by Robert Irwin
On my return from Munich, my employment as a War Artist, ‘temporary and non-pensionable’, came to an end. If by 1945 Nazi art could be seen to have had its day, the same thing seemed to be true of Surrealism. The Ministry of Information and the W.A.C. had wanted representational artists for the purposes of records and propaganda, but once the war was over, gallery owners were favouring abstract painters. Although the Serapion Brotherhood had proposed to conquer all time and space, it could now be seen to have been something that was peculiar to its time – like the crazes for mah-jong, the Lindy Hop and other defunct enthusiasms. A couple of my paintings were exhibited at the small ‘Surrealist Diversity’ exhibition at the Arcade Gallery, in the company of works by Max Ernst, Man Ray, Magritte, Picasso and Tanguy, but my stuff did not sell. Having fallen upon hard times, I barely kept myself alive by doing odd jobs. I found occasional work as a painter of ‘flats’ at the Ealing Studios and, even when there was no work for me to do there, I hung around for the sake of the warmth. I also got work sometimes at the Royal College of Heralds, painting armorial blazons. Occasionally I worked as a house painter and during the bitter winter of 1946–7 I was employed by the Post Office one day a week to answer letters, most of which were addressed to Father Christmas, but I also occasionally ghosted replies for Sherlock Holmes, Charles Dickens and the Tooth Fairy.
When I could afford the materials, I continued to paint out my obsession. I did a series of canvases, imaginary portraits of Caroline – Caroline at thirty, forty, fifty … Even at fifty she still looked attractive, if a little raddled. However, in the last of the portraits, Caroline at ninety, she is shown standing behind me, while I toil over a canvas on the easel. She has become cadaverous; there is no longer enough white hair to cover her scalp; the liver-spotted skin is stretched to tearing point over her projecting bones and the beginnings of a wispy beard sprouts from the chin. I also resumed work on my main cycle of paintings. ‘Secondhand Bookshop no 32’ has hands coming out of the shelves and showing the books to women customers and pointing them to interesting illustrations.
Clive bullied friends of his to buy some of my work. He and Sally moved from Woking to Chertsey and a larger house with swimming pool, squash courts and peacocks on the lawn. Clive, who had returned to his previous career in business, was teaching himself Serbian as well as bird’s-nesting for rare eggs. He also lectured me on the merits of Gilbert and Sullivan and illustrated their genius with selected extracts on the gramophone. There was an air of desperation in his musicological gabble. It was as if he did not want to give me space to speak. I saw little of Sally, but soon deduced that she was having an affair with one of the neighbours.
Apart from Clive and Sally, the only people I saw more than once or twice were Roland and Lee Penrose. Lee, who had been attached to the American forces in Germany, had taken photographs of the opening up of Buchenwald Camp, but whereas what I had seen had terrified and oppressed me, Lee was angry and bitter. From the Penroses I learnt that Paul and Nusch Eluard had survived the War, though Nusch was now looking frail and emaciated.
Slowly my fortunes as an artist took a turn for the better. Taking my initial inspiration from the hack work I did for Bluemantle Pursuivant, I now began to produce a series of smallish paintings of luridly Surrealist blazons. I devised armorial bearings for the Marquis de Sade, Sacher-Masoch, Baudelaire, De Quincey, Cagliostro, Lewis Carroll, Sacco and Vanzetti. It may have been a hangover from the wartime obsession with military insignia, I don’t know, but these works proved remarkably popular. The heraldic paintings were given a show at the Dedalus Gallery. Sir Alfred Munnings visited the show and then denounced my work at a well-reported after-dinner speech in the Royal Academy as ‘disgusting daubs’ and ‘an insult to human decency’. The owner of the Dedalus Gallery said that being denounced by Munnings was ‘the winning ticket’ and ‘like money in the bank’, and so it proved.
One evening, while urinating in the public lavatory at the bottom of Charing Cross Road, I was startled by a voice issuing from one of the cubicles.
