Dear friends,
Every few minutes another leaf gives up and tumbles to the garden floor. The path is already covered in an uneven carpet, a soggy base layer with a crispy top. In a single week, the hydrangea scrambling over the gate has turned from vibrant green to pasty yellow. At the bottom of the garden, the dahlias, asters and salvias are clinging to their final flowers, piercing the faded golds and rusty browns with accents of purple. On dry days, October is my favourite month to be outside - cutting back, sweeping, tidying - but it always has other ideas. The two events I find most inspiring - the London Film Festival and Cheltenham’s Literature Festival - occupy the same October fortnight every year. I do my best to divide myself between the two, taking endless notes, watching the seasons change from the window as I write.
Cheltenham brings the first whispers of that Christmassy feeling. I try not to get carried away but the boutiques on the historic parade get me thinking about stocking fillers. I spend eleven months of the year dreaming about the Cheltenham book tent and my own list for Santa always begins here. When in London, I spend film festival nights at the Foyles on Tottenham Court Road. The capital is a magnificent land where bookshops stay open until 10pm.
At the Literature festival I heard Suzanne Fagence Cooper talk about her wonderful book How We Might Live: At Home With Jane and William Morris. It was refreshing to hear a Pre-raphaelite story from the female perspective. The discussion leaned towards Jane’s childhood in the slums, her assimilation into the middle class, and her discretion during an affair with Rossetti. A debate about the great European novel, took us towards Don Quixote and Anna Karenina, ‘America first’ and Brexit. (I wrote about it on Instagram, here). I feel full to the brim with plots, questions and ideas. Hopefully my scrambled collection of notes will carry me through the next year and those inevitable phases of creative inertia.
In this month’s issue, you’ll find:
Places - To Be Read At Dusk: Dickens, Ghosts and the Supernatural an exhibition at The Dickens Museum until 5 March 2023
Pictures - Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery until 22 January 2023
Screen - Bones and All directed by Luca Guadagnino and Inland directed by Fridtjof Ryder (London Film Festival screening)
Places
To Be Read At Dusk: Dickens, Ghosts and the Supernatural - an exhibition at The Dickens Museum until 5 March 2023
In 1852, Charles Dickens published these words by journalist Henry Morley:
“I have no faith in ghosts, according to the old sense of the word, and I could grope with comfort through any amount of dark old rooms, or midnight aisles, or over churchyards, between sunset and cock-crow. I can face a spectre. Being at one time troubled with illusions, I have myself crushed a hobgoblin by sitting on its lap. Nevertheless, I do believe that the great mass of ‘ghost stories,’ of which the world is full, has not been built entirely upon the inventions of the ignorant and superstitious. In plain words, while I, of course, throw aside a million of idle fictions, or exaggerated facts, I do believe in ghosts — or, rather, spectres — only I do not believe them to be supernatural.”
Morley’s scepticism might seem at odds with the supernatural events occurring in Dickens’ fiction. Dickens is, after all, credited with inventing the Christmas ghost story. This conflict between fascination and healthy scepticism - a belief in the ‘supernatural’ only when it could be explained through the lens of science - lies at the heart of a new exhibition at the Dickens Museum. It traces Dickens’ interest in ghosts, and his belief that such stories should be read aloud, to the nursemaid who told him frightening stories as a child. Dickens went on to publish many of them in Nurse’s Stories (an article for his journal Household Words) where he describes the, “utterly impossible places and people,” that were, “none the less alarmingly real.” Dickens was not even six when his nurse began sharing these stories with him, creating worlds he was, “forced to go back to at night without at all wanting to go.” The experience had a powerful effect on him:
“The young woman who brought me acquainted with Captain Murderer, had a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember — as a sort of introductory overture — by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan. So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony in combination with this infernal Captain, that I sometimes used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story again just yet. But she never spared me one word of it.”
