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COPYRIGHT
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd 1991
This edition published in paperback 1996
Copyright © Kenneth Pople 1991
Kenneth Pople asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780002556644
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780008193287
Version: 2016-06-07
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preamble
Part One: The Early Cookham Years 1891–1915
1 The Coming of the Wise Men
2 The Fairy on the Waterlily Leaf
3 John Donne Arriving in Heaven
4 Apple Gatherers
5 The Nativity
6 Self-Portrait, 1914
7 The Centurion’s Servant
8 Cookham, 1914
9 Swan Upping
10 Christ Carrying the Cross
Part Two: The Confusions of War 1915–1918
11 The Burghclere Chapel: The Beaufort panels
12 The Burghclere Chapel: Tweseldown
13 The Burghclere Chapel: The left-wall frieze
14 The Burghclere Chapel: The right-wall frieze
15 The Burghclere Chapel: The 1917 summer panels
16 The Burghclere Chapel: The infantry panels
17 The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon
Part Three: The Years of Recovery 1919–1924
18 Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem
19 Travoys Arriving with Wounded Soldiers at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia
20 The Last Supper
21 The Crucifixion, 1921
22 The Betrayal, 1923
Part Four: The Great Resurrections 1924–1931
23 The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard
24 Burghclere: The Resurrection of Soldiers
Part Five: Return to Cookham 1932–1936
25 The Church of Me
26 Portrait of Patricia Preece
27 The Dustman, or The Lovers
28 Love on the Moor
29 St Francis and the Birds
30 By the River
31 Love Among the Nations
32 Bridesmaids at Cana
Part Six: The Marital Disasters 1936–1939
33 Self-Portrait with Patricia Preece
34 Hilda, Unity and Dolls
35 A Village in Heaven
36 Adoration of Old Men
37 The Beatitudes of Love
38 Christ in the Wilderness
Part Seven: Resurgence 1940–19
39 Village Life, Gloucestershire
40 Shipbuilding on the Clyde: Burners
41 The Scrapbook Drawings
42 The Port Glasgow Resurrections: Reunion
43 The Resurrection with the Raising of Jairus’ Daughter
44 Christ Delivered to the People
Part Eight: The Reclaiming of Hilda 1951–1959
45 The Marriage at Cana: Bride and Bridegroom
46 The Crucifixion
47 Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta
48 Envoi
Footnotes
Sources and Acknowledgements
Notes and References
Index
About the Publisher
I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be
the most spiritual poems,
And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul
and of immortality. …
Walt Whitman: Starting from Paumanock
Preamble
I often think I would enjoy writing more if it were not dependent on thoughts logically following each other. But I think this limits the capacity of thought and cuts it off from something which in its undisturbed condition it can deal with and perform.
Stanley Spencer1
IN 1938, some of Spencer’s friends and associates urged him to assemble his thoughts into an autobiography. They included his dealer Dudley Tooth, the newly appointed director of the Tate Gallery John Rothenstein, and the publisher Victor Gollancz, whose wife had been, as Ruth Lowy, one of Spencer’s fellow-students at the Slade and an early patron.
Their intention was to help him. His personal life was in shreds, his finances in disarray, his time largely devoted to saleable but ‘pot-boiling’ landscapes, his hallowed visionary work misunderstood and largely rejected. A judicious autobiography in which he could explain his ideas and motives might, it was felt, restore his prestige.
Spencer’s first reaction was one of caution. If, he argued, the public already found much of his visionary work ‘funny’, would they not find his explanations more so? Then suddenly he became enthusiastic. He would indeed write an autobiography. But it would not be assembled in the normal chronological arrangement. It would be a leisurely ‘stroll’ through his life, with pauses, diversions and retraces as the mood took him, a putting down on paper of the events, thoughts and feelings of his entire life to date. Nothing would be omitted. But neither would anything be stressed. The reader, making the journey with him, would be free to find the clues to his life, thinking and art, as Spencer himself had, often in strange and unexpected places.
The promoters were aghast. Some editing, they urged, must be accepted: ‘You are being offered a chance that you would be absolutely crazy to turn down,’2 fumed Dudley Tooth. Spencer remained unmoved: ‘I would rather a book on myself and my work were a confused heap and mass of matter from which much could be gathered than risk something of myself being left out in the interests of conciseness.’3 The venture collapsed.
Spencer, despite the travail of his circumstances, was blithely unrepentant. The fact was that, seized by the idea, he had already started on the project in private and was to continue it for the rest of his days. There was no discernible pattern to his writings. He would compose extensive essays in thick notebooks, but equally make random jottings in scrapbooks, on drawings, on scraps of letters, on old envelopes, on anything to hand. He seldom kept letters but would draft replies, often unposted because having sorted out his thoughts in them they became more valuable to him in his own possession than in that of the intended recipient. Others were unsent because on reflection he felt their sentiments were too confessional or, in other moods, too accusatory. By the end of his life the writings totalled millions of words, heaped into several trunks into which he would dip to reread, reannotate, re-paginate, rearrange. ‘You can burn those,’ he told his brother Percy when he knew his time was measured. But by his death, in December of 1959, the matter had passed from Percy’s hands, and in any case Percy did not want the responsibility.
