My friend Paul Clowney
Posted on 17 April 2012, 6:29
Paul Clowney, who died on Good Friday, was a friend I loved and respected for most of my adult life, and so the thought of him no longer being here is as nonsensical and perplexing as someone saying the rain’s going backwards. Several days since getting the news, I still can’t take it in. How is it possible for Paul to be gone? I find death more astoundingly opaque as I get older, when I thought it would get more transparent.
A friend texted me on Good Friday afternoon, just hours after Paul died, to remind me of a meal we shared where Paul arrived, took in the smell of coriander coming from the kitchen and said, ‘Ah… coriander. Reminds me of Vietnam.’ I can hear him saying it, in that cool and calming American accent of his.
That story reacquaints me with one of the things I always appreciated about Paul, that he was from elsewhere, culturally. From Vietnam, as a photographer with Richard Nixon’s army; from Philadelphia, where his father, Ed Clowney, was professor in theology; from Amsterdam where he studied and met his wife Tessa; from Francis Schaeffer and Hans Rookmaaker and ways of thinking about art and faith that were unfamiliar and highly creative.
Outstandingly for me, Paul was a maker. He knew how to make things that worked and fix them when they didn’t. He was a person who either understood or was so curious about objects that they would eventually reveal their secrets to him. If you were ever going to be stranded on a Pacific island with nothing to eat but coconuts, you would surely want Paul with you, because he would put Robinson Crusoe to shame for inventiveness.
Paul is the only person I know who would bring a set of chisels with him on a weekend break to Lyme Regis. He used them to crack open rocks on Lyme’s Jurassic beach and expose fossils which last saw the light of the sun 180 million years ago. He was a magician of that sort of thing.
Roey and I first met Paul and Tessa in 1978 when they invited us to one of their ‘Art at Home’ exhibitions in Ealing. They turned their home into a temporary gallery for an art show by painting the walls, removing all the internal doors and hanging pictures. It was a characteristically playful and effective concept of them both. We had just got engaged and were looking for somewhere to live, and they beguiled us into becoming their Ealing neighbours.
I can still see them both in that house’s conservatory, talking with friends under the leaves of their luxuriant vine while the music of Kate and Anna McGarrigle filled the house. And I can see Paul, with his long hair and dense moustache, sitting at the scoring end of a shuffleboard, offering encouragement and advice as various friends sent the pucks flying up the board.
I’ll always remember the beautifully calm and rational way he prayed grace before meals – prayers which were practical and simple, but borne out of a deep faith in the God who is there. Prayers which were a blessing not just of the food and wine on the table, but of us too.
I sit here now, writing these words after midnight, before I go to bed. I know Paul did this self same thing many, many times, because I used to call him at his agency, The Clearing House, after midnight when I had a technical problem I couldn’t fix, and he would simply say, ‘Come on over.’
And I think: All Paul’s deadlines, all his to-do lists and client relationships, and all his after-midnight tasks are now done. His great project is completed. As it says: ‘Blessed are those who die in the Lord, for they rest from their labours.’
And it also says this: ‘All you who, in life, have taken on you the cross as a yoke, and have followed Me through faith, draw near: Enjoy the honours and crowns which I have prepared for you.’
That is how I shall always think of Paul. My loved and honoured elder brother in faith.
Photo: Hans Clausen
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