W.D. Clarke

As the Canadian cultural studies academic Max Haiven puts it, Marx’s term ‘fictitious capital’ is more than an offhand dismissal of something he doesn’t like, but can also be understood as a description of the ontology of capitalism itself. Money is made with fiction and narrative, just as fictions and narratives can be sold for money

The very nature of the project of the Bank replicates this idea of something being made-up, something coming from nothing, to a degree that was almost seen at the time as magical. The project of the Bank depended on the idea of debt having value. This was a profound shift in a nation that jailed debtors in Newgate, or allowed them to find a sordid sanctuary in the ‘Liberty of the Mint’, a district in south London where Moll also lives for a while. More profoundly than anything else, the project of the Bank established the idea of a national debt that could be parcelled and sold as a commodity, thereby making the entire nation into a commercial venture, held together by a bet on the future. A debt is a negative. It is an absence that propels us forward in order to fill its gap. Something for nothing, a future positive for a present negative. This signals a shift in the nature of the imagination, in the relationship between tangible reality and created realities, in the relationship between signified and signifier.

The pen employ’d in finishing her Story, and making it what you now see it to be’, he confides to the reader, ‘has had no little difficulty to put it into a Dress fit to be seen, and to make it speak Language fit to be read’.94 The ‘pen’ has taken care of the reader and should be trusted.

perceived as a feminized version of a real man. He was an effeminate or emasculated being ‘still wrestling with his own passions and hysterias and with anterior and exterior forces let loose by his fantasies and appetites’...

stories are often told about entrepreneurs with feet of clay, who hide their avarice behind crocodile smiles and complex layers of offshore holding companies: Maxwell, Branson, Jobs. There is a constant tension between the heroic figure called forth to save the nation from economic hardship and the equally persistent suspicion that he (usually a he) will turn out to be a swindler or, at the very least, of the ‘lower orders’ with the morals of a market-stall holder, not a gentleman. Moll tells us that ‘many a Newgate Bird becomes a great Man’, and the reverse is also true. This is the same tension established in Defoe’s essay with regard to the ‘honest’ and the ‘contemptible’ projector. Defoe does not resolve the tension. His paper is merely an ‘essay’ upon projects; the ‘upon’ confirming that it can only be an attempt, a try, at understanding the complexities and ironies of the ‘art of projecting’. We might need the projector, but they might well let us down.

Establishing these sorts of equivalences between the Bank and Moll Flanders also calls into question the nature and purpose of the novel. In the last century, literature has sought to paint itself as distinctive and special. Literary theory has often suggested that Literature (capitalized) inhabits a space which is sacrosanct and different, somehow morally superior or detached from the commercial world. It is presented as if only the ‘space of literature’ has the freedom to say anything, and in terms of radical theory, promotes the ‘democracy to come’. We aren’t so sure about the iconoclastic nature of this characterization and suggest instead that the organization, the beginning of which is always a project, inhabits that space to the same degree as the novel or ‘literature’ more generally. Art is not our salvation, and the novel is not lord of the space of democracy.

The orders for the government of the hospital of Bethlem are exceedingly good, and a remarkable instance of the good disposition of the gentlemen concerned in it, especially these that follow;
1. That no person, except the proper officers who tend them, be allowed to see the lunatics of a Sunday.
2. That no person be allowed to give the lunatics strong drink, wine, tobacco or spirits, or to sell any such thing in the hospital.)

the Reformation as they say, is not yet of 200 years standing, yet learning has more increased and the universities flourished more; more great scholars been produced, greater libraries been raised, and more fine buildings been erected in these 200 years than in the 800 years of Popery; and I might add, as many great benefactions have been given, notwithstanding this very momentous difference; that the Protestant’s gifts are merely acts of charity to the world, and acts of bounty, in reverence to learning and learned men, without the grand excitement of the health of their souls, and of the souls of their fathers, to be prayed out of purgatory and get a ready admission into heaven, and the like.

where I thought the people seemed less divided into factions and parties, than in other places; for though here are divisions and the the people are not all of one mind, either as to religion, or politics, yet they did not seem to separate with so much animosity as in other places. Here I saw the Church of England clergymen, and the Dissenting minister, or preacher drinking tea together, and conversing with civility and good neighbourhood, like catholic Christians, and men of a catholic, and extensive charity.

In prosecution of my journey east, I went from hence to Canterbury; of which town and its antiquities so much has been said, and so accurately, that I need do no more than mention it by recapitulation. However I observe here.

