Apartment 16

FIFTEEN

Something was taking a toll on Stephen. Dark flesh bruised his eyes, his face was too thin, and the movements of his head and hands were slow, as if everything about him as he stood behind the reception desk was delicate and required careful gestures. Apryl had begun to find this more noticeable, the last few times they’d met. And to pick up on his agitation, as if he was nervous around her. Anxious even. Not a reaction she was aware of ever having caused in others before now.
But then his wife, Janet, was ill. And she’d learned from Piotr in the middle of one of his attempts to chat her up that the couple lost their only child years ago in some awful accident. And on top of that, the poor man rose at six every morning to oversee the exchange of nightwatchmen and day porters, before working until six in the evening himself. A twelve-hour shift playing diplomat and servant to the residents. He had told her as much in his quiet, undemonstrative way. And though she did get the impression he liked to help her and that there was nothing inappropriate or amorous in his interest – it was kind of fatherly – she was beginning to suspect that her arrival at Barrington House was causing him grief. Not an inconvenience so much as a reminder of something difficult, even unpleasant. Maybe it was something in her American character that troubled a reticent Englishman.
‘Good morning, Apryl. Making progress?’
‘Oh, you know, two steps forward, three back. No, I’m kidding. It’s fine. Really.’
‘Well, you’ve certainly put your mind to the task. I saw the skip.’
One more day, I think, and I’m done.’
‘The new skip will be here by Friday.’
‘Thanks. Thanks for everything. You’ve been such a help. I don’t know how I would have got this far without you.’
He wafted the praise away, and almost smiled. ‘It was nothing. Glad to help.’
‘But I was wondering if I could ask you something else. About Lillian.’
He frowned, and returned his eyes to the ledger. ‘Of course.’
‘Well, she kept a diary. Diaries to be exact.’
He squinted and underlined whatever he was reading with a fingertip. ‘Oh?’
‘They are . . . well, pretty strange. Freaking me out if I’m honest.’ Her voice started to falter. ‘Kinda confirms the impression you gave me. She was like really paranoid. I think she was sick. Like really sick for a long time. In her mind.’
Stephen nodded sagely, but couldn’t conceal his discomfort whenever the exchanges became more than just passing the time of day.
‘But she often writes about other people in this building. There are no dates in the journals, but I’d guess I’ve kinda reached the seventies now. Just from picking up little details. And I was wondering if there are any residents still living here from way back then who knew her.’
Stephen pursed his lips and looked down at the desktop. ‘Let me think.’
‘Do you remember someone called Beatrice?’
Stephen nodded. ‘That’s Betty. Betty Roth. She has been here since before the war. A widow. But I’m not sure she knew your aunt. I never saw them speak.’
‘No way! That’s amazing. Beatrice is still here? She and Lillian were friends. Back when both their husbands were still around. I’d love to talk to her.’
At this Stephen winced. ‘It’s not often I hear that request.’
‘Why so?’
‘She’s a rather difficult character.’
‘And for you to say that, it means she’s a total bitch, right?’
‘I never said a word.’ Smiling, Stephen raised both hands palm outwards. ‘You can try, though I don’t think she’ll see you. And if she does you may come away either in tears or too angry to breathe.’
‘That bad?’
‘Worse. Her own daughter is the sweetest woman you could ever wish to meet, and she leaves here in tears after every visit. Her relatives are terrified of her. Most of Knights-bridge is and they won’t let her shop in Harrods or Harvey Nicks anymore. Not that she goes out much these days. And she’s the main reason I lose so many porters.’
‘But . . .’
‘I know. She’s just an old woman. But woe betide anyone who underestimates her. I think I’ve said enough.’
‘Thanks for the heads-up, but I have to try. She might know how my great-uncle died. And Lillian mentions a couple called Shafer. Pretty much said dynamite wouldn’t budge them from here.’
‘Well that’s true enough. They still live here and I’ve never known them go further than the shops on Motcomb Street, even before Mr Shafer’s hip replacement. They’re very old now and he has a nurse. He can hardly walk these days. He’s in his nineties, you know.’
But Apryl was still replaying Stephen’s remark about them going no further than the shop around the corner. Even so many years after she had written them, her great-aunt’s crazy journals suddenly resonated with something that was more than just paranoid fantasy. ‘Could you . . .’
