Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (43 page)

Rain slashing down, we slithered through a channel of blue-grey mud, before crossing dunes held together with coarse grass, and achieving firm ground. Our fellow pilgrims, seeking release, rushed into private woodland to piss against innocent trees.

An English train. On a glorious summer morning. I am struggling to fix the precise point at which we pass over or under the M25, London’s collar: without success. The railway system lays down its metal rails, ladders for commuters, with no reference to the self-consuming serpent of the orbital motorway. Rivers and railways were always my favourite transport corridors. Time to absorb the landscape; to sit, barely registering geological shifts, dipping into a book, deprogramming a clotted backlog.

I like the way the steady-stare film-maker Patrick Keiller speaks of using train-time. He is a man, clearly, who abhors waste; a hoarder of old newspapers, careful with his finances, well aware that the next gig might be the last. Keiller used trains like an editing suite: he auditioned unregistered places. Even as he tortured himself with the knowledge that he was never going to use a single shot taken from a moving carriage, not crisp enough. The fields refused to stay still. Cattle lurched. Light values changed. The windows were greasy.

In the first phase of his career, when Patrick worked, as I did, as a part-time lecturer in Walthamstow, he explored out-of-the-way locales, searching for compositions suitable for a catalogue of surrealist architecture. The unfathomable mess of London, which might, if he had to evaluate it, drive him mad, was brought to book: a sewage cathedral alongside muddy Channalsea Creek in the Lower Lea Valley, a coal hopper in Nine Elms Lane, a concrete factory in Gravesend. Somewhere in the background of all these ghosted structures was a railway.

Keiller called his chosen sites ‘found’ architecture. A favoured technique involved spotting possibles from a train window, then making an expedition, by bicycle, to bag the view. Like sticking a flag on the moon. Accidents of transit, undescribed, went into the captured photograph; a private archive that would, eventually, transform itself into a series of groundbreaking films. What Keiller didn’t appreciate, at the start, was that he was being shadowed by future phantoms: the rasping ironies of Paul Schofield, who would become his fictional avatar, delivering scripted monologues; and the mysterious Robinson, a being brought into existence as a cultural ‘beard’, to take on adventures the film-maker was too fastidious to experience at first hand.

In an essay called ‘Imaging’, Keiller describes how he set out to look for a place he had seen a few days earlier from a train window. ‘It was a north-facing hillside of allotments behind the corner of two streets of suburban houses, beyond the railway’s bridge above the North Circular Road.’ Mounted on his bicycle, disorientated, a little puffed, he finds something else: a metal footbridge. A bridge that dictates its own terms. ‘Its long, narrow walkway resembled the linearity of a film; its parapets framed the view in a ratio similar to the 4 x 3 of the camera, and its elaborate articulation, with several flights of steps, half-landings and changes of direction, offered a structure for a moving-camera choreography which might include panoramas.’ The bridge, waiting all this time for an unsuspecting interpreter, was revealed to the world as the setting for two Keiller films: the launch of a new career. The whole curious process – train, bicycle, camera – drew the architectural photographer into a situation that left him no choice but to ventriloquize a previously mute element of the city. Keiller was the thing found, not Stonebridge Park.

My ride to Berkhamsted, on this blameless May morning, pushed me to read the train window as a frame for the contemplation of an exceptional group of British film-essayists. Chris Petit, of late, had been posting, on his website, fragments from his travels. He was one of those trapped by the Icelandic dust cloud in a hotel that suddenly takes on another identity, something more than a stopover. He was attending a film festival in Buenos Aires, a city which he found rather dull, architecturally, but blessed with cheap taxis. To escape, he took a boat to Montevideo, a flight to Madrid, another flight to Rome, a train to Milan. The train windows were misted, the landscape enervated and dim: he let his new pocket Mino-HD Flip camera run, uninterrupted, like the birth of cinema, and sent the result to his friends in lieu of a Ballardian postcard. ‘Lesson learnt,’ he said. ‘If you cut out the sightseeing, how pleasant the train can be.’

