Carl Halling - Rescue of a Rock’n'Roll Child

As ‘81 went on, my acting career lost a little of its initial momentum, so some kind of family decision was reached to the effect that I should return to my studies with a view to eventually qualifying as a teacher. I went on to pass interviews for both the University of Exeter, and Westfield College, London, scraping in with two mediocre “A” level passes at B and C. I wanted to stay in London so as to keep open the possibility of picking up some acting work in my spare time. So in the autumn I started a four-year BA degree course in French and Drama mainly at Westfield - but also partly at the nearby Central School of Speech and Drama - while staying in a small room on campus.
At first I was so unhappy at finding myself a student again at 25 that in an attempt to escape my situation I auditioned for work as an acting ASM, but it didn’t come to anything and a little while later, while ambling at night close by to the Central School, I was ambushed by a group of my fellow drama students who may’ve seemed to me to incarnate the sheer carefree rapturous vitality and joy of life of youth. Whatever the truth they made me feel fantastic, and because of them and others like them I came not just to tolerate my time at Westfield but to love it…coinciding as it did with the zenith of the crazy eighties, last of a triad of decades in the West of unceasing artistic and social change and experimentation. The Playboy Philosophy which exploded in the 1960s could be said to have reached its full flowering in this decade, even if the vast majority of people whose salad days fell within it ultimately forged respectable lives following a brief season as outsiders.Sadly, I never did, and I’m suffering for it now…from a cruel nostalgia for the trappings of status, security, respectability I once scorned. How bitterly I regret such short-sighted narcissism, a narcissism that’s been promoted and worshipped in the West for over half a century, as our society has given itself increasingly over to spiritual rebellion and wholesale sensual abandon - where once these were marginalised as aberrant. These are the same outworkings of the flesh that corrupted the antedeluvian world, and which survived the Flood to be disseminated throughout the nations to spell the end of one empire after the other, the Babylonian, the Medo-Persian, the Greek, the Roman.
 I had no excuse to embrace them. After all, I’d been blessed at birth by every good gift. But the truth is that the most desired qualities - such as intelligence, talent and beauty - are uniquely dangerous unless submitted in their entirety to God, not least to those who possess them. These people are visible and therefore vulnerable, and with more temptations than most, all too likely to fall prey to Luciferian pride and Luciferian rebellion…like David’s favourite son Absalom who was physically flawless but morally bereft. Little wonder therefore that so many of them are drawn to the power offered by art, and especially music, the writer of the first song Lamech having been in the line of Cain. Indeed, there are those Christians who believe that the Cainites were the first pagan people, and that they corrupted the Godly line of Seth through a sensual and wicked music not unlike much contemporary Rock. Of course not all Rock music is flagrantly wicked, far from it. Much of itis melodically lovely. While in terms of its lyrics, its finest songs display the most delicate poetic sensibility. The fact remains, however, that no art form has been quite so associated as Rock with rebellion, transgression, licentiousness, intoxication and a thanatophiliac love of death nor been so influential as such.
To think I once desperately sought fame as a Rock artist myself, and if not as Rock’n'Roll superstar then as actor, or writer, and it was surely a blessing I never gained this pagan form of immortality because had I done so I’d almost certainly have been used for the furtherance of the kingdom of darkness. Once I’d served my purpose I may well have died a solitary premature death as an addict, as has been the fate of so many men and women briefly briefly animated by the charismatic superstar spirit before being cruelly discarded by the Enemy of Souls.