‘Call them. Sure. Betty will be down at eleven thirty sharp for lunch. I’ll ask her then. She never misses her Claridges.’
‘Is that far away?’
‘No. Just the other side of Hyde Park Corner.’
Apryl nodded, unable to conceal a renewal of her discomfort. ‘That would be so cool. And say Lillian’s great-niece was asking after her. You know, family history stuff. And that she’d be real grateful for anything. Just a few minutes of her time.’
Stephen made a note on the desk pad. ‘I’ll call you upstairs. Or let you know if you’re passing.’
‘Cool.’
‘But I can’t make any promises. They tend to keep themselves to themselves.’
‘I understand. And there was one other person she mentioned. A painter who used to live here. Some guy called Hessen. Must be his surname.’
Stephen’s fingers paused as he scribbled his note on to the pad, but he didn’t look up at her.
‘You’ve heard of him?’ Apryl asked, her stomach tensing with excitement.
Stephen squinted, looked over her shoulder, then shook his head. ‘Painter? No. No. Not in my time. And we’ve no blue plaques on this building,’ he said, explaining how these signs commemorated the homes of famous people in London.
‘Uh huh. This would have been like ages ago. I think he was small potatoes too. Not famous.’
The desk phone began to ring. Stephen’s hand darted to the receiver. ‘You’ll have to excuse me while I take this call.’
Apryl nodded, trying to keep the disappointment from registering on her face. ‘Sure. I better fly. See you later. And thanks.’
She set out through the sodden green landscape of Hyde Park in search of a street called Queensway. It was in Bayswater on the north side of the great open common, beyond the Serpentine and through the maze of paths and trees.
Moving off the path and into the grass until it soaked through the canvas of her Converse, she moved at a diagonal trajectory, passing through an assortment of gardens, past the colossal Albert Memorial, and then walked alongside Kensington Palace where Princess Diana had lived. It felt refreshing to suck in the cold air. To see ordinary people doing normal things – nannies with prams, and children in their padded coats; joggers who staggered by, puffing, on steaming pink legs, or who strode lean and bony-shouldered past her. It wasn’t just her imagination – the further she moved away from Barrington House, the lighter she felt. Unburdened of the sense of gloomy enclosure in the cramped, brownish rooms of the apartment.
Taking a quick look at the white hotels and dripping garden squares and passing through a constant stream of tourists, she thought Bayswater would be the best place to relocate to from Barrington House. The idea of spending another night alone in the apartment made her feel sick with nerves.
She was scared of it. Afraid of the stained walls, the rotten carpets, and the silence so tense with expectation when night came. The prolonged incubation of a crazed and lonely woman had altered the place. Crumbling into dementia within the dour prison of her home where too many memories changed shape and flitted like spectres through the uncounted hours, it was as if Lillian had infected the place with a psychic damp that seeped its bottled terrors and paranoia into her own thoughts.
She couldn’t explain exactly how it had happened, or how her strange sensitivity to such things arose. But now she felt warm with foolishness at the absurdity of it all. That a place, a simple physical environment, could change her so much. But it could. Last night was proof again.
She wondered how she might explain her move into a hotel room to her mother. More white lies. The mere thought of breaking the news made her feel tired. Later, she could deal with that later. Because Bayswater had a kind of Mediterranean charm that she wanted to enjoy – even the sky broke into blue – and it seemed exclusively equipped for visitors from abroad. It was all luggage shops, chain restaurants and tacky tourist shit, but she liked the tall white buildings and Greek Cypriot groceries. She bought olives and hummus to snack on, from the Athenian grocery on Moscow Road where the old men behind the counter wore blue overalls and wrapped her purchases in white paper.
Once she’d bought an hour of time on a computer, and made herself comfortable with a cappuccino in the Russian Internet cafe on Queensway, she found that only three pages of a Google search contained anything relevant about a painter called Hessen. And there was only one artist by that name: a man active during the thirties in West London. He was known by few, but those still aware of him seemed enthusiastic enough. It was him. Had to be. The first name of her great-aunt’s nemesis was Felix. Felix Hessen.
