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For the time being, however, nothing was done with the painting. Stanley stored it in his room at Fernlea while he settled to other work. One such was among the first of what must be called his ‘landscapes’: the painting of Cookham, 1914.
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_b6f7fcab-855c-5d1f-94a8-76f3d63eba26)
Cookham, 1914 (#ulink_b6f7fcab-855c-5d1f-94a8-76f3d63eba26)
Excuse my muddle-headedness and slowness, when I see anything I see everything, and when I can’t see one thing I see absolutely nothing.
Stanley Spencer
SUPERFICIALLY The Nativity and even John Donne Arriving in Heaven can be classified as landscapes. But Stanley would not have regarded them so. For him landscapes, like still-lifes and portraits, captured tangible objects in real time. They can be called his observed paintings. Unlike his visionary or compositional work, observed paintings were invariably painted or sketched in situ, where possible in contiguous sessions. In them detail is precise and often continued full into the foreground, a technique which gives such paintings wide-angle clarity of definition and the strong visual impact resulting from great depth of field.* (#litres_trial_promo) An ancillary of the method, the use of a high-angle viewpoint, occurs in his first major landscape, Cookham, 1914, and has been proposed as imaginary,
because Stanley often used such viewpoints in subsequent visionary work. But he never did so, we can be sure, in observed paintings. There will exist an exact spot near Cookham which shows the scene precisely as Stanley saw it. It has been identified as near Terry’s Lane in Cookham leading up to Winter Hill, a little beyond Rowborough House.
In the most compelling of Stanley’s landscapes, we glimpse the power that place had for him: ‘My landscape painting has enabled me to keep my bearings. It has been my contact with the world, my soundings taken, my plumb-line dropped.’
Meticulousness of detail was not an arbitrarily adopted style. He could paint in no other way, for the precision in his personality was the physical manifestation of his inner search for veracity. Cookham, 1914 was the forerunner of a magnificent procession of observed paintings, hundreds in all, so decorative and so sought-after that he found himself frequently leaning on them for income. At times he complained of having to churn them out. Sometimes his complaint was justified because he was too rushed and the result mechanical. But in less hurried times he could enjoy the contemplative opportunities they afforded. We should not be deceived by his wail; it reflects only annoyance that he had to give them precedence at periods when he wanted to concentrate on visionary work.
Place, for Stanley, meant objects observed in relation to one another. In a newly observed scene neither the objects nor their relationship would have an immediate impact. Only when he drew some associative inference would the place take meaning. The process needed time. Given time, the place would assume for him an identity from his perception of its components. Change one, and for him the entire identity of the place changed. Thus his more powerful landscapes became connections between himself and the spirit of the landscape which had imposed its identity on him. At the moment of imposition, of connection, the place became an entity, a stasis.
Thus his landscapes in general lack figures. An animate figure, however discreet, would be an intrusion in the stasis of the scene. But stasis does not imply passivity. Each landscape in which place sang for Stanley revealed to him a necessary natural creation which would persist whether or not man interferes. He told Edward Marsh, who bought Cookham, 1914,
‘I think the true landscape you have of mine has a feeling of leading to something I want in it, I know I was reading English Ballads at the time and feeling a new and personal value of the Englishness of England.’
It is in the brooding calm of their existence that the power for Stanley of such landscapes rests. They are simply being.
When then is the distinction between such paintings and his visionary work? Why were the latter more significant for him? Essentially it was a question of how fully he could join himself to whatever he was painting. In observed painting, even the most sympathetic, he was not able wholly to amalgamate himself with his subject: ‘It is strange that I feel so “lonely” when I draw from nature, but it is because no sort of spiritual activity comes into the business at all – it’s this identity business,’ he was later to write.
Place became ecstatic for him when it became wholly subjective: ‘It must be remembered that whatsoever I talk about is the whole thing, by which I mean that if I refer to a place, I am talking of a place plus myself plus all associating matters of personal characteristics respecting myself.’
He saw it through a filter of personal associations which transfigured it into metaphysical meaning.
But when it came to the visionary paintings this raised a pictorial problem: ‘I need people in my pictures as I need them in my life. A place is incomplete without a person. A person is a place’s fulfilment as a place is a person’s.’
But figures depicted in the same way as he portrayed the detail of merely observed places or objects would destroy the stasis, even when his feelings about the figures made them its fulfilment. They could not be shown in that way, even when they were derived from people he knew and were associated with the place.
