How this man ever managed to do what he did was a matter of astonishment to me. He had some chronic skin disease that made him break out in unsightly rashes, and he seemed eaten up with rheumatic affections as well. But he clowned through his little military act with the most indomitable devotion to duty. He told me that it 'broke his heart' to serve in such a subaltern capacity. But he was not fit even for a staff job.
Baker had a small collection of my pictures which he bequeathed to the South Kensington Museum at his death. The Regular Army produces a few such freakish intelligences as his, and when it does it is a most attractive hybrid that you get, of which I suppose 'The Bengal Lancer' (Major Yeats-Brown) is the archetype. But Guy Baker is my favourite professional soldier.
His brother (who was a football international) had a charming house near Bristol. In going round the stables there with me the incorrigible 'captain', in showing off a horse a little flashily, nearly received a kick which would have forestalled all his martial contretemps. His familiarity with the horse all but cost him dearer than his deference to the General officer.
I started the War with an indecent amount of hair on my head. I had enough for three men. I started the 'post-war' with barely enough for one. After the pneumonia this happened. The fever had uprooted it and I was within an ace of going bald. An awfully intelligent skin-specialist advised vibro-massage. When I had about three hairs left, I called a halt to this massacre of the follicles.
So at the commencement of the 'post-war' the mere outward man tended to be more polite and well trimmed. I was still so exotic however that Russian refugees would come up to me in hotels and address me in the palaver of Rasputin.
I was rather in favour of the Russian revolution at first. Later on so many powerful people began muscling in at this end that I thought there must be something fishy about it. Mr. Gollancz alone is enough to put off any moderately sensitive man. I've always been a great supporter of the underdog. Bolshevism soon got to have such a top-dog look about it that I became a bit doubtful.
Just before I contracted pneumonia my personal appearance was professionally reviewed by Ezra Pound and Ben Hecht. I was dining at Pagani's Restaurant in Great Portland Street with Hecht and Pound, and from the impresario angle they surveyed me from head to foot. Hecht is now a film magnate in America, but at the time he was a journalist, and one of the enterprising minority of 'new' writers. He and Pound went over me with a fine comb—they pulled my hair, my nose, my stature, even my taste-in-socks, to pieces. My hair, Ezra assured Ben, looked quite different when I wasn't being the military man. Ben Hecht thought that the face really went with the haircut and the Sam Browne belt. He said that to put me across in America they'd better forgo all attempt to make me a type of high romance. My features were too regular and agreed too well with the uniform I was wearing ever to be susceptible of 'artistic' disfigurement or bohemian make-up. He said he thought I was what an American would think an English officer looked like. It was better to start from that basis, for the purposes of mass advertisement. I laughed, for I knew how wrong he was, and within a year or two my appearance would have satisfied the most pernicketty romantic canon.
It was at dinner, I remember, that the news of my father's death reached me. He was twenty years or more older than my mother. Pound and Hecht were surprised to hear that he
died in Philadelphia, in their own country. How he got there is unimportant—except in so far as I was cheated of my patrimony. My mother's death from a third attack of pneumonia followed close on his at the tail end of the Great Epidemic that immediately succeeded the Great War. I had had it. I was in Military Hospital near the Euston Road with double pneumonia for weeks. My mother came there to see me, nodding her head, with her poor tragic face and brought me books. Six months later she was dead. I was distracted at the time by this, the reader may believe me, and that event, for my mother was not an old woman, gave me a peculiar feeling about the Great War which I have not noticed in most War Books, because it had worn her down and killed her: and I swore a vendetta against these abominations.
Ben Hecht I have always found a very pleasant fellow. About six or seven years since, I had dinner with him and his wife in New York, on his roof-garden, or roof-arbour. Vines grew all over a dusty trellis, the grapes of which his wife cut.
