Heart of Darkness and A Humument fifth edition

Photograph Catherine Ashmore

 

Heart of Darkness was premiered with some success at Covent Garden’s Linbury Theatre. Reviews were generally enthusiastic about Tarik’s richly inventive score as well as the staging and set, the excellent band and the strong cast (especially Alan Oke as Marlow). Many reviewers also singled out for a mention (as does not always happen) that shadowy operatic drudge, the librettist.

Herewith a link to the Observer’s account (not on this occasion by their chief critic since one cannot be blown by one’s own strumpet) and one from that independent and often contentious blogger who sidles to his seat under the name of operacreep.

Tarik and I gave talks before the shows and it was he that pointed out that the first email exchange about the project was in 2002. Not quite ten years before the mast but a long haul. It already seems unlikely that this will be our last collaboration.

With the opera launched, Cicero published, and the Olympic Coin minted, time for fresh woods and pastures new: in this case to join those who have stumbled at the wide brooks and the high fences of translating Rilke. But this is an even longer venture hoping to have text and pictures for all the Duino Elegies (which the loftiest poet of the 20th century started in 1912) ready in a couple of years.

Meanwhile, the longest term of all my projects, A Humument heads for its fifth revised edition in the New Year. I have written a new introduction that has now come through a protracted battle with copy editors who do not like semi-colons. There are more than fifty newly revised pages. Although these were delivered with the introduction to Thames & Hudson only last week, the book has already appeared on Amazon.

October notes from Einstein Drive

Heart of Darkness storyboard, 2009.

I

Arte Povera is my watchword here since I bring (or have left there from last year) only basic equipment, a box of watercolours, a tube of white gouache, some paste and a bottle of acrylic medium, a few sheets of paper, a ruler and a scalpel, together with a small selection of brushes. Nonetheless it is amazing how in a day or two a neat office can be satisfyingly transformed into a chaotic studio.

A single artistic task will do the trick. In this case it was my much delayed response to an ever more insistent request to supply an image to ‘ident’ (as they told me) Heart of Darkness, i.e. to show possible backers "what it would look like".

I struggled with the idea; for a theatre production has no visual identity until a director is chosen who then decides on it with his or her set designer. Different direction might set the piece on Mars or Wolverhampton station.

Thus I had no image in mind that would allow me to bluff the matter out. However, after a day or two of calm at the Institute for Advanced Study it suddenly occurred to me that a storyboard with key moments pictured in different manners might be the answer.

These could be bracketed between the repeated set-ups of the Thames boat (on which Marlow is telling his tale) and the house of Kurz’s ‘intended’ which begin and end the opera; with a reprise of the Thames boat at the centre.

In the humanities library a kind librarian provided me with four or five copies of Zeit Magazin which she was about to throw out: these offered just the colours and contrasts I would need for collage. Three days later I had my storyboard complete, like a set of postage stamps.

When I got to New York the following Sunday and met up with Tarik, and walked the High Line with Charles and Bob of the American Opera Group everyone seemed happy with it and I could relax and enjoy the excellent crabcakes later served by Suki, our hostess in Washington Square.

II

With the storyboard done I returned to my revisions of A Humument. I have become a visitor to my own website (humument.com) where I can look at the stylish turning-page page-turner made by Alice from the most recent edition. There was a copy of the book only a few yards away in the library but I was pleased to find it to be out on loan.

When I started to make my reworkings of all the pages (I am well over half way through the process) the choices were easy since I saw better possibilities in Mallock’s text than I had initially found (sometimes as long as forty years ago). Also new opportunities of relevance have appeared, e.g. how was I to have predicted that the word ‘bush’ would (alas) come in handy?

Now I am condemned, as these pages get used up, to stumble on those that still appeal to me yet must, since the rules are the rules, be altered. One such is p.132 where I would have been sorry to part with ‘Mr Glad and his Mrs’. I can however imagine that Mr Glad’s wife passed away in the interim and that he has met a nice widowed lady called Mrs Hope. With a bit of strenuous redrawing, as can be seen here, I can now feature two figures instead of Mr Glad alone while not entirely losing the freshness of that first fine careless rapture.

A Humument p132, (clockwise from top L) unworked page, 1973 1st edition, 2009 revision, 2009 working drawing.

My painting XXXIII

As at 4.8.08

The ritual of augmenting the sombre rosters of Terminal Greys is the most frequent in my working calendar. It contrasts with the longest cycle which is the annual round up of 20 Sites just completed by sorting the slides (what's a slide, mummy?) into a first and second set (i.e. the best and next best photograph of each site). The first set is that now kept by the South London Gallery and presented here on the website (www.tomphillips.co.uk). The second, its shadow, is lodged with the Tate Gallery archive.


Quite early on (in the late seventies), as advertised in the above recyclable poster, the Tate started to host a lecture/performance by me of the piece as it progressed. This happened as the result of the support and enthusiasm of Richard Morphet and Simon Wilson, and continued biennially until 1995 by which time it involved the filling and refilling of many a perilous carousel in the projection room of the Clore Gallery. If the work should come into fashion again a lap top presentation (unimaginable in 1973) would be simplicity itself.


Here in 1973 and 2008 is site 3, my house in Talfourd Road, which is really a nest of studios which have gradually crowded out any sense of comfortable domesticity. The main studio, in which I am working on my painting, occupies the whole of the first floor. I am writing this in the nominal kitchen, an attic at the back overlooking a huge gingko tree which dominates the garden (a branch of which features in my portrait of Iris Murdoch). The smaller gingko seen here was planted in 1991 over my mother's ashes (for which, with the help of Jennifer Lee, I made a terracotta casket). This site alone features people I invite to appear rather than any random pedestrian. Here is Patrick Wildgust, friend, collaborator and currently the warden of Shandy Hall, passing by. His presence is appropriate since the house, in 2008, is acting as an outstation of Shandy Hall whose ghostly artist-in-residence I have mysteriously become. In this same kitchen I am at work on some new pages of A Humument to be shown at Shandy Hall in September (see events etc.). Patrick is, as it happens, in London today for the performance of Heart of Darkness at the Linbury Theatre of Covent Garden Opera House. This marks the end of a week of workshop sessions which have (opera swallows all) kept me from my painting and, more tragically, from the first two days of the Oval Test Match which in itself has been a ritual event in my life since 1948 when I witnessed Bradman's all too brief last test innings.