She told us there was a disappearance every eleven seconds
and taped everything we said.
DON DELILLO
At first it was cats and dogs. Snapshots blown up and pinned to trees, municipal noticeboards: ‘Bodger. I am a tanned male Staff with white chest and little black nose, much loved by my family and friends.’ London is a kennel city populated by vanished animals, kidnapped domestic pets. Self-published, premature obituaries have been wrapped around surveillance poles, pasted to electrical junction boxes. Killer mutts killed in the course of duty: as if one dog had eaten another until there was only a single beast, the dog of dogs, left in town. Dog-shaped absences are felt as a warm wind playing around your ankles. Snatched pooches. Porn-star poodles. Privileged pussies converted into winter gloves or given over to laboratory technicians for evil experiments, scent extraction. Extraordinary rendition. Extinguished darlings can be cloned and replaced. They leave their traces everywhere. Under and around a bench, beside the Regent’s Canal in Hackney, I notice a thick mat of grey fur; the site of an epic grooming session. Animals, heard at night, yelp in empty buildings. Tooth marks can be found in the branches of trees where pit bulls once hung, strengthening their jaws for combat: the obscene fruit of twilight.
Now the temperature has changed, pit bulls are forgotten. Their patrons, bereaved, have retreated deeper into Essex. Photographs of disappeared humans, victims of the latest outrage, multiply across plywood fences that protect the latest grand project. Life drains from the image like hope from a dying eye. Memory-prints of the lost are arranged, in the hope that such a ritual will restore the missing person, the loved one: daughter, brother, husband, father. The disappeared of the First War were named and published on English memorials because they were not here; their bodies, what was left of them, could not be returned from the battlefield. In our present climate of shoulder-shrugging amnesia, we have memorials to memorials, information posters telling us where the original slab has been stored. Heritage replaces the memories which should be passed on, anecdotally, affectionately, from generation to generation, by word of mouth.
It is difficult to explain, this conceit: a ‘city of disappearances’. J. G. Ballard thinks of the centre of London as a redundant mausoleum; he can’t understand why anyone would concern themselves with its erasure. He has never set foot in Spitalfields or visited Wapping. Why should he? Better to promote an accident of civil engineering like the Westway, a fairground ramp enlivened by tired fictions. What disappears, driving west, is not the road but the landscape that surrounds it: overbuilt, undermanaged. The ramp is the skeleton of a theme-park dinosaur. A fairground ride closed by safety inspectors: too predictable, too boring. A concrete folly in a skateboard jungle of cranes and diggers. A government-sanctioned sprawl of retail colonialism dumped between slip roads. Better this fancy, Ballard suggests, three minutes skimming above the houses, Hilton hotels, railway lines and stadia, than whatever happens down below in the dirty human streets. Three minutes of nervous reverie before the weight of things, the impossibility of escape, strikes us dumb once more.
By soliciting contributions to an anthology of absence, I hoped that the city would begin to write itself (punningly, in both senses): a Canetti fabrication, a documentary chronicle with a multitude of anonymous authors. A revival of the ‘Mass Observation’ project, perhaps, without the greedy voyeurism of poverty snoops and Home Counties elitists infiltrating northern industrial towns. You have to belong to a place before youare qualified to speak. I am a tolerated provincial who has outstayed his welcome, the liberties of Hackney (where we are all passing through). London: City of Disappearances was a book I couldn’t construct, except by proxy. I nudged potential contributors. I made suggestions: paintings that had been stolen or destroyed (like Graham Sutherland’s Churchill portrait fed into the boiler), bombed libraries, persons who stepped out for a newspaper and never returned, dusty reputations, found objects for which, as yet, no satisfactory explanation has been forged. Poets – I have a weakness for poets’ prose – responded warmly, they would start that very day: underground rivers, the Odeons of childhood, detective work on the careers of fellow poets of even more fabulous obscurity. The promised pieces never surfaced and I was not cruel enough to harry denizens of the netherworld. It was their decision, to hold back, to keep their discoveries from prying eyes. If they had succeeded in teasing out the history of some junkie angel, published in heaven, the integrity of the initial disappearance would be threatened. Better to leave well alone. One celebrated and prolific London author, pestered beyond endurance by my invitation to dredge, yet again, into the old memory sludge, replied by postcard: ‘Alas, I have nothing.’
