The Murder of a Doctrinaire Freudian by Her Analysand Nephew . . . . Oneiric Precognition of Parricide . . . . The Case of Hermine Hug-Hellmuth.

QUESTION: Is it possible for an infant of 5½ years to dream of his committing a violent crime . . . a murder to be committed thirteen years later?

ANSWER: Yes, if you’re the infant analysand and nephew of the psychoanalytic pioneer Hermine Hug von Hugenstein (defined as the first child psychoanalyst recognised by Freud and the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society) . . . and if the murder victim thirteen years later is destined to be your aunt.

A garden intruder from the
Fin de Siècle Viennese Crime Sheet:
Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt

Extraordinarily . . . and, indeed, sinisterly . . . the nephew in question – Rudolf  Hug (‘Rolf’, illegitimate son of Hermine’s illegitimate half-sister) – was the infant subject of one of the earliest analyses of Kindheitsträume (childhood dreams), an infant whose premonition of the circumstances of his own adult degeneracy were clinically documented in 1912 by his Aunt Hermine in her paper for the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie under the title of Analyse eines Traumes eines Fünfeinhalbjährigen (The Analysis of a Dream of a 5½-Year-Old-Boy) and written, in consequence, in dutiful adherence to prevailing Freudian psychoanalytic methodology.

A dispassionate record, maybe, but Rolf’s dream is surely one of the most startling testaments in psychoanalytic case histories from the Viennese wellspring, notwithstanding the analyst’s self-censorship – in her eagerness to be recognised by Freud as an accomplished unraveller of childhood’s pharaonic visions – leading to a calamitous failure to interpret the symbolic language of a dream that in so many coordinate details is a parable for the prefiguring of her own death.

Symbolic determinism.

The infant Rudolf is described by his eminent aunt as ‘. . . a strong [sexual] exhibitionist . . . a little tyrant . . .’ of ‘. . . precocious intelligence . . .’ yet ‘. . . an excrement smearer . . .’ who ‘. . . kept up an active interest in his and others’ defecation.’ At five years of age he could read and write. He looked like a ten-year-old, but was pale, according to a neighbour who knew the family. The boy never looked healthy.
  
His prophetic dream was described by Rolf thus: ‘I am so afraid. A big bear wants to eat me. There was also a big picket fence there and lots of pointed arrows on top. The bear wants to hug me with his front paws. In the middle of the ceiling there was a gigantic black spot, no, a big blot.’

Let us be clear. Hermine Hug-Hellmuth (the name by which she was latterly known following the abolition of nobiliary particles under the Habsburg Law of 1919) is remembered certainly for the professional detachment of her meticulous analytic method but – particularly in relation to her principal object of study, the child Rolf – that cold-eyed detachment is revealed to be a process of observation that saw the 5½-year-old as more an object of scientific enquiry than as a vessel receptive of familial affection.

Beyond the Pale? To be ever banished from a tender heart by barbed defences ?
‘. . . a big picket fence there and lots of pointed arrows on top.’

Visceral wish-fulfilment.

Let us examine Hermine’s analysis of Rolf’s dream more closely. 

1 – ‘I am so afraid.’ In his aunt’s view, Rolf was attention-seeking by ‘forcing affection for himself through the pretended fear.’

2 – ‘A big bear wants to eat me . . . and hug me with his front paws.’ The bear can be seen, according to Hermine, as the embodiment of his absentee black-bearded father by whom he wished to hugged  and kissed. At the age of ‘approximately three-and-half years of age he visited Schönbrunn Zoo for the first time. He saw bears standing up clinging to the lattice fence . . . His delight knew no end as he even saw the “standing up” bears’ erect penises.’ The appearance of the bear is, therefore, both a wish fulfilling dream of brute potency and an expression of the fierce ‘longing of the boy for his big, strong father.’ The bear, accordingly, is the ‘leitmotif of his nightly experience.’  

3 – ‘There was also a big picket fence there and lots of pointed arrows on top.’ In the child’s bedroom were ‘. . . Venetian blinds . . . and the light of the street lamp creates . . . shadow stripes like an actual fence drawn on the ceiling . . . In the dream the picket fence primarily refers to the railing of his little bed . . . through which he exhibited his penis . . . In connection with his lust to exhibit himself in bed he also had a habit of urinating during walks at every fence . . . for example, on a certain board or exactly through two slats into a crack.’ This exploit recalls for him the transgressive act, age two years, of making the arms or hands of his female carers ‘the target of his stream.’

4 – ‘Lots of pointed arrows.’ These refer ‘at first to his own penis but also to the penises of several boys who lived in the neighbourhood during his second year of life. They were repeatedly seen urinating through the fence into the neighbouring garden.’

5 – ‘A black spot, no, a big blot, in the middle of the ceiling.’ The boy – guilty in his infancy of ‘gross coprophilic activity’ as an ‘excrement smearer’ – was observed ‘some days before the dream’ running ‘obsessively around and around the room, squatting here and there, and calling, “Aunt Hermine, I will sit down and make a blot [faeces].” The dream ‘granted him the fulfilment of his wish, and, further, it was on the ceiling in a very exposed spot where everyone who entered the room could see it. In his defecation games he repeatedly selected to “blot” in the “middle” . . . ’ so, in Hermine’s view, her little nephew’s dream accorded at the most visceral level to Freud’s irrefutable dictum ‘Der Traum ist eine Wunscherfüllung’ (the dream is a wish-fulfilment), and moreover permitted a classical interpretation by which infant urolagnia and coprophilia are seen as simulative of adult sexual gratification and indicative of nascent carnal refinements yet to be fully explored.

13 years later . . .  the murder of Hermine Hug-Hellmuth by Nephew Rolf. 

In the small hours of September 9 1924, eighteen-year-old Rolf Hug climbed over the green fence that ran along the Viennese street on which his aunt lived, and scrambled up to an open window giving him entry to her small, functional ground-floor apartment where the noise of his footfall awoke Hermine whom he at once attacked, attempting to smother her with a pillow when in a fierce struggle for her life she fell on the floor.

When he could not silence her screams he strangled her, then gagged her after he became aware her limbs were still moving. He carried her body to her sleeping-couch in the centre of the room. He placed with care her head on a clean pillow, which concealed the blood-covered pillow that had smothered her. 

One drop of blood remained in her nostril. Her larynx and three ribs were broken. Rolf searched her underwear for money and took 2,600,000 kronen and a gold watch. With the aid of a chair he climbed out of the window and put on his shoes, which he had placed for retrieval in the darkness below, to leave by the way he had come, through the ‘garden of ivy’ that separated Hermine’s apartment house from the neighbouring building. 

In the years preceding the crime, Rolf had approached his aunt and demanded money with menaces on numberless occasions. Since childhood he had been a persistent thief and even neighbours were warned to guard their purses. 

Rudolf Otto Hug – ‘Rolf’ – was apprehended the next day at Mürzzuschlag railway station, some 85 km from Vienna. 

In brief, these are the essential forensic facts and confession evidence as they emerged from the police enquiry and trial.

Dark Street. (1933)
by Nikolai Sinezouboff. 

A child’s foreshadowing of a death. 

The theory of typological relationships, which sees the Boy as Father of the Man, can be as exegetical for the psychopathography of a patient as those correspondences identified by scholars of biblical prophecy, who find in events in the early scriptures revelatory foreshadowing of the Redeemer . . . sightings of the prefigurative type that anticipates the antitype of the future, proclaimed as the fulfilment of messianic prophecy. 

So, to draw similar parallels, what instructive concordances can we identify when – favoured by 20/20 hindsight – we examine the tragic history of Rudolf Otto Hug and his aunt?

1 – ‘I am so afraid.’ The corollary to Hermine’s dream-analysis of Rolf’s Fear is a counterview that considers the supposed Saviour to whom the infant looks for protection – Hermine herself – from whose hands, she records, he was ‘forcing affection for himself through the pretended fear.’

