Plate-glassed and Starbucked

Iain Sinclair
LONDON:
CITY OF DISAPPEARANCES
656pp. Hamish Hamilton. £22.50.
0 241 1429 9

If big cities are about desires, meetings and commodities, they are no less about desolation, absence and lack. The scale and mystery of urban life have always entailed disappearances, from the playfully fantastic to the simply unbearable; from De Quincey’s elusive chemist to the lost-pet notices that Iain Sinclair remarks at the start of this anthology. One of the sixty- odd contributors recalls that Sinclair’s original instructions were “vague but simple: did I want to write about things in London disappearing?”.

Many of the contributors choose to write about lost people: elegies, memorials, investigations into the anonymity of the city. Richard Humphreys provides a beautiful piece about the unsung life of his cleaner, the late Anthony Wentworth Ashburner, who had corresponded with Beckett about the banning of The Naked Lunch and wasn’t bad at cleaning either (though he wouldn’t do ironing). The late Derek Raymond remembers some old criminal associates, and how they made him laugh, while Stewart Home probes the milieu around the death of his mother, a heroin-user in the supposedly swinging 1960s, and while he’s at it manages a thorough and convincing character assassination of Alexander Trocchi.

People disappear in different ways. Alexis Lykiard turns in a “death of a hero” piece on Alan Sillitoe, a writer he used to admire but now despises. Some people choose to disappear; Chris Petit’s “The Stiletto of Fiction; or, the Chinaman” is about Kim Philby, including his acquaintance with CIA man James Jesus Angleton, his marriage and cricket (in which we discover a “Chinaman” is a sort of left-handed googly). The star of the escapologists is Driffield, or drif field, who nearly steals the book: two contributions are about him and three by him.

Driff was a book dealer – a specialist bookfinder and trade “runner” – who found fame when he self-published an obsessively thorough guide to Britain’s secondhand bookshops. It was a comic tour de force, and in its day extremely useful, before the shops themselves began to disappear en masse. With his loud voice and louder clothing, Driff was a hard man to miss, until the day came when he was seen no more. There were Lucan-style sightings, along with rumours of Eastern Europe and India and even far-flung bits of London, but – particularly since he was a troubled character who had been selling tickets to his own suicide, and collecting books on death – many people suspected the worst. He is, however, triumphantly alive; this book contains the proof.

The most substantial and impressive item in London: City of disappearances is a novella-length piece by the graphic novel magus Alan Moore, about Steve Moore (not a relative and not dead). Radiantly written and richly packed with atmospheric counter-cultural content, Moore’s mini-biography ranges over the I Ching; bygone suburban life and the Eagle comic; hallucinogenic mushrooms; Tibetan tulpas and imaginary women; and Elizabethan music (“he’s not listening to anything except gavottes, pavanes, speed garage harpsichord extravaganzas that put him in mind of his most cherished 1960s vinyl . . . . The sixteenth-century aural filigree infects his prose, informs his thinking with a tendency to the elaborate, an urge to decorate . . .”).

Memories of would-be literary acquaintances figure in an astute piece by John Welch, who moves from the pull of old Soho – as much an idea as a place – to the myth of “the ‘literary life’ with its interminable fantasies of inclusion and exclusion”. Myths, memories and fantasies of place are inevitably central to the book: Sarah Wise contributes a running gazetteer of disappeared locations, matched with Michael Moorcock’s picturesquely bogus and cunningly textured accounts of places like Nightmore Street, WC1, the site of the Tic-Toc Club and the murder of Nigel Fox-Patterson, the French bookshop on the Charing Cross Road, and Coveney and Child’s Medical Supply Stores, EC3, as (not) mentioned by De Quincey in his revised Confessions.

A number of contributors remember vanished locations – bookshops are popular – while Nick Papadimitriou records an edgy visit to the formerly rural site of Heathrow’s new Terminal Five (“I was shocked to find that where Perry Oaks should have been . . . there was now a massive building project”). Along with disappeared places, Iain Sinclair provides a substantial piece on railway termini as places of disappearance and “museums of melancholy”, taking First World War family history as his starting point and moving to encompass far more.

A sense of final days and ubi sunt has long been part of city writing – it is already the dominant note in Geoffrey Fletcher’s magnificent London explorations of the 1960s – along with a multitude of lost objects: in “36 rue des Morillons” the psychogeographical visionary Ivan Chtcheglov and his Lettrist comrades spliced together the quest for the Holy Grail with the Paris Lost Property Office. But the real lost object, increasingly, is felt to be the city itself.

Driff dates the decline of civilization from the moment in the 1970s “when they took the small mirrors out of red phone boxes”. Along with the demise of the old-style junk shop, he notes the latter-day absence of cheap rents, and of 1970s-style optimism about the future. Martin Stone similarly notes the changed times in the book trade: “Everything has been discovered – or at least priced”.

Tibor Fischer contributes a fantastic fiction about a woman increasingly dispossessed in a London where “you got nothing for a lifetime of decency; not a free glass of water. . . [any] genocidist from Rwanda passing through London got the same medical treatment as you and better housing rights”. Bill Drummond – too cynical for any simple nostalgia about “all that eel and pie shop sense of community stuff”, and sardonically wondering if white sparrows are leaving for Milton Keynes – notes the loss of the conjuring shop opposite the British Museum, fondly remembered by many: “That’s long disappeared. Maybe that’s it. The magic of London has disappeared”.

The magic of psychogeography, in its various forms – whether it was the emotional purchase on place afforded by personal memories and arcane local knowledge, or the way that places gain an aura from being in books, or the project of the man who wrote to Sinclair a few years ago to say he was walking the outline of his brain tumour on a map of London – had more than a little in common with Winnicott’s “transitional object”; an object that was neither wholly external nor wholly in the mind. Psychogeography was about the city as transitional object, but London is growing harder to internalize.

Plate-glassed, hyper-capitalized, Starbucked, its memories and character increasingly erased by meaningless modernistic redevelopment; London is blander and more rebarbative than ever before, more and more suited to critiques of separation, however obscure and open-ended they might be. “All we can ever know is the shape the missing object leaves in the dust”, writes Sinclair “ – and the stories, the lies we assemble to disguise the pain of an absence we cannot define.”

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Phil Baker is the author of The Dedalus Book of Absinthe, 2002.