Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  It was an enthusiasm I was happy to share. I asked my neighbour, an art historian and friend of Tanner, if she knew where Kossoff’s Dalston Junction paintings, from 1974–5, were to be found. I loved the way thick paint cracked and was scored with white scratches like very old film: these works were utterly estranged from the clarity of the coming digital age. They represented the antithesis of the hyper‐real industrial print. Eye‐mud applied with a savage trowel. Technical difficulties are lightly worn. There is an absolute respect for subject. Like Tanner in Graham Road, Kossoff stood at his high window: but he saw the world’s colour in the centrifugal force of those diminishing railway lines and implied journeys. The Dalston Lane studio was never more than a temporary perch, relished and abandoned: so that it was free to become a provocation to memory, a source of renewal to anonymous others, the audience for such things.

  ‘One of the best paintings,’ Harriet said, ‘was given to Menzies Tanner. As a gesture of gratitude on Kossoff’s part for a sympathetic review. I think it’s in Cape Town now, with his widow.’

  Tanner published a portrait of Dalston, as seen from his Graham Road window, while he was still under analysis, disillusioned with Marxism and modernism, moving inexorably towards Rome. And posthumous confession: guilty of every vice he no longer practised. The spiritual journey reminded me of Tony Blair: how smoothly the pendulum of conscience coincided with the requirements of a fortunate career. Tanner took care of the baby, with some reluctance, while his wife attended mass. He settled the babbling infant in a buggy, positioned so that she could watch the unmoving axolotl, while he typed up his thoughts on the pains and pleasures of fatherhood. There was a legacy to secure, the apologia of the East London years: Falling into Eternity. This paperback original, brought out by an independent press owned by a benevolent American patron, was a tactfully edited collage of journal entries and revamped reviews: Cambridge, Hackney, Calabria, New York.

  ‘The axolotl reminds me,’ Tanner began, ‘that recently I have been peering into Samuel Beckett, the murderer of the novel.’

  Peering is right. The knuckling of bloodshot eyes. The scratching at scabious skin. Human actions misinterpreted on a distant street. Constructing a laboured fiction out of Tanner’s fiction, his fable of lost time, I realized that I was only perpetuating an extreme version of myself: the weak‐eyed man at the window, the book‐heaped room, the wife taking on the burden of work and child‐rearing in support of the folly of authorship. Before Tanner could make his escape to Oxford, he would have to murder not only the novel but also his pale‐bellied avatar, the salamander in its milky waterbed. The pet axolotl, armoured, scaled, fed on bloodsucking flies, was the true spirit of Graham Road.

  ‘It died, most conveniently,’ Tanner recorded, ‘three days before I left for New York. I had come to hate the reptile. The sounds it made filled me with nauseous loathing. I resented having to hunt for flies and woodlice. The creature rejected most of the food I gave it, spitting it out as soon as my back was turned. I despised the futility of its imprisoned life. Coming back from the Saturday market on Kingsland Waste, I noticed it had developed a fungus which had spread from its underbelly right up its gills and throat – and also, in the opposite direction, to the gash of its anus.’

  A solipsistic diary entry from Falling into Eternity claims to discover, in the sluggish passage of clouds over this part of Hackney, a silent Soviet cinema through which the ghosts of labour history swim: vaporous forms holding up symbols of industry and war. But I cannot convince myself there is anything in Tanner’s report on his past life which is not a lie. His wife comes into the room and challenges him about the time he wastes staring out of a window he can’t be bothered to clean – and Tanner realizes that the gasworks he has mentioned so often in his journals are the ones on the canal, beyond London Fields. Objects, buildings and people, are oblivious to his introspective meddling with their status. He has invented them, as they suit his purpose. They are simply marks, insect smears, pigeon dirt, trapped in the glass.

  ‘The scene out there,’ Tanner admits, ‘has no intrinsic reality. It’s a painting bungled by amateurs. A Cubist landscape assembled by committee.’

  He took no steps, during the lost Dalston years, to establish a connection between the activity of gazing and the terrain mapped on his consciousness by the act of walking through it. The Falling into Eternity diary is a retrospective fiction, a spoilt novel. Tanner, despite the Rousseau boasts of bad behaviour, never achieved a paragraph to equal Kossoff’s hungry seizure of the view down on the railway and Ridley Road Market. He wasn’t greedy enough or generous enough: to let the eye play, freely, to open the heart. To compete with the modest Jewish artist; the day‐tripper who travelled east, along the line from Willesden Junction, to a rented room. In the borough where he lived as a child.

