Stereoscopic views that insist upon two good eyes. Middle ground vanquished. Panoramas that don’t quite fit.
No portraits. Portraits give access to the disappeared. Subject infiltrates consciousness of observer. A conspiracy of soul-theft: like psychoanalysis. Freud never made love after the age of forty.
Two pan-scrubber beards: Emperor Norton and Eadweard Muybridge. Naked men walking. A flick book. Frozen frames, stapled together, create the illusion of movement. But Muybridge wasn’t reliable, even with his motion-study sequences; he wasn’t above slipping in the occasional duplicate, a retake from another run.
I was Jewish not Scottish. My Highland blood, if any, came through that fraud, MacGregor. My expulsion and homelessness predated the Clearances. Emperor Norton’s San Francisco years, prophet without doctrine, living on his lack of wits, embroidering compensatory fictions, made more sense than the business with Peruvian jungles and undeveloped films. Muybridge’s cruel portrait told the true story: a broken man staring at the ground. Two broken men: one with a bicycle, one with a camera.
After lovemaking: language. I’d forgotten how it used to work, the poetry thing. The gift of words, whether you like it or not. Marina, camel hair coat around shoulders, long legs crossed, sat smoking at the window. She had Ruth Alsop’s habits, her gestures, perfectly imitated: thirty-five years lost. I struggled to invent our first meeting, the natural history of my destruction, the hole in my life. Those decisions are lightly taken, stupid argument, heat of the moment: one of you walks out. Thirty-five years before our narratives converge. If that’s what is happening. If that’s who she is. Who I am. Now.
The great stone liner, Cunard Court, was floodlit. My flat: the eye in a pyramid of yellow illumination. Marina pointed, thin wrist emerging from sleeve of charity-shop camel hair, to where the St Leonards pier once stood. So I had misidentified Hastings pier, visible in so many of Fred Judge’s postcards. And from this error many incorrect readings accumulated. Moon shadows on ruffled water brought the pier back as a ladder of light.
I put my arm around Marina’s waist.
‘Ruth?’ I said.
‘Touch it.’
The metal plaque with its braille lettering. I ran my fingers over proud script: useful practice for what was to come. Cunard Court: refuge of the one-eyed artist. A tribute to the demolished pier. How the English love things when they are no longer there. A nation of restorers: bodgers, destroyers, resurrectionists. Skeletal platform on rotten piles: memories of the good times nobody had (Graham Greene, Patrick Hamilton).
The plaque commemorated the location ‘where the first moving picture was shown 7th November 1896’. Precursor of what-the-butler-saw flickers. Rows of devices, like those X-ray machines in shoe shops, capping the eyes. Moon path as projector beam: true cinema.
‘When did you realise?’ Marina asked, as we walked slowly, arm in arm, towards Cunard Court.
‘What?’
‘That I was Ruth Alsop. And I left you, after Southwold, because I was pregnant.’
Her moods. Those photographs on the beach. The conversation, I hadn’t taken it seriously, hadn’t responded, when she talked about wanting a child. The smell of the pine woods, resin and soft paths after rain. I was too busy with my camera.
‘And I was the one – dumping Jiffy bags on your doorstep.’
‘Why?’
‘They were your scripts. I was returning them, one by one. Hoping
‘Mine?’
Coincidence, accident. The kind that happens a million times a day, people who once knew each other take flats in the same building. But nobody met in Cunard Court. Old ones who no longer went out, weekend sailors, speculators who passed on without making wills. Talking to a stranger in the lift was like holding a séance. What if they replied?
‘Did you marry? What happened to the child?’
‘Sort of. For a time. It didn’t work out. She’s fine.’
Marina noticed me in town, followed on a whim; remembered me. So she said. It had been easy, cultivation of Cunard Court handyman, to borrow a key: surprise for old friend, lover. She read my notes, the pages and pages of names, facts, prompts, false starts.
She was writing a book of her own.
‘It was obvious you were blocked. I borrowed a couple of red notebooks and copied the stories out, your drafts. A provocation, really. A tease.’
‘Why?’
‘My own book wasn’t coming. I couldn’t find a form until you provided me with a title: TheMiddle Ground. It wrote itself-in weeks.’ She kissed me.
‘I owe you,’ she said. ‘More than you know.’
The smell was heady: dying hyacinths in a bed around a table of black rock. Bang in front of the Royal Victoria Hotel.
TRADITION SAYS THAT
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR
LANDED AT
BULVERHYTHE
AND DINED ON THIS
STONE
‘You were never doing a novel. Barefaced topography. The names of your characters – Danny Folgate? Wink wink. Dowser as spirit of A13? Check out the City/Shoreditch boundary: Norton Folgate, E1. Drin? A river in Albania. And Mocatta, the W.R. Hearst of Fairlight? His drinking fountain must be all of sixty yards from Aldgate Pump: “In honoured memory of FREDERICK DAVID MOCATTA. In recognition of a benevolent life.” People as spirit of place, Andy. The same old tricks.’
