Sussex Writers & Artists

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SNAKE RIVER PRESS A SUSSEX GUIDE SUSSEX WRITERS & ARTISTS EDWARD LUCIE-SMITH

description

Endlessly entertaining and informative, Sussex Writers & Artists is a collection of crisp and concise biographies of writers and artists with a Sussex connection. Over the centuries a substantial number of the nation’s foremost creative figures have had their lives and work touched by the shaping spirit of Sussex. There have been some surprisingly varied reactions: Blake hated the place, Kipling fell in love with it, Bell, Grant and the Woolfs turned it into a place of literary pilgrimage and John Constable just came for a holiday. Whether it’s Beardsley, Belloc or Blake, Edward Lucie-Smith animates their lives and work in a riveting set of illuminating and revealing stories.

Transcript of Sussex Writers & Artists

Page 1: Sussex Writers & Artists

S N A K E R I V E R P R E S S

B O O K S A B O U T S U S S E X F O R T H E E N T H U S I A S T

wwwwww.. ssnnaakkeerr iivveerrpprreessss..ccoo.. uukk

‘I’ve given my soul to the Southdown grass,And sheep-bells

tinkled where you pass. Oh Firle an’ Ditchling an’ sails at sea,

I reckon you keep my soul for me!’

RUDYARD KIPLING PUCK OF POOK’S HILL

S N A K E R I V E R P R E S S

A S U S S E X G U I D E

SUSSEX

WRITERS& ARTISTS

E D W A R D L U C I E - S M I T H

S U S S E X W R I T E R S & A RT I S T S

William Blake hated the place, Kipling fell in love

with it. Bell, Grant and the Woolfs turned it into a

place of literary pilgrimage, John Constable just came

for a holiday. Shelley ran away from it as soon as he

could, Stella Gibbons poked fun at it. Look inside to

find out more about the Sussex connection with many

of the nation’s foremost creative figures.

E D WA R D L U C I E - S M I T H

Edward Lucie-Smith, author, journalist andbroadcaster, began his literary life as a poet butis better known as an art and design historian,critic and curator. He has lectured in Europe,South America, Hong Kong,Australasia and theUS.The author of many biographical critiques,art histories and general reference books, he isparticularly interested in the history of eroti-cism in art. His books include the major classicssuch as Sexuality in Western Art (1991) and Race,Sex and Gender in Contemporary Art (1994).

S U S S E X W R I T E R S

& A RT I S T S

Sussex Writers & Artists is a set of brief, brisk yetentertaining biographies of writers and artistswith a Sussex connection gathered togetherunder the selective eye of Edward Lucie-Smith.Not all of them were born in the county, not allof them even wrote about it, or made art aboutit, but its shaping spirit touched all of their livesin some way. From the seedy squalor of GrahamGreene’s Brighton to the sunlit innocence ofWinnie the Pooh’s Ashdown Forest, from EricGill’s erotic line to Turner’s lyrical recreation ofPetworth Park, Sussex Writers & Artists looks at theimpact that the county made on the creativemuse.Reading these brief biographies will makeyou want to re-read each writer’s words, seekout each artist’s work, and look at Sussex withnew eyes.

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£8.99

S N A K E R I V E R B O O K S

Snake River Press publishes books about the art,culture, personalities and landscape of Sussex. Snake River

books are available by mail order or from bookshops.You can order safely online through our website:

www.snakeriverpress.co.uk. If you prefer buying offline you can contact us by telephone: 01273 403988 or

by email: [email protected]

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I l l u s t r a t e d b yI V A N H I S S E Y

SUSSEX

WRITERS& ARTISTSE D W A R D L U C I E - S M I T H

S N A K E R I V E R P R E S S

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Book No 2Books about Sussex for the enthusiast

Published in 2007 byS N A K E R I V E R P R E S S

South Downs Way,Alfriston, Sussex BN26 5XWwww.snakeriverpress.co.uk

ISBN 978-1-906022-01-3

This book was conceived, designed and produced by S N A K E R I V E R P R E S S

Copyright © Snake River Press Limited 2007Text © Edward Lucie-Smith

Illustration © Ivan Hissey

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

The publishers and authors have done their best to ensure the accuracy and currency of all information at the date of preparation.Readers who intend to rely on the information to undertake any activity

should check the current accuracy.The publishers and authors accept no responsibility for any loss, injury or inconvenience sustained by the

reader as a result of information or advice contained in this book.

