by Robert Irwin
Obviously things had gone badly wrong, but I was struggling to decide whether the universe was so constructed that the wrong was indeed irretrievable. Ought it not to be possible for me to travel back in time and space and for me to return to a time when I still had Caroline’s love, a time when, if I had acted differently, everything which followed would have been different? How far back would I need to go? Back before last night’s hideous encounter certainly. And back to before the night of the Chelsea Arts Ball, when I already knew in my heart that I did not have her love any more. And though Paris was good, I already had a sense then that there was something wrong. Now I came to think of it, she was preoccupied when we returned from Brighton with the Eluards. Really, it would be best to go back to the opening of the Surrealist Exhibition in the New Burlington Galleries, back to before the hour of our walk to Trafalgar Square and her encounter with Clive Jerkin, back ideally to the moment when Caroline had me pinioned against one of the Gallery’s walls and had declared to me ‘I love you’.
As the aeroplane dipped and swerved over the Thames Estuary, I closed my eyes and concentrated. Was I not of the Serapion Brotherhood and dedicated to the proposition that through the power of the imagination we can tran scend time and space? Surely in a moment I should find myself, wine glass in hand, standing in the New Burlington Galleries and listening to Paul Eluard recite ‘Une femme est plus belle que le monde ou je vis …’ I should be there at the exhibition, perhaps with no memory of a Chelsea Arts Ball, or of Caroline’s announcement of her possible pregnancy or of my flight from Croydon, or any of those things, but that would be a blessed sort of amnesia.
However, it was useless. I believed in it, but I did not believe in it hard enough and when I next opened my eyes the aeroplane was struggling against the prevailing winds off the coast of France.
The odd thing was that Caroline’s revelation of her faithlessness had only increased my desire for her. Perhaps it was that her declaration of her capacity for independent and secret action had given her more depth. She now seemed the more fully human, precisely because she was so much less than perfect, and I found that I loved her treachery as much as I did her beautiful body. Even so, the treachery shocked me, and it challenged my view of how the universe really worked. For I had believed that it was elective affinity that had brought us together, operating through the laws of chance and desire. Caroline and I had been destined for one another.
‘Une femme est plus belle que le monde ou je vis
Et je ferme les yeux’
I had recited those lines to Caroline in St James’s Park and then, months later, their author had recited them back at us. Surely that had been an omen and a blessing conferred upon us by blind chance? It was hardly possible that I could have been mistaken. Caroline had no right to move against fate’s decree.
I had anticipated some sort of trouble at the airport, an interrogation about the purpose of my visit, a thorough search of my baggage for suspect literature, or something along those lines, but there was no such thing.
‘Welcome to Munich and the Reich.’
That month there were many visitors to the city, attracted by the Festival of German Art and Culture and I had some difficulty in finding a Gästheim, so that by the time I had successfully negotiated the rent of a room and had unpacked my things, I thought that I should like to collapse on the bed and go to sleep. But sleep was hard to come by, for on that night and the nights that followed I thought of Caroline and what she had done, and what I had done, and what we ought to have done and what we might have said about what we had done. Pushing sleep and everything else aside, these thoughts rushed on like a mill-race. It was rare that I managed to doze for more than a couple of hours.
I spent the next couple of days walking at random through the city, taking my directions from the saluting arms of the statues, the eagles’ gaze and the flapping of the red swastika banners. In my memory of those weeks I spent in Munich, the sky was always blue with only a few white clouds visible, and, though it seems absurd to say so, I think that clouds before the War looked different from those that we have seen in the sky since then. So I remember that the clouds over Munich were thirties’ clouds. I remember also admiring the women in the city. They were almost always elegantly dressed and as often as not they were arm in arm with officers from the army, the S.A. or the S.S. My artist’s eye rested as much on the uniforms as on the dresses. ‘Fascism is the aestheticisation of politics,’ as I remember Walter Benjamin remarking to me once.
