I have a most undeveloped moral sense. But the fearful death of this charming and talented young painter made me sort of indignant. The people who had so maltreated him could have selected something less unusual than a good artist for their purpose—though of course it was because they had detected something rare within this big blond envelope that they had coveted it. Ah, well! The fact of the matter is that Nature should not consign any really important message she has to send us to a big blond envelope.
The late Charles Rutherston, the art collector, was always a welcome visitor at my studio. For him I left the gate ajar. This was not only because one naturally likes people who come 'collecting' the works of one's hands, but because he was one of the pleasantest and least affected people of my acquaintance. He thought nothing of buying two or three dozen designs at a time, the best of which are now in the Manchester Museum, and are sent out to tour the country for the instruction of art-masters.
His brother, Sir William Rothenstein, came too: always welcome because so witty. I gave him one of my best drawings of that time. This is how it happened. He came in one day just before his brother turned up and made me very conceited by the generous praise he bestowed upon all he saw. One thing—a drawing in ink—the best small thing I had, he asked me to put aside. He must possess that, he said, if he could, and at once I put it aside. That was for him. After a few weeks I sent it round to his house. Meeting him in Church Street one day he bore down upon me all brilliantly lighted up, his eyes shining, uttering an apology six yards away about this drawing which brought a blush to my cheek. If one artist could not give a drawing to another! I exclaimed—for, of course, I had given him that. He should have understood. And peering brightly up into my face he thanked me as only he is able to thank: "There is a saying,' he said, 'in the bible, Blessed is he who gives and blessed is he who receives! So I will accept it without hesitation.'
Those Old Testament guys certainly did provide a formula for every occasion! On the way back to my studio I bought a bible and hunted up a few handy saws on the spot.
Sir William Rothenstein was until last year principal of the
South Kensington Schools and in that capacity irradiated his intelligence over the back areas of England, and many a poor fellow now can draw a cow—or, to be more accurate, teach another fellow how to draw a cow—who otherwise would have remained completely unresponsive to the presence of that quadruped. What it was possible for a man to do, Rothenstein did. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and the times are not propitious for folk-art. But he did more than Roger Fry in the way of popularizing artistic sensibility.
Rothenstein's brilliant services as an educationalist have rather over-shadowed his achievement as a painter and draughtsman. This great wit, for he is the last of the wits, is quite a different man when he paints. No sign there of the flashing intelligence. He becomes a humble workman, fumbling almost in his grim sincerity.
Noel Coward sat for me, to mention one or two of my sitters, and Senator Marconi. The former came from Swiss Sports with a rush and a swing, of course, all suntan and Mayfair magic : the latter crept in with one eye and a very stern expression. The live-wire of the English Stage and the wireless wizard both had fine heads. I have done Coward again quite lately but he then had become a Red Indian—still fine, but a bit Choctaw.
I found that my women sitters were apt to dislike Coward. Of course he saw through them, and his actor's charm was too like their own. I believe in the end that Coward's career will rival, for sheer success, that of Sir James Barrie. He can no more help becoming a knight than I can help speaking Spanish when I want to speak German. He has not invented Peter Pan, that is true. But perhaps he has done better than that. He has been Peter Pan. That takes more doing.
CHAPTER IV
The Wedding of Roy Campbell
Roy Campbell, who is at Toledo with his wife, got married while I was in Adam and Eve, and I went to the wedding. It was in the Old 'Harlequin' night-cafe in Beak Street.
I heard from Campbell this morning (June 26, 1937) and learnt with some surprise that he was at Toledo. The Government Army is only five miles away and that must be rather close quarters; and his house, too, was destroyed by shell-fire last year. I don't know what he's doing there. I supposed he was in Portugal, where he had a job as a supercargo. But the plains of the Tagus drew him back I imagine: he had become almost a Spaniard. I cannot see him as a Portuguese.
