Trawl
Page 12
On the horizon, through glasses, Scouse points out to me a battleship, presumably Russian, moving very fast for an object at sea, that is, noticeably moving, at a distance that must be several miles: and while I look there is a flash forward of her, which I excitedly tell Scouse about, and we both hear the sound of her guns, very faintly and seconds later. Even the Skipper seems interested enough to take his eyes off the fishfinder for a moment. I keep the glasses on her longer, however, she interests me more than she does the others. A cruiser, probably, she seems very oldfashioned, somehow, a throwback to the boys’ papers and omnibus books of my boyhood during the war. I do not think of her as a threat or as belonging to an enemy: she is merely another ship, out here, at sea.
Refraction or reflection? In this raindrop domed from the outside of the thick glass I from inside see reflected or refracted the deck and sea below, contained in one fish-eye lens view: this even catching the movements as the fish are swung through the air, as they cant down the chute. · · · · · For hours at a time I could watch this scene, do watch these scenes, the gutting, the hauling, the shooting, the steaming. The fishing. And the wake, the wake, again and again, constantly, always the same and never the same, the moving, the movement!
A squall: that is, a grey patch at sea level extending high into the sky, from what is probably roughly the east: which I have come to know as a squall, have been pleased that I can thus see the weather from a long way off, in a way that one does not see it on land, in cities, at least, though in the flat lands one might, I suppose, or at least there is more likelihood that one might.
The Russian cruiser has gone, its smokestack and staining smoke last, as in all the schoolboy books demonstrating that the world is round: and it is true, this—not proof, this evidence for the roundness of the world: solipsistically, I have now seen for myself that parts of ships, the lower parts, are below the horizon at one point, and the nearer they come, the more of them shows, from the top downwards: and vice versa, of course, as they go away: there are laws that govern these things, the things accept the governance of the laws.
The tenth day of fishing, and fishing since we left Vardö has been good. But the tenth day: five days out, ten days fishing, five days back makes up the trip. But the Skipper thinks we must make up for the time lost off Vardö: and the fishing is good at the moment, cod mainly, but good-sized fish, and the usual reds, and a few haddock.
Now the grey squall fills a quarter of our seeing, ninety points of our compass: the Skipper stares to the east, ahead of us on this haul, we trawl from west to east, haul, then swing about and trawl back from east to west, keeping just to the edge of a foul patch of the white duff, the Skipper tells me, a narrow borderline where both the useful and the useless are to be found and where it is difficult to take one without the other.
Snow at sea, great white flat flakes that sprawl in the wind, keep gusting out of the greyness which has grasped us, as far as I can see, greyness and the whirling white. Unlike snow at home, on land, there is nowhere here for it to settle, the flakes just vanish in settling on the dark swollen sea, the sea takes them, enfolds them as anonymously as the sprag gorges a codling, each contributing to the greater size of the other, not a good image. Except on the deck, where here and there pockets begin to form even now, tiny drifts, this soon after it has started, snow clings to the warps, and every windward side of nearly everything, chiaroscuro pounds in the afternoon of the short Arctic day. · · The gutting trawlermen too occasionally take snow in their faces to take a look upward at the bridge. · · And the Skipper, too, of course is thinking much the same as they are. · · · · · Suddenly the Skipper turns to Duff and says, That’s it, then: and swings the telegraph over and back to signal the last hauling for this trip.
I ask Duff how much we have, when the Skipper has left the bridge to sleep his first full night for ten days, and he tells me fourteen hundred kit, which is a fair catch: though how much they will make for it depends on how many other trawlers dock for the same market, for the sale on the same morning. They will worry about this all the four or five days back to port, now, for their earnings are directly related to the price the catch fetches, which is not within their control. Scouse on the same watch is glad we are going back, that this will be a twenty-one day trip and not longer, says to me that he is looking forward to screwing his wife again. And then he says, I wonder what she’ll ask me for this time? Every time he is home apparently his wife asks for something new for the home, and almost always gets it. Last trip she asked for a griller, he says, And I said, What d’you want with one of them hairy-arsed bastards?
Scouse, Duff and I stare out at the last gutting on this trip: the last few redfish are thrown ungutted into the washer, the last bastard halibut slide rippling down the chute, and the last cod and haddock, gracefully olivegreen and silver, are dowsed in the seablack water, urged over the edge of the chute by the rough sea’s action, go down, down. The snow blusters in the lights directed down from the bridge on to the pounds, in the lights strung above the washer snow skitters out or their ambits into the bitter blackness of the Arctic night. Here on the bridge the snow is not cold, I can afford to enjoy this new aspect of snow at sea: but there on the deck Stagg stands, perhaps bowed by the cold, and soon Festy sends the old man in. There are no more than a dozen fish left now. · · · · · None · · · · · Festy hoses down the deck himself, dismissing the others. · · · · · The deck is clear, the pound boards waiting until tomorrow to be taken from their deck stanchions. · · · · · Seas swill through the scupper doors, green, white, black. · · · · · · · · Duff turns to me and says: At least you’ve seen some weather, at least you’re not one of these pleasuretrippers who come out in July and wonder what the hell all the fuss is about!
