The Meaning of Recognition

by Clive James

  Which brings us to the second loss, the one that will affect many people who never met her, and eventually whole generations to come, because rarely since Rex Whistler was killed in Normandy in 1944 has there been a deprivation so calculated by fate to impoverish the future. Right from her first phase, she looked destined to put into reverse the dire expectations for the next round of young British art: she could draw, her canvasses had more in them the longer you looked, and there wasn’t a dead shark in sight. At Camberwell School of Art (where she went after Bedales) she was a star student, but there was no surprise in that. She had been born into a cultivated household – her father is the writer Frederic Raphael, two of whose books she illustrated – which is always a help towards an apparent precocity, although later on things tend to even out. The real surprise was in her thematic range. Precocious wasn’t the word for it. An historical synthesis is usually something that artists attempt only later on, as the final prelude to their achieved individuality. In the initial stages they work through one influence at a time. Young Sarah seemed to have been influenced by the whole European tradition all at once, and to have absorbed the lot.

  The first thing of hers I ever saw was a postcard reproduction of one of her big oil paintings. The postcard was a magic window on the past. On the other side of the window were Cossa’s frescoes in the Schifanoia palace in Ferrara, and Paolo Uccello’s Green Cloister in Santa Maria Novella in Florence. All the colours and characters of the Quattrocento were there. But when I went to her first big solo exhibition I found that she was already out of that phase and into something less crowded, rather in the way that the young Picasso, having proved that he could paint a whole nightclub full of people, switched his attention to individuals. The first picture of hers I bought was a huge oil with almost nothing in it except a centrally placed oval mirror framing her self-portrait in the act of painting: the one and only time, as far as I know, that she used her own good looks as a subject. It was the opposite of conceit, because the other thing in the picture, down in the foreground, was a grotesque homunculus that she had borrowed from Velasquez, just as she had borrowed the idea of the painter painting himself from Rembrandt. The picture was a set of quotations, but the arrangement and the execution were all hers, and typically luscious even in their austerity. It was a picture about chance, about beauty being a fluke. But there was no fluke in the technique, and the picture was also about that: about an abundant young talent discovering how spareness, too, could be a means of expression. It was a bravura piece: look what I can do. It was also a renunciation: look what I can leave out, see how I can discipline myself to serve the purpose. Barely managing to fit my wrapped trophy into a taxi, I already knew that it would be the last of her big pictures that I would ever be able to afford. The millionaires were already moving in. New York’s Metropolitan Museum had made a purchase. Every possible prize, except of course the Turner, was getting set to drop into her lap. If you do the rounds, you run into a lot of young artists who are going to be something. But she was already something.

  Like all her admirers I wanted her first flush of enchantment to go on for ever, but she was too serious to stay with a winning streak. On the face of it, her next phase looked like a total abnegation. Suddenly her pictures were drained of colour. Nothing remained except greys, dark greens and chilly blues, and the paint itself was acrylic, almost military in its determination to be non-seductive. But you didn’t have to look long to see why. The subject matter was terror. There was no overt violence: many of the pictures just showed people walking in the park. But something was going to happen to them, or they were going to do something to someone else. Like those interrogations in Harold Pinter’s early plays that lead you to nothing except a realization of what it feels like to be helpless, these pictures summed up the anxieties of modern history without having to mention it. They were so mature that there seemed no way forward, and no need to seek it. She had discovered something uniquely hers. Regrettable for its bleakness, admirable for its truth, it was a personal manner so powerful that it would have served most artists for a lifetime.

  Then she transformed herself yet again. A working visit to the Australian desert brought all the colours back with a rush. But this time the colour was without form, except for the way that a new and ravishing pointilliste technique (it was as if a re-born Seurat had met Clifford Possum Tjapaltjari over cocktails) arranged individual grains of red dust and molecules of stone into a resplendent Mandelbrot set, a polychromatic map for chaos. Some of the paintings were enormous and all of them were tremendous. The buyers went at them like a lynch mob. At Agnew’s I walked slowly so that someone with a lot more loose change would beat me to the one I wanted most. It was fabulous, with a price-tag to match. While painting my portrait she had given me a frightening lecture on how little of the money a painter gets to keep after the gallery takes its cut, but by now she was such a hit that freedom beckoned. She could have – she always could have – just painted away in a style the well-heeled public had learned to like, while exploiting her glamour in the glossies to boost the market. But she wasn’t like that.

  There was another metamorphosis, into a kind of neo-pop summa that looked as if the sixties were getting a re-run on a bigger screen, in a better theatre. Miniature motifs were repeated and counterpointed endlessly: Philip Glass had taken up embroidery. (In 1998 she moved to Marlborough Fine Art for ‘Strip’, an exhibition that put her pop phase riotously into one room. Her last exhibition, ‘Small Objects in Transit’ – etchings and monotypes – closed there last month.) She was having fun, but it was easy to predict that she was getting ready for whatever would happen next.

