Jonathan Bowden’s Fury, Part 1

6,074 words

Part 1 of 3

Edited by Greg Johnson and Peter Jacobi

In 1995, Jonathan Bowden self-published his Collected Works in 6 volumes (London: Avant-Garde, 1995), edited by Jürgen Schwartz, one of Bowden’s pen names. The six volumes comprise 27 distinct books, 12 of which had been previously published. Altogether, the Collected Works contain more than 2,600 pages of rare early Bowden.

Fury is the first book in volume 2. It was first published under Bowden’s pen name John Michael McCloughlin (London: Avant-Garde, 1994). We will publish it online in 3 instalments.

Fury is a collection of essays and letters with no apparent unity. The title is puzzling, because Bowden’s tone is jocular not ferocious. Perhaps the title refers to the effect the book might have on some readers, for Bowden refers to a number of real people in frank and unflattering ways. He refers to them with made-up names, many of them quite droll. But in some cases, it is easy enough to guess who he is talking about. For instance, Gaudier Louter-Finiscue of the Tuesday Club brings to mind Gregory Lauder-Frost of the Monday Club.

Given that Bowden had a penchant for peddling fictions about his own life as fact, it is probably prudent to treat everything in this book as fictional until proven otherwise.

Eventually, a fully annotated version of Fury will appear at the Jonathan Bowden Archive. It will then be followed by similar editions of the 26 other books in the Collected Works, plus a couple more early volumes that were not included.

We are publishing it now at Counter-Currents to crowd-source information for the notes. In particular, if you have any idea who the following names refer to, please share them in the comments below. Paul Hardman, Salim Have-Joy, Graham Paterson (and Patterson), Gabriella Make-Shift, Sibyl, the Metamorphoses, the Archdeacon, Delirium Tremens, Alexander Mousaka, Steely Romantic, Paul Steadman, and Miss Lucia.

Unlike many of Bowden’s early writings, I find Fury highly readable and entertaining, and I am delighted to know that nearly 2000 more pages await. — Greg Johnson

Paul Hardman[1] was, to a certain extent, a depressed and partly degenerate student at the Polytechnic of North London during the nineteen-eighties. He was manic to a certain degree; sweaty and obese, and he continuously affected a form of irritability; a degree of necessary cussedness which he adopted for his relations with the world about him. Moreover, Paul was a young man of around twenty to twenty-five years of age who was excessively fearful, paranoid, and liable to suffer from fits of anxiety. Although these spasms of angst, these essentially mild flashes of disturbance, were not occasioned by a particular activity—in other words, they were not a result of clinical depression; more accurately, of any particular form of mental illness whose focus lay outside the self. If you like, the form of mental illness from which Paul suffered was generic. It existed in and of itself, without rhyme or reason, sense of origination, or correspondence. In a sense, of course, it had to correspond with certain features of external reality, but these were well outside the self; or more accurately, they existed at a depth which was not easy to ascertain at so many leagues distant. Indeed, without being unduly Freudian about it, the origins of Paul’s present disturbance—such as it is—lay well back in the past, almost unreachably so in relation to present developments. That Paul was disturbed—at once a degenerate and an inadequate—no-one was prepared to gainsay; least of all himself, particularly when his many trips to the doctors are taken into consideration. You see, Paul Hardman was a hypochondriac who consulted his doctors, whether in London or Bristol, on a regular basis, about a large number of ailments, real or imagined, such as cramp, obesity, obsessive