The school of hard knocks

The Slade of the years immediately before the first world war has always been fertile ground for novelists. As Sarah MacDougall pointed out in her engaging biography of Mark Gertler, Gertler himself and his fellow students have provided copy for anyone and everyone from D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf to Katherine Mansfield, V.S. Pritchett and the woefully untalented and finally mad Gilbert Cannan.

Given her previous record, it was probably only a matter of time before Pat Barker joined this list, and Life Class opens in the familiar world of Henry Tonks’s Slade. ‘Is that really the best you can do?’ the formidable Tonks demands, as he critically examines the most recent effort at life drawing by Paul Tarrant, Pat Barker’s protagonist. ‘Then why do it?’

It is a question horribly faithful of the historical Tonks — and the very words he used in fact to Gertler — and typical of an institution Paul Nash labelled an ‘English public school seen in a nightmare’, but it is a question that Pat Barker’s fictional Paul is unable to answer. Born in Middlesbrough of a working-class family and subsidised by a rapacious rackrent grandmother, Paul finds himself as unsure of his artistic talent as of his social position in the Café Royal of Augustus John, or of the drawing room of Ottoline Morrell.

‘Art! It’s not for people like us…’ Paul hears his grandmother telling him, but, in a callow attempt to bridge the gap between ‘people like us’ and this alien world, he embarks on a vividly realised affair with Teresa, a life-class model at the Slade. Beaten up by her violent husband, Paul is patched up by his fellow student Elinor who proceeds to play him off in a triangular relationship with Kit Neville, a successful older artist, modelled partly on Christopher Nevinson.