Gluck

by Diana Souhami

  My instantaneous reaction was to puke violently. Vomit! It was quicker than light what I said. I deliberately seized on the word ‘aimez’ and using it by intonation and inflection and timing in its most hearty British way, said ‘Mais oui, certainment. Je l’aime beaucoup. Elle est si gentille et si bonne.’ My face, which is a complete mask in one way to her, the way I want it to be to everybody, conveyed only the most ingenuous and naive agreement and interest in what she had said. I twisted completely away from her meaning. She was thrown back on her haunches. I almost heard the fall and she just gave it up.4

  Leon M. Lion wanted a snapshot of it even unfinished. ‘I want permanently to memorise an unforgettable impression!!!’ he wrote to Gluck (15 December 1936). Lady Mary Villiers, who was married to a Rear Admiral and lived in Hatfield Grange, wrote to Nesta (8 January 1937) that she thought it remarkable of her, Nesta, but that Gluck missed herself. ‘She has so much beauty in her face she probably doesn’t know it.’ Though Gluck’s narcissism in the picture is disturbing, it gives a better likeness of Nesta. Strength and fearlessness were Nesta’s attributes. It was she who lived life to the full, charmed people with her glamour, generosity and understanding, had a go at everything – painting, writing, singing, drove fast cars, got her pilot’s licence, did yoga, got gold medals for skating and skiing, and travelled the world. In the picture Gluck has absorbed into Nesta’s identity.

  Gluck could play at being less than ‘ingenuous and naive’ when she chose. In January 1937 ‘YouWe’ stood beside a picture she was working on, of tinsel, iced cake and baubles, celebrating the first Christmas she had spent with Nesta and Seymour at their country house in Plumpton, Sussex. Molly Mount Temple (‘Emptée, as Gluck and Nesta called her for the way she pronounced her initials) came to dinner with Gluck while Nesta was away. She arrived at Bolton House with a flurry of instructions about the provision of food for her chauffeur and after drinks in the studio

  became almost hysterical for her with excitement over the ‘Noel ‘picture. Went on and on saying all the right things …

  I realised after the first few minutes that she was deliberately ignoring the ‘YouWe’ picture which was cheek by jowl with ‘Noel’. So I wouldn’t let her get away with it and after I had allowed part of the thrill of ‘Noel’ to pass off, I said ‘and what do you think of that one?’ She turned to look at it and there was a long pregnant silence. Then she said, ‘Who is the other?’ No answer from me because I thought it too silly to answer. Forced to speak she said …‘Oh Nesta’!… More long pause then turning decisively away ‘No, I don’t like it. You have made her too male and you too feminine’! Later she said about it that it was ‘Sinister’!! Isn’t it comic? I knew it would be a shock and that originally she would be very jealous and I am certain that is the base of her reaction. It’s really as a picture entirely her cup of tea, being definite and designed and clean cut. She said what she hoped would destroy it for me.5

  Gluck enjoyed both the provocative content of the picture and tantalizing people with the relationship it implied. Openness and yet secrecy, bravado, but reticence too. In later years few people knew that the blonde head was Nesta’s. They thought, correctly in a sense, that it was an idealized version of Gluck. The image made explicit a crucial psychological problem – her uncertainty as to where the boundaries between herself and others lay. Despite the defiant gaze she melts into another woman. In love she melted willingly if dangerously. In other contexts she battled for self-assertion, as if she was afraid of losing her will.

  She thought her love for Nesta strong enough to overcome all opposition, surmount all problems and last for ever. She saw it as a homecoming, an answer to all problems, an end to loneliness and the realization of a romantic ideal. Years later, in her seventies, she confided that Nesta had been the only woman she had ever really loved.6 And in her old age Nesta was to say that only once had she been in love.7 Perhaps this love was with Gluck. Theirs was to be an absolute marriage outside of society’s terms:

  ‘Oh God, Oh God – There never has been such a thing as Us. We’re quite perfect I think don’t you?…’

  ‘Darling Heart, we are not an “affair” are we – We are husband and wife.’

