Gluck

by Diana Souhami

  Gluck did advisory work, submitted designs, recommended other artists and exhorted those she knew – such as ‘Golly’ Yglesias, a Basque painter in Lamorna, and later Edmund Dulac – to contribute designs of tryptyches and madonnas, for the love of God and very little money. Through her working association with the Council Chairman, Bertram Nicholls, who lived in Steyning, about ten miles from Plumpton, Gluck first established contact with that town. In 1945 it became her home and remained so until she died.

  Gluck would show her paintings when she finished them to the Plumpton villagers. Early in November 1942, forty-nine people came up to Millers Mead to see a small landscape of Blackdown, the highest point in Sussex. Edith and Nora Heald, who lived in the Chantry House, Steyning, journeyed over specially. Nora was editor of The Lady and Edith, her younger sister, a wellknown journalist. They spent three hours with Gluck and she described it as ‘a good quiet time’. This was the beginning of her friendship with Edith, with whom she was soon to live for the rest of her life. Nesta had a bad boil and was in bed all day, so Gluck took the picture down to show her at the Mill House after the sisters left.

  Gluck disliked abstraction and ‘isms’ in art. She showed her work only in solo exhibitions and shunned comparison with other painters. She saw no anomaly in painting convolvulus with the sound of air raids blasting in the distance. She was unafraid of death and unswerving in her painting style. ‘If you honestly have the sort of vision that sees blue and pink trees or whatever the diversion might be’ she wrote in her ‘Book’,

  then go to it. If you don’t it is as if seeing the truth you preferred to tell a lie.… When I look at some of these patchy, painty modern landscapes I get the strong sensation of the painter having worked as hurriedly as he could to remove any suspicion that he could be guilty of such a solecism as to see a tree as a tree. The oak must bend to the blast of his ‘ism’ or snap. It usually snaps.

  So, while Graham Sutherland painted red landscapes and black landscapes, David Bomberg mauve and orange landscapes and underground bomb stores, Henry Moore frail figures sheltering from bombs in underground shelters and Paul Nash bleak, unpeopled, desolate warscapes, Gluck painted the most shortlived of wild flowers, violets and convolvulus, and the people whom she knew. It was her personal world beyond the reach of politics. The war went on outside as Virginia Woolf, living a few miles away at Lewes, noted in her diary: ‘“They’re at it again” we say as we sit, I doing my work, Leonard making cigarettes. Now and then there’s a thud. The windows shake. So we know London is raided again.’5

  Gluck was no pacifist. She wanted to make a contribution to the ‘war effort’. Kenneth Clark, then Director of the National Gallery, thought she might work for the War Artists Committee which, financed by the Ministry of Information, gave commissions to artists for war paintings. ‘In her Brueghel manner,’ he wrote to Wilfrid Greene (2 May 1942) who was asking about canvases for her, ‘there might be many scenes of war-time life that would be valuable to us.’ He also wrote directly to her (2 June 1942) suggesting that her crowd scenes would be appropriate or a scene inside a British restaurant. Gluck wanted such commissions and sent off photographs of her work for the Committee’s scrutiny: ‘I am interested in rough working types,’ she wrote to Clark, ‘or as seen in contrast with others of a different class. I do not know what part of the war effort might give this, nor if it would be possible for me to get a permit to see the more dramatic type of war factory or docks, such as have, for instance, very large machinery that dwarf the figures serving there.’

  The Committee did not employ her, but sent her a general permit for sketching freely out of doors. She travelled no further for inspiration than the nearby Home Guard canteen. In ‘Canteen, Plumpton’ soldiers drink tea, play billiards, smoke and lounge around in the cold. For another picture Gluck went to the Women’s Institute, Plumpton, and painted the awesome respectability of certain county women in ‘In England’s Green and Pleasant Land’. The thickankled conductor has split her seams trying unsuccessfully to inspire her impassive choir with Blake’s Jerusalem. In front of them lie cups of tea, the true focus of their vision, and on the walls behind them a map of the war-torn world. Gluck’s society portraits and paintings of the Cochran reviews linked her work to the twenties, and her white flowers to the thirties. These Home Guard scenes capture something of the local spirit of villagers during the war years.

