Alice herself features at considerable length, in an extended meditation on Tenniel’s illustration to Through the Looking-Glass, the one that shows Alice in the train. Alice ‘allies herself with the order of birds; a feather grows from her severe black torque’. That feather might be a clue to the solution of the murders. What murders? Why, didn’t you know? Spring-heeled Jack has returned, ‘VAMPIRE AND BRIDE-TO-BE IN DOCKLANDS HORROR’. Edith Cadiz might have been a victim of this man.
But that is to suggest too much interconnectedness, to imply that a plot might be about to happen. Downriver is jam-packed with teasing little hints at possible plots, but these coy insinuations of resolution, climax, denouement are marsh-lights designed to delude the unaware reader into imagining that some regular kind of story might be in the offing. Fat chance. These stories, flowing all together, from a river without banks in which you sink or swim, like the victims of the Princess Alice, clutching at associations, quotations, references to other writers, if you can pick them up.
I picked up one or two. The American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, is economically invoked with the single phrase, ‘a gibbous moon’. T. S. Eliot is constantly quoted by Edith Cadiz both before and after her disappearance; she passes round a hat that once belonged to him after she does her strip. The scarlet-haired opium addict, Mary Butts, makes a brief guest appearance and Sinclair borrows a minatory quotation from her autobiography: ‘I heard the first wraths of the guns at the Thames’s mouth below Tilbury.’
With this mass of literary references, the sex magic, the degradations, the torture, the rich patina of black humour, this is a book that triumphantly rejects any possibility of the Booker short-list in advance. It wears its contempt for all that on its sleeve. It is, besides, a work of conspicuous and glorious ill-humour. Sinclair doesn’t seem driven, like Burroughs, by an all-consuming misanthropy: he’s too romantic for that. But whenever Sinclair writes about the media, he goes pink and sputters. There is a section titled ‘Living in Restaurants’, about trying to make a television movie about Spitalfields. ‘The consiglieri liked the sound of it, the authentic whiff of heritage, drifting like cordite from the razed ghetto.’ The media lunches, four months of heroic eating. He hates them all. He constructs stiff, epigrammatic insults, more insult than epigram. The TV producer ‘has that combatant attitude so prevalent among people who spend their lives bluffing genuine enthusiasts into believing they know nothing about their own subject’.
There is an unhandiness about Sinclair’s prose, here. It creaks. His satire is splenetic but also heavy-handed. ‘The Widow was a praise-fed avatar of the robot-Maria from Metropolis; she looked like herself, but too much so.’ No prizes for guessing who that is. However, Downriver is set just a significant little bit further forward in the future, after the privatisation of the railways. And the Widow is still in charge. Who could have guessed, when Downriver went to press, that Margaret Thatcher would have resigned by publication date? Not Sinclair. When he appears in the third person in the final story, he babbles ‘some bravado subtext about considering his book a failure if the Widow clung on to power one year after its publication’. Unless he wants to claim a preemptive strike, he’ll have to concede that, like Blake, to whose prophetic books his own bears some relation, he had, as prophet, zero success rate.
At one point, the Fredrik Hanbury character opines: ‘Obsession matures into spiritual paralysis.’ Downriver is far more than the sum of its obsessions, compelling as these are. Who can ever forget that dog of dogs, the one with no eyes, not a dog whose eyes have been put out but one who never had any, grey fur there, instead. This is an image so horrifying I don’t want to understand it. What is the opposite of a dog? This question begins and ends the book, this manic travelogue of a city about to burn, and I can’t even begin to answer: I will have to read Downriver again, to find out.
Yet, in spite of, or perhaps in order to spite that central, dominating motif of the river, none of these twelve stories flow easily. There are swirls, eddies, and undercurrents but precious few stretches of clear water. When these occur, as they do, for example, two separate times in the section called ‘Prima Donna’ (the Cleansing of Angels)’, the limpid narrative achieves genuine supernatural horrow; the bristling begins. One is the anecdote about Cec Whitenettle, driver of the hell-train bearing nuclear waste through Hackney. The other is the story of the Ripper’s only personable victim, the ‘Prima Donna’ herself, that begins impeccably, better than Lovecraft, almost as good as Poe: ‘I had not, I think, been dead beyond two or three months when I dreamed of the perfect murder.’