Yet, according to Hermine’s biographers, Hermine (as Rolf’s closest surviving relative upon the death of his mother) ‘. . .  [never] entered into a loving relationship with Rolf.  On the contrary, her attitude towards him appears to have been distant, hostile, even mean. She kept away from all others’. She also ‘was unable to relate to other people in an intimate manner . . . ’ and she did not have friends in whom she could confide.

Hermine was a person, then, who positively bristled with resistance to intimacy, and it’s significant that in The Analysis of a Dream of a 5½-Year-Old-Boy she recalls ‘Rolf once saw his aunt by accident in her corset . . . ’; significant because the more-than-figurative steel corset has been the oft-repeated symbol of lovelessness for troubled analysands whose unresolved neuroses surface in adulthood to betray minds tormented by the absence of parental affection in infancy . . . the softness of an embrace denied, literally, by steel ribbing. And Hermine, after all, stood in loco parentis  for her dead sister.

So a palisade stockaded against affection is a persona suggestive of many resonances, not least the emotional resonance to be found in the archetypicality of her given name . . .  Hermine is a feminine form of Herman, a variant of which is Arminius, great chieftain of the Germanic tribes whose warriors – shielded by staked palisades – defeated the Roman army in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.  Her name is destiny and totemic of indomitable Germania. Nomen est omen. 

Indeed, in addition, the martial defensive connotations of Hermine’s family name, Hellmuth, should not be ignored, composed as it is of the Germanic elements helm (‘helmet’) and muot (‘spirit’ or ‘mind’), a combination redolent of the introspective, cautious, guarded person Hermine evidently was . . . an armour against amour.

      Barbed defences . . . 
Helmeted Arminius
leads the Germanic tribes from
his staked palisade (see rocky heights, above)
to defeat the Roman army in the
Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, 9 AD. 

Nor, in this regard, should we forget the cursed name of Rudolph, Crown Prince of Austria, and heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who killed his mistress, Baroness Marie Vetsera, at Mayerling and then turned the gun on himself. Can we be sure that Rolf was not condemned to misfortune by his ill-fated namesake, whose death set in motion a chain reaction that saw the heir presumptive Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated, an event that triggered World War I, and a defeat that brought about the collapse of the Habsburg Empire.  Nomen est omen.

So it is possible to see that far from a warm maternal-filial relationship, Hermine (Arminius) and Rudolf (Kronprinz) stood in stark opposition: a Victor-Vanquished nexus that could be resolved only in a high tragedy of mythological dimensions such as those Ancient Greek tragedies from which many of Freud’s psychoanalytical methodologies were derived. In short, did child-psychoanalyst Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, a Freudian doctrinaire and Rolf’s second mother, maintain conformity to Freudian doctrine (namely, belief in a variant-Oedipus Complex) even unto her death?

By examining more closely the remaining strands of 5½-year-old Rolf’s prophetic allegorical dream the embedded truth of Hermine’s analysis may begin to emerge.

2 – ‘A big bear wants to eat me . . . and hug me with his front paws.’ Contrary to the self-censoring interpretation proposed by Hermine (that Rolf’s dream projection is the fierce ‘longing of the boy for his big, strong’ absentee father), the bear’s forepaws can be also interpreted as Hermine’s own repressive hands of his recent infancy. At the age of three, Rolf’s exhibitionism (lifting his nightgown to display his penis) was discouraged by Hermine who admits, ‘In order to distract him [from ‘exhibitionist pleasure’ and the ‘strong auto-erotism’ of the ‘lust to exhibit’ his genitals] . . . I let my hand circle above the bed and swoop down like a swooping bird [pecking?] on his naked foot or hand . . .’ to ‘. . . fly away disgusted if it saw too much nakedness.’ So the [peckish?] hands sought by Rolf for longed-for warm embraces are both desired and feared in equal measure and, moreover, in his dream, become an anthropomorphised expression of a woman’s threat to his sexual potency, and a vision of hands to both clasp and consume him. This sense of repressive menace is more likely the ‘leitmotif of his nightly experience.’

3 – ‘There was also a big picket fence there and lots of pointed arrows on top.’ The significance of the picket fence with arrow-headed palings reappearing at the crime scene thirteen years after its dream occurrence prompts speculations as to second sight, particularly as ‘the picket fence’ of the 5½-year-old boy exerts the same attraction of a taboo as the forbidden barrier to the ‘garden of ivy’ that the eighteen-year-old youth scrambles over: the forest ‘green fence’ – the Arminius-erected palisade – looming in the dark that separates him from the apartment of his aunt.

4 – ‘Lots of pointed arrows.’ If, as Hermine proposes, the dream-arrows refer to penises defiling a garden by their urinating through a fence, in defiance of the rigidities of propriety, then Rolf’s criminal penetration of the ‘garden of ivy’ to reach the murder scene can be viewed as a fulfilment of a rite of desecration long meditated in his quest to be avenged. Hermine in her dream analysis suggests the ‘crack between two [fence] slats . . . could also refer to a vagina’, so the assault on Hermine’s apartment can be similarly seen as a violation preparatory to a virtual necrophilic rape, insofar as Rolf manhandled the half-naked Hermine in her death throes and searched her underwear to steal her long-preserved savings.

5 – ‘A black spot, no, a big blot, in the middle of the ceiling.’ There is conclusive fulfilment, too, of infant Rolf’s prophetic dream in the subconscious stage-directions the eighteen-year-old follows to set the crime scene.

           [Middle] Rolf carried the dying Hermine to the centre of the room.

           [Spot] One blackened drop of dried blood remained in one nostril.  

           [Blot] Her forehead had a swelling with a dark bruise on her neck

Just as Hermine had described Rolf’s childhood games of defilement, so Rolf in adulthood had selected to ‘blot’ in the ‘middle’ of the room and retrace the action of his dream by making a ‘blot’ in ‘a very exposed spot where every one who entered the room could see it.’ 

Murder was the dark stain on the chamber of sleep he foresaw from his infant cot. For Rolf, it was the ultimate act of defiance against the persecutor of his infancy who he believed had treated him with rigidity and without mercy. And indeed, the violence of his resentment can be measured by the smashed larynx and the silenced woman’s three broken ribs, a final breaching of the barricade of aloofness that for so long had resisted him.

Yet, in the end, when the deed was done, was it a simply a matter of basest greed for a benefactor’s possessions compounded by a sense of entitlement compelled by a paranoiac grudge?  In this connexion, we should be reminded that murder for financial gain in those desperate times of hunger and spiralling hyperinflation was a primary cause of homicide, with the highest banknotes then circulating printed in denominations of 500,000 kronen; at the time of Hermine’s death Austria’s money supply had increased by 14,250 percent.

Or was it, for Hermine, a case of an ‘elective victim’* submissive to a preordained slayer? There is substance in this suspicion. In the month before her death, in one of her letters to her principal confidant, Hermine confesses her fear of being strangled by Rolf. ‘I will be killed anyway,’ she predicts.

Deterministically, despite her fear of her nephew, only weeks before her death Hermine had placed in the hands of the same confidant a copy of her will in which she named Rolf as her only heir.

Murnau Street with Green-Fenced Garden,
Bavaria, Germany. (1908)
by Vasily Kandinsky.

A victim of psychoanalysis.

In the words of George MacLean and Ulrich Rappen, the joint editors of her work and distinguished as her quasi-speculative biographers, ‘Rolf can be considered a victim of psychoanalytic study that lacked a true loving relationship.’ In point of fact, after being released from prison, Rolf attempted to get restitution from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association, as a victim of psychoanalysis.

In sum, Hermine’s biographers conclude: ‘Hug-Hellmuth abetted her neglect by others by neglecting herself . . . Lacking friends, she did not create any nucleus of a following of colleagues or students . . She was a closed person who never talked more than was absolutely necessary, and even then reluctantly. One neighbour reported that Hug-Hellmuth talked to his cat more than she talked to him.’

