Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Keith Vaughan (Review of Keith Vaughan: His Life and Work by Malcolm Yorke)

Keith Vaughan was born in 1912. Later in his life he was to reflect on what he regarded as one of the more auspicious omens of his birth. He was a healthy baby, “but it was also observed that my penis possessed a loose and easily retractable foreskin which was not considered necessary to circumcise. For this piece of good fortune I have had many occasions to be grateful.” We shall see why in due course. In this nugget of autobiographical information are preserved many of the qualities that make Vaughan such a distinctive artist and personality: his unflinching candour, his formal exactitude, his dry wit, his lifelong obsession with his cock. All key aspects of his life as a man and, though perhaps not in every respect, his work as an artist.

Although he expressed satisfaction with his foreskin other features of Vaughan’s childhood were less happy. His father died when he was very young, and he grew up in a close, neurotic household composed of his mother — an omnipresent source of irritation for most of his life — and his younger brother Dick, a weak, insecure boy who totally depended on Vaughan for amusement and regular consolation.

Vaughan’s father’s death reduced the family to a level of bourgeois penury. Mrs Vaughan had to work hard to “maintain standards,” and constant economy was the order of the day. But in compensation the cultural atmosphere of the life they led was rich. At a young age Vaughan was an accomplished pianist and would accompany his mother on the violin. He also won a Royal Drawing Society award when he was seven years old. The intimacy of the family was broken, however, when he was sent away to boarding school two years later, to Christ’s Hospital in Sussex. Here he suffered the usual humiliations visited on sensitive boys at single-sex boarding schools — corporal punishment, bullying, smut, filth etc. — and Vaughan begged his mother to take him away, in vain. By his account his adolescence seems to have borne more than the usual burden of guilt, misery and isolation.

It was at school that Vaughan’s particular sexual nature began to assert itself in a manner that was unequivocally homoerotic and masochistic. And it was at Christ’s Hospital that he commenced a programme of regular and ingenious masturbation that was to prove lifelong. He retained nothing but unhappy memories of his schooldays but, whatever tribulations his psyche was undergoing, the seeds of his education as an artist were also sown. In the fields of music, literature and painting his years at school had not been unproductive.

It was his skill at drawing that led him, almost directly on leaving school, into the advertising world. He became a layout artist in the advertising services branch of Unilever — Lintas — where he spent most of the 1930s. The Lintas years functioned for Vaughan as a surrogate university and art school. Here he found a set of like-minded colleagues and friends who were also artists, intellectuals and eccentrics, happy to accept Vaughan on his own terms. Vaughan still lived at home with his mother but he began to experience a measure of independence too. He would spend weekends in a converted railway carriage on the Sussex coast at Pagham with a group of friends, where they would sunbathe and swim in the nude. In his memories, Pagham became one of the magic places of his life.

In other respects the broad character of Vaughan’s life in the thirties seems to be one of naively earnest and dogged cultural self-improvement: endless courses of reading, playing and listening to music, visits to the ballet (an obsession) and theatre. And in many ways the pattern of life he established for himself at that time was to remain constant. On one side single-minded artistic endeavour, and on the other an equal dedication to enriching his erotic experience.

Like many middle-class homosexuals of that era most of Vaughan’s sexual partners were working class, but in Vaughan’s case this arose out of expediency rather than from some Forsterian fantasy. Throughout his life Vaughan yearned — vainly as it turned out — for a romantic lover who would be his social and intellectual equal. Less orthodox, however, were the refinements of his masochistic auto-eroticism. He tried to construct a primitive machine that would deliver electric shocks to his genitalia; he pushed a needle through his foreskin, and when his mother left the family home at weekends he would endeavour to bind himself to the upturned legs of the kitchen table.

It was the war which changed everything. It removed him from the cosy world of Lintas and his family, and thrust him into an entirely new set of social encounters and environments. A committed pacifist, he registered as a non-combatant and was drafted into the pioneer corps. The manual work the corps carried out was routine and mindlessly laborious. It took him to parts of England he had never visited; it reintroduced him to communal life, but without the terrors of boarding school. Moreover, it initiated his development as a serious artist, forcing him out of the “years of dilettantism” of the Lintas period, and gaining him access to literary and artistic circles in London, that hitherto had been unapproachable, where he began to meet and be influenced by other contemporary artists — most notably Graham Sutherland.

The year 1939 also saw the start of his celebrated sequence of journals which he was to continue, almost without interruption, until the end of his life. The journals form an astonishing document. With complete candour Vaughan describes every aspect of his personality on the page. It is no exaggeration to say that they represent one of the most extraordinary, and greatest, pieces of confessional writing of the century.