  This undistinguished street, a transit between one life and another, is a good place for slow incubation, reverie, retreat. Against the harsh truth of what the city will do to those who move too far from civic benevolence: the unseen, the unrecorded. Thomas Holmes in his documentary reportage, London’s Underworld (published in 1912), tells how Ellen Langes, a blouse‐maker of Graham Road, starved to death, at the age of fifty‐nine. Out of work, she sold all her household goods – and then, hidden behind curtains of respectability, she went without food, wasting, losing strength; dying unsupported, unnoticed. Until Holmes made the incident a sentence or two in his account of the underbelly of London. Economic recession, a downturn in the garment market, a change of fashion, and it is not only the ghettos of Spitalfields and Aldgate that feel the pinch: in suburban Hackney, in rooms they can no longer afford, skilled workers face starvation. And meanwhile the feverish Joseph Conrad, returned from his nightmare on the Congo, factors a parallel horror in Graham Road’s German Hospital. He has brought back, to stimulate and appease memory, journals that seed a fable of insane colonialism. Heart of Darkness: Dalston.

  When we discuss these Hackney conjunctions in the Charlotte Street restaurant, Neil Murger shocks us by revealing that he can’t be doing with Conrad. Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, Victory: he has never been able to see what all the fuss is about. Long‐winded, contrived, laboured in their Flaubertian self‐consciousness. Tickell stared at his plate. Petit caught my eye and later remarked that, in his opinion, Murger had never opened a book by Conrad in his life. His judgement was based entirely on film, botched efforts, commissioned documentaries that went hugely overbudget. Horror stories about Nicolas Roeg and Francis Ford Coppola. Nobody could do a thing with Nostromo. There’s nothing more futile than a ‘novelized’ movie, the definition of cultural cannibalism. We drank to that, Petit and I having spent the last decade turning old screenplays into graphic novels and back into television. ‘Intratextual weave’, they call it, the boys from the new universities.

  Tanner didn’t read Conrad either. He watched television in bed. And seethed, wondering why he wasn’t on it. He woke his wife by shouting at the screen. Having arrived in Hackney with his Marxist convictions firmly in place, he lost faith when confronted by the life and behaviour of the urban proletariat: at bus stops, fish stalls, stationers where they sold him the special notebooks he required for the composition of his journals. He could no longer communicate with his former friends. Some of them, through social work, placement in psychiatric safe houses, poetry squats, were making the adjustment. Such writing as they produced was invisible. And unpaid. Tanner wrote for cash: art crit, polemics. Later, as his name became known, restaurants. Norfolk churches. Trees. And cars (he didn’t drive). Meanwhile, cadres of Cambridge and Essex poet‐militants received an energy transfusion from the realpolitik of Dalston and Stoke Newington.

  ‘They drifted,’ Tanner noted with a shudder, ‘towards the fringes of the Angry Brigade, Anarchism, and a now forgotten cult of the late 1960s and early 1970s, “Situationism”. They thought random letter bombs could revitalize a sluggish historical process.’

  Situationism would
be back, customized by Stewart Home, rebranded as ‘Psychogeography’: while Tanner discovered William Morris, Richard Jefferies and the English countryside. Situationismlite migrated to shops in Hoxton: handmade artists’ books, re‐mappings, found objects. Impresarios of punk plotted their Xeroxed hustles and scams.

  Tanner’s doomed axolotl was luckier than Trotsky, it escaped from Mexico City. To die in a Hackney tank. The solitary reptile remained in the larval stage as a sexually mature adult. The fringed head was an Aztec throwback. You could chew on the creature’s ribs and spit out fire. Fungus swallowed it. Bags packed, taxi at the door, Tanner dumped the ancient lizard in a shit‐crusted toilet bowl. Which failed to flush. He knew, in that instant, where his future lay: foregrounding the porn and downplaying the art. And publishing first in Paris. Translated back into English, wheedling tone of voice disguised, Falling into Eternity stayed on the bestseller list long enough to become a TV play. And the launch of Tanner’s fortune.