For me, this last observation on Hermine’s detachment summons up the pathos and bathos of the ‘high-functioning sociopathic personality’ that Patrick Hamilton captures so perfectly in the final paragraph of his classic novel, Hangover Square, and the death of his socially-withdrawn protagonist (whose suicide note reads, ‘Please order they look after my white cat which I left behind’):

He died in the early morning, and because of the interest then prevailing in the war, was given very little publicity by the press. Indeed only one newspaper, a sensational picture daily, gave the matter any space or prominence – bringing out (his crude epitaph) the headlines:                                                                  SLAYS TWO                                                                                                            FOUND GASSED                                                                                                      THINKS OF CAT.

A family trait of attention-seeking.

Ironically, when Hermine and Rolf are considered together in a ‘characterological analysis’, the traits that the aunt identifies in her infant nephew’s proclivity for recurring fantasies – ‘attention-seeking statements in his repertoire’ – she, herself, is to be found guilty of, insofar as her calculations to court the attention of Sigmund Freud decidedly succeeded when the Founding Father of Psychoanalysis agreed to write the adulatory introduction to her notorious faux-journal, Tagebuch eines Halbwüchsigen Mädchens – Von 11 bis 14½ Jahren (‘Diary of an Adolescent Girl from 11 to 14½ Years’), an intimate record of the developing sexuality of a ‘young girl belonging to the upper middle class’, first published anonymously in English in 1921.

The fact that Freud wrote in his introduction ‘This diary is gem’ and then withdrew permission for the book to appear after a succès de scandale when doubts arose as to the authenticity of its authorship (purportedly the work comprised the jottings of girl who had later died; an attribution that even today remains an unresolved question) is a measure of the notoriety the Diary won. For reasons of privileged confidential information, the ‘editor’ of the Diary (Hermine herself) protests she must ‘conceal the identity of the author’.

A public thirst for pubertal confessions.

As the writer of an incisive essay in Strange Attractor Journal Two (2005) intimates, there existed in the early 20th Century – an excessively repressive age, particularly in England – an eager reading public furtively grasping after a sexual knowledge that was withheld from the lay reader . . .

It’s now easy to poke fun at those classifications, ‘members of the educational, medical and legal profession’, considered qualified to read such books, but this was the period of the repressive reign of Britain’s infamous puritanical Home Secretary, Sir William (‘Jix’) Joynson-Hicks (the ‘Policeman of the Lord’, 1924-1929) . . . 

As the essayist makes clear, referring to the publication of an imitative work, The Diary of a Public Schoolgirl, (written in 1929 and first published in 1930), the fabricator of the spurious journal  . . .

. . . had again presciently recognised the existence of a specialised readership whose thirst for pubertic confessions he was confident he could satisfy.

Hermine’s journal evidently unloosed a flood of imitators . . .

This fraudulent journal [i.e. Hermine’s Tagebuch, inspired the] spurious Public Schoolgirl’s Diary. And [the faux-diarist’s] motives for the deception are remarkably similar, having at their root a countercultural, feminist-liberationist ideology that was entirely genuine.

In the British Journal of Psychology, 1921, Vol. 1, A Young Girl’s Diary is perceptively reviewed by Cyril Burt, the famous English psychologist, describing it as a journal, telling ‘. . . in her own colloquial phrases, how an Austrian girl [Rita] acquired, during the years of puberty, a knowledge, more or less exact, of the chief biological facts of sex . . . the book is anonymous.’  The publishers note that sale of the book is restricted to ‘. . . members of the educational, medical and legal professions as are interested in psychology.’

Cyril Burt doubted the veracity of this work, and believed the publication was encouraged ‘. . . no doubt, by the popularity attained by such writing as those of Daisy Ashford [1919] and Opal Whitely [1920] . . . purporting to be the unaided work of young children.’

Sigmund Freud exclaims rapturously in his preface: ‘This diary is a gem. Never, I believe, has anything been written enabling us to see so clearly into the soul of a young girl, during the years of puberal development.’ But by 1928 Freud’s laudatory reception of the work had been replaced by doubts. The work is now believed to be bogus, and confected by an adult woman, an ambitious child-psychologist lecturing in Berlin (see Hermine Hug-Hellmuth: Her Life and Work by George MacLean and Ulrich Rappen, Routledge, 1991). 

Its authenticity has been questioned because the document, more fraudulent than Freudian, is understood to have been written to exhibit Hug-Hellmuth’s psychoanalytical knowledge to enhance her stature in the eyes of Freud (she was a rival of Anna Freud).

These remarks from my stable-mate at Strange Attractor (an essay of mine appeared in Journal Three) appear to be a fair summary of the ambiguity of Hermine’s professional reputation, which there can be no doubt was undermined by the suspicions as to her veracity that became associated with her name, due to the obfuscations of her persistent denials of the Diary’s authorship [as Rita].    

So in conclusion, I will add that commentators of this affair, including Cyril Burt, have failed to identity what I would regard as a diaristic precursor of this confessional genre in German, and a work that also attracted similar notoriety. I refer to the best-selling Tagebuch einer Verlorenen** (‘The Diary of a Lost Girl’, 1905) by Margarete Böhme, a literary phenomenon, supposedly the true-life journal of a young woman forced into prostitution. This popular work, which scandalised society by prompting comparisons with the works of Zola, opens with the words:

Aunt Lehnsmann brought me a diary yesterday, as a belated Confirmation present. ‘Such a nice thing for a young girl,’ she said. ‘And such a cheap one,’ thought I.

Hermine, in her own Tagebuch eines Halbwüchsigen Mädchens, begins in a similar racy style (for girls, that is, of a similar period): 

July 12 . . . Hella and I are writing a diary. We both agreed that when we went to high school we would write a diary every day. Dora [older sister] keeps a diary too, but she gets furious if I look at it. 

Artfully/artlessly Hermine,  in the guise of editor, writes in her Preface: 

No attempt has been made to correct trifling faults in grammar and other inelegancies of style. For the most part these must be regarded as the expression of a child’s incapacity for the control of language. Rather they must be looked upon as manifestations of affective trends, as errors in functioning brought about by the influence of the Unconscious.

I have had occasion, in an earlier post, to identify certain suggestive passages from Hermine’s Diary, pointing them up as instructive, see Sex Lessons from Literature Unhindered by 20/20 Hindsight:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/sex-lessons-from-literature-unhindered.html

Under one of my note-headings, Sexual Heat, I quote the following from the young diarist, Rita, in her her twelfth year. She is observing her teacher on whom she has a crush:

When he strokes his beard I become quite hot and cold with ecstasy. And the way he lifts up his coattails as he sits down. It’s lovely, I do want to kiss him. Hella and I take turns to put our penholder on his desk so that he can hallow it with his hand as he writes. Afterwards in the arithmetic lesson when I write with it, I keep looking at Hella and she looks back at me and we both know what the other is thinking of.  

The symbolism of dip-pen and pen-holder and the excitement stimulated by these objects need not be dwelt on here, other than to observe that the secret sexual life of adolescent girls in the late 19th century, as expressed by contemporaneous women, must be sought in such almost imperceptible textual glimmers.

Similarly, for mydriatic response to stimulus (pupil dilation) as an index to sexual arousal, see Rita’s diary entry for the same year, observing a schoolboy admirer:

When he says that his eyes grow dark, quite black, although his eyes are really grey and they get very large. Especially in the evening when we say goodbye, it frightens me. I'm always dreaming of him. 

So, when Hermine writes in her Preface that we must regard such writings ‘. . . as the expression of a child’s incapacity for the control of language [under] the influence of the Unconscious . . .’, we correspondingly must observe that such clunking symbols as Pens and Pen-holders are very much within the control of a Conscious Mind anxious to please her mentor by conformity to oneiroid symbols central to the practice of doctrinal Freudians.

*For a fine novella tracing the journey of an ‘elective victim’ to her violent end, The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark is recommended, a work I first read in its entirety in a special issue of The New Yorker published in May 1970.

