Reviews for Stanley Spencer: A Biography

The average rating for Stanley Spencer: A Biography based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-12-22 00:00:00 Rick Falcino What Stanley thought about himself: I’m married to everybody really in varying degrees. I am Treasure Island. The most exciting thing I ever came across is myself. I emanate delicious lovely Stanley-qualities; all the time, bits of me thrown freely about. This is the third Stanley Spencer book I have reviewed in the last week and it will be the last, I promise. I can see you may have had enough of this fantastic nutcase. Hmm – what’s that? You think I am being harsh? Well, let’s see. Here are a few representative quotes demonstrating the ineffable unspeakable thing that was Stanley Spencer, genius English painter and unique human being : Stanley on his painting The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard, which is nine feet high and 18 feet long, which portrays the general resurrection of the dead happening in his own village: No one is in any hurry in this painting. Here and there things slowly move off, but in the main they resurrect to such a state of joy that they are content and happy to remain where they have been resurrected. Hilda [his wife] mooches along and slowly goes over a stile. She wears a favourite dress of hers. The people read their own headstones. A wife brushes the earth and grass off her husband. I am very fond of the girls taking it easy just below the prophets. Stanley writing to his first wife Hilda: I am all the time seeing your you-ness in you, in your turned-in foot, in the limpness of your bent knee, in its unexposed-to-the-weatherness. The is-ness of you to me is like the is-ness of God. Stanley on one of his pictures The Adoration of Of Old Men : In this drawing the man is lying sideways and back view along the bottom of the picture. It was a most passionate drawing of his vertebral column, hand he was full of that wonderful romantic aura that belongs to an old man… I could have kissed every bone in his spine. Stanley in company : Stanley would talk endlessly, rocketing a succession of verbal fireworks which fascinated his listeners at first; then a gradual surfeit would bring weariness, until by the small hours, even the most polite of hosts became exhausted… It could be difficult to silence him without causing offence STANLEY’S TWO WIVES PROBLEM Stanley was a very spiritual person, and as with many spiritual men he thought he should have two wives. The idea came upon him when Patricia Preece, a painter, moved to Stanley’s village of Cookham. He fell for her but he didn’t want to lose Hilda, his wife. So why not have them both as wives? There were quite a number of menages-a-trois around at the time in artistic circles. The two accounts of the personal catastrophe which followed – this biography and Patricia’s memoir – agree that that is what Stanley wanted. After that they completely disagree. Before I explain the disagreement, there is one more thing which each account agrees on : Patricia had a lifelong companion already, Dorothy Hepworth. From her twenties to her death, Patricia lived with Dorothy. This seems to be a major feature of Patricia’s life, you know – like, cough cough – she was gay already – but is confined to a footnote in this biography and never mentioned in Patricia’s memoir. The footnote says : After Patricia’s death, Maurice Collis (SS’s first biographer) asked Dorothy outright whether they had a physical relationship. Dorothy was adamant that they had not. (The idea in these male biographers’ minds seems to be that if women don’t have sex with each other then they’re not gay and if they do they are!) Dorothy is often mentioned as wearing men’s clothing, by the way. Not to be stereotypical, but, you know, what are we to make of it? Anyway, Patricia agreed to marry Stanley if he got a divorce which he did. Mr Pople maintains that Stanley had explained his Two Wives concept, and that Patricia would be No 1 and Hilda would be No 2. He says that as Patricia didn’t like sex with Stanley she was quite okay with the idea that he could go and have sex with Wife No 2. If she was gay, and she was perpetrating a major con on Stanley, this would make sense. In Patricia’s memoir she says that she and Dorothy went off to St Ives in Cornwall for her & Stanley’s honeymoon (!) – he was to follow later. At this point she says he had NOT breathed a word about any Two Wives, but what he had done was to invite Hilda down to Cookham behind her back, and the very night after the wedding, Stanley went to bed with Hilda, and “reclaimed” her as his wife (his word). He then explained the Two Wives to Hilda who reacted with horror. Upset, he hurried off to St Ives and explained the Two Wives thing to Patricia who reacted with total fury and vowed never to sleep with him ever again. And she never did and she never lived with him either. So he ended up with No Wives at all. Which version to believe? In the ineffably odd way of Stanley Spencer, even after all this he maintained an affable, friendly relationship with Patricia (but not with Dorothy who couldn’t stand him) – to the point where she became his business manager. Which was another point for the gossips who said this harpy had conned him into marriage, conned him out of his paintings and money and kicked him out of the house. I mean, you have to laugh. MAKING ENDS MEET All his painting life Stanley wanted to paint is visionary stuff or his sex stuff and it didn’t sell, it was too much for the limp-souled aesthetes of the time, so he had to crank out landscape after landscape to pay for the paint to paint the next landscapes. But then he would sneak off and do something weird about Jesus. STANLEY TO HILDA The contemplation of me by you when a love-feeling comes leads you into that deeper, uncatastrophic maelstrom of God-love. And when and after whirling stuff has eased up to the surface, don’t you find me among the oozing froth and scum? IS THIS BIOGRAPHY ANY GOOD, NEVER MIND HOW SPIFFY IT LOOKS This is a two-star biography about a five-star subject. Mr Pople overwhelms the intensely interesting biographical events with pages of vaporising about the paintings. Of course Stanley loved to vaporise about them too, but he was a certified mystic (either that or he was just certifiable) and he was entitled. Stanley created out of the materials of his own life and the gospel stories of Jesus an intoxicating cocktail ranging from the cosy to the horrifying to the painfully self-exposing to the hermetic parable and there’s no percentage in trying to figure this stuff out. You love it or you don’t. For my money you can take your Jasper Johns & Rauschenbergs & Liechtensteins & even gasp Warhols and de Koonings and shove them in a blender, I will take the funny distorted bonkers unfathomable fizzing Christs and Hildas and Patricias and builders and welders and dogs and kids and ducks and seraphim pouring constantly forth from this amazing man’s mind and fingers.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-05-28 00:00:00 Frederick Bradley I liked this. Where can I can I get a copy of Alfred mullings biography of spencer?