They sectioned me to Shenley. Where I met several writers and a few psychotherapists. Cornflakes, funny-tasting tea, acid and vegetable gardening.
Laingian community life followed my first encounter with the East End. I met Hannah Wolf. We took a room together (very convenient for the North London line) in Compayne Gardens. As friends, colleagues. She wanted to monitor my voyage through insanity. I should have talked my trauma out, but Hannah was too busy, meetings every night, readings at the bookshop, running around doing bits and pieces for Doris Lessing. The writers in West Hampstead were serious. They meant it. They enjoyed company, feuds, affairs, meals eaten off your lap while you talked opera and Angola.
I started to embark on monumental walks; do it that way, I thought, work the gap between personal psychosis and psychosis of the city: the crisis of consciousness lives in faulty synchronisation. Sometimes the city was crazier, sometimes my fugues leapt ahead: fire visions, sunsets over King’s Cross gas holders. We are part of the madness. Monitor everything: weeds, green paint on a wooden fence in Maryon Park, swans hooked by Kosovans on the River Lea, the way an Irish barman in Kentish Town stubs out his Sweet Afton and scratches a cut that never heals on his right wrist. When there is sickness, misalignment in the city, I sweat. I feel warts cropping on my tongue.
I had my first conversation with a living writer, the Guardian columnist Jack Trevor Story, a pub in Flask Walk. He was often there with a large dog and a small woman. He stood out from the usual Hampstead depressives and crossword-fillers. He had style. His mania, evident but lightly worn, convinced me. I decided to move to East London and take up fiction. Those twinned ambitions, symbiotically, brought the world together.
The day after I’d met him, Story rang me – offering, for a very reasonable price, the typescript of his first novel, The Trouble with Harry. The same one I’d seen him sell, twice over, to the bearded man who kept the bookshop on the corner.
Bo-Peep Inn
I began to wonder, witnessing the man gulp his pint of tomato juice, the blooded mouth, if Roos was not that terrible thing, a reformed drunk. The sweats, the trembles. The compulsive gorging, even in this smugglers’ den, of microwaved bangers and soft white bread. Layers of grease combed into thinning hair. Fat fingers gripping the table’s edge. A hard swallow, a dry heave disguised in a fit of coughing. The eyes had it, panic, frantic attempts to summon memory: what am I doing here?
We met on the Marina, by the pink granite fountain; Roos was almost on time. I hadn’t wasted my thirty minutes watching the waves, the lateral drift, the heaping and scattering of small stones. Squadrons of gulls, legs retracted, rising and falling on a fierce tide.
I read: ‘In Affectionate Memory of his Beloved Wife EDITH’. A sturdy pillar erected by James Castello, a Viagra afterthought. I’d known an Edith once, another graveyard, obliterated inscription, a lost woman reborn in one of my fictions. Title forgotten. Her name remains with me: Edith Cadiz. Is emotion for one who never lived, a spectre of the multiverse, legitimate? The fountain was unusual, by London standards, it worked, spurted to order, brass spigot: I cupped my hands and drank.
The marine parade, as Roos and I strolled west towards Bexhill, gushed with water, charitable taps, civic art (concrete disks), toilet facilities with operative basins and clean, flushed troughs. Hotels and tall houses were being restored, paint-licked, made ready for the season, the speculative developers. Old folk, weathered, hand in hand, kept each other upright. Young women, burdened with plastic bags, butting into the wind, left us limping in their wake. Roos, it has to be admitted, was not much of a pedestrian: he was affronted by this sudden loss of status, being naked (unmetalled) in a world of sunlight, sea breezes, dog accompanists, cycle lanes, salt-scorched palms and limp fronds. He wobbled, rolled his shoulders, hoping that the rest would follow. He worked his right foot, speculatively, as if reaching for the accelerator. He squeezed the knobs of the guard-rail like a gear lever. He stood, blinking furiously, waiting for the landscape to race past him.
