The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives Read online

  Throughout his early years … he rarely escaped the influence of this painter or that, and yet everything he did took its life from his own vitality and not from the mannerism of the moment. He imitates Van Gogh or Braque or Modigliani in an attempt to discover the secrets of their language, not from a desire to emulate their performance.

  But by 1928 he had shaken off this dependence. He not only had discovered his own language but also could turn it to astonishing account. In the paintings of his last two years Christopher Wood can be compared to no one but himself…His nearest parallel is perhaps the poetry of Keats. His paintings of Tréboul – the church on the cliff, the white houses among the rocks – have a clarity and a lyrical intensity that take one right back to Piero della Francesca.

  Partly this is due to a colour-sense so finely adjusted as to make almost any other contemporary British painting seem by comparison a clumsy hit-or-miss approximation; and partly to a gift for so organising his picture within its frame that everything in it is immovable, inevitable …

  Those who have secretly arranged their own list of British painters, from Hogarth onwards, in order of merit, will probably rewrite it after seeing this exhibition.

  Wood’s funeral took place at All Saints Church, Broad Chalke. The officiating clergy were Dr Prideaux and Mr Fuller, the vicar of Broad Chalke. As the coffin entered the church the organ played ‘O Rest in the Lord’, and as the cortège left for the churchyard it played ‘I know that my Redeemer Liveth’. The grave was lined with flowers and the coffin bore the inscription: ‘John Christopher Wood. Age 29.’ Clare Wood was not listed among the mourners. Perhaps the local paper did not think she was important; perhaps her courage failed her.

  As the summer turned to autumn the winds began to blow again on the coast of Brittany, rattling the green shutters of the Hôtel Ty-Mad. The holiday-makers were gone, the beaches were deserted: in the narrow lanes above the Plage St Jean the fishermen climbed up to their whitewashed cottages where their anxious wives were waiting for them. The festivals of saints’ days, the burials, the baptisms and the mending of nets went on into the winter. The exotic visitors of the early summer were forgotten. All except one.

  Alone in the Ty-Mad was the anguished figure of Max Jacob. On 1 October 1930 he wrote to Frosca Munster:

  Dear Madame, my good friend,

  I didn’t dare to write. I still don’t. I live with him in my thoughts night and day. He never leaves me. I cannot speak of him; I remain stunned by his disappearance. My God, is it true that we will never see his dear face again, never hear him speak again, so admirably, so well. Oh my dear, dear boy! And he could have carried on with his career as a painter that he’d started so well… I would very much like to have some details about how he died. Tony told me it was an accident and not suicide – and anyway why would he kill himself? He was loved by us and he loved us in return and I don’t think a problem with money could have depressed him that much. All we had was at his disposal, my God, my poor boy, my poor dearest, dearest boy. I will never stop grieving. You talk about your loss, Madame, but you’re still young; I promise you that at my age I can never be alone without the presence of the dead assaulting me and I cry, I am crying as I write to you: weep with me, a poor sick old man who has survived so many young people that I have loved and tried to help. May God have pity on our pain and on our grief. My dear Kit!!!

  Frosca had asked various of Kit’s friends for recollections or tributes for a book she was hoping to compile. Most of the responses were too solemn, too obviously eulogistic or, in Cocteau’s case (‘Wood first met me when I…’), too self-serving. Only Max Jacob had let her have the full force of his feeling, though this tribute too was, in its way, unusable. A little later, when he had collected himself, Jacob wrote a ‘Souvenir sur Christopher Wood en Bretagne’, an abbreviated version of which was published by the Redfern Gallery in their catalogue to the exhibition of the complete works in 1938. This is what he wrote:

  The Bretons, Kit used to say, make you believe in Paradise. He understood them well because he was like them. Always a little bit sad, even when joking, quiet until you got to know them – and it was not easy to get to know Kit – but charming in friendship, and oddly childlike … I saw the pious, honest girls who waited on us wipe away their tears and I know that they prayed for his soul…

