Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  I should have packed this game in years ago. It’s gone on far too long. I need the money. Days Like These will never come back into print.

  Now comes that Poliakoff moment, when we stop the tape and send the camera tracking, quite independently, across the wall of photographs: the record of a life, friends, lovers, and children who seem older, calmer, wiser, than the parents who have gone. Bearded Marc Karlin, eyes shut, on a bed: like Guevara laid out for the Bolivian military photographer. A youthful leather‐jacketed Widgery supports the bleeding Fountain in an iconic scene from the 1968 Vietnam demo in Grosvenor Square.

  ‘I tripped on the kerb and bashed my head. We spent the rest of the afternoon sitting under a tree while David tended my wounds. We didn’t have anything to do with battling police horses. But that photo has gone into several books.’

  A damp Sheila Rowbotham, clutching a dog, shelters with Julie Christie under a London plane, one of the trees that would be lost in the Great Storm of October 1987.

  I picked out, against the fence of somewhere that looked like the wood yard, up the River Lea, near Millfields, a woman who just might have been Astrid Proll, dark hair hanging over one stern eye. Heavy brows, jaw set. Unhappy to be witnessed in this place.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  Nigel moved closer.

  ‘Did you know him? Strange cove with a crazy name. Kaporal? Worked part time in the BNP bookshop in Tulse Hill. He gave me shedloads of inside dirt for Days Like These. I had to bloody pay for it, fifty quid. Two weeks’ wages! Not sure who the woman with him is. Some Hackney artist? From the lesbian squatter community around Shrubland Road, Broadway Market? Kaporal hung out with those types. Drank in the Britannia, before it became the Samuel Pepys. He booked to go on the Christie walk, I do remember that. Never showed. Probably dead.’

  Douglas Lyne and Henry Cohen

  I’d taken it as far as I could, my confidential report. No Arkadin, no master manipulator, stands revealed; nothing but dead white skin when Orson Welles unhooks his horsehair beard. Hackney excavated was as mysterious as ever. And as perverse. I acknowledged the potency of certain archaeological sites, future ruins: Labyrinth in Dalston Lane, the German Hospital, the Mole Man’s tunnels. And that restored pink music hall, the Empire. A cavernous stage on which to project the phantoms of figures who lived here once or passed through. Jean‐Luc Godard, dark glasses and corn‐yellow cigarette, mimes a silent comedy: soubrette wives kick up shapely legs in front of a burning screen. Welles, mopping his brow, saws the Lady from Shanghai in half, in quarters. The trick being that there is no trick: Rita Hayworth folded away among squashed furs in a cabin trunk. To gasps and wild applause, he produces the severed head of Jayne Mansfield from the mouth of a plastic whale. Walter Sickert, lounging at the bar, fills his pad with loose notations. He is treating his barber to a pint of whelks. Leon Kossoff, up in the gods, sees it whole, the pulsing energy field: like a swimming pool, a gene pool of all the coming races. Edward Calvert, crossing from Darnley Road, pictures Marie Lloyd as a draped nymph beside the recovered Hackney Brook. Swanny is present with his drinking school: Samuel Richardson, Joseph Priestley, Edmond Halley, Daniel Defoe, Arthur Machen, Alexander Baron, Harold Pinter, Patrick Wright and Stewart Home. Hollow Earthers relishing a funny night out.

  No Roland Camberton, our everyman: the missing narrator. Realism has no part in the story. Depicting Hackney, through manipulated autobiography, the author is airbrushed from his own script. Through slashing rain, the jaundiced tonal values of John Minton’s cover design for the lost Camberton novel, the proud dome of the Hackney Empire is barely visible. Minton is looking south. Everything is fudged, in the wrong place.

  The high‐angle viewpoint took me back to Hitchcock and Buchan, The 39 Steps. Nigel Fountain and Sebastian Bell, in their very different novels, drew on the notion that a section of map, properly interpreted, would point the way to revelation. The maps were not of London. They fell from a dying hand: the Scottish Highlands, remote cottages in Wales where fictions might be contrived and love affairs broken by the challenge of intimacy.

