Jidney: ‘I don’t know, think about nothing much, sit in the park, have a lager, trace kingdoms in the dust.’
Jones: ‘Do you feel different from other people?’
Jidney: ‘I don’t know. I’m no one except when I’m in power. When I’m not in power I sleep – I dream to pass the time. When I wake, when I’m in power, it’s nothing but a single jump to murder – not the time a sigh takes to ask for pity, not the length of a scream.’
Jones: ‘What about the other person’s right to live?’
Jidney: ‘Right? What do you mean exactly? I’d like to know more about what’s behind that remark.’
Jones: ‘I’m asking if you ever respect other people.’
Jidney: ‘Power isn’t based on respect. Still, the answer’s simple enough – I can’t live unless I can match my hunger to my greed. So let’s suppose it was you I’d picked for my victim. I’ll tell you what we’ll do – we’ll multiply my pain by yours, multiply it by two or twelve or twelve hundred or twelve thousand; I’ll unpack the Sony, set it up and we’ll film the whole movie, the full tragedy, the trusting flesh really sprayed out, the meal splayed out in rotten corners, mottled with horror.’
Jones: ‘Earlier you told me that you once let a meal go.’
Jidney: ‘That was Christine. Have I already told you about her? Did I tell you how I was coming to her and she looked me straight in the eyes and said: “If you’re so strong, why do you always take life, never save it?” I turned away from her, shrunken. That’s when I learned that power could never destroy power.’
Jones: ‘Tell me what made Christine so powerful.’
Jidney: ‘I realised that she wanted the whole answer and that she wasn’t frightened of it.’
Jones: ‘Weren’t you afraid she would betray you if you let her go?’
Jidney: ‘I knew she would never betray me, and she never did – if she’s dead by now, it’s not through me. I told her, I’ve got nowhere to go, so you’ll have to come with me, and she said, But I’m luckier than you, I have got somewhere to go, there’s a door here right in front of me, and she just walked through it; I never saw her again. She caused the one after her that I took later the same night to suffer more, that’s all – I said as I went into the second one Well, if I can’t beat life, I’ll at least make sure it can’t answer back.’
Jidney was silent for several minutes; Jones let him be.
Jones: ‘You’ve been quiet for a while now, Ronald, but I don’t want you to stop talking yet, so I’m going to take your hand again and lead you out of the silence. It’s calm here under this tree, it’s in bloom, come and see, it’s sunny, look at the clouds, can’t you smell flowers on the wind?’
Jidney: ‘No. We’ll go out again and have another wreck. Since death’s so final let’s have plenty of it. Life’s difficult? Let’s make it impossible! I chose each of you in your dark corner where you’d been waiting for me for years – Ann! Daphne! Judith! Flora! Wait, all of you! I can hear you fluttering, trapped in the sitting-room corner, little grey wings, little birds! I put my hand into the cage – I can smell the first one, Gerda, that old prostitute I knocked off when I was just a kid! You all knew I’d come, and I had the courage to come for you, and now here I am. A quick twist, the pleasure – don’t forget how grateful you all were to me. Gratitude? What thanks do I get? Are you laughing at me?’
Jones: ‘Nobody’s laughing.’
Jidney: ‘Somebody is, I can hear it. You could kill me with that, I can’t stand it, it’s like a stake through the heart.’
Jones: ‘I’m going to wake you now, Ronald. You won’t remember what you’ve been saying when you wake up, do you understand?’
Jidney: ‘Yes.’
Jones: ‘I shall count to ten. You won’t remember anything.’
Jidney: ‘That’s right. I won’t remember. I won’t understand anything. I know nothing. I am nothing.’
29
Next day Stevenson, myself, Crowdie and Dr Jones were sitting with Jidney again at the prison. Dr Jones had said to us beforehand: ‘The psychotic has very definite aims.’
Now, when Jidney had joined us, Jones said: ‘You have a very real purpose in being mad.’
