by Robert Irwin
Ned gave us a pep talk beforehand about the liberating power of group sex in the dark. It was the democratic way of making love, a way which gave the fat, the thin, the ugly and the old equal chances in the sexual lottery. But Ned went on to make it clear that he was not all that much exercised by thoughts of erotic democracy. His ambition went beyond that and he looked forward to the divine madness that would be unleashed by our couplings and which would make itself manifest to us in the room. Ned was shaking as he talked and I thought that he was excited as never before by this demonstration of his power over us.
Then we all stripped and leaving our clothes in nervous, untidy bundles all over the floor, one by one we passed behind a heavy curtain and entered the pitch-black room. (As I stepped beyond the curtain, I remember thinking that it felt a little like dying.) I went in just after Pamela, for my first thought was to catch up and tangle with her if I could. However, once inside the room she seemed to vanish and so I began to edge my way around with my back to the wall. I had not gone very far before a hand caught at my ankle and then two hands reached up at me pulling me onto the floor. I made no attempt to resist, but fell awkwardly and found my face pressed against what was evidently a soft, smooth woman’s thigh. I began to kiss and lick at this thigh, working my way up in a leisurely fashion. But I had not got very far with this arbitrarily chosen task, before a shrill screaming rose from the far side of the room. I remember that my first response was a feeling of irritation at some stupid bitch who’d lost her nerve, but the screaming continued; its shrilling filled the darkness and seemed to ripple back from the walls, and soon I could hear that more than one voice was screaming. Several people were shouting for the light to be switched on.
The light came on. I looked across the room and, having looked, closed them instantly, but the horrific image was still there trapped on my eyelids amidst clouds of phosphene; Ned sat slumped against the wall and women knelt at either side of him. His head was at odd angle and blood jetted out from his neck, drenching his torso and spraying the naked women and the walls.
When I opened my eyes again, I discovered that it had been Felix’s thigh which I had been kissing. She was now shakily trying first to get to her feet and then stumble across the sprawled bodies towards Ned. She was wailing,
‘Oh, the fucker! Oh the poor fucker!’
Of course the thing I now lament more than anything else in life is losing Caroline, but, after that the thing I regret most and the thing I am most ashamed of is my failure to stay with Felix as she wept over the corpse of Ned that night. However, I did not and I cannot go back and relive that night – and thank God for that. Norman was shouting that everyone who could get out should get out, put some clothes on, any old clothes and run for it, for Pamela had gone to phone for the police.
There was such a scrimmage at the door, I feared that none of us might escape in time, but in only a few moments I was dressed and out in the night air. I walked vigorously for a while, until I found myself at a tea stall in Convent Garden and I rested there a bit and idly listened in to the conversations of the porters and taxi drivers. Then I walked back towards St James’s Park and paced about the park until the dawn came up. Although the park at night appeared to be empty, I could not allow myself to be deceived. There were eyes everywhere – the eyes of Mass Observation and in more recent months, as the threat of war came closer, the eyes of Nazi spies as well. Everyone knew that the Nazis already had their spies in place in London. I was alert to the dangers of their gaze and yet not afraid, for my eyes too were powerful. Why just by looking at a mirror I could make smoke rise from its surface! By the time the sun rose I knew what I should do. Ned’s scheme for sampling and interrogating the collective unconscious was just screwy, like so many of the poor man’s now aborted ideas. Even so, I thought that it might be possible through the power of my gaze to force someone close to Caroline to reveal either something that they were deliberately concealing from me or even something that they were not conscious of knowing.
Brenda arrived early at the office of the fur merchant and stood waiting for someone to come and unlock the door. I arose from behind some dustbins where I had been hiding.
‘Hullo Brenda. Remember me?’
She shrieked, so I attempted to calm her.
‘I’m not going to do you any harm. I just want you to look into my eyes. Look into my eyes Brenda.’
The stupid girl would not listen. She just kept struggling to escape from my grasp and she was still shrieking. I had had enough of shrieking.
