Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (54 page)

Tex-Mex is generally the best option. The food was good, but in quantities that challenged the slender figures of my companions. They told me, proudly, that this was the place where Laura Bush had been socializing before she was done for drink-driving. Under a ceiling of silver hubcaps, portraits of lifestyle cars, an Elvis shrine, I learnt that I would be required, that afternoon, to identify a few of the more mysterious items in my rescued-landfill deposit.

Returned to the Harry Ransom Center, I picked up a notebook and flicked the pages. Dirt – processed, made safe – fell on the antiseptic surface of the desk. Clinker. Coal dust. A residue of the Lower Lea Valley. Of the Stratford railway sheds. English dirt preserved between pages of English paper: the work-diary jottings that became my vanished Chobhamjournals. I had resurrected material for
Ghost Milk
from a few photographs, reels of 8mm film, and an interview with Tom Baker. I had no use for the original, now that it had been processed through immigration. But the grit, the flakes of a place soon to be buried under the monolithic Westfield mall, that was another matter. I longed to rub the grains into my skin, to snort the essence of Chobham. The incident was such a neat conclusion, it framed a narrative. Writers are ruthless with their own lives, as well as the lives of those who surround them. Anna found these holdings disturbing, as if the story was now over. Many of the grey boxes had closing dates as well as dates of birth. When you are neatly sorted into chapters, you are sorted. Period. It seems rude to add another paragraph to the structure. Illegible notes, first draft, final version: an obituary in three slim files.

The next afternoon the Moorcocks took us to Bastrop. Linda was keen to point out the profusion of Texas blue bonnets, motorway-fringe plantings in spring abundance. The fields looked green and well kept, but you couldn’t walk in them. There were no paths across this terrain. Bastrop had expanded. The sole off-highway motel from my previous visit was downgraded by a rash of optimistic real-estate projections, with the old western-style main street maintained as a tolerated quotation, Bath or Cheltenham with hitching posts and livery stables. We ate, outdoors, in a shaded courtyard. Around the corner from the Gin-U-Wine Oyster Bar, with its time-shift balcony and chicken-fried steak, I found a shop offering Philip Roth first editions. I wouldn’t have bought one at home, but travel had prepared me for an account of ‘the enduring of old age’.
Exit Ghost
: ‘Walking the streets like a revenant, he makes connections that explode his carefully protected solitude.’

Michael Moorcock, more than anything in the Harry Ransom, was a
live
cultural resource, the London writer who, more than any other, kept the conduit open to the submerged literatures of Edwardian and Victorian England. He was a voracious reader and enthusiast, ploughing back his resources from the good days into supporting magazines for the best of his peers, British or American. Confessing his flaws, as he saw them, the misplaced wives (running amok on rogue credit cards), the bankruptcies, flights, breakdowns, vanities and illusions, he never stopped the books coming, never sold out the integrity of his vision. Libraries, built up and lost, flowed through this man. He lodged, steady and resolute, in the detritus of it. When I stayed in Bastrop, creeping up early to make a cup of coffee, before trying for a breath of air, Mike was waiting at the kitchen table, mid-sentence. To finish, or reignite, that never-ending tale: the gossip of ghosts, the testament of the last witness on the raft.

Texas, on the edge of the hill country, was where the word stuck to the fence, where names that meant nothing in the realms of cyberspace lay at peace in their graves. Among racks of sheathed ball gowns. Mounds of boots. Watches, toys. Discontinued gods. Like the aftermath of a benevolent holocaust. An epicentre for the next hurricane.

Mike spoke about how the fittest of men, the ones who skipped around town doing good works, putting up barns, were soon reduced by Bastrop’s microclimate, the wind from the prison, the Apache whistle of through-trains, to the state of cripples. He’d blistered a foot breaking in new boots at a dance, years ago, and had barely walked a step since: necrotized tissue cut back, toes amputated, long hours of treatment in an oxygen box, watching old westerns of his own choosing, singing cowboys or revenge sagas by Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. Having completed an all-embracing European epic, the Pyat quartet, navigating our darkest histories with an astonishing deftness of touch, Moorcock was labouring, as in his earliest days, on a
Dr Who
novel, conceived in the spirit of P. G. Wodehouse.

