Angel Dorothy

by Jane Brown

  At Dartington June opens with the usually crowded days and familiar faces, but wedding fever is in the air. Dorothy flits to London for ‘a fitting’ and then, on Friday 14th, she takes wing for the first time on the Croydon Airways late morning flight to Paris, which allows her to reach her appointment at Worth at five o’clock. On her return she sees Whitney and Daphne, to be debriefed, and then has an appointment with Gerald, to calm her nerves? The long, even tenor of life in Devon resumes, the roll-call of all the usual names, to which Irene and Gilbert Champernowne are now added. Irene is a Jungian psychotherapist and they are both skilled in healing through art therapies; they bring a deeper meaning to the practice of the arts in the serene surroundings of Dartington. Dorothy’s conscious understanding of living with music, painting, dance and drama as the texture of her days is heightened. She is both the spirit and the substance of the place, a presence more often seen in the audience or passing in her motor car by the majority of musicians, dancers and other students as her shyness prevents encounters. But she has all their interests at heart, she has to keep everyone’s desires and problems in her mind, and be prepared for the next big event or trip across the Atlantic. Her diary is essential to her juggling act.

  Maurice Browne comes for four days in mid-June to discuss the arrival of the Chekhov company, and his own future. Suddenly Dorothy realises that Beatrix Farrand, whose time is so precious, is already halfway across the Atlantic; she meets her at Plymouth on Tuesday 25th and Beatrix gets down to work immediately, watched with half an eye by Dorothy while she is having lunch or tea on her sunny terrace, the Loggia they call it, with an array of visitors. On a weekend in London she manages a Worth fitting, a session with Gerald, lunch with Gladys and Lady Winchilsea, who are soon to be mothers-in-law, and she arrives home in time to entertain a party from Bedales who have been invited by Mr Curry. She has noted on 24th June, ‘Michael’s friends to dinner’ – Leonard’s sister Irene Rachel, whom Dorothy likes very much, is their house guest, so it is family for dinner plus the fiery Cambridge radicals John Cornford and Hugh Gordon.240 Michael, who has to keep his head for long enough to be Whitney’s best man, is excited about going to Russia in August with a group including Cornford, Gordon, the brothers Anthony and Wilfrid Blunt, and Michael Young.

  Weddings come apace; first in July there is Irene Rachel’s engagement party in Yorkshire, she is to marry George Barker who is huntsman of the Badsworth in the famous hunt country near Pontefract.241 On 11th July Dorothy attends the St Paul’s, Knightsbridge wedding of Gladys Szechenyi’s daughter, also Gladys, to Daphne Finch-Hatton’s brother Christopher. The next day Beatrice arrives from New York to be one of Daphne’s attendants, and Dorothy has an appointment with her wedding hat at Schiaparelli’s. A folk dance festival, the quarterly trustees’ meetings (how does she sit still for long enough?) and a party at Redworth with the Jooss dancers fill the weekend before she catches the noon train on Monday for a final Worth fitting, and dinner at Whitney and Michael’s house. On Tuesday there is a rehearsal at St Margaret’s, Westminster – where seventeenth-century Whitneys were baptised and married – and later Leonard arrives with Miss Jefferies and Ruth and William, who are bridal attendants. Dorothy has a hair appointment early on Wednesday morning, 17th July, so that she appears freshly Marcel-waved – her Schiaparelli hat in hand – when she meets Cecil Beaton.

  He is already a celebrity photographer, thirty-ish, elegant and excruciatingly thin. He darts around the room in Park Lane being brilliant, flipping tulle drapes and adjusting the light, before he rather casually clicks his camera. His portrait of the afternoon’s bride, Daphne, as a porcelain beauty swathed in tulle, had appeared in Vogue in June, but Mrs Elmhirst’s portraits, he had been told, were strictly private and not for publication. Dorothy withdraws behind her powder-blue gaze, she is out of practice at sitting for her portraits, and she suspects that Mr Beaton’s camera will detect her edginess at the thought of her crowded afternoon to come. At least he is quick.

