Leslie Hurry’s palace of wisdom

In 2011 I posted here on a first, rather breathless, encounter with the ‘forties paintings of Leslie Hurry. He was clearly still working well into the 1970’s (he died in 1978); I may be missing something, but I still can’t see any recent monograph – is there really no big, glossy volume on this extraordinary artist?

This lack makes Paintings and Drawings by Leslie Hurry (Grey Walls Press, 1950) still a useful source, at least, up to that point. The book’s intro is by the “prolific and proletarian” Jack Lindsay; this is sympathetic but none too informative. Lindsay wastes several pages trying to set Hurry into some sort of mega history-of-art context, but then fails to locate him as a painter within the movements and networks of his own times, as if his development were some purely personal, hermetic affair. But the book does have 38 plates, though only two are in colour; despite the black and white, it seems worthwhile to scan a few here below. (Click to enlarge.)

Sketch for Self-portrait, drawing, 1945

The paintings give out all sorts of echoes. Hurry may have opted to work in detachment from organised surrealism, but his relations in that respect are obvious. Absent from much of the imagery is the standard post-cubist scaffolding, so that his figures often have a ghostly flaccidity, as if their bones had been carefully extracted. They swell, contract and flop like jellyfish. This watery, or airy, looseness is reminiscent of David Jones, and the earliest image in the book, a watercolour of a Breton mass from 1939, is strongly Jones-like, both in style and content. While some later figures show rather more structure, a constant Picasso borrowing throughout is the familiar multi-angled face, though in Hurry’s hands this becomes more an image of simultaneous ambivalence than a trick of animation across adjacent moments.

To my mind, his allegorical images of famine and so forth are the least successful. When Hurry does Agony it veers into cartoony; a 1945 watercolour titled Atom Bomb is awkwardly sub-Guernica. To compensate, the scenery designs are a pleasure; they are richly fantastic, and relate closely to the baroque obsessiveness of Robin Ironside.

Jack Lindsay’s introduction to the book rounds off with his own poem, “The Bough of Sweetness,” dedicated to Hurry:

O difficult regeneration of suffering men
on the star-anvils in Stepney and Glasgow clanging
Mass meeting Strike Prague Five-Years-Plan Shanghai
also the slight chime of a flower perfected
and the livid eyes of fear caught in a word
Steadily the hills close round
with the doves of dawn and the nearing annunciation …

Personally, I find Lindsay’s poetry more interestingly symptomatic than successful, though this does at least represent a clumsy attempt at a verbal equivalent of Hurry’s violent conjunction of the visionary and the political – all very ‘forties, very apocalypse.

September 1939, oil, 1939

Thought Threading a Dream, tempera, 1941

The Soldier and the Woman, watercolour & chalk, 1944

Liberation, watercolour, 1945

Cafe Bar, watercolour, 1946

Two Figures, oil, 1946

The Meeting, watercolour & chalk, 1947

Figures in Landscape, watercolour, 1948

In his introduction to the book, Lindsay gives us little by way of Hurry’s biography. Born in 1909, trained at St John’s Wood and the RA School of Painting, emerging in 1931, murals, landscapes, a loss of purpose followed by a “desperate retreat into his lonely self” at a cottage in Thaxted, a spell in Brittany and Montmartre in 1938, from these periods of crisis a move into his mature work, beginning with more geometric configurations but soon evolving into more organic forms, theatre work starting with Hamlet at Sadlers Wells in 1941 – and that’s about as factual as it gets. His Wikipedia page adds not a lot more beyond the interesting detail that his father had been a funeral director, a career path the son rejected.

At the time of my previous post there didn’t seem to be much of Hurry online, but matters have since improved. Copyright restrictions at the Tate site have been lifted, so his artist page there now shows six works, including  This Extraordinary Year, 1945, which called to me when it was on the wall at Tate Britain. Much of Hurry’s work was watercolours; these don’t qualify for the Art UK site, which now offers six paintings, of which four are portraits including two variants of himself, though not the self-portrait shown in this post. Beyond these sources, a Google image search will throw up a couple of dozen additional items from galleries and so on, not counting costume or set designs. Enough to go at.