History was lightly worn in St Leonards. James Burton, in his dotage, carved a town, a post-urban estate (with Classic pretensions), out of the hillside. His son, Decimus, on a commission in Tunbridge Wells, persuaded some free-floating royalty to winter on the coast: the Duchess of Kent and the young Princess Victoria. The usual riffraff–jaded aristos, Irish adventurers, gamblers, pimps, cooks, theatricals – followed. Crescent parks with Gothic follies. Masonic temples. An ugly church, designed by Burton himself, was replaced by an uglier one by Gilbert Scott (the power-station man). During the Second War, a V1 rocket, heading straight for Cunard Court, where a dance was being held in the Grand Ballroom, skidded down the promenade and blew up the elderly architect’s turreted pastiche. Albert Speer in the wake of Sir Walter Scott.
St Leonards was protected from the Old Town (fishermen, street photographers, privateers) by an elaborate, Doric-columned arch that made Temple Bar (in Fleet Street) look like a frame for runner beans. The scale was such that a person called Ballard took space on the south side for the sale of ‘Ladies & Gents Worked Slippers’. When the time came, there was no Temple Bar reprieve (removal to Theobald’s Park, return in triumph to the piazza of St Paul’s): the St Leonards arch was demolished, covertly, in a single night.
Much of the rest, pompous as it appeared, crumbled and cracked. Burton, pinched for funds and credit, dug out local stone (soft, red) for the construction work. He took his sand from the foreshore. Structural faults were soon apparent, blocks laid in the wrong grain. The charm of the natural landscape, woods, modest chasms, sylvan glades, the full Keatsian apparatus, was attacked, denuded, improved. To the point where, at the start of this new millennium, teams of police in masks, anti-bacteriological suits and white rubber boots, are picking through a monstrous landfill site for body parts, weapons used in the slaughter of a local businessman.
None of this mattered. My reflex scepticism was charmed by the seascape, views into tall-ceilinged houses, New Orleans balconies with ornamental ironwork, pink paint: the past as an asset, a free-and-easy marriage, give and take, not an accidental resource to be exploited. The grot and the gracious in perfect harmony: old motors decanting young hopefuls with black bags. Chipboard window panels being taken down. A long-serving Greek restaurant instantly reinvented as a Chinese takeaway. And one vast red box, windowless, like a giant container unit, to oversee the lot. The future in the shape of: CARPET RIGHT.
Jacky is lugging a camcorder but he doesn’t use it. He can’t talk when he’s walking, can’t think: nothing works. The in-flight computer is out of commission. I’m feeling generous, the mood of the morning, so I nudge him towards a pub I’ve spotted, early lunch at the Bo-Peep Inn.
But first: some necessary record of this evocative plaster statue (whitewash over grey conglomerate). The moss, the brown pox. A couple on a raft or bed, unemphatically pornographic in a Tennysonian sort of way: at it. Exposed. Drapes torn back. In the public gardens.
She is bent over his reclining (droopy, sapless) figure. His naked knee (above surgical support stockings, varicose veins) is crooked over hers. She kneels; her arms tight around his neck. His grip has not yet slackened on the long sceptre. A short skirt barely covers the darkness between spread thighs. Her nose has gone, tertiary syphilis. His eye socket: a lichen pad. King Harold and his mistress; another Edith, Edith Swan-Neck.
Very affecting. They say a Norton – Henry of St Clere – handed an archer the fatal arrow. Hastings, battle of: 1066. Up on Battle ridge, where the toffs now live. Normans and Saxons in combat. Henry was one of the uninvited tourists from across the Channel, eye (pale blue) to the main chance. There’s always one of us about, a faceless Norton, putting a cynical spin on triumph or disaster. I inherited the temperament. The inability to take public art on its own terms. Nothing that a few drinks in the Bo-Peep couldn’t cure. If you can’t resolve an argument, photograph it: in the country of the blind, the one-eyed king is the proper symbol.
The lovely
Edith: a white vampire ducking to get at that exposed neck. The fatal infection, love, that passes from generation to generation. Eros and Thanatos.
It didn’t seem to matter where he was, if Jacky had a plate in front of him, he was happy: he gobbled and yapped. He knew about Bo-Peep, the facts. Smugglers, wreckers. The nursery rhyme decoded: Bo-Peep as excise man, sheep as criminals, contraband. When the phone shrills at the bar, a man with tattooed earlobes, neck like a capstan, has to answer, in an embarrassed growl: ‘Allo. Bo-Peep.’