‘Is there anyone there?’
After a brief hesitation, I called back.
‘Yes.’
‘Are you alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you had better take this. It is destined for you and for you alone.’
Something slid out from under the door of one of the cubicles. Having done up my flies, I walked over to pick it up.
It proved to be a pamphlet printed on yellow paper, entitled What Have We Been Fighting For?, produced under the joint authorship of the West Ealing Phalantasery.
‘Go now and take what you have been given and study it carefully,’ commanded the voice. ‘We have finished our business here.’
I took the pamphlet back to Waterloo and only when I got home did I open it. The argument of What Have We Been Fighting For? was that we had been fighting to implement the theories of the French Utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772–1837). His theories were expounded with touching enthusiasm by the Fourierist comrades of West Ealing. In the ideal post-war Britain, ‘a land fit for the sexually obsessed’, the country will be divided into phalantaseries; no one will have to work for more than a couple of hours a day at any particular task, so no one will become bored or alienated from their work. Sex counts as work. Garbage will be collected by children in brightly coloured uniforms. These children, the Little Hordes, will ride about on zebras and blow trumpets, so of course they will enjoy their work enormously. People will travel to work on the antilion, a creature which condenses and replaces the lion and the motor car. Oceans will be crossed by people riding the antiwhale. For recreation one may visit museums filled by living men and women, all of whom proudly display their best features. All of society will be geared towards the unrestricted expression of the passions. The pamphlet, after roundly abusing the Beveridge Report, urges its readers to attend the regular Thursday meetings of the West Ealing Phalantasery. Alternatively, one could write to a certain Miles Midwinter.
I was tempted. Clearly chance had put me in the way of a sort of post-war, austerity substitute for the Serapion Brotherhood and it was even possible that in Miles Midwinter I should re-encounter Ned Shillings, reincarnated in a different but still recognisable form. After much hesitation, however, I came to the conclusion that I was too depressed to face a new gang of people and that I would be unable to engage in the profound frivolities of Fourierism with any real conviction. Mischievously I posted the pamphlet on to Clive.
It shocked me nevertheless that I could have been so seriously tempted and it made me realise how lonely I was. Loneliness played a large part in my decision to submit myself to psychoanalysis. So did the fact that I could only fall asleep by drinking myself silly and passing out. Above all though, I still felt that at any moment I might re-encounter Caroline in the street and then we would go to a tea-house or a pub and I would recount to her everything that had happened to me since we parted – my exercises in mesmerism and lip-reading in Germany, my attempt to trace her through a detective agency, my sojourn in the Milton Clinic, my work as a War Artist and (perhaps) my affair with Monica. But first I wanted to practise my life story on someone else. I wished to be judged and exonerated. No, more than that, I wanted to see myself through another’s eyes. I wanted to walk about outside myself and then look back and see me. As it was, I was trapped, buried alive in my own body, and no matter how hard I screamed, no one would ever hear me.
Dr Wilson’s consulting room was on the ground floor of his house in Swiss Cottage. The walls were lined with prints of Hogarth’s ‘The Rake’s Progress’. There was a bag of golf clubs in the corner of the room and his first disappointment in me was learning that I did not play. I visited him twice a week in the afternoons. I would lie on the sofa and look at the trees out of the window and while I talked, he would sit on a chair behind my head and scribble in a little notebook. Dr Wilson looked like a moustacheless Donald Meldrum, except that he did not have Meldrum’s sideburns
, and he was not as tall as Meldrum, and he did not have the latter’s bluffness of manner. So he was like the grin without the cat. Except that Dr Wilson never smiled. Not that I could be quite sure of that, with him sitting behind my head.
‘What do I do?’ I said at the first session. ‘What am I supposed to say?’
‘You must say whatever you feel the need to say.’
‘But I don’t feel like saying anything.’
A long silence. After only ten minutes I capitulated.
‘Aren’t I supposed to tell you about my dreams?’
