Jarman in his garden at Prospect Cottage. He was a serious gardener, and the book is full of lists of the various plants he nurtures and loves. By the end of the journals, sadly, he's listing the medica-tions he takes daily to combat AIDS.
What is it?
A journal by English writer/artist/filmmaker/activist Derek Jarman, first published in 1991.
Journals from when?
It covers the period from January 1989 to September 1990.
That’s not a very long period.
No, but he packed a lot in, and he has a lot to say.
Do tell!
So, in January 1989, he had already had an HIV-positive status for a while, but his health was good. He had purchased his house on the south coast of Kent and was energetically building a garden around it. And he was creating art and films. He makes The Garden during this period, and begins work on Edward II. So he’s not idle! This is very much the journal of a busy creative life. But eventually his health takes a dramatic turn for the worst ...
Still, a hefty book covering such a short period—he must describe his daily life in enormous detail! Is it interesting?
First of all, he doesn’t write every day, and when he does write, he sometimes focuses on the past, leisurely recounting tales of his childhood, his love of gardening, his tense relations with his father, his unhappy schooldays, his first gardens, his first sexual adventures—
Okay, great, this is what we wanted. So there’s lots of descriptions of his sexual life?
No, but his sexual life is just always there, it’s fundamental. He’s a beautiful writer! So everything he describes in terms of his sexual life—visits to Comptons gay bar in London, evenings in the gay bits of Hampstead Heath—is vivid and imbued with a kind of melancholy, because of course by this point in his life he was infected with HIV and knew his time was likely limited. And indeed, the last fifth of the book describes his declining health in 1990. There is also talk of his gay activism, Gay Pride marches, a visit to Poland to help the newly liberated country’s LGBTQ community come into the light.
What comes through in everything Jarman writes is an amazing energy and love of life. The book is not an “AIDS memoir” as such, a recounting of illness, but a celebration of life—the garden being the recurring metaphor—against a background of physical, environmental, and political menace that threatens to snuff out creativity and life itself. It’s ironic and apt that Jarman’s garden sits in the vicinity of a nuclear power station.
Stars?
Two. Derek Jarman is just simply one of the greats of gay history, a man who made unabashedly queer films at a time when that wasn’t the way to go if you wanted an audience, one of the first public figures to make his HIV-positive status public, a deeply brave creator and a lover of queer folk. Frankly, anything he has to say is interesting (I cherish his description of the Beat writers as “quite an ordinary little bunch seriously cultivating slender legends”), and this book is a precious and inspiring insight into a very rich and challenging and productive period of his life.
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