Derek Jarman by Tony Peake
Little, Brown, £25, pp613
'Do you know what I mean?' was Derek Jarman's incessant refrain in conversation, but after any exposure to his work, the answer tends to be: 'No, not always.' Nor, I suppose did he always know what he meant. But that hardly diminishes the slight but genuine pleasure to be had from one of his stage designs, his films, paintings, books or, in later years, political actions; the pleasure which comes from imagining some respectable Guildford Marjorie who can't believe her own ears and eyes. He loved to shock, and often found himself seeking out audiences, or even inventing them, when it started to look as if everyone who paid attention to him was really quite appreciative, and not shocked at all.
Jarman, in a way, strikes you as a latter-day Anthony Blanche. Swarthy, cosmopolitan, aesthetic and, as he was the first to tell you, a big man in his underpants (his nickname was Hose), he was highly popular at school. 'At nine, I discovered that sleeping with someone was more fun than sleeping alone.' Highly available in one sense, in his aesthetic judgment he was only attracted, like a magpie, by high glitter. An early fascination was The Wizard of Oz with its wizard who, tellingly, 'frankly admits his incompetence'. Out of school, there were such influences as his Aunty Doris, who once had the bright idea of writing to the Kremlin to offer herself as a cosmonaut on Sputnik. Her finest hour, though, was the invention of artificially perfumed rubber roses, a bouquet of which was presented to a mildly startled Queen Mary.
Meanwhile the young Michael Jarman (he dyed his name into Derek much later) was going along a familiar sort of path. When his next-door neighbour, Dorothy, took him into Watford to go shopping, he 'would make a beeline for the make-up'. The next bit you can write yourself - the heavy father, the tears before bedtime, and finally he was allowed to go to art school in London. Here, things all got a bit overheated: 'I took Brenda's dress-making scissors and threatened suicide.' But at least there were men - lots of them - a gay pub, the Willy in Hampstead, with its clientele of 'elderly models and artistic antique dealers'.
By now Jarman was Derek and hatching manifestos, as art students will. 'Turn Piccadilly into one vast shimmering glass funnel. Music, all types, from loud speakers, sometimes Bach sometimes Beatles.' All the manifestos boil down to: 'Everything, at all times, must be completely fabulous.'
Whether or not Jarman was any good in his subsequent career is open to question. Personally, I feel that he lacked that component of genius, the infinite capacity for taking pains, and that his films, paintings and books fall apart at the seams because he couldn't quite be bothered, or because he couldn't quite work out what he ought to be saying. At art school, he said, you had to be noisy to be noticed. The trouble was he never quite lost that idea - a characteristic Jarman film such as The Tempest exists in a mood of raucous, cheerful camp.
All his life, Jarman had to work on a shoestring. Sometimes this reaped unexpected dividends. His startling low-budget designs for Ken Russell's The Devils, for instance, are some of the best things he ever did; Sebastiane, his hilariously smutty film in Latin about St Sebastian, was cheap to make mainly because there were no costumes. By the Eighties, though, the corner-cutting began to show, and none of his later films - War Requiem, Caravaggio, Wittgenstein, Edward II - comes near the standards of his earlier work. It all looks as if the filmmaker and crew were having far too much of a good time to worry about the final result.
But there's a good reason for the skimped, casual feel of the last movies:this was Jarman in a hurry, possibly driven by the fear that his current project could be his last. And by then, his diminishing energies were channelled elsewhere; by his political activism on behalf of Peter Tatchell's excellent OutRage! pressure group; by taking the heroic step of publicly declaring his antibody status as soon as he was diagnosed with HIV. The best, most characteristic part of his work, apart from the much-admired and lovely garden at Dungeness, are his late paintings. They mount an unlikely but enchanting alliance between macabre high camp wit and violently un-English abstract expressionism and have titles like Arse-Injected Death Syndrome.
This is quite a good biography, very solidly researched and sensibly thorough - more than once I reflected that Jarman himself would never have been capable of such a sustained piece of applied concentration. It's true that it follows the European Union directive which dictates that all biographies must now begin with an account of its subject's funeral. And Tony Peake writes terribly badly as soon as he starts thinking about it: 'The sky was clear, the viridescent fields dotted with tentative lambs and occasionally splashed with the red of budding willows.' But he has done his homework, and I wouldn't have thought anyone will think it worth doing again.
When there is no one left to be shocked by what, in Julian Clary's words, is really 'a series of jokes about buggery', then Jarman will be forgotten; because, after all, there is not much more there than a gleeful urge to épater les bourgeois . For the moment, though, that is enough to be going on with, and there is always something nice about him; he defined the phrase 'the gaiety of nations'. All his friends, clearly, miss him like mad.
