by Jane Brown
At the last minute before the holidays her new mindfulness deposits a playwright at her door, and her diary notes the name of Sean O’Casey. He and his wife Eileen are coming to live in Totnes and want their children to attend the school. O’Casey’s three wonderful plays, including The Plough and the Stars, ‘a dissenting patriot’s history of the birth of the Irish Free State’, surely set him in the footsteps of the Russian masters?252 He had escaped from the tumult of Dublin theatricals to his preferred peace in Devon – could he be persuaded to write for Dartington’s new drama company?
There is no summering in the Adirondacks this year.253 The whole family, including Michael, climb aboard the sleeper for Fort William and two weeks of happy holiday, walking in the hills towards Loch Eilt, sailing in the Sound of Arisaig, dancing at a Highland wedding, shopping in Morar, picking blackberries and driving to Glenfinnan, all in rain and shine. After an interlude for the Jooss dance festival at Dartington the others went their own ways and Dorothy took Ruth and William, seemingly even without Miss Jefferies, to the Norfolk Broads, taking a boat from Wroxham, armed with flashlights, extra dishcloths, candlesticks and wellingtons. As in the Highlands she revelled in the earthiness – or wateriness – of it all, the morning mist on Hickling Broad, the joy of a hot bath, even of fetching milk in a can at Ranworth, of finding ‘a most interesting church’ and the ‘lovely breeze’ as they returned to their mooring. As Dorcas and Eloise had gone to spend a holiday with their respective families, this was a rare if not unique experience for Ruth and William to have their mother to themselves, and for Dorothy to take notice of her youngest children. Where was Leonard? He was committed to his fellow agricultural economists, fast becoming his habit as he gave some of his energies to his own particular interests. Though, as Dorothy had written, they had come together to England, and her life was no longer her personal story, their togetherness had really come down to a public display, and each had drifted into leading almost separate lives, often only in the same room in the evening after dinner when they listened to the BBC news bulletin or a radio concert. Dorothy’s return to high society ‘junkets’ on Whitney’s behalf had left Leonard rather bemused at his own role of dog-like devotion to ‘a person with a strong sense of world-unity and mission’ and yet ‘driven and confused by [her] imaginative tensions’.254 Now there was Mischa Chekhov. Leonard was not about to be embraced into the golden glow of her new-found appreciations, at least not yet.
Ten: Mischa and The Possessed
Since the holiday in Scotland Michael had been at home and working at campaigning on behalf of the Independent Labour Party in Totnes, an occupation arranged for him by Leonard and Headmaster Curry at Dorothy’s request. In early October she went to Cambridge to see him settled into what would be his fourth year and she was pleased to find he had friends outside college, with an Anglo-American academic family, the Cromptons, with three daughters. Michael was smitten with Belinda, the youngest.
Dartington’s Chekhov Studio opened on 2nd October 1936, and Dorothy was soon absorbed in explaining to the trustees and the world in general what this was all about. As she had once before, just ten years earlier, typed out the prospectus for the school, now she did so for the Studio, beginning with Chekov’s experience:
As a young man of twenty he entered the Moscow Arts Theatre under the direction of Stanislavsky. It is here that he learned to prepare the parts that later made him famous in Russia, and from Stanislavsky he learned also the value and importance of a method. Chekhov’s name became synonymous with the great roles he created [including Khlestakov in The Government Inspector, Malvolio in Twelfth Night and Hamlet].255
She noted that as director of the Second Moscow Arts Theatre Chekhov ran ‘an organization of nearly two hundred people’ for four years from 1923. ‘His aim was to deepen and ennoble the work of the Theatre,’ and he found the plays of Shakespeare most rewarding, enlarging the repertory to include King Lear and The Taming of the Shrew, alongside the Russian classics. ‘Leaving Russia in 1928 he determined to study at closer range the European theatre – he worked in Germany with Max Reinhardt, and then in Paris and in Riga.’