‘I conjure you to look into my eyes, Brenda. Don’t be unreasonable, Brenda.’
Although I was trying to keep my voice soothing and monotonous, I was conscious of its jagged quality. Anyway, before I had made any progress at all with my attempts to mesmerise her, I was attacked from behind. It was Mr Maitland. He was quite old and I might have fought him off, had he not been joined shortly afterwards by a policeman.
I was taken to Bow Street and charged with assault and resisting arrest. When I came before the magistrate and the question of bail was raised, it seemed wisest in the circumstances not to mention the name of anyone in the Brotherhood, and the only other person I could think of was Clive. Clive arrived with a lawyer and a little later he had a doctor round at the police station too. Naturally I am a little confused about the sequence of events around this time and I’m not sure whether the bail was ever paid.
I remember travelling up to Hampstead in a limousine with Clive and the doctor. Clive was flushed and excited. Perhaps this was the next best thing to running away to join the circus? He said that we ought to move fast, before my name was connected with ‘The Outrage at the Dead Rat Club’. So, on his doctor’s advice, I signed the committal papers which authorised my confinement in the Milton Clinic.
At this point in my narrative I have taken a break. I have just been downstairs in my house in Waterloo on my hands and knees in the bathroom sniffing the linoleum floor. If I ever have need to remember how it felt in the clinic, then I only have to sniff some linoleum. Its smell has the power to take me back across the years – better yet if its smell is coupled with that of urine – then I am back there, walking down those lime-green corridors. There seemed to be more corridors than rooms in the clinic and often a door, when opened, opened not into a room but into yet another corridor.
I was not at first aware of the corridors, for I spent the first few weeks of my confinement under heavy sedation in a room, or cell I suppose I should call it. I was in a straitjacket, though I can’t really think that there was any need for that. The doctors and nurses used to confer on the far side of the cell, whispering about my case, quite unaware that my skill as a lip-reader allowed me to read on their mouths the strange things that they were saying about me. The word ‘paranoiac’ came up quite frequently and this made me think of Salvador Dali’s famous paranoiac-critical method of painting and his way of transforming swans into elephants with only a few brush strokes. I recalled Dali saying that ‘the only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad’. Well it was like that with me also, for I could see that, as far as the doctors were concerned, I had all the symptoms of madness, and yet reflecting on myself objectively I was sure that I was not mad. Indeed, it struck me as somewhat unjust that I, a mesmerist of indubitable talent, should be confined and humiliated in a straitjacket, while over in Germany another great mesmerist, Herr Hitler, was not only at large but was being saluted and cheered by huge crowds.
My earliest trips out of the cell were on a trolley which took me to an empty ward in the clinic where electroconvulsive therapy was administered. The first time that it happened I was actually looking forward to it, for I was aware how much electricity I had lost through leakage from my eyeballs in the past months. Electro-convulsive therapy seemed a good way of getting myself recharged. Perhaps it was, but after those sessions I became aware of great holes in my memory – of windows looking out on to emptiness, of people without faces and of stree
t-names without streets to go with them. (I should have called this, my book, Memoirs of an Amnesiac, only the musician Eric Satie took that title for his own.) I felt that I was losing electricity rather than gaining it and very soon I began to dread my visits to the empty ward. I was supposed to be unconscious when the shocks were applied, for I was strapped down and gassed before the electrodes were attached to the head, but in reality there was always some part of me deep inside that was conscious of what was happening, so that I felt the electrodes attached to the skull, the rubber gag placed between my teeth, and my body convulse under the straps as the searing, skull-shattering pain raged through me. I would have confessed to anything to end that torture, but I was not quite conscious enough to be able to do so and, besides, my torturers were not interested in confessions.
Apart from electro-convulsive therapy, the other thing that I was afraid of was Dr Aczel. My reasoning was as follows: it was trouble with my eyes and my study of Dr Aczel’s Exercises in Practical Mesmerism which had led to my hospitalisation. What could be more likely than that, as the clinic came to grips with my strange case, they would get in touch with Dr Aczel, the leading authority on mesmerism as well as, in a sense, the author of my misfortunes? I could imagine Dr Aczel sitting in an office, in some part of the hospital which was inaccessible to me, and letting his burning eyes range over my case notes. When he was ready he would come for me, entrance me and gaze deep into me as one gazes into an abyss.
