Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  ‘I have … a thing … I want you to do,’ Mocatta rattled: as his back went into spasm.

  ‘I’m awfully busy just now,’ I said. ‘Fat novel months overdue. Publishers making unpleasant noises. You can’t rack up advances these days and forget about them. I used to make a tidy living inventing titles over lunch in Charlotte Street. Now they send in the heavies or take you to court.’

  Mocatta cracked his knuckles: a Moorcock villain from a shilling-shocker. He was much more like Jerry’s evil brother, Frank. The wheel of fate had completed its spin: where Jerry Cornelius fought the Vietnam War in London (from the roof of Derry and Toms), Mocatta (arms dealer, land shark) brought Mesopotamia to Fair-light. Along with his flying boat.

  Driving out of town, scarf blowing in the wind, Cornelius tuned in to Radio Potemkin, The Moquettes. See: A Cure for Cancer, first edition, p. 191. Moquette, Mocatta. Mock Hatter. The city was on fire.

  Identity drifted. Titles were optional. Place was absolute. Mocatta saw himself as the direct inheritor of Ford and Conrad. A gentleman farmer who didn’t farm. A writer who didn’t write – but was the cause of writing in others (future memoirs). Mocatta, as a name, belonged in Conrad’s fictional country, Sulaco. The Occidental Province where Hamburg Jews, Italian freedom-fighters, Masons, mad priests and men in love with silver were welcomed and absorbed.

  ‘One question,’ Mocatta persisted, ‘before I make my modest proposal. Can two men write one book? I’m thinking of Ford and Conrad. The total collapse Conrad underwent with the completion of Nostromo – and how Ford stepped in, took dictation, even composing that pivotal section, the conversation between Martin Decoud and Antonia Avellanos, the dark spirit of place. Oh, the subtlety, the spaces around the couple, the shadows. The stage business with the lost fan. Ford’s technique, barely perceptible, injects one drop of blood into the ice. The pure adventure story, Treasure Island revised by Dostoevsky, is lifted to another dimension. And I want you to play the Ford role for me. Write my story. I have the words, obviously, but not the time. My daughter can help.’

  I thought: fantastic. This situation. A library of sodden books stuck board to board. The missing wall. Brilliant light from the sea. Two characters, on the verge of hysteria, testing each other out, arguing over authorship – when they are both ghosts, deletions, figments of nobler writers’ fading imaginations. Skull talking to skull.

  Mocatta was Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius (a character leased to many hacks and visionaries). I came to him late in the day, when Jerry was pretty much played out, cycle completed. (And not yet bought by Hollywood.) Moorcock, prolific composer of sword-and-sorcery epics, labyrinthine London tales, had retired to Lost Pines, Texas: cleaner air (so he thought), different prejudices, a gracious property (very much like this one). In his exile (compulsive consumer of British newsprint, addict of Radio 3), the great mythographer must have been amused by some piece I’d written. He made ‘Taffy’ Norton the bonehead sidekick of his ‘metatemporal detective’, Sir Seaton Begg. A muscular Christian pathologist in the tradition of Dr Watson. Norton puts dumb questions quite effectively and consumes hearty breakfasts.

  ‘Who does the graft and who gets the credit?’ said Mocatta. ‘Orson Welles and Graham Greene arguing over the provenance of a wisecrack about cuckoo clocks. Pathetic!’

  He pulled a slim black volume from the shelf: Nicholas Delbanco, Group Portrait (Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James and H.G. Wells).

  A conscious and conscientious effort to subordinate his sense of self, the idiosyncratic diction that asserts identity. Or the opposed identities may have, momentarily, merged. It shows the degree to which collaboration can forge prose parts into a seamless whole. As Conrad was fond of saying, and Ford proud to report, ‘By Jove … it’s a third person who is writing.’

  ‘That’s what I require from you: the Harry Lime factor, the Third Mind. Keep me back in the shadows as long as you can, a cocktail of criminality and poetry. But stress my ability to notice the tonality of a marine sunset as I strangle a tart in an Eastbourne hotel.’

  ‘Is there a fee?’

  ‘Six months’ rent on Cunard Court, I control the property. No junkies on your floor, I guarantee. And I switch the drum and bass operation – persuading wrinklies to move on – over to D block. Reasonable? You give Hastings a bit of literary varnish and Hastings gives you a living – fair?’

  ‘Food, books, council tax, electricity?’

