Exquisite Corpse E-Book

Robert Irwin

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Novel about love and madness amongst the British surrealists.

Das E-Book wird angeboten von und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

Robert Irwin

Exquisite Corpse

Dedication

For Oliver Sorge who taught me all I know about writing.

Author’s note to the second edition

‘Books have their destinies.’ The first edition of this memoire, or rather it should be anti-memoire, was published only last year. What need for a second edition so soon after the first? The answer is that within a few months of the publication of Exquisite Corpse and in response to its publication certain things happened which forced me to re-examine the events it described and to look on them in a new light. When I look back at what I first wrote, I laugh, though really I should weep. I thought that I could look back on the past as if through a window, but what I was actually looking at was only a painting of a window … Illusions of the heart and the eye … When I was last in Brussels, René Magritte showed me one of his early paintings, ‘Human Condition I’, in which we see a picture on an easel standing in front of a landscape and obscuring part of that landscape. The picture itself shows a landscape, but it is doubtful whether the landscape it shows is really the same as the one it obscures. I have only recently become aware that the version of the past which I present in this book is somewhat like Magritte’s puzzle painting. I now have a very different idea of what happened so many years ago and would not now write what I have written here. Neither the manner nor the content would be the same. Nevertheless, I have not changed a single word of the text. Only I have added an additional chapter at the end, a chapter which changes the meaning of everything which comes before. Now it occurs to me to wonder if, in a year or two’s time, I may not be drafting a prefatory note to a third revised and expanded edition … I hope not. There has to be an end to all this.

London, December, 1952.

Contents

Title

Dedication

Author’s note to the second edition

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

About the Author

Copyright

Chapter One

1951

I rarely dream of Caroline. However, I dreamt last night that we were walking round Battersea Funfair. She wanted to be a milkmaid. I promised her a miniature Trianon. Then I was on my knees before her. She was impatient to go back to her office, but she condescended to feed me coughdrops.

Where is Caroline? Where has everyone gone? I walk up and down the old familiar streets of Soho and Bloomsbury without encountering anyone. And not just Soho and Bloomsbury, for I venture further – to Ealing, St Albans and the Faubourg St Germain – but the streets are always empty, empty save for the regiments of City men in bowler hats and suits, of spivs and street traders in trilbies and demob suits and the soldiers and sailors on leave. But these are dead people. Only the women seem alive. My eyes are always on the women, looking for Caroline, or if not Caroline, then for some other woman, in the hope that studying her may help me to understand Caroline better.

No Caroline. No Ned Shillings. No Oliver Sorge. No Jenny Bodkin. No Mackellar. No Felix. No Jorge. Even Pamela, who used to draw hundreds nightly to hear her sing, has vanished. Where have they all gone? While my back was turned, did they enter into a secret pact to sign up as lighthouse-keepers, nuns or foreign legionaries? It may be that they have settled down in quiet suburbs and have found employment and contentment as town clerks, insurance salesmen, jobbing decorators and so on, but that is hard to believe.

I have a photograph of some of the group in front of me now. It was taken in 1936, a couple of months after the Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries closed. We are assembled outside Winkelmann’s Gallery, just off Regent Street, all squinting into the sun, all save Ned, who from the centre of the group gazes fearlessly into the camera. The brilliant whites of his eyes always used to make me think of a raptor. Most of us are smiling sheepishly. Jenny Bodkin in her striped sailor’s shirt is brandishing that preposterous glove puppet of hers, the one shaped like a voracious, cunt fringed with pubic hair. Jorge, kneeling in front of us, wrestles unconvincingly with a concertina. Glasses and cigarettes are much in evidence and some of the glasses are raised in the direction of Ned, whose show this is. Felix sits at his feet and lets an exploring hand stray mischievously up his trouser-leg towards his groin.