I find it hard to account for the relatively low profile of such a remarkable British painter, particularly given recent stirrings of interest in the neo-romantic phase. Hurry’s tense, highly strung images layer up beyond exhaustion those twitchy, compulsive marks and fragments until they hiss and sing in a sort of maximalist coherence, hard won against the odds by forcing overwroughtness through to a point of virtue. For once here, the road of excess does lead to the palace of wisdom.

Satan meets Cinderella: two anarchist dramas of the ‘forties

Satan disguised as an engineer, a madman in the attic, an army of radioactive Welsh miners, plus Cinderella … Yes, it’s British anarchist drama of the ‘forties! This post will be a little longer than usual, I’m afraid, so be patient. First, a quick recap on the origins of all this in the poetic dramas of the previous decade.

The new poetic theatre

Plenty has been written elsewhere about the ‘thirties heydays of the “new poetic theatre,” and in particular the plays, more or less political and Brechtian, of W H Auden and Christopher Isherwood, staged by Rupert Doone and the Group Theatre with the incidental music of Benjamin Britten, the sets of Robert Medley, and Faber to publish the scripts – quite a back-up! The first of these, The Dance of Death (1931), an Auden solo effort, is somewhat clunky but finishes splendidly with a brief guest appearance by Karl Marx:

Announcer. He’s dead.

[Noise without]

Quick under the table, it’s the ‘tecs and their narks,
O no, salute – it’s Mr Karl Marx.

[Enter Karl Marx with two young communists]

KM. The instruments of production have been too much for him. He is liquidated.

[Exeunt to a Dead March]

THE END

Auden and Isherwood’s The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935) is my favourite of the series; their fascist-infected English rural idyll of Pressan Ambo, closely related to the nightmare delusions of Edward Upward’s extraordinary 1938 novel Journey to the Border, blends banality with menace, and is a fine satiric invention.  In comparison The Ascent of F6 (1936) and On the Frontier (1938) seem to lose a little sparkle.

Not surprisingly, other McSpaunday personnel get in on the act: Louis MacNeice’s witty Out of the Picture (1937) or Stephen Spender’s execrable “tragic statement” Trial of a Judge (1938), both also realised by Doone and Faber. Somehow Spender manages to write an anti-fascist play in which the fascists are the only interesting characters. One can almost forgive them for locking up opponents who go on like this:

TWO RED PRISONERS.
Your days in dark, our dark that wakes,
Across the centuries and the waves
Will join to break our chains and break
Into the nobler day which saves.

And so on. And on. John Piper’s scenery was wasted on it.

The coming of war and the dissipation of that particular political-poetical consensus might appear to mark the end of these theatrical experiments. So it’s interesting, a decade on, to come across their minor progeny under the colours of anarchism, which in more or less individualist or philosophical shades had become the ideological flavour of ‘forties neo-romanticism. Here are two examples.

The Last Refuge

Wrey Gardiner by Gregorio Prieto

The more slight, but no less interesting, is Wrey Gardiner’s The Last Refuge, a single act affair that pops up in the 1945 edition of New Road, an annual neo-rom anthology published by Gardiner’s own Grey Walls Press, and edited at the time by Fred Murnau. Charles Wrey Gardiner was most active as a poet and autobiographer, but is better remembered for Grey Walls and for his sustained editorship of Poetry Quarterly. Whatever the strength of his sympathies, The Last Refuge seems to be an unusual instance of his nailing his black flag overtly to the mast.

The play must have been written a few years before it saw the light in 1945. Despite some minimal stage directions it’s maybe better considered as unperformable, a drama on the page in the manner of Gervase Stewart’s The Two Septembers, or Robert Herring’s “pantomime” of the Blitz Harlequin Mercutio, to give two others from the same period and sampled on this blog. Virtually the entire script is versified. The action (or conversation, mostly) is set in a bombed-out house deserted by its owners, emblematic of Blitzed England, and squatted by a selection of archetypes: an Old Woman, her earth-daughter Cinderella, a Lunatic (her traumatised son in the attic), and an Anarchist who ascends from the cellar. A Voice in the Air from a wireless interjects occasional propaganda and inane dance music. Visitors comprise a Poet, in love (inevitably) with Cinderella, and an Inspector, the embodiment of authority, come to arrest the squatters on a charge of “living dangerously.”

