Vanessa bell, p.47
Vanessa Bell, page 47
I should like you to know that (at your request) I did tell her [Virginia] what you had said about the comfort she had been to you over Julian, and I have never seen her look more pleased and also surprised. I know that your message gave her the keenest pleasure.49
Though at first Vanessa relived her youth through the typed and bound copies of all Virginia’s early letters to Violet Dickinson which the latter now sent her, she was further cut off from her past by Virginia’s death. In the months that followed a certain rigidity settled over life at Charleston. Vanessa and Duncan rarely indulged in cross-examination of each other’s motives and would probably have considered any kind of public self-analysis bad form. Vanessa once told Angelica that she thought psychoanalysis was something everyone did for themselves; she doubted whether her brother Adrian, now a leading figure in the psychoanalytic field, had ever cured anyone and she was quite sure that her sister-in-law Karin never had. Though the Hogarth Press had been publishing James Strachey’s translations of Freud, it is doubtful if she had read any, though The Interpretation of Dreams had been in her possession, for when Robert Medley asked to borrow it, Vanessa told him that Grace was reading it. Vanessa’s belief in reasonableness made her unsympathetic to any theories that placed so much importance on the unconscious, an area about which she knew, and probably wanted to know, little. Because during these years she was dragged back into life against her tendency to dwell on the past, it was as if she needed to freeze some parts of herself, to maintain certain silences, in order to make the conflict bearable. John Lehmann, visiting Charleston at this time in the company of Leonard Woolf, has left a telling description: ‘Vanessa and Clive and Duncan Grant and Quentin were all there. It was strange to happen on them together like that: it increased the impression I had during the whole weekend, of visiting ghosts, of entering a dream, particularly as Vanessa was very silent, all too obviously still suffering under Julian’s as well as Virginia’s death. She can only have been in her early sixties at the time, but she looked much older.’50
In 1940 Vanessa, like Duncan, agreed to decorate a church, moved perhaps less by the Holy Spirit than by her admiration for Italian art. In 1939 both artists had joined the Society of Mural Painters and at the Society’s initial exhibition, shown at the Tate, had been represented by photographs of their decorative work. It was perhaps this occasion that fired a friend of Duncan’s Aunt Violet, Charles H. Reilly, a retired professor of architecture, to write to Dr G.K. A. Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, suggesting that Duncan should decorate a Sussex church. Bishop Bell responded immediately to the idea as he was keen to foster closer relations between the church and the arts. Therefore in November 1940 Duncan went to Brighton to meet him (seeing also that day a sailor he had met at Plymouth) and it was agreed that not only Duncan but also Vanessa, Quentin and Angelica should be involved in a scheme to decorate Berwick Church, some two miles from Charleston. Sir Charles Reilly and the bishop together looked round for patrons to pay for the project and found, among others, Mr Peter Jones, whose shop in Sloane Square Sir Charles Reilly had partly designed. Next an architectural adviser was thought necessary and as Edward Maufe, architect of Guildford Cathedral, disliked the idea of decorations, an alternative was found in Duncan’s and Vanessa’s former friend Frederick Etchells who suddenly reappeared in their lives, now a white-haired eminent architect.
Once they had enough money to proceed they had still to obtain the approval of the local church council. This was soon granted, even though the Hon. Mrs Sandilands spoke out against it. It subsequently passed the Church Advisory Committee in July 1941, but by September a group of parishioners, led by Mrs Sandilands, had begun to mount objections. Mrs Sandilands insisted that their protests should be heard at a chancellor’s court. It had now become a matter of no small importance because if this lady won her case it would be difficult for Bishop Bell to encourage church decoration elsewhere. Two days before the court met in Berwick church, Bishop Bell cunningly invited all the parishioners of Berwick to a meeting in the village schoolroom to discuss the artists’ designs. So much hostility was expressed at this meeting that Duncan felt it was not worth continuing, but Bishop Bell remained optimistic and assured them that Mrs Sandilands’ personal objection (as yet undisclosed) was trivial. Vanessa, meanwhile, was extremely ‘agitated’ (a term she often used to suggest mild perturbation even though the emotion aroused might be closer to fear or terror); she was convinced that Mrs Sandilands was going to denounce her publicly as an atheist living in sin. As it turned out, Mrs Sandilands’ most personal objection was easily refuted: she declared Quentin a conscientious objector which he was not. The other objections were quickly negated by representations in the artists’ favour on the part of Frederick Etchells, Sir Kenneth Clark, T.A. Fennemore (now associated with the Society of Mural Painters), the artist Bertram Nicholls and the president of a local archaeological society.
