Peter Fuller: Four Letters from Uxbridge Road - Art Influence

In the autumn of 1965, Peter Fuller and myself were two freshmen enrolled at the small, traditionalist Cambridge College of Peterhouse, to take the English Tripos. Quite quickly we recognised each other as a pair of misfits, for quite different reasons. I came from a Northern English Grammar School in a heavily polluted industrial area, and, fiercely left-wing, was reacting against what I felt was the ignorant, supercilious complacency of higher-class Cambridge. Peter was a fascinating, but clearly disturbed and damaged, product of a Southern English private (i.e. Public School) education. He was part of what had outraged him. I formed friendships outside the college with likeminded, largely Northern, left-wing, grammar-school, jazz-loving students, into all of the modernist arts. Peter kept contact with one or two fellow Old Epsomians. His tastes seemed fixed in the decadent 1890s. Swinburne was his particular hero. In college, we spent a lot of time together. Our relationship was rivalrous, and while not actually sexual, was certainly erotically charged. In later years this perhaps manifested most clearly in the interest we took in each other’s women-friends. By the time we had both read our Freud, we were highly conscious of this aspect. In our student days, I was perhaps the dominant one, capable of inflicting the mild humiliations and subtle cruelties he sometimes seemed to be asking for. This wobbly balance was to change.

Our courses were to diverge quite sharply after graduation. I moved to a cheap-property area: a decaying industrial Pennine valley, attempting, in company with an influx of disparate creatures of the zeitgeist, to create a complete alternative society of production, consumption, and the arts, in defiance of mass capitalist production and culture. Peter, in London, was forging a career as a writer and serious journalist, specialising as an art critic. He was gaining in confidence, and could now be sceptical about my apparent hippydom.
                                I think I’m not deluding myself if I assert that the rivalry continued through the course of his interests in the 1970s. I had been the precursor, pointing to (those rather Victorian figures) Marx, Freud, and Darwin. I was merely a curious reader. He became something of an acknowledged expert and authority, in the fields I had indicated. In my ‘drop-out’ position, earning money by physical labour    , I could afford my obscurity. As a serious writer trying to live, and, soon enough, bring up a family in London, he had every incentive to prove himself in ambition, and gain recognition. In rivalry terms, he was winning. But I held one trump card that could be surprisingly effective, and hurtful to him: I was a ‘pure poet’, whereas he was a ‘mere journalist’. Unfair of me, I grant, but, in failure, I lack the masochistic streak.
                                There were some similarities in our respective developments. We weaned ourselves off Marx and Freud, each seeing, sooner or later, that brilliant insights do not need the quasi-theological support of dogma, orthodoxy, and the scorn of heresy: the quests for theoretical purity that adhered to Freudianism and Marxism. And this was to inoculate us against the coming wave that might be described as Structuralism/Poststructuralism/Critical Theory: the intellectual baggage of Postmodernism, in which Theory becomes a dogma about nothing but itself.
                                We would also be in agreement in opposition to the inexorable rise of a hyper-capitalist, vulgar Celebrity Culture. We would share a respect for Nature as truth, where, for the ‘social-constructionists’, ‘Nature’ was no more than a figment of bourgeois ideology. The difference between us here was that I could look on these developments with a weary sense of detachment, exasperation, and resignation, while getting on with making poetry. Peter, with his taste for controversy, had little choice but to wade into the public argument, and by the inevitable processes of political triangulation, could be cast into the role of conservative, reactionary, even, supposedly, ‘right-wing’.
                                This traduces him, I think, but he did undergo a sort of Return---- not to his father, not to religion, and not to Epsom College, but to something resolutely, and in inverted commas, “Cambridge”. An open question such as ‘How can there be spiritual values in a totally material world?’ seems to me to be a typically serious Cambridge sort of question. I think this is what he was grappling with. I know no answer, but the question remains a good one.
                                We fell out of contact as we came to realise that there was nothing to be rivalrous about. Had he lived, I think we could have resumed conversation. I could never summon interest in questions such as why one artist might be better than another. If I could talk to him now, I’d be saying how wonderful it is that, in my small local town, there are dozens of artists of different sorts, some inept, some brilliant, working away at painting, music, or poetry, regardless of fame or money. Then I’d anticipate, and enjoy, the scathing rejoinder of the internationally-known, metropolitan critic, to this provincial ex-hippy.

These four letters, selected by Stephanie Burns, from thirty-five letters sent to me by Peter through the decade of the 1970s, form part of an intense series of eleven sent between the 28th September and the 18th October, 1973, which, as well as being hot confessional self-exploration, obliquely tell the story of an anticipated visit that Peter and Colette were to pay me in early November, and its aftermath. Another, more drawn out sequence, two and three years later, exhibits more rancour between us, as he was gaining recognition, and I withholding approbation.
Certain features of this selection might be flagged: There’s his confession of an intensely religious adolescence, which seems kinetically connected to his belligerent, confrontational materialism as a young adult. Many of us can calmly accept a materialist view of the universe, without needing to plunge into intellectual warfare. For Peter it was different. To say he was ‘exorcising his demons’ seems not too much of a cliché. The student I knew could articulate an intense sense of quasi-real demonic persecution.
It was his war on religion, I think, that leads him here to adhere too closely to Freudian reductionism. This is evident in his critique of the work of Liliane Lijn, and in his scorn (here and elsewhere) of what he calls ‘ecopolitics’. Any numinous sense of being at one with the natural world had to be reducible to the infant at the breast. He had to be fiercely partisan in the lingering Freud-Jung wars.

Liliane Lijn Land Sea Light Koan 1996, 800 (h) x 400 cm base diameter.
26’ x 13’ base diameter., Painted fibre-glass, lateral fibre-optics. Commissioned by the Isle of Wight Health Authority for St. Mary’s Hospital, Newport.

                                I made no copies of my side of the correspondence, but I think my own line has been consistent. Where Freud saw the return of repressed infantile phantasy, and Jung saw archetypes of the collective unconscious, I see free-floating poetic images. Any strong poetic image will be amenable to Freudian interpretation, but the interpretation does not exhaust or adequately explain the image. Maybe later we might have been more in agreement.
                                Then there’s the matter of abuse, physical, quasi-sexual, or sexual, and the damage it’s thought to cause. I have felt that this theme has been overblown in recent decades, but I’m in no doubt that Peter was abused, and damaged, through his experience at school, and that the decade of the 70s saw him engaged in a courageous, sometimes awkward and embarrassing, attempt to heal himself. If he didn’t quite get there, he was well on the way by the time he died.
                                I know little of Peter’s other friendships, but I’d say that our relationship had a peculiar intensity. It was, as I say, rivalrous; I’d deny that it was gay, but it was, somehow, not quite straight. He had some inordinate expectations of me, that I was bound to disappoint. And I failed to approve of his writings. Though judging in a tacit, wordless mode, I’m probably a severer critic of the written art than Peter ever was of paintings. I hold, almost unwillingly, impossible standards that, at best, I can barely or rarely match; few other writers pass my test. I don’t want to sound rancorous; I’d rather stay dumb. I couldn’t condescend to pretend that Peter was solving the problems that I was seeing. In a way, I sort of loved him. It was an odd and valuable thing, to have known him.

