Author Archives: pau1morgan

An unfettered howl

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Francis Bacon at the Pompidou Centre, Paris

When Francis Bacon’s Three studies of Lucian Freud was auctioned at Christie’s, the painting sold for a remarkable $127 million. Bacon is not only one the most valued painters of the past 100 years (by the crude index of auction price), he is also established as one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. A major new exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris focuses on the artist’s late period from 1971 until his death in 1992.

Bacon. En toutes lettres (11 September – 20 January 2020) includes 60 paintings, with 12 triptychs. In side-chambers, readings which inspired Bacon can be heard: passages from Aeschylus, Nietzsche, George Bataille, T S Eliot, and others – carefully selected from the artist’s library by the Pompidou’s Didier Ottinger. There is more than one trap for curators when attempt to provide an exhibition with structure. Telling a simplistic story with a rigid time-line. Being over-reverent. ‘Padding out’ with works which don’t add to an exhibition’s value. Worst of all, imposition of a rigid interpretive perspective, making it harder for the viewer to come to a personal relationship with a work of art – to see it for ourselves.

Ottinger falls into none of these traps curating Bacon. En toutes lettres. The high, wide spaces allow the works to ‘breathe’ with sufficient space around them for comfortable contemplation. Labels are discreet and minimal. The book readings provide an interesting context but are not overbearing. Bacon’s paintings are left to speak for themselves. Yet they do not simply speak. They roar. They howl. They sing sweetly and weep and scream out in defiance. This exhibition is an explosion, a spectacular display of Francis Bacon’s creativity in the last twenty years of his life.

The paintings are notably different from his earlier work: sparer, more refined, and using a smaller palette of intense colours. With Bacon, we are reminded of the human body in the bloody process of being born, in the throes of sex or death, or perhaps in an operating theatre or torture chamber. We look away, then are compelled to look again. Bacon’s cool, unblinking gaze is turned onto his own grief and suffering too. A posthumous portrait of his lover, George Dyer, is especially moving. One panel of the triptych shows Dyer as a defeated boxer, twisted and bloodied on the floor, hardly recognisable as a person. Many works are coloured by the sexuality which Bacon, recognises as integral to our existence and identity. He lived for most of his life in an era when homosexuality was cruelly persecuted, yet was defiantly, brazenly proud of who he was. Bacon understood sexuality not in a narrow physiological or legalistic way, but as an acceptance and delight in our physical existence. Through all of his works, we sense this delight as well as evocation of the fear and revulsion we can feel at this mirror held up to human life and our mortality.

The portraits – like the 1976 painting of Michel Leiris in this exhibition – can seem horrific to some, as though skin had been sliced and peeled back to expose what lies beneath, like a soldier’s face mutilated by an exploding shell. Yet perhaps what is most terrifying is not the suggestion of torn flesh, but what this reminds us of – the uncomfortable realisation of our own fragility: that we are embodied beings trapped for life in a carcase of meat and destined to die, eaten up by time.

 

The final painting in the exhibition is Study of a Bull, completed a few months before Bacon’s death. The bull hovers translucently at a doorway. Behind him is sheer blackness, before him the plain background of what may be a bullring. (The dying Bacon rubbed dust from his studio floor into the painting here, a reminder of his own mortality.) The door is a bright rectangle of light. Is the bull going forward into this? Retreating into the blackness? Or is the flickering, part-transparent bull doing both? The creature is transfixed in time. Study of a Bull is a masterpiece, evoking the mystery of human existence, providing no answers, but asking all the right, thrilling questions. Bacon wrote that he hoped through art ‘to crystallise time, in the same way as Proust did in his novels’. Bacon. En toutes lettres also reminded me forcefully of a passage by Vladimir Nabokov. It could have been written in flames at the entrance to this astonishing exhibition:

Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture.

For more details of the exhibition, see the Pompidou Centre website.

Images

Triptych – In Memory of George Dyer (1971)

Portrait of Michel Leiris (1976)

Study of a Bull (1991)

There are certain summer days . . .

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There are certain summer days in England when the heat bring a hallucinatory, even eerie stillness to the landscape.

One feels that, with the next breath of wind, everything might shimmer and disappear. Beneath the glory of the hedgerows lurks the horror that this will not last.

Thomas de Quincey noted this feeling in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1819):

The contemplation of death generally, is (caeteris paribus) more affecting in summer than in any other season of the year . . . The exuberant and riotous prodigality of life naturally forces the mind more powerfully upon the antagonist thought of death, and the wintry sterility of the grave.

For it may be observed generally, that wherever two thoughts stand related to each other by a law of antagonism, and exist, as it were, by mutual repulsion, they are apt to suggest each other.

On these accounts it is that I find it impossible to banish the thought of death when I am walking alone in the endless days of summer.

 

To the bluebell wood

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In memoriam T.S.

UK Border officers dress like wannabe SS guards these days. They wear black uniforms with tight, uncomfortable collars, and squint menacingly as you file by. I feel sure one of them will pull me aside, tip up my suitcase, and demand an explanation for the little tin box full of suspicious grey dust . . .

Clearing Immigration, I passed through the endless ‘duty-free’ zone. Vodka and perfume, all the essentials of life. Like Australian airports, Heathrow is a vast, glitzy shopping mall with a parking area which happens to fit planes as well as cars. Twenty minutes later, I was in a Vauxhall SUV, heading for the motorway. I had a mission to fulfil.