Ferocity of an Enfant Terrible

As I mentioned earlier, at first I fiercely resented being at Westfield, perhaps because I viewed being back in full-time education at 26 as a giant step backwards, but before long I’d embarked on one of the happiest periods of my entire life.
Westfield in the early ’80s was a hotbed of talent and creativity and I was provided with almost unlimited opportunities for acting and performance. Within days I’d made a close friend of a fellow French and Drama student from Darlington in the north east called Andrew - who despite a solid private school background and a rugby player’s powerful wiry frame dressed like a New Wave Rock star with dangling diamante ear ring and skin tight strides - and together we went on to feature in Brecht and Weill’s’s “The Threepenny Opera”.
I’d two small roles, the most interesting being that of a petty street thief Filch, who’d been played by the French writer and actor Antonin Artaud in “L’ Opéra de quat’sous”, one of two versions of the play directed in 1931 by G.W. Pabst. I came to be so very proud of this fact because Artaud, a tragic example of the avant garde persuasion taken to its logical conclusion, was one of my most beloved cursed poets.
Through this production I went on to play jive-talking disc jockey Galactic Jack in the musical play “The Tooth of Crime” by Sam Shepard, who has allegedly spoken of being influenced by Artaud. A coincidence perhaps, though Artaud’s concept of a Theatre of Cruelty was prophetic of so much post-war theatre, indeed art as a whole. The director, Neil, had been impressed by myself and Andrew in “The Threepenny Opera” and so cast us in “The Tooth” in consequence, with Andrew taking the lead role of Hoss. Before long I’d all but forgotten about acting in the outside world and was channelling every inch of my creative energy into performing at Westfield, the now vanished college which became my whole world for two glorious years.
 As for my French studies…in my essay writing I often flaunted an insolent outspokenness perhaps partly influenced by poètes maudits such as Esenin and Rimbaud, but also reflecting my own exhibitionistic need to shock. And while some of my tutors may’ve viewed these efforts with a jaundiced eye, one of my tutors came to thrill to them and await them with the sort of impatience normally accorded a favourite TV or radio series. How close this love of scandalising by way of the written word brought me to a seared conscience I can’t say; but one thing is certain, my compassion started to recede. This didn’t happen right away of course. Yet, even during those first two golden years, some of those who were drawn to me on a deep emotional level betrayed a certain unease with their words, and I was variously described as intense, inscrutable, mysterious, disabused and sad.
 So, why didn’t I cross the line beyond which it becomes impossible for a person to respond to the Holy Spirit? After all, from about 1983, I started to decline as a human being. Perhaps it was something to do with the prayers of believing friends and relatives. Or perhaps something precious was kept alive within me during those dark years. Certainly, I never fully stopped being a caring person, and I can recall being outraged by those avant gardists who advocated actual cruelty or the harming of innocents. How then did I square this with my adoration of certain favoured artists who thrived on verbal violence and scenes of madness and destruction? The fact is I couldn’t, hypocrite that I was.
 Keeping this adoration of destruction company was a savage fury towards what I perceived as social injustice, the chief targets of this high and mighty dudgeon being right-wing dictators on the right - indeed the political right wing as a whole - but when it came to left-wing oppression, I was no less indignant. The eighties was a decade of protest and riot in the UK, and all throughout its years of raging discontent, I allied myself with one radical lobby after the other, including Amnesty and Animal Aid, Greenpeace and CND. I marched against the nuclear threat in London and Paris, lectured for Amnesty while blind drunk to a roomful of middle-aged Rotarians, and had a letter published in the newspaper of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. I became a bit of a nuisance to some with my tracts and posters and pamphlets.
 Mine was the righteous fury that is rooted in a false notion of the perfectibility of Man…that fails to recognise that oppression stems from the sin we all share…that has no real satisfying motive other than its own existence. In time, it started to turn inwards, and to eat away at the reserves of tenderness that meant so much to me, its malignity enhanced by alcohol and dissolute living, and an addiction to astrology and other occult topics, and scandalous art and philosophy. My soul effectively started to cave in, and while it was ultimately saved from terminal ruin by God, I don’t think it’s ever fully recovered from the damage I inflicted on it. Such is my own “thorn in the flesh”…
This first remnant from my Westfield diaries, “Some Sad Dark Secret” testifies to some extent to a former tendency to mental vehemence, which was somewhat at odds with a usually affable manner. It was based on notes contained within a single piece of scrap paper which I recently unearthed and probably dating from 1982 or ‘83. The first three sections contain words of advice offered me by Dr Mein, the fourth and fifth by another of my Westfield tutors, which served to good-naturedly upbraid me for a didacticism he considered to be reminiscent of Rousseau’s.
Rousseau being of course not the painter Henri but the Swiss-born writer, philosopher, composer and pioneer of the contemporary autobiography Jean-Jacques who remains one of the most influential men in history. His alleged position as the father of modern liberalism and the modern educational system - perhaps even the modern world as a whole - has made him a byword among certain Christian conservatives. He’s also been widely cited as being one of the chief progenitors not just of the French Revolution, but the worldwide artistic movement that came in its wake known as Romanticism. And his assertion that Man is born free while being everywhere in chains which stems at least in part from his belief in the essential goodness of Man, has assured him a place of honour in the history of Socialism.
And yet, for all his universal genius and crusading humanitarianism he died a bitter and disappointed man. This would almost certainly have been my fate had I continued to believe in the perfectibility of Man under certain social conditions, which is the essence of Socialism, and which to a greater or lesser extent was my creed prior to coming to the realisation that only through Christ can the heart of Man be changed. That is, of course, had I even managed to survive into middle age.