perspiration i.e. sweating—hyper-ventilation—and a large number of failed diagnoses, fraudulent concerns—misplaced placebos—and medical redundancies. On one particular occasion his doctor virtually accused him of being a homosexual, and forcing bottles, various receptacles for soft drinks such as Perrier water, up his backside in order to approximate to anal intercourse. In a sense if the story had been true these bottles would have approximated to the use of “poppers”; namely amyl nitrate—a drug which is used by homosexual men to heighten the alleged ecstasy of sodomy, thereby exaggerating the unnaturalness of the act itself. Nevertheless, in Paul’s case this was completely wide of the mark, and any rectal bleeding which occurred in his case was due to piles—haemorrhoids—which appeared in his fundament as a result of stress, over-eating (usually pizzas), and continuous treks back and forth from the toilet. Indeed, it was all part and parcel of an indolent and lazy existence where Paul spent most of the day in bed or ensconced in front of the television set prior to ordering up the inevitable pizza which would be delivered by a motorcycle despatch rider.[2] Paul’s laziness, however, had a certain ideological justification—a specious theoretical excuse—namely that he was “oppressed” in his own life. He was a victim; a socialist and an anarchist; a man who was alienated from the structures and institutions of capital. On many occasions you would meet him as he rushed from one pub or pizza parlour to another—only to hear him justify his conduct by virtue of the capitalist system; what he used to call his alienation from the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Although, of course Paul’s political attitudes, such as they were, had as much to do with himself and the circumstances of his own life as they had to do with the nature of the social system. Indeed, his desire to change the social system was in direct proportion to his desire to change his own life, to alter once and for all the circumstances of his own existence. In short, Paul wished to completely transform the nature of society because he was socially maladjusted; psychologically distraught; a sociological cretin, at once isolated from and disaffected by “the system”; the system within which he could not find a place for himself. After all, a large number of people who are socially radical seek the absolute transformation of society in order to forgo changes in their own life. In a sense they do not wish to change themselves but wish to see the society change around them in order to save them the trouble. Although Paul’s psychosis, such as it was, did involve a certain degree of sexual looseness, disturbance, even hysteria. As is seen in his mutual masturbation—his degenerate onanism—with other males in his flat, such as Salim Have-Joy[3] and Graham Paterson,[4] both of whom showed bi-sexual tendencies. Nevertheless, the diagnosis of bisexuality in such circumstances is hardly conclusive given the degree of instability, laziness, ennui, despair, and sexual confusion which prevailed in such circles. Indeed, the last thing which can be expected in such circles is any form of stability; any base or centre of existence—anything which holds or is other than fluid—in other words, something which cannot be moved like mucus or sputum with a stick. In such circumstances, the mutual masturbation, the collective onanism of a group of students, is a form of low-level camaraderie and decadence. It is a homosexual fetish—an adolescent heterosexual act—without the presence of women, primarily because the men concerned are not mature enough to approach women. Nevertheless, Paul Hardman’s condition, such as it is, is supportable—it is not a form of clinical or psychiatric disorder. In short, it does not bear the stamp of medical disapproval, let alone hospitalization.

