Stanley Spencer (Text Only)

The parallels cannot be pushed too far. Modernism was more a state of mind than a specific movement. In the best of it can be found the sense of awe without which no artist can accomplish – Picasso shouting from his studio, ‘I am God! I am God!’ The disjunctions of Joyce’s Ulysses or Eliot’s The Waste Land parallel the many-layered but essentially unified compositions of Stanley’s The Nativity or of The Centurion’s Servant or of the many visionary paintings to come. The awe, the impetus to truth, is ‘spiritual’, ‘religious’. It pervades the work of the great modernists, even though many rejected canonical faith; as did Stanley in liturgical literalness. But ‘spiritual’ and ‘religious’ it remained for him, and we must continue to use his adjectives in that sense.

If Stanley’s interpretation of Christian tradition seems sometimes less than orthodox, he saw no point in divesting his art of its power. When such a magnificent paradigm lay at hand, one with which he was familiar from childhood, why squander its resources in crafting, as did so many of his contemporaries, some less apt device? If Cookham was ‘heaven’ for Stanley, it was because the Bible was the first text he had known which offered integrated interpretation of the disparate mysteries which were beginning to possess him. He would not always accept its interpretation literally, but it would remain a yardstick against which he could measure future texts and alternative explanations. For he remained convinced of having been vouchsafed a miracle, that what he saw happening during his adolescence in Cookham had already taken place for him in a deeper sense in the Bible of his Fernlea boyhood. Each Cookham occurrence was for him no more an event in isolation than were the Bible stories Pa had read to him. Each was a drum-roll in his as yet dimly discerned pageant of revelation, and it was his unsolicited destiny to relate the majesty of the one to the other, to take the elements of experience and fuse them into an assembly of spiritual meaning.

Swan Upping demonstrates this particularly well. One of the elements he chose for the composition was the foreground cameo showing two men at work on a punt; a second is that of the two girls carrying cushions to a punt – the sun is in the east, it is morning; the third shows a waterman of the Company of Vintners and Dyers bringing Thames swans ashore for marking. Connecting them, the boardwalk and towpath spike their way towards the lawn of the Ferry Hotel, flag raised to proclaim its services to passing river traffickers. Mr Turk’s boathouse is on the right, and beyond it arches Cookham Bridge.*

Each cameo is a little pocket of feeling. Stanley does not directly describe its nature, but its significance can be extracted from allusions in his writing. Part of his Cookham feelings related to his delight in the occupations of the villagers. The purposefulness of their daily activities made them for Stanley participants in some ritual, as though Cookham were a church, its inhabitants communicants, himself a priest. Not all the villagers gave him this feeling, but those that did became part of his abiding joy:

I hear Mr Johnson’s little boy call ‘Harry, Harry’ down below in the street and I hear his scuttling feet across the gravel as he runs past our house. Our back iron gate swings open and hits the ivied wall [of the house] out of which it is built with a bang, and then quick steps up the [side] passage, then the sound of the milk can opening and of the jug drawn off the window cill.8

The men tending the foreground punt capture the feeling. Stanley does not tell us who they are but, like the milkman, they are part of his Cookham ritual: men in their physical work, wage-earners, providers of the means to home-making, ‘nest-builders’, angular in presentation.

The girls behind them share the ritual, but differently. Their function is domestic. The cushions they carry are femininely rounded and patterned, suggesting softness. The girls who actually worked at the boatyard for Mr Turk on busy days have had their identity changed by Stanley.9 He has, he tells us, substituted for them the Bailey girls. William Bailey was a local builder and also an accomplished artist, and the family was a joyous strand in his Cookham feelings: ‘Somehow M. S. or Miss Roberts could never quite give me the significance of Cookham that the Bailey girls did, or any other Cookhamite such as Mr Worcester [Wooster?], Pa, Mrs Croper [Cropper?] or Mr Francis or Mr Pym or Mrs Bailey or Mr Hatch. It’s just heaven reciting those names.’10 It was Dorothy Bailey who gave Stanley his early art training. Her personality caught his imagination, induced his ‘love’: ‘Walking upon the Causeway between white posts placed at the eastern end is Dorothy Bailey. How much, Dorothy, you belong to the Marsh meadows and the old village. I love your curiosity and simplicity, domestic Dorothy.’

