Wunderkammer: Cane Hill Asylum

Posted on July 23, 2013 by Verity Holloway

The Internet, like the material world, offers places you’ll stumble across and never find again. An hour’s exploration can stay with you for years, long after the original site has disappeared, changed it’s name, or been wiped away by progress or neglect.

I came across photographer Mechanised’s images of Cane Hill Asylum on Livejournal years ago, and of all the teeming galleries of urban exploration you can trawl through online, this one left an impression. The photos struck a sensitive balance between the human narrative of the building’s original function and the beauty of the decay, and when I recently rediscovered the gallery’s new location – an accident – all the images packed their original punch.

Mechanised indulges in none of the pound-shop Halloween gimmickry you often get with urban exploration. The overflowing drawers of patient art are particularly poignant.

Epitaph for Happiness (and Audrey)
There’s not one curse or evil deed,
No spells or promises to heed,
There is no equal power within the mind
Yes!
Love’s happiness was hard to find
[April, 1969]

Post-war, wards at Cane Hill were named after historical luminaries in an attempt to lighten the stigma of the asylum. Waiting in the pharmacy, this wheelchair is from Rossetti ward – named for Gabriel, not Christina. Considering his mental health, it’s an affecting image.

David Bowie’s half-brother Terry died on the railway tracks outside the hospital.

Charlie Chaplin’s mother was a patient here.

She looked pale and her lips were blue, and, although she recognised us, it was without enthusiasm; her old ebullience had gone. […] She sat listening and nodding, looking vague and preoccupied. I told her that she would soon get well. “Of course,” she said dolefully, “if only you had given me a cup of tea that afternoon, I would have been alright.” The doctor told Sydney afterwards that her mind was undoubtedly impaired by malnutrition, and that she required proper medical treatment, and although she had lucid moments, it would be months before she completely recovered. But for days I was haunted by her remark: “If only you had given me a cup of tea, I would have been alright.”

Cane Hill was demolished after arson and flood made it unwelcoming to prospective buyers. The land is now being offered up for flats.

As Mechanised says, London is a ruthless city.

Wunderkammer: Doctor Sayre’s Spines

Posted on July 16, 2013 by Verity Holloway

Victorian medical photography often crosses the border into art. There’s a soft, fetishistic quality to even the most gruesome of images.

There’s something about spines in particular that catches my attention. Whether it’s the fact that I narrowly dodged the genetic scoliosis bullet, or that spines are anchored to our language of courage and stability, Lewis A. Sayre’s 1877 publication, Spinal Disease and Spinal Curvature (which you can download free at archive.org) stands out in terms of beauty and weirdness.

Sayre – shown above – recommended patients with spinal curvatures suspend themselves twice daily on a contraption resembling a tripod for flogging errant soldiers. The result were these strange photographs, with Sayre and his aides standing by like attendants to martyred saints.

Many of Dr Sayre’s patients are described as working class labourers, ‘stout’ and ‘surprisingly’ healthy, including children whose parents attributed their deformities to heavy manual work; lugging pails of coal, bad school conditions, and the repeated trope of the severe fall in infancy.

After treatment, they are nearly all reported to be interacting with nature, paddling ‘stockings off’ in seaside rockpools, feeling ‘no fatigue’ on long country walks and rounds of croquet, as if transported from their working class lives into a J. M. Barrie fantasy. These images are the purgatory between those two stages.

Marfan Syndrome and The Internship: Not a big-man’s disease

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Verity Holloway

There’s been a ripple through the Marfan community this week. Some American comedians I’ve vaguely heard of (my world is muffled by nineteenth century poet’s letters to their dentists) have taken it upon themselves to mention Marfan syndrome in their latest film, The Internship.

Instead of using their immense media power to spread lifesaving information to the suspected thousands of people who don’t know they have Marfans, Vince Vaughn and Will Ferrell decided it would be easier to throw this out there, apropos of nothing:

Will Ferrell: not actually qualified to take your ECG.

“C’mon, Marfan syndrome. You know, Marfan. Big man’s-disease. Giant killer.”

It’s crass, unfunny, and worst of all, untrue.

The National Marfan Foundation have released a statement urging the film’s producers to use this opportunity to spread the word about this often fatal disorder, and also pointing out the obvious: it was a stupid thing to say. Reactions from individual Marfs have ranged from “I’ve heard worse” to this, which reads like a punch in the gut:

A Virginia man, who lost his two-year-old son to Marfan syndrome in 2011, wrote that he was “extremely upset with the lack of taste, concern and respect concerning this disorder.”

