The Pleasures of an Old Book: Benjamin Haydon’s Autobiography and Memoirs

 

So many pleasures in an old book.

A while ago, I started browsing through a handsome 1926 edition of The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon published by Peter Davies (the Peter of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan) on the Internet Archive. I found the text so interesting that I decided to see if a copy was available for a reasonable price. I was able to find a set (it was published in two volumes) in very good condition for under $30 and have been thumbing through it with my morning coffee for the last month.

Haydon was a Regency-era painter often better known for his irascible temperament than his painting. He never achieved, or rather, never maintained the fame he aspired to and many pages of this book recount his begging for loans and avoiding his creditors. Whether you read his autobiography or a biography, you should not plan on reading about Benjamin Haydon unless you’re prepared to spend time with a man whose flaws often outstretched his talents.

Aldous Huxley puts it bluntly in his introduction, “The one gift which Nature had quite obviously denied him was the gift of expressing himself in form and colour” — a crippling deficiency for a painter, and one that explains much of Haydon’s difficulty in earning a living as one. “One has only to glance at one of Haydon’s drawings to perceive that the man had absolutely no artistic talent,” Huxley adds, before proceeding into a catalogue of this singularly untalented artist’s most notable failures.

Haydon did little to help himself by preferring grandiose scenes intended to dominate whole walls in galleries over the far more popular and profitable portraits of family members that wealthy patrons were willing to commission. Haydon aspired to be another Rembrandt, producing large canvas along the lines of “The Night Watch.” Instead, the grander the scale, the more his limitations were exposed: “One notices great swishing brush strokes daubed in for the sole reason that every inch of the canvas has got to be covered with paint.”

Haydon may have been a mediocre painter, but he was a lively, if self-obsessed writer. Huxley argues that Haydon’s father made a terrible mistake in sending his son to study painting. “As a romantic novelist, what might he not have achieved?” Haydon was able to keep his self-esteem aloft through humiliation after humiliation and seems to have been considered something of a magnetic personality by his friends, particularly for his lively and entertaining conversation, and a sense of his ability to engage an audience can be found throughout these pages.

Here, for example, having sold his painting “The Judgment of Solomon” (one of his grandiose canvases) for £600 and paid off numerous creditors (“My baker spread my honesty and fame in Mark Lane”), he heads to Paris, arriving just after the overthrow of Napoleon.

These elevations to the heights of glory from the lowest depths of misery are dreadful cuts into the constitution. I slept with horrid dreams and startling restlessness. My landlord’s honest joy was exquisite to me. I paid him £200, and he drew on me for the balance. John O’Groat held out his big hand and almost cried. I paid him £42, 10s. My baker spread my honesty and fame in Mark Lane, which I heard of. I paid him every shilling. My tailor, my coal merchant, my private friends, were all paid. In short, £500 went easily the first week, leaving me £130. It did not pay half my debts, but it established my credit. Many private friends forbore to press, the Hunts the foremost.

Now crowded in people of every description; some knew my father; some had nursed me when a baby; servants came out of the city who had lived with my mother; fathers brought me their sons that I might look at their drawings; authors sent me their works; my sister came to town to share my fame, and I pressed her to my heart, overwhelmed by the dreadful and painful burst of reputation after such long, struggling obscurity. I seized Wilkie’s offer to let my sister stay at his house whilst we went to Paris. I felt positive relief.

Paris was now the most interesting place on earth. Napoleon was overthrown and going to Elba. All the nations on earth were there. The Louvre was in its glory. Such wonders can be only conceived. No human being hereafter can ever enter into the feelings of Europe when we heard Napoleon was in retreat; it cannot be comprehended.

The editor, Tom Taylor, adds a comment about Haydon’s claim to having settled all his debts: “This is inconsistent with what follows, but the discrepancy is characteristic.” In other words, Haydon never quite managed to settle ALL his debts when he came into cash — otherwise, how did he manage that excursion to Paris?

This book came from the collection of one Elsie Raspin, whose bookplate (“her book”) graces the inside cover. Elsie Harriet Raspin, from what I can determine, was a Yorkshire woman and occasional poet. From the inscription, we know it was given to Elsie as a fresh new set.

Born in Fulham in 1892, Elsie graduated from Trinity College of Music in 1909 at the age of 17. Her parents must have moved to Yorkshire after that, for they were listed as residents of Eccleshill in Bradford when she married John Frederick Raspin, the son of a wool dealer in February 1913.

Elsie Raspin dabbled in poetry in the 1920s and 1930s. I can find records of around ten poems published between 1925 and 1933, several in Country Life and one in The Poetry Review. She must have been a friend and follower of the Bradford poet Alberta Vickridge, for a collection of Elsie’s work with the title Poems published in 1931 is credited to Beamsley House, which was Vickridge’s home. Vickridge published a quarterly poetry magazine, The Jongleur between 1927 and the early 1950s, and the University of Leeds holds over 100 manuscripts of contributions in its special collections. Although Vickridge was by far the most prolific contributor to The Jongleur, the collection includes poems by J. B. Priestley, Laurence Binyon, and the Jazz Age poet, publisher, and human train-wreck, Harry Crosby.

Here’s Elsie’s poem “The Folds of Night.” First published in Country Life in September 1925, it made its way across the Atlantic, appearing in the Brantford, Ontario Expositor (and perhaps elsewhere) in early 1926.

The Fold of Night

The mist of evening gathers in
The hill-tops to the fold,
It wreathes them round and keeps their thin
Sharp shoulders from the cold;
It makes the hills and mountains kin,
The tufted hillocks, bold.

It weaves the houses little shifts
Of soft, illusive grey,
It gives the tree-tops little gifts
To hide their leaves away;
It lies upon the fields in drifts,
It veils the fading day.

And when within the fold of night
They all are gathered close,
It disappears and leaves the bright
Clear stars, with twinkling glows,
To keep them safe from harm or fright,
To guard their sweet repose.

Elsie was also an advocate of what has become known as re-wilding. Well, to an extent. In a 1929 article in Country Life, she argued that gardeners should include flowers and other local plants in their gardens. She did not advocate “any rooting up of native plants from our already depleted lanes and woods,” she stipulated at the start. Instead, she suggested that seeds be collected and placed alongside domesticated plants. “First of all, because most of them are good-tempered and easy to please, being indigenous to the soil and climate, and secondly, because they are so much more beautiful than many of the pampered, half-hardy plants so widely used.”

After offering numerous examples of hearty, attractive plants she’d introduced into her Yorkshire garden, she closed with a plea for the value of the practice in fostering bio-diversity: “So many of them are disappearing or being driven into remote fastnesses by the rapid growth of building in the countryside that we should count it a labour of love to attempt their preservation in our gardens, whence, perhaps, their seed will be borne afield to find new stations where it can get a foothold.”

Elsie’s husband eventually took over his father’s business and remained in charge until the late 1950s. His ads calling for wool combers in shearing season appeared in the Bradford newspaper for decades. He died in 1966. The Raspins had two sons within a little more than two years after their wedding; both lived into their nineties. There is no online record of Elsie’s death.