Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (21 page)

Mendelssohn was a Bolaño character before the event, before the epic novels were contemplated; a life of poetry as (and in) politics. Shifting identities. European connections. Abortive actions. State retribution. And just that Bolaño quality of noble, slightly absurd defeat: broken monologues of accidental grace. With nobody, beyond the cabal, really listening. Poems surfacing, from time to time, in invisible booklets. A fact which neither diminishes, nor validates, their quality. It is, in the end, such an obvious demonstration of what the condition, the non-choice, of becoming a poet means: maddened productivity, confirmation of exilic and discounted status. The growing certainty that it is all for nothing.

Whenever I met Mendelssohn, which wasn’t often, and usually in Cambridge (which doesn’t count), I felt challenged, wrong-footed. There was a false note in whatever I was peddling. My membership of a covert society, to which you could not be elected, had long since elapsed: I was still working the same jaunty prose routines. Failing to keep quiet, failing to let the voices through, uncensored. Failing to fail. I could hear Anna Mendelssohn, in her borrowed boy’s sweater, muttering as I read.

‘A dead typewriter in a city where friends are made by appointment only,’ she wrote, in her Grace Lake persona. Re-remembering, and reconfiguring, the London of 1971. My urban-pastoral Chobham Farm days. Her time in the Hackney commune, in Amhurst Road, as part of the Angry Brigade. When the blue Volkswagen of the Special Branch spooks arrived, the raiders from Stoke Newington found Anna Mendelssohn still in bed. They asked for her name. ‘Nancy Pye,’ she replied.

‘Upon returning to this country in 1970,’ she later commented, ‘I was attacked, my own poetry seized, and my person threatened with strangulation if I dared utter one word of public criticism. I was unable to return to university at that point and was silenced.’ The poet’s gift for self-dramatization is obvious. The sense of being adrift in a world of symbols. At the mercy of poetry’s unforgiving truth. Which arrives early and out of synch. Like Soutine’s bedbugs nesting in the inner ear.

The poem of the city is a memory-construct. I didn’t know how much longer this place could tolerate me. My radar beacons were going down at a furious rate, the buildings by which I navigated. Rain, washing away bridges in Cumbria, gloom-glamed canalside Hackney. A pub for a doomed estate, and before that for the working canal, made a last desperate attempt to rebrand: as the Overdraught. A mirthless joke soon to be given a punchline when its windows were steel-shuttered, while property jackals hung their boards in place of the pub’s overpainted sign.

The filling station on the corner passed through all the stages on the way to entropy in a few months: functioning petrol pumps with attached inconvenience store (beggars blocking the doorway), potential artwork seductive in its abandonment, caravan invasion by dispersed Hackney Wick squatters. Then: bailiffs, boiler-suit heavies. Single torched caravan with demonic edgeland slogans. Tyre dump. Weed reservation backing on deleted laundry block. Yawning, flapping roof-structure above concrete pillars. Shell occupied by rats: fetid black box. Sweating walls lurid with anathemas on developers, bankers, politicians and named enforcers.

VOODOO IS BARBAROUS CAPITALISM CLOAKED IN MAGIC.

I thought about leaving London for a few months, travelling around the country to investigate and record sites of collapsed lottery-funded millennium projects, ghost-milk architecture. Many of these GP disasters had been wiped from the files. They never happened. The New Labour era was about a remorseless push towards a horizon that must, of necessity, remain out of reach: the next big idea. And about the mistakes of the past, best handled with a blanket apology delivered by a low-ranking minister, soon to be rewarded with a joke peerage. I would also make it my business to interview surviving poets, not as unacknowledged legislators, but as witnesses. Witnesses to their own dissolution. The ones in remote Welsh cottages. In flats on the south coast. In service stations perched on windswept northern hills. It was either that, a journey from which I would never come back, or China. The six orbital motorways of Beijing.

Mid-air people come in all shapes and sizes. The Beijing Olympic movie, regiments of perfectly synchronized, colour-coordinated figures, swaying and rippling in a stadium vaster than the desert which surrounds it, was world-changing. The breathtaking ballet of individualism disciplined in the common cause had been in rehearsal for a thousand years. Access to untapped wealth, a limitless labour force, all that
geography
, was overwhelmingly attractive. Businessmen, advisers, curators: they twitched to the poetry of the masses. They orgasmed appreciation. Like Steve Dilworth, they kept journals: in the form of digital snapshots, vacant blogs. Academics were drawn by the romance of Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound. Translations of classical Chinese poets at the dawn of the modernist era, a scouring of our flaccid English lyric. They honoured William Empson, who was suddenly back in fashion, for his eccentric tenure as a teacher in China and Japan. The oriental gig was much more attractive than a duty visit to some vodka binge in Moscow: tractor factory, opera, state museum.