Campbell has not any regulation political bias, I think. He may incline to Franco because he is a catholic, and to the Old Spain rather than the New Spain because he likes bullfights and all the romantic things. But of politics he has none, unless they are such as go with a great antipathy for the English 'gentleman' in all his clubmanesque varieties; a great attachment to the back-Veldt of his native South Africa; and a constant desire to identify himself with the roughest and simplest of his fellow-creatures in pub, farm, and bullring. Such politics as go with those predilections and antipathies he has, but it would be difficult to give them a name. He certainly is neither a communist nor a fascist.
He married the very beautiful Miss Garman. Her brother is a well-known English communist, who in his turn married a Guggenheim, a member of the millionaire family—also, I suppose, a communist. He, too, was surprisingly good-looking when he was young.
The marriage-feast was a distinguished gathering, if you are prepared to admit distinction to the Bohemian, for it was almost gipsy in its freedom from the conventional restraints. It occurred in a room upstairs. In the middle of it Campbell and his bride retired. The guests then became quarrelsome.
Jacob Kramer and Augustus John were neighbours at table and I noticed that they were bickering. Kramer was a gigantic Polish Jew (and still is, I believe) and he was showing John his left bicep. It was between John and himself. It expanded convulsively under his coat sleeve, and he kept drawing John's attention to this fact.
John did not seem interested. But Kramer would not be put off or have his bicep high-hatted like that. It went on moving about under his sleeve in an alarming fashion, and Kramer looked at it as if irresistibly attracted. It was such a funny thing to have in your sleeve, a sort of symbol, he seemed to feel, of Power. He tapped it as a prosperous person taps his pocket.
'I'm just as strong as you are John!' he kept vociferating, screwing his neck round till his nose stuck in John's face.
'You've said that before,' John answered gruffly.
'Why should I put up with your rudeness, John—why! Tell me that, John! You're a clever man. Why should I?'
John shrugged his shoulders, and looked down rather huffily at his spoons. He sought to indicate to his neighbour that philosophically interesting as the question might be, it was no time to discuss it, when we were convivially assembled to celebrate the marriage of a mutual friend.
At this moment Roy Campbell entered in his pyjamas. There was a horrid hush. Someone had slipped out to acquaint Campbell with the fact of this threat to the peace. In a dead silence the bridegroom, with catlike steps, approached the back of Kramer's chair. That gentleman screwed round, his bicep still held up for exhibition and metaphysical examination. He was a very supple giant, and by this time he was sitting one way but facing another, having as it were followed the bicep round behind himself.
'What's this, Kramer?' barked Roy, fierce and thick, in his best back-veldt. 'What are you doing, Kramer!' Roy Campbell pointed his hand at his guest and began wagging it about in a suggestive way as if he might box his ears or chop him on the neck with it.
'Nothing, Roy! I'm not doing anything, Roy!' the guest answered, in a tone of surprise and injured innocence.
'Well you let John alone, Kramer! Do you hear!'
'I'm doing nothing to John, Roy, I was talking about painting,' Kramer said.
'Never mind painting, Jacob. Is that how you talk about painting, Jacob?'
'Yes, Roy,' said Kramer, in an eager and concilliatory voice. 'I get worked up when I talk about painting,
Roy.'
'Look. Could I throw you out of that window if I wanted to Jacob?'
'I know you could, Roy.' Kramer nodded his head, his eyes screwed up.
'Well then let my guests alone, Jacob. You let my guests alone. Don't let me hear you've interfered with John again. Mind I'm only just upstairs, Jacob. I'll come down to you!'
A strangled protest and assent at once came from Kramer; and stiffly and slowly, his shoulders drawn up, his head thrust out, in apache bellicosity, Campbell withdrew, all of us completely silent. When the door had closed, Kramer got up, came round the table and sat down at my side. He'd put his biceps away. He continued with me the conversation about painting which had taken such a personal turn on the other side of the marriage board.
