Art, Psychoanalysis, and Adrian Stokes : A Biography 9781782414056, 9781782202837
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ART, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AND ADRIAN STOKES
ART, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AND ADRIAN STOKES A Biography
Janet Sayers
First published in 2015 by Karnac Books Ltd 118 Finchley Road London NW3 5HT Copyright © 2015 by Janet Sayers The right of Janet Sayers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13: 978-1-78220-283-7 Typeset by V Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain www.karnacbooks.com
In memory of Lesley-Anne Sayers 1958–2010 who, like Adrian Stokes, was a specialist in the modern art of the Ballets Russes
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
xi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
xvii
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
xxi
ABBREVIATIONS
xxiii
PREFACE
xxv PART I: CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
CHAPTER ONE Early years
3
CHAPTER TWO Oxford
13
CHAPTER THREE East and west
19 vii
viii
CONTENTS
CHAPTER FOUR Sitwell protégé
27
CHAPTER FIVE Sigismondo Malatesta and Ezra Pound
41
PART II: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FAME CHAPTER SIX Treatment
63
CHAPTER SEVEN Stone alive
75
CHAPTER EIGHT Carving
85
CHAPTER NINE Ballets Russes
97
CHAPTER TEN Colour and form
107
CHAPTER ELEVEN Euston Road
117
PART III: OUTER AND INNER LIFE CHAPTER TWELVE Transforming St Ives
127
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Inside out
145
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Love and divorce
159
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Outside in
175
CONTENTS
ix
PART IV: PSYCHOANALYTIC AESTHETICS CHAPTER SIXTEEN Smooth and rough
185
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Psychoanalysing Michelangelo
195
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Klein’s portrait
215
CHAPTER NINETEEN Hampstead again
227
CHAPTER TWENTY Chaos contained
237
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Reflections on the nude
251
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO More about Ariadne
259
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Renewed fame
265
NOTES
277
INDEX
303
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1
Ethel Stokes, 1898 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
4
2
Ethel and Durham in Egypt, c.1907 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
5
Geoffrey, Philip, Durham, and Adrian, c.1913 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
8
4
Geoffrey and Philip, c.1916 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
9
5
Oxford doodle, c.1920 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
14
6
Lower Stonehams, Pangbourne © Estate of Adrian Stokes
15
7
Eddy Sackville-West, c.1922, M. De-la-Noy (1988) Eddy. London: Bodley Head
16
Magdalen tennis team, 1923, Adrian (centre) © Estate of Adrian Stokes
17
Taj Mahal, Agra, Wikimedia Commons
21
Luini, Christ with Elders in the Temple, c.1515–1530, Wikimedia Commons
25
3
8 9 10 11
Osbert, Edith, and Sacheverell Sitwell, Wikimedia Commons xi
28
xii 12
L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S
Casa dei tre Occhi, Venice, photographed by Sean Sayers
31
13
Hotel Cappuccini, Amalfi, photographed by Sean Sayers
33
14
Rehearsing Les Noces © V&A Images
34
15
Passport photo, 1926 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
36
16
Giorgione, Madonna, Child, and Two Saints, c.1503–1504, Wikimedia Commons
38
Book cover, Sunrise in the West, photographed by Philip Stokes
42
Elephantine decoration in the Tempio, Wikimedia Commons
44
19
Olga Rudge © Mary de Rachewiltz
46
20
Ezra Pound playing tennis © Mary de Rachewiltz
47
21
Villa Giuditta renamed Villa Bice, photographed by Paul Tucker
49
22
Sigismondo’s Tempio in Rimini, Wikimedia Commons
52
23
Tempio low reliefs, Diana and Saturn, c.1456, Wikimedia Commons
54
An “eye” of the Casa dei tre Occhi, photographed by Sean Sayers
56
Piero della Francesca, The Flagellation, 1460, Wikimedia Commons
57
26
Giorgione, The Tempest, c.1508, Wikimedia Commons
58
27
With Richard at Lower Stonehams © Estate of Adrian Stokes
65
Melanie and Hans Klein, Brittany, summer 1930 © Melanie Klein Trust
67
29
Dartington Hall, Devon, Wikimedia Commons
72
30
Verrochio, Lavabo, c.1465, Wikimedia Commons
76
31
Donatello, Cantoria, c.1433, Wikimedia Commons
78
32
Luciano-designed Urbino courtyard built in 1467–1472, Wikimedia Commons
80
17 18
24 25
28
L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S
xiii
Book cover, The Quattro Cento, photographed by Philip Stokes
82
Sailing on the Adriatic, c.August 1932, M. Gardiner (1982) Barbara Hepworth: A Memoir. Edinburgh: Salamander Press, p. 22
86
Donatello, Dead Christ Tended by Angels, c.1438–1443 © V&A Images
88
Agostino, Virgin and Child with Five Angels, c.1450–1460 © V&A Images
90
Book cover, Stones of Rimini, photographed by Philip Stokes
92
Hepworth, Figure (Mother and Child), 1933 © Bowness, Hepworth Estate, photo by Paul Laib © The de Laszlo Collection of Paul Laib Negatives, Witt Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
95
9 Linden Gardens, Notting Hill, photographed by Janet Sayers
98
40
Massine rehearsing © Estate of Adrian Stokes
101
41
Isokon, Lawn Road, Hampstead, Wikimedia Commons
102
42
Kay and Curly Kent with Bernie Forrester, c.1935 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
108
Stokes, View from the Porthminster Hotel, 1936 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
109
With Deborah, Jessica, Sydney, and Unity Mitford, Athens, April 1936 © Estate of Deborah Cavendish
110
45
Stokes, West Penwith Moor, 1937 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
113
46
Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1558, Wikimedia Commons
114
47
Stokes in Provence © Estate of Adrian Stokes
118
48
Stokes, Landscape, Cornwall, 1937 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
120
With Graham Bell, May Day 1938, Adrian Stokes: Exhibition Catalogue. London: Arts Council, 1982, p. 54
122
33 34
35 36 37 38
39
43 44
49
xiv 50
L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S
Little Park Owles with Kennedy-designed wing on the right © Estate of Adrian Stokes
128
51
Margaret’s sketch © Estate of Margaret Mellis
129
52
News Chronicle photo of Margaret, photograph provided by Telfer Stokes
132
Margaret’s first collage, July 1940 © Estate of Margaret Mellis
136
54
Ann with Telfer © Estate of Adrian Stokes
137
55
Croquet at Little Park Owles © Estate of Adrian Stokes
139
With Telfer, Margaret, Freeman, and William, c.1942 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
140
57
Wallis’s grave, photographed by Janet Sayers
142
58
Santa Maria dei Miracoli, A. Stokes (1945) Venice. London: Faber & Faber
147
Sottoportico San Cristoforo, A. Stokes (1945) Venice. London: Faber & Faber
149
60
Book cover, Venice, photographed by Philip Stokes
150
61
January 1946 issue of Polemic, photograph provided by Ian Angus
154
Richard’s drawing, M. Klein (1975) Love, Guilt and Reparation, London: Hogarth, 1975, p. 389
155
63
Book cover, Cézanne, photographed by Philip Stokes
156
64
Stokes, Portrait of Margaret, c.1939 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
160
Start of “Dear Andrew” letter, 1944 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
162
66
Ann as “Andrew” © Estate of Adrian Stokes
163
67
Ann as Stokes’s “Annoak” © Estate of Ann Stokes
171
68
Stokes, Sasso Boretto, c.1947 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
172
Stokes painting in Ascona © Estate of Adrian Stokes
174
53
56
59
62
65
69
L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S
xv
Piero, Arezzo Annunciation, 1452–1466, Wikimedia Commons
176
Piero, Discovery and Proof of the True Cross, c.1460, Wikimedia Commons
178
Duff with Philip in Ascona, 1949 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
181
73
Bramante, Tempietto, 1502, Wikimedia Commons
187
74
Heathgate, Bucklebury, photograph provided by Edward Holloway
189
Stokes, San Materno, Ascona, 1949 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
190
76
View from Hurtwood © Estate of Adrian Stokes
193
77
With Ariadne, Philip, and Ann’s aunt and grandmother, May 1952 © Estate of Ann Stokes
194
78
Michelangelo, Moses, c.1513–1515, Wikimedia Commons
196
79
Michelangelo, Redeemer, 1536–1541, Wikimedia Commons
203
80
Michelangelo, David, 1501–1504, Wikimedia Commons
204
81
Michelangelo, Duomo Pietà, c.1547–1553, Wikimedia Commons
206
Michelangelo, The Rebellious Slave, 1513, Wikimedia Commons
207
83
Book cover, Michelangelo, photographed by Philip Stokes
209
84
Michelangelo, Night and Dawn, 1526–1531, Wikimedia Commons
210
Klein and others, Kettner’s restaurant in Soho, c.March 1952 © Melanie Klein Trust
216
86
Stokes, Landscape, c.1954 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
222
87
Stokes with Ariadne © Estate of Adrian Stokes
223
88
Coldstream, Unfinished Portrait of Melanie Klein © Estate of William Coldstream/Bridgeman Images
224
89
Philip and Ariadne, c.1955 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
229
90
Church Row, Hampstead, photographed by Philip Stokes
231
70 71 72
75
82
85
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L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S
91
Stokes, Olive Trees, 1958 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
234
92
St Trinit, Vaucluse © Estate of Adrian Stokes
239
93
Barnett Newman with Telfer in Manhattan © Telfer Stokes
242
94
Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed, 1844, Wikimedia Commons
243
95
Peter Lanyon with his children at Little Park Owles, 1963, photograph provided by Martin Lanyon
245
96
Gasometer at the Oval, Wikimedia Commons
246
97
Soutine, Chemin de la fontaine des tins à Céret, 1920, Wikimedia Commons
248
98
“Mosaic” of still life paintings © Estate of Adrian Stokes
252
99
Cézanne, Les grandes baigneuses, c.1900–1906, Wikimedia Commons
254
100
Michelangelo, Giorno, 1526–1531, Wikimedia Commons
256
101
Ariadne at Church Row © Estate of Adrian Stokes
260
102
Stokes in Crete, c.June 1970 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
262
103
With Ann in Cornwall, c.May 1972 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
263
Book cover, The Image in Form, photographed by Philip Stokes
268
Visit of Andrew and Sheila Forge, 7 December 1972 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
272
Stokes, Last Eleven (No. 3), 1972 © Estate of Adrian Stokes
274
104 105 106
ACKNOWL EDGEMENTS
Responsibility for all faults and other problems with this book rest entirely with me, not with the many people who have very kindly helped me with it. Particularly helpful have been Paul Tucker’s insights, transcription of Stokes’s not always easy to read handwriting, and Paul’s pursuit and encouraging my pursuit of details I might otherwise have overlooked and ignored. I am also very grateful to Ann Stokes, to Stokes’s sons, Philip and Telfer, and to Ann’s husband, Ian Angus, for all their unstinting help and hospitality to me over the many years I have spent writing this book, during which time my husband, Sean Sayers, has kindly read and commented on several of its many versions. My thanks also to the following who have read and discussed with me parts or all of the book, namely, Helen Douglas, Steph Ebdon, Mary Evans, Thomas Evans, Jill Halpin, Judith Hattaway, Lyn Innes, Stephen Kite, Stephen Laird, John Rodden, Telfer Stokes, Shirley Toulson, and Clare Ungerson. I first got to know about art and psychoanalysis at school in Devon at Dartington (where Stokes often spent time in the 1930s). This has resulted in further help with this book from people connected with Dartington, specifically Martin Bernal, Anne Buchanan Crosby, Alasdhair Campbell, Judith Conway, Anwyl Cooper-Willis, Elaine xvii
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Fitch, Helga Forrester, Stephen Forrester, Michael Foss, Rachel Kidd, Annette Morreau, Liz Piper, and Leina Shiffrin. In addition to all of the above my thanks, again in alphabetical order, to Peter Agulnik, Janet Axten, Massimo Bacigalupo, Claire Baines, Stephen Bann, Ann Olivier Bell, Hazel Bentall, Vicki Berger, Francesca Bion, Louise Braddock, Diana Brimblecombe, David Cairns, Lesley Caldwell, David Carrier, Sarah Carter, Phil Cohen, Deborah Devonshire (née Mitford), Andrew Duncan, Yvette Gibson, Martin Golding, Mel Gooding, Wendy Guthrie (née Dick), Carol Holland, Edward Holloway, Jules Hussey, Jane Lawrence Jones, Betty Joseph, Krishan Kumar, Martin Lanyon, Ian McKenzie, Patrick and Charlotte Mellis, Jonathan Miller, Rod Tweedy (and his colleagues at Karnac Books), Janet Montefiore, Noël Moncur, Jan Moore (at the Porthminster Hotel, St Ives), Thomas Morgan, Larraine Nicholas, Belinda Parsons, Ian Patterson, David Plante, Richard Read, Rosalind Richards, John Richardson, Markie Robson-Scott, Albert Rowe, Robert Sackville-West, Linda Sandino, Lesley-Anne Sayers, David Simpson, Hanna Segal, Julia Segal, Arin Sharif-Nassab, Oliver Soskice, Adrian Taylor, Richard and Mary Day Wollheim, and Sally Wraight (née Wedeles). I am also grateful to the following libraries, collections, and archives: Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript Library, Yale; Berg Collection, New York Public Library; Berkshire Record Office, Reading; Bodleian Library, Oxford; British Library, London; Canterbury public library, Canterbury, Kent; City of Westminster Archives Centre; Covent Garden, London; Crafts Study Centre, Farnham; Dartington Hall Trust Archive and Collection; Devon Record Office; Five Colleges Libraries, Massachusetts; Hyman Kreitman Research Centre, Tate Britain; The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies, Canterbury, Kent; King Alfred’s School, Hampstead; Marlborough Gallery, London; McPherson Library, University of Victoria, Canada; National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; National Gallery Archive, London; National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; National Library Sound Collection, London; National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; St Ives public library and archive; Rugby School, Warwickshire; St Ives Archive; St Paul’s School, Hammersmith; Templeman Library, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent; Trinity College, Oxford; University College London archive; and the Wellcome Collection in London. My thanks too for permission from Mary de Rachewiltz to include photos of, and quote from the letters of her parents, Ezra Pound and
AC K N O W L E D G E M E N T S
xix
Olga Rudge; from Edward Mendelson to quote from the letters of W. H. Auden; from Deborah Devonshire to include a photo of herself, Jessica, Sydney, and Unity Mitford; from Leonie Gombrich for permission to quote from the letters of Ernst Gombrich; from Giles de la Mare and Emma Cheshire, on behalf of Faber & Faber, to quote from the letters of Richard de la Mare; from Martin Lanyon to quote from the letters of his father, Peter Lanyon; from Telfer Stokes and Ian Angus to quote from previously unpublished writings by Adrian Stokes; from Telfer Stokes to quote from previously unpublished writings by Margaret Mellis and her family; and from Philip Stokes to quote from previously unpublished writings by Ann Stokes. My apologies if I have made any omissions in making every effort to trace all relevant copyright holders in completing this book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Janet Sayers (née Toulson) is emeritus professor of psychoanalytic psychology at the University of Kent in Canterbury where she also works as a clinical psychologist for the NHS. Her previous books include Mothering Psychoanalysis (Penguin), Freudian Tales (Vintage), Kleinians (Polity), and Freud’s Art (Routledge).
xxi
ABBREVIATIONS
Ann AC AS Beinecke Berg BH BN CW1-3 DM DS EAS EG EMM ERG ERS EP ESW FD
Ann Mellis Anne Crosby (née Buchanan) Adrian Stokes Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale Berg collection of English and American literature, New York Public Library, New York Barbara Hepworth Ben Nicholson L. Gowing (ed.) (1978). The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, Volumes I–III. London: Thames & Hudson David Mellis David Sylvester Estate of Adrian Stokes, 20 Church Row Ernst Gombrich Estate of Margaret Mellis Estate of Rolf Gardiner Estate of Robson-Scott Ezra Pound Edward Sackville-West Francis Davison xxiii
xxiv GB GL GR HW IJPA JM JR JS KC LG MG MK NLS MM NLSC OR OS PH PL PS RB RG RM RS SB SE SN SS TGA TLS TS TSA UCL WC WT
A B B R E V I AT I O N S
Graham Bell A. Stokes. (1973). A Game that Must be Lost. Cheadle Hulme: Carcanet George Rylands John Harvard-Watts International Journal of Psycho-Analysis Joseph Macleod Joan Riviere Janet Sayers Kenneth Clark Lawrence Gowing Margaret Gardiner Melanie Klein National Library of Scotland Margaret Mellis National Library Sound Collection, British Library Olga Rudge Osbert Sitwell Philip Hendy Peter Lanyon Philip Stokes Robert Byron Rolf Gardiner Richard de la Mare Robson-Scott Sven Berlin Standard edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth, 1974 Sidney Nolan Stephen Spender Tate Gallery Archive Times Literary Supplement Telfer Stokes Telfer Stokes Archive University College London William Coldstream William Townsend
PREFACE
Adrian Stokes is well known by many art historians and critics for his radical “carving” aesthetic emphasising the inspiration of the best architecture, sculpture, painting, and avant-garde creations of the Ballets Russes by the physical materials from which they are made. Through bringing his close friends—Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson and, with them, Naum Gabo—to St Ives in Cornwall in 1939 he also became the main catalyst of the town’s transformation into an internationallyacclaimed centre of modern art. Less well known is Stokes’s innovative use of the visual arts together with his experience of many years of psychoanalytic treatment by Melanie Klein as means of innovatively highlighting ways the outer world of the senses gives form to the inner world of fantasy and imagination. Nor are many aware of the moving story of his falling in love again in his mid-forties and the way this contributed to his pioneering psychoanalytic understanding of our experience of art, of everyday objects, and of our surroundings more generally. How did all this come about? What were its turbulent precursors during Stokes’s early love affairs while becoming a protégé of the
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P R E FA C E
writer, Osbert Sitwell, and then of the poet, Ezra Pound? Why, after this, did Stokes become a psychoanalytic patient of Melanie Klein in his late twenties? What did her treatment of Stokes reveal about his psychology? And how did he use this in writing about art? In answering these questions I will begin with his early years before, during, and immediately following the First World War.
PART I CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
CHAPTER ONE
Early years
“
G
oing down the hill one morning towards Lancaster Gate, my eldest brother remarked on an orange cloud in a dark sky: a thundercloud, he said. And sure enough, that afternoon there was a thunderstorm,” recalled Adrian Stokes at the time of doodlebug raids on England in the Second World War. “At nearby Stanhope Gate, an old lady sold coloured balloons. It was as if the whole lot had burst,” he continued in recalling himself aged six and his eldest brother, Philip, before the First World War.1 Philip, it seems, had been named after his and Adrian’s stockbroker grandfather, Philip Leon, who had died when his daughter, Philip’s and Adrian’s mother, Ethel, was six. Through her mother she was related to the once famous financier, banker, philanthropist, and Sheriff of London, Sir Moses Montefiore. Adrian was “pleased about the Montefiore” connection “but not about being Jewish”.2 Perhaps he was more pleased that his father, Durham, came from a non-Jewish Irish family. Born just over a year before Ethel on 8 April 1871, Durham also lost his father early, not through his father dying but through his father deserting Durham, his older sister, and their mother. It was this, apparently, which caused Durham to leave school, St Paul’s in Hammersmith, where he had 3
4
A R T, P S Y C H OA N A LY S I S , A N D A D R I A N S TO K E S
proved an able mathematician, at the age of sixteen, and obtain paid work in a solicitor’s office where, he bragged, he received a pay rise through getting a firm across the road to offer him a higher salary. By the time he married Ethel on 15 August 1896 Durham was working (like his father, Edwin) as a stockbroker in the City. His and Ethel’s first child, Philip, was born on 15 August 1897. The same year Durham was sufficiently wealthy to buy a grand terrace house, 18 Radnor Place, which, with its classical brick and stucco façade, was similar to handsome-looking houses in nearby Sussex Gardens.3
Ethel Stokes, 1898 It was at 18 Radnor Place that Adrian’s brother, Geoffrey, was born on 19 April 1900, and that Adrian himself was born on 27 October 1902. Ethel was disappointed that he was yet another boy. She had wanted a daughter. She was nevertheless very fond of Adrian and even more fond, it seems, of herself; she had been a great beauty in her youth, and was remembered by Adrian as vain, “frigid”, and obsessed with “order and cleanliness”.4 He also recalled her dislike of Durham. Not without reason. Durham was evidently a tyrant at home. This included his saving money, despite being a remarkably successful stockbroker, by starving
E A R LY Y E A R S
5
Ethel of adequate heat and light, and by forbidding her to make outgoing telephone calls. He was also ridiculously penny-pinching with himself. Examples included his only allowing himself “a three penny cigar after breakfast, a six penny one after luncheon, and a shilling one after dinner”. And he dominated the family with his absurd ruling that dinner must be at “8.14” and lunch at “1.11”.5 Ethel remembered Adrian, as a very young child, challenging Durham with repeated “Why?” questions at the dinner table. At this, Durham, who, said Ethel, “was very unkind indeed”, reprimanded Adrian, whereupon Adrian got under the table and continued his “Why?” questions from there.6 Adrian’s older brother, Geoffrey, also retaliated against Durham, in his case by urinating in Durham’s bath out of hatred of him. Unlike Geoffrey, it seems, Adrian courted Durham and succeeded, as a toddler, in transforming him from being “monosyllabic and very undemonstrative” into becoming “more affectionate”.7 Perhaps he missed Durham when he was away from home, including campaigning (unsuccessfully) as Liberal Party parliamentary candidate for Stepney in London in January 1906, and taking Ethel on exotic foreign holidays to Ceylon, Egypt, and Tunisia.
Ethel and Durham in Egypt, c.1907
6
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Durham and Ethel consigned the care of their sons to a succession of nursemaids and governesses. At the age of three Adrian began sharing Philip’s and Geoffrey’s governess, Miss Drew, who ruled that if the boys’ “shoelaces came undone while out for a walk, there would be no jam for tea: if they came undone again, no cake as well”. Miss Drew particularly meted out this punishment to Geoffrey, for whom it seemed to be primarily designed. Adrian did not remember it happening to him albeit he continued into adulthood to be “entirely bad at tying laces or anything else”.8 By the time he was six Geoffrey, as well as Philip, had gone to boarding school. Geoffrey was sent to a naval cadet school, probably Osborne College on the Isle of Wight. And Philip, who initially attended a day school, King Alfred’s in Hampstead, was sent to boarding school preparatory to going to public school, Rugby. In their absence Miss Drew was dismissed after someone saw her “maltreating” Adrian in the park. His next “caretaker”, Miss Harley, used to sing him hymns. “She was for me the Salvation Army of morbid streets and morbid walks,” he recalled in also recalling himself, perhaps on account of his mixture of bullying and taking care of his less able brother, Geoffrey, as akin to the brothermurdering Cain in the Bible asking “Am I my brother’s keeper?” to which Adrian added: “That was a wicked, frightened joke of Cain’s.”9 Happier memories followed. He remembered himself, aged seven, admiring twelve-year-old Philip’s love of geology on a seaside holiday at Hythe. “Philip my eldest brother still asleep … Unravels stones with hammer, doesn’t chatter,” Adrian related from that time.10 He also remembered Miss Harley being replaced as his governess by “a Swiss, French speaking … fairly normal girl”, Mathilde. She was still with the family it seems when Durham, who had been seriously ill, was sufficiently recovered to watch through binoculars from a balcony at 18 Radnor Place the funeral procession for Edward VII pass along the nearby Bayswater Road. “What stays in the mind were the long thin festive poles swathed in scarlet cloth, tipped with golden spear-heads that lined both sides of [the] Bayswater road. Even railings were tipped with gilt,” Adrian recalled from the coronation of George V the following June
E A R LY Y E A R S
7
1911. “The coronation brought soldiers to the park. Thousands were encamped there,” he also remembered. “Both Mathilde and I worshipped the soldiers,” he wrote. For a time, I clung to military pomp and discipline as the “solution” of the park and its environs. I had tried to order the universe in earlier years by the array of my lead soldiers. I was inconsolable if one fell. And so, the face of the park came in part to be symbolized by a hybrid image of soldiers in scarlet jackets and Marble Arch orators standing on soap-boxes. At this time, too, Mathilde and I sought the press of the crowd, in Rotten Row on a Sunday morning or around the bandstand of a summer evening. I have a pictorial, almost Renoir-like image—the only one—of those times based, I have little doubt, on much later experiences. For it is night, a dark, still night with rain in the air. The speakers at Marble Arch are lit with their torches. The outer fringe of whispering couples are lit by the public lamps. The crowd where it is dense is dark. Hats are in outline, so too railings …11
Then, like his older brothers before him, Adrian, having started day school when he was seven, was sent away to prep school, Heddon Court in Cockfosters on the outskirts of London. “Under the blare of King’s Cross [station] almost every boy is led by a parent far along the platform to be sick, sick from frightened anticipation, in front of the train that will throng him on an iron journey,” he recalled from the journey to Heddon Court. London drags out along the route; against the will it begins to thin: less and less people live here as if a curse lay on the glowering land. In the semi-country at Barnet we stamp our way over a bridge that clatters; we take brake for the school. Masters are with us, a matron awaits. There will be a fire-practice tomorrow …12
He hated Heddon Court. He also hated Ethel for reneging on her promise to take him away if he disliked it.
8
A R T, P S Y C H OA N A LY S I S , A N D A D R I A N S TO K E S
Geoffrey, Philip, Durham, and Adrian, c.1913 He nevertheless did very well at Heddon Court. Encouraged perhaps by Philip’s interest in philosophy, he became precociously interested, aged eleven or twelve, in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Encouraged also by playing tennis with Philip it seemed possible that he might become a schoolboy champion. But this was thwarted by lack of tennis at Rugby where he first became a pupil in May 1916. That month, Geoffrey, who had been called up a few months earlier for naval service in the First World War, served in a crow’s nest at the top of a ship’s mast during the Battle of Jutland. Several fires broke out on board his ship, HMS Malaya. There were heavy crew casualties. By the end of the battle, over 6000 fellow combatants were wounded or dead. Geoffrey survived but he was traumatised. Nevertheless, after his ship was repaired, he rejoined it before joining another ship, HMS George V, with which he served till after the end of the war when he was then sent on a course of instruction in Cambridge. Meanwhile, in 1915, Philip won a place in his school rugby team and a scholarship to begin studying history and classics the following autumn at Queen’s College, Oxford. Then, after staying on at Rugby till Easter 1916, and after the institution that March of the Military Service Act making eighteen-year-olds liable for military conscription, he did
E A R LY Y E A R S
9
army officer training and was then stationed as a qualified officer at Sheerness in Kent.
Geoffrey and Philip, c.1916 “It is a great comfort for me to know that you have habituated yourself into a state of calm … about everything. I have had to do the same, & am now without cares of any sort,” Philip wrote to Durham and Ethel after being sent in early January 1917 to Le Havre in France.13 In further letters home he asked after Adrian’s and Geoffrey’s wellbeing; he thanked Ethel and Durham for sending him food parcels from Fortnum & Mason in Piccadilly, and clothes parcels from Whiteleys in the Bayswater Road; and he asked them to arrange for a new pair of breeches to be sent him by his tailor, Gieves, in Savile Row. “There is much less damage in this warfare than in the trench to trench work,” he wrote reassuringly from the front where he was put in charge of sixty men in his rifle brigade.14 The following day, 4 April 1917, during fighting at Havrincourt Wood, near the River Somme, he suffered gunshot wounds to his head for which he was hospitalised in Rouen. “Regret to inform you that 2nd Lieut P D Stokes Rifle Brigade was reported … dangerously ill … permission to visit cannot be granted,” the War Office reported in a telegram to Ethel, then on holiday that Easter in Tunbridge Wells.15 “He was admitted this morning & an operation was performed this afternoon. His general condition is good at present & we hope that he will improve,” a matron looking after Philip told Durham.16 Worse news followed. “I am very grieved to send you the sad news of your son’s death,” she wrote on 10 April.
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His case was practically hopeless from the first—but everything was done to try to save him. He became unconscious this morning & passed quietly away this afternoon. He was quite conscious up till yesterday—but did not realize his condition at all. He will be buried in the Cemetery of St Sever—With much sympathy for you in your great loss …17
“Lieut Stokes was only with us 4 days:- he talked very little although he was perfectly rational. He left no message because I am sure that he had not the faintest idea that he was going to die,” the matron subsequently wrote in reply to a letter from Ethel. He said several times that he hoped his people would not be anxious about him—& that we would not write alarming letters about him. He complained of headache at times—but on the 3rd & 4th days he was practically unconscious the whole time & at the end,—just quietly stopped breathing. I asked the medical officer this morning if his brain would have been affected had he lived. He said that undoubtedly it would: & he would never have been the same again. In time:- even if you cannot realize it now—you will be glad that under the circumstances—he did not live …18
“I was 14½ and I consider that that event has crippled my life, partly because I felt alone, partly because of the added responsibility to parents,” said Adrian in later recalling the devastating effect on him of Philip’s death.19 He had been “the jolliest boy” in his boarding house at Rugby on first arriving there in May 1916. After Philip’s death the following April he became “much more serious”.20 Previously Adrian had been “a leading light in his maths set” at Rugby.21 Now he became a “Socialist”,22 and, following the posthumous publication in 1918 of Philip’s poems as a book,23 he took on Philip’s death-thwarted wish to become a “poet, philosopher, scientist or art critic”.24 His poetry included a poem about himself as a lone, self-conscious, long-distance runner. “Softly tread the ashen path,” it began. Flowers close in when you go by, Daffodils and daisies stare and peep, Whispering shyly, “Who is there?”25
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11
He also presented an essay about Joseph Conrad to the school literary society which was very much admired and sent to Conrad who replied agreeing with Adrian that his novel, The Secret Agent, was his best. Influenced, it seems, by this novel’s account of Hyde Park, Adrian devoted an essay to the park which was published as an article in the school literary magazine, The Rugbeian. “I stood in Hyde Park by night … I stood alone, and London moaned around,” this article begins. I was listening to the pulse of the drowsy monster which I had once loved … But this was all gone. … The night was cold, and I turned towards the Rotten Row and saw the long line of pale, sallow lights, anaemic mediocrities of pain and ugliness … Above them the plane-trees rustled in abject melancholy.26
In another article, mindful perhaps of Philip’s death and of Geoffrey having become an invalid seemingly due to the trauma he had suffered in the Battle of Jutland,27 Adrian wrote: When we see around us the smallness of the world and the carelessness of man, who is often poured into life only to die, others living only to be ever invalids … while we think of stars undiscovered, innumerable—then we begin to understand how petty is the world of one mind, the triviality of life, the individual, how he is only a particle of dust which defies the world and which in convivial moods exclaims, “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul!”28
A similar contrast between triviality and imagining himself the master of his fate bothered Adrian at Oxford.
CHAPTER TWO
Oxford
P
hilip had been prevented by his fatal wounding on the battlefields of the Somme from taking up his scholarship to begin studying history and classics at Queen’s College, Oxford, in October 1917. Two years later Adrian also applied to study history at Oxford where he won a scholarship to begin studying at Magdalen the following October. History attracted him as a means by which, he said, “all that was carried inside my mind, could be pinned down, arranged, comprehended”.1 It was, he also wrote, “an antidote to imaginative despair”.2 Oxford, however, made him feel gloomy. “Oxford is so massive,” he wrote, So dismally imposing. The giant grey blocks of clerical stone Frown down and breathe tradition.3
No surprise then, perhaps, that he decided to quit tradition and history for philosophy on first becoming a student in October 1920 at Magdalen where he registered for that year’s newly introduced degree, Modern Greats, comprising philosophy, politics, and economics. 13
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At Rugby he had studied the philosophy of Hegel, including Hegel’s emphasis on the unity of reality and reason. To this Adrian now added study of the neo-Hegelian philosophy of the Oxford don, F. H. Bradley, emphasising the interdependence of part and whole, the unity of appearance and reality, and identity in difference. Later Adrian would develop these aspects of philosophy in psychoanalysing art. Neither psychoanalysis nor art, however, interested him particularly at Oxford, where, as well as studying philosophy, he doodled and tried out his skill as a writer. “Ah, how pleasant to hear that barrel organ! I am sitting in a dull old College Hall at Oxford one hard grey February morning. The lecturer is droning on,” he wrote. The barrel organ is a godsend for me. I am back again in my nursery amongst my toys. I live again the days when Santa Claus really existed and when I thought that the French people spent their time walking about France singing the Marseillaise. I have lived in London all my life, and a barrel organ has visited me every Wednesday between 1 and 2 o’clock, the same barrel organ, the same barrel organ tunes. Whenever I hear a barrel organ, I think of the days when I did not yet know that life was for many a morbid struggle, so sad and perplexing …4
Then he doodled—“The other half of the half-witted old man,” he labelled the result.
Oxford doodle, c.1920
OX F O R D
15
Meanwhile, bereft of their beloved eldest son, Philip, Ethel and Durham sold their 18 Radnor Place home and moved to a large house, Lower Stonehams, in Pangbourne, less than thirty miles from Adrian at Magdalen. Here, in the grounds of their new home, they had a garden created in memory of Philip in which no one but Ethel was allowed to go because his loss was “a sorrow that she kept to herself”.5
Lower Stonehams, Pangbourne “I feel powerless to face even the greatest moments of life, and how much less the smallest … so conscious am I of an emptiness and the inadequacy of even the grandest and most sublime,” their bereaved son, Adrian, wrote at about this time at Oxford. We can see the stars and count the ages; we know of the multitude of men who have lived captivated by the same interests and emotions; we scan what seem great truths, yet we have to watch all our interest at one moment centre around a letter to be posted, a dog to be stroked, or meat to be eaten …6
He imagined a self-hating philosophy don—“a queer, unnatural, unearthly creature”—berating “hearties … pipe-smokers … aesthetes” for their trivial preoccupations. He imagined this don also berating himself. “I am in a state of complete flux, not knowing where to turn, I watch myself and laugh derisively,” the don tells his lecture audience.7 Adrian was also derisive about himself at Oxford where he described himself as “a miserable recluse”.8 Yet he was also involved in the manic
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homosexual whirl of early 1920s post-war Oxford later described by his friend, Evelyn Waugh, in the novel, Brideshead Revisted. For Adrian this whirl included the start of close friendships with various Old Etonians including Robert Byron (who became an expert in Byzantine history); John Strachey (who became a leading Labour Party politician); and Edward “Eddy” Sackville-West (later well known as a music critic and novelist). Like Adrian, Eddy had recently been bereaved. Whereas Adrian had been bereaved by the death of his brother prior to becoming a student at Oxford, Eddy had been bereaved by the death of his mother. Now, in 1922, Eddy began writing a novel in which he depicted his mother admiring an Adrian-like character as immensely “attractive” with “his big fair head, his square shoulders, his strong thighs and ankles” and “subtle mischief in his bright eyes” which, together with “the magnetism of his strength and beauty”, this character uses to win from others the “confidence and admiration” which, said Eddy, he craved.9
Eddy Sackville-West, c.1922 Eddy might well have been the cause of a “homoerotic” letter which Durham and Ethel discovered and which decided them to persuade Adrian to join them away from Oxford at Rapallo at the end of his third autumn term at Magdalen.10 He remembered the train journey taking him from France into Italy as a revelation. “Although the last day of
OX F O R D
17
the year, December 31st, 1922, the air was soft, tender, a darkness as of a perfect fitting lid upon the radiant world through which I passed,” he wrote. The revelation continued when, after he was taken by horsedrawn carriage to Durham’s and Ethel’s hotel in Rapallo, he awoke the following morning.11 “There was a revealing of things in the Mediterranean sunlight, beyond any previous experience, I had the new sensation that the air was touching things; that the space between things touched them, belonged in common; that space itself was utterly revealed,” he marvelled. There was a neatness in the light. Nothing hid or was hidden. Soon, an electric train passed, gliding with ease on the hard way just below, entered a tunnel. Unlike the electric trains on London’s metropolitan railway, which had always been a disturbance, this train and the tunnel did not prolong themselves inside me. It seemed that, for the first time things were happening entirely outside me. Existence was enormously enlarged by the miracle of the neat defining light.12
Then he was again in Oxford where he captained the Magdalen tennis team and wrote the best finals paper of his year in philosophy.
Magdalen tennis team, 1923, Adrian (centre)
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After graduating that summer, 1923, he stayed at Lower Stonehams where he hoped to write a book. Durham, however, had other ideas. He was determined that Adrian should earn his own living. Giving in to this determination Adrian got paid work as a journalist in London. But he hated travelling on the underground. “All these people, different faces; they’re all different, and I can’t stand it,” he complained to his Old Rugbeian friend, Joseph Macleod, who not unreasonably asked, “Wouldn’t it be worse if they all looked the same?”13 Adrian was not persuaded. On 26 July his brother, Geoffrey, got married to a young bride, Kathleen Spagnoletti. Then, after provoking an argument with Durham, to which Durham retaliated by asking when he was leaving home and never coming back, Adrian “drew lots for a ship” and left London, on 18 August 1923, “alone, and without a watch”, on board the SS City of Lucknow bound for Bombay.14
CHAPTER THREE
East and west
P
revented by Durham from writing a book at Lower Stonehams, Adrian instead began writing it in the form of a diary during his voyage east to Bombay. As though he were the Greek hero, Theseus, following a thread provided by Ariadne as a means of retracing his footsteps in a labyrinth away from the monster Minotaur, he called the resulting book, The Thread of Ariadne. For him the monster seems to have been the “Victorianism” and “Mathematical Thought” of Durham and his generation cutting up experience with numbers, words, and future-oriented ideals.1 Against this monster Adrian championed “the realization of Youth” and “the art of creating a harmony of emotions and states of mind, diverse in themselves but incapable of standing alone, pure, and without contrast, and so, interdependent from their very nature”. He called it “the art of concocting a mixture of jostling ingredients” through the method of attending to whatever free associations were suggested by the world around him.2
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“It rains, and a bird flies across in front of me,” he wrote. Then, pursuing the associations this brought to mind, he added: Wet, dull-red tiles, and the quad at Rugby with a disused bat soaked by the rain in the middle. Half an hour before three o’clock and afternoon school, and masters arriving with umbrellas; the most dismal time of the day for rain. A maid scurries along one of the dully-expectant dormitories above, looking for a duster she left under a bed in the morning …3
Further associations occurred to Adrian on first seeing Bombay. “All that I could distinguish were some chimney factories and a large dome— some old mosque, no doubt,—and scenes from ‘Chu Chin Chow’ and ‘The Garden of Allah’,” he reported in a newspaper article.4 “I had visions of tea and telling people how stupidly depressed I had been as I hurried on,” he said of himself after disembarking and getting lost in Bombay’s zoological gardens. It was now beginning to get dark and there was that melancholy awe about which fills public gardens at dusk when noises are so distinct and park keepers so noticeable. As I turned to the left to go out by the imposing main entrance into the busy main street I was conscious only of the atmosphere of Kensington Gardens and the noises of Bayswater road mingling with the smoke of an autumnal bon fire—and Peter Pan and time to go home in my pram with the first lights to high tea and bed.5
Other associations occurred to him on appointing himself agent of the British Raj’s apartheid exclusion of non-Europeans from its Europeansonly railway compartments. “As the Madras mail train left Bombay, two men boarded the carriage who looked as if they would be more at home in the other 3rd class carriages,” he wrote. I tactfully pointed this out to them as we were rather full. “We are Europeans,” they said. “Why?” I asked helplessly. “We are Jews,” they said triumphantly. Now this was puzzling … the fact remained that Jews came from Palestine which is in Asia. … There certainly are lots of Jews in Europe but what of that …6
He himself, of course, was a Jew who mostly lived in Europe. But that did not abate his anti-Semitism in this encounter. Then he was in Madras and on his way to Ceylon where he contrasted east and west.
EAST AND WEST
21
“The other night, accompanied by Silva and other members of the hotel staff, I visited a Buddhist temple … A real religion with no sticky Earlscourtian sentimentalism,” he wrote. “Sincere religious emotion in the temple, and meditation on God and the transitory nature of things. Walk out and crack any joke and light a cigarette,” he added. “Why no qualms,” he asked. Perhaps, he replied, because “ordinary life is necessary to give this holiness its meaning”. It was the same with the ordinary life depicted in the modern novel—in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, for example—which he praised as antidote to the western habit of cutting-up experience with “the definiteness of words”.7 He studied “the six systems of Indian philosophy” while camping near the River Ganges with a missionary, Charles, in Colgong. Here he went with Charles to a leper colony and to a market. This prompted further associations, specifically about men in “the trenches just before going over the top”; translating “Sunt loca non procul …” from Virgil into “An old grove of Dionysus now used as a market, far in the rustic forest”; and memories of “picking up potatoes” with German prisoners of war at Rugby.8
Taj Mahal, Agra
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In one of his newspaper articles published in India he mentioned getting together with a British soldier—“a Tommy”—on the train taking them to Agra and the Taj Mahal. “Not a bad hutch by any means,” said the Tommy.9 For Adrian the Taj became the first instance, at least in print, in which he dwelt at length on the physical materials from which art is made. “Marble when in such beautiful proportions has the attraction of a little model or a delicate doll’s house; definite, complete and suggestive, only of itself,” he wrote of the Taj. But above all the Taj is felt to be ageless and weatherless. Surely that marble cannot be sullied by anything, one feels—the rain only dances on marble—the Taj is weatherless—an indoor effect successfully defying the elements. It is like a house we build with ivory black-backed dominoes on a table—clean cut to a degree affording the only complete suggestion of the sheer.10
The Taj caught his attention in India. So did musing on the philosophy of identity in difference which he had learnt at Oxford. “Now suppose everything in the world were black … then … we would not see things as black—in fact we would have no conception of colour, just as if there were no light, we would have no conception of darkness,” he wrote. “Just one spot of yellow somewhere, and black would come into existence,” he philosophised. “Nothing that we can conceive is independent. However ultimate it may seem, it is interdependent for its very meaning. Good and Evil, Subject and Object, Beauty and Ugliness—are all defined by one another.” Hence, he said, his distrust of the “definiteness of words” in the west cutting off one thing from another on which it depends. He preferred the east and Benares— “indefinite like a dream” with its “mass of colours and crooked storeys forming the wonderful sweep of the river crowned by a Venetian sky”.11 Then he was on his way from India to Burma, Penang, Hong Kong, Canton, Shanghai, and across the Pacific to Canada where he marvelled at the sight of the Niagara Falls that winter. [E]verything, except the half-frozen fall, was white and still with several feet of snow. The water fell in steady tons, too gigantic to be hurried. A perpetual rainbow flitted at the base amongst the froth and steam, and all around this display of ungovernable power, in some places within a few inches, hung long, disdainful stalactites,
EAST AND WEST
23
comatose and beautiful. Here were mutually-heightened contrasts, here was Interdependence of meaning.12
His philosophy of interdependence preoccupied him. He was also preoccupied with lack of cash for which he cabled home to Durham. Mean as usual, however, Durham only sent him “the exact fare” for his ticket home,13 which Adrian supplemented by getting paid for playing his Swannee whistle—“the latest Jazz instrument”, he called it—in a band.14 After returning to London he earned money again as a journalist. This included writing for the Westminster Gazette; contributing to a gossip column in The Manchester Guardian; and getting work, on the strength of a trial baseball report, with the Daily Sketch. When the rent on his attic room at 28 Bloomsbury Street in London became overdue he accepted the invitation from his Magdalen College contemporary, John Strachey, to move into the home Strachey shared with Eddy Sackville-West in London while Eddy was away being psychoanalysed in Germany. “Now I am a journalist I report. I have to be smart, slick, funny— Frightfully good for me—much better than your London Season which requires much the same things but whose demands are not so rigorous or so long,” Adrian had previously boasted to Eddy.15 After moving into Eddy’s room, however, he became abject and contrite. “I write this sitting at your desk listening to a Mozart Quartette [sic] on your gramophone—and about to sleep in your bed,” he apologised to Eddy. I didn’t realize what colossal cheek it is … Of course I pay telephone, gas, washing etc and I am keeping an account of everything and I don’t touch anything, and nothing of mine comes out of my box. I take great care. Is it alright … till you come back … I shan’t use your envelopes again … I do love all your things and they are so good for me. I know you much better while I live amongst your things and I treat them with great reverence. Is it Sacrilege? … I think I must have wanted to come very much. I don’t even risk not being tidy. I don’t unpack anything. For goodness sake be angry if you are angry, otherwise you will hate me …16
Fearful of annoying Eddy by staying on in his room he nevertheless remained there till Eddy returned after which he went to stay at Lower Stonehams.
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From there, or from the flat at 13 Porchester Terrace (off the Bayswater Road) which Durham acquired that year, Adrian regaled Eddy with news of his travels. They included planning to go to Finland, probably with an Old Rugbeian school friend, Rolf Gardiner; and going to the Lido in Venice. He also boasted to Eddy about various casualseeming affairs including one with someone he mysteriously referred to as “the pipe man”, who was, he said, “joining the guards as a Tommy”, and with whom he was thinking of joining the then Rif Rebellion against Spanish colonial rule in Morocco.17 The pipe man did indeed go to Morocco. Not so Adrian who was busy finishing his book, The Thread of Ariadne, on which he had worked during his round-the-world travels. “What about the chapter ‘The Bridge’—must I rewrite that too, and tell me honestly, can the rest of the book stand or am I still open to the charge of ‘formlessness’,” he asked Eddy. Strachey’s sister, who worked on their father’s paper, The Spectator, advised Adrian about his book. So did her brother, John. “[He] thinks I apologize too much, and so do you with the ‘Young book’ etc,” Adrian told Eddy. “[B]ut you must not forget that it is not a novel, and when you preach to the world at 21 and revolt against everything, there is no point in pretending to be unaware of your apparent enormity.”18 John’s father advised Adrian about his Ariadne book. He also recommended it to the publishers Hodder & Stoughton. But they rejected it, as did the publishers Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, and Allen & Unwin. Then on 18 November 1924 Kegan Paul, Trench & Trubner wrote to Adrian agreeing to publish the book provided he pay half the cost of its production and promotion. He was furious, however, when they still had not sent proofs the following month; and when Geoffrey, his wife, Kathleen, and her parents made him lose his temper that Christmas. Perhaps he was cheered up by an Old Etonian friend, George Rylands, inviting him to “a little party of four” at the Café Royal to “celebrate the death of 1924”; and by the publication of his Ariadne book the following February.19 “In form [it] is an account of the bewilderments and contradictions and despairs through which the author passed before he found peace of mind and certainty of value (or ‘meaning’, he terms it) in everyday life,” summarised a review in The Spectator.20 This certainly seems a fair assessment of Adrian’s Ariadne book in which he described himself as “driven from pillar to post … in this world of intertwining tremendosities”; and as having suffered “the full buffetings of presuppositional
EAST AND WEST
25
demands” against which he had developed an obsession, he confessed, with “putting things straight in a docketed, precise manner”.21 He followed this by deriding the “picking and choosing” of “Hearties” and “Aesthetes” and of “Idealists” and “Fanatics” for failing to attend to “ordinary circumstances” and the “associations” these circumstances evoked.22 He linked this failure with the division of inner and outer, subject and object, in the philosophy of Descartes and Kant. He much preferred, he said, the philosophy of interdependence developed by Hegel and Bradley. “The conception of reality only gains meaning in contrast to appearance,” he went on. As illustration he gave the example of “Chaos” and “Coherency” each giving the other meaning by virtue of their contrast with each other. “[W]ords and arguments”, he added, are also given meaning by what is visible in the world around us. He also wrote approvingly about a painting by Bernardino Luini showing Christ, said Adrian, “searching away in the distance far beyond the words He speaks and the arguments He is upholding”.23
Luini, Christ with Elders in the Temple, c.1515–1530
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As further evidence that the outside world gives meaning to what is within us Adrian included notes from his round-the-world travel diary. They included the observation that “ordinary life” might be necessary to give “holiness its meaning”; and his telling himself, “Keep your highflying thoughts, but also remember that they are easily redressed, and would have no meaning if you did not also attach meaning to your cup of tea.”24 “The essential is to touch life, to enlarge our living relationship with the world,” explained a review in the Times Literary Supplement, “and we can do this only by throwing off the shackles and conventions of logical consistency and launching ourselves upon the uncharted sea, confident in our ability to assimilate realities of which we are a part,” this review continued.25 “The spectacle of a passionate, thoughtful youth, solitary and despairing in a world peopled by gigantic, meaningless abstractions, mastering the monsters … and achieving serenity—if this is not drama, where is one to find it?” asked the writer, Hulbert Footner, in the New York Saturday Review, referring to The Thread of Ariadne when it was published in America.26 By then Adrian’s travels had taken him again to Italy.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sitwell protégé
“
T
he brothers Sitwell are here,” Adrian wrote excitedly from the grand Hotel Bristol in Rapallo in early 1925.1 By then the brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, together with their older sister, Edith, had become leading lights of the British avant-garde with their promotion of the Ballets Russes productions of Sergei Diaghilev; with the organisation by Osbert and Sacheverell of one of the first exhibitions of modern painting in London; with Edith’s public reading in 1923 of her poem, Façade, to music composed and conducted by the Sitwells’ protégé, William Walton; and with the publication in 1924 of Osbert’s first work of fiction, Triple Fugue, and Sacheverell’s book, Southern Baroque. “The Sitwells were the first to open my eyes, met by chance in Italy,” Adrian later said of his first becoming a Sitwell protégé in 1925 in Rapallo.2 Here, persuaded by Osbert, Durham agreed to give Adrian money to fund his life as a writer rather than putting pressure on him to get paid work as a journalist and train as a lawyer.
27
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Osbert, Edith, and Sacheverell Sitwell Free from this pressure, Adrian accompanied the Sitwells that March to Valencia, Madrid, Seville, Ronda, Malaga, Cordoba, and Granada in Spain. “They were really quite alarming—alarming rather than forbidding. All of them were wearing black capes and black Andalusian hats and looked magnificent,” said Cyril Connolly after seeing the Sitwells and their entourage that April 1925 at the Washington Irving Hotel in Granada.3 “Write to me about your plans and when you want to go to Venice. May I think will suit me. I will go there to settle for several months as I propose having Venice as a background for a book,” Adrian had meanwhile written to Eddy from Seville.4 “I will be back 4–6 April—not later. Stay in London a little longer,” he wrote again to Eddy after learning that Eddy had reneged on staying with him that May in Venice.5 Whether or not he met up with Eddy on his return from Spain to London that spring, it was without Eddy that Adrian arrived in Venice on 5 May, booked himself into a box room at the Hotel Savoia e Iolanda near the Doge’s Palace, and began making notes for his next book. “Far better than admitting the neuralgic pang of conscience is to try to be receptive, to live the inspiration of such moments when there is no thought of pleasure or pain but only ecstasy,” he noted.6 “In my mind all the time is, of course, sex,” he continued.
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29
Moral indignation, religion at a standstill, hovering with evening— dressed dry-mouthed, fish-eyed, pouncingness on any form of aimlessness, the Ruskinicate, the stone-throw between Sunday church and Sunday lunch, Sunday nap and week-day nightly salutation to the children—upset me more than anything else. You see, my dear, religion is hot inspiration, a pouring forth, a prostration, an ecstasy, and its indignation is not a moral indignation, not something staunch with a red face. I think Ruskin must have been an eunuch although a great man. He lashes me daily, hurls at me Stones of Venice.7
It was not clear where this was leading. Nor did further notes help—the following included. Distant thunder and lightning that plays about the eager dome of the Salute—lust-life, trickly water that comes lip lap in ripples that wash with lingering dabs the fondamenta when burnished-prowed gondolas dart past—music that lingers beneath the stars widening as the inlaid porphyries of the Palazzo Dario, swallowed up to the stars to the cup chimneys of the Palazzo Dario that have drunk down the air in quiet ecstasy these five hundred years …8
By then he had moved to the Casa Scomparin by the Grand Canal in Venice from where he wrote to Eddy who was staying in Switzerland with a specialist in oriental ceramics, William “Billy” Winkworth.9 “I don’t know the man, but fancy going to Switzerland,” Adrian expostulated from his “enormous room with countless beds” at the Casa Scomparin, from where he grumbled to Eddy: “I live alone—absolutely and don’t speak to anybody and all day silly words like ‘grist’ and ‘Christostoms’ run in my head.”10 He had raged against words in his Ariadne book. Now he raged against words used by a friend (with whom he had previously sailed on the Norfolk Broads and spent time in the Pyrenees, Germany, and Austria) after this friend joined him in Venice from where they travelled together to Ravenna and Rimini. “It was about the word ‘Forrarder’ that he aired … He used the word in some connection and I took violent exception to it as being suggestive of stale-tea, squalid, smugness which was most repulsive if one still had soul to get satisfaction in other ways,” Adrian explained.
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He then said that it was a word “Jorrocks” (!) uses. At which I was really angry and said that although I did not know exactly what Jorrocks connoted … I knew enough to understand that it was connected with hunting and whiskey-drinking and was quite unpardonable in Italy … He then said that his father and mother were both hunting people and that his father had drunk whiskey …11
Fed up with what he described as Adrian’s “love of bullying” this friend and travelling companion quit Adrian in Rimini for Lora and Valparaiso in Spain.12 It was therefore without this man that Adrian travelled on that July to Urbino where Osbert Sitwell had particularly recommended him to see the town’s very beautiful ducal palace. Adrian was especially impressed by the palace’s courtyard which, together with the early Renaissance Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini (see p. 52), gave him, he later said, “the greatest architectural kick I have ever had”.13 Meanwhile that summer of 1925 he travelled on from Urbino to Bologna, Modena, Mantua, Verona, and Venice from where he was “whirled … almost unnoticing”, perhaps by Eddy’s lover, Billy Winkworth, to the Grand Hotel Villa D’Este in Crenobbia by Lake Como. “Alone at night you walk an ancient garden and at its end quietly the waters of the lake insist,” Adrian wrote referring to Lake Como. The scene is beautiful, complete to itself, transmuting all else into a bad dream, but—but what? It may be absurd but you cannot entirely forget that impossible journey from Milan, those heaving females … you could not experience horror at enormity if you were not also capable of realizing the peace of the lake.14
It was another example of the interdependence of opposites—in this case peace and horror of heaving females. Females continued to bother and annoy Adrian on his return to Venice, especially an English woman who had booked every room at the Casa Scomparin leaving him with little hope, he complained, of finding somewhere else to stay near the Grand Canal that summer. Soon, however, he found beautiful accommodation with Billy Winkworth in an art nouveau building, the Casa dei tre Occhi, which had been designed by a painter, Mario de Maria, and built across from the Doge’s Palace on the Giudecca.
