Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  Nicholas Moore had built up a world which was not just poetically self-sufficient, it had to be culturally self-sufficient as well.

  Of course, his wife was with him – but that was more of a problem than a help.

  IS:

  Did you visit him in hospital?

  PR:

  Only latterly, yes.

  IS:

  Did he know he was dying?

  PR:

  No, he’d been in so often. He didn’t look after himself. His cultural thing included good eating and good drinking. He wasn’t going to give these up just because he’d got diabetes. He was certainly not going to stop drinking wine. He was something of a connoisseur of wine. He ate himself through diabetes with French chocolate biscuits. He lived ten years longer than anyone in his condition would be expected to live; perhaps because of the drive that kept him writing poetry.

  The diabetes got worse. He developed gangrene somewhere, along an extremity. In his remaining foot. There was talk of that having to come off. He was imprisoned in a wheelchair. But he still gardened. I’ve had terrifying descriptions of Nicholas Moore and his wheelchair, gardening with one hand, the chair tilting over at forty-five degrees, while he dug holes in the ground. He’d recently given it up when I first met him. The garden then became totally overgrown, grass sprouted up.

  There was a move by the family to get him to Cambridge – which Moore strongly resisted. The reason he gave was that he couldn’t abandon his garden. The garden looked like a wilderness, but the pattern was still there, underneath. All it needed was weeding. This was a great creative work of his. He cultivated his own hybrids of irises and Michaelmas daisies and sempervivums. He had pieces of rock – limestone – which he said could not be moved to Cambridge. He’d have to stay there with his rocks, whatever happened. And yet, of course, a few weeks after he died the house was sold and the whole thing was razed, beyond trace.

  He had a beautiful flowering cherry in his front garden, a rare Japanese cherry. I have never seen one before. It grew up beyond his floor and emerged in front of the window of the tenants upstairs – and had to be trimmed, because they said it impeded their view of the council houses. When the house was sold, the tree was uprooted.

  IS:

  He was living in a condition of sentimental exile, like Guy Burgess in Moscow?

  PR:

  Yes, an exile in which the postal services had stopped taking messages back to his native country.

  IS:

  What was his state of mind, in hospital, when you visited him for the last time?

  PR:

  He was under painkilling drugs, so he was speaking very slowly. He was most concerned that nothing should be lost. He didn’t think in terms of archives; when he’d written poems, he threw them on the floor. When we were clearing up the place, afterwards, there were poems everywhere: under the kitchen sink, stuffed into flower pots. He didn’t want any of them to leave the flat, even if they got screwed up and dirty.

  IS:

  The ‘Last Poem’, or (THE LAST POEM) as you have it, published at the end of Lacrimae Rerum… was that written at home, before he went to hospital?

  PR:

  It was written in his head. He wrote everything in his head, before he started to type it. He wrote very little in longhand, because nobody could read his longhand – not even himself.

  He said the ‘Last Poem’ was in three parts. He told me what it was about. But it wasn’t very clear whether he was reciting or summarizing. He typed the first part, neatly. The second part he typed, roughly. The third part was still in his head. He was going to do that when he got home. He was concerned that it shouldn’t be lost. He mentioned this very particularly. But the third part is lost, yes. And will never be recovered.

  In spite of the neatness of Moore’s cultural isolation, the work was a sprawl, a mess. He was producing these typescripts, all day long, which were utter doggerel; and casting them around the room, spilling things on them, and eating off them.

  Writing was so difficult for him. He had to put his nose against the keyboard and type one letter at a time. It’s difficult to think of a poem when you’re doing that.

  The last year, he almost stopped. There were too many problems. If I hadn’t come, and taken an interest, Lacrimae Rerum wouldn’t have existed at all, hardly any of it.

  It’s interesting – you have to be metaphysical – but he makes continual reference to ‘islets’in his work. Which is a metaphor to him. He was living on an islet, a rock in the sea. Also, the seat of diabetes involves things called the Islets of Langerhans.

