2,577 words

Part 1 of 7 (Full series here.)

Edited by Greg Johnson and Peter Jacobi

In 1995, Jonathan Bowden self-published his Collected Works in 6 volumes (London: Avant-Garde, 1995), edited by Jürgen Schwartz, one of Bowden’s pen names. The six volumes comprise 27 distinct books, 12 of which had been previously published. Altogether, the Collected Works contain more than 2,600 pages of rare early Bowden.

Deliverance is the fifth book in volume 2. It had not been previously published. We will publish it online in seven installments.

Like many of the Collected Works volumes, Deliverance  covers a wide range of political and cultural topics. But instead of interspersing these analyses with fictional narratives, Deliverance is fictional from beginning to end.

Eventually, a fully annotated version of Deliverance will appear at the Jonathan Bowden Archive. It will then be followed by similar editions of the rest of the Collected Works, plus a couple more early volumes that were not included. — Greg Johnson

The place we had intended to rendezvous in was white specked with red—it was snow; the hint of brilliantine, admixed with a streak of blood—scarlet, orange, and purple—in fact, it was a blood red door which led into the interior. Much like the entrance to a traditional Parisian brothel circa 1894, the Academy Club, in Beak Street, Soho, consisted of a door—black on the outside; red within—topped by a mirror: red borders, black opalescent depths: which seemed to reflect back what could only be described as a silent scream—a moment of blackness, lurid colour, and pornographic tone: the poster paint abstraction of Munch’s painting The Suicide (itself a gaping wound, a precursor, a pre-pubescent wound from the era of the Great War). You then plunged down an ill-lit stair-well—dubious entrance—made of wood: the rickety promenade of a foreknowledged disclosure: before you came out on a wooden (or was it a parquet?) flooring below. The floor slid to the touch—it moved under the impress of the feet which moved across it—tumbling into the light: itself subdued, hidden in niches, behind the main action, adjacent to its concerns, circumambient to the chattering-classes’ gossip which was otherwise proceeding. The lights were dim in the twilight of a modified aviary—stuffy and overpowering despite the fan—the BBC monstrosity; Studio 14, off the sound-track, Bush House, Marconi’s own model, sir—and the conversation rolled back and forth over the drenched tiling, illuminated by yellow-red candles which guttered in little green dishes. Did I say drenched?—why yes, a gift from the woman’s lavatory overhead—a grateful deluge of pistons—itself a savage form of innocence—virginal bras bursting at the seams: the notification of an arrested passion; whore’s advertisements in telephone kiosks: the bra and pantaloon gym-slip; the hint of lust and bronzed leg—revealed and closed over again: hungry fingers groping amidst dark acreage, thick foliage, the onset of spring. Anyway, the cistern in the upstairs loo had broken—female water-works—flooding the basement bar below. I had come to this particular bar to see Brian: all heart; no head: cynical wonder: alone and craggy; the face of a Cockney eagle atop a dwindling frame. Do you remember that Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, “The Retired Colourman”? Massive, barrel-chested, tight, fanatically mean, desirous of more, the cheating wife, the impoverished—and yet elligible—chess-playing doctor—suspected by the malevolent cripple; the colour-sergeant, heretofore mentioned: all life was here. Conan Doyle saw to that. Well, Brian reminded me of such an encounter—a crippled spastic without the bravado: a warrior artiste: East End wide-boy on-the-make without substance; the artificiality of the last round on a credit card at Jack the Ripper (sorry, The Three Tons, the pub was renamed—feminist pressure: the bad breath of the Politically Correct before the bar). For Brian was a finally modelled neo-classical bust above the shoulder: a walking carapace or mausoleum: ovidian: the observance of that which would remain forever undisclosed: the dispensation of internalized cretinism which would otherwise typify a plaster-cast; hanging material on a craggy / boney frame à la Arno Breker—but oblivious of the stupidity within. An IQ of naught—possibly a minus number, if it were possible—this was Brian’s lot! He was a sensational hybrid—a man of dubious provenance: the mightiness of an arrested frame: massive, wiry, Herculean, in the manner of a Charles Atlas pictograph for calisthenics: a leering display: “Don’t kick sand in my face, squirt!”: a Nietzschean frame—all of which was off-set by the hollowness, the emptiness, the abandoned lot with parking space within: the fact that, psychologically speaking, he hadn’t got a pot to piss in. [He existed in a manner which is reminiscent of the New English Library’s Selected Nietzsche—a sub-existentialist compendium—somehow, I doubt that the old man would have approved—with a Thorak, Breker, or Kolbe relief on the