(1990)
• 20 •
Ian Jack: Before the Oil Ran Out and others
There is an old song by Ewan MacColl, a favourite in folk clubs thirty years ago and more, ‘Dirty Old Town’. It’s about Salford and enshrines all the often-parodied clichés of social realist art of the time, mucky canal and all. One day, though, the singer is going to tear that dirty old town down. Then it will be goodbye to the dark, Satanic mills for ever.
Well, the dark, Satanic mills are gone for good now. Manufacturing industry has departed this country and the great Northern cities have died even more speedily than they were born, when they doubled, tripled, tripled again their size, filth, complexity, poverty, wealth during the course of the nineteenth century. The Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher accomplished in eight years a more radical razing of mill and foundry and pit and shipyard than any pinko troubadour ever dreamed of.
But this peremptory cleansing has left these cities bereft of everything except their inhabitants, who eke out their scant resources picking over the local tip, as described by Ian Jack in Birkenhead, in 1985. Or they can set out to scour the country for work, like post-industrial versions of the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath.
Or they can turn to crime, for there is money around, lots of it, and if the Inland Revenue has opted out of the property redistribution business it is high time for private enterprise to take over.
If all that is solid really is melting into air, this time we are too bewildered by the speed of the vanishing to register anything but a diffuse blur. All the material evidence of the life of Ian Jack’s father has gone – birthplace, workplaces – in an abrupt divorce from history, as if there was a conspiracy to ensure the old man left no trace he had ever been born.
‘In this way,’ says his son, ‘de-industrialisation has disinherited the sons and daughters of the manufacturing classes; a benign disinheritance in many respects, because many of the places my father worked were hell-holes, but also one so sudden and complete that it bewilders me.’
Beryl Bainbridge says: ‘Whenever I go back to Formby, the Lancashire village in which I grew up, I find in it nothing that reminds me of the past.’ And yet, as she says somewhere else, the heart lies back there in the past, buried under the new supermarket, the multi-storey car park, the Job Centre.
Before the Oil Ran Out and Forever England are both collections of journalism about Britain in Year One of the Thatcherite revolution. Ian Jack used to work for The Sunday Times; there is a pungent coda describing his last days at Fortress Wapping.
The novelist Beryl Bainbridge’s book is tied in with a television programme, an investigation of three families from the prosperous South, a symmetric three from the deprived North. She was fortunate enough to find close-knit, loving kin. One of them, a member of the long-term unemployed, opines: ‘All we’ve really got is family.’ In an era of privatisation, our greatest pleasures are private ones.
Her title suggests, in spite of everything, continuity. Ian Jack’s, more ominous, suggests that our present plight, mass unemployment, homelessness, drug abuse, violence, is but the calm before the storm.
Both writers include large sections of family history, as if they feel they must offer their class credentials before seizing the nettle of present-day Britain.
And quite right, too. The national passion for Orwell surely springs from the opportunity he gave the reader to identify with an old Etonian grubbing about amongst the underclass, rather than having to face up to the fact that most of us are of working-class origins in the first place. The Road to Wigan Pier reminds me of what a Black American I once knew said about Uncle Tom’s Cabin: ‘I used to weep buckets over the plight of those poor people until I realised those poor people were me.’
Ian Jack made a trip to Wigan – a Lancashire-born Scot, he did not find it so alien – and found a newsagent who remembered ‘when the top of an egg were a luxury’. Recalled Orwell, too: ‘I remember some folk thought he was a nark of some kind, what these days you’d call a snooper from the Social Security.’
In this solid Labour town, The Lady sells more copies per week than all the socialist weeklies put together. I can enlighten Ian Jack on this apparent paradox. The Lady carries ads from the affluent South seeking clean, reliable Northern lasses as live-in nannies.
This is a collection of descriptions of Britain moving apparently inexorably into the Third World. Sidetrips – Rhodesia before it became Zimbabwe, the Falklands before the war, Turin – only reveal the shabbiness of our pretensions. However, Ian Jack has chosen as frontispiece a family portrait. His father’s. There will survive one splendid monument to the old man. It is a most moving account of a life which his son, with good reason, sees as having been exemplary. It is also a lament for the stoic, republican virtues of the old Scottish left.