‘It is truly encouraging to think of you all hobnobbing with Bishops and becoming hot stuff in the sacred art line,’ wrote Janie Bussy51 from occupied Nice, where the shortage of food left her wistfully daydreaming of Charleston and the puddings she had eaten there. Had she visited Charleston in December 1941, when the decorations were well under way, she would have found angels, bishops and virgins in every room. ‘The house is chaotic,’ Vanessa declared, ‘and all a dither with Christianity.’52
Once it had been decided that they should paint, not directly on to the walls of the church but on to plaster-board panels that could then be fixed into position, they had begun work in a barn lent during the summer months by Maynard, using easels for large-scale work provided by John Christie of Glyndebourne. Various people in the neighbourhood were dragooned into posing. Vanessa, in her two large decorations on either side of the aisle, a Nativity and Annunciation, made use of a local farmhand nicknamed Beckett (Stanley Standon) for one of the shepherds, as well as Grace’s small son John Higgens. She also borrowed some lambs and found photographs of others in the magazine Picture Post. Angelica modelled for the virgin in the Annunciation, while her friend Chattie Salaman knelt in odd positions in chairs, simulating angels in flight for Duncan’s Christ in Glory. He also portrayed a local soldier, sailor and airman who appear kneeling in the lower left-hand corner, while on the right are found Bishop Bell and other prelates. In the bishop’s absence an old model, ‘Jemima’, made out of chicken wire and papier mâché and which had been used at the Euston Road School, knelt permanently in prayer in Angelica’s bedroom, dressed in the bishop’s robes.
Angelica, meanwhile, had returned to Langford Grove for a term where she was employed by Mrs Curtis to teach art. Her contribution to the Berwick murals was to be a madonna on the wall opposite to the church door, but lack of time, ill health and fatigue prevented its production. From Langford Grove she wrote of her want of criticism and time to paint. Vanessa, anxious that she should not instead fall into the role of housekeeper to Bunny and his two children, thought Angelica better placed with Mrs Curtis than she might be in other jobs. ‘It’s so terribly difficult to paint seriously when one is responsible for other things’, she wrote, ‘and hasn’t room and space to oneself and we females have to struggle for it all our lives one way or another. However I can’t complain much at this moment for I have evolved a technique for really banning Grace and Mrs Scovell [the daily help] after the early morning for the rest of the day and am able to work quite hard.’53
After many sketches, the putting in and taking out of pillars in her Annunciation, after drastic criticism from Duncan regarding the angels’ wings and pose, her two large scenes were completed along with Duncan’s Christ in Glory and put into position in November 1942. Duncan subsequently added a large crucifixion for the end wall of the nave and four circular paintings of the seasons on the outside of the chancel screen. On the inside Quentin painted six small, rather Victorian panels representing the various sacraments, as well as the Wise and Foolish Virgins over the chancel arch. At a later date he added an altarpiece depicting the Supper at Emmaus as well as some murals over the vestry door and on the wall opposite. Finally Duncan’s mother embroidered an altar cloth and Phyllis Keyes made a cross and candlesticks. Vanessa painted three panels with archangels to ornament the pulpit (destroyed by vandals in 1962 and replaced with designs of fruit and flowers by Duncan). In the summer of 1943, shortly before the decorations were consecrated, coloured bands were painted around the arches in the nave and on the chancel screen, Duncan and Vanessa overseeing this and themselves painting trompe-l’œil circular windows in the nave, all of which help bind the decorations to their setting. Today a visitor to Berwick church has the same shock of delighted surprise that Sir Charles Reilly felt on first seeing the results of his suggestion: ‘It’s like stepping out of foggy England into Italy.’54
Vanessa put more of herself into these paintings than into any other of her mural decorations, for she used the religious subjects as an impersonal cloak for her own feelings and experience. Her Nativity slowly asserts a statuesque mood, aided by the stillness of the figures, the ridges in the drapery and the repeated use of horizontals - in the ox’s head, in one shepherd’s arm, the line of the hills and elsewhere - which radiate up and out of the composition. Light glows, not only from the kneeling shepherd’s lantern, but also from the Christ child. The Virgin, though she holds him on her lap, does not look down but straight out of the picture as if her thoughts are focused on his future sacrifice. The parallel between Mary’s experience and her own cannot have escaped Vanessa. Her painting of the Annunciation would seem to confirm this, as the pose of the Virgin contains a deeply felt expression of resignation, of submission to the compound of joy and pain involved in maternal experience. Between the angel and the virgin is a river of blue cloth, which falls from the virgin’s bent arm and leads the eye down to the narrow space between the two arches that spring up on either side. Within this thin wedge rises a vase of madonna lilies, their blooms carefully composed into an arching design. Lit from behind and edged with light, they, in Auden’s phrase, ‘show an affirming flame’.
