‘I can feel the fucking going on,’ said Joblard, with relish. ‘Does it take two to occult fuck? Or more?’
Jack groaned. I drove on, undiverted.
‘Verlaine saw it, but didn’t do it. He projected a “ferocious novel, as sadistic as possible, written in a very terse style”. But couldn’t carry it off; gone, swallowed, finished, back to the domestic teat, hungry ghost begging for absolution in the skirts of the church, breathing old farts.
‘From these acts only one man emerges. The other is eliminated, engorged. Verlaine was bloodless, sucked dry as paper. He was wholly necessary, an equal partner, but he never emerged from that room. What he had went over.
‘Rimbaud was reading, British Museum, diving into Poe, into magical primers. He claimed that writers are “the mirrors of gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present”.
‘That’s it exactly. “In everything any man wrote… is contained… the allegorical idea of his own future life, as the acorn contains the oak.” Yes!
‘They were pulsing, they were open. They roamed, every day, out along the river, into Whitechapel, Wapping, Ratcliff, Limehouse. Entering wilfully into that fiction.
‘Rimbaud’s occult awareness was so intense, he was burning his own time so recklessly, all or nothing, that he described more fiercely than any other man, then or now, the elements of the Whitechapel millennial sacrifice. And by describing, caused them. They were said. They had to be.’
Jack cast a baleful eye on the notebook, but at that moment he would rather drink than talk. The light was with us, doors open to the street, smoke and feathers.
‘The whole scenario, like a Rosicrucian Manifesto, is there in his Illuminations. I won’t even try to sound it in French. But in aborted English, the elements… a few fragments… shave it down… terrifying…
*
“I responded by snickering at this satanic doctor,
& finished by getting to the window –
Phantoms of future nocturnal luxury
*
We would wander, nourished by the wine of caves &
the biscuit of the road, hard pressed
to find the place & the formula
By the grouping of buildings, in squares,
courtyards & enclosed terraces,
they have ousted the coachman
*
On the slope of the bank, angels fashion their robes
of wool in pastures of steel & emerald…
meadows of flame… on the left the compost of the ridge
is stamped down by all the murderers… all
the disastrous clamours spin their curve
The pivoting of rotting roofs
*
I stepped down into this carriage where period
is adequately indicated by the convex windows,
Bulging panels & contoured seats
The vehicle turns on the grass of an obliterated highway:
& in a blemish at the top of the window on the right
swirl pale lunar figures, leaves, breasts
Unharnessing near a spot of gravel
*
Here will one whistle for the tempest & the sodoms
*
The accidents of scientific magic
The luminous skulls upon pea seedlings
*
The banner of bleeding meat
The moment of the sweating room”
‘Heat is prophecy.
‘“Satanic Doctor, window, place. Courtyards, ousted coachman. Left and right. The vehicle, the obliterated highway. Banner of bleeding meat. Moment of the sweating room.”
‘Take this malarial possession and drive it to Africa. Burn it in the furnace like a rotten bandage. Hack it off. Chatterton’s Africa, the Eclogues, the imaginary salvation. Tame the river. It’s always too late.’
For a moment, of necessity, it died. We swallowed, licked around the rim of our glasses. Then Joblard took it up.
‘In Canterbury today, teaching, I heard the fag-end of a lecture on Van Gogh’s time in London. Some highly-scented bitch from the Courtauld Institute.
‘Early 1870s he was here, with a dealer, then teaching, and with some mad job between clergyman and missionary. He had to walk about the East End, where I don’t know, she wouldn’t give you anything specific. Collecting school fees. He also preached a series of sermons. I can see him in the open-air pulpit at Mary Matfellon, spittling the winos, haranguing the derelicts of the future.
‘They only had one slide to show from this period. It was a sketch he made of a horse-drawn coach, travelling to the left, a swirl of shading in the ground, containing names and signatures; couldn’t decipher them. The coach is empty.
‘I flashed to another, hired, carriage, much later, 1889, driven from the asylum on a farewell visit to a girl in the brothel at Arles, one summer afternoon.’