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Casa dei tre Occhi, Venice Here, at the Casa dei tre Occhi, Adrian and Billy were joined by the art historian, Leigh Ashton (later a director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London). Osbert Sitwell was also in Venice by early September. But he was in great distress at having lost his usual travelling companion, his brother Sacheverell, to imminent marriage to Georgia Doble in Paris. Osbert’s friends, Dick Wyndham and Raymond Mortimer, kept him company in Venice. But they were no compensation for Sacheverell not being there. Nor was Adrian. He had piles and could “hardly move”.15 He was nevertheless well enough to quit Venice with Osbert who wanted to avoid the imminent arrival there of his father, Sir George.
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“Venice wound up rather hectically but I will slink any somewhere to spend the winter quietly. I have been consistently ill for the last 3 weeks—in pain and then without,” Adrian wrote after leaving Venice for Brescia and Parma.16 From there, with travel directions from Osbert, he went south to stay at a converted convent, the Hotel Cappuccini, high above the Bay of Naples at Amalfi where he read, and wrote down examples from, James Frazer’s study of magic and religion, The Golden Bough. These examples included the following ritual described by Frazer whereby in Chittagong in east Bengal … when a woman cannot bring her child to the birth, the mid-wife gives orders to throw all doors and windows wide open, to uncork all bottles, to remove the bungs from all casks, to unloose the cows in the stall, the horses in the stable, the watchdog in his kennel, to set free sheep, fowl, ducks, and so forth …17
This woman-centred ritual interested Adrian. Yet he was also paranoid about women. “A Russian woman has given me the fright of my life. I’ve been taking part in a sort of Phillips Oppenheim story for the last fortnight, treading between bombs amidst a flutter of death-dealing anonymous letters,” he told Eddy from Amalfi.18 Then, in reply to Eddy asking for more details, he wrote: The woman fooled me. She now runs up and down terraces heaving bosoms to show me how young she is. I have now reached such a state that if a woman slapps [sic] herself accidently [sic], it makes me feel rather faint.19
Fearful of women, he was also fearful of what he diagnosed in himself as “claustra-phobia” at the Hotel Cappuccini. “This is a foul place shut in by a nasty shanty Norquesan beach met by the landsliding mountains all bulwarked up,” he griped. [V]ery ugly and then there is the hotel with a knitted woollen scarf of a convent thrown into it perched on the bulwarks, all cells and one passage. The only place where you can walk is on a parallel terrace where you see the only orange that you are going to have for dinner.20
Nor, it seems, was Adrian much comforted by being joined at the hotel by Osbert, Sacheverell, and Georgia Sitwell; by the composer, William Walton; and by another Sitwell protégé, a young poet and student from Oxford, Peter Quennell.
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Hotel Cappuccini, Amalfi Adrian was unhappy at the hotel. So was Quennell. He found the Sitwells’ working holiday regime there oppressive: Osbert writing a novel, Before the Bombardment; Sacheverell “weaving the rich autobiographical tapestry of All Summer in a Day”; Walton “hammering away at a decrepit upright piano”; and Adrian “launching an imaginative expedition into modern art-criticism”.21 Quennell was glad to get away. So was Adrian. By early 1926 he was again in Rapallo at the Hotel Bristol. Also at the hotel that month was the British foreign minister, Austen Chamberlain; his visitor, Benito Mussolini, who had just become Fascist dictator of Italy; and the artist, William Rothenstein, who recalled Adrian at the hotel that winter as having a “blonde head chockfull of ideas, very abstract ideas”.22 Later that spring Adrian was in Rome where, through his Old Rugbeian school friend, Rolf Gardiner, he met Rolf’s sister, Margaret. “He is a lovely person,” Margaret soon after wrote to Rolf thanking him for introducing her to Adrian.23 “He really was the most fabulous looking young man I think I had ever met, then or since. He had this fair hair, wonderful large eyes set at a strange sweeping angle, very blue,” she said of Adrian.
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He looked down most of the time, but when he looked up it was absolutely breath-taking. And he had a beak-like nose. He had a general air of being some sort of magnificent bird. And he moved very well. And he had beautiful hands. I loved talking to him. I loved doing things with him. But there was always a certain remoteness about him as far as I was concerned and I dare say that that was true of his relation to almost everybody. There was a distance between him and other people. There was what I would call a secret quality about him as though his life were elsewhere.24
His life was evidently elsewhere when, after leaving Rome in the early spring of 1926, he found himself “mentally arranging” the town’s churches during a Diaghilev production of Boris Gudonov which he attended in Naples.25
Rehearsing Les Noces
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From Naples he went to Portugal where he stayed with Osbert at the Palace Hotel in Bussaco and “motored” to see Romanesque monasteries in Coimbra, Batalha, and Alcobaça.26 Then, after further travels, he returned to London where, for the first time, he saw the avant-garde productions of the Ballets Russes which included Les Matelots and Les Noces that June, and Jack in the Box and Parade that July. “It was all in black and white. The dancers, when they were not more actively employed, piled themselves and laced themselves into pyramidal patterns, from which peered forth sorrowful heads,” complained a reviewer of Les Noces in Punch.27 Adrian, by contrast, was delighted. “In the music” of Les Noces “Stravinsky de-ridiculizes the sublime,” he wrote admiringly. “What else in Art can banish for a moment the world of comparison and the bridging of distance, what else can forestall the nimble regret,” he asked. [W]hat other appreciation is free of the irksome muslin about the mind through which the past is strained and which is at once fatally rent by a voice in the street, need not spend itself upon the choice and ordering of associations? As we stand behind the dress circle at the ballet, for once in a way we live with double intensity our own existence, and our attention is absorbed rather than shoved and jostled on some path.28
Grateful to Les Noces and to other Ballets Russes productions by Diaghilev for taking him out of himself, Adrian devoted much of the preface of his now nearly completed book to praise of Jean Cocteau, Eric Satie, Igor Stravinsky, and others involved with the Ballets Russes. While awaiting this book’s publication Adrian stayed that June and August with Eddy in rooms which had recently been assigned to Eddy over the gatehouse of the Sackville-West home at Knole Castle in Kent. Adrian was “thrilled” by the prospect of staying there.29 It was evidently a great relief to be with Eddy rather than at Lower Stonehams from where he had told Eddy: “Am really thoroughly wretched what with one thing and another and don’t seem able to leave this terrible place.”30 Getting away from Lower Stonehams often took him abroad. More immediately that September it took him to a small house, Winstons, owned by William Rothenstein, on the outskirts of a remote hamlet, Far Oakridge, in the Cotswolds. Staying there, however, did not cheer Adrian up. “This cottage is a real Wuthering Heights and it is almost
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impossible to get food,” he complained in thanking Eddy for dedicating to him his then newly published novel, The Ruin. “It arrived yesterday and I read it all day. I was very moved and dreamed about it all night. I really do appreciate the book. I hope this will not set you against it,” he wrote. “I think it is a lasting achievement—this writing about your own house. You have succeeded in doing something that only you could do. This, surely, is the height of triumph.”31 No mention in this letter of the fact that Eddy prefaced The Ruin with a quote from Nietzsche: “Bist du ein Tyrann? So kannst du nicht Freunde haben” (“Are you a tyrant? Then you can have no friends”). Nor was there mention of Eddy depicting him, or someone very like him, saying, “I cannot live without a slave! I want and must have a complete ascendancy over another being, no matter who it is”; or of this character seeking to get away from an inner “daemon … that possessed him and urged him in turn to possess others” and from his craving “admiration” from them so as to transform or “metaphorise” terrible inner “realities” into outward form.32 Perhaps these inner realities exacerbated the physical ills from which Adrian suffered at Winstons that September. Nor was this helped the following month by his having “an awful row” the following month with Durham from which he escaped to Rapallo for which he renewed his passport.33 “What has one left behind?” he asked. “Discipline and licence. Waiting. Waiting for the rain to stop, waiting for the spring, waiting for the evening paper, for the cinemas to open … No moment is self-sufficient. Waiting for Saturday night.”34
Passport photo, 1926
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He was happier, it seems, early that November when, through asking Henry Rhode, the owner of tennis courts in Rapallo, if there was anyone living in the town who spoke English and might give him a game, Rhode introduced him to Ezra Pound. Pound’s tennis-playing (see p. 47) was apparently very eccentric and peppered with “very unorthodox yells and interjections”.35 Nevertheless Adrian often played tennis with him, beginning that autumn, before he returned to London where he wrote about his unhappiness there. “The world has turned monk. In the fields the smoking rubbish heaps draw a cowl over the stubble’s beard. In Hyde Park, too, they are burning rubbish, and peacocks hoot at the sinking year,” he wrote. London is sacked. In the hot months the city laid its heart upon the busy thoroughfares. Autumn has wizarded it away. … The red tennis courts at Queens Club are hard to the feet. Over a red and blue brick wall of a type common to maternity homes in the big thoroughfares, over a street in which the gas lamps are always burning, there stands a row of residential houses of an ugliness that is only surpassed by Harrods. The air is black and cold. Hold back the grimy net.36
How different from the title of his book, Sunrise in the West, which was soon after published and later billed by its American publishers as a challenge to the German writer Otto Spengler’s then recently published tome, Decline of the West. Far from being in decline, declared Adrian, the west was beginning a new renaissance with the modern art of Braque, Proust, and the Ballets Russes. So saying he went on to dwell on the “poetry” and “mystery” of eastern ritual, and on the “Christian Catholicism of the Dark and Middle Ages”. He then proceeded to praise the influence of “Byzantine art” and “Greek tradition” on the art of early Renaissance—quattrocento—Italy.37 “Blue skies shouted, and before the world could wake secure and processional captivity, the Quatro Cento [sic] had fired the exuberance of boyish prowess,” he said of this renaissance. As examples he cited a doorway designed by Francesco di Giorgio, a marble low relief attributed to Agostino di Duccio, and an early cinquecento painting, Madonna, Child, and Two Saints, by Giorgione. “The trusting thoughts lie deep within her sad eyes,” Stokes said of this Madonna.
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“St Francis, too, far below by the side of the throne, contemplates as singly, reading his sharp visions and impetuous love into the marble.” Meanwhile the saint in “shining armour … does not stare at the ground but looks ahead … taki[ng] trust, not through the persuasion of doctrine, but from the ardour of blue skies”.38
Giorgione, Madonna, Child, and Two Saints, c.1503–1504
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After thus praising quattrocento and early cinquecento art Adrian reviled the “prose-poetry”, as he called it, of art inspired by neoPlatonist ideas, the ideals of Calvin, or by the moral strictures of “Honesty, Justice, Coherence, Duty” and by the “mighty giants” of “God, Good, Beauty”. They weigh down the soul, he complained. They frighten children and make “man’s life like a pudding, with ingredients measured according to his abilities and station, every ingredient as docile as a prune … of endless calculation”.39 The best art, he insisted—“a good drawing by Picasso, the mosaics in the Church of San Appolinaris” in Ravenna, or “the loggia del Capitanio” in Vicenza, for example—results not from the prose of preconceived ideas, ideals, and calculation. It results from the poetry of what artists find in the physical world around them “impelling” their “immediate vision”.40 Both are needed: the poetry of immediate vision together with the prose of fact and reason. D. H. Lawrence was right to distrust “thought-consciousness”. What is also needed for the best art to come into being is outward-looking “spontaneity” together with the “otherness” of prose as a channel absorbing “the alloy of poetry”.41 “[W]e must have faith in our age, faith in the clean-sweep of matured prose, modern consciousness, faith in the starkness of machinery, courage to accept the interdependence of values … which … when courageously admitted … provide the medium, dig the channel down which the chasing waters of a pure poetry may flow,” he excitedly concluded. “We have discovered prose and poetry … and the supreme rule of their relationship, the sacred source of life itself and the secret of its everlasting youthfulness.”42 “No published book by a new writer contains more beauty of phrase and imagination, more strangeness and vitality than this,” admired Edith Sitwell.43 “Rhythmic prose is invoked to defend the Occident,” announced a review in the New York Times praising Sunrise in the West for its “passages of uncommonly good poetic prose”.44 “Exhilarated, pardonably enough, by the originality of his ideas, Mr. Stokes pours out images and arguments helter-skelter … throwing out a brilliant picture … or condensing the history of a thousand years into an epigram,” applauded the Times Literary Supplement.45 He had evidently begun making his mark as an exciting and excited young writer earning homage from Pound as “the rising Stokes”.46
CHAPTER FIVE
Sigismondo Malatesta and Ezra Pound
E
zra Pound first applauded Adrian as “the rising Stokes” after seeing a copy of his book, Sunrise in the West, with a copy of a marble low relief from the Tempio in Rimini on its cover (see overleaf). “Has a Rimini plaque on his wrapper and a great many mixed metaphors inside it; but it is not pifflingly frivolous,” Pound told his mistress, Olga Rudge, from Rapallo, soon after seeing the book in early January 1927.1 “Young chap called Adrian Stokes has drifted into the village, with large trunk full of highbrow books (Spengler etc) which I am swallowing in return for tips on the XV century,” Pound also wrote that January.2 Stokes himself, however, knew scarcely anything about fifteenth century Italy when he first saw the Tempio in early July 1925. All he knew then, he said, was that Sigismondo Malatesta, at whose command a church, San Francesco, was converted into the Tempio in 1450s Rimini, was “a great military leader” who gathered painters and scholars at his court to “secure immortality for himself” and for his mistress, later his wife, Isotta.3 By the time Stokes learnt this Pound had been so inspired by Sigismondo’s Tempio in Rimini, and by meeting with members of Mussolini’s Fascist party there, he had done research in the nearby 41
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Book cover
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Malatestiana library in Cesena into the life and times of Sigismondo.4 He also persuaded the reluctant Ernest Hemingway and his wife to join himself and his wife, Dorothy Pound, on a tour in early 1923 of sites associated with Sigismondo’s military exploits, after which T. S. Eliot published four of Pound’s Malatesta Cantos in The Criterion that July. These poems were then included in Pound’s book, A Draft of XVI Cantos, a copy of which he gave to Stokes who soon after drafted an essay which he called “Preliminary Cantos”. “Pilasters, swift as steel, friezes that are thin strips of line, arcs that hurry to their bases, ogival ribs, delicate as the legs of a suspended daddylong-legs vaulting a dome or a loggia, are drawn upon the stucco canvass,” he wrote in this essay in which he criticised the speeded up quattrocento architecture, as he saw it, of Brunelleschi and his followers in Florence. “In the Pazzi chapel, it is as if an inspired giant had seized a pointed pencil of pietra serena and had impetuously scribbled, line upon line, over the walls. Brunelescho [sic] speeded up the Gothic,” he continued. By rounding off the point of the Gothic arch with a rush of concentric lines, he overcame the pause of the apex, tuned the energy of the vanishing point into a speed that rushes one on to the next arch. To stand before the west wall of San Lorenzo is to experience again the release marked by the pistol shot that sends one off on the hundred yards race after the tension of straining at the leash.5
He much preferred the steadying effect of the “hard red marble of Verona” which he credited as inspiration of sturdy elephantine decoration in the Tempio (illustrated overleaf).6 The hard red marble of Verona, not the “soft grey pietra serena” of quattrocento buildings in Florence would guide the aesthetic Stokes adopted in writing a trilogy devoted to the art of quattrocento Italy.7 Like Ruskin in Stones of Venice he would use this trilogy to emphasise the inspiration of art by the physical materials from which it is made. Unlike Ruskin and his praise of Gothic architecture, however, he would devote his trilogy to praise of the post-Gothic revival in quattrocento Venice, Rimini, and other towns in Italy of the classicism of ancient Greece and Rome. He was excited doing research for this trilogy. He was also “very cold” that winter. And he again suffered with paranoid fear, this time fear of being “poisoned” by “a disgusting German woman”.8 “I’ve had a terrible winter and my work has gone badly,” he told his Old Rugbeian friend, Rolf Gardiner. “I have a peculiar and lonely genius,” he added.
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Elephantine decoration in the Tempio Actually, at the moment, I am not alone. Not knowing one’s own being yet, one fills in the waiting by helping others. So it was with my brother [Philip], so it is again now, an obligation taken on six months ago. I cannot break it, for my will is not sufficiently determined so as to excuse the causing of misery.9
Not wanting to cause Osbert Sitwell misery, he kept him company after leaving Florence in February 1927 for Sicily. After staying there through March and April he perhaps spent more time with Sitwell in mainland Italy, and at the premiere in Paris on 7 June 1927 of the Ballets Russes production, Le pas d’acier. “I have never been so thrilled,” he told Pound after returning from Paris to Lower Stonehams where, encouraged by Pound, he continued “slogging away” at research he had by then begun into the life and achievements of Sigismondo Malatesta, research which he continued that July in Venice.10 Here he again stayed at the Casa dei tre Occhi; spent time with Pound and his mistress, Olga Rudge (pictured on p. 46);
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and wrote to Eddy telling him he had had “no affair” before or since leaving England but was nevertheless “fairly happy”.11 This was scarcely the case when, after taking his ailing brother, Geoffrey, to Rapallo, he returned to Lower Stonehams where he was described that August by an acquaintance, Kyrle Leng, as unsettling and insane.12 He was indeed evidently very unsettled by then having battled for some time with what he described as an inner daemon of fear. “I have never ceased to war with it, a war terribly acute these last miserable, unspeakably miserable, seven months,” he wrote overleaf from notes about quattrocento sculpture. [T]he latter months [fear] has issued forth with destruction every moment day and night leaving me only for moments that I may be drenched in bitterness, as for other moments in which I must make my choice between a state of bitterness and a state of insane, evil, worry.13
“I’m completely undone—by England and my family. It’s like losing my memory. Lost all touch with reality. My own like a lot of horrible ghosts, and the light here,” he wrote wretchedly to Olga. “I am nearly insane with not getting on with my work yet I funk another lonely pilgrimage. Can’t stand being alone any more, for I have never had a companion of any sort,” he told her. My life has been spent in being with my family (they never see anybody, loathe everybody) and getting away from them. I have met very few people even casually. Perhaps you are a kindred spirit, perhaps you aren’t. At any rate I shall prize beyond words the chance sometime of getting to know you. Would you let me know where you are, and perhaps tolerate me in the same town sometime?14
Olga invited him to stay near her in Venice. But he could not bring himself to go there. Anyway, he said, he had to stay home at Lower Stonehams to look after the family silver while Durham and Ethel were away and when they returned he was such “a nervous wreck” he had to be dosed up with strychnine and was too “cowardly” to leave.15
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Olga Rudge “In terrific hurry to pack as I am off to Italy tomorrow,” he wrote excitedly to Olga three weeks later from London. “I am going to Rapallo. I suppose Ezra, to whom remember me, will turn up there later? … I am taking a companion as I can’t stand being alone just yet.”16 His companion, Adrian “Curly” Kent—“a very tall, vague, bohemian
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figure with wild hair”—had been at school with him at Rugby and had subsequently completed a year’s drawing and painting course at the Slade.17
Ezra Pound playing tennis
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Now, shortly after his twenty-fourth birthday, Curly arrived with Stokes on 25 September 1927 in Rapallo where they stayed at the Hotel Marsala near Ezra and Dorothy Pound’s flat in the same street. “Adrian seems all right. I think his trouble is philosophic thought a la Russe. He is very lively on the tennis court,” Pound soon after reported.18 “Apart from restorating [sic] himself playing tennis, and attempting to disentangle Adrian’s ideas of ‘significance’ and of the that which is incapable of schematic treatment, etc. at lunch, he has done nothing constructive,” Pound wrote again the following week referring more to himself than to Stokes.19 “Have just, I HOPE, prevented Adrian from buying a house, and thereby annihilating his income,” Pound announced a few days later.20 Instead of buying a house Stokes moved on 18 October with Curly into rented accommodation, the Villa Giuditta, next to a church, San Bartolomeo, in hills above Rapallo. Here, with Curly for company, and with books about Sigismondo sent him by Olga from Paris, all initially went well. After Curly left, however, Stokes became distraught. “Have been in a state of siege. It is almost impossible to break the silence of the evenings here. I screech like a peacock from time to time and also play two mouth organs at once,” he wrote unhappily in early December.21 His unhappiness was compounded by worries about his “pipe-man” friend about whom he had previously written to Eddy.22 Now, in connection seemingly with the suppression in 1926 of the Rif Rebellion against Spanish colonial rule in Morocco, the pipeman had been imprisoned there. Stokes sent him tobacco and tried, but failed, “to aid his escape”.23 Bereft both of this friend and of Curly, he persuaded Osbert Sitwell to keep him company at the Villa Giuditta and help pay the rent. Osbert was also miserable. A play he had written with Sacheverell, All at Sea, had opened and closed after three performances that November in London. Now, in Rapallo that December, he missed Sacheverell and did “a good bit of solitary howling” perhaps, he speculated, because of “some sort of nasty spiritual crisis combined with the first flush of old age”.24 He also seemed to Pound to be “very depressed by freddo” in early January 1928 when Stokes was apparently briefly away in Milan, and was perhaps also away when Osbert invited the writer, Ethel Mannin, to lunch at the Villa Giuditta.25 “On the appointed day I climbed the mule-track to the villa in a deluging rain. The water came cascading down over the cobbles in miniature waterfalls, and the tops of the ranges of the great hills were blotted out by swirls of low-hanging clouds,” she recalled.
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Villa Giuditta renamed Villa Bice The villa was foursquare and whitewashed, and stood behind a little whitewashed church, so close that there was no more than a cobbled alleyway between church and house. Below the villa a lovely valley grey-green with olive terraces went down to the sea. … The two predominant features of the tiny room into which the
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Italian woman servant showed me were an oil-stove and a small table supporting a huge bowl of press-cuttings.26
The press cuttings might have pleased Stokes. Some were very positive. Having Osbert living with him, however, made him unhappy as did the presence of Durham and Ethel in Rapallo that winter. “I have had a terrible time and am fairly reduced. But all the encumbrances of my life, for long accumulating, are being swept up in these terrible months,” he wrote at the end of January.27 Then, in early February, the encumbrances were gone: Osbert left to join Sacheverell in San Remo; and, after being entertained to tea and lunch by Pound, Durham and Ethel also left Rapallo. Having longed for them to go, Stokes was miserable in their absence. “Noises now come hollow from the valley into this once-populated cottage. For I am alone here. Life seemed so solid but yesterday. Now my purposes are playing with the wintry boulders in the stream below,” he wrote. The strongholds of the mind vacate. Unreality looms larger and larger like an emptied drawer. The cold hand of a nightmare makes a pass, and lo! a dreadful case, the world is lost to me for ever! The endless winter of the Absolute has me. Why one thought rather than another, why that response, how can unreality stop. I choose nothing. Emotions are provoked by circumstance. Why do I have fear now and appetite later? What ever I feel, even if poignantly, I can suggest to myself that I might be feeling something else more worthy to be felt.28
The Absolute was no solution. Nor was the intellect with its habit of “smothering” life with “dead leaves of fear”. Nor was the “abstraction beauty”.29 “[We] give that [abstraction] as the cause for our pleasure in the landscape, whereas the cause lies in the need of the soul for externalization,” he wrote. Thus the origin of all abstractions. The feeling that the interest in an object is never confined to its particularity, is explained by conceiving that object as the particularization of some generality, or interesting abstraction. Abstraction, then, is due to the unexpressed, unexternalized soul which finds its medium of expression
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in particulars, regarding them essentially as the occasions of its expression.30
With this decision about the soul finding itself in its externalisation Stokes seemingly felt better. “Adrian to tea latish, recovered or nearly so from alien presences,” reported Pound.31 “Adrian’s friend out of jail in Africa,” he added before sending the following to Olga.32 The elegant elongated Stokes Constructed a wheel without spokes, He said: Simply you feel That the thing is a wheel From the image that it invokes.33
Then Stokes was gone having “dumped several books, 4 Criterions, and the last botl of Osbert’s eyetalyan champagne, and 6 tennis balls”.34 From Rapallo, it seems, he travelled around Italy gathering material for his quattrocento trilogy. By June he was in Scandicci from where he was volunteered by D. H. Lawrence, who was living nearby, to take proofs of his novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to his publisher in Florence. Stokes undertook this errand, reading the novel on the way and remained “very miserable”.35 Previously he had been buoyed up by news that his pipe-man friend had been released from jail in Morocco. But it turned out that he was still in jail. All he had been promised was a fair trial which could scarcely be guaranteed, Pound noted, “without some preliminary enquiry into the fax.”36 Stokes, however, was reasonably confident, while staying in northern Spain in early July, that he had secured the pipe-man’s release through bribing “his Spanish judges”.37 “No everything is wrong,” he nevertheless told Eddy, referring not to the pipe-man but to himself.38 Osbert was just about to complete a novel, The Man who Lost Himself, about a Stokes-like figure who was inspiring but mentally unwell. He had now replaced Stokes in his affections with another young man, David Horner. Much more upsetting for Stokes, however, was the fact that Curly had a girlfriend. “Adrian 1st reported to have left Venice for England—evidently dis- or pur-turbed by lady now occupying attention of Adrian 2nd,” noted Pound on 29 September.39
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Nevertheless, on 16 October, the two Adrians were together again when they arrived in Rapallo, Stokes bearing what Pound described as an “opus about orl the bhloomink renaissance” consisting of four typed essays devoted to Sigismondo, the Tempio, and to four quattrocento artists, Pisanello, Pasti, Agostino, and Alberti.40 With these essays Stokes sought to illustrate his previously developed emphasis on “the need of the soul for externalization” to which he added that this is achieved through the “zest for life” becoming visible as an outward “thing complete in itself”.41 After the dark ages of inward-looking medieval mysticism, the outward-looking humanism of the early Italian Renaissance impelled men to “manifest” and “embody” their inner experience in objective physical form, he declared. Sigismondo was an “archetype” of this humanist impulsion or compulsion to harness inwardly given energy in the outward physical form of the Tempio, claimed Stokes. “Sigismondo personifies, his building proclaims a constriction upon energy … pent-up to instant manifestation … mass all at once like mountains in unbroken sunlight,” he added.42
Sigismondo’s Tempio in Rimini
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“Sigismondo was the best fighter of the day. Violent the life but not extravagant. Constriction is never released; the same with Quattro Cento art, particularly the Tempio,” Stokes continued. Mass all at once, projection of stone, these quarries the opportunity for the Quattro Cento to create, just as the large earth, the driving rain, the prolific sun give birth to the blossom and compact fruit. Consciousness of stone, of the material as such, so that the stone itself palpitates, the flower of it drawn out by men upon the surface, arabesque in low relief rooted still to the inner core. Sigismondo was compressed with will to be manifest, so too the old stones which he touched …43
What a contrast this, declared Stokes, with modern artists looking inwards to “their personalities and intelligence” for inspiration in creating their art.44 “What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cézanne,” Clive Bell had asked in forging ideas influential on modern artists. The answer, proclaimed Bell, is that all the best works of art are imbued with the idea of “significant form” so that the resulting “forms and relations of forms … stir our aesthetic emotions”.45 “I remember when this fact became clear to me,” said Roger Fry, one of the then leading advocates of modern art. I came upon a picture by Chardin. It was a signboard painted to hang outside a druggist’s shop. It represented a number of glass retorts, a still, and various glass bottles, the furniture of a chemist’s laboratory of that time. You will admit that there was not much material for [Freudian] wish-fulfilment (unless the still suggested remote possibilities of alcohol). Well, it gave me a very intense and vivid sensation. Just the shape of those bottles and their mutual relations gave me the feeling of something immensely grand and impressive and the phrase that came into my mind was “This is just how I felt when I first saw Michael Angelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.”46
No mention here of the physical materials of art inspiring its creation which Stokes emphasised in the four essays he now showed Pound.
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In them he developed this emphasis in terms of the claim that the best quattrocento sculpture and architecture was inspired by the marble from which they are made to bring forth the sea and animal life it suggested as “incrustation” and “stone-blossom”. As illustration he cited low reliefs in the Tempio externalising a host of zodiacal figures and Roman deities—Diana and Saturn, for instance—as well as a “court of dolphins, maidens and infants” from the “centuries of watery weight” converting the lime droppings of once alive animals into limestone and marble.47 Like the power exercised over Sigismondo by his mistress, Isotta, the Tempio’s marble low relief of Diana shows her, said Stokes, “in an excess of hypnotic power” summoning “the yet remaining lords of the universe”, represented by other figures in the Tempio.
Tempio low reliefs Diana and Saturn, c.1456
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They hasten to enrich the element that sustains the human form to its greatest glory … Venus comes reborn out of the further sea into the new element, her chariot drawn … by two white swans. Trees stand upon the tallest waves that move in procession behind her. Doves descend to give her greeting and to inspect the open shell, her birthplace, that she flourishes. As she touches land she disappears. Infusion is complete. Nothing remains to the outer senses, all is music now, imperceptible to the ear, loud in the blood.48
Impressed by this Pound declared Stokes, together with himself, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis as “the only writers of the day”.49 Stokes was excited by this. But he was also downhearted when, as before, Curly left him alone in Rapallo. In the absence of Curly he went to the cinema with another frequent visitor to Rapallo, W. B. Yeats. He was also entertained to tea and dinner with him by Pound. Then, at the end of November, he left Rapallo for London before returning to Italy, not to Rapallo but to nearby Genoa where he stayed close to the town’s railway station at the Hotel Aquila. “Do come in with Dorothy sometime if you feel like it, though I now feel rather nervous about Genoa as it is not turning out quite right and it would be awful if I have nothing to show you,” he told Pound from the Hotel Aquila, where Curly joined him.50 Then again Curly was gone, but soon after met up with Stokes in Paris. From there, it seems, they almost immediately left at the beginning of February 1929 for Venice where they found Olga staying at their hotel, the Pensione Seguso, near the house she had just bought at 252 Calle Querini. Soon, thanks to money from Durham, Stokes moved with Curly into “a really magnificent apartment” at the Casa dei tre Occhi, “the main room having one of the occhi [eyes] … at one end from which it runs back to windows at the other end almost on the lagoon, and getting all the sun”.51 Not only that, it was also “full of Titians and Tiepolos” exclaimed Evelyn Waugh after visiting Stokes there that spring.52 From the Casa dei tre Occhi (pictured overleaf) and with help from Pound’s librarian friend, Manlio Dazzi, Stokes did research both for Pound and for himself in Venice. He also used the findings of Dazzi’s art historian friend, Arnoldo Ferriguto, “a young Italian of the Fascist state”, Stokes called him, in deploring Jewish doctors in quattrocento Venice for leaving surgery to barbers so as to give themselves more time to steal “gold from corpses”.53
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An “eye” of the Casa dei tre Occhi The flagrant anti-Semitism of Stokes’s resulting article, despite being Jewish himself, contributed, perhaps, to it seldom, if ever, being republished. The article was nevertheless important as means by which Stokes extended his claim regarding the need of the soul to externalise itself from Sigismondo and the Tempio to paintings by Piero della Francesca and Giorgione.
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Piero della Francesca, The Flagellation, 1460 “For Piero, space, progression of colour or of perspective, was the symbol of externalization” as emblem of the “principle of Life the flux … to make itself outward, to make itself object, solid,” Stokes argued in this article. As illustration he cited Piero’s painting, The Flagellation, of which he said: Come before the picture, a spectator’s body will accompany the flash of his eye, slither on the polychrome floor, be caught to polychrome beams and sent back between the legs of the flagellator from the door whose hinges reflect light undisturbed, finally be allowed to recover near the smitten Christ columnar as the pillar to which his arms are tied. For so powerful the spaces of this polychrome architecture that Christ is robbed of his pain … Magnetic lightning runs along the architecture’s perspective lines, leaving brutality intact … Every tone is weighty in correspondence. Stabilization by means of a grand architecture served Piero well …54
As further illustration of his emphasis on art as emblem of externalisation Stokes cited Giorgione’s painting, The Tempest, inspired, argued
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Stokes, not by inward-looking neo-Platonist transcendentalism but by Aristotle’s outward-looking theory of the natural elements of fire, air, earth, and water. “You can discern the four elements in the peacocklight before the narrow thunder breaks; their affinities stand clear to the lightning,” Stokes said of The Tempest. “Giorgione associates the man erect with the fire and air principles, the woman expressionless, full of gravity, with earth and the stream.”55
Giorgione, The Tempest, c.1508
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Meanwhile Stokes had planned to go walking with Curly—“probably from Rimini across Urbino to Borgo San Sepolcro”, he said.56 Whether or not this plan came to fruition, he was in London in time to attend the Covent Garden premiere, on 26 July 1929, of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes productions, Le Bal and Prodigal Son, not long before the diabetic Diaghilev’s death in Venice on 19 August that summer. “The ballet is finished. It’s a hard blow for me,” Stokes wrote from Lower Stonehams.57 In a bid to save the Ballets Russes from financial collapse now that Diaghilev was dead he offered all his money to its London agent, Eric Wollheim. “Give what you like my boy but you won’t get another penny from me,” warned Durham.58 Wollheim, however, either ignored or rejected Stokes’s offer thereby leaving him with funds he needed to finance his continuing work as a writer and the psychoanalytic treatment on which he soon after embarked following recurrence of what he described as the “bloody tunnel” of the breakdown he had suffered while doing research into Sigismondo at the Villa Giuditta.59
PART II PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FAME
CHAPTER SIX
Treatment
I
think on the whole though, whereas there is not much hope for me anyhow, perhaps a psycho-analist [sic] might relieve some of my agony,” Stokes wrote in despair from Genoa in late 1928 or early 1929 to Eddy who had been treated by a psychoanalyst in Germany (see p. 23).
“
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What do you think, are they intelligent as all that? I know it is terribly expensive and probably useless, but I am now confirmed in a terrible and absurd morbidity. This is really a cry of help. Are psychoanalists [sic] any use for congenital absurdities, not by any means simple histeria [sic], and if so do you know of anybody, intelligent and of the profession, speaking English and at present living in Paris? If I was just a little bit different I should be alright I feel. … Did it do anything for you? I can’t really think that sex accounts for my eccentric perversities. They seem innate, but then if lulled other things … might get a chance.1
After writing this to Eddy he went to Paris, but he did not stop long enough to get treatment there. And it was not till later that he pursued the matter further after returning in the summer of 1929 from Venice to London. 63
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Here, as he was going into the British Museum, he happened to meet a contemporary from Rugby, William “Robbie” Robson-Scott. Previously he had come across Robbie’s translation of Freud’s book, Die Zukunft einer Illusion. Now he asked Robbie to tell him more about psychoanalysis from which he learnt that Robbie was in psychoanalytic treatment with Ernest Jones. “Dear Robbie, Are you still in torment as am I? I remain completely listless doing nothing, absolutely nothing, except in reading the sporting pages and playing cricket,” he wrote on returning to Lower Stonehams. “Robbie,” he also asked, “is there such a thing as a PsychoAnalytic library? I want very much to get hold of some books and the ordinary libraries don’t have them. Where ever does one buy them?”2 Prompted by this, it seems, Robbie gave a copy of his translation of Die Zukunft einer Illusion (The Future of an Illusion) to Stokes for his twenty-seventh birthday that October. By then, or soon after, having talked with Robbie for “weeks and months almost” about psychoanalysis, Stokes decided that, like Robbie, he too would get psychoanalysed.3 His initial psychoanalytic consultation, however, with Jones’s psychoanalyst colleague, James Strachey, did not go well. “Strachey sat and never said a word—overdid it I thought—while I babbled on, infuriated by a grinning photograph of Freud smoking a cigar. I’m to be handed over I think to Adrian Stephen—I think that’s the name—brother of Virginia Woolf,” Stokes grumbled. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear that I was going to be his first case inasmuch as my remarks about wanting somebody intelligent etc might have given Strachey the idea. And he had suggested Glover at first. Now I don’t want to be practised on. Further, I loathe London. I’ve decided I could not possibly stay there, so I shall come up every day from here [Lower Stonehams]. Of course if there was a psycho-analyst in or near, Reading, or even Oxford, it would suit me infinitely better. But how is one to find out? Ernest Jones might know. Could you just ask him if he knows of one at Reading, or Newbury or district? Fully qualified: of course.4
Since no such psychoanalyst, it seems, could be found in Oxford, Reading, or Newbury, Stokes had to make do with an appointment on 5 December in London with the psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein. Born in Vienna in 1882, Klein had married young and lived with her husband, Arthur Klein, and their children—Melitta, Hans, and Eric— in Budapest. Here she was psychoanalysed by Sandor Ferenczi. Then,
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after the end of the First World War and after the end of her marriage to Arthur Klein, she moved to Berlin and then to London where she became one of the first to pioneer the psychoanalytic treatment of very young children. This led her to develop the theory that adults, as well as children, entertain fantasies about parts of the mother’s body—her breasts and insides—as objects of desire and destruction such that she is internalised as a loved and hated, good and bad, maternal superego figure in the mind.5 Klein went on to apply this theory in psychoanalysing the paintings of a Scandinavian artist, Ruth Kjär, as motivated by Kjär facing and seeking to repair damage done by fantasies of maternal destruction.6 She presented her resulting paper to fellow psychoanalysts in London on 15 May 1929 by which time she had moved, or was about to move, into a flat, 93c Linden Gardens, in Notting Hill. And it was in her consulting room in this flat that Stokes’s almost daily psychoanalytic treatment with her began in early January 1930. “It’s a woman, said by Ernest Jones to me to be the best analyst in Europe. She puts everything down to brothers,” Stokes told his Old Rugbeian friend, Joseph Macleod.7 Klein did indeed attribute Stokes’s troubles to his brothers—to his identifying with his beloved oldest brother, Philip, and with his hated middle brother, Geoffrey. Yet he also sought to help Geoffrey in every way, including trying to aid his recovery from physical illness, out of guilt for his mistreatment and cruelty to him. He was accordingly very distressed by Geoffrey’s wife Kathleen— the mother of Geoffrey’s son Richard (born on 15 August 1925)—trying to get him to help her obtain a divorce from Geoffrey when his physical ills were diagnosed as incurable.
With Richard at Lower Stonehams
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Now, as well as feeling guilty about Geoffrey, Stokes was preoccupied with Curly’s impending marriage to his fiancée, Kay Facey. “The girl is admirable, and that’s a more expert opinion than you realize,” he said with bravado to Pound.8 “She really does seem to be ideal as well as in love with Curly, and there does seem to be a chance of them being superbly happy,” he told Joseph Macleod. “That makes me happy, as my hack witch [Klein] would tell you, because I identify myself with Curly so that’s the way I get my heterosexual pleasure.”9 “Melanie is certainly a genius. So far it has upset everything for me. I like her very much. An awful thing is that I have developed an unsuppressable giggle whenever she co-ordinates expressions which she considers to have a phallic reference,” he wrote to Robbie. The suspense is awful. I would like a 12 hour sitting or be hypnotized or something. Meanwhile one is a corpse rotting away with feelings long dead. And the way the corpse walks away to turn up at the same time next day, is most macabre. In fact I am more than ever miserable, and my dominant feeling about Melanie, is pity for her.10
He had pitied Ethel. Now he pitied Klein. Or, rather, he worried he might lose her to “some fatal accident” occurring during a weekend or holiday breaks in his treatment.11 He himself spent the first holiday break in his treatment in Italy. That April also saw the publication by T. S. Eliot of his article about Piero and Giorgione in The Criterion after which its Faber & Faber publishers immediately asked to publish his quattrocento trilogy. He hoped the first volume might be “ready for autumn publication” but soon realised that this was “utterly impossible”.12 Certainly there seemed no prospect of his completing this volume during that summer break in his psychoanalytic treatment, when Klein spent time with her older son, Hans, and possibly also with her younger son, Erich, in Brittany. In her absence Stokes suffered with acute anxiety while having minor surgery on his nose due to damage incurred apparently by schoolboy boxing at Heddon Court. The “bright orderly and efficient” atmosphere of the nursing home reminded him of Heddon Court. It added to his anxiety preventing him from sleeping before the surgery. After it he wept, “cursed the surgeon”, and felt an overwhelming desire to see Curly, who duly visited. When he was gone, however, Stokes was overcome by “terrible fear”.13
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Melanie and Hans Klein, Brittany, summer 1930 He broke out in a sweat and longed to see Ethel. “So after all that is the axis of my life, the good mother, and I had been trying to do without an axis and had fallen prey to the bad mother. Suddenly all Mrs. Klein’s teaching is borne out,” he told himself. “How terrible it would be if the conflict should be too much for me, the bad mother too strong just when Mrs. Klein is beyond reach and I am ill.”14 He got the nursing home staff to arrange for Ethel to visit. But when she arrived he was “immediately extremely embarrassed” by the “nurses seeing her come in with several parcels of sweets”. It reminded him of his fear that his schoolmasters despised him for being spoilt by her and by Durham when they visited him at Heddon Court. He did not want the gifts she brought him in the nursing home. She was also wary about kissing him there lest this embarrass him. She thereby became a “bad” mother in his mind, he said. Only by becoming a “good” mother, he added, using terminology he had learnt from Klein, could he bring himself to cling to Ethel in the nursing home.15 Previously he had written about being at war with an inner daemon of fear. Now he wrote that his fear of something “brutal and awful”
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hypnotising him as its “victim” could only be reduced through his having a good mother figure in his mind. Only then could he overcome the panic fear which had assailed him when, for instance, he experienced the anaesthetic used in his nursing home operation as hoisting him “down the darkness of chloroform, a poisonous, cavernous route”. To counter this panic fear he resolved to think of the “good mother” whereupon, despite being “a bit feverish”, he managed, he said, to produce a normal thermometer reading and get himself discharged back home to Lower Stonehams.16 Here, however, he continued to suffer with anxiety about having been bettered by the “admirable he-man” surgeon at the nursing home. He also panicked lest, despite every cell in his body fighting to recover, his ego might help his “enemy” superego prevent him from “getting well”. Yet he was also hopeful that, with continued psychoanalytic treatment, he might be able to “pin down” and define, limit, and thus counter the “terrible force” and “inhuman cruelty” and terrifying power of the superego daemon causing his panic fear and anxiety.17 From notes he began keeping the following April 1931 about his psychoanalytic treatment by Klein it seems he came to understand the terrifying power of this superego daemon as constituted, at least in part, by persisting rage against Ethel for bottle—rather than breastfeeding him as a baby; by a fantasy of cruelly beating her breast to bits, and attacking her with his urine; and by a fantasy of her watching him from on top of a building when, as a child, he urinated in Hyde Park, which it seemed to Klein he equated with Ethel as “hopeless, dead, dreary” due to her “suspicion always of dirt”.18 As for the troubling endless-seeming “flow” of words and preoccupations which had bothered him at Oxford, and as for the troubling tremendosities about which he had written in The Thread of Ariadne, Klein interpreted them as rooted in infantile fantasies about the flow of his faeces.19 She also interpreted in stark faecal terms his memory of hating the black stocking he wore as a child of which she said: His associations showed that the interior of his parents’ house had always seemed specially gloomy to him—“dead”, in fact—and that he held himself responsible for this gloominess—or rather for the destruction inside his mother’s body and his own, symbolized by the gloomy house—which he had brought about by his dangerous excrements (the black stockings). In consequence of his
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extensive repression of his “inside” and his displacement of it on to his “outside”, [he] had come to hate and fear the latter, not only in regard to his personal appearance, though this was a continual source of worry and care to him, but to other allied matters. For instance, he had the same loathing for certain articles of dress, especially his underclothes, that he had had for his black stockings and felt as though they were his enemies and were hemming him in and weighing him down by clinging so closely to his body. They represented his internalized objects and excrements which were persecuting him from within. In virtue of the displacement of his fears of internal dangers into the external world, his enemies inside him had been transformed into enemies outside him.20
This was not easily digestible stuff. Nor were Klein’s interpretations of some of Stokes’s other memories and associations as symbolising his fantasies about Durham attacking Ethel with faeces, equated with the penis, and about himself likewise attacking Durham and Ethel in their sexual intercourse together such that he imagined “the interior of the woman’s body” as “an infinite and unexplorable expanse where every kind of danger and death lurked” and “as a kind of container for terrifying penises and dangerous excrements”.21 How, then, did Stokes experience Klein? Transferring onto her his fantasies about Ethel retaliating against his actual and imagined attacks on her body and on her sexual coupling with Durham, he had, said Klein, fantasies about her as the child-eating witch in the story of Hansel and Gretel; as one of the tramps in Hyde Park who watched him eat there as a child as though they were “avenging mothers from whom stuff is taken”; and as a black horse in one of his dreams taking revenge for having been “accidentally kicked” and left “maimed and close to death”.22 Dreading women’s revenge for his actual or imagined attacks on them, he was fearful, said Klein, of their bodies as though their “sticking out” breasts and buttocks were means by which they would wreak their vengeance on his attacks on them.23 As an infant, Klein claimed, he had evidently defended against fear of Ethel retaliating against his rage and attacks on her “soft” body for not breastfeeding him by finding a substitute in the “hard” teat of his feeding bottle. He also found a substitute in the penis as “strong, life-giving, straight” after being initiated, as a toddler, into penis-sucking fellatio by Geoffrey.24 Hence, said Klein,
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Stokes’s homosexual affairs after leaving Rugby, affairs which served, she maintained, as defence against fear of women’s bodies as sites of oral, urinary, faecal, and penile attack. “To him, only the male, in whom all was manifest and clearly visible and who concealed no secrets within himself, was the natural and beautiful object,” she decided. “As he displaced all that was capable of arousing his fear from his father’s body on to his mother’s interior so he very strongly repressed everything concerning the inside of his own body and accentuated everything that was visible.”25 It was a way of understanding psychoanalytically the motivation of his emphasis on art externalising inner ferment in outer visible form. Previously Klein had written about boys defending against fear and dread of the mother attacking their sexuality by emphasising their “masculine” superiority, by recourse to “excessive aggression, and, despite their fears of their mothers attacking their sexuality, finding that their penis is reassuringly intact”.26 Now, during her psychoanalytic treatment of Stokes, she interpreted his dealing with his fears by looking for reassurance at the penis of men at the swimming pool he frequented at Regent Street Polytechnic in London. He also dealt with fear caused him by the sadistic cruelty of his superego by externalising it through being cruelly sadistic to others. Cowardice made him choose weaker men like Geoffrey as objects of his sadism. He was fearful that his clothes might betray his feelings of cowardice and inferiority. He was also fearful lest his inner conflict between sadism and guilt show on his face as sinister and mad. As a result, despite being remarkably good-looking, he was afraid others found him physically repulsive. He felt less conflict between sadism and guilt in sexual affairs with men who trusted him and made little of his sadism. With such men, or at least with men who were similar to his beloved eldest brother, Philip, he fell deeply in love. With other men his use of his penis as instrument of his sadism left him sexually unsatisfied. As for women, he only had sexual intercourse with them “once or twice” and then only from curiosity, from wanting to do what other men did, and from not wanting to upset the woman involved who was always more eager to have sex with him than he was with her.27 He had little confidence in being able to repair the damage done by his imagined or actual attacks on others. He could not bear his resulting impotence in sex with women. Nor could he bear his impotence in
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seeking to help Geoffrey recover from his physical ills. It was this, said Klein, that was the immediate cause of the breakdown bringing Stokes into psychoanalytic treatment. But he found its formality, lack of contact, and Klein being Jewish difficult just as he disliked, he said, “Jewish formality, emptiness and suspicion, nothing given, jealous pride” against which he sought to develop his capacity for “intimacy”.28 He valued being able to talk about all this with Klein. He also valued her attention to inner destructiveness as the cause of what he described as an “overplus of anxiety”.29 As he increasingly internalised her and her treatment as good and trustable, said Klein, he felt more confident about having the psychological wherewithal to resume work on his quattrocento trilogy. Armed with this confidence he decided to pursue this work by ending his psychoanalytic treatment, at least temporarily, so as to give himself time to pursue his quattrocento research in Dalmatia. On the way he stopped in Venice where Olga wrote admiringly about him as the “deletissimo Adriano” and as “awfully nice & much older”.30 But he felt “thoroughly ill” on arriving in Trieste, abandoned his plans to go to Dalmatia, and instead decided to spend time in Switzerland before resuming his psychoanalytic treatment, sooner than he had previously anticipated, early that October.31 In the following weeks he also continued work on the first volume of his quattrocento trilogy—work which Klein likened to his countering an image of Ethel’s body and London as “dark, lifeless and ruined” by imagining “a city full of life, light and beauty”. His work on this volume had the same meaning for him as this city, claimed Klein, since in writing it he brought together “each separate bit of information, each single sentence” so that it represented himself and his mother as “restored” and whole.32 By the time this volume was complete he had taken over the lease from his Old Etonian friend, Robert Byron, of a top floor flat at 21 York Buildings near the Thames embankment, Charing Cross station, and the Adelphi theatre on the Strand. And it was from this flat that he told Olga early the following February, “I have been working day and night. The result is the 1st volume of my great work which appears this spring.”33 During that Easter break in his treatment he spent time with Curly and Kay Kent at their home on the estate, centring on a medieval banqueting hall at Dartington in Devon, of an American millionaire, Dorothy
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Whitney Straight, and her Yorkshire born husband, Leonard Elmhirst. Here they had founded a progressive school where Kay worked as a secretary, and a modern art community where Curly gave talks and contributed paintings to an exhibition, and where a new school of dance and mime gave an opening performance on 2 April 1932 which it seems Stokes attended. “My dear Adrian, The official excuse for this note is to ask you to try and persuade Eddy [Sackville-West] to come over before Thursday to see me. I hope your index [of The Quattro Cento] is at last progressing,” the poet, W. H. Auden, wrote the following day. No, I can’t really write like that. One can’t write a bread and butter letter to thank someone for raising one from the dead. Life feels very rich and warm all over just now. Please give my love to Curly and Kaye [sic], and take a lot for yourself, my dear, Wystan.34
That summer Auden applied for work at Dartington perhaps in the hope of seeing more of Stokes there. But his application was unsuccessful.
