyan or the Greek artist Janko Varda.
Later one could dance to the accordions of a fishermen’s orchestra.

But by 1938 Cassis had become so popular that Mark Gertler felt he had entered a lunatic asylum full of exactly the kind of poseurs he had been so eager to avoid in London.
Kathleen Hale’s friend Yvonne Kapp depicted the Cassis scene in her novel
Mediterranean Blues
(1933), a gently withering satire on the
canaille
who wasted their youth soaking up sun and wine by the Provençal beaches:

Whatever the reason, there is no doubt that people who go to the South of France frequently adopt fancy-dress (in no way related to the local native costume), leave their wives or husbands, exchange or barter their mistresses and lovers, take up dancing, drinking, dope-peddling, card-sharping, sponging, cadging, procuring, pimping, embark upon marriage or creative fiction, alter the tone of their hair and skin, or even, it can happen, learn the French language.

*

Roger Fry justified the continuing exodus: ‘It’s almost impossible for an artist to live in England: one feels so isolated.’ For Fry, for Vanessa Bell, for Christopher Wood, for large numbers too of writers – D.
H.
Lawrence, Norman Douglas, James Joyce, the Sitwells, Roy Campbell, the Durrell brothers, Robert Graves, W.
H.
Auden and Christopher Isherwood – regular displacement was one of the essential conditions of their art:

What I call poetry is not understood in England [wrote the poet David Gascoyne], but I believe it to be something of far greater value than what is at present understood there…– I belong to Europe before I belong to England.
The values I believe in are European values and not English ones.

Even for those who did not set up house in Paris or the South of France, by the twenties going abroad was ‘the Bohemian thing to do’.
Across Europe there were writers and artists peddling their wares, sleeping rough, singing for their supper in gypsy encampments.
These were the early backpackers.
If the hippy trail of the 1920s didn’t quite extend to Kathmandu, there were proto-Kerouacs putting up at
posadas
in southern Spain, hiking in the Alps, tracing the course of the Danube through Hungary and Rumania, penetrating the haunts of Sardinian brigands, all on very little money; playing their fiddles in return for food and lodging, drawing inspiration for their art from the simplicities of their nomadic existence and the adventures experienced along the way.
And not far behind the pioneers came their followers, nosing out the hotel in Villefranche where Cocteau had once
stayed, writing postcards while sipping a
demi-bière
on the
terrasse
of the Rotonde where Modigliani once sat, buying sprays of almond blossom in memory of Keats from the flower vendor in the Piazza di Spagna.
There was a muleteers’ tavern near Palma where ‘everyone’ went, and of course the Bar Rostand at Cassis was like the Café Royal on a busy night.

Painters and writers have no ties and are free to live and work wherever they choose – so why choose to live in a land where the pubs closed early?
After the compulsory confinement of the war years, there were so many compelling reasons to get out of England.
Life on the Continent was much cheaper, and did not demand the expensive social apparatus in the way of staff, clothes and entertainments that society saw as essential marks of status.
In the twenties an English pound went three times as far in France as it did in England.
In 1926 bed and breakfast in Paris came to two shillings and sixpence; a meal with wine cost ninepence.
Debt, too, was all relative in a sunny climate, or so it seemed.