  When I first saw this term I thought it was some place he had visited during a holiday in Austria when he was young. But Langerhans was a German pathologist who described the islets, small groups of cells scattered through the pancreas.

  Those translations he did from Baudelaire, Spleen, are all to do with diabetes: the sluggish slowing down of the bloodstream, turning green, thickening to bile.

  IS:

  You seem to have a taste for searching out these old men, the survivors? When you went to see Nicholas Moore were you, in any sense, nominating a father?

  PR:

  I hope not. There is a feeling that you like to relate to father generations; but you don’t know what you want, or expect, from them. If you’ve got parents like mine, who are non-intellectual, perhaps there’s a tendency to hunt around. On a personal level, I like helping old people. I enjoyed going to Nicholas Moore and picking up the things he dropped, reaching for things he couldn’t reach, trying to make some order out of the appalling chaos he’d got his manuscripts into.

  We’d be talking about poems and he – suddenly – would think of one which he considered was very important, and we had to find it. So we’d start, turning things upside-down, moving piles of records and books, moving furniture, looking for one little thin piece of paper. Which nine times out of ten we didn’t find. Then it was time for me to go. He knew what colour the paper would be.

  If anyone ever published a ‘Collected Works of Nicholas Moore’, a three-volume job, a thousand-odd pages, his real achievement would be lost in it. Nobody would be able to find it.

  As, finally, nobody could find him. He didn’t relate to this locality in any sense. When he wrote about it, it was a dream image. It was an unreal world outside.

  IS:

  The reason he was there was the simple fact of the railway, conveniently connecting him to his city seed shop?

  PR:

  Yes, that’s why he was there. But it wasn’t a pleasant place. He had to put up with neighbours chucking stones through his window. The local kids looked on him as some kind of witch, because he was going round in a wheelchair, with his one leg. The house was obviously derelict, the windows coated in dust.

  IS:

  He never attempted to sell off his books? The obvious reflex for most writers?

  PR:

  No. Nobody wanted to read them, so why should anyone want to buy them? He’d got three or four copies of that very rare book of his, Recollections of the Gala, mint copies in a drawer; which he could have sold, even in those days, for £30 or £40 each. That’s not to mention all the signed presentation copies from Wallace Stevens.

  He lost his correspondence with Stevens. That was one of the things he did realize was of some value. He was still hale and hearty, he’d just arrived in St Mary Cray. So, instead of letting them fall among the detritus, he carried the letters from Stevens around in his wallet. Unfortunately, his pocket was picked while he was browsing in a street market in London; and they were lost, never to surface again.

  III

  ‘When your ghost comes to me, I will tell you

  What it is that I now pursue…’

  Nicholas Moore, ‘The Last Poem’

  I had my testament, the evidence of the tape. But was it admissible? It could be replayed. (It had to be, endlessly, inch by inch; a finger-blistering chore.) It could be verified. (Always the same sounds, until th
e tape pulls loose on the cassette, called upon to perform once too often, this brown slick of dental floss. The miracle of the machine is finite. In my case, very.) And, yes, the version offered in this book has been abridged, with minor details corrected; obviously, I tried to focus on the elements useful to my theme. (I left out the side of near silence, when I pressed the buttons in the wrong order.) I was trying to discover how much the contemporary Cambridge poet felt that he was ready to accept the role of scapegoat, the condition of exile. If the culture at large refuses to imagine your existence, how strong is the impulse to spit in its eye? Or: do you stick modestly to your last and wait (to the death) for a tap at the window?

  I always leave these meetings burdened with an obscure sense of guilt. Something to do with the ambivalence of dealing in books and failing to write them (and: writing them and failing to ‘deal’in them). Cambridge itself is the corporate manifestation of guilt, the brand leader, the architecture of guilt – corridors of the stuff; moulded, sprayed and cast. A memorial park themed in stalled art: morality tribunals programmed for one verdict. Guilty! Paragraphs by Henry James that can be unwrapped only in spasms of blushing shame.