Jidney: ‘Yes. The purpose is to put increasing pressure on meaning.’
Jones: ‘Yet the desire to be invisible is itself impossible and therefore mad.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Jidney, ‘but even so, the overriding idea is to force the god out of its corner, to make it explain, compel it to appear, to account for itself. The intensity of focus on the objective and desire for it is in direct ratio to its attainability – the more unrealisable the objective, the more overwhelming the need to grasp it – despair in the knowledge that it is unattainable being so deep that it is blotted out – indeed, the sufferer’s entire personality is blotted out.’ He turned to a warder who, incredibly, was studying for the church in his spare time and said: ‘I am here, therefore God is obliged to love me. If God is in all of us, then I must make others helpless, because that is the only way I can make the god in them listen to me – they’ll never do it as free agents, of their own accord.’ He turned away from us and added: ‘I look out of this window, and everything outside, the sky, the trees out there, is bright, empty. Life is so bleak, I can’t tell you how bleak.’
Later the same day, while we were having a break for tea, he remarked out of the blue: ‘It’s quite real. I feel it coming – death comes in and we stand looking down together at what I have done and say to each other: “Yes, what we have done here is quite real.”’
Later, Jones took us aside and said, out of Jidney’s hearing: ‘Let’s recapitulate. Jidney’s terror is so great that he has been cemented into it – the rest is bravado, the shallow front of horror. But of course his fear must express itself, and it does so in the form of his distorted, nightmare recital, the grotesque re-enactment of injuries to himself and others. Let us divide Jidney into Self 1 and Self 2. Self 1 is not really aware of his actions, even though he knows he is present – Self 1 mustn’t, and therefore can’t, be aware of them, because the whole point of the entire Jidney’s attempting the impossible is that Self 2 should bear the entire responsibility for what Self 1 knows perfectly well is wrong. But Self 2 enables Self 1 to disclaim all knowledge of right and wrong. The entire raison d’être of Self 2, the reason for his creation, is that he should in turn visit the terror on a third person (the victim), an action of which Self 1 is completely unaware, thus discharging it from the consciousness of Self 1, who has always been and must always remain innocent. The function of Self 2 is to shield Self 1 from all terror, absolve him of all responsibility, all guilt, all knowledge, even. But, because both selves know that this joint operation is an impossible one, neither can ever be satisfied with the result so that, just as in the case of certain mythological judgments – Sisyphus, for example – it has to be repeated for ever.
‘So, you see, what we have in front of us is a man engaged in a nightmare attempt to banish his own shadow – indeed, the well-worn phrase “being frightened of your own shadow” takes on a new meaning.’
* * *
The next morning Jidney met us again in the room that had been set aside for us in the prison and told us that he had had a dream about God. ‘God took me by the sleeve and said: “Do you see all those people killing each other?” “What?” I said. “Do you mean they can really feel all that pain? Who’s responsible?” “I am,” said God. “I never told man that I didn’t exist. I’m on everybody’s side, which means that I could never have existed.” “It sounds to me as if you had been invented,” I said to God. “There is great power in invention,” God answered, “you should know.”
‘I have always had these conversations,’ Jidney added, ‘sometimes with God, sometimes with absent or dead people. Some of them I know, the others introduce themselves. I hear them as clearly as I hear you –
’ he pointed to his head ‘ – in here.’
Going on to talk about his art, he explained to us that he was the new evangelist.
‘The challenge in art,’ he said, ‘is to be continually on the edge of truth without ever going over it.’
He insisted that any sportsman, murderer or artist would tell you the same, and that he himself existed in all three.
The following is from some notes that were taken of what Jidney said the same afternoon:
‘What is a revolution? It is a situation in which the judges are put on trial, overturned by popular mood. The parental promise has been broken, the nurse has failed the patient, the doctor has gone on an indefinite holiday when in fact the fever was at its height and the people has woken to find itself as abandoned as I was, the sheets filthy, the blanket stolen, the ward empty. So it took the blind, instinctive measures of despair.
