Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 117
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
He came right up to me before saying hello. Sherman had always done this: tucked his short body inside the personal space of others, so challenging us to refute the idea that it was he who was the measure of all things. We talked easily and unaffectedly, although of what exactly I have no recall. Probably there was a deal of cynicism about the drinks coasters; I do remember laughing in a full-bellied way that I hadn’t since I’d last heard his devastating wit. He drew you in, Sherman, and so drew you down. You began by bending your neck, but, as he continued rubbishing reputations and lisping shibboleths, you’d find yourself bending over, then hunching, then hunkering down, until finally you were squatting or even kneeling in front of him, mesmerized both by what he said and by his unusual intonation – a trifle old-fashioned – as he barked, ‘Jolly good!’ or affirmed ‘Quite right!’ about something he himself had just said.
After that initial meeting we fell readily enough into a pattern of regular contact, meeting up at a Chinese restaurant in Baker Street near his flat for long – and, on his part, bibulous – suppers. We reassumed the easy commerce of our teenage friendship, and it made me wonder if this was true for all men: that it was impossible to attain such proximity to another man, unless you had known him before the hardening of that deceptively transparent carapace: the ego.
There was more. At an experimental play we attended in a warehouse theatre – Sherman was friends with the stratospherically famous actress who was slumming in the lead – our seats were on a two-foot-high dais. When we arrived Sherman hoiked himself up on to this with no prevarication, then, when the lights came up at the end of the single act, he stood, turned to me and raised his arms. Responding involuntarily I lifted him down.
When Sherman visited our home for the first time, he descended the steep steps to the basement kitchen quite unafraid, despite our yapping snapping Jack Russell. I yanked the dog away and slapped it, but Sherman only remarked, ‘I’m not too fond of dogs for obvious reasons.’ He charmed my wife and saw fit to ignore our youngest son – then aged six – who, having been cowering upstairs prior to Sherman’s arrival, saying he was scared of ‘the elf’, now tiptoed up behind him so he could compare their heights.
Grace is what my wife said Sherman possessed, and, although this was a quality I had never associated with him when we were young, I could concede it to him now. My own behaviour had by contrast been utterly graceless – was it any surprise that my children had been corrupted by my facetiousness? As I grew closer to Sherman once more, I tried to squeeze this bladder, inflated with mockery, into the smallest cavity inside of myself. The disappearing trick didn’t work.
Dreams began to plague me. In them, trampolining children shot inexorably skywards from the back gardens of suburbia. In my reverie I saw first one, then two or four, their trainers skimming past the cherry blossom. Then my perspective changed: I was out on the marshes to the east of the city, and looking back could see a purple-grey cyclone hunched over the endless rooftops, rising up into the firmament, into which were being sucked a myriad vortices, each one comprised of a myriad children.
The children of London – they were being taken up. Yet this was no Rapture, for I knew there was nothing above them but the vacuum. I had to warn someone, but I’d lost my shoe and slashed my cheese-white foot on some razor wire. Up in the heavens the haemorrhaging had begun, tens of thousands of little lungs filling up with blood.
2
Round the Horn
Sherman Oaks stood stabbing the end of his unlit cigar at the South Downs and described his latest project to me: a 30-metre-high iron statue that he wished plunked in the River Seine: ‘It’ll be ten times life size, knee-deep in those bière-coloured waters and slap-bang opposite the Bibliothèque Nationale. Unlike Behemoth this one’ll be a hollow figure, the outer layer of which will be cut away in transverse sections – like an anatomical model – to reveal its interior.’
‘And what will be inside?’ I felt obliged to ask.
‘Aha!’ He sucked on the damp butt. ‘Inside it will be hundreds – thousands probably – of smaller solid figures, varying in size from the very little to the twice life size.’
‘So, the big figure is Pantagruel the giant, while the small figures it contains—’
‘Are representative of all the odd distortions of his size in the novels – yes, yes, of course. You would’ve thought that in the city where Rabelais died there’d be enormous enthusiasm for such an exciting piece, but the planning committee are proving almost wilfully obstructive – banging on about the preservation of the skyline!’
