{Transformationalist Essays}

The Art of Transformationalism

by

Fred Hughes

1.

   A notebook of a late journalist friend of mine has recently come into my possession. Most of the humble, unaccomplished Pitman shorthand refers to observations he’d made of everyday and unremarkable parochial proceedings including one interview conducted with an old man who lived in Fenton; one of the clutter of six towns that make up the City of Stoke on Trent.
    From his jottings it seems that the person he’d talked to, sometime in the late 1980’s I guess, about his wartime experiences - that is both the Great War of 1914-18 and the Second World War as well - had struck a note of consequence with the reporter’s inbuilt inquisitiveness who had filled several pages with underscored sentences and repetitive lines of, what can only be described as rather tedious information. Deciphering the sequence of the notes was relatively easy. They related, it seems, to a collection of photographs the war veteran had collated and catalogued in a number of albums. Clearly the reporter had been permitted to examine the albums but of course without the pictures being available today his words and descriptions have little relative meaning. Nevertheless, for some unapparent reason, my deceased friend had made precise notes of the content of two or three of the prints. One photograph he refers to, according to his notes, had, he seemed to think, stood on the old man’s sideboard for many years, so many years that when he considerately asked how long, the old man was unable to say exactly or even remotely judge the fluctuating timeline of hazy dates; he remembered only that it belonged to his father who died in 1953.
    “They’re Victorians; the people, lads and their dads. Died and dead a long, long time ago,” -   the scribbled notes contemporaneously whisper from the past.  
    Luckily, and with some profound insight, the reporter had managed to make a photocopy of the picture: I have it here; it lies across the palms of my two hands. I see now what he saw then.
    The fading copy (there is a clearer one on a website mentioned later,) of the picture portrays a group of some forty-odd men and boys set in a time likely to be, but can only be approximated, at the latter part of the nineteenth century. A hurried examination allows me time here for an equally token observation: that the level of each of age group of those in the picture is particularly wide. Several of the subjects are portraits of men of a younger generation  some are even children of but eight years or so I should estimate. It is the youth in these particular individuals that catches my eye, un-bright, a little pocket of naïve urchins standing to the side. The rest of the subjects pass through sundry perpetuity, ageless, all the way along to a couple of gentlemen who are clearly octogenarians. It is this difference in the ages of those gathered that makes the picture arresting.
    And now to address the dress, their clothes, the attire: half a dozen are wearing bowler hats, at least two carry impudently-cocked half toppers: one has a straw boating hat and a few more have workmen’s caps squarely planted on their crowns. But the majority wear no headdress at all.
    The group is roughly arranged in three lines. It is apparent that the most important constituent has been settled to the middle row which seems to be raised upon an out-of-sight platform. Thereupon the elders are seated and casually placed around a wide wooden lectern. One of these central men is standing up; he is dressed in the style of a principal speaker highlighted as such in a dark suit, a white shirt and white tie with a white kerchief folded into his breast pocket. It looks as though he has either just ended a speech or is about to embark upon one, waiting considerately for the camera operator’s preparatory ablutions.
    Soon after the picture was taken the cameraman, more than likely, will have departed with his box to process his film and the sitters will have dispersed to their diverse lives, to a medley of loves and hopes, each one doubtlessly affecting a thousand other lives, and each one of those other thousand ingratiating themselves upon yet another thousand. An addendum from the reporter evokes timelessness: ‘even as this picture has arrested time, it alone cannot transform it.’
    This all male gathering is standing in front of the wall of a small single-windowed building which looks much like the side of a practical building that one might have been accustomed to finding in one of those wilderness oases that were once a prominent and welcomed feature in industrial England  the Victorian pleasure park.      
    This is no ordinary working class gathering or peasant class casual group of men. Most are well dressed, not ostentatiously but not debased, but they are clean! Only one, himself situated on the extreme right side of the photo, looks remotely capable of manual work. He has no jacket and wears a dark waistcoat over a white shirt with a peaked cap slung slightly askew. He is supporting a small single tier ladder - a ladder that might have just been used by the principal men to climb to the heights of the dais? Some of the faces have numbers pencilled faintly below their likeness ascending from one to seven.
    The reporter’s notes become detailed.

