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  Living within sight of the Berlin Wall, steeped in the atmosphere of what he called ‘the city on earth that has come closest to the core of the darkness, hearing the very beat of the devil’s wing’, Turner’s lifelong fascination with Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and the Second World War found endless stimulation. He took long, aimless walks through the city, at all times of day or night, overcome with visions of the enormity that had been perpetrated there mere decades ago. Reading deeply from the literature of the war, Turner developed what he described as a ‘merciless obsession’ with Hitler’s plan, devised during the height of the Third Reich’s reach and ambition, to convert the island of Ireland into the ‘granary of Europe’ following the final triumph of Nazism. Turner’s second book, The Garden, was the controversial fruit of this obsession.

  Coining the term ‘Nazi-pastoral’ to describe an almost aggressively uncategorisable work, critics were not quite sure how seriously to take its plotless, meticulously realised, deadpan portrait of an alternative, Nazified Ireland in which Hitler’s plan has come to pass. Written in a documentary style recalling sociological surveys and governmental reports, The Garden was, according to one critic, ‘either a joke in questionable taste, or the nostalgic, vindictive fantasy of a confused and lonely man, whose bitterness has bred a disingenuous sympathy for the Nazis and for Hitler’. Indeed, defenders of the book, who insisted it was an extended exercise in cautionary irony, foundered when they tried to explain away the all-too-convincing sincerity in Turner’s depictions of a bucolic Ireland run by communities of agrarian fascists, where cheery colleens Irish-dance around swastikas, and boys in the Hitler Youth of Ireland (whose honorary president is W. B. Yeats) are taught to hunt, cook and swim, whilst having their imaginations fed by Celtic and Nordic mythology, and receiving lessons in the rudiments of Darwinism and race theory.

  Thus far, sexuality had had a somewhat muted presence in Turner’s work. Turner himself appears to have always been at ease with his own homosexuality (or strong homosexual tendencies), even if he was reluctant to publicise it in the conservatively Catholic Ireland where he had come of age. In Berlin, however, Turner took full advantage of the city’s fierce permissiveness to explore this sexuality in a deeper way than had been possible hitherto. The discoveries he made in the course of these explorations, based on his writings subsequent to The Garden, were strange and disturbing, hinting at the darkest recesses of the Sadean imagination. ‘It was as if’, writes one of Turner’s most perceptive and sympathetic critics, ‘[he] came to view his sexuality, and beyond that, the broader configuration of his instinctual drives, as a kind of map or diagram in which he could discern, in microcosm, all the horrors and psychopathology – political, social, personal – of thetraumatic century into which he had been born.’4

  Abandoning the last vestiges of conventional narrative fiction, and taking as his new literary models Bataille,5 Sade and Burroughs, Turner ventured into murky, often questionable artistic territories. At the same time, and with equal conviction, he conducted countless nocturnal forays into Berlin’s transgressive, erotic underworld. His most grotesque or bizarre adventures found their way into the writings of this period – writings which convey the unholy, anarchic allure of the Berlin night, in pages crowded with masochistic dog-men, dungeon-crawling ‘spiritual abortions’, bald women draped in chains ‘with vaginas in their armpits and armpits in their vaginas’, weeping teenage prostitutes from the Soviet hinterlands, and mute rent-boys with pure and sorrowful visages.

  By this time, Turner had learned German well enough to hold a series of unglamorous jobs in Berlin (he was not making nearly enough from his writing to live on). He worked for a spell as a night-watchman on building sites on the fringes of the city. Then he got a job as a caterer on trains connecting West Berlin to various cities to the north. In one of his most difficult passages, Turner writes of the strange happiness he experienced in this job, peering out the windows at ‘the silent dream of passing German landscape, a sublimely dreary post-industrial idyll whose every inch sang of holocaust – of the holocaust already passed and the holocausts to come, for all infinity, an eternal recurrence of this most perfect human exaltation and nightmare, the ecstatic vision of an engineered hell . . . And then I would interrupt my window-gazing reveries and, suffused with a world-embracing love like that described by the mystics, serve Coca-Cola, orange juice and ham sandwiches to beautiful German children and their waddling parents.’6

  It is at this point that a heavier fog descends on the biographical trail; fact, fiction and hallucination become impossible to separate. Most of what follows cannot be verified as factual truth, having been pieced together from Turner’s perilous later writings and the sparse accounts of those who knew him at the time. It is entirely possible that most of what is here recounted bears no relation to events that took place in external reality. However, it is the author’s belief that what follows is, at least, an approximation of the reality that pertained within the troubled psyche of Killian Turner in the period leading to the autumn of 1985. The only events which undoubtedly did take place are those of Turner’s disappearance and the subsequent investigation; the rest must be considered either metaphor or speculation.

