BOOKS

The Side of Angels and Dirt

BY JOHN M OR I IM ER TOD AY the quality of innocence eludes as it attracts us. We continually pursue the child- like, the naïve and the simplified in artists and writers, only to find that the objects of our admiration develop into shrewd operators, skilled in company law and with a flair for show busi- ness. Corrupt, materialistic and over-anxious, in our tired way, to be with it, we demand of artists that they should have none of these qualities, and turn on them with anger when they share our pal- pable defects. For this reason the life of the late Stanley Spencer will be widely popular. This is what an artist ought to be like. Here is inno- cence carried to its sublime and logical conclu- sion; and art dealers and advertising executives and popular journalists everywhere can feel vicariously cleansed at the thought that he never, even at the height of his fame, enjoyed an income of more than ten pounds a week.

It'll be a pity, however, if Stanley Spencer is thought of merely as a child, an eccentric, a pic- turesque scapegoat for the sins of our sophistica- tion. In Maurice Collis's book* he emerges as a far more complex and comic character. Innocent certainly, but with an innocence that was not in- consistent with a passionate selfishness, a cunning sense of preservation, a deep and demanding masochism and a more intimate relationship with a peevish, highly-sexed and personalised Old Testament God than can have been imagined since the days of William Blake.

It is somehow appropriate that Spencer's life should have been set in the Thames Valley, an area which has now become, on the surface at least, the lush centre of a materialist England, the wet, warm pasture of the stockbrokers and take- over bidders. Appropriate because he stands for a lost, rapidly submerging part of this country- side; like a village post-office squashed between the Italian shirt shop and the Bizarre Boutique, or a cow at the edge of the river gazing at the long line of luxury launches which wait at the locks as if they were traffic lights on the Western Avenue. Today Cookham has a collection of vintage Rollses and new Bentleys parked outside the Ferry Hotel,, there is a shop where one red leather dress stands as isolated and elegant as if it were in the King's Road; but next to that is Fernlea, the gaunt and ugly little house in which the Spencer family lived, and a little way down the street is the Copper Kettle Tea Room where, among the plaster and black beams and brass, Spencer met his second wife Patricia, who appeared to him so elegant, and for whom he bought, at times of extravagance, elaborate hats. The great black perambulator which he pushed, full of paint, across• the fields, and his enormous umbrella, are now carefully preserved in the local museum.

Off the High Street, however, the Spencer Country is immediately recognisable. In the back

, STANLEY SPENCER. By Maurice Collis. (Harvill tress, 28s.)

gardens round old men, apparently naked except for cruel cardigans and thick spectacles, peer up at you over white cow parsley. Chunky, ginger- headed girls pull up their skirts and dangle their pale feet in the water. Great mums sit relaxed among the nettles and knit, while thin men in burberries fish from camp-stools on the towpath. It was in these surroundings that Spencer worked, and had his strange encounters with love.

Although portraits of Stanley Spencer show a solemn, thoughtful and good-looking face, it seems that his general appearance was small, strange and furtive. This may account for the lack of success of his first love-affair, about which he wrote in prose which is quite as.good as the bet of his pictures. The girl, who lived in Reading, was sixteen.

1 had many lovely imaginings of being mar- ried to her. She was very peaceful and walking along the Caversham Road would wait for me while 1 called at the gents. . . . We went down to the bottom of her long garden where there, was a swing. She sat on the swing and I talked and I had the joy of swinging her. But her par- ents were furious and called me a little black rat. I had to get a job over this. We never embraced except once.

Such rapt, hallucinated writing is met with occa- sionally in the reports of murders or unusual divorce cases. It is rare in literature, and direct quotations from Spencer are by far the best thing in Mr. Collis's book.

Love remained for him as remote as this, until he met his first wife, Hilda. He was nearly thirty, and she was not, from his own vivid de- scription, obviously attractive.

She had a beak nose, a crease between nose and lips, eyebrows meeting and thick, long scowling eyes, smear-shaped mouth with lips in repose; lop-sided muscular neck, heavy burden of hair, wide chin dimpled in the centre, tufts of hair on the chin, creases circling the neck.

She told him once, when they were together on the top of a bus, that there were occasions when she did not feel quite right in the head.

