Exquisite Corpse

by Robert Irwin

The next morning I awoke screaming, but once awake I continued to lie with my eyes tightly closed. Soon work would begin in the ship-breakers’ yards and the dry docks, but in the early morning all the sounds I heard were soothing: the chug-chug of barges proceeding up the Thames, the slop of water against the piers, the occasional boom of a foghorn, and the crunch of footsteps on the gravel path that ran behind the house on Cuba Street. The house I was renting in 1936 has since been destroyed by one of the big raids on the Docks in 1941. It was an oddity, a survival from the eighteenth century, sandwiched between and overshadowed by two enormous nineteenth-century warehouses. Apart from warehouses, the street boasted a stable for dray-horses, a hostel for seamen, a Chinese grocer and a public house (the Lonsdale Arms).

  I lay there listening to the docks coming to life and thought of Caroline. Was she real? Perhaps not. The more I continued to think about it, the more likely it seemed that MacKellar had put some actress friend of his up to impersonating a fur-merchant’s typist. My breakfast was a cigarette and a cup of coffee. My day was and is measured out in cigarettes. Then I had to bribe myself with another cigarette to get myself to the easel. I worked on a sketch in pastels of my image of Caroline. I portrayed her with a body shaped like a violin, but with no legs. It had occurred to me that Caroline might be black, so she appeared as a legless negress, hovering over the houses on the other side of the river, like the tutelary deity of Rotherhithe, and, above her head, I drew a blind, weeping eye.

  Soon though I left the sketch and I turned to my work on The Girlhood of Gagool. But I could not concentrate on that either. I went out and took a tram into the West End and I walked up and down the streets of Soho. I failed to identify the offices of any furriers, but then she had never told me the name of the company she worked for. I went to the pub in Greek Street and sat there drinking and listening, but I never heard her voice. I lunched alone at the ABC cafe in Piccadilly and then paced about for a while in St James’ Park.

  Feeling faintly ridiculous, I returned home. I had thought I might go back to the pub later, but towards the end of the afternoon MacKellar turned up, anxious to see how my illustrations to his book were going – and a little curious too about how I had fared with the young woman after he had left me.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, MacKellar, what did she look like?’

  ‘Look like? Oh, quite pleasant I thought. Er – brown hair and brown eyes, I think.’

  ‘How many legs did she have?’

  ‘Two, I think, but I couldn’t swear to that mind.’

  I continued to press MacKellar, but this was all I could get from him. Such vagueness was exasperating. He had no visual sense. And that was also evident in his comments on what I had done so far for his book. He found my illustrations ‘too arty’. We were still bickering when Oliver walked in. He had come with a summons from Ned. There was to be a crisis meeting of the Serapion Brotherhood that night. (I suppose I should note here that the Serapion Brotherhood took its name from a visionary monk in a story collection by the nineteenth-century German writer, Hoffmann. Like our identically named brethren in Russia, with whom we corresponded, we were dedicated to the proposition that the imagination has the power to conquer time and space.) Now Ned had learnt that André Breton had written to the hanging committee at the New Burlington Galleries denouncing the Brotherhood and demanding the exclusion of works by its members. My presence at the emergency meeting was of course required and that of Manasseh. Manasseh lived not far away in Shadwell. As we walked towards Shadwell, MacKellar described to Oliver the previous day’s experiment with the sleep-mask and the typist.

  Oliver was contemptuous.

  ‘The girl was right. The whole thing was just silly. But do keep away from typists, Caspar. Office workers are objectively a counter-revolutionary phenomenon. Besides, you’d only be allowed to get your hands in her knickers after she’d got you to promise to marry her.’

  Oliver said this lightly enough, but I sensed an undercurrent of more serious annoyance. He resented the fact that I had spent the previous day together with MacKellar and with a dreary typist, rather than with him. Oliver turned to describing his lunch with a certain contessa. I am pretty sure that the contessa never existed. Oliver was always talking about his women friends, but I never met any of these women.