The blogger Maya, also known as MarfMom, is, as always, joyful and positive, and has written about the film. She rightly thinks we ought to use this opportunity to educate, because the danger of the line is that it spreads misinformation. Half of people with Marfans don’t know they’ve got it. They go without medication, take part in dangerous activities, and may not find out until they’re in the back of an ambulance. Accurate information in the public eye is vital.

‘Big man’s disease’? Marfan syndrome affects men and women equally. ‘Giant killer’? Not all Marfs are exceptionally tall, and even so, they tend to be thin or unmuscular. In fact, if I had to pick a mythical creature to represent Marfans, it would be the willowy elves from Lord of The Rings. They’re long, they’re languid, and they’re sick to the back teeth of orcs crawling out of the woodwork. And what is this ableist obsession with fantasy monikers anyway? Giants, dwarves, monsters. Anything but human.

Elfking Thranduil thinks your attitude stinks.

Handy rule of thumb: If you don’t have a disability, don’t make jokes about it.

I’m going to have that printed on little glitzy flashcards to make it all the more memorable, because although it’s basic human decency, some people still struggle with it.

No.

All the Marfs I know make light of our health among ourselves, our friends, and families. Laughter is useful, particularly when – and this actually happened to me – a saleswoman earnestly informs you your incurable illness will clear up if you just drink enough aloe vera juice.

But if you don’t inhabit that sphere, you can’t assume what people’s thresholds are. You can’t assume what people are just about managing to cope with, what their history is, who they’ve lost.

Another thing Vaughn and Ferrell might be unaware of is that people with a long-term health conditions are strongly encouraged to keep their feelings to themselves. Classic derailing: “It’s only a joke, don’t take it so personally, no-one will take you seriously when you’re angry”. If you’re going to speak out about ableism you must cloak yourself in charm and detachment, as if this wasn’t your everyday life being discussed. Heaven forbid you become one of those frightening party-pooper militants who lurk in drains with Pennywise the clown.

Yes, it’s just a weak joke in a film unlikely to go down in cinematic history. But there will be kids who’ll suffer in school because of this. There will be adults who’ve lost a child or a parent or a friend who will have to smile politely at jokes like this from colleagues, strangers, and even friends who, because they’ve seen it in a mainstream film, think it’s harmless behaviour.

It isn’t.

David Bowie is… really rather good

Posted on June 7, 2013 by Verity Holloway

The V&A have done it again.

‘David Bowie is’ was always going to be an immense undertaking, being a study of the evolution of earnest Davie Jones of The Society For The Prevention of Cruelty To Long Haired Men into…whatever this is…

But they pull it off. Beautifully.

Bowie has always been like a distantly freakish but much-loved uncle to me. I first got into his music by raiding other people’s parents’ record collections in the ’90s, and although I didn’t understand most of it, it stuck with me and shaped my tastes. I can’t claim to know much about him – I just enjoy the spectacle.

And spectacle is what the V&A provides, introducing you to the sensibly-suited Bromley boy who “just wanted to be known” all the way through to a cavern of screens displaying a gigantic gyrating Bowie flanked by mannequins displaying a career’s worth of costumes. The effect is like entering the temple of a strange, glamorous god, compounded by signs reading “David Bowie is watching you”. (We liked the less-worrying Warholian “David Bowie is thirsty – head to the cafe for orange juice or coffee!”) Would museum-goers accept such a gargantuan display from anyone else?

Laid out like the relics of saints, it’s thrilling to get within arm’s length of the tiny-waisted suits of The Thin White Duke and the dusty Regency pirate chic of Screaming Lord Byron. This collection of characters, each with a unique wardrobe, sound, and method of movement gives the impression of all the Bowies being present at once – a cast of personas that make you wonder who and where the actual David is. Or if he exists at all.

David Bowie Is Leaving Clues Everywhere

It was interesting to see evidence of Bowie’s consciousness that no art is fixed to its author’s intentions. Once it’s out there, it becomes a link in a chain of reactions, visualised in ‘The Periodic Table of Bowie’ by Paul Robertson at the exhibition’s end, filing high-profile fans like Morrissey under “fly my pretties fly”.

