Enigma of Robert Holcombe

Good evening, and thank you for coming along to this talk. I’m especially grateful to those here tonight as I am well aware that Robert Holcombe’s is not a household name, far from it, and he may be considered the single most elusive of all Postwar British artists – so elusive, in fact, that had I not invented him myself, he might never have come to exist at all. During the next 30 minutes or so, I hope I can cast some light on the curious phenomenon that Holcombe represents.

You see, a year ago, almost to the day, I found myself stuck with the novel I was writing – something in the backstory needed shoring up, and the solution turned out to be the insertion of a new character, Robert Holcombe, who could act as an influence on the book’s main protagonist, and be the source of some of that character’s more outlandish ideas – specifically, the idea of a playback machine for music that would rewire memory, directly affecting the human brain as it absorbed sounds that would map themselves on to its usual electrical frequencies.

Just as LSD simulates the chemical that causes synaptic firing, so the playback machine of my novel’s protagonist, created as an offshoot of 70s military research in the US, but completed in isolation in Germany’s Black Forest in the early 2000s, would be a concept he had become obsessed with after reading a short story, of which we shall hear more later, in which Robert Holcombe proposes a similar piece of ingenious technology… Having created my fictional character, and sketched out his back-story, I posted a few fragments of my text on a website, and was quickly distracted by other concerns.

Yet a few months later, things took a turn for the strange when I received a parcel in the post, from an elderly lady who introduced herself as Elizabeth Booth, Robert Holcombe’s younger sister, to whom his estate had passed at his death in 2003. The parcel contained this Victorian photograph album, used by Holcombe as a kind of scrapbook or archive… Elizabeth Booth’s letter also began to add to the fictional biography I had invented myself, with some facts of her own…and she kindly enclosed a small group of photographs.

So who was this suddenly rather palpable figure whose name I had contrived as Robert Holcombe? Well, here are some of the portraits sent to me by Elizabeth in January. Here he is, or so I have been told, aged around nine or ten years old,  here he is in an image taken at the time of his leaving of National Service around 1946. It was while in convalescence from injuries sustained on active service with the Royal Navy in Malaysia, around 1944, that Holcombe first developed his fascination with collage. His sister explains that he began cutting up magazines and rearranging the parts simply to relieve boredom; he recovered, of course, and completed his service in a series of posts within the UK (we know that during 1945, he was stationed in Northumbria, for example, but so far efforts to examine his military service records have been unsuccessful so the details are vague).

He went on to spend several years pursuing studies with the WEA while working in a variety of clerical jobs, and was finally accepted to study at the Slade School of Art in 1951, on a forces scholarship, where he enrolled to study printmaking. Here, it is believed that the blurred central figure may be Holcombe, while in this image, the masked subject may or may not be him – nor do we know whether the image documents a student art performance or simply a fancy dress party. Here he is at later dates – with his wife, we think, in the early 1960s…and with his daughter, in Leeds, sometime during the later 50s or early 60s…

One thing I learned from Elizabeth’s gift – that “1902” notebook – is that Robert Holcombe was never straightforwardly himself. He used the pseudonyms Gene & Michael Harrison in place of his own name for a start, as though just to confuse things – always signing his works with the initials GH or MH – Gene or Michael Harrison – the names chosen, he told his fellow Slade student Eduardo Paolozzi in a letter dated 1963, for their American sound.

This was something Holcombe felt carried a certain exotic charge in the austere years immediately following the war. It is notable that the split character of Holcombe’s pseudonym reflects a dual aspect of the works he made - although not entirely consistently applied, as a rule of thumb GH is the name used to sign works in which technological processes, machinery and architecture are fore-grounded, while MH is used mainly on works built around organic, anatomical and natural imagery.

In an earlier letter to Eduardo Paolozzi (dated 1961, and recently found among around 30 other previously neglected Holcombe related documents in the Paolozzi archive) Holcombe suggested that this working under the names of alter-egos allowed him to pursue different sets of obsessions running on parallel lines, giving the work a split personality. He often quoted the writings of Fernando Pessoa, the Portugeuse modernist poet and author of The Book of Disquiet whose many ‘heteronyms’ allowed similar stylistic and thematic interests to be encompassed within a single body of work. Some of the collages in his series The Modernists are thought to refer obliquely to works and imagery by Pessoa, though not all do, and much may be a matter of coincidence and speculation.

But so much with Holcombe is a matter of coincidence and speculation, and this was just the beginning.  

I had responded to Elizabeth’s first parcel – that 1902 notebook – with gratitude and curiosity, but also a powerful suspicion that I was the subject of a prank by a person or persons unknown. Yet – as the months passed, and further packages of Holcombe’s works arrived – this entire Modernists series, one after another, in batches of ten or 15 mounted pieces each time, apparently pulled randomly from packing cases kept in a self-storage unit on the outskirts of Exeter  -  the sheer mass of works and their unpredictability persuaded me that Elizabeth was indeed genuine, and held the archives of a real artist, who by wild coincidence somehow fitted my fictional profile – which when measured alongside the further biographical details revealed in Elizabeth’s letters and telephone conversations,  had proved unnervingly accurate.