I am on the edge of the group in the shadow of the Gallery’s awning. Looking at myself now, I know that I was preoccupied that day. I wanted to talk Winkelmann into agreeing to an exhibition of my illustrations to Mackellar’s The Girlhood of Gagool. I never had much chance of that. Oliver has one arm flung round my shoulders while with the other he cradles Monica. Caroline does not appear in the photograph. ‘La femme trouvée’, she was never regarded as part of our group. But she was the one who took the picture. Later, much later, after the war, I used this, her photograph, as the basis for a retrospective portrait of the group. I changed nothing except that I painted everyone with their eyes tightly closed, so that they appear to sleep, propping each other up in a collective dream. In this version, it is only I who is awake and who stares wide-eyed out of the canvas. The painting has passed into the hands of the National Portrait Gallery and I believe they keep it stored in some basement as part of their reserve collection.

There were about twenty or thirty of us, members of the Serapion Brotherhood, plus hangers-on and admirers. In the years before the outbreak of the War, I could walk into the Dead Rat Club on any night and find half a dozen of them at least. It was even unusual to walk any distance in central London without encountering one or other by chance. Indeed, it seems to me that chance operated differently before the War. We in the Brotherhood were so sure that we would change the face of art, literature, politics, everything. Now Soho’s bars and clubs are full of new men and women, who seem yet noisier, drunker and more confident: Maclaren-Ross; Tambimuttu, Colquhoun, MacBryde, Dylan Thomas, Nina Hamnett. The old gang have vanished very nearly without trace. I run into Paul Nash and David Gascoyne occasionally. I spotted one of Jenny Bodkin’s toys in a shop window a couple of weeks ago. It was the teddy bear with the hammer, who growls ‘Put me down’ when he is picked up. At least I know about Ned Shillings. He is dead, as he promised he would be. Herbert Read and I still correspond, though with increasing acrimony. I read everything that Oliver Sorge has published in Horizon and elsewhere, but I have no idea where he lives and letters sent to Cyril Connolly for forwarding go unanswered. Cyril himself swears he does not know where Oliver lives now.

Oliver Sorge, Paul Nash, Jorge Arguelles, Herbert Read. Now it occurs to me that all these names and indeed my own name may give rise in the reader to false expectations as to what this book is about. This is not a history of the Serapion Brotherhood. Nor is it in any sense an autobiography, for I loathe being bored to death with the details of an autobiographer’s parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, and then by an account of his (probably unhappy) days at school, to be followed by a lyrical evocation of spreading wings at university and so on, and so on. All that I hate. I have kept no diaries which might serve as the basis for an autobiography, but only a noctuary in which I record the little which has happened to me while I am asleep. If you are curious about my parentage, know then that Lautréamont was my father and Alice in Wonderland my mother. As for my infancy, I am still in it. In my studies the whisky bottle has served me as a microscope and the brothel has been my laboratory.

Neither is this book an artistic memoire. It is not more than incidentally concerned with my part in the organisation of the First Surrealist Exhibition in London, nor with my quarrel with André Breton and my expulsion from his movement. I am not planning to say anything very much about my career as a war artist nor about the court case brought against me by my psychoanalyst. The book is not really about me at all. Not only is this book not about me, it is also not written for you – unless your name is Caroline. What you hold in your hands is not literature, but a magical trap. Its sole purpose is to seek out Caroline. I have to publish the book of course and I imagine so many copies of Exquisite Corpse floating in so many stoppered bottles on strange and distant seas. The paradox is that publication on as wide a scale as possible is essential to my purpose, but really the book that is published is a private thing and destined for one reader only. If nevertheless you will persist in reading on, you will soon become aware of my literary failings. Oliver and Mackellar were the writers in the group and I, a painter, am working now in a medium that is quite foreign to me. Indeed, I tend to think of myself as writing a painting. I dab at the words and beneath all my dabbings and pentimenti lies a dark ground of melancholy and self-pity. I believe that the book will turn out like one of those murky canvases by the Genoese painter, Alessandro Magnasco – a sombre landscape of late evening in which we see with difficulty a rocky crevasse or broad swamp and where, in such a desolate landscape, half concealed by foliage and rocks, the emaciated and posturing anchorites or mountebanks can just be glimpsed, the highlights of their tortured figures being lit up as if in a flash of lightning.

