My dear Nesta
I really cannot tell you how I value what you did yesterday. It was a very generous, a very wise and a kind thing to have done. More of your spirit would help everyone.
I look forward to seeing you again, and I’d like you to feel very sure of me – of my friendship, of my wish to be of use and of help if ever that were needed.
I love courage and clear cut action – and anyone who has the first and behaves the last fills me with affection and respect. Excuse the grammar, the paper and the dirt!
My affectionate thanks
Constance
On the evening of Nesta’s visit to Constance, Nesta and Gluck went to a concert at Wigmore Hall. The following evening it was Covent Garden, the night after, the première of Ladies in Love followed by a cabaret. They dined mid-week at Bolton House and on 5 December – Constance’s birthday (now scratched out of Gluck’s diary) a Rolls Royce arrived at the studio to take Gluck to Plumpton for the weekend.
Whatever the circumstances (and Val Spry’s understanding was that Gluck had become so demanding of Constance and difficult, that Shav Spry forced an end to the relationship, for fear that Constance’s career would be hindered), a fatal rift happened at this time. They simply did not meet any more. It was the end of a friendship that had encouraged Gluck’s talent, furthered her career and taken her into the heart of thirties smart society. The relationship was reduced to ashes along with all the other burning.
One of Nesta’s first presents to Gluck was a gramophone and the songs of the day struck a special chord. ‘These Foolish Things’ was a favourite:
By the way I have ordered a new record – Cole Porter, very sentimental but clever, he’s the man who wrote ‘Miss Otis’. It’s sung by Virginia Bruce and is called ‘You’ve got under my skin’. [sic] I think you’ll like it. It’s not a dance record so it will do for us when we sit it out.6
Gluck went, while Nesta was away, to a season of surrealist films at The Everyman, Hampstead, and to an exhibition of eighteenth-century wallpapers at Sandersons which she found ‘beautiful and somehow consoling’. She saw Mae West in I’m no Angel. ‘Gawd! I was fascinated but never want to see her again’ and the Dionne Quins in The Country Doctor which she found marvellous, amusing and fascinating.
She tried to cut down on smoking, forty a day of Players Medium Cut (‘It’s the Tobacco that Counts’), and tried to cut down on Dial, but very often it was her only way of getting a good night’s sleep. She endured frequent visits to the dentist, a Mr Simpson, who told her he had never met anyone with such sensitive teeth. She bought new turtles for the fish tank, which she cleaned out regularly, but with equal regularity the turtles died. To salve the pangs of separation Nesta sent photographs of herself which Gluck scrutinized under a magnifying glass: ‘the little haze of mist round your mouth which is your beloved breath on the cold air – I nearly died of that in the side view one’.
Nesta bought an eiderdown for the studio bed which was a great success. Mabel thought it ‘looked so light as if it would fly up any moment’. It was not quite big enough so Gluck wanted to pay for an extra one. ‘Then it is really and truly household, isn’t it?’ The idea of shared domesticity was important to her, as visible proof of their relationship, though it would be hard to imagine two women less interested in domestic chores.
Gluck bought an anchor for the punt in which they spent their romantic afternoons on the lake at the Mill House ‘specially made and a chain to match … I think it ought to make quite a difference to our pleasure and comfort.’ She painted them lazing in it, she leaning against Nesta, the end of the punt stretching out across the water like a bright path that leads nowhere. (The director of The Fine Art Society thought the picture suggestive and would not have it in Gluck’s 1937 exhibition.) They went with Leon M. Lion and Lord and Lady Hollenden to H. G. Wells’s seventieth birthday party at the Savoy in October 1936. It was given by the PEN club and there were 500 guests. (No doubt Edith Heald, a founder member of the club, with whom Gluck was to live for thirty-five years, was there.) They went to the first night of Boris Godunoff at Covent Garden, to Cosi fan Tutte at Glyndebourne, to supper at the Savoy, to the Café Royal. Molly Mount Temple came to dinner, as did Ernest Thesiger, Osbert Lancaster, the Maufes, the Villiers, the Toyes, the Greenes. And above everything, in the whirl of it all, Gluck worked. The eighteen-month build up to her fourth exhibition, in November 1937, was an extremely productive time. She tackled a whole range of new work and completed canvases already begun.