My less exotic voyage into comfortable Hertfordshire was a return to the grand-project book, and to Ballard, after a number of necessary digressions, European trips, expeditions to Sheffield, Lincoln, Bristol, Edinburgh. Only the day before, I had completed, with another itinerant and restless film-maker, the hyperkinetic Andrew Kötting, the reconnaissance for a potential swan voyage, by pedalo, from the south coast to the Olympic Park. When I discussed my notion of carrying a whalebone box, by water, using a kayak like the one with which I had penetrated the Olympic backrivers, Kötting offered himself as a companion, but suggested at once an interesting variant: that we liberate a swan pedalo from the Hastings pleasure park and put to sea, around the coast to Rye. Then meander through military canals, rivers, ponds and gravel pits, to the Thames. If we ran out of water, we would drag the beast ashore, in the spirit of Werner Herzog, and manhandle it to the next launching place. Irresistible. My only stipulation was that the journey be completed before the opening ceremony for the 2012 Games. Another sweat-drenched exorcism. Another project that, by its mission statement, disqualified itself from any hope of sponsorship, even though it fulfilled all current requirements in terms of direction of travel. Towards insanity. Pure and undiluted.

Kötting hauled a plastic swan, a lure, as we walked. We were accompanied by a pair of mature students from the art college where he taught: one of them had got himself into shape for this by completing the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and the other kept a record with a pinhole camera made from a Swan Vesta matchbox. Random encounters calibrated our progress. Coming down the Swale, from Sittingbourne to Whitstable, I was pointing across to the prison complex on the Isle of Sheppey, and reminiscing about Joe Orton’s holiday stretch for defacing Islington library books, when we were joined by a bullet-headed man in a hooded Lonsdale sweatshirt carrying a tin bucket. ‘Seventeen,’ he said. ‘Seventeen poxy crabs.’ A former member of West Ham’s Inner City Firm, he had personal experience of Sheppey and the house on the hill reserved for the most violent offenders. Now an amiable manifestation of place, he was prepared to overlook Kötting’s provocative Millwall allegiance. And to demonstrate the sexing of crabs, by tearing off their legs. On a good morning, he could fill his pail with seventy or more, limbless but gender identified, bait for fishermen. By the time we reached the headland from which a ferry no longer runs to the pub where my novel
Downriver
concluded, Kötting was sharing his sandwiches with a pair of failed royal dogs, black retrievers who didn’t retrieve. Windsor Castle passed them on, so the well-bred lady explained, through contacts in hunting circles.

The walk becomes a choir of eccentric soloists, the electively unnoticed waiting to tell their tale. Around the Olympic Park, the air was so heady that men with dusty mouths were going down like ninepins. A cheery soul on a spinster’s bicycle scavenged the verges, the tangled thickets around the rat traps and mesh fences; with a mechanical hand of his own devising, he grabbed blue cans flung out of passing white vans, or dumped by migrating drinking schools. He filled sacks for charity, covering many miles a day in a forlorn circuit of the razor-wire perimeter.

Beside the A11, approaching Stratford, a man collapsed, inches from the traffic. He sprawled full-length at the roadside, prodded by an ambulance team eager to tidy him away: a premature celebrant, flag of St George, hammered into a reeking coma in expectation of World Cup triumphs indefinitely postponed in South Africa. The proprietor of the sole-surviving business, a barber called Giuseppe, twenty years in the game, was surrounded by red cones and chicken wire and overweening future developments. He gripped a Stanley knife and waited for the first council official to offer him compensation. In his window was a black-and-white photograph of a sharp-suited man with a Mexican moustache, and attitude, like a Liverpool footballer from the 1980s.

I had an appointment with the painter Brigid Marlin, the one who produced the Delvaux copies for Ballard. Brigid had written to me, after reading an account I’d published of my expedition to Old Charlton Road in Shepperton. In compensation for taking on the onerous task of reproducing works for which she had no particular affection, she compelled the reluctant novelist to pose for a portrait. ‘Painting J. G. Ballard was an unusual experience,’ she told me. ‘He was a very obstreperous model. He wanted to take control all the time.’

So many conflicting rumours were circulating, in the months after the writer’s death, that I wanted to listen to an eyewitness account of the intimate process of sitting for a portrait. It was difficult to avoid contributing to the prevailing mythology: the sanctification of the Shepperton anchorite. Ballard the good father. The spurner of metropolitan flimflam. Ballard the prophet and visionary, first man of the motorway corridor. Post-mortem sentiment congeals the legend: before the inevitable reaction, the teasing out of the flaws that make us human. The way he had, over almost half a century, manipulated autobiographical routines was exemplary: until he arrived at the purest of forms, the shifting of significant detail, for that last generous book,
Miracles of Life
, when all outstanding dues were paid.

