Читать книгу The Lonely City - Olivia Laing - Страница 13
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MY HEART OPENS TO YOUR VOICE
I DIDN’T STAY IN BROOKLYN long. The friend whose apartment I was staying in came back from L.A. and I moved to the green walk-up in the East Village. The change in habitat marked another phase of loneliness; a period in which speech became an increasingly perilous endeavour.
If you are not being touched at all, then speech is the closest contact it is possible to have with another human being. Almost all city-dwellers are daily participants in a complex part-song of voices, sometimes performing the aria but more often the chorus, the call and response, the passing back and forth of verbal small change with near and total strangers. The irony is that when you are engaged in larger and more satisfactory intimacies, these quotidian exchanges go off smoothly, almost unnoticed, unperceived. It is only when there is a paucity of deeper and more personal connection that they develop a disproportionate importance, and with it a disproportionate risk.
Since coming to America, I was forever botching the ballgame of language: fumbling my catches, bungling my throws. Each morning I’d walk up through Tompkins Square Park to get my coffee, past the Temperance fountain and the dog run. On East 9th Street there was a café that looked out over a community garden planted with an enormous weeping willow. It was populated almost exclusively by people gazing into the glowing clamshells of their laptops and so it seemed a safe place, in which my solitary status was unlikely to be exposed. Each day, though, the same thing happened. I ordered the nearest thing to filter on the menu: a medium urn brew, which was written in large chalk letters on the board. Each time, without fail, the barista looked mystified and asked me to repeat myself. I might have found it funny in England, or irritating, or I might not have noticed it at all, but that autumn it worked under my skin, depositing little grains of anxiety and shame.
It was such a stupid thing to get upset about: a minor artefact of foreignness, of speaking a shared language with a slightly different inflection, a different slant. Wittgenstein speaks for all exiles when he says: ‘The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.’ I was failing to make those complicated adjustments, those enormous silent shifts, and as such I was exposing myself as a non-native, an outsider, someone who doesn’t know the code word is regular or drip.
In certain circumstances, being outside, not fitting in, can be a source of satisfaction, even pleasure. There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure. Sometimes as I walked, roaming under the stanchions of the Williamsburg Bridge or following the East River all the way to the silvery hulk of the U.N., I could forget my sorry self, becoming instead as porous and borderless as the mist, pleasurably adrift on the currents of the city. I didn’t get this feeling when I was in my apartment; only when I was outside, either entirely alone or submerged in a crowd.
In these situations I felt liberated from the persistent weight of loneliness, the sensation of wrongness, the agitation around stigma and judgement and visibility. But it didn’t take much to shatter the illusion of self-forgetfulness, to bring me back not only to myself but to the familiar, excruciating sense of lack. Sometimes the trigger was visual – a couple holding hands, something as trivial and innocuous as that. But more often it had to do with language, with the need to communicate, to understand and make myself understood via the medium of speech.
The intensity of my reaction – sometimes a blush; more often a full-blown blast of panic – testified to hypervigilance, to the way perception around social interaction had begun to warp. Somewhere in my body, a measuring system had identified danger, and now the slightest glitch in communication was registering as a potentially overwhelming threat. It was as if, having been so cataclysmically dismissed, my ears had become attuned to the note of rejection, and when it came, as it inevitably does, in small doses throughout the day, some vital part of me clamped and closed, poised to flee not so much physically as deeper into the interior of the self.
No doubt it was ridiculous to be so sensitive. But there was something almost agonising about speaking and being misunderstood or found unintelligible, something that got right to the heart of all my fears about aloneness. No one will ever understand you. No one wants to hear what you say. Why can’t you fit in, why do you have to stick out so much? It wasn’t hard to see why someone in this position might come to mistrust language, doubting its ability to bridge the gap between bodies, traumatised by the revealed gulf, the potentially lethal abyss that lurks beneath each carefully proffered sentence. Dumbness in this context might be a way of evading hurt, dodging the pain of failed communication by refusing to participate in it at all. That’s how I explained my growing silence, anyway; as an aversion akin to someone wishing to avoid a repeated electric shock.
If anyone would have understood this dilemma, it was Andy Warhol, an artist I’d always dismissed until I became lonely myself. I’d seen the screen-printed cows and Chairman Maos a thousand times, and I thought they were vacuous and empty, disregarding them as we often do with things we’ve looked at but failed properly to see. My fascination with Warhol did not begin until after I’d moved to New York, when I happened upon a couple of his television interviews one day on YouTube and was struck by how hard he seemed to be struggling with the demands of speech.
