Stella Bowen (1893–1947)

Sometimes, a book on loan is just so perfect that you have to have your own copy. So it is with Stella Bowen's Drawn from Life, lent to me by WA author Amanda Curtin after I mentioned it in my review of Rosemary Lancaster's Je Suis Australienne Remarkable Women in France, 1880-1945. rel="nofollow" target="_top">Amanda's most recent book is about the 20th century expat Australian painter Kathleen O'Connor and I can now see why Stella Bowen's book would have been so useful for research in this period. Stella Bowen (1893-1947) was born and educated in Adelaide, but it's clear from this autobiography that for her, as for Kathleen O'Connor, life began as an expat in Paris.

(And it was also clear to me that I had to buy my own copy, though Amanda's Virago edition is much nicer than my 1999 Picador, because the Virago editions includes reproductions of Bowen's portraits, showing what a superb portraitist she was. See some of them here.)

The first chapter covers Stella's childhood and adolescence, and the bereavements that prompted her escape from the stultifying life mapped out for her by the social expectations of the era. She recalls her birthplace as...

...a queer little backwater of intellectual timidity—a kind of hangover of Victorian provincialism, isolated by three immense oceans and a great desert, and stricken by recurrent waves of paralysing heat. It lies shimmering on a plain encircled by soft blue hills, prettyish, banal, and filled to the brim with an anguish of boredom. (p.11)

Inspired by a charismatic art teacher called Rose McPherson (a.k.a. Margaret Preston), Stella set sail for England in 1914. She had a regular income inherited from her mother; and a return ticket and her uncle's arrangements for her to be chaperoned in London. But when her younger brother Tom subsequently cabled from Australia that he had enlisted and that her return was optional, she sold the return ticket and made a life for herself free of all ties to Australia.

It was war time, but what seems to us with the benefit of hindsight to be a shattering experience, was something Stella appears to have lived through without much emotional impact. She admits that she and her friends did not grasp that they were living in an epic and that the war turned out as it did. She was a pacifist, and she volunteered with some infant welfare work, but she spent most of her time at art school, quickly shedding her uncle's arrangements in order to share a studio with her friend Phyllis Reid. At the Westminster Art School she was taught by Walter Sickert, of whom she said that four minutes with him was worth four months criticism from elsewhere:

He taught me to trust one's faithful eyes, and to open them wide. I had never before been required to look at things so minutely, and having looked, to record them with so little fuss. He hated it if you touched the canvas twice in the same place. The first touch had a virtue all its own, he would say, and any correction you added only substituted a doubtful virtue for a positive one. In the same way, you were never allowed to erase a line. If you were wrong, you just made a heavier one in the right place. Then your drawing had the added interest of showing your first thoughts as well as your second. (p.46)

[I wonder, as we make more and more use of technology that allows us to 'fix' things, if Sickert's virtue still applies anywhere at all.]

It was when Peggy (her former Chelsea hostess) asked the young women if their big studio space could be used for a party, that Stella met Ezra Pound. He turned out to be only the first of the notable people that became part of her life. She went on to meet a Who's Who of London Bohemia: T S Eliot, Arthur Waley, Wadsworth, May Sinclair, Violet Hunt, G B Stern, Wyndham Lewis, and Yeats. These people, and Ezra in particular, added to her education, introducing her, for example, to the work of authors like James Joyce.

Stella's descriptions of people are superb, all done with a painterly eye. Here she is describing her friend Mary Butts, also doing volunteer work at the Children's Care Committee in the East End:

She was a flaming object in that dreary office, with her scarlet hair and white skin and sudden, deep-set eyes. She looked what she was — a girl who came from a lovely old home in Dorset and a family which had given her good manners and an expensive education, but had entirely failed to inspire her with the current ideas of her class. (p.39)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/06/23/drawn-from-life-by-stella-bowen/… (mehr)