But the effect of the war upon the many lives that he lived simultaneously is best shown perhaps by piecing together his own day-to-day comments as he scribbled them down in letters to his friends. They were hurried letters — the pen was a very poor substitute for talk. And the pen in the studio in Fitzroy Street was often lost. It was an untidy room. He cooked there, slept there, painted there and wrote there. There was always a picture on the easel, and on the table an arrangement of flowers or of fruit, of eggs or of onions — some still life that the charwoman was admonished on a placard “Do not touch”. It was there that he was living in the first months of the war.
“The Omega still struggles on,” the letters begin in the autumn of 1914, “but it doesn’t anything like pay expenses.” He is interrupted by a visit from Mr — of the British Museum, an expert on pottery. Mr — says that “the Omega pottery is far better than any modern pottery he has seen. He praised the turquoise in particular... though the peculiar beauty of the colour is, I think, more due to some mistake in the firing than to calculation.” Then he is off to Poole, to practise throwing, glazing and painting on china. He is making a dinner set. The lodgings are squalid; the cast-iron mantelpiece has a design of classical ladies’ heads upon it; he must find some way of deleting them; clay perhaps will do it; but he is out working at the pottery from dawn till dark. At Durbins he has a family of refugees who have “nearly wrecked the household”. And he realises that “the war isn’t going to be over the winter. A kind of deadness through the prolongation of the horror” is coming over Mm. “Oh the boredom of war — the ways of killing men are so monotonous compared with the ways of living.” His old suspicions of British hypocrisy are revived. “I can’t say just now the whole truth [about the bombardment of Reims Cathedral], which is that no bombardment can do anything like the damage that the last restoration did.” But France, the centre of civilisation, must be supported. He is full of admiration too for the English soldiers. “I had a talk with Sir Ian Hamilton, who is commanding the forces in England. He is the really fine type of soldier who never allows such feelings as hatred of the enemy to get the better of them.” And so the letters pass to my private life: “Why I am happy, why I am unhappy” is the title of one pencilled page.
1915.... Interest in the Omega revives. People are discovering that they must have houses and furnish them. Customers begin to return. “Had there been no war we should have been doing a very good trade by now, judging from the greater appreciation and liking we get for our work.” But the war is coming closer. Doucet (one of the Omega artists) is at the front. A friend to whom he was much attached had lost her son, her daughter-in-law and their six children, in the Lusitama. He must see her — he must do what he can to comfort her. He is off in April to work with his sisters in organising the Quaker relief fund in France. He attempts to see Doucet. Without a pass, and with a letter from the German Ambassadress in his pocket, he ventures into the front line, is arrested as a spy, and only saved by the intervention of the head of the Friends’ Mission. But he saw Doucet, who was killed a week or two later. Then he went on to stay with the Simon Bussys at Roquebrune. There he painted. “I see that all my efforts in England will sooner or later be likely to fail through the war, and that I must aim at painting as my serious occupation.” Back in England he finds the Omega languishing. Can it be revived by “doing hats and dresses as being things which people must have quand même”? No sooner is that scheme set on foot than air raids begin. One day that autumn “I found everyone at the Omega in a state of panic”. The suffragist lady who rented the top flat “typed all through the raid without looking out of the window, and was much disappointed to find that she had missed seeing the Zeppelin over the Square”. But the concierge gave notice and he must find another— “raid proof if possible”. In November he held a show of some of his pictures. Much to his surprise it is successful. “30 or 40 people come daily. But of course I don’t sell.” And “most of the critics are very cross with me”, though Sir Claude Phillips is enthusiastic, “chiefly because he found a moral, unintended by me, in the Kaiser picture”. Meanwhile, the newspapers are becoming more and more disgusting. “The tyranny of the Northcliffe press is intolerable.... If only Asquith had hung him [Northcliffe] at the beginning of the war as an undesirable native how much better off we should be.” And the Germans evidently “are going, to stick at nothing. It only shows to what length of inhumanity devotion to one’s country leads one, for I don’t believe they are naturally inhuman.” Privately, unhappiness is much greater than happiness. He is suffering acutely. He has a feeling “that the whole centre and meaning of my life” has been destroyed.
