The late Roy Fisher's recently-discovered prose work The Citizen discussed by Naush Sabah in her piece on Birmingham for BBC Radio 3's The Essay. Plus reviews.
On one of the steep slopes that rise towards the centre of the city all the buildings have been destroyed within the last year: a whole district of tall narrow houses that spilled around what were, a hundred years ago, outlying factories, has gone. The streets remain among the rough quadrilaterals of brick-rubble, veering awkwardly towards one another through nothing; at night their rounded surfaces still shine under the irregularly-set gaslamps, and tonight they dully reflect also the yellowish flare, diffused and baleful, that hangs flat in the clouds a few hundred feet above the city’s invisible heart. Occasional cars move cautiously across this waste, as if suspicious of the emptiness; there is little to separate the roadways from what lies between them. Their tail-lights vanish slowly into the blocks of surrounding buildings, maybe a quarter of a mile from the middle of the desolation.
And what is it that lies between the purposeless streets? There is not a whole brick, a foundation to stumble across, a drainpipe, a smashed fowl house; the entire place has been razed flat, dug over, and smoothed down again. The bald curve of the hillside shows quite clearly here, near its crown, where the brilliant road, stacked close on either side with warehouses and shops, runs out towards the west. Down below, the district that fills the hollow is impenetrably black. The streets there are so close and so twisted among their massive tenements that it is impossible to trace the line of a single one of them by its lights. The lamps that can be seen shine oddly, and at mysterious distances, as if they were in a marsh. Only the great flat-roofed factory shows clear by its bulk, stretching across three or four whole blocks just below the edge of the waste, with solid rows of lit windows.
Uncovered here is the hard bone the city is raised on. Yet it is a ground so moist and treacherous that subways cannot be cut through it.
2.
On the station platform, near a pile of baskets, a couple embraced, pressed close together and swaying a little. It was hard to see where the girl’s feet and legs were. The suspicion this aroused soon caused her hands, apparently joined behind her lover’s back, to become a small brown-paper parcel under the arm of a stout engine driver who leaned, probably drunk, against the baskets, his cap so far forward as almost to conceal his face. I could not banish from my mind the thought that what I had first seen was in fact his own androgynous fantasy, the self-sufficient core of his stupor. Such a romantic thing, so tender, for him to contain. He looked more comic and complaisant than the couple had done; and more likely to fall heavily to the floor.
3.
A man in the police court. He looked dapper and poker-faced, his arms straight, the long fingers just touching the hem of his checked jacket. Four days after being released from the prison where he had served two years for theft he had been discovered at midnight clinging like a tree-shrew to the bars of a glass factory-roof. He made no attempt to explain his presence there; the luminous nerves that made him fly up to it were not visible in daylight and the police seemed hardly able to believe this was the creature they had brought down in the darkness.
If I could climb on to the slate-roof of my house now I could see the towers of the jail where he is.
4.
I am always glad to hear of a death, even if it grieves me; and miserable to learn of any performance of the sexual act. I read the obituaries in the newspaper eagerly; each of these stopped lives becomes comprehensible, and submits to the agencies of fermentation, distortions of the will, my will that lives only in my memories – without being able any longer to struggle. From the carved or printed epitaph, the few bundles of clumsy and broken outlines that remain, I can breed whatever I want.
Yet whenever I am forced to realise that some of these people around me, people I have actually seen, whose hopeful and distended surface I have at moments touched, are bodily in love and express that love bodily to dying-point, I feel that it is my own energy, my own hope, tension and sense of time in hand, that have gathered and vanished down that dark drain; that it is I who am left, shivering and exhausted, to try and kick the lid back into place so that I can go on without fear. And the terror that fills that moment or hour while I do it is a terror of anaesthesia: being able to feel only vertically, like a blind wall, or thickly, like the tyres of a bus.
Lovers turn to me faces of innocence where I would rather see faces of bright cunning. They have disappeared for entire hours into the lit holes of life, instead of lying stunned on its surface as I, and so many do for so long; or instead of raising their heads cautiously and scenting the manifold airs that blow through the streets. Sex fuses the intersections of the web where it occurs into blobs that drag and stick; and the web is not made to stand such weights. Often, there is no web.
5.
Sitting in the dark, I see a window, a large sash window of four panes such as might be found in the living room of any fair-sized old house. Its curtains are drawn back and it looks out on to a small damp garden, narrow close at hand where the kitchen and outhouses lead back, and then almost square. It is surrounded by privet and box, and the flowerbeds are empty save for a few laurels or rhododendrons, some leafless rose-shrubs and a giant yucca. It is a December afternoon, and it is raining. Not far from the window is a black marble statue of a long-haired, long-bearded old man. His robes are conventionally archaic, and he sits, easily enough, on what seems a pile of small boulders, staring intently and with a look of great intelligence, towards the patch of wall just under the kitchen window. The statue looks grimy, but its exposed surfaces are highly polished by the rain, so that the nose and the cheekbones stand out strongly in the gloom. It is rather smaller than life-size. It is clearly not in its proper place; resting as it does across the moss of the raised border, it is appreciably tilted forward and to one side, almost as if it had been abandoned as too heavy by those who were trying to move it – either in or out
[…]
14.
The edge of the city. A low hill with houses on one side and rough common land on the other, stretching down to where a dye-works lies along the valley road. Pithead gears thrust out above the hawthorn bushes; everywhere prefabricated workshops jut into the fields and the allotments. The society of singing birds and the society of mechanical hammers inhabit the world together, slightly ruffled and confused by each other’s presence.
[…]
15.
The ashes are simply what is left. There is always something, and it is always a relic, even after only a moment. Something to be touched, to be handled hopelessly; something that obeys the laws of matter even before it is subjected to chance and the speculative will.
There was a time when myths were very real to me and I would skirt the colliery spoilbank that stands in the fields beside a wide reedy pond with swans and moorhens on it, half expecting to see, among the colours streaks of ash, purple, orange and black, the figure of Lancelot or Gawain lying uncovered, naked, made of fired white porcelain decorated with flowers, and with hand or shin or phallus snapped off and lost, like a handle. Or a sizeable splinter of the True Cross, almost undistinguishable among the singed brown shale. Those slopes are so quickly fissured by rain and so baleful in colour that they can seem, especially near water, immeasurably ancient, volcanic.
Contents List
Introduction
Note on texts
The Citizen (1959)
From a Citizen notebook (1960)
Five city poems:
The Fog at Birmingham
Midlanders
Sea Monster in Hospital Shed
Where We Are
Lost, Now
