Eileen McHugh - a life remade
Eileen McHugh: A Life Remade
by
Mary Reynolds
Philip Spires
www.philipspires.co.uk
Remaking a life
Let us imagine an artist who struggled to complete anything, left near-unintelligible notes and was probably incompetent in the use of materials. This was an artist who found any focus hard to maintain, who seemed to dabble in multiple forms and spread apparently undisciplined attention so thinly across a multitude of whim-driven activities that hardly any project came to fruition. Picture a corpus of surviving works that only just creeps into double figures, some of which are dubiously attributed, while others may have been reworked by other hands. And imagine a signature work so incompetently produced it is literally disintegrating whilst, in that same room on a facing wall, there exists another work, largely unknown, by a different artist, who has remained almost anonymous, despite producing something that is arguably as beautiful and technically superior to its neighbour. If asked to assess, how might contemporary viewers, coming to this body of work for the first time, judge its worth or its creator’s achievement?
And how might we judge another artist who has left just one work, which exists only in reproduction as a contemporary photograph, taken in the few moments the work existed? But this artist, we now discover, left a variety of notes, descriptions and indications of materials to be used that are sufficient to reconstruct lost works. Is it not our duty to remake this life’s work, to recreate this legacy that might enrich lives, change perceptions and reinterpret experience? This artist is called Eileen McHugh. The previous, unfocused incompetent was called Leonardo da Vinci.
But where might I begin to remake the life and work of an artist like Eileen? We have no works, no studies or even failed projects awaiting reassembly. We know little of her undocumented life, whose destination remained unknown even to her own mother. But we all leave our own marks on time. Identifying them is the challenge, and then describing them becomes possible. Once reassembled, we might then remake Eileen McHugh’s life and reconstruct her works to enrich our collective experience. But where to start?
London, of course, changed everything. She was just eighteen, adult, though not formed, not yet consciously searching for herself, but, despite that, still discovering it anew. The city played its crucial changing part, its immediate and permanent mutability forever challenging, forever creating, forever destroying. Thus, she arrived an adult and gradually learned to recreate the child, consciously and perhaps pretentiously following Picasso’s stated example. At least that was her stated aim.
Before art college, her work had dithered between what her teachers demanded and, more originally, what she momentarily and arbitrarily imagined. This was what she had learned to call her art, but she later conceded that she was nothing special in that regard. Occasionally, her style had suggested its maturity, but she would only become aware of that some years later, mere months before that artistic life ended prematurely.
So London is the place to start, her arrival marking a cusp that separated the juvenilia from her own style. I will, during the course of this re-evaluation of her work, place her identity and the events that shaped it at the very centre of my story, because, like her work, her life can now be remade only via these once discarded memories, these near-forgotten trivia. The remaking of Eileen McHugh, however, must reconstruct the individual, the person, because, as Eileen herself noted, it was e e cummings who wrote that ‘the artist’s only inevitable country is himself’ and, in the case of Eileen McHugh, the words ring completely true after the obligatory change of gender. She was her art and her art was her, personal, personalised, inseparable, utterly individual and yet ultimately effectively anonymous.
After all, from the early nineteenth century onwards, the expression of individuality is what art had progressively become. Before then, she imagined, it had been the paymaster who had called his piper’s tune - church, rulers, feudal barons, bourgeois accumulators, states and corporations - and so style had been essentially dictated by expectation, form by commission, content by intended use. This recent, emergent philosophy that art must be individual expression implied that the first thing an artist should achieve is self-knowledge and self-awareness. That was the difficult part and had to precede the easier activity of producing objects. Once achieved, however, continued originality implied equally continued self-reappraisal, a process that, each time it was repeated, had to confront and overcome the same challenges but finish at a new uniqueness. For Eileen McHugh, this was perhaps the source of her ultimate failure. In a sense, she simply opted out of that essential process. Achieving the unique always remained in her power. Having it seen as such was always the challenge.
Her art, like her artistic life, ended prematurely and, because of her pursuit of impermanence, it obviously no longer exists. In Eileen McHugh: A Life Remade I will try to bring back to life both the artist and her work so that they can both occupy their rightful and deserved place at the forefront of our experience. But this goal of the ephemeral makes her œuvre difficult to recreate. The style and concept are easy and remain accessible today. But the materials she chose were specific to their time, as were many of her inspirations. Imitation is available to us, but it remains mere imitation. And strangely, a recreation of her life shares that same restriction.
Arguably, she was the product of a place and a time. Now we are all slaves of time and live to the rhythms it imposes. But in Eileen’s case, it is not only era that is intangible, because the place she knew cannot be revisited, probably cannot even be imagined by a contemporary critic, for it has been physically changed by the years, its social fabric unwound and rewoven.
It is today impossible for a contemporary reader to appreciate the unique character of her adolescence. Her experience itself was also unique in its own time and place, and it is now impossible to reconstruct it, almost impossible to describe it, as she would have experienced it. Education is something we have learned to take for granted, an expensive necessity desired by all. But in Eileen’s era, it was a rationed good, cheap if you could get it, but available only to an elect few.
In Eileen’s case, she did not follow any predicated path. She did stay on at school until sixteen, though there was no requirement. She did seek qualifications, but her route was unconventional, and her achievements hardly recognised. She did, however, obtain the bare minimum of what she needed, albeit a year late, and this passport to further learning opened onto a future of creativity.
