White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

by Iain Sinclair

  He willingly abandoned himself, his unborn self, to the sensationalisation of his history. The victim drew the hand of the author over the paper: his mouth spilled, he choked on darkness.

  Treves worked with surgical precision; cut away all extraneous dialogue, local colour, architecture, weather. Merrick was the nerve of all this: and it was at the cost of his own existence.

  He could not be forgotten. He was umbilically attached to his creator. Uninstructed, the Golem, like one mad, began running about in the Jewish quarter of the city, threatening to destroy everything.

  He was the missing chapter of Edwin Drood; but Dickens shied back from a deformity that he might have shaded but could not quite turn to sentiment. There was a clairvoyance of ugliness that frightened him. The sideshow freak becomes Presence. And what had been his life was left to enter the stones, to move away among dim tree heights, to describe the rim of the missing church of Mary Matfellon. A taint in the colour of the hops.

  He sat where he had sat before. And now there was no temperature; no veil over the nakedness of his face.

  As we approach the glass cabinet we walk into his skeleton. The cabinet is set at an angle in the most obtuse corner. A phrase is present, not spoken by any of us, left in the room: ‘inside it always smells like rotten marble’.

  Climbing towards this secret room, by steps, winding into the vermiform appendix of the caecum. Forbidden steps, at hieratic distance, enlarging our stride.

  As we approach the skeleton cabinet, we approach our darker selves. Joblard’s meat outline is imposed on the twisted bone armature. My face stares out from the skull cast, taking on an inherent mongolism of dim oils. A caul of opaque skin hides me from the light. The bones on Joblard’s suit are aboriginal lime. The Elephant Man’s peaked bee-keeping hat, his net, keep out the angry eyes. His collapse at Liverpool Street Station, steam cathedral, walkways, girders, high forests, hat torn from him, the weight of oppressive Great Eastern Masonry.

  Bury the bell! Flinching. On this site: the Bedlam yelps, the cages of straw.

  He is rescued. A portrait of himself. A specimen. Joseph Merrick, Pope. The church model upon his hand. Entering the tarot of blasphemy. Rioting bone coral. The hat. The church in all its detail.

  The glass is a mirror.

  So the circuit is completed: the eyes of the audience are brought to this place to look into themselves, to look out, from the painted shadow of what a man was, to the three dark shapes crossing the floor to join with him, in one unbroken moment.

  Across the generous boulevard, Whitechapel Road, and into the Blind Beggar; stopped down, thirsty. We are looked over and ignored. There’s a few of the chaps in from Brady Street, so the Brick Lane mob stay clear. But we are only amateurs of ullage, don’t count: drink up, move on. No claim to any territory. ‘Arright, John?’

  The chaps are talking overtime, but make it look like a bank job. Hunched in dynamic tension, not a casual hair, water slicked. Knees that don’t fit under tables. The light is stained, the street drifts back, snatches of warm breath.

  ‘Hinton, for me, is the key figure. The whirlwind, energising principle. He puts it all up in the air. But he’s crazy, he’s out of himself. He erodes his boundaries; he spills. And it’s up to others to interpret his work, to take it on and carry it through.’

  Joblard is used to these uninvited monologues; they are fed into his well-earthed intelligence. He doesn’t have to reply to them; he returns some fragments of his own, precise and accurate tales, seemingly unconnected, but burning the time until it is gone, the poison absorbed. He has the gift of turning nouns into verbs. He makes them move.

  ‘Did you ever read Hinton’s son, Howard? What is the Fourth Dimension? Published 1887, of course. It was all there, all coming to the boil. Howard was completing one aspect of his father’s work.

  ‘James Hinton says, “Will my friends try after I am dead, for I cannot do it myself…” He says, “It was too much for my brain, but it is by the failure of some that others succeed…”

  ‘He says, “Either I had a second self, who transacted business in my likeness, or else my body was at times possessed by a spirit over which it had no control, and of whose actions my soul was wholly unconscious.”

  ‘He left the harpoon on the table. He forced other men to take it up. It’s that mad, self-heated excitement that connects with the real but cannot translate it into action. No action would be enough. It was gone when he said it. He saw the contrary. He cancelled himself.

