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My Father's Head by Matthew Collings
Apr 2006
Following article originally published in Art Is Why I Get Up in the Morning (Mumford Fine Art, 2006) and reprinted in full in The Independent on Monday, 3rd April 2006 (Independent article titled ‘Sculpted In Time’).
I don’t know much about my father. A lot of it is fragments I remember from my childhood. Not from direct experience but things I was told. He liked the opera singer Tito Gobi and the Shakespeare sonnet that has the word bootless’ in the first line, but he couldn’t stand Eartha Kitt. He once took the teaspoon from his cup of hot tea and held it against my mother’s wrist and laughed at her expression of innocent pain and surprise. He was brought up for a while in Gibraltar. He was educated by the Jesuits. He committed suicide.
I always knew there was a bust of him by Elisabeth Frink, and that at one time they were going to be married. I only met her once. It was in 1977 at Waddington’s in Cork Street, at a private view of paintings by William Scott. I was still a student. I said, ‘You knew my father, Arthur Collings’. She asked about a mutual friend, Rachel Pinney, who had been my father’s doctor in Chelsea. Lis and Arthur lived together in a room in her house at 93 Oakley Street. It was Rachel more than my mother who often referred to ‘Lis’ in conversations with me about my past – Lis was an artist, she lived in France, she’d been my father’s lover. I told her I was at art school. She asked which one. She approved of it being the Byam Shaw, because they encouraged life drawing.
I think I might have seen the bust once or twice when I was a child at my aunt’s flat in Sloane Avenue. She worked at Peter Jones in the complaints department. She was a distant figure. As an adult I realized all my father’s family were distant – what was the terrible thing that made them all so alienated? Why did none of them ever rescue me from children’s homes, from the police, from loneliness? I associated my father with nothing but sadness. It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I began to put together a picture of him that was at least relatively more objective. I don’t know if there’s some terrible scandal that will one day be unearthed. Incest I suppose it will be. Or maybe it’s a generational thing, the Second World War, the way it dried everyone up emotionally. Whatever the cause, there seemed to be a deadening awful lovelessness surrounding my father or trailing behind him, that dogged him till his death in July 1955 at the age of 38, much younger than I am now.
Among his crowd in Chelsea he was seen as a romantic figure, good-looking like a film star, moody, fascinated by art. He fulfilled a stereotype. It was partly the culture of the time, which was literary existentialism inherited from Paris. Partly it came from what was going on in society generally: the aftermath of the Second World War, all the tragedy, death, bravery, etc. I suppose it was a way of positively mythologizing a horror to which there really couldn’t be any answer. In any case, my father was a romantic bohemian type, but he was also medically ill – he’d had an unsuccessful brain operation and he’d received a head injury in the war. Plus, unknown to anyone, a part of his brain that hadn’t been attended to during his operation was being attacked. After his death an autopsy revealed a tumour there. It could have been removed by surgery if it had ever been diagnosed while he was alive. It may have been the cause of his symptoms.
The brain operation was a leucotomy, performed immediately after the war. He came back depressed from a POW camp. It was in East Germany – the Russian army liberated him. I think he signed up for the RAF in the first place partly because he had some emotional disturbance in his life. Perhaps he was already suicidal. He had an alcoholic father and a domineering mother – the father walked out at some point and never returned. When the war broke out Arthur was in a reserved occupation, working as a draughtsman for the Admiralty. However, he joined the Pathfinders as a navigator. The Pathfinders was known to be a particularly dangerous section of the RAF. They flew ahead of bomber attacks laying down flares to illuminate the target. He was shot down, his parachute failed to open correctly and his head was injured. Friendly Luftwaffe pilots gave him cigarettes and looked after him for a while. He was in the camp for two years and suffered a breakdown there. He thought he was Jesus. He gave away his blankets. In Britain a psychiatrist examined him – he was free now so why wouldn’t he pull himself together? He was accused of malingering. He punched the psychiatrist in the face. Later the leucotomy was done. A leucotomy is a partial lobotomy. The connections between the frontal lobe and underlying structures are severed. It was widely used in the 1940s and 1950s to treat severe psychotic or depressive illness. Though it achieved some success, it left patients dull and apathetic; there was also a considerable risk of epilepsy. The operation was largely replaced by the use of psychotropic drugs from the late 1950s.
