Gluck by Diana Souhami (most interesting books to read .TXT) 📗

try as one may to keep the big view they can buzz like gnats and be very disturbing.

How I wish to God I could say all this with you in my arms and your head snuggled on my shoulder. Having got it out I feel better and closer to you even though it’s on paper and Heaven alone knows how and with what a mood you will read it. The sun is pouring into my room on to our bed. Mabel [Gluck’s housekeeper] has just been in to see if I’m alright. I assured her I was grand and just getting up which I am.

One disadvantage of my job is that it shuts me up in one room and there is nothing to stop a bee buzzing, and to you, constantly on the move and with additional fresh contacts all this eremite drooling will seem exaggerated.

… All my love to you as ever – and for ever

That was only pale because I blotted it at once. Not because I feel reticent about it. All my love now and forever.

‘What’s this dull town to me,’ wrote Nesta of St Moritz. But winter sporting is different from working alone in a studio all day. Gluck’s news was only of love and work and she feared that the latter at least might bore:

Is all this studio chat too remote and musty for the gay, glittering atmosphere of St Moritz and caravanserai hotels and haute monde? How well I know it all! Perhaps it is a little depressing for you to get all this kind of thing?

Certainly Mrs Obermer cannot have been entirely carefree on the ski slopes – her father failing (he was to die in April 1937), her mother writing depressed letters, her lover jealous and impassioned and her husband urging her to prolong her stay. He sent Gluck a postcard and the claim he was making threw her into a turmoil and pained her to read:

The hoar frost on the trees and bushes would fascinate you. What pictures you could conjure up here. Another year you too must come. I hope you are satisfied with your work. Nesta looks another person and I too am feeling fine. Nesta’s mother writes lugubrious letters about her father and so N. has decided to leave here in a week. I am doing my best to prevent it, as it is doing her so much good and she simply loves the skating. I don’t believe it is necessary for N. to return and I have written her mother begging her to send a reassuring letter so N. can remain a few weeks longer. Love Seymour.

Gluck could make no overt claims to the time or attentions of the woman whom she loved and regarded as her wife. She was dependent on endless letters and secret nights. She could scarcely have travelled to St Moritz, explained that Nesta and she were really married and gone home with her together and for ever. Nothing in law either condoned or condemned her feelings. They were simply beyond the pale. To her, integrity of feeling must have its concomitant in integrity of expression. That was her creative ideal. To go against love so deep was self-betrayal, the ultimate crime. But however confident she felt about love for all Eternity, the pain of additional weeks of separation was more than she could bear.

Years later, when Gluck was in a safe but unromantic relationship, Nesta wrote from Honolulu, where she had moved with her husband, about the difference in their depth of feeling. She believed there was an invisible line which separated the truly talented, like Gluck, from more ordinary mortals such as herself.

Royal Hawaiian

On the Beach at Waikiki

Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

9 March 1952

Beloved Tim

This ain’t a fairwell letter coz there ain’t no fare-lells, but just to tell you what your friend Charlot said yesterday. They dined with us. I was telling him my theory about the invisible line and that you understood at once, and said you thought the reason I was below it was because I didn’t love enough. He thought a moment and nodded and then said: ‘Also, to be a creative artist, you must be very good.’ ‘Good?’ I said, surprised. ‘But haven’t there been many bad men who were fine creative artists?’ He shook his head. ‘Not in the final sense.’ I thought of Yeats’ line ‘And I saw the blessedest soul alive, and he waved a drunken head, – But he went on: ‘Do you know what Matisse said to Braque? He said, “When you start a picture you must recapture the atmosphere of your first communion.”’

I nearly bust myself wanting my Tim. It was terrific, wasn’t it?

I enclose – no I don’t – I tell you the amended itinerary. Imperial Hotel, Tokyo. Then Bangkok, Hotel Oriental from April 26th to Tuesday May 4th. Singapore (Hotel Raffles) only from 4th to 6th and Bali from 6th to 23rd. Don’t attempt any communication to Bali or Bangkok – only Japan, Manilla, Singapore, Sydney and Auckland. Fiji, Samoa are also hopeless, because even aeroplanes only come every ten days.

So you see Tim was touching the nail on the ’ead when’ee said I didn’t love enough, and it’s only thanks to your thought that I got the added nuggets.

In their early days together such philosophical conundrums about Love do not seem to have preoccupied them. But there were always the obstructive roots and brambles. Gluck, while living only for the next meeting, was optimistic that a path would be cleared – in much the same way as she set her sights on Eternity while working specifically for her 1937 show. And promises were airily and vaguely made. In 1936 when Gluck was in her studio in Cornwall Nesta wrote: ‘It’ll be the last time you’ll be there without me, d’you realise that.’ ‘Sweetheart do you mean this,’ Gluck replied, ‘or did you just write it in a sudden spasm? Anyway I love you for it and feel