by Robert Irwin
Outside in the rain again, we pressed close to one another under the umbrella and this time Caroline allowed me to kiss her on the mouth. ‘Every kiss is a conquest of repulsion,’ as Larry Durrell remarked to me some years later, when we were relating to each other our unhappy dealings with women. Back then in 1936, all of a sudden I experienced a sort of anti-epiphany. Suddenly, while kissing Caroline under the umbrella, my vision was out of focus. Her eyes were like a pair of jellyfish surrounded by thin black tendrils, and between the jellyfish there was a kind of hump, or perhaps it was a beak, and, below the beak, a voraciously mobile red orifice. An instant later I was seeing correctly again and she was the most beautiful thing in the world. Such disturbances in my field of vision were not new to me. Kenneth Clark has taught us to see the human nude as the most godlike of forms, but there have been moments, when I have been having one of my turns, and I have been unable to see the human nude, stripped of clothes and culture, as anything other than a forked mandrake root, something which screams when it is pulled out of the filthy earth.
Caroline said nothing about my erection, though she must have been able to feel it pressed hard against her. At length she pulled away.
‘When can I see you again?’ I wanted to know.
‘I’ll come for another sitting on Saturday, darling,’ she replied.
Darling! No one had ever called me that before. The word made me think of a family closely clustered by the fireside, listening to the wireless and drinking Ovaltine. There was a kind of frisson to the word ‘darling’. I hugged this word to myself as I walked back to Cuba Street. However, the desire that raged between my legs made every step agony.
The next member of the Brotherhood she was to meet was MacKellar – no, come to think of it, he had been the first person she met, even before me. Anyway, that following Saturday, I was wondering how to handle the highlights on Caroline’s skin-coloured shoes and Caroline was talking about her cat, when the door burst open and MacKellar came dancing in, carrying a Gladstone bag in one hand and a bundle of Wide World magazines in the other. He was delighted to see Caroline.
‘Why, it’s the young lady from the brothel – er, I mean pub!’
He dropped the magazines and the bag and started whirling round the studio, chanting,
‘Now you have taken over, I’m set free! I’m free! I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’
Then, out of breath, he stopped and stood looking at us and stroking his moustache with pleasure.
‘I have taught young Caspar here always to be respectful to women. I trust you have no complaints on that score?’
Caroline shook her head. Whereas Oliver at first had made her nervous, I could see that she was already amused and charmed by MacKellar.
‘Who are you? You aren’t really Caspar’s father, are you?’
‘I am MacKellar,’ and then in an eerie half-echo of Oliver Sorge the week before, ‘You won’t have heard of me. I’m struggling to remain unknown.’
‘Like Oliver?’
‘Oh, you have met Oliver then! No, no, I’m not like Oliver. I could never be as good as him. He’s so clever and poetic. I know quite a lot of his stuff by heart.’ MacKellar closed his eyes and started to declaim, ‘The fluting of the blue-nosed mandrills suits the curates who daily press their suits into the shapes of hearts, clubs, spades and trowels, wishing thereby to show their contempt for the directors of large railway families and their bulimic offspring. O Mardi Gras! O Pentonville! O Maria! What has become of the steel-tipped leopard, who, with feet of fire, patrols the concourses and the swimming baths and douses the bathers with the rainbow colours of his breath …’
It was all drivel of course and MacKellar was lying as usual. Oliver and MacKellar were reluctant literary allies against the rest of the world, but they actually despised each other’s work. At this time, in the spring of 1936, Oliver was experimenting with automatic writing. Writing simultaneously with his left and right hands, he was trying to tap and use the unconscious as a source of inspiration, writing without thinking and relying on free association to produce vivid imagery. Actually I don’t think that MacKellar’s impromptu parodies of Oliver’s work were any worse than the stuff itself. Oliver, for his part, characterised MacKellar’s novels as mere schoolboy japes. I find it odd that MacKellar’s novels are indeed now quite forgotten, while Oliver still has a definite reputation, if only in the world of literary coteries and small magazines.
Once embarked on his parody of Oliver’s stuff, MacKellar was all but unstoppable and Caroline had to tie her scarf across his mouth to bring the performance to an end.
