London's Wildest Woman
Henrietta Moraes
Henrietta Moraes was the most spectacularly alive person in 1950s and 1960s Soho — which is saying something. Francis Bacon painted her seven times. She drank with Dylan Thomas. She was married three times and in love considerably more often. A new biography finally gives her the page count she deserves.
There is a photograph — there are many photographs — in which Henrietta Moraes is doing something that looks entirely effortless and was almost certainly costing her a great deal. She is in a pub, or a club, or someone's studio, and she is fully present in the way that only certain people can manage: not performing presence but constituting it, so that the space around her seems to have organised itself in relation to where she is standing. The Soho of the 1950s was not short of vivid personalities. It had Dylan Thomas, who drank himself to a standstill with great commitment and some style. It had Francis Bacon, who was painting some of the most extraordinary canvases of the twentieth century in a studio of spectacular squalor and spending his considerable earnings at roulette. It had Muriel Belcher, who ran the Colony Room Club on Dean Street and had opinions about everyone she served. Into this company came Henrietta, born Audrey Wendy Abbott in 1931, and she was, by all accounts and most photographs, the most alive person in a room reliably full of very alive people.
The Colony Room, for those who came late to the subject, was a private drinking club on the first floor of 41 Dean Street, Soho, opened in 1948. It was small, green-painted, permanently saturated in cigarette smoke and the accumulated grudges of the creative classes, and it served as the de facto parlour for a generation of painters, writers, poets, and professional characters who found conventional society intolerable and the licensing hours of regular pubs barbarous. Bacon was Belcher's star attraction and unofficial talent scout. He brought in the painters. The painters brought in the poets. The poets brought in the women who had the sense to find all of this more interesting than the alternatives on offer in postwar Britain, which were limited.
She moved through Soho as though it had been designed for her specifically, which in a sense it had — there was nowhere else in England in 1955 where a woman of her temperament could have operated at full capacity.
Henrietta arrived in this world via a route that was itself already eventful. She had been expelled from school — several schools, in fact — and had found London in her late teens with a combination of good looks, reckless energy, and a talent for attaching herself to interesting people that would serve her variously well throughout her life. Her first marriage was to Norman Bowler, the actor, which was brief. Her second was to the poet Dom Moraes, son of the journalist Frank Moraes, and it was from this marriage that she took the name by which she would be known for the rest of her life. Dom Moraes was a poet of genuine gifts who had won the Hawthornden Prize in 1958 at the age of nineteen; the marriage was passionate, chaotic, and shorter than either party had probably intended. Her third husband was the photographer Michael Law. Between and around these formal arrangements she managed a private life of impressive complexity, which she documented in her memoir Henrietta (Jonathan Cape, 1994) with a candour that was bracing and occasionally alarming.
But it is the Bacon connection that gives the new biography its most vivid material, and justifiably so. Bacon painted Henrietta at least seven times — a sustained attention that amounted, in his case, to something very close to obsession, mediated through the particular violence of his painterly method. His portraits of her are not flattering in any conventional sense. They submit the human face and body to the kind of distortions that were his signature: the flesh smeared and displaced, the features both unmistakable and impossible, the image hovering between likeness and catastrophe. Henrietta's response to these paintings was, characteristically, mixed. She was proud of them — how could you not be? — and also aware that what Bacon had painted was less a portrait than a confrontation with the fact of embodiment, which she found uncomfortable to look at in much the same way that confrontations with the fact of embodiment tend to be uncomfortable to look at. She sat for him because he asked her to, and because to decline Francis Bacon's request to paint you was simply not a thing one did in Soho in 1963.
The biography — whose precise title is noted with a caveat below — covers this territory with appropriate thoroughness, and is at its best when it resists the temptation to turn Henrietta into a symbol. She has been in danger of becoming a symbol for some time: the Bohemian Woman Who Lived Too Fully, the muse who was more interesting than the painters she inspired, the figure whose actual interiority has been somewhat obscured by the mythology that gathered around her during her lifetime and intensified after her death in 1999. The best biography of someone like Henrietta requires a certain resistance to that mythology — not in order to deflate it (it is, on the evidence available, broadly accurate) but in order to find the person inside it.
The person inside it was, by turns, generous and infuriating, hilarious and exhausting, genuinely talented and systematically self-defeating. She could be monstrous to people who loved her and unexpectedly kind to people she had no particular reason to help. She drank too much, famously and for a long time — a condition she shared with so many of her circle that it was less distinguishing characteristic than professional standard. She ran out of money with impressive regularity, a situation compounded by a relationship with financial planning that could be charitably described as impressionistic.
Her memoir, Henrietta, published in 1994, reads as a masterclass in the art of surviving one's own life — or at least in the art of making surviving it sound considerably more fun than it probably was.
Dylan Thomas is in here, as he tends to be in any account of literary Soho in the late forties and early fifties — thunderously charming, comprehensively unreliable, the kind of man whose presence in a room instantly became the room's defining fact. Lucian Freud is here too, another painter in whose orbit she moved, a man of similarly complicated dealings with the people he found interesting. The Wheatsheaf on Rathbone Place, the Fitzroy Tavern, the French House: the geography of bohemian Soho is traced with the affectionate precision of someone who has spent time in its surviving remnants and talked to people who knew the originals. There is a Soho that exists now only in memoirs and biographies and the occasional surviving pub, and the new biography is a useful addition to its literature.
What the book does particularly well is its treatment of Henrietta's later years, which have tended to receive less attention than the Soho decades. After the marriages, after the Colony Room, after the decade in which she was the most vivid person in the most vivid part of London, she continued to exist — less visibly, less photographically, but with the same fundamental commitment to being who she was that had characterised the whole enterprise. Her memoir, when it appeared in 1994, showed that the writer she had always been was still there, and the biography is right to treat the book as a serious achievement rather than a celebrity document.
Henrietta Moraes died in 1999, aged sixty-eight. She had outlived Dylan Thomas by forty-six years and Francis Bacon by seven. The Colony Room Club, her spiritual headquarters, closed in 2008. Soho has changed beyond any recognition she would have found comfortable. But the photographs are still there, and the Bacon paintings are in museums, and the memoir is still in print, and now there is a biography that makes the case — persuasively, entertainingly, with the irreverence the subject would have demanded — that she was worth the full treatment. She was. She emphatically was.