Exquisite Corpse

by Robert Irwin

  Caroline smiled,

  ‘I suppose it was a bit silly. Even so, I found it quite frightening.’

  ‘That’s exactly right,’ replied Ned. ‘Though I would prefer to say that it partook of the Absurd. And for me then the question is “What are the sources of the fear evoked by this film?”. It is a fair bet that those sources are both sexual and unconscious in their nature. Any convincing analysis of the psychosexual potency of Mystery of the Wax Museum will have to be made at several levels. Essentially what we are confronted with on the screen is a psychodrama in which unacknowledged desires are made visible in disguised forms. What after all are waxworks? Essentially they perform the same symbolic function as automata, mannequins and dolls. They are markers on a dangerous borderland between life and death. The wax figures have the appearance of life, but it is the appearance only. At the same time the waxworks’ functional relationship to the dolls of childhood games signals that in this film we are regressing back to a world of infantile desires and fears. It’s not merely, of course, that all small children desire to have their toys come alive and they pretend that they have actually done so. It’s more than that. Ivan Igor, the monster who runs the wax museum, stands here for the father figure – superficially benign but actually a threat to his children. Fay Wray and Glenda Farrell in the film are subconsciously Igor’s daughters and like all daughters they desire to sleep with their father.’

  Caroline looked doubtful and I could see that she was considering the idea of sleeping with her father (who I gathered was a rather elderly man who worked for the railways and smelled of pipe tobacco), before she put the idea swiftly out of her mind. I was unimpressed by Ned’s harangue, for I had heard him deliver an almost identical analysis of Gold Diggers of 1933 only a few weeks previously. Ned always talked in paragraphs, without any ums or ers. His performances had a snakelike, hypnotic effect and, beyond our circle, other drinkers in the pub had turned to watch and listen.

  ‘And of course, it will not have escaped your attention that there is a family resemblance between Igor and the women he traps and kills. Igor, after his accident in the fire at the beginning of the film, is a mutilated monster, and women, as we all know are also monsters in that, in a certain sense, they must be seen as castrated, i.e. mutilated men. This takes us on to another level of analysis of this profoundly interesting film and that is the sense in which the unfolding of events represents a threat to the primal patriarchy, for clearly what we are seeing is the –’

  ‘Hold on a minute, Ned,’ Jenny Bodkin interrupted. ‘Would it not make more sense to see man as a sort of monstrous woman? Take the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Is it not obvious that the hump of the Hunchback is in symbolic terms a displaced penis, that is to say something that is perceived as a deformed addition to the perfect female body? And in Mystery of the Wax Museum, it is hard to see Fay Wray as anything other than the mother figure whom Igor perceives as threatening his doubtful virility. Surely, Ned, you can see that?’

  Jenny smiled triumphantly, but Ned, having waited until she had finished speaking, resumed his own discourse as if she had not spoken.

  ‘Clearly, what we are seeing is a symbolic representation of man’s fear of female sexuality. Igor is a kind of Bluebeard figure who can only neutralise female sexuality by coating his female victims in wax. Moving on to something much more obvious –’

  ‘Hey stop it a minute Ned! What about what Jenny was saying about man being a deformed woman?’ Felix was determined to stop Ned’s flow.

  ‘If you stop to think about it, you will see that Jenny and I are saying the same thing,’ replied Ned blandly. ‘Now to continue with something much more obvious, it is striking is it not that when Igor kills Fay Wray he then transforms her body into a waxwork of Marie Antoinette, a woman who is centuries older than he is, i.e. his mother? But this is only half the story. Indeed, if you press me, I should have to say that though male fears of –’

  ‘Stop, Ned! Stop! You and Jenny are not saying the same thing. You were saying that a woman is a deformed man, but she was saying exactly the opposite.’

  ‘You are being tiresome, Felix,’ Ned replied, still without taking his eyes off Caroline. ‘As I was saying, although male fears of female sexuality are explored in the basement of the Wax Museum, in the end I should say, if you pressed me, that ultimately this is a film about woman’s fear of her own sexuality. This is what gives it its profound and universal appeal. It’s the Beauty and the Beast complex. Woman’s sexuality seems both frightening and absurd to her. I have to say that a surprisingly large proportion of the young women I have taken to bed were afraid to acknowledge their own sexual needs.’