Art Director & Publisher Peter BridgewaterEditorial Director Viv Croot

Editor RobertYarhamPage makeup Richard Constable & Chris Morris

Illustrator Ivan HisseyConsultant Lorraine Harrison

This book is typeset in Perpetua & Gill Sans,two fonts designed by Eric Gill

Printed and bound in China

S N A K E R I V E R P R E S S

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C O N T E N T S

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . 6

DAISY ASHFORD . . . . . . . . . . 12

ENID BAGNOLD . . . . . . . . . . . 14

AUBREY BEARDSLEY . . . . . . . 16

VANESSA BELL . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

HILAIRE BELLOC . . . . . . . . . . 20

E.F. BENSON . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

WILLIAM BLAKE . . . . . . . . . . 24

SIR DIRK BOGARDE . . . . . . . 26

SIR FRANK BRANGWYN . . . . . 28

SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES . . 30

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE . 32

JOHN CONSTABLE . . . . . . . . . 34

ELIZABETH DAVID . . . . . . . . . 36

CHRISTOPHER FRY . . . . . . . . 38

STELLA GIBBONS . . . . . . . . . . 40

ERIC GILL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

DUNCAN GRANT . . . . . . . . . . 44

GRAHAM GREENE . . . . . . . . . 46

PATRICK HAMILTON . . . . . . . 48

IVON HITCHENS . . . . . . . . . . 50

HENRY JAMES . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

RICHARD JEFFRIES . . . . . . . . 54

DAVID JONES . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

RUDYARD KIPLING . . . . . . . . 58

HERBERT LA THANGUE . . . . . 60

OLIVER MESSEL . . . . . . . . . . . 62

LEE MILLER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

A.A. MILNE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

PAUL NASH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

SIR WILLIAM NICHOLSON . . . 70

THOMAS OTWAY . . . . . . . . . . 72

ERIC RAVILIOUS . . . . . . . . . . 74

THOMAS SACKVILLE . . . . . . . . 76

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY . . . . 78

ROBERT TRESSELL . . . . . . . . . 80

J.M.W. TURNER . . . . . . . . . . . 82

H.G.WELLS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84

REX WHISTLER . . . . . . . . . . . 86

LEONARD WOOLF . . . . . . . . . 87

VIRGINIA WOOLF . . . . . . . . . 89

W.B.YEATS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

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D A I S Y A S H F O R D1 8 8 1 - 1 9 7 2

L E W E S

Daisy Ashford, without a doubt now one of the best-known Sussex authors, wroteher celebrated book The Young Visiters

in 1890, when she was only nine years old and living in Lewes.The manuscript lay in a drawer fornearly 30 years, until it was finally published in1919, with a preface by J.M. Barrie. Speaking ofthe photograph of the child-author that accom-

panied the text, Barrie wrote:

This is no portrait of a writer who had to burn the oil at midnight (indeed there is documentary evidence that she was hauled off to bed every evening at six): it has an air of careless power; there is a complacency about it that by the severe might perhaps be called smugness. It needed no effort for that face to knock off a masterpiece.

In fact the sheer confidence of the narrative – a child’s eye view of Englishupper-class society – and what seemed to be its sharp satirical edgecaused many people to believe that the text had been written by JamesBarrie himself.

Though The Young Visiters is not – contrary to report – the only novelor novella that Daisy produced (there was another one called TheHangman’s Daughter, in addition to a number of short stories). Shestopped writing when she was in her teens, though, according to herdaughter, she continued to tell entertaining stories – invented lives forpeople she had observed in a teashop or elsewhere. But when her master-piece was finally published, she couldn’t see what all the fuss was about,or why her book had become an instant classic. Since its publication, ithas never been out of print.

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Its immediate success was partly due to the cult of childhood thatflourished in Britain in the years immediately after World War I, perhapsin reaction to the horrors of the war itself. A.A. Milne’s Pooh storiesand poems featuring his son Christopher Robin were beneficiaries ofthe same impulse – a need to try to reclaim a lost innocence.There wasalso the fact that The Young Visiters, with its naïve but telling vision ofVictorian high society, recalled something that suddenly seemed incred-ibly exotic and remote.

