Two centuries after William Hogarth published his engravings of the decline and fall of Tom Rakewell, Rebecca West wrote a morality tale of decline and fall updated for the C20th –The Modern “Rake’s Progress” 1934.
Eighteenth-century Rakewell was the spendthrift, dissolute son of a rich merchant who goes to London and wastes his money on luxurious living, prostitution, and gambling – behavior that leads to prison and finally the madhouse. West’s tale is not quite so grim.
West wrote her text at the invitation of David Low – the great political cartoonist whose work earned him the disfavor of dictators and hypocrites of all stripes. Low – the creator of Colonel Blimp – was developing a series of twelve paintings that told a story and he wanted a text to go with them.
Their collaboration was first serialized in Nash’s, Pall Mall Magazine and then published as a book – The Modern Rake’s Progress, Words by Rebecca West, Paintings by David Low (1934).
Low’s original idea was to depict a pageant of London life based on the Prince of Wales.
In the spring of 1925 I had spent a family holiday at Biarritz. The Price of Wales was there, a beautiful piece of character in his golf-suit, getting persistently in my line of vision, set up invitingly as a model for me. Why not use me as a peg upon which to hang a pageant of London life of the time, in all its variety, with all its personalities and characters? I planned it there and then, walking under the trees. But it was not until 1933 that I got to work on a series of twelve colour plates. Unfortunately, when it came to the point, inspiration would have been cramped and publication impossible had the figures, especially the central figure, been too readily identifiable; so I had to tone down the likeness and scramble the situations. As it turned out I disguised it so well that it became almost completely unrecognisable and changed into something else, which wasn’t the intention at all. Served me right. I had to abandon the original conception and pull the whole thing together again on somewhat different lines, giving it a backbone of Hogarthian morality and re-making the central character (who by now had nothing to do with the Prince) into someone coming into wealth and leading a life of fashion. (Low’s Autobiography, by David Low – 1956 p.289).
The Modern Rake’s Progress is a fascinating portrait of London’s society in the thirties with caricatures of eminent and fashionable personalities of the period. It depicts a wayward and decadent age and a foolish hero who succumbs to the temptations of fame and flattery. In clever snapshots, Low shows The Rake’s rise and inevitable fall.
The accompanying text by West is a parallel satire of the life of times of Our Hero – George. In short and biting chapters she presents a commentary on the moral ambiguity and corruption of the era in which the Rake flounders. It’s sharp, sarcastic, facetious, and at times heavy-handed.
This disclaimer is nonsense of course. Low did indeed depict some of the personalities of the time. And he even provided West with a key identifying them by name.
The unpublished sketch (below left) is the kind of preliminary drawing Low sent to his collaborator as a plot outline to guide her writing.
Low’s notes indicate which well-known journalists and gossip columnists are included.
Lady Oxford is in the foreground, Hannen Swaffer is in the hat and Castlerosse is sitting on the bed. Margot Asquith is another possibility.
The nightstand with copies of Dog Racing and Film Fan suggest George’s interests.
George is a lowly bank clerk. He earns two pounds a week and for relaxation goes to the dog track and the movies. He has a girlfriend called Florrie.
He’s first seen in bed as the gossip-mongers of the press invade his bedroom to get their story and their photographs. One investigates his wardrobe and another looks under his bed. Even the cat is affronted by the attentions of a pampered-looking pooch.
Modest private citizen George has been rocketed into to limelight. He is now a public celebrity.
The Press Hails a New Celebrity
West: “George wakes as few have wakened, in the back of a fourth-floor boarding house to find himself a millionaire and peer. Yesterday, George was a clerk being the lesser scion of a family, though ancient, had foredoomed itself through imprudence. “
“George wakes to find himself a millionaire and peer – the inheritor of a fortune earned in the manufacture of the second best preparation for the blackening of female eyelashes.”
“So now George sits up in bed staring at the world that is opening before him, that is indeed doing more than that, that is opening his bedroom door. For they are all there, all the gossip writers, all those alchemists who make public that which one would have thought essentially and inalterably private.”
“Make no mistake George, these visitors are characteristic of the new world into which must step once you have risen and donned that sizzling shirt, that pyrotechnic sports suit which are all your limited experience can envisage as alternative to your clerkish white collar and blue suit.”
The Rake Gives a Cocktail Party
Low’s notes for West: “It is obvious that Our Hero has now become rather a swell. An expert from Heal’s has fixed him up with the right carpet, a Picasso and an Epstein.
