REVIEW OF BOOKS

Stephen Spender on the life and talent of Mark Gertler

This* is a compilation or anthology of letters and documents relating to the life of Mark Gertler, rather than a biography. Sometimes I wished that Mr Woodeson had confined his own contribution to editorial notes; for the documentation is excellent, and he evidently knows much about his subject, but his own writing is of the standard which might be called brochure.' Here is an account of Edward Marsh:

In England people either were, or were not, 'in society '; Marsh was definitely in. On one hand he revolved gravely through the balls and circulated politely and wittily in the great country houses of the rich and titled, where one glittering weekend followed another. Through his work, he had an equal acquaintance with the practical realities of government, power and privilege, carrying out his duties with a light touch and apparent ease. A fellow civil servant, Harold Nicholson, later said of him, we thought it fitting that, suitably arrayed, he should spend his days in heavily carpeted rooms, locking and unlocking cabinet boxes With one of the four keys that dangled from a slim silver chain.'

The transition in this paragraph from Woodeson prose to that of Harold Nicolson is from credulous cliches to feline irony, a fact of which Mr Woodeson seems Only dimly aware. It seems, thqugh, strangely consistent with his career that a book about the demonic, entertaining yet somehow dejected and defeated. Mark Gertler should have the air of a secondclass waiting room. With his immense talents he never quite broke into the stratosphere of pure creative freedom and he received from buyers and critics secondclass treatment. Yet he might have been the English Chagall or Soutine. Wyndham Lewis, in a notice of the Gertler Posthumous retrospective .exhibition held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1949, allowed himself a magnificent outburst. I quote this passage, which seems to have excaped Mr Woodeson's usually very watchful eye:

The evidence of one of this country's crimes against art is to be found in the most convincing form in this exhibition . . . Have you

Math Gertler John Woodeson (Sidgwick and Jackson £5.50)

noticed in latter-day England how artists show great promise, often, and then 'go off' — or actually go to pieces? . . . You know how sweet a tooth our public has, how unwilling to give its attention to anything a little severe, how it exerts its slothful, sentimental 'pressure from the first moment a fine artist re?

veals himself . . Some, in the end, do no more good work at all. Gertler did . . . it is that that causes one to be particularly indignant.

Gertler's life strangely parallels that of D. H. Lawrence. Both rocketed from working class origins to success amid the same part-literary and artistic, partaristocratic liberal circle. They met under the aegis of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Lawrence was from the Nottingham mining district, Gertler from the central European and East End ghetto. Both were tubercular as the result of conditions of their early youth. Both were not so much uprooted as cut off from their roots; and their problem in their lives, as well as their art, was one of adaptation to a cliquish society of people with sympathetic and attractive virtues but also affectation and snobbery. There was a fundamental change in style and outlook in the work of both, though also a certain continuity.

Lawrence's upbringing was luxurious in comparison with that of Gertler who was born into the frightful poverty of the ghetto of Przemysl, a small town in the border country between Russia, Austria and Poland. Przemysl in addition to having its own population of impoverished Jews was one of the first places to which victims of pogroms in those countries fled. His father, who seems to have been remarkably unbusinesslike, went for five years to America where he made just enough money to pay for his family to emigrate to London. There he joined them in their one room in Whitechapel in horrific conditions of overcrowding and. exploitation. Mr Woodeson, drawing lavishly on documents (particularly on Gertler's own lively autobiographical notes, letters and diaries) about the condition of the Jews in Whitechapel at the turn of the century, conveys all this well. This is the best part of his uneven book.

As a young boy Gertler was one of those irrepressible artists who cannot be stopped from drawing everything with whatever materials are available. His family lived in conditions of appalling misery. When he was already on the verge of adolescence, a friend of the family, "a Scottish fur traveller," took his drawings to a Mr Gaskell, of the Regent Street Polytechnic, which had a department for various kinds of commercial art. When he was seventeen, he called, with specimens of his work, on William Rothenstein who received him with enthusiasm and generosity, and got him a place at the Slade (at that time a Bohemian outpost of the English public school system).

Between the ages of eighteen and twenty he painted those scenes of East End life which still seem closest to his deepest feelings, his real situation, and most sympathetic to his gifts. By this I don't at all mean that afterwards he became false, but that his later circumstances put a kind of gulf between him and his very Jewish inspiration which was based on compassion and suffering, so that he had, as it were, to approach themes in his later work by what was for him a

devious path which went through Paris and Bloomsbury. Looking at his pictures it is obvious, I think, that his true direction was by any way but these; by Russia, central Europe, even Belgium (he had something in common with painters like Ensor and Permeke).