  In November or December of 1984, Turner agreed to collaborate on an industrial-noise track with a musician friend, Heinrich Mannheim, who he knew through the S/M underworld. Mannheim’s band, Sublime Ascent, was at the extreme end of the thriving noise-music scene in Berlin in the eighties. They took their cue from bands like Whitehouse, whose aesthetic of extreme violence and sexual cruelty Mannheim considered the only cultural form immune to assimilation by the capitalist-consumer system. Sublime Ascent are reported to have incorporated images and video footage of war atrocities, executions and torture into their infrequent live shows. It has even been rumoured that, in one extremely secretive performance in a disused governmental premises on the fringes of either Frankfurt or Dresden, the band improvised a set to the prolonged, ritualistic killing of a consenting and ecstatic male, hands bound and on his knees, a series of cuts made on his naked torso.

  The tapes said to have resulted from the collaboration between Sublime Ascent and Killian Turner have become the holy grail of Turner aficionados. On the recordings, Turner is thought to have read from a collage made up of his own texts and those of Georges Bataille, possibly spliced with certain passages from Sade and Nietzsche, and transcripts of the commentary from the 1982 World Cup. He read over a sprawling sound-texture that lurched between extreme noise and eerie, dark-ambient sonic wasteland, performed live by Sublime Ascent. Present at the recording was a forty-something man with long, greying hair and a bushy, black moustache who was never to be seen without his wraparound sunglasses, his overall appearance suggesting a somewhat seedier Carlos Santana. This was the figure Turner would refer to in his writings sometimes as Frank Lonely, but more often as Mother D. After watching the recording session whilst drinking several cups of herbal tea, Frank Lonely/Mother D remarked that he admired the text which Turner had read, or at least what he had understood of it (his English was imperfect), and thought he had recognised certain phrases from Georges Bataille. When the day’s recording was finished, the two men went out for a drink and ended up talking long into the night – about art, music, love and politics. Turner eventually stumbled back to his Friedrichshain apartment as a murky dawn broke over Berlin, rarely in his life having laughed or enjoyed himself so much.

  The diaries Turner kept in the months immediately preceding his disappearance detail his intense, at times all-consuming friendship with Mother D. The two men shared a love for Bataille, for underground American rock bands like Suicide and Big Black, and, bizarrely, for most varieties of animated film, but especially those produced by the Disney corporation. Turner and Mother D would spend their weekends visiting cinemas all over the city, watching Bambi, The Jungle Book, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and whatever other feature-length cartoons they could find (they appear to have had no intere
st in shorter fare, such as animated TV series). ‘In the presence of Mother D I re-embody the child I never truly was,’ wrote Turner, ‘which in turn prepares me, spiritually if not fizzically [sic] for what is to come, i.e. the great radiance/the crossing/the sacred blah-blah-blah.’7

  It was towards the end of July that Mother D introduced Turner to a friend and ex-lover of his named Anashka. Turner was instantly enthralled. Indeed, Anashka seems to have been a formidable figure, of no great beauty, perhaps, but with intense erotic allure. Born to a Russian mother in exile from the Soviet Union, and an Italian anarchist father, Anashka always wore a black beret and tight black jeans, though the rest of her apparel varied wildly. ‘The beret and jeans were the frame,’ wrote Turner. ‘The rest was the whirring reel . . . of a film I could watch for ever.’ Anashka was twenty-nine and co-ran a gallery and performance space in Lichtenberg. She was also an artist who used the medium of dance, often augmented with vitriolic spoken-word outbursts and even, when the chemistry of a performance demanded it, physical assaults on her audience. One night she performed to an audience consisting solely of Turner, inan apartment borrowed from a friend who was visiting Poland. Turner was transfixed by the dance, which consisted for the most part of Anashka standing deathly still, wincing very occasionally, and emitting long, alarming shrieks even more infrequently. After almost three hours, Anashka collapsed to the floor and announced that the performance had concluded. Turner thanked her and asked her what the piece was called. Anashka thought about this for quite some time, before replying, Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald. Turner and Anashka then made love on the floor of the apartment – an experience which astonished Turner. He was to write at length about this incident on several occasions, as if trying to coax out its core meaning by approaching it from multiple angles. ‘I cannot say’, he concluded, ‘whether the carnal fusion with Anashka was the greatest bliss of my life . . . or the deepest horror.’

