Our World: Merged

‘Our World: Merged’ is an extract from Lynne Bryan’s memoir Iron Man, published by Salt, 2021. The extract contains four of seventeen fictional letters to artists that Lynne uses in Iron Man to unpick her thoughts and feelings in relation to her disabled father and his prostheses, a pair of wooden crutches and a leg iron. 

1993

Dear Jo Spence,

I have just learnt about your work and, sadly, have also learnt that you died last year at the age of fifty-eight. I do not normally write to the deceased but I feel the need to write to you.

In 1992 my daughter was born. I was delighted. But a girl. I am so worried for her. Girls have such a shit time. I don’t feel equipped to help her, not properly. I feel I am too girlish myself, too shy, too soft.

Girlish. Check out that word. Sex as insult.

Here’s a story: Eight days after my daughter was born a writer, who tutored me, also died: Angela Carter. We didn’t get on really. I think she tolerated me. Just about. Her comments on my writing had a note of exasperation in them, and in the couple of tutorials we had she kept trying to shock me. I think she wanted to jolt me out of my shyness, to wake me up. Stop being so timid: I think she may have wanted to say this to me.

Bravery. Bravura. These are good words and ones that spring to mind when I think of her and when I think of you. Of course I never met you but I feel I know you through your work, that photograph you took of yourself on the doorstep of a scabby house, two full bottles of milk on the step, you holding a broom with a scraggy towel wrapped round your waist, topless, full-breasted, wearing specs and a chunky string of beads and an unflattering haircut, your expression defiant, unyielding. Another view of the housewife, another view of the woman indoors. An alternative image for Page 3. Both sad and angry. Grimly real.

You knew our lot. You were in revolt against it.

In your biography it says that you were born to factory workers. I too was born to factory workers: my dad slaved in a shoe factory and my mum overlocked women’s pinafores and children’s knickers. She did this piece-work at home when I was small, and I can remember the machine in the kitchen and Mum hunched over it and the whirr of the machine as she pushed through knicker after knicker, stitching the sides, adding the elastic, hemming the legs. I noticed that Dad would come in after work and expect his tea, then he’d practice darts in the bedroom – where his board would hang – or watch some telly, or go out to The Liberal Club to have a beer, while Mum carried on working, making Dad’s pack-up for the next day, washing the pots, cleaning the house, getting my sister and me ready for bed. I saw the unfairness in this and didn’t want it to happen to me. I studied hard. I went to college. The college was in Yorkshire where Peter Sutcliffe, The Ripper, was on his brutal rounds…

You know what I’m getting at. Escape the bounds of class perhaps, but sex, gender? 

Here’s another story: My father is disabled. He wears an iron on his leg and can’t walk without the use of crutches. He gets less pay than a physically-able man; he gets mocked for not having the right kind of body; he fears being attacked; he plans ahead in order to not find himself in situations where he could be hurt or humiliated further; he has surrounded himself with many defences. As I see it my father’s experience is closer to the female than the male. Yet, the power at home, when we were a  family together, resided with him. 

I now work at a women’s project which is against violence against women and children. And, until recently, I helped run a feminist magazine. I want to make the world a better place for the vulnerable: for Mum, my sister, myself, my daughter, every female. 

Do you object to my using the word ‘vulnerable’? Should I use ‘oppressed’? Or should I resist the language of victimisation?

Yes, I hear you and Angela say; Yes, resist that kind of language.

Here are the lessons I think I need to learn from you:

·            Fight but fight cleverly

·            Use Art wisely

·            Use Art to effect change

·            Use Art to build strength

·            Be truthful

·            Think slant but don’t obscure 

·            Reveal and challenge 

·            Open your mouth

Thank you,

Lynne Bryan

*

2006

Dear Jeff Wall,

I am so sorry. I missed your retrospective at Tate Modern. The publicity just passed me by. I am really upset, because I would have loved to have seen it, especially Dead Troops Talk (A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986.), one of the few images that truly affects me.

I don’t know when I first saw this photograph. I must have stumbled across it in a book or a newspaper supplement, although I’m surprised I didn’t flick past it because of what it depicts: the aftermath of a battle. I don’t like images of suffering; I don’t know what to do with them; they make me feel accused and powerless and ashamed. But something different must have caught my eye and I must have quickly realised that this image isn’t documentary but a staged image challenging or subverting or in opposition to the document. It’s fiction, offering commentary. 

I think the three soldiers in the centre of your magnificent image must have drawn me in, made me stop, stare. One soldier is lying on a rubbled hillside. A fellow soldier is sitting on him. This porky soldier has been injured in the belly and has the fingers of one hand stuck inside his entrails; his other hand is perhaps – it isn’t clear to me – raising the head of the soldier he’s sitting on. Poleaxed soldier’s face is covered in blood but he’s gleefully grimacing at a piece of gristle – human probably – that another soldier is dangling before his eyes. How daft! How funny, cruel, audacious, absurd!

