The coincidences ran deeper than that: Ian lived in Albion Road where I was mired in Albion Drive. When Anna went into labour with William, our second child, the midwife rushed to the wrong address, Albion Road in Stoke Newington.
Breakwell’s diary films were now part of the art‐school canon. His genius lay in a trick I never mastered, knowing what to leave out. The film he made about tea‐dancing at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill‐on‐Sea, was a poignant and delightful elegy. He died and we gathered, yet again, to celebrate the passing of a good man. In the bar of the Cochrane Theatre, Brian Catling, nursing a whisky which he produced from a pocket inside his heavy leather coat, told me about his latest enthusiasm, a video‐installation artist. ‘Straight out of a Hitchcock film, this iced blonde with immaculate tailoring walked towards me across Tower Bridge. Hat, gloves, heels. Marnie or North by Northwest. We enjoyed a four‐hour lunch while she described her Moby‐Dick performance piece.’
London bridges and white whales. As preparation for my expedition in search of Kaporal’s studio and the missing Welles film, I looked again at Orson’s virtuoso turn, the sermon delivered from the ship’s‐prow pulpit in John Huston’s film. Colour had been vampirized to invoke old whaling prints. The cast were English and Irish grotesques. Ray Bradbury wrote the script. One of the model whales drifted out to sea. Cetacean appearances in unlikely places suggested the imminent arrival of a drowned world. Catling called his first son Jack, Jack Ishmael.
The haunted building stood between the railway and an overgrown green path that led towards Alexandra Palace. Pulling myself up on a low wall, I was able to peer inside the reprieved development opportunity. Herman Melville in Ishmael’s opening monologue from Moby‐Dick speaks of ‘pausing before coffin warehouses’. This dark‐windowed hulk off Scarborough Road was one of those. How does Melville continue? ‘Circumambulate the city . . . What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.’
One studio dimly lit, a figure dressed entirely in black hunched over a table, hair on fire. It was a woman, slender as a child, rapt in such furious concentration that my waxed‐moon face at the window didn’t break the spell. If she noticed the unmannerly intrusion, it could be incorporated, effortlessly, into the work in progress. Thick black shadows flattened in an etching press.
I knuckled the dirty pane. I gestured. Caught her attention. She pointed towards a metal door. I was let in.
Oona Grimes was the etcher’s splendid name. The huge sheets pinned to the wall, the fiercely delicate topographical drawings on the desk, were part of a John Dee working, Enochian cartoons made in response to long study of the Mortlake scholar.
The black Oona favours is eloquent and hard won. She seems to be processing the graphic novel of a city that exists outside time and beyond place. A narrative of fragments and fractures constructed from old postcards, torn maps, cells of film recovered from Wardour Street bins. We have to imagine the angelic argument between Grimes and Dr John Dee. Which conjurer summons which spirit? Does the contemporary artist pitch herself back to haunt the precocious nightmares of the Elizabethan geographer? She walks in his sleep (as a forgotten pulp novel was once titled). An outline with no fixed core. A sketch come to life: Madimi dressed as Minnie Mouse.
The man of Mortlake was a true London presence, but any previous attempt to approach him ended in failure or farce. A sequence featuring Dee and his scryer, Edward Kelly, was aborted from my novel Radon Daughters. Misplaced. The saxophonist and composer John Harle conceived a Dee opera for which I was asked to write libretto and book. We lunched Elvis Costello, who agreed, so it appeared, to take the magician’s part. Before he actually read the synopsis and remembered, with relief, an orthodox Catholic past. A television‐production company had the hare‐brained scheme – even by their own fantastic standards – of walking myself and Alan Moore to Prague: as an Oxfam Dee and Kelly. I’m not sure who got which part. Several hours of recorded interview vanished into the same black hole from which Oona Grimes extracts the eye‐tar to factor the nigredo for her etchings. The midnight black.
‘She seemed to play up and down, child‐like, and seemed to go in and out behind my books.’ Dee recorded a sighting of Madimi in his Diaries. He whispered: ‘Whose maiden are you?’
To which there can be only the riddling reply: ‘Whose man are you?’ A circular exchange without resolution.