Some Sad Dark Secret

Dr M. said:
“Temper
Your enthusiasm,
The extremes
Of your
reactions,
You should have
A more
Conventional
Frame
On which to
Hang your
unconventionality.”

The tone of some
Of my work
Is often
A little dubious,
She said.
She thought
That there
Was something
Wrong,
That I’m hiding
Some sad and dark
Secret
From the world.

She told me
Not to rhapsodise,
That it would be
Difficult,
Impossible, perhaps,
For me to
Harness
My dynamism.
“Don’t push People”,
She said.
“You make
Yourself
Vulnerable”.

Dr H. said:
“By the third page,
I felt I’d been
Bulldozed.
I can almost see
Your soapbox.
Like Rousseau,
You’re telling us
What to do.
You seem to
Work yourself
Into such an
Emotional pitch…

And this
Extraordinary
Capacity for lists.

The Westfield Players

In the summer, a group of us went on to play in “Twelfth Night” at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Directed by the brilliant Dawn Austwick with Shakespeare’s Illyria tranformed into a Hippie Arcadia, I played Feste as a Dylanesque minstrel strumming dirge-like folk songs with a voice like sand and glue.
The Westfield contingent’s key players couldn’t have deviated more from the politely liberal norm we seemed to encounter nightly at the Fringe Club on Chambers Street if we’d tried. That was particularly true of Ged, who played Malvolio. At the time he was a hard looking but colossally kind-hearted guy from Liverpool with slicked back rockabilly hair, usually dressed down in denims as per the fashion at the time, with post-Punk at the height of its popularity as an underground movement. Ged I think had been around during the Punk days at Eric’s in Liverpool, and was a fascinating, charismatic guy with a hilariously dark sense of humour.
He and his girlfriend Gail, who’d designed the flowing Hippie costumes, and who was also a very dear friend of mine back then, never stopped encouraging me nor believing in me. We were all very close that summer despite sharing a single large house on Prince’s Street I think it was and there wasn’t a single argument that I can remember.
During my second year I lived in an upper floor apartment in Powis Gardens, Golders Green, sharing it with my close friends from the French department, Andrew and David. Andrew from Darlington in the north east was a slim dark good-looking guy who’d gone to the distinguished private school Sedburgh, but who looked like a Rock star when I first met him, with his left ear graced by a fake diamante earring and favouring skin-tight jeans worn with black pointed boots. The more conservative David, who’d gone to the Catholic public school Ampleforth, was an incredibly gifted pianist and guitarist who despite a misleadingly serious demeanor was a warm, affectionate, witty, eccentric character who endlessly buzzed with the nervous energy of near-genius. He might not have wanted to ape the way his flatmates dressed and behaved, but he was fiercely protective of us despite our shallow social butterfly ways.
Soon after moving in, I decorated the walls of my room and the lounge, which doubled as David’s bedroom, with various provocative images including reproductions of Symbolist and Decadent paintings, and icons of popular culture and the avant garde. We then went on to organise what we optimistically called a salon, which although well-attended didn’t survive beyond a single meeting, although this was well-attended. One thing is certain, we weren’t part of any revived Brideshead generation or anything like that.
We drove our effusive landlady half-crazy at times through heavy-footedness and other crimes of upper floor thoughtlessness, although I don’t remember her complaining all that much despite the fact that we weren’t averse to drink-fuelled discussions extending well into the night. In common with most of my friends I tended to drink heavily at night, but almost never during the day. The truth is that self-doubt wasn’t an issue for me in the early eighties and I was a truly happy person, in fact so much so that I may’ve exaggerated my capacity for depth and melancholia as a means of making myself more interesting to others. But my first two Westfield years were wonderful…an almost nonstop cycle of plays, shows, concerts, discos, parties set in one of the most beautiful and bucolic areas of London. What possible reason was there to have been discontented?
My second year drama project was centred on the one-act play “Playing with Fire” written in by the Swedish realist plawright August Strindberg. I was allotted the task of supplying the music for the production as well as the leading role of Knut, a sardonic Bohemian painter forced to endure the adulterous behaviour of a friend Alex who following an invitation to stay with him at the house of his upper middle class parents for a few days, embarks on a torrid affair with his wife Kerstin. Alex was played by budding playwright Vince, while Ondrej played Knut’s hated bourgeois father. Both were as wifully madcap as me, and while there was a clash of personalities between Vince and Ondrej, I got on brilliantly with them both…in fact I went on to play the lead in one of Vince’s more disturbingly provocative plays at college…electric with rebellion were we, all three, just like Harry and Caresse Crosby and yes, part of a new Lost Generation.
We performed “Playing with Fire” around three times in the Michaelmas term of 1982. I also think that the production of “Twelfth Night” we’d staged at Edinburgh was re-performed this term with most of the original cast intact, to be followed by “Blood Wedding”. The piece below, adapted from notes I made during this period, with the first verse actually containing references to “Twelfth Night” captures the spirit of those heady first two years at Westfield, a college then in its twilight time prior to being incorporated into Queen Mary on east London’s grim Mile End Road, far, far from the semi-pastoral beauty of Hampstead. It also provides some indication of the unquenchable desire for attention, affection and approval that characterised me back then, and the way it affected some of those who cared for me most.