I have perhaps lost my chance to see the northern lights, the aurora borealis, the farther south we go, now we go south. But perhaps I may see them, perhaps, on the way home. Home. What does that mean to me? · · No. · · · · · I should go to sleep, retire to my bunk, think there, perhaps, if I can, if I am allowed to, as the saying goes. I shall see.
Home. Means her. · · · · · · · · Good, for a start, that I think of her, Ginnie, in connection with home, home not in the sense of my home, I have no home: there are the flat I rent and my parents’ home: but neither of these is truly my home. I can form the concept of my home, though, I can see the desirability of having a home. Which means her, in that home, making that home: with me. I’ll rest there.
Mahogany · · · · · · · · the dark red mahogany · · Mahogany Hall Stomp, late Louis, I think · · yes, with some group he called his All-Stars, I think, Bigard, Hines, Cozy Cole on drums, none of them were really stars, not up to the standard of his Hot Five, or Seven, though Hines played in the late Sevens, or even from the beginning, I can’t remember, but can · · yes, recreate the sound of that Mahogany Hall Stomp, listened to it so many times, it started with four stop-time chords, really stomping, then a chorus you could hear Louis cutting through, clear, still playing well, into his first solo, only fair, for him, that is, then the trombone, forget who that is, but he tries to get such a dirty tone that it becomes grotesque, filthy rather than dirty, ha, to be succeeded by Bigard’s weak, mannered clarinet and Hines’ trivial oversophisticated piano, and the further descent to some inept banjo riffs: then suddenly Louis’ second solo, clean, sharply articulated, knowing exactly where each variation is going, perfect, the tone like no one else’s, the sureness delightful in its inevitability, even the longheld high note, which would be showy in a player with less of his confidence, rightness: and the sidemen redeemed only by the drumbreak from which Louis leads into the final chorus, the stop time stomping again, and a perfectly-executed short coda. Worth having in my head only for Louis, how missed are the ensemble virtues of the Five, and even more thos
e telepathic double breaks with Joe Oliver when Louis was second trumpet to the master in his Creole Jazz Band. · · · · · I collected 78s from · · Dorothy’s time, it was always a cause of disagreement between us, that I would spend so much of the so little I earned on records, jazz records, that she could not understand and did not like, even once spending three pounds fifteen on transcriptions of Jelly Roll Morton’s Library of Congress recordings, playing and talking about his life: which she found quite pointless · · while I worshipped him, Jelly Roll, worked like a scholar on the sexual innuendoes in his creole, in his name and in the titles of many of his compositions. · · Perhaps that is what she hated · · Yet the money was probably · · of course · · And I loved the jazz more than her, I see that now, of course, this was being true to myself, I saw through jazz, or rather through the lives the men lived who played it, what I had to be, an artist, in the broadest sense, though not a painter, not a jazzman · · and that helped · · · · · or perhaps I consoled myself with art · · no, for I wanted this while I was in love with her, the two fought, conflicted · · perhaps · · certainly · · yes, those records showed me, Parlophone New Rhythm Style Series, blue, white, and gold, Hot Fives, Hot Sevens, Meade Lux Lewis, Boogie-Woogie Prayer, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, ah, Morton’s Red Hot Peppers on plum and gold HMV, labelled accurately (but not in the sense the labellers meant) Dance Orchestra, all with odd stamps for copyright royalties: most of all the black and gold Brunswicks of Joe Oliver, just stark labelling, as though he were any old dancehall musician. · · Then later the specialist labels, Jazz Collector, Jazz Selection, gold, · · Melodisc, yes, purple and yellow Melodisc, Leadbelly singing Ain’t You Glad, others purple and · · gold? That strange drum solo by Baby Dodds, a whole record of drums, by Baby Dodds, how well he knew dynamics, can sustain interest on that record! · · Tempo, Cow-cow Davenport, piano, · · can’t remember any more Tempo, · · Vocalion Origins of Jazz, a later series, when things began to move. · · And the French label, with initials AF … · · can’t remember, had only one, Johnny Dodd Memorial, with the Chicago Feet-warmers, Lady Love on one side, and on the other · · can’t remember · · Jazz Man with more Morton, rare Morton, just before he died, poor sod. Hot Jazz Club of America · · the odd Columbia · · Vogue · · Esquire · · · · · · · · The jazz of those 78s runs through my head like the · · · · · never mind the image, the thing itself, that is important, they stay with me while the socalled masterpieces of English literature which were poured through me at college left nothing but the flatulence of disappointment. · · · · · · · Jazz was very important to me, to my development, though that is somehow the wrong word for it, yes, the wrong word. It was certainly through Jazz that I began to realise what it was about, art, that is, through Jelly Roll and Louis and most of all through King Joe, I began to understand what it was I could do, what I should do, then, accepted that if I was lucky I would end up being ruined by success, like Louis, or if I was unlucky end up being dead of cold and poverty like Joe: those pathetic letters to his sister at the end, about his clothes, about not being able to afford an overcoat, about his job as janitor in a pool hall, his pyorrhoea, heart