Iain Sinclair - Downriver

‘Bull loved bits of White Chappell ,’ said the worthy young man, deputed to make the offer. ‘He never finishes anything. He skim-reads. But he has the hunch you could work up something lowlife, London, topographical — basically, downriver .’ I didn’t answer. I was lost in admiration for the style of my potential patron, who was occupied with a courageous, single-handed revival of the Colin Wilson look. Drab: with balls.

We were sipping our tepid half-pints in an unlikely hostelry, off Trafalgar Square, crammed to the doors with paroled business folk. I hadn’t partied in this zone since my eldest daughter was born in the (transferred) cockroach hospital around the corner. The ambulance, on that occasion, had broken down a mile shy of its destination. We walked the streets, carrying our suitcases (how much stuff do you need for an unborn child?); into the building, stepping over the sprawled ranks of junkies puking on the floor of Casualty.

‘I hope you don’t object to line-editing,’ warned the bespectacled go-between. ‘Bull likes to keep a tight grip on the text. That’s the house style. Delusions of empire building. He thinks he’s putting out the New Yorker . He chops everybody. Except Jeanette Winterson. And Martin Amis, of course.’

I was caught off-balance: being asked for a ‘piece of writing’, and promised real money, the front window, display space alongside the cash register. I went along with it. I should have known better. But now, a year and a half later, I was living ( living ?) on kill fees; and feeling like a resurrectionist when the graveyard has just been covered in concrete.

I showed Sofya the great man’s final letter of rejection. ‘ I’m confused by it, confused about what is being depicted… I remain at a loss .’ We were, up to that point, and despite our cultural differences, in complete agreement. The man had sweated as he wrestled with this thing. The typescript was devastated by saline smears, honey blobs, burns, wine-spits. Holmes could have gathered up enough ash for a library of monographs. Bagman truly wanted it, wanted to hack and slash, transplant, transpose, transform: until his ‘piece’ came into a focus that would hold. He wanted to achieve a finished object that could be honourably exploited.

I dragged the spurned and tattered rewrite from my pocket and shoved it across the table. Pencilled comments speared the margins: a messianic tutorial. ‘ Who is “I”?’ was the first controversy. An existential dilemma that stopped the present writer dead in his tracks. On that single incisive challenge the whole schmear hangs. ‘ Who is “I”?’ Answer that riddle, or get out of the maze. The slippery self-confessor, the closet De Quincey (I, Me, You, He), speaks of‘the Narrator’, or ‘Sinclair’: deflects the thrust of the accusation. The narrator exists only in his narration: outside this tale he is nothing. But ‘Sinclair’ is a tribe. There are dozens of them: Scots, Jews, Scribblers, Masons, Cathars (even Supernaturals, such as Glooscap, the mangod of the Micmacs). It’s an epistemophiliac disguise. A small admission to win favour: a plea bargain. And what gives this self-designated ‘I’ the right to report these events? How deeply he is implicated? Is he (I) a liar? Can we (you) trust him?

This was beginning to pinch. I (‘I’) let my gaze drift down the lovingly assembled beds of words until I (‘we’) arrived at the sentence reading: ‘The man who had shot, and lost, the definitive Minton.’ ‘ WHAT IS THIS? ’ screamed Bagman’s reasonable pencil. What is this? As if he suspected it (Minton) of being some species of effete English porcelain. Should I have provided a footnote on the Soho Scene in the 1940s and 1950s, on John Deakin the photographer, on John Minton? Should I have credited Daniel Farson? Was Minton now forgotten? Even among all the kiss-of-life attempts to revive the flaccid corpse of British Romanticism? Did it matter if these strange names remained unidentified, mysterious? Which names, if any, would have been acceptable? Mervyn Peake? The wrong sexual persuasion. The Roberts? Colquhoun and MacBryde? Worse. They only exist as fictions in the untrustworthy memoirs of Julian Maclaren-Ross. Francis Bacon, perhaps? Too many of them. And they’re all too famous. (But you will notice if you check back to the first tale that I have, in fact, acted on Bagman’s excellent advice, and rejigged the sentence.)

Now the editor was warming to his task. He made short work of the knockabout book-dealing picaresque featuring the Nigerian, Iddo Okoli. (Racist? Afro-American sales?) A firm grey line removed it entirely. We (Bull and I) limped along in a nervous truce for several more pages. ‘Destot’s gap’ was the next provocation, eliciting an agonized ‘ HUH??? ’ The medico-theological debate over the point of passage of the nails, hammering Jesus the Nazarene to the cross (palms of the hand or gap in the wrist?), had gone unremarked in Cambridge. And why not? There were sexier topics out there in the slums and shanties of magical realism. Travel was sexy. Poverty was sexy. The New Physics was sexy. Sex was not sexy. (Except for Martin Amis.)

The jig was up. All patience expended, Bagman bombarded the innocent pretensions of the flinching text. ‘Bishopsgate Institute?’ he snarled, ‘ what Institute?’ The Princess Alice went down for the third time, cleaved by the editor’s anguish. ‘Too compressed. What slaughter? What psychopath? What nickname?’ Guilty. Guilty on all counts. Tumbled. I (I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I) have been found out. Deconstructed. Spike it . ‘Let’s do lunch sometime and talk about happier things.’ Bull remains ‘a big fan’ and begs to be the first to refuse further ‘sketches’, ‘evocations of the city not dissimilar from Tilbury’. So there might still be an outside chance of getting my spoon in the gravy.

‘That’s Butts Green for you,’ said Sofya, ‘those dinky sentence rhythms, straight out of Enid Blyton. I love Bull. He’ll change tack when he stops having to read bedtime stories.’

The trouble with Butts Green , I believe, is not Bull — but his readers. The magazine is a huge market-forces success. A jewel in the Widow’s crown. It’s a way of participating in literature without getting your hands dirty. It synthesizes and it addicts: culture crack for provincials. Mail-order sampling. ‘The Last Show’ in your pocket.

I was rapidly being written out of my own story. ‘Saul didn’t think you’d be up to doing yourself,’ Sofya said. ‘He thought you were too shifty and, basically, too bald. He’s changed his mind after two days of Milditch. But he’s absolutely ecstatic about Dryfeld. He told me to thank you. It’s really the haircut he’s fallen in love with. We’re calling Dryfeld’s agent as soon as we get back to the office. Saul wants him under personal contract.’

Dryfeld? It was getting worse. If we had to have Dryfeld in the film — couldn’t we afford an impersonator? I knew that Raymond Carver was dead, but I’d settle for Alexei Sayle. We’d have to act fast. The medics kept telling Dryfeld if he didn’t stop drinking, he’d be dead in six months. The man was a teetotaller.

I’d only ventured to Tilbury in the first place because Milditch put me on to a junkshop that turned out to be a howling dog. I asset-stripped a few of the more blatantly fictional elements — and ran for my life. I was then bullied by Butts Green into cutting and cutting again; line-editing, clarifying, glossing, paraphrasing and — finally — casting to the winds. Only to discover, as I lurched from the river’s grasp, that my fragmented nightmare was being captured on videotape. The film existed before the book could be completed. The book had therefore been declared redundant by all interested parties. And they wanted the advance returned by the first post. If I could find an even hungrier hack to ‘novelize’ the mini-saga then I wouldn’t have to pursue this madness to its inevitable climax. I could sit back and read the pulp version in the comfort of my own room. Later, after relishing the exhibitionist wrapper, I could sell it.