‘Just this Beloved, nothing but happy pictures since Youwe’, she wrote to Nesta. In ‘Noel’ she wanted to reflect her new sense of freedom. It was unlike anything she had worked on before. She did not draw first, but painted directly, delighting in conveying the textures of the things she was painting, feeling very ‘robustious’ as she put it and cracking crackers to get in the revelling mood. She got the streamers and blue frilled paper from Woolworth and the sinister mask is one she had torn as she put it on Nesta’s head the previous Christmas. She worked at the picture for three or four months in 1937, one day painting a pale pink cracker, the next a little silver ball and, for days on end, the striped damask tablecloth. She strove to make the whole thing look as if it had been dashed off in a moment. She wanted the cake to look wobbly and unprofessionally made. There are little silver edible decorations, piped icing and a precarious robin. At times she thought it the limit of banality, but in the end she declared herself pleased, gave it ‘satisfied and slightly bloated looks’ between sips of tea and writing to Nesta, and wanted it to hang beside ‘YouWe’ in her 1937 show.
Two of her best portraits of women were to appear in this. There was ‘The Lady Mount Temple’, dressed by Schiaparelli in the absolutes of black and white, her hat perched on her head at an angle of conquest, her jewellery worn like military decoration, the veins in her hands revealing her age, her head cocked to one side as she looks down on her viewer with the arrogance and authority of her class. Equally telling psychologically, and technically better, was the portrait of the best-selling novelist, Susan Ertz, a friend of both Gluck and Nesta. Her serenity and elegance are emphasized by the muted browns of her clothes and the pale green silk of the upholstery. Her husband, Ronald McCrindle, commissioned the painting in 1936, but thought it made his wife look ten years too old. Gluck waited ten years and then offered it again through a letter from Nesta. Susan Ertz hung it over the drawing-room fireplace of her Kensington house and insisted on giving Gluck the original commissioning fee of£50.
The flower groups in the 1937 exhibition all showed Constance’s influence the considered displays and careful choice of vases. The large-scale ‘Nature Morte’, or ‘Dead Group’ as Gluck called it, the skeletons of flowers and grasses in an alabaster vase, all delicately painted in pale silvers, greens and browns, reflected Constance’s view that anything from the hedgerow could provide material for an arrangement.
Gluck was aware of a sexual element in many of her flower paintings. Of ‘Lords and Ladies’ a picture of wild arum lilies, she wrote to Nesta, ‘How can these flowers be female? Anything more male than this prominent feature I cannot imagine.’ As she painted the flowers she wrote of ‘loving them and stroking them with my most chosen brushes’. Of the blousy display, ‘Lilac and Guelder Rose’, Lord Villiers remarked, ‘It’s gorgeous. I feel I could bury my face in it.’ Gluck called a painting of flowering chestnut ‘Adolescence’ and, with her typically unusual application of sexual stereotype, described the two blooms as a boy of eighteen and a girl of sixteen. The ‘girl’, she wrote, was wistful, slimmer and higher up in the picture so that the ‘boy’ has to reach up to get her. She cut the two branches for the picture from the chestnut tree in the garden of her neighbours, the Toyes, while they were away. ‘The bits I cut were taken from where it didn’t make any difference to its divine shape – and Oh how lovely they are!’7
While working on this picture she wrote to her mother (13 December 1936), urging her to
recapture her adolescent self ‘the real you … was what you were before you married.… One’s adolescent ideal is the core of one’s spirit and what else matters when we come to realise the values in life.’ Not the sort of letter that mothers in their sixties find terribly helpful, but an insight into Gluck, who stayed close to adolescent rawness of feeling and resisted maturity with its suggestion of compromise.
She ran into trouble with the quality of this canvas, a presage of the battle she was to wage for decades with the manufacturers of artists’ materials. It was grainy and full of knots, the paint sank in and became dead, and subtle differences of colour and texture got blurred.
