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4,649 words

Part 4 of 5

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.

Craze is the fourth book in volume 2. It was first published as a distinct book under Bowden’s name (London: Avant-Garde, 1993). We will publish it online in 5 instalments.

Craze is written as an interview, but there is little overall unity to the line of questioning, but broadly there are two foci: modern art and a lesbian couple Bowden knew.It is unclear who Bowden envisioned as his interviewer and his audience. He was writing over the heads of his peers to a potential future audience who could appreciate him. Let us hope he finally found it.   

As usual, real people appear under pen names. In some cases, it is easy enough to guess who Bowden is talking about. For instance, Gaudier Louter-Finiscue of the Monday Club is Gregory Lauder-Frost. 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 Craze will appear at the Jonathan Bowden Archive. It will then be followed by similar editions of the rest of the Collected Works, plus a couple more early volumes that were not included. — Greg Johnson

Anne herself had retreated further into a form of catatonia, of arrested relief—whereby she lies on a hospital life support machine in a W. London hospital, an obscure west London hospital, so obscure in fact that her mother does not know her whereabouts. The decision to place her on the life support machine was not taken lightly—it was due to the fact that her heart was beginning to fail. The drip-feed, the intravenous drip which was feeding her, could not produce the energy necessary to keep the heart beating, so mechanical stimulation had to be introduced. All in all, it is a reversal to type, a situation in which Anne is retreating yet again—first from her mother, then the world, ultimately Isabella, and now from life itself. It was a continuous process of adaptation, retreat, and the horror of correspondence, the seeming refusal to register a thing. In short, it was a time to return to her own loneliness, the thing in her stomach which refused to burst free. As such it was a type of nightmare: the thing which Rosamund Lehmann chronicles in her novel—reprinted by Virago—of a female sculptor, her collapse and final diminuendo.[1] The extent to which she began to find that the character of the people she knew, the women in particular who she had come to admire, were taking on the attributes of the sculpture which she had before her. It was as if all these particular characters were having grafted into their skin a type of alabaster completeness, the absence of a rogue moment, the extent to which they were undergoing a transformation. As they gradually became stone, one could see them taking on a second skin—a Skin 2, although not entirely in the sado-masochistic sense, but not entirely in a sense which was removed from this either. As a consequence, she began to see people’s personalities trapped amid this stone work, this reluctant heaven or abandonment of grace. Now this was the same as in particular forms of skin care treatment—where the face was caked in muck, with plaster—an entombment rather than an inspiration. This was something which locked these people up in themselves more than would have otherwise been the case, in the sense that statuary is always a partial defeat, a closing off of the actual. It was as if Anne had reached out to the men and women around her only to experience a crisis of her imagination, as the skin which she expected to find became stone.