MacArthur was there, with his handsome olive face and soft blue eyes, who has since become Ben Hecht's business partner. MacArthur was in the famous Rainbow Division in France and at the time I met him was very natural and gentle: he was always fighting, according to Ben. That morning he'd knocked out a muscular drayman, who had been rude, he thought, and who wanted a fight too. Ben said MacArthur always knew when a man wanted a fight. That's a thing I've never for my part been able to tell: but that's probably because I've never been on the look-out for that sort of thing. But for MacArthur himself (as he was then), I will swear no man could tell of him that he wanted a fight. For a gentler, more discreet, more noiseless creature I never encountered, the soul of a sort of beautiful natural chivalry.
Looking over New York as the sun was setting, Ben Hecht said to me: 'I always call that a Jewish sunset. I call it that because all the smoke you see, which makes the body of the sunset, comes out of chimneys owned by Jews. So I call it a Jewish sunset.' And it had indeed a Jewish look: a sort of fulminating Old Testament heaviness, and brooding beauty.
CHAPTER II
I Go Underground
After I'd grown my hair again, I was demobilized. Round this time some of my old Blast associates wanted to start things up, and begin the 'post-war' with a bang.
There was William Roberts, who was a Field Artillery gunner during the War: Edward Wadsworth who had done naval clerking in a Mudros office and had got a rather rolling nautical gait as a consequence; there was Turnbull who had been a Flying Corps officer in France and done some excellent pictures of air-battles; there was Frank Dobson, the sculptor, who had been blown up by a mine in France, and looked as if he had, what's more, but who, as all sculptors have to be, was very industrious, and whose stones were worth showing (Baker had known him in Cornwall before the War and had introduced him): lastly Frederich Etchells was there too, probably the most promising of my colleagues but already beginning to abandon painting for architecture. There were others, all interesting artists.
Not all of these people were dying to exhibit (Etchells loathed the idea) but some were very anxious indeed that we should do a bit of 'blasting' again. They pressed me, as a born leader in such affairs, to up and 'blast' a way for them through the bourgeois barrage. And at length I thought I would. I founded 'X Group'. After a short while I left this Group and it fell to pieces. Roberts said this when he reviewed this book.
One of 'X Group's' most prominent members was MacKnight Kauffeur, who became the Underground poster-king : he disappeared as it were belowground, and the tunnels of the 'Tube' became thenceforth his subterranean picture galleries.
I went underground too, as I have said at the opening of this book, but in another way it would be far too technical an excursion to explain to you why I went underground. You'd have to know a great deal about painting, and writing too, to follow it. It will be sufficient to say that I still had to learn a lot of things in my two professions. This I preferred to do in secrecy. So I withdrew into a place called Adam and Eve Mews. There I did my first satisfactory paintings. Before that time I had accomplished nothing—all I had done had a promise, or was at the most a spirited sketch, or plan (like 'the Plan of War', in Blast No. 1).
The War, of course, had robbed me of four years, at the moment when, almost overnight, I had achieved the necessary notoriety to establish myself in London as a painter. It also caught me before I was quite through with my training. And although in the 'post-war' I was not starting from nothing, I had to some extent to begin all over again.
For those not of military age, the War had been in some cases a godsend. The 'post-war' was dominated by people who, like Bennett and Shaw in letters, w
ere already old men. They thrived on it. Those who were schoolboys during the war did not benefit. They seemed to suffer from a kind of reflected shell-shock, an emotional paralysis.
The War, as it has turned out, was not for me either bad or good, because if it had not occurred I should certainly have wasted my time in a hundred ways: and the obligation to make a new start—and the decision I took to make a really new start while I was about it—was in the long run beneficial. I might never have submitted myself to the disciplines I did, if I had not been thrown back on myself. In a rather silly way, I had been too successful. So in the long run the War helped my career; but it was a long run all right.
It is important to understand what an odd place England is to be an artist in, especially a painter. The English experience little response to artistic stimulus. In their bones, they are the 'Philistines' Matthew Arnold said they were. They have heard that they are 'civilized' and that civilized people are fond of art. So they make the necessary arrangements for the unavoidable presence of the fine arts in their midst. All 'pictures', when they come into the world, are to be sent immediately to a concentration camp, called Burlington House. And once a year the British Public will go and look at them. After that they will forget all about art until the same time next year.