To read them now is a disturbing experience, for they are expressed with an intensity he would normally have denied the public gaze. They have been sieved by scholars for references to his paintings, but, interesting though these are, they offer little in the way of immediate illumination. Spencer knew this. They are written in a code, a language of his own which appears to be the language we also use, but is not. The language was born not of secrecy but from the impossibility all artists face, in whatever medium, of finding in the words or images or symbols they are given to use that universality their imagination perceives. In them his thoughts flow like a stream of consciousness, turning and twisting, so that the reader is soon lost in a tangle of developments and, if he or she can summon the will, must go back again and again to re-chart their course over even a few of the many thousands of pages. The surprise is that to each development there is invariably a beginning and an end; however many diversions Spencer took on the way, he usually knew both his direction and his destination. His imagery, bizarre and esoteric though it often seems, captures both the exuberance of his associations and the precision with which he externalized it in his art.
In venturing today into this study of Spencer’s life and art, boldness is offered; but it is boldness disciplined by the sense of the totality of his experience. An artistic interpretation which ignores Spencer’s material existence will remain truncated. Yet a biography which blinds itself to the revelation in his paintings of the facts of his existence can only perpetuate the superficiality which saw him – and sometimes sees him still – as whimsical or innocent or unworldy or even as blasphemer or pornographer. His oddities are, like the highly personal and visionary paintings he undertook, sudden flashes of lightning, often charged over long periods, which momentarily illuminate climaxes in a continuous procession in his mind, an inner pageant. The pageant overwhelmed him. To its service he dedicated both his art and his everyday existence. When he could reconcile them, he knew happiness. When they conflicted, he was torn. The demands of art invariably won, but the cost in material sacrifice could be cruelly high.
It would be a rash interpreter who claimed complete elucidation for so complex a personality. Spencer used his art to explain himself to himself. As with the poetry and prose of his contemporaries Eliot, Pound and Joyce, it is the exactness of personal detail in Spencer’s paintings which makes so many incomprehensible or uncomfortable. But the paintings were not intended to prompt discomfort. He lived in hope that the public would catch up with him. His art, perceived through sympathetic understanding of his life, can reveal a transcendent outlook, an intriguing and majestic vision of life which some may dismiss as no more than typical of his time, but which most may joyously recognise as having eternal and universal import.
A work of great art – pictorial, musical or literary – reaches out and touches some profundity in our nature independently of its maker. Awed, we may wish to know more of him or her. The quest is often disappointing. We can know nothing of Homer, little of Dante or Shakespeare. Of later artists, of whom we can search to know more, we sometimes ask ourselves how such fallible men and women could produce such sublimity. The purpose of this study is not to dissect Spencer and his art. Rather is it to recapture through the medium of his own words that sense of the wondrous and mysterious through which he became someone other than the everyday artist people thought they knew, and entered a heaven of his own which he felt he had to strive, through imagery, to share with us. Thus the narrative pauses at some of the major paintings representative of the main periods and events of Spencer’s life and offers suggestions as to their emotional origins. (The majority have been chosen as being available in public galleries. They may not always be on display, but can usually be seen by prior arrangement.)
Throughout this book, Spencer – Sir Stanley Spencer CBE, RA, Hon. D. Litt. – is referred to as ‘Stanley’, not as a mark of familiarity, but in order to distinguish him from his many brothers, and especially from his artist-brother Gilbert, with whom he was sometimes confused. Textually his writings have been rendered into conventional spelling and punctuation, no easy matter at times when he was in full flight. Occasionally bracketed insertions have been made to catch the sense of his often elided thought.
The obvious starting-point for the search for Stanley’s inner pageant must be the Thames-side village of Cookham where, in the cool unsettled summer of 1891, on 30 June, he was born.
PART ONE
The Early Cookham Years
1891–1915
CHAPTER ONE
The Coming of the Wise Men
I am actually old enough to remember the Victorian Age; and it was almost a complete contrast to all that is now connoted by that word. It had all the vices that are now called virtues; religious doubt, intellectual unrest, a hungry credulity about new things, a complete lack of equilibrium. It also had all the virtues that are now called vices; a rich sense of romance, a passionate desire to make the love of man and woman once more what it was in Eden, a strong sense of the absolute necessity of some significance in human life.