  Ned looked hard into Caroline’s eyes. She sat bolt upright over her glass of shandy and gazed fearlessly back.

  ‘The only thing women who sleep with Ned should be afraid of is the likelihood of getting the clap,’ said Felix loudly.

  ‘Anyway, that is how I see the main areas of tension in the film,’ concluded Ned imperturbably. ‘Though of course one can also see Mystery of the Wax Museum as a parable about voyeurism and the dangers of treating women as sexual objects. In the end however, the film’s infinite ambiguities defeat any conclusive analysis.’

  There was a silence, then Oliver said that he saw the film in pretty much the same way too. Jenny started talking again about Bellmer’s dolls. Bellmer and Dali would both have waxworks in the Burlington exhibition.

  ‘You must come to the private view, Caroline. You will bring her, won’t you Caspar?’

  Felix said that she needed another bloody drink after listening to all Ned’s fucking rubbish, but Oliver said that they ought to be moving on, as he was due on stage quite shortly. Most of the group were going on there anyway as drinking-up time approached. Oliver invited Caroline and me to come too, but she refused, saying that Mummy and Daddy would be waiting up for her. I wanted to see her home but she only allowed me to walk her to the bus-stop, insisting that I should then go on to the club. As we waited at the bus-stop she asked me what Felix had meant by ‘all those tarts’.

  ‘They were just what Felix said – “tarts”.’

  ‘Tell me about them.’

  ‘I will sometime. Meanwhile would you like to come to the private view that Jenny was talking about? It should be quite an event.’

  She nodded thoughtfully,

  ‘That would be nice.’

  I think she would have returned to the subject of the tarts, but at that moment the bus came along. If she had persisted, then she might have forced her way into a sort of Bluebeard’s chamber of past sexual encounters. I had lost my virginity at the age of fifteen in Istanbul. There was (and, I suppose, still is) a street of brothels in Pera, not far from the waterfront and the Galata Bridge. The Turkish men walked up and down looking at the half-naked women displayed in the windows and doorways and I and my guardian walked with them until we had fixed on a woman whom we agreed was the prettiest. She was crop-headed and hard-faced and her breasts were like tennis balls. My guardian passed me some money which I paid to the cashier at the foot of the brothel’s stairs. I pointed to the crop-headed woman and she led me upstairs. She threw herself onto the bed and, not suffering herself to be kissed or stroked, she parted her legs and hurried me on, though this was hardly necessary as I came very quickly. She then promptly rolled off the bed and hurried to the bidet. A few minutes later, my guardian decided that he would try her too.

  Later I had had more satisfying though also more expensive experiences with Janine in Paris and one memorable night with Kiki de Montparnasse and a whole string of women in London whose love I paid for, including a prostitute of mature years who was particularly attached to me and whom the group dubbed Old Mortality. These women had in a sense been my mothers. But now I hoped to be rescued from them and their kind.

  I hurried away from the bus-stop to the Dead Rat Club. Pamela and Oliver had agreed to a double act. Pamela sang first ‘Ou Sont Tous Mes Amants’ and then the ‘Chanson du Ra
t Mort’ in that dark, fumy voice of hers. Meanwhile Oliver, under the stage-name of Mandryka, in perfect silence performed feats of legerdemain with a double pack of cards, creating waterfalls, fans and other exhibitions. He made the cards run up and down his arms and then he had them float in the air between his hands. Make-up accentuated his saturnine melancholy and under the heat of the spotlight sweat coursed down his face and mingled with the mascara, so that he looked like a Pierrot weeping black tears.

  I made my way to the Brotherhood’s table where a drink was awaiting me. I sat there drinking and reflecting on my evil nature. I was like Igor, I thought, a monster who preyed on innocent and unsuspecting women. But (and it was a crucial difference), I wished to be redeemed. I wished to be able to say ‘I is the Other’. What was I doing in the club? If it had not been for the excruciating dullness of my dreams, I would have preferred to have been asleep – much preferred it to all this smoke, noise and tawdriness. None of us looked cheerful that evening. Felix’s face, in particular, looked puffy and it was evident that she and Ned had been quarrelling again.