‘From a drawer of the sideboard on which the silver-framed photograph stands the old man produces a yellowing parchment envelope containing a small snapshot and a single piece of lined paper listing the names of the numbers that appear on the framed picture - one to seven:

1. Mr. Frederick Hammersley
2. Mr. Malcolm Bingham
3. Mr. John Williams
4. Mr. Matthew Darlington
5. Mr. Josiah Barnett
6. Mr. Redmond Christiansen
7. Master Jorge Luis Borges

    His note and the photocopy tie-in neatly: numbers’ one and two stand together in the centre of the front row. Both are hatless and wear full-set beards - Hammersley and Bingham. Further to the left in the front row a small, waif-like boy is trying to peer between two corpulent men. The crude nomenclature indicates him to be Jorge Luis Borges; his number is seven. The man with the ladder is number four; he is identified as Matthew Darlington. The central speechmaker, number five, is Josiah Barnett. And then there is a portly man with the bearing of a town alderman. He is Redmond Christiansen: number six. Number three, on the left of the back row of the platform is John Williams. Underneath the list, also scribbled in pencil, is the single date, 1888.
    The reporter notes: ‘The small snapshot the old man has produced from the drawer, that is the picture that accompanies the list of identified persons, is actually a magnified close-up of the last named, John Williams, on the back of which is yet another pencilled scribble which says, ‘ - by Enoch Bennett - man of Burslem, 1843-1902.’ There is also a further series of numbers written thus: 1-1-6-9-12-12-13-16-18-18.’

2.

    Five Towns author, Arnold Bennett, starts to write his novel Buried Alive on December 22^nd 1908. He calls it his ‘new humorous novel’ - though it must be ventured that up until this date there was little that could be referred to as chaste humour in any of his previous major offerings. Indeed, what there was, what Bennett had written up to this time, has to be considered with some careful audit, that is unless his immediate previous three novels are accepted without question as ‘humorous’. These are: the ‘fantasia’ The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902 ‘.... a mixture of rather fantastic comedy and slapdash melodrama.’ - review in The Athenaeum). And the ‘frolic’, Leonora (1904 ‘.... we find neither the smartness nor the gaiety of The Grand Babylon Hotel here,’ also - The Athenaeum.... - the story of a woman who finds romance in middle-age.) And, A Great Man - also a ‘frolic’ (1904 - a book about the rise of an author in the professional world of literature - ‘.... on the whole, it amused me well enough,’ the author himself notes.) These three may be considered slightly humorous in, or after, a style that the author’s more jovially-acquitted contemporaries critically enjoyed. But for Mr. Bennett, it was a purposeful transformation. As to A Great Man, HG Wells pointed out to him in a letter that, ‘.... You don’t know quite how well you can do this sort of thing and consequently you don’t do it as well as you could...’   

    The working title of Buried Alive is ‘The Case of Leek’ and its synopsis records the story of a famous artist, Priam Farll, whose previous life as a recluse changes dramatically when he adopts the persona of his valet, Henry Leek, after the valet’s sudden death. The attending physician, believing the dead man is Farll, thus certifies the deceased officially  Farll, though, is alive and becomes Leek, who is dead. The folksy reticence of the reclusive artist to correct the mistake leads Farll to enter a new world unrestrained from the ascetic fame that has burdened the artist’s identity. Priam Farll transforms into the valet wholeheartedly and liberally and even attends an arranged clandestine meeting with one of Leek’s inamoratas who has the name of Alice Chalice. Neither Leek nor Farll have ever met Alice, nor does Alice know either man. This blind-date turns out unexpectedly well.
    As the book drifts on, Bennett becomes more Wellsian than Wells, and, as a consequence, Farll becomes more Pollyish than Mr Polly as he embarks upon a bewildering life of eccentricity and bafflement taking the reader into the high galleries of quite entertaining humour. That is until Farll starts to paint again. In the attic of the apartment he shares with Alice at 29 Werter Road, Putney, Priam delivers to his canvas a picture of the Putney High Street at dusk. The artist captures the new century represented in carefree Edwardian urban life in a stroke.

‘The streets through which he passed were populated by domestic servants and tradesmen’s boys. He saw white-capped girls cleaning doorknobs or windows, or running along the streets, like escaped nuns, or staring in soft meditation from bedroom windows. And the tradesmen’s boys were continually leaping in and out of carts, or off and on tricycles, busily distributing food and drink, as though Putney had been a beleaguered city. It was extremely interesting and mysterious - and what made it the more mysterious was that oligarchy of superior persons for whom these boys and girls so assiduously worked remained invisible.’

