Goose of Hermogenes

Foreword by Peter Owen

I first met lthell Colquhoun in the early 1950s, in a Soho pub called the Wheatsheaf, an establishment frequented by impecunious bohemians when they could afford to do so. Soho at that time was the haunt of writers, painters, down-and-outs, drunks, drug addicts and people on the fringes of the arts, some of whom subsequently became successful. I was there with the poet Thomas Blackburn and some others with an interest in writing. lthell was of that party. At the time she was in her forties and still a very attractive woman: slim, with a soft and unaffected voice, ash-blonde hair and a fair complexion. She also had an endearing giggle. I was told that she was a painter and that she also wrote poetry. I bumped into her a number of times in the Wheatsheaf and I grew to like her. She was multi-talented, affable, with a vivid and unconventional imagination. Coming from a well-to-do family, she had a private income, and her background and education at Cheltenham Ladies' College gave her a veneer of respectability, but this was tempered by her exceptional creativity. She told me that she had written a short novel called Goose of Hermogenes, and I agreed to read it. The book was unusual and memorable, very well written, with a strong mystical element.

I had only just started publishing under my own imprint and had very little money, and I wasn't sure about whether I would be able to sell the novel. It was short, which at that time was problematic, as bookshops did not like books of only a hundred pages or so. I told her I would think about it, which I did, and from time to time she used to press me for an answer.

I got to know lthell better after my marriage in 1953, as she became friends with my wife Wendy, and she often visited us in Holland Road, near Shepherd's Bush, for coffee. She once invited us to a dinner given by the PEN Club at the Rembrandt Hotel in South Kensington. It was there that I first met Peter Vansittart, whom I later published. Ithell and I continued to meet periodically at parties - in the 1950s and 1960s the less well off among our friends, many of them writers and artists, were famous for hosting so-called 'bottle parties', at which each guest contributed a bottle (a favourite was strong, cheap Merrydown cider), and lthell often accompanied us or came over to our flat. Sometimes Wendy and I visited her studio in Windmill Hill, one of the most attractive parts of Hampstead, near the High Street. It was large and comfortably furnished, and lthell lived there most of the year except for the periods when she stayed in her Comish cottage. She was a good hostess, easy to talk to and with a good sense of humour, and we would sit surrounded by her paintings in the studio. These were mostly bleak landscapes, probably of Cornwall, the majority of which incorporated some sort of phallic symbol.

lthell was unpretentious and on the surface appeared relatively conventional - although she sometimes wore a caftan - but we knew she had leanings towards the occult and that she had had some dealings with Aleister Crowley. (She once told me that Crowley had tried to seduce her and had chased her around his house.) We also knew that she had previously been married to an art historian and critic.

In the mid-1950s Ithell suggested to me that she write a travel book about Ireland, so I commissioned her to do so. The book, The Crying of the Wmd,was distinctive and highly original, and Ithell supplied her own illustrations and designed the cover. The book, although unusual, sold reasonably well, and we followed it with The Living Stones, a book about Cornwall. Distinctly out of the ordinary, both books incorporated lthell's interest in the occult and Celtic lore. However, partly because oflthell's reminders, I couldn't get Goose of Hermogenes out of my mind, and in 1961 I decided to publish it. Yet again lthell designed a very good cover, and the novel eventually sold out.

I had known that she was a painter of distinction but did not have a chance tosee her earlier surrealist paintings until she had an exhibition at the Parkin Gallery in Sloane Square in the 1970s. This exhibition was an eye-opener for me; I came to the conclusion that her early work was her best. At any rate, it was a breakthrough for her, and on the strength of it the organizers sold lthell's work on to major galleries.
By this time lthell, who suffered from asthma, had, on her doctor's advice, moved permanently to Cornwall. After this Wendy and I saw very little of her, and the Parkin exhibition was the first time that I'd seen her in a long time - it turned out to be the last. She offered me a fine painting at a good price, but I stupidly did not take up her offer.
This was, of course, an indication that there was not yet any great demand for her paintings, and it was only after her death in 1988 that real national and international regard for her work came about. I believe she was aware of her unusual ability and disappointed that she did not receive the recognition she deserved during her lifetime.
But she was never bitter.

I miss Ithell. She was one of the few really brilliant and exceptionally talented people I ever met who was good company, genuinely unassuming and always a pleasure to be with.

Peter Owen, 2003

ITHELL COLQl.JHOUN (1906-88)
A Background to the Artist by Eric Ratcliffe

It was in 1955 that, using his gift for selecting promising manuscripts, the independent publisher Peter Owen produced the first travel/biographical book by the surrealist artist lthell Colquhoun. Entitled The Crying of the Wind: Ireland, it had been written following a trip she took with friends, travelling from Dublin up to the north­ west coast of Ireland and back, taking in various detours en route. The travel element of the book was secondary to a descriptive feast of Irish lore and habits, ancient wells, fairy traditions and legends. She was obviously deeply attracted to these features of the landscape. The Times Literary Supplement, on 30 September 1955, referred to it as 'a rare and beautiful travel book' and mentioned the air of mystery that it exuded: 'Here is the authentic touch of the Gothic novelist, and one wishes that Miss Colquhoun had both the canvas large enough and the unrestricted scope to introduce the mysterious figures that should flit across this darkling landscape.'