The first was a clip from the Merv Griffin show in 1965, when Warhol was thirty-seven, at the height of his Pop Art fame. He came on in a black bomber jacket and sat chewing gum, refusing to speak out loud and instead whispering his answers in Edie Sedgwick’s ear. Do you do your own copies, Griffin asks and at this ideal question Andy comes to life, nodding his head, putting a finger to his lips and then mumbling the word yes to a torrent of amused applause.
In the second interview, recorded two years later, he sits rigid against a backdrop of his own Elvis I and II. Asked if he ever bothers reading interpretations of his work, he gives a campy little wobble of the head. ‘Uhhhh,’ he says, ‘can I just answer alalalala?’ The camera zooms in, revealing he’s by no means as disengaged as the affectless, narcotic voice suggests. He looks almost sick with nerves, his make-up not quite concealing the red nose that was the bane of his existence and which he tried repeatedly to improve with cosmetic surgery. He blinks, swallows, licks his lips; a deer in headlights, at once graceful and terrified.
Warhol is often thought of as being completely subsumed by the glossy carapace of his own celebrity, of having successfully transformed himself into an instantly recognisable avatar, just as his screen-prints of Marilyn and Elvis and Jackie Kennedy convert the actual face into the endlessly reproducible lineaments of the star. But one of the interesting things about his work, once you stop to look, is the way the real, vulnerable, human self remains stubbornly visible, exerting its own submerged pressure, its own mute appeal to the viewer.
He’d had problems with speech from the start. Though passionately fond of gossip and drawn since childhood to dazzling talkers, he was in his own person frequently tongue-tied, especially in younger life, struggling with communication by way of both the spoken and the written word. ‘I only know one language,’ he once said, conveniently forgetting the Slovak he spoke with his family:
. . . and sometimes in the middle of a sentence I feel like a foreigner trying to talk it because I have word spasms where the parts of some words begin to sound peculiar to me and in the middle of saying the word I’ll think, ‘Oh, this can’t be right – this sounds very peculiar, I don’t know if I should try to finish up this word or try to make it into something else, because if it comes out good it’ll be right, but if it comes out bad it’ll sound retarded,’ and so in the middle of words that are over one syllable, I sometimes get confused and try to graft other words on top of them . . . I can hardly talk what I already talk.
Despite his own incapacity, Warhol was fascinated by how people talk to one another. ‘To me,’ he said, ‘good talkers are beautiful because good talk is what I love.’ His art exists in such a dazzling array of mediums, among them film, photography, painting, drawing and sculpture, that it’s easy to miss quite how much of it was devoted to human speech. During his career, Warhol made over 4,000 audio tapes. Some of these he stored away, but others were transcribed by assistants and published as books, including several memoirs, the gargantuan diaries and a novel. His taped works, both published and unpublished, investigate the alarmingness of language, its range and limits, just as his films explore the borders of the physical body, its boundaries and fleshy openings.
If becoming Warhol was an alchemical process, then the base metal was Andrej, later Andrew, Warhola, born amidst the smelting fires of Pittsburgh on 6 August 1928. He was the youngest of three sons of Andrej, sometimes spelled Ondrej, and Julia Warhola, Ruthenian emigrants from what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now Slovakia. This linguistic instability, this parade of changing names, is a staple of the immigrant experience, undermining from the very first the comforting notion that word and object are securely attached. I come from nowhere, Warhol once famously said, referring to poverty or Europe or the myth of self-creation, though perhaps also attesting to the linguistic rent from out of which he had emerged.
Andrej had been the first to arrive in America, settling at the beginning of the First World War in a Slovakian slum region of Pittsburgh and finding work as a coal miner. Julia followed in 1921. The next year, their son Pawel was born, anglicised to Paul. None of the family spoke English and Paul was bullied at school for his accent, his mangling of American diction. As a consequence he developed a speech impediment so severe that he cut class whenever he might have to talk in public; a phobia that eventually drove him to drop out of high school altogether (years later, in the diary he dictated each morning down the phone to his secretary Pat Hackett, Andy commented of Paul: ‘And my brother speaks better than I do, he always was a good talker’).
As for Julia, she never mastered the new language, speaking at home in Ruthenian, itself a blend of Slovak and Ukrainian mixed with Polish and German. In her own tongue she was a strikingly garrulous woman, a magnificent storyteller and ardent letter writer; a genius of communication transplanted to a country where she could not make herself understood beyond a few phrases of broken and garbled English.
Even as a little boy, Andy was notable for his skill at drawing and his painful shyness: a pale, slightly otherworldly child, who fantasised about renaming himself Andy Morningstar. He was passionately close to his mother, particularly when at the age of seven he contracted rheumatic fever, followed by St Vitus’s Dance, an alarming disorder characterised by involuntary movements of the limbs. Confined to bed for months, he inaugurated what might in retrospect be termed the first of his Factories, those hubs of production and sociability he would go on to establish in New York. He turned his room into an atelier of scrapbooking, collaging, drawing and colouring in, activities for which Julia served as both rapturous audience and studio assistant.
