The tomb of Louis de Brézé, Rouen Cathedral
Duff Cooper is going sight-seeing in Rouen, with his beloved Diana beside him–in his imagination, at least.
…I went almost with you to the churches we wanted to see. At the first, St Patrice, there was such a crowd… So I went to St Ouen, where… there was plenty of room and the church is most beautiful inside. I felt I could become a bore about churches… Then I strolled back to the Cathedral because I wanted to see some tombs there which I hadn’t been able to see in the morning.
I sometimes portray Cooper–and Diana Manners, too–as dashing but somewhat dim. Dimmer, anyway, than our shooting-star poets. And, of course, they were: no one was as whip-smart as Charles Sorley or as melancholy-wise as Edward Thomas, and they are dead.
But that is hardly the point. Rather, because Cooper and Manners are young, rich (although, having much richer friends, they consider themselves poor), attractive, and much in demand in society–very popular, in the exclusive sense of “popular”–and because neither of them are writers by profession (or even aspiration) it might seem like I am more interested in the world they see around them than in how they see it, or how they choose to write about it. These are diaries and letters that I’m quoting from, not polished memoirs, and these two weren’t brought on board for the depth of their analyses, were they?
Well, perhaps not, but that may have been a bit of reverse snobbery. Regardless, none of this means that they are themselves devoid of interest–or of interests (the lack of which our patron saint Paul Fussell identified, in another book, as the determining trait of the Upper Class). Manners may be a “society beauty,” but she writes with disarming passion about how she experiences fear and longing–and if she was sharp enough, anyway, to be Raymond Asquith‘s favorite correspondent and social co-conspirator, who are we to complain? Just yesterday she tossed off one of the best metaphors of the lost generation that I’ve ever read.
The tomb of Louis de Brézé, Rouen Cathedral, upper detail
And Cooper may be a not-perfectly-faithful near-rake with a gambling problem, a hobbit-like interest in food, and a tendency to get distracted by present pleasures, but he does spend at least some of his leisure time studying Renaissance tombs in cathedrals, and can summon a thought or two about them. He may not be running a Modernist magazine in the interludes of trench tours or building a world out of languages while on garrison duty, but he still knows something of poetry and art and, more importantly, his sense of his own experience of the war is deepened by them.
He writes to Diana, tonight, a century back, of a tomb that has struck his fancy:
…there was a very lovely one of the husband of Diane de Poitiers–
This would be Louis de Brézé, a French nobleman of talent, though outshone in life by his courtier wife–and naturally she is named Diana.
The tomb of Louis de Brézé, Rouen Cathedral, lower detail
…good late Renaissance–alabaster divided as it were into two stories… Above the gentleman appears on horseback and in armour, very fine with smiling female figures at his head and feet representing Victory, Glory, etc.
Beneath him is seen a small, almost naked man, one cloth twisted round the lower part of his body, his head thrown back as though in death agony… At his head kneels Diane quietly praying, at his feet a Virgin with a happy laughing child. I remember that he was a very ugly man and small as he here appears. Diane ordered the tomb. How well those people lived and with what pomp and fantasy they died. All this and more I thought of saying to you while I was looking at the tomb, and then I rejoined my friends, and then we dined…
Louis de Brézé, by Jean Cloué
There is so much here that I don’t know where to begin–but I fear I will end in a half-baked art history lesson, so those of you inclined to the more military aspects of this project or (un)duly offended by half-informed cultural critical ramblings are hereby excused the rest of the day’s lesson.
First of all, Louis de Brézé was not, as it happened, so very ugly:
Diane de Poitiers
But Diane de Poiters was a famous beauty beloved of both powerful men and portraitists. Although her marriage to Louis de Brézé could hardly have been considered a love match, it may well have been relatively happy. She was a teenager and he was in his fifties–one of those uncomfortable facts which “but it was a different time” doesn’t excuse. But, at least according to contemporary accounts, they seemed to share interests and were very much together; she bore him two daughters. When he died, Diane was in her early thirties, and she commissioned the magnificent tomb.
For Diane, however, this was only chapter one. She gained power/fame/happiness/ignominy/notoriety as the mistress of the dauphin–later King Henri II–and was one of the most powerful and influential women of the 16th century, signing royal proclamations and sitting often for the court artists. So it’s surely a good thing her 20th century namesake avoided the Prince of Wales.
Duff Cooper, 1918 (IWM)
There are strong parallels, here: of nobility, celebrity, and beauty. And then some enormous differences. First of all, if we are going to be doing a few paragraphs of potted Renaissance biography we should note that it will be Henri who will become the great love of Diane, not Louis.
Diana Manners, c. 1914
But the greater difference is that this is the tomb of a man who died at what was then a good old age. When Duff sees a tomb constructed by a faithful wife (never mind that her primary fame will be as a mistress, never mind that he and Diana can’t marry unless he gets a good job and stops gambling away his money) he can’t help but think of a tomb that Diana might supervise and that would stand over a man killed in his twenties.