‘In background, lady pinching his ear, Jimmy de Rothschild. Two ladies sitting down, the green one a young version of Lady Lavery. Three young men drinking, Bob Boothby, Randolph Churchill and another. Tom Webster supporting J. H. Thomas refusing cherry from nondescript flapper. Behind, Douglas Fairbanks amusing the ladies. Over his left shoulder, Sir Denison Ross. The Rake, on his left Sir P. Sassoon, on his right three anybodies, one of whom might be Beatrice Lillie. The couple dancing are Sir Harry Preston and (only slightly) Constance Collier. At the piano, Noel Coward, over his shoulder Gertrude Lawrence. Past her, just arriving, Lady Diana Cooper and husband [Duff Cooper]. Leaning on the piano, left side, Sir Landon Ronald; right, Humbert Wolfe, a Sitwell. In foreground, Miss Jeanne Stourton sitting on floor with cigarette-holder. In right-hand corner, Cecil Beaton. ‘They are not all likenesses . . .Some are not even recognisable . . .’ – David Low by Colin Seymour-Ure & Jim Schoff 1985
It’s veritable who’s who of the smart set of fashionable society.
West: “George has moved into an expensive flat decorated with an Epstein statue and a Ben Nicholson picture which represents to George nothing but the stripes of a locomotive, coldly illumined as by regret. But he was compelled to buy them by art dealers who had the same degree of knowingness as those who frequent racecourses and know”Form at a Glance” by heart. It is an infallible recipe for subduing the simple; we shall see George fall a victim to it time and time again.”
“Everybody is here. The Lovelies are present by the score, all wearing the expression peculiar to their tribe: the eyebrows are raised, as if theye were indignantly outfacing some adversary inferior to themselves in sense, and the jawsare drpped like an idiot’s so that the rouged mouthshave an odd, soft, flattened look.”
West savages the young men equally (surly young geniuses muttering unkind remarks about George) as well those old enough to know better but drawn to see what it is all about, what they may have missed from their own youth, and from fear of missing out.
This is the fizz and filth world of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. Foolish George even invests in the movies like dotty Colonel Blount in Waugh’s novel.
The Rake Invests in the Movies
Low’s notes for West: ‘Left to right : a knot of camera-men hanging about waiting. Next along, a group of producers who might be Basil Dean, Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Asquith. The next group includes stars and “business executives” making a fuss over the Rake . . . Mae West and Greta Garbo hang on his neck . . . Charles Laughton and Jack Hulbert are in the group … A little apart stands the foreign Super-producer-genius, more-or-less like Korda. He wonders how the devil he will ever get anything done with such a crowd. In the right-hand corner the inevitable musicians purvey inspiration.’
West: What happens to the rain that falls into the sea?
“George has put a great deal of money into British talkies. Two leading exponents of female glamour languish now on his shoulders, professing readiness to bite off far less than they can chew.”
“Someone had noticed that there were beds in Hollywood films; so the British companies bought a bed. But it was the wrong bed. It was a British bed, a bed to sleep in and not to act on, and as soundly legitimist as any Bourbon.”
“The rain falls into the sea, but the sea seems no fuller.”
So on the next venture.
The Rake Backs a Possible World Champion
Low’s notes for West: ‘The Rake has become a “sportsman” and has been financing another of those horizontal heavyweights of which Olde England is so prolific. Here he is matched with Camera … In the front row might be some of the members of the Boxing Board of Control, Col. Myddleton, Sir W. Bass, Lord Tweedmouth, Tom Webster, Curtis Bennett, Harry Preston (it is one of his famous fight parties at which everyone smokes guinea cigars and sports uniform buttonholes. The Rake is his protege). Poor old Lonsdale, and at the right end of the row a bookmaker suggestive of the boss of Ladbroke’s (“the well-known bookmakers”) seems to be making a bet. Behind, a Mosley sits between a Fannie Ward and a Lucy Houston. (Why, heaven knows — just a whim.)’
West: “George has become a sportsman. You know, one of the best. he has been persuaded by one of his friends, his wonderful new friends, to back another of these English heavyweights who, as time goes on, prove themselves descendants of Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’: boxers whom there are none to praise and very few to love.”
“And oh! the difference, the financial difference to George.”
The Rake on the Crest of a Wave
This is the fizz and filth world of Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety where bright young things drink to excess and do indulge in foolish and risque escapades. It is clearly a recipe for a further slide in degradation. This painting almost feels like an animation in the way the characters lean and drape and sway and lounge as if without spines they are barely able to sit or stand upright. The champagne flows, the music plays, the showgirls dance, and The Lovelies are all over Our Hero.