I’d met Trevor through mutual friends. Somehow we got along. It’s always a mystery why we like the company of some people more than others. He was an artist. He was originally from England, but then so are thousands of other Australians. Did we recognise a similar way of looking at the world, despite differing in so many other ways? Whatever the reason, there was an inexplicable click, like two jigsaw-puzzle pieces fitting comfortably together. Catching up with Trevor and Meegan in Melbourne, we’d sit on their verandah after dinner with a bottle of wine, while he talked excitedly about his latest project.

After decades in Australia, Trevor had begun to yearn for the landscapes of his youth. Nostalgia is an especially British ailment. He started a subscription to the London Times. He spent hours on Google Streetview, humming as he re-created the bicycle rides of his boyhood down the country lanes of the 1950s. No sooner was the family back from one visit to Europe, than he began planning the next. There was one more trip in Trevor last year, but it never happened. An illness returned and he died in September. The cremated remains of a human weigh about two and a half kilograms. Trevor’s family agreed that he would want half of these buried in England.

I knew just the place.

I love to drive off straight after landing at Heathrow. I like to catch how the English landscape feels strange to me before I get used to it. Within a few hours it feels normal again, the place where I grew up. So it’s exhilarating after the long flight to set off on the M4 at 130 km per hour, down the long green corridor to the west. The motorway gives way to dual carriageways, then A roads, then narrow country lanes that I know as well as my own skin. I’ve become used to the subtler shades of the Australian bush, so the hedgerows and woodlands of Britain have an almost tropical luxuriance. As the light fades, so the foliage turns a thousand shades of green. Stopping for a coffee, I feel like a secret agent, able to pass as a local but not of this place any more. I am a spy from the past. Trevor and I used to discuss this feeling, and the strange, powerful love we all feel for the landscape where we grew up.

I reminded him of Birkin in DH Lawrence’s Women in Love, who delights in stripping off his clothes to lie in a field, ‘naked among the primroses’ and at one with the earth. In a few weeks, too, Trevor too would go to earth, his ashes dissolved into the moist and fragrant soil beneath a canopy of oak trees. The leaves would fall. There would be snow. A fox would pass by, leaving footprints lost when the next rain fell. And by the following April, bluebells would appear, to fill the woods with a hallucinatory blue haze.

Do people still use the word ‘gentleman’ these days? I hope so. Trevor was one of nature’s gentlemen. Older than me, he seemed eternally boyish. Peter Pan with a roll-up cigarette in his hand. There was a full head of hair (banished later by chemotherapy) and an impish expression. He had a modesty and curiosity about the world that was not assumed or even a virtue, but simply an innocence which he had somehow retained after the age of eight. Maybe you know the feeling of being the youngest person in the room, even when you are among the oldest. What is it to be a ‘grown up’? It’s how we expected to feel when we were older, but for some of us it never happened and never will.

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes. The ceremonial burning of the dead was practised for thousands of years until it fell into disfavour with the rise of Christianity. By the nineteenth century, it was regarded in Europe as a barbaric, primitive ritual.

Cremation became respectable again largely thanks to a Welsh doctor, William Price.

When Price’s infant child died in 1884, he built a pyre on a nearby hilltop to cremate his son. An angry mob stopped him from going ahead and Price was arrested and charged. He defended himself in court, acknowledging that there was no law stating cremation was legal, but equally there was none stating it was illegal. The judge agreed and a legal precedent was set. Within a few years, crematoria were being built all over the country.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Dr Price, one of the great eccentrics and freethinkers of the Victorian era (when there was plenty of competition). He was prominent radical and had to flee the country for a while after the Newport Rising, when troops killed dozens of Chartist marchers. A popular GP, he refused to treat tobacco smokers, was a vegetarian and an anti-vivisectionist. Dr Price despised religion, was an enthusiastic nudist and propounded free love, denouncing marriage as the enslavement of women. He promoted the Welsh language and culture, founding his own Druidic movement, mainly for the rather splendid costume, I suspect.

On his eighty-first birthday, Dr Price married for the first time, to 21-year old Gwenllian Llewelyn. They had several children and he lived well into his nineties.

On his death bed, Price’s last words were, ‘Bring me a glass of champagne’.

Trevor was one of those people ‘good with their hands’. He never knew how much I envied his easy way with the physical world. Apart from previous professional careers (air force, finance) and being an accomplished painter, Trevor could build a house . . . create a beautiful garden . . . restore a piece of furniture. My father was the same, with a shed full of tools that he took for granted all men knew how to use. Mallet. Vice. Plane. Mortice block. Spokeshave. He tried to interest me in them for years before sadly accepting my cack-handed and complete lack of interest.

I can only imagine how it feels now to walk through the world able to have such mastery over your surroundings. I wish I’d talked about this to Trevor. Did he feel more confident to know such power over his surroundings? Would you feel more a part of the material world? That you could build a wall, repair a roof, plant a new garden, fix a broken chair? As someone who has Hire-a-Hubby on speed dial, I can only dream . . .

 

Trevor painted moments rather than places. They are never dramatic, his works. Depictions of people are rare. A doorway opens into a brightly-lit corridor. Hills and hedgerows undulate into a distance that never seems to arrive. A country crossroad with a girl and a dog slipping by. What interests him is how the light falls and interacts at that very instant – the angles and reflections of sunlight in that moment of still life, never to be repeated. In their quiet, deceptively calm way, Trevor’s paintings evoke for me the horror of time passing, those photons of irretrievable moments now spinning away into the cosmos.

