Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  I absolutely refused my new partner’s psychoanalytic overtures. I wouldn’t, couldn’t, on pain of death, reveal my dreams. The raw material of future books. ‘You operate,’ Hannah told me, ‘an extremely effective schizoid defence mechanism against exhibiting signs of your evident clinical depression.’ We could barely sleep in the same room: Hannah dreamt my unwritten narratives. She saw the Hackney house as a boat, washed over by giant waves – three weeks before my first trip to the coast. My deposit on the seafront flat. Hannah said that I lived too compulsively in the visible (boxes of photographs, paintings). She made me listen to music, gloom, moaning, Schnittke (as performed by the Kronos Quartet).

  ‘Spirit,’ she announced, ‘has no eyes. After death, in the cosmic stream, you’re blind.’ She touched invisible shapes, described biographies for my savagely repressed alternate lives. I felt like a child-killer, aborting better selves. I suffered from ontological insecurity. I used the false avatar of city-as-body as a way of avoiding a deep-rooted conviction of impotence.

  Hannah didn’t read novels. Poetry and Marxism. She was fantastic in bed, generous and greedy – with a European dignity and relish for dirt that I had never previously encountered. But she would talk. She insisted upon equal use of my work room. For her therapy sessions. I could have 8.30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Afternoons were hers. The walls, the floorboards, the curtains, the fabric of my chair: infected by hours and hours of deranged monologue. Lies. Confessions. Fetishes. Regressions. Rebirths. Language that drove me to the borders of alcoholism. Instead of taking off for my afternoon walk, I hung around the house, trying to eavesdrop on Hannah’s intimate séances.

  Second-wife syndrome. This time I disappeared. Without a word. I hid out on the south coast. I knew that silence was the worst thing I could do to Hannah. Now there would be no dreams. She would have nothing to interpret, nothing to complain about. If I left it long enough, phased it right, before I came back to Hackney, she’d be gone.

  And she was. Leaving a long, closely argued, loving, vituperative letter behind her. I read the first dozen pages and put it aside. I didn’t deserve this. Hannah had too large a soul for me. I regretted Ruth (bitterly, bitterly), airbrushed Hannah from my CV. And wished her well in her trashed flat, her excrement-smeared, needle-carpeted corridor in Goldfinger’s tower block overlooking the flood pool of the A13.

  Brick Lane

  By the time we crossed Bethnal Green Road and started down Brick Lane, I knew Track was a walker. The look, dress-in-the-dark potluck with stout boots and rucksack, was reassuring. She didn’t talk too loudly or make a fuss about curious details she’d noticed. She was alongside, on the move, keeping her own counsel. If she didn’t know what I was on about, she had the grace to let me run with it, uninterrupted.

  I wanted to find out about that name, Track, where it came from, so I asked about her work instead.

  ‘I’m making a real change right now.’

  What Seed told me about Track, his enthusiasm, set me off in entirely the wrong direction: Jimmy liked painters who ran variations on his own style and scale. Make it big. Loud. Expensive. I wasn’t used to disinterested patronage. Usually, when a Sixties veteran, survivor on the circuit, deigned to notice the work of a young painter, to call me over to visit the studio, there was a disguised agenda, a payoff. ‘I’ll get this old fart to write you up in Modern Painters and you’ll let me into your knickers.’

  Track, by her own choice, nothing to do with Jimmy’s recent landscapes, operated on boards or canvases that could rarely be manoeuvred out of the locations where they were painted: fire stations, cooling towers, fish-packing sheds, municipal swimming pools. She slept where she worked. East London, Hackney to Poplar, Shoreditch to Stepney, had been colonised, peanut factories, fur warehouses, printworks, by self-described artists (ie., non-citizens). Transients. They incubated prospects for ‘socially responsible’ architects (stable conversions, brewery renovations, synagogue makeovers). Wolfish developers with collarless shirts and an interest in rewiring history.

  Jimmy conformed, his best canvases looked like blow-ups from an estate agent’s digitally enhanced display panel. He used the cameras they used; he projected industrial ruins, cinemas, pool halls, onto a screen. And he painted by numbers. In New York, where the sites he favoured meant nothing, they loved his work: for the colour (absence of). So English! The space-filling potential. Possessing a Jimmy Seed was the best way to visit London, Europe. A price tag that guaranteed respectability.