But today, neither can we recreate or envisage the environment of the time. Attitudinally, it was as removed from our own era as it is possible to be. Abortion and homosexuality had only just been decriminalised, and the latter only in England and Wales. It was less than a decade since the last executions and most adults had lived through at least one World War. Possibly it is this era’s proximity to our own that erects the greatest barrier to its understanding. We might assume similarity to today, but that would be wrong, especially in its attitudes towards race.
Eileen Mary McHugh was born on August 8, 1952 in Wakefield. It was a town with a major literary and artistic tradition, though hardly anyone living there was aware of it. Writers such as Mercer, Storey, Braine and Bairstow were or had been nearby. Sculptors Moore and Hepworth had matured in the area. Lindsay Anderson would make one of the films of the era in the town, its plot drawn from David Storey’s book. It was a time when an accent became acceptable and the experience of a life less than privileged had become an avenue to be explored, no longer seen as simply a dead end.
But the Foundation Course that Eileen McHugh followed in the town´s college hardly even acknowledged the contemporary. Tutors presented the learning experience as if it had been drawn from a Renaissance studio, with a stress on technique, life drawing and apprenticeship. It was an experience that was universally criticised by students who dutifully but resentfully followed its demands, before rejecting its values. And Eileen followed this path, faithfully completing all the set tasks, but consciously trying to reject what they were trying to impart. It is no surprise whatsoever that she later destroyed all her work from that period. And this is why London marks a cusp between the juvenile and the mature.
The nineteen-sixties was a decade when British society still rationed education. One still had to be worthy to receive it. Eileen was not among the mere one fifth of the population pre-qualified for exposure to academic study. Thus branded as an eleven-year-old, it was assumed she would leave school at fifteen, since the raising of the school leaving age, ROSLA, an acronym that sent shivers up the spines and set icicles in the wallets of those who had become used to their right to privilege, was still in the future. It was surely educational experience that formed her as a person, her view of the world and thus her art. Of course, she would not be alone if this were true! In her case, the experience was very much of its time and will perhaps be unfamiliar to many.
If artists must inhabit themselves, Eileen McHugh´s clear problem was her inability to decide who she was. Moulded and branded by society via her school and college experience, she fought to find her own voice. Eventually she surely did just that, but it was a state that was only temporarily maintained and soon ceased completely, never to come to life again. Her style and artistic language inevitably mean that we have no enduring evidence of her work. But now we have her notebooks, so some of her genius might be reconstructed and her work reimagined. Hence now is the time to write the official biography of the artist, hence Eileen McHugh: A Life Remade.
“Life’s greatest moments are the ones that are lost.” Forgotten is what Eileen McHugh meant to write. But popularity identifies greatness. It uncovers talent’s otherwise hidden achievements. Cream floats, says the cliché, but it’s only a cliché because we recognise the analogy’s recurring truth. The artist must inhabit a private world of inspiration, of course, but she also exports a personality, markets an identity that is no longer the artist’s property. And then, possibly, an unpredictable popularity makes that parochial identity universal, confers and creates status, confirms genius that will be remembered.
In Eileen McHugh’s case, however, popularity alone is not enough to locate her vision, identify her achievements, or display her talent. There is much more to this artist than the single work for which she is now so widely known. The time is surely now ripe for an examination of her life and work, because there are surely other gems waiting to be discovered, despite her own wish that none of her art should endure. For her, true greatness was to be achieved only if the work was dismissed, discarded and then effectively ignored. In her view it would, however, be absorbed by its everyday environment and thus paradoxically be given a kind of permanence, becoming a part of what everyone merely took for granted. Her creations were objects of the here and now, ephemera calculatedly conceived to have no lasting consequence, nothing that might aspire to or achieve longevity, let alone permanence. Paradoxically, however, she appeared to appreciate that if left where she put them, they were all potentially, but anonymously eternal.
So what might Eileen McHugh, the artist, have made of her current fame, achieved over thirty years after her creative life came to an end? Marion McHugh, Eileen’s mother, at the end of her life enabled me, despite the difficulties of communicating with a memory so disabled by dementia, to build up what I sincerely believe to be an accurate, sympathetic and penetrating portrait of the young Eileen, when she was at the height of her creative activity. And, given that the art becomes the eventual property of those who experience it, rather than those who create it, it may be that we can only reconstruct the artist from others’ experience of her.
There is, of course, the inevitable question of what Eileen might have made of a project to promote her name into a permanence she herself always rejected. Indeed, we must try to envisage how she might have reacted to the fact that one of her works, just one, it has to be said, has achieved such fame. As ever, putting words into the mouth of an historical personality is easy, but rendering them convincing is eternally problematic. One of my purposes in constructing this biography is to create a discussion of Eileen’s work, an examination that might reassess its impact and its worth. Obviously, I remain convinced of its originality, individuality and uniqueness, and I intend in these pages to illustrate these qualities, and to reconstruct other examples of her work. This has become possible only because of the journals and letters her mother kept so carefully, sealed, unthumbed, undisturbed in an attic box.
