by Robert Irwin
Together we identified those we could. André Breton and Ned Shillings faced one another like heraldic lions and they exchanged frigid formalities. Oliver was being charming to Baroness D’Erlanger and Lord Berners. MacKellar in cowboy gear was talking vigorously to Constant Lambert and he later told me that he was proposing that they do an opera about cowboys together. MacKellar wanted to call it ‘The Rio Grande’. Close to where we were I could see Henry Moore with Salvador Dali and it looked very much as though the former was getting a lecture from the latter on how to wax moustaches.
This particular private view had turned out to be the unscheduled event of the season and le tout Londres et Paris was there in the room that day – painters, poets, patrons, critics. The paintings and sculpture furnished the formal pretext of our assembly, but really it was the women who were on display. I became aware of this from listening to Caroline. Her reading of the fashion magazines had made her an expert in this matter and she whispered to me the names of the designers of the women’s dresses – Meinbocher, Steibel, Schiaparelli, and others. I marvelled at the triumph of the mysterious Spirit of Fashion. The women in the gallery, driven by instinct and desire had moved together as a herd – wild and indisciplined, but still a herd. Individuals might stray a little away from the herd – a dip in the neckline, the adoption of a new sort of hat pin, an almost imperceptible adjustment of the hemline, a deeper shade of the prevailing colour – little shifts, but in the long run the direction of the great herd was precisely dictated by those countless little shifts that the fashion-conscious individual women composing the herd had made in their tentative attempts to stray away from it.
Hunting round the Gallery, I located my own works. My ‘Second-hand Bookshop no. 1’ hung between paintings by Max Ernst and André Masson. My experimental steel engravings to Confessions of an English Opium Eater were in a glass case which also contained Tenniel’s illustrations to Alice in Wonderland and Picasso’s design for a cover of Minotaure.
As soon as Read’s speech finished, there was a surge towards the drinks. Once we had secured our glasses, Caroline wanted to make a careful study of ‘Second-Hand Bookshop no. 1’, so I left her and started to push my way around the edges of the gallery. Felix was doing the same, stabbing her finger at one picture after another, hissing noisily ‘Shit! Shit! Shit! That’s shit!’ Lady Winbourne went over to complain to one of the keepers and after only a few minutes, Felix was escorted out of the Gallery.
Then MacKellar accosted me, clutching a sheaf of paper pinned to a clip-board. He had taken it upon himself to organise Ned’s orgy for him. Would we like to put our names down near the head of the list? Thirty or forty would be needed to make the party go with a swing. I hastily declined on behalf of Caroline and myself, but suggested that Edith Sitwell was a likely prospect and MacKellar hurried away.
My own responses to what the gallery displayed were slower than Felix’s, but eventually I came to roughly the same conclusion. The trouble was that the British Surrealists were so drab and anaemic, childishly obsessed with circuses and seasides, and desperately concerned to be polite and charming. Every Mayfair smartie and dealer was there looking at this stuff. I stood surrounded by people whose mouths were full of cheap wine and ‘isms’ – Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Neo-Romanticism, Dadaism, Fascism, Anarchism, Communism, Freudianism. Surrealism was just another ‘ism’ on the same level as the rest. I heard some voices proclaiming their outrage and others declaring that they had seen it all before. Surrealism was supposed to be about a revolution in our perceptions, but this was just wine-and-cheese chat about some belated specimens of fantastic art. But I knew that Surrealism was not an ‘ism’, and neither did it have any relation whatsoever with neoromantic ideas about fantastic art. Surrealism was and is a science dedicated to the revelation of the Marvellous in everyday reality.
I stood there drinking and thinking furiously, then I came to my decision. My work was not going to be part of this Movietone-Sitwell-Schiaparelli jamboree. I found a chair and lugged it through the crowd to ‘Second-Hand Bookshop no. 1’. Standing on the chair, I got my picture down. Mesens and Penrose came over to expostulate.
‘Caspar, what’s got into you? You can’t do that!’
‘But I have done it.’