It was as if horror of this sort, a real as against a spectral horror, was too much for the mind to bear. So the mind retreats into the realm of Clive Barker and H. P. Lovecraft, figures whom we have had occasion to mention before. When there world consists of a little thrill; the subjugation of minor, even suburban, moments to a larger calm, itself the absence at the centre of some sort of core—an emptiness. This is something which contemporary Christian theology tends to refer to as an understanding of God’s absence, namely hell. That is why horror novels are so popular, so relatively popular. It is because their devotees wish to experience a little thrill, an abandonment near to death; a premonition as to the prospect of disease. This is something which inevitably gives the devil, let alone Thanatos, his due. When it is the spirit of death, the nature of absence—if you like, the peregrinations of Grendel’s sister, which gives horror fiction its due. It is less what is commonly discussed in relation to the vaults of post-structuralist theory—where popular fiction is often given a privileged position in and of itself, depending where you are on the spectrum. In other words, the nearer you are to Terry Eagleton and the further you are away from the Yale School of deconstructionists, the closer you are to a justification of popular culture from a sub-Marxist perspective. (Nevertheless Eagleton himself has moved from left Catholicism to a position equidistant between a post-Marxist Left and the post-structural abortion clinic.) The superficial charge against the Gothic vocabulary, however, is that it is to do with the body—with a fear and loathing of the body à la Cronenberg. Where in the latter’s films heads explode and gore is deliberately dispersed all around the set, certainly in the rushes. Yet horror is ultimately frigid, wasteful, and otherwise redundant. It is the absence of the prospect of a mark—a deserted plain; a certain congealed quality—the nature and extent of depressive ardour. When we could say that it revolves around a pessimistic feature—as the monsters created by a particular type of lust (a lust which has more to do with despair than anything else)—dance and caterwaul in the darkness. This is a situation in which great hulks; silent screaming nerds, themselves dwarf-like creatures with incredibly ugly visages, move to-and-fro in this particular daylight. Nevertheless, it is not the thing itself—not the metaphorical usage—which matters, merely what these creatures—these Beings of congealed blood—actually signify. When in Anne’s life they were little more than hulks of disparagement; things which remained silent in abandoned rooms, particularly in relation to this house in Bow. The monsters which haunt her imagination are deep, hidden, spectral things—instruments of wonder. They lurk deep in the recesses of the unconscious mind, and they are hairy, rectangular, if not linear—prehensile and fungible. These monsters which lurk in her nether depths could flit between the house, her room, and her life. This is what Isabella chose to call her incessant “travelling,” the extent to which even the semi-comatose state in which she finds herself is merely an extension of her waking state, her waking to dream state. Even Isabella believes that the coma which presently dominates her consciousness and subjects her to sleep is a form of dreaming—a traveller’s distance from the object of its quest.

When another thing needs to be asked and this is the extent to which Isabella dominated Anne. Indeed, the question has to be asked—even if it is only fictional in form—namely, did Isabella murder Anne or at least attempt to murder her?

The facts are unclear. Yet it is relatively obvious that all lesbian relationships or pseudo-lesbian relationships involve a retreat from the world; a type of redundancy. Where both partners believe that intercourse with others—of whatever sort—is unhealthy, not to say unhelpful, in relation to their own spiritual growth. The fact that lesbians seek the solace of the absence of the male; in a sense, they seek masculinity by virtue of its present absence. This is the fact that it is present and absent, particular and universal, all at one and the same time—since lesbianism involves a retreat from the flesh, insofar as feminine coitus is considered to be part and parcel of the male, i.e., the fact that he has to be there if anything meaningful—anything demonstrable in relation to the flesh—is to occur. In short, Sapphic ardour, the romantic adoration of the invert (not to say the ingrate) always involves a retreat or a moment of solace. As a result, it wishes to amputate something about life—what it wishes to amputate is unclear, since inversion is nearly always a confused state—most particularly when it pretends not to be so. However, there is a degree to which lesbianism pits itself against the absence of a man; it wishes to test itself against the penetrative member at one remove. If you like, the whole purpose of lesbianism—at least in one sense—is an attempt to make up for an arrestation of male flesh. It is an attempt, possibly through the use of a false member—a dildo, for instance—or the application of a certain amount of force—to reconnect with the male. It represents a failed gambit to seize the presence of the absent male; in fact, to force oneself back—through the binding necessity of the absent flesh—in order that a woman can have a penis. So that she can feel the presence of a hoary member between her legs, touching at its outer extremity the nature of her reclining thighs. In short, the necessity of female inversion is found to be an abstracted cult of the phallus; a theoretical phallocratism. This is the extent to which lesbianism resembles less a form of Gay Rights than Male Rights, man’s rights—in relation to the pity of a certain expropriation—at one remove. It is as if radical lesbianism is a form of theoretical anti-feminism, although the term un-or-non-feminism may be better in such a context. As a result, it is a form of unconsecrated ground; a sepulchre of the absence of the Holy—where women without a phallus secretly worship it in relation to the tidings of a noontide sun. It is that moment in the mid-evening when one experiences a certain pricking at the nape of one’s neck. We might say, therefore, that Sapphic adoration represents a new time to die, if not to dance—a phallogocentric extravaganza without the male! Yet all the time working towards his return, even if it is in a different context.