It was a hard life, well lived, that of a skilled artisan, a socialist of the old school, an autodidact, a Burns lover, a good father, and, on the evidence of excerpts from the memoirs he compiled in his old age, possessed of a prose style that, alas, puts Norma Dolby’s way with a pen to shame, although they would probably have recognised one another as beings cut from the same cloth.
Looking back on the earlier self who had just discovered politics and plunged into Marx, Jack London, Upton Sinclair like a dolphin into a delighted sea, Mr Jack wrote: ‘We intended, and may have succeeded just a wee bit, to make the world a better place to live in. But we expected too much to happen too soon, and we did not realise how heavily the dice were loaded against us.’
Mr Jack died before the NUM strike of 1984–5 revealed just how heavily the dice were still loaded. That strike might have broken his heart. It nearly broke mine.
Norma Dolby’s is an artless, month-by-month account of the slow erosion of a small mining community’s faith in and respect for the police and the processes of the law, though not, finally, in justice itself: ‘We want justice and are willing to fight for it.’
Mrs Dolby found her feet as a public speaker during the strike. One day, on a platform, her shyness suddenly vanished. ‘All my thoughts spilled out. I really let myself go . . . If we went down, what hope had anyone else of surviving Maggie’s slaughter of jobs.’
Impossible not to recall Brecht: ‘When I say what things are like/Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds/That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself/Surely you can see that.’
But by the strike’s end, her village, Arkwright Town, in Derbyshire, had almost gone down. The divide between those who stayed out until the end and those who did not ran deep. ‘People dropped their eyes when they passed you and did not answer when you spoke to them.’
Mrs Dolby’s husband opted for redundancy. There are rumours the pit will close. The community disintegrates, the great strike recedes into memory – but too many of us remember it for it to suffer the white-out of the past under Thatcher, even if they try very hard.
Mrs Dolby talks a great deal about the kindness of strangers – the gifts of food and money, toys, clothes, hospitality, support, from all over Britain, Europe, the world. ‘Never can you measure such kindness.’
Norma, kindness had nothing to do with it. We weren’t being kind when we shelled out for the collecting boxes. We were doing it for ourselves, because you were standing up for us, too. We were doing it for our children, and for the old men and women who wanted to make the world a better place to live in and, for a time, thought they had succeeded, even if only a wee bit.
(1987)
• 21 •
Michael Moorcock: Mother London
This epic portion from the kitchen of Michael Moorcock’s imagination is a vast, uncorseted, sentimental, comic, elegiac salmagundy of a novel, so deeply within a certain tradition of English writing, indeed, of English popular culture, that it feels foreign, just as Diana Dors, say, scarcely seems to come from the same country as Deborah Kerr.
Mother London contains obvious input from the music hall –
Josef Kiss, the central character, himself started out working the halls as a mind-reader. And Moorcock tends to create his characters with a few, swift, sure strokes, brilliant and two-dimensional, just as the characters in music-hall sketches, or, indeed, the personas of the performers themselves are created.
He also does not deny the influence of pulp fiction – a whole generation of English youth nourished its dreams on Western novels – nor of The Magnet, The Gem, nor certain kinds of teddibly, teddibly Bridish popular history. (He quotes copiously from Arthur Mee.) But across the ad hoc structure and the unapologetically visionary quality of it all necessarily falls the incandescent shadow of William Blake, for whom there was no distinction between the real and the imaginary and whose phantom rises again every time we see a way out of that particular trap.
It isn’t really a question of ‘magic realism’, that much-abused term. For Moorcock’s Londoners, nothing could be more magical than the real fabric of the city they love and the stories with which it echoes.
A city is a repository of the past. Therefore Mother London is organised as an anthology of memories – recollections from the pasts of a group of men and women who meet regularly at an NHS clinic (under threat) to collect their tablets and enjoy group therapy.
