Among the Bohemians (57 page)

Anrep, Helen (1885–1965)
After an unhappy affair with Henry Lamb, Helen married Boris Anrep in 1917; they had two children, but she left Boris in 1926 and found happiness with the art critic Roger Fry, through whom she became close friends with much of Bloomsbury.
Warm-hearted and argumentative, she fitted the stereotype of the Bohemian with her romantic clothes and easy-going generosity.

Anrep, Igor (b. 1915)
Younger child of Boris and Helen Anrep, Igor saw himself as an outsider from ‘red-brick conventional people’.
Brought up with his sister
Anastasia in Bloomsbury and among the John children at Alderney Manor, Igor was tutored by Isabel Fry, Gerald Brenan and Marjorie Strachey.
As an adult he studied psychoanalysis and became a doctor.

Ashton, Frederick (1904–1988)
Renowned British choreographer, Ashton’s homosexuality was accepted in the group described by Cecil Beaton as ‘the illuminati’, of which he was a central figure.
A regular at the Great Ormond Street gatherings of painters Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, his friendship with the ballerina Lydia Lopokova brought him into contact with Bloomsbury.

Bagnold, Enid (1889–1981)
‘Tomboyish, dramatic, outdoor, beautiful,’ Enid Bagnold was born into a military family, but in her youth Bohemia was her world.
She studied art under Sickert; Gaudier-Brzeska sculpted her; Frank Harris seduced her.
She was herself a successful playwright and author, best known for
National Velvet
(1935).
Her wide social circle comprised writers, designers and actors.

Bax, Clifford (1886–1962)
Brother of the composer Arnold Bax, Clifford studied art at the Slade and Heatherley’s Art School.
His close circle included Godwin Baynes and Edward Thomas.
After travelling and living abroad Bax abandoned painting and became a prolific man of letters.
The Bax brothers hosted cricket weekends at their country home, described in Clifford’s memoir
Inland Far
(1925)-

Baynes, Godwin (1882–1943)
A vital central focus of the ‘Neo-pagans’, Baynes was a Cambridge rowing blue and a singer, proportioned like ‘a hero of antiquity’.
Before their marriage, he and Rosalind Thornycroft went on romantic holidays together; they set up a Bohemian household near Baynes’s doctor’s practice in London’s East End.
The marriage ended in divorce after both had been unfaithful.

Beaton, Cecil (1904–1980)
Photographer and designer, Beaton was an habitué of ‘haut Bohemia’, from which many of his clients were to come.
He was as familiar with the Sitwells and Cunards as he was with the Johns and Lady Diana Cooper.
Though Beaton may have seemed snobbish, he admired purity above pretension, and the individual over the fashionable.

Bedford, Sybille (b. 1911)
Daughter of an aristocratic German father and an English mother and brought up in cosmopolitan Europe, Sybille Bedford lived between Provence and the Bohemian fringes of literary London.
She became a central figure in the Aldous Huxley circle at Sanary, described vividly in her autobiographical novel
Jigsaw
(1989), and in her biography of Huxley.

Bell, Clive (1881–1964)
Born into a rich philistine family, Bell became a key figure in Bloomsbury, genial and worldly.
As a critic, he was in the avant-garde of aesthetic theory.
After the birth of their two sons his marriage to Vanessa Bell evolved into friendship, and he had several affairs, the most enduring being with Mary Hutchinson.

Bell, Julian(1908–1937)
Elder son of Clive and Vanessa Bell, Julian was brought up with his younger brother in the relaxed atmosphere of Gordon Square and Charleston, while benefiting from an exceptionally close relationship with his mother Vanessa.
A highly politically engaged poet and teacher, Julian was killed driving an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War.

Bell, Quentin (1910–1996)
The younger of Vanessa and Clive Bell’s two sons, Quentin grew up in a world where Post-Impressionism, pacifism and agnosticism were the norms: ‘From an early age I knew that we were odd’.
With a certain inevitability he grew up to become a writer, artist and academic, chronicler of Bloomsbury, and the acclaimed biographer of his aunt Virginia Woolf.

Bell, Vanessa (1879–1961)
Virginia Woolf maintained that the basis of her sister Vanessa’s life was ‘an easy Bohemianism’.
A painter, she held a lifelong contempt for conventionality; her son Quentin described his parents’ marriage as ‘elastic’.
Vanessa had a liberating affair with Roger Fry, but the partnership that she formed with Duncan Grant lasted the rest of her life.