I tried to be tactful. ‘You have to concede, Sherman, that this would be a very, um, radical, addition, to a traditionally, er, traditional city. But, tell me, is there a Rabelaisian anniversary of some kind – I mean, what’s the pretext?’
Sherman put his sculptural head to one side of his plinth of a body and scrutinized me. He seemed on the verge of a crushing put-down, but was interrupted by the cheap-bleep of his mobile phone, which he fetched up from one of the pockets of his self-designed silk waistcoat. He turned away and began barking into it:
‘No, no, call Klaus in Stuttgart, he has the plans, he’ll be able to email them to the Kapellmeister in Berne … What’s that? No, I’m in Sussex … Suss-ex, not having sex – but I’ll be flying to Bremen late this evening so have Heidi send copies to the hotel there for me, and make sure the tent’s there too … Yes, and the crampons … Cramp. Ons, yes, quite right, jolly good!’
I wasn’t certain whether I found Sherman’s habit of punctuating our times together with these noisy one-sided conversations infuriating or endearing. Invariably it was me who proposed the excursions, then made the arrangements, and, while I was flattered that the Great Man dealt with me directly, unobstructed by the small tribe of factotums that staffed his growing atelier, I couldn’t help but feel that his inability to cease from his Herculean labours was a message barked at me: See how busy I am! How sought after! How creatively fired up!
It was true that Sherman’s career trajectory had become near-vertical in the fifteen years since Behemoth bestrode the Manchester Ship Canal. Now, not a week went by without an invitation arriving at my house to an Oaks opening in Seoul or Soweto, Kiev or Cancun. Along with executing smaller works for private galleries and public collections, Sherman politicked remorselessly: trying to arrange funding and permissions so that he could have body forms poised on Alpine mountaintops, or sunk in Norwegian fjords, or submerged where the Kattegat met the Skagerrak.
Taken in sum, Sherman’s works were acquiring a peculiar sort of public reverence – as if they were secular votive objects.
Their very simplicity, combined with their creator’s refusal to spout the usual arty-gnomic guff, seemed to inspire people’s devotion. You might’ve imagined that the critics would have accused Sherman’s big things of exhibiting the usual fanfaronade of the monumental, which, historically, has been a totalitarian mode, yet they said nothing of the sort; instead the notion took root that this was an individualistic, Neoliberal giganticism – besides, in a globalized world of ever taller buildings, longer bridges and thicker dams, Sherman’s statues were, comparatively speaking … dinky.
That no one saw fit to remark on the way Sherman was populating the world with big Shermans I found inexplicable. Moreover, while it was well known that all the body forms were derived from casts of Sherman’s own body that were then enlarged, what everyone seemed oblivious to was that the basic unit of Shermanness – one Sherman, if you will – was not his actual height, 3’3”, but 6’4”. That this was my own height may have been a coincidence – if an odd one.
On the first point, as a friend of sufficient long-standing to have seen him playing with clackers, I felt able to tackle the Maître: ‘Isn’t it a little egotistical,’ I ventured across the table in the Heavenly Kingdom, ‘the way that all your works are, um, you?’ I was almost blown away by the vehemence of his rebuttal:
‘For fuck’s sake! Don’t be so dumbly, simplistically, bruisingly, prosaically predictable, mate.’ He speared a prawn ball with a chopstick. ‘The works aren’t me. It doesn’t matter that they’re based on my own body any more than it matters that pharaonic statues were all made using a single set of standardized measurements and dimensions of someone who wasn’t even a fucking pharaoh! The point is that the body forms are archetypes – they are everyman.’
The obvious rejoinder – as a person of restricted height Sherman was not that archetypal – died in my mouth. Had I uttered it when riled, I may have been unable to prevent myself asking him not only why he scaled up his own height to mine, but also why he thought no one else had done the calculation. This seemed especially bizarre, given a recent public exhibition had involved one hundred ‘life-sized’ Shermans being ranged right along Hadrian’s Wall – yet nobody pointed out that all of them were six-footers.