  Track recorded: manhole covers, curls of paint peeling from warm pink brick, Victorian tradesmen’s faded boasts. Graffiti. FUTURE EVENTS. ANGEL LETTING. FAT BOY/HUSBAND. RUHEL SUCK ON YOUR MOTHER. STOP DIRTY WAR IN KURDISTAN. FUCK MY HEAD IS MELTING. NO BLOOD FOR OIL. NOT CRICKET, SCREAM.

  ‘What really sucks in this neighbourhood,’ she said, ‘is the spray-can guys, they’re all pros.’

  She was right. Brick Lane was a permanent exhibition of look-at-me graphics, stencils, retro-Situationism. Track did not, she announced, buy into the current Birkbeckian vogue for psychogeography. Goldsmiths, the RCA. That mob, over the river in Lewisham. They were awash with it. Stewart Home and his chums didn’t realise what a monster they were liberating when they started to rip off Guy Debord and the Lettrists. French philosophers have never played over here; not on their own terms, not in French. But they get their revenge, in the Brits they choose to honour. In Paris they adore the psychotic nightmares of novelist Derek Raymond (Edgar Wallace noir), a London of rain, festering meat beneath Catford floorboards, rats up the rectum, serial killers with Shelley on the brain; we suffer wankers spouting Baudrillard, Derrida, flannel about flâneurs.

  Tiny, luminous panels. Miniatures too complex to read as discrete items. Words. Symbols. Tracings. That was Track’s current method: bring the work down in scale, a level of abstraction that can be accommodated in a moleskin notebook. Each page a block. Each block a world.

  ‘London won’t fit in my pocket? I’ll try someplace else.’

  ‘In my day,’ I said, playing the crusty (barbers were already offering pensioner’s discount), ‘self-respecting artists worked in the brewery as labourers, they didn’t sit around drinking espresso and fantasising about a show at White Cube. The only white cubes they understood were impregnated with acid.’

  ‘Right.’ She smiled. ‘I love the old standards too.’

  From her rucksack, Track produced a fat book; a novel, written in the last typewriter decade, that described a walk down Brick Lane. The journey we were now making, a parallel tracking shot. A once-familiar dérive into Princelet Street, past the synagogue where David Rodinsky lived with his mother and sister in a small cluttered room. And then, alone, with fifty cases of books. Wind-up gramophone. Millet calendar. Bus tickets. London A-Z. Bundles of sodden newspaper.

  They were queuing, school kids in beanies (David Beckham) and oversize battledress, outside the brewery, for a freakshow. Body parts. Plasticised, waxwork flesh: in all its contemporaneous, stop-frame banality. A Dr Strangelove franchise. The twenty-first-century equivalent of the Elephant Man, blanket around shoulders, huddled over a heated brick. Or, tidied away in his London Hospital apartment, visited by the great and good: the Exhibit.

  In Track’s battered old novel, pages loose as a junkie’s teeth, Brick Lane was adrift in time, unanchored; much as it had been at the time of the Krays (the Ripper, Mayhew and the Quaker philanthropists). Two characters – Track detached the relevant sheet – set off to visit the Princelet Street synagogue, relishing the exoticism of the area, its connections to Polish ghettoes, shtetlach in the Ukraine.

  The turn into Princelet Street, from Brick Lane’s fetishist gulch of competing credit-card caves, is stunning. One of those welcome moments of cardiac arrest, when you know that you have been absorbed into the scene you are looking at: for a single heartbeat, time freezes.

  We are sucked, by a vortex of expectation, into the synagogue, and up the unlit stairs: we are returning, approaching something that has
always been there. The movement is inevitable.

  As is the prose. I could have written it in my sleep. I remember doing a very similar piece for the Guardian, commissioned by that wise man, Bill Webb: on Rodinsky. As usual, I took it far too seriously, months of research, nights sleeping on the floor of the weaver’s garret, cultivation of feline characters from the Spitalfields Heritage Trust. All for nothing. Webb retired to Oxford. The new people at the Guardian didn’t know what I was talking about. The guy who produced Track’s novel must have stolen my notes and given them a language spin. Words like ‘Vortex’ betrayed a background in Wyndham Lewis, a Cambridge connection. A post(humous)-modernist, cocky, slumming it for a season: straight out of Liverpool Street Station, research file bulging with John Rodker, Mary Butts, Isaac Rosenberg, Aleister Crowley. Ten minutes in Elder Street, curry pit-stop in Brick Lane, drink in the Seven Stars (Jimmy Seed sketching strippers), and they think they’ve cracked it.