Stanley’s solution was not to paint the detail in such pictures as it could be observed. The places would be real, but not painted objectively. Nor would figures: they could be real persons but would emerge from his composition in a transfigured form. Both place and people would be reconstructed visually out of his metaphysical relationship with them, after contemplation and invariably in the quiet of a studio. Thus when Stanley paints visionary effusions he is not painting a real place, even though he makes use of one; he is not painting real people, even though he is using them; he is not even painting his feelings about both, though he is making use of them. He is painting a transfiguration of experience. * (#litres_trial_promo)
This did not mean that he painted such pictures with less meticulousness than he painted his observed scenes. On the contrary, the transfiguration involved him in the most exact choices, for it demanded forms of expression which to the untutored eye can appear to be distorted. If he had to use such distortion of detail, then it had to be in tune with the emotional content of the whole. The balancing act in this process made composition frequently an agony, especially in his novitiate years:
I have [only] as yet been able to see something I want to write or paint in a disarranged state. It is as if I had seen a box of chessmen and had no idea of how or in what order they were to be placed. But I would know if a domino or some draughts got into the box that they had nothing to do with the chess pieces. I know to the last detail what does belong to the game. I only don’t know yet the order. It is a big ‘only’. I have noted in all my various desires that they have a relationship to each other and that they or many of them, come together to suggest some clue as to what their final form will be. This final something, the thing that ecstasy is about, God alone can give the order and reveal the design.
His own expressed distinction between his observed and visionary paintings was that the observed paintings ‘had no memory-feeling’. Memory-feeling was the mainspring of transfiguration. Only when memory-feelings crystallized as moments of metaphysical illumination would people and places merge for Stanley. Then the figures would become personifications, incarnations, of experience through which Stanley strove to approach the meaning by restoring the experience. But the miracle to Stanley was that the attempt to capture the illumination, to approach the meaning, enabled him to compose a work of art based on the sensation of the originating experience but in an imagery which transfigured it and gave him a joy and happiness he could find in no other way. It is a true source of art: certainly of Stanley’s art.
CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_1fb91991-28f6-5e2b-a21c-37bcd73a99fc)
Swan Upping (#ulink_1fb91991-28f6-5e2b-a21c-37bcd73a99fc)
‘What do they mean by religious art? It is an absurdity. How can you make religious art one day and another kind the next?’
Picasso
MYSTICISM? EXORCISM? ESCAPISM? SUBLIMATION? Stanley’s astonishing access to the disjointed memory-feelings of his subconscious, and his creative ability to associate them, in whatever random or involuntary way they might have come to him, into patterns of meaning – paintings – which constructed for him a metaphysical world alternative to the physical world, all these could fascinate a psychologist: as in fact they were to do in later life. Through his midwifery of the metaphysical from the physical, his redemption, Stanley was evolving a unique form of expression, a language.
Modernism was arriving, its battle-cry ‘directness is all’. Directness was to be achieved by dismembering an object, event or sensation into its apprehended constituents and then clinically and unsentimentally reassembling them into a taut form which, however surprising it might at first appear, was to the artist more truthful in re-fashioning the essence of the original than contemporary representational art could offer.
It may seem a far cry to a puzzled young painter cloistered in an English village. But the link existed. Picasso’s exploration of cubism remained as solidly based on real objects as Stanley’s compositions did on places. Proust’s happiness in his cobbles
was echoed in that of Gwen in hers, his mysterious feelings about his hawthorn blossom by Stanley’s for his Cookham wildflowers.* (#litres_trial_promo) James Joyce exactly recalling sensation, even of the cloacal, parallels Stanley sitting seemingly for hours on the outside loo at Fernlea with a worm or newt on his bare thigh to relish its movement against his skin; a habit his family, awaiting their turn, found infuriating. D. H. Lawrence, celebrating sexuality, presages Stanley having an ‘interesting discussion’ with young Peggy Hatch ‘on the relative sizes of our legs just above the knee, but only just above’,
or tentatively feeling the penis of a boyhood companion and wondering at its softness,* (#litres_trial_promo) or in the quiet of Wistaria Cottage imagining a girl ‘squatting’ before him, then feeling a ‘warm glow’ at the spectacle of the uncovered legs of girls as they played in the straw, or momentarily breathless at the sight of a girl bending to retrieve a ball through railings.
For each artist, the minutiae of physical sensation demanded a place in the totality of experience, even if for Stanley their expression in pencil or paint was still hesitantly circumscribed.
The parallels cannot be pushed too far. Modernism was more a state of mind than a specific movement. In the best of it can be found the sense of awe without which no artist can accomplish – Picasso shouting from his studio, ‘I am God! I am God!’ The disjunctions of Joyce’s Ulysses or Eliot’s The Waste Land parallel the many-layered but essentially unified compositions of Stanley’s The Nativity or of The Centurion’s Servant or of the many visionary paintings to come. The awe, the impetus to truth, is ‘spiritual’, ‘religious’. It pervades the work of the great modernists, even though many rejected canonical faith; as did Stanley in liturgical literalness. But ‘spiritual’ and ‘religious’ it remained for him, and we must continue to use his adjectives in that sense.
