The Citizen

and the Making of 'City'

Roy Fisher, Peter Robinson

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781780375977
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

When Roy Fisher told Gael Turnbull in 1960 that he had 'started writing like mad' and produced 'a sententious prose book, about the length of a short novel, called the Citizen' he was registering a sea change in his work, finding a mode to express his almost visceral connection with Birmingham in a way that drew on his sensibility and a wealth of materials that could last a lifetime. Much later in his career he would say that 'Birmingham is what I think with.' This 'mélange of evocation, maundering, imagining, fiction and autobiography, ' as he called it, was written 'so as to be able to have a look at myself & see what I think.' All that was known of this work before Fisher's death in 2017 is that fragments from it had been used as the prose sections in City and that – never otherwise published – it was thought not to have survived. This proved not to be the case, and in The Citizen and the Making of City, Peter Robinson, the poet's literary executor, has edited the breakthrough fragment and placed it in conjunction with the first 1961 published version of Fisher's signature collage of poetry and prose, along with a never published longer manuscript of it found among the poet's archive at the University of Sheffield, and some previously unpublished poems that were considered for inclusion during the complex evolution of the work that Robinson tracks in his introduction. By offering in a single publication the definitive 1969 text, two variant versions of City, its prose origins in The Citizen and continuation in Then Hallucinations, as well as some of the poetry left behind, this landmark publication offers a unique insight into Roy Fisher's most emblematic work. It is supplemented with an anthology of Fisher's own comments on City and a secondary bibliography of criticism on his profound response to changes wrought upon England's industrial cities in the middle of the 20th century.

37

THE CITIZEN

(1959)38

39

I

1.

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 40can 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 41he had been discovered at midnight clinging like a treeshrew 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. 42

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, 43almost as if it had been abandoned as too heavy by those who were trying to move it – either in or out.

6.

In the century since this city has become great, it has twice laid itself out in the shape of a wheel. The ghost of the older one still lies among the spokes of the new, those dozen loud highways that thread constricted ways through the inner suburbs, then thrust out, twice as wide, across the housing estates and into the countryside, dragging moraines of buildings with them. Sixty or seventy years ago there were other main roads, quite as important as these were then, but lying between their paths. By day, they are simply alternatives, short cuts, lined solidly with parked cars and crammed with delivery vans. They look merely like side-streets, heartlessly overblown in some excess of Victorian expansion. By night, or on a Sunday, you can see them for what they are. They are still lit by gas, and the long rows of houses, three and four storeys high, rear black above the lamps, enclosing the roadways, damping them off from whatever surrounds them. From these pavements you can sometimes see the sky at night, not obscured as it is in most parts of the city by the greenish-blue haze of light that steams out of the mercury-vapour lamps. These streets are not worth lighting. The houses have not been turned into shops – they are not villas either, that might have been offices, but simply tall dwellings, opening straight off the street, with cavernous entries leading into back courts.

The people who live in them are mostly very old. Some have lived through three wars, some through only one: wars of newspapers, of mysterious sciences, of coercion, 44of disappearances. Wars that have come down the streets from the unknown city and the unknown world, like rainwater floods in the gutters. There are small shops at street corners, with whole faceless rows of houses between them; and public houses carved only shallowly into the massive walls. When these people go into the town, the buses they travel on stop just before they reach it, in the sombre back streets behind the Town Hall and the great insurance offices, or in the few streets that manage, on the southern side, to cross the imperious lines of the railway that fan out on broad viaducts from their tunnels beneath the central hill.

These lost streets are decaying only very slowly. The impacted lives of their inhabitants, the meaninglessness of news, the dead black of the chimney breasts, the conviction that the wind itself comes only from the next street, all wedge together to keep destruction out, to deflect the eye of the developer. And when destruction comes it is total: printed notices on the walls, block by block, a few doors left open at night, broken windows advancing down a street until fallen slates appear on the pavement and are not kicked away. Then, after a few weeks of this, the machines arrive.

7.

A café with a frosted glass door through which much light is diffused. A tall young girl comes out and stands in front of it, her face and figure quite obscured by this milky radiance.

She treads out on to a lopsided ochre panel of pavement before the doorway, and becomes visible as a coloured shape, 45moving sharply. A wrap of honey and ginger, a flared saffron skirt, grey-white shoes. She goes off past the Masonic Temple with a young man: he is pale, with dark hair and a shrunken, earnest face. One could imagine him a size larger. Just for a moment, as it happens, there is no one else in the street at all. Their significance escapes rapidly like a scent, before the footsteps vanish among the car engines.

8.

Cannot complain. There is no cause for complaint. There is no ground for complaint. No audience for complaint. No comprehension of complaint. There is no language for complaint. There is no possibility of complaint. Complaint does not exist.

9.

In this city the governing authority is limited and mean; so limited that it can do no more than preserve a superficial order. It supplies fuel, water and power. It removes a fair proportion of the refuse, cleans the streets after a fashion and discourages fighting. With these few things it is content. This could never be a capital city, for all its size. There is no mind in it, no regard. The sensitive, the tasteful, the fashionable, the intolerant and powerful have not moved through it as they have moved through London, evaluating it, altering deliberately, setting in motion wars of feeling about it. Most of it has never been seen. 46

10.

