In such an atmosphere Gluck cemented her relationship with Edith. It had more to do with striking an attitude than real compatibility. Gluck wanted a home and Edith was determined to provide her with one. They had good times – they went to the Theatre Royal at Brighton and saw Lady Windermere’s Fan, Murder in the Cathedral and Valerie Taylor in Anonymous Lives. They went to Glyndebourne for Benjamin Britten’s new opera Albert Herring and to London – occasionally – to visit the art galleries. Gluck kept on with her work for the Sussex Council of Churches and both she and Edith took tea with the Bishop at Chichester Palace. They visited the Bougheys, the Greenes and the Dulacs. Susan Ertz and her husband Ronald McCrindle came to stay and Gluck spent the occasional weekend with Molly Mount Temple. On Gluck’s birthday, on 13 August, Edith brought her red roses and nectarines with dew on them on her breakfast tray. ‘Darling Grub’, she wrote when Gluck went into Hove nursing home in July 1947 for an operation on a tooth abscess ‘… I played our record at the time I thought you were under in case you were disembodied enough to drift this way … I will come at 3.30, Love E.’
Gluck was taking a completely different focus on her professional life. She seldom visited the Bolton House studio and made no contact with The Fine Art Society. She was not working toward an exhibition or in any thematic way and had left the buzz and pressure of London life behind. The tensions and dramas of the Chantry House obsessed her now. Nora and Gluck were scarcely speaking and there was deep bitterness between the sisters. ‘Nora makes terrible scene with E. before supper. I hear it but stay upstairs. Nora insulting to E. about her job.’ ‘E. working hard. Nora goes in and makes scene on her at 11.30 when she’s working. E. tells her to go away.’
In October 1947 Gluck sold the Letter Studio in Lamorna after some pressure from her trustees about her continuing to hold properties she seldom used. The loss made her extremely miserable. All that she once had was slipping away. Nesta, free as a bird, sent letters from Italy, Zurich, Lenzerheide, Mexico, New York, until Seymour had a minor stroke in November. Then she came back to Plumpton for a while. It would have confirmed her worst fears had she seen Gluck in this hothouse of emotional discord. Nora accused Gluck of spying and called her and Edith ‘disgusting people’. Gluck thought Nora ‘treacherous’ and ‘crazy’. Nora, in her sixties, was scared of losing her home – a home that she had done so much to create, and Gluck, in her fifties, was scared of not finding a home and facing loneliness. And perhaps, more ominously, there were old scores to settle for the pain and loss that triangular relationships had caused her.
There were no oysters, champagne, or dancing on New Year’s Eve, 1947. Edith cooked a goose because the kitchen staff were away. Early the next year the division of the linen, furniture, glass, carpets, pictures and records took place. The Trust paid for half of the value of Chantry House on Gluck’s behalf and Nora, with that money, moved out to another house in Steyning, at Wyckham Close, on 14 February 1948. She was sixty-five. Though in the years that followed some reparation took place between the sisters, Nora never visited Chantry again.
FIFTEEN
YEATS’S BONES
With Nora ousted from Chantry, Gluck had a responsibility to make the menage à, deux work. The demands of the house soon dictated the structure of her life. It became in one way the settled home she had always wanted and in another a curtailment to her talent. A housekeeper, Mrs Gurd, joined them in 1949 and stayed with them, like the gardener Mr Lovett, until they died. Robert Lovett, a former postman, first went to the Chantry in the early fifties and did not mind stretching Gluck’s canvases and listening to her woes as well as pruning the trees. Whereas to Nesta Gluck had been the ‘darling boyee’ now she began for all the world to seem like a patriarchal father – the father Edith never mentioned. She was protective of Edith but dominated her totally. It was Gluck who sat at the head of table in a dinner suit, carved the roast, pulled the wine corks, checked the household accounts, hired and fired the kitchen staff and monopolized the conversation at mealtimes. Everything was spotless, ordered, formal but the atmosphere of the house changed.