If Stanley’s interpretation of Christian tradition seems sometimes less than orthodox, he saw no point in divesting his art of its power. When such a magnificent paradigm lay at hand, one with which he was familiar from childhood, why squander its resources in crafting, as did so many of his contemporaries, some less apt device? If Cookham was ‘heaven’ for Stanley, it was because the Bible was the first text he had known which offered integrated interpretation of the disparate mysteries which were beginning to possess him. He would not always accept its interpretation literally, but it would remain a yardstick against which he could measure future texts and alternative explanations. For he remained convinced of having been vouchsafed a miracle, that what he saw happening during his adolescence in Cookham had already taken place for him in a deeper sense in the Bible of his Fernlea boyhood. Each Cookham occurrence was for him no more an event in isolation than were the Bible stories Pa had read to him. Each was a drum-roll in his as yet dimly discerned pageant of revelation, and it was his unsolicited destiny to relate the majesty of the one to the other, to take the elements of experience and fuse them into an assembly of spiritual meaning.
Swan Upping demonstrates this particularly well. One of the elements he chose for the composition was the foreground cameo showing two men at work on a punt; a second is that of the two girls carrying cushions to a punt – the sun is in the east, it is morning; the third shows a waterman of the Company of Vintners and Dyers bringing Thames swans ashore for marking. Connecting them, the boardwalk and towpath spike their way towards the lawn of the Ferry Hotel, flag raised to proclaim its services to passing river traffickers. Mr Turk’s boathouse is on the right, and beyond it arches Cookham Bridge.* (#litres_trial_promo)
Each cameo is a little pocket of feeling. Stanley does not directly describe its nature, but its significance can be extracted from allusions in his writing. Part of his Cookham feelings related to his delight in the occupations of the villagers. The purposefulness of their daily activities made them for Stanley participants in some ritual, as though Cookham were a church, its inhabitants communicants, himself a priest. Not all the villagers gave him this feeling, but those that did became part of his abiding joy:
I hear Mr Johnson’s little boy call ‘Harry, Harry’ down below in the street and I hear his scuttling feet across the gravel as he runs past our house. Our back iron gate swings open and hits the ivied wall [of the house] out of which it is built with a bang, and then quick steps up the [side] passage, then the sound of the milk can opening and of the jug drawn off the window cill.
The men tending the foreground punt capture the feeling. Stanley does not tell us who they are but, like the milkman, they are part of his Cookham ritual: men in their physical work, wage-earners, providers of the means to home-making, ‘nest-builders’, angular in presentation.
The girls behind them share the ritual, but differently. Their function is domestic. The cushions they carry are femininely rounded and patterned, suggesting softness. The girls who actually worked at the boatyard for Mr Turk on busy days have had their identity changed by Stanley.
He has, he tells us, substituted for them the Bailey girls. William Bailey was a local builder and also an accomplished artist, and the family was a joyous strand in his Cookham feelings: ‘Somehow M. S. or Miss Roberts could never quite give me the significance of Cookham that the Bailey girls did, or any other Cookhamite such as Mr Worcester [Wooster?], Pa, Mrs Croper [Cropper?] or Mr Francis or Mr Pym or Mrs Bailey or Mr Hatch. It’s just heaven reciting those names.’
It was Dorothy Bailey who gave Stanley his early art training. Her personality caught his imagination, induced his ‘love’: ‘Walking upon the Causeway between white posts placed at the eastern end is Dorothy Bailey. How much, Dorothy, you belong to the Marsh meadows and the old village. I love your curiosity and simplicity, domestic Dorothy.’
Stanley renders unidentifiable the figure bringing ashore the carpet-bagged swans, his elbow lifted, a sack worn for protection against angry beaks and wings. Yet he too is part of the mysterious ritual which makes Cookham holy for Stanley, and which in this painting he has localized along the river because, he says, when in church one day the sounds of river activity filtered in and took on the aura of the religious atmosphere he was experiencing at worship:
My Cookham feelings were really this, that I felt this Ascot-fashion Boulter’s-Lock Sunday Bank-holiday terrific physical life could be tremendous seen spiritually, and this desire on my part was intensified by the fact that Cookham had as far as nature aspects were concerned and as far as the different jobs that were done there (boats and boat-building etc) an affinity with the Bible and the Bible atmosphere. So that in a way all the things that happened at Cookham happened in the Bible. … Of course in this idealizing of Cookham people it was more just my own idealizing of them, my own feelings of perfection projected on to them …
If interpretation of the painting stops at this point, it may seem a straighforward rendering of an artist’s powerful place-feelings; three episodes or transformations of experience chosen from many possible, and assembled visually to define an otherwise intangible totality of meaning. But, Stanley being Stanley, we may guess there must be more. The imagined high-angle viewpoint, the packed composition, the geometrical arrangement of components and the density of colour give a charged intensity of feeling which the pacific cameos so far described do not explain.