  ‘But Howard, the son, hooked onto just one part of Hinton’s pitch, the acts of time. He described a model system of lines, nearly upright, sloping in different directions, connected to a rigid framework. He proposed that this framework be passed through a horizontal fluid plane which stretched at right angles to the direction of the motion. There would be the appearance of a multitude of moving points in the plane, equal in number to the straight lines in the system.

  ‘We have got to imagine some stupendous whole wherein all that has ever come into being or will come co-exists, which, passing slowly on, leaves in this flickering consciousness of ours, limited to a narrow space and a single moment, a tumultuous record of changes and vicissitudes that are but to us.

  ‘So it’s all there in the breath of the stones. There is a geology of time! We can take the bricks into our hands: as we grasp them, we enter it. The dead moment only exists as we live it now. No shadows across the landscape of the past – we have the past, we have what is coming; we arrive at what was, and we make it now.

  ‘We give ourselves up, let go, stalk up on ourselves unawares. We walk into our own outlines; we are there before. Howard is become his own father.

  ‘He articulated his father’s uncompleted argument. We service the dead. Without him a piece of the father would have disappeared for ever.

  ‘You can’t get off that curve. It’s like old Dick Brandon. The family eating their breakfast in a back-kitchen at Bow are already dead, the Peenemunde rocket launched from German scrublands. The patriarchs are scattered on the roof; it is with them as they go about their business, it is lead in the skirts of their coats. They might as well take a ladder, climb onto the parapet and wait for their death.

  ‘Until we can remake the past, go into it, change what is now, cut out those cancers – we are helpless. We are prisoners, giving birth to old faults, carrying our naked grandfathers in our arms.

  ‘What Hinton said, Gull did. Hinton claimed, “Prostitution is dead. I have slain it. I am the Saviour of Women.” But it was Gull who took the hansom-cab as a time module: one of Howard’s diagrams made actual. He floated in a solution of time, lifted above the horizontal plane, out of it, not that crudity of arriving, not anywhere; realising, embodying, all those potential moments of will.

  ‘The great synthesis travels in a sealed cab. Stars move across the pitched roof, the coracle lid: at the velocity of Gull’s breath. Compressing his time. Making incisions, making sacrifice. Gull, the literalist, made act, made complete, did. Or Hinton would have been nothing.

  ‘Gull, the ironist, not needing to believe, oversaw the slaughter of five women. Coldly; unattached to his actions. Buried one threat. Earthed one terror. Made sacrifice that the new century could be born. He aborted his own future.

  ‘He was a victim. He could not escape the acts he had to perform. The will of the victims was as great as his own: rushing together into annihilation, each serving the other.’

  Joblard now was sketching rapidly, black contours, rib and vein, the heart’s heart, the labyrinth of the secret city, the temperature-graph of the dying stones: neutralising the spread of madness.

  We made our way back, Hanbury, Spital, Woodseer, to the brewery gates. A visit. It is my instinct: never go back. To return is to remake what is. But Joblard, having no past, cultivates the pieces of the immediate that can still be reached.

  The gift of friendship, the knack of making demands: it is kept alive.

  The ullage men are dozing behi
nd their guts in the concessionary bar, only slightly inhibited by a made-up front-office man drinking with two plumbers and a girl they have brought back from the Seven Stars. They have connections, involvement with doubtful invoices, the juggling of delivery notices. Lightweight suits like oil slicks, cheap cigars. They punctuate their remarks with sudden touches on the woman’s shoulders, leaving incipient bruises in her soft flesh. They are pouring doubles into her, promising the full tour.

  ‘How’s the old feller, then? Still around?’

  ‘Dead. You didn’t know? Six months back. Dead and buried.’

  ‘Old Eves, he’d been working on it a long time. It’s what he was waiting for.’

