White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

Iain Sinclair

with a new introduction by

ALAN MOORE

VALANCOURT BOOKS

First published in Great Britain by Goldmark in 1987

First published in the United States by Valancourt Books in 2015

Published simultaneously in hardcover and paperback

Copyright © 1987 by Iain Sinclair

Introduction © 2015 by Alan Moore

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

Cover by Henry Petrides

INTRODUCTION

Bloodmaps and Papercuts: Iain Sinclair’s Lines on London

Born blue while the Luftwaffe were bombing Cardiff, only drawing breath once a detective novel had been dropped upon his head in a pulp-paper baptism, hard-bitten language slapping at the pulsing fontanel, impactful books aren’t part of Iain Sinclair’s DNA so much as part of his phrenology. The rhythmic Beats, Burroughs and Kerouac, shaped his expanding skull as surely as Buñuel and Hitchcock would precision-grind his eye, and with his 1967 sketch in celluloid of Allen Ginsberg he was able to establish himself in the shifting, mutable East London landscape that has been a starting-block for his astonishing excursions ever since.

Over-examined and still not sufficiently explained, the ’sixties seemed a decade with no culture save for counter-culture; seemed an era when the page had disappeared to leave only the margins. It was on these fertile borderlands that the creative muscle of the period was forced to stake its turf, evolving idiosyncratic or sometimes authentically delusional survival strategies out of precarious situations and psychologies. Sinclair’s own business model, practical and not uncommon although never easy, was to strike an amicable left brain/right brain balance between now-arcane professions of the street – packing cigars, employment at a Brick Lane brewery, mowing unkempt verges and the grounds of Hawksmoor churches for the Parks Department – and the always-arcane craft of poetry with the establishment of his heroic Albion Village Press in 1970, there in the after-burn of underground self-publishing amid a radiant and fraying web of stapled, spirit-duplicated visionaries. And, of course, the overlap between the literary and a living wage in this Venn diagram resided in the feverish, life-shortening profession of book dealer, crazed prospectors working second-hand shop seams in search of frequently imaginary nuggets: hens’ teeth modern first editions, pencil-underlined association copies or respected classics fraudulently autographed by Michael Moorcock.

The bombardment of minutiae and incident, the multiplied perspectives and phenomena available at that specific juncture of the ripening century, that exact locus on the Hackney map, seemed to demand a new approach to narrative and language, an irradiated prose with heavy water syntax able to contain the burgeoning complexity of ordinary experience. His urban strolls and circumnavigations became circuits of a verbal cyclotron, a sentence-smasher. Concepts were accelerated and collided, circumstantial decay-particles observed and noted in their fugitive trajectories. Perhaps provoked by the light-bending density of J.H. Prynne’s event-horizon writings Sinclair tested his poetic to destruction, overloading poetry’s delicate-looking armatures with information till the form itself collapsed to unexpected shapes beneath an unaccustomed weight.

Sinister intuitions from his Parks Department days, suggestions of alignment between Hawksmoor’s architectural embodiments of ‘Terrour & Magnificence’, were manifested in the startling Lud Heat, 1975, poetry captured at a stage of larval transformation into a divergent and genetically enriched species of prose. The slender tome provided only an inadequate containment-­shell against the force of the fusion reaction taking place within, where new and radical ideas encroached upon critical mass to threaten an excursion. In its subterranean literary release, an underground test-detonation, Lud Heat served as epicentre for a shockwave which would resonate through culture into the next century, its visible blast pattern evident in Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor and my own From Hell with Eddie Campbell as just one meagre example. Toiled on at the same time and yet only seeing publication after some four years was Suicide Bridge, in which Sinclair reconstructs the Kray twins’ Pale Ale Gothic empire as the titan London pantheon of William Blake and gangsters’ heads sing prophecy from a urinal floor. In both of these fiercely distilled and concentrated works the sense of something bigger struggling to emerge and to define itself is palpable. In 1987 this would turn out to be an extraordinary and revelatory first novel trading as White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings.

One underappreciated fact about first novels is that authors, vicious twists of fate a part of their profession, are by no means sure they’ll live to write a second one. Thus everything, their lives and their obsessions, must somehow be folded into the few hundred pages that, however fleetingly, they feel might possibly comprise their headstones. Books become cryptic and strangely purposeful time-capsules like the London railway maps, the photos of contemporary beauties and the straight-edge razor secreted beneath the base of Cleopatra’s Needle. In Sinclair’s case the diversity and breadth of his concerns, along with the demented vagaries of his book-dealing day-job, meant that what we understand by the word ‘novel’ would require significant body-modification simply to accommodate the increased bandwidth. Modular and interchangeable, the plug-in units of conventional plot structure were discretely junked in favour of the riskier and more exploratory agendas of the poet. Leave the work open to accident and impulse. Understand it as a volatile and driven individual that must be negotiated with, and always listen carefully to its unreasonable demands. Trust that the proper ending will announce itself in a rhymed image or an inadvertent shift of light rather than in the murderer revealed or the discovery that someone’s been their own ghost from the start. Relinquish all authority. Armed thus with attitudes and tools appropriate to an entirely different medium, the delinquent doctor’s son applied a ballpoint scalpel to the meat cartographies of Spitalfields and to the hard-up wildlife rustling in the district’s yellowed newsprint skirts.

