Gluck

by Diana Souhami

  In January 1937 Mr Sawyer’s pulse rate was down to fifty and his appetite gone, he was dozing most of the time and ‘sinking slowly’. Nesta wondered whether to cut short her winter holiday in order to be with him. Her mother, troubled by a bad leg, sent depressed bulletins to St Moritz, hoping that her daughter would come home. Gluck tried to interpret the facts:

  My heart I want to say something about your Father.… I have a feeling of responsibility about negating the gloom of your mother’s letters. I do think it true that he is getting steadily weaker, that he does not eat enough and is dozing most of the time. But with your stay daily getting your strength up it seems unnecessary to curtail it when this state of affairs … may continue for a month or more.… If my impressions are correct I think if you come back when you thought of doing so it will be all right.

  Gluck, who revered the concept of truth, colluded in keeping the affair secret in order to avoid pain and scandal. But her sexual orientation was no secret and she could not always hide her feelings. Her jealousy of Seymour, her hatred of being marginalized by his socially legitimate claim to Nesta, and her fear that Nesta was not matching her own passion, spilled out. Bothered by the vagaries of the post, afraid that her three letters a day to the Carlton were not getting through quickly enough, she suggested an alternative strategy, to speed communication. Nesta replied: ‘It doesn’t matter, as I pass the Carlton daily to go to the skating rink there won’t be any delay in my getting your letters, so either way all is well.’

  For Gluck, alone with the ‘Demon’ as she called it, of her artistic ambition, living her life through Nesta and scarcely allowing letters to get through the box before opening them, Nesta’s restraint in waiting until morning for a letter that arrived the previous evening, was tantamount to indifference:

  In bed, Thursday morning, 7 January (1937)

  My one instinct was to fly backwards into nothingness – no contacts, no heart, no feelings. I was furious with myself having bothered to find out what posts would reach you most quickly. What did it matter – if you didn’t get them at night next morning would do.

  Your mother was right, I ask too much – and yet I do not ask what I am not prepared to do and give myself.… You will never know the turmoil, the rage, quite cold blooded that seized me – just the same rage that I got at Plumpton when Seymour kept us both hanging about and I did not know when you were coming in to see me.

  Don’t make any mistake – I know you love me, I know how you love me and I know that nothing like this can prevent me loving you, but my ears went back and I felt that armour close with a snap again round my heart which had become, I suddenly realised dangerously softened …

  I went to bed. There was nothing else to do – I was sick with myself for minding at all. I had so nearly reduced feeling to insensitiveness and now I had let it get all vulnerable again. I determined not to think about it and when in bed took Dial [a barbiturate available only on prescription or the Black Market] and a purge and hoped by this morning I would find it was all exaggeration and a result of being overtired. At 3 am I woke up with the headache worse than ever and took two aspirin and slept till nine. I felt better and calmer but it would not be possible just the same not to write all this to you.… You see darling, when you are near or with me, it’s like a warmth that keeps me from analysing and retrospecting and gradually I melt and feel human and creative and happy and all the suspicions bred by my life so far just seem impersonal and of no account and are lulled and I am tamed and safe and happy in it. Then when something like this happens I can feel my ears go back, I can feel my jaw set, I can feel that overwhelming urge to fly – to the desert I know so well it would be, but it seems safe somehow.…

  I don’t think with all this outpouring of words I have made it clear what I minded. I manage, and you manage, to keep some semblance of our true relationship going, but when you are the chattle, as far as your goings and comings are concerned, of someone else, then I become it too and that, at sudden moments like last night, becomes intolerable. I feel as if I was being hamlugged about, and not to know where you are, so even if I wanted to telephone or telegraph I would be uncertain, or have to duplicate the contact, because of someone who has first claim on you being uncertain and erratic and you having to follow suit fills me with a crazy fury.

  Do try to understand. I have understood all your very strong feelings about the clutching things in my life. I suppose it’s just the old Adam pouring upward to my brain but you are the only human being I have ever trusted and therefore loved. I do love you and I know what your love is for me and it is true that you sustain my spirits but I am human after all and if what I have written is small and seems a fuss about nothing, don’t forget that it is the tiny things that count and that try as one may to keep the big view they can buzz like gnats and be very disturbing.