In 1998, astronomers detected the first body circling another star. The tally is now over 4,000 exoplanets. We can tell that some have atmospheres, even oceans. We know some are rich in minerals and even have volcanos. It is a near-certainty that life has evolved elsewhere in the universe. The nearest of these exoplanets is Proxima Centauri b, just four light years away. In other words, what we see has taken four years to travel through space at the speed of light. We are looking into the past, at where the Centurians may live. But if we can see them, perhaps they can see us.

With a powerful-enough telescope, those alien watchers would see the earth as it was in 2015. They would see Donald Trump announcing his candidacy for president. Islamic State capturing Palmyra. Ireland voting for equal marriage. They would see Trevor giving us a tour of his garden in the most exquisite detail. They could watch you, perhaps even hear what you were saying, at that exact distance in space-time ago. As Einstein insisted, ‘the distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion’. Each moment is never lost after all, but lives forever, travelling endlessly in a wave of photons across the universe.

The Summer of Acid

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People are talking about using LSD to treat mental illness again. Evidence is thin, and the plural of anecdote is not data, but my own experience was educational . . .

I learned more about music and drugs than my studies as an undergraduate. My university was ancient and deep in the countryside, comfortably nestled among the buxom green hills of Wales. While other students were innocently dancing to Abba at a campus disco, an exclusive, long-haired coterie (so we imagined) sat around a log fire in our sprawling farmhouse retreat, listening to the Velvet Underground, Spirit, or the Quicksilver Messenger Service. We took our music seriously, preferably on LPs imported from the States (which had extra-stiff covers, ideal for rolling joints). Our musical mentor was a gentlemanly dealer of the old school, more interested in expanding minds than his wallet. Drugs were not simply for recreation, he taught us, but a way to explore altered states. They were surprisingly plentiful and LSD was our substance of choice. Pure and strong, it was the Dom Perignon of drugs.

Lysergic acid diethylamide (acid) is a hallucinogenic drug which binds to serotonin and dopamine receptors in the brain. A dose of just 500 micrograms (imagine 1/10th of a grain of sand) is enough to affect someone for up to 12 hours, causing major disruption to how the brain interprets information from the senses, to the perception of time, and even to the sense of self.

A group of us took an acid trip once every week or so. Those nights lasted for days, it seemed. Time became elastic. I recall walking through the college gatehouse and making no progress despite putting one foot in front of the other. However long I walked, I remained on the same spot. Only by gripping the wall and forcing myself forward did I begin to move at last. Space and time synchronised once again, I joined my friends. Somehow they knew what had happened without a word. We took telepathy for granted. By raising my hand, I could stop time or make it run fast or slow. As I walked, I felt the air caress my skin like a cashmere scarf. All my senses were intensified and spilled over into each other. Everything was more so.

April Love (Arthur Hughes)Back at the farm, a woman on a poster began to move as she smiled and beckoned, inviting me into the Pre-Raphaelite world she inhabited. Music, too, was caught up in this synaesthesia. Sounds tumbled visibly from the speakers in coloured cubes and spheres, spilling and dissolving on the floor. After a walk at sunrise through an oak wood, we went to bed and slept all day. Waking that evening, we felt like space cowboys returning from a voyage to a strange and distant planet, our eyes still sparkling with what we had seen.

A bad trip was something we all expected eventually. We were professional trippers, we told ourselves. The standard operating procedure was to get home and feel safe, minimise stimulus, and hopefully get to sleep early. When it happened to me, this advice was no help against the conviction that devils were swooping above the house on black leathery wings, impatient to destroy and devour me. They were like Doré drawings of Satan brought to life. No sooner did I imagine something, than it appeared before me in terrifying detail. I tried hard to remain calm. Surely I would fall asleep soon. Dawn came and went. My fellow-travellers retired to bed and I was left alone with my waking nightmare. When I tried to think, a second voice rose in my mind, insisting it was me. I have never been more terrified in my life. Closing my eyes transported me to another world where demons slashed at my sides with razor-sharp scimitars. I gasped in pain. The idea of cutting my skin to part the flesh went around and around in my mind. It was an almost philosophical obsession: that I could cut one surface into two, and then slash again into smaller and smaller pieces to infinity. The dark world of the cloaked, devilish figures had always existed alongside ours, I realised. Mirrors were the doorway. I jumped from the bed and hung a blanket over the bathroom mirror. Was I safe for now? What else could I do? There were still a half-a-dozen tablets of LSD in my desk drawer – the tiny eggs from which these devils had hatched! As quickly as I could, I cut up the tabs and flushed them down the sink, remembering to put the plug in afterwards as an extra precaution. At last I fell asleep from sheer exhaustion.

When I finally woke after nearly 24 hours of unconsciousness, I thought it was all over. But it was not over. Mirrors still worried me. I remembered that Vonnegut had called mirrors ‘leaks’ into another universe in Breakfast of Champions, but that provenance did not help; alone in the house, I would still turn them to the wall. I discovered it was possible to believe something and not believe it at the same time. And then I found myself incapable of telling a barman what I wanted to drink. Standing wordless and feeling like an idiot, I couldn’t make that simple decision. The problem, in fact, preceded decision-making: I had lost the capacity to discriminate and form any preference. It extended beyond that embarrassing moment in the pub. There were trivial decisions like which shirt to wear in the morning. There were more serious matters, about which course electives to take, for example. I found it easiest to let matters flow, doing things at random without thinking about why or about the consequences. As the months went by, my friends began to notice the difference. I was careless in various ways, with things and with people. In the middle of Lent Term, I took off on a trip overseas just because I felt like it. I avoided hallucinogenics, but there were other vices to indulge. If I wanted to do something, then others would just have to accept the fact. This included my relations with an increasing number of females, both in college and in the town. Life was getting complicated. It was my year of living dangerously.