The poet Lee Harwood, from whom I bought paperbacks in his days in Charing Cross Road, at Better Books (or so I think I remember), cannot substantiate Paul Buck’s claim to have worked in the same shop. ‘I guess Paul must have been there when I was away somewhere.’ He does however recall Buck’s attempts to fascinate young women: ‘I’m a sadist.’ ‘Ah, the murky past,’ Harwood muses. While Buck, infiltrating the same city of shadows, believes that Harwood was out of circulation, in hospital. Harwood, challenged, pictures the scene: ‘I was locked up in that hospital just east of Mile End tube. (The chief psychiatrist was an ex-concentration camp victim. He seemed to have learned a lot from his captors in the way he treated his patients! A Burroughs nightmare.) So the pieces of the puzzle at times fit together.’
More frequently, they do not: we revise, talk ourselves up, airbrush the shame. Tale-tellers, those with a gift for public relations and self-promotion, take over the production, fabricate a mythology and sell off the doctored footage. Alexis Lykiard’s role in the celebrated 11 June 1966 poetry readings at the Albert Hall remains woefully under-described. Jeff Nuttall, an inspirational figure to his peers, never made it on to the stage. With John Latham (the intense, mad-eyed sculptor/philosopher), Nuttall had got himself up in an Aztec costume stitched together from books. They were going to fight a duel. Alex Trocchi, the master of ceremonies, forgot to signal their entrance. Latham, suffering from heat exhaustion, fainted in the wings. An attendant barred Nuttall’s path. Later, in what must have been a very bad night for this functionary, he discovered the two artists soaping each other down in Sir Malcolm Sargent’s private bathroom.
The book of disappearances assembled itself as a deflected autobiography, scripted by an automatic pen in an end-of-the-pier booth in an out-of-season resort. Friends and friends of friends sent me the missing chapters of a book I was incapable of writing. With a Charing Cross Road dealer, I visited Nuttall in Hebden Bridge, helping to clear his library (a not infrequent occurrence). He was on the move again, evacuating the trash of identity: magazines, lavishly inscribed (and stained) booklets from other poets, multiples of his own samizdat titles. Hebden Bridge, on the road between Halifax and Rochdale, was an outstation of the reforgotten, a penal colony of cancelled creatives, drift-culture marginals. The London poet and publisher Asa Benveniste, a significant figure at that golden moment in the 1960s when books from presses such as Trigram, Goliard and Fulcrum outperformed their mainstream rivals, opened the front room of his terraced house as a shop: personal holdings and the relics of his press were offered for sale. I would have to revise Ed Dorn’s tag: youdon’t reappear, dead – youreappear in Hebden Bridge; rolling a thin cigarette, peddling your most precious possessions. And sporting a metaphorical beret.
When I listed some of Nuttall’s books in a (long-vanished) magazine put out by an equally long-vanished book-runner, Driffield, I was contacted by a man who worked for a fast-food franchise in Gloucester Road. The burger joint was obviously a front for other, even speedier activities. This man, pock-marked, chivalrous, struck me as an exemplary customer. He crossed town to collect his purchases, paid cash on the nail (no haggling), brought cookies (he was known to my children as the ‘Cookie Man’) and champagne. What’s more, he left the best of the books behind him, in my safe-keeping. I have them still, a complete run of Nuttall’s My Own Mag (with all the Burroughs contributions). Then he vanished. Into South America, so he hinted. Once, after a number of years, he returned: more cookies, more champagne, a private viewing of his holdings. A handshake at the door and out into the night. Never heard from again. My wife thinks the Cookie Man might have perished in the newsreels of the Mexico City earthquake. I can’t convince myself that he had any corporeal existence. The literate burger-slave bailed me out at a point when I was frantic to get a big book finished. And then, charity performed, he stepped from the frame: a shape-shifter with a carrier bag of goodies and a roll of crisp, high denomination banknotes.
For the bookish, London is a book. For criminals, a map of opportunities. For unpapered immigrants, it is a nest of skinned eyes; sanctioned gunmen ready to blow your head off as you run for a train. When the city of distorting mirrors revealed itself, through its districts and discriminations, I discovered more about London’s past as a reworking of my own submerged history. Stephen Smith’s investigation of Paul Raymond, skin impresario and property speculator, brought back one of my more unlikely occupations from years spent taking on anything and everything as a way of learning about the metropolis. I was a short-lived stagehand at Raymond’s Revuebar. A mature student (lifelong) from the School of Art and Technical College, where I had been teaching in Waltham-stow, got me in. I wanted to experience the difference between the public face of Soho entertainment and the back door (pit, sweatbox, slum). The glitz of front of house, where the businessmen and Japanese tourists eased their elbows and sharpened their gaze, was balanced by the narrow quarters allocated to the stage staff, the (un)dressing rooms of the gravy-coloured dancers. My fellow labourers, efficient, diminutive, muscular, were mostly Australians in green-striped T-shirts, puncturing cans and sitting around a small television set.