trouble, his inability to play any longer: Louis’ two sidemen who saw their former leader selling on a street corner and were too overcome to speak, his dignity, the nobility reflected in his name, and most of all his responsibility to his talent, were what the bare biographical details of the life, to say nothing of the playing of, King Joe Oliver gave to me, mean to me, at this time, and have stayed with me, so that now he seems an exemplar for my life, for all of which I am proud and equally for that which I fear: so that now I give to old men selling on street corners, or old men begging, or young men down on their luck, for that matter, if they are reduced to the depths of asking for a cup of tea, or the price of a packet of fags, or a drink, it matters little, I give to them because it seems like giving to myself, there is no charity about it, because that is the way I see myself ending, dying in some street, in the cold, without an overcoat, worst of all unable to play any longer. · · · · · “Soon as the weather can fit my clothes”, that was one of the phrases I remember, “weather can fit my clothes”, that construction, in Joe’s letter to his sister, “Soon as the weather can fit my clothes I know I can do better in New York”. And his sister spent her rent in having his body sent to New York, in the end, that was the only way he got there, to New York, in the end. But what he did, the way he did it, too, his loyalty to what he was, to what he contained, consisted of, this was my exemplar. · · · · · · · · And all the others, the way they did it, totally involved in all that was going on, besides art, in prohibition, the gangsters, Pinetop Smith shot in a speakeasy, Louis marrying Lil, the treatment of sex and love as enormously important, so rightly for me, as I wanted to be just so involved in everything, in all of it, who was a bank clerk at the time and engaged to a bourgeois Dorothy. · · · · · · · · This interest in jazz was both a gesture against such as Dorothy and an example of the sort of thing I must do, felt buried in me, something very small and quiescent to which I had to be loyal, could be disloyal to only at the utter expense of self: and this exemplar gave me hope, too, in this situation, in my situation, that these men created where they could, as they could, often in circumstances greatly inimical to their creating anything, while still fully enmeshed in everything else in life, their lives and their art inseparable. · · · · · · · · Went round the London jazz clubs, then, in search of this life, disappointed, of course, though I still think the jazz was good, the boys trying to play like Joe and Johnny and Honore Dutrey, and making noises far better than any commercial band was, at that time, in that comic cellar in Oxford Street, for example, and a crypt of a church behind Marble Arch, another in Gerrard Street, great times, in their own right, now I think of them, though not what I had been looking for, which were of course speakeasies and bathtub gin and molls. The only girl I picked up there was Jewish, a Jewess, from Golders Green, of course, who thought jazz was great, tried to sing herself like Bessie Smith, fair voice, not the experience to sing like Bessie, of life, that is. Yes, she had an audition for one band, in Great Windmill Street, Rochelle, her name was, and when she arrived the manager said Go into the rehearsal room and warm up first, there’s a pianist there, and we’ll come later. And Rochelle did, and after she had sung a couple of numbers they came in and said, No, they did not want her to sing with the band: and that was her audition, they had done it so she would not be nervous, but she thought she had been cheated, and cried. · · Rochelle was the only virgin I had, I think, not counting Dorothy, who does not count since somehow it was the only thing she gave me, not that I could see anything in it, for me, in return for my pandering to her bourgeois, there should be a better word for my being disloyal to my self. · · · · · Met Rochelle when she was sixteen, kisses, passionate manual manipulations, then a break because her father hated gentiles going with his daughters, of whom there was another, older, who fancied she knew about modern art: and then, three years later, when Rochelle was nineteen, yes, met again through both being in the BM one lunch hour, and came together for just about a fortnight, ten days perhaps, when just once I had her on her father’s parlour (he would call it) floor, satisfying touch, that, when he was out, just before her period, using Gynomin, and me withdrawing, too, three ways safely. I looked upon it as didactic, instructing the young, there was little pleasure in it for me. · · · · · Rochelle. She was all right, I wish her well, no bitterness, there, and I had her once only, no one would notice, I felt no barrier. I had only her word for her being a virgin, and what is a virgin anyway, what use, what significance is it? Not to me, not to anyone, much, really, perhaps she was not one, but so what?�
��· · · · · Rochelle: I wish her well. · · · · · · · · But jazz then was important for these things, and also, since adults and the bourgeois hated it, despised it, ridiculed me for it, it set me apart, was the first real martyrdom I went through for a minority, willingly, epitomised my relative isolation, and I knew I was right about it, and have since had it more than confirmed, that jazz is an art form, a great, no, an important … · · · · · that’s all over, that fight, this is accepted now, there are other things, more important struggles for this generation, for my · · Sleep · · · · · Never difficult to sleep, for me. · · · · · Sleep.