posted on 25 Aug 2016

Black Apples of Gower by Iain Sinclair

The French have the term flaneur to describe the quintessential urban idler and dandy. The concept first came into use in the nineteenth century and was elaborated on by Walter Benjamin who began to explore the activity as an archetype of the twentieth century experience. Iain Sinclair has elevated flaneurism into a psychogeographical event. With a cast of spielers and chancers – obscure film-makers, book runners, ageing poets, impoverished scribblers – he documents walks that become strange inward journeys, and if their purpose is sometimes unclear or their execution botched, then he seems all the more satisfied.

To be sure, such methods run a grave risk of self-parody, and Sinclair is sometimes not far from this – but he is saved time and time again by his marvellous prose. From it he has fashioned a tool that is as useful for excavating cultural archaeology as it is excoriating bureaucrats and mediocrities. He has a Swiftian eye for folly and human baseness and a pleasurably jaundiced intelligence. You become attuned to his shorthand, his riffs.

His finest book to my mind is Lights Out for the Territory, but Black Apples of Gower (Little Toller) is one of the most beautifully produced. It is an odd and enigmatic little book and considers his personal relationship to the Gower peninsula and its greatest artists, the poets Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins, and the painter Ceri Richards.

The endeavour is a little different to his other ‘walk’ books – less about a single, particular expedition and more about the importance of place to the artistic imagination – but the method is Sinclair’s familiar blend of memoir and cultural and metaphysical speculation. And elegy. For all Sinclair’s favourite places seem endangered and in need of elegising. They have either already disappeared – expunged by planners, socially cleansed by politicians – or are being refurbished and ‘heritaged’ in readiness for an IPO. Even on the Gower Sinclair seems only a few steps ahead of the cultural commercialisers whose only interest in Dylan Thomas is that his name can be used to brand breakfast meeting rooms in “revamped marina hotels”.

At his most indulgent, Sinclair can be prolix, intent on cramming everything into the text that he can, and Black Apples, despite its brevity, is not entirely free from this. Some parts work better than others. There is a strange digression into Blake, which seems somewhat shoe-horned in. And the penultimate section, largely about the Paviland ‘red lady’ cave burial site where the oldest buried remains in Britain were found in the nineteenth century, may be rich in numinous meaning to Sinclair, but it frankly defeated me.

While Black Apples is probably not essential Sinclair it gives a very good introduction to the terrain he has made his own and there is much to enjoy. Its insights and connections are provocative and interesting. The reminiscences of Vernon Watkins are affectionate and illuminating and Sinclair’s analysis of Ceri Richards’ work made me want to see more of it.

Its deft and lightly done self-satire is a great pleasure. The rare presence in this book of Sinclair’s wife, Anna, for instance, both humanises Sinclair while also (carefully, gently) diminishing him: the mystic walker with disordered senses is revealed as an oldish codger, careful not to slip in case he can’t get up again.

At one point they meet an obsessive jogger who is filming everything on a head-cam – even them. Sinclair cannot decide whose project is the madder. You can’t help but have some sympathy with this view. At least the jogger has a goal, Sinclair says, whereas for him the walk is only the beginning. It won’t be real – nothing can even be said to have happened – until the first sentence has been tapped out.

And that is the point, really. Sinclair’s walks, his slightly crazy expeditions, mean nothing until he has worked his alchemy on them, and every time they could turn out to be base metal rather than gold. That’s why we keep reading – to find out whether the magic will work. And Sinclair, I suspect, writes for precisely the same reason. Suddenly – there it is! That mysterious soft, warm glow that only gold has. How did he do it?

 

Alun Severn

August 2016