**Significantly, Böhme’s Tagebuch einer Verlorenen was first translated into English by Ethelind Colburn Mayne, one of the earliest translators of Freud. 
Note also: Ethelind’s own writings are distinguished by her own very elegant Englishing of the Conscious and the Unconscious mind, which she calls the 'Stage-side' and 'Cage-side' of human personality. How exquisitely neat!

Our Lobbying of the Viennese Government for Recognition of Hermine.

It was only after the appearance of this posting (June 2016) and selective, persistent lobbying of the compilers of the Cultural Archive of Vienna that Hermine Hug von Hugenstein was accorded, a month later, recognition on that city’s website. Thanks to these efforts, this permanent record of her status in Austrian cultural development now cites her as a ‘pioneer’ of child psychoanalysis, ‘Hermine Hug gilt als Pionierin der Kinderpsychoanalyse. . .’ 
See :
https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Hermine_Hug-Hellmuth

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2015)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

 

I am a Serial Killer Diarist . . . Unremarked Clues to Two Notorious Crime Sprees.

A serial killer of my acquaintance (recorded in a private diary entry of mine) desisted from further killings after his fifth victim because he had determined the FBI defined serial murder as a body count of at least four slain, and to be classified unequivocally a ‘serial killer’ was his sinister aim.

Reluctantly, then, I am led to characterizing myself as a serial ‘killer diarist’ because I can claim that, in my lifetime, my brushes with criminal homicide amount to at least three murder victims and five murderers, including two of the most notorious serial killers in England from the 20th Century . . . the ‘Acid Bath Murderer’ John George Haigh and the ‘Gay Slayer’ Colin Ireland. 

To satisfy the curiosity of forensic graphologists I exhibit here the signatures of the latter pair, each investigated for the murders of over five victims:

Initial graphological interpretation: Haigh’s rapid connected pen-flow, in his final letter to his parents from the condemned cell, indicates speed of thought coupled with a regularity that is the product of the sham conventionality of a gifted cheque forger and handwriting fraudster. The extreme connectivity, observed in multiple word linkings, betrays a writer under pressure who nonetheless still possesses remarkable reserves of mental agility. Colin Ireland’s haywire oversized ‘tag’ signature displays a much-practised complexity (of the kind honed in brooding solitude) that expresses the conflicted identity of an unregarded narcissistic attention-seeker (‘Notice me!’) seething with morbid juvenile hang-ups he labours to conceal. Its pretentious illegibility compensates for an inferiority complex by weaving a false image that deceives himself more than others.

I accept that my claim to a more than nodding acquaintanceship with homicide may appear an unworthy boast, but in my defence I can promise I never actively sought immersion in these infamous cases; they impinged upon my private life quite unprompted.

Hitherto Hidden Modi Operandi of Two Serial Murderers.

So I will not dwell on those squalid cases of homicide classified as ‘spontaneous domestic’, ‘drug-motivated’ and ‘argument-excited’.  In my personal experience, these include a notable Royal College of Art alumnus killed by a lover in a frenzied knife attack; a heroin dealer from my Sussex village slain by one knife thrust to his abdomen; and two teenage students who repeatedly stabbed their friend, a fellow student, then burned and buried the body in the grounds of their agricultural college (all three teenagers I’d observed the previous year representing their college at the Kent County Agricultural Show). 
  
However, these tragic homicides – profoundly disturbing to friends and families of the killed and their killers alike – are cited here solely to highlight the vast gulf that exists between the ‘red mist’ savagery of the impulse-murder, when the balance of the mind is disturbed, and the as-yet-undocumented magnitude of the chilling calculation that two serial killers applied to their notorious series of carnage, only now revealed by my questioning of principal surviving participants.

Rich pickings.

Chronologically, then, John George Haigh and homicide contrived by the art of forgery . . . his forging of letters that netted him a fortune in property – homes, businesses, investments, personal possessions, even a dog – the estates he snatched from the intended beneficiaries of those he deceived and killed.    

His first recorded victim (there are thought to be additional murders) was William ‘Mac’ McSwan, a wealthy young man he battered to death with a table-leg on September 9th 1944. The crime scene was Haigh’s basement lodgings at 79 Gloucester Road, London SW7, where he disposed of the body in a salvaged 40-gallon water butt he’d set aside to contain concentrated sulphuric acid. Two days later he poured Mac’s dissolved remains down a drainage channel in the basement.

He then informed McSwan’s parents that their son had fled to Scotland to avoid his call-up for military service, a deception that contained an element of truth insofar as Mac had intimated to others his intention to evade conscription. 

The extraordinary lengths to which Haigh then went to extract money from Mac’s parents, the source of the son’s wealth, demonstrate in the most graphic terms the dogged cunning of this single-minded killer whose ruthless greed can never be truly comprehended. 

Here, then, for the first time, is a new insight into John Haigh’s murderous modus operandi . . .

According to my informant, who is very close to this case (I write as an irregular native of Mid Sussex, the setting for Haigh’s three final killings in February 1948 and February 1949), Haigh then by is own account duped the McSwan parents by assuring them that their William was alive and well in Scotland, and that only he, Haigh, could be trusted to convey money to the son’s secret bolt-hole. This deception was maintained by a series of letters forged by Haigh to the parents and purporting to come from their son in Scotland.

Over 700 Miles for a Tuppenny-Ha’penny Alibi.

My informant claims that Haigh drove over three hundred and fifty miles each way to a point just across the Scottish border (Kippford and Castle Douglas in Kirkcudbrightshire) solely to secure the franking of a Scottish postmark on his forged letters; an alibi bought for the price of a tuppenny-ha’penny stamp. 

Of course, later, when Mac’s parents became suspicious of the forged letters and the sums of money demanded by the suave go-between to aid the draft-dodging fugitive, Haigh’s lethal answer was – on the pretext of their meeting William – to lure them to the killing ground of his basement where they were promptly despatched in the same manner as the son. From these three crimes, by forging power of attorney, Haigh gained four freehold properties in London and the transfers of gilt-edged securities held by the McSwans . . . a total of some £4000 (the purchasing power of about £120,000 today).

Suborned Psychiatric Evidence.

More detailed indiscretions I cannot reveal, in respect for my elderly informant’s fears that more disclosures would expose the identity of one of Haigh’s closest intimates. Yet I will reveal that the suggestion, mooted in the national press at the time of Haigh’s trial in July 1949 and hinting his defence plea of insanity under the McNaughton Rules was concocted with the connivance of a suborned psychiatric professional, can now be substantiated. 

The evidence for this contemporary view (supported by the comprehensive account of my informant, whose anonymity I continue to preserve) I intend to publish soon as a fascinating footnote to the therapies of certain pioneers in psychoanalytically-oriented treatments for psychiatric illnesses, which only a decade later were to include such cures as, for instance, a course of intramuscularly-given LSD and intravenously-given Ritalin, preceded by Sodium Amytal as a relaxant and followed by a chaser of Largactil.

Experimental precursors of these treatments were known to Haigh and the disorders of the mind for which they were devised were replicated in his studied behaviour, and in the claims made by him that his homicidal actions were driven by religious visions (forests of crucifixes oozing blood, etc). . . so I can affirm that a conspiracy by those loyal to Haigh was, indeed, under way to subvert the integrity of his trial with perjured testimony and fabricated symptoms whose aim was the feigning of mental illness to save his neck from the noose. 

(As to religious mania, in case I have not remarked it elsewhere, let us remind ourselves that Haigh was a lapsed member of  the Plymouth Brethren, and shares the notoriety of those other evil-doers and ‘Justified Sinners’ of the Elect  . . . 'the wickedest man in the world’ Aleister Crowley and John Bodkin Adams.) 

Nevertheless, John George Haigh was hanged at 9am at Wandsworth Prison on August 10th 1949. The Medical Panel of Statutory Inquiry had advised the Home Secretary that Haigh was sane in law and no mitigation outweighed the death sentence. 

The Certificate of Death was posted on the prison gate at ten minutes past nine. 

