In 1970s New York, word spread of an “Andy Warhol of London”: a 29-year-old graduate of the Slade School of Art who dressed in boiler suits and lived in a derelict Thames-side warehouse where he threw legendary parties. Marc Balet, an American architectural student and soon-to-be art director of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, visited him during the summer of 1971. The two men were sitting out of the window, their feet dangling over the river, when Balet brought out his Super 8 film camera. The young Derek Jarman was entranced; though he’d long wanted to direct a film, he was unfamiliar with how to use a camera and hadn’t the means to buy one. He asked Balet if he could borrow it.
The story of what became of this aspiring filmmaker is well known. After shooting a series of experimental short films in and around his warehouse, he went on to create a string of low-budget experimental art films that are now considered British cinema classics, beginning with Sebastiane(1976), a historical film about the life of Saint Sebastian told exclusively in Latin, and ending with Blue (1993), a poetic rumination on loss and death. Triumphantly queer explorations of English myth and politics, his films were also fierce rejoinders to Section 28, and, later, the Thatcher government’s inaction during the Aids crisis, when Jarman and many of his collaborators would die.
Recent rediscoveries speak to the extent of Jarman’s early experiments in disciplines beyond filmmaking, such as visual art and writing. One of his early expressionist oil paintings, Picnic, recently turned up in an attic in Bath. Electric Fairy, his first Super 8, was rediscovered in 2008. And now Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping—the only short story he wrote—has been transcribed from an old cassette recording and printed for the first time by London’s Prototype Publishing.
Penned in 1971, when he was 29, it is a surreal and bizarre fantasy that follows an unnamed young, blind king and his faithful valet, John, as they leave their native Fargo and set out on a journey down the Superhighway, a version of the Wizard of Oz’s Yellow Brick Road. On their journey, they meet a colourful set of characters: a sweet tour guide named “Begum in flowered chintzes”, a haughty “Miss Century Fox”, and “Mr Dream” who floats “amongst the lily pads like an iridescent oil spot”. Events unfold with the loose, free-associative logic of a dream. Jarman chooses his words carefully; each sentence shimmers.
A key inspiration was the stark geometric scenery and resplendent costumes that Jarman designed first for Frederick Ashton’s modernist ballet Jazz Calendar (1968) at the Royal Opera House, then, later, for Ken Russell’s gothic historical drama film The Devils (1971). Influenced by the landscape paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and Paul Nash, Jarman’s sets of dayglo shapes and hulking monoliths bear some resemblance to the landscape of burning pyramids, funereal obelisks and electric pylons “gilded with pure gold leaf” he conjures up during the protagonists’ journey.
Although Jarman once hinted to a friend that the tale was autobiographical, if there are other elements drawn from his early life, they have likely been transformed beyond recognition. The infernal glowing billboards of “Movieland”, one of the first destinations for the king and his valet, were, perhaps, inspired by his first trip to North America in 1964, where Jarman had been both astonished and appalled by the experience of travelling the “subways at 100mph” and walking through “the electric wastes of / park avenue” at night. “Borgina Ginz” and “Sir Pa Sir Cur”, two raucous dinner guests whom the king and his valet meet later on, talk trash like the queens Jarman met in the bars and clubs of 1960s Soho. There’s also a brief cameo from “Crêpe Suzette”—a diva sat on a “zebra sofa eating a marron glacwho, four years later, in 1975, would go on to become the drag persona that clinched Jarman the coveted title of “Alternative Miss World”.
To read this novella is to catch a glimpse into the mind of the filmmaker as a young man, fresh out of art school, overflowing with ideas but short on money, and spinning new stories from the Pasolini and Fellini films he’d watched and the Shakespeare, Jung and Blake he’d read. Images, the more mysterious and fantastical the better, were what excited Jarman most. Rather than follow a conventional linear narrative, the novella moves quickly from image to image with a poetic, impressionistic quality that evidences a growing interest in collage. Though the quantity of images can be overwhelming, they are vivid and demonstrate his filmmaker’s eye: a golden-eyed boy wheels around in circles; men in dinner jackets scrabble through heaps of sapphires; flowers bloom, freeze, and crumble into dust.
Jarman wrote this novella a couple of months before he was given Marc Balet’s Super 8 camera. Not long after, he drove down to a beach in Dorset with a car-full of foolhardy friends, black fishing nets and tinfoil boats to shoot one of his first short films, The Siren and The Sailor. But tempting as it is to see this slim, 50-page volume as a rehearsal for the films that Jarman would go on to create, it is also a standalone experiment in prose fiction—with its own distinct pleasures.
To call the novella a piece of “juvenilia” would also do it a disservice; it is a complement to Jarman’s filmmaking, rather than an adjunct; a Technicolor enlarging of the unique world of queer myth and magic he wished to conjure, and not just its prototype. With every new Jarman rediscovery, we are lucky to spend more time there.
