Cut out, paint, repeat for 50 years

AHumument started life around noon on November 5 1966 at a propitious place. Austin’s Furniture Repository stood on Peckham Rye, where William Blake saw his first angels and which Van Gogh must have passed once or twice on his way to Lewisham.

As usual on a Saturday morning, the artist RB Kitaj and I prowled the huge warehouse in search of bargains. Arriving at the racks of dusty books left over from house clearances, I boasted that the first one I found that cost threepence I would make serve a serious long-term project. I soon chanced on a yellow book with the tempting title A Human Document. Looking inside we saw the fateful price.

It was a novel by someone that neither I nor my bookish companion had heard of: WHMallock. The words “Ninth printing” above the date 1892 suggested a certain popularity when it had been published by Chapman and Hall at 3/6. Mallock’s stock had luckily depreciated at the rate of a halfpenny a year to reach the requisite level.

Mallock was born in 1849 and after leaving Oxford started what promised to be a brilliant career with a rapturously received political satire, The New Republic, followed by a stream of antisocialist polemic and writings on religion as well as many novels. By his death in his 70s, he had faded into embittered obscurity, his views all but obsolete.

His snobbery pervades A Human Document and his attitude toward Jews (though not untypical of the time) supplies the crux of its love story. For Mallock, the adultery of its heroine Irma somehow did not really count since her wealthy husband was Jewish. These negative aspects of his literary persona assisted rather than impeded my scheme, as did his intelligence, immaculate prose, luxuriant vocabulary and wide allusion. His complete lack of humour also helped: it is fun to construct the odd joke out of a dry text.

Like most projects that end up lasting a lifetime, my version had its germ in idle play. Influenced by William Burroughs and his Nova Trilogy – a set of novels in which fragments of sentences are cut up and reassembled to give them new and unexpected meaning – I had begun to toy with the idea of taking a book and altering every page, by painting or collage, to create an entirely new version. Now the die was cast, the dice thrown: chance had become choice and a notion grown into an idea.

Once I had got my prize home, page after randomly opened page revealed that I had stumbled upon a treasure. Darting eagerly here and there I somehow omitted to read the novel as an ordered story. ( Though in some sense I almost know the whole of it by heart, I have to this day never read it properly from beginning to end.)

At first I merely scored out unwanted words with ink leaving some (often too many) to stand and the rest more or less readable beneath hatching. The first page I finished in 1966 was page 33. In reworking it, years later, I incorporated part of the original as a memorial to the start of things, now burned and pasted onto its successor. I discovered in the process some additional words lurking on the page: “…as years went on you began to fail better”, echoing a much loved phrase of Beckett, which did not exist until 17 years after my initial version. Serendipity is the best collaborator.

The book’s rechristening resulted from another chance discovery. By folding one page in half and turning it back to reveal half of the following page, the running title at the top abridged itself to A Humument, an earthy word with echoes of humanity and monument as well as a sense of something hewn, or exhumed to end up in the muniment rooms of the archived world. I like even the effortful sound of it, pronounced as I prefer, Hew-mew-ment.

By 1973 I had altered every page. Seeing the book shown as a whole (at the Serpentine in London, then in The Hague, then Basel) gave me some satisfaction, but the feeling that I could fail better than that began to nag. The first bound trade edition (1980) marked the end of a dormant period. The book had become a book again and in its turn a suitable case for treatment. So I set about doing the whole book again, showing bit by bit, as edition followed optimistic edition, what I could come up with.

Half a century ago, Tom Phillips began altering a Victorian novel, page by page. Finally, he thinks his work is done

Inasmuch as A Humument tells a story, it could be described as a dispersed narrative with more than one possible order; more like a pack of cards than a continuous tale. A narrator, fashionably unreliable, has most of the text. Sometimes he might be identified with the artist and sometimes not, and sometimes in any case it could be a “she”.

I have so far extracted from Mallock’s novel well over a thousand segments of poetry and prose and have yet to find a situation, sentiment or thought which his words cannot be adapted to cover – and all thanks to a man who, from accounts of his personality, would seem to be someone I would not at all have enjoyed meeting. I have tested other fictions and discovered nothing to equal him in the provocation of fresh conflations and marriages of word and phrase.

I have enjoyed the discovery of nonce or nonsense terms that provide a fantasy obbligato. These are extracted from longer words. The less selfevident their source, the more autonomously

Once I’d changed every page, I felt I could do better, so began it all again