by Robert Irwin
So the rest of the day passed. We swam again and tossed the beachball about. Paul talked earnestly to Caroline about which French poets she should read next. He and Nusch pressed us to come and stay with them in Paris. There should be closer contacts between the British and French Surrealists, and Caroline, who had never been abroad, would enjoy Paris so much. They made her promise that she would come with me and Paul pressed a signed copy of his own poems upon her. I sketched first Caroline and then Paul with Gala. Paul and Gala kissed occasionally, but Nusch seemed not to mind. Monica scribbled furiously in her notebook, Jorge slept and Oliver sat a little apart, brooding and watching us all. Then I remember talking to Caroline about how I could easily increase my income by doing posters for the railways or for Shell Petrol.
I often think about that day. If I truly were possessed of Serapion’s powers then I think that I would choose to spend the rest of my life imprisoned in that day, forever playing beachball with Caroline and listening to Paul discoursing on the poetry of love. However, the curious thing is that I also have a sense, very vague admittedly, that it was on that day that I failed some sort of exam – an exam I did not even realise that I was taking.
We left the beach reluctantly. Caroline had lost one of her shoes somewhere on the beach. So I carried her back to Jorge’s car. I loved even her heaviness. Jorge drove Oliver, Caroline and me back to London, but he refused to take Caroline back to her house, insisting that she must come and see his place first. After that she could take a taxi which he would be happy to pay for. Jorge’s home was indeed one of the marvels of London and a sort of substitute for the man’s uninteresting personality. He lived in a huge custom-built caravan, which he called his ‘Chariot’ and which at that time was parked just off Park Lane. He claimed that one of these days he was going to drive it to China, where he would introduce the benighted warlords to Surrealism and where he would of course smoke lots of opium.
Although there were tiny dormitory rooms for a butler and maidservant in the caravan, in fact Jorge had staff from one of the big Mayfair hotels come in daily to attend to his needs. As for Jorge’s own quarters, the walls of the red leather interior were broken only by mahogany doors. Caroline, who had been preoccupied with her own thoughts during the drive back to London, came to life again. She was enchanted and her reactions were like those when she first visited my studio in Cuba Street. She skipped around, opening cupboards and pressing buttons. If one stood at the control panel in the living room and cranked one of the handles, a pair of heavy leather armchairs swung out from the walls and unfolded themselves and, if one turned another handle then a card-table was hydraulically thrust up from the floor – all this under a ceiling studded with artificial eyes.
Jorge watched the excited Caroline benignly. I think it is true to say that for him the display of his wealth was more pleasurable than sex.
‘It’s the simplicity of the raggle-taggle gipsy life that I’m after,’ he said wryly.
‘It’s spiffing!’ said Caroline. ‘You are lucky Jorge!’
‘Well, yes. I suppose so. But I find that money doesn’t make one happy. But then again, who gives a damn about happiness?’
Chapter Eight
We went to Paris in November. I was pleased to be out of England. Ned had been lecturing the Brotherhood almost every week on the liberation that came from separating sexual delight from procreation and he was increasingly pressing about holding an orgy, in order to break down ‘bourgeois and pseudo-familial bonds’. As for Oliver, since he had been accepted into the Magic Circle, his vanity knew no bounds and he seemed to regard himself as a latter-day Cagliostro or Rasputin, rather than what I think he was, an entertainer with a skill at palming cards. His obsession with the long-dead girlfriend of Hoffmann showed no sign of abating and apparently he had actually bought a red divan, in the hope of one day consummating his necrophiliac fantasy upon it. MacKellar, when we told him about Stella, thought the whole thing hilarious and took to staging mock seances with the declared aim of raising Gagool.
‘Gagool! Gagool! Come out, you naughty black thing you. I know you are hiding in the shadows somewhere. I conjure you. You are black but comely! Just wait till I get that loincloth off!’
However, since the illustrations to The Girlhood of Gagool had been completed, I was seeing less of him.
Caroline had told her parents that she was going on holiday with Brenda. I was surprised by her determination to go to Paris and by her readiness to lie to her parents.
