Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  ‘Norton. Wait!’

  He was shouting, but I was around the first bend, out of sight, house gone for ever. I felt the hard shape of the brown parcel he’d given me: a book. A curse. I didn’t want it but I couldn’t throw it away. The provenance was too rich.

  Cunard Court

  Sleep knuckled from eyes. Doors thrown wide. And still the town wouldn’t come into focus: so it wasn’t all bad. Women lost. Threats from psychopaths. Bills, bailiffs. A tray of begging letters from maniacs who want a free ride into the writing game. Life as I knew it. Naked feet on rail, coffee cup in hand.

  The sun rises quietly over the pier, a golden triangle dissolving across sleepless waters: the stern-wake of a white stone liner that only travels backwards. Paul McCartney (on Concorde) boasted of witnessing two sunsets in one day; at the rail of Cunard Court (last of the Atlantic queens), the sun never goes down, it solicits admiration – fetch that camera. One more panoramic view of the bay and Beachy Head.

  If another person has been in the flat while I’ve been away, so what? They’re not here now and they left no mess.

  What seas what shores what grey rocks. What is this face, less clear and clearer?

  Not Ollie, surely, not here? The day’s first promenader: scuttling, slowing, breaking into a jog. The mysterious woman from the Bo-Peep Inn? A hot flush, memory spasm: stuck like a wet leaf to the window of a train. Except that trains, as we saw on our walk to Pevensey Bay, don’t move; parked in sheds, in sidings, ancient, dirt-encrusted, with bright new logos.

  Mistah Kaporal – he dead.

  Unsecured tartan dressing gown, flipflops. Grumbling belly, manky hair: Norton aged sixty dripping from the shower. If he doesn’t sit at his desk, six hours straight, what purpose to the man?

  Coffee with just enough Colombian in the blend to make me long for a last cigar. Can I contemplate this temperate seascape with equanimity – and, at the same time, pay my dues to the horrible murder (car over cliff) of an associate I’ve exploited for so many years? Poor Jos. Poor Kaporal. Poor Jacky. Adiós, Ollie (you’re not responsible for your father). Another unrinished book. Draconian penalty clauses for non-delivery. Involuntary amputation, eyes on a skewer.

  I’ll slip out for a croissant, a newspaper. I’ll open Mocatta’s package before I drop it in the bin. I’m too superstitious to dump a book while it is still safe and snug, embryonic in its protective sac. A scarce Ford? An inscribed Conrad? Mocatta is sure to tell me later, when he knows the Jiffy bag has been discarded: he’ll savour my anguish.

  Kaporal’s attic. A blue light. There is always a light – like a TV set that can’t be shut off. Preserve it as Mr K’s memorial. I’d be happy to pay his rent, lock the door, leave the room untouched for years. His legend.

  The book’s a dog. A demonstration of Mocatta’s weakness for genealogical research (last refuge of the snob, the social climber). David Sinclair: Sir Gregor MacGregor and the Land that Never Was (The Extraordinary Story of the Most Audacious Fraud in History).

  Why not? I’ve nothing else to do, I’ve run out of characters (dispersed into more promising narratives). A morning on the balcony, feet up, picking at a book, watching a line of yellow plastic birds, strapped to the rail, spinning for their lives – and, away, away, in the gauzy distance, tiny white yachts. The reassuring hum of traffic, sirens. It takes me a few minutes to realise what’s missing. Mocatta has been as good as his word: the rhythm of drum and bass, two floors down, has stopped. The bleepy silence of intensive care.

  The point my Fairlight patron was trying to make, it soon became clear, was this: Conrad’s Sulaco, a fictional republic based on substantial research, was anticipated in this person MacGregor’s topographic scam. The Scottish adventurer (my relative) invented a real country. He commissioned a guide book and shipped boatloads of the gullible (who paid for the privilege) out of Edinburgh to the swampy and largely uninhabited shores of Poyais on the Mosquito Coast. Like Conrad, he drew from his imagination a coastal province with harbour, public buildings, churches, libraries, grand squares, distant hills.

  Sir Gregor appointed himself General and Cazique, military and political ruler, a combination of the functions of three or four Conrad characters. City bankers backed him, South America in the period after the Napoleonic Wars was fashionable: the Imperium, glutted on military success, was greedy for profit. Sir Gregor MacGregor was the author the times demanded, a literate Archer with a fragrant wife and a fluid sense of actuality.