The few moments when Gardiner tries a satirical touch are uncomfortably clumsy: “Silvery Sid and his Sauntering Saps” is not a great mickey-take name for a radio dance band, and Cinderella’s unsophistication at times has a cor-luv-a-duck touch – “Did ever anyone have such funny men as come my way?” The writing is far happier when Gardiner goes with his usual (and rather likeable) overstrained earnestness. The central tension here is between the writer’s twin, dialectical self-projections, the Poet and the Anarchist, the Poet being apt to rhapsodise in gloomy symbols, provoking the Anarchist’s denunciation:

Your song is vague and indecisive, Poet.
What the poor people need is freedom,
Not the undying words of a dyspeptic dream
But a bitter marching song that none can stem,
A rising tide, a rousing fire,
An anthem for the world’s despised.

Where the poet sees the traumatised son as “a caged animal” the Anarchist hails his insanity as a liberation:

He has had that little jolt
That brings a man to know
His own will’s the source and fountain
Of his own world.
The second bomb would give him the full knowledge
Of one who walks and lies down at will,
Accepts and refuses the snags of fate,
Free in a world where mass suggestion has no power.

The Anarchist brings proceedings to a sort of conclusion when, in a moment of Stirnerite resistance, he grabs the poker from the fireplace and brains the Inspector, leaving the Lunatic to pontificate –

All you poor crackbrained fools who disdain desire
Are but the slaves of a crawling cesspool
Some call sanity.

– the Poet to ruminate –

Truth is still stranger than we know,
Like light falling in a chaotic dream
In the twisted corridors, suddenly upon the wall,
Haunting the mad, the suffering, the chosen few.

– and Cinderella to round it all off with a nice bit of bathos:

Love as a woman’s tear will always fall
Sure as the gentle rain upon us all.

It’s all agreeably heady, and very much of its moment.

Cities of the Plain

If the class solidarity of “the world’s despised” is only alluded to in The Last Refuge, it’s up front, with marching boots on, in our second contribution, Alex Comfort’s “Democratic Melodrama” Cities of the Plain, published by – who else? – Grey Walls Press in 1943. As poet, novelist, literary critic, anarchist theoretician and conscientious objector, Comfort was remarkably busy during the ‘forties, with a literary reputation later eclipsed by his Joy of Sex fame. (Cities had been preceded in 1942 by Comfort’s “mystery play” Into Egypt; as this is currently unobtainable, I can’t say anything about it.)

If Last Refuge was not designed for performance, Cities most certainly was. A slightly pompous permissions note states that the author “wishes to repudiate in advance all the ideological constructions, of whatever complexion … placed upon this play. Ideological theatres will apply unsuccessfully.” Whether any theatre, ideological or not, applied successfully to stage it, is an open question. Directions insist that it is to be acted “with the maximum of gusto.”

A remarkably schoolboyish Alex Comfort faces up to the shadows of the mid-forties

The play, closer to its Auden-Isherwood predecessors, is set in a parallel society. The title references the Sodom and Gomorrah of Genesis, but the narrative involves a single unnamed city in thrall to a ruthless capitalist corporation that mines the neighbouring mountain. (For some reason best known to Comfort, the miners have Welsh names: Iorwerth, Dai etc.) Facing imminent bankruptcy, the directors sell out to a proposal by two mysterious and unscrupulous “Engineers” to mine the mountain for radium; though many miners will die from radioactivity, this is presented to them as a noble and necessary sacrifice. Dissent is encouraged by the principled doctor, Manson (man’s son, presumably), who leads back from the mountain an army of scorched, ulcerated and mutated miners who tramp off into the future, members of the audience joining them, to lead the revolution.

