Gluck

by Diana Souhami

  Gluck noted down her profound worries with a cool regard for the truth. This was how it was. She wished for things to be different but did not know what to do. It was not the world war that threatened her. She bought blackout paint for the windows, walked to see bodies brought from a German plane shot down less than a mile away, and did not wake when nearby aerodromes were bombed at night. Her worries were about love, money and where she could call home. She was abstracted and lost things – the cigarette case Nesta gave her, her lighter, her shooting-stick, her fountain pen. Dr Richards warned her to be very careful. And she did a self-portrait of herself looking for all the world like the Duke of Wellington, arrogant, combative to a hostile world, allied to masculinity as a definition of hardness and pride. This was not at all the cheeky chappy of her 1926 self-portrait, and not at all the face of a person who would write again and again in her diary, as she did, ‘no telephone calls, no letters, terribly upset about it all’.

  Though on a crucial level she was unhappy, life was not all gloom. She had a distractable disposition and quick-changing moods and if fun was on offer, she liked to have it. There were still with Nesta the games of badminton, shared walks on the Downs, times spent reading aloud in the hut: Paradise Lost or Moby Dick, Yeats, Blake and Plato; or listening to music, or singing duets, or sunbathing in the nude – though the fads of sailing, skating and riding had faded forever. Often enough she would note, disarmingly, ‘a lovely day’. Her good friends were there though it is doubtful how much they knew of her problems. When in February 1941 she was both feeling miserable and having problems with staff, which meant that she had to make her own tea and feed the chickens, Noel Boughey phoned her every evening to see how she was getting on. Gluck stayed with Wilfrid and Nancy Greene at their wartime home, ‘Wilderness’, in Holmbury St Mary, near Dorking, messed about in the garden, listened to Haydn and Beethoven on their gramophone and went with them to tea with Max Beerbohm and his wife and had a happy time.

  It was not that Nesta neglected Gluck for long or was ever angry with her in other than a passing way. It was simply that she did not have the disposition for exclusivity. Years later she talked of ‘the tyranny of friendship’.2 She knew that she drew problematic people to her, and then could not be the answer they desired. She was so much the opposite of Gluck, which was perhaps where attraction lay – so unobsessive, easy with people and physically fearless. She believed in Gluck’s exceptional talent, gave what she could and wanted her to be happy. Each Christmas she bought her a diary and inscribed it with all hope for the coming days. ‘To my Tim’ she wrote in Gluck’s 1943 diary ‘with so many large hopes that the days be filled with large joys (and small too) small as Tiny Tim’. Gluck would always drop work to have time with Nesta. She resented interruptions from others and longed for them from her. As the war went on, Nesta took on more and more speaking engagements and, as suited her, travelled the country – often on her motorbike. She had been awarded an OBE in the first war for similar charitable works. She resisted telling Gluck her every move and to Gluck such evasions were betrayal and lies. Gluck was again having arsenic and iron injections and taking sleeping pills. But her true drug was her moments with Nesta. Those moments elated her, she deflated when they passed.

  By April 1943 Gluck seemed thoroughly depressed and discordant. With ever-changing help in the house and her smallholding now sizeable, she had to do more chores herself. On Good Friday she parted with Zar with whom she clearly was not coping: ‘Very upsetting day. Zar’s last day. Very unhappy. Did not work. Difficult day.’ she recorded. A fortnight later the kennels phoned to say that he was ill and should be destroyed. ‘Zar put to sleep’ was her diary entry for 7 June 1943. The settled life he was supposed to symbolize and be part of had never come about.