Swallowed by Bexhill Road, umbilically attached to Hastings, Bo-Peep has ceded its outlaw status: rotting craft, decayed foreshore, cheap brandy. Or has it? Checking the bar, I’m not so sure. Solitary session-drinkers marking out their territory with plastic lighters and fresh packs of cigarettes. The bar stools have backs to them, to stop the punters sliding, unexpectedly, to the stone floor.
Women. A couple of near misses. Masses of hair, industrially bleached, teased and tossed. Healthy skin and tidy features. Full slap: as for studio lighting. One of the pair had been mistaken, so I overheard, for the TV weather girl: a boast? But sweet-natured too, talking of their kids, putting it back, licentiously, forking down cod platters with peas and chips. Plum suede: boots and token skirts. Hoop earrings. Dressed for the occasion, this lunch, where their companions, the men, stayed with T-shirts (clean), low-slung jeans – and comfortable silence.
Sunlight filtered by dirty muslin projected the pattern of the arched windows across the table. Roos and Norton: part of the spectacle. The general amnesty. Laughter. Families. Coins rattling in machines. Dogs sleeping under tables. Ordinary, contented humans at their leisure.
And one face that didn’t belong. A woman, by herself, writing at a round table. Postcards spread in a semi-circle. A large glass of yellow wine, untouched. Coup de foudre. Her full shape would all his seeing fill. John Keats, poet: Isabella (Or, The Pot of Basil).
Keats, knife. The words went together.
‘Knife? You want a knife?’ Roos offered. He hadn’t used his own, the one wrappered in a paper napkin. He’d forked, split, speared -licked up the last crumbs. His oval plate was so clean it didn’t need to be stacked in the dishwasher.
Lick. Stack. Dish. Split.
‘Keats. Know the story? Keats in Hastings, the woman?’
(Roos again, picking his teeth.)
All I wanted was for Jacky to shift himself, his imposing bulk, so that I would have a clear view of the woman at the window table. These things don’t happen every day. Ruth was the last time. I remember – stop it, stop it – having her pointed out to me at a poetry reading. (Robert Creeley, since you ask, an art school in Gloucester.) The poets I was with (self-published, private means) were obsessed (it had lasted three weeks now) with one of the students, a great beauty. They never exchanged a word with the woman, knew nothing about her, beyond her looks: her look, its potential. Mysterious – if you were hellbent on mystery. The youths, half crazy, hand-addicted, found her an irritation – of just the kind they thirsted for. Her inaccessibility (untried) was her charm. Dark, full-lipped. The sort of character they’d been told about in Wilkie Collins, Woman in White. Blonde = virtue, dusky = vice. A kind of masculine strength in female form. No form: they knew nothing about previous lovers, previous history. My take, I glanced away from the stage, was: analgesic, spiritual diamorphine, soul drip. Not even, not then, the beginning of something, a flicker in the heart’s muscle. The end, I didn’t know it, of one kind of selfishness, self-absorption.
I really was there for the poetry. Or the prose. The way Creeley, the Black Mountain man, paced his sentences. Husbanded tension. You could hear commas fall. He played the pauses with consummate technique.
And his eye. I was interested in that too, the missing one. Accident. Permanent wink. An asymmetrical Cyclops with a nicely considered beard. The Wyndham-Lewis-like Spanishness of Creeley’s portrait in photographs. The ‘wife’ mystique: always a handsome woman in the frame, wide-eyed to emphasise his loss. A language dandy folded around ocular absence. Le Fou. The Whip. For Love. Close things touched and distance properly registered: an exemplary career.
‘Another?’
It was the only way to see around Roos: by walking to the bar.
‘I couldn’t, not yet. Go another banger.’
‘Drink?’
‘Right.’
‘What?’
‘Tomato. Pint. Plenty of Worcester. Ice.’
While I waited (without annoyance), I turned towards the window, the source of light, the backlit woman who was scribbling in her notebook. Which was, of course, the biggest provocation of all. The amateur existentialists back at the Gloucester reading were driven to frenzy by their desire for women who wrote; they panted like Sicilians on heat, in the wake of a rich young widow in tight black.
Creeley, as he told us, had the thing all poets suffer in youth -and which I was enduring now. ‘My dilemma, so to speak, as a younger man, was that I always came on too strong with people I casually met. I remember one time, well, several times, I tended to go for broke with particular people. As soon as I found access to someone I really was attracted by – not only sexually, but in the way they were – I just wanted to, literally, to be utterly with them.’