Burying herself at Steyning did not help Gluck’s career. It was a small market town, rather well-furnished with nursing homes. With the sale of Bolton House her links with London became tenuous. She seldom if ever used her Hampstead studio, and eventually sold that too in 1949. To compensate, in 1953 she bought the ‘Dolphin Cottage’ in St Buryan, Cornwall. Mr Dawbarn of The Fine Art Society, who so liked her work and encouraged her in the thirties, retired after the war. For the next thirty-five years Gluck had little or no contact with the Gallery and she and her work were all but forgotten by them. And the trend in postwar art was toward abstraction, which she regarded as a passing fad. She believed in the universality of classicism – that it revealed nature and human character ‘in all their depth and nakedness, freed from the fashions and hypocrisies of time and place’.1 She found herself out of kilter with the times.
Commissions for portraits and flower groups still came from those who knew her and a clique of people remained as convinced as ever of her worth, but the sheer joie de vivre of the thirties was gone both from her and society’s élite. Art was now for public museums rather than for stunningly designed rooms in private houses and ‘Prints for Pleasure’ of the old masters were available for the average drawing room wall.
Society had drastically changed. Nationally, the postwar years were a time for reconstruction. The polarities of the thirties – joblessness, deprivation and hardship for many; money, daring and style for a few – were dulled. There was a Labour government and a spirit of egalitarianism. Few individuals now commissioned pictures of perfect blooms for their walls or perfect floral displays for their dinner-party tables. Constance Spry kept her shop in South Audley Street, but ‘weekly masterpieces’ of flower decorations for fantasy interiors like Atkinsons Perfumery were no longer wanted. She diversified into teaching homecrafts – cookery, housekeeping, flower arranging, gardening and needlework. With her husband Shav she bought a rambling Georgian house, Winkfield Place near Ascot, and opened it as a college for girls. She lectured nationwide and wrote books and articles for numerous magazines.
The Villa Hammamet in Tunisia, the setting for hedonistic summers in the thirties, got occupied by the Nazis during the war. Jean Henson was incarcerated in a Silesian prison, starved, and for years eluded the searches of the Red Cross. His wife Violet stayed imprisoned in the Villa, cooped in a couple of rooms. After the war the couple reunited, but the élan and magical years of endless summers, peacocks strutting in the marble courtyards and games of halma on the terraces were gone for ever.
Gluck’s brother, Louis, took over as Steward of The Fund in 1940 – the key job in administering the complex structure of trusts and investments, claims and practical problems of the Family dynasty. He lost his seat as Conservative MP for Nottingham East in the Labour landslide of 1945, but despite his parliamentary disappointments he was to hold a plethora of public offices: President of the Albert Hall, President of the Marylebone Conservative Association, President of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, Chairman of the GLC. He was knighted in 1953. As the years passed he got more busy, autocratic, uncompromising and impressive. The jokiness shared by him and Gluck when young evaporated and they continued to try to avoid direct negotiations with each other over her financial affairs. There was a bond of kinship, Gluck stayed with him when in London, but they had lost common ground. She got on his nerves and he would turn the sound up on the television when she came in the room. When for years she ceased to paint, and herself got more autocratic, she no longer in his view justified her eccentricity.
And as if there was not enough to divide them, their mother, after the war, began evincing symptoms of madness. She became even more hyperactive, showed signs of paranoia, her moods changed erratically and she stopped looking after her appearance or eating enough. When she thought no one was looking, she slipped chicken legs or buttered rolls off her plate and into her
handbag to avoid eating them, and the room she lived in at the Cumberland became chaotic.
Nesta resumed her fun-filled, glitzy life. She left Britain for good and went to Hawaii in 1948. Seymour, by then in his eighties, had had a stroke and wanted to live in the sunshine. Nor did Socialist Britain hold much attraction for them. ‘Big men made the world and great men inspired us, but it is the little man we fear,’ wrote a May fair friend to Nesta in the postwar years.
All initiative is being throttled. We are being taxed, controlled, regimentated and pestered by every petty little civil servant. Through laws our financial condition is being shattered … So my dear Nesta, stay on your little Island in the Pacific, stay there until this mad crazy world becomes normal again – or perishes.2
‘N. leaves for USA on Nieuw-Amsterdam train 4.35. Cannot settle to anything.’ was Gluck’s disconsolate diary entry for 26 August 1948. For weeks before the departure day she made a box, lined in satin, for Nesta’s poodle, Mr Chips, to travel in. Nesta came to the Chantry House and said her sad goodbyes four days before she left, while Edith discreetly walked alone on the downs.