The high-angle viewpoint was one with which Stanley had been experimenting in visionary work. Its use in Swan Upping was not merely a technical device to shorten perspective and compress into proximity detail normally invisible or discreet when seen from ground level. There was an emotional element. In the back garden of Fernlea grew a large walnut tree which overhung neighbouring gardens. At harvest the Spencer boys would climb into it to shake down the nuts and, as Sydney described and Stanley later drew, sometimes clambered to do so on to a neighbour’s ‘tin sheds’, much to his fury. Stanley as a boy loved to climb alone into the tree. There was always wonder at the unexpected vistas revealed, and also a feeling of isolation, of remoteness, of godlikeness; very much the feeling in the painting.
The angularity given the towpath has, it has been suggested, affinities with cubism and vorticism.
At the time, Stanley’s former fellow-students Nevinson, Wadsworth and Bomberg were experimenting with the styles, and Stanley was interested to see their work. However, the towpath actually does zigzag as Stanley shows it, the abrupt changes of direction being caused by the property boundaries of the riverfront cottages. Stanley’s artist’s eye instinctively registered such minutiae. But, as with all his visionary work, the painting of the scene was not done from actuality. On the contrary, as he stresses in his description, he drew the scene from memory, returning only afterwards to compare his drawing with the reality and to congratulate himself on the accuracy of his observation.
The comment is significant. Stanley is not painting the scene as a landscape. He is deliberately painting it through the filter of ‘memory-feeling’. The resulting configuration is subservient to the feeling. Of course, most original artists do this. But where many of his contemporaries developed the distortion to carry their meaning, Stanley reverses the process. He aims to bring the configuration of his memory-feeling into as accurate a parallel with the observed as he can, convinced that the more accurately he can do so, the closer he will draw to the power of the associations inherent in the memory-feelings. He will never expect to match the two exactly. There will always be some distortion. When it increased alarmingly in later years, he felt that he had lost this first and early vision, the ‘innocence’ in which he was happiest.
If therefore there is cubism or vorticism in Stanley’s reconstruction of that part of the scene, it is less because he accepted the tenets of those styles than because the angularity was truthful to the place and could be brought into the picture to convey a directness of feeling which would counterpoint the more rounded imagery of the figure associations. But an even more striking counterpoint is evident in the upper part of the painting, the bridge section, which is mysteriously different in feeling from the relative calm of the foreground scene. In the bridge section a wind blows, rippling the water, flapping the flag, sending clouds scudding across the sky, streaming the hair of the male figure as he gazes towards Cookham, towards the female figure at the bridge end where the branches of the fir tree seem to extend her feelings to him in sympathy.
Looking back, Florence thought that the male figure on the bridge was the last detail Stanley painted before having to lay the painting aside; he had begun applying the paint from the top. She was evidently hinting that the figure represents Stanley’s foreboding at being torn from Cookham by the onrushing winds of war, and the entire top scene can suggest such an emotional dread. But, if so, Stanley was being neither narrative nor illustrative. He was surely doing what he did in The Centurion’s Servant, striving to transcend the distress of an unavoidable physical necessity by calling this time on the spiritual resources of his Cookham feelings.
That he felt he was succeeding is evident from a later reference to the painting. He began painting it, he said, in Ship Cottage, and at one point army recruits were undergoing field training in the vicinity: ‘seeing the manoeuvring of troops going on outside, I felt if only there was not this war, what could I not do?’
He conveyed the feeling in a paean to the Raverats: ‘I am in a great state of excitement, quite a treat to feel like it. I hear the voice of the acceptable year of the Lord, I want to draw everybody in Cookham, to begin at the top of the village and work downwards.’
What might have been accomplished had Stanley been able to carry out his enthusiasm! Swan Upping, like The Centurion’s Servant, is a hymn of joy to the miracle given him to redeem the apprehension of the unfamiliar through the peace of the known and loved. ‘There is’, he said in later life, ‘greatness in that painting.’
