You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts

by M. John Harrison

  (9) EULOGY FOR THE AGEING HAUNTOLOGIST

  Mystical sunsets behind the troubled roofs of East Sheen, the overgrown gravestones of Barnes Common, the grim Edwardian silhouette of the Elm Guest House. A smell drifts down the river which can’t for a second be mistaken for that of the brewery. The tide is low, the water fast and turbulent between the piers of Barnes Bridge. Eddies thicken with the matted stuff left at high tide – bottle caps, tampon applicators, condoms in a matrix of sodden interwoven twigs rarely more than five or six inches long – it’s a substance in itself. (The sexual health of a nation can always be judged by the state of its rivers.) Like the smear of light on the wet tiles under the bridge, it is a language, a signal from those who have gone before. It is what they have to say. They remember being alive, they remember a slick of light on old tiles on a wet day, the pavement becoming wetter and blacker as people track the rain into it and the human footprint blurs to black. They remember the cold draughts. Everything thus becomes more itself, or what people have understood it to be. The departed swirl forever under Barnes Bridge, a cultural attraction which draws visitors from all over the world. Come for the sunsets, we say in West London: stay for the funeral!

  (10) THE LOTS OF MARY

  Further along the tideway, the old Holst House fills up with depictions of people in the throes of some cultural stress difficult to understand. They recoil from one another and yet seem intertwined; they are bent back in the shapes of change, of seizure, of a body language of transformation which can have no meaning to the carefully groomed and dressed art tourists who pass in front of them. In his rooms directly above the Middle Gallery, Harry Price, puzzled by some implied but not quite demonstrable consonance between the celebrations of the St Margarets Day of the Dead and the central anxieties of Arnold Böcklin’s masterpiece, which he feels as a powerful astral ‘presence’ in the hanging space below him, falls asleep thinking about the agitated gestures of the woman and her son, the smiling but curiously unreceptive expression of the older male. His dreams are filled with sounds both human and marine. At three in the morning the phone rings. A throat is cleared at the other end, but no one speaks and in the end it is Price who, looking down at his hands, feels he must whisper: ‘I’m becoming something else.’

  Name This City

  A prison for the heart. The heart’s longings emerge squashed and distorted, in grimaces made inhuman by the sheer length of time they have been held in place: as if everyone you see there had spent their lives walking poorly-dressed into the wind and rain, which they have not. Hurt from the very beginning, the heart eats too many cakes. It deforms itself looking away from mirrors. It learns to ironise everything. At eighteen years old it has already collapsed like a senile face. You burst into tears on its behalf without knowing why. This city is no place for the heart, which therefore tries not to recognise itself in shop windows full of too-cheap clothes but keeps up a bright chat about its contact lenses, its colon and its high fibre diet. When the heart stares straight out at you here – as in children or lunatics – it’s a frightening, exhilarating experience. A drawing of the town hall: the artist has subtly accentuated the portico, with its monolithic pillars and architrave, to make it seem menacing and gloomy. Old men sleep in the side doorways. There’s a blanket, a pile of dirty coats. Further on, outside the mall, someone is hosing down the pavement.

  Jack of Mercy’s

  Hardo Crome began his vast narrative poem, Bream Into Man, as soon as he arrived in the city. Most of the themes, obsessive images and techniques of the finished work – including its characteristic sabotage of narrative expectation – were already present in this most marginalised and often-misunderstood canto, ‘The Gin Gun’. ‘The Gin Gun’, ostensibly a self-contained murder ballad, was published as a run of two hundred stapled pamphlets by Orcer Pust’s Green Pony Epistemological Society Press (then situated in premises on the north bank of Allman’s Reach) and not distributed widely. Reviews by Ray Inevort and Eric Desablier (Inevort famously called it ‘a kind of metaphysical chancerism’) served only to confuse its potential audience among the grisailles and midinettes of the Low City.

  Over the next year, Crome moved restlessly across the old Cultural Industries Quarter. He became, briefly, a Starnist. He lived in no less than five different locations, including Monfourchet and along the Disclonal Avenue, until he settled on the edge of one of the city’s more debatable spaces, in a fourth-floor room on the edges of Chenaniaguine where 21st Street meets Monsanto Avenue; and for the whole of a dry summer stared down nightly across New Rose Ground, to the dim lights of Atomic Avenue.