Unlike Gabriella Make-Shift,[5] my stepsister due to my father’s second marriage, Paul Hardman (sic) did not have a condition which was clinical and that could be treated by medical science. She on the other hand, suffered from a form of clinical depression which had been diagnosed as such and that doctors were attempting to cure with a mixture of therapy and drugs Gabriella has always exhibited—to my mind—a certain moroseness; a tendency towards depression of a particular sort—coupled with a type of wildness and excitability—which was just the other side of depression and withdrawal. Although it was difficult until relatively recently to think of her as at all depressed, with the sole exception of these momentary trace-elements, these suggestions of withdrawal, remoteness, and isolation to which I have referred. According to a hypnotherapist, who had a lot to do with her during this time, the death of her father when she was five years of age had a considerable effect on her, an appreciably greater effect than most people realized at the time. Perhaps it was at this time—when she was still a very young child—that a certain schism occurred; a type of rupture in her personality—the beginning of a lost, waif-like, and tormented existence. However, the onset of this recent bout of depression, this clinically diagnosed depressive condition, was due to completely normal and observable facts, facts which lay outside the self and for which she was not responsible. Although, let it be said, there is a degree to which everyone is responsible for what happens to them—no matter how harsh that may appear.

The problem began when a wart or cyst which may have been cancerous or pre-cancerous, malignant or benign, was discovered in Gabriella’s womb. As a result, a condition which amounted to a possible tumour of the ovum was then diagnosed and a treatment programme involving radiation, chemotherapy, was then set in train—all seemed to proceed smoothly and the radiation seemed to have done its work when the cyst disappeared and x-rays of the womb gave no indication of a relapse. It transpired not long afterwards, however, that Gabriella had been pregnant—only a few weeks pregnant—when the radiation treatment was beginning to take hold. As a result, if Gabriella went to term with the child then there was every prospect that her baby would be malformed, even grossly misfunctional. For the radiation dosage which she received, although relatively mild, was still enough—so she was informed by a succession of doctors—to leave the child handicapped, even suffering from the absence of a spine, or the relative absence of a spine, as in the case of the condition known as spina bifida. Gabriella was then faced with an agonizing choice—whether to abort the child and terminate the pregnancy—or to allow the pregnancy to run to term with the possibility of a deformed child as the upshot of these developments. Moreover, matters were not made any easier by the fact that Gabriella was an anti-abortionist, even a passionate anti-abortionist—although she was in no sense a member of one of the anti-abortion pressure groups, such as Life or SPUC (the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child). Nor was Gabriella a Roman Catholic. Indeed, her mother was a lapsed Anglican from Merseyside with a completely relaxed and secular manner, even to the extent that she flirted with the detritus of the Occult, such as astrology, tarot-card readings, graphology, astronomy,[6] and the rest. Nevertheless, after much soul-searching, Gabriella finally decided to abort the child, and the abortion took place well before the twelfth week of pregnancy, and Sybil,[7] her mother, paid for the abortion to be done privately rather than on the NHS.

Then the really difficult phase of this drama began; and Gabriella became clinically depressed over the abortion. Above all, over the fact that she had—in her own words—killed her own baby, maimed her own child, more than if she had allowed it to live, albeit in a deformed state. She felt personally responsible for the child’s fate—its birth and death, as we might say—and in her own mind it was as if she had committed infanticide; a retrospective mercy-killing. In a sense she had snuffed out the life which could have been; and yet was not allowed to be—she had destroyed that which did not have the power to exist. Moreover, she had extinguished a part of her own life; her own expectancy, the degree to which she could have expected to live through her own son or daughter, her own flesh and blood. Ultimately, she saw herself as a temptress; a feminine Svengali—a destroyer of the might-of-been; of the possibilities of existence and inexistence, being and nothingness. It was as if she had brought forth the child from her own womb—bloodied and bleary—only then to consume it, to cannibalise it, with a platter of her own choosing in a manner which may have been drawn from William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus; an early and pre-emptive tragedy; an aftertaste of guilt. It was about this time that Gabriella turned her back on her job—despite her employer keeping the post open for her—because she could not face it. In a sense she could not face the world with its disappointments and anxieties, and she preferred to remain at home, lying on the sofa, or clutching a cuddly toy. As a result, there was a regression—a certain return to childhood—to a situation which promised a sense of certainty, punishment, reward, and mastership. It was ultimately a world in which she did not have to exercise control, to persevere or forswear, to enter into anything she did not approve of or renounce any activity whatsoever. In short, she could remain quiet and alone—bereft of fate—clinging to the wreckage of a past life; in other words, to nothing in particular. Above all, she was waiting for Sybil to make the necessary decisions, like when to wash, when to consume food, when to retire for the evening, and what television programmes to watch. As a result, the Metamorphoses[8]—who were a post-working-class family; a middle-class arriviste family without culture—allowed Gabriella to drift back into a relatively lazy, provincial, and backwood childhood. During the months since the abortion Gabriella has retreated to the earliest stages of childhood; to a pre-cognitive infancy; an assured rest, the phlegmatic quality of the goldfish in its bowl which stands alone on the mantelpiece. It was as if Gabriella wished to re-enter her mother’s womb and gnaw at the cervix. In short, she wished to be born again and aborted through life to this, the scene of her own private Calvary, this moment of grief. Gabriella’s condition was not improved by the fact that she was shown the foetus in the womb as a result of an x-ray, long before it was considered necessary to abort the child—all of which added to the sense of guilt—the sense of decadent and late romanticism which affected Gabriella—and which added to the nature of her mental condition. Also, at the time of the abortion—the actual operation to remove and crush the infant foetus—the doctor who was aborting the child turned to Gabriella and said: “You’ve been a very naughty girl, now go away and don’t be one in the future!”—all of which suggested that he was an anti-abortionist operating in an abortion clinic, a paradox in and of itself. Although Sybil and Archdeacon[9]—my father (and Gabriella’s stepfather)—have used this incident in order to shift the blame for Gabriella’s condition away from its original source. In a sense they have used this “regrettable” incident as an excuse; a psychic crutch—something which can be used as a divine conceit; a well-spring of emotion. If you like, Gabriella’s immediate relatives have seized on this incident—on the “regrettable” remarks of this doctor—as a creative factor in her condition. This was something which was seized upon by the hypnotherapist—feeding upon Sybil’s anxiety—in order to extract more money from the parents.

