by Robert Irwin
He nodded enthusiastically.
‘I am. I hail it Irrationality’s Triumph. It is about a mandarin in China who cannot say particular words for, if that mandarin says particular words, mortality triumphs. With this book about a magic mandarin, I will be rich, oh so rich. A man who is publishing books will buy it. But Caspar, your insanity, how is it? And this hospital, how is it?’
While MacKellar was vigorously and excitedly clawing the air for more words, I was dopily baffled. Sedatives and electro-convulsive therapy had made me stupid, and it took me almost half an hour to work out that, after his failures with Blind Pew Looks Back and Dentist of the Old West, MacKellar had embarked on another project, to write a full-length novel set in Imperial China which would be composed entirely of words which did not contain the letter ‘e’ – that is to say he was going to write a lipogrammatic novel. In order to get in practice for the writing, MacKellar was trying to go about not using the letter ‘e’ in conversations as well. The reason that he had purchased bananas from the fruit-monger was that he had not been able to ask for grapes. By the time I had worked all this out, the strain of conducting conversation in this manner was taking its toll on MacKellar and his initial vigour was quite exhausted. Soon afterwards he bade me a bleary farewell and shuffled out of the ward. Not only had he smelt of cider, but his overcoat, which he never took off, had been heavily stained.
‘I will visit again soon,’ had been his parting lie.
He never reappeared. I wish I had better memories of my last sighting of him, for this was pitiful. Our leader and teacher, Ned, had died violently by his own hand, but MacKellar, fooling about and fenced in by his self-imposed ‘e’-lessness, had been quite unable to talk about it.
Finally, there was the visitor who did not come. Whenever I was told that some one was coming to see me, I became excited, thinking that it might be Caroline come to see me and take me by the hand and take me back to bed in Cuba Street. But with this excitement, there was also fear – fear and shame that she should ever discover me reduced to such a strait.
I forgot to mention that after a couple of months I was moved from my solitary cell into a ward with six other patients. Although I was encouraged to play ping-pong and cards with the other patients, I found that I preferred a solitary card game, my own special version of patience which took a very long time, for before I turned each card over I tried to will its suit and value and to force the random order of the pack to conform to my will. I would sit at the card table and imagine my will bearing down on the next card and compelling it to become, say, the four of spades.
At other times I would stare out of the window and I would try to use my mental forces to form the clouds into the shapes I wanted. Cloud-sculpting might be the art of the future, I thought. In principle, these sorts of exercises were no different from my interior drills in which I marshalled and shaped my hypnagogic imagery. (Indeed I had long thought that hypnagogia’s fundamental message was that, contrary to superficial appearances, the real world was in fact just as fluid and submissive to manipulation by the enlightened mind as hypnagogia was.) In practice however, I found that I was rarely successful with my drilling of cards and clouds. They were disobedient and regularly slipped out from my control. Indeed after some months I was forced to conclude that I had not really been having any success at all. At the risk of repeating myself here, I must emphasise that Surrealism is not, as most people think, an artistic movement; it is a scientific method of investigation in which experiment plays a leading part. My experiments in the clinic and their failure led me to the objective conclusion that the universe was not after all constructed around me, as my presence at its centre had at first led me to surmise. It was a blow and it took me a long time to recover from this discovery.
The clinic’s staff also encouraged me take up art therapy and here they had more success. Just the smell of turpentine and oils had the power to lift my spirits. I had not painted at all since before I left for Germany. The last painting I had completed had been my miniature portrait of Caroline. Since then my mind had been on other things and besides my hands had been shaking too badly for me to think of handling a paintbrush. In the clinic, however, sedatives slowed the tremor down.
Now that I picked my brush up again after so long an interval I found that both my style and my technique had altered. My brushwork was much looser and impressionistic and there was a naive, almost childlike quality to the pictures. Although the meticulous Flemish brushwork technique was abandoned, I still worked in miniature, filling the picture surface with tiny emblems and scraps of writing. Most of the work I did during this period is in the Prinzhorn Collection today.
