Exquisite Corpse

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by Robert Irwin


  With surprising suddenness the sky clouded over and a cold wind started to blow from the East. I took a few hasty photographs. The purpose of the photographs has invariably been misunderstood by my sitters. It is not that I intend with my paint-brush to mimic the likeness produced by my Brownie box camera. Rather, I take photographs of likenesses only in order to go beyond them. Once one has seen what is visible, it becomes easier to paint the invisible.

  Caroline kept talking. She wanted to travel the world and have adventures. Her eyes were alive with excitement. This was her first spiffing adventure – having her portrait painted by a Surrealist artist. We hurried in out of the cold and I served them whisky. Caroline was amused by my picture of the legless negress of Rotherhithe. She said it was ‘super’, but Brenda was shocked. Caroline promised to return the following Saturday. I told her to be sure to wear the same blue dress. She turned her cheek to me to be kissed. Then Brenda and I shook hands.

  The next Saturday she arrived early and alone and I set to work straightaway. Although I have a certain swift facility as a book illustrator, I am a slow worker in oils. I work with ox-hair brushes, making minute strokes that are so closely worked as to be effectively invisible. Every area of the canvas is treated in the same detailed manner and all of it is equally brilliantly lit. Despite the modernity of my subject matter, my technique, as several critics have noted, is modelled on that of the Flemish Primitives, especially the Van Eyck brothers.

  I wanted to catch in two dimensions Caroline’s solidity, the volumes of her flesh, the degree to which she was fully in the world. My first thought had been that she was a creature from another planet, but, of course it was the reverse which was true. It was I who came from another planet and observed the goings-on on Earth with an alien’s vision – never quite part of them and baffled by the most commonplace things. Since I wished to reproduce the heaviness of her flesh, I asked if she would agree to being painted in the nude. She refused and, indeed I think I would have been disappointed if she had agreed. I loved her pudeur. Even so, I set to work on a painting strategy that would effectively sidestep her refusal to undress.

  This time I painted indoors, for it would have been too much of a performance to lug paints, easels and chairs down to the quayside. However, it was hot in the room and Caroline’s face grew sweaty and we kept having to break off while she powdered her nose. Even when she was posing, her eyes roved restlessly over my cluttered studio and it was impossible to get her to keep her head still for a moment.

  She talked about children, how she would like to have lots of children and how she would mother them. I kept her going, feeding her questions, while all the time my mind was on something else. The painting of this portrait was a magico-erotic act, a form of mutual seduction, in which I, by trapping her image in paint, would in turn find my image trapped in hers. It seemed to me like one of those processes portrayed in old alchemical manuscripts, in which the Red King lies with the White Queen in a glass retort and the fruit of their coupling is the fantastic parti-coloured hermaphrodite.

  I did not want to express myself in the portrait. I did not want to possess but to be possessed. At the end of it all, I wanted to be able to declare, ‘I is the Other!’. So I plunged deeper and deeper into self-abnegatory investigations. Alas! After barely two hours’ work, the sitting (or seance might be a better word) was broken by the unexpected arrival of Oliver.

  The pretext was that he had come to collect the sword-stick that he had lent me. He was startled by the presence of a woman in the room and not at all pleased when I introduced Caroline. However, Oliver always had perfect manners.

  ‘So you are the beautiful but invisible typist! I am Oliver Sorge, the writer.’ And when she did not respond, he added, ‘Although, I am not well-known yet, I plan to be. I don’t suppose you know anyone called Stella by any chance?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Such a pity … Are you sure now that you don’t have any sisters called Stella? I have decided to start a new affair, I don’t care who with, except that she simply must be called Stella.’

  And Oliver rattled away about how he had fallen in love with the mysterious Stella over the planchette and then about how he had been out of town, staying in a large country house, whose chatelaine simply adored him, and he of course adored her, but they really were impossible for each other. Caroline must know how such things were?

  He offered her a cigarette from a gold cigarette case, a gift from Emerald Cunard, he said. Caroline did not smoke. Oliver said that Caroline and Emerald should meet. Oliver looked modestly down at his hands while he was talking, but he was wasting his time with this gambit. Caroline simply did not know who Emerald Cunard was. Nevertheless, after her initial alarm, Caroline was charmed by Oliver. He had the looks of a matinee idol and she could not see how he was patronising her and, for much of the time, talking over her shoulder at me. There was always a faintly anguished look in his eyes when he talked to women and he would resort to the extremes of courtesy and flattery to protect himself from any aggression on their part.

  That day, I remember, before coming round to Cuba Street, Oliver had gone to an early performance at the cinema to see Chaplin’s latest film, Modern Times – his first with sound. Chaplin, is a saint in the hagiology of Surrealism, canonised both for his bizarre comedy and for his devotion to cunnilingus. Oliver went along with the orthodoxy and he quoted Louis Aragon’s pamphlet Hands off Love! in praise of ‘the little man’. However, I have always loathed ‘little men’ and their tawdry version of humour and we got into a fierce argument, during which Caroline sat silent and uncomfortable.