Dartington Hall, Devon
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“Term ends June 23rd. After that let us go somewhere. Germany, Italy, Estonia, where you will. Should you tire of London and drive a week-end in Scotland nothing would be nicer for us than a visit, best love,” Auden wrote again to Stokes after returning to his teaching job at Larchfield Academy in Dunbartonshire.35 He sent Stokes a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious, and a copy of his own newly published book of poems, The Orators. “Please write,” he begged. “And let me know when there’s a chance of seeing you again. I’m living miserably like a hen, scratching for food, best love, Wystan.”36 When this failed to elicit a response Auden became desperate. “My dear Adrian, Are you dead, sick, abroad, imprisoned, cautious or cross?” he asked. Perhaps, he wondered, his previous missives had not reached Stokes. Perhaps he had moved. Worrying that this might be the case he wrote to him care of Faber & Faber. “You might drop me a pc or something to let me know that you still exist,” he pleaded.37 “My dear Adrian, I should have written long ago to congratulate you on your book,” he then wrote in trying another tack after the first volume of Stokes’s quattrocento trilogy was published. “The poetry in it is quite devastating. You are one of the three contemporary writers I can read with genuine admiration,” he assured him. What greaves me is that those who deserve you will probably never read this, thinking, from the title that, you are another of those rich bric-a-brac-loving ninnies. But when the day comes, and come, believe me, it will, when you overcome your fear of your own life, your books will reveal to the real English what you are, a master. … I’m coming to London in July. I hope you’ll be able to spare me some of your time, and if possible walk with me, best love, Wystan.38
Whether or not Stokes had time for Auden that July he had by then become something of a celebrity. “None of the West-end clubs is more pleasant and restful on a hot day than the Savile, in Brook-street,” reported a gossip columnist in the Daily Express. “I lunched there yesterday, for instance. At one table sat Mr. Adrian (‘anti-Spengler’) Stokes and Mr. Robert (‘Byzantine’) Byron, at another Mr. Evelyn (‘Vile Bodies’) Waugh. Mr. Stokes is a talented writer, and untidy. Mr. Byron is a talented writer, and tidy.”39
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Stokes remained untidy. So did his 21 York Buildings flat. It was such a “mess” he only found a book he particularly wanted when he discovered from the London library that he had borrowed this self-same book from there a couple of years before. This prompted him to look harder for the book which he unearthed from his flat’s “twilit silt of books and dust” by which time the first volume of his quattrocento trilogy had won him considerable esteem as one of Britain’s most up-and-coming radical art critics.40
CHAPTER SEVEN
Stone alive
I
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t is a book for the ‘whole life’, it is very much a book for ‘stone alive’,” Ezra Pound wrote admiringly in his review of the first volume of Stokes’s quattrocento trilogy, The Quattro Cento, following its publication in June 1932.1 Unlike others, who had praised quattrocento and cinquecento art as inspired by the inwardly given genius of its creators, Stokes argued in this book that the best early Italian Renaissance art was inspired by its creators wanting to bring to life the physical materials from which it is made, quintessentially stone, as emblem of the compulsion of the human spirit to externalise itself in stable outward form. “I call Quattro Cento the art of the fifteenth century which expresses this compulsion without restraint,” he declared. The highest achievement in architecture was a mass-effect in which every temporal or flux element was transformed into a spatial steadiness. Meanwhile in sculpture, all the fantasies of dynamic emergence, of birth and growth and physical grace had been projected within the stone. The stone is carved to flower, to bear infants, to give the fruit of land and sea. These emerge as a revelation or are encrusted there.2
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Verrocchio, Lavabo, c.1465
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As illustration he described at length a quattrocento marble basin, or lavabo, created by Verrocchio in the old sacristy of San Lorenzo in Florence. “[A] lion’s mask looks out, while at the sides are griffins with women’s heads and tails that intercoil to hoist dead weight of bath, rich cup and urn,” he wrote of this sculpture. The smooth rivets of these tails show by contrast how corrugated with flapping spines are the monsters of precious dropping above them. Marine splendours have descended upon the urn and crested cup, scorning the bath where priests wash their hands; marble embraced to remembrance of primeval beginnings in lime dropped by countless animals. White upon white stone, these symbols, these gradual amphibian progenitors; while the delicate mouth of the urn passed over, unencumbered, comes free from the background. There, oak in a huge wreath emblazons the green and slimy disc, setting off the architecture of the laden vessels. Ribbons stream on the wind; and where above the falcon sets on the day with his armour of plumage, the wind blows him back tense.3
With its “tense concretion” this marble basin captures “the life-flux” in “tangible stone” converting “formless power to organized show”.4 “[U]nder the hands of fifteenth-century sculptors, the stone blossomed as if subject to the steadiness of all rooted living forms,” Stokes proclaimed. He called the effect “stone-blossom”. He illustrated it again and again. Examples included a well-head, for instance, sculpted to reveal “putti or infant cupids” blossoming or emerging from its red Verona marble material as “emblems of release, of a bursting from bonds”.5 “[O]nly sculptors with a passion for the material, stone, will keep so close to this primary fantasy that”, he continued, “they create for the stone her children in the image of male human infants. And so the marble putti who play along the marble of Donatello’s singing gallery, are the most intense manifestation of stone-blossom.” Then, extending what he had learnt from Klein in writing about the putto, or infant, of quattrocento sculpture, he said: The putto is a pagan emblem to those overburdened by sense of guilt … [W]e of the West have symbolized fecundity by the infant, by the play of infants in whom the primary desires that make the
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adult world limitless, subterranean, dark, are seen bright and immediate and in their least unsettled state. We in the West believe … that the child’s intent play in modes hateful and loving, express a more real necessity than does the grown god’s esoteric power to lure and to destroy. And since the putto is unguarded, without reserve, he symbolizes as well as the necessity, the ideal of emotional externalization … the translation outwards of the formless flux of passions, to definite, concentrated, objective form.6
The quattrocento putto is first and foremost a “symbol of joy and freedom”. Donatello’s “putto is a powerful plaything both in muscle and in sex”, Stokes added in extolling the marble infants of Donatello’s Cantoria in Florence.7
Donatello, Cantoria, c.1433 He deplored by contrast the “elegance” and “reserve” of the doors designed by Ghiberti for the baptistery of Florence Cathedral. He also deplored what he described as the “guilty-conscious emphasis on what is calm and on what is sweet” in the sculpture of Luca della Robbia. To this he added criticism of quattrocento artists who “manipulated but did not love” the physical materials of their art.8
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He also criticised, as he had in his “Preliminary Cantos”, the uncontained energy of quattrocento buildings designed by Brunelleschi and other architects in Florence.9 In such buildings, he now wrote, “[p]ilasters, strips of line, arcs … hurry to their bases” due to their designers using “perspective science … invented to enable fluid effects of speed”.10 Speed—unsteadied and uncontained tremendosities and excitements—was not what he wanted from the visual arts, quattrocento or otherwise. Rather his continuing psychoanalytic treatment revealed to him his longing to steady excitements, fantasies, and fears emanating, said Klein, from his not sufficiently bringing together in his mind loved and hated, good and bad, images of Durham and Ethel, and of his brothers, Philip and Geoffrey. She psychoanalysed his work on The Quattro Cento as a way of steadying torn apart images of others in experiencing them instead as whole and outside his damaging fantasies about them. He, in turn, praised the whole-making “mass-effect” of quattrocento buildings, especially the courtyard designed by Luciano Laurana for the ducal palace in Urbino.11 “Luciano did not stucco his brick. He left it rough. In the second place his stone is white; pilasters are thin, plain, unfluted, immeasurably straight and smooth,” Stokes wrote in praise of this courtyard. The stone, then, lies on the brick in low relief, yet stands out simple, distinct, a white magic, nitidezza [clearness]. The unpassable space between window-frame and pilaster along the storey, or the exact framing of a window that lies back on the wall—for the colonnade beneath is broad—give so supreme an individuality to each stone shape (though every pilaster, for example, except for his place, is the same as the next), that one appears to witness a miraculous concurrence of masterpieces of sculpture, each designed to show the beauties of his neighbour as unique. There is no traffic among them. Their positions are untraversable, and no hand shall dare to touch two stone forms at a time. They flower from the brick, a Whole made up of Ones each as single as the Whole. What could be more different from Brunellesque running lines, than this sublime fixture of the manifest?12
As for the columns of this courtyard’s arcade, they are “brothers”, said Stokes. “Nowhere must they irremediably join. They must be apart for concerted strength.”13
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Luciano-designed Urbino courtyard built in 1467–1472 “[S]olids afford an effect of mass only when they also allow the immediate, the instantaneous synthesis that the eye alone of the senses can perform,” he added to his praise of the Luciano-designed courtyard in Urbino. An undecorated wall, perhaps better than a decorated one, may give a strong impression of mass, but only when there are variations in its surface, mostly of colour or tone, that the eye with one flash discovers coherent, so that perceptions of succession belonging to any estimate of length or height or density, retire in favour of a feeling that here you witness a concatenation, a simultaneity, that the object is exposed to you, all of it all at once. And just because stone is solid and fixed and yet has the power in a high degree to reflect light, to accept tone, thus making a purely visual synthesis possible, it is the ideal vehicle of mass-effect and therefore the revealer of the spatial dimension, and so the basic inspirer of the visual arts.14
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The same is true, said Stokes, of paintings by Piero della Francesca—even when they represent “a battle in progress”—since the resulting “shapes by means of colour and perspective … afford a sense of completeness” subsuming “ferment psychological and physical … in terms … of unalterable positions in space”.15 “With love of stone, as characteristic of the Italian Quattro Cento, [Stokes] couples the immediate realisation of space as an end in itself,” admired Charles Marriott in The Listener.16 “The architect’s command of space and mass-effect, his power of revealing an entirety by simultaneity rather than by rhythm, is displayed and superbly illustrated by the reproduction and description of Luciano Laurana’s courtyard at Urbino,” applauded another reviewer of The Quattro Cento.17 “Mr. Adrian Stokes, the author of the most remarkable and enthralling book on an art subject that I have come across for many a long day … makes words blossom as the marble blossomed under the chisel of some Renaissance sculptor,” enthused the art critic, P. G. Konody, in The Observer.18 “[Stokes’s] survey is wide, and in point of sheer creative criticism”, said another art critic, Frank Rutter, in voting The Quattro Cento, with its copy of a detail from a Piero della Francesca battle scene on its cover, “the most important original art book” of 1932.19 “[T]his book should be read not only by amateurs of art, but by those who actually practise it,” given Stokes’s implication “that no design can be valid in its affirmation unless first conceived visually in terms of the material to be used”, insisted Robert Byron in Week-End Review.20 “This is an unusually good book … Mr. Stokes’s sympathies and sensibilities being extraordinarily like those of Ruskin,” explained Kenneth Clark, then curator of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. [Stokes] has Ruskin’s love of stones and marbles, all that devout sensuality which made him prefer the colour of Venice and Verona to the frozen calculations of Florence. Like Ruskin he prefers the anonymous Veronese carver of a well-head to most of the Florentine swells.21
“Stokes has not only picked the best period, defined it, limited his definitions, but he has for a number of years ransacked Italy not as archaeologist, but as looker. He has carried his eyes about and made them
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Book cover
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work,” admired Ezra Pound. “The incontestable interest of Stokes’ work lies in his not having started from a theory (even from a correct one). His concern has led him to objective facts and he has compared them, correlated them, setting shape against shape.”22 Sometime, Pound hoped, Stokes would tell the story of how he told the eminent art critic, Bernard Berenson, “where to git off at”.23 Stokes, however, did not tell this story in the second volume of his quattrocento trilogy. Instead he devoted it to developing its first volume’s stone alive aesthetic in terms of emphasis on the importance of artists responding to the physical material of their art by carving it to reveal what it inwardly suggests rather than modelling it to conform with their preconceived fantasies and ideas.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Carving
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tokes’s research in support of his carving aesthetic in the second volume of his quattrocento trilogy, Stones of Rimini, took him in early August 1932 to Venice on “what might prove to have been a honeymoon”.1 His potential bride was a young sculptor, Mollie Higgins, to whom he dedicated Stones of Rimini and who, worried by “Adriano!” shouts from gondoliers greeting Stokes in Venice, feared this might prove a prelude to her being taken to “a nest of homosexuals”.2 Perhaps she was also worried by Stokes’s enjoyment of open homophilia in Dalmatia where he took her, across the Adriatic, in pursuit of his research for his quattrocento trilogy. “A lot of politics enters into the art criticism of these parts, and the museum officials here are resolved to convert me to the Croatian point of view, about 15th century carving,” he wrote that summer from Dalmatia where he marvelled in seeing boys and men fondle each other. “Boys caress themselves and each other,” he wrote. “The dirtiest and fattest of stevedores mince along the quay hand in hand … and the most affectionate dispositions seem to wear layer upon layer of ragged shirt, as too trousers, through which, however, flesh shows.”3
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Sailing on the Adriatic, c.August 1932 “Then, of course, there has been a baby scare of some ten days duration. However I took the woman by the stomach and pommelled her: and that’s alright,” he said following his and Mollie’s return to Italy where, at Rimini, they enacted fantasies of themselves as Sigismondo and his mistress, Isotta.4 From Rimini they went to Florence and to France where they avoided Klein after glimpsing her travelling on their train. And the following Monday 12 October, Stokes resumed his treatment with her in Notting Hill. Klein was making a difference to his life. So was Mollie Higgins. So too did another close friend, Margaret Gardiner. Through the scientist, Solly Zuckerman, she had met and become close friends with the sculptor, Barbara Hepworth. In 1932 she was persuaded by Hepworth to move into lodgings at the Hampstead home in Elm Row of an
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assistant curator at the Tate, Jim Ede. And it was from here, it seems, that she introduced Stokes that year to Hepworth who by then was living with the painter, Ben Nicholson, at the studio she had shared with her ex-husband, John Skeaping, 7 The Mall, round the corner from Mollie’s Belsize Park home and that of the sculptor, Henry Moore, and his painter wife, Irina, in Parkhill Road. “The meeting between Barbara, Ben and Adrian was a success from the start. They liked each other and they were deeply interested in each other’s work and ideas,” said Margaret.5 “They were working out their ideas together along with some architect friends—Leslie Martin for instance (Wells Coates was slightly of that group)—and they liked Adrian very much … he was extremely perceptive about their work … inspiring in fact.”6 She also remembered Stokes and Nicholson sharing a great love of games, including tennis which they played together in a club in Belsize Park, “Ben small, lively, with magnificent movements … Adrian tall with his rather long hair … tied back … and … very anxious to win”.7 Stokes’s tennis playing days with Pound in Rapallo were over now he was kept in London by his psychoanalytic treatment with Klein. He nevertheless kept in touch with Pound who often got him to run errands for him in connection with his Cantos and other writings. He also kept in touch with Pound through Olga who visited him whenever her work brought her to London. “She went up to town & wandered round & got lost & got dirty & then she went & dolled up … & waited for Adrian who turned up most shatteringly beautiful & took her to dine in Soho,” she told Pound of one of her meetings with Stokes.8 “It was lovely seeing you again and”, he said, “so nice to meet someone who does not ask too many questions about oneself. I am afraid I nearly always answer with a lot of lies.”9 Klein too noted “his extraordinary power of dissimulation” through which, she said, he hid from others his inner psychological ills.10 He also hid his feelings from himself, she said, by dominating and “managing” others.11 He deplored, however, this self-same dominating approach by artists in creating their art in so far as they modelled its physical material by according it no “rights” of its own in treating it as “formless mud” subject to their “masterliness” and “wilful” preconception.12 As an example, and despite having praised Donatello’s marble Cantoria (see p. 78) at length in The Quattro Cento, he criticised in detail a low marble relief, Dead Christ Tended by Angels (illustrated overleaf), in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
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Donatello, Dead Christ Tended by Angels, c.1438–1443 “Even in [a] photograph you can follow the modelling of [Christ’s] stomach which is made ‘anatomical’ in the mode that is common to Florentine sculpture of this period,” Stokes said of this relief. On the other hand, the further wing of the foreground angel on the right is no more than sketched in. As surfaces, the figures traced in the background, the background heads and the nimbi, have no aesthetic relation whatsoever with the masses in front. These background shapes are relevant only to the composition as a whole, that is, as shapes; which is not enough relationship for carving conception. But apart from the background shapes, in [the] foreground, too, there is shown small feeling for changes in surface as significant in themselves. To Donatello, changes of surface meant little more than light and shade, chiaroscuro, the instruments of plastic organization. The bottom of the angels’ robes is gouged and undercut so as to provide a contrast to the open planes of Christ’s nude torso. The layers of stone are treated wholesale. Though some of the cutting is beautiful in itself, the relief betrays a wilful, preconceived, manner of approach. In brief, the composition is not so much founded upon the interrelationship of adjoining surfaces, as upon the broader principles of chiaroscuro.13
What, then, is the difference between this modelling approach to artmaking and that of carving? As answer Stokes declared that “a figure carved in stone is fine carving when one feels that not the figure, but the stone through the medium of the figure, has come to life.” In the process of being carved stone
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“suffers all the stroking and polishing, all the definition that our hands and mouths bestow on those we love,” he said. “For polishing gives the stone a major light and life” evoking from it shapes that are “gradual” in articulating “something that already exists in the block”.14 “Such definition of form by whittling and polishing marble, so that in representational art the figures themselves tend to be flattened or compressed, as if they had long been furled amid the interior layers of the stone and now were unburdened on the air,” seemed to Stokes to be “the essential manner of much stone carving”. Moreover, he went on: Just as an enhanced feeling of the spherical is attained to the glory of stone, by elongating spheres into ovoids and into other gradually rounded shapes, so three-dimensional form may become all the more significant from being represented by the compressed shapes of low relief.15
But what about human forms? How is carving realised in creating them? “Stone gradations are multiplied by an Agostino Madonna and child relief. Graduated surfaces are the logic of its form. Each surface sponsors a fresh disclosure,” answered Stokes. Thus the forms carved on the inner layers are progressively flattened. The further into the stone the more pronounced becomes the flattening of shapes: yet the inner and background shapes suggest no less contour than the outer shapes; with the result that they are luminous even in the dimmest light, as if their contours were indeed the face of the stone-block itself.16
He particularly praised in these terms Agostino’s low marble relief, Virgin and Child with Five Angels (illustrated overleaf). “The poignancy of [Agostino’s] shapes is not so much in themselves, as in their relations with his other shapes,” he said of this relief. See the angel’s head at the bottom of the relief, his hand clinging to the frame as if he had emerged from the back layers and had passed through the Virgin to the front, or as if the stone were a sea in which he rocked by his hand to and from a breakwater. Also, notice the poignancy of the child’s curving shoulder juxtaposed upon the face of an angel behind, from which the shoulder’s roundness graduates. Face and shoulder give each other shape.17
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Agostino, Virgin and Child with Five Angels, c.1450–1460 To this Stokes added praise of other work by Agostino including carved low reliefs attributed to him in the Tempio in Rimini. “Diana comes greyish out of a black sky, out of a mist of apparel,” Stokes said of one such relief (illustrated on p. 54). [S]he has been summoned out of the marble as if by trumpets, shrill trumpets that drown the murderous bugles of the Last Judgment, so that starlight now specks the darkness of her mind. Ripple of drapery over her skin as the folds unwrap to linger with the breeze
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arouses her from trance. What is this new nakedness? Eyes, all eyes. A leg, voluble as are eyes of youthfulness, of grace. An exteriorization of divinity …18
“This is the second instalment of Mr. Stokes’s discursive treatise on certain aspects of fifteenth-century Italian art, and it more than fulfils the promise of its predecessor,” applauded the art historian, Roger Hinks. “Briefly stated, this is the main thread of Mr. Stokes’s argument,” Hinks explained to readers of The Observer. Marble, with its translucency and inner light, has a quality which inevitably calls to mind the beauty of human flesh and directly encourages a humanist conception of art. Water, moreover, which occurs so constantly in physical proximity to limestone, and which is indeed responsible for its characteristic structure, provides more than one hint as to the means of carving and smoothing and polishing this primary material. … Every process which respects and enhances the natural life of the stone is congenial to [Stokes]; and he is particularly attracted by the flattened forms of low relief, which remind him at once of the eroding power of water and the capacity of water to diffract objects seen through it.19
After reading the book’s chapters, “Stone and water” and “The pleasures of limestone”, Auden praised limestone in a poem beginning, If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly Because it dissolves in water. …20
From Stones of Rimini “we discover or re-discover Mediterranean art and life, the character of limestone, the differences between carving and modelling,” approved another writer.21 “[P]erhaps the most brilliant … section of [Stokes’s] book … is an essential digression on the distinction between carving and modelling,” enthused the art critic, Herbert Read.22 “It is not too much to say that, after reading [Stones of Rimini],” declared the literary critic, Orlo Williams, “there is no ordinary man or woman but must look on stone, worked and unworked, with a new and more lively eye, touch it with a more sensitive hand, and think of the artists who have worked in it with a deeper understanding.”23
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Amongst all this praise there was one notable exception. Ezra Pound. “[Stokes] has relied on his halftone reproductions very greatly, but without giving the duller reader a lead,” Pound complained. “The jacket design seems to me anything but fortuitous,” he continued in criticising the cover of Stones of Rimini which had been designed by Ben Nicholson. “Take a full set of photos of the Tempio and start counting the CIRCLES. Reverse, for a moment, Stokes’ stone-blossom criterion or rather augment it by the idea of the flattened sphere,” Pound continued. “That seems to me the ‘formal’ adjunct which might aid in pursuing Mr. Stokes’ analysis further.”24 “That is monstrous. Because the flattened sphere is throughout the subject of the book whereas there is small mention of stone-blossom,” Stokes raged after seeing a draft of Pound’s review. “I have offered an entirely new approach to visual art as a whole,” he fumed. “I have related the flattened sphere or thinned stone to the very process of carving, and the very process of carving and modelling I have related to all manual activities and to all physical activities whatsoever.”25 “Just as the carver consults the stone for the reinforcement of his idea, so Mr. Nicholson has started to paint when he prepares his canvases,” he had meanwhile written in using his carving aesthetic to promote the modern art revolution in painting then being pioneered in London by Ben Nicholson. “It is obvious that [Nicholson] relies more than is usual upon [the] rich plaster covering [of his canvas] or some other interesting surface to guide him,” Stokes continued. In contrast with most exhibited pictures, almost every canvas or panel is of different proportions, corresponding to a different elucidation of surface. So strong is the recoil from the plastic [modelling] approach to painting that Mr. Nicholson, among others, sometimes actually carves his canvases: his lines are often incisions on the plaster, on the panel, on its basic preparation or in the paint.26
To this Stokes added praise of invitation cards designed by Nicholson for expressing “the liveliest perceptions in terms of correspondence between two circles, so intense is his power to elucidate the plane on which they lie”.27 This may well have influenced Nicholson in designing the cover of Stones of Rimini. It also arguably influenced his creation soon after of the first of his low relief paintings, December 1933, for which he later became known as one of Britain’s most innovative and important twentieth century painters.
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“People touch things according to their shape. A single shape is made magnificent by perennial touching,” Stokes had meanwhile written at the start of Stones of Rimini, part of which was excerpted in the October 1933 issue of The Criterion. “Perfect sculpture needs your hand to communicate some pulse and warmth, to reveal subtleties unnoticed by the eye, needs your hand to enhance them,” he wrote, in going on to praise, in these terms, the sculpture of Barbara Hepworth.28 “The stone is beautifully rubbed,” he wrote in praising an abstract figure (see next page) carved by her from alabaster to which, perhaps due to his mother-centred psychoanalysis by Klein, he was particularly attracted, and of which he said: [I]t is continuous as an enlarging snowball on the run; yet part of the matrix is detached as a subtly flattened pebble. This is the child which the mother owns with all her weight, a child that is of the block yet separate, beyond her womb yet of her being. So poignant are these shapes of stone, that in spite of the degree in which a more representational aim and treatment have been avoided, no one could mistake the underlying subject of the group. In this case at least the abstractions employed enforce a vast certainty. It is not a matter of a mother and child group represented in stone. Miss Hepworth’s stone is a mother, her huge pebble its child.29
He went on to help Hepworth write her contribution to Herbert Read’s edited book, Unit 1, devoted to promoting modern British architecture, painting, and sculpture. “Carving is interrelated masses conveying an emotion; a perfect relationship between the mind and the colour, light and weight which is the stone, made by the hand which feels,” Hepworth wrote in her contribution. “I do not want to make a machine that cannot fulfil its essential purpose; but to make exactly the right relation of masses, a living thing in stone, to express my awareness and thought of these things.”30 “Used, carved stone, exposed to the weather, records on its concrete shape in spatial, immediate, simultaneous form … the winding passages of days and nights, the opening and shutting skies of warmth and wet,” Stokes had meanwhile written.31 “[C]ontemporary sculptors have studied the essential shapes of stone with reverence,” he added in reviewing an exhibition of Henry Moore’s sculpture at the Leicester Galleries in London.32 “Pebbles and rocks show Nature’s way of working stone,” Moore in turn wrote in his contribution to Read’s book, Unit 1.
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Hepworth, Figure (Mother and Child), 1933 Smooth, sea-worn pebbles show the wearing away, rubbed treatment of stone and principles of asymmetry. Rocks show the hacked, hewn treatment of stone, and have a jagged nervous block rhythm … There is in Nature a limitless variety of shapes and rhythms … from which the sculptor can enlarge his formknowledge experience.33
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Following Nature’s way, however, hardly seemed the approach adopted by sculptors in deeply gouging stone and praised as Vorticist by Ezra Pound. Annoyed with Pound for his negative review of Stones of Rimini, Stokes delegated one of Pound’s requests to Mollie, namely that of getting a photo for him of a Vorticist sculpture, Boy with a Coney. Meanwhile Stokes spent the Easter 1934 break in his psychoanalytic treatment in promoting, in terms of his carving aesthetic, the avantgarde creations of the Ballets Russes.
CHAPTER NINE
Ballets Russes
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y the time Stokes worked on writing about the Ballets Russes in his book, To-Night the Ballet, Klein had moved to a house in St John’s Wood where his psychoanalytic treatment with her continued. He too had also moved. Instead of living at 21 York Buildings, or at Mollie’s home at 53 Parkhill Road in Belsize Park, he began living in early 1934 at 9 Linden Gardens, Notting Hill, round the corner from where his psychoanalytic treatment had begun in the same street more than four years before. His treatment by Klein had acquainted him with her theory that psychological development proceeds from experiencing others as partobjects (breast, anus, and penis, for instance) to experiencing others, beginning with the mother, not in bits but as good, loved, hated, and whole. This evidently influenced him, as did the modern art aesthetic of “significant form”, in writing about the integrating effects of music and ballet.1 “Think how the streets spring to life when the bolder kind of barrelorgan grinds its tune,” he wrote at the start of To-Night the Ballet.
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9 Linden Gardens, Notting Hill At once the streets become a mise-en-scène, the movement of passers-by and of traffic becomes a ballet of a sort. So many things that lay in pieces in the mind and which were projected into the external world as piecemeal, rhythmless, living death, are gathered together, organized and drilled by the music: and so we see the
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street differently. We survey the intervals between pedestrians: the fact of their succession alone has taken on an almost heroic meaning. We discover rhythm in their walk. Life again proceeds, outward as a spectacle: past and future have gathered and organized themselves in the physical movements that are the present.2
In the same way, he argued, the visual music of ballet serves as emblem of life organising and converting “inner ferment into definite action and thought”.3 “In the days of the Diaghilev Russian ballet it used to be a special pleasure to watch in movement the ‘palette’, as the art critics say, of some great modern painter like Picasso or Matisse,” he continued. “Every moment the dancers made fresh groups, fresh pictures that revealed further the painter’s thought.”4 By 1934 the Diaghilev Russian ballet had been revived by Wassily De Basil and René Blum in Monte Carlo with the addition of three “baby ballerinas” (two twelve-year-olds, Irina Baronova and Tamara Toumanova, and a fourteen-year-old, Tatiana Riabouchinska) recruited in Paris by the dancer-choreographer, George Balanchine. The main star of the company, however, was the dancer-choreographer, Léonide Massine. “Unless you go” to this revived company’s productions, claimed Stokes, “you cannot experience dreams in the flesh … an inner world externalized with all the insistence and the verve of which the outer world is capable.”5 He likened the effect to an image of the beloved becoming “wedged in the mind”;6 and to the Italian Renaissance manifesting the inner world of “romantic impulses” in “concrete and definite” form.7 As evidence he gave the example of Columbine in the Ballets Russes production, Carnaval, showing her beholders “the deepest emotions as something theatrical or outward and self-contained”.8 He also praised the carving, as it were, of Ballets Russes productions by Stravinsky, Satie, Picasso, and others from the material of classical ballet and modern painting. He went on to describe dancing as “an assault upon space, an assault of love … similar … to that of the carver upon his stone or that of the farmer as he ploughs the earth”. He likened seeing dancers on the stage to looking inside a doll’s house so as to see, as it were, “the inner processes” of the mind as “tangible objects … beautifully arranged”. He evocatively described Ballets Russes productions as dramatising the audience’s inner feelings in the outward form of characters on the stage as in, for instance, the ballet Petrouchka showing
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“fatalism” and other “passions” in the outward form of a puppet come to life.9 He also praised the revival of the deftness of classical ballet in Ballets Russes productions. Quirkily he likened this deftness to “the dexterity by which a fishmonger with two or three vertical slashes, with a prod or two, with a horizontal sweep, fillets a fish”; and to the “swift, controlled, precise movements” of the “cashier selling tickets and giving change to the queue-ed crowd after a football match”. Similarly deft, he implied, was Irina Baronova entering on her points as a spinning top in Jeux d’enfants “dressed from head to foot in tight woollen bands of colour” and twirling, one foot pointed on the ground, the other seeming to impel her as if it were a whip, thereby making the accompanying music visible in the form of her dancing shape.10 He praised the realisation of this through the geometry of classical ballet which he admired for its “turning out” technique maximising what the spectator can see of the dancer’s body. It was another instance for him of art as emblem of life converting “inner states” of mind into “outward objective form”. Just as Agostino carved figures in the Tempio to show “the gradual and glowing face” of their stone material, so classical ballet, Stokes claimed, shows “human passions” in “the gradual uncontorted curves and straight lines of the extended human body”.11 He declared the “geometry”, “outwardness”, and “the harmonious gradualness” of classical ballet “an emblem of the European spirit”. Enriched by the Ballets Russes it had succeeded, he said, in bringing this spirit into “closer relation with contemporary life”. He also applauded the rootedness of classical ballet in the “open, physical and graceful attitudes of the marble Greek gods in whom emotion is shown as an outward-turned body”.12 He loathed, by contrast, inward-driven romanticism not tempered by the material of classical ballet. He particularly loathed the inwardlyinspired romantic dancing of Isadora Duncan and of German expressionism. He characterised it as “terrible and formless German ‘yearning’ … European ‘Yoga’ with its hasty mazy mesh of improvised gods and surges”.13 He much preferred the classical and geometrical approach to ballet of the choreographers, Rudolf Laban and Léonide Massine. And it was with Massine and his then recently premiered symphonic ballet, Les présages, that Stokes ended To-Night the Ballet in praising the Ballets Russes of Monte Carlo for smoothing away northern European “excesses” with the “steadying hand” of the south.14
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Massine rehearsing “Mr. Stokes, who writes (and incidentally writes extremely well) … dedicates his book ‘in homage to Massine … with whom lies the future of the ballet’,” reported a review in Punch.15 “Every lover of ballet should read Mr. Stokes’s book, especially his convincing defence of the classical method,” admired Raymond Mortimer in the New Statesman.16 “[Stokes’s] book is not just a bit of enthusiastic gush, but a serious inquiry into the nature of the art of ballet,” observed a journalist in London’s Evening News.17 With the publication of To-Night the Ballet, preceded by the publication of the first two volumes of his quattrocento trilogy, Stokes had consolidated his reputation as a major innovative art critic by the time the summer break in his psychoanalytic treatment began in early August 1934. As such it was no surprise that he was hired by The Spectator to review that summer’s Ballets Russes season at Covent Garden, after which he spent time in Venice, where he saw Ben Nicholson’s and his estranged wife Winifred’s contributions to that year’s Biennale, and then returned via Arezzo, Vienna, and Dresden to London. Here, as well as continuing his treatment with Klein, he moved late that autumn into a top floor corner flat, number 23, in the ultramodern Isokon building which had been designed by Wells Coates and completed earlier that summer in Lawn Road, Hampstead. It was just
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a couple of blocks from Mollie Higgins’s home in Parkhill Road. But Stokes’s involvement with her was waning. “I am living in this curious building at Hampstead and I was supposed to be getting married next Saturday, but it now seems very unlikely,” he told Eddy from the Isokon on 4 December.18 Mollie was “too English” for Stokes.19 Or so Margaret Gardiner claimed. Comforted during the break-up of her affair with Stokes by a psychoanalyst friend, Gilbert (later Lord) Debenham, Mollie married him on 1 April 1935, by which time, or soon after, Stokes had other girlfriends. They included a young art student, Virginia Parsons, and a daughter of the philosopher C E M Joad, who might have been the girlfriend to whom Stokes referred to as Livia, and to whom he dedicated the Swan Lake chapter of his next book, Russian Ballets. Before completing this book he spent part of the Easter 1935 break in his psychoanalytic treatment in Monte Carlo. Here he discussed with Massine designs (now in the Tate) by Ben Nicholson for a Beethovenbased ballet on which Massine was then working. “The conductors are against the Beethoven but Massine says that all that holds him up starting on it is the difficulty of the décor,” Stokes told Nicholson in encouraging him to send Massine more designs.20 Meanwhile he himself was slaving away, he said, at completing his Russian Ballets book before the Ballets Russes returned that June to Covent Garden.
Isokon, Lawn Road, Hampstead
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In the process he used ideas from his psychoanalytic treatment by Klein more explicitly than he had before. Previously she had recounted one of his dreams in which he imagined himself making Durham and Ethel lie end-to-end in bed while he urinated and, in doing so, showed them that his penis was “very large”. He then told her a dream in which he could not make Ethel understand that frying something alive was torture “since the hot fat prevented it from burning altogether and kept it alive while skinning it”. He also reprimanded Klein for the way she lit her cigarette so that a bit of the still lighted match flew towards him. She lit it the wrong way, he said, just like Durham “who served the balls the wrong way at tennis”.21 Klein interpreted all this as indicating that Stokes had a “mania” for managing, controlling, and deriding others, and that he also suffered with persecutory fear of them, unmitigated by identifying with, and internalising others as integrating loved and good figures in his mind. “What dominates the dreams are the distressed feelings which are connected with anxiety for his loved objects,” she commented.22 Stokes in turn used the notion of countering anxiety with a good and loved figure in describing Irina Baronova and David Lichine in the ballet Les présages encircling and having “each other for a good object”. To this, in describing the andante cantabile movement of Les présages, Stokes added: Thus the overwrought loneliness expressed by the music is made less unreal by the presence of a loved one upon the stage. The music is provided with greater breadth, with a more profound truth; for we now see loneliness in its true nature of anxiety: the object for which we search, when thus found, does not appease though it be used continuously as a reassurance. When later Baronova runs back from him, Lichine remains poised, then comes to her side to seek re-assurance against his loneliness. Compulsively he follows backwards and forwards. … The subject matter, we see, of this part of the ballet is the compulsiveness that characterizes love when it is mingled with anxiety: also, the still greater compulsiveness endured when anxiety dominates.23
Doubtless this reflected something of his own experience of love. It also undoubtedly reflected what he had learnt from Klein about her theory of love and anxiety.
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Most of all, however, he used his account of Les présages and of Massine’s second symphonic ballet, Choreartium, as answer to Massine’s critics who objected to him choreographing these two ballets to music not composed for the ballet. Previously Stokes had likened the visual effect of Ballets Russes productions to that of hearing the sound of a barrel-organ. Now he emphasised the visual fidelity of Les présages and Choreartium to their music by likening witnessing these ballets to seeing gulls flying above the sounds of London. “Watching Présages is like watching the gulls over the dark Thames embankment. Behind, the intermittent trams thunder, cars pass in endless streams. Below the dark stone, beneath the gulls in their array, the waters run,” he wrote. There on the embankment we watch the gulls. They must sum the symphony of noise and movement. As its product we watch their unambiguous shape. Our ears sense innumerable threads of meaning: our eyes would see these variations in terms of one form equally upheld by every passing air, by every noise, an animation in various hovering movements or in the parabolas of flight. We attribute thus a white outcome to the ferment of the street, to the dull, travelling waters [of the Thames].24
He then went on to liken the dancers in Les présages “rising from the sea” of its Tchaikovsky fifth symphony music to “gulls with outspread wings”.25 Then he turned to Choreartium choreographed by Massine to Brahms’s fourth symphony and to what Stokes described as the “multiplication of themes that draw and push each other angrily” in this symphony’s first allegro non troppo movement. “[V]isually speaking, one will conceive the volume of sound from the orchestra as something broad, though the crash of one note to a note below is a vertical movement,” he said of Brahms’s music at this point so that the dancing and grouping of the dancers on the stage above the orchestra pit capture for the symphony’s “grandiose evolution … precise dramatic definition just as the gulls … over the embankment … sum the city’s noise.”26 “Putting the Russian ballet into words,” applauded London’s Evening News.27 “‘Russian ballets’ is a highly complex technical treatise that is illuminating and crystal clear, because [Stokes] has treated it as a poet,” admired the self-styled balletomane, Arnold Haskell, in
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The Sunday Times.28 “One can only say that this is an exceptionally rare book, dealing with a great art,” said another reviewer, “balletomanes have at last a poet to serve them, where formerly but histories & faint tradition of enthusiasm had to suffice.”29 No surprise, given these reviews, that Russian Ballets proved even more successful and even more of a best-seller than To-Night the Ballet. Nor is it any surprise that The Spectator again hired Stokes to review that summer’s Ballets Russes season at Covent Garden. Yet he was miserable due to some kind of physical injury keeping him housebound at the Isokon that summer. “I’m still stuck here and I am afraid it is impossible for me to come to you much as I would like. I am going to be allowed to go away but only direct to a place where my doctor knows another doctor,” he wrote unhappily from his Isokon flat in turning down an invitation to stay with Robert Byron. This wound has got to be carefully watched and dressed every single day, and apparently no mere nurse can be trusted with it. Altogether a very bloody business. … I am bored here very nearly to tears, bored, lonely, depressed, hot, uncomfortable, hungry and rather sleepless.30
Whatever the cause of his wound, Stokes discovered a doctor in Totnes in Devon who could be trusted to supervise its treatment. And it was at the Seymour Hotel in Totnes that he stayed while combining medical treatment for this wound with spending time with Curly in nearby Dartington “trying to paint”.31
CHAPTER TEN
Colour and form
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ainting now became the subject of Stokes’s next book, Colour and Form. Previously he had emphasised both the carving responsiveness of artists to the physical materials of their art and art’s psychologically integrating effect on its beholders. In Colour and Form he developed this two-fold account of art in terms of painting about which he got help from Curly at Dartington in Devon. While there he gadded about with a potter, Bernie Forrester, who, together with Curly, taught at Dartington Hall School while its usual pottery and painting teachers, Bernard Leach and Mark Tobey, were away on a year’s study leave in Japan. Then, following the return of Leach and Tobey to Dartington and following the birth of Curly’s and Kay’s daughter, Virginia, on 16 December 1935, Curly spent time with Stokes in Cornwall. Stokes had spent seaside holidays in Cornwall as a child. Now he painted there while staying with Curly at the Porthminster Hotel in St Ives. Here, through attending a dance in the town, Stokes met the future famous painter, Peter Lanyon, then still a seventeen-year-old schoolboy. The next day, as he was driving to Land’s End, Stokes saw Lanyon painting a picture of a ruined mine engine house. “I stopped politely to look at what he was doing and from that moment I was impressed. More so when I saw other of his small painted boards,” he recalled. 107
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Kay and Curly Kent with Bernie Forrester, c.1935 They had lightness, even elegance, unexpectedly combined with an apparent intensity of feeling. As in much of his later work the over-all effect was urgent, particularly in a beautiful use of blue. I was also impressed by engineering skills he had acquired. He took me at this time to see many places in West Penwith in which he delighted.1
Then, having given up his Isokon flat (which was taken over by the photographer, Bill Brandt, and his wife, Eva), Stokes was again in Dartington where he worked near its medieval banqueting hall. “I have just got into this room for the first time and here I hope to work. It is said to be the ghost room and the ghost sounds most convenient for my present purposes since his manifestation is to scatter papers and burn them,” he wrote from there to Ben Nicholson.
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Stokes, View from the Porthminster Hotel, 1936 So, if I fail to write and bring a book from here the explanation will be simple. I haven’t had a very impressive time just lately: waiting about mostly. There is a bell rope passing from the ceiling through the floor of this room, and birds cackling very low down in the chimney. I suppose it’s alright. I have got all your pictures here and they look surprisingly well. I think they will have an effect upon the artists of the place, particularly the new one. My own attempts at painting are getting a bit muddled.2
“I am thinking of getting married soon but not to anyone in particular,” he also wrote early that March from Devon.3 Then, perhaps in quest of a wife, he went on a Mediterranean cruise. “At Troy we were unpopular with the Turks since they had chosen that afternoon secretly to refortify the Dardanelles and I put both my hands through the windows of a car. Greece is just as it should be,” he wrote.4 By then he had met up with Deborah, Jessica, and Unity Mitford who, together with their mother, Sydney, were also on the cruise.
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With Deborah, Jessica, Sydney, and Unity Mitford, Athens, April 1936 “He looked like a blond eagle and I fell for him,” recalled Deborah. “He was a painter, art critic and ballet-lover, and when I got back to London he took me to Covent Garden to see the Ballets Russes,” she added. We saw Léonide Massine and the three “baby ballerinas”, Tamara Toumanova, Irina Baronova and Tatiana Riabouchinska, and Alexandra Danilova in Symphonie Fantastique, Shéhérazade and L’Après-midi d’un Faune and my favourite of all, La Boutique Fantasque. At sixteen, I was not allowed to go out alone with a man so Nanny Blor came as chaperone. Goodness knows what Adrian (or Nanny) made of this, but it was the rule, take it or leave it, and luckily for me Adrian took it. Fixed in my memory is the 10 p.m. delivery of letters at Rutland Gate. I was always hoping for one from Adrian and used to sit in the hall ten minutes before the post was due. When, absolutely to time, a loving letter fell on the mat, squashed between Hansard and various circularly addressed to my parents, it was unbelievably exciting.5
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“I was head over heels in love with him for a while, but gave it up as teenagers are apt to do,” she subsequently said of her romance that year with Stokes.6 Meanwhile, after reviewing the summer 1936 London season of Ballets Russes productions for The Spectator, Stokes stayed with Eddy Sackville-West at the Provencal home in Sanary of Aldous Huxley (whom Eddy had first got to know when Huxley taught him French at Eton). He also spent time away from Sanary in Paris where, he told Eddy, he drew “very badly” and spent time with Livia.7 While in Paris he caught the eye of a young postgraduate art student, Margaret Mellis, at that year’s Cézanne exhibition in the Jeu de Paume. “He just looked rather distinguished. I thought he was very old actually because he had all these tiny little wrinkles all over his face … hair breadth ones which made him look very interesting,” she explained. “He had wonderful yellow hair and really blue eyes, huge enormous blue eyes, sort of flashing eyes and the bottoms of his trousers were slightly sort of ragged so I thought he probably didn’t have any money.”8 She noticed him again when, after leaving the Cézanne exhibition, she went to the Orangerie, and he came in. Convinced that he would pick her up, she sat and waited. Sure enough, after looking at the gallery’s Monet water lily paintings, he came over to talk to her. “[H]e had a very special kind of rather soft voice, rather sort of like an oboe in sound you know, slightly reedy. And we started talking about the Monets. And then he said: ‘Come and have tea with me,’” she recalled.9 After spending a few days together he invited her to return with him to Sanary. But, thinking this would be improper, she refused. When he was gone, however, she immediately regretted not having discovered his address in England so she could see more of him there. After dithering anxiously whether to go to find him at his hotel in St Germaindes-Prés she went there only to dither again about whether to go in. But there was no need since just at that moment he emerged, was evidently pleased to see her, gave her his address, and, while she went north to her family’s home in Scotland, he returned south to Eddy in Sanary. Soon he was again in London where he went to that October’s exhibition of paintings by Cézanne and other nineteenth century French painters at the New Burlington gallery. Two of Stokes’s paintings— Landscape, Berkshire and Waiting for the Tennis Net—were shown at the same gallery in that November’s exhibition by the collective known
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as the London Group of artists. That winter he also worked on his painting book, Colour and Form. “It will be best to start, possibly with the Christmas trees in St Martins in Fields. Then describe what sort of Form I am writing about, the carving form, and put this in relation with the previous books,” he mused.10 “I notice first of all the vivification of the church wall, bestowed by the presence of the trees,” he continued. Their presence has resuscitated to a native dignity, as of fruitfulness, the Portland limestone of [the St Martin-in-the-Fields] portico. The very discoloration of the stone now appears fruitful because, grown from this earthiness, the trees seem to have taken their dark colour: while from the other side, owing to the presence of the green, a slight pinkish colour has warmed the stone (for, physiologically speaking, such green calls forth its complementary colour, a purplish red) as if summer warmth were stored there.11
It seems likely he sought to achieve a similar effect with paintings he did that winter in Cornwall, including West Penwith Moor (now in the Tate). Colour was an issue for him. So was the bringing together of related forms as he explained in reviewing an exhibition of paintings by Ben Nicholson the following March 1937 in London. The best paintings, Stokes now declared, exercise the “synthetic powers” of the eye in association with the brain whereby “basic fantasies of inner disorder find their calm and come to be identified with an objective harmony”. As evidence he cited an abstract painting by Nicholson, possibly 1934–6 (also in the Tate), conveying “the sense of a piece of colour, a red segment, for instance, containing all the other colours and tones and so, of course, the areas in which they figure” so as to achieve the stability of “universal wish-fulfilment”.12 With this reference to Freud’s theory of wish-fulfilment Stokes added a psychoanalytic gloss to the aesthetic of significant form emphasising relations between parts as a whole. At the same time he took issue with Roger Fry who, in advocating this aesthetic, argued that its achievement does not necessarily depend on colour. By contrast Stokes insisted that, as Goethe had long before put it, “All nature manifests itself by means of colours to the sense of sight.”13
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Stokes, West Penwith Moor, 1937
“The colours of a picture are fine when one feels that not the colours but each and every form through the medium of their colours has come to an equal fruition. Thus is carving conception realized in painting,” Stokes declared. He went on to illustrate this claim with various paintings including, in particular, Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
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with its notable subordination of content to form and colour illustrating the truth of the German proverb, said Stokes, “that no plough comes to a standstill because a man dies”.14 “About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters,” commented Auden after reading this. Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure …15
More significant for Stokes than the death of Icarus in the background of this painting was the way its other figures and its landscape are drawn together by colour. “The further peasant with crossed arms, looking into the sky, is particularly at home here,” he claimed. The blue of his shirt shaped from his folded arms is, as it were, an extraction of the blue from the green-blue milky sea, whitened and fleeced from association with his sheep. The black members of that flock are weltering extracts of the further shade, there in the light on the seashore.16
Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1558
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Colour and form are what matters in this and other paintings, not the attempt “to reproduce the material of the unconscious in the raw” as surrealist painters did, thereby neglecting art’s roles as mirror, said Stokes, of life identifying “inner states” of mind with “the organization of the outside world”.17 Rather than romantic and Freud-influenced painting inspired by inwardly occurring fantasies and dreams, Stokes adopted for his account of painting the emphasis of the experimental psychologist, David Katz, on ways we see colour “out there” in things, tingeing them as the “life-blood” tinges our skins.18 As illustration he described Picasso’s 1925 painting, Woman with Mandolin, which had then recently been shown at the Rosenberg galleries in Paris. “On looking at this picture one will perceive immediately that there exists some integrating relation,” Stokes said of this painting. In terms of two forms “going into” a third, of one texture as the sum of another of larger area and so on, there is perhaps expressed the wished-for stabilizing, not so much of our personalities as of its qualification by those miscellaneous mixed-up archetypal figures within us, absorbed in childhood, that are by no means at peace among themselves.19
He had learnt about these miscellaneous mixed-up figures in himself not from Freud but from Klein. She had emphasised the integration of these figures as a whole in the ego. Stokes in turn adopted a similar emphasis in praising paintings by the self-taught St Ives painter, Alfred Wallis. They included Wallis’s painting, Voyage to Labrador (now in the Tate), which Stokes then happened to own, and of which he said: One’s sense of a coloured area added up and “going into” another, allows the impression of augmentation and of disintegration. Boat and sea are in reality bound by interaction. Without any direct suggestion of weight or movement or buoyancy, this general, as well as a particular, relationship is thus fixed. At the same time the significance of the slightest difference in colour and tone is dramatized. Great meaning of coldness belongs to the dirty white tinges in the sea, and equally to the slight reddening of the boat, haven of comparative warmth upon the waste.20
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Used thus colour provides, claimed Stokes, “a humanistic quality attributed to the inter-working of things in space”.21 He had argued something similar in The Quattro Cento and in Stones of Rimini. Now, in Colour and Form, he claimed that just as “[c]arving creates a face for the stone” so too the painter with “a carving proclivity is manifestly at pains to show that the forms” he depicts each have “a face which he discloses”.22 Quoting this approvingly, a young South African painter, Graham Bell, declared in his review of Colour and Form, “Someone has said that it takes a piece of genius to say something new about a picture. Mr. Stokes has not only something new to say, he offers the outline of a new technique for looking at pictures.”23 Two days after this was published in the New Statesman Stokes became a student of Bell and others at what became known as the Euston Road school of art.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Euston Road
T
he Euston Road school of art was the brainchild of Graham Bell, William Coldstream, and others associated with the London Group of artists who, in reaction against “the problems of abstraction” and “the orgies of Surrealism”, returned to the postimpressionism of Cézanne.1 With support from Kenneth Clark (then director of London’s National Gallery) and Stokes’s erstwhile lover, William “Billy” Winkworth, among others, the school was founded by William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore, and Claude Rogers, in association with Graham Bell and Rodrigo Moynihan. Teaching at the school was also provided by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in whose studio at 12 Fitzroy Street, near the Euston Road, the school began on 4 October 1937. Earlier that year Bell and Coldstream had written what, in effect, amounted to a draft of the school’s prospectus. In it they said that, having experimented with abstraction, they had decided that “the only aspect of painting that is really engrossing is the exploration and experience in paint, by actual experience, of the material world”.2 Coldstream followed this with an article in which he insisted that “painting is not a scientific record but a record of fact enlarged and modified by one’s reaction to it”. As for his own work as a painter, he said, “I never 117
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consciously try to make things fit into any preconceived plan or form and find I lose interest unless I let myself be ruled by what I see.”3 Stokes had meanwhile spent part of that summer, 1937, painting again in Provence while staying there with Eddy Sackville-West. Following his return to London he helped the dancer-choreographer, Michel Fokine, with rehearsals of a new version of the Ballets Russes production, Coq d’Or. He also got advice about his paintings from Coldstream to whom he soon after wrote saying, “I’m sure there is much variance between our approaches, but there must also be a good deal of perhaps hidden common ground between people who at this moment choose to advocate a quiet return to realism.”4
Stokes in Provence
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For Stokes this was not so much a return to realism as consistent with his by then longstanding emphasis on the inspiration of art by the objective reality of the external world rather than by inwardlygiven romanticism or transcendentalism. Other things, however, were on his mind that early autumn 1937, notably his thirty-seven-year-old brother, Geoffrey, who had for some years been chronically ill with Parkinsonism, then contracting pneumonia from which, attended by Ethel, he died in a hotel in Eastbourne on 18 September. “I find it very sad down here: in fact I find it sad everywhere,” Stokes had told Eddy from Lower Stonehams apropos Geoffrey’s final illness.5 “I can’t write about it. Everybody goes about saying it is ‘a happy release’. Perhaps it was. I write and receive letters in the attempt to forget about it, so don’t refer to it when you write,” he then told Eddy soon after Geoffrey had died.6 Later that month, September 1937, he was again in London where his review of Coq d’Or and other Ballets Russes productions was published in The Spectator, and where, on 4 October, he became one of the Euston Road art school’s first students when it opened its doors to students that day. Why, though, as an acknowledged expert in art did he become an art student? “He felt that he really must learn to draw properly … if he was going to paint properly,” explained another of the school’s first students, Margaret Mellis.7 Evidently he painted sufficiently properly for one of his paintings, Sodden Hillside, Cornwall (possibly Landscape, Cornwall, 1937), to be included, together with paintings by other members of the Euston Road art school, in that autumn’s London Group exhibition at the New Burlington galleries in London. But he was very depressed. Geoffrey, whom he had hoped to help recover from his physical ills as the means of making amends for his cruelty to him, had just died. His one-time girlfriend, Margaret Gardiner, had another lover, the physicist, J. D. Bernal, by whom she had given birth to a son, Martin, that March. Another girlfriend, Livia, had become “subsidiary wife” to a man by whom she was pregnant.8 And, the day Stokes went to see Olga in Venice that November, he discovered she had just left town. “It was a very windy cold day and I caught cold and have been confined, literally confined, to this room here with tonsillitis for eight days. I feel depressed and caught,” he wrote soon after from his hotel, the Pensione Calcina (next door to the Pensione Seguso where he had stayed with Olga and Curly some years before).9 Also with him at
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the Pensione Calcina were Eddy and L. P. Hartley (later well-known for his novel, The Go-Between). Like Stokes, Hartley too was ill. Eddy ministered to them both and then “hoiked” Stokes off for a few days to Sanary.10 By then, helped it seems by Coldstream, nine of Stokes’s paintings had been accepted for an exhibition which, together with paintings by Ivon Hitchens and others, began in the new year, 1938. Stokes stayed for the opening and then spent a few days in Cornwall before returning to London where, on Monday 17 January, he started psychoanalytic treatment again with Klein alongside continued work as a student at the Euston Road art school.
Stokes, Landscape, Cornwall, 1937
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That winter or spring he also began an affair with an eighteen-yearold secretary, Sonia Brownell (later married to George Orwell), who caught the eye of several of the Euston Road art school students and teachers. Stokes, however, was the first to begin an affair with her. “[He] picked her up during a ballet in the gallery at Covent Garden” and “took her to one of the famous parties at Bertorelli’s restaurant … where the Euston Road School of Art celebrated at long tables laid end to end with wine, speeches and rowdy singing.” For three weeks she was very close to Stokes but stopped seeing him when he turned “nasty” and threatened, more or less seriously, “[to] lock her in a cellar”.11 He also propositioned an art historian, Ann Olivier Popham, but desisted when she told him she was Graham Bell’s girlfriend.12 That put paid to any hope he might have had of settling down with her. “The difficulty always is to find somebody suitable,” he told Eddy in the hope, it seems, of settling down with him. “I do not regard myself as the best sort of person for you to have with you,” he admitted, “yet, if you are feeling at all depressed and wanting to be left in peace, I should not be a bad person to have around as I need so little coping with, and am said to be amiable and understanding.”13 “There again, I feel we should seize the opportunity this summer to live abroad,” he went on. “I’ve never thought war was probable until this week. If it breaks out while we are in France, then we shall be able to escape to some neutral country more easily.”14 War was very much on the horizon. The painters, Graham Bell and Anthony Devas, were “both very scared by the prospect of war which they feel is due to fall any minute”, reported another artist, William Townsend, after meeting them at an exhibition that March.15 The same week Bell and others sought to defend their objective realist approach to painting against Julian Trevelyan and other surrealist enthusiasts in a debate in London. Then, on 1 May, they joined forces with thousands of others in an anti-Fascist demonstration in Trafalgar Square. Stokes was also there and, it seems, contributed to that year’s Euston Road art school project of making anti-Fascist posters based on Goya’s Disasters of War.16 Fearful perhaps of suffering a similar fate to that which had befallen his older brothers in the First World War, Stokes became increasingly determined to leave London when it seemed likely it might become the target of aerial bombing like that which had killed hundreds of civilians in Guernica in Spain the previous March. Now, in the summer of 1938,
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having decided he must leave war-threatened London but not alone, he told his fellow Euston Road art school student, Margaret Mellis, that they must marry the following week.