  How I wish to God I could say all this with you in my arms and your head snuggled on my shoulder. Having got it out I feel better and closer to you even though it’s on paper and Heaven alone knows how and with what a mood you will read it. The sun is pouring into my room on to our bed. Mabel [Gluck’s housekeeper] has just been in to see if I’m alright. I assured her I was grand and just getting up which I am.

  One disadvantage of my job is that it shuts me up in one room and there is nothing to stop a bee buzzing, and to you, constantly on the move and with additional fresh contacts all this eremite drooling will seem exaggerated.

  … All my love to you as ever – and for ever

  That was only pale because I blotted it at once. Not because I feel reticent about it. All my love now and forever.

  ‘What’s this dull town to me,’ wrote Nesta of St Moritz. But winter sporting is different from working alone in a studio all day. Gluck’s news was only of love and work and she feared that the latter at least might bore:

  Is all this studio chat too remote and musty for the gay, glittering atmosphere of St Moritz and caravanserai hotels and haute monde? How well I know it all! Perhaps it is a little depressing for you to get all this kind of thing?

  Certainly Mrs Obermer cannot have been entirely carefree on the ski slopes – her father failing (he was to die in April 1937), her mother writing depressed letters, her lover jealous and impassioned and her husband urging her to prolong her stay. He sent Gluck a postcard and the claim he was making threw her into a turmoil and pained her to read:

  The hoar frost on the trees and bushes would fascinate you. What pictures you could conjure up here. Another year you too must come. I hope you are satisfied with your work. Nesta looks another person and I too am feeling fine. Nesta’s mother writes lugubrious letters about her father and so N. has decided to leave here in a week. I am doing my best to prevent it, as it is doing her so much good and she simply loves the skating. I don’t believe it is necessary for N. to return and I have written her mother begging her to send a reassuring letter so N. can remain a few weeks longer. Love Seymour.

  Gluck could make no overt claims to the time or attentions of the woman whom she loved and regarded as her wife. She was dependent on endless letters and secret nights. She could scarcely have travelled to St Moritz, explained that Nesta and she were really married and gone home with her together and for ever. Nothing in law either condoned or condemned her feelings. They were simply beyond the pale. To her, integrity of feeling must have its concomitant in integrity of expression. That was her creative ideal. To go against love so deep was self-betrayal, the ultimate crime. But however confident she felt about love for all Eternity, the pain of additional weeks of separation was more than she could bear.

  Years later, when Gluck was in a safe but unromantic relationship, Nesta wrote from Honolulu, where she had moved with her husband, about the difference in their depth of feeling. She believed there was an invisible line which separated the truly talented, like Gluck, from more ordinary mortals such as herself.

  Royal Hawaiian

  On the Beach at Waikiki

  Honolulu, H
awaii, USA

  9 March 1952

  Beloved Tim

  This ain’t a fairwell letter coz there ain’t no fare-lells, but just to tell you what your friend Charlot said yesterday. They dined with us. I was telling him my theory about the invisible line and that you understood at once, and said you thought the reason I was below it was because I didn’t love enough. He thought a moment and nodded and then said: ‘Also, to be a creative artist, you must be very good.’ ‘Good?’ I said, surprised. ‘But haven’t there been many bad men who were fine creative artists?’ He shook his head. ‘Not in the final sense.’ I thought of Yeats’ line ‘And I saw the blessedest soul alive, and he waved a drunken head, – But he went on: ‘Do you know what Matisse said to Braque? He said, “When you start a picture you must recapture the atmosphere of your first communion.”’

  I nearly bust myself wanting my Tim. It was terrific, wasn’t it?

  I enclose – no I don’t – I tell you the amended itinerary. Imperial Hotel, Tokyo. Then Bangkok, Hotel Oriental from April 26th to Tuesday May 4th. Singapore (Hotel Raffles) only from 4th to 6th and Bali from 6th to 23rd. Don’t attempt any communication to Bali or Bangkok – only Japan, Manilla, Singapore, Sydney and Auckland. Fiji, Samoa are also hopeless, because even aeroplanes only come every ten days.