  ‘Few here will admit to knowing the source of those lights,’ he writes in his journal of the time. ‘Those who do keep the knowledge from outsiders. Outsiders! As if any of us belong here. Leucaena Road is a parade of self-made dwarves down from Marg-Fawly, performers with quadriceps so developed that in the arena they are able to jump twenty feet into the air from a standing position. But they can barely walk and often their heads are tucked so deep into their displaced clavicles that they have to be led around by apprentices. Saturday morning, in the streets up behind the Zocala it’s Particle Boys and Regulation Girls; whereas over here it’s all ‘poets’, if that is what you want to call strummers like Ansel Verdigris and Echo Marsailles. An apparently endless column of artistic refugees, in retreat from the gentrification which began five years ago at the foot of the Gabelline Stair and now spreads into the Low City like mould on bread, we have been displaced. Paradoxically, there are no incomers here: we are all the most pathetic of insiders. We know nothing but we are in the know.’

  After a month without entries, during which he seems to have pursued a less than satisfactory affair with Tamsene Field (later he will call her ‘that decapitated princess’, while in her history of the Starnist movement she refers to him only as ‘a dissociated little man with red hair’), the journal adds, ‘In the face of this, any adventure will do,’ and Crome, abandoning Starnism, which he now described as ‘rotten with self-reference, turn upon turn receding into meaninglessness’, begins the series of unaccompanied forays into New Rose Ground which will lead to Cantos 2 through 7 of Bream Into Man.

  ‘Letting myself in each night by the little iron gate on Mangot Street,’ he tells us, ‘I exchange entryism for the entrada.’ In a sense, this is not hyperbole. Only someone desperate for subject matter would cast himself adrift in this way. Old Rose Ground – which, paradoxically, consists in a brand new park with a boating lake – used to be the city’s graveyard. New Rose Ground (also known as Jack of Mercy’s Ground), differentiated by its position on the East or ‘lower’ side of the Royal Canal, has an air of industrial dereliction, as if the irregular hectare of overgrown water meadow it occupies was briefly the site of factories, quarries, rail yards, waste dumps and so on. Courses of brick rise above the couch grass and weeds. Litter is everywhere in the light scrub of hawthorn, gorse and elder. There are old bell pits and standing pools which drain or fill mysteriously; and a single shallow, circular lake filled with discarded machinery.

  ‘Viewed at night,’ Crome writes, ‘it is a coming and going of denizens, animals, whole sudden holographic tableaux of inexplicable events. Corners of the space fold themselves up or unfold to reveal, briefly, a landscape difficult to interpret in terms of our world, along with glimpses of the mythical original inhabitants of the Quarter, who, in turn, displaced even earlier inhabitants.’ These seem as elastic and self-modificatory as the space itself. An old couple and their dog, for instance, are said to be the last of an entire species of human beings called The Lords of Vule Portny, ‘an individual of which was always comprised by this triad – although the third party doesn’t always look like a dog.’ It was an evolutionary choice long-abandoned, some way of being human pursued for a thousand years or so, ‘as suddenly out of fashion as it was in.’ Even in the day, the lighting seems odd. There are infinite opportunities for getting lost, and the ghosts of more tenuous human choices still
haunt the open patches between elder groves. ‘You go down by the river, on waste ground which still remembers itself as a water meadow. You see them there in front of you, flickering in and out of vision – it’s only an effect of the long grass. Don’t follow!’ It’s not clear who – or what – he means here; or why, after a year or eighteen months, he abandoned his exploration of the Ground. (His journals record only: ‘Last time in, by the [illegible] Gate. All strata disturbed & buckled. Birdlike cry of the lar gibbons. Fresh shallow pits & scrapes observed.’ Then: ‘To anyone who imagines entry to be possible through Omber Grove & the Electric Quarter, I say only: Look always to the right, never to the left!’ And then, halfway down the page, heavily underscored: ‘I swear that this is the last time.’)

