In the same way that Poe used his schoolmaster’s real name but changed everything else about him to suit the purposes of the story, the real Manor House School bore little resemblance to Poe’s description of it. The ancient Elizabethan labyrinthine building with gothic windows (where, even after several years, the narrator is unable to say exactly which part he sleeps in) described in William Wilson is perfectly suited to a story of doubling, repetition and reflection: and it sticks so firmly in the reader’s mind that to deny having seen it altogether would be impossible. Taking all of this into account, Perrott’s acquaintance could not have answered in any other way.
By Bridget Penney.
We were certainly not poets of the dispossessed. We strutted our Billy-the-Kid sense of cool — bombsite kids clambering out of the ruins — posing our way out of the surrounding dreariness. We were living in our own colourful movie (an earlyish Warhol flick we liked to think), which we were sure was incomparably richer, more spontaneous and far more magical than the depressing, collective black-and-white motion-less picture that the 9-5 conformists, or those that stumbled around with their booze-fuelled regrets, had to settle for.
The city’s core punishes you into diminution to the point that you crave some sort of human recognition. Urban North Stars. It can be the balding fake blond guy that works at the chemist you once – only once - went to. The girl that wears stilettos two sizes too big and walks like a five year old in her mother’s heels. The macrocephalic lady that you used to meet on a daily basis just before the abandoned gas station at Store Street, every morning, around nine twenty five; a marker of time and space (and then you stopped seeing her and time and place lost their macrocephalic marker).
Regardless of what one thinks of Saatchi, a cumulative effect of the book’s narrative is to convey the staggering amount that he has achieved, particularly in terms of the variety and number of shows and artists bought (and sold) and exhibited over the years. By 2004, he owned 2,500 artworks with a value of around £50 million. The book clearly makes the link between the ephemerality and superficiality of advertising and the same quality in much of the work Saatchi promotes, but then he admits that 90% of it will be worthless in ten years time (and it was ever thus). The incorporation of quotes from more recent interviews given by Saatchi reveals even more his maverick, independent and dissenting nature. He is paradoxically a stand-alone art establishment and at the same time highly critical of the art establishment in general, especially its “arid intellectualism”.
Stewart Home himself was fictionalised in a passage read from one of Iain Sinclair’s books and later when I asked Stewart about this he said that they had just met accidentally and Iain Sinclair had used the meeting in his book with some added colour to expand a train of thought. I began to wonder if the whole weekend was a self-referencing literary exercise and any one us could become a character in a number of different works. This was when I told Stewart Home I was superimposing grid references over the text of this weekend. Sinclair had me thinking that events could be seen through various literary prisms; as if relating a walking scene to a memorised text. It may be that as Sinclair was intimating, things have been so psychogeographically and psychopolitically circumscribed and redrawn as to be gasping for breath and existence. We have to maybe superimpose new maps.
From one art opening to the next, it is suddenly enough for us to witness an uprising for a link to appear. Directions that seemed contradictory cease to be so. Of course, it is easy to be disheartened by the recent wave of mindless looting and violence in London’s streets. But don’t you go believing, reader, that art institutions can once again retreat into the background. Comrades, let us continue on this path we have stumbled upon earlier this year. If the Ayatollah’s call to murder a novelist was a hinge moment for a previous generation, the Chinese government’s kidnapping of a visual artist is our hinge moment. Ai Weiwei’s release is merely the beginning.
As to the accusations that these rioters are ‘shitting on their own door step’, attacking their own kind, well, frankly, that’s crazy talk. These kids have nothing in common with the small business owner, for even that modest acquisition is beyond these kids. This isn’t their community, none of this belongs to them. Even on your crappy estate, with its stinking rubbish, high rents, violence and urine-soaked lifts; you’re endlessly reminded that your home isn’t yours, that you are suffered to live there and that nothing belongs to you.
Goldman has been called “a sort of Proust of the Whitechapel Road” and compared - favourably - with Dickens, Gissing and Gorky, yet his work has suffered neglect since the ’40s, even East End My Cradle. His photo in Penguin New Writing of 1940 is placed alongside those of Eliot, Auden, Isherwood, Dylan Thomas, Graham Greene and a handful of others, yet of them, his name alone is not widely recognised. Yet this is the literary company he really belongs in, though to be sure he can be discussed alongside such Jewish writers of the East End as Israel Zangwill and Simon Blumenfeld. He can, that is to say, be bracketed with ‘Jewish [or Anglo-Jewish] writers’ or with ‘working-class writers’ but his quality transcends the limitations implied by these categories.
At some point in the terminal decades of the GDR, the original and indestructible stone cladding which formed the predominant surface of the Karl-Marx-Allee had been mysteriously replaced here by a celluloid casing, as though intended as a screen for outdoor film projections, in which the film’s own celluloid had unaccountably been confounded with the surface on which it was to be projected, resulting in an ultimately awry, film-inflected urban surface.
Long after the conflict that obscured his earlier works and the post-war factionalism have dissipated, Heppenstall’s novels can be judged on their own terms. Structurally adventurous, ideologically intangible and often hilarious, Heppenstall’s earlier novels are unlike anything else in English literature. Orwell retains his literary reputation despite problematic revelations about his actions (such as his list of ‘crypto-communists’, handed to the Foreign Office in 1949) – Oneworld Classics‘ forthcoming reissue of The Blaze of Noon will hopefully build a platform for Heppenstall to be accorded the same critical even-handedness.