We made our way from the Gare du Nord to the pied à terre which Jorge had lent us for the week. It was a steep climb up into Montmartre to his place, which was a step away from the Place Pigalle. Since Jorge rarely spent the night away from his magnificent ‘Chariot’, it was a mystery what he needed this tiny flat for. However a clue of sorts was provided by the masses of vellum and Moroccanbound pornography shelved in an alcove above the bed-head. Some of it was Surrealist – images by Man Ray and Bellmer and prose by Dali – but most of Jorge’s collection consisted of anonymous or pseudonymous nineteenth-century works. In the evening when we staggered back breathless from our random peregrinations through the streets of Paris, we would fall upon the stuff, reading out snatches of lascivious but unintentionally comic dialogue to one another and we puzzled over the pictures.
One image, a steel engraving in a book called, I think, Sombres dimanches, particularly haunted me. During the whole of that week we were in Paris the cryptic tableau that I had discovered while flicking through pages of Sombres dimanches was rarely out of my mind. I can still summon up every detail of it even today.
A young woman in a high-necked dress of black satin knelt at a prie-dieu. The carved side of the prie-dieu was covered with a gothic tracery, making it resemble a choir stall. The woman’s knees rested on a densely patterned carpet, while her head and prominent bosom were pressed upon the pages of a large book that lay open upon the desk. Caught in profile, the woman’s face had a look of gentle resignation. Her fair hair was pinned up under a large, flower-laden hat of the sort fashionable in the 1890s. The walls of the room were covered with a mottled wallpaper on which a floral pattern could just be discerned. Behind the woman was a bed half concealed by white drapery which cascaded from an unseen point above. Over the lady’s head was a mirror in an ornate oval frame. The kneeling woman had drawn up her heavy skirt and petticoats to reveal a perfectly white bottom. Behind her stood a mustachioed gentleman in evening dress and he appeared to contemplate that almost luminous twin-mooned apparition. As he did so, he also brandished a lady’s looking-glass with a coralline frame. The angle he held the mirror at suggested that he intended to spank the lady with it. The man’s face could only fully be seen in the mirror above the lady’s head. His expression seemed to be one of anxious enquiry. The looking-glass that he carried displayed a reflection of the lady’s bottom. Yet the respective positions of his face, her bottom and the mirrors were such that these reflections should have been impossible. It may simply have been a matter of artistic incompetence, but I doubted it. More disturbing yet was the general mood of the image and the quaintly frozen postures of the lady and the gentleman. I had the impression that I was spying upon something which regularly took place, a ritual that was only tangentially concerned with sex. Everything was pressed into the corner of the room and one could not see the rest of it, yet I had the impression that it was very small and that beyond that room there were only more rooms, each one very like the one I was looking at. The air seemed somehow frowsty and I had the feeling that whatever was taking place was taking place towards the end of a wet afternoon in mid-winter. It filled me with foreboding.
Having stumbled on this image, I closed the book hastily and hid it under the bed. I did not want Caroline to see this picture and be affected by it as I was. But in the days that followed, when Caroline was shopping or getting some food ready, I furtively returned to the picture again and again. I was possessed by the ridiculous notion that if only I studied the pi
cture with sufficient attention to its details, then it would yield up its secrets – secrets that were perhaps concealed in the fall of shadow, or in the pattern of the carpet, or in the arch of the lady’s single visible eyebrow.
By now it was a little like that with my portraits of Caroline. Time and again I would commence with a rough likeness, which I would correct or refine and then after more study I would make yet further adjustments. Yet all I succeeded in producing were approximations of Caroline’s likeness. I hoped through intensive study of her face – that face which was simultaneously so wonderful and so ordinary – to mimic it exactly on canvas and thus my brush moved in minute strokes across my image of her face like a laboriously travailing insect. Yet with each portrait I completed of Caroline I was being forced to the conclusion that she was coming to seem more, not less mysterious. She was holding something back from me. I was sure of it. And she was changing. Perhaps it was something to do with the process of being painted. Sometimes during our sittings I caught a look of apprehension pass over her face like a cloud across the moon. I began to think that it was possible that I would never really know her until I had known her in the Biblical sense and penetrated her. By the time we set out for Paris it was obvious to me that the paintbrush had proved inadequate as an instrument of investigation, but I still had hopes for my penis.