In the style of his nurse, Dickens fervently committed to reading his own ghost stories aloud. The exhibition curators reveal he performed a one-man version of A Christmas Carol an impressive 127 times. Meanwhile, Dickens also threw himself into to the new, and immensely popular, world of Spiritualism, attending seances and looking for haunted houses. But he was not easily hoodwinked and was both cynical about the motives of Spiritualists and suspicious of trickery. It led to a feud with steadfast Spiritualist William Howitt - one that played out publicly in the pages of Spiritual Magazine and Household Words. A copy of Dickens’ scathing public take-down of Howitt is on display at the Museum.
While Dickens was attracted to the practical elements of magic and the pseudo-science behind Mesmerism - a kind of healing hypnotism - he was not alone in his criticism of Spiritualism. The exhibition also displays a seance-mocking illustration for Punch by Dickens’ illustrator John Leech. It’s a small exhibition but one that contains wonderful pieces from the archive. Leech’s original preparatory sketches for Christmas Carol are an extraordinary highlight. If it’s possible, the image of a cowering Scrooge is even more poignant in simple outline; Leech emphasising the bony hands shielding his desperate face.
Pictures
Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery until 22 January 2023
The National Gallery’s introduction to its new Lucian Freud exhibition tells us that:
“Freud was uncompromising in his dedication to painting and was resolutely unattached to the point of self-proclaimed ‘selfishness’. He rejected anything that might interfere with his independence — including monogamy in his relationships or traditional roles of parenting.”
The gallery presents this as ‘context’ - telling us that it, “acknowledges Freud’s complexity as a person whose art elicits polarised responses.” Passing over it so swiftly feels dangerously like turning a blind eye, and it’s hard to escape the feeling this problematic behaviour is endorsed as part and parcel of artistic genius. Swerving the difficult questions - and what would likely make a more challenging and exciting gallery experience - the exhibition focusses on, “technique and context rather than on the biography of the artist or any of his sitters.”
What unfolds is a journey into flesh. Hands, faces, veins, the skin’s undertones, its thinness over bone. Freud’s subjects shed their clothes with each passing room, until we’re confronted with the colossal naked works And the Bridegroom, Sleeping by the Lion Carpet and Portrait of the Hound. En-route to this exhilarating final space, there are portraits of David Hockey, the late Queen Elizabeth, Freud’s ex-wives, his daughters, and a touching sketch of his mother shortly after her death.
I’m certainly no expert, but what appeals to me about Freud is his unflinching approach to truth. It’s the highest possible compliment to say I would have been afraid to sit for him; afraid he would see those parts of my character that I least want known, and put them right there in the paint. His portraits are unflattering in the extreme. By no means photo-realistic, their ferocious honesty reveals something deeper - the complexity of the person beneath.
We’re told Freud preferred to call his nudes, ‘naked portraits’, “contrasting emotional vulnerability with physical nudity.” From the matter of fact position of the bodies to the brutal way they are lit, there’s nothing alluring about these works in the traditional sense - nothing designed to entice or titillate the viewer - something that allows them to shed many problematic aspects of the ‘nude’. And yet those same decisions can also feel exploitative. The vulnerability of the naked subjects is particularly challenging and reveals a problem with placing the artist and their ambitions at the centre of the story (in this case, Freud’s desire to explore the, “relationship between paint and flesh.”) The technical focus of the gallery notes leave the works feeling like an exercise in artistic skill, one in which the subjects themselves are marginalised. I find myself wondering how they felt - both about the finished works and the process of sitting for them.
It would be an injustice to end without remarking on the intimacy of the relationships in Freud’s double portraits. Or commenting on the technical skill of the epic works in that final room. Viewed at a 45 degree angle, the subject, Leigh Bowery, appears three dimensional in Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, as if sitting in relief from the room behind her. The gallery notes allude to the importance of the relationship between painter and sitter in creating this highly detailed work. There lie the bones of a far more interesting story.