  We collected Manasseh from his rented room. Manasseh’s paintings really owed more to Jewish folklore than anything that could be described as Surrealist, but he seemed happy enough to be associated with our group. What is more, a painting by him plus some small steel engravings and a painting by me had been selected by the Burlington hanging committee – also something between a sculpture and an objet trouvé by Jorge. So we were directly threatened by this new Parisian démarche. However, the fact that all of Felix’s submissions had already been rejected made for a tense atmosphere in the group’s meeting that night.

  Immediately we arrived, Ned launched into a tirade against André Breton.

  ‘– the Black Pope of Surrealism. It is Breton, not us, who should be expelled from the ranks of the Surrealist movement. We must seek solidarity with other worker-artists in Moscow and Mexico City.’

  While Ned ranted on from the only armchair in the room, Felix propped herself against his legs and rubbed herself up against him like a cat. In the end, it was agreed that Manasseh, Jorge and I would go round in deputation to the Galleries the following morning to protest and to threaten a demonstration on the day of the private view. Then there was talk of other things – the Rhineland, Abyssinia, pierced ears and the death of G.K. Chesterton. I was inattentive. I kept thinking of Caroline. Talk moved on to the pressing need to invent new vices. After all, when was it that the last vice was invented?

  Oliver suggested cigarette smoking as the most recently invented vice. Adrian snorted, but, even under such provocation, he said nothing. Adrian was very peculiar, I think. Adrian was always there. He features in every photograph I have preserved of the group, but he hardly ever said anything and we all wondered why he was with us. He had written some poetry, so he said, but he never showed any of it to us. He was a classicist and was known to be working on a book, provisionally entitled Did the Ancient Greeks Smoke Cigarettes? I do not know where Adrian is now and certainly his book has not been published, but I gathered from certain mumbled remarks that Adrian let drop that the planned book was going to demonstrate that there was indeed nothing new under the sun, that the ancient Greeks were great cigarette smokers and that there were lots of references to smoking in the Iliad, if only one translated certain words correctly. This, however, was practically all I, or anyone else, ever got out of Adrian.

  However, I digress. Somebody else in the group proposed rubber fetishism as the most recent vice. Then Oliver suggested drilling more holes in people’s bodies, so that there would be more orifices for sexual pleasure. The ideal lover would look like Emmenthal cheese. Eventually talk came round to my blindfold exploration of London and my encounter with the typist. Oliver was dismissive, arguing that quests for the Mysterious Woman were a waste of time and he declared provocatively that women had no souls.

  Ned cut him short angrily. It was time for the Surrealist sermon. Ned told us how the Marvellous was out there in the streets of London trying to signal to us. It was only necessary to be alert to the possibility of its presence and to seek out chance encounters and coincidences. He quoted Baudelaire on the ragpicker. ‘Everything that the big city threw away, everything that it lost, everything it despised, everything it crushed underfoot, he catalogues and collects.’ Women were channels through which the Marvellous manifested itself. According to Ned, a woman could be materialised by the insemination of chance by desire. Then the appearance of these women would in turn lead to the transformation of the world into the domain of the perfectly Marvellous.

  ‘Things are not created by factories. That is a bourgeois lie. Things are created by our desires. If we truly desire a thing, but do not have it, it is only necessary to increase our desi
re in order to have it. I brought Felix into existence simply by desiring her,’ Ned concluded grandly.

  Felix’s slitted eyes opened just a fraction and she muttered something. I am not sure, but I think it was ‘Kiss my cunt’. In the awkward silence which followed, Jorge produced a planchette. No meeting of the Serapion Brotherhood could conclude without the playing of some game or the carrying out of a group experiment.

  With the aid of the planchette, we set out to interrogate the spirit of the Absurd. We all gathered round the table to place our hands on the board which rolled on smooth castors. Only Monica sat outside the ring, acting as the stenographer and recording the answers of the spirit of the Absurd. The pencil attached to the board moved slowly and uncertainly.

  Question. What is a dream?

  Answer. A wingless barrt.

  Q. What is art?

  A. A displaced lecture.

  Q. Who will win the war in Abyssinia?

  A. Paradogs.

  Until towards the end of the seance MacKellar wanted to know who was Caroline?

  A. Deliriam of grief.

  Then MacKellar asked ‘Who are you? What is the name of the spirit who has been communicating with us?’

