My first impression of Moret, and indeed the impression that remains with me still, was of a tiny compact little town hardly more than a village, but self-contained with no scattered houses on its edge. One left the country and abruptly entered the town. Moret les Sablons, the nearest railway station, was some distance away; you passed through the forest of Fontainebleau on the train. Moret itself stood near the fringe of the forest and on the banks of the fast-flowing Loing, a delightful river noted for its fishing and at that point about as wide as the Thames at, say, Goring. Approaching the town from the station one entered by an ancient stone archway built somewhat in the form of a tower. One was now in the Grande Rue, the main street, only a few hundred yards long, which ran downhill through another archway, similar to the first, on over the old stone bridge and so towards the canal, which just there paralleled the river, and into the country again. By the bridge there were flour mills, quite pleasing buildings in their way. Moret’s chief attraction is the magnificent old church built on a rise in the ground towards the centre of the town. The church, seen from the far bank of the river with the bridge and archway in front, had been painted many times by Alfred Sisley, who may be said to have made the place famous as a resort for painters, much as Claude Monet made Giverny.
At Moret we both began to work regularly. One canvas in the mornings and another in the afternoon. Sometimes we went out painting together, sometimes I went off by myself. There was lots to paint and the weather was perfect. We both drank a great deal of wine but not too much – for a while. About six each evening we used to meet at a little café in the main street, the Select; for Moret too had its Select. Just one Pernod before dinner. We kept to just one. Leon Kelly, an American, a good friend of Rowley’s, was usually there. I liked Leon immensely. He was a very talented painter. He helped me a great deal. He had married a French girl and they lived in a studio near the bridge, overlooking the river.
During the aperitif hour excitement was provided as we sat round the green painted table in the open front of the café that faced up the Grande Rue to the old stone archway which marked the finish to the town. About 6.30 every evening the waiter said, pointing up the road, ‘Here come Monsieur Jack!’ And at the top of the hill framed in the light coming through the archway we saw a dark figure on a bicycle getting larger and more distinct as it cruised down the hill at full speed, swaying alarmingly from side to side, missing disaster by millimetres. It was Jack en route to his evening Pernod at the Select. As he came abreast of us Jack gripped his brakes and steered towards the kerb. Some evenings he mounted fairly well, other times he fell off and the patron of the café rushed to help him up. It depended on the number of Pernods he had had on the way, but no matter how tight he was, Jack never fell off until he was opposite the Select. Sometimes we might be in time to catch him before he reached the ground. A stoutish middle-aged, not t0o clean shaven Englishman, he had been a vet in the army during the Great War. After the Armistice he had stayed in France and made a living doctoring cows and horses for the farmers round about Moret. Pernod was his passion. I have seen Jack’s face every imaginable colour – mauve, yellow, red, green, blue. We used to have bets on it. Jack lived for Pernod; he would take five or six in a couple of hours , and that is hard going.
Dinner at the Auberge de la Terrasse, where Rowley and I stayed, was served out of doors in a kind of gravelled yard that opened out of the inn. It was enclosed on two sides by walls against which were a few creepers. At the far end was a stone parapet over which one could lean and look down on the bank of the Loing. Gaily coloured wash-house boats and a bath house were moored to the near bank. Beyond, on the other side, were tall trees, whilst above them and slightly to the left rose a hill. On fine summer evenings it became very lovely and one forgot the row of lavatories badly screened by a hedge of dusty privet that occupied one side of the yard. About half a dozen tables covered with gaily checked tablecloths were placed haphazardly. Behind the lavatories a flight of stone steps led down to the river bank. On fine Sundays the high old-fashioned pay desk of dark wood was moved, with a great deal of trouble, from its usual place in the hall out into the yard – I should really call it the terrasse.
Then the local fishmonger, sixtyish, with short white hair, resplendent in a frock coat, a thin streak of coloured ribbon in the buttonhole, presided at ‘la caisse’, solemnly shook you by the hand and wrote mysterious things in a huge ledger, tracing lines and figures with a slow, spidery precision, holding the pen in his great red paw that had thick golden hairs on its back. A delightful fellow, this fishmonger. He shook hands with everyone, he beamed good-naturedly. In the mornings Rowley and I used to see him at his fish stall, in the town near the church, his shirt sleeves rolled up over muscular arms which were now covered with fish scales. He roared a greeting and then gravely, with a kind of sideways twist, presented you with his elbow or upper arm to be shaken. I believe when he was alone he shook hands with himself. Rowley got on very well with him; neither understood a word the other said but Rowley had, through me, told the fishmonger what an indispensable article fish was for ‘fixing you up in the morning’.
We did not sleep late in the mornings although we were seldom in bed before 1am. About 9, Rowley dragged me off to buy fish, which we took round the corner to Leon’s studio. Leon, pottering about in pyjamas, fussed with a canvas, and his wife sat up in bed yawning like some sleepy animal. ‘Come on Leon, tell her to fix that fish, nothing like it for breakfast. We have got some watercress, too.’ And Marcelle got up slowly from among the tumbled bedclothes, still heavy-eyed and yawning, and throwing an old shawl over her nightdress began to cook the fish. I slipped downstairs for a jug of coffee from the nearest café and by the time I got back the fish was nearly ready. I never touched it myself, could not be bothered with the bones, but I usually nibbled some watercress to please Rowley. Moret was famous for its watercress, there were large beds of it growing near the river. Rowley was delighted when he discovered he was sure of a constant supply of this wonderful food – a sure remedy for hangover. It seemed to work with him, that and the fish, at least for a time. Perhaps because he believed in them.
