The Last Englishmen Page 9

  Just as painters had to rethink their art after the arrival of photography, so did mapmakers. The algorithms used to account for distortion and calculate scale from photographs made for laborious computations. A black box was needed to automate them. The first was invented in 1901; the Wild (pronounced Vilt) was the latest iteration. Photogrammetry, the craft of making measurements from photographs, thus became the art of avoiding mind-bending computation so as to master the art of detailing the contours of distant surfaces, such as mountains, from photographs. Using aerial and terrestrial photography, the Swiss had spent the past five years remapping all of Switzerland.

  As the Alps constituted about half of the country, the Swiss had a head start on the new technique of stereophotogrammetry, one ideally suited for mountainous terrain. In this technique, instead of a single photograph, a pair of photographs was used. Each photograph of a fixed point on a summit was taken from a slightly different base on the ground. By adjusting the left and right handwheels of the Wild the two images merged and suddenly the mountain would jump into three dimensions in the viewfinder.

  This physiological phenomenon affected the geometry inasmuch as it was suddenly possible to identify and plot more accurately every feature of the visible terrain. But it also required an illustration method that could convey an illusion of depth, without overwhelming the map with useless or distracting detail. A subtle sense of light and shade, Michael saw, enabled Swiss mapmakers to differentiate between rock and scree, between snowfield and glacier; it was a perfect marriage of art and the scientific method. The Swiss mastery of Felszeichnung, mountain portraiture, accounted for the popularity of prewar Swiss maps. Like the features of a human face, a skillful rendering of weathered rock, even the way its strata were arranged, gave each mountain face its individuality, its profile. After mastering Felszeichnung, Michael left for the Alps to photograph the mountains themselves.

  Of course the mere idea of getting out of a sleeping bag an hour before dawn made him feel he was taking a ridiculous pursuit far too seriously. A cup of tea eased him past this. Together with his small team, Michael would begin to climb. If he let himself attain full consciousness the pace was unbearable, so he maintained a trancelike reverie, letting his mind wander as his boots beat out a rhythm over the frozen moraine. If he was hungry, the relentless, drumming thought of food became tedious. Even worse was having someone along who insisted on talking. Michael tended to choose the lowest mountains for his stations, ones that would give him sufficient observations but wouldn’t be too difficult to climb.

  At dawn, having reached over eleven thousand feet, he would call a halt. The damp patch at the small of his back beneath his rucksack would go instantly cold as the peak of the massif in front of him attained a rosy glow. He would then suit up and slather his face with cream to protect it from the sun. One of his assistants would unrope and cross to the next ridge with the target mark and two-meter rule. To distract himself from the cold, Michael would estimate the distance and the time it would take his assisstant to get there. Using a hammer and chisel to prepare a foothold, he would then remove the tripod from its case and plant it on the ground.

  By the time the phototheodolite was set up, the yellow light that lay across the snowy peaks would tell him the sun was high enough to begin. A dark eyepiece was fixed and pointed at the sun to establish the longitude. While one of his assistants held an umbrella over his head, Michael would inform his booker that he was first going to take the sun’s lower limb, by which he meant the lower edge of the disk. But since in the telescope everything was upside down, it was actually the upper one. When the sun reached the cross wires in the theodolite, he shouted “UP” and the booker noted down the time on his watch to the nearest half second. Then he read him the vertical angle. Twelve such observations completed the morning sights. After checking the angles twice, Michael took a photograph.

  Without a set routine, the hurry to get to work might cause some small slip in the setting of the swing or the observation of the spirit levels. While this might not render the work invalid, accuracy and efficiency were Michael’s bywords.

  At noon the latitude was taken. After that he would sit down and tear into a tin of sardines while his assistants finished building a cairn over the spot where the tripod had been. The empty tin would be buried in the cairn and a final stone placed on top. That day’s station, combined with the day before’s and the next day’s, would provide the three corners of a triangle. A fourth station taken the day after the next would, with the two previous, extend the network further. Eventually a latticework of triangles would overlie the area to be mapped. The Great Arc had progressed in exactly this manner.

