One of the many things I admired about the musician Scott Walker was that he reportedly kept his phone disconnected, apart from an hour or two on Wednesday afternoons when he would put it back on the hook. If you wanted to speak with him, this was your only window.
Oh to be so famous that I could become a hermit.
Apologies for dribbing and drabbing Keep All Your Friends for the past couple of months. (If you haven’t noticed the lag, your life is full and rich.) I’ve been away. I failed to take with me enough books to read. My girlfriend travelled with a far better selection. I took a copy of The Skin by Curzio Malaparte with me, because I had imagined, vaguely, that it might be helpful for something I’m writing. The Skin describes the surreal and grotesque conditions in Naples after Allied forces took control in 1943, and is written from the perspective of a slippery liaison officer working with Italian liberation forces and the American military. It was a trudge. Or my mood was mismatched to it. Or Malaparte needed an editor, and I was stuck with a new unexpurgated edition of the book. My girlfriend suggested her copy of Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Will and Testament instead. It’s narrated by a woman estranged from her family, forced into contact with her parents and siblings by an inheritance dispute concerning the ownership of two country cabins. As she describes an increasingly tense back-and-forth of emails and phone calls about the cabins, the reason why the narrator cut ties with her family in the first place becomes horrifyingly clear. (The book caused controversy on its publication in 2016, with accusations from the author’s family that Hjorth had based it on actual events and violated their privacy, accusations she denied, but which in turn led Hjorth’s sister to write a novel about Hjorth’s novel.) Will and Testament turns at a rapid clip. The family is kept in perpetual conflict, the possibility of reconciliation appearing only occasionally on a distant horizon. Apology and forgiveness are talked about, then denied or sabotaged. I had swapped one novel about war for another.
This year is the centenary of the War Resister’s League, a secular organization established in New York City by Jessie Wallace Hughan in 1923. (Thank you to writer and editor Matthew McClean for pointing this out.) What timing. The past weekend, the Judd Foundation in New York hosted an exhibition dedicated to the WRL’s work. Donald Judd became involved in the late 1960s, through his wife, Julie Finch, Hughan’s great niece. The artist helped organize and participate in a number of fundraisers for the WRL, among other political causes, including the Association for the Prevention of Torture.
A book on Judd and one on the painter Philip Guston sit next to each other on my shelves, which is the banal reason why thinking about Judd’s pacifism made me leap to Guston. When Guston’s name comes up, the first thing that always comes to my mind is not his work, but the friendships that ended over his turn from abstraction to making figurative paintings about racism, war and Richard Nixon’s paranoid America. (People have short memories. They shrink further in the wash of ideology. As John Perrault wrote in the Village Voice at the time, before Guston was an abstract painter, he was a social realist. “Wasn’t everybody?”) In 1986, six years after Guston’s death, the composer Morton Feldman said in a talk at CalArts, Los Angeles: “He was my closest friend, and he was also my closest friend in art.” The pair stopped speaking after Guston unveiled his new figurative work at Marlborough Gallery in 1970. “We had no contact at all and then I got a call from his daughter… He died and had a heart attack and on his death bed, I mean, to make matters worse, he wanted me to come and say Kaddish. So, it’s a sad story. What makes it extremely sad is that we broke up because of style.” Avant-garde partisanship is as dumb and tragic as any other.
Judd’s sculpture can leave me cold, but maybe it’s his fans I have the problem with, or at least the ones who like using words such as ‘rigour’ as a term of praise for art. Rigour doesn’t have any patience with doubt, it doesn’t admit to not having answers, and artists who claim to have all the answers both bore and scare the bejesus out of me in equal measure. The other day, I saw a clip from an interview with the artist collective Slavs and Tatars for The Afikra Podcast. “Today so many artists want to be the smartest person in the room,” they said, when maybe “the role of the artist is to be the fool. […] The thing is, of course, if you try, as an artist, to try and convince people that you’re an idiot, there’s a good chance you’ll succeed at convincing some people that you’re an idiot.” Humour can be an image of peace, but we don’t all laugh at the same things. Cute animal videos are an image of peace too, but some of us have fur allergies.
One of the great feats of heroic modernism is often phrased as ‘breaking down borders’ (or ‘boundaries,’ or ‘walls’) to ‘establish new forms’. Necessary, laudable, led to some important pieces of art. It’s also what invading armies do. Of course it’s only a metaphor, but the drama of militarized language—‘challenge’, ‘interrogate,’ ‘undermine,’ ‘confront,’ ‘destroy’—is good for making you feel like you’re doing something important yet bad for the soul. These words crop up every day in exhibition press releases, essays, on museum walls. ‘Peace’ is a word long namastéd into vapidity, spun by religious con-artists and eye-rolled at by people who confuse skepticism with intelligence, but you won’t see it used on many museum didactics. Call me naive and I’ll fight you with a cuddly toy dove, but something has to follow conflict.