We get tantalising scraps of Bowie’s multimedia consumption, of bits and pieces ransacked from culture modern and antique. He remarks he may well have ended up as a novelist, and you see the mingling of the musical/literary/cinematic in the storyboarding for Hunger City with its echoes of A Clockwork Orange and Todd Browning’s Freaks. The wordplay in Future Legend is decidedly Mervyn Peake:

Of course, my favourite was always going to be the frock-shot on The Man Who Sold The World. “Funnily enough, and you’ll never believe me, it was a parody of Gabriel Rossetti. Slightly askew, obviously.” Dinah Roe has written about the amusing homage here.

Highlights

I usually hate tinny museum headphones, but the sound here was high-quality with a clever ‘spotlighting’ system sensing where you were standing. You could stand three feet away from someone having a totally different experience.

This knitted catsuit was apparently available in pattern form for early fans to copy. Sadly no photos of valiant DIY efforts.

Small children leaping about, playing air guitar – the chain reaction at work.

The Goblin King’s crystal alongside a handwritten letter from Jim Henson telling Bowie how perfect he’d be for the role.

GO.

The exhibition continues until August 11th 2013. All online tickets are currently sold out, but if you turn up the the V&A’s main desk when they open at 10am, you’re likely to get a ticket for later in the day.

Ken Russell’s Dante’s Inferno: “Let’s go stunner-hunting!”

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Verity Holloway

After casting Sean Bean in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I can forgive Ken Russell of almost any sin. Even Dante’s Inferno. Most of it.

Through a psychedelic ’60s lens, with the Pre-Raphaelite circle portrayed as drink-mad, cemetery-defiling pyromaniacs on top of all the usual Russell weirdness, Dante’s Inferno the only film I’ve ever awoken at dawn for, snarling over the final seconds of the auction: “It’s mine, it’s mine, it’s the only DVD copy I’ve ever seen anywhere, and it’s mine…”

Now, someone thoughtful has uploaded the whole wacky display to YouTube, so you can enjoy it as much as I did all those years ago, alone in my flat, wondering what on Earth I’d allowed into my life.

Don’t expect a history lesson. Do expect drunken bicycle jousting, zombie Lizzie Siddal, and Oliver Reed playing himself. No, it isn’t sensitive. But if you’ve ever seen the schlocky ’70s horror Burnt Offerings, you can’t really dislike Reed. My late Auntie Ann used to drink with him, and maintained he was a gentleman. He’s not a bad likeness of Rossetti, physically; dark and languid in layer upon layer of shabby Victorian tailoring. Jan Marsh has a chapter on the film in her excellent book The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal. She calls Reed ‘solid but smouldering’.

Leave me alone – I’m smouldering, solidly.

Topsy and Janey, experiencing an approximation of married bliss.

Judith Paris as Lizzie Siddal. Again, quite a good likeness.

…and Swinburne, getting overly-friendly with the Oxford dead. You cannot take him anywhere.

“A great Italian tormented in the Inferno of London”

Posted on May 12, 2013 by Verity Holloway

Ruskin, there, being a bit over-the-top.

dgrbirthday

As it’s Mr Rossetti’s 185th birthday, I celebrated with poems and pie in the park. It’s what the tormented old rhinoceros would have wanted.

So, news. It’s been a productive spring. After being longlisted for the Pageturner Prize, I sent my novel to The Literary Consultancy, who I can’t recommend highly enough. If you’re lost in your one-hundred-thousand-word forest, unable to find your way home, an honest critique, plus no-nonsense business advice, is invaluable. Having slogged through the rewrites and given it a good trimming, I’m about to pass it on to some friends to read. It’s a vertiginous feeling, but I remain optimistic.

In other writing news, I’m in the next edition of The Pre-Raphaelite Society Review, talking about A Pre-Raphaelite Journey: The Art of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale. If you’ve ever wondered what a Pre-Raphaelite tackling early 20th century airborne warfare looks like, Eleanor’s your woman.

Happy birthday, DGR. Pie?

MAY 5 – CLARET

Posted on May 5, 2013 by Verity Holloway

Rossetti, taking a sip in Millais’ Isabella.

The forth annual Claret Day is here, Victorianists. Settle down with a bottle of red, and take part in this tradition of immense poetical gravity.

(I made it up a few years ago after reading a cryptic comment in Rossetti’s notebook in the British Library.)

Bonus points if you involve a certain marsupial. The good people at Red House have joined the #WombatFriday malarky, so now it’s officially sanctioned.