‘A tragedy that such a brilliantly gifted writer, one of the foremost geniuses of our age, should have to scrape a living by performing conjuring tricks in nightclubs!’
‘Is he really a conjuror?’
MacKellar assured her that this was true – and so it was. The lie here was MacKellar pretending that he thought this was a tragedy. People meeting Oliver and reading the (carefully planted) details of his dress and manner invariably deduced that he had something like a large flat in Kensington and that a private income probably dispensed him from any need to earn his living. In fact, he lived in lodgings just off Tottenham Court Road and though he had managed to acquire a tailcoat, he was too poor to buy most of the conjuring equipment he needed and too poor also to hire an assistant.
The sitting was now suspended and MacKellar was showing Caroline the Wide World magazines he had brought along with him, full of pictures of Zulus and pygmies, and he was telling her the plot of The Girlhood of Gagool. Caroline was baffled by MacKellar’s account.
‘I don’t understand. What are you getting at? Why have you written it?’
‘It is simultaneously a blow struck in defense of African womanhood and a pataphysical denunciation of European imperialism,’ he declared grandly.
‘Whataphysical?’
‘Pataphysical. Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions.’
Marching up and down the room, MacKellar favoured Caroline with his pataphysical impressions of Africa. He had never been to that continent and when he set out to write the novel, he conscientiously did no research for it whatsoever. It was a continent of dark fantasy, in which the poet, Rimbaud, and his gang of slavers and ivory hunters, drifted like ghosts through elephants’ graveyards and down long highways flanked by mysterious stone colossi, in search of the legendary sexual treasures of a woman called Gagool.
Then MacKellar wanted to see my latest lithograph for the book. I had just completed the scene in the Halls of the White Dead, where Da Silvestra, the sinister Portuguese, tempts Gagool to have sex with him by offering her his umbrella. While we were poring over this exciting image, Caroline tiptoed over to look at my portrait of her. Hitherto I had adamantly refused to let her see what I was doing.
‘Oh! It’s horrible! Oh, Caspar, how could you?’
I had never seen her angry and upset before and I found it painfully affecting.
‘It is as though you had undressed me,’ she continued. ‘Is that really how you see me? And what’s the point of it all, doing something so weird and horrible like that?’
I could not think what to say. Indeed, my sort of paintings had no point at all in her world. But in my world they were gateways into another reality. Weirdness is beauty, beauty weirdness. But she was in pain and I felt her pain as my own. I had not wanted to hurt her, yet I could not have prevented myself. I had painted the only sort of painting I knew how to do.
She continued to gaze at me reproachfully. Her eyes were moist. She was waiting for an answer. MacKellar had not noticed her distress – or perhaps he had.
‘Oh, that is just Surrealist painting for you. There is nothing bad or frightening in it. It is a beautiful joke. Surrealism is full of jokes. Surrealism is like Shakespeare’s enchanted isle, “full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not”.’
(Another of MacKellar’s lies. At the dark heart of Surrealism is ugliness and
terror. Surrealism was to destroy Ned. I wished to God it had taken me when it took him.)
MacKellar continued,
‘Let me tell you about the Surrealist–Pataphysical novel I am currently working on.’
And with a flourish he threw open his Gladstone bag and produced a skull and a dentist’s hand-drill. He didn’t so much tell her about Dentist of the Old West as act it out. It was the exciting yarn of Doc Milligan, Dead Rock’s only dentist and a keen Roman Catholic. Indeed Doc Milligan wants to become Pope, but the Jesuits, who are strong in Chicago, hire Billy the Kid to deal with him. MacKellar did an imitation of Billy the Kid’s toothless mumble after Milligan had finished with him. Then he rushed on to the penultimate scene in the book, the Crazy G Saloon, where Milligan, surrounded by a ring of cow-pokes with guns trained upon him, still succeeds in killing Cardinal Vito Borgia by filling his teeth with poisoned amalgam.