White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings in its Thatcher-ridden desperate business and delirium, as well as in its Barnum coterie of marvels and grotesques, is only fiction by a whisker. Held against the revelations of the gutter and the sodden headlines crumpled there, plain artifice seems scarcely worth the effort. Joblard, Dryfeld, Nicholas Lane are all, unlikely as it seems, existing entities in our common human continuum and to encounter them is to become aware of Sinclair’s little-noticed gift for understatement. Similarly the preposterous and eerie situations herein or else something very like them were occurrences in spacetime, give or take a felony. This territory generates a fear and loathing of its own, without requiring chemical precursors. The book’s parallel account of William Withey Gull and the tormented Free Love advocate James Hinton also operates in the same territory of reported fact, extrapolated or deduced from the elaborate blood-confections spun by Joseph Gorman Sickert and mal-fated Stephen Knight in their wishfully-titled Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. Sinclair’s novel, in its dazzling originality of content, lets the narrative of his red-eyed and predatory literary jackals stray into the umbra cast by one of their own much sought-after dog-eared prizes.

It is in the book itself, however, rather than in its riotous materials, that the real substance of Sinclair’s accomplishment is to be found. Right from the first page with its glossolalic heading and its haunted snapshot . . . a decaying vessel of some kind, perhaps a rowboat, timbers jutting like a ribcage or the feathers of a rotted swan and stranded in a tidal estuary, grey sky charring to a crisp up at the photograph’s top edge . . . the reader is aware of being in an alien country, this even before the opening paragraphs with their abrasive swoon of language and the most distressing although memorable use of the word bouillabaisse that you will ever hear. Sinclair forces the novel to be what his tale insists it be, compels it to include the stray transmissions picked up via a séance or via the postal service during the work’s composition. An acrostic jotting trickles through the pages, gathering uneasy meaning and momentum as it goes. A letter from the poet Douglas Oliver containing his misgivings at the occult currents surging under Sinclair’s earlier Suicide Bridge is found pertinent to the current investigation and is pasted in. The writing of the book is an event, rather than an event’s recounting; fiction growing new techniques and new appendages as it proceeds, with this exhilarating rush of innovation captured live as it unfolds in each fresh paragraph.

Iain Sinclair, in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, has provided much more than a brilliant debut. Anybody with a stake in stories will discover here a lens through which to look more penetratingly and with a staggeringly informed eye on the new landscape that has crept up to surround us, on contemporary reality as implied by the shadows cast in fiction, and on the comparative timidity and languor with which words and concepts are routinely handled. For my money the most crucial and most bar-adjusting voice currently resonating in the English language, Sinclair’s opening gambit, his first novel, is a manifesto for a future literature that has more blood, more brains, and more mysterious beauty; a demand for art sufficient to the fractal complications of its times. Those who aspire to understand what’s happening in modern writing should start here.

Alan Moore

Northampton

April 5, 2015

Alan Moore is one of the greatest comic book writers of all time, best known for his multi-award-winning Lost Girls, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Watchmen, the only graphic novel to make Time magazine’s list of the top 100 modern novels. He is also the author of the novels Voice of the Fire (1996) and Jerusalem (2016, forthcoming). He lives in Northampton.

". . . then I tell you what change I think you had better begin with, grandmother. You had better change Is into Was and Was into Is, and keep them so."

"Would that suit your case? Would you not be always in pain then?" asked the old man tenderly.

"Right!" exclaimed Miss Wren with another chop.

for

B. Catling, there before me

and

Martin Stone, always ahead

book one: MANAC

1

THERE IS an interesting condition of the stomach where ulcers build like coral, fibrous tissue replacing musculature, cicatrix dividing that shady receptacle into two zones, with communication by means of a narrow isthmus: a condition spoken of, with some awe, by the connoisseurs of pathology as hour glass stomach.

Waves of peristalsis may be felt as they pass visibly across the upper half of the abdomen, left to right, as if conscious of diurnal etiquette. Friends of surgeons have watched mesmerised, gawping, with the empty minded rapture of plein-air sunset smudgers, at this revelation of secret tides. A boring pain recurs, beaks in the liver, even the thought of food becomes a torture; a description that starts at discomfort is refined with each meal taken until it colonises the entire consciousness, then copious vomiting, startling to casual observers, brings relief.

Nicholas Lane, excarnate, hands on severely angled knees, stared out across the dim and featureless landscape, then dropped his gaze to the partly-fermented haddock, mixed with mucus, that poured from his throat, that hooked itself, bracken coloured, over the tough spears of roadside grass. Lumps, that were almost skin, split and fell to the ground. New convulsions took him: his bones rattled with their fury. Patches of steaming bouillabaisse spilled a shadow pool across the thin covering of snow.