Such a project is rendered doubly problematic when we remember that Eileen McHugh’s personal ambition was to be forgotten and to leave no personalised mark. Surely, then, this new fame has placed her memory into an uncomfortable limbo, a state that she herself would not have sought. Surely an enduring celebrity would have been the last thing desired by an artist who strove to achieve the ephemeral, the purely instantaneous anonymity of permanent non-existence. These are serious and important considerations, of course. But I will argue that Eileen’s goals were dictated by her concept of what was possible. I will suggest that if she had shared the privilege of a different family environment or birthright, or even a different educational experience, then her attitude to her work may have been transformed. After all, Eileen would not have been the first artist to have pursued the ephemeral, only to find it achieving its own permanence. What do we now think that Duchamp was doing with his Fountain, for example? With our hindsight we know that eventually he reproduced it!
The dilemmas posed by the apparently random interaction between artistic motive and achievement have been repeatedly voiced. Though Eileen McHugh: A Life Remade certainly began as a project to reconstruct a life, the inseparability of the artist from her art means that merely relating events leads directly into critical appraisal of her creativity. Ironically, I cannot answer the criticisms that arise, for there is no material evidence for the stance I have now adopted, except for Eileen’s own words, here published for the first time. I cannot answer the questions posed, and neither can Eileen McHugh, since her artistic personality ceased to exist decades ago. Eventually history decides and, in Eileen’s case, history has bestowed an institutional permanence via popularity of its own accident.
Marion McHugh would surely have had her view but deciphering what this might have been is a route full of wrong turns, cul-de-sacs and, eventually, fantasy. On most days, Marion believed her daughter had been killed in an accident. On other days, she was convinced it was no accident and believed that Eileen had killed herself. In moments of lucidity, she might even admit that she simply did not know what happened. At other times, she bowed to what surely is the truth, but then she never did open those crucial letters, only some of which had actually come from her daughter. My hope is that this work may go some way towards addressing and illuminating Eileen’s life, so these points and others will be addressed. But, rest assured, neither life nor art will admit answers, only motives, and these, still disputed, will be forever debatable.
Eileen McHugh is one of those rare figures who is well known and unknown at the same time, a brand name not a person, a product not an experience. How many people at breakfast associate the family name on the cereal box with Malthusian philosophy that demanded the creation of a food with no nutrition in order to reduce sex-drive? And how many of us would dream of vacuuming the floor with a Spangler? Eileen might be known for nothing more than “He’s on the other line…”, but there is more to her work than this single, iconic piece. So it is thus time to put the record straight by recreating and then displaying the artist’s life and work, thus permanently and justly associating her name with her achievements.
A biography of an icon, however, must never be a mere event. It must grasp a status demanded by its subject and inhabit that citadel throughout. So, in the case of my efforts on behalf of Eileen McHugh, let me fail from the start, since she has now become so well known, so obviously recognised and widely described that I, from my relative obscurity, could never even aspire to such status. At best, I can be a medium through which Eileen’s work can be revealed.
It is over thirty years since Eileen McHugh last worked. For most of those years, her name would hardly even have registered in the memories of her former neighbours. In some ways, she may even have been labelled as better forgotten. She lived in a pre-internet era, and so never contributed to social media, never owned a mobile phone, never owned a credit card and so left neither a transaction trace nor a download history. She did not even own a camera for most of her life, so pictures of her exist largely in other people’s memories. A life so recent was thus unknown in our times at the dawn of my interest in reimagining her work.
It might be legitimately asked if anything remains to be said about a figure such as Eileen. Received opinion is that she left no work, desired no legacy, despised the very concept of permanence, rejected longevity and treated life itself with apparent contempt. These assertions, I will argue, remain true, but the reality was considerably more complex, and thus of interest. For me, personally, this reconstruction of Eileen has been a voyage of discovery via the memories of those who knew her, and it is this journey I seek to share. No matter how anonymously we choose to live, our very existence inevitably leaves its imprint in the crushable fabric of life, and forms moulds that can be refilled into recreated form.
Talent, in itself, is already success, and recognition confirms talent. Ideas are in themselves achievements, but when the ideas are born of great talent, it is almost inevitable that they will capture attention and, like floating cream, rise to achieve the prominence and status they deserve. And even when such ideas possess no physical existence or expression, if they be the product of genius, they will prevail and ultimately emerge to demand recognition. Such was the process by which Eileen McHugh became a household name, despite her complete lack of physical legacy to advertise her genius.
And given the prominence of her signature piece, it is now essential that someone attempts to reconstruct the body of her other work. Remaking the products of Eileen’s undoubtedly fertile imagination, however, poses greater problems than reassembling the little we know of her creative life. Though she did leave us copious descriptions of some pieces, most had to be re-imagined through the memories of those who saw them, sometimes at the very instant they were created, for in many cases that is as long as they existed. That she destroyed most of what she produced is now common knowledge and, as a reader of this critical biography, you may legitimately ask what now can be authentic in a corpus of work which only exists in modern reconstruction? My answer will be revealed as the biography proceeds, but at the outset I need to stress the importance in this process of Eileen McHugh’s own notebooks, which have come into my possession only since the recent death of her mother.
Never before have we had the privilege of seeing the sculptor’s work from the perspective of her own thoughts, her own choices, inspirations and justifications. I discovered the texts, which were never released by Marion McHugh during her lifetime, in a forgotten box of personal effects that had not been touched by anyone since it was lodged with the owners of the care home where she spent the last years of her life. Marion McHugh had not deliberately hidden the notebooks, nor had she destroyed them, so one must conclude that her intention in preserving them had been to share them. Marion’s state of mind, her incapacitating dementia and latterly her struggle with Parkinson’s Disease probably meant that, by the time I began visiting her, she had merely forgotten the notebooks had ever existed.
