Vanessa bell, p.49
Vanessa Bell, page 49
Confined to Charleston throughout the greater part of the war, Vanessa and Duncan were now eager to get abroad. Duncan was the first to leave England, taking a short holiday in Copenhagen in the spring of 1946 with his mother and Aunt Daisy, the latter now blind, cantankerous and scarcely able to walk. Later that year he made a trip to Dieppe with Vanessa and the painter Edward le Bas. The town, especially on the harbour and sea front, had suffered much war damage, and their hotel, which had no hot water and very little furniture, was one of the few in operation. They found some empty rooms at the top of the hotel which they used as a studio and from where they painted views of the roof-tops. Vanessa must also have sketched in the market because eight years later she made a large subject picture out of a Dieppe fish-stall. Their painting routine was broken by culinary treats; on one occasion they dined on white wine and oysters with Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson. On another they accompanied Ethel and Nan to a nearby eighteenth-century chateau where the owner regaled them with tales of the destruction wrought by the Germans.* Two days later they visited the damaged Château d’Auppegard; a bomb had fallen near by, the house had been looted and German soldiers had completed the havoc. They had crudely disfigured one of Duncan’s designs in the loggia and he and Vanessa spent most of the afternoon retouching their former work. Inside the château the rooms were bare and empty and in one room the ceiling had entirely collapsed. Ethel and Nan lived in only three of its rooms and declared they were now too old to restore and refurnish the house as they would like. The occasion was not, however, uncheerful; Duncan, especially, was delighted by the sight of a large pat of Normandy butter and a jug full of cream.
Edward le Bas now became their regular travelling companion. He seems to have entered their lives soon after the war, immediately becoming one of their closest friends. Sexually ambivalent, le Bas’s introduction to Duncan may have come through a mutual boy-friend, the young Jamaican, Patrick Nelson, who sometimes acted as an artist’s model. Le Bas later told Paul Roche that his first meeting with Vanessa had been difficult until he had made it clear that he had no intention of taking Duncan away from her. Instead he brought to their lives a welcome note of luxury, obtaining for them seats at Covent Garden, giving parties and entertaining regularly.
Le Bas was tall, bearded and had hair like an astrakhan collar. He came from a wealthy family whose fortune had been made in steel tubing. After his father’s death he had inherited a third of the family business and had worked in the firm until 1932 when his mother fell mentally ill. Made deeply anxious by this, le Bas panicked and experienced a profound sense of loneliness; nervous strain caused a rash of blisters to appear on his hands and feet. He promptly resigned from the family business, which he hated, and thereafter only attended the firm’s annual meeting at Claridge’s, a proceeding that still made him so nervous his hand visibly shook as he signed the relevant papers. In his spare time he trained as a painter at the Royal Academy Schools, joined the Artists International Association and made a close friend of Charles Ginner. He had begun to form a very fine collection of twentieth-century art and even before meeting Vanessa and Duncan had bought examples of their work. Cultivated and refined, a perfectionist in both his dress and style of living, his most notable talent (he was, perhaps, too selfless a person to be an outstanding artist) was his ability to give pleasure: he had an easy, sociable manner and a gently effervescent character; wine drunk in his presence seemed like champagne. Even when entertaining children he knew how to turn a fairly predictable outing into an exceptional treat.
But his passport into Vanessa’s life was chiefly his deep love of painting. He had in his collection one of her most successful still lifes, a sonorously colourful, complex arrangement of fruit and pots, painted in 1930. His own style was safely within the Camden Town-Bloomsbury tradition, a high-keyed naturalism, fluent but unexceptional. Vanessa found his painting competent but restricted, and remarked of his portrait of Angelica, painted in 1950 (and now in the Arts Council collection): ‘As a painting like all of E’s work it seems to me somehow just too feeble - sympathetic and with a good deal of charm, but not enough vision of his own.’13
Vanessa remained an astute, if sometimes harsh, critic, even of her friends’ work. Her familiarity with Keith Baynes did not prevent her from seeing that one of his shows at Agnew’s was ‘pretty and quite empty’. She looked with severity at the work of certain artists who had come to maturity immediately before the 1939-45 war, in particular Graham Sutherland and John Piper, though on the whole her attitude was less forceful to Piper than to Sutherland. When in 1951 she made her first visit to Long Crichel, a house some eight miles from Salisbury shared jointly by Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Edward Sackville-West, Eardley Knollys and Raymond Mortimer, she found there a large collection of French and English paintings (many of them acquired by Knollys while running the Storran Gallery).
