College Life at Westfield College, London University
Thanks to the generosity of my interviewers both at Westfield and Central, I'd effectively scraped in with two mediocre "A" levels at B and C. Ultimately, however, the one-time head of the French department and published author Dr M. advised me to seriously consider a career as a professional academic. Not bad for a secondary school write-off. Dr Mein was my principle tutor during my final year, and under her galvanising mentorship I studied the controversial and often disturbing writings of Andre Gide as my main subject. From the outset, she tirelessly encouraged my intellectual and literary inclinations in the firm belief that I had the makings of an academic or writer.
From the very first essay I produced for assessment at Westfield, I exhibited a caustic outspokenness in my writing at least partly influenced by my favourite avant garde artists but also reflecting my own tendency to mental bellicosity. While some of my tutors may have viewed these submissions with a dubious eye, Dr M. thrilled to them and awaited them with the sort of impatience normally accorded a favourite TV or radio series. How close this love of outraging by way of the written word brought me to a seared conscience I can't say; but one thing is certain, my compassion started to recede. This didn't happen right away of course. Yet, even during those first two golden years, some of those who were drawn to me on a deep emotional level betrayed a certain unease with their words.
So, why didn't I cross the line beyond which a person can no longer respond to the Holy Spirit? After all, from about 1983, I started to decline as a human being. Perhaps it was something to do with the prayers of believing friends and relatives. Or perhaps something precious was kept alive within me during those dark years. Certainly, I never fully stopped being a caring person, and I can recall being outraged by those avant gardists who advocated actual cruelty or the harming of innocents. How then did I square this with my adoration of certain favoured artists who thrived on verbal violence and scenes of madness and destruction? The fact is I couldn't, hypocrite that I was.
There was something about my truculent writing style that was what the French call criant, showy and overdone. In this respect perhaps I was a little reminiscent of the youthful Louis Aragon. He was the World War One medical orderly who went on to become a Dadaist in the Paris of the twenties, and then a founder of Surrealism, before joining the French Communist Party in 1927 and the Resistance over ten years afterwards. Described as radiant by his great friend the Surrealist leader Andre Breton in 1952, for him, the golden boy of some thirty years earlier had been somewhat coquettish in his rebellion, with an excessive desire to please born of an essential warmth and suggestibility.
I aspired to be an enfant terrible on a small scale myself at Westfield, ever seeking the centre of attention, baulking at every restraint, talking, smoking, drinking to excess, driven by a desire to be loved by everyone almost as if my sanity depended on it, while alienating those who'd gladly have devoted themselves to me and me alone. But that was never enough for me. And then there was the shadow that endlessly warred against this constant need to give and receive affection, a hidden, terrible rage significantly directed towards what I perceived as social injustice. The chief targets of my rage were dictators on the right wing of the political spectrum, indeed the political right as a whole. Throughout a decade of riot and protest in the UK, I affiliated myself with one radical lobby after the other...CND, Greenpeace, Animal Aid, Amnesty International etc., and I marched against the nuclear threat in London and Paris, lectured for Amnesty while blind drunk to a roomful of middle-aged Rotarians, and had a letter published in the newspaper of the Anti-Apartheid Movement.
While I'm not suggesting I was insincere, my righteous fury was blind to the fact that oppression stems from the sin we all share, being based on a fallacious notion of the perfectibility of Man, that has no real satisfying motive other than its own existence. In time, it started to turn inwards, and to eat away at the reserves of tenderness that meant so much to me. And my darkness was enhanced by alcohol and dissolute living, and an addiction to astrology and other occult topics, and scandalous art and philosophy. What a contrast to the noble and uplifting purposes of Christianity.
Initially I was unhappy about becoming a student again at Westfield, perhaps because it'd only been just a little over a year after my modest triumph at the Old Vic and I felt that by going back to college I was taking a step backwards in my career. After all, I'd be 30 by the time of my final year. It wasn't long, however, before Westfield started to become something of a paradise for me, not just in terms of the dozens of fellow students who warmly befriended me, but the almost unlimited opportunities for acting and performance the college provided me with. Westfield in the early '80s was a hotbed of talent and creativity and I wasted little time in passionately engaging with it.
