by Robert Irwin
My excitement at this evidence of Oliver being still alive was swiftly overtaken by disappointment that the book gave no clue whatsoever as to Oliver’s present whereabouts. The inside dustjacket merely listed his previous publications. We took turns in reading the novel in bed. When Stella made her first appearance in the story, I patted Monica’s rump and smiled inwardly, for I remembered Oliver saying that Stella’s broad bottom was going to be modelled on Monica’s.
As for the novel as a whole, it was much less experimental than his earlier works (or for that matter, than the pieces he was later to publish). It was obvious to us that, for all its trappings of gothic fantasy and its references to ectoplasm and etherial spheres, the story was heavily autobiographical. The hero (Oliver had rechristened himself Robert), having broken some sort of interdiction and summoned up Stella, a vampire from Hell, nightly makes love to this beautiful but sinister spirit on a red divan. As the nights pass, he realises that he is being drained of his psychic energy and that he must escape her clutches. While he still has strength to do so, he flees to Spain, where he enlists in the International Brigade and goes off to defend Madrid. Despite many hair’s breadth escapes from death, Stella is never far from his thoughts. Indeed, she is most on his mind when he is closest to death. Robert comes to realise that it is only death that will finally free him from thoughts of Stella. He becomes increasingly foolhardy, the one who is the last to retreat and the first to volunteer for suicide missions. He is seriously wounded on one of these missions and brought back to a hospital in Madrid (a vast and gloomy eighteenth-century pile, formerly run by monks). He thinks that he is certain to die and for the first time he is at peace. As the novel ends, a nurse is standing with her back to him, filling the syringe with what is presumably a pain-killer. He cannot see the face of the nurse, but the reader can. It is Stella’s face.
The Vampire of Surrealism is prefaced by a quotation from Baudelaire: ‘To love an intelligent woman is a pederast’s pleasure’. As one would expect of any novel by Oliver, it is an intensely misogynistic book. We are to understand that not only is Stella a vampire, but so are all women. The novel is an allegory of fear of women. For a man to love a woman is to surrender his male identity; to surrender his identity is death. Uniquely among Oliver’s books, The Vampire of Surrealism was published by the long-established and rather stuffy house of Barrington and Lane. The day after Monica’s discovery I hurried round to the publisher’s address given opposite the frontispiece, even though I already knew what I would find. Where the office of Barrington and Lane should have stood in Paternoster Row there was only a crater. It was one among the many publishing premises destroyed by the bombs that fell around St Pauls.
Monica’s massive collection of file cards recording the conversations of friends and acquaintances proved to be even more interesting than Oliver’s novel. At first she denied me access to them, but I nagged away at her until she indulgently gave way. Though I spent months immersing myself in that amazing archive, it is hard to say what I learned from it. I learned a bit about Monica certainly. She had joined the Serapion Brotherhood after ‘a chance meeting’ with Ned. Subsequently, she had spent weeks and months in the intensive study of the meaning of such a chance meeting. What were the objective odds of their meeting then? Or earlier? Or later? In what sense was their meeting significant? What material criteria had to be fulfilled before such a meeting could take place? Monica’s notes were copious and filled with references to Pascal, Fermat, Freud and Jung. I could not see that she had got anywhere.
Anyway, at the time she met Ned, her researches into the nature of objective chance were in the future. Ned had discoursed grandly about convulsive passion, tracking the Marvellous, primal matriarchy and all the other things he used to discourse so grandly about. Monica had been mesmerised – I use the metaphor advisedly – by his talking. It was not so much that she fell under his thrall as that she threw herself under it. Straightaway she resolved to become Boswell to Ned’s Johnson. She started attending meetings of the Brotherhood and committing to memory everything that Ned said, holding it in her head until she was able to faithfully transcribe it onto paper. At the same time she became Ned’s mistress. She replaced Jenny Bodkin and lasted three months before being replaced in her turn by Felix. There was a wonderful file card dating from one of the last days when Ned and Monica were still living together. They were queueing behind some old women in a fishmonger’s and Ned was talking, blah, blah, blah, about woman’s manifest destiny as muse, when Monica impatiently cut him short.