We pocket a bottle of Armagnac; there is a promise of whisky also – at the studio. The three of us, whistling, through the silent warren to Pear Tree Court.
Joblard’s genius is partly expressed in his ability to manipulate the surface of the material world so that, despite all the odds, and while all his peers are going under, he is always supplied with a space in which to work. Dines well, cigars, holidays in villas. Some kind of improbable shape-shifting knack, slipping through periods and disguises, dressed for the abattoir or the tea-dance. Now with a white linen jacket. The castoffs of nautical novelists, backwoods tree-carvers, Blue Mink percussionists all fit, as a second skin. He can borrow from Wellesian gourmets or midgets; the garment, once transferred, is immediately his. Nothing looks new, nothing is decayed.
He unlocks the door. A long room under the now pressing sky; a skylight, star-tile in the roof peak. It is another of Joblard’s secrets. Like Sickert, he had his bolt-holes. The work, the thing made, was the only reality.
Was that a tenable claim? Not altogether. But as a claim, it stood.
Jack found a chair, his feet upon a roll of opaque plastic sheeting, unplugs the brandy.
Joblard’s work is scattered: a pouring of lead; an anvil that might be for use, or might be the work itself; long bow or harpoon on the floor. Elements that could connect, or could be abandoned, broken down, turned into other machines. Bones become lines. Faults run into veins. There are many drawings, star maps, x-rays. A theatre of transformation: surgical rather than gestural.
The generosity of manner ends at the door. Joblard hangs his jacket over a propane cylinder, rolls up his sleeves. If he talks about the work it is in immediate and practical terms. But there is no flannel about craft or technique. He hits you with the basic counters: flayed skin, steel sheet, folding; rib, joint, poured; parchment, paper, salt. As we look at the objects – he does not speak of them, but of some other thing, some thing they might become, or might once have been. His face reflects the potential light of the act implied in the object. Harm is here; is contained. The object is its own defence.
This is the richest moment.
When the total assembly is made, when the action is fully described and named, then part of what is here now is closed off: there is a waxed seal.
We light our sumatras from the gas gun, which is then hooked over a tripod, giving a pale cave light. The mad shadows deform us. We are spread back. The bottle standing on the floor between us.
‘I want to remake what has never been made before,’ claims Joblard, grinning savage, one chipped tooth, breakfasting on the thunder stone. It is a night of extravagance, linked by the blue fire tongue, the triangle of utter calm.
‘The ghosts are more tangible than the human presences, the animated clay dolls. I want to re-enter the familiar and discover its dangers. I will name nothing.’
Jack, the long man, sniffs, something over-ripe, hair standing in clumps, disguised presence, allergic to pretension, breaks in; not interrupting, continuing, taking up the torch, putting his hand to the flame. His tale.
‘One January I was working as a decorator in the flat of
a Steiner disciple, flower painter, at 16 Chepstow Place, Westbourne Grove. All day off the ground, scratching flakes of ancient paint from the ceiling, eyes sore, dry throat. Handless man. She’s out most of the time, getting ready, leaving for Australia, a man.
‘Comes back late in the afternoon, cup of herbal tea, says, “Oh, by the way, did you know this was the room of the Suicide Club, the actual address?”
‘It was already a strange time for me. I only took the job to get at her piano. Downstairs was a Radio Times theatrical, Beckett man, his wife, nervous in dark glasses. Dusty glamour of obscure fame. Claims she is writing “metaphysical detective stories”. But their main occupation is table-tennis, in the back yard, coats, gloves, mufflers; long ritualised bouts.
‘The radio was on all day: a comet crashed into the hills behind the cottage where John Cowper Powys lived. I’d just come back from there, mad trip, sponsored by a ragtrade lunatic who thought he was some kind of zen master: meaning that he could hire and fire a dozen tremblers a day, and do Groucho Marx imitations on the telephone. He shipped me to the slate quarries in a red Ferrari to turn A Glastonbury Romance into a three-act opera. When I got back – my job was gone and I was done for stealing the car. Shocked into enlightenment!
