Midsummer: the shortest night. The year on its side. Joblard is to marry. To make that act, that avowal: St Bartholomew-the-Great. The Chemical Wedding, sponsus and sponsa, merging in song, twisting around the columns of that stone forest; celebrated here in the blending of russian stout, nigredo, with dry blackthorn cider. The risks crowd us, cackle; magpies at the window.
Birds spin into hats, they disguise themselves. We suffer the resilience of the silver-workers, lion spirited, boisterous, loud upon pavements: the Hat & Feathers, corner of Goswell and Clerkenwell Roads. Broad challenging frontage, fresh paint and pillars of red Peterhead granite, gravestone.
Naturally, we do not talk of these things, the things ahead. Does the unspoken, for the first time, put a tremor in Joblard’s hand? Hardly. Rolling a cigarette, damaged finger in a leather stall.
Pints first, begin slowly. Change on the table-top. Joblard running three coins between his fingers. Blackmail the ferryman. Ungrounded bribes. Don’t say it! Take all the time because there is so much coming at a rush, more than the short night will hold.
Without preamble, I plunge.
‘Accepting the notion of “presence” – I mean that certain fictions, chiefly Conan Doyle, Stevenson, but many others also, laid out a template that was more powerful than any local documentary account – the presences that they created, or “figures” if you prefer it, like Rabbi Loew’s Golem, became too much and too fast to be contained within the conventional limits of that fiction. They got out into the stream of time, the ether; they escaped into the labyrinth. They achieved an independent existence.
‘The writers were mediums; they articulated, they gave a shape to some pattern of energy that was already present. They got in on the curve of time, so that by writing, by holding off the inhibiting reflex of the rational mind, they were able to propose a text that was prophetic.
‘Doyle encodes the coming sacrifices, Stevenson’s Jekyll & Hyde, in that predetermined calvinist language, describes what is almost at hand – the escape of the other, the necessary annihilation of self. The Whitechapel Golem, unsouled. There were so many figures, conjured essences, loose among the traps – unfocused, undirected. I don’t know whether they reported them or created them.’
I fumble for a notebook. Not sure if I’ve lost it. The urge towards saying; knowing that what is said is false, thickens the line of truth. The ill-shaped sentence bruises the past. I need a quote from Francis Crick.
‘“If, for long periods of time, one could prevent the two sections of the brain communicating with each other, one could perhaps convince one brain that it was in the same body as another brain – in other words, one could make two people where there was one before. An area of research that is likely to lead to interesting consequences.”’
‘Hymie Beaker,’ Joblard replied, sliding across the first chaser.
‘Also,’ I couldn’t stop now, ‘on Radio 4, February 19, 1969, he predicted the creation of man/animal hybrids.’
‘Too late. We’ve already got those,’ said Joblard, as his mate Jack hovered over us. ‘The Third Man: part musician, part crocodile.’
Jack presents himself, initially, as an alien life-form. The light from the streetdoor shines through his grey raincape. Beads of sweat trickle down his scalp. His thick glasses are misted over: he is eyeless. His arms are lost within the wings of the cape.
Jack grinned at us: not extinct, obsolete.
But he was so amiable, so lacking in nervous speedy aggression of manner, that I was forced to assume a terrible stubborn fury beneath. Jack made no imposition, needed to assert nothing. More than any human I had met he obeyed Nietzsche’s gnomic instruction: ‘Become what you are.’
Strong-throated, Jack cleared his glass; listened. A vital witness, neutralising the possible escape of the third side, the necessary stranger, always present when two men are talking. Jack sealed the triad. A new benevolence.
I truly believe that if we could have kept him we could have changed fate. The sacrifices would have been annulled. The shriek in the night, by this addition, earthed.
But the fret is on, it’s compulsive. One of those times when it has to be said.
‘Rimbaud, Verlaine. Went over the ground. Verlaine said, “As for London, we have explored it long ago… Whitechapel… Angel, the City… had no mysteries for us.” He said that the City had “the atmosphere of a machine-shop, or the interior of a heart. All the heroes are to be found there.”
‘And this is simply the truth. They are there as guides – the poets born and dying at the old gates of the City.
‘Chaucer, Keats; Milton, born at the sign of The Spread Eagle, his father had another house, The Rose. And they are there in the stone effigies, the Moloch façades. It’s the most darkly encoded enclosure in the western world. Bad magic, preconscious voodoo.