  Until now, there was always something that was going to happen next. My own bet is that it would have been the real synthesis – the majestic one, not that merely sensational one she started off with. We will have to guess what it would have looked like, and at the moment guessing hurts too much. One thing we can be sure of: it would have included human figures painted to a standard seldom seen in British art since the eighteenth century. Throughout her short but lavishly fruitful career, whatever phase she was currently caught up in she never ceased to paint portraits, and her lasting reputation would be assured by them alone. They are monumental even when small, and universal even in their solitude. The National Portrait Gallery already has two of them. In the future, when Tate Modern comes to its senses and begins to concern itself with artists instead of trends, there will be a room full of Sarah Raphael portraits so that the new young artists may flock, marvel, and resolve to do likewise. They will learn, from an artist born for greatness, that it takes more than a concept to reflect life. No matter how far she strayed into the abstract, humanity was always her subject, and all the grief that went with it. Human grief gave the coherence to her exuberance, the chest-voice to her joy. For all her conspicuous blessings, it was part of her genius that tragedy was not strange to her: but to lose her so abruptly is a hard way to have it proved.

  Independent, 17 January 2001

  ALDOUS HUXLEY THEN AND NOW

  When we were young, clueless and longing to be profound, what a thrill it was to open a novel weirdly entitled Eyeless in Gaza. The thrill was doubled when the author turned out to be quoting Samson Agonistes. ‘Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.’ At one point in the text a pair of lovers are lying on the patio when a dog falls out of an airplane and explodes right beside them. A quotation from Milton and a canine kaplooey: sophisticated, or what? That, kids, was the kind of multilevel blast that Aldous Huxley used to give us when he was current. Nowadays, the titles of his books are more alive than his books, but still he won’t lie down. The legend lingers. God-like in his height, aquiline features and omnidirectional intelligence, Huxley was a living myth. He was the myth of the man who knew everything. Inevitably he attracted contrary myths designed to shrivel his looming outline. To borrow the haunting rhythm of another celebrated Huxleyan title, Point Counter Point, it was a case of Myth Counter Myth.
Among the counter-myths was the one about his holding forth on a string of topics at the dinner table. On every topic, he knew all there was to know. But a fellow guest noticed that all the topics began with the same letter. Suspicious, the fellow guest retired to the library and checked up. Huxley had been quoting verbatim from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  That particular counter-myth had an element of possibility. Huxley did indeed know his way around the Encyclopaedia Britannica, from A (‘This letter has stood at the heart of the alphabet during the whole period that can be traced historically’) to Zygote (‘the biological term for the fertilised egg ovum’). From one of his early essays we find that he owned a half-sized edition on thin paper and when travelling always had a volume of it with him. But from the same essay we learn that Huxley carried the volume only because he could not concentrate properly while on the move. From all his other writings we must deduce that when at his desk and undistracted he read everything, and not just in the humanities but in science, history, politics, sociology, psychology and religion. You name it and he’d read it. Especially he’d read it when you couldn’t name it. He made people who were merely quite bright feel worse than stupid: he made them feel narrow. In Britain, his land of origin, critical disparagement became common after his relocation to America in 1937. Even when set in Europe, hadn’t those brittle young novels – Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves, Point Counter Point – been flashily yearning for a wider world? So let him have it. But any British feelings that their star had deserted them were only an adornment to a more basic British feeling, expressed in an everyday motto you can still hear in the school playground, even from a teacher: ‘Nobody likes a clever-dick.’ Good riddance to scintillating rubbish.

  When living in Britain, Huxley was already a presence in the American slick magazines: he was an adopted figure of fashion, showing up in Vanity Fair like Noel Coward or Cecil Beaton. When living in America, he was given space in Esquire for his views and photo-spreads in Life for his beautiful face, plausibly represented as the icon of higher thought: he was up there with Einstein. Fame in America, as usual, meant fame everywhere. While he was alive, Aldous Huxley was one of the most famous people in the world. After his death, his enormous reputation rapidly shrank, until finally he was known mainly for having written a single dystopian novel about compulsory promiscuity and babies in bottles, Brave New World. For that, and for having been some kind of pioneer hippie who took mescalin to find out what would happen. Where did he go? A glib answer could be drawn from the title of his first book of madly clever short stories: Limbo. A better answer might be that he vanished into the comfort zone where names are referred to with some confidence but not for the detail of what they did. People of a certain age might still say that so-and-so is like someone out of Point Counter Point but they will probably not have read it recently or at all. Only a specialist in post Great War literature could quote from Crome Yellow or Antic Hay the way we can all quote from The Great Gatsby or Decline and Fall. In the comfort zone, a reputation is fragmented into the sort of quiz questions finely calculated to ensure that beyond a certain stage you will not go on doubling your money. Which of these books was written by Aldous Huxley? Was it (a) In Our Time, (b) Time and the River, (c) Time Regained, or (d) Time Must Have a Stop? Would you like to phone a friend?