  ‘You’ll have to graft, bar work, minicabbing. The world doesn’t owe you a living, you ponce, just because you’ve knocked out four novels in thirty years scrounging off the generosity of publishers.’

  I walked away from him: the edge of the room, the edge of the world. With one soft eye, I was no judge of distance. This was my moment of choice, keep walking or sign another, probably terminal, Faustian contract. Unable to appreciate the detail in the cloud, pinky-mauve behind grey, breaks in the flocculent membrane, I went with fine gradations of sound: unfathomable depths grumbling and shifting, small waves breaking and dragging on shingle, gulls, rustling leaves, footfall on gravel, distant shouts, children’s voices in the country park.

  ‘Let’s keep it simple,’ Mocatta said. ‘I see my story as a blend of documentary and hommage – what might vulgarly be called fiction. The model will be Conrad, Nostromo. Just call the book: Mocatta. Very much the Conrad feel. I’m the title part but I’m not always on stage, do the Harry Lime thing again – build me up through contradictory accounts, shreds of gossip, newspaper cuttings.’

  ‘Is there a plot, a structure?’

  Mocatta laughed. ‘Brink’s-Mat,’ he said, ‘the Heathrow bullion blag. Gold for silver – geddit? How the robbery connects with the construction of the M25, Falklands War, ecstasy trafficking, asylum-seekers. The large picture – politics, media, business – I’ll fill you in. You can pick most of it up in one afternoon in the clubhouse of the London Golf Club in Swanley. They all belong: Denis Thatcher, Sean Connery, Kenny Noye, Kelvin McKenzie, Kerry Packer (overseas member, obviously).’

  ‘I don’t play, never have.’

  ‘Neither do they. Swanley’s much too civilised. Think of it as an eighteenth-century coffee house. Investments and sex.’

  ‘So gold is the motif. What about the characters?’

  ‘You can do the lowlife, villains, chancers, artists. I’ll point you in the direction of the serious players. And I’ll be there in the wings, glamorous, well dressed–but obscurely troubled. The secret wound.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Your business to find out. Succeed and I’ll kill you.’

  ‘Location?’

  ‘South coast. The coastal province, the new republic: Pevensey Bay to Folkestone. Old freedom-fighters from the Balkans, bent doctors, retired mercenaries drinking away their guilt: it’s on a plate. My life, I don’t know what I’m paying you for. The Nostromo parallels write themselves. The search for the treasure? Coppers digging up builders’ yards in Hastings. You can plant the gold bars in … Canvey? Isle of Grain? By the Dungeness Lighthouse? No, I’ve got it, one of those off-shore forts, Thames Estuary. Perfect. You’ll sell hundreds of thousands, film’s in the bag. Give it plenty of that magic realism, coke-skewed actuality, fast-breeding metaphors, and I may chuck in another six months in Cunard Court, gratis. A year if you’re short-listed for the Booker.’

  ‘Where is the bullion? It might help if I knew which areas to avoid. You don’t want metal-detector freaks blundering over your property.’

  Mocatta was gripping one of the shelves, his back again, spur of bone pressing on lumbar nerves. Interview concluded, time to be moving on. Why do we have to talk in the shorthand of comic-strip bubbles? Why can’t we be granted the dignity of Jamesian paragraphs, the unspoken, flicks of hair, turns around the garden, silent contemplation of art works?

  ‘You stupid, or what? There never was any bullion, cunt. Urban myth. Insurance scam from the off. Bit of business that grew out of the landscape of perimet
er fences, bonded sheds, proximity to motorway. A fucking fiction. And we all did very nicely on it. Cops, customs, legit and semi-legit Kent and Essex entrepreneurs. Half the faces from the Elephant have brought property in Biggin Hill on the back of the Brink’s-Mat scam. The rest are in Cyprus.’

  I was too dim, too slow to pick up the connections: a fossil from the age of paper. Paper was truth. Touch it, smell it, always faithful. I knew how to navigate those tides, that sea: novels, essays, travel journals, poetry. Everything said that needed to be said. The clues all in place. Names named. Hastings had played its part in the invention of television, the whoredom of electricity. Now they were up for broadband internet connections, the world in your lap. I was finished, doomed like those decent, backstreet bookshops. Corrupted by a sentimental attachment to a past that never happened.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I lied.

  He stared at my outstretched hand, a turd on a silver plate. He was a man of extreme, probably clinical, fastidiousness – camping in a ruin, a bombed-out palace: Blenheim as Butlin’s, Camber Sands.

