“Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer” – William Burroughs

In the locked black cabinet of my secret library lie many books (it’s quite a large cabinet): The Story of O in its original Olympia Press edition, Aleister Crowley’s Scented Garden of Abdullah and White Stains, Justine and Juliette, Kraft-Ebbing’s casebooks, Wanda von Sacher-Masoch’s diaries… only one contemporary novelist makes the cut, holds such esteemed company, and that is Dennis Cooper.

The George Miles cycle consists of five novels Closer (1989), Frisk (1992), Try (1994), Guide (1997) and Period (2000). George Miles was the name of a schoolfriend of Cooper’s growing up in sixties California, but in the books he is presented as a totemic figure, the form around which the other characters’ desires, erotic and frequently violent, coalesce. The novels frequently delve into the consequences of desire, the horrors perpetrated in the name of love, the responsibility of the author for his creation, and the difficulty of representing fantasy lives authentically on the page. In 2004, Cooper published Wrong, a collection of short stories centred on a homosexual rapist and murderer. Chirpy stuff.

These novels belong in the Black Cabinet because, like de Sade, they both attract and repel, they excite while gnawing at the blackest parts of human psyches, assault the edifice of our taboos until nothing remains, until we are purged of that which disgusts us about ourselves. Cooper himself has likened the books to a dismemberment, each new atrocity revealing more about the state of the body. Cooper is neither compromising not apologetic: we enter his world with our eyes open, and we must endure to be shrived.

The Sade link is particularly clear at the moment: Cooper is in France, visiting one of de Sade’s castles and seeing one of his own plays produced at Avignon (the festival itself is currently the subject of some debate – L’Humanité complained about “a triumphant sense of masturbatory autism”). You can read all about it at his blog, a refreshingly unauthorial endeavour, mixing highbrow literary criticism with geronto/paedo porn and bondage imagery. We would expect nothing less.

A Humument is an ongoing work by British artist Tom Phillips. Begun in the 1960s, it was privately published by the Tetrad Press in 1970, and was subsequently picked up by Thames & Hudson in 1980, since when it has become a bit of an art cult.

A Humument is a ‘treated Victorian novel’. For forty years, Phillips has been sketching, painting, altering, slicing and dicing, page by page, W.H.Mallock’s A Human Document, a fairly uninspiring – but textually rich – novel published in 1892, which he found in a second hand bookshop in London.

The results are a series of poems and micro-narratives, startlingly evocative, often moving and frequently hilarious. They can be profound – “logical. maintain this – that man is only human because of his longing this – that life has lost all its hopes, and death none of its” (1970 ed., p. 25) – or frankly sexual, as above. They can be long or extremely brief – one of my favourite pages was created by blocking out all words except “the theatre: never again”, leaving only the full stops, which, ringed, become a hundred staring eyes.

While the style of the illustrations varies, a continuous voice soon arises from the text. The best example of this is the ongoing story of semi-hero Toge, a shaky pink figure who moves through the book, his tale spelt out in fits and starts: “only toge, alone. loneliness is. throb of my watch, long. shrivelled aspiration. I have something left. two things left. first- my viola. the other thing- your image. I cannot get rid of it” (1970 ed., p. 305).

Thames and Hudson recently published the fourth edition of the book. The artist’s stated goal is to gradually update and rework pages until the work has entirely replaced itself. This edition marks a particular watershed, as all the pages which could host a ‘toge’ story (i.e. all the pages which contain the word ‘together’, toge’s only possible source) have done so, and it remains only for his story to fade from the work.

You can view the original 1970 edition, and read more about the work, here, and I can’t recommend the print edition highly enough. And if you find an edition of A Human Document in some dusty bookshop, I suggest you send it to Tom. He needs more copies.

There’s also a thematic link with Zak Smith’s illustrations for every page of Gravity’s Rainbow, a similarly tortuous and enlightening undertaking.

Along with quite a few other people, but rather more peacefully than some, Ed McBain, king of the police procedural novel, died last Thursday, after selling nigh on 100 million books in his lifetime.

