Derek Jarman's garden at Dungeness
Best known as a gay activist, writer, artist and filmmaker, Derek Jarman’s physical end in 1994 followed an heroic and well-documented struggle with AIDS. A last act was to make a film whose completely blue screen and soundtrack commentary was a brave testament to having gone blind. He lies over Romney Marsh in one of England’s most beautiful sheep-frequented chuchyards, in the towering presence of a two thousand year-old yew tree.
Derek Jarman
Jarman was a gay renaissance man, cheekily canonised by the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence in a shoreline ceremony before his clapboard cottage and lovingly created sculpture garden, where he managed to grow a profusion of bright flowers and herbs in the nuclear terrain of Dungeness. His journals similarly captured the vibrancy of gay life and gay politics against the backdrop of a Thatcherite Britain.
The rebel in Jarman was closely shadowed by a late 1940s, early 1950s upbringing, travelling to rather grand places as the career of his RAF father Lance dictated. This ambivalence showed itself in Jarman’s appetite for lying across Charing Cross Road protesting with Jimmy Somerville with members of Outrage!, his attraction to cruising and all the liberating elements of the thriving London scene, and a private reticence at betraying the values of his parents’ privileged world. In paint, celluloid and intimate writings Jarman wrestled with his vision of a new gay Jerusalem.
It was Jarman who took the homoerotic story of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, a young man pierced with arrows, featured in such gay literature as Yukio Mishima’s Confessions Of A Mask, to make the film Sebastiane in 1976. Not only was the dialogue in Latin, giving it a certain stylistic campness, but as a way of looking positively at gay sex, it was a pioneering British production.
When Derek Jarman became fully aware of the consequences of being HIV positive, his journals became an inner resource, vividly capturing every aspect of gay life, with ruminations on how many assaults of the virus his body could take. Through it all is a touching portrayal of the “true love” of his handsome companion HB, and of a rich social life enjoyed at the Ness. His listing of the curious names of plants and wildflowers, teased into life from the salt-wracked earth, read like a botany of the soul. Jarman noted how poppies are featured in a number of his films, including Carravaggio and The Last Of England, as the “bringer of dreams and sweet forgetfulness.”
Jarman's final resting place
Visiting Jarman’s beloved Prospect Cottage about a decade after his death, his garden, once so stunningly photographed by Howard Sooley, seemed sadly neglected. Perhaps the same can be said for his other works. Tilda Swinton, Jarman’s muse and early discovery in films, has gone on to moviestar heights - one cannot imagine her dancing on the shingle now. The articles of anti-gay legislation which Jarman challenged vociferously have become the relics of past Conservatism, like Section 28. His paintings drawn in the white heat of terminal illness are seldom exhibited, and may seem less interesting at a time of successful combination therapies.
The journals, Modern Nature and Smiling In Slow Motion are still worth reading, however, for beneath the fighting is a real love of beauty and of England such as no other gay man has fashioned. In every medium Jarman, to quote Horace, “enjoyed the power of daring everything.” The gay Jerusalem that came after Stonewall may have faltered in its tracks, but the blueprint remains steadfastly here.
By John Hartley
(c) Copyright 2010. All rights reserved.
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What do you think about Derek Jarman? Please feel free to comment below:
February 2nd, 2010 at 2:00 pm
A good friend of mine who stimulated my interest in Jarman in the first place has written to me saying: “Jarman was a supreme example of ‘the examined life.’ I always loved him more than his movies. Of course his work is worth attention, and like any artist’s work is a ‘work in progress’,never finished, only abandoned. He was important to me in my young and more confused years as an example of a gay person who did not compromise. He was an honest and authentic man, someone to be emulated. I will always be an admirer.”
January 19th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
Didn’t see that coming! All I can say David is, any publisher out there who thinks it’s a good idea get in touch.
January 19th, 2010 at 10:33 am
John - why don’t you write that book about Derek Jarman?
January 19th, 2010 at 7:44 am
Thanks almost. I hope this will encourage you, and others not familiar with Jarman, to look more closely at his work. At some point he will doubtless enjoy a major retrospective at one of London’s major galleries. A book featuring the recollections of many people who have interesting memories of meetings and encounters with him might work well too.
January 18th, 2010 at 6:48 pm
To be perfectly honest, I\’ve no recollection of having ever heard of him. However, another brilliantly written piece John and very interesting to. Thanks.