  Ned was talking about how marriage was disgusting. Basically, it was a disguised form of commercial transaction, in which the woman sold sex in exchange for goods and services provided by the husband.

  ‘Sex should be a free and communal activity entered into by equals without any obligations,’ he said. Then a thought struck him.

  ‘We should have an orgy – I mean the group should. It will help bring the Brotherhood closer together and give it more cohesion. Why, we could hold it right here in this club! We’ll need more women though, so most of the men should try to bring along a woman.’

  MacKellar was enthusiastic,

  ‘The wife was complaining only a few days ago how she never gets invited to the group’s activities.’

  However he was the only one to be so enthusiastic. The rest of us stared gloomily back at Ned.

  Just then Pamela’s and Oliver’s act finished and, relinquishing the stage to a comedian, they came over to our table.

  ‘Hello, Caspar,’ Pamela greeted me fondly.

  ‘He’s got a new girl!’ the rest of the group chorused up at her.

  She made a little moue. I shrugged apologetically and begged for one of her shoes. Then, snatching a bottle from Jorge, I filled the shoe with champagne and drank to Pamela’s beauty. Effectively immobilised, she subsided on to my knees and, after she had taken a sip from it, her shoe circulated among the rest of the group. We all agreed that the club’s champagne tasted better out of a shoe.

  MacKellar was especially appreciative,

  ‘It’s like red wine with cheese isn’t it?’

  In fact he was so keen that he took off one of his own shoes and filled it with champagne as well. Pamela on my knee was quietly crooning the lines of ‘Ou sont tous mes amants?’.

  Meanwhile Ned, ever obstinate, had reverted to the subject of the orgy.

  ‘We’ll have everyone enter the room blindfolded and on all fours. Caspar, where did you get that sleep-mask of yours?’

  ‘I bought it in a shop off Wigmore Street. It sold medical things – prosthetic limbs and things like that.’

  ‘Excellent. Get twenty or thirty sleep-masks then – and a few false legs. They should be good for the orgy too. They ought to help blur the frontier between reality and unreality. Jorge will give you the money for the legs.’

  Jorge nodded sombrely.

  Oliver lit up a cigarette from his Emerald Cunard case and blew a smoke ring, before drawling,

  ‘Aren’t orgies rather vieux jeu?’

  Ned looked irritated,

  ‘I’m not talking about a bourgeois orgy, which is just a party with no clothes on. I am talking about a total immersion in polymorphous perversity and the systematic derangement of the senses. Blindfolds will facilitate the workings of chance and objective desire and we will create an human carpet of interlocked limbs, tongues and sexual organs, rippling and throbbing in a single mysterious rhythm. Sex has to be liberated from marriage and reproduction. What’s more, we men need to lose our fear of each other’s physicality. Nothing should be forbidden as we move beyond the conventions of good and evil.’

  Turning to Oliver, he said,

  ‘You can bring your contessa.’

  And to me,

  ‘You can bring Caroline.’

  Then he continued,

  ‘The great thing about an orgy is that in Surrealism there should be no discrimination between the beautiful and the ugly and blindfolded –’

  But Ned never finished the sentence, for, while he had been talking, Felix had unsteadily stood up on her chair and now she screamed down at him,

  ‘It’s just because he’s bored with me. Well, it’s not half as fucking much as I’m bored with him!’

  And then she poured half a bottle of champagne over Ned’s head. Norman, the club’s manager, hurried over to ask if she wanted another bottle, but she gestured him impatiently away. Then she attempted to kick Ned in the face, but, in doing so, she lost her balance and fell, concussing herself lightly on the edge of the next table. Ned plunged to join her on the floor and she slowly recovered consciousness in his embrace. When she started to cry, Ned set to licking her eyeballs. Jorge passed glasses of champagne down to them.

