by Robert Irwin
‘So according to the cards, what is your future?’
‘What? Oh no. I don’t believe in fortune-telling.’ Oliver was seriously offended. ‘That sort of occult rubbish is for illiterate gipsy women. No, no, what I’ve dealt here is part of the plot of my next novel. It’s going to be called The Vampire of Surrealism and its plot is going to be based on random shuffles of the tarot pack. It’s my new way of using chance to stimulate the sources of creativity in my unconsciousness. These ten cards I’ve just dealt myself will be the ten leading characters in my novel. Of course the most important one is Stella.’
I thought that this was all quite interesting and I was about to sit down on the red divan placed under the window and discuss the procedure more fully, when Oliver screamed,
‘Don’t sit there! Don’t sit there! Don’t touch it! That is reserved for Stella. It is where Stella and I make love. Here, have my chair. I don’t mind standing for a bit.’
Oliver quickly calmed down, and once he had done so, he apologised. He had been preoccupied and a bit depressed, he said. Norman, the Manager of the Dead Rat Club, was now demanding that Oliver should tap dance while he did his card tricks.
‘I can do it of course. I can do anything if I put my mind to it. But it’s so … degrading.’
But then Oliver waved the problem away and asked me what had brought me round to see him.
I did not come to the point immediately. Instead I filled him in on some of what Caroline and I had been doing in Paris, though I held back from telling him about the evenings and nights in Jorge’s flat and about Caroline’s hurried visit to the Musée Grevin, and then I reported what Eluard and Breton had been saying about our duty to the people of Spain and how we were all under threat from Fascism and so on. However, there was a tightness about Oliver’s jawline which suggested boredom. So reluctantly I came at last to the topic that I wanted to talk about and at the same time did not want to talk about.
‘Caroline was with me this afternoon.’
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’ said Oliver deadpan.
‘Yes, but she doesn’t want us to see each other so often and she lectured me. She was saying that I and the rest of us were poseurs and that all our Surrealist activities were pointless. She also seemed to be suggesting that I was running away from myself.’
Oliver shrugged, but I continued,
‘No, listen. The thing is that, while she was saying this, I thought that she actually despised me, and the strange thing is it was precisely at that moment that I desired her more than I had ever done before.’
Now Oliver exploded,
‘For Christ’s sake, Caspar! I did warn you that she wasn’t for you. Can’t you see how much you are making a fool of yourself running after her? People are laughing at you – no, not me, but others. Ditch the silly girl, as you should have done the first day you met her. She’s just not your type.’
‘That’s it. It is just because she is not my type and she’s wrong for me that I want her. I want to be loved by the sort of person who would not love a person like me.’
‘Well,’ Oliver said. ‘If that is how it is, you are going to suffer. You won’t believe how much you are going to suffer. Mind you, suffering is good for the artist,’ he ended, somewhat piously I thought.
‘But Oliver, you too are in pain. Would you prefer to have the pain which is supposed to be good for your art, or would you prefer to have Stella?’
He smiled bitterly,
‘These days I have both.’
‘Oliver?’
‘Yes,’ he looked irritated, wishing this conversation would end.
‘I remember you talking, years ago, about the seances and trances that André Breton, Robert Desnos and others were holding. Magnetic fields came into it somewhere.’
‘The period of trances. Yes. They were hypnotising each other in order to extract things from the unconscious. In the end though they abandoned these experiments as too dangerous. One or two subjects were getting violent and they also experienced difficulties getting people out of the trance states. Yes, I remember reading about it and talking about it. What of it?’
‘Oliver, I also remember that you went on to teach yourself mesmerism. Would you teach me?’
‘What?’ he said vaguely and then, once he had realised why it was that I wanted to learn mesmerism, ‘Oh no! Oh no!’ His voice was high pitched and sounded even a little crazy. ‘You can’t compel someone’s love like that and, even if you could, it would be like making love to an automaton or a wax doll.’
‘Please Oliver … you are my oldest friend. Teach me mesmerism.’
