Encounters, remembering David Hockney

  Encounters, remembering David Hockney*

 

I’ve written on Authors Electric previously about 1960s meetings with Paul McCartney (roughly ten minutes) and poet Barry MacSweeney (a good deal longer), and so the recent death of David Hockney prompted some thoughts and memories which I thought I’d share with readers of this blog. 

 

I met him in 1968, or it may have been 1969, I can’t quite remember the year. Time often blurs the boundaries of our thinking. Anyway, he came to our college literary society to give a talk about his art and he spoke to his audience of degree students for an hour or so about his growing success as an artist. The most memorable part for me was his account of his life in California, beginning in 1964, which was always bright and sunny, and which was making him extremely happy. 

 

I drank it all in. I was in the first year of an English degree at Hendon College. I was by now delighting in the experiences of life in London which was so far away from my previous life in Liverpool that it made that city seem provincial. In 1967 David Hockney’s picture, Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool, had won the John Moore’s Painting Prize at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery, and I remember going to see it exhibited there and feeling somewhat nonplussed, for want of a better word. It was an early rendition of the love that dare not speak its name and at that time there was little conversation about the subject of homosexuality or being gay. After his talk a few of us continued the evening with him at The Midland Arms next door to the college, which served Watney’s Red Barrel and which had a fantastic bar-billiards table. I vividly remember his trademark blonde hair and dark-framed glasses within a smiling face as he held court before the four or five of us mesmerised students.

 

I was to experience another cathartic moment when later in my time at Hendon College Dr Hopkin gave us a lecture on W.H. Auden’s poem, “Lullaby”. He had copied the four verses out on the rolling acetate of an overhead projector. It begins with the lines: 

 

Lay your sleeping head my love,

Human on my faithless arm;

Time and fevers burn away

Individual beauty from

Thoughtful children and the grave

Proves the child ephemeral;

But in my arms till break of day

Let the living creature lie,

Mortal, guilty, but to me

The entirely beautiful.

 

In the flat where I was then then living with my first serious girlfriend the poem seemed to encapsulate all the passions that I was feeling in this new relationship. Dr Hopkin did not tell us anything about the life of Auden, who at the time was sixty-two and had been Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1956 to 1961. Much later when I was teaching from a book of Auden’s poems, I told my students that Auden had spent several years in America, where he had emigrated with Christopher Isherwood in 1939, and where in California, he had met and fallen in love with Chester Kallman. This was a relationship that was to continue for the rest of his life. The poem itself is said by scholars to have been inspired earlier by Michael Yeats, a young student of Auden’s

 

While preparing a suitable reading of Auden’s poem to give to my adult students, I had made some notes: If you want to follow it further, you should read the whole poem, referenced below. It illustrates the universality of love in whatever form it takes.

 

The poem explores the excitement and the boundaries of love which it shows as a delicate but very human state. It is also something that can give us transcendent feelings of being in another world. Set against the real world, however, it cannot last and will inevitably be destroyed. It remains that only fleeting moments of lovers’ bliss can be preserved.

 

Values and ideas about love are constantly changing and being the subject of discussion. Although I am not yet of the age that David Hockney reached, I can clearly recall the bright optimistic future that he represented when I saw him speak and which he managed to continue for the rest of his life. The 1960s were a time of challenges and the gradual acceptance of being different. W. H. Auden and David Hockney were different in their own individual ways. 

 

W. H. Auden kept his sexuality under wraps. In 1935 he married Erika Mann, daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann, to provide her with a passport to escape Nazi Germany rather than because of any sexual desire. He never gave out much detail about their relationship. David Hockney on the other hand was able in Los Angeles to celebrate his freedom from restrictions which in the UK were not lifted until 1967. ‘His joy was the joy of a gay man breaking free’ is the subheading of a recent article by Matt Cain in the Observer pullout section about David's life and fame. 

Talking to a friend recently, about the death, he vividly remembers attending an exhibition of David Hockney's work and noting his use of the camera and photographs to create a very special artistic legacy. And I wished I could remember more about that meeting at Hendon College so many years ago. I tried to recall if David had used photographs, or slides of his California paintings on an overhead projector, as Dr Hopkin had done with Auden’s poem; or will this simply remain hidden, like one of those gaps that are left in our memories during the inevitable passage of time?

 

Thanks for reading!!

References:

Auden, W.H. (1940) Another Time

Hockney  A life observed. The Observer 14th June 2026

Leyland, P. (2020) A View of Performance Poetry. Authors Electric.

Leyland, P. (2022) A Meeting with Macca. Authors Electric.

*Picture credit: An employee poses alongside artworks entitled A Bigger Splash (Getty: Licence obtained)