Smoke machines. Dry ice. Wet leather bikinis. Motorbikes on stands. The drench of steaming bodies and industrial perfume countered cigar fug, the testosterone soup of the unseen punters. We were the ashtray of the vanities. Pounding sound, cracking whips, coloured lights flashing on chrome: androids of the night. We darted forward, as the curtain closed, to pick up discarded wisps of costume that were like skin changes, surgical dressings improvised from unsuitable materials: vinyl, peeled dog, diamanté. We skidded on sweat pools.
Will Self’s lively account of a street incident outside the pre-transported Charing Cross Hospital (where he was born in 1961) keyed up recollections of a different order. I accompanied my wife, eleven years after the yowling novelist’s first appearance in the city, for the birth of our first child. We got a booking up West because the Natural Childbirth antenatal classes we attended were held there: yogic exercises that might have been developed by Mike Leigh, a dummy babe of sinister aspect and a comprehensive account of everything that could possibly go wrong. Instruments of delivery laid out for inspection. The classes were like a suburban wife-swapping club, licensed to go no further than inflicting Chinese burns on the smooth thighs of potential partners, to whom you had just been introduced. Raw biology, immortal longings and a mug of hot sweet tea: the English way.
The ambulance carrying us from Hackney – another discontinued courtesy – broke down, half a mile shy of its destination. We walked, with our bundle of nightwear (sponges to suck, soap, warm socks), down the middle of the street, into a building where assorted junkies and headbangers were lying on the floor, waiting for admittance. We stepped over them and on, eventually, to a room where we were left alone: to come to terms with this improbable but inevitable situation. What a privilege it was, being so close to the heart of things, watching the cockroaches crawl across damp plaster, with someone to call on if required; within the throb and pulse of the nocturnal city, the ghosts of empire. A daughter, disgruntled, red-faced, came into the world. I slid home, on private rails, finding London an altered landscape. I saw, that one time, more truly into the dream of things: Strand, Fleet Street, Smithfield, Bunhill Fields. A route that became a mantra for the years that would follow.
I’m haunted by the way more vivid memories overwrite my own. Ann Baer visiting the exiled German painter Ludwig Meidner in Golders Green: a young woman having her portrait painted as an act of patronage, in order to keep a difficult artist afloat in difficult times. Meidner’s terrifying visions, made before the First War, demonstrated the tremble that lies beneath the confident fabric of long-established cities. Future detonations are experienced by neurotic seers before they actually happen: crumpled buildings, crushed humans, the sun like a melting eye. Meidner left Germany for London, with his wife, Else, also a painter. A fretful relationship. They held a joint exhibition, years later, which I saw, at the Ben Uri Gallery in St John’s Wood. I copied a couple of lines from the catalogue into my notebook: ‘Since their art did not make enough money for the Meidners to survive in London, they were dependent on assistance from well-wishers and charitable organizations. Else eventually accepted a position as a servant with an elderly woman in Sydenham.’ That catalogue has now vanished. There must be a library somewhere – like the Gray’s Inn Road cellar that Malcolm Letts describes – where all the missing books of London are assembled, three-deep on the shelf, welded together by subterranean ooze: a single volume, the great compendium of disappearances. Meidner caught that instant of fracture, the rip in the temporal membrane, before it was obvious to less agitated citizens. Trapped here, reputation occulted, he studied Blake and began to write. I was honoured to have his painting Apokalyptische Landschaft (1913) on the cover of the first edition of my novel Downriver.
