by Robert Irwin
Pseudo-Caroline doubtfully said she’d do her best. Then she skimmed the notebook, mouthing some of the dialogue to herself, until she came to the last page.
‘It says here “IMPROVISE”. What does that mean?’
‘What it says. At that point we’ll play it by ear and the better you perform, the better I’ll be pleased and the more I’ll pay you.’
Pseudo-Caroline was still puzzled and suspicious, but it was true. I had no idea what would happen when we reached the park and sat down on the grass. I had stopped short in the notebook at the point where Caroline had said she was going to get us some ice cream and then vanished. I wanted to see what would have happened if she had not disappeared in that way. There was a fluttery feeling of excitement in my stomach as I looked forward to the mysteriously uncertain ending of our little play.
At last Saturday came. I was early in the pub. Jorge’s broad-brimmed gaucho hat had gone back with him to Argentina, so I had purchased a bowler hat instead. With such a hat I can imagine myself to be a man in a Magritte painting. Extraordinary things always happen to men who wear bowler hats. I was wearing the hat and clutching the Indian sword-stick (for though Oliver had come round several times to Cuba Street to collect it, he had invariably forgotten to take it away). As soon as Pseudo-Caroline came through the door, I donned the sleep-mask and I called out impatiently,
‘MacKellar? MacKellar?’
Pseudo-Caroline replied in a low, artificially sexy voice.
‘Was that the name of your friend?’
I nodded.
‘Well, he’s gone out just now, but he wrote a message which he pressed into my hand.’
And she pretended to read the note which began.
‘Dear Miss –,
‘You have a kindly face. I beg you take care of this tragically afflicted young man …’
And so we continued. Pseudo-Caroline had not thoroughly mastered her lines and it was fairly obvious that she was consulting the notebook from time to time, but I did not mind that. What was more of a problem was that as we emerged from the pub, my hand trustingly in hers, I realised that not only was it bitterly cold, but a thin drizzle was falling. The pavement was wet and I was concentrating on my feet and worrying about what we should do in the park if we could not sit on the grass. Nothing was quite right. Her perfume was too strong and it reminded me of rotting gardenias. One of her nails scratched sensuously across my palm. On my eyelids, in place of the luridly coloured wild rout of the old days, I could see gaunt and spectral men in striped jackets and trousers, who seemed to wish to usher me on towards the front of a queue whose end was invisible.
Distracted by these matters, I did not at first realise that she was not in fact leading me towards St James’s Park. This only became obvious when she began to coax me downwards, down a staircase of stone or brick, which in its lower half seemed to disintegrate into a heap of dusty rubble. The descent was narrow and she pressed her body against me as she continued to mouth words from the notebook and to coax me slowly downwards. Finally, after what seemed a long time, we reached the bottom. There was a squeaking and a slithering behind me – perhaps a rat. I was about to ask Pseudo-Caroline what was going on, when I felt something cold against my neck and heard a man’s voice close to me.
‘Your money, where is it, chum? Hand it over. I got a knife at your throat. And drop your walking stick.’
He should not have reminded me of the stick. Without appearing to do anything, I surreptitiously turned the silver top of the stick and pressed a stud inwards to release the Indian blade. I brought it up with a flourish to flail in the empty air. At almost the same moment I lept blindly forward and staggered a bit and felt as I did so a stinging sensation on my neck.
‘Look out, Arnold! He’s got a fucking sword!’ cried Pseudo-Caroline.
At last I could pull the sleep-mask down from my eyes. It was twilight and, under the heavy cloud cover, the darkness was coming on fast. The three of us faced one another in the water-logged crater of a bomb-site, shielded from the surrounding streets by large advertising hoardings. Arnold wore a duffle coat, scarf and a fisherman’s woolly hat and he was rather hopelessly brandishing a flick-knife. Pseudo-Caroline stood close beside him wringing her hands. I blocked the only exit across the the heap of bricks and rubble up to street level. My neck was bleeding a little, but it was only a nick. As I gazed at Arnold’s pale and startled face, it suddenly occurred to me that stupidity is not morally neutral, not always anyway. There are certain kinds of stupidity that are actively evil.