On my way up the uncarpeted stairs with the jug of coffee I might pass Moret’s only whore wrapped in a soiled dressing gown on her way to the café for a morning coffee and a petit verre. She moved slowly on her wooden leg, her hair tousled and her face still with the traces of the previous night’s make-up. After dark she haunted the streets, standing in her doorway listening for the footfalls of possible clients. For after dark the little town was very still. The cafés closed at 11 p.m. There were no lights showing in the houses for most people went to bed early. I do not remember street lamps. Always the last to leave, we came out of the Select into the dark night.
No traffic and the streets practically deserted. Away down by the bridge the beam of an electric torch wandered, momentarily lighting up a close-shuttered window, throwing into sharp light and shade the cornice of a building or the edge of a kerb and the pavé. Moret’s only whore was searching for someone to take home, up those creaking wooden stairs and through the long dark passage, to her room beneath Leon’s studio. She has heard our voices and the beam of light swings in our direction to be focussed on our faces. She stays in the doorway and as we come close greets us. I suppose she did not want us to notice her uneven walk and awkward movements caused by that wretched artificial leg. But soon she gave up accosting us. Leon once assured me that she did fairly well, holding as she did in Moret the monopoly of her profession.
Somehow wherever I found myself with Rowley I found drunks. As I read through what I have written so far, the main theme seems to be alcohol. I find it on almost every page and I suspect you have already begun to wonder if we knew any really sober people.
It is fascinating to discover or to imagine one has discovered reasons for conduct. In oneself and in others. It is too easy to dismiss a drunk as merely weak-willed. Many weak-willed people do not drink or use other drugs. I think Rowley drank because he wanted companionship, for when he had stopped working he felt bored. Possibly his boredom had, at the beginning, grown out of unhappiness. I do not know. He could not, after a day’s painting, sustain an intellectual conversation for long, although he liked to be with intelligent people; but as I watched the antics of some of his drinking companions, I felt that our painter must have his clowns to amuse him. And he was the greatest clown of them all when he was in the mood. He used to say it was a good thing that I kept my legs, otherwise he might never get home. He had something in him that simply asked to be looked after.
Unlike most of his companions, Rowley worked. That alone endeared him to me. And then he worked so well. His oils at that time were glittering things, full of colour and light. I feel that they were not very profound, but they expressed such delight in the coloured appearance of things in sunlight. He became profound later on, when perhaps he realized at last that there were only a few years left.
And so leaving Leon at the door of his studio we go on down the sleeping street towards the great chestnut trees that stand before the inn. Rowley was going to paint those trees. I wonder if he ever did. And Pierre the landlord is waiting up for us. Pierre, drunk and a trifle annoyed that we have been spending our money at the Select and not with him.
Pierre – short and thickset like a little bull. His thick black hair commencing such a short way from his heavy eyebrows under which little eyes look straight out, piercingly.
‘A brandy, Pierre, before we go to bed,’ I say, and Pierre, softened, leads the way into the darkened bar, turns up the lights and setting three glasses and a bottle on the counter, pours out a generous measure. And after another, ‘C’est avec moi, Messieurs.’ Pierre looks at me and says with his deep gruff voice, ‘Ah you think too much Monsieur Clifford. It is a great mistake. I too, I think too much. During the war I was with the ambulance. With this hand I have killed Frenchmen, my own countrymen. Shot them. They begged me to do it, to end their agony. And I did. There was nothing else to do, but I cannot forget.’ And Pierre must pour out another brandy, slopping it over the counter with a shaking hand.
I persuade Rowley to come up to bed, telling him it will be fine tomorrow and he wants to finish his picture. We leave Pierre, sitting now, his elbows on the table, dark and glowering, the eternal black stubble framing his face, a brutal face in which strangely kind piercing eyes stare out at the opposite wall, past the half-empty brandy bottle and the coarse, squat little glasses.
We creep up the stairs to Rowley’s room on the first floor. ‘Come in a moment and just have a last cigarette. I’m not drunk, only I can’t sleep, and I don’t want you to go just yet. Stay and talk a while.’ He falls on the bed still in his clothes and I pull a blanket over him. We talk for a while. He lies on his back and I can see the red glowing tip of his cigarette, and if I turn my head I dimly sense the trees on the far bank of the river and in the stillness I hear the wind gently moving their leaves. There is a slight movement behind me and the red cigarette tip begins to move slowly downward and then stops. He has taken it from his lips. The cigarette still glows between the long fingers of his hand lying limply just over the edge of the bed. His voice dies away. I carefully take the cigarette from him. I wait a few more minutes to make sure he is really asleep. At last I leave him, closing the door carefully, and I go up the next flight of stairs to my own room that also looks over the river towards the dark rustling trees on the far bank.