  A. Stella.

  Oliver stroked his nose thoughtfully.

  ‘It is Stella we should be hunting for,’ he said. Then he asked, ‘Stella, old girl, where we can find you?’

  The board began to move rapidly – too rapidly. The planchette now appeared to be out of our control and in the possession of a frenzied spirit. It lifted off the table and flew across the room.

  Ned brought the seance to an end.

  ‘I think we should be wary of this Stella. I think she may be something that bastard, Breton, has sent our way.’

  As I walked back from the tram-stop that night. I chanted ‘I’m mad, I’m mad, I’m completely mad’. People turned to give me funny looks and I scowled back at them. I wanted nothing to do with them. I was concentrated, alert to any possibilities chance might put my way in these shabby streets. Somewhere, sometime, soon I would have a conversation with an organ grinder, or a hand would beckon me into a pawnbroker’s shop. Perhaps I would hear a passing undertaker utter something curious, or maybe I would hear screaming in a darkened alley. Anyway, something would happen that would change my life forever. Perhaps it was already happening, even though I was not aware of it. The streets I walked down seemed to vibrate and waver, as if they were on the verge of dissolving before the force of my expectations. In those days I thought that there were infinite possibilities ahead of me and I could see the clouds rolling across the ink-blue night sky stretching on forever.

  In bed at night I cling to my hypnagogic imagery for as long as possible, seeking to delay the onset of sleep and dreams. I do not know why, but I usually have very boring dreams. They usually concern work schedules, shopping and waiting for buses. Such dreams are perhaps useful as training for waking life as a petit bourgeois. ‘See!’ my dreams tell me. ‘This is how one purchases a pound of sausages! And this is how one hails an approaching bus!’ But such perverse dreams are useless as a source of inspiration for art.

  The following morning, Saturday, we – Manasseh, Jorge and I – went round to the New Burlington Galleries. Although it was the weekend, Penrose and Mesens were there, planning the layout of the exhibition. They were astonished to see us. They had heard nothing from André Breton, nor had they received any representations protesting at the showing of works by members of the Serapion Brotherhood. Penrose told us that he looked forward to seeing us at the private view and we shuffled apologetically out of the Gallery. Once again we had fallen victims to Ned’s raging paranoia.

  Angry at the time wasted, I returned to Cuba Street and did some preparatory sketches of angry lions for Gagool – the sort of lions to whom one could feed Shillings or Breton. Then, almost as dissatisfied with my lions as I was angry with Ned Shillings, I stretched myself out on the floor and closed my eyes to enter an hypnagogic trance. I decided that I would conjure up a vision of a woman. Streams of lava coursed over my eyelids, but I was not in the mood for volcanoes and I set myself to concentrate and to superimpose the image of a woman on this red-hot molten stuff. I had something half like a woman, half like a flame wavering in my vision, when I heard a voice say,

  ‘What a spiffing place!’

  According to the literature on the subject, hypnagogic voices are not unknown and, for an instant, I fancied that the voice had been conjured up together with the image of the flaming female. But I opened my eyes and, though I had never seen her before, I recognised that it was Caroline. The young woman discovered by my desire, perhaps even invented by my desire, was standing in the doorway.

  ‘I’m sorry. We did knock, but you obviously didn’t hear and, since the door was not properly closed, we pushed it open and jolly well came up anyway. Are you all right?’

  I continued to lie on the floor, gazing up at her and not saying anything. Caroline did have brown hair and brown eyes and two rather shapely legs. She wore a blue dress and blue gloves that came up almost to her elbows and she carried an umbrella and a handbag. Her face … and here, in this anti-memoire, I find myself in real difficulties. The pitiful truth is I no longer remember quite what her face was like. Not a day, not a waking hour, has passed since she vanished that I have not thought of Caroline and how she looked. I remember that she was beautiful and that it was a very English sort of beauty, with just a faint trace of puppy fat about it. But really memory has worn thin. I remember not exactly Caroline’s face, but rather the memory of an earlier memory of a memory of Caroline’s face and this ersatz sort of memory relies heavily on assistance from the portraits that I painted of her and which I have kept. So I am at the mercy of the images I have made of her and it is no longer possible for me to walk behind those canvases and to check their likenesses against that of the sitter.

