Desk Notes No.5

Sickert's gaslight, the Happening adaptation, & Critchley's Notes on Suicide

Sep 04, 2022

Dear friends,

I’m waging a war. I thought the drought would be on my side. But each time the dahlias make a brave effort to push their shoots above the soil, the slugs annihilate them. Beer traps are usually enough to keep them at bay. This year the fox has found a taste for it. Every morning I awake to empty cups rolling around the lawn. The traps greedily dug from their hiding places and turned into litter, ensure the slugs escape their fate. There are few to be seen in the clear light of day, but evidence of their feasting remains. This afternoon I’ve been preparing my next, more effective, line of defence - a barrier of raw wool around the base of the shoots. Grocery companies use it to insulate chilled food during delivery. It’s expensive equipment in garden centres, but free with an order of fancy cheese. (Any excuse.)

Mercifully the garden has other delights. The tomatoes are finally ripening. And three plants are producing more courgettes than we can eat. A single rainy day and they’re transformed into marrows. I’m grateful that the heatwave has let me off the hook; I sowed my seeds far too late and, in any ‘normal’ year, I’d be struggling to get a crop now. Instead, the winter squash leaves are bigger than I’ve ever seen. The plants are climbing higher, sprawling wider than ever before. The fruit is already swollen and more numerous. A nice reward, after losing my entire crop of strawberries to that voracious fox.

I could cry over what’s lost, but I prefer reminding myself that no matter how much we pluck, pick, dig and tame, a garden is never really one’s own. It belongs equally to the wildlife we love and loathe. There’s a delicate balance and it’s best not to meddle too much. I find it comforting that, in the garden, no two years are ever the same. There’s always a quality of boom and bust. This is the year of the mediterranean veg. Next year, it will be the turn of something else.

In this edition of Desk Notes I share what I’ve been thinking about in August.

Pictures - Walter Sickert at Tate (until 18 September)

Print - Notes on Suicide by Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

Screen - Happening directed by Audrey Diwan (2021), now available to stream on MUBI; Saint Frances directed by Kelly O’Sullivan (2019), now available to stream on Channel 4.

Pictures

Walter Sickert at Tate (until 18 September)

I spend a lot of time with my head in the nineteenth century, thinking about social history, factories, slums and working class life. It will be no surprise to my instagram followers, that Tate’s Walter Sickert exhibition was the highlight of my month. Sickert painted ordinary life as it played out through shop doorways and cafe windows, inside music halls, bedrooms and bedsits. This was not always appreciated by critics who believed the reality of working class life made unsuitable subject matter for fine art. In their label for Blackbird of Paradise, Tate share a disparaging quote from contemporary art journal, Graphic, who wrote of the painting that Sickert, “has vaguely indicated a type of humanity of the most degraded kind.”

In marked contrast to the ‘plein-air’ approach of the impressionists, Sickert was drawn to indoor spaces by night; the crowded, confined spaces where real life happened amidst the magic of performance, in the dreamy glow of artificial light. Minnie Cunningham at the Old Bedford (1892) captures the young singer in profile on stage. Dressed in floaty, vivid red and lit from the footlights, Minnie is a picture of femininity. Her bonnet is brightly illuminated but her face escapes the artificial glare. Instead, a flattering warm light catches her chin, the tip of her nose, her upper eyelid; it illuminates her soft brown curls and the delicate wrist hanging gracefully by her side. It feels empowering, this image of a girl in the light, asking us to look at her. Only the subtitle, a quote from one of her songs - ‘I’m an old hand at love, though I’m young in years’ - recalls the seamier side of the performing life.

The second half of the exhibition’s ‘music hall’ room invites further scrutiny of Sickert’s depiction of female performers. Here Sickert turns his attention to a largely male audience, looking down on the stage from above. Gallery of the Old Bedford (1895) and Noctes Ambrosianae (1906) are pictures you can hear as well as see. The men are caught in movement - arms hanging over banisters, heads turned to each other, mouths half open, talking, singing perhaps? The Tate describes this as the, “incidental performativity,” of the crowd.

A later room in the exhibition, ‘nudes,’ explores the male gaze - the tension between men and women - more thoroughly. But my heart remained with these early pictures and Sickert’s artificial light: the way it’s concentrated on the stage, the crowd above becoming a glow of faces; the way the earth-toned uniform of the working class dissolves into shadows; one mass distinguished only by hands, moustaches and hats. Today, Sickert invites us into a world that no longer exists. The warm gleam of gas light bounces off mirrors, red-orange pillars, gilt details. The scene half hidden in shadow. It puts me in mind of a line from Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her:

“In this world things are beautiful only because they are not quite seen, or not perfectly understood. Poetry is precious chiefly because it suggests more than it declares.”