With Graham Bell, May Day 1938 She was amazed. She had been eager to see more of him after spending time with him in Paris in September 1936. She had holidayed near his Sanary home with Eddy the following August in the hope of seeing him there. She joined the Euston Road art school that October to see more of him in London and spent time with him there. But they were not lovers. Hence her amazement when he suddenly announced his decision that they must marry. Since she was very much in love with him she agreed. But she immediately became so ill with flu she had to stay in bed to get well enough to attend their registry office wedding on 16 July, witnessed by Durham and by her mother, Maisie. Then, still unwell, Margaret stayed with her aunt and uncle, Eva and Norman Wilkinson, in Highgate, while Stokes went to a performance of Massine’s ballet, Seventh Symphony, in Drury Lane, after which she was well enough to attend a party at the Euston Road art school celebrating their marriage.17 “It was sweet of you both to come to that party. I like being married very much indeed. It seems to bring with it all sorts of invaluable things that I didn’t know about before. … Your present is stimulating me to find a home to put it in. It’s really lovely,” Stokes soon after wrote to Ben Nicholson.18
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“The bride is 24, a good painter and scotch, very Scotch,” he told Eddy from Lower Stonehams. In fact she says that she and her brothers are the last direct survivors of several distinctive Scotch families, the Nairnes, Mellises, Scotch Berkeleys and Dunsinanes. She certainly looks very Celtic and is not at all of the sandy engineer kind of Scot. This sounds rather like a horse. But it is difficult to know where to start in giving you an idea about her.19
This did not augur well for their marriage. Nor did her getting ill again on their honeymoon in Rapallo. While there Stokes introduced her to Ezra Pound whom she recalled sitting under “a big sculpture of himself” by Gaudier-Brzeska and talking “all the time” about “the boss”, Mussolini, which she found “terribly boring”.20 Stokes was not so much bored as furious. “Ezra cannot wait, cannot make the one important renunciation of today,” he fumed. “And so he ends up thus, an intellectual if you please arguing ‘The “reds” (in Spain) are bankers and Jews’ or ‘Bankers and Jews are “reds”’.”21 Then, after returning from Italy to England, Stokes took Margaret on house-hunting expeditions in Norfolk and Suffolk. Here in Aldeburgh he thought of buying a nearby Martello tower from Mollie Higgins’s sister-in-law, Audrey Debenham. But he decided against it due to the track leading to the tower being “threatened by shingle drifts”.22 And he did not like “the would-be old-fashioned hotel” with its “outer wall lying leeringly along the mean provincial street” where they stayed.23 He preferred the Porthminster Hotel in St Ives and by early September he had begun making enquiries about buying a house in nearby Carbis Bay, Little Park (or Parc) Owles, including its grounds, greenhouse, potting shed and a garage for £3,000.24 He made further enquiries about the house after returning with Margaret to London. Here he kept on his top floor flat at 6 Fitzroy Street as a studio and rented a not far away home for himself and Margaret at 32 Tottenham Court Road (opposite Percy Street). “From an ABC restaurant [that September] I used to regard a dislocated perspective of chimney pots while reflecting that it was unlikely that one of them would be extant in a year’s time,” he later recalled. “London and the attaching stigma from which I could not separate
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myself were under threat. Hitler epitomized a great destructiveness: over against Hitler London was, to my mind, a volatile bedraggled bird, sprawling in a snare, punch-drunk, indifferent.”25 Frightened for their safety, Stokes and Margaret, like other Londonbased artists evacuated themselves and their art-work to the country a couple of days before the signing on 30 September of the Munich Pact ceding the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia to Germany. This was scarcely reassuring. Stokes and Margaret nevertheless returned to London, as did other artists, in time to see Picasso’s painting, Guernica, which, together with its many preliminary sketches, was shown that October at the New Burlington galleries to raise money for the relief of those then suffering the civil war resulting from the military coup by General Franco and his Fascist followers in Spain. The next month Stokes’s painting, Olive Trees, and Margaret’s painting, Rose Garden, was shown in the London Group’s exhibition at the same galleries. Then, at the end of the year, Stokes and Margaret spent time with her family in Scotland before going briefly to Cornwall to finalise Stokes’s purchase of Little Park Owles and its surrounding land amounting to “two and a half acres” in all.26 “It is the nicest house in those parts. It ought to be good for work and staying in, well separated in its parts,” Stokes told Eddy after returning with Margaret from Cornwall to London. “If it does turn out to be comfortable, I hope you will come and stay and should you like it, for an indefinite period.”27 Making Little Park Owles comfortable for themselves, Eddy, and for other guests included getting material, designed by Ben Nicholson, for cushions and curtains for the house for which Stokes also borrowed a large painting by Nicholson. Then, on 31 March, Stokes and Margaret left London for Lower Stonehams, and stayed there a few days before driving to the Porthminster Hotel in St Ives from which they moved a couple of days later, on 3 April 1939, into Little Park Owles.28
PART III OUTER AND INNER LIFE
CHAPTER TWELVE
Transforming St Ives
“
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he object of these notes and of the eventual book (a life’s work) is to mirror correspondence between the outer world as present to the senses and to the imagination … between the outer world, then, and the inner aspects of personality,” Stokes wrote soon after moving with Margaret into Little Park Owles.1 Living there, far away from Italy and from the modern art world of London, transformed him from a writer specialising in art into a writer also concerned to use his experience of psychoanalysis in reflecting about the interdependence of outer and inner life. Here too in Cornwall he became the catalyst of the transformation of St Ives into an internationally acclaimed centre of modern art. Some movement in that direction had begun with the establishment in 1921 by Bernard Leach and a Japanese potter, Shoji Hamada, of a pottery in St Ives; with Virginia Woolf making the town the setting of her breakthrough modernist novel, To the Lighthouse, published in 1927; and with Ben Nicholson, shortly after discovering the work of the St Ives artist, Alfred Wallis, including some of Wallis’s paintings in modern art exhibitions in London.
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Wallis’s paintings were much less influential on art in St Ives in the early 1930s, however, than the work of the artist, Stanhope Forbes, or of Borlase Smart and Leonard Fuller, who, in 1938, started the St Ives School of Painting. Here, from his home with his sister and their widowed mother at the Red House in St Ives, Stokes’s protégé, Peter Lanyon, studied after deciding against studying at the Euston Road art school in London. Instead, in St Ives, he was very much influenced by Stokes’s dictum that art mirror the identity of “inner states” of mind with “the organization of the outside world”,2 which became a major theme in his paintings of “nature and landscape as a metaphor for the workings of the human body”.3 Stokes spent time with Lanyon in St Ives. He also spent time with Margaret drawing and painting at the Eagles Nest home in nearby Zennor of William Arnold-Forster who, if the model did not arrive, took off his clothes and served as model instead. By then, together with Margaret, Stokes had transformed Little Park Owles, which, before the First World War, had been an outbuilding of the next door house, Tremorna, to become a separate dwelling with the addition of Italianate features and a large wing designed by a London-based architect, George Kennedy.
Little Park Owles with Kennedy-designed wing on the right
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Here, in the upstairs corridor and bedrooms, overlooking a courtyard at Little Park Owles, Stokes and Margaret hung paintings by Alfred Wallis. In one of the rooms in the Kennedy-designed wing of the house they hung a white relief painting by Ben Nicholson. They also installed in the sitting room a gramophone with an ultra-modern acoustic horn (a wedding present from Margaret’s parents) and records operated with wooden needles which visitors remembered sharpening with specially designed scissors. Downstairs were further rooms including Stokes’s study cum studio from where he could see “across the bay to Hayle and to the sand dunes that curve round to the point of Godrevy lighthouse” about which he had written as an example of the bringing together of colour and form.4 “The lighthouse cylinder stands among a group of white-washed buildings with black barrel roofs seemingly all of one piece,” he explained. On some days the circumventing sea has blue, yellow, green, maroon and even orange colours crested with evanescent foam as epitome. From the point in a tearing wind we look down at the island growing into firm white buildings with black roofs: the central cylinder of white outlined against the grey sky is a monument to every form and colour in sea, sky and rock.5
Now, excited by such views from Little Park Owles, he invited Graham Bell and his girlfriend, Olivier Popham, to stay. “It is delectable here. Wonderful inside & out. There is a superb view from where I sit now of the stone parapet against the sea. We have tea on it as it is sheltered & full of all the sun that exists,” Margaret told her family in a letter including a sketch of Little Park Owles and its sea view.6 “We have an angelic gardeners boy of 14 with beautiful manners & very intelligent. He was a terrific help at the beginning lighting the fires when they went out from incompetent handling knowing everything,” she also wrote.
Margaret’s sketch
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I felt a great interest in the garden as soon as I arrived & Adrian who literally knows nothing about it is now beginning to be interested. We’ve been reading a book called a real A B C of gardening (not very good). We’ve got millions of primroses, Narcissus, stocks, wallflowers, forget-me-nots & other flowers, peach trees, apple trees. We are growing potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers & marrows. Peas, beans, artichokes, onions etc etc have been put in already. There are lots of roses & a greenhouse with an orange tree grown from a pip.7
Vegetable growing would become one of Stokes’s major occupations in Cornwall, with which he got help from a local farmer, Telfer Nankervis, and a gardener’s boy, William, while also worrying about imminent war. “The voltage in this house being at sixes and sevens with other voltages, I haven’t a wireless here so I don’t know what’s happening over this Easter, the moment I have long been dreading. But news of [G]ood Friday’s exploit has reached here,” he wrote referring to the start on 7 April 1939 of Italy’s invasion of Albania.8 “I have awful dreams about the war,” said Margaret later that month. “But being here it’s not the same horror as it was in London, when we were all too aware that it was what was expected at any moment.”9 It was comforting living away from war-threatened London. It was also fun, it seems, visiting Alfred Wallis at his home in St Ives. Often Stokes and Margaret found him alone. One time, however, a crowd of people were going in and out buying his paintings. “He told each person to put the money down, wrap a painting in newspaper and take it away,” said Margaret. Some people didn’t know what to give. I tried to improve his prices which were a few shillings, or materials which were not always suitable, such as brightly coloured paper and old canvas already painted on. Wallis didn’t mind what people gave; he was more interested in having them wrapped in newspaper. I bought a long narrow painting with four boats sailing before the wind, probably an early one, painted on a wooden board. Another time when Adrian and I visited him Wallis was in the middle of painting over an old calendar. He painted over what was there, enlarging the areas and going freely over the edges without changing the subject, transforming a conventional calendar into a real painting.10
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“We are enchanted with Cornwall and our new home,” Stokes told a newspaper reporter in also saying that he was “preparing” for an exhibition at the Lefevre Galleries in London and that he wanted to paint landscape “typical of Cornwall” which, together with Margaret and Curly and Kay Kent (whose sister had married Bernard Leach’s potter son, David), he explored that April.11 “Sometimes the path had an inch to spare from a sheer drop down miles deep.” Other times “the path was on an overhanging crag & liable to give way if walked on. Quite terrifying,” Margaret said of these explorations. You see the houses against the sky & everything looks as if it had been there for millions of years extraordinary shaped rocks. Masses of these … balanced ones which ought to fall off … Then huge caves & funny rocks like tables covered with birds …12
Stokes was particularly impressed by the sea at Cornwall with its “submerged rocks, free to the air between two waves, for ever and ever in that brief moment throwing off the maximum water before the return of the wave”. Here, surely, he mused, “in all the sensations of vastness and of superhuman force and rhythm which this scene gives to all the senses, we attend a parable of inner economy and of those forces within us”.13 As well as thus musing about the outer world of the senses and the inner economy of the mind he was involved in hosting a stream of visitors. First to visit were Curly and Kay Kent. Then came Margaret’s parents and her brother and sister, Duff and Ann. Barbara Hepworth’s ex-husband, the sculptor John Skeaping, visited. So did friends from the Euston Road art school: Victor Pasmore, Thelma Hulbert, and Catharine Sinclair in June 1939; and Bill Coldstream and his wife, Nancy, later that summer. The Coldstreams were still at Little Park Owles when the signing on 24 August of the Ribbentrop-Molotov non-aggression pact between Germany and Russia made war more than ever likely. “Terrible day listening to the news,” Margaret noted in her diary. “Bill marching up & down & round clasping his head in mortal terror. Every now & then a wry joke coming out. Nancy not upset. Just waiting. I don’t feel the horror yet either. Adrian calm.”14 He had hoped Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth would come to stay. “The tennis here is good on grass courts: one of the oldest
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clubs in the country with some good players: in fact nearly all the good Cornish players. Tomorrow I am playing a single against the Cornish champion,” he had written hoping that news of tennis playing in the area would bring Nicholson there. “Tell Barbara we have laid in the News Chronicle menu, a double portion. At the moment Margaret is upstairs being interviewed for their series of Cornish Artists that they publish in the western edition,” he added as further inducement.15 “Mrs. Stokes has dark hair and a pair of blue eyes that sparkle with fun,” reported the article resulting from this interview. “[She] studied painting first at Edinburgh Art School … has won three painting scholarships and has exhibited regularly at the Royal Scottish Academy and the Scottish Society of Artists.” Although she was “terribly thrilled” at winning a postgraduate fellowship she did not mind “giving it up to marry Adrian”, the article continued in making a love story of her involvement with Stokes.16
News Chronicle photo of Margaret
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By the time this was published Stokes had persuaded Nicholson and Hepworth to bring themselves and their four-year-old triplets for safety from war-threatened London to Little Park Owles. Hepworth tried to get Mondrian, then living in a bedsit round the corner from her and Nicholson in Belsize Park, to come with them to Cornwall. But he did not like the country and he could not afford to live there.17 So it was without Mondrian that Hepworth, Nicholson, their triplets, their nanny, and a cook arrived on 25 August at Little Park Owles in “a battered old car” at midnight in “pouring rain”.18 Thousands more evacuees from London arrived in Cornwall following Germany’s invasion of Poland and Britain’s declaration of war on Germany two days later on 3 September. Evacuees from London to Cornwall that month included the Russian-born constructivist artist, Naum Gabo, who, with Leslie Martin and Ben Nicholson, had edited the influential internationalist modern art journal, Circle. Now, with his artist wife, Miriam, Gabo arrived in Carbis Bay where Hepworth found them a bungalow home, Faerystone, near the end of the drive to Little Park Owles. To earn money Hepworth persuaded the manager of the power station at Hayle to pay for Nicholson, Stokes, Margaret, and Coldstream to design camouflage for the power station and its chimneys which only Margaret was brave enough to scale and paint. At the end of September, Stokes and Nicholson were enrolled into the special wartime constabulary organised by the police station at St Ives, by which time Stokes had begun working on “the land” as wartime conditions “required” by “digging up the garden” at Little Park Owles for more vegetable growing there. He also toyed with the idea of becoming “a proper unskilled agricultural labourer” on nearby farms;19 partnering another man in running a farm in Devon; or getting away from Little Park Owles to join Eddy Sackville-West or Robert Byron wherever their work took them during the war. “For the first few weeks, at any rate, I hope to be able to remain here. But later on, all one asks is to be among one’s friends,” he told Eddy from Little Park Owles just prior to the war beginning.20 The day war was declared he wrote to Byron. “What are you doing or about to do?” he asked him. Do please bear me in mind if you need an assistant for some job suited to my capacities. If one is to have any choice, one does so
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much prefer to be near at least one friend. Otherwise I shall either work on the land here or apply for a camouflage job.21
He wanted to be near either Eddy or Byron. He also wanted to get away from the strain of living with Nicholson and Hepworth. “The Mandarins, as Bill [Coldstream] calls them, are too prim and tight for permanent hosting,” he grumbled in early October. “I long for intimacy and not to have to bolster up boyish and mulish little worlds,” he explained to Graham Bell.22 The triplets were trying. Art work at Little Park Owles was also a problem. “Painting goes on all over the house from time to time, and the clash of styles in so confined a space reverberates even after dark,” Stokes grumbled to Kenneth Clark.23 Despite being large Little Park Owles felt very crowded that autumn. “Ben worked in Adrian’s studio, Adrian kept his big room at the sea end of the house where he had his desk and books,” Margaret recalled. “Barbara worked in their bedroom where she did drawings because there was not enough room to make sculpture. The triplets and the nurse lived in my studio and I worked in our bedroom.”24 Crowding was a problem. So were arguments between Nicholson and Hepworth. They were not used to sharing a bedroom. Hepworth’s smoking exacerbated Nicholson’s asthma. He also hated the sound of her alarm clock going off. When it did, despite his telling her not to use it, he threw it out of the window narrowly missing hitting Martha (the cook and housekeeper) in the courtyard below. The Nicholson-Hepworth ménage had to go. A couple of days after Christmas they moved to a nearby house, Dunluce, for which Stokes lent Nicholson the rent. He also helped Nicholson earn money by persuading Peter Lanyon to take paid art classes with him which, together with the influence of Naum Gabo, contributed to Lanyon becoming one of Britain’s leading modern artists after the war. Meanwhile, thanks to Stokes and Margaret living at Little Park Owles, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Margaret’s close artist friend, came to stay in May 1940 and soon after decided to live in St Ives where, like Lanyon, she too became a major post-war artist. Another future major figure in St Ives was Sven Berlin who got work teaching art at an evacuated school, Rocklands, in Carbis Bay, which he combined with doing gardening work at Little Park Owles. Here he was so impressed by seeing Wallis’s paintings he became the first person to write a
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biography of him. Before that, in 1940, he was recruited, together with Nicholson, Gabo, and others, to a squad of civil defence volunteers which Stokes was asked to organise, after which, following the start of German bombing of England that summer, Stokes, and thousands of others, were drafted into the Home Guard. “On Home Guard night-watches I would leave my car, the means of agricultural transport, up a steep incline at the back of the cinema,” Stokes later recalled. Here stood amid harsh accents and over strong reverberations the house of day-dreams, offering more freedom, more light, particularly if you had come from the hills in the Land’s End country, the probable venue for the Americans’ recent “exercise”. Their military expeditions and our own conducted to an image of St Ives as a nestling outpost upon the wilds; a more ancient, more comfortable, more wooded, but equally western small town in a Western film. And, as with earth-stubbed fingers, muffled, bristling with unwieldy weapons, I dismounted from my car behind the cinema, I could have imagined myself a member, however inefficient, of the Sheriff’s posse.25
Films shown at the cinema in St Ives also furnished material for his notes about the outer and inner life. “In a Victor Hugo film, one was shown once more the sewers of Paris. The hero, pursued, squanders his failing strength … amid the subterranean mud and cataracts,” he wrote. Many the dangers in this tomb of suffocating, purposeful yet silent water; his head submerges. This vast under-water-way, which has such a firm hold on the imagination, with its occasional arches and dim lights from above, is most directly a magnification, indeed an intensification of images concerned with the inside of the body.26
While he combined writing with Home Guard duties and with growing and supplying vegetables to evacuated schools in the area, Margaret, encouraged by Nicholson and Gabo, created collages for which she later became well known.
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Margaret’s first collage, July 1940 Her first collage was complete when, coinciding with a visit to Little Park Owles of Cyril Connolly (who that year founded the influential literary magazine, Horizon), an air raid warning was heard for the first time in Carbis Bay. Naum Gabo was frightened. So was Stokes. “From our bedroom window, we can see across the sea vague searchlights over Redruth and perhaps Falmouth,” he wrote, “and then maybe we hear the plane; that is if the all-clear signals are not summoning us to the tomb.”27 “Invasion seemed imminent,” he said, recalling that they found a hiding place, “a chamber cut in the rock, with a stream within”.28 Whether or not they planned for the heavily pregnant Margaret to give birth in this chamber, she gave birth, in the event, not there but in her room at Little Park Owles on 3 October 1940. Since the baby was a boy she assumed Stokes would call it after his beloved oldest brother, Philip. But he decided instead to call the baby Telfer because it sounded well with Stokes.29 “I am delighted with the good news and send you both all my good wishes for the happiness of your son & your own,” Klein wrote congratulating Stokes on Telfer’s birth. “I am so glad that the feeding goes well.” Then, in answer to Stokes’s impatience to begin toilet-training his infant son, she said by way of advice, “holding [him] over the pot
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without worrying or influencing him does not I think do damage and saves some trouble”.30 Stokes passed on this advice to Margaret who was helped in looking after Telfer by her eighteen-year-old sister, Ann. She had hoped to study to become a musician after leaving school that summer. But she could not sight-read music. So her parents instead sent her to keep Margaret company at Little Park Owles. Anyway, said their father, living with Stokes and Margaret would be an education in itself.
Ann with Telfer
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Living with them did indeed provide Ann with an education of sorts. Impressed by her enthusiasm for dancing and for the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film, Top Hat, Stokes arranged for Ann to take dancing classes with his ballerina friend, Phyllis Bedells, at an annex of the town’s Palais de Danse (later used as a sculpture studio by Hepworth). Since Ann liked playing the piano he also got her one from a local dealer, Andrewartha, which decided him, he said, to nickname her “Andrew”, albeit this might have been more due to her reminding him of a man he later memorialised in a poem, André.31 “She is a bit of a treasure,” he said of Ann soon after she arrived at Little Park Owles.32 She was still there looking after Telfer and going to ballet classes in St Ives when Stokes’s close friend, Robert Byron, was lost at sea following the German torpedoing of the ship on which he was travelling north of Stornoway in Scotland on 24 February 1941. She also remembered Stephen Spender honeymooning with his second wife, Natasha Litvin, at Little Park Owles in April 1941; playing poker and vingt-et-un at the Faerystone home of Naum and Miriam Gabo and their baby daughter, Nina; and playing croquet and Monopoly at Little Park Owles. “Monopoly is an extremely revealing game,” observed Margaret Gardiner after she stayed at Little Park Owles in 1941 with her fouryear-old son, Martin, and his father, Desmond Bernal. Adrian bought up the slum properties and developed them and [he] was extremely astute at … making bargains with other people, buying them out and so on. Desmond Bernal was very good at the game too but there was a great difference between the two men in that because … Adrian really minded, he really wanted to win, it mattered to him.33
Gardiner was also pictured playing croquet at Little Park Owles with Gabo, Nicholson, and the art critic, Herbert Read. At about this time Alfred Wallis was moved, due to increasing debility, from his home in St Ives to the Madron workhouse in Penzance. He had dreaded being sent there. It was a scandal given the money that collectors of his work made from his paintings—a scandal Margaret Mellis sought to excuse by explaining that, in the early 1940s, “no one would give much for [Wallis’s] paintings and even if all his admirers clubbed together they could not have afforded to pay for a private home”. To make things better for him, she added, Nicholson went to see the manager of the workhouse and told him about Wallis’s paintings “so that at the end of his life he was both respected and admired by everyone round him”.34
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Croquet at Little Park Owles Margaret also recalled that, in order to rescue Wallis’s paintings before his Back Road West home was fumigated due to its flea-ridden condition, Stokes drove her and Nicholson there. At first they were so engrossed in turning over and looking at the paintings they did not notice that they too were flea-ridden. When they eventually noticed they bundled them in a rug and stored them in one of Stokes’s garages at Little Park Owles after Nicholson had first got rid of fleas on himself by walking fully clothed into the sea. Unlike Nicholson, Stokes and Margaret continued to be bothered by fleas for several weeks when their visitors included William Coldstream, on leave from the army, and Graham Bell, on leave from the air force. By then Stokes’s expected exhibition at the Lefevre Galleries in London had been cancelled because of the war. He nevertheless spent a few days in London in September 1941 when, among other things, he helped Durham and Ethel sell their Porchester Terrace flat in Bayswater. Then he was again at Little Park Owles where he worried his garden help, William, might be called up for military service. This worry, it seems, decided Stokes to telegram an engineer and conscientious objector, Peter Freeman, asking for an immediate reply to his previous invitation to Freeman to join his vegetable growing enterprise. “Taken aback by this business-like acumen from an artist,” Freeman recalled, he immediately wired his acceptance of Stokes’s invitation, “and a month
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or two later” he was at work with Stokes “dressed in bottle-green dyed battle dress checking hundred weights of potatoes ready for all our spring planting”.35 Vegetable growing work, together with Home Guard duties, kept Stokes busy over the following months. Meanwhile his sister-in-law, Ann, continued helping Margaret look after Telfer; went to ballet classes in St Ives; was applauded for doing “character sketches with great verve”;36 and was praised in the local paper for her contribution to a variety concert as “Bedell’s brilliant pupil”.37 She also helped with a festival organised by Barbara Hepworth and others in St Ives to raise funds to send a mobile X-ray unit to Russia then enduring the German siege of Leningrad. The festival included a Soviet Life Exhibition for which, on 12 February 1942, Naum Gabo gave a speech about “the sufferings and achievements” of his fellow Russians.38 Other fund-raising events included a concert with contributions from the Ballets Russes dancer, Anna Ivanova, and from Hepworth’s sister-in-law, Mary Skeaping. The Hepworth-Nicholson triplets raised money by making and selling “dolls house furniture of match boxes”;39 Ann helped with a fund-raising auction on 28 March;40 and Stokes persuaded his Old Rugbeian friend, Joseph Macleod, then a BBC radio broadcaster, to have the St Ives medical appeal announced after the six o’clock news in early May.41
With Telfer, Margaret, Freeman, and William, c.1942
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The same month, May 1942, Ann, who had been prevented by the aftermath of a childhood knee injury from continuing ballet classes in St Ives, left Little Park Owles and returned with her father, David, to the Mellis family home in Scotland. She was therefore away from Cornwall when Alfred Wallis died on 29 August 1942 at the Madron workhouse in Penzance. From there Wallis’s body was sent by train to Stokes as the person appointed to deal with his financial affairs. Or his body would have been sent to Stokes had it not been diverted, on the advice of Sven Berlin, to the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army also organised Wallis’s funeral. He had left £20 to pay for it. Nevertheless it began in the paupers’ part of the Porthmear cemetery. Stokes, however, intervened and, after this and whatever extra money was needed, the funeral continued in the part of the graveyard where Wallis had wanted to be buried. Soon after that Sven Berlin completed and sent an account of Wallis’s life to Cyril Connolly for publication in Horizon. Nicholson, however, felt that, since he was the first person, with Christopher Wood, to have “discovered” Wallis, he should be the first person to have an article published about him. This led him to ask Stokes to put pressure on Berlin to withdraw the account of Wallis which he had sent Connolly. Stokes, however, refused to do this and a stand-up row ensued between himself and Nicholson. They were still at loggerheads after Connolly published Berlin’s account of Wallis together with a brief account of him by Nicholson in the January 1943 issue of Horizon. Nor were Stokes and Nicholson friends when Berlin approached Stokes for help with getting money together to pay for a tombstone for Wallis’s grave. “I will give £5 and I should think Jim Ede is good for £5. Then there is Watson’s £10 and with you, that makes £20–10, leaving some £5 more. Barbara should be good for £1,” Stokes replied. I am sure Herbert [Read] would give £1. Who else has got Wallises? [The collector] Madame Wertheim? I know none of these people’s addresses, not even the Herr Flamingo. Nor would I myself approach Ben and Barbara as I am no longer on speaking terms, and I shall sever relations entirely and finally for a great deal too much more than excellent reasons.42
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Wallis’s grave Eventually, after Stokes agreed to forego the money he had lent Nicholson to pay the rent at Dunluce, Nicholson again became friends
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with Stokes, by which time a covering, made of ceramic tiles designed by Bernard Leach, had been made for Wallis’s grave. Wallis was dead. So was Graham Bell. Following an accident on an air force training flight he died on 9 August 1943. His girlfriend, Olivier Popham, was devastated. So, it seems, was Stokes. “I think I have had a more vivid sense of Graham, of an embodied and gifted intelligence, of a friend, than in the case of anyone else,” he said of Bell.43 Bell’s loss may have reminded him of the loss of another friend with whom he had spent time as a teenager in the Pyrenees. “I may be digging and my foot may hit the spade in a certain way and at that moment I have a glimpse of a road in the Pyrenees where I was walking some 25 years ago: nor has this memory been previously evoked,” he wrote the month Bell died. I suspect it is not so much something I was doing in the field that corresponded with some incident on that road, and thus evoked the memory: no, I suspect that the total configuration of image and sensation in the field, though concerned with entirely different experiences, happened to correspond in direction, feeling or pattern with a moment of my consciousness while walking that road: and that this particular pattern had not come up before.44
It was an instance of an inwardly occurring image being evoked and given form by sensations arising from the world around him. He would write more about this in the following months while also getting to know and influence the future leading British artist, Patrick Heron, after Heron began work, as a conscientious objector, in January 1944 at the Leach pottery in St Ives. By then Stokes had summarised the notes he had begun making soon after first moving to Little Park Owles into an essay which he hoped Connolly would publish in Horizon.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Inside out
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“
uring the last twenty years I have found that whenever I had the sense of profound contemplation, a relationship was my object; and this relationship the one between all compulsive stirring in man and the outside world he inhabits,” Stokes wrote in summarising notes he had made about the outer and inner life. Man matches the externality of things with thought, with selfexpression, with sublimation. … The peg is always there, thousands and millions of pegs, the inanimate world, distinct from ourselves—that is part of every image—subject of natural law in whose ordered otherness we may contemplate the muddled exigency of being alive. … Hence the profundity of the interrelationship between what is inside us and outside.1
He called his resulting essay “a summing up of all I have ever thought incorporating experience of six years of daily psycho-analysis”.2 This essay, however, was so compressed and virtually incomprehensible Connolly rejected it for publication in Horizon. Instead Stokes included themes from this essay, and from notes he had made about the 145
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outer and inner life, in completing his quattrocento trilogy with a book about Venice. “Venice excels in blackness and whiteness; water brings commerce between them … white stone and interior darkness. Colour comes between, comes out of them, intensely yet gradually amassed, like a gondola between water and sky,” this book begins.3 It was a way of picturing visually intercommunication between the dark inner world of fantasy and imagination and the external physical world we get to know through what we can touch and see. “Like the sense apparatus of the human body, windows bring what is inside in communication with what is without: like consciousness they are the exit upon the external world of the life within,” he continued. Such, as it were, is the plain physiology of ordinary building of which we are the more constantly aware in Venice not only because of the length and darkness of the apertures in the strong light of Italy, but also because they are framed so simply and beautifully by the liston of Istrian stone: and because at the receptive moment of summer evening as of early morning, the shutters are thrown wide: the houses breathe, the tenants show themselves.4
Then, having apologised for not being able to find a replacement, during the war, for a squared up photo of Venice’s quattrocento church, Santa Maria dei Miracoli, Stokes used this photo, as he had used the water and stone of Venice, to convey visually the intercommunication of inner and outer life. “Pilasters, with their arch mouldings lying upon the bright marble wall-space, are the inner dark ferment in architectural form upon this marble,” Stokes said of this building. The darkness of the windows is like a residue both of the inside of the church and of the dark canal. … And so, while the stone still further exteriorizes elements of the outside world in a form of dramatic arrest, at the same time in the angle of the tower, for instance, the almost buried strips of capital and pilaster are the last of the inner darkness that has squeezed through to be a still and static outward thing.5
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Then came more examples. The Manzoni-Angaran palace, for instance, converting “[m]ovement and depth of water … into stone” expressing, said Stokes, “paramount arrest without excluding the content of what is successive”.6 Another example was San Cristoforo transforming into outward form, he maintained, an inner image of the mother and other figures “good and bad” that “dominate our lives”. Having thus illustrated his thesis regarding the transformation and substitution, as he also called it, of inner by outer reality characterising “all human process”, Stokes went on to recount the quattrocento transformation of Venice from a town of mud and brick into the city of water and stone celebrated by Gabriele d’Annunzio in his novel, The Flame of Life, which Osbert Sitwell had particularly recommended Stokes to read the first summer he lived in Venice.7 Now, having highlighted the water and stone character of Venice as visual emblem of interchange between inner and outer reality, Stokes illustrated this interchange in terms of Giorgione’s painting, The Tempest or Tempesta (see p. 58). True to its title, a tempest or thunderstorm brews in the background of this painting. Yet at the same time the painting as a whole portrays, said Stokes, “the utmost drama of the soul as laid-out things”. To achieve this effect, he argued, Giorgione chose a moment of utmost revelation, in visual terms sunrise or sunset when things stand “as they really are” and when the hush of this revelation induces a contemplative mood … [when] relationship and affinity between objects become an essential part of their meaning: [so that] every clearly seen object appears to possess equal importance, equal insistence whatever the size, owing to the inter-locking palpability of local colour …8
Just as the best quattrocento sculptors and architects made the face of stone to manifest its inner life in outer form so too, Stokes maintained, Giorgione shows us in The Tempest the mind outwardly revealed to our eyes. “The world as we perceive it … is the language of every passing mood or contemplative state,” Stokes generalised. “Indeed, without this canvas, as it were, on which to apply ourselves … we cannot conceive the flow of the mind any more than the activity of the body.” Or, as he also put it, “The external world is the sounding board of the emotions. That is self-evident: nevertheless, in contemplating the eternal poetry of Giorgione’s Tempesta, it has seemed a discovery.”9
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Book cover
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“[A]rt concentrates and solidifies mental process in a guise of the spatial world,” quoted one of many laudatory reviews of Stokes’s resulting book.10 “It propounds what amounts to a new aesthetic, based as much upon seeing as upon thinking, on fact as upon fancy, in which the mind is invited simultaneously to observe and the eye to imagine,” admired the art writer, Herbert Furst.11 “[T]he essence of artistic creation especially is the bestowing on pieces of matter the power to communicate a particular set of phantasies,” Stokes had meanwhile written in an article published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. We do the same with words.12 “By their interposition internal thought-processes are made into perceptions,” Freud had observed in explaining how what is unconscious becomes conscious through the use of words in talking cure psychoanalysis.13 Quoting Freud approvingly on this point, Stokes recommended psychoanalysts to follow the lead not only of Freud but also of artists in paying attention to ways the inner world becomes knowable through the outer “world of the senses”.14 By then Stokes had also used Klein’s psychoanalytic ideas about the importance of “trust” in an inner image of the mother as a good figure within the mind.15 He went on to use notes he had made during his psychoanalytic treatment by Klein in writing the first part of his next book, Inside Out. She had interpreted ways he defended himself against upsetting inwardly occurring fantasies, including fantasies about his parents’ sexual intercourse, by focusing instead on the world around him. Now, in Inside Out, he recounted these fantasies in terms of the engine house operating the fountains in Hyde Park near his childhood home in Bayswater. “The cold and grinding mechanism was housed in Portland stone of a late Victorian style, both white and darkened,” he recalled. The fountains themselves had little grace owing to the pretentiousness of every detail of the stone lay-out. Moreover, the smell of decay was freshened by the sprayed water that dropped like pellets on the surfaces of the basins. Surplus water from the final basin poured away into the Long Water. Here was the inky-dark medium of the park suicides.16
To this he added memory of being told as a child that when the park’s river, the Serpentine was drained it revealed everything that had been
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flung into it. It thus provided an image of the park, according to Klein, and of Ethel as a “torn, attacked and divided mother” needing to be “known, controlled and restored”.17 From Hyde Park as “the setting down of the sum of earlier desolations” he now turned to the “counter-landscape” of Italy remembered from his first visit to Rapallo during his third year as a twenty-year-old student at Oxford.18 “As I think now of that valley at Rapallo that goes up to Mont’Allegro, as I think of the afternoon winter sunlight, I have the sensation of a sound which contains every note,” he wrote. Nature spreads and mounts before me, fixed and growing … a demonstration … of the power of life to be manifest … [as] many things, concrete things, each bound to each by an outwardness that allows no afterthought to the spectator … answering life wells to the surface, and he feels—hence the great beauty of Mediterranean landscape—that the progress of a man’s existence is outward, giving shape, precise contour to the few things that lie deepest …19
Two landscapes then: “Hyde Park is especially a destroyed and contaminated mother, Italy the rapid attempt to restore.”20 “The broad confrontation for me, particularly at Rapallo, is the piledup darkness of the mind with the vast sunlit tangible world,” he continued. Then he reflected about ways his life over twenty years later in Cornwall also provided examples of the substitution of inner by outer reality. “As well as things in themselves, a wood, a house, the sea, are also symbols of physical and psychological states,” he wrote.21 “Outside, a row of tulips is not at all a cycle of the cares of cultivation … we note the intervals and rhythm of their positions: we may view our life in that place in terms of their upright calm,” he said. “This wide concatenation of the outside world is more aesthetic, less passive, than those refreshing moments in which we are primarily astounded by the powerful extent of Nature; in watching a sunset, perhaps or the fury of the sea upon rocks,” he added. Through all the sensations of vastness and of super-human force and rhythm which such a scene gives to the senses, surely we attend a parable of inner economy, of those forces within, seemingly foreign to us. We are looking on Nature, but at the same time we look on a clearer distribution of forces within ourselves, a clearer interaction, one more Homeric, more in style and therefore more disinterested than is the case. We would that inner conflict were thus
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windswept, that visitation of the deeper caverns of the mind were subject to such causes as those that govern tides.22
Then he turned to more domestic objects. “How blessed that things do not move with our thoughts. The glass on the table is still while I think, imagine, fear and love,” he observed. A little contemplation of its outwardness, a little scientific or aesthetic appraisal, stabilizes the world short of the need for action or mere physical engrossment. If it were not for the still spatiality and tangibility of this glass on the table, expression would not be our life-blood: at least, not with the colour, already apparent in the process of perception, of abstract, shiftless ideas.23
It was another example of ways we become conscious of what is “within” us in terms of things separate from us in the outside world.24 A rather different example came from Telfer, as a toddler, crying all morning for “his red pants” when they were in the wash because of what they stood for “in his mind”.25 Nevertheless, like the glass on the table, Telfer’s red pants and other examples in the outside world give to what Stokes called the “undimensional acuteness of inner feeling” the dimensions of “length, breadth and depth”.26 “Trains, shunting, trains. How the trucks knock, knob and jostle one another,” he wrote in illustrating this dimensional effect of external objects with the example of the sound of trains shunting on the single track railway line near Little Park Owles. “[T]he rearrangement, re-shuffle of passenger and freight for further long striding journeys, impinges deeply on the mind,” he claimed. “It is a residue, an echo, this shunting” intimating “something solid, definite … while the original is a fantasy buried deep in the mind”.27 These and other examples of the effect of the outer world on the inner world of the mind were included in an article by Stokes published alongside articles by the philosophers Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer in the January 1946 issue of the journal, Polemic, the cover of which was designed by Ben Nicholson. Then, after incorporating this article in the first part of Inside Out, Stokes turned in the book’s second part to Cézanne. As though puzzling about how he himself had grown away from the tremendosities and excitements of his youth he asked how Cézanne came to strive for “his senses to reveal, for his mind to recreate, a quintessential structure” having in his youth been “the first wild man of modern art revelling in an orgiastic omnipotence”.28
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January 1946 issue of Polemic As answer Stokes noted Cézanne’s study of paintings by “the Venetians, Rubens and Poussin” and his learning his craft as a painter from Pissarro. He also noted Cézanne’s “love of Virgil and the classics” from which, said Stokes, Cézanne derived “passionate identification with what is other, insisting upon an order there, strong, enduring and final as being an other thing, untainted by … the arrière pensée of ‘thinking makes it so’”.29
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Richard’s drawing He likened Cézanne’s insistence on objective and impartial perception to one of Klein’s patients, a ten-year-old boy, Richard, recognising, during the course of his psychoanalytic treatment, that his mother was both “good” and “bad”. Or so Klein claimed in interpreting the top right-hand detail of one of Richard’s drawings (illustrated here) as signifying his mother as both the “crown” of a queen and as the beak of a “horrid” bird.30 Scientists should similarly counter fantasy with objectively perceived reality, argued Stokes, in concluding Inside Out by proclaiming that it was “the duty of every scientist … to seek psychoanalytic treatment in its longest form”.31 With this extraordinary conclusion he hardly endeared himself to his publishers, Faber & Faber. They were “disgusted”, he said, by his Inside Out book and only published it “under protest”.32 To put them in a better mood he agreed to lend his name, as one of Britain’s most distinguished art critics, to a Faber & Faber book of reproductions of Cézanne’s post-impressionist paintings.
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“No painter has excelled Cézanne in organizing the power of colour to organize the kind of forms that may grow from the sense of colour,” Stokes wrote in this book’s introduction in which he also claimed that Cézanne’s achievement of form via colour was the means by which he transformed “inner ferment” into organised outer form.33 As illustration, perhaps influenced by his continuing gardening work at Little Park Owles, Stokes focused on Cézanne’s portrait of his gardener, Vallier (a copy of which was included on the book’s cover).
Book cover
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“So different from Rimini is the deeply felt mathematic. Gardener thicker paint bigger brushes. Though particularly an organic piece of drawing with colour and the cylinder of the legs,” Stokes had previously noted apropos this portrait in his diary.34 Now in introducing Cézanne post-impressionist paintings he said of this portrait: The cone from thigh to knee—a wonderful piece of drawing— accepts at each extremity for commentary profound and startling, the cone of the hat and the cones of the peasant shoes. There are also the cones of the head, of the elbows: kindred shapes remark themselves in the under-knee, in leaves, in the folds of the shirt. None of them do we feel to be forced. On the contrary it is a clear and startling, even a simple apprehension of volume which Cézanne causes to reverberate in our mind, by means of the slow, subtle, chromatic echoes that come from every part of the canvas.35
He also noted that prior to painting this and his other revolutionary post-impressionist paintings Cézanne had fallen in love. “It is still something of a shock to read that he did not paint from May till August that year,” commented Stokes. “This is probably the only gap in his working life and around it there sways the emptiness and the loneliness following an atom bomb explosion,” he added.36 By then he too had fallen in love before or shortly after the US atom bomb explosion in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 was followed by the surrender of Japan and the end of the Second World War.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Love and divorce
H
“
e used to fall very deeply in love,” Klein said of Stokes in the early 1930s.1 By then the men with whom he had fallen very deeply in love probably included Eddy Sackville-West; the friend whom he referred to as “the pipe-man”;2 and his Old Rugbeian contemporary, Adrian “Curly” Kent. Then, in the late 1930s, it seems, Stokes became enamoured of Graham Bell to whom he wrote long intimate letters prior to Bell’s death in August 1943. Neither then nor before that had Stokes’s wife, Margaret Mellis, been someone with whom Stokes was in love. She was nevertheless very much in love with him by the time they married and moved into Little Park Owles where, she said, she had “absolutely everything the heart could desire”.3 She was delighted that, after the strain of moving in, Stokes was again “very beautiful”.4 She arranged flowers for him to paint. She sat for his portrait of her, and she seemingly enjoyed spending time with him at Lower Stonehams and at the ballet in London in the summer of 1939. She was nevertheless “v. sad” and suffered with “terrible depression” after her parents and younger siblings, Duff and Ann, visited and
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then left her alone with Stokes at Little Park Owles in August 1939.5 She was furious with him the following March 1940 for inviting “reams of people” to stay when she was suffering with nausea during her early pregnancy with Telfer. She hoped guests Stokes had invited would not be able to come because it was so “awful seeing to the cooking when she was sick”.6
Stokes, Portrait of Margaret, c.1939
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“I want Ann to come & stay here soon, as soon as possible. Adrian may be going off & here am I all alone in a large empty house,” she wrote desperately to her parents pleading with them to send Ann to keep her company at Little Park Owles. Otherwise, since she could not manage the market garden all by herself, she was fearful that Stokes would import Margaret Gardiner (also known in the Mellis family as “Marbrute”) to run things at Little Park Owles when he was gone.7 “I haven’t been slacking about household things,” she wrote in selfdefence after Stokes raged at her for not getting lunch ready “exactly on the dot of 12.30”; for her “incompetence”; and for not recognising that, alongside her work as an artist, she was making “a violent effort to be a housekeeping WIFE”.8 He nevertheless stayed on at Little Park Owles where Margaret’s pleading with her parents to send Ann to keep her company there resulted in Ann’s arrival in August 1940. “Ann & I sweated round & prepared beds & put flowers everywhere” ready for a visit from Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender, Margaret told her parents from Little Park Owles a few days later.9 By then Ann had been upset to discover how badly Stokes and Margaret got on together; that they no longer shared a bed; that Stokes instead slept downstairs in his study cum studio; and that he even sometimes took his meals there. She was also very angry with Stokes for becoming furious with Margaret about the messy state of her bedroom when she was giving birth in it to Telfer that October. Margaret, however, was still very much in love with Stokes. She missed him when he was away for a few days the following September 1941 and wrote excitedly anticipating his return, “A[drian] coming home hurray & hurray.”10 But she was very “sad & lonely” at Little Park Owles after Ann left the following May.11 Nor is it likely that this was helped by their Church of Scotland father, David Mellis, preaching to her about herself and Stokes. “You two simply must give Telfer a brother. It is simply a crime to have every possible combination of circumstances & gifts for having good children & giving them such a wonderful home & then not to have them,” he sermonised.12 “Having taken things (household things) entirely into your own hands you simply must see that Adrian is properly cared for as well as Telfer,” he ordered Margaret that December. You have always thought that you could have things both ways in this world. I expect you are beginning to see what we told you so
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often that you can’t. If you want to make a success of your home you simply must put it first & neither sacrifice Adrian to Telfer or Telfer to Adrian but yourself for both.13
This is unlikely to have allayed hostilities between Stokes and Margaret. By May 1944 these hostilities had reached near breaking point when Margaret wrote in her diary: Did tomatoes all day without stopping except to get meals. Then A went to the cinema. Selfish pig. He never makes any effort to take me. He doesn’t care how much he hurts my feelings either selfish swine I feel too tired to paint & I want to go to the cinema I HATE everyone …14
Happier times followed: “A had to go on Guard [duty]. Kissed me good night about 4 times,” she noted in May 1944.15 Then in July she included mention of “a lovely day” on the beach with Stokes and Telfer.16
Start of “Dear Andrew” letter, 1944 That October marked Stokes’s forty-second birthday for which Margaret’s sister, Ann, sent him birthday greetings. “Dear Andrew,” he replied, using the nickname he had coined for her after buying her a piano from the dealer, Andrewartha. I was very touched to get a letter from you on my birthday, and for once no tree blew down that day. Very sweet of you to remember and you write such amusing letters. I went into Penzance to sell carts of tomatoes, and the first thing I saw was Andrew Artha’s [sic] van sailing along with its huge letters. When you come here next—and I hope it’s soon—I will try to get this van to meet you so that you are properly announced and delivered here.17
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Ann as “Andrew” “Tons of love from Andrew,” Ann in turn wrote early the following February 1945 on the back of a photo which she sent Stokes and Margaret showing herself in her uniform as a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) which she had joined some months before.18 “There is a point to be made about adolescence, youth and falling in love,” Stokes wrote that month. “It is then we know best that life is expression, that expression is finding what is within us in forms that are outside us.”19 Whether or not he was thinking of Ann in writing this, he certainly was not thinking of Margaret with whom, by the end
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of the war, he had not got on well for a long time. Margaret thought this might have been because his Home Guard and market gardening work prevented him getting on with his writing. “Then he started going to London and I thought that was quite a good idea because that would give him a change,” she recalled.20 She also remembered that, after being demobilised from the WRNS in November 1945, Ann got tickets for herself and Stokes to go to the ballet together in London. Here Ann lived at the Highgate home of her and Margaret’s aunt and uncle, Eva and Norman Wilkinson, from where she resumed dancing classes with Phyllis Bedells at her ballet school which, now that the war was over, had returned from St Ives to Quex Road in West Hampstead. Ann was delighted that Stokes, the well-known ballet expert, came to watch her dance at the school. But she was astounded, she said, when he told her he had fallen in love with her. She was also angry that he was pleased that persisting problems with her knee, which had previously prevented her continuing dancing classes in St Ives, might now prevent her becoming a dancer so she could marry him instead. She reassured herself that he could not marry her, even if he succeeded in getting a divorce from Margaret, since it was illegal at that time in Britain, and in almost everywhere else in the world, for a man to marry the sister of his still living ex-wife. He was nevertheless determined to marry Ann and discovered he could do so legally in Switzerland provided he first got divorced from Margaret and persuaded Ann to agree to marry him. Ann, however, was not in love with him. She liked him well enough. But she found his stiff unresponsiveness off-putting when he first met her and the Mellis family in Scotland at the end of 1938. Perhaps, Ann had suggested that winter, he might like to toboggan. No, he said, he did not like tobogganing. So Ann asked him if he liked skating. No, he did not do that, he replied. Perhaps he liked horses. “Not really, I don’t ride,” he answered.21 She also remembered wondering that December whether she should give him a goodnight kiss as she did other members of her family. Since her brother, Duff, said she should, she gave Stokes “a peck” from which he “pulled back” which she thought silly since she was then only “a little girl”. He was an uptight “stuffed shirt”, she said, like the man with whom she later had an affair in the navy.22
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Despairing of ever winning her love, Stokes told her that, since she would not marry him, and since his marriage to Margaret was over, he would have to find someone else to marry. That clinched it for Ann. “What a fool I am! This wonderful man. I’m letting him escape. He won’t go back to Peggy [Margaret],” she told herself before hurrying the next day to ask Stokes if it was too late to change her mind because, she said, she had decided she would like to marry him after all, whereupon, she recalled, “all went well”.23 But not quite. Stokes was still very anxious about retaining her affections when she was late meeting him for a boat trip on the River Thames. He was still anxious after the boat arrived at Greenwich and they went to its park. Here he declared his love for her and told her “she was now the man in so far as she determined how much she saw” him and whether he “kissed her”. Then, despite her having told him “she didn’t want to be the man” in relation to him, she acted the man, he said, in telling him, “I want a kiss now”, after which they “walked about arm and arm”, and talked about her brother, Duff, whom he hoped would support him in his love for her.24 Overleaf from notes about Piero della Francesca and Giorgione, which he made on the train returning him from London to Cornwall, he wrote a love poem to Ann as his sturdy “oak tree”.25 Then he was again at Little Park Owles where he was like “a block of ice” to Margaret. “Write to me for Gods sake,” she begged Ann. I didn’t sleep for one minute last night & feel as if I’d been on the rack. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I think I’m going mad. Who did he go to the ballet with when you weren’t able. Why was he so worried round about June 1st or 2nd. Do you know anything. Things? cdn’t be worse in feeling than they are at the minute. Heaps of love if there is anything left in me which hasn’t gone sour rancid, dust & ashes. please write please write please write.26
She pleaded with Ann. She also pleaded with Stokes. She pressed him to tell her what he had been doing in London. Then he let slip he had fallen in love. At this she became frantic. She was relieved, however, to learn that he was in love with Ann. “Well that’s all right he can’t possibly go off with her,” she told herself. Then she discovered it was not going to be all right at all. He was evidently “madly in love” with Ann.27
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To find out more she went to see Ann in London. Since Ann was late meeting her train when it arrived at Paddington they met instead at the Holland Park home in London of Patrick and Delia Heron. Here, rather extraordinarily in the circumstances, Ann and Margaret shared a bed. “There is not half an oz of embarrassment between us and we are 50 times closer than ever before,” Ann told Stokes, signing herself as Andrew. “The whole business is so heart breaking that I can hardly take it in and think of it as if reading a book,” she added. “We both try to pay the taxis or the meals and I say, ‘Well it’s Adrian’s money anyway’ & Peg says ‘This is Adrian’s money anyway too!’”28 Funded by him they went to see a performance of Javanese dancing together at the Garrick Theatre. Soon after Stokes took Ann to another performance there. But they had to leave early because she was ill and had to return to her aunt’s and uncle’s house in Highgate where Stokes left her. “A most terrible parting,” he called it. “I can’t even find out how she is beyond a single telephone call to the aunt.” Nevertheless, he went on, “[t]hough temporarily laid out by grief and apprehension, I feel a new strength”.29 His new strength, however, was almost immediately put to the test by Ann who wrote on 14 July telling him I don’t want to marry you and do not want to be any one’s mistress but my own … I am desperately, desperately sorry and angry in a useless way to be the person to hurt you; you of all people and by me and this letter reads like cold stone; almost as cold as a certain way you have of talking to Peg [Margaret] … I beg you not to try to see me nor to prolong your own or my own agony by argument or any of the powerful means in your possession.30
His powerful means nevertheless prevailed and they stayed together a few days later, as he had previously planned, in the village of Aldermaston, not far from Lower Stonehams. He also successfully persuaded Ann to spend time with him soon after in Cornwall. He nevertheless became frantic when, after she left and went to Glyndebourne (for the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s opera, The Rape of Lucrece) and then went to stay with her parents in Scotland, she did not immediately write. He was reassured, however, when she wrote in early August, albeit not to him but to Margaret telling her
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Darling Peg, I believe Dad & Mum have both written to you since I found it was the most natural thing to tell them you were pretty miserable and had come to the decision of divorcing and they of course are very sympathetic … They do not know about Adrian & me—if you came up you would sense the madness of telling them. It is quite off the point to make them blindly furious with Adrian & horror struck with me so if you don’t want to put me in a position from which I shouldn’t recover easily you will keep that to yourself. If you want to cut me off completely from A. that would certainly do it.31
Reassured by Ann thus conveying her continuing desire to be with him, Stokes wrote her a long love letter. “I’ve been in love before alright but though violently, not to a hundredth this degree,” he told her. For I do not believe that one can more than once lose one’s identity, so to speak. I simply don’t know myself any more nor any of my former activities. I am nothing except in relation to you. … If I am cut off from you altogether, there is nothing of me surviving and, since in some way I have committed the whole of myself, as far as I can see there could be nothing. Your replica is not to be found. If I thought there was the slightest chance of an approximation I would search the world. … may you never be thus reduced by loving to desperation, my merry, merry, Andrew.32
Desperately in love with her, he was determined to leave Margaret and Little Park Owles by the end of that month. Margaret dreaded that, in his absence, she would kill herself with the gun they happened to have at Little Park Owles. To avert this dread she asked her brother, Duff, to come and stay. But he was too busy and ill in Scotland to do so. She asked Wilhelmina Barns-Graham to keep her company. She would have done had Margaret only explained why she needed her to do so. Margaret, however, could not bring herself to tell Wilhelmina or other friends and acquaintances in Cornwall that she and Stokes were separating. Since neither Duff nor Wilhelmina agreed to keep Margaret company after he was gone Stokes suggested finding someone else who might help in St Ives. There they chanced to meet a typographer
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acquaintance, Anthony Froshaug, who was moving to Cornwall, had not yet found somewhere to live there, and agreed to move into Little Park Owles that very night, after which Stokes left the following day for London. Here he stayed at the Belgravia home in West Halkin Street of his and Eddy’s artist friend, Eardley Knowles. He also began psychoanalytic treatment again with Klein (who had written to him earlier that year congratulating him on his articles in Polemic and in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis).33 While in London that autumn Stokes consulted a lawyer who advised him that, to speed up the divorce he wanted from Margaret, he should proceed not through a court in London but through the court in Bodmin in Cornwall. Furthermore, since Stokes did not want to implicate Ann in his divorce proceedings, the lawyer advised him to hire a prostitute, travel with her to Cornwall, and stay with her there in a hotel to provide evidence of his adultery with her and thus provide grounds for Margaret to divorce him. Stokes, however, like Durham, his father, could be very mean. To avoid the expense of hiring the prostitute, and paying the train fare for himself and her, he asked Margaret, with remarkably little concern for her feelings, if she knew anyone who would play the role of his lover for free. “Is there no one trustworthy in Cornwall who would do this; if not for me, then for you?” he asked. “Miss Jean,” for instance, he suggested. The lawyer says it is quite unnecessary for me to sleep with the person! The important thing is to have breakfast brought to one in bed. If Miss Jean is willing (I don’t suppose she is) to be what is called a sport, let her pick any hotel (but not in St Ives) and engage a room … The point of me coming to Cornwall is not only with a view to Bodmin assizes but to make it easy and quick for the Penzance lawyers to collect and identify the evidence. Perhaps Anthony [Froshaug] might suggest some one who would not mind acting (it’s only an act) as co-respondent? I really don’t feel, certainly in my very low state, able to face the prostitute business.34
Luckily for Stokes and his distaste for the prostitute business and for spending money on it he managed to find a woman willing to play
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the role of his lover for free in exchange for a trip to Cornwall and “ceaseless talk about psycho-analysis—and nothing more”.35 He was worried, however, that his chances of getting divorced from Margaret on the grounds of his adultery would be compromised by her adultery with Froshaug. To avoid this he told Margaret that as soon as Duff left, after staying at Little Park Owles, she must get Froshaug to leave too to avoid her being seen staying alone with him there. At this Margaret was furious. Stokes had been happy enough to have Froshaug stay with her when it suited him only to want him to go when this was no longer the case, she fumed. “Oh well, I’ll have to come back to Cornwall to explain,” he irritatedly replied. At first, after he arrived at Little Park Owles, Margaret agreed to ask Froshaug to leave. But when Froshaug said he wanted to stay she said he could and that her adultery with him could be used by Stokes as grounds for his getting a divorce from her. As soon as she said this she realised by the look of “pure joy” on Stokes’s face that she had “done something really stupid”.36 She was even more convinced of her stupidity when Froshaug soon after left her to return to his girlfriend in London. She was somewhat consoled, however, by Patrick and Delia Heron coming to keep her company at Little Park Owles with their close friend, Francis “Jacko” Davison, whom she liked and eventually married. Meanwhile her father, David Mellis, having learnt of Stokes’s plans to divorce her and marry Ann, wrote congratulating Stokes for getting his “own way about this little matter”.37 “If you aren’t pleased with her I’m afraid we haven’t any more daughters. My goodness 2 is plenty,” he quipped.38 Joking aside, however, he was concerned lest Margaret might be heavily penalised financially by Stokes divorcing her for adultery with Froshaug. Perhaps it was this that led Stokes to add an affidavit to the divorce papers in which he testified that Margaret had always been “a loyal wife”; had only “very reluctantly for the sake of his happiness agreed to the divorce”; and that he accordingly granted her “£350 per annum tax free for life”.39 This might have been a generous settlement at the time. But in later years it left Margaret in penury compared to Ann. Meanwhile, in December 1946, Margaret left Little Park Owles and Cornwall with six-year-old Telfer to spend Christmas that year with her family in Scotland. Then in early January 1947 she took Telfer to begin boarding school near Rugby before taking herself to London where she
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moved into a bedsit in Kensington. Here she was very miserable, quite unlike her sister, Ann. “Oh what fun to be in London again … Scotland was marvellous & Telfer is the sweetest little boy that ever was. Ours will have much the same blood,” Ann wrote excitedly to Stokes from Chelsea.40 “I feel sure Peg will be married quite soon to someone. Jacko [Francis Davison] may be quite a good person may’nt [sic] he? She is like the princess with a string of suitors turned into heads round her neck,” she wrote again to Stokes while he was staying at the Porthminster Hotel arranging for the sale of Little Park Owles.41 The same month, January 1947, his book, Inside Out, dedicated to Margaret, was published. Unlike his immediately preceding books it received scarcely any immediate attention from reviewers. “Being so short and having no peg from the dear Editor’s point of view, quite apart from the present shut down of periodicals and book shops, it is only a letter such as yours which gives the fact of publication any reality,” he wrote disconsolately to Barbara Hepworth in reply to her showing interest in the book.42 Eventually it would receive considerable attention. For the moment, however, Stokes was, it seems, less concerned about the fate of this book than with securing his divorce from Margaret. Thanks to Duff, despite being deaf, providing evidence of having overheard Margaret’s adultery with Froshaug when he was staying at Little Park Owles the previous autumn, the Bodmin assizes granted Stokes a provisional divorce from Margaret on 13 March 1947. To ensure that this was not overturned by his being seen with Ann he continued staying at Eardley Knowles’s flat in Belgravia while she stayed in Scotland from where she wrote almost every day to Stokes in letters which she sometimes adorned with a drawing of herself as his “[A]nnoak, a stout oak and a stoake”.43 Then, on 1 May, Stokes’s divorce from Margaret was finalised and three weeks later he married Ann in Switzerland at a registry office in Ascona where a resident from their boarding house, Sasso Boretto, acted as a witness. Stokes wanted to announce his marriage to Ann in The Times. But his father-in-law, David Mellis, advised against this. “You are liable to be prosecuted for incest if anyone reported the thing to the authorities,” Mellis warned. “Before your return to this country you must have a complete domicile established. It is only after that that the marriage would be accepted as valid,” he added.44
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Ann as Stokes’s “Annoak” Stokes’s hopes of honeymooning with Ann at the home of his Old Rugbeian friend, Ian Henderson, then working for the British Foreign Office in Malta, were also dashed since Henderson refused to have them stay there due to the British illegality of their marriage. Nor would
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David Mellis agree to their staying at his and his wife Maisie’s home in Scotland when Margaret was there. “For Peg [Margaret] to see you both together is more than she could stand,” Mellis explained. “It is easy for you, Adrian, to think you can be quite good friends with Peggy because you never really loved her & found it impossible to live with her. Peggy loved you more than she ever loved anyone else.”45
Stokes, Sasso Boretto, c.1947
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Mellis worried about Margaret. So did Maisie after visiting Margaret in London where she was distressed to find Margaret had become perilously thin due to grief at her loss of Stokes. “For goodness sake EAT,” he implored her from Ascona.46 “I eat a lot. You needn’t worry about that,” she replied from Paris from where she travelled with Francis Davison to manage his adoptive mother’s house, the Chateau des Enfants, in Cap d’Antibes.47 Here, after a visit from her Euston Road art school friends, William Coldstream and Sam Carter, Margaret became relatively happy. Not so Telfer. He had become dangerously ill at his boarding school near Rugby, after which he spent his summer holiday that year with Margaret and Francis at their home in Cap d’Antibes from where he went to a local day school. That solved one problem. It did not, however, solve his upset on learning from Margaret, or Ia as he called her, that his father had married Ann. On learning this he wept, asked “How can Daddy marry twice?”, wept some more, and then said, “That means Daddy doesn’t like you anymore Ia, poor little Ia, never mind I will love you all the more.” Again in tears, he added, “Daddy will never come back to us.”48 This, together with David Mellis pressing Margaret to “try & arrange for Adrian to see Telfer”, persuaded her to invite Stokes and Ann to stay with Telfer, herself, and Davison at their home in Cap d’Antibes. “It would be much cheaper & much nicer than anything else or any other way of your seeing T[elfer],” she told Stokes in early August. “If Ann could manage the journey it would be quite easy once she got here as we have a woman who does all the cooking. Ie [sic] there is nothing to do,” she added. “Anyway it’s the only practical way of seeing Telfer & I can only feel it would be good for all of us,” she went on.49 Seeing Ann pregnant with Stokes’s child in Cap d’Antibes, however, proved more than Margaret could bear. To avoid a repeat of the terrible upset she then suffered Davison put an embargo on any further visits from Stokes to Telfer at Cap d’Antibes. Stokes himself, however, was blithely unaware of the unhappiness his and Ann’s visit had caused. “The visit was an enormous success and I think it solved many things for us. Ann & I are very contented about it,” he wrote after they returned to Ascona. Here, delighted by the view from the boarding house, Casa Sfinge, to which they had moved, he was inspired to paint “four entirely different pictures from the same spot”.50 Then in November he moved with Ann into a “bungalow”, Casa alla Motta,51 “a very small shack”,
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he called it,52 approached “by steps & paths from the side of the police station” on the outskirts of Ascona and cheaper than properties nearer the centre of the town.53 From Casa alla Motta he spent a few days in early December 1947 in England visiting his parents at Lower Stonehams, stayed with RobsonScott in London, and went to that winter’s Van Gogh exhibition at the Tate. Then he was again at Casa alla Motta awaiting the birth of his and his beloved Ann’s baby, to whom she gave birth by Caesarean section in a hospital in Locarno, near Ascona, on 18 February 1948. The baby was a boy and, unlike Stokes’s first child, he was called Philip like Stokes’s beloved eldest brother.