The house is full of pictures, the best being a Vuillard, a Bonnard and a Pissarro, some other attractive ones by Pasmore, Moynihan etc., wear rather thin after a day or two. But the real horrors to my mind are the Graham Sutherlands and Pipers. They led to a terrific set to between me and Eddy. He’s so intelligent that one can only say what one really thinks, so I abused G.S. regardless of politeness. ... They’ve got a horrible affair, large and hot and shapeless [Red Landscape, now in Southampton Art Gallery], but full according to Eddy of the most poetical and romantic memories of Wales. Of course in the end I am merely thought old and old-fashioned and incapable of appreciating the young. But how tired one gets of most of them when one has to live with them even for a few days.14
What she did not mention was that her discussion with Edward Sackville-West had been for long queered by her conviction that when he spoke of ‘Wales’ he meant ‘whales’.
Without any apparent difficulty Vanessa had slipped back into a more sociable way of life. When in Paris with Duncan and Edward le Bas in the autumn of 1947 she mixed with Segonzac, Georges Duthuit, who had married Matisse’s daughter, and the artist Clairin and his wife, and was aware that certain of the younger generation were in the city - Benedict Nicolson, Philip Toynbee, Igor Anrep and Olivier Popham. But she was perhaps most happy when seated in the Luxembourg Gardens amid the flowers and falling chestnut leaves, recollecting her granddaughters as she watched the children play around a fountain.
The trio’s most successful holiday during these post-war years was the trip they made to Venice in the autumn of 1948. This time Angelica was also present. They put up at the Pensione Seguso on the Zattere, avoided almost all society and, apart from the siesta, spent most of the day painting. Angelica’s evident pleasure at having a break from her family delighted Vanessa. ‘I hadn’t really seen so much of her for years,’ she told Helen Anrep, ‘and it has been very nice. Edward too is extremely easy and charming, rather independent in his ways which is a good thing.’15 Angelica, however, noticed that he was impressionable, nervous and easily taken in. He was often teased by Vanessa and Duncan who were scornful of the Royal Academy where he exhibited. But their exchange was always good-natured and they ended their days at Florian’s eating ices and drinking coffee and grappa.
On the whole Vanessa was more willing to travel abroad than make the journey from Charleston to London. But when Helen Anrep let part of her house at Baylham in Suffolk and took a top-floor flat in Percy Street, Vanessa realized that a semblance of their former London life might be revived: ‘There may be a kind of dilapidated social circle in Bloomsbury once more. How odd it would be.’16 She herself agreed to rent a room in Marjorie Strachey’s flat at 1 Taviton Street, then resigned her rights in favour of Duncan and took instead the top flat in the Strachey’s house at 51 Gordon Square. For some reason - perhaps because she made too infrequent use of it - this arrangement was soon terminated. She became a member of the Cowdray Club in Cadogan Square but stayed there very rarely.
Her disinclination to leave Charleston meant that Duncan mostly visited London alone. He still had a great many friends and dependents, among them the intellectual policeman, Harry Daley, who was also a friend of E.M. Forster, and the ex-haberdasher called ‘H’ who had earlier been a friend of Stephen Tomlin’s. Edward le Bas remained his closest friend and to him Duncan confessed all his adventures. These did not threaten Vanessa’s relationship with Duncan but the situation changed dramatically when he became familiar with the young poet Paul Roche.
They met in the summer of 1946 in Piccadilly. Duncan asked Roche if he would like to see some pictures and Don (as he was familiarly called) agreed, expecting to be taken to the cinema.17 His bicycle was put on the roof of a taxi and they drove off to Bedford Square, where Edward le Bas was then living, to see his collection of paintings. This began Roche’s education in art, for he was subsequently taken by Duncan to the Tate, the National Gallery and to various commercial galleries in the West End. At first they continued to meet at le Bas’s house in Bedford Square, until Duncan arranged with Marjorie Strachey that Don should live permanently at Taviton Street, in his room, hung from floor to ceiling with his paintings and where the young man was often persuaded to pose.