    Farll sees newspaper adverts on hoardings and sketches the oddness of a photograph of a twelve year old boy who weighs twenty stone. He picks out black-banner headlines, “What the Germans Said to the King  Special!” And: “Surrey’s Glorious Finish.”  “The Unwritten Law in the United States  Another Scandal!” And the Financial Times scoops the story of the collapse of a local brewery: “Cohoon’s Annual Meeting - Stormy Scenes!” Words! Pictures! The artist has stopped time.

  “Is that Putney Bridge?” 
  “Yes,” he said.
    “I thought it was. I thought it must be. Well, I never knew you could paint. It’s beautiful, for an amateur.” She said this firmly and yet endearingly, and met his eyes with her eyes....’

Alice had been approaching the canvas wanting to go right up to it and, perhaps, to touch it  a close-up look, like workaday squinters in town hall galleries do.

‘.... “No, no, no!” he expostulated with quick vivacity, she stepped towards the canvas.
    “Don’t come any nearer. You’re at just the right distance.”
    “Oh! If you don’t want me to see it close,” she humoured him. “What a pity you haven’t put an omnibus on the bridge!”
    “There is one,” said he. “That’s one.” He pointed.
    “Oh yes! Yes, I see. But, you know, I think it looks rather more like a Carter Paterson van than an omnibus. If you could paint some letters on it - ‘Union Jack’ or ‘Vanguard,’ then people would be sure. But it’s beautiful. I suppose you learnt to paint from____” She checked herself. “What’s that red streak behind?”
    “That’s the railway bridge,” he muttered.
    “Oh, of course it is! How silly of me! Now, if you were to put a train on that. The worst of trains in pictures is that they never seem to be going along. I’ve noticed that on the sides of furniture vans haven’t you? But if you put a signal against it, then people would understand that the train has stopped. Though, I’m not sure whether there is a signal on the bridge.”
    He made no remark.
    “And I see that’s the Elk public house there on the right. You’ve just managed to get it in. I can recognise that quite easily. Any one would.”
    He still made no remark.
    “What are you going to do with it?” she asked gently.’

    Meanwhile, an art dealer, Mr Oxford, has been buying Farll’s paintings, those executed after his ‘death’ and selling them to an American connoisseur, Whitney C Witt, who discovers a ‘ruse’ after spotting that the canvasses are date-stamped post morte and threatens to expose the dealer. Oxford finds out Farll’s whereabouts and confronts him. He attempts to persuade the painter to join him in the scam, he wants to produce the evidence that he is still alive in order to save himself from being prosecuted; but Farll is convinced only that ‘the dirty little rascal wants me to manufacture imitations of myself for him!’ In other words, he believes that Oxford wants Farll to transform himself into the person Farll has been saying he wasn’t!
    This is Bennett executing pure circus. It must have been obvious to him that the storyline was destined for the stage of charade; a dramatic piece of farce. How does it happen that the instant we paint the picture we want to see it from another angle? And isn’t it so, that what we see in a picture has to be different than that which our neighbour sees? An extravaganza of conflict; a photographer would know better.

‘...”What’s that red streak behind?”
    “That’s the railway bridge,” he muttered.
    “Oh, of course it is! How silly of me! Now, if you were to put a train on that....”’

3.

Marguerite.

    Bennett, the author of the recently published novels, The City of Pleasure, and, The Statue, has also written, more seriously, The Death Of Simon Fuge and has commenced work on the first part of his life’s masterpiece, The Old Wives’ Tale. He has taken some time out to commence Buried Alive, - ‘Grand total: 375,000 words. This constitutes a record year,’ he tells his Journals on December 31^st 1907. What a year it was in other ways also, for, almost six months earlier, he married Marguerite Soulie. The author was then an unmarried bachelor of forty; Marguerite was a widow of thirty-two. That Bennett was in love with this French demoiselle is beyond question. But what is love? He had, just months earlier pledged his heart to a much younger maiden, 21 year old Eleanor Green, an American, who had rejected him and bled his heart dry. He writes poetry to Marguerite, and he reads poetry to her as well as dedicating to her real poetry written by real poets.
    It is formally attested that Bennett’s middle name (he was Enoch Arnold Bennett) was given in esteem of the poet Matthew Arnold whose early important collection is, Empedocles On Etna and Other Poems, published in 1852. One poem is entitled, The Buried Life, and contains the lines:

.... Alas! Is even love too weak
To unlock the heart and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal’d
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they loved and moved
Trick’d in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves - and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!