Ultimately though, my father and Sybil will have to face the fact that they may have a somewhat wounded daughter—a misanthrope in reverse—for many years to come. As a result, Gabriella may remain in the family home for many years, and she may be restricted, at least for the foreseeable future, to a sedentary and somewhat retarded existence. It is also questionable whether Gabriella could ever marry, at least in her present state, and she could well end up like a character in a novel by Jean Rhys—one of those sad, lonely, and slightly disturbed women (with an intact maidenhead) who drift into middle-life in a succession of boarding houses and temporary lodgings.

Although it must be said that Gabriella is suffering from a type of nervous depression—a neurotic position—which is cyclical and ever-present. It is as if Gabriella is taken over by some outside force, some force outside herself which is strong, sinuous and ugly, and incapable of being removed easily. All of a sudden, she will be convulsed by one particular anxiety—usually a relatively unimportant matter—which takes on a significance out of all proportion to its actual size. Such an anxiety is felt to be all-important and unforgiving, and it will not allow an individual like Gabriella to relax for a moment. This recurrent anxiety, such as it is, leads to repeated panic attacks—states of aloneness and isolation—which cannot be dealt with in any way except through psychiatric treatment. As a consequence, these cerebral tics, this snapping to and fro of the psyche, takes on an almost physiological form, a type of disturbance which is as much of the body as the soul. In short, it resembles a tic, a recurrent form of physical disequilibrium, where a man constantly puts his hand to the back of his head (again and again) in a compulsive way.

All of which reminds me of a homosexual journalist of my acquaintance, Delirium Tremens,[10] who is prone to fits of anxiety over events that are of no significance, such as the loss of his hair. As a consequence, his hair is thinning on top and receding at the margins, and he is terrified that all his hair will have gone by the time he is thirty-five years of age. Although it must be said that hair loss or the prospect of it is just one of many anxieties, and in the end the anxiety more than its concern is what matters. It is as if we have a field or pattern of force, a locus of emotion, which needs an outlet—a form through which it can express itself, such as the loss of hair or some other ailment. If you like, depressive anxiety is a form of energy which seeks an outlet in the life of the individual concerned.

Gabriella is not the most tragic or the most disturbed of the people I know, however, nor is she the most complicated of these psychological specimens. Indeed, the title of the most complicated has to go to Alexander Mousaka,[11] an Anglo-Italian of my acquaintance who I have mentioned before, particularly in my fifth book Prole.[12] Alexander Mousaka was born in Stepney Green in East London into a quite extraordinary family who were living as much in the nineteenth or the eighteenth as in the twentieth century. Alexander’s father was a nineteenth-century sailor—a tough-nosed Italian—who could hardly speak any English, except a version of pigeon Anglo-Italian when it suited him. Moreover, Alexander’s father was a form of antediluvian peasant—reminiscent of the character called Bestre in one of Wyndham Lewis’ Flemish stories (in the collection called The Wild Body)—and he was at once incorrigible and tight-lipped. He was a man of strange, savage silences—of impenetrable moments of blackness; deep troughs of sullen expectancy—all of which gave him a saturnine disposition. As a consequence, his gestures were deeply symbolic—avatar-like; sensuous and withdrawn—they were gestures which resembled the eye of a raven; at once swivelling, lustrous, obscene, and distended. His look resembled that of a manic dealer in goat skins; a novice in the art of selling pelts—a man who had a certain animadversion to trading in flesh. In short, he was a master of the “spike”; the guest house and rented room, and he was the sort of man who never knew when to stop, to restrain his inner demons. According to Alexander, he had murdered several rival sailors on various voyages—some had been bludgeoned to death in the hold, while others were thrown semi-conscious into furnaces, although his father and his fellow sailors always pretended that they had been washed overboard. In short, Anthony’s father was not a man to be trifled with; and he was an habitué of the East End: its pubs, cafes—as I have mentioned elsewhere an accent on the e is always redundant—grotty billiard halls, peeling walls, litter bestrewn streets, and foreigner-infested alley ways. As a consequence, his father would sit in the corner with a roving and abstracted eye—something like an eagle—with a hot cup of tea placed on the table in front of him next to an unopened copy of The News of the World, Reveille, Titbits, or a similar periodical. Always his father would be listening in an aggressive, controlled, and deeply passive way—what we may call a solemn lack of judgement—to the people and places around him. Those fields of walking protoplasm, what he dimly discerned to be this human scum which circulated in his range of vision, were always coming and never arriving! They flitted before his consciousness like visions from another world—caricatural tropes and figures—which he dimly chose to recognise as existing in the same world as himself. His back was always strong, sinuous, and weather-beaten, lying in the back of a creaking chair, with dusty glass panes and cracked linoleum all around him—together with the pungent smell of onions in the background. Nevertheless, Alexander’s father was never intimidated by his surroundings, and during the last war when he was an old man he refused to be fazed even by the Blitz. As a consequence, he used to walk down burning streets which consisted of nothing except fire, barricades, and the remains of burning buildings. Alexander’s father was also a man of sudden and violent habits, and on one particular occasion he threw an iron bar, possibly a poker, at Alexander and he had to move quickly in order to avoid being hit.