  ‘Fuck Eves! He’s still running around, the old wanker. He’ll be dying for the next thirty years. He’ll see you out, mate.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘Brandon. Cut him open, didn’t they? Full, mate. Every fucking inch of him. Packed, he was. Cancer. He was drinking in this bar on the Friday – they had him six feet under in Tower Hamlets by the Tuesday. Suit him there, nobody checking up on him. He never changed, like a skeleton. No teeth. Finished up his pint, didn’t he? Got another one in, didn’t refuse. But he never fucking drank it.’

  The chaps, the well-connected trio, take the girl out, tip-a-toe on stilt heels, laughing, over the cobbled yard of the cooperage.

  ‘Come on, boys. We’ll follow them.’ Ullage boss as voyeur. ‘Might get some fucking leftovers.’

  Down the dray-walk, into the stables, a suggestion of rats at her ankles, the girl obligingly lifting, shaking, her tight skirt; a run in her stocking. The exact extent of the damage to be assessed by the man from the front-office.

  Then by tunnels and walkways, a route that involves many ladders. The girl follows one of the plumbers, the office man at her rear, closely guarding against any danger of her falling by resting his manicured hands on her buttocks. They pass gleaming tanks, skimming baths, hoppers; they enter the cold store, along Hanbury, chilled porter, the shunned corner, the ground where the body of Annie Chapman was discovered, turned out at Dorset Street, ‘the worse for liquor and potatoes’. The plumbers go no further, not worth the candle; a tap and a bucket. They sit on the stone floor, passing the bucket between them, sharing a song.

  The office man wraps his jacket around the girl’s shoulders, an overcoat, scarlet lining; manages at the same time to disengage the straps of her dress. He warms her with a long pull at his flask.

  Our quest is unfocused. We join the plumbers on the deck. Seminal promptings frozen; we float once more in the direction of decay.

  ‘She’ll bite it off!’

  ‘To the brim, John. Fill her right up.’

  The bucket carried unsteadily back; it spills, soaking the plumber’s overalls.

  A scream.

  The plumber sits up too suddenly, gashing his head on a brass tap. Blood down his cheek. A scream that freezes us to our shadows.

  We blunder. There are so many doors, ladders, steps, dead ends, blind passageways. We dip under pipes, lacking Brandon the guide, the rat among secrets. A long floor, out of the darkness, grain over boards, high arched ceiling; a pulsing of machine breath, nerve dials.

  And in the powder, on the floor of this glass-wall’d chamber, a line of footprints, leading our eyes to the man, head on his knees, nursing an aluminium pipe.

  The girl, now virtually naked, jacket slipping from her shoulders, hurls herself against a window; it shatters. She drags her wrist backwards and forwards across the jagged glass edge, screaming madly: bands of light from the shuttered roof stripe the nave, white dust floating in immaculate columns.

  16

  To: Sarah Hinton

  8 Finsbury Square

  July, 1861

  My dear Sarah,

  Where do you think I am now? I am at Dr Gull’s. I have taken up my abode here for a week or so, to do a paper with the Doctor, the one we were talking about before.

  I was so filled with my ideas, swollen and exultant, absorbed in my schemes and projects when I saw you, that I did not even tell you where you could find me.

  I want time for the thoughts to mature, so that they may present themselves in fit shape, and not need to be worked up.

  The Doctor listens, an owl in a green waistcoat, bottled in his window seat, the light behind him, his feathers all on fire. I cannot read his expression, his approbation or his censure. I believe that he looks at my chair and sees nothing. I am invisible – but my words go for him like hornets, and they sting!

  His right hand always resting on his abdomen, feeling every breath as it escapes, so infernally calm, so contained, with all the complacency of an expectant mother. Those heavy caterpillar eyebrows! That remote eye! He seems to have welcomed my train of thought before I have launched it from the platform.

  And now he is such a great man in the world, his wife and family live at Brook Street – his old surgery in Finsbury he maintains as bachelor quarters, so that we can talk without disturbance; talk, talk, talk! I am sure that I weary him, but he gives no sign. Indeed it begins to come on me that I do no more than save him from the exertion of articulation, of defining, working down to what does not need to be said. The smoothed cap of hair! The high stiff collar! The very portrait of a successful physician. He has painted himself and disappeared into his own likeness.

