Derek Jarman: A Biography

26. A Fifth Continent

26 A Fifth Continent O Rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.1 For someone as sensitive to signs as Jarman, 1987 did not start promisingly . On 6 January, he and Tilda Swinton had their photographs taken by Angus McBean, one of whose photographic portraits had long been the only piece by any artist other than himself to hang on the walls of Jarman’s flat. When the session ended, McBean announced: ‘You are going to be my last sitter.’ As he ‘pressed the button for the last time “Stormy Weather” was playing on the stereo’.2 There could have been few clearer ways of signalling the end of an era, unless it was another appearance Jarman made in front of the camera, to play his old friend Patrick Procktor in Prick Up Your Ears, Stephen Frears’ film about Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. In 1967, when Peter Gill had commissioned Procktor to draw Orton for a programme insert for his Royal Court production of Orton’s Crimes of Passion,3 Jarman had been twenty-five, living in Islington, catching glimpses of Orton in Chapel Street Market and visiting Procktor in his Manchester Street flat, where he himself had featured in more than one of Procktor’s paintings. Now, in his mid-forties and feeling ‘like mutton dressed as lamb’,4 Jarman was required to stand in front of an easel and roll back the years by pretending to be Procktor while Gary Oldman, lying naked on a rug, pretended to be Orton. Doors were closing. With private panic, uncertainty and despair came a crippling caution. Jarman’s libido, once as unflagging a constituent of his daily life as fun and laughter, went on temporary hold, as did certain gestures of affection. Because there was still so little clear information about AIDS, he stopped kissing people when he met them, or else made sure he kissed only air. He worried about touching the children of friends, about sharing cups and glasses. His fears were magnified by the fact that his diagnosis coincided with the government’s as yet most determined attempt to educate the public about the disease. A leaflet on AIDS was put through the letterbox of every household in the country.5 There were newspaper advertisements, posters, a campaign on radio and television and in the cinema, public discussion and articles in the written media. Such a widespread raising of public awareness should have been wholly to the good, only the method chosen by the government to convey their message was hardly designed to calm the fears of a person recently diagnosed as HIV positive. Intent on shocking the public into immediate awareness, the campaign favoured apocalyptic images of danger and death: an exploding mountain, an iceberg, a giant tombstone. Nor did the subsequent newspaper coverage, with its hair-raising predictions of how this terrible plague might decimate the country, make matters any easier. ‘AIDS: THE NEW HOLOCAUST’6 ran a not atypical headline. In the circumstances, the public face of confidence and determination Jarman put on his private fears is all the more remarkable. Perhaps it was simply his background. He knew he had a war to 384 Derek Jarman fight and that if he wanted to outwit or hinder his enemy, what was needed – more as a matter of self-preservation than a conscious crusade – were meticulous planning, tactics, courage. Still intent on not allowing his diagnosis to imprison him in secrecy, he resolved also that it must never lead to any outward display of self-pity. If there was comforting to be done after he had broken his news to anyone, invariably it was the bearer comforting the recipient. More interested in moving forward than in talking about how he felt, he discouraged discussion of his emotions. He armed himself with as much information on the disease as he could, bemoaned its scarcity and plotted how best to rectify this state of affairs. Ever the expert at replenishing himself with new faces, he began to change the composition of his court, finding new friends to suit his new situation. He forced himself to count his blessings and to see blessings where others might have thought they could not exist. He rejoiced that HIV had given him back...