by Brendan King
Nora, a cold, distant woman, according to Austin, didn’t adapt well to the role of mother, something not made any easier by Harold’s hands-off approach to fathering and his busy professional life. In August 1934 she took Anthony to Marseilles for three weeks, where she met the artist André Lhote and came to a realization that her enforced marriage and the subsequent demands of motherhood had stifled her own creative development.
Shortly afterwards the marriage fell apart. Harold met and fell in love with a woman of a very different character to Nora, Elizabeth Anne Parry, and Nora abandoned her children, leaving Liverpool for Paris to study painting at André Lhote’s Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse. Austin always blamed Elizabeth for breaking up the family and as a result never got on with her.
After the fall of Paris in June 1940, Nora returned to Liverpool. Harold took the opportunity not only to instigate divorce proceedings, allowing him to marry Elizabeth in 1942,4 but also to urge Nora to take responsibility for Austin, who was seen as a disruptive influence. Nora encouraged Austin to prepare for art school,5 and in the autumn of 1945 he enrolled at the Liverpool College of Art, where he would remain almost continuously – as student, postgraduate student and lecturer – until he left Liverpool for good in 1960.
By the late 1940s Austin had grown into an idealistic, ambitious young man, combining his mother’s enthusiasm for art with his father’s rigid commitment to hard work and discipline. Earnest and socially engaged, he believed passionately in art and in the power of culture to transform and enrich people’s lives, but this positive outlook was undermined by psychological fault lines, his aloof family upbringing having left him reserved and wary of emotional attachment or commitment.
A turning point in Austin’s life came when he met Dorothy and Gordon Green. They lived in a large Georgian house in Hope Street just opposite the art school where Austin was studying, and a short walk from the Philharmonic Hall where Gordon, a concert pianist and music teacher, was a member of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Midway in age between Austin and his parents, the Greens played a huge part in his development, not just through their personal friendship but also through their influential position in the Liverpool cultural scene. Their house served as a meeting point for musicians and artists, as well as a convivial space in which political and social ideas could be discussed. Fritz Spiegl was a frequent guest, Sviatoslav Richter and Artur Rubinstein would drop by whenever they were performing at the Philharmonic, and the sculptor Herbert Tyson Smith was one of many visitors connected to the art world. A number of Austin’s early commissions for portraits came through contacts made while at the Greens’ Hope Street house, the basement of which they generously let him use rent free. For the next few years it would serve as Austin’s studio and eventually as a living space, and he would sleep on a divan under the window, through which he could watch the female art students going into college.
Austin was always appreciative of what the Greens had done for him: ‘Being so short of cash and the means to buy my materials, if it was not for the help of my greatest friends, the Greens, my position would be critical. Of these latter I could never say too much. Dorothy Green’s constant encouragement and interests, her belief in my ability, and her untiring pursuit of sitters and patrons, means more to me than I could ever tell.’6 Dorothy was also Austin’s confidante as regards his emotional life, or what he referred to as ‘my numerous girl friends’. On every matter of importance to him she proffered her advice and judgement, and he wrote in his journal that he had never yet known her to be wrong in her criticism or guidance, whether relating to art or affairs of the heart.
During the summer of 1950 Austin was at a loose end. To pass the time before starting his final year at college in September, he began looking for a job. Hearing that the Playhouse was advertising for student painters to work on set designs for their forthcoming production of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, he decided to go along; he had nothing to lose and it might prove an interesting experience.
As she had with Hugh Goldie and Paul Mayo before him, Beryl fell for Austin immediately. She seemed to have no middle gear once her emotions were engaged, it was all or nothing. Austin was not like that; although he was undoubtedly attracted to her – publicity photographs at the time perfectly capture her distinctive wide-eyed look and her pouting expression – he also found her naive, not to say immature. He affectionately called her ‘tatty-head’ and ‘sweetie’, but his tone to her was frequently paternal and superior – something that could be, and often was, mistaken for condescension. Certainly Austin’s innate caution, his emotional reserve, was at odds with Beryl’s instinctive spontaneity.
Ken Ratcliffe found Beryl’s infatuation with Austin somewhat disconcerting. Although Austin had succeeded where he had not, Ken still thought their difference in age and temperament gave him a chance if he bided his time: ‘Austin was a mature man, he seemed to me a kind of father figure. I never thought they’d get married. Beryl was just another girl friend. My hope was that eventually she’d steer away from him and come to me. But it didn’t happen that way.’7
Austin may have won Beryl’s affection, but Ken was working closely with her for hours at a stretch under the pressure-cooker atmosphere of constant rehearsals and performances. This was not a healthy situation for any of them, and it quickly settled into the classic love triangle that would recur so many times in Beryl’s life and in her fiction. Beryl was fixated on Austin; Ken was increasingly frustrated by his unrequited passion for Beryl; and Austin, though he was flattered by Beryl’s attentions and enjoyed her company, refused to commit himself to a serious relationship, preferring to retain the freedom to embrace any experience, romantic or otherwise, that came his way – as he felt an artist should.
