The Collector

#learningIsAGift ?
#rituals of #theBeautifulJourney 

I’ve been wanting to have a book club with friends for quite a while and eventually proceeded with the idea and was lucky to have people interested in it . The design for it was …

• taking turns, we choose a book
• taking turns, we host the meeting at our own house
• after the book discussion we also play a board game
• we meet every (2 to) 3 months

So the book club was actually a Book & Board Games Club ?
The first edition for it took place exactly as designed, but then the coronavirus lockdown happened and the meetings moved online and the frequency increased to 1 month, as we have more time now to spend reading. ?
I’ve chosen a book for the first edition and hosted the meeting together with my wonderful partner Paul.

The Magus is the first novel I’ve read by John Fowles. It’s a fat volume, but I was so fond of reading it, I even took it with me on my holiday to Iceland. So when the time came to choose a book for the first meetup of my long desired book (& board games) club, choosing between John Fowles’ The Collector and other book club-y books, going for The Collector was an easy choice. Still planning to read even more of his books.

The Collector, John Fowles debut novel, is a captivating book and it surely got us talking at the book club meeting. Unfortunately, this book is popular among serial killers, but there are good aspects about it as well and like any other book, it can impress different people in different ways.

The serial killers connected to this book, all from the 1980s, are Charles Chi-Tat Ng and Leonard Lake which in their pursuits had what they called an “Operation Miranda” (Miranda is the name of the female character in the book), Christopher Wilder whom is said to have had the book with him at the time of his death and Bob Berderella, also known as the Kansas City Butcher, whom confessed to being impressed by the movie The Collector (1965) which is based on this book.

The book does exploit the serial killer/murder topic well, as it also introduces The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (a book I’ve read many years ago) in the story line. This is another notorious book thought to have had a bad influence on some people.

The book is yet wonderful in its abundance of art references. I’ve ended up spending time looking up all the artists mentioned and feeling so good about the sensation of learning that it gave me. For example:

John Bratby (1928 – 1992), an English writer, painter and founder of the kitchen sink realism in the 1950s, “a movement in which artists use everyday objects, like trash cans and beer bottles as subjects of their works, which are often thickly-laden portraits or paintings”. I’ve looked through some of his paintings and chosen a few that look nice to me, having to admit I am not an immediate fan of the style.

• Birds and Flowers
• Venetian Afternoon

• Snow in the Front Garden
• Washday in the Tenements

Paolo Uccello is mentioned as well, with his tempera and oil painting The Hunt in the Forest (1470), which is probably one of the best-known paintings in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England. The Ashmolean Museum is the world’s first university museum and The Hunt in the Forest is “an early example of the effective use of perspective in Renaissance art”.

Paolo Uccello (~1397 – 1475) was a Florentine painter, mathematician and the pioneer of visual perspective in art. Giorgio Vasari described him as obsessed by trying to understand perspective and to grasp the exact vanishing point. Funny enough, the painting is featured in the “Point of Vanishing” episode of the British TV series Lewis as a clue to solving a murder.

Then we have Paul Nash (1889 – 1946), “a British surrealist painter and war artist, as well as a photographer, writer and designer of applied art. Nash was among the most important landscape artists of the first half of the twentieth century. He played a key role in the development of Modernism in English art”. And he once said

“I have tried … to paint trees as though they were human beings”.

• Landscape from a dream
• Solstice of the sunflower

• Wittenham
• The Menin Road

Paul Nash attended Slade School of Art, same school as Miranda in the book The Collector.

Others more knowledgeable in matters of art have said that Landscape from a dream is Paul’s response to Surrealism in which a fascination for Freud’s theories is common, hence the idea of a dream fits in just right. The painting is also said to be strongly resembling the work of René Magritte and that it could also represent aspects of Paul Nash’s relationship with Eileen Agar. This combination of things reminded me of a silly challenge I took part in about re-creating a famous painting only with things you have around the house. I went for René Magritte – The Lovers.

Lately I’ve started painting once a week and given I like sunflowers, I’ve attempted painting them, but can’t really get them right yet and it reminds me of what Miranda says in The Collector:

What I write isn’t natural. It’s like two people trying to keep up a conversation. It’s the very opposite of drawing. You draw a line and you know at once whether it’s a good or a bad line. But you write a line and it seems true and then you read it again later.

Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot (1841 – 1895), also mentioned in the book, was described by Gustave Geffroy in 1894 as one of “les trois grandes dames” of Impressionism alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt. Feminine charm, “effleurer” (to touch lightly, brush against) were words used to describe her paintings and technique.  This could have led to her saying “I don’t think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal and that’s all I would have asked for, for I know I’m worth as much as they.” Yet, close friends of hers, Renoir, Monet, and Degas considered her to be as central as anyone to the Impressionist movement. Miranda says that she would like to paint with Berthe’s “simplicity and light”.

• Grain field
• In the Country (After lunch)

• Reading
• Landscape in Tours

Miranda mentions reading about Piero, whom could be, for example, one of the following two painters.

Piero della Francesca (1415/20 – 1492) was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance, a mathematician and geometer, known for frescoes and his painting The Flagellation of Christ which made it into Kenneth Clark’s list of favourite paintings, calling it “the greatest small painting in the world”. Piero’s most famous work is the cycle of frescoes The History of the True Cross in the church of San Francesco in the Tuscan town of Arezzo.

Piero di Cosimo/di Lorenzo (1462 – 1522) was a Florentine painter of the Renaissance. His work covers mythological, allegorical and religious subjects.

• Perseus freeing Andromeda
• The discovery of honey by Bacchus

As Miranda is an art student, it is only normal to see an abundance of art references and topic explorations in the book. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn Self Portrait with Two Circles, one of more than 40 self-portraits Rembrandt had painted, is mentioned in the book. This painting can be seen at the Kenwood House in London, alongside The Guitar Player painting by Dutch Baroque artist Johannes Vermeer.

The book also mentions Tachism (aka Abstraction lyrique), a French style of abstract painting popular in the 1940s and 1950s, often considered to be the European equivalent to abstract expressionism.

On this front of expressionism we’re introduced to Oskar Kokoschka (1886 – 1980), an Austrian artist, poet, playwright, and teacher best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes, as well as his theories on vision that influenced the Viennese Expressionist movement.

• Venice Bacino di San Marco
• The Tempest (or Bride of the Wind)

• The Prometheus Triptych, considered by Oskar to be his most important work
  • Hades and Persephone, Apocalypse, Prometheus

Oskar “explained that the dangers faced by contemporary civilisation were symbolised by the figure of Prometheus “whose overweening nature drove him to steal fire so that man could challenge the gods”.  The artist’s fear was that culture and society were being dominated by science and technology which threatened the freedom and individuality of mankind.  Such fears became widespread as the cold war and nuclear arms race developed during the 1950s and the Prometheus Triptych can be seen as prophetic of the period.” See reference.

As I’m not from England, it was also nice to look up various mentions of places.

Aldermaston (Berkshire, England) is mentioned, where the Atomic Weapons Establishment is located, making this town well known in connection with the UK’s nuclear weapons programme, as well as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Our main character, Miranda, is not just an art student, but also an activist. She mentions walking from Aldermaston to London, although without any mentions as to why. Neverheless, this way I’ve found out about the Easter time “Ban the Bomb Movement Walks” from Aldermaston To London, Trafalgar Square (1952-1963). For further details and image source see reference.

The last Aldermaston to London march was in 1963, the year of John Fowles debut novel The Collector.

I’ve also enjoyed learning about Boadicea and Her Daughters a bronze sculptural group in London representing Boudica, queen of the Celtic Iceni tribe, who led an uprising in Roman Britain. It was sculpted by the English artist and engineer Thomas Thornycroft and installed in 1902. In 1958 it became a Grade II listed building. Images are from wikipedia.

On the skills of an artist, Miranda remembers G.P. telling her:

But however good you are at translating personality into line or paint it’s no go if your personality isn’t worth translating. It’s all luck. Pure hazard.

On a different topic again, the book also introduces a new word – lameduck. To lameduck someone is to show that you are cleverer than they are.

And to end on a positive note, here is what Miranda says:

It’s no use. I’m not a hater by nature. It’s as if somewhere in me a certain amount of good-will and kindness is manufactured every day; and it must come out. If I bottle it up, then it bursts out.

The paintings presented above are my own choice unless mentioned otherwise.

Until next time … keep learning and being kind!