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Nicky Charlish
posted 22 January 2007

The tortured artist is a regular, indeed hackneyed, fixture of the cultural scene. But is he a product of nurture, nature, or a combination of both? To answer this question is as difficult as resolving the nature/nurture debate itself. How good a job does this biography of an artist who indeed walked on the wild side do?

Born in Edinburgh in 1934, Donald Cammell - best known as director of seminal Sixties film Performance - had a comfortable upbringing (the family money came from Cammell Laird the shipbuilders). His father was an art critic, poet, playwright and translator, a traditional man of letters. After an abortive attempt at portraiture, Cammell became a film director. It's the Umlands' contention that the erratic, stop-start progression of his career - which this book examines thoroughly - plus his behaviour patterns, such as threatening suicide on several occasions (he eventually committed the act in 1996), suggest he suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). He seemed to have fulfilled standard diagnostic criteria for BPD, a particularly perplexing psychological condition, but there's a danger of a circular argument here. Which comes first: BPD or its supposed outward and visible signs?

Following such criteria for diagnosis (which themselves can become subject to change in the face of new research) might involve overlooking some other factors. The Umlands also speculate about whether a short but seemingly traumatic period spent boarding at a remote Scottish Catholic prepatory school could not only involved sexual abuse but have been a - if not the - contributing factor triggering his BPD. The large body of evidence they provide is suggestive yet inconclusive, more a case of balanced probabilities than proved beyond reasonable doubt. The Scottish legal system's verdict of Not Proven seems the best one here.

Cammell's parents, who eventually moved to London, were interested in the occult, with leading practitioner Aleister Crowley being a visitor to their house along with other people interested in 'magick'. Gnosticism, with its belief in a body/spirit dualism and the view that the human spirit is trapped in the evil of matter (the body), seems to have become the nearest thing Cammell had to a belief system. Perhaps this explains why, despite fathering a child, he showed little enthusiasm for parenthood, believing that he might pass on his own mental problems to his offspring (a theme that crops up in his 1987 film White of the Eye, as does inter-generational conflict in his 1968 film Duffy). It would be interesting to know why Cammell didn't consider the idea of human nature as a mixture of both good and evil, with each human person being a fascinating, variable mix of both.

Along with Gnosticism, Cammell also seems to have taken up the idea - seemingly inspired by seeing Rober Bresson's 1951 film of the Georges Bernanos novel Diary of a Country Priest - that toutes les adventures sont des Calvaires: all spiritual journeys are martyrdoms. This theme runs through Cammell's best-known work, Performance, in which the gangster Chas (James Fox) on the run from his associates, take refuge in the Notting Hill home of faded rock star Turner (Mick Jagger). Although released in 1970, it was filmed during 1968. It isn't simply an unflattering snapshot of the fag-end of Swinging London or a realistic glimpse of Notting Hill before gentrification effected its transformation into a politically symbolic hub of well-heeled trendiness. Nor is it just a powerful antidote - along with Get Carter (1971) - to the glorification of gangsters. It's an examination of Chas' journey towards recognition of his homosexual side - via drugs and lifestyle - and the effeminate Turner's attempt to emulate Chas' masculine toughness.

And the film is really the fulcrum, not only of the book (which, it's pleasant to note, contains copious notes, a thorough bibliography and plenty of illustrations), but of the debate to which it makes its contribution. For Performance is not only a classic, no-holds-barred look at gangland and its counterculture, fixing them both in time for continual historical examination. It's a constant, provocative reminder of the interaction of life's tough opposites. Madness. And sanity. Fantasy. And reality. Death. And life. Vice. And virtue.