Some guy called Miles Butler had written a book on him a few years before, so most of the links were to reviews of that book. It was published by Tate Britain, so she scribbled the details down: Miles Butler, Glimpses into the Vortex – Drawings by Felix Hessen. There was also an organization called the Friends of Felix Hessen. It was based in Camden and had a freakish website. All black and red graphics designed by an amateur. She read the gushing introduction about ‘Hessen’s rightful place as a great surrealist painter’, about his ‘contribution to Futurism’, and about him being ‘a precursor to Francis Bacon’, whom she’d heard of.
She clicked on the link to the biography, which ran for several pages, but there was no mention of Barrington House that she could see during an initial skim-read. He was a Swiss Austrian immigrant, but just about as obscure as an artist could be. For a ‘great painter’ he wasn’t exhibited in a single art gallery during or after his lifetime. His surviving sketches were now in America at the New Haven archive.
The biography webpage claimed his father was a successful merchant and sent the young Felix to medical school in Zurich. For some reason his wealthy parents then emigrated to England and Felix Hessen ended up studying fine art at the Slade, where he excelled as a draughtsman. The Introduction argued that his support of something called the British Union of Fascists, and a man called Oswald Mosley, before the Second World War, was responsible for a left-wing conspiracy in the arts banishing him into oblivion. Hessen was even locked away in Brixton prison for ‘acts prejudicial to public safety or to defence of the realm’ for the entire war. And there was speculation that he’d met the top Nazis in the thirties too – maybe even Hitler – to try and interest them in his art. Which they never liked. So he had to make do with being a communications officer for the British fascists, who didn’t like him either.
No wonder Reginald hated him.
After his release from prison he became a recluse at the family home in West London. And only his sketches from the thirties survived, along with one copy of some arts journal he started, called Vortex. It lasted four issues and had fewer than sixteen subscriptions when Hessen gave up on ‘a philosophical medium to ideas incommunicable in language’.
Apryl knew a loser when she saw one.
Hessen then disappeared in the late forties, but the website didn’t give an exact date. He was listed as missing by the family lawyer years before he was finally declared deceased in official records. The estate was sold by a distant branch of the family in Germany. He never married, never had children, and survived his parents, who both died before the war and before their son’s brief notoriety.
He was hardly mentioned in records of pre-war art either, although someone called Wyndham Lewis thought he showed ‘uncanny promise’ before they soon fell out, while Augustus John recommended his work to the Royal Academy, though Hessen had no interest in the institution. And in memoirs of the time there was only the briefest mention of him. One of the Mitford sisters, Nancy, thought him ‘unjustly handsome and vile’. He was even expelled from Crowley’s occult society, Mysteria Mystica Maxima, very quickly after they ‘doubted the path of his enlightenment’. Allegedly, he tried to bribe and then blackmail Crowley to hand over the knowledge required to conduct summoning rituals far beyond his status as a mere adept. Rumours in occult circles at the time suggested that Crowley did indeed impart both the knowledge and the relevant tracts for a significant fee in order to feed his morphine and prostitution habits. It was highly volatile material that the Great Beast Crowley had used himself, with some success, in a lengthy summoning ritual at Boleskin in Scotland, on the shores of Loch Ness, after a considerable period of fasting. A poet called John Gawsworth remembered Hessen being ejected from the reading room of the British Library for conducting rituals between the desks that had made the lights dim throughout the entire building.
But soon after the war he was gone. Vanished. Probably a suicide.
There was no mention of him being a lousy neighbour in Barrington House.
The Friends of Felix Hessen organization dismissed the Miles Butler book as part of the liberal arts campaign against Felix Hessen.
The website also published over thirty essays on his missing oil paintings, the sketches for which were allegedly only preparations for Hessen’s ‘great vision of the Vortex’. According to the website, the missing paintings were part of another conspiracy. They had been suppressed or hidden to this day by arts councils because of the painter’s associations with fascism.
The Friends met fortnightly to listen to guest speakers, and to take part in the ‘Hidden Landscape of London Sessions’, whatever they were. There was a meeting this coming Friday night in Camden on ‘Hessen and the Nazi Occult’, with a guest speaker from Austria called Otto Herndl. The phone number for a guy called Harold was given to call for details. Apryl quickly browsed through the other topics on the Friends’ forthcoming itinerary: ‘Felix Hessen and the Cult of Dissection’; ‘Banquet for the Damned – Felix Hessen and Eliot Coldwell’s Unseen World’; ‘The Puppetry Grotesque in Pre-war Painting’; ‘The Feral – An Eye For The Bestial’; ‘Surrealism and the Modernism of Ezra Pound – Glimpses of the Vortex’.