This was a typical 'Post-war' scene: this is how, in the 'postwar', you married and were given in marriage. The 'Post-war' produced its types. Occasionally I meet them now and can tell them immediately. Still 'post-warring' away, getting old, drowning Time in drink, and completely impervious to the changes in the world around them. They are not my favourite type by a long way.
The 'post-war' in a sense was a recrudescence of 'the Nineties'. The realities that had begun to peep out in 1914 in England were submerged for a decade. Roy Campbell was never 'post-war'—he struggled in the toils rather amusingly. I remember coming upon him in the Eiffel Tower Hotel in Percy Street on one occasion, delivering emphatic thumps upon the table at which he was sitting.
'I won't be a Nineties man!' he was vociferating. 'I won't be a Nineties man. I w-w-w-w-won't be a Nineties man!' He was glaring at somebody—for this was a personal defiance: and I think it must have been Ronald Firbank—who was the very genius loci of the 'post-war', and the reincarnation of all the Nineties—Oscar Wilde, Pater, Beardsley, Dawson all rolled into one, and served up with sauce Creole.
CHAPTER V
Sitters
It was almost impossible to do a portrait of Ronald Firbank, he was so interested in what I was doing. He wanted to look over my shoulder while I was drawing him. I pointed out that this was impossible.
We started off by my getting him up on the model's throne, an operation demanding a certain tact. He was afraid he might fall off. He fluttered at the thought of so much self-exposure. But I got him up. I stood in front of him for a little, to see he stayed put. I knew him well. I did not expect it to be easy.
He rolled his eyes and frothed at the mouth. He said that I ought to see him the first thing in the morning. I said I wished I could. The young day, he told me, gave him, fresh from sleep, a new face. It only lasted an hour or two. Breakfast was apparently the last straw. It was breakfast that started the debacle. To put the matter shortly—Bacon and eggs! Having soiled himself irretrievably with breakfast, he got through the rest of the day as best he could. Until the night came. With the night, things began to look up again—that is his face did. His beauty returned to him, the artificial light helping things out. But it was never quite the same as the first hour of the young morning. That was really the time to see him!
I am, myself, a late riser. I told him he must have confidence in me; that I should never see him as I should see him—that I should hate him anyway if I had to rise so early to look at him. But that I could well imagine what it was like and would endeavour to get into what I was about to do something of this immaculate daybreak beauty. Then I sat down and began work.
He writhed about on his chair, clasped and unclasped his hands. But I was not unaccustomed to hitting moving targets
H* in the sitter line. I selected a position to which I noticed he always returned, however much he twisted and tossed. I disregarded the other positions he successively took up.
I fixed my eye upon his mouth. He gasped, as he saw me do this. Firbank was what is called 'toothy' and he foamed rather easily. A lather would collect upon his prominent muzzle. He leapt off the throne all of a sudden and rushed over to my side and looked down at the paper on which I was drawing.
'I had to look!' he exclaimed. 'Well r
'Oh, I don't know! You are cruel,' he gasped.
'Don't you like it?'
'Oh, I don't know! It's lovely!' he stood writhing at my side.
I stood up.
'Return at once to that throne,' I said sternly. 'Or I shall probably beat you with that mahlstick.'
Shuddering and screaming he rushed back, barked a knee upon the edge of the throne, and reoccupied the chair.
But he got worse and worse. His stomach began rumbling and he flushed so much at this and then went so pale, I was afraid he might faint. At last he bounded off again and came gibbering round behind me.
'I had to see what you were doing. I couldn't bear it any longer. I just had to have a look!' he panted in my ear, clawing at his arms and knees.
I got him back but it became quite impossible after that. He jumped on and off the throne every second minute. Also he had remarked how I had selected a certain position out of all those he presented me with, and he avoided it deliberately.