This 'authentic touch' was to be fulfilled six years later, when Peter Owen published the first edition of Goose of Hermogenes in 1961. The manuscript had been completed some time previously, and its publication followed Colquhoun's second travel book, The Living Stones: Cornwall, published by Peter Owen in 1957, which had been inspired by the landscape surrounding a converted hut in the Lamorna Valley in Cornwall in which Ithell had lived and painted for a time before she moved along the coast to Paul, near Newlyn. It iswith The Living Stones that we fully comprehend that Ithell Colquhoun regarded nature as she found it in the valley and on the cliffs beyond as a part of her, she as one with the flowers and birds - the long-tailed tits, the whistle of the goldcrest, the bluebells and the campion, the sea pinks along the cliffs: 'I am identified with every leaf and pebble, and any threatened hurt to the wilderness of the valley seems to me like a rape.'

Ithell Colquhoun's psychic sensitivity to nature cannot be over­ emphasized. She was not simply romanticizing about her feeling of being magnetically attracted to the wonders she found in standing stones, circles, wells, the old saints and nature's life. It was a living landscape, not simply a backdrop for tourists or a means to an end for those who made their living from the land.

After a sound education at Cheltenham Ladies' College, where she had been noted as showing really good ability in 'humane subjects', Ithell had studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, being awarded the summer prize in 1929 for her painting Judith Showing the Head of Holofemes, which was shown at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1931.

From painting in a traditional mode during and immediately after a short period living in Paris in 1931, she began to work in a surrealist style, having become acquainted with the Surrealist Manifesto of Andre Breton and visiting exhibitions showing the work of Salvador DalL The year 1939 was one of peak painting activity for her and a time when she was getting recognition as a mature and skilful artist. However, in 1940 she was expelled from the London Surrealist Group, of which she had been a member for little more than one year, as she was unable to conform to the dictats of E.L.T. Mesens, as expounded in a meeting of the group on 11 April at the Barcelona restaurant in Soho. The main issue was that surrealists should refuse to participate in exhibitions springing from 'artistic bourgeois spirit'; other points were adherence to the proletarian revolution and a ban on joining secret societies. Ithell was unable to conform to the strictures imposed by Mesens and was thus expelled from the group.

Her dedication to her work as a rising and mature artist at the end of 1939 had resulted in her showing in twenty exhibitions (five of them solo), and as an independent she went on to participate in about a hundred more as her work became known and appreciated. She was never remembered as a celebrity name in surrealist painting, and her role as a pioneering woman surrealist painter in England has never been adequately acknowledged. It is reasonable to conclude that this must be ascribed to the 1939 expulsion and subsequent bias against her and her husband, the surrealist artist, critic and art historian Toni del Renzio, who was newly arrived in England and was looked on as an upstart attempting to redefine the path of surrealists there. Another factor was that, as her association with the group had not formally begun until 1938, she had missed being represented in the prestigious International Exhibition of 1936 at the New Burlington Galleries in London, the first full exhibition of surrealist works in Britain, and so her name was not associated with the surrealists in the public mind. Nevertheless, the couple's home in Bedford Park, west London, was a well-known venue for surrealists to gather in the early years of the Second World War.

She did receive a great deal of publicity from her solo exhibitions and the catalogues that accompanied them. Substantial information about her work, together with reproductions of it, can be found in Surrealism in Britain by Michel Remy andWomen Artists and the Surrealist Movement by Whitney Chadwick.

Ithell's work in Cornwall, often employing automatic techniques, have a mystique no doubt stemming from the absorption of more esoteric knowledge, continuing an interest in the subject which began in the period around her early studies at the Slade. Her final book, published in 1975, Sword ofW,sdom: MacGregor Mathers and the Golden
Dawn (Neville Spearman, London), contains much of her accrued
occult knowledge and theory.

She exhibited widely abroad and had two solo exhibitions, in West Berlin and Hamburg, as well as touring with the Fantasmagie group in Czechoslovakia. She wrote a great deal of poetry, some of which was collected in Grimoire of the Entangled Thicket (Ore Publications, Stevenage, 1973) and in Osmazone (Dunganon, Sweden, 1982).

The Hermogenes of the title - the name means 'born of Hermes'-was a Carthaginian philosopher-painter. He was contemporary with Tertullian - an early church father, also a Carthaginian - and his anti­ Christian gnosticism provoked along treatise from Tertullian, inwhich he likened the philosophy of Hermogenes to his bad painting. Within the terminological confusion of the medieval alchemists, the Goose of Hermogenes was one name for the elixir that was produced at the end of the Opus, the Philosopher's Stone itself. Was this the fabulous goose that laid the golden egg?

Each chapter in the Goose has a title relevant to a stage in the alchemical progression to complete the Opus, the Great Work. This short book appears to be an exceptionally sustained surrealist text. It is, with its moving and changing allegory, dream imagery set in a framework of the strange happenings that befall the narrator, a parade of the unconscious modified and made elegant by the skills of the author, indeed an opus in its own right. Read on.