For a few weeks Rowley had behaved himself reasonably well, then the weather broke and it rained for some days. Work was interrupted. But apart from the weather, Rowley had struck a dull patch. Every artist does from time to time. He had been working hard and now he talked of leaving Moret and going back to Paris. The country was beginning to bore him and he wanted to see Montparnasse again. Meanwhile there was another money hitch so he had to remain in Moret, whether he liked it or not, cursing the bastards who bought his work and then kept him waiting for the money and the rain which would not let him finish his pictures.
The Auberge was full. Several American painters with their wives, Willy Gilman and little Lucette from the Dôme, and a Pernod fiend whom Rowley nicknamed the Duchess of Canada, and Danilevsky with his ukulele. Danny soon learned all Rowley’s favourite songs. He played well and he played incessantly. Rowley was delighted. With such a willing accompanist always there when he was wanted there was no excuse for not joining in the choruses of ‘Barnacle Bill’ and ‘The Sentimental Skipper’. Rowley’s *father turned up from Manchester. He was a quiet old chap and sometimes he ventured to suggest that Rowley took things a little more quietly. This only made Rowley very angry. ‘The old man is all right but why the hell can’t he leave me alone? He gets on my nerves.’ The father was a sedate, older edition of the son, with less personality, but about the same height and with the same big nose. He used to come sketching with us, carrying Rowley’s paint box. He stretched his canvas and attempted to wash his brushes. When it was hot Rowley generally sent him off to the nearest café for cannettes of beer. He was lonely, I am sure, and I talked to him often but I never heard him say what he thought of his son’s work. He talked a lot but I cannot remember a word he said. He went to bed early and if he did come with us to the Select he never stayed for more than a couple of drinks. I believe Rowley had to keep him. Years after, Rowley said that the old man had spoiled a lot of his paintings by oiling and then varnishing, making them go horrid and yellow. Rowley was furious.
* Thomas Smart, a grocer, born circa 1863 in Altrincham, Cheshire (now in the Greater Manchaster area). GRH
Pierre was doing well. Every room in the place was taken and he decided to have a raised wooden platform built jutting over the river, on which diners would have their food and admire the view. There was a deal of planning and consultations with the builder and one morning a couple of workmen carried a lot of great wooden piles into the yard and started to dig holes to receive them. Now this leads up to the ‘Duchess of Canada’ for she fell into one of the holes and Rowley and I hooked her out, and that is how we got to know her. She was not a very attractive person, and although she had let us see that she was dying to join our party we had not encouraged her. Danilevsky treated her abominably. He took a sadistic pleasure in encouraging her to drink until she became quite crazy. And Danny saw to it that she bought him plenty of wine. It never had any effect on him, that I could see.
When the weather was bad we ate indoors in a large room that ran from back to front of the inn. Danny sat at the Duchess’ table. Tilting back in his chair apparently not very interested in the food, his eyes half closed, he made me think of a sleepy cat; only this cat smoked Russian cigarettes, drank red wine or Pernod and played with a ukulele. The claws were there though; and as the evening wore on Danny’s music became more urgent, with something hard and compelling about it.
He plied his companion with drink, she was paying, and his own glass was never empty. ‘Come on you old bitch, I’m bored! Give us a dance,’ Danny roused her. ‘And take another shot of Pernod to liven you up!’ He began to play again and the Duchess jumped from her chair, finished her drink and danced. Danny sat there, tilting backwards, smoke rising from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. His attitude was indolent but the dark brown eyes, still half closed, now looked cruel and gleamed viciously. ‘Faster, put some guts into it!’ The poor Duchess gasped and whirled as the rhythm of the music quickened. She whipped off her dress and danced naked. I was surprised the first time it happened and I realized her frock was her only garment. Her thin body leaped in complete abandon whilst Danny smiled softly, showing white teeth. Never changing his lolling pose he played with frenzy until the dancer, utterly exhausted, fell to the floor. Danny had achieved the climax I knew he had been planning for hours. He got up and glancing at his victim drawled ‘Bloody old fool. Guess I’ll take a look outside.’
The rain has stopped and after a little while I hear the sound of Danny’s playing again. I walk out to the terrasse. The air is fresh, lovely after the rain. The wet gravel crunches under my feet, behind me Rowley shouts to Pierre for another drink. At the far end of the terrasse I can see Danny, his white shirt and pale face showing clearly in the moonlight. He is sitting on a corner of the stone parapet, leaning lazily against the wall, overlooking the river. He is a white silhouette against the dark trees. His head thrown back, he stares at the moon sailing high above us. But now he plays a sad Russian song and he plays with such exquisite feeling that I stand quiet and listen, wondering. Indoors, Pierre’s wife and her sister are helping the Duchess up the stairs to bed.
At last I turn away and ask Pierre about the Duchess. * ‘Elle dort. C’est triste. On dirait une femme dégénérée par l’alcool.’ Well, he sold her the drink, it was his business for he kept a bar; and after all he made no effort to stop her drinking it. One day two women came in a handsome car and took the Duchess away. Who were they? What relation? I don’t know. I was glad to see her go.
* i.e.”She sleeps. It’s sad. Looks like a woman degenerated by alcohol.”
