LONDON LETTER
themselves enormous expenses. The streets in the middle of London
seem as crowded as ever with large cars though the new spectacular
American ones, with their backs looking much the same as their fronts,
generally carry the CD plates of diplomats. More sedate, and grander,
Rolls Royces are also everywhere: perhaps because doctors, who are
earning huge fees, are allowed to charge a car and a chauffeur against
income tax. In England today the classes who feel the pinch of taxation
the most resentfully are the financially successful writers, painters, and
actors, and elderly people living on interest from investments. Stafford
Cripps's capital levy is being taken very calmly; the few people I know
who are well off enough to be caught by it are using mildly bad lan–
guage and accepting their losses.
Restaurants and night clubs are not doing so well as a year ago,
largely, I think, because the people who can afford them are more set–
tled
down into their peacetime lives. Good antique furniture is wildly
expensive, the prices being pressed up by the steady native demand
for it and the rapacious American locusts who for the last two months
have been clearing the shops. This situation only upsets a very small
proportion of the population and to the country as a whole the dollars
earned are desperately necessary; but to have to sell up our chairs and
tables is a sad result of glorious victories in two world wars.
In spite of this capital levy good paintings (and also the Royal
Academy ones) are selling well. Barbara Hepworth, who has devoted
her life to abstract sculpture, has suddenly produced an exhibition, at
the Lefevre Gallery, of exquisite paintings of doctors and nurses perform–
ing major operations. They are presented, without the least gruesome–
ness,
in
pencil and water color and greasy crayon. Her tense figures
with masked faces and capable bony hands are beautifully drawn in
th~
traditional manner. Robin Ironside, a younger painter, is exhibiting
a dozen or so large water colors stippled
in
the most minutely detailed
style--which derives from Dore, the Pre-Raphaelites, Beardsley, and
Surrealism. This fascinating combination produces an original result.
The most impressive of the pictures now at the Redfern Gallery is
"The Death of the Poet Cinna" ·which shows a decomposing, nude,
and emaciated poet dead on top of a coffinlike mound covered with
a huge tangled mantle; which reminds one of a neglected bed of twisted
weeds and flowers and poisonous thorns. The melodramatic atmosphere
of the Ides of March is .suggested by sinister happenings high up in
the terracoUa-colored, dreadful, thundery sky. The elaborate lush "de–
cadence" of Ironside's pictures might not be so interesting if it were
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