Stokes painting in Ascona
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Outside in
S
tokes’s renewed psychoanalytic treatment with Klein in the autumn of 1946 had reacquainted him with her theory that our psychology is constituted by internalising our experience of others outside us as loved and hated part-objects within us. Mindful of this after his divorce from Margaret and marriage to her sister, Ann, in May 1947, he noted for possible inclusion in a book, Outside In, which he planned that November: Ceaseless seas of experience construct the coral mind … we are made up by these minute and accumulated deposits no more than by those monster forms, beneficent and murderous which we in fantasy have swallowed, incorporated so that they lie together inside, sometimes separate, sometimes in union, to whose needs, to whose natures, all subsequent experience is referred, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and so on. Children in their play propitiate or regiment the inner figures to which both this love and this hate is referred. Things and other people cause to partake of these forms within. They are inseparable from the ego, from the foundations of the atoll, of the outside-in.1
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Then he turned to writing another book, Art and Science, about Alberti, Piero della Francesca, and Giorgione.2 He began with Alberti whom he described, as he could have described himself, as seeking to counter “cruel and ruthless” feelings of “enmity and disappointment” at being “deeply wounded” with “constructiveness … tenderness … patience”. This factor, he claimed, drove Alberti to conceive of nature as “wide example of order and of beauty which the artist, without distortion of any kind, must concentrate or intensify, retaining the natural balance that typifies the structure of all living things”.3
Piero, Arezzo Annunciation, 1452–1466
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It was this, he went on, that impelled Alberti to recommend artists to choose from “appearances … viewed with impersonal exactitude. … those forms that express harmoniously a state of mind or exhibit harmoniously their own function: for that is beauty”. Or so Stokes claimed in arguing that the buildings Alberti designed, including the Tempio (see p. 52), convey “passionate stillness … affording instantaneous apprehension to the eye … governed by PythagoreanPlatonic calm”.4 So too paintings by Alberti’s near contemporary, Piero della Francesca. “The beautiful wall, door and entablature of [Piero’s] Arezzo Annunciation … is topped by cloud, by the figure of the Almighty and the softest blue sky,” he wrote as illustration. Like the rest of the building with the slow plain aperture above, like the tapering column between the Virgin and the announcing Angel … this wall, thus measured against the majesty of the holy subject, becomes the record of perfect interval.5
From Piero’s Arezzo Annunciation he then turned to other architectural features of Piero’s paintings such as his fresco, also in Arezzo, Discovery and Proof of the True Cross. “[T]he ring of a skull-cap and the spring of an arch; the darkness of an aperture circled with stone and the dark centres of eyes flanked with their whites,” for instance, the consummation expressed in an emperor’s conical hat surrounded by heads of coiled, pleated hair against a background of arches and circular disks; the spiral grooves of ears and the straight grooves of a transparent covering that falls from the head; the winding river with light paths and white belts or curving outer hems; extended fingers and the feathered points of an heraldic eagle; the horses’ hooves of opposing armies like wide-bottomed chessmen on the board; the acanthi of a Corinthian capital and the features and fingers of the Virgin, the beads and structure of her vestments …6
Such connexions are profuse in Piero’s paintings showing “the mind becalmed, exemplified in the guise of the separateness of ordered outer things”.7
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Piero, Discovery and Proof of the True Cross, c.1460 So saying Stokes went on to praise Giorgione, as well as Piero, for crystallising in a single glance fragments of inner experience in the outer form of “variant shapes that insist uniformly”. Or as he also put it: [Giorgione’s and Piero’s] inspired emphasis upon simultaneity entailed a lack of emphasis in any particular, but a much heightened accent upon brotherhood, upon a conception of form stemming from the ceaseless inter-communication of textures and surface colours; yet, unlike a decorative treatment, expressing deep emotional content; subsuming, also, in terms of simultaneity or immediacy, the tugging and less immediate sensations of rhythm, balance and opposition that are first objects of a tactile approach.8
Together with Alberti, Piero and Giorgione helped overthrow the inward-looking transcendentalism of the Middle Ages in favour of Renaissance attention to the outside world, claimed Stokes. With this conclusion Art and Science was hailed in the Times Literary Supplement as one of Stokes’s “most important works”;9 in The Spectator as “superbly enjoyable”;10 and in the New Statesman for conveying “a calm and ‘outwardness’ in almost perfect contrast to the frenzied ‘inwardness’” of the abstract expressionist painting which was then beginning to become popular in New York and London.11 Meanwhile, after finishing Art and Science, in early autumn 1948, Stokes returned to work on his above-mentioned book, Outside In. It
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begins with Cornwall giving him a sense of home, in part, perhaps, because it reminded him of his brother Philip’s “love for geology” there.12 He followed this with his “sense of loss” in London and his finding some consolation for this, as a child, in looking at a clock which, with its Roman numerals, suggested, he said, both “innocence” and “cheerful dormant power like a row of shoes in sunlight”. Other times what he “saw outside confirmed with hideous amplification the self-distrust, the shame and the division that lay” within himself. Not so, by contrast, memory of landscapes in Italy giving him a sense of “Rebirth”.13 “The country was divided by stone walls. Towards sunset the day before, every twig had been discernible, each with syntactic meaning to the eye,” he wrote as illustration. I had gazed through sun-lit undergrowth and trees on terraces at a white house, over hill distance to the clear mountain contour. I had reflected on this reversal of the mind’s self-glancing situation whose undergrowth is dark, lying well behind the eyes, whose contact is clear with thin horizons only; whereas in the panorama before me the simple shapes of the distance had clearly served as finish to the nearby threads. A church clock had struck, soothing, it seemed, the separated noises of the town, submitting afresh the sublime sweetness of reason which I saw embodied in houses among olive terraces and vineyards. Many bells in perspective of sound from many villages, had proclaimed the weight and calm of measured things.14
Then, commenting on himself as his book’s author, he added: Our friend prefers to describe broad landscapes more than the issues they embody and transmute. And, indeed, he spares us: for it is likely that the sense of inner persecution was weighted, that the degree of compulsiveness was large and that the artifacts of behaviour were ill formed.15
Klein had written in similar terms about him in recounting his case history in her first book, published in 1932. Now, just as he was completing the first four chapters of Outside In, she told him about
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the forthcoming publication at the end of 1948 of her second book, Contributions to Psycho-Analysis. Prompted by this, he wrote a review of this book which he sent to Cyril Connolly at Horizon. Connolly, however, had just published an article by one of Klein’s most vehement critics, Edward Glover, rejecting her theory about “the infant’s sense of overwhelming loss arising from the imagined destruction inside itself of the all-loving mother” as “mystical deviation” from Freud.16 Anticipating on this basis that Connolly would not publish Stokes’s review of her Contributions book, Klein suggested he send this review instead to the American scientific journal, Nature (which had years before published a short review of his book, Sunrise in the West).17 Whether or not Stokes acted on this suggestion, he went on to incorporate material from Klein’s Contributions book in the fifth chapter of Outside In. “[T]he desire for perfection is rooted in the depressive anxiety of disintegration,” he quoted from her book. “A man who doubts his own love may, or rather must, doubt every other thing,” he also quoted from her description of him as a patient defending against depression and loss with mania, omnipotence, and persecutory fear of others.18 “Encountering the problem in his first resourceless, wordless, year of life,” he had, he said, “not so much mourned loss in full melancholy as with dire, omnipotent and sometimes cruel desperation kept both himself and his inner or outer objects under separated control.” Love of Ann had changed this. Since falling in love with her he no longer felt the same desire “to control” his surroundings or “dispose of the terra-cotta monstrosity of Baron’s Court or the wastes of Kensington”. Nevertheless, he argued, neither he nor anyone else could altogether dispense with the mania involved in denying inner reality and controlling others even though, he admitted, this entails “insensitiveness and worse”.19 He had written much of this when Klein wrote inviting herself to visit him in Ascona when she was staying near there in Brisaggo in late summer 1949. The visit went ahead after which he sent her olive oil and butter and, it seems, helped her with banking matters following that September’s thirty per cent devaluation of the pound, by which time Ann’s brother, Duff, had come to stay with her and Philip in Ascona while Stokes was away for a couple of weeks in Italy.
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Duff with Philip in Ascona, 1949 “Everything is just as wonderful as ever and still unexplored, unexplained. I want to start finding it all over again,” he told Ann from Venice.20 “The remnants of the P.E.N. conference are still here and I encountered Stephen Spender and had lunch yesterday with Auden. Cyril Connolly is said to be moping in bed somewhere,” he wrote again a couple of days later.21 Then from Venice he went to Vicenza, Padua, Verona, and Mantua gathering material for Outside In which he decided that month to rename Smooth and Rough.
PART IV PSYCHOANALYTIC AESTHETICS
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Smooth and rough
“
I
was glad to hear about the fruitful time you had in Italy and very interested in your plans for the book,” Klein told Stokes, referring to his then recently renamed book, Smooth and Rough. “The idea of inserting the chapter on architecture as you conceive of it, to precede the one on the Machine Age, seems to me promising.”1 With the resulting chapters Stokes helped pioneer the use of psychoanalysis as a means of understanding aesthetic experience both of art and of the world more generally around us. In doing this he adopted ideas from Klein’s book, Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, in which she described the infant responding to parts of the mother’s body—her breasts and insides, for instance—with fantasies of “scooping” them out, “devouring the contents”, and “destroying” them “by every means which sadism can suggest”.2 This may then be followed, she said, by the infant making good in every detail the damage done by his “sadistic impulses” thereby helping enable his integrating identification with the mother as a “good object”.3 As a result the infant’s persecutory fear of the mother taking revenge on his imagined and actual attacks on her body, and his depressive anxiety about the damage done her by these attacks are allayed. 185
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Influenced by this, Stokes claimed that architecture can likewise allay persecutory and depressive anxiety resulting from attacks on the mother’s body by symbolising her as having survived intact and whole. “We partake of an inexhaustible feeding mother (a fine building announces), though we have bitten, torn, dirtied and pinched her, though we have thought to have lost her utterly, to have destroyed her utterly in fantasy and act,” he wrote. “The building which provokes by its beauty a positive response, resuscitates an early hunger or greed in the disposition of morsels that are smooth with morsels that are rough, or of wall-space with the apertures,” he continued. To repeat: it is as if those apertures had been torn in that body by our revengeful teeth so that we experience as a beautiful form, and indeed as indispensable shelter also, the outcome of sadistic attacks, fierce yet smoothed, healed into a source of health which we would take inside us and preserve there unharmed for the source of our goodness: as if also … the smooth body of the wall-face … were the shining breast, while the mouldings, the projections, the rustications, the tiles, were the head, the feeding nipple of that breast. Such is the return of the mourned mother in all her calm and beauty and magnificence. She was mourned owing to the strength of greed, owing to the wealth of attacks that have been made on her attributes whenever there has been frustration. … And so, we welcome the appearance or re-appearance of the whole object which by contradistinction has helped to unify the ego; the joining, under one head, of love and of apparent neglect which thereby may become less fantastic; the entire object, self-subsistent in opposing attributes.4
It might well seem implausible to claim that architecture evokes oral fantasies. To make this psychoanalytically based claim more persuasive Stokes quoted Ruskin saying, “I should like to eat up this Verona touch by touch” and “I should like to draw all St Mark’s, stone by stone, to eat it all up into my mind, touch by touch.”5 “There is evidence for an early fantasy of burrowing into the mother’s body and robbing the wealth she is supposed to contain, particularly her babies. I have glanced at architecture from the side of a reparation for these and other fantasies,” Stokes continued. He contrasted
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architecture, in this respect, with machinery which he claimed can fuel fantasies of burrowing into the mother’s body, and also fantasies associated with persecutory and depressive anxiety. “If men are to be well contained,” he concluded, “the ‘philosophy’ of the machine” must be tempered by “the embrace of trusted objects” including architecture of which he provided various examples including the early cinquecento Tempietto in Rome.6
Bramante, Tempietto, 1502
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“One of the pleasures of reading Mr. Stokes’s writings on art has always been in the discovery of a poet’s sensitivity to the textures and— one might almost say—the ‘soul’ of the various building stones of Italy,” applauded a review in The Spectator. “Mr. Stokes takes to its extreme Geoffrey Scott’s dictum ‘that we both transcribe ourselves into terms of architecture and architecture into terms of ourselves’,” this review continued in looking forward to Stokes further developing this dictum psychoanalytically.7 Stokes would indeed do this in subsequent books. By then his semiexile with Ann in Switzerland had ended. When they first moved and married there in May 1947 her father had told them that only when they had established a “domicile” abroad would their marriage be accepted as valid in Britain.8 By the beginning of June 1950 they had evidently established just such a domicile when Stokes wrote saying: Owing to devaluation we have to leave Switzerland at the end of this month and return perpetually to England. I have loved it here for 3 years and meant to stay for ever. My address can only be the one of very very ancient parents, for the time being,—Lower Stonehams, Pangbourne.9
Soon after returning to Lower Stonehams he rented from a Mr. Ker a nearby home, Heathgate, in Bucklebury. “This is the house, a few miles off the Bath Road between Newbury and Reading. It’s very nice to have a pied-à-terre again and thank goodness the settling in is nearly over,” Stokes soon after told Eddy.10 Here, in Bucklebury, Stokes got to know a psychoanalytically minded neighbour and composer, Robert Still, with whom he played tennis, and began work on an opera, Oedipus. He also helped Still, together with the philosopher, J. O. Wisdom, and the psychoanalyst, Roger Money-Kyrle, found the Imago Group of artists, philosophers, and psychoanalysts which met regularly from 8 February 1954 for eighteen years to discuss the application of psychoanalysis to non-clinical matters, including art. Meanwhile, from Bucklebury, in 1950 Stokes spent time reviewing that summer’s first London season of the New York City Ballet.11 He also helped organise an exhibition of his paintings which opened at the Leger Gallery in Old Bond Street on 20 February 1951. “I have always tried to suggest that light is there behind the objects depicted, welling through, rather than that the scene is only lit exteriorally [sic],” he said of these paintings.
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Heathgate, Bucklebury For I feel that the essence of colour is this sense of inner light in which there are reciprocities that are defeated by the light beam that comes and goes with such force. I like a static world, & faint though it be today, the essence of it is surely real enough. I have always tried to suggest that light is there behind the objects depicted, welling through.12
Patrick Heron admired the result in Art News and Review for distilling “stillness” by divining “a sort of honey-coloured glow inside the terraced hump of the olive orchard; inside the smudged column of smoky darkness which is a cypress; inside the insubstantial, biscuit-frail walls of a villa”.13 “I particularly liked Nightfall: Berkshire, Ascona from Lake Maggiore—Via del Castelrotto, Locarno—San Materno and Main Street—Ascona,” Klein told Stokes after visiting the exhibition on 10 March.14 Stokes, however, was away that weekend in Canterbury from where he visited Telfer at his school in nearby Betteshanger where he had begun boarding a couple of years before. That month also saw the publication of Smooth and Rough, copies of which Stokes sent to the psychoanalysts, Ernest Jones and Hanna Segal, and also to Klein. “I spoke to my colleague Mrs. Marion Milner
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about it. She has read some of your earlier books, which she found very interesting, and she is going to review this one for the Int. P.A,” Klein replied in inviting him to tea with Milner and telling him about Milner’s then recently published book, On Not Being Able to Paint.15 Stokes duly read the book in which he particularly noted her claim that, if one could imagine destroying “the very symbol of order and control in oneself”, then one might well feel one had to “copy the ordered behaviour of others, whether in painting or in living”.16 What this meant to him is not quite clear. Much more clear was his later incorporation of other ideas from Milner in diverting from Klein in his psychoanalytic account of aesthetic experience. For the moment, however, he was more preoccupied, it seems, with wanting to become a psychoanalyst himself and with getting Telfer psychoanalysed. “It always seemed to me that, although Adrian himself was analysed for so many years,” commented Margaret Gardiner,
Stokes, San Materno, Ascona, 1949
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the fact that he was so keen on everybody else whom he knew being analysed and was always trying to push them into analysis, and feeling that this was what they needed, was, in a sense, a mark of his own failure in analysis: that he was trying to shuffle off his particular problems and difficulties in analysis onto other people, and doing it vicariously.17
Perhaps he influenced Gardiner in having her son, Martin, psychoanalysed. Now, in 1951, he turned down the offer of Telfer’s mother and stepfather to move from their home in Suffolk to London so Telfer could live with them and be psychoanalysed there. “Even supposing that in the event this did turn out to have its attractions, I fear there would be poison at its roots which no one could distil and then throw away,” Stokes replied in rejecting this offer and insisting that getting Telfer psychoanalysed depended on finding him a suitable boarding school in London.18 Alternatively he considered the possibility suggested by the headmaster of a day school in north London that Telfer might be able to board with one of the school’s pupil’s families and attend psychoanalysis and school from their home. Why, though, upset Telfer by moving him from his boarding school at Betteshanger where he was happy? In the hope of preventing this his stepfather, Francis Davison, sought legal advice from which he learnt that if Stokes “could show good cause” why Telfer should be moved from his school at Betteshanger to be psychoanalysed in London then Stokes would get legal permission to do this.19 But was five times a week psychoanalysis in London really necessary for tenyear-old Telfer? “Look, this seems to be the situation. Very few people dream of imposing a full Freudian analysis on a child, specially when there is so little wrong with them,” a friend advised Davison after discovering that the best mental health treatment for children was provided by the Tavistock Child Guidance Clinic headed by the psychoanalyst John Bowlby. “This is an excellent place, but quite booked up (& may be too cheap for Adrian),” this friend observed in going on to suggest that probably Stokes would prefer “private & expensive treatment” through the London Clinic of Psycho-Analysis. Or perhaps Stokes had already “fixed everything” by “steam-rollering over” Davison’s and Margaret’s feelings. “What a maddening business,” the friend exclaimed after
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listing a number of possibilities Stokes would probably reject because they were neither Freudian nor Kleinian but simply geared to helping “troubled children”.20 By then Stokes’s insistence on getting Telfer psychoanalysed had somewhat abated. After a long illness with heart disease his mother, Ethel, as a Rosicrucian believer in reincarnation, had told Ann that, although she would not live to see the baby with whom Ann was then pregnant, she would live on in the baby’s body.21 True to her word Ethel died some weeks before Ann, after a prolonged labour, gave birth by Caesarian section on 10 June 1951 to Stokes’s daughter, Ariadne. He was worried about her cry as a newborn child seeming rather “extraordinary”.22 She also clamped so severely onto her breast “it could hardly be removed from her mouth”.23 Worries about her coincided with Stokes’s involvement in helping clear Lower Stonehams prior to its sale that July. “My parents would never again come into the house: it was as if it reverted to the former owners,” he reflected. Traces of our occupation were disappearing fast; many symbols of absence came together: the experience was painful, confused, and discoloured by a rush of time. I went finally into the garden where this mental state was shaped and limited by taking on the character of a thing. For, in the quietness of Saturday lunch-time, the gardener had left burning a steady bonfire that smouldered easily. It simplified the confused feelings I had felt in the house concerning “the clean sweep”. But the spectacle was itself appealing because of the intense, directed and simple action it contained. … I took pleasure in the palpable image outside me of all I felt: it, a concrete form, was my feelings, yet calm, noble, wrapped and also more vivid than they, without the confusion or successiveness of feelings.24
It was another example for him of the outside world containing and giving form to inner turmoil, including the turmoil of trying to find a permanent home for himself, Ann, and the children. “All the houses I go to see are disgusting or in bad condition. We don’t know what to do & I am playing with the idea of emigrating,” he wrote dejectedly.25 He tried advertising for “a house on the
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coast—a most uninhibited advertisement describing all the impossible collocations” he wanted.26 Then, unable to find a suitable home near the coast, he bought Hurtwood House in Surrey. Designed by the architect, A T Bolton, to look “like a Tuscan villa”,27 it was surrounded by trees which, said Ann, “made a lovely sound of the sea”.28
View from Hurtwood “The hill where we live is spectacular for England, with potential views in 2 directions over some 50 miles, over to the sea,” said Stokes of Hurtwood in inviting the director of London’s National Gallery, Philip Hendy, to visit.29 “This is a strange & isolated house with stupendous views for England,” he told another friend, the Euston Road artist, Claude Rogers.30 By then it was some months since, after a brief visit to Holland while Ann took the children to Scotland for Ariadne’s christening, the Stokes family had moved into Hurtwood in September 1951. Ariadne was three months old. Soon after the move she developed eczema so badly that Ann had to sleep with her, cuddling her as a means of “calming” and preventing her scratching and making herself bleed.31 She also proved so difficult to wean that, unusually for middle class babies in England at that time, she was breastfed till she was nearly a year old and after that continued to be very “clinging” to Ann and could not bear to be separated from her.32 Ariadne was evidently unhappy at Hurtwood. Not so, seemingly, her older brother, Philip, who remembered Hurtwood having “a fabulous view” and “if the sun was at a certain height in the sky,” he said, “you could sometimes see the reflection of the sun in the sea.”33
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With Ariadne, Philip, and Ann’s aunt and grandmother, May 1952 Telfer was less happy at Hurtwood where he stayed during school holidays from Betteshanger and later from his next school, Bryanston. He remembered being scared to the point of having “a fit” while staying in one of the downstairs bedrooms at Hurtwood because, he explained, there were no curtains on the windows and “someone could be outside looking in”. The upstairs sitting room surrounded on two sides by “a balustrade” with “a fantastic view” brought back happier memories of Ann listening to music there.34 And it was at Hurtwood that Stokes and Ann entertained family and friends, and that Stokes developed themes from his book, Smooth and Rough, in writing psychoanalytically about the life and work of Michelangelo.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Psychoanalysing Michelangelo
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sychoanalysing artists could be seen as a continuation of the process of seeking to understand art in terms of the biographies of its creators as in Giorgio Vasari’s 1568 book, Lives of the Artists, about some of those most involved in the renaissance of art in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. Freud was therefore not the first to write about the lives of artists as he did in his book about Leonardo da Vinci and his painting, Madonna and Child with St Anne.1 Freud followed this, in 1914, with an article, initially published anonymously at his request, in which he sought to understand the “powerful effect” of Michelangelo’s Moses statue in Rome. Focusing on two details of this statue—“the attitude of [Moses’s] right hand and the position of the two Tables of the Law”—Freud speculated that Michelangelo might have been motivated in creating this statue by wanting “to make the passage of a violent gust of passion visible in the signs left behind it in the ensuing calm”.2
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Michelangelo, Moses, c.1513–1515
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This interpretation by Freud of Michelangelo’s Moses was in turn psychoanalysed by Freud’s biographer, Ernest Jones. It reflected, said Jones, Freud’s wrath with Jung for abandoning his psychoanalytic teaching and Freud’s more or less unconscious identification, in this respect, with Moses’s wrath with his followers for abandoning his religious teaching in worshipping a golden calf.3 Stokes’s psychoanalysis of Michelangelo has likewise been criticised as reflecting more about Stokes than about Michelangelo. “Whether horizontal on a couch in Hampstead or on a bench in the Sistine Chapel, the author is writing of one experience, his own,” wrote Lawrence Alloway (then an assistant director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London) in reviewing Stokes’s psychoanalytic book, Michelangelo.4 It was a criticism Stokes risked inviting in retelling Michelangelo’s life and the aesthetic effect of his art in terms gleaned from his own experience, not least his experience of psychoanalysis and of being in love. Ironically, however, although Stokes’s Michelangelo has thus been criticised for reflecting more about Stokes than about Michelangelo it was important in inaugurating psychoanalytic attention to the psychological or aesthetic effect of art in evoking identification and a feeling of oneness with it. First, though, Stokes considered other psychoanalytic accounts of art which focused, as had Freud, on the psychology of art’s creators. “[U]nless the artist can reach down to the experience of deep anxiety and find the way out his work will not give us a deeper understanding of ourselves or a fuller enjoyment of life,” Stokes quoted, for instance, from the psychoanalytic account of art developed by the psychoanalyst, John Rickman (who, like Stokes, had been psychoanalysed by Klein). To this account of art Stokes added emphasis on artists being “circumscribed” in creating their art by “the changing cultural milieu” in which they work and by the physical materials of their art evoking an “aesthetic experience” of “partial merging” with it. He related this to the ecstasy of “mania” and to its psychoanalytic theorisation as rooted developmentally in the baby’s experience of oneness with the mother’s body in feeding from her breast.5 Furthermore, Stokes went on, aesthetic experience is also characterised by awareness of the physical “object-otherness … wholeness, selfsufficiency or completeness” of works of art essential to the “stability” which is “the essence of the satisfaction they afford”. Observing that this had scarcely been noticed in previous psychoanalytic “evaluation”
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of art, Stokes went on to argue that this effect of art included a sense of being integrated by it. He related this, in turn, to Klein’s claims regarding the integrating experience of the mother as “restored” and “whole” despite infantile fantasies of attacking her breasts and other parts of her body with resulting persecutory fear of her retaliation, and “depressive” anxiety about damage done by attacks to her.6 Klein, however, did not like Stokes’s resulting paper, a copy of which he sent her in the hope, perhaps, that she would recommend its inclusion in an issue of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis or in a book she was editing with her psychoanalyst colleagues, Paula Heimann and Roger Money-Kyrle. “Before we could judge where it could be published it would need, I think a good deal of rewriting,” Klein said of this paper in criticising it as “very difficult to follow”.7 “May I add—and please don’t take this criticism too much to heart; for it is not meant like that,—that while in your writings some parts are of great beauty others are not clearly enough expressed,” she said in a further letter. “I have heard this criticism expressed by people who much appreciated your books and seemed to me to belong to the class of ‘good’ readers.”8 In revising this paper she suggested he might want to consider a paper applying her version of psychoanalysis to aesthetics written by Hanna Segal. Stokes accordingly began this revision with Segal’s paper in which she psychoanalysed “inhibition of artistic activity” as due to the artist failing to face depressive anxiety about damage done to others and the need for its repair without evading this through resort to mania.9 Stokes, however, disagreed in reiterating his previously stated claim that aesthetic experience is akin to the ecstasy of mania in so far as this involves experiencing oneness with what is separate from, and other than oneself. In support of this claim he quoted approvingly from what he described as Marion Milner’s “penetrating and fearless” psychoanalytic paper, “Aspects of symbolism in comprehension of the not-self”.10 In this paper Milner cited Bernard Berenson’s then recently published claim that aesthetic experience includes feeling “at one with the work of art”. To this Milner added that repeated experiences of just such “oneness” might be needed to develop a sense of “twoness” and separateness from others and the world around us.11 Previously Freud had described the sense of oneness and the “oceanic” feeling of limitlessness as rooted in the infant’s experience
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of oneness with the mother’s breast. He also claimed that this is the precursor of the lover’s sense of being “one” with the beloved.12 Stokes cited this in introducing his book about Michelangelo in which he also incorporated jargon from art and psychoanalysis. This included stating that he had replaced the “carving-modelling distinction” which he had previously applied to art with psychoanalytic terms such as “persecutory” and “depressive” anxiety, and with the notion of “good” and “bad” figures as objects in the psyche resulting from fantasies about whatever gives “satisfaction” or “causes” pain.13 On seeing an early draft of Stokes’s resulting book Kenneth Clark said that, although he assumed Stokes did not expect him to understand the book’s psychoanalytic aspects, its other non-psychoanalytic aspects contained some of the best and most profound things ever written about Michelangelo.14 “I really believe that I understand the general theory, and the double relationship: The duality of oceanic feeling and specific otherness,” said Stokes’s artist and art professor friend, Lawrence Gowing. I see exactly the general pattern in Michelangelo’s case—here. But the profound point which underlies all this—the ingested, incorporated object, good-cum-bad, I know about rather than know. … So I wonder if my own difficulty doesn’t suggest that the greatest help of all would be an approach to all this at some point directly, in words of one syllable that can’t be misunderstood.15
The art historian, Ernst Gombrich, commented in somewhat different vein about Stokes’s Michelangelo. “It seems to me … that the historian is forced to try to sort out what is typical of a culture and where the individual variations set in, in other words to see the individual against the ‘reality’ of his environment,” he told Stokes. “It is for this reason mainly, that I have expressed my doubts … concerning the possibility of analyzing the dead,” he went on. Those subtle but all-important cues we derive from what we call “unexpected” behaviour or “impredictable” reactions are often out of reach for the historian because nothing is harder than to know exactly what was “normal” in a person in which only the supernormal individuals really interest us (and have left records). I have
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a hunch that these subtle differences between convention and genius also play a great part in art … all this happens within the “reality” called style. This does not mean, of course, that the deeper layers are not there, but I somehow feel that they may have to be approached … from that angle.16
Stokes’s publishers, Faber & Faber, did not like the book. “There is much in it that I enjoyed myself, but it is no good denying that I myself find this psycho-analytical approach a little forbidding, and that was the feeling also of one of our other readers,” Richard de la Mare told Stokes on behalf of Faber & Faber on 30 March 1954.17 Three weeks later he wrote again. “My dear Adrian,” he began. This is a most difficult letter for me to write and one that I would give anything to avoid writing, for I can think of few things that go more against the grain than to say you nay … we feel very doubtful indeed about your MICHELANGELO book … I am desperately sorry to disappoint you about it. But it is no good beating about the bush, for we should feel most doubtful about making a success of it, and it would be neither fair to you nor to ourselves to set out with feelings of that kind. The truth is that the psycho-analytical treatment appeals to none of us, and we had a similar reaction from the outside reader whose opinion we sought when we felt so doubtful ourselves but at the same time so very disinclined to give you a negative answer.18
It was a bitter blow. Faber & Faber had published all except Stokes’s first two books, often with considerable success. Undaunted, Stokes immediately approached another publisher, Tavistock, which had just agreed to publish New Directions in PsychoAnalysis including a revised version of his paper which Klein had rejected a couple of years before. The editor at Tavistock, John HarvardWatts, was also eager to publish art as well as psychoanalysis books. He accordingly welcomed Stokes’s request that he consider publishing his book about Michelangelo which Tavistock then produced the following summer.19 Stokes, however, was gloomy. A family holiday in Ascona that August had been cut short by Philip becoming ill with measles, which Ariadne then contracted. This was followed by Stokes, as the newly elected chairman of the Imago Group, being criticised by the retiring chairman,
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Robert Still, for his militant Kleinianism and for his speaking so softly it was difficult to hear his “imperial words”.20 Stokes was also disheartened later that autumn by lack of response to his Michelangelo book. “Some weeks ago I sent out about 15 copies mostly to people who had liked my books, I think I have had two acknowledgements without reading: the rest is silence,” he told his Old Rugbeian friend, RobsonScott. Then, by way of consolation, he added: I see, however, in the Radio Times that Herbert Read will refer to the book in a talk at 6.25 on Sunday in the 3rd programme. He is, of course, a devotee of the romantic schools of psychology & the English publisher of Jung: but I don’t think he will be hard on me.21
Read was far from hard on Stokes. “It is not a long book, but it is so tightly packed with meaning it must be read more than once,” he told BBC radio listeners in going on to praise, with a long quotation from Stokes’s Michelangelo, the “magnificence” of some of its prose.22 This could hardly be said of the book’s introduction, filled, as it was, with almost incomprehensible psychoanalytic jargon. Nor could it be said of Stokes following this with a dreary catalogue of events in Michelangelo’s life: his birth on 6 March 1475 just prior to his father, Ludovico, losing his post as governor of Caprese (near Florence); Michelangelo’s mother being too ill to breastfeed him so he was breastfed instead by a wet nurse living in Settignano (also near Florence); Michelangelo’s mother dying when he was six; his introduction, aged thirteen, to the studio of Ghirlandaio; his work for the Medici family in Florence; his subsequently combining this with work for other employers including Pope Julius II in Rome; and his writing poems to a middle-aged widow, Vittoria Colonna, and to a nobleman, Tommaso de’Cavalieri, who was in his early twenties when Michelangelo, then in his late fifties, first met and fell in love with him in 1532. Stokes then went on to argue that with his work—not as a “mere artisan” but as an “artist”—Michelangelo sought to repair “the pride and wealth of his family”. This reparative aim was driven, said Stokes, by depression or “melancholy” and by Michelangelo seeking to counteract feelings of “persecutory anxiety” through creating art.23 Michelangelo, however, was long dead when Stokes wrote this. And, of course, he was never psychoanalysed. What evidence then did Stokes have for diagnosing Michelangelo as suffering from depression and
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persecutory anxiety? By way of answer Stokes used letters Michelangelo wrote to his relatives for whom, through money earned from his art, he became their “chief breadwinner”.24 “You all have lived off me now for forty years … and I haven’t had even a good word from any of you in return,” he complained to one relative. Quoting this, Stokes went on to quote from a much earlier letter written by Michelangelo to his father, Ludovico, telling him: I gather you are upset with me and say I have turned you out … I am certain that from the day I was born … I have always had the intention both in big things and small to please you … It amazes me that you so quickly forget all this, you with your sons who have had me on trial for more than thirty years … You certainly repay me well. But let it be as you say. I want to persuade myself that what I have always done is shameful and harmful: and so, as if I had done it, I ask your forgiveness. Try to forgive your son who has always lived badly and done all the evils that are possible in this world … wretch that I am …25
From this Stokes concluded that nothing was sufficient to convince Michelangelo that he had done enough to atone for “the melancholy guilt” he felt in relation to Ludovico.26 “You, father, are sculpted alive in the middle of my heart,” he wrote in another letter to Ludovico.27 “I take this wording literally: the very father”, commented Stokes, “dwelt within” Michelangelo as “a person to be instructed, still more to be placated”. He remained in Michelangelo’s mind as “a persecuting as well as a persecuted figure, evoking nevertheless a certain pleasurable passivity” in Michelangelo who, Stokes claimed, wanted to take his mother’s place in sexual intercourse with his father.28 Having thus psychoanalysed Michelangelo as entertaining this wishfulfilling fantasy, Stokes went on to argue that Ludovico remained in Michelangelo’s mind as a figure who, with his art, “he wooed, pacified, imitated, nursed”. As for Michelangelo’s employer, Pope Julius II in Rome, he figured in Michelangelo’s mind, claimed Stokes, as someone for whom Michelangelo “invented omnipotent forms that bestow an ideal activity upon what is corporeal, an ideal receptivity also, whereby ceaseless tension is married to an unbounded health”.29 But what evidence is there of this in the art of Michelangelo? For Stokes its omnipotent forms included Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting, The Redeemer, of which Stokes idiosyncratically wrote:
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He half rises: his arms are flails. Wide as an ape, with electrifying precision he ordains parcels of humanity to the distant zones. He governs in himself an ethereal density, the colossal weight which would belong even to a match-box were it filled with material from the centre of the sun: yet he is brisk, gymnastic; the order and disorder of the hair suggest a serpent-quick intelligence …30
Stokes found evidence more generally for his psychoanalytic account of Michelangelo’s work as an artist in Michelangelo’s use of the art of classical Greece in which, said Stokes, “the human form” figured as “vehicle of feeling”.31 From his use of classical form Michelangelo forged “beauty out of conflict”. You can see it, claimed Stokes, in the “smooth-and-rough” texture of Michelangelo’s late carvings—his 1564 Rondanini Pietà, for instance—in which the smooth body of Christ is “backed and flanked by rougher supporting figures”. You can also see in these and earlier figures “fantasies”, said Stokes, akin to those of “exploring the inside of the mother’s body”.32
Michelangelo, Redeemer, 1536–1541
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Michelangelo, David, 1501–1504
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But what about Michelangelo’s David carved, noted Stokes, from “an emaciated block of unusual length and thinness, excavated at Carrara by Agostino di Duccio” and “then mangled by the attempt of another artist”? Exalting Michelangelo’s “genius” in creating David from this unpromising material, Stokes went on to argue that it exhibits “the classical formula for achieving depth of planes: one knee forward, one foot back, the torso inclined gently backward, the head forward, the shoulders slightly hunched”. The result, argued Stokes, corresponds to Michelangelo’s need to emphasise “reunion within the object and within himself … of parts that [had] threatened to fling away their identity”.33 Stokes then turned to Michelangelo’s Duomo Pietà in which, noted Stokes, Vasari described Michelangelo as imagining himself as this sculpture’s “standing figure” of Nicodemus. Not so, said Stokes. In creating this sculpture, he claimed, Michelangelo imagined himself as “the child who sought to come between the parents, who longed to restore the father to the injured mother, to join them in harmony” despite their being “dead or overcome with melancholy”. In creating this sculpture Michelangelo was, claimed Stokes, “the puppeteer, the artist, for ever the grieving, resourceful child crying out for resurrection, forcing on the hard beauty that finally coagulates from the endless ceremonials of sadness …”.34 As for Michelangelo’s carving, The Rebellious Slave and other carvings, sometimes referred to as Captives, in the Louvre, Stokes argued that Michelangelo was motivated in creating them by his “sense of predicament and guilt” supported by “a state of uneasy passivity” known to us as beholders of these carvings “in terms of an oppressive weight which, however frightening, had at one time been partly welcome to Michelangelo”. Seeing this in these carvings, Stokes said of them: They are figures of passivity or suffering, and also of unusual strength. We are not made to feel that strength evaporates; though death will overcome it, the strength still shows, or, rather, the vision remains, as if coming from profound sleep. Indeed, while phantoms possess the Captives, a nightmare of pound-by-pound oppressiveness, their raised, bull-strong bodies translate some of this dependence into the slow particles of health.35
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Michelangelo, Duomo Pietà, c.1547–1553
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Michelangelo, The Rebellious Slave, 1513 What, then, of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel depiction of Saint Sebastian, usually depicted as oppressively impaled by arrows?
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“[H]ere, on the Sistine wall, the arrows no longer impale his body,” said Stokes of this painting, a copy of which featured on the cover of his Michelangelo book (see p. 209). No longer tied and upright, [Michelangelo’s Saint Sebastian] kneels in calm, relaxed expectancy. A tanned champion, he appears to be resting between the field events of a pitiless Olympiad. The episode of the arrows has become in our eyes an episode of training: their tips must have stimulated the giant body which has massively closed upon the wounds, which has closed, as it were, on a great deal of stimulus, shutting it in. The arrows have fertilized Sebastian: gigantic, muscular, of prodigious weight, he is yet full of spring, and somehow protected, clothed, muffled even, by his own sleek nudity, as an elephant by the wrinkled hide. The heroic proportions are so generous that we become aware that his body might suggest the agile cushion sometimes associated with superlative strength, with the loose-knit silence, for instance, of the catribe.36
Such “virile” figures lack all “trace of effeminacy”. Yet “they incorporate … female powers”. Or so Stokes maintained in attributing to this feature of Michelangelo’s art its awesome “terribilità”.37 “Michelangelo projected into art a heroic, constant movement that overcomes, or rather absorbs, depression and the state of being overpowered,” said Stokes of Michelangelo. So too his depiction of woman as “indomitable, a seer, a prophetess” who “[w]hatever the ferment … must possess the brooding calm of a fine youth”.38 As evidence Stokes cited Michelangelo’s sculptures, Night and Dawn, in the Medici Chapel in Florence. “They are carvings that make of depression itself, rather than of defences against it, a heroic cycle; a statuary less of uneasy grandeur than of grandeur in unease,” Stokes said of these sculptures. This feeling is unescapable: it comes to us through the sense of touch and the consuming eyes, from a hundred sources that interweave, monumental composition, modelling, movement, directional contrast and the rest. It finds the hidden depressive centre in ourselves, but even did we not possess it, we should be aware that here are great works of art, here an eloquence of substances that is read by the tactile element inseparable from vision, by the wordless Braille of undimmed eyes.39
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This phrase—“wordless Braille of undimmed eyes”—is an eloquent way of conveying the tactile and visual effect of these sculptures even if one is not moved by them, or even if one is repelled by what Stokes once described as their “writhing forms”.40 Overlooking the fact that others might not be moved by these sculptures he psychoanalysed their moving effect as due to Michelangelo’s use of “the reparative, reposeful terms of art”.41 With his use of the term “reparative” Stokes echoed Klein’s claim that “the sculptor who puts life into his object of art … is unconsciously restoring and re-creating the early loved people, whom he has in phantasy destroyed”.42
Michelangelo, Night and Dawn, 1526–1531 In writing about the aesthetic effect of art, which he sought to illustrate with the art of Michelangelo, Stokes drew not only on Klein’s version of psychoanalysis. He also drew on other versions of psychoanalysis in arguing, as I have indicated, that art evokes oneness with its physical otherness akin to the infant’s illusory oneness with his mother’s breast and with his recognition of her bodily otherness. Michelangelo’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures lend themselves particularly well to Stokes’s argument in this respect since they often depict the human body, albeit not usually that of the mother. “Now, if we are to allot pre-eminence in aesthetic form to an underlying image of the body, we must distinguish two aspects of that image, or, rather, two images which are joined in a work of art,” Stokes maintained. There is the aspect which leads us to experience from art a feeling of oneness with the world, perhaps not dissimilar from the experience of mystics, of infants at the breast … We experience it to some extent also from passion, manic states, intoxication, and perhaps
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during a rare moment in which we have truly accepted death; above all, from states of physical exaltation and catharsis … [B]ut only in contemplating works of art, as well as nature, will all our faculties have full play, will we discover this kind of contemplation in company with the counterpart that eases the manic trend. I refer to the measured impact of sense-data that distinguishes the communicating of aesthetic experience from the messages of ecstatic or dreamy states: I refer to the otherness apprehended in the full perceptions by which art is known.43
Aesthetic experience thus revives, he claimed, “the positive rhythmic experiences of the infant at the breast and the subsequent appreciation of the whole mother’s separate existence … uninjured by his aggressive or appropriating fantasies” causing her to be “mourned”.44 To this he added Freud’s theory that the infant’s illusory oneness with the mother’s breast is revived in the “oceanic” feeling of oneness with the world and in the lover’s experience of being one with the beloved; and Klein’s theory that we internalise others as figures or part- and whole-objects in our minds.45 As illustration he quoted from Michelangelo’s love poems, many addressed to his beloved Cavalieri. “I am more than usually dear to myself: ever since I have had you in my heart … I am like a man with a magic power,” Stokes quoted from one such poem as proof of Michelangelo’s sense of oneness with his beloved. “With your feet I can carry weight,” he quoted from another poem addressed to Cavalieri. The whole of you enters me through my eyes … like a cluster of grapes thrust into a jar. … And now that I have you inside me, it seems that you are my pith and marrow: hence I become larger, my body swells as does my heart with your image.46
Quoting this from Michelangelo, Stokes went on to point out that oneness with his beloved both aggrandised Michelangelo’s sense of himself and also fed his feelings of omnipotent control. “I believe I love with such faith that even were you made of stone I would be able to make you follow me,” Michelangelo told his beloved in also acknowledging that the latter was other than and independent of his domination by telling him, “you are not, after all, a rag-doll whose movements inside and out can be controlled”.47
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Why, though, Michelangelo’s preoccupation with men not only in his poetry and in his visual works of art but also in his life? Stokes ended by psychoanalysing this as due to Michelangelo needing to turn from “the hidden incalculable, uncounted evil within the woman (who lacked Vittoria Colonna’s aristocratic manliness), to the measurable maleness of the male”.48 There are problems, however, with this claim and, more generally, with his psychoanalytic account of Michelangelo and his art. “To be sure, Freud himself made the first, not very convincing experiment in the analysis of the work of art,” observed the art historian, Eric Newton. “Mr. Stokes may be impeccable in his deductions from Michelangelo’s art and his poetry.” Yet he says nothing about their aesthetic merit. Or, as Newton scoffed in reviewing Stokes’s Michelangelo: “It would be possible for the Freudian critic to be as penetrating and revealing about Edward Lear as about Michelangelo without so much mentioning that the one was a charming pigmy and the other an alarming giant.”49 “Michelangelo’s relations with his family are discussed in detail; his little-known poems are examined minutely and there is a brief and well documented summary of the main events of his life,” reported another reviewer. The book as a whole contains, said this reviewer, “a great deal of high-flown commentary which may have some bearing on psychoanalysis but seems to have very little on art”.50 The artist and sculptor, Henry Moore, disagreed. “Of the books I read in 1956 the one which remains strongest in my mind is Adrian Stokes’s Michelangelo,” he told The Sunday Times. “I did not think that, at this late date, so much that is new and profound could be said about Michelangelo. I was continually engrossed and appreciative, and was made to believe and marvel more than ever in the superhuman greatness of Michelangelo.”51 “Not since Ruskin ha[s] anyone described … with such a largesse of spirit … and such an inventive approach to the English language,” said the art critic, John Russell, of Stokes in the New York Times Book Review when Stokes’s Michelangelo, together with other books by Stokes, was republished by Thames & Hudson.52 Welcoming this republication, the art historian, Stephen Bann, admired Stokes more as “a writer” than as a “theorist” or “contributor to the scientific study of art”.53 And it was as a writer that Stokes was lauded by the philosopher and art critic, Richard Wollheim, when he introduced another republication of Stokes’s Michelangelo, this time by Routledge.
