PARADISE REX PRESS, INC.

Introduction by China Miéville

In the published version of this novella the introduction was moved to the back and became an afterword. The reason was to better sustain the conceit to any readers that this was a book written by the fictional author Andrew Wilmingot, and only rediscovered by me. At this point I’ve talked about it enough that people know that isn’t the case, and I thought who better to sell this work than China, and who better to hopefully impress upon anybody stumbling here that it is, in fact, worth a read?

Liam Sharp’s acknowledgements

For Beardists everywhere, past and present.

For China Miéville. I know you don’t want thanks. Tough. This is for loving the project, and helping smooth the wrinkles born of my inexperience.

For Joe Barcham and Ali Pow3rs for their feedback, heart and enthusiasm.

For Jonathan Wallis and Derby Museum for access to various Beardist documents and artworks, and also for allowing us to print Wilmingot’s Juvenilia.

To Paul Wilkinson for the generous inclusion of Wilmingot’s last letter to Gladys Wilkinson.

To the Wilmingot/Wilson estate for allowing this publication to go ahead.

To Jeff Wilson for the priceless original copy of Paradise Rex Press, Inc. I shall treasure it always.

Finally, for Andrew Wilmingot who’s work inspired and dared me.

Andrew Wilmingot’s acknowledgements

For Mike, Gladys and Gerard.

ANDREW WILMINGOT’S

PARADISE REX PRESS, INC.

Liam Sharp

Dictionary: Beardism, n. Pure pseudo-psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, how history functions based on an (imagined) alternate past and the progression of industry. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason based on actuality (other than imagined actuality), outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation with the one proviso that the practitioner wear a beard.

Encyclopaedia: Beardism. Philosophy. Beardism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected alternate history, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought married to the progression of industry (industriosophy). It tends to the ruination of other pseudo-psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in the solving of all the principal problems of life through the act of wearing a beard and creating artworks.

Introduction by China Miéville

A man sickens. (The air round there'll do that to you.) Forced to do the job the stricken patient can't, his young son struggles for miles with boat and cargo. He steers and hauls, goes the distance. He unlocks locks. And while he’s gone, out beyond the penumbra of home, his father succumbs. The man dies. 'An' the poor lad's got to bring the narraboat all the way back to Deadby basin an' all!'

It seems an impossible task. But there is someone, there are someones, waiting for him. Unspeaking bowed-headed figures are at every lock on the return journey, on the child's fatherless way back. Keeping the gates open, closing them behind him. The taciturn kindness of it is overwhelming. Mythologized in the telling, that is the Midlands way right there, those are the ties, that the town-wide responsibility to the vulnerable.

But to where is it this unlocking leads? Leads back?

To Deadby.

The kindness is an ensnaring. How he had struggled, that orphan, orphan like the discombobulated hanging words skew-whiff on the page in the proofs pressed by the Paradise Rex Press, to leave. To rid himself of his load. But the dead observing dead quiet deadly serious not dead but deadening men (it is men) of Deadby usher him back. It turns out there's poignancy but little celebration in that return to the land where people are 'Strong in the Arm, thick in the 'ead'.

Parliament Jones, resentful artisan Hamlet, protagonist of Andrew Wilmingot’s extraordinary mooncalf masterpiece, is perspicacious enough to see his own, similar, entrapment by that enfolding town. He’s no less entrapped for seeing it. Surely, some might object, in such community is strength: Parliament’s very name seems an invocation of decisive collective wisdom. But the name is its own simultaneous mockery. '[N]o one will venture to reproach', Marx said, the English Parliament 'with being overdosed with genius'. This Parliament knows that to be the case about himself. Is insight into one's own drabness that drabness's antidote, or its telos?

Wilmingot's rendition of the local accent reads first as a bracing antidote to Metropole snobbery. This is clearly a local literature, a grassroots English avant-garde. Scandalously neglected now, Beardism was an aesthetic vindication of patronised, marginalised voices. But the accent keeps coming. The clipping out of letters, their replacement by a thicket of apostrophes, accurate and relentlessness, becomes eventually realistic and stylized, discomfiting, and, at last, a kind of performance.