But we, my love! - doth a like spell benumb
Our hearts and voices? Must we too be dumb?

Ah! Well for us, if even we,
Even for a moment can get free
Our heart, and have our lips unchain’d;
For that which seals them hath been deep ordained!....

    Isn’t it interesting to note how many poets have pressed into use the practice of using similar themes through homogeneous application  and yet stamped  with multiple degrees of emphasis? This, there is some suggestion, is simply in order to get a message across to the reader. But may it also not be applied to the foible of subliminal mimicry? In the case of Matthew Arnold this becomes distinguished in what we may construe as being an expression of similar thought. Can it not be said that Matthew Arnold’s The Buried Life is a good example of the transformation of one poem into another? And by the way, are there not other quotes in other Matthew Arnold’s poems from the same anthology that stand comparison as a supporting illustration.

Yes! In the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.

But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour -

Oh! Then a longing like despair
Is to their furthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain-
Oh might our marges meet again!

Who order’d, that their longings fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?
Who renters vain their deep desire?-
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.

And what is the name of this poem by Matthew Arnold? Why - To Marguerite: Continued.
Coincidence: perhaps?
Ah, The Buried Life!  Buried Alive!

Stuffed in among this literary blast genesis appears Mr Bennett’s only known published poem, part of which goes:

‘.... And lo!
Spectacular and cold,
Between the moonstruck sea-award and the sky
Whose violet arches span the silver waste,
Flashes and burns the Mediterranean night,
Consuming in its frigid fire the sense
Of human, intimate things. And far below,
Gently the palms wave on the murmurous shore
In acquiescence....’ 

    It would indeed be a mistake to compare Matthew Arnold with his given-namesake and vice versa, but it may be reasonable to suppose that Mr Bennett either copied the style of the classic poet, or, he sublimely transformed the sentiment.

4.

The Transformation [al -ists]

    In discussing the Art of Transformationalism, the author of an internet website -  (www.stoke.freeuk.com/html/mb.html) - the only international source that can presently be found at this moment in time on this subject, that with any reliability - allows meagre insight of a movement which appears to have raised its colours but briefly in the two decades that spanned the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Here a visitor may find the photographs of the group of men that lay on the side drawers of an old man’s house. Dean Hammersley, the website’s apparent author, gives indifferent biographical details of the little that is known of the movement’s acknowledged leader, Malcolm Bingham, who appears to have been the main promoter of the school which asserts, and whose motto has become: ‘... everybody is an artist in the Republic of Art.’
    The style of Bingham and his devotees, and it has to be said, its frustrated imitators, is very much akin to plagiarism, and yet nothing could be further from the truth. Bingham, through his erratic artistic production, has earned himself the reputation in his own lifetime of being a forger. His suggested prolific output has been set as proof that no one could deliver such quantities without resorting, not to emulation, but to downright - copy  precisely. And yet, since his death in 1936, it has been strongly argued that he was doing nothing more sinister than to reproduce his own original work by copying it over and over again - a sort of transformation of an original artistic creation into something that is equally original. This is not in any way like the obsessive system used by Cezanne to reproduce light and natural balance as in, say, his reproductions of the same view such as Château Noir, or his brooding over apples, jugs, tables and curtains, arranging them with infinite variety as with the repetitive Still Life With Apples and Peaches. But so comprehensive was Bingham’s output that, in the 21^st century, it has now become impossible to identify any of the many Bingham works that are hung in the regional, national and international galleries. To quote Dean Hammersley:

‘Of Malcolm Bingham’s own original work, there is the White Painting (said to originate from his White Period) that was found in the cellar of Burslem’s Old Town Hall. This, together with his ‘lost’ masterpiece - ‘The World In Three Acts’, represents his known identifiable work out of a mass which, some say, may number over five-thousand pieces!’

    The White Painting, Hammersley tells us, can be found today in the archive vaults of the Potteries Museum in Hanley, Stoke on Trent. When first hung the painting caused a great deal of controversy after the Friends of the Museum pressed the local council to refuse permission for a scientific scrutiny by experts from the British Museum. It was quietly removed from public display in 1925 during the visit of His Majesty George V who had come to Stoke on Trent to convey the status of ‘City’ upon the county borough. Today it may only be viewed by acknowledged experts and researchers, although there has been little interest by researchers and contemporary artists since 1963. The ‘World in Three Acts’ is a different matter. 