  Discussion of the scene with the robotic men in the factory led on to a discussion of the future. What would the world be like in 1950? And what would be our part in that world? (This used to be a frequent topic of conversation in the group, though it was only desultorily pursued. None of us expected to live beyond our thirties and Ned, I remember, declared that he would die at the age of thirty-three, the age of the good revolutionaries, Jesus Christ and St. Just.) However, that afternoon in May 1936 the three of us conjured up a world of metropolises composed of skyscrapers and ziggurats encircled by great spiral ramps. The air would be crowded with tiny little airships cruising from tower to tower. Britain in 1950 would be a republic run by Controllers, who would preside over great technico-economic corporations. Oliver would betray his vocation by writing propaganda and speeches for the Controllers, while I would betray mine by becoming (oh, the shame!) a Fellow of the Republican Academy. When Oliver asked Caroline where she would fit in the technocratic world of the future, she replied unhappily that she did not know. All she wanted was to live in a cottage with honeysuckle growing round the door.

  Soon after that she said she had to be going. I saw her downstairs. She promised to return on Sunday and again she offered her cheek to be kissed.

  Once she had gone, Oliver relaxed.

  ‘So that’s your objet trouvé – femme trouvée, I should say. Nice bodywork. A shapely looking bit of driftwood, I think one must concede that, but in the long run you must let her drift on. She’s not for you.’

  I kept my voice noncommittal.

  ‘How not for me?’

  ‘Oh, debauch her by all means. She looks as though she could do with a good debauching. But, if one is serious about one’s art, one must be serious about the life that is going to go into one’s art. Everything that will be of any real importance to a writer or an artist happens to him between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. Everything! After that it’s just elaborations, variations, footnotes, and recollecting things in tranquillity. So it is vital to lead as interesting, as intense and as bizarre a life as possible while one is still young. I’m afraid that an affair with little Miss Typist just isn’t the ticket.’

  Oliver was watching me very intently as he said all this. Then, after a few minutes of uneasy silence, he walked over to examine the canvas I had been working on. Since I had not let Caroline see
how I was handling her portrait, Oliver was the first to look on what I had done.

  ‘Even so, it must be admitted that your portrait of her is already quite brilliant. O bravo!’

  ‘Striptease’ is perhaps the best known of all my paintings. Though I have always refused to sell it, it has gone on show many times. In ‘Striptease’ I have painted Caroline’s head, upper arms and legs blue and additionally I have taken pains to mimic the texture of cotton in those areas. Her dress and gloves on the other hand I have painted in flesh tones, so that it is evident that she wears a dress of human skin. People tell me that they find the effect disturbing.

  Caroline, true to her word, returned the following day. She had never heard people argue about films the way Oliver and I had done. She wanted to know more about his affair with the lady in the large country house, but I decided that I was not prepared to be a party to Oliver’s imposture.

  ‘There is no lady in a big house and no affair. I’m sure of it. It is all Lombard Street to a china orange that Oliver is homosexual.’

  Her eyes widened.

  ‘I’ve never met a homosexual before – not knowingly at least.’ (Another spiffing adventure!) ‘He was quite nice, I thought, but are all your friends like him, so strange and talking all the time in that way?’

  My ‘no’ was pretty sincere, for, when I thought about it, I realised that Oliver was one of the more normal of my friends. It would probably be a good idea, I decided, to keep Caroline away from the Serapion Brotherhood. Anyway, then I started asking her things about amateur theatricals and I got down to some serious work on the portrait. This time, as she was leaving, I told her that I should need to get to know her better, if my portrait was going to work. She smiled and agreed to meet me on Wednesday when she got off early.

  Chapter Four

  We met at the ABC restaurant. Caroline was cheerful. Mr Maitland had commended her for her swift and tidy typing. Since she wanted to do some shopping, we took a bus to Gamages. It was raining when we got off at High Holborn and we walked pressed together under her umbrella. I smelt her perfume and, smelling her perfume, thought nothing. As so often, Baudelaire did my thinking for me.

  ‘Et des habits, mousseline ou velours,

  Tout impregnés de sa jeunesse pure,

  Se dégageait un parfum de fourrure.’

  Gamages, the heart of the Empire! – the Empire of Women, I mean. Once inside, I saw very few men. I was excited. I could not remember ever in my life having been in a department store before and yet I recognised the place as the theatre of so many of my night journeys – those cavernous halls sealed off from natural light and those long passageways that ran between counters piled high with objects, stretching seemingly to eternity and patrolled by sonambulistic floorwalkers – this, night after night, had been the stuff of my dreams. The shop was a Broceliande, an enchanted place, in which all sorts of adventures were to be had amidst the forest of its columns. Caroline took me by the hand and, starting with haberdashery, I think we covered very nearly the whole shop. It was impossible not to be amazed by the collections of objets trouvés piled high on counters and divested of their domestic contexts. I was particularly struck by the hundreds of hats without wearers, assembled like so many lobsters stranded on a beach.

  Yet, though hats, teapots, ribbons, ashtrays and shoes seemed stranded in this Museum of Everyday Life that was Gamages, I knew with another part of my brain that every object there was destined to be found – just like the lost orphan in a snowstorm in so many old and sentimental silent films. I noted moreover that there was an unmistakably erotic flavour to the practice of finding and paying for the objects of desire. The very draperies were stiff with sex. I stopped to watch a fat woman stroking the sides of a lampshade, until it had seduced her into buying it.