‘Rimbaud and Verlaine were, at that time, the great time for them, the time of their time, into that inhuman sex heat coupling, “total derangement”, that was occult in intention as well as effect; the will of Rimbaud and the compliant sacrifice of Verlaine, reversing and twisting, exchanging, animus and anima, reading each other’s dreams, spine snake dramas, double-helix, pain. The black acts. Like Crowley and Victor Neuberg in their talentless variant. “They were full of eyes within.”’
The evening was rancid now, our glasses slid in pools of sweat across the table. Our arms stuck to the chairs, which creaked as we moved; faked pornographic sighs.
‘I can feel the fucking going on,’ said Joblard, with relish. ‘Does it take two to occult fuck? Or more?’
Jack groaned. I drove on, undiverted.
‘Verlaine saw it, but didn’t do it. He projected a “ferocious novel, as sadistic as possible, written in a very terse style”. But couldn’t carry it off; gone, swallowed, finished, back to the domestic teat, hungry ghost begging for absolution in the skirts of the church, breathing old farts.
‘From these acts only one man emerges. The other is eliminated, engorged. Verlaine was bloodless, sucked dry as paper. He was wholly necessary, an equal partner, but he never emerged from that room. What he had went over.
‘Rimbaud was reading, British Museum, diving into Poe, into magical primers. He claimed that writers are “the mirrors of gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present”.
‘That’s it exactly. “In everything any man wrote… is contained… the allegorical idea of his own future life, as the acorn contains the oak.” Yes!
‘They were pulsing, they were open. They roamed, every day, out along the river, into Whitechapel, Wapping, Ratcliff, Limehouse. Entering wilfully into that fiction.
‘Rimbaud’s occult awareness was so intense, he was burning his own time so recklessly, all or nothing, that he described more fiercely than any other man, then or now, the elements of the Whitechapel millennial sacrifice. And by describing, caused them. They were said. They had to be.’
Jack cast a baleful eye on the notebook, but at that moment he would rather drink than talk. The light was with us, doors open to the street, smoke and feathers.
‘The whole scenario, like a Rosicrucian Manifesto, is there in his Illuminations. I won’t even try to sound it in French. But in aborted English, the elements… a few fragments… shave it down… terrifying…
*
“I responded by snickering at this satanic doctor,
& finished by getting to the window –
Phantoms of future nocturnal luxury
*
We would wander, nourished by the wine of caves &
the biscuit of the road, hard pressed
to find the place & the formula
By the grouping of buildings, in squares,
courtyards & enclosed terraces,
they have ousted the coachman
*
On the slope of the bank, angels fashion their robes
of wool in pastures of steel & emerald…
meadows of flame… on the left the compost of the ridge
is stamped down by all the murderers… all
the disastrous clamours spin their curve
The pivoting of rotting roofs
*
I stepped down into this carriage where period
is adequately indicated by the convex windows,
Bulging panels & contoured seats
The vehicle turns on the grass of an obliterated highway:
& in a blemish at the top of the window on the right
swirl pale lunar figures, leaves, breasts
Unharnessing near a spot of gravel
*
Here will one whistle for the tempest & the sodoms
*
The accidents of scientific magic
The luminous skulls upon pea seedlings
*
The banner of bleeding meat
The moment of the sweating room”
‘Heat is prophecy.
‘“Satanic Doctor, window, place. Courtyards, ousted coachman. Left and right. The vehicle, the obliterated highway. Banner of bleeding meat. Moment of the sweating room.”
‘Take this malarial possession and drive it to Africa. Burn it in the furnace like a rotten bandage. Hack it off. Chatterton’s Africa, the Eclogues, the imaginary salvation. Tame the river. It’s always too late.’
For a moment, of necessity, it died. We swallowed, licked around the rim of our glasses. Then Joblard took it up.
‘In Canterbury today, teaching, I heard the fag-end of a lecture on Van Gogh’s time in London. Some highly-scented bitch from the Courtauld Institute.
‘Early 1870s he was here, with a dealer, then teaching, and with some mad job between clergyman and missionary. He had to walk about the East End, where I don’t know, she wouldn’t give you anything specific. Collecting school fees. He also preached a series of sermons. I can see him in the open-air pulpit at Mary Matfellon, spittling the winos, haranguing the derelicts of the future.