1916.... The war is closing in. It is pressing upon non-combatants. The servant difficulty is acute. At Durbins he is camping out alone; the children are at school; the house is too big for him; he has an ineffective old Scotchwoman “who can talk but can’t cook”. He does the washing-up himself. On the other hand, the Omega surprisingly flourishes. “The Bank balance has risen from £27 to £130 after paying a quarter’s rent.” Norway and Sweden are beginning to buy. California is “clamouring for our pottery”.
And he has been commissioned to decorate a room in Berkeley Square, for which he is making a “large circular rug and tables in inlaid wood”. Public affairs, however, are going from bad to worse, “The persecution of the C. O.’s seems to be getting more and more horrible.” He is taking up the cudgels on their behalf. A sharp correspondence with Lord Curzon and Mrs Asquith leads to the comment: “It is terrible, isn’t it, that we have lost all the liberties that we set out to fight for. I think England will become unendurable.” One Conscientious Objector anyhow is employed by the Omega. And he is writing testimonials for friends. “I have known Mr R. C. Trevelyan for twenty-five years. I can state most emphatically that he is a man of serious and genuine convictions and of strong principles....” The children are a comfort. At Easter he bicycles about Oxfordshire with Pamela: “Pam is delightful to travel with. She loves loafing about towns and looking at shops as much as I do”, and Julian at Bedales “delighted me by going to bed when I lectured”. There was a rapid journey with Madame Vandervelde to Paris; visits to Ministers; visits to the “little artists’ rabbit warren behind the Gare Montparnasse”. The painters are all discussing Seurat. “You know... how we gradually come to think he was the great man we’d overlooked.... The new Matisses are magnificent, more solid and more concentrated than ever. Picasso a little dérouté for the moment but doing some splendid things all the same.” Then England again; and work at the pottery at Poole. More and more of the work was falling on him; the Omega artists were being called up. At Poole he had to work “13 hours one day” and “didn’t finish till it was dark on Saturday, working on alone in the empty factory.... At the last moment I found I’d forgotten to put handles on [Madame Vandervelde’s] dishes and there was no time to prepare them and let them get stiff as one ought. So I had to invent a handle which could be made instantly out of a ribbon of clay.... Miss Sand’s umbrella stand was a terrible job. It sagged and bulged and threatened utter collapse but I managed at last to punch and squeeze and cajole it into shape.” And then he has to give his mind to a bedstead: “I’m afraid the varnish has rather a bad effect on the tempera red lead. It seemed to run and clot in places in a way I’ve never seen. But it isn’t serious unless you look close.” He is always being sent for to the workshop to talk to possible clients. Among them was W. B. Yeats. They argued. “I had a huge discussion on aesthetics with him.... I impressed him so much that... he actually bought linen and carpets — rather a triumph for my dialectics.” But he was feeling “very seedy”. Something seemed wrong inside. A new doctor advised a new diet — potatoes and rice. The wear and tear of the war was beginning to rub sore places on the surface of some old friendships. McTaggart was becoming more and more reactionary. Lowes Dickinson, whose political views were sympathetic, “has no sympathy or understanding for art so that we never talk of it, and my work is just
a subject for jokes with him”. His temper was short. A deputation from the Arts and Crafts Society provokes an outburst. “Three sour and melancholy elderly hypocrites full of sham modesty and noble sentiments” came to the Omega to choose exhibits for a show at Burlington House. “They represent to perfection the hideous muddle-headed sentimentality of the English — wanting to mix in elevated moral feeling with everything.” And in spite of their moral feelings they “wanted to put me in a sort of dark cupboard and I got really angry...” and the show as a whole “ is such incredibly lunatic humbug and genteel nonsense as you could hardly believe possible”. But he found relief in the picture he was painting — a copy of Buffalmacco. “The more I study it the more I am amazed at it. It seems to me to be just the next step that I’m aiming at. It goes one further than Seurat.” And he was reading Stendhal with enthusiasm. But he was “horribly lonely” that winter. The “old Scotch witch” had been replaced by a slavey “bred in genteel houses and with only one conception of housework — that there must be a tray under everything”. So he was developing bit by bit a habit of solitude and was struggling as best he might to find some means by which “out of the wreck of all that seemed safe and central” something might yet be preserved. But he was bitter; irritable, and at times “the struggle seems hopeless”.
