Gluck

by Diana Souhami

  Early in December 1939 she went to Chillington Hall, Wolverhampton, to do a portrait of Diana Giffard, who later married the MP Airey Neave.3 She travelled by train to Wolverhampton with all her gear and the Giffards met her at the station. ‘It looks a bit over life size’, Gluck wrote to her mother of the house. She described the Hall as a ‘bracing place 500 feet up’. Everything was on the grand scale. Even the private driveway was two miles long which played hell with the petrol ration and presented problems with the post. The place was so vast that footmen bicycled through the hallways from the servants’ quarters when the front doorbell rang, in order to arrive before visitors grew too disconsolate. A fire was lit for Gluck each night in her room. She slept well, enjoyed herself, worked hard, and thought the Giffards charming and sweet to her. ‘Last night they started to teach me to knit and we became nearly hysterical with laughter in the process. It’s rather fun.’ It was a pair of mittens on four needles. She did not get far, and Diana Giffard finished them and gave them to her for Christmas.

  Gluck worked out something of a formula for her commissioned, flat-fee portraits – a head and shoulders with an uncomplicated background took her two weeks. But now she again ran into problems with the quality of the canvas:

  Every day I do a tiring good day’s work and the next day it all looks as if water had run through sand. Nothing to show for it.… It’s one of the things I’ve got to settle when I get to London. I can’t go on like this any longer. This is the third experience and a new guaranteed canvas.… It has all taken at least four times as long.

  She was back in London in time to do her Christmas shopping at Whiteleys department store and to arrange for the transfer of her piano to Millers Mead. It was a snowy winter, the water pipes at the Mill House froze and the hens declined to lay. Gluck bought a flying suit so that she could work in the icy weather. ‘I just pull it on over very few clothes, zip it up and am so warm it’s almost too much. It looks very dashing so I feel quite smart at the same time.’

  She had collected together what she could of her world and brought it as close to Nesta’s as was possible. Close as this was, it was by no means as close as she had dreamed and hoped. But she believed, fatalistically, that things would work out as they must, and she was prepared to wait and see. She spent her fourth consecutive Christmas at Plumpton with Nesta, Seymour, the Villiers and the new addition, Zar. And on New Year’s Eve Nesta went over to Millers Mead. The two of them had supper together, danced and saw in the New Year. Nesta who had a bad cold left at 7.45 a.m. on New Year’s Day.

  TWELVE

  THE WAR EFFORT

  In March 1940 Gluck became ill. Love, for which she had burned her past and on which she had staked her future, was not working out. ‘Dearest Meteor,’ Nesta wrote (7 March 1949),

  Gluck had a most terrible brainstorm yesterday and tried to jab her wrist with a knife … she shouted and raged for an hour, in which time she called me a Liar, Callous, Selfish, had done nothing for her etc.… She put on her heavy flying suit when I went to take Zar for a walk and scared everyone by disappearing. I looked everywhere – even rushed the car to the Downs. It was nearly dark when I discovered her walking in the fields. She had been walking for an hour and was absolutely done. I’ve told the doctor he must be drastic. Of course you must know nothing … the more she works herself into these fits, the worse her heart will get.

  The year began peacefully enough for Gluck. Her first painting, to ‘christen’ her new studio, was an idealized drawing of Nesta’s head. She called it ‘Madonna’, or ‘Nativity’ and it speaks only of repose and love. With Gluck as her tutor, Nesta, too, set up a painting studio down at the Mill House. Grounded by the war, exotic travel and winter sports denied her, she turned for recreation to art. She proved a keen pupil and painting became a lifelong enthusiasm. She made no great claims for what she produced – Gluck in later years referred to her efforts as ‘daubings’ – but she had panache and was prolific. At some point one of her paintings was bought by the Los Angeles Gallery of Modern Art. Called ‘The Clutching Hands of Every Day’, it showed ‘nothing but hands writhing – holding one back from all things one wants to do!’ In a matter of months in 1940 she produced forty-five canvases, which she sold at an exhibition in the Reading Room of the Village Institute in Plumpton to raise money for the Red Cross. They were mainly landscapes and portraits and certainly free-flowing. ‘I am very proud of my pupil,’ wrote Gluck to the Meteor (18 September 1940), but she showed little interest in the exhibition and only went to it after Nesta criticized her for not doing so.