‘They only had one slide to show from this period. It was a sketch he made of a horse-drawn coach, travelling to the left, a swirl of shading in the ground, containing names and signatures; couldn’t decipher them. The coach is empty.
‘I flashed to another, hired, carriage, much later, 1889, driven from the asylum on a farewell visit to a girl in the brothel at Arles, one summer afternoon.’
We pocket a bottle of Armagnac; there is a promise of whisky also – at the studio. The three of us, whistling, through the silent warren to Pear Tree Court.
Joblard’s genius is partly expressed in his ability to manipulate the surface of the material world so that, despite all the odds, and while all his peers are going under, he is always supplied with a space in which to work. Dines well, cigars, holidays in villas. Some kind of improbable shape-shifting knack, slipping through periods and disguises, dressed for the abattoir or the tea-dance. Now with a white linen jacket. The castoffs of nautical novelists, backwoods tree-carvers, Blue Mink percussionists all fit, as a second skin. He can borrow from Wellesian gourmets or midgets; the garment, once transferred, is immediately his. Nothing looks new, nothing is decayed.
He unlocks the door. A long room under the now pressing sky; a skylight, star-tile in the roof peak. It is another of Joblard’s secrets. Like Sickert, he had his bolt-holes. The work, the thing made, was the only reality.
Was that a tenable claim? Not altogether. But as a claim, it stood.
Jack found a chair, his feet upon a roll of opaque plastic sheeting, unplugs the brandy.
Joblard’s work is scattered: a pouring of lead; an anvil that might be for use, or might be the work itself; long bow or harpoon on the floor. Elements that could connect, or could be abandoned, broken down, turned into other machines. Bones become lines. Faults run into veins. There are many drawings, star maps, x-rays. A theatre of transformation: surgical rather than gestural.
The generosity of manner ends at the door. Joblard hangs his jacket over a propane cylinder, rolls up his sleeves. If he talks about the work it is in immediate and practical terms. But there is no flannel about craft or technique. He hits you with the basic counters: flayed skin, steel sheet, folding; rib, joint, poured; parchment, paper, salt. As we look at the objects – he does not speak of them, but of some other thing, some thing they might become, or might once have been. His face reflects the potential light of the act implied in the object. Harm is here; is contained. The object is its own defence.
This is the richest moment.
When the total assembly is made, when the action is fully described and named, then part of what is here now is closed off: there is a waxed seal.
We light our sumatras from the gas gun, which is then hooked over a tripod, giving a pale cave light. The mad shadows deform us. We are spread back. The bottle standing on the floor between us.
‘I want to remake what has never been made before,’ claims Joblard, grinning savage, one chipped tooth, breakfasting on the thunder stone. It is a night of extravagance, linked by the blue fire tongue, the triangle of utter calm.
‘The ghosts are more tangible than the human presences, the animated clay dolls. I want to re-enter the familiar and discover its dangers. I will name nothing.’
Jack, the long man, sniffs, something over-ripe, hair standing in clumps, disguised presence, allergic to pretension, breaks in; not interrupting, continuing, taking up the torch, putting his hand to the flame. His tale.
‘One January I was working as a decorator in the flat of a Steiner disciple, flower painter, at 16 Chepstow Place, Westbourne Grove. All day off the ground, scratching flakes of ancient paint from the ceiling, eyes sore, dry throat. Handless man. She’s out most of the time, getting ready, leaving for Australia, a man.
‘Comes back late in the afternoon, cup of herbal tea, says, “Oh, by the way, did you know this was the room of the Suicide Club, the actual address?”
‘It was already a strange time for me. I only took the job to get at her piano. Downstairs was a Radio Times theatrical, Beckett man, his wife, nervous in dark glasses. Dusty glamour of obscure fame. Claims she is writing “metaphysical detective stories”. But their main occupation is table-tennis, in the back yard, coats, gloves, mufflers; long ritualised bouts.
‘The radio was on all day: a comet crashed into the hills behind the cottage where John Cowper Powys lived. I’d just come back from there, mad trip, sponsored by a ragtrade lunatic who thought he was some kind of zen master: meaning that he could hire and fire a dozen tremblers a day, and do Groucho Marx imitations on the telephone. He shipped me to the slate quarries in a red Ferrari to turn A Glastonbury Romance into a three-act opera. When I got back – my job was gone and I was done for stealing the car. Shocked into enlightenment!
