Edge of the Orison by Iain Sinclair

Author:Iain Sinclair
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141911014
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-03-23T16:00:00+00:00

He dreamt that lying as he did in bed, Edward and Jane [Williams] came in to him; they were in the most horrible condition – their bodies lacerated, their bones starting through their skin, the faces pale yet stained with blood… Edward said, ‘Get up Shelley; the sea is flooding the house, and it is all coming down.’ Shelley got up, he thought, and went to the window that looked on the terrace and the sea, and thought he saw the sea rushing in.

Worse was to follow: Shelley met himself out on the terrace, a double who said, ‘How long do you mean to be content?’ The fetch established an identity quite independent of the poet, the dreamer. But located firmly in place, the broad terrace of the former convent. The position from which Mary Shelley would watch the sea, when her husband did not return from his voyage to Leghorn.

The last emotional attachment of Shelley's life was for Jane, the (courtesy) wife of his friend Edward Williams. He presented Jane with a guitar which was to become one of the most notable relics of the Shelley cult. This dark, calm woman seems to have had the gift of suggesting much by saying little, keeping clear of literary squabbles, the posturings of poets and pretenders. Mary liked her, as a companion for afternoon walks. ‘Jane and I are off together,’ she wrote to Mrs Leigh Hunt (Marianne Kent), ‘and talk morality and pluck violets by the way… She has a very pretty voice, and a taste and ear for music which is almost miraculous.’

Living communally with this troop of world-class neurotics, anarchist rentiers and bluestocking totty, Jane Williams was taken for a person of sensibility, but no great imagination. They liked to make a picture of her, a plaintive soundtrack for their experiments in auto-destruction: sweet Jane floating on the bay by moonlight, strumming her guitar.

Anna Sinclair, in her youth, knew the syndrome all too well. She weathered maelstroms of performance angst, expelling kitchen-squatters, poets and camp followers, into the street (after three or four days of herbal monologues and ill-tuned guitars). She beat off dazed admirers who turned up at our Hackney house claiming a lifelong fascination with ley lines or multiple-superimposition 8mm film. It dawned on me, very early in the game, that most of the men, husbands, pre-famous sculptors, who arrived late with invitations to very private views, or expressed their eagerness to chauffeur us to a cinema club or Charlotte Street meal, were not acknowledging my remarkable talent, my brilliant conversation. They wanted the chance to feed, however circumspectly, on Anna's aura: that impenetrable look called unconcern.

Even as a child, an adolescent, she had been the still point, as outsiders saw it, in an outrageous family. Letters of acid denunciation from co-drivers on trips through France – ruined picnics, tragic treats, stinking cheese – would single Anna out as ‘calm, serene and beautiful’. It's an unbeatable act, absence. Detachment. Going deep into your own thoughts. Letting

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