Intimate but unreachable
Hugh Cecil
THE LAUGHTER AND THE URN: THE LIFE OF REX WHISTLER by Laurence Whistler
Weidenfeld & Nicotson, £14.95
Rex Whistler was one of the most versatile British artists of the interwar Period — muralist, landscape painter, draughtsman, portraitist, book illustrator, bookplate and poster designer, creator of sets and costume for the theatre. He was born in 1903. On 17 July 1944, his first day in battle, he was killed, bowled over by a mortar bomb, near Caen. He and the author of this book, the poet and glass- engraver Laurence Whistler, were the children of a Hampshire clergyman's daughter and a builder. The marriage had been bitterly opposed, on social grounds, by the bride's father.
After a false start with the Royal Academy, Rex emerged as the star pupil of his year at the Slade. Aged 20, he was chosen to paint the mural in the Tate Gallery restaurant, a light-hearted, inuna- ture work of fancy for which he is most widely and perhaps least justly remem- bered. He was borne aloft swiftly on a `chairlift' of personal popularity to the peaks of English fashionable life. The gaily irreverant cultural milieu he represented eloquently demonstrates the difference be- tween British society, only lightly scathed by the Great War and the rest of Europe, where satire took more savage forms.
Some of his finest work can be seen in his minutely detailed, vigorous drawings for an edition of Gulliver's Travels, in his wall decorations depicting a fabulous sea Port, at Pias Newydd, Angelsey, and in his Portraits of children, like the entrancing Laura the Drummer, painted early in the war. He celebrated, in romantic vein, the exuberance of European baroque and the English 18th century, with embellishments of humour and grotesquerie. Frivolous, playful, fantastical — these adjectives have been applied to his art, often to denigrate; and it is true that many of the figures in his mythical landscapes lack strength; the hands and feet are sometimes weakly drawn — odd when one thinks of the powerful fist-like grip with which the draughtsman himself guided his pencil. His reputation, so far removed from the se- rious and the avant-garde, later cost him the chance of serving as a war artist. He found his way eventually to the front, a gallant and eccentric tank commander in the Guards' Armoured Division, inspiring a devoted loyalty.
He had many of the high-spirited, attrac- tive qualities of his work; yet this searching biography shows that he was not wholly in tune with the bright, brittle society he loved. He was no dilettante in his profes- sional approach — strengthened by architectural study, it was painstaking and uncompromising. The dark and tragic al- ways had a place in his imagination. This made him the right artist for the Konigs- mark drawings, commissioned in 1940 evoking a world of enchanted baroque, erotic romance idealised to perfection, drama and doom.
Though unusually charming in personal- ity and appearance, he was dissatisfied in love. 'The romantic position is always precarious,' as Laurence Whistler has else- where observed, but this was the ground which Rex Whistler chose. He gave his heart only to girls who matched up to his exacting standards of beauty, but never found one with whom he was sexually or `Girt with a red rose': Lady Caroline Paget spiritually compatible. There was a grow- ing undercurrent of sadness below the uninhibited gaiety of his social life, the `lovers only' parties, the picnics and cos- tumed caperings by firelight. His long- delayed release from virginity and his many homosexual friends led some women, disappointed in him, to draw an obvious conclusion. Such judgments are easily made. Undoubtedly he had at times felt intimidated by forceful masculine sex- ual self-confidence; his illustration of an over-refined Gulliver surrounded by brut- al, ruttish yahoos looks very like a personal nightmare. His strong erotic imagination, however, as it appeared in his art, was manifestly heterosexual; and his brother suggests that he developed late emotional- ly and might well have found fulfilment had his life been spared.
There is evidence, from his later work, of an inner development: his first painting, after he joined the army, of a village scene near Colchester, shows a new readiness to adopt a realistic treatment. Here the feeb- ler elements in his style are absent, but imagination still comes through in the feeling of high summer, expectant and mysterious, the grey-golden church tower rising above a prosaic foreground of cab- bage and corrugated iron. We might have witnessed a progress in his art as significant as that of Laurence Whistler in his glass engraving.
This book is a brother's portrait, in which, rightly, admiration, love and com- petitiveness all play their part. Their social tastes differed. 'No companionship was like Rex's' Laurence has recorded, 'but in the presence of others he inhibited me and I felt like his shadow. Consequently in that brilliant world he introduced me to, I made small headway.' Here he reinforces his criticisms of the 'Bohnionde, revealing mixed feelings about his brother's friend and mentor, Edith Oliver. His catalogue of frivolities is good humoured but astringent: Cecil Beaton's 'crude' vaunting of his affairs with women; the much enjoyed snobberies about vocabulary; the surprise visits to strangers, like the artist Henry Lamb: 'Cecil adored the sensation [wrote Edith Oliver] . . . We drove back laughing immoderately at having been so unwel- come.'
Throughout the book, the background to the artist's work is admirably explained — in particular the trials of decorating the Tate Gallery, and, much later, Mottisfont Abbey (for the demanding and conven- tional Maud Russell). The skilfully recon- structed war episodes make a moving climax to this fascinating — and sump- tuously illustrated — tale. During the closing passages, where he describes the scattering of his mother's ashes on the hillside above her childhood home, the author is at his poetical best: How did a builder's son and a parson's daughter come to invent such a man? How, Edith wondered, do ordinary people invent extraordinary? For myself I never thought of all three as either one or the other. Here anyway was the end of it, the matrix now crumbled like the gem. I put my hand into the box, took out a handful of the curious, rough crumbs, and lobbed it into the young corn, then another and another, changing the direction, following its course. Each time it glanced for the fraction of a moment in the breeze, making as it seemed to me a secret sign, but never twice the same, a faint hieroglyphic which I failed each time to decipher.
The 'urn' gets plenty of treatment in the book. It would have been nice to have had even more of the real 'laughter'. Rex Whistler, like his brother, had an acute ear for the absurd and the bizarre. We are given a taste of this in his description of a visit to Balmoral: 'The Sunday service at Crathie Church "wasn't quite such fun", he recorded, "though strange and interest- ing — with vast gaping crowds outside and extempore prayers bawled in Scotch inside — 'paradoxical as it may seem to Thee 0 Lord° — and all that." ' He himself seems not so much para- doxical as ambiguous — both intimate and unreachable, his artistic destination uncer- tain, his passions an enigma. `Glass is an Ideal medium for expressing the ambi- guous, having ambiguity in its very nature,' Laurence Whistler has written in his illus- trated volume, Pictures on Glass, In this life of his brother he has shown how adeptly he can convey, in words, the same elusive quality.
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