  She completed work, in a sporadic way, on ‘Jerusalem’, ‘Pleiades’, two small landscapes and a triptych for the Sussex Council of Churches. In connection with her work for the Council, she made several trips to Steyning to see the Chairman, Bertram Nicholls. On those trips she visited the Heald sisters at the Chantry House. She lunched with them, sometimes stayed overnight and met their friends, the fashion editor, Alison Settle, the writer and editor of the London Mercury, Rolfe Scott-James and his wife Violet. Nora Heald, then in her early sixties, was editor of The Lady and stayed most of the week in London in a flat above the offices. Edith worked from home. She was fifty-eight, ten years older than Gluck, when they met in 1943. A friendship started, shaped by mutual need. Edith had had a close relationship with the poet W. B. Yeats and was desolate when he died in 1939. She and Gluck looked at books, listened to music, visited Chichester Cathedral and then Edith stayed at Millers Mead. They walked in the woods and Gluck missed her when she left. It was respite from her desperation over Nesta. She saw Nesta on Christmas Eve 1943, the atmosphere was sad and she went to the Chantry House for the holiday – the first time in eight years that she had spent Christmas apart from her ‘darling wife’.

  Gluck held an exhibition of her paintings in Steyning Grammar School in February 1944. Edith helped her set it up, and they had lunch and tea together and looked at books on Rembrandt. Edith was sympathetic to her unhappiness and arranged distractions. They went to Brighton for a week and stayed at the Beauport Park Hotel. Gluck bought a Redouté watercolour of pansies and they had tea in the Pavilion. They visited Winchester and Rye, Hastings and Battle. Nesta phoned Gluck in her hotel room most nights.

  On a sunny weekend in May, when Nora was away, Gluck stayed at the Chantry House alone with Edith. They read in the garden and in the evening danced. Gluck began a portrait of her, of which there is now no trace. She struggled with it for weeks, scraping out the face and beginning again and again. Edith made frequent trips to the Millers Mead studio for sittings and they sat up late talking and listening to the gramophone. Clifford Musgrave, Director of the Brighton Art Gallery, was impressed by the picture: ‘It is very true and has an inner life of its own, the sort of phantasmal quality of some Chinese paintings. What a task it must have been building up the surface!’3 He asked Gluck to exhibit her paintings in the Gallery’s autumn exhibition.

  Gluck took to spending most days and nights at the Chantry House. Edith’s war contribution was to serve as a fire warden in Steyning and Gluck started another painting of her at work in the makeshift office, dozing over a book at 1.30 a.m. They had quiet, consoling times together. On the last Saturday of June 1944 both Nora and Edith stayed at Millers Mead and asked Gluck if she would like to come and live with them and paint in one of the cottages on the estate. Gluck sat alone from midnight until three in the morning pondering the invitation and the next day said yes. The following week Edith invited her to go on holiday to Lyme in Dorset in August with her to meet her friends Edmund Dulac and Helen Beauclerck. Nesta was jealous and distraught. ‘N arrives at 5.10 pm has tea with me. Offers* but I say no.’ In tears about it all, Nesta went alone for a day to Newhaven, to walk by the sea. When Nora and Edith came the next day to stay at Millers Mead, Nesta rode up on her motorbike after midnight, put notes under the door for Edith and Gluck, and phoned in the small hours of the morning.

  There were scenes and there were tears. ‘I am very nervy and cannot decide about going to Steyning’ Gluck noted in her diary, weeks after having said she would go. She told Nesta all she felt. Nesta took off her ‘wedding’ ring, then later put it on again. On the day before Gluck left for Dorset with Edith, she and Nesta had a ‘pretend’ birthday – Gluck would be forty-nine on her holiday.

  The problem was of course that she was in love with Nesta and it was an unshakeable fact. The holiday was not an unqualified success. Edith caught a cold, Gluck had a fainting turn and headaches and got a boil in her ear. All she noted of Dulac was when he had a headache and when at dinner he made a perfectly shaped duck from a pellet of bread. He did, though, draw up Gluck’s horoscope. Like Yeats he was interested in things occult, though his analysis of her work seems to have more to do with simple opinion than th
e stars:

  … The Flower pieces are herself at her best – her happiest, most detached mood. Neither passion nor protest intervene directly.

  The portraits come next. Her sitters have some of the objective values of flowers for pattern making but the externals of dress, likeness etc, impose themselves upon subjective direction and control.… The landscapes represent the Romantic escape. The arrangements are 90% subjective … Composition and design are very strongly biased by romantic emotion.

