Sinclair, Iain
SINCLAIR, Iain
Nationality: British. Born: Cardiff, 11 June 1943. Education: Cheltenham College, 1956–61; London School of Film Technique; Trinity College, Dublin; Courtauld Institute, London. Family: Married Mary Annabel Rose Hadman in 1967; two daughters and one son. Career: Former poetry consultant, Paladin Publishers, London. Since 1979 book dealer in London. Agent: John Parker, MBA Literary Agents Ltd., 45 Fitzroy Street, London W1P SHR. Address: 28 Albion Drive. London E8 4ET, England.
Publications
Poetry
Back Garden Poems. London, Albion Village Press, 1970.
Muscat's Würm. London, Albion Village Press, 1972.
The Birth Rug. London, Albion Village Press, 1973.
Lud Heat. London, Albion Village Press, 1975.
Brown Clouds. Newcastle upon Tyne, Pig Press, 1977.
The Penances. London, Many Press, 1977.
Suicide Bridge. London, Albion Village Press, 1979.
Fluxions. London, Albion Drive, 1983.
Flesh Eggs and Scalp Metal. London, Hoarse Commerce, 1983.
Autistic Poses. London, Hoarse Commerce, 1985.
Significant Wreckage. Child Okeford, Dorset, Words, 1988.
Flesh Eggs and Scalp Metal: Selected Poems 1970–1987. London, Paladin, 1989.
Jack Elam's Other Eye. London, Hoarse Commerce, 1991.
The Ebbing of the Kraft. Cambridge, Equipage, 1997.
Plays
An Explanation, with Christopher Bamford (produced Dublin, 1963).
Cords, with Christopher Bamford (produced Dublin, 1964).
Novels
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. Uppingham, Goldmark, 1987.
Downriver (or, The Vessels of Wrath). London, Paladin, 1991.
Radon Daughters. London, Jonathan Cape, 1994.
Slow Chocolate Autopsy, with Dave McKean. London, Phoenix House, 1997.
Other
The Kodak Mantra Diaries: Allen Ginsberg in London. London, Albion Village Press, 1971.
Lights Out for the Territory. London, Granta, 1997.
Crash. London, BFI Publishing, 1999.
Liquid City, with Marc Atkins. London, Reaktion, 1999.
Dark Lanthorns. Uppingham, Goldmark, 1999.
Rodinsky's Room, with Rachel Lichtenstein. London, Granta, 1999.
Sorry Meniscus: Excursions to the Millennium Dome. London, Pro-file, 1999.
Editor, The Conductors of Chaos: Anthology. London, Picador, 1996.
Editor, with Douglas Oliver and Denise Riley, Penguin Modern Poets 10. London, Penguin, 1996.
*Critical Study: "A Cartography of Absence: The Work of Iain Sinclair" by Simon Perril, in Comparative Criticism, 19, 1997.
* * *With its mixture of the esoteric and the earthy and its combination of poetic and prose forms, which give his work its unique range of tones and textures, Iain Sinclair had finally by the 1990s become almost a cult figure, proving that a poet from the underground could make it to the surface.
Sinclair's roots as a writer belong in the late 1960s inheritance from American beat and Black Mountain lyricism, but he was not well known in the alternative British poetries of the time. Perhaps this was because his early occupation was as a documentary filmmaker, a point worth noting since precise perception and the ability to "frame" significant slices of life have fed the realist side of his writing, which provides interesting contrasts with the use of arcane knowledge and free prosodic forms derived from Charles Olson. His first substantial book was the prose log of the making, in 1968, of an Allen Ginsberg documentary and was published by his own Albion Village Press as The Kodak Mantra Diaries. Along with stills and transcripts, this not altogether reverent account is still a valuable source of information about Ginsberg and about both the official and unofficial faces of late 1960s radicalism, the backdrop for Sinclair's writing. The exercise was valuable for Sinclair, who honed his prose writing to a style similar to that of the so-called new journalism, which adapted fictional pace and tension to reportage. It also established Sinclair as a maker of books.
Sinclair's major trilogy (for a number of years it looked as if the third might never appear) consists of the books Lud Heat (1975), Suicide Bridge (1979), and White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987). Lud Heat 's central thesis is that Hawksmoor's London churches emanate psychic energies that affect the population. (Peter Ackroyd borrowed this for his novel Hawksmoor, for which he is satirized in Sinclair's later work.) The work charts his own mundane life, as a council grass cutter working near the churches, in diary form. He bears witness to the films of Stan Brakage and the homicidally obsessed sculpture of his friend and poet B. Catling. Sinclair dramatizes himself as cosmic victim when apparently random events emerge as patterned and preordained. Essays on ritual murder sites and on the churches provide the patterning.