‘I am a paradigm of all that is desperate in society. All its illnesses are to be found in my illness; not to interpret me correctly is to interpret nothing correctly. Not to interpret what is alienated in society is not to interpret the causes of the facts lying on the floor with their skirt over their head and a knife through them. The purpose of language and art itself is to tell us . . . ’
Jidney was taken ill at that point and we had to break off there.
30
‘Before he arrives,’ said Dr Jones, as we waited for Jidney’s warders to usher him back into the room, ‘I should like to give you the benefit of an idea I’m developing for a conference later on in the year.’ He took some papers out of his briefcase. ‘Let us see if we can make an appreciation of Jidney from another angle, based on what we have learned about him so far.’
We waited.
‘Since we have recovered several samples of Jidney’s artistic work, it might be instructive to compare his work to the work of a great painter who recently died and to see whether, and if so to what extent, it is possible to equate the artist’s view of society with the assassin’s. Accordingly I have taken a recent assessment of the painter’s work (I apologise to the author for adapting it) and have replaced the painter as the subject for discussion with Jidney, thus placing Jidney at the easel – or, if you prefer, causing the painter to commit a murder in the place of a work of art. I shall now read this to the group, and I think you will agree with me that the curious and not uninteresting result is tinged with frightening overtones of the absurd, which I hope to use as a basis for further study.’
He gazed at us across the top of his spectacles but, as we did not react, he merely said: ‘Here goes, then’ and began: ‘It seems to me, first, that we risk a tendency to overvaluate Jidney, to get him out of proportion – to raise the stakes too high, or drive them in too deep. He enjoys the reputation at the moment, as he goes to trial, of being the most celebrated mass killer in the country. This has nothing to do with his being at the forefront of murder, it seems to me. Except at the very outset of his career Jidney has been out of step with the motions of contemporary murder. No, his particular fame rests partly on our placing him as the last outpost, or possibly the last gasp, of the great assassinating tradition in sexually-linked murder – it rests on our placing him alongside killers with the status of, say, de Rais, the Ripper, Christie and, more contemporaneously, of Nilsen and Bundy, Gacy and Dahmer. And it is partly to do with seeing Jidney as the assassin of our time, to do with the almost musical pleasure that he derived from gaining financially from his victims – from the psychotic experience of the killings themselves (raised, in his own mind, and on his own admission, to virtually symphonic proportions) – that he is upgraded to the position he now enjoys.
‘Hs stands as a murderer who provides pre-eminently a portrait of his age. It corresponds perfectly to one of the age’s self-images – its conviction that it knows more about horrors than any previous age. Jidney’s career has satisfied that criterion, even confirmed it. Speaking to colleagues who have examined him, he has seemed to several of them to represent what amounts to a heroic act, yet another proof of our capacity to face and outface the worst. But this is a light from which he should be retrieved. To see Jidney’s work as an unmitigatedly appalled and appalling statement of the condition of modern man and woman is misleading, for Jidney’s work can also be seen as the psychotic version of comic art, and this is not paradoxical – horror and comedy are often allied.
‘Looking at three of his earlier murders, as in the course of examination he has provided us with asides on them, it could be observed that it was only what could be termed the sincerity of his disgust, expressed in the savagery of his actions, that saved them from what would otherwise be mere grand guignol. But why assume that unless Jidney is truly, madly, deeply disgusted, unless he is transmitting a sensation of pure torment, then he must be some kind of phoney, an accused man trying to find a gap between medical knowledge and retribution in order to avoid punishment? That is to ask for an opus without internal drama and without overt performance. One could hardly apply such strictures to Ronald Jidney. Jidney is, frankly, a flesh-creeper. His life has been devoted to making flesh creep, slip, seep, burst, smear, crawl and leave a trail of blood. But he has accomplished this with terrific sweep and flair and verve. In spite of his talk yesterday of working directly from and upon the nervous system, his work is no stranger to display. Blood perhaps, but with gusto.
