Gluck

by Diana Souhami

  I swerve between optimism and the deepest depression very easily. I do try to keep my eye on the ball – which is to get back to work, to my vision. But vision comes from a basic certainty and I am still far too easily wobbled.16

  Dialogue Crepusculaire, 1961

  ‘Intimations’: Transience, 1964.

  She needed from her work another triumph, another affirmation. Mercifully she found within herself another burst of creative energy. It earned her one last show and final accolade.

  NINETEEN

  A RETROSPECTIVE VIEW

  Gluck’s perfect, hand-made paints were a challenge to her. She had to show her worth again. ‘I cannot begin to tell you how marvellous it is to have such paints …’ she wrote to Nesta (5 February 1970). ‘Oh how I wish you could see them and share the thrill of genuine lapis lazuli and the feel of the paint on the brush.’ In the late sixties she began to work with them, admitting to extraordinary nerves and depression at the task ahead. When, early in 1969, her friend the painter and art historian Martin Battersby spent an afternoon with her looking at her work from the thirties, she panicked at the contrast between her productivity then compared to the fallow years.

  One of the first pictures of her renewed vigour, done in 1967, would have made Queen Mary drop her lorgnette. Called ‘The Piper of the Merry Maidens’, it was of a phallic standing stone near Lamorna. According to Cornish legend, The Maidens, a circle of stones near Lamorna, come alive toward midnight and sing strange songs about the sea. That summer, when staying down in the Dolphin Cottage, Gluck again painted the views she loved of Boleigh Farm and St Buryan at dawn; the same strip of land, huddled dwellings and wide sky, but more tentative than her early work and adding little.

  For months she painted a jug of pansies on a marble slab. ‘Feel so happy and contented,’ she noted in a rare expression of joy. ‘This group of pansies never existed except in my inner vision and was built up by unheard harmonies.’1 Mr Lovett picked fresh pansies each day from the garden. In January 1967 she finished and signed it and made one of her by then infrequent visits for dinner at Gatewick. ‘All out of tins and fizzy Portuguese rosé!!!’

  Time was not on her side. Her hands were swollen with arthritis, she needed a hearing aid, she suffered attacks of vertigo, arthritis, asthma and bronchitis, insomnia and exhaustion. ‘Feel very tired and depressed about future and my failing strength’ was a typical diary jotting from 1968 on. She had a series of bad falls: in the attic at 2 a.m one morning when she hurt her ribs, in Cornwall when she hurt her knee, in her studio when she bruised her nose and sprained her wrist, on the studio path one snowy January day. In the early seventies a housekeeper, Winifred Vye, was hired to live in and look after Edith, who had become exceedingly frail. Edith tried to hide her disabilities from Gluck.

  Mrs Mayer said she was horrified to see E. walking by Pecknell’s. ‘Had no idea she was so bad.’ This was just before E. fell in yard.

  Shocking report from A. about seeing E. peering in Alison’s window. Used the word ‘heartbreaking’.

  Miss Vye scene at lunch with me re. E.2

  The rows lessened, talk of breaking up ended and jealousy abated. Gluck’s preoccupation with Anne Yorke faded, and months passed without reciprocal visits to the Chantry studio or Gatewick. Gluck watched Edith with a mixture of protectiveness, attentiveness and unconcealed impatience. Edith became forgetful and threw away the key to the wine cellar, lost her house keys, and forgot to attend to her financial affairs. Gluck took a sharp view of such absentmindedness. Miss Vye tried to protect Edith:

  I tried to shelter Edith from Gluck, but Gluck wanted no one near Edith but herself. One woman can dominate another and take over their lives. It was a love hate relationship. Edith believed in her but Gluck put her through a mangle. She wanted power and control of body and mind. She trusted nobody. Everywhere was locked. We used to do the housekeeping on Saturdays, Mrs Guy and I. One week I had the benefit of a halfpenny. Gluck said ‘Go down and ask Miss Vyefor the halfpenny she owes me. ‘… You can’t say anything absolutely bad about her because then she’d confound you and be nice. She was just very difficult to live with. She didn’t have a grip on her feelings.… Only Nest knew how to deal with her. It was a joy when she came to stay.3

  Craig died in 1968 and Helen Beauclerck in 1969. The Maufes celebrated their diamond wedding in 1970 in their house, Shepherd’s Hill, in Buxted, Surrey. Prudence wore a diamond tiara, and Edward sported a diamond brooch on his lapel. There were 160 guests, a choice of excellent sweet or dry champagne and ‘the best fork luncheon’ Gluck had ever tasted.