In many respects, of course, it just represents a type of disruptive heterosexual affair without the glorious aftertaste of the phallus; the taste and odour of redundant semen after the act. This is the heterosexual affair which begins with a type of hunger as well as indifference in relation to the male, a man who hungers after the taste of the flesh and is satisfied if he obtains it, if only for a moment. For the man often requires several different things at once, possibly incontrovertible and yet definitely contradictory things, things which cannot necessarily be enjoyed or experienced at one and the same time. At first the man inevitably wants the glories of the flesh—this is just a token of an abundant masculinity. Yet at the same time he also experiences a lurid romanticism, a sensitivity totally beyond the bounds of feminist theory, which tends not to allow for it. In short, it is the man and not usually the woman who feels love initially in the relationship—at a moment of priapic relevance, even of distaste. This is because the man is quicker, he is more immediate in relation to his ardour, at least in the early stages of an affair. When a woman is both easily aroused and yet in some sense distant from her emotions, as if to admit that she had such emotions weakened her in relation to the conflict which was to come. At first the woman feels a certain wantonness, but this is soon replaced by an element of inner anxiety, if not a form of arrested complacency. For the woman begins to feel that she has given herself too cheaply in relation to the affair; indeed, that an element of refusal, even coyness, is necessary when dealing with a man. As a result, a lot of women are taught from their earliest moments—not necessarily in their mother’s milk—that to satisfy a man’s ardour too readily is not the way to his heart. In such circumstances, it is felt that longevity in relation to an affair is inversely proportional to the speed with which each partner, the man or the woman, takes the other to bed. It is as if—at least in accordance with a particular type of female psychology—that the longer coitus is kept out of things, the more it is dangled in front of a man then the more interested he will be in the woman, at least in the longer term. There is a certain truth to this, however, but the real point is that an easy conquest sets up lines of contrast and intervening force in either partner. From the perspective of the man there is a certain sense of relief that the main event is over already, that it has been despatched quite tidily and with little sense of rancour. On the other hand, most of these emotions are mingled with a form of distaste, partly over the act itself—the degree to which it is a surrendering of the male quest—also because the woman surrendered to it a little too easily. This sets up contrary lines of force in the man, as we have already discussed. He feels, in one sense, that he has taken his pleasure and there is a degree to which he feels a genuine warmth for the woman as a consequence of this. However, he does also feel that the woman he has been with has not acted according to type, particularly if he wants a long-standing relationship with her, and that she has given herself a little too liberally for his liking. The woman also feels a certain let-down after the event, primarily because dreams, phantasizing about sex, and so on is always much more exciting than the event itself. So there is an extent to which the morning after, with or without the assistance of the morning-after pill, is always something of an anti-climax. This is something which promises much and yet refuses to deliver; a diminuendo. For the woman herself is split between contradictory feelings: on the one hand, she wishes to fall violently in love with the individual concerned, on the other, she wants to keep her options open and see if she can arouse other men in a similar manner. Why be tied to one, she thinks, when the excitement of the chase leads her to reserve judgement over the choice of a partner. When one of the salient facts about relationships is that every attempt has to be made to prevent them from becoming boring. Indeed, this is essentially the reason for extra-marital affairs and the like, they are attempts to keep the thing from becoming boring—although they are also used as a means of alleviating stress and proving to oneself that one is still attractive to others. While the response of the woman has a lot to do with her sexuality; namely, a woman who was brought up in a relatively centred manner will see longevity, matrimony (of one sort or another) and childbirth as the essential things. Whereas a woman with a damaged or fractured personality, a personality which lacks self-estimation in one way or another will have an element of the whore in her in the sense that she will possess an element of loose and nondescript sexuality. She will not be sure who to give it to, she will dream of the prospect of Romantic Love and yet at the same time she will hunger for a disembodied form of penis. Such a woman dreams of other men at the moment one of their number is mounting her. She is also a woman who is fascinated by the prospect if not of prostitution—something which is dissident and yet integral to the female psyche—then the idea of heedless and promiscuous sex, something that excites her. When we have to bear in mind that such a woman does not know what she wants and is prey to every fancy and concatenation. She believes that she must have it all and now—but she also has no clue as to what she actually wants! Yet it is wrong to think that such women cannot fall in love, in a sense some of them can be capable of acts of great selflessness, devotion, and self-sacrifice, if only for a moment. For the truth of the matter is that they are morally and emotionally lazy, forgetful, easily aroused and yet more easily bored, prone to wonder at their own sense of inconsequentiality. In a sense they always remain bemused—they wonder what men see in them when they hardly know who they are ! This is something which resembled a woman like Eileen O’Shaunessy, not to mention her mate, the nurse, Rosalind Duffy. Although Rosalind, to be fair, was a different type of woman altogether—a woman who was capable of loyalty it had to be admitted. Yet who possessed an air of distraction, a token of indifference, a sort of purblind loyalty to the nature of her own pain. When to look at Rosalind’s face—as I once did as she stood under a lamp outside the half-way house where she worked in east London—was to see that it was set by the passions which had once coursed through it and inflamed it. It was as if her own absence of stillness, her own pain, the heedless desire for passion—although in her case a mixture of romantic ardour as well as the need, the compulsive and re-iterated need for penetration—all mingled together in her features. They all returned together in one medley, one pot-pourri of lust, arrested innocence, burnt-out orgasms, loneliness, and the desire for love. In short, in her features one could see a wizened, jack-daw, as well as pulled together form of extremity—despite the age (indeterminate late forties to early fifties) a not unattractive visage at that! But one that was riven with loneliness, boredom, passion, desire, the desire above all for contact—and not just the sort of “contact” which was affordable through “contact” magazines and the like, but a genuine type of contact, a form of romantic effluvium, although Rosalind was always prepared to settle for cock!