One reason for the book’s continued popularity, however, is that it isstuffed with quotable quotes. For example, who can forget Daisy’s child’s-eye vision of royalty? ‘Here on a golden chair was seated the prince ofWales in a lovely ermine cloak and a small but costly crown.’And othergems are not difficult to find:‘Bernard always had a few prayers in thehall and some whiskey afterwards as he was rather pious.’ Or,‘My ownidear [sic] is that these things are as piffle before the wind.’

In her own way, Daisy was a phrase-maker on a par with Oscar Wilde.

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Ashford’s Top Works

f The Young Visiters, 1919f Love and Marriage (with Angela Ashford), 1965f The Hangman’s Daughter, 1983

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R Y E

Henry James’s successor at Lamb House inRye was the prolific novelist and shortstory-writer Edward Frederic Benson,

who moved into part of the building shortly afterJames died in 1916, and took over the full lease in1920. Benson was a son of an Archbishop ofCanterbury, and for part of his time in Rye he sharedhis home with his brother, A.C. Benson (1862-

1925), now remembered chiefly as the author of the words that werefitted to Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance No.1 to create the patriotic anthem‘Land of Hope and Glory’. A.C. Benson undertook the job at thepersonal request of King Edward VII, shortly after the latter’s accessionto the throne. E.F. Benson was to be the author of a popular series ofroyal biographies, as well as of well-regarded ghost stories, books ofmemoirs and a whole series of other works – about 100 titles in all.

However, his reputation, revived by a successful television series inthe 1980s, now rests on his series of comic novels about the rival ladiesMapp and Lucia.When first introduced, the two appear in quite sep-arate narratives, though Mapp is already settled in Rye (which Bensoncalled Tilling) in Miss Mapp, first published in 1922.The two did notconfront one another until the publication of Mapp & Lucia in 1931.Twosequels followed – Lucia’s Progress (1935) and Trouble for Lucia (1939) –before Benson’s death in 1940. In describing Lucia’s adventures he drewheavily on his own experiences in Rye, even promoting her to mayor ofthe town, an office he himself held for three terms.

Although Benson is a minor writer compared to his predecessor atLamb House, he was much more intimately connected with the life ofSussex, and the social rivalries described in the Mapp and Lucia books

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still ring true today. Proof of the pleasure people still take in his bookshas been the recent appearance of two Mapp and Lucia sequels, Lucia inWartime (1985) and Lucia Triumphant (1986).These are have been writtenby Tom Holt, otherwise best known as a writer of science fiction.Thereare also two societies, the E.F. Benson Society and the Tilling Societydevoted to studying and celebrating his work.

Benson does not appear often in standard dictionaries of quotations,yet a number of his formulations have a distinctly Wildean ring.This,for example, is his description of one of his two main protagonists:

Though [Lucia was] essentially autocratic, her subjects were allowed and evenencouraged to develop their own minds on their own lines, provided always thatthose lines met at the junction where she was stationmaster.

This lies somewhere between the wit of Wilde himself and the writingsof P.G.Wodehouse.

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Benson’s Top Works

f Queen Lucia, 1920f Miss Mapp, 1922f Mapp and Lucia, 1931

Blake’s Top Works (see next page)

f Songs of Innocence, 1789f Songs of Experience, 1794f The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790f Milton,1803-8

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A L F R I S T O N

Dirk Bogarde, born Derek van den Bogaerdein Hampstead of mixed Belgian andScottish ancestry, is best remembered for

his career as an actor. Starting out as a matinée idolin the 1950s (on his death Glenda Jackson describedhim as the Leonardo di Caprio of the period), whenhe made his name as the handsome young SimonSparrow, hero of the ‘Doctor’ series, he went on to

star in difficult, complex films by major directors, among them JosephLosey’s The Servant (1963) and Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969)and Death in Venice (1971). During the latter years of his success as an actor,Bogarde lived mostly in Provence with his partner Tony Forwood, movingback to London in 1988 when Forwood fell ill with cancer. Forwood’simportance in Bogarde’s life was only full acknowledged after his death.Neither of them seems to have thought of moving to Sussex. However,Bogarde claims a place in this book because his Sussex childhood playedan important role in his books – he wrote both a series of memoirs andnovels that are often obviously based on his own life.