The best known work is also by quite a long way the largest. When I started ‘How to Get About in London’, I crazily thought that I might be able to sell it to London Transport and that it could be reproduced on posters in the Underground stations and that this would help me get work as a commercial artist. However, as I toiled over this huge canvas, other preoccupations took over. ‘How to Get About in London’ is a vast pictorial map, at the centre of which, located in a maze of streets filled with billowing fog, one beholds the face of Caroline. Her face is situated roughly in the area of Holborn. I have painted myself behind bars in the clinic in Hampstead, but then there is another me whom I have painted smoking opium in Cable Street and who is dreaming the rest of this autobiographical map. The spine of London runs up from Trafalgar Square, up Charing Cross and on up Tottenham Court Road, to Euston and beyond. Those streets which are not filled with fog are filled by quotations in tiny, tiny writing and these quotations intersect at crossroads. For example, Aldous Huxley’s ‘An intellectual is someone who has found something more interesting to think about than sex’ runs along Oxford Street to the top of Charing Cross Road at which point it shares the last word, ‘sex’, with a quotation from André Breton which runs up Charing Cross Road and across into Tottenham Court Road. ‘I wish I could change my sex as I change my shirt’.
Again, ‘It’ is boldly lettered at the centre of Seven Dials and from this ‘It’ run a whole series of quotable streets: ‘It is certainly true that my ideal was simply to become a husband, to live solely for being married. And lo and behold, while I despair of attaining that goal, I become an author, and, who knows, maybe a ranking author’ (Kierkegaard); ‘It is necessary to think in opposition to the brain’ (Gaston Bachelard); ‘It is not worth living if one has to work’ (André Breton) and so on, round the dial. I have also painted in some of the Tube stations, but in place of the legend ‘London Underground’ I have written over the entrances ‘A dream is a tunnel running under reality’ (Reverdy).
The purpose of these quotations is to help the foreign visitor find his way about the city. I am proud of this my masterpiece, for it is an innovative blend of cartography, literature and personal reminiscence. As far as the latter element is concerned, one sees the pub in Soho where De Quincey met the prostitute Anne and where I met Caroline. Caroline’s house in Putney shut up and barricaded, Aleister Crowley standing outside the Wheatsheaf waiting for someone, a female vampire looking out of the window of Oliver’s garret in Tottenham Court Road, the New Burlington Galleries in Bond Street, Clive waving from his office in Brompton Street, Meldrum, Franey and Hughes conferring in their office in Great Portland Street, and Jorge’s ‘Chariot’ parked beside Green Park. The city as a whole is dominated by two features; first a vast Madame Tussaud’s Waxwork Museum to the north of Caroline’s face and, secondly, to the south, on the site where the Dead Rat Club should be, one sees a barren hill surmounted by an empty cross round which weeping women kneel. Then, beneath Soho’s Golgotha, one sees that St James’s Park is circular and can be rotated to facilitate chance encounters. Finally, at each corner of the map there is an archangel with puffed-up cheeks. The job of these creatures is to blow people together and to blow them apart again.
There is a smaller companion picture, ‘London After the Bombing’ in which I am accompanied
by a woman veiled in white and together we contemplate a similar map of London, but one in which everyone else is dead, most of the buildings are ruined, and the sayings on the streets have buckled and become jumbled-up word-salads. Other works produced in this period include ‘Thought-Forms Copulating’, in which naked human forms cover every square inch of the picture surface in a perfect sort of organic tesselation and ‘Mr Sorge Fights Against Fascism’, in which Oliver, in a top hat and opera cloak, stands on the battlements of a castle and confronts a great billowing cloud of darkness, from out of which one can dimly discern a veiled woman emerging. Finally, I should mention ‘The Eyes of Dr Aczel’ in which men and women are shown trapped in the huge, hemispherical eyeballs of the mad doctor.