The Moorcock mansion was in southern colonial style, a veranda facing a wide lawn that ambled down to a quiet road. Customized properties in white and pink, self-consciously charming, were set apart in shady avenues. This section of town was exploited by numerous film crews looking for untainted iced-tea Americana. Austin, with its music, its design studios and geek entrepreneurs, attracted its share of movie stars. But no other Bastrop dwelling, I’m sure, opened directly on to the varnished melancholy of an Arts and Crafts interior: William Morris wallpaper, good pieces of furniture bought in Portobello Road at the right time, rows of George Meredith and Robert Louis Stevenson first editions. Every chamber, moving back through the Moorcock house, could have been transported to the Harry Ransom Center. Mike kept unsold stock, prodigious quantities of the back titles, in a structure he called ‘The Shed of Shame’. Cats scarfed his neck, purring and self-cleansing, as he wallowed in a deep chair, his fingers racing across the keyboard of a laptop, taking, as it appeared, the oracular dictation of his Egyptian pets. Bad news or old movies played, as low interference, on a giant plasma screen. Step outside, he said, and something will bite you.

If the approach to the mansion was straight from the directory of historic Bastrop residences, Mike’s study at the rear was 1960s Notting Hill, Colville Terrace, a commune of one. When I was last here, ten years ago, you could still get in. Mike worked at his computer, keeping in touch with a diverse set of friends and disciples. Now the lumber was dense enough to bar him from the memory-prompts and sacred relics that informed and mapped his multiverse. The toys had a practical purpose. Mike demonstrated how he worked out potential narratives by manipulating plastic figurines. Betty Boop voodoo dolls,
commedia dell’arte
Pierrots and Pierettes, carnival masks and Elric swords were heaped over every surface. The walls were paper histories,
Tarzan
comics, family photographs, friable magazines, newspapers: the salvage of centuries. A group shot with Moorcock and Ballard as middle-aged men, companions-at-arms, took my eye. Mike in his Russian phase, bearded, capped, piratical. And Ballard, eyes shut against the sudden flash, in dark, open-necked shirt and white jacket. They were refereed by a diminutive bookshop manager, who stood between them, ready to open twin piles of books for signatures.

Ballard was a raw topic for Mike. Much that was now credited entirely to the Shepperton man emanated from Moorcock’s promiscuous curiosity, his civic conscience and his ability to put himself around: conduit to Paolozzi, Burroughs, Borges. I’m not sure, at this stage, if the details of who and when, and what exactly happened that night, actually matter. But Moorcock, the mythologist’s mythologist, was drawn, despite himself, into the debate over the way Ballard was perceived by the media, the new generations of fans and readers of website interviews. When, in 1999, I wrote about Cronenberg’s film of
Crash
, I plotted my path by the stories Mike told me, psychotic episodes from the motorway years, Hampstead orgies, reluctant trips to a wreckers’ yard. As I came to know Ballard, a little, and to value his company, I saw how much the two men meant to each other at the period of
New Worlds
, when they met, on a regular basis, to plot their assault on a stagnant culture. Ballard would always say: ‘Mike
must
come back. London is his city. He belongs here.’ He gave no evidence of having read any of the books after
Letters from Hollywood
.

Moorcock never failed to acknowledge Ballard’s peculiar genius, even as he wrote effortless parodies of his style. He was a midwife to the fragmented tales of the high period, the mad period, that led to
The Atrocity Exhibition.
He steered a wide berth around
Crash
, while recognizing the achievement, the apotheosis, of
Empire of the Sun.
But differences festered. The core story was not being told. One man was self-exiled, walled in by books, cats, guitars, still sweeping between half-welcome commissions and major work that editors and critics were slow to accept. The other, Jimmy Ballard, at his death, was a global phenomenon, subject of glowing tributes, a news story. He left his daughters, his grandchildren, substantial fortunes. Spielberg and Martin Amis – on screen – paid their tributes at Ballard’s Tate Modern memorial. The archive, which he swore did not exist, was now lodged in the British Library. And being picked over by those who wanted to keep old arguments alive.

Meeting the biographer John Baxter in Paris, Mike found himself mounting a strenuous defence of his old friend, against tides of malignant rumour. The confirmation of anecdotes, privately delivered, gave him no satisfaction. Better to relish being away from the unforgiving Texas summer, playing Cajun tunes with the legendary Paris book-dealer Martin Stone. A huge doorstep volume of Moorcock’s non-fiction – 717 pp., no indexes – had just been published by Savoy Books, a magnum opus in a small edition. The prolixity, the breadth of interest, the scatter of photographs running back to childhood, made this an invaluable source. Mike was curated in a way that was available to all: if you were lucky enough to hear about it.