 

Haigh (1909–1949)                          Ireland (1954–2012)

Palette of Pain:

Colin Ireland and Art’s Sadomasochistic Cabal.

And so to Colin Ireland. My peculiar connexion with that hulking nemesis and his appalling crimes is simply explained by my close association with a principal detective, a senior Met officer investigating the case with whom at the time I was in a relationship.  (And, lest anyone be swift to judge, his wife, known to me since our infancy, remains a cordial intimate of mine, and is aware more than a little of the true nature of our intense attachment.)

Hence, thanks to his influence, on August the 22nd 1994 I was smuggled into the National Police Staff College at Bramshill in Hampshire, where, together with senior police officers and distinguished criminal psychologists, I attended the definitive official debriefing on the case of Colin Ireland and his five murders, illustrated by coloured photographic slides of the crime scenes.

‘Criminy!’ muttered a visiting lawman seated behind me, ‘that knocks Francis Bacon into a cocked hat!’

And, indeed, the images I viewed that day of the five grim tableaux bestiale surpassed for sordidity the canvases of Francis Bacon, master of Laocoönic writhings stilled on the striped ticking of soiled mattresses . . . and not surprisingly, since their mise en scène shares the same subject matter that preoccupied the murderous psychopath who stalked Soho in 1993 . . . the needy helplessness of homosexual carnality . . . and both traded on it.
 

 

The Dark Theatre of Anomic Morbidity.

‘We’re reaching the murky end, aren’t we . . . ?’ bragged Colin Ireland to his police interrogators at the conclusion of his confession. A policeman’s pager then sounded in the interview room. ‘The Queen’s just given me a free pardon,’ the killer quipped, a remark no less arch, one suspects, than those heard in the milieu of his five gay victims, a dangerous London underworld of casual sexual encounters in which Francis Bacon also prowled. 

Francis and Colin? Colin and Francis? Conclusive similarities? Yes. As I make evident in my new considerations here, their hunting grounds for sexual prey not only overlapped, but their relativist attitude to male flesh as a commodity of desperate commerce drove them to a common vision . . . disturbingly, a vision of shared motifs in the execution of their notorious tableaux nature morte and a shared proficiency in the seduction of one-night-stands to answer their distinct visceral needs  . . . ‘shared’, yes, for the blunt reason that more than a decade before the Soho killings, both men haunted precisely the same seedy gay nightspots, where they were certain of finding the sadomasochistic subculture of willing thrill-seekers they sought.  

Fact. The five death scenes, with their grisly homophobic set-dressing, were viewed by investigators hunting the ‘Gay Slayer’ as calculatedly the unknown killer’s painterly ‘compositions’ or, in other words, fixated, psychotically conceived, corporeal ‘works of art’, which, according to the profiler assigned to the case, were not disfigured by gross mutilations because these would detract from the aesthetics of the arrangement.  ‘The motifs change and develop,’ the profiler stated. My shorthand notes from the 1994 police file are quite specific on these connexions (nevertheless, please be assured, where confidential issues of privilege arise, sensitive witness statements have been redacted to preserve the anonymity of certain insiders who testified from the gay cruising scene).

The murder room that was the site of Ireland’s second atrocity, the asphyxiation of a handcuffed Christopher Dunn, was characterized by Baconian mirrors around the bed; mirrors were also propped against the walls. The police assumed the ritualistic arrangements were for photos to be taken by the killer (untrue) or to confound investigators with the perverse effect for finders of seeing the body manifoldly reflected back at them. The case profiler suspected ‘. . . the positioning of the bodies gave the killer pleasure and was meant to please investigating officers with his piece of work.’ 

Colin told the police that the defiled corpses were ‘. . . almost like a signature – to almost let you know I’d been there. I was reaching that point – you know where you feel you have to set up a stage each time.’

The Placidity of Violence.  

As an older Royal College of Art alumnus David Hockney* once told us (he was in his late twenties at the time and still living in Notting Hill Gate where I had student digs; this was following his days of slumming it in a shed at Kempsford Gardens, off the Earls Court Road): ‘. . . I am not conscious of violence . . . I do not think that many of my generation are obsessed with violence.’ And, deliberately setting a distance between himself and Bacon, he went on, ‘A painter using violence as an activity, as Bacon does, is rare . . . Violent action alone becomes placid in time . . . I refused to do my national service. I was a conscientious objector and worked in a hospital laying out corpses.’ 

As an admired pacifist with a defined aesthetic rationale (the symmetry of a diver’s superb pectorals, say), David regarded the so-called artists of ‘violence’ as merely campily querulous. It’s certainly true, in my view, that fixed action on the canvas can in time mutate into the tame placidity Hockney identifies; his doubts shared by those who believe that a rendering of la condition humaine, when conceived as a screaming skull trapped in a notional human cage, is discerned ultimately as portraiture veering towards the risibly hammy.

In Bacon’s case, this placidity of violence – the ‘sham pain’ he proposed for his friends and rendered on those unsized verso canvases regarded by the cognoscenti as transgressive art – was, of course, the expression of a consummate passive-aggressive masochist with a bent for self-abasement and who’d remained complaisantly acceptant of the whip since his teens; his lover, Peter Lacy, for example, threatened to chain him to a wall, stalled like an animal on fouled straw; the sort of kinkiness that only hints at the master-slave sexual dynamics of Bacon’s dependency on dominant partners . . . his beau idéal, after all, was Colonel Gaddafi.

Spectrum of Desire: The Coleherne Psychosexual Colour Code.

And it was these ill-fated master-slave sexual dynamics, observed in precisely the same loci as Bacon’s stomping grounds, that the homophobic heterosexual killer Colin Ireland exploited when he, too, stalked the streets of Soho scouting for future victims. As Ireland disclosed to the police, he worked as a bouncer in a gay nightclub, ‘notorious in its day’, called Scandals in Wardour Street (on the fringe of Soho before you reach Leicester Square). His antipathy to homosexuals strengthened during those bleak times in the late 70s, when his duties included turning away wealthy celebrities of advanced years who would arrive late in the evening intent on picking up good looking smartly dressed East Enders who’d ventured ‘up west’.

Bacon’s peregrinations through Soho’s ‘Black Mile’ were no different . . . a late night circuitous ‘monkey parade’ into the mephitic depths of the West End (according to a Berwick Street Market veteran) that led from the Colony Club in Dean Street via The Golden Horseshoe and Charlie Chester** casinos in Archer Street thence to Scandals and on to the ‘Meat Rack’ of Piccadilly Circus, where a man-about-town braved the risk of being lured to an unceremonious ‘queer-rolling’ in some dark alley. 

Curiously, Bacon’s compulsive sous le manteau activities in London’s nightlife mirrored the furtive nocturnalism of Haigh who, scuttling around blackout London during WW2, hid his crimes under cover of darkness. At precisely this time of national emergency, Bacon by his own admission scratched a living from the underground gambling dens he frequented and by a chronic running up of reckless debts. (Haigh and Bacon were exact contemporaries, both born 1909.) Bacon avoided conscription by inducing an asthma attack on the day of his medical.

Some thirty years later, in the sexually charged atmosphere of London’s Seventies counterculture, the man dubbed the ‘Gay Slayer’ (‘IC1 White European type’) amassed a similar knowledge of precarious lives subsisting in the city’s shadows; knowledge he would later apply when, in 1993, he made a New Year's resolution to become a serial killer, choosing gay men as his victims because he had determined that their sadomasochistic passivity when bound or handcuffed made them willing targets.

‘I picked them up at the Coleherne pub . . .’ Colin Ireland confessed to investigators (a gay pick-up joint but a step away from Hockney’s Kempsford Gardens in Earl’s Court), ‘. . . frequented by homosexuals who are involved in sadomasochism, leather type combat, you know, soldier-type clothing, that sort of . . . that type of . . .  clientele [observed when] working in Scandals in the late Seventies . . .’ Earl’s Court, as the police file makes clear, was a magnet for the ‘Vest and Pecs Pack’, i.e. ‘suntanned muscular men’ posing in ‘designer-tee-shirts’.