  Track pointed, with distaste, to a stencilled artwork on the mustard-yellow brick of the old brewery, a Thatcher figure embracing a bomb: the artist had signed his cartoon!

  Shamed, we turned west into Princelet Street, self-consciously waiting for the hit the novelist described, the Wellsian time jump. And it was still there. Like a quotation. Brick Lane graffiti had itself been graffiti’d: base ground for ruder signwriters. A demonic dandy (heroin Goth, cockscomb) customised with a pair of purple wings. Awarded a chalk spliff. Tagged. Then made to spout political slogans. The level of visual sophistication was absurd. BNP / ROCK AGAINST RACISM polarities: faded as the boasts of defunct hairdressers, radio-valve salesmen, furriers and tailors. Posters peeled from posters. Cheap glue wrinkled torn paper like elasticated stockings on the ghosts of bin-searching old ladies.

  Blue plaques, boasting of poverty and benevolence, Jewish boxers, forgotten politicians, infested restored Georgian properties. Satellite dishes for the heritage classes (commissioned from Wedgwood). A kind of life – afterlife – had returned, behind the period shutters, the authentic doorcases.

  ‘Only in Spitalfields,’ said a local architect, stopping off between projects, ‘are householders, whatever their wealth, just two inches, literally, from ordinary folk. No porch, no barrier. We may have fine wines, furniture, libraries, but there’s absolutely no separation from … streetlife. We can smell the market, hear the voices of children.’

  Princelet Street was deserted. The synagogue, which now enjoyed an ambiguous status as a potential display case of immigration, appeared to be closed. I imagined it, in a fever of impotent fury, as an archaeological museum in Baghdad, after the Second Gulf War, looted, cleaned up, handed over to an occupying power with no interest in deep-culture traces. It awaited funds (millions) for restoration. And, meanwhile, to pass the time, it hosted occasional, by invitation, media events. Rodinsky’s room had been scoured, the rogue scholar tidied away. The stairs were unsafe, visits were discouraged. A young artist, carrying out a memory project, eager to gain access, was required to put up a £2,000 bond.

  My wife Hannah (whose status was even more ambiguous than that of the museum) knew Rachel Lichtenstein, the woman who uncovered the mystery, Rodinsky’s life, death, burial place. Hannah and Rachel grew up together in Southend. They clubbed in Hackney, worked on a kibbutz, attended conferences in Kraków. I visited the room with them. Saw poetry readings, heroically cold, orange flames wavering from the candelabrum in the draughty synagogue. Shots of pure Polish spirit laid out on a table in the entrance hall. Shrouded objects stacked in dark corners.

  Skin like alabaster.

  I tried, when Track lifted her arm, brushing warm brickwork, to scan the revealed flesh. Was mainline addiction the origin of that curious name? She saw me looking and pulled down her sleeve.

  The peeling pink door, at the far end of Princelet Street, hadn’t changed. In appearance. Its continued existence, its knowing distress, was perverse: Wilkes Street (named after Nathaniel, brother of John, the radical, champion of the mob, editor of The North Briton) gave shelter to Tracey Emin and a raft of merchant bankers and art moguls. ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’

  The house sold itself by a strange act of impersonation, continuing to be what it never was – outside time. Wall panels, dark timber, candle-holders; the narrow, twisting staircase up which comic-book genius Alan Moore, backlit like a Dürer Christ, climbed to his fate: the discovery of a legendary magical primer, the summoning of those demonic entities, the Vessels of Wrath. A long-forgotten drama.

  I’d been involved in a minor way with this film, directed by Jamie Lalage, at the point where he’d dropped out of features, out of Morse-type travelogues for the Tourist Board, into late-night TV. Taking me on, as untrustworthy guide to the labyrinth, was seen by his peers as a suicide note, a cry for help. Jamie was expelled from the Barbican and deposited in a carpet warehouse in Archway: the confirmation of their thesis.

  I won’t bore you with full-frontal nostalgia. This is a slasher précis of the yarns I threw at Track. Spitalfields had worked its old magic, I rapped like a speed freak. Lalage’s film, The Cardinal and the Corpse – ‘Too many corpses, not enough cardinals’ (Time Out) – was a wake for Whitechapel, a party for the near-dead, a hooley for vampires who’d just heard that the blood bank was foreclosing. The best of the London writers: Derek Raymond (RIP), Alexander Baron (gone but not forgotten), Michael Moorcock (vanished into the Texas badlands). Mythic book-runners: Dryfeld (disappeared) and Nicholas Lane (relocated to another dimension). All present in that secular synagogue, the house with the peeling pink door.