It all sounded like a load of Greek salad and she quickly found her eyes glazing at the unfamiliar words and obscure references. But she made a note of Harold’s number. He was a doctor after all, of metaphysics. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but he seemed like an authority on Hessen because he was the author of most of the essays and of a book soon to be published by the group.
But when she clicked on the link to the gallery of Felix Hessen’s surviving sketches, the back of her neck began to prickle. Once they had fully downloaded, picture by picture, she went dizzy and had to refocus her eyes. If she needed a visual depiction of her great-aunt’s persecution fantasies, of the hideous things Lillian described crowding and pursuing her back to Barrington House, then Hessen had drawn them in charcoal, gouache and ink. And he had done so in the thirties, before Lillian’s journals were even written.
Apryl stayed in Bayswater for the rest of the morning, drinking coffee and eating flaky sugary pastries. For hours she was content to stare through the rain-blurred windows of a Lebanese cafe. All the time trying to make sense of what she had first stumbled across in Lillian’s journals and now found on an obscure Internet site. She wished she’d never looked at the journals. But could not stop herself trying to figure out why her great-aunt and uncle had been so obsessed with this man who lacked a single redeeming feature and who drew the most awful pictures of dead animals, human corpses, and those puppet things that seemed to be a combination of the first two subjects. She hadn’t liked looking at them online, and now bits of them had taken possession of her memory. The image of something that looked like a dark monkey with horse teeth came again into her thoughts and made her shudder. Just looking at the picture made her think she could hear it scream. But suppressing the image only made a second appear in its place – like that thing, a bit like a woman, a very old woman, and more bone than flesh, looking up from a basement window.
Sitting at the little table in the cafe, she made a decision. She would read the Miles Butler book on Felix Hessen, the man Lillian claimed was responsible for making her life so wretched. She would go to the Friends of Felix Hessen meeting on Friday. And she would speak to anyone left in Barrington House who knew Lillian when she was younger. She would do it for Lillian. Otherwise, no one else would give a damn. At least she could spend Friday in Camden checking out the market before the lecture in the evening, where she could talk to one of these experts. Just to get a better sense of this artist – the man who drew those terrible things.
By noon there was one other thing she also knew for certain: she would not be spending another night at Barrington House.
In a hotel room in Leinster Square she forked through a takeout from a Vietnamese place on Queensway, sipped her Chardonnay and opened Miles Butler’s book at the introduction.
The paperback was only one hundred and twenty pages long and mostly filled with the prints of Hessen’s sketches. There had been no more than a dozen copies of the book left at Tate Britain in Pimlico, and all had been reduced. ‘Never did that well’, the assistant told her in the gallery bookshop. ‘Not most people’s cup of tea.’ They were about to be ‘remaindered’, whatever that meant.
‘My great-aunt knew him,’ she’d told the assistant, with a weird sense of pride. But he didn’t seem impressed at all.
From the gallery she went back to Barrington House to pack an overnight bag with some clothes and toiletries. On her way out of the building she stopped at the front desk to talk to Stephen, catching him before he finished his shift.
He didn’t question her decision to stay in a hotel. She suspected he was surprised she hadn’t done so sooner, considering the state of the apartment. Or thought that possibly he was even relieved that she might not be bothering him so much now. But he did tell her that both Mrs Roth and the Shafers had declined to see her.
‘But why? They knew her.’
Stephen had shrugged. ‘I asked nicely and said the very charming niece of Lillian was over for a while and would like to know more about her aunt, who she never met. But they said no. A bit mean-spirited, I thought. So I tried to talk them round. But that set Betty off.’ Then Stephen shook his head and looked more tired than ever.
What was wrong with these people? Didn’t the old love to talk about their memories? Apparently not. Her disappointment simmering, she took a cab up to Bayswater and checked into the hotel. After a hot shower – the best she could ever remember taking – she settled on the soft bed with the Miles Butler book. And immediately congratulated herself on her decision not to study it at Barrington House. It felt safer to deal with these things here. In another world, one clean and bright and comfortable and modern; the antithesis of the home Lillian could never escape.