                Your letter of October 8th arrived yesterday: it ranks among the great letters which I have received and pushes the present exchange forward to quite a different level. It will take a long time to assimilate all of it, but it has already radically affected the present stream of my thinking. It has certainly added to the feeling that in these letters I can write in a more valuable way for whatever it is that I am seeking than through that which is destined for an exposure in publication. As you said at the beginning, a letter is a text: one has it; one holds it – and the legal profession is correct to regard it as a publication. But it lacks the entrenched status of that which is printed publicly. It combines the stasis of the written, one beginning already lies unused on the floor, with the developmental fluidity of talking. I’ve really not written any letters before: I will have to ask you not to worry too much about the fact that I am quite unable to transcend your last. ”In poem & dream there’s neither specifics nor generals, but only public privates in a private public.” And what of letters?
                                I must take you through a digression too – and it may be an unending one as well – as I wish, desperately, to explain why I am where I am, and how I got there. “The territory is not the map,” is a precise slogan. But when one stumbles into a cesspool of viscera one is filled with a special kind of gratitude to even a clumsy cartographer. Never mind if his naming of names sometimes leaves much to be desired, or even if whole sections of his map are blanked out, confused and muddled. A great many of the landmarks he mentions are readily visible, others become recognisable as one floats closer. To string a few more banalities and analogies together, he’s even drawn in some pathways to the clover fields. So a mat of clues is not a map. Nor Freud’s even the only clue. The rough sketch will do for a time. Who else even hints at where the rainbow ends.
                                Look at it this way round. When I was eleven years old – I’ve probably told you before but it bears telling again – I went to a Sunday school run by a man called Oliver Stott. He was rich beyond my comprehension at the time, a manager of a local hardware chain, and I was much impressed by the chlorinated swimming pool he had in his garden. I was foolish enough to believe that it was through generosity that he allowed us children, “Young Crusaders” I believe we were called, to use it on alternate Saturday afternoons. He was fat, and foolish, a crazy and dangerous driver, and, of course, an impossible Christian whose sorely thumbed Bible with a big, perforated elastic band round it, was forever clutched in his holy hands. Oliver Stott believed so deeply in the factual, historical truth of the Bible that he conceived of his life’s task as inculcating fundamentalist religion into children, in the hope that at some point in the proceedings they would open their hearts to Jesus, and accept him as their Lord and master. Many and devious devices were used to make the children succumb to this momentous step. There were, for example B.Y.O.G’s (Bring Your Own Grub) when he would cavort with the Young Crusaders across the nearby downs – watch them picnic, then remind them of how Jesus fed the 5,000 and how he could still feed you now if you “opened your heart to him.” This went on for two years of my life. One of Oliver Stott’s tactics was to introduce henchmen from the Billy Graham campaign in Britain, who would come down on special Sundays for the purposes of conversion. Conversion, we were taught, was the greatest step we would ever take in our lives: we were specifically told it was of far more importance than any mere earthly relationship. Conversion was also a specific event: I think those freaks went as far as really believing that the spectacular incorporation of Jesus into your heart actually involved structural changes in the aorta. Conversion took place for me one Sunday afternoon, as it did for everybody else. You had to screw up your eyes, and sit very quietly, and if you felt Jesus coming into you, you put up your hand. I recall at the time an uncertainty about whether the great event had actually occurred – but I put up my hand anyway, because I had been warned that the Devil was almost certain to make a last ditch stand, and I assumed my doubt to be a product of his evil efforts. I felt warm and fuzzy. That night, in my Eagle diary, I made the entry that I had let Jesus... you know where.