‘You will remember that we were all present when one of my colleagues, in what was intended to be a devastating rebuke, compared Jidney’s activities to Walt Disney’s. He noted “the surprising formal similarities of their work.” And it is an observation that sticks, in my mind at least. Consider the typical Jidney scene, as typified by the video recording in the vault – the body writhing as he sexually assaults it on the existential bedsit stage. Everything that is not flesh, everything that his method will not take to – clothes, furniture, other props – is visualised in a bold and bright notation. And even the bodies themselves, acting out the bouncy lines that their torment lends them, are like cartoons, only violently mixed-up ones. What makes Jidney’s damaged bodies so particularly alarming, in fact, is that they are cartoon personages whose conventional invulnerability has suddenly been broken through. Yet, at the same time, the victim retains in her appearance something of the cartoon’s ability to “bounce back”. To explode, in cartoon terms, is not a catastrophe: it is its métier. This fact limits Jidney’s ability to record the actual catastrophes that he causes – hence his apparent objectivity, insouciance even (except under hypnosis) when describing them. Even when he was describing the murder of his own mother, which happened in front of him, there was little he could do in language to distinguish this cardinal death from the inevitable disaster areas into which he converted every human figure.
‘We must never forget, of course, the horrible difference between the artist and the psychotic – the first works of course from the model, the second immediately from the flesh; painting was never, and could never have been enough for Jidney; you do not have to be knowledgeable in art to realise that Jidney, whatever his aspirations, had little or no talent for the canvas. Having said that, however, Jidney was very much a performer, his work a visual display of his perpetual, internal making, unmaking and remaking. He speaks often of “vulgarity” as the element to be avoided, to be destroyed by subjecting it to various “controlled accidents” – introducing the “irrational” and then “taking advantage of whatever happens next”. He has an enormous, one might say an irrepressible gift for reducing a lively, fleshly surface to chaos, and the caricaturist’s knack of extracting a likeness from chaos. It was this illustrational impulse that required the flesh of his victim to disperse; it then recouped these pieces into what seems to us disturbingly ungraspable swerves of flesh, half optical blur, half physical slurp.
‘Risk was of course at the heart of Jidney’s work. There was the risk that the accident might prove unusable. There was also the risk that the att
empt at an image would coalesce into mere proficiency. In certain scenarii a delicate balance was maintained between the image and the virtuoso formal invention. But the despised “vulgarity” was always lurking there, sustaining the effects, and sometimes peeping through a little too much – suggesting that if the distorting operation was suspended entirely, only a glib facility would emerge. In his later work, it can be seen that those ungraspable ectoplasmic manifestations settled down into something straighter. Jidney describes faces (in the Flora Borthwick case, for example, and that of Ann Meredith) as appearing in slick and often cute solidity – the flesh only marginally smeared; he recalls observing what would, in his earlier period (which, after all, spanned thirty years) have been once-evanescent highlights determining themselves in his memory as a blob on the end of a nose. As we have all seen in his last work, the Meredith case, the body had become a twisted and amputated cartoon, a Disney nightmare. Jidney’s hand and “vulgar skill”, as he refers to it himself, were then on show too clearly.
‘Jidney should not be over-revered on his insane pedestal. He is a brutal murderer, not the great worker in human suffering and mortality that he would like to be described as being – indeed, often believes that he is. Leaving aside, if that were possible, the abominable terror, suffering and death that he has caused, his effects (even, with hindsight, to himself) were very much surface effects, with only a very transient ability to satisfy him – if you like, one aspect of his madness was his unwearying pursuit of the impossible, his sad, obsessional drive to recreate the experience until it did permanently satisfy him.’
‘My purpose in this inquiry through substitution of one career for another, that of a painter of violence with a violent man, gentlemen, has not been to equate the artist with the assassin, but merely to attempt to argue whether, and to what extent, a comparison between the two states is possible, and, if so, where, to what extent, and why.’
Dead Man Upright Page 20