Introduction to A HUMUMENT

by Tom Phillips, RA

Like most projects that ended up lasting half a lifetime, this work started out as idle play at the fringe of my work and preoccupations. I had read an interview with William Burroughs (Paris Review 1965) and, as a result, had played with the “cut-up” technique, making my own variant (the column-edge poem) from current copies of the New Statesman. It seemed a good idea to push these devices into more ambitious service.

I made a rule; that the first (coherent) book I could find for threepence (i.e. one and a quarter pence) would serve.

Austin’s the furniture repository stood (until it closed in 1995) on Peckham Rye where Blake saw his first angels and along which Van Gogh had probably walked on his way to Lewisham. At this propitious place, on a routine Saturday morning shopping expedition, I found, for exactly threepence, a copy of A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, published in 1892 as a popular reprint of a successful three-decker. It was already in its seventh thousand at the time of the copy I acquired and cost originally three and sixpence. I had never heard of W.H. Mallock and it was fortunate for me that his stock had depreciated at the rate of a halfpenny a year to reach the requisite level. I have since amassed an almost complete collection of his works and have found out much about him. He does not seem a very agreeable person: withdrawn and humourless (as photographs of him seem to confirm) he emerges from his works as a snob and a racist (there are some extremely distasteful anti-semitic passages in A Human Document itself). He has however been the subject of some praise from A.J. Ayer for his philosophical dialogue The New Republic and A Human Document itself is flatteringly mentioned in a novel by Dorothy Richardson. However for what were to become my purposes, his book is a feast. I have never come across its equal in later and more conscious searchings. Its vocabulary is rich and lush and its range of reference and allusion large. I have so far extracted from it over one thousand texts, and have yet to find a situation, statement or thought which its words cannot be adapted to cover. To cite an example (one that shows how Mallock can be made ironically to speak for causes against his grain), I was preparing for an exhibition in Johannesburg (May 1974) and wanted to find some texts to append to paintings; I turned (as some might do to the I Ching) to A Human Document and found firstly:

wanted. A little white
opening out of thought.

And secondly:

Delightful the white wonder
To have the sport and grasses
The ancient dread
Judgement now has come
Judgement suddenly. Black from a distance
Expected hurrying on.
Take a new turn
Back to reason.

More recently, in working on an illustrated edition of my own translation of Dante’s Inferno I have managed to find a hundred or so parallel texts from A Human Document which act as a commentary to the poem. I have even found sections of blank verse to match the translation as in this fragment which forms the halftitle:

My story of a soul’s surprise, a soul
which crossed a chasm in whose depths I find
I found myself and nothing more than that

When I started work on the book late in 1966, I merely scored unwanted words with pen and ink; (it was not long though before the possibility became apparent of making a better unity of word and image, intertwined as in a mediaeval miniature. This more comprehensive approach called for a widening of the techniques to be used and of the range of visual imagery, Thus painting (in watercolour or gouache) became the basic technique with some pages still executed in pen and ink only, some involving typing and some using collaged fragments from other parts of the book (since a rule had grown up that no extraneous material should be imported into the work). In some recent pages I have incorporated elements of their printed predecessors.

Much of the pictorial matter in the book follows the text in mood and reference: much of it also is entirely non-referential, merely providing a framework for the verbal statement and responding to the disposition of the text on the page. In every case the text was the first thing decided upon: some texts have taken years to reach a definitive state, usually because such a rich set of alternatives was present on a single page and only rarely because the page seemed quite intractable. In order to prove (to myself) the inexhaustibility of even a single page I started a set of variations of page 85: I have already made over twenty. The visual references used range from a telegram envelope to a double copy of a late Cézanne landscape.

The only means used to link words and phrases are the �rivers’ in the type of the original: these, if occasionally tortuous, run generously enough and allow the extracted writing to have some flow so that it does not become (except where this is desirable) a series of staccato bursts of words.

Occasionally chance procedures have been used. One page (p.99) executed in this way was first divided into half, and, by tossing coins, every word except one was eliminated from each half. Once again the book spoke (like the I Ching). It’s two word, in a faintly Jewish voice said (in 1967) �something already’. The title of the book itself was arrived at by invited accident: folding one page over and flattening it on the page beneath makes the running title read A HUMUMENT (ie A HUM(AN DOC)UMENT), which had an earthy sound to it suitable to a book exhumed from, rather than born out of, another. According to Mary Ann Caws, who has written at length on A Humument this procedure is called crasis.

The numerical order of the pages is not the chronological order of their making. The initial attack on the book was made by taking leaves at random and projecting the themes that emerged backwards and forwards into the volume. In the end the work became an attempt to make a Gesamtkunstwerk in small work, since it includes poems, music scores, parodies, notes on aesthetics, autobiography, concrete texts, romance, mild erotica, as well as the undertext of Mallock’s original story of an upper-class cracker-barrel philosopher ex-poet and diplomat, who falls in love with a sexy prospective widow from Hampstead (her husband is out of combat, being a sick man and, being a Jew, beyond the pale in any case).