Then the bugs took over.

‘When I was writing here in Texas,’ Mike said, ‘I noticed an increase in the ant population on my desk. We won’t poison the surrounding ground, so we have to deal with insects on a daily basis.’ He tracked the scurrying soldiers back to a boxed set of
The Newgate Calendar.
Taking out one volume, he discovered an entire colony, eggs and all, sustaining themselves on eighteenth-century ink, the bloody records of extinct London lowlife. Literate cockroaches crept from fat Ackroyd biographies, sated on essence of Blake, Dickens and Eliot. ‘I’m on first-name terms with half a dozen of them and they no longer try to carry off the cat. Domestic life in Bastrop is like being on the Discovery Channel twenty-four hours a day.’

The cave-like shops of Chinatown, with their masks and lanterns, cinnabar pillboxes, novelty crucifixions, retro-Mao posters, were as close as I was going to come to Beijing. We are on the wrong side of the Pacific Ocean. The last time I was in San Francisco, I brought home, as a present, one of those round red boxes. I loved to handle it, the cool surface responsive to touch. The diagram incised into the lid was the map of a city I had been chasing for years, a labyrinth within a series of protective walls. And inside the empty box, the colour of sea and sky: a deep turquoise.

San Francisco was a walking city. We treated ourselves to a week at the Holiday Inn on the corner of Van Ness Avenue and California as a way of deprogramming the strangeness of Texas, where I had been a kind of exhibit, struggling to live up to my papers. I climbed the University Tower and was shown the spot where Charles Whitman, the rifleman who killed fourteen people and wounded thirty-two others, was himself gunned down by the police. The walkway on the twenty-ninth floor had been closed for years, then caged in, after students used it as a suicide platform. The clarity of the light, the tiny figures with their neat shadows, made trigger fingers itch, even among the liberal-minded humanists who took the excuse of my guided tour as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to inspect the site. Knowing nothing, except how to get lost in an interesting way, I led my disparate group on a circumnavigation of the university-city; its population at 50,000 students was twice the size of the small town where I grew up. Out on the highway we passed a humped structure, bigger and whiter than the Millennium Dome on Bugsby’s Marshes. The membrane of the tent enclosed a pitch for football practice: funded, used, and fitting unobtrusively into the university parkland.

Around Polk nothing much had changed. We started the day in Bob’s diner, with fresh orange juice and too much weak coffee. The independent cinema which, back in 1995, had been showing Abel Ferrara’s
The Addiction
, was now featuring the French gaol saga
A Prophet.
The same audience, ponytails and herb-saturated leather waistcoats, were occupying the same tired seats. Street folk, with their discretion and subtlety of movement, colonized doorways around our part of town, away from North Beach, where they had been so visible and assertive on my last visit. After the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s
The Road
, a distressed shopping trolley had become the must-have accessory, heaped with salvaged microwaves, TV sets, duvets, outdated cans and cereal packets.

It was too easy to romance this town, with its contours of poverty, the locked restrooms for which café owners would dole out a key attached to some great wooden ball, to prevent street people and addicts from taking possession of their generally filthy sties. My ideal San Francisco was in place long before I came across Hitchcock’s
Vertigo
. The absurdity of his necrophile voyeurism forgiven for those dreamlike drifts, Jimmy Stewart tracking Kim Novak’s green Jaguar Mark VIII around the steep hills of a revised topography. Auto-courtship. All of it within a short drive of the director’s favoured hotel, the Fairmont on Nob Hill. And his chosen restaurant, Ernie’s on Montgomery Street. The Gotti brothers, who owned this establishment, were awarded cameos, in the 1958 film, as maître d’ and bartender. The crew gorged themselves, during a morning’s shoot, on salad with Roquefort dressing, New York steaks and baked potatoes, banana fritters. Hitch sent down a truckload of wine from his vineyard in Scotts Valley. In the director’s vision of San Francisco, the bridges, parks and phallic towers are subservient to more significant architectural constructions: the behatted elongation of James Stewart, who walks like a man with a chronically bad back, and the baroque entablature of the Edith Head-tailored mass of Kim Novak. Who walks like an avalanche with the breaks on.