Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

They conversed in French; Conrad fluently, rapidly, meridional emphasis, a whiff of garlic, Norton with painful slowness and an atrocious accent. My great-grandfather’s shipboard ‘Frog’ is a footnote -1 had to wade through suitcases of untranscribed diaries to fill out the details — in a section entitled ‘Striking Personages and Eccentrics Met On Voyages in the East’. Norton has more to say about his ‘fellow-passengers’: Tindall, Wernham, Jock Hay and the brothers Rossiter. ‘All gone now excepting one of the last-mentioned.’

Like Conrad, Arthur Norton retired from his first career, at around forty, and took to country living and occasional literary composition. Investments evaporating, he ventured.

The French-speaking Pole, come ashore at Stanford-le-Hope, wrote, grimly, remorselessly, every word wrenched from him, to keep his family afloat.

Arthur put the notion of authorship, this whim, aside: he went after gold in Australia, he tried Tasmania (sent for the family). I have a prize-book, Class V, Mathematics, from Hobart, awarded to his youngest son, my grandfather. The Terror of the Indians ( or, The Life of David Crockett ) by John S.C. Abbott. The frontispiece, a steel-engraving, depicts yet another black river, huts, smoke, coracles.

Scratching for gold was as foolish as taking shares in South African mines. Norton, so his journals reveal, felt his age — fifty-three — on a circumnavigation of Lake Sinclair. His leg was troubling him, he leant on a heavy stick. But there was one expedition left in the old man, his Nostromo : Peru. He would act on the hint dropped by the first mate of The Highland Forest on the passage out; the madness that did for Walter Raleigh, silver mines, cities of gold covered by jungle.

And here is the thing that still puts the shiver on me: Arthur Norton’s bias towards the picaresque, the grand project that declines into loose bowels, fevers, hallucinations, might have touched Joseph Conrad — as the Pole’s over-nice attempt to draw financial advice from my bearded ancestor, mistaken for a hardheaded man of business, was fatally misinterpreted. Could it be, I wondered, that Norton had infiltrated Conrad’s fiction? A ghostly cameo, a line or two, offering a sort of immortality? The language of great writers, the order of words, mistakes, inspirations, is outside time. But the order never changes. If Norton was in Conrad, he lived. Lives. Outlasts the rest of us, sons, grandsons, great-grandsons. Hidden away in an Amazonian thicket of sea tales, silver hunts, redemption, loss of nerve — and flashing, dark-eyed women (unreal as miniatures in a locket).

I went everywhere in the canon, odd volumes, sets, battered first editions, before I tried Youth: And Two Other Tales. Heart of Darkness had been milked to death, they’d all been at it, Orson Welles, Nicolas Roeg, W.G. Sebald. It wasn’t Heart of Darkness , although that played best with the situation I found myself in. So many of Conrad’s tales begin at the hinge, the liquid edge of the A13: ‘an enfilading view down the Lower Hope Reach’. The living and their fictional doubles yarning their lives away, ‘not more than thirty miles from London, and less than twenty from that shallow and dangerous puddle to which our coasting men give the groundless name of “German Ocean”’.

The End of the Tether was a makeweight, thrown in to bulk out a volume, 40,000 words for William Blackwood, ballast for Youth . This was that famously unlucky manuscript, burnt in an oil-lamp explosion, lost, rewritten. Fiddled with by Ford Madox Ford. Critics talk of old age and Lear , ‘assorted fools and grotesques’. The End of the Tether has been eclipsed by Heart of Darkness . But it was here that I found the sepia imprint of Arthur Norton, his limp, the heavy stick that supports him in the Peruvian photographs.

His age sat lightly enough on him; and of his ruin he was not ashamed. He had not been alone to believe in the stability of the Banking Corporation. Men whose judgment in the matters of finance was as expert as his seamanship had commended the prudence of his investments, and had themselves lost much money in the great failure. The only difference between him and them was that he had lost his all …

He had to use a thick cudgel-like stick on account of a stiffness in the hip — a slight touch of rheumatism. Otherwise he knew nothing of the ills of the flesh.

Arthur Norton, dragging around the deck, talking investments, blackguarding his advisers; his dry, Aberdonian humour misunderstood by the supposed Frenchman.

A burnt manuscript, months of graft, destroyed.

Norton’s shot at immortality: a dodgy hip, stick, money-talk that sent him back into exile, that pushed Conrad towards the crowning achievement of Nostromo .

Different Americas, the same Essex. The Lower Hope Reach, in morning light (Conrad favoured dusk, redness over London), never changes. A poultice of yellow mud, a fast-flowing river, an immense and very English sky.

We’re moving, over ramps, along tolerated pavements — FOOTPATH CLOSED — much faster than the morning traffic, which, in thin blue, first-cigarette tension, is not moving at all. The A13, everybody knows, is the future; the highway on which the sacred cities of Thames Gateway will depend. With the blessing of government and mayor, the one thing on which they agree, brownfield swamps will witness the beginning of a process whereby London is turned inside out. Centre as an inauthentic museum (haunted by authentic beggars, junkies, prostitutes), flexible rim as a living, working, vibrant economy.

Meanwhile: stasis. Avenues of red-and-white cones. Yellow, giraffe-neck cranes. Heavy-duty machinery exhibited but not used: two Irishmen with one shovel, down a ditch, the only action. Dozens of grey drums, stencilled MILTON: I like those. I photograph them — with a vividly decorated (pink, blue) tower block in the background. Mexican vivacity, Siberian weather fronts.

We can’t talk. We have to creep, Indian file, backs to the wall. Noise verges on blood-from-ear levels. Not from the cars and lorries (thumping engines, exhaust fumes, radios, mobile phones), nor from road crews (drills, banter, radios again), but the sky. Traffic helicopters, weather helicopters, accident helicopters from the roof of the Royal London Hospital: a Murch/Coppola Apocalypse Now , wraparound-Dolby soundscape, without Wagner and the Doors. Sky fouled by contrails, smoke plumes, planes into Stansted, Heathrow, Silvertown. Crossing and circling, holding patterns and bumpy descents. Actual noise and the imagined noise of phonebabble, acoustic fizz, deregulated fibre-optic overload. Outgrowths on church steeples, schools, filling stations: dishes and masts and things that blink from tall poles. Scanners tracking the bands, trying to find a language they recognise.

When the traffic does stir, it comes straight at us, hating our independence. A blue dumper truck, ISLE OF DOGS, careering across mud, making up for lost time. White vans bombing over the crest of the ramp like breakaway fairground gondolas. We are obliged to press ourselves against scrapwood fences that obscure our view of the Canning Town estates and the Prince of Wales Park Farm.

When in doubt, quote Ballard: The continued breakdown of the European road-systems would soon rule out any future journeys’.

Track was unimpressed.

‘You don’t attempt future journeys. Every walk you lead disappears, very rapidly, into the past.’

She kept her eyes open, this girl. Crunched by wheels (taller than she was) of an articulated lorry, she swooped on something black and shiny. An old record, a seven-incher with rat bites taken out of it. ‘My Oh My’ by Slade. Log it, the absurdity. (For the grid, the only future that counts: the sketchbook.)