Not true. I had no idea. About Mocatta. The man’s in the newspapers, on TV. He owns this building. He has a mother, a daughter. A library.
‘And Marina,’ I said. ‘Marina Fountain. What about her?’
‘The last pub before you get to Bo-Peep, as you very well know. The one under the cliff workings, near the statue of King Harold and Edith Swan-Neck. Marina Fountain is a splash of cheap gold paint on a black background. A boozer with a narrow garden, a pit stop on the road to Bexhill.’
Ollie and Kaporal, saucepan smouldering with the remains of burnt spaghetti sauce, had gone for a curry, leaving Arthur Norton’s prints pegged out to dry in the shower room. A brief note gave nothing else away. We moved, down the corridor, to Marina’s flat.
My head was aching, my mouth an asbestos sandwich. Marina had a bottle of Calvados. She kissed me again. Said that she’d slip downstairs to join the others, a coffee, so that I could decide, in private, what do about the Peruvian photographs. Give them, unseen, to Ollie: a future conceptual project? Or exploit them? If not as a conclusion to my abandoned novel, then as the start of something fresh. Like the Conradian postcards I found in Brick Lane Market and printed (as endpapers) for my novel, Downriver. The moment those negatives were transformed, they abdicated their power. Their hold over me.
The Calvados, with its lovely afterburn, did the trick. I mellowed. Marina had a studio flat, smaller than mine, but better organised. Her neat typescript had been left on the Ikea desk. Nothing to consider: read it. 214 pp., the length I’d aimed for, back at the start. Three sections (bright-yellow interleaves). Everything my chaotic novel failed to achieve: discipline, reason – inevitability. Themes stated, interrogated, resolved. She had a nifty title (like a white paper from the LibDems): The Middle Ground.
Hastings as Hastings. Her argument was shaped through unforced biographies of three men: John Logie Baird (first television signal), Fred Judge (photography and its limitations), Keith Baynes (view from a single eye). There were no awkward authorial intrusions, Marina was seductively present in every line. Her tone, her sureness of touch. The anecdotes. She left space around her characters that allowed readers to fill in details according to taste. Playful severity. Scholarly rigour without a blitz of footnotes. It was a fine thing, this book. I pictured the finished object with a dust-wrapper based on one of Fred Judge’s fading bromoil nocturnes. Text double-spaced. Generous margins. Good cream paper. Dark-blue cloth. Stitched, not glued. Minimal cover copy (gloriously vague). Justified hyperbole from Susan Sontag, Anita Brookner and Simon Schama: in boxed quotes.
Recommended summer reading, pick of the y
ear. Fame, prizes, respect. And more: a job well done.
John Logie Baird (born in the year of the Ripper murders, down from Helensburgh on the Clyde, unwell) scarcely registers where he is. An orthodox Scottish CV: poverty + the go-getting push of the permanently disappointed man. He’s touchy, upset when journalists talk of ‘seeing by wireless’. He picks this sleepy town with its crumbling sandstone cliffs (and, in future time, famously bad TV reception) as the place to attempt the first transmission.
Who will help him? Who is President of the Hastings Radio Society in 1924? William Le Quex: author, Ripperologist, spy, faker. (Marina doesn’t tell you much about Le Quex, but I can’t help myself. He’s the kind of forgotten man who would, if the fellow hadn’t turned up with a bulging suitcase, have invented Baird and his ‘Shadowgraph’ disc: primitive science fiction in a striking pictorial wrapper. Sold on railway stations in time of war.)
The threat to England and the British Empire from alien invasion (yellow faces, Mongol hordes) was a festering obsession: 200 books credited to this Londoner who died in Belgium. According to his faithful admirer, N. St Barbe Sladen, Le Quex never grasped the nice distinction, if any, between fact and fiction.
His publications include: Beryl of the Biplane, The Bomb-Makers, The Bond of Black, The Broadcast Mystery, The Chameleon, The Closed Book, The Death-Doctor, The Double Shadow, An Eye for an Eye, The Spider’s Eye, Three Glass Eyes, The Voice from the Void.
Future war, radio waves, Whitechapel Murders and the green rays of marine sunsets: Le Quex was a card-carrying Nostromoner. He had himself appointed to the honorary consulship of the Republic of San Marino. If anyone had the time to wade through the morass of his paranoid fictions, the secret history of the period would reveal itself. He stood at Baird’s shoulder when that first transmission was made.
Sound becomes picture: ‘A curious high-pitched whistle, with a hint of regular and very rapid interruptions.’ A large veined disc that looked like god’s eye, spinning spinning, above a base made from coffin wood.
Marina was smart enough to spurn the Le Quex digression, but she rescues Baird and the era of backroom experimentation, driven amateurs. Rescues the man. And she is just as sympathetic to Fred Judge with his hunger for ‘views’.