  Only Nesta seemed eternally young. In 1968, as a very rich widow (Seymour lived until he was ninety-two), she moved from Hawaii to Switzerland and so visited Chantry more frequently. She lived in luxury in a house ‘Le Tourbillon’, in Vaud, not far from Lausanne, with devoted servants, a cat and a dog. She had a hide-out, a chalet in the mountains ‘where the narcissi meet in great white waves in the spring’. She continued with her salon life, infinitely happier to be in Europe than Honolulu, and ever more sought after and adored. There were parties at the Villa Coward, inherited by Noel Coward’s lover, Graham Payn. Ginette Spannier wrote to tell Nesta that the only nice thing about 1973 was meeting her. When Edward Heath was Prime Minister, Nesta dined on occasion at 10 Downing Street and he was a visitor at Le Tourbillon, as were Joan Sutherland, Joyce Carey, Yehudi and Diana Menuhin and a host of those with talent, rank or money. When Gluck and Edith were her house guests, Nesta insisted on paying Edith’s fare, arranged for her to have a private sitting room and ensured that Monica Sterling, whose books Edith had years previously favourably reviewed, was among the guests.

  Only Nesta could go on telling Gluck, right into old age, about her impossible behaviour:

  … You interfere FAR too much in other people’s business and none of your arguments are anything but specious really. You mind your OWN business and if small unpleasantnesses happen and people forget to do what you want, weigh them against world importance AND GET ON WITH GIVING THE REAL YOU A CHANCE.

  … I wish I could forget, but I can’t, that awful morning when some man came and wanted to see Edith, and you stood at the garden door and angrily screamed so that the whole neighbourhood could hear you. You were angry because she ‘hadn’t told you where she was going!’Good God! What price freedom? It was NOT YOUR BUSINESS to do anything but say quietly, ‘I think she may be in the garden. She probably won’t be long. I’m afraid I must get on with my work.’ NO ONE would have thought that rude. But your way must have made the wretched man even more uncomfortable than it did me …4

  I love you so very much and I can’t bear to see you wasting so much of your energy on useless fears, for you have so little time to spare! – hence my abominable exasperation. Now. Do not waste your time writing or dictating pages. Don’t write anything. I understand all without any more word-flowing.5

  Gluck could not discard her imperfect feelings along with the machine-made paints. The hardest cut of all was for her to see herself clearly. Among her jottings about the Aga, the housekeeping, her medication, the frogs and the fish in the ponds, paints, Steyning affairs and work in hand, she noted her state of mind:

  That cell of most terrible solitary confinement – my brain.

  We always know deep inside us what is right and if we go against this we always pay for it, maybe years later.

  She went on campaigning, knowing how wasteful it was. In 1970 in the sub-post-office in Steyning she saw a greetings’ card of an ill-drawn girl with orange hair and frilly knickers. It was designed by one Gluck for Royle Publications. ‘I can only tell you with absolute truth,’ the true Gluck wrote to the solicitor, Michael Rubinstein, ‘that after first seeing this card I felt I would never be able to sign my own pictures Gluck again, which of course I am now determined to maintain my right to do after fifty years of use.’ She had already written a furious letter to the card’s creator – a Mr Dickens of Acacia Gardens, Kent, who had hap
lessly settled on the monosyllable as his nom de plume. ‘I must’, she wrote, ‘receive your immediate reply to this letter with your agreement that as from its receipt you will:

  1 Cease using the nom-de-plume Gluck or GlÜck in any circumstances.

  2 Notify Messrs Royle Publications Ltd to this effect.

  3 Substitute another nom-de-plume for any of your work Messrs Royle Publications Ltd may already have in hand for publication, signed either Gluck or GlÜck, at the same time giving them a new nom-de-plume in substitution.’

  Mr Dickens answered in bewildered tone, calling her variously Gluck Esquire and Mr Gluck, saying he thought that as his (her) style of work must differ from his own he doubted there would be confusion, but that he was quite prepared to make a feature of the umlaut, presenting it as two quite big little circles.