⁎

Graham Patterson,[13] for his part, was another one of those failures who inhabited the Polytechnic of North London; and he was a romantic, albeit a cynical one, and a would-be-writer. He was also something of a beatnik, one of those failed “hipsters,” white rappers, or quixotic existentialists of whom Norman Mailer was so proud and he was what we might call an amateur hipster. Graham was also fascinated by prostitutes (to a certain extent), and he had a lurid (if undoubtedly innocent) appreciation of the sexual underworld; of the shadow or penumbra cast on mainstream sexuality by the sexual underworld, particularly in a big city like London. He was also an avid reader—although this was somewhat restricted by personal laziness—and the possession of what can only be described as a second-rate mind. He also inhabited a world which contained many literary references, such as Céline, Bukowski, E. L. Doctorow, Hunter S. Thompson, Burroughs, Ginsburg, and Henry Miller, particularly the Henry Miller of his first three novels, Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn, with Coleridge somewhere in the background. Yet many of these literary references, such as Bukowski and Miller, were lived rather than read, and Graham exhibited an extraordinary vulnerability together with the disconcerting habit of living two completely different lives. There was also a dark and somewhat subdued romanticism to Graham, something which was reminiscent of the catalogue of near-perversions which Mario Praz, the Italian academic, chronicles in The Romantic Agony. In short, there was a Gothic or slightly decadent baroque touch to Graham; a refined disturbance, what we might call an identification with Hawksmoor’s churches, such as St. George’s in the East, which stands in Stepney in the older part of Stepney village rather than Stepney Green with an eighteenth-century burial yard or ossuary in the background. In fact, an incendiary device from the Luftwaffe fell into the Church and gutted the interior during the war—all of which has been replaced by a functional sixties interior—but the outside of the building remains intact. Indeed, the building offers a very dramatic sight if you look up at the tall perpendicular tower at around eleven o’clock in the evening with the clouds scudding overhead. On such an occasion the building, which has three windows at the back covered up with stone, takes on a particular quality; what we can only describe as a certain powerful resonance. In such circumstances, the Church seems to manifest a certain power; a dark and terrible splendour, even in its defined and formal structure, its sheer and definitional limits. In short, the Church seems alive, not with a sense of menace, not with any cheap Gothic thrills, but with a sense of inner foreboding; a tragic and somnolent form of fate. If you like, the Church represents a nimbus of divine power—power which is beyond this earth and yet linked to it—at once a spectral and a mysterious notion. However, the nimbus of darkness which attaches itself to the exterior is as much the trellis work of an internal extremity; a reflection onto outside appearances of what the viewer actually sees. As a consequence, such a phenomenon is a psychic transcription; a field of force and identity which leaves the individual only to return to him in a different guise. It is, in short, a phantasmagoric scenescape; a working-out of the functions of the human and the religious, something which is laced with redemptive possibilities. For when you look out upon the outside world in the direction of Hawksmoor’s Church—upon the full panoply of human and non-human worlds—you are witness to a certain betrayal. When by betrayal we mean the loss of certain divine archetypes; certain redundant gestures which are the utterances, the secret footfalls of our ancestors, the peoples and times and ghosts who came before us—all of whom do not exist separately from us, but inside us, inside our minds, as a possibility of what might otherwise exist. As such, these are moments of raw power; genuine nerve-endings. When the individual comes face to face with a sense of absent completeness; of a portent at once divine and resigned, as well as depressive—riven with the consequences of death—and this is the presence of the dark side, the side which exists prior to the possibility of completeness. This is something which exists prior to it; and yet opposes it at one and the same time—what Jung would call “the shadow”—the presence of evil; the understanding of pain as a token, a symbol of our original violation.