1. That the first Christian bishop, if not the first Christian preacher, that ever came to England, (for I know not what to say to the story of Joseph of Arimathea, and his holy thorn at Glassenbury) landed in this country, and settled in this place; I mean St Augustin,15 sent over by Gregory, Bishop of Rome. This Gregory it seems was a true primitive Christian Bishop of Rome; not such as since are called so; long before they assumed the title of popes, or that usurped honour of Universal Bishop.

2. That, seven Bishops of Canterbury, from St Augustine, inclusive of himself, lie buried here in one vault.

3. That Thomas Becket, or Thomas a Becket, as some call him, archbishop of this see, and several archbishops before him, plagued, insulted, and tyrannized over the Kings of England, their sovereigns, in an unsufferable manner.

4. That the first of these, having made himself intolerable to King Henry II, by his obstinacy, pride and rebellion, was here murthered by the connivance, and as some say, by the express order of the king, and that they show his blood upon the pavement to this day.

5. That he was afterwards canonized, and his shrine made the greatest idol of the world; and they show the stone steps ascending to his shrine, worn away to a slope, by the knees of the pilgrims, and ignorant people who came thither to pray to him, and to desire him to pray for them.

I shall cover as much as possible the melancholy part of a story, which touches too sensibly, many, if not most of the great and flourishing families in England. Pity and matter of grief is it to think that families, by estate, able to appear in such a glorious posture as this, should ever be vulnerable by so mean a disaster as that of stock-jobbing. But the general infatuation of the day is a plea for it; so that men are not now blamed on that account. South-Sea was a general possession; and if my Lord Castlemain was wounded by that arrow shot in the dark, ’twas a misfortune. But ’tis so much a happiness, that it was not a mortal wound, as it was to some men, who once seemed as much out of the reach of it; and that blow, be it what it will, is not remembered for joy of the escape; for we see this noble family, by prudence and management rise out of all that cloud, if it may be allowed such a name, and shining in the same full lustre as before.

This cannot be said of some other families in this county, whose fine parks and new-built palaces are fallen under forfeitures and alienations by the misfortunes of the times, and by the ruin of their masters’ fortunes in that South-Sea deluge.

if you will suppose me to come there in the month of July, or thereabouts, you may think me to come in the middle of the season, when the town is full of company, and all disposed to mirth and pleasantry; for abating one unhappy stock jobbing year, when England took leave to act the frantic, for a little while; and when every body’s heads were turned with projects and stocks, I say, except this year, we see nothing of business in the whole conversation of Epsome. Even the men of business, who are really so when in London; whether it be at the Exchange, the Alley, or the Treasury-Offices, and the Court; yet here they look as if they had left all their London thoughts behind them, and had separated themselves to mirth and good company; as if they came hither to unbend the bow of the mind, and to give themselves a loose to their innocent pleasures; I say, innocent, for such they may enjoy here, and such any man may make his being here, if he pleases.

Here you have the compliment of the place, are entered into the list of the pleasant company, so you become a citizen of Epsome for that summer; and this costs you another shilling, or if you please, half a crown. Then you drink the waters, or walk about as if you did; dance with the ladies, though it be in your gown and slippers; have music and company of what kind you like, for every man may sort himself as he pleases; the grave with the grave, and the gay with the gay, the bright, and the wicked; all may be matched if they seek for it, and perhaps some of the last may be over-matched, if they are not upon their guard.

After the morning diversions are over, and every one are walked home to their lodgings, the town is perfectly quiet again; nothing is to be seen, the Green, the Great Room, the raffling-shops all are (as if it was a trading town on a holiday) shut up; there’s little stirring, except footmen, and maid servants, going to and fro of errands, and higglers and butchers, carrying provisions to people’s lodgings.

This takes up the town till dinner is over, and the company have reposed for two or three hours in the heat of the day; then the first thing you observe is, that the ladies come to the shady seats, at their doors, and to the benches in the groves, and covered walks; (of which, every house that can have them, is generally supplied with several). Here they refresh with cooling liquors, agreeable conversation, and innocent mirth.

Those that have coaches, or horses (as soon as the sun declines) take the air on the downs, and those that have not, content themselves with staying a little later, and when the air grows cool, and the sun low, they walk out under the shade of the hedges and trees, as they find it for their diversion. In the mean time, towards evening the bowling-green begins to fill, the music strikes up in the Great Room,and company draws together a-pace. And here they never fail of abundance of mirth, every night being a kind of ball; the gentlemen bowl, the ladies dance, others raffle, and some rattle; conversation is the general pleasure of the place, till it grows late, and then the company draws off; and, generally speaking, they are pretty well as to keeping good hours; so that by eleven a clock the dancing generally ends, and the day closes with good wishes, and appointments to meet the next morning at the Wells, or somewhere else.