‘You are under contract to the Gallery,’ Penrose pointed out.
I laughed,
‘What has the Surrealist revolution to do with contracts?’
Mesens chipped in,
‘Isn’t this rather arrogant, Caspar? Do you think that your work is too good to hang beside Picasso, Nash and Dali? Aren’t you being a little immature?’
Caroline, who had been talking to some people whom I did not recognise, came over to find out what was going on.
I swept my arm round to encompass the drunken, chattering throng in the Gallery.
‘These are grown-ups? God save me from maturity!’
Mesens shrugged and smiled. Looking back on that confrontation, I now think that he was not at all displeased by my gesture. I think that he thought that the private view was going too smoothly. He actually wanted outrage and scandal, the more the better.
I was about to lay into the Mayfair smarties and dealers who had turned up for the event, but at that point Caroline intervened,
‘Leave your painting where it is, Caspar. You are making yourself look silly.’
And before I could make some protest about artistic integrity or whatever, she was close by me and her breath hot in my ear,
‘I want your work to be a success. Do this for me, Caspar. Do it for me, my love.’
And then with no more thought about artistic integrity, I rehung my painting and backed apologetically away from Mesens and Penrose.
‘And now I want you to meet these nice people I’ve just been talking to,’ said Caroline, taking me by the hand.
The ‘nice people’ she introduced me to were Paul and Nusch Eluard and Gala Dali. Paul Eluard, a serious and gentle looking man, offered me his hand. His hand had a pronounced nervous tremor, as did mine, so that our handshake was like the momentary intertwining of tendrils of seaweed in an ocean swell.
Then Paul turned towards Caroline and recited the opening lines of a poem of his;
‘Une femme est plus belle que le monde ou je vis
Et je ferme les yeux’.
A dizziness seized me. The couplet that I had quoted to Caroline during my first blind encounter with her was now being quoted to me by their author, to whom I had just been introduced by Caroline. I had a brief, almost instantaneous glimpse of the real way the world worked and of tunnels criss-crossing under the universe and a sense of infinitely deep abysses folding in upon themselves. I felt my glass slip from my hand, though I no longer quite knew what a glass or a hand were. I could see nothing – rather I saw a lattice-work of silvery metallic threads crossing over and under, over and under one another and filling my whole field of vision. I swayed on my feet, but somebody, probably Paul, caught me by the shoulder. Then the centre of the metallic lattice-work started to thin and break apart and I thought that I glimpsed tall black shapes wavering in a submarine cavern. But this soon resolved itself into a large room filled with pictures and people, although I recognised nobody and nothing. Then I recognised some of the people, but I did not know what they were doing in that place. Finally, I came fully to myself. I was facing Paul and Caroline and I felt as though my brain had just been opened and given a good scrubbing with a wire brush before being closed up again.
Caroline was wide-eyed with alarm,
‘Caspar! What is it?’
‘Too much to drink,’ suggested Oliver who was standing with a neighbouring group of people.
‘I have just seen that there is a logic to the universe, but it is a logic that does not quite make sense.’ My voice was slurred but emphatic. ‘Surrealism is really true though.’
While this exchange was going on, Paul had rescued my glass, which had been rolling about under our feet. This he
now presented to me. I accepted it. Then I lit a cigarette and stared at him suspiciously, for it seemed possible to me that this earnest French poet with a receding hairline and a shaky handshake might not be what he seemed at all. This thing in a tweed jacket and flannel trousers might in fact be an ingeniously disguised gateway into another universe. He, for his part was regarding me with equal suspicion.
MacKellar reappeared,
‘Edith said no. I think that she might have agreed, if it wasn’t for those two brothers of hers.’
He looked down at his shirt front which was stained with red.
‘After a while,’ he continued, ‘I found that I was concentrating my enquiries among those drinking white wine. Monica said no. Gascoyne said that he was going to be out of the country. A Welsh poet – I can’t remember his name – said yes, but only after he was cured of the current dose of clap. A man from the BBC said he might if we were serious. Penrose was very rude. Some people just pretended not to know what I was talking about’.
