A Horror and a Beauty:

The World of Peter Ackroyd’s London Novels

Petr Chalupský

The original manuscript was reviewed by Christoph Houswitschka

(Department of English Literary Science, University of Bamberg),

Milada Franková (Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno), and Šárka Bubíková

(Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, University of Pardubice).

Language supervision by Bernadette Higgins

Published by Karolinum Press, a publishing department of Charles University in Prague

www.karolinum.cz

ebooks@karolinum.cz

Cover by Jan Šerých

First English Edition

© Karolinum Press, 2016

© Petr Chalupský, 2016

ISBN 978-80-246-3161-5

ISBN 978-80-246-3171-4 (pdf)

ISBN 978-80-246-3451-7 (ePub)

ISBN 978-80-246-3452-4 (Kindle)

All great art is born of the metropolis.

(Ezra Pound)

. . . fidelity to historical reality is a secondary matter as regards the value of the novel. The novelist is neither historian nor prophet: he is an explorer of existence.

(Milan Kundera)

CONTENTS

Cue-Titles

Introduction – Power, Majesty, Darkness, Shadows

Chapter 1 – Ackroyd’s London, Past and Present

London and the English Literary Sensibility

Ackroyd, History and the Historical Novel

Ackroyd’s London Chronotope

Chapter 2 – Uncanny London

London the Obscure

Wandering and Wondering in Eternity – Mythical Time

Where Suffering Seems to Linger – Genius Loci

Variety, Energy and Darkness – Cockney Visionaries

Poets of Power and Darkness – Ackroyd’s Occultists

The Divine Spark that never Dies, or Making the Dead Speak – the Magic of the Imagination

Chapter 3 – Felonious London

Serial Killings and the London Gothic Psychothriller

Crime Re-written

Assuming a Story – the Narrative of Detection

London Confined

Vivifying Crimes, Vivifying the City

Chapter 4 – Psychogeographic and Antiquarian London

Psychogeography

Ackroyd’s Psychogeographic Antiquarianism

Two Related Concepts

London of the Mind

Ackroyd’s Lonely Londoners

Ackroyd’s Walkers

Chapter 5 – Theatrical London

“Where pathos and pantomime meet”

London as a Stage and the Stage as London in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem

The Might and Glory of the City Celebrated – The Clerkenwell Tales

The Horrific, the Spectacular and the Sublime

Chapter 6 – Literary London

The Necessity of Imitation – the Counterfeiting and Metafictional London of Chatterton

When William Met Mary: London as a Palimpsest in The Lambs of London

Towards Autobiographic Self-referencing: Literary London in Three Brothers

Conclusion – Longing and Belonging

Summary

Bibliography

Index

Cue-Titles

A

Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

ATW

“All the Time in the World”

B

Blake

C

Chatterton

CT

The Clerkenwell Tales

CVF

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

D

Dickens

DLLH

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem

FEP

“The Future of English Prisons”

GFL

The Great Fire of London

H

Hawksmoor

HDD

The House of Doctor Dee

EEL

“The Englishness of English Literature”

LB

London: The Biography

LL

The Lambs of London

LLCV

“London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries”

LTM

The Life of Thomas More

LU

London Under

ML

“A Manifesto for London”

N

Newton

PP

The Plato Papers

TB

Three Brothers

TSR

Thames: Sacred River

WBSR

“William Blake, A Spiritual Radical”

Introduction:

Power, Majesty, Darkness, Shadows

With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Peter Ackroyd is one of the most prolific contemporary British writers, having written more than sixty books, including collections of poetry, essays, novels, biographies, historical and literary non-fiction and books for children. He is also the author of several television documentaries and even of a libretto for an opera based on his favourite William Hogarth engravings. An exceptionally hard-working and diligent author for whom writing has grown from profession and avocation to passion and vital need, he maintains a rigid work discipline, the capacity for which he believes he owes to his energetic and indomitable grandmother, and boasts of never having missed a deadline: almost every day he takes a taxi from his Knightsbridge apartment to his office in Bloomsbury near the British Museum and Charles Dickens’s house, an area he considers to be London’s holy territory, where he spends eight hours working, mostly on three different books at once, usually a biography, a work of non-fiction and a novel, which he insists is necessary for his sanity since if he did only one thing at a time he would think he was wasting his time[1]. His immense productivity, its intellectual, generic and imaginative variety, his erudition and the breadth of his field of interest make Ackroyd one of the most exceptional writers of his generation.

