Ken Pople - Stanley Spencer (Text Only)

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd 1991

This edition published in paperback 1996

Copyright © Kenneth Pople 1991

Kenneth Pople asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780002556644

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780008193287

Version: 2016-06-07

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Preamble

Part One: The Early Cookham Years 1891–1915

1 The Coming of the Wise Men

2 The Fairy on the Waterlily Leaf

3 John Donne Arriving in Heaven

4 Apple Gatherers

5 The Nativity

6 Self-Portrait, 1914

7 The Centurion’s Servant

8 Cookham, 1914

9 Swan Upping

10 Christ Carrying the Cross

Part Two: The Confusions of War 1915–1918

11 The Burghclere Chapel: The Beaufort panels

12 The Burghclere Chapel: Tweseldown

13 The Burghclere Chapel: The left-wall frieze

14 The Burghclere Chapel: The right-wall frieze

15 The Burghclere Chapel: The 1917 summer panels

16 The Burghclere Chapel: The infantry panels

17 The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon

Part Three: The Years of Recovery 1919–1924

18 Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem

19 Travoys Arriving with Wounded Soldiers at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia

20 The Last Supper

21 The Crucifixion, 1921

22 The Betrayal, 1923

Part Four: The Great Resurrections 1924–1931

23 The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard

24 Burghclere: The Resurrection of Soldiers

Part Five: Return to Cookham 1932–1936

25 The Church of Me

26 Portrait of Patricia Preece

27 The Dustman, or The Lovers

28 Love on the Moor

29 St Francis and the Birds

30 By the River

31 Love Among the Nations

32 Bridesmaids at Cana

Part Six: The Marital Disasters 1936–1939

33 Self-Portrait with Patricia Preece

34 Hilda, Unity and Dolls

35 A Village in Heaven

36 Adoration of Old Men

37 The Beatitudes of Love

38 Christ in the Wilderness

Part Seven: Resurgence 1940–19

39 Village Life, Gloucestershire

40 Shipbuilding on the Clyde: Burners

41 The Scrapbook Drawings

42 The Port Glasgow Resurrections: Reunion

43 The Resurrection with the Raising of Jairus’ Daughter

44 Christ Delivered to the People

Part Eight: The Reclaiming of Hilda 1951–1959

45 The Marriage at Cana: Bride and Bridegroom

46 The Crucifixion

47 Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta

48 Envoi

Footnotes

Sources and Acknowledgements

Notes and References

Index

About the Publisher

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be

the most spiritual poems,

And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,

For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul

and of immortality. …

Walt Whitman: Starting from Paumanock

Preamble

I often think I would enjoy writing more if it were not dependent on thoughts logically following each other. But I think this limits the capacity of thought and cuts it off from something which in its undisturbed condition it can deal with and perform.

Stanley Spencer 1

IN 1938, some of Spencer’s friends and associates urged him to assemble his thoughts into an autobiography. They included his dealer Dudley Tooth, the newly appointed director of the Tate Gallery John Rothenstein, and the publisher Victor Gollancz, whose wife had been, as Ruth Lowy, one of Spencer’s fellow-students at the Slade and an early patron.

Their intention was to help him. His personal life was in shreds, his finances in disarray, his time largely devoted to saleable but ‘pot-boiling’ landscapes, his hallowed visionary work misunderstood and largely rejected. A judicious autobiography in which he could explain his ideas and motives might, it was felt, restore his prestige.

Spencer’s first reaction was one of caution. If, he argued, the public already found much of his visionary work ‘funny’, would they not find his explanations more so? Then suddenly he became enthusiastic. He would indeed write an autobiography. But it would not be assembled in the normal chronological arrangement. It would be a leisurely ‘stroll’ through his life, with pauses, diversions and retraces as the mood took him, a putting down on paper of the events, thoughts and feelings of his entire life to date. Nothing would be omitted. But neither would anything be stressed. The reader, making the journey with him, would be free to find the clues to his life, thinking and art, as Spencer himself had, often in strange and unexpected places.

The promoters were aghast. Some editing, they urged, must be accepted: ‘You are being offered a chance that you would be absolutely crazy to turn down,’ 2fumed Dudley Tooth. Spencer remained unmoved: ‘I would rather a book on myself and my work were a confused heap and mass of matter from which much could be gathered than risk something of myself being left out in the interests of conciseness.’ 3The venture collapsed.

Spencer, despite the travail of his circumstances, was blithely unrepentant. The fact was that, seized by the idea, he had already started on the project in private and was to continue it for the rest of his days. There was no discernible pattern to his writings. He would compose extensive essays in thick notebooks, but equally make random jottings in scrapbooks, on drawings, on scraps of letters, on old envelopes, on anything to hand. He seldom kept letters but would draft replies, often unposted because having sorted out his thoughts in them they became more valuable to him in his own possession than in that of the intended recipient. Others were unsent because on reflection he felt their sentiments were too confessional or, in other moods, too accusatory. By the end of his life the writings totalled millions of words, heaped into several trunks into which he would dip to reread, reannotate, re-paginate, rearrange. ‘You can burn those,’ he told his brother Percy when he knew his time was measured. But by his death, in December of 1959, the matter had passed from Percy’s hands, and in any case Percy did not want the responsibility.

To read them now is a disturbing experience, for they are expressed with an intensity he would normally have denied the public gaze. They have been sieved by scholars for references to his paintings, but, interesting though these are, they offer little in the way of immediate illumination. Spencer knew this. They are written in a code, a language of his own which appears to be the language we also use, but is not. The language was born not of secrecy but from the impossibility all artists face, in whatever medium, of finding in the words or images or symbols they are given to use that universality their imagination perceives. In them his thoughts flow like a stream of consciousness, turning and twisting, so that the reader is soon lost in a tangle of developments and, if he or she can summon the will, must go back again and again to re-chart their course over even a few of the many thousands of pages. The surprise is that to each development there is invariably a beginning and an end; however many diversions Spencer took on the way, he usually knew both his direction and his destination. His imagery, bizarre and esoteric though it often seems, captures both the exuberance of his associations and the precision with which he externalized it in his art.