The Eluards could not decide what to make of MacKellar. Caroline and Nusch turned to discussing ‘Secondhand Bookshop no. 1’. I remember noticing that Caroline’s French was surprisingly good. Oliver Sorge and David Gascoyne now joined our group and Paul and David started canvassing Oliver and me about the Serapion Brotherhood’s views about the need to harness the Surrealist movement of liberation to a broader movement of political revolution. Oliver gave them the Serapion line, as preached by Ned; politics does not really exist. Politics is a fantasy, a sort of group psychosis. It is an after-the-event explanation for why things really happen. Both Capitalism and Communism are powerless before the omnipotence of Desire. Eluard, who had never heard of the Serapion Brotherhood before, was baffled and disturbed by what Oliver was telling him.
Then the women interrupted, wanting to know what I meant by my painting. It showed the interior of an antiquarian bookshop lined wall to wall with dusty leatherbound volumes, but in front of the shelves of books and partially obscuring them one saw a great heap of naked and emaciated corpses.
‘What are the corpses doing there?’ the women wanted to know.
‘It is rather a question of what are the books doing there?’ I replied, laughing and drinking madly. A silly answer, of course, but what answer could I give that would not diminish my painting? If I had thought that ‘Secondhand Bookshop no. 1’ could have benefited from an explanation, I would have written one out and attached it to the frame. Even more crucially, what answer could I give that would not allow Caroline some access to the monstrous horrors within me?
‘Well, why the books then?’ Caroline persisted.
That was easier to deal with,
‘You are looking at a shop which deals in unwanted and useless knowledge. Secondhand bookshops, full as they are of discarded and rejected knowledge, leatherbound outcasts and losers, corporately constitute the unconscious mind of bourgeois society.’
But Nusch’s mind was still on the corpses. Giving her husband’s arm an affectionate squeeze, she declared that it was curious that, while Paul’s poetry was full of images of beauty, delicacy and love, what she had seen of the exhibition did not appear to match the poetry at all. As it happened, our group had moved on and we were now standing in front of Marcel Jean’s painting, entitled ‘Rue coupée en deux’ in which a legless and armless woman was displayed upon a pedestal with a sheet trailing out of her shattered womb. And Nusch pointed across the gallery to Hans Bellmer’s La Poupée, a doll whose limbs were grotesquely splayed in such a manner as to suggest that this was a girl who had just been raped.
‘Surrealism has to make a shock assault on the senses,’ said Oliver. ‘It is precisely the nobility and the vulnerability of women that gives these images the power to shock’.
Nusch was unpersuaded by Oliver’s words and I was about to argue against him – something on the lines that the women in these Surrealist paintings were images of irrationality and that they were displayed as worshipful icons of unreason. I thought the women in the paintings were symbols of a necessary opposition to masculine rationality. However, my thoughts were vague and I never managed to articulate quite what I meant, before Jorge came over with something that proved to be Sheila Legge. I write ‘something that proved to be Sheila Legge’, for what Jorge introduced us to was described by him as the Phantom of Sex Appeal and what we saw was a figure in a long white satin gown and black leather gloves, topped not by a human head, but by a thick cluster of roses. Sheila Legge was indeed clothed in mystery. Jorge and Sheila had decided that it was time for this particular Surrealist manifestation to be given a more public airing, so Sheila was going to walk over to Trafalgar Square to be photographed by the press. Jorge urged us to come too. Although I had hopefully kept my empty glass in my pocket, the wine had in fact run out some time ago. We all agreed that the walk and some air would be a good idea.
Nusch had to get her coat. While I was waiting with the rest, standing slumped against the wall, Caroline turned on me and put her hands over my shoulders pinioning me with her body against the wall. She looked searchingly into my eyes before announcing,
‘I love you.’
I shrugged and smiled carelessly.