It was just a few years ago that Eileen McHugh’s legacy changed my own life. By chance, after contact with Marion’s carers during her final months in the care home, I was presented with that box of memorabilia. Inside I stumbled across what I then believed was the only item of Eileen’s work still in existence. For some unknown, unconscious reason, I decided not to throw it and the other contents of that private box into the plastic bin liners that were rapidly filling with Marion’s few, but unwanted possessions. And so “He’s on the other line…” came to the world’s attention. This work, alongside assembled memories from the single shoebox that Marion had brought from the house she vacated, the house that had been sold to fund her care, were passed to me as the only possessions she retained. And when I took that now fabled object in my hand, its contents struck a previously un-played chord and thus demanded their own preservation. Perhaps it was the immediate sense of genius, an implicit but vivid recognition of genuine talent that immediately imprinted on my consciousness. I decided to keep it for whatever frivolous reason and the rest is now mere history. As a result of keeping this apparently trivial object, Eileen McHugh’s name just a year later had become pure currency, exchangeable anywhere. It is my sincere belief that my reconstructions of work from the notebooks will also remake the future, assuring her legacy and confirming her genius.
But given that Eileen McHugh’s personal ambition was to be forgotten and to leave no mark, surely, then, this new fame has placed her memory into an uncomfortable limbo, a state that she herself would not have sought. But here, in Eileen McHugh: A Life Remade, this re-examination and reconstruction of her work, let me assert my belief that any art must become the property of its audience once the creator has given it an existence. It is the artworks themselves that are communicated via the artist’s ideas, and then these concepts, which now have lives of their own, enter a form of independent public ownership, so they can be legitimately examined, repeated and even remade. Once created, they own their existence and retain their right to that life, their internal meaning remaining their own property.
Eileen McHugh was forever burdened by meaning, her short burst of creativity stacked with experience, her imagination emotional and vivid. If fame had come earlier, during her short creative lifetime, her story would now surely be altogether different. Inescapable and irreversible is the fact of her cessation of activity, aged just twenty-four, having received no recognition, fame, wealth or, arguably, even contentment. But like all great artists, it falls to her followers, her devotees, her survivors, whose lives have been enriched by the power of her vision, to ponder what might have been and to raise her legacy to the stature it deserves
Who knows what she might have produced had she not achieved her apparent goal of becoming unknown? What might Schubert have composed if he had lived as long as Brahms? How might Raphael have represented the world had he survived into Mannerism? And what would Owen have written about had he outlived Armistice Day? In the case of Eileen McHugh, it could be argued that she achieved the anonymity she desired. But here I intend to question this view, to demonstrate that the young artist’s vision was coloured by the deprivations of her environment and that her creativity did conceive of the permanence that it has since achieved. After inheriting her notes, sketchbooks and journal, I can shed new light on what she might have achieved and, indeed, they have illuminated the manuscript of an artistic life story as yet untold. It is not often that a household name belongs to a person unknown and I hope to put flesh onto these unclaimed bones and answer the question of where her work might have travelled if she had attained a longer creative life, one that might even have reached middle-age.
This and other questions have been at the core of my work. Through forensic and painstaking research, I have reassembled detail of the artist’s life and have reconstructed many of her lost works, a catalogue of which is in preparation and will be published alongside this biography. The work’s very nature, of course, means that none of it can be described as original, in the sense that it comes to us directly from the artist’s own hand. We can have no problem with this, however, especially when we cannot be sure whose brushstrokes painted a canvas from the studio of an old master, or which particular printer was responsible for etching a plate, or even which unrecorded editor created that now famous line. Art is in the communicated idea and its formulation, and these can be appreciated in the work of Eileen McHugh as completely as they might be for any artist, alive or dead, private or public. It is the art that lives on, not the artist. Music lingers while its composers decompose.
But also, by its very nature, Eileen McHugh’s work challenges our very understanding of what is original, since from the outset she sought to redefine our perception and experience when we view a work of art. In a sense, she became the ultimate denouement of the arts, Dadaist by achievement as well as ideology, in that she wanted all of us to become participants in the process of creation, to remake the object itself. In her version of reality, it is not the product of the artistic process that matters, but the process by which our attention comes to rest on a form, on an object we are invited to see. It is not the object itself which forms her art, but the experience of attention diverted and focused, however momentarily or ephemerally. It was that moment, when perception is possibly changed, that she explored. Objects we would have normally not even noticed thus become, by virtue of the artist’s vision, objects of our concentration, perhaps interest, perhaps not. But our lives have been changed by the encounter, and that cannot be denied. I hope here to lead the reader along the pathways of the artist’s now revealed intentions. It is a path that must also inevitably follow her life, because in her case, perhaps more so than for any other artist, her life was her art and her art was her life. The two are inextricably intertwined and must be understood as one and the same, despite our possessing little evidence of either.
