Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Nicholas Moore had built up a world which was not just poetically self-sufficient, it had to be culturally self-sufficient as well.

Of course, his wife was with him — but that was more of a problem than a help.

IS:

Did you visit him in hospital?

PR:

Only latterly, yes.

IS:

Did he know he was dying?

PR:

No, he’d been in so often. He didn’t look after himself. His cultural thing included good eating and good drinking. He wasn’t going to give these up just because he’d got diabetes. He was certainly not going to stop drinking wine. He was something of a connoisseur of wine. He ate himself through diabetes with French chocolate biscuits. He lived ten years longer than anyone in his condition would be expected to live; perhaps because of the drive that kept him writing poetry.

The diabetes got worse. He developed gangrene somewhere, along an extremity. In his remaining foot. There was talk of that having to come off. He was imprisoned in a wheelchair. But he still gardened. I’ve had terrifying descriptions of Nicholas Moore and his wheelchair, gardening with one hand, the chair tilting over at forty-five degrees, while he dug holes in the ground. He’d recently given it up when I first met him. The garden then became totally overgrown, grass sprouted up.

There was a move by the family to get him to Cambridge — which Moore strongly resisted. The reason he gave was that he couldn’t abandon his garden. The garden looked like a wilderness, but the pattern was still there, underneath. All it needed was weeding. This was a great creative work of his. He cultivated his own hybrids of irises and Michaelmas daisies and sempervivums . He had pieces of rock — limestone — which he said could not be moved to Cambridge. He’d have to stay there with his rocks, whatever happened. And yet, of course, a few weeks after he died the house was sold and the whole thing was razed, beyond trace.

He had a beautiful flowering cherry in his front garden, a rare Japanese cherry. I have never seen one before. It grew up beyond his floor and emerged in front of the window of the tenants upstairs — and had to be trimmed, because they said it impeded their view of the council houses. When the house was sold, the tree was uprooted.

IS:

He was living in a condition of sentimental exile, like Guy Burgess in Moscow?

PR:

Yes, an exile in which the postal services had stopped taking messages back to his native country.

IS:

What was his state of mind, in hospital, when you visited him for the last time?

PR:

He was under painkilling drugs, so he was speaking very slowly. He was most concerned that nothing should be lost. He didn’t think in terms of archives; when he’d written poems, he threw them on the floor. When we were clearing up the place, afterwards, there were poems everywhere: under the kitchen sink, stuffed into flower pots. He didn’t want any of them to leave the flat, even if they got screwed up and dirty.

IS:

The ‘Last Poem’, or (THE LAST POEM) as you have it, published at the end of Lacrimae Rerum … was that written at home, before he went to hospital?

PR:

It was written in his head. He wrote everything in his head, before he started to type it. He wrote very little in longhand, because nobody could read his longhand — not even himself.

He said the ‘Last Poem’ was in three parts. He told me what it was about. But it wasn’t very clear whether he was reciting or summarizing. He typed the first part, neatly. The second part he typed, roughly. The third part was still in his head. He was going to do that when he got home. He was concerned that it shouldn’t be lost. He mentioned this very particularly. But the third part is lost, yes. And will never be recovered.

In spite of the neatness of Moore’s cultural isolation, the work was a sprawl, a mess. He was producing these typescripts, all day long, which were utter doggerel; and casting them around the room, spilling things on them, and eating off them.

Writing was so difficult for him. He had to put his nose against the keyboard and type one letter at a time. It’s difficult to think of a poem when you’re doing that.

The last year, he almost stopped. There were too many problems. If I hadn’t come, and taken an interest, Lacrimae Rerum wouldn’t have existed at all, hardly any of it.

It’s interesting — you have to be metaphysical — but he makes continual reference to ‘islets’in his work. Which is a metaphor to him. He was living on an islet, a rock in the sea. Also, the seat of diabetes involves things called the Islets of Langerhans .

When I first saw this term I thought it was some place he had visited during a holiday in Austria when he was young. But Langerhans was a German pathologist who described the islets, small groups of cells scattered through the pancreas.

Those translations he did from Baudelaire, Spleen , are all to do with diabetes: the sluggish slowing down of the bloodstream, turning green, thickening to bile.

IS:

You seem to have a taste for searching out these old men, the survivors? When you went to see Nicholas Moore were you, in any sense, nominating a father?

PR:

I hope not. There is a feeling that you like to relate to father generations; but you don’t know what you want, or expect, from them. If you’ve got parents like mine, who are non-intellectual, perhaps there’s a tendency to hunt around. On a personal level, I like helping old people. I enjoyed going to Nicholas Moore and picking up the things he dropped, reaching for things he couldn’t reach, trying to make some order out of the appalling chaos he’d got his manuscripts into.

We’d be talking about poems and he — suddenly — would think of one which he considered was very important, and we had to find it . So we’d start, turning things upside-down, moving piles of records and books, moving furniture, looking for one little thin piece of paper. Which nine times out of ten we didn’t find. Then it was time for me to go. He knew what colour the paper would be.

If anyone ever published a ‘Collected Works of Nicholas Moore’, a three-volume job, a thousand-odd pages, his real achievement would be lost in it. Nobody would be able to find it.

As, finally, nobody could find him. He didn’t relate to this locality in any sense. When he wrote about it, it was a dream image. It was an unreal world outside.

IS:

The reason he was there was the simple fact of the railway, conveniently connecting him to his city seed shop?

PR:

Yes, that’s why he was there. But it wasn’t a pleasant place. He had to put up with neighbours chucking stones through his window. The local kids looked on him as some kind of witch, because he was going round in a wheelchair, with his one leg. The house was obviously derelict, the windows coated in dust.

IS:

He never attempted to sell off his books? The obvious reflex for most writers?

PR:

No. Nobody wanted to read them, so why should anyone want to buy them? He’d got three or four copies of that very rare book of his, Recollections of the Gala , mint copies in a drawer; which he could have sold, even in those days, for £30 or £40 each. That’s not to mention all the signed presentation copies from Wallace Stevens.

He lost his correspondence with Stevens. That was one of the things he did realize was of some value. He was still hale and hearty, he’d just arrived in St Mary Cray. So, instead of letting them fall among the detritus, he carried the letters from Stevens around in his wallet. Unfortunately, his pocket was picked while he was browsing in a street market in London; and they were lost, never to surface again.