September 2008

BE MY FRIEND – a monthly portrait of one of Jackie’s pals

This month – EVA LOEWE AND SHANNON DOYLE

In the booklet of my album FAIRYTALES FOR HARDMEN there are two ‘In Loving Memory’ pages – one for Eve Loewe and one for Shannon Doyle. Both these women died at about the same time, and quite unexpectedly, from where I stood in the world. They were very different kinds of people, who only met once, but liked each other immediately.

Eva had been part of the Loewe leather ware and accessories-to-the-rich-and-famous dynasty, but latterly had become a professional advocate of my friend James Hillman’s ‘Archetypal Psychology’ movement, and she was the co-founder of the London Convivium For Archetypal Studies along with Noel Cobb.

Shannon was an Irish-Canadian transsexual professional killer who had lived the first part of her life in Louisiana, but, in a profession which took her all over the world she had discovered that she loved England and tended to return there whenever she was between assignments.

EVA LOEWE Eva’s Convivium was an annual convivial meeting, as the name implies, of friends, scholars, students and like-minded souls who gathered together to listen to speakers who had links to the ideas of James Hillman, Jung, poetry, music, and the great figures of the Renaissance. The most fabulous of these get togethers was held on the outskirts of Florence in a mansion which had belonged to the Medici family. We all stayed with nuns just a little further up the road – the nuns cooked for us and provided endless red wine of their own making – early April sunshine and the chance to sit at lunch with the likes of the Canadian feminist Archetypal writer Ginette Paris (Pagan Meditations, The Sacrament Of Abortion/with James Hillman) and the astrologer Geoffrey Cornelius, with music provided by lute player Anthony Rooley and singer Emma Kirby – these were blessed days, and the blessing was largely the work of Eva. Through long days of study, or sitting with a glass of wine on the balcony, overlooking stunning views of the city below, Eva would afford me interludes of her unique warmth and insight filtered through her laughter which was like spring water moving in a clay jug.

We had become friends the previous year after a dinner party at her Hampstead home. A gathering of the great and good from the world of trick cyclists had been discussing many things at length, mainly from a Jungian point of view, which I always find interesting, but I am absolutely no Jungian – the idea of ‘wholeness’ makes me shudder. Towards the end of the evening, talk got onto music and in particular the work of Schubert. A polite attempt was made to bring me into this part of the blether, me being a musician and that. “And what are your feelings about Schubert, Jackie, if indeed you have any?” I then royally pissed everyone off except Eva by telling a joke about Schubert – there’s probably only one, and I happened to know it:

Two Glaswegian guys tell their wives that they intend to go to London without them for a week ‘for a break’ and to get some culture (this joke is set in times before Glasgow became the culture capital of the universe with its deep fried Mars Bars). The wives are rightly sceptical but consent and off the two lads go. For six days they fall all around Soho getting steamboats, getting ripped off in clip joints and eating curry. On the last day of their trip, they’re sitting at breakfast in their hotel with appalling hangovers – one says to the other “Listen we better dae SOMETHING cultural today or they’ll ken wiv jus’ been oan tha piss”. “Aye” his mate reluctantly agrees “Here! We kid go tae yon Royal Albert Hall and see some classical music, and then goa on the pish again efter!” This plan is agreed on and off they go. Sitting in their seats high in the gods, listening to the orchestra, one turns to the other and whispers “Is that Schubert?” Bert says “Naw – ah could smell it when I came in”.

Total silence except for Eva laughing so hard she nearly dropped the tiramisu. “Maybe we should get Jackie to tell a joke like this at the very beginning of each Convivium, just to relax people!” she offered. “Maybe not” said her husband Noel staring straight ahead.

Our times together were always moments stolen from formal events, whether in Windsor Great Park, mansions in London, or very occasionally dinner at my house. But Eva constantly pushed me towards ideas and principles of insight which she intuited were correct for me, and she was always right. In particular she urged me to attend the poet Kathleen Raine’s Temenos Academy at whose meetings the great woman herself, coming to the end of her life, but still with fire and vigour, would give those assembled wild academic broadsides culled from a life lived turned up to ten. One of Kathleen’s most beautiful ideas is that of DEFENDING ANCIENT SPRINGS (see her memoir of this name) and it’s thanks to Eva that I became exposed to the life force of such an ancestor. As James Hillman says ‘good people are ancestors too’.

SHANNON DOYLE A long time ago I fell out badly with a business partner in Newcastle Upon Tyne, and we both went around the city’s bars, careful not to bump into each other, complaining furiously about the other’s behaviour, and threatening to kill each other – the way you do – not with real observable intent. Shannon Doyle came to the city on an entirely different matter and DID kill my erstwhile business partner – I met her through happenstance at the Swallow Hotel where she and her gun were staying. Word spread around the city that it was me who had ordered the hit on my, by now, dead ex-business partner, and I learned that sometimes, no matter how hard and honestly you protest your innocence, people will not believe you. Somehow a darkness attached itself to me via this incident – I was leaving yet another city for good and in a hurry, and the darkness would appear to be a permanent component of my aura – or so I’m told by people what can read auras – or people on very strong psychedelic drugs.

I became friends with Shannon who found my Geordie plight hugely amusing. Although Canadian she had lived most of her life in Louisiana and her myriad hideous tales of sexual betrayal with guns, culled from her membership of a gun club in that southern state certainly put my woes into perspective.

She rarely talked directly about her work and I rarely asked – I was too involved in learning from her styles of thought, her poetic basis of mind and her superb impressionistic way of speaking. The song LOVERS AT THE GUN CLUB is mostly made up of images she fed me, or from things I heard her say to others. I knew the song would arrive one day after an incident in the Shenandoah Valley USA. She picked me up from an event I was attending in Virginia and we were driving back to Washington DC. We drove through a farming hamlet close by the Shenandoah river, and saw a line of teenage boys who had their arms outstretched in awkward quasi-fascist salutes. An older guy was officiously walking up and down the line adjusting the kids’ arms so that the angle of salute was more ‘proper’ presumably. Shannon slowly drove over to this activity and beckoned menacingly to them with her first finger. The whole group came over with great reluctance: this was a Doyle Trait – making people enter actions which frightened them through the sheer force of her personality. When the lads were gathered by her window of the car, she said, very slowly in a terrifying southern drawl:

‘Teenagers practising fascist salutes They got the tattoos but they don’t got the boots’

The kids then backed off slowly in fear, all of them looking at their shoes, as if noticing for the first time that there was something wholly inadequate about their interest in and pursuit of the fascist dream. Shannon laughed a gentle but totally crushing slow laugh and slowly moved off in her Cadillac convertible. As we pulled away I said “I’m going to write that down.” She laughed again and replied “why – are you afraid you’ll forget it?”

Once, in Cincinnati, we entered a coffee house just as it opened. The owner was behind the counter with his back to us, squatting down, sorting out something in a large box. We just stood and waited for him to finish, politely and saying nothing. The guy slowly stopped moving, but remained where he was, with his checked shirt back to us. Then he said:

“I don’t know who that is behind me, but please don’t kill me”. “Shannon said, with great tenderness and care, but still letting the man fall deeply into the reality of her world “Don’t worry – nobody’s getting killed today”.