N. starts new version (fourth) of green apple. This time with pink background. I have terrible struggle all day trying to work out Cyril’s portrait. A. comes to studio 3.30–4.30. N. ticks us off in a curious way about E. and general situation. A. and I fed up.5
Gluck kept the Yeats Room, her study and her new studio locked when she was not working in them, which angered Edith because of its implication of lack of trust. The studio, separate from the house, could be reached either through the grounds of Chantry, or from the road:
I told A. she did not know how I suffered nervous tension owing to her refusing ever to come through to the studio by the Chantry House. Because just when I should have been quiet after lunch I was on tenterhooks that I could not get out to the studio in time to let her in. She was equally unhappy at the thought of running into E. or coming into the house at all, the amosphere of which she says she loathes.… I said I could not go on feeling that if the studio gate was locked, she would not come round to the Chantry House front door. I pointed out that it was, after all, half my house … she said of course she would come to the house if necessary only it was like Jane Eyre and Rochester.6
To get away from the ‘general situation’, Gluck went each year for a fortnight in the late 1950s to a health clinic, Enton Hall, in Sussex. A regime of fasting, enemas, colonic irrigation, steam baths, cold baths, massage and very early nights resulted in rapid weight loss. She checked in weighing around ten stone and checked out weighing nine. Breakfast was hot water and an orange, lunch tomato juice, and supper a leaf or two of lettuce and perhaps a yoghurt. From time to time she got dizzy and breathless and had to be revived with Ribena laced with ‘something else’. With the help of a homeopathic doctor there, a Dr Pink, she touched on the truth of what was wrong:
He asked me innumerable questions about how much pleasure I got out of my work. Could not get him to talk diets as he came back repeatedly to this theme. In the end after telling him everything about my work, reactions to same, hours of work and what I had been doing about paints and linseed oil, he suddenly said: ‘Diet is not what is wrong with you. You are suffering from frustration with your work. ‘And then, though of course no one could know it better than I, I realised how fearfully true this was and how I must concentrate all my forces on seeing I could get back to happy unfrustrated work with all else kept at bay. I liked him … I feel I have wasted my life and especially the last ten years. I must get back to what I was.7
The chief problem in keeping all else at bay was that she perceived herself as the victim. It would have shocked and astonished her to hear people say, as they did, that she was powerful and manipulative. She believed herself to be revolving around the needs and demands of Edith and Anne without acknowledging how she caused them to revolve around her own needs and demands. Both women phoned and wrote to Gluck at Enton, and she phoned them and wrote to them each day. They visited her and brought gifts – all in a fortnight’s separation:
We lay and talked looking out of the open window. The air was keen. I said to A. ‘I don’t intend to revolve round anybody any more. People will have to revolve round me or I can’t have any people in my life. ‘… She went at 6 pm not allowing me to see her off. She left some lovely chestnut buds and I missed her …8
A week later Edith arrived bringing a huge bunch of flowers:
blossom, giant snowdrops, grape hyacinth, blue hyacinths, narcissi, white and yellow and large and small daffodils – very sweet smelling and the epitome of Spring. Also books to read.… After a rest a long talk about my changed views and attitudes. At first E. was very stubborn and tried to bring out all the dreary old complaints, but I soon stopped it by saying no amount of recriminations would alter me, that the past must be buried utterly, I would not be a battleground any more and that everyone without exception would have to observe this, or I would just dispense with their companionship.… After tea she went at 5.30 pm and I felt much more at peace. Telephoned to see if she was all right at 9.45 pm as she had seemed very tired and failing when she drove away.9
From Anthony Kimmins, a client at Enton and son of the founder of Chailey Heritage School for which Nesta and Gluck had raised money before the war with their exhibition of Royal furniture, Gluck heard rumour in 1959 that Nesta, widowed two years previously, intended to remarry.