  In the early afternoon Michael would set up a detail station, choosing a spot in front of a prominent peak. Later, he would cross the glacier and ascend to the other side of the valley to take a photograph of the same fixed point from another base, leaving the phototheodolite behind under a tarp for the next day. Long before the sun set Michael would be back at the hut for a cup of Maggi soup and an early night.

  Romanisches Café, Berlin,

  Winter 1931–1932

  By the time his photographic plates were inserted into the Wild in Zurich, Michael Spender was in Berlin to study the Zeiss stereoplanigraph, the German version of the Wild, and to master the techniques of aerial photogrammetry. The Germans were so ferociously pro-Zeiss as to be nearly Zeiss propagandists, he wrote Hinks. They assumed the superiority of the Zeiss without ever mentioning the Wild.

  For some time now, Berlin had been a city of lost souls. That winter Hitler and the Communists were preparing for civil war. Martial law had all but been declared, with paddy wagons on every corner and truckloads of police ready to haul anyone off at the slightest pretext. Though spies were everywhere, they did little to dispel the atmosphere of lawlessness. Delinquent boys and peroxide tarts whose fathers had been killed in the war haunted the beer halls. One could scarcely walk the streets for the beggars. Black markets offered every luxury and red-light establishments served every escapist or illicit desire. In this city of increasing menace, Michael met the woman who would become his wife, a runaway named Erica Haarmann. In desperate straits herself, she leapt at the chance to escape.

  That winter Michael also met up with his brother at the Romanisches Café.

  “There isn’t a girl sitting in this place,” Michael had observed in the flat and statistical tone of voice Stephen had nearly forgotten, “who hasn’t got scars on her wrists where she has cut her veins in an attempt to commit suicide.”

  It was Stephen’s habit to think of Michael as insensitive and unobservant, particularly in regard to himself, so any evidence to the contrary was grist for the mill of his reflections. Where Michael maintained a rational view of the world, Stephen nurtured an intuitive one. Where Michael immersed himself in the innermost workings of the latest technological marvel, Stephen preferred a dispassionate exhumation of his innermost feelings, particularly those inspired by his family.

  Michael had been slightly more welcoming of him at Oxford than he’d been at Gresham’s, but he had resolutely refused to introduce him to Wystan Auden, his former lab partner. Stephen, who cultivated literary friendships with the same care he’d once lavished on his striped caterpillars, had been crushed. Eventually, Stephen found his own way to Wystan’s rooms, where he soon finagled an introduction to Wystan’s school friend, Christopher Isherwood, who was also then in Berlin. Christopher never tired of hearing about Stephen’s family and, like a thief emptying an unsuspecting mark of his valuables, would eagerly ply him with questions. Stephen never failed to oblige him, particularly when it came to Michael. And now that he had got over his awe of his elder brother and was making his way in the world, Stephen could begin to regard Michael much as Michael might regard a piece of machinery that didn’t quite work as it was intended to. Michael became something to be taken apart so that his flaw might be identified and, if not fixed, at least established with certainty.
Stephen diagnosed his brother’s flaw as “spiritual astigmatism.”

  So, with map and compass, rock hammer and theodolite, Michael Spender and John Auden undertook explorations of the world, one they regarded with a naked eye from a distance and close up in a viewfinder or microscope. Similarly, Wystan Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender made up the three points of the literary triangle through which events in Germany and elsewhere would be sited and mapped, in poetry and prose, in the coming decade. They, too, considered the times and the world in front of them, albeit from different angles and with different implements.

  CHAPTER 6

  The School of Art

  38 Upper Park Road, Belsize Park, London,

  October 1935

  Until she left for Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Nancy Sharp had spent her entire life on the Cornish coast, the daughter of the town doctor and a disapproving mother. She had no opinion on the clash between labor and capital and associated the British Empire with mottled and gnarled old men sucking down pipe slobber while droning on about their days in the colonial service. Like most girls her age, too, Nancy far preferred sea bathing, riding, and tennis to climbing mountains, arctic expeditions, and similar Boy Scout pursuits. When, in the fall of 1928, Nancy arrived at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, she came fired up with a single idea. She would transform the epic discontent of her youth into Art. To her mind this would only work if she did nothing but paint and allow everything else to go to the dogs. It was as simple as that.