Only slowly did I recover a more robust sense of identity – of who I was and how I behaved. The madness drained away. After a year I could look in a mirror again and wonder what on earth I had been worried about. I could look my friends in the face. I could order a Pils beer with confidence. By then, we had all become more cautious after someone we knew embarked on a never-ending trip . . . the LSD brought on a first episode of schizophrenia. This is uncommon but happens if you are genetically vulnerable, and who knows what lies in your genes? Only much later did I learn to call my experience a drug-induced psychosis, with effects that were temporary. I was luckier than I knew.

Was there anything positive about that sunny summer of acid? It was a vivid lesson that subjective reality is only a construct of our senses – and yet an exquisitely sophisticated one, evolved to optimise survival. It was a reminder that normality is precious and not to be taken for granted. I’ve been left with a faint but perceptible sense of distance from everyday life, like a scientist observing an experiment. It was also an uncomfortable discovery to know how it felt to be brutally selfish in my dealings with other people: a temporary psychopath. The most important, unforeseen consequence, though, was that when I later worked in mental health, I could better understand and empathise with people affected by psychosis, due to my own first-hand experience. In the end, I am aghast now at the risk we took so casually in those days with the most complex and extraordinary thing to ever exist: the human brain.

Satan in Paradise Lost (ill. C. Doré)

Images

Arthur Hughes. April Love (1856)

Gustav Doré. Illustration for John Milton, Paradise Lost: Satan (1866).

The thankful ones

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Is there any place in Australia which does not have a war memorial?

No matter how small the town, you always see a reminder of those who left to fight for the British Empire in 1914-18 and never came home again. Teenage boys mostly, who had rarely travelled more than a day’s ride from home, they died on the other side of the planet, in France, Turkey, or the lands of the Ottoman Empire. Their names are engraved in countless plaques on the walls of Soldiers’ Memorial Halls, town halls and post offices, or most often beneath the statue of a slouch-hatted soldier in order arms position, rifle resting on the ground and head bowed in respect.

Over 400,000 Australians volunteered to fight in the First World War, out of a population of just 4.4 million– almost a quarter of the entire male population. Of these, over 60,000 never returned. For Britain, with a population ten times greater, the number of casualties was a similarly high at 700,000. The UK too, of course, has a war memorial prominent in every town and parish. Yet of all the thousands of villages in Britain, there are a few dozen where there is no memorial. Remarkably, every soldier from those places returned home alive from the trenches.

They are known as the Thankful Villages.

One of these lies in the remote west of Wales, comfortably nestled between the mountains and the sea: a place called Llanfihangel-y-Creuddyn, a farming community of rich dairy land clustered around a thirteenth century church. All around, black-and-white cows graze contentedly in tilting fields of deepest green. This is my father’s family home. I can confidently say that my family have lived here for hundreds, and almost certainly for thousands of years, working as farmers and blacksmiths – a specialty of the area. Over the years, they will have gone away to fight the Germans, the French, the Spanish, the French again, the Normans, and probably even the Romans. A dozen local men joined up in 1914 and left for the Front, serving as gunners, infantrymen, and drivers. Even the local vicar went to be a curate with the army in what is now Iraq. Every one of them came back alive, including three of my own family.

My great-uncle Silvan served in the fledgling Tanks Corps, manning a gun in one of those early metal monsters which lumbered across the hellscape of the Somme. I remember him as a sprightly farmer in his seventies. On family visits, he rescued my brothers and me from the boredom of teatime conversation, beckoning us out with a wink to help with milking the cows. An hour later, we all returned, faces streaked with milk, shoes caked in mud, and wide grins on our faces.

But not all the returned soldiers had grins, even those without bodily wounds. Growing up, we were all familiar with ‘Dai Trolley’. Every morning he walked from one end of the town to the other, pushing a trolley in front of him, turned to go back, then turned again and again until it was time to stop and go home for tea. Dai had suffered brain damage after a shell exploded near him during the allied landings in Italy. Walking all day at least kept him fit. His family knew where he was, and everyone in town kept an eye out for him. He even served as an impromptu courier service. If you wanted something delivered, you dropped it on the trolley, slipped a tip in his pocket, and phoned ahead to say, ‘Dai coming with those bulbs I promised you!’

And there was another Uncle too, a cousin of my mother. He had been in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. As children, we had heard about the camps, and talked in horrified whispers about the bamboo slivers pushed under fingernails and men crucified alive. It was almost scary to meet someone who had actually been a prisoner there. After tea with my aunt, we were taken to say hello. He spent his time in a room at the back of the house. The curtains were drawn and a coal fire burned there even on the warmest summer’s day. Here he sat, huddled by the fire, chain-smoking and staring into the flames. He tried to smile and talk to us, but his voice stuttered as he spoke and his hand never stopped trembling, sending cigarette ash tumbling over his waistcoat. His presence frightened me. In the decades since the war ended, he had rarely moved from the room. It was his safe place.

We don’t only remember the dead on Anzac Day then, but those who returned from the wars. They too paid a price which some have kept on paying.

When Actors Kiss

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   In dreams begin responsibilities   WB Yeats

Two enormous faces – each the size of a house, it seemed – leaned towards each other. Slowly they kissed, lips grazing against each other in unashamed Technicolor before the two mouths opened to each other. As I realised what was happening, I was overcome with unease and felt sick at the sight before me. Something felt terribly wrong.

