I FIRST CAME to Modern Nature a year or two after its publication in 1991, certainly before Derek Jarman’s death in 1994. It was my sister Kitty who introduced me to his work. She was ten or eleven then and I was twelve, maybe thirteen.
Strange kids. My mother was gay, and the three of us lived on an ugly new development in a village near Portsmouth, where all the culs-de-sac were named after the fields they’d destroyed. We were happy enough together, but the world outside felt flimsy, inhospitable, permanently grey. I hated my girls’ school, with its homophobic pupils and prying teachers, perpetually curious about the ‘family situation’. This was the era of Section 28, which banned local authorities from promoting homosexuality and schools from teaching its acceptability ‘as a pretended family relationship’. Designated by the state as a pretended family, we lived under its malign rule, its imprecation of exposure and imminent disaster.
I can’t remember now how Derek first entered our world. A late-night Channel 4 screening of Edward II? Kitty was immediately obsessed. For years she’d watch and re-watch his films in her room late at night, Jarman’s most unlikely and fervent fan, bewitched in particular by the scene of Gaveston and Edward dancing together in their prison, two boys in pyjamas moving together to the sound of Annie Lennox singing ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’.
It was the books that did it for me. I fell for Modern Nature at once. Returning to it this winter I was astounded to see how thoroughly my adult life was founded in its pages. It was here I developed a sense of what it meant to be an artist, to be political, even how to plant a garden (playfully, stubbornly, ignoring boundaries, collaborating freely).
I became a herbalist in my twenties under its lingering spell, charmed by the endless litanies of plant names – woody nightshade, hawkweed, restharrow – interspersed with fragments from old herbals, Apuleius and Gerard on the properties of the sorcerer’s violet and the arum lily. When I came to write my first book, To the River, it was Jarman’s voice I channelled.
In the early 1990s, Derek was always in the paper or on the radio. He was one of the very few well-known people in Britain to make his HIV status public, and so he became a kind of figurehead. ‘I’ve always hated secrets,’ he explained of his decision, ‘the canker that destroys.’ He was vocally incensed by the prejudice, the censorship, the lack of research and funds, but he was also charming, witty and full of mischief.
He feared the announcement would threaten the viability of his future as a film-maker, since he could no longer be insured. He knew too that he’d be the subject of tabloid hate, a visible target for Aids panic. It wasn’t paranoia. In his 2017 diary for the London Review of Books, Alan Bennett recalled sitting behind Jarman at the 1992 premiere of Angels in America. He’d slightly grazed his hand on the way to the theatre and was ‘desperate lest Jarman turn round and shake hands. So I shamefully kept mum.’ In the interval he raced upstairs and got a plaster, after which he felt able to say hello. Bennett relayed the story, he explained, ‘as a reminder of the hysteria of the time, to which I was not immune’.
It’s hard to express how bleak and frightening those years were. There was no internet, that addictive mutation of Dr Dee’s magical mirror. You knew so little. Even sick, Derek was a testament, blazing, blatant, to possibility. We looked at him and knew there was another kind of life: wild, riotous, jolly. He opened a door and showed us paradise. He’d planted it himself, ingenious and thrifty. I don’t believe in model lives, but even now, a quarter century on, I ask myself, what would Derek do?
*
Derek Jarman began the diary that became Modern Nature on 1 January 1989 by describing Prospect Cottage, the tiny pitch-black fisherman’s house on Dungeness beach he’d bought on impulse for £32,000, using an inheritance from his father. After decades in London, he finally had the opportunity to return to his first love, gardening.
At first glance, Dungeness was hardly a promising location for a besotted plantsman. Nicknamed the fifth quarter, it was a place unlike anywhere else, a microclimate of extremes, plagued by drought, gales and leaf-scorching salt. In this stony desert, overlooked by a looming nuclear power station, Jarman set about conjuring an unlikely oasis. Like all his projects, it was done by hand and on a shoestring budget. Hauling manure, digging holes in the shingle, he cajoled old roses and fig trees into bloom with the same irrepressible charm he applied to actors.
In its early pages, Modern Nature reads not unlike Gilbert White or Dorothy Wordsworth, a scholarly account of local flora and fauna mixed with scraps of antiquarian lore. Jarman had a painter’s facility for capturing the shifting tones of sea, sky and stone, and his sharp eyes were busy ferreting out unlikely abundance on the beach. Horned poppy and sea kale grew from the shingle; there were bluebells, mullein, viper’s bugloss, broom, gorse, lizards and dozens of different types of butterflies.