The significant landfall, for me, was the manifestation of J. H. Prynne on the ‘banks of the Imperial canal in the eastern city of Suzhou, during the summer of 1991’. A fruitful contact was established between the most accomplished and formidable poet/teacher of these islands and a collective of local experimentalists. In an Afterword to a gathering by this Chinese Language-Poetry Group, Prynne wrote: ‘The exotic remoteness of that location at once bids to compose an allegory of displacement, which in turn demands a fully prepared resistance.’ The liquid haze of a canalside watercolour is drafted into Prynne’s analysis of the problems faced by unsponsored poets who have found a legitimate dynamic in the field of difficulty. In being where they are: with no compulsion to decamp. Both sides of this poetic collaboration are engaged but properly wary: the setting persuades them to strike out, with reckless commitment, in ‘the great aquarium of language’. A conference is convened at Pearl River. In June 2005 a select band of English poets accompany Prynne on his return flight to China. Their intention? ‘To make forded crossings from English into Chinese and from Chinese across into English.’ There is a language of the world made from ‘wit, scepticism and cantilevered invention’. And now, suddenly, everything is in flow; currents are powerful, we lose our footing and look to be swept away.

It was the influence of this fable, revived symbols in a traditional landscape, that prepared me for the discovery of an expelled Chinese poet who was about to publish a book set on my own doorstep. Bloodaxe announced:
Lee Valley Poems
by Yang Lian. I loved the idea of this new angle of approach, even before I chased down the proof sheets. And, eventually, the book itself. A slender thing with reeds in mist.

‘There is no international, only different locals,’ says the poet. Now I would have to find him and learn how such a project had come about. Without admitting it, I was searching for a withdrawal strategy. Somebody capable of remaking the Olympic Park without the burden of prejudice and bitter resentment. A neon moon in the yellow river.

Matías Serra Bradford arrived from Buenos Aires to deliver a lecture on Borges and Cortázar, a state-funded and well-attended event. He told me that Borges, in his final period, welcomed visits. The eyes were gone, but he was listed in the directory. Accessible to anyone who picked up the phone. He talked in a whisper of the London that never was: of Stevenson, Arthur Machen and M. P. Shiel. Like many Anglophile Argentines, the old man read more widely and eccentrically than our local critics, who seem to prefer pastiche to the real thing. He made better use of that reading too, understanding essence but forging it into something new and strange. A genial Minotaur in a mildewed labyrinth.

If poets were the hidden arbitrators, Matías was a conduit, a cut-out man, brokering exchanges between cultures and continents. He published, in an English-language newspaper in Buenos Aires, substantial essays on figures who barely registered in their own country. He might discuss Patrick Hamilton alongside David Gascoyne and Julian Maclaren-Ross. He edited an anthology,
La Isla Tuerta: 49 poetas británicos (1946–2006)
, gathering up a secret history that ran from William Empson, W. S. Graham, Nicholas Moore, by way of Prynne, Raworth, Douglas Oliver, to Bill Griffiths, Brian Catling and Barry MacSweeney. Facing texts, English/Spanish: Matías made the translations. 511 pp. Stiff buff self-wrappers. A quiet brick to hide among the stacks of smart-academic or dust-bunker bookshops across Europe. One of those objects, I imagine, to be adapted by spies for code systems. No innocent civilians would be plucking this one from the pine shelves.

The questing catholicism of Bradford’s reading was demonstrated when he alerted me to an account of the curious passion Arthur Waley developed for the Lea Valley. The distinguished Sinologist, collector and translator, liked nothing more than taking a skiff on the murky and polluted Hackney river. Hubert, Waley’s brother, described Arthur, head in clouds, ignoring the floating dogs, drowned cats, fizzing scum from factory pipes, the sewage outflow. What he admired was: ‘The abrupt way London ended there.’ The River Lea was more than a border, more than a link, carrying walkers or rowers out into the Thames, back into rural Hertfordshire. With its reed beds, marshes, herons, kingfishers, wooded horizons, huge skies, the Lea was a crude but haunting translation of a classical Chinese landscape. Enough perhaps to let Yang Lian find what he was tracking down, in his exile, his estrangement: a clean page for the word-shapes he wanted to inscribe. ‘Water tells nothing,’ he wrote. ‘I hear the boats in my body.’