Stanley renders unidentifiable the figure bringing ashore the carpet-bagged swans, his elbow lifted, a sack worn for protection against angry beaks and wings. Yet he too is part of the mysterious ritual which makes Cookham holy for Stanley, and which in this painting he has localized along the river because, he says, when in church one day the sounds of river activity filtered in and took on the aura of the religious atmosphere he was experiencing at worship:

My Cookham feelings were really this, that I felt this Ascot-fashion Boulter’s-Lock Sunday Bank-holiday terrific physical life could be tremendous seen spiritually, and this desire on my part was intensified by the fact that Cookham had as far as nature aspects were concerned and as far as the different jobs that were done there (boats and boat-building etc) an affinity with the Bible and the Bible atmosphere. So that in a way all the things that happened at Cookham happened in the Bible. … Of course in this idealizing of Cookham people it was more just my own idealizing of them, my own feelings of perfection projected on to them …11

If interpretation of the painting stops at this point, it may seem a straighforward rendering of an artist’s powerful place-feelings; three episodes or transformations of experience chosen from many possible, and assembled visually to define an otherwise intangible totality of meaning. But, Stanley being Stanley, we may guess there must be more. The imagined high-angle viewpoint, the packed composition, the geometrical arrangement of components and the density of colour give a charged intensity of feeling which the pacific cameos so far described do not explain.

The high-angle viewpoint was one with which Stanley had been experimenting in visionary work. Its use in Swan Upping was not merely a technical device to shorten perspective and compress into proximity detail normally invisible or discreet when seen from ground level. There was an emotional element. In the back garden of Fernlea grew a large walnut tree which overhung neighbouring gardens. At harvest the Spencer boys would climb into it to shake down the nuts and, as Sydney described and Stanley later drew, sometimes clambered to do so on to a neighbour’s ‘tin sheds’, much to his fury. Stanley as a boy loved to climb alone into the tree. There was always wonder at the unexpected vistas revealed, and also a feeling of isolation, of remoteness, of godlikeness; very much the feeling in the painting.

The angularity given the towpath has, it has been suggested, affinities with cubism and vorticism.12 At the time, Stanley’s former fellow-students Nevinson, Wadsworth and Bomberg were experimenting with the styles, and Stanley was interested to see their work. However, the towpath actually does zigzag as Stanley shows it, the abrupt changes of direction being caused by the property boundaries of the riverfront cottages. Stanley’s artist’s eye instinctively registered such minutiae. But, as with all his visionary work, the painting of the scene was not done from actuality. On the contrary, as he stresses in his description, he drew the scene from memory, returning only afterwards to compare his drawing with the reality and to congratulate himself on the accuracy of his observation.

The comment is significant. Stanley is not painting the scene as a landscape. He is deliberately painting it through the filter of ‘memory-feeling’. The resulting configuration is subservient to the feeling. Of course, most original artists do this. But where many of his contemporaries developed the distortion to carry their meaning, Stanley reverses the process. He aims to bring the configuration of his memory-feeling into as accurate a parallel with the observed as he can, convinced that the more accurately he can do so, the closer he will draw to the power of the associations inherent in the memory-feelings. He will never expect to match the two exactly. There will always be some distortion. When it increased alarmingly in later years, he felt that he had lost this first and early vision, the ‘innocence’ in which he was happiest.

If therefore there is cubism or vorticism in Stanley’s reconstruction of that part of the scene, it is less because he accepted the tenets of those styles than because the angularity was truthful to the place and could be brought into the picture to convey a directness of feeling which would counterpoint the more rounded imagery of the figure associations. But an even more striking counterpoint is evident in the upper part of the painting, the bridge section, which is mysteriously different in feeling from the relative calm of the foreground scene. In the bridge section a wind blows, rippling the water, flapping the flag, sending clouds scudding across the sky, streaming the hair of the male figure as he gazes towards Cookham, towards the female figure at the bridge end where the branches of the fir tree seem to extend her feelings to him in sympathy.

Looking back, Florence thought that the male figure on the bridge was the last detail Stanley painted before having to lay the painting aside; he had begun applying the paint from the top. She was evidently hinting that the figure represents Stanley’s foreboding at being torn from Cookham by the onrushing winds of war, and the entire top scene can suggest such an emotional dread. But, if so, Stanley was being neither narrative nor illustrative. He was surely doing what he did in The Centurion’s Servant, striving to transcend the distress of an unavoidable physical necessity by calling this time on the spiritual resources of his Cookham feelings.

