A Cover Story – 31/08/2024

I do not know if our recent Rainer Maria Rilke event, celebrating Martyn Crucefix’s translation of and decades of work committed to the poet, was the cause of my returning to God’s Little Artist by Sue Hubbard, a poetry collection about Gwen John. Rilke and John became friends in Paris in the early twentieth century. Both had close and complicated relationships with Rodin, noted in Crucefix’s Rilke and in Hubbard’s poetry.

I do not know if the painting by Gwen John, The Convalescent, on the cover of Hubbard’s book led me to begin a novel which I have been meaning to read for a long time, The Life of Rebecca Jones by Angharad Price. If so, conscious thought played no part in this for it was not until I saw the books next to each other that I realised they have matching covers.

I do not know if thoughts of Gwen John’s brother, Augustus John, reminded me to look into Charlie Porter’s book about the Bloomsbury Group, Bring No Clothes.

I do know that this moved Miranda Seymour’s biography of Ottoline Morrell further up the to be read mountain(s), her lavish sartorial choices being just the start of what one longs to discover. (After all, look at how Augustus John depicted Morrell’s chin in his portrait of her. An extraordinary creation. I must learn more.)

I do know that it was in this mood of reading about art in fiction and non-fiction and the indiscrete spaces in between that I turned to the other books I recommend here. There are so many connections between them it’s almost indecent.

God’s Little Artist by Sue Hubbard is a collection of poems which form a biography of Gwen John, from growing up in Tenby to attending the Slade School of Art to life in France as model, artist and anchorite, to her death in 1939. As individual poems, they are intricate portraits of moments in time. As a whole, they are cinematic, moving and playful.

The Life of Rebecca Jones by Angharad Price, translated by Lloyd Jones is a fictionalised account of the life of Price’s great-aunt, part of a farming family in the Maesglasau valley. (There is a Welsh pronunciation guide at the back of the book, if you’re wondering.) Three of Rebecca’s four brothers were blind. A documentary was made about them in the sixties which the character Rebecca watches in the novel. It breaks her heart. Price’s deft writing illuminates where the visible has previously gone unseen.

Bring No Clothes by Charlie Porter explores why we wear what we do and the constraints and possibilities of fashion, through six members of the Bloomsbury Group. The exhortation to ‘bring no clothes’ was addressed to guests by Virginia Woolf and a similar message came from her sister, Vanessa Bell. Don’t dress for dinner, was its meaning. No need for rigid formality and all the social significance carried within the folds of Victorian garments.

The book is a fascinating examination of class and history. I still rather like the idea of dressing for dinner in the style of Ottoline Morrell and am looking forward to meeting her in Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale by Miranda Seymour.

Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul refrains from using The Convalescent for its cover but Paul does keep a copy on display in her studio. Paul’s letters to John, imagining that she is able to communicate with a fellow artist with whom she shares much (in temperament and affairs) are obsessive and intimate, almost making a one-sided address a real dialogue. They are too an insight into writing a self-portrait whilst apparently looking at someone else.

Thinking about portraits, their subjects and their creators, I have thoroughly enjoyed the novel The Painter’s Daughters by Emily Howes about Gainsborough’s daughters, and often his models, Peggy and Molly. Howes’ imagining of their relationship with their father and each other and creation of the narrator Peggy’s voice is addictive.

From Peggy Gainsborough to Peggy Guggenheim, Rebecca Godfrey’s last book, Peggy, is a fictionalised account of Guggenheim’s extraordinary life from losing her father at a young age – he died on the Titanic – to building her art collection in travels across Europe and America whilst facing war, sexism and antisemitism.

Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky is a love affair with cinema, celebrating and encouraging the collective experience of art. Kinsky was travelling in Hungary near the Romanian border when she found a closed and decaying cinema. Moved by thoughts of Berger and the many ways of seeing, she decided to revive it. As one does.

Artwork is on display in brilliant children’s books too.

As well as the illustrations themselves, art is in the making and the subject of discussion in Bear and Bird: The Picnic and Other Stories by Jarvis. I love this series and recommend it frequently but cannot write this newsletter without again encouraging you to read the story in which Bear and Bird try their hand at painting.  

Pernickety Boo by Sally Gardner, illustrated by Chris Mould is magnificent. Sylvie Moonshine finds an umbrella at a jumble sale which an absent-minded magician once used to stir a potion. The umbrella has named itself Pernickety Boo and is exploring the powers it has since developed. I see in one of Sylvie’s mothers a Vanessa Bell figure and there is a rather glorious handbag which puts one in mind of Ottoline Morrell. But that may just be me.  

Pernickety Boo has a dog’s head rather than the traditional duck. For your duck, and indeed your goose, needs:  
Colin’s Castle by Holly Swain is about a vampire who wants to settle into his new home, as we all do after the stress of moving, only to find a squatter in the castle: a rather tempestuous duck who shows no sign of leaving and every sign of wanting to enjoy Colin’s bath.
If you think that sounds intrusive, try holding a conversation when Hank the goose is nearby. Hank Goes Honk by Maudie Powell-Tuck, illustrated by Duncan Beedie is about a goose who keeps interrupting, even in the library or the cinema. Gwen John and Esther Kinsky could teach him some etiquette. In their absence, others step forward.

We’ll be with the rather more poetic cormorant in a couple of weeks’ time: do join us at 6pm on 14 September to hear Elizabeth Parker reading from her second collection. Tickets are available here on in the shop.

The week after, we are hugely looking forward to celebrating Orla Owen’s novel, Christ on a Bike on 20 September. I hope you can join us to share poetry and fiction together.  

May your weekend bloom with art and may you never forget your umbrella, even if you bring no clothes,
Lizzie  

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