From the outside, friends and colleagues variously described Vaughan as intelligent, charming, diffident, somewhat aloof, critically acute and astringently witty and generally good company. The self-portrait that emerges from the journals is considerably at odds with this, at once fierce, cold and anguished. They are excellently and lucidly written but what is so striking is the unsparing honesty, the brutal objectivity. The self-analysis is relentless. Full of self-doubt, seeded with contempt and rare exhilaration, Vaughan probes and reiterates his dilemmas and anxieties — both artistic and personal — with a determination and dedication that are prodigious. So far as his development as an artist is concerned it is as if Vaughan had realized that for him the route to success was through sheer persistence and hard work rather than inspiration and imagination. True, Vaughan had Sutherland’s own huge discipline and effort as an early model, but this tenacious and unceasing toil in the older artist must have chimed with elements that already existed in his own personality. A working practice was established that he was not to deviate from. Vaughan was not, it seems to me, a naturally gifted draughtsman in the way that, say, Augustus John was. The line in a Vaughan drawing is not fluid and suggestive but firm and heavily scored. Sketchbooks are filled with dense dark pencil drawings, fretted with cross-hatching, which are worked up in the studio into sombre, muted gouaches or oils in which form and composition dominate. The whole artistic achievement of Keith Vaughan from World War Two onwards is a strenuous, laborious one; its nature is obstinate, striven-for, built up slowly and steadily, relying on constant effort and patience to see the work through to a successful culmination, rather than afflatus or spontaneous invention.

After the war, during the forties and fifties this dedication began to pay off. Vaughan’s reputation grew and he began to move in established metropolitan artistic and literary circles. He taught at Camberwell, Central and the Slade. He was friend and associate with many of the artists that make up the neo-romantic movement, notably Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde and John Minton. By 1950 his career was firmly established. On a personal level it seemed that he had found some measure of happiness too. He set up house with one of his painting students, Ramsay McLure, but although they remained together for the rest of Vaughan’s life the passion swiftly dimmed and Vaughan returned to his old methods of obtaining sexual satisfaction. At some time in the fifties he bought a machine from Gamages department store which he adapted to pass electric current through his genitals. For the rest of his life it was to the machine he turned when he was in need of sensual excitement or consolation.

Biographically, the last thirty years of Vaughan’s life were uneventful. His subject matter remained remarkably constant — more often than not the male nude in a landscape — as his style became more abstract. He showed regularly and the prices he commanded rose steadily. He and McLure moved to a flat in Belsize Park, and increasing prosperity soon allowed him to buy a cottage in Essex. McLure lived there while Vaughan led a solitary life in London during the week, returning to the country at weekends. Vaughan’s working routine was quickly established and rarely varied. He would paint in the mornings and break for lunch at 12.30. After lunch there would be a siesta followed by a shorter period of work until seven when he had his first whisky. He took great care over his solitary dinner and made sure to drink a bottle of good wine. After dinner he might watch TV, listen to music, or write in his journal.

Sexually he resorted more and more to the machine. He went on occasional “lust sleuthing” forays in Soho looking for rough trade but he came to rely on masturbation for sexual release, perfecting the operating procedures of his machine and employing other flagellatory or masochistic props — metal-tipped canes, needle and thread, mustard and red pepper.

The last ten years of Vaughan’s life as evidenced by the journals represent, as their editor Alan Ross describes, “a descent into hell … redeemed by … frankness, spleen and dry humour.” Self-analysis, nostalgia and misanthropy are mingled with despair and meticulous chronicling of his experiments with the machine (which, in a display of typical Vaughan candour, he kept on open show in his studio). Yet to the outside world, until the onset of his final illness, he appeared little changed; still teaching, still painting successfully, still reluctant for company, yet, when he was persuaded to go out, apparently enjoying himself. In 1975 he developed a malignant cancer of the bowel and underwent a colostomy. Radiation treatment followed and Vaughan became a semi-invalid, becoming progressively iller as the cancer advanced and complications set in. On the morning of 4 November 1977 he decided to commit suicide. He swallowed the pills with some whisky and sat down to record his final thoughts in his diary before he died. “Oblivion holds no terrors for me,” he wrote. These last pages of this extraordinary document are very moving, full of stoic resignation and dignity. The final lines read: “65 was long enough for me. It wasn’t a complete failure, I did some …” And then nothing.

He did some good work. Vaughan’s posthumous artistic reputation continues to grow as indeed does his personal fame, owing to the publication of the journals last year. Malcolm Yorke’s fine biography is a valuable and diligent adjunct to them, filling in many of the gaps and also setting Vaughan’s work firmly in its artistic and historical context. Inevitably, though, the journals form the best and unique access to Vaughan’s strange and complex personality. Any biography would suffer by comparison in this regard but one senses here and there that, however well-equipped Yorke is to talk about the work, the life of Keith Vaughan — or rather the life in Keith Vaughan — remains something of a mystery to him.

1990