‘If you wish.’
On the face of it I had lost that round. However, after several sessions of me relating my dreams and saying what I thought about them, it was evident that I had the upper hand after all and Dr Wilson was forced to give way. The problem he faced was that, as I believe I have mentioned earlier in this anti-memoire, my dreams are very boring – dreams of shopping, catching trains, sitting in waiting rooms preparing for interviews, things like that. Speaking for myself, I found the shopping dreams faintly interesting in a dry sort of way, for over the years I had found that a sort of repetitive dream topography had built up, which I could remember from dream to dream. So as I was walking up one dream street, I might recall that in the parallel street and a little to the left that there was an excellent ironmongers with an outstanding range of ironmongery – all sorts of things which were hard to find in post-war Britain. I found the consistency and dullness of my dreams rather fascinating. Also I was curious about how it was that I was never quite able to purchase anything in the shops that I visited. The elusive widget glimpsed in the window of the dream shop remained forever beyond my grasp.
Dr Wilson did not share my fascination. After a few weeks he banned me from talking about my dreams. So I started talking about my hypnagogic imagery. This also proved not to interest him. Again, as I have already noted in the prologue to this book, he regarded this as some sort of anomalous optical phenomenon. Instead, he started to probe me about my earliest childhood memories of my parents. Here again he was frustrated, for my earliest memories concerned my guardian and his enthusiasms for horse racing, harlots and operetta.
By now we were six weeks into analysis and already the phenomenon of transference was taking place. Transference is the development on the part of the patient of a strong feeling towards his or her analyst, which creates an emotional charge between them. After only six weeks we had reached this vital stage in analysis. And it was mutual. We loathed each other. Part of the problem was that, like most Surrealists, I was well up in psychoanalytical theory and I had read more of Freud than Dr Wilson had. I was wise to all his mind games.
He was still trying to confine himself to comments like ‘And how do you feel about that?’ and ‘Is there anything else you would like to say?’, but he was finding this pose of neutrality increasingly difficult and again and again he was betrayed into impatience. Having failed to get me to talk of my parents, he got me to talk about Caroline. This I was willing to do in great detail. After a few weeks I had only got as far as describing how I was feeling while I stroked her knee in the cinema while it was showing The Mystery of the Wax Museum, when he exploded with impatience:
‘Stop it! Stop it! Enough! I can do nothing for you. Psychoanalysis is definitely not for people like you. Analysis is a remedial treatment for neurotics, but you … you are …’
He fell cautiously silent.
‘I am what?’
I swear that he was about to denounce me as mad. However, to have done so would have been to have lost the game according to the rules he was accustomed to play by. He would probably have been drummed out of the ranks of the Psychoanalytic Association by other Freudians.
After a careful pause, he replied.
‘You have not come here in good faith. You do not want to be cured. You do not want to be returned to society as a properly functioning member of that society. Instead, you have come to me for confirmation of your fantasies. Now I want to hear no more about this Miss Begley. It is possible that she may once have existed, though personally I doubt it. Whatever was once the truth of that matter, she now is merely the creature of your mind and has no existence outside your imagination. So no more of her if you please. I cannot, and psychoanalysis cannot give you back this phantom of desire. All psychoanalysis can do is treat people so that they can function ordinarily in society –’
‘But that is what I want! I want to become ordinary! Make me ordinary, please!’
‘No ordinary person would have said what you have just said. The fact is that you have come to me to make you more exceptional than you already are and to make your life all wonderful. You expect life to be colourful, marvellous, with exciting things happening all the time. But life isn’t like that and, if analysis can teach you anything, it is how to compromise. Life is hard for everyone. It’s something you’ll just have to buckle down and accept. A first step in this necessary process would be to drop your fantasies of the perfect woman, the so-called Caroline.’
I let the silence build up, before asking,
‘And how do you feel about what you have just said?’
