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Preamble

I often think I would enjoy writing more if it were not dependent on thoughts logically following each other. But I think this limits the capacity of thought and cuts it off from something which in its undisturbed condition it can deal with and perform.

Stanley Spencer¹

IN 1938, some of Spencer’s friends and associates urged him to assemble his thoughts into an autobiography. They included his dealer Dudley Tooth, the newly appointed director of the Tate Gallery John Rothenstein, and the publisher Victor Gollancz, whose wife had been, as Ruth Lowy, one of Spencer’s fellow-students at the Slade and an early patron.

Their intention was to help him. His personal life was in shreds, his finances in disarray, his time largely devoted to saleable but ‘pot-boiling’ landscapes, his hallowed visionary work misunderstood and largely rejected. A judicious autobiography in which he could explain his ideas and motives might, it was felt, restore his prestige.

Spencer’s first reaction was one of caution. If, he argued, the public already found much of his visionary work ‘funny’, would they not find his explanations more so? Then suddenly he became enthusiastic. He would indeed write an autobiography. But it would not be assembled in the normal chronological arrangement. It would be a leisurely ‘stroll’ through his life, with pauses, diversions and retraces as the mood took him, a putting down on paper of the events, thoughts and feelings of his entire life to date. Nothing would be omitted. But neither would anything be stressed. The reader, making the journey with him, would be free to find the clues to his life, thinking and art, as Spencer himself had, often in strange and unexpected places.

The promoters were aghast. Some editing, they urged, must be accepted: ‘You are being offered a chance that you would be absolutely crazy to turn down,’² fumed Dudley Tooth. Spencer remained unmoved: ‘I would rather a book on myself and my work were a confused heap and mass of matter from which much could be gathered than risk something of myself being left out in the interests of conciseness.’³ The venture collapsed.

Spencer, despite the travail of his circumstances, was blithely unrepentant. The fact was that, seized by the idea, he had already started on the project in private and was to continue it for the rest of his days. There was no discernible pattern to his writings. He would compose extensive essays in thick notebooks, but equally make random jottings in scrapbooks, on drawings, on scraps of letters, on old envelopes, on anything to hand. He seldom kept letters but would draft replies, often unposted because having sorted out his thoughts in them they became more valuable to him in his own possession than in that of the intended recipient. Others were unsent because on reflection he felt their sentiments were too confessional or, in other moods, too accusatory. By the end of his life the writings totalled millions of words, heaped into several trunks into which he would dip to reread, reannotate, re-paginate, rearrange. ‘You can burn those,’ he told his brother Percy when he knew his time was measured. But by his death, in December of 1959, the matter had passed from Percy’s hands, and in any case Percy did not want the responsibility.

To read them now is a disturbing experience, for they are expressed with an intensity he would normally have denied the public gaze. They have been sieved by scholars for references to his paintings, but, interesting though these are, they offer little in the way of immediate illumination. Spencer knew this. They are written in a code, a language of his own which appears to be the language we also use, but is not. The language was born not of secrecy but from the impossibility all artists face, in whatever medium, of finding in the words or images or symbols they are given to use that universality their imagination perceives. In them his thoughts flow like a stream of consciousness, turning and twisting, so that the reader is soon lost in a tangle of developments and, if he or she can summon the will, must go back again and again to re-chart their course over even a few of the many thousands of pages. The surprise is that to each development there is invariably a beginning and an end; however many diversions Spencer took on the way, he usually knew both his direction and his destination. His imagery, bizarre and esoteric though it often seems, captures both the exuberance of his associations and the precision with which he externalized it in his art.

In venturing today into this study of Spencer’s life and art, boldness is offered; but it is boldness disciplined by the sense of the totality of his experience. An artistic interpretation which ignores Spencer’s material existence will remain truncated. Yet a biography which blinds itself to the revelation in his paintings of the facts of his existence can only perpetuate the superficiality which saw him – and sometimes sees him still – as whimsical or innocent or unworldy or even as blasphemer or pornographer. His oddities are, like the highly personal and visionary paintings he undertook, sudden flashes of lightning, often charged over long periods, which momentarily illuminate climaxes in a continuous procession in his mind, an inner pageant. The pageant overwhelmed him. To its service he dedicated both his art and his everyday existence. When he could reconcile them, he knew happiness. When they conflicted, he was torn. The demands of art invariably won, but the cost in material sacrifice could be cruelly high.

It would be a rash interpreter who claimed complete elucidation for so complex a personality. Spencer used his art to explain himself to himself. As with the poetry and prose of his contemporaries Eliot, Pound and Joyce, it is the exactness of personal detail in Spencer’s paintings which makes so many incomprehensible or uncomfortable. But the paintings were not intended to prompt discomfort. He lived in hope that the public would catch up with him. His art, perceived through sympathetic understanding of his life, can reveal a transcendent outlook, an intriguing and majestic vision of life which some may dismiss as no more than typical of his time, but which most may joyously recognise as having eternal and universal import.

A work of great art – pictorial, musical or literary – reaches out and touches some profundity in our nature independently of its maker. Awed, we may wish to know more of him or her. The quest is often disappointing. We can know nothing of Homer, little of Dante or Shakespeare. Of later artists, of whom we can search to know more, we sometimes ask ourselves how such fallible men and women could produce such sublimity. The purpose of this study is not to dissect Spencer and his art. Rather is it to recapture through the medium of his own words that sense of the wondrous and mysterious through which he became someone other than the everyday artist people thought they knew, and entered a heaven of his own which he felt he had to strive, through imagery, to share with us. Thus the narrative pauses at some of the major paintings representative of the main periods and events of Spencer’s life and offers suggestions as to their emotional origins. (The majority have been chosen as being available in public galleries. They may not always be on display, but can usually be seen by prior arrangement.)

Throughout this book, Spencer – Sir Stanley Spencer CBE, RA, Hon. D. Litt. – is referred to as ‘Stanley’, not as a mark of familiarity, but in order to distinguish him from his many brothers, and especially from his artist-brother Gilbert, with whom he was sometimes confused. Textually his writings have been rendered into conventional spelling and punctuation, no easy matter at times when he was in full flight. Occasionally bracketed insertions have been made to catch the sense of his often elided thought.

The obvious starting-point for the search for Stanley’s inner pageant must be the Thames-side village of Cookham where, in the cool unsettled summer of 1891, on 30 June, he was born.