MacKellar had been doing research for this book and seizing the skull, he started drilling one of its molars, all the while improvising the showdown dialogue between Vito Borgia (rather strangulated because of the number of instruments in his mouth) and Milligan (silkily triumphant). MacKellar drew Caroline in to act as his ravishingly pretty assistant – hitherto a goodtime girl and torch singer in the Crazy G Saloon, she has decided, under Milligan’s inspiring example, to go East and study to get dental qualifications. MacKellar got us both to join him in singing ‘Home on the Range’ at the tops of our voices, while he drilled away, the idea being to drown out the screaming of the doomed cardinal. Then having inspected the hole with a little silver mirror, he showed us how to fill the hole with a special sort of cement which he also produced from the bag.
Finally, he displayed himself to us as Pope Milligan, sitting on his throne in Rome and displaying the head of his arch-enemy on his knees. Only when we had knelt to kiss his papal ring was the performance over, and then MacKellar went rushing off downstairs to find one of my bottles of whisky.
Caroline would have liked to have been still angry with me, but, of course, it is not possible to sustain a fury against someone with whom one has just been singing ‘Home on the Range’. I agreed to put ‘Striptease’ aside (it was far enough advanced anyway for me to finish it without any further sittings) and I promised to do a nice normal portrait of her, starting next Saturday.
Caroline sat on the sunny window-sill and looked down on the river behind her. MacKellar reappeared with the whisky and proposed a toast to the objet trouvé from Gamages. As we drank, he started talking about the cinema. There was to be a Serapion Brotherhood outing to the cinema that coming Friday to see Mystery of the Wax Museum. He urged Caroline to come too. Evidently it was not going to be possible to keep the group away from Caroline. I passed MacKellar a cigarette and wound up the gramophone and the strains of ‘Who’s wonderful? Who’s Marvellous? Little Miss Annabel Lee’ filled the room.
Chapter Five
I spent the day working on the scene where Rimbaud and Gagool walk through a herd of hungry wildebeests, while he explains to her the principles of Symbolist poetry. Then, towards evening, I headed towards Piccadilly to meet Caroline. The group was congregated outside the Vitagraph. (Appearance at these group outings was more or less compulsory and only Manasseh consistently refused to go to the movies.) MacKellar was in high spirits, for he had discovered that Zane Grey, the author of Riders of the Purple Sage and scores of other westerns, had started life as a dentist. So MacKellar had just sent off a long letter to him with a list of technical questions about dentistry. I introduced Caroline to Jenny Bodkin, the toymaker. Oliver came up, looking resplendent in what was admittedly a rather frayed tailcoat. After the film was over, he would be going on to perform at the Dead Rat Club. He clicked his heels in the manner of a Prussian aristocrat and bent to raise Caroline’s hand to his lips, but, as he kissed it, he shot me a curious sideways glance. Then – it could be delayed no longer – Ned and Felix came over to us on the corner of the pavement. Felix matched her step so closely to Ned’s that she appeared to be strapped like a knife to his waist.
‘Hullo Caspar. Still doing those Gollywog’s Girlhood pictures?’ Felix enquired. Then she looked up with a brilliant smile.
‘And you must be the Caroline we’ve all heard about. It’s lovely to meet you. And it’s lovely that Caspar’s got a normal woman at last. I was getting fed up with all those tarts of his. I’m Felix by the way. We must have a long chat some time.’
Caroline, though she towered over Felix, looked stricken and vulnerable, but there was nothing I could do to protect her at that moment. Ned, who now had a hand squeezed tight on Felix’s shoulder, introduced himself and then added affably,
‘Felix is a bit mad.’
‘Well, as to that dear, we’re all a bit mad,’ said Felix and she continued confidentially, ‘Ned likes to flog his woman – flog her until he draws blood – before he can ever start any creative work. Mind you, when he’s finished he’s terribly apologetic and I make him kiss and lick me all over. But really I shouldn’t be saying all these things. Tell me about yourself, Caroline. You don’t mind me asking do you? I do like to get my nose in every crevice. What do you do? Dance? Paint? Write?’
Caroline, whose eyes were a little moist, said nothing and I replied for her.
‘She’s a secretary, Felix.’
‘A secretary!’ she exclaimed in tones of exaggerated disappointment. Then she added, ‘I don’t see how one can be a Surrealist secretary.’