  Relief from ‘conflict’ expressed in terms of more or less obvious caricature she gets from her ‘character scenes’. The less detached her emotions are the less she allows facts and objects to collaborate.

  … while she is exceptionally gifted to deal with her emotions there is somewhere a hiatus … independence has led her to a blank wall and she doesn’t know how to get through it …

  Helen Beauclerck, with whom Dulac lived, pronounced it ‘a not very lucky horoscope, but most interesting’.

  Gluck was extremely pleased to be met by Nesta at Plumpton station three weeks later. As soon as she got back, and in the middle of all her frayed and confused feelings, Wilfrid Greene gave her a commission which she could not, out of friendship, refuse. He was resigning as Principal of the Working Men’s College, after years of service, and had been asked to present a drawing of himself to the College.

  I would not want to be drawn by anyone but you … and I am writing to know whether (1) you would honour me by accepting the commission and (2) whether you would please us by coming to stay here for a few days and then and there accomplishing it …4

  When she arrived at his house ‘The Wilderness’ in Dorking, Rayner Goddard, who became Chief Justice two years later, was staying too. She thought him very nice and both he and Lord Greene were enthusiastic about the drawing she did and they all made large bonfires together in the garden.

  Her peace and concentration were broken by a phone call to ‘The Wilderness’ from Edith. She was in great distress because Nesta had gone to see Nora in London and ‘been beastly’ about Gluck. Nora had then had a row with Edith – presumably about the impending move. Nesta phoned Gluck too but made no mention of the visit.

  On 6 October Gluck moved into the Chantry House. It was understandable but it was to prove most damaging. She went there largely because she did not know where else to go or what to do. Her suffering because of love took away her confidence and happiness. She had declared her love so often, so passionately and wholeheartedly. It was not independence that led her to a blank wall but a broken heart. And her painting suffered. She faded from the public eye and produced very little. Others were to suffer too, including Edith. It is hard to be on the receiving end of a rebound from such love. Unlike Nesta, Gluck could not let go – not of things, not of arguments, nor issues, nor the past. In old age she wrote of her YouWe days in a shaky hand:

  Count not the years

  The laughter or the tears

  What was, still is, and ever shall so be;

  Count only this – my heart belongs to thee.

  Sentiments that she stored within her, like letters in a shoebox.

  PART THREE

  THE FACTS OF LIFE

  1945–1978

  FOURTEEN

  THE ETERNAL TRIANGLE

  In Steyning Gluck moved into an established home. The Heald sisters, Nora and Edith Shackleton, bought the Chantry House in February 1934 when Edith was forty-nine and Nora was fifty-one. They intended well-earned, elegant country living for their middle age. The house was empty, near-derelict and covered in ivy with broken windows and leaking roofs and the gardens were overgrown. They rented a place nearby, Smugglers Cottage, and worked at Chantry’s complete renovation. The original sixteenth-century building had been the home of priests from the chantry chapel in Steyning Church. It was enlarged in the style of a Georgian country house in the early eighteenth century. Nora and Edith opened it up and made it light and warm. They took out the back staircase, put in new walls, windows and floors, ripped out the old larders, had a new kitchen built, new bathrooms, a new roof. They moved in at the end of May 1934. ‘Tidy at last’ was the caption in their photograph album for the ‘before and after’ transformation of the house. They took with them their antique furniture, paintings, glassware, rare carpets, rugs, ceramics, books, and huge collection of gramophone records. By summer Mr Hole, the gardener, was gathering figs and pears from the pruned fruit trees in the now orderly walled orchard.

  Nora spent week nights in London in a flat above The Lady offices, Edith worked from home. There were house parties most weekends where the conversation, food and wine were reputed to be good. Edith complained that most of the household decisions were left to her, but there were servants to do the chores and it was to all appearances a harmonious and enjoyable life. They took frequent holidays together, motoring in Europe, chauffeured by their nephew Ivan, staying in inns and sightseeing.