Arthur’s depression didn’t clear up. He had girl friends, he socialized and he was good company, often kind, often funny; interested in ideas and culture and history, and in psychology and what made everything tick the way it did. But he had dark moods, terrible headaches, he couldn’t concentrate, he couldn’t work at any kind of level of ambition or intensity. His inability to keep an even keel gradually caused him to be sometimes self-pitying and sometimes cruel. He caused scenes. He disappeared for days on drink binges.
He lived with Lis for three years. He introduced her to the Beaux Arts gallery. He had some kind of minor job there for a while. He thought Lis was a genius. But he became more and more difficult. He was always rowing and getting drunk and smashing her stuff up or stealing it to pawn it. He alarmed her parents and under pressure from them she ended the engagement and went off with a BBC guy. She still lived in the same house as Arthur. He would go to her room at night sometimes because he couldn’t stand to be alone. He hung around in pubs; the Queen’s Elm, King’s Head, Six Bells and so on, and got more and more despondent. The following year he met my mother, Rosalind Herdman-Smith, who was a student at Chelsea, and got married to her. My mother had been a nurse, she was ten years younger than him, very gentle at that time, and he wanted looking after. Lis was at the wedding at the Chelsea Registry Office with a lot of others from her and Arthur’s former crowd. Everyone was friendly and it was a good scene.
When my father died my mother was seven months pregnant. He just went out the door one day and never returned. After a week she felt she was going mad. Then the police called and said he was dead on one of the Channel Islands. He’s been secretly saving up the sleeping pills one at a time, which my mother served him each night. He kept them in a Swan Vesta matchbox, and then took them all at once. I don’t know why he did it in Jersey or Guernsey, or wherever it was: I suppose it just had to be somewhere far away. It happened at a bed and breakfast. I don’t know how he had the money to get there, or to buy drink, or stay at a hotel, or pay for a prostitute – the gardener told my mother he’d spent the night with one, a blond. His body was found in a flowerbed.
Distraught, my mother gave away or sold the head, along with other possessions, to a junk shop where it was found by Arthur’s sister, Hilda – who retrieved it, and it eventually passed onto Arthur’s brother, Geoffrey. It finally came to me a few years ago via Geoffrey’s wife, Elsie, who died a year or so after I went up to her house in Bath to collect it. When my mother saw it in my house it troubled her. It seemed to represent a knot of painful emotions – maybe it did for everyone connected to Arthur.
To me Arthur is a compelling figure, a myth, a tragedy – he’s where I come from. As a father he wasn’t able to do me any good and in fact by suicide he harmed me. I see other things in him though – my daughter’s character and features, her difference to me and her connectedness. What is inherited and what just accrues? Everyone has these questions about what we are and what drives us, and I see his head on my shelf as a kind of talisman of this eternal mystery.
But of course I see something else in it again: a work of art, Lis’s own self-expression or whatever it is artists offer us. Is it feeling, expression, experience or skill? It depends what the aims of the age are – what the current rhetoric of explanation happens to be. Personally I feel my father’s head contains all the things I’ve been writing about here but I know it very profoundly expresses or somehow stands for Lis’s own experience, the beginnings of her journey as an artist. She’d been at Chelsea already for a while, had been taught a certain method of carving by Willi Soukop – a wooden structure, plaster over that, then the application of cutting tools, then a coating of shellac to protect the material before casting. She’d done figures and birds, and was already admired and talked about. This was her first portrait. Arthur’s curly hair and handsome brow, his particular jaw, his sensual mouth, his excellent nose – a perfect, chiselled ski slope, which I have a blurred, comic version of, but which my daughter Babette has inherited exactly – all these are present, animated by a creative talent just beginning to burn brightly.
Image Below: Dame Elisabeth Frink, Arthur Collings (1952), Original plaster, Height 40.5 cm / 16 in.