Added to this Hilda was not easy to live with. She did very little housework, got up late and spent a great deal of her time writing to a wide circle of Christian Scientists. She also irritated Spencer by telling him that his abilities as a painter were, all due to a friend of hers who was giving him 'absent treatment.' In spite of this it was with Hilda that Spencer discovered sex, a great revelation to him and a subject on which he felt he had original thoughts. To her he wrote the great mass of letters which tell the story of his life, the letters continued, long after their divorce, and when she died he went on writing to her for a number of years, without ever refer- ring to the fact of her death. When he met his second wife Patricia, Spencer had no desire to give up Hilda, he wanted to be married to them both. The failure of both women to agree to this suggestion caused him a great deal of disappoint-

ment. It was the habit of the more sophisticated Patricia to 'turn a stone deaf ear' to all he said, and go out laughing.

Except for brief moments of infidelity with Hilda when he was married to Patricia, Spencer never, established the Old Testament harem which he dreamed of continually as he walked down Cookham High Street. But, coming to him late in life, sex impressed him as the answer to all the evils of the world. 'During the war,' he wrote, `when I contemplated with horror my life and the lives of those with me, I felt the only way to end the ghastly experience would be if everyone suddenly decided to indulge in every degree and form of sexual love, carnal love, bestiality, any- thing you like to.call it. These are the joyful in- heritances of mankind,' and he often said, 'I am on the side of angels and dirt.' The fact that men are never more innocently employed than when making any sort of love may seem an obvious simplicity, although it's one that has never oc- curred to legislators and politicians.

However, it's not Spencer's love life that he writes about best. His so-called erotic paintings have a feeling of discomfort; and if he had ever built and painted the temple of sex he often talked about I can't help feeling it would have been a draughty, pointed building; a place about as sensual as the Rudolf Steiner Hall. In spite of the idiot philistinism of Sir Alfred Munnings, who ordered a number of Spencer's drawings and sent them to the police hoping he might be prose- cuted, Spencer was not a great erotic painter or writer. He was solitary and his great experiences took place alone. No doubt his love for the for- midable Hilda was touching and enduring but her virtue was that, with her, he did not 'have to stop being me.' Resolutely, implacably, and what- ever happened, Spencer went on being himself, and that, no doubt, is what we envy.

During one period he took a room in Hamp- stead, lived alone and didn't go out for days on end. He wrote that he wore a very thin vest, and wore it so long that it sagged and hung on him and got black from the coal. 'But I loved it so that I wore it till it was just a rag. I wish I had drawn the way the folds went.' And from the contemplation of his vest he felt himself 'pene- trating into the unknown me.' On another occa- sion at Fernlea he would take a small animal such as a caterpillar and lay it on his skin as he sat on the lavatory seat. This gave him a sharp sense of awareness, as did scrubbing floors in the days when he was a hospital orderly. 'I liked the surface. The colour was very good, some parts faded, some a bit yellowy and some peach-like.'

In all his paintings this is the most important thing, the great value of some physical object, seen with hallucinated clarity, the strings of a mop, the texture of a sweater, the flowers on a hat or the cord of the dressing-gown his father wore to walk the streets of Cookham, during that awk- ward period when his trousers had been stolen by thieves. In contrast to the deep meaning of these small objects the great allegorical subjects of the pictures seem to fade into insignificance.

It is easy to laugh at these moments of fascin- ated perception; it is equally easy to make from them unwarrantable deductions, such as the exis- tence of a God interested in polygamy, or a great purpose in the Universe. It is also fashionable, I suppose, to criticise such activities as self-indul- gent, private and of no use to society. In fact, it may be more useful to have a completely clear idea of the nature of a mop, or a cauliflower, or a wool-shop window, than a vague and blurred message about the nature of the Universe or the destiny of man. The talent for a minute and hyp- notised view of the world should be accepted for

what it is. Surely it can only be achieved by devo- tion and innocence pursued as ruthlessly as crime.

Mr. Collis has assembled Spencer's illegible and chaotic writings to make the basis of a very good book; although I could have done with more of Spencer's words throughout. When he was dying he wrote, '1 am never weary. Never bored.' It's difficult not to feel that a man who could write this after a lifetime in Cookharn was in some way better than us. We may very well be right.