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like some sodding wog making salaam and dipped his head to
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the earth. I went bonkers, Nance, I lost control. He was mocking
us, this murderer. I ran at him as if I were centre-forward for
Arsenal taking a penalty kick. I was aiming for the upper left
corner of the goal. His neck held his head in place, but the
fucker was thrown back, a rag dod, knocking over the praying
mantis, who kept at it on his side: "Lieber Gott, lieber Gott, lieber
Gott." I'd kdled him, though, this joker, this murderer. Only, he's
murdered sleep, Nance. He's murdered sleep.'
But even without Mumsy as witness, the traumatic effects of
Entwistle's late war experience are clear. I mean, of course, his
magnificent eight-panel painting,'The Eighth Day: Destruction',
a series on the relationship of the Jews and Germany from the
Enlightenment to the Holocaust, the cause of his scandalously
public resignation from the Royal Academy. He worked on
'Destruction' for almost ten years, finishing that extraordinary
undertaking in February 1962. These were Mumsy's years, the
years in which he painted her again and again, at first ecstati-
cafly at last furiously. But 'Destruction' possessed him, exhausted
him; he strove to abandon it, despaired of his talents, his abdity
to fulfd his vision, bedowed his frustrations to the heavens. One
day he appeared in the kitchen haggard, red-eyed, tearful, terri-
fied. 'Oh, Nance, Nance, what have I done? What have I done,
Nance?' What he had done was to hurl pots of paint at three
completed and two aU-but-completed canvases. Mumsy took
him by the hand back to his studio, where she supervised his
tearful (but successful) clean-up of the damage. She was good at
bucking people up was Mumsy.
'Destruction' occupies its own room in theTabakman Museum
in Tel Aviv, Entwistle's outright gift to the State of Israel, less
perhaps a matter of sympathetic largesse to a persecuted and
nearly annihdated people at least, so said some cynics in stagy
asides - than one of dl-considered pique.This judgement is grossly
unfair. Certainly, there was pique. In 1963 Entwistle had submitted
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all eight canvases to the Royal Academy for exhibition. It was a
fud year after the application of his final brushstroke. During that
year he had visited the paintings almost dady in the outbudding
he had emptied and whose interior wads he had freshly white-
washed to accommodate them, walking from canvas to canvas,
fiddling with his braces or scratching his crotch. He was
immensely proud of what he had achieved, the execution of so
complex a narrative, his mastery of colour, form and feeling; he
was less confident of his historical accuracy, going so far as to
invite Sir Trevor Ridley, Regius Professor of Modern German
History at Oxford, to look them over. He had never had any-
thing but scorn for academics 'Fucking sophists, every one of
the buggers. Talk about making the worse appear the better case!
Wait tid they turn their beady eyes on your books, Robin.' He
had a point, I'm bound to admit. (And yet he invited the aca-
demic Kops to be his biographer! Yes, let's not forget that.) At
any rate, the offer to Sir Trevor of a weekend in Dibblethwaite
emphaticady reveals Entwistle's insecurity.
The RA accepted only 'Day 4' of'The Eighth Day: Destruction',
offering no explanation for the choice, other than 'the unfortunate
but unavoidable fact' that space constraints prevented the exhibiting
of ad eight. In that ruling there may have been a modicum of
truth. Entwisde, after ad, would have required a gadery to himself.
But to choose 'Day 4' was to rufde no feathers. It was relatively
bland, however brilliantiy its characters were drawn, the artistic
luminaries, the 'stars', ofWeimar Germany, engaged in a Dance of
Death. The world did not yet really want to know about the
Holocaust, the subject of'Day 8'.The RA had a duty to its public.
Hence Entwisde s pique. Pique is to put it mddly. Fury is a
better word. But I don't think we can in decency ignore his sin-
cerity. This had its roots in his artistic integrity. But, more than
that, it had to do with his experience at the liberation of Bergen-
Belsen, his shock at discovering, whde stid young, the possible
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consequences of man's inhumanity to man. He could not shake
it from his head. It invested his dreams, his nightmares, at least
until the catharsis which the final panel of his work engendered.
It scratched open in him, however short-lived, a species of fedow
feeling, of compassion.
But the letter he wrote to the President of the Royal Academy,
sending copies to The Times and the Yorkshire Evening Post, has
become famous, at least in those circles where art-historical
detads matter.
Dear Sir,
My resignation is final, which is why I have made it gen-
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