Screens
Bones and All, directed by Luca Guadagnino - on Netflix from 23 November 2022
Inland, directed by Fridtjof Ryder - London Film Festival screening
On the theme of flesh, I managed to catch a preview of Luca Guadagnino’s much-hyped cannibal film, Bones and All. The first sequence takes all the physical intimacy you might expect from the director of Call Me By Your Name, before subverting it in a grotesque twist at a girl’s sleepover party. Teenager Maren (Taylor Russell) is a born cannibal. Her father can no longer reign in her irrepressible urges and bails out, leaving her to fend for herself on the run.
An underworld of cannibal outcasts is quickly established with the appearance of Sully (Mark Rylance), a creepy, predatory cannibal who stalks the elderly dead and dying, detecting them with a bestial sense of smell. His feedings are sinister and gory, hardly offering a sense of what an ‘ethical’ cannibal might be. But the film’s most potent source of anxiety comes from the unpredictability of the older male cannibals not as man-eaters but men; from an instinctive sense of their bubbling sexuality, and an uncertainty about if, or when, it might erupt. In their vicinity, Maren is a veritable innocent and we are keenly aware of her vulnerability.
A weight lifts when Maren meets a cannibal her own age, Timothée Chalamet’s lanky, malnourished, Lee. And yet as the film meanders into a comfortable coming-of-age love story, it also loses the intensity and originality that made it great. Guadagnino presents cannibalism as an intimate act that creates emotional bonds: in a sense, using flesh to reveal the isolating physically of the self. There’s lots to absorb here - a commentary on what it means to be human, on morality, self-control, addiction, and parental abandonment. But Bones and All feels most honest when it addresses the power imbalances in male-female relationships. “I don’t trust you,” says Maren, “it doesn’t matter if I’m right. It only matters that I feel it.”
Mark Rylance makes another scene-stealing turn in Inland, a Lynchian debut from writer-director Fridtjof Ryder that has all the smouldering ambiguity of Eraserhead. In the mystifying opening shots, fish-eye lenses distort the focus, bending and warping reality. A boy dressed in pillar-box red (echoing the iconic Don’t Look Now) stands out against the verdant greens of the forest. He’s staring at a statue of a woman, a figure just as incongruous to the woodland scene.
Newcomer Rory Alexander plays the boy as an adult man, checking himself out of a psychiatric hospital. He returns to his father (Rylance) and childhood home on the edge of the woods where his mother disappeared many years earlier. What happens next is mysterious, eerie and loaded with hidden meaning. Inland has cult status written all over it and is guaranteed to be endlessly debated online. Surreal episodes occur in what appears to be a psychological dream space; an otherworldly realm reminiscent of the sinking deep black death sequences in Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin. There’s an underwater feeling to the dialogue, keeping us remote, while the woodland soundscape - creaking bark and babbling streams - intrudes on suburban spaces. Inland is folklore in the era of urban sprawl. A film of questions and whispers about the incompatibility of the built and natural environments. It has me thinking about faerie queens, the Green Man and mother nature. I can already feel myself being pulled down the rabbit hole.
Wishing you all a happy Halloween! If you have any thoughts about the things you’ve read in this month’s Desk Notes, please get in touch in the comments.
Thank you for reading. If you haven’t already, please subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
This month’s featured image is a close up from Lucian Freud’s painting ‘Large Interior, Notting Hill’ (1998). My own photograph, taken at the National Gallery.
Places, pictures, screen & post office banners courtesy of the Internet Book Archive.
What can you say when you read last October newsletter in January the next year? :D This is me; way behind with pretty much all my emails. As a Halloween enthusiast I was especially drawn to your text on Dickens. Indeed, I wonder how should one believe in the supernatural through a scientific lens. It immediately made me think of the last volume of The Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghosts I've read (vol. 5). The essay included tells the reader how 'developments' such as the new Spiritualist societies were changing the very way people wrote and talked about ghosts.
I miss London's museums and galleries so thanks for providing such an engaging glimpse into the Dickens and Freud exhibitions. Not sure if I could cope with Bones and All, I get unsettled reading M R James.