Among the Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson

ones, and there were Utopian ideals at stake as they hurled themselves over social barriers with kamikaze recklessness.Drearily conventional concepts like suitability, rank, and caste were thrown overboard in the dizzy descent.D.H.Lawrence introduced the ‘gamekeeper-fucks-Lady’ element into British literature with Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) (another notorious banning), but one senses that Lawrence was cranking up his own erotic sensations in writing about Constance’s secret slumming with Mellors, as much as those of the characters.Lady Chatterley may have been drawn from life.Ottoline Morrell’s biographer Miranda Seymour hazards that Lawrence was portraying her subject’s real-life affair with a young gardener called Lionel Gomme (‘Tiger’) who was working at Garsington in 1920.Ottoline’s lover brought her ‘simple love’, ‘across the great gulf of the world, conventions and positions…’; the fact that ‘Tiger’ was mainly interested in football and cars did nothing to lessen his attractions.Sleeping with members of the working class offended every convention of the time; Nina Hamnett made no secret of how turned on she was by boxers, building labourers and sailors.
    Even more defiant in their breach of accepted behaviour were the women who, like Nancy Cunard, had sex with black men.According to Douglas Goldring the daring jazz-obsessed female acolytes of ‘Haut Bohemia’ were notorious for ‘their attacks on the virtue of [the] Negro artists’ who danced and sang in London’s revue shows.There were some narrowly averted public scandals, but the participants were, it seems, getting their kicks by deliberately tempting fate.Nancy was a class rebel who delighted in pushingout the boundaries.This included having a long-term sexual relationship with a black man named Henry Crowder, to the predictable outrage of her mother, Lady Cunard, and her upper-class cultured friends.One day Lady Asquith dropped in to luncheon with Lady Cunard, and making small talk over the meal chanced to refer in a rather barbed manner to her friend’s errant daughter.How is Nancy?she asked ‘… what is it now – drink, drugs or niggers?’ Lady Cunard found herself utterly embarrassed; advisers rallied round, Sir Thomas Beecham was enlisted to pen an admonitory letter to Nancy, detectives and policemen were put on the case.Nancy meanwhile wallowed in the notoriety which attached itself to her, and retaliated by publishing a lengthy open letter to her mother entitled ‘Black Man and White Ladyship’, in which she sounded off over pages on colour prejudice and class, and revelled in the unconscious double entendres into which her White Ladyship had floundered:
    With you it is the other old trouble – class.
    Negroes, besides being black (that is, from jet to as white as yourself but not so pink), have not yet ‘penetrated into London Society’s consciousness’.You exclaim: they are not ‘received!’ (You would be surprised to know just how much they are ‘received’.)
    But the episode was not just a peccadillo; Nancy Cunard’s relationship with Henry endured.She also dedicated herself for years to compiling an exhaustive ‘Negro Anthology’.
    Men ‘stooping to conquer’ was nothing new, indeed it was almost regarded as an obligatory rite of passage for young eighteenth– and nineteenth-century blades to test their prowess on available girls of the lower class; but Bohemia brought a new twist to the tradition.Carrington’s capriciousness caused her lover Gerald Brenan endless heartache and loneliness, which he assuaged by the obsessive picking-up of shopgirls or homeless teenagers from off the London streets.They would go for long mournful walks together, eat fried eggs in workmen’s cafés, and stagger back to Brenan’s flat in the early hours for stimulating proletarian sex sessions.Later, when Carrington married Ralph Partridge, one aspect of the ménage à trois – consisting of Lytton Strachey