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“One of the fascinating aspects of [Stokes’s Michelangelo] is the delineation, embedded, like a Rembrandt portrait, in deep chiaroscuro, of [Michelangelo’s] uneasy depressive genius,” applauded Wollheim. [T]he grown son who is obliged to mother the father whom he resents, the young orphan who desires nothing more than to usurp the place of the dead mother whom he loves, the great creator who writes, “I live on my death”, and again, “I tell you there is no better approach to sanity and balance than to be mad”.54
It was also as an art writer that Stokes was celebrated in a conference at the Tate devoted to his achievement over sixty years after he began working on his Michelangelo book in the early 1950s when he also became embroiled in a saga resulting from his offering to commission a portrait by William Coldstream of Melanie Klein.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Klein’s portrait*
S
tokes first offered to commission a portrait by Coldstream of Klein at the beginning of 1952. By then Coldstream had become professor of fine arts and principal of the Slade in London. He had also developed a method of portrait painting whereby, said one of his students, The brush is held at arm’s length—care being taken that the arm is fully extended for each measurement—in such a way that it is in a plane at right angles to the line from the artist’s eye to whatever part of the subject he is looking at … If for instance the top of the brush handle … is against the corner of the sitter’s mouth, the thumb nail can be moved down to the level of the lowest point of the chin. This length on the handle is then compared with another distance down or across the model’s head …1
This meticulous approach to transforming the three-dimensional reality of the subject into a two-dimensional painted portrait resulted
* A version of this chapter is due to be published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
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in Coldstream requiring forty sittings from the poet Stephen Spender’s first wife, Inez, in completing her portrait. “He needs all these sittings not to make time for a long series of trials, errors and corrections but because he works with extreme deliberation,” explained the painter, William Townsend.2 Whether or not Klein knew this, she appreciated Stokes’s offer to commission a portrait of her by Coldstream. “I have given some thought to it and also discussed it with a few friends who agree with your arguments in favour of this suggestion,” she told Stokes on 19 January 1952. “Although I am reluctant to accept the financial demand it imposes on you and my other friends I am inclined to accept because I hope that the money might be collected from subscriptions,” she went on. “My friend Mrs. Riviere is very interested in this plan and would like to discuss it with you.”3 Joan Riviere had been one of the first psychoanalysts to welcome Klein’s move from Berlin to London in 1926. Perhaps knowing of Klein’s penchant for enhancing her appearance with a hat whenever she presented papers at large psychoanalytic gatherings, Riviere used Klein’s ideas in explaining women’s adoption of a masquerade of femininity to deflect envy of their achievement in spheres dominated by men.4 She also defended Klein’s development of psychoanalysis in exchange lectures between psychoanalysts in London and Vienna; and she gave public lectures with Klein in London which were published together as a book, Love, Hate, and Reparation.5
Klein (fifth figure from the left) and others, Kettner’s restaurant in Soho, c.March 1952
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Riviere also edited contributions by Klein and her followers to controversial discussions in the British Psycho-Analytical Society into a book, Developments in Psycho-Analysis. She contributed articles about psychoanalysis, literature, and about Ibsen’s play, The Master Builder, to the March 1952 issue of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (IJPA) devoted to celebrating Klein’s contribution to psychoanalysis. And, together with this issue’s editors, Paula Heimann and Roger MoneyKyrle, and other psychoanalysts, Riviere attended a dinner organised by Ernest Jones at Kettner’s restaurant in Soho to celebrate Klein’s seventieth birthday on 30 March 1952. Klein had meanwhile responded to Stokes’s impatient request to learn what Riviere thought of Coldstream as a painter by telling him: I am not yet sure what Mrs. Riviere’s views about Coldstream’s paintings are. I think she appreciates his qualities as an artist but is uncertain as regards his attitude towards “likeness”. I myself think that both are essential—as you also pointed out—for a portrait of this kind. However I know she will discuss her views with you directly.6
Riviere did indeed discuss her views with Stokes directly after first seeing Coldstream’s portrait paintings, Man with a Beard and Havildar Ajmer Singh, at the Tate. “I admired them extremely as pictures; I thought they were exquisite as you said, so rare, in that they had not a trace of vulgarity—a quality which seemed unique among all the surrounding works,” Riviere told Stokes in a letter early that February. She was concerned, however, that neither portrait “conveyed a likeness” apart from “a misty ‘impression’” of their subjects, and that Coldstream might therefore not create a portrait of Klein “significant for those who never knew” her.7 There was also the question of raising money by subscription to pay for the portrait. Furthermore there would be difficulties about hanging a portrait of Klein in London’s Institute of Psycho-Analysis since, explained Riviere, many of its members—particularly those headed by Freud’s psychoanalyst daughter, Anna—did not support Klein’s work and were “very jealous of her reputation and results”.8 Klein’s reputation and results were very much celebrated in the IJPA that March. As well as containing a photo of Klein with pearls
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and Christian Dior look, it contained Jones’s testimony to Klein’s work having become “firmly established” in psychoanalysis both by her and by her followers following “her lead in exploring the deepest depths”.9 The same month, March 1952, despite Riviere’s reservations about Coldstream painting Klein’s portrait, Klein began sitting for it. By the end of May she had granted Coldstream eighteen sittings. After seeing the result Townsend admired it as likely to become one of Coldstream’s “best for a long time”.10 Klein, however, was very dissatisfied with it. So was Riviere. “I don’t wish to pretend that I don’t share this dissatisfaction, because I do; since to my mind any portrait of [Klein] has to be judged entirely on its merits as a portrait of her for posterity,” Riviere told Stokes early that August in also telling him that: the finished picture might possibly turn out to be a very great work of art, as portraying the nobility and tragedy in the human experience of acute depression, & in so doing could reveal the painter’s talent as highly exceptional and outstanding—the comparison with Rembrandt comes to mind …11
Nonetheless, she said, as a portrait, Coldstream’s depiction of Klein was a serious failure due to his projecting onto Klein his own “unconscious experience”.12 The result did no justice to Klein’s “cheerfulness and gaiety” and “immense vitality & elasticity”. Instead it falsely portrayed her as in a state of “static gloom … isolated in suffering, withdrawn from life and all its interests, & sunk in a melancholic, not to say senile, despair”. As such, complained Riviere, the portrait threatened to lend credence to Klein’s critics who rejected her psychoanalytic emphasis on “depression” and “persecution-phantasies” as motivated by her own “psychotic tendencies”.13 After learning of these complaints from Riviere, and after Klein asked him to see her about the portrait, Stokes wrote hurriedly to Coldstream a couple of days before he was due to resume work on this painting. Klein now admitted that she put “far more store on the existence of a portrait of her than she did originally”, he said. Furthermore everyone saw in it “a strong & formidable work of art in the making”. Nevertheless, Stokes continued, Klein and her friends complained that, despite “her quick sympathy … warm heart” and “gaiety”, the portrait made her “look 20 years too old … melancholic … hard & unfeminine”.14
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If Coldstream could not reassure Klein that further work would “lessen” the Klein portrait’s “utterly out of character” aspects then, despite regarding it as “a very fine & powerful piece of work”, Stokes recommended Coldstream to abandon work on it. “What you are up against is not just feminine vanity. I think, in the circumstances, there is more to it than that,” Stokes added, perhaps thinking of Riviere’s concern that the portrait was not only unfaithful as a likeness of Klein but might also damage the future survival of her innovative contribution to psychoanalysis.15 Coldstream was not persuaded. Klein would not grant him further sittings, he surmised, “because she felt he was making her look too old and serious and not sufficiently feminine, and he could not promise that any more femininity would become apparent if he went on with the work”. Of course psychoanalysts likewise cannot promise what might become apparent in their interpretations of what their patients do and say. Without perhaps knowing or pointing this out, Townsend observed that “[a]s a psychologist [Klein] obviously could not see herself as others saw her”.16 “I assume that you know what happened about the portrait before I left,” Klein told Stokes after she had returned from summer holiday that year to London. I decided that in any case I could not go on with so many sittings, all the more as I felt that even 20 additional sittings might not be sufficient. The decisive word, however, came from my doctor who very strongly objected to my rest over 20 weekends being disturbed by the sittings. I still think I might have gone on had I really had the conviction that the portrait would turn out what one would hope for. … I believe there may be great value in the portrait, although my friends do not feel that they want me to be perpetuated in that way. Over the phone Coldstream told me what one would expect an artist to say—that he could not guarantee the outcome.17
Like psychoanalytic patients fearful of what might emerge in their psychoanalysts’ interpretations of them Klein was evidently fearful of what might emerge in Coldstream’s portrait of her. Disliking what had so far emerged, she wanted it banished as soon as possible from her home. Coldstream offered to fetch it. But he still had not done so early that September perhaps, she speculated, because he found it “too difficult” to come to her house.18
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Abandoning hope of Klein granting Coldstream any further sittings, and aware of her impatience to get rid of the portrait, Stokes fetched it away from London to Hurtwood. He also compensated Coldstream for cutting short his commission of the Klein portrait by paying for another portrait by him, this time of a model, Miss Mond, which eventually took pride of place in the sitting room of Stokes’s family home. Meanwhile, perhaps to allay her negative feelings about Coldstream or his negative feelings about her, Klein invited him, together with Stokes and Ann, to tea. This, however, did nothing to allay Klein’s negative feelings about the portrait about which she wrote to Stokes that December telling him: You will remember that when we spoke about the unfinished portrait you suggested that if I wished it to be destroyed you would consent to this being done. I feel badly about this because I know it is a work of art and I hate the thought of having it destroyed. But I feel very strongly that I do not wish it to be kept as a record of me and, as we both know, that is what it in the end might turn out to be. My family and friends do not wish me to be perpetuated by this portrait. Moreover I am aware that people who have never seen me have a very phantastic conception of me as a person in connection with my work, and I certainly would not wish to add to this by leaving behind a painting which confirms it.19
This might seem reasonable. Nevertheless Klein’s wish to have her portrait by Coldstream destroyed is surprising. It is particularly surprising since one of Klein’s most important contributions to psychoanalysis resides in her drawing attention to anxiety about destruction as a source of the psychological ills bringing patients into psychoanalytic treatment geared to enabling them to become conscious of their destructive impulses, not to aiding and abetting them. Stokes admired this aspect of Klein’s contribution to psychoanalysis. He also admired Coldstream’s portrait of her, albeit unfinished, and, despite her request for its destruction, he kept it intact at Hurtwood. The portrait was still there when, in early spring 1953, Klein was briefly hospitalised for treatment of dizzy spells and decided, due to ill health, not to present a paper at that July’s international congress of psychoanalysis in London. Increasing ill health also made it difficult for her to manage the stairs at her house in St John’s Wood which
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she accordingly sold that year in favour of moving into a more easily manageable one floor flat in Hampstead. By then Stokes had presented a paper, “Form in art”, in January 1954 in which he dwelt particularly on portraits, not portraits by Coldstream, but portraits by Rembrandt in London’s National Gallery of which Stokes said: Here, on the walls, faces come softly but vividly from dark backgrounds, faces and hands that “realize” the sitters. Drawing, texture, disposition, echoing toppling shape, seem to be a rich fructification of character rather than the physical representatives. Such an effect depends on eliciting from us muscular response to the drawing and an increase of the usual correlating activities of vision. We feel this apprehension of inner and outer actuality in prior terms of our muscular responses, let us say, to be benign.20
This apprehension is benign, he added, because, as well as evoking oneness with them, these portraits, in being separate and other than us, are safely “out of harm’s way”.21 Unlike previous versions of this paper, which Klein had rejected, she and her co-editors accepted this “Form in art” version for inclusion in their Tavistock-published book, New Directions in Psycho-Analysis. This smoothed the way for Stokes to get his Michelangelo book published by Tavistock. Gratitude to Klein for this may have contributed to his giving her one of his landscape paintings (illustrated overleaf). “It hangs opposite my analytic chair and I very much enjoy looking at it. It is an excellent painting and particularly appeals to me,” she wrote in thanking Stokes for this painting. Then, in the same letter, she expressed her appreciation of Stokes’s and Ann’s hospitality to herself, her son, Eric, his wife, Judy, and their children, Michael, Diana, and Hazel, during their visit that summer to Hurtwood. “We all enjoyed the day very much and the drive back, when the sun came out, was very pleasant. I did not feel tired afterwards,” she added.22 Then she again raised the matter of Coldstream’s portrait of her. After seeing it at Hurtwood the previous month, June 1954, Townsend, who had already admired it a couple of years before, remarked that it was “austere indeed, but majestic, beautifully drawn”.23 Klein, however, was not so positive. “You told me when showing me the portrait that you have not any more the strong feeling about doing away with it which you had formerly,” she now told Stokes.
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Stokes, Landscape, c.1954 If this is so I shall reply to your question whether I still want it to be destroyed with “yes”. I still feel about it as I did when I saw it first, that whatever its artistic value—it is a bad record of me and that I would not wish to be perpetuated like that. I hope that you actually will not regret to do away with it—I would not wish to hurt your feelings. I am still sorry that your generous offer did not come off as it deserved. But I remain grateful for the thought which prompted this offer.24
In previously banishing the portrait from her home Klein was akin to Oscar Wilde’s fictional character, Dorian Gray, banishing his portrait to an attic when he does not like its portrayal of him. Unlike Dorian Gray, however, who eventually destroys this banished portrait when he cannot bear what it reveals, Klein left to others—specifically to Stokes— the task of destroying her portrait by Coldstream when she continued
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to dislike it as she had in first requesting its destruction in December 1952. What was Stokes to do? Previously he had ignored Klein’s request for its destruction. By July 1954, however, knowing of her then failing health, he was perhaps more sympathetic to her sense of urgency in wanting the portrait destroyed so it could not outlive her and detract from the continuing influence of her development of psychoanalysis when she was dead and gone. He was also grateful for all the help she had given him as his psychoanalyst and, more immediately, for accepting his “Form in art” paper in New Directions in PsychoAnalysis. More than this, perhaps, Stokes was grateful to Klein for organising psychoanalytic treatment for his and Ann’s three-year-old daughter, Ariadne, when, after seeing her at Hurtwood “being encouraged to walk”, Klein told Stokes that he “must” have Ariadne analysed as soon as she could talk.25 Ann was rather appalled by the peremptory way Klein insisted on Ariadne being psychoanalysed. But she was also perhaps grateful to Klein for organising this treatment.
Stokes with Ariadne
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As for Klein’s repeated request for the destruction of the Coldstream portrait, it led to a “dreadful three days” of Stokes “stamping around wondering what to do”, said Ann, because it “made him so unhappy not doing what [Klein] wanted”.26 Then, after deciding he would do what Klein wanted, but unwilling to destroy the portrait himself, he delegated this task to Ann. At first Ann planned to tell him she had destroyed the portrait after instead hiding it in a tree. Perhaps guessing Ann might fail to destroy the portrait as he wished, he ordered her to set light to it and “watch it burn” while he was out of the house, after which they would tell anyone who asked about its whereabouts that it had been sent to America.27 Ann carried out this order. First, though, before setting light to the unfinished portrait, she took a black and white photo of it.28 Why had Klein so disliked this portrait? Was it due to it making her look too masculine? Was it because it made her look too passive, or because it brought her too close to its beholder, and brought her too close to Coldstream when he painted it? Was it due to her sense of Coldstream mocking her?
Coldstream, Unfinished portrait of Melanie Klein
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Perhaps out of anger at her preventing him finishing painting her portrait, Coldstream did indeed mock Klein in regaling others with the following more or less invented dialogue between her and himself. klein: “How much longer?” coldstream: “It’s just beginning to look human.” klein: “You can’t tell whether it’s a man or a woman.” coldstream: “But I said it is just beginning to look human.”29 Perhaps Klein liked other artists better. Perhaps she preferred Ishbel McWhirter and Feliks Topolski, who both drew pictures of her, and Jane Brown who remembered “liking her a lot” when she photographed Klein in the late 1950s.30 Meanwhile, following the destruction, at Klein’s request, of Coldstream’s unfinished portrait of her, Stokes remained very friendly and loyal to her. Mindful of her objection to Coldstream’s portrait for depicting her, she said, as depressed and un-feminine, Stokes also testified in print to her happiness and femininity. “Melanie Klein has demonstrated the hard realities of the psyche and slowly laid out an unflinching foundation upon which future generations will in time have the chance to build,” he wrote. Yet despite this lonely and courageous intellectual power, Melanie Klein was pre-eminent in her enjoyment of people, in her looks, in responsiveness: such attributes, changeless even in old age, are not to be separated from the feminine patience, coupled with readiness, that will have aided her to construct the technique for the analysis of children.31
By then, it was some years since Coldstream’s unfinished portrait of Klein had been destroyed at her request. It was also some years since Klein had turned down Stokes’s offer to commission another portrait of her, this time by Jacob Epstein. “Your idea about the Epstein bust is in itself very attractive, but I would not in any circumstances permit people, even if they cared to do so, to spend such a lot of money for that purpose,” she told Stokes, who by then had spent quite a bit of money compensating Coldstream for the time and trouble he had taken in painting his unfinished portrait of Klein.32
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Hampstead again
B
y the time Klein turned down Stokes’s offer to commission and pay Epstein to make a bust of her Stokes was again living in Hampstead where he had lived many years before in the Isokon building in Lawn Road, and where Klein had moved in 1953. His return to Hampstead was connected, at least in part, with Klein’s diagnosis of Ariadne as schizophrenic, albeit the diagnosis of what is today called autistic spectrum disorder might have been more appropriate. Stokes’s return to Hampstead was also connected with Klein helping organise for Ariadne to begin treatment four times a week in early September 1954 with the psychoanalyst, Esther Bick. “She came to me for analysis … for reasons of severe general retardation which relentlessly followed on from a difficult birth,” Bick later explained. At the beginning of analysis her retardation in speech, toilet habits and motor control was severe. She needed her mother to put her on the pot, to wipe her usually streaming nose, to fasten her shoelaces; she was “spilling out” as she later told me. But the first three months brought a most encouraging change in general liveliness, speech and emotional contact … she could not wait to come to me …1
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Whether or not Ariadne could not wait to see Bick it seems a scandal that, aged scarcely more than three years old, she was taken on a long journey by car and train four times a week from Hurtwood to be psychoanalysed in London. At that time, however, psychoanalysing very young children had become something of a fad among Klein enthusiasts. Klein herself had psychoanalysed her youngest child, Erich, in Budapest when he was three. She had then psychoanalysed two- and three-year-old children in Berlin and, after moving to London, her first patients included Ernest Jones’s three-year-old son, Mervyn, and a four-year-old boy, “Dick”, whom, like Ariadne, Klein diagnosed as schizophrenic.2 “She came in hunched, stiff-jointed, grotesque like a ‘sack of potatoes’ as she later called herself, and emitting an explosive ‘SSBICK’ for ‘Good morning, Mrs. Bick’,” said Bick in recounting Ariadne’s initial treatment sessions with her. This “sack of potatoes” seemed in constant danger of spilling out its contents partly due to the continual picking of holes in her skin representing the “sack” skin of the object in which parts of herself, the “potatoes”, were contained …3
At first all went well with Ariadne’s treatment. “She depended on it, absolutely, and after the first day she started playing,” recalled Ann.4 “But the first break at Christmas [1954] produced a dramatic change,” said Bick. On her return [Ariadne] started a systematic destruction of the play materials, teeth clenched, stopping only to pick up bits in order to tear them or break them into smaller bits. … This behaviour changed when she indicated I should pick up all the bits when she threw them in my direction. Gradually the destruction was replaced by a ball game in which she had complete control over my movements. I had to stay in a certain place and was only allowed to hold the ball to my chest when she threw it to me; she then took it back and went into a position opposite me and threw the ball again. This process was repeated until we neared the end of the session when it would be replaced by her spinning a tin, excitedly flapping her hands as she watched.5
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Telfer also recalled Ariadne flapping her hands. She called it “birding”, he said, in likening this flapping to Stokes turning and exercising his wrists as he walked.6 “[She] was an enchanting, fairy like tiny child with funny fluttering movements with her arms at half stretch followed by a jump as if across a puddle & turn round to flutter again before another jump, always looking at the ground,” said Ann. “Actually the fluttering was so exactly like Adrian’s own hand movements when deep in thought that even Philip remarked on it!”7 Ann also remembered Ariadne’s psychoanalytic treatment resulting in Philip wanting to be psychoanalysed, for which he was taken out of his Catholic primary school in Wonersh, near Hurtwood, every Tuesday morning to see a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, Dina Rosenblüth, in Hampstead.8 Stokes would have preferred Philip to be treated by the psychoanalyst, Elliott Jaques, with supervision from Klein. But Klein, then in her seventies, had reduced her psychoanalytic workload, and did not have time to supervise Elliott Jaques’s psychoanalysis of Philip. So, after she reassured Stokes that treatment by a psychotherapist could be just as good as treatment by a psychoanalyst, Stokes agreed to Philip continuing psychotherapy treatment with Rosenblüth.
Philip and Ariadne, c.1955
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Getting Philip and Ariadne from Hurtwood to their psychotherapy and psychoanalytic treatment in London, however, was a lengthy and troublesome business. To reduce the travelling involved Stokes tried to move the family to London by advertising for a house swap. “Country House, easily run, every modern convenience, centre London 70 minutes door to door, in simple Italian style, stupendous situation. Wd exchange 1–5 yrs for London house, Hampstead, St Johns Wood preferred,” he noted for this advertisement.9 “Nothing has progressed in selling this house. I advertised its astounding vistas in the personal column of the Times & had six answers to all of which I wrote lengthy letters now absorbed into silence,” he complained.10 The family still lived at Hurtwood when, on 8 February 1955, he presented a paper to the Imago Group, “Psycho-analytic reflections on the development of ball games”;11 when he presented a further paper to the group that November about Freud’s books, The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its Discontents;12 when he gave a lecture, “An influence of buildings on the graphic arts in the west”, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in February 1956;13 reviewed Rudolf Arnheim’s book, Art and Visual Perception, for Encounter;14 when his introduction to a Faber & Faber book of reproductions of paintings by Raphael was published that April;15 and when that June he gave a talk with Lawrence Alloway about Freud and the arts at the ICA.16 Then, having bought a house, 20 Church Row, in Hampstead earlier that year, Stokes moved there with the family in August 1956 after which Philip continued his psychoanalytic psychotherapy treatment with Dina Rosenblüth at seven every morning before going to prep school, The Hall, in Swiss Cottage. “I was a very bad analysand, very bad indeed. I didn’t cooperate. And I screened myself off with the screens she had in the room. I set up a little stove and melted candles and dripped them into bottles,” he said, recalling his smashing the bottles to get “a solid wax impression of a bottle shape”.17 He also remembered going with Ann to classes at Hampstead’s Well Walk Pottery. He gave up, however, after finding bits of glass in his clay. Ann, though, very much enjoyed working with clay and later established a kiln at 20 Church Row where she taught pottery to friends and relatives including her niece, Charlotte Mellis; the psychoanalyst Hanna Segal’s son, Gabriel; the philosopher Richard Wollheim’s twin sons, Bruno and Rupert; and Wollheim’s girlfriend, later his wife, Mary Day Lanier.18
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Church Row, Hampstead (number 20 is the second house on the left) “I very much enjoyed the evening with you and I was also glad to see your new home, which I think is beautiful,” Klein told Stokes soon after dining at 20 Church Row in October 1956.19 Other visitors included Ariadne’s home tutor, recommended by Bick after Ariadne was unsuccessfully tried out at a nearby school in Fitzjohn’s Avenue. Another frequent visitor was an art student, Anne Buchanan (later married to the architect, Theo Crosby), who was introduced to Stokes by one of her teachers, the artist and art lecturer, Andrew Forge. “Ann had let me in, and been all smiley, and she’d taken me up and left me in the drawing room with Adrian. And I was really quite awed … It was really quite sticky. And in came Ariadne … She was sort of round … tubby,” Anne Buchanan said of her first impressions of Ariadne.20 “She was a surreal child, perhaps schizophrenic or autistic. I settle for the simple explanation that Ariadne’s brain was damaged. Certain aspects of her intelligence functioned superlatively well,” Buchanan recalled. [S]he was small and had an elderly air, holding her shoulders under her ears, her head seemed shockingly inappropriate to her voice.
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She came into the room where we were talking and asked in a loud voice if she could play some music. Adrian smiled lovingly as he said, “Of course”. She started going through a large pile of records, “I want Mozart, Dada, I want Mozart” she crooned.21
Telfer, of course, also remembered Ariadne at 20 Church Row. He also remembered Stokes visiting him at his public school, Bryanston; his taking him to see Eddy Sackville-West who lived nearby at Long Crichel House with Eardley Knowles and the music critic, Desmond Shawe-Taylor; and his sometimes taking him to strained meetings with Durham at his hotel accommodation in Tunbridge Wells. By the autumn of 1957 Durham, then aged eighty-six, had been moved to a nursing home, Ferndale where, said Stokes, he grew “gradually weaker” and “with no pain at all” died that November.22 Among his papers was an unpaid cheque for Bick’s previous month’s treatment of Ariadne. Before that he had been known as “The Bank”.23 Now, following his death, payment for Ariadne’s psychoanalytic treatment and for other expenses, including Philip’s psychotherapy and school fees, had to be taken care of by Stokes. By then Stokes had caught the attention of Richard Wollheim (whose father Stokes had known years before as London agent of the Ballets Russes) at a lecture, possibly “The liberating quality of avant-garde art”, given by the art historian, Meyer Schapiro, at the Slade.24 “The lecture, which had influence on the development of local painting, was a dazzling performance, but I had some curiosity left over for the identity of a most remarkable-looking man sitting one row behind me,” said Wollheim. In his mid-fifties Adrian looked boyish with a head of rather vivid fair hair, slightly Venetian, which he ran his finger through a lot, and I noticed that the skin on his face, which was evidently very delicate, was totally covered by a very fine criss-cross of lines. As though this was not striking enough, the pattern on his face was taken up in the pattern of his check shirt and his tweed suit, from which there billowed out—always—a large slightly faded silk handkerchief. He looked most like a great beaked bird: fierce in repose, but on the verge of tears when he smiled.25
Wollheim did not get to know Stokes, however, till some months later when, in early 1958, they happened to meet at an exhibition at the Royal
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Academy in London, after which they discovered many shared interests including enthusiasm for the philosophy of F H Bradley about whom Wollheim was then completing a book. “Ever since meeting Mrs. Wollheim and yourself at the academy, I have wondered whether we could invite you both all this way to supper,” Stokes wrote nervously to Wollheim later that year. “A dismal tube journey, but less arduous if you have a car. It is what we would like of course: the houses in this street are not unpleasant. … I do so hope there will be an occasion suited to you.”26 Further supper and dinner meetings followed. “I remember one evening taking a great friend of mind, John Richardson [Picasso’s biographer], to dinner at Church Row,” Wollheim later recalled. [T]he conversation turning to an art critic who had once been an avid ballroom dancer, John got up and went through all the palais dances of the twenties and the thirties. Often afterwards Adrian would say, “I did like ‘Shuffle Off to Buffalo’”, and tears would return to his eyes until the silk handkerchief had wiped them away. … And he could be firm. Once when I was dining alone with Adrian and an old friend of his who was a distinguished historian of architecture … made some idiotic remarks about psycho-analysis. Adrian waited until we had all had one cup of coffee and then he turned to his guest and said, “It was very kind of you to come”, and in a minute … manoeuvred him to the front door and out into the wintry street. It was not yet half past nine.27
Others found Stokes irritating. They included the writer, Julia Strachey. “Driving a car on the Continent appears to be most exacerbating for the nerves, and Adrian Stokes too is a whirling inferno of persistent anxiety,” Strachey complained after spending six weeks with Stokes and her husband, Lawrence Gowing, at Torri del Benaco by Lake Garda.28 “I try to discount my own alarmist tendencies & that leaves me unable to know what to think,” Stokes wrote from there after a palace coup in Iraq made him nervous that petrol shortages, resulting from this coup, might impede their journey home by car from Italy to London. “I am trying to be sensible & brave & make the most of this opportunity to work in the most lovely country, having got here,” he wrote that summer from Torri del Benaco where, despite his anxieties, he completed several paintings, including Olive Trees (now in the Tate).29
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Stokes, Olive Trees, 1958 Following Stokes’s return from Torri del Benaco that summer, 1958, Telfer moved into the downstairs front room at 20 Church Row prior to becoming a student that autumn at the Slade. At the same time he fulfilled Stokes’s long-held wish to have him psychoanalysed by beginning psychoanalytic treatment, arranged by Stokes, at eight o’clock on the morning of 8 September 1958 with Hanna Segal in her consulting room at her family home in Lyndhurst Road not far from Church Row.
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Telfer resented this treatment keeping him in London on Saturdays. He nevertheless persisted with it for a couple of years and, perhaps influenced by his experience of being psychoanalysed by Segal, he came to regard his relation with Stokes as quasi-psychoanalytic. “He’d put me in the position of either him or me being analysed,” Telfer explained. “He could never look at anyone. It was very hard for him to do that. He would always look away.”30 Stokes was nevertheless also very proud of Telfer. “I am so lucky, particularly in the circumstances, to have so thoroughly nice a son whom I dare to think unusually gifted in art,” he told Eddy after meeting with him at the Savile Club in London in early January 1959.31 A few days later, however, a terrible argument broke out between Stokes and Telfer which ended with Stokes going out with Ann and returning later that evening having suffered a heart attack. “My friends tell me that such a slight attack as yours was does not in any way prejudice the length of life nor mean that it might be repeated,” Klein told him later that month.32 Slight or not, Stokes’s heart attack kept him bedridden and then housebound for several weeks at 20 Church Row. By the summer, however, he was more than well enough, it seems, to take Ann, Philip, and Ariadne for a month’s holiday in Ventimiglia on the Italian Riviera. Here he painted, as he had the previous year in Torri del Benaco, by which time he had completed another psychoanalytic book, and several psychoanalytic articles, many of which he presented to the Imago Group in London, about the value of art and the external world more generally in so far as they contain and thereby counter inner chaos.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Chaos contained
I
“
f men are to be well contained,” Stokes had written at the end of Smooth and Rough, they must be able to temper fragmentation with “the embrace of trusted objects”.1 Works of art can achieve this, he said, in so far as we experience them, like the person who first mothers us, as loved, whole, and good. As such, he argued, works of art celebrate “victory over inner chaos”.2 He proceeded to illustrate this with the example of Michelangelo using the “classical formula” for bringing parts together as a whole in creating his Bacchus and David sculptures.3 Stokes followed this by likening the classical Greek concept of “balance between diverse aims and compulsions” to Klein’s theory regarding the integration of the ego. “[I]n favourable circumstances the external world of things as well as people … bolsters up ego-integration” through serving as a symbol of the body as whole, he claimed. Art does this. So can landscape in which, he wrote in rather far-fetched vein, “[b]its of objects controlled by projected bits of the ego, as well as internal objects, are given the air”. As such, he argued, landscape can offset anxieties about “[w]hat consumes, what attacks, what rejects, what envelops or is enveloped” through their standing outwardly “together as parts of a perceptual construction, space”.4 237
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Landscape, he claimed, like works of art, can counter defensive splitting of “sense impressions” and “thought processes” occurring in psychotic states of mind as described by his Imago Group friend, the psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion.5 Impressionist paintings can have the same effect, argued Stokes, through their use of “overlapping textures” to compose “objects very vividly in a tactile ensemble”.6 Bion in turn likened the work of Monet as an Impressionist painter to the work of psychoanalysts in bringing together as a whole their impressions of what their patients say and do in analysis.7 By then Stokes’s likening of the integrating effect of art in terms of psychoanalysis and classical Greek culture had received a very hostile review from the novelist, Jean Howard. She was very sympathetic to psychoanalysis and became a patient of the Kleinian psychoanalyst, Leslie Sohn. She also approved of Hanna Segal’s very clear exposition of Klein’s version of psychoanalysis. But she was appalled by Stokes writing at the start of his 1958 book, Greek Culture and the Ego, that, as he put it, “I must presume in the reader a knowledge of Freud”.8 “He presumes, in fact, so much that many potential readers will be deterred by his use of esoteric terms without explanation; for example, ‘body-ego’ and ‘ego-figure’,” Howard complained.9 “Mr. Stokes is a difficult writer: his sentences are highly condensed; he has a disturbing habit of inserting into his text quotations from psycho-analytical literature whose relevance to what he is saying is far from evident,” acknowledged Richard Wollheim in an article he devoted to Stokes in the Stephen Spender-edited journal, Encounter.10 To help readers unfamiliar with Kleinian psychoanalysis Wollheim explained it and its much greater relevance than Freud’s version of psychoanalysis to the modern art aesthetic of significant form given Klein’s emphasis on the psychological significance of parts brought together as a whole. “I would beg you to try and present your ideas in a simpler form,” Wollheim told Stokes in reply to his asking for advice about a paper he had presented to the Imago Group on 19 January 1960 which was then rejected, together with the book of which it formed a part, by the publishers, Routledge & Kegan Paul.11 Stokes had more success with another paper he presented to the Imago Group on 3 January 1961. In presenting this paper he used photos of Romanesque churches in France, such as St Trinit in the Vaucluse, to convey ways in which, through architecture’s “fusion of stone shapes … we may apprehend
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the symbol of a whole body” via “due proportion of darkness, light, rectangularity, roundness, roughness, smoothness, wall, aperture” conveying “solace and reassurance”.12
St Trinit, Vaucluse
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“The primacy of architecture” as “mother of the arts”, he claimed, consists in symbolising “the putting together of fragments of experience that have been dispersed, so that even pain coheres, owns features”. To this he added the claim that “[a] collapsed room displays many more facets than a room intact”. Then, improvising at length on this theme, he wrote: [A]fter a bombing in the last war, we were able to look at elongated, piled-up displays of what had been exterior, mingled with what had been interior, materializations of the serene Analytic Cubism that Picasso and Braque invented before the first war; and usually, as in some of these paintings, we saw the poignant key provided by some untouched, undamaged object that had miraculously escaped. The thread of life persists, in the case of early Cubist paintings a glass, a pipe, a newspaper, a guitar whose humming now spreads beyond once-sounding walls that have become clean and tactile remains. In such strange surroundings, not altogether unlike the intact yet empty buildings invented by Chirico, the brusque accoutrements of comfort for pavement life, the one of the café, extend a great sense of calm: a simple shape and a simple need emerge from the shattering noise and changing facets of the street. Later work by Picasso is more disturbing since he has broken off and re-combined parts of the body, often adding more than one view of these part-objects … but the furor of his genius is such that the sum of misplaced sections does not suggest the parts of a machine: on the contrary, in the translated bodies … of Guernica, there exist both horror and pathos as well as aesthetic calm …13
He followed this with a trenchant critique of romanticism, as opposed to classicism, in art. In particular he criticised the romanticism, as he saw it, of abstract expressionism beginning, he said, with Kandinsky’s decision, on the basis of a visionary experience of one of his paintings as “entirely composed of bright colour-patches”, that he would no longer depict objects in his paintings. He also criticised Jackson Pollock for deciding to “destroy the image and its symbolic associations” with his action and abstract expressionist paintings and for wanting to become one with them.14 Stokes diagnosed this psychoanalytically as akin to the “non-differentiation between the thing symbolized and the symbol” characteristic, according to Segal, of schizophrenic states of mind.15 “What [Stokes] has to say … will not please everyone, and he expects his readers to have mastered the principles not only of aesthetic
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experience but of psychoanalytical techniques,” observed John Russell. “Anyone who is not frightened away by this will find … that the effort involved in its comprehension is rewarded a thousand times over,” Russell nevertheless continued in reviewing Stokes’s third Tavistockpublished book, Three Essays on the Painting of our Time.16 “Mr. Stokes’s application of Kleinian concepts rests upon one quite simple intuition … that aesthetic experience reconciles two opposite forms of object-relationship … a very strong identification with the object … [and] commerce with a self-sufficient object at arm’s length,” approved the art critic and curator, David Sylvester.17 “Here, as in his previous books, [Stokes] is trying, gently and persuasively, to find a new foundation for visual aesthetics in a new conception of our relation to the external world,” admired the philosopher, Stuart Hampshire, in summarising Stokes’s Three Essays argument regarding the background of modern art in “failure of confidence and of style in architecture”.18 Architecture was hardly the strong point of the holiday home in Castleford in Cornwall where Stokes took the family on holiday the following summer, 1962. “[W]hen we got there we found that we had been put up in a converted chicken shed,” recalled Philip. And my father was absolutely devastated by this. The architecture of a chicken house is absolutely the antithesis of what he had been expecting. But it turned out to be very comfortable. It was a Nissen hut and it had been very well appointed. And in fact we enjoyed it all very much indeed, once we got over the initial shock.19
Then they were again in London where Telfer graduated that summer from the Slade before registering as a graduate student later that year in New York. Despite his dislike of abstract expressionist painting, Stokes urged Telfer to use his connections with the art world as means of getting to know the New York based abstract expressionist painter, Barnett Newman. “There was a talk last night by Lawrence Alloway, now director of the Guggenheim Museum, about Barnett Newman,” Stokes wrote from London to Telfer. “I know Alloway, though not well. If you presented yourself & said I suggested it & that I admired his talk, I think he would be pleased. I am thinking you might be given an opportunity to meet Newman.”20 Telfer duly met Newman, not, however, through using Stokes’s connection with Alloway, and, just as Stokes many years before had become a protégé of Pound in Rapallo, Telfer became a protégé of Newman in Manhattan.
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Barnett Newman with Telfer in Manhattan Now, as well as writing to Telfer from London with advice about how to promote his career as an artist, Stokes also wrote to him about his girlfriend who had suffered a nervous breakdown during her final year as an art student at the Slade. “[B]ecause there has been breakdown in the face of some frustration & difficulty—maybe you have already saved her several times—it does not necessarily mean it will be repeated, still less that it will be prolonged,” Stokes pontificated apropos this young woman then being treated with sedative medication. [This] is not to be equated at all with electric shock treatment, drug taking or hypnosis. Sleep, rest, are induced: that’s all, usually most effectively. I have heard of people in analysis who have been advised to continue with these sedatives for a time. There is absolutely nothing else that can be done for her at the moment. In such an illness one is invaded by unreason. I think she feels it so. The drugs will help her to snap out of it.21
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He knew. After all he was no neophyte when it came to nervous breakdowns, their medication, and psychoanalytic treatment. Now, in January 1963, worries about the nervous breakdown of Telfer’s girlfriend continued alongside the publication that month of Stokes’s fourth Tavistock book, Painting and the Inner World. In it he again railed against abstract expressionism. “[A]rt devotes itself entirely to sense-data … in order to focus steadily on the integration of the inner world as an outer image,” he declared. Art, he went on, can only achieve “tranquility tinged with terror”, as famously advocated by the philosopher, Edmund Burke, by engaging “contents at loggerheads with each other”.22 In doing this, artists also have to take account of the particular times in which they live. Otherwise, argued Stokes, their work can have no “urgency or power”. Turner’s last paintings—including, for instance, Rain, Steam and Speed—would never have achieved this effect had he not previously completed “a thousand studies amassed from many kinds of objects under the aegis of contemporary styles for picturemaking”.23
Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed, 1844
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Also crucial, Stokes maintained, to the effect of Turner’s paintings is his integration of “different tendencies in the mind”, including those of oneness with what is other than, and separate from oneself. Praising Turner for this, Stokes said of his paintings: In the great last period not only is the world washed clean by light, but humidity is sucked from water, the core of fire from flame, leaving an iridescence through which we witness an object’s ceremonious identity: whereupon space and light envelop them and us, cement the world under the aegis of a boat at dawn between Cumaean headlands, or a yacht that gains the coast. Together with Turner’s whirlpool of fire and water we experience beneficence in space. There abound calm scenes that would be sombre or forlorn without the gold, without the agitated pulse and delicacy in so light a key. Beneficence is very widely scattered; encompasses from afar.24
With such paintings Turner rehearsed, said Stokes, “the chief relationships of the psyche to its objects, particularly an enveloping relationship associated with the breast”.25 “[R]ecently [Stokes] has set himself the task of reconciling the individual’s apprehension of art with what we have learnt about the structure of the human psyche,” observed John Russell in The Sunday Times. This has made [Stokes] more difficult to read, since the new truths which he puts before us have still to be couched in technical language. But as that language is the language of the new enlightenment, and as it will guide us in the understanding of every department of human life, it is not unreasonable that the reader should be asked to master it.26
The dance and art critic, Nigel Gosling, was not so forgiving. “What Mr. Stokes is trying to say is important and difficult and calls for the utmost clarity. Instead,” Gosling complained, “he adopts a gnomic, idiosyncratically twisty syntax, combined with a mixture of colloquial, archaic and invented words which work as a kind of poetry but makes understanding extremely difficult.”27 As evidence he quoted Stokes beginning the Turner chapter of Painting and the Inner World with the following declaration: Art opposes self-concealment: painting should reveal its student. Nudity, an absolute achieved so often in an instant without rebuff,
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furnishes no reference to the endless mind. On the contrary, great artists deepen the search in themselves, pierce for a moment a hardly won aesthetic integration in order to disclose and realign the detail of which it was fashioned.28
These sentences more than prove Gosling’s point. Their meaning is far from clear. “Indistinctiveness is my forte,” Stokes quoted Turner as saying.29 It seemed to be also Stokes’s forte, commented the novelist, Brigid Brophy, in a savage review of Painting and the Inner World which she ended by saying, “I think I have glimpsed some interesting and original ideas in Mr. Stokes’s book, but I dare not praise them in case they should turn out to be mine, not his.”30 Reeling from the negative reception of Painting and the Inner World, Stokes decided that this book was “de trop”.31 By then he had again taken Ann, Philip, and Ariadne to Cornwall and to St Ives. “[I]t still has some glorious moments when for example the latest Hepworth takes off for the moon and is escorted on a red carpet by the mayor and corporation to the boundary of the borough,” Peter Lanyon, then living with his family at Little Park Owles, joked in anticipation of Stokes’s visit there.32
Peter Lanyon with his children at Little Park Owles, 1963
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As well as meeting up with Lanyon that summer, 1963, Stokes also visited Patrick Heron, who was then living with his family at Eagle’s Nest in Zennor from where he took Stokes to see parts of Cornwall which he had not seen since petrol rationing during the Second World War.33 “A bowl of Cornish cream can epitomize the pale, rich canopy of stone-hedged fields, can uncover warmth in Celtic remoteness,” Stokes now wrote in his next book, The Invitation in Art. [T]races only of the human past keep us in touch with our own development. In Cornwall again, very old and less old civilizations are everywhere apparent, in names, in dolmens, in mines. … Of course the realization of the past-living-in-the-present that I have in mind is not at all a matter only of antiquarian, or of cultural interests in a narrow sense. An awareness of the continuing generations, however arrived at, is enough. People often talk of “roots” as a necessity, of a conservative well-foundedness that betrays, I submit, the need of the psyche to project into surroundings a history of its development, to receive from this projection an image of the psyche’s architecture constructed upon firm and ancient foundations.34
Gasometer at the Oval
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In contrast to the landscape of Cornwall he loathed the cityscape of 1960s London, particularly the gasometer at the Oval cricket ground. Using Klein’s psychoanalytic theory regarding infantile fantasies about parental sexual intercourse, including images of the father and mother as bodily “part-objects”, which she contrasted with the integrating image of the mother as good, loved, and whole, Stokes said of this gasometer: [Its] squat, erectile cylinder could be destructive … [conjuring] images of the child’s impotence in conjunction with monstrous phallic attacks on the mother by a monster father … A bad mother as well, possessing a bad phallus, it does not attempt to pierce and mingle with the vaporous sky but takes on bullying duties, namely to outrage the houses of the poor (with small apertures) that miserably cluster near the naked plant.35
Architects should be prevented from designing such monstrosities. They should “be instructed in the projection of symbols” and in the importance of “the integrative purpose of art”, insisted Stokes.36 Freud had emphasised just such integration, claimed Stokes, in bringing together otherwise disconnected feelings such as “belief in God” and “the young child’s submission to a stern, all-seeing father”. So did Klein with her emphasis on the bringing together of “entirely diverse” feelings as a whole.37 The best art, Stokes added, results from its creators likewise bringing together the fragments produced by their initial attack on the physical material from which their art is made. “It is ‘seconds out of the ring’ for every writer as he opposes his first unblemished sheet, innocent of his graffiti. It is even harder to being to paint,” Stokes claimed. Painters should not however rest content with this “‘aggressive preliminary” of art-making, he continued. They should bring together the resulting parts—“tone against tone, colour against colour, shape against shape and line … things of worth from juxtaposition, meaningless in isolation”. Hence, claimed Stokes, the aesthetic merit of Soutine’s early landscape paintings, Chemin de la fontaine des tins à Céret, for instance, engorging “the spectator through their furious whorls” yet also conveying “supervening wholeness in spite of the violence done”.38
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Soutine, Chemin de la fontaine des tins à Céret, 1920 By then, perhaps influenced by Stokes, his close friend, Richard Wollheim, had begun psychoanalytic treatment in 1962 with a Kleinian psychoanalyst, Leslie Sohn. Sometimes, after his treatment sessions, Wollheim called in on Stokes. Adrian would come downstairs, shuffling a little in his slippers, holding his pipe just above his right shoulder and parallel to the ground, adjusting his silk handkerchief. There would be words of welcome, some words of apology, some reflections on the last meeting. “I have been thinking …” he would begin. All very hesitant at first. We would be upstairs by now. He would play with a
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large box of matches, he would stare up at the ceiling, he would … try out a number of positions until, getting into one that no one else would have stayed in for a moment, he settled for it: his back largely towards me, a cat across his knees, sitting bolt upright, looking out of the window over St John’s Wood over the valley of the Thames—and then the thoughts flowed. Next morning a letter or postcard arrived. It continued the conversation, apologized for too emphatic an assertion, concluded probably on a tangential or enigmatic thought.39
In one such letter Stokes included the almost finished draft of his abovementioned book, The Invitation in Art. “Remember the thought in sending you this is that perhaps you will be stimulated to a collaboration that would lie alongside, either now or in the future. I hope you will consider the possibility worth examining, however improbable,” Stokes said at the start of this letter to Wollheim.40 Over the following weeks he sent Wollheim further drafts and re-drafts of his Invitation book after which Wollheim agreed to write its preface. “A heroic metaphor is not inappropriate in describing The Invitation in Art; it is the final logbook in a long Odyssey. In over fifteen books Adrian Stokes has explored his chosen ground with the tenacity of a Ulysses,” the writer, Eric Rhode, told BBC radio listeners when The Invitation in Art was published in January 1965.41 “In a preface to Stokes’s first book, Middleton Murry likened his originality as a thinker to Wittgenstein,” Rhode continued. That seems an odd comparison now; but it is still true in so far as both these writers present us with similar difficulties. Their work is incomprehensible until you have made an imaginative leap, and start to see things in the light of their unusual yet striking vision.42
“We want to be certain that the matter has absorbed the artist and to identify with him; we want to feel volume, density, and the air it displaces, to recognize things perhaps in the manner of the half-blind,” quoted another enthusiastic reviewer of Stokes’s Invitation book. “[W]e demand to be drawn in among these volumes, almost as if they were extensions of ourselves, and we do not tire of this process, the incantatory process at work,” this reviewer added.43
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“[I]n Stokes writings the potency of art derives from its capacity to symbolize not merely the whole body but also parts of the body. And in this way it takes us back to, and allows us to participate in, earlier pleasures and experiences,” Wollheim had written in the book’s preface.44 Years later Hanna Segal praised this book for showing the “containing” effect of art.45 It was also an effect Stokes sought to convey with his next book, Reflections on the Nude.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Reflections on the nude
T
he female nude is “a thing apart” signifying “an undeniable architecture of cool and subtle relationships between shapes and tones and contours,” Stokes wrote in praise of Coldstream’s paintings of the female nude.1 By then he had often worked as a painter with Coldstream in the studio in Frognal Lane, Hampstead, of Telfer’s tutor at the Slade, Sam Carter. Here, like Coldstream, Stokes completed paintings of the female nude, some of which, together with other paintings, were included in an exhibition, which he shared with Lawrence Gowing, at the Marlborough Gallery in London in January 1965. “Stokes’s work has always been something of a mystery even to the in-group of his admirers,” Wollheim’s close friend, John Richardson, said in a BBC radio discussion of these paintings. “What surprises one in such a sophisticated writer is the innocence of the artist’s eye,” Richardson continued. The answer is probably to be found in Stokes’s passion for the analytical writings of the late Melanie Klein. In accordance with her teachings, his paintings don’t reflect the intellectual processes of the mind, but the harmonious patterns of the psyche. Best, I think, are the shimmering landscapes … pewter coloured olive trees …
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Bonnard comes to mind. Also Morandi. I’m thinking of those clusters of bottles which seem to melt into the space around them.2
“There is no mildness in the paintings of Adrian Stokes,” the art critic, Robert Melville, explained in the exhibition catalogue. The “ostensible subject-matter” of Stokes’s paintings is, said Melville, “a quiet and insidious pacification of a longing for extreme and devastating solutions” so that “if one stays long enough with them one becomes aware of a miraculous conversion of a vision of the condemned universe into intimations of the peaceable kingdom”.3 With such intimations Stokes sought, through his paintings, to convey “an interpretation of volume that is without menace, in slow and flattened progressions as of the lowest relief, in which any section is as prominent or important, or is as little so, as any other section”.4 Unfortunately, however, his “anguished striving” outpaced his ability as a painter. As a result his paintings conveyed “a languorous or hazy ambience to arrangements which … hardly bear scrutiny”, reported a review in The Spectator.5 Others criticised Stokes’s paintings in “self-effacing tones of brown, violet, green, and blue” as depending on “a very gentle sort of tension” which was sometimes too gentle “to be detected”.6 To counter this Stokes organised for twenty-eight of his still life paintings to be hung together at the Marlborough as a “mosaic” to secure “some sort of impact” which, he admitted, they “vastly needed”.7
“Mosaic” of still life paintings
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His writings had more impact, including those in his second Venice book published in 1965 with illustrations by John Piper. “Since Ruskin first took that ‘broad road leading towards the East’ and on to one of his most superbly pictorial passages of prose, how many authors have dared to follow across the lagoon,” asked Quentin Bell in reviewing this book. Certainly, amongst living authors no one is better fitted for the attempt than Mr. Adrian Stokes. He, at least, understands the art of descriptive writing: he has the ability to observe where the rest of us can only see, to summon images when and as he needs them, he is not afflicted by the shamefaced timidity which scrawls the word “precious” with a purple pencil whenever a writer dares to enjoy himself amongst words and images.8
This was preceded by many leading figures in the arts criticising the Times Literary Supplement for not including Stokes’s previous three books in a survey of books published in England in the 1960s. This was particularly unfortunate said the letter’s signatories since Stokes could justifiably be regarded as “the most original and creative live English writer on art”.9 Stokes’s writing on art soon after included a lecture he gave on 19 January 1966 at the Slade,10 and an article published that year in the journal, Art and Literature.11 In this article he praised in psychoanalytic terms the integrating effect of Rembrandt’s paintings of the female nude as: sagging repository of jewels and dirt, of fabulous babies and magical faeces despoiled yet later restored, a body often flaccid and creased yet still the desirable source of a scarred bounty: not the bounty of the perfected, stable breast housed in the temple of the integrated psyche that we possess in the rounded forms of classical art, but riches and drabness joined by the infant’s interfering envy, sometimes with the character of an oppressive weight or listlessness left by his thefts [in which] supervenes, none the less, a noble acceptance of ambivalence in which love shines.12
It was another way of illustrating his claim, which he had made during the first months of his psychoanalytic treatment by Klein, regarding the aesthetic merit of painting in bringing parts together as a whole. Now he illustrated this claim not only with paintings by Rembrandt, but also with paintings by Cézanne, including Les grandes baigneuses which had then recently been acquired by the National Gallery in London.