When Eileen O’Shaunessy, for her part, was something else again. It was she who could write the following letter:

I wouldn’t have mentioned sodomy unless I thought it was right. I hope you’re not offended. It’s just that I get so low sometimes and I think my life is completely useless. Maybe it is! Maybe all the “square” people from my mother down were right all along, and I’m just a goddam whore. I wouldn’t mention it if I didn’t think it was the truth. Anyway, you often feel like varying the sexual act just to make it a little less tedious, a little less pedestrian. Somehow, I can’t think of anything more appropriate, more exciting, more degrading and true to what I am than to take it in the arse!

Eileen O’Shaugnessy, for her part, was an amateur league erotomaniac; a woman whose lust existed to one side of herself in a manner which was essentially unfulfilled. She was one of those girls who used to haunt the rock clubs in and around Tottenham Court Road in the hope of clitorial stimulation—the prospect that here she would find something (or somebody) to alleviate the emptiness. Even the mention of sodomy in the letter is rather fictitious, something which was overdone—a spicy tit-bit that she had picked up from another couple—needless to say, a girlfriend and her boyfriend from whom she had become estranged. You see, Eileen was the type of woman who could visualise affairs—even invent them on occasion—all for the edification of people she knew, particularly her analyst if she happened to be in analysis at the time. Yet Eileen was the sort of woman who was just about to enter analysis, whether the analyst was real or imagined, male or female, fictive or involved, dispassionate or preparing for some sort of kinkiness, usually distended, with herself.

In her appearance she had a certain sheen, a particular shine or glow to the skin when she was excited—usually on an occasion when she was fishing in the waters. When she was attempting to engineer a pick-up. Yet there was also a drab and somewhat predictable side to her, the depressive and isolated side, which manifested itself in a partly Goth but mainly post-rocker manner, the mannerisms of the jaded club queen—the extent to which her hair was dry, unwashed, stiff with hair-spray and re-arrangement.