*
Grimes was a scavenger as much as an etcher, cranking her heavy press, attacking a white scroll. She brought in, from the street, schools of those little plastic fish that contain soy sauce. And she nailed them to her wall, alongside cards, toy wheels, ice‐lolly sticks. Her icons and equations, derived from Dr Dee, became storyboards prophesying future horrors: the fate of London. This woman, I realized, might prove the salvation of my Hackney project. She could convert the inchoate mess into a formal system. If she could devise symbols for each section of the book, like the intertitles of a silent film, readers would have something on which to rely. Trust the picture, not the word. And, more importantly, she might be able to crack the code of the ribbons tied to the canalside fence, my catalogue of tin notices and shifting graffiti, the mad runes of Hobo Sickert. Amassed evidence, I tried to convince myself, was moving towards a mathematical system I would never interpret. But Oona, staying in one place, taking her time, evaluating the Jiffy bags of material with which I would keep her supplied, just might.
We talked: unconnected anecdotes, gossip. We had friends in common. Oona, as a mature student, knew Catling from Norwich. Where she had also come across the mysterious mask‐maker Nigel Henderson. Much of Oona’s work, it was obvious, derived from cinema: as memory and inherited technique. Her father, Stephen Grimes, began as a storyboard artist. It was in her blood, this ability to break narrative down into sequences of stopped movement, fixed sets: each image affecting its successor.
Stephen Grimes was taken up by John Huston. He was officially the assistant art director to Ralph Brinton on Huston’s Moby Dick. He was responsible for the model of the white whale, the one that floated away in search of its own northwest passage. Oona spent much of her childhood on film sets, and even appeared in the background of several major films she prefers to forget. One of her sisters, she thinks, was born in Fishguard, at the time of the Moby Dick shoot. Another sister, Sarah, invited to recall a visit to the studio, drew up a short list of memories: ‘The pulpit where the preaching happens. A full‐size model head of the whale with guys aiming water sprays at it. Steve’s little model boats in a water tank. His super sketches.’
Oona agreed to look at my Hackney documentation. When I returned the following afternoon to Finsbury Park, slender trees along the railway were whipping in the wind. The etcher responded at once to Edmond Halley’s Hollow Earth theories. She pored over maps of subterranean continents, Symmes’s holes, patterns of interior fire. She was charmed by snapshots of coloured fences, dog fur under broken benches, plaster swans. She asked if she could hold on to the drawings I’d made of the letters woven, in red and blue, into the railings by the canal.
ON TUESDAY, 3RD FEBRUARY 2004 AT 8.00AM, EXACTLY ONE YEAR AFTER MARGARET MULLER WAS MURDERED, A MEMORIAL SERVICE TO COMMEMORATE HER LIFE WILL BE HELD IN VICTORIA PARK. A TREE WILL ALSO BE PLANTED. WERE YOU IN VICTORIA PARK AND HAVE NOT YET COME FORWARD?
A head‐shot, smiling, of the murdered woman. Who, it seems, was a good friend of Oona from the Slade. They took tea together, often. They talked. Every photograph I produce, every name I mention, Grimes is already there. She is the missing link in my incomplete tales. Snapshots from forgotten walks become an identity parade.
‘Oh, Anna,’ she said. With a smile. ‘Anna, yes.’
‘That’s not Anna, that’s one of the Red Army Faction when she was on the run, somewhere in East London.’
‘I don’t mean your wife. I mean Astrid. Astrid Proll. She was with my sister, they were close. Astrid lived with us in t
he country. She called herself Anna. That’s how I knew her.’
This German woman was everywhere. I must be the only person left in Hackney who didn’t meet Proll, argue with Jean‐Luc Godard, deliver fast food to Orson Welles, drink with the Angry Brigade, take walks in the rain with Julie Christie. All those dim years, in the slow dream of a vanishing city, rolling kegs across the yard of Truman’s Brewery, painting white lines on Hackney Marshes: what did I think I was doing? Jock McFadyen said he was quite surprised when he saw the family babysitter on the Six O’Clock News: Proll. Anna. Her Hackney identity. They say she lived somewhere around London Fields.
It struck me: why did Oona let me in? This wool‐capped figure at the window on a dark afternoon.