Her essay, measuring Fred’s nightstalking of London against a project undertaken in Hastings by the Hackney-based photographer, Effie Paleologou, did justice to two very different sensibilities. Judge, inspired by Alvin Langdon Coburn, wanted something more than commercial success, a definitive catalogue of the picturesque. He wanted: art. Loss of control, breakdown – the unexpected. Paleologou read Hastings as a theatre set: threads of rope, cobbled streets illuminated with puddles of artificial light.
‘All eyeballs and head,’ wrote Liz Kent in her introduction to the Paleologou exhibition at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery. ‘The light is mute, the reddish cast of the colour so peculiar that we are left wandering through the image, asking ourselves: what exactly is going on?’
The Keith Baynes meditation, which concludes The Middle Ground, carries the three movements back to their starting point, the view from Cunard Court. Marina is working from the room that once belonged to a gentleman artist. She discusses Max Beckmann and his Italian marine paintings (coded biography, Kabbalah, premonitions of war); and argues that this lesser thing, Baynes’s Francophile relish for sunlight on water, yachts, fishermen, is not to be spurned. There is a passage to be navigated into the ‘middle ground’, a corridor he neither delineates, nor understands. A space where lives can be lost. After improvisation and analogy, Marina comes to Baynes’s last years, more or less forgotten, removed to Warrior Square: the man with one eye.
I had emptied most of the bottle. This book would make her name: Ruth Alsop. There it was in red letters on the half-title of her script. I was already mapping out an essay in her support. Would that be too intrusive? Drooling hack jumping on the bandwagon of a livelier intelligence. You had to be very careful, these days, who you puffed, or who you chose to libel. My fiercest critics were my oldest friends.
Postpone the decision, my trip downstairs. Handle the objects on Ruth’s desk. Postcards: Baynes, Judge, Beckmann (The Bark, 1926). The invitation to the Paleologou show. The Remington on which she had, so laboriously, copied out my aborted tales. Maps. Books. Stones from the beach.
A tin with a paper label, yellow and blue, picture of the sphinx. Finest Handmade AMBAR CIGARETTES. Philip E. Mitry. At the Anglo-American Bookshop Opposite Shepheard’s Hotel. Cairo, Egypt. I had to sniff the interior. Photographs. Preserved. The lion shot, myself as a child, in Paignton. A photo-booth strip, Ruth mugging as I frown. A semi-tropical garden carved from the cliff: Fairlight! Ruth with a child, a girl. Mocatta’s daughter. Ollie.
The story made too much sense, it hurt. A stone in the heart. Ruth with Mocatta. The flat in Cunard Court as pay-off, benevolent banishment. Child lost. Twice. My daughter and the other, the one Ollie was carrying. Fathered, head in the ditch at Thurrock, by Reo Sleeman. Resolution as pain postponed.
I couldn’t go back to my flat, the darkroom, the drying prints. That was over, a discontinued and discredited narrative. I couldn’t join the characters in the curry house. Relationships were too complex now – with Kaporal as a kind of son-in-law and Ollie a daughter, lost, carrying a child that wasn’t mine.
I picked up a book from the top of the pile and brought it close to my face. Deep-blue cloth with five wavelines, top and bottom, on spine. Caress it, feel the heat, then flip the lid.
Afterwards his story was not so clear. It lost itself amongst the innumerable tales of conspiracies and plots against the tyrant as a stream lost in an arid belt of sandy country before it emerges, diminished and troubled, perhaps, on the other side. The doctor made no secret of it that he had lived for years in the wildest parts of the Republic, wandering with almost unknown Indian tribes in the great forests of the far interior where the great rivers have their sources. But it was mere aimless wandering; he had written nothing, collected nothing, brought nothing for science out of the twilight of the forests, which seemed to cling to his battered personality limping about Sulaco, where it drifted in casually, only to get stranded on the shores of the sea.
Acknowledgements
Marina Fountain’s ‘Grays’ was originally published in 2002, in a slightly different version, by Goldmark (Uppingham), as part of a selection called White Goods. My thanks to Mike Goldmark.
Marina Fountain’s ‘View from My Window’ was published by the Worple Press, 2003, as part of a limited edition of The Verbals. My thanks to Peter and Amanda Carpenter. And to Kevin Jackson.
The Publisher is grateful for permission to reproduce from the following: Under the Net by Iris Murdoch, published by Chatto & Windus. Reprinted by permission of the Random House Group Ltd; The Epic of Gilgamesh translated by Andrew George (Penguin Books, 1999), translation copyright © Andrew George, 1999; Behindlings by Nicola Barker, published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, copyright © Nicola Barker, 2002; Motion Studies by Rebecca Solnit, published by Bloomsbury Publishing, copyright © Rebecca Solnit, 2003.
Thanks to J.G. Ballard for permission to quote from his works, to Jennifer Dorn for permission to quote from Ed Dorn’s poetry, to Lee Harwood for permission to quote from his letters, and to Andrew Dakers Ltd for the extract from More Things in Heaven by Walter Owen.
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First published by Hamish Hamilton 2004
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Copyright © Iain Sinclair, 2004
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ISBN: 978-0-241-96598-6
Dining on Stones Page 42