Peter Fuller Epsom days
                                Anyway, at this Sunday School there were many lessons on evolution. In fact, evolution could well be seen as the major bug-bear of Oliver Stott’s life. He had a purist, nineteenth century belief that Darwin’s hand had been guided by the Devil. “The Origin of Species” had only to be flashed in front of his eyes, for him to be convulsed with a deep need to communicate with his creator, and beg the almighty being to protect him from the evil influence of such abominations. One of Oliver Stott’s most prized possessions, of which he had many, was a projector: a very good, and expensive one. He used it to show the most extraordinary films I have ever seen. Certainly, nothing since compares with them. They were mostly about evolution. One concerned the vicissitudes of a young man in a class-room, who, being a Young Crusader, was often deeply shocked by the behaviour of his school-mates. Some of them went so far as to use such vile expletives as “Blast” and “Oh Jesus.” This posed a great problem for our hero, because no sooner would they engage in such behaviour than he would be tempted to see them as resembling apes engaged in a cacophony of vileness. The hero’s unfortunate imaginative excursion was graphically illustrated with full use of cinematic stunts. A precursor of “Planet of the Apes” and all that. However, no sooner had he had this vision than it was made absolutely clear to viewers that Darwinist comparisons of this kind were nothing but the work of the Devil – who made a grinning, diabolical entry. Realising into what straits he had fallen, the hero called upon Jesus, who immediately enabled him to look round his class-room and recognise his school-mates once more as boys and girls, But his trials and tribulations were still not over, for again the devil made an appearance, and the vision of the monkeys was once more repeated.
                                To add, as it were, the scientific moment, Oliver Stott managed to acquire a great many film-strips and additional material about the Piltdown man. This you will remember was the much heralded “Missing Link” between men and apes, discovered by archaeologists which then turned out to have been a successful hoax. The inference one was supposed to draw, it goes without saying, was that all evolutionary discoveries were tricks of the same kind.
                                Subsequently, you must understand, I was very surprised to find that Darwinism was a widely accepted biological theory. I believed that it was something practised, like witchcraft, by a tiny minority of sinners who had made some terrible pact with the devil and who had no hope of the eternal life, which, I was convinced was mine.
                                After my conversion, of course, I plunged very deeply into religious experiences. In a recent letter you seemed to forget that, when I was describing a now-favoured pursuit of persecuting the Christians. I am entitled to persecute that which I once was, that which undoubtedly nestles unflushed-out in some hidden and imperceptible cranny of the mind. I suppose it is my religious background above all else which makes me feel I have travelled along separate roads to most of the people whom I now know. I am convinced that it is why I do not crave for the world view of the Sufis any more, or what have you – it is not a denial of an area of experience, but simply a moving through. I was once somewhere around there – the experiments are no longer necessary. The danger, which I only admit in letters of this kind, is the [Malcolm] Muggeridge one. It is more a fear than a danger: in the middle of the night, I once woke up trembling with terror at the thought, “What if I should ever find my faith again!” because that would be the end. Which indicates that despite all rational protestations to the contrary, and all the functions of what Freud called the “Higher Areas” of the mind, there is still some way to go before losing it. Just when my father’s image was becoming tarnished, I became intensely religious – and God, quite straightforwardly and simply, took on for me all the attributes of the father. He was savage and severe, and he knew my innermost thoughts. He realised how guilty I was in my wishes – and he loved me all the same. I did not learn much through reading Future of an Illusion.
                                Sometime after my conversion came my Baptism. I was 13 at the time, and belonging to a Baptist sect, of course it was by complete immersion upon confession of faith. I remember it quite well. You dressed in sort of cricket clothes – godly white, yet practical at the same time. You looked something like a cross between the Arch Angel Gabriel and a PT enthusiast, if you understand me. You walked in front of a church full of people singing hymns, “Oh Jesus, I have promised to serve thee to the end, be thou forever near me, my saviour and my friend” they all choked. And they did choke. For it was a deeply emotional occasion for the little cluster of God’s people gathered together there in Eastleigh. Mostly, you must realise, they were working-class folk, though I did not understand that, at the time. I just knew there was something different about my father. Apart from the town-clerk, and a Religious Education Teacher from a local school, there were no other “professional” people in the congregation. So there I was – the doctor’s son – about to be sanctified, and received into the bosom of the godly fellowship. (It gave me voting rights at the democratic church meetings and I no longer had to feel guilty about taking communion). The ceremony itself was performed in the hushed, expectant silence of these religious acts. I stood in a sort of swimming bath at the front of the church. It was normally kept covered with floorboards, and a simple table with a brass cross stood on top of it. But, on the great day, the marble steps and the baptismal were revealed for all to see, and filled with comfortably warm water kept at the right temperature by a small immersion heater. I was plunged beneath the water by the black robed minister (who wore his special, water-proofed gear for the occasion) and held there for several seconds. He then pulled me up spluttering, and I had been baptised. Marvellous... the congregation sang again – and the minister told me that if ever I did anything criminal and wicked I brought discredit not just on myself but on the whole of god’s church. When I had got out of my cricket-angel clothes, and been given a cup of tea in the vestry, I was invited to take communion – according to the Baptists, neither the body and blood of Christ, nor just a symbol either. My father liked that. He was especially pleased about the fact that the Baptists’ communion wine was non-alcoholic. In fact, it probably wasn’t – but as he could neither partake of the demon drink, nor deny himself “Holy Communion” he had to find a solution after his own fashion – so he avoided and problematic inquiry and insisted it was non-alcoholic. “Ribena, or something like that,” he once explained. Tasted like wine to me.
So that was my Baptism, and my father, rejoicing, presented me with a copy of the then recently published New English Bible, in memory of another event, which everyone assured me, forgetting my conversion, was the greatest day of my life. I was told how much more important it would prove to me than my marriage (sex without marriage being unthinkable) this being a marriage with the Body of Christ on Earth – the Church.
                                All this must be set in context. My father had crawled up on his hands and knees, out of Battersea Grammar School: he did so, he believes, because he was a “gifted” creature. On the way up to becoming a General Practitioner, he decided to hold firm to his faith. This was difficult for him. His father had been a small tailor, and his mother worked in a greetings cards shop. My father has and had nothing but contempt and loathing for the working class (I well remember him jeering at the “ignorance” of Trade Union Leaders when they decided to take strike action). He resented his parents for “not bettering themselves” and on occasions, obviously felt sorry for them – not being “gifted” as he was. Middle class values were what my father wanted: but, at the same time, his infantile infatuation with his own father persisted in his insistence on the Baptist religion and its accompanying morality. He once, in a rare moment of emotion, told me that all his life he had tried to be “inconspicuous” had “longed to conform” and admired “respectability” above all else. But this set of values, of course, was completely irreconcilable with the fact that he remained a “Non-Conformist.” Because this particular mid-line was so difficult to maintain, my father eventually found himself totally isolated. He oscillated between patronising the working-class, “simple bodies... poor souls....ignorant....” and attacking them with a vengeance, usually for their lack of interest in “CULTURE.” The middle-class, well, he never could learn their ways. He did not understand that if you invite people to dinner, they will only ask you back if you serve them something other than orange-juice with soggy cherries floating in it. My father was/is very conscious of the fact that he can’t behave socially like his “professional colleagues” whom, on the one hand he admires unreservedly as what he would like to have been, and on the other he affects to despise, for their drinking, promiscuity, ungodliness etc. But, such of the middle-class as he did manage to make his own (mostly his wife, his house, and the things he has filled it with) he clung to desperately as the most valuable part of life. Largely, it was money and what money could buy. Not drinking, or smoking, or going to expensive restaurants, or giving fancy women presents, my father found he had a great deal more of it to deploy than most of his esteemed “professional colleagues”. And money went to buy culture: culture in the form of books, and classical records approved by the appropriate experts, and visits to stately homes, and to the cheap seats at the Opera. Money went to buy Grecian and Roman antiquities, guaranteed by the Folio Society, a telescope for studying the stars, a tape-recorder for recording bird song, and a stereo-record player for playing the “approved” records. Money bought thousands (literally) of books on God, and most especially of all, money bought a great education for his 2 sons. They were to have not only all the wealth of the middle-class (which he had got) but its social graces too. In this great scheme, by father had still over-looked the difficulty of the mid-line. He did not realise that for it all to come true, his sons could not remain “Non-Conformists” like him. The paradox of the baptismal and Epsom College escaped him entirely – but that’s another episode.
                                I should point out that as a child I was an enthusiastic collector and a remarkably precocious expert on natural history. I filled my room with strange animals, and I knew a great deal about the anatomy of fishes. I also kept, with my sister, a “museum”. This was a wide-ranging collection which included sea-shells in great number, stuffed birds, dried animal bones, archaeological specimens, creatures in formalin – and fossils of all kinds, many of which I had myself extracted from quarries. Looking back, the first of the great steps which I made in my life was the realisation that the fossils were, in some way I could not fully perceive, incompatible with my most fervent anti-Darwinism.

