When I first saw this term I thought it was some place he had visited during a holiday in Austria when he was young. But Langerhans was a German pathologist who described the islets, small groups of cells scattered through the pancreas.
Those translations he did from Baudelaire, Spleen, are all to do with diabetes: the sluggish slowing down of the bloodstream, turning green, thickening to bile.
IS:
You seem to have a taste for searching out these old men, the survivors? When you went to see Nicholas Moore were you, in any sense, nominating a father?
PR:
I hope not. There is a feeling that you like to relate to father generations; but you don’t know what you want, or expect, from them. If you’ve got parents like mine, who are non-intellectual, perhaps there’s a tendency to hunt around. On a personal level, I like helping old people. I enjoyed going to Nicholas Moore and picking up the things he dropped, reaching for things he couldn’t reach, trying to make some order out of the appalling chaos he’d got his manuscripts into.
We’d be talking about poems and he — suddenly — would think of one which he considered was very important, and we had to find it. So we’d start, turning things upside-down, moving piles of records and books, moving furniture, looking for one little thin piece of paper. Which nine times out of ten we didn’t find. Then it was time for me to go. He knew what colour the paper would be.
If anyone ever published a ‘Collected Works of Nicholas Moore’, a three-volume job, a thousand-odd pages, his real achievement would be lost in it. Nobody would be able to find it.
As, finally, nobody could find him. He didn’t relate to this locality in any sense. When he wrote about it, it was a dream image. It was an unreal world outside.
IS:
The reason he was there was the simple fact of the railway, conveniently connecting him to his city seed shop?
PR:
Yes, that’s why he was there. But it wasn’t a pleasant place. He had to put up with neighbours chucking stones through his window. The local kids looked on him as some kind of witch, because he was going round in a wheelchair, with his one leg. The house was obviously derelict, the windows coated in dust.
IS:
He never attempted to sell off his books? The obvious reflex for most writers?
PR:
No. Nobody wanted to read them, so why should anyone want to buy them? He’d got three or four copies of that very rare book of his, Recollections of the Gala, mint copies in a drawer; which he could have sold, even in those days, for £30 or £40 each. That’s not to mention all the signed presentation copies from Wallace Stevens.
He lost his correspondence with Stevens. That was one of the things he did realize was of some value. He was still hale and hearty, he’d just arrived in St Mary Cray. So, instead of letting them fall among the detritus, he carried the letters from Stevens around in his wallet. Unfortunately, his pocket was picked while he was browsing in a street market in London; and they were lost, never to surface again.
III
‘When your ghost comes to me, I will tell you
What it is that I now pursue…’
Nicholas Moore, ‘The Last Poem’
I had my testament, the evidence of the tape. But was it admissible? It could be replayed. (It had to be, endlessly, inch by inch; a finger-blistering chore.) It could be verified. (Always the same sounds, until the tape pulls loose on the cassette, called upon to perform once too often, this brown slick of dental floss. The miracle of the machine is finite. In my case, very.) And, yes, the version offered in this book has been abridged, with minor details corrected; obviously, I tried to focus on the elements useful to my theme. (I left out the side of near silence, when I pressed the buttons in the wrong order.) I was trying to discover how much the contemporary Cambridge poet felt that he was ready to accept the role of scapegoat, the condition of exile. If the culture at large refuses to imagine your existence, how strong is the impulse to spit in its eye? Or: do you stick modestly to your last and wait (to the death) for a tap at the window?
I always leave these meetings burdened with an obscure sense of guilt. Something to do with the ambivalence of dealing in books and failing to write them (and: writing them and failing to ‘deal’in them). Cambridge itself is the corporate manifestation of guilt, the brand leader, the architecture of guilt — corridors of the stuff; moulded, sprayed and cast. A memorial park themed in stalled art: morality tribunals programmed for one verdict. Guilty! Paragraphs by Henry James that can be unwrapped only in spasms of blushing shame.
The meeting happened, devoured its time, as I planned that it should. There is a colour photograph of Peter Riley, at the end of the table, side-on, half-turned to look down on the microphone, the silver weapon. The casual details accumulate: the wine bottle (drunk to an inch below the label), the bowl of oranges, low-fat spread, carton of fruit juice. Then; the pale-yellow door (its paintwork bubbling under the abrupt severity of the flash), the garden beyond, the slate-blue bookshed. It is possible, with care, to make out the titles of a few oversize volumes in the corner cabinet: A Pictorial History of Jazz, Antisuyo, Paris Imprévue. The focus is very slightly soft, but the occasion is there to be remembered. Parts of it are fixed.
Yet I was not quite satisfied. I had got no more than I set out to get. The taped interview, like its flashier television counterpart, necessarily gives you no more than you ask for. The answers are all implied in the questions. If the ‘subject’dares to break into some thicket of improvisatory parentheses, he has to be dragged back — kicking and screaming. Truth never did climb off the cutting-room floor.
My thesis had to take a more extreme form. Pain, madness, mutilation: all the showbiz shamanist tokens that would authenticate my quest. I put a photocopy of Nicholas Moore’s ‘Last Poem’ in my pocket and set out to follow the River Darent, from the Thames at Crayford Ness through Dartford Marshes, until it divided, to be rechristened as the Cray. I hoped to track the stream as it meandered south, between tumps of undifferentiated settlement and the open-field illusion of golf courses, hospital woods, cemeteries, and humiliated farms. At St Mary Cray I would identify Nicholas Moore’s house, and take the snapshot Peter Riley requested, as we stood talking on his doorstep.
I clung to the irrational belief that the third sequence of Moore’s final poem, the ‘lost’ coda, would deliver itself up to me in the course of my pilgrimage: and not, as Riley claimed, stay ‘stored as electrical connections’ in the dead poet’s brain. Irretrievable; ‘out with him’. Holding page sixty-one, the blank (expectant space) finish of Lacrimae Rerum, Moore’s posthumous selection, to the light reveals a reversed text; the editor’s ‘note’ coming through like a spirit message from the far side of the paper. It cannot be interpreted, but it offers a ruled garden on which the number (III) signifies the gap in which the poem could still resolve itself. A sinistral, mirror world in which the italicized word 
stands out.
In the second section of the ‘Last Poem’ (though addressed to the loved one, or Muse) there is a deliberate Hamlet-echo of pursuit, inheritance, chilclass="underline" the elongated boredom of unfulfilled death. And the cold. The words evaporate in the tall corridors of a skull-castle. A son’s father returns with questions, dripping earth: ventriloquist of self-inflicted guilt.