  Beneath these trees and on these rocks in the corner of the Bay of Douarnenez Kit lived two months, which were alas to be his last. Neither the storms of October nor the awful knowledge of what was to come have chased away their memory. The wind is rattling the door of my room and I dare not go out. I don’t want to creep with funereal tread across the landing that used to echo to the sound of our schoolboy laughter… or to the confident sound of our work. The fresh canvas is no longer there, not on the wall or the table, not among the pots of house paint or on top of the mirrored wardrobe: no more those great paintings completed in two hours but shot through with indefinable, melancholy doubt. I will never again see from his balcony the larch which hides the sea and the little chapel he loved to paint. ‘One can hear the birds singing in your trees,’ one of the few poets who knew him commented; and Kit was so modest and so poetic himself that he was less flattered by the compliment than touched by the beauty of the idea.

  Today the sea is green and the sky is black. Kit, who always saw Finistère through the eyes of his own country (that of the Brontë sisters) could have painted this autumn in the colours of Courbet. A few days ago, just before dawn, his voice awoke me: having lived in another world he seemed even more real than when on this earth. I went downstairs. He was there, and his characteristics, those of the philosopher-warrior, his openness, his sad and humorous good nature, were shining in his face. He mentioned two names that I cannot repeat, and I felt his protective arm around my shoulder.

  May God take care of this man who was a hero, strong and sure, a child whose curiosity touched everything.

  Max Jacob was besotted with Wood, but his choice of the word ‘hero’ was significant. Wood had lived a life of cultural daring: his heroism was in his dedication to a wider world. Or as Winifred Nicholson put it: ‘Longing in him was not discontent. Life to him was not a sense of existing but a driving power which set him striving in the endeavour that was high adventure.’

  The days grew shorter in the vale round Broad Chalke. Clare Wood had kept all Kit’s letters from the day he went to Paris and now she had time to look back through them. From Alphonse Kahn’s house he had written: ‘I honestly believe I am born under a lucky star.’ From Bruges, where he had gone with Tony Gandarillas, he was struck by the sight of people at prayer: ‘Some day I shall paint exactly what I saw then.’ And he had; at Tréboul in 1930. From Tunisia in April 1922 he wrote: ‘Some day I hope to repay you for all your great kindness and love and the care you took of me when I was ill. I never forget.’

  From Sicily the same year: ‘It is surely not intelligent to worry about the time when one will die. Live for the present, not much for the future, and think you are going to live for ever.’

  From Paris in 1924: ‘All I want is to succeed, and I shall do it somehow.’ From Le Canadel in August 1924: ‘I know I can be a great artist because I understand and feel the things I like so much if I can only be left with them.’ From Paris in the spring of 1925: ‘The time goes terribly quickly. I hope the whole of my life won’t pass as fast as this.’

  At the start of 1928, after his affair with Meraud, he had written: ‘I feel freer, happier and with my face in the wind, which is a real exhilaration and ready to start on the biggest journey one can make. I will get there and I do trust it will be quick.’ And from Tréboul in 1930: ‘It’s extraordinary how I have to hurry, hurry from one thing to another, but it’s just the one moment or the chance I have to get on.’

  In his last year he had repeated his favourite proverb: ‘La vie s’arrange …’ ‘Life always works out’; but he added ‘… mais autrement’ – ‘not how you expect it’.

 
Each year in August, on the anniversary of Kit’s death, Winifred Reitlinger sent flowers to Mrs Wood. She wrote back one year: ‘I have them in my room by Kit’s photograph and quite close to a lovely picture. The door of the house is wide open all the time so everyone in the house enjoys them. It means a great deal to me to know you are thinking of him and I love you for doing it. I feel certain he knows everything, especially everything that is being done out of love. It is eleven years now since he left us but he is the same Kit – just as lovable.’

  Clare Wood kept in touch with Tony Gandarillas and worried about Frosca. Her letters remained firm and composed until 1942 when she suffered the first of a series of breakdowns. In 1944 she spent eight weeks in a nursing home in Salisbury; her final letter was a trembling pencil scrawl.