Glimpses of the Vortex was much better written and less hysterical than the text on the Friends’ website. But the author didn’t include much more biographical detail than she’d already read online. Most of the text was an analysis of the imagery and symbolism in the surviving sketches. She found this difficult to understand and skimmed it because it made her feel stupid. But the illustrations she had seen online were all here on expensive shiny paper and all the more disturbing for it. It took a conscious effort to prevent her eyes wandering from the text to the relentless suggestions of the savage, the bewildered, the terrified and lost figures in the drawings. Those with elements of colour being the worst of all. When she turned a page, she got into the habit of covering the illustrations with a napkin so she could focus on the text. They made her remember whole passages from her great-aunt’s journals. And these comparisons were so disturbing she began looking about the bed and the small, well-lit room as if she suddenly expected to see someone standing there, watching her.
She shook the feeling off and skim-read the section about Hessen’s early medical training and the fuss a tutor at the Slade had made over Hessen’s drawing of cadavers instead of live models, and for having ‘no interest in beauty’. The only mention of Barrington House was brief – it was merely cited as the place where he lived reclusively after the war.
His imprisonment during the war, the author suggested, had broken Hessen and foreshortened his career as an artist: ‘Hessen was a privileged and acutely sensitive man unused to the stigma of being a traitor or the harsh conditions of prison.’ The only way Hessen could be studied was through his art – the actual drawings. And only through a study of them from a psychoanalytical angle.
His life was an inner life, and the only true glimpse of who he really was, and of what he tried to achieve, exists in his art.
It wasn’t what she wanted to read. And maybe the author was incorrect anyway. Maybe there was something else. She had a hunch an entire chapter of the painter’s life remained unwritten: the Knightsbridge years – a story hinted at in Lillian’s journals that could be backed up by the testimony of his surviving neighbours, if only they would speak to her. Maybe the others – this Betty woman and the Shafer couple – had seen his paintings too, or at least been told of them by Lillian and Reginald. A long shot maybe, but something she knew she should tell this Miles guy about. The back of the book listed him as a curator at Tate Britain, so he wouldn’t be impossible to track down if he still worked there.
She continued to skim through Miles’s interpretations of the art until she happened across anything specifically concerned with Hessen. And what little had been recorded about the painter portrayed him as irascible, unpleasant, spitefully vindictive, and ultimately indifferent to the feelings of others. His short temper was repeatedly attested to, and blamed for alienating what few remnants of friendship he had before the war.
He was already deeply withdrawn before his incarceration in Brixton prison under Regulation 18b, which allowed imprisonment without charge or trial. The author suggested that a bipolar illness could have already consumed him prior to his arrest, describing him as ‘exhausted, listless, paranoid, possibly even exhibiting signs of schizophrenia, and hypermania’.
An acquaintance and sculptor called Boston Mayes claimed Hessen didn’t appear to sleep and his face was cadaverous. He talked to himself in front of others and often forgot they were there. He was utterly distracted, absorbed and forgetful. ‘A mind at the end of its tether.’
There was evidence in some of the memoirs of Hessen’s unwise investigations in the twenties into Enochian magic and black magic. But apart from his sporadic esoteric, philosophical and political writings in Vortex in the early thirties in support of fascism, which pretty much sullied his reputation for all time, Miles Butler admitted he didn’t have much to go on besides the surviving drawings. And so it was these he tried to decode:
Hessen’s work was an idiosyncratic and deeply personal investigation of an inner vision, something he’d spent his entire adult life evolving. He prepared himself with psychic investigations while a student, and with extreme political disciplines afterwards, until he realized the answers he sought didn’t exist in any other ideology or set of beliefs. Philosophy and fascist fervour were, in Hessen’s opinion, merely vehicles that skirted round the Vortex – they were methods to it, or symptoms of it – preparation. And it was only through his art, with reference to occult ritual, that he even came close to realizing his vision.
The Vortex was a region Hessen believed to be, in effect, an afterlife, the true and final destination of human consciousness: a terrible, lightless and turbulent eternity that gradually reduced the soul to fragmention, in effect a perpetual nightmare in which an inhabitant possessed no control over their inevitable demise. Personality and memory became mere residues, and a final awareness was only able to register terror, pain, bewilderment, entrapment, disorientation and isolation. In effect, hell. Paranormal activity merely represented the last flickers of those lost souls, struggling to return to their lives at the edge of the Vortex, where the walls separating it from this world were at their thinnest and most permeable.