  Gluck bundled the correspondence off to Mr Rubinstein. He drafted a temperate and conciliatory response telling Mr Dickens that enormous confusion and damage had occurred and asking him to drop, once and for ever, the use of Gluck or Glück. Royle Publications agreed to stop using the name ‘so long as it is quite clear that we are not admitting that you are legally entitled to claim this … Mr Dickens proposes to use the name “Gluckli” on any new work which he does for us and perhaps you will let us know that what we have said in this letter is acceptable.’ Unluckily for Gluckli it was not quite. Gluck wanted, and got, an assurance that the ‘u’ should have an umlaut, leaving Mr Dickens with the glottal stopper Glückli – an impediment almost as ugly as his cards. Mr Rubinstein told her firmly that he proposed to close his file and winged in a bill, ruefully acknowledging a considerable undercharge.

  Despite such diversions Gluck achieved, in old age, two paintings which redeemed her years of battling over paints and showed that her talent was intact. These she called ‘The Path to the Lough’ and ‘Rage, rage against the Dying of the Light’. The inspiration for ‘The Path’ was a landscape in Rosapenna, near Ballyclare, Northern Ireland, where Edith’s cousin Dido lived: ‘I owe you so much – you made it all possible.’ Gluck wrote to Dido in 1969:

  From when you first drove us to Rosapenna and gave me such a warm welcome at Fairview, everything I have dreamed of painting in landscape became released and I therefore owe you a great debt …

  She called the picture an allegory. The path is misty, winding, circuitous and uncertain, but leads ultimately to still water, calm mountains and light sky. ‘I was for the first time utterly relaxed and peaceful when it was finished’, she wrote to Nesta (14 August 1970), ‘and felt it was the first picture I had ever painted that told all of my innermost thoughts and feelings – I can die happy if that picture survives.’

  The picture was 51 × 76 cm inches and she enjoyed working with her new brushes on a larger surface. She signed it in 1969. She had promised it to the Bougheys, but had difficulty in parting with it and kept it for another year. Eventually Richard Boughey, whose brother, John, Gluck had painted shortly before he was killed in 1940, collected it at 11.30 on 8 August 1970. It fitted with difficulty into the boot of his car. ‘Very sad about it going,’ Gluck noted in her diary (8 August 1970). ‘I mourned loss of picture by evening.’

  Worthing Beach was the inspiration for the other outstanding picture of her old age. She and Edith used to take weekend breaks at the Beach Hotel. Room 88 on the third floor was their favourite, with its adjoining bathroom and view of the sea. Gluck spent days walking on the beach, talking to the bait diggers or sitting in the beach shelter taking notes and drawing. One cold evening in 1969, the beach was deserted.

  Not only were there no people but the beach seemed scoured clean – no sea wrack, no rubbish, nothing. Then I saw in the distance this small patch of something light coloured, and when I went to look there was this dead fish’s head lying just at the edge of the sea in a small depression with the tide coming in. I couldn’t get it out of my head. The next evening – two tides later don’t forget – I went back. And the head was still there, a little more stripped and skeletal and in a hollow a little deeper; and I knew I must paint it. For me, what had seemed a symbol of decay and death had become an emblem of resurrection.6

  Its eyes were eaten away and it was surrounded by lug worm casts. She took photographs and notes, had the head posted to the Chantry and began painting it with its nose pointing toward the ocean. For a title she took the recurring line from Dylan Thomas’s poem written to his dying father: ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’.

  It is a severed head with dark sightless chasms where its eyes had been. She was painting her death, the end of her vision as an artist, the loss of love, the wasted years: ‘… now that I am old and nearing the end of this life my homeland comes clear and it comforts me’. Her theory was that this beached creature was trying to get back to the sea. Into the worm casts, the scales and torn tendons of the fish and froth of the water, she put the same delicacy of texture and detail as in her flower paintings. Nesta thought she was sick and recommended a psychiatrist. Gluck worked at the picture from 1970 until 1973:

  Very depressed about the picture and how long it is taking and whether I am achieving what I want or spoiling it.

  Very worried by outgoing sea bit and scrape it out. Cannot find what I want.

