Among the Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson

forty-seven.
    Being shocked was for prudes and old maids.Where was the kick in being genteel?
    By the time Marie Stopes’s book Married Love was published in 1918, there was no stopping the onward rush of what Douglas Goldring called the New Morality.For in it Stopes pointed out – to married and unmarried alike – the importance of mutual orgasm, and directed her readers to a little-known part of the female anatomy, the clitoris.This, she explained in the most tactful language, could, by arousal, consummate a woman’s desires.She also advocated such consummation as beneficial and valuable quite apart from the useful, procreative function of sex.In order to achieve this desirable result, it was permissible to have sex without having children, and Stopes explained how to do it.Her book came, as Goldring said, like the answer to a prayer.Equally liberating were the newly published writings of Freud.The literate and semi-literate eagerly pounced on his psychoanalytical theories, which, with their new-found vocabulary of ‘repressions’, ‘complexes’, ‘release of inhibitions’ and ‘unconscious desires’, provided a persuasive rationale for more or less doing what you wanted to do.And now the plaguey Puritans could protest in vain, for the gateway was flung wide, and the way was paved for an adventure of the senses, a voyage of experimentation with Bohemia off to a flying start and free-thinkers of all colours tagging along behind.
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    Now it no longer seemed to matter if you branched out into unconventional permutations; for artists, self-expression was all, and as in art the spirit of modernism was blowing away the shreds and tatters of conventional representation, so in love and sex the rules were toppling, giving way to imaginative refractions and reinterpretations of the norm.For example, was the conventional couple mandatory?What law proscribed living with more than one woman, or more than one man, or a man and a woman?As it happened bigamy had been illegal in Britain since 1603 and homosexuality was only legalised between consenting adults in private in 1967, but Bohemia is a country with a more relaxed attitude to these transgressions, and its inhabitants were undeterred by laws beyond their frontiers.The ménage à trois, or occasionally à quatre, was not uncommon.Not that these relationships would have constituted an offence against the law, for in most cases theindividuals were only married to one of the partners in the household, the other being brought in as an accessory live-in mistress.The complexities of these households could become labyrinthine.The Bloomsbury Group was once described as ‘a circle of people who lived in squares and loved in triangles’.But the phenomenon was by no means confined to Bloomsbury, which for all its infamous reputation was restrained compared to some set-ups.
    The young Helen Maitland came to Europe from the west coast of America in 1909; in Paris she fell in with the artistic community that revolved around Augustus John, who had been living there since 1905.Helen became mistress to Augustus’s friend Henry Lamb, who had recently parted from his wife, Euphemia.When that affair turned nasty she re-attached herself to the talented and dashing Russian mosaicist, Boris Anrep.
    She started living with my father Boris in about 1910 [recalled their son, Igor]… and they were very happy in Paris together – but, he had a wife.He always had two wives, all his life, which of course made for difficulties.He had married Yunia in Russia – she was a young lady of a respectable family and he was caught in bed with her, and he was made to marry her… and she was living in the house when my father took on my mother, and they lived in a ménage à trois in Paris for quite some time.
    Then at the beginning of the War I was born, and my mother thought it better to go back to England.They took a cottage in Gloucestershire, and Yunia came too – in fact she helped my mother with the