Many rules have grown up in the course of the work. Although Mallock’s original hero (Grenville) and heroine (Irma) have their parts to play, the central figure of this version is Bill Toge (pronounced �toe-dj’). His adventures can only (and must) occur on pages which originally contained the words �together’ or �altogether’ (the only words from which his name can be extracted). He also has his own recurrent iconography; his insignia include a carpet and a window looking out onto a forest and his amoeba-like, ever-changing shape is always constructed from the rivers in the type. His story, the Progress of Love, is a favourite neo-platonic topos and there are deliberate parallels with the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili the most beautiful of printed books, published in Venice in 1499.

As well as A Humument itself, Mallock’s novel has been the source for other ventures, notably the complete score of an opera IRMA whose libretto, music, staging instructions and costume designs all come from A Human Document.

Other offshoots include Trailer (published by Editions Hansjorg Mayer. Stuttgart 1971), which is in effect garnered from the cutting floor of A Humument though a self-sufficient work, and DOC, a series of affidavits and testimonies which attempt to build up the picture of a lecherous doctor. There exists also small paintings which make variations of wording and design from the book itself and catch up on some lost opportunities in the original. Texts from the same Mallock novel also appear as pendants to paintings such as the series The Quest for Irma (1973) and Ein Deutsches Requiem: after Brahms. In preparation is a ballet scenario (with score and costume designs) which could either be performed separately (as The Quest for Grenville) or an an interlude in performances of IRMA.

As work went on and ramified, a second copy of A Human Document became necessary. Curiously it turned up in the other branch of the same furniture repository (though this time it cost 1/6d). This copy had belonged to one Lottie Yates who had herself �treated’ it to some extent, heavily underlining passages that seemed to relate to her won romantic plight (occasionally in the margin she had sighed �How true!’). It seems also that she had used it as a means of saying to her beloved the things she lacked words for, passing the underlined copy to him as a surrogate love letter. Thus in 1902, someone has already started to work the mine. The first copy had belonged to a Mr Leaning and was unmarked save for his signature. I have since acquired fifteen or so copies, many sent gratis from well wishers (notably Patrick Wildgust, most dedicated of Mallock hunters). Most have no sign of their owners: one, however, which was purchased at the Beresford Library, Jersey in 1893, by Colonel J.K. Clubley, passed eventually into the hands of someone who merely signs himself �Hitchcock’. The most recent additionhas been a copy supplied by a well-wisher from the library of Sir Gerald Kelly, a past President of the Royal Academy, though how he got it from �Nell’ to whom it was presented by �Michael’ in 1901 is not recorded.

The recent find of the original three-decker first printing has been somewhat of a disappointment. Its letters are big and, with its broad type-rivers and wide spacings it lacks the tight look of the single volume. Each word seems to have fewer neighbours. Yet a new quest started: an even more recondite curiosity had come to my notice in the form of a one-volume American edition, also published in 1892 (by the Cassell Publishing Co. of New York). I have recently acquired a copy of this version which differs on every page as a result of some cutting (mainly of French words in the original). I need hardly add that reasonably priced examples of the ordinary English popular edition would still be exceedingly welcome. To help me locate certain key words (when tackling the Dante Project for example) I have, with some help from others, compiled a complete concordance to A Human Document.

Virtually all the work on A Humument has been done in the evenings so that I might not, had the thing become a folly, regret the waste of days. One kind of impulse that brought this book into slow being was the prevailing climate of textual criticism. As a text A Humument was not unaware of what then occupied the page of Tel Quel (and by now must already have ceased to be a fashionable feature of undergraduate essays). A Humument exemplifies the need to �do’ structuralism, and, (as there are books both of and on philosophy) to be of it rather than on it. At its lowest it is a reasonable example of bricolage, and at its highest it is perhaps a massive deconstruction job taking the form of a curious unwitting collaboration between two-ill suited people seventy-five years apart. It is the solution for this artist of the problem of wishing to write poetry while not in the real sense of the word being a poet…he gets there by standing on someone else’s shoulders.

Publication of A Humument was started in 1970 by the Tetrad Press with a box of ten silk-screened pages which made up Volume I. Other volumes (ten in all, containing varying quantities of pages) were printed by lithography, silkscreen and letterpress in a limited edition of one hundred copies. The original manuscript was completed in the autumn of 1973 and was shown within days of that event, in its entirety, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (in whose bulletin, then edited by Jasia Reichardt, it was first mentioned in 1967).

This revised new edition in book form differs from the private press edition in that several new pages have been substituted for these first versions – sixty or so in the first revised edition (green cover) and another hundred in the second revised printing. If this book finds favour (ie sells), and I live, it will need no more than two further editions to make the last Humument a complete replacement of the first, page for page.

In a sense, because A Humument is less than what it started with, it is a paradoxical embodiment of Mallarmé’s idea that everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.

- Tom Phillips