Sissy, momma’s boy, spoilt: this sort of withdrawal can leave a mark on a child, especially if they’re temperamentally unsuited to the society of their peers or do not conform to gender roles. It happened to a future friend, Tennessee Williams, who never quite refound his footing in the shifting, sometimes perilous hierarchy of school. As for Andy, though he always had female friends and was never actively bullied, he could not in fairness be described after his re-emergence from the sickroom as socially desirable, a popular presence in the hallways of Schenley High School.
There was his appearance for a start: tiny and homely, with a bulbous nose and ashen hair. The illness had left his strikingly white skin covered in liver-coloured blotches, and as a teenager he suffered from the mortification of acne, earning him the nickname Spot. In addition to his physical awkwardness, he spoke English, his second language, with a heavy accent, which instantly marked him as coming from among the lowest of Pittsburgh’s immigrant working classes.
Can I just say alalalala? According to his biographer, Victor Bockris, Andy had trouble making himself understood right through his teens and into adulthood: saying ‘“ats” for “that is”, “jeetjet” for “did you eat yet?” and “yunz” for “all of you”’; what one of his teachers later described as ‘mutilations of the English language’. In fact, his grasp was so poor that even at art school he relied on friends to help him draft essays, assuming he’d even understood what the teachers had assigned.
It’s not easy to summon him, the Andy of the 1940s. He lingers at the threshold, slight in his creamy corduroy suit, standing with hands folded prayer-style against his cheek, a pose he’d copied from his idol Shirley Temple. Gay, of course, not that anyone had the terminology or sophistication to vocalise that then. The sort of boy who polarised opinion, with his confident, stylish drawings, his flamboyant outfits and awkward, uncomfortable air.
After graduation, he moved in the summer of 1949 to – where else? – New York, renting a slummy walk-up on St Mark’s Place, two blocks away from where I had my humiliating morning coffees. There he started, like Hopper before him, the arduous process of building a career as a commercial illustrator. The same rounds of magazine editors, dragging a portfolio, though in Raggedy Andy’s case it was a brown paper bag. The same grinding poverty, the same shame at its exposure. He remembered (or claimed he did; like many of Andy’s stories, this may actually have happened to a friend) watching in horror as a cockroach crawled out of his drawings as he displayed them to the white-gloved art director at Harper’s Bazaar.
Over the course of the 1950s he transformed himself by dogged networking and hard graft into one of the city’s best known and best paid commercial artists. In that same period, he established himself within the intersecting worlds of bohemian and gay society. You could see it as a decade of success, of rapid elevation, but it also involved repeated rejection on two fronts. What Warhol most wanted was to be accepted by the art world and to be desired by one of the beautiful boys on whom he developed serial crushes: a breed exemplified by the poised and wickedly glamorous Truman Capote. Adept despite his shyness at manoeuvring himself into social proximity, he was hampered by an absolute belief in his own physical abhorrence. ‘He had an enormous inferiority complex,’ one of these love objects, Charles Lisanby, later told Bockris. ‘He told me he was from another planet. He said he didn’t know how he got here. Andy wanted so much to be beautiful, but he wore that terrible wig which didn’t fit and only looked awful.’ As for Capote, he thought Warhol was ‘just a hopeless born loser, the loneliest, most friendless person I’d ever met in my life’.
Born loser or not, he did in the course of the 1950s have several relationships with men, though they had a tendency to fizzle out and were marked by his extreme unwillingness to show his body, preferring always to look than be seen. As for the art world, though he succeeded in having several shows, his drawings were dismissed as being too commercial, too campy, too weightless, too flimsy; too gay altogether for the homophobic, macho climate of the time. This was the age of abstract expressionism, dominated by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, in which the cardinal virtues were seriousness and feeling, the revealed layers behind the superficiality of the image. Beautiful drawings of golden shoes couldn’t be anything but a retrograde step, frivolous and trivial, though in fact they represented the first stage in Warhol’s assault on distinction itself, the opposition between depth and surface.
The loneliness of difference, the loneliness of undesirability, the loneliness of not being admitted into the magic circles of connection and acceptance – the social and professional groupings, the embracing arms. Another thing: he lived with his mother. In the summer of 1952 Julia had arrived in Manhattan (I’d like to say by ice cream van, but that was a previous visit). Andy had recently moved into his own apartment and she was anxious about his ability to care for himself. The two of them shared a bedroom, as they had when he was a sick little boy, sleeping on twin mattresses on the floor and re-establishing the old production-line of collaboration. Julia’s hand is everywhere in Warhol’s commercial work; in fact, her beautifully erratic lettering won several awards. Her housekeeping skills were less pronounced. Both that apartment and the larger one that followed quickly degenerated into a state of squalor: a smelly labyrinth filled with wobbling towers of paper, in which as many as twenty Siamese cats made their homes, all but one of them named Sam.
