Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  I sit on a stone block in a sheltered hollow, and look from my map (Landranger 177) to the river, and back again: the sun dance, the golden float of midge-bright particles. The love soup. Teasingly, the light reveals itself. The tainted water is marked on the pale blue that represents the Thames with a heavy cross of ink. (There could be no mistake.) The death place, between Gallions Reach and Barking Reach, is named: Tripcock Ness, or Margaret. The chill of that baptism inflicts, as if by ordinance, its own shock waves of ruin. Margaret mines the channel, exacts her toll, visits the drowned; a succubus, she drinks their terror, licks the weed from their mouths, irradiates them with her glory. Punitive strokes of benevolence flay them to the last wafer of skin. A curtain of nuclear winter hangs across the river – a second barrier – a thin line of artificial snow, a mantle of ash through which all traffic must pass.

  I let my anger die in the distance. And, as so often before (when I walked beyond Woolwich), I found myself meditating on the poet, Nicholas Moore, somewhere on the other bank, in a white hospital ward, dying in exile. After long years of neglect, blind struggle, the satisfaction of pitching it all into the flow of the river; that molten crucible of light – splitting desire into a chimeric insect pattern. Maya. Illusion. Nothingness. Without ego; freed at last from the persistence of your ghosts. (How we load our own burdens on to the defenceless dead!)

  The south shore then became a place of interest. (Literary associations stick like dogdirt to the turbulent mouldings of our boots, as we plod through ‘Eliot’s’ East Coker, ‘J. C. Powys’s’ Montacute.) Some life, in the form of new hope in the sky, had escaped down these unconsidered tributaries of Thames. And I wanted very much to learn about the accidents that brought Nicholas Moore to this dim sprawl, where he lived for so many years, sustained, energized, possessed by the poems he wrote. Until the day came when words could no longer offer any protection. There was nothing left to articulate in that form. (‘Reconciliation and relief after immense suffering’?) Impertinent to speculate. We need to know more than there is to tell.

  ‘Night. Night thoughts. Nacht und Traume. Dreams

  Of the old. Greisengesange. Turtle dreams.’

  I decided to visit Peter Riley, the poet and bookdealer, in Cambridge; to tape an interview about his pilgrimages to St Mary Cray (to talk with, and assist, Nicholas Moore). I would transcribe some sort of record and include it, as a testament, among my twelve fate tales. There should be a bridge of light, however hallucinatory (and self-willed), to span the guilty river.

  My state of mind was strange enough (put it down to the fever) to risk this evil town, to which every excursion was another failed attempt on the record for being buried alive in peat slurry. Fen consciousness has never really recovered from the retreat of the North Sea: the life-forms are Jurassic. Already, the cold chalk of Templar enclaves has worked its way under my fingernails, as I bite them in frustration, trying to find a way into the deconstructed shell of Liverpool Street Station.

  I stepped on to the train, with an air of assumed bravado, carrying a tape-recorder, and two or three of Nicholas Moore’s books for the journey. We jolted pleasantly above all the familiar East End secrets. Soundless, they were no more troubling than an in-flight movie.

  I followed Peter’s directions out of Cambridge Station, across the car park – soft drizzle – into a web of narrow streets that clung for support to the railway. I bought some cheap cigars from the Bengali corner shop, as a gift. Nothing better was on offer. We could have been in… Crouch End?

  The house was easy to locate, an unfraudulent artisan’s terrace, now shifted in use and status (down?) And, after the usual preliminary courtesies (the peek at the poetry shelves, the soup, the coffee), we settled to make our tape.

  II

  A Conversation with Peter Riley, at Sturton Street,

  Cambridge, 1 March (St David’s Day) 1989

  IS:

  How did you come to visit Nicholas Moore in the first place? And why did you decide to go and see him?

  PR:

  I simply wondered what had become of him. I made a few enquiries around and nobody knew where he was, or thought he was still alive. Eventually, I found an address which I wrote to – and it worked.

  Nobody published him: but, although he wasn’t publishing, Nicholas Moore never gave up hope of publishing. He was constantly producing ‘Selected Poems’, constantly sending things to periodicals like the Spectator and TLS, who did not publish any of it.

  He must have produced a dozen different typescripts of ‘Selected Poems’, which went to every possible publisher in the country. He was writing a lot of deliberate doggerel – he called it ‘satire’ – with serious poems, now and then. He’d write all day long, he did nothing else. In the morning he’d hammer away at his typewriter – most of it was rambling, rhapsodic – but, generally, towards the end of the day, he might get around to a serious poem.

  He sent people bundles of this stuff, which just gave them terrible headaches: then it all came back.

  IS:

  You got an address for him, dropped him a line?