  The afternoon’s wedding is a starry affair and The Times carries fifteen column inches of report, more than half that the tightly printed roll-call of guests. Dorothy’s relatives include her stepsister Addie Lambart, Almeric Paget now Lord Queenborough, and the Baillies, her friend Gladys Szechenyi and her two younger daughters and Pamela McKenna, with Christopher and Cecily Martin, who is a McKenna, from Dartington.242 Whitney’s friends include Ian Fleming, a mediocre stockbroker and man about town at this time, and his business partner Richard Seaman. To the majority of the guests Whitney’s mysterious mother, of whom there was much gossip but whom none of them knew, was an object of gush and awe, almost an exhibit. She sailed through, Leonard standing stalwartly at her elbow looking a little like a figure from Menswear Magazine.

  Dorothy and Leonard escape to the opera, and on the way home they visit Bedales at Steep in Hampshire, enthused by their recent visitors. There is a happy, active end-of-term disarray about the place, which is set in beautiful countryside. They do not envy the large brick main building in Tudor style, but Ernest Gimson’s heavily timbered library cannot but impress – fine memorial libraries are becoming fashionable, but there will not be one at Dartington because book learning is less revered than activity and experience. After the end-of-term festivities they – plus Beatrice and Ruth and William – are off on the Aquitania, arriving in New York on 30th July. They go straight to Raquette Lake and Camp Deerlands in time for Beatrice’s birthday on 2nd August with ‘a wonderful supper’ by the lake. The newly-weds Whitney and Daphne arrive for a short stay before going to take the more glamorous airs of Saratoga Springs, the racing resort that Whitney’s grandfather had helped to create. The remainder of August is given over to tennis, swimming, canoeing, sailing and shopping; the most onerous duty was listening to a First Aid talk, and the most momentous was William ‘catching a big fish’.

  They return to the fray in New York on 2nd September, the absent Michael’s birthday the previous day still signifying the end of the holiday. A week later they sail on the Manhattan and Dorothy’s diary has several days marked ‘in bed’, code for shutting herself in her own cabin to be alone with her thoughts. Whitney’s wedding, and the alien crowd of English society to whom she has nothing to say, overlaid with her summering dose of nostalgia in the midst of the mountains and lakes of upstate New York, alongside the realisation that her home at Old Westbury had little place in her life now, all this had emphasised her rootlessness. Ever since Willard’s death and the war her Atlantic crossings had given her this space for her own thoughts, but these Manhattan notebook entries dated 13th September reveal her to be ‘at sea’ in many senses:

  The practice of religion, then, must be the conscious effort to find perfection, as we approximate it. One means of doing this might be found, I believe, in the attempt to clarify for ourselves the moments, the incidents, the individual qualities in people, which have penetrated, further than the rest, into the ideal world. Perhaps one form of meditation might be the concentration on someone we know, someone we love, to find the essential quality of that person which makes him divine and so greatly deserving to be loved.

  These notes can be seen as holiday-work for her therapist, Gerald Heard or Irene Champernowne, but they end in such a pitiable longing for an anchorage. Is there such a person of ‘essential quality’ as to ‘make him divine’? Her elusive artistic genius is not Kurt Jooss, who is too severe and too safely married, nor Walter Gropius, who is too wavering in his attachment to Dartington, and to England. Her notes begin to replay her analytical thinking from twenty-eight years ago, when in that hotel in Venice she had put down her reasons for choosing her husband, except that now it is something of herself, her own innate creativity so long suppressed, that she is searching for:

  And, as with people so with beauty – to recall, and by recalling to dwell with it. And so, I believe, I must gather up for myself as I go the values, the experiences which belong to my real world and which will enable me, perhaps, in momen
ts of fleeting insight to apprehend God... I can no longer call to Him out of the void, nor can I any longer pray... I must begin with something more immediate – with human beings, their lives, their thoughts, their creations – then conceivably I can recognize the divine there instead of continuously passing it by.243