  Towards the end of that period, he met the pianist Ingo Lympany. Of a planned collaboration between these two ex-Starnists, nothing remains. By then two further tranches of the poem had been published – ‘On Greenmartin Swale’ (GPESB, 1902), a memoir of Crome’s childhood in the villages of the Hangline Estuary; and ‘Tending rubbish fires’ (GPESB 1903). These were received quietly, with Eric Desablier – by now editor of New Rose Quarterly – declaring, ‘While he remains convincing as the conscience of Starnism, we sense in these stories a growing uneasiness with any kind of outer world.’ Several works planned in this period have either vanished, or were never even begun and remained only in note form. Among the latter, ‘The Mysterious Wife’ stands out:

  ‘A husband,’ Crome wrote to Lympany, ‘knows very little about his wife. Her arrival in the city is surrounded by mystery. Nothing she has told him about herself is true. She is both arriviste and adventuress; even her parents were counter-jumpers. One day she invites an old friend of hers to dinner. The husband asks this man what she was like as a child, and to protect her, the old friend begins to invent for a her a more convenient past. This myth is so beguiling that the two men soon begin to develop it, the husband subtly leading the reminiscences of the friend. Soon they are addicted, to the exclusion of the wife, who loses control of her own history to the extent that when, a year later, she announces that she will return to the provinces, they hardly notice. None of it is true! she shouts. They only blink and look away – that week they have begun embroidering a tale of her first communion. The husband will seem first a dupe.’

  Crome began writing Bream Into Man again in the aftermath of the ‘Force Publique’ scandal in the early 1920s, with ‘Prolepsis’ and ‘By Omber Grove’. The rest of the material was produced in a six-year stint beginning with the 20,000 lines of ‘Bros Quai to Quai Mytho’. Throughout this period the sense of immanence which so saturates the early Cantos was being replaced by what the poet later named ‘the unthought known’; and his sacralising of the mundane had given way to a kind of paranoia in which something literally unthinkable was seen to hide itself inside everyday events and, particularly, objects. ‘The value of this unthinkable thing,’ he wrote to Lympany, ‘is in direct proportion to its horror.’ (Lympany’s side of this correspondence was destroyed by the great fire at Lowth in 1933; but Edio Bornfoth, who knew Lympany well, claims (Indices 47, 1950) that the pianist replied, ‘Best not think about it then.’) On the basis of this shift of emphasis, Crome decided to rewrite the Cantos to that date.

  Some were revised out of existence – ‘Organ 40’ mutated into ‘Christobel at the Atlantic Steps’, for instance, retaining perhaps eight lines of the original text; while ‘Events Recorded Last Wednesday in Iron Chine’ was dropped entirely. Revision being as slow a process as primary composition, an interim volume was made available by Hart Volante, a short-lived enterprise of Paulinus Rack’s, financed by proceeds of a ballet called ‘The Little Hump-backed Horse’. Revisions up to about 1938 also made up the bulk of the Green Pony edition of ‘Marks and Gravures’; further revision was carried out prior to the undistributed and now rare second edition in March 1939. The advertisments – for cold-cure and genever – bound into the Green Pony edition were described as ‘part of the text’, as was the dedication of the volume and a cover lino cut attributed to the expressionist portraitist L.A. Ashlyme; all of which was intended by the author to control and contextualise his overall system of allusion and imagery.

  During this period his journals are full of the young woman who came in two or three days a week to look after him. A Lowth midinette who had arrived in the city less than a year before, she smelled, he records, ‘of clean washing & geraniums’. In letters to Lympany and Rack, he calls her Genet or Ginny, although her real name seems to have been Marianne. Two or three pen sketches show her as having perhaps a less-formed character than the poet ascribes to her; nevertheless there is a sense of inevitability in the set of the head, the way the eyes meet the eye of the viewer. She loved dancing, music and the theatre. Their relationship was close. Crome sometimes referred to her as his niece; and once, in the hearing of Rack and Lympany, as ‘my daughter’: Lympany, perhaps remembering the story of the mysterious wife, seems to have remained unconvinced. Here, the journal is no help. A kind of shyness falls steadily across its pages for a year, a reserve which extends as far as the household accounts, from which even the midinette’s salary disappears; although clearly it’s her to whom Crome is referring when he records, ‘G died last Wednesday at Lowth, of blood poisoning after a game of handsey-nailsey.’

