Tag Archives: Canongate Books

Damian Barr, The Two Roberts

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Damian Barr, The Two Roberts. Canongate hb 2025. 310pp. Library copy

I first heard about this recently published novel, based on the lives of the two Ayrshire artists, Robert Colquhoun (1914-62) and Robert (usually known as Bobby) MacBryde (1913-66), in newpaper reviews. I’d never heard of them, and wanted to find out more. It was well worth the effort: it’s a fascinating, deeply moving and rather sad account of their rise from relative poverty, via the famous Glasgow School of Art (GSA) to fame and fortune in the 1940s, then to obscurity, neglect and penury when their work fell out of fashion in the fifties.

The two men met during their first days at the GSA in 1933. Bobby – always the more open, extravert and impulsive of the two – was smitten at first sight; Robert was a much more reserved, conflicted character, and took some time to acknowledge his reciprocal love. These were dangerous days to be homosexual, but Bobby in particular never tried particularly hard to conceal his feelings.

Damian Barr gives some vivid and poignant insights into their early lives: despite hardships, bullying, parental indifference (especially in Robert’s dour Kilmarnock household) and lack of resources, they both worked hard at developing their precocious artistic talent. At the GSA they rapidly established themselves as star students, coming top of their year and winning a prestigious research grant to visit London’s galleries, and then a joint scholarship to tour Europe. This latter was cut short by the imminence of war.

They moved to London and became feted: Robert was likened to Picasso, and specialised in the human form (as well as animals), while Bobby was a Scots Braque, mostly producing brilliant still lifes – but they influenced and inspired each other’s work. They became established denizens of the louche Soho-Fitzrovia bohemian/artistic set, mixing with artists Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and John Minton, among others, and Dylan Thomas and Irish poet (from Enniscorthy, like Colm Tóibín) Anthony Cronin, who wrote about them in his memoir of that period and place, Dead as Doornails (1976).

They became heavy drinkers at this time, and although they made a lot of money from sales and exhibitions, spent it just as rapidly – throwing famous parties, helping their less fortunate friends. When from the late forties abstract expression became the dominant artistic fashion, their work was no longer appreciated, and they slid into poverty, homelessness and alcoholism. They relied on handouts from friends, and lived in borrowed/bummed temporary accommodation,  including a few years in the early fifties as the most unlikely of nannies to the four children of Elizabeth Smart (by her married lover, the poet George Barker; I posted on her extraordinary novella inspired by her hopeless love for Barker, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, HERE).

In this Suffolk idyll they behaved themselves on weekdays, Robert painting in his room, Bobby doing the housework and looking after the children. At weekends, however, their drunken, tempestuous behaviour and fights were fierce. It ended in disaster, as usual by this time.

They were kept just about afloat also by some random commissions, such as a sponsored period in Lewes, Sussex (near the famous farmhouse at Charleston, the country home of Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister, and Duncan Grant; the Woolfs had their second [sometimes primary] home nearby at Monk’s House, Rodmell), designing the costumes and sets for a ballet in London.

But they shared or mutually generated a self-destructive tendency that blighted their final years and led to their tragically early deaths. In Robert’s case this came at the age of just 47 in 1962 as he prepared for a retrospective exhibition of his work that they both hoped would revive his reputation and fame. It wasn’t to be. Bobby died just four years later in a car accident. It’s only recently that writers like Barr, and a few enterprising galleries, have rediscovered and promoted their prodigious talent.

Despite the fights, they were clearly devoted to each other and very much in love. Damian Barr portrays their complicated relationships, the promiscuous casual sex with other men, and sad decline into obscurity and squalor, with candour and verve.

I’d highly recommend this excellent fictionalised biography, and do look out for the two Roberts’ art work online:

Link HERE to a BBC Arts site: a useful brief biography of the two artists (to provide context for a 2015 exhibition of their work in Edinburgh): ‘The Two Roberts: Love, Paint and Poverty’. It has some lovely colour images of some of their work, and quotations from some of their contemporaries and biographers. Also a link to the lyrical short black and white film by a young Ken Russell, made for the BBC in 1959, and described with an ironic twist in Damian Barr’s novel.

The National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh provides images of the paintings held there by the two artists, and some further brief biographical material, along with a short film about them: link HERE for the materials on Colquhoun…

And HERE for their materials on MacBryde.

Information about the exhibition ‘The Two Roberts: Artists, Lovers, Outsiders’ at Charleston in Lewes gallery, Sussex, now until April next year at the link HERE – the first in England since 1962. It’s curated by Damian Barr, and inspired by the two years the artists spent in Lewes, 1947-49, supported by the Miller sisters, patrons connected to the Bloomsbury group (about whom the Roberts were pretty disparaging – but were quite happy to accept their patronage!)