*
Enough. At the beginning of the 1960s, Warhol reinvented himself. Instead of whimsical drawings of shoes for fashion magazines and department store ad campaigns, he began to produce flat, commodified, eerily exact paintings of even more despicable objects, the kind of household goods everyone in America knew and handled daily. Starting with a series of Coke bottles, he progressed rapidly to Campbell’s soup cans, food stamps and dollar bills: things he literally harvested from his mother’s cupboards. Ugly things, unwanted things, things that couldn’t possibly belong in the sublime white chamber of the gallery.
He wasn’t quite the originator of what quickly became known as Pop Art, though he would soon be its most famous and charismatic proponent. Jasper Johns had produced his first encaustic, messy, painterly American flag in 1954, and they were exhibited at the Leo Castelli gallery in New York in 1958. Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Indiana and Jim Dine all had shows planned in the city by the end of 1960, and in 1961 Roy Lichtenstein, another Castelli artist, pushed even further in terms of both content and execution, ditching the human brushstrokes of abstract expressionism altogether to paint the first of his giant primary-coloured Mickey Mouses, Look Mickey, a cartoon lovingly replicated (though perhaps, considering the adjustments and clarifications that Lichtenstein made, a better word is purified) in oils, right down to the Ben-Day dots of the printing process, soon to become a signature of his style.
One talks about the shock of the new, but part of the reason Pop Art caused such enormous hostility, such a wringing of hands among artists, gallerists and critics alike, is that it looked on first glance like a category error, a painful collapse of the seemingly unquestionable boundary between high and low culture; good taste and bad. But the questions Warhol was asking with his new work run far deeper than any crude attempt at shock or defiance. He was painting things to which he was sentimentally attached, even loved; objects whose value derives not because they’re rare or individual but because they are reliably the same. As he put it later in his bewitchingly weird autobiography, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, in the lovely Gertrude Steinish cadence at which he was so adept: ‘all the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.’
Sameness, especially for the immigrant, the shy boy agonisingly aware of his failures to fit in, is a profoundly desirable state; an antidote against the pain of being singular, alone, all one, the medieval root from which the word lonely emerges. Difference opens the possibility of wounding; alikeness protects against the smarts and slights of rejection and dismissal. One dollar bill is not more attractive than another; drinking Coke puts the coal miner among the company of presidents and movie stars. It’s the same democratic inclusive impulse that made Warhol want to call Pop Art Common Art, or that had him declare: ‘If everybody’s not a beauty, then nobody is.’
Warhol emphasised the glamour of sameness as well as its potentially unnerving aspect by producing his common objects as multiples; a generative bombardment of repeating images in fluxing palettes. In 1962 he discovered the mechanical, wonderfully chancy process of silk-screening. Now he could dispense with hand-painted images altogether, transforming photographs by way of professionally produced stencils directly into prints. That summer, he filled the living room-cum-studio of his new house on Lexington Avenue with hundreds of Marilyns and Elvises, their faces rollered on to canvases covered in tonal splashes of pink and lavender, scarlet, fuchsia and pale green.
‘The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do,’ he famously told Gene Swenson in an interview for Art News conducted the next year.
AW: I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody.
GS: Is that what Pop Art is all about?
AW: Yes. It’s liking things.
GS: And liking things is like being a machine?
AW: Yes, because you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again.
GS: And you approve of that?
AW: Yes.
To like: to feel attraction. To be like: to be similar or indistinguishable, of a common origin or ilk. I think everybody should like everybody: the lonely wish lurking at the heart of this profusion of likeable like objects, each one desirable, each one desirably the same.
The desire to transform himself into a machine didn’t end with the production of art. At around the time that he was painting the first Coke bottles, Warhol also redesigned his own image, converting himself into a product. In the 1950s, he’d shuttled between Raggedy Andy and a more dandyish uniform of Brooks Brothers suits and expensive, often identical shirts. Now he codified and refined his appearance; playing not, as is customary, to his strengths, but rather emphasising the elements of himself about which he felt most self-conscious or insecure. He didn’t surrender his own individuality, or try to make himself appear more ordinary. Instead, he consciously developed himself as a replicable entity, exaggerating his physical appearance to create an automaton or simulacrum that he could both shelter behind and send out into the world at large.