  I ripped through Sinclair’s book: this was personal. Should I look on myself as a Norton (old Arthur lost in Peru)? Or a MacGregor (sitting comfortably in London conjuring up a fabulous Central American colony and persuading others to invest in it)? Amateur travel writer or professional fraud? In the fevers of these contradictory Highland bloodstreams lay the genesis of my delirium, my schizophrenia.

  As I studied Sketch of the Mosquito Shore, the book MacGregor commissioned (with its engravings of the port of Black River), the final barrier between truth and fiction dissolved. MacGregor (coward and hero) fought in the South American wars of Liberation. He knew Bolívar and enjoyed the privilege of friendship with the legendary General Francisco de Miranda. He betrayed them both. MacGregor was no Garibaldino in honest retirement. And he was certainly not the model for Conrad’s Giorgio Viola. The man who kills Nostromo.

  MacGregor devised a form of fiction that paid, a premature assignation between Bruce Chatwin and get-rich-quick TV. The man was a genius. Poor Arthur Norton, botanist, gold-hunter, vanished into the jungle. His justification, if it lay anywhere, was hidden inside that early Kodak camera: the undeveloped film. Kaporal (on my behalf) had been chasing old ladies, second wives of third cousins, through the net: nothing. The trail was cold. No more Nortons. No relicts dreaming away their twilight years in coastal retirement homes, villas and follies left by Scottish colonialists returned from Ceylon and South Africa.

  I put Mocatta’s book aside: a Japanese flatpack table that threatened to buckle under the weight of a single volume. Nothing to be done. Close my eyes, feel warm breezes from the south-west. Brood on: James Burton (inventor of St Leonards), his pyramid tomb, white hotels, Masonic lodges, parks and crescents. He was as crazy as MacGregor (or so his family thought). Carving a town, a resort patronised by royalty, out of the cliffs: a vision (of fame, loot, immortality).

  Sinclair, digging deep, discovers (to his own satisfaction) the source of MacGregor’s ‘undoubted attachment to South America’. One of his ancestors, implicated in the disastrous attempt to colonise Darien in the late seventeenth century, ‘formed a marriage with a native Princess of the country, from which sprung our hero’. The conman’s unusually dark complexion was therefore explained: his taste for the primitive, the baroque, his inability to discriminate between truth and fiction.

  I leant on the rail, breathing deeply. Hastings shimmered. The height – seven floors up – offered an illusion of omniscience (toy houses in blues, pinks, yellows): more distant than the stars and nearer than the eye. Why not attempt a Philip K. Dick? What was that video? Minority Report. Eyeball recognition. So change your eyes. Pluck them out, score replacements on the black market. Replenish sight.

  Lines from Eliot drumming in my head all morning, occupying the gap left by the spiking of Mocatta’s amplifiers (thumpthumpthump). In Margate, as voyeur, the poet made his existential cri de coeur (or boast): ‘I can connect/Nothing with nothing.’ A bank clerk, under the paving stones of King William Street, looking up through green glass: the legs, the silk-sheathed legs, the clicking heels of typists. Tom Eliot the Nightstalker, his agonised peregrinations: doorways he can’t enter. Libido and lethargy: the hair-shirt, pornographic imaginings in the Cannon Street Hotel. Eliot’s breakdown and seaside convalescence were resolved: the publication of a masterwork. I couldn’t help myself, everything connected with everything. And Eliot was the messenger: Death by Water, The Hollow Men, Marina.

  The conspiracy: to write and rewrite Joseph Conrad, Heart of D
arkness, Nostromo. A voyage, backwards up the birth canal, tagged with epigraphs from the master. I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  One of the letters on my tray was from a woman who had laboured ‘for more than seven years’ making an artist’s book out of Nostromo. Squeezing ghosts of words, with infinite pain and care, until they become abstractions, wave patterns printed on tissue. ‘I am badly distressed,’ she wrote, ‘by my failure to get the work out to even the modest public.’

  But the public is never modest. Nor the writers, the initiates: the possessed. Why should they be?

  Burroughs cuts up Conrad. Graham Greene follows his lawless roads, his journeys without maps (Burroughs cuts him up too). Conradians all: Nostromoners. The name of the society, the brotherhood, it came to me as I stood on the balcony, watching Kaporal’s window, waiting to see what Ollie would do next, clutching my binoculars. (A telescope would be more use now.)

  Nostromoner (Nost-rom-on-er), n.: physicist of language, anonymous disciple of the writer Joseph Conrad (especially Nostromo). One who is dedicated to reworking the major texts and adapting the masks of Conrad’s characters, spurning novelty. Nothing to be written that is not written.

  Grand Master: J.L. Borges.

  The society never meets. No member must acknowledge another. Special interests: the alchemy of false memory, residues floating in the universal mindstream.