What constitutes the fascination of the life we led at Moret? And why do I remember it so clearly? Remember the trunks of the trees beside the river? Trunks that were streaked with the palette scrapings of the artists who had painted there. Some of those smears were years old. The tiny fish that swarmed in the deep water close to the shore, safe from the fast-running stream. The two little American girls who came to Moret for a weekend, unwittingly strayed into the tough gang at Pierre’s, Rowley and I taking them on the river. I rowed towards the aqueduct and we went ashore at a little village some way downstream. Rowley and I had a red wine each and the girls chose grenadine. Rowley was strangely silent all the time. On the way back to avoid the full strength of the water I pulled close to the bank. Yellow irises grew there. The girls were delighted. One clasped her hands and said ‘Goody!’ I paddled, holding the boat against the stream and they leaned over and picked bunches of the flowers.
When we got back the one who had said ‘Goody’ thanked me for the ‘ride’! I had never heard boating spoken of in that way before. She explained that they were at a finishing school in Paris and had told the headmistress they were spending the weekend with friends from New York. After dinner she gave me two bunches of the yellow irises we had gathered, they were prettily tied up with the ribbon she had worn in her hair. ‘For your rooms, you and your friend,’ she said.
I gave Rowley his bunch of flowers and he took them upstairs and put them in the water jug on the wash stand. He was very subdued and touched by the incident. ‘Fancy Cliff, just schoolgirls. No, we must not try anything with them. I would not be right somehow.’ I cannot recall their names and they left next morning.
There were nights when we sat under the stars and the candles burned steadily within their little transparent cardboard shades. One to each table, throwing circular pools of light on the red and white checked clothes. Danny played softly and sang to himself and forgot to plague the Duchess. A splash now and again as a big fish jumped in the water below. Two dark figures, a boy and a girl, wander by the side of the river, their bodies seeming one, so close are they. I watch Clare and think how lovely she is. I am held by the perfect drawing of her neck. I wish she wasn’t married to Max because I like him, and I wish too that she would not return my look so wickedly, smiling invitingly. She is eighteen but not a bit like the American girls we took on the river. Clare is very sophisticated. She frightens me – but I cannot stop looking at her.
Rowley is telling Leon about his friend Marcel who owned a flour mill somewhere in or near Moret. Marcel was quite well off. He had two cars. He did not get on well with his wife and they quarrelled over the cars. So Marcel sold them and bought a steam roller. ‘Used to dash about in that with a hell of a rattle – a great guy.’
But now he is talking about Ireland and what a beautiful place it is to paint and how well he worked there. ‘I could paint anything there. And when it was too bad to work out of doors I bought flowers to paint in my room at the hotel. Once I got some waterlilies and floated them in the bath and painted those. I fixed it so they looked as if they were in a pond and I was seeing them from above.’
Leon told us that his wife was always grumbling at him because he did not work hard enough and make more money. Leon used to spend days just lying about out of doors, looking at the sky and the trees; afterwards he worked like a demon, making perhaps a dozen watercolours in a day. They were very sensitive. But his wife would have been more pleased, he said, if he had painted just one a day and did not ‘waste’ so many hours doing nothing. ‘She can’t see that I must think about things before I paint them.
Whilst we were in Moret Rowley became interested in lithography. Max Simpson, Clare’s husband, gave him some chalk and a few sheets of transfer paper and Rowley made one or two small drawings. Some years later he drew his series of lithographs of old Paris streets.
I had got to know a French painter, Briant, and I used to spend some evenings playing billiards with him, the local doctor and the patron of the Café du Siècle Siele, where Briant was staying with his pretty wife and little daughter. Briant was very charming to me and through him I sold a picture to one of his clients, borrowing the fare to Paris from Pierre for I was hard up again. I can’t remember the picture very well. It was, however, of the Loing with its coloured boats and the hill in the background. I still have a preliminary study in pen that I made for it.
We celebrated the sale of the picture in the Select one evening. The crowd were there, including Jack the vet. He was a frightful colour, bright mauve – the evening before his complexion had been distinctly green. Moret was such a sleepy little place; there wasn’t much excitement except that provided by the artists. Once a wheel had come off the two horse van that used to go every day to meet the train. Moretl talked about it for weeks. This evening the patron was telling us about a circus, arrived early that morning, showing tonight, your only chance to see it. A gaudy poster already advertised its attractions from behind the bar. ‘Forest bred lions.’ ‘The Red Indian Chief and his Braves.’ ‘Trapeze Artists’ etc, etc. The performance commenced at 8.45 and we all decided to go.
As it happened Jack got there first, rather against his wishes. We were intercepted by a fellow wearing a dirty maroon coat with shabby gold facings. He was from the circus. The proprietor had been told there was a vet in the town and had sent to ask him to come and look at one of the animals. Monsieur Jack was pointed out.
‘Oh’ he said, ‘one of the horses gone lame eh? Well, I’ll see what I can do.’
‘No, monsieur, it is not one of the horses.’
‘Not a horse’ says Jack, his eye on the flaming poster with ‘Forest Bred Lions; in block capitals six inches high, ‘then I fear I cannot help you.’
It was a lion, the man explained, but monsieur need have no fear. The trainer would be there, and in any case the animal was very weak, refused to eat and lay in a corner of its cage.
But Jack wouldn’t budge. ‘Not in my line at all.’