Many details I had written in my notebooks, stored away –  but not placed online, or shown to others – and these were often reproduced in Elizabeth’s long, sometimes rambling, handwritten letters…She was clearly proud of her brother, and keen to support my researches in the hope that I might win for him the attention he had shunned himself, but which she, at least, felt he richly deserved.

In his series The Modernists, Holcombe appears fascinated by such unlikely conjunctions of things, times and events but it was one of only two known Robert Holcombe short stories – entitled ‘Not Smoking Can Seriously Damage Your Health’, published in The Lomax Review of May 1976 – that first exposed me to the possibility that Holcombe had very literally willed himself – and perhaps Elizabeth and his works, too – into being by way of my fictional inventions. To explain why this may be the case, we must first hear the story…what follows is a severely abridged version: I will run a slideshow of Holcombe’s work while I read through it…

1.

When Alan Green stepped from the shadows of the hospital corridor into bright sunlight, the first thing he did was screw up his eyes a little. The second was to reach into the inside pocket of his green corduroy jacket and take out his cigarettes – a pack of Lucky Strikes from his last trip to Florida a month before.

As he stood there in the car park for a moment, then began to walk slowly towards the hospital gates, he relished the feel of the smoke in his lungs, and considered the events of that morning. He’d been brought into the consulting room and offered a seat, and the consultant hadn’t once looked at him properly – never a good sign, he’d thought. He’d been offered a cup of tea or a cigarette, asked if he was feeling okay. The leaves of the sycamore outside the window moved around languidly in the heat behind an open panel, while he’d found his attention kept being drawn to a framed print on the wall, showing the body stripped down to a map of nerves.

“It’s not what we hoped to find”, said the consultant, opening a manila file in front of him and lifting the top sheet to examine a typed page beneath it. “I’m afraid it is what we discussed last week”.

The consultant looked at him, and he became acutely conscious of himself, sitting here, at 56 years of age, uncomfortably hot, still unmarried, with no children, the faint affectation of his bottle green tailored corduroy jacket and blue jeans, his plimsolls, red neckerchief and open-necked shirt, his dandyish flounce of collar-length greying hair. What did the consultant see? A man who had never properly grown up, being presented with the news that his life was probably now over?

“So it’s not benign?”, he replied – a formality, spoken for want of something to say, rather than a need to receive the inevitable confirmation.

“No. In fact, it’s at a more advanced stage than our initial assessment suggested.” There was a long and – for the consultant, plainly uncomfortable pause. “I’m sorry”, he had said eventually.

Alan was distracted – thinking about the machine in his laboratory less than half a mile from the room in which he now sat, under a clear sentence of death. “Do you know what caused it?” He asked. “Is there any one thing that might have brought this on?”. There were good reasons for asking…

“Well, based on our interview, you haven’t worked with dangerous substances at work, though there might be things we aren’t yet sure have carcinogenic properties, we’re learning all the time. But the most likely thing is smoking. We do know that increases your cancer risk very significantly, and you’ve been smoking twenty to thirty a day for many years now. That’s our best guess. You can never be a hundred percent sure with these things, but if you’d never smoked, or given up fifteen years ago, the chances are that we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Thanks”, he’d said to the consultant, meaning it. “That gives me something to think about. Is it ironic that I feel urgently in need of a cigarette now, to help me digest that information?”.

The consultant smiled, the first time his face had registered any emotion beyond ‘neutral’ in the thirty minutes they’d spent together. “I’m glad to see you’re keeping your sense of humour”, he’d said, pushing the spectacles back onto the bridge of his nose as they began to slip, then seemingly remembering his role. “A sense of proportion can help recovery rates enormously…”

“Take care”, the consultant had said as he left, but Alan was already intent on reaching the waiting room door, oblivious to the receptionists and waiting others around him. He needed to get back to the laboratory. If the machine was going to help, he had no choice but to accelerate his testing. There were now far greater risks in delay than premature trials.

2.

[in this second part, we rejoin the character after many weeks in his lab, working on the mysterious machine – at last, he reveals its nature to us...]

He sat down in front of the wooden box into which all the banks and wires around him ultimately fed, inscrutably elegant with its perfect unglued joints, its lid that opened smoothly and silently, the array of dials and switches inside. He began to rearrange the jackplugs in their sockets, folded out the two brass rods that channelled the signals from the machinery around him into the hollow core of the box. He lifted the headset carefully from its cloth wrapping, its net of electrodes and crystals draped over his hair like one of Cleopatra’s headdresses, and it was strange, he always – before using the machine – found Elizabeth Taylor’s features crossing his mind.

