The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell

by Storm Jameson

  She stood here, I thought, and turned over pair after pair of gloves, not willing to explain in English what she wanted and because of the silence she must oppose to her volubility very cold towards the woman; at last she chose a pair, glancing, mistrustful, at the price, then doubled her hand for the glove to be measured across her knuckles. Still guarded, she smiled for the first time when the woman blew chalk into the fingers and stretched them on wooden tongs. She refused to have them fitted, and carried them to the garden of the Place Gambetta; there, with infinite pains, each finger smoothed down and the thumb left out until the last, she tried them. A success? The money not wasted? … Content, lightly happy behind her remote gaze, she relaxed and gave Bordeaux its head.

  *

  Les Eyzies, July.

  I shall not believe that men lived, yes, lived at the ends of these long galleries in the rock — a primitive civilisation of a much higher order produced the drawings of animals on the walls. Nor do I believe that the artists were moved by anything less strong than the pleasure of creating an object they could look at, detached from themselves. The actual drawings and paintings, by the way, and the copies made of them, are not alike. The originals are rougher and incomplete, with a childish severity the copies smooth out.

  The same impulse to explain, and explain away, is responsible for the idea, puerile, that homo Mousteriensis made his drawings because he believed they would help him in some magical way with his hunting. The hunter lived his knowledge of the animal, or dreamed it. One day a man found pleasure in knowing his knowledge, in separating it from himself, so that he knew it in a new way and loved it with a new love. The step from the primitive to the speculative use of the mind had been taken. It was a step away from the magical use of the sign (to act upon nature) and towards the disinterested use — as knowledge, the act by which the artist enters into the object, and the work of art is conceived in and born from it. If his fellow primitives, or many of them, or sometimes, mistook his disinterested signs for magical ones, it would not be surprising. It is surprising that we fall into the same error. I am sure that what he deeply wanted to do was to detach as many things from himself as possible. The first, it is also the pure impulse of art. Before an object can be taken into the mind, and before it can be created, it must be, if only for a moment, detached. The great artists are those who have separated from themselves a universe of objects, so that they have created or re-discovered an inner world, where they move freely — noticing how from a certain angle or in certain moments this object resembles one other or a great many, how they vibrate into each other and affect the eye so that for the future it sees differently: the folds of a woman’s dress as ribbed sand; or the sea, the stones of a graveyard, the conscious mind, as surfaces which, if questioned, will give up the same metaphysical image; or pity is seen to be another face of contempt. His hardest effort gives, as object, to the artist, himself: he is at last free.

  This attempt, always renewed in the generations of writers and readers, was certainly being made in the caves of the Véz re valley, by a prehistoric Frenchman — already, by that clear and massive sunlight, told to think without more ambiguity than one needs to explain what finally is inexplicable: why the human mind should delight in representing to itself what it sees, and what it feels, why it cannot be content to live absorbed in the universe, why it must begin its work of detaching things from itself and having begun, seek, often to exhaustion, to make a whole out of what it knows to be only fragments. Why?

  Looking at the cave drawings of la Mouthe, I realised the vanity of my hard work. I shall never advance very far in detachment. A decade and a half of almost incessant work have only brought me to the point where I see what a writer is — and see in the same moment that I was never a writer nor shall be. Once I had too much to learn, but then a certain moment was reached when I had too much to unlearn. And now there would be no time — lacking exceptional powers of concentration. May I be born again, remembering my mistake! (O but to live it all over again — even with so much that was joyful and simple — would one have the strength?)

  *

  He took an extreme pride, this uneducated director of a steel works, in the very complicated and beautiful machines and machine-tools, designed or perfected in his works. At first I thought they are in some sense or on some level the counterpart today of Renaissance sculpture. The marvellous organisation of the human body, as it was grasped and, in his way served, by Michelangelo, is a machine comparable in grandeur with these. But more love, and a finer, because disinterested courage, went into the construction of his symbols of David and Moses and the others. We are forced, in describing the work of design and labour, to use the same word for sculpture and machine-tool. They are both of them constructions.

  Then I noticed how puerile, placed beside the machines of this factory, are such works as the kinetic sculpture of Moholy-Nagy, and the different yet essentially similar work of the Constructivists — yes, they even call themselves or are called by this name which challenges them to an effort of organisation as great as that of the unnamed designer of these machines and tools. How childish, in comparison, is their response. . . . But what I want is to understand the nature, the final impulse, of abstract sculpture and painting. It is not something to condemn, but to be wrestled with. It has a human value. . . . We tor get that some of our values belong to death.

  Is not abstract art the statement purely of relations? Are not the forms of a Hepworth, a Rodchenko, an Arp, the schemes of a mind which creates by reducing to a few the multiple powers of the object? The mind’s creative effort is directed as purely as possible to its relation with the ideal skeleton, the Idea. The next and logical move would be towards an empty space in which, undistorted by the need to express itself through any matter, the pure form, realised in the mind of the artist or in the mind of an ideal spectator in harmony with his, would exist solely by its absence. (Am I mistaken in my memory of an emptily white canvas? By Mondrian? By some artist whose name I have forgotten?) The analogy with the poetry of Mallarmé is too clear to be missed. Would not an abstract painter or sculptor find his keenest pleasure in thinking,

  plus longtemps peut-être éperdûment

  A l’autre, au sein brûlé d’une antique Amazone?