She finished the cornucopia of pomegranates begun in Hammamet and the head of the Arab boy. Mabel said he looked better without a cap, so bareheaded he remained. She finished the charcoal drawing ‘In Aid Of …’, lampooning a society gathering for whom a charity occasion is just another cocktail party. She showed it only to Molly Mount Temple and Nesta and swore them to secrecy because many of the people in it – the women who look like hens and the bored men – were apparently recognizable.
She did a quirky picture of a lovelorn rhinoceros, which she titled ‘Frustration’. He, like Oscar the faience bull exhibited in her 1932 exhibition, was bought by Molly and hung along with Gluck’s portrait of her at Broadlands. After Molly died the pictures were disposed of by the Mountbatten family, with whom she had not been popular.8 The portrait turned up in 1973 in the cellar of Molly’s sister’s house. A friend wanted to buy it from her, but she gave it to him, remarking that she already had one portrait of Molly and one was enough.9
On a Monday in February 1937 Gluck and Nesta drove to Southease, a village in East Sussex in the valley of the river Ouse. They had a picnic in the car and Gluck began a landscape of the river at a point where it changes course, as she felt she was herself changing course, and flows to the open sea. She called it ‘Sulky Spring, Southease’.
In June they went to Poole in Dorset, to an island they called ‘their Shangri La’, and Gluck painted one of her best seascapes, ‘The Sands Run Out, Poole Harbour’, looking inland from the sea with the sun breaking through the rain. Nesta had various broadcasting commitments in London, talks and poetry readings with the BBC, so she travelled back and forth on the train. ‘Marvellous and happy day, work at big picture.’ ‘Lovely day, bad weather. Cannot work.’ were typical of Gluck’s diary entries at this time.
In August, while staying down in Plumpton, she spent two weeks in the open air painting Falmer Church and graveyard: the church, its reflection in the water and the wall and towpath form the shape of a cross. Nesta spent several days with her and wrote a twenty-page sketch called A Painter’s Day about interruptions from trippers of a different social class:
MAN: Is’y! Look at that now. ’e’s pynting the church.
SECOND MAN: SO’e is now. And the water.
MAN: Wouldn’t I blinkin’ well like to be a painter instead of drivin’ this blinkin’ bus.
SECOND MAN: S’pose’e’ll get pots of money for that.
MAN: That’s right. Pots. Some people’s got all the luck.
Work and fun merged. There were games of badminton, teatimes spent lazing in the punt on the lake, enough days and nights together to keep dissatisfaction at bay and too much to do to be jealous for long. Everything was geared towards making a success of her show.
As in her 1932 exhibition she again created The Gluck Room at The Fine Art Society and as in 1932 this led to a great deal of fuss. Ernest Dawbarn, the director, kept out of the way and simply established the dates available for installation and when she must have the place cleared. A Mr Westbrook of the Camden Joinery Mill, Camden Town, got the job of constructing the room. He was experienced at building exhibition stands and displays, and confident of his work. He had no appetite for lengthy correspondence.
Gluck perfected the design used in 1932. The room, measuring approximately thirty by fourteen feet, and the frames, were this time to be in grey alder wood. Seven foot high pilasters, stepped vertically in the same way as her frames, divided it into bays and a boxed skirting, one foot six inches high and ten inches wide, ran round the circumference. A four foot six inch wide door separated The Gluck Room from the rest of the gallery.
Her relationship with her framemaker, John Footman, at the antique furniture dealers and restorers, Louis Koch in Cleveland Street, was good. If people got on amicably with Gluck over her business affairs, they were open with her, realized she was needy, did their best and were blessed with exceptional patience. As Mrs Guy, who did housework for Gluck and Edith Heald in later years when they lived in Steyning, Sussex, put it ‘You could lead her, but you couldn’t drive her. She had to think it was her idea.’