I was too young to see this movie. At the age of eight, I was already in love with films. Every Saturday morning, I took myself to the local cinema where we lived in a quiet suburb of London, My taste was Disney classics or science fiction adventures, however, not the romantic drama projected in front of me now. But why was I seeing this very adult film? I can only think that my parents had tickets for a special showing and a babysitter had let them down. Off went the three of us on the Tube to the Leicester Square Odeon (half an hour distant on the Northern Line). I clutched my mother’s hand tight, always terrified of being swept off the platform by the draft of an approaching Underground train. Settled into my seat at the Odeon at last with a packet of toffee Poppets, I watched the inexplicable film. Why was nothing happening? This was so boring . . . no fights, no space rockets, no faithful animal jumping on the villain like Shadow the Sheepdog. It was just people talking! And then the climactic scene, a gigantic close-up of the two stars kissing. Who were they? Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief? Or Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun, their beautiful faces contending for our attention?

What had shocked me was this. I understood that it was two actors on the screen, simulating fictional characters, but how could they possibly act something so intimate as a kiss? Could grown-ups pretend to have emotions? A whole world of potential deceit opened up before me. It was a disturbing discovery, like finding out that Father Christmas did not exist, or that my parents had sex. (And perhaps there was an unspoken fear, that they only pretended to love me!)

Ten years later, in a philosophy class at school, I discovered that Plato shared my confusion and concerns. In the ideal state he describes in The Republic, poets and actors are banished for giving a false representation of reality. By imitating actual people, they commit a crime by leading their audience away from the truth. This is a bizarre and reductionist view of theatre and the arts, of course, but I could understand the philosopher’s horror at people pretending to be other people and simulating emotions they do not have. It’s not so far from the horror we experience when watching a zombie movie, as familiar, homely characters become the Living Dead. This reaction also recalls the fascination of ‘did they or didn’t they?’ Decades after they appeared together in Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie still get asked whether the rumour is true that they actually had sex on camera during a bedroom scene. We continue to be intrigued, confused, and sometimes troubled by the phenomenon of people acting someone completely different.

Acting is a very strange profession. Our relationships, and society in general, rely on individuals behaving consistently and ‘in character’. To pretend to be someone else, or about how we feel, is to be suspicious, untrustworthy, and possibly criminal. In a theatre, however, we give an entire profession a licence to lie. Actors ‘shape-change’ into other people, in a way that would be terrifying in real life. They not only behave, dress, and move differently, they kiss people they hardly know, as though they were lovers. They lie in bed together naked and pretend to have passionate sex. It is as though they were possessed by demons.

Over a year, a single actor might need to behave convincingly as half a dozen different people. A Tudor princess. A NSW cop. Someone in an ad, overwhelmed with joy by a new breakfast cereal. It’s a curious job description, that makes actors very special people. Does the regular pretence of emotion and intimacy affect how actors relate to others? Of course not. But they are human too. In secret imaginings, we have all done things quite unlike our usual selves. We may all have dreamed of behaving in ways quite unacceptable in real life. To have such fantasies is entirely normal. ‘The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life,’ wrote Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams.

Transgression only occurs when private dreams leak across into ‘actual life,’ when other people are affected – for example, if the fantasy of a flirtatious relationship with a colleague slips into unwelcome touching and harassment. In dreams begin responsibilities: we might imagine something in our heads, but are culpable for acting on it in a way unwanted by another person. Recognising that distinction is an important part of growing up, and one that I was still too young to understand as those gigantic lips met above my head at the Leicester Square Odeon. For some people, however, it seems this distinction eludes them long after childhood.

Image: Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun (1951).

Odyssey

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Twin Towers (Image: Simon Leventhal)

Review
THE YEAR EVERYTHING CHANGED
Phillipa McGuinness (Vintage, 2018)

Every era imagines its own future. We always get it wrong, of course; often comically, sometimes tragically. The year 2001 was emblematic of ‘the future’ for decades, thanks to Stanley Kubrick’s visionary film of the same name. Videophones! Robots! Spaceships elegantly ascending to a Strauss waltz!

With the approach of the new millennium, we imagined The End of History, as Francis Fukuyama put it in his 1992 book. In the post-Cold War world, nuclear weapons would be dismantled and conflicts peacefully resolved. The ‘world wide web’ would dispel ignorance and distribute knowledge to all. Liberal democracy would spread inevitably as market forces created educated, progressive middle classes around the world.

How the gods must have laughed at our hubris as reality unfolded . . .

See the rest of this review in the June 2018 issue of Australia Book Review.

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

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heroA HERO FOR HIGH TIMES
Ian Marchant (Cape, 2018)

When punk hit the fan in the late 1970s, I was already at university, writing a thesis on Nabokov’s Lolita. At Friday night dances, the ancient timbers of our college trembled as we pogo-danced on the spot, arms raised in the air and singing along at the top of our voices: ‘SEX . . . DRUGS . . . ROCK . . . ROLL!’ The song was a punk anthem by Ian Dury. The band was the Repeaters. I know them well, and the singer, 20 year-old Ian Marchant, was a chum of mine. After the gig, the night was still young – it’s remarkable that so many of us survived those years with our mental and physical health more-or-less intact.