West: “Tonight George might be in London or Paris or Berlin or New York. He is probably not quite clear himself which of these capitals he actually is. But he is happy because he is obeying that curious impulse to give the mating instinct its fling in a night club … where through the fumes, bottles of champagne are borne solemnly as if they were reminders of mortality by waiters who have the pasty gravity of Inquisitorial Gaolers.”
The Rake Plunges on the Turf
West: “It is a pity that George hoped to make some money when he put on his grey topper this morning. It is a pity he is not merely a spectator as Ascot today. that owing to the kindly readiness of his new friends to put him on to as many good things as possible, he has his own racing stable and his own hopes for today.”
“Having plunged on his horse and lost at Ascot, George loses his temper – to much consternation: On the faces of both the jockey and the trainer at the horse’s head dwells that expression, which is seen when one who is not a child of light finds a mug showing itself not quite such a mug as he thought.”
“Racing in England is notoriously honest as the day.”
But he has broken a gentlemanly convention. We must all look away.”
The Rake’s Marriage
West: “It may have happened in the scented glades outside an Ascot dance that George’s heart was inclined toward matrimony, or under the evening star at Hurlingham…yet it seems likely there was some other factor in the event: that some sterner will closed on George like a steel trap on a rabbit’s foot … At the wedding we look at the bride’s mother in her pew and recognise at a glance who was the steel trap, the fish hook, the lethal bullet.”
It is true that the scale of the ceremony seems a little out of proportion; the enormous number of ecclesiastics who have been called out to sanctify the love-life of our puny little George seems as excessive as the troops of mounted police that our bourgeois states send out to attend the smallest gathering of Communists.”
So there is George at the altar, as limp as a fish with a burning tide of color suffusing his face as the congregation turn to look at the disturbance in the aisle. His friends find it a welcome distraction as former girlfriend Florrie makes her presence felt, The only one smiling is the bride’s mother who sits and smiles:
What a woman! If they would but send her to America to deal with the gangsters, and then bring her back to Europe to disarm the nations!
And is that Oswald Mosley standing with his hands in his pockets?
The Rake at the Gaming Tables
West: George has come to an evil pass because he is a fool. He has staked all his future power and happiness on a game such as children play in the nursery … he is suffering the agony without consolation that sick beasts feel.”
The Rake’s Divorce
West: “George is out of luck as we all are when we find ourselves under the necessity of hanging about the Law Courts.”
Just as it took an excessive number of churchmen at his marriage George so it takes an equally excessive number of lawyers for his divorce. The Lovelies titter and whisper gossip in outrage about the scandal that he has so broken with convention as to seek to divorce his wanton and adulterous wife. The lawyers line their pockets.
“Nothing is clearer in this world than that a cloud and its silver lining are too often destined for two different possessors. In this case George holds the cloud. On George’s wife, we must not be too hard. Could one explain to a goldfish that it may swim in one aquarium but not in another?”
The Rake at the End of his Tether
West: “George has been bracing himself all morning with drinks, softening the all too harsh outlines of this world, and he lunched very alcoholically, hardly using his teeth at all. For he knows that he has come here to be told by his bankers that he is ruined.”
What ruined George was taking advice for a friend put him onto a good thing.”
“Had George lived in a Bloomsbury boarding house, practised the chaste thrift of celibacy and had his life been as bare of horses as Mr Noel Coward’s ‘Cavalcade’, George might still be having this painful interview with his bankers.”
“And, I beg you, do not blame the bankers overmuch. Whatever faults they may have committed have been punished by the change in their prestige.”
The Rake is Thrown out of his Hotel
West: “When he had to leave his house he came to the Hotel Magnificent, for they all knew him there.”
“George is borne out through the hall, losing his dignity in a sudden realisation that life is even more difficult than he had suspected.”
The Rake Finds his Level
West: “So George one day finds himself waiting to draw his dole and glad to get it. What has happened … happens very slowly; it happens to too many of them; it has no news value.”
“You are in a perfect position to explain to them that they misconceive their lot, that they are not castaways, suffering by accident, in want simply because no one has taken thought to make provision for them. Tell them that there is a plan, which like everything else in this best of all possible worlds, is all for the best. Explain to them that they are the foundation stones on which civilisation is built, and even if the superstructure weighs heavy it is so fair that they should think it a privilege to bear the weight. You know all about the superstructure, George. Tell them how very fair it is.”
And there you have it: Twelve snapshots of the London social scene of the early 1930s.