Munich that summer was a city of roses and everywhere I looked I saw garlands of roses, as well as the banners and the eagles alertly poised on marble columns. The city furnished an appropriately grandiose background to my personal unhappiness. I was alone. Not only was I without Caroline, but, for the first time in quite a few years, I was free and independent, able to commune with myself and plunge deep into introspection, without feeling that I had to report back to the Serapion Brotherhood on the results of my investigations.
In the evenings I drank alone in my room and listened to the distant sounds of singers and brass bands in the cafes and beer-gardens. I felt no desire for company. I resumed my exercises in mesmerism and I found some faint consolation in those monotonous eye drills. Some words of Nietzsche, which Manasseh had once quoted to me came to my mind, ‘And if thou gaze into the abyss overlong, perchance the abyss will gaze into thee’. Engaged in exercises designed to build up the power of my eyes, I spent much of my time in front of the mirror, studying the reflection of my pupils trapped on its surface. Despite Nietzsche’s warning, I persisted in my work in front of the mirror and then, a little later, without quite knowing why – trying I think to keep my purpose secret even from myself – I also began to study my lips and their movements. I set myself to master lip-reading.
It was only on my third day that I felt ready to set out for the avowed and arbitrary goal of my trip to Munich, the exhibition of Entartete Kunst – Degenerate Art – in the old Institute of Archaeology. In this building Nazi officials had assembled and put on display, all hugger-mugger, a huge collection of paintings and sculptures by avante-garde artists: Nolde, Kirchner, Braque, Chagall, Schmidt-Rotluff, Kokoschka, Mondrian and many others.
‘It is not the mission of art to wallow in filth for filth’s sake, to paint the human being only in a state of putrefaction, to draw cretins as symbols of motherhood, or present deformed idiots as representatives of manly strength.’
Here and there, placards on the walls bearing Nazi commentaries, like the one above, abused the paintings and admonished those who gazed on them.
‘Artists who for fourteen years were duped by Jews and Marxists and accepted laurels from their hands are now being extolled as our revolutionaries by certain individuals lacking in instinct and by specific politically motivated backers. It is high time we stopped being too tolerant.’
‘The Jewish longing for the wilderness reveals itself in Germany and the negro becomes the racial ideal of a degenerate art.’
‘If they really paint in this manner because they see things that way, then these unhappy persons should be dealt with in the department of the Ministry of the Interior where sterilisation of the insane is performed, to prevent them passing on their unfortunate inheritance. If they really do not see things like that and still persist in painting in this manner then these artists should be dealt with by the criminal courts. (Hitler.)’
Mingling furtively with the rest of the gallery-goers and eavesdropping on their conversations, I learnt to my dismay that these exhortatory texts were not really necessary. From all directions I heard such remarks as,
‘It’s disgusting! How can one tell what it’s supposed to mean? How can we ever have been taken in by such stuff? If you want my opinion, I should say that it is the job of the artist to produce only beautiful things and not to dredge up all this muck. It really makes one quite sick!’
And from one pretty young Hausfrau in a floral print frock,
‘I
t’s not the paintings that should be on display here, but the artists so that we could all spit on them!’ An old woman in black, doubtless her mother, cackled approvingly.
And I, the Surrealist spy in the House of Degenerate Art, cringed guiltily. I was afraid of being unmasked. I was even more afraid that it might be possible that they were right and I wished that I was as confident of my loyalty to Surrealism as they were confident in their hatred of it. It was a dreadful thought and a preposterous one, but might it not be conceivable that these awful people would succeed in making me see modern art in the way they did?
And yet, as I walked from room to room, and attempted to study this hatefully assembled collection of Cubists, Expressionists and Surrealists, my mind rarely stayed with the pictures on which my eyes were fixed. Instead, I was thinking of Caroline and her seduction by Clive. I conjured up the scene in which she yielded up her virginity to him and, having done so, I replayed it again and again like a spool of scratchy old film, all jerky movements in flickering light. Caroline, blushing, undresses before the superciliously smiling Clive. Tremulous in her nakedness, she walks towards him. She assists him to undress and fumbles eagerly with his collar-studs and cuff-links. Now Clive is naked, except for his socks and the suspenders which keep them up and he presses her down onto the bed and she throws her arms around him, as he, without any preliminaries, thrusts his prick into her and she is crying, at first a little with pain and then with joy. Finally, in languorous pillow talk, they laughingly discuss what on earth can be done about the miserable, love-sick Caspar.