‘Drop the knife,’ I said.
He did so.
‘On the ground, both of you. No, not like that. I want you kneeling, facing each other.’
They knelt in the mud facing one another and shivering. I was shivering too. It was very cold.
‘She betrayed me. I want you to hear her confession, Arnold. I am going to stand back a bit so that you have some privacy. Caroline must pay the penalty for her treachery, but before I behead her, she should be allowed to make her confession. That is only right and proper. After that I’ll want to use your scarf to cover up her eyes.’
Holding my sword raised before me like a royal executioner, I walked backwards a bit, till I was close to the ruined staircase. They faced one another and talked in low tones. It did not look to me as though he was shriving her soul. Never mind. All of a sudden they rose to their feet and ran in opposite directions round the site. Arnold had spotted another way out, a precarious track which wound its way up to a gap between the hoardings. He started to climb. Then Pseudo-Caroline changed course and stumbled in her high heels towards the way up that he had found. It was not going to be possible for me to detain them both. I barred Pseudo-Caroline’s way with my sword. She was moaning horribly. She was quite unable to speak. But it was never my intention to execute her. Dr Wilson was right. I was not a murderer. However I had no idea at all what to do next. We had reached the improvisation stage much sooner than I had expected.
Then, fast as the snap of a finger, it came to me what should happen next. A grown-up can re-enact the dreams of youth, if only he is bold enough. I forced her up the brick staircase at sword’s point. The bomb site we emerged from was one of those between Leicester Square and the National Gallery. I hailed a taxi and told it to drive to Swiss Cottage. I pushed Pseudo-Caroline into the cab ahead of me. She was still moaning, but I smiled reassuringly at her and said,
‘Behave yourself and you’ll still get paid.’
The volume of her moaning abated somewhat, though only somewhat. The taxi driver, however, was quite oblivious to her distress.
‘Swiss Cottage. That’ll cost you. People complain about how expensive taxis are,’ he said. ‘That’s because petrol is so expensive. They don’t realise that. And why is petrol so expensive? It’s because we are still at war. We should never have got involved in the Korean War in the first place. Two World Wars in one century are enough. We’ve no business fighting the Koreans’ wars for them …’
While the taxi driver favoured us with his views on the Koreans, the Chinese, the Japanese and the Russians, I was using the point of the sword-stick to make eyeholes in the sleep-mask. Then I redonned the mask and the hat and, as I did so, a mysterious feeling of pleasure swept over me. It took me a while to track down the hidden source of this pleasure. Then I recalled how as a child I used to sit in solitary splendour in the nursery which also doubled as a cinema, while my guardian screened for me episodes from the matinée serial. The Adventures of Zorro. That was it! With my bowler hat, eye-mask and flashing blade, I am the very incarnation of the masked avenger, the English Zorro! Hurrah! Romance and adventure were still to be had for the asking! Hurrah!
When we reached our destination in Swiss Cottage, while I was still fumbling for some money to pay the driver, Caroline murmured beseechingly to the taxi driver,
‘Help me, please help me!’
But he did not hear.
‘I told you it would be pricey. A
nd you mark my words, we’ll be hearing from the Chinese again. Been a pleasure talking to you, mate. Cheerio.’
I hammered on Dr Wilson’s door with the pommel of my sword. By now the thin drizzle had turned into something more like real rain. We had to wait a long time on the doorstep while the lights in the house came on and finally Dr Wilson opened the door to us. It was not late and I was astonished to see that he was already in pyjamas and dressing gown.
‘Good evening, Dr Wilson. Sorry to get you out of bed. This is Caroline, the woman you said does not exist. Caroline, this is my analyst.’
Pseudo-Caroline looked to Dr Wilson in despair, but then she did a nervous bob and said,
‘Charmed I’m sure.’
He ignored her and looked thunderously at me.