Austin would take Beryl out, picking her up at the stage door on occasional evenings after a performance had ended, but it was Ken who was invited to Sunday lunch with Beryl’s family at Goodacre. Looking at the photographs of him in the back garden, tall and elegant in his pale double-breasted suit, handsome in a manly, distinguished way, it is hard to avoid the feeling that Winnie would have preferred Beryl to be seeing Ken, not Austin, whose bohemian appearance and attitudes were antipathetic to the values she held dear.
The first sign that Austin might be taking his relationship with Beryl more seriously was the Easter weekend of 1951, when he took her away to Wales. He’d become interested in sculpture and wanted to find some suitable stone. Beryl’s account of the trip, written the following year, indicates that she saw it as marking a new phase: ‘I loved him very much and he loved me . . . I had known him for almost a year, and yet that Friday it was like a tentative new meeting, a delicate interplay arose between us.’ After walking through the snow that lay deeply over the hills and fields of the Welsh countryside, they went into a wayside inn to warm up, and the physical intimacy between them was clear for all the world to see: ‘We sat on two chairs drawn very close to the fire and he pulled my head down on his knee so that my body was against him and his arm round me and his face on the top of my hair. And I held tight to his big firm hand and loved him so hard it went right through both our bodies, and the snow on the ground, to the brown earth beneath.’8
In July the Playhouse began rehearsals for its revival of The Sun and I, which was scheduled to open at the end of the month as part of the Festival of Britain celebrations. This time Beryl was to play the part of Grace Abbott, rather than reprising her original role as the boy David. It was around this period that Beryl made her first attempt to leave home. She would later recall renting a bedsit in Liverpool but that after three days her father ‘dragged’ her back home.9 Tensions between Beryl and her parents had been mounting – understandably enough given her age and the fact that she and Austin had recently started sleeping together. This was not a step Beryl had taken lightly, as Austin put it shortly afterwards:
She treated sex with the highest degree of respect believing it to be perhaps the most beaut
iful of all matters relating to human beings, she never could understand what it was that made men turn to prostitutes for mere gratification; believing that the sexual act was the highest form of human co-operation and communion, she could only envisage sexual union between two people who were very much in love and for whom it was the final contact of two souls.10
This ‘final contact of two souls’ seems to have taken place at a flat in 31 Falkner Square – at least Beryl used this address as the title of a semi-autobiographical account in which she describes her first sexual experience with Austin. The story, in which Austin’s name is changed to Adam, is remarkable for its flat tone, betraying little of the emotion the event must have inspired in her:
When the Festival came I had a flat in Falkner Square, with the cathedral looming beyond the end of the road. Facing the door was a leafy barren enclosure with a splintered war damaged shelter. In the daytime the children swarmed and screamed all over it, and at night time couples nestled frantically together and the air was full of warm mutterings and secret things . . .
I was not happy because I had seen very little of Adam, he was working so hard on one of the many exhibitions, while I had opened in a new show a week earlier and had my days free . . . The day before the Festival began Adam came in the afternoon to see me. He was very dirty and pale and his skin was bad with too little sleep, and he took off his shoes and lay down on my bed under the coverlet. Then he said ‘Come to me’, and we both took off our clothes. Afterwards he went fast asleep, lying half on top of me, and I moved slowly away, and pulled the coverlet over him, and turned him on his back. And I lay beside him till it was time to go to the theatre, listening to his breathing, watching the afternoon sun struggle behind the brown drawn curtains. He did not move even when I got up and washed my face and dressed, even when I opened the door and went out. And when I came back in the evening, with the negroes lounging on the street corners, and slow cars drifting aimlessly up the roads, slight rain began to patter on the leaves, and trickle in the gutters. The room was practically in darkness and he still had not moved. I filled a glass with milk, got out some buiscuits, and set them on the table.
His left arm was lying heavily over the side of the bed, his large square hand heavily veined, and I held it lightly till he woke. When he drank the milk a film spread over his lip, and he wiped it away quickly with his arm.
Then he had to go back to the studio to finish final details and I stood under the leaves and watched him walk away up the street. As I turned to go into the house there was a half smothered scream from the shelter across the square, and the rain began in earnest to murmer in the trees.11
To Beryl such brief intimate moments were Pyrrhic victories. Austin’s commitment to art and to his development as a human being seemed to be stronger than his commitment to her. This suspicion was only reinforced by his next decision. Now that his work helping to prepare art exhibitions for the Festival of Britain was over, Austin decided to embark on his own bohemian version of the Grand Tour, taking in the major capitals and art galleries of Europe – all on as little money as possible, hitchhiking whenever he could, walking whenever lifts weren’t forthcoming, and relying on the kindness of strangers for bed and board.