That he felt he was succeeding is evident from a later reference to the painting. He began painting it, he said, in Ship Cottage, and at one point army recruits were undergoing field training in the vicinity: ‘seeing the manoeuvring of troops going on outside, I felt if only there was not this war, what could I not do?’13 He conveyed the feeling in a paean to the Raverats: ‘I am in a great state of excitement, quite a treat to feel like it. I hear the voice of the acceptable year of the Lord, I want to draw everybody in Cookham, to begin at the top of the village and work downwards.’14

What might have been accomplished had Stanley been able to carry out his enthusiasm! Swan Upping, like The Centurion’s Servant, is a hymn of joy to the miracle given him to redeem the apprehension of the unfamiliar through the peace of the known and loved. ‘There is’, he said in later life, ‘greatness in that painting.’15

By the time Stanley was composing it, the intricate lines of trenches and barbed wire had been lengthened across Europe from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier. In the Balkans the tragedy of the Dardanelles was about to be played out and Rupert Brooke to die on his way there of a blood infection. On Germany’s eastern frontier, preparations were under way for those Teutonic hammer-blows which were virtually to knock Russia out of the war. At home, volunteers flocked to swell the new Kitchener armies under training. Stanley and Gilbert remained in Cookham, continued their painting and kept up their drill and ambulance training. Stanley read as enthusiastically as ever: ‘I am still reading Dante. I have only just finished Hell. I like reading anything like that very slowly. It is wonderful the part where Virgil embraces and carries Dante. …’16 Handholding?

Alas for Stanley, into the creative exaltations of his Cookham feelings, the upheaval of the times kept breaking. He sensed his isolation from his brothers – ‘My brother Percy who entered the army as a common private is now a lance-sergeant. My brother Horace who is in Nigeria is guarding prisoners. …’ – and, even more forcefully, his isolation from village opinion:

In the barber’s yesterday a married man who had been in the South African war and was just going to the present talked a lot about how he had done his bit and was waiting for the young men to go, but they did not seem to. He waited for me to stand up … and looked me up and down. ‘Now, Master Spencer, you ought to be in the army, you know. Here am I, a married man with children, and I am going tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow!’ My answer was to stand and look at him like an idiot and a lout, and the fact that the barber had parted my hair made me feel more so. ‘Why haven’t you joined?’ he asked. I tried to become dignified but only became more foolish. ‘Well, at any rate,’ I said, ‘I hope you will believe me that there is some honour in a civilian and when he says he cannot, it is because he cannot’; and with that I strode out, feeling I had made a thorough mess of myself. … It is terrible to be a civilian. God says: ‘You must go, but I give you the power to obey or disobey this command.’ If you do not go, then you feel something has gone from you.17

Moreover, as time passed and the wounded – mostly at this early stage of the war regulars, territorials or reservists – came home to convalesce, a further puzzle presented itself: ‘It is funny the difference between the wounded soldiers and the ones not yet gone to France. The ones just going look at you and say: “Be a man. We’re British. Will tha join Kitchener’s Army?” But the wounded are always quiet and never say a word about our not joining. …’18

In May 1915 Stanley sent the Raverats a sympathetic note about Rupert Brooke. Inflation, virtually unknown within living memory, was beginning to be an unsettling phenomenon. Jack Hatch was dropping heavy hints that he would appreciate an increase in the weekly eighteen-pence rental Stanley paid for use of Wistaria Cottage. Should he and Gilbert go? Percy had gone. Horace was on his way home from Africa to join up. Sydney knew that he would be going, and was snatching for those moments of remembered joy that many imminently campaigning soldiers know:

As I came on through Weston [Weston-super-Mare] Woods towards the Old Pier the sun poured down upon the wet sands of the bay. The woods, the green grass and dark furze bushes with fringes of fire crept down as far to the shore as possible. The gulls were lazily crying to each other in the hazy distance and the whole of creation seemed to speak of peace. … I dawdled and picked flowers. I lived and breathed and exulted for a dreamy hour in that old land of peace long vanished for me. … With all the grim prospect of the present, how grateful I am to a God who gives respite to his creatures and makes the full enjoyment of such an afternoon still possible.19