The man went off but presently came back with the proprietor of the show. He summed up Jack at once and bought him a Pernod. Someone stood another round. The circus proprietor bought a third and Jack began to get quite brave. It cost the owner of the lion quite a bit in Pernods, but finally he and Jack lurched off arm in arm.
Jack actually went into the cage. The lion died soon after and the circus people all said it was his fault.
That evening, at the circus, the lion tamer came among the audience, as is the custom in some Continental shows, selling postcards of herself with the lions grouped dejectedly round her. Rowley spoke to her in English and she replied in the same language with a real Manchester accent. He made what he would have called ‘a grab at her’. She turned and caught him a terrific wallop on the jaw. He swung backwards over the narrow seating and before I could catch him, crashed down with a hell of a clatter, bringing an avalanche of planks and people with him.
Rowley was getting more and more difficult. He behaved at times like a spoiled child. Without warning I have seen him pick up a dish of food and fling it over the parapet into the river just because he didn’t like the look of it. Or it might go out of the window, smashing the dish to pieces. Pierre, coming back from retrieving the spoon, only smiled. ‘I like artists in my house. They are so gay.’
‘No difficulty in finding where Rowley is living. Just look for the bits of broken crockery lying around.’ said Max.
At last I had to go back to England. The Select gave us a champagne party to celebrate the paying of our bill, for we had both managed to get some cash. It was held after 11 when the café was closed. The management provided one large bottle of champagne per head, there were about half a dozen of us, and of course we ended up by getting quite a few more bottles. It was an expensive send-off. We shut Willy Gilman in the lavatory because he kept on fighting with his French girl, Lucette. Lucette was very happy. She put flowers in her hair and hung a wreath of them round her neck. She danced. ‘I want everyone to be happy,’ she cried. ‘All my life I have only wanted that.’
The party finished late and Lucette ran ahead of us down the moonlit street, leaving a trail of pale and dying flowers behind her.
Rowley came back to Paris with me to see me off. I only just caught the train.
* * * * * * *
‘He needs a woman to look after him. Someone who could direct his really remarkable talent.’
The words are Leon’s and they occur in one of the letters he wrote me shortly after I left Môret and was back in London. Rowley was now in Montparnasse and judging by his fairly frequent letters to me he continued to lead his usual life. His letters sometimes contained descriptions of parties; once the news that Willy Gilman had died from an overdose of Veronal. Now and again he mentioned he was working.
Sometime after he returned to Montparnasse, Rowley took a studio in the rue Daguerre, which is on the way to the Porte d’Orléans, near the huge bronze Lion de Belfort. It is within easy walking distance of Montparnasse.
And about that time Ruth Hallmann went to live with him. One of his letters told me they had settled down in the studio, they had got a cat – he loved cats – and everything was ‘swell’. I hoped that maybe he had found the type of woman he thought he needed. The news that Homer Bevans lived close by was, however, disturbing. I knew my Rowley by now. All was well when he had been in Moret with the Finn until Homer and his gang helped to drive her away. I had, it is true, found it impossible to stop Rowley drinking, indeed I hadn’t tried, but I succeeded, more or less, in helping him to put some limit on it.
Ruth stayed with Rowley until he died in 1934. She was with him when he came back to England in 1932. I saw her then for the first time. Early one morning I went to King’s Cross to meet them. Rowley looked ill and exhausted and Ruth and I had almost to lift him out of the train.
Ruth was a big, fair-haired Scandinavian. She had large yellowish brown eyes and she stared very hard at me. She spoke English with an accent not easy to understand. During the long taxi drive to my studio in West Kensington she told me how often Rowley had spoken to her about me. ‘You are his best friend,’ she said, looking at me with her bold eyes. I felt she was summing me up, trying to find out how much influence I had over Rowley, for she treated him as if he belonged to her utterly. Rowley sat humped up in a corner of the cab. He complained of the cold although he was wearing three overcoats, one on top of the other. He had an alarming cough and his eyes looked feverish. It was some years since I had seen him, and I saw a terrible change.
At the studio Ruth helped me cook bacon and eggs on the gas ring and we made tea. After the meal Rowley sat on my old green sofa and cheered up a little, but he still coughed terribly.
There was a portfolio among his luggage. It was full of watercolours of Paris streets, many of them crowded with figures. I thought they were among the finest things he had done, and I think so still. His art had, like himself, changed greatly. These drawings possessed, for me, an almost overpowering sense of sadness. Yet they were full of life and movement. The sunlight of Moret and of the Paris oils I remembered had gone. Rowley had dug deeper, reached far beyond his previous concern with the accidental light and shade, the charming coloured effects of sunlight. Here was the very soul of the streets. In design they were masterly.
Rowley told me what a difficult business it had been getting away from Paris. He owed rent and Ruth and he had managed to get a few paintings at a time past the concierge, leaving them with various friends. I forget how they finally managed to take their luggage away but I remember him telling me that on the way to the station they kept on telling the driver to stop so as to pick up various pictures and only just arrived at the station in time for the train. It had been an exhausting business, and he did not know how he would have got on without Ruth.
