Ken Pople - Stanley Spencer (Text Only)

If I were able to express how much this hospital life and atmosphere was cut off and out of the power of any other power than itself, I could make it clear what I felt at the moment of meeting. Compared with the crushed feeling the place gave me, the army and the war took upon themselves something of the feeling of freedom that one felt about civilian life in peacetime. The appearance of this young man was a godsend. He was terribly good and kind to me and appreciated the mental suffering I was going through.

During the first months of their friendship Desmond was fit, and they were able during Stanley’s time off-duty to explore Clifton together. Engrossed in conversation, they must have made an odd-looking pair, Desmond well over six feet tall, slim and languid, with reddish hair and the beginning of a beard, and Stanley a slight, dark-haired and brisk figure beside him. They contrasted too in personality, Desmond intellectually reserved, Stanley the eager terrier zigzagging after ideas which would set his imagination alight. There were visits to Desmond’s home, sometimes with Budden, to meet his mother and his aunts. There were visits to the bookshops of Bristol where fine secondhand bargains were to be found. There were ‘at homes’ at Desmond’s friends and with the Clifton hostesses of the day:

I go down to Mrs Daniell’s to hear some singing on my half-days. Mrs Daniell has a fine voice and so has her daughter. I felt quite ‘crackey’ with delight to hear some duets out of Figaro and they sang them well. They sing heaps of early French things. A young Slade student named Desmond Chute does the arranging for these visits and he plays the piano. I shall always feel grateful to Mrs Daniell. 17

Desmond for his part found Stanley an ideal pupil. For although he was four years younger than Stanley and lacked Stanley’s intuitive genius, his love of literature and music matched Stanley’s instincts.

When I [Stanley] used to visit him, he used to translate so much [of the Odyssey] and then read it in the original. Mind you, if he was to read about two pages he could go through to order, whether he had the book or not. Sometimes when we have been out for a walk – wonderful walks – I would begin to ask him about some particular novelist and he would go through the whole novel quoting pages and pages, quite unconsciously. 18

In the spring of 1916 Desmond suffered one of his attacks of nervous prostration, and their meetings had to take place in Chute’s bedroom:

When I think of the wonderful quiet evenings I have spent in Chute’s bedroom with the sunlight filling the room and Desmond surrounded by the wildflowers which he loved [in later life Chute became a knowledgeable gardener]. I used to sit looking out of the wide-open window and listen to him translate Homer and Odyssey, Iliad and Cyclops and the men escaping under the sheep, oh my goodness, it really did frighten me. 19

It is noteworthy that Stanley is affected as much by the drama of this forefather of all adventure stories as by its verse.

I have looked at different translations of Homer, but nothing to approach Desmond’s. … Our evenings were so satisfying. He read me Midsummer Night’s Dream one night and on another night he read me As You Like It. I think it is a wonderful play. The colour of Chute’s hair is a brilliant rust-gold. It glistened as the sunlight fell on it as he sat up in bed reading. … He reminded me in character of John the Baptist. Of course, having studied at Downside, Desmond has a natural grace that makes it satisfying to be with him. [Chute was a devout Roman Catholic]. I mean he has a mind so quickened by God that you can do nothing but live when you are with him.

It was Desmond’s patient coaxing which at last gave Stanley a glimpse of the spiritual meaning to be found in his military life. Desmond was reading aloud from St Augustine, and there Stanley found a quotation, a notion, which seemed to provide the key to the redemption he so desperately sought: ‘St Augustine says about God “fetching and carrying”. I am always thinking of those words. It makes me want to do pictures. The bas-reliefs in the Giotto Campanile give me the same feeling.’ The quotation is a paraphrase of a passage from St Augustine’s Confessions : ‘ever busy yet ever at rest, gathering yet never needing, bearing, filling, guarding, creating, nourishing, perfecting’. 20Other passages in St Augustine could have similarly inspired him:

Therefore He who is the true Mediator – inasmuch as by taking the form of a servant he became the Mediator between God and Man, the man Jesus Christ – in the form of God accepts sacrifice along with the Father, together with whom he is one God. Yet in the form of a servant he chose for himself to be sacrificed rather than to receive it. … In this way he is at the same time the priest, since it is he who offers the sacrifice, and he is the offering as well. 21

The dedication of Stanley’s whole existence, the sacrifice of himself to the spiritual sources of his art, destined his art to be a ‘mediator between God and Man’, a perpetual theme in his writings. If he had not enlisted but stayed at home painting, he would have continued to ‘accept’ or ‘receive’ the sacrifice of himself to his art. But by volunteering into the army, he had yielded the nobility of sacrifice demanded by his art to lesser commitments which had no relevance. He had reduced himself to the role and status of a ‘servant’. The function of a servant is to ‘fetch and carry’, to ‘do things to men’. By offering to deny his spiritual destiny as artist, he had deliberately ‘chosen to be sacrificed’. The fact that such sacrifice might mean not only artistic but physical death was inconsequential. Sacrifice was a sacrament and Stanley was both priest at this particular sacrifice and the sacrifice itself.

Some such metaphysical revelation – the theme of Christ Carrying the Cross – must have come to Stanley as an ‘emergence’, an exaltation. The meaning to his presence at the Beaufort, ungraspable till now, could at last be visualized. Its impact was joyous. He worshipped and even, in his fashion, loved Chute, who already understood it and had shown it to him. For, at last, with understanding came the urge to compose, to draw, to capture his comprehension:

The sunlight is blazing into the corridor just near the Sergeant-Major’s office and I say inwardly, ‘Oh, how I could paint this feeling I have in me if only there were no war – the feeling of that corridor, of the blazing light, and the Sergeant-Major and his dog – anything, so long as it gave me the feeling the corridor and the circumstance gave me!’ If I was Deborah, the lunatic who doesn’t know there is a war, I could do it. His sullen face and shifty eyes – I envied him the agony of being cut off completely from my soul. I thought in agony how marvellously I could paint this moment in this corridor now. And if at any time this war ends, I will paint it now , that is with all the conviction I feel now; but it can only be done if I feel assured that I am not suddenly going to be knocked off my perch. No! Not quite like that, because that can easily happen. No! Not that! But it was a belief in peace as being the essential need for creative work, not a peace that is merely the accidental lapse between wars, but a peace that, whether war is on or not, is the imperturbable and right state of the human soul; and that is only to be found in the peace of Christ. 22

The crucial sentence in the passage must be the curious, ‘I envied him the agony of being cut off completely from my soul.’ It seems to predicate a notion that in our instinct to find a place in which we cannot be ‘knocked off our perch’ – a state of being ‘home’, at ‘peace’ – we seek those miraculous moments which lift us beyond the physical where we are isolated into our separate existence into a spiritual world in which we are not only at one with each other but with the form and meaning of creation itself. Our lives are Odysseys to reach those joyous states. Only in achieving them can Stanley’s desire to paint have meaning. Deborah, however mysteriously, was permanently in such a world, and even if his state was not one Stanley sought for himself, he felt it ‘agony’ that he could offer only sympathy in comprehension, not the empathy of truly spiritual identification.