The shadowy cave

I continued my tour of faded seaside resorts this weekend with a trip to Margate. We had intended to visit the new Turner Contemporary Art Gallery, only to discover that they are currently between exhibitions. So after a mooch around the gift shop, we were at a loss as to what to do – we’d already had our lunch, and the wind was strong enough to prevent us from walking along the front (although Robert was keen to see the shelter where Eliot wrote ‘On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing’). And then I spotted a flyer advertising the famous Margate Shell Grotto. The others were less enthusiastic about the prospect, it has to be said, but since we were in Margate on a blustery grey Sunday afternoon with nothing better to do, they went along with it.  

I am a fan of a good grotto, as celebrated by Pope and Akenside. But my interest is not exclusively poetic; it stems from a fascination with caves and crevices and (especially) catacombs. Anything subterranean, hidden, possibly forbidden. A shell grotto has that extra dimension of obsession; the one in Margate incorporates 4.6 million shells, the leaflet proudly declaims. Shell grottos represent a single-minded and rather insane venture; they are without any real value apart from novelty – a kind of outsider installation art on a grand scale.  

And it’s a great word, grotto, suggesting both “gritty” and “grotty”. I was excited to find this piece on the derivation of the term on Wikipedia:

The word comes from Italian grotta, Vulgar Latin grupta, Latin crypta, (a crypt). It is related by a historical accident to the word grotesque in the following way: in the late 15th century, Romans unearthed by accident Nero’s  Domus Aurea on the Palatine Hill, a series of rooms underground (as they had become over time), that were decorated in designs of garlands, slender architectural framework, foliations and animals. The Romans who found them thought them very strange, a sentiment enhanced by their ‘underworld’ source. Because of the situation in which they were discovered, this form of decoration was given the name grottesche or grotesque.

And who wouldn’t want to visit Nero’s underground chambers?! Although as we walked up the hill, away from the sea and Margate’s small concessions to tourism, the streets became less appealing, grotesque in their own way. There were a few guys sporting neck tattoos and cans sitting outside a dilapidated cafe. There was a scappy, treeless park. My companions were even less certain, but no one suggested going back. We had come so far, a whole ten minutes from the sea front.  

The Margate Shell Grotto is no doubt less grand than Nero’s digs, but impressive nonetheless. At one time the chambers would have been gas lit, which would have added to their eerie quality, but even with the few electric lamps, the grotto was wonderfully creepy. The other couple who had ventured there (possibly by accident, having rolled up at the Turner Contemporary as we had) were keen to show us the odd acoustic trick they’d discovered. The man made us stand under a dome with a small round skylight (a diorama of passing clouds, like a James Turrell), the only source of natural light, while he passed through the adjoining chambers, demonstrating his Mongolian throat singing abilities. The strange, disembodied noise caught in the dome, which acted as a sort of stereo speaker. In the upper display room was a black-and-white photo of a séance held inside the grotto at the turn of the century. The woman behind the gift shop counter introduced us to her three-legged Siamese cat. The place was a perfect fit for a sort of Aleister Crowley-type occultism, complete with capes and spells, and I wondered if Crowley had ever visited (after all, he ended up in Hastings, just further along the coast). Robert also reminded me of the Romantic fad for hermits, who would often hole up in grottos or follies. I wondered too if Eliot had wandered off the beaten track as we had, away from his solitary shelter on the front, and discovered that odd underworld …

photo courtesy of Amy Stein

Ostend and the World

In 1905 the Austrian author Stefan Zweig wrote an essay describing the summer season in Ostend, which was then the North Sea’s answer to Monte Carlo. He speaks of the elegant women promenading on the front, the delicate art nouveau architecture. Zweig was in Ostend when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914, heralding the beginning of WWI. The Germans were to capture the port, as well as most of the Belgian coast, the following year. Although Ostend suffered extensive damage, ‘La Reine des Plages’ made a comeback as the premier jazz age resort of Northern Europe. But WWII was to bring greater destruction and an end to the concept of the ‘summer season’. It is a place that represents a way of life which no longer exists.

The Ostend you see today still retains traces of its glory, in blocks of Deco flats skirting the Digue like ocean liners, in sweeping Horta balconies above betting shops and chain stores. It is like so many once-grand British seaside resorts; but where places like Blackpool survive on kitsch, and Folkestone and Margate attempt to reinvent themselves as art destinations, Ostend strikes me as irredeemably depressing. 

I suspect the Flemish day-trippers around me don’t share my view. On a slightly overcast August Saturday, they come pouring off the train, groups of girls tottering in skyscraper heels ready to hit the shops, and men with tattoos and cans. They remind me of the hoards that pack the sandy beach in James Ensor’s drawings (modern-day versions of Breughel’s village scenes).  Ensor is the most famous son of Ostend; an artist who remained faithful to the place that gave him his vision. He would have seen it in its heyday, and watched its decline. He never decamped to Paris or the States; although by the end of his life he was famous (the Belgian government made him a Baron). He stayed in Ostend, in a flat over the souvenir shop his mother ran selling carnival masks and shells. After his death in 1949, the shop and flat were opened as a museum. It is his museum that has brought me here.

I have been a fan of Ensor’s work for nearly 30 years. He is like no other artist, in his mix of the figurative and the surreal, the broadly comic (which comes from his Flemish roots; but also from his English roots, and the tradition of Hogarth and Gilray) and the morbidly serious. Here is a world of colour and carnival, but in the centre of it, death and loneliness. In his greatest work, the monumental ‘The Entry of Christ into Brussels’, the tiny figure of Jesus is isolated, alone, almost lost (like ‘Where’s Wally?’) in the tapestry of humanity cramming the streets. The reason for the celebration becomes sidelined by the desperate need to be part of the crowd. 

To be honest, the house is an enormous disappointment. There is something shabby and sad about the place. Screenprint reproductions of his paintings line the walls, the real thing shipped to grander galleries (his paintings ended up seeing the world the artist never visited). There is his harmonium, the easel where he painted, but in the dark Edwardian gloom, it is impossible to see how anyone could be inspired.  

Unless of course your message is all about isolation, like that tiny figure no longer central to most people’s lives. The masks the artist’s mother sold from the downstairs shop keep appearing, as if you could change your identity, become someone else, by wearing one. Skeletons dance and put on frilly hats, but they are there as a reminder. He lived here all alone for the last third of his life, and watched the world change from one tiny lace curtained window.  

Ostend speaks to me of failure. A place of grandeur struck down by one war, which lifted itself up, only to be practically leveled by another. And now it has given up. While I stand on the Digue, looking out over the sea towards England, riots are brewing in London, which will spread, like the fires the rioters light, to other cities. I wonder what Ensor would have made of the world now.