Gallant Festivities

It was my evening, that’s
For sure -
At last I’m good
At something -
27 years old
I may be, but…
“Spot the
Equity card…”
“It’s your aura, Carl…”
I even signed
One of Phil’s friends’
Programmes -
“When are you going
To be a superstar?”
Said Luce
A few days ago -
That seemed to be
The question
On everyone’s lips.
“You got Feste perfectly,
Just how I envisaged it”
“…Not only when
You’re onstage
but off too!”
At last, at last, at last
I’m good at something…

And so the party…Chloe
called me…I listened…
…To her problems…
References
To my “innocent face”…
Livvy said:
“Susy seems Elusive
But is in fact,
Accessible;
You’re the opposite -
You give to everyone
But are incapable
Of giving in particular.”
M. was comparing me
To June Miller
Descriptions by Nin:
“She does not dare
To be herself…”
Everything I’d always
Wanted to be, I now am…
“…She lives
On the reflections
Of herself in the eyes
Of others…
There is no June
To grasp and know…”
I kept getting up to dance…
Susy said: “I’m afraid…
You’re inscrutable
You’re not just
Blasé,
Are you?”
I spoke
Of the spells of calm
And the hysterical
Reactions
Psychic
Exhaustion
Then anxious elation…

A Hateful Work Ethic

I’d say things started to go a little wrong for me once I left Westfield in the summer of ‘83 with a few months to spare before travelling to Paris to work as an English language assistant in a French secondary school, the Lycee Jean-Paul Timbaud. This spelled my exile from the old drama clique, and I’d not be joining them in their final year celebrations, and the knowledge of this must have affected me. I was after all severing myself from a vast network of gifted friends of whom I was deeply fond, and so losing an opportunity of growing as an artist in tandem with like-minded spirits. I could’ve opted for an alternative few weeks in France as Andrew did, but doing so would’ve deprived me of the chance of spending more than six months in Paris, a city I’d long worshipped as the only true home of an artist. Even before the end of the summer term of 1983, I remember there was a twilight atmosphere to things, as if a golden era was winding down.
Earlier in the year, my close friend Monique, a brilliant dynamic woman of North African Jewish ancestry had told me something to the effect that while many were drawn to me, they sensed la mort in me, which is to say death. But then she was in thrall to the intellectual worldview, and familiar with the works of the great psychologist Freud who identified a death drive, subsequently named “thanatos”, although Freud himself never used this word.
Precisely what she meant by death in relation to me I’m unable to say, but she may have identified in me some kind of will to destruction, and specifically self-destruction. As things turned out she was right although it was barely embryonic in the early ’80s. Looking back though I attribute this seed of self-destruction to a cocktail of poisons potentially fatal to the human spirit, including alcohol, astrology, and intellectualism.
The last-named is not in itself wrong, but it’s my contention that intellectuals are more tempted than most by various dark lures including pride, rebellion and sensuality. The same could be said of those who’ve been lavishly gifted by God with beauty, or great talent and so on. Intellectuals have been among the most powerful and often also dangerous men and women in history, and the Modern World has been significantly shaped by the ideas of intellectuals such as Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Their theories and especially those of Marx and Freud and their apostles both orthodox and schismatic fanned the flames of a largely bloodless revolution in the 1960s and while this’d been quenched by about 1972, the philosophies that inspired it far from fading themselves set about infiltrating the cultural mainstream, where they became more extreme than ever, and so entered the realm of the Postmodern, while remaining the ultimate consequence of centuries of ModernisterosionoftheJudaeo-Christian fabric of Western civilisation.
But I was never an intellectual in the manner of Monique, who’d chosen a career in academia as I recall, so much as someone who was both troubled and fascinated by the idea of extreme cerebrality. Reading Colin Wilson’s “The Outsider” in the early ’80s, I especially identified with those intellectuals who were tortured by their own excesses of consciousness such as T.E. Lawrence, who wrote of his “thought-riddled” nature.
As a child I was extrovert to the point of mania but by the time of my late adolescence I found myself becoming subject to rival drives of equal intensity. One of these was towards peace and introspection, the other, attention and approbation. It seems this duality is common among artists and may serve to explain why so many have sought some form of sedation as they drag their sensitive souls towards the worldly acclaim they at once crave and recoil from.
For my part I subjected my body, the creation I tendered so lovingly at times, to a ruthless almost contemptuous work ethic which couldn’t have differed more from the noble impulse first identified by the German social philosopher Max Weber and which he dubbed the Protestant Work Ethic. For Weber, the latter didn’t so much give birth to Capitalism, which of course it didn’t, as facilitate its growth in those nations in which the Reformation had been most successful. If the work ethic beloved of the Calvinist Pilgrims who forged the first American colonies was intended for the glorification of God, mine was a decadent late variant entirely given over to the promotion of the self.
And to this end, I consumed a variety of intoxicants, not just because I enjoyed doing so but because they enabled the constant socialising that brought me the attention, affirmation and approval I so craved…my narcissistic supply, some might call it, and they’d have a point. How else to explain the sheer demented fervour of my endless self-exaltation? That’s not to say that I wasn’t loving towards others because I was, but precisely what kind of love was it that I spread so generously about me? Whatever it was it wasn’t agape, the selfless love described in 1 Corinthians 13, in fact it was a form so unacceptable to God that in time it’d have seen me damned and in Hell.
Although relatively pure in the early 1980s, intellectual poison had already started compromising it, for I was hardly less heartless towards my mind than my body, treating it as little more than an object of research and experimentation. Little wonder then that I eventually turned to drink as a means of pacifying it, although alcohol still wasn’t a serious problem for me in the early ’80s, when my exhausting daily regimen tended to be fuelled instead by massive quantities of caffeine tablets. That said, Monique didn’t like it when I drank to excesss as if she’d already singled me out as someone who’d go on to develop a drink problem. In this as in other things she showed remarkable insight.
The piece below first existed as a series of scrawled notes based on several conversations I enjoyed with Monique in 1982 or ‘83. One of these resulted from an incident in which I’d made a fool of myself by storming off during a gig after having broken a guitar string. As the guitar belonged to my flatmate David who was in the audience, he quite reasonably expressed his displeasure out loud, while my musical partner Aidan told me to keep playing. Feeling humiliated without any real cause, I threw an atypical temper tantrum before storming out of college and making my way back to Golders Green. After a period spent wandering aimlessly in Golders, I eventually bumped into Monique who’d come looking for me…

She Dear One Who Followed Me