God's little artist

Michael Holroyd

GWEN JOHN: A LIFE by Sue Roe Chatto, £25, pp. 364, ISBN 0701166959 It is 20 years since Susan Chitty published her pioneering biography of Gwen John, and the time is now fight for a more thorough appraisal of her life and work.

The publisher's blurb on the cover of Sue Roe's new biography declares that the book is based on `unpublished letters'. Since there is no edition of Gwen John's correspondence, this is inevitably true, though perhaps slightly misleading. These letters have been seen and used by previous scholars, and many of the reference notes which point to manuscript sources in Wales, France and the USA could have added various publications.

But Sue Roe is a good researcher, going to original documents as well as to books and catalogues, and visiting places where Gwen John lived so that she can give firsthand impressions of them. Occasionally she gives way to a muted note of frustration at finding no resounding new information, as when she tells us that the death of Gwen's mother 'is not recorded in the Pembrokeshire Herald'. But her use of the correspondence between Gwen John and Rodin is exemplary, and she makes good use too of the unpublished reminiscences of Louise Roche to give a fascinating glimpse into Gwen's later life.

The value of this biography does not really depend on amazing revelations, but on a careful reworking of what is already largely known. Like a mosaic, Sue Roe's narrative is built up from a great number of small facts gathered together and meticulously arranged. It is a very detailed recreation, full of named cats and their antics. illumined but also clouded by the great shadow of Rodin who was the love of Gwen's life. 'You are all the happiness in my life,' she told him.

Sue Roe is particularly skilful at blending a close observation of Gwen John's pictures into the account of her life. She enables us, her readers, to look, as it were. closely over the artist's shoulder as she works, and pick up her thought processes. `She seems to have almost invariably used paint in the way she used words, drafting and redrafting numerous times,' she writes. 'As a result, her work gained a strong, fluid sense of immediacy and an intimacy between artist and subject which she was consciously developing in her portraiture as well as in her drawings.' It is an intimacy that also embraces the reader.

In her preface, Roe describes Gwen John as 'an enigmatic figure'; the 'object of much curiosity', who has 'always seemed a mysterious and shadowy figure within the history of British painting'. She attributes this not so much to the fact that (as the American patron John Quinn observed) her work belonged more naturally with French artists, but to `the problem of why we find it so difficult to imagine the lifestyle and frame of mind of a woman artist living alone'. This feminist point must certainly have been valid during Gwen John's lifetime, and even into the 1960s, but it seems less relevant today.

But Sue Roe is working to an agenda. She wants to rescue Gwen from our pity (and also rescue her brother Augustus from our indignation). Gwen, she argues, lived 'a busy, daring and eventful life ... in Paris during one of the most exciting periods in the history of European painting ... she was influenced by the work of her contemporaries — Cezanne, Rouault, Chagall, Lhote, Gleizes ....' And yet: 'Somehow a picture of Gwen has grown up, in the years since her death, of a reclusive, solitary person who neglected herself, refused to eat and never exhibited her work.'

The evidence of this book reveals an artist who habitually painted solitary figures, needed much privacy to cultivate her work, refused to see a doctor over a long period of illness and hated hurrying over her pictures for exhibitions. 'I don't see anybody,' she wrote; and again, will not be troubled by people.' She was reclusive and busy. The adventure of her life, its daring, lay largely in solitude. 'My life is like a long illness,' she wrote. Nevertheless, as her friend Jeanne Foster remarked, she was 'a great lady, in a way'.

In attempting to change the way in which Gwen achieved her greatness, making it less dark and lonely, Roe appears to be echoing an opinion within the John family. The opening paragraph of her acknowledgments contains the words generous, generosity or generously five times when expressing her gratitude to the Johns for their support, assistance, encouragement and so on in giving her 'the privilege of quoting'. To a fellow biographer, this pleasing meadowland of thanks looks more like a minefield, the mines themselves located in the bibliography and notes.

