by Robert Irwin
Without waiting for my reply, he gleefully ushered me out of the office and we started walking towards the restaurant. This was not at all the sort of confrontation that I had anticipated. Even more unexpected was what came next. We had only walked a few steps when he turned to me and asked,
‘How is Caroline by the way?’
‘What do you mean? I thought that she was with you.’
He shook his head decisively.
‘No. Why should she be with me? I presumed that she had gone off with you to Paris or somewhere, months ago. No? Well then, it seems that she has diddled both of us. What a pair of chumps we are!’
It was a very long lunch. Clive actually sent one of the waiters round to his office to get the secretary to cancel a couple of appointments. First, I got him to talk about his meetings with her and the amateur dramatics. Apparently she was a damned good actress. He had admired her enormously.
‘A corking girl! A real English rose! They don’t make many like her any more!’
However, apart from a bit of kissing and cuddling, particularly backstage during the rehearsals of The Vortex, there had been nothing between them. Caroline had told Clive that she wanted their relationship to be Platonic.
A very intense young man, his eyes, bright and tiny as a sparrow’s, darted about all over the place and he was interested in and enthusiastic about absolutely everything. Over the last year or so he had become particularly interested in ‘long-hairs and bohos’.
‘After I met all you lot in Trafalgar Square with that woman with roses all over her face, I actually went to the Surrealist Exhibition. Gosh, that was fun! I can remember looking at “Second-hand Bookshop no. 1” and admiring its technique, though at that time I didn’t know it was by you, of course.’
He leaned across the table and poured me some more wine, before whispering with theatrical confidentiality,
‘It’s all a bit of a lark though, isn’t it? Come on now, you can tell old Clive Jerkin. Just between you and me. I won’t tell anyone. Surrealism’s jolly interesting, but in the end it’s a kind of put on. It’s good because it makes chaps like me think, shakes us out of our bourgeois preconceptions and all that, seeing a floppy watch or a furry teacup, but Surrealism is just a joke, isn’t it? Don’t let me down on this one.’
I shook my head in vigorous denial, though if I thought about certain cases like MacKellar I would have had to admit that Clive was at least partly right.
Clive had actually been reading David Gascoyne and Herbert Read on Surrealism and he wanted to check his reading against mine. However, although he was interested in me as a representative of Surrealism, he was even more interested in me as an individual. Partly it was that Caroline had talked so much about me. But it wasn’t just that.
‘I find this hard to put into words,’ he said. ‘But when I was a boy I wanted to run away and join the circus, but I never did. When I left home, I left it for Eton and Oxford. You though are the sort of person who, when he thinks of running away to join the circus, just goes ahead and does exactly that. I’m actually grateful to people like you, for, as the years pass, I often find myself wondering what would have become of me if I had actually joined a circus, or become a painter in Montmartre, or a soldier of fortune in some South American War. Well, then I can check myself against people like you. I mean that you are the me that I might have become, if I had gone down your particular road. Oh dear, I’m afraid that I’m not making much sense.’
I couldn’t reciprocate, as I had never dreamed as a child of running away to join a business broker’s office and, besides, the only thing I was interested in that day was Caroline. I sat there thinking about how things might have turned out, if, when I had returned to England, I had found Clive and Caroline married. How I would have visited them in their flat. How I would have set about installing myself as the third partner, the gooseberry, in a bizarre ménage à trois. How I faced the practicalities of loving Clive as Caroline did and getting his cock between my lips, while he continued to burble enthusiastically about the Bohemian way of life. My imagination has always been strong, but at this point it was beginning to fail.
‘Penny for them,’ said Clive, who had at last noticed my silence.
‘Oh nothing … Forgive me, but do you swear that Caroline is not with you and that you don’t know where she is?’
‘Oh for God’s sake! I thought that we’d got all that out of the way. I really haven’t the faintest notion where the dear girl is.’
