The Initials in the Heart

by laurence-whistler

From the book jacket flap: "This is a book about love. Laurence Whistler, poet and engraver on glass, tells the story of his life with Jill Furse, a young actress of great beauty and promise, and of their five-year marriage cut short by her death. Though tragic in brevity, it is a love story of extreme happiness, still growing through the bitter separations of war."

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sir Laurence Whistler (1912-2000) was best known as a graphic artist who engraved on glass. I ran across him as a poet through one of his short works that was anthologized in The Poetry of Dogs. Liking that so much I learned more about him and discovered the book reviewed here. This book has the same theme as many others, e.g. Love Story but without the bathos of most and with an incisive and poetic sensibility. Tender and exquisite.

[Felicity · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this memoir of his sadly curtailed first marriage, the effect of Whistler's intention is not so much to celebrate the one great love of his life as to establish her reputation for posterity. This is understandable, even laudable, but I found myself wishing that he had honoured her for something more substantial than her great beauty and unfulfilled potential. Jill Furse, a promising actress whose stage career had been disrupted by debilitating illness, died shortly after giving birth to their second child. Twenty years elapsed between her death and this commemoration, but the distance in no way reduced the veneration of one of those whom the gods love. The adulation extends even to her rather trite poetry. 'Though verse was not a mode for the full affirmation of her mind,' he concedes, appearing wilfully blind to the bathetic last lines of the verse he reproduces, perhaps because, citing a contemporary review of her acting, he commends 'the gentle art of understatement' and its exquisite simplicity. In rejecting the 'romantic abnegation' -- the native suspicion that a girl of outstanding beauty can have no real talent -- the gentleman doth protest too much, methinks. Furse's talents should surely have been separable from her female beauty. Whistler, now better known as an innovative glass engraver, regarded himself as a failed poet who was nonetheless a 'maker'. One might wish that the poet manqué had made more of Furse's distinctive qualities than her stage presence and her exquisitely feminine gift for putting his good before her own.