‘No, no, no! And again no! It’s dangerous and it’s evil. Look at the Reichschancellor in Germany. Adolf Hitler. One can see that he has dabbled in mesmerism. And that fat man we sometimes see drinking in the Wheatsheaf … what’s his name? … the one that smells … Aleister Crowley. You don’t want to get mixed up with those sorts of people.’
‘But from what you have been saying recently, it sounds as though you are trying to compel the love of this spirit, Stella.’
Oliver’s laugh rang out noisily.
‘But I know what I’m doing! And I am aware that what I am doing is terribly dangerous. It’s all in the eyes. The power leaks out through the eyeballs. It doesn’t do to meddle with the eyes. You, Caspar, you need your eyes to paint. The matter is closed.’
I rose somewhat huffily to go. Oliver put his arm about me and said,
‘Please don’t take offence and let’s stay friends. As you say, we have been friends a long time and I’m sure we’ll continue to see one another, but please, I beg you, don’t come here again. You are disturbing the psychic atmosphere and I need to concentrate. Stella might materialise at any moment. Only I know that she will not materialise while there is someone else in this room.’
Then he picked up the Hanged Man from the cards on the table and brandished it before me.
‘My story demands that someone be sacrificed for the fellowship to be redeemed. There is no telling yet who it will be.’
Feeling thoroughly rejected by now, I walked aimlessly down the Charing Cross Road. I had a few drinks in the Green Man – no, damn it, a lot of drinks. Then I decided to go and see Ned. (This was after I had decided against going to visit MacKellar, in case I ran into that awful wife of his.)
Felix greeted me affectionately at the door.
‘Poor Caspar,’ she said, without me having said anything to her. Then she went out to do some shopping, leaving me alone with Ned.
I described Oliver’s strangeness to him.
‘Oliver’s near the end of the path he’s chosen and he’s cracking up,’ he said shrugging. ‘Let’s just hope that he doesn’t decide to appoint himself as a Sacrifice for the Redemption of the Fellowship.’
‘Ned, there’s something else you should know. These last few months I have painted nothing that you could call Surrealist. Indeed, I can hardly hold the paintbrush at all in the state I’m in. So I’m thinking of leaving the Brotherhood and giving up Surrealism. I think that I can earn more as a commercial artist and a painter of posters.’
‘It won’t be as easy as you think to give Surrealism up; if it happens, it will be more a matter of it giving you up’, Ned’s tone was dispassionate. ‘But this isn’t about money is it?’
‘No. I’m thinking about a total change in my life. I haven’t decided yet. I definitely haven’t made up my mind, but, if I do decide, then it will be a break with everything and then I will write to you and everyone else telling them that I don’t want to see them again. There won’t be anything personal in it, but I thought I should warn you. If I am to reconstruct myself as a totally different person then I shall need new and different friends.’
‘Except Caroline. You aren’t going to send Caroline a goodbye card,’ said Ned looking at me keenly.
‘Except Caroline,’ I agreed. ‘I am going to turn myself into the sort of person she wants me to be. I might even give up art alt
ogether and go into business.’
Ned was silent for a while, except for the drumming of his fingers. Suddenly he came to a decision.
‘It’s a good idea,’ he said. ‘Get out while you can. Surrealism has just about had its moment. Every path has been explored and every path has turned out to be a dead end. It’s become like a ghetto in an ancient walled city, full of dead ends and closed courtyards. If you follow Surrealism to the end, all you will find is madness and death. Besides, there is a great war coming in Europe and I cannot imagine that there will be any useful role for the Brotherhood in that war. I have to stay with the group for as long as I can because I have a responsibility to it, but it’s different for you. Half of me will be sorry to see you go, of course, but it is good that you are thinking of it. You should follow your star. I reckon that what is important is not what happens in a man’s life, but what he leaves behind him for eternity. There are only two ways for us to achieve an eternity of sorts: one is by works of art, through which one’s ideas and reputation live on after one. The other is by having children. You’ve done enough painting anyway. I think that it makes more sense to have lots of children. Marry Caroline with my blessing. She’s got good childbearing hips. It’s a pity though … I was counting on you two for the orgy.’