Stamford Hill in the rain. Mushroom-men command the pavement. See-through prophylactics over the black trilbies of Orthodox Jews. Long black coats scurrying, with purpose, ballasted by plastic-protected bags, large enough to be constantly shifted from hand to hand. Wigged women and their captive children. Never the two together, the men and the women. Young males dressed old, burdened or given status by their uniform of difference. Is there some inherited ocular weakness? They don’t see outsiders, invaders; they walk right through, push us aside. Time is a value. There are no wanderers, no open agendas. I have witnessed the youths, coats off, scampering in Springfield Park on Sunday mornings, chasing footballs, but I’ve never seen an Orthodox man rambling up the Lea, sprawled on a bench staring at the water. ‘A bench,’ Yang Lian says, ‘sinks deep into its own nature.’

The Chinese poet, now living on the crest of the hill, above Abney Park Cemetery, beyond the Morrisons superstore, was born in Switzerland in 1955. He spent his childhood in Beijing. In the 1970s, along with so many others of the academic and diplomatic classes, he was sent into the countryside. His family were put to work on an agricultural commune. He remembers writing his first poem, after the death of his mother, by the soft light of a paraffin lamp. When he came back, years later, to revisit the village, it had been wiped out by a new pre-Olympic motorway.

Back in the city, Lian joined the group of poets associated with the literary magazine
Jintian.
His poem ‘Norlang’ was criticized by government agencies operating an ‘Anti-Spiritual Pollution’ programme. After the Tiananmen protests and the savage state response, he chose to become a poet in exile, settling in London in 1997.

I watched Lian perform, giving interviews at conferences and literary festivals in Germany: he was intense, voluble, committed to his perceived destiny. Which he laid out in what New Labour would call a mission statement: ‘Give me a single breath and I will grow roots, penetrate the soil, probe shingle and magma, and hear the sea through every artery and vein of groundwater, sharing the voyage of every navigator since the dawn of time.’

No modesty, false or otherwise, flouted here. Yang Lian was unashamed of his calling and his lineage. He saw the V of wild ducks in flight, crossing his Stamford Hill window, and took them for a welcome sign, a letter in his personal alphabet. He remained in one place long enough to number the last apples on a neighbour’s tree. He spoke of a process of self-excavation, worrying at the water margin he discovered on his doorstep, the deep metaphor that was Springfield Park. He relished the silence of this tributary street, its dark-coated ghosts like confirming elders of a previous existence in another country.

I was a few minutes early and I walked down towards the railway embankment at the end of the street. Notices boasted of how random plantings, trackside weeds and wild flowers, tough black poplars, were now a protected nature reserve. I remembered Matías Bradford’s grandfather, a London boy from Croydon: how, aged fourteen, he had emigrated to Argentina, to work on the railway. And never returned. His fluency in Spanish, after sixty years, was modest. But he endured, thrived.

Stoke Newington has a way of absorbing exoticism, giving shelter, without fuss, to writers such as Joseph Conrad and Yang Lian. Toleration without celebration: the Chinese poet, with his spacious flat, his scrolls and bowls, books and bleached bird skulls, passed unnoticed. With his wife, Yo Yo, he operated a literary website: the ‘snow-white’ skeleton of a small bird was their icon. This fetish, retrieved from the marshes, reminded me of Steve Dilworth and the hierarchies of dead things waiting for his intricate caskets. Nature-sculptures found, not made. Made to be found, then hidden. Antidotes to the inflationary tendencies of Westfield’s public art, the blustering towers of Stratford. The compulsion to force the crowd to look up and ignore the ground beneath their feet. The delicate snail-shells on which they are about to trample.

Yo Yo poured the tea. Her husband, in the push of numerous projects, the fever of publication, apologized for the curb he would have to put on our conversation. Discreetly, he watched the clock. He was discomfited by the fact that he had been too preoccupied, that morning, to wash. His hair was long, his eyes hot. He was fit for purpose and pumped to expound a story made from fixed elements, around which he circled, again and again. Taking breath, punctuating the monologue with excited emphasis, he struggled to bring a sentence to resolution. It wasn’t, in truth, a conversation at all: an audience with a privileged person. A poet. I placed the recorder on the table and off he went.