‘At the Coleherne,’ the Police Report continues dispassionately, ‘they line up at the bars according to sexual preference. There is a sadomasochist group in the pub. There is also a sexual code in the way they wear their handkerchiefs . . .’  [One of Colin’s victims] had been known to display the colours black and red. ‘Black denotes heavy SM while red denotes “fisting” . . .  “fisting fucking” [the Report explains] is the term used to cover the practice of inserting the lubricated fist into the anus . . . [adding] one S&M practice is to pour molten wax down the urethra of the penis.’

False Flag Operation.

For his final murder, Colin Ireland admitted the colour code had netted his victim. According to a gay witness (who confessed to being attracted to the killer upon first observing him), Colin was wearing an MA-1 flight jacket (black nylon) and ‘From the rear left pocket of his jeans he had a pair of black leather gloves sticking out, not all leather but had webbing between the fingers.’

The fact that Francis Bacon was a well-known habitué of the Coleherne has been, I believe, hitherto neglected in critical considerations of the significance of the artist’s unique palette; that is, his profound cognisance of the custom of gay handkerchief colour-coding in this and any number of London's sadomasochistic ‘leather bars’ of those times. (Incidentally, Bacon’s own trademark leather jackets were from the South of France.)

And it was this wearing of colour-coded handkerchiefs to signal sexual proclivities – a code devised to free gay cruising from the dangers of mixed messages in SM mating rituals – that aided Colin and Francis alike in their quest for pick-ups, since it was by these fetishistic criteria that their very similar modi operandi were underpinned. 

In sketchy spectral order, the psychosexual colours identifying sadomasochistic practices are: White, Light Pink, Dark Pink, Red, Orange, Mustard, Yellow, Green, Light Blue, Dark Blue, Lavender, Purple, not forgetting Black, Brown, Beige, Olive and Grey.   

I believe that the significations of these psychosexual colours have not been explained by art critics, and their influence on Bacon’s later iconography is worthy of a semiotical study for deeper exploration towards decipherment.

(In a future study I propose to remedy this shortcoming by cross-referencing Bacon’s own palette to the codified colour system practised by sadomasochists to identify the sexual predilections of potential partners, and indexed to perceived intensities of pain or humiliation. For example, as both Francis and Colin were perfectly aware, ‘flagging’ the white hankie in the left back pocket denotes a dominant abuser in search of the catamitism of the procurable abused, whose white signal would be flagged in his right pocket.)

May I add a literary note: When a man’s concupiscence is self-advertised then, to steal a line from Chekhov (Platonov), who in turn echoes the words of his mentor Nekrasov (maligning a prostitute), there are fatal words on his forehead: ‘For Sale at Public Auction’.

 

Killing . . . the ‘Roller Coaster Effect’.

‘What is it?’ 

According to Colin Ireland, this was the most common chat-up line at the Coleherne, meaning, ‘Which SM are you into?’ 

‘It’s like milk boiling [the urge to kill], you can’t stop it,’ Colin continued in his confession, quoted in the Case File. Murder became an addiction. ‘I went to the Coleherne that evening and I felt that if I was approached by one of the group that tended to trigger feelings in me – masochistic men – I felt there was a likelihood I would kill.’
 
(The Police Report from 1994, I should emphasise, is not in the public domain, and remains held under wraps by the Met’s Serious Case Review Group, due to its sensitive contents, particularly gay witness confidentiality.)

Yet for me the Report does not – cannot – begin to tell all. So, to learn more of the Coleherne’s arcane subculture that hustled behind its blacked out windows, and to add substance to my Theory of Psychosexual Colour Symbolism in the decoding of Bacon’s later paintings, I arranged to meet one of the pub’s young barmen, X, who had agreed to introduce me to a number of regulars with long memories. This was many, many years ago. The Coleherne is now defunct.

Agreed, there was a certain inappropriateness in the figure that hastened down the Old Brompton Road that bright midday, dressed as I was in my thornproof tweed hacking jacket and Church’s brogues. Yes, a hayseed in tweeds up from the country. (I was heading for the Hurlingham for a polo meeting. From the Coleherne it was just three Tube stops down the District line to Putney Bridge. I had a lunch date fixed with a rising poloist of latin good looks who, afterwards, was to show me his latest string of mustangs.) 

Young X shimmered in a black silk shirt. The youth’s bruised jaw was patched with pink Elastoplasts and his right forearm was bound in plaster of Paris. I raised an eyebrow.
    ‘Private ding-dong.’ He grinned painfully. ‘Last night sorta got aht of hand.’
    ‘Ding-dong,’ I repeated, pointing to the optics behind the bar, ‘then you deserve a Bell’s. Make it two.’
    In the darkest recesses of that blacked-out room at the rear of the Coleherne public house, X confirmed the legend of Francis Bacon as a connoisseur of the pub’s leathermen’s bar, and substantiated Colin Ireland’s account of the colour-code.  

In general, I learned, the colours worn on the left side denoted the ‘active’ participant or ‘giver’ (a ‘top’ or ‘topmaster’). Worn on the right meant ‘passive’ or recipient.  It seems that the exception at the Coleherne was the colour orange, which, worn on the right, meant ‘Nothing tonight.’

Getting Away With It.
As Colin Ireland explained to his interrogators, the colour-coded rôle-playing favoured his murderous methodology, an admission that may be seen to add substance to a theory of victimology that a victim can be the willed agent of his own murder. 

To one trussed victim Colin said, ‘You know what I think this is about tonight, don’t you?’  
   ‘Yes,’ the victim answered. ‘And you could probably get away with it ’cos there’s no connexion.’ 
   ‘I got the impression,’ Colin went on in his confession, ‘that he was a man who wanted to die. I thought he’d almost felt he’d sought me out, as I had sought him out, in a way, in a strange way.’

Of his first killing he confessed, ‘Just something clicked, something snapped . . . and I finished it.’  Colin Ireland is described by the police as six-foot-one-and-bit with ‘sixteen-and-half stone of pressure’ behind his coups de grâce. Curiously, this killer of leathermen carried a ‘Leatherman’, a multi-tool device. The rope (‘specially-made cord’) he bought from a ship chandlers near the Kursaal on Southend’s waterfront. 

Early on in the series of murders Ireland wore an SAS-style camouflage combat smock, and later, for picking up his victims, he admits to wearing ‘an American green M65 field jacket’ and (for his final murder) ‘a black bomber jacket’. He boasts of always leaving the Coleherne by the same door to avoid the CCTV security system. (It should be noted that serial killer, Dennis Nilsen, began his reign of terror at the Coleherne pub, the ‘crucible’ of his initiation into London’s homosexual subculture.)

As Ireland’s stepfather said after his stepson’s trial, ‘Colin wanted to rid the world of those sick [sado-masochists] . . . and decided that it was his mission to wipe them out. He did what he did and makes no apologies for it . . .’ 

The sybaritic milieu of one victim, so graphically described in the Police Report, reads like a passage by des Esseintes: ‘A temple to sado-masochism. Cords, various chains, giant dildos, a flail, a truncheon, leather & plastic fetishistic gear, waders & plastic sheeting. [The victim] was an amyl nitrite user & supplies were found in the fridge . . .’ Hafada scrotal piercing, and steel nipple rings, are also described as a distinguishing fetish of a victim who, according to a ‘close friend (of eleven years),’ was estimated to have had ‘between five and six partners a day.’

Mention of the waders and plastic sheeting is instructive; in the hankie code known to Colin and Francis the colour yellow figures quite prominently.

Extreme Urolagnia in the Ring.

A relative and contemporary of mine, ‘Simon Pure’ (I shall call him, on account of his naïvety when an art student), an alumnus of the Royal College Art (where Bacon kept a studio for some time), has in his maturity delved into the homosexual clique that surrounded Bacon because he came to know a number of the key players in later life.

