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| FEATURES | BY GERALD ISAAMAN |
Patricia Cornwell
Sickert's house at No.6 Mornington Crescent
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Patricia Cornwell’s much-trumpeted new book, arrogantly sub-titled Jack The Ripper – Case Closed, undoubtedly falls into the same abyss. Worse still, she has not only spent years researching the mystery of the serial killer who murdered at least five women in Whitechapel in 1888, she also has spent millions of dollars to allegedly prove her thesis. So convinced is she that Walter Sickert, one of the most formidable painters of his time, was the butcher who horribly slashed prostitutes to death, she even bought some of his paintings and cut up at least one so that it could be tested for DNA to prove her case. Alas, it did no such thing, leaving the mystery as wide open as it has been for more than a century. It was one thing to be the successful author of a string of novels about a brilliant forensic pathologist named Dr Kay Scarpetta, quite another to use her knowledge and experience in a bid to resolve facts so old that they fall to dust when you touch them. Nevertheless, she earns admiration for determination and devoting a slice of her life to following the Ripper’s bloody trail, en route adding to what might be called Ripperology. She could, for instance, be right that he was also responsible for other deaths outside London. At the same time too, she discovers nuances and insights into the life of Sickert which are worth knowing, the more so since he spent so much time in what is now the borough of Camden. Indeed, she might have included a map so that you can follow his – and her – gyrations through the streets of Hampstead, Camden Town and Fitzrovia. One of the fascinations for readers is that Sickert lived at numerous addresses locally and used rooms in various houses as his “secret” studios, where, according to Cornwell, he indulged in his dark paintings of bloody murders. These, she claims, could have only been executed by someone aware of what actually happened. The imaginative mind of the artist never enters into it, though it obviously does in her own thought processes. One is No 6 Mornington Crescent, just round the corner from the Old Bedford Music Hall, in the heart of Camden Town, one of the obsessions of Sickert’s paintings, and near to the Richard Cobden statue. Here Sickert, intoxicated like many with the murders which so frightened the populace, painted his depressed and sombre Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom in 1908, which Cornwell links directly with the murder of Emily Dimmock, who lived in St Paul’s Road, now Agar Grove, Camden Town. She shows so little understanding of his art, his desire to reveal “the colour in the shadows”, which make so much of his work outstanding. Sickert’s “Ripper” paintings all became part of the massive – and impressive – amount of circumstantial evidence she had built up about the artist. And allowed it to fool her. Another address is 54 Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, which strangely no longer exists on the electoral roll, from which she insists Sickert himself wrote and dispatched a number of letters that were among scores sent to Scotland Yard by disturbed claimants to the mocking title of Jack the Ripper. One was a postcard on which the alleged killer wrote: “I am waiting every evening for the coppers at Hampstead Heath,” which she describes as “a sprawling parkland famous for its healing springs, its bathing ponds, and its longtime appeal to writers, poets and painters”. Having seen the postmarks on these letters, she goes on to claim that they are in Sickert’s hand partly because the post-boxes “in close proximity to 54 Broadhurst Gardens include Kilburn, Palmerston Road (mere blocks from his house), Princess Road, Kentish Town, Alma Street, Finchley Road (which runs off Broadhurst Gardens)”. It is that kind of ignorance of the locale that is disappointing and dumbfounding, despite the fact that Sickert is known to have been a prolific writer to newspapers and may well have been caught up in the clamour of the times. But how you prove him a murderer when he was in Dieppe when the first death occurred needs more than hysterical, circumstantial evidence. There was an odd mention of Sickert and the Ripper in Robert Emmons biography of Sickert, published in 1941. But all this nonsense really began with the ravings of Joseph Sickert, a latter-day painter from Kentish Town who insisted he was Sickert’s natural son, although Cornwell claims Sickert could not have children because of an operation to remove a penile fistula. I interviewed Joseph many years ago when a journalist, Stephen Knight, produced the first misguided book libelling Sickert as the East End monster. Each chapter was full of theories and assumptions which dramatically became hard facts once they were mentioned, the dramatic conclusion of this house of cards being that Sickert was undeniably the Ripper. Cornwall, at times, uses the same pattern, all part of modern murder profiling perhaps, making statements about Sickert she can neither prove nor disprove but, inevitably, informing us with crazy, damning logic that if he wasn’t in one specific place he could well have been in another. And it is on such false foundations that her case crumbles – and would no doubt do so in court — the more so as she ignores Joseph Sickert and Stephen Knight, letting us assume that the very idea that Sickert was to blame for the mutilating murders is uniquely hers. Like all good thrillers, this one leaves its mark and sets you thinking about life in the gloomy, gaslit streets of London’s East End and wondering about the career of a tremendous artist who deserves far better recognition than this or some Sickert trail round Camden. But it is, of course, brilliant fiction or, at best, faction. And will always remain thus. This undoubtedly is the searing moment to stage another major exhibition of Sickert’s true art, a decade having passed since the last one at the Royal Academy. Portrait of a Killer, by Patricia Cornwell (LittleBrown, £17.99) |
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