As is often the case with gifted individuals, Ackroyd’s is a complicated personality and he has often been judged a controversial, eccentric or even grandiloquent figure. Facts about his life that he has stated in various interviews over time have contributed to the creation of this idiosyncratic persona: that he never met his father and was brought up as an only child by his single mother and maternal grandmother in a strict Roman Catholic household in a council house in working-class East Acton in west London; that he was a driven child whose intellectual tendencies were promoted by his mother and who wrote his first work, a play about Guy Fawkes, aged nine; that as a child he dreamed of being a Pope, a magician or a tap dancer; that he once saw a ghost; that he never wanted to be a novelist; that he never knows how his novels will end, relying on intuition and instinct rather than planning; that he does not read fiction, including that of his contemporaries, since he finds it too untidy; that he is gay, and his relationship with an American dancer, Brian Kuhn, lasted for more than twenty years until Kuhn contracted Aids in 1990 and died of it four years later; that nursing Kuhn was the only occasion which saw him leave London, for a cottage in the West Country; that he is happy and relieved to have led a single, celibate life for years as it allows him to concentrate on his work, which now matters more to him than love because it sustains him; that his workload nearly killed him in 2000, when, after he finished London: The Biography, he suffered a heart attack and spent a week in a coma; that he has always been a heavy drinker, dedicating the days to working and nights to drinking; that he leads a solitary life, hates to leave London and dislikes the countryside; that he is not a very outgoing person, he does not go to the theatre, concerts or the opera; that he does not read newspapers, is not interested in reviews, even though he once worked as a reviewer, does not like to discuss his finished books and hates literary festivals; that he is not interested in politics and has an aversion to commenting on the news, claiming that his opinions are of no consequence or value, and is therefore often criticised for his apolitical and aloof attitudes; that he is happiest in his study when reading, writing and doing research, aided by two assistants who fetch him the books and other materials he needs for his projects[2]. These shards of information about Ackroyd’s background and life not only reflect his character and explain his reputation for eccentricity, they also help to contextualise the intense focus in his work on London, the metropolis in which he was born and in which he has spent his whole life, the city whose culture, history, mythos and spirit are the objects of his intense passion and almost obsessive devotion.

Despite its numerous and openly criticised drawbacks, the metropolis has been one of the most common and popular objects of imaginative representation, celebratory as well as condemnatory, literature being no exception. “[T]o the literary imagination all the great cities are sacred [ . . . ], whatever suffering and inequity transpire in them,”[3] as in their multi-facetedness and contradictoriness they constitute a bottomless source of inspiration for artistic rendering. What urban literary works have in common is that “they reflect the discursive heteroglossia that resonates in the texture of each city, at the core of which lies an ultimate otherness on the personal, social, cultural and political levels that permeates and determines the modern city dwellers’ everyday experience.”[4] Their role is more complex than simply providing their readers with amusement and aesthetic enjoyment, for they can prove helpful in making the city more accessible by translating its baffling elusiveness into linguistic, stylistic and narrative devices that readers find familiar and comprehensible. Any city as big and diverse as London is too vast, chaotic, volatile and incoherent for its inhabitants to ever understand and know it in its totality. That is why these inhabitants “never experience the space of the city unmediated,” but always through “symbolised and metaphorised” representational forms[5], which produce images and patterns that enable them, to some extent at least, to make sense of the city’s innate convolutedness and heterogeneity. Novels and other literary texts may thus serve their readers as crucial psychic, spiritual and creative vehicles through which to approach and appropriate urban space, for they “in their way constitute the cities we live in as much as planners and builders and politicians and users do,” and so they “become frames through which the disorderly, ungraspable material city can be mentally and imaginatively perceived.”[6] Ackroyd’s London novels do provide such a frame as they depict a distinctive and consistent chronotopic construct based on dramatisations of a set of their author’s beliefs and convictions concerning the nature of the capital.