Peter Fuller collecting specimens for his "museum".
                A lot of this will undoubtedly prove boring to you. I’m sorry. But there is no short-circuiting it. I shall have to mention my father’s attitude. My father has had one great principle guiding all his life. He adheres to it more firmly than anything else, and does so despite all the contradictions in which it lands him. The text which he has invented and made his motto is, “Avoid all controversial areas.” This goes with another constellation of obsessional characteristics. Firstly, compromise. Whenever crossing roads, my father boldly declares to anyone who is near him, “To the mid-line.” To which he proceeds, and at which he halts, often for a considerable length of time. My father has a deep fascination with mid-lines, but is quite incapable of perceiving that roads can run almost anywhere and that mid-lines are always most uncomfortable, dangerous, and futile positions on which to stand. And so my father called his children round him, and informed them that he had heard that Oliver Stott was teaching about the iniquities of evolution. He was particularly disturbed by the fact that my sister was parading a most violent and hysterical attack on Darwin penned by an associate of Stott’s, Leith Samuel, a reformed Jew, who had taken Christ into his heart, and ran an Evangelical Church in Southampton where he enjoyed a considerable vogue. My father’s position was of course that evolution was “a controversial area” and should therefore be avoided. He suggested that there was considerable truth in the Genesis story that God had created the world in 7 Days, [side note: This capital letter is an interesting slip] but did not fail to add that there was a lot of truth in Darwin too. We should avoid adherence to the Fundamentalist belief on the creation of the world, but we should in no way be seduced into a pagan acceptance of evolutionary theory. The best possible solution, the way to preserve our faith in Jesus, was to try and leave the whole thing on one side – which is, I am sure, precisely what he has done.
                Unfortunately, I can go no further with this tonight. You may well feel that I have wasted your time in the telling of this story, but I hope to continue it soon, at least until you become so irritated you tell me to stop. What I am trying to explain is really this. You reached your landscape very early on, by your own route, even if you were shocked to find that the valley was crowded with others waving distinct but related sketch-maps of it. My intellectual back-ground was the nineteenth century. The pre-occupation with the writers of that period I had at Cambridge was not a faked nostalgia for a world I had never known. The only book which mentioned revolution in our house was Carlyle’s text on “The French Revolution” – and that, interestingly, had once belonged to my grandfather (whom I never knew) and whose memory my father patronised on the grounds that “even for a man of his type, an uneducated person, he had read a little.”
You must forgive my anecdotal presentation: I want to communicate all this. And I have an end in view. If you can bear with me for a few letters more it would be useful, if not, I will abandon the approach. Meanwhile, there is one last story of great importance. You may have heard of Paul of Tarsus. You will certainly know he was converted on the road to Damascus, on which he had a vision. God appeared to him, and warned him, “Saul, Saul, it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” Saul was promptly struck blind – though it is true his blindness later disappeared. I was always fascinated by this story in my childhood, and I went to great lengths to discover what the good Lord had meant about kicking against the pricks. The bible commentators all say that the pricks are pointed sticks used to prod oxen when ploughing fields – but I was sensible enough not to believe them.
                                You will understand that Freud has greatly helped me in my comprehension of this infantile preoccupation. The conversion of St. Paul is indeed a transparent version of the castration complex, the consequences of rebellion against the father (blindness from Samson to Oedipus having at one level at least the same significance,). But, as you say, the map is not the territory; nor is the territory the map. You see, I know that once I did travel along the road to Damascus. I was born there. And I have seen photos of myself being held by my father in that very City. Probably, I was already kicking against his prick – or wanting to. To escape blindness, I certainly later made the Pauline mistake of letting Jesus...you know where. Can you wonder why I hate Jung so much.
                                More apologies for this letter’s inadequacies. But there’s more to come.
                                                Love
Peter

P.S. I cannot refrain from remarking that it is ironic that even as I wrote all this, Zionist planes were bombing Damascus. I have, of course, a political position on the war, though that would be another kind of letter. Meanwhile I pine irrationally over what will perhaps be the final obliteration of some telling scrap of evidence in the dust – evidence so infinitesimally slight (ten million feet-prints down) yet a kind of trace all the same. Never mind: it could never have been found on the territory anyway. The thorn-bushes have been over-built. And it still survives, somewhere, on the....map???

Dear Michael,
I ask myself, as I begin this letter to you, what is it that I am trying to get from you, or give to you – if anything? This sudden stirring is no accident. Somewhere it has something to do with a realisation that Marxism, too, is only a clue, though, it must be said, an essential and vital one. I picture the last few years spent, not altogether unfruitfully, inside Karl’s plaster globe, sniffing, as it were, at its weak points. Somewhere during my analysis, I said to myself, “Not the whole truth!” and I used a big hammer to shatter the plaster. Once outside, I realised a.) that it hadn’t been a caste of Marxism at all; b.) even if it had been an approximate representation, its so-called “global” moment was all to often a projection of infantile omnipotence on the part of those who claimed to have achieved an experience of it. (As a child, interestingly, I longed to have a Geographia globe. I was fascinated by globes, and I asked for one for successive birthdays and Christmases for several years. I have no idea why my parents never gave me one – but somehow, I was never surprised, and consequently never disappointed when they did not. But, looking back, a lot of my activity has been designed towards obtaining the denied Geographia sphere, which was, itself, only a substitute for a continuing infantile belief in my own omnipotence.) Anyway, with the big pieces of shattered plaster lying around me, I suppose that I remembered you : no longer a bourgeois deviation; no longer of the slightest shred of importance that “militants” like Big Ed Emery had turned against your poems; no longer matters to me that you don’t contain your experience of words within the obsessional structures of the class struggle. Or to be more exact – it is probable that I now feel that you are far closer to “real”? perceptions (far nearer Marx, even) than those who crusade under the banners of “political” activity : they do not understand politics. This is far from being a rejection of materialism, or any kind of collusion within the philistine, freakish opponent of Marxism who raise shibboleths like their own awareness and creativity etc. etc. in its place. But you can see that. Twenty six is too early to stop travelling onwards – but to do so, selfishly perhaps, I must reach back to things I nearly saw before. So, let’s look at Michael’s valley: more than that, it might partly be mine.

Liliane Lijn Young Universe 1962, 40.7 (h) x 48.4 (w) x 28 (d) cm, Letraset on painted metal drum, painted wood case, motor. Words taken from a poem of Nazli Nour.