Rejected by the galleries for being too camp, too gay, he intensified his swishy way of moving, his mobile wrists and light, bouncing walk. He set his wigs a little askew, to emphasise their presence, and exaggerated his awkward way of talking, speaking in a mumble if he spoke at all. According to the critic John Richardson: ‘He made a virtue of his vulnerability, and forestalled or neutralized any possible taunts. Nobody could ever “send him up”. He had already done so himself.’ Forestalling criticism is something we all do in small ways, but the commitment and thoroughness of Warhol’s intensification of his flaws is very rare, attesting both to his courage and his extreme fear of rejection.
The new Andy was immediately recognisable; a caricature that could be cloned at will. In fact, in 1967 he did just that, secretly sending the actor Alan Midgette out in Warhol drag to do a university lecture tour on his behalf. Dressed in a leather jacket, albino wig and Wayfarers and mumbling through his talks, Midgette did not arouse suspicion until he got lazy and stopped applying Andy’s signature pancake layer of pallid foundation.
Multiple Andys, like the multiple silk-printed Marilyns and Elvises, raise questions about originals and originality, about the duplicatory process by which celebrity arises. But the desire to turn oneself into a multiple or machine is also a desire to be liberated from human feeling, human need, which is to say the need to be cherished or loved. ‘Machines have less problems. I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?’ he told Time in 1963.
Warhol’s mature work, in all its many mediums, from the screen-printed divas to the magically random and quixotic movies, is in perpetual flight from emotion and earnestness; arises, in fact, out of a desire to undermine, undo, do over plodding notions of authenticity and honesty and personal expression. Affectlessness is as much a part of the Warhol look, the gestalt, as the physical props he employed to play himself. In all the eleven years and 806 pages of his vast diaries, the response to scenes of emotion or distress is almost invariably it was so abstract or I was so embarrassed.
How did this come about? How did Raggedy Andy with his weeping needs become transformed into the anaesthetised high priest of Pop? Becoming a machine also meant having relationships with machines, using physical devices as a way of filling the uncomfortable, sometimes unbearable space between self and world. Warhol could not have achieved his blankness, his enviable detachment, without the use of these charismatic substitutes for human intimacy and love.
In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he explains in very precise terms how technology liberated him from the burden of needing other people. At the start of this laconic, light-footed and remarkably funny book (which opens with the unnerving declaration: ‘B is anybody who helps me kill time. B is anybody and I’m nobody. B and I’), Warhol revisits his early life, recalling the babushkas and Hershey bars, the un-cut-out cut-out dolls stuffed under his pillow. He wasn’t amazingly popular, he says, and though he did have some nice friends, he wasn’t especially close to anyone. ‘I guess I wanted to be,’ he adds sadly, ‘because when I would see the kids telling one another their problems, I felt left out. No one confided in me – I wasn’t the type they wanted to confide in, I guess.’
This isn’t exactly a confession. It floats weightlessly, a play or parody of unburdenment, though it does explicitly conflate loneliness, the desire for closeness, with the desire for more or deeper speech. All the same, on he goes, spilling details next about the early years in Manhattan. He still wanted to be close to people back then, for them to open up their hidden regions, to share those elusive, covetable problems with him. He kept thinking his roommates would become good friends, only to discover they were just looking for someone to pay the rent, something that made him feel hurt and left out.
At the times in my life when I was feeling the most gregarious and looking for bosom friendships, I couldn’t find any takers so that exactly when I was alone was when I felt the most like not being alone. The moment I decided I’d rather be alone and not have anyone telling me their problems, everybody I’d never even seen before in my life started running after me . . . As soon as I became a loner in my own mind, that’s when I got what you might call a ‘following.’
But now he had an ironic problem of his own, which was that all these new friends were telling him too much. Instead of enjoying their problems vicariously, as he had hoped he would, he felt instead that they were spreading themselves on to him, like germs. He went to a psychiatrist to talk it over, and on the way back he stopped at Macy’s – if in doubt, shop: the Warhol credo – and bought a television, the first he’d ever owned, an RCA 19-inch black and white set.
Who needs a shrink? If he kept it on while people were talking it was just diverting enough to protect him from getting too involved, a process he described as being like magic. In fact, it was a buffer in more ways than one. Able to conjure or dismiss company at the touch of a button, he found that it made him stop caring so much about getting close to other people, the process he’d found so hurtful in the past.
This is a strange story, perhaps better understood as a parable, a way of articulating what it’s like to inhabit a particular kind of being. It’s about wanting and not wanting: about needing people to pour themselves out into you and then needing them to stop, to restore the boundaries of the self, to maintain separation and control. It’s about having a personality that both longs for and fears being subsumed into another ego; being swamped or flooded, ingesting or being infected by the mess and drama of someone else’s life, as if their words were literally agents of transmission.
