Andrew O’Hagan

Mr Turner is my favourite Edwardian. He sits in a chair under the window. He doesn’t waste a lot of words. And when he laughs he rocks a little. The sky is busy and blue over Richmond. Every few minutes a plane goes by. They seem to enter the window-frame just about head height; each one passes through the ears of E.S. Turner, and on from there to some Spain or America. He isn’t bothered. He’s nearly ninety. He’s thinking of things to say about his life. And when he speaks he speaks in a small way. His voice seems aware of the danger it’s in.

Never give a writer a key to your apartment. Or your office. Never let him talk to your children. If he says he wants to take a bath tell him the plumbing’s knackered. If he makes for the fridge say everybody just died of food poisoning. Don’t encourage him in any way. Never give him your mother’s phone number. Keep him back from anything sharp. Tell him nothing you wouldn’t tell your worst enemy. Hide from him in the supermarket. Avoid eye contact. Never go out to war with one; never share his drugs. And never, never kiss a writer. Never kiss one no matter what. At the hard core of American writing this century, these would appear to be the big lessons. And they all crumble down to one thing in the end: never trust a genius who even thinks he might be American.

All his life Andy Warhol looked like death. He came into the world that way: blank, rheumy-eyed, sick as the day was long. An unmerry child with St Vitus’ Dance, the young Warhol lay twitching in his bed under a blanket of fan magazines, the source of all his imaginary friendships – with Errol Flynn and Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper and Gary Cooper – and the only thing he craved in those Pittsburgh days was the chance to be as lovable as Shirley Temple. The adult Warhol looked as much like death and lived as much by desire. A mobile presentation of 20th-century estrangement. A man in a wig in a season in hell. ‘A sphinx without a secret,’ said Truman Capote; ‘the Ecce Homo of modern exhibitionism,’ said Stephen Spender. For his own part, Warhol was intensely reasonable: ‘I just want to be a machine,’ he said.’

The early railroads were rough maps of Victorian fancy. Trains and human hearts, in those days at least, were similar engines, chugging along on fresh steam or dank air. The Victorians cared about going forward: they meant to conquer all the worlds beyond their own, and no matter of geology, or history, or finance, was too big for their ambition, or too small for their genius. The story of the great railways is also the story of minor lives, and how they were made, or altered, or destroyed, with the coming of the new machines. People have been travelling from one great place to another forever, in their heads, but to move over the distant world – to be carried quickly on wheels, or propelled fast over water, or carried supersonically through the air, or through space, to some faraway place – must count for a lot in what it means to be modern. The carriages that carried us, the sustaining vessels, have a central role in our recent tales. We are intimate with our modes of transport. These vehicles are now close to us by nature, by desire and by design. Transport promises a future, just as it carries the remembrance of selves and places and things passed. Ours is a world of pictures coming and going at speed. Few of us now live, or would care to live, with the guarantee of being in one place for ever. But the British live with these thoughts of expansion and speed just as their empire is shrinking to nothing.

Babies and old people have so much in common. They have similar hair and teeth for a start, and they don’t like food too hot. You can’t leave them out in the sun for long; they don’t remember big numbers; they sometimes need help into their chair; they often get sick in the car. They also have a common skill, which is to turn themselves into the image of the thing they love. Someone pointed out to me the other day that the old geezer behind the bar looked like an egg. After some pretty detailed enquiries I discovered that the gentleman was, in fact – and had been for years – a great lover of pickled eggs. There is an old lady hot dog seller in the Strand who looks just like a hot dog, with onions for ear-rings. There was the bloke I met in Durham Cathedral two months ago who looked like the stone gargoyles he professed to adore, and in Strathclyde I know any number of old folk whose faces resemble nothing so much as a full and hearty tumbler of Grouse whisky. Children are much the same. They can look like their toy rattle – all blue and bumpy – or their teddy bear. I once knew a boy who looked like his bike. His ears were like handle-bars, his nose was a saddle, his eyes turned around like wheels. He would sit on his doorstep oiling and tightening and stroking until the long day was done. And one morning he awoke to discover he looked like his Raleigh Chopper. He later joined the Royal Air Force, and now he flies over the land, quite happy it seems, with his adult nose pressed against the window of his bomber. Unfortunately, most young children expend this mimic genius in coming to look like their mothers or, even worse, their fathers, and most elderly people use it up in the act of becoming their children.’