He claims that each writer should have “a very strong sense of belonging to a possession of a particular territory,”[7] and his territory, which he transforms into an imaginative urban space in his novels, happens to be London. The fact that he is a Londoner who is well-acquainted with London’s history is the main reason why Ackroyd chose the city to be the setting, theme and even character in most of his novels, being the ultimate landscape of his, and most of his central protagonists’, imagination. He has always been a keen walker of the city streets even though, ironically perhaps, the outcome of these walks has been observation and gathering of experience and research material rather than epiphanic revelations or ideas for his work[8]. His relationship to London is not idealistic, idolising or purely aesthetic; he does not consider it a likeable, appealing or formally elegant city, but one built upon strictly pragmatic imperatives and as such often disrespecting or ignoring the wishes and needs of its citizens. For Ackroyd London is a heterogeneous city of contrasts and contradictions, a motley amalgam of joys and sorrows, a mighty apparatus generating, regulating and equalising positive and negative forces and energies, and he likes it precisely because of its variedness and as a unique historical phenomenon, always an independent, open, and infinite labyrinthine city (ML, 386–387). “Its power, its majesty, its darkness, its shadows,” answers Ackroyd when asked what fascinates him about the city[9], stressing what he sees as its essential property: it defies an unequivocal, clearly delimited definition or appraisal, as its every dark side has its bright spot, every light its shadow. His London’s charm and power rest in its ability to confront and subsequently reconcile these opposing tendencies and phenomena within the city’s progressing continuum of human imagination, creativity and experience.

London’s heterogeneity is inevitably reflected in the diversity of literary devices – genres, styles and modes of expression – inspired or instigated by the city, which attempt to capture as many of its aspects and metamorphoses as possible. In the same vein, Ackroyd’s writing on and about London includes novels, biographies and non-fiction, mostly lectures, essays and historical books. Despite their formal differences, the relation between these works is complementary; their viewpoint and subject matter often correspond and overlap, and Ackroyd considers them equal in terms of their communicative value as well as their capacity for capturing the spirit of the city, seeing them as “single chapters in the book which will only be completed at the time of [his] death.”[10] So he describes what he means by the term “Cockney Visionaries” in his lectures, inquires into the lives of the most significant of them in his biographies, while some others appear as characters in his novels; or, he frequently speaks about London’s inherent inclination to violence and criminality in his non-fiction books, and various forms of crimes feature in all his novels set in the city, to mention just two examples. Although Ackroyd’s biographies also fall into the category of his London works, their in-depth analysis would reach beyond the scope of this volume. However, references are made to the lectures, particularly to “The Englishness of English Literature,” “London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries,” “William Blake, A Spiritual Radical” and “All the Time in the World,” historical studies, especially London: The Biography and Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, and to selected biographies and interviews. The central focus of this book is the portrayal of the city in his London novels, namely in The Great Fire of London, Hawksmoor, Chatterton, The House of Doctor Dee, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, The Clerkenwell Tales, The Lambs of London, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein and Three Brothers. His only novel set in the city but not discussed is The Plato Papers, a playful futuristic experiment which, unlike the above titles, does not elaborate much on Ackroyd’s particular London chronotope.

Central to this chronotope is Ackroyd’s concept of perpetual time, one in which the past and the present (and the future in consequence) are not only hard to distinguish, but in which the past can be found, in different forms, in or underneath the present reality. A related aspect of this space-time model is the intrinsic interconnectedness between certain territories of the city and the analogous events and actions that have tended to happen in them repeatedly in different historical periods. As most of these happenings are of obscure and/or violent nature, Ackroyd’s London novels revolve primarily around the city’s dark sides, its shadowy, subversive and vicious displays, its hidden, undercurrent lines of force, and the radical, desperate and defiant human acts that spring from them. This capital’s, especially its East End’s, marginality and liminality “makes it an ideal location for transgressions of all kinds of boundaries: legal (crime), natural (magic) and even temporal (the presence of the past).”[11] It is an internal as well as external subterranean world, mostly concealed from public view and scrutiny, yet which exists within the “official” world, in individuals’ minds, in the privacy of their homes, pulsing beneath the silt of pretence, hypocrisy, play-acting and disguise. However, this cityscape is far from being a damned one, as good and evil exist there side by side, producing effects so diverse as terror, dismay, fascination and grace. It reflects Ackroyd’s conviction that, both physically and metaphorically, “[i]f the underworld can be understood as a place of fear and danger, it can also be regarded as a place of safety [ . . . ], a place of fantasy” (LU, 3–4), and the idea of its “secret passages, of mysterious entrances and exits, of retreat and concealment, possesses an incurable charm” (LU, 7). Therefore, his stories render and dramatise those properties of the city and its life, present and past, as they are considered as one, which have been commonly overlooked and dismissed by its academic histories and other official discourses.