  The meeting happened, devoured its time, as I planned that it should. There is a colour photograph of Peter Riley, at the end of the table, side-on, half-turned to look down on the microphone, the silver weapon. The casual details accumulate: the wine bottle (drunk to an inch below the label), the bowl of oranges, low-fat spread, carton of fruit juice. Then; the pale-yellow door (its paintwork bubbling under the abrupt severity of the flash), the garden beyond, the slate-blue bookshed. It is possible, with care, to make out the titles of a few oversize volumes in the corner cabinet: A Pictorial History of Jazz, Antisuyo, Paris Imprévue. The focus is very slightly soft, but the occasion is there to be remembered. Parts of it are fixed.

  Yet I was not quite satisfied. I had got no more than I set out to get. The taped interview, like its flashier television counterpart, necessarily gives you no more than you ask for. The answers are all implied in the questions. If the ‘subject’dares to break into some thicket of improvisatory parentheses, he has to be dragged back – kicking and screaming. Truth never did climb off the cutting-room floor.

  My thesis had to take a more extreme form. Pain, madness, mutilation: all the showbiz shamanist tokens that would authenticate my quest. I put a photocopy of Nicholas Moore’s ‘Last Poem’ in my pocket and set out to follow the River Darent, from the Thames at Crayford Ness through Dartford Marshes, until it divided, to be rechristened as the Cray. I hoped to track the stream as it meandered south, between tumps of undifferentiated settlement and the open-field illusion of golf courses, hospital woods, cemeteries, and humiliated farms. At St Mary Cray I would identify Nicholas Moore’s house, and take the snapshot Peter Riley requested, as we stood talking on his doorstep.

  I clung to the irrational belief that the third sequence of Moore’s final poem, the ‘lost’ coda, would deliver itself up to me in the course of my pilgrimage: and not, as Riley claimed, stay ‘stored as electrical connections’ in the dead poet’s brain. Irretrievable; ‘out with him’. Holding page sixty-one, the blank (expectant space) finish of Lacrimae Rerum, Moore’s posthumous selection, to the light reveals a reversed text; the editor’s ‘note’ coming through like a spirit message from the far side of the paper. It cannot be interpreted, but it offers a ruled garden on which the number (III) signifies the gap in which the poem could still resolve itself. A sinistral, mirror world in which the italicized word stands out.

  In the second section of the ‘Last Poem’ (though addressed to the loved one, or Muse) there is a deliberate Hamlet-echo of pursuit, inheritance, chill: the elongated boredom of unfulfilled death. And the cold. The words evaporate in the tall corridors of a skull-castle. A son’s father returns with questions, dripping earth: ventriloquist of self-inflicted guilt.

  This paper voice tracked me, folded and refolded into a zipped pocket, as the train jolted once more towards North Woolwich, and the ferry crossing. Despite official radio warnings – I couldn’t wait in the house long enough to drag a coat from the cupboard – it was a fine, bright, high-cloud morning. The ‘free’ ferry celebrated its role in the narrative by carrying no other passengers. Do they know something? They have all shuffled down the foot tunnel. The green river shines like crocodile mud. The south shore is more of a promise than a threat. The rail connection to Erith offers intriguing glimpses, scrub-covered slopes on which to imagine the Abbey (rems of) Lesnes. And the more recently imposed fantasy of Thamesmead.

  Detrained at Erith, it is a considerable effort to shake free from the town. The river is guarded by a succession of scrapyards, metal fanciers, supplicants for brazery, machine cannibals: only the most dog-footed plodder, sampling each fresh lane, will eventually clear the buildings; and then the fields open gloriously to the waterline. The Thames is almost domesticated, frisky, Edwardian, a tributary of itself; pleasure boats ride at anchor. I walk, among tethered horses, on an elevated pathway: distant flashes of Dartford. The revolving shadow of the radar scanner on the Crayford Ness beacon plays on a low wall. A peaked sun projects this illusion: the silhouette of an amputee wrestler, frenetically warming up. The creek mouth has a scimitar tide of driftwood, cans, plastics – an over-eager Richard Long installation, an unscavenged beach.