Any art outside of the place set aside for such things is not art. Else it would be inside. What it is is not quite clear to Englishman. Usually it is a joke. It may have a certain nuisance-value or joke-value. But it really has no business to be there. And it has not of course any money value.
Now in Mayf air there have always been a number of people who are wise to the fact that no serious art can ever be inside the Royal Academy, and therefore if there is any good art it must be outside. But they also know that as a result of this extremely uncongenial atmosphere for art, there are very few good pictures anywhere in England, by living artists. And as they are not expert in these matters, and usually not prone to like pictures, they are not going to dash off in search of that rare flower in these foggy islands, a good picture.
These conditions result in a great deal of lunching, and dining and cocktailing for artists, but very little work, as I have explained elsewhere. So the fact of the matter was I was none too keen, if I had to start all over again, to repeat my time-wasting and rather silly experiences. Blast! urged my colleagues —some of them blessed with incomes. But once more to go through all that comedy appealed to me less than it did to them. I had found from bitter experience that an artist in England is compelled to sacrifice so much time explaining why he is an artist at all, that the necessary time for the donkey-work, to do the stuff, is not available.
For a few years after the War I had some money. So I resolved, in making this fresh start, to go about it in a very different way. My solitary 'X Group' reversion to type was undertaken against my better judgement.
These years spent in underground work were exceedingly useful. If I went underground, I was still visible from time to time. Even I would make occasional sorties of a few weeks at a stretch into Mayfair. At Mrs. Bengie Guinness's house in Carlton House Terrace, and at Sunningdale, for instance, I would taste expensive food and enjoy the conversation of people prominent in such circles—by far the wittiest of whom was Sir Denison Ross. I even started—at Sunningdale—a portrait of Mrs.Bengie Guinness, who was a particularly handsome woman, like a powdered eagle. But I dropped this, a little brusquely, I am afraid, in a fit of impatience with all such modes of breadwinning. I am sure had I finished it it would have been a fine portrait, and would have put money in my pocket. But I got what almost amounted to a complex about Mayfair.
My old friend Harry Melville (who, to give him an identity at this time of day, was an heir of some sort to the famous Lord Ribblesdale) used to deliver me lectures in Adam and Eve. 'For the sake of your car-reerl' he would boom impressively at me, 'you must—four times a week—make up your mind to put on a boiled shirt!' But the boiled shirt game did not seem to me worth the candle.
Adam and Eve was not my first stop after War, but was my longest. My semi-retirement had now lasted two or three years: work had been continually going on from the nude, from still-life, and much 'out of my head', with the object of creating a system of signs whereby I could more adequately express myself. A hurried Show at the Leicester Galleries had disgusted me, and I knew that a stiff spell of work was what was demanded of me. I got through an unspeakable amount of work: some of this I sold privately, most I destroyed. Then, at the end of my money, I made a sortie into the portrait-world.
Except for a big oil-portrait of Miss Edith Sitwell, I confined myself to portrait-heads in pencil or aquarelle. The reason for this is as follows. If it is your purpose to do a good portrait— I mean one not too indecently pretty, or merely photographic, you will almost invariably have a free fight with your sitter (or her husband or his wife) at the end of it. Unless you are a jolly good businessman you will have the portrait on your hands. Under these circumstances it is obviously better not to undertake an oil-portrait which is going to eat up a good deal of your time. If it is a pencil head, which has only occupied two or three afternoons, that doesn't matter so much.
When you get better-known some of these difficulties arc smoothed out. But I was not so well known then as I am now (and being well-known as a writer is just as good as being well-known as a painter, though celebrity as a chef would not help you as a dress-designer). Hie 'sitter-complex' was a very serious matter.
Sitters are apt to be very nice right up to the final sitting. They are hoping that at the last minute something will happen to the picture which will transform an extremely interesting-looking young woman into a raving 'society-beauty', out of whose face every vestige of meaning has been extracted, the proof of your superlative craftsmanship. When this doesn't happen, the storm breaks. The cheque that is to pay your studio-rent (which is already overdue) is not forthcoming. And, although as a portrait it's fine, no one wants a portrait of somebody else. So there you are.