Bogarde was brought up at Lullington, near Alfriston, in Sussex notby his parents (his father was the first art editor of The Times), but by hisolder sister Elizabeth and their adored nurse Lally.The county figures inhis first volume of memoirs, A Postillion Struck by Lightning, published in1977, and also, more intensely in the novel-memoir Great Meadow (1992),which recalls his intense response to nature as an 11-year-old boy, andagain, more obliquely in his final novel, Closing Ranks (1997). One curiousfeature of this last book is that, while it tells the story of an upper-classfamily gathered round the death-bed of a beloved nanny, the dyingwoman curses them instead of blessing them.

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In fact Bogarde seems to have felt a real ambivalence both about hisfamily and about Sussex. It only emerged, some three years after hisdeath, that he had a long-lost paternal grandfather who had lived inBrighton, reappearing there many years after deserting his wife and son.Aimé van den Bogaerde was an adventurer who, having lost all his money,sailed for Colombia in 1899, to try his luck as an orchid hunter.At firsthe sent optimistic reports of his progress but, soon after announcing hisintention to return home with his fortunes restored, he ceased tocommunicate with his family. His wife died in 1917, believing he hadbeen killed in South America.

When Aimé reappeared in 1931, his son Ulric, resenting his behaviour, refused to have anything to do with him, but Dirk, who hadsome contact with him, was apparently fascinated, although Aimé doesnot figure in any of his books of reminiscences.The returned prodigal,who died in 1938, was an alcoholic who forged paintings for a living,or else touted his own art round the pubs of Brighton in exchange fordrink. He sounds very much like the kind of flawed character thatBogarde might have played in the later years of his film career.

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Bogarde’s Top Works

f A Postillion Struck by Lightning, 1977f Voices in the Garden, 1981f A Short Walk from Harrods, 1993

Brangwyn’s Top Works (see next page)

f The Return of the Fishing Fleet, 1888f A Cooper atWork, 1905f British Empire Panels, 1924-33

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C R O W B O R O U G H

Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born inEdinburgh, but came from Irish Catholicstock. He was educated at Stonyhurst, the

great English Catholic boarding school, which hehated, then returned to Edinburgh to study medi-cine. During his student years he began to writefiction in his spare time.After adventurous voyagesto the Arctic (which fascinated him) and Africa

(which he disliked), he set up an independent medical practice inPortsmouth. In 1885 he married, and in 1888 he published his firstSherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet.This was followed two yearslater by another, The Sign of Four, featuring the same hero, which madeConan Doyle famous on both sides of the Atlantic. Holmes was to haunthis creator for the rest of his life, as Conan Doyle tended to prefer hisother, more ‘serious’ writings, such as the historical novel The WhiteCompany. By 1893 he had already decided to get rid of his burdensomehero, and wrote a story called The Final Problem, in which Holmes andhis inveterate enemy Professor Moriarty fall to their deaths at theReichenbach Falls in Switzerland. However, this absence did not last, asHolmes was already well on his way to becoming a national icon – aposition he still occupies today.

The health of Conan Doyle’s wife Louisa was now in terminal declinefrom tuberculosis, and he was in love with Jean Leckie, who was tobecome his adored second wife. In 1900 he volunteered for service asa doctor during the Boer War, and wrote an account of his experiencesthat earned him a knighthood in 1902 (it may also have helped thatEdward VII was a great fan of Sherlock Holmes). He revived Holmes in1901, with one of his most celebrated books, The Hound of the Baskervilles,

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where the detective moves in the realm of the uncanny, which was tobecome an obsessive interest in his creator’s later years.

In 1906 his wife died, and in 1907 he was at long last able to marryJean. It was at this point that he moved to Sussex – his second wife’sfamily came from the county. In the year of his marriage he bought anold house called Windlesham near Crowborough, to which he madesubstantial additions. He lived there for the rest of his life, though healso kept a small flat in London.

Sussex makes a number of appearances in Conan Doyle’s later fictions.Holmes, having moved from London, is imagined spending his retirementas a Sussex bee-keeper, in The Sussex Vampire, one of Conan Doyle’s lastset of Sherlock Holmes stories. Published in 1924, it contains a detaileddescription of what is probably the author’s own house, now set near afictional town named Lamberley. Here is Holmes’s and Watson’s firstglimpse of it:

It was evening of a dull, foggy November day when,having left our bags at theChequers,Lamberley,we drove through the Sussex clay of a long winding lane andfinally reached the isolated and ancient farmhouse in which Ferguson dwelt. It was a large, straggling building,very old in the centre,very new at the wings withtowering Tudor chimneys and a lichen-spotted,high-pitched roof of Horshamslabs.The doorsteps were worn into curves,and the ancient tiles which lined theporch were marked with the rebus of a cheese and a man after the original builder.