After I had written these words, the longest stretch of words I have written since I ran away from school, I went for a walk along the South Bank. The Festival of Britain was in full swing and I had to walk past those cutely twee little jokey machines of Emmet, John Piper’s so very English plasterboard follies, the dismal Skylon and the not very exciting display of G-Plan furniture. Here and there I saw were sad signs of the domestication of Surrealism. One now sees a lot of paintings of high-horizoned landscapes which are empty of all but a few mysteriously disposed objects and the advertising hoardings are crowded with images of disembodied hands and eyes. Surrealism has lost its claim to shock. Even its power to charm is now questionable. Some Festival!

We were more truly festive during the War. As I strode through the crowds I felt myself burning with an hideous intensity, so that I could fancy that if any one of these people touched me they would instantly catch alight and crumble to ashes, consumed by my psychic fire.

When I came back, I opened another bottle of whisky and stared at the wall. It hardly matters which wall I stare at, for, in a brief fit of enthusiasm for trompe d’oeil, I have painted false windows on three of the walls, so that these walls exactly resemble the fourth wall, which really does have a window which looks out on a railway siding. The door into the room is almost invisible, for it has been painted into the wallpaper. With my art I have created my prison.

Though I paint in this room, it would not suit many artists. The real window faces south, and all my colleagues, rivals rather, swear by a northern light. However, the problem with the light does not trouble me, for I no longer paint from life and I actually prefer the yellowy glow shed by the naked light bulb over my garish colours. I paint from within the head. I have only to close my eyes and the hypnagogic images appear unbidden. I see in silent turmoil shapes of men, beasts, buildings, symbols and landscapes. They ceaselessly chase one another across my eyelids before disappearing into the unilluminated area of my head. When I asked Dr Wilson, my psychoanalyst, about these images, he assured me that hypnagogic imagery was quite common and had something to do with misfirings or discharges from the retinal rods. (Or was it cones? I forget what exactly.)

When I consulted a dictionary, I found ‘hypnagogic’ defined as ‘sleep-bringing, ushering in sleep’. Something is not right here, for I am never more awake than when I am watching these shapes dancing and twisting, covering my field of vision and dissolving into one another. A recumbent dog becomes a fruit bowl, its brown rump metamorphosed into the curving outline of a pear, and a narcissistic youth contemplating his image in a pool of water becomes, with just a tiny shift of focus, a skeletal hand holding an egg – even as my old friend (and by this I mean ex-friend) Salvador Dali has so successfully demonstrated with his paranoiac-critical method. As Dali puts it, we are working with ‘a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon the interpretive-critical association of delirious phenomena’. This is in full accord with the Surrealist Manifesto, for we follow Breton’s prescription when we seek to takedown ‘thought’s dictation in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all moral or aesthetic prejudice’.

Anyway I do not believe that hypnagogic imagery has anything to do with sleep, for I have hardly slept at all since Caroline vanished. Sometimes I lie on the floor with my eyes closed and passively let the images flow over me – ziggurats transformed into bonfires whose flames become tendrils in a great vineyard at the end of which is a wall with a door, but, as I approach the door, it transforms itself into a pool on which floats a duck which turns into an upturned foot and so on with unflagging energy – a plotless, scriptless, pointless cinema.

At other times however I am not so passive, for it is possible to force and shape what I see and I have a repertoire of concentration-building exercises. I make all the letters of the alphabet parade themselves before me. One by one they flicker uncertainly on my eyelids, longing to be something else. Then I relax my control and they dissolve and recompose themselves thankfully into ostriches, or windows, or banjos, whatever they have chosen. Or I may summon up the image of Hitler and make him swagger and salute, then run, then stand on his head and I may inflate his head to three times its size. However, the strain involved in this sort of visual drill is considerable. In particular, it is curiously difficult to summon up likenesses of individual men and women at will.

