Gluck Diana Souhami (smart books to read TXT) 📖

I realised after the first few minutes that she was deliberately ignoring the ‘YouWe’ picture which was cheek by jowl with ‘Noel’. So I wouldn’t let her get away with it and after I had allowed part of the thrill of ‘Noel’ to pass off, I said ‘and what do you think of that one?’ She turned to look at it and there was a long pregnant silence. Then she said, ‘Who is the other?’ No answer from me because I thought it too silly to answer. Forced to speak she said …‘Oh Nesta’!… More long pause then turning decisively away ‘No, I don’t like it. You have made her too male and you too feminine’! Later she said about it that it was ‘Sinister’!! Isn’t it comic? I knew it would be a shock and that originally she would be very jealous and I am certain that is the base of her reaction. It’s really as a picture entirely her cup of tea, being definite and designed and clean cut. She said what she hoped would destroy it for me.5

Gluck enjoyed both the provocative content of the picture and tantalizing people with the relationship it implied. Openness and yet secrecy, bravado, but reticence too. In later years few people knew that the blonde head was Nesta’s. They thought, correctly in a sense, that it was an idealized version of Gluck. The image made explicit a crucial psychological problem – her uncertainty as to where the boundaries between herself and others lay. Despite the defiant gaze she melts into another woman. In love she melted willingly if dangerously. In other contexts she battled for self-assertion, as if she was afraid of losing her will.

She thought her love for Nesta strong enough to overcome all opposition, surmount all problems and last for ever. She saw it as a homecoming, an answer to all problems, an end to loneliness and the realization of a romantic ideal. Years later, in her seventies, she confided that Nesta had been the only woman she had ever really loved.6 And in her old age Nesta was to say that only once had she been in love.7 Perhaps this love was with Gluck. Theirs was to be an absolute marriage outside of society’s terms:

‘Oh God, Oh God – There never has been such a thing as Us. We’re quite perfect I think don’t you?…’

‘Darling Heart, we are not an “affair” are we – We are husband and wife.’

I have never said or written ‘Eternity’ before … I have never as I have said to you over and over again – felt it before.… I was always looking for you, always hoping against hope for you – but never in my innermost heart did I think I had found you until I really did so … until you I count my life a dream and do not feel I even became conscious or began to live until I met you and claimed you. And any ditherings I have shown since that moment were only what you call ‘top nerves’. Never from that moment did I really deep inside think I could not find my only rest and peace in you. I knew about you and me, all I was not sure about was what life had in store and now I share wholeheartedly your vision and courage about that. Clear? As mud you will say and ask me all over again some time just to have the fun of hearing it all over again – and though it tears me a little because it brings back my mistakes, I will have such pleasure in repeating it all ad infinitum – that to all Eternity again …

Good night my most precious. I must just add two lines I discovered in an old notebook. Don’t know who wrote them or whence they came …

‘They have most power to hurt us whom we love

We lay our sleeping lives within their arms’

I love you – I long for you – I want you and I need you. All of you for all of me.8

It was on 23 May 1936 that a chauffeur arrived at Bolton House to drive Gluck down to Nesta’s home, The Mill House, Plumpton, for the weekend. Gluck and Nesta lazed in the garden, had breakfast in bed, read poetry at night and on the evidence of Gluck’s letters, fell in love. From that date on ‘N’s phone calls, letters, visits to the Hampstead studio, dinner dates and meetings, became the focus of Gluck’s diary entries. Most weekends were spent at Plumpton and there were few further visits to Constance’s house, Park Gate. When Gluck left, at the beginning of July 1936, for a pre-arranged painting holiday at the Hensons’ villa in Hammamet, Nesta saw her off from Dover, fed letters to her and was at the quayside when she returned two months later. They stayed for two nights at the Majestic Hotel, Folkestone, spent a week at the Mill House, then returned together to Bolton House.

Such of Gluck’s love letters to Nesta as have survived were all written in 1936 and early 1937. They were among her papers when she died, neatly folded in a red Charles Jourdan shoebox. Handwritten in ink on airmail paper, unsigned – mostly undated except for notes like ‘Wednesday morning in bed, 7.15 am’ or ‘Later the same day’ – Nesta, who did not live in the past or hoard possessions, letters or photographs, must have returned them to Gluck after their time together ended. Nesta threw most letters away, but if they were special returned them to their sender. For Gluck they were the ‘YouWe’ letters, a declaration of romantic love that bridged the gap of continual separation. ‘If I was able to write the most divine poetry to you it would still fall short of what I feel.’ There is no record of Nesta’s letters to her.

The Obermers moved around a good deal. They had the house