`I have endeavoured to present Gwen as accurately as possible, without speculation or invention,' Roe reassures us all. But I have seldom read a biography filled with so many speculations. We learn that Gwen 'was probably inspired' by Whistler's 'Symphony in White', that 'perhaps Camille [Claudel]'s sculpture caught' her eye, and that she `may have gone with Constance [Lloyd] to some of Lhote's classes'. She 'surely must have seen his [Picasso's] work in the avant-garde galleries', 'probably discussed Picasso' with one of her nephews, `may also have been looking at the work of the German Renaissance painter, Diirer', and 'must have seen Bonnard's work ... Perhaps oddly, she does not seem to have mentioned his work.' So many perhapses, possiblys and maybes are inevitable when examining an artist who was so secretive.

Another of the difficulties in writing about 'God's little artist', as Gwen referred to herself, is the lure of sentimentality. Sue Roe does not wholly avoid this danger. The atmosphere of 'goodwill, kindness, empathy' which surrounded Gwen's home in the rue Babie, also fills this book. No one escapes the goodwill, not even Gwen's father whom she could not actually bear to see, but whose love for her 'did not seem to diminish', we are told, and whose death at the age of 91 caused her 'great sadness', though she did not go to his funeral.

But this benevolent attitude has its advantages, particularly in the pen portraits of Rodin and Augustus John. 'The very men from whom she was alleged to have fled,' Roe shrewdly writes, 'were those who took her most seriously as an artist.' She does not blame Rodin for the fading of their love, but holds an admirable balance between them.

Augustus John also comes out well. When, meeting Whistler outside the Louvre, he asked him whether he did not think Gwen had a fine sense of character, Whistler had replied: 'Character? What's character? It's tone that matters. Your sister has a fine sense of tone.' But, Roe adds, 'Augustus was right.' It was a quality they shared and which helped to give him insight into her work. For she, painting with her left hand, and he with his right, were 'much the same really, though we took a different attitude,' he wrote.

The closeness between them that emerges from this biography makes one regret that Wyndham Lewis never wrote the book he planned about them both. The pictures they painted, mainly in France, of single figures and of children, he in the southern light and open air, she indoors showing her 'different attitude', would surely make a splendid joint exhibition at the new Tate Britain. Bryant's edition is an awful book, oleaginous and opinionated, in which Brooke's diary entries are mixed up with his own postwar reflections and Bryant's own highly tendentious comments in what Alanbrooke's protégé, Montgomery, would have termed 'a dog's breakfast'. The present editors have done a superb job of restoration, cleaning off Bryant's heavy varnish, restoring the original text, confining Brooke's postwar comments to the bare minimum and their own to a brief explanatory introduction. So now at last the Alanbrooke diaries, like those of his opposite number at the Foreign Office, Alexander Cadogan, are available as a reliable source for all historians of the second world war.

What the new edition does reveal, however, is how little time Alanbrooke had for any of his colleagues. The only ones for whom he expresses uninhibited admiration were his predecessor John Dill; his civilian colleague P. G. Grigg, first PUS at the War Office and then secretary of state for war; the excellent Adjutant-General Ronald Adam (high time someone wrote his biography); and his protégé Montgomery, so long as he was kept on a short leash. About the rest he is dismissive. Alexander, in spite of all his charm and courage, he regarded as 'a very small man', and his admired chief of staff in Italy, John Harding, he effectively damned by describing his lunatic proposal, in summer 1944, to transfer all American troops in Italy to France and British troops vice versa. He constantly lamented the indifferent calibre of British senior officers, attributing it to the heavy officer-casualties in the first world war (but were German officer-casualties any less?). As for his American colleagues, Marshall had no idea of strategy nor Eisenhower of fighting battles. He detested Beaverbrook, despised Herbert Morrison, distrusted Duncan Sandys and loathed de Gaulle. As for Churchill, he described working with him as like being 'chained to the chariot of a lunatic', though his pejorative comments are well balanced by appreciative ones.

Alanbrooke himself was clearly not an easy colleague, but most of his judgments were entirely justifiable. He may not have been the flawless strategist as Bryant depicted (and, as the editors show, he believed himself to be) but he was sensible, down to earth, and prevented people from making disastrous mistakes. And he was delightfully human. The diaries show how aware he was of his own fallibility, how crushed he was by the responsibilities he bore, and how he was sustained by the love of his family with which he spent every weekend and by his passion for bird-watching. 'Two hours in a hide close to a marsh tit at its nest', he wrote happily, 'made Winston and the war disappear in a cloud of smoke', and, most touchingly, he was a martyr to frequent and dreadful colds. A fine man, if not a great one.