In general, hypnagogic forms are labile and pass swiftly out of my control. When I summon up images of nude or half-dressed women, these women frantically writhe and twist and recombine with each other and with the landscape. The women are desperate to escape my godlike clutches and eager to preserve their modesty by transforming themselves into myrtle bushes or cows or whatever. On occasions when I am able to freeze one of these images I may behold a woman caught midway in such a transformation with her arms beginning to grow leaves, her nose beginning to reshape itself into a stork’s beak, her shapely legs fading into tendrils of smoke. It is impossible when contemplating such an image not to think of the ‘exquisite corpse’, one of those composite figures we used to produce during our Surrealist games of consequences. One artist would draw the head, then fold the paper and pass it to his neighbour who would sketch in the torso before folding the paper again and so on, until some marvellous hybrid emerged from the unfolded paper.

Novelists make use of exquisite corpses as a matter of course. I remember Oliver making this point quite forcibly. In The Vampire of Surrealism, the book for which he is best known the woman Stella is a kind of exquisite corpse, for while the brilliant white face and raven hair belonged to Felix originally, the wit, the bum and the thighs were taken from Monica and the breasts came from a woman glimpsed walking down the King’s Road. So Oliver told me.

Naturally, I have tried to summon up an hypnagogic image of Caroline, but I was fearful and conscious that I was attempting something that was somehow blasphemous, and it was perhaps because of these misgivings of mine that she did not appear – and has never appeared. So, if that form of conjuration failed, will this new attempt be any more successful? Will the magical letters on the page summon her presently to me? If I call, will she come? Perhaps. But suppose she is dead. Suppose that one evening, as I sit writing this in the upstairs room of this house in the backstreets behind Waterloo Station, I might hear a muffled but insistent thumping and I will go downstairs and open the door and a thing will stumble out of the smog into my arms. I will find myself embracing something putrescent and caked with earth. The blue dress will be stained and partly rotted away. The teeth that press against my lips will be yellow and loose. Yet I would embrace the thing willingly. The horror of that would be less than what I suffer now. It is certainly possible that she is dead. It is even possible that I killed her.

Chapter Two

1936

‘Will any kind friend inform a poor blind man, who has lost the precious sight of his eyes in the gracious defence of his native country, England, and God bless King George! where and in what part of this country he may now be!’ I was noisy and I am sure many people turned to look at me.

Mackellar, however, kept his voice low.

‘We are coming up into the centre of Hampstead now. In a minute or two we will pass by Flask Walk. There’s a bishop approaching in the opposite direction. Raise your hat to him and wish him a good afternoon. On your left there is a wine-merchant. If only you could see, you would behold a fine window-display of imported sherrys … ’

MacKellar carried on, conscientiously describing shop after shop, but I was hardly listening, as I carried on with my Blind Pew act, tapping the ground ahead of me with an Indian sword-stick. The sword-stick had been provided by Oliver for the day. My hat (very like the one worn by Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) had been lent to me by Apache Jorge. The coat I was wearing had been absent-mindedly left by Ned in my rooms a few days ago. The sleepmask over my eyes was, however, my own. While MacKellar struggled with words to create his version of London, I was seeing quite a different city laid out upon my eyelids, so that I appeared to advance through great chasms and pass by oriental temples. I saw nuns and priests shepherd crocodiles down otherwise deserted streets. I entered houses at random and walked through crowded drawing rooms in which all the conversations were animated but silent. Out of doors again, I confronted huge mobs and, though I could distinguish every feature of every face in the mob with minute particularity, I noted without surprise that I had never seen any of these people before. So wonder after wonder unfolded itself on my eyelids as I walked blindfold through London.