‘Woman’s manifest destiny! What woman? What about this woman just in front of you with her pebble-lens glasses and her weight problem.’
The woman in question turned round angrily. Ned bent towards her, thoughtfully inspecting her as if he was indeed considering her candidacy as a muse.
Monica continued.
‘I’m tired of being your muse. Why don’t you let this one have a go? Or what about the old bag in front of her?’
‘’Ere, stop being so personal,’ screeched the one with the pebble glasses and grabbed hold of Ned’s jacket by its lapels. ‘You want to give that woman of yours a damn good hiding.’
Then the fishmonger ordered Ned and Monica out of his shop and told them not to bother coming back again.
At about the time she was expelled from Ned’s bed, her interests began to broaden and, since she had become familiar with Ned’s repertoire of intellectual tricks, she decided that her own ideas were at least as interesting. She started to keep cross-classified records of what everyone in the group and the world at large said. Crawling over her records, I was amazed to find how often I spoke and how seriously what I said was taken by other members of the group (though not as it turned out by Monica). But of course I did not spend so long working on Monica’s mighty card-index because I was interested in her history, or Ned’s, or that of the Brotherhood as a whole. No, all that was incidental. What possessed me was the desire to learn more about Caroline. She, of course, had a whole series of cards dedicated to her, even though she and Monica had met on only a few occasions: at Gamages, at the cinema, at the New Burlington Galleries and on the outing to Brighton. (I should say here that, in writing this anti-memoire, I have occasionally supplemented my failing memories by drawing on Monica’s file cards for the details of what was said on certain occasions.)
I was disconcerted to find on the cinema card, besides an objective précis of what Caroline had said and done that evening, the pencilled annotation ‘A typical middle-class, tight-lipped, tight-arsed bitch’. Turning to one of her group cards which recorded meetings of the Brotherhood, I found a further record of our outing to The Mystery of the Wax Museum and its aftermath. Included was the record of a conversation between Monica, Jenny and Oliver as they were walking from the pub to the Dead Rat Club. Jenny was puzzled about the circumstances of my first meeting with Caroline. Surely it was unusual for a respectable girl to enter a pub unaccompanied and then to strike up an acquaintanceship with a complete stranger? Perhaps she was not what she seemed? Monica suggested that she might have had someone with her, but Jenny thought that Caroline was less innocent than she appeared. Oliver closed the conversation by declaring that he was bored with everything to do with ‘that little miss’.
Monica’s record of the Gamage’s meeting was entertainingly supplemented by her speculations that I was an indiscriminate, bisexual erotomaniac, who was cheating on Oliver by sleeping with Caroline. I now learned that without quite saying it, Oliver, behind my back, had been giving the impression that he and I were sleeping together. On the other hand, nowhere in Monica’s notes was there any glimpse of an inkling that Caroline and I might not have been sleeping together. As far as Monica could see, I slept with everyone without giving the matter a moment’s thought. Monica’s record of what had happened at Brighton matched my memories fairly well, though the archive additionally provided an account of conversations in her car to and from the seaside. Oliver was in a funny mo
od on the way back and he seemed to be trying to goad Monica to such a point that she would throw him out of the car. He had mocked her determination to pursue a career as a journalist, as well as her abilities as a driver. More nastily, he had needled her about her tendency to sit on the edge of the group, never making any proper friendships within it. He had quoted Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra: ‘As yet woman is not capable of friendship: women are still cats and birds. Or at best cows’. Monica had wondered how Oliver was ever going to manage if his ghostly woman should turn up. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate for him to attempt to raise the ghost of a beautiful boy?