They had arrived at such short notice that I had no time to find them a room. There was no bed in the studio for I was only using it to work in. I remembered an old friend of Rowley’s, Mrs Dockrell, and we all went to her little antique shop in Kenway Road, Earl’s Court. She knew plenty of people who let rooms and we were able, with her help, to find a place that afternoon. Not long after, Rowley moved to a couple of furnished rooms in Paultons Square, Chelsea. They had not been there long when the ceiling fell down. Luckily one of Wentworth Studios in Manresa Road was vacant and for some months Rowley lived there with Ruth. He did a few oils of Chelsea streets and some flower paintings in the studio. His health was getting steadily worse. Some days he was too weak to get up. Although he would not admit it I think he knew by now that his lungs were going fast. He smoked and drank comparatively little, chiefly I think because it no longer gave him any real satisfaction. A morbid streak began to appear in him, yet he kept his sense of humour only now it had a quality of grimness. There was a song, very popular just then, called ‘Ain’t It Grand To Be Blooming Well Dead‘. Rowley never tired of putting it on the gramophone. He wished Danny was there to play it on his ukulele. He made a large watercolour of a funeral procession and he named it after the song. He seemed to gloat over it.
He talked very often of his health. He consulted doctors. His friend *Doctor Stross came to see him. A change of climate was thought necessary and Ruth took him to Mousehole near Penzance, Cornwall. Although he wrote telling me how he loathed being there his health undoubtedly improved for a time, and he painted some fine watercolours and a few oils. In these oils he abandoned the almost pointilliste technique he had used in Moret and he now worked with a fully loaded brush with plenty of impasto. They were strong and amazingly vigorous.
* Dr Stross, Rowley’s friend, doctor and patron Barnett Stross (1899-1967) GRH
In 1933 he had an exhibition at the Leger Gallery of the Paris watercolours and the work he had done in Cornwall. Rowley came back to London for the show and stayed at the * Eiffel Tour Hotel. He was sick of Cornwall. He said the Cornish were the most miserable lot of people he had ever lived among, and he was a fool to have gone there, also the climate was filthy and would have surely killed him had he stayed there any longer. The improvement in his health was only temporary for his disease had now developed all its terrifying characteristics, playing with its victim, giving him sudden bursts of energy and hope, only to leave him utterly prostrate, coughing up blood-stained phlegm. He had finished with smoking and he could not even bear the smoke from other people’s cigarettes, it made him cough. I never smoked when I was with him. He had grown a full beard, and it gave him a wild, prophet-like appearance, with his hawk-like nose and keen piercing eyes. He lost weight and became pitifully wasted. Ruth was devoted to him in her way but I could not help wishing that she had discouraged him from going to the Fitzroy on evenings when he felt a little stronger. It would do him good, she said, and cheer him up. It is true that he did regain, for a few hours, some of his former good spirits, and he never had more than two or three drinks, but the crowded, smoky atmosphere of the ill-ventilated Fitzroy was hardly the place for a man rapidly approaching the last stages of TB.
* The Eiffel Tour (Tower) Hotel at 1, Percy Street, Fitzrovia, London, later called the White Tower Restaurant and now called The House of Ho. GRH.
Perhaps by then it did not matter so much, for I believe it was too late to do anything for him, the disease had got too firm a hold; but his energy was so short-lived, and when he had walked the few steps from the Fitzroy to the Eiffel, leaning on me with all his slight weight, I had to take him in my arms and carry him up the many flights of stairs to his room, for the Eiffel was an old-fashioned place and had no lift. Then as he lay on the bed, coughing and spitting blood, I used to wish with all my heart that Ruth would manage things differently, it should not have been so difficult. Rowley was now too feeble to insist on his own way for long. But the truth was that Ruth loved the atmosphere of the pub herself. Of course Rowley hated being left alone and she did spend a fair amount of her time with him. There is her point of view to be considered, yet I find it hard to forgive her. She never tired of saying how much he meant to her, how greatly she loved him. I have known more devoted women.
Ruth did so much for him that the things she left undone were more noticeable in consequence. I believe that she was half starving when she first met Rowley. Something about him must have appealed to her, his helplessness perhaps; she is so big and strong, so capable. She is said to have picked him up, literally, in the Dingo one night when he was very drunk, found out his address from the barman, or maybe from Homer, and taken him back to the rue Daguerre in a taxi. And there she found he had some sort of a home with furniture and a bed. The paintings were good too, very good. I have great respect for Ruth’s judgement in art. She must have felt that here was a chance of comparative security. She had been knocking about Montparnasse for quite a time, frequenting the all-night bars and, I have heard, snatching bits of sandwiches left on the tables. There was a husband somewhere, in Denmark I think, a very brilliant draughtsman, for I once saw a reproduction of a drawing by him. She was never Rowley’s mistress; she told me herself that he never had any sexual relations with her, and had not Rowley himself told me more than a year before he met her that he had ‘finished with that sort of thing.’ I had rather doubted it at the time, he was only forty-one, but subsequently he told me he had caught syphilis many years before. It was the usual story. He had become bored with the treatment, then the disease appeared to subside, and he thought, or wanted to think, he was cured. Possibly it was again giving him trouble when he mentioned it to me during that summer of 1928 in Paris.
Ruth’s relationship to Rowley always appeared to be that of a mother. I am sure that her healthy woman’s instinct to protect, when faced with physical weakness or ill health, was very genuine, but her natural cupidity played a by no means inconsiderable part. Rowley was pitifully grateful to her for all she did. She seldom lacked money and he was always generous.