Bowen, Stella (1893-1947)
The painter Stella Bowen left her native Australia in 1914 and lived for ten years in England and France with the writer Ford Madox Ford, with whom she helped set up the
Transatlantic Review
in 1924.
Their relationship is described in her memoir
Drawn from Life
(1941).
After bringing up their daughter Stella continued to paint, write and exhibit.

Brenan, Gerald (1894-1987)
Through his youthful friendship with John Hope-Johnstone Brenan became close friends with Augustus John’s family.
His relationship with Carrington also brought him into contact with Bloomsbury.
Brenan emigrated to Spain in 1919, where he became an admired Hispanist; his memoirs portray many Bohemian characters of his time.
V.
S.
Pritchett described Brenan as ‘one of the best talkers and letter-writers in England’.

Brett, the Hon. Dorothy (1883-1977)
The painter Brett (known, like Carrington, by her surname) rejected her upper-class background to become a ‘Slade crophead’.
She often helped her poorer friends financially; these included Mark Gertler, Carrington, D.
H.
Lawrence, J.
M.
Murry, and Katherine Mansfield.
After Mansfield’s death she had an affair with Murry.
Brett, who was deaf all her life, lived in Taos, New Mexico from 1924.

Brodsky, Horace (1885-1969)
Australian, the writer and critic Horace Brodsky grew up in the USA.
In 1908 he came to London where he became involved with Vorticism.
He later wrote an intimate biography of his close friend Gaudier-Brzeska.
Brodsky returned to New York in 1915 to edit
Rainbow
, a magazine of art and poetry, but finally settled in England in 1923.

Brooke, Rupert (1887-1915)
‘The handsomest young man in England’ achieved almost mythic status after his untimely death, but during his lifetime Brooke was subject to recurrent depressions and a deep confusion about his own
sexuality.
The poet was the nucleus of the ‘Neo-pagans’ – a group of friends including the Olivier sisters, the Darwins, David Garnett, James Strachey and Geoffrey Keynes.

Butts, Mary (1890–937)
Admired by many for her flamboyance and magnetism, the writer Mary Butts lived a round of ‘haut Bohemian’ parties and lovers, both in Paris and London, experimenting with hair dye, modernist poetry and, unhappily, opium.
Her friends included Aleister Crowley, Douglas Goldring and Jean Cocteau.
She eventually moved to Cornwall and lived quietly, gardening and cooking for friends.

Calder-Marshall, Arthur (1909–1992)
Calder-Marshall, a humorous, sceptical Christian, grew up in Sussex and came into early contact with Victor Neuburg, the influential poet who published Dylan Thomas; he also crossed paths with the ‘Beast’, Aleister Crowley.
After Oxford Calder-Marshall taught, then became a professional writer known for his essays, novels, biographies and social commentaries.

Campbell, Mary (1899-1979)
Eldest of the seven beautiful and rebellious Garman girls, Mary married Roy Campbell in 1921; following a turbulent lesbian affair with Vita Sackville-West, Mary opted for her husband and two daughters, with whom she moved to France and, later, Spain and Portugal.
Her profound Catholicism gave Mary strength in the subsequent years of their stormy marriage and Roy’s untimely death.

Campbell, Roy (1901–1957)
When not in his native South Africa, France or Spain, Roy Campbell was one of Augustus John’s favourite drinking companions.
Active in the creation of his own legend – that of a pugilistic, womanising, poet-pirate, who drank deep of life, and alcohol – he later offended many by his pro-Fascist politics.
He was killed while driving in Portugal.

Cannan, Gilbert (1884-1955)
Cannan’s novel
Mendel
(1916) is a thinly disguised portrait of his friend Mark Gertler, drawing upon the Bohemian milieu of the Slade School of Art, and Gertler’s love affair with Carrington.
Cannan himself was notoriously cited as co-respondent in J.
M.
Barrie’s divorce; he later married Barrie’s wife Mary.
He suffered from schizophrenia and ended his life in a lunatic asylum.

Carline, Hilda (1889-1950)
The Hampstead home of the painter Hilda Carline and her two painter brothers, Richard and Sydney, was a rendezvous for artists including Gertler, the Nash brothers, Anrep, Medley, Kathleen Hale and Dorothy Brett.
Hilda’s talent, obscured by the genius of her husband Stanley Spencer, was largely sublimated into gardening.
The couple divorced in 1937.

