A nicely brought-up young man
John McEwen
INTERIOR LANDSCAPES: A LIFE OF PAUL NASH by James King
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, L16.95
There have been four books on Paul Nash. His own is the best but this latest contribution by a Canadian Professor of English is the most revealing about his private life and, if you like your pictures hung by a tale, about his pictures too. It does not begin well. James King's prose is as uncouth as his subject is elegant: if Nash's development is to be paralleled you can bet it will be done `clearly'; if he has a preoccupation you can count on it being `central'. And old King has another fault — actually he is 45 so he should watch this trait — he is forever drawing conclusions and poking them home when all the reader wants is to be left alone. In other words, one is assumed to be one of his students at McMaster University, Ontario, nodding agreement, taking notes: 'Of course, Nash's dream of separation and loss was linked directly with his obsession with his mother and death.' Excuse me sir, how do you spell 'separation' sir?
James King's advantage is to quote extensively for the first time from Nash's private correspondence and thus reveal the influence on his art of his mother's mad- ness, his unique but unsettled marriage and long fight against asthma. His landscapes are accordingly shown to derive as much from his imagination as from the English or Flanders countryside; an imagination fed by the art of Blake, Rossetti and de Chirico, the books of Thomas Browne and Frazier's Golden Bough, as much as by his private life. And this undoubtedly serves to fill in a few of the interpretative gaps left by Andrew Causey in his conscientious but plodding critical biography of 1980; but it is not for this that one recommends the book. It is for further gossip of a society and time still present and for the descriptive prose of Paul Nash, which thankfully comes to dominate. Money is always of interest, the more so perhaps the older one gets, and lack of money makes for a better read than a sufficiency of it. Nash, like so many artists, forever considered himself on his uppers: 'No servants and no money and all that sort of thing, but we are picking up a bit now and hoping for better days.' In
1931 his Oxford retrospective and exhibi- tion of illustrations and stage designs at the Batsford Gallery netted a total of 11 guineas. Luckily he had that great standby of prewar days, 'a small private income', which was topped up by the death of an aunt at an important middle-age juncture. Nevertheless, in 1938 he was forced to resume teaching, as an assistant in the School of Design at the Royal College of Art, and able therefore to boast a gross annual income of £750 or £15,000 by present standards (translated solely on the basis of sterling inflation). Things have hardly changed; an artist of similar critical acclaim can expect little more today. (In- cidentally, Nash was in good company. In Paris in 1933 he found that the likes of Leger, Miro and Picasso were not selling much either: 'Only the painty impressionis- tic like Segonzac are making anything'.)
Money is the most helpful gauge of worldly respect for artists as for the rest of us, and with Nash lack of financial success fuelled doubts and depressions. In 1919 he even kept the flag of his self-esteem flying by writing laudatory critical notices of his work under the pseudonym `R.D.' The deceit was exposed by the critic Frank Rutter and Nash ruefully admitted to behaviour unworthy of a gentleman. More typical of his manners was a limp response years later to a potential American client. Why did he paint, she asked. 'I am afraid I cannot explain why I paint,' he replied, sublimely unaware, in his gentlemanly English way, that to be an artist is a business as well as a calling. Something of this attitude may also be said to water down his painting. The sharpest criticism of him quoted here is Epstein's: `. . . Mr Nash paints anaemic pictures in order not to shock or hurt people's feelings.'
Nash went to America once, in 1931, as the British representative of an interna- tional exhibition jury. He could have travelled first class both ways but, because he took his wife, he went out first and returned third. Then as now rich 'freebies' were easier to come by than cash. True to English form the Nashes far preferred roughing it in third to swanning about in
first. The pages on America are the most entertaining in the book. The only artists Nash wanted to meet were some of the New Yorker cartoonists, especially James Thurber, whose 'scribbling' he compared with that of Matisse. A selection of these, in the circumstances, surprised men was duly assembled for his inspection. In cus- tomary fashion his hosts treated Nash as a star and he was won over, though in art he felt that America had 'not yet developed the courage completely to let go. How else am I to explain those skyscrapers which begin with such marvellous logical simplic- ity yet which are spoiled by atrocious gothic ornamentation at the top.'
Not letting go can be said to have been Nash's main problem too — particularly exposed by his flirtation with Surrealism. The restraint and good manners even of the English supporters of Surrealism made them temperamentally quite unsuited to that bombastic movement; Surrealism may be regarded as a fag-end of Romanticism, but Nash's romanticism was always of a Wordsworthian variety. The difference is hilariously made clear by Vanessa Bell in her prim description of the infamous Sur- realist Exhibition of 1936:
Duncan went to the Private View and found a 10/- note on the floor which he tried to place on a statue so as to add to the meaning of it. Unfortunately someone, perhaps the owner, perhaps not, came up and pocketed it. Then as he was going out Paul Nash came up and gave him a herring which he asked him to put outside, as he said some Philistine had attached it to a picture.
Some of Nash's best paintings were born of these faddish years, but in the end he returned to the subjects and, in the form of the conservative Gordon Bottomley, even the mentors, of his youth. Despite its making free with Nash archive material this is not an indiscreet or sensational or even particularly searching book. We are not told who Nash's affairs were with or how many he had; we hear little of his brother or sister; but we do learn a painful amount about what it means to be an artist in England, particularly a well-educated and nicely brought-up artist.
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