  The winter of 1939–40 was sufficiently cold to allow skating on a friend’s pond, a small compensation for being kept from the Alps. A hen laid the first egg – cracked – on 27 January 1940, the second – cracked – on the 29th, the third – cracked – on the 30th and the fourth – whole – on the 31st. Gluck again resolved to give up smoking, this time to pay for Zar’s food, a resolve she again did not keep. Requests for commissioned portraits continued to come in. The Maufes kept hoping for theirs, Ida Copeland, a former Unionist MP for Stokeon-Trent, a Commissioner for the Girl Guides and wife of the Director of Copeland China Works in Cornwall, asked Gluck to paint both her soldier sons before they were posted overseas. She lived in Truro and Diana Giffard and Christabel Pankhurst were staying with her in March 1940 when she was urging Gluck to ‘come without delay’. ‘She looks rather like an insignificant little black beetle,’ Diana Giffard wrote to Gluck of Christabel (18 March 1940), ‘I simply can’t imagine her chaining herself to lamp-posts and being sent to prison.’

  At Millers Mead Gluck was close to Nesta with enough work in the offing. The Meteor used her powers of persuasion on the Chief Petroleum Officer, Tunbridge Wells, to ensure her daughter’s ten-gallons-a-month ration got doubled so that she could motor with all her gear to fulfil her various commissions. But something was wrong with Gluck. She was suffering from what seem to have been anxiety attacks, her heart palpitating, worrying obsessively about practical matters, unable to get down to work.

  The catalyst to the outburst described by Nesta came in March 1940 with Gluck’s servants, the Fitzgeralds. They lived in and she paid them £120 a year for all general duties. On the morning of the 2nd March, after a fraught weekend of rows with the Meteor over business matters, she told Fitzgerald to clean the windows. He refused, saying the sun was on them. She asked if he was refusing to carry out her order and he replied, yes. She asked him to repeat this in front of Mrs Fitzgerald, which he did, adding a few unrecorded insults. The couple were out of the house by 2.30 p.m. The doctor was summoned. He ordered Gluck to bed, told her to forget about work and gave her Haverol Oil capsules and an injection of ‘one of those very good vaccines’ – a dubious medicinal concoction of arsenic and iron – ‘made by Allen & Hanbury, recommended for cases of this kind by Sir James Purves Stuart, the great nerve Consultant’. On Nesta’s recommendation, a resident nurse was brought in. ‘When I saw her I gave a gasp of joy’, Nesta wrote to the Meteor (9 March 1940). ‘… I knew Gluck would like her. Tall, iron grey hair, grey eyes and a strong quiet face. Took command quietly. Gluck obeyed like a lamb!’ The doctor wrote to the Meteor telling her not to visit her daughter who was ‘on the verge of a serious breakdown’, that her heart was feeble and intermitting and that were it not for the help and support of Mrs Obermer matters would be worse.

  The Meteor paid for the nurse – three guineas a week – sent down a revolving garden sun hut, large enough to take a day bed, put £1000 of Defence Bonds into Gluck’s account, paid a ten-shilling fine for her, incurred by driving through a red traffic light and wrote her sweet letters telling her to ‘forget about the war, the chickens, me and everybody’. Nesta organized replacement staff, looked after Gluck’s affairs and sent progress reports to the Meteor. Perhaps Gluck courted such responses to her neediness. But her illness was real enough. The upheaval of war and relinquishing Bolton House had left her insecure, and moving to Millers Mead, just down th
e road from Nesta emphasized how close to her she was, but showed also that she had scant hope of getting closer.

  Gluck stayed in bed for a month and wrote notes collected in a folder called ‘Book’ about her theories of painting – about being true to vision, receptive to the identity of the subject painted and painstaking in the execution of work. Though repetitive and oratorical – she urges her reader never to work simply for money or in a way that feels compromised or false – the core of her ideas (see pages 42, 54, 89 and 192) is profound and heartfelt.

  She cancelled the Copeland portrait, which would have brought her in a hundred guineas, and went instead, after a month of complete rest, to Bournemouth for a week in April 1940 with Nesta and Mrs Sawyer. In her diary she noted seeing a rainbow, reading Blake, restful days and not sleeping well when she and Nesta were given hotel rooms on different floors.