  Then we started drinking seriously. I do not remember much about the rest of the evening. I remember Ned saying that detailed organisation of the orgy would be sorted out at the next meeting. I also remember him saying to me apparently à propos of nothing in particular,

  ‘That Caroline, she’s very intelligent. You know that, don’t you, Caspar?’

  I was unable to conceal my surprise and Ned, seeing this, continued,

  ‘Her face is intelligent. The eyebrows especially. Faces can be read. You as a portraitist should know that. As people pass out of childhood they begin to lose the face they were born with and they acquire the face they have worked for. If you look at me, you will see that I have acquired a lion’s face. It is the sort of face I need, if I am to lead the Brotherhood. Then look at your own face with its lack of laughter and sorrow lines and you will see that you have grown yourself a mask, but it is a mask which conceals nothing, for by now your mask and your face are identical. But Caroline’s face is a fine, intelligent face.’

  I was drunkenly trying to pull myself together and remember where the door was which led out of the club, but Ned held me by the sleeve and what he said next surprised me even more,

  ‘Besides, as a general rule of thumb, people who lead regular lives and engage in the difficulty and discipline of ordinary work are more intelligent than the artists, writers, singers and whatnot that modern mythology has made out to be some sort of elite. Look down the table, Caspar. Look at them. What do you see? Admit to yourself, what you have secretly always known, that the Serapion Brotherhood mostly consists of the walking wounded, pitiful figures on crutches, helpless without drinks, drugs and lots and lots of attention. Caroline, however, is not like them and she will take exactly what she wants from life.’

  ‘That’s very interesting, Ned,’ I said and I broke away from his grip. But, before I could find the way out, I got caught up in a great conga, which swaying and sweating, wound its way round the tables of the club and in my fancy I can see that conga going on and on, snaking along a path that was to peter out in the battlefields of the Second World War.

  Chapter Six

  The First International Surrealist Exhibition opened to the public on Saturday, June 11, 1936. The private view was on Friday afternoon. I had arranged to meet Caroline from work. Although we could have walked to the exhibition, as a surprise for her, I had arranged for Jorge to pick her up in his car. As we rolled up, she was standing on the corner outside the fur importer’s office studying a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal. This she stuffed into her handbag before being ushered into Jorge’s car and waving back up to Brenda and Jim who gazed down enviously upon us from a high window. Caroline was wearing an elegant, long, wh
ite dress which clung to her hips before flaring out at the calves. I was astonished to hear that she had made the dress herself. A broad-brimmed black hat trimmed with pink wax stems was set at an angle on her head.

  ‘What a pretty car!’

  ‘I am so pleased that we have the opportunity of meeting again.’

  All the emptiness of the pampas was in Jorge’s slow and formal diction. Out of consideration for Caroline’s hat, lest it blow away, Jorge drove slowly, so slowly that we were even overtaken by a horse-drawn hearse. New Bond Street had seized up with traffic heading for the view and we had to park some distance away. We found ourselves walking in behind the Sitwell trio and the Movietone cameras swivelled away from them to follow our advance into the exhibition. Just as we passed through the doors Caroline, suddenly timid, looked to me for reassurance. I squeezed her hand and we shouldered our way in.

  We arrived just as Herbert Read, standing uneasily on a rather springy sofa, began his speech of introduction for André Breton.

  ‘Do not judge this movement too kindly. It is not just another amusing stunt. It is defiant – the desperate act of men too profoundly convinced of the rottenness of our civilization to want to save a shred of its respectability …’

  It was horribly hot and crowded and people were looking impatiently at the drinks laid out on the trestle-tables behind Read and he kept having to raise his voice to get it to carry over the steady murmur of conversation. Caroline was getting me to point out to her people that I recognised. She was excited, a little nervous certainly, but also a little confident, for I think that she was aware that she already knew and understood more about Surrealism than many of the drones and liggers at this private view. Besides her dress was spectacular and, as Emerson remarks somewhere, ‘the sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow’. She was smiling. Smiles came so easily to her then. I just wanted to stand close to her and steal some of her happiness.