Dean Hammersley again writes:

‘... The latter is a triptych in conventional style detailing the state of the world as Bingham envisaged it.... The first panel, depicting “a toff in a punt” appears under the popular name of ‘Boulter’s Lock’, and is in the possession of Lady Lever, [today] hanging in the Lever Gallery in Port Sunlight, Lancashire, UK. The whereabouts of the other two panels are unknown and have been missing for an unknown number of years.’

    Among the Potteries Transformationalists was included an active group of writers who also made reproductions of their own unpublished works, some of which were stolen - or alleged to have been stolen - and passed-off as fakes. A number of these were produced to appear under pseudonyms. Prolific though they were, Hammersley refers to only a handful: ‘The Mind Game,’ by Norman Spinrad, and the notable essay ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges.

    Borges was the grandson of Frances Haslam who was a close friend of Edward Smith, the captain of the ill-fated Titanic, both of whom were born in the Potteries. An Argentinean by birth, Borges stayed with his grandmother in Fenton during the late Victorian phase of the Transformationalist movement at a time when the literary wing was forcefully pro-active in reproduction. Biographers have always followed the assertion that Borges took much of his influence during this early period of his life from his mentor John Williams of whom very little biographical details are known other than that he adopted a complete change of identity in 1900 when he left the Potteries for good. Borges himself says of Williams, ‘To refute him is to become contaminated with unreality.’ And he warns all those who attempt to categorise Williams: ‘....his descendants still seek, but they will not find the one word that contains the Universe’. 

    In a recent upsurge of Transformationalist writing, a book in the style of the early Transformationalists has been published on the World Wide Web in the form of a trilogy chronicling the life and activities of one Doctor Shock in the fictional town of Stump. Dean Hammersley compares, not unfavourably, this trilogy with the Arnold Bennett novel ‘Buried Alive’. He says:

‘Whilst on the subject reference should be made to Arnold Bennett’s Buried Alive.... a comic novel about an artist who swaps places with his dead valet. It has been suggested (…. no doubt by some Transformationalist aficionados….) that Bennett wrote this as an allegory on the life of the painter Malcolm Bingham.... The great artist in Buried Alive is called Priam Farll. It is a name that fairly screams “anagram”.’

Hammersley offers the following solution:

Mal.,R.A.,R.I.P.,f.l.

Which, translated from the Latin, is represented in Bingham’s Victorian memorial: ‘Malcolm Bingham, Royal Academician, Resquiescat in Pace, false lectio. (Malcolm Bingham RA., Rest in Peace, false reading.) In other words - Malcolm Bingham is an academic deceiver!

5

The Great Adventure.

    Arnold Bennett, it seems can’t let go of the theme of deception; all the characters and locations in all his novels are ‘thinly disguised’ real people. In his journal for Friday November 11, 1910, he writes:

‘.... I finished “The Great Adventure” this afternoon at 4.30pm, four days in advance of time. Actual dialogue 20,300 words. I shall doubtless cut it to less than 20,000....’

    He is not talking about his book, Buried Alive, but he is referring to his stage transcription of his novel Buried Alive - The Great Adventure.