In 1917 there were more air raids. That meant fresh difficulties with the staff at Fitzroy Square. Also the supply of coal was failing. “Some days you can get 6d. worth of briquettes, other days not even that.” The pipes froze; he mounted the roof at Durbins with a pail of boiling water but failed to thaw them. Water rushed over the walls; the bath remained cold. In spite of air raids and frost the Omega must be made to form a centre. A play by Lowes Dickinson was acted there. He used it too to show pictures. One show was of children’s drawings. He had met Marian Richardson, “a school mistress in the Black country”. “She’d been up in town”, he says, “to try and get a post in London and brought her class drawings. She’d been refused without a word, and I didn’t wonder when I saw what she’d been at.... She has invented methods of making the children put down their own visualisations — drawing with eyes shut &c. I assure you they’re simply marvellous. Many of them are a kind of cross between early miniatures and Seurat but all are absolutely individual and original. Everyone who’s seen them is amazed. John was in and said quite truly it makes one feel horribly jealous.... Anyhow here’s an inexhaustible supply of real primitive art and real vision which the government suppresses at a cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds. If the world weren’t the most crazily topsy-turvy place one would never believe it possible.” In the showroom he started a “sort of evening club.... It meets once a week and is a great success. We hope to get all the more interesting people in London to come. We hadn’t enough chairs and didn’t want to buy them so we made great pillows of sacking filled with straw and put them round the room against the wall. [A sketch.]... Yeats and Arnold Bennett came last night.” Arnold Bennett records that he came on “Friday March 2nd 1917”. “After dining alone at the Reform I went up to Roger Fry’s newly-constituted Omega Club in Fitzroy Square. Only about 2 chairs. The remainder of the seats are flattish canvas bags cast on floor near walls, and specially made for this. An exhibition of kids’ drawings round the walls. Crowd, including Madame Vandervelde, Lytton Strachey, the other Strachey, Yeats, Borenius &c. They all seemed very intelligent.” But there was no comfort to be found in the public world: “... it seems as though nothing would break the evil spell and as though we should drift on forever into an utter decline of civilisation. I dined with the Hamiltons a night or two ago and found what seemed intelligent military opinion entirely sceptical, as I had long been, about any chance of decision on the Western front.... Really the white man’s burden isn’t the poor blacks but his own incredible idealistic folly.” He was painting — a copy of S. Francis by Cimabue, revising his misconceptions of that artist, and making discoveries. “... When one begins to study the forms in detail one finds just the kind of purposeful distortion and pulling of planes that you get in El Greco and Cézanne and the same kind of sequence in the contours.” He was trying his hand at portraits too— “It’s odd how I get likeness without character”, he reflected; and Viola Tree failed to come—”... sitters are the devil and there’s nothing so unsettles one as waiting for one who doesn’t come”. As to his own drawing he reflected, “I’m beginning to find out about my drawing... the way that is to unhitch the mind. You’ve no idea what a difficult thing that is for a creature like me that’s always on the spot.” Was that why the unhinged, the insane always came to him? His “incorrigible sanity” seemed to attract them. An account follows of advice asked and given. The Omega, which refused to die or to live, was becoming a heavy burden. A whole day was frittered away doing “horrid little things” at the workshop; among others choosing a lining for a bedspread with a “disagreeable smart lady” who talked with the fashionable drawl. “If I could only see my way to get quit of it altogether I would”, he groaned.