‘I thought you were the fellow with the next studio.’
‘Which reminds me – do you know a man called Kaporal?’
She shook her head. My researcher was unique. The only Hackney character with whom Oona was not involved in some way. She was quite alone in the building, working long hours, painting black dots, practising mirror‐writing, experimenting with Letraset.
I was convinced that Kaporal had the next unit, the Finsbury Park cold store was his kind of place. When I peered in through the cobwebby window I could make out cans of film stacked on a table, tottering columns of box files. A Kaporal bolthole.
‘The guy next door said “Hi” in the corridor once. Offered me a drink from his flask. He slept here, but he didn’t do any work. I was quite sure, that first afternoon, that you were him, come back.’
‘Does your key open his door?’
‘We could try.’
There’s a passage from Moby‐Dick in which the steersman claims to be sailing ‘east‐sou’‐east’ (the direction of Folgate’s ley) when Ahab snarls, ‘Thou liest!’ And smites him ‘with his clenched fist’. They are, in fact, being carried in the opposite direction. Thunder in the night has ‘turned’ the compass: ‘The magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner’s needle, is, as all know, essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled at, that such things should be . . . The needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue thus marred or lost.’
Kaporal’s metal tins, his film archive, had that effect. For the nameplate on his studio door, he used a card of a rucksacked figure tramping down a country road. There was a name: sinclair. And a phone number. Mine.
‘It’s uncanny,’ Oona said. ‘Kaporal has exactly your look. The drooping shoulders, the weight of the world. Managed despair. Even the Masai Barefoot Technology trainers. In the wrong size.’
Nigel Fountain and Marc Karlin
I sat on the train, going through the tunnel towards Kentish Town, the Hackney Diaspora, with the dead poet Ed Dorn. Or rather: I stood, sweated, swayed, struggled for air – which my fellow travellers, electronically preoccupied, paper‐pampered, were reluctant to cede. We fought hard, elbows, bags, for a wrap of our own space: buried standing. Dorn floated free, around the curved lid of the mortuary torpedo. At full length along the floor. Across moraines of lap. Inside and outside scratched obscenities on the windows. He was happy to share my experience of the Marc Karlin tape and seemed to approve the tone and tenor of an argument in defence of a Miltonic republic of letters (spurned, disregarded). Dorn, who pitched himself as a Protestant, always moving west towards ‘maybe Las Vegas’, admitted that of late, postmortem, he’d flirted with the Eastern Orthodox Church and was thinking seriously about relocating for a season to the environs of Constantinople. But then he thought seriously about everything, with a cynical whip of the tail, acceptance of responsibility for what language can do. Or undo.
The slim book‐shaped thing that brought the poet back was called Ed Dorn Live. In defiance of obituaries published around the end of the millennium. Which he saw no good reason to contradict. His abhorrences, spearing public clowns and civic cant, had never been more pertinent. How could he share American ground with Reagan and the Bush boys, the oil pirates and their feeble opponents, the neo‐lib breastbeaters who derided the forces of darkness into a significance they didn’t deserve?
It was not a popular position to maintain against lachrymose confessions of historic guilt (and avoidance of present action). The 20‐zeros, greeted with the worst architecture since the retreat of the glaciers, achieved new and improved levels of double‐speak. Notices around the latest field of rubble boasted of improving the image of construction. The thing itself no longer mattered, and barely existed, but the image got sharper and sharper. High definition, finally, absolves content. Any municipal scandal or act of pillage can be countered with the green card: more bicycles, less road. Recycling, as Dorn pointed out, has itself become a major polluting industry. ‘Nobody wants to live downwind from a polyurethane recycling plant.’ There isn’t time to unscrew the lid on the jar, to scrape the food‐substitute out, before the object becomes the problem. Huge fuel‐burning trucks rumble around the borough collecting skeins of plastic bag.
After Highbury, I managed to capture a seat, the space in which to listen to the Marc Karlin interview that Patrick Wright sent me. Wright had delivered a series of portraits of cultural ‘outriders’, who operated on or beyond the fringes of the known world. The irony being that Wright himself was very soon removed from the equation, nudged aside from his late‐night radio slot, while his long‐mediated, hard‐travelled epic on the Iron Curtain was decommissioned for the crime of being too much itself.
