Analysis of an art critic
Michael De-la-Noy
MARCHES PAST by Peter Fuller
Chatto & Windus, f9.95
Iget the impression from Peter Fuller's autobiographical memoir that he has never been very good at taking advice. He has certainly ignored that of Frances Donald- son, who wrote 27 years ago in Child of the Twenties, 'the one thing that no one is anxious to hear about is the life of the middle classes. The middle classes are inhibited, sterile, pretentious and mainly philistine. They are without charm, origi- nality or courage. They produce the dullest women in the world, and no natural background for autobiography.' Plenty of middle-class writers, Lady Donaldson among them, have however risen trium- phantly to her challenge. In recent years, Thomas Hinde, Philip Oakes, Peter Van- sittart have all shaped rivetting memoirs from material Lady Donaldson warned them away from. Perhaps in addition to ignoring her tongue-in-cheek overstate- ments, Peter Fuller should have read au- thors like these for autobiographical guide- lines alongside the list of unbelievably erudite and off-putting titles he cites as his daily fare.
But then he is an art critic, and a one-time mixed-up Marxist, who luxuri- ated for four and a half years on a couch in Harley Street at other people's expense. Now there is promising material. But I cannot honestly say I am any wiser as to why he went in for psychoanalysis or what real difference it has made to his life, only that his ambition is to 'bring what I learned from it into contact with the making of history: . . . to leap out of the shell of my residual narcissism into the full tide of realism.' A doctor did stick his finger up young Peter's backside prior to extracting his appendix, and Mr Fuller's anal fixation is certainly one of the recurring themes of this complex, digressive book. And natur- ally, like any intelligent boy, he failed to see eye to eye with his father, who sounds rather a nice man, a Baptist G.P. who wrote to Peter at his 'minor public school' once a week. My father wrote to me once in the whole of his life! But what else went wrong I must be too dense — like much of Mr Fuller's purple prose — to grasp.
The shape decided upon for this memoir only adds to the general feeling of dis- orientation. In 1975, Peter Fuller, now 39, and already the author of nine books, began to keep a journal — on 28 March to be precise. For reasons almost entirely arbitrary he has treated us, in a series of confusing time-switches, to entries for 28 and 29 March for the years 1975-78. The flashbacks that really work are two recol- lections from school (the brief episode with the doctor and an inevitable beating), seven pages of genuine interest about his father and home that really take off, and a terrifying account of the birth of his daugh- ter. One can forgive someone a lot for writing of this quality. But if only he had spared us the banality — 'Colette and I lay in bed, side by side, watching Melvyn Bragg's programme, Read All About It, on the television screen' — or indeed the pretentious guff. Mr Fuller has a thing about fish (I associated buying fish with sad visits to painted women'), and here he is describing a purchase:
Separated in their otherness, they hang and spiral there, swallowing Tastey Pet Fish Flakes at the surface, while I digest sprink- lings of over-determined projection: flying up like the rising penis, floating like the hallucinated breast, sinking, satiated, bottom-feeding, mouth-blowing amidst the excrement, turd-day, polymorphously per- verse.
If this is the kind of thing that turns you on you will not hesitate to agree with the blurb, which informs us that 'this remark- able autobiographical memoir establishes Peter Fuller as one of our finest writers.'
Marches Past is essentially an insider's book. There is a great deal about modern art, enough in fact to drive some of us back in desperation even to the Pre- Raphaelites, and if you understand what Peter Fuller means when he writes, 'ab- stract expressionism was at least about the heroic exploration of subjectivity . . Art is draining down its own anus', you will feel perfectly at home. I feel I have a much clearer insight into his view of the world when I read, 'The radio babbles on. Marghanita Laski is back again. The pitch of her voice sends prickles of irritation through me.' Mr Fuller is perfectly entitled to feel irritated by the pitch of anyones voice, and I only mention this swipe at Mrs Laski because it comes as surely rather a gratuitous encore to an earlier, decidedly ungallant, description of her as the 'ageing throttle of the right'. I am not paid to carry a flag for Marghanita Laski, but in case I sound out of joint with Mr Fuller it is only fair to record that she is among the half dozen most intelligent people I have ever met. His disdain for Agatha Christie, 011 the other hand, I can sympathise with, despite the fact that on his own confession he has never read a single novel by her. Someone else who irritated Peter Fuller was his French father-in-law, a truly dis- advantaged man, being a member of the petit bourgeoisie, a village postmaster, in fact. Every time the poor chap tries to take an interest in Peter's work he really gets the brush-off. The one person he clearly loved was his wife (she has now left hint, alas), but I could not tell you what she looks like, said or felt. You cannot write autobiography without egotism, but With egotism alone you canot bring any charac- ter, even you own, to life. If there were, prizes for incredible conduct, I would nominate Peter Fuller for his choice of parting gift to his long-suffering analyst, a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason. Peter Fuller told his analyst the only action in his life that caused him regret was accepting a painting as a present and then selling it. Surely he must have meant the only regrettable action he has not suppressed. Nobody's life can be that blameless. With bland self- assurance he also tells us, 'Of course, vie had all read [Ronald Laing] in the late, 1960s, along with Jorge Luis Borges an°, Henry Miller . . .' But, of course, not all us had. I approached Marches Past With high expectations and ended it quite ex- hausted, partly because the other trouble with this sometimes terribly tedious book is that Mr Fuller conducts us with stultifying solemnity though an elementary expedi- tion of basic discoveries like a fourth- former who has just discovered masturba- tion. It may be very exciting for him but for anyone in the fifth form it really is old hat •
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