Dorothy only wrote of her own feelings at the opening of the Studio in 1936 in her 1959 memoir. In 1936 she clearly felt that she had to justify the introduction of this avant-garde Actors Studio and present it as part of their steady progress. She started with her own love of the theatre as a means of ‘refreshment and renewal’, she recalled Maurice Browne and Journey’s End, Richard Odlin and their attempts at open-air performances including Milton’s Comus, Nellie Van and her productions of Ibsen, especially A Doll’s House, and their newly refurbished Barn Theatre, and continued:
For me [this] all leads up to the day when Mr Chekhov came to Dartington – one day [afternoon of Monday 12th October] I went over as a visitor to his class. Several people were sitting with me on the little balcony and I watched an exercise. Mr Chekhov was showing the different qualities of emotion in the way we approach someone. He walked across to Esme Hubbard in one tempo, and then in another, taking her hand and saying ‘how are you?’ It was a simple exercise, but what he gave to it was such a revelation to me that I knew I had met the man who was for me, the Master.256
After that first visit it was Beatrice, on the phone, who urged her mother to join the group ‘for an hour a day’. Dorothy continued, ‘I did this with certain misgivings, but soon it was 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 hours a day and even more. I hardly dared ask myself where I was going. I only knew that the work opened up new vistas of life for me.’ Her diary is the evidence as the sessions grow, first her morning sessions then the afternoons, and ‘Mischa’s’ classes replace her usually multifarious activities. Soothing friends such as Arthur Waley with his ‘mask-like face’, who talked of the Chinese poets, and his devoted companion the dancer Beryl de Zoete were welcomed as regular guests.257 Also Jim Ede, a curator at the Tate Gallery, who had been once before and thought Dartington ‘an oasis of light, of activity + of friendship’ and was overjoyed that Dorothy’s taste matched his own, for the works of Kit Wood, David Jones and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, as well as Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson. Ede suggested that Dartington should have a gallery, partly because Dorothy’s collection was growing too large for the house, but for some reason this did not happen, possibly because this was Ede’s last visit for twenty years as he was on the point of leaving to live and work abroad.
It was less easy to cope with ‘several talks’ with Headmaster Curry, who had left his wife Ena at High Cross House while he moved into the school to live with his new love who was a school housemother. His reasoning was that he wanted the children ‘to see what a really happy marriage was all about’. Dorothy noted that she must call a meeting of housemothers. There was no question of losing Curry, he was too valuable a headmaster, but the liberal excesses of his regime – at least in the opinion of the Dartington Sales Department’s staff – contributed to the racy reputation that undermined their marketing efforts, reduced to ridicule by stories of the school’s pupils bathing naked in the Dart then leaping about as the Totnes trains went past.
Dorothy’s ‘Master’ and his rarely seen wife were installed in an elfin-style thatched cottage at Yarner. Everyone was fascinated by his Russian mystique and the rule was that no one was to disturb him. In class he was wholly serious, but outside he was enchantingly child-like, enthusing over their tea-and-biscuit breaks and substantial lunches. Classes were held from 10.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m., then lunch and a rest afterwards, before resuming at 3.30 p.m. until 5.30 p.m., and sometimes later. A peep through the door of the large studio revealed the Master in his loose-fitting suit conducting his class of sylph-like figures, both male and female, clothed from neck to ankle in a supple navy blue fabric, wearing slippers of the softest suede, and moving elegantly to the music played by Patrick Harvey on the piano. On the end wall of the studio huge letters exhorted ‘GET THE RIGHT FEELINGS THROUGH THE RIGHT MEANS’. The exercises were for suppleness and co
nsciousness of one’s body, then the class would move into the exploration of their emotions through responses to mythical or Shakespearean characters and situations. This was necessarily an analytical process which brought tears and laughter to the surface, the end result being that the actor arrived on stage not only physically attuned, as Stanislavsky taught, but emotionally involved, and so able to project the feelings of their character to the audience.258