  And would he not feel that the forms realised by a Pavlova, and ceasing in the very instant of creation, are closer to his ideal than any he can fix in stone or wood?

  By a usual paradox, the purity of the mind’s effort is subordinated to nature in the abstract sculptor’s obedience to the nature of his materials. The less pure artist disregards in them any quality he does not need in order to construct; they obey him, they become at once less and more than themselves: he is able to give to the organisation of sensations and thoughts the energy the abstract sculptor spends in submitting to the nature of wood, stone, granite.

  In attempting to realise a pure method, the artist approaches the philosopher, whose effort is to know, rather than to construct. Abstract art is a statement of what is. It is representational by the method of algebra. It excludes memory and expectation, the past and the future, all that estate and playground of the artist which consists in what is not already here, given. (Or rather, does not his most serious play consist in leading what is into these other states, a ceaseless movement back and forth, between being and absence?) It states a few of the relationships of volume, surface, position, light. But to construct is to do more than make a statement, and more than to note in colour or line an algebraic formula, and more than to realise by setting it up a problem in geometry. Out of the block of relations thus stated, the artist who constructs (not the Constructivist!) evokes a new and fecund object: between it and the spectators an image or an order of images is born, and which move comme les meut l’objet aimé.

  The speculations of the abstract artist’s mind — sterile until entering and being entered into by the senses, the body, to create between them a precise play of forces and a deliberate illusion — p
roduce a formula which is too pure to act. (In the preface Valéry wrote to a book by, I think, Lucien Fabre, I came on this sentence: Rien de si pur ne peut coexister avec les conditions de la vie. Nous traversons seulement l’idée de la perfection, comme la main impunément tranche la flamme.): And strangely, the purity of his work is not what he believes it to be. Abstract art is the slave of matter. It arrests movement in the object of its contemplation, justly affirming its identity — x = x — but denying its interrelations with the rest of the universe (inner and outer). By a natural paradox, the effort to make a purely intellectual gesture has fallen into its equally sterile opposite: a purely material one results. The artist who is satisfied to make a statement is giving himself a satisfaction. Pure art? Or is he the type of Onan? Let me look again at one of these Constructivist objects, a Form, a single shaft of wood, polished, by Barbara Hep worth. To admire it, I must set in motion my own rational pleasure in a statement of relations. I must make the mental effort to rc-state them. There is no relation between my mind and the artist’s, though I persuade myself that one takes place. I, too, have carried out a sterile act.

  Sterility. The unconscious revolt against it led to surrealism — the attempt to lead back into the object those of its powers which had been abstracted. And, since it was the motion in reverse of an intellectual act, it was sensational and archaic. Surrealism, in painting or literature, sprang from a profound troubling of the human spirit. Its first confused gestures were seized on and imitated by the impulse which drives women and advertising agents to run after a fashion and police it to their use. It became stereotyped at a very shallow level of discovery. The descent into the self usually reaches no farther than the most trivial memories of representational art, fragments broken off Victorian monuments, photographic reproduction of objects, landscapes less truthful than coloured postcards. Impatience, the commercial desire for quick results, has closed or is closing with this rubble steps by which a new divinity — une profonde enfant — might reach the light.

  The paradox of surrealism, in art or poetry, is that its quality depends not singly on the power with which the subconscious image, the dream, is charged, but on the strength and subtlety of the conscious intelligence which receives and works on it. Moreover, the irrational sign is not made by a primitive imagination, rich in concrete experiences of a world in which sense and symbol are vitally fused. The evolved intellect, speculative and practical, has taken up into itself a vast psychic energy which cannot be turned back into the irrational, but can be used to explore, subtilise, and conceive enduring forms for the energies which spring from a source deeper than itself, and deeper than the dream.

  Everywhere in these years, not only in the books we live with and the paintings we admire, we are faced by the refusal of the intellect to understand the flesh. This refusal, made, if it is honest, without contempt, is the nature itself of the intellect. Does not the artist exist only to overcome the consequences of this natural inclination of his reason? To pose to himself the problems raised by the real existence of an infinite number of subtly organised bodies, and to solve them by the method of his art? And the nature of this method? Neither abstraction of sensual motion, nor a smuggling of part of it back in popular surrealism. A deep attention, the liveliest and most wilful curiosity, and the most profitable, almost an act of love, giving immediate knowledge of the creature loved.

  This absence of love terribly equals a presence of fear. Fear is the deep motive of abstract art — fear of a repellent civilisation which is dominated by the power of things. Driven by his unacknowledged fear, the artist’s intellect begins the effort of abstraction which finally imprisons him in the object, in his statements. His fearful struggle, to avoid being implicated, implicates him always more hopelessly in objects he cannot dominate, but must obey. He suffers now

  Pour n’avoir pas chanté la région où vivre

  Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l’ennui.