Click your heels three times, and in 2018 Ian is a respectable grandfather, novelist, author of three acclaimed travel memoirs, and regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 4. In all other respects, he is thankfully just the same. Ian’s new book – A Hero for High Times – is an attempt to write a history of what was once known as the ‘counter culture’, or in his word, ‘the freaks’.  From the 1950s Beats via hippies and punks to the New Age travellers of the 1990s, he traces the lineage of these groups which revolted against society to embrace a life of self-exploration (not to mention, self-indulgence) with wilful, adolescent exuberance. You get the picture.

Every generation believes it is unique and special. There is a good case to be made, however, that those who grew up in the second half of the twentieth century were indeed exceptional. A combination of factors contributed to this, especially free access to health services and university education in post-war Britain. The big three reasons, though, were celebrated in Dury’s song: sexual freedom following introduction of the contraceptive pill (remember Larkin’s much-quoted lines from ‘Annus Mirabilis’: ‘Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) /Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP’). Recreational drug use went mainstream in the 1960s – for good or ill – with everything from cannabis to LSD and heroin easily available. Most important was rock’n’roll; the 1960s were to music what the 1590s were to the English language.

Coming of age in this era which Ian Marchant records was a joy we took for granted at the time. Ian does a good job of tracking the antecedents of this beat-hippy-punk-traveller DNA, noting early-century enthusiasm in Germany and California for ‘natural living’ (i.e. nudity, free love, soyburgers). He is an experienced, natural teacher and raconteur, skilfully explaining a complex thread of social history over the course of a century. Yet the book would have been closer to a sociological study if this were all it did. And after all,  a number of other works have already attempted to write a history of the counter culture. The genius of A Hero for High Times is that Ian alternates chapters of social history with a biography of his friend, Bob Rowberry, who lived these times in the fullest sense.

Bob’s story reads like a picaresque novel: Tom Jones’ adventures updated to Cool Britannia. He came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a Soho ne’re-do-well (doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that). He recalls a teenage Eric Clapton practising his banjo in a coffee bar. Within a few years, helped by his entrepreneurial spirit and a rich girlfriend, Bob had a successful business running a clothes shop on Carnaby Street (featured in Vogue) with some drug-dealing on the side. Needing a little more entertainment, he set off for Afghanistan, armed and leading a convoy of vehicles to smuggle back an industrial quantity of cannabis hidden beneath hundreds of afghan coats (the hippie uniform) – the first to be sold in Europe. You feel his time in Kabul was Bob’s golden age: living with his glamorous ‘posh’ girlfriend on their own estate, doing deals, and riding off on a motorbike with a rifle on his back, to shoot a deer for dinner. Through the 1960s and 1970s, he is everywhere where it’s at, and with anyone who is anyone. He sold acid to RD Laing and half the performers at Glastonbury. (The drug was produced at Europe’s biggest LSD laboratory, hidden in the Welsh mountains near where Ian and I lived at the time.) Similar dealings with another band led to them adopting the name of Bob’s cat, Procol Harum. He was a behind-the-scenes fixer at the legendary Isle of Wight Festival. Caught smuggling in Iraq, he was interrogated by Saddam Hussein but managed to escape. Living in Mexico, he is imprisoned by a corrupt police chief, but freed by a popular uprising. And on the tales go on.

It’s possible half of Bob’s stories are as tall as they are wide-boy. But that is their charm. If even a quarter of his tales are true, that’s a bonus. Alternating Bob’s life with Ian’s chronicles of alternative culture gives the book a dynamic authenticity that either alone would have lacked. The history peters out in the mid 1990s, a time when, Ian claims, the counter culture faltered and failed. Youff no longer celebrated authentic music, rebellion, and innocent hedonism as he did at their age. But isn’t this the complaint of every passing generation? A more likely explanation is that the author, like his hero Bob, belatedly entered middle age around that time, settled down after a fashion, and began to see things differently. For example, like him or not, Jeremy Corbyn is barely mentioned, and  there is no mention of the massive push for social change driven by young people, which has made Labour the biggest party in Europe, with over half a million members. The index has a fulsome entry on Hippies, but nothing about the importance of Hip-hop (in the year Kendrick Lamar has been recognised with a Pulitzer Prize). Music made by young people today is as creative and exciting as it has ever been, from southern California (Knower, The Internet) to the current London jazz explosion (Nubya Garcia, Shabaka Hutchings).

It is the fate of youth to be idealistic and exuberant. It is the fate of age to decry that fings ain’t wot they used to be. In A Hero for High Times, Ian Marchant manages to keep both perspectives in focus with this thoughtful and highly entertaining book.

What becomes of the broken-hearted?

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Cover: Bookshop of the Broken-Hearted

The Bookshop of the Broken-Hearted
Robert Hillman (Text Publishing, 2018)

‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,’ wrote Theodor Adorno.

For a whole generation after World War Two, few novels were written about the Holocaust. It seemed too soon. Only in the nineteen-eighties did writers feel more confident that they could write about it without throwing the typewriter across the room with a cry of horror and despair. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron and Thomas Keneally Schindler’s Ark (both published in 1982) showed it was possible to write about the fate of the Jewish people under the Nazi regime with sensitivity as well as a clear artistic purpose. Since then, the Holocaust has become a frequent background for both fiction and movies, including the highly-praised Book Thief by Markus Zusak, another Australian like Keneally. For any writer, the dangers of writing about that period are legion; how easy to stray into treating what happened with mere sentimentality, a lack of the right kind of respect, or – almost worse – to bring that cruelty and horror into the domain of the normal through familiarity.