There are photographs taken by long exposure of streets by night. In them the lights of windows and streetlamps show as motionless blobs; but the pictures are dominated by the tangled confusion of smears and lines made by the lights of moving buses and cars, bright marks that have no clear beginnings or ends; some of them make strange curves and loops on the edges of the maze, but always return to it. Sometimes life here resembles such a picture; a mass of blind and contorted purposes that cannot be separated or understood. There is never one which rears up in pain and remains, cut off where it stands, for the gestures of tragedy are caught early by watchful ambulances, policewomen and newspaper reporters, who all know how to neutralise them quickly and efficiently, discharging them after treatment into the foggy gully of the public memory.

‘When you begin to remember, when you think for a moment that you can taste the chimney pots or can conjure the scent of umbrellas on your breath – take a bus, greet new friends, remember you can read.

‘There has been a major war since then. Things are constantly appearing in a new light. It is to be presumed that the children are enabled to see it.

‘When the figures on the calendar change it becomes more than evident that something has happened that must affect us all.’

I am not dying or mad; my crimes are minor and not easily detectable; there is little about me that would divert or scandalise the public; so my thoughts have not yet fallen into the hands of the hospitals, the police or the press. Yet they are the thoughts of a tragedy: of the defiance of life. They are so now, when I cannot recognise anything 47that I see, when I know that all things that I encounter are extensions of my own body; I cannot even recognise that. They tend upwards to breaking point, in a landscape of destroyed war engines curving romantically into a smooth sky – today. Left lying a day, they’ll curve their ends round with curative gestures and become in some sense comic – the sense of shapes contained within other shapes contained within life. The tragic knows, while it briefly exists, that life cannot satisfactorily contain it.

II

11.

The release is coming. I am going to be able to die. With that ability in my pocket I shall be able to use the past.

The spit turns, or the stage revolves. With a sudden tumble and grating, with a certain diabolic suction of music, I am given a new set of faces, new symbols to bear. The setting is quite particular. Where I was born, on the edge of the city a narrow road runs north from the main westward road into the small triangle of farmland that still separates the city from two of its neighbouring townships. After a couple of hundred yards it is joined by what was once a lane but is now the last of the suburban streets. It has houses on one side and a cemetery on the other. Between the main road and this lane, called Cole Lane, a large laundry was built in about 1930: a low brick building lying back from the roadway behind spiked railings 48and perfunctory gardens of lawn and laurel. The corner opposite the cemetery gate is now the laundry’s car park; but before the war there was still the small yard of a monumental stonemason called McLean. It had a lean-to office with wide windows, a three-legged hoist with a dangling hook, and a neatly gravelled patch, fenced off with loops of tarred chain between short marble posts, in which the completed tombstones were displayed for sale.

In this vanished place I see my images, casually disposed among the marble carpentry. There are four of them lying there; and perhaps the little yard itself makes a fifth, unlike the others in that I have seen it before – though I have probably not thought of it for twenty years.

The four things are greyish white, corpse-colour. Indeed the most arresting of them is the figure of a woman, quite nude, lying stiffly on the side of the gravel between the polished headstones, looking as if she had been tipped there after the limbs had grown rigid. The others are what appears to be an albino raven lying similarly, with folded wings; a neat pile of coke ash and clinker; and a man’s cotton singlet, clean but frayed into holes at the hem. This vest is as such a garment might be, soft and light; the wind flutters it where it lies draped. The ashes too are visibly loose and of a natural texture though somewhat bleached. But the woman and the bird seem stony and hard, like a waxworks or petrified things.

The woman is tall and lean, not beautiful. A flat narrow belly, breasts that are hardly noticeable; a stringy, athletic physique. The shoulders are high and square, the face supercilious and a little mean, with a nose that curves strongly over a long upper lip and a poor chin. There is no expression and the eyes are shut as in an unguarded sleep. 49The hair, quite fair and straight, is fastened close to the head in a kind of plait, such as a sternly-reared little girl might wear. It is a body that has been put under strain by the will.

The bird – I do not know so much about birds: it may be a jackdaw, not a raven. It is quite large, with ragged feathers and knobbly claws. But it has a great smoothness and dignity in its lack of colour; the beak and eyes are lightly closed and the head inclined a little forwards. This is the least welcome of the four.

The ashes make a roughly conical pile six or eight inches high. They seem to be the product of an unusual heat. Some m...

Table of contents

• Description
• Title Page
• Contents
• Note on Texts
• Introduction
• The Citizen (1959)
• From a Citizen notebook
• Five uncollected City poems
• City (1961)
• Then Hallucinations City II
• CITY: Roy Fisher typescript (c. 1962-63)
• City (1969)
• Notes
• Roy Fisher’s published comments on City
• Secondary Bibliography
• Copyright