Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Lists again (the defining contemporary vice). Compose a new list, best of, just like television, to stop my knees giving away. Before I run to the kitchen, make my escape. Let’s see. What can you offer on ‘South American’ or ‘Central American’ novels (or films) by European writers and artists? They have to be authentic: texture and soul. Snake inside sugar egg.

I nominate: Malcolm Lowry for Under the Volcano (novel, not film). B. Traven for everything from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to The White Rose . Werner Herzog, Luis Buñuel. R.B. Cunninghame Graham (mate of Conrad). W.H. Hudson. Daniel Defoe ( Robinson Crusoe filmed by Buñuel). Georges Arnaud for The Wages of Fear (film and book: oil, nitroglycerine, sweat). William Burroughs for The Yage Letters . (I wouldn’t, as a general rule, include Americans, but Bill’s a dark twin of T.S. Eliot, same birthplace, so I’ll make an exception. Apologies to John Huston, Sam Peckinpah and Budd Boetticher.)

Burroughs also qualifies as a Conrad obsessive.

‘One of my favourites is Joseph Conrad. My story, “They Just Fade Away”, is a fold-in from Lord Jim . In fact, it’s almost a retelling of the Lord Jim story. My Stein is the same Stein as in Lord Jim .’

That’s Burroughs in a Paris Review interview. A yarn he repeated when I met him in Lawrence, Kansas, second drink in hand, sun dropping, cat on lap. Minder moving in to whisper something in his ear.

My wild card is the little-known novel More Things in Heaven by Walter Owen. Owen, an initiate, lived for a time in Buenos Aires. He produced a sequence, linked narratives involving spontaneous combustion and a cursed manuscript, that seems in some ways to prefigure Borges (with a dash of M.R.James). Owen’s book, difficult to find, has itself become a talisman, possession (unless it can be passed on to an unsuspecting recipient) conferring malfate, paranoid delusions, death. I rid myself of my original copy, but still have the second — which arrived, anonymously, as barter against a bad debt.

Mr Letherbotham, a middle-aged bachelor who for some years had earned a somewhat precarious livelihood as free-lance journalist and reporter attached to one of the local English newspapers, was found dead in his apartment on the fourth floor … The body of Mr Letherbotham was seated at a small writing-table. It was evident that he had been in the act of writing when death overtook him …

I was fascinated and appalled as I read and re-read the thirty or forty scribbled pages which had littered the floor of the room in which in the silence of the night death had come to their writer in a mysterious and dreadful form. And gradually I found the conviction forming in my mind that the story they unfolded was not fiction but a narrative of factual events, and that from them an astonishing inference might be drawn regarding the manner in which the tragedy had been brought about…

Mr Letherbotham’s first name, I remember, was: Cornelius . Accident or warning? ‘I was struck by the coincidence,’ stated Owen, ‘if indeed it was a coincidence and not a clue to some hidden connection.’

Back in the Seventies, when I had a cash-in-hand job, tracking down living associates of John Cowper Powys on behalf of a rag-trade millionaire, I got to know another member of the Kings Road retinue, the poet Hugo Manning. Manning, working as a correspondent in Buenos Aires, came across Owen. They shared an interest in the occult. In verse. Hugo showed me, with pride, the inscribed copies of Owen’s translations of The Gaucho Martin Fierro and Don Juan Tenorio , which he later sold to the West Hampstead dealer, Eric Stevens.

Was Hugo, in fact, the model for Mr Letherbotham?

It didn’t take much prompting to tease out the story. Hugo never came to terms with English weather; mopping his brow, he sweltered (visible vest, thick woollen shirt, tweed jacket, duffel coat), battling primitive central-heating systems. He was a man confused, as lost as Conrad’s Captain Mitchell, returned, after years in Sulaco, to England. Hugo puffed away at his pipe, doodled with coloured pens in the ever-present ledger: portraits of hangers-on in his patron’s office. He had the nautical beard, the garrulousness traditional in Ancient Mariners. There was always a yarn to be spun — in words whose order never changed.

Hugo was the conduit between Walter Owen and Borges (although the two writers never exchanged a word). Memories of Owen, the mystical journalist — and even, perhaps, his cursed book — were passed on when Manning formed his rather one-sided acquaintance with the blind librarian. Living in Swiss Cottage, years later, as a humble member of Canetti’s circle, Hugo published a private press booklet on Borges.

Yes, he told me, the Argentinian never tired of expressing his enthusiasm for De Quincey, Stevenson, Chesterton and the Beowulf epic, but his great love was … Conrad. Borges, according to Hugo, insisted upon the intimate relationship of document and fiction. He quoted Bioy Casares: ‘I think Conrad is right. Really, nobody knows whether the world is realistic or fantastic, that is to say, whether the world is a natural process or whether it is a kind of dream, a dream we may or may not share with others.’

Borges and Manning. The blind man and the old sailor with the clear blue eyes. Long afternoons at café tables — neither man was a serious drinker — discussing the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. Hugo was a Jew and a scholar. They were, if you like, study partners. It was Borges’s fancy to claim some Jewish blood, on the side of his Portuguese mother. I understood very well, from the things that Hugo did not say, that he believed his life’s work, the writing, was pointless. In a world of correspondences and balances, demons and angels, everything worth saying had been said. His laboured verses were tributes to a music his ears were too thick to catch. Borges, on the other hand, fan of cowboys and knifemen, high romance and hermetic pulp, recognised the world as a labyrinth of texts and echoes, a forest where the blind were the surest guides.

The women were head to head over a plate of Marmite sandwiches (I could smell them); Marmite and anchovy soldiers — to provoke the necessary thirst, the pints of warm sweet tea. They were also, it was quite obvious, immodestly drunk: as the proper response to Mocatta’s anachronistic withdrawal.

‘Nice little chat, boys?’ cackled the crone. ‘I’d fetch your tea from the oven if my pins was still working.’

Ollie pushed herself up and came over to her father, hugging him, as he flinched. Crackled.

‘Shall I call a cab for Mr Norton?’

‘Let the slag walk. It’s what he’s known for.’

A walk was fine. Mocatta led me back through corridors that had warped and crumbled, slithered seaward, during the time I’d spent in the library.

‘I don’t go out of doors. Agoraphobia — brought on in Belmarsh. I’m like an albino in sunshine.’

The evening light, dappled leaf patterns, low gold, was inviting. I knew better than to attempt a handshake. Five or six miles back to St Leonards would give me an appetite. I might risk the Balti house with the photo of that satisfied diner, Lord Longford, in the window. The encomium from Cunard Court resident Leslie Ash: ‘Unique!’

‘Don’t go tearing off. I’ve got something. Before you start on our book, a little bit of inspiration. You might find we’ve more in common than you imagined. I’ve always had a fancy for genealogy. What’s your middle name?’

‘MacGregor. Father’s mother. Or was it grandfather’s second wife? A proscribed name for centuries. Highland banditry, then strategic Jacobitism. Savage blood. We’re proud of it.’