While the majority of characters are believable to degrees, the two Engineers operate on a different level. The Black Engineer, so called for the colour of his clothing – black shirt, velvet dungarees and biretta – is revealed as something beyond human when he encounters the sherry quaffing Bishop of Sodom and Gomorrah (a “pillar of Conservative-Churchmanship”), who recoils in horror, crying: “I don’t believe in you! I’m not a Manichee! You’re a heresy!”

This odd disjunction is a deliberate dramatic contrivance. In a discussion on Shelley’s The Cenci in “The Critical Significance of Romanticism,” later collected in his 1946 Art and Social Responsibility, Comfort notes that in that play, as in those of Ford and Webster:

The human players pass through a tragic conflict, but their opponents are not persons – they are naked, animated symbols. The impulses and powers of evil and of infatuation which in tragedy operate through imperfect living people are here made external and come to occupy whole persons, elevated to the same status of identity and reality as the protagonists … [Cenci] is a mask, as if the Devil had inspired a dummy or a suit of armour and made it walk.

Here is the Black Engineer’s offer to the Directors, in return for the mountain:

I offer you the price of your living, to drink the wine of this plain and to sit at this table – to sleep with your wives and to keep your names out of the papers; to make the sun and the moon stand still in the sky, and to sanctify the status quo. I offer you a new grip on the reins, a new leg for your broken chair. You shall not become bankrupt but be rich, and you shall die and lie in gold coffins …

It’s remarkable that the atheist Comfort, in order to personify and animate corporate evil, is obliged to fall back on this Faustian religious supernaturalism.

Like Auden and Isherwood, Comfort keeps his verse passages for key moments and uses far more vernacular conversation than Gardiner, though this can be a bit overdrawn and heavy handed at times. With the possible exception of the miners’ songs, which have a passing touch of Disney’s Seven Dwarfs (“With a will, ho!”), the verse is effective. Comfort was, in fact, a pretty decent poet. Here’s some of Manson’s big speech at the end of Scene II, pleading for the healing of the sick earth:

Now in the night, when continents
like tables cool and creak, and each tap’s timbrel
flickers invisible, constellations rise
westward on Europe moving carefully.
Out of Orion’s cockpit with no noise
the white aseptic stars watch blind earth tossing,
clawing the mask, going under; see the rivers’
reflexes quietly fade, the body grow quiet.
Between the hems of night the inflamed cities
throb in the flank; the finger in wise pity
probes the soft coils – as the stars’ gloved hands
draw up the wounded countries with small stitches.
You of the lancets, Sirius, Betelgueuse,
scanning the festered cities, plotting the fever,
cut to the permanent bone. This sickness is mortal.
Incise the will. Restore the healthy granite.

As a bit of a contrast, here’s the feverish, apocalyptic dance of the revelling shareholders, sung as the miners march to their fate, with a touch of Louis MacNeice’s “Bagpipe Music”:

The hills are tumbling round our ears,
The stars crash down from the night;
But the bonds are good and the wheels go round
And there’s wind in the bagpipe yet.

Seven red madmen dance to the moon,
Seven pale horses rode,
But spades are trumps and the sun stands still,
And there’s wealth on the turn of the card!

Their wheels are broke and their bones are dry –
Their hammers bang for the coffin;
But all we see is a five-pound note
And a Union seat in the offing.

And grey death hides behind the door
With a rattle of shot in his throat,
But the wheels go round and the people roar
To keep the bastard out.

Can you hear the crash of the steeples, boys,
And the guns go crack in the trees?
The world shall burn to warm our hands –
It makes a lovely blaze!

There is more of value in this play, and much more could be said about it. But I will return at some point in these posts to Comfort’s poetry. He wrote two further plays. The first act alone of The Besieged appeared in Life and Letters Today for April 1944, but it was never published entire. Gengulphus is also listed as unpublished; some sources give a date of 1948, suggesting a possible publication, though I can find no trace of that.

The quick fade to these experiments in anarcho-drama is probably attributable to the same factors that saw off neo-romanticism in general. The verse speeches, the heightened, symbolic characters, the open calls to political action, the almost expressionist intensity – these are worlds away from the kitchen sink social realism of ‘fifties theatre.

