Derek Jarman: A Biography

10. Meeting Mr Wright

10 Meeting Mr Wright At the end of the 1963 summer holidays, during which he kept himself in pocket money with a series of odd jobs,1 Jarman returned to London to look for digs with Noël Hardy, another Drama Society friend from King’s. Their search led them to Kentish Town and a house at 2 Healey Street, immediately south of the shabby Victorian terraces of Prince of Wales Road. As an area, Kentish Town was both poverty-stricken and colourful. It boasted a myriad businesses, from piano-manufacturers to the Greek bakeries which served the local Cypriot community. Along Chalk Farm Road, one encountered ‘a string of shops that sold old electrical equipment and cheap second hand furniture stacked in unloved piles and spilling on to the street. The last train had just left the Roundhouse.’2 The house was owned by a couple who could have stepped straight from an episode of Granada’s recently launched Coronation Street. He was a postman who greeted the dawn in his Royal Mail livery. She was a housewife, her dress domestic: a floral pinny accessorised with a duster. Their name was Luff, though Jarman swiftly nicknamed them Mr and Mrs Lust. He and Hardy set about rearranging the accommodation to their liking. They had taken the top floor – a front room and kitchen at the rear, with shared use of the bathroom on the half-landing. Jarman occupied the front room and covered the floral carpet with polythene so as not to fall foul of Mrs Lust when he started using the room as a studio. Hardy had the kitchen, in which they also ate, and which he draped from floor to ceiling with muslin in a desperate attempt to mask the ferociously jolly seaside scenes on the bright blue wallpaper.3 Less easily masked was Jarman’s continuing jumpiness. Hardy’s girlfriend, Winnow Colyer, remembers Jarman at this time as extremely tense. Plagued by spots and boils and given to swallowing vitamins by the mouthful, he was anything but easy in his casing of post-adolescent skin. Although finally at art school, where he had always wanted to be, he was finding that the Slade, like his sexuality , was something of a minefield. To the fulsome letter of recommendation that had accompanied Jarman’s original application to the Slade, Robin Noscoe had added a rider: ‘His drawing is bold and vigorous and would respond well, I think, to the discipline an art school could give it.’4 The reverse was proving true. Although Jarman professed horror to Roger Jones at how sloppily everyone at the Slade was dressed (‘There are no standards ,’ he wailed), he was far more disconcerted by the discovery that in fact there were standards, quite rigorous standards, against which he was now being measured and frequently found wanting. Already under siege from his worries about his sexuality, the seemingly confident ‘artist’ of the King’s News feature, for whom ‘honest and outspoken opinions are what count’, could not bear confrontation in the one area which had, until now, been sacrosanct: his art. In his own, despairing words, he found the Slade ‘an alien, competitive world. Art had never been that way for me before.’5 One department among many at University College, London and ‘located in that slightly decaying academic atmosphere of Bloomsbury, 18th-century publishing houses and students’ hostels’,6 the Slade was as cold, grey and forbidding as the courtyard of which it formed the north face. It was also peculiarly without focus. Was it an art school, and therefore bohemian, or was it part and parcel of the university, and as such pedagogic? It had, in just over a hundred years of existence, been paterfamilias to Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash, Meeting Mr Wright 89 Stanley Spencer, David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington, Augustus John. Yet undermining this proud and very English heritage , there was, in the mid-sixties, enormous uncertainty as to how to move forward and marry the Slade’s figurative tradition with the new developments dashing themselves against the rocks of artistic orthodoxy. Since 1949 the Slade had been run by the soberly suited, patrician figure of Sir William Coldstream, founder with Claude Rogers and Victor Pasmore of the Euston Road School of Art. This school was famous – or infamous, depending on your opinion – for its view of the artist as little more than a humble observer...