Piranesi(30)

There were two entries for James Ritter both in Journal no. 21: page 46 and page 122. The first one was titled: The disgrace of Laurence Arne-Sayles.

Arne-Sayles’s career, always controversial, ended abruptly in April 1997, when a woman employed to clean his house found something: a brown liquid that seemed to ooze out from beneath a wall in one of the rooms. The room was a bedroom and, according to Arne-Sayles, not used. But the cleaner could see that it was being used, hence her cleaning it. She sponged up the liquid. Then she smelt it. Urine and faeces. A little more liquid seeped out from under the wall. She pushed the wall, it gave slightly. She put her ear to it. Then she called the police. Behind the wall – the fake wall – the police found a room in which was a young man, very ill and entirely incoherent.

Arne-Sayles’s academic career was over. Following a trial (widely reported) he was sent to prison initially for three years; however, while in prison he was convicted of inciting other inmates to violence and riots. In the end he served four and a half years and was released in 2002.

Arne-Sayles did not testify at his trial and never offered any explanation as to why he’d imprisoned James Ritter.

I found this entry to be disappointing; there was very little information as to who poor James Ritter was. I turned to the second entry. This looked more promising.

Biography of James Ritter

Born 1967 in London. In his youth Ritter was very good-looking. He worked as a model, a waiter, a barman, an actor and occasionally as a prostitute. Throughout his adult life he suffered prolonged periods of mental illness. He was sectioned at least twice between 1987 and 1994, once in London, once in Wakefield. He was sometimes homeless.

After he was found behind the fake wall in Arne-Sayles’s house he was taken to hospital where he was treated for pneumonia, malnutrition, dehydration and bipolar disorder. The police tried to discover how long Arne-Sayles had kept him prisoner, but Ritter was incapable of giving any sort of coherent answer. So the police talked to people who knew him – drug addicts, social workers, people who ran hostels for the homeless. All that they (the police) were able to establish was that Ritter had been seen in and around Manchester in the early part of 1995, so it was possible – though by no means definite – that he had been imprisoned for as long as two years.

Ritter’s own story, as he gradually became able to tell it, served to make matters more obscure. He insisted that he had only been at Arne-Sayles’s house in Whalley Range for brief periods; most of the time he had been at a different house, a house that contained statues and where many of the rooms were flooded by the sea. Most of the time he appeared to think that he was still there. On several occasions while he was in hospital he became very agitated, saying that he needed to go back to the minotaurs because the minotaurs would have his dinner. Despite being put on medication to control his delusions, he continued to insist on this story of a house with a flooded basement and statues.

Quite what Arne-Sayles was trying to achieve by keeping Ritter prisoner is still a matter for debate. Two theories have been put forward.

The first is that Arne-Sayles brainwashed Ritter in order to lend credence to his claims that other worlds not only existed, but that he and other people had been there. Certainly, Ritter’s description of the house is similar to the vast, empty rooms in Sylvia D’Agostino’s film, The Castle; it is also similar to Arne-Sayles’s own description of the other world in the book he wrote in prison: The Labyrinth. (Of course, it is perfectly possible that Arne-Sayles simply elaborated on Ritter’s hallucinations.) But if that was Arne-Sayles’s aim – to manufacture evidence of another world – then why did he choose a man with a history of delusional illness as his witness?

The second theory was that the kidnapping had less to do with Arne-Sayles’s Other World theories than with his outré sexual tastes. (This was the line the prosecution took at the trial in October 1997.) But in that case why was Ritter babbling about houses with seas in the basement?

Angharad Scott attempted to interview Ritter for her biography of Arne-Sayles, but Ritter had taken offence that no one believed him about the house with the ocean imprisoned in it and he refused to speak to her. In 2010 a Guardian journalist – Lysander Weeks – tracked him down for a retrospective piece on the Arne-Sayles scandal. At this point Ritter was working as a caretaker for Manchester Town Hall. Weeks described him as calm, self-possessed, almost Zen-like. Ritter claimed to have been drug-free for a decade. Nevertheless the story he told Weeks was the same one he had told the police: that for about eighteen months between 1995 and 1997 he had inhabited a large house where the sea flooded the basement and sometimes rose up to the ground floor. Ritter said he had slept in a sort of white, translucent cave beneath the marble sweep of a great staircase. Ritter said that working at Manchester Town Hall was what had saved him; it too was a vast building with great rooms and statues and staircases. The resemblance to the other house – the one Arne-Sayles had taken him to – calmed him.

Journal entries on Sylvia D’Agostino and poor James Ritter: some initial thoughts

ENTRY FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST DAY OF THE EIGHTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS

The last entry on poor James Ritter was the one I found the most intriguing. It was just as full of nonsense words as the others, but the part about the Minotaurs was a clear reference to the First Vestibule. I also recognised Ritter’s description of the white, translucent cave beneath a Staircase. The First Vestibule contains just such a Staircase with just such a cave-like space beneath it. And it was in that cave-like space that I had found much of the rubbish that had so annoyed me. James Ritter was clearly the person who had eaten crisps and fish fingers in the First Vestibule. (This insight alone justifies my decision to continue reading my Journal!)