  ‘This is Brenda,’ Caroline introduced her companion. Brenda, a rather ordinary looking young woman, stood a little behind Caroline and stared curiously down at me.

  ‘What a spiffing place!’ Caroline said again. And she started to pace about the room, inspecting it and picking things up. She tried on the gaucho’s hat. She stabbed a finger at the botched version of a perpetual motion machine, cast in brass, that I had on the table, setting its complicated array of pendulums going. She sniffed suspiciously at the opium pipe. She also briefly inspected the ox skull, the Klein flask, the carefully selected pile of driftwood, the portrait of Mussolini mounted as a darts board, the statuette of Isis, the phrenological bust, the huge Tibetan abacus, the ivory sculpture of the Virgin Mary crucified upon the Cross, the great pile of picture books about Africa and of course my paintings and drawings scattered everywhere about the room. Her eyes were wide with delight. As she walked about, she kept talking.

  ‘I’ve come to apologise. It was unforgivably rude of me. I’m sorry I left you in the park, really sorry. I can’t explain. I just had a feeling – I get them sometimes – but it was silly. I can’t explain it. I just sort of panicked.’ She looked quizzically at me, seeking absolution. ‘Anyway, I have come to see if you were serious about painting me. Brenda is my friend from the office, whom I was telling you about. You can paint her too if you want.’

  Brenda, evidently Caroline’s chaperone, continued to stare nervously down at me. Finally she summoned up the courage to ask me what I was doing on the floor.

  I told her that I had been attacked by boredom and that it had overcome me. Then I recited the following lines,

  ‘Rien n’égale en longeur les boiteuses journées,

  Quand sous les lourds flocons des neigeuses années

  L’Ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosité,

  Prends les proportions de l’immortalité.’

  Caroline was enchanted.

  ‘That’s French!’ she said. ‘I got a distinction in my school certificate.’

  ‘That was Baudelaire.’

  ‘Was it? Well, we didn�
�t do him at my school.’

  I motioned languidly for them both to join me on the floor, so that they could join me in contemplating how the play of sunlight upon the river was reflected in a dancing golden skein on the ceiling of my studio. However, though they may have been briefly tempted, they decided that my floor was far too dirty for their dresses and, telling me not to be so lazy, Caroline set to pulling me to my feet. Brenda helped and in a matter of minutes Caroline had got me organised to make tea for them.

  She was perfectly ignorant about painting and I think she expected me to start work on a portrait in oils immediately. However, I had no canvas primed and, even if I had had one ready, it is my invariable practice to start with some preliminary sketches. So I took my drawing board and, since it was a sunny day, we went out on to the quayside. I had Caroline pose uncomfortably on a bollard and I set to work. Brenda looked enviously on and in time she was joined by a circle of sailors and dockers, who made flattering remarks about Caroline’s looks and less flattering ones about my sketches. I like to get my sitters to talk while I work on their portraits. I have to know who they are and talking gives their faces animation. Caroline’s face was almost bovine in repose, but, as she talked and a crowd of admirers gathered, she began to glow with life.

  I said as little as possible, needing to concentrate on my drawings, but I fired off quick questions whenever necessary, in order to keep her talking. It was she who had to do the work, for it was she and not I who was going to have impose her personality on her portrait. The previous portrait I had done had been of Oliver. Oliver had claimed that he found the whole business of sitting, posing and being made to talk quite ridiculous. But then, since he liked ridiculous things, he announced that he was going to invite people round to his flat where he would get them to ‘sit’ for his novels and short stories. He particularly hoped that Monica would come round and pose, so that he could find the right words to describe her bum.

  But I digress. Hitherto the only women I had known at all well were society hostesses, nightclub singers, artists and prostitutes. Caroline came from another world. Her happy childhood and home life, the schoolgirl japes, the minutiae of office life, her love of cats and dogs and of dancing and amateur theatricals, her collection of coffee mugs, her struggles to master dress-making, all that seemed quite natural to her, but I was baffled and fascinated. Did this way of living work? If so, why should I not take up dancing and amateur theatricals too? What was there to stop me?