This, I am bound to admit did not happen to me more than once. But once was enough, and other artists told me it was always happening to them. So I thought I'd take the cash I could get for the small stuff and let the credit go. I pot-boiled to some purpose—but always on a modest scale, like a cautious punter—about that time. In spite of it all, in the end, I had to do a moonlight flit—flitting with Miss Sitwell's portrait down the Mews at the dead of night, and setting up my easel elsewhere.
Miss Edith Sitwell's portrait was sold last year (1936) to the Fifty Shilling Tailor—or one of them—for a good price. This, it is true, was because it had never been exhibited before. So the scores of sittings spent in recording this picturesque enemy of mine had to wait fourteen years for its Fifty Shilling tailor.
CHAPTER III
The High Wall at Adam and Eve
There was a brick wall with a locked gate in it This protected my garden-studio, at Adam and Eve. Over seven foot, it was an obstacle to all but sixfooters, and sixfooters are not usually dangerous. It's the little men you have to keep out.
In my absence this wall was often scaled. A wall's no use really. And the smallest of men would go over it as readily as the biggest. I once found my garden full of little men, who turned out to be a deputation from a small dago country, who had heard that I led a painting-gang called 'X', and wanted my gang for some dealer's racket.
Going underground, or locking myself in, was all very well. But no one of course was going to believe that an artist really wanted to be let alone and to get on with his work. They took it to be deeply-meditated coyness.
One of the smallest men who ever stormed my wall was Colonel Lawrence—'Lawrence of Arabia'. It presented no obstacles, naturally, to him. He left no message. Later he told me of his exploit.
A sixfooter who went over it and camped in my garden was Kit Wood, the young painter who subsequently killed himself by throwing himself under an express train at Winchester.
Kit Wood was the only 'pos
t-war' English painter of outstanding merit. He and Henry Moore, the sculptor, are the two English artists, more or less in their cradles when the war began, who are of more than local interest. Moore has brought to the abstract shaping of stone artistic intelligence of a very high order. Wood had not so fine a mind. But his romantic nature was able to organize itself sufficiently to get something out of paint. His pictures have imaginative beauty which is as easy as a reverie and it does not put you under duress like a nightmare. It is the gentle dream of a dairymaid. But it is a pukka dream.
He was a big healthy blond: the teutonic kind of Englishman, tall and good-looking. But, alas! his great social attractiveness brought him into bad, rich, opium-eating company. He trod De Quincey's path; only there was a rushing locomotive at the end of it, instead of a vision of a Roman Consul— a locomotive to which he gave himself screaming, in answer to the shriek of its throttle. And doubtless it was kinder than those to whom he gave his young friendship.
He used to try and persuade me to 'have a pipe' with him as he called it. I asked him if he got imposing dreams, like that of the 'Consul Romanus' of De Quincey. He answered no. There were no dreams at all. His consciousness did not leave the everyday plane at all. It merely was able to sun itself in a placid animal well-being, apparently. He felt perfectly normal—as he would like to feel but didn't at ordinary times,
'So you take it to feel normal?' I asked in some astonishment. For it had never occurred to me that this abnormal stimulus was resorted to in order to make men feel like other men. Yes, he answered: that was it. And it had never occurred to him, it seemed, that this vicious circle of 'vice' constituted an odd way of arriving at where ideally you began.
Of course I told him that all he felt under the influence of opium for an hour or two I felt all the time: that all I could hope to achieve by recourse to this drug was to reach the abnormal condition from which he so desired to escape. He assured me that there were very few people in London with whom he would desire to 'smoke a pipe', and that I was the one he would first select. But though agreeably flattered, I was compelled to say that I was sorry, but I saw no purpose in feeling sick next morning for nothing—unless he could promise me a vision. And even then I had some pretty hefty visions of my own, without a narcotic. I must have morphia laid on at my nerve-centres, I said.
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