I accept that Eileen McHugh did not foresee the enduring success her work was destined to achieve. And it is also clear that the very notion of that success might for her have been anathema. None of us can imagine, however, how we might react if the unimagined and unexpected spotlight of fame were to fall on us. It has the power to change people, and so it might have changed Eileen McHugh, whose individual vision was probably not even understood by her peers, family or teachers. Thus, we may only speculate how attention, if it had arrived earlier, might have transformed her attitude to permanence. Now, as a result of my research, I feel personally qualified to speculate on how this might have affected her. I have used, for want of a better term, a process of psychological extrapolation, drawn in part from my own reactions to my own attainment of recognition when previously I had never even considered the possibility. The position is also justified, because history cannot be rewritten. The question of whether Eileen McHugh herself would have accommodated her changed status is now an irrelevant consideration, since de facto her name is now public property. Both fame and status are now irreversibly hers, whether she might like it or not! As such, she has become the public property of anyone who experiences the product of her genius, in whatever form.
So intertwined are the events of the artist’s life and the products of her creativity that I have rejected the idea of dealing with them as separate topics. Throughout I will deal with the physical and artistic lives together, illustrating how completely intertwined they were. Sometimes one becomes the other, and thus illustrates how the artist herself chose to express her genius in the objects she constructed. It is surely impossible to separate any artist from the art, the person from the work. We see both as manifestations of the same humanity, an exported personality from an individual’s country, preserving a response to a precious moment in time and space. Via its extended permanence, this shared humanity becomes part of each and every one of us who experiences its message, with value and worth communicated, absorbed and incorporated. Whatever we do from that moment, our changed perception endures, its influence on future thought and action assured. Once experienced, these objects cannot be excised from our memories and thus they leave us changed.
And the rest, it has to be said, is history. We are now some years on from that day when Marion McHugh herself passed away, over three decades after her husband, after growing frailer by the day in her nursing home. But the preceding year witnessed the development of a bond between Marion and me. Via my inheritance of that forgotten box, Eileen’s probably forgotten papers came into my possession, documents without which this biography could not have been written. This material, alongside my own research now forms the most complete archive currently available on Eileen McHugh and will itself eventually be catalogued and displayed in the museum I intend to build and dedicate to her life and work. I hope that this artistic life will be transformed into a permanent memory that can be experienced, understood, incorporated and absorbed by anyone who cares to share it.
London
She was just eighteen when London claimed her. The town itself was older, but to the naïve teenager arriving at art college in mid-September, it felt younger, like a tabula rasa she could mould in her own infinite image. For Eileen, as for most of us, the city’s power to absorb without changing counterbalanced Eileen’s exuberance, cancelled it out to leave a plain, self-preoccupied normal. She would never have claimed that at the time, of course, since her opinions would have then been constrained by the insecurity that almost inevitably steers youth away from individuality, mingled with the narcissism that denies anything existed before the self. Her youth convinced her she was unique, but London had seen it all before. This painful realisation would come later, and gradually.
Her art college started two weeks earlier than the university places that just one or two of her higher achieving former friends had proudly secured, a fact of which they never seemed to tire of reminding her in those months that followed their individual decisions about their no-longer collective future. She had little to do with them after leaving school, but they were still there, just down the hill from home and still seen on most days. But at least she was here, or there, ready to start her pursuit of the one thing she had convinced herself she wanted. Of course, there were other things that attracted her, but she had yet to believe that they were truly for her. Art college, and thus the status of the artist, the visionary, the one anointed with the ability to see and communicate, that status was for her and at the time she was determined to claim it.
It was a mock-classical Victorian brick pile that welcomed its new intake. Eileen, like most of her fellow students, had little knowledge of the origins of their college, but detailed awareness of what had unfolded there just a couple of years before. The fact that the institution had been changed by student action was immediately conceded to all those newcomers who heard the head of school’s address. He stressed the proletarian and therefore respectable and noble origins of the institution. He also acknowledged how minimally the building had been converted on becoming an august modern institute of higher learning - a lick of paint here or there, all neutral, functional, boring, and an occasional opening up of the classroom spaces to transform them collectively into a salon-studio. It was definitely not perfect, but change was on the way, he said. The assembled new intake accepted his apologies, but they were thus prepared for the relative deprivation of their coming experience, but not yet aware of how they would react.
This meant that the three storey, wooden sash-windowed, green copper-topped, porticoed pile atop a rise near a famous north London hill welcomed Eileen McHugh into its intellectual care, but simultaneously warned that the experience may indeed be limited. It would take less than a term for the positive to be hollowed out, but she, along with her fellow students, mostly female but all called fresh men, still managed to pursue their increasingly individual paths while they enjoyed a collective, if competitive, friendship.
They were almost all teenagers, overwhelmingly female and all, in their collective analysis, attractive. The few blokes were gay, but the word would never have been used, because it had yet to be redefined. In that era, they preferred ‘queer’, labellers and recipients alike. It did not go unnoticed amongst the new recruits that years two and three both matched the same profile.
It was the end of London’s swinging decade, just after the year of student protests, sit-ins, lockouts, marches and wilting flower power. It was the era of mods, rockers, hippies, anti-war movements, emerging awareness of the planet’s resource limits and nascent anti-consumerism in a generation that would go on to out-consume all that went before. It was an era where being left-wing was cool, but an era where they would have preferred the word ‘fashionable’. The fact that fashions can change is evidenced by this same generation’s election and re-election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan less than ten years on.