Paul Hardman, of course, suffered from a certain sexual confusion, even hysteria, which could be most readily observed with women. As a consequence, Paul spent most of his time with women, insofar as he spent any time with women at all, in an attempt to prevent sexual intercourse from rearing its ugly head. In a sense he regarded coitus, penetrative sex, as somehow inadmissible—at least unwanted in his own case, in that he was incapable of gaining an erection in relation to women, even though he desired to desperately. We might say, therefore, that Paul suffered from a form of aglognia; a striation of the flesh, a difficulty in perceiving intercourse as profoundly penetrative, as definitely a movement in and out. (When we remember that a man’s purpose is essentially to put his seed into the heart of a woman.) All of which led to a feeling of social isolation and uselessness; a feeling of inability to work, think, and even play effectively. In a sense Paul’s life became a form of meaningless ennui, a type of terminal decline, a veritable living death. During the course of which Paul was too neurotic to read properly or effectively, and he existed in a form of nether world, a compendium of videos, political magazines, arcana, trivia, and used pizza sachets. Indeed, his life resembled little more than the stain, in part tomato, dough, ketchup, olives, cheese, and salami left in a cardboard pizza carton once the meal had been removed and consumed. He was also fascinated by cultural dross, by the leavings of the consumer society which he affected to despise, and like those innocents in the nineteen sixties who made their homes out of panelled soup cans in a pathetic imitation of Andy Warhol, Paul draped his entire existence with the underbelly, the residuum, of capitalist culture. Whether the culture concerned was new wave music, “house,” punk, neo-punk, hard-core thrash, “straight edge,” New Romantic, rap, even allegedly “right-wing” forms of music—as with the case of Public Enemy, Sham 69, Rush, and even Siouxsie & the Banshees in their earlier stages—together with other forms of artlessness.

Letter to Steely Romantic[14] (name changed) 29th July, Leyton

Dear S—,

Our contretemps the other evening was merely a result of your alleged “arrogance” and the fact that you were born to exercise your own will in relation to just about everything. Of course, this is a defect from which we all suffer, including myself, and it is what we might call a divine failure. This is a failure—if it be so—of hubris, a capacity not to notice the fact that we have been placed on this earth in proximity to other people, something which you tend to forget. In any event, as I said in my letter on the fourteenth of this month, the little fracas which we have been through is all in the past, as I have made clear on several subsequent occasions. Nevertheless, let me reiterate a part of my last letter so that you can be sure of my intentions: “As far as I am concerned [I wrote], there are no irreparable differences between us and our relationship will continue as before.”

If I might change the subject somewhat, it appears that two items of interest have occurred recently, the first is Paul Steadman’s[15] visit to Oxford to meet the patrons of The English Review, and the second is a spot of what can only be called spontaneous combustion, if there is such a thing, at the back of my flats here in Leyton. To deal with the spot of spontaneous combustion first there is an abandoned parking lot, an affair of corrugated steel and wooden joists around a specified concrete surface at the back of the flats, and last Thursday morning, around two o”clock, an old wreck of a car which had been sitting quietly with the sun beating down upon it suddenly exploded sending a shower of sparks and flames into the air. The fire brigade were soon called and dowsed the burning wreck which after all the excitement resembled the carcass, the automobile chassis, from J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash that depicts modern vehicles in multiple pileups and other forms of dissolution.