And I can’t help but think what that tomb might look like.
What has changed, then, in terms of artistic taste and expression and the representation of death and mourning, between the early 16th century and the 20th? What has stayed the same?
Diane de Poitiers, kneeling over her husband’s effigy
A lot, and then also a lot. But the one trap I would like to avoid tumbling into, here, is the presumption of any sort of linear progress.
Cooper admires the duality of the tomb: heroic, traditional, noble portraiture over an uncompromising and direct view of death–a small, frail, human being, dying in pain. And yet the whole is surrounded and surmounted by images not only of lofty generalized virtues but of specific love, Christian and human. The two women flanking the dead man are, naturally, the virgin–at his feet–and his wife, kneeling by his head.
Surely, then, the sophisticated 20th century could preserve some of this depth of meaning and feeling–if, that is, it is not ready to overthrow it?
Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, Edwin Lutyens
And of course there will be no general overthrow–no modern revolution at all–in figural memorial art. Lutyens, with his Cenotaph and Memorial to the Missing, will boldly refuse to participate in the old traditions, but it’s more than a quibble, I think, to see this as a sort of boycott, a refusal to engage the old styles (or, at the least, since the government and the public will sponsor and eventually embrace such memorials, a position of negotiated compromise rather than capitulation) rather than a Salon des Refusés/Le Sacre de printemps-style bid to divert the mainstream. His memorial stand apart without either scorning what has gone before or attempting to improve upon what now seems like a dead-end.
And, after all, even if the single representative soldier was still preferred for many traditional memorials, on the scale of campaigns like the Somme (72,000 names) or wars like Vietnam, (58,000 names) a single bronze or marble soldier would seem horribly overburdened. A solid emptiness–and the names–were what remained.
The very fact that Lutyens’ two great monuments (and Lin’s) are public monuments to tens of thousands of ordinary men and not opulent tombs for one very rich and powerful man puts them in a different–and far less common and less artistically developed–category from the tomb that Duff was gazing upon today, a century back. There wasnt’t so much tradition to kick clear of–and there will be much “progress,” soon, in public memorial art, in the sense that there will be innovative and powerful and moving works: first Lutyens and then Lin, in the English-speaking world, and others, elsewhere, among whom Käthe Kollwitz will come in to the discussion below.
But is there “progress” in private memorial art? What could be more conservative in taste than the individual/familial funerary monument? Are there modernist sculptural accents available in the catalogues provided by cemeteries, or just simple slabs that do double duty as “modern” and plain, classical, Doric headstones?
I know of many people who chose not to be buried in a traditional way, but none come to mind who wished their bodies to be buried in an old churchyard or cemetery with a bold expression of artistic innovation installed above. (There must be some, but this can’t be common!)
Wooden cross, from war grave, IWM.
So what could they do? What was Duff thinking of when he mused about this Renaissance couple and himself and Diana and the fact that he might soon be killed? And what will she think when she reads the letter?
What would the tomb of Duff Cooper look like?
It would begin, almost certainly, with a wooden cross in France or Flanders. But many of the wealthy and famous received reburial (or, at least, commemoration) at home. What form might this take?
Well, it might very well look something like this:
Edward Horner, St Andrew’s Church, Mells, Lutyens and Munnings
This is the monument, in the parish church near his family’s estate, of Duff’s hardest-lost friend, Edward Horner. It was not built until after the war, but it incorporates–attached to the front of the pedestal–the wooden cross first raised over his body.
It’s noble and beautiful–and if the horse is faintly ridiculous for a man killed after the introduction of the tank, well, so was the elaborate parade/tournament armor that Louis de Brézé wore in his own equestrian effigy: it indicated status, rather than military reality. Horner did serve for some time in a cavalry regiment, even though he did not ride a charger into battle.
And if the choice of an equestrian statue seems like a strange throwback, that bitter irony of 19th century aristocrats mourning the mass slaughter of their 20th century sons in bizarre Tennysonian terms, well, then there’s this: the very same Sir Edwin Lutyens, a family friend of the Horners, designed the plinth that holds the wooden cross and the family coat of arms.
Look again: the boy sits quietly on the horse, the horse hangs its head, perhaps in weariness. This is very traditional–
Christian, aristocratic, heroic–and yet not, or not quite. Look at it from another angle, below, and remember that Lutyens no less than Lin returned again and again to favored, simple, powerful forms: Edward Horner is astride his charger, but he is also atop the Cenotaph.
But let’s continue with the thought experiment. If we were to re-create the tomb of Louis de Brézé, how would we manage the rest of it? Once the statue of Edward Horner was moved (within the church from its original spot) we get that nice stained-glass frame, above, and the Christian context.