cover—massive, masculine, sweated. and yet effortless, grace under pressure, pin-point accuracy, the nature of the Aegean: beef-steak—Charlton Heston’s torso in the sunset—next to futuristic swirls of paint: abstract and expressive: the hint of painterly decadence—the notation of a necessary Fascism (the only true political doctrine)—Brian was a combination of these: a mixture of the body and the expressive inarticulacy of mind. viz he was as thick as shit!] He was the man I had to meet. In truth, Brian resembled one of the less than illustrious siblings of Dr. Moreau—reminiscent of H. G. Wells’ plot—from the island paradise [?] named after the doomed vivisector: what with the flesh hanging down around the skull in folds: Epsilon minus: Marathon Man in reverse: the catalepsy of the unused beggar—the mislaid shark—all at sea: but not to fear. For Brian grinned aimlessly and gormlessly—the Death’s-head at the feast—a man who was always ready to blow out the lighted candle in his own mind! He was like Dr. Moreau—if not his charges—the massive face: shaken but not stirred: lugubrious: lacking in passion: a certain bovine dexterity—except vitiated by Leonine will: hulk-like; a burnt-out case, animated by nought but the passion for pure and disinterested research—itself beyond reason: with the type of heavy-set jowl or grimace which involves smiling with the corners of the mouth pulled down instead of up. This was Brian to a T—if one discounts the absence of an intellect, a certain low cunning admittedly, but no mind to speak of, no mind at all. One remembers the low shambolic gait of the Beast-men—the relics of a Will at once cursory, despondent, investigatory and amoral: here was B: the vivisected puma—the man-thing yet to be; aft, beyond sight, beyond the reckoning of things as they were: what with blood and carbolic acid in the sink: the stink of disinfectant—the nearness of the slightly sickening and tipsy odour of ether—the puma wrapped in bandages and pain—Frankenstein without the ether: the one released for freedom; the other yet to be free—and walk upright in the sunrise. Here was Brian now: failed barrow boy: lightening rod; quick on his feet; you are off my son!; ex-barrow boy; failed Head Hunter (in the City; not the jungles of Borneo): offering to buy me a raspberry ripple—no, I tell a lie, a Perrier water, ice, and lemon—ubiquitous Yuppy fare without dignity—and engaging me in what he fondly imagined to be matters of “business”—what with the vivisected puma in the background—in my own mind at least—left purring (or was it howling?) at its grave: the bandaged monstrosity in the room aft; behind consciousness; the inner-reckoning: the outer wound: “I’ll do ’im, son; you tell him, you fucking tell him: i’ll do you for that toast, mate, and too right I won’t, my old dad” [heard elsewhere in the bar]. This was the bright yellow cover of Moreau’s Monsters—not the pale Aldiss echo[1]—replete with warm tints: as of abandoned sick-rooms: exultant chambers of near-defeat; themselves off in the rear, behind the galley, along from the break, where the action isn’t. Brian had started to talk (rabbit)—but I wasn’t listening. What I had in mind was the litany of the Law: the spare part progress; inflationary will and oft betimes; the dripping gorge: all moss and lichen; the criss-crossing of the ranges of the mind; not to mention running at full pelt, whilst pursued by a man-thing in the moonlight. This was the echo—the after-echo—of these words, as we sat in the booth, the niche or nook, strong bow, timber, words on wood, the click of dice or was it backgammon (?)—an altogether superior game—the reek of Brian’s bad breath: a compulsory halitosis. While in the background there was Moreau: alone and aground: adrift in the moonlight: bloodied in the bracken: the puma gone and prancing in the cane-break: the huts afire and smoke billowing from them across the island: the smell of burning timber: of iron and blood: the foreknowledge of emptiness; space to go yet; unsolid; lacking in dispassion: only to arrive at the solution of its own absence of a quest; the retrieval of what existed before me as one grasps for it, wrestles for it, in the prose, the body of the text, the awakening from the dumbness, itself the recognition of defeat. This is what one has to face—the recognition of what awaits one in the text. Here was Brian; lapis lazuli; against nature: before the others: out ahead of them; beyond reason: backwards before the pregnant nature of his time: the time of his time: one could see him getting younger every minute; receding, retracing the cavalcade of steps; down into the dungeons of the past: out into the day-break; the seasoned absence of the soul: younger and younger; kicking a football, in diapers, crawling up his mother’s cervix; back into the womb, before time, before the absence of time; the fixed certainty of inexistence—nothing of what it is to be free: aborted: dead: the baby on the slab or in the bucket: the necessary mercy killing in accordance with feminist diktat; obscenity (but should morality enter