‘Fourmillante cité pleine des reves

Ou le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant

Les mystères partout comme des sèves

Dans les canaux étroits du colosse puissant’

MacKellar shook me out of my Baudelairean reverie,

‘We are passing a duchess. Raise your hat. Now we are passing a cheese-monger’s. Magnificent cheeses! Smell them!’

I sniffed. The smoggy air was damp and heavy with coal dust. No cheese. The other reason for not listening to MacKellar was that he was lying. We had left my place in Cuba Street early in the morning and, after walking out of the Docks area, we had taken a tram. Lunch was in an eel-and-pie shop, probably the one in Whitechapel Road. MacKellar had helped me to feed myself, explaining to our fellow customers how I had been blinded in the service of Surrealism. Since then we had been walking a long time and I guessed that we were on the edge not of Hampstead but of Soho. However, MacKellar always lied whenever he could. It was more or less a matter of principle with him – essential training for a writer of fiction. He even pretended to be an admirer of Dr Josef Goebbels and would quote appreciatively, ‘The bigger the lie, the more beautiful!’ and MacKellar would add that lying was like lipstick, in that it did indeed make the world more beautiful and – more interesting.

In the East End we had had some trouble. MacKellar had got into a fight with a crippled beggar who had thought that I was going to poach on his territory. A little later I heard a posh voice saying that I should be horsewhipped to get the nonsense beaten out of me. But since then there had been no excitements.

‘I’m tired and bored,’ I announced loudly. ‘I want to be taken to a brothel – a really good brothel!’

‘Hush man. I’m taking you to one. We are almost there. It is the best brothel in Hampstead.’

And in a few minutes we pushed through some swing-doors.

‘Is this the brothel?’

‘Aye, this is the brothel. But not so loud or you will scare the ladies.’

‘Are the ladies beautiful?’

‘Aye.’

‘Describe them to me.’

‘I will, but first I will get the madame to provide us with some drinks.’

MacKellar forced me down on to a hard wooden chair and I was left alone in what was evidently a crowded room. I could smell beer. I remember that I wondered why I was doing this. Defamiliarising the world might have its uses as an exercise in the cleansing of perceptions and it was true that there were the visions. Even so I was restless. I was waiting for something really exciting to happen – something that would change my life forever. When I had set out this morning my hopes had been high. I had been expecting the unexpected and I had visualised myself as a sort of goat tethered to a hunter’s tree as bait to trap the marvellous.

MacKellar returned and pressed a pint of beer into my hand.

‘For God’s sake man, what do you see? What manner of people are these?’ I cried.

‘This is one of London’s most exclusive brothels,’ he assured me. ‘Apart from us, all the men here are in white tie and tails, but the madame is a particular friend of mine and she let us in as an exception.’

I nodded patiently. I was fairly sure that this was one of two public houses in Greek Street. Probably it was The Eagle. I had visited the pub when I was researching my illustrations to De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. (De Quincey met the prostitute Anne in this street.)

‘By contrast, all the women are nude,’ MacKellar continued. ‘They are lying or sitting on red velvet sofas at the far end of the room. Some of them are looking at you curiously. They must be wondering what it would be like to make love to a blind man. Any moment now one of them will come over.’

‘Are any of them beautiful?’

‘I have told you, they are all beautiful.’

Until then all I had been able to smell was beer and Guinness, but then suddenly I caught a faint and bitter hint of a woman’s perfume and from close by I heard a woman’s voice asking softly,

‘Why is he like that?’

’Ah, love is blind,’ replied MacKellar.

Then he went silent. I fancied I could hear the scratch of his pen. That day and for that matter every day MacKellar carried a notebook in which he jotted down his impressions of the world. His constant fear was that he might experience an epiphany without having on him the means to record it. I sat and drank, thinking of MacKellar’s many problems. Suddenly, and it was a little like missing a step when descending a staircase in the dark, I had the sensation that he was no longer with me.

‘MacKellar? MacKellar?’

A young woman’s voice, perhaps the same voice as before, answered me.