  Both sisters were successful and highly respected journalists at a time when it was exceptional for women to have such careers. Edith began, in the early 1900s, as a freelancer with stories in the Manchester Sunday Chronicle, where her brother Ivan was assistant editor. She used her mother’s name, Shackleton. (The family was distantly related to Ernest Shackleton, the antarctic explorer.) By her early twenties Edith was a special correspondent on Beaverbrook’s London Evening Standard – she was the first woman to go into the Press gallery at the House of Lords and she covered events in Paris during the First World War, the struggles for Irish independence and the setting up of a republic by the Sinn Fein in southern Ireland in 1919. During the 1920s both she and the poet Edward Shanks worked as leader writers on the Standard’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’.

  ‘I sometimes suppress the fact that I write leaders for a daily paper when being condescendingly questioned by the inhabitants of the outer world’ she wrote in an essay, ‘Women in Fleet Street’,1

  rather than face the disbelief or alarm which follows. Though journalism is one of the professions in which women and men get equal rates of pay for the same work (thanks largely to the National Union of Journalists), and in Fleet Street a woman usually finds friendship and a fair share of the hard work among her men colleagues, news editors still keep up the tradition that anything written by a woman has an especial quality of rareness, as though women observed and recorded as seldom as dogs walk on their hind legs …

  In the 1920s she wrote opinion pieces in the Express, Sunday Express and Daily Sketch. Her writing was free-ranging, whimsical, sharp and with a feminist bite. She had been a suffragist, was an advocate of equal pay and a founder member of the PEN club. She wrote about the myths of female passivity and male superiority and extolled the virtues of spinsterhood and late love: ‘There are other and better bouquets than those we get at our first dances …’2 She considered the marriage promises ‘wild and improbable’, and provoked a heated correspondence in the Sunday Express (October 1925) by advocating that ‘the wisest and most eloquent women should be allowed to occupy the pulpits’. She wrote of the iniquities of violence against women, maternal mortality, snobbish boarding schools and censorship, and warmly about all things Lancastrian and the delights for women of short hair, sensible clothes and driving their own cars. She was romantic about talent and love: ‘… novel writing is like marriage – you should never do it unless you feel that otherwise you will be unable to go on living at all …’3; and dismissive of domestic calm: ‘the secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously,’ she wrote, quoting Nietzsche, in the Sunday Express, 19 July 1927.

  In her whimsical words she tweaked at the Establishment’s tail. ‘Adam was rather a poor creature’ she wrote in the Evening Standard, 25 April 1929, in response to an MP who lamented that women’s independence made men lose their manners, ‘but one likes to believe that his sons have steadily grown out of his sneaky way of trying to put the blame on somebody else …’ And in a piece ostensibly urging economic independence for partners in marriage she mis
chievously remarked:

  I believe there is something divine in marriage, but I believe also that there is something divine in many other human relationships. David and Jonathan appeal for no legal assurance that one shall support the other or be responsible for his debts, as long as they both shall live, even though their friendship breaks. Why should Edwin and Angelina?4

  She was for a time the Evening Standard’s drama critic and the only woman member of what was known as the ‘Critics Circle’. In September 1931 the paper appointed her as their book critic:

  In offering Miss Shackleton the control of this important feature we have been influenced by her reputation as one of the best-known women journalists, by her high standing in the literary world, and by the wide popularity of the many articles she has contributed to this journal in the past.

  Three months later, for some unexplained reason, Edith left and went to Greece and the job went to J. B. Priestley.

  Nora was both a journalist and editor. She started as a music and drama critic, then became editor of the women’s pages of The Daily Herald, editor of The Queen and from 1930 to 1953 editor of The Lady. Edith did a weekly book review page for The Lady and a humorous, informative and extremely popular opinion page ‘With Prejudice’, under the name of ‘Clio’. Nora took into The Lady’s stable the fashion writer Alison Settle (who also moved to Steyning in the 1930s and was a close friend of the sisters), Stella Gibbons, the author of Cold Comfort Farm, and the writer and book reviewer, Elizabeth Coxhead.