  PR:

  Ummm, yes. I wanted work like that to do. I said I was interested in collecting his work together – little realizing that I was talking about something like three thousand poems.

  I got an address. He responded. And I called in.

  IS:

  What did you discover?

  PR:

  He lived in St Mary Cray. It’s near Orpington. Estate houses, of about the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, covering several hillsides; mostly semi-detached houses, let off into maisonettes. He was in a downstairs maisonette, on his own. His second wife had died two or three years earlier.

  I turned up and found this little man, with one leg, in a wheelchair, in absolute total squalor. Through the front door, then along a corridor. Several rooms open off: a bedroom, and the room he lived in, a back study which was now disused, a totally squalid kitchen, and a bath which was full of lumber and detritus. There was coal everywhere. It was absolutely filthy. He was perfectly happy in there and very organized.

  The place he lived in, the room itself, was incredible. You couldn’t see the furniture, except for the table and the chair he sat in. It was piled up with food and rubbish and biscuits and bits of paper: old newspapers, magazines, books, and records.

  It’s strange that this should have happened to him. Nicholas Moore was a very successful young poet – as early as 1939, and on through the war. It was the war that made this possible. A reaction to the left-wing liberalism of the 1930s, Auden and that generation. During the war things got published that would never otherwise have got into print.

  IS:

  Nicholas Moore had been part of a Cambridge group?

  PR:

  He was the son of the philosopher, G. E. Moore, and was a student at Cambridge. As such, he was interested in joining all the forms of modernism together in one movement: taking whatever he wanted from America, from Wallace Stevens, and from Surrealism, jazz, Picasso, Henry Miller and Durrell.

  His friend, George Scurfield, said to me once, ‘We thought in those early days we could stop the war.’ He was referring to the polemic activities of that student group in Cambridge. They were fellow-travellers. They thought they could forge a link between Britain and Russia. But how they were going to do this with student magazines is not clear.

  People’s university careers ended and they disappeared; but Moore carried it on. He took it to London and collaborated with Tambimuttu.

  IS:

  Why wasn’t he actively engaged in the war?

  PR:

  He was a conscientious objector.

  IS:

  Did that mean he went to prison?

  PR:

  No, he had to go and work on farms in East Anglia, digging potatoes. That didn’t seem to last long; for the last years of the war he was commuting between Cambridge and London.

  IS:

  He thought of poetry as being his care
er? And then the war ended and it was all over?

  PR:

  Not very suddenly; it was a process which took the rest of the 1940s to work itself out. As the poetry-reading public increased, and became something more like Auden’s public, so Nicholas Moore’s personal readership diminished and diminished. A completely new set of poets had taken the situation over.

  IS:

  During the war, he lived in London?

  PR:

  No, he lived in Cambridge, and commuted to his work in Tambi’s office. He took no part in that Soho scene. He carefully steered clear of it. When he finished work, he went back home – and left the others to drink themselves insensible.

  IS:

  When did he move to Orpington?

  PR:

  That’s part of the great crisis which occurred to him around 1948. Unfortunately, this worsening literary situation happened to coincide with three or four other crises, which amounted to a total reversal of fortune.

  IS:

  Presumably, he wasn’t making any money from the poetry? Even when he was successful?

  PR:

  No, I shouldn’t think so: not much. Tambi was paying him, he’d got work. But very little specific payment for writing. But in 1948 everything, which had been going so rosily for him, collapsed in a short period. Only the poetry was not sudden. That was a slow haemorrhage of readership.

  IS:

  Wasn’t that, then as now, a general condition?

  PR:

  It affected a lot of people: Wrey Gardiner, David Gascoyne, and W. S. Graham (who ended up living in Cornwall, in penury). Perhaps George Barker too. Many of them left the country.

  IS:

  Was this normal, everyday indifference? Or did society need to revenge itself on them? Was there no longer the imagination to tolerate their very existence?

  PR:

  It’s difficult to know the basic reasons for this. But it’s to do with what the readership of poetry is, and their expectations.

  IS:

  The readership of poetry seems to consist only of other poets, the peer group, and those looking for a way into the racket. Was there ever a readership of people not involved in the practice of writing the stuff?

  PR:

  There was for Nicholas Moore and his associates during that one brief period. There was an intellectual following that was a continuation of the following the modernists had during the First World War, Pound’s and Eliot’s public. Their books were professionally produced by Poetry London and the Grey Walls Press. The reason these poets weren’t at Faber is that they thought they had their own publishers. Then, of course, those publishers collapsed; and Moore and his colleagues were left without a publisher at all.

  There were also financial disasters. The supportive money from Moore’s family was no longer there. His wife, Priscilla, left him. Half his early poems are dedicated to her.