By the time Stanley was composing it, the intricate lines of trenches and barbed wire had been lengthened across Europe from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier. In the Balkans the tragedy of the Dardanelles was about to be played out and Rupert Brooke to die on his way there of a blood infection. On Germany’s eastern frontier, preparations were under way for those Teutonic hammer-blows which were virtually to knock Russia out of the war. At home, volunteers flocked to swell the new Kitchener armies under training. Stanley and Gilbert remained in Cookham, continued their painting and kept up their drill and ambulance training. Stanley read as enthusiastically as ever: ‘I am still reading Dante. I have only just finished Hell. I like reading anything like that very slowly. It is wonderful the part where Virgil embraces and carries Dante. …’
Handholding?
Alas for Stanley, into the creative exaltations of his Cookham feelings, the upheaval of the times kept breaking. He sensed his isolation from his brothers – ‘My brother Percy who entered the army as a common private is now a lance-sergeant. My brother Horace who is in Nigeria is guarding prisoners. …’ – and, even more forcefully, his isolation from village opinion:
In the barber’s yesterday a married man who had been in the South African war and was just going to the present talked a lot about how he had done his bit and was waiting for the young men to go, but they did not seem to. He waited for me to stand up … and looked me up and down. ‘Now, Master Spencer, you ought to be in the army, you know. Here am I, a married man with children, and I am going tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow!’ My answer was to stand and look at him like an idiot and a lout, and the fact that the barber had parted my hair made me feel more so. ‘Why haven’t you joined?’ he asked. I tried to become dignified but only became more foolish. ‘Well, at any rate,’ I said, ‘I hope you will believe me that there is some honour in a civilian and when he says he cannot, it is because he cannot’; and with that I strode out, feeling I had made a thorough mess of myself. … It is terrible to be a civilian. God says: ‘You must go, but I give you the power to obey or disobey this command.’ If you do not go, then you feel something has gone from you.
Moreover, as time passed and the wounded – mostly at this early stage of the war regulars, territorials or reservists – came home to convalesce, a further puzzle presented itself: ‘It is funny the difference between the wounded soldiers and the ones not yet gone to France. The ones just going look at you and say: “Be a man. We’re British. Will tha join Kitchener’s Army?” But the wounded are always quiet and never say a word about our not joining. …’
In May 1915 Stanley sent the Raverats a sympathetic note about Rupert Brooke. Inflation, virtually unknown within living memory, was beginning to be an unsettling phenomenon. Jack Hatch was dropping heavy hints that he would appreciate an increase in the weekly eighteen-pence rental Stanley paid for use of Wistaria Cottage. Should he and Gilbert go? Percy had gone. Horace was on his way home from Africa to join up. Sydney knew that he would be going, and was snatching for those moments of remembered joy that many imminently campaigning soldiers know:
As I came on through Weston [Weston-super-Mare] Woods towards the Old Pier the sun poured down upon the wet sands of the bay. The woods, the green grass and dark furze bushes with fringes of fire crept down as far to the shore as possible. The gulls were lazily crying to each other in the hazy distance and the whole of creation seemed to speak of peace. … I dawdled and picked flowers. I lived and breathed and exulted for a dreamy hour in that old land of peace long vanished for me. … With all the grim prospect of the present, how grateful I am to a God who gives respite to his creatures and makes the full enjoyment of such an afternoon still possible.
Back at Fernlea, each of the youngest brothers wished to protect the other, and their parents wanted to shield both. But, by May, Gilbert ‘has passed his St John’s Ambulance exam. He has got orders to go to Eastleigh.’
Eastleigh, near Southampton, was the clearing hospital for the Southern Command group of hospitals which took the brunt of the casualties arriving from France. Rapid expansion of the service demanded more medical orderlies. At the last moment Gilbert’s orders were changed. He was to proceed to Bristol and there enlist in the Home Hospital Service of the Royal Army Medical Corps for duty in a newly created hospital, the Beaufort War Hospital, on the outskirts of the city.
Back in Cookham the family eagerly awaited Gilbert’s news. Pa consoled himself with the thought that ‘the discipline will do him good’, for Gilbert was regarded as the wilder of the two youngest brothers. When his letters came, their message was disconcerting: ‘Gil says that they intend to kill him if they possibly can. He works from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. … the way he is living is unhealthy … the men are horrible … they have not inoculated him and yet there is enteric in the next ward. He wrote his letter to us in bed, he gets no rest. …’
Gilbert stressed that Stanley should not follow him, at least not to the Beaufort. The work would be too heavy, and he should aim for a convalescent home.