In mid-August he went to London for a few days before setting off for Brussels. Significantly, despite the new development in his relationship with Beryl, his first letter to her dwelt almost solely on descriptions of the exhibitions he’d seen: ‘I have been to practically everything there is to go to in London’, including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition which was ‘too terrible to describe, a really horrifying experience’.12
Over the course of his tour, which in the event lasted until mid-October and included Brussels, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna, Venice, Florence, Avignon and Paris, Austin wrote to Beryl every few days, seventeen letters in total. While they were not exactly love letters – or not what Beryl would have considered love letters, being more concerned with recording his social and cultural experiences than the state of his feelings – they nevertheless conveyed a sense of his deep affection for her and an awareness of a growing attachment. ‘I am beginning to feel somewhat lonely – an unusual feeling – not a general loneliness but a loneliness only for one person,’ he told her before he set off. ‘I have felt there was something missing during this stay in London and for a while I wouldn’t admit that it was you.’13
Such hints, brief though they were, must have given Beryl a sense that her feelings for him were justified and that at least at some level he too saw a potential future together: ‘Be good Sweetie, I think of you last thing at night and first thing in the morning and often in between whenever I see something that would have delighted you, why is it that a pleasure is not quite complete unless it is shared?’14
Absorbed as he was in his own experiences, Austin seemed to be unaware of Beryl’s intense feelings of jealousy, and among his descriptions of towns and art galleries are numerous admiring references to passing girls who catch his eye. He was struck by the women in Brussels, ‘tall slender delicate dark mysterious looking creatures who never speak’,15 while those in Munich were ‘large and handsome with great deep pensive eyes, they wear no shoes and their legs are brown and inviting’.16
Austin undoubtedly found women sensually attractive, but his letters to Beryl also reveal someone who felt threatened by predatory sexual desire in others, male or female. He writes how uneasy he was in a gallery in Amsterdam when two men started talking to him, fearing that they might be homosexuals, and later, outside, he experienced a similar unease when confronted by the knowing glances of women in the streets:
The women here, even the lovely looking ones, look at you in such a way as to leave no ambiguity, no doubt as to what they mean, even in the lonely poor quarters they lean against their front doors, smile blandly and with a nod of the head towards the interior, invite you to partake of what they offer. I walk with my eyes down, for I dare not look up straight because what I see makes me want to flee before the horror of the female sex . . . I cannot stop to stare at a building, a new or even a so-called ‘ARTIST’ painting in the street, without girls in front or behind giggling nudging or casting furtive glances, they do it to everything in trousers – how I detest it.17
A few days later, in a letter to Beryl from Amsterdam, he tried to capture both a sense of his feelings of despondency at missing her, and his excitement at experiencing so many new things:
When I was in London I felt that at last I was free, free to roam, to wander, that is why I did not write to you. I said to myself I am free, I will be free but what did it mean, what is freedom? I soon felt the emptiness of your absence, I soon felt it when I had time on my hands. Really – though I am discontented about not having you here and the way people live – I am learning so much, so very much about my work that I am bursting with knowledge and the desire to work it all out in paint, and stone, and pencil, and charcoal, and ink. The stimulation is great, very great.
Inevitably Beryl saw in Austin’s desire to be free only the implication that he wanted to be free from her, and in his enthusiasm for knowledge, for work and for contact with other people a proof that she wasn’t enough for him. Misunderstandings on both sides were magnified by the unreliability of the post. Arriving in Vienna, Austin found there were no letters waiting for him and dashed off a peremptory postcard full of resentment, annoyed by what he assumed was Beryl’s indifference. He immediately regretted it and sent a letter of apology.18 But Beryl’s letters, when they did finally arrive, only made things worse. Upset at his references to being ‘free’, her tone was querulous and she questioned his motives for going. Austin, who valued the ideal of openness and honesty over a more tactful consideration of other people’s feelings, didn’t hold back in his response:
Having not had any letters from you for over two weeks . . . I was overjoyed to find two waiting for me in the morning. But the tone of both was so despondent, so miserable that the joy was taken away. Why
all these questionings, why take a phrase out of its context and quote it? I cannot and do not want to be free from you, the freedom I meant was the freedom from School, from the studio, from Liverpool, as you say the stimulation is the important thing, and here in Europe it is everywhere.
Always I think of you and what it will be like to see you again, I visualise sitting opposite you in my studio or in a café and looking at your beautiful soft eyes and wide cheek bones and feeling so happy because of the love which between [us] we have built into something which is more beautiful, more great, than anything we could build separately . . .
Of course we will go away for a weekend when I return, there is nothing I want more now than to be with you alone for a long time. How can you have so little faith? We have a great future before us, you must believe in it always, or you might destroy or undermine it by your doubtings. I love you, I always will, believe that and there is nothing to panic about, nothing to fear.
Beryl, one must live, one must continually be experiencing life as fully as possible . . . Direct experience is far greater than indirect experience i.e. reading about it. It is because you show that you despise ‘stupid people’ that they do not invite you to a party or seek after your company.19
This mixture of earnestness, moralizing, and a genuine attempt to understand and explain was never going to work with Beryl. Temperamentally, she was too self-absorbed to devote herself to trying to understand people she didn’t like or considered stupid. Nor was her overly romantic notion of the way things should be between lovers well adapted to survive real-world practicalities. To Beryl, Austin’s notion of loving common humanity was all well and good, but it paled into insignificance beside the love of two people.