The most deeply buried of all the mind-dramas reactivated by contributions to the anthology started with Chris Petit’s account of Kim Philby’s house in Crowborough. Philby was a professional of disappearance, presenting a false self, keeping his doctored script afloat on alcohol: living with the strangeness, in his circle, of not being a walking disaster, not coming visibly apart as the years rolled on; not having the underworld of predatory homosexuality, class on class, still proscribed, as a smokescreen. Petit uses that ghost, spook of spooks, James Jesus Angleton, as his posthumous dreamer: the world is a conspiracy of the ungodly. Life and career: a futile attempt to write himself out of the story. Angleton’s visit to Philby’s wife, Aileen, in Crowborough, the Strindbergian theatre of that two-hander, brought it back. A rented flat in Sandycove, alongside Joyce’s tower, on the southern rim of Dublin Bay. Early 1960s. We didn’t know what we’d walked into: all the loose ends of unresolved literary and cultural projects that needed somewhere quiet in which to atrophy or resurrect themselves. Xeroxes of late Modernism in a provincial backwater, still hag-ridden by the Church and the well-oiled machinery of political corruption. Casualties of the peace treading water, watching the horizon: runaways and failed suicides. You couldn’t talk about disappearance in this context. We were off the map in a place that held resolutely to its fabricated past. A willed disappearance, a voluntary submersion, doesn’t count. At the top of the house was a poet, escaped from South Africa, biding her time, plucking a guitar, waiting for the move to Hampstead. Beneath her, a nurse, battered mistress of a northern novelist whose books were being turned into films, plays. A convalescent putting her life back together, after experiencing the torrid integrity of this man’s acted-out Lawrentian dynamic. She had the bruises, the limp, to prove it. And then, in the spacious ground-floor flat, the sprawled daughters of a shadowy American presence in Ireland (military, diplomatic, CIA). They were picking up the graces of an undemanding education, inquisitive about alien lifestyles, innocently promiscuous.
Stepping away from material too eager to be transcribed, I came out of the garden gate and down to the rocks. A gaunt woman in Bermuda shorts, legs drawn up, was already sitting there; our neighbour. She nursed a permanent glass of something iced and clear, vodka. It was my first taste and I learned to appreciate that the spirit was better not taken by the tumbler if there was still business outstanding in what remained of the day. Even among the electively lost, this woman was the paradigm. Unlike the rest of them, people were actually looking for her; journalists, investigative teams, ghost-writers with mousetrap chequebooks. She hadn’t disappeared, not this time, she was hiding: and therefore, more than ever, aware of herself, her difficulties, a life snatched away, without explanation, one January night in 1963. Here, in the next house, was Eleanor Philby, the third wife of the Third Man: dark glasses, headscarf for the street (she never went out). Beirut had just happened, the headline disappearance. When there is a choice, for the woman left behind, London or Moscow, she makes an instant decision: Dublin. What Eleanor noticed about the men in the secret world was ‘their watchfulness, but also a surprising tenderness’. ‘You tend to compensate,’ she wrote, in her account of her marriage, ‘by the intensity of your sex-based relationships.’
The blinds were permanently down, the television was on. The vodka kept coming. They must have been doing an afternoon series of Preston Sturges movies; it was hard to tell, reception was hit and miss. Drift footage, mirthless high spirits on trains: The Palm Beach Story. ‘Films,’ wrote W. G. Sebald (in ‘Kafka Goes to the Movies’), ‘far more than books, have a way of disappearing not just from the market but from the memory, never to be seen again.’ I didn’t watch a Preston Sturges film, from that time in Eleanor Philby’s flat, until June 2005 – when I dug up a DVD of Sullivan’s Travels. Our television seances were a ruse for holding a three-way conversation (the Third Man silent as a Buddha); the pearly-grey screen became a window into an American past about which I knew nothing. Glamorous figures exchanging quips. Hollywood plutocrats toying with Marxism, boasting about meeting Brecht and Greta Garbo at a dinner party in Salka Viertel’s Santa Monica salon. Things Eleanor said, my film-buff remarks: they allowed us to avoid any form of direct interrogation. ‘Communism, communism, this picture is the answer to communism.’ ‘With a little sex in it.’ Veronica Lake, tactfully robed and framed, pregnant, was cast against the wishes of the studio bosses. There is a black cook and a big-time director, played by Joel McCrea, who decides to go hobo, on the road, Grapes of Wrath with following caravans and attendants. ‘What do youknow about garbage cans?’ barks the money man. And when at last McCrea takes his place – chain gang, swamp convict – with the wretched of the earth, they are all redeemed by viewing some Disney slapstick. The American dream: the point at which savagery gives way to sentiment. The paradox of fang-rotting sugars and perfect white teeth.