  Again tackle sea and again fail. Vote before starting work. Stay up till 4am because of election. Wash brushes at 3am with tv in bedroom.7

  Again and again she wiped out and repainted the small stretch of sea to the left of the picture. As ever she could not leave it be and declare it finished. Edith thought it a masterpiece – the best she had ever done. Gluck asked Lovett how much he thought it was worth. He said £4000, and she agreed. Miss Vye admired it as a painting, but saw cruelty and loneliness in it and hated it for the cost to domestic harmony its creation seemed to exact. It was to be Gluck’s last major picture, original, unexpected, technically superb, and with all her old flair of composition and verve.

  In 1970 she repeatedly wrote to Nesta of her desire to have another exhibition and to ‘come back just sufficiently as a painter before my demise’. She made a few tentative enquiries but found herself more or less forgotten by The Fine Art Society and other London galleries and she did not get very far.

  I think really because I haven’t got my Zgr to bite them all in the calf as of yore – I do so need someone to chat them up … I am certain the show would not only be a sell-out but give me some consolation before I die for all the years of frustration.8

  She wondered if Nesta might help find a suitable room in a grand private house where she might show her pictures. She thought this would be away from ‘the scrabble of normal exhibition stomping grounds’ and ‘almost Garboish’.

  Nesta did not come up with anything specific, so Gluck went again to The Fine Art Society in 1972. ‘As my last show was here in 1937, I think it is time we considered another’, she told the gallery directors, Andrew McIntosh Patrick and Tony Carroll: They got out photographic records of her exhibitions in the 1930s and went down to the Chantry House for Sunday lunch on 14 May 1972. They saw that Gluck had managed to reacquire much of her best work and they offered her an exhibition then and there. They thought ‘The Dying of the Light’ a stunning picture.

  For Gluck this was her resurrection, and the happiness of her declining years. She called the directors ‘the boys’. They took her from the obscurity into which she had allowed herself to fade. ‘This’, she told them, ‘will after all be my last one-man show and I would like to go out with a bang!’9 Though she plagued them with her obsessions and demands, preparations for the exhibition, which was to be held in May 1973, were exciting and happy. The two men treated her with straightforwardness and affection. ‘Very respectful reception’, she noted of her next meeting with them in June, ‘lunch in Andrew’s flat 12–3.15.’ Her brother Louis, delighted at this renaissance, arranged for cars to chauffeur her to and fro from Steyning to London and his children and grandchildren convened for a celebratory dinner at his house.
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  In June 1972 Gluck and Edith, who was getting ever more frail, spent three weeks in Switzerland as Nesta’s guests. On her return to Steyning, Edith began evincing signs of extreme forgetfulness and confusion, and increasing loss of motor control. On a walk with Miss Vye her legs gave way and from then on she had to rely on a walking frame. It was difficult for Gluck too. She wanted to produce more pictures for her show and to involve herself in all preparations for it, but she could not put such acute domestic problems from her mind. Her anxiety and preoccupations made her, if anything, even more short-tempered with Edith. She finished a painting of a spray of myrtle and a shell, but it seemed to have no special significance, beyond the fact of buds bursting to reveal strange effervescent flowers. She was devastated when Tony Carroll did not want to include it in the show. Diplomatically, he told her she must keep some back for her next exhibition.

  In November 1972, preparations began in earnest for the show the following Spring. Nesta called at The Fine Art Society, impressed them with her charm, told them she was ‘whirling with contacts’ and began putting the word about to her numerous influential friends. Gluck signed all pictures in her possession, advertised in The Times and The Telegraph to trace the whereabouts of those sold long ago, negotiated with a framemaker, worried about the lettering of the flag to be hung outside the gallery, the quality of photography in the catalogue, the design of the room, the publicity, and whether champagne or sparkling wine would be drunk at the party. She allowed no one to get on with their job without intervention from her.

  She could not bring herself to say that ‘The Dying of the Light’ was finished, and she went on and on working at it. Worry took its toll and on a day in December, ten days before Christmas, when a batch of frames arrived all marginally the wrong size, when she felt ‘hysterically overtired and strained’ and the water tanks overflowed in the roof, she had a heart attack and was carried up to bed in a chair. Fearful of alarming ‘the boys’, she phoned and told them she felt ‘as bright as a button’. She phoned David Tonkinson, too, and added a codicil to her Will asking for the exhibition to go ahead even if she died. Christmas – upon which, as with all feast days and holidays, Gluck set great store – was ‘rather grim’ that year. Edith and Miss Vye went to neighbours and Gluck stayed at home alone.