G. K. Chesterton: Autobiography1
COOKHAM VILLAGE lies some thirty miles from London along the favoured stretch of the Thames from Henley, past Marlow and Cliveden, to Boulter’s Lock and Maidenhead Bridge. It rests on the slightest of rises at a point where the eastward-flowing river makes an abrupt right-angle bend south against the bluffs of Cliveden Woods. Lying within the elbow of the bend, the village is in effect an island, for the river may once have made its course on the other side of the rise, isolating it today by its low-lying remnants – Marsh Meadows to the north, Cookham Moor to the west, Widbrook Common to the south, and Odney Common to the east. These water-meadows often flooded in Stanley’s boyhood, and the winter rising of the river was anxiously watched, as Stanley’s brother Sydney notes in his diary for January 1912: ‘I went up the river and saw the heron high in the air flying towards Hedsor, dim in the rain. A peewit and a seagull met, exchanged compliments by numerous tumblings, then went their several ways. Cattle were taken off the Moor this morning and pigs from Randall’s styes this evening.’2 For this reason extension of the village has not been possible and under protective preservation it remains virtually as Stanley knew it in his boyhood.
A few cosmetic alterations have occurred. The malthouses whose cowls once dominated the village have gone, the blacksmith’s forge is now a restaurant, the village shops have become boutiques or tea rooms, Ovey’s Farm in the High Street is now a residence, its barns a garage and filling station, and the former Methodist Chapel is now the Stanley Spencer Gallery. But in its structural appearance the village remains much as it was in the early decades of the nineteenth century when Stanley’s paternal grandfather arrived from Hertfordshire to help build the superior residences locked inside their high red-brick walls which Victorian genteel wealth and the new commuter railway system from London were imposing on the neighbourhood. A builder by profession but a musician by inclination – he inaugurated a village choir – Grandpa Julius prospered sufficiently to produce two families by two marriages, thus giving Stanley a profusion of ‘cousins’ in the village. His Spencers were the product of Grandpa Julius’ second marriage.
For the two sons of the marriage, Grandpa Julius demolished a row of small cottages in the High Street and replaced them with a pair of semi-detached villas. The elder son, Julius, occupied Belmont, the left-hand villa facing from the road. He had a family of daughters – Stanley’s ‘girl-cousins’ – and was managing clerk to a firm of London solicitors. The younger son, William – ‘Pa’ to Stanley – occupied the right-hand villa, Fernlea, and was a dedicated musician. The piano and violin being Victorian social accomplishments much in demand, he set up as the local music ‘professor’, cycling to teach the children of the grand middle-class houses – Rosamond Lehmann remembers a ‘gentle old man with a white beard’ – and welcoming the humbler in his home.3 The succession of little girls sitting in the hall awaiting their piano lesson was a long-standing Stanley memory, and he did much of his early painting to the accompaniment of their halting efforts.
Pa supplemented his income by acting as church organist, mainly at St Nicholas, Hedsor, in the advowson of Lord and Lady Boston. Lord Boston had been one of his piano pupils, and in those days of discreet patronage the Bostons did much to help their church organist. They allowed him, for example, to enjoy the study of the stars in their private observatory and on one occasion met his expenses on a cycling holiday along the south coast while his wife, Annie, relaxed at Eastbourne. From his Pa, Stanley asserted, he took his ‘sense of wonder’, and from Ma his small frame and his sense of the dramatic. Ma was an excellent mimic, a gift which Stanley inherited and could use to social effect.4
Ma – Anna Caroline Slack, but Annie always – had been a soprano in old Julius’ choir when Pa married her in 1873. Their eldest son, William – ‘Will’ – was invited at the age of seven to play Beethoven before the Duke of Westminster and his guest the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) at the nearby mansion of Cliveden. The Prince was so impressed that he presented Will with a piano. At fourteen Will gave a public concert at the prestigious Queen’s Hall in London, and under the Duke’s patronage studied and graduated at the Royal College of Music. There he was followed by his brother Harold, a violinist. Today the elder of their two sisters, Anna – Annie always – would have followed them, but the custom of the day decreed that she act as helpmeet to her mother and as a not altogether willing nursemaid to the two youngest sons, Stanley and Gilbert. There were eleven children in all. Florence (Flongy) was the younger sister. The other sons were Horace, who delighted in conjuring and did so professionally; Percy, a keen cellist; and Sydney (Hengy). Stanley was ‘Tongly’ and Gilbert ‘Gibbertry’, presumably as derivations of childish attempts at pronouncing their names. A pair of twins died in infancy.
