Gluck

by Diana Souhami

  The nursing home, ‘Homelands’ was about eleven miles away at Cowfield. Edith was admitted there on 20 January 1975. It was well run, but she felt abandoned and lonely and in ‘prison and pain’ from having to use a catheter. Gluck found driving a strain, so Clare Griffin chauffeured her to the home usually twice a week. In April Gluck was herself ill with a chest infection: ‘Went to see E. first time for a month. A very worthwhile but heartbreaking meeting. She did not look well and had tears in her eyes when she saw me.’2 On subsequent visits Edith seemed sad and forlorn: ‘She called me back for the first time to say goodnight. This finally broke me.’3

  Alone in the house, she said its upkeep was killing her, that it was dead to her without Edith, and she talked of moving permanently to the studio. She wrote one of her pithy, bitter little poems:

  I’ve had ’em large

  I’ve had ’em small

  I’ve had ’em short

  I’ve had ’em tall

  They’re all the same

  What e’er the frame

  The first and last

  Are most steadfast

  Steadfast Edith certainly was. And the last.

  It was all too late to make amends. There were too many wrongs to right. It was not Edith’s infirmity but her own that stopped Gluck from painting now. She had the place to herself, her perfect oils, her first-rate canvases. The Fine Art Society wanted any work of quality she cared to produce. The critics were as gracious about her work as in her heyday. She had shown, with the technical excellence of ‘The Path’ and ‘Rage, rage …’, that none of her ability had waned. Her staff saw to the cooking, the shopping, the cleaning. Her accountant managed her business affairs and negotiated on her behalf with her nephew, Roy, who had succeeded his father as Steward of the Fund. Money was there as needed. Her doctor, Richard Boger, the last in a succession of practitioners who tried to treat her, gave a great deal of his time. She still had, above everything, the ambition to paint good and lovely pictures. That was the altar on which so much else was sacrificed. But ever more by the day the pains of age prevented her from working.

  In autumn 1975 she went for the last time to her cottage at St Buryan. ‘Edith very sweet and glad I was going to Cornwall to create’4 No creation came – she had an attack of emphysema and spent most of the time in bed. The rose, her favourite flower, that she was going to paint ‘as perhaps no one has ever painted it before’, wilted in her studio. And, to her dismay, she and Nesta suffered some kind of quarrel, which led to a coolness Gluck could not endure:

  Whatever you do would never alter what has kept our friendship alive for over 40 years and so many thousands of miles apart. During the whole of that brief telephone call I was in tears.… Dearest Zgr can we not now return to the precious lien that binds our friendship and forget all the trivial misunderstandings that have, and are, causing me great unhappiness. I have as you know a heavy and increasing burden of responsibility to see that Edith does not die miserable and feeling, as she does, that everyone has forgotten and deserted her.5

  In September 1976 Clare Griffin told Gluck that she was going to have a baby the following April. ‘You’ve got one child, why do you want another?’ was Gluck’s unenthusiastic response. ‘My sole means of transport was removed at a stroke,’ she wrote to Martin Battersby. The following week Miss Vye said she would be leaving at Christmas. Her name had been on a council housing list since 1950 and now she had the chance of a flat in the nearby town of Storrington. Gluck panicked and saw herself without support. She immediately made arrangements to move Edith to a nursing home close by Chantry House in Steyning. ‘We are not telling her anything in order to avoid upsetting her, but fear from something she said at our last meeting that she has an inkling but no details.’, Gluck wrote to the matron of the new home. Edith had been at Homelands for nearly two years. The staff knew her and were kind to her, the place was pleasant and efficiently run. The only virtue of Carisbrook Nursing Home was that it was close to Chantry. Edith was moved there on 11 October and died, in unfamiliar surroundings, a few weeks later, on 5 November.