Then spring came. He lunched with Madame Vandervelde, and met Elgar and Bernard Shaw. “Elgar”, Mr Shaw records, “talked music so voluminously that Roger had nothing to do but eat his lunch in silence. At last... Roger... began in his beautiful voice... ‘After all, there is only one art: all the arts are the same’. I heard no more; for my attention was taken by a growl from the other side of the table. It was Elgar, with his fangs bared and all his hackles bristling, in an appalling rage. ‘Music’, he spluttered, ‘is written on the skies for you to note down. And you compare that to a damned imitation.’ There was nothing for Roger to do but either seize the decanter and split Elgar’s head with it, or else take it like an angel with perfect dignity. Which latter he did.” And with Madame Vandervelde he went to Dulwich. “The Poussins [in Dulwich Gallery] are gorgeous. My word, what a composer. Also the finest Rubens in the world, and a Guido Reni which I found myself admiring seriously.” He half thought of taking an old house with a magnolia tree in the garden and of retiring to Dulwich for life. But there was Durbins — he had no servants; but friends still came down. “Gertler came for the week end and we had endless talks on art. Gerder is really passionately an artist — a most rare and refreshing thing.... The fact is, artists are a different race.... He went wild over my photos and reproductions.” Goldie Dickinson came; Clive Bell came: “We had a very good time together.... He’s amazing in the quantity and flow of his mind, and the quality gets better I think.” The gardener had been called up. The weeds were rampant. He took on the job of weeding himself. “I quite understand Maynard’s [Keynes’s] passion for weeding. When once it gets hold of you it’s irresistible.... I’ve learnt to scythe properly at last.... And now I must finish planting the cauliflowers.” In London there were more raids. One sent him to sit in the basement of Heal’s shop, where he was hanging pictures— “an absurd and boring proceeding”. Another raid he watched from his window in Fitzroy Street. “It was like a game being played high up with purest blue sky and dazzling light.” During the full moon he made Durbins into a refuge for some of his friend’s children. “It’s rather a business, and I’m so seedy I hardly know how to make all the arrangements.” Internal pains had not yielded to his diet of rice and potatoes, and he was trying yet another doctor. “I begin to feel I should like someone to look after me instead of always looking after the innumerable helpless ones,” he admits.
So autumn came, and he tried to finish his pictures for a show in the midst of other distractions. “It’s been a fearful rush, ending yesterday afternoon with me painting in my bedroom (for light) and... and... and... all trying to talk to me at once about their separate affairs.” The show of flower pictures was a success. But it was difficult to feel elated by success. The cold was horrible. Again the pipes froze; again hot water was poured from pails; and “Julian dragged me off to a pond three miles away through a bitter North wind to skate... and I enjoyed it very much when I had once started”. He visited his parents at Fail
and. He was amazed by his father’s vitality. “My father has just worked out with me a most admirable letter on the Pope’s peace proposals which I hope will come out and may do good. He’s splendid about the war. It’s very odd which side people come out on.”
So 1917 came to an end; and he noted how the struggle to keep going was almost intolerable; both publicly and privately. He spoke of the “sadness and numbness of my life”. Happiness had left him, he felt; and he was training himself to live “only on outside fringes”.
January 1918 begins with a penal draught of a poem.
“Accidia” it is called. “Accidia”, he explains, “is the sin of gloominess.” The gloomy, he says, are the sinners who do not enjoy life, whom Dante punishes by “eternal fog and blackness and I think mud”. Accidia was a great sin; it must be fought. But it was hard; for the cold was bitter; and food was getting scarce. The gift of a rabbit was very welcome. But again, to his surprise, the Omega improved. Sales increased “and I am the only person who can be called upon to do designs”. Odd jobs multiplied. He was helping to produce a play by Zangwill. “I’ve spent the whole day at the theatre seeing about the dress rehearsal of Zangwill’s play. My scene is really a great success.” He met Diaghileff and “have hopes that later on he may give us some decorations to do for a new ballet”. Also “I had an amusing time on Sunday with the Empire builder [Sir James Currie].... I spent Sunday afternoon composing an inscription for his and Kitchener’s busts at Khartoum — an odd job for me, but it was amusing trying to turn the usual official humbug into something real.” He was also trying his hand at translating the Lysistraia for Madame Donnay. “I’ve never imagined such indecency possible on the stage. It would be fun if they could really do it, but of course no one could now. What civilised people the Greeks were!...”
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 439