An RCA tutor of Simon’s, the artist Richard Chopping, friend and subject of Francis (who painted him a number of times) reflected the sadomasochistic preoccupations and extreme fetishes (including urolagnia) of the Sohemians of the Sixties in his novels, The Fly, and The Ring. (The Chopping portrait is by Bacon; amusingly, its coded colour is suggestive of heavy SM, whipping, rubber and bondage, all in interplay with subtler shades of humiliation – or ‘hum’ in gay argot.)

Take this despatch from Chopping’s frontline of ultrafetishism, for example. The young homosexual protagonist in this fiction has just been beaten into semi-unconsciousness by a gang led by his ex-lover called Boy, a sexual opportunist . . .

Silently they lugged his half-slaughtered body like a side of meat. [Note. A side of meat; a familiar Baconian image.]  The Boy motioned his cronies to gather round.  With cold deliberation he unzipped his jeans, gesturing to them to follow suit. Four jets descended on to the unconscious body to complete his defilement.

Here, for your interest, from a memoir, is a description of Francis Bacon’s studio, which mentions Richard Chopping. It’s the marriage celebration of the painters Michael Wishart and Anne Dunn.  The party in the studio was attended by clientele from the Gaygoyle Club and the Colony Room in Dean Street.

Francis astonished everyone by painting his two large chandeliers crimson, and his face a more delicate colour. The end of our celebrations coincided with the opening of a two-day regatta party given by Dickie Chopping . . . in Essex.

 And here is another description of a homosexual club; from Dickie Chopping’s novel:

The club was a basement. One had the feeling of being confined in a converted air-raid shelter. The acrid smell of urine clutched at the gorge. The club consisted of a large room lit by a Waterford glass chandelier of unusual and unexpected beauty. Behind and in the middle of the bar, like an Empress, was enthroned the woman who ran the bar.

The Empress must be salonnière Muriel Belcher, obviously (‘the great Jewish wit’ at her ‘Wailing Wall’), although the Colony Room was not in a basement. The fictional club sounds suspiciously like an amalgam of the Colony Room and the Rockingham club in Archer Street.

The epigraph to The Ring quoted by Chopping is from Baudelaire.

The supreme pleasure in Love lies in absolute knowledge of doing evil. And men and women know, from birth, that in Evil is to be found all voluptuousness.

An engaging conceit, no doubt, for those dishing out the Evil, but not for Colin Ireland’s victims on the receiving end, betrayed by false colours in a leather bar. 

(Of course, the pioneering symbolist Baudelaire found his followers in Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, whose own tempestuous sadomasochistic affair should be elevated to no more than an orgy of ‘blood and sperm’, if the verdict of Verlaine’s wife, Mathilde, is to be believed.)

Sexplay with Menaces . . . Fatally Trussed Up with Telephone Cable.

Dickie Chopping describes in his novel the fictional club’s clientele of rent-boys. The majority of them had ‘roughed up’ a good many of their clients. One was a psychopath, who would ultimately flee the country, after a succession of violent beatings and trussings-up with telephone cable following a more than usually perverted sexual connexion, which had proved fatal to his unfortunate partner.

In this shadowy subterranean world, then, of sexplay with menaces, it is surely not at all surprising that the Colin Ireland investigation progressed hesitantly, given the controversy surrounding the Operation Spanner trial some three years earlier, which had resulted in convictions of homosexual men for acts of consensual sadomasochism. Within London’s cruising scene of 1993 there was a mood of intense suspicion and noncooperation in response to scrupulous police enquiries. While, on the part of the police, in the early stages of the investigations, there was a tendency towards provisional deductions theorising the deaths of the first victims had resulted from BDSM bondage games that had turned fatal.

Bed knobs and Yawn-Makingly Familiar Transgressions.
‘I tied him up,’ Ireland told police, describing a victim’s submission, ‘there was a bed . . . four posts with knobs on the top and I tied him by his fists with cord. Specially-made cord.’

 
Of his last victim Colin remarked dismissively, ‘He was obviously, the leather type. The leather type is a certain type of . . . the gay scene that’s very much into wearing leather . . . the hero without a cause type.’

This remark, pointing up, as it does, the relativism of those sadomasochists who live solely by Nietzschean reliance on ‘exalted sensations’, also evokes Francis Bacon’s rather grandiose post-ratiocinated Nietzschean creed of cleaving to, in his own words, the ‘brutality of fact’ and to a pursuit of the nihilist’s ‘easy and intense ecstasy of a particular kind without counting the consequences.’ (An incisive observation on nihilism from a significant year – 1932 – by William Plomer, a closeted writer of pronounced sensitivity.)

This deficiency of scruples, this ‘optimism for nothing’ but visceral existence untrammelled by bourgeois shibboleths and defined by a cultish aesthetic of violence certainly set the tone for the artists who composed the ‘Ring’ of raffish chancers and devotees of ‘rough sex’ that surrounded Francis Bacon in his prime. 

In a word, Bacon’s compulsive subject was the naked, unreined Id.

Richard Chopping, numbered among Bacon’s closest devotees, shared this compulsion. As Simon Pure recalls: ‘I remember Dickie as a controversialist and he interviewed me as an applicant during the RCA Admissions assessments. His interest in students like me seemed to be focused on literary violence, exemplified by the sadism of Flaubert. I remember we discussed Flaubert’s Salammbô, which fortunately I had read, and the passage at the siege of Carthage, where the barbarians pulled out the toenails of the slaughtered to sew into breastplates. This excited Mr. Chopping’s interest. I then mentioned a crucifixion in Salammbô.’

They found a lion attached to a cross by its four limbs like a criminal. His enormous muzzle hung to his breast, and his fore-paws, half-concealed beneath the abundance of his mane, were widely spread apart like a bird’s wings in flight.

‘I refrained from observing that Bacon’s anthropomorphic Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), therefore, seemed rather yawn-makingly familiar and, by contrast, somewhat tame once one had learned that Flaubert had stolen a march on the artist by some eighty years.’

The Convergence of Sadomasochism . . . Bacon as ‘Superman’.
Critics of Bacon have noted his assumed Nietzschean leanings, and his sharing of an ethos that discounted notions of body and soul; a reductionist ethos that deemed human beings to be ‘simply bodies, and nothing else’ but with a capacity for ‘exhilarated despair’.  This point was taken up in a novel (written by a Fitzrovian drinking crony of Bacon’s) in which Francis is satirised as a follower of Nietzsche. The Nietzschean painter in the novel resents a critic, complaining:

‘He says I stir up clear waters to make them muddy and seem deeper than they are.  That’s Nietzsche, actually. Not [the critic]. He’s terribly good. Nietzsche I mean. When I’m painting I sometimes try and believe I’m superman . . .  good artists are so often promiscuous. It makes it difficult for them to live in society, because society thinks them immoral.  They’re not helped by the thousands of bad artists who think that immorality makes them good artists.’

And this connexion between a prominent British artist and a lurking homicidal psychopath, both active in violent contiguous subcultures, is not the only instance identified in the history of painting in twentieth century London. Some seventy years earlier, Walter Sickert produced his ‘Camden Town Murder’ series (1908), in which he relished the sensationalist frisson a naked subject of voyeurism could induce in the gallery-going public; a morbid series that sparked suspicions that when a young man his guise had been ‘Jack the Ripper’, the brutal unidentified perpetrator of the serial murder of prostitutes in Whitechapel in 1888 (Nietzsche’s Year Zero, not so incidentally, for the Revaluation of Values).

Les petites morts douces de l’après-midi?
Sickert’s voyeuristic post-mortal ambiguities.

If contemporary accounts of the Whitechapel killer’s motives are to be believed, then Colin Ireland’s mission to cleanse London society of what he perceived to be an unspeakable contagion shares a similar compelling animus. (Incidentally, my great-uncle had been taught by Sickert and Professor Tonks at the Slade. Uncle once drew, on a folded sheet, a caricature of Sickert chasing his hat in a high wind. When you opened the fold you saw it was not the hat that Sickert was chasing but a naked model. ‘A skirt-chaser,’ Uncle hinted darkly, ‘and a whole lot worse. In fact, a thoroughly bad hat.’)