  So you see Tim was touching the nail on the ’ead when’ee said I didn’t love enough, and it’s only thanks to your thought that I got the added nuggets.

  In their early days together such philosophical conundrums about Love do not seem to have preoccupied them. But there were always the obstructive roots and brambles. Gluck, while living only for the next meeting, was optimistic that a path would be cleared – in much the same way as she set her sights on Eternity while working specifically for her 1937 show. And promises were airily and vaguely made. In 1936 when Gluck was in her studio in Cornwall Nesta wrote: ‘It’ll be the last time you’ll be there without me, d’you realise that.’ ‘Sweetheart do you mean this,’ Gluck replied, ‘or did you just write it in a sudden spasm? Anyway I love you for it and feel somehow it is true’. Somehow, she felt sure, Nesta would sort it out:

  I trust you absolutely to handle your own personal situation with regard to us, without question.… I was greatly relieved to feel you were going to do something to prevent things drifting. It will be much less wearing in the long run. But how or what you do to achieve this I would not presume to advise. I am completely happy and serene about it all. My instinct is to let you be and give you your head-because I can trust your heart. So my Italian Duchess – go to it! 2

  So Gluck wrote while staying for a weekend with Wilfrid and Nancy Greene at ‘Joldwyns’, their Cornish home. The Greenes had had years of harmonious married life. It was this ideal of domestic accord that Gluck wanted unrealistically to achieve …

  they made me ache. I didn’t envy them, only felt it a privilege to know them and know my fortune was and might be theirs. Theirs is the real thing, and how rare and precious. And with all my heart I believe it is our possession too, now and evermore.

  Questions of context and commitment matter more as love proceeds. Three months later, during the St Moritz separation, when things were quite evidently still drifting, Gluck was alluding to

  a plan of campaign, too full of matter for discussion and adjustment for me to write, but the only solution for everybody’s peace of mind and future well being. I feel you will approve and agree. It’s terribly simple like all good plans – and honest so it can’t be defeated (honest up to a point).

  There cannot have been that many solutions on offer. They could choose between an affair, with all the excitement and problems of secrecy, separation and feigned casualness. Or they could end their relationship. Or Nesta could leave her husband and live openly with Gluck. It seems as if Gluck thought that this was what would be:

  Friday, Thank God, morning, October 23rd

  You say I can never know how much you love me. All I do know is that I could say the same to you, and I do not believe you will ever know how you fill and smooth out all the gaps and tears in my heart – making it whole and happy as I had always longed it should be.… I love you with my life. I can’t bear to leave you even like this, or to shut you up in the envelope but I must. You will be with me truly now and forever, so why should I mind.

  Such absolute feelings, so close to jealousy, possession and pain, bring trouble in their wake. For more mundane reasons openness was not easy. Gluck lived in her beautiful Georgian house, had the studio designed by Maufe, the ‘Letter Studio’ in Cornwall and two or three full-time staff, but this was all courtesy of the Family Fund. She had a personal allowance to meet her needs, but no capital. Her own earnings did not go far. It is unlikely that her trustees would have revised her income to accommodate, in their view, even more remarkable transgressions of lifestyle. Her brother, Louis, one of the trustees, was at the time Conservative MP for Nottingham, absorbed in the problems of cutting public expenditure and urging the nation to rearm.

  Both women moved in social circles where money was the key to the good life. Nesta, along with her works for charity and patronage of the arts, was enmeshed in an extrovert whirl of travel, parties, high fashion, servants, and all the expense of a stylish international social life, financed by her elderly husband. She had no wish to lacerate his feelings. Divorce was none too easy to obtain in the 1930s. Separation would have reduced her income and exposed her to scandal. She kept her marital status perhaps as much for her own sake as for Seymour’s. It was one thing to have an intense and secret love affair while seeming to conform to society’s rules, another, more unpredictable and isolating, openly to flout those rules and pioneer a different way. Perhaps separation was never mooted, but words like ‘forever’, ‘Eternity’, and ‘only you’, do suggest an exclusivity that it requires some strategy to achieve.