Another chapter detailed Hessen’s obsession with death. He believed his only chance of interpreting existence began with a study of its end:
. . . when a consciousness became aware of its end and the sudden consuming dialogue with extinction.
The best evidence of what follows this life is glimpsed in a death mask, a livid facial expression, especially if the eyes are still open. They give us a vague approximation of whatever we call the soul, and what it has slipped into. In these eyes I first glimpsed the Vortex.
And what we have become in this life, at the most profound depth of ourselves, determines our position at the next level.
From what she could grasp of all the psychobabble, it seemed Hessen was convinced of a kind of duality – like Freud and Jung, but in a more mystical and sinister way:
From his studies of psychic phenomena in the twenties, and of people who possessed the talent to speak in tongues, he believed two selves, in essence, were always conducting a simultaneous existence within the same body. The one shown to the world and called a personality was, at best, a flawed construct: an approximation of what we created, out of necessity, for survival. But when that was abandoned, at the moment of death or in the midst of madness, or another altered state of mind, or most often during sleep, the other self would be glimpsed.
Hessen spent his life trying to find it through any method of displacement at hand – through removal of the conscious self through occult ritual, or via hypnotism, automatic writing or painting. He had no interest in anything but the other self. And by communicating with it, knowing it and ultimately controlling it in this life, he believed one could achieve not only an awareness in the following existence, inside the Vortex, but the equivalent of sentience – or life after death – an animation that bridged both the mortal plane and the afterlife, that terrible region very close to, but concealed from, the naked eye and the primary senses.
Not easily described by logical or reasonable means afterwards, his art was to act as a pure and sudden glimpse of the ‘other’, of what was only ever seen in dreams, or in times of euphoria or mental disintegration. Of what actually existed inside the Vortex – what Hessen called the population of the Vortex. This was something only understood and interpreted by the ‘other’ – in his case, his art.
Despair, feelings of dislocation, altered states of consciousness, a psyche unravelled and paralysed by depression; all of these were aspects of the restless, infinite Vortex, and represented a closeness to its relentless surging around our short and inconsequential lives.
Sipping her wine and changing position to ease the cramp in her elbow, Apryl frowned as she went back to reread the earlier chapters about the surviving sketches; Hessen’s early studies of dead animals and human deformity. Even as a teenager at the Slade, using ink, pen and pencil he had been faithfully depicting the heads of dead hares, the bleached grins of skinned lambs and the horrors of congenital disease:
No classical nudes survive from this period, when it was compulsory to produce them at the Slade. Only his fastidious depictions of dead animals and human deformity have been found.
Stillborn triplets, the preserved faces of those who had perished through disease, and the bulbous skulls preserved by the Royal College of Surgeons were his favourite subjects. In all the awfulness of nature’s distortions visited upon children, he attempted to distil and re-create the full impact of specific images that caused horror and revulsion in an onlooker. The sudden uncomfortable surprise, the inability to prevent the stare, the gaping open perception and astonishment at the malformed: it was this reaction he wished to inspire.
‘It is so much more plentiful than beauty,’ Hessen had written in his failed journal. In decay and deformation and ugliness he found far more evidence of what existed within the Vortex.
Imbuing his obsessive drawings of cadavers and body parts with a peculiar life, he created an animism. As if, after life, after the end of self, a new animation existed through a sense-memory of the physical remains – a sign of what one would become after death, or rather, of what one would become trapped as, inside the Vortex.
And in the chapter about Hessen’s re-creations of animal and human hybrids that followed this phase – ‘the grotesque figures stricken by despair and painful contortions that gained Hessen a small posthumous notoriety’ – Apryl learned more than she cared to about his slide into primitivism.
Still controlled, his expression is not quite free enough from, or unconscious of, what he learned at the Slade while exposed to the Italian masters. ‘Figure Bowed Clutching Face’, ‘Toothless Woman Drinking Tea from a Saucer’, and his other earlier figurative drawings reflect his radical affront to traditional aesthetics and notions of beauty in Western art, and yet they only hint at his own voice, at the signature that would become shockingly apparent just before his work ceased. Here, towards the end of his surviving portfolio, his drawings are full and pulsing with an acknowledgement of the essential ugliness of mankind as he saw it, and the attendant isolation and bewilderment of existence. Subjects are barely recognizable as the people he’d observed in streets, cafes, pubs, and shops. Some of the figures appeared more canine than human. Others had limbs more reminiscent of the goats and jackals he’d drawn at Regent’s Park zoo, and the figures possessed the faces of apes. They were drawn with the surety of someone observing life, more than simply showing what had been imagined. Hessen himself claimed that this was actually what he had trained himself to see in those around him.
