Derek Jarman: A Biography

Prologue

Prologue The picture on the front page of the Independent was of an unequivocally bespectacled man photographed against a hazy bank of flowers in Monet’s garden at Giverny. Wearing a cap, scarf and rumpled tweed jacket, he had a book clasped tightly in his left hand, a walking stick in the other, and was confronting the camera with a steady gaze subtly suggestive of a smile. The caption read: ‘Gay champion dies on eve of new age.’ It might have added a number of other epithets: painter, designer, filmmaker , writer and gardener. The ‘new age’ (prematurely announced) was a reference to the parliamentary vote being taken that evening, 21 February 1994, to give homosexuals parity with heterosexuals by lowering the age of consent for homosexual sex to sixteen. Later that night, as Parliament settled on a compromise age of eighteen, disappointed protesters on the pavement outside fell momentarily silent in the dead man’s honour. The doorstep of Phoenix House, the block of flats in Charing Cross Road where Derek Jarman had latterly lived when in London, was adorned with candles, as was the exterior of the nearby Waterstones bookshop, where copies of Chroma, Jarman’s most recent book, graced the window. Shipley’s, a bookshop that took particular care to stock everything he had ever written, created a small shrine to his memory. So did Maison Bertaux, the coffee shop in Greek Street where he had been a devoted regular, and Presto in Old Compton Street, where he often ate. Soho was saluting one of its denizens – though, as coverage in the national papers indicated, Jarman’s fame stretched far beyond the nexus of streets where he had lived. By the time his other home, a simple cottage at the tip of Romney Marsh, came to witness his funeral, news of his death had circled the world. It was 2 March 1994, the most perfect of early spring days. The sky was clear, the viridescent fields dotted with tentative lambs and occasionally splashed with the red of budding willows. Those who arrived in good time went first to Dungeness where, on the windswept shingle between the looming ugliness of the nearby power station, the fishing huts and the slate-grey sea, Jarman had famously created a sculptural garden of great unusualness and beauty. Passing through the cottage’s dark wooden rooms, more redolent of a Russian dacha than of anything English, one arrived at the newly constructed ‘west wing’, a plain room overlooking the rear garden. The drapes were drawn, candles guttered, a small grapefruit tree filled the air with its scent. One of Jarman’s most treasured possessions – a plaster cast of the head of Mausolus, the ancient king whose tomb gave the world the word ‘mausoleum’ – locked unseeing eyes with the room’s central occupant. The plain oak coffin was open. Jarman was dressed in a robe of glittering gold. The cap on his head proclaimed him a ‘controversialist’. People came and stood in silence over the coffin. They hugged and spoke quietly with Keith Collins, Jarman’s companion , and with Howard Sooley, the photographer friend who had faithfully recorded the last years of Jarman’s life. Earlier that day, Collins had placed a number of carefully chosen effects in the coffin. The designer Christopher Hobbs, one of Jarman’s oldest friends, now added a small brass wreath similar to the one he had last fashioned as a prop for Jarman’s filmic account of the painter Caravaggio. The actress Jill Balcon, who had appeared in two of Jarman’s later films, Edward II and Wittgenstein, supplied a second wreath, of laurel. As the mourners left this temporary mausoleum, they encountered another line of people in the passage outside, queuing to use the 2 Derek Jarman bathroom, whose walls of blue stood testament to Jarman’s final film, an imageless journey into a blue void. In the garden people wondered whether the silent, sightless, shrunken form in the coffin could possibly be Jarman. The face was familiar and, no doubt, the feet – absurdly huge and pale in comparison with the tenuous, umber features above them. Yet the talkative, excitable Jarman had never been that small, that Mandarin-like, that still. The only thing that felt right was that he should be the centre of so much attention. Spilling from the garden into the road, groups of black-clad people came and went, talking in...