  But the time might have arrived for Huxley’s return to the discomfort zone, where we have to deal with what he said as a permanently disturbing intellectual position (point of view, counter point of view) rather than dismissing it as an obsolete set of fads and quirks. How should we live? Can nothing harmonize the turbulence of our existence? How can we stop development from destroying the human race? The questions that racked his brain are still with us. They drove him to mysticism in the end. If we don’t want them to do the same to us, we had better find out how so clever a man should come to believe in the All, the Good, the Transcendental and a lot of other loftily capitalized words that look like panic disguised as tranquillity. Unless we are smarter than he was, which for most of us is a remote possibility, then our chances of escaping his decline into what sounds awfully like flapdoodle are remoter still. We need him back so that we can examine him. We need to know what happened in that clever head.

  Shining a light in his eyes is a good way to start, because his eyesight, or lack of it, ruled his life more than he was willing to let on. He could talk about a wall-sized Paolo Veronese as if he could see it at a single glance. Actually he had to look at it a few square inches at a time. Chief among the many merits of Nicholas Murray’s new biography of Huxley is that it appreciates the full weight of his early tragedies without overdoing the retroactive prediction of his future behaviour. But underdoing it would have been a grievous fault. One of the tragedies was the early loss of his beloved mother, another was the loss of a beloved brother, but those were merely devastating. What happened to his eyes changed the way he saw the world. Later on, as a grown man, he had to read about the discovery of antibiotics by holding his face very close to the page. Had they arrived earlier, his disease would have been cured instantly. As things were, he was left at the age of sixteen with only one eye functioning, and that only partly. He was still one of Eton’s star pupils, but from then on nothing was effortless.

  Nor should we conclude from the famous names of his school and family that he had been issued with a free pass by his background. His parents belonged to the working upper middle class, not the landed gentry. Most of the wealth in the house was the wealth of the mind, and he would have led no cushy life even had he been able to see properly. But his ruined eyes made the life of a writer into hard labour: right to the end, he was always hoping to score the hit in the theatre that would free him from the treadmill of piece-work, the forcing house of the multi-book contract, the debilitating chanciness of writing film-scripts. At the start, he showed heroic tenacity in continuing to prepare himself. At Balliol he went on reading at his usual rate of eight hours a day even if he had to do it with a magnifying glass. Sometimes not even the magnifying glass would work the trick. From his fluent prose style – it always loped along, even when its feet were no longer in contact with the earth – we could probably guess that he read Macaulay, but it is useful to be told that he read him in Braille. English was still a new subject at Oxford. Determined not to waste what was left of his eyesight on trash, Huxley read everything in English literature that mattered. He had already started to do the same in French literature while he was still at school. The result of his literary studies, formal and informal, was the solid foundation of what Murray calls his ‘wide and easy allusiveness’. We are bound to acknowledge the wide, but should put a question mark over the easy. A macaronic tendency to drag in an untranslated quotation, whether in French, German, Italian or Spanish, would be a mark of his prose for the rest of his life, and could have been a tacit claim that there was really not very much wrong with his eyes at all, if he could take in all that print. In any audience for the ballet there is someone with a bad leg who knows an awful lot about dancing.

  Against the odds posed by his comparative indigence and absolute injury, Huxley had managed to give himself a magnificent preliminary education. But somehow it had to be turned to account, or he would have lived out his life as a schoolteacher whose pupils could guy him behind his back to his face. The option of enlisting as an officer and joining the bulk of his generation in the graveyards of the Great War had been providentially removed by his affliction. Instead, his front line was Garsington, the country house where Lady Ottoline Morrell assembled around her the most glittering cenacle of the time: Bertrand Russell met T. S. Eliot’s wife there, with the usual results, and D. H. Lawrence was present to study the hyper-cultivated haute bourgeoisie that he would later despise in print for having presumed to tolerate his rebellious nature. Eyeless in Garsington, Huxley orated to the gathering because he was unable to read faces well enough to pursue an ordinary conversation. Erratically enthusiastic even in her first youth, O
ttoline was often made fun of in retrospect, and especially by the writers she fed for free. Huxley was not guiltless in that regard. Though his adult life was marked by his personal kindness, he made a cruel caricature of her as Priscilla Wimbush in Crome Yellow.

  In its form a throwback to the novels of Thomas Love Peacock, Crome Yellow teems with bright people making speeches, which often clog the action. When they make speeches, they tend to quote other speeches. Even the few dullards, wheeled in for purposes of contrast, are weighed down with learning. Take the journalist Mr Barbecue-Smith, allegedly the author of platitudinous bestsellers peddling spiritual uplift. Huxley introduces him thus:

  Mr Barbecue-Smith arrived in time for tea on Saturday afternoon. He was a short and corpulent man, with a very large head and no neck. In his earlier middle age he had been distressed by this absence of neck, but was comforted by reading in Balzac’s Louis Lambert that all the world’s great men have been marked by the same peculiarity, and for a simple and obvious reason: Greatness is nothing more nor less than the harmonious functioning of the faculties of the head and the heart; the shorter the neck, the more closely these two organs approach one another . . .