Introduction to Firing the Cathedral
He’d been written off. Affectionately, it was true, but still discounted as too much a creature of his times, who’d vanished with them into Ten Best retrospectives, hindsight orgies and I Love… The Bomb Years. Poor old Jerry, stood there shivering, watching while they repossessed the Roller. Sighs and wipes his nose, silvering one crushed velvet sleeve. Where had it all gone wrong? Or, for that matter, where had it all gone? Evaporated in the sweaty, wired Bolivian twilight of the later 1970s, around the time the Derry & Toms building had been claim-jumped, Biba’s Weimar flapper fantasies outflanked by Dorothy Perkins and her pastel horde. When the New York Dolls played the roof-garden there in ‘73, Biba employees were obliged to first dispense with a neat queue of pack-a-mac clad female skeletons left over from A Cure for Cancer’s opening chapter. Now look at it. The location and its aura both had gone into some sort of kabbalistic plunge through layers of materialisation and mundane solidity, from the ethereal heights of fiction, to a haven for Art Deco proto-goths, finally grounded as twin-set high-street emporium.
If the dreamtime’s collapse had ended there, the situation would still have been salvageable. In the same decade, though, other fictions, far more dangerous, began their catastrophic plummet into form. Miss Brunner, obviously, had always been the one to keep your eye on. Even when confined entirely to the symbol level as an icy fascist glyph, a rune, she’d been unnerving. Dropped into reality, however, she was ruinous. That dominatrix essence, percolating down through cinematic, near real astral planes in the cheekbones of Jenny Runacre, to be at last made manifest in Grantham’s Iron Virgin, Downing Street, 1979. What had it said, the cover line in that last 1960s issue of New Worlds, beneath the paranoiac photo-silhouette? “Forget 1970. What about 1980?” Something like that. By 1980, everyone’s bad dreams would be made actual. In some instances, they’d be in office. ‘Ennit real, ay?’ as his mum would no doubt have indignantly observed.
Mind you, by 1980 Mrs. C. herself had died. Not for the first time admittedly: the whole clan had been dead and resurrected at one time or other, shifted into new identities and names, Cornell, Carnelian, caught up in some karmic witness protection program. Still, it made you think. It wasn’t only family, with their reversible demises and their deaths no obstacle, but friends of family too, gone by the century’s end, not coming back. Angela Carter, with that trapdoor in her smile. Jack Story, one last whisky breath escaping through the snottygobble trees. James Colvin and that bloody fateful filing cabinet filled with rejected manuscripts. The 1900s, like an old style Mafia, had tried to take as many people down with them as possible. If not by the plain, straightforward rubout then, like Jerry, by planned obsolescence. He’d always been too much about the twentieth century to survive it, or so everyone assumed. As it turned out, everyone was wrong. As it turned out, even the twentieth century hadn’t been about the twentieth century.
Easy mistake to make, the assumption that Cornelius was too much of his times, and not an impression he sought to correct. Every word and gesture, every article of clothing or accessory was so up to the moment that it risked rear-end collision. Parodying Ian Fleming’s fetish for the listed brand name, he would end up inadvertently prefiguring the thousand-year Reich of the hot designer label. Many’s the time you’d see him looking lost in Berwick Street, pacing in circles searching for the offices of International Times, dressed in a Glyn Jones car-coat, looking smart and solarised and Art Nouveau; or else some striking and magnificently vulgar number from Mal Dean’s latest collection.