‘I’d work into the night: the moon gibbous and threatening. She wants me out, got her yoga routine to complete. I’m getting nowhere, a couple of feet a day. The ceiling’s like treacle; no blood in my arms.
‘And walking back to the underground, all these bandaged patients behind tall windows, convalescent, lobotomised, sitting at individual tables waiting for food, being watched by children’s television.
‘I buy a Standard and read of the murder, that morning, in a near-by street, of James Pope Hennessy, the biographer of Queens. He’s been stabbed in the head. Died from inhaling his own blood.
‘When I get home I dig among my Stevensons and discover that 16 Chepstow Place was not the address of the Suicide Club, but the address of a Mr Bartholomew (ha!) Malthus, who inhabits that story, suffering a “Melancholy Accident” and falling to his death “over the upper parapet in Trafalgar Square, fracturing his skull and breaking a leg… Mr Malthus, accompanied by a friend, was engaged in looking for a cab…”
‘In November I saw reviewed in The Sunday Times the book that Pope Hennessy was working on in his study at the time of that definitive interruption: a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson.
‘My wages were gone, forty pounds, the precise amount required for membership of the Suicide Club.’
Now the line of new light drives across the floor. The gas tongue so pale its power has gone. The marriage is almost on us. We have slept on our shields. Man to man to man, silent, sunk, the unwilled exchange, the talk brought to its finish. No more to be done, the word is – on.
To the obelisk. Unspoken. It is time to walk, return to the domestic chamber, to Camberwell, to dress the day.
But first we will walk that small mystery, make that connection: from the obelisk of St Luke, Old Street, to the demolished obelisk of St John, Horseydown, by way of the extinguished church of Mary Matfellon, Whitechapel. The three enclosures of ruin. Unacknowledged, but not concealed. St Luke, roofless, wild space in a border of stone; St John, a rim of the original onto which a place of business has been grafted; and Mary Matfellon, nothing, a field with a diagram in the grass, a stain only. The shunned Apostles.
The less they are, the stranger they become.
The walk has nothing to do with lines of force, immaculately ruled patterns, stern geometry of will, pentagrams, grids, brass-rule control. It is older and wilder. The triple spiral, finger print, found at New Grange. The spiral that winds out of Clerkenwell into Whitechapel into Southwark. It is not precise, it can’t be measured. But it is invoked. We want it and that is its truth.
The freshness of the day and the obelisk an absolute white, white beyond white, against the dim dirt-grained stone of the body of the church. The fence is breached and the door to the tower unlocked.
This is an act of morning.
We are lifted. The steps in time, wide. Counting the climb as if we would never again descend to the same city.
And raising ourselves by the ascent of this risk. Entering the blade. Beyond the door of light – the skin of the local is shaken. We climb, turning, winding into the tower but, strangely, it becomes a descent. We go down towards the sky.
A great bell hangs, a bulk of danger. Old wood. A pillar fallen across two discs or bowls; upturned scales. Spidery darkness. Cool breath. The soupy smell of stone dust, cloth dust, dust dying into dust; ropes on the floor, broken boards. We climb into the dark.
And now Jack is framed across the circular space of the window where the clock once hung. It is the ghost of a rose, unfolding rose of time, twisted into iron: it is a filter, projecting the rose onto the city. Jack’s outstretched arms break the circle, Adam Kadmon.
I turn from the light to Joblard. He is leaning back against the skirts of the bell, his breath gone. Out of the heat vortex. His face has died. He is white, bearded in shadows. It is the face of my father. The Father of Lights.
His spine resting on the buried bell. The bell within the obelisk. The cancelled bell that has been hidden from the world.
A flutter of birds against the window. Bird lime. Stench of old feathers.
We turn away, our prayers are made. Down into the face of the lion: Bunhill, Finsbury, Sun, Appold, Pindar, Spital, Steward, White’s, Thrawl, Matfellon, the path of old stone: by the Minories to the Tower, to Horseydown and the Old Kent Road.
To be shaved, washed, suited.
Joblard’s room has been cleared of its detritus; the brown swallowed in pale shades, the windows polished, open to the new day. A white cloth spread.
The room-dividing panels have been forced back so that the space is doubled, lit through. Flowers, lace. And by these changes, and on this day, a marriage is made.