Where I got to last night, I must go back to: the road to Damascus. But first an interesting recapitulation, a truly diversionary diversion. Yesterday, I had to cover an exhibition by Liliane Lijn, an artist, for Arts Review. Miss Lijn, in the top rank of “Kinetic Sculptors” has long been interested in rods, cones, and movement. Two groups of drawings in this exhibition attracted my attention. One was of designs for a phantastic sculpture with a functional purpose. Miss Lijn designates it, “The Whirling Wind Cone.” Her catalogue notes for it must here be introduced in full. “Two ink drawings for a projected sculpture which would fulfil the function of an electrical generator. The sculpture would rotate with the wind thus pumping water into a reservoir (or tank, depending on dimensions), and generating electricity. Made of a succession of flaps or wings which would catch the wind, these wings were meant to have a number of slits shaped in different ways so that as the wind passes through them, the whole sculpture would resound with sound. The idea being to provide a small town with energy on two levels: practical energy for physical needs and lyrical or spiritual energy for psychic needs. We spend much of our time working to provide ourselves with practical energy, the kind we can use, but very little time is spent on large scale manifestation and absorption of psychic energy. Without giving my intentions a mystic veil, I think that the greater part of what is called ‘art’ involves research into the field of psychic energy.” Miss Lijn, much to her admirers’ delight, also provided a number of “Industrial Landscapes” which showed an extraordinary preoccupation with valleys and cooling towers. Her comments on these drawings: “For many years I have felt that industrial structures such as cooling towers, power stations, electrical pylons, etc. were and are in fact the landscape monuments of our time. We no longer erect sculpture on a monumental scale, not even in our cities, not to mention the countryside, but these structures are built because of their functional necessity and more than often (sic) are connected with our use of energy. In a sense they are imbued with the meaning of their function. They often radiate another type of energy; the energy of a living presence.” Miss Lijn also exhibited two sculptures in solid steel, called “Koancuts.” They were cone-shaped, but the top of the cone had been sawn off. The structures had been cut and secured by an invisible, internal pin, so that if you swivelled them one way, they appeared to fall into a state of collapse, but one only had to swivel them the other way for them to be erect, and entire.

Liliane Lijn Zero Gravity Koan 2004, 250 x 150 cm base diameter, Glass reinforced polyester, Perspex, motorised drive and fluorescent lights

                                I am not going to go on for a long time about this, because it will already be perfectly obvious to you what I am going to say. Miss Lijn’s dealer was deeply offended when I suggested their might be so much as a trace of a phallus in all this – but the combination of cones, and interest in the two kinds of “energy” they produced, productive and, to make only a marginal adaptation, pleasurable, and a comparative interest in cooling towers in the landscape, did appear to me to be most intimately related to a combination of phallic preoccupations and considerations of the vicissitudes suffered by instincts in their progressive enslavements to the reality principle. “Koancuts” themselves, combined with all Miss Lijn’s grandiose schemes for inflicting the nation with “Whirling Wind Cones” also did not seem to be a million miles from the castration complex, and the particular severity with which that is experienced by some women.
                                Now, it may well be that it is possible to experience something approximating the “energy of a living presence” radiated by cooling towers. I am not denying that – though it can scarcely be “living” if it is a valid perception of that inanimate object. The point I wish to make is that Lijn earnestly believes she has achieved such an experience – and it is no wonder that she needs the veil of mysticism to cover up what, in fact, she has done. All this awesome talk about “psychical energy” and “living presences” in this particular case can readily be exposed as a perception of an internal reality. Her presentation of the experience as belonging to external reality has caused her to foolishly muddle, disguise, and confuse the nature of the latter. Your experience of Jimmy Horsfield’s farm may well be entirely distinct: I am almost convinced that it is. But when one encounters the work of a woman like Lijn, who can delude herself so entirely, and still retain her credibility, one is filled with doubt.
                I cannot proceed any further along the road to Damascus now, but hope to do so soon. I trust that you will not feel I have wasted your time by writing to you about this artist. It did seem important to the early part of our correspondence.
                                Love

Liliane Lijn A for Elm, 31 x 11.5 x 11.5 cm, Letraset and vinyl transfers, gouache on turned mahogony cone, electric motor.