Back at Fernlea, each of the youngest brothers wished to protect the other, and their parents wanted to shield both. But, by May, Gilbert ‘has passed his St John’s Ambulance exam. He has got orders to go to Eastleigh.’20 Eastleigh, near Southampton, was the clearing hospital for the Southern Command group of hospitals which took the brunt of the casualties arriving from France. Rapid expansion of the service demanded more medical orderlies. At the last moment Gilbert’s orders were changed. He was to proceed to Bristol and there enlist in the Home Hospital Service of the Royal Army Medical Corps for duty in a newly created hospital, the Beaufort War Hospital, on the outskirts of the city.

Back in Cookham the family eagerly awaited Gilbert’s news. Pa consoled himself with the thought that ‘the discipline will do him good’, for Gilbert was regarded as the wilder of the two youngest brothers. When his letters came, their message was disconcerting: ‘Gil says that they intend to kill him if they possibly can. He works from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. … the way he is living is unhealthy … the men are horrible … they have not inoculated him and yet there is enteric in the next ward. He wrote his letter to us in bed, he gets no rest. …’21 Gilbert stressed that Stanley should not follow him, at least not to the Beaufort. The work would be too heavy, and he should aim for a convalescent home.

To no avail. Stanley too had now passed his St John’s examination – ‘which was a farce as only about three questions were asked and I don’t remember being asked or answering any of them’22 – and was at last able to persuade his parents to let him volunteer. On 23 July he sent postcards to his friends. To the Raverats he wrote: ‘Am going to Bristol. Ma seems very well about my going away. Sydney now has a commission and is a 2nd Lieutenant in the Norfolks.’23

Stanley put on his straw hat and Burberry raincoat-it threatened thunder – and, carrying a gladstone bag, made his way out of Cookham by a roundabout route along Sutton Road. He had slipped quietly from home to avoid emotional farewells, and taken an unusual direction to minimize lingering memories of the village. On the way the thunder-shower broke and his straw hat was ruined. When he reached Maidenhead Station, he was embarrassed to find that his father had cycled in to see him off and was the only fond parent there. The little party of volunteers presented their Civic Guard instructor with a stick with a horse’s head handle and then, as the train moved out, Pa compounded his son’s embarrassment by calling out to the orderly in charge of the party to take care of him as he was ‘valuable’.

How could they know that he was to become one of the century’s most celebrated artists? Who would tell the ‘rather superior but nice young man’ from the Maidenhead branch of W. H. Smith’s that the eager, talkative, wiry and boyish young man sitting opposite him was someone whose paintings were already attracting attention? To the others in the party he was just another recruit, good at drawing and something of an artist. But, like Stanley, they knew that as the train drubbed westwards they were being carried away from the familiar and, in Stanley’s case, the beloved. The agony of that day was to infuse one of Stanley’s most remarkable paintings, his Christ Carrying the Cross.

CHAPTER TEN

Christ Carrying the Cross

Painting with me was the crowning of an already elected king.

Stanley Spencer1

ACADEMIC CATALOGUING stresses the chronological dating of an artist’s work. In Stanley’s case, the exact date of painting may bear little relation to the emotions of its genesis. He could, as in The Centurion’s Servant, be attracted (1913) to a theme for one reason, fail to find any suitable visual association, let the project gestate and then (October 1914) discover that his current emotional circumstance provided just the trigger he needed. In subsequent paintings the gap could extend over many years. On the other hand he could happily paint a picture, keep it unseen for years, then suddenly produce it out of current context. So too he could produce what seemed to be a new work but one which proved to be essentially a reworking of themes in earlier works. Stanley’s life and art cannot be compartmentalized. Both were a vast rolling pageant in which each new painting related to what had gone before and would illuminate those which were to follow.