  It was too much to bear. In the first winter of his death it seemed like failure, when she had only those letters to read. There were the paintings, too, but their wild colours and melancholy doubt were not the kind of things that people understood in Broad Chalke.

  Clare Wood was much occupied and much exhausted by the running of a doctor’s house, alone with no domestic help. It was to this strain that she attributed her nervous collapse.

  When it was dark it would be time to draw the curtains and to shut away, as before, the troublesome events outside; but with them now would also be closed for ever the foreign shining world: the noonday sun on a plate of lemons in Taormina, the glimpsed face of Mussolini in the Roman crowd, the candle-lit gardens of the Comte de Beaumont; the lonely country by the sea with the ships blazing on their final voyage, the mystery of which her son had tried to grasp.

  The chandelier in the dining room would draw up the light only of its own reflection in the polished table, as damp England settled down into another autumn.

  Richard Hillary

  A mile and a half from Broad Chalke in Wiltshire is the small tillage of Fifield Bavant. In May 1995, fifty years after VE Day, the village held its celebrations. In the tiny Norman church there was a display that included various wartime mementoes – identity card, medals and so on – that had belonged to the pilot and writer Richard Hillary, a branch of whose family lives in the village. A modest crowd of mainly local people came to pay their tributes.

  British celebrations of the event split people along a bitter little divide that has run through much of the domestic political discussion of the last quarter of the century. On the one hand were the latter-day Empire Loyalists who tried to suggest that the global war had been won by Britain alone, and that the decisive participation of the great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, had been little more than a convenience. On the other were the disgruntled internationalists who were unwilling to believe that Britain might ever have performed a useful or morally just role, and that to suggest otherwise was a conspiracy of an undefined ‘establishment’.

  Somewhere among the bunting and the bitterness there were reasonable accounts of what British forces achieved. What might have struck anyone who had no hard allegiance to either side of the political fault line was not so much the size of the British contribution to the Allied effort as its continuity. From 1939 to 1945, from Holland to Tunisia, from Italy to Burma, from Normandy to the waters of the Atlantic, Britain was continually fighting. Its singular position placed it under certain obligations. The disgruntled internationalists pointed out that Halifax, not Churchill, might easily have been its leader; the nationalist romantics claimed that the ‘British character’ was immune to such infection. But however it came about, the isolation of 1940 and 1941 was met in a distinctive way. The International Brigades who fought against Franco in Spain were motivated by a self-conscious political idealism, but the infantry at Dunkirk and the fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain had no such crusading passion. Memoirs of the War made it seem as though at times it was almost a matter of taste: the Nazis were so lacking in self-awareness, so crude, so strangely unimpressive in their way, that they must – albeit reluctantly – be taken on and defeated. Their army might be the finest ever to take the field, their air force might conceivably, as its commander claimed, be able to clear the RAF from the sky, then bomb Britain into submission; but the people behind these outstandingly well-drilled services – those men with their goose-step, their bragging and their hysterical rallies – were preposterous.

  Although this contempt lasted throughout the War, it lived, in 1940, with fear. The British armies were on the retreat; and while the Navy went about its work unseen, it was the RAF – the smallest service, whose members often fought in single combat – that seemed best to embody Britain’s position. The public had been bombed, battered and scared, yet in the scruffy, nonchalant figures of the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots it found men on whom it could fasten its hopes.