During my confinement in the Milton Clinic I had to abandon my own exercises in mesmerism. When I wrote a little way back of ‘reflecting on myself’, I meant this metaphorically, since for over a year I never saw a mirror. There were no mirrors in any part of the hospital I was allowed into. I suppose the fear was that a patient might smash one and then use a broken shard to slash at his wrist. I tried instead to use my reflection on the surface of my bathwater as a substitute, but, since my baths were always supervised, I was unable to concentrate.
After only a few days, I was released from the straitjacket and then, three or four weeks later, I received my first visitors. The very first was Clive and then, after I had told him how to get in touch with her, Jenny Bodkin, and later yet, as the weeks turned into months, Clive sometimes came with his new wife, Sally. Through Clive and Jenny, I was able to follow the aftermath of the gruesome affair at the Dead Rat Club. The police had arrived about ten minutes after the departure of most of the participants, but they detained those who remained on the suspicion of being accessories to murder. The evening papers on the day after speculated wildly about the ritual sacrifice of a Surrealist philosopher-artist by drug-crazed orgiasts. However, the cut-throat razor beside Ned’s body had belonged to Ned and a search of Ned’s flat and an examination of his papers soon revealed that Ned had been planning the manner of his exit from the world for over a year.
Ned’s jottings showed how, influenced by his study of the Theatre of Cruelty, he had envisaged his suicide as a kind of educational tableau. One notebook in particular began with a quotation from André Breton blocked in large red letters: ‘THE WORD SUICIDE IS A MISNOMER: THE PERSON WHO KILLS IS NOT THE SAME AS THE PERSON WHO IS KILLED’. During my confinement, I thought a great deal about this verdict of Breton’s without ever really feeling that I understood it. Also, in the statement which Felix made to the police, she said that she thought that Ned had committed suicide because he was afraid of death. I had difficulty in understanding that too, but I think that perhaps his was a fear akin to vertigo – the latter being an affliction whose sufferers are not afraid of the heights as such, but rather they are afraid of themselves and their potential readiness to hurl themselves off from those heights. One thing that did emerge from Ned’s rambling writings on the subject of suicide was that he considered it to be, as it were, built into the philosophy and practice of surrealism – the natural end towards which all Surrealists tend. The earliest writings of the French group reveal that Breton, Aragon and Eluard were morbidly fascinated by the sinister bridge of suicides in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. In his Paris Peasant, Aragon speculates that some who hurled themselves from that bridge to their death had had no previous intention of killing themselves, ‘but they found themselves suddenly tempted by the abyss’. A little further on in the same chapter, Aragon begins to speculate on the mysterious affinities between vertigo and desire …
As early as 1919 Jacques Vaché had killed himself with an overdose of opium. Then Jacques Rigaut shot himself through the heart in 1929, in 1933 Raymond Roussel committed suicide in curious circumstances, and two years later René Crevel, after leaving a note on his desk, saying ‘I am disgusted with everything’, gassed himself. Then in 1937 Ned Shillings’s long affair with the Marvellous had ended in a blood-boltered acte gratuit. So it seemed at first glance, but thinking back on things and particularly on our conversation in The Pillars of Hercules, it has crossed my mind, that perhaps Ned really did believe that it was impossible to leave this world simply by committing suicide and perhaps he envisaged himself spending the rest of eternity with thirty naked and copulating people in a darkened room from which there was no exit. Who knows?