  Conrad’s Monkey

  Joseph Conrad, not yet Conrad, back from the sea, back to the gravy of rented London rooms, the future books that were waiting impatiently for him, brought a companion: an evil‐tempered monkey. A marriage of convenience. Mutual loathing. Suspicion of the grey world in which they found themselves. Master mariner (downgraded to second mate) and impulse‐buy pet: chained like reluctant lovers. The trim‐bearded mandarin, in high collar, is the prisoner of his red‐mouthed familiar. Curved eyebrows meet, inverted commas. The mouth is so tight it might as well be stitched.

  It sprang, it nipped: a difficulty in the Sailors’ Home, a scandal in the boarding house. The monkey, all too soon, vanishes from the story. Biographers lose interest, scholars avert their gaze. There is not much evidence to go on. This was an atypical act for Conrad, that paradigm of early modernism; the alienated and stateless craftsman cursed by the need to shape and reshape complex fictions. To sell himself in an expanding and hungry market. With the awful risk that his efforts might be well received. He would have to produce more words, stories, lies. And in this clumsy tradesman’s language, English.

  Conrad lost chapters, entire manuscripts, as a matter of principle. He left them in Berlin cafés and was appalled when some alert waiter came running after him with the abandoned bag. He flung drafts, which had given him infinite pains, rheumatic cramps, malarial sweats, fugues of despair, into the fire. The disgusted monkey, a potential fictional device, took off. To become its own author. To haunt the trees in the riverside reaches of London. To found a dynasty. To chatter in the ears of susceptible wanderers.

  Drifting through Wapping, copying inscriptions on gravestones removed from their original setting, I heard a commotion of marmosets in Scandrett Street. You could smell the cinnamon in spice warehouses that were being converted into avant‐garde galleries and recording studios. The story I was contriving, in the dementia of the Thatcher era, involved monkeys and a fanatical collector of Conrad, hiding out in one of the last council flats, a sturdy veteran of the post‐war Labour restoration of bomb‐damaged docklands. The momentum of my tale pulled towards suicide, a true episode, one of the first Narrow Street developers attaching himself to an iron hoop and standing in mud, waiting on the tide. What struck me now was the way a walk, brooding on some unwritten chapter, would bring forth messengers from that realm where the undead of fiction coexist with mythical biographies of London writers; with post‐historic traces, stones, totemic animals.

  Checking the title I typed for this section, I noticed an error: ‘Conrad’s Money’. Which was no error, but the accidental heart of it: failing investments in South Africa, disputes with his literary agent (Pinker), collapsed banks. Wife and son finding new ways to blow their allowance. Needy relatives, servants, school fees. A gasguzzling Cadillac. And, above everything, like the British weather, medical bills. Jessie’s knee, his gout. Competitive depressions. The anguish. The horror.

  Writing, or the state of mind that must be endured ahead of the act, is a form of mediumship: you see what you need to see. Now it was the turn of my Kurtz, the legendary disappearing book‐runner, Driffield. Driff had to be a major element in any attempt at retelling the story of Kingsland Waste. I used to sit with him, while he sucked up mugs of coffee, in Arthur’s Café (Est. 1935), on the far side of the road, away from the action. They knew him, they tolerated his eccentricities. The Waste, so Driff explained, was worth the cycle ride from Notting Hill, because he could make it part of a loop that carried him north to Stoke Newington and on to god‐knows‐where: Finsbury Park, Holloway Road, Kentish Town, Camden. The skinhead’s requirements were specific: in terms of the books he wanted (golf, suicide, embroidery) or refuelling (black coffee, more coffee, wholesale quantities of vegetarian mush, curried or otherwise). But the man was long gone, the fact that he would feature in my next chapter did not produce him. A pity. I discovered, when it was too late, that the red‐cheeked cyclist kept a bolthole in Ritson Road. That was why he was happy to drop in on Albion Drive, late into the evening, with fresh purchases.

  After years of rehearsed vanishings, from which he would return, refreshed and louder than ever, Driffield achieved the real thing: disappearance. Creditors were closing in, magazines collapsed, all sorts of rumours had the police on his tail. For almost a decade he went to ground. And in this absence, London changed. Contemporary fictions had no room for such caricatures: the ticks, the megaphone monologues, the fancy dress. London was otherwise engaged; putting up barriers on railway stations, private roads, gated estates. You could no longer explore Britain on a platform ticket (bicycle in tow). Secondhand bookshops were being hacked down like the Amazonian rainforest. The internet didn’t do coffee and wholemeal biscuits the size of LPs. The age of non‐paying first‐class train travel was over. And street markets were shallow harbours on the edge of an eBay.