Consider his emotions on that day of leaving Cookham for the war. There was natural apprehension about how he would fit into his new life. But the greater fear was that of the rupture of his Cookham spiritual life which he guessed must follow, and of the hurt to his father who valued him and his mother who, despite her brave front, was anxious for him. He was the last of their sons young enough to go: ‘In the months that followed the declaration of war, I [Florence] was called upon time and time again to stand by the younger sons as one by one, letting their little mother down as gently as possible, they took up their Cross and went.’2

Christ Carrying the Cross, an evocation of the Fourth Station of the Cross, can be interpreted as a flowering of such feelings. It was not in fact painted until after the war, in 1920, but its detail is so apt to Stanley’s recorded description of the day he left home that a correspondence is inescapable. We can begin with the three figures in the centre of the bottom part of the picture to the right of the line of five men looking through railings. This trio, Stanley says, depicted himself and friends: ‘As youths we stood in a gate opposite our house [presumably the gate of Ovey’s Farm] and watched people go by on Sundays and in the evenings. The three men in the central part of the bottom of the picture form the onlooker part of the scene’3 – so that by implication all the others are participants. Once more Stanley stands outside an emotional situation in order to watch a transcendence of his feelings into visualized allegory. He later likened the scene and its watching youths to a newspaper account of crowd reaction at the funeral of Queen Victoria. The journalist, anxious to convey the solemnity of the occasion, proclaimed that ‘women openly wept and strong men broke down in side streets’,4 an overstatement which became a catchphrase, and one which Stanley would merrily quote on occasion.

‘To the left of the picture is a wide street coming towards the spectator, through the iron palings at the side of which other men peer down at the stooping figure of the Virgin.’5 There being in reality no ‘wide street coming towards the spectator’ at the side of Fernlea – the house shown in the painting has been coalesced into Fernlea-Belmont – Stanley has emotionally eliminated all the buildings between it and Sutton Road, the ‘wide street’ down which he went on his way to Maidenhead to avoid lingering memories of Cookham.* He has thus slid together in association the two notions of ‘home’ and ‘departure from home’. Fernlea-Belmont has taken the situation in the village of the Methodist Chapel. Ma, who felt the parting so keenly, has become metamorphosed into the Virgin Mary, not because Stanley saw her sentimentally in that guise, but because he is sympathetically capturing in the transfiguration the utter agony of her feelings. She is a distraught figure barred from her son by the ‘iron palings’ – Stanley has given them the semblance of military spears – ‘at the side of which other men peer down’. Examine these other men. Each is a manifestation of a white-faced, agonized Stanley. They are the five Spencer sons gone to war of Gilbert’s Crucifixion.

Stanley ‘looks down’ on Ma, for in the kinesis of emotion in the painting, Ma is now a receding, diminutive figure, appearing as she must have done when in boyhood he climbed the walnut tree in the back garden of Fernlea, the tree from which he could ‘survey the worlds not only in our own garden but the other gardens beyond’,7 so giving him once again the feeling of distance and isolation which this sad occasion invokes. As an associative element, the feeling is brought into the picture as the ivy which covered the neighbouring cottage, The Nest, in which an elderly couple, the Sandells, now lived. Stanley’s grandmother had come to live at the cottage when old Julius died, his business being continued by a son of the previous marriage, Stanley’s ‘Uncle John’. Old Mr Sandell had been one of the firm’s employees and was allocated the cottage when the grandmother died.

A resolute Christ – with the profile of Pa – is escorted by four soldiers whose winged helmets reproduce those worn in early Renaissance paintings.* Followers, or disciples, are with Christ. He too is about to round the corner into Sutton Road, to leave behind his lingering memories of Jerusalem. On the right, men shoulder the ladders of Bosch’s version of the event to mount Christ on the Cross, but for Stanley they are Fairchild’s builders’ men counterpointing the tension by carrying their ladders to some prosaic job at which they are due, the imagery of Cross and ladders interlinked. They go about their business indifferent to the young man in a raincoat and straw hat who carries his gladstone bag up the street; just another recruit off to the war like so many other young men of the time. Passers-by hold up their hands to shield their eyes from the low July sun as they watch.* From the windows of Fernlea-Belmont a congregation of figures, echoes of Stanley’s family, of himself in childhood happiness, of his uncles, aunts, cousins, friends and family maids, look out to reinforce his memories of home. Old Mr and Mrs Sandell, whom the family loved and who loved them, are at the side window of The Nest. The lace curtains blown out by the draught from the open windows on that sultry summer day have been transformed into wings. The onlookers in their silent commiseration have taken on the protectiveness of angels.