Apryl read on, uncomfortable with the mind the biographer was unravelling for her. A mind that had inflicted its terrible vision on Lillian and Reginald.
When he began to use gouache, ink, chalk and water-colours, ‘the influence of surrealism and abstraction on Hessen became visible.’
Miles Butler went on to describe the backgrounds in these works, with detail that Apryl found deeply unpleasant. She’d only begun to notice the backgrounds of the drawings the second or third time she’d looked at the pictures.
Half-formed misty landscapes drifting into a sense of a moving nothingness, of infinity, at the edge of each picture. Around the thin silhouettes at windows, or the hunched figures in corners or holes, he tried again and again to portray a sense of vastness. Never static but alive, seething, turbulent, cold and vacuous. There is an absence of shape or solidity surrounding and swallowing the claustrophobic studies of these figures trapped in dingy rooms, or performing seemingly repetitive tasks alone. Most are reduced to all fours and resemble apes or puppets, their faces pushing relentlessly against walls in a futile attempt at escape.
So he was a nut. But the last chapter about his painting was more relevant to what she wanted to know. Though no easier to read. Frowning in concentration, and ignoring her glass of wine until it had gone warm and tasted sour, she squinted at the sentences and often read them twice over, struggling to connect these bits of information to his influence on Lillian:
Why would a man who spent so long pursuing such a vision, and perfecting the line in order to capture it, suddenly stop creating? It didn’t make sense if he never considered his sketches to be anything but preparatory notes – preliminary studies before the greater work was attempted: a depiction of the Vortex in oil.
Maybe prison put an end to his frightening ambition, or he destroyed his own work. That was all the author really offered to explain the fact that not a single painting by Hessen had ever been found.
His intentions were clear in the surviving issue of Vortex, as was his frustration at the amount of preparation needed to equip him sufficiently to achieve the vision. But of course he painted at some point. He must have done. Hessen was too determined, too single-minded to be distracted from a work before which all else had become secondary. Was it really feasible that such a monstrous ego, with such an epochal vision, would never progress further than line drawings and gouache? Most probably these ultimate works were destroyed by the artist’s own hand.
He couldn’t have destroyed them, because Lillian and Reginald had seen the paintings. The author also questioned what Hessen did alone for the four years after his release from prison before his disappearance. These remained the two mysteries debated endlessly by his admirers and critics alike:
There is little information in existence about this period of his life. Even before the war, he was largely an enigma. And the few visitors and models whom Hessen allowed into his studio in Chelsea in the thirties told conflicting stories. The painter Edgar Rowel, who rented a studio close to Hessen, attested to seeing paintings he found ‘profoundly affecting in Hessen’s rooms’.
Contrary to this, not one of his acquaintances from his time at the Slade claimed he showed any evidence of ever having painted a single canvas. Nor did he ever admit to such. But contradicting this position again, a model called Julia Swan mentioned locked rooms, dust sheets, the existence of art materials, and the smell of paint and cleaning spirits in his mews studio in Chelsea – all the paraphernalia of a painter at work in his own lodgings.
There is also another mention of Hessen’s studio in Chelsea in the memoir of the French painter Henri Huiban, who assumed Hessen was a sculptor due to the loud noises he made at all hours. And there was a rumour of actual oil paintings spread by the alcoholic poet Peter Bryant, who briefly befriended Hessen at the British Library. He wrote of ‘giant paintings glimpsed in Felix’s darkened rooms’. But in the Fitzroy public house, Bryant was also fond of declaring himself the reincarnation of a Celtic king, so his testimony is, at best, dubious.
Giant covered canvases stacked together, but turned to face the wall, were also reported by Brian Howarth, an acquaintance of Hessen’s from the British Union of Fascists, who once called on him at his studio to collect some papers.
Infuriatingly, the book asked more questions than it answered, but at least the author admitted this:
And where did the artist go? How could a man of his wealth and position just vanish without a trace?
But traces did exist. Traces that were rapidly vanishing as time passed. It was becoming, Apryl realized, a case of no one having looked in the right place.