Apart from the Berwick murals Vanessa continued to produce many still lifes and landscapes during the war as well as portraits of her friends. She painted Duncan, Helen Anrep and, in the year before her sister’s death, had executed for Virginia a formal portrait of Leonard at his typewriter with his dog at his side (National Portrait Gallery). When Desmond MacCarthy spent a weekend at Charleston in 1943, Vanessa and Duncan both began informal portraits of him which they completed some months later when he made a second visit. Their paintings still sold, but at lower prices than before the war; in April 1942 Vanessa agreed to let the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts buy a snow scene at Tilton for £15 (now in the Arts Council collection). She continued to design dust-jackets for Leonard, including one for the posthumous volume of Virginia’s essays, The Death of the Moth, in which the loose calligraphy of her drawing jars uncomfortably with the typeset lettering. In 1943 she designed a cover for the Dutch sofa in Duncan’s bedroom; its large, simple lines and patterned shapes were worked in black, brown and yellow-ochre by Ethel Grant. That year she also began a large painting entitled The Kitchen (Charleston Trust), showing Grace at work. Compared with the Berwick murals, it is an unsatisfactory exercise in monumentality; despite her feelings for simple mass, the spaces between objects are ugly and meaningless and every part of the canvas is worked with a dull regularity.
In the spring of 1942 Angelica and Bunny decided to marry. Though Duncan and Vanessa were warned of this fact, they were not invited to the wedding or told of its date. Vanessa had a scene with Angelica over her marriage in the garden room but afterwards concerned herself with finding a wedding present, and was anxious to effect a reconciliation. After marriage Angelica continued to visit Charleston occasionally, at weekends, but she came alone. Vanessa, however, had been less outraged by this union than some of her relations and friends who were alarmed by the twenty-six-year difference in age. Helen Anrep went so far as to predict that in the long run Bunny would suffer for allowing Angelica to fall in love with him.
Meanwhile the war continued to cause a dearth of entertainment and culture in the area around Lewes and so two elderly sisters, collectively known as ‘the ladies of Miller’s’, determined to provide it. They had moved into Lewes from Northease Manor and taken Miller’s House, the stables of which, with the help of much glass, they converted into a studio and gallery. Mrs Frances Byng Stamper and Miss Caroline Byng Lucas, or ‘Bay’ and ‘Mouie’ as they were respectively nicknamed, came from an aristocratic background, having been wards of Princess Marie-Louise and brought up in royal circles. Each week they travelled to London to spend their meagre food coupons at Fortnum and Mason’s, for everything about them was of the very best, from their Ferragamo shoes to their manners. Mouie, however, tended to dress a little artily, and this, combined with their extreme gentility and lack of good looks (Mary Hutchinson declared them the ugliest women she had ever seen), made the people of Lewes laugh gently at them behind their backs.
