In contemplating writing creatively about the life and death of a real person, famous or otherwise, one has (a minimum of) six key decisions to make, the last four of which are dependent on the first and second.
First and foremost is whether to write poetry or prose. With five poetry collections and four novels already published, I imagine the decision Sue Hubbard made to plump for poetry to address her subject, Gwen John (1876–1939), wasn’t an easy one to make; however, the notes at the back indicate that Hubbard had previously written (at least) one poem about a moment in John’s life so perhaps that had left an itch that needed to be scratched. I admire Hubbard for even taking on such a large and complex project.
The second decision, perhaps a subconscious one, is how much of the subject’s life needs to be recounted to do justice to their main events, relationships, successes, failures and emotions. Despite some artistic success, John, as is widely known now, had only one solo exhibition in her lifetime and lived in the shadow of both her two-years-younger brother, Augustus, who became the most celebrated British painter of their day, and Rodin, 35 years her senior, with whom John had an unequal relationship for a decade from 1904 (and whose forename was, by coincidence, the French equivalent of her brother’s). The 34 poems in this collection run chronologically from John’s childhood and adolescence in North Wales to her death in Dieppe, two weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War. As we’ll see, they aren’t ‘Wiki poems’, i.e. they don’t clunkily include facts for the sake of it; rather, they tend more towards impressionistic sketches, pleasingly in keeping with John’s style of painting. Neither do they amount to a full-blown biography (her mother’s death when John was eight isn’t mentioned for instance, though her absence can be inferred), but that doesn’t necessarily make them any less meritorious or successful than had Hubbard written a fuller account in prose.
Thirdly, should the poet use the same voice – first, second or third person – throughout, and if so which; or should they vary it from poem to poem? Hubbard, I think wisely, has opted for the third person and stuck with it. The benefit of it is, of course, that it provides a certain objectivity, irrespective of how sympathetically the poems are cast. By contrast, writing in the second person almost always reads like a half-baked fudge. It might, though, have been tempting for Hubbard to use the first person; indeed, the notes tell us that the poem about John she’d had published previously was in John’s voice, so she has changed it for inclusion here. Maybe using the first person en bloc would have felt presumptuous.
And fourth, what tense should be used, past or present, and, again, should that be consistent or varied? Hubbard has sensibly chosen to employ the present tense in all the poems, bestowing immediacy, timelessness and a sense of the life’s moments being never ending. Again, this choice surely aligns with the spirit of John’s paintings, and also with her Catholic belief in the life eternal.
The fifth decision pertains to what form(s) the poems should take. Hubbard mixes them up, in a comparatively limited way: 16 are in couplets; five in tercets; six in quatrains; six in narrow-ish blocks; and one has four octaves. Really, though, the tone in all of them is the same, so the variation of the forms only succeeds visually, albeit that that helps to offset the tonal sameness. Whatever their length, Hubbard’s stanzas are rarely self-contained, and her block poems are always composed of several sentences.
The sixth decision may, but needn’t, be subconscious: which narrative tone should be struck? As I say, Hubbard’s tone is consistent throughout: the broadly omniscient voice which enables depiction not just of what John does and what happens to her, but also, where appropriate, her thoughts and feelings. (Hubbard appears instinctively able to judge when to describe John’s emotional reactions and when to let events simply imply reactions.) That narrative consistency also drives the language Hubbard deploys: in echoes of how John’s palette was often muted (as Hubbard considers in a couple of poems), and how her adult life was lived in poverty, austerity and a lack of loving fulfilment, Hubbard’s writing is spare and purposely low-key, usually in short, frequently compressed sentences, though that means that when she uses adjectives their effectiveness is heightened, occasionally quite beautifully: in the poem ‘Teapot’ for instance, ‘a curdy light spills / into her china breakfast bowl.’
Hubbard’s four-page introduction does not explain any of those decisions; instead, it gives a potted prose summary of John’s life, with a psychoanalytic slant. While that may be generous to the general reader who knows little of John’s biography, to others it may be superfluous. On balance, if read before the poems, it might well detract from them. Had it been included as an afterword, that would arguably have been more prudent, and I would advise potential readers of this book to approach it in that manner.
Nevertheless, the poetry is engrossing from the start. ‘Luncheon in Tenby’ opens with a solid metaphor for the oppressiveness of the Victorian values perpetuated by John’s father towards her and her siblings, her mother having died when she was eight:
The mahogany sideboard reclines
against the wall like the chief mourner
at a funeral. [. . .]
[. . .]
Her father demands quiet, so she
and Winifred speak in signs. [. . .]