Not that any of them are deranged, exactly. But they are all sensitives, some of them perhaps too sensitive to the stories of the city and its myriad voices. The grandly eccentric old man, Josef Kiss, can hear what people think. Sometimes it drives him mad.
We can hear the voices, too. The narrative is seamed with them, voices in a multitude of tongues, speaking platitudes, mouthing sexual paranoia, prejudice, gossip, wild talk, abuse . . . the city talking to herself. She is not a loving mother. But we must take her as we find her; she is the only one we have.
During the Blitz, Josef Kiss put his talents as a mind-reader to work, seeking survivors in the burning ruins. He did not find the beautiful Mary Gasalee among the ruins, however. She walked out of the flames by herself, carrying her new-born baby in her arms.
In spite of this authentic miracle, Mary’s daughter grows up to be a best-selling historical novelist, not the new Messiah. Though the novel ends with the joyously consummatory marriage of Josef and Mary, there is no suggestion this event might cue in the arrival of another saviour, even though the city that survived the fire from heaven might now be in need of divine intervention to save it from the effects of late capitalism – the property boom, the demise of history, the exile of the working class from the city they built.
For the London Moorcock celebrates is working-class London, whose history has always survived by word of mouth, in stories and anecdotes. He takes you on a grand tour of the forgotten, neglected parts of London, as far as Mitcham in the South, but always coming back to W 11, where, twenty years ago, you could see the Proverbs of Hell chalked up on the walls.
And if Josef and Mary turn out to be indestructible, as they do, perhaps there is hope in the infinite resilience of narrative itself.
Not for Moorcock the painful, infrequent excretion of dry little novels like so many rabbit pellets; his is the grand, messy flux itself, in all its heroic vulgarity, its unquenchable optimism, its enthusiasm for the inexhaustible variousness of things. Posterity will certainly give him that due place in the English literature of the late twentieth century which his more anaemic contemporaries grudge; indeed, he is so prolific it will probably look as though he has written most of it, anyway.
(1988)
• 22 •
Iain Sinclair: Downriver
Iain Sinclair, in the profane spirit of surrealism, has chosen to decorate the endchapters of his new work of fiction with a dozen unutterably strange picture-postcards. They show scenes such as that of six men, heavily veiled, veils held down by brimmed hats, posed with long-barrelled rifles. And two men in grass skirts, with feathers in their hair, intent on a game of billiards. They are Africans. And here are twenty-odd white men, in straw boaters, surrounding a prone crocodile. Joblard, Sinclair’s friend, arranges the cards so that they tell a story. At once they become scrutable: they are images of imperialism. Joblard titles this picture story, what else, ‘Heart of Darkness’.
But the twelve interconnected stories in Downriver don’t match up with the numbered postcards, unless in such an arcane fashion it must necessarily remain mysterious to me. Downriver is really a sort of peripatetic biography: Iain Sinclair’s adventures at the end of time, at the end of his tether, in a city of the near future with a hallucinatory resemblance to London. The decisive influence on this grisly dystopia is surely the grand master of all dystopias, William Burroughs. Jack Kerouac, asked for a quote for the jacket of The Naked Lunch, said it was an endless novel that would drive everybody mad. High praise. Downriver is like that, too.
It is mostly about the East End. This reviewer is a South Londoner, herself. When I cross the river, the sword that divides me from pleasure and money, I go North. That is, I take the Northern Line ‘up West’, as we say: that is, to the West End. My London consists of all the stations on the Northern Line, but don’t think I scare easily: I have known the free-and-easy slap-and-tickle of Soho since toddlerhood, and shouldered aside throngs of harlots in order to buy my trousseau casseroles from Mme Cadec’s long-defunct emporium, undeterred by rumoured crucifixions in nearby garages. Nothing between Morden and Camden Town holds terror for me.