And Eileen McHugh was deeply into all of it. On some days she saw herself as a mod, adopted a crew cut and wore braces and boots. On other days, it was sandals and a long, loose, ankle-length skirt with tee shirt above, thin enough to advertise she wore no bra. There was a jacket for colder days, an embroidered Indian fake, with little mirrors stitched into the patterns. She had bought it on the secondhand stalls in Wakefield market on one of her ritual Tuesday morning rummages about a year before. She hadn’t grown much in that year in any direction, because the jacket still fit her, or fit her as badly as it always did. It had probably been discarded by someone who had acquired it as an act of worship after hearing Sergeant Pepper’s, and then got married. Having no ideological preference, she could be mod one day and hippie the next, at whim.
Before she arrived in higher education, she played Progressive Rock and Ravi Shankar in equal measure. Her tastes were catholic, matching her religion save the case of its initial letter, though the music was not lapsed. She worshipped Yes and Chicago, retained a soft spot for Fifth Dimension, and regularly played Richard Harris singing - for want of a better word - songs by Jim Webb before an orchestra of kitchen sinks. Where the hell was MacArthur Park anyway? And did it matter? Iron Butterfly was something to dance to, especially if she was drunk enough not to know what she was doing. But already for a year or so new sounds had begun to stir her imagination. They were largely American, as were all the others, but not exclusively so. These new sounds fit no marketed mould. They were raucous and poetic, individual and collective at the same time, random and yet forcefully structural.
She had first heard jazz on BBC2 and had concluded it was played by old men who smiled at the camera. But then she heard Tubby Hayes and Mike Westbrook and was enthralled. She soon progressed to BBC Radio Three’s jazz, late at night, in bed, under the covers with a trannie and earphones. It was far from the dance music of the bands, even a long way from the celebrated self-promotion of bebop; no, this was different. This was the flamboyant introspection of Coltrane, Coleman, Davis (already passé), Ayler, Shepp, Taylor. Already she had absorbed the British scene. Skidmore had just been awarded his prize in Montreux. Osborne was to become her manic hero and Surman was always there, except when she tried to get to one of his gigs. But more of that later…
It was a new world, a synthesis of fragmentation, an unpredictable, never to be repeated dose of individualized sound, which coincided with the ideological route her art had already taken. The experience convinced her that she had been right all along, and sure enough London’s fringes drew her into free jazz. She arrived looking up to pineapple and cheese on sticks washed down with Hirondelle at parties, and continued the fashion, because food was just not something you thought about. Where she came from, male friends considered an evening with a Watney’s Party Seven to be just about the coolest thing on the planet, despite the beer being warm because the giant can would not fit in a sixties fridge. But her tastes began to change, and the total freedom of the music symbolised, even idealised that change. Increasingly, she saw cultures, like religions, as she had been repeatedly told during her Catholic upbringing, as stained-glass windows, grey and flat on the outside, yet coloured, inspiring and magnificent inside. But the London Eileen still saw only from the outside still seemed multi-coloured, surprising and exciting. Its glass shone from every angle. And its jazz she would see coloured from the inside.
We can be sure about the details, by the way, from the previously mislaid archive of Eileen’s notes that were rediscovered in her mother’s stowed-away box. At least in those early months, Eileen was a very conscientious communicator. She had promised her parents she would keep in touch and wrote home regularly, at least in her first year. And the letters were not mere summaries, and often contained verbatim accounts of what she had done at college, rewrites of material she offered her tutors during the day. For an artist who trusted to the moment, she displayed a surprising need to perfect and refine, as if each raw statement needed redefining and reworking. Let’s let Eileen describe herself. It was the first task of her induction week and preserved in the sketchbooks she kept so conscientiously and carefully under instruction at the start of her course.
Task 1 Describe yourself and your education to a stranger
My name is Eileen McHugh. I am eighteen years old. I come from Wakefield, halfway to Pontefract, to be accurate. It’s called Crofton. It’s quite a big town now. Before it was just a mining village, with terraced houses on streets that had numbers, not names. Before that there were farms. But then, about ten years ago, they started building estates, but not council houses. They were new houses with all mod cons, like gardens, built-on garages, driveways, bathrooms and indoor toilets. We even had central heating installed a few years later, and a telephone. We moved to a semi near a new pub called The Weavers Green on Slack Lane. That really is its name. I’m not lying. I never do. We have a Cock Lane as well. There’s a Grime Lane in Sharlston, another village a mile away.
I went to secondary school in Crofton. I didn’t pass my scholarship. I went to a school called Browns. It was a private school in Crofton. It’s one of the reasons my parents decided to move to Crofton from Wakefield, so I could go to that school. My parents knew I wouldn’t pass to go to Grammar School. I was in a junior where they had two streams in each year. It was the other class that was preparing for the eleven-plus. We got the same work, but nobody actually did it. We were being told all the time about sheep and goats needing to be separated. I can’t remember which one I was. The other reason we moved was that the area where we lived before, near the rugby ground, had lots of immigrants and we didn’t feel safe.
My parents did not want me to go to a Secondary Modern. They thought it was not right for me, but I think that it was more likely not right for them. Most of my friends went to the Secondary Modern, but not the one in Crofton. We moved just as I finished junior school, so they went to a school close to where we used to live. I had to make a new set of friends when I started at Browns.