    The play, under the title of The Great Adventure, first opened at the Kingsway Theatre London on 25^th March 1913 to huge success. In September it began a run in Sydney Australia and in October it arrived on Broadway, New York - ‘.... ten days late - where it played at Booth’s Theatre for 52 performances. .... It does not seem to have been a very eclatant success.’ Bennett records in his journal. Nevertheless, by the end of the year Bennett’s annual audit reveals his income from books to be - ‘6,924 pounds: from plays = 8524,’ most of which return is from the receipts of The Great Adventure. ‘....All this handsomely beats last years records.’ the writer reports.
    In June 1914 the author still sees the play running in London having achieved its 500^th performance which is celebrated by Bennett who beforehand has taken a large party with him to dine at Cesar Ritz’s Hotel to a meal prepared by Auguste Escoffier where eggs are eaten. The play finally ends its run of 673 performances in November when a greater adventure is about to be enacted in Flanders. 
    In 1915, The Great Adventure is made into a film in the UK, transcribed by Benedict James and is produced by Laurence Trimble with Henry Ainley playing the main character -  Liam Carve (Priam Farll) and with Esme Hubbard as Janet Cannot (Alice Chalice). Its running time is ten minutes, filmed in black and white and silent.
    In 1921, Hollywood has a go at it, again as a silent movie, with a running time of thirty minutes. The director casts Lionel Barrymore as Priam Farll and Doris Rankin as Alice Chalice. At least on this occasion the producers keep a respectful courtesy to the names Bennett has originally given his characters. But perhaps the most successful and important of the transformations from book to stage play to film is released in 1934, three years after Bennett’s death. Hollywood gives decent prominence to a feature length movie, (63 minutes) which is backed-up by the state of the art Western Electric Wide Range Sound System, when they launched ‘His Double Life,’ formerly  known as ‘Buried Alive’ and ‘The Great Adventure.’ Priam Farrel (another change of name) is played by the English actor Roland Young who has already made famous the role of Topper in ‘Topper’, ‘Topper’s Adventures’, and ‘Topper Returns’. Young’s most famous performance, one that picture-goers remember best, is the lead role in ‘The Man Who Could Work Miracles’ by H G Wells.  The famous actress, Miss Lillian Gish, takes the part of Alice Chalice in ‘The Great Adventure’ playing alongside Young.

6.

‘How To Spot A Transformationalist.’

    The investigators, and indeed the doubters, of this artistic phenomenon have insinuated that Arnold Bennett is in fact a true Transformationalist. But their evidence of this assertion is most definitely inconclusive. A return to the website of the Transformationalists to find another of Hammersley’s  quotes is not entirely helpful:

‘It is easier to say what a Transformationalist is not than what he is.’ Hammersley does not give much away.

    The author(s) - if it should not be Hammersley alone - of this apparently paltry statement spend a lot of time on the theme of conjecture which, it should be pointed out, is as undetermined, and perhaps as vague, at the end as at the beginning. The whole of the thesis is one of ambiguity, so much so that its very origin is obscure: perhaps that is the intention! Is this then the atom that lies at the very heart of the genre? Confusion reigns. But the more one begins to excavate the sources to the assertions, the clearer the essay becomes. See what you think.

‘.... Transformationalism is more than a mere oddity’ the essay on the website claims.  Therefore to ‘….continue into the realm of insidious speciousness, and leaving aside Transformationalist revivalism, Arch Oboler’s oeuvre (1923-1945) implies that the time is now:-  “.... we may ask”, Oboler says, “what is one to make of such statements as ‘nothing lasts forever?’” Linked today by the theme of globalisation, the term transformationalism introduces theoretic implications for the obverse question, ‘what is the point of repetitious globalism?’ ‘Globalisation may be an idea whose time has come.’ Says Bill Dixon in 2000 - this is Dixon, reporting from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cape Town, who quotes Zygmunt Bauman speaking in 1998, “Globalisation is a fad-word for the intractable fate of the world.” The usefulness of the term ‘globalisation’ is either as potent or as insipid as the term ‘transformationalism’. As Dixon insists, ‘.... if we do not know what globalisation is suppose to mean, it can explain nothing.’

    Some observers at the start of the 21^st century tend to interpret Globalism and Transformationalism as having the same meaning and the terminology of both encompasses world order in both economic and environmental issues. But recognition of the men who were experimenting a hundred years earlier, and the two important transmitters of the genre, Frederick Hammersley - Dean’s great-grandfather - and Malcolm Bingham, with the later emergence of the melancholic Jorge Luis Borges, the Transformationalist Movement is only recently becoming noted. These are the men who broke through the restrictive ‘boundary of boundaries’ and then attempted to destroy the principles of the premise of ‘boundary setting’. But what seems to have confused the fundamental issues, and thereby the acceptance of Transformationalism as a noted form of art, seems to rest upon the allegations that Bingham made a conscious decision to move into the world of forgery. And this point may never be resolved.
    “Which of the world’s masterpieces were painted by Malcolm Bingham?” inquires Dean Hammersley. His researches - and it is true that no one has had access to more personal files than did Hammersley - have all ended inconclusively. He makes reference to the portrait of a young girl which hangs with other paintings in the Vermeer collection in the National Art gallery of Washington. Despite many years of art investigation and chemical experimentation on this particular painting no expert has yet had the courage to say that it is not a Vermeer. By the same criteria - though it still is tantalizingly credible - no one has had the spirit to say that it is a painting that was executed by Bingham. And so the Vermeer must remain priceless in this awesome puzzle. This seems to be the essence of Transformation -alism and it seems to be the reason why the experts shy away from the whole subject. 