  By June she felt strong enough for what was intended to be the first of three portraits, husband, wife and son, of the Maufes. ‘Three small portraits to go with their family ones – one of the most honouring commissions I have ever received.’1 She began with Edward. The other two did not get done. Though Maufe had won the competition for Guildford Cathedral in 1931, the foundation stone was not laid until 1936. The war then put a stop to building, and the Cathedral was not consecrated until 1961. Gluck used his winning signed sketch as the background ‘brainwave’ to her picture and shows him drawing the plan of the cathedral on his worktable. She captured his tall, willowy elegance and episcopal looks. He and Prudence were accomplished dancers and he was said to be charming, exquisitely mannered and shy. The joke ran that he was so shy that on arriving at a party and announcing ‘I’m Maufe’, his host’s reply was ‘what already?’ After Maufe, Gluck painted a delicate flower piece – white convolvulus in a stemmed glass. It took her five weeks of solid work. The flowers wilted within hours and she scoured the hedgerows for replacements. She painted it in the summer of 1940 at the time of the blitz on Britain, air raids and dog fights in the sky. She regarded it as one of her best flower paintings. It was bought by the owner of Millers Mead, a Colonel Hale, whose son eventually took it with him to Rhodesia.

  Though uprooted and unsettled by the war, Gluck was neither deflected from her artistic vision nor made afraid. ‘People say to me, “what dreadful times to live in …” I don’t think so. They are inspiring and spiritual times, earthly and material values not meaning a damn thing any more, because they are so insecure.’ She saw an enemy plane brought down in flames over the downs, heard the ‘goings on’ of bombing all around, and went to air-raid practice, a first-aid course, and jam-making mornings at the Village Institute. The hens went broody and supplied her with twenty-seven chicks and the bees seemed regularly to sting her and Nesta, but provided them with honey too. Rabbits were added to the home farm, eggs pickled, vegetables bottled. The next set of servants, the Uptons, left at a moment’s notice, but somehow replacements were again soon found. Gluck trained as an emergency ambulance driver and volunteered to house a pilot for forty-eight hours’ leave twice a month – no pilots appeared. When in September 1940 she heard of the death of John Boughey she drove straight over to ‘Mailing’ to be with his family. They are thankful they have the portrait,’ she wrote to her mother,

  but I now feel if only I had the tongue of an angel … I did my best, and if it wasn’t worthy of the full greatness of the boy, at least it got something of his quality. I cannot bear to think of it and I feel so sad and unhappy for his wonderful and lovely family.

  She tried to work as if nothing was wrong. A war she thought just was being fought, but it was not her war. And behind the self-sufficiency – the hens, the rabbits, the bees – a kind of personal loneliness was compounding. Her relationships with her constantly changing staff seemed to worsen. She watched them like a hawk and criticized their every move. Time after time they left hurriedly after explosive scenes. It was a roll call of disaster. After the Uptons came the Burdens, who left amid scenes with her and the police. Then Mr Williams, Mrs Stevens, Miss Scott, Margaret, and Beatrice who stole some onions and silver and was at once dismissed. Then Mr Holloway who got an ulcer, ended up in Chailey Hospital and was viewed with suspicion by Gluck’s Dr Richards. He wrote to her (6 February 1941):

  This man’s a damn sight too psalmy for my liking … for an out of the way place like Chailey and Plumpton there have been an enormous number of bombs dropped and I do know the police are on the look-out for suspicious people in that neighbourhood, although the railway has been suggested as a possible cause.

  Then Miss Ward, followed by Mrs Drury, both of whom stuck it for a week. Then Mrs Payne, Mrs Richards who suffered from hysterical symptoms of tightness in the throat, and her son whom Gluck helped with his spelling, Mrs Beard, Mrs Dennett, Mrs Facey, Paula, Mrs Caspell, who was not a good cook and cried all day after Nesta gave her a dressing down, Isobel, Dora, Mrs Reed, Miss Foster – all fled or were fired with indecent speed.

  Nor was Gluck managing with Zar. He took to disappearing for hours at a time and would show up three miles away or go down to the Mill House for the night. She punished him by withholding his food or ignoring him, which did not make him a more obedient dog. And worst, and at root, there were cracks in her relationship with Nesta. They were lovers in the afternoons or in hotels. They always saw the old year out together and the New Year in (in 1940 Nesta arrived at Millers Mead on her bicycle at 10.30 on New Year’s Eve and at midnight they had oysters and champagne), but she seldom slept at Millers Mead, Gluck now had no excuse for staying at the Mill House and the Love to all Eternity of 1936 seemed far away.