  I attempted a nostalgic obituary for the lost cyclist in a book called London: City of Disappearances: ‘Think of the vanished Driff as Kurtz. The Brando version. Heavier, half‐naked, sweating in the dark. Reading by candlelight as his demons gather around him. Ambulances, squad cars. Beams from surveillance helicopters. Some splinter of Polish iron infiltrated his soul.’

  That room was Ritson Road, another view from a high window: into the stockade of the decommissioned German Hospital. Ian Askead, when I met him on the Waste, told me that Driff had been seeing one of the nurses. A married lady with a large, hard‐drinking surgeon husband. A ex‐military man with a Scottish temper and the regimental record for speed of amputation in the field. Although they had vanished, the nurses and doctors, a microclimate of rumour persisted: frantic couplings in cupboards and corridors, interactions between registrar and midwife, anaesthetist and scrubber. Hackney’s hospitals, whatever you inflict on them, survive as reservoirs of deep‐memory. Flashes of heightened consciousness: nano‐visions under the knife, at the point of death. Unexplained lights in frosted windows. Wavering shadows across courtyards where no trees have ever been planted.

  And all this time, although I was foolish enough not to recognize it, Driff was on a major quest: for the Northwest Passage. An escape from London. From vengeful husbands and fathers. From nightsweats, debt‐processors, taxmen. The private detective who stuck to his trail for three years, Stafford to Stratford East, Galway to Gloucester, had no foul papers to deliver, no summons, no physical retribution. He was carrying, along with his drip‐dry shirt, battery‐operated toothbrush, Polo mints, a large cheque. Which weighed nothing. £27,348. For Driffield. A share of the estate of a grateful collector, a man for whom Driff combed Kingsland Waste, Maidstone Market, the Westway section of Portobello Road, searching for magic books: conjuring, rope tricks, memoirs of Houdini. Confronted in a Penzance boarding house, the snarling dealer accepted the proffered envelope. He bought his dream ticket for India and left Hackney: for ever.

  Driffield vanished and Conrad returned, books and events were arranged around the 150th anniversary of the writer’s birth; when, once more, plot lines c
losed in on the German Hospital in Graham Road. John Stape, in The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, discussed the novelist’s slow recovery from the traumas of the Congo, malaria and imperialism. A brief Hackney respite.

  ‘A claim that he became involved with a woman attached to the hospital and even fathered a son by her,’ Stape wrote, ‘has not withstood investigation.’ Driffield as the elective son, the inheritor? I don’t think so. Time to get right away, my own northwest passage, Cumbria. We had a family wedding in Sedbergh.

  I like the town, the setting, the knowledge that the poet Basil Bunting is buried, on the banks of the River Rawthey, at Brigflatts, a Quaker Meeting House. Plain stones, curved, in a shaded place. ‘If you sit in silence,’ Bunting said, ‘if you empty your head of all things, there is hope that something, no doubt out of the unconscious, will appear.’

  A certain something was sucking the life out of this town; it had attempted, since my previous visit, to reposition itself as the ‘English Hay’, another graveyard of dead libraries. Proper shops, grocers, haberdashers, curry shacks, were being replaced by nicely mannered but neurotic book boutiques. A draggle of fell walkers, sheltering from horizontal rain, taking pride in not buying, had been pitched as a form of regeneration.

  Buying a newspaper from the only non‐bookshop on the main street, I walked straight into him, his table. Anna was the first to spot the infamous yellow sweater. She took off, at speed, knowing the morning was gone. Driffield, mouth bared in a seizure of thick cappuccino foam, was grunting over a spread of broadsheets, waiting for the shops to open. He’d cycled over from Kendal. And before that Morecambe. He was back on the road, but couldn’t cope with the reluctance of dealers to begin the day’s trade. Now he dealt in a single author, Burton. I misunderstood him, convinced that he was after Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy: an old favourite from the days when he collected books on suicide. But this was the swashbuckler, Richard, explorer and erotologist; the one whose stone‐tent mausoleum I had visited in Mortlake. Driffield had found a battered first edition of The Lake Regions of Central Africa, with map, and wanted to pull a switch with a grumpy Sedbergh man who had a clean copy, lacking map. Also in Driff’s pouch, how he came by it I don’t know, was a letter from Burton’s wife, Isabel: the one who burnt his manuscripts and denied him a burial out in the trackless desert wastes.