Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Let them create terror and a dread aura,

so when he arrives fear of me overwhelms him,

so his good sense is confounded and his judgement undone!’

The ibis wasn’t suited to poetry. It prized its anonymity too much, company credit cards, the cleanliness of a Belgian service station — Roos was quite at home. Menu from Poland.

In Gilgamesh the dead return. But they are too discreet to gossip about their experience of the afterworld. Ollie, throat slashed, windpipe severed, can’t speak. There is an eloquence in the position of her body, the way it has fallen and stopped falling. Eyes shut. Head turned from the road, back towards Rainham.

‘I cannot tell you, my friend, I cannot tell you!

If I tell you what I saw of the ways of the Netherworld,

O sit you down and weep!’

You have a place, off-highway, on the borders of everything. You have the Thames. The road east, the A13. And the orbital motorway. At the ibis decisions have to be taken, difficult choices: meat or fish, red or white? Express or Mail? Lies have to be shaped. Time must be hobbled. It’s a holding zone, a customs post with no customs, no form.

‘If your eyes are of no more use to you than this, I shall have them put out.’

My second book, the spare: Nostromo . You recognise it? The copy liberated from Pevensey Bay? Where Ollie was slightly pregnant and drinking white wine. Now she isn’t. That would be too much. I can’t inflict further distress on the unborn. I stole the Penguin Conrad from the kitchen of the beach chalet. A weekend visitor had left it behind. The two women were never going to read it, were they? Small print, brown pages, thickets of lush South American prose (penned on the south coast). Verbiage. Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowksi (naturalised Englishman): godfather of magic realism, cousin to Dostoevsky and Flaubert.

Appalling arrogance, I admit. Horrible attitude. The American girl (Track) might, for all I know, have a doctorate in post-colonial studies: The reassembly of chaotic events into a causal sequence exposes an author swimming against the tide, caught between a Western view of a non-Western world and a desire to reconstruct, as a mirror image, the Polish conflicts of his childhood.’

In Nostromo , that masterpiece of movement, shifting perspectives, romance, rebellion (intelligent, frustrated women and good black cigars), nothing affects me so much as the agony of its composition. The research, the libraries devoured. Maps, charts, engravings. Financial pressure. Small farm near Hythe (rented from colleague). Author (creased brow) knowing he has a vast undertaking on his hands, long, complex, laboured: it must seem easy, free-flowing as a swift stream in chalk country. It must divert a dull-witted readership. The pain of those paragraphs! Sentences. Syllables. Mots justes. Money money money. To entertain. Ford at Winchelsea. Henry James at Rye. Wells at Sandgate. Stephen and Cora Crane at Brede Place. Food on the table. Wine. The creaking study door. Forbidden entry. Family excluded. Nightwork.

A short story that got its claws into him, cells breeding like a cancer. It swells, unnoticed, into a novella: 60,000 or 70,000 words. Three months at the outside. Telegraph Pinker.

Six months in: ‘ Nostromo grows; grows against the grain by dint of distasteful toil… but the story has not yet even begun.’

Black and bitter depression, fevers, troubled stomach. A condemned man writing against the clock to save his head from the executioner’s axe. Hand trembling, palsied. Focus lost: that terrible image of the eyes being put out. Eyes on hooks. Eyes of the dead.

Two years from the start, the breezy, optimistic beginning, Conrad cracks: mounting debts, serialisation, finish the thing or starve. This obscure life, three miles from the sea, thirty miles from France. He scribbles by day and dictates by night: to Ford Madox Ford (his wife can’t stand the fellow, perpetual guest and benefactor). Gout and the other attendant demons conspire to unman him: Ford has to doctor one of the chapters. Dual authorship, they’d done it before. Half delirious, like a skeleton on a raft, tongue swollen till it fills his mouth, Joseph Conrad completes the draft by working through the heat of August for eighteen hours a day.

Then what? Revisions, proofs, corrections. Editorial adjustments. Critical disapproval. Indifferent sales. Academic scavenging. Posthumous acclaim. Posthumous revisionism. The minutiae of books and life picked over by impertinent hacks. An overblown and wholly misguided television translation. A film that is never made, the obsession of David Lean in his Limehouse palazzo, brown Thames glittering outside the window. A man who does not know how to answer the phone. Scriptwriter Christopher Hampton banged up for weeks, months, years. A reprise of the original torment of composition. Finish it and die, Lean knows the story. And he strings it out: ‘a book largely constructed out of other books’. Hampton’s sequestration repeated by Norton — which Norton? — in the cabin-sized bedroom at the ibis hotel.

Language voodoo, a book opened at hazard. Room 234, p. 234: ‘I spoke to you openly as to a man as desperate as myself.’

Nostromo, the Capataz de Cargadores, a self-regarding adventurer, is also known to the females of the harbourside inn at which he lodges as Gian’ Battista. John the Baptist. Could I have been thinking of that? Prophet and road. The dark painting in some Maltese church, the execution in all its erotic theatre: man of the desert, half naked, glistening with sweat, decapitated for the delight of a courtesan.

A.M. Norton, the fabulist, had collapsed into a boneless heap, so much dirty laundry. News happened, it was nothing to do with him. Wait and see. Like T.S. Eliot, as it was rumoured, he sought sexual congress, with all its implied difficulties, as prick to his muse. Margate convalescence and The Waste Land . Neurasthenia, incense and a decent suit.

Andy Norton, urban topographer, blistered like one of those downland hikers of the Thirties, was more reckless: take the story as it comes. He sprung from the window, charged through the traffic, rescued the damsel. Who required nothing of the sort. It was her choice to be in the car, letting the high romance, of love and loss, play itself out. To be, once and for ever, rid of men and their fuss.

I ran down the stairs. Jacky was drinking again. Essex had that effect on him. The book he’d published on the Basildon Ecstasy bandits: the possible consequences. He had to get back across the river, fast. To Hastings. He was prepared to validate my reconfiguring of history, cobbled together from a couple of chapters of Nostromo and a quick glance at the crib he downloaded from one of the hotel’s laptops.

Gian’ Battista steals the silver. He pays court to the younger daughter of the lighthouse-keeper (the grand old Garibaldino), while he is betrothed to the elder. He is shot, killed. The critics call this ‘Conradian transference’. You get what’s coming to you, but you don’t know when.

Hannah was still slogging from Thurrock Station, muddy, exhausted, when they brought Ollie in. Quite safe. Not yet pregnant. Rescued from her mad drive north: Reo Sleeman splattered across the tarmac with the stranger who stormed to her rescue — like Gilgamesh — and vanished into the night.

Fiction conquers all: the Bush/Rumsfeld doctrine. Keep saying it. A new world order. A road map for peace. Reality is infinitely malleable (given the budget and sufficient force of arms). As the tanks rolled across the desert (same shots repeated, flexible commentary, on different nights), as Howard Marks yarned and laughed (receiving a commission to visit Panama on behalf of the Observer ), I took Ollie upstairs. To rest and recover. I gave her my bed. I had learnt to listen to women and not to watch. My dreams were unashamedly Freudian (forgive me, Hannah). My mouth tasted of Ruth: blood and sugar. The evidence of Pevensey Bay, which lay both before and beyond me, confirmed the fantasy: I made love to the young woman who was like a daughter, but who shared my mother’s name. And through this intoxicating and stomach-tightening folly, I became my own father.