‘I’d work into the night: the moon gibbous and threatening. She wants me out, got her yoga routine to complete. I’m getting nowhere, a couple of feet a day. The ceiling’s like treacle; no blood in my arms.
‘And walking back to the underground, all these bandaged patients behind tall windows, convalescent, lobotomised, sitting at individual tables waiting for food, being watched by children’s television.
‘I buy a Standard and read of the murder, that morning, in a near-by street, of James Pope Hennessy, the biographer of Queens. He’s been stabbed in the head. Died from inhaling his own blood.
‘When I get home I dig among my Stevensons and discover that 16 Chepstow Place was not the address of the Suicide Club, but the address of a Mr Bartholomew (ha!) Malthus, who inhabits that story, suffering a “Melancholy Accident” and falling to his death “over the upper parapet in Trafalgar Square, fracturing his skull and breaking a leg… Mr Malthus, accompanied by a friend, was engaged in looking for a cab…”
‘In November I saw reviewed in The Sunday Times the book that Pope Hennessy was working on in his study at the time of that definitive interruption: a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson.
‘My wages were gone, forty pounds, the precise amount required for membership of the Suicide Club.’
Now the line of new light drives across the floor. The gas tongue so pale its power has gone. The marriage is almost on us. We have slept on our shields. Man to man to man, silent, sunk, the unwilled exchange, the talk brought to its finish. No more to be done, the word is – on.
To the obelisk. Unspoken. It is time to walk, return to the domestic chamber, to Camberwell, to dress the day.
But first we will walk that small mystery, make that connection: from the obelisk of St Luke, Old Street, to the demolished obelisk of St John, Horseydown, by way of the extinguished church of Mary Matfellon, Whitechapel. The three enclosures of ruin. Unacknowledged, but not concealed. St Luke, roofless, wild space in a border of stone; St John, a rim of the original onto which a place of business has been grafted; and Mary Matfellon, nothing, a field with a diagram in the grass, a stain only. The shunned Apostles.
The less they are, the stranger they become.
The walk has nothing to do with lines of force, immaculately ruled patterns, stern geometry of will, pentagrams, grids, brass-rule control. It is older and wilder. The triple spiral, finger print, found at New Grange. The spiral that winds out of Clerkenwell into Whitechapel into Southwark. It is not precise, it can’t be measured. But it is invoked. We want it and that is its truth.
The freshness of the day and the obelisk an absolute white, white beyond white, against the dim dirt-grained stone of the body of the church. The fence is breached and the door to the tower unlocked.
This is an act of morning.
We are lifted. The steps in time, wide. Counting the climb as if we would never again descend to the same city.
And raising ourselves by the ascent of this risk. Entering the blade. Beyond the door of light – the skin of the local is shaken. We climb, turning, winding into the tower but, strangely, it becomes a descent. We go down towards the sky.
A great bell hangs, a bulk of danger. Old wood. A pillar fallen across two discs or bowls; upturned scales. Spidery darkness. Cool breath. The soupy smell of stone dust, cloth dust, dust dying into dust; ropes on the floor, broken boards. We climb into the dark.
And now Jack is framed across the circular space of the window where the clock once hung. It is the ghost of a rose, unfolding rose of time, twisted into iron: it is a filter, projecting the rose onto the city. Jack’s outstretched arms break the circle, Adam Kadmon.
I turn from the light to Joblard. He is leaning back against the skirts of the bell, his breath gone. Out of the heat vortex. His face has died. He is white, bearded in shadows. It is the face of my father. The Father of Lights.
His spine resting on the buried bell. The bell within the obelisk. The cancelled bell that has been hidden from the world.
A flutter of birds against the window. Bird lime. Stench of old feathers.
We turn away, our prayers are made. Down into the face of the lion: Bunhill, Finsbury, Sun, Appold, Pindar, Spital, Steward, White’s, Thrawl, Matfellon, the path of old stone: by the Minories to the Tower, to Horseydown and the Old Kent Road.
To be shaved, washed, suited.
Joblard’s room has been cleared of its detritus; the brown swallowed in pale shades, the windows polished, open to the new day. A white cloth spread.