This is the push and pull of intimacy, a process Warhol found much more manageable once he realised the mediating capacities of machines, their ability to fill up empty emotional space. That first TV set was both a surrogate for love and a panacea for love’s wounds, for the pain of rejection and abandonment. It provided an answer to the conundrum voiced in the very first lines of The Philosophy: ‘I need B because I can’t be alone. Except when I sleep. Then I can’t be with anyone’ – a double-edged loneliness, in which a fear of closeness pulls against a terror of solitude. The photographer Stephen Shore remembered being struck in the 1960s by the intimate role it played in Warhol’s life, ‘finding it stunning and poignant that he’s Andy Warhol, who’s just come from some all-night party or several of them, and has turned on the television and cried himself to sleep to a Priscilla Lane film, and his mother has come in and turned it off’.
Becoming a machine; hiding behind machines; employing machines as companions or managers of human communication and connection: Andy was as ever at the vanguard, the breaking wave of a change in culture, abandoning himself to what would soon become the driving obsession of our times. His attachment at once prefigures and establishes our own age of automation: our rapturous, narcissistic fixation with screens; the enormous devolution of our emotional and practical lives to technological apparatuses and contraptions of one kind or another.
Though I made myself venture out each day for a walk by the river, I was spending increasing hours sprawled on the orange couch in my apartment, my laptop propped against my legs, sometimes writing emails or talking on Skype, but more often just prowling the endless chambers of the internet, watching music videos from my teenaged years or spending eye-damaging hours scrolling through racks of clothes on the websites of labels I couldn’t afford. I would have been lost without my MacBook, which promised to bring connection and in the meantime filled and filled the vacuum left by love.
For Warhol, the Macy’s television was the first in a long line of surrogates and intermediaries. Over the years, he employed a range of devices, from the stationary 16mm Bolex on which he recorded the Screen Tests of the 1960s to the Polaroid camera that was his permanent companion at parties in the 1980s. Part of the appeal was undoubtedly having something to hide behind in public. Acting as servant, consort or companion to the machine was another route to invisibility, a mask-cum-prop like the wig and glasses. According to Henry Geldzahler, who met Warhol in the transitional year of 1960, just before he began his transformation:
He was a little bit franker, but not much. He was always hiding. What became obvious later on, as he used the tape recorder, camera and video, the Polaroid, was the distancing quality of technology for him. It was always keeping people at a slight remove. He always had a frame through which he could see them in a slightly distanced way. But that wasn’t what he wanted. What he wanted was to make sure that they couldn’t see him too clearly. Basically, all those personality devices he had, all those denials and kind of cagy self-inventions, were about – don’t understand me, don’t look into me, don’t analyze. Don’t get too near me, because I’m not sure what’s there, I don’t want to think about it. I’m not sure I like myself. I don’t like where I came from. Take the artifact as I’m giving it.
But unlike the television, which was static and domestic, a transmitter merely, these new machines also allowed him to record the world around him, to capture and hoard the messy, covetable litter of experience. His favourite was the tape-recorder, a device that so radically transformed his need for people that he nicknamed it my wife.
I didn’t get married until 1964 when I got my first tape recorder. My wife. My tape recorder and I have been married for ten years now. When I say ‘we,’ I mean my tape recorder and me. A lot of people don’t understand that . . . The acquisition of my tape recorder really finished whatever emotional life I might have had, but I was glad to see it go. Nothing was ever a problem again, because a problem just meant a good tape and when a problem transforms itself into a good tape it’s not a problem any more.
The tape machine, which in fact entered his life in 1965 (a gift from the makers, Philips), was the ideal intermediary. It served as a buffer, a way of keeping people at one remove, at once diverting and inoculating the flow of potentially infectious or invasive words that had so agitated him prior to the purchase of the television. Warhol hated waste, and he liked to make art out of what other people considered superfluous, if not actually trash. Now he could capture the social butterflies, the proto-Superstars who’d begun to gather around him, storing their unscripted selves, their charismatic effluvia on the preservative medium of magnetic tape.
By this time he was no longer working at home, painting pictures with his mother, but had instead moved his studio operation on to the fifth floor of a dirty, dingy, barely furnished warehouse on East 47th Street, in that dismal part of Midtown near the UN, its crumbling walls meticulously covered with silver foil, silver Mylar and silver paint.
The Silver Factory was the most sociable and least bounded of all of Warhol’s working spaces. It was permanently thronged with people: people helping out or killing time, people lolling on the couch or chatting on the phone while Andy laboured in a corner, making Marilyns or cow wallpaper, frequently pausing to ask a passer-by what they thought he should do next. Stephen Shore again: ‘My guess is that it helped him in his work to have people around, to have these other activities around him.’ And Andy himself: ‘I don’t really feel all these people with me every day at the Factory are just hanging around me. I’m more hanging around them . . . I think we’re in a vacuum here at the Factory: it’s great. I like being in a vacuum; it leaves me alone to work.’