Don was not quite so young as he led Duncan to believe. Nor was he in the navy. When they had first met, Don’s black trousers and navy-blue shirt made Duncan ask if he was a sailor. Don did not deny it, wanting to disguise the fact that he was actually living in a London presbytery learning to do parish work. And for a short period the pretence was kept up. Duncan painted several pictures of him dressed as an able seaman (one of which was bought by Benjamin Britten, another by John Lehmann). Shortly after they met Clive remarked to Frances Partridge: ‘Well, you know that Duncan has a room in Taviton Street, along with his cousin Marjorie and Mrs Enfield, but perhaps you don’t know that a handsome young able-bodied seaman is often to be seen there in full uniform. I have myself seen him - with Duncan - at a performance of Carmen, and I’m bound to say he is extremely able-bodied. Please use the utmost discretion.’18
Vanessa, however, soon became aware that Don filled the gap in Duncan’s affections left by George Bergen. (Duncan heard nothing from Bergen for several years until 1951 when a cablegram arrived at Charleston announcing that he was getting married the next day.) As with George, the age difference between Duncan and Don aroused the elder’s paternal instincts. And like Bergen, there was something exotic and unpredictable about Roche. Of French descent, with some Germanic blood in his inheritance, he had been, like Duncan, brought up in India. His interest in the Greeks and Greek literature had left him with an almost narcissistic interest in physical beauty, and this, combined with his golden hair and worship of the sun gave him a bronzed glamour that had for Duncan an obvious attraction. He was also highly literate, his keen intelligence and well-modulated voice making him a fluent and sympathetic talker. Yet he would not, and perhaps could not, woo Vanessa, as le Bas had done, and made little effort to allay her apprehensions.
At first Roche took his friendship with Duncan rather nonchalantly. ‘I had to tell Duncan several times at the beginning that I was not in love with him. He said that that was more than he could expect and that it was enough if he could have permission to love me. I said yes, not yet realizing the staggering humility of the request. What I was never able to tell him in later years, though I tried to show it by looking after him, was that I came to love him more intensely than I have ever loved anyone.’19 When Duncan began making weekly visits to London, to draw and paint Don, he would remark enigmatically that ‘certain people’ made his visits difficult. ‘If only certain people could understand,’ he would remark. When pressed by Don to explain who these ‘certain people’ were, he blurted out: ‘Vanessa has never got over Julian’s death ... she never used to be like this.’ When Don asked whether Vanessa made a scene, Duncan replied, ‘Oh no, no. Nothing like that... but it is all very powerfully felt. And I can’t bear to do anything that hurts her.’20
Vanessa did make an effort to befriend Roche. She visited Taviton Street on several occasions and Don modelled for both her and Duncan. She was kind and considerate, but also hesitant and uneasy. It obviously pained her to see Don doing things for Duncan, shopping and cooking and being so completely at home in this pied-à-terre. The domestic intimacy he enjoyed with Duncan had the direct effect of sharpening Vanessa’s isolation. According to Roche, Duncan constantly asked him to visit Charleston and even live there permanently with him and Vanessa. Roche had the impression that Vanessa was steeling herself to accept him, but he never took up the invitation and rarely visited Charleston while she was alive. He nevertheless remained a dominant figure in Duncan’s life until 1954, when, with Clarissa whom he was to marry, he left for America to take up a teaching post at Smith College, Massachusetts. He returned to England at Duncan’s request after Vanessa died and thereafter spent long periods as his companion, looking after him in his final illness at his house in Aldermaston.
Roche has recalled that Vanessa was never unkind to him, but that she accepted his presence with a sad, yearning smile and a hidden sigh. Scarcely any mention of him appears in her letters to Angelica and Quentin and what suffering she endured was inward and unexpressed. Her chronic unhappiness inevitably left its mark. ‘Self-denigration and timidity became a habit,’ Angelica has recalled, ‘expressed outwardly in drab, unstylish clothes, a shrinking from society and the constant reiteration that Duncan’s work was so infinitely better than her own.’21 Denied intimacy with his deepest feelings, she withdrew more profoundly into herself.