  And who can be surprised if, more sensitive than the others, the artist is terrified by the power things have acquired over us? A day will surely come, years from now, when those pausing in front of them in museums will say, of these faceless Profiles and skeletal Forms, “How the artists of that time starved themselves, and filtered everything before tasting it! How much fear they swallowed with every particle of life, and how, turning their backs on the present, they found that both the future they dreaded, and the past, were deserting them, and there was nowhere they could live safely, except in just that metaphysical point to which they clung and gave birth to their sterile thoughts. All their strength went into denying what they feared, and hated because of it. They had none left over for the effort of construction.”

  Which will arrive first, artists who are brave enough to rejoice, or a world to rejoice in?

  *

  The other day I was forced to come into the open and quarrel with an older, infinitely more powerful person — a man who as well as being bad-tempered and arbitrary, is an individual, very rare these days.

  I knew as soon as I took my place at the head of the long table — it was a committee, and these are an ordeal to my growing fear of people — that there was going to be trouble, and I repeated to myself: You are the last voice on earth of your mother Sylvia Russell and Mary Hervey her mother. This gave me courage: I could not very well disgrace these two shades, both so headstrong and outspoken and, especially the last, formidable.

  The trouble began at once, when he accused me of subservience to the Foreign Office, of plotting to bring our innocent society under ministerial control. The accusation was grotesque, the fantasy of a strong lively mind twisted by its suspicions. There were foreigners at the table. They were distressed, and their deep respect for him kept them mute; facing their silence, I had either to oppose or give way to him.

  My need to be approved of is terrible. Alone in my room, writing, I can be honest. I say “honest “— but sometimes the effect is not what I meant, and I am accused, to my extreme astonishment, of violence. Violence? My whole instinct is towards pleasing people; I dread, worse than anything, their disapproval. There, there, good dog, I say to the beast I see coming into the room with another person. I smile, nod, make propitiating signs with my voice. I behave as I do with all except the few close friends in whose hands — with due regard for politeness — I can risk the truth. . . . My heinous wish to be liked, my fear of disapproval and anger, form a part, inseparable, of my anxious wish for these almost strangers to feel happy. An image of myself comes forward to serve them with anything they need to feel pleased with themselves. My self disappears. I have no idea what it does, or how it excuses itself for its cowardice and indiscipline. I do not always succeed; at these times something must have betrayed me. That disobedient violence?

  Today — thanks to the support of my two shades — I was able to seem calm and scarcely to feel my ordinary terror at the sound of a raised voice. He became milder and repeated, “I don’t like the way you’re going.” I had an impulse to tell him that I admired his willingness to be quarrelled with. Instead — “You talk,” I heard myself say, “like my mother.” An extraordinary thing to say; where on earth did it come from? The ridiculous dispute went on, past the cautious faces of the foreigners, with bent heads evading the anglo-saxon lightnings. Can I be learning courage? Or is it simply that when there is no hope for it, no hope of pleasing, when I am savaged by an opponent plainly not to be soothed, I make the best of a bad job?

  In the end, he said he was leaving us, we had abandoned him. I protested that it was we who were being abandoned. “No, no,” he said, “it is a parting,” and rose to go. I stood up — and stood while he gathered his overcoat and gas-mask. He lectured us, smiling, on our duty to carry gas-masks. I opened the door, we shook hands; he went. None of the others, English or foreigners, seemed sorry; they stretched themselves and smiled. I was so sad that it cost me an effort not to show it. To think that of all writers in the world I had chosen this one for my unlikely c
ourage — the one who influenced my adolescence, changed it and my life. (For that I owe him no thanks, but is he responsible for what I made of myself?) A few months before this, I had asked him to approve of a difficult and drastic action I wanted to take in this society. He said: Certainly, he would do anything he could, “though I am an old worn-out man, and may drop dead at any moment. What would you do if I dropped dead now? ”

  “I should cry for my lost youth,” I said, almost without thought.

  “Ah.” He did not seem vexed — but I could not read his expression, I know of him only what is obvious. . . . It is true that he was in some way our youth, the youth of those whom two wars have eaten. Could he not have been content — clearly, disgust with the world is the root of his arbitrary ways and many suspicions — could he not, I thought sadly, be content with having changed the mental habits of more young men and young women than any writer since Rousseau? No, of course not — he wanted them to do him credit. Alas, so many of them were killed before they had time to show whether they were fit for that. He is defeated now by the tolerance of our English governments, who despise writers too much even to suppress them. Unlike that other fountain of ideas, Bernard Shaw, he cannot console himself by clowning. His seriousness was one of the qualities we liked in him: the young do not care for mountebanks. And now this fantastic dispute!

  I console myself that probably he has not left — except for a short time, to punish us.

  *

  Usually when she had to see or when she thought about her first husband she felt a sense of guilt, as though in some way she were to blame for everything — it was astonishing how large a part guilt played in her deep life: very often she felt most guilty towards acts which, if she were to talk about them, would surely have been justified by her listeners, as they had been by events. But it would be she who was telling the story, and it was she who had caused to happen the events which seemed to justify her. Only she knew how treacherously she had behaved. But what if it were all she knew about herself? There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification. She was good at both.