I also had high hopes for that first night in Jorge’s flat. I was in a fever of impatience that was difficult to conceal. Indeed I do not think I was successful and I think that Caroline must have noticed my tormented restlessness. Whether she had or had not, she heedlessly lounged on the bed leafing through Jorge’s amazing collection of erotica for almost two hours, before announcing that she supposed that it was time that we went to bed. While she went to the lavatory, I stripped and leapt under the sheets. She reentered the room and began to undress in that lovely sequence of movements peculiar to women; bending to unfasten suspenders and roll down stockings, pulling the dress over the head, and arching and stretching to unhook the brassiere. Caroline kept her girdle and panties on. She came to the end of the bed and paused. She seemed to be admiring her half-naked body in the mirror of my eyes.
Then she said,
‘Darling, we are going to sleep together, but that is all. Like brother and sister, I mean. I don’t think that we are ready for anything more.’
I started to protest, but she cut me short.
‘Caspar, don’t! It’s just that we don’t know one another well enough yet. I need time, that is all. And we have all the time in the world. Just be patient and don’t spoil things.’
‘Why should sex spoil anything?’
‘Oh dear! I was afraid of this. Caspar, I’m sorry. When I said that I was going to come to Paris with you, I did mean to sleep with you. I admit it. And you have paid and everything … I’m sorry I’m being such a weed. It just doesn’t feel right now, that’s all.’
‘What doesn’t feel right?’
‘I don’t know. I’m in a muddle. I can’t say.’
‘Well come to bed anyway and stop shivering. And don’t start crying. I’m not going to rape you or beat you up.’
She looked at me dubiously, before getting into bed on the far side. I rolled over to her side.
‘Look but don’t touch,’ she said.
Despite what she had just said, it was still possible that her ‘no’ meant yes. Perhaps she did want to be forced. Perhaps this was a token refusal, something to satisfy her conscience, or something to provoke me into asserting a dominant role? Whatever the truth of the matter, the strength of my desire made me weak.
‘Caroline, I would do anything for you.’
She looked at me solemnly.
‘Really?’
‘If you asked me now, this minute, to cut off my right hand, I would do it this instant without thinking.’
‘Really? Well, all I want you to do is not to rush me into sex tonight. That’s not such a big thing to ask is it? I certainly don’t want you to cut off your right hand. It’s a very nice right hand.’
And she kissed it. Then after gazing into my eyes for several minutes, she said,
‘But if you mean what you say, I would like you to do to me what Ned does to Felix. I want to be licked all over. Lick me – if you’d like to, that is.’
I moved to the bottom of the bed and set to licking her feet. Then, as she rolled over onto her stomach, my tongue began to work up her leg. I am not sure what game she was playing that night, but it was certainly some sort of game. At the same time that she played with my desire, I think she was testing the strength of her determination to resist it. While I worked on her feet, she turned the pages of Jorge’s copy of The Lustful Turk.
‘Super,’ she murmured drowsily as my tongue moved up to her thigh, but then as it reached the lacy edge of her panties and I slid my hands up to pull them down, she turned over and sat up.
‘Now you are being naughty,’ she said. And then, ‘But you may cuddle me until I fall asleep.’
Sleepless I held her and watched sleep steal her away from me.
That first morning in Paris I awoke screaming. I had forgotten to warn Caroline that this was likely to happen and she threw herself upon me in a frenzy of alarm, but, once I had reassured her, she rested comfortably on me and picked at and teased the hairs on my chest. We were loath to leave our bed, for the weather that day was not welcoming. From the gable window of Jorge’s flat we looked out over oilcloth roofs, leaded windows, shadowed courtyards and pigeons – all grey in the pearly dull light. The clouds were low over the houses and I quoted one of Malcolm de Chazal’s aphorisms to Caroline, ‘Without the shadows, light could not ride the objects, and the sun would go everywhere on foot’.