The Obermers stayed for six years in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on the beach at Waikiki before moving into a house on Diamond Head. They mixed in a rich ex-patriate community and friends on world tours to the Far East and beyond stopped by while their aeroplanes refuelled in Hawaii. It was light years away from the small-town gentrified life of Steyning, and her letters to Gluck began to show how different their lives now were:
… the dogs whined about six and as I let them out I realised it was pure and fresh – the dawn of the world. I opened the big windows into my fen and orchid garden and heard a furious ‘tr-trutting’ and saw my big tame (wild) red cardinal bobbing about in a vexed way on top of my wild birds’ food cage. I gave him lots of sunflower seeds, all in my nightdress which was no dress – and then walked down on the stepping stones all surrounded by violets to the beach and dug my toes into the cold sand, my head in the sun that came slanting through the palm trees. Everywhere was peace and sapphire sea.3
She used Hawaii as a base for travelling, and visited Britain each year. Money gave her freedom and she spent it easily on looking good, enjoying life and helping and entertaining her friends. She got her pilot’s licence and took up surfing and deep-sea diving. The Duke of Buccleuch described, when passing through Hawaii with his wife on a world tour, being whisked through the mountain passes in Nesta’s ‘snow white open Cadillac with a pair of café au lait Weimaraners occupying the back seat, their amber eyes flashing above their diamond collars.’4 Nesta was a tireless letter writer – she would write, and receive, twenty or so letters a day. She wrote in an uncensored rush in blue biro on blue paper. In the postwar years she took control of her life and lived it fearlessly. She had a crystal quality, a many-faceted sparkle and energy, that impressed and attracted and with her charm and talent for the art of friendship, and her wealth, she contrived, despite the distances, to keep her friends and make many more. People had fun when she was around. She never stopped hoping that Gluck would be fulfilled, successful and happy.
I do hope and pray that everything is falling into place about the picture and that your spirit is satisfied. I know it is going to be a masterpiece. Oh Tim! If you could only think out your life as you tell me to think out a picture …
At the moment you are not loving when you think of your new life, you are threatening. ‘I’m going to do this, that, etc and if they … they can damn well … etc. ‘All right, all right. Don’t frown and fold!!!5
By contrast to Nesta’s free flight Gluck’s life seemed all too earthbound. She absorbed into Edith’s world, then resented her for the drain it made on her own resources. As ever she could not clearly define the boundaries between herself and her partner. The flip side of her dominance was her dependence. Edith was supportive, trustworthy, loyal and sympathetic, so many of the old pains of insecurity were assuaged. She did though, as the years passed, become consumed with jealousy which neither of them resolved. It became ultimately a tense and cruel relationship, though it began pragmatically enough.
One of the first trips abroad they took together as part of their new shared life was to the cemetery at the village of Roquebrune in the south of France to visit Yeats’s tomb. For Edith the trip was a pilgrimage – to recapture that ‘wonderful southern night of stars’ when eight years previously she had kept vigil by Yeats’s bedside the night he died.
When they arrived at the cemetery, on 10 June 1947, they found no trace of Yeats: no headstone, grave nor mention of him. Edith was totally disbelieving. Gluck, whose French was fluent, questioned the local priest, Abbé Biancheri, who checked the records with the Director of Funeral Services at Menton. The Abbé’s findings shocked both women. With graves as with most things you get what you pay for. Yeats’s widow, George, had a choice between a permanent site, a concession for ten or fifteen years or, cheapest and worst, a ‘fosse commune’, known colloquially as a pauper’s grave. This she chose, or by mistake, got. It meant that Yeats’s corpse had been put in a communal grave, along with four or five others of the newly dead. Every few years each ‘fosse commune’ got cleared to make way for more corpses. This happened to Yeats’s site. Some bones were dug up in 1941 and then in January 1946 the whole site was cleared and all the bones put in the communal ossuary.