  The genre he proposed was provocative: South American multilayered fiction as practised by an alien (a thief). Revolution, colonialism, a fabulous harbour. Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (published in 1904) was not only the summation and synthesis of a number of white-world tendencies, but also a template for Marquez, Fuentes (pinch of Stephen Crane) and Jorge Luis Borges. (I remember the great Argentinian myth-maker being asked about his favourite films. ‘Westerns,’ he replied. Imagine that: a blind man in a half-deserted, afternoon cinema, confronted by widescreen prairies, mesas, buttes, rock chimneys. Films composed by directors with eye-patches, bandits. A theatre of sound, full orchestra and spare dialogue. West of the Pecos. Mitchum growling his way through Raoul Walsh’s Pursued.)

  Lists again (the defining contemporary vice). Compose a new list, best of, just like television, to stop my knees giving away. Before I run to the kitchen, make my escape. Let’s see. What can you offer on ‘South American’ or ‘Central American’ novels (or films) by European writers and artists? They have to be authentic: texture and soul. Snake inside sugar egg.

  I nominate: Malcolm Lowry for Under the Volcano (novel, not film). B. Traven for everything from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to The White Rose. Werner Herzog, Luis Buñuel. R.B. Cunninghame Graham (mate of Conrad). W.H. Hudson. Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe filmed by Buñuel). Georges Arnaud for The Wages of Fear (film and book: oil, nitroglycerine, sweat). William Burroughs for The Yage Letters. (I wouldn’t, as a general rule, include Americans, but Bill’s a dark twin of T.S. Eliot, same birthplace, so I’ll make an exception. Apologies to John Huston, Sam Peckinpah and Budd Boetticher.)

  Burroughs also qualifies as a Conrad obsessive.

  ‘One of my favourites is Joseph Conrad. My story, “They Just Fade Away”, is a fold-in from Lord Jim. In fact, it’s almost a retelling of the Lord Jim story. My Stein is the same Stein as in Lord Jim.’

  That’s Burroughs in a Paris Review interview. A yarn he repeated when I met him in Lawrence, Kansas, second drink in hand, sun dropping, cat on lap. Minder moving in to whisper something in his ear.

  My wild card is the little-known novel More Things in Heaven by Walter Owen. Owen, an initiate, lived for a time in Buenos Aires. He produced a sequence, linked narratives involving spontaneous combustion and a cursed manuscript, that seems in some ways to prefigure Borges (with a dash of M.R.James). Owen’s book, difficult to find, has itself become a talisman, possession (unless it can be passed on to an unsuspecting recipient) conferring malfate, paranoid delusions, death. I rid myself of my original copy, but still have the second – which arrived, anonymously, as barter against a bad debt.

  Mr Letherbotham, a middle-aged bachelor who for some years had earned a somewhat precarious livelihood as free-lance journalist and reporter attached to one of the local English newspapers, was found dead in his apartment on the fourth floor … The body of Mr Letherbotham was seated at a small writing-table. It was evident that he had been in the act of writing when death overtook him …

  I was fascinated and appalled as I read and re-read the thirty or forty scribbled pages which had littered the floor of the room in which in the silence of the night death had come to their writer in a mysterious and dreadful form. And gradually I found the conviction forming in my mind that the story they unfolded was not fiction but a narrative of factual events, and that from them an astonishing inference might be drawn regarding the manner in which the tragedy had been brought about…

  Mr Letherbotham’s first name, I remember, was: Cornelius. Accident or warning? ‘I was struck by the coincidence,’ stated Owen, ‘if indeed it was a coincidence and not a clue to some hidden connection.’

  Back in the Seventies, when I had a cash-in-hand job, tracking down living associates of John Cowper Powys on behalf of a rag-trade millionaire, I got to know another member of the Kings Road retinue, the poet Hugo Manning. Manning, working as a correspondent in Buenos Aires, came across Owen. They shared an interest in the occult. In verse. Hugo showed me, with pride, the inscribed copies of Owen’s translations of The Gaucho Martin Fierro and Don Juan Tenorio, which he later sold to the West Hampstead dealer, Eric Stevens.

  Was Hugo, in fact, the model for Mr Letherbotham?