However, we did have to venture out, for we were expected later that day by the Eluards. Caroline’s mood that morning was strange. Though she did not seem to share my sense of oppression, I got the feeling that she was somehow on the run as she clattered down the steps and took a zigzag course through the streets of the unknown city. But was she escaping with me or from me?’
It was a long walk to the Eluards and we almost had to run the last part to arrive before lunch. Paul served us pastis and plunged immediately into a disquisition on the war in Spain. Since Ned did not believe in politics, we in the Serapion Brotherhood had paid little or no attention to the progress of the Civil War. In Paris, however, people found it difficult to talk about anything else. Franco had been stopped south of Madrid, but everyone was aware that the reprieve was temporary and the Republican government itself had just moved to Valencia. Eluard was asking himself what were the duties of a writer or an artist in this perilous situation? What could he do in order to help the forces of liberty and progress? But over lunch talk turned to less portentous matters and Nusch wanted to know how we had first met. Having heard our story, which was not exactly a story of love at first sight, Paul gravely suggested that going blindfold was probably also the best way to see Paris. Before we left the Eluards, we arranged to meet again. Moreover, since I had business to transact with André Breton (not otherwise relevant to this anti-memoire, so I will not trouble you with the details), Paul, even though he was no longer on intimate terms with the Surrealist leader, agreed to effect an introduction.
In the days that followed we explored Paris in the approved Surrealist fashion. We did not visit the Louvre (a cemetery for dead art). We did not see the Arc de Triomphe (a celebration of militarism). We did not go near the Eiffel Tower (a monstrously vulgar piece of ironmongery). Instead we walked hand in hand through places which were nowhere, quiet shops and unfashionable arrondissements. We never passed an impasse without walking to its end and back again and we never passed a flight of steps without either ascending or descending. If a statue seemed to be pointing in a particular direction then we followed its direction.
Whenever we passed a second-hand bookshop, we paused and I would make a sketch of its exterior. For her part, Caroline wanted to stop at the rag-trade sweatsh
ops where dresses were made. She wished to learn as much as she could about Paris’s fashion industry and sometimes she would succeed in striking up conversations with the arpétes and their supervisors. She would point to dresses walking ahead of us in the street and identify them as a Schiaparelli, a Vionnet, or whatever.
She had hitherto vaguely thought of French as a complicated system of cunning tests devised by English school-boards. It was hard for her to get over her amazement at discovering it to be a living language, fashioned for use and spoken by real working people. Her French was good, if a little formal. Mine was, by contrast, rather slangy, most of it having been picked up during the six months I had spent in a Marseilles jail.
All that week in Paris the air was heavy and moist. The sky was like a muddy river flowing over the city and I imagined etherial fish swimming in its murk. Drops of water would collect on the edges of awnings and on the leaves of bushes before heavily plashing down into puddles. Walking beside Caroline, I tried to see the city through her eyes and, following the directions of her eyes, I found myself looking into puddles, shop-windows and the faces of other men. It was slowly borne in upon me that it was not exactly water, glass or faces that she was studying, but rather herself, finding herself reflected in every part of Paris. I was happy to follow her in this.
The city in the damp autumn seemed to be rotting away. Everywhere one saw leprous stretches of peeling paint and rusted and leaking guttering. The smarter residential areas were, I remember, especially sombre – appropriately oppressive stage sets for my unconsummated passion. The portes-cochéres were always locked. Dark trees and shrubs set the great houses at a distance from the roads and the green shutters on the windows of the houses were, like the portes-cochéres, closed. We speculated what went on behind those shutters and I thought again of the mustachioed gentleman and the lady caught between the two mirrors. (It only now occurs to me that the couple in the picture may have been about to carry out an experiment in the erotics of catoptrics, making use of the reflection of reflections to multiply the appearances of the lady’s bottom to infinity and in so doing to similarly multiply the delight that came from contemplating her bottom also to infinity.) Anyway, on only one occasion, when evening was coming on, did we walk past one of these windows which had carelessly been left unshuttered and then we saw a naked woman dancing with her back to us on a red settee. We stood and watched for a while and then walked on in silence. The curious tableau made me think of Oliver and his bizarrely useless red divan.