He’d have to be careful about that, in case he inadvertently conjured her. After all, the sole purpose of all this electronic ingenuity was the manipulation of particles, at a level so minute that their order could be changed by focused thought. These were what he had begun to call the Wild Cards, a category of particle that seemed to offer blank slates within the fabric of reality, particles that went unnoticed and did nothing until woken by the energies his machine directed through them. These would switch on the Wild Cards, and they, in their turn, would reshape the quantum fabric around themselves, gradually (he assumed) rippling outward through reality until the codes within them manifested as objects and events at the physical level.

His first attempts had felt like hallucinations: he had been seeking something else, when a sudden urge for a chocolate biscuit, while wearing the headset, had led to a hazy but undeniably real example on the desk in front of him. The shock had distracted him, and the biscuit dissolved, but an attempt to bring it back had succeeded: he had held the thought while the base and rippled chocolate surface materialised fully, then lowered his fingers to it. The heat of his fingertips even melted the points on its surface where they touched, the aroma of cocoa met his nostrils, and when he picked it up, it was solid. As he bit into it, it not only tasted like a biscuit, but – unlike most biscuits – exactly how his mind had expected that biscuit to taste. He had even brushed its crumbs from his lap, and needed to wash the melted chocolate from his fingers.

That had been the start. He tried it again with other objects: a favourite pen he’d lost at school when he was ten years old, a cup he’d broken a few weeks before, a book he’d cast aside during a downpour while camping with his first proper girlfriend at the age of seventeen. Each had materialised, once the thought had formed fully in his mind, and he began to think about other possibilities. A stick insect he’d had as a pet in his teenage years reappeared, as live as he remembered it, and the creature lived on today, eight months later, in a glass jar full of foliage in the corner of the laboratory. He glanced at it again, and there it was, its twitching antennae betraying the life it contained.

He’d been worried about trying anything bigger, but one afternoon, accidentally, while trying to focus on something else – a crystal he’d seen on a shelf at a former girlfriend’s house – he’d found himself overcome with longing for the woman, Anna, he’d lost instead. His heart was beating uncontrollably as her shape began to appear beside him, as though she were stepping naked from the air as easily as he remembered her stepping from her morning shower. His hand stretched towards her, but as his fingertips made contact with hers, and he felt the reality of her warm skin, his mind fled, alarmed, from the vision taking shape before him. She began to dissolve, and he slumped in his chair, considering the implications of her appearance.

What if she did fully materialise? She had been the age he remembered her at, not her age now. Did this mean she would be duplicated in the world, existing in her own past while her present self – married, with three children, somewhere in North London, continued obliviously about her business? He didn’t know, and for months had been too afraid to delve into the implications of his unsettling invention. But that announcement by the consultant had changed things. Whatever the paradoxes and risks, he was now intent on testing his device to the limits of its potential.

If an object or person could be invoked or changed by thought alone, and that invocation could perhaps alter a timeline within the fabric of reality, he had the means to save himself, and as soon as he locked the laboratory doors behind him after that visit to the hospital, he had begun his tests in earnest.

This time, he wouldn’t focus on objects but on events. Could he focus on a point in time, some very small specific detail that could be altered, rippling its effects upstream into his own future? Again, he started small: deliberately breaking a glass on the floor of his laboratory, he focused on the moment of the throw and tried to reverse it. He realised, though, more by vague intuition than sure knowledge, after many trials in which nothing happened, that the glass would be intact on his desk at the end of his experiment, but his memory of the act of breaking it would be erased too. He wondered if he’d tried to leave himself notes, or take photographs as reminders, but if he had, those had vanished too, having been, at the point of reversal, never made.

He began to suspect that his failures indicated the process worked better and more completely than he could have hoped. He looked back over the memories he held of his own life, and realised that he had no way of knowing which he might already have manipulated. He had no way of knowing for sure, just a sense that these were the possibilities at his disposal. Only in the moments when the changes were solidifying around him could he be aware that two possibilities were in play, and his thoughts were moving reality itself from one to the other, like a train moving over switches and finding itself racing ahead on a new track.

It was time now – at the age of 56, with the image of his lost love Anna materialising in the air on his mind, with only a few months left to live according to even the best medical prognosis – to address the one thing he knew he had yet to change. That day, at the age of fifteen, when he was pretty sure he’d begun smoking. The cancer was writhing like a black anemone beneath his ribcage – he could feel it, eating away at him – and he was ready to deal with that now.

And we now enter the third and final phase of Holcombe’s tale – we are abruptly plunged into a different time and place, and the voice of a changed narrator within a reality wholly transformed…

3.