In December 1948 Duncan wrote Vanessa a letter which discloses his split loyalties - his deep love and affection for Vanessa, and his obsession with Roche.
Darling Nessa, I am writing you a letter - everyone else has gone to bed and the wind is howling outside - because I sometimes feel it is so very difficult to talk to you, I mean about the things that occupy our thoughts now. I cannot bear to think that you are unhappy about me. When I see that you are unhappy I simply do not know what to say or do. It makes me feel terribly guilty, a feeling that perhaps I ought to be more used to because I suppose I have made several people unhappy, long ago. ... I would like to try to explain to you a little of what I feel ... in writing I can say things which I should find very difficult to say to you in words. The first thing I want to say is, that I think you do not understand at all how much I love you, and Angelica. I never say so - it is quite out of my power. I try to show it sometimes by what I do, and by suggestion. But I don’t think that it is much understood. As for Angelica, she is so much occupied by family life and so on that I don’t think it necessary to say much, but with you, I always thought you knew and know, and when I find that you do not know apparently, it leaves me without words, and I feel quite helpless. And then I never can express to you my admiration for you as a painter and as an artist. You always laugh at me when I try to say what I think and make out that I am trying to be nice to you. But that is very far from the truth. I have the very highest opinion possible to have of you as an artist. I often and especially if you are away or I can see a picture of yours away from you, feel that here is an artist quite different from me and quite of another order. How silly people are not to be able to distinguish.
I suppose you may be wondering why I am writing all this well it is partly to explain that I find it so difficult to make you believe what I say. And also of course because I never seem to be able to talk to you about my feelings for other people, at least I mean about Don. One of the reasons I feel it difficult is because I think you may be hard on him. I don’t mind in the least if you don’t like him. For one thing he has no place in my heart that can possibly be compared to what you mean to me. I absolutely rely on you for everything. You do everything for me, and I never can do anything for you which distresses me. But Don, for one, is a quite different thing. I love him, but surely one can love a good many people? I do not think that Don is in love with me, though he does love me. Is not that a possible state of affairs? I have been lately through rather a bad time with him, through no fault of his, nor of mine, but I think now we understand each other a good deal. But I am very slow to get to know people.
When we were in Venice I had a letter from Don from Brussels where he went first sending me a diary which I had asked him to write. In it he wrote an account of going to bed with a girl which I did mind in a silly sort of way. I had told him of course on his holiday he must feel perfectly free to do as he liked, and which I really meant. But somehow from the diary I got the impression that he was happy to be away from me and do as he liked. He is by nature a purely normal young man and I want him to do as he wants. But it made me unhappy to think he was glad to be away from me. ... In spite of all this I do not think that I have ever been so happy as when I was in Venice with you, Angelica and Edward. There was a sort of background of unhappiness for a little, but not so bad after all, because Don wrote to me every day almost, and I really did believe nothing mattered between us, except our love for one another, very unequal possibly, but he wanted my love and I was quite ready to give him mine. He always wanted to know why I couldn’t spend my holiday with him and although I would have liked this, I could never wish to give up our painting holiday and all that it meant to us and at last convinced him that I could not give that up. But I think that he was sad about it, and always said he had so few holidays and that we were so little together, that he could not understand why I should not give up a little time to him.
It is true I only see him for little bits. You think that he is free with my time to come and see me, but that is not true. He has one day off in the week and can sometimes come round for an hour or two otherwise. I often think you must wonder how we spend our time together. Well, he is always severe with me for wasting time. And sets me down to draw or paint nearly all day and always after supper. He reads to me if I can give him a pose in which he can do it, or sometimes we have the wireless on. We never go out. I sometimes suggest a movie or a theatre - but he thinks that a waste of time, and I am really quite happy not doing anything like that or seeing anybody, except Margery who comes occasionally and begs to read her latest poem or asks us to cook her a meal. Is this, my dear, very painful to you? It literally is a quite good description of how we spend our time. I will stop now ... I think that even you will agree that Don is very understanding of me and my unfortunate disposition. If he loves me, it is only because he can perhaps help me, and therefore you too. Yr loving D.22
