Derek Jarman: A Biography

12. Becoming Derek

12 Becoming Derek In late 1964, Jarman reworked some of the scribbles in his notebook into: ‘Tentative ideas for a manifesto after 11 ⁄3 year at an art school’. In part, this read: Theatre ballet and painting must be revived. This cannot be achieved separately. There must be intercommunication . . . There must be communal basis even if only from the artists themselves. Fragmentation and the perverted cult of personality at all cost is a force which has rendered the artist impotent . . . The painting school says you are not a painter. ‘I’m proud.’ . . . failures are to be desired as long as they are complete, stretched to their limits . . . . . . the audience must become participators. The creators the artist must abrogate his mystery. . . . turn Piccadilly into one vast shimmering glass funnel. 500 ft high. 6 skyscrapers . . . music all types from loud speakers sometimes Bach sometimes Beatles.1 The ideas are in fact far from tentative. Not only had they been gestating for some time, they were passionately held and would inform much of Jarman’s future output – though not, it has to be said, in their entirety. The cult of personality was not later seen as a complete perversion, nor were failures always to be desired. Pride was not all Jarman felt at being told he was not a painter. At the start of his second year at the Slade, he still felt uncomfortable there and continued to take criticism of his abilities to heart. It is no accident that architecture should figure so prominently in his manifesto. That November, he moved into a new flat in West Hampstead, where two of his three co-habitees were architectural students: Dugald Campbell, his old schoolfriend and flatmate from Witley Court, and a new acquaintance called Julian Harrap. With Campbell and Harrap the turning of Piccadilly ‘into one vast shimmering glass funnel’ was, as a topic of conversation, the rule rather than the exception. The flat at 64 Priory Road, one of West Hampstead’s quieter and more leafy streets, was on the bottom floor of a solid, handsome house, and unfurnished, allowing the new tenants to decorate their rooms to suit their separate tastes. Julian Harrap, nicknamed Pode, favoured a varnished floor, complemented by built-in cupboards; his space was shipshape. Lawrence Warwick-Evans who, with his girlfriend Pat, took the fourth room, was of a more romantic disposition; on one occasion he went so far as to cover his floor with autumn leaves in order to create a rural effect. Not surprisingly, the most conspicuously ‘designed’ of the quarters belonged to Jarman, whose room was at the front of the house, facing an oblong slope of garden and, above that, the street. His design constants – the antique reading chair, his candlesticks, easel, Güta Minton’s ‘friendship’ plant, his books and the Georgian glass he was still collecting – were complemented by much that was new. Fabric, for a start. ‘Saturated as he was with the romance of mediaeval Christianity’,2 once he had given the walls a coat of white (‘White is the only colour for rooms,’ he declared loftily),3 he draped his room with fabric, principally a burgundy -coloured velvet. To heighten the mediaeval effect, he placed ecclesiastical-looking candles on the table he built specially for the room, burned endless joss-sticks and played appropriate music: Becoming Derek 109 Gregorian chant and Albinoni. He acquired a tailor’s dummy, which he dressed to suit his mood or the arrangement of the room. He installed a Pither stove, not because Priory Road could be cruelly cold – he never noticed the cold in any case – but for the look of the thing: its large circular base, its sheer iron sides, its stovepipe chimney . He made sure the scent of his joss-sticks was always offset by that of flowers: whatever he had seeded in the window-box plus at least a jam-jar’s worth of Fritillaria. In marked contrast to the care he lavished on such design minutiae , domestically speaking, he was slapdash. He lived on bread and cheese or scrambled eggs, frequently ‘borrowed’ from his long-suffering flatmates, left the washing-up and hogged the bathroom to go through his daily ritual of splashing his face with water forty times. Everything had to be done on his terms. When Campbell’s girlfriend sneaked into his room to dry her knickers on the Pither, he was so outraged by...