‘May we come in?’ I said, brandishing my sword. ‘It’s rather wet out here. Caroline is going to agree to marry me after all. I think some drinks would be in order. We have come to bring a bit of colour and a touch of the Marvellous into your drab life.’
I was going to say some more about the Marvellous, but at this point Dr Wilson’s wife, her hair in curlers and her body in a heavily quilted dressing gown, appeared at the top of the stairs and, seeing me masked and armed at the door, she started screaming. Pseudo-Caroline started screaming too. I had never seen Dr Wilson’s wife before. It had not even crossed my mind that he was married. Lights came on in neighbouring houses. Someone must have phoned for the police. They arrived just as we were settling down with our drinks and I was prodding pseudo-Caroline to tell Dr and Mrs Wilson about what it was like to work as a typist for a fur company.
I was charged with a whole string of offences, most of them beginning with a, like abduction and assault, and I was remanded in custody. However, my lawyer said that since I had not been charged with arson in a naval dockyard (which is a capital offence), I would probably get off with a fine. He was wrong. I was sentenced to three months in jail. My one big consolation was that the psychiatrist who examined me before sentencing found me to be perfectly sane. When this was announced in court I favoured Dr Wilson with a big smirk.
I served out my sentence in Brixton. It was while I was there and I had a little time to think that I conceived of this project, my anti-memoire, which is also an open letter to Caroline. In it I have held nothing back. I stand naked before her – no, more than naked, I have taken the knife to myself and flayed myself alive.
Caroline. ‘There is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated of which the echo is not faint at last.’ So said the Victorian poet and essayist, Walter Savage Landor. Caroline, Caroline, Caroline, Landor was wrong. The old gent was a fool. The power of your name still burns fiercely within me. In writing this book, I have attempted one final act of sorcery designed to entrance you and bring you back to me. Caroline, Caroline, Caroline, I am nothing without you and without you my life has been a meaningless story.
Chapter Fifteen
When this book – a book which really wrote itself – came out in the autumn of 1952, it received mixed and confused reviews. Cyril Connolly in The Observer characterised me as ‘a lonely figure left stranded by the ebbing tides of the Surrealist movement’ and as ‘a charmless blend of Peter Pan and Captain Hook’. According to Connolly, ‘Caspar combines the egocentricity of the first with the lack of moral principles of the second. However, he has succeeded in capturing the ethos of a particular group dedicated to experiment in art and literature, as well as the flavour of a certain period. Fortunately, both the group and the period are now behind us’. The best review I received was from an anonymous reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement. That review was not so different from Connolly’s, but it did praise the book for its startling frankness and for the insights it gave into a certain kind of distorted sensibility. Apart from a clutch of lesser reviews and a card from Clive severing all contact between us there were at first no other responses to my book.
I continued to paint and sales continued to improve and I even noticed that paintings that I had sold before the War, if they came back on the market, were now reselling at higher prices. I learned from one gallery owner that quite a few of my paintings were being bought by another dealer acting on commission and then being shipped off to Argentina – presumably to Jorge Arguelles. Items in my Surrealist Roll of Arms continued to be in hot demand, but I abandoned the series after a while, feeling that I was getting stale.
To coincide with the appearance of my book, I worked on what can only be described as a nonself-portrait of myself as writer. In this painting I show myself seated at a desk, pen poised over a notebook and gazing into a large mirror that is propped up on the desk, but in the shadowy background we can also see Caspar, the writer’s Doppelganger, the painter who stands with palette and brushes behind the canvas on the easel, and this second Caspar also gazes into the mirror. Their faces are the same, yet it is evident that the man who paints the portrait is not the same as the man who is writing about the painter.