Cairngorm pilgrim: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

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Nan Shepherd (1893-1981), The Living Mountain. Canongate, 2014 (The Canons series)

‘One never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it.’

Nan Shepherd wrote this homage to the Cairngorm mountains mostly towards the end of the second world war, but was advised by a well-meaning correspondent that it would never find a publisher. She put the MS in a drawer where it remained until it was published ‘quietly’ (as Robert Macfarlane puts it in his introduction to this edition) in 1977.

I find it as difficult to describe as he does:

A celebratory prose-poem? A geo-poetic quest? A place-paean? A philosophical enquiry into the nature of knowledge? A metaphysical mash-up of Presbyterianism and the Tao?

Mountains have long inspired powerful emotions in those who contemplate them. Edmund Burke, in his examination (1757) of all things ‘sublime’, such as mountain ranges, believed that ‘terror’ was its ‘ruling principle’. Until the time of the early Romantics, wild nature in all its forms, especially mountains, were viewed with similar misgivings, although there was always a concession that mighty vistas inspired feelings of awe. Rude nature was seen as something of an imperfection, a visual proof of the fall of humankind from grace. It was chaos – the antithesis of human reason and logic.

I came across a fine example of this wary attitude to nature’s wildness when listening to a podcast recently of the Radio 4 programme The Verb (dated 29.6.18), an episode called ‘Northern Rocks’ – about the craggy hills of the north of England. One contributor cited the English author and rent collector in Scotland, Edward Burt (died 1755; he was also a surveyor for the making of General Wade’s military roads there after the 1715 Jacobite rebellion). Burt wrote in 1727-28 about Scottish mountains in a grumpy letter to a friend (published 1754):

I shall soon conclude this description of the outward appearance of the mountains, which I am already tired of, as a disagreeable subject. . . . There is not much variety, but gloomy spaces, different rocks, heath, and high and low, . . . the whole of a dismal gloomy brown drawing upon a dirty purple; and most of all disagreeable when the heath is in bloom. But of all the views, I think the most horrid is, to look at the hills from east to west, or vice versa; for then the eye penetrates far among them, and sees more particularly their stupendous bulk, frightful irregularity, and horrid gloom, made yet more sombrous by the shades and faint reflections they communicate one to another.—Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to his Friend in London. Fifth edit., vol. i. p. 285. (Link to this quotation online HERE).

Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain front coverWordsworth was to use the term ‘sublime’ about his beloved Lakeland mountain region in a more transcendendent sense, and he was influential in changing the largely negative attitudes to wild nature prevalent until his time (though there was a fashion in the decades before him for admiring the ‘picturesque’ – sanitised tableaux of natural scenes to be admired in urban drawing-rooms). Shepherd favours this Wordsworthian attitude, with a dose of sensuality, metaphysics and Zen thrown in. She’s also a sort of rural psychogeographer or flâneuse, if it’s possible to be one outside of an urban setting:

Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with them…

She has no truck with the (mostly male) climbers who seek simply to chalk up another peak to their tally of conquests. Mountains are not there to be vanquished. Her approach is more selfless, spiritual and poetic.

The dustjacket of this book carries a quotation from the Guardian newspaper: ‘The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain’. I wasn’t convinced of this until the final three chapters. The poetic prose and lofty transcendentalism was a bit heady for my taste – though there were some lovely descriptions of the flora and fauna as well as the topography of the mountains. Then I must have become attuned to the style and approach.

There are some memorable moments, like the description of her waking from a sleep outside her tent (in the summer, of course) to find an owl perched on her tent-pole. She writes beautifully about the ‘swiftness’ of many of the creatures that live on the mountain: the eagle, peregrine falcon, red deer and mountain hare. But this isn’t sentiment or gush: as a sensible naturalist she recognises that being speedy is ‘severely practical’ –

…food is so scarce up there that only those who can move swiftly over vast stretches of ground may hope to survive. The speed, the whorls and torrents of movement, are in plain fact the mountain’s own necessity. But their grace is not necessity. … Beauty is not adventitious but essential.

This represents the best and worst of Shepherd’s prose style. That second sentence is, well, sublime, but I omitted a long sentence in that extract, which would to my mind have benefitted from some editing.

I don’t want to end on a negative note. Here’s the final paragraph, that conveys this book’s essence:

I believe that I now understand in some small measure why the Buddhist goes on pilgrimage to a mountain. The journey is itself part of the technique by which god is sought. It is a journey into Being; for as I penetrate more deeply into a mountain’s life, I penetrate also into my own. For an hour I am beyond desire. It is not ecstasy, that leap out of the self that makes man like a god. I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. To know Being, this is the final grace accorded from the mountain.