LWIA 4.3: Iain Sinclair

You ever have a 1500 word section that takes you two weeks? That isn't entirely the fault of the material—I had quite a bit of travel through there, and have just been swamped in general. But gosh this was hard. Hope you enjoy. I'd promise to have the next section faster, but that just feels like cursing myself.

Indeed, Moore drew the entire idea of offering an occult history of London from the work of Iain Sinclair. This was a debt that was, rather impressively, identified by Grant Morrison several months before “What Doth the Lord Require of Thee” even saw print when, in one of their Drivel columns, they remarked upon From Hell’s “great, unacknowledged debt to the subtext and subject matter of Ian [sic] Sinclair’s books White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Lud Heat.” (Indeed, Steve Bissette once claimed that Moore’s addition of an appendix annotating his sources emerged out of his “incredulity at such a statement given the multitude of sources Alan was clearly working from for research.”[1]) This debt was indeed visible as early as “A State of Darkness,” where Gull and Hinton discuss the architecture of Nicholas Hawksmoor. But it is in “What Doth the Lord Require of Thee” that the influence fully takes center stage.

Iain Sinclair is one of the slower moving success stories in British letters. His career dates back to the 1970 self-publication of Back Garden Poems. He produced a variety of other poetry collections over the next fifteen years, most notably his 1975 Lud Heat, before pivoting to novels in 1987 with White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. At no point in these nearly twenty years, however, did he experience anything like success. This was not a surprise to him per se—he was after all self-publishing avant garde poetry with a heavy debt to William S. Burroughs. As he later put it, “I was quite happy initially doing odd jobs and writing when I wanted to, and being a book dealer,” which he did for a decade starting in the mid-70s.[2] Gradually, however, he began to acquire a critical reputation and, following the 1991 publication of Downriver, an exploration of Thatcher’s Britain beginning from his wholly unironic belief that she was “demonically possessed by the evil forces of world politics.”[3]

Sinclair is most often thought of in terms of psychogeography, a label he has in turns embraced and rejected. The word’s origins lie with the French Marxist group the Situationist International, and particularly the work of its founder Guy Debord. Beginning from the Lettrist notion of hypergraphy—an attempt to decouple language from phonemes—psychogeography emerged when the Situationists began applying the idea to architecture, understanding buildings and, subsequently, urban spaces at large not from a top down perspective of design but rather in terms of how they are experienced. As Guy Debord put it, “psychogeography sets for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographic environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” From this Debord and his comrades designed the notion of the derivé—“a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences” in which one moves through a city according not to its normal routes and geographies but along more idiosyncratic paths that cut across neighborhoods and regions and reveal the landscape’s hidden, or perhaps unconscious logics.

The concept did not so much make the jump to the UK as it began fundamentally entwined with the country. Among the founders of the Situationist International was British artist Ralph Rumney, who had the distinction of being the first of many people to be expelled from the organization—“politely, even amiably,” he was sure to note—by Guy Debord, whose ex-wife Michèle Bernstein Rumney would later marry. Rumney contributed to a 1957 psychogeographical art exhibition in Brussels under the banner of the “London Psychogeographical Committee,” although in truth he was the only member of said committee. The banner was revived, however, in 1993 by the London Psychogeographical Association, which openly admitted the previous organization’s non-existence in the course of trumpeting its resurrection.

Sinclair was involved in none of this, but quickly adopted the label as “a useful term to create a kind of brand image with.”[4] Unsurprisingly once he adopted the term his work began to shift fairly clearly towards its implications, perhaps most obviously in his unexpected 2001 hit London Orbital, which records his experiences walking the entire length of the M25 ring road around London. But these tendencies were present in his work well before 1993, and indeed his work was a major influence on the LPA. The psychogeographic approach is also clear in this, or any number of similar passages from White Chappel, Scarlet Tracings: “Southwark holds its time, with the City, with Whitechapel, with Clerkenwell, holds the memory of what it was: it is possible to walk back into the previous, as an event, still true to this moment. The Marshalsea trace, the narrative mazetrap that Dickens set, takes over, the figures of fiction outliving the ghostly impulses that started them. The past is a fiction that absorbs us. It needs no passport, turn the corner and it is with you. The things they do there are natural, you do those things. Detached from this shadow you are nothing, there is nothing. You have no other existence.”