  But I owe so much more than I can tell to Dr Gull, our walks together, each morning, the divisions of the city as yet unpolluted by the traffic of mere business. And our walks at night into the dark heart, the gutters, the veins of corruption. So much of the inspiration for The Mystery of Pain lay not in secluded study or in quiet contact with nature, but in the back streets and slums of Whitechapel. Evil, Sarah, is a stained glass window with a glowing reality behind it; it is radiant with martyr and saint, with the divinest meaning just beyond our sight.

  I thank God there is so much ugliness and evil. I clasp evil and wrongness to my heart; they are life, they are God’s tenderest love. He says to me in them, ‘Look, my child, and tell me what I am doing; ’tis painful to you at first, but you will love it when you see it.’

  The thought of the mystery of pain is the seeing our life again as a Fluxion. The feeling of pain is an element brought into the self-form by isolation. This I have suffered, but not for my redemption. It is not until we look upon pain as a willing sacrifice that it becomes pure good. I have refined self in pain and refined pain until it is a force in my work. It was of use, no more. The highest good of everything is its making possible a better thing, a thing not possible except for it.

  I was given a seed and when I loved it I was bidden to bury it in the ground, and I buried it, not knowing what I was sowing. That joy is more bitter than pain, that pain dearer than delight.

  Sarah, we have gone so far together. Your offer this afternoon clears my path. Here is the work: to gather up the force which is in these evil thoughts, which now we merely feel as pain, uselessly, save as it makes a tension in our hearts that must gain its relief and expend itself in life at last: to gather up the force and put it, directly, to use.

  I have seen such sights. A man may have reason to say he has found a door, and not a wall, although he can open it but a little way, and he has very scanty ideas of the space into which it leads. You will remember how utterly I must be unable to do justice to what I want to say.

  But I hear the Doctor’s tread, he is not asleep, though he is never, as I am, troubled; restless, turning. I do not disturb him with my work. I am quite silent, I assure you, letting slip only the occasional moan. The heat of my thoughts, the intemperance of my argument, must not be allowed to break in on his meditations, which are unseen, water running beneath water. I will restrain my hand and let my words go free, where they will, from the window and out into the ignorant and uncaring streets.

  Your brother,

  James

  To: Caroline Haddon

  8 Finsbury Square

  July, 1861

  My dea
r Caroline,

  I was at De Beauvoir Square this afternoon, and Sarah said to me, ‘Make haste and write your book; I will pay for the printing of it.’ I went to Dr Gull in the evening, and mentioned it. ‘Tell your sister I will divide it with her.’

  I have just put down my pen and sealed a letter to Sarah, but I cannot rest, the Doctor is occupied, and there is so much, so very much to be said; please forgive me if I say just a little of it to you. It is not enough to leave these things half-born. Nothing can be that does not act, or be except by acting. The world is ruled by thought, but no one knows what will come of doing.

  And yet from a little commonplace idea I have started on a train of thought that has almost revolutionised my ‘holdings’ on many of the most interesting and important subjects of thought, especially to a physician. My new ideas may be true or false, or rather, in great measure, they must be false; but that is not the question. They are new and mutually dependent, and inasmuch as they have flowed from an obvious though unrecognised truth I think they may contain the elements of something valuable.

  But I was going to tell you where I have finished; for I must have done now, since it is impossible to go any farther. I have at last embraced the revolutions of the planets in my investigations, and propose to wind them up with an inquiry into the centrifugal force. You will smile, but I speak in earnest. I have either lighted upon a great fact or a monstrous fancy. If it be the latter, I am content: you know my opinion as to the part which error plays in the world. I don’t aspire to any higher honour than to do my work.

  If my ideas be correct, and it may be partly so, I have made a step towards solving, not the essential mystery, but the ‘mystery’ of life. I want to meet with some first-rate mathematician and astronomer just to put him a few questions as to the centrifugal force, and then I would positively abstain from further pursuit of these subjects for the present, and would patiently retrace my steps, and sit down deliberately to mature the speculations that have crowded upon me, and revise and purify what I have written, which amounts to upwards of four hundred closely written foolscap pages.