Once the electro-convulsive therapy had been discontinued, I found that I was neither happy nor unhappy in the clinic. I made no attempt to escape, though I am sure that I could have used my mesmeric powers to do so. By the end of my first year, I was allowed a great deal of freedom to wander about in the building and the grounds, but it was only some way into the second year of my confinement that I secured access to a mirror. What I saw in the mirror was disturbing, for I saw a face that was exactly like my face, but I knew that it was not mine, not the real me. It lacked my identity. I did not know whose face it was, so I left it, my double’s face I suppose, trapped in the mirror. This was not the disaster it might have been, for by then I had abandoned all thought of developing my mesmeric powers any further. Instead I painted, played patience and, for the first time in my life, read the newspapers. I followed the developing situation in Europe with growing anxiety – the Spanish government’s retreat to Barcelona, the formation of the Axis, the Anschluss with Austria, the Czechoslovak crisis, Munich, the collapse of the Spanish Republic, the Danzig crisis, the German invasion of Poland, Britain’s declaration of war and the Phony War period. By the winter of 1939–40 I had become desperate to leave the clinic, for I could imagine what would happen when the Germans came marching into London. Doctors attached to the S.S. would tour the city’s hospitals and asylums and all the degenerates, cretins and madmen in those places would be rounded up and killed by injections of cyanide. Notoriously that was Nazi policy.
In a panic, I started painting studiously ordinary portraits of hospital staff and pictures of flowers and trees in the grounds. On occasions when I thought I was not being observed, I used to walk about talking to myself and practising being normal.
‘How are you?’
‘I am well, thank you.’
‘What weather we are having!’
‘Yes. The weather interests me enormously – no, I mean to say that I am only quite interested in the weather.’
And so on.
I need not have worried. Early in 1940, we heard the news that the Milton Clinic was being requisitioned for wartime purposes. Everyone who could conceivably be discharged from the hospital was being discharged. I was among those judged fit enough to be returned to society.
Chapter Thirteen
The Milton Clinic was a time machine. When I had stepped into it, England was at peace, but when I walked down from Hampstead into central London in the spring of 1940, I found that I was walking through a city many of whose features were quite strange to me: barrage balloons like dinosaurs stranded in the air, parks dug up for vegetable gardens, and Georgian terraces stripped of their railings. Indeed, so strange was the city, in which all the street names and sign posts had been removed, that I occasionally lost my way.
To look at things in more personal terms, I had admitted myself to the clinic in 1937, on the day after my participation at the last ever meeting of the Serapion Brotherhood. In my years as an artist before my hospitalisation, I hardly ever spoke to anyone who was not of the Brotherhood. Now, however, I emerged into a world in which Ned was dead, Oliver missing presumed dead, Manasseh in the United States, Jorge in Argentina, Felix in Northern Ireland, and MacKellar, after his divorce and the sale of his home, gone God knows where, but possibly to the doss house. Others like Mark and Jenny had been called up and dispersed to barracks and airfields in the provinces. So one could say with Malory’s King Arthur, ‘such a fellowship of good knights shall never be together in no company’. Surrealism was on the run all over the world. Breton and Tanguy had escaped to New York, but after the Fall of France other Surrealists were reported to be held in concentration camps and there was no certain knowledge of Paul and Nusch Eluard. Born in the wake of one World War, Surrealism had expired at the onset of the next.
The lease on my house in Cuba Street had been surrendered soon after my admission into the clinic and the kind and efficient Jenny had supervised the storage of most of my possessions in one of the Harrods warehouses. Having nowhere else to go, I went to stay with Clive and Sally in their big house near Woking. I was there for a few weeks while I sorted myself out and looked for somewhere to rent. It was really Sally I stayed with, for we saw little of Clive. He had succeeded in his aim of becoming a millionaire before the age of thirty, but, when the war came, he had thrown up his business-broking with alacrity and wangled himself into the R.A.F. I think that Sally was actually relieved at seeing less of her husband, for, when he did appear, his indiscriminate enthusiasm for absolutely everything and his curiosity about anything was exhausting. He would turn up burbling about the aerodynamics of the Spitfire and rudders, flaps and aerodynamics and about his other recent enthusiasm, Finnegan’s Wake and, after a few hours on these topics he would drop them and cross-question me about the hospital. What was it like to be a mental patient? What were the doctors like? What had the other patients been like? I was vague and my answers disappointed him. The trouble was that I had paid very little attention to the other inmates of the clinic, for I had found them dull and ordinary by comparison with my old companions in the Serapion Brotherhood.
A few weeks after my release from hospital, I came before a call-up board. The result was a foregone conclusion and the whole thing should only have taken ten minutes, only no one on the board could understand how it was that I had no surname and we spent hours going round and about the issue. The end of the matter, however, was what it always was going to be. I was categorised as grade 4 – unfit for service in any military capacity whatsoever. But, if I was not to become a soldier, what was to become of me?