On the night of 10 June 1947, in the Hotel Mirabeau in Monte Carlo, Edith was inconsolable. She was crying and kept saying ‘I would know his bones anywhere.’ Gluck made notes for a poem, in rather blank verse, about the traumatic episode:
The Hotel Bedroom
Exhausted – Distraught – our pilgrimage in vain
To whom to turn, to help
To reach the Truth, so rudely shattered
Then – Language I had – I seized
The Telephone – I reached Authority
I spoke of what we had found
All through I heard her agonised crying, crouched on the ground
‘Let me but see – I would know
his bones anywhere’ ran through my
brain as I tried in vain to move officialdom.
But this could not be, for
ossuaries are not for rifling through
as searching in a dustbin or waste
paper basket to piece together what
has been scattered with like matter.
An added problem was that Yeats, in one of his last poems, Epitaph, had expressed the wish to be buried in Drumcliffe, County Sligo, Ireland, where his father had lived and his great-grandfather was once rector: ‘Under bare Ben Bulben’s head, In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid’ he wrote. Gluck checked the records, rechecked and checked again – with Abbé Biancheri, the town hall at Roquebrune, the director of ‘Maison Roblot’ the undertakers in Menton. The facts were beyond doubt as the Abbe wrote to her: (15 June 1947):
The registers of the Roquebrune Town Hall show that Mr Butler William Yeats [sic] was buried on 30 January 1939 in a communal grave (square E, at the spot which is now occupied by the body of Madame Victoire Lanteri.) No permanent grave was acquired in his name. His bones were dug up in January 1946 and put in the communal ossuary.
I questioned M. César Lautier, the official responsible for exhumations and the upkeep of the graves, at length. His recollections are vague, but he thinks that Yeats’s body had a surgical truss circled with thin strips of steel. If this information is correct, one could perhaps, with a great deal of difficulty, find some remains of the hapless poet. But the already arduous task of finding the right bones in this ossuary is complicated by the fact that there are new exhumations every day.
When Edith and Gluck got home they went immediately to see Edmund Dulac and Helen Beauclerck. Dulac had been a close friend of Yeats for twenty-five years and of Edith for twenty years. He decided to cover up what seemed to him an appalling blunder on the part of Yeats’s widow, George. Dulac wrote to the Abbe Biancheri accordingly (27 June 1947):
&n
bsp; I write to implore you to ensure that this matter goes no further. I’m asking you to say nothing to anybody and to take whatever measures are necessary to ensure that all those at Roquebrune who have some knowledge of these facts, either on account of their office, like M. Reynaut, or through rumour, preserve absolute silence. All it would take would be an excessively curious tourist for the Press to batten on to this with avidity and we must at all costs avoid the scandal that would arise from such a revelation and the pain it would cause those close to Yeats and to his other friends. If by some chance, which I cannot foresee, a member of Yeats’s family were to come to Roquebrune to visit the poet’s tomb, it would be necessary to behave with the greatest prudence and to employ as much diplomacy as possible and the greatest delicacy – of which I’m sure you’re capable – to check their identity. As for sightseers or journalists, you could claim that your duties do not permit you to accompany them to show where the grave is buried.
The Abbé gave every assurance of discretion. He had, since 1942, received only one letter of enquiry about a Mr Yeats. As no one could give him any information he assumed the letter was intended for another Roquebrune, in Var, and did not answer it. With the Abbe’s cooperation in cutting through French red tape, Dulac and Edith drew up detailed plans to avert questions and scandal and to repair the damage. They arranged for a temporary stone to be fixed on the Roquebrune cemetery wall saying that W. B. Yeats was buried there – without of course specifying ‘though not for long’. They took out a concession ‘in perpetuity’, for about 5000 francs, for the erection in the cemetery of a permanent headstone which Dulac designed and a Sussex sculptor, Joseph Cribb, immediately began to carve. The Abbe chose a site for it right against the ossuary – ‘in my opinion it’s the natural site for the poet’s monument’, he wrote to Dulac (12 August 1947).
Gluck Page 19