To no avail. Stanley too had now passed his St John’s examination – ‘which was a farce as only about three questions were asked and I don’t remember being asked or answering any of them’
– and was at last able to persuade his parents to let him volunteer. On 23 July he sent postcards to his friends. To the Raverats he wrote: ‘Am going to Bristol. Ma seems very well about my going away. Sydney now has a commission and is a 2nd Lieutenant in the Norfolks.’
Stanley put on his straw hat and Burberry raincoat-it threatened thunder – and, carrying a gladstone bag, made his way out of Cookham by a roundabout route along Sutton Road. He had slipped quietly from home to avoid emotional farewells, and taken an unusual direction to minimize lingering memories of the village. On the way the thunder-shower broke and his straw hat was ruined. When he reached Maidenhead Station, he was embarrassed to find that his father had cycled in to see him off and was the only fond parent there. The little party of volunteers presented their Civic Guard instructor with a stick with a horse’s head handle and then, as the train moved out, Pa compounded his son’s embarrassment by calling out to the orderly in charge of the party to take care of him as he was ‘valuable’.
How could they know that he was to become one of the century’s most celebrated artists? Who would tell the ‘rather superior but nice young man’ from the Maidenhead branch of W. H. Smith’s that the eager, talkative, wiry and boyish young man sitting opposite him was someone whose paintings were already attracting attention? To the others in the party he was just another recruit, good at drawing and something of an artist. But, like Stanley, they knew that as the train drubbed westwards they were being carried away from the familiar and, in Stanley’s case, the beloved. The agony of that day was to infuse one of Stanley’s most remarkable paintings, his Christ Carrying the Cross.
CHAPTER TEN (#ulink_5f398c8e-3d17-55a0-bf63-fd7598b37585)
Christ Carrying the Cross (#ulink_5f398c8e-3d17-55a0-bf63-fd7598b37585)
Painting with me was the crowning of an already elected king.
Stanley Spencer
ACADEMIC CATALOGUING stresses the chronological dating of an artist’s work. In Stanley’s case, the exact date of painting may bear little relation to the emotions of its genesis. He could, as in The Centurion’s Servant, be attracted (1913) to a theme for one reason, fail to find any suitable visual association, let the project gestate and then (October 1914) discover that his current emotional circumstance provided just the trigger he needed. In subsequent paintings the gap could extend over many years. On the other hand he could happily paint a picture, keep it unseen for years, then suddenly produce it out of current context. So too he could produce what seemed to be a new work but one which proved to be essentially a reworking of themes in earlier works. Stanley’s life and art cannot be compartmentalized. Both were a vast rolling pageant in which each new painting related to what had gone before and would illuminate those which were to follow.
Consider his emotions on that day of leaving Cookham for the war. There was natural apprehension about how he would fit into his new life. But the greater fear was that of the rupture of his Cookham spiritual life which he guessed must follow, and of the hurt to his father who valued him and his mother who, despite her brave front, was anxious for him. He was the last of their sons young enough to go: ‘In the months that followed the declaration of war, I [Florence] was called upon time and time again to stand by the younger sons as one by one, letting their little mother down as gently as possible, they took up their Cross and went.’
Christ Carrying the Cross, an evocation of the Fourth Station of the Cross, can be interpreted as a flowering of such feelings. It was not in fact painted until after the war, in 1920, but its detail is so apt to Stanley’s recorded description of the day he left home that a correspondence is inescapable. We can begin with the three figures in the centre of the bottom part of the picture to the right of the line of five men looking through railings. This trio, Stanley says, depicted himself and friends: ‘As youths we stood in a gate opposite our house [presumably the gate of Ovey’s Farm] and watched people go by on Sundays and in the evenings. The three men in the central part of the bottom of the picture form the onlooker part of the scene’
– so that by implication all the others are participants. Once more Stanley stands outside an emotional situation in order to watch a transcendence of his feelings into visualized allegory. He later likened the scene and its watching youths to a newspaper account of crowd reaction at the funeral of Queen Victoria. The journalist, anxious to convey the solemnity of the occasion, proclaimed that ‘women openly wept and strong men broke down in side streets’,
an overstatement which became a catchphrase, and one which Stanley would merrily quote on occasion.
‘To the left of the picture is a wide street coming towards the spectator, through the iron palings at the side of which other men peer down at the stooping figure of the Virgin.’