  There is a formal, twin-towered rivergate where the rib of the Darent splits from the Thames and begins its own journey. Lost land. Game birds thrash from cover at my approach, shoot out over the water, decoying attention: rubbish fires drift gritty blue smoke from fenced yards. Dumper trucks, far away, grind and drone, tipping out the endless intestinal waste of the towns. The young river wanders, is alive; its surface shimmering, burning with gold scraped from the rims of heavy coins. I cling to the bank until the Darent parts from the Cray, and the view to the south-west is of mean over-settled hills.

  The Cray, according to Barry MacSweeney who walked part of it as ‘a hack on the Kentish Times’, was once a ‘first-class trout stream, used by Henry VIII’. At its mouth it is still unspoilt, a surprising thatch of river wheat, tawny with feather-headed rushes. A small Egypt, Mosaic in implication: a removed place.

  But here a path cuts between hedges, back towards Slade Green: a solitary track across Crayford Marshes. An old man, black-jacketed, plods down this narrowing tunnel of perspective; limping, leaning on a stick. I stop to watch, and (of course!) to project on him the spectral avatar of Nicholas Moore. Let him go. I force myself to heed Douglas Oliver’s warning about believing ‘every lame man was a messianic sign’. The figure recedes very slowly, weak-footed, lurching inexplicably from verge to verge, avoiding the gravelled camber at the centre of the lane, tapping for grassy softness.

  He was hooked, for a long time, on a stile. I was hooked also, watching him; thinking of nothing else. The ground between us. He became part of the stile, inhuman, a sack balancing on the rim of disaster. He was forced to look back the way he had come, and to face me: while he lowered himself, tragically slow, legs stiff as planks, towards the expectation of solid earth. I must have appeared to him, at that distance, if he noticed me at all, as a stump or post. And even though I now withdraw all the meaning I can discover in this occluded incident, it will not suffice. I am listening for something else, a voice, a sound: something Peter Riley cites as Moore’s dominant mode, ‘the speech of a variety of statues’.

  If the walk so far has been coated in sensual pleasures, the riposte is swift; the path runs into a storm-fence and further access to the river bank is denied. I am expelled, forcibly parted from the Cray, deposited on a mudslide slope, where lorries (Hell Drivers), cursing from a weighbridge, gun the short track that separates them from the A 206. On either side of this slithering hazard are pens of chemical threat, sacks marked HOPE, inadequately sealed skull-drums, hissing valves: behind which rises a tower, proclaiming itself the ultra-Mosque of Vitbe Bread. Its business is to convert the river wheat to uniform envelopes of
white shame.

  The pub is worse. Any traveller is a leper; a dusty, sweating renegade. A carpet fouler. Born-again barpersons target the Industrial Estate with reflex smiles: Canada Dry, Booker, Chef’s Larder (‘Caring About Catering’). The empty, vaselined suits of salesmen are serviced by over-obliging waitresses in cruelly laundered jeans. The soup of the day is pink, slightly saline, with a limp leaf floating on its custard-like surface. Something lumpy and white has struggled for life in it. And has lost.

  Now the problems really begin. I am disoriented by a fury of traffic, screaming to get away, or cutting – with no signals – into one of many identical service roads. Unknowingly (fume-crazy), I drift north-east, losing all the river’s wisdom: go back on myself towards Erith and the Thames. The first roundabout is a vortex of unconvincing promises: no offered destination holds the slightest attraction for me. Feebly, I aim for the highest ground and shuffle into one of Nicholas Moore’s nightmares: unlittered streets, clean cars, safe margins of grass, lace curtains that twitch faintly as I pass, like the last flicker of breath in an oxygen tent. I shadow the railway embankment, hug to it, a lifeline, a false river that peevishly deposits me at Barnehurst. A nameplate attached to nothing: a subliminal cancellation, an early-morning travel flash. Bad news.