He has always been known as playwright Joe Orton's lover – and killer. But, beyond his celebrated library book jokes, is it time we started taking Kenneth Halliwell seriously as an artist?
In January 1959, Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell began their campaign of theft. Starting at Hampstead Central Library on Finchley Road, north London, and moving on to libraries in Islington, they stole books of every genre, but with a particular taste for what Orton called "rubbishy novels and rubbishy books".
Back in their flat, the pair pasted pictures of male nudes, toys and budgerigars into surreal positions on the book jackets. Musclemen vied with monkeys on staid theatrical memoirs. Sybil Thorndike, the grande dame of British theatre, was replaced with a bare-breasted Henry Moore sculpture. And in an eerie presentiment of what was to come, a study of the venerable actor, Alec Clunes, was hijacked by a photograph of a stoved-in skull.
They also added outrageously rewritten copy to the book's dust jacket flaps. Orton's humour is particularly evident in these typed blurbs. The overheard conversations that he would weave into his plays were rehearsed in what were capsule Orton dramas in their own right. Dorothy L Sayers's Gaudy Nights is perverted with "Lord Peter Wimsy" urinating behind a bush after visiting a "Transvestite Den". Other would-be Sayers readers were promised underage sex and dildoes rather than a cosy detective story.
"Adding text to pervert and to ridicule became easy play," writes Ilsa Colsell in Malicious Damage, a new book analysing the collaborative art of these two men – a unique partnership that has been hitherto overshadowed by Orton's later success as a playwright. Colsell, an artist herself, sees Halliwell as Orton's mentor, the man who introduced him to aesthetic and literary theory. Indeed, Halliwell referred to themselves as "a genius like us", like a kind of Gilbert and George before their time.
Halliwell, six years older than Orton, met his partner at Rada in 1951. The men soon moved in together and began writing novels and plays – as well as pursuing their library transgressions. But as Orton's celebrity and success took over, Halliwell increasingly came to see himself as an artist, and he expanded their collages into the room the two men shared in Islington.
"I remember the back wall of their tiny bedsit," Orton's sister, Leonie, recalls in the book. "It was covered from floor to ceiling with hundreds of colour plates made into collages. I remember them as being very dark in tone, no hue of brightness; they'd been torn out of Renaissance art books." The actor Kenneth Cranham, who knew both men well, called the room "noise for the eyes". To other visitors, it resembled "some extraordinary tomb".
In his 1978 biography of Orton, Prick Up Your Ears, John Lahr psychoanalysed the collaged room, calling it: "Halliwell's theatre and a mosaic of his mind. Its humour was a testament to his fear and loathing." Lahr saw it as "a series of haunting notions where the past, present and the surreal coexisted but never coalesced to make a coherent whole. The warped images signalled an imagination in retreat."
It was also a work-in-progress, as Colsell notes. When the police raided the bedsit in search of evidence for the library thefts, they found "an additional 1,683 loose plates and over 70 books … in various states of arrested dissection". Orton and Halliwell stood convicted, as much by what they represented as by what they had done. They were guilty of institutional violation and served their sentences separately. For Orton, prison prompted an objectification that refined and defined his dramas-to-be. For Halliwell, confinement may have been the tipping point that sent him into depression, and increasing use of tranquillisers.
In her attempt to recreate the conditions that led to their art, Colsell has gone to great lengths to speak to those who knew them – especially Leonie who, Colsell reports, is remarkably forgiving of Halliwell's actions, and keen to assist in the rehabilation of his reputation. Likewise, Colsell has consulted the private letters of Peggy Ramsay, Orton's agent, who wrote that both mens' lives were destroyed, "one through success and the other failure". Of course, she adds, "the story of the failure would be very much more interesting". Ramsay, too, was keen to give Halliwell his due, says Colsell. "She is at pains to show Kenneth in a better, more compassionate light."
Halliwell and Orton's story ended in the early hours of 9 August 1967, with nine hammer blows delivered to Orton's head by his lover, who then committed suicide by drinking grapefruit juice laced with pentobarbital. The collages were splattered with Orton's brains. But Colsell triumphantly retrieves their relationship from that gory end. She sees their aesthetic subversion in a contemporary light: "To literally inhabit art in this way, to allow it to form a blurred boundary between itself and ordinary living, seems no great leap to a modern audience."
Their art invoked a particularly 20th-century medium, echoing the work of John Heartfield, Kurt Schwitters and Richard Hamilton. Even more fascinatingly, collage is a favoured medium for contemporary artists such as Linder Sterling and John Stezaker. The latter finds the collage books beautiful. "The language of the courtroom," Stezaker told me, "seemed totally misleading: defacement, violation. These exquisitely crafted works must have involved, for Halliwell at least, hours of calculated effort and research. I was surprised by the reverential quality of many of the books: collage was clearly used in a form of homage to the literary works they appended. Its use as a decorative embellishment was reminiscent of medieval illumination and rarely interfered with the legibility of the books."
Stezaker also found strange the disparity between the comic, transgressive tone of the textual additions, which one tends to attribute to Orton, and the lyric qualities of the pictorial collages, which Colsell attributes to Halliwell. "For him," he says, "collage books are clearly aesthetic gifts to an anonymous public, whereas for Orton they are subversions of the public imagination."
Orton and Halliwell achieved notoriety through the sensational arc of their inseparable lives and deaths. The hidden nature of the crime for which they served time – these mutilated books – stood as a cover for the true nature of their offence: their sexuality. They were criminals twice over. Yet now their collaged books lie carefully preserved in the archives of the very institution that once found them so offensive – an irony both men would surely appreciate.
Malicious Damage by Ilsa Colsell is published by Donlon Books at £35
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