Dear Michael,
                                The ardours of the autumn become intolerable: who needed Hopkins to know that it was not the leaves that we were grieving for. In the streets, I see all my young skin scattered across the paving stones. Growth gives way to ageing; the cells are dying. Life is a long Fall. These feelings of nostalgia; a yearning and a cutting off. I have heard people say, here, in this room, that they wish to return to the country to see more of the seasons, to watch the cyclical gyrations of the year in closer detail. Each autumn, for me, grows more painful than the last. The myth of rebirth is too shallow for consolation. There are those who know what the aim of all life is and those who do not, and the latter are the lucky ones. The fiction of growth ends before birth: there is no comfort to be found even in the fact that “natural death” is an unknown to protoplasm: rather the opposite; there is an escape, but the vicissitudes of human “living” have blocked it. Thanatos will win in the end; the preacher, thus far, is right.
                Here’s a snippet from Roazen’s Freud: Political and Social Thought, a useful kind of academic book. Better than most. In his introduction he says, “Reality is likely to be so much richer than any of the niggardly labels psychoanalysis has given us, that one must be quite sure that there is a net gain in using a technical concept. A conceptualisation can freeze out capacity for insight, as well as liberate our energies.” I toss it in as an aside, something for the joy of corroboration – everything is full of meaningful? mistakes today.
The papers report the violent action on the road to Damascus: half a dozen headlines this morning might have been ripped out as appropriate. Going back to the subterranean past makes me sadder – this sense of loss, which is, no doubt, in part the reliving of a separation from my mother’s breast, but has its own autonomous dynamic in the present. (The way in which adolescence co-incidentally, almost, repeated my infantile fears for me was quite remarkable. My poor mother suffered a cancer of the breast when I was about 12, I think it was 12, and both were removed in an operation. The silence of the family then. My father’s whisperings with the surgeons and his unspoken belief that she was certain to die. A greater loss even than her breasts was imminent.)
                                                Wednesday, 17th October 1973
Some days later – and your letter came. Hail painter of the past! Not just the dying poet in my womb but the dead painter too, by Jezus – and sometimes the half-man of god as well. Hmmmmmmmm. Something more to munch beneath a wintry sun. Good to know you, brother. Your comments on politics and Freud had me reeling with recognition. It’s too easy to put these things aside. I keep noticing in analysis the massive reluctance to drawing parallels between internal reality and external, but you are right – over Ireland particularly, where the “objective” politics is unknown and unknowable. It is precisely this which must never be said, in the left context. The biggest psycho-political drama of them all was the Death of A President: 350 books, and half a million assassination freaks still live and relive the events of that day. The death of the president is the clue, the act – and at the same time the irrelevance. The primal crime returns; the usurper, Johnson, is destroyed by national guilt – and Nixon, too. The American crisis has more to do with this one act than many would dare to admit. Kennedy’s successors are all the triumphant sons, dancing on the grave – and they have to be crucified. The most appalling revelations about the malpractices of the Kennedy administration will never relieve this collective guilt. Harry Kissinger should read Totem and Taboo – not that it would help him much to change things. Not to simplify too far you could put it all this way round. American capital, shuddering, no doubt on inherent contradictions, was given the great shove towards the rim of oblivion by allowing itself to stage a primal crime – all over again. There are those who regarded the Death of the President as a forgotten irrelevance in the panorama of bourgeois history. They are wrong. They should look to what happened to the appalling LBJ, what is happening to the worse Richturd Mylouse Nixswine : it’s an old story, and it’s relatively independent of class and imperialism. But all that’s just an aside. A soon-to-be-forgotten line of thinking cooked up on a wet Wednesday afternoon. The ludicrous thing is that the “Left” love psychoanalysis, yet constantly accuse it of its “bourgeois origins”. As soon as it makes an intervention in politics, however, they say, “Psychoanalysis, O.K. but not here. Don’t be ludicrous. Don’t talk about projection, introjection, identification, acting out, paranoia, and separation fears in relation to Northern Ireland. This is politics, man. This is class and Imperialism.” And the “Left” once again thereby demonstrates its reactionary enslavement to part of one clue. But maybe that’s necessary for the “activists” to change social structures first. I’ll come back to politics. I don’t understand your ecopolitics at all – I recoil at the very thought, with deeply saddening images of long-haired young men piling non-returnable bottles outside the Coca-cola company offices. But I realise that’s not it. You will have to explain, but listen: I want shitting in the middle of the room to come back. So they are raping the earth, and I want that to stop – but the people who are against raping the earth are also against shitting in the middle of the room. (So am I – but I recognise it as a menacing, usurious characteristic.) My father didn’t like the Cornish countryside because of the relics of our industrial past. I told you that. The problem about ecopolitics, tritely conceived, is that it is a new brand of the puritanical repression of all instincts. In the Beyond the Pleasure Principle bit, Freud points out that some diminutive infusoria don’t die a natural death (something which is biologically unknown apparently) but are killed by their own toxic excretions. If man cannot pollute his environment and die, where will his death instinct find its satisfaction? This is all simplicifaction and half-lies, but I suspect that ecopoliticians are planners of bloody deeds, wreakers of wilder destruction, plotters of some beyond-toxic catastrophe. There’s no doubt, they are on the side of death. I prefer not to think about it. You know the story of the Chinese delegation taken to view the terrible effects of pollution hanging over an American City. They fell on their knees in awe and wonderment, longing for the day when such sophisticated muck-making establishments would be built in Holy People’s China. Fuck, I don’t know anything about this. You will have to explain; it’s something distinct for you I suspect. But my own ambivalence about anal-erotism makes it harder. Definitely “harder”, this time.
                                I’m coming back to Russia, which I have tried to think about, and to much else in your last letter besides. But, unperturbed and onwards – back to the wretched, mine-scarred road to Damascus. The sweet-nothing of conversion has been left behind. Jesus flows through the arteries, drips to the ground every time I cut myself. Where now in the great adventure that leads to the far-off valley, where one has to march shoulder to shoulder with such strange bed-fellows, or something? So here’s the next slice of history. The next packaged piece from my past (a stupid woman actually used the phrase, “The next best thing since sliced bread,” to me the other day – so I asked her, naturally if she did not prefer French rolls, and, naturally, being a stupid woman she thought my reply obscene. I cannot understand where popular metaphors of this kind come from, especially when everyone hates sliced bread).
                                You do not say whether all this is tolerable to you. But I enjoyed your last letter. It was interesting, “interesting” definitely, this time to learn about interest: no doubt the relevant passages in the irascible Norman O. Brown have not escaped you. One last thing; a point of time at which these two roads meet, temporarily, shows what I have been saying to be true. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, you already had a sophisticated political position. Cuba was to be allowed its nuclear weapons. I remember the day well. I was playing rugger in the afternoon at Epsom, taken by a tolerant master who normally endured my ravings with considerable patience. I was however, convinced that these were the last days. I, too, projected all my omnipotent destructive phantasies on to what I could make of political events. I remember striking terror in all 30 pubertal youths running across that muddy field by shrieking about the Apocalypse. They believed me – the only time anyone has believed me at that school, and of course, it turned out to be a false prophecy. That night, I too wrote in 5 seconds flat, a few terrible thoughts. I had no idea whether Cuba or America was good or bad, and not the slightest conception of the fact that there was a revolutionary Government in the former. There was no reason why I should have known. Hang on – somewhere in my bloody files I can find the drivel I wrote that day. In fact it is dated 24.10.62: it appears to have been penned at a time when I was spewing words, over notebook after notebook, scrawling line after line of non-verse, going back to polish one or to gems to show admiring English masters. This then, from the raw Student Notebook of the time was the crap I was moved to write about the Cuban missile crisis. It was my first “political??? poem??” – which made it quite outstandingly bad.
                The Cuban Crisis                                24.10.62
Is this the culmination of the race?
The end of mortal man’s desires?
Is this the consummation of the age –
The touching of the stone of endless life,
The world’s predetermined destiny?
All my life, I’ve waited for liberty,
To live my life as I would live it
And as the sweet dawn of maturity
Rises o’er the deep damned night of youth
I see the mushroom cloud grow in the sky
And doubt that peace is anywhere on earth.
Russia, Cuba, America, who cares –
They’re all complete inanities for men,
Who rave for endless power – to die beyond.
A politically minded poet?
No – a man who sees the age is near death
Which tampers with the key to destruction.
O fools, does it really matter in this world
If this land is his, or that land is hers.
Is man too mad to be really happy?

I see that immediately after, I scrawled on. I did not consider these to be poems. A kind of outpouring- a private practice. What is interesting in sample number two is the clear progress of the projection of aggressiveness outwards, and the intense reaction formation within. The talk about dawns and noons of maturity was partly exaggerated by my hatred of the school. But it is interesting that I had to relearn all the real insights of these lines recently. The real crime was in childhood “omnipotent” wishes, they were the most destructive of all. These lines bear the same date as the above.