Again I stood up. I had to get a head of him done—it was for some publication and I was being paid for it. I dragged a table near my easel and I made him sit upon the corner of it, within reach of my foot. To say that he now remained quiet would be untrue. But he seemed more able to keep still this way than in a chair. And I was able to correct him from time to time with a warning kick.
I got my head, tant bien que mal. I consider it the best head that was ever done of him. Augustus John was as usual a little too flourishing and juicily skilful. For you can suggest too much juice with a pencil just as much as you can with a brush. Mr. David Low the caricaturist does that, for instance. He has a juicy line very like a John line. How I managed it I don't quite know—some process of deduction rather than of mere sight. But I got him, and he even seemed to like it himself, after it was all over.
Firbank is buried in Rome next to the grave of John Keats. I shouldn't like to have a grave next to his. If there's one place where one may, I suppose, expect a little rest it is in the grave. And Firbank in his winding-sheet upon a moonlit night would be a problem for the least fussy of corpses in the same part of the cemetery, 'Thou still unravished bride of quietness!' I can imagine him hissing at Keats, 'come forth and let us seek out the tomb of Heliogabalus together shall us!' If there were only a Keats Society, I'd get up an agitation to have his grave moved.
From this you must not gather that I objected to Firbank. On the contrary. He seemed to me a pretty good clown—of the 'impersonator' type. Facially, he closely resembled Nellie Wallace. He seemed to like me—I had such relations with him as one might have with a talking gazelle, afflicted with some nervous disorder.
In Stulik's one night I had dinner with him and a young American 'college-boy' who was stopping at the Eiffel Tower Hotel. The presence of the fawning and attentive Firbank put the little American out of countenance. He called the waiter.
'I guess I'll have something feat!' he announced aggressively.
'What will you have, sir?' asked the waiter.
'I guess I'll have—oh—a rump-steak.'
He pored over the menu: it was evident he felt that a rump-steak would disinfect the atmosphere.
'Yessur.'
'Carrots,' he rasped out defiantly.
'Yessir. Carrots, sir.'
'Boiled pertaters.' 'Yessir.'
'What? Oh and er...'
But with gushing insinuation Firbank burst excitedly in at this point.
'Oh and vi-o-lets!' he frothed obsequiously.
Reacting darkly to the smiles of the onlookers the college-boy exclaimed, but without looking at his cringing 'fan'—
'There seems to be a lot of fairies round here!'
And he sniffed the air as if he could detect the impalpable aroma of an elf.
About this time I did a set of drawings for the weekly Sketch. The Lady Tredegar of to-day, then Miss Lois Sturt, sat to me for one of them, as also Viscountess Rothermere, Mrs. Dick Guinness and her daug
hters. I thought Lois Sturt was the most beautiful of all the debutantes: that rarest of all things in England, a dark plump beauty. And Lady Diana Manners was the despair of my pencil. I was amazed to find that upon a model's throne and facing a raging north-light, at twelve in the morning, she was far more beautiful than any photograph had led one to believe.
During the War I became acquainted with one of the most extraordinary women of the circle to which Diana Manners belonged, Sybil Hart-Davies: before her marriage her name was Duff-Cooper and she was the sister of the recent War Minister. She was a woman with a great taste for learning. Her proficiency in Greek was such as to dumbfound Lord Oxford, who was doubtless unaccustomed to hear Greek from the mouths of the aristocratic amazons of England.
On one occasion I was lunching with Sybil Hart-Davies in the Criterion Restaurant during the War, and her brother and Diana Manners were discovered in the distance, the former in uniform. She told me there was a romance. But it was a romance that culminated on the battlefield, when this somewhat diminutive figure behaved like a paladin. Unsusceptible as I am to the chivalrous impulses, my artist's eyes enlightened me, as I was tracing on the paper this pure, historically-English, profile: I understood as I drew, how these things come about; another factor in war, which until then had eluded me. Once I painted a woman who was subsequently murdered. I had the same clairvoyance then. I swear that the brush, and especially the pencil, is like a planchette set.
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