Derek Jarman: A Biography

29. Blue Prints

29 Blue Prints Although Modern Nature contains references to how unwell Jarman was starting to feel in the final months of 1989, it never conveys the full extent of his developing illness, or the despair it engendered. To appreciate how critical the situation was becoming, one has to read between the lines. That The Garden was troubling him as much as it was speaks volumes; usually he sailed through his films with consummate ease. Then there were ill omens like the snake, or lonely visits to the heath; the painful matter-of-factness with which he recorded the death, almost always AIDS-related, of friend after friend after friend. By the beginning of 1990, illness had come to the fore. On 1 January, he was in Dungeness viewing the rushes for The Garden: ‘so appallingly inept no wonder I am ill’. The next day was little better: ‘A very slow start – hardly slept. Brewed myself porridge, so painful to swallow I had to talk to myself as a diversion. I have never had such an unpleasant cold . . . It has made this Christmas, never a good time for me, the most depressed I can remember.’1 A further affliction was itchiness. This had started much earlier, while he was scripting War Requiem, when sometimes his scalp had become so uncomfortable that he could not concentrate without continual scratching from Collins. Now the itchiness was more widespread and frequently so acute he could hardly bear to be inside his skin. Itchiness, aching limbs and hacking cough notwithstanding, there was much work to be done. Together with Peter Cartwright and Collins, he was viewing the rushes of The Garden preparatory to a rough edit that would impose some shape and narrative on their disparate raw material. There were meetings with Mackay and the distributors about publicity and with Simon Turner to map the soundtrack. The poems that would form the voice-over were written and their recording by Michael Gough arranged. The BBC had asked him to present a ten-minute tour of a favourite building for their series Building Sights. He chose Garden House, the home his old art teacher Robin Noscoe had built for himself in the fifties. To clarify certain details of family history for Modern Nature, he was corresponding with his Aunt Moyra. He was approached by Annie Lennox to direct a video for ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’, which she had been asked to perform for Red Hot and Blue, a charity concert of Cole Porter songs.2 In addition to his own painting, he was making ‘a series of gouaches’, ultimately unused, for the cover of Jon Savage’s history of punk rock, England’s Dreaming. He was giving considerable and constant thought to Edward II. He was being interviewed for the release of War Requiem and monitoring its reception in New York, where it was savaged by his old foe Vincent Canby.3 In February, he was dealing yet again with the tabloid press, which had been alerted to the potentially blasphemous nature of The Garden. He appeared on The Late Show to pay tribute to the recently deceased Michael Powell. He was asked to comment on the AIDSrelated death of actor Ian Charleson. While others praised Charleson for his ‘strength and honesty’, his ‘courage in coming clean in death’, Jarman could remember only that Charleson had unwittingly been running ‘for the opposition’; that he had accepted the removal of Jubilee from his cv to ‘protect his reputation’ and concealed his HIV status until the very end. A number of Jarman’s friends found his attitude too harsh and begged him to ‘let sleeping dogs lie’.4 He Blue Prints 453 resolutely refused. For him, the issues were too important and wideranging . February ended with a visit to Warsaw, where he had been invited by a group of young Polish film-makers to lecture and show his films. It was a punishing week: over and above the daily screenings and lectures , he agreed to take part in an impromptu film recording his impressions of the country. On his return he found himself entering a ‘twilight’ zone of mounting fever, monumental night sweats, nausea, continual aches, lethargy and disorientation. Forced to subsist almost entirely on peppermint tea, he was literally wasting away. ‘The razor bumps over the bones of my face. Even the bones themselves have shrunk. My hands seem half their normal size. My...