‘Was that the name of your friend?’

I nodded.

‘Well, he’s gone out just now, but he wrote a message which he pressed into my hand.’

She read it out. It was plain from her reading that she was amused.

‘Dear Miss ______,

You have a kindly face. I beg you, take care of this tragically afflicted young man. God help me. It has all become too much for me. Thank you and God bless!

His despairing father,

M.’

‘MacKellar,’ I sighed.

She giggled and then,

‘You are coming with me.’

Her voice, though pleasant, brooked no contradiction. It was not a cockney voice, but then again it was not a Mayfair voice. I guessed that it was a voice from Metroland. Then, as I continued to listen to it, I thought that I could detect an exaggerated clarity of diction which reminded me of certain screen actresses. It was even possible, I concluded, that this young woman might have gone to elocution classes – not the voice of a debutante, but the voice of someone who wished she had been. There was a kind of constraint in it that I found erotic. It sounded as if all her vowels were bound in consonantal corsets.

She took my hand and led me out of the pub. I felt like a trusting child in an infant school crocodile. (That was the sweetest thing ever, her hand nestling in mine like a tiny bird.) It was indeed the first time I had held hands with anyone since infant school. The sun at last had beaten its way through the haze and I felt its faint heat on my face. At first I said nothing for I was concentrating, trying to visualise what sort of body would go with that sort of voice. Surely it is true that certain kinds of body go with certain kinds of voice. Hence opera singers. The voice that was now guiding me, I was sure, issued from a body shaped like a violin. Only a woman with a narrow waist and swelling hips could give birth to such a voice – so I hoped.

I was listening to the pleasant click of her heels upon the pavement when she spoke again.

‘What do you do – for work I mean?’

If it had been MacKellar, he would have spun her some yarn about being a professional mahjong player or a zoo keeper, but I spoke the truth,

‘I am an artist – a painter.’

‘An artist! How fascinating!’

I winced and I wanted to say ‘No. No. It is not fascinating at all. It is solitary and boring. Most of it is technique and preparation for the application of technique – stretching the canvas, mixing pigments, diluting them with oil – all very boring’. Whenever I talked with Felix, it was always about where to buy certain oils, how to clean brushes and dealers’ commissions. We enjoyed such talk, but nobody else could possibly enjoy it. Whenever I put a painting aside as ‘finished’, I still have the feeling that I could have spent yet more time on what I have been working on and have done it better. However, I was certain that this was not what she wanted to hear, so I gave her an uplifting version of my current work – a commission from a publisher to illustrate MacKellar’s The Girlhood of Gagool.

On the previous day I had started work on a lithograph showing the young and beautiful Gagool triumphing over the corpse of Prince Ndomba and looked on by the respectful Kukwana guards. Gagool, dancing on the corpse of the prince, demands to know ‘What is the lot of man born of a woman?’ and the Kukwanas chorus ‘Death!’ Here and throughout his absurdist novel MacKellar, aiming at parody, had modelled his prose on that of the Chums Annual, but I was unwilling to follow the same juvenile model. In the book, Gagool represented the force of liberation arising in the heart of Africa, which was going to free us all from the forces of Western scientism and rationalism. I had shown the Kukwana warriors, leaning on their assegais, to be almost as stiff as the dead prince. Gagool, by contrast, all flashing eyes and floating hair, frozen in her spider-like dance, appeared to incarnate the force of life. It is one of the key moments in the book and the trick for the illustrator is to spot such moments.

So then she wanted to know about MacKellar and, after him, the rest of my friends. Were they all like that, writers, painters and philosophers and all a bit mad? Then she wanted to know my name. I told her it was Caspar.

’Caspar!’

I hastened to assure her that Caspar was not my real name.

‘Nothing about you is quite real.’

I heard an undercurrent of wistfulness in her voice. I became defensive. Why should we let past generations impose their names upon us? As for surnames, they were labels devised for the convenience of the authorities, so that they could survey, tax and conscript us more easily.

