Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Lynch cracks and is removed to a fictional version of the Epsom hospital in which Hayward himself had once been incarcerated. The hospital has its snobberies, hierarchies of incompetence. Robotic table-tennis and ECT are compulsory. ‘Everything was quiet, sunny, calm, but below these obvious suggestions of the air a hint of indescribable horror and violence.’

Within parkland, behind high walls, in an environment policed by burly men in white coats (NCOs left over from recent wars), Lynch encounters ‘the burning’. ‘With clinical assistance he cut his way back into sanity, but the shadow of the greater reality was never far from his mind.’

The asylum as rite of passage — through brain-shock, redirected lightning — goes back to Mary Shelley. And to Hayward’s contemporaries, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. To Ken Kesey. To Carl Solomon (dedicatee of Howl ), to Allen Ginsberg’s ‘starry dynamo’. And Harold Pinter’s Aston (in The Caretaker ): ‘Then one day they took me to a hospital, right outside London… They used to come round with these… Idon’t know what they were… they looked like big pincers, with wires on, the wires were attached to a little machine.’ Hayward, shocked in every way, every sense, is closer to the Gloucestershire poet/composer Ivor Gurney (and David Jones) than to the excited Laingian rhetoric of the Sixties. He associates himself with the landscape in which he lives, with forms of traditional knowledge. He fears: love and its loss.

His angst feeds in that dark ditch of the English imagination, the First War: in missing it. The guilt. Edward Thames spending a final, shivering winter in an Epping Forest cottage. Hayward’s bland Cotswold escarpment lacks shellholes, blackened tree stumps, bones poking from mud. Hayward faces: ‘The dilemma of those who are chosen to speak, but dare not. The trivial escape via sheer sensation, or the terrified plunge into the narrowing corridor of psychosis. With the increasing urgency of the voices on one side, it is scarcely possible not to crack.’

Hayward’s sense of place is respectful. Districts are recalled by a few precisely observed details. Epsom is vividly present in the walk that only a patient or hospital visitor would recognise, our green way between gulag and station. Locals, so Peter Carpenter informed us, know these byways as ‘The Slips’.

Released from confinement, Bran Lynch ‘took a narrow footpath that ran behind the backs of absurd villas towards the centre of town’. His delusions couldn’t be contained in a complacent Surrey town. ‘His particular kind of illness was a bit much for provincials to cope with. Even his insanity, it appeared, was metropolitan.’ City: madness, voices. Country: incubation or denial of visionary experience, silence.

Lynch, the dreamed double, walks Hayward’s walk: as we walked it, the same geography.

Tarry pavement soft after much sun. Rigidly fenced little back gardens, nakedly exposed from the sly angle of this path. Like a succession of intricately decorated privies, each revealing the particular crapulous mode of the indwelling imagination. Some with gnomes, goldfish. Some with pampas grass. Some with prize dahlias. One tusked and hummocked with coarse grass and weeds, among which lay jagged tins of Kit-e-Kat. At the end of this one a lithe sumac, already beginning to turn.

The aristocratic countryman’s eye falls on the follies and pretensions of suburbia, and exposes its own shame; an awkward passage through a mundane world. The banality of Epsom is eternal: Lynch enters the same cheap clothing store we visited. He buys ‘tapered K.D. trousers’, and gives his flannels to a charity shop. He takes a train for London.

The nakedness of the relationship between author and avatar possessed Peter Carpenter. Carpenter saw Hayward/Lynch as a significant Epsom figure, a man purged and refined by the hurt he had suffered. He sent me a ‘draft biographical outline’. Research materials for a potential ‘life’; a story that would, in all probability, never be written.

Born (1931) to an established, landowning Gloucestershire family. Parents separate. A ‘peripatetic existence’, with his mother, ‘moving between various hotels in the South of England and relations in the Isle of Man’. The estate is sold. They retreat to Galloway.

Dartmouth Royal Naval College. Hayward is allowed to leave the Navy to try for Oxford. Labourer on an organic farm. National Service. Merton College, Oxford. Fruit picking, libretto for opera. Oxford literary friendships include: Edward Lucie-Smith, Elizabeth Jennings, Adrian Mitchell. Receives instruction with a view to converting to Roman Catholicism. ‘Viva’d for a First but awarded a Second.’ Decides against becoming a Catholic, meets David Jones. They correspond.

Publishers’ rep for Elek Books, marriage. Honeymoon in Tenby and West Wales. Drives long distances, ‘often sleeping in the back of the van’. Sets up his own press. Moves from cottage to cottage. Children. Flat in Cheltenham: ‘acquainted with various poets, artists and bohemians, including Lyn Chad-wick and W.S. Graham’. Absorbed in a textual commentary on David Jones’s The Anathemata.

More poetry, more cottages: no electricity. ‘A petrol pump brings water from a well.’ Takes up woodcarving. Visits Harrow and discusses his commentary with David Jones.

‘Meetings with Gerald Yorke in Forthampton, interest in Aleister Crowley and magical rituals.’ Attempts novel. A number of extra-marital relationships: ‘drinking heavily and feeling trapped in London’. Quits Arrow Books. ‘Investigates possible life as a crofter.’ Calls on David Jones ‘in a distracted state’. Arrested for assault on police officer: ‘remanded in custody and subsequently admitted to Horton Hospital in Epsom.’ ECT. Released, after six weeks, into wife’s care. Teaches Cheltenham Technical College. Depression. Stays at Tibetan Centre. And at the Cistercian Monastery on Caldey Island (as David Jones had done).

It Never Gets Dark All Night accepted by Heinemann. Research into private papers of Ivor Gurney. Affairs on Ibiza: ‘manic episodes and feelings of alienation… increasingly reliant upon alcohol, tranquillisers and sleeping pills’. Novel published to generally favourable reviews.

Travels through France, Spain, Morocco, Ibiza: ‘hearing voices’. Starts work on novel ‘dramatizing a conflict between white magicians in Gloucestershire and black magicians in Ibiza’. Plans to set up bookshop in Exeter. Takes overdose, recovers in hospital. Invests in stock market. Travels relentlessly. Visits England, returns to Ibiza. ‘On 9th December 1968, he dies at Can Marias, probably by his own hand. Body flown back to England and buried at Quedgeley in Gloucestershire in an unmarked grave.’

I open Hayward’s novel at random: ‘An excess of transparency, described by the experts as a “nervous breakdown”, had brought him into direct contact with this world. Yet there were no devils.’

The chain of authorship, of promptings, coincidences, is laid bare. In a way that could only be broached in an Epsom pub, after a day touring lost hospitals and sealed tunnels. Carpenter chases Hayward, who chases David Jones, who is a pivotal figure in my own Welsh mythos. Jones is fractured by war, spiritual crisis, the impossibility of knitting together strands, whispers of Celtic, Roman and contemporary history: broken inscriptions, nervous palimpsests of sign and symbol. He convalesced, through long years, in his Harrow cave, his trench; submerged in boarding houses until he passed into the hands of the nuns. Harrow Hill looks west to the motorway. Hayward, like so many other casualties of London, is shipped out to Epsom.

A table of misaligned Ancients, retro-Romantics, in a racing pub, conduct a seance on nominated predecessors; hoping, like the other madmen of the town, to find clues in printed texts. Kevin Jackson takes the prize by dipping into Jones’s The Anathemata and fixing on ‘a weird premonition of your Epsom encounter with my pal Martin Wallen’.