‘We shall all soon be hearing of the wedding and how Honolulu blazons it forth’ he said with a cheery wave. This gave me a great shock as Nesta had denied emphatically last year that there was any truth in the rumour. I said ‘who is it?’ and he could not recall the name but said he owned a ranch and most of the island. I said I thought it would be a good thing to happen, and he agreed, but I felt sore and angry.10
Gluck immediately wrote to Nesta to ask if the rumour was true. She got an unsatisfactory reply and wrote in her diary:
I answer at once … my only comment on her unbelievably typical evasions about marriage was ‘Congratulations! as they say in “My Fair Lady”.’ The rest of the letter was about ‘Illustrated London News’ and linseed oil. Let’s see what she makes of that. My relief if she marries will be great. Both for her sake and mine.
It was all something of a muddle – romantic dreams but domestic discord and unhappiness, high ambitions but the dry campaign for better paints, the pain of old wounds, the advancing years, past glory all but forgotten and a sense of self-betrayal so acute as to make her ill. She wrote a bitter little poem about Nesta’s freedom and called it Zgr – her pet name for her:
Zgr
She gives everyone the slip
Stealing away silently into the black night
Steering by well-remembered stars
Round the treacherous coast
of life.
But however known the coast
The terrors lie beneath
And the stars remain aloof.
Nesta did not many again, even if her suitor did own most of Honolulu. Nor did she withdraw her loyalty to, and affection for Gluck. A few months prior to these rumours, of what Gluck regarded as betrayal, Nesta wrote (14 July 1959):
Darling Tim
I have talked to you so much and so long lately that I woke with a start in the middle of the night and realised that perhaps after all I had not put any of it down on paper … I so hope you had a bit of a good Xmas … I had a lovely one at the Ranch and saw again a Lunar Rainbow one night. Mother of Pearl with violet and faintly touching both ends. I long for you on those occasions and think of you intensely. In fact you have no idea how just thinking of you helps me when I feel frustrated, contemptuous of myself, lonely – or a mixture of all three. I don’t know why exactly, but it’s true and rather interesting. Have you read Dr Zhivago yet?… it is his thoughts on art and life and descriptions of moon on snow and how it glazes a goblet of wine.… There are many places which I just long to read aloud to you so that we can glut over them together. It strikes sparks deep down under the solar plexus.
While Gluck stifled, Nesta was flying high. She adapted stylishly to rich widowhood. Her exotic travels, works for charity, and artistic and sporting successes, were written about in the Honolulu papers. She made such headlines as ‘Englishwoman claims title of oldest surfer at Waikiki’. Rear Admirals, pickle farmers, industrialists, Princesses, musicians, artists, beachboys, film producers, Lords, Dukes and Marchionesses gathered at her parties. She served them caviare and hamburgers. Profits from sales of her paintings went to the blind. She recorded readings for libraries for the blind, made endowments for painting and music scholarships and gave money to striving artists. Dismissive of her own abilities, she tried to help others to achieve. She confided to Gluck that she felt she had never dug deep enough within herself to find out where her own abilities lay.
She was uninterested in Gluck’s paint battle. She urged her to end the fight and get back to Art. Nor did Gluck stop work entirely from 1953 to 1967. But she slowed right down, painted in an unfocused way and some of what she produced was poor.
In Octo
ber 1954, Edith cut from her rose garden, and put in the drawing room, a single bloom of a white, Frau Karl Drushki rose. The next day Gluck began painting on a panel the face of the rose, snipped at the stem, with a cool grey background. She called it ‘Portrait of Frau Karl’. She worked for a fortnight before complaining that the background would not dry and then again getting absorbed in her campaign.
For thirteen years, on and off from 1955 to 1968, she painted a dish of fruit, walnuts and leaves with ‘autumn tinged vine leaves’ from Gatewick. She intended it as an academic study of the quality of paint, but it became a study of a painter’s block.
Red apple tacky. Woodworm powder falls on it, but can be picked off. Work at grapes.
The most terrible scene of all. E. then goes to have a perm. I am left more dead than alive. After lunch manage to work at Group. Pear and green apple and plum.
Work til dark at foreground. Great bothers with it. Lemon yellow used first time, made freshly by Newman.