But the reformation has been and gone in Britain, and even the many Roman Catholic soldiers and officers are unlikely to be memorialized alongside images of the suffering Christ. This would be inappropriate for a soldier’s tomb, and very awkward for thos who might note that the crucifixion has already re-purposed both as propaganda and poetry (and will figure even more explicitly in coming poems.
Madonna and child, tomb of Louis de Brézé, Rouen Cathedral
What, then, of the Madonna?
She stood (at right) holding the Christ child at the feet of Louis de Brézé, adding a note of consolation to his death agonies. Would this still work for a war memorial, even in deeply Catholic countries, or would it be too incongruous to have the immaculate mother of God and the Christ child looking down on men killed in a massive war between Christian nations?
Many artists side-step this question: there are other Christian scenes to draw upon, after all, and there will be notable and deeply moving Modernist adaptations of traditional Catholic imagery in continental war memorials. And of course the pietà is unavoidable, and terribly powerful:
War memorial, Brotterode, Hans Dammann
But it is impossible to imagine this in an English context–neither the Catholicism, the sensuousness, nor the frank admission of the pain of loss are in keeping with practice and expectation.
The only (brief) studies I’ve made of parental loss in this project point out its silence–here is Kipling, with utter decorum restricting himself to a single mention of his only son while writing a two-volume history in his memory–or its brave, crazed refusal (Tennysonian, again?) to face the reality of suffering and the finality of loss: there is Conan Doyle, fallen from ratiocination into spiritualism, and Ettie Desborough, strenuously insisting on the beauty and happiness of life even after the death of two of her sons in quick succession.
Ettie Desborough, with Julian and Billy Grenfell
And when I wrote about the Grenfells, what image did I use of Lady Desborough and her sons? The striking young mother and her beautiful, golden-haired children. Which is as she would have had it–I can’t see a memorial context in Britain that remembers children as adults, or mothers wrapping their arms around the bodies of slaughtered sons.
So one could not expect a Protestant pietà. And if we look to the war experience itself–carried on in Catholic France and Flanders, replete with Christian statuary, there is of course only one image of the Virgin that caught the imagination of the British soldier–and she would hardly do for a tomb or memorial.
I’m not trying for Gravesian (or even Fussellian) irreverence with this juxtaposition of the peaceful alabaster pair on the tomb of Louis de Brézé and the diving Virgin of Albert; I only want to point out that the religious statue that most appealed to the writing-inclined British soldier appeared to be dashing her child down into a ruined town. She has become a symbol of malign fate and the powerlessness of the soldier–or, at best, Fortuna on a deep downward turn. Instead of holding her son high as a reminder of coming redemption, she is sending him swiftly to his gruesome death.
But this is a side-track: whether the figure on our imaginary tomb of Duff Cooper is equestrian or not, it is almost certainly solitary: there is no place, now, for women (or children) on the warrior’s tomb. On the tomb of de Brézé his mother, surely long dead, is not remembered–but Christ’s mother is.
What of Duff’s mother, who couldn’t bear to see him off at the station?
But this is a man in the prime of life, so we think first of the wife–or the intended. Diane de Poitiers kneels piously at Louis’s head, but Diana will have no graven image anywhere near Duff. No place, now, either for mourners or implications of hope.
In one of the timely coincidences that I’m always so pleased to draw attention to, Cynthia Asquith–acquaintance of Duff and Diana and novice nurse–came face to face with this sort of suffering only yesterday, when she saw the uncovered stump of an amputee patient for the first time. She handled it, and “won” her “spurs”–see the persistence of equestrian thinking amongst the aristocracy! And then today, a century back, after a long day with her identity subsumed into that of “nurse”, she was suddenly a wife once again, and terrified:
Thursday, 16th May
A letter from Beb in which he casually mentioned having had a small splinter in his arm—adding no damage done. To my surprise, a few minutes later I got this telegram: ‘Lieutenant Asquith K. Brigade slightly wounded—remaining on duty. Secretary, War Office.’ I had quite a nasty turn, as ‘War Office’ were the first words I read![1]
No: no place for a wife on the war memorial–we would have to show her praying in agony beside the post-box, or peering for the awful sight of the telegraph boy coming toward the door, and nowhere near the body of her husband.
Let us return, then, to the image of the dead man: this is, after all, the central issue–literally and figuratively, figuratively and literarily. What should it be like?
In public war memorials, lone, stoic figures will be the norm–but Duff has admired this very different tomb. Visitors to Rouen describe the lower figure of de Brézé as “disturbing,” and the artist(s) has been at pains to show just that–pain. The status and military pomp of the knight are stripped away. Here, instead, is an old man, almost naked, and dying hard. We can see in this is the frankness of the middle ages about matters corporeal persisting into–and melding with–the Renaissance’s classically-inspired renewal of attention to the real human form. The skill of the sculptor[2] is such that we want to claim the figure for that classical tradition, and yet it shows pain, age, and suffering. So what do we have? Something like the complex post-classicism of Hellenistic and Roman portrait sculpture, which does not divorce the goodness or greatness of the subject from the pain of the human condition.
