Coming to the end of Derek Jarman
For many years I managed the British and Irish literature section of McNally Jackson (McNally Jackson divides lit into regions, thus you do not go to any one ‘Fiction’ section, but must first identify the nationality of the author before commencing your search). As a consequence it meant that I was attuned to British and Irish publishing in a way I might otherwise not need to be as an Australian in America. I could recommend good books by the small presses we were table to stock, like Fitzcarraldo and Tramp Press, and I could point you in the direction of Máirtín Ó Cadhain or Nan Shepard (a Gaelic-speaking Irish writer and a lesser-known Scottish nature writer, respectively). Much of that information I gleaned, quite frankly, from regular perusal of the London Review Bookshop’s website. It was a way for me, in New York, to track what was popular in the UK - there are important differences in the markets, weird schisms that I find endlessly fascinating. From the LRB I could discern what was selling well in London, and what books nominated for, say, the Goldsmiths Prize or the Republic of Consciousness Prize, I should be ordering for New York. That was how I came to Derek Jarman.
Derek Jarman was an artistic polymath of the late twentieth century. His closest proxies are two other queer artists, both taken too soon by AIDS – David Wojnarowicz and Herve Guibert. All three artists were committed to a kind of queer radicalism, not interested in translating experience for a straight, conservative audience, nor sanitizing any aspect of their lives. Jarman, like Guibert and Wojnarwoicz, worked across art and literature, but Jarman is probably best remembered as a filmmaker. I am ashamed to say I’ve never watched a full film of Jarman’s – a professor at university played us clips of Edward II as part of a class on the homosocial in Early Modern English literature, and I watched half an hour of Caravaggio once. The Derek Jarman that means the most to me is the Jarman to be found in his books.
At some point in 2017 or 2018 I heard about Modern Nature, his masterpiece (book-wise). There was a resurgence in Jarman interest in the UK around then, and that was how I encountered him – the London Review Bookshop made him author of the month, at some point. I remember leaving the back office to poke around McNally Jackson’s shelves, to find the creaky University of Minnesota Press edition of Modern Nature sitting in the film section. We hadn’t sold a copy in over a year. None of his other books were in print in the US. I bought it that day, and, reading it slowly over many months, it was one of the most profound reading experiences I’ve ever had. It is certainly one of my most favourite books, one I will find it necessary to have around for the rest of my life.
One of the most well-known things about Jarman is that he had a house on the coast of England at Dungeness, in the shadow of a nuclear plant. It was windswept and unlovely. A piece by Zoe Williams from several years ago describes it thus: “They call Dungeness the desert of England, though experts observe that, lacking both the dearth of water and the extreme differential in night and day temperatures, it fulfils none of the desert criteria. The landscape certainly divides people – a broad, echoing flatness with the famous nuclear power station on one side, the shingle dipping into the sea on the other; railway carriages turned into quaint and spooky dwellings; newcomers from “that London” planting black, post-apocalyptic architecture alongside. It’s so intense I felt on the verge of a spiritual awakening.” But Jarman was a gardener alongside his art, and he remade the house and the landscape around it, made it beautiful. One day, I hope I will be able to visit it myself. Modern Nature is about that garden, and about Prospect Cottage. The book has its origins in Jarman’s diary, spanning 1989 and 1990. In some ways it mimics the nature diaries of writers like Dorothy Wordsworth or even the seasonal nature writing of Donald Hall and Wendell Berry. But Jarman was no Victorian naturalist and no American back-to-the-lander, and while much of the book is intensely interested in describing plants, the seasons, the creation of a garden, Modern Nature operates much like the work of Sebald or Proust – it is a work of the mind on the page, and so often the garden works like a madeleine, throwing Jarman back into childhood, into reminiscence. At the time of writing, Jarman had been diagnosed as HIV positive, and had taken steps to be extremely vocal about it on the public stage, one of the first people to do so in the UK. Modern Nature ends up documenting the onset of Jarman’s AIDS, as the virus transitions and he experiences his first prolonged hospital stay in 1990.