In Suicide Bridge the focus becomes more mythic, and the verse is more confidently handled as narrative. Sinclair cleverly takes Blake's sons of Albion from the prophetic books and replicates Blake's modeling of them upon real characters. Thus, Blake's Hand and Hyle—the Hunt brothers and Hayley—are refigured as modern embodiments of instinctive East London evil, the Kray Twins. This imposition of "myth" carries with it a danger that Sinclair recognizes in his introductory essay: behind his identification of an ancient place and a particular named person could be the modern energy of fascism. On the other hand, another long essay, "The Horse. The Man. The Talking Head," attempts to chart both occult forces and contemporary conspiracy theories (the focus is on the strange paranoid existence of Howard Hughes) and to align the two, so that by the end America's White House-underworld-CIA-big business-showbiz nexus is figured as literally demonic. Indeed, the first of the sons to die, Kotope, is a capitalist with underworld connections. His is the paranoia of bullet-proof Rolls Royce windshields, traveling through London in a vain pursuit of an occult grail. "The Manner of His Dying" is pastiche William Burroughs: "Six Arabs on the Doorstep" mow him down and then dissolve into shrubbery. But death, as for many of the murder victims, fulfills him. He becomes the place and "erects one final, animal, vision of the city, / … and is gone."
These two handsomely produced Albion Village books became, along with Allen Fisher's extensive Place project, models for a notational obsession with place and topology in some radical poetry of the 1970s, but they did not receive much contemporary recognition, although Sinclair was anthologized in The New British Poetry (1988). Sinclair's work was also taken up by the so-called Cambridge school of poetry—despite the fact that one of its practitioners is satirized in Suicide Bridge as Skofeld—and his work was again later anthologized in A Various Art (1987), where he oddly shares space and apparent allegiances with poets like J.H. Prynne. Between Suicide Bridge and these anthologies Sinclair published very little and was even rumored to have given up writing.
Working as a bookseller and perhaps seeing Ackroyd's borrowings of his work as symptomatic of the parasitism of the literary world, Sinclair eventually turned to fiction, in turn "borrowing" Ackroyd's device in Hawksmoor of presenting a double narrative—contemporary set against historical. The earlier books had been obsessed with murder and with the still unsolved mystery of the East End Ripper murders of the 1880s. Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution was a timely piece of journalistic detective work, and it is not surprising that its theory that a vast conspiracy, involving both Walter Sickert and Queen Victoria's physician, Sir William Gull, was responsible for the murders was assimilated into Sinclair's novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. A narrative based on the life of Gull and other Victorians ("their behaviour is dictated by sources other than historical record," a note tells us) contrasts with the surprisingly seedy world of contemporary bookselling and the obsession of a character called "the author" with solving the murders. The sole runner-up for the Guardian fiction prize of 1987, the novel is too esoteric and allusive to be treated singularly and needs to be seen as the fictional conclusion to the notational Lud Heat and the mythic Suicide Bridge, to which it presents an interesting formal variation. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive how a writer who really does believe that words are magic would have much patience with the kind of textual unities that contemporary fiction favors any more than his poetry has commerce with the empirical and rational lyricism of the dominant orthodoxy of British verse.
This highlights the essential difficulty for a reader who does not share a belief in what Sinclair calls the "complex and secretlyworked system of parallels, analogues and models." Despite Sinclair's occasional skepticism toward his own pattern making, does the reader merely accept this occult knowledge and learning as some readers of Yeats accommodate A Vision, as a convenient superstructure for fictive elaboration? To do so is to take Sinclair's work less than seriously.
The success of the novel led Paladin to issue a selected poems, Flesh Eggs and Scalp Metal, and Penguin to feature him in its Modern Poets series. These are valuable for collecting his short later poems, notable for their terse "street detail" (to use the title of one) of East End lowlife. The poems seem occasional, as though his greatest energies are now reserved for fiction, including a great ragbag of London, Downriver. Nonetheless, his work as poetry consultant at Paladin and as editor of The Conductors of Chaos (1996) attempted to gain the kind of visibility that he now enjoys for other writers of the alternative British poetries, drawing on his own association with the Cambridge school and upon Catling's involvement in the vibrant performance writing scene.
Sinclair has increasingly not operated as a poet. He can be observed in the British media talking about Cronenberg's Crash, on which he has written a critical work, or about the beauty of the automobile, revealed by his own circumnavigation of London's orbital motorway. Perhaps this only brings him back to the cultural arena of The Kodak Mantra Diaries. In any case, his poetry has always included that which is not poetry.
—Robert Sheppard