But Sinclair obviously isn’t interested in plain sailing. His everyday prose is dense, static, each sentence weighed down with a vicious charge of imagery. Fighting the current, this reader was forced to ponder the ultimate function of fiction. This was very good for me. Is it to pass the time pleasantly, I asked myself? If so, they put some quite good things on television these days. But something is happening in this text that makes it necessary to go on reading it, something to do with time itself, even if, in order to go on, you must – to mix metaphors – crack open each sentence carefully, to inspect the meat inside.
All writers of fiction are doing something strange with time – are working in time. Not their own time, but the time of the reader. One of Sinclair’s milder obsessions is with ritual: the project of ritual is to make time stand still, as it has apparently stood still in David Rodinsky’s room in the Princelet St Synagogue since the day, twenty-odd years ago, when he disappeared. (See Tale No. Five, ‘The Solemn Mystery of the Disappearing Room’.) If time could be persuaded to stand still for even one minute, then the thin skin that divides Victorian London, Pocahontas’s London, Blake’s accursed London, Gog and Magog’s London, The City of Dreadful Night, Jack London’s London (The People of the Abyss), Downriver’s London of the near future, might dissolve altogether. The partitions of time dissolve in the memory, after all. They dissolve in the unconscious.
At one point, Joblard and Sinclair watch Pocahontas being carried ashore to die, but that is altogether different, a purely literary trick with time. It is an easier one because the reader watches it being done on the page rather than experiences it in the act of reading. The thing is, you can’t skip bits of Downriver. You have to move with currents as violent and mysterious as those of the Thames.
Its vision of London is pure hell. Madmen, derelicts, visionaries, ‘wet-brains’ live in the towers of abandoned mental hospitals. Academics voluptuously drown themselves in chains. Bohemians live with a dedicated ferocity. Oh! that Imar O’Hagan, with his trained snails and his ‘fridge full of blocks of frozen vampire bats like an airline breakfast of compressed gloves’.
It describes a city in the grip of a psychotic crisis. One image makes this concrete – a room in Well Street (‘Grade 2 listed husk’), former home of a mad, addicted girl, now a suicide. The walls are covered with shrieking graffiti, protests, denunciations, phone-numbers, pyramids, quotations, lingams, crucified sparrows, horned gods, walking fish. ‘The floor was clogged with mounds of damp sawdust – as if the furniture had been eaten, and, conically, excreted. Bas-relief torcs of blood were plashed over the skirting-boards. “Dogfights,” Davy explained.’ This, even more than the voodoo ritual later to be enacted on the Isle of Doges (sic), is the true heart of darkness within the city.
On the whole, the English, except for Dr Johnson, never have liked London. Cockney Blake saw, within a crystal cabinet, a refreshed, regenerate, a garden city:
Another England there I saw,
Another London with its tower,
Another Thames and other hills.
Sinclair and two companions precipitate themselves out of that nightmare voodoo ceremony by an act of will and find themselves transported to just such an earthly paradise, freshly designed for the ‘Nineties by a snappy Post-Modernist’, a ‘morning-fresh Medieval city’, a ‘transported Sienna. Beneath us, along the riverside, a parade of windmills’. Windmills,
the green sign of harmless energy. Benign, harmless windmills, the herbivores of the energy world. But when they look closer, they see the windmills are not windmills after all, but the sites of crucifixions.
Downriver is an unapologetically apocalyptic book that has, alas, found its moment, even if the Widow is now reduced to soundbites. Mother London, says Sinclair, is splitting into segments: a queasy glamour extinguishes the mad, bad past in Whitechapel, the rest of the places go hang . . . and yet these stories show how impossible it is to pull down an imaginary city. As Sinclair walks round London, he reinvents it, and remembered pain will always dance like heat in the air above the spot in Whitechapel where the Ripper struck down poor Lizzie Stride. The singing that turned to screaming continues to impress itself on the water where the Princess Alice went down. Listen, you can hear it on the slapping tide.