After he became ill, Jarman published two other excellent books in a flurry of work in his final years. The first, At Your Own Risk, documents a kind of twentieth century history of gay experience in England, a political work that reads as something written for the time in which it was written (I am being polite, it is a little dated, although lovely). The other, Chroma, a book about colour, was written as he began to go blind shortly before his death. There is also a book called Derek Jarman’s Garden, a glossy photo book you’d find in the Gardening section instead of the creative non-fiction shelves, and in normal times when I have all my possessions and my books aren’t all in storage in Queens, Derek Jarman’s Garden sit on my desk. There is also a book called Pharmacopoeia, set to be released in March 2022 in the UK.
All unavailable in the US. I had nobody to share my passion with. The UK, meanwhile, had reissued all of Jarman’s books as pleasant Vintage Classics with their cheerful thick red spines. It took going to London in 2019 to acquire a copy of At Your Own Risk (I read it all in two train rides, from London to Stockport and back again). In July last year, in a flurry of movement when some travel restrictions eased, I spent some time in Melbourne visiting my family. I found, at Paperback Bookshop on Bourke Street, Smiling In Slow Motion. This is the journal stretching from May 1991, when Modern Nature ends, to a fortnight before Jarman died in February 1994. Unlike Modern Nature, Smiling In Slow Motion is not a constructed or edited journal (an excellent example of this form is Helen Garner’s Yellow Notebook). Instead, it is pure journal. Sometimes gossipy, less Sebaldian. It wasn’t until I was in Berlin that I began reading Smiling In Slow Motion. It was like meeting an old friend. Every morning I woke up, it was still marginally warm, and the windows in the bedroom would be wide open. I read it in bed, still sleepy, drinking coffee. But for my first few months in Berlin I was in a state, and there was one morning when I read the line “I wish you were here with me this morning,” in Jarman’s journal and it unseated something in me. I burst into tears and had to take a break from the book. I learned that Jarman’s journals could completely undo me, and so I had to take the book slowly, carefully. It sat on the bedside table for six full months. Because, as I said last week to V, eking out the final pages, I knew what happened at the end of the book. Those last pages document Jarman’s death. I did not want to come to the end of him. When I finished it on Wednesday I had a very small cry.
It is noon on Monday as I write this. Bookstores are open still, in Berlin, although we are in hard lockdown – they are considered an essential service. Nevertheless, I haven’t been to one since before Christmas – it does not seem entirely responsible. But I have need of a copy of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. It’s a forty-five walk to Saint George, the English language bookstore in Prenzlauer Berg, and I know that there is a copy of Chroma on the shelves there. I am off to buy it now. I have one last treat up my sleeve, before I fully come to the end of Derek Jarman’s books.
Books mentioned:
The Dirty Dust - Máirtín Ó Cadhain (US, UK, AU)
The Living Mountain – Nan Shepard (US, UK, AU)
The Mausoleum of Lovers – Herve Guibert (US)
Close to the Knives – David Wojnarowicz (US, UK, AU)
Modern Nature – Derek Jarman (US, UK, AU)
The Grasmere Journals – Dorothy Wordsworth (US, UK)
Eagle Pond – Donald Hall (US, UK)
The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (US, UK, AU)
The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald (US, UK, AU)
Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust (US, UK, AU)
At Your Own Risk – Derek Jarman (UK, AU)
Chroma – Derek Jarman (UK, AU)
Derek Jarman’s Garden (UK, AU)
Pharmacopoeia - Derek Jarman (UK)
Smiling In Slow Motion – Derek Jarman (UK, AU)
Yellow Notebook – Helen Garner (US, UK, AU)
Ways of Seeing – John Berger (US, UK, AU)
What I’ve been reading lately:
Lose Your Mother – Saidiya Hartman (US)
Transit – Rachel Cusk (re-read) (US, UK, AU)
The Baby – Marie Darrieussecq (UK, AU)
The New Testament – Jericho Brown (US, UK, AU)
What I’m looking forward to:
My Baby First Birthday – Jenny Zhang (US, AU)
Something New Under the Sun – Alexandra Kleeman (US)
The Hard Crowd – Rachel Kushner (US, UK, AU)
Something to look at:
— from Smiling in Slow Motion, by Derek Jarman
Some notes:
I’m doing an event with Elizabeth Kolbert and Leslie Jamison at Center For Fiction (but virtually) on February 24 at 7.30pm. You might register for it here. I also wrote a playlist for Largehearted Boy to accompany The Inland Sea, which is surely the closest I will ever come to programming Rage.