  She goes no further, and if she did have a notion of a creative beauty that was within her grasp, it was all swept away the moment the Manhattan spilled her onto the Southampton dockside, where Michael, just back from Russia, met them. The ‘Socialism in action’ that the Intourist guides had set before the loose-knit group of young travellers, the busy modern factories, collective farms and workers’ housing, had made them feel that Tolstoy’s society was in the making, even if only halfway through the first Five Year Plan. The contrasts between the Tsarist court that Dorothy had found intact in 1908 and Michael’s impressions kept them talking for the short time they had together. Term started for Dartington’s activities on 21st September, but Dorothy and Leonard soon headed north for Manchester for the Jooss Ballet’s first night, then on to Leonard’s parents for a short stay, which featured a trip down a coal mine at Barnsley. Their stay in Cambridge included seeing the new film Sanders of the River, starring Paul Robeson and Leslie Banks, a homage to goodness in people and deeds, in darkest Africa. While going about her motherly task of making Michael’s rooms comfortable Dorothy noted in her diary that she met more of his friends, Maurice Dobb and Brian Simon. Dobb was the ‘fair-haired, pink-cheeked’ dandified doyen of the Cambridge left, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain since it was founded in 1920, a delightful, charming, cultured man, enjoying the new-found enthusiasm for his cause. Brian Simon, like John Cornford and Hugh Gordon, was of the younger contingent of clever and passionate activists, extraordinarily gifted young men drawn to the opinions of distinguished members of the university, like Dobb, and J.D. Bernal, the crystallographer and X-ray pioneer of the Cavendish Laboratory. Bernal’s expressed ‘intellectual’s’ opinion was that the USSR was the only nation ‘moving on’ and providing ‘the antithesis to the whole catalogue of cultural reaction represented by Fascism’.244 Dorothy hoped Michael would remain level-headed and keep to Socialism, but she feared that he felt isolated, and homeless (rather as she did) and susceptible to hero-worship and the Communist ideal of comradeship, the force which drove his brilliant and fearless friend John Cornford.245

  On Friday 11th October at 11 a.m. she noted that Michael Chekhov was to be given a tour of the estate.246 He is ‘Mr Chekhov’, he seems older and less handsome than his photographs, but there is an elasticity in his step and he glides along in his loose-fitting suit, and when he is talking and something sparks his interest he becomes a magician. The moment is good, the trees are sheened in gold, especially the beech trees, and the tiltyard ‘theatre’, the legacy of Richard Odlin, has been freshly mown. The beauty of the place is irresistible and Chekhov is delighted that he will come to teach there. Dorothy is walking on clouds.

  But Walter Gropius was still putting the finishing touches to his transformation of Barn Theatre when, late in 1935, he was ‘poached’ as Isokon’s Controller of Design for their new furniture making enterprise. Dorothy may have allowed herself a scowl, but it would have had to be in private, for both Jack Pritchard of Isokon and Gropius’s partner Maxwell Fry were involved in the policy discussion group soon known as Political and Economic Planning being nursed into life under Leonard’s and Dartington’s wings. When, a few months later, Pritchard appealed for help in paying for Cambridgeshire’s Impington Village College, construction costs having doubled the estimated £20,000 as Gropius had not used standard components, it was Dorothy who answered the appeal. She paid some, if not all, of the architects’ fees of over £1,000.247

  December begins with a weekend trip to Yorkshire for Irene Rachel’s and George Barker’s wedding. Christmas shopping in London and seeing Whitney and Daphne are mixed with the usual parties and carols at Dartington, ending with ‘our party’ for Christmas Day at home, but without Whitney and Daphne. On 28th December, true to pattern, they all pack up and go off to Portwrinkle to the Chalet, for long walks and games on the beach. Dorothy’s holiday reading is Dr Ian Dishart Suttie’s Origins of Love and Hate just published and probably given to her by Gerald Heard, who had been to Cambridge to see Michael at her request. Dr Suttie dealt with the breakdown or loss of a closeness between mother and child, and the child’s subsequent craving for companionship and to love and be loved from another source, not – as Freud insisted – necessarily sexual. Dorothy was blaming herself for Michael’s yearnings for the comradeship of Communism at Cambridge, and it was also no accident that they had seen Hamlet together, the starting point for a discussion on a mother who married a second husband.248 The year ended with ‘a terrific storm’, and after it had passed she and Leonard played golf, only this time it was not so ‘soppy’ and she managed three holes.