After this we talked of indifferent matters, but I was glad that I had talked to Ned about what was in my mind, for earlier – and I feel ridiculous and childish confessing this – I had entertained a ludicrous, half-formulated fantasy that, if I announced that I was going to defect from the Brotherhood, then I would have been tipped the black spot and hunted down as a renegade. So I was relieved that Ned took things so calmly. Only a little later did it cross my mind that he might have been putting me off my guard and that even now he was instructing trusted stranglers from within the group on where to find me … But no, really these fantasies proved to be absurd.
I now took to drinking in the Wheatsheaf. It was on the seventh evening that I ran into Aleister Crowley. (I smelled him before I saw him.) Although I bought him several drinks, he was morose and not at all forthcoming. However, eventually he did suggest that I visited Watkins’s occult bookshop in Cecil Court, off Charing Cross Road, where I might find, if I were lucky (or unlucky?) a copy of Dr Aczel’s Exercises in Practical Mesmerism.
‘Do let me know how you get on, dear boy,’ he said as I thanked him and left.
I did find the book that he had recommended and I set to practising its regime of eye-exercises in front of a mirror. (The long-term effects of these exercises can be seen in some of the self-portraits I did later.)
On the Wednesday after my meeting with Crowley, Caroline agreed to meet me for drinks and a meal. She was bubbly and friendly and full of stories about the first read-through of The Vortex and about the rest of the cast. I offered to come down to Putney and take a part myself, but I was told that all the roles had now been allotted.
Relaxed and happy at the end of the meal, she smiled and said to me,
‘Isn’t this nice? We just have to take time to get to know one another better.’
‘To that end, would you agree to be my partner at the Chelsea Arts Ball on New Year’s Eve? It’s fancy dress and this time the theme is the eighteenth century. Come on. You can’t possibly have a rehearsal on New Year’s Eve.’
She sat silent, obviously tempted. Then she said,
‘All right darling, that would be utterly super.’
And then we settled down to discussing what sorts of costumes we might wear.
I persevered monotonously with my exercises in mesmerism. Dr Aczel was a great believer in training up the muscles in the eyeballs. However, he also said that the hypnotist had to win the trust of the person who was to be hypnotised, so that that person was ready to surrender up part of his or her consciousness to the guardianship of the hypnotist. Therefore there were evidently limits to how far I could proceed on my own.
One evening in the Dead Rat Club when Oliver was absent (I think he was performing at Maskeleyne’s Theatre), I brought the topic up with the group and asked for volunteers. MacKellar was first to agree to be guinea pig, but he was hopeless. He just sat there with a fatuous grin on his face, saying things like,
‘Has it started yet? When am I going to be under your influence?’
Then Monica offered herself. To my surprise, I found that after only a few passes of my hands I had led her into what seemed like a trance-like sonambulistic state, but others in the group were more sceptical. I got her to raise and lower her arms, but that was judged to be no real test. Then Ned suggested getting her to undress.
‘You can’t get a hypnotised subject to do anything unless he or she actually wants to,’ objected Jorge.
‘Tell her that she is in her bedroom and that it is time for her to go to bed,’ suggested Ned.
I did as Ned proposed.
‘You are in my power, Monica. You will do what I tell you until I release you. But for the moment you are alone in your bedroom and it is late. It is time for you to undress and go to bed.’
A faint sleepy smile spread across Monica’s face. Her eyes were slits. Slowly but without hesitation she bent to unzip her skirt and step out of it. Although others in the club were clapping in time to some sort of striptease rhythm, she seemed unaware of it and those in the Brotherhood sat silently watching. Looking back on it, I am certain that there was more than pure science in their observation. For some of us at least, there was just a streak of pleasurable malice in watching Monica make an exhibition of herself, for there had been a certain amount of resentment at the way she always sat on the edge of the group from where she observed us and took notes on our conversations.
But when she finally stepped out of her panties and began to grope uncertainly for the whereabouts of her bed, Felix shrilled at me,
‘Stop it, Caspar! Stop it! Bring her out of it! It’s gone too far!’