It would be interesting to know if either of Comfort’s two published plays was ever staged. My ex-library copy of Cities (Croydon Public Libraries) sports a fully clean borrowing label; clearly Croydon Rep didn’t jump at the chance to put on this “Democratic Melodrama.” Which is rather a pity.

Black magic in the White Country: Michael Ayrton and Aleister Crowley

You can’t venture far into pre-‘fifties Bohemia without bumping into the sad but morbidly fascinating figure of Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast. But is it always the real Crowley that we meet, or an apparition?

Michael Ayrton

Peter Cannon-Brookes’ 1978 monograph on neo-romantic wonder boy, painter and maze-maker Michael Ayrton contains this intriguing allusion:

“During 1941 Michael Ayrton’s friendship with the composer Cecil Gray and the mystical circle including Barnet[sic] Stross, Freda Cavell, James Laver and above all Margery Livingstone[sic], and its links with Alistair[sic] Crowley, began to take on a new significance.”

Beyond a hint at “deeply disturbing elements” in Ayrton’s writing, we’re not told what this “new significance” was, nor what Crowley may have had to do with it. Confidence is not strengthened by the misspelling of three names. (Nor by the possible garbling of a fourth: is “Freda Cavell”, a name I can’t place, an inadvertent blend of Lady Frieda Harris, designer of Crowley’s Thoth tarot, with Edith Cavell, the subject of one of his more offensive articles?)

But how “mystical” was Ayrton’s circle? And how did Crowley fit in? Having ditched my Crowley biographies (and other Crowleyana) some years ago following my liberation from Crowleyanity, I don’t have many references handy, but the other names can be quickly sketched in for now: Cecil Gray, music critic and composer; James Laver, writer, fashion historian, curator at the V&A, and contributor to a 1948 monograph on Ayrton; Marjorie Livingston, clairaudient, psychic writer and lecturer; Dr (later Sir) Barnett Stross, art collector and from 1945 MP for Hanley, one of the “six towns” of the Potteries.

Barnett Stross

Ten years after Cannon-Brookes, Malcolm Yorke, in The Spirit of Place, 1988, came up with a  startling claim about Stross:

“[Ayrton] was at this time interested in the occult and may have met, on his Fitzrovian travels, the Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley, who was by this time past his best … [Crowley] had also been defeated in battles across the ether by the white witch Barnett Stross, MP for Stoke-on-Trent, and inevitably a friend of the Ayrton family. It is impossible at this distance to know how deeply Ayrton took this interest …”

“Doc” Stross, popular family GP, Labour councillor and re-builder of Lidice – a “white witch” engaged in Dennis Wheatley-style astral fisticuffs with the Beast? But by the time we reach Justine Hopkins’ Michael Ayrton: a Biography, 1994, this “may have met” scenario has firmed up alarmingly:

“Cecil [Gray] had known the Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley, in the days of his power, and on one occasion introduced him to Michael, although the latter was little impressed by the bloated, boastful charlatan that Crowley had become since his fatal experiments in Paris. He was, however, the cause of a confrontation between the Beast and Barnett Stross, GP, MP and white wizard. Hearing through Cecil that Crowley had some particularly inventive and unpleasant devilry in mind he protested violently, and summoned Stross to the battle across the aether with his dark counterpart. Stross apparently triumphed, and Crowley threatened revenge on Michael in no uncertain terms; the fact that no disaster befell him only went to confirm the scepticism which was an essential part of his involvement with the spirit world.”

So Ayrton not only met Crowley, but set Stross against him, and was threatened by Crowley for his pains? In Hopkins’ index Crowley’s first name is spelt as “Alastair”, suggesting Cannon-Brookes as her source. But “battle across the aether” is obviously lifted directly from Yorke. Are the extra bits from a third source, or just a creative embroidering of Yorke’s story?

The Temptation of St Anthony, 1942-3

But it doesn’t stop there. It’s a simple step forward in wishful thinking to have Ayrton not only meeting Crowley but becoming his student. Here’s novelist and art writer Michael Bracewell pronouncing on ‘Magic and Modernity in British Art’ in Tate Etc. 17, Autumn 2009 (my emphasis):

“The Neo-Romantic sensibility had some occasional links to the world of contemporary operational magic; the artist Michael Ayrton, for example, became interested in the occult during the early 1940s and in the writings of Aleister Crowley, “The Great Beast”, who by this time was more of a Fitzrovian casualty and proto-Beat than a persuasive magician.”