  King George V died at Sandringham on 20th January 1936, and the next day the new King flew himself from Norfolk to London for his Accession, which seemed a good omen to his modern subjects. A few days later Whitney Straight applied for British citizenship, the notice appearing in The Times on 4th February, and prompting a family conference.249 Whitney had made his choice and put his faith in Britain and his British company, and therefore it was Michael, as yet only twenty, who remained an American citizen and who would fall heir to the American family trusts and properties. Dorothy still had her American passport, though she had applied for British citizenship in April 1935. As this was one more estrangement between brothers who had depended upon each other Dorothy continued to be watchful of Michael, and it seemed her new policy was to keep him as close as she could, whenever possible. She was in Cambridge in early March when he was elected to the Apostles, after his nomination by David Champernowne. On 26th March she and Leonard sailed on the Berengaria for an unusually sociable crossing, for her, cocktails with the Captain and Buster Keaton films. It was a hard-working trip spent at Old Westbury where a great deal of her past was exorcised. She had left in such a hurry in 1925 (was it really eleven years ago?) that there were piles of boxes and trunks to be sorted through, to see what Whitney, Beatrice – now settled in America – and Michael might like to keep. Willard’s carefully packed mementoes from China, porcelains and bronzes by the dozen, and boxes of her father’s Georgian silver and dinner services, things she could not quite bring herself to part with were all destined for a holding station, the caverns of Manhattan Storage. Anna Bogue was kept busy with mammoth lists and labelling marathons. Leonard went to Ottawa, leaving Dorothy to see her old friends, and go to Washington for tea at the White House with Eleanor Roosevelt.

  Back at Dartington in May, on the 6th, Michael Chekhov comes to dinner and confirms that he will open his teaching studio in the autumn.250 Dorothy is overwhelmed, but keeps her bubble of excitement to herself, nor does she write anything down, yet. She has been delving into his theatrical past, as well as her own, and can hardly allow herself to suspect, let alone believe, that a creative force that verges on the ‘divine’ is coming to Dartington. It is her most blessed (and least troublesome) child Beatrice who has guided her into this, Beatrice, now twenty-two and confidently pursuing her acting training in New York, who ‘found’ Chekhov and realised that his experimental methods would suit her mother’s dreams. Chekhov’s Moscow Arts Theatre background matched Stanislavsky’s, and as with Lee Strasberg’s Group projects in New York the actors were trained in feelings rather than techniques, in nourishing their ‘emotional memory’ and ‘finding themselves in the character that the author had written’. Beatrice elaborated in excited telephone calls as she learned more, that the Group was ‘based on two propositions: that art should reflect life, and that through art it is possible to make life better. Theatre had to provide for society what society had failed to provide for itself’.251 These actors had a role in the community, and as teachers. It seemed to Dorothy that in her latent, almost secret, l
ove of the theatre she had found the extension of John Dewey’s hopes for education – to a larger justification for life itself beyond the schoolroom.

  Just in case her flight of fancy took her over she was brought to earth, and by Chekhov himself. She had been out in her garden placing new shrubs with her head gardener David Calthorpe, gardening came into the conversation and Chekhov gave it his blessing, saying that he liked to teach outdoors whenever the weather was suitable, urging his students to be at one with nature, to ‘feel what it is like to be a tree’ and to experience the tenderness of flowers. The very next day she noted in her diary, ‘Digging in garden,’ thus announcing the birth of Dorothy the gardener, rather than merely the garden owner who instructs her gardener. She will no longer pass by the beauty around her, at least people keep telling her that she lives in a beautiful place, and now she begins to recognise this. For the first time, unbelievably, she and Leonard take a weekend motor tour around Somerset and west Wiltshire, to the cathedral at Wells, to Bath and Bradford-upon-Avon, and they discover places that had been there all the time, unnoticed. Returning home, Dartington now appears in context, and she realises what Beatrix Farrand, the most contextual of designers, has been working towards with her insistence on traditional materials and native plants. Through the entrance arch their beautiful Courtyard oval is a reality, its focus on the Porch entrance to the, now restored, Great Hall, rather than on the discreet door to their house in the far right corner. The Courtyard lawn is surrounded by cobblestones, and through these the twin wheel-tracks of smooth stone run as necklets, allowing in the motors of their visitors and themselves.