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Cézanne, Les grandes baigneuses, c.1900–1906 “At first sight these figures could suggest a quorum of naked tramps camped on top of railway carriages as the landscape roars from left to right; except, of course, that studied, monumental, they altogether refuse the character of silhouettes,” he wrote quirkily of this painting of which he went on to say at length: The distorted angularity of many shoulders, the insistence upon angle and strength of line, oppose with ferocity a facile mingling of these bodies, in order to rejoin them sharply; with the result that our apprehension of the bulky, answering v-shapes is a startled apprehension, as if experienced by means of the extreme flare of a forked lightning flash. Coupled with the contrasting monumentality, this sharpness persists in the impression however long we gaze. Another reconciliation is between the sheet-lightning of the enwrapping towels and the slow swathes of blue daylight … For me the blue embrace is the final impression, withstanding a hurricane-like flattening of the light-toned foliage and a suggestion in the shape of the right-hand bathers’ group of a petal-shaped volcanic orifice erupting into a steamy cloud beyond.13
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He was similarly enthusiastic about Picasso’s painting, Three Dancers, suggesting, he maintained, “an image for an amalgam of experiences” since in this painting “every line and tone and division helps in the setting up of various relationships across and down the face of the canvas” thus serving as “container of a sum of meanings”.14 Stokes also praised the containing and integrating effect of parts brought together as a whole achieved by the Dadaist artist, Kurt Schwitters; by the “heavy sanded surfaces” created by the French artist, Jean Dubuffet, and by the Spanish artist, Antoni Tàpies; by the “generous steel constructions” and “delicately piled cube” sculptures of David Smith; and by the Venezuelan artist, Jésus-Rafael Soto, with his abstract construction made from “projecting square plaques against a background of black and white lines”.15 “In my own mind I revisit early years abroad, the sense of discovery in many galleries … the predominant effect of the pictures in relation to the discomfiture of loneliness,” Stokes told his lecture audience at the Slade. “Art meant oasis for the body as well as for the mind but also a ritual that affirmed unalterable contact … rescued from the excess that had obscured or depleted an embrace.”16 Now, after the opening in April 1966 of an exhibition at Camden Arts Centre including two of his paintings—one of a female nude, the other of trees on Hampstead Heath—Stokes went with Ann to Rapallo where they stayed near the Villa Giuditta. “I think he is very happy … and painting his 5th picture,” she told Wollheim from Rapallo.17 “Hope later to go to Pisa & Lucca & perhaps Florence,” said Stokes, anticipating perhaps a visit that June to see, among other things, Michelangelo’s sculptures in Florence’s Medici Chapel.18 “To us the representation of correct musculature, however detailed, is no longer emotive in itself: we no longer associate naturalism tout court with the promise of aesthetic value,” Stokes said of one of these sculptures, Day or Giorno. As a mountain may appear to transmit to itself the presence of its peak, so Giorno’s square head, sunk in the shoulders, impregnates with thought the feeling the body’s bulk: as if the brain were entirely a transmitter rather than the receiver also of corporeal sensations. Our sensation is that muscle speaks; there is speech not from the mouth but from contours and bulges that ripple at the behest of a reckless verisimilitude.19
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Michelangelo, Giorno, 1526–1531
Whether or not we find Giorno has this effect on us Stokes’s account of this sculpture is “particularly impressive” as noted by a review in the Times Literary Supplement.20 “For a few readers—amongst them, it must be said, some of the finest poets and painters and philosophers of our time—Adrian Stokes has seemed, for some time now, the deepest, as well as the most intriguing, critic of the arts working today,” applauded Wollheim in The Listener, in going on to dedicate to Stokes his book, Art and its Objects.21 The same year, 1968, as this was published Stokes was offered a knighthood in appreciation of his work as a Trustee of the Tate. But he rejected this offer because, he said, as a writer he was known as “Adrian Stokes” without any prefatory “Sir”.22 By then he had given up book-writing due to lack of response to his sixth Tavistock book, Reflections on the Nude. This convinced him that he had “small prospect of getting another book published”.23 Instead he wrote articles and a story about himself becoming ugly due to an anti-aging injection causing “a cluster of quills” to grow on his face.24 He also wrote poems, one of which, The start of life resembles trees,
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was published in The Listener in December 1968, and he continued painting.25 “Apart from the more or less irrelevant fact that I always want to do it I find I can speak about my own painting only in a negative way,” he wrote that year, which included another exhibition of his paintings at the Marlborough (this time together with work by the artist, Keith Vaughan).26 Sidney Nolan praised them as having a charge like electricity;27 Lawrence Gowing applauded them as very moving;28 and William Coldstream said the best were better than ever.29 This must have been heart-warming. So was walking over Hampstead Heath to see Telfer at his home in Kentish Town. But Stokes was also unhappy as was his daughter Ariadne.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
More about Ariadne
A
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riadne is entirely miserable every moment of the time out of London. She has to be without her special aids in August, but leaving home as well is the last straw,” Stokes wrote after abandoning hope of going to stay in Cornwall again in August 1965. “Ann & I were tempted for a moment to leave her up here in September & accept your wonderful offer for ourselves. But it would have been very wrong of us & it would have set her back,” he added in turning down Barbara Hepworth’s invitation to stay in one of her Barnaloft flats in St Ives that summer.1 “She has a very sweet nature and she gives us happiness; nor, I think, is she unhappy, though her enormous gentleness, as if she had a skin too few, unfits her for the world,” he said of Ariadne in October 1965.2 Hepworth tried to reassure him with praise of Ariadne’s good looks and evident inner happiness and strength.3 “Beautiful unbending daughter,” he told her in a poem after she turned sixteen in June 1967,
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Ariadne at Church Row Hugging yourself to preserve a skin That barely separates Barely resists the air; Stiff-jointed, bent, muscle-stretched Day and night against unintegration; The bond with you has been for sixteen years And would that we were free to talk. A part of you is sane, a part of each of us Psychotic …4
The “internal function of containing … parts of the self is dependent initially on the introjection of an external object, experienced as capable of fulfilling this function”, reported Ariadne’s psychoanalyst, Esther Bick,
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in overly abstract theoretical terms at a psychoanalytic conference in July 1967. In Ariadne’s case, said Bick, “[i]mprovement was achieved, along with a lessening of her general total dependence, more through a formation of a second skin based on her own muscularity than on identification with a containing object.”5 “I have been thinking a lot about Ariadne, and your work with her. I do hope for you both that some kind of stability, less harrowing, has been reached,” Gowing told Stokes the following December.6 Then, in the autumn of 1969, having by then had sixteen years of psychoanalytic treatment by Bick, Ariadne refused to go for any more treatment sessions with her. At first she was well enough to be left in London while Stokes went with Ann in early summer 1970 on a two week Mediterranean cruise which took them to Turkey where he was disappointed that the Byzantine mosque of Santa Sophia was closed due to that day marking the anniversary of the capture of Istanbul by the Ottoman empire on 29 May 1453. “Round, jewelled Byzantium,” he said of Santa Sophia, A form that slowly turns Falls always to a scimitar Incorrigible brick modelling …7
Then the cruise took him and Ann to Crete and Venice. From there they returned to London where Stokes was relieved to discover that leaving Ariadne there without them had not been a “disaster”.8 They were nevertheless very concerned about Ariadne whom they took that November to see the medical director of the Camphill Village Trust residential community at Delrow House in Watford in the hope that he might be able to help. He was impressed by their patience with Ariadne. But he felt they had probably always received the wrong kind of advice and, instead of psychoanalytic treatment, he arranged for her to stay at Delrow House.9 “Would that I could commend to you your courage,” Stokes had previously written in a poem to Ariadne, [Would t]hat I could mitigate by one moment Your unhappiness Your fear to make us mad …10
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Stokes in Crete, c.June 1970 Whether or not she was fearful of making others mad, she was evidently troubled and troubling. The New York writer, David Plante, for instance, who had moved to London where, through Stephen Spender, he got to know Stokes, recalled Ariadne coming into a room where he was learning pottery at 20 Church Row. There, said Plante, Ariadne undressed and stood naked near him till Ann came and fetched
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her. Another time, he recalled, Ariadne dropped a torn piece of paper on which she had written “MUDDLE HEADED”.11 She could be disquieting, and worse. One holiday away from London, when the family forgot to bring with them her antischizophrenic medication, she tried to strangle Ann.12 Medication helped. But it had dire effects. “She had the aspect of one who could never reach what she desperately needed; now she was making no further effort and was simply confining herself within herself; her life did not proceed in any direction,” recalled a family friend.13 An appointment was scheduled for Ariadne at Delrow House on 8 May 1971. But Stokes and Ann were unwilling to stop her medication so she could be assessed without it to see if she could become a resident there. So, instead of being assessed at Delrow House, she was sent to a residential institution in Birmingham. But she ran away. Through an agency in London, Stokes discovered she could be accommodated in a retreat run by Irish Catholic nuns in Sussex. A visit was arranged for 23 February 1972. Then, or soon after, she began living there. To help her settle in, the nuns suggested Stokes and Ann not visit for a while. In the interim Stokes gave a lecture, “The future and art”, first in Camberwell and then at Chelsea School of Art.14 He also went with Ann on another Mediterranean cruise that April. Then, following their return to London, they went for a few days at the end of May to Cornwall.
With Ann in Cornwall, c.May 1972
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Stokes grieved on their return to London in early June that Telfer was no longer available for Stokes to talk to at his home in Kentish Town since he was now living with his then girlfriend in Venice, California. “It’s sad to think you are not in call in London and the place seems much emptier to me,” Stokes told Telfer on 18 June from London. “We all went to see Ariadne at her convent near Burgess Hill in Sussex the other day,” he added. She has settled down and likes the nuns who are kind to her: and even looked content and utterly relaxed. This is a very great relief to us and there now seems every hope it will continue, and that she is better there than here or anywhere else.15
And it was at this convent that Ariadne remained then and in the years following the publication of Stokes’s next book, The Image in Form.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Renewed fame
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ith the publication of Stokes’s book, The Image in Form, he recovered the fame he had first enjoyed following the publication of The Quattro Cento in June 1932. Excited by Wollheim securing a contract for the publication of The Image in Form from a poet friend of Stephen Spender, Nikos Stangos, Stokes wrote to Wollheim saying: Bowled over by the perfect action of your kindness, stunned with delight, I want to say also, though still euphoric, that did you eventually find insufficient unity in the project, insufficient material or other difficulty, I would very well understand.1
Despite Stokes thus offering Wollheim a means of avoiding the work of putting The Image in Form together, Wollheim persisted with it. “You were asking about influences. I have been thinking whether I can help more. Of Hildebrand I didn’t know at the relevant time nor, shamefully, many of the Germans, nor even of Wölfflin till the late thirties,” Stokes told Wollheim in helping him write the book’s introduction. “The only aesthetics or near-aesthetics I had read in addition to Pater & Ruskin were Berenson & Roger Fry from both of whom 265
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I learned a great deal. I should have got to know them. I’m afraid I avoided almost everyone,” he continued. Perhaps I should mention that when I first lived in Venice in 1925 I was so excited that I remember it today, by D’Annunzio’s novel Il Fuoco, an account of his affair with Duse. The book has many references to the Renaissance & to Pisanello. At that time I bought the Quattrocento sculpture and architecture volumes of Adolfo Venturi’s Storia dell’Arte Italiana. … Ezra read an essay I had written about Agostino & low relief and the stone-and-water theme in 1928. He arranged for it to be published in the Criterion … As you will have seen at the end of the first chapter of Stones of Rimini, I was planning to write a second book about the Tempio … it was its absence that disappointed Ezra, since it would have been in this historical context that I would have discussed his Malatesta Cantos. … I found I could not make up my mind about Sigismondo the more I worked on the testimony, i.e. my sympathy with Ezra’s views weakened. … Of a second Tempio book, in the end only the short essay on Alberti in Art & Science was realized. … Ezra was very kind to me and encouraging while urging me about Sigismondo—there is evidence of this in Stones of Rimini—but I do not feel I can claim him in any respect as an aesthetic influence: and my interrelated interests in the Tempio, in Agostino, in low relief, in the stone-and-water theme existed when I met him.2
“Reading the proofs for a week now of … The Image in Form,” Stokes wrote later that year to Ben Nicholson. I was re-struck how obsessed I was to the point of dottiness with low relief, in The Quattro Cento (1932) & Stones of Rimini Jan 1934, much of it written in the twenties. Of course the early Renaissance low relief on which I relied to define “the carving attitude” not in sculpture only but also painting, was of no interest to you, though you were sometimes intrigued by photographs of architectural detail of this kind. I like to think I may have contributed something to your evolution towards relief, however indirectly. And of course I am immensely stimulated by you & Barbara: the last is mentioned by Wollheim in his introduction.3
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By then, as well as working with Wollheim on this book’s introduction, Stokes had reviewed Wollheim’s book, Freud, for The Listener.4 He was also ill. In the spring of 1969 he had had an X-ray and colonic irrigation treatment. Two years later he was operated on for bowel cancer. “I am making an excellent recovery and I have hopes of being allowed home about Tuesday. I have had to suffer a very vulgar reconstruction, as if re-designed by Salvador Dali,” he joked after the operation to Barbara Hepworth.5 Prompted by news of Stokes’s illness, Stephen Spender wrote to him about his poems, some of which, thanks to Nikos Stangos, were included in an edited paperback, Penguin Modern Poets 23. “Every day now I get stronger. When I got back here from hospital, saw the sky, felt the peace, I was at a loss to understand how the sense of the fullness of life could have been in such abeyance,” Stokes had meanwhile written on returning home after his bowel cancer surgery.6 Together with Ann, he spent some of that Christmas Day with Richard and Mary Day Wollheim at the home of Nikos Stangos and his partner, David Plante, who, in the new year, 1972, noted Ariadne’s imminent move to “a home run by nuns, where she will spend her life”.7 Ariadne was on Stokes’s mind. So was the fifty-fifth anniversary in April 1972 of the death in the First World War of his beloved brother, Philip. “So in my dream my brother Philip is returned,” Stokes now wrote. Where had he been these fifty five post-Flanders years? Much accomplished, still young … To dream then of the less excellent Next brother dead nearly forty years. Surely I figured in the vanguard of his fate, Infiltrated with my mind he thought his own … Across to Coriolanus and Cain.8
“‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Cain had said. That was a wicked, frightened joke of Cain’s,” Stokes had written in Inside Out.9 This was included in an autobiographical section of The Image in Form which was published on 29 June with a photo of the arcade of the quattrocento courtyard of the ducal palace in Urbino on its cover.
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Book cover
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“In truth, we cannot but speak of the surface of any work of art, and equally of shape and volume, of the articulated body, metaphors by which we assert the dynamic effect of its impression and the selfcompleteness,” he wrote in an excerpt from The Quattro Cento included in The Image in Form. “In the fifteenth-century courtyard of the palace at Urbino designed by Luciano Laurana …, in my opinion one of the greatest masterpieces of architecture, we surely see the same thing,” he continued. “Each plain yet costly member of this building has the value of a limb: in the coordination of the contrasting materials there is equal care for each: together they make stillness that, as it were, breathes.”10 “Because art is a distillation of human experience I shall examine my own experience very carefully and share with anyone who wants it my understanding of that experience,” Stokes implied in regaling his readers with art’s psychological impact on him, admired the art historian, Norbert Lynton. Yet, Lynton also pointed out, “There are dark patches in what [Stokes] writes, dark perhaps to himself, and there are many moments when ‘Yes, but’ or ‘But surely it is also true that’ burst from one feebly against the current of his thoughts”. “It is a corollary of this that there are also many occasions on which Stokes’ words and one’s own thinking mate and produce joyful insights,” Lynton added. [Stokes] also offers us basic themes for consideration—such as the alternative and in some ways complementary means of carving and modelling and their significance in painting and in architecture as well as in sculpture, the role of our surroundings as impetus to developments in art, the duality of art as internal and external object, and so forth. He returns to these again and again and, in conjunction with the Kleinian examination of infantile development, they provide the basis of most of his writing.11
Lynton praised this aspect of Stokes’s work. Not so the philosopher, Roger Scruton, who described “Stokes’s sensitive perception” as all too often “crushed beneath an immovable apparatus of psychoanalytical theory” irrelevant to understanding our conscious enjoyment of art.12 This and other critical, as well as positive, reviews of The Image in Form renewed something of the fame Stokes had enjoyed in the 1930s. Positive reviews included Marina Vaizey in The Financial Times praising
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Stokes for his “rare gift of making us share his vision, so that the things and places and artifacts and characters that he describes are enriched by his observations”.13 “It is easy to describe the distinction of Adrian Stokes. His writing is the only criticism today that casts an imaginative spell like art … He recaptures as much as writing ever has of the actual reverberations of art on one’s life,” marvelled Lawrence Gowing in The Observer.14 “Mr. Stokes’s gift as a writer is in combining a high degree of conceptual rigour with great subtlety of feeling. He knows through feeling, and he feels through knowing,” applauded another review.15 “If a sampling of 40 years’ work qualifies as a Book of the Year, I’d certainly choose The Image in Form,” the critic, John Gross, told The Observer in praising this book as “analysis raised to the level of poetry”.16 “I can think of no other English-speaking critic who had the ability to write in a prose so close to the beauty of the objects he was describing and who simultaneously took such a broad and original approach to his subject,” said the artist and art historian, John Golding, when The Image in Form was published in America.17 As proof Golding quoted the following, written by Stokes while he was living with Ann in Switzerland: As I walk under the arcade of Locarno’s main square, I see in a clear and liquid shade a café table with a light-blue cloth that touches a stone pier. I think I would be entirely safe there: leaning against the pillar I would be able to partake utterly of every thought: I would be immobile, provided for, as in the womb yet out-of-doors: existence within and existence without would be thinly divided: in the blue tablecloth I would clutch the sky.18
With writing like this Stokes shows, commented Golding, “how the kind of visual experience that we encounter daily can flood our consciousness in such a way as to destroy the barriers between the eye and the mind”.19 By the time this was published Stokes himself had become increasingly disoriented. He got muddled trying to find the front door of his home in Church Row, and in trying to organise his Imago Group papers in sequence for their publication as an edited book. “I have a numb hand, nothing serious as a result of low pressure. I can articulate things perfectly but I cannot altogether many words,” he scrawled in an aerogramme to Telfer in California. “Dadda seems to have had a small
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stroke; but one that has come on gradually,” Ann explained in the same letter.20 “I’ve had terrific confuscion [sic] and in the hospital could not say even ‘water’ and other words to giggling Siamese girls, and now I can use a numbrous [sic] etc and walk a lot and can paint,” Stokes wrote after an X-ray and other tests in a nearby hospital in Hampstead.21 As a young man he had suffered with panic anxiety during and after his nursing home hospitalisation for minor surgery on his nose. Now, after his brief hospitalisation in September 1972, when he was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumour, he became relatively calm. “I think once he knew that he was going to die fairly soon he faced it with great bravery, though I’m told, also with fear. He didn’t want to die, and quite right too,” said Margaret Gardiner. She also recalled that, in his final months, “he couldn’t talk very easily and he got tired very easily”. Yet, she observed, “a real sort of warmth and tenderness came out in him” so that she felt “closer” to him than she had before.22 To help him deal with being terminally ill a doctor, Jack Fieldman, who had been in psychoanalytic treatment with Klein and who was recommended by Bick, talked with Stokes. This helped. So did the pills Fieldman prescribed. “Adrian painted a very agonized painting before Dr. Fieldman came to us, and he said his head felt like boxes crashing together at night, and we walked or strode the Heath half the day,” Ann remembered. As soon as we took the first Fieldman pill—Tofronil—which was lunchtime on Monday, 30th September … Adrian became calm and not at all resigned but resolved … from that moment we both lived an enchanted 3 months and stretched time like a bit of elastic, and were aware of every second practically. I must have done 3 times as much in every 3 hours as I have normally done, and felt while shopping and waiting for the assistants to put the things in the bag that they were simply sleep-walking. Phil gradually realised—I think he couldn’t believe it at all at first and we did not hurry him, but in the last 5 weeks he simply spent his entire spare time inventing and producing electrical aids for our life, and marvellously helpful presents like his £9 cigarette lighter which Adrian couldn’t exist without and called his Fetish. We had 50 cigarettes, 3 pipes and 12 tins of tobacco on each floor, which saved a certain amount of travel for me—we also had 36 boxes of matches in view—in case.23
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Visit of Andrew and Sheila Forge, 7 December 1972 As well as admiring Philip for inventing and producing electrical aids for Stokes, Ann arranged a seventieth birthday party for him. “I never liked birthdays … never again,” Stokes confided in Wollheim.24 When, however, it became evident that Stokes would not last long, Ann organised a farewell party for him. She also organised further visits from friends, including one on 7 December from Andrew and Sheila Forge. Stokes also painted that month, his hand “crab-like as it proceeded across the canvas”.25 When this became too difficult he used his thumb to make marks on the canvas. Forced to abandon the reserve which had perhaps contributed to much of his writing being “clogged”,26 forced to abandon inhibitions, perhaps due to keeping in check the cruel and sadistic fantasies Klein had long before diagnosed in him, his painting became freer. “[He] would groan and indicate which blob of colour he wished Ann to dab a brush into; it all seemed a little like Ann’s cooking, haphazard but tasty, the shapes in the picture glowed clearly,” recalled one of his visitors. “He grasped the brush from [Ann] and would aim a sure stroke or perhaps two onto the canvas, then jab the brush back to her.”27
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One evening he worked late on a painting showing “two bottles or jugs grouped together, one overlapping the other, placed slightly left of centre, with no line drawn between the level on which the bottles stand and the ground behind them,” said Wollheim. It was a familiar theme. “Bottles, jugs, earthenware or china bowls, the utensils of domestic life, transformed into something like architectural members, the shapes discriminated but not opposed.”28 Two days after finishing this painting Stokes had lunch with Ann in his bedroom cum study at 20 Church Row. She then helped him onto his bed and, while he slept, together with Mary Day Wollheim, she held one of their annual pre-Christmas sales of their pottery. The actress, Peggy Ashcroft, happened to be passing and was invited in. Nikos Stangos and David Plante were there. So was Telfer newly returned from California. So was his mother, Margaret. “When I arrived at about 3 o’clock there was the most extraordinary sound of breathing all over the house,” she recalled. “Adrian was lying up in his study, on the bed, and Philip had fixed up a thing so you could hear it all over the house.”29 Mary Day Wollheim’s friends—the theatre director, Jonathan Miller, and his doctor wife, Rachel—were also at the party. He was struck by how very “Hampstead” it all was, music playing, a pottery sale, and a man dying upstairs.30 The way he put it was reminiscent of Stokes’s long before observation about Brueghel’s painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, proving the truth of the German proverb that “no plough comes to a standstill because a man dies”.31 “Then suddenly at one point the breathing changed and I went rushing upstairs,” said Margaret. As a doctor Rachel Miller was asked to advise. Perhaps, suggested Nikos Stangos, an ambulance should be summoned to take Stokes to hospital. But he was unconscious and nearly dead. There was no point. “And then Adrian suddenly gave a great jump, and then he really was dead.”32 It all happened while Telfer was outside helping Stephen and Natasha Spender put pottery they had bought at the sale into their car. “Mr. Adrian Stokes, who died last Friday, wrote primarily about art but over a period of more than 40 years his work was increasingly concerned with the whole relationship of mental life with the physical world,” reported an obituary in The Times.33 After seeing Stokes’s last paintings his art gallery director friend, Norman Reid, organised for eleven of them to be shown in an exhibition at the Tate.
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Stokes, Last Eleven (No. 3), 1972 Many of Stokes’s friends attended the exhibition. Margot Fonteyn would also have been there had her ballet performances not kept her abroad.34 Nigel Gosling, who had previously been scathing about Stokes’s writing, applauded his Last Eleven paintings in this exhibition for showing “a sensitive, sweet-flavoured lyricism”.35 John Russell praised them as akin to those of Turner as depicted by Stokes in his book, Painting and the Inner World.36 “In one picture, which was painted before medicine controlled the pain, the usual calm is thunderously disturbed. Then the tone clears again. Light shines and glances round the shapes; the lustrous exchanges of colour reappear,” approved Gowing in the New Statesman.37 “These last paintings formulate a small group of bottles, jars and jugs glassy and filled with light, emerging from a shimmering background of gentle strokes of colour,” approved Marina Vaizey in the Financial Times.
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The paintings are sui generis, poignant, irridescent in their pleasure in the sheer beauty of these simple objects. His final painting is oddly freed from that slightly worrying carefulness that sometimes obtruded in earlier paintings. In some curious way the objects of his still lifes somehow emerge in delicate and touching beauty, rather than being extracted too painstakingly.38
Stokes’s paintings, however, were not his forte. Much more impressive was his attention to the physical materials of art, its inspiring effect on artists in creating their work, and his use of psychoanalysis in seeking to understand the aesthetic effect of art and of the world more generally around him. “Stokes’s imagination was at its strongest when, as a painter writing about art, he brought together in one argument the most abstract psychological theory with the most concrete visual impressions,” applauded Stuart Hampshire when Stokes’s psychoanalytic papers were published as a book, A Game that Must be Lost.39 Further appreciation of Stokes followed the republication of almost all his books in 1978; an exhibition of his paintings at the Serpentine Gallery in 1982; and the republication of The Quattro Cento, Stones of Rimini, and Michelangelo in 2002. More appreciation of Stokes has been expressed in articles and books about him. They include, in 2007, The Coral Mind, edited by Stephen Bann; in 2008 Adrian Stokes: An Architectonic Eye by Stephen Kite; and, in 2014, Art and Analysis by Meg Harris Williams—books I have sought to complement by telling the story of Stokes’s life.
NOTES
Chapter One 1. “Going down the hill …” TGA8816.3 2. MM to RW, 18 May 1982, UCL archive 3. S. Kite (2009) Adrian Stokes: An Architectonic Eye. London: Legenda, p. 16 4. Stokes’s recall of this is reported by Klein in her account of him as a patient Mr. B in M. Klein (1932) The Psycho-Analysis of Children. London: Hogarth, 1975, p. 269 5. Sacheverell Sitwell recalling Durham in a BBC radio programme devoted to Stokes first broadcast on 18 October 1973 6. In R. Read (2002) Art and Its Discontents: The Early Life of Adrian Stokes. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, p. 4 7. The Psycho-Analysis of Children. London: Hogarth, Klein, 1932: 267–268 8. “shoelaces came undone …” TGA8816.3 9. “maltreating …” TGA8816.3 10. A. Stokes (1981) At Hythe. In: P. Robinson (ed.) Adrian Stokes: With all the Views. Manchester: Carcanet, pp. 30–31, 30 11. “What stays in the mind …” TGA8816.3 12. A. Stokes (1947) Inside Out. London: Faber & Faber. CW2, p. 170 13. Philip to Ethel and Durham, 14 January 1917, EAS
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278 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.
25. 26. 27.
28.
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Philip to Ethel and Durham, 3 April 1917, EAS War Office telegram to Ethel, 7 April 1917, EAS Matron to Durham, 7 April 1917, EAS Matron to Durham, 10 April 1917, EAS Matron to Ethel, 21 April 1917, EAS AS to GB, c.February 1942, TGA2002.14 Macleod in a BBC radio programme devoted to Stokes first broadcast on 18 October 1973 Philip to Ethel and Durham, 21 February 1917, EAS A. Stokes (1925) The Thread of Ariadne. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, p. 12 P. Stokes (1918) Poems. Rugby, UK: George E. Over PD, n.d., “WILL & CONVERSATION to my parents to be opened in the event of my death not less than 10 days after the occurrence thereof”, EAS—capitals in original A. Stokes (1920) Softly tread the ashen path … The Rugbeian, 1 (10 June), p. 149 A. Stokes (1920) Hyde Park. The Rugbeian, 1 (8 March), pp. 114–116, 114 My thanks to Peter Agulnik for pointing out the possibility that Geoffrey’s invalidism might have been due to the parkinsonism afflicting many affected by the 1918 flu epidemic A. Stokes (1920) The master-paradox. The Rugbeian, 1 (10 June), pp. 150–152, 152
Chapter Two 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
A. Stokes (1947) Inside Out. London: Faber & Faber. CW2, p. 149 A. Stokes (1951) Smooth and Rough. London: Faber & Faber. CW2, p. 227 A. Stokes (1929) Oxford. The Rugbeian, 1 (11 July), p. 173 “Ah, how pleasant to hear that barrel organ …” TGA8816.8 R. Read (2002) Art and Its Discontents: The Early Life of Adrian Stokes. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, p. 9 A. Stokes (1922) Dilemma. Oxford Fortnightly Review, 10 February, pp. 330–332, 330 A. Stokes (1922) The last lecture. Oxford Fortnightly Review, 12 May, pp. 394–396, 395–6 E. Rhode (1973) Memories of Adrian Stokes. Listener, 13 December, pp. 812–815, 813 E. Sackville-West (1926) The Ruin. London: Heinemann, pp. 28, 35–36 Read 2002: 19 “Although the last day of the year, December 31st, 1922 …” TGA8816.3
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12. “There was a revealing of things in the Mediterranean sunlight …” TGA8816.3 13. Macleod in a BBC radio programme devoted to Stokes first broadcast on 18 October 1973 14. A. Stokes (1925) The Thread of Ariadne. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, p. 77
Chapter Three 1. AS diary, 25 August 1923, in Stokes (1925) The Thread of Ariadne. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, pp. 85, 87 2. Stokes 1925: 85, 87 3. Stokes 1925: 88 4. A. Stokes (1923) Europeanised cities. The Englishman, 18 December, p. 6 5. A. Stokes (1923) A stroll through Bombay. The Englishman, 20 December, p. 6 6. A. Stokes (1923) Travelling 3rd class. The Englishman, 22 November, p. 6 7. Stokes 1925: 131–132, 136, 175 8. Stokes 1925: 177, 179, 185 9. A. Stokes (1923) Musings on the glory of the Taj. The Englishman, 6 December, p. 6 10. Ibid. 11. A. Stokes (1923) Inter-dependence as a philosophy. The Englishman, 10 December, p. 8 12. Stokes 1925: 251 13. Ann to JS, c.19 June 1999 14. A. Stokes (1923) Europeanised cities. The Englishman, 18 December, p. 6 15. AS to ESW, c.March 1924, Berg 16. AS to ESW, c.April 1924, Berg—underlining in original 17. AS to ESW, c.mid-August 1924, Berg 18. AS to ESW, c.April 1924, Berg 19. GR to AS, c.27 December 1924, R. Read (2002) Art and Its Discontents: The Early Life of Adrian Stokes. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, p. 26 20. A. Porter (1925) The pit of despair. Spectator, 28 February, pp. 328–329, 329 21. Stokes 1925: 4, 6, 17 22. Stokes 1925: 43–44, 56, 60, 62 23. Stokes 1925: 69, 75 24. Stokes 1925: 136, 202–203 25. Anon (1925) The thread of Ariadne. TLS, 19 March, p. 184 26. H. Footner (1925) A valiant book. New York Saturday Review, 29 August, pp. 79–80, 80
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Chapter Four 1. AS to ESW, c.February 1925, Berg 2. AS to RW, 23 January 1971, UCL archive 3. In J. Pearson (1978) Façades. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, p. 189 4. AS to ESW, c.early March 1925, Berg 5. AS to ESW, c.mid-March 1925, Berg 6. AS diary, 6 May 1925, TGA8816.7 7. AS diary, 9 May 1924, TGA8816.7—underlining in original 8. AS diary, 18 May 1924, TGA8816.7 9. ESW to Raymond Mortimer, c.18 June 1925, in M. De-la-Noy (1988) Eddy: The Life of Edward Sackville-West. London: Arcadia, p. 95 10. AS to ESW, c.June 1925, Berg 11. AS to ESW, c.mid-July 1925, Berg—bracketed exclamation mark in original 12. AS to ESW, c.late July 1925, Berg 13. AS to BN, 10 September 1962, TGA8717.1.2.4565 14. A. Stokes (1926) Sunrise in the West. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, pp. 128–129—italics in original 15. OS to SS, 5 September 1925, in S. Bradford (1993) Splendours and Miseries: A Life of Sacheverell Sitwell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 152 16. AS to ESW, 27 September 1925, Berg 17. In Stokes 1926: 17 18. AS to ESW, c.mid-October 1925, Berg 19. AS to ESW, c.late October 1925, Berg 20. AS to ESW, c.late November 1925, Berg 21. P. Quennell (1976) The Marble Foot. London: Collins, p. 142 22. W. Rothenstein (1939) Since Fifty. London: Faber & Faber, p. 48 23. MG to RG, c.spring 1925, ARG 24. Gardiner interviewed for a BBC radio programme devoted to Stokes first broadcast on 18 October 1973 25. AS to ESW, c.March 1926, Berg 26. AS to BN, 8 May 1964, TGA8717.1.2.4578 27. Evoe (1926) Diaghileff’s Russian ballet. Punch, 23 June, p. 672 28. Stokes 1926: ix—italics in original 29. AS to ESW, c.March 1926, Berg 30. AS to ESW, c.early September 1926, Berg—underlining in original 31. AS to ESW, c.mid-September 1926—underlining in original 32. E. Sackville-West (1926) The Ruin. London: Heinemann, pp. 78, 88–89, 175 33. AS to Sacheverell Sitwell, 25 October 1926, Harry Ransom Center, Texas
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34. Stokes (c.1926) Notebook, TGA8816.15 35. In M. Bacigalupo & W. Pratt (eds.) Ezra Pound, Language and Persona. Genoa, Italy: Universita degli Studi di Genova, 2008: 411 36. “The world has turned monk …” TGA8816.15 37. Stokes 1926: 3, 8, 44 38. Stokes 1926: 45–47 39. Stokes 1926: 56, 67, 69 40. Stokes 1926: 99–100, 106 41. Stokes 1926: 133–134 42. Stokes 1926: 164–165, 168 43. E. Sitwell (1927) Good and bad literature. T.P.’s and Cassell’s Weekly, 12 March, p. 659 44. Anon (1927) Rhythmic prose is invoked to defend the Occident. New York Times, 31 July 45. Anon (1926) Sunrise in the west. TLS, November 46. EP to OR, 5 January 1927, Beinecke
Chapter Five 1. EP to OR, 5 January 1927, Beinecke 2. EP to Homer Pound, 8 January 1927, in M. de Rachewiltz, A. and J. Moody (2012) Letters Ezra Pound to his Parents. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 616 3. A. Stokes (1934) Stones of Rimini. London: Faber & Faber. CW1, pp. 261–262 4. L. Rainey (1991) Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/ poets/m_r/pound/poundandmalatesta.htm 5. A. Stokes (1927a) Preliminary Cantos. TGA8816.13, n.p. 6. A. Stokes (1927b) Quattro Cento Sculpture and Architecture: Florence and Verona, TGA8816.4 7. “soft grey pietra serena” TGA8816.4 8. AS to ESW, 9 July 1927, Berg 9. AS to RG, 15 March 1927, ERG—underlining in original 10. AS to EP, c.mid-June 1927, Beinecke 11. AS to ESW, 7 July 1927, Berg 12. Kyrle Leng to Cecil Beaton, c.27 August 1927, St John’s College Library, Cambridge 13. “I carry about in me something intent on frustrating and destroying me …” TGA8816.10 14. AS to OR, c.August 1927, Beinecke
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15. AS to OR, 5 September 1927, Beinecke 16. AS to OR, 22 September 1927, Beinecke 17. Tony Neville’s recollection of Adrian Kent in M. E. de la Iglesia (ed.) (1996) Dartington Hall School. Exeter, UK: Short Run Press, p. 133 18. EP to OR, 3 October 1927, Beinecke 19. EP to OR, 10 October 1927, Beinecke 20. AS to OR, 12 October 1927, Beinecke—capital letters in original 21. AS to OR, 6 December 1927, Beinecke 22. AS to ESW, c.August 1924, Berg 23. EP to OR, 21 December 1927, Beinecke 24. In S. Bradford (1993) Splendours and Miseries: A Life of Sacheverell Sitwell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 176 25. EP to OR, 4 January 1928, Beinecke 26. E. Mannin (1930) Confessions and Impressions. London: Jarrolds, p. 241 27. AS to OR, 26 January 1928, Beinecke 28. “The strongholds of the mind vacate …” TGA8816.13 29. A. Stokes (c.1928) Loneliness. TGA8816.13, n.p. 30. “For we are conscious …” TGA8816.13—underlining in original 31. EP to OR, 15 February 1928, Beinecke 32. EP to OR, 17 February 28, Beinecke 33. EP to OR, 20 February 1928, Beinecke—underlining in original 34. EP to OR, 21 February 1928, Beinecke 35. AS to ESW, c.June 1928, Berg 36. EP to OR, 3 March 1928, Beinecke—underlining in original 37. AS to ESW, c.July 1928, Berg 38. AS to ESW, c.July 1928, Berg 39. EP to OR, 29 September 1928, Beinecke 40. EP to OR, 31 October 1928, Beinecke 41. “the need of the soul for externalisation” and “zest for life …” TGA8816.13 42. A. Stokes (1930a) Pisanello. Hound & Horn, 4 (1, October–December): 5–25. CW1, p. 20 43. Stokes 1930a: 25 44. Stokes 1930a: 27 45. C. Bell (1913) Art. New York: Putnam’s, 1958, pp. 17–18 46. R. Fry (1924) The Artist and Psycho-Analysis. London: Hogarth, p. 16 47. A. Stokes (1929) The sculptor Agostino di Duccio. Criterion, 9 (34, October): 44–60, 58 48. Stokes 1929: 59–60 49. R. Read (2002) Art and Its Discontents: The Early Life of Adrian Stokes. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, p. xxv 50. AS to EP, c.December 1929, Beinecke
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51. AS to EP, c.February 1929, Beinecke 52. E. Waugh (1930) Labels. London: Duckworth, p. 159 53. A. Stokes (1930b) Painting, Giorgione and Barbaro. Criterion, 9 (36, April): 482–500, 492, 496 54. Stokes 1930b: 486–487 55. Stokes 1930b: 482, 499 56. AS to EP, c.mid-May 1929, Beinecke 57. AS to EP, c.September 1929, Beinecke 58. Ann to JS, c.21 June 1999 59. AS to EP, c.May 1929, Beinecke
Chapter Six 1. AS to ESW, c.December 1928, Berg 2. AS to RS, c.late August 1929, ERS 3. Robson-Scott in a BBC radio programme devoted to Stokes first broadcast on 18 October 1973 4. AS to RS, c.October 1929, ERS 5. M. Klein (1928) Early stages of the Oedipus conflict. Love, Guilt and Reparation. London: Hogarth, 1975, pp. 186–198 6. M. Klein (1929) Infantile anxiety situations reflected in a work of art and in the creative impulse. Ibid., pp. 210–218 7. AS to JM, 15 January 1930, NLS12964/16 8. AS to EP, c.January 1930, Beinecke 9. AS to JM, 15 January 1930, NLS12964/16 10. AS to RS, c.February 1930, ERS 11. M. Klein (1932) The Psycho-Analysis of Children. London: Hogarth, 1975, p. 272 12. AS to EP, 12 May 1930, Beinecke 13. “bright orderly and efficient …” TGA8816.11 14. “So after all …” TGA8816.11—underlining in original 15. “immediately extremely …” TGA8816.11 16. “brutal and awful …” TGA8816.11 17. “admirable he-man …” TGA8816.11 18. “hopeless, dead, dreary …” TGA88.16.71 19. “flow” TGA8816.71 20. Klein 1932: 266–267 21. Klein 1932: 265–266 22. “avenging mothers …” TGA8816.71 23. Klein 1932: 265 24. “soft … hard … strong, life-giving, straight” TGA8816.71 25. Klein 1932: 266
284 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.
35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.
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Klein 1928: 191 Klein 1932: 265 “Jewish formality, emptiness …” TGA8816.71 A. Stokes (1933) Review of The Psycho-Analysis of Children by M. Klein. Criterion, 12 (April): 527–530, 527 AS to OR, 17 August 1931, Beinecke AS to OR, 22 August 1931, Beinecke Klein 1932: 273 AS to OR, 1 February 1932, Beinecke Auden to AS, 3 April 1932, TGA8816.229. This and further letters from Auden to Stokes are quoted with the permission of the estate of W H Auden, and are copyrighted by the estate Auden to AS, 18 April 1932, TGA8816.229 Auden to AS, n.d. 1932, TGA8816.229 Auden to AS, 20 May 1932, TGA8816.229 Auden to AS, 5 June 1932, TGA8816.229 Anon (1932) Gossip column. Daily Express, 13 July M. Gardiner (1988) A Scatter of Memories. London: Free Association Books, pp. 171–172
Chapter Seven 1. E. Pound (1932) Review of The Quattro Cento. Symposium, October, pp. 518–521. In: H. Zinnes (ed.) Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (pp. 222–225, 223). New York: New Directions, 1980 2. A. Stokes (1932) The Quattro Cento. London: Faber & Faber. CW1, p. 40 3. Stokes 1932: 72 4. Stokes 1932: 76 5. Stokes 1932: 34, 79 6. Stokes 1932: 118–119 7. Stokes 1932: 119 8. Stokes 1932: 87, 100 9. A. Stokes (1927) Preliminary Cantos. TGA8816.13 10. Stokes 1932: 102 11. Stokes 1932: 134 12. Stokes 1932: 133–134 13. Stokes 1932: 134 14. Stokes 1932: 134—italics in original 15. Stokes 1932: 135 16. C. Marriott (1932) The art of a young century. Listener, 8 June: 826–827, 826
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17. K M L (1932) Book news and reviews. Oxford Magazine, 20 October: 67–68, 68 18. P. G. Konody (1932) Art and artists. Observer, 4 September 19. F. Rutter (1932) Art books of the year. Bookman, Christmas 20. R. Byron (1932) Quattro Cento and Nove Cento. Week-End Review, 4 June: 692–694, 694 21. K. Clark (1932) The Quattro Cento. Criterion, 12 (46, October): 146–149, 146 22. Pound 1932: 222–225, 222–223 23. Pound 1932: 225
Chapter Eight 1. AS to EP, c.July 1932, Beinecke 2. In R. Read (1998) The letters of Adrian Stokes and Ezra Pound. Paideuma, 27 (2 & 3): 69–92, 88 3. AS to ESW, c.mid-September 1932, Berg 4. AS to RB, c.late September 1932, Beinecke 5. M. Gardiner (1988) A Scatter of Memories. London: Free Association Books, p. 170 6. Gardiner interviewed for a BBC radio programme devoted to Stokes first broadcast on 18 October 1973 7. Ibid. 8. OR to EP, 11 April 1933, Beinecke 9. AS to OR, 1 May 1933, Beinecke 10. M. Klein (1932) The Psycho-Analysis of Children. London: Hogarth, pp. 265–266 11. This occurs in an account of Stokes as an anonymous patient, C, in M. Klein (1934) A contribution to the psychogenesis of manicdepressive states. Contributions to Psycho-Analysis. London: Hogarth, 1948: 282–310, 299 12. A. Stokes (1934) Stones of Rimini. London: Faber & Faber. CW1, pp. 235–236 13. Stokes 1934: 245—“As surfaces” italicised in the original 14. Stokes 1934: 231–232 15. Stokes 1934: 233–234 16. Stokes 1934: 243 17. Stokes 1934: 248 18. Stokes 1934: 276 19. R. Hinks (1934) Stone, water, and stars. Observer, 25 March 20. W. H. Auden (1948) In praise of limestone. Horizon, 18 (July): 1–3, 1 21. L. Banyard (1934) A Pangbourne author’s notable work. Reading Standard, 16 March
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22. H. Read (1934) Stones of Rimini. TLS, 1 February, p. 71 23. O. Williams (1934) Stones of Rimini. National Review, 52: 397–402, 400 24. E. Pound (1934) Stones of Rimini. Criterion, 13 (52, April): 495–497, 495–496 25. AS to EP, c.March 1934, Beinecke 26. A. Stokes (1933a) Mr. Ben Nicholson’s painting. Spectator, 27 October, p. 575. CW1, pp. 307–308 27. Stokes 1933a: 308 28. Stokes 1934: 183 29. A. Stokes (1933b) Miss Hepworth’s carving. Spectator, 3 November, p. 621. CW1, p. 310 30. In H. Read (1934) Unit 1. London: Cassell, p. 19 31. Stokes 1934: 183 32. A. Stokes (1933c) Mr. Henry Moore’s sculpture. Spectator, 10 November, p. 661. CW1, p. 312 33. In Read 1934: 29–30
Chapter Nine 1. For more details about the modern art aesthetic of significant form see p. 53 2. A. Stokes (1934) To-Night the Ballet. London: Faber & Faber, p. 13 3. Stokes 1934: 23 4. Stokes 1934: 25 5. Stokes 1934: 26 6. Stokes 1934: 33 7. Stokes 1934: 36 8. Stokes 1934: 39 9. Stokes 1934: 53–54, 60 10. Stokes 1934: 68–69, 71 11. Stokes 1934: 82–83 12. Stokes 1934: 88, 94 13. Stokes 1934: 114 14. Stokes 1934: 123 15. Anon (1934) Balletomania. Punch, 11 July, p. 56 16. R. Mortimer (1934) To-Night the Ballet. New Statesman, 23 June, pp. 967–970, 968 17. Anon (1934) Thought in motion. Evening News, 27 June 18. AS to ESW, 4 December 1934, Berg 19. R. Read (2002) Art and Its Discontents: The Early Life of Adrian Stokes. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, p. 220
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20. AS to BN, c.17 April? 1935, TGA8717.1.2.4550 21. M. Klein (1934) A contribution to the psychogenesis of manicdepressive states. Contributions to Psycho-Analysis. London: Hogarth, 1948, pp. 282–310, 300–301 22. Klein 1934: 298, 304 23. A. Stokes (1935) Russian Ballets. London: Faber & Faber, pp. 141–143 24. Stokes 1935: 127 25. Stokes 1935: 135–136 26. Stokes 1935: 158, 161–162 27. Anon (1935) Putting the Russian ballet into words. Evening News, 13 June 28. A. Haskell (1935) The poet of the ballet. Sunday Times, c.16 June 29. G.H.G.S. (1935) Russian Ballets. Arts Quarterly, EAS 30. AS to RB, c.August 1935, Beinecke 31. AS to RB, c.September 1935, Beinecke
Chapter Ten 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.
“As I was driving …” TGA8816.163 AS to BN, c.March 1936, TGA8717.1.2.4557 AS to OR, 6 March 1936, Beinecke AS to BN, 23 April 1936, TGA8717.1.2.4551 D. Devonshire (2010) Wait for Me! London: John Murray, p. 80 Helen Marchant on behalf of Deborah Devonshire email to JS, 22 August 2011 AS to ESW, c.early September 1936, Berg MM interviewed by Mel Gooding, 10 December 1993, NLSC In S. Kite (2009) Adrian Stokes: An Architectonic Eye. London: Legenda, p. 195 n. 3 “It will be best to start …” TGA8816.18 A. Stokes (1937a) Colour and Form. London: Faber & Faber. CW2, p. 28 A. Stokes (1937b) Mr. Ben Nicholson at the Lefevre Galleries. Spectator, 19 March, p. 517. CW1, p. 316 In Stokes 1937a: 8 Stokes 1937a: 24, 71 W. H. Auden (1939) Palais des beaux arts. New Writing, Spring Stokes 1937a: 71 Stokes 1937a: 13–14 Stokes 1937a: 15, 17 Stokes 1937a: 33–34 Stokes 1937a: 32 Stokes 1937a: 36
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22. Stokes 1937a: 22 23. G. Bell (1937) Analysis of colour. New Statesman, 2 October, p. 498
Chapter Eleven 1. Geoffrey Tibble reported by W. Townsend (1936) Diary entry, 9 December. The Townsend Journals London: Tate Gallery, 1976, p. 39 2. G. Bell and W. Coldstream (1937) Plan for artists. In: B. Laughton (1986) The Euston Road School. Aldershot, UK: Gower, p. 4 3. W. Coldstream (1937) How I paint. TLS, 15 September, pp. 570–572, 572 4. AS to WC, mid-September 1937, TGA8922.4.774 5. AS to ESW, c.early September 1937, Berg 6. AS to ESW, c.20 September 1937, Berg 7. MM interviewed by Mel Gooding, 10 December 1993, NLSC 8. AS to ESW, c.October 1937, Berg 9. AS to OR, 15 November 1937, Beinecke 10. AS to OR, c.3 December 1937, Beinecke 11. H. Spurling (2002) The Girl from the Fiction Department. New York: Perseus, p. 31 12. Ann Olivier Popham interviewed by Paul Tucker, 12 October 2011 13. AS to ESW, c.March 1938, Berg 14. Ibid. 15. Townsend diary, 18 March 1938, The Townsend Journals, London: Tate Gallery, 1976, p. 44 16. Ann Olivier Popham interviewed by Paul Tucker, 12 October 2011 17. Norman Wilkinson was the inventor of “dazzle painting”, also known as “dazzle camouflage”, to protect merchant shipping during the First World War 18. AS to BN, 20 July 1938, TGA8717.1.2.4552 19. AS to ESW, c.17 July 1938, Berg 20. MM interviewed by Mel Gooding, 10 December 1993, NLSC 21. “Ezra cannot wait …” TGA8816.53—underlining in original 22. I. Collins (1999) A Broad Canvas: Art in East Anglia since 1880. Norwich, UK: Black Dog Books, p. 71 23. “the would-be old-fashioned hotel” TGA8816.12 24. Estate agent to AS, 18 October 1938, TGA8816.249 25. A. Stokes (1951) Smooth and Rough. London: Faber & Faber. CW2, p. 226 26. Stokes 1951: 218 27. AS to ESW, 14 March 1939, Berg 28. MM diary, 3 April 1939, EMM
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Chapter Twelve 1. “The object of these notes …” TGA8816.12 2. A. Stokes (1937) Colour and Form. London: Faber & Faber. CW2, p. 14 3. A. Causey (2006) Peter Lanyon: Modernism and the Land. London: Reaktion, p. 10 4. A. Stokes (1951) Smooth and Rough. London: Faber & Faber. CW2, p. 218 5. Stokes 1937: 41 6. MM to Mellis family, c.mid-April 1939, EMM 7. MM to Mellis family, 10 April 1939, EMM—underlining in original 8. AS to GB, 9 April 1939, TGA2002.14 9. MM to Mellis family, 24 April 1939, EMM 10. M. Mellis (1977) Notes on St Ives. TGA7817.6 11. Anon (1939) Means to paint Cornwall as it is. News Chronicle (Western edition), c.July 1939 12. MM to Mellis family, 24 April 1939, EMM 13. “submerged rocks, free to the air …” TGA8816.12 14. MM diary, 24 August 1939, EMM 15. AS to BN, c.July 1939, TGA8717.1.2.4556 16. Anon (1939) Gave up fellowship to marry. News Chronicle (Western edition), 7 September 17. Mondrian to BH, 24 September 1939, TGA8012.965 18. B. Hepworth (1970) A Pictorial Autobiography. London: Tate Gallery Productions, revised edition, 1985, p. 42 19. AS to RB, c.October 1939, Beinecke 20. AS to ESW, c.27 August 1939, Berg 21. AS to RB, 3 September 1939, Beinecke 22. AS to GB, 9 October 1939, TGA2002.14 23. AS to KC, c.October 1939, TGA8812.1.3.3046 24. M. Mellis (1985) in St Ives 1939–1964. London: Tate Gallery Publications, p. 100 25. Stokes 1951: 223 26. “In a Victor Hugo film …” TGA8816.12 27. AS to GB, c.September 1940, TGA2002.14 28. Stokes 1951: 221 29. MM interviewed by Mel Gooding, 10 December 1993, NLSC 30. MK to AS, 21 November 1940, in J. Sayers (2012) Dear Stokes. Psychoanalysis & History, 14(1): 111–132, 112 31. A. Stokes (1981) André. In: P. Robinson (ed.) Adrian Stokes: With all the Views. Manchester: Carcanet, pp. 140–141 32. AS to GB, c.September 1940, TGA2002.14
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33. Gardiner interviewed for a BBC radio programme about Stokes broadcast on 18 October 1973 34. Mellis 1977: n.p. 35. Freeman interviewed for a BBC radio programme about Stokes broadcast on 18 October 1973 36. Wendy (née Dick) Guthrie interviewed by JS, 26 October 2011 37. Anon (1942) Successful variety concert. St Ives Times, 2 January, p. 7 38. Anon (1942) Soviet Life Exhibition. St Ives Times, 20 February, p. 4 39. Rachel (née Nicholson) Kidd email to JS, 8 November 2011 40. Anon (1942) Gigantic Gift Auction. St Ives Times, 27 March, p. 4 41. Anon (1942) Report. St Ives Times, 15 May 42. AS to SB, 2/22? April 1943, National Art Library, V&A, London, MSL/1980/31/7 43. AS to Olivier Popham, 15 August 1943, TGA2002.14 44. “I may be digging …” TGA8816.53
Chapter Thirteen 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
“During the last twenty years …” TGA8816.167 AS to JM, late 1942, NLS10509/5 A. Stokes (1945a) Venice. London: Faber & Faber. CW2, p. 88 Stokes 1945a: 98–99 Stokes 1945a: 99 Stokes 1945a: 102 Stokes 1945a: 104, 112 Stokes 1945a: 129–130 Stokes 1945a: 137–138 O. Williams (1945) A view of Venice. National Review, October: 339–343, 342 H. Furst (1945) On aspects of art. Apollo, November: 275–276, 275 A. Stokes (1945b) Concerning art and metapsychology. IJPA, 26(3–4): 177–179, 177 S. Freud (1923b) The Ego and the Id. S. E., 19: 23 Stokes 1945b: 179 Stokes 1945a: 135 A. Stokes (1947a) Inside Out. London: Faber & Faber. CW2, p. 143 Stokes 1947a: 146 Stokes 1947a: 146, 153 Stokes 1947a: 157–158 Stokes 1947a: 158 Stokes 1947a: 159–160 Stokes 1947a: 161
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Stokes 1947a: 162 Stokes 1947a: 163 “red pants … in his mind” TGA8816.12 Stokes 1947a: 163 Stokes 1947a: 166 Stokes 1947a: 171, 178 Stokes 1947a: 171, 174 M. Klein (1945) The Oedipus complex in the light of early anxieties. Love, Guilt and Reparation. London: Hogarth, 1975, pp. 370–419, 388 Stokes 1947a: 182 AS to RS, c.May 1949, ERS A. Stokes (1947b) Cézanne. London: Faber & Faber. CW2, pp. 259–260 AS diary, 30 July 1944, EAS Stokes 1947b: 266 Stokes 1947b: 265
Chapter Fourteen 1. M. Klein (1932) The Psycho-Analysis of Children. London: Hogarth, 1975, pp. 270–271 2. Stokes referred to the “pipe-man” in several letters to Sackville-West now in the Berg Collection in the New York public library 3. MM to Maisie Mellis, 10 April 1939, EMM 4. MM to Maisie and David Mellis, 24 April 1939, EMM 5. MM diary, 20 and 23 August 1939, EMM 6. MM to David and Maisie Mellis, 10 March 1940, EMM—underlining in original 7. MM to David and Maisie Mellis, c.13 August 1940, EMM—underlining in original 8. MM to Maisie Mellis, 20 August 1940, EMM—underlining and capitalisation in original 9. MM to Maisie and David Mellis, 1 September 1940, EMM 10. MM diary, 12 September 1941, EMM 11. MM to Ann, c.1 May 1942, EMM 12. DM to MM, 3 May 1942, EMM 13. DM to MM, 1 December 1942, EMM 14. MM diary, 15 May 1944, EMM—capital letters in original 15. MM diary, 20 May 1944, EMM 16. MM diary, 19 July 1944, EMM 17. AS to Ann, c.29 October 1944, EAS 18. Ann to MM and AS, 2 February 1945, EAS 19. “There is a point to be made …” TGA8816.53
292 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.