It made me ponder whether my own guilt was only a subsection of a more widespread shame. Perhaps the unacknowledged six-foot dwarfs were evidence of a collective uneasiness about the sizeism that dare not speak its name? Or maybe – in Britain and, increasingly, the States as well – the scaling up of the small was registered, albeit unconsciously, as a just commentary on the misadventures of post-imperial nations that were in stature denial, and went on punching above their weight in the world arena, KOing hundreds of thousands of blameless everymanikins?
So, I said nothing in the Heavenly Empire, and I said still less up on the Downs; where we walked on, with Sherman fleshing out the impression of his next week’s itinerary that I had been given by the phone call. The tent and crampons were needed for a trip up on to the Grosser Aletsch glacier, where the installation of an heroic group of Shermans – the central one standing 37 metres, and surrounded by five more half that size – was being strenuously fought by what the artist termed ‘a bathetic coalition of tree-huggers and chalet maids’, with whose positions, nonetheless, he sympathized.
It was at the core of Sherman’s steely grace that he refused his disability the right to dictate his physical limitations. When he was young this had seemed feisty; now he was middle aged it had taken on an almost mystical character. Sherman Oaks couldn’t gaze upon lake, river or sea without stripping off and diving into it. Confronted by a rocky wall or an icy defile, he would insist on scrambling up it. If on our rambles we came across signs prohibiting access or fences barring it, Sherman was duty bound to trespass.
Thus he kicked against the pricks – but they remained big ones. He had great energy but it was wearisome for him to walk more than a mile or two. So he was almost always attended by his driver, Baltie (short for Balthazar), a dim old Etonian, who, as Sherman put it – out of his earshot – ‘Rather than being equipped with an elaborate and expensive education should’ve aged fourteen been packed off to deliver groceries!’
On this particular day Baltie had picked us up in the Range Rover where the train halted at Plumpton Racecourse. Then he drove us up a track on to the Downs, and Sherman walked with me to Ditchling Beacon; then, in his own coinage, he ‘called in a Baltie-strike’. I next saw him at Saddlescombe, where he clambered down from the car and accompanied me to the Devil’s Dyke.
Such a punctuated companionship did have its advantages: being with Sherman for more than an hour or two at a time was de trop. The constant phone calls, the bluster, the charging into fields with bulls in them – it all grew wearing; besides, I also needed time alone to process (the therapese is warranted here) certain psychological symptoms that had been latent in me for many years, and were now coming disturbingly to the fore.
Were those the shreds of black plastic bags caught on the legs of the pylons that strode over the hills? Or were they the clothes of plane-crash victims who in death had transgressed the first commandment of globalism: keep your belongings with you at all times? Was there any more distressing sight to behold than television news images of rayon blouses, frumpy brown skirts and smalls unlaundered for the entire fortnight, now caught in the bushes at the airport’s perimeter? To say nothing of the holdalls and suitcases that lay ruptured like sickeningly burst boils. Enfin, the corpses, neatly packed away in body bags, all they once possessed having already been decanted.
In eleven days’ time I was due to leave for a fortnight’s book tour, heading first to Toronto and then on to several cities in the USA. Due to, but I was questioning whether I could go at all, since my as yet unpacked bag dragged on me like an anchor. Of course, I had long since dispensed with anything but carry-on and was taking only a small rucksack – and not one of those pantechnicons you see being hauled up the aisle, a shotgun marriage between human and trunk. The lapwing pee-witting up above me, the ladybird millimetring along the buttercup at my feet, the red kite swooping between me and Fulking, or the rabbit hopping across the chalky path – were they so encumbered? I yearned in my own life to re-create Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise by stylizing my impedimenta over and over again, each time reducing the scale of books, clothing and toiletries, until all I took with me was a sheaf of sketches slipped inside my wallet. Nowadays, the thought of carrying anything more seemed grotesque, making of my world an nth-class cabin into which – my greasepaint moustache shining – I manoeuvred the steamer trunk packed with the other Capitalist Brothers.