Long after he had been ' taken up' by Edward Marsh, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Middleton Murry and others he went on living with his family, whose circumstances had improved sufficiently for them to rent a house in Spital Square. In this way he remained close to his subject matter: to his mother, father and brothers, who were the centre of his emotional life, and his link with his childhood in central Europe. At the same time he belonged to the Bohemian set of the Murrys, Augustus John, C. R. W. Nevinson, Dorothy Brett and S. S. Koteliansky which Lawrence describes satirically in Women in Love. Indeed, apparently Gertler is the model for the nihilistic Jewish artist whom Lawrence portrays as Loerke in that novel. Lawrence was horrified and fascinated by Gertler's painting The Merry Go-Round, and wrote to Gertler in a way that shows he thought of this Jewish genius as being in a relation of atavistic connivance with the forces destroying civilisation:

It is a terrifying coloured flame of decomposition, your inner flame. But dear God, it is a real flame enough, undeniable in heaven and earth.

It would take a Jew to paint this picture. It would need your national history to get you here, without disintegrating you first. You are of an older race than I, and in these ultimate processes, you are beyond me, older than I am. But I think I am sufficiently the same, to be able to understand.

The last sentence seems an understatement. Lawrence was fascinated by destruction, death and dissolution; these were the qualities which he so admired in Melville, Whitman and Hawthorne. However with Gertler there was a lack of confidence in his own work, a tendency to have moods of deep depression and perhaps a masochism (despite his Lawrentian gift of mimicry and capacity to keep a party immensely amused) in which Lawrence would not have indulged.

Lawrence, one can be sure, would not have permitted his happiness to be ruined by that teasing witch, Carrington, companion of Lytton Strachey, of whom we have heard so much recently. Carrington was a fellow student of Gertler at the Slade. He fell in love with her almost as soon as they met and was made alternately happy and unhappy by her almost to the day when she committed suicide. She seems to have been a green-eyed doll, serious as an artist, intuitively bright and with a kind of childish malign innocence which was immensely attractive. Gertler and she had, I suppose, that supreme bond which can make certain people secretly understand one another all their lives — that they were both children who never grew up. Their innocence was everything: their most powerful weapan tin the world the threat that 'they 'might lose it. (Thus Gertler, Carrington-like i. exercised his charms over homosexuals like Edward Marsh and Lytton Strachey, while making it clear that he could " never do anything " with them, much as she carried on with heterosexuals, fundamentally making the same thing clear, though she did occasionally half-do things.) They were perfectly designed by nature to torment one another, though Carrington, who referred to Gertler sometimes as "my Jew," came out, of course, top.

Early on in the relationship, when both were still students, Gertler propose to Carrington, but she made it clear that she was not ready for marriage (she was never ready for it, though, just to complicate matters, she married, for a while, Ralph Partridge, with whom Lytton Strachey was in love). Their relationship fell into the pattern of his making propositions to her which she rejected; then, his saying that he would have nothing more to do with her; then, his saying that he loved her, could not live without her and required no sexual relationship; then, their meeting and his making further propositions. The relationship developed to that point when during the great war she rationed him with what, naming it after another commodity restricted in supply, they called sugar.' Sugar was followed by letters of pepper: " But darling," she wrote, "I shall look after that alright, and only allow you three lumps a month."

Of course, when one has written that Carrington — commiserating with herself that she felt neglected by Lytton Strachey (who was the ideal partner for her) and asking Mark to come back — was a bitch, one has merely drawn superficial con clusions from the superficial but sensational facts with which biographers now regale one. 'With Gertler and Carrington there was a deep understanding which was more important to them than the tangle of their frustrations.

Towards the end of his life, Gertler married, but later separated from his wife, became ill with the consumption that Lawrence also died of, and cut matters short by taking his life. Carrington had committed suicide after the death of Lytton Strachey. Whatever injuries she had done to her admirers, were redeemed by her suffering. Koteliansky was also to commit suicide. Lawrence, one feels, might have done the same thing, had he not fought his way out of loneliness by creating his relationship with Frieda.

As Wyndham Lewis pointed out in the article from which I have quoted, all through his life Gertler continued to paint beautiful pictures. Nevertheless, I am inclined to agree with the common judgement that his early work was his

best. The reason was that innocence, pressure of vividly experienced circuM

stances, closeness to his own people, enabled him to paint these pictures almost instinctively. Lacking the conditions which

would have encouraged in him a sleep walker's ' development, he became lost later on, though occasionally he painted poignantly dark works like The Merry-GoRound and the beautifully poetic Black and

White Cottage, reproduced in this volume. His life was a success if one accepts that it is enough for an artist to have painted half a dozen marvellous works, It was a failure if one considers that a talent which was fundamentally prolific did not produce a large number of free and uninhibited inventions.