In Sebastiane, Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress’ 1976 film, the soon-to-be-martyred Roman soldier is warned by his friend Justin to stop fighting against their pagan authorities. “The truth,” Sebastiane responds, “is beautiful”. As they speak, Justin tends to the wounds of the third-century saint in an act of love that has the potential to endanger both of them if they are caught by their tyrannical overseer or their fellow soldiers. This moment of intimacy is luxuriant; where there could be a palpable sense of terror, Jarman and Humfress instead focus on the tenderness between two defiant men.
Sebastiane’s “truth” is not just his devotion to Christ in a pagan society, but also his willingness to receive and give affection in the overtly masculine, violent and sexual environment of a military outpost. This is the kind of truth echoed in Jarman’s only known work of narrative fiction: Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping, which was written in 1971 and published for the first time in 2022 by House Sparrow Press. It follows a blind protagonist known as King who is accompanied on a trip across a mythical America by his valet John. On this trip (almost entirely on foot) they encounter pierrot clowns, poets excavating the land in search of old spoken verses and a mystic guide called Begum, who shows them the sights of Movietown. King and John, like Sebastiane and Justin, remain constants to one another in an increasingly unreliable and disrupted landscape.
Those familiar with Jarman’s oeuvre will not be surprised at this surrealist depiction of America. Both his early work as a set designer and his later films as director have the same camp theatricality that underpins Billboard Promised Land. Jarman’s dislike of Hollywood and its mechanisms also shows strongly. King and John are bemused at the endless billboards of Movietown, its arid terrain, and the sound of clowns shouting that “owing to a lack of interest, tomorrow has been cancelled, you are now in the strawberry beds of the eternal present”.
Jarman’s distaste for Hollywood’s glossy sheen meant he chose to stay in England to work on smaller, grittier projects. These projects looked at large, luminous figures in history as in Caravaggio (1986) and Wittgenstein (1993) and commented on England’s socio-political climate as in The Last of England (1987); all of his films were punctuated with queerness, especially between men. A fascination with exile permeates his work: Sebastiane is sent to a military outpost, Caravaggio dies in exile and The Tempest, which Jarman adapted in 1979, is predicated on a stranding. The roots of this can be seen in Billboard Promised Land: King leaves his comfortable villa in search of a life with no plans and although they are not actively in exile, the same feeling of being displaced outsiders haunts the King and John as they continue on, searching for meaning in Movietown.
Coming in at 36 pages, Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping can’t be classed as a novel, but neither can it really be classed as a short story. As Declan Wiffen says in his afterword, Jarman “had a habit of revisiting imagery, retelling stories and recycling material across different mediums”. Images that appear in Billboard can be seen in his later and earlier work – most obviously in a play written and performed during his time at the Slade art school in the 1960s, called The Billboard Promised Land.
This published version of Billboard isn’t strictly a written text: it is a near-identical transcript of a recording of Jarman reading the story aloud, edited with reference to written versions of the story still in Jarman’s archives. The recording can be accessed through a QR code at the end of the book, included alongside reproductions of Jarman’s notebooks that have parts of the final text written out, alongside plans and drawings. The bulk of the book is in fact made up of other people’s writings on Jarman as a person, an artist and a film-maker, including contributions from writer Philip Hoare and artist Michael Ginsborg. All of the contributors, as well as the story itself, are evidence of the richness of Jarman’s career, from writing to painting to gardening, as well as film-making. That his only known work of narrative fiction should arrive as part of such a varied, collaborative book is a fitting tribute to the way that he conducted his life and career.
• Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping is published on 3 November.