For this purpose, Ackroyd often plays with historiographic accounts by deliberately altering verified facts, inventing characters, events and texts and mixing them up with real historical ones, as well as by making paranormal happenings crucially affect the plots. The result is a peculiar universe in which, within a historically plausible framework, certain things, which lack support in either history or a rational worldview or both, are shown as not only possible, but natural and even inevitable. His is a poetics of the dark and the mysterious, yet one which manages to portray the city’s obscurities as engaging or even enticing, not because it revels in violence or perversity, but through the use of a cleverly playful, inventive and subtly poetic language and imagery which impart to these Gothic elements a feel of ease and naturalness. Ackroyd began his career as a poet and assumes that when he turned from poetry to fiction “the same sensibility simply migrated into a different medium.”[12] He professes what he identifies as the English tradition of not separating history from literary creation and since, after all, the very first historians were poets he strives to return to these roots and “restore the poetry of history.”[13] His novels can be taken as more imaginative and less restrained exercises in the method which he also employs in his more ambitious projects – the histories of London and England.

In order to understand the London of Ackroyd’s novels it is necessary to be acquainted with the underlying postulates that shape his conception of the city as such. The first chapter introduces his fundamental ideas about London, its history and its position in and relationship with the English literary sensibility as he has presented them in his non-fiction. It also discusses his understanding of history, the historical novel and historical writing in general and compares them with some poststructuralist revisions of history and its textual representations, although he himself is rather sceptical of their legitimacy. Finally, it discusses the theoretical principles of his urban chronotope, which forms the basis of his London novels in terms of their setting, plot and character construction. Ackroyd’s infinite, eternal, mystical and labyrinthine London defies any systematic categorisation or taxonomy, yet for the purposes of this study the most defining aspects of its novelistic projection have been identified – the uncanny, the felonious, the psychogeographic and antiquarian, the theatrical and the literary – which are individually examined in the five subsequent chapters. However, these aspects cannot be separated from one another as they are closely interconnected and as such they not only coexist but influence and determine one another. For instance, the uncanny often goes hand in hand with the psychogeographic, the felonious with the theatrical, but all of them, though in varying degrees, can be traced in each of the discussed novels. A specific, prominent role is played by the city’s literary character, namely its intertextual, metafictional, palimpsestic and apocryphal manifestations, which accompanies all the other aspects, and this is why it is treated last, in the sixth chapter, since it in fact summarises, generalises and completes what has already been elaborated in the preceding four. Ackroyd believes that for every writer dealing with the past, hard, factual evidence should be only one side of the coin, one which must always be complemented and balanced by “spiritual truth” if he or she aspires to understand the nature of history[14]. As this spiritual view often prevails over the factual in Ackryoyd’s London novels they may not offer versions of the past that can boast historical precision or correctness, but they are ingenious, thought-provoking, evocative and, what he always stresses as paramount, enjoyable, and his fictional world is thus definitely worthy of close exploration.

The End of Preview

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Cue-Titles

Introduction - Power, Majesty, Darkness, Shadows

Chapter 1 - Ackroyd’s London, Past and Present

Chapter 2 - Uncanny London

Chapter 3 - Felonious London

Chapter 4 - Psychogeographic and Antiquarian London

Chapter 5 - Theatrical London

Chapter 6 - Literary London