  Gluck had spent the previous couple of days in London. She had stayed at the Westbury and seen Chorus Line with Nesta and they had dinner together. On the way home Gluck visited Edith:

  Leave Nursing Home approximately 5.45. Home by 6 pm. Lovett sees to luggage.… Miss Vye had supper downstairs and my drink was left in my bedroom. I said I would put tray on landing. All this took place before 10.30. Then I mucked about and at last exhausted got into bed but before lying down telephone rang. Boger spoke. It was 11.15 pm. Rang for Miss Vye who helped me put on some warm clothes over pyjamas and then waited for Dr B to fetch me. We left Chantry House at 11.25 to go back to the Nursing Home.6

  Gluck went into shock. For days she told no one of Edith’s death. In the small hours of the night that Edith died, Miss Vye, on her way to her bathroom, heard Gluck crying and saying aloud, ‘O Edith I’m so sorry. Forgive me.’ The funeral was at Worthing Crematorium on Friday 12 November, a laurel wreath with no inscription or identification the sole adornment on the coffin. Gluck seemed not to recognize anyone at the funeral and spoke to no one. Edith’s obituary in The Times referred to her friendship with Yeats, and spoke of her as one of the principal women journalists of her period. Her ashes were buried in Steyning churchyard alongside those of her mother and Nora.

  Two weeks after the funeral Gluck suffered another heart attack. On Christmas Eve she felt ‘unspeakably sad’ as she stayed up late wrapping her presents and getting in a mess with the paper, labels and cards. On Christmas Day she lunched alone with Miss Vye who left for good the following week. Gluck bore no rancour and they stayed on visiting terms. After Miss Vye, there followed a succession of temporary housekeepers and after the housekeepers a succession of state-registered day and night nurses.

  There was no more talk of painting now. Bow-chested with asthma, her heart none too certain, Gluck got through the days. On many occasions Lovett carried her to her bed, she grew so frail. The world was out of reach. She lay, sideways, across her huge four-poster so as to watch from her window the changing sky and the view of Chanctonbury Ring, the clump of beech trees on the South Downs that, in 1939, she and Nesta called ‘YourOur downs’. ‘Out of reach.’ she wrote. ‘One might as well expect to reach Katmandu or the top of Everest as the end of this bed.’ She listened to Chopin and Debussy, ran the house from her room, and wanted to be gone. She likened herself to a tattered sail, shredded by the gales of life ‘A blinding glimpse of sun, but promise there was none.’ Along with jotted instructions about servicing the Aga, oiling the door locks, calling the piano tuner, planting the lobelias and feeding the fish, she asked for the end. ‘My pain within’, she wrote.

  Why could I not join the rout

  of wind and rain and sky and sun

  and tattered finally beyond repair

  cease to despair.

  Again, and yet again, and then again – a pressing occupation for the last ten years of her life – she added codicils to her Will. When the codicils became too numerous, David Tonkinson began afresh and another Will was drafted. It became a document of assertion and, in its omissions, of vendetta. Her miniature silver paintbox, on a silver necklace, given to her as a child by Sir Joseph Lyons, was to go to the Victoria and Albert Museum; her easels and painting materials and bottles and tubes to do with her experiments on paint to the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution; her books to the London Library; her Picasso bronze hand to the National Gallery of Scotland; her Kemmler grand piano and Amati violin to the Royal College of Music; her diamond horseshoe tiepin and coral bull’s head tiepin to Anne Yorke’s sons; her silver and jewellery to her nephews and niece; the drawings Munnings did of her down in Lamorna, in those heady years when she first realized she was an artist, the drawing Arthur Watts gave to her when they were neighbours in Hampstead, the Redouté watercolour of pansies and the Dürer engravings bought when she moved to Chantry; the drawings by Cocteau, Be
erbohm and Leslie Blanch – all she carefully distributed, then redistributed, to her friends and relatives.