  I wanted Hitchcock, excited by what he had learnt in Germany, to open with a track across light bulbs spelling out: E‐M‐P‐I‐R‐E. But, in reality, when I view the DVD, it’s MUSIC HALL. His theatre has been constructed in a studio, but is otherwise accurate: a bar at the back, curtain of tobacco fug, urgent faces. A gunshot. Ribs crushed, women and old folk trampled in the stampede: ‘Fire!’ A device Hitchcock reprised, in one form or another, right through the catalogue to North by Northwest and Torn Curtain.

  Out of animal heat, and damp night, a woman with a fur collar confronts Richard Hannay: ‘May I come home with you?’ ‘It’s your grave.’ A real bus on a contrived set that has none of the grandeur, or pretension, of the actual Hackney Empire. Destination? Holborn, Bank, Aldgate, Bow, Stratford. Joe Kerr, driver and transport scholar, reckoned it would be a 25, the predecessor to the Routemaster. The route was west–east and not, as would be required for the Empire, north–south. Hitchcock’s music hall is located in Nowhere‐Whitechapel.

  ‘You may call me Annabella.’

  That’s a given: when slender creatures offer up their naked backs to bread knives. Or announce themselves as secret agents. Or eat haddock at midnight from the kitchen table. Sexual favours are on sale to the highest bidder. With optional extras. Silent stars voiceless in an age of sound. Look out for the man with the missing finger joint.

  The Annas protest: we won’t die in the first reel. And we don’t belong in the East London swamps.

  To firm up memories of the period immediately before our move to Hackney, I read the transcripts of my interviews from 1967 with Allen Ginsberg, R. D. Laing and other counter‐cultural luminaries. I flicked through books dealing with that period. One of them, Walking the London Scene: Five Walks in the Footsteps of the Beat Generation by Sydney R. Davies, had been passed on by Gareth Evans. Gareth’s interventions often anticipated my needs.

  A person called Douglas Lyne, described as ‘archivist and Chelsea habitué’, came across William Burroughs in the Lillie Langtry pub. Lyne had picked up a copy of Naked Lunch in Paris. It interested him enough to phone Arthur Boyars, Burroughs’s editor, to see if an introduction could be fixed.

  He is given a number: the Empress Hotel. He phones and leaves a message. A meeting is arranged for 7.40 p.m. Precisely. In the cab, Lyne’s wife, Monica, panics: what should she wear to socialize with a notorious junkie?

  ‘Would you like a drink, Mr Burroughs?’

  ‘That’s what we’re here for. Brandy.’

  ‘Double?’

  ‘I could do a triple.’

  He knocks back five of them before the money runs out. They agree on another session in Lyne’s Chelsea local, the Surprise. It goes well: Burroughs taps Lyne for a pound and leaves, almost immediately, for Tangier. From where he sends a card with a hand‐painted desert scene. And also a copy of Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag, inscribed ‘cordially William Burroughs’.

  The next time the two men meet is back at the Surprise. Burroughs, spectral as ever, walks into the pub and hands Lyne his pound. He accepts a round or five, before returning to Lyne’s flat to record, on a reel‐to‐reel machine, an interview for the archive. A drinking friend of Lyne, some Soho associate, is persuaded to take part. He doesn’t like Burroughs: unwholesome. A lemur dripping poisoned fruit. The fellow has the knack of lisping your thoughts back, before you can get them out. Or putting obscene words in your mouth: dead flies wrapped in sandpaper.

  They are, all three, quite drunk. Brandies have been fired back all evening. The man from the pub, the one working the machine, was a writer himself. Years ago. That might have been the source of his irritation. His books were classically constructed, widely reviewed and completely forgotten. He was out of the loop, off his turf: a Hackney man. Name of Cohen. Henry Cohen. In his pomp, to keep the shame of this literary habit from his orthodox family, Henry sailed under a flag of convenience: Roland Ca
mberton.

  It was a relatively simple matter to track Burroughs into Hackney, the drug and rent‐boy underworld of the Kray era, the connections with Swanny and Genesis P‐Orridge. There was a full‐blown Arena compilation by Neil Murger, shortly after the great man died, which included Burroughs and Patti Smith doing a drunken turn in a Smithfield cellar. She asks if he’s going on to Hoxton. He yawns.