Seems to me that Rebecca West’s morality tale of the corrupting power of money on the foolish takes a bit of a backseat to Low’s paintings. She has some delicious (and vicious) satiric observations but lards her story with some heavy-handed moralizing that seems leaden compared with the illustrations. But all in all, a terrific entertainment.
I had a hard time tracking down an online copy. I found one at the Lucknow Digital Library in Uttar Pradesh, India,
Thank you Lucknow Library.
Other sources:
Mutual Art, Sir David Low
Sim Fine Art
David Low by Colin Seymour-Ure & Jim Schoff 1985
Low’s Autobiography, by David Low – 1956
your blog is so good.the publication is so good it indicate the importence of education is the backbone of a nation
impressive cartoons, someone showed a great ability for the portraiture of characters
It’s one of the reasons Low was such a great political cartoonist.
Thanks for reviewing this. I loved the cartoons.
David Low was what is known as a British national treasure. Not especially for these paintings – interesting though they are. (He was actually from New Zealand and made his name in Australia from where his departure for the UK made the headlines.)
Thanks for sharing this amazing book . It definitely caught my attention. Let’s follow our blogs. Anita
What a fascinating book project! I read your post thinking about Fred and Adele Astaire, who became very popular in England during the 1920s — so much so that Adele left show business to marry a member of the aristocracy (who sadly proved to be alcoholic) and moved to his family’s castle in Ireland. They must have been part of this mileau… I also like this the protagonist’s inheritance is ” a fortune earned in the manufacture of the second best preparation for the blackening of female eyelashes.” So many fortunes have been made creating somewhat unnecessary yet very-well-marketed products like makeup!
That’s a great detail isn’t it – a “preparation for the blackening of female eyelashes. “And the second best at that. George’s parents went broke because they were so imprudent as to use their land for the production of food. West has a whole load of social commentary like that tucked into the text.
I think it was Noel Coward who persuaded the Astaires to perform on the West End in the early 1920s. They would certainly have known many of those in the London fashionable circles of the bright young things.
This is fascinating thank you!
And now, nearly a century later, we have ‘The Rake enjoys a brief post-mortem celebrity’. What a salacious backstory, Josie, and still so pertinent for our times in terms of newspaper and online gossip and the obscene lifestyle of the immoderately well off, toffs and nouveaux riches alike.
Yes – it is certainly a timely moral tale for our shallow times. Sometimes, though, it seems as if the last two paintings don’t happen so often anymore.
Yes, the shallow-minded rich don’t end up paupers and having to make do with 30p meals on unemployed benefit or a state pension… 🙄
Your mention of Colonel Blimp reminded me of an excellent movie titled THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (1943) directed by famed British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. (The title character reportedly bears no relation to David Low’s character, but I’m not qualified to vouch for that.)
It’s years since I’ve seen that film Apparently Low insisted that Blimp be shown as internally stupid a backward, obdurate, dunderhead. Low saw him as a military type that can be found in every country and through time.
This is from the Colin Seymour-Ure & Jim Schoff book:
“Official suspicion prevented the release of Laurence Olivier from the services to play the leading role, which Roger Livesey took instead. Then, although the film sentimentalised Blimp as a well-meaning, determined type with a VC from the Boer War, there was enough mockery of his resistance to change for Churchill, who attended the first night, to oppose its export. It would be ‘disastrously bad propaganda’, said the Daily Mail. In the end it went abroad in an altered version, with Blimp depicted on the American posters as a twinkling old womaniser. Low enjoyed watching the film being made, and he had long ago become inured to misunderstandings and controversy attaching to the Blimp symbol”
“Gad, Sir ! Baldwin may have no brains, but he’s a true Englishman.”
‘…a beautiful piece of character’ Marvelous illustrations, wonder what Low would do with a few of today’s charmers. West’s prose doesn’t have quite the same verve…
As someone who saw the tale end of Low’s career – in the Herald and then the Guardian, and who remains in awe of his achievements – I too ask wonder what he would make of this era.
Excellent. I was going to say what an unlikely source for the online copy, but on the the other hand, maybe not?
I was amazed at hard it was to find the text online.
I suppose it’s because it is not exactly one of Rebecca West’s more well-known works. And the whole book seems to have slid into obscurity.
But: Those illustrations are gorgeous.
West and Low are both fascinating figures from the C20th.
West’s commentary is an interesting insight into left-wing feminist thinking of her era.
And this is a book worth reading – and especially looked at!
So thank you Lucknow Library (although its version has the text, it is woeful on the pictures!)