  Only the young were to receive material reminders of her – there was nothing for Louis or Nesta. As for her money, there was no question of it reverting to The Fund. ‘They don’t need it,’ she remarked. What she felt to be the injustice of her economic dependency, of being bound by her father’s terms, of having to defer to her brother, had kept her simmering throughout all her years. She used her Will to settle a score. She wanted her much-loved cousin, Julia Samson, her great nieces and nephew and her faithful staff all to receive token amounts. The bulk of her money – and she had accrued some £90,000 – she was to assign, in equal divisions, to the Donkey Club, Wivelsfield Green; the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution; The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

  At Christmas 1977, Gluck endured a stroke which ravaged her physically, but left her mind unimpaired. She was dying and she knew it. Her brother, none too well himself, and his wife had booked to go to Switzerland for their winter holiday. Lady Gluckstein suggested they either cancel or go on the understanding that they would miss Gluck’s funeral. They went on the trip. Gluck’s cousin, Julia Samson, drove through the January fog from London to Steyning to see Gluck one last time:

  We talked and had tea. She thought of me as young and her sensibility wouldn’t have let her make a young person sad. I said I’ll come and see you next week. She didn’t say anything, just looked at me and her eyes were very very sad. There was a passion there inside. Perpetual liveliness.7

  There was no next week. Gluck died the next day on 10 January 1978. She was eighty two. In her Will she stipulated that she wished to be cremated and to have a non-denominational service. With religion, as with gender, she wanted something singular. For her, God was the divine judge, Love the eternal goal, Art, at its best, a linking of the two, and her own individual light the only clue to follow.

  To her nephew Roy fell the task of trying to organize a service she might have wanted. He took her request for a non-denominational service to mean no reference to God and no presence of clergymen. As a procedural guide, he loosely followed the Liberal Jewish Synagogue form of burial. Those who knew her, gave readings of passages and poems. She had asked in particular for a reading of the words of Christian at the end of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘I leave my sword to him who can wield it. My scars I can take with me.’

  Her brother, despite bad weather, ill health and his assurance to his wife that they would keep to their holiday plans, cut short their trip to Switzerland to attend the funeral. He took no part in the service, though his youngest son for the first time ever saw him cry. Whether the tears were of grief or anger, who knows. He was offended by her obituary in The Times which spoke of her running away to become an artist, with half a crown. Nor did he realize, when he saw her Will, which excluded all mention of him from it, that The Donkey Club, Wivelsfield Green – one of the main beneficiaries of her fortune – was a hospice for the incurably ill. To him it seemed like a scornful rebuff, the squandering of funds, for what, he wondered, had she ever cared about donkeys. He spoke of her stabbing him even from beyond the grave. He attended the gathering after the funeral at the Chantry House then he and his wife tried to fly back to Switzerland. All planes were grounded because of snow, and they were forced to spend the night at Heathrow.

  As for Nesta, Andrew McIntosh Patrick had told her of Gluck’s death:

  January 11th, 1978

  Andrew, dear Andrew

  How kind you were to tell me. I can never be grateful enough.

  It was a great shock.

  I’d had a long letter only about 3 days before … I’m not quite sure still exactly when she died. Louis said it was easy, but I wonder –

  She was so special wasn’t she? – absolutely maddening – but so loveable!

  What will happen to all the pictures she left? I hope you get them. You and Tony made the whole difference to her life. It was a happy ending really – and it could have been, without you – such a sad one.

  I’ll see you when I come over –

  Love and deep thanks

  Nesta

  Asked if there was anything of Gluck’s she would like, Nesta replied, ‘Oh, a few of her fine-haired brushes.’

  Gluck’s ashes were scattered in her studio garden. As requested in her Will, a thesis was commissioned on her battle to improve artists’ materials and all her papers on it sent to Harvard University. At her request, The Fine Art Society staged a memorial exhibition. It ran for six weeks over the Christmas season in 1980. Again there was a splash of intrigued interest in her life and work. The Sunday Times colour supplement ran a six-page feature on her. The commercial value of her pictures began to rise.

  ‘I have never yet been able to get from anyone a satisfactory answer to my constant question –’ she wrote to Tony Carroll two years before she died:

  What is the link? By what content would one recognise a picture was mine? I, of course am the last person to be able to answer such a question. So?? It will be too late for me when posterity decides.

