Delicate Smears
Julia Ball x John James
The artist Julia Ball died in February. Her paintings have been part of my everyday life and thoughts since I moved to her quarter of Cambridge, near the river in Chesterton, in 2014. I have taken a detour to walk past her studio — opposite the ruined remnant of the counting house of an Anglo-Norman Augustinian priory standing among the Edwardian villas and Victorian terraces of her neighbourhood — hundreds of times. My partner claims to commune with the spirits of the priory women, such as its foundress Hugoline of Cambridge, who used to live and work there. They have nothing to say to me. But walking by Julia Ball’s windows I have felt an anchoredness and consolation in the image of the world her paintings made. I would say her name in capital letters in my heart, and sneak a look through the glass to see if she was working. Sometimes I had seen her out in the fens, painting in the fields around the villages to the north of Cambridge. She would go out to the same spots in the flatlands every day for weeks or months on end, watching small changes, and restarting or overpainting her images with each new day’s observations. Whenever I stepped on to the towpath that runs alongside the Cam, from the street where I now live to the village of Waterbeach five miles downriver, I would think of her and hope to see her.
From the 1960s through to the 90s, Julia Ball taught printmaking and painting at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology, known as the Tech, where she became a friend to John James and Wendy Mulford, who also worked there, and through them came to know many of the poets who worked and fought with them, like Denise Riley and J.H. Prynne. From 1963 my grandmother, who had been a single parent to my dad since 1951, worked at the Tech as a library assistant, while living in two rooms of a labourer’s cottage in a fenland village called Landbeach, a little west of Waterbeach. My older sister would later attend the Tech, by which time it was called Anglia Polytechnic University, studying for her foundation course and degrees in English and Sociology, while raising three small children as a single mum, living in social housing round the corner from where I live now, before moving her work to the University of Sussex, where she would eventually become a lecturer. I taught briefly at Anglia Poly, by which time it was called Anglia Ruskin University, in 2007-8, running a Creative Writing course designed by John James, which he had devised for teaching at Sussex during a visiting lectureship in the late 70s, and brought back to repeat in his role as a lecturer in Communications Studies at the Tech in the early 80s. One of the first poetry readings I heard in Cambridge when I moved back to the city as a postgraduate student in 2001 was given by John James, in the Mumford Lecture Theatre at Anglia. I didn’t know anyone and turned up alone. There were some drunk Cambridge students there I recognised from seminars and lectures, who sneered at everything and made loud remarks. John wanted to show us a film while he read. There were technical issues. John was crestfallen. In 1955 a De Haviland Vampire jet from RAF Waterbeach narrowly missed the church spire in Landbeach and crashed in the paddock beyond the Rectory, where my dad was being looked after by the ladies from the Women’s Institute as his mother cleaned the house. The pilot had ejected, but his parachute canopy didn’t open in time. His body fell into the graveyard, to lie on the path before the church doors. After the reading by John James, there was a reading by Lisa Robertson, who was a visiting poet in Cambridge that year, across town at Gonville and Caius. In 1955 jets were falling out of the sky all over the fens.
Land and water. Water and sky. My son is a young man, working in the fens, building fences as a coppicer’s apprentice. My father as a young man worked as a tree surgeon’s assistant on the same land before going back to university to study for his ordination to the Anglican priesthood. When his master learned his plan, he told him: ‘Revenge is my religion’. When I was reading in the J.H. Prynne archive last week for my essay on ‘Write-Out’ and information retrieval, I found myself going through copies of Prynne’s courtesy notes, sent along with copies of his 1984 book The Oval Window, which also included a number of personal letters sent back the other way. One of them was from Julia Ball, who signed off like this: ‘Thanks for the ⬭ Window’. In my opening lecture for the students at Anglia, I talked about John James’s poetry alongside some of Frank O’Hara’s ‘walking around New York’ poems. I was trying to get the students to see the work we would do together as part of a pattern that we didn’t need to add any extra meaning to in order to make our observations worthy of each other’s interest. We just needed to look and listen, and communicate our observations with care. Water and sky. Sky and land. Most of the students were women twenty years older than their teacher. The whole scenario was absurd. It was the best work I ever did. When Lisa Robertson was in Cambridge she wrote a book called The Weather, observing and documenting small changes in the fenland sky through passages of prose that bound incantations of the names of feminist heroines to the transformations of light and vapour in passing clouds. I read the Anglia students John James’s A Theory of Poetry (1977), which begins ‘it’s very important | to make your lines | bands of alternating colour’. And then I showed them a Julia Ball painting with bands of colour going from side to side, and explained how Julia Ball worked, and where she lived. I wanted them to see Julia Ball’s work as John James saw it, as a specialist technical labour being done in our city, one easy empyrean transition away from where we were on East Road. He represented her work like that in his next major poem, Toasting (1979), written for an exhibition John put on when he was at Sussex: ‘when the massive skies ride over | dispelling the lactic smear | you can look up there || & the presence of JULIA BALL her little studio over | in old Red Abbey on the east side of town near the | river & Stourbridge working on the light’. And then I would ask them to write something like that. Sky and land. Land and water. To work on what there is. Just to look and keep looking.
Something like that. I can see Stourbridge Common from my window right now. I hope someone is working on the light. It’s a worry. I showed my son this painting and he said ‘A train, going over the fen out by Waterbeach’, but I think it’s one of Julia Ball’s Malaysian paintings. She didn’t just stay home. Cambridge is a world city and the people come and go. John James would have found my son’s mis-identification of the scene interesting: ‘over & again the same new land’, he says in Toasting, ‘month to month & year by year until her eye | returning from Malaysia & Iran | unveiling pale grey milk delusion | goes into that part again | the pool at Quy | become the window in the mosque at Qom | the eye itself the crescent & the moon’. Julia Ball’s father was a country Rector in Dorset. Everyone knows that poets can see the coming weather. My dad was a country Rector in Suffolk. The eye itself the darker and the lighter clouds. Without places like the Tech I wonder how people like my son and his friends, and their children, might ever know that Abbey was once red, or that the feminist painter who lived on the corner by the ancient counting-house thought the weather we share subject enough to paint her life out over. It’s not adequate just to weep over their manuscripts in the same room day after day. But I don’t know what else to do. I am so grateful that John James’s poetry showed me the way to the paintings of Julia Ball. I hope they are safe. One of my Anglia students told me that Lisa Robertson’s poetry changed her life. I believed her. She changed mine. They all did. You could just about walk in and sign up for a course. And there would be John James and Julia Ball ready to teach you about making poems and prints. My sister teaches people about life-long learning and surviving fascism. I wonder what those Cambridge students are teaching. You can still see the crater from the Vampire crash in the field behind the church at Landbeach. John James called Julia Ball’s work ‘continuous dub | echo & dub’. He could have been writing about The Weather. The eye itself the poem and the book. When he made poetry about other’s people’s art and writing, John James had a gift for letting their work all the way in, without his lines ever feeling like anyone else’s but his own: ‘the drift & climb of cloud at evening’ — I can’t bear it — ‘the drift & climb of cloud at evening | the tilt & lift of earth at evening | into that slow bleed long horizon | are her almost basement memory dreams’. What there is. Something like that. Work on light. Julia Ball in red capital letters in the sky over the counting-house. Thanks for the slow bleed long horizon.