Mocking Clues to Homophobic Murder. 
I have no searing criticism to level against the police in their handling of the Colin Ireland case, which was sensitive to the point of punctiliousness. ‘We are not thought police,’ the senior police investigator stated, ‘prying into what goes on in the privacy of people’s homes.’ The Case File makes clear the investigators’ consultations with GALOP (the Gay London Police Monitoring Group) to seek a collaboration in nailing the ‘Gay Slayer’ at the height of the media blitz, when the Press were determined to highjack the case.
  
However, though Colin’s homophobic motivation was evidenced powerfully at the crime scenes, and knowledge of it could have led directly to the Coleherne pub’s leather scene, the relevant clues were not read correctly, in my personal view, due to the inexperience of the ‘token gay officer’ on the case who was blind to many of the practices and customs associated with homoerotic leather-sexuality.

That is why, frustrated at the police’s seeming failure to perceive an emerging murder series, conforming in Colin’s mind to the textbook Crime Classification defined by the FBI, Colin’s taunting of the police by telephone included this challenge: ‘You've got some good leads on my identity from clues at the scene.’ 

So if Colin Ireland assertion was correct, what were the deliberate clues he intended to be revealed in the symbols he arranged so fastidiously on the bodies of his victims?

Cryptic Clue 1: A key motif was observable at the scene of the first murder. The prosecution at Ireland’s trial stated that, as an expression of his disgust, Ireland ‘got some condoms and put one in [the victim’s] mouth and another in his nostril. As a further humiliation he put two teddy bears on the bed in a “69” position.’
 
So far as I can determine, the police profiler (an eminent forensic psychologist) at no time connected these ‘cuddly toys’ (as he refers to them) to the ‘big boys’ nights’ of ‘leather-clad truckers’ (as they are termed in the Case File) observable at the Coleherne or other gay hangouts where the teddy bear was worn.

Bear identity for huggers.

As the Report establishes, Colin knew of these gay venues where ‘Chubbies and Chasers’ gathered.  Yet the Report at no point connects the teddy bears to Colin’s mockery of a significant offshoot of the leather community . . . the hypermasculine Whitmanesque hugging/cuddling subculture singing ‘the body electric’ whose practices are visibly identified by the wearing of teddy bears.

Cryptic Clue 2: More sinister still, also on the occasion of his first murder, Colin placed a soft toy (a rabbit, according to the police profiler) by the victim under his left arm. The Case File refers to two other unsolved murder cases in which homosexuals were killed in settings similar the Colin Ireland murders. Common factors included: ‘elements of theatre’; ‘elements of sadism’; ‘elements of bondage’; ‘arrangements which symbolise control’. In one of the cases there figured an Ireland-ish taunt: ‘A dead rabbit was nailed to a doorpost.’

Hence, it is my belief that the theories proposed by psychologists, namely, that Colin’s strategically arranged tableaux of furry animals represented a tragic lost childhood, and that the toys were symbolic of a stolen innocence (his encounters with paedophiles), can be dismissed because their meaning was entirely specific, and related pointedly to his adult crimes.

Cryptic Clue 3: The very method of Colin’s crimes suggested strongly the nature and appearance of the perpetrator, just as Colin hinted. Only a formidable individual posing as a ‘top’ (S&M master/dominant partner) could have overpowered his victims and secured their submission so compliantly. Beyond the absence of sexual activity on the part of the dominant ‘top’, the denunciatory feature of the knotted condoms applied to gag one victim, for example, indicated a moralising mission or crusade (Colin reserved his most desecratory embellishment of the bodies for those victims he found to be undisclosed HIV-positive). Indeed, it would be not so removed from the truth of Colin’s motivation to imagine he saw himself as something of a Hercules in his mythic cleansing of what he regarded as Augean stables; for the slaying of the Nemean Lion we may take the cat Colin killed to punish one of his victims, arranging its carcass with the condom-enclosed tip of its tail in the victim’s mouth, and the animal’s mouth fastened on the man’s penis and testicles.  

Decipit frons prima multos. The initial appearance of a man can deceive many, even himself. The face Colin Ireland viewed in the mirror each day was classically that of Heracles of the Twelve Labours – the physiognomy of a boxer, with a broken nose, 
as broken as Michelangelo’s. Colin was vividly described by a witness as sporting ‘a kink in his nose’.

Critique of the Theatricality of Violence

‘I should have been a con-man, a robber or a prostitute,’ boasted Francis Bacon. ‘But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.’

By Bacon’s own analysis, his reliance on chance was integral to his character and central to his creative process as a painter. ‘The mystery [of art] lies in the irrationality by which you make appearance . . . enormously instinctive and accidental things [that come out of a desire] for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way.’ As a fellow connoisseur of the Coleherne’s leatherman subculture, Francis like Colin revealed himself to be no different in his fascination with the homosexual male in articulo mortis, in both sexual and nihilistic terms. Both gambled, relying on chance to achieve the desired effect from their corporeal assemblages, whether on canvas or on post-mortal bedsheets. And driving them was the mutuality of a bleak world-view that saw only meaninglessness. 

‘I would like some day to trap a moment of life in its full violence, its full beauty. That would be the ultimate painting. I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance.***’  

Colin Ireland, Soho’s ‘Gay Slayer’, could have said it with greater conviction. 

The theatricality of Bacon’s ambition now rings distinctly hollow.

Yet, in a their hunting of fresh conquests in Soho’s moral twilight, these jaded optimists of nothingness, these deceivers not so undeceived, sought, successfully after their own fashion, each to kill the night.

London’s Time Out report on leads in the hunt for Colin Ireland.

* For covert priapean subject matter in David Hockney’s youthful drawings, see:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/01/priapus-and-dessication-of-oxford-dons.html 

** Extraordinarily enough – and almost too incredible to countenance – the ‘senior Met officer’ to whom I refer as one of the principal investigators of the Colin Ireland case to my certain knowledge (since he confided these details to me) by sheer coincidence struck up an acquaintanceship with Francis Bacon in a Soho dive one night, and went on to Charlie Chester’s in his company to carouse into the small hours.

*** Ars longa, vita brevis – I can't refrain from adding that it was John Minton, tutor at the painting school of the Royal College of Art, who recommended Francis Bacon for the position of artist-in-residence at the RCA. Readers of this account of the braggadocio of London School artists might like to consider that it was a student of Minton, and habitué of Bacon’s Soho watering holes (the Colony Room Club, The Coach and Horses, and the French House), who also boasted of more than a brush with homicidal criminality . . . in this case, a five-minute-affaire with the American serial killer and necrophiliac, Paul John Knowles, captured in 1974, believed to be responsible for deaths of over thirty victims, tortured and murdered with the most unconscionable cruelty. Ars longa, vita brevis. Yes. Certainly. As admirers of Caravaggio can confirm, he and his art lived longer than the victim he knifed with the rara dexteritate of a master’s hand.

 

And one begins to wonder at the so-called Legacy of the Tortured Artist when, shades of Dorian Gray, Bacon’s self-portraits are faces seen more and more to resemble the frozen features of Vladimir Putin.

 

Self Portrait Hidden in the Attic
Any collector must ask themselves: ‘Can I countenance
another person’s ego exhibited above my mantlepiece?
It’s an affront to my self-esteem.’

●

28.05.22 Extraordinary. Exploring my father’s family papers, I found today his Health & Pension Contributions Record Card for 1937. Between 1961 and 1992 Francis Bacon‘s studio address, like my father’s, was 7 Reece Mews, London Sw7, the postal district, too, of the Royal College of Art. 

 

 

●

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence . . .

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sister-Morphine-Narratives-Community-Psychiatric/dp/1844712990

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html  

and A Bad Case (2015)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html