  In her oratorical style she spoke often of the exacting standards she set herself and of the heights to which as an artist she aspired:

  … Feel that every work is your last and must say all you can of your feelings whatever your stage of development.… Just as no man shares his finger prints, so no man shares his heart or soul. A11 men are original if they are truthful, even though in that truth we must discern the common root of mankind …

  That instant of Vision. That moment when you saw. Even as you look again, it is no more, no, nor ever will be. So it is you who by your emotional awareness and concentration can live for all eternity in a second of time.8

  Behind the portentous tone was such a desire to do some ‘good and lovely work before she died. The best of her pictures have a simplicity and directness, a pure sense of harmony and form, a perfectionist use of colour and brushwork. But aspiration and analysis aside, the cool, calm pleasure of her work, all that she left, as proof of having lived – Craig, perched on the rocks in Cornwall, Bettina, adjusting her hat, the gaiety of the Cochran reviews, Constance’s white flowers, Nesta’s face merged with her own at the opera, a patch of convolvulus with a grasshopper perched on it in the garden at Millers Mead, the punt on the lake at the Mill House, the turning tide in Poole Harbour, the sun rising at St Buryan, Edith dozing in the fire warden’s office at one o’clock in the morning – all those moments and more, distilled from her life, have survived her, her proof of having been, the prizes she left behind, as fresh as the moment she perceived them, as undeniably her as the cadence of her voice, her demeanour or her smile.

  Image Gallery

  Photograph of Gluck by Howard Coster, ‘Photographer of Men’, circa 1924

  A.J. Munnings, Drawing of Gluck dressed as a gypsy, 1916. ‘The caravan did not exist, but I did smoke a tiny pipe as shown’

  The Old Stable. Gluck’s first Bolton House studio

  ‘Miss Gluck is the happy possessor of an unspoiled Georgian house and a completely modern and efficient studio.’ The studio, seen from Bolton House, 1936

  Edward Maufe’s plan for Gluck’s new studio

  Vernon House, Carlyle Square, designed by Oliver Hill, Gluck’s Lilies the only painting in the drawing room

  The Gluck Room at The Fine Art Society, 1932

  Molly Mount Temple and Gluck at the 1932 exhibition, in front of Broadlands

  Gluck in her Bolton House studio, January 1937

  Nesta in St. Moritz 1937

  Royal Hawaiian Hotel. On the Beach at Waikiki, 1952, Nesta, second left, sits between her husband Seymour and Charlot (to her right)

  The Gluck Room at The Fine Art Society, 1937, the walls and frames in pale grey alder wood

  A private view. Guests at The Fine Art Society, 1937, in front of White Lilac and Guelder Rose
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  Waltzing in Lenzerheide, Gluck and Nesta, 1938

  ‘I have a dog’. Gluck and Zar

  Bookplate for the Heald sisters, by Edmund Dulac, showing the Chantry House

  Weekend parties with the Heald sisters prior to the Gluck years. Edith is on the right

  NOTES

  ‘GLUCK: NO PREFIX, NO QUOTES’

  1.

  Sheila Graeme, Things Have Gone to Pieces, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1970.

  2.

  Gluck, Biographical Notes (undated).

  3.

  Ibid.

  4.

  Gluck, ‘Credo’, The Fine Art Society exhibition catalogue, London, 1973.

  5.

  Gluck, Notes on the Philosophy of Painting, 1940.

  6.

  Ibid.

  7.

  Diary entry, 31 March 1957.

  8.

  Gluck, ’On the Quality of Paint’, Tempera, Society of Painters, 1969.

  9.

  Gluck to Nesta Obermer, October 1936.

  10.

  Gluck to Andrew McIntosh Patrick, 24 May 1972.

  11.

  Gluck to Nesta Obermer, 22 January 1937.

  12.

  Gluck, Notes (undated).

  ‘THE FAMILY’

  1.

  Yvonne Mitchell, The Family, Heinemann, London, 1969, p. 138–9.

  2.

  Joseph Gluckstein to Mr and Mrs Louis Hallé, 8 August 1894.