“The Naked Truth”

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 247, 9 January 1928, Page 12

“The Naked Truth”

Woman Sculptor’s Memoirs A TALK WITH TROTSKY If it is, indeed, the naked truth which Clare Sheridan tells in “Nuda Veritas,” published by Thornton Butterworth, some of her friends may not be altogether pleased. Mrs. Sheridan writes with uncompromisng candour of people as varied as the Connaught Princesses, her cousin Mr. Winston Churchill, and Lenin. Her mother, Mrs. Moreton Frewen, was one of three American sisters brought up in Paris, of whom the two others, were Mrs. Leslie, the mother of Shane Leslie, and Lady Randolph Churchill, the mother of Winston. In childhood, Clare Frewen and her brother Peter were left for some years to the care of an Alsatian governess, who constantly ill-treated them. “Five years of appalling torture ensued, which have resulted in all kinds of psychological idosyncracies,” says Mrs. Sheridan. Obliging Bailiff Mrs. Sheridan says that in London she and her brother never knew when they entered the drawing-room whether bailiffs would be sitting there or not. Once when Peter and I returned from a walk and rang the door bell it was answered by an unknown man. We protested to our mother: “How can you, when we are so hard up, engage a new servant?” She answered: “Hush! It’s a bailiff. I’ve given him ten bob and he’s promised to open the door and clean the mirrors.” The manner in which she became engaged to Wilfred Sheridan is charmingly told. The author was then staying with her aunt Jennie Churchill, and Mr. Sheridan was invited to dinner. We had not met for two years. We were both much changed. He was maturer and more beautiful—l was more experienced and more amusing. He asked me my plans. I told him: “To-morrow I go to Holland.” “What for?” “That no longer concerns you!” “What? Are you going to marry?” “You always advised me to.” “But you would be happier in a cottage with me than In a castle with him.” “I have always thought so.” And so they became engaged, and after a fashionable wedding they said good-bye to their friends “and were no more seen for five years.” Captain Sheridan was killed in the war, and his widow was left with two children, and nothing to live on but her pension. Winston's Sunsets Mrs. Sheridan found a studio “in an obscure alley,” and there began her work as a sculptor which was afterwards to bring her fame. The sudden gift of £I,OOO from a chivalrous American colonel, who regarded her “as a kind of heritage left to the nation by a dead patriot,” enabling Mrs. Sheridan to give up “pot-boiling” and devote herself to the study of her art. When Mrs. Sheridan persuaded Mr. Churchill to sit for her she found him almost too restless to portray. Now and then Winston, remembering me and that I was trying to portray him, would stop still and face me with all the intensity with which he had been painting. These were my momentary chances which he called sittings! Then as the day faded he abandoned whatever he was at work on and turned excitedly to the window to paint the sunets. His canvas had been prepared; the cedar tree in the foreground was already painted; he went straight for the colour. On one of these occasions he said to me, without looking round: “Sometimes —I could almost give up everything for it!” Lenin gave Mrs. Sheridan a sitting when she went to Russia, but her efforts to start a conversation with him met with no encouragement. Trotsky was more talkative. He said tq her once: “Much as I like you and admire you as a woman. I assure you that if I knew you were an enemy, or a danger to our revolutionary cause, I would not hesitate to shoot you with my own hand.” Mrs. Sheridan’s interviews with Mussolini, Mustapha Kemal, Primo de Rivera, and the Mexican President are described with the vivacity that runs through the book.