Exquisite Corpse

by Robert Irwin

  Also available from The Overlook Press

  THE ARABIAN NIGHTMARE

  PRAYER-CUSHIONS OF THE FLESH

  NIGHT AND HORSES AND THE DESERT:

  An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature

  Copyright

  This paperback edition first published in the United States in 2003 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  New York

  www.overlookpress.com

  NEW YORK:

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  Copyright © Robert Irwin, 1995

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-46830-774-0

  Dedication

  For Oliver Sorge who taught me all I know about writing.

  Contents

  Also Available from the Overlook Press

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note to the Second Edition

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Author’s note to the second edition

  ‘Books have their destinies.’ The first edition of this memoire, or rather it should be anti-memoire, was published only last year. What need for a second edition so soon after the first? The answer is that within a few months of the publication of Exquisite Corpse and in response to its publication certain things happened which forced me to re-examine the events it described and to look on them in a new light. When I look back at what I first wrote, I laugh, though really I should weep. I thought that I could look back on the past as if through a window, but what I was actually looking at was only a painting of a window … Illusions of the heart and the eye … When I was last in Brussels, René Magritte showed me one of his early paintings, ‘Human Condition I’, in which we see a picture on an easel standing in front of a landscape and obscuring part of that landscape. The picture itself shows a landscape, but it is doubtful whether the landscape it shows is really the same as the one it obscures. I have only recently become aware that the version of the past which I present in this book is somewhat like Magritte’s puzzle painting. I now have a very different idea of what happened so many years ago and would not now write what I have written here. Neither the manner nor the content would be the same. Nevertheless, I have not changed a single word of the text. Only I have added an additional chapter at the end, a chapter which changes the meaning of everything which comes before. Now it occurs to me to wonder if, in a year or two’s time, I may not be drafting a prefatory note to a third revised and expanded edition … I hope not. There has to be an end to all this.

  London, December, 1952.

  Chapter One

  1951

  I rarely dream of Caroline. However, I dreamt last night that we were walking round Battersea Funfair. She wanted to be a milkmaid. I promised her a miniature Trianon. Then I was on my knees before her. She was impatient to go back to her office, but she condescended to feed me coughdrops.

  Where is Caroline? Where has everyone gone? I walk up and down the old familiar streets of Soho and Bloomsbury without encountering anyone. And not just Soho and Bloomsbury, for I venture further – to Ealing, St Albans and the Faubourg St Germain – but the streets are always empty, empty save for the regiments of City men in bowler hats and suits, of spivs and street traders in trilbies and demob suits and the soldiers and sailors on leave. But these are dead people. Only the women seem alive. My eyes are always on the women, looking for Caroline, or if not Caroline, then for some other woman, in the hope that studying her may help me to understand Caroline better.

  No Caroline. No Ned Shillings. No Oliver Sorge. No Jenny Bodkin. No Mackellar. No Felix. No Jorge. Even Pamela, who used to draw hundreds nightly to hear her sing, has vanished. Where have they all gone? While my back was turned, did they enter into a secret pact to sign up as lighthouse-keepers, nuns or foreign legionaries? It may be that they have settled down in quiet suburbs and have found employment and contentment as town clerks, insurance salesmen, jobbing decorators and so on, but that is hard to believe.

  I have a photograph of some of the group in front of me now. It was taken in 1936, a couple of months after the Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries closed. We are assembled outside Winkelmann’s Gallery, just off Regent Street, all squinting into the sun, all save Ned, who from the centre of the group gazes fearlessly into the camera. The brilliant whites of his eyes always used to make me think of a raptor. Most of us are smiling sheepishly. Jenny Bodkin in her striped sailor’s shirt is brandishing that preposterous glove puppet of hers, the one shaped like a voracious cunt fringed with pubic hair. Jorge, kneeling in front of us, wrestles unconvincingly with a concertina. Glasses and cigarettes are much in evidence and some of the glasses are raised in the direction of Ned, whose show this is. Felix sits at his feet and lets an exploring hand stray mischievously up his trouser-leg towards his groin.

  I am on the edge of the group in the shadow of the Gallery’s awning. Looking at myself now, I know that I was preoccupied that day. I wanted to talk Winkelmann into agreeing to an exhibition of my illustrations to Mackellar’s The Girlhood of Gagool. I never had much chance of that. Oliver has one arm flung round my shoulders while with the other he cradles Monica. Caroline does not appear in the photograph. ‘La femme trouvée’, she was never regarded as part of our group. But she was the one who took the picture. Later, much later, after the war, I used this, her photograph, as the basis for a retrospective portrait of the group. I changed nothing except that I painted everyone with their eyes tightly closed, so that they appear to sleep, propping each other up in a collective dream. In this version, it is only I who is awake and who stares wide-eyed out of the canvas. The painting has passed into the hands of the National Portrait Gallery and I believe they keep it stored in some basement as part of their reserve collection.