There being in reality no ‘wide street coming towards the spectator’ at the side of Fernlea – the house shown in the painting has been coalesced into Fernlea-Belmont – Stanley has emotionally eliminated all the buildings between it and Sutton Road, the ‘wide street’ down which he went on his way to Maidenhead to avoid lingering memories of Cookham.* (#litres_trial_promo) He has thus slid together in association the two notions of ‘home’ and ‘departure from home’. Fernlea-Belmont has taken the situation in the village of the Methodist Chapel. Ma, who felt the parting so keenly, has become metamorphosed into the Virgin Mary, not because Stanley saw her sentimentally in that guise, but because he is sympathetically capturing in the transfiguration the utter agony of her feelings. She is a distraught figure barred from her son by the ‘iron palings’ – Stanley has given them the semblance of military spears – ‘at the side of which other men peer down’. Examine these other men. Each is a manifestation of a white-faced, agonized Stanley. They are the five Spencer sons gone to war of Gilbert’s Crucifixion.
Stanley ‘looks down’ on Ma, for in the kinesis of emotion in the painting, Ma is now a receding, diminutive figure, appearing as she must have done when in boyhood he climbed the walnut tree in the back garden of Fernlea, the tree from which he could ‘survey the worlds not only in our own garden but the other gardens beyond’,
so giving him once again the feeling of distance and isolation which this sad occasion invokes. As an associative element, the feeling is brought into the picture as the ivy which covered the neighbouring cottage, The Nest, in which an elderly couple, the Sandells, now lived. Stanley’s grandmother had come to live at the cottage when old Julius died, his business being continued by a son of the previous marriage, Stanley’s ‘Uncle John’. Old Mr Sandell had been one of the firm’s employees and was allocated the cottage when the grandmother died.
A resolute Christ – with the profile of Pa – is escorted by four soldiers whose winged helmets reproduce those worn in early Renaissance paintings.* (#litres_trial_promo) Followers, or disciples, are with Christ. He too is about to round the corner into Sutton Road, to leave behind his lingering memories of Jerusalem. On the right, men shoulder the ladders of Bosch’s version of the event to mount Christ on the Cross, but for Stanley they are Fairchild’s builders’ men counterpointing the tension by carrying their ladders to some prosaic job at which they are due, the imagery of Cross and ladders interlinked. They go about their business indifferent to the young man in a raincoat and straw hat who carries his gladstone bag up the street; just another recruit off to the war like so many other young men of the time. Passers-by hold up their hands to shield their eyes from the low July sun as they watch.* (#litres_trial_promo) From the windows of Fernlea-Belmont a congregation of figures, echoes of Stanley’s family, of himself in childhood happiness, of his uncles, aunts, cousins, friends and family maids, look out to reinforce his memories of home. Old Mr and Mrs Sandell, whom the family loved and who loved them, are at the side window of The Nest. The lace curtains blown out by the draught from the open windows on that sultry summer day have been transformed into wings. The onlookers in their silent commiseration have taken on the protectiveness of angels.
When some years later the Tate Gallery showed the painting, they mistitled it Christ Bearing His Cross, which for Stanley implied ‘a sense of suffering which was not my intention. I particularly wished to convey the relationship between the carpenters behind him carrying the ladders and Christ in front carrying the cross, each doing their job of work and doing it just like workmen. … Christ was not doing a job or his job, but the job.’
The comment is again significant in interpreting not only this painting but much of Stanley’s visionary art. He is warning us away from seeing the painting in terms of pure emotion. However sad his feelings and of those around him on that day, the painting is not ultimately about those feelings, and he is not imputing them to Christ. Christ is simply doing the job he has to do, as Stanley, off to the war, is doing what he has to do. The job, the fact, the event exists in its dispassionate reality. Stanley’s struggle to use recalled emotion in the creation of visionary allegory meant that he had to detach the emotion from whatever event aroused it for him. Throughout his life, the struggle, both in behaviour and in art, will continue, making his actions seem detached at times. When, for example, in his letters or writings he reveals strong feelings about an event, they are seldom concerned specifically with the event itself or with the cause of the event, but with his own or others’ ability – or more usually inability – to appreciate the implications, the transcendence, he finds in it.
Such detachment however does not imply that he was anaesthetized to the emotions he was recalling. Twice in his comments on the painting Stanley refers to the three onlookers – himself in recollection – as ‘louts’, a strongly condemnatory epithet in his vocabulary.
The most likely reason is that the dilemma he is recollecting in the incident is so strong that he finds it necessary angrily to belittle it. He transfers the pain of his self-searching to painted representations of himself watching his more visionary self dredging from his memory-feeling the painful visual elements so necessary to composition. Like someone half in and half out of a bad dream he introduces a defensive technique to limit his pain. He turns himself into a doppel-Stanley. Indeed in this case the procedure armours him sufficiently to be able to tell a later friend with some good humour that he is aware that his depiction of Fernlea-Belmont ‘looks rather like a diseased potato’.