We had to wear a uniform, just like in Grammar School. Except our uniform was green, and striped. There wasn’t another school that wore green. We stuck out like sore thumbs. It was the only cheap private school in the area. There were other private schools in Wakefield, but only for rich people. We used to be laughed at by the Grammar School kids, who called us dumbos and also by the Secondary Moderns, who called us stuck-up dumbos. Perhaps they were both right. And also wrong at the same time. For most of the kids in Browns, it was the parents who decided they should be there.
The school was in Crofton New Hall. In fact, it was an old house behind stone walls at the bottom of Cock Lane. It had a little stream, the beck, we called it, running across the back. The school wasn’t up to much. We had no equipment. The science labs were just benches with sinks and gas taps. Every floorboard creaked, and the plaster was cracking off. It wasn’t a big place, but everywhere had an echo. And most of the teachers couldn’t care less. Except for art, which I loved. The art teacher was Miss Wallace and she cared about what you did and talked about it. She didn’t just put a tick and a mark out of ten at the bottom. I didn’t like school.
At least, I didn’t like it during the day. But I enjoyed it in the evenings. One of my best friends was Martin. His father was the caretaker at Browns. They lived on-site but he went to the Grammar School. And so did all of his friends. Apart from me.
But because his dad was the caretaker, he and his friends used to meet at Browns in the evenings, usually around six o’clock, and play football in the school playground. It wasn’t very big, but enough for five-a-side. The advantage for the boys was that the school was being cleaned in the evenings and because they couldn’t afford to employ enough women to do the job, Martin’s mother and father did most of the work and they hardly ever finished before ten o’clock. And, while the school was being cleaned, they kept all the classroom lights on, so the playground was lit up and the lads could play all year round. The boys played football and the girls - there were four of five of us - used to sit at the side. The boys thought we were watching them, but we were chatting. And because I was in the school during the day, I knew my way around the buildings, so sometimes we went inside if it was raining. Martin’s dad didn’t like that, but we didn’t do anything wrong, so he usually turned a blind eye. I used to enjoy the wet nights inside, which forced the boys to talk. And we used to look at my work, which was always on display. And then we would talk about it.
Like all school students whose projected grade average is below A, Eileen was self-deprecating. She would always get the excuse in first, well before the criticism had been aired. It’s about knowing your place and then not aspiring to a status beyond your station. In her case, like everyone else’s, it was never a conscious trait, but a conditioned response, brought on by a repeated perception of being belittled. She had friends she valued, that she thought she could not live without, and it was they who, collectively though implicitly, ruled out of order any attempt to step outside their assumed norm. It may have been an age of freedom, individuality, self-expression and of letting it all hang out, but woe betide anyone who challenged social norms or threatened convention. So things just never change, at least at home…
But for Eileen McHugh, going to college meant leaving home and London was about to change everything. It was big. It was anonymous. Anything went. At college she met new people, who all arrived in the group with individual but apparently no collective social baggage. She felt she could become the person she wanted to be but remained unclear as to who that person might be. The anticipated change did emerge, but neither immediately nor swiftly, and eventually it took her to many places she never imagined she might go.
It had been her parents, her father in particular who had insisted on her tenancy of a single room in a family house north of the college. In those days they were called digs, possibly because they were both archaeological and grave-like. A college-backed list of officially registered, and therefore trusted accommodation had arrived in an information pack alongside her college acceptance letter. It was a few stapled sheets onto which addresses and telephone numbers had been listed. It had been typed onto a spirit duplicator master, with corrections still evident, and then run off, as the teachers said at school, to multiple, vaguely blurred copies. Eileen saw it as a school worksheet, that excuse for not having textbooks, that she had seen every day of her school life and she prejudged it accordingly. Names of proprietors were included where relevant and Eileen’s father, Thomas, had ringed a half a dozen places they might try. All were private addresses, offering one room, where the proprietor was listed as a Mrs Something-or-Other. After all, misters could not be landladies and that was the heading above the column of names. If Tom McHugh’s daughter was going to London, then he was going to make sure she would be looked after like she was still at home.
They had made the phone call in August, a month before she was due to start college and had paid rent from the date of the call. “It being hard to say no to someone else willing to pay the extra…” said the apologetic but emphatic voice at the other end. Eileen was worried from that point, and her fears proved justified. Mrs Duke would probably be large, maternal, judgmental, stern and intolerant. The assessment proved nothing less than accurate.
That suspicious, bigoted landlady came with a poky space attached, and it soon began to grate with a young woman who had suffered visions of liberation. Away from home for the first time, Eileen wanted to stay out late, invite an occasional friend around, possibly even someone who wasn’t female, but the short dark, almost cubist lady who owned the place had an explicit, written condition of tenancy that stated, ‘No visitors’. She double locked and chained the front door at ten o'clock and clarified from day one she would not get up to admit any latecomer, even a tenant. And any tenant that did arrive home after ten would be a tenant no longer. If awakenings could be rude at the end of the nineteen-sixties, then this one was near-pornographic. Let's say that Eileen suffered the destruction of multiple preconceptions, the blocking of imagined opportunities and the complete restriction of a freedom she had imagined but had yet to claim. The experience of London, adulthood she had yet to approach, independence she had only imagined, all these simply disappeared before a landlady with house rules and a door chain.