So, on the subject of DGR and intoxication…

The Card-Dealer
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Could you not drink her gaze like wine?
Yet though its splendour swoon
Into the silence languidly
As a tune into a tune,
Those eyes unravel the coiled night
And know the stars at noon.

The gold that’s heaped beside her hand,
In truth rich prize it were;
And rich the dreams that wreathe her brows
With magic stillness there;
And he were rich who should unwind
That woven golden hair.

Around her, where she sits, the dance
Now breathes its eager heat;
And not more lightly or more true
Fall there the dancers’ feet
Than fall her cards on the bright board
As ’twere an heart that beat.

Her fingers let them softly through,
Smooth polished silent things;
And each one as it falls reflects
In swift light-shadowings,
Blood-red and purple, green and blue,
The great eyes of her rings.

Whom plays she with? With thee, who lov’st
Those gems upon her hand;
With me, who search her secret brows;
With all men, bless’d or bann’d.
We play together, she and we,
Within a vain strange land:

A land without any order,—
Day even as night, (one saith,)—
Where who lieth down ariseth not
Nor the sleeper awakeneth;
A land of darkness as darkness itself
And of the shadow of death.

What be her cards, you ask? Even these:—
The heart, that doth but crave
More, having fed; the diamond,
Skilled to make base seem brave;
The club, for smiting in the dark;
The spade, to dig a grave.

And do you ask what game she plays?
With me ’tis lost or won;
With thee it is playing still; with him
It is not well begun;
But ’tis a game she plays with all
Beneath the sway o’ the sun.

Thou seest the card that falls,—she knows
The card that followeth:
Her game in thy tongue is called Life,
As ebbs thy daily breath:
When she shall speak, thou’lt learn her tongue
And know she calls it Death.

The strange, corporeal afterlife of James Legg

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Verity Holloway

If you were lucky enough to catch Doctors, Dissection, and Resurrection Men at the Museum of London, you’ll remember this fellow…

This is murderer James Legg. In 1801, the 80-year-old Legg challenged a fellow pensioner, Lamb, to a duel. When Lamb refused, throwing the pistol to the ground, Legg did the ungentlemanly thing and shot him anyway. Although apparently well-received in the courtroom, not to mention the ramifications of his advanced age and plea of insanity, Legg was sentenced to be hanged on the 2nd of November, and his body dissected.

Meanwhile, sculptor Thomas Banks and painters Benjamin West and Richard Cosway had always wondered if artistic representations of Christ’s crucifixion were anatomically correct. How they justified this is a mystery (“It’s for art, dears, art”) but surgeon Joseph Constantine Carpue apparently saw no moral issue with procuring the hanged Legg’s body fresh from the gallows and crucifying it in situ. The four men created two casts, one with skin on, one with skin off. The casts were moved to Banks’ London studio, where they attracted much attention from the curious public before being displayed for art students in the Royal Academy.

The ‘experiment’ still brings up uncomfortable questions about ownership and consent. But awfulness aside, the cast is incredible, and enormous. Legg must have been an imposing young man if he were that size at 80. The photograph is somehow more dreadful than viewing it in person. Perhaps it was the low light of the exhibition, or the woman sat at his feet, sketching, but I found it rather beautiful.

When I first set eyes on James Legg’s plaster remains and learned of his strange corporeal afterlife in the RA, I hoped Dante Gabriel Rossetti would have seen him. The student Rossetti hated drawing from sculptures in the same way most of us hated doing our times tables, but this is the boy who, dismayed by the sight of cancan dancers’ petticoats, took William Holman Hunt to a Parisian morgue to view a drowned man. On holiday. For fun. (He was a pleasant traveling companion, wrote Hunt, for certain values of pleasant.)

I think he would have loved James Legg.

Rossetti’s prolonged phase of reveling in the macabre produced some amusing works and letters: the ballad Jan Van Hunks about a smoking contest against the devil (DGR never smoked), general delight in ‘stunner’ murderesses and all things Poe. A cast of a flayed murderer would probably have persuaded him to pay more attention in class.

Look at this jaunty little Death, done in 1840. Note the odd leg bones. It was never meant to be a serious anatomical study, but the disregard for details is there. “I have nearly finished studying the bones,” he wrote to Mamma Francis in 1843, ” and my next drawing will most probably be an anatomy-figure.” He sounds bored to tears.

Sadly, the cast of James Legg was removed from the RA in 1822, seven years before Rossetti was born, and only returned in 1917, thirty-five years after his death, when it narrowly avoided being blown up by a zeppelin bomb.