She was the sort of girl who was attracted towards a pit of eroticism. Yet she was not beautiful or wanton enough to bring it off properly. Nevertheless, she was attracted—almost in a stereotypical manner—to the opposite of what she wanted. There was just a glimmer of the fact that she did not actually know what she wanted—what she actually needed to achieve. In her own imagination, however, she would drift from man to man, imagining it to be love—at least not knowing the difference—whilst all the time wondering what the other would be like, the thing she was not experiencing at the time. If you like, she did not have the sense to know the true nature of dissatisfaction. She could presume upon a certain threshold, a particular modicum of knowledge—much of which was arbitrary, the rest made up on the spur of the moment. In fact, she was the sort of woman who would fling herself into another affair after one man had dropped her … usually because the thing had petered out anyway. Yet to spice it up she had to give it a certain level of intrigue, a sort of compulsory mystification. The truth was too absent and transparent for Eileen—too liable to burst or shatter in her hand, particularly when she shook it to see if it was still there. So, in a sense, she elaborated on the nature of the truth to find her own truth, to make it palatable, to reconnoitre the absence of her own mark, the mark she had been able to give to the proceedings. For instance, if she had picked up a man on the rebound from another failed affair (usually a man who was just indulging himself between mistresses, a friend of a friend), she would attempt to jazz it up. In her own mind, at least, the affair began to take on a much more lurid and expressive character. It became genuinely important, if only for a moment. The actual fact was that she dreamed of being erotic … the actuality was that she was relatively frigid, capable of the act to be sure. Yet it was a nightmare for her—a giving and receiving of shudders and liquids for no purpose. It was nothing except the prospect of a certain form of excitement, of romantic ardour, which she believed you had to experience in order to be free. Perhaps the use of the term free here is a misnomer—for what she really meant was that you had to suffer, you had to be in a romantic state of ecstasy in order to be alive. As far as she was concerned, life—real life—involved pain, the pain of romantic abstraction. When, in truth, she didn’t know if she was actually alive until she tasted such pain—until she knew that she had felt something in the entrails of her being. The truth was that her tastes were jaded, bored, and supremely indifferent. She knew that there was a canker at bottom in her spirit, something which prevented her from being what she would truly like to be. Although that itself remained something of a mystery—a thing which could be pondered on without end and without residual meaning. The fact was that this woman mistook interiority—the inward flourish—for death (or is it depth?). In turn, she imagined that introversion, the chronicling of a particular pain, made one liable to a certain notoriety, the notification of a type of battle fatigue. When in actual fact she had made one of the cardinal female blunders—a thing which separates this sex apart from its opposite, namely the male. She believed that to be interesting was to be obsessed with sex and death, with a type of Scorpio-related conscientiousness (if you are at all familiar with the astrological parallel). When in actuality this was a false motif, merely a genuflection towards her exhausted tastebuds. Not that the depressiveness, the introversion and sense of loss were feigned, however. They were truly real—she was a depressive, after all. Indeed, it was the need to get away from the existence that Jean Rhys customarily describes in her novels which lay behind her romantic extravagance. For in fact she was living a somewhat twilight existence in dim-lit hotels, bed-sits, and boarding houses. As she flitted around many of London’s less salubrious neighbourhoods—Tottenham, Finsbury Park, Stoke Newington, Plaistow, and the rest—in an attempt to find a decent place to stay. When she first lived in London on her own, she specialised in a form of dowdy hotel, a type of establishment that is so far beneath the reckoning of one star as to not be considered in the tourist guides. These are the extremely cheap hotels with battered facades and broken, emaciated awnings which are to be found around the big railway stations such as Paddington, Victoria, and King’s Cross. All such establishments seem to be replete with Polish grande-dames with false, shiny teeth, peroxide to white hair (with the curlers still in), strong tobacco smoke and old brooches worn over pert (if slightly decaying) bosoms. This was the air of boarding-house desperation which she had to escape from and the only way to properly flee was into the recesses of her own mind. Where things became magical—if not magic(k)al; talismanic. In situations where an early sixties drama—like The L-Shaped Room—could be transcended through fantasy, by virtue of the recollection of certain moments that had not occurred. It was in such a spirit that she could flirt with the idea of sodomy—almost meaninglessly, without any understanding of what it really meant. She also wished to be daring—a little “homosexual.” She wished to flirt with the element of masculinity, in fact a form of heaviness, of maladroitness in a way, which lurked in her persona. When in actual fact she was deliriously feminine in a quite strong, confused, and depressed way—she longed to howl in ecstasy as the member penetrated her bowels. Yet, in truth, she did not know what such a thing would actually be like!

All of which resembles a particular type of woman who can be described in this way.

[1] [The novel in question was The Ballad and the Source.—J.S.]