Of course, I in my cell in the clinic had a somewhat different perspective on the history of Surrealism from the one which I think that Ned had ended up with. My vision was perhaps unduly solipsistic, but I saw Surrealism’s beginning and end as both being in the madhouse, for Surrealism’s precise origins were in the mental asylum in Saint-Dizier where André Breton had worked as a medical orderly during the First World War. It was there that he first became fascinated with the insanely beautiful utterances of the mad. This in turn had led Breton on to study the theories of Dr Janet on hysteria and prepared the way for the elaboration of the aesthetic of convulsive beauty as well as foreshadowing Breton’s celebrated love affair with the madwoman Nadja.
Anyway, to return to the aftermath of the orgy, Norman was charged with keeping a disorderly house and sentenced to two years. Scrupulous Chen, most unfairly, was found guilty of drugs dealing and got ten years. A couple of prostitutes were bound over. Although Felix was one of those who had stayed by Ned’s body, she did not appear in court. Her father was something senior in the Air Force and she was taken back to the family home in Northern Ireland. I never saw her again.
Apart from Clive and Jenny, the earliest of my visitors was Donald Meldrum. I did not recognise him at first.
‘Why you’ve shaved your moustache off!’
‘It was a false moustache in the first place.’ He smiled apologetically. ‘I got in by pretending to be your cousin. Don’t let me down on that one. I thought I owed it to you to make a report – not that I really have anything to report. Neither of Caroline’s parents would talk to me, nor would that hysterical young woman, Brenda, but I was successful in interviewing Jim and Enid from the office. I also impersonated a civil servant from the Ministry of Labour and talked to Maitland on the telephone. I talked to the Begleys’ neighbours, but Caroline’s parents seem to keep themselves pretty much to themselves. I paid a lad to watch their house for a few days, but that produced no leads. I’ve covered the morgues and, though one can never be sure, it does not seem that any body corresponding to Caroline’s has turned up. I also did the hospitals and I’ve put an advertisement in the Chronicle asking for anyone with information to get in touch with me. No one has. There are other possible lines of enquiry, but in the circumstances I think that we must consider the Case of the Vanishing Typist closed.’
I learned later that Meldrum had returned my deposit of ten guineas, leaving it with the clinic’s registrar for safekeeping.
There were other visitors. Jorge came accompanied by Jenny. Jorge was horribly uncomfortable and he seemed to think that madness might be infectious, something that could be caught from inadequately scrubbed linoleum. He had come to say goodbye.
‘I am going back to Argentina. England is no bloody fun anymore.’
I was sorry to hear this, for Jorge had been the best customer
for my paintings. It was from Jorge that I learned that Antonin Artaud, friend of the Surrealists and pioneer of the Theatre of Cruelty, had also been confined in a lunatic asylum, only a few weeks after me. The rumour from Paris was that he was being given electro-convulsive therapy, also just like me. I wrote to him first to a hospital in Rouen and then to Rodez, but I never received any reply. My letters to him have been published in a long article in the Times Literary Supplement and I do not need to repeat their contents here.
The strangest visit was from MacKellar. He staggered in smelling strongly of cider.
‘Hail Caspar!’ he said. ‘I hand you bananas.’
And he presented me with a bunch of bananas.
‘MacKellar! It’s good to see you. How are you? How are the others? Is there any news of Oliver?’
‘Information about I is not good.’ he said. ‘Post-orgy. Bryony said adios. As for my books, a man who is publishing books says my books not good. Our pals all kaput or not around and our conjuring pal is still in Spain I think.’
After only a few seconds of this, I was wondering if the reason for MacKellar’s presence in the ward was that he had just been admitted to it as a patient. Alternatively, had someone told him that the only way to talk to lunatics was in lunatic language?
‘Thanks for the bananas.’ I said. ‘But why bananas?’
MacKellar’s forehead creased in anguish, as he struggled to answer.
‘I go to a man who has fruit which I want to buy. I want not this fruit, but … but a fruit which is small and which vino contains. Vino is of this fruit. Robin Hood’s colour is this fruit’s colour. But I could not say it to any man who has fruit, so I buy bananas for you. I could say bananas.’
‘Jolly good of you. Thank you.’ I said. ‘Do I gather that Blind Pew Looks Back is not getting anywhere and that you are writing something else?’