Felix’s sudden outburst of fear unsettled me and, flustered, I found that the passes that I had previously rehearsed did not suffice to rouse Monica from her trance and I kept having to retreat before her as she continued to grope blindly for the non-existent bed. Finally though I did succeed and, when she came to and saw her condition, she shrieked and, grabbing some of her clothes, ran off in the direction of the Ladies cloakroom.
Monica’s breasts and hips had been wonderful to behold and the whole thing should have been good harmless fun, but I knew that it was not. I had the queasy feeling that a vessel of nastiness had been inadvertently unstoppered.
Anyway, thus it was that I was responsible for Monica’s leaving the Serapion Brotherhood. We still saw her around occasionally, for she went off and attached herself to the other group of Surrealists, who were based mostly in Blackheath. She hung around with Charles Madge, Roland Penrose and Humphrey Jennings and we heard that she had become involved in the Mass Observation project. According to Jennings (who incidentally was the translator of Paul Eluard into English) Mass Observation was going to carry out ‘a sounding of the English collective unconscious’. Participants in Mass Observation – and there were hundreds, if not thousands of them – were going to take notes and report on such things as ‘the behaviour of people at war memorials, shouts and gestures of motorists, the aspidistra cult, the anthropology of football pools, bathroom behaviour’, and so on and so on. In this manner the texture of English life would be caught in a way which owed nothing to the techniques of a literary elite. For the first time the working class would be presented with their own culture. Jennings believed with Lautréamont and Eluard that ‘Poetry must be made by all, not by one’. Ned was very suspicious of Mass Observation at first, but … But I digress.
New Year’s Eve approached and I could think of little else except the night I would spend with Caroline at the Ball. We met briefly from time to time. I always brought roses to these meetings. The reason it was always roses was that it was practically the only flower I knew the name of to ask for. We discussed, among other th
ings, our costumes. I was going as Count Cagliostro and was hiring most of my costume from a theatrical suppliers, but Caroline, who had decided to go as Marie Antoinette, was making her own dress. As she described it, it was a spectacular feat of soft engineering – an elaborate creation of hoops, frills, furbelows and layered petticoats. What with her office work and her amateur dramatics, she ought to have been worn out, but she was full of energy and it was I who was often preoccupied and despondent.
The night of the Ball, the night when one bad year gave way to what proved to be a worse year, finally came. Before the War the Chelsea Arts Ball was the biggest party of the year. It may be still, for all I know. At the entrance, confronted by the Pathe and Movietone news teams and the flashing bulbs of the press, Caroline paused to slide her cloak off onto my arms and she spread her skirts before the cameras to reveal herself dressed in an astonishingly elaborate panniered confection of pink, blue and white. As we progressed into the Albert Hall, she instructed me on the distinctive functions of the skirt’s countless furbelows, ribbons, puffs and bows. She had stuck buckles on her shoes to make them look more antique. She seemed feverishly excited, though this may only have been the effect of the patches of rouge she had pressed to her cheeks. In that antique make-up and with her powdered hair piled up in high tightly curled rolls she also looked much older. She might have been a seasoned courtesan – one with a long list of dangerous liaisons behind her. I still have the photograph taken of us by the Ball’s official photographer and in it she looks almost sinister. Indeed, we both look a little strange. The floor of the Albert Hall was fringed with mock pavilions and pergolas and crowded with English, French, Russian and Venetian aristocrats in powdered wigs, as well as grenadiers, highwaymen and their molls, milkmaids, banditti, sans cullottes and figures from the Commedia dell’ Arte. Many of the revellers wore domino masks and these had the effect of making the eyes seem brighter and the smiles sharper.
The music that night was provided first by Jack Hilton and then later by Ambrose and his Band. It was somewhat curious to behold the perruqued and silken-clad crowd dressed for the minuet but dancing to the strains of ‘Night and Day’ and ‘Begin the Beguine’. Caroline seemed so softly yielding that, as she rested her head on my shoulder, I found my hands straying everywhere, down past the bodice and stomacher and hopelessly fumbling at her panniered skirt, but, after only a little while, she broke away.