  The last painting which linked directly with Nesta’s life was of her mother, Ethel Sawyer. Gluck’s second picture of her showed her as she lay dying in 1943. The next year Gluck and Nesta were to part. The painting was the flip side of the YouWe profile. Resemblance between mother and daughter is strong, but now the eyes are closed, the face tired of life, creased with pain, all vision gone. Somewhere in Gluck’s psyche it had registered that Eternity in love is hard to find. ‘Nothing but happy pictures since YouWe’, she had written to Nesta in 1936. Seven years later she was painting the death of her lover’s mother.

  THIRTEEN

  THE WAR WITHIN

  Gluck’s personal battle, during the war years, was with her trustees over the management of her affairs. She wanted autonomy and to handle her own money. There was nothing she hated more than being told what to do and when to do it. She presented herself as a man, a person of power, authority and strength. To The Family this was a masquerade. She was a woman, a girl, and by their social definition dependent and with no authority. From her father’s point of view, when he drew up the terms of her inheritance, she was his difficult and rebellious daughter. He wished to ensure that she would always have a roof over her head and adequate funds which she could not squander. Had she been, in the accepted sense of the term, a conforming man, as his eldest child she would have been a member of The Fund and a director of the business. As it was she had to defer to her brother, her cousin Sir Samuel Gluckstein and her mother. It strained her relationship with them all.

  The trustees agreed to the rent of Millers Mead when Bolton House was commandeered in September 1939. But the Auxiliary Fire Service moved out in July 1941, stopped paying rent to Gluck and left her again responsible for the rates. Left empty, the house suffered. Rainwater seeped in because the gutters were blocked with leaves. The whole place needed extensive repairs and there was a wrangle between Gluck, her Trustees and the Fire Service, about who should pay.

  In the thick of the war, Gluck was responsible for the upkeep of three houses, income tax was ten shillings in the pound and her net monthly income had been substantially cut. Her cousin, Sir Samuel Gluckstein, one of her trustees, urged her to limit her expenditure to the absolute minimum. ‘I am not endeavouring to read you a lecture’, he wrote (while doing just that), ‘but I am endeavouring to help you to avoid getting into financial distress.’ (30 July 1941)

  Her mother and brother were deeply involved in the war effort. The Meteor, awarded the MBE in the First World War for her work for Belgian refugees, again immersed herself in the fight for right. Frugality came easily to her. She closed up her flat in London, put her belongings in store, and lived in one room in the Cumberland Hotel, snatching meals as and when she could. (She lost two-and-a-half stone in the war years.) During the blitz she slept on a camp bed in the hotel corridor. For economy’s sake, she used scrap paper for writing letters. Her chauffeur went to make aeroplane parts, so she garaged her Rolls-Royce, handed in her petrol coupons and travelled by bus. She continued her work as a Justice of the Peace and worked avidly for charity. In London War Weapons Week she personally collected £27,000 in five days. Her son, now a Major after active service in France, worked in the army legal service and continued as an MP. He was intensely patriotic, an uncompromising negotiator and a hard-liner who was on Hitler’s death list in the event of German invasion. He advocated ‘blunt methods’ of reprisal bombing and opposed the notion that some towns and cities should be spared. At home he did a great deal to organize the reconstruction of the lives of refugee children. Neither he nor the Meteor wanted to spend
much time corresponding with Gluck about her rent and rates.

  The Fund made its discretionary decisions about financial help for the family in an ad hoc, democratic way. In the war years Gluck was overdrawing on her allowance by some £100 a year which invited consternation and reproof from the Trustees – and worried her too. ‘My finances are a little on the wrong side,’ she wrote to her mother (1 June 1942). She was genuinely unclear quite what her responsibility was over the upkeep of Bolton House. To boost her income, she wanted to put the furniture in store – if the house was empty, she was absolved from paying rates – and let it for the duration of the war. She wanted to keep on the studio in case she got commissions in London. The Trustees, or her brother certainly, doubted that she would use the studio until the war was over, advised her to save money by storing the furniture in the studio gallery and foresaw further problems if the house was let. Gluck wrote endless letters, with carbon copies to all and sundry, in part businesslike, true and accurate over detail, in part reflecting her current emotional hurt and insecurity and in part aggravating old wounds and resentments:

  December 13th, 1941

  My dear Luigi

  You wrote to me in December l938 as follows: –

  ‘You have been told many times that there is no income apart from the Trust Funds available for the maintenance of Bolton House and your other properties. If the total income is paid to you, you must be responsible for the upkeep.’