Evan Hunter, McBain’s real name, had his first success in 1954 with Blackboard Jungle. This novel, which was turned into the successful movie with Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier, is essentially a youth exploitation tale and drawn from his own experiences of teaching in the inner cities. As such it bears many of the hallmarks of his later work as Ed McBain: hard-boiled stories with a strong but always compassionate moral core.

Less famously, but perhaps even more significantly, he also wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcocks’ The Birds, which he and Hitch adapted from the Daphne du Maurier story.

It is as Ed McBain, however, that he will be remembered, and particularly for the 55 87th Precinct novels, the last of which is due in September. McBain invented the police procedural genre, which differed from the traditional American gumshoe or British detective novels in their recognition of whole teams of good (and occasionally bad) officers fighting the good fight (or otherwise, &c). He wasn’t much of a fan of the title himself: “Not procedurals,” a character in Romance (1995) complains when the label is applied to him. “Never procedurals. And not mysteries, either. They were simply novels about cops. The men and women in blue and in mufti, their wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, lovers, children, their head colds, stomachaches, menstrual cycles. Novels.”

And it’s true: I dare anyone to pick up a McBain and not be lost after a few pages. They rattle by, full of genre staples: tough men, beautiful women, vicious weapons, but absolutely styled and compelling.

In print for over forty years, the McBain novels are a paperback hunter’s particular pleasure, as they’ve been out under a hundred imprints and a thousand covers over the decades. It is rare to find a bookshop or stall that lacks a few suitably yellowed McBains, and as they’re rarely more than a quid and frequently pocket-sized, they are an essential if nothing else catches the eye.

In fact, it’s become kind of a law. All lonely McBain’s will find a home with me. One down, a couple of hundred to go. Go pick one up yourself.

I came late to David Foster Wallace, missing out on The Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair (and too far along to go back for them now), but I snapped up Infinite Jest when I saw it, weighty and contemporary: ‘Ooh, A Challenge,’ I thought. And I wasn’t wrong. I took it into my English A-Level class when my teacher asked us to bring in examples of “bad” writing – not because it was bad, but because it was different and I wanted to see the reaction. I also took in a Clive Cussler novel, Aztec Gold, which was genuinely shit (but still great. Or not. I’m torn). The example section I gave was a single sentence, at least four pages long, which contained repeated (and nested) ellipses, inexplicable hyphenations, bits of french and more acronyms than the Honours List*. But it was funny. Noone else got it.

Then there is A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a collection of journalism that continues in the same vein of eminently readable insanity, and is just plain hilarious. Anyone who doesn’t laugh out loud reading DFW’s meditation on hotel pillow mints, and how the hell they get there when you never leave your room, has no funny bone.

The real kicker for me, as a maths geek as much as a lit geek, is Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. Imagine a uni-level maths textbook written by Pynchon or Joyce, and, as ever, acronymised to hell. It’s fantastic, and it really, really isn’t that difficult to read. Like many, many other books, it’s not “too long”, it’s not “too clever”, it’s not “too complicated”, it’s just quite hard work, and all the better for it.

DFW gets this a lot, the accusation that he’s overcomplicating things, that he’s being wordy, showoffy. Well, what is writing for? Why do we read? I have a kind of transcendental/MDMA theory of reading, that is probably a result of having 5-10 books on the go at any one time, that it doesn’t matter where you are in a book, what’s been happening (or what you think or don’t think has been happening) – all that matters is what’s happening right now, on the page in front of you – if it makes you feel alive, excited, intrigued, then to hell with a coherent, overarching plot. Who cares if Finnegan’s Wake is unknowable to me – my heart has shook when after 20 pages, meaning suddenly surfaces, like a whale, for a few lines – who cares what happens to the character at the end (like Slothrop, slowly melting out of sight in the last chapters of Gravity’s Rainbow) – I walked with them a few steps of the way, and I’m grateful for those steps.

Anyways, I was inspired (if that’s quite the right word) to write this by something I just read by DFW. Only a very good and clever man could get up in front of a graduation class of college students and say this:

If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Read the rest here. Seriously, go now. (Cheers, Rake.)

* oh, and the footnotes**.

** the endless footnotes

The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of Iain Sinclair. Obviously, such a discussion is central to any talk of books and London, but I’m always slightly afraid of writing about Sinclair because his star has ascended in the last couple of years and he is everywhere – Radio 4 the other day, commenting on something or other; the Guardian the next; Patti Smith’s Meltdown (which I missed. Typical).