Truly horrible scenes. Shattered for day. Cannot settle to anything.
In August 1957 she accepted another commission to paint a judge, this time a relative, her second cousin Sir Cyril Salmon. A year later he made the headlines as the ‘Notting Hill Race Riots Judge’. He sentenced each of nine white youths to four years’ imprisonment for racial assaults and there was a furore at the severity of the sentences: ‘Everyone,’ he told the accused, ‘irrespective of the colour of their skins, is entitled to walk through our streets in peace, with their heads erect, and free from fear. That is a right which these courts will always unfailingly uphold.’11
He said he could afford only half the fee Gluck proposed of 500 guineas. She visited him at the Royal College of Justice and they agreed he should sit in his blue summer robes. Gluck then had an attack of pneumonia and could not work. ‘I feel very ill and breathing difficult and painful. Thought I’d reached the end.’ She painted him dwarfed by heraldic trappings, taking up only a third of the total space, which made him disgruntled. ‘This is most disturbing for me’, Gluck noted in her diary.
Portrait of the Rt Hon. Justice Lord Salmon, 1960
She put in months of work on all the heraldry. For someone disgusted with paint, it is an extremely painterly piece, crammed with detail, from the worn edges of legal documents, to the strings on the lyre, or the cameo on the signet ring. She wanted to avoid the clichés of scarlet and ermine, so used brilliant blues, reds and golds, with touches of green and cyclamen. She shows the chains, red claws and bared teeth of justice, the faces of the lions and the unicorn enraged and cold. She spent a day on the blue cover of the book in the foreground, another on one of the pink cuffs, another on the lion’s crown, another on the curls on the lion’s legs. ‘Work morning and till 3 pm on unicorn’s tail endings and border … technical difficulties from canvas. Musgrave to dinner, saddle of lamb, marmalade pudding, E. made soup.’ was her diary entry for 31 January 1959.
She went on with it all through 1959: ‘work very hard all day against awful disturbances and terrible scenes … paint green swag ribbon.… Do not know what to do to get peace.’12 By October Cyril Salmon was pleading with her to part with it:
Everyone who saw it was in raptures over the portrait and you know already that I think it is perfect. You can’t better perfection – so isn’t it time for the man with the hammer to come and release you from this particular labour? I’m longing to have it …
But she did not let it go.‘… as there is not really such a thing as perfection, she replied (31 October 1959), ‘there is no reason why what passes for it should not be bettered.’
It was not cost effective work – two and a half years for 250 guineas. She became fussed and worried about dichroism, the surface of the canvas and the tuft under the unicorn’s tail. She finally cleaned her palette on 20 May 1960. The next month at a party at the Chantry House, eighty people from the town came to see the portrait. She handed it over to Sir Cyril on 27 June 1960 – three years after the initial commission. ‘A brilliantly original conception brought off miraculously well …’ he called it.13
In August 1960 Gluck went alone for a few days to Seaford. She sat huddled on the beach in a cold wind, reading the four Gospels and planning a painting of the Crucifixion, which never got done. On the way home she bought five black goldfish for the pool and some fish food, and when she got in had a row with Edith about bedrooms, because Helen Beauclerck and a new housekeeper, Miss Burges, were both due to arrive on the same day. In autumn Nesta visited for a day and Gluck felt the strain of trying to cram a year’s news into a few hours. Craig, nearly blind, went into a nursing home and Gluck dealt with the selling of her bungalow and sparse possessions. Edith holidayed in Venice and returned looking well. Miss Burges’s cooking proved unsatisfactory and she left under a cloud. Gluck gave up smoking for two weeks. Anne Yorke invited Gluck and Edith for Christmas lunch at Gatewick. Edith declined the invitation and instead visited Nora. It was the last time the sisters were to spend Christmas together. Three months later Nora died and her ashes were buried in Steyning churchyard beside those of her mother.
Edith became more reserved, withdrawn and compliant, as she reached her octogenarian years. Perhaps she simply felt worn out. Gluck made all the household decisions and bossed her about, but when Edith was alone for a few days she cut back the magnolia that was making her study dark, invited friends to dinner and enjoyed cooking the meal herself.