‘Toads!’ remarked Dryfeld, ignoring the event, ‘the females carry the males on their backs across these roads. Or die in the attempt. Like Shetland fisherwomen. Wet skirts tucked into their belts. Out through the breakers. Husbands. Drinking all night. Cling to their necks.’

He broke off, scribbled a few lines into his ring folder, in stiff blue capitals; then, unprompted, relaunched his monologue.

‘If the A1 had anticipated itself, Darwin would never have needed to leave these shores. It’s all here, Monsieur. Only the fittest and most insanely determined life forms can battle across that river of death to reach the central reservation – but then, ha! They are free from predators. They live and breathe under the level of the fumes. They stay on this grass spine, leave the city, or the sea-coast, escape, feral cats and their like, and travel the country, untroubled, north to south. The lesser brethren die at the verges. And are spun from our wheels, flung to the carrion. Grantham’s daughter, this is your vision!

And when the cities are finished, abandoned, life will steal back in down this protected tongue. The new world will evolve here.’

Nicholas Lane’s stomach having emptied itself he climbed back into the car, found that he still had one cigarette stashed, called for a match. Nobody had one. He sniffed, drew his hand across his nose, and left the cigarette dangling like a piece of torn lip.

To call him thin would be to underdescribe him. His skin was damp paper over bone. Nothing could get into his intestine so he functioned directly on head energy. An icicle of pure intelligence.

The mid-England dark, torpid and thick, a kind of willed ignorance, was wide about them. A heavy but sluggish motorcar facing south, mudded hubs, filthy windows. The kind of car that is common in the antiques game, strong enough to take plenty of potential Welsh dressers. Not so common in the book trade. See one and you see a villain. Call it a Volvo. A case of sealed heats, old smoke, sweats, bags, fears, papers, coffee nerves, sleepless, questing, never willing to call it a day.

They had spent a gentle half-week motoring from London to Glasgow, to Stirling, to Edinburgh, to Newcastle, to Durham, with brief expeditions to Carlisle, Richmond, Ripon and many lesser centres, many a rumour chased, and after nothing more interesting than used books.

The car was indeed filled with them. Elephant folios, loose, sets of bindings, sold by the yard, carrier bags of explosive paper­backs, first editions packed into cardboard boxes, leaflets on fireworks, golf novels, needlework patterns, catalogues of light fittings, vegetarian tracts, anything that could be painlessly converted into money, so that they could get back out on the road again.

Jamie, known to many an auction ring as the Old Pretender, was at the wheel, for it was his car, asleep, his near horizontal forehead sunk onto his arm. Septic skin, a tropical pallor, old planting family, liver already counted out, and suffering a slightly inconvenient dose of the clap. Useful man. Plenty of relatives with decayed mansions, inhabited by domestic animals and uncontrolled vermin. Be lucky to see his thirtieth birthday. When he wasn’t drunk, he was asleep. And he had not, as yet, been allowed his sundowner; Dryfeld would not permit the car to halt in daylight, until the threat of a lapful of Nicholas Lane’s week-old breakfast, and the vision, across the road, of a phonebox, gave him pause.

Dryfeld sported a camelhair coat, with lumps of the camel still attached, more padded horse-blanket than coat: it was stretched well beyond its limits in accommodating the dealer’s rigid shoulders. His weight seemed all to have been compressed somewhere near the top of his spine, he had no neck. His skull was shaven, deathrow chic, and was so massive and burdened with unassimilated information that it tipped aggressively forward, almost onto his chest. He hunched his shoulders so that they could support the weight, striding at reckless speed, taken for a hunchback. The thick skin of his face stretched into a permanent frown.

It was tragic that Max Beckmann died too soon to have a crack at him: the darkest self-portraits hint at something of Dryfeld’s flavour. But Dryfeld never posed, was never at rest.

His pockets sagged, tormented by the selection of coins needed for his hourly phone-calls. His business was all done through other people’s premises. He would ring his contacts day or night, from every caff, or garage, or railway station where he found himself with a crack of time. So that when he arrived back in London he could immediately pick up more money, cash in his cheques, drop a sack of recent purchases, and leave again.

He lived nowhere, was nobody. Made it his business to stay out of all the files, lists, electoral rolls. He took his name, and he had only one, from St Mary Matfellon, White­chapel. The promise of an anarchist booksale in Angel Alley had drawn them into the labyrinth, but the sale, being run by anarchists, was naturally cancelled and moved, unannounced, to another location, at another time, changed from books to records. The moment was not to be wasted. Dryfeld plunged into the White­chapel Library and stormed through the accounts of the eliminated church. Among the list of rectors he found, Tho. Dryfeld, 10 January 1503 – 2 March 1512. Nobody was using the name, it became his.

He was as well read as any railway cleaner with his pick of the first class carriages, pockets bulging with slightly corrupted newsprint, thick ink-stained fingers. He absorbed all the information by touch, a kind of idiot’s braille.

Nicholas Lane never read a newspaper, carried no cash. Paid for his tea with a crumpled cheque. He appeared as