But I don’t think we’ve really come to grips with Sinclair yet. The work that broke him into the mainstream, London Orbital, is a fantastic piece of writing, but it is assumed by many to be a piece of utter, if spirited, non-fiction, and has given Sinclair the reputation of a scholar and a man of letters, rather than the intense writer of the imagination that he is. Personally, I believe than Iain Sinclair is the best novelist currently writing in England.

I don’t know too much about Sinclair’s work with the Albion Village Press or his bookselling days, although recollections of these recur in his work, and a full bio is available here. His own poetry – particularly the wonderful Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge – foreshadows many of the obsessions of his later fiction. But it is the first set of novels, White Chappell Scarlet Tracings (1987), Downriver (1990) and Radon Daughters (1994) that marry the psychic readings of London’s streets with a narrative style that is unique in modern fiction: fragmentary, hallucinatory, unbearably modern in its full, Joycean sense. Landor’s Tower, although viewed by many – including the author – as a weaker effort, is one of the best examples of Sinclairs self-fictionalising. His doppelgangers stalk the pages (most frequently ‘Norton’) – and characters such as Dryfield, the legendary bookseller, the photographer Marc Atkins and lit-nut Stewart Home recur in fiction and non-fiction. My point about the non-fiction titles – beginning with Lights Out… but particularly Orbital – is that “Iain Sinclair” is no more the author of these books than Robinson is of Patrick Keiller’s films, to which he frequently refers. The books are fugues, visionary ecstasies, produced by exhaustion, which break down the barriers between non-fic and fiction, creating alternative structures of history and form: they end with charred notes and jumbled letters. He repeatedly stresses the inability of language to contain ideas, both individually (words) and collectively (the novel). This is radical work.

Of course, as soon as I started thinking about writing this post, I found my way to this interview at Londonist. It touches nicely on a number of the things I’ve mentioned above, as well as namechecking fellow legends Alan Moore, Michael Moorcock and the previously mentioned Stewart Home. It also includes some thoughts on the recent London Eye brouhaha, although without mentioning an interview Sinclair had with Tony White (author and Lit Ed of The Idler a few years ago where he pointed out the sheer commercial genius of British Airways selling “flights to nowhere”, and suggested that the BA gift carrier bags might be better used to deal with airsickness…

[ P.S. Comments are now ON ]

So, I just finished Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, for those who don’t know it, a psychological study of alcoholism and obsession in late 1930s Earls Court. Cheering stuff.

I think I first heard Hamilton’s name from Iain Sinclair – surprise, surprise – who flagged him up as a great forgotten London author. Ah, “forgotten” and “London” – two words to make my snobbish metropolitan heart beat faster. This alone would never be enough by itself to make me read anything – trying to keep up with Sinclair is not an advisable activity. But his name kept popping up and seems to be on a bit of a roll at the moment: back in March the NFT programmed a season of his film adaptations (David Thomson article here) and the BBC just adapted his Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky for telly (but broadcast it on BBC4, in the assumption that the proles and the tight couldn’t take it. Public service my arse). Nevertheless, he rarely appears on lists of great c.20th authors, despite J.B.Priestley’s opinion that he was “Among the uniquely individual minor novelists of our age – a master.”

A pity, because the London he evokes is at once bizarrely foreign (in a history’s-another-place kind of way) and immediately recognisable. How many of Hamilton’s own landmarks were destroyed – almost immediately after publication by bombing or by later development – is unknowable, but the texture of piss-poor, crusty fag-end London life hasn’t changed. Descriptions of pubs, their atmospheres, of drinking sessions that begin in the suburbs and soon necessitate a taxi to Soho to continue: the rhythms of the London binge are unchanged. Psychologically too it’s spot on: unrequited love for cruel, beautiful girls was a running theme of Hamilton’s life as well as his work. It also has the greatest last three lines of any book I’ve every read; a final-para punchline that you have to read the whole book to get, self-deprecating yet absolutely, ruthlessly direct.

At some point, I’ll take my copy down to Earl’s Court and find some of his pubs. Mm, lovely pubs.