  I have never said or written ‘Eternity’ before … I have never as I have said to you over and over again – felt it before.… I was always looking for you, always hoping against hope for you – but never in my innermost heart did I think I had found you until I really did so … until you I count my life a dream and do not feel I even became conscious or began to live until I met you and claimed you. And any ditherings I have shown since that moment were only what you call ‘top nerves’. Never from that moment did I really deep inside think I could not find my only rest and peace in you. I knew about you and me, all I was not sure about was what life had in store and now I share wholeheartedly your vision and courage about that. Clear? As mud you will say and ask me all over again some time just to have the fun of hearing it all over again – and though it tears me a little because it brings back my mistakes, I will have such pleasure in repeating it all ad infinitum – that to all Eternity again …

  Good night my most precious. I must just add two lines I discovered in an old notebook. Don’t know who wrote them or whence they came …

  ‘They have most power to hurt us whom we love

  We lay our sleeping lives within their arms’

  I love you – I long for you – I want you and I need you. All of you for all of me.8

  It was on 23 May 1936 that a chauffeur arrived at Bolton House to drive Gluck down to Nesta’s home, The Mill House, Plumpton, for the weekend. Gluck and Nesta lazed in the garden, had breakfast in bed, read poetry at night and on the evidence of Gluck’s letters, fell in love. From that date on ‘N’s phone calls, letters, visits to the Hampstead studio, dinner dates and meetings, became the focus of Gluck’s diary entries. Most weekends were spent at Plumpton and there were few further visits to Constance’s house, Park Gate. When Gluck left, at the beginning of July 1936, for a pre-arranged painting holiday at the Hensons’ villa in Hammamet, Nesta saw her off from Dover, fed letters to her and was at the quayside when she returned two months later. They stayed for two nights at the Majestic Hotel, Folkestone, spent a week at the Mill House, then returned together to Bolton House.

  Such of Gluck’s love letters to Nesta as have survived were all written in 1936 and early 1937. They were among her papers when she died, neatly folded in a red Charles Jourdan shoebox. Handwritten in ink on airmail paper, unsigned – mostly undated except for notes like ‘Wednesday morning in bed, 7.15 am’ or ‘Later the same day’ – Nesta, who did not live in the past or hoard possessions, letters or photographs, must have returned them to Gluck after their time together ended. Nesta threw most letters away, but if they were special returned them to their sender. For Gluck they were the ‘YouWe’ letters, a declaration of romantic love that bridged the gap of continual separation. ‘If I was able to write the most divine poetry to you it would still fall short of what I feel.’ There is no record of Nesta’s letters to her.

  The Obermers moved around a good deal. They had the house in Sussex and another in Kensington at 41 Egerton Square. They wintered on the ski slopes, made frequent trips to the United States and travelled the world. In the early years of their relationship, when parted, the two women wrote to each other two or three times a day, sent telegrams and telephoned and longed for separation to end.

  Friday night

  It’s a cruel thing to say but it makes me feel less lopsided to know you are suffering equally, because I thought it would not be so bad for you with so many ‘goings on’ going on and with me enforcedly alone all days – though I know it would not make any difference to me how much I was surrounded and now I see you are the same.

  Alone a lot in her studio, Gluck created the fantasy, common to lovers but insubstantial as a bubble, of divine synchrony:

  I have no doubts now that I receive by that curious bond be
tween us waves from you, sad or happy and I like to feel this. Do you remember us leaning against that field fence at Plumpton and looking at the stars and how bright Orion was and how you said you like him so much? Well these last nights every time I came out of the Studio the first thing I saw in the sky was Orion blazing away – the stars have been very bright and he is in the Southern sky at the moment and from there and my bedroom the most prominent. And I see again your darling face quite clear and beautiful in the moonlight. One day I am going to do a picture of that star because it was so lovely. It was so calm and big and we were so close – and poor old Rex [one of Nesta’s dogs], and you being so heartbreaking about him and me having got cross. Aren’t I awful! Ha! Goodnight my angel. I adore you – and kiss your hands, your face and your loved body all over – and thus you sniggle up and go to sleep. That’s me to you tonight. You will probably read this on a bright sunny morning and that’s what time and space can do to thought. Let’s forget it.