  An early self-portrait shows a striking young woman with chestnut hair leaning forward in a chair in front of an open door, beyond which was a window. There is a slight frown on her face, as if she can scarcely believe what she sees. When she painted she leaned forward in exactly this way. After a series of quick dabs, she would pull away to squint at what she had done. Returning her brush to the palette, she would make little circles in the pigment, her eyes darting in and out of the scene before her, fully absorbed and uncharacteristically at peace. Her work conveyed this stillness: a sleeping cat, a view from a window, a quietly contained landscape. Her sullen adolescence was not where she belonged; the painting was.

  After her first year at the Slade, Nancy became privately engaged to a Kenyan coffee planter named Errol. Yet by the end of that summer, all that mattered was escaping the prison of her family home for London. That fall she shared a large studio near Hampstead with a waif-like painter raised by Augustus John’s bohemian ménage in Dorset. This girl knew nothing of the social conventions that had so stifled Nancy. For her the Deity was a world-famous portrait painter in a perpetual search for sitters.

  At the Slade, as at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and indeed, Nancy supposed, in the world generally, the pecking order was everything. If she was going to find her way to the top, the preponderance of females—three for every male—meant she had to work fast. Where the other girls tended to huddle in groups, arranging themselves on the lawn or front hall of the Slade, Nancy aimed for more of a splash. When one of her paintings in a show of Slade students’ work received a favorable mention in the Times and the Manchester Guardian, she was thrilled to be singled out. This was it, she thought.

  But the Slade Boys took it sourly, scoffing at the idea that newspaper critics knew the first thing about serious art. It shouldn’t have surprised her. Her brother had always been the apple of her mother’s eye. So Nancy’s studio—someone compared it to the stage set of a German expressionist film—became her stage. Her parties and the wild revels that accompanied them marked the boundaries of their Slade set and the shifting alliances within it. At midnight Nancy would send the Boys scattering all over Hampstead where, waking late the next morning under their coats, they would struggle to recall what had possessed them.

  Engaged or not, Nancy needed a boyfriend to make her mark, and on her list of those to try for was the insufferably self-possessed Bill Coldstream. From a distance Bill had struck her as simply more alert than the rest. Thin as a pencil, with his jacket of green tweed, and immaculately polished shoes, he had a shrewd look about him. Once the director’s prize student, Coldstream no longer appeared at weekly Sketch Club where she might have caught his eye. And when he did emerge from his Fitzroy Square studio he was invariably surrounded. His superior knowledge of modern art guaranteed him an entourage.

  Over tea at Express Dairy, cheap meals at Bertorelli’s, or beer at his studio, Bill Coldstream held forth. Pictorial art was at a dead end. Cézanne and Degas were the ones. In politics, too, his opinion was definitive. Britain’s colonies held the key to its standing as the preeminent world power. Soviet Russia, not having any, would never pose a serious challenge to Britain’s hegemony, though America needed to be watched. While his witty send-up of the Boys’ fumbling grasp of aesthetics was taken as a token of affection, one thing was clear: Bill Coldstream took no one’s work as seriously as his own. The only thing that unsettled him was the prospect of another war; that haunted him.

  The Slade Boys all agreed they would settle for two rooms, good food, limitless art supplies, theater tickets, and one Continental holiday a year. Such modest requirements were not a measure of their ambitions, which were considerable, but of their entitlement. Like Bill, they may have feared that one day their time would come and it would be 1914 all over again. But in the meantime, the annual Remembrance Day vigil for the war dead with its two minutes of silence was wearing thin. “Herd masturbation” one of them called it. Nancy never gave it much thought. She would never have to fear a call up.