She was also under pressure. For the first time in her life, her tutors made demands on her that she was expected to fulfil. No more the promise, no more the excuse. Students were handed project briefs describing assignments that would last six weeks, sometimes longer. And these were project briefs whose distribution came with completion dates attached and an expectation that each individual would deliver on time and in full. She took time to get used to such demands, to realize they were as nebulous as what had gone before. Initially, she took them all at their word and did her utmost to deliver.
The first three months were a quiet time, perhaps the quietest of her life, since as a teenager in Crofton she had been given much of the freedom she asked for, though never more than would trouble her conservative parents. It was a freedom with strict but unwritten limits that were publicly respected implicitly by both sides. Paradoxically, London, which she imagined as the great liberator from these invisible boundaries, initially reined her in, dictated a work and no play cloistered monasticism she had never before experienced, and it was a shock of sufficient severity to provoke reaction.
And so she spent an isolated term, during which she almost religiously consulted each day’s listings in the almost biblical, fortnightly edition of Timeout to scan the events. It was of course the jazz section that interested her the most, even more than the gallery listings. From the distance of West Yorkshire, she had notions of going to Ronnie Scott’s once a week, of rubbing shoulders with some of those American names that she knew only from album covers and radio. That was before she knew how much it cost to get in. And if that surprised her, then eventually so did the price of a drink inside. But with all that wisdom still in the future, she read in each issue that there existed a special student rate for anyone arriving before nine thirty and buying a drink. And the frustration of her confinement started to mount. Eventually, it would be the other venues that would attract more, but in that first term, the 100 Club, Peanuts, Bedford College and the Jazz Centre Society were just names, but names that amplified the frustration of not getting to Frith Street.
It was December before Eileen, Linda and Charlotte finally agreed to pool their respective grants and move in together. They found a little flat above a shop in Muswell Hill, right on the Broadway. It had a large lounge that could be divided with furniture so that two of them could share, while Linda, an older, late-vocation artist could have the single room, because she also had an established boyfriend, who conveniently had nowhere permanent of his own. There was a shared bathroom and a kitchen of sorts, a kitchen that also boasted the flat's main entrance, which was at the top of the external fire escape at the back of the property. It was going to work and the three of them agreed to make it happen.
It was probably only later that Eileen realized that it was this break with the past that most contributed to the change in her outlook. Until then it had been family, school, dependable, trusted encounters with people who were always there. All of a sudden, she realised she had remained blind to the fact that her entire life, and not just the last term, had been confined, defined by others, lived to external demands placed on her. Suddenly she felt she was alone, paradoxically in control of everything, but sensing a powerlessness, an inability to decide or to act. Art college, at least in the first month, felt like it might occupy the same ground as her adolescence, imposing its own rules and limits. But she soon learned that a landlady was not a mother and a college tutor was anything but in loco parentis. Moving in with her two flat mates opened her eyes to changes that had already happened but had gone unnoticed. She was now on her own, together with Linda and Charlotte, but separated by their individual needs and competitive setting. She was suddenly responsible for herself, queen of her self-image, but a mere pawn in the space that the chess moves of their selfish sharing created.
Initially, Eileen found Linda a challenge, because she was different and fit none of the models that life had thus far convinced her existed. Linda was older, from Eileen's perspective an almost incredible eight years older. She was almost old enough to be Eileen's mother. She had left school at fifteen and taken no public exams. But that was where the similarity of their experience ended. Linda had done a secretarial course before taking a job to do what the training had taught her, that she should commit to paper and ink permanence what the creativity of the male mind dictated. It is hard for contemporary experience to comprehend that less than fifty years ago documents were produced on typewriters, on sheets of paper with carbon copies, by women, always women. Men thought up the words, but none of them was able to type, because typing was not considered a skill. It was menial, repetitive, not worthy of brains trained to think. Neither was shorthand a skill, despite it having to be learned in detail and at much cost of time. But a secretary's lot was nice work if you could get it and paid the mortgage if you could stick it. Linda couldn't. By twenty-four, the fifteen-year-old's ambition of a semi in Harlow, husband, kids and two incomes no longer appealed in the way that the teenager’s previously conventional mind had imagined. She was bored. She was bored shitless, especially in Harlow. It was a time when the term ‘far out’ was cool, and the Essex dormitory suburbs were just too far. She felt she was on the wrong side of the river, her bridges burnt, but in fact, as far as the geography was concerned, she was on the right side of the river and didn't even need a bridge.
She had taken up painting as a pastime, had followed Kenneth Clarke's every civilizing word, had taken a holiday to Florence on the back of the enthusiasm his presentations generated and then decided to chuck in the salary and study art. A foundation course at a local college began
Impressum
Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG
Texte: Philip Spires
Bildmaterialien: Philip Spires
Cover: Philip Spires
Lektorat: Caroline Spires
Satz: Philip Spires
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 24.06.2020
ISBN: 978-3-7487-4710-9
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Eileen McHugh - a life remade is part of a personal project to support two artistic endeavours. Alfas del Pi Music Society has existed for twelve years, but the has never owned a piano. The Klein-Schreuder Sculpture Garden in Alfas del Pi mounts regular exhibitions and has a permanent display pf works. Donations received by readers of Eileen McHigh - a life remade - will be shared equally by these two projects, both of which are registered charities in Spain.