Anna stood at the graveside, her 28 years weighing heavy on her, but still composed and beautiful, in her own way. She hadn’t taken Alan’s death well, at first, but seemed to be slowly coming to terms with the random accident that had snatched him from her. Anything could have prevented them being in that place at that exact moment on that particular Spring day, whether going to the shop to buy milk and cigarettes, as others surely had, or simply deciding to stay in and watch the news instead of taking that fateful walk. It was too late to consider those possibilities now – what had happened had happened.

Even so, it seemed unnatural that a young man’s life could be erased by a passing car like that. He’d been out walking with her, and must have seen the car lurch around the corner at speed, bearing down on them both with all the inevitable momentum of something too sudden to avoid, though Anna wondered at the presence of mind with which Alan had thrown her aside, out of the path of the red Cortina as it swerved and impacted his own fragile body, pulling him under the wheels as it shot forward, stopping only a hundred yards down the road, his body still underneath the vehicle, barely recognisable, the coroner said, the driver staggering out, swearing blind that his brakes weren’t working, the beers on his breath obvious to everyone within a ten yard radius of his gesticulations.

Alan had often talked to Anna about chance, and the way it shaped our lives, but Anna was never sure – she believed we made our own destinies from the opportunities and challenges life threw before us. She had said to Alan’s mother only that morning how strange it was to feel that her strongest desire was to talk to Alan about the feelings she was having about his death. He might have understood, she’d said, but had he been able to understand, the feelings would never have been there. There was something that would never be right about a man vanishing completely from life at the age of 30, before he’s even had a chance to get properly started with the business of living.

The two of them had been going through a difficult patch, too, so it was hard to deal with this, knowing that they weren’t on their best terms the day it happened. He had saved her, though. He had spent the split second he’d had to react pushing her out of the way when he might, in the same instant, have saved himself. Anna had said she was never sure that Alan loved her until that moment, but it was too late to make use of the knowledge now. Some things can’t be changed, and we’ll never know what might have become of us or what Alan might have accomplished. Perhaps it’s for the best, said Anna, as she began to walk away from the freshly dug earth, that we’ll never know what exactly it is we’re losing…

So with the conclusion of this story, I begin to wonder if Robert Holcombe’s existence has come about largely because I had imagined him, just as he had imagined his machine, and his story’s protagonist had imagined that chocolate biscuit and stick insect? Had a chain of imaginings triggered a reaction of explosions among a long chain of ‘Wild Card’ particles, and sent the fabric of reality hurtling off down these unforeseen routes? Perhaps so – alongside his fascination with architecture and consumerism, film, jazz and the emerging popular culture of his day, Holcombe’s Folklore Series certainly suggests he was open to the possibility of myth as reality, to strangeness as a factor in life…

We can also see – in his story’s ending, as in his work – that by 1976 an early optimism had darkened considerably…here are works on Biafra, worlds with black suns and skies of stone…

[Pause slideshow at final work, ‘Manifold Conditions That React In The Brain’]

This is Holcombe’s final known work – yet more may lie in that Exeter Self-Storage unit to be discovered – indeed, I have Elizabeth’s word that her packages so far have barely cleared the first of many packing cases. Many may hold the detritus of his everyday life, in the aftermath of his own wife’s death (her name was also ‘Anna’, Elizabeth tells me – she is the woman his protagonist lost before she lost him in turn). Yet there may also be more writings, more artworks, and each fresh discovery has the potential to change this version of events again. The most recent package received from Elizabeth – only a few days before this talk – is the first evidence we have that he worked in a medium other than collage…

Here we have a set of silkscreen prints, taking their cues from the covers of Scientific Book Club volumes of the years between 1958 and 1961, revealing his interests at this time in a very stark way…

So as we consider Holcombe’s suggestion in this story – that time may be altered by thought alone, and that reality is malleable, subject to the operations of imagination – I wonder again what the relationship may be between the fiction I contrived of Holcombe’s existence, the seeming emergence of his life and work in the real world, and the meaning of these elusive – and often (I hope you will agree) darkly amusing works he made and amassed in private between his Slade years and his retirement from practice as a municipal architect in the early 1980s.

Perhaps Elizabeth herself – as my one link to the reality of Robert Holcombe – is herself a figment, as she sits in her Exeter retirement home, at 80, Robert’s age at death, tirelessly writing letters, and dispatching her friends and carers to the Self Storage unit in order to dispatch fresh bundles of her brothers life’s work to a Nottingham stranger. Perhaps we will meet one day, in person – and there will be more prints and collages, further writings and yet unknown publications to come. Perhaps the warped and layered reality into which my accidental association with Holcombe has already plunged me will become stranger and more complex still.

The Enigma of Robert Holcombe was presented at Hatch: It’s About Time in October and November 2010 as part of the Sideshow festival. Some footage of the Nottingham performance is included in Amelia Beavis Harrison’s report for Tethervision’s Sideshowshow, made in November 2010.