(1991)
London E.8
1.3.91
Dear Angela
I enjoyed your rap on Downriver enormously. It makes the whole business sound dangerous, difficult and insane: which is about as rich a mix as you can hope for. I would even be tempted to read the thing.
The only point I would argue is the prophetic ‘failure’ of Blake. (And this book.) Prophecy has nothing to do with ‘accurately’ casting future events, like some speedy weather-man. It has to do with causing future events by the power of invocation (or necessary sacrifice). Blake’s razor-clawed chickens will be coming home to roost for aeons and were already doing so before he was imagined in Soho.
The prophetic element in this text is supposed to make things happen, not to second-guess banal newspaper reality. Mrs Thatcher (both more and less than the ‘Widow’) picked up her cards exactly one year after the typescript was handed in to Nick Austin.
It doesn’t take much of a prophet to know that the family living beneath the curvature of a flying bomb are already dead as they enjoy their domestic – but posthumous – breakfast in Canning Town. What we have to do is show what we fear most – and damn it to actually happen.
all best
Iain
AMERIKA
. . . The pure products of America go crazy . . .
William Carlos Williams
• 23 •
Robert Coover: A Night at the Movies
The American cinema was born, toddled, talked, provided the furniture for all the living-rooms, and the bedrooms, too, of the imagination of the entire world, gave way to television and declined from most potent of mass media into a minority art form within the space of a human lifetime. In the days when Hollywood bestraddled the world like a colossus, its vast, brief, insubstantial empire helped to Americanise us all.
A critique of the Hollywood movie is a critique of the imagination of the twentieth century in the West. Could this be what Robert Coover, most undeceived and quintessentially American of writers, is up to in this new collection of stories, characterised as they are by his particular quality of heroic irony? Certainly they are located almost entirely within the territory of the American film except for a side-trip into a British one, ‘Milford Junction 1939: a Brief Encounter’, which gets onto the bill for A Night at the Movies under the description of travelogue.
Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison. But Coover is no respecter of mysteries. The book kicks off in the cinema, with a story called ‘The Phantom of the Movie Palace’. But nowadays the cinema is a rat-haunted, urine-scented wreck, inhabited only by a lonely projectionist screening reels at random for his solitary pleasure.
‘The Phantom of the Movie Palace’ describes the method of much of what is to follow, as the projectionist puts together his flickering collages:
He overlays frenzy with freeze frames, the flight of rockets with the staking of the vampire’s heart, Death’s face with thrusting buttocks, cheesecake with chaingangs, and all just to prove to himself over and over again that nothing and everything is true. Slapstick is romance, heroism a dance number. Kisses kill.
At last the projectionist finds himself flattened into two dimensions, up there on the screen, ‘surrendering himself finally . . . to that great stream of image activity that characterizes the mortal condition’.
Coover exacts a similar surrender from the reader. There is some exceptionally strenuous image activity ahead in these stories that precisely reactivate the magnificent gesticulations of giant forms, the bewildering transformations, the orgiastic violence that hurts nobody because it is not real – all the devices of dream, or film, or fiction. Coover is also diabolically, obscenely, incomparably funny.
The collection includes, besides the travelogue already mentioned, a weekly serial, some shorts, a cartoon, a musical interlude, and not one but three main features – a Western, a comedy, a romance. Every aspect of the mortal condition, besides every type of Hollywood genre, is comprehensively covered. Some of the movies invoked are imaginary; some, like the musical, Top Hat, reinvent the familiar in hallucinatory terms: ‘he had some pretty fancy moves, but all that nimble-footedness looked to me like something he mighta learned tippytoeing through the cowshit.’
‘Shoot Out at Gentry’s Junction’ starts off deceptively straightforwardly: ‘The Mex would arrive in Gentry’s Junction at 12:10. Or had arrived. Couldn’t be sure . . . Sherriff Henry Harmon grunted irritably and eased his long pointed boots to the floor.’