Carrington, Dora (1893-1932)
Prominent at the Slade School by her bobbed hair, naive air and asexual sobriquet, the painter Carrington’s circle included Brett, the Nash brothers and the John family.
Mark Gertler was obsessed with
her.
In 1915 she fell in love with Lytton Strachey, to whom (despite her marriage to Ralph Partridge and other entanglements), she remained devoted.
Heartbroken after his death, Carrington shot herself.

‘Chiquita’
Thinly disguised as ‘Juanita’ by Seymour Leslie in his novel
The Silent Queen
(1927), the gamine Chiquita was introduced to Augustus John as a model.
She became pregnant by him, and was looked after by Dorelia at Alderney Manor before having the baby, Zoё.
Leslie supported her financially until she married John’s friend Michael Birkbeck.

Clarke Hall, Edna (1879–1979)
Considered one of the most gifted artists of her generation at the Slade, two of Edna Waugh’s closest friends there were Gwen John and Ida Nettleship, through whom she met Augustus John.
He drew her and greatly admired her work, but her confining marriage at the age of nineteen to lawyer Willie Clarke Hall was a setback for her talents.

Colum, Mary (1886–1957)
Released from her Catholic school into the heart of Bohemian Dublin, this ‘lovely, saucy, bright student at University College’ was much influenced by the Irish Revival writers Yeats and Synge.
She was also deeply involved in women’s suffrage.
With her husband the poet Padraic Colum she helped found the
Irish Review
and became a friend of James Joyce.

Connolly, Cyril (1903-1974)
Etonian and Oxford graduate, Connolly vacillated between literary respectability and dissolute Bohemianism; his one novel,
The Rock Pool
(1947), describes Bohemian life on the Côte d’Azur.
An ardent traveller and hedonist, his close friends included Patrick Balfour, Noel Blakiston and Peter Quennell, though as editor of
Horizon
he knew most of the major writers of his day.

Cooper, Lady Diana (1892-1986)
‘Dazzling and valiant’, Lady Diana Manners was one of the ‘Mayfair troika’, consisting of Nancy Cunard, Iris Tree and herself.
Her autobiography describes her marriage to the politician Duff Cooper, and her career as an actress and hostess to the cultured and aristocratic milieux of her day.
Cecil Beaton admired her for her ‘aristocratic grace’ and ‘gypsy bohemian traits’.

Crowley, Aleister (1875–1947)
Poet and diabolist, Crowley, who liked to be known as ‘the wickedest man alive’, claimed to be the Beast from the Book of Revelation.
In 1920 he founded Thelema, the centre of his cult at Cefalù, Sicily, where Betty May’s husband Raoul Loveday died.
Crowley wrote and travelled extensively, but was often to be found in Fitzrovian pubs.

Cunard, Nancy (1896–1965)
Cecil Beaton’s photograph of Nancy, cropped, bangled and kohl-eyed, remains a potent icon of the twenties.
High-born but rebellious, she was equally at home in Mayfair and Bohemia.
With Augustus John, Nancy ‘discovered’ the Eiffel Tower restaurant.
A poet, she founded the Hours Press, and campaigned for racial equality; her long affair with a black man outraged her family.

Daintrey, Adrian (1902–1988)
A solid middle-class background equipped Daintrey for his later career as
Punch’s
art critic.
He studied painting at the Slade, and his circle included Augustus John, Matthew Smith, Nina Hamnett, and Alvaro Guevara.
Recalling Café life in Paris (a second home) he wrote, ‘Art was a question of chat about one’s complexes accompanied by an endless succession of drinks.’

Dennison, Christabel (1884–1925)
A painter, Christabel was a marginal figure in the studios and bookshops of Bohemia, her potential blighted by an unhappy affair with the writer John Adams, by whom she had a child, adopted after birth.
Christabel’s writings give a picture of an educated, aware woman oppressed by domesticity and a masochistic love affair.

Devas, Nicolette (1911–1987)
The daughter of poet and philosopher Francis Macnamara, Nicolette’s autobiography lays claim to ‘Two Flamboyant Fathers’, the other being Augustus John, with whose children she was largely brought up.
Her sister Caitlin married Dylan Thomas; she herself went to the Slade and married her more conventional fellow-student Anthony Devas.
After her children were born she took up writing.