Goodbye World of Agony,
I take my leave of you.
Sharp my sword in (illegible word)
And wet my knife in blood.
You’ll not stick guns in my hand
And order me to shoot.
I won’t crush a fly upon
The window-pane if you
Should order me to do.
Do I care about you
Or the foolish ways of death?
Keep your blood filled chalice
I will drink the sweeter wine
Of blessed paradise.
The foul, cursed dream of childhood
Is fading as a mist
Scatters beneath the rays of noon.
I’m now a real man
Who knows this maturity
Which rises up in me.
War, death, blood, rape or murder
I will seek liberty.

What surprises me about this stuff, apart from its content, is that simultaneously I was writing extremely sophisticated, polished poetry for exhibition purposes. I had a remarkable talent for parody particularly, and could produce lines of Browning, Eliot etc. on demand. Yet, this banal sense, which handled the intractable material of my adolescence, was far more important to me. In a sense, I can see why. It was my equivalent to reading Freud now: the poetry rather than this stuff was the elaboration. The clichés, inversions and banalities had a special meaning given my baptismal background. Also, the freedom from all formal disciplines (which I had handled well since the age of seven) was important. The lines at first look like crap...but then, between 18 and 24 I would have found it much harder to have recognised that I did have a foul cursed, dream of childhood at all – or to have catered for my aggression so simply, in this way, too,
There’s still more to come,
Love,

Dear Michael.

                Last week, we were away in Bath and Bristol. On Tuesday, I sent you a letter – a short one – explaining that it was hard to write in the hotels and friends’ houses there – but on getting back home yesterday I realised that that note was probably wrongly addressed, being sent to 14 Heights Road rather than 14 Foster Clough. So you may never have received it, and someone had an interesting glimpse into our exchange of letters. The substance of this note, apart from interesting digressions on George Fuller, who warned me against you when you danced puck-like upon the table of the dining-room in the Garden House hotel, and Peter Blake’s fairies, was that next Friday, November 2nd, we are coming to Stoke, near Newcastle, for my brother’s wedding. That takes place at 11 a.m. on the Friday morning, and will be over, I imagine, by about 2 p.m. or 3 p.m. I thought that we might travel on to visit you just for the week-end, that is, arriving Friday afternoon and staying Friday night, and Saturday night, and returning sometime on Sunday. Do you think that is feasible? How would we get to you from Stoke, anyway? If it proves successful, perhaps we could come for a longer time in January or December. I hope the week-end will be O.K. because I am anxious (interesting word) to see you. How long would the journey take from Stoke to where-ever it is you are near? At least it cannot be as far away as Damascus. Forgive my punctilious rudeness in advance – but as I mentioned earlier I am now combating my rheumatic condition vigorously (there was more than a little truth in that aspect of Reich’s work). So, it must be at least a mattress on the floor, or a bed, but not just a sleeping bag on the floor. That request should freak ya.
                                I have received the published poems, but as I am writing this very soon after opening the letter, I have done no more than glance through them briefly. By the time I see you, I will have read them properly. Please do not think that the exchange of letters is petering-out. I have thought about it a lot recently, and unless you are withdrawing, which seems unlikely, I am just beginning. Did you notice the interesting co-incidence: just after our exchange on the Cuban Missile Crisis, we provoked another one. Enough to revive infantile omnipotence intact again!!!
                                So, once more to work: a little jet of verbal sperm, another squirt of words to mix in with the autumn pages. These leaves from a life-time deserve not to be forgotten or to be squandered in a transitory analysis. If we strike the rock, there is no saying what will flood out; where the oceans will divide; which tribe will be lost; or who will become the Moses-Freud. There’s nothing cryptic here. So, maybe, we should not have blown – but the process is too exciting to be interrupted. We’re into it now – and it’s great to realise that it’s too late to pull-out discreetly, wiping our moist type-writer keys for another thrust. The maps are emerging rapidly – inaccurate as they maybe. The woof and the warp of the woven past. What splendour, it all coheres!!!
                                I’m taking another road into all this – and I’m going to say something about confessions. It is important to resist the superficial, the secondary, the thought-crust styled contribution. So here is a sweet and sour diversion. Some years ago you made a dual confession to me. You told me, one day when you visited London, of two crimes you said you had committed against me. You may remember this even now.
One of these confessions concerned money which you said you had taken when I had given it you for posting Synthesis mail. The other was that when Colette and I had visited you in Cambridge some months previous to this, you had asked her for money, and received it from her. Now, both of these revelations struck me as surprising at the time. The Synthesis one appeared to be a purist act of conscience, and if I had believed that you had a vigorously strong and cruel super-ego, I might have accepted it as such. Certainly, there was no conceivable possibility of my ever detecting the crime or even suspecting it unless you told it to me. But, it was linked with the second confession, which was in many ways far more interesting. Firstly, Colette has no recollection of the incident at all. She never went out of her way to deny it – but simply could not remember. But, secondly, why should you confess it to me at all? Colette of course is entitled to do as she wishes with her money – and it was strange, in the first place, that you should have felt that this was a matter which needed confessing to me. Neither of these confessions could be accepted at face value.
                                The context of them as I am sure you remember, was undoubtedly the developments within that tripartite relationship. Firstly, there was the visit to Cambridge itself, and the events, or rather non-events, in the bed on the floor in the house there. Secondly, there was your historic letter of love to Colette, which followed some days later.
                                So, it strikes me in retrospect, the confessions were in fact devious means of fulfilling a phantasy. They appeared to be passive, open, and friendly, but in fact were aggressive. It was as if you were saying, “There, I really did seduce Colette after all.” But the only way you could tell me that was by as it were confessing it. The Synthesis crime involved taking something from me secretly which I could never have known about. Rationally of course, as the magazine had folded etc. when you told me, there was no reason for the revelation. It was really a triumphant kind of statement rather than an honest loving one. It could be paraphrased, “You tried to stop me, and you thought you had succeeded; you didn’t now a thing about what was going on. But I stole what you protected so carefully after all.” The second confession certainly confirms this – particularly as Colette could not remember the incident at all, and I still cannot see on a surface-conscious level what there really was to confess. Unless, of course, it was the same thing again, though this time more explicit, “Look, I not only took what was forbidden by you, but I did it with Colette’s consent. She gave me this freely. You were the one who was forbidding – but you did not succeed with your rules and strictures, because I got it from her anyway”. So your confessions became a way of fulfilling a phantasy even though, at an apparent level, they appeared to be quite different and to have an opposite function in terms of the relationship within which they were made.
                                You may be wondering why I am writing this. It is only because I wish to give a vivid example of how different confessions can really be from what they appear to be. The process is one of the most intriguing psychological devices available in the conduct of relations. It is, of course, very rare for the confessing party to realise all his motivations, but, “as a rule” the confession poses as being conciliatory and passive, whereas in fact it is the opposite. This becomes a banal fact if we look at less subtle examples. The husband confesses his adultery to insult his wife; the sinner tells the priest not some much to assuage his guilt, as to live through the sin again – though this time with a built in punishment for it. In these respects, the confession is often like the compulsive neurotic symptom so familiar to the analysts.
                                Before moving on, I have just looked up the “love Letter” to Colette written on 13th August 1969 – and found therein the proof of the above interpretation. It said:

