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biography he develops a loathing of Olga and her guests. According to Richardson, a ‘heavy Russian cloud of refugee resentment, grief, and nostalgia’ permeated her entourage and her rooms ‘resounded with Russian rather than French chatter’. He also suggests that Picasso would have noticed in 1932 that Spain’s recently elected government had begun a move to make divorce legal. Personal misery sent his thoughts in this direction, and by the end of the book, Picasso has achieved not divorce but a legal separation from Olga. Meanwhile, psychic stress is alleviated by his alter ego, the Minotaur. Relief is expressed in the poignant drypoint Minotaur Caressing the Hand of the Sleeping Girl with His Face (1933). The sleeping figure is Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, who first became his lover in 1927, when she was seventeen and he was forty-five. She is a significant presence in much of this book but remains hidden from Picasso’s public life, housed down the road in Paris or, when he is in Cannes, kept at some distance in Biarritz. She also spends much time at Boisgeloup, where Picasso joins her and their daughter at weekends. In the etching, she lies on her side, the Minotaur crouching over her, nuzzling the hand resting on her cheek with his clumsy snout. ‘He’s studying her,’ Picasso later admitted to another mistress, Françoise Gilot, ‘trying to decide whether she loves him because he’s a monster. It’s hard to say whether he wants to wake her or kill her.’ This remark harks back to a story about the young Picasso which Richardson revealed in the first volume of his magnum opus. At the end of 1894, not long after the artist had turned thirteen, his beloved younger sister Conchita fell seriously ill with diphtheria. A new antidiphtheria serum was sent for, and while waiting for its arrival from Paris, the family, not wanting to frighten the child with their anxiety, carried on as usual with the celebration of Epiphany and the exchange of presents. With all the family engaged in prayer, Picasso, in a sudden burst of faith, offered to make the greatest sacrifice he could conceive: he vowed to God that if Conchita’s life were spared he would never again paint or draw. Conchita died before the serum arrived. The ominous implications of this vow – that Picasso’s talent had been preserved through the sacrifice of his sister – cast a shadow over the artist’s life. Picasso called it his ‘dark secret’ and only talked about it with his mistresses. The sacrifice of others to his art was a pattern to be repeated. If Richardson is right in suggesting that death, thereafter, was linked in Picasso’s mind with creativity, it may explain the savage distortions found in his images of his muse and lover Dora Maar, famous as an artist and photographer as well as for her striking looks. ‘They don’t titillate; they bite,’ Richardson observes of these pictures. Maar recorded with her camera the stages through which Picasso’s Guernica passed in the course of its making. Until 1937, he had refrained from using art as a vehicle for his political beliefs, but the carpet bombing of the small town of Guernica on market day, when women and children had come into town with their produce, stung him into action. This large painting was first shown in Paris at the 1937 World Fair, then journeyed to England and other countries, rapidly becoming Stratford Literary Festival SPRING FESTIVALFESTIVAL 3rd-8th May 2022 Maggie O’Farrell Ali Smith Howard Jacobson Sir Derek Jacobi Andrew Miller Hollie McNish Sam Knight Alex Renton Tessa Hadley Charlotte Mendelson Simon Armitage Luke Kennard and much more... stratlitfest.co.uk an international symbol of protest against oppression and destruction. John Richardson, who died in 2019, began his career as an art critic and first met Picasso through his partner, Douglas Cooper, an outstanding collector of Cubist works, primarily those of Picasso, Braque and Gris. Cooper and Richardson frequently entertained Picasso in the château they restored in the south of France. Noticing that when Picasso changed his lover, everything else in his life, even his dog, changed, Richardson initially thought of approaching the subject of Picasso by telling the story of his women. But when he finally began to write, he found himself recording the progress of Picasso’s life, loves and art in a single weave. ‘My work is like a diary,’ Picasso once remarked, thereby licensing Richardson’s biographical method, which he uses to fold the artist’s life and work into a richly satisfying whole. Yet Richardson’s four volumes of biography leave the last thirty years of Picasso’s life largely unchronicled. It is hard to imagine how anyone, however expert in this subject, might step into his shoes. Much that he records here is enhanced by his familiarity with Picasso. There is a vignette of Alice B Toklas, shrunken and ancient, squeaking with alarm as Picasso takes off her large black hat with its long egret feather and using it to tease her dog. There is also an account of Picasso, during the occupation of Paris, playing the simpleton when asked to show two German officers round the bank vaults where he and Matisse have stored a mass of work (which, on this occasion, was left untouched). No previous biographer of Picasso has commanded such detail, range and depth when dealing with this unendingly inventive and ferociously experimental artist. This fourth volume is shorter than the rest and more tautly written, but it nevertheless reflects Richardson’s gift for merging the personal with the professional. The illustrations are well placed and sustain the arguments within this absorbing narrative. The abundant energy displayed by Picasso throughout makes it astonishing to recall that on his arrival in this world he was thought to be stillborn – until his uncle, a doctor, blew cigar smoke in his face. Literary Review | april 2022 10