>Saltash seems to be the ruins of a larger place, and we saw many houses as it were falling down, and I doubt not but the mice and rats have abandoned many more, as they say they will, when they are likely to fall; yet this town is governed by a mayor and alderman, has many privileges, sends members to Parliament, takes toll of all vessels that pass the river, and have the sole oyster fishing in the whole river, which is considerable. Mr Carew tells us a strange story of a dog in this town, of whom it was observed, that if they gave him any large bone, or piece of meat, he immediately went out of doors with it, and after having disappeared for some time, would return again, upon which after some time they watched him, when to their great surprise they found that the poor charitable creature carried what he so got to an old decrepit mastiff, which lay in a nest that he had made among the brakes a little way out of the town, and was blind; so that he could not help himself, and there this creature fed him. He adds, also, that on Sundays, or holidays, when he found they made good cheer in the house, where he lived, he would go out, and bring this old blind dog to the door, and feed him there till he had enough, and then go with him back to his habitation in the country again, and see him safe in. If this story is true, it is very remarkable indeed, and I thought it worth telling, because the author was a person, who they say might be credited.

A man might say of them, that they have the Indies at their door, and will not dip into the wealth of them; a gold mine at their door, and will not dig it. It is true, the reason is in part evident, namely, poverty; no money to build vessels, hire seamen, buy nets and materials for fishing, to cure the fish when it is catched, or to carry it to market when it is cured; and this discourages the mind, checks industry, and prevents all manner of application. People tell us, that slothfulness begets poverty, and it is true; but I must add too, that poverty makes slothfulness, and I doubt not, were two or three brisk merchants to settle at Kirkubry, who had stocks to furnish out ships and boats for these things, they would soon find the people as industrious, and as laborious as in other places; or, if they did not find them so, they would soon make them so, when they felt the benefit of it, tasted the sweet of it, had boats to fish, and merchants to buy it when brought in; when they found the money coming, they would soon work. But to bid men trade without money, labour without wages, catch fish to have them stink, when they had done, is all one as to bid them work without hands, or walk without feet; ’tis the poverty of the people makes them indolent.

However, to do the ladies of Yorkshire justice, I found they did not gain any great share of the just reproach which in some other places has been due to their sex; nor has there been so many young fortunes carried off here by half-pay men, as has been said to be in other towns, of merry fame, westward and southward.

>Should we go about here to give you an account of the religion of the people in this country, it would be an unpleasant work, and perhaps scarce seem to deserve credit; you would hardly believe that in a Christian island, as this is said to be, there should be people found who know so little of religion, or of the custom of Christians, as not to know a Sunday, or Sabbath, from a working day, or the worship of God from an ordinary meeting, for conversation. I do not affirm that it is so, and I shall say no more of it here, because I would not publish what it is to be hoped may in time find redress; but I cannot but say that his Majesty’s gift of 1,000*l*. annually to the Assembly of Scotland, for sending ministers and missionaries for the propagating Christian knowledge in the Highlands, is certainly one of the most needful charities that could have been thought of, worthy of a king, and well suited to that occasion; and if prudently applied, as there is reason to believe it will be, may in time break in upon this horrible ignorance, that has so far spread over this unhappy part of the country.

It is not so with all the people, they are not all stupid, and without any notions of commerce, navigation, shipping, fishing, &c…

>They had formerly a woollen manufacture here. But as the Union has, in some manner, suppressed those things in Scotland, the English supplying them fully, both better and cheaper; so they have more than an equivalent by an open trade to all the English plantations, and to England itself.

…and, though here is an extraordinary salmon fishing, the salmon come and offer themselves, and go again, and cannot obtain the privilege of being made useful to mankind for they take very few of them

If you homogenized all the reviews (still kept, somewhere, in a withered envelope), allowing for many grades of generosity and IQ, then the verdict on Aforethought was as follows: nobody understood it, or even finished it, but, equally, nobody was sure it was shit.

Richard published his second novel, Dreams Don't Mean Anything, in Britain but not in America. His third novel wasn't published anywhere. Neither was his fourth. Neither was his fifth. In those three brief sentences we adumbrate a Mahabharata of pain. He had plenty of offers for his sixth because, by that time, during a period of cretinous urges and lurches, he had started responding to the kind of advertisements that plainly came out with it and said, WE WILL PUBLISH YOUR BOOK and AUTHORS WANTED (or was it NEEDED?) BY LONDON PUBLISHER. Of course, these publishers, crying out for words on paper like pining dogs under a plangent moon, weren't regular publishers. You paid them, for example. And, perhaps more importantly, no one ever read you.