Mr Westbrook was a busy carpenter. The contract for The Gluck Room, though interesting and worth some £150, presented no particular problems. Gluck did. The colour of the alder was, she said, wrong, some of the fittings were an eighth of an inch out, there was confusion about the price of additional items and labour and the meaning of remarks that were or were not made. By the end of it all he lost his temper:
November 30th 1937
Dear Miss Gluck
Many thanks for your unlimited correspondence. I have wasted enough time and money on your job so far. I think it time I called a halt. Definitely your invoice stands as I have forwarded viz: a total of £148/l5/6d. This sum you either pay or tell me you will not.
When you care to explain to me why you broke your part of the contract by refusing to have my name inserted in your catalogue as you definitely promised, I may feel inclined to answer further questions. Meantime I shall be very pleased to hear what you intend doing as regards to payments? I would refer you to your own letters of October 2nd, last paragraph, November 1st, second paragraph, November 3rd, first paragraph. An early acknowledgement of this letter and its contents will oblige.
Yours faithfully
A.J, Westbrook
She was getting as good as she gave – a formula which got her nowhere, time after time.
Accompanied by Nesta and the actress Leonora Corbett, who was starring in To Have and to Hold at the Q theatre, Richmond, Gluck made several visits to the tailor for her exhibition menswear. She arranged the lettering for the flag to be hung outside the gallery in Bond Street proclaiming her show, sorted out titles of pictures for the catalogue and supervised the printing and distribution of 2500 invitation cards. And a month before the show opened, she attempted to resolve a less practical problem – Mother. She wrote the Meteor a cautionary letter:
October6 1936
Mother darling
I do hope you will read this letter very carefully as I am going to do my utmost not to write anything that could be misunderstood by you or that could possibly hurt you.
For at least a year, as you well know because I have often burst out about it to you, I have tried to show you how vital it seemed to me to avoid, especially in my Exhibition, any connection whatever with the family name. It is twenty years now since I have called myself Gluck and made it what it is, an independent and not entirely unknown name.
As you well know, there will be innumerable press people about, and that’s the difficulty. You have been very sweet in wanting to help me as much as you can, but I have had repeatedly to refuse because no one can help me except in very small and personal ways, but now darling, I’m going to tell you frankly the ways you can help me. They are terribly important to me, though they may not seem so to you.
First of all, do remember to call me Hig instead of Hannah. It really worries me to think that at the Show, or any time we are with people, out will come the hated name. Do please make a tremendous effort for my sake.
Then I know you genuinely think it will help me to have some of the Royal Family at the show. For a very long time now, I have tried to tell you it is a matter of indifference to me about whether they come or not. Though you do not seem to realise it by your many remarks, my paintings have
nothing to do with royal patronage, but a good deal to do with Time! And Time is a dignified affair and does not truckle to temporary things. If you had been a personal friend of the Queen it would be different. Even Queen Mary is different because you have had some sort of connection with her, but for the others you would have to write explanatory letters and immediately the comment ‘why Gluck and Gluckstein’ would come up at once.
The Brookses I should like to meet, because they are nice people and are sweet to you. For no other reason at all. As they are not taking the Royalty matter out of your hands and you would have to do it all yourself, I really do not want you to. If you do, I don’t wish to hear another word about it, for to me it seems undignified, and we cannot run around explaining why I took the name of Gluck – and there it is!
I am putting all I have into this exhibition, every ounce of myself, and I do want to feel that you are in complete agreement with me, and not hindering me simply because I had not made everything clear to you. What I feel is that the people who come through knowing you with your name of Gluckstein can only be a source of danger and distress to me. Please try and see this, and when you send out the cards, do not put your name on as well as mine.
I am more than happy that you as my mother will be able to be at my show. You’ll look a knock out and I shall be very proud of you. But it must be as my mother and not as Mrs Gluckstein. D’you see?
Anyway, if you truly love me you will do this to help me and give in to my wishes, even though they may disappoint you, so please darling let me recapitulate them once more.
1. Unless the Brookses can hand my cards to the Queen or any members of the Royal Family in the ordinary way of friendship or acquaintance, do nothing about it.
2. When you come to the show, tell no one you are Mrs Gluckstein. Just tell them you are my mother. You will help the sale of my pictures more than you know, because then I shall not be labelled ‘rich amateur’ and your personality will not be swamped by the name either.
Gluck Page 12