  Caroline wanted another coffee mug for her collection. I looked over the hundreds of coffee mugs spread before us. There in the crockery department, I found a disordered reverie of life, for in the course of one’s life, over the days and years, one will encounter a thousand coffee mugs, but in Gamages one could encounter them all at once. Caroline offered me a penny for my thoughts and I told her some of this and, even while I was talking, I was regretting it, for I was terrified that she would think me mad. When I had finished, she did indeed look thoughtful.

  ‘You are very mysterious, you know. You are just like the Count of Monte Cristo.’ (That was what was on her school’s syllabus, instead of Baudelaire.)

  Then she went back to appraising coffee mugs. The shop had just taken delivery of Edward VIII coronation mugs and in the end Caroline bought one of those. Next door, in kitchenware, I too made a purchase. Resting forlornly among an assemblage of whisks and graters, was a tin cube, open at its top and its bottom and with a twisted metal blade somewhat like a ship’s propeller running from one of its sides to the other. When I asked the assistant at the counter what it was for, she confessed that she had no idea. She offered to go and find her supervisor, but I paid up gleefully. The thing’s tenuous grip on reality and its tawdry mystery appealed to me. Ninepence had secured my objet trouvé.

  Upstairs in Women’s Clothing, where the garments either have acquired or will acquire an erotic sacredness through being placed next to the skin of a woman, I found that I had an erection. Caroline did not have enough money to buy a new dress, but she still wanted to try some on and she kept disappearing behind those mysterious curtains, like a conjuror’s assistant going into a vanishing cabinet, before she emerged to parade herself before me, time and again.

  ‘I need your artist’s eye,’ she said.

  ‘You should be clothed in mystery,’ I said.

  She kept trying on dresses and I stood there holding her umbrella and handbag. I was thinking of the Veil which protected the Holy of Holies in the ancient Temple of Jerusalem, when I heard a voice calling.

  ‘Caspar! Well, this is a coincidence! Caspar, over here!’

  I turned and saw that it was Monica, calling to me from next door in hosiery. Swivel-hipped and vampish as ever, Monica came over and, when Caroline next came out from behind the curtain, I introduced them to each other. Monica and Caroline chatted a bit about dresses and stockings, but, every now and then, Monica would give me a funny look. I thought then that it was merely that she was surprised to find me in a department store, or perhaps it was that she was overwhelmed by the sheer coincidence of our meeting. However, I now know that Monica was surprised to find me with a woman, for she had decided some time previously that Oliver and I were lovers.

  Monica was a freelance journalist, who also dabbled in collages. But the thing that really marked her out in the group was her card-index. She kept an index about everyone she had ever met, plus dated records of the conversations she had had with them, as well as notes on the people they said they knew. She once gave a lecture to the Brotherhood on the scientific importance of her card-index (which already filled several large flood and fire-proof steel cabinets). In the long run, Monica claimed, careful collation and analysis of such meticulously kept records would enable a scientific researcher to demonstrate how it was that objective chance, the external expression of our desires, actually operated in the world. Coincidences, those little peaks of the iceberg sticking up above the surface of the waters of consciousness, could be used as mapping points in the delineation of the submerged depths of the marvellous. Monica had smiled all the time she talked and none of those who listened to her lecture could decide if it was quite serious.

  ‘You must bring Caroline along to the next meeting of the Brotherhood,’ said Monica, at last turning to me.

  I grunted a yes, but meant no. It was not just that Caroline would be out of her depth in the Brotherhood and that they would patronise her. I feared for her should she ever encounter Ned Shillings. Women (and men too) found the power of Ned’s mind quite mesmerising and Ned’s intellectual ascendancy had given him a kind of droit de seigneur over the women in the group. Monica herself had only recently been cas
t aside in favour of Felix.

  Monica bade us farewell and walked away looking preoccupied. Doubtless she was memorising the conversation she had just had for entry in her card-index. Caroline thought that Monica was ‘nice’.

  ‘Are all your friends nice?’

  Again, I grunted. The truth was that I did not think that any of us were at all nice, myself included. However, if being ‘nice’ qualified me to kiss Caroline, then I was prepared to go along with the imposture, but the truth was that I had only been standing there, holding her umbrella and handbag, as part of a long-term strategy to fuck her senseless.

  We took the escalator down from Women’s Clothing. By now my erection was quite painful. Caroline paused to buy a birthday present for her father, a pipe rack. It looked almost as bizarrely pointless as my kitchen utensil. I told her that I would like to meet her parents. She was surprised and then evasive.

  ‘They are just ordinary,’ she said.

  I took her to a pub I know in Red Lion Street and introduced her to the Penny Man. He was to be found there most evenings, sitting in a corner. You gave him some pennies and he swallowed them, allowing you to put your ear to his stomach and hear them clink as they hit the bottom. On a good night he could make three or four shillings – more than enough to pay for the following evening’s beer. He’s gone now. I think he must have been killed in one of the German raids.

 

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