Within days I'd made a close friend of Andrew, a fellow French and Drama student from Darlington in the north east. Before long, we were both being directed by a dynamic and flamboyant guy called Lee in Brecht and Weill's's "The Threepenny Opera". I'd two small roles, the most interesting being that of a petty street thief Filch, who'd been played by the French writer and actor Antonin Artaud in "L' Opra de quat'sous", one of two versions of the play directed by G.W. Pabst. Fool that I was I was proud of this fact because Artaud, a tragic example of the avant garde persuasion taken to its logical conclusion was one of my favourite cursed poets. More or less by accident I recently heard a brief snatch of a recording he made a few months prior to his death aged on the internet; and it was one of the most distressing aural experiences I've ever had, so much so that it took days for me to return to normal. Through this production I went on to play jive-talking disc jockey Galactic Jack in the musical play "The Tooth of Crime" by Sam Shepard, who has allegedly named Artaud as an influence on his work through theatrical theories contained in his "Le Thtre et son Double". The director, Neil, had been impressed by myself and Andrew in "The Threepenny Opera" and so cast us as Jack and the lead, Hoss, respectively.
I'd say things started to go a little wrong for me once I left Westfield in the summer of '83 with a few months to spare before travelling to Paris to work as an English language assistant in a French secondary school, the Lycee Jean-Paul Timbaud. This spelled my exile from the old drama clique, and I'd not be joining them in their final year celebrations, and the knowledge of this must have affected me. I was after all severing myself from a vast network of gifted friends of whom I was deeply fond, and so losing an opportunity of growing as an artist in tandem with like-minded spirits. I could've opted for an alternative few weeks in France as Andrew did, but doing so would've deprived me of the chance of spending more than six months in Paris, a city I'd long worshipped as the only true home of an artist. So, in the autumn of that year, I took lodgings on the grounds of the Lycee JP Timbaud in Bretigny-sur-Orge, a commune in the southern suburbs some sixteen miles south of the city centre, remaining there until the following May.
I feel sure that not too long after arriving in Bretigny I became afflicted by a certain sense of self-disillusion, although perhaps not yet, at least not consciously, but I was aware of a new darkness spreading itself over my mind, and I didn't like what was happening to me. It was the start of my drinking. At the same time I affected an attitude of strutting self-confidence, not that this was new. Some of the Lycee kids said I was like Aldo la Classe a comic character created by the actor Aldo Maccione. I got on fantastically well with the kids, but their unbridled affection made me feel humble; I didn't feel up to it. It was not like me to be so mortified by myself. There seems little doubt to me today that that my conscience was starting to become seared by '83 and so scream out in protest and pain
I recently attempted to encapsulate the totality of my Parisian experience with "My Paris Begins" featured below, and its cast of characters includes a slim pretty white girl who wasn't what she seemed, her smouldering black beau, a madman or derelict who took exception to my appearance, and my close friends Marie, Jane, Judy, Igor, Andrea, David, Dom, Astrid, Sandra, Rory...and Anna-Justine.
My Paris Begins
...my paris begins with those early days as a conscious flneur i recall the couple seated opposite me on the metro when i was still innocent of its labyrinthine complexity slim pretty white girl clad head to toe in denim smiling wistfully while her muscular black beau stared through me with fathomless orbs and one of them spoke almost in a whisper "qu'est-ce-que t'en pense" and it dawned on me yes the slender young parisienne with the distant desirous eyes was no less male than me dismal movies in the forum des halles and beyond being screamed at in pigalle and then howled at again by some kind of madman or derelict who told me to go to the bois de boulogne to meet what he saw as my destiny menaced by a sinister skinhead for trying on marie's wide-brimmed hat and then making my way alone to my room in the insanely driving rain getting soused in les halles with jane who'd just seen dillon in rusty james and was walking in a daze jane again with judy at the cave de la huchette jazz cellar the cafe de flore with igor who asked for a menu for me and then disappeared back to bretigny cash squandered on a gold tootbrush two tone shoes from close by to the place d'italie portrait sketched at the place de tertre paperback books by symbolist poets such as villiers de l'isle adam but second hand volumes by trakl and ernest deleve and a leather jacket from the marche de puces of the porte de clignancourt wandering the city alone or with andrea or igor or david or dom or astrid and sandra i still miss losing rory's address scrawled on a page of musset's confessions d'un enfant du siecle walking the length and breadth of the rue st denis what a city as anna-justine once breathlessly wrote me...