The word “Fitzrovian” here may betray Yorke as the inspiration, with “past his best” inflated to “casualty and proto-Beat.” (The Beast as a Beat? I suppose we understand what he means.) Ayrton as Crowleyan was also cemented into the record by Martin Clark of Tate St Ives, interviewed on the occasion of its show ‘The Dark Monarch’ in 2009:

“We know that Michael Ayrton was interested in Aleister Crowley’s writing.”

Do “we know” this? No, we don’t actually, but that doesn’t prevent this “knowledge” from passing into circulation and ending up (inevitably) as a selling point for Ayrtons. The hammer price of The Satyr Disturbed recently doubled its estimate at Sworders auctions with a description that confidently declared (my emphasis):

“During the 1940s, Ayrton became interested in the occult, and specifically in the writings of the magician-mystic, Aleister Crowley.”

The creative slipping-in of “specifically” now makes Ayrton not just a student of Crowley, but a disciple! How much of this has any substance? Anthony Clayton, at his antonine itineraries blog, has previously taken a look at some of it and found it a bit of a magickal bubble. I agree. But behind the hype lurk some interesting connections that do bear scrutiny. Back to the “mystical circle” of Ayrton’s friends …

Cecil Gray had been a close friend and biographer of suicidal composer and naked motor bike rider Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock). In her Sword of Wisdom, 1975, surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun confidently lists Warlock among the membership of Crowleyan lodges. So it’s quite possible that Gray had met Crowley through him. Though he is little recognised as a composer, one of Gray’s three operas was The Temptation of St Anthony, composed in 1935-7 to his own libretto based on the novel by Flaubert. My friend Gerald Leach, who has a copy of the score, comments that he uses instrumental ensembles and colours deeply informed by the ancient religious music of Assyria, India, Greece and Israel, which rather suggests a “mystical” intention. In 1942-3 Ayrton produced his own hysterically overwrought painting on this theme, whose inspiration must have been Gray’s opera; Malcolm Yorke associates Ayrton’s occult tendencies with “some quite extreme spiritual crisis being worked through in various studies for The Temptation of St Anthony.”

James Laver in 1948

The dilettantism of Ayrton’s friend James Laver also took on some curious directions. To while away wartime train journeys, according to his 1975 Times obituary (republished here), Laver set himself the task of reading every book on occultism in the London Library. His resulting study of Nostradamus was published in 1942, and was the first to identify the “Hister” bits as referring to Hitler. According to T W M van Berkel, Laver’s material fed into a black propaganda brochure on Nostradamus authored in German for the Special Operations Executive by the astrologer Louis de Wohl (who also cast Laver’s horoscope) and printed by Ellic Howe of the Psychological Warfare Executive, himself later a well known chronicler of the Golden Dawn.

In his introduction to Paintings by Michael Ayrton (Grey Walls Press, 1948), while discussing Ayrton’s notable 1945 broadcast on Picasso as a “master of pastiche”, Laver makes this extraordinary comment:

“The Litany of Art, Picasso has recited backwards. Everything he does is à rebours and characterised by the same purposeful distortion. It is the very mark of diabolism, and Picasso is the great black magician of our time – its most typical figure therefore, the equivalent in the world of contemplation of those other black magicians who have laid waste both Europe and the European soul … Ayrton is the first to acknowledge his own debt to Picasso, if it is only a debt to a ‘black magicism’ from whose toils he has escaped but whose methods have given a permanent impress to his own practice.”

Picasso as black magician and Art Nazi? A bit strong, surely. But Laver had diabolism on his mind at the time, having visited the ageing Crowley in his Hastings boarding house the year before, as briefly recounted in his 1963 autobiography. At this high point of English neo-romanticism, art and magic seem to have been all one to Laver:

“… the magicians and occultists of all ages have known that everything that is without is also within. Art therefore comes full circle and returns to the World of Magic from whence it sprung.”