Robert Hillman ventures into this perilous territory with a new novel, The Bookshop of the Broken-Hearted. The year is 1968. A farmer, Tom Hope, has lost his wife, Trudy, not once, but twice. She runs away first to be with another man, and then again to join a religious cult. To add injury to injury, she abandons a child with him for a few years – long enough for the farmer and the boy to bond and love each other – and then takes him away again. Bemused and alone again, Tom considers himself a hopeless husband, a hopeless man. At this point, a newcomer opens a bookshop in the local town: Hannah Babel, an immigrant from Hungary. The plot is sprung.

Tom Hope is a simple man. A dab hand with farm equipment, metalwork, or a sick sheep, he is ‘soft,’ reluctant even to shoot a wild dog that is killing his sheep. He has few words, seems ignorant of the wider world, is passive, dull even – just the sort of man a wife would leave, you imagine. Hannah appears a familiar literary character at first. An attractive ‘continental’ (read, ‘Jewish’) woman arriving in a conservative country town: sophisticated, educated, well-dressed, and setting the feathers flying among the men.

The town is full of memorable characters, from the randy butcher to the eternal spinster. There is a flood. There is a wedding. There is a murder. More than one, in fact . . . around six million in total, including Hannah’s first husband and little boy who are killed in Auschwitz. Here, then, is the challenge Hillman sets his characters: how can you bear to live, let alone love, after such tragedy, such loss? How can you have hope? Into this maze, Robert Hillman leads his characters in The Bookshop of the Broken-Hearted.

Hillman is a practised and masterful storyteller. The plot is ‘frictionless,’ carrying the reader forward eagerly as the pages are turned. Description of people and places is spare; the narrative pauses only occasionally with a telling detail. This is most obvious with ‘Hometown’. ‘You can’t have a wedding without sausage rolls,’ Hannah is firmly told by Bev from the CWA. Anyone who has lived in the country will recognise Hillman’s affectionate, sharply-drawn evocation of the suffocating yet also comforting familiarity of small town life. Once Tom and Hannah become lovers and marry, they begin to change. The reader’s initial impressions of them are forced to change too.

In Hannah’s presence, Tom is forced to grow up. His relationship with his first wife, Trudy, was in monochrome, either adoration or bleak despair. With Hannah, he learns about love as coming to understand that someone else actually exists in the same way he does, and the extraordinary struggle to accommodate sharing one’s existence with another person. This is profoundly true as he discovers Hannah’s past; she even has to educate him about the existence of the death camps and who the SS were. He learns the tenderness with which to manage her feelings, while at the same time, preserving his own integrity as a person. This becomes a crisis when his little step-son, Peter, runs away from his mother to be with Tom. The thought of having a little boy in the house and developing affection for him is unbearable to Hanna, whose own son was taken from her at Auschwitz to be murdered. She feels there is no choice but to flee.

Hannah, too, changes in Tom’s presence. We learn more about her experiences in the 1940s. It is as though the reader sees a pencil sketch turn to an oil painting with colour and subtle depths. Her initial exotic ‘cosmopolitan’ persona is revealed as a protective outer layer to her character, as she lowers her defences with Tom. He (and the reader) begin to see her complexity and pain and courage to somehow carry on living with the burden of horror she has known.

Among other things, The Bookshop of the Broken-Hearted is a portrait of a good marriage. Being together challenges Hannah and Tom to mature and to become better people. They learn when to compromise and when to not. They learn when to be together and how to be happily apart. Tom can never completely know Hannah’s pain, but he knows its shape and how to respect its presence. In Rilke’s telling phrase, ‘Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.’

In Robert Hillman’s impressive canon, The Bookshop of the Broken-Hearted is possibly the best book he has ever written.

 

Image: Text Publishing

The Lampeter Brethren: A Victorian Sex Cult

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St David’s College, Lampeter, is the smallest university in the UK. It’s the oldest in England or Wales after Oxford and Cambridge.  It’s also the furthest away from, well . . . anywhere really. When I arrived – after leaving school and a year away in Germany – I was charmed. It’s a feeling that’s never left me.

Lampeter is an ancient market town nestled comfortably in the hills of mid-Wales, hundreds of kilometres and across a mountain range from the nearest city, distant from any motorway or railway line. The only way to get there is to drive for hours along winding narrow roads sheltered by high hedges tangled with honeysuckle. It’s a bother to get there, and I suspect that’s just the way the locals like it. Listen to conversations on the High Street for ten minutes and you will learn the price of a cow, that the beer at the Black Lion hasn’t been the same since the brewery took over, or that Daniel Price was seen sneaking in the back door of Mrs Jones the baker’s again.

Across an ivy-covered wall lies the College. Wide lawns lead to a tower and spires enclosing a peaceful quad where a fountain plays next to the Gothic chapel. It is the last place you would expect to find after driving for the day across the Cambrian Mountains. There were fewer than a thousand students. A typical day could involve a morning tutorial discussing Beowulf and the intricacies of Anglo-Saxon poetry; an afternoon walking or horse-riding in the hills, and then an evening in a pub with some local girls. After midnight, a group of us might solemnly place tablets of LSD on our tongues to see the true nature of the world revealed.  We would wander in the woods all night, able to stop and start time with a wave of the hand, hiding from neon dragons and following mermaids floating among the branches. In those years, it was as if pages of Brideshead Revisited, Under Milk Wood, and The Electric Kool-Acid Acid Test had been sewn together at random to tell our story.