7.

Who Then is Priam Farll?

    The assertion of Dean Hammersley that the character of Priam Farll is ‘an allegory of the life of Malcolm Bingham’, lies much deeper than in the little he reveals. Suggestions that the novel ‘Buried Alive’ is a satire on the artistic establishment of London, or, that it was Bennett’s attempt to ‘ingratiate himself on the communities of the Potteries who had rejected his fame as a writer,’ are interesting. It is simplicity in its charge, and these seem to be the only points that Hammersley is making. Unfortunately for the evolving researcher, Hammersley leaves a clutter of hypothesis behind.
    The stories of Jorge Luis Borges, in particular ‘The Garden Of Forking Paths,’ have far more merit as examples of Transformationalism than Bingham’s paintings. It is enlightening that in ‘The Garden Of Forking Paths’ Borges locates the storyline in the Potteries town of Fenton without any reference to any other of the towns that make up the city of Stoke on Trent. Fenton, as all Bennett followers know, is the only town that Arnold Bennett ignored of the six - or the five - that he actually wrote about. It is interesting that he actually chose not to make any reference at all to the town despite the reasons he gave on phonetic consideration.
     The enlarged photograph, the one extracted from the scene of the meeting of Transformationalists in a garden that I have suggested might be a park, clearly shows a man in his early fifties. (Could this be the only known picture of The Garden of Forking Paths?) He is a man with a humbled expression; moustache, confused demeanour which is said to be the only known picture of the vanished John Williams. Also interesting is the suggestion -  and it is a well made point - that a comparison of this picture is in order set against any one of the readily obtainable photographs of Enoch Bennett, the novelist’s father, when he was at a similar age. There is no doubt that the facial similarities are remarkable!
    Reference should also be made to the numbers on the back of the photograph - 1-1-6-9-12-12-12-17-19-19. If these are given to represent a letter of the English alphabet and rearranged in the Latin numerical anagram as configured by Dean Hammersley thus: 17-19-9-1-17 and 6-1-19-12-12, it spells out PRIAM FARLL!
    One last matter: on the website Dean Hammersley seems to have manufactured a life for John Williams, a life which is full of ambiguity. And it must be understood, that this is a biography quite without substantiated truth. This may have come from the supposition that Dean Hammersley may or may not himself be the author of the Doctor Shock books, which, at this moment in time, may only be consulted on the World Wide Web. The Hammersley writing seems to be a definitive example of modern Transformational writing, a style that ignores all the known established boundaries.
    There remains the photograph that once sat on the sideboard in the old man’s house in Fenton still to be considered. It would be wrong in a lifetime of anonymity to intrude on this man’s privacy. To do so would result in summoning him to the court of deception to answer only to the charges of the concealment of authentic or corrupt Transformationalism whichever is considered to be the more serious, in the anti-surrealistic world that is inhabited by the so-called expert in artistic criticism. An unhelpful clue may be found in the only substantiated fact of the old Fenton man: that, during World War Two he had a job at Bletchley Park Buckinghamshire, which is on the border of Bedfordshire. The town of Bletchley sits across the A5 route - the Watling Street - and is just five miles north of the village of Hockliffe at the beginning of the A50 route. It was to Hockliffe that Arnold Bennett brought his father, Enoch, to die in 1902, and where he left him buried in a sad unvisited grave in Chalgrove.
    The old man of Fenton was a wartime photographer/decoder at Bletchley Park. His friend during, and for a short period after the war was Alan Turing although, like everything else that resides in mystery in Bletchley Park, there is no record of their friendship. As both parties are now dead and their mutual acquaintances have dispersed without comparable references, it seems that once again we are unable to draw any conclusions. The old man kept no diary and all his photograph albums were destroyed in a mysterious fire in 1985. The man in the house, with his photograph of the Transformationalist meeting, was taken to hospital where he died some six months later. His entire collection of thousands of photographs burned away in the conflagration unseen. Dean Hammersley had the only known photograph of a group who tried to dismantle boundaries; he now is dead after a lifetime in local journalism.

© Fred Hughes 2006

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(Fred Hughes is a local historian and the author of ‘Mother Town: Episodes in the history of Burslem’. He has also written extensively for the Evening Sentinel and is a frequent contributor to Radio Stoke.)

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