But there speaks the everyday Stanley. The visionary Stanley knows that the imagery, strange though he finds it, is exact to his purpose. It is, he says, ‘wonderful’.
In this painting, Christ Carrying the Cross, Christ the Son of God is preparing for the final agony which will redeem his creation. Stanley too is entering an agony with the same inevitability. He will endure whatever befalls him in the implicit trust that he too must find redemption in his own purpose and creativity. In the top right of the painting Stanley inserts, out of its true position, one of the cowls of Cookham’s malthouses. His grandfather is said to have had the building of them. The eye of God is upon him.
Stanley has given the painting flat tones and an unfamiliar, abstract quality, almost a floating sensation. Looking back, he doubted whether it conveyed the transcendence he sought: ‘The Cross, as far as its position in the picture is concerned is right enough. But I still feel it is a pity that I failed to arrive at the notion I had hoped.’
The Cross and its transfiguration of the material into the spiritual is the theme of the painting. When Stanley’s dealer subsequently asked him if he should catalogue it as Christ Carrying His Cross, Stanley again furiously corrected him. Its title, he said, was Christ Carrying the Cross.13 The Cross is universal. It represented for Stanley, as he assumed it represented for all, a necessary submission to the perpetual confusions and frustrations of existence from which it is our purpose to seek redemptive meaning. All Stanley’s powers of spiritual awareness would be needed if he was to find the true meaning of the agony of the next four years.
PART TWO (#ulink_9fe62700-be1a-5b92-a296-4d68ef2b91b7)
The Confusions of War (#ulink_9fe62700-be1a-5b92-a296-4d68ef2b91b7)
1915–1918
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#ulink_42aed1c0-57f2-5c24-bc59-42feb2a07fc6)
The Burghclere Chapel: The Beaufort panels (#ulink_42aed1c0-57f2-5c24-bc59-42feb2a07fc6)
‘An ideal place for a sick man. No wonder they so rapidly recover.’
King George V to Lieutenant-Colonel R. Blachford, Superintendent of the Beaufort War Hospital, September, 1915
IN LATER LIFE Stanley was to assert that after 1919 he resolutely ‘turned his back’ upon the Great War. In the sense that he did not use his experiences in the way that many of the war poets and artists used theirs, his assertion is valid enough. But to interpret his statement as discounting all war influence in his art is patently absurd. War memories can be traced in many later paintings, and without some knowledge on our part of their origin in his war service, the force of these paintings is diminished. For Stanley, as for countless young men of his generation, the shock of war was to prove ineradicable. Only time, or in Stanley’s case an attempted sublimation offered comfort, and the greatest of the redemptions he undertook was the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere painted between 1927 and 1932. Of the sixteen side-wall panels in that masterwork, ten re-create the Beaufort War Hospital.
The hospital, Stanley’s ‘roaring great hospital’ – it had 1600 beds – had been hastily converted three months earlier from the Bristol Lunatic Asylum. Most of the thousand or so inmates, men and women, were moved to rural asylums, about eighty being retained for domestic duties. Assigned to the patronage of the Duke of Beaufort, the ad hoc hospital was a typical 1860s institutional building comprising a central administrative and service block from which ward wings extended right and left. Across these, at intervals, other wards ran transversely, enclosing small courts. The right half, facing the building, had been the male half, the left the female. The male hospital staff had been ‘volunteered’ into the Royal Army Medical Corps with rank appropriate to their status; the superintendent and medical staff as officers, the administrative and supervisory staff as sergeants and corporals. The female staff, having no surgical nursing qualifications, became auxiliary nurses, augmented by Red Cross nursing volunteers and supervised by an intake of army nursing sisters from Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service who, as most old soldiers will confirm and as Stanley was to discover, were formidable authoritarians. There Stanley joined a number of young volunteer orderlies like himself. Because they were known only by surname, and Gilbert, having arrived first and being bigger in build, was mistaken as the elder, Stanley was invariably referred to as ‘young Spencer’.
The first panel on the left wall in the Burghclere Chapel, showing a Convoy of Wounded Soldiers Arriving at Beaufort Hospital Gates, hints at Stanley’s impressions on arrival. The wounded were shipped to Southampton from France or to Avonmouth from the Dardanelles and were entrained in ‘convoys’ to Temple Meads Station in Bristol. From there they were ferried to the hospital in a motley collection of vehicles or, as in the case of the ‘walking wounded’ in the painting, in requisitioned omnibuses. At this still excited state of the war, they were cheered through the streets of Bristol by passers-by. A convoy could consist of several hundred patients and the duty staff had to work frantically to register, examine, bath and install them with their kit – the Sorting and Moving Kitbags panel.