The word opsimath is an undervalued one. It means a person who begins to study or learn late in life. I wish I had discovered it years ago, which itself is an opsimathic wish. (Opsimathian? Opsimathicalist? I should learn.) Learning to write, working out what to say, what to make of something that happened to you years ago, it takes decades. In that sense I think all writers are opsimaths, so it’s unfortunate that the culture demands of them immediate opinions about immediate problems. That’s another thing about war, its horror takes all the weight out of language. Still, people try their best to make images of peace. Maybe it’s an infographic, or a link for a place to donate money, or a painting of an olive branch. Or a race for the Know-All Championship Cup: “you don’t get it!” “no, you don’t get it and I’m going to tell you why!” A march and a vigil, silence, a petition, a phonecall to your local political representative, a bloviating op-ed written in the imperative—‘demand,’ ’must,’ ‘shall,’ ‘cannot’—because what else is there? An image of action, an image of a call to action, an image of a screenshot of a finger-wagging admonition against calls to action that aren’t the right calls to action: no matter if some of them annoy us, in a sense they are saying “I’m doing all that I can under circumstances which make everything feel futile.”
The other day, and for reasons unrelated to the catastrophe in Gaza, though it was buzzing everywhere, I read Derek Jarman’s War Requiem. It’s a slim volume published by Faber in 1989, and for all the Jarmanalia that has been reissued in recent years, this one has slipped through the net. (I would complain but it’s better that people enjoy his writing about gardening and colour.) The book comprises the brief screenplay Jarman wrote for his film adaptation of Benjamin Britten’s 1962 War Requiem, Britten’s libretto, and diary excerpts from the shoot. War Requiem sets poems by Wilfred Owen within the structure of a traditional requiem. I was struck by these lines, from Owen’s ‘A Terre’:
'Little I’d ever teach a son, but hitting,
Shooting, war, hunting, all the arts of hurting
Well, that’s what I learnt, — that, and making money.'
My grandad—a decorated veteran of two world wars, who convalesced alongside Owen after being injured on the Western Front—used to say that the bravest man at the Remembrance Day parade in the town where he lived was the town clerk, who did not have any medals pinned to his chest. The clerk was a Quaker and had been a conscientious objector. My grandma was a nurse in Dublin during the Irish War of Independence in the early 1920s. She was Catholic, and she treated the injured from both the Irish republican and occupying British sides. “They were just men,” she would say. There was no messing with grandma. After Dublin she spent a couple of years nursing in New York City, where she carried around a revolver in her handbag. The other day I tried, stupidly, to Google ‘films about pacifism’ and quickly realised that it was futile. The ironic thing about anti-war films, even the greatest, is that they have to show images of war for the pacifist narrative to make sense. (Take one example: Elem Klimov’s astonishing Come and See, made in 1985, restored a couple of years ago. It depicts the Nazi occupation of Belarus during World War Two, as seen from a boy’s point of view, and its images count among most horrifying in modern cinema.) A war movie doesn’t need to show peace for its narrative to be coherent: it can plunge you right into the blood and noise and squalor and keep you there for as long as the film lasts. Every standard book about how to write a screenplay tells you that the hero of the story must find themselves in conflict with a person, a thing, a feeling, because that’s how drama works. Peace, say the movies, isn’t a set worth building, so get to the point, start a war.
I follow the Lee Miller Archives on Instagram. The other day they posted a photo Miller took in 1957 of her father, Theodore Miller, and her housekeeper Patsy Murray. They’re shelling peas at the kitchen table of Farleys House, Miller’s home in Sussex. The photograph is colour, Murray’s red cardigan pops out of the left-hand side of the photograph, half-balanced by a bright red standing lamp on the right, behind Miller senior. There’s a nice symmetry with the backs of two chairs in the middle of the image, and there is a cheerful drawing on the wall, probably something priceless given to Miller by a famous artist. It doesn’t have the glamour of Miller’s fashion work. Or, more to the point, the frightening power of the image she took from a balcony window of the moment the citadel of St Malo was hit by a German air strike in 1944. (This turned out to be one of the first times napalm was used in combat.) Or the famous shot of her taking a bath in Hitler’s abandoned Munich apartment in 1945. It’s an unremarkable, quiet photograph of two people preparing food; an invaluable image.
RECOMMENDATIONS
—Rosalind Nashashibi’s 2017 film Electrical Gaza is available to watch online at LUX until the end of October.
—Cellist and composer Lucy Railton has a new album out on November 10, titled Corner Dancer. You can read a good in-depth interview with her at Tone Glow here. It’s where I learned about the singer Sonia Malkine, and led me to the clip below of Malkine, unaccompanied—though she is holding a mighty looking lute—singing Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now. Look at the expressions on the faces in the audience. You can practically see the electricity in the air.
—A retrospective of the filmmaker and playwright Julius-Amédée Laou is touring the US. I caught the first night at BAM this past weekend, which included his debut short, Open-Mic Solitaire, about a young Parisian man who hijacks a radio station after his brother is killed in a racist attack, and his first feature The Old Sorceress and the Valet, a surreal, tragicomic study of old age, love, witchcraft and nostalgia. The next stop for the program is Philadelphia I believe. Steve Macfarlane interviewed Laou for Bomb magazine here.
—Sasha Frere-Jones’ memoir, Earlier, is just out from Semiotexte. I think it might be one of the best titles for an autobiography that I have come across. The book hops back-and-forth through time, a little like sitting next to someone as they take you through an old family photograph album. You can also find his Substack here.
—The NYRB have just published another addition to their list of books by the great French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette. Skeletons in the Closet, translated by Alyson Waters, tells the story of a private eye lumbered with a case that the police can’t be bothered to investigate but which he can’t let go. For a snappy and informative introduction to Manchette, I recommend Lucy Sante’s preface to the writer’s ‘years of lead’ novel Nada (also in the NYRB series).