  You wrote on December 5th 1941 that: –

  ‘As the Trustees are responsible for the condition of the property, the Schedule of Dilapidations is their concern and I accordingly do not propose “to instruct Trevors to let you see it at once”.’

  Though your use of the word responsible appears to be haphazard, and these two statements taken together appear contradictory, there is no doubt from your 1938 letter that I am expected to pay for the upkeep of Bolton House as my responsibility and as accounts I have had to pay prove; but from your letter of 1941 I am to gather that despite having to pay, I am not to be allowed to see that for which I am paying. The Schedule of Dilapidations, having direct connection with the upkeep of Bolton House, is very much my concern as well as that of the Trustees, and there cannot be any valid reason for refusing me sight of it.

  I had to struggle for four years from 1934–1938 before getting a yearly statement of my financial position. My reason for wanting this statement was the same as for my requests now, to enable me to arrange my life with complete knowledge of my affairs. The Statement should have been a matter of routine and ought never to have become, as it did, a matter of lies, intimidation and a cause for grievance on the part of the Trustees against me …

  The Meteor sent her a great deal of maternal advice, most of which went unheeded. ‘I cannot,’ she wrote (25 May 1942),

  either understand or cope with this continual correspondence with copy letters to Louis and Mr Dyer, but I would like to make this perfectly clear … Today everybody’s income has been reduced to exactly half … If you were to write a thousand letters you would not alter this, and I do think, in these very strenuous, nerve racking days, the less correspondence you and anyone has the better … I am sure if you and Louis met more often there would be greater mutual respect and understanding instead of this continual waste of time and letters. You were always very devoted to each other … I do not get younger and these things make me very unhappy.

  Sir Samuel was short-tempered with her, called her Hannah, and treated her like a difficult child. He wrote with a truth untempered by tact to her mother (8 January 1942) ‘she must be made to understand that she cannot carry the burden of three establishments plus storage, contrary to the advice of her Trustees, and expect that she is going to be free from anxiety.’ Her brother tried to avoid replying directly to her about her affairs, and when forced to do so, was curt and to the point. He warned that ‘a final breach between us must follow’ unless she changed her tack. ‘The word “final” astonishes me,’ she replied (20 May 1942), ‘as I did not know any breach existed. In any case I cannot see why a breach should occur as a result of letters asking reasonable questions upon Trust matters that affect my income.’ All three of her Trustees thought she was being impossible and wasting their time in the middle of a world war. Her mother tried to be placatory, generous and helpful, but irritation kept creeping in. Her brother was totally out of temper with her and her cousin, dismissive. ‘I am really very sorry for you and Louis,’ he wrote to the Meteor (16 December 1941).

  The whole atmosphere became electric with bad feeling. Gluck, while purporting to want only the facts and autonomy over her own affairs, wrote of mishandling of affairs, unfriendly and unconstructive letters and of attitudes that were ‘inimical and trampling’. ‘If,’ she wrote to her brother (13 December 1941),

  your interpretation of your functions of a Trustee and as representing the other Trustees, is to continue to obstruct every request I make, to instruct your agents to do likewise and to adopt a carping attitude towards me, such as assuming knowledge of my lack of participation in the war effort when you know nothing about my life, then I can only say that I find living under such conditions intolerable, and will consider myself free to act in the future in accordance with the situation you will have forced on me.

  Her mother kept asking her to meet and talk things over amicably rather than to write endless pernickety letters. Gluck had employed a secretary, a Mr Stanley – another expense – to deal with the voluminous correspondence she generated. When Gluck, her mother and her brother did meet to talk about Bolton House, at the Trocadero on 6 August 1941, they rowed horribly. Referring to the meeting four months later, Gluck wrote to her mother (9 December 1941): ‘This talk was of a nature so disgusting and shocking to me that it became clear that I cannot discuss any matters connected with my Trust affairs without a witness and a shorthand writer being present.’

