Authors: Adam Nevill
The Friends met fortnightly to listen to guest speakers, and to take part in the ‘Hidden Landscape of London Sessions’, whatever they were. There was a meeting this coming Friday night in Camden on ‘Hessen and the Nazi Occult’, with a guest speaker from Austria called Otto Herndl. The phone number for a guy called Harold was given to call for details. Apryl quickly browsed through the other topics on the Friends’ forthcoming itinerary: ‘Felix Hessen and the Cult of Dissection’; ‘Banquet for the Damned – Felix Hessen and Eliot Coldwell’s Unseen World’; ‘The Puppetry Grotesque in Pre-war Painting’; ‘The Feral – An Eye For The Bestial’; ‘Surrealism and the Modernism of Ezra Pound – Glimpses of the Vortex’.
It all sounded like a load of Greek salad and she quickly found her eyes glazing at the unfamiliar words and obscure references. But she made a note of Harold’s number. He was a doctor after all, of metaphysics. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but he seemed like an authority on Hessen because he was the author of most of the essays and of a book soon to be published by the group.
But when she clicked on the link to the gallery of Felix Hessen’s surviving sketches, the back of her neck began to prickle. Once they had fully downloaded, picture by picture, she went dizzy and had to refocus her eyes. If she needed a visual depiction of her great-aunt’s persecution fantasies, of the hideous things Lillian described crowding and pursuing her back to Barrington House, then Hessen had drawn them in charcoal, gouache and ink. And he had done so in the thirties, before Lillian’s journals were even written.
Apryl stayed in Bayswater for the rest of the morning, drinking coffee and eating flaky sugary pastries. For hours she was content to stare through the rain-blurred windows of a Lebanese cafe. All the time trying to make sense of what she had first stumbled across in Lillian’s journals and now found on an obscure Internet site. She wished she’d never looked at the journals. But could not stop herself trying to figure out why her great-aunt and uncle had been so obsessed with this man who lacked a single redeeming feature and who drew the most awful pictures of dead animals, human corpses, and those puppet things that seemed to be a combination of the first two subjects. She hadn’t liked looking at them online, and now bits of them had taken possession of her memory. The image of something that looked like a dark monkey with horse teeth came again into her thoughts and made her shudder. Just looking at the picture made her think she could hear it scream. But suppressing the image only made a second appear in its place – like that thing, a bit like a woman, a very old woman, and more bone than flesh, looking up from a basement window.
Sitting at the little table in the cafe, she made a decision. She would read the Miles Butler book on Felix Hessen, the man Lillian claimed was responsible for making her life so wretched. She would go to the Friends of Felix Hessen meeting on Friday. And she would speak to anyone left in Barrington House who knew Lillian when she was younger. She would do it for Lillian. Otherwise, no one else would give a damn. At least she could spend Friday in Camden checking out the market before the lecture in the evening, where she could talk to one of these experts. Just to get a better sense of this artist – the man who drew those terrible things.
By noon there was one other thing she also knew for certain: she would not be spending another night at Barrington House.
In a hotel room in Leinster Square she forked through a takeout from a Vietnamese place on Queensway, sipped her Chardonnay and opened Miles Butler’s book at the introduction.
The paperback was only one hundred and twenty pages long and mostly filled with the prints of Hessen’s sketches. There had been no more than a dozen copies of the book left at Tate Britain in Pimlico, and all had been reduced. ‘Never did that well’, the assistant told her in the gallery bookshop. ‘Not most people’s cup of tea.’ They were about to be ‘remaindered’, whatever that meant.
‘My great-aunt knew him,’ she’d told the assistant, with a weird sense of pride. But he didn’t seem impressed at all.
From the gallery she went back to Barrington House to pack an overnight bag with some clothes and toiletries. On her way out of the building she stopped at the front desk to talk to Stephen, catching him before he finished his shift.