Or is it rather a great leap forward past several centuries of pallid Neoclassicism toward a new realism? That, as it happens, is what Guy de Mauspassant–or, really, a character in one of his stories (translated as either “Tombstones” or “Laid to Rest”–saw in the figure of Louis de Brézé:
The tomb of Cavaignac reminded me, I must confess without making any comparison, of the chef d’oeuvre of Jean Goujon: the recumbent statue of Louis de Breze in the subterranean chapel of the Cathedral of Rouen. All modern and realistic art has originated there, messieurs. This dead man, Louis de Breze, is more real, more terrible, more like inanimate flesh still convulsed with the death agony than all the tortured corpses that are distorted to-day in funeral monuments…
Are there any Great War memorial figures like this?
Design for an Australian War Memorial, by George Lambert
I don’t think so: nothing as real or as terrible as a 16th century image of an old man dying in bed.
I have had trouble finding any (again, with apologies, after only a brief and shallow search) that are even recumbent, and none that put the sculptor’s skill toward the depiction of mortality and pain. But even this sketch, at right, is idealized in a way that elides the question of suffering and death. He has ‘fallen’ rather than being killed or dying, and he lies there whole and undisfigured, and apparently at peace. So there is no “advance” into realism, only a “retreat” toward tall, stoic figures–an armed soldier, head down, quiet but still implicitly heroic–or the mass rejection of figural mourning begun by Lutyens.
So, what then?
I don’t think the whole scene could have been replicated. Duff Cooper admired both the realism of the “small, almost naked man… his head thrown back as though in death agony” and “Diane quietly praying, at his feet a Virgin with a happy laughing child.” And he particularly admired the “pomp and fantasy” with which they died. Things fall apart–all this can’t be assembled any more; no monument could capture the man and his pain, both the alabaster and the mud, the soldier and the son and the lover. To imagine an equestrian Duff, the Virgin of Albert, a contorted bronze dying man, and the soft-focus sad-eyed gaze of Diana Manners is to anticipate some sort of bricolage Guernica… but a tomb must gesture toward meaning, toward closure, and we are straining to bring too many disparate elements into contact with each other.
Eerily, this is just what a madwoman was telling the beautiful Diana, nurse to the indigent and insane, today, a century back, at Guy’s Hospital.
May 16
…No. 2 regained a little lucidity when I was attending to her tonight and kept on repeating “It’s not right, dear, I know it’s not right. You shouldn’t do it. It’s not right for you to do it.”
For a long time she couldn’t explain what was wrong, then at last “You’re too clean to touch me, nurse. I know it’s not right you should have to, and don’t do it. I know I’m not for for you to touch, too foul, too foul,” It was horrible and all said very blankly and quietly, but it seemed to me very, very sensible…[3]
No memorial can manage to hold together the pomp and the suffering, the beauty and the misery. Has the modern world put paid to that, or the Great War more specifically? Too big a question, but we know where we lean, don’t we?
Or am I only a century late in taking advantage of a poor, disturbed woman, now by expropriating her helpless words and making them serve as symbols, as if she really were the madness and the filth (and not the war itself–a war brought on by men, like Duff, who eat well and work in Foreign Offices) and Diana indeed not a woman but a pious figure in alabaster.
Anyway. If Duff were to “fall,” now, he would get a wooden cross, and his name on a memorial. Then, if the funds could be found, perhaps a handsome sculpture of him standing tall and mutely brave in his Grenadier Guards uniform. But Diana wouldn’t be there–and neither would his lonely mother.
I promised, above, something of Käthe Kollwitz, the greatest artist to work on Great War memorials. Her son Peter was killed at the age of 18 in 1914, during the German invasion of Belgium. For years afterwards–even now, a century back, and for more than another decade, she worked on a statue to be placed at his grave, in Flanders. It became two:
Käthe Kollwitz, The Grieving Parents
In 1937, on the anniversary of her son’s death twenty-three years before, she was working on this:
Käthe Kollwitz, pietà
So I got a bit carried away with this–one thing, one image, one memory, led to another. And it’s getting hard not to look ahead–towards death, towards the end, towards memory.
But one more thing: today, a century back, Wilfred Owen–having resisted the lure of a visit to his own mother in Shrewsbury–arrived to spend his long-awaited three-day leave in London. He will be lodging in the flat above Robbie Ross in Half Moon Street, and he has brought fair copies of all his best recent poems. He wants opinions… and he plans to visit Charles Scott Moncrieff tomorrow. So it’s away with mothers and sons and thoughts of death, and onward and upwards with comradeship (and more) and poetry!