  There were about twenty or thirty of us, members of the Serapion Brotherhood, plus hangers-on and admirers. In the years before the outbreak of the War, I could walk into the Dead Rat Club on any night and find half a dozen of them at least. It was even unusual to walk any distance in central London without encountering one or other by chance. Indeed, it seems to me that chance operated differently before the War. We in the Brotherhood were so sure that we would change the face of art, literature, politics, everything. Now Soho’s bars and clubs are full of new men and women, who seem yet noisier, drunker and more confident: Maclaren-Ross; Tambimuttu, Colquhoun, MacBryde, Dylan Thomas, Nina Hamnett. The old gang have vanished very nearly without trace. I run into Paul Nash and David Gascoyne occasionally. I spotted one of Jenny Bodkin’s toys in a shop window a couple of weeks ago. It was the teddy bear with the hammer, who growls ‘Put me down’ when he is picked up. At least I know about Ned Shillings. He is dead, as he promised he would be. Herbert Read and I still correspond, though with increasing acrimony. I read everything that Oliver Sorge has published in Horizon and elsewhere, but I have no idea where he lives and letters sent to Cyril Connolly for f
orwarding go unanswered. Cyril himself swears he does not know where Oliver lives now.

  Oliver Sorge, Paul Nash, Jorge Arguelles, Herbert Read. Now it occurs to me that all these names and indeed my own name may give rise in the reader to false expectations as to what this book is about. This is not a history of the Serapion Brotherhood. Nor is it in any sense an autobiography, for I loathe being bored to death with the details of an autobiographer’s parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, and then by an account of his (probably unhappy) days at school, to be followed by a lyrical evocation of spreading wings at university and so on, and so on. All that I hate. I have kept no diaries which might serve as the basis for an autobiography, but only a noctuary in which I record the little which has happened to me while I am asleep. If you are curious about my parentage, know then that Lautréamont was my father and Alice in Wonderland my mother. As for my infancy, I am still in it. In my studies the whisky bottle has served me as a microscope and the brothel has been my laboratory.

  Neither is this book an artistic memoire. It is not more than incidentally concerned with my part in the organisation of the First Surrealist Exhibition in London, nor with my quarrel with André Breton and my expulsion from his movement. I am not planning to say anything very much about my career as a war artist nor about the court case brought against me by my psychoanalyst. The book is not really about me at all. Not only is this book not about me, it is also not written for you – unless your name is Caroline. What you hold in your hands is not literature, but a magical trap. Its sole purpose is to seek out Caroline. I have to publish the book of course and I imagine so many copies of Exquisite Corpse floating in so many stoppered bottles on strange and distant seas. The paradox is that publication on as wide a scale as possible is essential to my purpose, but really the book that is published is a private thing and destined for one reader only. If nevertheless you will persist in reading on, you will soon become aware of my literary failings. Oliver and Mackellar were the writers in the group and I, a painter, am working now in a medium that is quite foreign to me. Indeed, I tend to think of myself as writing a painting. I dab at the words and beneath all my dabbings and pentimenti lies a dark ground of melancholy and self-pity. I believe that the book will turn out like one of those murky canvases by the Genoese painter, Alessandro Magnasco – a sombre landscape of late evening in which we see with difficulty a rocky crevasse or broad swamp and where, in such a desolate landscape, half concealed by foliage and rocks, the emaciated and posturing anchorites or mountebanks can just be glimpsed, the highlights of their tortured figures being lit up as if in a flash of lightning.

  After I had written these words, the longest stretch of words I have written since I ran away from school, I went for a walk along the South Bank. The Festival of Britain was in full swing and I had to walk past those cutely twee little jokey machines of Emmet, John Piper’s so very English plasterboard follies, the dismal Skylon and the not very exciting display of G-Plan furniture. Here and there I saw were sad signs of the domestication of Surrealism. One now sees a lot of paintings of high-horizoned landscapes which are empty of all but a few mysteriously disposed objects and the advertising hoardings are crowded with images of disembodied hands and eyes. Surrealism has lost its claim to shock. Even its power to charm is now questionable. Some Festival!

  We were more truly festive during the War. As I strode through the crowds I felt myself burning with an hideous intensity, so that I could fancy that if any one of these people touched me they would instantly catch alight and crumble to ashes, consumed by my psychic fire.

  When I came back, I opened another bottle of whisky and stared at the wall. It hardly matters which wall I stare at, for, in a brief fit of enthusiasm for trompe d’oeil, I have painted false windows on three of the walls, so that these walls exactly resemble the fourth wall, which really does have a window which looks out on a railway siding. The door into the room is almost invisible, for it has been painted into the wallpaper. With my art I have created my prison.