page 13
biography joe moshenska The Poet and the Whale Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne By Katherine Rundell (Faber & Faber 344pp £16.99) What would it be like to be swallowed by a whale? Disappearing into the huge maw of a sea giant has made for thrilling and terrifying narratives, from the biblical story of Jonah to Melville’s Moby-Dick and Walt Disney’s Pinocchio. But here’s a stranger idea: what if you were already living inside a whale but didn’t realise it, so vast were its cavernous insides? For an idea this odd and haunting, you would have to look to the works of John Donne and, more specifically, to what is by far his most bizarre poem, ‘Metempsychosis’, which tells the story of the migration of a single soul from entity to entity, from the apple picked by Eve in Eden through a head-spinning range of animal and human creatures. It’s as part of this hallucinogenic bestiary that we encounter the whale, with its pillar-sized ribs and ‘thunder-proof ’ hide, and are told that ‘Swim in him swallowed dolphins, without fear,/And feel no sides, as if his vast womb were/Some inland sea.’ I’ve always been haunted by these lines – by the question of how to interpret them and whether they should be interpreted at all. Are the dolphins somehow a metaphor for our condition as humans, believing that we are free so long as we remain oblivious to the restrictions within which we operate? Does Donne call the whale’s abdominal cavity its ‘womb’ innocently – the word could just mean ‘stomach’ in this period – or is there a deliberately gender-bending quality to this whale teeming internally with life, making it a symbol of pregnancy? Or are the dolphins just innocent sea creatures, brought idly to life by a poet allowing his imagination to go on a surreal holiday in a poem so strange that one critic in the 19th century called it ‘the effusion of a man very drunk or very mad’? The agility of Donne’s imagination and the sheer pyrotechnic weirdness of his writings have made him both irresistibly attractive to biographers – who wouldn’t want to understand the man behind poems like this? – and particularly elusive of biographical scrutiny: what set of facts could possibly help to explain such a person? Katherine Rundell’s excellent SuperInfinite approaches Donne with keen and frank awareness of these temptations and the pitfalls they conceal. She recognises the double bind in which Donne’s works place his readers: they are conspicuously difficult and erudite, demanding depth of knowledge, intensity of attention and speed of Poet about town: portrait of Donne, c 1595 thought from those who would follow them, but bringing knowledge to bear upon their quicksilver shifts and spurts of imagination can feel like ramming a pin through the body of a particularly beautiful butterfly in order to taxonomise it. Rundell is scrupulously polite about R C Bald’s ‘spectacularly detailed’ life of Donne, the standard scholarly biography, calling it ‘the bedrock of this book’ in a footnote, but there has surely never been a duller life of a more exciting poet. Knowledge may be necessary, but it can be like an anvil dropped on the head of a mischievous cartoon character, stunning it briefly into passive silence. Rundell’s response to this risk is to put herself and her reactions to Donne’s work into Super-Infinite, part of a recent tendency among writers, including Rachel Eisendrath (on Philip Sidney) and Anahid Nersessian (on John Keats), to bring canonical authors down from the glassy firmament into a more personal, earthly realm. She states near the outset that her intention is ‘both to tell the story of [Donne’s] life, and to point to the places in his work where his words are at their most singular: where his words can be, for a modern reader, galvanic … This is both a biography of Donne and an act of evangelism.’ The form that this evangelising takes is subtle, however. After a prismatic introduction that gives us snapshots of Donne some years apart, introducing us to the markedly different guises in which he will appear, the book settles into a predominantly chronological narrative, sliced into brief and bitesized portions. These follow Donne, born in 1572 into a Roman Catholic family haunted and decimated by persecution, from his childhood, through his younger years spent as an adventurer in the Earl of Essex’s expeditions to Spain and around Lincoln’s Inn, where he became renowned as a writer of daringly contorted and riveting poetry, and then on to the first turning point of his life, his outrageous clandestine marriage to a teenage girl named Anne, which saw him imprisoned and then forced for some years to wander aimlessly in the professional wilderness until he eventually took holy orders and became dean of St Paul’s. By the end of his life, he had established himself as the most famous and admired preacher of the age, kings and crowds straining to unpick every sentence of his sermons as they unfurled. Rundell tells these stories engagingly, striking a good balance between the thorough and the necessarily brisk. This book’s most obvious predecessor in the mixing of information, interpretation and opinion is John Carey’s classic study John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (also published by Faber, four decades ago), though Rundell leans more than Carey towards biographical linearity, and is less inclined to see Donne’s religious conversions as the key to his tangled mind. While this biographical narrative is april 2022 | Literary Review 11