  J.G. Ballard, who became a Nostromoner the moment he left Cambridge, was later expelled for announcing himself, to a well-connected television director (son of the Archbishop of Canterbury), on his arrival at Shanghai International Airport, with the words: ‘Hello, James. Mr Kurtz returns to the Heart of Darkness.’

  The expulsion was meaningless (like the mad pronouncements of André Breton and Guy Debord). You can’t belong to a society that doesn’t exist. This is a covert (and imaginary) association whose membership is posthumous, invented by scholars hungry for tenure: forged documents, doctored photographs. Several of the more significant and prolific Nostromoners (Poe, Stevenson, De Quincey) preceded Conrad, contriving their imitations before the original was written or remembered. (All composition is memory.)

  Forge/forget: the cannibalistic closeness of those words. If I lay the book, Mocatta’s gift, The Land That Never Was, across my knees (bony, Quixotic), and remove the pretty dustwrapper (eye-gum) … well then, by weight and shape, you have a laptop. Lift the front board, the lid. Words fall in vertical lines, bar-code rain. Patterns not symbols. Visible echoes. Pattern recognition: the art of the bibliophile, the Nostromoner. It costs nothing to join. Pick up a paperback in any flea market, a cheap Penguin from a Hastings charity shop. Start there. Work up to the hardback (with its megabyte).

  Ballard, serene in Shepperton, started to give away secrets. Book as computer. His story. Title (‘re-memorised’ from Borges): ‘The Index’.

  From abundant internal evidence it seems clear that the text printed below is the index to the unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography of a man who may well have been one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century …

  Who and what does he list? ‘Eliot, T.S., suppresses dedication of Four Quartets … collegium of Perfect Light Movement … Limited Editions Club… Oswald, Lee Harvey…Sex-change, rumoured operation … Telepathy, conducts experiments … Zanuck, Darryl F …’

  Private libraries, arcane societies, Eliot. Ballard might as well have published an article in the Sunday Telegraph (he tried that but nobody noticed). You have to chase remaindered editions to bring the story to closure: a copy of A User’s Guide to the Millennium picked up in Greenwich, after a walk to the site of New Labour’s Dome (closed while uninterested parties argue over the small print of the asset-stripping contracts). Greenwich is a place of pilgrimage for Nostromoners: an anarchist’s bomb, lifted from newsprint, destroying the interpersonal dynamics of a fictional family: The Secret Agent.

  Before you flip Ballard’s millennial computer, examine the photo-collage dustwrapper (icons and influences). Check out the suspects: Graham Greene (top right, very shifty) and (top left) Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now (Coppola’s folly).

  Conrad resists cinema: Orson Welles’s aborted trial run (pre-Kane) at Heart of Darkness, the career suicide of Nicolas Roeg’s straight-to-oblivion version. Welles was a lifelong Nostromoner (three Conrad scripts, all unmade). ‘I don’t suppose there’s any novelist except Conrad who can be put directly on the screen,’ he told Peter Bogdanovich. He smuggled Heart of Darkness onto radio (nobody listened), then conceded: ‘There’s never been a Conrad movie, for the simple reason that nobody’s done it as written.’

  Conrad, on a healthy retainer from the Lasky company, wrote a silent-screen adaptation of ‘Gaspar Ruiz’ (Gaspar the Strong). Lasky rejected the script, it was shelved. In company with his literary agent, J.B. Pinker, Conrad travelled to Canterbury to view Maurice Tourneur’s film of Victory. The Silver Treasure, a film based on Nostromo, was made in 1926, and is now lost. There are no known prints in any of the great collections. Orson Welles’s footage for Heart of Darkness can be found in the Lilly Library, Indiana University.

  Affiliated Nostromoners who smuggled Conradian material into the cinema include: Alfred Hitchcock (Sabotage), William Wellman (Dangerous Paradise), Carol Reed (Outcast of the Islands), Andrzej Wajda (The Shadow-Line). Richard Brooks, Terence Young and David Lean are not Nostromoners. A fact confirmed by Lean, who died in his riverside conversion at Limehouse while labouring over his long-term obsession, a script based on Nostromo.

  I didn’t dispose of the User’s Guide dustwrapper without scanning it for additional information. There wasn’t any, a random (post-Pepper) iconographic sweep: Aldous Huxley, two (dead) Beatles, Presley, Warhol, Humphrey Bogart, Ronnie Reagan. Generic necrophilia. Freud, Dalí, Marilyn Monroe: faces looking for T-shirts. Torn newspapers. Motorways. A poster for Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

  Graphic scrim. Lose the wrapper. Flip the lid.

