[Written by John Aplin]
100 Years Ago: Three Letters by Ricketts from January 1924 (part 2)
Gordon Bottomley was not alone in having to miss the single London performance of his short play Gruach given at the St Martin’s Theatre on 20 January 1924, for a short period of hospitalisation also prevented Thomas Sturge Moore’s attendance. A day after sending Bottomley his reactions to the staging and acting of Gruach, Ricketts wrote again giving the latest news about Moore’s condition, knowing that Bottomley would be anxious to know.
To Gordon Bottomley, 22 January 1924
The T S Moore operation has turned out excellently. I think he was intimidated by too many visits from friends & perhaps Marie intimidated the Doctors who seem to have been perplexed by the case.(1) The Operator has given Marie a frank and reassuring report that all is now well. (Privately) I rather fancy the operation was unnecessary or else, I should say matters were less grave than they thought. T recovered rapidly and looked singularly serene & dignified in his grey hair & beard, He had obviously been preoccupied & frightened, but is well on in convalescence. I have advised Marie to let him “go slow” for a year.
I intended to write this earlier but the stress of everyday occurrences made me put it off.
Yours Ever
CR
PS
I have painted a new Don Juan.(2)
(1) Marie Appia was Sturge Moore’s French cousin and wife.
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| Charles Ricketts, 'Don Juan Challenging the Commander' Oil on canvas, 116,8 by 88,9 cm (1924-1928) [Collection: Royal Academy of Arts] |
To Thomas Sturge Moore, about 25 January 1924
BL Add MS 58086, f 114
My Dear Moore
We are without another book on German Gothic sculpture. My pet statue is that of a King standing & handless at Rheims, all our books on Gothic art are at Chilham(1) and several books on old masters, we kept Greece & the Orient here […] our books mount up to about 4,000 do what we can to keep them down.(2) I will send you one or more books on beasts by Collette Willie which I think quite exquisite, her other admirable books (better still) are about worthless or improper persons of a very modern type and probably would not interest you.(3)
J.-E. BLanche, Manet (Paris: F. Rieder & Cie., éditeurs, 1924)
One of the books from Ricketts's art library,
with a handwritten dedication from the author to Ricketts
[Private Collection]
I wrote a long letter to Bottomley which he might lend you concerning his play which I thought went very well indeed, despite several shortcomings in the performance, at least, till the exit of Macbeth & Gruach. [….]
I am sorry you have this tiresome complication which, I know needs care.(4) [George] Clausen was troubled by it in Italy when seemingly in perfect health. Tell Marie she must consider this letter in part for her. I hope she is not overworking herself.
Tonight I am attending, by request, a seance to meet the Spirit of Oscar Wilde. I had some questions put to him of which the answers were not entirely satisfactory. The published seances have been quite extraordinary quite unlike the usual insipid spiritualistic stuff. Yeats says it is an obvious case of the medium having created a second personality, founded on Wilde, within her subconscious self.(5) Some of the vagueness of the answers to my questions & actual mistakes might be ascribed to the lapse of time, change in character and outlook & even intrusion of the medium’s personality, anyway it will be interesting.
Yours Ever
C Ricketts
Notes:
(1) Chilham Castle in Kent, owned by Edmund and Mary Davis, where Ricketts and Shannon had the loan of the Keep as a country retreat.
(2) Only a small part of the vast art library assembled by Ricketts and Shannon would be described in several auction catalogues between 1933 and 1939.
(3) He probably sent Colette Willy, Sept dialogues de bêtes. Paris: Mercure de France, 1905, reissued 1923.
(4) Sturge Moore here annotated the letter with his medical condition: ‘phlebitis’.
(5) A series of messages beginning in June 1923 and purporting to come from Wilde were notated during spiritualist sessions by two mediums (Mr V. and Mrs Travers Smith). Notes from the session on 18 June 1923 record that ‘Mr. V. was the automatist, Mrs. T.S. touching his hand’ (Hester Travers Smith, Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1924, p. 9).
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| Hester Travers Smith (ed.), Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde ( London and Edinburgh: Dunedin Press, 1930 |
It is a happy chance that this short series of letters from exactly 100 years ago should remind us of the significant roles played by both Gordon Bottomley and Thomas Sturge Moore during Ricketts’s later years, for of all his wide circle of friends they were his most fervently loyal admirers from his early years until the end, and indeed beyond. Following his sudden death on 7 October 1931 they were determined to ensure that the originality of his artistic legacy should be celebrated and remembered. Their belief in this originality may seem paradoxical, in that Ricketts’s respect for traditional practice meant that his own work had seemed by many derivative and backward-looking, and Bottomley and Moore knew that changing fashions would find it too easy to marginalise him. And indeed, in many ways that happened.
The years since 1931 have been a continuing process of rediscovery and reemergence, in large part made possible by two things – the significant labour of preparatory work which made the publication of Self-Portrait possible in 1939, and Moore’s dutiful preservation of the large archive of materials in his care which he ensured passed in due course to the British Library (formerly the British Museum), establishing the collection of Ricketts and Shannon papers. His own personal literary archive of correspondence and other manuscripts is now at Senate House Library, University of London, and provides further essential research material. Bottomley’s equally extensive archive of correspondence, manuscripts and printed matter of all kinds has more recently been deposited at the British Library, containing much unique material directly relating to his own life-long interest in the creative output of Ricketts and Shannon.
The complex genesis of Self-Portrait is a story worth telling, and could generate several blog contributions. Moore’s declining health in his later years meant that he had to rely increasingly on the help of others as he became almost overwhelmed by the huge accumulation of materials which he gathered together. At quite a late stage he entrusted the task to Cecil Lewis, despite knowing that he had little knowledge of Ricketts’s artistic output; and in turn, during the very last stages of production, with the onset of war and his own return to a combat role, Lewis found himself relying on Bottomley’s help, causing some unfortunate tensions between Moore and Bottomley.
It is perhaps inevitable that despite its obvious value, with the inclusion of somewhat randomly-chosen extracts from correspondence and journals, Self-Portrait is a flawed work, a serendipity of different kinds of materials without a sufficiently clear narrative or editorial method. The process of research and rediscovery which it set in motion has nonetheless led to a growing number of valuable monographs and PhD studies, first among them the seminal biographical and critical work of Paul Delaney which in 1990 culminated in his Charles Ricketts. A Biography. And now this invaluable weekly blog continues to draw in the growing number of admirers of the work of its two subjects, keeping alive the hopes of those earlier believers in the fragile beauties and vulnerabilities of a legacy whose richness and variety can still surprise and delight us.
John Aplin