Such airy Neo-platonisms don’t mean too much on close inspection, but they show where Laver was at. As a historian of fashion he is still well regarded, but much of his thinking seems to have emerged from that curious between-the-wars alternative-progressive world of gymnosophy, Co-masonry, the Woodcraft movement and so forth. There are suggestions (as on this forum) that Laver also knew Austin Osman Spare, and that he may have been associated with a coven that met at Chanctonbury Ring on the South Downs during the ‘forties. Maybe, maybe not. But it is worth noting that Ayrton painted a Paul Nash-style view of the Ring in 1946, Track to Chanctonbury (shown here). Laver certainly knew Gerald Gardner through a shared interest in naturism, and contributed a foreword to J L Bracelin’s 1960 biography of the creator of Wicca.

Constant Lambert by Ayrton

But what of the alleged white wizard, Barnett Stross MP? In 1944 Ayrton and his close friend the composer Constant Lambert called in on Stross during a visit to the Royal Ballet, then in wartime exile at Stoke-on-Trent. Stross, as quoted by Justine Hopkins, took them to the Great Tip at Hanley:

“… a dumping ground for old shards. Beneath the crockery there is a colony of rats, for when the potters empty and tip into this hole there is often food in the way of bread mixed up with the fragments. I took Michael to see this place one summer evening before dusk, and he saw the rats come up for an airing. Little ones and large ones, brown and badger and some were scabrous…”

The Sleeper in the White Country, 1945

Ayrton, who found the rest of the Potteries colourless and puritanical, was much taken with the Tip, where, as he recalled, “a million broken cups and saucers make for rats a porcelain Chicago.” The following year he painted a spectral view of the Tip with an unexplained naked man in the foreground. This was titled The White Country, but is listed today as The Sleeper in the White Country, perhaps to distinguish it from a Mintonesque view of the clay dusted Potteries streetscape, The White Country, painted in 1946, and a view of The Tip, Hanley, minus naked figure, of the same year – both shown below.

The “sleeper” at the Tip is very clearly the same person featured in the rather alarming The Sleeper in Flight of 1943 (below), said by Cannon-Brookes to be an image of the young Nicholas Malleson, which I take to mean Dr Nicholas Malleson, later Director of Health Services at the University of London, who in the ‘sixties advocated the legalisation of all hallucinogenic drugs, declaring: “I’ve known many young women I’d rather see take LSD than Billy Graham.” (Young men too, presumably.) Though why is it Malleson at the Tip?

The Tip, Hanley, 1946

Whatever his identity, it seems to me that the “Sleeper” may be occupied less in normal dreaming than in astral projection, which could lend some credence to the “white witch” business. Indeed, The Sleeper in the White Country was purchased by Barnett Stross; could the “white” of White Country mean something more than clay dust? The Sleeper may be related to the prone naked figure in The Earthbound of 1944 (below), itself anticipated by the sunbather in Joan in the Fields of the previous year. However the lying man in Earthbound seems not so much asleep as psychically knocked out, recalling Mantegna’s The Bewitched Groom, an image Ayrton could not have failed to know.

The White Country, 1946

I’m sympathetic to Ayrton’s 1946 rallying call, in British Drawings, for “the lyrical, the satiric, the mystical, the romantic and the preoccupation with linear rhythms, which are the bones and basis of our art.” But his own work, however admirable, was not “destined to shape the future of British art,” as Wyndham Lewis had predicted. At times his mannered, arcane, literary quirkiness puts him close to the eccentric illustration of Mervyn Peake, which some of his earlier drawings resemble; no coincidence that Grey Walls Press put out a volume of Peake’s drawings the year after their Ayrton book.

The Sleeper in Flight, 1943

One last small piece of spookiness: in 1952 Ayrton married Elisabeth Balchin, another graduate of the wartime Special Operations Executive. Her first husband, Nigel Balchin, while seconded from the National Institute of Industrial Psychology in 1933 as a consultant to Rowntrees, had personally created an iconic brand of chocolates. You’ve guessed it – ‘Black Magic’ …

The Earthbound, 1944