Free Among the Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson Page B

romantic idealism informs their attitude to money and poverty.Bohemia had its libertines, undoubtedly, but on the whole their motives were coloured by a kind of uncynical naiveté.
    Augustus John, as so often in Bohemian circles, set the pace.He was promiscuous, but not afflicted by guilt; his promiscuity had a happy-go-lucky quality, a well-meaning delight in the newness of fresh sex.Though he strayed, he always returned to his chief love Dorelia, and he never meant anyone to get hurt.Augustus’s entire personality exuded an irresistible aura of sex, like a force of nature.Women found him magnetically virile in his youth, swaggering, long-haired, earringed, talented, the male sex symbol of his day.Michael Holroyd, his biographer, roughly classified John’s conquests into ‘occasional models’, ‘chief mistress’, and ‘grand lady’, but did not attempt a complete tally of Augustus’s groupies.When Viva King went to stay at Alderney Manor, the Johns’ home in Dorset, Edie (Dorelia’s sister) recommended her to shove a chest-of-drawers against her bedroom door.Not that it would have prevented him if he had tried, according to her.Viva claimed to have been one of the few who managed to repel him.One day, reading aloud to him from the works of sexologist Havelock Ellis, Viva became aware that Augustus, excited by the passage, was starting to emit strange sounds – ‘like a sea elephant coming up for air’…
    [I] realised it was Augustus starting some ‘funny business’; but when told to, he returned quietly to his chair.When I was married he would whisper that he would like to give me a child.I am told he proposed this to many women.
    Augustus’s secretary Kathleen Hale was less resistant to his powerful masculinity:
    I felt a frisson whenever he came into the room.Sometimes there would be mock battles between us, when he would try to ‘rape’ me, scuffles that always began and ended in laughter – hardly the atmosphere for passion.I have always found laughter as good as a chastity belt.Once, though, out of curiosity, I allowed him to seduce me.The sex barrier down, this aberration only added a certain warmth to our friendship.
    There was something almost endearing, if preposterous, about Augustus John’s determination to ‘have a go’ whatever the circumstances, and few could resist.
    Dylan Thomas fell into much the same category as Augustus John, though most accounts agree that physically he was unattractive.But according to Constantine Fitzgibbon Dylan’s sexual susceptibility was disarming to the strings of women he slept with: ‘His interest in women was normal, and he satisfied it in a manner that was quite accepted and acceptable in the Soho of his youth… he just liked girls, and he told them so.’ There was at least no hypocrisy about it.
    Here too, Bohemians felt themselves to be standing on the moral high ground in relation to society in general.They were revolted by humbug and pusillanimity, by prudery combined with furtive promiscuity.The ‘illicit’ nature of sexual liaisons during that period both made a statement and added hugely to the excitement.The sense that the terrain on which they were so joyously cavorting was really a public lawn sternly labelled keep off, made the Bohemian sex pioneers almost inebriated with their own wickedness.For Vanessa Bell, mentioning the word semen was only a start.Painting ‘really indecent subjects’ was another way to get Mrs Grundy running for her policeman’s helmet.
    I suggest a series of copulations in strange attitudes and have offered to pose [she wrote to Roger Fry in 1911].Will you join?I mean in the painting.We think there ought to be more indecent pictures painted…
    Bawdy was fun; Nina Hamnett would regale a pub full of regulars with smutty jokes and limericks:
I sometimes wish when I am tight
That I were an hermaphrodite
And then, united to a black
Deep-bosomed nymphomaniac
We’d be wafted up to heaven
In position