So far, so good: already the stereotypes are briskly in play and, as so often in Westerns, the set-up is strictly Freudian. If Hank Harmon, clearly the Henry Fonda role, ‘a tough honest man with clear speech and powerful hands’, stands for the Superego, then the Mex is, as ever, the Id incarnate. ‘Here he is in the schoolhouse demonstrating for the little childrens the exemplary marvels of his private member.’
The presence of the Mexican bandit, his grotesque Hispanic accent, that amazing private member, the appalling stench of his fart – ‘The goddam Mex had let one that smelled like a tomb’ – his presence transforms the genre. With the Mex at the centre, all becomes a bloody carnival of sex and death.
It soon becomes obvious the terrible Mexican must triumph at the shoot-out. ‘Adios to Gentry’s Junction! . . . The storekeeper, the banker, the preacher, they swing with soft felicity from scaffolds and the whisky he is running like blood.’
The two other main features exhibit no less manic invention. ‘Charlie in the House of Rue ‘ – yes; it is that Charlie – takes slapstick via its own remorseless logic of paranoia and anxiety to a place of the deepest anguish and disquiet, as darkness, ‘like the onset of blindness,’ irises in on the clown. ‘What kind of place is this? Who took the light away? And why is everybody laughing?’
If Coover turns a Western into a savage fiesta and a Chaplin two-reeler into an analysis of the compulsion to repeat, he is cruellest of all to the love story that is, of all film romances, most precious to buffs, for he turns Casablanca into a blue movie in which Rick and Ilsa get it on again in no uncertain manner: ‘he’s not enjoyed multiple orgasms like this since he hauled his broken-down black-listed ass out of Paris a year and a half ago . . .’
This is desecration on the grand scale, a full frontal attack on – or, rather, a full frontal revision of – one of the sacred texts of American cinema. But Rick and Ilsa also founder amongst gathering shadows and uncertainty. The other characters wait downstairs in the bar for the lovers to get up and dress and the action to continue but is that possible, now? Hasn’t everything been changed? The story, nostalgically titled ‘You Must Remember This’, ends the book; the ending is an unanswered, unanswerable plea: ‘And then . . .? Ilsa . . .? And then . . .?’
It is a wild night, this marathon night’s viewing, in the semi-derelict picture palace of twentieth-century illusion, from which gangsters can whisk you away in an unmarked car during the ‘Intermission’, send you spinning through a dozen different hazards – sharks, seraglios, dud parachutes, etc. – and dro
p you back in your seat in time for the shorts.
But, wait. Something has happened while you have been away. Now the audience is ‘all sitting stiffly in their seats with wierd flattened-out faces, their dilated eyes locked onto the screen like they’re hypnotized or dead or something’. The most virtuoso single exercise in the book, the strangest, the most exemplary in its demonstration of the transforming resources of narrative, ‘After Lazarus,’ concludes with a coffin being lowered towards the camera. ‘Sudden blackness.’
At this moment, impossible not to recall, as if they were prophecy, the final words of Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard’s great film of the Sixties, ‘Fin du cinema. Fin du monde’.
(1987)
• 24 •
Hollywood
In its heyday, the period 1917–60 dealt with in The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Hollywood was a gold-rush boom town, a place of pilgrimage, when the young and the beautiful, the cynical and the depraved, the talented, the lucky, and the doomed thronged to seek their fortunes. That was how it was supposed to be, at any rate, and, oddly enough, that was really the way the capital city of illusion was, as if Hollywood itself were its own greatest production.
Easy to forget, nowadays, how unprecedented the movie industry was in its mobilisation of vast amounts of capital, both financial and human, in the production of pleasure. Easy to forget the religious fervour that possessed the audiences, those communities of strangers crowded together in the dark. (How appropriate that, according to Hollywood Anecdotes, one of the abandoned Art Deco picture palaces in New York has been consecrated as a Pentecostal tabernacle.)
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