Alone in a crowd; hungry for company but ambivalent about contact: it’s not surprising that in the Silver Factory years Warhol acquired the nickname Drella, a portmanteau of Cinderella, the girl left behind in the kitchen while everyone else has gone to the ball, and Dracula, who gains his nourishment from the living essence of other human beings. He’d always been acquisitive about people, especially if they were beautiful or famous or powerful or witty; had always desired proximity, access, a better view. (Mary Woronov, in her terrifying amphetamine-memoir of the Factory years, Swimming Underground: ‘Andy was the worst . . . He even looked like a vampire: white, empty, waiting to be filled, incapable of satisfaction. He was the white worm – always hungry, always cold, never still, always twisting.’) Now he had the tools to take possession, ameliorating loneliness without ever having to risk himself.
*
Language is communal. It is not possible to have a wholly private language. This is the theory put forward by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations, a rebuttal of Descartes’s notion of the lonely self, trapped in the prison of the body, uncertain that anyone else exists. Impossible, says Wittgenstein. We cannot think without language, and language is by its nature a public game, both in terms of acquisition and transmission.
But despite its shared nature, language is also dangerous, a potentially isolating enterprise. Not all players are equal. In fact, Wittgenstein was by no means always a successful participant himself, frequently experiencing extreme difficulty in communication and expression. In an essay on fear and public language, the critic Rei Terada describes a scene repeated throughout Wittgenstein’s life, in which he would begin to stammer while attempting to address a group of colleagues. Eventually, his stuttering would give way to a tense silence, during which he would struggle mutely with his thoughts, gesticulating all the while with his hands, as if he was still speaking audibly.
The fear of being misunderstood or failing to generate understanding haunted Wittgenstein. As Terada observes, his ‘confidence in the stability and public character of language coexisted, it would seem, with a dreadful expectation that he would himself be unintelligible’. He had a horror of certain kinds of language, in particular ‘idle talk and unintelligibility’; talk that lacked substance or failed to produce meaning.
The idea that language is a game at which some players are more skilled than others has a bearing on the vexed relationship between loneliness and speech. Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants.
Though Warhol shared many of Wittgenstein’s problems with speech production, he retained a typically perverse fondness for language errors. He was fascinated by empty or deformed language, by chatter and trash, by glitches and botches in conversation. The films he made in the early 1960s are full of people failing to understand or listen to each other, an investigative process that sharpened with the arrival of the tape machine. The first thing he did with his new wife was to make a book, entitled a, a novel, composed entirely of recorded speech; a celebratory tour de force of idle and unintelligible language, around which loneliness hovers like a sea mist.
Despite the declaration of the title, a isn’t a novel in any ordinary sense. It isn’t fictional, for a start. It doesn’t have a plot and nor is it a product of creative labour, at least not in the way that term is ordinarily defined. Like Warhol’s paintings of inappropriate objects or wholly static films it defies the rules of content, the terms by which categories are assembled and maintained.
It was conceived as an homage to Ondine, Robert Olivo, nicknamed the Pope, the irrepressible speed-queen and greatest of all the Factory’s supernaturally gifted talkers. Charming and unstable, he appeared in many of Warhol’s films of the period, most notably Chelsea Girls, in which he can be seen flying into one of his notorious rages and slapping Rona Page twice around the face for calling him a phoney.
Ondine was a quicksilver presence. A photograph taken around the time of a’s taping catches him in a rare moment of stillness, out in the street, head turned to confront the camera – a handsome man in aviators and a black t-shirt, his dark hair falling in a quiff over his eyes, an airline flight bag slung over his shoulder, his mouth in the characteristic pout-cum-smirk that Warhol describes in POPism as being ‘pure Ondine, a sort of quizzical duck’s mouth with deep smile lines around it’.
The original plan was to follow him for twenty-four hours straight. Recording began in the afternoon of Friday, 12 August 1965, but after twelve hours and despite copious consumption of amphetamines Ondine began to flag (‘you have finished me off’). The remainder was taped later, in three sessions over the summer of 1966 and one in May 1967. The twenty-four cassettes were then transcribed by four different typists, all of them young women. The pool comprised Maureen Tucker, later the drummer in The Velvet Underground, Susan Pile, a student at Barnard, and two high school girls. They approached their task in a variety of ways, some erratically identifying speakers and some failing to distinguish between voices at all. None were professional typists. Tucker refused to transcribe swear words, while one of the girls’ mothers threw away an entire section, horrified by the language.
Warhol insisted that all these errors be preserved, alongside the many infelicities of transcription and spelling. As such, a is resistant if not actively antagonistic to the production of understanding. Reading it is confusing, amusing, baffling, alienating, boring, infuriating, thrilling; a crash course in how speech binds and isolates, conjoins and freezes out.
