The digital archaeology of Life Before Death & a leaking foreword from Shane MacGowan
In 1994 I published a small collection of my short stories in a Xeroxed pamphlet / chapbook / fanzine edition called Life Before Death. On the inside cover it said ‘Foreword by Shane MacGowan’ and it had a quote from him on the back. I had known Shane for some years, and my best mate Mo O’Hagan was playing rhythm guitar in his post-Pogues band, The Popes, at that time. We thought Life Before Death might get taken a bit more seriously if it had a mention of somebody famous on the back. We didn’t know anybody famous apart from Shane, so it had to be him.
Mo took me up to a grubby rehearsal studio just off the Caledonian Rd to meet Shane. Predictably, Shane couldn’t be arsed writing the foreword. Admittedly, it was pretty early in the afternoon, and he probably wasn’t long out of bed. Shane isn’t really a morning-type person. He couldn’t be arsed writing anything at that time of the day — but he did offer a few suggestions on what to say. Him and Mo came up with a few things that seemed to make sense. Except that they didn’t really make sense — since I was writing under a silly pseudonym (William H. Milk) and Shane had made reference to my real name. He was big on references to Irish mythology, and my real name, McCool, linked me right back to the legend of Finn McCool, the warrior.
However, I was more of a worrier than a warrior, and I wanted to remain anonymous, so that I could release my personal and painful stories, but still retain some distance. Shane said that he understood, but Mo still thought I was wrong to use a pen name.
The band were anxious to get on and rehearse, or maybe just anxious, so Shane told me to go ahead and write whatever I wanted for a foreword and it would be fine. I wasn’t happy with that. It didn’t seem right. So we cobbled something together and I read it back to him and he said, sure, sure, that’ll be fine.
I put the wee booklet together and it did quite well. I was immensely proud to see it in a prominent position in the window of Compendium Books in Camden Town. That, for me, was what success looked like. Getting your work in the shop front of ‘Britain’s pre-eminent radical bookstore’.
Thanks to the backing of Compendium’s Mike Hart, it sold well, and I even got a letter (this was pre-internet) from a bloke in America telling me that he liked the stories.
Great.
In the meantime, I had a family to raise and a living to earn. Mo and I took separate paths. He struggled on in the music business, and continued hanging out in Camden. When he passed on, we had not spoken for a while and I felt a painful and bitter loss.
For twenty-odd years I sorta forgot about Life Before Death until my wife Lida reminded me about it. Criticizing a recent piece I had written for New Philosopher magazine, she wondered why my characters had such a sour, cynical outlook in my recent stories. She wondered why I didn’t try again the softer realism I had used in Life Before Death with stories like ‘Those that were not long for this road’?
In a lunchbreak, I idly googled Life Before Death, and it floated up to the surface, with a copy for sale in a poetry bookshop in posh, literary, Hay-on-Wye. A real J.R. Hartley moment.
In a box carpeted with cockroach dung in our garage in Sydney, I managed to find a single battered and scribbled over copy. I flattened it out and got it onto a scanner. The printing was blurry and the pages creased. The OCR software which I used, struggled to make sense of it. Words from separate sections got mixed together.
It seemed to me that things were leaking out of the pages, particularly the foreword. When I read through the output, it began to make a lot more sense. Shane had always been big on Burroughs and the Beats and had turned me on to Ginsberg’s Howl. This digital cut-up treatment leaked meanings all over the text, mixing up the past with the technological present. The first line came out as:
Got can.com
Mall guru
Well, that was obvious. The first story was set in the Good Mixer, the pub next to Arlington House, the huge hostel in Camden for the homeless. Many of the homeless guys in the hostel lived on cans of Super Lager. There was even a book about them called Hide That Can. And in our own rhyming slang, me and Mo had called Carlsberg Special Brew, Metal Guru.
He hadn’t had a
bad pint
mince up his
Chriatmaa Dey.
Though then
He hed far too much
And had spent Boxing Day in bed,
buffering.
Spank gleanings
4r writing short eggs and barons
with a clear held. brain bright,
Hard-hitting plots
Concentrate
quiet end laptop
quiet be the auld fellah trod Arlington House.
with their papers
the tables in the back coops
Cooking up at the televisions
and then aging
as something about football
or the hordes was mentioned.
He the list exciting writer I have read in half
But I think I’ve said enough…
Milk’s stories spoil for themselves.
The stories weren’t entirely spoiled, they hadn’t gone sour. Apart from the foreword, which I carefully reconstructed, the other pages were more straightforward and just needed some checking and tidying. I put them back together and got them online. Under my own name, this time.
The Life Before Death stories live again.
See them at: http://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B01EZBDDCQ
And https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/662658 (FREE download, epub, mobi, pdf, etc)
Jim McCool’s latest story, ‘Just Another Day in Paradise’ can be seen in issue 12 of New Philosopher. See http://www.newphilosopher.com/
