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Desmond Chute, 1895–1962

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

Walter Shewring
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Extract

Stanley Spencer has left it on record how in 1916, among the miseries and the friendlessness of a military hospital in Bristol, he was suddenly aware of someone who, ‘like a Christ visiting Hell’, came walking down a stone passage towards him: ‘a young intellectual named Chute’. In April 1940, a few months before his own death, Eric Gill wrote in his Autobiography: ‘of Father Desmond I shall say little because my love for him is too intimate, too much a matter of daily companionship and discussion and argument, too close a sharing of life and work and ideas and doubts and difficulties - the only man and therefore the only priest with whom I have been able to talk without shame and without reserve.’ Ezra Pound, no blind admirer of the clergy, was present at Father Desmond’s funeral. It falls to me to offer some coherent account of this remarkable man, perhaps the most widely gifted of all English priests of his own time, yet one who through accidents of circumstance remained comparatively unknown. It is easy to gather recollections of him; it is hard now to convey to a younger generation the things he stood for.

He was born at Bristol on September 11,1895, a collateral descendant of William Charles Macready, the Shakespearian actor whose surname was his own second name; his family had kept links with the stage, and still owned the Prince’s Theatre at Bristol. In 1906 he went to Down- side; brilliant from the first, a classical pupil of Nevile Watts and later Head of the School, he might well have become a scholar of Balliol or of King’s, and this would have pleased both his parents; but in 1912 he chose instead to enter the Slade.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 44 , Issue 511 , January 1963, pp. 27 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © 1963 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Maurice Collis, Stanley Spencer (1962), pp. 49–51, 67–68. Dates are confused; in 1916 Desmond was twenty.

2 p. 209. Cf Eric Gill, Letters (1947), p. 448.

3 Whether this was a good thing or bad thing I can't decide ‐ so often, in our perverted age, technique is the enemy of art; the Slade provided technique. Desmond relished afterwards the possible applications of Mother Julian's sentence: ‘And anon he falleth into a slade, and taketh full great sore’.

4 As he wrote himself: ‘To anyone who has learnt a craft in a workshop, the elaborate expertise whose aim is to spot the master's hand, isolating his work from that of the school, is simply laughable. The touches of the master are as fleeting as they are frequent, whereas the imprint of his mind is everywhere, and not least in what he has least touched’.

5 Eric Gill, Letters, pp. 148, 153, 163, 175. Time and circumstance have not been kind to these Stations.

6 His best portraits are pure line‐drawings and are psychologically convincing. Sometimes he added colour; sometimes he used a landscape background. Eric Gill's Letters have at p. 214 a portrait of E.G. by D.C. (distinct from that in the Nationd Portrait Gallery), and at p. 346 one of D.C. by E.G.

7 From their earliest acquaintance Desmond was conscious of the greater gifts of this friend, and he lived long enough to be enthralled by the Anathemata. I am glad to see, as I write this memoir, that some of my judgments have been anticipated by Mr Jones (letter to The Tablet, 20 October, 1962).

8 The Game Vol. II, no. 3 (1918), p. 55. In Vol. IV no. 4 (1921), p. 50, is the other roundel, from Charles d'Orléans: The year hath cast his cloak away.

9 A recorded talk of his about Yeats and Pound was broadcast on Christmas Eve, 1955 and was printed in The Listener, 5 January, 1956, with reproductions of his own portraits of both poets.

10 One of these, a Tuscan who had married a Genoese, replied to his condolences: ‘Yes, he was a very good husband, a wonderful husband; but ‐ would you believe it, Father? ‐ till his dying day the poor man could never hear the difference between tórta and tórta’.

11 He helped to found this Apostleship at Genoa and did much work on an Italian prayer‐book for sailors of which he presented a copy to Pius XI. The audience was to have been of five minutes, but the Pope stayed for half an hour, asking questions about the Apostleship and listening intently to the answers; Desmond's mother kneeled beside in ecstasy.

12 After the war, he rebuilt at his own expense in the main church of Rapallo the Chapel of the Redeemer destroyed by his countrymen, adding a memorial to a priest friend who had then been killed in the confessional (inter remittenda peccata animam pro ovibus posuit). The donor, says the inscription, was Desmundus Macready Chute, sacerdos, Anglicus natione. Two further words may be supplied from Dante's tenth letter.

13 Two chapters of this were published in the Downside Review of 1949 (nos. 208 and 209).

14 Bibliography. Obituary of E.G. in Osservatore Romano, 28 February, 1942. Italian translation of Social Justice and the Stations of the Cross printed in battered unauthorised form in Humanitas, Brescia, March 1951. Blackfriars, December 1950 and January 1951 (Eric Gill: A Retrospect and Eric Gill and the MoneyChangers). Catholic Art Quarterly, U.S.A.: Thomist Aesthetics (Pentecost 1949); Eric Gill (Christmas 1953); Sacred, Holy or Religious Art (Michaelmas 1954)