by the name of Wilfred, however, caused her slightly more grief.
Oct 3: Hideous jealousy. She’s not as fair I know, nor is her intellect to be compared. Had I modelled the statuette I would not have been so far inferior. It’s not severe enough to be unrequited love and thus an experience, simply irritating. Still it has the virtue of being the only thing so far that has occurred, and it has occurred in most lives that have been lived, and tis best to know and feel—it’s really only a pity that it isn’t more.
She was too proud, and too strict with herself, to allow much in the way of girlish moonings. Besides, as Herbert Spencer said and Kathleen copied down in her notebook: ‘Every pleasure increases vitality, every pain decreases vitality.’ Suffering was never her idea of a good time, and this is the only expression of jealousy of another female in all her diaries.
In August 1901 she went to Germany with her sister Presh. ‘Every prospect pleases, only man is vile,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Here alas there are women too, they are worse.’ Not Presh, of course. Kathleen was very fond of Presh. This is typical of her ‘dislike of women’ throughout her life: she would claim to dislike all women heartily, and yet there always seemed to be a couple present whom she liked very well.
For Christmas that year she went to the Hervey Bruces at their English pile, Clifton, near Nottingham. Sir Hervey’s late wife had been Marianne Clifton, whose family had lived there since Domesday, and the house included a renaissance ‘pages’ hall’, redecorated with Dutch painted panels in honour of a visit by Charles I; an octagonal Georgian hall; a Chinese drawing room; a scaled-down copy of the Crystal Palace as conservatory; two dozen bedrooms and no bathrooms, peacocks, bestatued balustrades and seven terraces. ‘Uneventful, physically and mentally,’ Kathleen wrote, which was about as damning as it could be. The only high spot was on 28 December when someone was overheard to say: ‘Heavens, child, be careful not to marry a Bruce, they are dreadful people with scarcely a redeeming virtue.’ Kathleen rather agreed. It was time to get away from all these Bruces.
‘I wish it were correct to live all alone,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘It’s far the best form of existence.’ It was the sort of thing that you could do in … oh, Paris, say.
THREE A Badly Dressed Virginal Anglaise in Paris
1901–1902
IT WAS UNUSUAL for young women to head off to Paris with artistic intent, but it was not unheard of. Gwen John, sister of Augustus, went there in 1904, and posed for Rodin and for English women artists as well as making her own name. Parisian art schools were largely better than the English ones at the time, with more opportunity to work from life, more and better models, a more individual approach to the teaching, more study of the anatomy. And Paris was Paris: you could live in the Latin quarter, be Bohemian, meet other artists, go to the cafés and get away from your family. This is not to say that the schools were filled with young dilettantes with no interest in art. The work was hard, and though unsuitable companions for a young lady were readily available they were not obligatory. There were ladies-only pensions, ladies-only classes, and it was also allowed for a young woman to take a chaperone to any individual classes she might have.
And so Kathleen went to Paris, to study art. She did not go alone: two girlfriends from the Slade, neither of them close, also thought it was ‘a fine idea’.
They lived initially at a pension, run, of course, by Madame. Madame was in her mid-fifties, ‘dark and squalid’, fussy, with a wig. She had about a dozen young women staying, whose grammar she would correct rudely over meals. They enrolled themselves to study at the Académie Colarossi, a studio popular with art students from all over the world. Clive Holland, a journalist writing in 1904, reported ‘A pretty Polish girl’, ‘a Haytian negro’, ‘a merry-faced Japanese’, ‘an Italian girl of whom great things were expected’, half a dozen Americans and ‘a sandy-haired Scotsman’. Classes here included life drawing and painting both nude and clothed, watercolours, sketching, black and white drawing, ‘decorative composition’ and sculpture.
Kathleen was rather afraid of both her friends. ‘I was younger than they, shorter than they, poorer than they, shyer than they, less well dressed than they and much less dignified than they. They were both very pretty.’ Whether or not Kathleen was pretty is almost impossible to say. She was athletic, not tall, with particularly strong shoulders and arms. Her hands were still large, and she never sat still. Photos show a strong face, quite masculine, with a firm jaw and a definite nose. Descriptions say she was pretty, mentioning bright eyes, masses of hair and joie de vivre. Her dress sense never improved very far beyond the holey underwear of her boarding-school days and the homemade almost-Fortuny cloak. Certainly she was attractive.
When she wrote about them later, Kathleen gave them the names Jocelyn and Hermione. Jocelyn was in fact Eileen Gray, who was later to become a well-known and influential modernist furniture designer and architect, one of whose chairs fetched $28 million at auction in 2009. Hermione was Jessie Gavin, fair and beautifully dressed, who told Kathleen that she lived her whole life in terror because there was madness in the family. This made her wonderfully romantic. Kathleen thought perhaps she should meet romantic cousin Hener.
It was Kathleen who got the male attention: ‘As weeks went on I found various young men waiting at the doors for me, and the two other girls would go on with a glance of mockery. This made me feel incredibly ill-bred. I wanted the nice boys to walk home with me; I wanted them to because I liked them and it was fun; but I would tell my two dignified friends that it was a good way of learning French.’ (Kathleen had learnt French at school, but had what Podge called ‘the most atrocious accent I ever heard. Where you got it from I can’t imagine.’ This may be why Kathleen’s version was that she spoke no French at all when she arrived in Paris.) ‘I thought their expressions accused me of behaving like a kitchen maid. In any case, no young men hovered around them, I had no notion why; and I thought them very nice and well-behaved, and myself very inferior. The nuns would approve them and reproach me, but it was all so exciting, so stimulating, and so sunshiny.’
Her song for leaving Britain, her childhood and her family behind went: ‘I won’t be my father’s son, and I won’t be my mother’s son, but I will be the fiddler’s son, and have music when I will.’ For an orphan, this was realistic as well as romantic, but it was only for when she was feeling brave. In weaker moments she would quote Keats: ‘To bear all naked truths and to envisage circumstance, all calm, that is the top of sovreignty’. She found herself, in Paris, to be naive and innocent. Sometimes
everything and everybody seemed rather ugly and terribly wicked, but I was fully determined there must be no half measures. I must appear surprised at nothing. I must allow no one to suspect my pitiful ignorance, my still more pitiful innocence. When strange, unknown things happened, I registered them, but from no one did I ask an explanation, and of many things the explanation did not occur to me till twenty years later.
One such episode involved Madame from the pension. To Kathleen ‘this repellent woman was a formidable pillar of propriety and austerity’, but with hindsight perhaps she was not. ‘Madame slept on the ground floor, her window giving on to the street. I slept directly above this, and used to drag my bed across to the window to get the maximum of air. One night in the small hours I awoke, hearing a disturbance below. Looking down, I saw a quite young man jumping out of Madame’s window. “A burglar,” I thought, and was about to fly to the rescue when Madame’s head popped out of the window, pleading, noisily, “Ah, Marcel, si tu reviens, je te donnerai encore un louis!”’ (Marcel, if you come back, I’ll give you more money.) Very Anaïs Nin, but it made no sense to Kathleen.
One of the first things the convent girl with her bathtime chemises had to accept was the nude model. On her first day at Colarossi’s,
passing an open door of one of the studios, I saw Hermione standing at the back of the room near the door and went to join her. Hermione was standing composedly with her head critically on one side. At the end of the studio passed, one by one, a string of nude male models. Each jumped for a moment