The most interesting event of the week, however, concerns Paul Steadman and his visit to Oxford in order to meet the compilers of The English Review, The Reactionary, and other publications produced by “Perfect Publications,” a sort of Ultra-Reactionary Edwardian Cult at present based in the Oxford area. Paul arrived there in the middle of the afternoon and was met by an extremely ancient car, “a vehicle of the right shape” according to its occupant, who met him outside the Ashmolean Museum and who then conducted him into the suburbs. Paul was then invited into a relatively nondescript semi-detached house which was obviously being rented for the occasion and left to wait in a lounge or sitting-room opposite a reasonably large front-window for half an hour. During this period Paul was left alone, except for the ministrations of an Edwardian butler; an “Upstairs-Downstairs” butler as we might say. Every so often this slightly sinister ambience was enlivened by muffled sounds, possibly footfalls or more likely various cupboards and wardrobes opening and shutting, all of which was accompanied by noises of banging and crashing. Eventually the mistress of the Establishment, “Miss Lucia”[16] to use her nom de plume, made an appearance—a somewhat extraordinary and sinister appearance at that. For Miss Lucia seemed to be crippled or grossly malformed with lumps or protuberances on various parts of her anatomy—all of which was reminiscent of padding (such as shoulder pads, for instance) while “she” wore a large black hat, gloves, and a face net indoors. Paul also noticed, in a somewhat disconcerting way, that the individual concerned seemed to be facially malformed as well with an enormous amount of makeup, such as talcum powder and foundation cream, about the face. This was used to hide the possibility of facial hair and was certainly used to conceal a hairlip[17] which latter was seen to protrude from the upper lip. The whole macabre and somewhat frightening appearance was given the coup de grace by the fact that the individual concerned was wearing black lipstick and quite possibly similar make-up around the eyes, although it was hard to see due to the facial netting. Paul then sat through an extraordinary interview in which the ills of the modern world were mulled over and then tea was taken punctually at the end of the afternoon. Except that the china tea-set was splintered and cracked in many places and a residual brown stain was left in the saucer when you had drained the cup. Ultimately the trip ended in anti-climax, and Paul returned to Bromley late at night after catching a connecting train.

If we view these strange events objectively, however, then there can only be two real explanations: the first is the relatively mundane one; namely that the woman concerned was very ancient and possibly malformed—all of which led her to conceal that fact. The other explanation is that the “woman” whom Paul met was actually a man in disguise; a man in drag—in other words, an aged sub-Edwardian poseur who chose to act the part of a transvestite; an eonist, particularly when we remember that the Edwardian period involved a certain amount of decadence; a tincture of bisexuality (à la Gluck’s reliefs), a sort of ritual effluvium or cross-dressing.

It is something which can be seen in the crisp and lacquered “masculinity” of a Noël Coward; a music-hall artiste. When Coward himself, of course, was obviously homosexual, but he chose to hide this behind a veneer of flirtatious manhood; crisp cravats, resplendent tiepins, and a compressed (if not congealed) hairstyle—a mixture of Brylcreem and frigid substance, a somewhat decadent flowering of masculinity-into-femininity. All of which is reminiscent of a book of plates I once saw about the Occult which included a picture of an Edwardian Satanic cult; a cult of power, a mixture of the Sitwells and Gilles de Rais, replete with stylized head gear. This is particularly apt when we remember that this cult is very Reactionary and romantically right-wing. Moreover, it is illustrative of what happens when style triumphs over substance. When there is a regrettable lack of digression, a decadent formalism, a triumph of style; a veritable chiaroscuro of superficial appearance—hence the degenerate, florid, and somewhat over-ripe element in this Cult. In that it strives for a form of radical respectability—where sexuality and bodily functions are dismissed as “bestial”—when this merely conceals and expresses a black orchid; a fully-grown perversity; a dissolute and disingenuous tableaux—what we might call a hidden and “psychic” lesbianism; the degree to which decency is close to its opposite, particularly when it denies that fact.

yours,
J. B. 29/7/1991

Notes

[1] Who is Paul Hardman?

[2] From Albania?

[3] Who is Salim Have-Joy?

[4] Who is Graham Paterson, elsewhere Patterson with two “t”s?

[5] Jonathan Bowden’s stepsister was named Gail Maskell.

[6] Bowden probably meant to write “astrology.”

[7] Bowden’s stepmother was named Sylvia.

[8] The Metamorposes seems to be Bowden’s collective term for his stepmother and her children.

[9] Bowden’s father was named Anthony.

[10] Perhaps Damian Thompson

[11] Perhaps Anthony Mastropasqua

[12] In volume 4 of the Collected Works.

[13] This time with two “t”s.

[14] Perhaps Stuart Millson

[15] Perhaps Stead Steadman

[16] Who is Miss Lucia?

[17] “Harelip”?