Conan Doyle fitted comfortably into the kind of mental space occupiedby his contemporaries Kipling (see p.58) and Belloc (see p.20). He andKipling were friends, despite the latter’s increasing reclusiveness, andused to play golf together.As with Kipling, Conan Doyle’s temperamenthad a mystical side, which became more pronounced as he grew older.In later life he became a strong supporter of Spiritualism, and devotedmuch time and money to the cause.

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Conan Doyle’s Top Works

f A Study in Scarlet, 1888f The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1891f The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1901

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H E N R Y J A M E S1 8 4 3 - 1 9 1 6

R Y E

Henry James was born in New York, andcame from a well-known, and also wealthy,family of American intellectuals. His father,

Henry senior, was a well-known figure among theTranscendentalists who were attracted by thepersonality and beliefs of Ralph Waldo Emerson;his brother was the philosopher William James. Hisformation as a writer was thoroughly cosmopoli-

tan – he studied, at various times, in Geneva, London, Paris, Bolognaand Bonn. He also spent a brief period at Harvard Law School.

His first European residence was Paris, where he sometimes wrotefor the New York Tribune, but he soon moved to London, settling there in1876. Of London he wrote, in 1888,

It is a real stroke of luck for a particular country that the capital of the humanrace happens to be British. Surely every other people would have it theirs if theycould.Whether the English deserve to hold it any longer might be an interestingfield of inquiry; but as they have not yet let it slip the writer of these linesprofesses without scruple that the arrangement is to his personal taste. For afterall if the sense of life is greatest there, it is a sense of the life of people of ourincomparable English speech.

However, after more than 20 years, he decided he needed somethingmore tranquil. He moved into Lamb House in Rye in 1898, and becamea British subject in 1915, only shortly before his death.The character-istic products of his years in Rye are a group of elaborate late novels –The Wings of a Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904). James’s oblique fictional methods in these books drive some readers to distraction – his career has been bitchily described as

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consisting of three periods: James the First, James the Second, and Jamesthe Old Pretender. However the general view is that the late works arehis most perfect products. Experts on James give the prize to The Wingsof a Dove, although James himself, who was an excellent commentatoron his own efforts, seems to have preferred The Ambassadors.

None of these books offers any reference to life in Sussex.Theirsettings are international and urban.The events recounted in The Wingsof A Dove take place in London, then in Venice, and the central characteris an American heiress. Rye was simply a place that offered James theseclusion he needed in order to write.

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James’s Top Works

f Daisy Miller, 1879f The Portrait of a Lady, 1881f The Ambassadors, 1903

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C H I D D I N G L Y

Lee Miller was an American – in her prime,a woman of extraordinary vivacity andbeauty – whose reputation as a photographer

has recently been experiencing a revival, thankslargely to the efforts of her son Anthony Penrose.

She was born in Poughkeepsie, NY, and herfather, who was an engineer and camera enthusiast,taught her the basics of photography when she was

still a child.At the age of seven she was raped by a family friend, who atthe same time infected her with a venereal disease – this left psycho-logical scars that took a long time to heal, if indeed they ever did.At 18she went to Paris to study theatre design and lighting. On her return, ayear later, she was spotted on a New York street by the magazine publisherCondé Nast, and through him became a successful fashion model,working for the leading American photographers of the time.

In 1929 she once more left for Paris, determined to meet theAmerican photographer Man Ray. Ignoring his insistence that he did nottake students, she soon installed herself as his assistant, mistress andmodel.Together they revived the photographic solarization process thatbecame one of the hallmarks of Man Ray’s style.According to the graphicaccount she gave much later to the curator and critic Mario Amaya,

Something crawled across my foot in the darkroom and I let out a yell andturned on the light. I never did find out what it was, a mouse or what.Then Iquickly realised that the film was totally exposed: there in the developmenttanks, ready to be taken out,were a dozen practically fully-developed negativesof a nude against a black background.Man Ray grabbed them,put them in thehypo and looked at them later.He didn’t even bother to bawl me out, since I was

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so sunk.When he looked at them, the unexposed parts of the negative,which hadbeen the black background,had been exposed by this sharp light that had been turned on and they had developed, and came right up to the edge of the white,nude body.But the background and the image couldn’t heal together, so therewas a line left which he called a ‘solarization’.

