The Two Roberts by Damian Barr review: 'innocents abroad'
Damian Barr’s novelised account of the lives of Scottish artists Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde sees them fêted in London before reaching an ostentatiously fictitious ending. Review by Stuart Kelly
The artists Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde make a fleeting appearance in Iain Sinclair’s work Pariah Genius. The poet George Barker supposedly said to the photographer John Deakin, “Life is a sea of boiling blood. If I on my island and Colquhoun on his island may not be permitted to wave to one another across the ensanguined flood, it is a pretty sorry state of affairs?” To which an exasperated Deakin replied in one of his printable rebarbative retorts, “Art crap! Poetry crap!” (They were all, as Sinclair puts it, “dedicated alcoholics”). What struck me especially though, was Deakin’s photograph of the two Roberts, MacBryde asleep on the sleeping Colquhoun’s shoulder and looking almost innocent. I think Damian Barr has tried to capture some of that in his novelised account of their lives, and especially in the first half of the book. It has a quality not dissimilar to Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys or even Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library. I suspect there will be comparisons to Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, but such connections are superficial and Barr writes far more tenderly.
After a brief prologue – a moment that is more oasis than epiphany – we are back in 1933, “Bobby” MacBryde going to Glasgow School of Art after five years in a boot factory in Ayrshire. Colquhoun gets onto the train at Kilmarnock, heading for the same destination, and is surreptitiously sketched by MacBryde. The novel progresses with the sections diminishing in length: from art school (almost half the whole novel) to travelling in Europe on a scholarship on the eve of the Second World War, to a return to Scotland before moves to London, Lewes and Tilty Mill – where Deakin’s photograph was taken and the scene of one of the most notorious examples of what might now be called their “chaotic lifestyles” – and eventually, from 1955-62, “no fixed abode”. The latter parts are melancholy, with letters pleading for cash or forgiveness, both of which they needed.
The descriptions of them falling in love are done very well indeed, with both the paranoia of criminality and the bohemian experiment in living described with honesty. MacBryde and Colquhoun could, as students, share a flat, except theirs was actually living together. There are notes of domesticity which accord with the biographical record. There is a winking tolerance from unexpected quarters, and a sense of local pride, parochialism and claustrophobia – MacBryde’s aunt, for example, thinking “Robert Burns had better watch his back because Ayrshire would soon have another name to sing”. There are touching sequences about an older homosexual stall-owner in the Barras and drag acts at the Napoleon, which have, again, a kind of innocence. Although the tone darkens in Isherwood-esque Europe, horror is closer to home.
Perhaps because I have read a lot about the period, the Soho parts struck me as missing an important quality: evil. This relates to a question the novel itself raises and attempts to short-circuit. Why is this a novel and not a non-fiction book? Barr writes in the afterword that “Bobby and Robert have been buried in footnotes when, for a brief, glorious time, they were the story… They did not, or could not, play the game”. Barr continues: “Because their lives ended tragically, I was reluctant to write their story – to add to the gay body count”. So he does write an ostentatiously fictitious ending, which is almost like the extravagant end to Derek Jarman’s adaptation of The Tempest. As an aesthetic choice, that is an acceptable solution. But it does overwrite the sheer nastiness of the clique around Francis Bacon, Muriel Belcher, George Barker, Lucien Freud and others.
In a way the two Roberts were innocents abroad. This comes across in other (non-fiction) accounts of their lives, notably AJ Cronin’s Dead as Doornails. Cronin describes MacBryde as having “achieved incandescence” in his cups, singing even though “much of the wording was inaccurate, but he had filled it out for himself over the years with verses which, though they were often almost meaningless, yet were fitting, even somehow deeply moving”. Colquhoun “wooed his drunkenness” and “certainly sought a form of oblivion”. Colquhoun even looks like a bored Mephistopheles and MacBryde like a squiffed cherub. Julian Maclaren-Ross also has some choice things to say about them both, and their intermittent adoption of stereotypical Scottish attire and attitudes.
In terms of their art, Barr has a few carefully selected moments, particularly around the influence of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa – an unexpected choice, almost Bacon-ish – and indeed the sheer shock of seeing works in reality that had only been black and white reproductions. The old line about MacBryde for still life and Colquhoun for portraits is here, but not truly explored given Colquhoun was reserved and MacBryde gregarious. Perhaps understandably there is more sense of the artist-lovers as artists in John Byrne’s Colquhoun and MacBryde, while Barr is more keen to show them as lovers – indeed, the opening prologue is an Edwin Morgan-like snapshot.
Barr can write – a few notes are very writerly, as when he describes the two men’s bodies “curled like commas”. But for a third novel he might need to detach from the historical voiceover and sing his own song instead.
The Two Roberts, by Damian Barr, Canongate, £20.
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