But this was only part of it, for I had invested so much of myself in my love for Caroline that she had become the embodiment of my soul, my anima, so that, at the same time Clive is entering between her legs, he is forcing my legs apart also and, at the same time he is fucking her, he is sodomising me. Since I am so bound to Caroline in my imagination, then later when she crawls over to kiss and suck at Clive’s prick, I too find my mouth in the same place.
Then, as I continued to walk among the paintings, imagining these things and worse, it occurred to me that the Hausfrau with the shrill voice must be right. I did deserve to be spat at, for surely I must be a degenerate to have such thoughts as these. I should go back and find that young woman in the floral print dress and I should go down on my knees before her and I should confess that I was a Surrealist artist and beg to be horsewhipped.
‘Entshuldigen Sie bitte, gnädige Frau, excuse me please, I am a diseased and degenerate artist. I am not worthy of the love of a healthy woman. So whip me, whip me! Flog the sickness out of me!’
However, at the same time I was considering this, I also knew that I should be unable to bring myself to do it, for I really loved as well as feared the monsters that peopled my brain. So I did not confess and since I did not confess, I was never found out and I was not beaten up and flogged by all these people who had queued up to sneer at and abuse the confidence trick called modern art. The thing was that these people had a very clear idea of what a degenerate artist should look like. He has dulled, drug-laden eyes. Unwashed, greasy hanks of hair fall over a low simian brow, his lower lip is slack and there is an unmistakable trace of Jewishness in the hook of his nose. Whereas I was tall and very blond and, when she first saw my hatchet face in profile, Pamela remarked that I looked a little like Buster Keaton. Among the people at the exhibition of Entartete Kunst, I might have been an off-duty S.S. officer. My realisation of this led on to further disturbing thoughts. If everyone gets the face they deserve, what was I doing with the face of a Nordic blond beast? And if I had the face of an S.S. officer, should I not make the rest of me join my face and apply to join the ranks of the S.S.?
I was thinking, thinking, thinking all the time and my thoughts were out of control – like a complex piece of clockwork from which the counterweights or escapements had been removed, so that the springs were flying loose and the cogged wheels turning faster and faster. A war was coming and it was clear that Germany would win it. I agreed with Manasseh on this and I also agreed with his view that England was exhausted and effete. But if I joined the S.S., then I could be on the winning side and then when we entered London I could have Clive hunted down. He would almost certainly have become a fighter pilot or an officer in one of the smarter regiments. I would have him shot. And I could have Caroline brought before me in shackles … But, no, this was all too childishly mad.
More prosaically, I kept devising and discarding strategies for winning Caroline back when I returned to England. At times I thought that I should assume an air of coolness and even restart my affair with Pamela, in order to awaken Caroline’s jealousy. At other times, I thought the opposite – that I should plead my case with such fire and passion that she would be unable to withstand me and perhaps I would even be able to argue her into seeing the greatness and brilliance of my art. At yet other times, I thought that I should stop talking vaguely about getting a respectable job and that I should actually start applying for whatever was being advertised.
The pornographic film on its continuous reel still played in my head, as I went backwards and forwards between the various strategies, powerless to decide between them. Hours passed before I was really able to look at the paintings that I had come to see, and then I was only able to focus on them by pretending that I had Caroline hanging on my arm and that I was telling her about these works of art and explaining to her what the artists had been trying to do in painting them. Her ghost listened obediently to my silent words.