Will was about to be offered a teaching post in Bristol when he suffered a nervous breakdown.5 In Ma’s view it was brought on by Pa’s relentless pressure towards the highest professional standards, a characteristic which all the siblings inherited in their various careers. The collapse necessitated expensive medical treatment at Virginia Water and impoverished the previously thriving household so much that Percy had to give up the prospect of articles with his uncle Julius’ law firm and take a job at a neighbouring sawmill; half his meagre pay went to the family. In the crisis Florence took a post as governess, and Sydney, who intended to go into the church, had to restrict his studies to night schools and crammers, later supported by Will. For, having recovered, Will had obtained a post as piano master at Cologne Conservatoire and had there met and wed Johanna, daughter of a prosperous Berlin family.*
In few families can there have been such close identity of interests and passions. There was the devoted and scholarly respect for music which the children shared all their lives. Pianos, violins, violas and cellos were part of their upbringing. So were books, for in all the siblings lay the fierce intent to expand their knowledge and imagination through literature. Will and Sydney kept detailed diaries, lovingly preserved by Florence, who herself had her family recollections typed and bound. Pa’s idealistic venture at promoting a village library failed from sheer high-mindedness in the choice of books. All the family were inveterate talkers, for Pa encouraged discussion, especially at mealtimes, on any topic from politics – they were Liberals – to poetry, philosophy, psychology or religion. He worshipped Ruskin. The family were soaked in the language of the King James Bible, for Pa adopted the prevailing custom of family Bible-reading, a habit Stanley was to continue all his life.
The family possessed astonishingly retentive memories both auditory and visual. Will could memorize a page of music or a restaurant menu at one reading, and Stanley could instantly replay a once-heard piano piece which interested him. The acuity of Stanley’s visual memory was a cornerstone of much of his painting. Images from a multitude of sources – places, people, gestures, happenings, books, newspapers, paintings, exhibitions – flooded his mind and could be recalled when needed, even years later, with photographic accuracy.
As a family they were encyclopaedic acquirers of information and catholic in their interests. All were immersed in a countryman’s instinctive and unsentimental solicitude for nature. Percy, in his role of big brother to Sydney, Stanley and Gilbert, took them birdwatching. Sydney’s diaries are full of rhapsodies: ‘Went up Barley Hill in the dark and gathered poppies and a little corn. I love to see the poppies looking jet-black against the corn. Saw three glow-worms. …’6 Pa’s sense of wonder never palled: ‘I crossed London Bridge on Tuesday and could have stood for hours watching the flight of the seagulls – surely the acme of graceful motion. And yet the people passed by without a glance. …’7 Will, translating Heine: ‘I discovered that we have no word which quite gives the feeling of Wehmut. “Full of sadness” means more than “sadly” but not quite the same as “sorrowful”. This brought to my mind a word I had not thought of for years – “tristful”. I think the goddess of poetry herself must have helped me to think of it. It more nearly gives the meaning of Wehmut than any word we have.’8 And Stanley: ‘The marsh meadows full of flowers left me with an aching longing, and in my art that longing was among the first I sought to satisfy …’9 but, as we shall see, not always in the manner we might conventionally expect.
With these characteristics went an inbuilt instinct for mastery in whatever they undertook. Will, for example, who had been speaking German fluently for years, one day made a slight mistake for which Johanna corrected him.10 Appalled, he promptly devoted an hour and a half every day to the complete memorization of every detail of German grammar. A similar search for perfection could make Stanley an exhausting companion. As a family they loved charades and games, and were determined solvers of puzzles and problems. Occupied by an erudite question of musical interpretation, Will could divert time to finding the highest score possible at dominoes. Percy’s essential function at the substantial London building firm of Holloway and Greenwood, to which he had ascended from his sawmill, was, according to Stanley, ‘getting the aforesaid gentlemen out of scrapes’.11 Gilbert became a considerable bridge player whose skill was in demand at Bloomsbury parties. Horace’s aptitude in conjuring was not an unforeseen eccentricity but a deeply rooted family characteristic. Above all they shared a continual search for comprehension and validity in experience.
‘Home’ had a special meaning for Stanley. His childhood memories would recur time and again in his paintings. Home was where he was ‘cosy’, tucked up in the safe embrace of those who loved him and shared his values.* At home he was shielded from the incomprehensible threats which lurked in the world outside; threats quite specific from some of the village boys who were contemptuous of his slight build and tried to bully him – he was to find a defence in the sharpness of his tongue – or from those villagers who had “no means of understanding his exaltations and thought him ‘funny’. Home was where he first experienced the impact of those feelings he came to know as ‘happiness’. His happiest feelings, as he frequently emphasized, were those of a baby safe in the known confines of its pram, gazing in wide-eyed wonder at the larger world it saw beyond; except that in Stanley’s analogy the larger world was not only physical but, more significantly, metaphysical – what he called ‘spiritual’. Home meant handholding, the sanctuary he found as a child when walking with Pa or Annie lest the sensed terror of becoming lost befall him. It represented that peace of mind in which his and mankind’s spirit is free to soar untrammelled by emotional bewilderment. All his life Stanley’s deepest commitments were to be to those who, like his family in childhood, were willing and able to handhold, to set fire to his imagination and help solve the deep mysteries which beset him.