(or The Bodleian Oath*)
Here's the Accompanying Photograph!
Saturday's Times ran an illustration of flop house resident, gravely ill Bernhardt Wichmann III, 76, laying on a single bed in a dingy room no larger than a closet. To accompany an Upstairs, Downstairs-style study in contrast between purveyor of preppy pub food J.G. Melon, and said shabby single-room occupancy hotel above it. But is this the stuff of a self-styled melancholy style blog?
Indeed.
Because Wichman's over-the-top floor-to-ceiling collage -- compulsive embellishment to create fantastical variance with grim objective reality -- got me thinkin' bout sixties-era British playwright Joe Orton, and the similar décor of his inner-city London council flat. A "garden of earthy delights" created from hundreds of mutilated library books. Which, true to form, resulted in Orton and lover Kenneth Halliwell being sentenced to Hell, six months imprisonment.
The couple's guerrilla tactical art included altering, and then returning, library books. Evidence that Orton honed his satirical skills with scissors, in order to skewer the genteel middle classes, authority and defenders of ‘morality’, several years before the wild successes of the playwright's Entertaining Mr. Sloane, etc.
"Libraries might as well not exist; they’ve got endless shelves for rubbish and hardly any space for good books." Orton wrote in 1967. Thanks for reminding us, Joe, that not so long ago, before the Information Age's embarrassment of riches, nourishing a hungry mind could be tough going.
*The Bodleian Oath is, of course, Oxford University Library's "I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, or to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or in its custody; nor to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.”