  That was the big disaster for Moore; he was left with no wife – which devastated him. She went off with somebody else. No wife, no money, nowhere to live, no publisher. He was helpless: so he went down to London and found himself a job.

  He’d always been interested in gardening, had become expert at cultivating new species of flowers. He got himself a job in a horticultural shop, a seed merchant’s. He was wandering around the West End and saw an advertisement in a tobacconist’s window for this flat in St Mary Cray, near Orpington. He took it, and lived there for the rest of his life.

  He continued to work in this flower shop, commuting to St Mary Cray. He married a second wife, a very different sort of person. She was more of a local product, a daughter of the bourgeoisie of those suburbs.

  The 1950s, as a period, is dark and obscure. He wrote less and less. He was on the train every day, into Victoria. Then there was a child. He was in a very difficult situation by the middle or late 1950s. His wife began to get mentally ill and couldn’t cope with looking after the children. He had to do all the work in the house himself, while struggling with other things, and doing some writing. He began to get very ill himself. The child, his son, was put out to a foster home. He found he’d got diabetes – which he had for the rest of his days.

  IS:

  When did he have his leg amputated?

  PR:

  That was much later on. He continued with the diabetes for quite a while, under treatment. But it gets worse, whatever happens. So that brought him, more or less, into the situation in which I found him.

  He started writing again, in earnest, around 1965. It had become a totally private activity, although he always had hopes of making a ‘comeback’. He never gave up. He remained in touch with Tambi – who likewise had schemes, was going to make it back into the limelight. But never quite did, not properly.

  IS:

  He was more prolific than W. S. Graham, for example?

  PR:

  Oh yes, his method was to write: he didn’t think. His poetry wasn’t concentrated in the way that Graham’s was. But the poetry kept him alive, I believe.

  IS:

  Did he hope that at some point circumstances would turn around again? Did he feel it was an accident that nobody read him any more?

  PR:

  He might have thought that at first, but after thirty years… If he hadn’t kept going there would have been nothing at all.

  IS:

  Did he greet you warmly when you arrived?

  PR:

  Oh yes, various people had taken an interest in him before that. There was Barry MacSweeney. And, around the time he published Spleen, there was some short correspondence with Andrew Crozier and Jeremy Prynne. The thing was that Moore kept up to date with poetry. He was a subscriber to Grosseteste, and he bought Ferry Press books.

  He was stuck out there in a wilderness, in outer suburbia, in the most dismal place you could possibly think of living in.

  IS:

  It wasn’t anywhere near a river? His writing is filled with images of water.

  PR:

  I think that started in Cambridge. The dream images are of the Cam. His father’s house was a few yards from it.

  IS:

  I wondered what his sense of that location, the place he lived in, was?

  PR:

  He thought it was an accident. A fairly pleasant place, when he first moved. His house was on the edge of the development, next to fields. But within a few years, of course, the whole area had been covered in suburbia. Nothing in sight except identical houses. He had really established a personal island, or islet, in the middle of a huge mud estuary.

  There is no sense of movement. In Lacrimae Rerum there’s a dream sequence about wandering endlessly through anonymous streets: pavements the same, trees the same, round corners and up hills. That’s suburbia. It doesn’t crop up much in his poems, only at the end. He had an island, this dingy room in which he lived. He maintained all the things which had been part of that student enclave in Cambridge: jazz, cricket, gardening, modern art – also pots, especially Lucie Rie pots. He actually ate his dinner off Lucie Rie pots, which were worth thousands of pounds. And, occasionally, he broke one.

  IS:

  When you turned up… did Nicholas Moore see you as a messenger from the same tradition, a couple of generations on? An initiate?

  PR:

  He didn’t know I came from that background. I suggested it to him later on. But he had begun to feel pretty bitter about the whole poetry world. He didn’t sit there like a church father and calmly accept what had happened to him – as if he was a hermit in the desert.

  There was a large sense that poetry is very important and was everywhere abused. He felt that what he was writing was important, and that the world was losing it. There was no access to the world. All he could do was keep on producing. In phases. Faster and faster. Until, as his illness got worse, it tailed off. He was in and out of hospital. There’d be two or three years with an upsurge of poetry. He always went to the same hospital, Orpington Hospital.

  Writing was
now physically very difficult. Diabetes affects your eyesight, you go nearly blind. He didn’t wear glasses. His vision was very blurred and minimal. It was a 1940s island, without television. Hospital meant the radio. You’re stuck in a bed for weeks and weeks. There’s nothing to do except put on your earphones. There’s only one station: Radio One. So he was caught listening to John Peel. It’s extraordinary. He sent poems to the BBC and John Peel. Peel had slight intellectual pretensions.