I was pleased to find that Surrealism was represented in the exhibition by, among other things, Max Ernst’s La Belle Jardinière. This was a painting of a nude woman in a garden. Her stomach was ripped open and a bird pecked at her stylised entrails, while a ghostly nude gardener danced in the garden behind her. I explained to the non-existent Caroline how this painting was one of the works produced during the period of trances, when Breton, Péret, Desnos and others experimented with mesmerically induced trance-imagery. In the painting itself, the closed eyes of the two figures may indicate that they have summoned up each other’s images while they are themselves in trance states. Gala Dali, the dark muse of the Surrealists, was the model for the woman in the painting – or rather Gala Eluard as she was back in 1923 when she and Max Ernst were conducting their affair. When I recalled how Gala had sat on the shingle at Brighton and how she had gazed with those deep-set, black eyes of hers on Caroline and me as we sported in the water, she now seemed to me to have been a creature of ill-omen.
La Belle Jardinière was disturbing. Max Ernst had intended it to be so. As phantom-Caroline and I contemplated the painting, I became uneasily aware of a certain kind of complicity between Surrealism and Nazism. After all, we Surrealists had set out to shock people. And now at last, here in Germany, we had found an audience which was prepared to take us seriously. They were shocked. In England, we had dressed up as deep-sea divers or gorillas and, standing on our heads on the tops of grand pianos, we had lectured gallery-goers about the power of Surrealism to outrage and we had attracted only weary smiles and polite disagreement, but in Munich at least our works were accorded their proper status and they were officially classified as ‘outrageous’ by the Nazi authorities. When I said that I was shocking, Dr Goebbels agreed.
There were other exhibitions on in Munich that summer. Across the park from the Entartete Kunst exhibition, I discovered the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung, the Great German Art Exhibition, where the paintings were hung in a long, low, classically Fascist colonnaded building and Arno Breker’s preposterously over-muscular statues of men and horses stood quite lifeless on their pedestals. Although the paintings and sculptures were of little intrinsic interest, as I inspected them I recalled how Ned had described Surrealism as having reached a dead end, and that I had also heard some critics saying that Surrealism had passed its heyday in the 1920s. Here by contrast, in the Haus der Deutsches Kunst, I was confronted with works made by artists who were certain that they were producing
the art of the future. Much of their work was technically incompetent, and almost all of it was uninspired and tinged with vulgarity, and yet as I gazed on these works in 1936, not having the gift to see into the future, it did indeed seem possible to me that I was gazing on the art of the next thousand years.
Elsewhere – it was in the Library of the German Museum, if I remember rightly – there was an exhibition devoted to Der Ewige Jude, the Eternal Jew, but though Manasseh had declared everyone in the Serapion Brotherhood to be honorary Jews, I still found little to interest me in all that propaganda. From time to time in the streets, I would be surprised by fancy-dress processions celebrating two thousand years of German culture, or some such Nazi lie – great carnival floats painted gold and silver, and flanked by horsewomen dressed as Valkyries or men in the armour of the Teutonic Knights, and followed by blonde maidens in white chitons who tossed flowers at the smiling, cheering crowds. Everyone was so happy. Only I was miserable and afraid.
I realised then that I was desperate to leave Munich and so, having consulted several guide books, I took the train to Potsdam and from there made my way to a hotel on the Wannsee. It was only then that I attempted to get back in touch with Caroline. I sent her a telegram:
SORRY TO HAVE BEEN SO BEASTLY. WHEN I GET BACK THINGS WILL BE BETTER. ALL MY LOVE. CASPAR.
I had decided to spend the next two months or so in Germany before returning to England and attempting to pick things up with Caroline. In the meantime I wrote to her almost daily. I spent hours on rough drafts of these letters, sucking at the end of my pencil and fumbling for the right phrases. In the end, quite a few of the letters I sent had more drawings than words – pictures of boulevardiers, sun-bathers, chess players, members of the Hitler Youth and the League of German Maidens engaged in Strength-Through-Joy group gymnastics, yachts scudding across the lakes and, in the background, the holiday chalets and hydrotherapy clinics which fringed the shores. I was anxious to present myself in my letters as a cheerful person reporting on a long and agreeable holiday. These letters, an extended exercise in lying, were I suppose the closest I have ever got to writing a novel. In reality I was miserably and doggedly making preparations to win Caroline back by any means I could devise. (Although I had sent her a poste restante address, Caroline never replied to my letters.)