'We used g' down t' Little Newton market and nick an apple or two. 'e al'as 'ad smokes off 'is dad, like, and we found a gap in t' shed wall round t' back o' t' Green man, so we'd crack open a few bottles an' get sozzled by t' river, me' be 'ave a dip too.'

These apostrophes celebrate beer, sentiment and the knowing of place. This could only have been written by a local. This is neither eulogy nor the top-down scorn of a southern snob: it is the insider rage of the Midlands Modernist.

Keep that barge moving, lad, Parliament Jones might well say, fervently projecting, desperate for the boy to avoid Orpheus’s mistake. Why the ruddy hell would you come back?

That boy's is not the only dead progenitor. Within these pages mothers die, fathers die. 'Who am I going to call Father now?' at last demands an intrusive textual function with no business intervening in the conversation it interrupts. Deadby is a thanatocracy. It is ruled with cloying traditionalism by dead parents. Of whom, of which, the deadest and rulingest, thinking but unthinkable, unstupid, unmalevolent but utterly terrible, is the parent of all of it. The parent of that whole town, the inkdust children and the wraith children. The parent birthing the dead that are all of us, Wilmingot's devil, awful spinning rebis, that baleful motherfather, the Oman.

The Oman tends the dead - oh you know, us - with poker-hot metal, with fingers of memory. What a horror such parenting is – but, ultimately, so quotidian a horror. Deadby is the nursery of all of us.

Who’d want to be a child? Is it any wonder the Beardists grew beards?

Beards, beard tales, bearding readers with urgent appeals, beard fiction, new beard. His heart, we hear of one man, was in his head. It was too big for his head. It oozed out, then, surely. It eructed, not by any means the only such eructation in these pages. And the froth of such out-oozing must enbeard him. For all its cantakerousness there is a heart, a hopeless hope to Beardism, a deep exasperated affection. The project, the ultimate Beardist aim, is to express that, to inflect it in a way not coterminous with nor reducible to the drab Deadby sanctimony.

‘Arboretum Rise’ is exemplary. There is in that poem no scorn, no Larkinesque patrician simper. Such impatient gentleness, long-suffering solidarity. And all because the poet wears a heartical beard! Like that of a medium drooling ectoplasm she won’t wash, that clogs into a beard that conducts the uncanny, an unkempt face-sigil of alterity and contact. All beards mean connection. They mean a grumpy love. The balance between grump and love oscillates.

'I think I'm meant to be somewhere', one character announces to another.

'It's a fate we all suffer.'

Well is that not the bleeding truth? Where it is we are supposed to be, however, no bugger quite knows, though insinuations abound, most clearly in Wilmingott's industriosophical manuscript.

'Time to find Hades and bargain a way out of here', he says.

It's not so much somewhere we're meant to be, then, as somewhere else. Anywhere but here. That's a dull enlightenment, to borrow a phrase. The everyday epiphany is experienced not in the mind but in the boots: the way out of the Deadland lies not in any shattering nor apotheosis, nor even in drudgery, but in trudgery. Trudging and bargaining might just get us out of here.

Surely not. Who’s this peddler of shabby Damascene moments to claim special wisdom? ‘Ashamed like’, he acknowledges slander: ‘I’m not in fairness bein’ bloody fair at all’. A confession of snobbery, that he traduces fellow locals for the purposes of scorn, and to big up his own vision; and with that comes the knowledge that the wraith-children of the Oman are just that: wraiths. They can only be shadows of the children of the town that is Derby, not, or, better, not only, Deadby. Wilmingot knows he does not deserve his beard if he will not do a little bit righter by them. So his awkward apology.

But even so, might it be so simple? Is that how to sneak away? Trudge, bargain, scuff your way out?

It seems too easy. But it works.

We know it works. Look: there's the result of it. The shepherd of this book. The local man, boy, man, who, swaddled by the parent in Parliament Jones but that's alright, snuck through the hedge. Is out here now. Drawing, yes, but, too, writing.

China Miéville 22 July 2011