‘That’s because you don’t think, Felix,’ said Ned (who was unable to take his eyes off Caroline). ‘Either the Surrealist revolution is for everyone, or it is for no one. When the Serapion Brotherhood takes over the country, we will need Surrealist taxi drivers to take us to mysterious destinations, we will need Surrealist sewer workers to investigate the depths of the Unconscious and we will need Surrealist secretaries to take down the dictates of the Marvellous at 120 words per minute.’
Caroline said she thought that she could only manage a hundred words per minute, but Ned assured her that her speed would get better under Surrealism and at this point MacKellar confirmed that his typing had improved no end since he became a Surrealist.
The Brotherhood always made a point of sitting together in the front row, so that we could be in the closest possible communion with the flickering dreams on the screen in front of us.
As we were making our way down the dark aisle to the front of the cinema, Caroline sniffed and then turned to whisper noisily in my ear,
‘Being licked all over by one’s lover is no substitute for a proper wash. I think that woman should use soap and water occasionally.’
Felix, who had overhead, looked up delighted,
‘And I think you should try being licked all over by Caspar,’ she said.
Oliver was in earshot during this exchange and, though I could not see his face, I could imagine his expression.
Ned wanted Caroline and me to sit next to him and Felix, but Caroline paused, allowing Oliver to come between them and us. Behind Caroline’s back, Felix winked at me and I winked back.
After a newsreel featuring Italians marching though Addis Ababa, the main film began. Mystery of the Wax Museum starred Lionel Atwill and Glenda Farrell, plus Fay Wray in a supporting role. However, it was Fay Wray (she of King Kong fame) that the Serapion Brotherhood had turned out to pay homage to. Ned and Felix had seen the film twice already and they chorused the dialogue in time with the actors on the screen. Whenever the villainous Ivan Igor came out with lines like, ‘If you will forgive this poor crippled stump, my dear, I am happy to know you’, a cheer went up from our group, but there were others in the cinema who took the film more seriously and halfway through the manager came down to remonstrate with us, threatening that he might have to ask us to leave.
In the film Fay Wray was abducted by Igor, because he wanted to coat her in wax and display her as Marie Antoinette in his necrophiliac waxworks, but I thought that Caroline was more beautiful than Fay Wr
ay and therefore I paid little attention to what was happening on the screen. When Igor crept into the Bellevue Morgue and bent, gurgling and retching, over the darkened silhouette of a young woman’s corpse, Caroline shrank against me and allowed me to put an arm around her. I slid that arm round further to gently fondle her right breast, while with my other hand I stroked one of her knees. I suppose Caroline’s knee was not very different from anyone else’s. The knee is such an ordinary thing, yet sitting under the luridly coloured flickering light coming from the screen and stroking Caroline’s silken, rounded knee I felt intensely happy. The knee is a transitional zone between the functional calf and the erotic thigh. A woman’s knees are clashing rocks between which man’s frail craft must venture to find the warmer waters that lie beyond. Not that I was thinking all these thoughts at the time. I would have to have been mad, madder than I actually was, to have done so, but I have often returned in memory and reflection to that evening with Caroline in the cinema.
Caroline’s knee poking out from beneath the skirt seemed touchingly, touchably vulnerable. Surely it was an absurd thing to be doing, sitting there, paying homage to someone’s knee, but then I have dedicated my life to the absurd, and, besides Caroline suffered me to stroke her knee. She accepted it placidly, in much the same way that a horse accepts being patted and stroked. I almost hated her for making me want her so much and yet I was so happy that I remember thinking that no matter what happened to me thereafter, no matter what eternity of hells might be my destiny, these minutes spent stroking Caroline’s knee made everything worthwhile. In the light of what I have suffered since, I find it interesting to recall that moment and that thought. This fondling was the lightest and most refined of pleasures, and so when Mystery of the Wax Museum moved towards its climax and we closed for a kiss I was sad to do so.
As the credits began to roll down the screen the Serapion Brotherhood made a rush for the exit, for it was a matter of principle with us never to stand for the National Anthem. We moved on to the Duke of York. Caroline took out a little mirror and remade her mouth. Jorge went off to buy a round of drinks. Jenny Bodkin started talking about Hans Bellmer’s sinister Surrealist dolls, some of which were going to be exhibited at the New Burlington Galleries the following week, but Ned cut across her. He wanted to know what Caroline had made of the film?