Immortal Thoughts: Late Style In A Time of Plague

by Christopher Neve and with Gwen John

This is an oddity of a book. In Immortal Thoughts: Late Style In A Time Of Plague, Neve, an artist and writer, imagines the lives of some of his favourite painters in their last years and through their last works. Each small essay is interspersed with his own thoughts and feelings about Covid, lockdowns and what it is to live through a pandemic in his own old age.

On the front line as a bookseller through the pandemic and beyond, it’s become clear that Covid created a weird, publishing lacunae which writers have attempted to fill with books that try to process the pandemic. The books that ensue are fascinating from the point of view of social history but are not always satisfying things in their own right.

I had already read: Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th-Century British Painting by Neve and enjoyed it, so I had high hopes for this, that weren’t, for me, entirely realised. I do not, for one second, blame the author for this. I think that there are certain things that you have to read at particular times in your life or under specific circumstances. Making my way through this, I found myself increasingly aware that I was not the right reader for this book.

A huge part of the disconnect for me was that the artists that are so obviously and devotedly beloved by Neve, and who he writes about with such intimacy and affection, largely leave me cold. I can admire their skills, but I can’t love them like I love Tracey Emin or David Hockney. These essays read like love letters between people I don’t know, some of whom I don’t care to know. They are more interesting as way-markers set down in a time of upheaval and impending death. I found the book most valuable as a prompt by which to think of the works of art, artists and creators that I would set down to guide my own path.

The only artist that I was properly excited to read about in this book was Gwen John. John is an artist that perplexes and fascinates me. I feel like she’s a puzzle waiting to be cracked, if that’s even possible. With John however, the more I read about her, the further away from her I appear to travel. I am beginning to think that’s deliberate.

It seems stupid to say that John’s work is more like a means by which to access your own feelings as a viewer of the art, because that is one of the functions of all art, but it seems so much more central to John. Some artists tell you how they feel and you find yourself reflected back, in part because you too, have felt that way. Other artists seem to paint in order to remove themselves from the world. That’s how I feel about John, and think I might feel if I ever get to see an Agnes Martin painting in the flesh. The paintings are open to inhabitation because the paintings are an act of departure, not arrival.

In talking about John, Neve starts:

‘You saw her once, or perhaps several times, but did not know it was her.’

Which in itself could be a metaphor for John’s life and work. He concludes:

‘Her last works, probably done eight or ten years before her death, are small pencil marks on tiny pages, small experiments of great presence made of next to nothing. Things of consequence made almost out of absence.’

The thing is that this doesn’t seem strange to me. It seems like the kind of thing a woman does when she doesn’t fit the societal norms of her day. It seems like the kind of thing women have always done to survive in extremis. There is always the circle to be squared that involves finding a way to exist in a world that doesn’t let you whilst simultaneously demanding your presence.

In this essay, I think Neve fails to inhabit John’s world as successfully as he does the other painters and paintings he talks about because it is ‘strange’ to him. He has a better grasp of the other worlds he inhabits, because even though he is separated from them by time, he is connected to them by things he knows to be true, whether they be facts or knowing what it is to be a man, painting in a man’s world. John made a deliberate decision to separate herself from the very world that Neve finds himself most comfortable in and this creates a dislocation. It is this unease that Neve pours into his writing about John.

I ask myself, do I think that Neve’s writing about Gwen John is the most successful part of the book because it is the part that I resonate with the most, or is it that in failing to come up with any concrete answers, John is absolutely the right subject for a document about a time of great, social dislocation? When people are not able to exist in the roles that have defined them all their lives, either through illness or isolation, people who document ‘otherness’ suddenly have a lot to say to us. In Covid times, many of those who are used to being the ‘us’ in ‘us and them’ now get a taste of what it is like to be ‘them’.

The most beautiful part of the essay on John is when Neve shares fragments of her writing that reads like poetry:

‘nuts and nettles

faded primroses and dandelions

milky bluets (cornflowers)

grey and yellow plaid.’

And for me, the most beautiful parts of this book are the sections between the essays where Neve tells us about the every day beauties of his world.

‘Then came the time of buttercups. Fields, jugs, jars and buckets full of buttercups. The waxiness of their petals on sunny evenings. A tide, a reverie of childhood buttercups.

‘The elder with its winey breath and creamy umbrels. Dog roses, their delicate petals shaded china-pink at the edges. And the climbing honeysuckle. Often, honeysuckle, dog roses and elder climbed through each other. The whitethroat sang loudly in the blackthorn, and, if you walked in the buttercups so that your shoes turned yellow, you saw that among the stems were red clover and the tiny sparks of grass vetchling.’

The juxtaposition of the burgeoning garden life against the reports on the radio of the spread of the virus are a stark and beautiful reminder of the losses and gains that make up a life, and which were super-concentrated during these strange days.

And at the end?

Neve’s summation of John’s life and work that becomes the perfect metaphor for the pandemic, the book and life itself.

‘The strangeness. The strangeness.’