40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.
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MM interviewed by Mel Gooding, 10 December 1993, NLSC Ann interviewed by JS, 15 September 2006 Ibid. Ibid. “she was now the man …” TGA8816.57 “oak tree” poem, TGA8816.57 MM to Ann, 15 June 1946, EMM—punctuation and spelling as in the original MM interviewed by Mel Gooding, 10 December 1993, NLSC Ann to AS, 22 June 1946, EAS—underlining in original AS to RS, c.early July 1946, ERS Ann to MM, 14 July 1946, EAS Ann to MM, c.6 August 1946, EMM AS to Ann, 7 August 1946, EAS—underlinings in original MK to AS, 11 June 1946, TGA8816.235 AS to MM, c.early September 1946, EMM AS to MM, c.mid-September 1946, EMM MM interviewed by Mel Gooding, 10 December 1993, NLSC DM to AS, 29 November 1946, TGA8816.245 Ibid. A. Stokes (c.1947) A short account of the circumstances of the married life and the conditions of the divorce of Adrian Durham Stokes and Margaret Mellis. TGA8816.251 Ann to AS, 7 January 1947, EAS Ann to AS, 21 January 1947, EAS AS to BH, 20 February 1947, TGA965 Ann to AS, c.early April 1947, EAS DM to AS, 21 June 1947, EAS Ibid. AS to MM, 14 June 1947, EAS MM to AS, c.late June 1947, EAS MM to AS, 8 August 1947, EMM MM to AS, 8 August 1947, EAS AS to RS, c.September 1947 AS to RS, c.September 1947, ERS AS to Macleod, 10 October 1949, NLS12964/16 AS to BN, 8 July 1958, TGA8717.1.2.4563
Chapter Fifteen 1. “Ceaseless seas of experience construct the coral mind …”, dated November 1947, TGA8816.214
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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.
293
A. Stokes (1949) Art and Science. London: Faber & Faber. CW2 183–212 Stokes 1949: 186–187 Stokes 1949: 240–241, 243 Stokes 1949: 194 Stokes 1949: 198 Stokes 1949: 198 DM to AS, 21 June 1947, EAS M. Swan (1949) The concept of space. TLS, 18 November, p. 744 L. Gowing (1949) A great critic. Spectator, 30 December, p. 924 P. Heron (1950) The poetry of measure. New Statesman, 8 April Stokes 1951: 218 Stokes 1951: 228, 231 Stokes 1951: 232 Stokes 1951: 234 E. Glover (1945) Psychology and the public. Horizon, 11 (63, March): 205–211, 210–211 Anon (1927) Review of Sunrise in the West. Nature, 9 July, p. 42 M. Klein (1948) Contributions to Psycho-Analysis. London: Hogarth, pp. 290–291 quoted in Stokes 1951: 237—italics in original Stokes 1951: 237, 239 AS to Ann, 16 September 1949, EAS AS to Ann, 20 September 1949, EAS
Chapter Sixteen 1. MK to AS, 23 October 1949, TGA8816.235 2. M. Klein (1948) Contributions to Psycho-Analysis. London: Hogarth, p. 282 3. Klein 1948: 282, 284 4. A. Stokes (1951) Smooth and Rough. London: Faber & Faber. CW2, pp. 240–241, 243 5. Stokes 1951: 316, n. 3 6. Stokes 1951: 248, 256 7. M. Swan (1951) Response to architecture. Spectator, 23 March, p. 392 8. DM to AS, 21 June 1947, EAS 9. AS to OR, 1 June 1950, Beinecke 10. AS to ESW, c.August 1950, Berg 11. A. Stokes (1951) A note on abstract or symphonic ballet. Adelphi, February, pp. 44–46 12. AS to ESW, 5 March 1951, Berg—underlining in original 13. P. Heron (1951) Paintings by Adrian Stokes. Art News & Review, 24 March—italics in original
294
N OT E S
14. MK to AS, 25 March 1951, TGA8816.235 15. Ibid. 16. M. Milner (1950) On Not Being Able to Paint. London: Heinemann, p. 47 17. Gardiner interviewed for a BBC radio programme about Stokes first broadcast on 18 October 1973 18. AS to FD, 2 May 1951, TSA 19. Lawyer to FD, 4 May 1951, TSA 20. Anon to FD, 8 June 1951, TSA 21. Ann interviewed by Linda Sandino, 30 March 2003, NLSC 22. Ann interviewed by JS, 15 September 2006 23. E. Bick (1986) Further considerations on the function of the skin in early object relations. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2(4): 292–299, 292 24. A. Stokes (1964) Living in Ticino, 1947–50. Art & Literature, 1(March): 232–238. The Image in Form. London: Penguin, 1972, pp. 314–320, 318—italics in original 25. AS to ESW, 5 March 1951 26. AS to ESW, 14 April 1951, Berg 27. N. Pevsner (1962) Surrey. London: Penguin, p. 195. In: T. Harrod (2009) Ann Stokes: Artists’ Potter. Farnham, UK: Lund Humphries, 2009, p. 122 28. Ann interviewed by JS, 15 September 2006 29. AS to PH, 5 January 1953, National Gallery archive 30. AS to Claude Rogers, 21 Jan 1952, TGA8121.1.19 31. Ann interviewed by JS, 15 September 2006 32. Bick 1986: 292 33. Philip Stokes to JS, 7 March 2007, email 34. Telfer interviewed by JS, 30 June 2007
Chapter Seventeen 1. S. Freud (1910c) Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood. S. E., 11: 63–137 2. S. Freud (1914b) The Moses of Michelangelo. S. E., 13: 211–236, 211, 222, 236 3. E. Jones (1955) Sigmund Freud: Years of Maturity. London: Hogarth 4. L. Alloway (1956) Analysand aesthetics. Art News & Review, 3 March 5. A. Stokes (1951) Art and a formal aspect of dreams. TGA8816.193, pp. 1–30, 1–2, 6, 9 6. Stokes 1951: 16, 17, 19, 34 7. MK to AS, 19 January 1952, TGA8816.235 8. MK to AS, 8 February 1952, TGA8816.235
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295
9. A. Stokes (1952) Art, object-relationship and a formal aspect of dreams. TGA8816.192, pp. 1–2 10. Stokes 1952: 26 11. In M. Milner (1952) Aspects of symbolism in comprehension of the notself. IJPA: 33, 181–195, 189, 191 12. S. Freud (1930) Civilization and Its Discontents. S. E., 21: 59–145, 64, 66 13. A. Stokes (1955) Michelangelo: A Study in the Nature of Art. London: Tavistock. CW3, pp. 9–10 14. KC to AS, 8 July 1953, TGA8816.231 15. LG to AS, 5 January 1954, EAS 16. EG to AS, 22 February 1954, EAS 17. RM to AS, 30 March 1954, EAS 18. RM to AS, 21 April 1954, TGA8816.247 19. HW to AS, 27 April 1954, EAS 20. Still to AS, 26 October 1955, EAS 21. AS to RS, 27 October 1955, ERS 22. H. Read (1955) Michelangelo and Bernini. Listener, 24 November, pp. 886–887, 886 23. Stokes 1955: 23, 32 24. Stokes 1955: 22 25. Stokes 1955: 26–27 26. Stokes 1955: 27 27. In Stokes 1955: 27 28. Stokes 1955: 27–28 29. Stokes 1955: 28, 30 30. Stokes 1955: 33 31. Stokes 1955: 35 32. Stokes 1955: 38, 42, 45 33. Stokes 1955: 47–48 34. Stokes 1955: 49 35. Stokes 1955: 51 36. Stokes 1955: 52 37. Stokes 1955: 52 38. Stokes 1955: 53 39. Stokes 1955: 53–54 40. A. Stokes (1926) Sunrise in the West. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, p. 56 41. Stokes 1955: 54 42. M. Klein (1937) Love, guilt and reparation. Love, Hate and Reparation. London: Hogarth, pp. 57–119, 106 43. Stokes 1955: 37 44. Stokes 1955: 38
296 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.
N OT E S
Stokes 1955: 10 In Stokes 1955: 63–64 In Stokes 1955: 65 Stokes 1955: 75 E. Newton (1956) Michelangelo in the consulting room. Time & Tide, 24 March G H G. (1955) Art and artists. Irish Times, 10 December H. Moore (1956) Books of the year. Sunday Times, 23 December J. Russell (1978) English amateur. New York Times Book Review, 30 April S. Bann (1979) The case for Stokes. PN Review, 6(1): 6–9, 6 R. Wollheim (2002) Introduction. Michelangelo. London: Routledge, pp. xiii–xviii, xviii
Chapter Eighteen 1. In B. Laughton (1986) The Euston Road School. Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, p. 157 2. W. Townsend (1976) The Townsend Journals. London: Tate Gallery, p. 44 3. MK to AS, 19 January 1952, in J. Sayers (2012) Dear Stokes. Psychoanalysis & History, 14(1): 111–132, 119 4. J. Riviere (1929) Womanliness as a masquerade. IJPA, 10: 303–313 5. J. Riviere (1936) On the genesis of psychical conflict in earliest infancy. IJPA, 17: 395–422; J. Riviere (1937) Hate, greed and aggression. In: M. Klein & J. Riviere (1937) Love, Hate and Reparation. London: Hogarth, pp. 57–91 6. MK to AS, 8 February 1952, in Sayers 2012: 119 7. JR to AS, 10 February 1952, in L. Stonebridge (2007) Portrait of an analyst. In: S. Bann (ed.) The Coral Mind. Pennsylvania, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 105–121, 111 8. Ibid. 9. E. Jones (1952) Preface. IJPA, 33(2): 83 10. WT diary, 27 May 1952, in B. Laughton (2004) William Coldstream. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, p. 170 11. JR to AS, 10 August 1952, in Stonebridge 2007: 113 12. JR to AS, 10 August 1952, in Stonebridge 2007: 113–114 13. JR to AS, 10 August 1952, in Stonebridge 2007: 114 14. AS to WC, c.late August 1952, EAS 15. Ibid. 16. WT diary, 4 September 1952, in Laughton 2004: 170 17. MK to AS, 4 September 1952, in Sayers 2012: 122
N OT E S
297
18. Ibid. 19. MK to AS, 11 December 1952, in Sayers 2012: 123 20. A. Stokes (1955a) Form in art. In: M. Klein, P. Heimann, & R. E. Money-Kyrle (eds.) New Directions in Psycho-Analysis. London: Tavistock, pp. 406–420, 409 21. Stokes 1955a: 410 22. MK to AS, 19 July 1954, in Sayers 2012: 124 23. Townsend diary, 14 June 1954 in Laughton 2004: 170 24. MK to AS, 19 July 1954, in Sayers 2012: 124—underlining in original 25. Ann Buchanan Crosby (n.d.) Memories of Adrian Stokes. TGA931.28, pp. 1–6, 3 26. Ann interviewed by JS, 11 March 2007 27. Ibid. 28. A copy of this photo is included in J. Sayers (in press) Adrian Stokes and the portrait of Melanie Klein. IJPA 29. Dialogue reported by Andrew Forge in an interview on 24 November 1978, in Laughton 2004: 170—italics in original 30. Luke Dodd email to JS, 10 April 2014 31. A. Stokes (1960) Obituary note: Melanie Klein, The Times, p. 24 32. MK to AS, 1 November 1956, in Sayers 2012: 129
Chapter Nineteen 1. E. Bick (1986) Further considerations on the function of the skin in early object relations. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2(4): 292–299, 292–293 2. M. Klein (1929) The importance of symbol-formation in the development of the ego. Love, Guilt and Reparation. London: Hogarth, 1975: 219–232, 221 3. E. Bick (1968) The experience of the skin in early object-relations. IJPA, 49: 484–486, 485 4. Ann interviewed by JS, 15 September 2006 5. Bick 1986: 293 6. TS interviewed by JS, 30 June 2007 7. Ann to JS, 13 July 1999 8. Ann interviewed by JS, 15 September 2006 9. “Country House, easily run, every modern convenience …” TGA8816.139 10. AS to RS, 27 October 1955, ERS 11. A. Stokes (1956) Psycho-analytic reflections on the development of ball games, IJPA, 37: 185–192 12. A. Stokes (1955) Freud’s views concerning culture in The Future of an Illusion and in Civilization and Its Discontents. TGA8816.188
298
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13. A. Stokes (1956) An influence of buildings on the graphic arts in the west. TGA8816.181 14. A. Stokes (1956) Seeing as action. Encounter, 6 (March): 91–93 15. A. Stokes (1956) Raphael. London: Faber & Faber. CW2, pp. 273–288 16. Unfortunately I have been unable to find further details about this talk 17. PS interviewed by JS, 7 January 2007 18. Ann had begun teaching and working with Mary Day as a potter by May 1966, and in a letter to Wollheim dated 22 December 1966 she mentions starting a pottery class for Bruno and Rupert in the new year. 19. MK to AS, 1 November 1956, TGA8816.235 20. AC interviewed by JS, 11 December 2006 21. A. Buchanan Crosby (1988) Memories of the Stokes family. TGA931.28, pp. 1–8, 3 22. AS to DS, c.late November 1957, TGA220816/2/2/3 23. Examples include Stokes’s written dedication of a copy of his book, The Thread of Ariadne, to Durham and a letter from Durham to Stokes dated 21 December 1949, EAS 24. M. Schapiro (1957) The liberatory quality of avant-garde art. Art News, Summer, 56(4): 36–42 25. R. Wollheim (1980) Adrian Stokes, critic, painter, poet. PN Review, 8(1): 31–37, 36 26. AS to RW, 7 September 1958, UCL archive 27. Wollheim 1980: 36—italics in original 28. JS to Francis Partridge, c.July 1958. J. Strachey (1958) Julia. Boston: Little, Brown, p. 255 29. AS to Ann, 18 July 1958, EAS 30. TS interviewed by JS, 30 June 2007 31. AS to ESW, 7 January 1959, Berg 32. MK to AS, 31 January 1959, TGA8816.235
Chapter Twenty 1. A. Stokes (1951) Smooth and Rough. London: Faber & Faber. CW2, p. 256 2. A. Stokes (1952) Art, object-relationship and a formal aspect of dreams. TGA8816.192, p. 2 3. A. Stokes (1955) Michelangelo. London: Tavistock. CW3, p. 48 4. A. Stokes (1958a) Greek Culture and the Ego. London: Tavistock. CW3, pp. 81, 90, 95, 99 5. W. R. Bion (1957) Differentiation of the psychotic from the nonpsychotic personalities. Second Thoughts. London: Heinemann, 1967, pp. 43–64, 50 6. A. Stokes (1958b) Monet. London: Faber & Faber. CW2, p. 294
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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.
299
W. R. Bion (1965) Transformations. London: Heinemann Stokes 1958a: 80 J. Howard (1959) Mr. Stokes’s Greece. Spectator, 30 January, p. 167 R. Wollheim (1959) A critic of our time. Encounter, 12 (4, April): 41–44, 44 RW to AS, 31 May 1960, TGA8816.244 A. Stokes (1961a) The impact of architecture. British Journal of Aesthetics, 1 (3, September): 240–256. CW3, p. 196 A. Stokes (1961b) Three Essays on the Painting of our Time. London: Tavistock. CW3, pp. 146, 155 Stokes 1961b: 168–169 Stokes 1961b: 166 J. Russell (1961) Situation not vacant. Sunday Times, c.13 August D. Sylvester (1961) All at once. New Statesman, 11 August, p. 190 S. Hampshire (1961) An enveloping wholeness. TLS, 14 April, p. 228 PS to JS, 14 March 2007, email AS to TS, 6 January 1963, TSA Ibid. A. Stokes (1963) Painting and the Inner World. London: Tavistock. CW3, pp. 215–216 Stokes 1963: 230, 238 Stokes 1963: 249 Stokes 1963: 251 J. Russell (1963) Art and the mind. Sunday Times, 3 February, p. 26 N. Gosling (1963) Art in the jungle of psychiatry. Observer, c.3 February Stokes 1963: 236 Stokes 1963: 237 B. Brophy (1963) Good and bad breast. New Statesman, 1 March, p. 308 AS to RW, 16 April 1964, UCL archive PL to AS, 10 June 1963, TGA8816.236 AS to BN, 21 August 1963, TGA8717.1.2.4576 A. Stokes (1965) The Invitation in Art. London: Tavistock. CW3, p. 295 Stokes 1965: 280 Stokes 1965: 283 Stokes 1965: 263 Stokes 1965: 288, 292–293 R. Wollheim (1978) Adrian Stokes: Critic, painter, poet. TLS, 17 February, pp. 207–209, 209 AS to RW, 16 April 1964, UCL archive Rhode’s father, as owner of tennis courts in Rapallo, had long before introduced Stokes to Pound there
300
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42. E. Rhode (1965) Impact in art. Listener, 28 January, pp. 51–52, 51 43. Stokes 1965: 304 in T. J. Diffey (1965) Review of The Invitation in Art. British Journal of Aesthetics, 5(3, July): 304–307, 304 44. R. Wollheim (1965) Preface. The Invitation in Art. London: Tavistock, pp. ix–xxxii, xxi 45. H. Segal (1991) Dream, Phantasy and Art. London: Routledge, p. 93
Chapter Twenty-one 1. A. Stokes (1962) Coldstream and the sitter. Introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition, William Coldstream. London: Arts Council. CW3, p. 187 2. John Richardson contributing to a BBC radio broadcast about the Stokes and Gowing exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery, from 23 January to 6 February 1965 3. R. Melville (1965) Introduction to Stokes’s paintings at the Marlborough Gallery, Old Bond Street, 23 January to 6 February 4. A. Stokes (1965) Interview by Guy Burns, Arts Review, 17(1): 2 5. N. Wallis (1965) Behind the scenes. Spectator, 29 January, p. 18 6. Anon (1965) Paintings by Mr. Adrian Stokes and Mr. Lawrence Gowing. Times, 20 January, p. 13 7. AS to BN, 20 January 1965, TGA8717.1.2.4581 8. Q. Bell (1965) Prose poem. New Statesman, 28 January, p. 134 9. Letter to the TLS, 12 August 1965, signed by Alan Bowness, William Coldstream, Andrew Forge, John Golding, Lawrence Gowing, Stuart Hampshire, Barbara Hepworth, Frank Kermode, R. B. Kitaj, Robert Melville, Henry Moore, John Piper, Herbert Read, Henry Reed, Norman Reid, John Russell, David Sylvester, and Richard Wollheim 10. A. Stokes (1966b) The image in form. British Journal of Aesthetics, 6(3, July): 246–258. CW3, pp. 331–342 11. A. Stokes (1966c) Reflections on the nude. Art & Literature, 10 (Autumn): 160–167. CW3, pp. 303–330 12. Stokes 1966c: 325–326 13. Stokes 1966b: 335–336 14. Stokes 1966b: 331, 334 15. A. Stokes (1967) Reflections on the Nude. London: Tavistock. CW3, pp. 317, 319 16. Stokes 1966b: 338 17. Ann to RW, 21 May 1966, UCL archive 18. AS to RW, 21 May 1966, UCL archive 19. Stokes 1966c: 310–311—italics in original 20. Anon (1967) Part-objects and whole-objects. TLS, 9 November, p. 1052
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21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.
301
R. Wollheim (1967) The art of mingling. Listener, 26 October Ann to JS, letter dated c.19 June 1999 AS to RW, 2 November 1969, UCL archive A. Stokes (1967) Face and Anti-Face. TGA8816.90. GL, pp. 95–106, 95 A. Stokes (1968) The start of life resembles trees. Listener, 10 October, p. 464 A. Stokes (1968) Note. Studio International, 185 (954, April): 153 SN to AS, c.December 1968, TGA8816.238 LG to AS, 22 December 1968, TGA8816.233 WC to AS, 31 December 1968, TGA8816.231
Chapter Twenty-two 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
AS to BH, 31 December 1964, TGA965 AS to BH, 25 October 1965, TGA965 BH to AS, 23 October 1966, TGA8816.234 A. Stokes (c.1967) Schizophrenic Girl. In: S. Spender (ed.) Penguin Modern Poets 23. London: Penguin, pp. 147–148, 147 E. Bick (1968) The experience of the skin in early object-relations. IJPA, 49: 484–486, 485 LG to AS, 22 December 1968, TGA8816.233 A. Stokes (1970) Anniversary Day, May 29th. In: P. Robinson (ed.) Adrian Stokes: With All the Views. Manchester: Carcanet, p. 95 AS to Robson-Scott, 14 July 1970, ERS Director to Anne Crosby, 24 November 1970, Crosby archive Stokes c.1967: 147 D. Plante (2013) Becoming a Londoner. London: Bloomsbury, p. 220 Philip recalled this in conversation with JS, 9 April 2014 A. Crosby (1988) Souvenir de Adrian Stokes. Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, no.25, autumn, pp. 9–12. English translation, TGA931.28 A. Stokes (1972) The future and art. Studio International, September, pp. 89–93. GL: pp. 146–160 AS to TS, 18 June 1972, TSA
Chapter Twenty-three 1. 2. 3. 4.
AS to RW, 14 October 1970, UCL archive AS to RW, 23 January 1971, UCL archive—underlining in original AS to BN, 13 Oct 1971, TGA8717.1.2.4594 A. Stokes (1971) Research into the deafness of the mind. Listener, 29 April, p. 554 5. AS to BH, 22 August 1971, TGA965
302
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6. AS to SS, 6 September 1971, Bodleian 7. D. Plante (2013) Becoming a Londoner. London: Bloomsbury, p. 220 8. A. Stokes (1981) André. In: P. Robinson (ed.) Adrian Stokes: With all the Views. Manchester: Carcanet, pp. 140–141, 141 9. A. Stokes (1972) The Image in Form. London: Penguin, p. 300 10. Stokes 1972: 126 11. N. Lynton (1972) Words about art. Guardian, 6 July 12. R. Scruton (1972) Roger Scruton on Adrian Stokes. Spectator, 5 August 13. M. Vaizey (1972) Images and artifacts. Financial Times, 24 August 14. L. Gowing (1972) Spellbinder. Observer, 27 August, p. 25 15. C. Fox (1972) Subjective objects. TLS, 29 September, pp. 1150–1151, 1150 16. J. Gross (1972) Books of the year. Observer, 17 December 17. J. Golding (1974) The eyes have it. New York Review of Books, 21 March, pp. 38–40, 38 18. Stokes 1972: 316 19. Golding 1974: 40 20. AS and Ann to TS, 10 September 1972, TSA 21. AS to TS, 27 September 1972, TSA 22. Gardiner interviewed for a BBC radio programme about Stokes first broadcast on 18 October 1973 23. Ann to LG, 23 December 1972, TGA8816.246—underlining in original 24. R. Wollheim (1980) Adrian Stokes: Critic, painter, poet. PN Review, 7(1): 33–37, 37 25. A. Buchanan Crosby (1988) Memories of the Stokes family. TGA931.28, pp. 1–6, 5 26. Wollheim interviewed by JS, 22 June 1998 27. Crosby 1988: 5 28. R. Wollheim (1972) Adrian Stokes. The Listener, 28 December, p. 900 29. MM interviewed by Mel Gooding, 29 March 1994, NLSC 30. Jonathan Miller interviewed by JS, 28 February 2011 31. A. Stokes (1937) Colour and Form. London: Faber & Faber. CW2, p. 71 32. MM interviewed by Mel Gooding, 29 March 1994, NLSC 33. Anon (1972) Obituary: Adrian Stokes. The Times, 19 December, p. 18 34. Margot Fonteyn to Ann, 23 May 1973, EAS 35. N. Gosling (1973) England in the sunshine. Observer, 25 February 36. J. Russell (1973) English achievements. Sunday Times, 25 February, p. 28 37. L. Gowing (1973) True to form. New Statesman, 2 March, p. 316 38. M. Vaizey (1973) Adrian Stokes. Financial Times, 5 March, p. 3 39. S. Hampshire (1974) Art and sanity. Observer, 20 January
INDEX
Balanchine, George 99 Ballets Russes xxv, 35, 37, 44, 59, 96–105, 110–111, 118–119, 140, 232 Bann, Stephen 212, 275 Barnett Newman 241–242 Barns-Graham, Wilhelmina 134, 167 Baron’s Court 180 Baronova, Irina 99–100, 103, 110 barrel organ 14, 97, 104 Battle of Jutland 8, 11 Bayswater 6, 9, 20, 24, 139, 151 Bedells, Phyllis 138, 140, 164 Beethoven, Ludwig van 102 Belgravia 168, 170 Bell, Clive 53 Bell, Graham 116–117, 121–122, 129, 134, 139, 143, 159 Bell, Quentin 253 Bell, Vanessa 117
Agostino di Duccio 37, 52, 89–90, 100, 205, 266 Alberti, Leon Battista 52, 176–178, 266 Alloway, Lawrence 197, 230, 241 Amalfi 32–33 anti-Semitism 20, 56 Arezzo 101, 177 Aristotle 58 Arnheim, Rudolf 230 Arnold-Forster, William 128 Ascona 170, 173–174, 180–181, 189–190, 200 Ashcroft, Peggy 273 Ashton, Leigh 31 Astaire, Fred 138 Auden, W. H. 72–73, 91, 114, 181 autism 227, 231 Ayer, A. J. 153
303
304
INDEX
Belsize Park 87, 97, 133 Benares 22 Berenson, Bernard 83, 198, 265 Berlin 65, 216, 228 Berlin, Sven 134–135, 141 Bernal, J. D. 119, 138 Bernal, Martin 119, 138, 191 Betteshanger 189, 191, 194 Bick, Esther 227–228, 231–232, 260–261, 271 Bion, Wilfred 238 Birmingham 263 Blum, René 99 Bodmin 168, 170 Bologna 30 Bolton, A. T. 193 Bombay 18–20 Bonnard, Pierre 252 Borlase Smart, Robert 128 Bowlby, John 191 Bradley, F. H. 14, 25, 233 Brahms, Johannes 104 Bramante, Donato 187 Brandt, Bill 108 Brandt, Eva 108 Braque, Georges 37, 240 Brescia 32 Brisaggo 180 Brittany 66 Britten, Benjamin 166 Brophy, Brigid 245 Brown, Jane 225 Brownell, Sonia 121 Brueghel, Pieter 113–114, 273 Brunelleschi, Filippo 43, 79 Bryanston 194, 232 Bucklebury 188–189 Budapest 64, 228 Buddhism 21 Burgess Hill 264 Burke, Edmund 243 Burma 22
Byron, Robert 16, 71, 73, 81, 105, 133–134, 138 Byzantine art 16, 37, 73, 261 Cain 6, 267 California 264, 270, 273 Calvin, John 39 Camberwell 263 Cambridge 8 Canada 22 Canterbury 189 Canton 22 Cap d’Antibes 173 Carbis Bay 123, 133–134, 136 Carrara 205 Carter, Sam 173, 251 carving xxv, 83, 85–96, 99, 107, 112–113, 116, 199, 203, 205, 208, 266, 269 Casa dei tre Occhi 30–31, 44, 55–56 Castleford 241 Cavalieri, Tommaso de’ 201, 211 Céret 247–248 Ceylon 5, 20 Cézanne, Paul 53, 111, 117, 153–157, 253–254 Chamberlain, Austen 33 chaos 25, 235, 237 Chardin, Jean Baptiste 53 Chelsea 170, 263 Chirico, Giorgio de 240 Chittagong 32 Clark, Kenneth 81, 117, 134, 199 classicism 4, 8, 13, 43, 99–101, 154, 203, 205, 237–238, 240, 253 claustra-phobia 32 Coates, Wells 87, 101 Cocteau, Jean 35 Coldstream, Nancy 131 Coldstream, William 117–118, 120, 131, 133–134, 139, 173, 213–225, 251, 257
INDEX
Colgong 21 Colonna, Vittoria 201, 212 Como, Lake 30 Connolly, Cyril 28, 136, 141, 143, 145, 161, 180–181 Conrad, Joseph 11 containment 69, 79, 99, 112, 152, 186–187, 192, 228, 235, 237, 250, 255, 260–261 contemplation 38, 145, 148, 153, 211 Coriolanus 267 Cornwall xxv, 107, 112, 119–120, 124, 127–143, 152, 165–170, 179, 241, 245–247, 259, 263 Crete 261–262 Crosby, Anne Buchanan 231 Cubism 240 Czechoslovakia 124 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 148, 266 Dali, Salvador 267 Dalmatia 71, 85 Danilova, Alexandra 110 Dartington 71–72, 105, 107–109 Davison, Francis 169–170, 173, 191 Dazzi, Manlio 55 De Basil, Wassily 99 De la Mare, Richard 200 Debenham, Audrey 123 Debenham, Gilbert 102 Delrow House 261, 263 depression 20, 48, 105, 119, 121, 159, 180, 185–187, 198–199, 201–202, 208, 213, 218, 225 Descartes, René 25 destruction 45, 65, 68, 71, 78, 124, 152, 180, 185–186, 190, 210, 220, 222–225, 228, 240, 247 Devas, Anthony 121 Devon 71–72, 105, 107, 109, 133 Diaghilev, Sergei 27, 34–35, 59, 99 Dior, Christian 218
305
Doge’s Palace 28, 30 domination 5, 87, 103, 148, 211, 216 Donatello 77–78, 87–88 Dresden 101 Dubuffet, Jean 255 Duncan, Isadora 100 Duse, Eleonora 266 Earls Court 21 Eastbourne 119 ecstasy 28–29, 197–198, 211 Ede, Jim 87, 141 Edward VII 6 Egypt 5 electric shock treatment 242 Eliot, T. S. 43, 55, 66 Elmhirst, Leonard 72 emblem see also symbol 57, 75, 77, 99–100, 148 Epstein, Jacob 225, 227 Eton 16, 24, 111 Euston Road 116–117, 119–122, 128, 131, 173, 193 Expressionism 100, 240, 241, 243 externalization see also projection 50–52, 54, 56–57, 70, 75, 78, 99, 145 Faber & Faber 66, 73, 155, 200, 230 faeces 68, 69, 253 Falmouth 136 Fascism 33, 41, 55, 121, 124 femaleness 30, 208, 251, 253, 255 femininity 208, 216, 218–219, 225 ferment 70, 81, 99, 104, 146, 156, 208 Ferriguto, Arnoldo 55 Fieldman, Jack 271 Finland 24 Florence 43–44, 51, 77–79, 81, 86, 88, 201, 208, 255 Fokine, Michel 118 Fonteyn, Margot 274
306
INDEX
Footner, Hulbert 26 Forbes, Stanhope 128 Forge, Andrew 231, 272 Forge, Sheila 272 Forrester, Bernie 107–108 Franco, Francisco 124 Frazer, James 32 Freeman, Peter 139–140 Freud, Anna 217 Freud, Sigmund 53, 64, 112, 115, 151, 180, 191–192, 195, 197–198, 211–212, 217, 230, 238, 247, 267 Froshaug, Anthony 168–170 Fry, Roger 53, 112, 265 Fuller, Leonard 128 Furst, Herbert 151 Gabo, Miriam 133, 138 Gabo, Naum xxv, 133–136, 138, 140 Ganges, River 21 gardening 15, 129–130, 133–134, 139, 156–157, 161, 164, 192 Gardiner, Margaret 33, 86, 102, 119, 138, 161, 190–191, 271 Gardiner, Rolf 24, 33, 43 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 123 Genoa 55, 63 geology 6, 179 George V 6 Ghiberti, Lorenzo 78 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 201 Giorgio, Francesco di 37 Giorgione 37–38, 56–58, 66, 148, 165, 176, 178 Giotto 53 Giudecca 30 Glover, Edward 64, 180 Godrevy lighthouse 129 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 112 Golding, John 270 Gombrich, Ernst 199
Gosling, Nigel 244–245, 274 Gowing, Lawrence 199, 233, 251, 257, 261, 270, 274 Goya 121 Granada 28 Grant, Duncan 117 Greenwich 165 Gross, John 270 Guernica 121, 124, 240 Guggenheim Museum 241 guilt 65–66, 70, 77–78, 202, 205 Hamada, Shoji 127 Hampshire, Stuart 241, 275 Hampstead 6, 86, 101–102, 164, 197, 221, 227, 229–231, 251, 255, 257, 271, 273 Hartley, L. P. 120 Harvard-Watts, John 200 Haskell, Arnold 104 Hayle 129, 133 Heathgate 188–189 Heddon Court 7–8, 66–67 Hegel, G. W. F. 14, 25 Heimann, Paula 198, 217 Hemingway, Ernest 43 Henderson, Ian 171 Hendy, Philip 193 Hepworth, Barbara xxv, 86–87, 94–95, 131, 133–134, 138, 140, 170, 245, 259, 267 Heron, Delia 166, 169 Heron, Patrick 143, 166, 169, 189, 246 Higgins, Mollie 85–86, 102, 123 Highgate 122, 164, 166 Hildebrand, Dietrich von 265 Hinks, Roger 91 Hiroshima 157 Hitchens, Ivon 120 Hitler, Adolf 124 Home Guard 135, 140, 164 homosexuality 16, 70, 85
INDEX
Hong Kong 22 Horner, David 51 Howard, Jean 238 Hugo, Victor 135 Hulbert, Thelma 131 Hurtwood 193–194, 220–221, 223, 228–230 Huxley, Aldous 111 Hyde Park 11, 37, 68–69, 151–152 Hythe 6 Ibsen, Henrik 217 identification 65–66, 103, 112, 115, 154, 185, 197, 241, 249, 261 identity in difference 14, 22 Imago Group 188, 200, 230, 235, 238, 270 Impressionism 117, 155, 157, 238 incrustation 54 Institute of Contemporary Arts 197, 230 integration 97, 103, 107, 115, 180, 185, 198, 237–238, 243–245, 247, 253, 255, 260 interdependence 14, 19, 22–23, 25, 30, 39, 127 internal object 65, 69, 71, 103, 175, 211, 237, 260, 269 Iraq 233 Isle of Wight 6 Isokon 101–102, 105, 108, 227 Isotta degli Atti 41, 54, 86 Ivanova, Anna 140 Jackson Pollock 240 Jaques, Elliott 229 Jews 3, 20, 55–56, 71, 123 Joad, C. E. M. 102 Jones, Ernest 64–65, 189, 197, 217–218, 228 Joyce, James 55 Jung, Carl Gustav 197, 201
307
Kandinsky, Wassily 240 Kant, Immanuel 8, 25 Katz, David 115 Kennedy, George 128–129 Kensington 20, 170, 180 Kent 35, 9 Kent, Adrian “Curly” 46–48, 51–52, 55, 59, 66, 71–72, 105, 107–108, 119, 131, 159 Kent, Kay 66, 71–72, 107–108, 131 Kentish Town 257, 264 King Alfred’s School 6 Kite, Stephen 275 Kjär, Ruth 65 Klein, Arthur 64–65 Klein, Erich 64, 66, 221, 228 Klein, Hans 64, 66 Klein, Melanie xxv–xxvi, 64–71, 77, 79, 86–87, 94, 97, 101, 103, 115, 120, 136, 151–152, 155, 159, 168, 175, 179–180, 185, 189–190, 192, 197–198, 200, 210–211, 213–225, 227–229, 231, 235, 237–238, 241, 247, 251, 253, 271–272 Klein, Melitta 64 Knole Castle 35 Knowles, Eardley 168, 170, 232 Konody, P. G. 81 Laban, Rudolf 100 landscape 50, 91, 111–114, 119–120, 128, 131, 152, 179, 221–222, 237–238, 247, 251, 254, 273 Lanier, Mary Day 230, 267, 273 Lanyon, Peter 107, 128, 134, 245–246 Laurana, Luciano 79–81, 269 Lawrence, D. H. 39, 51, 73 Le Havre 9 Leach, Bernard 107, 127, 131, 143 Leach, David 131
308
INDEX
Lear, Edward 212 Leng, Kyrle 45 Leon, Philip 3 Leonardo da Vinci 195 Lewis, Wyndham 55 Lichine, David 103 Little Park Owles 123–124, 127–143, 153, 156, 159–161, 165–170, 245 Livia 102, 111, 119 Locarno 174, 189, 270 London Group 112, 117, 119, 124 loneliness 43, 45, 103, 105, 157, 161, 225, 255 low relief 37, 41, 53–54, 79, 87–93, 124, 129, 252, 266 Lower Stonehams 15, 18–19, 23, 35, 44–45, 59, 64–65, 68, 119, 123–124, 159, 166, 174, 188, 192 Lucca 255 Luini, Bernardino 25 Lynton, Norbert 269 Macleod, Joseph 18, 65–66, 140 Madras 20 Magdalen College 13, 15–17, 23 maleness see also masculinity 70, 77, 212 Malta 171 Manhattan 241–242 mania 103, 180, 197–198, 210–211 Mannin, Ethel 48–50 Mantua 30, 181 Maria, Mario de 30 Marlborough Gallery 251–252, 257 Marriott, Charles 81 Martin, Leslie 87, 133 masculinity 70, 224 mass-effect 52–53, 75, 79–81, 88, 94 Massine, Léonide 99–102, 104, 110, 122
Matisse, Henri 99 McWhirter, Ishbel 225 Mediterranean 17, 91, 109, 152, 261, 263 Mellis, Ann 131, 137–138, 140–141, 159, 161–171, 173–175, 180–181, 188, 192–194, 220–221, 223–224, 228–231, 235, 245, 255, 259, 261–263, 267, 270–273 Mellis, Charlotte 230 Mellis, David 141, 161, 169–170, 172–173, 188 Mellis, Duff 131, 159, 164–165, 167, 169–170, 180–181 Mellis, Maisie 122, 172–173 Mellis, Margaret 111, 119, 122–124, 128–140, 159–170, 172–173, 175, 191, 273 Melville, Robert 252 Michelangelo 53, 194–213, 221, 237, 255–256, 275 Middleton Murry, John 249 Milan 30, 48 Miller, Jonathan 273 Miller, Rachel 273 Milner, Marion 189–190, 198 Mitford, Deborah 109–111 modelling 83, 87–88, 91, 93, 199, 208, 261, 269 Modena 30 Mondrian, Piet 133 Monet, Claude 111, 238 Money-Kyrle, Roger 188, 198, 217 Mont’Allegro 152 Monte Carlo 99–100, 102 Montefiore, Moses 3 Moore, Henry 87, 94, 212 Moore, Irina 87 Morandi, Giorgio 252 Morocco 24, 48, 51 Mortimer, Raymond 31, 101
INDEX
Moynihan, Rodrigo 117 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 23, 232 Mussolini, Benito 33, 41, 123 Nankervis, Telfer 130 Naples 32, 34–35 New York 39, 178, 188, 212, 241, 262 Newbury 64, 188 Newton, Eric 212 Niagara Falls 22–23 Nicholson, Ben xxv, 87, 93, 101–102, 108, 112, 122, 124, 127, 129, 131–135, 138–142, 153, 266 Nicholson, Winifred 101 Nietzsche, Friedrich 36 Nolan, Sidney 257 Norfolk 29, 123 Notting Hill 65, 86, 97–98 nursing home 66–68, 232, 271 omnipotence 153, 180, 202, 211 oneness 197–199, 210–211, 221, 244 Oppenheim, Phillips 32 Orwell, George 121 Osborne College 6 otherness 39, 145, 197–199, 210–211 Oval cricket ground 246–247 Oxford 8, 11, 13–17, 22, 32, 64, 68, 81, 152 Padua 53, 181 Palestine 20 panic fear 68, 271 paranoia see also persecution 32, 43 Paris 31, 44, 48, 55, 63, 99, 111, 115, 122, 135, 173 Parma 32 Parsons, Virginia 102 part-objects 65, 97, 112, 175, 185, 198, 205, 211, 228, 237–238, 240, 247, 250, 253, 255, 260 Pasmore, Victor 117, 131
309
passivity 152, 202, 205, 224 Pasti, Matteo de’ 52 Pater, Walter 265 Penang 22 penis 69–70, 97, 103 Penzance 138, 141, 162, 168 persecution 69, 103, 179–180, 185–187, 198–199, 201–202, 218 philosophy 8, 13–15, 17, 21–25, 48, 187, 233 Picasso, Pablo 39, 99, 115, 124, 233, 240, 255 Piccadilly 9 Piero della Francesca 53, 56–57, 66, 81, 165, 176–178 Pipe man 24, 48, 51, 159 Piper, John 253 Pisa 255 Pisanello 52, 266 Pissarro, Camille 154 Plante, David 262, 267, 273 Plato 39, 58, 177 poetry 10, 32, 37, 39, 73, 148, 212, 244, 270 Poland 133 Pope Julius II 201–202 Popham, Ann Olivier 121, 129, 143 Portugal 35 Post-Impressionism 117, 155–157 pottery 107, 127, 143, 230, 262, 273 Pound, Dorothy 43, 48, 55 Pound, Ezra xxvi, 37, 39, 41, 43–44, 46–48, 50–53, 55, 66, 75, 83, 87, 93, 96, 123, 241 Poussin, Nicolas 53, 154 projection see also externalization 75, 98, 208, 218, 237, 246–247 Proust, Marcel 37 Provence 111, 118 psychosis 218, 238, 260 Pyrenees 29, 143
310
INDEX
Quattro Cento 53, 72–75, 79–83, 87, 116, 265–266, 269, 275 Quennell, Peter 32–33 Radnor Place 4, 6, 15 Rapallo 16–17, 27, 33, 36–37, 41, 45–52, 55, 87, 123, 152, 241, 255 Raphael 230 Ravenna 29, 39 Read, Herbert 91, 94, 138, 141, 201 Reading, Berkshire 64, 188 Redruth, Cornwall 136 Reid, Norman 273 Rembrandt 213, 218, 221, 253 reparation 65, 70, 186, 198, 201, 210, 216 restoration 48, 71, 152, 198, 205, 210, 253 Rhode, Eric 249 Rhode, Henry 37 Riabouchinska, Tatiana 99, 110 Richardson, John 233, 251 Rickman, John 197 Rif Rebellion 24, 48 Rimini 29, 41–43, 52, 59, 85–86, 90–92, 94, 96, 116, 157, 266, 275 Riviere, Joan 216–210 Robbia, Luca della 78 Robson-Scott, Robbie 64, 66, 174, 201 Rogers, Claude 117, 193 Rogers, Ginger 138 romanticism 99–100, 115, 119, 201, 240 Rome 33–34, 43, 187, 195, 201–202 Rosenblüth, Dina 229–230 Rothenstein, William 33, 35 Rouen 9–10 Rubens, Peter Paul 154 Rudge, Olga 41, 44–46, 48, 51, 55, 71, 87, 119
Rugby 6, 8, 10–11, 18, 20–21, 24, 33, 43, 64–65, 70, 140, 159, 169, 171, 173, 201 Ruskin, John 29, 43, 81, 186, 212, 253, 265 Russell, Bertrand 153 Russell, John 212, 241, 244, 274 Russia 32, 99, 102–105, 131, 133, 140 Rutter, Frank 81 Rylands, George 24 Sackville-West, Eddy 16, 23–24, 28–30, 32, 35–36, 45, 48, 51, 63, 72, 102, 111, 118–124, 133–134, 159, 168, 188, 232, 235 sadism 70, 185–186, 272 San Remo 50 San Sepolcro 59 Sanary 111, 120, 122 Santa Sophia 53 Satie, Eric 35, 99 Scandicci 51 Schapiro, Meyer 232 schizophrenia 227–228, 231, 240, 263 Schwitters, Kurt 255 Scott, Geoffrey 188 Scruton, Roger 269 Segal, Hanna 189, 198, 230, 234–235, 238, 240, 250 Serpentine, River 151 Seville 28 Shanghai 22 Shawe-Taylor, Desmond 232 Sheerness 9 Sicily 44 Sigismondo 41–44, 48, 52–54, 56, 59, 86, 266 significant form 53, 97, 112, 238 Sinclair, Catharine 131 Sistine Chapel 53, 197, 202–203, 207–208
INDEX
Sitwell, Edith 27–28, 39 Sitwell, Georgia 31–32 Sitwell, Osbert xxvi, 27–28, 30–33, 35, 44, 48, 50–51, 148 Sitwell, Sacheverell 27–28, 31–33, 48, 50 Sitwell, Sir George 31 Skeaping, John 87, 131 Skeaping, Mary 140 Slade School of Art 47, 215, 232, 234, 241–242, 251, 253, 255 Smith, David 255 Sohn, Leslie 238, 248 Soho 87, 216–217 Somme, River 9, 13 Soto, Jésus-Rafael 255 Soutine, Chaim 247–248 Spender, Inez 216 Spender, Natasha 138, 273 Spender, Stephen 138, 161, 181, 216, 238, 262, 265, 267, 273 Spengler, Otto 37, 41, 73 St Ives, Cornwall xxv, 107, 115, 123–124, 127–128, 130, 133–135, 138, 140–141, 143, 164, 167–168, 245, 259 St John’s Wood 97, 220, 230, 249 Stangos, Nikos 265, 267, 273 Stephen, Adrian 64 Still, Robert 188, 201 Stokes, Adrian, chronology birth (27 October 1902) 4 sent away to prep school 7 starts public school, Rugby 8 “crippled” by oldest brother’s death 10 studies philosophy 13–17 post-Oxford travels 18–23 writes to Eddy Sackville-West 23–24 The Thread of Ariadne 24–26 meets Osbert Sitwell 27
311
travels in Spain and Italy 28–33 attends Diaghilev productions 34–35 Sunrise in the West 37–39 involved with Ezra Pound 41–55 stays with “Curly” Kent in Venice 55–59 wonders about psychoanalysis 63–64 treated by Klein 65–71 courted by W H Auden 72–73 The Quattro Cento 75–83 Mollie Higgins affair begins 85 meets Hepworth and Nicholson 87 Stones of Rimini 87–93 modern art reviews 93–95 To-Night the Ballet 97–100 moves into the Isokon 101 Mollie Higgins affair ends 102 Russian Ballets 102–105 paints in Dartington and St Ives 107 Deborah Mitford affair 110–111 Colour and Form 112–116 joins the Euston Road art school 116–119 depressed by older brother’s death 119 re-starts treatment with Klein 120 marries Margaret Mellis 122 moves to Little Park Owles (LPO) 124 Hepworth-Nicholson family arrive 133 Home Guard and vegetable growing work 135 birth of son, Telfer 136 Ann Mellis at LPO 137–141 Wallis’s death and burial 141–143 Horizon essay rejected 145 Venice 146–151
312
INDEX
Inside Out 151–155 Cézanne 156–157 marriage breakdown 159–164 courts Ann Mellis 164–167 re-starts treatment with Klein 168 divorces Margaret 169–170 marries Ann 170 birth of son, Philip 174 Art and Science 176–178 Outside In (re-named Smooth and Rough) 178–187 Stokes family move to Heathgate 188 start of Imago Group 188 Leger Gallery exhibition 188–189 tries to get Telfer psychoanalysed 190–192 birth of daughter, Ariadne 192 Stokes family move to Hurtwood 193 Michelangelo 197–213 Coldstream’s portrait of Klein 215–225 Ariadne’s psychoanalysis begins 227 Stokes family moves to Hampstead 230 Wollheim friendship begins 232 heart attack 235 Greek Culture and the Ego 237–238 Romanesque architecture talk 238–239 Three Essays on the Painting of our Time 240–241 Telfer in New York 241–242 Painting and the Inner World 243–245 The Invitation in Art 246–250 1965 Marlborough exhibition 251–252 Reflections on the Nude 253–256 1968 Marlborough exhibition 257 troubles with Ariadne 259–264
The Image in Form 265–270 illness and death (15 December 1972) 270–273 Stokes, Adrian—works Art and Science 176–178 Cézanne 155–157 Coldstream and the sitter 251 Colour and Form 112–116, 129 Concerning art and metapsychology 151 Face and anti-face 256 Form in art 221 The future and art 263 Greek Culture and the Ego 238 The Image in Form 264–267 The impact of architecture 238–239 Inside Out 7, 13, 151–155, 267 Invitation in Art 246–250 Michelangelo 197–213, 221, 237, 275 Miss Hepworth’s carving 94–95 Mr Ben Nicholson at the Lefevre Galleries 112 Mr Ben Nicholson’s painting 93 Mr Henry Moore’s sculpture 94 A note on abstract of symphonic ballet 188 Painting and the Inner World 243–245 Painting, Giorgione and Barbaro 55–58 Pisanello 52–53 The Quattro Cento 72, 75–81, 87, 116, 265–266, 269, 275 Raphael 230 Reflections on the Nude 250, 253–256 Review of Arnheim 230 Review of Wollheim 267 Russian Ballets 102–105 The sculptor Agostino di Duccio 54–55
INDEX
Smooth and Rough 13, 123–124, 129, 178–181, 185–190, 194, 237 Stones of Rimini 85, 87–96, 116, 266, 275 Sunrise in the West 30, 32, 35, 37–39, 41, 180, 210 The Thread of Ariadne 19–26, 29, 68 Three Essays on the Painting of our Time 240–241 To-Night the Ballet 97–101, 105 Venice (1945) 146–151 Venice (1965) 253 Stokes, Ann see Mellis, Ann Stokes, Ariadne 192–194, 200, 223, 227–232, 235, 245, 257, 259–264, 267 Stokes, Durham 3–7, 9, 15–19, 23–24, 27, 36, 45, 50, 55, 59, 67, 69, 79, 103, 122, 139, 168, 232 Stokes, Edwin 4 Stokes, Ethel 3–7, 9–10, 15–17, 45, 48, 50, 66–69, 71, 79, 103, 119, 139, 152, 192 Stokes, Geoffrey 4–6, 8–9, 11, 18, 24, 45, 65–66, 69–71, 79, 119, 267 Stokes, Kathleen 18, 24, 65 Stokes, Philip (Stokes’s brother) 3–4, 6, 8–11, 13, 15, 44, 65, 70, 79, 136, 174, 179, 267 Stokes, Philip (Stokes’s son) 174, 180–181, 193–194, 200, 229–230, 232, 235, 241, 245, 272–273 Stokes, Richard 65 Stokes, Telfer 136–138, 140, 153, 160–162, 169–170, 173, 189–192, 194, 229, 232, 234–235, 241–243, 251, 257, 264, 270, 273 stone-blossom 54, 77, 89, 93 Strachey, James 64 Strachey, John 16, 23–24
313
Strachey, Julia 233 Stravinsky, Igor 35, 99 Suffolk 123, 191 superego 65, 68 Surrealism 115, 117, 121 Swiss Cottage 230 Switzerland 29, 71, 164, 170, 188, 270 Sylvester, David 241 symbol see also emblem 7, 57, 68–69, 77–78, 152, 186, 190, 192, 198, 237, 239–240, 247, 250 synthesis 80, 112 Taj Mahal 21–22 Tàpies, Antoni 255 Tate Gallery 87, 102, 112, 115, 174, 213, 217, 233, 256, 273 Tavistock Clinic 191 Tavistock publications 200, 221, 241, 243, 256 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 104 Tempio Malatestiano 30, 41, 43–44, 52–54, 56, 90, 93, 100, 177, 266 tennis 8, 17, 37, 47–48, 51, 87, 103, 111, 131–132, 188 Thames, River 71, 104, 165, 249 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista 55 Titian 55 Tobey, Mark 107 Topolski, Feliks 225 Torri del Benaco 233–235 Totnes 105 Toumanova, Tamara 99, 110 Townsend, William 121, 216, 218–219, 221 tremendosities 24, 68, 79, 153 Trevelyan, Julian 121 Trieste 71 Troy 109 Tunbridge Wells 9, 232 Tunisia 5
314
INDEX
Turkey 261 Turner, J. M. W. 243–244, 274 unconscious 10, 73, 115, 151, 197, 210, 218, 273 Urbino 30, 59, 79–81, 267–269 Vaizey, Marina 269–270, 274 Van Gogh, Vincent 174 Vasari, Giorgio 195, 205 Vaucluse 238–239 Vaughan, Keith 257 Venice 24, 28–32, 43–45, 51, 55, 59, 63, 71, 81, 85, 101, 119, 146–150, 181, 253, 261, 264, 266 Ventimiglia 235 Venturi, Adolfo 266 Verona 30, 43, 77, 81, 181, 186 Verrocchio, Andrea del 76–77 Vicenza 39, 181 Vienna 64, 101, 216 Villa Giuditta 48–49, 59, 255 Virgil 21, 154 Vorticism 96 Wallis, Alfred 115, 127–130, 134, 138–139, 141–143 Walton, William 27, 32–33 war xxvi, 3, 8–9, 16, 21, 65, 121–122, 124, 128, 130–131, 133–134, 139, 146, 157, 163–164, 240, 246, 267
Waugh, Evelyn 16, 55, 73 Wertheim, Lucy 141 West Penwith 108, 112–113 Whitney Straight, Dorothy 71–72 whole object 14, 71, 79, 88, 97, 112, 115, 186, 197–198, 211, 237–239, 247, 250, 253, 255 Wilde, Oscar 222 Wilkinson, Eva 122, 164 Wilkinson, Norman 122, 164 Williams, Meg Harris 275 Williams, Orlo 91 Winkworth, William 29–31, 117 Wisdom, J. O. 188 wish-fulfilment 53, 112, 202 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 249 Wöllflin, Heinrich 265 Wollheim, Eric 59, 232 Wollheim, Mary Day see Lanier, Mary Day Wollheim, Richard 212–213, 230, 232–233, 238, 248–251, 255–256, 265–267, 272–273 Wood, Christopher 141 Woolf, Virginia 21, 64, 127 Wyndham, Dick 31 Yeats, W. B. 55 Zennor , Cornwall 128, 246 Zuckerman, Solly 86