But, it was foolish to bait Dr Wilson and, my question having alerted him, he retreated back to the games-playing mode of the professional analyst.
‘Would I be right in detecting hostility in your question?’ he wanted to know.
‘Why do you ask?’ I replied.
And so it went on with question parried by question. But Dr Wilson’s querying of the reality of Caroline had disturbed me more than I let on to him. When I came to think of her, I realised that she had become so much a creature of my mind that she was now hardly more real to me than Trilby. It then occurred to me that a partial answer might be to put some flesh on my memories of Caroline.
The very next day I went round to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in Gower Street and asked to see the Principal. Had I an appointment? I had not. What was my business? I wanted to hire a young, female drama student for a day. Eventually I was brought before one of the Principal’s deputies and I explained my needs to her. Quivering with indignation, she heard me out before shaking her head decisively.
‘Quite out of the question. We are not an escort agency.’ And eagerly ushering me out of the office, ‘If you don’t mind, we’d like you to leave the premises now.’
This was a set-back. However, the woman’s remarks prompted me to ring up an escort agency with an office in Chelsea. The woman at the other end of the line, once she had managed to grasp what I was seeking, told me that my demands were too bizarre and specific. Her young ladies were not equipped to offer the sort of service I was demanding. At this point I briefly abandoned the project.
But the next session with Dr Wilson was especially stormy. It ended with me asking.
‘You hate me don’t you?’
His chair creaked uneasily.
‘Yes.’
‘You are not supposed to say things like that.’
‘Why not, if it is true?’
‘You think I murdered Caroline, don’t you?
‘I am so far from thinking that, that I do not believe she ever existed.’
The session terminated early. I stormed out of the consulting room. I went to a newsagent, close to the tube station and bought a little notebook and then sat in a cafe, writing in it until the notebook was more than half full. Then I took the tube to Leicester Square and from there I walked into Soho.
The prostitute I picked out in the end was chosen because she looked the most respectable. She wore a calico print dress and might have passed for a young housewife. Indeed, I had thought when I picked her out that she might be in her mid-thirties, but there was an odd sheen to her face and inspecting her more closely in the pub, I saw that make-up had been skillfully applied in a pancake layer and she was probably in her late forties, or perhaps even older. Still she was quite a handsome woman.
Over drinks in the pub in Greek Street, she told me tha
t her name was Martina. I told her that from now on, as long as I was paying her, her name was Caroline. Then I passed the notebook over to her and explained how I wanted her to learn Caroline’s half of the dialogue. In a few days’ time, once she had memorised Caroline’s part, we would meet again in this same pub and I would have a sleep-mask over my eyes and she would take me by the hand and lead me out of the pub and we would walk towards St James’s Park. Step by step and word by word, we would re-enact my first meeting with Caroline all those years ago.
Pseudo-Caroline opened her mouth to refuse, but I pressed five pounds into her hand. That was in advance. There would be another five pounds when we next met in the pub and yet ten pounds more, if she performed as well as I hoped.
‘You will be the star of this production,’ I said. ‘You are quite good-looking.’
‘I bet you say that to all your popsies,’ she said, patting her hair self-consciously.
‘I’m offering you a terrific part. You have the chance to give the performance of your life. Have you seen Brief Encounter?’
Silly question. Everybody has seen Brief Encounter.
‘You will be Celia Johnson to my Trevor Howard,’ I continued. ‘This is one of the great love stories of our time. I don’t want you just to memorise your lines in a mechanical way. I want you to feel your way into your part, like method actors do. It’s difficult, I know, but you must draw on your own past insofar as it is possible, so as to help you understand what it would be like to be Caroline – a young typist, still innocent and virginal and with little experience of life.’
Pseudo-Caroline looked baffled. I wished I had succeeded in getting someone from R.A.D.A., someone who really could have put Stanislavsky’s theories into practice in recreating the role of Caroline, but ‘Needs must when the Devil drives’. I was in a hurry. I was in a fever of impatience.