I could not pick up where I had left off, producing Surrealist canvases and hunting for commissions to illustrate books. Artists’ materials were now very hard to find and almost the only place where one could buy brushes of any sort was in ironmongers’s shops. My best patron, Jorge Arguelles, was now living on the other side of the world, as was Edward James. There was hardly a gallery left open in London, and, even if there had been, people were not buying paintings any more. That was unpatriotic. You were supposed to buy war bonds or something. As for books, the production of books had been seriously cut back and those which were being produced were being produced in conformity with wartime economy standards.
In the end, I found work through chance meetings in pubs. The War was a great time for chance meetings. It was as if all the cards on the table had been thrown up in the air and then, for the first time ever, they were thoroughly shuffled. Everyone was on the move – servicemen in transit, couriers, refugees, evacuees – and people were always meeting one another in unexpected contexts. I lived in daily expectation of re-encountering Caroline serving in a soup kitchen, or in a darkened railway carriage or an air-raid shelter. In wartime, such a meeting was possible – no, even probable. Surely, it was likely that I had already just missed her vanishing round a corner or climbing on to a bus? Of course, I longed for such a meeting, but there was also a part of me which dreaded it, for I had emerged from hospital impotent. It might have been the shock of the orgy, in which death and sex had been so indissolubly fused together, that had desexed me, or it might have been all the electro-convulsive therapy and the sedatives. I do not know. By contrast, the excitement of war, the feeling that one did not know where one
would be tomorrow or even if one would be alive tomorrow, had heightened the sexual temperature of most of those around me and I would often stumble across lovers copulating on bomb sites. In my asexual state, I would contemplate them with a sort of scientific detachment before walking on.
Though I did not find Caroline, I did find employment by hanging around in pubs. I ran into Roland Penrose in a pub in Charlotte Street and he found me work with a film director friend of his. Originally I was taken on to paint the flats, but my face was my fortune. With my blonde hair and hatchet-faced profile, I was the very man they needed to play a sinister S.S. officer. Darkness Over Lublin, a film about the German occupation of Poland and the Polish resistance, was shot at the Ealing Studios. The sets swarmed with Polish and East European Jewish actors and advisors. A film is so like a dream – or, in the case of Darkness Over Lublin, a nightmare – and I found a peculiar pleasure in impersonating a creature of nightmare. The director loved the way I could make my eyeballs bulge and glitter.
Rehearsals and shooting lasted only six weeks and that was the beginning and end of my career as an actor. However, by then I had met Paul Nash, also in a pub, and he remembered me from pre-War exhibitions. He very kindly provided me with an introduction to Kenneth Clark and Clark in his turn got me taken on by the War Artists’ Commission. Thus I became one of a group which included Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and Edward Ardizzone. Our job was to make an artistic record of the War. I received maintenance, £1 a day for each day spent away from home, a warrant for third-class rail travel and a small sum for each painting completed, this sum being fixed in advance according to the size of the canvas.
My commissioning by the W.A.C. coincided with the beginning of the Blitz in 1940 and this coincidence provided me with my artistic mission. I became a painter of ruins and firestorms and I thought of myself as the heir to Piranesi and Mad John Martin. I left my Surrealist box of tricks unopened for the remainder of the War. The Blitz provided its own Surrealist effects – a white horse galloping around inside a burning meat market and displaying all its teeth in a panicked, mirthless grin, a girl in a blue dress emerging with her skipping rope from clouds of black smoke and skipping calmly by, and the facades of buildings curving and distending like the sets of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Everywhere I walked I saw staircases which led nowhere, baths suspended apparently in mid-air, brick waterfalls flowing out of doorways and objects jumbled incongruously together in conformity with Lautréamont’s aesthetic prescription; ‘Beautiful as the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table’. Long tongues of flame would leap out of every window of some great office block, like demons being expelled from a disenchanted castle. I was not really very aware of the Germans or their bombers: I felt rather that it was the fire that was our real enemy while water was our ally. At times I toyed with the notion that Britain had entered the War on the wrong side and that we should have allied with the glamorous fire against the dull and squelching water.