Once the nonself-portrait was completed, I commenced on a new phase of experimentation. After so many years, both lean and fat, of hardship and success as a painter, I knew where I stood and it was not in the same rank as Picasso, Magritte and Max Ernst. I was a second-rate artist. Of course, second-rate is not at all bad, but still … For a long time I had been feeling that I wanted to go back to basics and make a fresh start and try to master new skills. However at my age and with my reputation it would have been ridiculous for me to go along to the Slade or Camber-well and apply to be taken on as a student. Then it came to me how I could procure a teacher without having to stir from my room in Waterloo. Over the last two or three years Belsen’s visual after-effect on my hypnagogic imagery had been fading and, though there were occasions when I would lie awake, gazing on long shuffling columns of concentration-camp victims, those occasions were now less frequent.
I determined that I would summon up an hypnagogic art teacher. I gave him a trim white beard, beret and blue blouse, called him Marcel, and provided him with canvases, paints and an easel. I believe that William Blake followed a somewhat similar procedure and received instruction from such a master in his dreams. Blake even produced a pencil-portrait of his teacher. Anyway, day after day I close my eyes and concentrate on producing Marcel and his equipment. Once he is firmly established, I set him to work, painting on the backs of my eyelids. The rhythm of Marcel’s brushstrokes is quite soporific and I have to struggle to stay awake and concentrate. I have a pencil and sketch-pad to hand all the time and, though my eyes are closed, I attempt to reproduce in sketch form, but as accurately as I can, what Marcel is painting in my head. Marcel’s face is turned away from me, so I cannot see what he is saying, if anything, but that is unimportant. I learn by looking over his shoulder and copying him. It is like Surrealist painting by numbers. Not only do I not know what I shall be painting from day to day, but I have no firm grip on it from minute to minute. Marcel always starts at the top of his canvas and works methodically down to the bottom without going back to retouch anything. However, if for example he is painting a landscape, that landscape is changing constantly while he paints. A picture which begins at the top as a distant view of Chinese junks in a harbour at sunset may end up in the foreground as a pile of wreaths laid in an English cemetery, and yet the transition from harbour to cemetery is seamless. The same is true of still-lifes, insofar as one can speak of still-lifes in the ceaseless flux of hypnagogia, so that a bowl of fruit rests on a field of fire and a vase of flowers descends into the mouth of a dolphin. Under Marcel’s patient tuition I feel that I have taken on a new identity as an artist. My control over my hypnagogia is increasing and I find that what I want to see always appears before my eyes and the colours are brighter too. Childhood bright. There can be no colour without light. Marcel is silently teaching me how to locate and make use of the inner sun of hypnagogia.
Six months after the publication of Exquisite Corpse, I received a long letter from Sweden. It was fr
om Monica. For the last three years Monica has been lecturing in the Department of Social Sciences in Stockholm, while also working on a social history of Surrealism. She wrote of course in response to the publication of my book. The letter’s tone was characteristically mocking. It began ‘I have only myself to blame I suppose, as I never thought that you had a book in you …’ Monica went on to lament the fact that people could not take out a copyright in their own lives, but she took comfort from the thought that, since her colleagues in the Social Science Department had not seen my book, they had no idea that they had a nymphomaniac in their midst. However, the chief burden of her letter was that I had misunderstood and misrepresented the nature of her researches into coincidence, so that I had made her out to be some kind of crank. She insisted that her approach to the subject had a sound philosophical basis and she quoted Schopenhauer on the subject. According to the German philosopher, all events in man’s life ‘stand in two fundamentally different kinds of connection: firstly, the objective, causal connection of the natural process; secondly in a subjective connection which exists only in relation to the individual who experiences it, and which is thus as subjective as his own dreams, whose unfolding content is necessarily determined, but in the manner in which the scenes in a play are determined by the poet’s plot. That both kinds of connection exist simultaneously, and the self-same event, although a link in two totally different chains, nevertheless falls into place in both, so that the fate of one individual invariably fits the fate of the other, and each is the hero of his own drama while simultaneously figuring in a drama foreign to him – this is something that surpasses our comprehension and can only be conceived of as possible by virtue of the most wonderful pre-established harmony … It is the great dream dreamt by that single entity, the Will to Life …’ Then Monica continued ‘Dearest Casparkins, don’t worry if you can’t understand all this. You never were cut out to be an intellectual and I fancied you just as you were.’