By now we were walking on grass. It must have been St James’s Park. I felt the sun intermittently, but it was obvious that the shadows were lengthening.

I took over the questioning.

Her name was Caroline. She was a typist and she worked for a fur importer with an office at the bottom of Soho. After work, if she went anywhere other than back to her room in her parents’ house in Putney, then it was to the ABC cafe on the corner of Piccadilly with a friend from the office. (‘She’s awfully nice, but ever so boring!’) This was the first time she had ever ventured alone into a pub after work. So this was her adventure as well as mine. When she had tremulously pushed open the door of the Eagle, she was entering a world which hitherto had existed only in her fantasy. Since she had never been in a Soho pub before, she had had little idea of the sort of people she would encounter in such a place, but she had vaguely imagined herself getting into conversation with some sort of louche, Bohemian artist. And then she had fallen into conversation with me. Life can be so predictable at times …

At work Caroline typed invoices and letters for the fur company. There were five of them in the office. It was all so normal and yet so strange to me that I was entranced. Office work! Regular hours! Office intrigues! Office jokes! To me it was a fantasy world in miniature, a modern Lilliput, endearing in the pettiness of its concerns. She told me how hard she had to work to satisfy Mr Maitland’s high standards; how careful they all had to be in economising on typewriter ribbons and carbon paper; how Jim, the office-boy, teased her; how they quarrelled about what sort of tea to buy; how she dreamt of something vaguely different and better, but it was so vague that she could not quite find the words for it. Suddenly I found myself longing to become part of this Lilliputian fantasy world.

‘I should like to become an office-boy,’ I announced. ‘How does one set about it?’

‘You are too old to be an office-boy.’

Her voice reproved me. She probably suspected me, quite unfairly, of teasing her. Too old at twenty-five to become an office-boy! Already one career closed against me before I was even really aware that it existed! I fell despondently silent. I should have liked to have found work as an office-boy in the same office as Caroline. I would take messages, make tea, put stamps on envelopes and tease Caroline. It would all be very easy at first, but slowly I would work my way up and take on more responsible tasks. And in the evenings Caroline and I would go out. Sometimes we would go to the pictures, but on other evenings we would walk together, window-shopping in Oxford Street, dreaming of how we would furnish a place of our own once we were married. Having become Mr Maitland’s assistant, I then replaced him. Caroline and I married and moved out into a place of our own in Barnes. I learn how to smoke a pipe, fill in tax forms, plant vegetables, play canasta and wear carpet slippers. Such skills cannot be impossibly difficult. I have read about people mastering them. I am perfectly willing to learn. Anyway in this new life in Barnes occasionally I will switch on the radio and quite by chance catch a snatch of a talk about Surrealism, and I will think to myself what a lot of pretentious and boring rubbish! What was that all about? Of course in the life I am envisaging for us there will be boredom too, as I have to discuss international fur prices in the office and the pattern of curtains in the home. But that would be precisely the beauty of this amazing and strangely contrived way of life. It would all be quite beautifully boring. It would be a way of containing the commingled mysteries of sex and happiness. That is the whole point of the bourgeois way of life – putting sex and happiness at the centre of existence and making their achievement easy. It was evident to me as I contemplated the bungalow in Barnes, the predestined theatre of our thoroughly domesticated passion, that it was far more beautiful than any painting either I or Salvador Dali was ever likely to paint.

Caroline was impatient with my silence. She wanted to know what I had been doing sitting in a pub with a sleepmask over my eyes? I tried to explain about the Serapion Brotherhood and its quest for convulsive beauty. It was important to train oneself to sense auras. It was necessary to disorder the senses, or even to switch them off altogether for a time, in order to become sensitive to the auras. My temporary adoption of blindness was a form of cognitive estrangement. It was a way of letting the darkness of the night and its dreams invade the daylight hours. With MacKellar’s help, I had been sniffing blindly and casting about in the streets of London, hunting for the dream-woman – the woman who so far had existed only in the Brotherhood’s dreams. I quoted Paul Eluard’s verse in ‘La Revolution surrealiste’:

‘Une femme est plus belle que le monde ou je vis

Et je ferme les yeux.’