Not long after the exhibition at Leger’s finished, Rowley, on his doctor’s advice, made up his mind to go away. He decided on Spain, he needed the sun. The tickets were bought and all arrangements made. I went to the Eiffel to say goodbye to them for they were leaving the next morning. One of Rowley’s friends had promised to call with his car to take them to the station.
The prospect of a change had cheered Rowley. He was happy and full of plans. His doctor had told him that he could take a little whiskey now and again and he had a quarter bottle in his room. There were several people there and we drank to the success of the journey. Then some idiot suggested ‘just one’ at the Fitzroy. I tried to tell Rowley that he had a hard day in front of him. I would get the others away and he could settle down and have a good sleep. And Ruth should have backed me up. I offered to stay with Rowley whilst she went with the others, but some devil in her insisted that Rowley came with us.
‘He was feeling better’ she promised: he would ‘only drink one whiskey.’
No one seemed to realize how ill Rowley was, and he was inclined to be in a wilful mood himself, so Ruth had her way and we went to the Fitzroy. That in itself need not have been fatal for the Fitzroy closed at 10.30, but in the bar we inevitably met * Nina Hamnett and she was full of a club just opened near the Scala Theatre, the Blue Mask.
* For Nina Hamnett, artist and bohémienne, see her Laughing Torso (Constable, London 1932) and Marjorie Lilly’s Sickert: The Painter and His Circle Elek, London 1971). A protegée of Sickert, she lent Clifford Hall Sickert’s letters to her, which, anxious for their survival, he copied. They are quoted in Miss Lilly’s book. JH
‘Let’s all go there!’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you go. Rowley is off to Spain tomorrow. I will take him back to the Eiffel now.’
But it was no good. Ruth wanted to see the club and Rowley must go with her, and it wasn’t far away. And to the Blue Mask we went. He only had a little to drink but it was sufficient, and the excitement, and coming out of the over-heated basement in which the club was situated did the rest. When he got back to the Eiffel he had a serious haemorrhage. He was too weak to be moved next morning, so he stayed on there, and the pictures he had told me he was going to paint in Spain were never painted.
When he recovered a little Rowley used to get Ruth to bring him bunches of flowers which she arranged on the little table near his bed; and he painted a few delightful watercolours of them whilst he was lying propped up with pillows. Sometimes he wrote. Odd bits about cats and dogs. He began a skit based on the exploits of Evans of the Broke. The papers were full of his doings just then. He also amused himself writing out a series of names for public houses and one very interesting fragment about himself and Homer, and the competitions they used to have in the old Montparnasse days, drinking ‘knock outs’.*
* ‘I was not content to drink just drinks that made me blind, but as I went on I found I wanted “knock outs”. I used to sit with my “boozing companion” Homer Bevans and we had two tumblers into which we put crème de menthe, Pernod, rum, fine, then maybe gin, white or red wine or any other thing that occurred to us such as Picon or almost anything. Then we would see which went out first. If we stood the first without a collapse we had a second and I think it was known to run to a third…. I think my reason for not realizing I was a hopeless drunkard was because in spite of all this I was generally able to get up quite early, 8 or 9 o’clock, and work as though nothing had happened.’ – Rowley Smart.
I saw him once or twice every week and made a few sketches of him in lithographic chalk. One day when we were alone he gave me a watercolour inscribed to Marion and myself. He had painted it from memory since he had been at the Eiffel. ‘Take it,’ he said, ‘before Ruth sees it. I want you to have it.’
One day he told me some girl had turned up saying she was his daughter. ‘What did you do?’ I asked.
‘I gave her a picture and sent her away,’ he replied vaguely. The incident evidently had not impressed him.
He owed Stulich money for his room. Stulich, the fat wheezy Austrian who ran the Eiffel, was a good-hearted fellow. Everyone owed him money. The restaurant was nearly always empty now and his establishment seemed to be dying slowly. Diners seldom came to the once famous restaurant on the ground floor with dozens of pictures crowding the walls – pictures by practically every well-known artist of the day, all friends and sometime patrons of the Eiffel restaurant. Times had changed. The peace wasn’t working as planned and Europe was unsettled. Artists were the first to suffer. Sales had never properly recovered since the slumps of 1928 -9.
It is, I believe, characteristic of TB patients that they retain, almost to the end and in spite of suffering, a firm belief in their eventual cure. The disease in its early stages tends to encourage this attitude in them, and Rowley was just like the rest. He was doomed. I knew it. No one could have failed to see it in his face. He probably knew it himself but if he did he never said so to me. He endured his illness with courage. He was seldom in low spirits and he painted whenever he felt strong enough. He reached maturity in his work in the last two years of his life, reached it in spite of terrible health.
His old friend Doctor Stross helped him in every way, but he could not give him strength, nor could he prevent the inevitable progress of disease. Rowley fought hard. His spirit was magnificent, and his love of his work seemed to get greater as the time given him to live shortened.
When I went to see him and found him so full of determination to live and go on working I almost felt he would pull through after all, but his nervous cerebral vitality was powerless to heal the wasted ill-used body that was at last beginning to wear out.