On the Berkhamsted train, I flicked through the catalogue Brigid Marlin had sent me. I could see why Ballard thought of her as a surrealist, there was that clarity of light he admired, frozen figures traumatized against empty landscapes, hair floating upwards like smoke. The technique was about precision, egg tempera suspended between layers of oil: the hyper-unreality of certain kinds of spiritual representation, like the suffering saints and Tibetan cosmologies of Glastonbury Tarot cards and New Age posters. The intention, as I understood it, was far removed from the extravagant and virtuoso onanism of Dali. But the big shock, coming off the Kötting experience, was the discovery of Marlin’s repeated swan motifs; the rape of Leda was an obsessive aspect of the oeuvre. Arching nudes, shaven-headed or metamorphosing into slender irises, were caught up by the feathered assault, the seizure.

One painting,
The Rod
, became Ballard’s touchstone. He wrote Marlin what he described as ‘the only fan letter’ he had ever sent to a painter, after seeing a reproduction in a magazine. His fancy fed on reproductions, postcards, portable versions of masterworks with the blight of originality filtered out. The industrial processes of mass-marketing make an image more desirable, more used, less tainted by sanctimonious and elitist notions of the unique moment, the burden of ownership. An inaccurate copy was a neutered multiple to be cut out, as required, stuck on a wall, pasted into a scrapbook collage. Taken apart and reassembled as part of a pulp-magazine fiction. Ballard was claustrophobic about art events, openings: he made an exception for Brigid Marlin.

It’s easy to see the appeal of this Kuwait painting from 1973,
The Rod.
The one that looks as if it could very easily have been commissioned for the dustwrapper of Ballard’s
Vermilion Sands
, a collection of interlinked tales published in the same year. Marlin’s painting and the Ballard jacket designed by Brian Knight are interchangeable. Insect-eyed women with flowing hair or complicated headdresses. Sand. Ruins. The same wind-sculpted towers of rock, the Monument Valley molars.
The Rod
, in its cinemascope format, is an authentic Ballard inscape produced by an artist who had never opened any of his books. Encouraged by a friend with a taste for genre fiction, Marlin put her painting into a competition forsf-inspired work: and took first prize.

There is a fever, an erotic imperative, in Ballard’s pursuit. He almost believes – he has earned the right – that he can
live
in the work, move through the screen of Marlin’s meticulously constructed layers of glaze into the ground of her imagination. He claims
droit de seigneur
over these preternaturally still women who are naked, draped in transparent webs, posed in woodland, beside lakes, in front of vistas of cracked earth. They are threatened by mechanized swans, beaked ravens, burning oil wells, stalled motorways, newspaper headlines. He recognizes the figure projected into
Vermilion Sands
, his ‘Prima Belladonna’, in the Marlin portfolio. And he suspects that the model is Marlin herself: the artist and her mirror, a metaphor for the lost Delvaux painting he wants her to recreate. So that it can sit beside the desk where he writes, every day. A permanent back projection into which he will drift and dream.

‘I assumed,’ he wrote in his introduction to the Marlin catalogue, ‘that the wistful and even ethereal figure who appeared in many of the paintings was a self-portrait of the artist. In fact, I was quite wrong.’

This conjunction, painter and writer coming together in a studio, beyond the outer rim of London, to conjure up a vanished Delvaux, is a potential Henry James novella, of mutual misunderstanding, oblique dialogues on the nature of art and portraiture: who will write this other into existence? And which painting, Marlin’s transcription of the reluctant Ballard or her revised Delvaux, is the truer mapping of the psychopathology of the Shepperton visionary?

Berkhamsted, as you come out of the station, is a
Midsomer Murders
location, without the cast, the troubled vicars, the industrialists laying out golf clubs with which they will, before the first set of adverts, be beaten to a pulp. They say the franchise plays well in France: England as it ought to be, stereotypical, monocultural, with rigid social hierarchies. I’m a little early for my appointment. I circle around the fenced-off castle ruins and up the hill. Footpaths splay out in every direction, protected by barbed wire:
PLEASE DO NOT CLIMB OVER THIS FENCE
. Bushes dressed with hawthorn blossom mark the borders of close-cropped fields that drop away towards a line of low hills. Llamas munch in the company of shade-seeking donkeys.