  There were snippets of film: Burroughs hiding his face with his hat on London Fields, recordings from bunker performances in Vyner Street. What I couldn’t get across, as I made the calls, knocked on doors, was the fact that it wasn’t Burroughs who interested me. Not this time. It was his Chelsea collaborator, Henry Cohen (aka Roland Camberton). Who?

  I tried to reach Sydney R. Davies, who was published by a small press in Glasgow, and eventually, by email, contact was established. Mr Davies was protective of Douglas Lyne, who lived in active retirement, with his massive archive and, potentially, the Burroughs– Camberton tape, somewhere south of the river. The former Chelsea habitué, I calculated, must be well into his eighties.

  We fenced around the thing I really wanted: the story of Camberton’s lost years. Was it possible to make a second life outside Hackney? Davies fed me fascinating sidebars.

  ‘Douglas showed me a copy of a book called New Writing & Daylight, published by John Lehmann in 1946. There was an article, “The World of Alfred Hitchcock”, by Julian Maclaren‐Ross. Douglas knew Maclaren‐Ross and Dylan Thomas. As did Henry Cohen.’

  The tape archive, stored in many cardboard boxes, would take months to sort through. Lyne was however prepared to grant me an interview, if I understood that he wouldn’t approach the subject of Camberton directly: I would be responsible for making a record of post‐war life in Soho and Chelsea. The pubs, the films.

  ‘I saw Douglas last night,’ Davies emailed. ‘He has managed to dig out various papers relating to characters he knew from his old Chelsea days, many of whom used to drink in the Surprise. And there is one particular box of reel‐to‐reel tapes, not labelled, from that era. I would have to assess if they are still playable on his old machine. He saw you on TV the other night in a programme about J. G. Ballard and has agreed to meet you – if you can come to his house next Sunday afternoon.’

  It was a long way from Chelsea, through the hell of late‐weekend traffic, in cold November rain. A large villa in one of those streets you can never find again, deep in Kaporal territory: Tulse Hill, Herne Hill, the slopes above Brixton. A cemetery of private lives in houses from which furtive men appear with dogs who piss in hedges. And, always, beyond the local darkness, blue television screens muted by net curtains. A demented high road where the real action goes down, speeding aliens chasing reluctant contacts. Trying, unsuccessfully, to buy single cigarettes on tick.

  Mr Lyne lived deep in historic time; military anecdotes were intertwined with genealogies of the Welsh Marches and musings on his blood relationship to Father Ignatius, the charismatic priest who raised a girl from the dead in Wellclose Square.

  The man was a charming and persuasive talker, the years in pubs and clubs had not been wasted, but he wouldn’t be deflected from the slow unravelling of an invisible thread. An allusion to Camberton would be parenthesized for an aside on the Napoleonic Wars. In his own good time, Douglas would return to my topic. There were mugs of slow tea and chocolate biscuits. Tape followed tape. Mr Lyne, with his swept‐back silver hair, trim moustache and milky eye, was like a benevolent Pinochet. Military bearing, liver‐spotted hands. Clean white shirt. Dark waistcoat. Lightweight suit.

  He started by speaking of his childhood in Monmouthshire. A family of land agents and German Jews, railway builders and importers of Portuguese wine. But everything, I understood, led to the war. Douglas expressed his enthusiasm for the accuracy of Alexander Baron’s early books, the private soldier’s tale.

  In all the slit trenches and foxholes, in Italy or Africa, there were books. I started at Alamein and ended up at the Alps two years later. One’s constant companion was Penguin New Writing, anything published by John Lehmann.

  As I was a private I had plenty of leisure time in which to read. And my mother, who didn’t really resent my not going into the Guards, kept sending me books. Huge parcels every week. I read Connolly, Horizon and so on. I’ve got them all in there. I have a large library, mainly books from my father and mother. They had such different tastes. She had a passion for the classics of her day, Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Bloomsbury.

  I took to the life of an artillery man because it’s not really dangerous. One has to go to the front about one week in four. That leaves three weeks a month without a great deal to do: reading, talking, drinking, socializing. I learnt Italian. As I had so little to occupy me – I was no. 6 on the gun – they sent me off to get provisions. Sorrento, those nice places. The thing in the army is to keep in with storemen and cooks. They always had plenty of extras, which we used for trading, down in the destitute cities. The cooks always had sardines. It was a gentleman’s life really. A marvellous preparation for the post‐war years.