  Many of the airmen were from Commonwealth countries, many more from Poland or Czechoslovakia. The RAF seemed to have a different social feeling from the other services. Those who cared about such things noted a preponderance of ‘minor public school’ men; they called them the Brylcreem Boys in semi-affectionate recognition of the fact that no ‘gentleman’ would use such cheap hair cream. None of this mattered. What was significant was the character of a man who wanted to fly fighter planes. He needed to be competitive and scornful, eager for a chance to prove himself; he needed also a rarer combination of qualities: he had both to be young and alert, yet attach no great importance to his life. This was the requirement that came before patriotism, political belief or even skill in flying. It was not like being in the infantry where, even during the slaughters of the Western Front in 1914-18, you had a better then even chance of surviving. If you flew more than a certain number of missions in 1940-1 you were not likely to come back. This did not mean that all the pilots were reckless, willing to risk their lives for the sake of the chase and kill above the clouds; nor did it mean that they had to be more patriotically motivated. It meant only they had to have, at heart, some indifference to dying. The public were encouraged by Churchill’s speeches to believe this indifference was heroic; the pilots themselves did not see it as such. Far from subscribing to the myth, they tried to subvert it. They cultivated understatement in a private slang; they came close to callousness: they claimed to feel nothing.

  If the RAF represented Britain in those two years, and if the fighter pilots were its epitome, there was a short time when the most emblematic of them all was Richard Hillary. His book about his experiences, The Last Enemy, was published in 1942 and struck some mysterious answering note in the British wartime mood. Christopher Wood’s stricken man on a parachute had found his powerful, symbolic hour.

  It was fitting that the hero of the moment should be a twenty-one-year-old Australian with an ambivalent feeling about ‘English’ virtues. Hillary was born on 20 April 1919, in Sydney. His father Michael was a civil servant of Anglo-Irish descent; his mother Edwyna had Scottish and Spanish blood. Michael Hillary had served in India and Mesopotamia during the Great War, had won the DSO and was twice mentioned in dispatches. From 1921 to 1923 he was private secretary to the Australian Prime Minister, Billy Hughes. Then, when Richard was three, Michael Hillary was posted to Australia House in London. Richard lived the rest of his life in England and did not appear to think his Australian beginnings important. He was sent to boarding schools at an early age and adopted the manners they taught. He was too emotionally open to be regarded as typical, but he certainly viewed himself as English.

  As a child he was pugnacious and self-assertive. He would hop about in a fury if he was denied, but soon afterwards he could laugh at himself. His nerves and emotions were close to the surface, and he was tiresomely quick-tempered. The loss of a game of tennis or beach cricket would mean a heavy fire of hurled bats and rackets; the thwarting of any whim would mean tears and abuse. It was some compensation to his parents that he was doggedly truthful. When he had behaved badly he never sought to escape the blame; his father could recall no instance in his life in which he had shown less than complete
dedication to the truth. Richard respected his father, but did not feel close to him. Michael Hillary was a friendly, hospitable man up to a point; but he had strict views on how things should be done. For warmth of emotional contact, Richard Hillary turned, like Christopher Wood, to his mother. Personal connections were her strong point: as a spiritualist she even believed in communication with the dead. She was a good-looking woman, mild-mannered and devoted, to the point of indulgence, to her hot-headed son. Photographs of Richard as a child show a plump, cheeky-looking boy with the confident look in the eye of one who will jump off the highest wall, take on the biggest bully and persecute those less brave than himself.

  Michael Hillary’s visit to London preceded a permanent posting as Auditor-General in the Sudan, so the question of boarding, schools arose at once. The real separation came in September 1926 when Richard was seven and a half. Shortly before their departure for the Sudan his parents left him in the headmaster’s study at his preparatory school. The full implications of his abandonment somehow escaped the child until the moment when his mother leant down to kiss him goodbye. His skin turned crimson, his eyes shone, his jaw clamped tight. He watched his mother leave, but he did not cry. She had taught him to be a ‘man’.

  He wrote to her in Khartoum, begging her to take him away. Mother and son had developed the rugged intimacy that was necessary in a relationship which had to survive separation for two-thirds of the year. When they were reunited Richard was too happy to worry about school: the last thing he wanted to do in the holidays was to trail round alternative places, to be shown down further brown corridors that smelled of loneliness and chalk and boiled dinners. He finished his time at the school; in the phrase employed in such cases, he ‘stuck it out’.