  Though I paint in this room, it would not suit many artists. The real window faces south, and all my colleagues, rivals rather, swear by a northern light. However, the problem with the light does not trouble me, for I no longer paint from life and I actually prefer the yellowy glow shed by the naked light bulb over my garish colours. I paint from within the head. I have only to close my eyes and the hypnagogic images appear unbidden. I see in silent turmoil shapes of men, beasts, buildings, symbols and landscapes. They ceaselessly chase one another across my eyelids before disappearing into the unilluminated area of my head. When I asked Dr Wilson, my psychoanalyst, about these images, he assured me that hypnagogic imagery was quite common and had something to do with misfirings or discharges from the retinal rods. (Or was it cones? I forget what exactly.)

  When I consulted a dictionary, I found ‘hypnagogic’ defined as ‘sleep-bringing, ushering in sleep’. Something is not right here, for I am never more awake than when I am watching these shapes dancing and twisting, covering my field of vision and dissolving into one another. A recumbent dog becomes a fruit bowl, its brown rump metamorphosed into the curving outline of a pear, and a narcissistic youth contemplating his image in a pool of water becomes, with just a tiny shift of focus, a skeletal hand holding an egg – even as my old friend (and by this I mean ex-friend) Salvador Dali has so successfully demonstrated with his paranoiac-critical method. As Dali puts it, we are working with ‘a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon the interpretive-critical association of delirious phenomena’. This is in full accord with the Surrealist Manifesto, for we follow Breton’s prescription when we seek to take down ‘thought’s dictation in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all moral or aesthetic prejudice’.

  Anyway I do not believe that hypnagogic imagery has anything to do with sleep, for I have hardly slept at all since Caroline vanished. Sometimes I lie on the floor with my eyes closed and passively let the images flow over me – ziggurats transformed into bonfires whose flames become tendrils in a great vineyard at the end of which is a wall with a door, but, as I approach the door, it transforms itself into a pool on which floats a duck which turns into an upturned foot and so on with unflagging energy – a plotless, scriptless, pointless cinema.

  At other times however I am not so passive, for it is possible to force and shape what I see and I have a repertoire of concentration-building exercises. I make all the letters of the alphabet parade themselves before me. One by one they flicker uncertainly on my eyelids, longing to be something else. Then I relax my control and they dissolve and recompose themselves thankfully into ostriches, or windows, or banjos, whatever they have chosen. Or I may summon up the image of Hitler and make him swagger and salute, then run, then stand on his head and I may inflate his head to three times its size. However, the strain involved in this sort of visual drill is considerable. In particular, it is curiously difficult to summon up likenesses of individual men and women at will.

  In general, hypnagogic forms are labile and pass swiftly out of my control. When I summon up images of nude or half-dressed women, these women frantically writhe and twist and recombine with each other and with the landscape. The women are desperate to escape my godlike clutches and eager to preserve their modesty by transforming themselves into myrtle bushes or cows or whatever. On occasions when I am able to freeze one of these images I may behold a woman caught midway in such a transformation with her arms beginning to grow leaves, her nose beginning to reshape itself into a stork’s beak, her shapely legs fading into tendrils of smoke. It is impossible when contemplating such an image not to think of the ‘exquisite corpse’, one of those composite figures we used to produce during our Surrealist games of consequences. One artist would draw the head, then fold the paper and pass it to his neighbour who would sketch in the torso before folding the paper again and so on, until some marvellous hybrid emerged from the unfolded paper.

  Novelists make use of exquisite
corpses as a matter of course. I remember Oliver making this point quite forcibly. In The Vampire of Surrealism, the book for which he is best known the woman Stella is a kind of exquisite corpse, for while the brilliant white face and raven hair belonged to Felix originally, the wit, the bum and the thighs were taken from Monica and the breasts came from a woman glimpsed walking down the King’s Road. So Oliver told me.

  Naturally, I have tried to summon up an hypnagogic image of Caroline, but I was fearful and conscious that I was attempting something that was somehow blasphemous, and it was perhaps because of these misgivings of mine that she did not appear – and has never appeared. So, if that form of conjuration failed, will this new attempt be any more successful? Will the magical letters on the page summon her presently to me? If I call, will she come? Perhaps. But suppose she is dead. Suppose that one evening, as I sit writing this in the upstairs room of this house in the backstreets behind Waterloo Station, I might hear a muffled but insistent thumping and I will go downstairs and open the door and a thing will stumble out of the smog into my arms. I will find myself embracing something putrescent and caked with earth. The blue dress will be stained and partly rotted away. The teeth that press against my lips will be yellow and loose. Yet I would embrace the thing willingly. The horror of that would be less than what I suffer now. It is certainly possible that she is dead. It is even possible that I killed her.

  Chapter Two

  1936

  ‘Will any kind friend inform a poor blind man, who has lost the precious sight of his eyes in the gracious defence of his native country, England, and God bless King George! where and in what part of this country he may now be!’ I was noisy and I am sure many people turned to look at me.

  Mackellar, however, kept his voice low.

  ‘We are coming up into the centre of Hampstead now. In a minute or two we will pass by Flask Walk. There’s a bishop approaching in the opposite direction. Raise your hat to him and wish him a good afternoon. On your left there is a wine-merchant. If only you could see, you would behold a fine window-display of imported sherrys …’