Then, reaching inside his jacket, he produced a wallet and from the wallet a photograph. I found myself staring at the image of a young woman whose plump face was framed by ringlets of curly dark hair.
‘That’s Sally,’ said Clive proudly. ‘We are getting married next March.’
A thought struck him.
‘Look, I’ll get you an invitation to the wedding. You’ll be so much more interesting for me to talk to than Sally’s ghastly relatives. I love the girl dearly, but her family are another kettle of fish. Do come.’
I smiled non-committally.
‘But what about Caroline? Where has she gone and how am I going to find her?’ I persisted.
Clive’s birdlike head moved left and right and up and down while he thought rapidly.
‘Private detectives – a detective agency, that’s the answer.’
‘Good, but how does one set about finding a detective agency?’
‘I have no idea, but I’ll put my secretary on to it. Give me your address and I’ll be in touch. What fun this is going to be!’
I went on from the restaurant to Ned’s place and I walked in on Ned using a cut-throat razor to spread butter on to toast, while talking to a young man whom I did not recognise. I could see Felix on the bed in the next room and guessed that she was sleeping off a hangover.
‘You just missed Jenny,’ said Ned, pointing me to a chair. ‘And Jenny ran into Monica a few days ago. You heard that Monica got involved with those Mass Observation people and has been beetling backwards and forwards between Blackheath and Bolton in that old Tin Lizzie of hers? Well, it’s more interesting than we realised. According to Humphrey Jennings, the man she’s working with, what they are trying to do is not just to train volunteer observers to survey political opinions and collect statistics on what people are eating and wearing and all that sort of stuff. No, the ultimate aim is to get everyone observing everyone, and everyone to be on the alert, so as to spot the subliminal flickers of imagery emanating from the collective unconscious as it manifests itself in the events of ordinary lived experience. Mass Observation will transform itself into a psychoanalysis of everyday life conducted on a massive scale. I have decided that this ought to be discussed at our next meeting and I am proposing that everyone in the Brotherhood registers with Mass Observation and starts training immediately – taking notes on conversations overheard in pubs, and recording how long the people in the pubs take to get their drinks down, and the point at which they light up their cigarettes – stuff like that. Mass Observation is going to put the quest for the Marvellous on a new and more scientific basis.’
This was absolutely typical of Ned. I had vanished months ago without any warning and during all that time I had not been in touch with Ned or any other member of the group, and yet he showed not the slightest curiosity about why I had gone away or where I had been. Instead he followed his invariable practice of talking about whatever was at the top of his head.
I nodded politely to the unknown young man and only then did Ned say,
‘Oh yes, I forgot. Caspar, this is Mark. He’s a new recruit to the Brotherhood. He was living in Portugal until recently. He’s a – what’s the word? – a monachino, a specialist in the seduction of nuns.’
‘Hello, Mark. Do you do anything else?’
Mark’s face was plump, but the cherubic look was belied by the Mephistophelean arching of his eyebrows. In response to my question he only shrugged and smiled.
‘He has turned seduction into an a
rt form,’ said Ned.
‘Why nuns?’ I wanted to know.
‘Their skin smells nice,’ said Mark at last.
Then, having decided that I was going to find Mark difficult to talk to, I turned to Ned.
‘I’ve just been to Germany, Ned, and I have seen the future and it does not like us.’
And I told him about the Exhibition of Degenerate Art and what I had observed of the growing militarisation of Germany, the anti-Jewish laws, the Strength through Joy Movement and so on.
Mark silently left soon after I had started my analysis of how things were in Germany. Ned was interested in the ‘degenerate’ art of course, but he did not want to hear about the politics and, though he did hear me out, he looked uncomfortable.
‘Dark entities that hitherto existed only in gruesome fairy tales are now transforming themselves into real things. The Nazis are similar to us, Ned,’ I concluded. ‘We and they are both trying to encounter the Irrational, but shake hands with the Irrational and you may not get your hand back.’