  Before all this, I was sent to Oxford. I went to Trinity College. Our library had been taken over by Graham Greene – who didn’t want his collection of books to be bombed. His wife was living down there, a very charming lady. They weren’t together, but they knew of one another’s movements.

  The president of the college asked one to breakfast, once a term. I was seated next to a lady who didn’t have much to say. She asked, ‘What are you interested in?’ I mentioned Frank Harris. She said, ‘Oh, that’s good. Have you seen the first editions?’ She said, ‘You ought to try my husband’s collection. It’s in Trinity Library.’

  I trotted round there and found Greene’s books, a huge collection of erotica. Amazing pornography.

  There was a strange thing called the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, ABCA. Very dangerous people. All sergeant majors. They’d been set up, actually, by a chap who was a cousin of mine. A German speaker who had been advising Beaverbrook on black propaganda. He said that what we were going to do was make sure we win the post‐war election. The ABCA were left‐wing Oxbridge intellectuals. They were given jeeps. To go wherever they liked, to talk to anybody they could find about the course of the war. They indoctrinated the men. Anthony Burgess was involved. William Empson and so on. Totally left. They directed us towards Sartre. They were all communists.

  As soon as the war ended, May 1945, they set up a class system, officers’ mess, sergeants’ mess: a replay of the pre‐war world. I tried for a vacancy in the Intelligence Corps and was posted to Austria. Vienna, in many ways, became the centre of Europe. Austria was totally and absolutely The Third Man. The Third Man was all about the Intelligence Corps, Trevor Howard and all that. The atmosphere: Carol Reed knew his stuff.

  Meanwhile, Henry Cohen – which was Roland Camberton’s real name – joined the Air Force. I think he was my age. I would be very surprised if Henry was more than two years either side of me. I think he was probably born in 1921. His attitude, now I come to think of it, was similar to my own. There were people born before ’21 who had some kind of civvy life. Monica, my wife, was born in 1918. She was quite a different kind of person. She had a civilian attitude.

  Henry had gone straight into the RAF at eighteen. We came out around the same time, 1946. I took one look at the family home, Woodlands, and decided that nothing had changed. I’d made a few contacts in the film world. The 1930s was a great period: Eisenstein, Hitchcock, John Ford. Documentary was a huge thing: Paul Rotha, Basil Wright, Cavalcanti. Lots of people gravitated to Ealing Studios and Korda. I’d been able to help, while I was at Oxford, with Crown Films, Strand Films. They came down to make something called Oxford at War.

  Dylan Thomas was at Strand Films. I met him there. A most vain and cultivated man, strange man.

  It was a time of jobs for the boys. The Cambridge people had one setup and the Oxford people another. Burgess and Maclean, Philby and so on.
Humphrey Jennings was slightly younger.

  Film had been my thing. I did my own Bell and Howell home movies before the war. In colour. Family. And, later, evacuees. It was a natural progression to join a documentary film company. There was plenty of money about, the government was socialist. The industry was dominated by communists.

  Julian Maclaren‐Ross was a very great friend. It might have been through Henry Cohen. Henry knew Maclaren‐Ross. They drank together.

  Worldwide Pictures, where I worked, was based in Soho Square. Elizabeth House. For five years this was the centre of my life. A spectacular melting pot, Soho. Fitzrovia. Rathbone Place. The Wheatsheaf. Every pub had its own clientele.

  For some reason, perhaps because of my curious background, I never got too thick with any coterie. I moved from one to another. I had a share of my mother’s flat in Sloane Street, a penthouse. I would buy a carnation for my buttonhole every morning, before going to join my communist friends in Elizabeth House. I moved in two worlds. My friends would come back to Sloane Street.

  Henry was with me. This was the atmosphere in which I got to know him. He was no doubt pursuing a course of his own. When peace came, film and arts people all got together. Johnny Minton, as a painter and a drinker, was one of us. He did the covers, the dustwrappers for Henry’s books.

  I met Monica in 1949. We had a short time together in Sloane Street: before it became intolerable. My mother kept bombing in. There was a hair salon below. It was all very awkward. One of my people, who worked for Rotha, found what he called a ‘studio flatlet’ in Oakley Street. They say of Oakley Street that you go there twice: once on the way up, once on the way down.