The same feels true of Sickert’s early music hall paintings. There’s a wondrous, dreamy quality to this kind of light that seems to both reveal and obscure. It’s romantic, clandestine and somewhat seedy. These moments frozen, will change the next. Our imagination fills in the gaps. Perhaps this is why I prefer these early British scenes, to those coming later, when Sickert, “returned to Camden Town from Dieppe determined to study how to paint colour in shadows.”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, about how artificial light, and gaslight in particular, is associated with the sordid underbelly of life. About how it’s been used to illuminate that which is unwholesome and decaying. I’ve been reading Patrick Hamilton’s 1930s novel, ‘The Midnight Bell’, in which waiter, Bob, becomes infatuated with a local prostitute. Visiting her fourth floor attic bedsit in the slum of Bolsover Street, he’s taken aback by the squalor. The light sets the scene:

“Outside was the fog of the late afternoon, and the shapes of things glowed strangely in its murky dusk. Only in certain lights could you see each other’s faces.”

As the day draws on:

“Prunella got up and lit the gas.
This was of a nightmare green brightness, and as well as reintroducing to the mind the wild filth and disorder of the room, brought to a nervous consciousness a little clock on the mantlepiece, which after brief debate, and comparison with harlots’ wrist-watches, was ascertained to be Right, and which informed Bob that he was due at ‘The Midnight Bell’ in ‘ twenty minutes…
The horror of having to leave her in this green and malignant den… was too much for him.”

Incidentally, Hamilton wrote the play which became Gaslight - the 1940 and 1944 films that spawned the popular term ‘gaslighting.’ The very light helps to undo the sordid bigamist and villain of the tale.

Further down the river from Tate, at the Courtaud Gallery, I bathed in the pallid green, artificial light of Toulouse Lautrec’s In a Private Dining Room (At the Rat Mort). A den of iniquity, the Parisian Rat Mort was famous for its private alcoves and sex workers. The woman lit in sickly green by the nearby lamp is Lucy Jourdain, a high-class prostitute of the time. “The man (on the right in the painting) may be the Australian painter Charles Conder, who was a friend of Lautrec’s, but he’s cut out by the frame,” Richard Thompson, professor of fine art at the University of Edinburgh, told CBS in 2005, “She’s the one who’s important. He comes and goes. He just provides the money and the meals and the jewellery.” Just like Bob in The Midnight Bell.

While the vibrant reds in Sickert’s paintings may have brought to mind scandal, immodesty, even shamelessness for their contemporary audiences. Lautrec’s queasy greens are the colour of envy, of pallid sickness, and absinthe (which, for the French, had a similar negative reputation to that of gin in the time of Hogarth and Dickens). Tate explains how, “Even the colour of the drink may have had an effect on Lautrec, who commented that he felt haunted by colours:

“To me, in the colour green, there is something like the temptation of the devil.””

Print

Notes on Suicide by Simon Critchley

“I know you didn’t ask to be, but if you had the chance to never exist at all, or to have the exact life you’re living now, would you have chosen to be born?”
[There’s a long pause. Bridget eventually nods]
“And when you have kids, they’ll be glad they were born too.”

This dialogue comes from Saint Frances, a cinematic gem about maternal ambivalence and biological clocks. I’ve thought about this scene many times over the last few years. I couldn’t keep it out of my head while reading Simon Critchley’s Notes on Suicide. Critchley approaches the subject from a philosophical rather than an emotional perspective, aiming to cut through the moral judgements imposed on people who choose to take their own life. His writing exposes a fundamental truth: that no one chooses to be born.

“What kind of ‘community’ is it that forces its members to stay alive when they don’t want to? Most people don’t choose where they were born or where they live. What kind of duty does one have to something that one didn’t choose?”

Critchley attacks both the limitations of language to discuss suicide (we seem to find only ‘embarrassed’ remarks and ‘empty platitudes’) and our lack of, “compassionately minded clear thinking on the subject.” Suicide was decriminalised in the UK in 1961, but many of the prejudices that came with the law still remain. As a society, we label those who have freely taken their own lives as, “foolish, selfish and irresponsible… but if we declare that their actions were constrained by uncontrollable behavioural factors like depression, we remove their freedom.” Do we really believe life is obligatory? Critchley wastes no time debunking the Christian moralism that underpins these attitudes, exploring how the idea that life was given to us - either by our parents, or by God - strips away our freedom of choice.