Dorothy’s life narrowed to the essentials. She had for some time been noting events which marked the worsening situation in Europe, and she listened carefully to Edward VIII’s Abdication Speech on 10th December. She would have found it hard to sympathise with one who put love before duty, and could not help wondering if the public’s disdain for Mrs Simpson would rub off on other American women, especially in Devon. Into this esoteric existence a letter from Noel Brailsford – ‘I want to tell you that I am joining the International Brigade in Spain’ – came later in the month. ‘I know your pacifist principles,’ he continued, ‘at one time of my life I came near to holding them as strongly as you do, but can one in this muddled world be sure of any theoretical guide to conduct?’ He made his case fervently, that indolent Britain must wake up, that ‘the Brigade, if we back it wholeheartedly, can save our souls as well as the soil of Spain’, and that ‘if the Republic goes down, the whole Spanish Left will be massacred’.259
He asked her for money for his recruits. She was in a terrible quandary, she loved the Spain she knew, and made herself reply immediately, on 21st December:
I hardly know what to say to you... I can hardly bear the thought of your going to Spain. My heart is torn between the desire to restrain you and the urge to encourage nobility and greatness when one sees it in action of this kind. What can I do? I think I must ask you to take a gift as a kind of personal testimonial to yourself and to ask you to spend it in any way that you think best. I can’t quite bring myself to contribute to a fighting brigade direct, but if you make the contribution for me perhaps that is a way to salve my conscience. It sounds terribly dishonest, doesn’t it? But you will understand how torn and confused and miserable I feel about it all. The purity and integrity of your motive is about the finest thing I see. Bless you.260
Others among Brailsford’s friends dissuaded him from fighting – he was rather old at sixty-three – and he was able to take his recruits and supplies to Spain, and return unharmed. No amount of pleading would have detained Michael’s friend John Cornford, a determined hero who left behind his former girlfriend Ray Peters and their infant son, as well as his poetic muse Margot Heinemann, and who was killed in the fighting on the Cordoba front on 28th December, the day after his twenty-first birthday. Cambridge, the city of the Darwins, was deeply saddened at the death of Charles Darwin’s promising great-grandson, and his poor parents, Professor F.M. Cornford and the poet Frances Cornford, who were close friends of Rupert Brooke and had named their son Rupert John, suffered an echoing tragedy. It was Michael who kept his head and managed the duties of a friend, sorting out Cornford’s papers and belongings, and – with Dorothy’s assistance – he found a refuge for Ray Peters and her son James with his friends, the Ramsdens, who worked for the Labour Party in Totnes.261
For Michael, Cornford’s death brought on the crisis that had been hovering about his college life. Cornford, with his fierce Byronic looks and vehement Marxist outbursts, had been Michael’s shield, their friendship carrying him into a well-connected company who would otherwise not have had much time for the tall, fair and frankly lightweight American, with his sports car and the epithet ‘millionaire’ dropped every time he entered the room.262 With Cornford holding the stage Michael could be, as he admitted, a bystander in political arguments, which suited him. Poignant images of Willard arise like spectres, Willard who had no banking training, who had not been to West Point, and who found that the gremlins of Morgan’s Bank and the American Expeditionary Force defeated him – and Cambridge and Trinity College in the 1930s were no less demanding. Michael was ill-equipped, he had been educated with dancers and actors at Dartington, followed by a year’s cramming at the London School of Economics, rather than with his peers at Eton or Rugby; he felt exposed and isolated, that nobody liked him (shades of Willard’s desperation) and most of all that his ‘final examinations loomed like monsters’ on his horizons, and he dreaded failure. These seem common enough as final year fears, except that Michael went further and told his mother that he felt like the student Razumov, in Joseph Conrad’s 1911 novel Under Western Eyes, swept out of his depth in the current of history. The unworldly Razumov moves from St Petersburg to Geneva, finding himself a pawn in a revolutionary underworld in which he is forced to become ‘a secret agent’ against his will.