Soon, Hubbard pictures John on her way to art school in ‘London— / leaving her stern father / with his taxidermy and law tomes, / his shelves of devotional works— / to embrace anatomy, perspective, / and the history of art’ (‘Slade’). There, ‘she learns from Tonks / a new freedom of line. / How to evoke round objects / on flat paper. Three dimensions / whilst working in two.’ This writing has a pleasing brevity to it, with just enough information conveyed for the reader to fill in the rest of the scene. In the life classes, we’re told that, ‘the women are strictly / segregated, the male nudes never / completely nude’ (‘Glaze’), with nice emphases at the line-ends to reinforce the prohibition. ‘Walking with Dorelia’ is a lively, humorous rendering of John’s 1903 walking tour in France with Dorelia McNeill, whom she met at Westminster School of Art and who was later to become her brother’s main, lifelong partner, and hints at their supposed mutual sexual attraction:
[. . .]
sleeping under haystacks and icy stars,
lying on top of each other to stay warm.
They wake to astonished farmers,
gathered gendarmes peering curiously
at les jeunes anglaises déshabillées
huddled under a pagoda of portfolios,
straw woven in their tangled hair.
Hubbard captures well John’s hand-to-mouth subsistence in Paris from 1904 and the city’s colour and grime:
[. . .] On the street corner,
crippled in her sooty blacks
la petite fleuriste hawks bunches
of muguet and yellow mimosa.
Across Sunday streets
bells drift above junk shops
and cheap bars where des maudits
nurse glasses of cloudy absinthe.
Far from Tenby
this, now, is home.
To eat, she knocks on studio doors,
poses, if she can, for women.
(‘Montmartre’)
As that poem’s next stanza attests, the male artists were all too free with their hands, and it’s no coincidence, presumably, that the facing poem is the first of seven consecutive poems concerning John’s relationship with Rodin. It’s here that the collection truly hits its stride. ‘Modelling for Rodin’ (‘Naked before him, / she finds a new peace’) becomes something more: ‘the weight of him, // his tongue in her mouth / like something feral.’ Hubbard adroitly conjures the complexities of John’s relationship with the ‘Maȋtre’; how she can’t just make do with being one of his many model–mistresses, particularly in the vividly heart-rending poem ‘Love is Lonelier than Solitude’:
She thinks of him all the time,
an anchorite in her quiet cell
waiting for his booted step on the stair,
reluctant to go out in case he comes.
All is clean and polished. Her hair washed,
bluebells in a jar on the mantle,
a bow around Tiger’s neck.
The tangible sense of unrequited love that Hubbard conveys here continues in the poems that follow – ‘Fire’, ‘Hands’ and ‘Drawing the Cat’ – in which John’s longing approaches madness, not helped by being forced sometimes into a threesome with Rodin’s (female) ‘Finnish assistant— // the one who thinks she’s ugly’. John wrote hundreds of fervent letters to Rodin without receiving replies, and Hubbard supplies a moving portrait of John with pen in hand, ending with an intriguing, apposite metaphor of liquidity for the futility of her passionate task:
A flood of moonshine spills
onto the round table,
the blank white sheet,
a millrace of words pulling
her under, soaking her wet.
(‘Letter to Rodin’)
The post-Rodin poems are equally interesting. In ‘Suitors’, we see John’s attractiveness to a succession of other women. ‘The Poetry of Things’ and ‘Communion’ show John at work, drawing, in both her room and outside: ‘There is poetry in ordinary things, / her blue jug, the basket of kittens, // that line of busy ants’; ‘she takes her notebook / to Gare Montparnasse, sketches travellers with carpet bags // and furled umbrellas, though her chilblained fingers are freezing.’ Hubbard delves into John’s increasingly nun-like piety in a number of poems, not least the title poem, the precious thinness of which, almost as much as John’s art, is delicately crafted:
Her God is a God of quietness,
so she must be quiet.
His love is constant.
It does not despise,
or rebuff like carnal love.
She would live without
a body, now. Its fleshy needs,
its urgent desires [. . .]
What has crystallised for me through reading and re-reading God’s Little Artist is an appreciation of how well Hubbard inhabits John’s world, with all its disappointments, and draws out her character. Like Letters to Gwen John (Jonathan Cape, 2022) by the painter Celia Paul (no relation of mine), this is an important creative contribution to the ongoing reappraisal of John; but, more than that, its poems provide a fine match of uncomplicated forms and lucid writing to John’s ascetic life and exquisite art.
God’s Little Artist by Sue Hubbard (Seren, 2023), £9.99, available to buy here.
Tag: gwen-john
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Review of Sue Hubbard’s God’s Little Artist
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