  A real index to go with its fictional predecessor.

  Alphaville 14,19

  America (Baudrillard) 182

  American Films 22

  Analog 203

  Apocalypse Now 12,114

  Big Sleep, The 181

  Borges, Jorge Luis 236

  Bowles, Paul 135

  Brando, Marlon 8–9

  Breton, André 85, 88, 89, 90, 99

  Burroughs, William 91, 92, 97,126–36,140,181,182, 238

  Bush, George 12, 35

  Cabinet of Dr Caligari 90

  Cain, James M. 66

  Cartier-Bresson, Henri 63

  cataclysm fiction 208–9

  Céline 137

  Citizen Kane 6,181

  Computers 225–7, 279

  Conrad, Joseph 114–15,173,180, 209

  And, yes, you’ll also namecheck: Eliot, Greene (and Green Berets), Hitchcock, Dennis Hopper, Howard Hughes, inner space, insanity, R.D. Laing, Fritz Lang, Chris Marker, Henry Miller, Michael Moorcock (p. 190), physics, Poe, Roy Porter, Rear Window, Carol Reed, relativity, Nicolas Roeg, Jack Ruby, Jimmy Savile, R.L. Stevenson, Sunset Boulevard, television (5, 11, 24, 73, 82, 89,167–8,173,174, 225–7, 232, 236, 243), The Tempest, Vietnam War. And Darryl Zanuck.

  Zanuck: Nostromoner? Old movies, run to the point of invisibility on the Irish provincial circuit, act like pre-electronic computers. Tap in wherever you like, surf the reference books, download the connections.

  Zanuck in exile, Paris. Affair with Juliet Greco (model for Marina Fountain?). Zanuck as writer, his stories published by a hair-oil company. Talent recognised: scripts for Rin-Tin-Tin. 1924: The Lighthouse by the Sea. There it was, the Nostromo connection, bold as brass. The best place to keep a secret: in lights, the brightest bulbs you can find, above the marquee. Remember Nostromo’s last reel, the Isabels? The Capataz de Cargadores has arranged for the old Italian freedom-fighter to be appointed as lighthouse-keeper. He rows across the bay, courts the younger daughter, goes back for the buried silver. Is shot. K
illed.

  Zanuck works with Bill Wellman (Maybe It’s Love, 1930). Wellman is a Nostromoner. Wellman directs Robert Mitchum.

  WELLMAN: I make pictures. What do you do for a living?

  MITCHUM: That, Dad, is a matter of opinion.

  Mitchum, Wellman, Zanuck. They invade Europe. They smoke cigars. They talk Conrad. Zanuck cultivates the eye-patch directors – Raoul Walsh (The Bowery, 1933) – before they lose their orbs. John Ford, he was another pirate. Another eye-patch (painted by Kitaj). Fritz Lang (The Return of Frank James, 1940).

  In Hastings, everything connects to everything. The British love their secret societies, confederacies of outcasts: Aleister Crowley expelled from most of them. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, O.T.O., Ma Ion, Kos: they make it their business to confirm writers in rituals of impotence, elective invisibility. Machen, Blackwood, A.E. Waite, Austin Spare, Walter Owen. The Redonda mob. Remember them? M.P. Shiel as ‘King’ of Redonda – an uninhabited islet near Antigua (map like Treasure Island, displacement like Conrad’s Isabels). John Gawsworth, Lawrence Durrell, Dylan Thomas: all members of the cult. Poetry has to go somewhere. W.B. Yeats, George Russell, Crowley: verse in freefall, from vision to bathos. Limping towards Hastings to die.

  Ford Madox Ford: The Shifting of the Fire (1892)

  M.P. Shiel: Shapes in the Fire (1896)

  Walter Owen: The Mantra of the Fire (1947)

  Jim Morrison (The Doors): Come on Baby, Light My Fire (as

  featured in Apocalypse Now, 1979)

  Alan Moore: Voice of the Fire (1996)

  Fire on water. Cults of the coast. Explain this: I was walking up the long slope of London Road, in the direction of Silverhill (and, ultimately, the Ridge), an early expedition to locate the house where Crowley gave up the ghost. Two men, with their partners, in a Thai restaurant. They know each other but they aren’t sitting together. Nobody else in the place. One couple (J.G. Ballard and friend) in the window. With the other pair in the furthest dimmest recess: Nicolas Roeg (and protégée). Nostromoners in psychic communication? Regrets for Roeg’s film of Crash: never made? A proposed Ballard script for Nostromo? As space opera.