Eleanor Philby, if she successfully erased her memories, clipped the labels from her clothes, stayed out there on the rocks, might have been a figure to set beside the ‘Piano Man’ of Sheppey. People cannot simply disappear, abdicate from the soap opera of the city; they must reappear: even the ones who have never been seen before. Like Kaspar Hauser, the changeling of Karlsruhe, or the peasant poet John Clare adrift in London, figures with no history continue to arrive out of some black hole: space-time anomalies. On a beach in the Thames Estuary, a man is discovered, in a wet evening suit with all identifying marks removed: one of the drowned, walking out of the river. His hair is erect, spiky; he hasn’t shaved in a couple of days. White shirt, no tie. The look seems to be calculated, borrowed from David Lynch – but the expression contradicts any facile explanation. A second life for a person who has avoided the preliminaries.
Here, and more convincingly present than the magician David Blaine in his high glass coffin, is a being to trouble the imagination. Blaine’s performance was mired in banality, he made himself a target; he was attached by an umbilical cord to City Hall and the media hose. A volunteer for the virtual pillory, the soft crucifixion of tabloid headlines, this self-hostaged American floated on the sweet stink of narcissism: underwritten by burger sweat and bad electricity. Too many safety lines, too many cables. It took the novelist Nicola Barker to redeem the project (before moving on, I’m sure, to the Piano Man).
The revenant’s expression tells us nothing, a passenger from nowhere. He is lodged in the Medway Maritime Hospital at Gillingham, where he draws detailed impressions of a grand piano. Unhesitating marks on paper, found in later times, will be a passport to the City of Disappearances. There are so many achieved and aborted quests, our soundtrack is as busy as a screwball Preston Sturges comedy. But, as noise fades, we are left with a gazetteer of erasures, each disappearance represented by a random object or image: a cabinet of curiosities. The military hairbrush that once belonged to Franz Kafka (as recorded by Kathi Diamant). Paul Buck’s photograph, pigeons in Trafalgar Square, from which his mother has been excluded. Kiki Benzon’s Camden Lock shoes, the ones that can’t be found a second time. Jeff Nuttall’s daughter, in his story, running away to London: how was that episode resolved? Marius Kociejowski’s discovery of a ‘blank Gretna Green marriage certificate’. A fading VHS tape of a deleted Channel 4 documentary, The Cardinal and the Corpse, in which dead London writers like Derek Raymond and Alexander Baron (along with the Kray associate Tony Lambrianou) keep on talking, still at the pub table, trying to fix the topography of forgotten films.
I thought the book might, in the end, be defined by pieces that didn’t appear. Nicholas Royle’s extended tale, a novella, was promised but it didn’t arrive. As deadline followed deadline, I considered publishing his postcards, the teasing hints of what was to come: Picasso etchings, Soho drawings, a promotional card for Baby Oil and Ice (an account of ‘striptease in East London’). And then, story delivered, Royle discovers, in a secondhand paperback of Kafka’s The Castle, a folded, photocopied poem: ‘The Disappearing City (Prague, 1938–London, 1988)’ by Nicholas Drake.
‘At dawn the storm troops execute the clocks.’
Another search is initiated. Everyone is keen to point out – as is the poet of ‘The Disappearing City’ – that he is not that Nick Drake, the suicided lyricist, the one whose sister played the woman in the first (television) version of J. G. Ballard’s Crash. Another person entirely, stroke victim, so they say, prizewinner. (The poet, run to ground by Royle, denies it. The confusion here is with yet another Nick, the playwright Nick Darke.) Did Drake do a book on Yeats for Penguin (author’s details not on file)? I met the original, the now celebrated singer/songwriter, my first time on radio, late 1960s, The John Peel Show. I had an 8 mm Bolex in my woolly shoulder-bag, I was keeping a film diary, but security wouldn’t let me shoot while the show was on air. No images of Peel or Drake, just the empty studio, an associate playing the various parts, faking it: an unreliable memory. The show was taped – it might have some value now – but that tape is lost. Too much time has been wasted searching for it, for all the other photographs, poems, totems. Never go back. Emulate Basil Bunting and burn the letters before the pests get at them. Free up the researchers. At the finish, even the cabinet of curiosities will betray us; all we can ever know is the shape the missing object leaves in the dust – and the stories, the lies we assemble to disguise the pain of an absence we cannot define.
[I. S.]