“If life is a gift from God, then what exactly is a gift? A gift is something one gives to another person. After the act of giving, the gift belongs to the recipient… so if the prohibition against suicide is based on the idea that life is a gift from God, then life appears to be a gift with many strings attached, which entails that it is no longer a gift. Namely, a gift that we can not reject is not a gift.”

To lose one’s child must be, “profoundly painful and deeply troubling,” writes Critchley, but this is not the focus of his work. The detached, objective reasoning feels jarring in this typically emotive context, but this is Critchley’s point. We need to find new ways of talking and thinking about suicide. He is asking us to consider our attitudes from outside. To consider the question, “In what conditions is or is not life worth keeping?” Is there such a thing as suicide, “chosen for its own sake, because one simply wants to die?” In other words, “what is stopping us? Why live?” As Annie Ernaux writes in her memoir about illegal abortion in the 1960s, “people judged according to the law, they didn’t judge the law.”

The most interesting aspect of Critchely’s book is a foray into suicide notes - what they reveal about motive, about relationships, about love. He explores the injustice of reducing someone’s existence to the moment and method of their death. And, in a new preface for the Fitzcarraldo Edition, brings the subject of unhappiness right up to date:

“We are addicted to social media, and once addicted everything flows down an algorithmically generated gutter of links into a bottomless rabbit hole of melancholia… Many of us feel like shit quite a lot of the time. Oddly, we seem to like it, or to behave in ways that make it worse.”

* If you’re struggling with suicidal thoughts, help is available. You can speak to the Samaritans on 116 123

Screen

Saint Frances directed by Kelly O’Sullivan (2019), now available on Channel 4

Happening directed by Audrey Diwan (2021), now available to stream on MUBI

I’d like to return to those words from Saint Frances - “if you had the chance to never exist at all, or to have the exact life you’re living now, would you have chosen to be born?” It’s just the kind of line trotted out by ardent pro-lifers. While the film’s protagonist, Bridget, chooses to end her pregnancy with legally prescribed abortion pills, another female character proudly displays the slogan ‘Unborn Lives Matter’ on her fridge.

Back in 2019, when Saint Frances was released, it felt like a landmark film, depicting the physically bloody, messy reality of female life. When the US Senate overturned Roe vs Wade, effectively making abortion illegal in at least 12 states, they consigned Bridget’s experience to another era. In its place, Happening - Annie Ernaux’s memoir about illegal abortion in 1960s France - has become urgent. It documents the steady stripping of a woman’s agency; the terror of undergoing a dangerous, unsupervised medical procedure; the trauma of an extreme human experience. Ernaux’s book is a self-reflexive masterpiece; as much about this experience as it is about the inability of language to express it.

“When I write, I must guard against lyrical outbursts such as anger or pain. I would not want crying and shouting to feature in this text because they barely featured in my life at the time. Above all I wish to capture the impression of a steady flow of unhappiness, conveyed by a pharmacist’s inquisitive attitude or the sight of a hairbrush by a steaming basin of water. The distress I experience on recalling certain images and on hearing certain words is beyond comparison with what I felt at the time: these are merely literary emotions; in other words, they generate the act of writing and justify its veracity.”

It strikes me then, that a film adaptation of Happening should seek, not to replicate Ernaux’s language or literary design; it should not attempt to be faithful in the traditional sense. But to replicate the experience itself, with the tools only cinema has to offer. That said, adapting Happening is not without challenges. The internal, psychological nature of the experience - and the isolation it entails - is difficult for narrative cinema which relies on dramatisation. But writer-director Audrey Diwan avoids the obvious: there are no emotional outbursts and very little crying in her film. Even the graphic physical procedures play out in virtual silence - pain and discomfort conveyed in grimaces and body language. Diwan lets these scenes run on until you feel almost compelled to look away. Happening is essential viewing, but it’s not for the faint hearted. This is, of course, Diwan’s point.

The claustrophobic framing (a near square aspect ratio) draws us deeper into the emotional experience of Anne. Subheadings - ‘3 weeks,’ ‘5 weeks,’ ‘9 weeks’ - mark the slippage of time. The dialogue isolates her even further. Co-writing with Marcia Romano, Diwan exposes a system of policing women that engenders secrecy and slut-shaming: girls afraid of confiding in friends; medical professionals unwilling to offer advice; predatory men who see pregnant, single women as fair game. Together, Ernaux’s memoir and its adaptation paint a bleak picture. Women with no alternative but to risk exposure, censure, prison and death in securing illegal abortions. That the risks are worth it, is all the evidence those making the law should need. “I’d like a child one day,” says Anne, “but not instead of a life.”

Wishing you all a lovely September. If you have any thoughts about the things you’ve read in this month’s Desk Notes, please get in touch in the comments.

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