  This Love was Truth in a universal sense. It was elemental, it merged with the stars in the southern sky, it was beyond harm or accurate expression, it was, like her painting, a God-given gift and it was, with her painting, her world. There were no boundaries, no borders. ‘It is because we fused and in every way, that it is suffering as well.’ The past was over and the present and future could not divide them. It would escape ‘The Rubbish Heap of Time’, the world’s constraints. It was the original thing.

  I think we are like a perfect apple cut in half – the most lovely and significant of fruits and I am sure for that reason chosen as of the Tree of Knowledge.

  Gluck, of course, was Adam, and suffering, during a three-week separation, from the hole in his rib cage:

  It’s shocking how he misses his rib when Eve is not by his side, his heart nearly pops out through the gap that’s been left. Today it’s a fortnight – they do say it’s the first twenty years that are the worst!

  Nor was it a love that had a moral reference in society’s terms, the Truth being beyond morality – ‘the greatest bond of all – the most precious and the most difficult in the world of human relationships and I think you will agree our proudest possession’. The Truth, as Gluck felt it, was that Nesta was her inspiration and her wife: ‘Love, you are such an inspiration to me, and that you should be my darling wife too is all any man can expect out of life, don’t you agree?’9 The fact that Nesta already had a husband in the ordinary sense of the word and that the world did not define Gluck as a man, were not truths with the same weight as truths of the heart. And if the heart was anarchic, dangerous or destructive, so be it. Writing of Byron and his relationship with his half-sister, Augusta, both women remained unshocked:

  Re Incest. No I can’t be shocked at it either. What a pity we can’t add all this to ‘YouWe’. Perhaps we do. It seems to me sometimes as if we have every relationship rolled into one – Just a teeny weeny bit of a shadow of a shadow of incest too, don’t you think? Ha! As for you ‘bestraddling’, glorious word, all worlds, you do, we do. Again a bond. I don’t so much as you because my life has been less varied, but mentally near enough to share the detachment and twinkle. Adorable you. How I love you.… Oh my darling Love, my Heart, there never has been anything in the world before so lovely and warm and complete as Us.10

  This was no callow, passing crush. Neither of the women was young. Gluck was forty one, Nesta forty three. Both had packed in a fair amount of living. But for Gluck at least the past was over now. Nesta alone understood her, knew her thoughts and feelings and who she really was. ‘We feel and think together whatever the distance – only I wish it wasn’t being proved so often because of being parted so much.’ At times the sense of fusion and of presence in absence had a hallucinatory quality and life became a waking dream:

  At 5.30 a.m. I woke up and you were asleep, your head on the pillow next to mine and I looked at you with my eyes open and I was awake and it was so intense that I got a pain across my forehead – and of course it could not last more than a minute like that. But it comforted me. You were so very much there.… I know you had come to me and I know you could only do that in great intensity of feeling and leaving your body.

  Separation, even for a week or fortnight, was endurable only through fantasy and fantasy had its edge of pain:

  I feel like a balloon this morning so close to you in my spirit, though God knows I daren’t let myself think for one minute of such materialization as you suddenly coming into the room, or the feeling of you in my arms, or your naked body lifting against mine in the firelight, because then I ache suddenly with such force I don’t know what to do. Just now I am hugging your lovely spirit close to me and feeling you so terribly strongly I wonder if at this moment, which is 9 a.m. you are thinking very hard of me.11

  Visitors to Gluck’s studios in Hampstead and Lamorna commented on how well she looked and how happy she seemed. A neighbour from her Chelsea days, Evelyn Haworth, who sixteen years previously had lived in the studio above hers in Tite Street, said how young and ‘spiritual’ she now seemed compared to her time with Craig. Gluck scrutinized her reflection in the glass and concluded that this was because of ‘lovely letters and telegrams and feeling surrounded by your love’. Nancy Greene and her husband Wilfrid, Lord Greene, Master of the Rolls, who were devoted friends of Gluck’s and great admirers of her work (Gluck was to paint his portrait in 1949) commented so often on her appearance that

  I would have become embarrassed if I had not been lapping it up with a grin from ear to ear for ‘YouWe’. I have never cared a damn before whether I was good looking or not … but now I want to be for you – because it is an outward sign of us, and so as I say I glowed in this acknowledgement to the power of our combined magic.

