First Friends Book

First friends, like first loves, never die; they just itch like a smarting scar. The Nash brothers both saw service in the First World War, with first Paul and then the younger John becoming official war artists. Their shocking pictures capture the essence of that bloody, and muddy, conflict, which was so often played out against their beloved rural landscapes. Their expressive letters, included here, paint as vivid a picture of life in squalid trenches as ever their pencils or brushes did. Paul would marry Bunty, and John Christine, entering into unconventional relationships that somehow worked, despite the ghost of a friend whose increasingly vaporous essence hung over all their affairs. The artist Dora Carrington had been pursued by the Nashes prior to the outbreak of war, slipping through their fingers with mercurial charm. John, the more impetuous of the two, certainly could never escape his fixation. She eventually found companionship with Lytton Strachey, despite (or because of) his homosexuality, and when he died in 1932, she followed five weeks after, the result of an "accident" with her rabbiting gun. It was a tragic ending that horrified, but perhaps didn't surprise, her friends. But that was in the future. The narrative of this beautifully crafted quarto, creditably given a wider audience by Viking after being published in a limited edition by Fleece Press, is made up of the trunk full of letters discovered by Ronald Blythe, covering a period from when Carrington, Paul Nash (and John, though he didn't attend art school) and Christine Külenthal met at the Slade School of Art, until shortly before Carrington took her life. At first the correspondents frolic with the abandon of artistic awakening, accompanying their bon mots with illustrative doodles and sketches, particularly by Carrington. With time, though, the friends discover their forked paths, the distance becoming emotional as well as spatial, and the loss is dealt with variously, from Carrington's fractured withdrawal, to the Nashes' increasingly frustrated attempts to resuscitate the past. Blythe's delicate stewardship, marshalling his sources with dextrous ease, airs these friendships afresh, evocatively setting a personal agenda of catalytic change against a backdrop of warthat was to change the global landscape forever. --David VincentRead More