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biography he develops a loathing of Olga and her guests. According to Richardson, a ‘heavy Russian cloud of refugee resentment, grief, and nostalgia’ permeated her entourage and her rooms ‘resounded with Russian rather than French chatter’. He also suggests that Picasso would have noticed in 1932 that Spain’s recently elected government had begun a move to make divorce legal. Personal misery sent his thoughts in this direction, and by the end of the book, Picasso has achieved not divorce but a legal separation from Olga.

Meanwhile, psychic stress is alleviated by his alter ego, the Minotaur. Relief is expressed in the poignant drypoint Minotaur Caressing the Hand of the Sleeping Girl with His Face (1933). The sleeping figure is Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, who first became his lover in 1927, when she was seventeen and he was forty-five. She is a significant presence in much of this book but remains hidden from Picasso’s public life, housed down the road in Paris or, when he is in Cannes, kept at some distance in Biarritz. She also spends much time at Boisgeloup, where Picasso joins her and their daughter at weekends. In the etching, she lies on her side, the Minotaur crouching over her, nuzzling the hand resting on her cheek with his clumsy snout. ‘He’s studying her,’ Picasso later admitted to another mistress, Françoise Gilot, ‘trying to decide whether she loves him because he’s a monster. It’s hard to say whether he wants to wake her or kill her.’

This remark harks back to a story about the young Picasso which Richardson revealed in the first volume of his magnum opus. At the end of 1894, not long after the artist had turned thirteen, his beloved younger sister Conchita fell seriously ill with diphtheria. A new antidiphtheria serum was sent for, and while waiting for its arrival from Paris, the family, not wanting to frighten the child with their anxiety, carried on as usual with the celebration of Epiphany and the exchange of presents. With all the family engaged in prayer, Picasso, in a sudden burst of faith, offered to make the greatest sacrifice he could conceive: he vowed to God that if Conchita’s life were spared he would never again paint or draw. Conchita died before the serum arrived. The ominous implications of this vow – that Picasso’s talent had been preserved through the sacrifice of his sister – cast a shadow over the artist’s life. Picasso called it his ‘dark secret’ and only talked about it with his mistresses. The sacrifice of others to his art was a pattern to be repeated.

If Richardson is right in suggesting that death, thereafter, was linked in Picasso’s mind with creativity, it may explain the savage distortions found in his images of his muse and lover Dora Maar, famous as an artist and photographer as well as for her striking looks. ‘They don’t titillate; they bite,’ Richardson observes of these pictures. Maar recorded with her camera the stages through which Picasso’s Guernica passed in the course of its making. Until 1937, he had refrained from using art as a vehicle for his political beliefs, but the carpet bombing of the small town of Guernica on market day, when women and children had come into town with their produce, stung him into action. This large painting was first shown in Paris at the 1937 World Fair, then journeyed to England and other countries, rapidly becoming

Stratford Literary Festival

SPRING FESTIVALFESTIVAL 3rd-8th May 2022

Maggie O’Farrell Ali Smith Howard Jacobson Sir Derek Jacobi Andrew Miller Hollie McNish Sam Knight

Alex Renton Tessa Hadley Charlotte Mendelson Simon Armitage Luke Kennard and much more...

stratlitfest.co.uk an international symbol of protest against oppression and destruction.

John Richardson, who died in 2019, began his career as an art critic and first met Picasso through his partner, Douglas Cooper, an outstanding collector of Cubist works, primarily those of Picasso, Braque and Gris. Cooper and Richardson frequently entertained Picasso in the château they restored in the south of France. Noticing that when Picasso changed his lover, everything else in his life, even his dog, changed, Richardson initially thought of approaching the subject of Picasso by telling the story of his women. But when he finally began to write, he found himself recording the progress of Picasso’s life, loves and art in a single weave. ‘My work is like a diary,’ Picasso once remarked, thereby licensing Richardson’s biographical method, which he uses to fold the artist’s life and work into a richly satisfying whole.

Yet Richardson’s four volumes of biography leave the last thirty years of Picasso’s life largely unchronicled. It is hard to imagine how anyone, however expert in this subject, might step into his shoes. Much that he records here is enhanced by his familiarity with Picasso. There is a vignette of Alice B Toklas, shrunken and ancient, squeaking with alarm as Picasso takes off her large black hat with its long egret feather and using it to tease her dog. There is also an account of Picasso, during the occupation of Paris, playing the simpleton when asked to show two German officers round the bank vaults where he and Matisse have stored a mass of work (which, on this occasion, was left untouched). No previous biographer of Picasso has commanded such detail, range and depth when dealing with this unendingly inventive and ferociously experimental artist. This fourth volume is shorter than the rest and more tautly written, but it nevertheless reflects Richardson’s gift for merging the personal with the professional. The illustrations are well placed and sustain the arguments within this absorbing narrative. The abundant energy displayed by Picasso throughout makes it astonishing to recall that on his arrival in this world he was thought to be stillborn – until his uncle, a doctor, blew cigar smoke in his face.

Literary Review | april 2022 10

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