  The more she ignored the Trustees’ recommendations which were sharp, but not punitive – such as that she should store her furniture in the studio gallery to save paying rates on the house – and went her own way, the more implacable and unsympathetic they became. The more obsessive and demanding her letter writing, the more she was stonewalled. By 1942 communication had reached such an impasse that it was difficult to see how any of it could be put right. The sub-text was far too complicated. She could not have said that she wanted to keep Bolton House studio uncluttered because it was her special space, or that love had gone wrong and left her feeling lonely, powerless and dependent, or that it galled her not to be treated like a man, when she was by no means a typical woman, or that she did not know where quite to call her home. She tried to present herself to the Trustees as a force to be reckoned with, high on principle, a hard negotiator, an homme d’affaires, the master of her fate and the captain of her soul. The wrangle happened at a time when she was suffering acutely from disappointed love. It soured her feelings about Bolton House and she was never to return there.

  I cannot be expected to take an interest in the property when I am refused information with regard to its upkeep and my liabilities in connection with it.… were Father alive today, which unfortunately he is not, he would have been the first to welcome my interest in the subject and my desire to get it straight.1

  Worries about love exacerbated Gluck’s combativeness. After five years of so-called marriage, in 1941, she was chronicling in her diaries Nesta’s daily news as if it were her own. Nesta’s visits to Brighton, sore throats, colds, headaches and lumbago, her badminton games with Seymour, the day she lost her dog Mr Chips in Brighton, lunches with her mother, dinner guests, broadcasts, poetry readings and charity commitments were noted down as if indivisible from Gluck’s own activities and concerns. And as time went on she took to recording, with obsessive precision, the hours they did or did not spend together. Nesta was travelling the country talking at Women’s Institute and Red Cross meetings on Anglo-American relations. ‘Wings for Victory’ was one of her talks. Sh
e saw less of Gluck whose diary entries became a litany of pain: ‘Do not see N. all day.’ ‘N. comes to see me 4.20 to 5.30.’ ‘N. dashes in for a second on way to Lewes.’ ‘No letter from N. Very unhappy about it all.’ ‘N. comes from 11.30–12.30. Lay in hut and read Chinese poems. Got very upset by them.’ ‘N only came in for ten minutes. Very short. Was most depressed by her. She went to Boo for day. Came to see me however at 8 pm for few minutes. Was very sweet then.’ ‘N. comes 6.30 but only for 1/4 hr.’

  When, in 1941, Nesta went to Newcastle for ten days and Gluck received only four letters, three phone calls and a telegram, she became extraordinarily miserable and depressed. ‘Send telegram. “Plus que moi” etc.’, she recorded. And she wrote poetry that reflected her hurt – sonnets in Shakespearean style:

  I heard the sea and the incoming tide,

  I felt your heartbeats throb against my own.

  I thought I held you fast … but from my side

  I found that you and all delights had flown.

  Then I remembered how you lay at rest,

  And heard the gulls cry in the tremulous day

  I saw your dear hair tumbled on your breast

  And languorous vigour of your darling clay.

  And how your eyes, as you lay quietly sleeping

  Were shadowed by one graceful arm flung wide,

  The passionate night your gentle form belying …

  Oh God must I forever be denied

  Such life with you – Must we forever part

  And I go lonely, with an aching heart.

  Nesta’s absences highlighted how isolated Gluck was in Plumpton. This was her exclusive relationship. She had staked everything on it and it was not so much going wrong, as not going anywhere. Her life in the thirties in Hampstead had been social and fast. As time went on at Millers Mead she dined more often than not alone. Few people visited her in an everyday way. Seymour, if he came to pick up Nesta, did not come in. Craig stayed with her for a month or so in November 1943, but Gluck was horribly nervy with her and burst out about how hopeless everything seemed. When the Meteor visited for weekends she and Gluck argued constantly about the Trust. On several occasions Gluck wrote to her mother not to discuss business matters when they met; all that, she said, could be dealt with in writing and she wanted to preserve their relationship apart from the Trust. But the subject was too pressing to avoid.