But I never went to Whitechapel until I was thirty, when I needed to go to the Freedom Bookshop (it was closed). The moment I came up out of the tube at Aldgate East, everything was different from what I was accustomed to. Sharp, hard-nosed, far more urban. I felt quite the country bumpkin, slow-moving, slow-witted, come in from the pastoral world of Clapham Common, Brockwell Park, Tooting Bec. People spoke differently, an accent with clatter and spikes to it. They focused their sharp, bright eyes directly on you: none of that colonialised, transpontine, slithering regard. The streets were different – wide, handsome boulevards, juxtaposed against bleak, mean, treacherous lanes and alleys. Cobblestones. It was an older London, by far, than mine. I smelled danger. I bristled like one of Iain Sinclair’s inimitable dogs. Born in Wandsworth, raised in Lambeth – Lambeth, ‘the Bride, the Lamb’s Wife’, according to William Blake – nevertheless, I was scared shitless the first time I went to the East End.
Patrick White says somewhere that there is an intangible difference in the air of places where there has been intense suffering, that you can never get rid of the memory that pain imprints on the atmosphere. London’s river runs through Downriver like a great, wet wound. Almost all the stories are affected in some way by the swell and surge occasioned when the pleasure boat, Princess Alice, sank after it collided with the Byewell Castle, a collier – a high-Victorian tragedy recalling the loss of the Marchioness, although Sinclair does nothing with the analogy, lets it lie there in the water. An estimated six hundred and forty people went down with the Princess Alice, including the husband and two children of Elizabeth Stride. Her family gone, she took to drink, went on the streets. She became one of the victims of Jack the Ripper – the kind of ominous coincidence that fiction needs to avoid if it is to be plausible. Life itself can afford to be more extrovert.
So can Sinclair, who has no truck with plausibility but allows or persuades his densely textured narrative to follow a logic based on the principle of allusion, engaging in a sort of continuous free collective bargaining with his own imagination. For example: there is sardonic, virtuoso description of the Princess Alice disaster:
The victims chose an unlucky hour to enter the water. They were discharging the sewage from both the north and south banks into Barking Creek. Outflow. Mouths open, screaming, locked in a rictus. Rage of the reading classes. Public demand for the immediate provision of swimming-pools for the deserving poor. Let them learn breast-stroke.
Then the narrative moves like this:
Something happens with the draw of time. With names. The Alice. Fleeing from the extreme interest of L
ewis Carroll (weaving a labyrinth of mirrors for his English nymphet) into the tide-flow of Thames. Can you row, the sheep asked, handing her a pair of knitting-needles. Dodgsons. Dodgeson. Out on the river with another man’s daughters: Lorina, Alice, Edith.
And thence to the enigmatic Canadian performance artist, Edith Cadiz, whose story we already know. By day, she worked as a nurse, nightly subsidising herself – for that income would never keep her – as a prostitute of the least exalted type. Edith Cadiz haunts the text, with her disinterested love for the mad children in her care, her unnerving stripper’s act involving a dog and a set of street maps. One day, after copulating with a dog at the request of a Member of Parliament – this text is rich in dogs, some of them memorably unnerving – she disappears.
She is no less haunting a character because Sinclair makes plain she is not his own invention but the invention of another of the characters he has also invented. But many of the other characters, including Sinclair himself in a memorable walk-on (‘a flannelled Lord Longford: on sulphate’), are drawn, kicking and screaming, one assumes, from real life. Some of them I recognise. One or two of them I know. That is Sinclair’s autobiographical bit. Think of Downriver as if Alice had wept a river of tears, rather than a pool; this river, like memory, full of people, places, ideas, things, all with ambiguous reality status.
King Kole, the Aboriginal cricketer, standing at the rail of the Paramatta, watching a pilot-boat butt its way across Gravesend Reach, knew he had arrived at the Land of Death. Gravesend did for Pocahontas, the Indian princess, too: she died there, on her way back to Virginia. Sacrificial victims of imperialism. But less fatal presences include a writer, Fredrik Hanbury, a name transparently concealing one familiar to readers of The London Review of Books. There are painters, vagrants, Jack the Ripper, Sir William Gull, ritual murder, cricket, Homerton, Silvertown, ‘The Isle of Doges’ (VAT City plc).
Expletives Deleted Page 13