Michael’s sense of the dramatic had concocted the ‘secret agent’ idea (perhaps he had been reading too much John Buchan in Scotland or even Erskine Childers?) and the situation, at least in January 1937, was really rather different. True, he had been approached by Anthony Blunt, at the prompting of Guy Burgess, to ‘work for anti-Fascism’ but this was seen as putting one’s ideals into action, and supporting all those who went off to Spain. Burgess was especially admired ‘as one who in the most real sense had sacrificed his personal life for what he believed in’.263 If he was valued as an American, Michael protested, he had left that country when he was ten, and from what little he knew it seemed fanciful that in its increasing isolationism America was interested in events in old Spain. He also believed that Blunt told him not to worry about his finals for his degree did not matter, whereas Michael knew very well that in his mother’s eyes it was of the greatest importance.
Dorothy’s diary notes that Blunt, with Michael Eden and Guy Burgess, visited Dartington in the Easter holidays, though it is not clear if she invited them, or if it was their own idea. Anthony Blunt was rather desperately searching for a job and knowing Dorothy’s interest in art perhaps hoped that she might do as Victor Rothschild’s mother had done for Guy Burgess, and pay him a retainer as an adviser.264 Or perhaps they just wanted to see if Michael’s tales of the important people his mother knew were true? Guy Burgess was remembered as amiably playing cricket on the lawn, though less appreciated when, after too much to drink, he ogled the Jooss male dancers. Dorothy and Blunt walked in the garden talking about paintings; did he tell her of his opinion of her young favourites of the Seven and Five Society, that he had called them ‘a bedful of dreamers’ – or did he steer her towards his rather grudging opinion of Picasso as making ‘almost the only form of serious art that could be produced in the given circumstances’? Did he happily take her commission for buying her Picasso?265 She asked Blunt to keep an eye on Michael for his last term, and they agreed to keep in touch as she put his Cambridge and London phone numbers into her diary.
Louise Croly and Dorothy at sea, Naushon 1937
At the end of the holiday when Michael said he could not go back, Dorothy reached her own crisis point: did he not realise that she had given up her country, and lost Whitney to Britain, and that now she looked to him to succeed where Willard had failed? Did he not realise that talking to so-called Marxists was child’s play and mattered little, when his Cambridge Honours would fit him for carrying on her work with her liberal connections in America, and directing her newly founded William Collins Whitney Foundation?266 She actually lashed out at Michael, using Harry’s failure: ‘My brother Harry was a brilliant student at Yale... But he ran away. He ran away from every hard challenge: he couldn’t face the possibility that he might fail. He squandered his great gifts, and that is something you cannot do!’
It was Michael’s turn to be shocked at his mother’s rarely seen passion, and he returned to Cambridge to work hard. Undoubtedly Dorothy wrote to Maurice Dobb – who held up the example of Kim Philby as a brilliant student to Michael – and to Maynard Keynes.
William, Leonard and Ruth Elmshirst, Naushon 1937
If it was a battle for Michael’s ideological soul then it was Round One to
his mother; Michael duly gained his First Class Honours and left, announcing that he would be working in America. Dorothy had already written to Eleanor Roosevelt on his behalf.267
They all left for America, and that August of 1937 Leonard and Dorothy (though perhaps not Michael) with Ruth, William, Miss Jefferies and Louise Croly were guests on the Forbes family’s Naushon island, off Cape Cod. It was a particularly idyllic summering, captured by Leonard with his new camera, his snapshots carefully arranged into a small album. He labelled this unique album Naushon 1937 – did he fear it was to be the last of such summerings, the last of those magical happenings of which the first two had changed his life?
Dorothy was contemplating her second year of Mischa’s classes. She thought that Leonard was jealous and fended him off by thanking him for his patience ‘during this strange new experience of concentrating all my energies on one thing, one idea’. She added, ‘I see, with a kind of overwhelming gratitude, that perhaps only you would have been capable of supporting and helping me in this way – asking nothing in return, and only eager to see new vistas of life opening for me.’ Michael Young suggests that her fondness for Mischa, whom she loved, had flowed over to Leonard, that she had conjoined them.268