  Gluck went on producing good work though she took to spending longer on each picture. The deadline of an exhibition or the pressure of a commissioned portrait made her paint quickly. Left to herself she worked with a sense of timelessness and with exquisite precision. To visitors to her studio, she would show, under a magnifying glass, the silken undersides of petals of flowers painted in six colours with brushes pared to a few hairs. A painting of violets, begun in November 1940, took her about seven months. The villagers of Plumpton came to see it when it was done. The Bougheys commissioned it and paid her a hundred guineas. She described her ‘vision’ of its shape – a votive offering in a bronze vase, formal in composition, clean and cool in colour, the violets wiry and strong despite their delicacy.

  After ‘Violets’ came a tangle of pink convolvulus and grasses. Called ‘Pleiades’, it is a small piece, 19 × 24 cm. She worked out of doors, crouching for hours over the same patch of weeds, until her back ached and her hands, already showing signs of the arthritis that bent her frame in later years, got cramp. It is rich in hidden detail. The grasshopper on a leaf and the drops of dew on a web come as a suprise. The tangle of leaves gives a sense of cover, of life going on in the dark world beneath what is seen. As in ‘Noel’, she created order, rhythm and harmony out of seeming disorder. She worked again at it in June, July and August 1942 – ‘N. comes at 3.15 and leaves at 3.50. Very depressed and find gossamer very difficult to do.’ was her diary entry for 26 July 1942. She lamented to her mother:

  … if I don’t get it done before September is over I am dished – and there are two waiting prospective purchasers. Anyway I am not anxious to face it again a third year and the work in it is terrific. I can only do very little every day and it is a great strain on the eyes. It is certainly going to be worth it when finished, but when will it ever be finished!? 2

  She did face it for a third year and finally finished it, or at least let it be, in August 1943.

  Early in 1942 she did a commissioned portrait, ‘George Hardinge Esq.’ He lived nearby at a house called Sheffield Park and liked bridge, billiards, the races and the Church. He was a difficult sitter and she had problems in getting canvas and paints of decent quality. He got very tired, and as one of the sittings was on a Sunday, went off to church for a couple of hours in the middle of it. In his portrait he looks difficult and Old School, his collar sta
rched and white and his moustache and what is left of his hair, neatly groomed. He looks well cared for though, no doubt by Mrs Hardinge, who provided Gluck with supper and champagne and showed her round the garden.

  Gluck met him through her association with the Sussex Churches Art Council. The Bishop of Chichester, President of the Council, officiated at the Thanksgiving Service and lunch, given in Gluck’s and Nesta’s honour, in the Chapel of the Heritage Craft Schools, Chailey, in gratitude for the money they raised from the Exhibition of Royal Furniture in 1939. Each Christmas the two women went to a service at Chailey Chapel and sat in the front pew with the Schools’ founder, Dame Elizabeth Kimmins. In 1942, the Bishop, impressed by Gluck’s painting, social connections and ability as a fund-raiser, invited her to become an executive member of the Council committee. Duncan Grant and Edward Maufe were on it. It aimed, grandly, for the fusion of art and the Church which existed in the middle ages.

  Gluck had cast off her Jewish background (her brother was President of the Liberal Synagogue in St John’s Wood). She believed though that the true artist was a servant of God and she wrote several poems on this theme:

  Let me be pure of heart

  And always ready to receive all beauty.

  As stretches of unbroken sand

  Are patterned by the mighty sea,

  So let my soul be graven by Thy hand,

  And let all beauty print its shapes in me.

  Let my ears ever like the twisty shell

  Be tuned to all sweet harmonies,

  And Lord give me the power to give

  Thy gifts to others, so they too may live.3

  She accepted the Bishop’s invitation with excitement and wrote to him (5 March 1942) of ‘the vital need to mankind of the arts and the artist’s vision’. ‘We are going to prevent the hideous things that have been allowed to ruin so many lovely buildings and going to raise the standard of taste in towns and villages’ she told Mrs Bromley-Martin, a wealthy lover of Art and God, urging her to take out a seven-year covenant.4