‘A woman is more beautiful than the world in which I live, And I close my eyes.’

I was not making much sense even to myself. I took another deep breath, but she silenced me with a finger to my lips. I kissed the finger. I was aware that she was no longer beside me but in front of me.

‘Well I think it is very silly,’ she pronounced with mock solemnity. ‘But it’s quite nice.’

And we kissed mouth to mouth. I had no precise idea where we were and, for all I knew, there were a ring of thirty or forty people around us intently watching us kiss. I let the sword-stick drop to the ground and my fingers ran everywhere over her face. I was trying to use them as eyes. My hands caressed the hair which fell in waves down to the shoulders. Then my hands dropped to brush against the firmness of the breasts under the heavy fabric of her dress. My hands continued to explore lower down, passing the line of her girdle. Would she be violin-shaped like her voice?

Would she be wearing silk stockings? Might she not have only one leg? I would not have put it past MacKellar to have lined me up with a one-legged woman. However, she firmly prevented me from discovering how many legs she had and she pulled me down to sit beside her on the grass.

‘So now, am I – what was it you said? – your convulsively beautiful, utterly mysterious woman?’ The voice was teasing.

‘I should like to paint you, Caroline. Come to my place – 41 Cuba Street in the West India Docks – and I’ll paint your portrait. Come this weekend. My fingertips tell me that you will make a good portrait. Your skin texture is excellent.’

‘Hmmm.’ I could practically hear the sceptically raised eyebrow.

‘I’d paint you with your clothes on.’

Silence.

I was trying to work out how to explain to her that my offer to do her portrait would not be the prelude to my seducing her, but this was difficult, since that was indeed my intention.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘Let me think about it.’ She removed her hand from mine. ‘I’m going to get us some ice-cream.’ She left me sitting there. As I sat alone in the dark, listening to the ducks and the distant murmur of conversations, I could feel that the sun had finally sunk behind the trees and, though my skin was still warm, I shivered. She did not return. I was such a fool that I sat there for the greater part of an hour, but she did not come back to me. Finally I removed the sleep-mask. The park at dusk was still crowded and in every direction I looked I could see young women – blondes, brunettes and redheads. None of them appeared to pay me any special attention.

Chapter Three

The next morning I awoke screaming, but once awake I continued to lie with my eyes tightly closed. Soon work would begin in the ship-breakers’ yards and the dry docks, but in the early morning all the sounds I heard were soothing: the chug-chug of barges proceeding up the Thames, the slop of water against the piers, the occasional boom of a foghorn, and the crunch of footsteps on the gravel path that ran behind the house on Cuba Street. The house I was renting in 1936 has since been destroyed by one of the big raids on the Docks in 1941. It was an oddity, a survival from the eighteenth century, sandwiched between and overshadowed by two enormous nineteenth-century warehouses. Apart from warehouses, the street boasted a stable for dray-horses, a hostel for seamen, a Chinese grocer and a public house (the Lonsdale Arms).

I lay there listening to the docks coming to life and thought of Caroline. Was she real? Perhaps not. The more I continued to think about it, the more likely it seemed that MacKellar had put some actress friend of his up to impersonating a fur-merchant’s typist. My breakfast was a cigarette and a cup of coffee. My day was and is measured out in cigarettes. Then I had to bribe myself with another cigarette to get myself to the easel. I worked on a sketch in pastels of my image of Caroline. I portrayed her with a body shaped like a violin, but with no legs. It had occurred to me that Caroline might be black, so she appeared as a legless negress, hovering over the houses on the other side of the river, like the tutelary deity of Rotherhithe, and, above her head, I drew a blind, weeping eye.