  When, in December 1929, Bill finally appeared at one of Nancy’s gin parties, such was his presumption that he didn’t bother to introduce himself. After that she went out with him nearly every night, matching his sly remarks on the Boys tit for tat. Abstract discussions of aesthetics were as boring to Nancy as arguments over politics. But Bill’s cocksure air of knowing what he was about, his unquestioned place at the top of the heap, was something she wanted more than anything for herself. Failing that, she would have him instead.

  Mixed parties soon brought an end to serious discussions. Evenings now began with a frantic rush to secure the most prominent spot at the Yorkshire Grey, and invariably ended with someone making a drunken spectacle. The Boys blamed the arrival of women in their lives for this new state of affairs, Nancy foremost. Long-suppressed grievances began to be aired. Bill was now “God Coldstream” and Nancy was declared a detestable creature. Then the slump of 1930 hit and the market for paintings vanished overnight.

  Money, and the lack of it, now dominated their thoughts. And beyond the indifference of the public and the Royal Academy’s blinkers, the Boys suddenly had to worry about those patently sham, cleverly slick modernists like Henry Moore and Ben Nicolson. They looked to Bill not to simply explain what they were about but to show them. But Bill’s paintings were closely guarded, arranged so he could tell if they had been disturbed. He couldn’t draw if there was anyone watching, but if left alone he tended to dither and dawdle. He would look for a book of matches, change his trousers, shave, and hunt around for a turpentine cloth to have in close reach, though he had yet to get out his brushes. Hours were spent staring at his easel.

  “Just what does Bill think he’s up to?” the Boys wondered. Whatever happened to that confident chap who so charmed them all at the Slade? another asked. The milk bottle of piss kept handy to save him the trouble of a trip to the loo and the piercing eye of a pet kestrel, caged amid rotting meat scraps in a gloomy corner, contributed to the dungeon-like feel of his studio.

  So there it was. Four years after leaving the Slade and three years after marrying Bill, Nancy’s idea of living only for Art was in tatters. It had ended with bill collectors at the door and wails emanating from the perambulator. Flowers withered before she could paint them. Uniformed nannies invaded their lives, sniffing at the clothes on the floor and casting appalled looks at overflowing ashtrays, jam-smeared towels, and a floor running with piddle. One February, in the dead of winter,
the stove exploded. Baby Juliet ended up in an oxygen tent, Bill with the flu, and Nancy with jaundice. The absolute low point had been when Bill couldn’t find a canvas and one of her most treasured portraits caught his eye. Without a second thought he painted over it. The Boys were still talking about how wild Nancy had been over that.

  Nancy looked for truth in the raw material of her life. Like a historian digging for the roots of a long-simmering feud that had ended in all-out civil war, she retraced the steps that had brought her to such straits. The beginnings were clear. Her mother had greeted the news of her engagement with a flat statement: her father would never let her marry a painter. So Nancy had left a good-bye note under a hairbrush, pinched some money, and raced back to London. Her father sent her brother to head her off. He had arrived at the Marylebone Town Hall only to discover it was the wrong registry office. She and Bill were married at St. Pancras. The next day they proceeded to her family home in Bude only to be met at the door.

  “I can do nothing with your father,” her mother said. Her father appeared.

  “You cad!” he had shouted at Bill. “You might as well have brought her home dead on a stretcher.” Nancy burst into tears.

  “I’m very sorry, sir.” Bill had replied. Her tears stopped.

  Sorry? SORRY?!

  Was it Bill’s lame reply to her father? Or the ghastly black hat she had borrowed ten pounds to buy for the ceremony? (A rare instance when her taste in hats failed her.) Perhaps it was the letter that followed her back to London signed, brutally, H. C. Sharp. A long, hot, dreary summer, living on three pounds a week in a grim and sooty King’s Cross flat, followed. And when her father died of a heart attack that fall, her mother hadn’t hesitated to accuse her of killing him. Perhaps the curse on their marriage lay there. At least with the slump Bill’s dalliances with models were behind them; they could scarcely keep themselves in pencils and milk. When Nancy wasn’t mourning the loss of her youthful promise, she made herself miserable searching for the exact moment her life went wrong. She ran the reel of that race to the registry office again and again, wondering how things might have turned out differently.