Book Review: A Pageant Truly Play’d by Tessa West
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Reviewed by Pete Warzel
I received an email several months ago from the UK author, Tessa West, asking if I might be interested in her new biography about Constance Smedley and Maxwell Armfield, a British couple, she a writer and playwright and he a painter. The interest might be their employment by the Santa Fe Railway Company during 1920.
I say the book is about Constance and Maxwell, Connie and Max, but it is a bit more than that. While Tessa was researching their lives and histories, she and her brother found several paintings in their father’s belongings given to him by Max. Letters between the two men also were recovered and the book that was to be a biography of man and wife now became much more personal through this serendipitous link with her father. Ms. West uses the relationship to draw a portrait of her father, David, as well as present the biography of these two adventurous artists.
Constance Smedley was born to wealth in 1877, Birmingham, England. (One of her father’s ventures was the world’s first company to produce “movies”, and filmed four, one minute scenes from King John by Shakespeare, to show before live performances of the play.) By all accounts she was a pistol, in spite of her physical disability – most likely polio. She attended the Birmingham School of Art and began writing novels after leaving the school. In all she published twenty novels, and another twenty books of non-fiction and children’s literature. Connie also started, extremely successfully, a bricks and mortar club as a creative and business environment for women – the Lyceum – having been dismissed by the Writer’s Club when she proposed there be a special section for women.
Maxwell Armfield was born into a Quaker family in 1881, in the south of England. His family also was well-off, due to the founding and expansion of Armfield Iron Works. Max attended Sidcot, a Quaker School, and then the Birmingham School of Art, several years following Connie. The school was affiliated with William Morris, the multi-faceted and talented artist at the heart of the British Arts and Crafts movement.
About two thirds of the slim book relates their individual family lives, education, and accomplishments. Then, in 1907, never knowing each other despite having attended the same school, they meet. The artistic duo becomes a force in 1909 with their marriage, within an atmosphere of the suffrage movement in England, and the storm clouds appearing in Europe for the Great War. While they lived in the countryside and worked on their individual painting and writing projects in different parts of the house, they also collaborated on “design, illustration, text and theatre.” The Greenleaf Theatre, an endeavor that “…was to bring all the arts together with the intention of using them to project the central concept of a play,” was a successful venture founded by the couple.
But 1914 and the onset of war steered them to America. Here they developed their creative strategies, Max had success in selling his paintings, and they were invited to stage a play at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, California, at the university. The Santa Fe Railway extended them an invitation to travel the southwest and depict the striking geography and native scenes for use as promotional material by the railroad as it expanded tourism during this vibrant part of American history. (Although not mentioned by Ms. West, the train car they had for their own *, the meals at stations along the route, and the El Tovar Hotel at the Grand Canyon, were all part of the tourism expansion by the Fred Harvey Company in association with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway).
This is a set piece in a larger arts movement, isn’t it? British intellectuals finding each other, sharing an adventurous spirit and a calling for the arts, turning out books and paintings, plays and stage sets. Then…coming to America. Visiting the center of the tourism boom in the southwest and Santa Fe, and so fitting the pattern being established by artists from everywhere drawn to the beauty and exoticism of New Mexico. (Within the same ten year period, our friend Cormac O’Malley tells us about his father, Ernie, IRA Commander, poet, adventurer, traveling to Santa Fe, directly to El Zaguán, and befriends Dorothy Stewart, writes poetry, keeps magnificent diaries, and explores with Dorothy and her friends, the southwest and Mexico).
The title of Ms. West’s book comes from Shakespeare, As You Like It. Reference is to The Historical Pageant of Progress, a 1911 production in rhyming verse, that the married Armfields were involved staging. In the end, it is a fitting epigram of the lives of these two artists. The book is a look at two very British artists, representative of their time, and a part of the trend of history in the southwest and Santa Fe in the 1920’s, as the city also was discovering itself.
A Pageant Truly Play’d
By Tessa West
Brewin Books, UK
Softbound, 172 pages