here?): the face of Denholm Elliott in Alfie: dead in the bucket. But to return to the present: with a jolt I see Brian sitting before me in the bar, gabbing on, incessantly, without mercy, rancour, linguistic exactitude or taste. No taste, you see, that is the salient thing. This is the unnecessary or sad fatality of the thing—The Ballad of the Sad Cafe etc …—this is what we have to deal with. It is the emptiness—the necessity not to have to go on, without meaning, lacking in virtue, logorrhoea, but without the reedy pathos—the inarticulate dumbness of Dorothy Richardson’s stream of consciousness model—praised defensively in a pamphlet by John Cowper Powys—himself a heterosexual lesbian, with a priest for a son, in a bed-sheet. Such a thing is without the tacky unoriginality of the former model—a certain hardness or sharpness: a type of clearness in the prose: the repetitiveness of a hard or a “fascistic” embrace—Céline rather than the chaotic arabesque of Burroughs—this is what has to be aimed for. One has to wait for the voice—as the Anglo-Irish actor Peter O’Toole put it in relation to his stage autobiography—one has to wait for the voice: perhaps one waits for a lifetime—well, almost a life-time: but in the end it comes: Oh! How it comes! (As the vicar said to the mid-wife). Yet the intention is all: what one actually wishes to do with the mellifluous unintentionality: the representationality of the prose: the ardour of its embrace—This is what matters. In any event, to return to Brian: his face was pressed against the pane of his own understanding: he rippled and caterwauled at will: he peeled back the skin on his own forehead: in the manner of Graham Percy’s painted illustration of Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau: where the head of a furry animal, a Scottie dog, for instance, was seen to be peeled back, as in Durer’s anatomy, along the lines of its lineaments: a taxonomy of consciousness: the codifications of an Ordnance Survey map. Here, Brian was found among the sanctity of his own palms: he walked and ran along the sands; a riddle of the sands; a veritable beast, communing with the sheer speed of his onrushing form: as he staggered shambolically amidst a misspent nature wracked with pain: the prospect of emptiness. When he was released from the enclosure—set free to return to the bounty of an indifferent nature—he would not last long. For he was not a triumph of his art: more accurately, he was its downside, the hint of entropy in the curve; a redundant gesture of absent grace: a man who ran with the wind of his own shallowness. You see, there was no sense of futility amongst the others, the barren outcasts of this tundra, in that Brian always managed to think of himself as one of the lads: someone who was returning to nature—quite literally—rather than running from it. In a manner which was reminiscent of Montgomery, in the story, who finds a home from home amongst these Beastmen, has indeed become a part of them a part of the show; the dance of death à la Bosch; the degree to which he had become unfit to his kindred; incapable of meaningful intercourse with the human, as the “silly ass” Prendick supposed, a man-beast, set apart, beyond the pale, beyond the remit of the human. In fact, Brian too often sloped off to the “beasts” with his drink, unemployable, with a million schemes on the go, a nod and a wink, you understand, none of them likely to eventuate this side of doomsday. His wife worked down the local hospital in Bromley, Kent—not too proud to get her hands dirty—while his son swotted away on his GCSE’s even during the Cup Final itself, such was his ardour to obtain the certificates. Brian remained aloof: in dreamland: amongst the others; listening to the conversation, the shouted, mis-matched words in a bar, not necessarily a sub-Tattlerish pick-up bar like Punchinello’s, Soho & Kensington. No. He had been big in head-hunting—but was let down by his upper-class partner—they’re all bastards, bastards, every one—except those that are Jews, of course—and they’re even bigger bastards, mark my words, John—mine’s a Bloody Mary, thanks very much. Brian had worked up a thirst now: as fresh as the day: now that he had swerved, ducked, jived, and avoided certain topics of debate: he was in his stride; moving forward; catching his breath; always available; ever ready; ready for anything. He puffed up his chest like a turkey-cock—rather than another type of cock—and behaved like an absurd mountebank; the preliminary contortions of the same; the manipulator of others’ expectations: the man who can be released from small chains and minute boxes—as in ex-Soviet psychiatric hospitals—but this time as a prelude to audience applause and ready cash, hard currency, collected by a beauteous assistant, the middle-class wife with a Liverpool accent and impeccable south of England small talk, in a cut-away cleavage, a tight-fitting bodice, the magical assistant, ready to oblige.

Note

[1] [Brian Aldiss, Moreau’s Other Island (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980).]