I had, at last, run Nigel Fountain to ground. His novel, Days Like These, was out of print and pretty much forgotten. The mix of John Buchan, Hitchcock, fascist conspiracy and grunge topography was a secret history I wanted to revisit. Fountain, one of the Montague Road musketeers with Karlin and David Widgery, was stuck with an impossible role: he was still alive. The pain of memory. What should he do with it? How should he behave in a culture determined to stitch his eyelids shut, to block his ears? The Third Man, with his posthumous tapes, transcripts, photo albums, spiked articles, remaindered books, was hiding out, very comfortably, on verdant slopes above the Kentish Town Underground station.
Pressure of time (money) had folded in on me. I couldn’t recognize any person or object outside the field of the present book; taking a short Silverlink commute was also a Karlin tutorial, an opportunity to listen again to the living voice of Fountain’s dead friend. Wright launched his free‐flowing introduction half a dozen times before it satisfied his producer. He had come to Karlin’s lair, the Fitzrovia bearpit beneath the editing suite where I was, at that moment, working with Chris Petit.
The quality of sound, the clarity of this tape, made listening painful: two men fought for breath in a basement, stacked with paper, from which most of the oxygen had been sucked out and replaced with blue smoke. Patrick, an articulate language pro, was operating on one lung; he’d lost the other in Paris. He took an ambitious flight across areas of common interest, before surfacing, when Karlin was least expecting it, with a loud question mark. Marc responded with a weighty pause, he wasn’t glib and he wanted to mean what he said. Then he gasped, coughed, steadied himself with a cigarette. Dry clicks of the plastic lighter were registered. Wright mentioned the convenience of the Middlesex Hospital, around the corner, where their conversation might have to transfer.
The unedited tape was more poignant than the cropped version that went out on air, or the printed summary published in Marc’s old magazine, Vertigo. It was good to hear the three attempts at every question. The film‐maker spoke with much heart and humour, no regret, with becoming modesty and a sense, perhaps, of having made difficulty for himself by working on the wrong side of the Channel. His films were about ‘distances’, the impossibility of speaking for another person, representing alien lives. He resisted Wright’s thesis about the loss of cultural memory, willed amnesia and talked of the situation in terms of ‘glide’.
Patrick laboured to keep the tone upbeat. ‘You’re still alive,’ he said. ‘You’ve stayed
in work.’ It didn’t register. Karlin spoke of London insomnia, pacing the house at night. The hour of the wolf: anxiety, phantoms from other worlds. ‘We’re so good at burials,’ he said. ‘Burials make me very angry. I don’t belong to the memory department.’
He brought back so vividly the last time I’d worked in film, the long hours running and re‐running our own footage and that of the 1960s counter‐cultural archivist Peter Whitehead – whose life, as he wanted to remember it, was on celluloid. Marc was the lurker in the doorway. The morning chat in the smoky cellar: the certainty that time was running out. I felt that we were tolerated, in our digital technology, by a generous figure from another, purer tradition. And, now, I was moved to hear, in this final Karlin interview, that he had appreciated what we were attempting to do.
‘The Avid gives the creative person an enormous possibility of making the film in the editing,’ Marc said, ‘and, if it’s used creatively, it’s incredible. I mean, an example of that was Chris Petit’s and Iain Sinclair’s film, The Falconer. You can really work on the image, on the text of the image, on the quality of it, on the feeling of it, and it really is like a painter’s tool, and, if it’s done with a sensibility, as opposed to a trickery, it’s an incredible piece of equipment.’
Karlin made it sound as if film was still a potentiality. It’s like what Dorn said about poetry, when he gloried in the triumph of obsolescence. ‘It’s obsolete, yeah. But so what? There are lots of great things that are obsolete. Kerosene lamps are obsolete, but there’s no light like it in a cabin in northern Wisconsin . . . Think of the best things in the world, actually, and they’re all obsolete. Sure. But that’s because a world that grows more and more venal and greedy and opportunistic makes things obsolete at a great rate . . . So poetry is real obsolete . . . It makes me feel great. It makes me feel like I’m working with something that’s good enough to be obsolete.’
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 46