By now Ned was nowhere to be seen. Presumably he had gone off to comfort Felix. The members of the organising committee had also vanished. Nevertheless a great gaggle of Surrealists and members of the Serapion Brotherhood set off following the Phantom of Sex Appeal on her Surrealist pilgrimage to Trafalgar Square. Outside the gallery a couple of barrow boys in cloth caps whistled at the Phantom. We made a bizarre procession through the shabby London streets. I remember that Caroline and I were walking next to Max Ernst and that Max, whom I already knew well, was talking to us about Lop Lop, the giant bird that was simultaneously his muse and his persecutor. Max and Caroline wanted to know if I had a similar muse.
And here that memory of the procession down Piccadilly in June 1936 comes stumbling to an abrupt an ignominious halt. I have checked and double-checked. I have looked at old newspapers, consulted books on art history and even asked Roland Penrose about it. There can be no doubt about the matter. Our conversation with Max Ernst never took place, for he was never in England that year. He was in France all through June. And yet I think that I remember him so clearly – his high-domed, white-haired head, his sharp nose and his strangely poetic pronouncements about painting and what Lop Lop did for his painting – and all that set against the backdrop of some dreary High Commission in Pall Mall belonging to Canada or Australia. My memory of Ernst that day is a false memory and doubtless it is only one among many, but it is rare that I have the opportunity of checking my memories against recorded history.
Now why did I think that Caroline and I walked alongside Max Ernst, sharing confidences with him? What real memory does the false memory mask and who did we walk and talk with that day? It is impossible for me to say. If only Caroline were with me now, so that we might compare our recollections of that day, but when she vanished she took a large part of my past with her. She has stolen my memories and I blame her for that.
I have a similar but different problem with the lecture, entitled ‘Paranoia, the Pre-Raphaelites, Harpo Marx and Phantoms’, which Salvador Dali gave in the Conway Hall some ten days later. He attempted to give his lecture on the paranoiac-critical consciousness dressed in a deep-sea diver’s suit, from which heavily muffled and totally incomprehensible sounds emerged. His arms waved wildly and after a while it became evident that he was suffocating in the suit. Gala Dali followed by the organisers rushed on stage and set to banging at the rivets which held the helmet clamped down onto the rest of the suit. Everyone in the audience was laughing, but it proved to be a close-run thing and Gala told me afterwards that Salvador had nearly died. The event was filmed, photographed and reported. Every account of the First International Surrealist Exhibition mentions this attempt of Dali’s to plumb the depths of the unconscious. My problem is that I cannot now remember whether I attended th
e lecture or not. I might have, but then again it seems possible that what I am remembering is a compilation made from the reminiscences and camera-work of others.
Anyway as we walked down Pall Mall I am sure that I remember Caroline proprietorially taking my arm, but perhaps that too is false. In Trafalgar Square the Phantom Sheila was surrounded by photographers and pigeons. These pigeons clustered on the shoulders of the Phantom, heightening the strangeness of the apparition. Passers-by stopped to gawp. One of them, an apprentice city gent by the look of him, turned appealingly to Caroline, who by now had let go of my arm and had purchased a bag of crumbs which she was feeding to the pigeons. Perhaps she looked the most normal and approachable in our group.
‘What’s going on? What is it for? Is this some student rag?’
‘That is the Phantom of Sex Appeal,’ Caroline said confidently. ‘She is a Surrealist manifestation of the unconscious,’ she added a little less confidently.
‘I’m sorry, you must think me an awful duffer – my name’s Clive Jerkin by the way – that doesn’t mean anything to me. What is Surrealism? Is it some kind of political party?’
Despite his admission of howling ignorance, I thought the man looked intelligent. His pixy-like face and his bright sparrow-like eyes suggested a perpetual state of intense alertness.
Caroline was patient with him.
‘Surrealism is a movement which tries to liberate people from their ordinary ideas and prejudices and – er – it wants to show them things they were not aware of before. It goes beyond all reason.’
‘Gosh! It sounds jolly strange, but rather fascinating. You wouldn’t let me buy you a drink in exchange for explaining it a bit more would you?’