  The day after Anashka’s performance, Mother D told Turner of an abandoned house in the countryside just outside Berlin, in the shadow of an Autobahn flyover. For months, he and Anashka had been talking about taking over the house and turning it into some kind of art space or music studio. Though nothing came of this intention, Mother D did drive Turner out to the house one unusually cold afternoon in early September. For Turner, whose mental state was most likely entering a stage of extreme deterioration, visiting the house was an experience of near-religious intensity. He had the sense of being in a place that existed outside of time, a primal, sacred and abyssal site, a ‘portal on to infinity’, where ‘good and evil are one, are nothing’. While it is not clear whether Turner continued to visit the house after Mother D had revealed its location to him, his writing immediately became fixated on the image of a dilapidated house, unoccupied, on the fringes of a vast post-industrial city. In what has become unofficially known as the House Sequence, written in a frenzy of productivity throughout that September, the structure is described as having cracked walls and smashed windows, and is overrun with weeds, yet radiates an intense, unearthly beauty. Across a broody strip of wasteland from the house, the broad, silent Autobahn soars indifferently past, ‘like mighty Quetzalcoatl’. In the opening variations of the sequence, the house stands serenely abandoned, crumbling and unwitnessed. Later, as the sequence gathers ‘a kind of entropic momentum’,8 Turner begins to introduce human presences into the scene. One, two or, at most, three figures appear, always in the middle of the afternoon. They enter the house through the side or back door, which creaks on its hinges, and walk silently through the dilapidation. Various images occur and dissolve: a couple mutedly make love on the dusty floor; a man hangs a painting on a cracked, bare wall and gazes at it for hours, tears running down his face (we never see what the picture represents); a solitary woman, clearly modelled on Anashka, enters a bedroom and lies on the damp floorboards where a bed might once have been. She lies there for a long time, gazing at the ceiling. She begins to masturbate, but stops before reaching orgasm. Darkness falls and still the woman has not moved. Suddenly we see her as a skeleton.

  In the penultimate variation in the sequence, the house is the setting of a suicide. On a melancholy afternoon in autumn, a woman and a naked man watch in silence as a second man slits his wrists in the overgrown back garden. His body slumps to the ground and the man and woman stare at it for a long time (the moon rises, falls; the sun rises, falls). Then they leave. Finally, in what is both the termination of the House Sequence and the last of Killian Turner’s known writings, a man arrives at the house, alone, holding a pile of photographs. He spends the night walking from room to room, weeping occasionally. In each room he stops and looks at some of the photographs, sometimes letting one fall to the floor, or placing one on a mantelpiece or windowsill. Very early in the morning, he leaves the house, gets into a red car which he has parked nearby, and drives away. The car merges with the Autobahn that soars out and away from the city, towards an unknowable horizon.

  The House Sequence was posted to Turner’s publishers in mid-October. Near the end of that month, Killian Turner was reported as missing by his landlord. His rent had been due for three weeks. His apartment bore no suggestion that Turner had fled – the cupboard was reasonably well-stocked and his personal belongings had not been removed. The West Berlin authorities interviewed acquaintances of Turner, along with residents of his apartment block. No one could say where he had gone, nor did they know of any friends or family of Turner’s who might be contacted in Ireland. After an examination of the diaries and notebooks found in his apartment, efforts were made to trace the individuals referred to as Mother D/Frank Lonely and Anashka. However, none of Turner’s acquaintances were able to identify either of these from the descriptions given by the authorities. It appears that those involved in investigating Turner’s disappearance reached the conclusion that neither Mother D nor Anashka really existed. Eventually, when several months had passed and nothing came up in the case, Killian Turner was officially declared a missing person by the West German authorities, and the whole affair was quickly forgotten.

