Iain Sinclair - Downriver

IS:

When did he move to Orpington?

PR:

That’s part of the great crisis which occurred to him around 1948. Unfortunately, this worsening literary situation happened to coincide with three or four other crises, which amounted to a total reversal of fortune.

IS:

Presumably, he wasn’t making any money from the poetry? Even when he was successful?

PR:

No, I shouldn’t think so: not much. Tambi was paying him, he’d got work. But very little specific payment for writing. But in 1948 everything, which had been going so rosily for him, collapsed in a short period. Only the poetry was not sudden. That was a slow haemorrhage of readership.

IS:

Wasn’t that, then as now, a general condition?

PR:

It affected a lot of people: Wrey Gardiner, David Gascoyne, and W. S. Graham (who ended up living in Cornwall, in penury). Perhaps George Barker too. Many of them left the country.

IS:

Was this normal, everyday indifference? Or did society need to revenge itself on them? Was there no longer the imagination to tolerate their very existence?

PR:

It’s difficult to know the basic reasons for this. But it’s to do with what the readership of poetry is, and their expectations.

IS:

The readership of poetry seems to consist only of other poets, the peer group, and those looking for a way into the racket. Was there ever a readership of people not involved in the practice of writing the stuff?

PR:

There was for Nicholas Moore and his associates during that one brief period. There was an intellectual following that was a continuation of the following the modernists had during the First World War, Pound’s and Eliot’s public. Their books were professionally produced by Poetry London and the Grey Walls Press. The reason these poets weren’t at Faber is that they thought they had their own publishers. Then, of course, those publishers collapsed; and Moore and his colleagues were left without a publisher at all.

There were also financial disasters. The supportive money from Moore’s family was no longer there. His wife, Priscilla, left him. Half his early poems are dedicated to her.

That was the big disaster for Moore; he was left with no wife — which devastated him. She went off with somebody else. No wife, no money, nowhere to live, no publisher. He was helpless: so he went down to London and found himself a job.

He’d always been interested in gardening, had become expert at cultivating new species of flowers. He got himself a job in a horticultural shop, a seed merchant’s. He was wandering around the West End and saw an advertisement in a tobacconist’s window for this flat in St Mary Cray, near Orpington. He took it, and lived there for the rest of his life.

He continued to work in this flower shop, commuting to St Mary Cray. He married a second wife, a very different sort of person. She was more of a local product, a daughter of the bourgeoisie of those suburbs.

The 1950s, as a period, is dark and obscure. He wrote less and less. He was on the train every day, into Victoria. Then there was a child. He was in a very difficult situation by the middle or late 1950s. His wife began to get mentally ill and couldn’t cope with looking after the children. He had to do all the work in the house himself, while struggling with other things, and doing some writing. He began to get very ill himself. The child, his son, was put out to a foster home. He found he’d got diabetes — which he had for the rest of his days.

IS:

When did he have his leg amputated?

PR:

That was much later on. He continued with the diabetes for quite a while, under treatment. But it gets worse, whatever happens. So that brought him, more or less, into the situation in which I found him.

He started writing again, in earnest, around 1965. It had become a totally private activity, although he always had hopes of making a ‘comeback’. He never gave up. He remained in touch with Tambi — who likewise had schemes, was going to make it back into the limelight. But never quite did, not properly.

IS:

He was more prolific than W. S. Graham, for example?

PR:

Oh yes, his method was to write: he didn’t think. His poetry wasn’t concentrated in the way that Graham’s was. But the poetry kept him alive, I believe.

IS:

Did he hope that at some point circumstances would turn around again? Did he feel it was an accident that nobody read him any more?

PR:

He might have thought that at first, but after thirty years… If he hadn’t kept going there would have been nothing at all.

IS:

Did he greet you warmly when you arrived?

PR:

Oh yes, various people had taken an interest in him before that. There was Barry MacSweeney. And, around the time he published Spleen , there was some short correspondence with Andrew Crozier and Jeremy Prynne. The thing was that Moore kept up to date with poetry. He was a subscriber to Grosseteste , and he bought Ferry Press books.

He was stuck out there in a wilderness, in outer suburbia, in the most dismal place you could possibly think of living in.

IS:

It wasn’t anywhere near a river? His writing is filled with images of water.

PR:

I think that started in Cambridge. The dream images are of the Cam. His father’s house was a few yards from it.

IS:

I wondered what his sense of that location, the place he lived in, was?

PR:

He thought it was an accident. A fairly pleasant place, when he first moved. His house was on the edge of the development, next to fields. But within a few years, of course, the whole area had been covered in suburbia. Nothing in sight except identical houses. He had really established a personal island, or islet, in the middle of a huge mud estuary.

There is no sense of movement. In Lacrimae Rerum there’s a dream sequence about wandering endlessly through anonymous streets: pavements the same, trees the same, round corners and up hills. That’s suburbia. It doesn’t crop up much in his poems, only at the end. He had an island, this dingy room in which he lived. He maintained all the things which had been part of that student enclave in Cambridge: jazz, cricket, gardening, modern art — also pots, especially Lucie Rie pots. He actually ate his dinner off Lucie Rie pots, which were worth thousands of pounds. And, occasionally, he broke one.

IS:

When you turned up… did Nicholas Moore see you as a messenger from the same tradition, a couple of generations on? An initiate?

PR:

He didn’t know I came from that background. I suggested it to him later on. But he had begun to feel pretty bitter about the whole poetry world. He didn’t sit there like a church father and calmly accept what had happened to him — as if he was a hermit in the desert.

There was a large sense that poetry is very important and was everywhere abused. He felt that what he was writing was important, and that the world was losing it. There was no access to the world. All he could do was keep on producing. In phases. Faster and faster. Until, as his illness got worse, it tailed off. He was in and out of hospital. There’d be two or three years with an upsurge of poetry. He always went to the same hospital, Orpington Hospital.

Writing was now physically very difficult. Diabetes affects your eyesight, you go nearly blind. He didn’t wear glasses. His vision was very blurred and minimal. It was a 1940s island, without television. Hospital meant the radio. You’re stuck in a bed for weeks and weeks. There’s nothing to do except put on your earphones. There’s only one station: Radio One. So he was caught listening to John Peel. It’s extraordinary. He sent poems to the BBC and John Peel. Peel had slight intellectual pretensions.