Gluck painted a portrait of Anne Yorke in 1963. It took three months and she felt frustrated by how slowly the paint dried and by having to work some of the time with a bound right thumb. She severed the tip of it and it was sewn back on by Dr Dunce. The portrait is a tense study, the skin taut, the eyes wide and sad. The sittings inevitably led to outbursts:
Terrible scene with E. late at night which makes me feel terribly ill. She thought she heard me on the telephone. Had listened outside my door. Ghastly. Sad.14
Gluck’s pictures began to reveal a sense of time running out, of compounded loneliness and the coming of death. To herself, she admitted her mistakes, and the waste of her talent:
I have never had a fear of death … when I was young I felt as if I had been thrown out to work my passage home.… I felt death would be the moment of release from the efforts of daily ‘living’… I realised very young the value of lying fallow. I forced rests on myself while painting … then when I felt I had become sufficiently detached, I would return, suddenly. This detachment gave me a less biased eye and I could see whether I had failed or succeeded. But always this longing for a truth I could live and being as I was, this was never to be fulfilled. As life went on I spent it prodigally, unwisely. A sense of timelessness deceived me into thinking my time was limitless for creation. Only within the last tormented years have I seen how ambivalent this sense of timelessness has been. It gave eternal qualities to my work perhaps but it limited its output.
Now I find myself failing in my human strength. I see that I am swimming straight back to He who sent me out and I do want to reach that haven having a prize in my hand. Something worthy of the trust that was reposed in me when I was sent out … I have not done my job yet, so pray to be able to accomplish it.15
She painted a picture of a dead bird and called it ‘Requiem’. Tybalt, the cat, caught and brought in a dead hedge sparrow. This small corpse provided the impetus Gluck needed to work fast. On the third day it started to decompose and on the fifth to smell badly. Gluck stayed up until 2.30 in the morning struggling to finish the painting. By the seventh day she was through and Lovett buried the remains. Gluck cleaned off her palette and the current cook, Mrs Gratcher, served gammon and treacle tart for supper. The picture is of a sorrowful thing – feathers bedraggled, unpreened and incapable of flight, claws useless, beak snapped shut and eyes sightless. Gluck’s identification was with the fact of death – the end of all performance.
She cared for creatures. There were two huge bird tables in the gardens with hoppers and trays. She ordered tw
enty-eight pounds of bird seed and seven pounds of peanuts at a time. Each day in winter the baker brought a large brown loaf which was cut up into tiny squares for the birds. When the frog population became scarce, Gluck had three heated pools dug in the garden for breeding them. Mr Lovett then had to cut the grass with a handmower for fear of hurting them. They spread all round Steyning.
Gluck hoped that she would find in death the peacefulness that eluded her in life. She painted a series of tiny pictures, about thirteen by eighteen centimetres, and called them her ‘Intimations’, taken from Wordsworth’s poem Intimations of Immortality. ‘Cold Grey Stones’ was of the tide coming in on the deserted beach at Worthing. ‘Homeward’ was a lone bird flying into the sunset. The sky, which figured so romantically in her early landscapes, becomes in her late paintings a cool haven. In ‘Transience’ a blackbird alights on a tiled roof, sings, and stays poised for flight, unconcerned by any domestic upsets beneath the eaves. Gluck felt dazzled by the sky when painting this. All her care for detail went into the lichens on the roof and the colours of the slates. Compared to the ornate portrayal of human justice in her portrait of Sir Cyril Salmon, it is a simple, calm piece.
Around her, life faded. Craig went totally blind. Each birthday Gluck sent her a parcel – a bed jacket, or a shawl, or Blue Grass perfume. Tybalt got cat flu, became limp and listless, died in October 1965 and was buried with great grief under the silver birch tree in the garden. Gluck and Edith endured the incapacities of age. Doctors were summoned at all hours – for shingles, heart pains, breathlessness and dizzy turns. Without her work Gluck suffered from frustration and despair:
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