In part it was my insistence on being allowed access to Monica’s records and my obsessive study of them that precipitated our break-up. Monica slowly came to realise the depth of my obsession with Caroline. I made love to Monica with my eyes shut and eventually she rightly guessed that it was the image of Caroline’s face that flickered and burned on the inside of my eyelids. But that was only half the story, for slowly I came to realise that Monica loved my body and only my body. I was her ‘gorgeous hunk’. She also called me ‘Casparkins’ and her ‘teddy-bear’. I was intellectually negligible. She loved my torso and muscular legs, but my clothes had more of interest to say than I did. The more she told me that my body was gorgeous, the more I became ashamed of it. I was beginning to fear that I might be buried alive within my own body. So we started to drift apart while still sharing the same bed. Then, without rancour, we agreed to separate and I moved out to the house I still rent in Waterloo. We continued to see each other for a while and then stopped.
Not long after we separated, the War on the Home Front entered a new phase, as the Germans started firing V-weapons from bases on the Pas-de-Calais. I found that I had new ruins to record and I was busier than ever. The pilotless flying planes and the noises that they made in the air prior to their silent descent attracted a new wave of folklore, such as the belief that the Vergeltungswaffe, or reprisal weapons, were guided to their targets by the ghosts of dead Luftwaffe pilots. I collected as much information of this sort as I could and forwarded it on to Mass Observation.
The last V-rockets fell towards the end of March 1945 and a few weeks after that my career entered a new phase as I was sent to join the British troops who had crossed the Rhine. I eventually succeeded in catching up with the unit I had been posted to in the suburbs of Bremen. Then I was told that I was being sent on to Bergen-Belsen to make an artistic record of a concentration camp that the Nazis had maintained there.
I was excited in advance by the visual possibilities in such a commission. One of the officers who briefed me had already visited the camp and thus I was able to conjure up an image in my mind’s eye – a huge muddy expanse with wooden walkways surrounded by barbed wire, matchstick men with pale bird-like faces walking amidst the chimneys, huts and makeshift tents. Something rather grand and even romantic in the manner of Caspar David Friedrich’s canvases might be appropriate. The corpses would not trouble me. I had seen plenty of death in London.
I arrived in Belsen. Another war artist, a young man with dark, deep-set eyes, called Mervyn Peake, had got there before me. We walked round the camp together, hardly speaking at all. After throwing up a couple of times, I made a few desultory sketches. I think that he may have done the same. Even after the camp’s liberation hundreds of inmates were still dying every day. I abandoned all plans of painting in Belsen. Hitherto I had taken it for granted that art and literature covered everything in the universe, or at least in principle they could cover everything. There were no forbidden zones. I now felt that this was not true. So I painted nothing in Belsen and I have nothing to say about it as a writer. Indeed, I would not have mentioned it all, were it not for the fact that I returned to England in a very strange state of mind. My visit to Belsen may have contributed to that strangeness.
Chapter Fourteen
I did not return to England immediately. Instead I was seconded to an American Denazification Commission with special responsibility for paintings and sculptures and it was under these peculiar auspices that I returned to Munich, the city where I had made such careful preparations for the conquest of a woman who, as it turned out, was no longer around to be conquered. Large parts of the city were now rubble and U.S. military engineers were adding to the rubble by blowing up selected Nazi monuments. I joined a small group of American and British artists and art historians who advised on the works of art discovered concealed in shelters and mines all over Bavaria. We adjudicated on what was and what was not Nazi art. Paintings of the Nazi leaders, the Wehrmacht and the Hitler Youth obviously. But what about Siegfried slaying the dragon? A trio of naked women whose bodies all conformed to the Aryan ideal? Traditional peasants sitting down to a traditional pot of stew? And was there such a thing as a Nazi style as well as Nazi content? Wherever we drew the line, some things would be on the wrong side of it. We argued, and fiercely, but on the whole we did not incline to mercy and thousands of paintings and sculptures were condemned by us to be confined in storage cellars by the U.S. Defence Department. The art which had proclaimed itself the art of the next thousand years was locked away after thirteen.