He didn’t question her decision to stay in a hotel. She suspected he was surprised she hadn’t done so sooner, considering the state of the apartment. Or thought that possibly he was even relieved that she might not be bothering him so much now. But he did tell her that both Mrs Roth and the Shafers had declined to see her.
‘But why? They knew her.’
Stephen had shrugged. ‘I asked nicely and said the very charming niece of Lillian was over for a while and would like to know more about her aunt, who she never met. But they said no. A bit mean-spirited, I thought. So I tried to talk them round. But that set Betty off.’ Then Stephen shook his head and looked more tired than ever.
What was wrong with these people? Didn’t the old love to talk about their memories? Apparently not. Her disappointment simmering, she took a cab up to Bayswater and checked into the hotel. After a hot shower – the best she could ever remember taking – she settled on the soft bed with the Miles Butler book. And immediately congratulated herself on her decision not to study it at Barrington House. It felt safer to deal with these things here. In another world, one clean and bright and comfortable and modern; the antithesis of the home Lillian could never escape.
Glimpses of the Vortex
was much better written and less hysterical than the text on the Friends’ website. But the author didn’t include much more biographical detail than she’d already read online. Most of the text was an analysis of the imagery and symbolism in the surviving sketches. She found this difficult to understand and skimmed it because it made her feel stupid. But the illustrations she had seen online were all here on expensive shiny paper and all the more disturbing for it. It took a conscious effort to prevent her eyes wandering from the text to the relentless suggestions of the savage, the bewildered, the terrified and lost figures in the drawings. Those with elements of colour being the worst of all. When she turned a page, she got into the habit of covering the illustrations with a napkin so she could focus on the text. They made her remember whole passages from her great-aunt’s journals. And these comparisons were so disturbing she began looking about the bed and the small, well-lit room as if she suddenly expected to see someone standing there, watching her.
She shook the feeling off and skim-read the section about Hessen’s early medical training and the fuss a tutor at the Slade had made over Hessen’s drawing of cadavers instead of live models, and for having ‘no interest in beauty’. The only mention of Barrington House was brief – it was merely cited as the place where he lived reclusively after the war.
His imprisonment during the war, the author suggested, had broken Hessen and foreshortened his career as an artist: ‘Hessen was a privileged and acutely sensitive man unused to the stigma of being a traitor or the harsh conditions of prison.’ The only way Hessen could be studied was through his art – the actual drawings. And only through a study of them from a psychoanalytical angle.
His life was an inner life, and the only true glimpse of who he really was, and of what he tried to achieve, exists in his art.
It wasn’t what she wanted to read. And maybe the author was incorrect anyway. Maybe there was something else. She had a hunch an entire chapter of the painter’s life remained unwritten: the Knightsbridge years – a story hinted at in Lillian’s journals that could be backed up by the testimony of his surviving neighbours, if only they would speak to her. Maybe the others – this Betty woman and the Shafer couple – had seen his paintings too, or at least been told of them by Lillian and Reginald. A long shot maybe, but something she knew she should tell this Miles guy about. The back of the book listed him as a curator at Tate Britain, so he wouldn’t be impossible to track down if he still worked there.
She continued to skim through Miles’s interpretations of the art until she happened across anything specifically concerned with Hessen. And what little had been recorded about the painter portrayed him as irascible, unpleasant, spitefully vindictive, and ultimately indifferent to the feelings of others. His short temper was repeatedly attested to, and blamed for alienating what few remnants of friendship he had before the war.
He was already deeply withdrawn before his incarceration in Brixton prison under Regulation 18b, which allowed imprisonment without charge or trial. The author suggested that a bipolar illness could have already consumed him prior to his arrest, describing him as ‘exhausted, listless, paranoid, possibly even exhibiting signs of schizophrenia, and hypermania’.
An acquaintance and sculptor called Boston Mayes claimed Hessen didn’t appear to sleep and his face was cadaverous. He talked to himself in front of others and often forgot they were there. He was utterly distracted, absorbed and forgetful. ‘A mind at the end of its tether.’
