Iain Sinclair - Downriver

I let my anger die in the distance. And, as so often before (when I walked beyond Woolwich), I found myself meditating on the poet, Nicholas Moore, somewhere on the other bank, in a white hospital ward, dying in exile. After long years of neglect, blind struggle, the satisfaction of pitching it all into the flow of the river; that molten crucible of light — splitting desire into a chimeric insect pattern. Maya . Illusion. Nothingness. Without ego; freed at last from the persistence of your ghosts. (How we load our own burdens on to the defenceless dead!)

The south shore then became a place of interest. (Literary associations stick like dogdirt to the turbulent mouldings of our boots, as we plod through ‘Eliot’s’ East Coker, ‘J. C. Powys’s’ Montacute.) Some life, in the form of new hope in the sky, had escaped down these unconsidered tributaries of Thames. And I wanted very much to learn about the accidents that brought Nicholas Moore to this dim sprawl, where he lived for so many years, sustained, energized, possessed by the poems he wrote. Until the day came when words could no longer offer any protection. There was nothing left to articulate in that form. (‘Reconciliation and relief after immense suffering’?) Impertinent to speculate. We need to know more than there is to tell.

‘Night. Night thoughts. Nacht und Traume . Dreams

Of the old. Greisengesange . Turtle dreams.’

I decided to visit Peter Riley, the poet and bookdealer, in Cambridge; to tape an interview about his pilgrimages to St Mary Cray (to talk with, and assist, Nicholas Moore). I would transcribe some sort of record and include it, as a testament, among my twelve fate tales. There should be a bridge of light, however hallucinatory (and self-willed), to span the guilty river.

My state of mind was strange enough (put it down to the fever) to risk this evil town, to which every excursion was another failed attempt on the record for being buried alive in peat slurry. Fen consciousness has never really recovered from the retreat of the North Sea: the life-forms are Jurassic. Already, the cold chalk of Templar enclaves has worked its way under my fingernails, as I bite them in frustration, trying to find a way into the deconstructed shell of Liverpool Street Station.

I stepped on to the train, with an air of assumed bravado, carrying a tape-recorder, and two or three of Nicholas Moore’s books for the journey. We jolted pleasantly above all the familiar East End secrets. Soundless, they were no more troubling than an in-flight movie.

I followed Peter’s directions out of Cambridge Station, across the car park — soft drizzle — into a web of narrow streets that clung for support to the railway. I bought some cheap cigars from the Bengali corner shop, as a gift. Nothing better was on offer. We could have been in… Crouch End?

The house was easy to locate, an unfraudulent artisan’s terrace, now shifted in use and status (down?) And, after the usual preliminary courtesies (the peek at the poetry shelves, the soup, the coffee), we settled to make our tape.

II

A Conversation with Peter Riley, at Sturton Street,

Cambridge, 1 March (St David’s Day) 1989

IS:

How did you come to visit Nicholas Moore in the first place? And why did you decide to go and see him?

PR:

I simply wondered what had become of him. I made a few enquiries around and nobody knew where he was, or thought he was still alive. Eventually, I found an address which I wrote to — and it worked.

Nobody published him: but, although he wasn’t publishing, Nicholas Moore never gave up hope of publishing. He was constantly producing ‘Selected Poems’, constantly sending things to periodicals like the Spectator and TLS , who did not publish any of it.

He must have produced a dozen different typescripts of ‘Selected Poems’, which went to every possible publisher in the country. He was writing a lot of deliberate doggerel — he called it ‘satire’ — with serious poems, now and then. He’d write all day long, he did nothing else. In the morning he’d hammer away at his typewriter — most of it was rambling, rhapsodic — but, generally, towards the end of the day, he might get around to a serious poem.

He sent people bundles of this stuff, which just gave them terrible headaches: then it all came back.

IS:

You got an address for him, dropped him a line?

PR:

Ummm, yes. I wanted work like that to do. I said I was interested in collecting his work together — little realizing that I was talking about something like three thousand poems.

I got an address. He responded. And I called in.

IS:

What did you discover?

PR:

He lived in St Mary Cray. It’s near Orpington. Estate houses, of about the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, covering several hillsides; mostly semi-detached houses, let off into maisonettes. He was in a downstairs maisonette, on his own. His second wife had died two or three years earlier.

I turned up and found this little man, with one leg, in a wheelchair, in absolute total squalor. Through the front door, then along a corridor. Several rooms open off: a bedroom, and the room he lived in, a back study which was now disused, a totally squalid kitchen, and a bath which was full of lumber and detritus. There was coal everywhere. It was absolutely filthy. He was perfectly happy in there and very organized.

The place he lived in, the room itself, was incredible. You couldn’t see the furniture, except for the table and the chair he sat in. It was piled up with food and rubbish and biscuits and bits of paper: old newspapers, magazines, books, and records.

It’s strange that this should have happened to him. Nicholas Moore was a very successful young poet — as early as 1939, and on through the war. It was the war that made this possible. A reaction to the left-wing liberalism of the 1930s, Auden and that generation. During the war things got published that would never otherwise have got into print.

IS:

Nicholas Moore had been part of a Cambridge group?

PR:

He was the son of the philosopher, G. E. Moore, and was a student at Cambridge. As such, he was interested in joining all the forms of modernism together in one movement: taking whatever he wanted from America, from Wallace Stevens, and from Surrealism, jazz, Picasso, Henry Miller and Durrell.

His friend, George Scurfield, said to me once, ‘We thought in those early days we could stop the war.’ He was referring to the polemic activities of that student group in Cambridge. They were fellow-travellers. They thought they could forge a link between Britain and Russia. But how they were going to do this with student magazines is not clear.

People’s university careers ended and they disappeared; but Moore carried it on. He took it to London and collaborated with Tambimuttu.

IS:

Why wasn’t he actively engaged in the war?

PR:

He was a conscientious objector.

IS:

Did that mean he went to prison?

PR:

No, he had to go and work on farms in East Anglia, digging potatoes. That didn’t seem to last long; for the last years of the war he was commuting between Cambridge and London.

IS:

He thought of poetry as being his career? And then the war ended and it was all over?

PR:

Not very suddenly; it was a process which took the rest of the 1940s to work itself out. As the poetry-reading public increased, and became something more like Auden’s public, so Nicholas Moore’s personal readership diminished and diminished. A completely new set of poets had taken the situation over.

IS:

During the war, he lived in London?

PR:

No, he lived in Cambridge, and commuted to his work in Tambi’s office. He took no part in that Soho scene. He carefully steered clear of it. When he finished work, he went back home — and left the others to drink themselves insensible.