  There were two stories: Moore’s magical primer that held the secrets of the city and a search for the journals (confessions) of a man called David Litvinoff, who had been ‘dialogue coach & technical adviser’ on the film Performance. Litvinoff, it seems, grew up in Whitechapel. He knew everybody, Krays, Lucian Freud, Jagger. And Joey Silverstein (we’ll come back to him). Joey the Jumper was definitely in the film, rueful at a Formica table as his long-suffering partner, Patsy – who had the lovely, brittle style of middle-period Christine Keeler – blew the whistle. Joey had the copyright on paranoia; bitten fingernails, hand through greying hair. Withdrawn smile. Another cigarette. Deep drag. Smacked lips.

  There were no journals.

  Joey had been Litvinoff’s lover, there at the finish, the suicide in the country. He admitted as much. There were reel-to-reel tapes, hours of them, covertly recorded telephone conversations, as Litvinoff worked his way through a cardboard box of vodka bottles. He wound up his victims, cruelly exposed their pomposity, greed, their ambition to get into Jagger or Nigel Weymouth or Christopher Gibbs. Then he yawned in their faces, fell asleep, phone in hand. He wasn’t well. He had money, cashmoney, the wad, and was flash with it. He had nothing. The kind of negative equity that had gangsters hanging him out of a window with a shaved head (useful research for Performance). Litvinoff was the conduit, more runs (east-west) than the Circle Line. Just as unreliable. He died and must have been buried somewhere, the tapes with him. Nobody knew. Only a few film anoraks, paperback collectors in places like Canterbury and Hastings (great for charity shops), cared.

  The house with the pink door twinned itself with Prague and started to appear in Dickens. When Alan Moore’s Victorian Gothic, Jack the Ripper deconstruction, From Hell, was filmed by a pair of black brothers (‘it’s a ghetto story’), a facsimile of the house, of Princelet Street, was constructed in Poland.

  At the time of The Cardinal and the Corpse, Joey’s dad, Snip Silverstein, was still working (off the book) in an unrestored upstairs room in the Princelet Street house: smart suits for hoods, for City sharpies who strolled across from Bishopsgate – and parody ‘Fifty Shilling Tailor’ streetwear for Gilbert and George. Snip started as a barber, obviously, given his size (diminutive), his gift of the gab. When Raphael Samuel passed on, he was the last working Jew in Elder Street.

  The little barber was the reason for my baldness. His stories, in the chair, were so enthralling, I kept c
oming back. I demanded a trim every afternoon: to find out what happened next. He’d learnt his trade in the army, during brief periods in camp, Colchester, Catterick. Most of the time he’d gone over the wall, getting away, not from the red caps, but from an irate husband or father. He took up hairdressing, so he said, to make sure he had an adequate supply of rubbers for the weekend.

  Spielers were Snip’s undoing. The old Whitechapel double act, industry and indolence: periods of hustle (Hoffmann presser, gentleman’s outfitter in Shaftesbury Avenue, bookie’s runner) undone by lost Sundays gambling with Jack Spot: gangster, razorman, hero of Cable Street. Fabulist. Jack and Snip were like – that. Blood brothers. With one difference. Jack kept his loot, relocated, up west, south coast, abroad. Snip stayed put: dapper, shiny shoes, lemon waistcoat, trilby. He attended shul with small businessmen and television personalities he’d known since they were snotty-nosed kids thieving from the stalls in Middlesex Street.

  ‘I could kill for a tea,’ Track said.

  I wanted a bacon sandwich. Thinking about Snip made me peckish. Snip and Joey, father and son, Pellicci’s in Bethnal Green Road, like refugees from Alexander Baron’s novel, The Lowlife. Joey was a voracious reader. Snip never got beyond the racing pages and the Torah. But Joey deferred, treated his old man with slightly shocked courtesy: he presented him to outsiders as a great wonder, an oracle from a vanished world. Battles with Mosley’s blackshirts, runs out to Brighton races, stitch-ups in Denmark Street. The fortunes Snip lost on a turn of the cards were replicated by the great books Joey held in his hands – before peddling them for a necessary pittance in Camden Passage or Cecil Court. Pre-war Faulkners in pristine wrappers. A beautiful run of early Waughs. The Colin MacInnes trilogy: all inscribed to Joey (a late friend).