All Ned said to this was,
‘Come on, we are going on a pub crawl. Tonight I want to drink enough to be able to forget everything I have ever thought.’
While he was out of the room, foraging for some drinking money, Felix sleepily padded in and gave an affectionate peck.
‘You sodding arsehole Caspar, where the fucking hell have you been? Still I’m glad you’re back. Maybe you can talk to Ned. This orgy business – it seems like it’s been dragging on forever – it’s becoming an obsession with him. First, he had Adrian researching Dionysian rituals and Bacchic festivals, but now this creep Mark has turned up and it’s getting sinister. Ned and he are studying the Marquis de Sade and Antonin Artaud and the two of them are working out how the orgy we are going to have will fit in with the philosophy of the Theatre of Cruelty. Talk to him, Caspar. He listens to you. I don’t like the way things are going.’
I nodded absently and when Ned reappeared, jingling coins in his pocket, I went out with him. I did intend to pour cold water on the great orgy project, but first I wanted to talk to him about Caroline and once we were seated with our drinks in the Pillars of Hercules, I told him some of what had passed between Caroline and myself before I left for Germany and how, now that I had returned, she seemed to have vanished into thin air.
‘When I lost her love, I failed in the only thing in life where failure really matters. I can’t live without her, Ned. Now that I have been without her for three months, I know that I can’t live much longer without her. I’ll die if I can’t have her. I’m considering committing suicide.’
Ned took this pretty calmly.
‘Well it might be an option, I suppose, but are you sure that there really is an exit out of this world?’
We gazed into our beers and I pondered Ned’s image of life as a sealed nightmare with all ways out locked and bolted. Then I continued,
‘I can’t understand how she can do this to me – I mean how she can have had such a powerful effect on me, how she obsesses all my thoughts. Half of me can see that she is perfectly ordinary; the other half wants her more than money, fame, happiness or life itself. I spend all my time thinking about how she speaks and moves. I can’t understand it.’
‘Oh, but that’s easy,’ said Ned. ‘It’s all a matter of sexual recognition signals. Your unconscious mind has been responding to Caroline’s breasts and buttocks. Thought doesn’t come into it; only hormones do. It’s like white mice responding to a certain sort of sexual smell or the peahen’s desire which is automatically triggered by the peacock’s spreading of his tail. And with Caroline, her responses will be unconsciously determined by her reproductive drives and her need to find both the right mate and the right nesting place before she starts producing children. Now the case of the Californian fruit-fly, dropsophila pseudo obscura, is really interesting. Scientific observation, conducted on a massive scale, on the breeding habits of the fruit-fly has shown that the female fruit-fly prefers males with rare markings over fruit-flies with markings that are statistically closer to the average. Now you, Caspar, are definitely unusual in looks and everything else; so in principle I would have thought that you had a very good chance.’
‘But it’s not a Californian fruit-fly that I’m trying to attract.’
I would have liked to have talked more about Caroline, but then we were joined by John Gawsthorne, the eccentric bibliomaniac and horror-story writer. Having been eavesdropping on our conversation from his seat by the bar, he decided to join us. I remember that we talked a bit more about suicide and Gawsthorne quoted Marcus Aurelius: ‘Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear’. And then Gawsthorne wanted to talk about my Secondhand Bookshop cycle of paintings and how I decided what titles to paint on to the shelves. Then Ned started to urge Gawsthorne to sign up for the Serapion Brotherhood’s orgy,
‘Caspar has come back to England just in time. We are holding it at the Dead Rat Club on Thursday next week. At last Mark and I have got it all organised.’
‘Is it really necessary, Ned?’ I objected.
‘Of course it is – and it’s just what you need, Caspar. One thing it will do is make you realise that in sexual terms, when you come right down to it, Caroline is just a hole with a lot of flesh around, above and below the hole. She’s no different from any other woman. One cunt’s the same as another. The cunt is the main thing and all the rest of the body is an optional extra.’
