Oral History Interview with Moira Roth, 2011 April 22-24
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Oral history interview with Moira Roth, 2011 April 22-24 This interview is part of the Elizabeth Murray Oral History of Women in the Visual Arts Project, funded by the A G Foundation. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Moira Roth on April 22-24, 2011. The interview took place in Berkeley, Calif., and was conducted by Sue Heinemann for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Elizabeth Murray Oral History of Women in the Visual Arts Project, funded by the A G Foundation. Moira Roth and Sue Heinemann have reviewed the transcript. Their corrections and emendations appear below in brackets with initials. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview SUE HEINEMANN: This is Sue Heinemann interviewing Moira Roth at her home in Berkeley, California, on April 22, 2011, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, card number one. So Moira, I thought we'd just start with your childhood and early period. MOIRA ROTH: Well, what I've done in preparation for this is to pull together a number of documents, including my mother's birth certificate, my parents' marriage and my own birth certificate and a couple of photographs about my mother. So let me begin by this: My mother was Scottish-Canadian and was born in Canada, and on her birth certificate she says she's the daughter of Duncan McClellan. And then it says, "Esquire," and in another document it says he's a gentleman. Their daughter arrives in 1903, and my mother begins quite conventionally as a child. The family is very wealthy. She's sent to a finishing school in Switzerland. Then she goes to Paris. She's a debutante in Montreal. And she's clearly all set for a conventional marriage, et cetera. Then she decides to shift her way of thinking and living and, I don't think literally, but she metaphorically escapes from Canada and she goes to the left-wing school of the London School of Economics and, there, meets my father. And my father comes from a very different background. He is Irish working class. He's the only person in his family to go to college. He gets a degree and he's teaching at the London School of Economics. And there, he and my mother meet. And they marry when he is 30 and she is 28, and then they stay married until about six months after I'm born. And then my mother goes off with a lover and my father returns to a childhood sweetheart, so it's a fairly brief marriage. And I am born in London, and, as I said, because my father and mother split up very shortly after my birth, my mother takes me to Cornwall. And I have what, in retrospect, seems like a very romantic childhood. We live in Mevagissey, which is a very pretty town in Cornwall. And it's near Tintagel, which was the home of King Arthur and his knights. And I have very few memories of it, but the one that I most remember is an episode where there's suddenly a warning that sharks are in the nearby waters, which is unusual, given it's England. And my mother and I are on a beach and then it turns out the tide is coming up and we won't be able to escape up the cliff. And my mother, very dramatically, leaves me on the beach, swims, thinking there could well be sharks in the water, goes to a nearby beach, gets some help, and someone comes in a boat and I'm rescued. So that is my one concrete memory of my childhood. My mother was a very shy but basically self-assured person who became more and more interested in theosophy and Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. She ends her life as a Buddhist. And although she comes, as I said, from a very wealthy background, she doesn't behave in a very wealthy way. She behaves in a very well- mannered way. And I suspect she later on becomes a role model for me—not when I'm a child, but there are many things, in retrospect looking back on my mother, that are inspiring to me. She was very independent. She did what she cared about. She was unconventional but, as I said, well-mannered. And she lived a very full and complicated life, including a short breakdown when I was 20. So at a certain point, my mother decides that she has to choose a good school for me and so we move in order to live in Letchworth, which is where this school is, called St. Christopher's. But it's not a Catholic school. It was firstly invented in India by a group of theosophists who felt that when they went back to England, they should have a good school for their children. And then later on, Quakers came, so it was an odd mixture of theosophists and Quakers. So we arrive in Letchworth before World War II. I was born in 1933, July 24th. We arrive in Letchworth and my mother buys a very beautiful house with a huge garden, which is where we have memorable luncheons when I'm a child. In the meantime, my father has not only gone back to his childhood sweetheart, but he's got a job at the University of Johannesburg. So he has gone out to Africa and I don't see him at all for the first few years. And then when he comes back, he teaches at Bristol University and, during the war, he's at the Board of Trade in London. So my mother and I arrive at Letchworth and I go to this school that begins with a Montessori experience. And it's quite remarkable for a school of that time. It's an international school so it has children from Africa. At one point, both the head boy and head girl are Africans. It has children from Persia, as it was then called, quite a lot of Jewish refugees from Europe, and then also refugees from London who were escaping the Blitzkrieg. It's also a vegetarian school. It's very, very progressive. At one point, we have the great pleasure—the children have the great pleasure—of demanding that a rather intemperate French teacher come before us because she kicked someone and we have to decide if she should be expelled from the school. [Laughs.] And the classes are equally experimental. So it means that, though I am a child of immigrants and have this unconventional class background of Canadian upper class and Irish working class, the whole school is unconventional. So it's a very comfortable school for me to go to. And I live with my mother in Letchworth and go to school each day, but many of the children are boarders. And then World War II comes along in the fall of 1939. And shortly after that the Germans, as you know, move very, very quickly through Europe and then, at a certain point, decide they will invade England, but firstly, they will bomb London. And so that's what is called the Battle of Britain. And Churchill becomes the savior figure in that moment in English history. So my father is in London. He and my mother go to court over me because both of them think I should be taken out of England because it's dangerous. And my father takes me to Ireland, where the idea was I would live with his family. My mother demands that I come back and that she will take me to Canada. And there are lawsuits and they're hardly on speaking terms after that, although my father comes to visit me regularly during wartime in Letchworth. At that point, when there is the Battle of Britain in 1940, it becomes not an option, but anyone living outside London who has a fairly large house is made to have evacuees. And most people simply accept whoever the government sends, but my mother makes—and I'm going to read to you from Abraham's Daughter—it's the autobiography of someone who becomes almost my surrogate mother after my mother dies. Her name is Rose Hacker, and she describes how she is one of the people who comes to live with us. And she, herself—Rose Hacker—is Jewish. She is terrified, as is her husband, when they're living in London and the bombing is about to start. And this will give you a sense of what it's like to be an English Jew waiting for the Germans to invade. She writes on page 65 of her autobiography: "We really expected Hitler to invade England, probably somewhere along the South or East coast. As Jews, we anticipated the fate of French and Dutch Jews, who had joined their German coreligionists in the concentration camps. Mark"—who is her husband—"Mark tried to persuade me to take the boys to America but I refused until it was too late for ships to travel. Although bombing was heavy in London and his Holborn office building was hit three times, he would never talk about his experience, but constantly discussed safer homes for me and the children." And then Rose and the two children, Michael and Lawrence, who were almost like brothers for me for a while, move out and they move to a place called Cranleigh.