Like every generation, we believed ourselves unique, with a special understanding of the world. Over a century before, another student at Lampeter had a more dramatic revelation. Henry Prince studied divinity at the College before becoming an Anglican priest. He was convinced that the end of the world was near, and that he alone knew the key to salvation. To be saved, the sinful flesh would need to be united with the Holy Spirit. The sinful flesh would belong to the richer, female members his congregation. The Holy Spirit was himself. This was a clever  and convenient reversal of centuries of Christian tradition. Instead of condemning and repressing sexuality, original sin would be expunged by celebrating the pleasures of the flesh.

Prince had considerable gifts of persuasion, using charm and evangelical enthusiasm to excite the audience in more ways than one. His first congregation was converted en masse, no mean achievement in Victorian England. Men and women of all classes flocked to his sermons. After moving Prince around various parishes in an attempt to reduce his influence, the Church of England eventually defrocked him. This was the making of the renegade priest.

Followers of the Lampeter Brethren now numbered several hundred, including many wealthy families and professional people who looked after its affairs. There were lawyers, a doctor, and even an estate manager. Together, they bought a 200-acre estate near Glastonbury in Somerset and built a village clustered around a mansion and protected from prying eyes by a 4-metre high wall. The community was called the Abode of Love. Here, Prince introduced the Holy Spirit into one of his many ‘spiritual wives’ by having sex with her in front of the congregation as an organ played a celebratory hymn. This was called, ‘the Great Manifestation’. There is no record of whether this was followed by applause.

A journalist from the Illustrated London News managed to penetrate the Abode in 1851, expecting to find scenes of depravity to delight his prurient readership. He was disappointed. Apart from the swinging culture, as we would call it now, the place was the epitome of cultured upper-class comfort. Unlike most Victorian men with their bushy sideburns and beards, the males kept their hair short and were clean-shaven. The women, too, cut their hair short and dressed in simple, comfortable clothes. Billiards was apparently a passion of the women at the Abode. They loved to be in the fresh air too, and had their own hockey teams. They kept horses and hunted with hounds. In a peculiarly English manner, this ‘sex cult’ served its own blend of tea every afternoon at 4 pm.  With an unconvincing attempt at disapproval, the journalist noted that ‘they have converted the chapel into a banqueting house, and substitute feasting and enjoyment for privation and prayer’.

‘If God be not life, happiness, and love,’ said one of the family, ‘then we do not know what God is.’

Prince was undoubtedly a rogue who financially and sexually exploited some of his female followers. At the same time, many of the most enthusiastic members of the Lampeter Brethren were women of all ages who seem to have relished the personal and sexual freedom which the Abode gave them in the repressive Victorian age.

They were ‘very willing followers – his recommendations are so pleasant,’ the journalist acknowledged. This willingness caused a scandal when three daughters of the wealthy Nottidge family joined the Brethren. After the fourth sister, Louisa, ran away to join them, it was one heiress too many for the family. They had Louisa kidnapped and certified insane by a compliant doctor. After nearly two years locked away in an asylum, she managed to escape and sued her family for abduction and illegal imprisonment. Louisa won the case, and returned to spend the rest of her life happily at the Abode with her sisters and friends.

The Nottidge case was one of Wilkie Collins’ inspirations for his famous suspense novel, The Woman in White. There are interesting associations between Collins and the Lampeter Brethren (apart from his own domestic arrangements – living with two mistresses and their children). Louisa Nottidge was declared sane and freed from the asylum after being examined by the Metropolitan Commissioner in Lunacy. It so happened that the Commissioner was Bryan Procter, a friend of Collins (as was his daughter, the feminist, Adelaide Procter). Wilkie Collins also knew Adelaide’s friend, Frances Cobbe, whose brother was a a senior member of the Lampeter Brethren and married to one of the other Nottidge sisters. Frances was a lifelong friend of Collins, and became one of the leading feminist theorists of the Victorian era – producing provocative pamphlets such as What Shall We do with Our Old Maids? And Celibacy vs Marriage, arguing for female economic and personal independence. There is a final link. When Henry Prince died, his associate John Pigott took over as leader of the Lampeter Brethren. He was the nephew of Wilkie Collins closest friend, Henry Pigott.

As new members joined and funds flooded in, the Brethren decided to build a mighty centre in London. It was called the Ark. At first sight, it seemed a regular church, built in the Gothic Revival style with a tall spire. The four corner turrets bear stone scrolls bearing the ambiguous words, ‘God is Love’. The Art Nouveau stained glass windows were designed by the celebrated artist, Walter Crane, inspired by mystical scenes from William Blake’s writings. Two women from the Brethren community were closely involved in this building: the architect, Violet Morris and her sister, Olive, who had trained as an engineer as well as being an expert wood carver (responsible for the Ark’s pulpit and lectern).

Henry Prince died in 1899. The world, after all, had not come to an end as he predicted. The Lampeter Brethren accepted this disappointment bravely, ‘uniting the spirit with the flesh’ in the comfort of their country estate, with free love, fox-hunting, and good food and wine to soften the blow. The community slowly dwindled in the twentieth century, as changing social mores lessened the need for it. In 1957, the last member, one of the Pigott’s ‘spiritual wives,’ died and the properties were sold.

And what of St David’s College where it all started? The little town of Lampeter is almost unchanged. The college is now a campus of the University of Wales, specialising in the humanities. There are still fewer than a thousand students, and the divinity school has been cleverly broadened with courses in Islamic studies, Daoism, and Confucianism. Saudi and Chinese donors have been persuaded to make generous endowments, contributing to the survival of the College. I like to think that Henry Prince would have smiled and approved.