“Dear Peter, I will try to make this letter as straight as possible, --- I thought of addressing a letter to Colette, & starting off ‘Dear, Dear Colette’ – probably I want to write in secret to Colette, but I feel I dare not transgress on property relations.....now it is clear to me that in relation to Colette I am a lover....So, in potential, however remote, Peter, you are thus rival, and I do not trust you.....”

Later on, it said, “I think I travel honestly, & when I meet opposition I give myself away.” So, I am convinced that my interpretation of the confessions is correct. The phrases about trust and property relations are particularly interesting.

                                All this has comparatively little to do with our own sweet history. It is, as I said, the best example of a confession that was not really a confession which I could find, one which I am sure that for your part, you will be able to confirm.
                                The confession, of course, which I am making here is my life. And I, too, am wondering why I am doing it, though I have no intention of stopping. We have moved through birth, Baptism, conversion and a little bit of my father. We have mentioned my mother’s breasts, and the landscape, and my love affairs with Freud and Marx. (I am sorry there are so many mistakes in this letter, but no doubt they are interesting in themselves.) And now, we must take it all further – watch the interaction with your confession – and see where we are.
                                The boring bit, which we were bound to come to sooner or later, can no longer be evaded. It may be summed up as EPSOM. Three years which were a kind of experience you could never have known. EPSOM has to be confronted. It is so much part of my past, so unbelievable and horrific, that I could never leave it out – though I suspect that public school reminiscences are tedious to all those who never experienced them. It must be like listening to an inquisition or concentration camp freak. Still, I am surprised I ever managed to move away from that context at all. The truth about that time was far worse than I depict it now. I do not know if you ever saw “If” but I remember coming away from that thinking that it was a pale shadow, a shimmering mirage of what it was like. A sort of pallid understatement – and then being shocked because all the reviews assumed it was exaggerated. Here are some random memories, all crowded together. Lower school could wear no handkerchief in their breast pocket at all. Middle school could have a white one, unfolded. Upper School could have a white one folded. Upper school in the sixth form could have a coloured one; house prefects could have a coloured one folded. Brollies were forbidden for lower and middle school. Upper school could carry them. House prefects could carry them rolled. School prefects could carry them rolled and walk with them as with a walking stick. The absurd consequence was that if it pissed with rain a school prefect would far prefer walking with his rolled brolly, as with a walking-stick, to putting it up to keep himself dry. The punishment for infringements was always the same – a beating. But these petty regulations were so jealously guarded and enforced by the inmates of the educational asylum themselves that the rules were rarely broken. I will not bore you with all the details, but life was limited and confined down to its tiniest details. Caps had to be worn out of school grounds (Upper school and above excepted, though in summer they tended to wear boaters as status symbols). A pillar box was situated ten yards from the school gates. Early on, before knowing the rules, I walked those ten yards to post a letter – and was beaten for it.

Peter Fuller Formanterra, 1972.
                                You have probably seen, on the covers of paper-backs, in films and articles, a depiction of public schools as places filled with green cricket pitches, afternoon teas, gowned masters, and rotundly speaking close-shaven youths. Beneath the patina of middle-class civilisation seethes the violence, the sadism and the rabid homosexual love. Well, it is all like that, only more so. One of the key events in my career was as follows: Campbell, the ultimate public school hero prefect was head of house. He led the cheer-leading in the day-room when the House won its silver cups. “TWO FOUR SIX EIGHT Who do we appreciate? H-O-L-M-A-N- Holman!” And everyone sort of banged on the tables and shuddered with excitement. Reich could have written the mass psychology of fascism there. Anyway, one day, after winning at rugger, Campbell returned to his study, known, for some reason, as “The Prefects’ Bin”. He yelled, as in the novels, “Fag!” And those who had that status had to come rushing to serve his whim. The last one to present himself got the job. At this time I was much given to reading Shelley and Bertrand Russell, and, as usual, failing to realise that the fag shout was on, arrived last on the scene. Campbell was sprawled in a chair and his personal fag was “brewing” – or making toast for him. He told me to take off his muddy boots. My one act of rebellion! I screamed and yelled and told him to take his own bloody boots off, and stormed out, slamming the door behind me. To you, no doubt, this seems an obvious reaction – but in the context of the school it was unthinkable. I returned to reading my Shelley. I then began to become afraid – and also, no doubt, to realise at some level that my protest was motivated not by sheer hatred but by the complexities of my father complex. I expect, although I would have denied it at the time, that I was craving the inevitable consequences. Anyway, I decided to apologise (I have always regretted that decision). I did so, and my apology was received in stoney silence. There were two forms of beating in the school. One was called a “Box-room” the other a “Common-room,” for comparatively minor offences. You were never told when it had been decided to mete out either. In the latter case, everyone went to bed, and the lights were put out. Then a prefect would walk along the corridor and call out the names very formally, asking them to put on dressing-gowns and come down to the common-room, official name for the Bin. The former affair was much more complex. It took place during prep – in the box-room, or changing room, and it was a much more savage beating, watched by all the prefects standing round the room like Gestapo. The punishments could be heard all over the whole House. For my rudeness to Campbell, I was called to the box-room – and, hating myself once again, I made a further apology, before the ritual took place. If only I had hit him, or kicked him, or ran away, or something, I would be much surer of my political positions than I am now. But, tragically, I was complicit with it all. Of course, all this may sound inconsequential to you – but it was in fact a pivotal event, with thongs, if that is the right word, stretching back into my darkest infantile nightmares, and forward into the sometimes saddening future. It was, like my Baptism, the fossils, conversion – and everything else, one of the key happenings in my life,
                                I’ll leave it there for the moment. These confessions are harder than you might imagine. There is so much to rid oneself from on the road to freeing libido. I am going to draw all by threads together soon. Be patient. Write again. See you soon,
                                Love,
                                                Peter

Chekezlovakia1989/90, Peter Fuller right