I was still in Munich on V.E. Day, when I gather all London exploded in huge and rapturous celebration. So soon after Belsen, I would not have been capable of celebrating. And several of the European Surrealists had perished in the Nazi death camps, most notably Robert Desnos, the pioneer of automatic writing in trance states. Sessions of ‘Knees-up Mother Brown’ would certainly not have sufficed to keep the horrors away from me. Forces radio and magazines told me that Europe had been ‘liberated’. It gave me an odd turn, seeing that word ‘liberated’. Liberation had been an important word in Surrealist vocabulary before the War. Liberation had implied the setting free of a kind of wildness imprisoned in the individual and the unleashing of the unsuspectedly vast powers of the imagination. De Sade, Freud and Artaud had given us the courage to transgress beyond the frontiers of the normal. It was they who seemed to point the way towards the liberation of mankind. But now having spent so many months with the British and American forces in Germany, I could plainly see that the ‘liberation’ that had been achieved had been achieved by meticulous organisation and strict discipline.
I was not decommissioned as a War Artist and allowed to return to London until November 1945. One evening, only a week or two after my return, I was walking down Oxford Street. London’s street lighting had not been properly maintained during all those years of blackout and when the moon came out from behind the clouds it provided better illumination than the occasional yellowing street light. A fog was beginning to rise and the more distant buildings faded into it. Most shop windows were still boarded up and there was little to be seen in those which were not. I was walking along thinking about how before the War I had walked here with Caroline on one of her shopping trips. I felt her absence physically and it was actually painful for me now to walk alone in streets where we had once walked together. Nevertheless, I actively sought out this pain. The pain, like a strong fist, squeezed my heart and I staggered on the icy pavement. Then suddenly, I glimpsed something out of the corner of my eye. As I recovered my balance, I turned to face a gang of emaciated, shaven-headed figures of indeterminate sex and dressed in pyjama-like garments. They stared impassively back at me. Behind the gang, another similar figure was hanging by his neck from a barren tree. I threw up my hands to protect myself from them and, as I did so, I recognised my ghostly reflection caught in the glass of the shop window. I went down on my hands and knees on the ice before this window, the only one to be lit up in the whole of Oxford Street. From my kneeling position on the pavement, I looked up at the wax tableau in the window and at the sign above which read ‘All the Horrors of the Concentration Camps. Admission 6d’. As soon as I could recompose myself, I staggered to my feet and hurried away from the scene, reflecting as I did so that it has been my fate in life to be haunted, not by ghosts or vampires or anything of that
sort, but by objects, solid things of wood, wax, glass or paper, which dispose themselves to torment me and which gnaw at my conscience.
It is one of the curious features of hypnagogia that it is not necessary to close the eyes in order to be aware of the play of its imagery. It is only necessary for the room to be dark and then with open eyes I will see the inevitable swarm of men, women and things cavorting in the blackness. God help me, I think my hypnagogic imagery is active even when I am not looking at it. Only by staying wide awake in a well lit room can I avoid entering the hypnagogic landscape. Curiously, it was the Oxford Street waxworks, rather than the Belsen victims on which they were modelled, that precipitated a crisis in my private mental world. Emaciated men, women and children now began to parade on my closed lids and on darkened walls. I saw them in theatres and galleries, on beaches and in beds. Silently and reproachfully they were everywhere. I used to try to lie awake fighting off their visitations, but as soon as my concentration dropped and I began to nod off, they would be upon me again. If I had thought that I could be free of these visions if I cut out my eyelids, I would have done so.
After sticking it out for a few weeks, I went to a doctor and got him to prescribe me tranquillisers and sleeping pills. I supplemented what the doctor gave me with alcohol and opium. I was amazed to discover that the House of Serenity in Cable Street had survived the trial of Scrupulous Chen and his imprisonment and I frequently visited the place. I relished the bitter-sweet smell of the heated opium and the increasingly tatty look of the silk and satin decor, for the memories it brought back of better times before the War.