But as he explained to the painter Maggi Hambling, his interests did not entirely square with those of a stately Victorian naturalist. ‘Ah, I understand completely,’ she replied. ‘You’ve discovered modern nature.’ The definition was ideal, encompassing both reeling nights cruising on Hampstead Heath and the waking nightmare of HIV infection. His capacity to write honestly about sex and death – self-evidently the most natural of states – makes much contemporary nature writing seem prissy and anaemic. Derek still seems to me the best as well as the most political nature writer, because he refuses to exclude the body from his sphere of interest, documenting the rising tides of sickness and desire with as much care and attention as he does the discovery of sea buckthorn or a wild fig.
Building a garden was Jarman’s characteristically energetic, fruitful response to the despair of what was, pre-combination therapy, a near-certain death sentence. It was a stake in the future, and it also led him into remembrance of the past. As he reacquainted himself with the plants he’d doted on as a boy – forget-me-not, sempervivum, clove-scented gillyflower – he was cast back to the gardens of his own peripatetic and unhappy childhood.
His father was an RAF pilot, and the family moved often. As a child Jarman had lived in sprawling splendour on the banks of Lake Maggiore in Italy, in Pakistan and Rome. While billeted in Somerset, a wall of the house gave way under a tidal wave of honey, made by wild bees that had congregated in the attic. A sensitive child, Derek found in gardens a zone of magic and possibility, a ripe alternative to the violent regimentation of military life. He remembered building nests from grass clippings and poring over the luxuriant coloured plates of Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow Them on rainy days. His father bandied floral insults: pansy, lemon; once, or so a relative said, he threw his small son through a window.
A garden, especially a neglected garden, was also powerfully erotic. At prep school, miserably adrift, temperamentally unsuited to the code of muscular Christianity, Derek had his first sexual experiences with another lost boy, licking and caressing in muddy ecstasy in a glade of violets. The lovely feeling, the boy called it. Inevitably they were discovered, the first and most agonising experience of being cast from Eden, a trauma he replicated in film after film.
School. He called it Paradise Perverted: beatings in place of embraces, the miserable little boys in their poorly fitting suits torturing each other, starved of affection, estranged from their bodies. He carried with him into early adulthood a corrosive sense of shame, an inability to speak of, let alone act upon, his real desires. ‘Frightened and confused, I felt I was the only queer in the world.’
Modern Nature is suffused with regret for this wasted time, the strangulated years before Jarman finally gathered the resolve to come out at art school and begin – joy of joys – having sex with men, that still illicit act, the paradise regained of reciprocated desire.
*
The classical education Jarman received marked him in more benign ways, too. It’s plain even in the changeable weather of a diary that he oscillates continually between two selves, the rebel and the antiquarian. There’s the wicked scourge of the system, yes, the queer experimenter who delights in making Mary Whitehouse wince. But there’s also the traditionalist who doesn’t possess a credit card and hides the fax machine in a laundry basket, who grieves the loss of rites and structures, the teeming vegetable gardens of Kent made obsolete by supermarkets, the Elizabethan bear pit in Bankside torn down by developers.
Jarman is not exactly nostalgic here, and certainly not in the Little England sense. He was against walls and fences; for conversation, collaboration, exchange. As he says on the very first page: ‘My garden’s boundaries are the horizon.’ What enraptured him was a heraldic, romantic, maybe half-imaginary England. ‘The Middle Ages have formed the paradise of my imagination,’ he writes dreamily, ‘not William Morris’s journeyman Eden but something subterranean, like the seaweed and coral that floats in the arcades of a jewelled reliquary.’
As a student at King’s College London in the 1960s he’d been taught by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, whose knowledgeable eye could detect the multiple timeframes at play in every haphazard English city or country scene. To Jarman there were times when it seemed the past ran very close, almost touchable – a feeling he shared with Virginia Woolf and which he made manifest in films like Jubilee and The Angelic Conversation, his time-travelling enchantments.
England’s losses were melancholy. The sharper blade was Aids. Jarman’s diary is punctuated by death, the premature and cataclysmic loss of so many of his friends. ‘Old age came quickly for my frosted generation,’ he writes grievingly, and dreams often of the dead. On Thursday 13 April 1989, he records a phone conversation with his beloved Howard Brookner, the brilliant young New York film-maker. Brookner had by then lost the power of speech and for twenty minutes communicated by way of a ‘low wounded moaning’, a devastation magnified by the technological wizardry that couldn’t cure him but sent his voice speeding halfway round the earth.
Aids contributed too to a sense of impending apocalypse. Faced daily by the baleful spectacle of the power station Dungeness B, which one day appeared to explode in a cloud of steam, Jarman fretted over global warming, the greenhouse effect, the hole in the ozone layer. Would there be a future? Was the past irreparably destroyed? What to do? Don’t waste time. Plant rosemary, red-hot poker, santolina; alchemise terror into art.