White Chappel, Scarlet Tracings is in many ways the most obvious point of Sinclair’s influence on From Hell for the simple reason that it is in a large part about the Ripper murders. And indeed, the similarities go well beyond that. Sinclair’s use of William Gull as the Ripper can be chalked up to Stephen Knight’s common influence. But Sinclair’s tying in of Hinton’s What is the Fourth Dimension?, his repeated discussions of the “geology of time,” and his suggestion that the Ripper “made sacrifice that the new century could be born” are, as Morrison observes, all plainly influences on From Hell. But Drivel being Drivel, Morrison pushes the point further. The discussion takes place in a section labeled “plagiarism,” as one of several examples in which Morrison tries to work through the concept. They never manage a coherent notion of it, ultimately mounting a defense of it on the grounds that the idea of plagiarism rooted in “the bourgeois concept of art as a commodity which is the sole privilege of an educated cultural elite,” but for all that they try to soften the pejorative, the fact remains that they describe Moore’s work as “heavily plagiaristic.”

In the case of White Chappel, Scarlet Tracings, this is plainly nonsense. While it and From Hell work with similar ideas, they are fundamentally doing very different things. Sinclair’s book is a complex and often willfully obscurantist novel that winds the Jack the Ripper material in with a contemporary plot about rare book dealers hunting an obscure copy of Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet. Its point is, in keeping with Sinclair’s larger interests, largely about physical spaces—Jack the Ripper is used as a lens for understanding the subconscious of London’s East End. From Hell, in contrast, is a period piece primarily interested in understanding its time—less psychogeography than what one might call psychochronography, with the metaphors about history having geology and architecture serving largely to make the case that one can use the same methods to explore both.

This notion is essential to “What Doth the Lord Require of Thee,” which also highlights a different line of influence from Sinclair to Moore, namely Sinclair’s debut, Lud Heat, and particularly its first section, entitled “Nicholas Hawksmoor, His Churches.” Hawksmoor was a baroque era architect and colleague of Christopher Wren, best known for the design of a sextet of London churches, which are distinct for their novel revival of gothic architectural styles otherwise unfashionable in the period, making use of idiosyncratic shapes and sudden contrasts while constructing optical illusions that offer a misleading sense of scale. Sinclair reads into these designs a wealth of pagan and occult inspiration, theorizing that Hawksmoor worked “a code into the buildings, knowingly or unknowingly, templates of meaning, bands of continuing ritual,” and building a larger theory that the churches collectively impose an “unacknowledged magnetism and control-power, built-in code force” upon London, crafting with the help of the artist Brian Catling a map of the churches that noted how various locations like William Blake’s Lambeth home and Bethlehem Hospital (aka Bedlam) were situated upon the lines between them.

“What Doth the Lord Require of Thee” picks up directly on this work, having Gull direct his coachman Netley on a tour of Hawksmoor’s churches along with various other sites before illustrating that the locations visited form a pentagram with Saint Paul’s Cathedral at the center. This is not the same as Sinclair’s map, which doesn’t even include Saint Paul’s, but the influence is undeniable. Indeed, Moore ended up having to get in touch with Sinclair when his efforts to rework the map into the shape he wanted ran aground due to his inability to find a location on Sinclair’s map called “Lud’s Shed,” only to find out that this was an in-joke between Sinclair and Catling. Moore recovered by focusing instead on Hackney’s original name of “Hackon’s Ea,” named after a Saxon king, which allowed Moore to shoehorn in an entirely apocryphal story about the murder of the Teutonic lunar deity Mani. But the point of contact blossomed into a lifelong friendship with Sinclair, who would soon cast Moore in his 1992 TV film The Cardinal and the Corpse as a crazed book collector (wearing, comically, a Rorschach t-shirt) searching for a 16th century alchemical text that, as he repeatedly ranted, was “the key to the city.”

[1] Screenshot of a “long deleted” message board discussion posted by Ben Hansome to Twitter

[2] Mark Pilkington and Phil Baker, “City Brain,” The Fortean Times, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20080228120340/http://www.forteantimes.com/features/interviews/37/iain_sinclair.html

[3] Stuart Jeffries, “On the Road,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/apr/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview14

[4] Wil Self, “Iain Sinclair Interview,” Spoiled Ink, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20060508072216/http://www.spoiledink.com/FEATURES/author_interviews_007.php