The room-dividing panels have been forced back so that the space is doubled, lit through. Flowers, lace. And by these changes, and on this day, a marriage is made.
18
Nothing uses me to it.
James Hinton turned heel at Limehouse, would go no further: as if it could be walked out, as if he could unravel the pain, give it a fixed distance and stamp it down. His fists smashed against the iron gates, head bowed to his old enemy, the wind; force gone out of him. The high tower of St Anne’s church offered no resistance: it made the wind. Hinton obeyed the dead. He was one of them. A sensation not experienced by many mortals – to have no place among the living, to live less than those dead bones, those humps in the ground.
There was a horrible sense of continually walking into himself, falling behind, gone, dead on arrival. Seeing himself, leaning on the gate, a drowned man, the octagonal capped lantern of the tower rising from his head, cuckold, making him an insect. To be blown where the wind chose. The will was gone in him. He would not listen to his own death.
He turned towards annihilation, the labyrinth again, the secret heart. Saviour of women. There was nothing to fear. By passion would passion be killed. Prostitution is dead, I have slain prostitution.
In Church Passage, off Mitre Square, a woman is waiting. Think what a work had to be done! Blessed is he who has found his work! Nothing to be said; she lifts a hand and puts it upon his shoulder. Rust-coloured hair, her eyes have him, brown, wood varnish. He pulls her by the wrist. She drags behind him.
There is no drama, debate, discussion. She was waiting. And now it is she who is leading him into the narrow gash of Angel Alley. Black straw bonnet, tilted, some fur at her collar, three large metal buttons. Jaunty, a bit of a turn. Name is Kate. Unasked. Name is Conway. Name is Kelly. Tattoo on forearm. Name is Eddowes. Heavy workman’s boots, unlaced. Soap in her pocket, ribbons.
Hinton sniffing at her apron: God’s instrument. The maul. Within the passage; Hinton under the bell of her skirts, so many skins, so many layers. The print, Michaelmas daisies. Dark green petticoat, stained, not fresh. Hinton presses his face to her belly. She lolls back, complacent, a song from the halls, counting the line of bricks.
Nothing to fear; Hi
nton has her legs parted and is driving against her, bruising her, she is bumped repeatedly against the wall. He cannot finish it. Not blamed, the woman, for nothing. His arms under her stocking’d thighs; has her lifted from the ground, her boots kicking out. He touches the tip of her womb.
Turns her; now a dog, skirts thrown clear, clutching his fingers into her thighs, sweating, gasping. Rolls off her, still aflame, blood-charged, raw. His pocket-knife; hacks the buttons from her jacket, throws a coin at her feet. Returns. It cannot be drowned. Covered. Crushed. Kept down.
Crosses, through the traffic, the carts and carriages, the people: a wild shadow. He can hear nothing but the dead in their bells. The stones will not hold them. They will grow from the earth. Grave-words: re-sting, not ‘resting’. Hornets.
There is a drinking trough, or shrine, in the wall: the stone moulted, creased, the skin of deformity. A memorial to ‘one unknown yet well known’. And, through the mouth of this Caliban, a pipe has been driven, a hole. Hinton, on his knees, looks at the stone of sacrifice.
Enters the field of Matfellon, dragging the prostitute, hand in hand, bowed under thunderous clouds, a new Adam and a new Eve.
‘“And there was given me a reed like unto a rod: and the angel stood, saying, Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar…”’
He releases her, unshriven, to climb the ladder into the roadside pulpit: howls.
‘“And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in strength.
Write these things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter;
The mystery of the seven stars which thou sawest in my right hand…”
‘It is the time of the ending of time. And a child shall be born, white as the lamb, a saviour will come. But you, who are called Sodom and Egypt, are not worthy of the child; you are the dead begetting the dead. And there is no hope for you. You have made my temple a place of shame; it cannot be measured, as your days are measured. Women couple with beasts upon my sacred altar.
‘And the child that is born shall be an Antichrist, god of unreason, Babylon. You shall follow him in travail, yea, to the end of your days.’
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings Page 12