  Today, Killian Turner is remembered and read by but a few scattered devotees to the literature of collapse. Perhaps this is a fitting destiny for the man who declared, in a typically self-consuming aphorism, ‘It is not enough to court extinction; our aspiration is never to have been.’

  1 For instance: ‘Why should it be that, in an age of burgeoning communication technologies which render geographical space increasingly insignificant, a writer, or any artist, must continue to be categorised primarily in reference to his national peers and forebears? It is obvious to me that . . . writers should henceforth be categorised according to affinities of style, areas of enquiry and formal concerns, rather than by the comparatively inexpressive fact of their birth-proximity to other writers.’ (Erased Horizons, Forgotten Shores: Essays 1975–1982, Sacrum Press, Dublin).

  2 Turner’s gradual shedding of his national identity undoubtedly had a stimulating effect on the development of his art. Shorn of the parochial concerns which predominate in the work of many Irish writers of his generation, Turner was freed to soar far from the homeland, towards universal or exotic themes. In a famous essay, Jorge Luis Borges expresses frustration at Argentinian authors’ unreflecting attachment to place in their work; seeing themselves primarily as Argentinian writers, they crowd their stories with local colour and content that caters to the literary sightseer and tourist. Yet why, asks Borges, should an Argentinian writer not eschew the constraining tropes of locational realism, and take as his subject the universe itself? Just as Borges met his own challenge, revolutionising the short story by engineering sublimely playful, metaphysical mysteries and ingenious hoax-narratives, so too did Killian Turner explode prejudices about what ‘Irish literature’ was allowed to do, grappling as he did with ideas of reckless scope and ambition: time, infinity, chaos, Nazism, nuclear war, sex, evil and language itself (conceived, via Burroughs, as a relentless viral weapon, of origin
foul but obscure).

  3 At twenty-four he published his first short story, in a Trinity College journal. ‘Father Coward’ is the confessional monologue of a north Dublin priest who secretly harbours heretical notions concerning the true, chilling significance of the visions at Fatima.

  4 Thomas Duddy, ‘Bludgeoning the Muse – the Transgressive Anti-Fiction of Killian Turner’, Review of Contemporary Literature, Issue 68, June 2002.

  5 For a period, Turner even seems to have entertained the belief that he himself was the reincarnation of Bataille: ‘Not figuratively, but in the full meaning of spirit recast, power enfleshed . . . There are nights when, woken by the howl of a junkie down in Boxhagener Strasse or the rattle of a late U-Bahn train, I walk to the darkened mirror, and from it peer the radiant, saintly eyes of Georges Bataille.’ (Visions of Cosmic Squalor/The Upheaval, Anti-Matter, London.) However, as Bataille lived until 1962, and was therefore Turner’s contemporary for fourteen years, it is difficult to understand how Turner even considered holding this eccentric notion.

  6 Admittedly, while all of the late Turner is challenging, some of the fragmentary work of his final years, especially certain of the pieces collected in Visions of Cosmic Squalor/The Upheaval, can only be described as unhinged. And yet, even the most aberrant of his work has a quality of dazzling entertainment. Consider the sprawling, unfinished essay, worked on during the early eighties and unpublished at the time of his disappearance, in which Turner asserts that Joyce’s final novel, the monstrous Finnegans Wake, is nothing less than a coded transmission intended to trigger the apocalypse. According to Turner (and this has been ridiculed by the few scholars who have bothered to address the issue at all), while Joyce was living in Trieste, he was contacted by a sinister group of Cabbalistic Jews who, given impetus by the events of the First World War, were promulgating an eschatological doctrine in which language itself figured as a kind of super-weapon, radiating metaphysical contaminants through the media of literature, radio and cinema. Joyce, writes Turner, most likely considered the conspiring Cabbalists as nothing more than a picturesque nuisance. However, he goes on, the Cabbalists submitted an unwitting Joyce to a refined form of hypnotism, implanting him with the apocalyptic codes, syntactic rhythms and linguistic motifs which their ancient studies had revealed to them as the ammunition of cosmic disarray – and which, according to Turner, were to surface, unbeknownst to Joyce, across the expansive tapestry of his most mystifying novel.