Through Man Ray, Miller met all the leading artists and intellectuals inParis, among them Picasso, the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard and JeanCocteau. In 1932 she returned to New York to set her own studio, butthis did not last long. In 1934 she married a rich Egyptian and went tolive with him in Egypt, but, still restless, returned to France in 1937,where she met and began an affair with Roland Penrose, a wealthyEnglishman from a Quaker background. Penrose, a minor artist, but amajor patron of the arts, formed part of Picasso’s entourage. Picassopainted Miller during the month she and Penrose spent in his companyat Mougins in the South of France, and she made a number of photo-graphs of the artist and his circle.

World War II provided the opportunity Lee Miller had been lookingfor all her life, though perhaps without knowing it. She made picturesof London in the Blitz, and in 1944 she became a combat photographer– working rather incongruously for Vogue – and followed the alliedadvance through France and into Germany, where she was present atthe liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald.The very direct photographsshe made during the war years are her best work.

She had not been faithful to Penrose during the war, but in 1946 shedivorced her Egyptian husband, and married him in 1947.The couplesettled at Farley Farm at Chiddingly, and entertained a wide spectrumof celebrated friends there.Though Miller still occasionally took photo-graphs of these visitors, she had essentially lost interest in photographyas an art, seemingly burned out by her wartime experiences. She nowbecame obsessed with cooking as a creative substitute, but at the sametime grew increasingly addicted to alcohol and Benzedrine. By the timeshe died in 1977 she had completely lost her once astonishing beautybut remained both fascinating and disconcertingly forthright to the end.

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B O O K S A B O U T S U S S E X F O R T H E E N T H U S I A S T

wwwwww.. ssnnaakkeerr iivveerrpprreessss..ccoo.. uukk

‘I’ve given my soul to the Southdown grass,And sheep-bells

tinkled where you pass. Oh Firle an’ Ditchling an’ sails at sea,

I reckon you keep my soul for me!’

RUDYARD KIPLING PUCK OF POOK’S HILL

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A S U S S E X G U I D E

SUSSEX

WRITERS& ARTISTS

E D W A R D L U C I E - S M I T H

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William Blake hated the place, Kipling fell in love

with it. Bell, Grant and the Woolfs turned it into a

place of literary pilgrimage, John Constable just came

for a holiday. Shelley ran away from it as soon as he

could, Stella Gibbons poked fun at it. Look inside to

find out more about the Sussex connection with many

of the nation’s foremost creative figures.

E D WA R D L U C I E - S M I T H

Edward Lucie-Smith, author, journalist andbroadcaster, began his literary life as a poet butis better known as an art and design historian,critic and curator. He has lectured in Europe,South America, Hong Kong,Australasia and theUS.The author of many biographical critiques,art histories and general reference books, he isparticularly interested in the history of eroti-cism in art. His books include the major classicssuch as Sexuality in Western Art (1991) and Race,Sex and Gender in Contemporary Art (1994).

S U S S E X W R I T E R S

& A RT I S T S

Sussex Writers & Artists is a set of brief, brisk yetentertaining biographies of writers and artistswith a Sussex connection gathered togetherunder the selective eye of Edward Lucie-Smith.Not all of them were born in the county, not allof them even wrote about it, or made art aboutit, but its shaping spirit touched all of their livesin some way. From the seedy squalor of GrahamGreene’s Brighton to the sunlit innocence ofWinnie the Pooh’s Ashdown Forest, from EricGill’s erotic line to Turner’s lyrical recreation ofPetworth Park, Sussex Writers & Artists looks at theimpact that the county made on the creativemuse.Reading these brief biographies will makeyou want to re-read each writer’s words, seekout each artist’s work, and look at Sussex withnew eyes.

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£8.99

S N A K E R I V E R B O O K S

Snake River Press publishes books about the art,culture, personalities and landscape of Sussex. Snake River

books are available by mail order or from bookshops.You can order safely online through our website:

www.snakeriverpress.co.uk. If you prefer buying offline you can contact us by telephone: 01273 403988 or

by email: [email protected]