In light of their commitment to realism and the religious nature of so many Pre-Raphaelite paintings, it is tantalising to wonder how the PRB would have reacted to such a ‘teaching aid’, had it been available.

Although Rossetti would probably argue, it doesn’t matter how accurate the cast – it’s the soul of the thing that matters.

The Most Beautiful Bookshop In The World

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Verity Holloway

We were in Venice last week, lost, and chilly. In search of the third spritz of the afternoon, we’d taken a walk down an alley, then another, and found ourselves in a tiny, mossy courtyard, when abruptly…

‘WELCOME to the most beautiful bookshop in the world’.

The Libreria Acqua Alta. Part curiosity shoppe, part bottomless book-dump (good luck if you’re after a specific title) the Libreria Acqua Alta “looks like your corner of the living room”, according to Gabriel.

‘Für Katzen’, said a card propped up against a rather damp bowl of kibble. Inside, camera-shy kitties reclined on mounds of catalogues, faded postcards of American government buildings from the 1960s, and reproduction antique maps. In a landlocked gondola, Tintoretto languished with Taschen’s Big Penis Book (3D, in case you’re interested). The sweet, faintly worrying smell of paper-rot bloomed with varying intensity as we delved deeper into the labyrinth.

I know what you’re thinking. Where’s the fire escape?

Nailed it.

I seem to have annoyed you gentlemen in some way

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Verity Holloway

When Quentin Crisp hennaed his hair and sashayed his way through London in form-fitting trousers and mascara, he generated rage. On one of the many occasions he was dragged off the street and beaten, he managed to raise his head and address his attackers: “I seem to have annoyed you gentlemen in some way”.

There’s been a lot in the news about Sophie Lancaster this week. In 2007, 20-year-old Sophie was beaten to death. She was out walking with her boyfriend in a public park and some boys decided they didn’t like her goth clothing. So they killed her.

Dwell on that for a moment: they murdered her because they didn’t like her clothes.

Sophie’s mother Sylvia heads the S.O.P.H.I.E campaign – ‘stamp out prejudice, hatred, and ignorance everywhere’ – and as a result of her work, Manchester police have announced they will be treating attacks on members of alternative subcultures as hate crimes. I don’t pretend to know anything about the law. I can’t say if this will make any palpable difference. But, personally, I’d like to live in a society that fosters creativity and diversity, especially in something so harmless as individual style.

vali-myers When the news filtered through to the mainstream press, I’d been reading about the Australian artist Vali Myers. Vali, with her trademark raccoon eyes, red haystack of hair, and tattooed moustache, is such an exciting figure, not only for her outlandish paintings and appearance, but because her chosen adornments were so intrinsic to her sense of self:

“My father used to say to my mother, ‘Vera, how can you let her go out like that?’ But Mum used to tell him it was my war-paint. Believe me, in Melbourne in the 1940s, I needed it.”

I like that quote. Love it, in fact. But I can’t help but think she’d have a Hell of a time on a bus in 2013.

Yes, Vali was an unusual case. But you don’t have to be flamboyant to attract hostility. I’ve been physically assaulted more than once for wearing ‘too much’ black. By grown men, in daylight, on crowded streets. Every single one of my friends who hover in the vicinity of an alternative subculture have experienced street harassment. Sophie’s death was not a freak occurrence, a fact which is all the more bewildering when you consider that goths are, at the heart of it, arty, generally quiet people who like to pose for photographs in castles.

Why not just try harder to fit in?

No.

It makes me happy to express myself. It makes me happy to see other people express themselves. At the railway station in Preston last week, I saw a little old lady wearing so much artfully layered green eyeshadow her face resembled the wings of a magnificent beetle. Was it ‘age-appropriate’? No. Was it fashionable? No. But she looked content and she looked fabulous. It’s a mark of self-esteem and imagination when someone is kitted out in an individualistic way, and I wish more people would.

But Quentin Crisp was right: it annoys people. And it’s a petty thing to be annoyed by; so anchored in ego and personal anxiety. How dare they leave the house like that? The naysayers seem to wonder. And what does it mean? Do they want attention? Do they think they’re better than me?

Well, what if it means nothing at all? What if it’s just …fun?

Everyone is entitled not to like things. But hostile reactions to the harmless creativity of personal style totally baffle me.

Somewhere Without Horizons

Verity Holloway, writer