For an hour (it was the new system) he worked on his latest novel, deliberately but provisionally entitled Untitled. Richard Tull wasn't much of a hero. Yet there was something heroic about this early hour of flinching, flickering labor, the pencil sharpener, the Wite-Out, the vines outside the open window sallowing not with autumn but with nicotine. In the drawers of his desk or interleaved by now with the bills and summonses on the lower shelves on his bookcases, and even on the floor of the car (the terrible red Maestro), swilling around among the Ribena cartons and the dead tennis balls, lay other novels, all of them firmly entitled Unpublished. And stacked against him in the future, he knew, were yet further novels, successively entitled Unfinished, Unwritten, Unattempted, and, eventually, Unconcerned.

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women—and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses—will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men will say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams."

In the bathroom mirror, of course, he would be reduced to two dimensions, so the bathroom mirror was no place to go if what you wanted was depth. And he didn't want depth. By a certain age, everyone has the face they deserve. Like the eyes are the window to the soul. Good fun to say, good fun even to believe, when you're eighteen, when you're thirty-two.

Looking in the mirror now, on the morning of his fortieth birthday, Richard felt that no one deserved the face he had. No one in the history of the planet. There was nothing on the planet it was that bad to do. What happened? What have you done, man? His hair, scattered over his crown in assorted folds and clumps, looked as though it had just concluded a course of prolonged (and futile) chemotherapy. Then the eyes, each of them perched on its little blood-rimmed beer gut. If the eyes were the window to the soul, then the window was a windscreen, after a transcontinental drive; and his cough sounded like a wiper on the dry glass. These days he smoked and drank largely to solace himself for what drinking and smoking had done to him—but smoking and drinking had done a lot to him, so he drank and smoked a lot. He experimented, furthermore, with pretty well any other drug he could get his hands on. His teeth were all chipped pottery and prewar jet glue. At each given moment, whatever he was doing, at least two of his limbs were immovably numb. Up and down his body there were whispered rumors of pain. In fact, physically, at all times, he felt epiphanically tragic. His doctor had died four years ago ("Unfortunately I am terminally ill."); and that, in Richard's mature opinion, was definitely that. He had a large and lucent lump on the back of his neck. This he treated himself, by the following means: he kept his hair long to keep it hidden. If you went up to Richard Tull and told him he was in Denial, he would deny it. But not hotly.

So I am nineteen years old and don’t usually know what I’m doing, snap my thoughts out of the printed page, get my looks from other eyes, do not overtake dotards and cripples in the street for fear I will depress them with my agility, love watchin

So I am nineteen years old and don’t usually know what I’m doing, snap my thoughts out of the printed page, get my looks from other eyes, do not overtake dotards and cripples in the street for fear I will depress them with my agility, love watching children and animals at play but wouldn’t mind seeing a beggar kicked or a little girl run over because it’s all experience, dislike myself and sneer at a world less nice and less intelligent than me. I take it this is fairly routine?

Don’t I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Bayswater Road.

I am a novelist (proud to say so, and equally proud to admit that only one-tenth of one novel has seen the light of a bookstore) and operate under the belief that novels an

I am a novelist (proud to say so, and equally proud to admit that only one-tenth of one novel has seen the light of a bookstore) and operate under the belief that novels and people are ideally suited to each other. Reading a novel is all about the immersion of oneself in the comfortingly familiar incomprehensibility of life and living, in observant incomprehension, in the disorder and beauty of the houses that languages and minds build, in the disordered architecture of language itself
—Gary Amdahl, “Narrow Road to the Deep North”

“You are twice the man you think you are.”
—Gary Amdahl, “The Volunteer”

I said things like, “Had I only known...” but the truth was, well, I don’t know what the truth was.
—Gary Amdahl, “The Flight From California”

As Barry Hannah’s narrator says in the story “Carriba”: “Murder is not interesting, friends. Murder is vomit. You may attach a story to it but you are already dishonest to the faces of the dead.... I knew I had no place arranging this misery into entertainment, a little Hamlet for busybodies and ghouls. ...My whole professional life reared up in my mind. I was a hag and a parasite. I was to be grave and eloquent over their story. ...They were to get nothing. I was to get fame and good bucks, provided I was interesting. A great sick came on me.”

I went about perfecting the terrible beauty of the black tale—the writer of fiction assuming the pompous posture of truth-teller and coming more completely undone by the duplicity of it than he would have had he simply told lies […]

(e.g. “Dennis's mother left his father because there wasn't enough of him to go around”)

(“But certainly we had a friendship referring dangerously to sex and violence and little else. But what else is there?”)