  Molly Mount Temple commented on how much better she liked Gluck’s hair, now cut with a hint of curls, and found her appearance a positive distraction:

  At one period I was holding forth and she suddenly said, ‘Why are you such a good shape, I can’t take my eyes off you it’s most distracting and I haven’t heard a word you said …’

  It was the ‘YouWe’ magic. ‘Now it is out,’ Gluck wrote of their reciprocal love. ‘And to the rest of the Universe I call “Beware – Beware!” We are not to be trifled with.’ And a week or so later, when she was again being flattered on her changed looks, ‘I know that our love has given me what everybody cannot help seeing like a lighthouse – because it is a warning too – Beware, Beware!

  The ‘rest of the Universe’ was to steer clear of this dangerous force. Gluck’s world was hers alone. She had a perfect studio, admiring friends, was working well for her fourth solo exhibition and was in love – to all Eternity:

  Oh darling – I do love you so deeply, so violently and yet so tenderly, it almost suffocates me at times … I think we are really very lucky – to have this tremendous mutual love, one of the rarest and most precious things in the world – perfectly balanced in our essential difference and likenesses.… What a tangle, what jungles we have had in our lives, and now, anyway to me, it all seems crystal clear and unmistakeable and real, without question, merely with a few roots to stumble over, a few brambles to cut away before reaching freedom and light.

  EIGHT

  ROOTS AND BRAMBLES

  There were quite a few roots to stumble over and brambles to cut away. Operatic love has obstacles and this love had its share. At the beginning of 1937, while Gluck wrote her bulletins of passion and painted in her studio with the ‘YouWe’ picture propped always before her like a kind of altarpiece, Nesta was in St Moritz with Seymour. He was in his seventies and enduring bouts of illness. He was a retired playwright, had a considerable private fortune and gave generously to charities. To Gluck he was the Big Bad Wolf, her rival and opponent. She had seen his spy thriller Pigeon Post at the Garrick Theatre in 1918. In St Moritz the Obermers were staying at the Waldhaus. Gluck’s letters were delivered each day to the Carlton and Nesta collected them on her way to the skating rink.

  I
n Plumpton, Nesta’s father was mortally ill and her mother voicing criticisms of what she sensed of the relationship between the two women – who feigned casual contact with each other of the sort that befits good friends separated by frequent travel. While Nesta was away, because of her father’s illness, Gluck phoned Mrs Sawyer regularly. On a typical day, when the post had yielded three letters and one card ‘my only post and what a feast!… I thought to find only one and then the whole pile was you – I nearly passed out with suppressed emotion and rushed to the studio and buried myself …’, Gluck mentioned, when asked, that she had received only a ‘quite ordinary cheerful card (God help me). So now you know. You haven’t corresponded except as I have just said.… In that statement your Mother seemed to find relief and all was well.… Goodnight again my darling love. I hold you to me.’

  And a week later:

  Your Mother asked if I had heard from you and I said in a casual way ‘Oyes, I had a letter yesterday.’ ‘Is Seymour any better,’ asked she. ‘I believe so,’ answered I. ‘I think he took a sleeping draught and felt better for a good night.’ Why does everyone rub King Mark under my nose?

  Gluck’s mother too, though fulsome in her praise of Nesta – ‘I am as deeply and fully aware of her charm and sincerity as you are. She is outstanding and I know her real worth’ – and guarded at opposing anything that might add to her daughter’s happiness, was putting out warning references to society’s terms: ‘… That bloody insistence on S. and you as the “Ideal Couple”.… It bores me,’ Gluck wrote.1