Where are we? Hard to tell. In the street, in a coffee shop, in a cab, on a roof terrace, in a bathtub, on the phone, at a party, surrounded by people popping pills and playing opera at full blast. Everywhere is the same place really: the empire of the Silver Factory. But you have to imagine the interiors. No one describes their location, just as in a conversation one doesn’t stop to itemise the elements of the room in which it’s taking place.
The effect is like being shipwrecked in a sea of voices, a surf of unattributed speech. Voices in the background, voices vying for space, voices drowned out by opera, inconsequential voices, unintelligible garble, voices running into one another: an endless barrage of gossip, anecdote, confession, flirtation, plan; language taken to the threshold of meaning, abandoned language, language past the point of caring, language disintegrating into pure sound; OW-UH-mmmmm. I dunno what the wor dis. Oooooo-mmm-mmm, through which the voice of Maria Callas perpetually seeps, itself gloriously deformed.
Who’s talking? Drella, Taxi, Lucky, Rotten, the Duchess, DoDo, the Sugar Plum Fairy, Billy Name, a parade of cryptic, unstable nicknames and noms de plume. Do you understand or don’t you? Are you in or out? Like any game, it’s all about belonging. ‘The only way to talk is to talk in games, it’s just fabulous,’ Ondine says and Edie Sedgwick, disguised as Taxi, replies: ‘Ondine has games that no one understands.’
People who can’t keep up, who slow the flow, are cast literally to the margins. In one of the most disturbing sequences, Taxi and Ondine are joined by a French actress, whose repeatedly ignored interjections are placed on the far side of the page, away from the main stream of conversation, the text shrunken to denote the tiny tininess of an ignored voice, caught in the echo chamber of exclusion. Elsewhere, the talk is of who deserves to stay inside the charmed circle of the Factory. Elaborate rules are drawn up, protocols of expulsion developed. Society as centrifugal force, separating the elements, policing division.
But speaking, participating, is almost as terrifying as being ignored. Warhol takes the desire for attention – to be looked at and listened to – and sharpens it into an instrument of torture. ‘I’m making love to the tape recorder,’ Ondine says towards the end of his marathon of speech, but from the very beginning he also keeps begging to stop, asking over and over how many more hours he has to fill. In the john: ‘No, oh Della, please, I, I, my . . .’ In the bathtub: ‘may I ask you in all fairness – this is no private . . .’ At Rotten Rita’s apartment: ‘Don’t you hate me Drella, by this time? You must be so disgusted with putting that thing in my face . . . Please shut it off, I’m so horrifying.’
Putting that thing in my face: there’s certainly something sexual about Warhol’s behaviour: stripping Ondine down, encouraging him to ejaculate a torrent, to spill his secrets, to dish the dirt. What he wants is words – words to fill or kill time, take up empty space, expose the gaps between people, reveal wounds and hurts. He says very little himself beyond a reticent, repetitive litany of Oh, Oh really? What? (In 1981, by which time he’d become considerably more fluent, even chatty, one of his first superstars called him on the phone. He immediately fell back into the old stuttering speech, telling his diary: ‘The dialogue was straight from the sixties.’)
Towards the end of the book, Ondine escapes for a while and Drella is left with the Sugar Plum Fairy, Joe Campbell, the actorcum-rent boy who starred with Paul America in his movie My Hustler in 1965. Slender, dark and quick-witted, a former boyfriend of Harvey Milk, Campbell was astonishingly skilled at making even the most reluctant people open up. He turns the tables on Warhol, submitting him to the same kind of scrutiny he forced on others. First he examines his body, describing him sweetly as soft, not fat. ‘How old are you?’ he asks. A long pause. ‘Very great silence.’ ‘Yeah, uh talk about Ondine.’ ‘Nah, why do you avoid this problem?’ Warhol repeatedly tries to turn the flow of the conversation. For a minute or two, Joe plays along, and then he returns to the attack.
SPF—Why do you avoid yourself? Huh?
SPF—Why do you avoid yourself? What?
SPF—I mean you almost refuse your own existence. You know- Uh—it’s just easier SPF—No I mean I like, I like to know you (talking very quietly) I always think of you as being hurt. Well, I’ve been hurt so often I don’t even care anymore. SPF—Oh sure you care. Well uh, I don’t get hurt anymore . . . SPF—I mean, it’s very nice to feel. You know. Uh-no, I don’t really think so. It’s too sad to do (opera) And I’m always, uh, afraid to feel happy because then uh . . . just never last . . . SPF—Do you ever, do you ever do things by yourself? Uh no, I can’t do things by myself.