  It didn’t take much prompting to tease out the story. Hugo never came to terms with English weather; mopping his brow, he sweltered (visible vest, thick woollen shirt, tweed jacket, duffel coat), battling primitive central-heating systems. He was a man confused, as lost as Conrad’s Captain Mitchell, returned, after years in Sulaco, to England. Hugo puffed away at his pipe, doodled with coloured pens in the ever-present ledger: portraits of hangers-on in his patron’s office. He had the nautical beard, the garrulousness traditional in Ancient Mariners. There was always a yarn to be spun – in words whose order never changed.

  Hugo was the conduit between Walter Owen and Borges (although the two writers never exchanged a word). Memories of Owen, the mystical journalist – and even, perhaps, his cursed book – were passed on when Manning formed his rather one-sided acquaintance with the blind librarian. Living in Swiss Cottage, years later, as a humble member of Canetti’s circle, Hugo published a private press booklet on Borges.

  Yes, he told me, the Argentinian never tired of expressing his enthusiasm for De Quincey, Stevenson, Chesterton and the Beowulf epic, but his great love was … Conrad. Borges, according to Hugo, insisted upon the intimate relationship of document and fiction. He quoted Bioy Casares: ‘I think Conrad is right. Really, nobody knows whether the world is realistic or fantastic, that is to say, whether the world is a natural process or whether it is a kind of dream, a dream we may or may not share with others.’

  Borges and Manning. The blind man and the old sailor with the clear blue eyes. Long afternoons at café tables – neither man was a serious drinker – discussing the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. Hugo was a Jew and a scholar. They were, if you like, study partners. It was Borges’s fancy to claim some Jewish blood, on the side of his Portuguese mother. I understood very well, from the things that Hugo did not say, that he believed his life’s work, the writing, was pointless. In a world of correspondences and balances, demons and angels, everything worth saying had been said. His laboured verses were tributes to a music his ears were too thick to catch. Borges, on the other hand, fan of cowboys and knifemen, high romance and hermetic pulp, recognised the world as a labyrinth of texts and echoes, a forest where the blind were the surest guides.

  The women were head to head over a plate of Marmite sandwiches (I could smell them); Marmite and anchovy soldiers – to provoke the necessary thirst, the pints of warm sweet tea. They were also, it was quite obvious, immodestly drunk: as the proper response to Mocatta’s anachronistic withdrawal.

  ‘Nice little chat, boys?’ cackled the crone. ‘I’d fetch your tea from the oven if my pins was still working.’

  Ollie pushed herself up and came over to her father, hugging him, as he f
linched. Crackled.

  ‘Shall I call a cab for Mr Norton?’

  ‘Let the slag walk. It’s what he’s known for.’

  A walk was fine. Mocatta led me back through corridors that had warped and crumbled, slithered seaward, during the time I’d spent in the library.

  ‘I don’t go out of doors. Agoraphobia – brought on in Belmarsh. I’m like an albino in sunshine.’

  The evening light, dappled leaf patterns, low gold, was inviting. I knew better than to attempt a handshake. Five or six miles back to St Leonards would give me an appetite. I might risk the Balti house with the photo of that satisfied diner, Lord Longford, in the window. The encomium from Cunard Court resident Leslie Ash: ‘Unique!’

  ‘Don’t go tearing off. I’ve got something. Before you start on our book, a little bit of inspiration. You might find we’ve more in common than you imagined. I’ve always had a fancy for genealogy. What’s your middle name?’

  ‘MacGregor. Father’s mother. Or was it grandfather’s second wife? A proscribed name for centuries. Highland banditry, then strategic Jacobitism. Savage blood. We’re proud of it.’

  ‘We could be cousins then.’

  ‘Cousins?’

  ‘Name banned: MacGregor, Mocatta. All the proper Scots dispersed to the colonies,’ he said. ‘Ceylon, Canada, Panama. Why not? Haven’t you come across coal-black Nortons, Nortons in skullcaps? I’ve heard rumours, put about by envious scum, that Mocatta might have a drop or two of the Semite, generations back. We’re both Hebrews in denial, who knows?’

  I was away, breathing rich moist earth, when he called out. The curse of having been a bookdealer left me with perfect recall of the shelves of his library. (The way we can walk into a shop, after three years, and know just where to put a hand on that second edition of Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky with the perfect dustwrapper.) There was a gap in the M section: one volume missing between Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, first English in scuffed d/w, and Julian Maclaren-Ross, The Weeping and the Laughter (A Chapter of Autobiography), first edition, nice copy, slightly faded on spine. Lavish presentation inscription to David Garnett. (I checked.)