During the war they determined to make Miller’s House a cultural centre where exhibitions could be shown, lectures held, concerts performed. At one time they considered calling this venture the ‘Sussex Art Centre’ but this title was advisedly dropped in favour of Miller’s. Both ladies were devoted to Duncan who charmed them with his manners, humour and good looks and who, because of his covert femininity, presented no threat. He, Clive and Vanessa gave their full support to the gallery and were present at its opening in July 1941. Through their influence Sir Kenneth Clark made the opening speech, while Raymond Mortimer and Joe Ackerley were asked to help with reviews. The ladies themselves, with their perfect manners, made excellent hostesses and contributed significantly to the gallery’s success.
Among the more important exhibitions mounted by Miller’s Gallery was one of modern sculpture, held in January 1942, to which Sir Kenneth Clark lent small bronzes by Rodin, Maillol, Degas and Henry Moore. Duncan wrote the catalogue introduction. In November 1942 Clive gave a talk illustrated with lantern slides on modern art, and two years later another on Renoir. Before the first lecture the ladies of Miller’s lunched with the Charlestonians at the White Hart in Lewes, this becoming a customary routine, later continued at Shelley’s Hotel. The social occasions provided by Miller’s attracted Barbara Bagenal, who was now living at Rye. She appeared at a talk given by E.M. Forster and announced (to Vanessa’s consternation) that a combination of pedal bicycle and a change of trains brought her easily to Glynde (the station nearest Charleston).
The ladies of Miller’s were also responsible for commissioning art. They encouraged Vanessa and Duncan to do lithographs and in January 1945 included some of their work in a volume of artists’ lithographs which they published. They also decided that the ancient frescos in the area should be recorded and in 1947 published - again under the imprint The Miller’s Press - the book of photographs and tracings, Twelfth-Century Paintings at Hardham and Clayton, for which Clive wrote a lengthy introduction.
Apart from the opportunities created by Berwick church and the ladies of Miller’s, the war years were noticeably short on commissions and social gaiety. In 1943 Vanessa and Duncan did, however, receive an invitation to enliven the children’s restaurant at Devonshire Hill School at Tottenham. Their decorations, based on the tale of Cinderella, were unveiled in February 1944, Maynard making an opening speech and Vanessa coping on her own with the aldermen and Lord Mayor because Duncan was ill. Afterwards she spent the night in London and attended a meeting of the Memoir Club. As was the custom nowadays, they dined first at an inexpensive restaurant in Charlotte Street and afterwards collected at 46 Gordon Square to hear two or three papers read. Except for a visit to her old friend Hilton Young, now Lord Kennet, these were the only occasions during the last years of the war that Vanessa visited London.
She still depended greatly on her family and was pleased when in the spring of 1943 Quentin, after a period of work with the Political Warfare Executive in London, returned to Charleston on doctor’s advice. He began work again as a farmhand for Maynard and, in the intervals, painted his altarpiece for Berwick church. Vanessa was also delighted with the news that Angelica was pregnant and began immediately to make clothes for the forthcoming child. Soon after this announcement, in April 1943, Bunny accompanied Angelica to Charleston on a reconciliatory visit. Though Duncan remained a little stiff throughout the first evening, Clive provided a great deal of noise and jollity; Bunny bumbled about trying not to show too much how glad he was to be once more within the fold, and Vanessa, in her silent fashion, emitted an emotive power that bound together all the diverse emotions and personalities.
She wrote at once when she heard of the death of Helen Anrep’s favourite, Graham Bell, killed in an air crash on active service with the RAF at the age of thirty-two in 1943. Graham and his friend Anne Olivier Popham, together with Claude and Elsie Rogers, had been staying with Helen and her children at Rodwell when the war broke out, and he and the Rogers had stayed on a few months, painting and helping her cope with two evacuees and the work of house and garden. This fresh tragedy must have seemed like an echo of Julian’s death to both Vanessa and Helen, and the latter wrote: ‘He was so undeveloped but I think there was a good deal to develope [sic] and he wanted so much to live. If only his divorce had been accomplished and he and Olivia [both Helen and Vanessa spelt Olivier’s name thus] married it would have made a great deal of difference. ... Julian’s death and now Graham’s have some quality of frustration in them that makes them very hard to bear.’55
