Two of Britten’s finest

John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in art
Frances Spalding
OUP £25
(978-0-19-956761-4)
CT Bookshop £22.50

RICHARD INGRAMS’s book Piper’s Places, written with the insight and sensitivity of one who knew John and Myfanwy Piper well, is arguably still the most sym­pathetic and quietly perceptive study of a couple who, with their friends and fellow church-crawlers John and Penelope Betjeman, epitomised the quiet but un­ashamed unconventionality that was a feature of many British artists — and, for that matter, composers — of the mid-20th century.

Frances Spalding is one of our most accomplished biographers of artistic figures (among them, the artist John Minton and the writer Stevie Smith), and one of the most dogged. If anything, her text, pub­lished perhaps a year or so earlier than she would have preferred, is a little too dogged. This is a hefty, as well as inspiring, read.

But Spalding’s own wide-angle lens (think of Piper’s Windsor, or Renishaw, or Hardwick Hall) shares much with us from these two extra­ordinary and brilliant lives.

We see the Pipers as eager young people, aspiring to break into an art world peopled by deities — Kokosch­­ka, Kandinsky, Braque, Klee, Mondrian. John produced canvases — abstract at first, then those im­ages of wind-blown Portland, rugged North Wales, and bombed Coventry which we so often asso­ciate with him.

Myfanwy — his talented youthful mistress, then his second wife, and mother to their four children — started out as an editor, prising out modern artists in Paris (Jean Hélion was the key one); met Giacometti; and became one of the most arti­culate commentators on modernism in European art.

While valiantly supporting John in his art, jazz piano-playing, pot-making fads, and Chagall-like stained-glass work (as in the south-facing baptistery window for Cov­entry), as well as bringing up a family, Myfanwy came to know Benjamin Britten after meetings of Auden, Isherwood, and Spender’s Group Theatre.

This met at the Pipers’ home, Fawley Bottom, a Chilterns-backed farm­house, originally derelict, near Henley-on-Thames. Myfanwy took to Britten immediately.

Even John, designer of most of Britten’s operas, including the all-male Billy Budd, was not exempt from Britten’s occasional self-distancing. But Myfanwy’s work with the composer was a model of intensive collaboration, from The Turn of the Screw (Venice, 1954) to his last opera, Death in Venice. Owen Win­grave, another Henry James story, acted as a bridge to restoring — or, arguably, keeping in good repair — the Piper ascendancy crucial to many of Britten’s undertakings.

It is a delight to see such a beauti­fully produced book, originally commissioned by the Piper family, now taken up by OUP. Six hundred pages long, superbly illustrated with colour plates, many monochrome photographs, and line drawings set into the text, complete with apt 1930s-style endpapers, this warms to the greatness, but also the unique fun and endless liveliness, of life with the Pipers.

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