I wanted to object, that if this was really his opinion, why did always he choose to sleep with women with pretty faces, Felix being a case in point? But, turning back to Gawsthorne, Ned continued,
‘The orgy will be a major assault on rationality, a return to the power of primitive ritual. The event will have its own destiny, so that all the participants will be caught up in it. Besides, I have a surprise planned, something that will ensure that no one who participates will ever forget the event.’
Then talk drifted on to the other members of the group and Ned was worrying about Oliver and whether he was still alive or not.
Suddenly Gawsthorne jerked his thumb to point to a man drinking alone at the far end of the bar.
‘That man’s back from fighting for the P.O.U.M. in Spain. Maybe he can tell you about Oliver. I’ll introduce you, if you like.’
Nowadays everybody has heard of George Orwell, but in those days before the War and before the publication of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, he was less well known. Even so, he was quite well known, I suppose, but, since Ned and I only read Surrealist novels and since we were not interested in politics, we had not heard of him. He for his part, on being introduced, gave no sign of ever having heard of us either. Orwell’s face was gaunt and craggy – a bit dog-like. Like Clive, he had been to Eton, but unlike Clive he certainly did not look ex-public school. His voice was deep and monotonous. It reminded me a bit of Jorge’s manner of speaking. Later I learned that in Orwell’s case the way he spoke was the after-effect of a wound in the neck received on the Aragonese front.
He seemed perfectly affable and Ned asked him if he had come across Oliver Sorge anywhere during his time in Spain. We were in luck. Orwell had indeed encountered Oliver in a bookshop in Madrid. He remembered him well.
‘He was looking for an English – Spanish dictionary. He seemed a bit clueless – didn’t even have enough money for the dictionary. I met him just the one time. I was with the Trotskyists in the P.O.U.M., while he was in the Anarchist F.A.I. He seemed pretty clueless about Anarchism too. I couldn’t make him out. He was all right, I suppose, but terribly nervous and pale, gabbling a bit about a woman he was escaping from. But I wasn’t in too good a shape myself. None of us were. You’ve no idea what it’s like out there. It’s not just the Fascists who are killing people. The Communists are also killing Trotskyists and Anarchists. Your friend will be lucky to get out alive. You don’t know what war is like. But you will learn, for the war we are fighting in Spain will come to England soon an
d German bombs will rain down on London’s scruffy streets and snug little pubs. The bombers will always get through. But everyone in England is trying to pretend we can avoid it all by doing nothing.’
Suddenly Orwell gestured violently upwards with both his hands, as if he was hurling an invisible table into the air.
‘This place is asleep! Wake up, England! Wake up!’
Everyone in the pub looked round to see what the shouting was about and then, embarrassed, looked away again.
When Orwell had calmed down, Ned pressed him for any more information that he could give us about Oliver and his present whereabouts. He shook his head.
‘I don’t thinks so. I’ve been back in England since June and a lot has happened since then. I just remember thinking what a strange man he was – rather effete.’
Suddenly a look of acute dislike crossed his face.
‘I’ve just worked out who you two are,’ he said. ‘You’re Serapion Brothers. And you,’ prodding at my chest aggressively. ‘You do those foul paintings. What the fuck do you paint like that for? It’s diseased, disgusting, phosphorescent in its putridity. But you call it art and expect us to treat you like an artist. I saw “Secondhand Bookshop no. 4” in a gallery only the other day and it turned my stomach.’
(In ‘Secondhand Bookshop no. 4’ rivulets of blood and sperm dribble down from the spines of the books to form pools on the dusty floor of the shop.)
Orwell continued,
‘It reminded me of some of Salvador Dali’s vile stuff, things like the totally repellent “The great Masturbator” and the filthy and diseased “Sodomy of a Skull with a Grand Piano”. You and your Surrealist cronies are aesthetic gangsters and parasites. You prey on rich degenerates like Edward James and Jorge Arguelles.’
In response, I was shouting as loud as Orwell,