There was evidence in some of the memoirs of Hessen’s unwise investigations in the twenties into Enochian magic and black magic. But apart from his sporadic esoteric, philosophical and political writings in
Vortex
in the early thirties in support of fascism, which pretty much sullied his reputation for all time, Miles Butler admitted he didn’t have much to go on besides the surviving drawings. And so it was these he tried to decode:
Hessen’s work was an idiosyncratic and deeply personal investigation of an inner vision, something he’d spent his entire adult life evolving. He prepared himself with psychic investigations while a student, and with extreme political disciplines afterwards, until he realized the answers he sought didn’t exist in any other ideology or set of beliefs. Philosophy and fascist fervour were, in Hessen’s opinion, merely vehicles that skirted round the Vortex – they were methods to it, or symptoms of it – preparation. And it was only through his art, with reference to occult ritual, that he even came close to realizing his vision.
The Vortex was a region Hessen believed to be, in effect, an afterlife, the true and final destination of human consciousness: a terrible, lightless and turbulent eternity that gradually reduced the soul to fragmention, in effect a perpetual nightmare in which an inhabitant possessed no control over their inevitable demise. Personality and memory became mere residues, and a final awareness was only able to register terror, pain, bewilderment, entrapment, disorientation and isolation. In effect, hell. Paranormal activity merely represented the last flickers of those lost souls, struggling to return to their lives at the edge of the Vortex, where the walls separating it from this world were at their thinnest and most permeable.
Another chapter detailed Hessen’s obsession with death. He believed his only chance of interpreting existence began with a study of its end:
. . . when a consciousness became aware of its end and the sudden consuming dialogue with extinction.
The best evidence of what follows this life is glimpsed in a death mask, a livid facial expression, especially if the eyes are still open. They give us a vague approximation of whatever we call the soul, and what it has slipped into. In these eyes I first glimpsed the Vortex.
And what we have become in this life, at the most profound depth of ourselves, determines our position at the next level.
From what she could grasp of all the psychobabble, it seemed Hessen was convinced of a kind of duality – like Freud and Jung, but in a more mystical and sinister way:
From his studies of psychic phenomena in the twenties, and of people who possessed the talent to speak in tongues, he believed two selves, in essence, were always conducting a simultaneous existence within the same body. The one shown to the world and called a personality was, at best, a flawed construct: an approximation of what we created, out of necessity, for survival. But when that was abandoned, at the moment of death or in the midst of madness, or another altered state of mind, or most often during sleep, the other self would be glimpsed.
Hessen spent his life trying to find it through any method of displacement at hand – through removal of the conscious self through occult ritual, or via hypnotism, automatic writing or painting. He had no interest in anything but the other self. And by communicating with it, knowing it and ultimately controlling it in this life, he believed one could achieve not only an awareness in the following existence, inside the Vortex, but the equivalent of sentience – or life after death – an animation that bridged both the mortal plane and the afterlife, that terrible region very close to, but concealed from, the naked eye and the primary senses.
Not easily described by logical or reasonable means afterwards, his art was to act as a pure and sudden glimpse of the ‘other’, of what was only ever seen in dreams, or in times of euphoria or mental disintegration. Of what actually existed inside the Vortex – what Hessen called the population of the Vortex. This was something only understood and interpreted by the ‘other’ – in his case, his art.
Despair, feelings of dislocation, altered states of consciousness, a psyche unravelled and paralysed by depression; all of these were aspects of the restless, infinite Vortex, and represented a closeness to its relentless surging around our short and inconsequential lives.
Sipping her wine and changing position to ease the cramp in her elbow, Apryl frowned as she went back to reread the earlier chapters about the surviving sketches; Hessen’s early studies of dead animals and human deformity. Even as a teenager at the Slade, using ink, pen and pencil he had been faithfully depicting the heads of dead hares, the bleached grins of skinned lambs and the horrors of congenital disease: