Duncan Grant's 32-Year Bond With Paul Roche, Told by His Son

Duncan Grant died in 1978 at the age of 93 in the Roche family house in Aldermaston, Berkshire, ending a 32-year relationship that Paul Roche's family describes as the central devotion of both men's lives — and one that the writer's youngest child now argues has been persistently miscategorized.

"Everyone in our family accepted the fact that my father loved Duncan more than he loved us," Roche's youngest child writes in a first-person account. "Not one of us was jealous, least of all my mother, Clarissa."

Paul Roche — poet, novelist and translator of Greek tragedy — met Grant by chance in July 1946 at Piccadilly Circus, both trying to cross the traffic. Roche, then 29 and a Roman Catholic priest, was on his bicycle. Grant, 61 and dishevelled in a tailored suit, asked him if he would like to see some pictures. Roche assumed he meant films. Grant meant paintings.

How did a priest become Duncan Grant's model?

They took a taxi — bicycle bundled in, a bottle of rum bought on the way — to Edward Le Bas's flat in Bedford Square, where Grant was staying and which held works by Augustus and Gwen John, Walter Sickert, Paul Nash, Matthew Smith, Vanessa Bell and Grant himself. Roche started modelling for Grant the next day. He also briefly modelled for Vanessa Bell, Grant's artistic partner and former lover, and later regretted not making more effort with her.

Roche's path to that evening was itself singular. Born Donald Robert Paul Roche to a British army officer father working as an engineer for the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, he lost his mother, Roberta Arathoon, to smallpox at nine, and the family left India for England. Educated in Latin, Greek, theology and philosophy, he was ordained despite living what the memoir calls a double life — slipping off his dog collar to dress as a sailor and meet women at dances.

Within a few years Roche left the priesthood, telling the cardinal he had a dentist appointment and disappearing. He kept his ordination secret from his children; the author learned of it only in their 30s. It was Grant who told Roche he was a writer. "Only because of Duncan did he have the courage to leave the priesthood," the account states.

What kind of love was it?

Vanessa Bell did not approve, and Roche was never invited to stay at Charleston, the Bloomsbury group's Sussex farmhouse. On one occasion he camped in a tent in a field on the Downs behind the house while Grant brought him food and drink; after Bell found out, the two men could meet only in London. "Duncan cared a great deal about Vanessa's feelings," Roche told his child.

Grant's bond with Bell had become strained after their daughter Angelica was born in 1918. "It had become a huge ordeal for him. He was torn in different directions. He couldn't give her what she needed," Roche said.

The memoir's central claim runs against decades of speculation. "As much as I loved him, I did not have any sexual feelings for him and we certainly never did the deed," Roche stated plainly. Grant's letters carry the asymmetry: "Why oh why is it worthwhile to go on loving you? I should like to know. But you won't be able to tell me." Another closes: "Even if not loved your loving D."

The author's verdict: "Lover? Boyfriend? Muse? Companion? Friend? None of these words describe the essence of their partnership. Beloved is the only word that seems to fit."

What does this change for how we read Bloomsbury?

It complicates the label "muse" that historians have applied to Roche. The memoir insists the influence ran both ways: Grant was Roche's mentor, educator and the reason he translated Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus — versions that sold in the hundreds of thousands and remain in print.

The men's lives diverged in 1953, when Roche fathered a son, Toby, with Mary Blundell after a meeting on the Côte d'Azur, while Clarissa Tanner, a 22-year-old American he had met in Paris a year earlier, was pregnant with Pandora. Roche and Tanner married and moved to the US, where he taught at Smith College alongside Sylvia Plath. A Bollingen Foundation grant to translate Greek tragedy ended his teaching there — grant rules barred him from the classroom — and the family moved to Mexico, where a daughter, Vanessa, was born.

Vanessa Bell's death in 1961 brought Roche back to England after eight years without seeing Grant. A year later the author was born. Grant became a fixture — every Christmas, a self-described "kingpin of our dysfunctional family." When Grant was present, fights ceased; Clarissa Roche was at her best. He gave the children a watercolour of a donkey, embroidery, and a five-pound note each — "a fortune in those days." One Christmas he stopped coming: "He's spending time with his other family," Clarissa explained.

Three of the children — Pandora, Toby and the author — went to art school. "Observing him, I learned to look," the author writes of Grant, who painted daily in his studio to classical music, Mozart above all, and worked until days before dying of pneumonia. Roche cared for him full-time, jokingly calling himself "nanny," and published With Duncan Grant in Southern Turkey in 1982, a journal of a 1973 holiday.

After Grant's death and the parents' divorce, Roche moved to Mallorca, returning to teach at Notre Dame, his walls hung with Grant's portraits of him: nude, washing his feet, typing, as Christ ascending — a companion piece to the Lincoln Cathedral mural in the Russell Chantry — and as Christ the shepherd. The author kept Grant's first painting of Don, the nude on a red rug from Bedford Square, on a bedroom wall, and defends it against those who called that strange: "It was not sexual or erotic but soulful."

What the account leaves open is whether the wider record will accept its terms. The letters, the paintings and the family's testimony are now on the table; the biographers who used "boyfriend" and "lover" have not yet answered.

The last image is Roche at 61, knees buckling over Grant's body, picked up by his youngest child. "Duncan made us a family," the author writes, "and now we were on our own."