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Harry Gordon in front of one of his fantastical paintings |
Painting humanity over the dark nightmare of barbarism
After witnessing the shocking brutality of war, the late Harry Gordon became a major player in the arts world of the 1950s. But his brilliance had to shine through dark despair. Simon Wroe uncovers his story
THE soldier Harry Gordon died at the Battle of Arnhem in 1945, his senses blown into another stratosphere by an enemy shell. It was the artist Harry Gordon who walked the 3,000 miles back across Europe, plagued by lice and dysentery and delirious with malnutrition.
The Death March, as the German guards nicknamed the grim column of casualties and prisoners of war, shed bodies with every passing day. Men were shot or lost through madness and disease; others never woke from their sleep in the snow.
The odds of survival were not in Gordon’s favour. Left for dead by his regiment after the shell exploded beside his head, every day of his capture was racked with terrible migraines and blinding pain. He vowed that if he ever made it home he would spend the rest of his life creating things instead of watching them be destroyed.
In April this year Gordon passed away, at the age of 89. He had remained true to his word. The ground floor flat in Lambolle Road, Belsize Park, where he lived for the past 40 years with his third wife, Maggie, is overrun with his fantastical paintings, Blakean etchings and figurative sketches bearing such titles as “Celibate Caliph confers with comic concubines” or “The wise old owl ignores the hoopla game”.
Besides the art, Gordon also left behind the reason he became a painter: reams of typewritten pages describing the horrors of his military service and his views on the world thereafter.
“Many friends were killed, or shot, for attempting to steal food. My best friend lost his reason and became religious. Last I saw of him was [him] running screaming into the woods and being fired at by the guards,” he wrote.
“Having a lot of trouble from my head wound, which seems to be aggravated by the cold weather, zig zag lights spreading in a golden arc from the corner of my right eye tells me that head pains are coming… Get some sleep by fits and starts but have terrible nightmares, of falling through flak when my parachute doesn’t open and I wake up screaming and my head is on fire all aflame.”
“Even years later, he couldn’t talk about the war without crying,” remembers Maggie. “When I met him in ’63 he would still wake up at night screaming.”
Gordon weighed little over six stone when he returned to England. He recovered and married his wartime sweetheart Marion, but it was short-lived: she found his trauma “childish” and ran away with a German prisoner of war six months later.
The women in Gordon’s life seemed to dictate his fortunes. As a teenager he missed a year of school because he fell in love with his history teacher and had a breakdown. If Marion was a last spectre of conflict and suffering, Norah, his second wife, was a fresh start. She fostered his artistic ambitions, even acting as his promoter and saleswoman. They ran an art gallery together in Parkway, stocked with his pencil drawings of Camden Town sketched at night under street lamps and his colourful oil “fantasies”. Sylvia Plath bought one of the latter as a birthday present for Ted Hughes.
This was the most commercially successful period of Gordon’s career. With his mop of unkempt curls, red neckerchief and corduroy suits, it was hard to miss him drinking the Edinburgh Castle dry with Dylan Thomas and Louis MacNeice. He exhibited his work in Germany and San Francisco. Many commended him; the sculptor Jacob Epstein told him he “put poems in frames”.
Gordon later wrote: “I knew he was right… and in order to live in what I called my ‘Essence’ I must go on being a somnambulist, painting like an owl, one eye opened to the world and the other shut to the world and listening to the voice of intuition.”
His relationship with Norah, however, was deteriorating; and Gordon was drinking more and painting less. Flashes of introversion crippled him. His notes describe “the feeling of tension, of displaying one’s guts on a wall, like walking naked through a tube train with not even the News of the World to cover one”.
He left the gallery and the marriage in 1962, “as Norah rang the mental hospital”. For a while he slept rough in a cave in Long Mynd, Shropshire, before crashing at a friend’s stately Bayswater residence. He was kicked out when, seized by a desire to paint again, he used their grand piano as an easel.
“Hysterics over paint on Grand piano,” he wrote. “Very unreasonable, what is a bit of paint compared to the loss of that vision.”
Eventually he moved into a bedsit in Swiss Cottage, down the corridor from Maggie, then working for Social Services.
“He was gentle, creative – even then I sensed he was different,” she remembers. “I used to darn his pants for him and take his clothes to the launderette – silly little things.”
They married and had a son, David, in 1969. In the next four decades, Gordon found a peace he had not known since the days of his childhood in Dartmoor, when he, the eldest of five, would lie under the cabbage plants beside the prison where his father worked and stare at the sun.
He still painted prolifically, searching for “an inner singing quality” to his work, and decorated sets for the theatre director Joan Littlewood, but he no longer courted the art world. Instead, he taught art appreciation in Brixton prison and campaigned against Brutalist architecture.
“He had a great belief that art was one of the civilising influences; that without it, it wouldn’t really be life,” says Maggie.
During the last year of his life he was bed-bound with osteoporosis. When his bedroom ceiling fell in, Maggie moved him into his studio, where he lay surrounded by his paintings and manuscripts. Among them, there is a photograph of him with his son. In speech bubbles above the figures Gordon has written:
“What will life be like when I grow up, dad?”
“More human than it’s been for me I hope, son.” |
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