*
But wait! I don’t want to neglect the other Derek, the mischief-maker, chatty and irrepressible as his neighbour’s thieving crow, flirting in Compton’s bar, gossiping and plotting over cakes from Maison Bertaux. He steals cuttings from every plant he sees, fulminates against tabloid editors, the National Trust, ticket machines and Channel 4 controllers, and then concludes disarmingly by revelling in his own good fortune, his late-flowering joy.
‘HB, love,’ a hospital scrawl. The deepest source of his happiness was the Hinney Beast, the nickname he bestowed on his companion, Keith Collins. Extraordinarily beautiful, Collins was a computer programmer from Newcastle. They met at a screening in 1987 and by the time the diary began were living and working together, shuttling between Prospect Cottage and Phoenix House, Jarman’s tiny studio on Charing Cross Road.
‘I’m an old colonel and he’s a young subaltern,’ Jarman told the Independent in 1993, for their ‘How We Met’ column, to which HB replied: ‘Our relationship is very unusual – we’re not lovers or boyfriends. I tell you what we’re like: James Fox and Dirk Bogarde in The Servant. I’m always saying things like: “If I may be so bold, sir, my quiche comes highly recommended.”’ Shadow-boxing, popping out of cars like a Jack-in-the-box, taking three-hour baths, in which he balanced bowls of corn flakes and prayed with his head under water, HB is a vivid presence in Modern Nature. He teases and soothes Jarman, cooks his supper, acts in the films and makes even the editing suite run smoothly.
Film was a more intransigent beloved. ‘I had foolishly wished film to be home, to contain all the intimacies,’ Jarman writes, but bringing his vision into the world required endless compromise and frustration. It was the giddy delight of the shoot he loved, the improvised, gorgeously costumed chaos, flying by the seat of his boiler suit, restaging images snatched from dreams.
The contemplative periods at Prospect Cottage were increasingly interrupted by a whirlwind of projects, as he attempted to squeeze decades of work into a handful of years. In the two years covered by the diary, Jarman made The Garden and the films for the Pet Shop Boys’ first tour, which he also directed, as well as beginning work on Edward II and painting sometimes five canvases a day. There was so little time, so many ideas to make material.
All this activity came to an abrupt halt in the spring of 1990, when he found himself on the Victoria Ward of St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, battling TB of the liver while the poll tax riots raged outside. His hospital diaries are notable for their ongoing cheer, despite what was plainly agony and terror. Dressed in ‘Prussian blue and carmine jimjams’, he logged the torments of sight loss and drenching night sweats with curiosity and good humour. Returned to a state of absolute physical dependency, flooded by memories of his own unhappy infancy, he discovered to his abiding joy that he was surrounded by love.
*
The diary ends in hospital, the opening litanies of plant names replaced by those of the drugs that were keeping him alive. AZT, Rifater, Sulphadiazine, Carbamazepine, the grim lullaby of the early 1990s. But Jarman would rise from his hospital bed and go on to make Edward II, Wittgenstein and Blue, his magisterial late films. He crammed much more than seems possible into the next four years, before dying at the age of fifty-two.
I wish he’d had longer. I wish he was still here, buoyant and fizzing, cooking up something out of practically nothing. The range and scale of his work is dizzying: eleven feature films, each pushing the bounds of cinema, from Sebastiane’s Latin to Blue’s unchanging screen; ten books; dozens of Super-8 shorts and music videos; hundreds of paintings; set designs for Frederick Ashton’s Jazz Calendar, John Gielgud’s Don Giovanni, and Ken Russell’s Savage Messiah and The Devils; not to mention the iconic garden.
There’s no one like him now. The other day I read a tweet from a journalist defending people who write gutter pieces by saying: ‘Journalism is a dying industry and writers need to pay their rent. We’re certainly not rich enough to choose our morals over the need to survive.’ I could imagine Derek laughing at that. His whole life was a refutation of her shabby logic. Imagine thinking morals are a luxury for the super-rich!
He saw film as a dying industry and still he kept on making them, not waiting for funding or permission but picking up a Super 8 and assembling a cast of friends. When he and the designer Christopher Hobbs needed a set in Caravaggio to look like Vatican marble, they painted a concrete floor black and flooded it with water, an illusion of plenitude that was somehow plenitude in its own right, because of its imaginative richness: a richness comprised not of hard cash, but of resourcefulness and effort. His entire fee for War Requiem was £10. He had enough to eat, what else was there to do but the work he loved? On always to the next thing. ‘The filming, not the film.’
Here’s another line that has stayed with me for more than twenty years. It’s from Modern Nature, and recurs in Chroma and Blue (Derek was an inveterate recycler of favourite shots and lines). It’s borrowed loosely from the Song of Solomon, a more gentle relic of the Christianity that had made his childhood so bitterly unhappy.
For our time is the passing of a shadow
And our lives will run like
Sparks through the stubble.
It’s how we all go, in and out of the dark, but oh, to have given off such a blaze.