At the Devil’s Dyke, Sherman and I sat on a bench. I wanted to tell him the folk tale associated with this great V-shape gouged out of the chalk escarpment. How the Devil, bent on flooding the Sussex Weald so as to drown all its sleeping cotters, one night set to with his mighty spade, aiming to dig a ditch through the Downs. But an old woman living alone in a farmhouse awoke in the small hours and lit her lamp. Satan, fearing the dawn, cast his tool aside and with a howl leapt all the way across the Weald to the North Downs, where he landed, thus creating the enormous depression now known as the Devil’s Punchbowl.
Wanted to – but couldn’t, because Sherman, while chewing a pizzle of biltong I’d handed him, was on the phone to a powerful arts Gauleiter half a world away, etching with incisive verbalizations his plan to implant the crater of Rano Kau, the volcano at the south-west corner of Easter Island, with scores – if not hundreds – of carved basalt Shermans, latter-day moai that, like those celebrated statues, would awe visitors by the sheer implausibility of their being in that place at all.
‘Make it happen!’ Sherman cried, then turning to me said, ‘So, what were you saying?’ But then he was interrupted once more by the fo-fiddle-i-o of contemporaneity, so that while he exchanged yelps with some willowy curator in a Berlin bunker I was left to tell myself that the destination for this trip was Lancing College, which stood on its knoll on the far side of the River Adur. My father and uncle had been educated there, and the neo-Gothic pile loomed large in the family mythology, having been founded by my great-great-grandfather, Nathaniel Woodard.
His photograph – an original daguerreotype – had hung in the gloomy stairwell between the second and third storeys of my grandparents’ house on Vernon Terrace in Brighton, throughout the interminable Sunday afternoons of my childhood. It now hung in exactly the same position in my own terraced house in South London. The High Anglican churchman, and apostle of public school education to the rising middle classes, sat, life sized, behind thick glass, edged in gilt and framed with black mahogany, his expression at once stern and soppy, his cheeks furry.
At Lancing we would find something pleasingly out of joint – another oddity to add to our collection. Together, Sherman and I had visited the Tradescants’ monument at St Mary at Lambeth, and, rubbing away the lichen from the tomb, read the inscription: ‘Whilst they (as Homer’s Iliad in a nut) / A world of wonders in one closet shut’ – a reference to the gardening family’s celebrated ‘cabinet of curiosities’, the Ark, which in the seventeenth century occupied a site close to my house. In place of the long-departed Ark there was now a takeaway called Chicken World, which seemed painfully apt: a world of chickens in one box shut …
Another time Baltie had driven Sherman and me down the M3 to Painshill. Here we had wandered Charles Hamilton’s landscaped park, surveying its grottoes, its ruined abbey, cascade and temple. Standing by the lake while Sherman bellowed at a banker in Shanghai, I was entranced as a flotilla of model dreadnoughts came cruising by, line abreast; then appalled, when one of these six-foot Edwardian warships was opened from within, the entire deck and superstructure flipping up to reveal the pasty face of the middle-aged boy who was lying inside.
I thought often of Claude Lévi-Strauss, still alive and buzzing at a hundred, an anthropological bee deep in the honeyed hive of the Sorbonne. It was his contention – made with reference to Clouet’s portrait of Elizabeth of Austria – that all miniatures have an intrinsic aesthetic quality derivable from their very dimensions. So it was that Sherman and I set out for Godshill, a model village on the Isle of Wight, where we discovered a model of the model village inside of it, and inside this model, model village a third.
Not that we neglected the sublime; after all, Sherman’s own works were themselves Burke’s ‘great objects and terrible’, willed concretizations that forced us into submission – albeit democratically. So we visited Northern Ireland for the weekend, and Baltie drove us in a rental Range Rover back and forth along the lanes to the south-west of Belfast, until we were able to establish the exact location from which Swift had seen the Divis and the Black Mountain massif as a recumbent giant, the easternmost tumulus of Cave Hill being its nose.