J.G. Ballard has a nice line about characters moving through a crowd on their ‘private diagonals’. That’s me. I passed the table close enough to sneak a look at the ring of postcards: London. At night?
Jacky’s tomato juice is solid, pulped gruel, two blots of brown sauce floating on the surface like a bad conscience.
‘Pud?’
‘I think not. But thanks. I don’t really do puddings. Not often, not every day.’
‘Coffee then?’
‘I could try the cod. If you’re sure. It looks flaky and damp, the peas too. Proper wedge chips. OK, I’m on. And bring a couple of sachets of tartare. And maybe one of mayo.’
This time my diagonal sliced across hers, a run at the Ladies: our eyes (if mine hadn’t been afflicted with strabismus) might have met. Recognition. Challenge. An indication that the leopard-print top (sleeveless, straight neck) was a genuine artefact, Fifties, not like the rubbish the other Bo-Peep women found on a rack in Matalan. Scarlet mouth. Expensive smell.
Jacky Roos, his mouth filled with cod (a nasty silver tone in the white), was at his most Belgian: belly satisfied, tomato juice swilled with chasers of black coffee, he wanted to talk. Loosen his belt, strain the bracers. John Keats at Bo-Peep.
Let me summarise. JK, Book II of Endymion: 1817. Poet aged … twenty-two? Delusions (founded and confounded) of eternal fame. Actuality: funds stretched, uncomfortable in his skin, flogging himself from place to place (each worse than the last).
His conviction (the Romantic franchise): ‘I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not.’
Big question: ‘Have you never by being Surprised with an old Melody – in a delicious place – by a delicious voice, felt over again your very Speculations and Surmises at the time it first operated on your Soul – do you not remember forming to yourself the singer’s face more beautiful than it was possible and yet with the elevation of the Moment you did not think so – even then you were mounted on the Wings of Imagination so high – that the Protrotype (sic) must be here after – that delicious face you will see.’
Consequence? Hard travel, coach, foot, sea. The curious notion that a new location would provoke poetry, that’s all it takes. Get out of town: Isle of Wight (agoraphobia), boat to Margate (claustrophobia), Canterbury (Chaucer lost). Hastings. Quitting London, always a mistake: especially for a man lucky enough to be born by one of the City’s ancient gates (Moorgate, future tube disaster). A failed medic who couldn’t cure himself (his poor brother): the lamia waiting, the blood kiss.
Endymion, that epic of ambition, white light, immature rhetoric, is also a map of Keats
’s travels. A road book.
Swart planet in the universe of deeds!
Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds
Along the pebbled shore of memory!
Many old rotten-timbered boats there be
Upon thy vaporous bosom, magnified
To goodly weapons …
That’s Bo-Peep. That’s Hastings. Wave-watching. Mooning about the cliffs. Until Keats sees the woman in the pub: Mrs Isabella Jones.
‘Isabella Jones?’
‘Right.’ Roos said, wiping his nose. ‘She was travelling with an Irishman, decrepit, uncertain temper, dubious connections. And –’
‘My mother was a Jones.’ Typical non sequitur. Deflecting attention from my interest in the Isabella aspect. The only line I could quote from my own work, the first in a rambling fiction about the Thames, time travel and secret railways: ‘And what,’ Sabella insisted, ‘is the opposite of a dog?’ Dull question, but showy: I knew the answer now. The twin statues in Victoria Park, the Dogs of Alcibiades, with their snouts smashed. Letting in the wind. Overseeing future crimes.
Young Keats met this woman, his own age, was attracted. There may or may not have been a physical relationship (probably not), an exchange of ‘heat’. A kiss. A single embrace. And then she, very obligingly, vanishes. With aspirations to muse status. Or: like the first manifestation of tuberculosis, the lacing of the lungs, the red cough on the sheet.
The dog riddle didn’t matter to me. The pain came from the Sabella part. It’s one of those names I can’t shake off. Like Marina. And Edith. The daughters of Lear in Julia Margaret Cameron’s carbon print (1872) are played by Marina, Edith and Alice Liddell: the Lewis Carroll gang, Alice in Wonderland jailbait. River sirens. Joseph Conrad’s fatal (and invented) islands in Nostromo are called the Isabels.
Dining on Stones Page 28