Susan Sontag in Regarding The Pain Of Others – see, I have even read up on your work – describes Dead Troops Talk in great detail. I imagine you know of this and her conclusion that the image’s power resides in its subjects - the soldiers - not seeking the gaze of the viewer. The war dead, instead, are totally focussed on each other; they talk and play gruesome games, bonded by an experience that ‘we’ – those who have never been at war – can’t imagine or comprehend. Their world, our world.

My father is disabled – a soldier of sorts – and I am not. His world, my world.

Does this image resonate for me because I feel it describes my father, his state? Because it too describes the gulf between us that I know to be unbridgeable?

When I was little I used to take my father’s crutches and try to walk with them. Impossible because I was smaller than him. Impossible because he was the adult and I the child. Another unbridgeable.

Male. Female. Some would say another unbridgeable.

I have never shown my father Dead Troops Talk. He is a Dad’s Army man. His world, my world.  

Have you heard of Dad’s Army?

With much admiration,

Lynne Bryan

*

2006

Dear Jeff Wall,

I would like to add to the letter I wrote you a few weeks back. I hope you have kept it!

His world, my world.

Does Dead Troops Talk – in truth - resonate for me because it describes a world that isn’t mine but in some way has been made to be? 

I have a snapshot of my father in a deckchair in the back garden of his first marital home with me newly-born swaddled in his lap. He is looking down at me, me looking up at him. His face ecstatic, smiling. What was going through his mind then? He may have been congratulating himself. His healthy child. His.

I rest swaddled on his lap and his lap was part-human and part-prosthesis and so - despite myself - I was intimate from birth with a body collapsed, trussed and poorly reconstructed. 

Him looking down at me, me looking up at him.

The subjects of Dead Troops Talk don’t seek the gaze of the viewer; they are instead locked into a gruesome communication which is theirs and theirs alone, which is only something that perhaps they can understand, which has to do with shared tragedy. They’re locked into a particular way of being. Enclosed. Together forever.  No way out. 

Am I drawn to Dead Troops Talk because in fact I was of him (his failed body, his adapted self), brought up by him (not from normal land)?

His world, my world, our world.

Entwined. Merged.

Together. Trapped.

Lynne Bryan

*

2017

Dear Jo Spence,

There’s a gelatin print of yours called Body Parts (Self Portrait). Do you know the one I mean? Thirty-six images set into a square, six images by six. One image of your face, the rest shots of  your – I assume - body parts: an eye, a nose, a tongue, toe nails, toes, a nipple, lots of nipples repeated. The image reminds me of the work of Louise Bourgeois, her small sculptures of limbs and breasts, testicles, eyes and ears. Did you ever get to see any of her work? She was less well-known when you were alive but, now, she’s recognised as one of the all-time greatest artists. A female too!

Anyway, anyway, her body part sculptures have been described as ‘typifying’ her ‘investigation into complex emotional states’. I’ve found it difficult to unpick this thought. How can a fragment of the human body be an investigation into what is in the mind?  I wonder – is it to do with humans finding it easier to interpret the whole but feeling less secure when confronted with the part? 

My father, who I’ve told you about, didn’t present as whole. He was visibly a composite, an accumulation of parts: flesh and metal and wood. I know people found it hard to respond to him because they saw this and it triggered something in them. His disability frightened many and made them feel ashamed and troubled too; and so they tried to handle the complexity of their feelings by pushing him away, labelling him Freak, Hop-A-Long, Cripple, Spaz.

I was of him, and I suspect - in fact I know - that many people who met me with him didn’t see a father and a daughter but the Cripple and the Cripple’s daughter, the Freak’s progeny. I know this not because I was called names – not that I can remember - but because I was looked at in the way Dad was looked at. These people would have preferred me not to exist.

Occasionally some would congratulate me for taking charge of Dad’s crutches as he made his way down some steps clutching a handrail for support, for holding the door open for him, for carrying his bag or taking care of his coat or jumper; they patronised me as much as they patronised him. At other times people would express surprise that he had a daughter and I think this was because they saw the gammy leg and they thought gammy penis. Others were puzzled by my attractiveness and I think this was because they expected the Freak to only have damaged, ugly genes to pass on. 

I am writing a memoir about my father and me; it is my way of opening my mouth. Earlier in this memoir I described myself as being a living, breathing ‘complex emotional state’. Is this because I cannot free myself from Dad? Because I am locked with him in the world of the bit, the part, the fragmented? 

There are three images in Body Parts (Self Portrait) that I am drawn to the most. A series of upside-down mouths: the closed-mouth, the open mouth, then mouth with gritted teeth. The open mouth looks like an open wound, the tongue in its depths an organ, a heart pumping.

I can hear my heart as I am writing this letter, as I write towards the end of this book.

Lynne

Iron Man, was published by Salt, 2021.