Yet another attempt, and this time he goes to Sweden, to Ruth’s people, and from there to a little wooden house far away from any town and built on the edge of a great forest. His letters from there speak of the loneliness, the silence of winter, with deep snow everywhere. He is so weak that he is unable to get up for days on end but ‘Ruth looks after me’. Yet his letters from Sweden are not miserable – they still breathe something of his old vitality.
Whilst he was in Sweden a large representative collection of his work was opened in Manchester. It was a great success, and the final seal was set upon it when a false report of the artist’s death in Sweden was published by the English newspapers. That Rowley got a great deal of cynical amusement from the affair was evident from the letter* he wrote me describing it.
* Dear Cliff, Thank you for your letter, for amusing change of bath scene(sic). There hasn’t been very much to write about “down in the forest nothing stirred” until we got a phone call from the Swedish rep of the Daily Sketch asking about my death. Then phone calls came all day from various papers, English, Swedish, Stockholm, Gothenburg – last Thursday, Manchester Guardian, Feb 22, gave a long obituary notice of my death. I got a copy this morning. How the hell it has come about I cannot think as we had no correspondence on the matter and one would think such a paper as the Manchester Guardian would be certain before publishing such a thing. Well all these papers ringing up it appears to be making a great fuss. We had interviewers and camera men out and a darn fine interview with photographs in The Swedish Morning News. Will send you a copy and other press about me in other daily paper here. It has kept Ruth very busy answering the phone. How they got our address, specially phone number, I cannot make out, we are not in the book. It’s all a mystery to us from beginning to end. Rowley.
In 1934 he returned to England, still with Ruth, and they settled in a little cottage at Longnor near Buxton. It seemed that Sweden had done him a little good after all, although he was still terribly weak.
Marion and I had gone to Paris. I wanted to paint some pictures for an exhibition and I promised that we would spend a few days with Rowley when we got back. We were in Montmartre. I had little desire to revisit Montparnasse although I did go there once. The Dôme was still crowded, and I thought I recognized the ‘Duchess’ but I couldn’t be sure. All was the same, yet strangely different, and I was aware of many ghosts. I was glad to return to the Butte.
One morning of a sunny day in the summer of 1934 the maid brought me a letter addressed in Ruth’s large scrawly hand. As I puzzled out her quaint spelling I seemed to feel that Rowley was dead. I turned a page and read, ‘Rowley passed away very peaceful.’
At the time I do not recollect having any feeling of shock. I had expected the news for so long, and I knew what a misery life had become for him. I remember feeling sad that I had not seen him again, and wishing that I was back in England. But there was nothing I could do for him now. I got my paint-box, easel and canvas and went along the rue Lepic to the Place du Tertre. I set up the easel and completed the picture I had started a few days before. I kept thinking of Rowley but I painted well.
Rowley had left everything – his only possessions were his personal belongings, his paintings and an old fur lined coat that Doctor Stross had given him – to Ruth, and immediately after the funeral she began to quarrel with his family. I know nothing about these quarrels, only that they occurred, for she told me about them herself. She left Longnor and came back to a room in the Eiffel. Both the Leicester Gallery and Tooth’s had approached her and suggested having a memorial exhibition of Rowley’s paintings. She was very confident arranging things but finally she came to me and asked me to arrange the show at the Leger Gallery. I subsequently gathered that she had tried to be too clever. She had played one gallery off against the other and had finally lost them both.
The memorial exhibition was finally held at the Leger in 1935. Ruth insisted on asking very high prices and only a few paintings were sold although the show received a great deal of praise.
She was now established at the Eiffel. She haunted the Fitzroy and borrowed money from all Rowley’s friends who were foolish enough to lend it. She who had asked impossible prices at the gallery now sold his pictures ridiculously cheap whenever she got the chance. She made it impossible to consolidate his reputation, the foundations of which he had so firmly laid.
I remember going to see her at the Eiffel to take her a bundle of lithographs Rowley had asked me to look after some months before he died. It was nearing lunchtime and she was still in bed. She raised herself and said ‘Hello Cliff,’ tossing her heavy tawny hair out of her eyes. I thought what a fine picture she made. Then I caught sight of a pair of men’s trousers, braces hanging limply, that were lying crumpled on a chair near her bed. I stood the bundle of lithographs against the wall, made some excuse, and turning out of the room hurried down the stairs.
I see Ruth from time to time. I may come across her in the Kings Road, at the Six Bells or in some club or other. She never fails to mention Rowley. ‘No one like him. Nothing has been the same since he died.’ One night she told me a rather pathetic story about walking home with him one winter’s night from Montparnasse to the rue Daguerre. Rowley said how cold it was, and she took his hand and as they walked held it under the fur collar of her coat. After a little while Rowley suddenly said, ‘Of all the women I have ever known, you are the only one who has ever done even a little thing like that for me.’
- Ruth is now married. She married, I believe, before the present war commenced. Her husband is in the army: a lieutenant.
I met them in the Six Bells soon after he got his commission. Someone called him and he went to the far end of the bar. Ruth put her hand on my arm. She leered at me. ‘Don’t you think I have done well for myself, Cliff? I have British nationality now and if my old man gets killed, why, the God damn British government have to keep me for the rest of my life!’
I think Rowley would have liked that.
Postscript 1942
Ruth’s husband has been cashiered.