  Within a month of this laconic obituary he returned to his exploration of the shifting terrain of New Rose Ground. At first the journal gives up only brief, disconnected impressions – mainly of a failed attempt to enter from the south, between the vast deserted tenements of the Banlieue Lumianide, which led only to ‘a deep sense of regret’; of ‘a sticky darkness applied as if to the skin’, a sensation of self-disgust from which it took weeks to rid himself. Then, after a return to his usual point of entry via the ‘little iron gate on Mangot Street’, we read this: ‘Just after dawn, bright pale sunshine fell at an angle on to the bank of the Royal Canal. I was walking at the [illegible] pace. I observed two people and a dog perhaps a hundred yards ahead of me. They were doing something there, a little way back from the towpath in the green shade between scrub willow and elder.’ He could see them coming and going between an abandoned lock and a little clearing. The project, whatever it was, seemed urgent, yet ‘carried out in an atmosphere of calm’. He could hear two quiet voices; the dog panting and yelping and scraping. But by the time he arrived, they were gone, leaving only a long raw slot in the black, fibrous mud. ‘Shallow at first, its lower edge packed and fluted by the dog’s thick claws, this deepened and narrowed towards the back, where the tangled, freshly-broken roots of some plant protruded.’

  He couldn’t see much. His own shadow got in the way. He sifted some of the earth through his fingers. A rubbish tip from a hundred years ago: layers of beads and buttons interleaved with household waste rotted to soil; broken china and glass, no item more than a quarter-inch on a side. Bottle stoppers. Broken tools. ‘It was the basic substrate of the city,’ he records, ‘packed yet somehow not dense. But then millions of tiny bits of rusty machinery!, compressed into a layer on their own, as if, a century or two ago, an extra layer of time had been laid down, here and perhaps all over the city. I rubbed my fingers together and watched the rust fall.’

  Later he followed the dog’s huge footprints east until they left the canal at a sudden angle and plunged into the interior of New Rose Ground, where it still seemed dark and he could hear not voices but musical instruments; or perhaps a factory. He didn’t feel confident enough to follow. He had no sense of being observed in his turn, nevertheless he was careful how he made his way back to the Mangot Lane exit. Later the same day, exhausted by his attempts to sleep, he sat by his window and looked out over the waste, hoping to recognise something, or place himself on his night’s travels. ‘But as usual,’ he noted in the journal, ‘what can be seen from the window bears no resemblance to that which was endured on the ground.’

  And then, inexplicably: ‘Jack of Mercy’s! I ha
te the thought of being buried alive.’

  Late in 1939 he began to revise the middle sections of Bream Into Man, only to be defeated, as he wrote to Paulinus Rack in December, ‘by earlier selves who won’t let go’. Asked to nominate his favourite passages, he found they hadn’t changed. ‘“Fire Parties” and “Antinomia”,’ he told Rack: ‘Although I wish I’d called the latter something different, so as not to perpetuate the idea that these versions still orient themselves to the literary ideologies and aesthetics of Starnism and the Old Men.’ The narrative had produced, he thought, ‘a lively if terminal vegetation of secessionists, mummers, folklorists, paretic expressionists, Midland nature poets and consumptive Low City modernists, all mad with fear of the unthought known’. At the same time its infrastructure – as Shoshime Dollimore pointed out in a review of Cantos 34 through 51, published as ‘The Fearful Hours of Night’ – had become rotten with the very Starnism Crome had deplored when he abandoned it twenty years before. ‘After a point,’ Desablier says (locating it at about halfway through Canto Three of Chapter 46), ‘nothing stays still long enough for you to trap it in the critical rhetoric’. Crome has found himself by locating with precision who he isn’t.’

  By then he was suffering from the paresis which would end his life. He had the slow form of the disease (called ‘Discartia’ or ‘Mummy’s Lobe’ in the Low City where it had been endemic since the wars of the Analeptic Kings), with its distinct phases and curious effects on the spatial awareness of the sufferer, its accompanying parasitic infections and long incubation period. He seems to have welcomed the fevers and dysenteries, which he sometimes called ‘my little holidays’. He was less sanguine about the pain in his lower limbs, which often crippled him for a week, and for which he required huge doses of morphia. In letters to Balfio Histamine he took to referring to the disease as ‘her’. ‘Mummy!’ he says: ‘my slow, careful lover.’