  NINE

  BLAZE WITH A FIRE

  Gluck was so sure of her future that for a week she burned her past. A visitor to her studio at Bolton House in October 1936 remarked that it was like Golders Green crematorium and Gluck thought the simile apt as she fed the fire with diaries, letters, photographs, and reminders of her life. ‘My choicest moment today was burning several canvases.’1 She burned, for example, most of the picture done in the 1920s in Lamorna of Ella Naper raking a bonfire while Gluck watched. But she kept the fragment of herself. And she burned her ‘first serious paintbox’:

  Poor old thing. An honourable and fiery grave. I had had it over twenty years and it was pensioned off about four years ago and now it’s gone because that half is gone and nothing is accompanying me now that does not serve.2

  She was clearing out what she called the ‘clinging unrealities’ of her life. ‘Mabel and Gwen’ (her servants)

  have been imitating a Greek frieze all day carrying away great stacks of stuff in procession. It is getting dark now and I have not stopped since this morning.… It is the purest heaven to feel so completely above all this possession and outside it all – and to know how bright the future is going to be.3

  Good sense prevailed when it came to burning too many of her canvases:

  You see dear Love just now I want to start such a new life that anything even vaguely smelling of the past stinks in my nostrils, but then it might not do so so much in other people’s, so I must I suppose be a bit careful.… What would it matter if I destroyed everything. There is more, as I said crazily before, to come and we hope better4

  She felt a sense of freedom in the unencumbered rooms with all the problems of the past reduced to ashes and in possession of Love that ‘makes me blaze with a fire that I do not believe even Death will be able to quench’.5

  The relationship with Constance ended at this time. Hitherto, Gluck had spent her weekends at Constance’s home, Park Gate, now it was Nesta’s home at Plumpton. After the fateful May 1936, Gluck made only a couple more visits to Park Gate. On one of them Constance said she was ‘bored about everything to do with flower pictures’
, and Gluck walked in the park alone. On the other, after Gluck returned from summer with the Hensons in Hammamet, she went down to Kent for lunch and tea. ‘C. very stuffy to begin with and not much better after. Relief get home. Bed. Telephone N. 10.30. N. telephones me 11.20. Dial.’

  And for Constance the regular midweek dinners and nights at Bolton House ended. She stayed once in June, a month after Gluck’s ‘marriage night’ with Nesta: ‘C. dinner and night B.H. Talk and say no more *’, was Gluck’s blunt diary entry for 24 June 1936, and once in November: ‘Awful evening Thursday’, was how that was recorded. A week later there followed a cryptic, confused exchange, the evidence of which Gluck saved from the flames and filed away. Mabel wrote Gluck a phone message ‘Flower Decorations rang up. Mrs Spry would like to spend Thursday and Friday evening with you.’ Gluck phoned the shop to say no (she was spending both evenings with Nesta). Constance’s private secretary, a Miss Lake, rang to say ‘No one rang from Flower Decorations last night. A mistake has been made.’ And both she and Constance sent letters.

  ‘Darling Gluck,’ read Constance’s (24 November 1936),

  I’ve just had such an extraordinary message – ‘Miss Gluck sorry she can’t put you up on Thursday and Friday.’ It’s Greek to me! I haven’t dreamed of such a thing. It must be someone else. You must have thought me a perfect damned nuisance. We’ve tried to get you on the telephone to explain – or Miss Lake has – with no success and I’ve got to go off without having it explained to you. Love Constance.

  And from Miss Lake on the same day:

  I assure you that no message was sent to you on Mrs Spry’s behalf last evening. The shop was closed at 7o’clock and Mrs Spry herself left here at least an hour earlier. Any message being sent from Mrs Spry or for her would definitely go through me and no other person here would have any knowledge of this.

  On the same day Gluck sent back Constance’s nightdress with a letter. The following Monday Nesta called to see Constance and whatever the purpose of the visit it prompted a grateful reply: