The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction 9781350011687, 9781350011717, 9781350011700

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The 1960s A Decade of Modern British Fiction

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Titles in The Decades Series The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Philip Tew, James Riley and Melanie Seddon The 1970s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Nick Hubble, John McLeod and Philip Tew The 1980s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Philip Tew, Emily Horton and Leigh Wilson The 1990s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Nick Hubble, Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble and Leigh Wilson Forthcoming The 1950s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble

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The 1960s A Decade of Modern British Fiction Edited by Philip Tew, James Riley and Melanie Seddon

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC 1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Copyright © Philip Tew, James Riley, Melanie Seddon and Contributors, 2018 Philip Tew, James Riley and Melanie Seddon have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN : HB : 978-1-350-01168-7 ePDF : 978-1-350-01170-0 eBook: 978-1-350-01169-4 Series: The Decades Series Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents List of Figures Series Editors’ Preface Acknowledgements Contributors

Surfing the Sixties: Critical Introduction Philip Tew, James Riley and Melanie Seddon 1

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Our Troubled Youth: A Literary History of the 1960s Melanie Seddon

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The Housewife and the Single Girl as Archetypes in Satirical Novels of the 1960s Joseph Darlington

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British Women’s Fiction of the 1960s Tracy Hargreaves

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Certain Circles: Gay Fiction and Cultural Attitudes of the 1960s Yvonne Salmon

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Ways of Staying, Ways of Saying: From Black Writing in Britain to Black British Writing Graham K. Riach

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The 1960s Existential Fiction of John Fowles Michelle Phillips Buchberger

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Experimental British Fiction of the Sixties: Five Meta-modern Novelists Philip Tew

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Inner Space Odyssey: Suburban Spacemen and the Cults of Catastrophe James Reich

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Terminal Data: J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock and the Fiction of the Decade’s End James Riley

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5 6 7 8 9

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Timeline of Works Timeline of National Events Timeline of International Events Biographies of Writers Index

Contents 285 289 295 301 311

List of Figures 1.1 1.2

Clearing a Bombsite, E13, 1961 – John Claridge Up to No Good, E1, 1963 – John Claridge

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Series Editors’ Preface Nick Hubble, Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson

The series began with a focus on Contemporary British fiction published from 1970 to the present, an expanding area of academic interest, becoming a major area of academic study in the last twenty-five years and attracting a seemingly ever-increasing global scholarship. However, the very speed of the growth of research in this field has perhaps precluded any really nuanced analysis of its key defining terms and has restricted consideration of its chronological development. This series addresses such issues in an informative and structured manner through a set of extended contributions combining wide-reaching survey work with in-depth research-led analysis. Naturally, many older British academics assume at least some personal knowledge in charting this field, drawing on their own life experience, but increasingly many such coordinates represent the distant past of pre-birth or childhood not only for students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, but also younger academics. Given that most people’s memories of their first five to ten years are vague and localized, an academic born in the early to mid-1980s will only have real first-hand knowledge of less than half these forty-plus years, while a member of the current generation of new undergraduates, born in the very late-1990s, will have no adult experience of the period at all. The apparently self-evident nature of this chronological, experiential reality disguises the rather complex challenges it poses to any assessment of the contemporary (or of the past in terms of precursory periods). Therefore, the aim of these volumes, which include timelines and biographical information on the writers covered, is to provide the contextual framework that is now necessary for the study of the British fiction of these four decades and beyond. Each of the volumes in this Decades Series emerged from a series of workshops hosted by the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW ) located in the now vanished School of Arts at Brunel University London, UK . These events assembled specially invited teams of leading internationally recognized scholars in the field, together with emergent younger figures, in order that they might together examine critically the periodization of initially contemporary British viii

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fiction (which overall chronology was later expanded by adding previous decades as precursory fields of fiction-writing) by dividing it into its four constituent decades: the 1970s symposium was held on 12 March 2010; the 1980s on 7 July 2010; the 1990s on 3 December 2010; and the 2000s on 1 April 2011. Subsequent seminars expanding the series included the 1960s on 18 March 2015 and the 1950s on 22 April 2015. During workshops draft papers were offered and discussed, and ideas exchanged, ensuring both continuity and also fruitful interaction (including productive dissonances) between authors of what would become chapters of volumes that hopefully exceed the sum of their parts. The division of the series by decade could be charged with being too obvious and therefore rather too contentious. In the latter camp, no doubt, would be Ferdinand Mount, who in a 2006 article for the London Review of Books concerned primarily with the 1950s, ‘The Doctrine of Unripe Time’, complained ‘When did decaditis first strike? When did people begin to think that slicing the past up into periods of ten years was a useful thing to do?’ However, he does admit still that such characterization has long been associated with aesthetic production and its relationship to a larger sense of the times. In The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction – published in 1967 during the period covered by this volume – Frank Kermode argued so influentially that divisions of time, like novels, are ways of making meaning. And clearly both can also shape our comprehension of an ideological and aesthetic period that seem to co-exist, but are perhaps not necessarily coterminous in their dominant inflections. The scholars involved in our BCCW symposia discussed the potential arbitrariness of all periodizations (which at times is reflected by contributors by extending the parameters of the decade under scrutiny), but nevertheless acknowledged the importance of such divisions, their experiential resonances and symbolic possibilities. They analysed the decades in question in terms of not only leading figures, the cultural zeitgeist and socio-historical perspectives, but also in the context of the changing configuration of Britishness within larger, shifting global processes. The volume participants also reconsidered the effects and meaning of headline events and cultural shifts such as the miners’ strike of 1984–85, the collapse of communism, Blairism and Cool Britannia, 9/11 and 7/7, to name only a very few. Perhaps ironically to prove the point about the possibilities inherent in such an approach, in his LRB article Mount concedes that ‘For the historian. . . if the 1950s are famous for anything, it is for being dull’, adding a comment on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affluence’. Hence, even for Mount, a decade may still possess certain unifying qualities, those shaping and shaped by its overriding cultural mood.

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After the various symposia had taken place at Brunel, guided by the editors of the particular volumes, the individuals dispersed and wrote up their papers into full-length chapters (generally 10,000–12,000 words), revised in the light of other papers, the workshop discussions and subsequent further research. These chapters form the core of the book series, which, therefore, may be seen as the result of a collaborative research project bringing together initially twenty-four academics from Britain, Europe and North America. Two further seminars and volumes have added scholars to this ongoing project, which will consider critically modernist and postmodernist periods of literary output and the emergent successor to both, achieved by both by covering subsequent decades as they complete their course and also by featuring precursory decades, extending the focus of study backwards in time to cover the British fiction of both the modern and post-war periods. Each volume shares a common structure. Following a critical introduction shaped by research, the first chapter of each volume addresses the ‘Literary History of the Decade’ by offering an overview of the key writers, themes, issues and debates, including such factors as emergent literary practices, deaths, prizes, controversies, key developments, movements and best-sellers. The next two chapters are themed around topics that have been specially chosen for each decade, and which also relate to themes of the preceding and succeeding decades, enabling detailed readings of key texts to emerge in full historical and theoretical context. The tone and context having been set in this way, the remaining chapters fill out a complex but comprehensible picture of each decade. A ‘Colonial/ Postcolonial/Ethnic Voices’ chapter addresses the ongoing experience and legacy of Britain’s Empire and the rise of a new globalization, which is arguably the most significant long-term influence on contemporary British writing. Generally a literary historical context will feature in at least one other chapter, which is potentially concerned not just with historical novels but the construction of the past in general, and thus the later volumes will be considering constructions of the earlier decades so that a complex multi-layered account of the historicity of the contemporary will emerge over the series. A chapter on ‘Experimental Writing’ highlights the interaction between the socio-cultural contexts, established in earlier chapters, and aesthetic concerns, and another will focus on women’s writing and that particular gendered form of voice, perception and written response to both literary impulses and historical eventfulness. Various other chapters with a variety of focuses are added according to the dynamics and literary compulsions of each particular decade, which may feature international

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contexts or a specific sub-genre of the novel form, for instance. Each decade is different, but common threads are seen to emerge. In the future it is planned that the Decades Series will offer additional volumes, in effect reconnecting Contemporary British Fiction with its modernist precursors, linking both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through a detailed and forensic examination of its literary fiction.

Works cited Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Mount, Ferdinand. ‘The Doctrine of Unripe Time.’ London Review of Books. 28(22) 16 November 2006: 28–30, www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n22/ferdinand-mount/the-doctrineof-unripe-time.

Acknowledgements We wish to thank variously: all the contributors to this volume; David Avital, our ever supportive Bloomsbury editor; the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing, for funding the original gathering of contributors; Brunel University London Library (especially for its online resources); John and Janet Claridge; the Decades series editors, Nick Hubble, Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson; Larry Goodall (for sending an e-copy of an Ann Quin letter); Merv Honeywood and other proof-readers at RefineCatch Ltd for going beyond the call of duty; and last but proverbially not least, all the editorial and production staff at Bloomsbury.

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Contributors Michelle Phillips Buchberger teaches Integrative Studies, English and Film at Miami University, Ohio. Her doctorate on John Fowles, submitted to Brunel University London in 2009, was awarded a Vice-Chancellor’s Prize for Research Excellence. Her other research interests include post-Second World War British fiction, philosophy of film, and interdisciplinarity. Recent publications include ‘The Film that Almost Was – John Fowles’ “The Black Thumb” and his Collaboration with David Tringham’ (Framework 57 (2), Autumn 2016) and ‘Avoiding the “Dead Thing Decorated.” Neoplatonism and Daniel Martin’ in Plotinus and the Moving Image: Neoplatonism and Film Theory (Brill, 2017). Joseph Darlington is Programme Leader for the BA (Hons) Digital Animation with Illustration at Futureworks Media School. He completed his PhD on British experimental novelists in 2014 and was awarded a Harry Ransom Centre Fellowship for research on Christine Brooke-Rose. He has published papers in journals including the Journal of Modern Literature and Comedy Studies. He coedits BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal and is currently editing a special edition of ICS entitled ‘Work and Play’. Tracy Hargreaves is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the School of English, University of Leeds. Co-editor, with Alice Ferrebe, of a special edition of the Yearbook of English Studies, Literature of the 1950s and 1960s, she has published on mid-twentieth-century literature, television, and film censorship. She is currently working on a study of intimate and ordinary life in literature, film and television from 1945–1968. James Reich is Chair of Creative Writing and Literature at Santa Fe University of Art and Design, New Mexico, USA . He is the author of the novels Soft Invasions (2018), Mistah Kurtz! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness (2016), Bombshell (2013), and I, Judas (2011). He has published critical work on J.G. Ballard for Deep Ends: The J.G. Ballard Anthology (2015, 2016), introduced Barry N. Malzberg’s Beyond Apollo (2015), and numerous articles on the intersections of psychoanalysis,

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poststructuralism, and cultural theory. He is the founder and publishing editor of Stalking Horse Press, New Mexico. Graham K. Riach is a Departmental Lecturer in World Literature at the University of Oxford. While working on a book – Short Change: Writing and Politics in the Post-Apartheid Short Story – he is developing two other projects: Worldly Forms: Postcolonial Aesthetics and Global Narratives of Ageing. His research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, world literature, genre and form, and aesthetics. James Riley is a Fellow and College Lecturer in English Literature at Girton College, Cambridge. He works on modern and contemporary literature, film and counterculture. Recent publications involve a multi-volume collection on the film and literature of the 1960s. His next book will be Playback Hex, a study of William Burroughs and the tape recorder. James is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He writes about his research and other matters at the blog Residual Noise. Yvonne Salmon is a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, whose teaching and research extend across a various faculties including English, Art History, Law and Land Economy. An affiliated member of the Centre for Film and Screen, she chairs the Cambridge University Counterculture Research Group and directs the Alchemical Landscape project hosted at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH ). A fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Royal Geographical Society and Royal Anthropological Institute, her research includes literature, counterculture, law, photography and film. Her work has been published by Getty, Cambridge University Press, Intersentia and the BFI , among others. Melanie Seddon specializes in British post-war literature and culture, in which area she recently completed her doctorate. Until recently based at the Centre for Studies in Literature at the University of Portsmouth as a lecturer in twentiethcentury literature, she has published articles and papers on B.S. Johnson and Maureen Duffy and has interests in auto-fiction, spatial and affect theory. An independent researcher, Seddon is co-editor of BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal and currently works in academic publishing. Philip Tew is Professor in English (Post-1900 Literature) at Brunel University London. His publications include: B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading (Manchester

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UP, 2001) and The Contemporary British Novel (Continuum, 2004; rev. second ed. 2007). He is founding Director of both the B.S. Johnson Society and Hillingdon Literary Festival. Recent books included: Zadie Smith (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); with Nick Hubble Ageing, Narrative and Identity: New Qualitative Social Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and with Jonathan Coe and Julia Jordan Well Done God!: Selected Prose and Drama of B.S. Johnson (Picador, 2013). Tew’s recent research has been concerned with and social narrative.

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Surfing the Sixties: Critical Introduction Philip Tew, James Riley and Melanie Seddon

Conflicts and change On 24 August 1962 Scottish author Alexander Trocchi addressed Edinburgh’s McEwan Hall as part of the five-day Edinburgh Festival Writers’ Conference. Previous panels had considered matters of style, nationalism, censorship and commitment. As Angela Bartie and Eleanor Bell report in ‘1962 International Writers’ Conference, Edinburgh: An Edited History’ (2012), the final panel on 24 August addressed ‘The Novel and the Future’. Trocchi, author of Young Adam (1954) and Cain’s Book (1960) responded directly and without apology: the novel had no future. An artefact of the nineteenth century, when the form had entered the twentieth ‘the most vital writers and painters’ began to consider it limiting rather than a ‘source of inspiration’. For the art of fiction to continue, argued Trocchi, it must change direction. A possible future might be found in the ‘fantastic anarchic disorder of modern art and the anti-novel’. Needless to say, Trocchi’s statements drew comment from the rest of the panel. Stephen Spender remarked that Trocchi was merely recapitulating the general precepts of modernism, in his view, a model from which the novel had been attempting to recover since 1920. Rayner Heppenstall obliquely questioned the modernity of writing that could constitute the ‘anti-novel’. With a nod to both Cain’s Book and the work of fellow delegate William Burroughs, he added that ‘the junkie sex novel’ already ‘belongs to the past’.1 During the ‘Scottish Writing Today’ panel on 21 August Trocchi had generated a spirited, if not actively hostile, discussion on nationalism. According to Allan Campbell and Tim Niel in Alexander Trocchi: A Life in Pieces (1997) Trocchi claimed that Scottish literature was rife with provincialism. Squaring up to poet, communist and Scottish Nationalist Hugh MacDiarmid, Trocchi described it as ‘stale porridge [. . .] Bible class nonsense’ (154). Comparable claims had been 1

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made elsewhere during the panel that contemporary literature was required to be international in scope. Trocchi, however, had embellished his position with something of a personal attack on MacDiarmid, calling him (with ‘respect’) an ‘old fossil’ (154) as James Campbell relates in Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark (2008), MacDairmid’s later response was to brand Trocchi ‘cosmopolitan scum’ (199). More than the thrust of Trocchi’s arguments, his arrogant tone generated antagonisms. Trocchi asserted: ‘Of what is interesting in the last twenty years or so of Scottish writing, I myself have written it all’ (199), a bold claim in 1962 for an author with only two published works, both generally unavailable in Britain. The Writers’ Conference attracted a wide spectrum of authors ranging from Muriel Spark to Lawrence Durrell. However, Trocchi and the above exchanges have come to emblematize the proceedings, in part, due to their easily extrapolated symbolic value. While the minutiae of the debates set the immediate agenda for correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement and Encounter, including a letter by Stephen Spender in the latter, the spectacle of Trocchi neatly crystallizes some of the conflicts that have come to characterize the decade as a whole. The tussles he generated mirror the wider ebb and flow of such conflicts as modernity against tradition; experimentation against conservatism (or the status quo); an outlook of futurist internationalism against the preserve of national heritage and, more broadly, the perception of an antipathy between the (seemingly) young and their (apparent) elders. Such time-honoured binaries gained a degree of systemic, disciplinary and institutional ubiquity in the 1960s. This volume does not aspire to offer a comprehensive historical guide to fiction of the 1960s, rather a critically informed analysis of that decade’s British fiction, considering key major currents, thematic clusters, generic variations, ideological concerns, historical issues and the cultural milieu. This critical introduction attempts to surf through the decade – not so much like the surfing over the ocean waves, popularized by groups based on America’s west coast such as the Beach Boys, more as one currently surfs the internet, moving between and linking information drawn from a range of sources – and in so doing it will present key contexts and interconnections relevant to the subsequent chapters. Perhaps arguably one year in particular marks a change in mood, both politically and culturally, with the start of the so-called ‘British invasion’ of America by popular music groups from Britain, beginning with the Beatles in February in 1964, followed by their tour commencing in August. Change was a characteristic of much political ambition within Harold Wilson’s Labour government elected in March 1964 in the aftermath of the Profumo Affair which ran from March to

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September 1963 (and the Denning Report). The associated focus on sex, sleaze, decadence and corruption in high places decimated support for the previous Conservative administration, even after the patrician former peer, Sir Alex Douglas-Home, succeeded Harold Macmillan on 19 October 1963 after renouncing his peerage. Three weeks later he entered the House of Commons as a Member of Parliament after his 12 November by-election victory. Labour’s new Education Secretary, Tony Crosland, as later reported by his wife, Susan, planned sweeping and some thought destructive changes to the secondary education system. Circular 10/65 (and subsequent directives) ordered local authorities to introduce comprehensive (mixed ability) schools, threatening financial restrictions for non-compliance. According to Susan’s biography, Crosland promised, ‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England and Wales, and in Northern Ireland’ (148). Ironically, in a retrospective study published in 2004 Fernando Galindo-Rueda and Anna Vignoles use statistical analysis to suggest such change was not as anticipated, since ‘Our results indicate that the most able pupils in the selective school system did do somewhat better than those of similar ability in mixed ability school systems’ (27), and they add ‘that the shift to comprehensivization may have compressed the distribution of education achievement, by reducing the performance of the most able students relative to the performance of the rest’ (28). Perhaps because of such breaches with the past, rejecting traditional values, cultural memory consistently casts the 1960s in a position of selfcontained exceptionalism. In Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism (1998), Julie Stephens cites the oft-made distinction between the ‘1960s’ as a distinct historical period and ‘The Sixties’ as a more amorphous cultural moment (18). Either way, its status as a ‘magic’ decade – one that shook the world; invented sex; opened the doors of perception and produced popular music that has never been subsequently bettered – is a seductive but nonetheless hagiographic construction of the era’s material, social and political complexity. For historians such as Dominic Sandbrook, writing in Never Had It So Good (2005) and White Heat (2006), this image works as a departure point from where he charts the ‘popular’ – if not ‘provincial’ – experience of the 1960s, which is typically excised from metropolitan descriptions of ‘The Sixties’. That said, Britain’s progression though the decade was marked by its continuing, nationwide attempts to adapt to the challenges and opportunities of a re-configured postwar landscape. At the start rationing remained a very recent memory, bombsites still punctuated London streets and, as George Charlesworth notes in A History of British Motorways (1984), the country’s nascent motorway network covered a

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mere 76 miles. However, within a few years infrastructural development had increased exponentially and urban planning had moved increasingly towards utopian dimensions. Such transformation is typified by Birmingham’s Bull Ring Market development between 1961 and 1964, and similar projects aimed at enhancing city-life, shopping habits and the range of consumer goods available. In each case a commodified ‘modernity’ was proffered as the motor and goal of change, yet arguably its underlying dynamic force was what Christopher Booker describes as a late 1950s ‘property boom which had been unleashed in London by the relaxation of building and rent controls, [and which was by the 1960s] accelerating by leaps and bounds’ (133). As the debates at the Writers’ Conference evidence, the early 1960s saw the concept of ‘the modern’ emerge as a key facet of political, cultural and national identity. Yet clearly, opposition existed. However much the visionary car parks of J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) may have voiced the unconscious hopes of Britain’s concrete and steel, this wave of construction was also seen as the ‘ravaging wind’ (142) in his The Wind from Nowhere (1961), a force that leaves ‘Thousands of inverted buildings’ in its wake (142). John Barr made the point clear with his study Derelict Britain (1969), which equated modernization with excessive industrial pollution, the loss of regional specificity and the destruction of architectural history. In Angus Wilson’s novel Late Call (1964) the novel’s central character, the aging Sylvia Calvert, reflects on her son’s street and home where she is a lodger: ‘it all seemed strangely like the other parts of Carshall that she’d seen on previous visits [. . .]’ (70); its uniformity not perhaps entirely catastrophic but this portrayal of the fictional Midlands new town similarly connects the progressivism of post-war architecture with a distinct sense of dislocation, until Sylvia immerses herself in the strange new atmosphere and is rewarded with an apparently renewed lease of life. Trocchi may have read the turn of Wilson’s plot as an appropriate analogue to his own pronouncements on the novel form. Experimentation is not terroristic in its handling of the past but is instead necessary for the continued functionality of any given form. This was something of a party line for Trocchi’s publisher John Calder, one of the key organizers of the Writers’ Conference. His regular TLS advertisements presented Calder and Boyars as champions of the European avant-garde. As is evidenced by The Nouveau Roman Reader (1986), which Calder edited with John Fletcher, his publishing stable was mainly associated with Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Marguerite Duras. According to the advertisement Calder placed in the TLS on 3 September 1964, such writers ‘were trying to depict the reality of our time in a language capable of portraying

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the anxieties and despair of the human condition’ (797); their stylistic approach was able to ‘convey poetic truth’ (797). While Calder valued Britain’s ‘traditional’ writers, he felt its contemporary material fell ‘drastically behind in those branches of literature that aspire to be considered as art’ (797). However, in favouring this ‘continental list’, Calder was not abandoning Britain for more exotic climes, rather seeking a way to prompt ‘a revival of the English novel’ (797). In addition to Trocchi he found this impetus in a crop of ‘younger writers’ that included Ann Quin, Alan Burns, Elspeth Davie, Aidan Higgins, R.C. Kenedy and David Mercer (797). Fiction was ideally placed in the 1960s to register the decade’s ongoing process of transition. A case in point: the 1960 obscenity trial that greeted Penguin’s decision to publish an unexpurgated edition of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). This episode has been extensively offered as the symbolic gateway into the apparent sexual revolution of the 1960s. As Alistair McCleery notes in ‘Late News from the Provinces’ (2013): For the cultural historian, the lifting of the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover marks a boundary between the repressive 1950s and the liberated 1960s, an instance of the ‘immense freeing or unbinding of social energies’ that Fredric Jameson argued to be characteristic of the latter decade. The ‘end of the Chatterley ban’, in this reading, represents a new Zeitgeist in the UK – with swinging London at its centre. (136)

In terms of censorship, Penguin’s victory was certainly a watershed moment.2 One might trace the influence of Chatterley’s public resurgence on subsequent literary representations of sex and sexuality such as Alexis Lykiard’s The Summer Ghosts (1964).3 However, the issue at the heart of the trial was not the representation of sex but its material context: Penguin’s proposition to issue the volume as a paperback. To adapt Judge John Mervyn Guthrie Griffith-Jones’ comment as recorded in C.H. Rolph’s The Trial of Lady Chatterley (1961), in such a format it was possible that one’s ‘wives and servants’ might read the novel (17).4 Although not an invention of the 1960s the paperback extended its market reach during the decade, effectively dissolving the commercial boundaries between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ fiction. Its rising popularity was celebrated in the title of The Beatles’ eleventh single ‘Paperback Writer’ (1966), discussed below. As Ben Mercer has described in ‘The Paperback Revolution: Masscirculation Books and the Cultural Origins of 1968’ (2011), the mass market paperback was sold not just in bookshops but also kiosks, supermarkets, railway stations and newsagents (616). The combination of original titles, copious

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reprints and the shift from ‘a demand-led book economy to a supply-led one’ fed into ‘debates about the democratization of knowledge and the impact of “mass culture” ’ (615). Seen in this light, novels such as Len Deighton’s The IPCRESS File (1962) acquire a double significance. A bestseller when originally published, Deighton’s thriller significantly re-calibrated the figure of the spy. Since 1955 Ian Fleming had established the public school educated, officer class James Bond as a further iteration of the ‘gentleman’ adventurer.5 By contrast, Deighton’s unnamed narrator is a lower-middle class worker within the largely clerical, informatic world of British Intelligence. Peppered with references to working hours, paperwork, pay-rises and the specifics of shopping at Soho delis, Deighton accurately renders the work culture of Britain’s white-collar economy. While Fleming’s writing was escapist Deighton’s fiction offered a degree of reality (or at least realism), as regards Britain’s post-war administrative class. And, according to Christopher Booker, in such fiction ‘no one’s identity was certain [. . .]’ (186), reflecting shifting socio-cultural and historical dynamics. Brian Baker makes a more specific point when considering food and consumption in the novel. With reference to former food-writer Deighton’s parallel text the Action Cook Book (1965), Baker frames the narrator of The IPCRESS File as a figure of conspicuous consumption. His connoisseurship, highlighted by way of a grocery list that includes ‘black bread, coffee beans or ground coffee, French sausages, and aubergines’ (40) speaks of both affluence and aspiration. In this respect he is representative of the consummate ‘bachelor’: an unmarried, metropolitan male in possession of a ‘generous disposable income’ (42). Particular care was taken to target this bracket as a readership. As Tom Dyckhoff has argued,Raymond Hawkey’s‘simple,close-cropped,photographically based’ cover design became ‘a template for all airport novels.’6 Composed with the elegance of a magazine layout, Hawkey’s gun, coffee cup, paperclip arrangement is extremely illustrative of the novel’s content. It speaks of a certain ease of consumption and a thematic combination of action and familiarity, exactly the kind of novel one might wish to read to pass the time of a long journey. Although somewhat derogatory, the idea of The IPCRESS File as an ‘airport novel’ also highlights its status as a very particular commodity, one bought and read by those with the necessary income to travel by air, whether for business or as part of the booming 1960s tourist economy. The IPCRESS File is precisely the kind of book Deighton’s unnamed protagonist would buy and read when travelling to Germany in Funeral in Berlin (1964) and Finland in Billion Dollar Brain (1966).

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The crucial point is that 1960s British fiction is not merely reflective of its context at the level of its themes and representational strategies. Rather, it is also materially and economically indexical of the shifts that have come to characterize the decade’s historiography. As such, reading the decade by way of its fiction permits an understanding of the decade’s imaginative life and the complex of forces that shaped its cultural production. A two-way street rather than a mirror, the fiction of the 1960s is inspired by, comments upon and informs its surrounding context.

Building classlessness Following the release of The Beatles’ ‘Paperback Writer’, a number of authors were suggested as the model for the eponymous writer.7 In interviews, however, Paul McCartney described the ‘archetypal’ Penguin paperbacks as his general point of inspiration.8 The song has often been read as an experimental bridge point between the albums Rubber Soul (1965) and Revolver (1966). But beyond this sonic ambition, its theme and form place it at the intersection of two key lines of popular cultural production: the international singles market and the expanding market of mass publishing. Apposite since it was the growth of such markets and their economic buoyancy that supported the meteoric rise of The Beatles during the decade. Indeed, ‘Beatlemania’ and subsequently what was called ‘the British Invasion’ were closely linked to the increasing Anglo-American economic power of 1960s youth, a culmination of demographic post-war shifts. Initially this was a process almost entirely motivated by a flow of cultural capital seeking to be commodified in what was the world’s largest marketplace. As Ian MacDonald reflects concerning The Beatles’ revolutionising of the recording studio [. . .]. The only significant aspect of pop The Beatles failed to change was the business itself. Acquiring possibly the only honest manager in Britain at the time (certainly the only one to vote Labour) they nevertheless ended their career together on the timehonoured killing-field of the contractual dispute. (25)

A common language and heritage helped the Brit newcomers in their conquest. The lifestyle aspects associated with this wave of populism would intensify a few years later, much of it still monetized in more subtle ways than record sales. It is easy to synthesize this new musical and cultural presence with the subsequent emergence of the hippies with the Summer of Love in 1967, ‘freak’ or ‘head’

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The 1960s

culture and psychedelia, and conclude that the 1960s were shaped and defined by youth culture.9 Surely it played its part, but as Arthur Marwick indicates in ‘Introduction: Locating Key Texts Amid the Distinctive Landscape of the Sixties’: ‘There is much prima facie evidence that, for good or ill, there were important movements of change in the sixties [. . .]. [T]he working class, women, provincials, young people, blacks, became visible as never before’ (xii). However, as Mark Donnelly cautions in Sixties Britain: Culture, Society and Politics (2005): [W]hile ‘classlessness’ and a weakening of traditional deference were undoubtedly features of a period that saw all forms of authority questioned, there was no fundamental redistribution of income and wealth across social classes – despite six years of Labour government – nor was there a shift of power away from the sources of authority that were known collectively as the ‘Establishment.’ (xiv)

Those controlling the media often belonged to this small elite; that people felt free and rebellious was perhaps of little consequence while such disparities prevailed. In a structural sense the lives of millions were untouched by such supposedly radical cultural dynamics. When Nell Dunn published Talking to Women (1965), working-class Battersea resident Kathy Collier, a 26-year-old working in a butter factory, reflects of money: ‘I think while you’ve got it, spend it. You haven’t got it tomorrow’ (29). Collier’s words recall those of Viv Nicholson, who after winning over £300,000 on the Littlewoods football pools in 1961 famously declared to the press that she was going to ‘spend, spend, spend.’10 In contrast to this excess though, Collier’s underlying worries about trying to make do on what’s available are self-evident. And as middle-class Catholic and early proponent of Pop Art, Pauline Boty, reminds Dunn of their life in central London: ‘[W]e live in a society which is much more classless than any other society in England’ (9).11 Although Boty championed London as a locus of social levelling, she had personally encountered opposition and prejudice when endeavouring to pursue her ambitions in the capital. A talented painter, Boty had been discouraged, in 1958, from applying for a place in the department of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art and directed instead to the more ‘female-friendly’ school of stained glass in the same institution. By the time Boty had finished her studies in the early 1960s, the Royal College of Art was projecting a more progressive image to the outside world, in the form of its striking new premises which were opened in 1963. Directly facing the Albert Hall, the building stood as a reinforced concrete anomaly among the Georgian terraces and Victorian splendour of

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Kensington. Inside this hallowed institution, however, everyday practicalities still revealed attitudes from an earlier age: the architects of the project, the RCA’s own H.T. Cadbury-Brown, Sir Hugh Casson and Robert Gooden, had felt it to be unnecessary to provide women’s lavatories in the otherwise well-appointed staff room. Although her graduation pre-dated the move to the new imposing building, Boty’s name had already become linked to the debate surrounding post-war urban architecture. During her first term at the RCA she joined a protest group named Anti-Ugly Action that campaigned against, what they felt to be, the unimaginative and ill-considered re-development of the local environment. The activities of the Anti-Uglies received considerable media coverage and public comment and Boty became a poster-girl for the student protest group, a figurehead of a moment in which, John Betjeman commented, ‘art is coming into its own again after the worship of science and economics.’ In the 1960s, he proclaimed, ‘what is more important, the art of architecture is at last coming in for the public notice it deserves’ (cited by Baker, 23). Unfortunately, Boty’s artistic output had been somewhat side-lined by her efforts to educate the public in architectural style. In 1957 one of her paintings had been exhibited at the Young Contemporaries exhibition alongside the work of Robyn Denny, Richard Smith and Bridget Riley. Building on this exposure, in November 1961 she shared equal billing in the exhibition ‘Blake, Boty, Porter, Reeve’ at the AIA gallery at 15 Lisle Street in London’s China Town, a show that has since come to be considered as the first British ‘Pop Art’ show. It was Peter Blake, however, whose name would become attached to the development of this style in Britain, partly thanks to his high-profile album cover artwork and subsequent connections to popular figures such as The Beatles. Equally importantly, early in his career, Blake was promoted by the ICA , which had been developing a ‘trans-cultural exchange’ between the American and British art worlds as the 1950s drew to an end. The institute acted as a cultural barometer for the two nations and in 1958 alone the works of William de Kooning, Yves Klein, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still were brought to London and members of the ICA s circle, such as William Turnbull and John McHale, travelled to the States to represent British cultural life. Subsequently, Blake’s work was chosen by the institute in 1960 to herald the coming of a new, conceptually-based decade of British Art in the well-received show, ‘Theo Crosby, Sculpture. Peter Blake, Objects. John Latham, Libraries’. The exhibition launched Blake into the international arena bringing artistic acclaim that Boty, at that time, had not yet received. The positioning of modern and contemporary art at the centre of British cultural life was among the founding principles of the ICA ,12 which prided itself

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The 1960s

on curating what Robert Melville described as ‘works of our time that are on the crest of change’ (102). This proved no small task – in 1946 Britain remained a deeply conservative country, but from 1959 to 1969 the ICA steadily hosted performance artist Jean Tinguely, the fourth conference of International Situationism, poetry readings by Michael Horovitz, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and Alan Brownjohn, lectures by Desmond Morris,13 Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan, and exhibitions by David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg among many others. By the end of the decade, through reciprocal projects such as these, the institute had become an indispensable hub for spontaneous gatherings of informal, inter-disciplinary cells and cutting-edge artistic expression. One key coterie was the Independent Group,14 described by David Robbins (6) as ‘an emerging generation of artists, architects and critics [who] grew critical of the prevailing domesticated, water-downed version of modernism’. These cells were practise-based and solution-focused and in the case of the Independent Group, devoted to the examination of modern living through an aesthetic lens. The group featured architects Alison and Peter Smithson – key figures in both the field of post-war architecture and the wider context of 1950s cultural life, organizing exhibitions and symposia at the ICA and other London galleries. With Eduardo Paolozzi they curated the ‘Parallel of Art and Life’ exhibition in 1952 and ‘This Is Tomorrow’ in 1956, both significant moments in the development of the British pop art movement.15 The married architects, the Smithsons, came to prominence in their twenties through their prize-winning design for Hunstanton Secondary Modern School in Norfolk, the Economist building in central London and the Robin Hood Gardens housing complex in Poplar, East London. From 1953 founding members of Team 10, the Smithsons defined themselves as New Brutalists, a term they coined in 1953. Reyner Banham in The Architectural Review in December 1955 cited the Smithsons’ school as a key example, outlining key characteristics: first formal legibility of plan; second they clearly exhibited their structure; thirdly, materials selected and prized for their inherent qualities ‘as found’, creating physical objects that refuted concealment or adornment. He enthused: ‘One can see what Hunstanton is made of, and how it works, and there is not another thing to see except the play of spaces’ (22). Such bold construction resulted in buildings that ‘should be an immediately apprehensible visual entity, [. . .] the form grasped by the eye should be confirmed by the experience of the building in use’ (25). Although a stark, somewhat Spartan aesthetic, New Brutalism became fashionable in subsequent years, combining material structure, social

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function and visual form, blending interior and exterior as well as mental spaces in citizens’ routine use of the building. The Smithsons were commissioned to produce in 1956 the ‘House of the Future’ at the Daily Mail-sponsored Ideal Home Exhibition at Kensington Olympia Hall. Utilizing plastic to create a ‘space-age’ environment, their work was much admired as reflecting and capturing the changing times in Britain. B.S. Johnson in his ‘Review of New Brutalism’ reflected that ‘New Brutalism is about the only movement in any art form this century initiated and developed by the British which has achieved international acceptance.’ The house was a simulation, holes cut into windowless walls to expose the interior. In her 1956 piece, ‘Unbreathable Air’, Beatriz Colomina comments that this represented ‘both a house on exhibit and an exhibitionist house, a peep show’ (39). Unsurprisingly experimental writers such as Johnson were attracted to New Brutalism and matters of contemporary architecture more generally. Similarly, the framing of New Brutalism as an ‘art form’ is indicative of the close intersection between creative and infrastructural thinking during the 1960s. Take a parallel example, the overt futurism of the Archigram group (exemplified in their ‘Living City’ exhibition at the ICA in 1963), envisaging a utopian world of complicit machine living and infinite material resources.16 Largely hypothetical, their images of interconnected pod dwellings and ‘instant’ balloon-dropped cities owed more to experimentalism in graphic design than to innovation in town planning. Ballard moved in a comparable direction with the stories that made up his 1971 collection, Vermillion Sands. The last story, ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ (1962) imagines a ‘psychotropic’ (205) house, able to respond to the moods of its inhabitants. Within this system, traumatic events experienced by previous occupants are ‘recorded’ by the structure and re-played to the current residents by way of an intense structural disturbance, a rippling ‘grand mal’ seizure (205). Ballard’s conceit is horrific, yet his vision of an augmented architecture draws together interior and exterior spaces. As with the ‘House of the Future’, Ballard’s ‘forgotten spaceships’ (186), the domiciles at the futurological Vermillion Sands resort, pertain not just to the provision of shelter but to the expansion of the mind. As well as comparable aesthetic interests it could be surmised that the formal experiments offered by the Smithsons and Archigram, as well as those performed in the literary test beds of Ballard and Johnson, demonstrated a shared interest in exploring human subjectivity in situ, whether that be the space of the home or the space of the page. In contrast to this speculative, imagined architecture, the seductive secrets of everyday urban living were more mundane. The Parker Morris Committee of

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The 1960s

1961, tasked with investigating living conditions in British public housing, concluded there was much room for improvement. The resulting ‘design bulletin’ led to Parker Morris Standards, stipulating spatial requirements for all housing in New Towns and from 1969 all council housing.17 During the war, approximately 4 million homes were destroyed and Churchill’s coalition government addressed the shortfall in housing stock by building prefabricated houses, planned to last up to 10 years. Even with 156,622 temporary ‘prefabs’, the country faced an acute housing shortage, with waiting lists soaring in urban areas. The New Towns Act (1946) relocated citizens away from poor or bombed-out housing, resuming the mission of pre-war ‘overspill’ estates and earlier garden cities.18 A second wave of New Town development saw the development of Skelmesdale, Lancashire in October 1961, swiftly followed by the arrival of Telford (1963), Redditch (1964), Runcorn (1964) and Washington in Tyne and Wear (1964). Such was their success a third wave of New Towns followed towards the end of the decade, the most famous Milton Keynes, established in January 1967. Although each wave addressed the same pressing issue, the New Towns remit developed over time; first, a high provision of social housing and later various housing to attract urban migrants from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Their location was along the rapidly developing infrastructure of the nation, these towns becoming ideal bases for both manufacturing and residents commuting into metropolitan centres. While the New Towns and suburban development permitted the extension of existing towns and settlements over a larger area, in the cities, space remained at a premium, with new, speedy solutions required. In the late 1960s, the Smithsons won the contract to develop a substantial bomb site at the intersection of three major motorways in East London. Robin Hood Gardens incorporated the Smithsons’ creative vision, articulated in ‘The Ordinary and Banal’ in 1964: ‘that the architecture of the next step is in pursuit of the ordinary and banal does not mean that it has lost sight of its objective. Ordinariness and banality are the artsource of the new-situation.’ In the Smithsons on Housing made for the BBC in 1970 by writer B.S. Johnson, Peter Smithson explained their rationale behind this design: ‘It is a model, an exemplar of a new mode of urban organization [. . .] When it is finished you will be able to smell, feel and experience the new life that is being offered through your full range of senses.’ The interlocking maisonettes were spacious, the imposing residential blocks abutted a large shared green space with playing areas, while two huge reinforced concrete walls acted as sound barriers against the roar of the Blackwall Tunnel. Most strikingly, the Smithsons designed the maisonettes along concrete ‘streets in the

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sky’: these wide brutalist walkways simulacra of the residential streets of the East End obliterated by the Blitz and slum clearance, which spaces for Alison Smithson boasted ‘an inherent feeling of safety and social bond’ (98). Such masshousing projects aspired to an organic social unfolding in such utopian space. For local authorities, the pared-back aesthetic delivered speedy and cheap solutions to a social housing time-bomb, but were distrusted.19 Outcomes proved disappointing, and as Peter Smithson later reflected on BBC Radio 4, ‘walking on the walkways is not a pleasure’, adding, ‘the week it opened, people would come in and shit in the lifts, which is an act of social aggression.’ The Smithsons’ lofty aesthetic ideals had unwittingly encouraged chaos, the liminal space of their ‘streets in the sky’ emerging as sites of unregulated transgression and deviation.

Rebellion, reform and literary responses Despite his clear tone of anger and regret, Peter Smithson’s observations might be recast into a very different context. Such wilful social aggression, scatology, corporeality, damage, destruction, unregulated transgression and deviation evokes a performance by the Vienna Actionists, or any number of confrontational avant-garde projects that proliferated in the 1960s. In Vienna Actionism: Art and Upheaval in 1960s Vienna (2012) Eva Badura-Triska describes the loose, collaborative group (principally Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler) as artists who [. . .] established the body as a site of exploration, and its blood, sweat and excrement as art material: performance as the transgression of both social and religious taboo, and art itself as a violent, tragic recognition of brute fact. (i)

For the artist and writer Jeff Nuttall, work produced by the Destruction in Art Symposium, The Destructivists, Fluxus and the Panic Movement, and his own People Show, worked within such an aesthetic as a means of reflecting and diagnosing a cultural climate of pervasive violence. Nuttall’s perspective, outlined in his book Bomb Culture (1968) was informed by a looming sense of total, global destruction. In this regard Nuttall was reflecting a prevalent social anxiety. As the decade began, the Cold War and Mutually-Assured-Destruction (MAD ) dominated much thinking, both public and private. However, despite the potency of the Aldermaston marches between 1958 and 1965, the gravitas of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 16–28 October 1962 and the stark reality of films such as Peter

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The 1960s

Watkins’ The War Game (1965), Bomb Culture can be read as something of a downer alongside contemporaneous ‘countercultural’ publications such as Pete Roche’s Love Love Love (1967) and Michael Horovitz’s Children of Albion (1969). To celebrate the beginnings of a new, post-war community was one thing but to define that community as catastrophic was quite another. Although reasonable in its analysis, Nuttall may have seen himself in R.D. Laing’s observation in The Divided Self (1960) regarding the prevailing, more widespread, albeit perhaps transitional culture of the West as the 1960s began: ‘A man who prefers to be dead rather than Red is normal. A man who says he has lost his soul is mad’ (11–12). Bomb Culture was essentially up against the contemporaneously prevalent image of the 1960s as Swinging, a label conveying an ideology of youth, and potential revolution. Even amid the post-war decline of Empire, London could imagine itself the centre of the world, its music, fashion and radical sexual mores pervading the global consciousness. So-called ‘free love’ seemingly determined new relationships, or at least ones considered ‘liberated’. The idea of London as a ‘Swinging’ city emerged from a Time magazine cover feature of April 1966. With its focus on the likes of the Robert Fraser Gallery, Carnaby Street and nightclubs including the Ad Lib and The Scotch of St. James, the article was essentially a map of the city’s elite, affluent centre a world as alien to most Londoners as it would have been to Time’s American readership. The initial chapter in this volume, ‘Our Troubled Youth: A Literary History of the 1960s’ by Melanie Seddon, challenges cultural memories of the decade which focus on youth, fame and success by looking first at the origins of the decade in the 1940s and 1950s, with its legislative framework enabling the abandonment of National Service in 1963, educational reform of schools and universities. Seddon charts the demotic trend in fiction allowing a depiction of harsher realities contained variously in: the autofictions by writers such as B.S. Johnson and Maureen Duffy and associated writers; concerns regarding National Service raised in writing by Andrew Sinclair and David Lodge; school-focused fiction by E.R. Braithwaite, Edward Blishen and Johnson; together with fictional explorations into what were often still the paralyzing effects of class and sex (33 ) in novels by Margaret Drabble, Duffy, Nell Dunn, Shena Mackay, David Storey and Raymond Williams. Seddon’s chapter charts the dynamics of the lives of the younger generations facing a variety of social expectations, the impact of which allow both self-scrutiny, resistance and adaptation to such social forces, particularly in terms of class and gender. The second chapter, Joseph Darlington’s ‘The Housewife and the Single Girl as Archetypes in Satirical Novels of the 1960s’, considers and contextualizes writing of the period reflective of gender, and in particular the greater autonomy and freedom

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gained by women through the prism of both archetypes initially in Eva Figes’ Equinox (1966) and Anthony Burgess’ One Hand Clapping (1961), and subsequently the critical reception of a work from the previous decade, Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958), a drama initially intended as a novel. This chapter explores texts with a ‘liberalization of sexual attitudes at their core’ (see page 60), and also analyses in detail Christine Brooke-Rose’s The Middlemen (1961), Margaret Forster’s Georgy Girl (1965), Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (1965), Carol Burns’ The Narcissist (1967), and Muriel Spark’s The Public Image (1968), all being examples of the changing perspectives of younger women writers toward motherhood and their offspring, while exploring the negative impact and in doing so satirizing more traditional attitudes. Tracy Hargreaves’ third chapter also focuses on gender and details how a raft of new women writers – Edna O’Brien, A.S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Nell Dunn, Margaret Forster, Fay Weldon, Kamala Markandaya, Angela Carter, Ann Quin, Eva Figes, Attia Hosain, P.D. James and Jennifer Dawson – together with more established figures – Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Penelope Mortimer, Brigid Brophy, Christine Brooke-Rose, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Taylor – defined and interrogated a transitional present marked by a growing sense of self-awareness and changing social mores. Hargreaves reconsiders the directions taken by such women, the cultural and ideological meaning of being a woman writer, and also explores how such writers, ‘Between them, in essasys, interviews, and in their fiction’ used their writing to provide ‘different entry points for considering the diversity of British women’s fiction in the decade [. . .]’ (see pages 81–82). She demonstrates how these writers interrogated these dynamics from various oppositional, gendered literary perspectives, examining the minutiae of such oppressive practices and the personal and psychic struggles against them. In the fourth chapter, ‘Certain Circles: Gay Fiction and Cultural Attitudes of the 1960s’, Yvonne Salmon considers various texts written in the aftermath of the recommendations of Lord John Wolfenden’s Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (1957), which observed that homosexuality was not a disease nor should the law interfere in private matters of sexual behaviour between consenting adult men. After a further ten years its recommendations were implemented in the Sexual Offences Bill of 1967 which partially decriminalized homosexuality. Salmon reviews variously the report, through existing associated scholarship, and Wolfenden’s significant ambiguities regarding matters of private and public space. Its systemic unwillingness to offer a framework for the understanding of homosexuality as a lifestyle or subculture informs her analysis of British fiction published between the years of 1960 and

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The 1960s

1966, in which she focuses on comparable points of silence and non-articulation. However she makes the case that for writers such as Gillian Freeman, Martyn Gof and Maureen Duffy such ambiguity ultimately works as a means of outlining a specific and potentially viable subject position. Graham K. Riach’s ‘Ways of Staying, Ways of Saying: From Black Writing in Britain to Black British Writing’ analyses global forces shaping writing in 1960s Britain and the effect of policies with regard to migration and citizenship, and the impact and legacy of the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948. He considers negative reactions to such immigrants (with causes) and the long-term effect of such diasporic sensibilities as a context for understanding what has variously been labelled Commonwealth (including Caribbean), black British, and simply British writing, which categories are examined critically and contextually. Deploying rather the term ‘black writing in Britain’ Riach examines ‘The terminological debate around what to call writing by black authors in Britain’ (see page 140) in terms of both scholarly reception and definitions of such work as an oeuvre. As a chapter focusing on the work of a quintessential 1960s writer, Michelle Phillips Buchberger’s ‘The 1960s Existential Fiction of John Fowles’ undertakes close readings of three novels and one work of non-fiction by John Fowles published in the 1960s, The Magus, The Collector, The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Aristos. Considering this author popular among the public and academics of the period, she argues each text deals variously with the suprarational elements of existence, examining both ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ reflection. She demonstrates how Fowles goes beyond mimetic realism in order to interrogate and develop a more mythopoeic world-view, one ‘predicated on a more subjective, symbolic order rather than that of the scientific, objective notion of reality, and the former is essentially in at least an implicit fashion intersubjective’ (see page 171). Buchberger explores existential ideas that influence and permeate these texts, considering key concepts such as free will, authenticity and inauthenticity, and the experiential. Despite what Philip Tew labels the ‘simplistic, fallacious accounts of literary avant-gardism’s decline’ (see page 194), his chapter, ‘Experimental British Fiction of the Sixties: Five Metamodern Novelists’, argues for a range of vibrant and sustained experimentalism that characterized much literary output in the 1960s, which had roots both in the post-war period and modernism, although he details very different perspectives that are prevalent in the later decade, including hyper-realism, a spatialized social consciousness, less elitism, and intense aesthetic self-consciousness conjoined with a largely jaunty comic demotic style derived from 1950s British (and American) fiction. In his close analysis of Wilson Harris, Rayner

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Heppenstall, B.S. Johnson, Ann Quin and Muriel Spark, Tew argues for the social value of this perceptibly avant-garde writing. Although the authors of these texts collectively act as the inheritors of modernism and simultaneously look forward to the late-twentieth-century territories of postmodernism, their novels are revealed to carry more than a transitory cultural significance. Tew argues instead a plethora of de-familiarizing techniques are marshalled with the intention of intensifying the logic of realism, thereby offering an often underrated, yet authentic voice of the Sixties, imbued with a sense of intersubjective potential. The eighth chapter, James Reich’s ‘Inner Space Odyssey: Suburban Spacemen and the Cults of Catastrophe’, offers a cartography of British New Wave Science Fiction (and Fantasy) writing during the decade, demonstrating both the influence of and divergences from hard scientific fact which derived from space exploration by manned rockets, satellites and probes during the decade. The chapter situates, contextualizes both historically and contemporaneously, and analyses fiction and other writing by Anthony Burgess, John Brunner, Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard and Arthur C. Clarke, all personally connected to the imperial outposts that were gaining independence from Britain, and that of Michael Moorcock, all connected with either ‘the New Worlds magazine contingent’ or ‘the permissive and experimental New Wave of science fiction curated and defined by Michael Moorcock, Ballard, and others’ (see page 230). Somewhat appropriately given its topic, the last chapter is James Riley’s ‘Terminal Data: J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock and the Fiction of the Decade’s End’. Ostensibly reading from the same New Worlds milieu covered by Reich, Riley’s analysis looks at the manner in which Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition and Moorcock’s The Final Programme (1969) have been taken as markers of the disastrous ‘end of the sixties’. This pervasive trope reads the decade as plotting a narrative of decline in which such optimistic projects as the (broadly understood) counterculture fail to realize their promise and political efficacy. While it is possible to frame the decade with polarized fictional examples, Riley argues that the imposition of such an interpretive paradigm ultimately masks the specific textual strategies at work in experimental texts such as The Final Programme. As Riley notes, ‘the fiction of the end of decade is not same as the fiction that the decade ends’ (see page 281).

Tentative conclusions? Naturally the ‘Swinging’ epithet is largely a myth or illusion, palpably neglecting the experience of those over forty, including most world leaders, such as John F.

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The 1960s

Kennedy who, although considered ‘youthful’, was forty-three when he became the thirty-fifth President of the United States (the first Roman Catholic) at his inauguration in January 1961 (subsequent historians have suggested he benefited from widespread vote fraud to win the electoral college). In just under three years JFK would be dead, assassinated on 22 November 1963 in Dallas. Much else transpired of global significance before London swung.20 And as Christopher Booker notes, ‘The “pop explosion” of 1963–4 in fact marked the last consummatory wave of all that youthful and social upheaval which had begun back in jazz clubs and art schools and among the South London Teddy Boys of the late Forties’ (233). So why do so many commentators so determinedly compress accounts of the decade both chronologically and thematically? As Arthur Marwick suggests in The Sixties (2011): ‘Mention of “the sixties” rouses strong emotions [. . .]. What happened between the late fifties and the early seventies has been subject to political polemic, nostalgic mythologizing, and downright misrepresentation’ (3). In ‘Introduction’ he traces how many involved in the so-called ‘subcultures, movements and new institutions’ became entrepreneurial (xiii), adding that ‘the relationship between the arts and sixties society is not well represented by the cultural theorists who see cultural artefacts and practices merely as the embodiment of ideologies, whether dominant or alternative’ (xiii–xiv). As Marwick notes, the decade’s cultural dynamics were oriented to ‘the almost universal presence of television, of “spectacle” as an integral part of the interface between life and leisure’ alongside ‘Unprecedented culture exchange [. . .]’ of leisure and artistic practices (xviii) in a manner perhaps never previously experienced, or, at least, not so intensely. As a classic babyboomer Jenny Diski makes an apparently counter-intuitive suggestion that ‘our parents, the generation whose youth was cut short by the Second World War and who so complained about their wild children’s doings, had more to do with dreaming up and even sustaining the Sixties than we think’ (2). They offered the leisure time in an extended higher education to think – which detail rather gives away the typology of the individuals she thinks mattered in the 1960s since even by 1970, as Paul Bolton indicates, only 8.4 per cent of the population participated in higher education (14) – and hence to rebel against ‘Two generations before us [which] had been involved in war’ (5). Diski concedes that when faced by the Cold War, their inability to alter such geopolitical realities freed the young (6). Why did Time magazine dedicate its 15 April 1966 issue to ‘LONDON: the Swinging City?’ Age was part of the dynamic, undoubtedly. After the baby-boom of the late-1940s and 1950s, the urban population by the mid-1960s was unusually young, with 40 per cent of Britain’s population under 25, with many

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gravitating to the capital. As Mark Donnelly posits this baby-boom generation were raised in relative affluence (1) and, as he summarizes, many younger people were drawn to the lessons of the immediate past, rejecting conflict, finding more positive paradigms in the founding of CND, and the synthesis of existentialism and the apparent freedom of the Beats – the origin of which latter movement was, of course, post-war North American bourgeois prosperity, combined with, in both Britain and America, what now seem historically low, static and accessible property prices, according to data collated by Katharina Knoll, Moritz Schularick and Thomas Steger (19, 114). The past might be regarded as prologue, since as James J. Farrell reflects about the American scene in The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism (1997), the ‘personalist politics’ (5) that characterized the 1960s emerged in the mid-1950s with such movements and various outlooks which ‘were suspicious of the market economy because they did not believe in homo economicus, who feels no obligation to others. They decried the depersonalization of people in the impersonal factories and bureaucracies of the modern economy’ (6). True, this became a credo believed by many like Farrell who was a paid-up (Christian, anti-war) member of the counterculture, but those very industrial complexes created and sustained communities, and relative prosperity, ironically most being subsequently decimated, their demise at the hands of the globalized neo-liberal economy. In terms of Britain, as Dick Pountain and David Robins explore in Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (2000): ‘[O]utside the ranks of a minority of hippy-radicals, the mainstream counterculture actually rejected working-class culture and politics more vehemently than that of the middle class. [. . .]. By and large hippies saw working-class manners as conservative, sentimental and sometimes downright threatening’ (87). A major divide existed, largely ignored by the counterculture as regards white working class youth. As William Simon, John H. Gagnon and Stephen A. Buff said of their field research in 1971: When compared to the most conservative and minimal goals set for contemporary education – except perhaps the dubious goal of ensuring reasonably conformist behaviour, schools in the working class areas can only be described as undramatic disaster areas. [. . .] Traditionally, the schools serving working class areas have avoided the problems of intellectual development and have concerned themselves with building character of the simplest sort and ensuring a minimum of discipline problems. (20)

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Intellectual and educational capacity are at the core of the social limitations suffered by the Anglo-American working classes, a divide even sustained by scholars supposedly studying differentiation of social experience. In False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (1973), Stanley Aronowitz’s socio-ethnographic study at the time of an industrial dispute in mid-1972 of the communities serving the Lordstown GM complex, opened in 1966, he describes ‘the so-called “hippie”’ (29) sub-group, where ‘They are more aware of alternate political and philosophical ideas. This does not mean they are intellectuals’ (31). His underlying categorization in retrospect seems stark, his description of working conditions almost entirely negative. As Aronowitz adds, ‘Fantasies of alternative jobs or professions help sustain the workers’ (38). Countercultural hippies were largely affiliated to the educated middle classes, finding working-class existence alien, often impenetrable. Consider Aronowitz’s covert elitism concerning bourgeois ideation and experience, but also Farrell’s actually fundamentally naïve claim that ‘Political personalists believed in the harmony of rhetoric and reality. They believed that language was communal, and that the purpose of words was to tell the truth. Hypocrisy, in the Sixties, was one of the cardinal sins [. . .]’ (8). Again this begs the questions, whose community, and whose truth? As Paul Willis and Philip Corrigan say, ‘No discourse is superior to any other, nor can one discourse guarantee “truth” or “reality” (except its own) to any greater extent than any other “discourse”’ (86). Moreover, there is surely an innate self-regard in such individualists and their groupings, and their very ideas of inclusion actually turns out to be either ideologically exclusionary or rooted in a completely different set of dynamics to those they fondly imagined, ones easily fragmented and commodified (marketized). As Diski admits, looking back subsequently many believe the 1960s ‘consolidated the sense of self which created that monstrous beast: the Me Generation’ (7), adding of its legacies: ‘We really didn’t see it coming, the new world of rabid individualism and the sanctity of profit’ (9). MacDonald reflects on this apparent paradox given that the mass of society was disinterested in radical protest: [T]hose who thought they were at the cutting edge of social development in the Sixties – the hippies, the New Left – soon found themselves adrift in the wake of the real social avant-garde of the period: ordinary people. The individualism of the Me Decade, as Tom Wolfe dubbed the Seventies, was a creation of the Sixties’ mass mainstream, not of peripheral groups which challenged it. Former hippies and radicals who abandoned the utopian ‘we’ for rueful selfinterest in the seventies, far from leading public taste, were merely tagging along behind it. (31)

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D.J. Taylor commented: ‘Meanwhile, as a phenomenon, the Sixties go on being mythologized and misinterpreted, and – it might be argued – having more significance extracted from them than they can decently stand.’ Interestingly he finds the highpoint in Britain in 1966 when England beat West Germany in the FIFA World Cup final, a victory dependent upon an error, a goal that might never have been, perhaps a curiously apt and telling symbol for this decade.

Notes 1 See: Angela Bartie and Eleanor Bell’s online text ‘1962 International Writers’ Conference, Edinburgh: An Edited History’, part of the fiftieth anniversary held at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2012: www.edinburghworldwritersconference.org/ background/ See Bartie and Bell’s co-edited volume, International Writers’ Conference Revisited: Edinburgh, 1962. Scans of Trocchi’s autograph draft for ‘The Future of the Novel’, dated August 1962 are kept at the archive holdings at Washington University: http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/items/show/9643. 2 ‘Regina versus Penguin Books Ltd’ sought to prosecute Penguin Books under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 after their proposed publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover on 16 August 1960. The trial lasted six days, 20 October to 2 November 1960. 3 Lykiard’s novel narrates a love-affair between an eighteen-year-old student and an ‘older’ woman of twenty-three. ‘Mellors’ (92) is mentioned during one of the novel’s many sex-scenes. 4 This oft-cited comment came from Griffith-Jones’ opening statement: ‘Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book? Is it a book you would have lying around your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ 5 Although film adaptations of their work were broadly contemporaneous, Ian Fleming and Len Deighton were almost a generation apart. Fleming’s James Bond novels were published between 1953 and 1966. Deighton’s ‘unnamed’ narrator novels began in 1962 with The IPCRESS File and continued through to Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy (1976). 6 See Tom Dychoff, ‘They’ve Got it Covered’, Guardian, 15 September 2001, https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/15/historybooks.features 7 The poet and writer Royston Ellis claims that the song is a tribute to him: www.roystonellis.com/beatles.php 8 For Paul McCartney’s account of the song’s composition see the entry on ‘Paperback Writer’ at: https://www.beatlesbible.com/songs/paperback-writer/

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9 The Summer of Love and the subsequent ‘freak’ or ‘head’ culture was parodied in the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics created by Gilbert Shelton. Featuring unemployed long-haired Freewheelin’ Franklin Freek, Fat Freddy Freekowtski and Phineas Phreak, their lives revolve around the procurement and enjoyment of recreational drugs, particularly marijuana. 10 See Viv Nicholson and Steven Smith, Spend Spend Spend. Jonathan Cape: London, 1977. 11 A briefly celebrated artist, Boty died tragically of a malignant cancer discovered during pregnancy; delivering a daughter in February 1966, she died later in June aged twenty-eight. 12 The Institute for Contemporary Arts was founded in 1946. It acquired a permanent site at 17 Dover Street, Piccadilly in May 1950 and moved to its current premises in Nash House in March 1968. 13 Desmond Morris briefly became director in 1967, resigning when sales of his runaway best-seller The Human Ape exceeded all expectations, becoming a tax-exile. 14 The Independent Group met at the ICA from 1952–1963 and included among its members, Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull, Toni del Renzio, Reyner Banham and Alison and Peter Smithson. 15 For further information see Lichenstein and Schregenberger, As Found (2001). 16 Archigram was an avowedly avant-garde design group active mainly between 1961 and 1974 based at London’s Architectural Association. See: http://archigram. westminster.ac.uk/ 17 These standards were thrown out by the incoming Conservative government in 1980 in their Local Government, Planning and Land Act. 18 Wythenshaw, a Manchester relocation project, began in the 1920s and was completed in the 1970s, resulting in then the largest social housing estate in Europe. 19 Ronan Point, a 22-storey tower block in Newham, partly collapsed on 16 May 1968 through a combination of a gas explosion, poor design and shoddy construction; an entire corner failed, and the incident led to public mistrust of high-rise housing projects. 20 Consider just a selection of headline events: in March 1960 in South Africa police killed 69 and wounded 180 black protestors in the Sharpeville Massacre; in the same year R.D. Laing published The Divided Self; in 1961 the contraceptive pill was approved for general public use; Adolf Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against humanity and later hung; the Berlin Wall was constructed; the Soviets launched the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin; in 1962 the world faced the Cuban Missile Crisis; in 1963 a ‘Hot Line’ was established between the US and USSR; and in June 1964 Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison, found guilty on four charges of sabotage. In America the 1960 Civil Rights Act passed; the Vietnam War commences; the Bay of

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Pigs Invasion fails; America enters the Space Race; the Civil Rights Movement emerges; and Marilyn Monroe was found dead. In Britain in 1961, outed by a Soviet defector as the ‘third man’ of the Cambridge spy ring, Kim Philby defected in July 1963; work started on the Post Office (later BT ) Tower, completed in 1965; Britain was denied entry to the European Common Market in 1963 and 1967; in 1963 the Great Train Robbery occurred; the last two hangings took place in 1964; and in the 1965 Race Relations Act was enacted and Winston Churchill died. In terms of technology: Spacewar! was devised in 1961, an early digital computer game; in 1962 the audio (compact) cassette was invented; at General Electric Company, Nick Holonyak Jr created the first practical visible-spectrum LED ; Telstar, the first commercial satellite, was launched, later leading to transatlantic broadcasting and telephony with satellites in geosynchronous orbit in 1965; the first touch-tone telephones were introduced in 1963; and Douglas Engelbart invented the computer mouse in 1964.

Works cited Aronowitz, Stanley. False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992 [1973]. Badura-Triska, Eva. Vienna Actionism: Art and Upheaval in 1960s Vienna. Germany : Walther Koing, 2012. Ballard, J.G. The Wind from Nowhere. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967 [1961]. ———. The Atrocity Exhibition. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970. ———. Vermillion Sands. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973. Baker, Brian. ‘ “You’re quite a gourmet, aren’t you, Palmer?” Masculinity and Food in the Spy Fiction of Len Deighton’. In The Yearbook of English Studies. 42, 2012: 30–48. Baker, Rob. Beautiful Idiots and Brilliant Lunatics: A Sideways Look at TwentiethCentury London. Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2015. Banham, Reyner. ‘The New Brutalism.’ October. 136, 2011: 19–28. Barr, John. Derelict Britain. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Bartie, Angela and Eleanor Bell (eds.). International Writers’ Conference Revisited: Edinburgh, 1962. Glasgow : Cargo Publishing, 2012. Bolton, Paul. Education: Historical Statistics: Standard Note: SN /SG /4252. London: House of Commons Library, 27 November 2012; researchbriefings.files.parliament. uk/documents/SN 04252/SN 04252.pdf Booker, Christopher. The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties. London: Fontana Collins, 1970 [1969]. Calder, John and John Fletcher. The Nouveau Roman Reader. London: Calder, 1986. Campbell, James. Syncopations. California: University of California Press, 2008. Campbell, Allen and Tim Niel. Alexander Trocchi: A Life in Pieces. Glasgow: Rebel Inc., 1997.

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Charlesworth, George. A History of British Motorways. London: Thomas Telford, 1984. Colomina, Beatriz. ‘UnbreathedAir’. In Alison and Peter Smithson: From the House of the Future to a House of Today. Max Risselada and Dirk van den Heuvel (eds.). Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2004. 31–49. Crosland, Susan. Tony Crosland. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982. Deighton, Len. The IPCRESS File. London: Hodder, 1962. Diski, Jenny. The Sixties. London: Profile Books, 2010. Donnelly, Mark. Sixties Britain: Culture, Society and Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Dunn, Nell. Talking to Women. New York: Ballantine, 1968 [1965]. Dyckhoff, Tom. ‘They’ve got it covered’. Guardian. 15 September 2001. https://www. theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/15/historybooks.features Farrell, James J. The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism. New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 1997. http://www.dallasfed.org/assets/documents/ institute/wpapers/2014/0208.pdf Galindo-Rueda, Fernando and Anna F. Vignoles. The Heterogeneous Effect of Selection in Secondary Schools: Understanding the Changing Role of Ability. August 2004. IZA Discussion Paper No. 1245: https://ssrn.com/abstract=575089 Johnson, B.S. ‘Review of New Brutalism.’ Western Mail. 28 December 1966. ———. (dir.). ‘The Smithsons on Housing’. London: BBC , 1970. Knoll, Katharina, Moritz Schularick and Thomas Steger. ‘No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870–2012’ . Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute, Working Paper No. 208. Dallas: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, October 2014. Laing, R.D. The Divided Self. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. Lichenstein, Claude and Thomas Schregenberger. As Found: The Discovery of the Ordinary. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller, 2001. Lykiard, Alexis. The Summer Ghosts. London: Antony Blond, 1964. MacDonald, Ian. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. 2nd edn. London: Vintage Books, 2008 [1994]. Marwick, Arthur. ‘Introduction: Locating Key Texts Amid the Distinctive Landscape of the Sixties’. In Windows on the Sixties: Exploring Key Texts of Media and Culture. Anthony Aldgate, James Chapman and Arthur Marwick (eds.). London and New York: I.B. Taurus, 2000. xi–xxi. ———. The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958–c.1974. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. McCleery, Alistair. ‘ “Late News from the Provinces”: The Trial of Cain’s Book’. In The Scottish Sixties: Reading, Rebellion, Revolution? Eleanor Bell and Linda Gunn (eds.). New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. 132–53. Melville, Robert. ‘The Exhibitions of the Institute of Contemporary Arts.’ The Studio, April 1951: 97–103.

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Mercer, Ben. ‘The Paperback Revolution: Mass-circulation Books and the Cultural Origins of 1968 in Western Europe’. Journal of the History of Ideas. 72 (4) October 2011: 613–36. Nicholson, Viv and Steven Smith. Spend Spend Spend. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977. Nuttall, Jeff. Bomb Culture. London: Paladin, 1968. Pountain, Dick and David Robins. Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. Risselada, Max and Dirk van den Heuvel (eds.). Alison and Peter Smithson: From the House of the Future to a House of Today. Rotterdam: 010 Publisher, 2004. Robbins, David. The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1990. Rolph, C.E. The Trial of Lady Chatterley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. Sandbrook, Dominic. Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles. London: Little, Brown, 2005. ———. White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties. London: Little, Brown, 2006. Simon, William, John H. Gagnon and Stephen A. Buff. ‘Son of Joe: Continuity and Change Among White Working Class Adolescents.’ Journal of Youth and Adolescence. 1 (1) March 1972: 13–34. Smithson, Alison and Peter Smithson. ‘The New Brutalism.’ Architectural Design. April 1957, 113. ———. ‘The Ordinary and the Banal’ (23.11.1964) A & P Smithson Archive, London; reproduced in As Found: The Discovery of the Ordinary. Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger (eds.). Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2001. 141. Smithson, Alison. Team 10 Primer. London: Studio Vista, 1968, 98. Smithson, Peter. ‘Rebuilding Britain for the Baby Boomers.’ Archive on 4. London: BBC Radio 4, 26 January 2013. Spender, Stephen. ‘Letter from Edinburgh.’ Encounter. 12(4) October 1962. Stephens, Julie. Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Taylor, D.J. ‘Clinging Sixties’. TLS: Times Literary Supplement. 27 July 2016: N.Pag.; http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/clinging-sixties/ Trocchi, Alexander. Young Adam. Paris: Olympia, 1954. ———. Cain’s Book. New York: Grove, 1960. Walker, John. John Latham: The Incidental Person – His Arts and Ideas. Middlesex University Press: London, 1997. Willis, Paul and Philip Corrigan. ‘Orders of Experience: The Differences of Working Class Cultural Forms.’ Social Text. 7, Spring–Summer 1983: 85–103. Wilson, Angus. Late Call. London: Faber, 1964. Wolfenden, John. Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1957.

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1

Our Troubled Youth: A Literary History of the 1960s Melanie Seddon

The very behaviours, events and products that appeared to characterize Britain in the 1960s have long-since become fixed in our global cultural consciousness of that decade: the coffee shops of Soho, Twiggy posing in a Mary Quant mini-skirt, the Beatles nonchalantly crossing Abbey Road, with McCartney barefoot. Retrospectively, Britain’s glorious capital undisputedly shimmers in the world’s eye – a city at the centre of where it was ‘at’. Browsing the website London60sweek, a twenty-first-century public repository of Sixties pictures and events, one encounters a realm solely inhabited by the beautiful, the talented and the rich. In the illustrative timeline pictures, apart from Harold Macmillan, musician Cyril Davies and the Beatles’ producer George Martin, almost everyone else seems improbably young. In January 1968, Brian Jones (who would meet his untimely death in 1969) is pictured with Jimi Hendrix outside the Olympic Sound Studio, both clad in sumptuous velvet and furs. In May, an entry details how a young Mick Jagger bought 48 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea for £50,000 and 22-year-old Marianne Faithfull decorated the residence with expensive antiques. And two months later, one learns: Jagger celebrates his 25th birthday with Marianne Faithfull, John Lennon and Paul McCartney at the Moroccan styled ‘Vesuvio Club’ in Tottenham Court Road, where some of London’s trendiest models, artists, and pop singers lounged on huge cushions and took pulls from Turkish hookahs, while a decorative, helium-filled dirigible floated aimlessly about the room.1

These happenings have all been recorded by users of the website as noteworthy gestures, acts of socio-cultural significance deemed to capture and define an age. Aside from the advantages of louche beauty and talent, the agents of these acts 27

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shared significantly an additional common factor: their youth. Sixties London appeared to be for the young. This view was clearly held by influential British Vogue editor Diana Vreeland when, in 1965, she positioned London at the epicentre of a British ‘youthquake’ (112). Her pithy portmanteau word neatly encapsulated what Dominic Head would later describe as ‘the sense of a newly empowered sector of society [. . .] conveyed principally by the new spending power of young people and the emergence of mainstream youth-related cultural forms’ (24). Historian Arthur Marwick shifts the epicentre across the Atlantic noting that British efforts were late-to-party in comparison with the North American cousins who had been hijacking Western culture since late 1957. Yet, Marwick’s comprehensive survey The Sixties both champions the foregrounding of youth in constructions of the decade and warns against it, advising that, ‘indeed, the “teenage revolution” and “the new youth culture” have, like “the rise of the middle class” before them, become clattering clichés ready for collapse into the pages of an updated 1066 and All That’ (41–2). Nonetheless, Marwick concedes that like all clichés this one contains some truth; teenage subcultures were beginning to blossom in late1950s Britain due to a new affluence following war-time privation. Jonathan Aitken too refers to ‘young’ as ‘surely the most overworked word of the decade’ (1), but cannot help but employ it in the title of his primary-source reportage,

Figure 1.1 Clearing a Bombsite, E13, 1961 – John Claridge.

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The Young Meteors (1967). He chooses, instead, to qualify the adjective in his preface by explaining that the term may be applied to anyone who ‘would be thought of as young in relation to the job they are doing’ (1). The 1960s was a time when everyone had an investment in youth. Aitken, thus, confidently ignores conventional temporal boundaries much in the same manner as Marwick who begrudgingly positions youth as a key player in an ongoing long 1960s that stretched from 1958–74. In this same generous spirit, this chapter will consider texts that punctuate this elongated and highly constructed era and consider how they worked together to testify to a whole spectrum of ‘juvenile’ experience that engaged the masses, yet is somewhat missing from the mainstream images and populist narrative of the time.

The post-war period This survey begins, however, by suggesting that it is helpful to look back even further than the 1950s when trying to understand the considerable social changes that unfolded during this period, the impact of which is captured in the literature of the time. The key cultural players gathering in 1960s London were children of the forties born into strained and stagnating social conditions often made worse by war. We must look to their formative environments and beyond, both the aggressive pre-war slum clearance and war-time bombing that reduced much of Britain’s urban areas to patchy waste-ground. These spaces, which Ben Highmore calls ‘a central motif within the social imaginary of postwar reconstruction in Britain’ (324), lay untouched long after armistice had been called. Urban reconstruction did not occur in the first glorious years of peace but stretched out indefinitely over the next three decades, shaping the cultural domain of the second half of the twentieth century. Such makeshift space informed the aesthetics, behaviours and practices that would develop in that period. Highmore uses Leila Berg’s 1972 photographic monograph of waste-ground urchins, Look at Kids, as an example, asserting that images such as these continued to have a profound impact on public opinion and political behaviour, constituting ‘a mainstay of “caring” photojournalism from before the war into the postwar period’ (324). Importantly, for this reading of the Sixties, works such as Berg’s ‘literalized a set of analogies for damaged youth’ (324), which gave birth to a haunting imagerepertoire2 of the feral child that the institutions were keen to address. From the mid-century onwards, progressive social reformers and successive governments were troubled by this powerful image-repertoire that was forming

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in the public imagination and worked hard to find solutions to and reasons for the youth problem. What is now nostalgically re-framed as the Sixties’ joyous celebration of youth was in reality rooted in fear, a persistent hangover from the dislocation, social rupture and anxiety of the war years. Highmore’s paper draws attention to key social reformers, including Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham’s 1942 study into the ‘very real aggressiveness which rages in the inside of the child’ (31). Two years later, social worker Marie Paneth proposed that children should be permitted to exhaust their aggression freely in wastegrounds of which they would be custodians. In a similar vein, in 1946 Lady Allen of Hurtwood advised that adventure playgrounds might channel the naturally unruly tendencies of the young. Such studies suggested specific juvenile spaces were required in which the social conditioning of youth could take place. Resources in the post-war period were limited and earlier reliable routes to a disciplined youth were felt to be antiquated and their top-down elitism no longer justified. Key among these was National Service which Richard Vinen notes, ‘did not end with a bang but with a series of whimpers’ (359). While the last conscripts entered the armed forces in November 1960, it was not until early summer 1963 that the last military obligations were fulfilled. The commonly held view at this time and summarized retrospectively by Vinen was that this institution (very like the run-down schools) ‘belong[ed] to that part of post-war Britain that was impoverished and jerry-built. Almost no-one thought that peacetime conscription could, or should, be permanent’ (359). While for the upper classes military service was a matter of tradition and honour, merely an extension of the discipline instilled in public school, for the average eighteen-year-old, the year and a half of service that was required of them appeared a pointless exercise with little reward.

Legislation for change Hence 1963 was a turning point in the evolving opportunities and obligations of the nation’s youth, who moved to become a central focus for those in charge of the country’s fortunes. It was also a benchmark year in educational reform; the school leaving age was fifteen and only 12.9 per cent of students remained in school at seventeen. The Newsom Report assessed the education of 13–16-yearolds of ‘average and less than average’ ability and recommended expanding their share of the nation’s educational resources. Despite a significant increase in the post-war educational budget, it reported 40 per cent of the children surveyed

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were still taught in overcrowded and inadequate school buildings. Poor children were particularly badly served: 79 per cent of schools in impoverished areas had seriously inadequate buildings and resources, enduring high turnovers of teaching staff. Expectations for such children were exceedingly low and adequate spaces for their development, virtually non-existent. However, writing two years after the Newsom Report, Anthony Sampson comments that education remained an area of ‘almost total uncertainty and flux’ (191), adding that ‘nowhere has the British passion for letting institutions just grow, and the British distaste for centralised control been more evident than in the educational system’ (191). A scapegoat was found in what some considered the class-biased educational streaming of the eleven-plus exam, referred to by Sampson as ‘the sorting machine of the British Elite’ (193), which filtered children into three kinds of school which, on paper, were supposed to have ‘parity of esteem’ (194). This was a claim that few believed. Novelist and poet Maureen Duffy recalls the tremendous pressure to pass the eleven-plus in That’s How it Was (1962): If I didn’t pass I was stupid. I was no different from everyone else, I’d be a slummocky trollop, like Gladys, living in one room, screwing and scraping in filth and ignorance for the rest of my life. There’d be nothing for me. (99)

The exam sorted the children into the tripartite system of grammar, secondary modern and technical schools, but in reality what was happening was that ‘at eleven, all British schoolchildren were divided into two classes, “eggheads and serfs” ’ (194) by educational apartheid.3 Change seemed long overdue and in 1964 preparations began for the raising of the school leaving age (ROSLA ) to sixteen (for which many pre-fabricated buildings would be required) during a period of radical examination of education. The Labour Party entered the general election promising to abolish the eleven-plus and develop the secondary school system along comprehensive lines in the name of social justice. The publication of the Robbins Report in the same year called for university places for ‘all who were qualified for them by ability and attainment’.4 However Sampson noted in 1965 that the real driving force behind the initiative was perhaps more oblique and not one of social justice, but of prudence.5 The new comprehensive system was designed to stop ‘wasting the greatest national resource – able manpower’ (195) and occupy the young minds that might otherwise lose their way. Those previously consigned to the category of ‘serf ’ could henceforth usefully be prepared to fill the expanding bureaucratic and middle management positions of the emergent consumer society. Opportunity for all (whether welcome or not) became the order of the

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day.6 But for some, historical, economic and cultural forces often worked against the march of ‘progress’. Reflecting on her own hard-won education in the preface to That’s How it Was, Duffy notes, ‘No member of my family in the over four hundred years I have traced us back had ever gone to college before or indeed stayed on beyond the statutory leaving age. [. . .] Literacy itself among us was only sixty years old’ (viii). In the novel, Duffy’s protagonist Paddy is supported by her mother in her efforts to gain an education and encouraged to try for a scholarship in spite of the hardship this would inflict on the family: When the forms had come round for her to fill in in the first place there had been anxious deliberation. ‘You’ll stay on til sixteen at least, so that’s alright. Ten pounds if you leave but we won’t worry about that.’ (100)

Such pressure in the home environment was underestimated by the policy makers but painstakingly detailed and foregrounded by Duffy and her contemporaries. Indeed, Mark Donnelly suggests approaching the Sixties as ‘a site of contest, one in which dynamic forces of change were seen to be locked in a recurring struggle with forces of resistance’ (3), and nowhere is this plainer to see than in the literature written by the young. It serves the metanarrative of post-war regeneration to present the legislation of the time as the sound bedrock on which a new egalitarian society would be smoothly built; but the novels reveal a chaotic implementation of social change. The young were not mere blank canvases passively waiting to be inscribed, but creative individuals with a thirst for self-determination and expression. The objections and obstacles encountered by the young found expression in a range of semi-autobiographical writings that moodily and problematically shadowed the glossy visuals of the time.

Sixties stories In an interview with Sixties grande dame Mary Quant, Beesley et al. comment: ‘Like a scripted robot she talks of unending parties, dancing and celebrities. [. . .] Her tale contains hardly any hardships or nuance. Her sixties is a story she has told so often she thinks it’s true’ (17). Perhaps Quant’s nostalgic account might not be entirely discounted, given the positivism of youth and success, and the framing of such recollections – an historical account, a media interview, with attendant publicity photo – still reflect aspects of a larger moment. In this era the

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media seemed to democratize representation and expression; culture was apparently found on the streets, there spontaneously assembled, performed or discovered as an objet trouvé. According to Groes at this time ‘fictional representations no longer vied for dominance with the real’ (2), and, ‘there was, rather, a sense that the two were indistinguishable, resulting in a simulacral amalgamation’ (2). The texts that this chapter foregrounds are of this type: they simulate and testify; imagine and record; and detail the quotidian struggle between the personal, political and aesthetic. The autofictions of writers such as B.S. Johnson and Maureen Duffy delivered up the raw ‘truth’ of an experience that resided in the gaps of any overarching historical metanarrative that would be constructed after the fact. Regarding the impulses that impelled the writing of her first novel in 1962 Duffy comments: If I couldn’t invent facts, which I couldn’t because I wanted to tell a particular truth, the art must be in the style, in a language that was colloquial, with I hoped the energy of the demotic, and charged with imagery. (vi)

A similar demotic style appears in the National Service novels of Andrew Sinclair and David Lodge. Such colloquialism is inflected in the schoolyard voices in the fiction of E.R. Braithwaite, B.S. Johnson and Edward Blishen, part of the wider investigation into the paralyzing effect of class and sex that is fictionally documented in Raymond Williams’ Second Generation (1964); David Storey’s Flight into Camden (1961); Margaret Drabble’s A Summer Bird-Cage (1963) and other fiction by Nell Dunn, Shena Mackay and Maureen Duffy. ‘Youth’ represents a generously wide category and features as a lens in many 1960s texts largely written by the young, for the young, focusing on the concerns and projections of baby-boomers. Groes might suggest nostalgia impels critical representation of Sixties Britain as a ‘utopian locus where meritocratic values had triumphed and as an Eden where no one had to engage in any laborious activity but that of shopping, dressing up and partying’ (70), but such novels capture a contrasting mood. Few reference any easy, Swinging Sixties lifestyles redolent of the experiences recorded by Quant; instead one encounters impassioned struggle and faltering, uncertain progress. Together such fiction points to a generation fuelled by a new sense of entitlement and greater freedoms while hampered by conservatism and similar deep-rooted inequalities and social structures faced by their parents. Overwhelmingly one finds an investment in the demotic; indeed Head claims that, at this time, The novel of working class life is being eloquently written by members of the working class themselves [. . .]. The new generation of working-class novelists

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The 1960s were often beneficiaries of the Butler Education Act of 1944, which had given them access to grammar schools, and had opened the door to a university place for some. (59)

He is forced, however, to check his own nostalgia, conceding that ‘education remained class-bound, it should be stressed [. . .] the working class novelist is an exceptional figure, moving beyond her or (usually) his roots in the process of establishing himself as a writer’ (59). More often than not, middle-class writers possessed time, space, financial security and contacts to reproduce in print the experience of the masses, reflecting ideological shifts aiming to transform British society for everybody. Nonetheless, these novels remain an important, and yet overlooked, resource in the demythologization of Britain’s most celebrated decade.

Bull and Brasso: The National Service novel One outmoded, yet influential institution that was due to fall under the cultural and political spotlight in the early 1960s was National Service. Trevor Royale notes that ‘given the variety of National Service life and the intensity with which young men experienced it, it is hardly surprising that it should have spawned a variety of books’ (234). This may be true, but the novels of the period tend to fall into two camps of National Service experience. Firstly, there are those set abroad, such as Alan Sillitoe’s Key to the Door (1961), which details conscription in Malaysia, and Leslie Thomas’ The Virgin Soldiers (1966) set in far-flung Singapore. Secondly, there are the domestically-set novels that rely on class and social tensions rather than exoticism for their drama. Andrew Sinclair’s novel The Breaking of Bumbo (1959) is one of the latter but although focused on a deceptively narrow and gendered slice of mid-century experience it is interwoven with the themes and social concerns that characterize other novels of the period. Bumbo relays the escapades of Bumbo Bailey from officer training school to a commission in the Brigade of Guards in London. Although the semi-autobiographical novel recounts the experience of an Eton-educated conscript, Sinclair is at pains to emphasize the guardsman’s struggle for acceptance. Bumbo is ashamed of his comparatively ordinary background and the scholarship that marks him out from his fellow officers. Lacking class, he fashions a place for himself in the most snobbish of British regiments through wit, buffoonery and determination. For him, National Service is a chance to advance and prove his worth beyond all expectation. Granted a place in the

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prestigious regiment, he gains access to London society and its elite social season. Bumbo’s more humble beginnings cannot be masked and uneasy in the upper echelons of British society, Bumbo finds friendship in the groovy underworld of Chelsea and its liminal inhabitants. Sinclair’s novel explores why Bumbo fails to fit in despite the advantages that he enjoys. The original blurb from the 1959 edition promotes a protagonist who is ‘partly his own victim, and partly the victim of his own small world, he is Made, and has his season, and is Broken.’ The opening pages attempt to establish the levelling effect of National Service – Drill Sergeant Plumb, for example, bellows at the new conscripts: ‘ “I don’t care who your bleeding fathers are. . .” ’ (11). Unfortunately, Bumbo does not benefit from military blood in his veins and consequently harbours anti-establishment, pacifistic feelings. The narrative reflects on his misfortune: ‘It was, after all, no fault of Bumbo that he was born in a society that accepted conscription gladly, and equated pacifism with treachery’ (14). Yet brute force appears to work its magic and before long, ‘it was only in th[e] sleep-stolen time that Bumbo could remember who he was or who he had once been’ (12). The conscripts begin to think of themselves not as individuals but as ‘one of the 24 that were one, that were one under the Drill Sergeant’ (14). Bumbo’s early capitulation to the rigours and expectation of military life is perhaps assisted by his assumed class-status, since National Service offers different benefits to those of different socio-economic backgrounds. Thanks to his public-school education, he is fast-tracked to the Brigade of Guards at Wellington Barracks where ‘he was one of a limited number of young men qualified by postal address and education as escorts’ (58). A fixture on the London Debutantes’ Season, Bumbo is perfectly placed to witness the fading of empire through a social construct that has become an outmoded, ‘badly organised commercial marriage mart, screened by a venal veneer of ex-aristos’ (58). The prim and antiquated endeavour that is known as ‘the Season’ is thrown starkly into relief by the free-living and loving encountered on the King’s Road where the protagonist finds acceptance. Flitting between the two worlds, Bumbo morphs into a ‘salamander. Quick Change Artiste [. . .] a spy. A renegade. Traitor. Class Enemy’ (121). His new acquaintances provoke an examination of his identity and demand his allegiance in the long-fought class-war. He vows to encourage mutiny in the privileged ranks, reasoning, ‘we’ve won every bloody battle for the Establishment in three hundred years. It’s time we asked why’ (115). Unsupported by his men, Bumbo is arrested for treason and humbled; rejected by his bohemian lover, he resigns from the Guards and settles down with a disgraced Deb.

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David Lodge’s Ginger You’re Barmy (1962) also stays firmly on home territory and is the second in a successful line of novels that map the continuum of social change across the long Sixties. Lodge’s early works are steeped in the ambit of post-war Britain; like The Breaking of Bumbo, Ginger fictionalizes the author’s personal experiences as a National Service conscript in the waning years of the 1950s. Lodge’s later works trace other institutional change. The British Museum is Falling Down (1965) looks at the hardships of married, postgraduate life in a swinging, libertine London. By the mid-1970s Lodge had turned his eye to the evolving realities and opportunities in provincial British university life in the first of his Campus Trilogy. Lodge’s work tends towards the autobiographical, and his national service novel, then, captures the experience of a grammar school student doing his time before university. Much like Sinclair’s novel, Lodge’s work conveys a strong sense that conscription was a very different experience for Britain’s post-war social classes right from the moment the young men set off for training camp: Public school boys wondering if they would get a commission in father’s old regiment, (they needn’t have worried, father had written to the Colonel); grammar school boys making resolutions to keep studying in preparation for university (they scarcely opened a book for the next two years); office boys and factory workers [. . .] wondering how they could keep their girls or pay their HP. (18)

National Service might have been class-blind in terms of the initial call-up, but such temporary egalitarianism was employed to swell the ranks of the armed forces. Jonathan Browne, Lodge’s grammar-educated protagonist, occupies a hallowed middle-ground with some social mobility and a glimmer of opportunity. This does not make him happy; he glumly states, ‘I dimly perceived that I had been wrenched out of a meritocracy for success in which I was well qualified and thrust into a small archaic world of privilege, for success in which I was singularly ill-endowed’ (49). Lodge’s prose is more successful than Sinclair’s in painting a picture of the relentless grind and petty prejudices of service life: the persecution of effeminate Percy, mindless tasks such as ‘spud bashing’ and ‘Bull,’ the fastidious cleaning of regimental kit. The official website for the British Armed Forces and National Service details that: The recruits were introduced to Number 3 Green Blanco, to be rubbed into all webbing items and Brasso, used to polish brass buckles, cap badges, and buttons. ‘Bull’ took up a large part of the new recruits’ daily routine, despite the fact that

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often there did not seem to be much practical purpose for the rules of kit maintenance. It was, however, an integral part of the regime of discipline that would transform civilians into soldiers.7

The practice of Bull may well have been ‘integral’ to character formation, but for the majority (which constituted anybody below the elite classes) such activities were a waste of time to be endured, as Lodge writes ‘the last surviving relic of feudalism in English society’ (76). Conscription had become an anachronism in a rapidly changing society, which Lodge highlights in the novel with an announcement in a newspaper concerning the end of conscription juxtaposed with the shiny minutiae of everyday life: I flipped idly through the crumpled pages: gossip column, woman’s page, film starlet stooping to reveal her breasts, competitions. WIN A NEW ASTON MARTIN OR £3000, CASH . Whoever chose the cars in these competition, I wondered. And if nobody, then why not just offer the cash? SUDDENLY ! A NEW WAY OF LIFE . An advertisement showed a young couple in a luxurious bed, watching a television set placed on a shelf at their feet. (189)

In the modern world (as depicted on the pages of the rag) there is no place for Bull and Brasso. The couple depicted instead smoothly fit into the last of the three categories that Marwick uses to manage the youth explosion of the decade. The historian divides the young into three categories: Pupils aged 13–19, Students aged 19–23 and Young Earners, aged 15–25 (43–4). The fabled and aspirational Young Earners were no longer in education, mostly not yet married and hence deliciously free of life’s usual constraints. The work they undertook was the very opposite of Bull; it did not define them, or seek to change them, but was a means to an end. By 1965, as Sampson patiently explains, ‘the old nonconformist ethos, the sense of work being itself virtuous and self-improving, is being undermined by the new prosperity’ (617). By 1960, National Service had been earmarked as a barrier to the successful passage of the child to the new socially generative and valuable category of Young Earner. To arrive at this desirable status, all young citizens required equal and unimpeded access to the subsequent stages of pupil and student, but educational institutions were severely constrained in terms of quantity and quality. The Newsom Report had criticized the educational provision for ordinary children, and as a result, the regional and social inequalities maintained by a seemingly ‘unfair’ eleven-plus exam were phased out in favour of a comprehensive system. In 1965, Sampson was positive about the possibilities of the modern system: ‘Like the new universities, the comprehensives have the

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The 1960s

Figure 1.2 Up to No Good, E1, 1963 – John Claridge.

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glamour of youth, and so have attracted good staff, keen in the culture and social possibilities of the school’ (214). In practice, new schools were hastily established and teachers drawn from far afield on a temporary basis, often arriving with little relevant experience. It soon emerged that no real improvement was sustained over the tripartite system even though ‘virtually no national effort was put into researching what the secondary modern should be doing. Some did experiment: but the decentralised education structure did not promote controlled experiment or the extension of successful ideas to other schools’ (194). Sampson concludes that ‘comprehensives have been forced to compromise: they have not been able to destroy the grammar schools, [which still] cream off the cleverest children’ (214). In short, schools were reaching a crisis point – 1964 would be marked by a critical shortage of teachers (an estimated 60,000 shortfall) which the proposed raising of the school leaving age would exacerbate.

Sixties schooling A portrait of the background to this educational crisis is expertly drawn in E.R. Braithwaite’s To Sir with Love (1959), a text whose popularity largely arises from the film version (1966) which shifts the setting from a gloomy East End elementary school of 1948 to a comprehensive in the Swinging Sixties with little consideration of the original text. The film’s central theme is the struggle for acceptance by a black ex-serviceman in a post-Windrush London. Conditions within metropolitan schools had so little improved that the plot’s re-positioning in mid-1960s London was accepted unconditionally. That said, the strengths of Braithwaite’s novel, its portrayal of a city struggling to lift itself out of the austerity of war, become lost beneath a glossy celluloid veneer of mini-skirts and pop music. Braithwaite’s original narrative is populated with characters who are ‘common as hayseeds’ (8), individuals who ‘were of the city, but they dressed like peasants, they looked like peasants, and talked liked peasants’ (7). The children who attend the school have plenty in common with Freud and Burlingham’s feral children; they get into fights and use obscenities, they walk to school past ‘raped and outraged buildings’, and play on ‘gaping bomb sites’ (11). Braithwaite’s novel, then, provides a snap-shot of the children of the Newsom Report: working-class children who have had the misfortune of having ‘always been poorly fed, clothed and housed’ (30). Echoing the report, the narrative chooses to focus on children who shockingly ‘by the very nature of their environment [. . .] are subject to pressures and tensions which tend to inhibit their spiritual, moral

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The 1960s

and physical growth’ (30). Braithwaite’s semi-autobiographical novel is undoubtedly about race but it is also about class and wears its socio-political heart on its sleeve when the narrator solemnly declares of his underprivileged charges: ‘It is our hope and intention to try to understand something of those pressures and tensions, and in understanding, to help them’ (30). The practical problems the children and the educational authorities faced in the post-war period are made very plain by Braithwaite. The school building is decrepit and foreboding; the children are crammed into classes of forty-six. Educational diktats are impotent in the face of the traditions and behaviour of a wider community where girls commonly became engaged or married at fifteen and ‘the juvenile courts [were] crowded with parents and children from ages six upwards’ (116). Money, rather than knowledge or legislation, is the main motivator in this deprived area where, at the beginning of the autumn term, ‘nearly half the class was absent, away in the hop-fields of Kent with other family members’ (106). In terms of teaching provision, there is a high turnover of staff, a factor emphasized by all novels detailing the schooling system at the time. E.R. Braithwaite’s ‘Sir’ becomes a teacher as a last resort and without formal qualifications after his ethnicity bars him from any other gainful employment in 1948. The staff rooms of the Sixties were filled with teachers who would like to be doing something, anything else. Likewise, B.S. Johnson’s protagonist Albert Albert is a manqué architect turned unhappy supply teacher. Edward Blishen’s two school novels of the period detail institutions staffed by an endless rota of temporary, under-qualified teachers fresh out of emergency training colleges. Like Braithwaite and Johnson, Blishen wrote from personal experience; in the prologue to Roaring Boys (1955) he foregrounds the validity of his fiction, stating that Stonehill Street School is ‘no fantasy; its boys are not entirely apocryphal’ (i). While slightly outside of our temporal parameters of interest, the novel lays the foundation for its sequel of 1969 where the school becomes part of a fullyfledged large comprehensive complex. The earlier Roaring Boys shows the tentative beginnings of educational reform; it is set two years after the raising of the school leaving age and is interwoven with the obstinate opposition that the act encountered: ‘this was still a raw issue with most of the Stonehill Street Boys and their parents. They felt that it amounted to a year’s malicious and probably illegal detention’ (5–6). In such impoverished surroundings, the nub of the matter was, as ever, financial: ‘we had snatched a year’s earning from their pockets. We had humiliated them by detaining them in the child’s world of school’ (6). Resistance was not only to be found in the rank of the pupils and their parents; the headmaster of Stonehill Street equally loathes the changes

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made to his institution, and members of the general public are also keen to have their say: ‘ “I mean – this Education Act” said Gibson. “Rather like these big classical concerts in sports arenas, don’t you think? Trying to fetch along the wrong people” ’ (181–2). Educational reform on a large scale has taken place by the time of Blishen’s follow-up, This Right Soft Lot (1969), where the marriage of hasty legislation and few resources had resulted in secondary schools with classes that were fit to burst. Blishen exasperatedly notes, ‘as we lost a member of staff, he was not replaced’ (51). Stonehill Street has become stretched over two sites and teachers cannot be persuaded to remain in an environment in which ‘there was no one to spare, anywhere. Now and then, a whole segment of a complete subject dropped out of sight – no-one to teach it’ (51–2). No amount of papering over of cracks can hide the bulging seams of institutions pushed to their limits. Whereas both Blishen and Braithwaite chose to end their tentative exposés with rosy scenes of appreciative students made good, ex-supply teacher B.S. Johnson takes a different tack, even choosing to lampoon such clichés in the pages of Albert Angelo (1964): I told you the sods pinched my pen a couple of weeks ago? I was reading this novel recently about a teacher in the east end who won over the kids by love and kindness, morality and honesty, against tremendous odds – talk about sentiment and wish fulfilment! I can just see my lot coming to me at the end of term with a present – or even my pen back – addressed to sir, with love! (130)

Although the pages of his well-received second novel are laced with black humour, Johnson’s vision is relentlessly negative about the grim educational realities. The novel finishes with the hapless teacher being killed by his students – bundled into the Regent’s Canal by the vicious and ultra-masculine cadet corps, a remnant of militarism and fascism. Such an ending seems fitting, since Johnson presents the inner-city schools as a battlefield, haggard staff fighting a battle, losing, up against the newest members of post-war society, youth: They sit, large and awkward at the aluminium-framed tables and chairs, men and women, physically, who you are trying to help to teach to take places in a society you do not believe in, in which their values already prevail rather than yours. (47)

The secondary modern is thus presented as a liminal space, an urban bad-land which few civilians dare to enter. As Johnson’s beleaguered teacher confides to his friend, ‘It’s like I’m working at the frontier of civilisation all the time’ (132).

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It is important to note that though harassed and abused, Johnson’s protagonist does not place the blame squarely on the students themselves. He targets, instead, the piecemeal and lacklustre attempts at ‘education for all’, one of the central tenets of the post-war welfare state. Ignorance, after all, was one of the giants to be tackled on Beveridge’s ‘road to reconstruction’,8 but initiatives were falling short of expectation. Albert issues a stark warning about latent aggression: ‘If we go on half-educating these kids anymore,’ he said suddenly to Terry, ‘then the violence will out. I’m sure they know they’re being cheated, that they’re being treated as subhuman beings. And the school is a microcosm of society as a whole.’ (133)

In the microcosms described by Johnson, Braithwaite and Blishen, few children remain in education for any longer than is legally required. In To Sir with Love, the ‘top’ class has little to distinguish it from the other forms, its members happily destined to fill positions in the factories and industries that formerly absorbed their parents.9 At Blishen’s Stonehill Street a mere twenty-two students stay on beyond the official leaving age. This motley group consists of a couple of boys who narrowly failed the entrance exam for grammar school and those who were ‘backward’ and deemed to be in need of further remedial instruction. There is no mention of higher education and even the suggestion of enrolment for the new General Certificate of Education (1965) is balked at. Blishen comments, ‘the perverse skills of GCE teaching weren’t within our grasp, as a team. We should play just as badly, or even worse, on that pitch’ (229). Again, it is the institutions that are to blame here rather than any intellectual inadequacy of the children themselves. Referring to the more able students, he continues, ‘Professor Higgins and Co can take their GCE s later, if they want them, in some suitable institution. But let’s not pretend it can be done for them here’ (231). Many of the writers surveyed in this chapter had first-hand experience of the inequalities and inadequacies of the educational system. B.S. Johnson incorporated his professional experience as a supply teacher into his novel Albert Angelo, but also delves further back to relive the formative experiences of his youth in his largely autobiographical third novel, Trawl (1966). As a bright working-class boy in 1941 he was afforded the possibility of taking the elevenplus exam to win a place at grammar school. Johnson faced the added hurdle of doing so while billeted as an evacuee, and sitting an alternative paper to his classmates, a ‘special exam. Different from the others’ (74). This peculiar turn of events highlights the lack of parity in this crucial determiner of intellectual ability; local authorities were free to set their own papers. Johnson was forced to

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take the London exam. On failing he is summoned by the head teacher who mocks his efforts: ‘ “Couldn’t you even do that one?” ’ (75). Trawl works as an autofiction, an effort to pinpoint the root of the author’s existential angst in Sixties Britain. Johnson presents moments such as these as key to the sense of latent inadequacy that developed over the subsequent years: ‘I do not think I realised at the time that I had been sorted out as not worth a grammar school education, and that I was not really competing on the same level any longer’ (84). The consequence of failure soon become clear when he is sent to a secondary school that ‘specialised in turning boys into clerks’ (140); this was clearly the expected end of his educational journey. There appeared to be no second chances.

Opportunity for all? Entry into university was not expected of youths such as B.S. Johnson; his eventual enrolment into King’s College London was achieved through nine months of private Latin lessons and a pre-sessional course at Birkbeck’s nightschool while working in a clerical job more fitting of his social status. He was not alone in desiring a university education. Back in 1965 Sampson explains that, ‘the demand for degrees has hugely increased since the war, and with the growth of big corporations, the break-up of family firms, and the need for professional managers, “graduatisation” has spread through industry and even into parts of the city’ (221). The problem, however, was that Britain was distinctly lacking in universities and those that existed were elitist, anti-expansionist and dedicated to protecting their own interests. In 1961 the Robbins Report was commissioned to survey or ‘review the pattern’ of the nation’s ‘full-time’ higher education provision and suggest how the increased demand for tertiary seats of learning could be met.10 Published in 1963 the proposals made and instituted were farreaching.11 Nine new universities were created from scratch – so-called ‘plate glass’ universities, constituting an alternative to the established ancient seats of learning and the ‘red brick’ universities of the nineteenth century. In addition, ten existing colleges of advanced technology were adapted into fully-fledged universities. The report anticipated its recommendations would open up university education to a wider socio-economic spectrum and ‘ensure equal academic awards for equal performance; that it should eliminate artificial differences of status and recognise hierarchy only in so far as it was based on function and attainment’ (265).

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Two years later the Robbins Report had been condensed into a single guiding principle, university places ‘should be available to all who were qualified for them by ability and attainment’, but statistical reports show that in fact, the paper did not have the far-reaching and sustained impact it hoped for. Bolton notes that, in fact, ‘the evidence, as far as it goes, suggests that over the latter half of the 20th century there was little change in the proportion of university students from lower social classes’.12 This paucity of positive working-class university experience is reflected at a granular level in the novels of the time. Where working-class academic experience is explored in fiction, a paralyzing clash of culture is emphasized, stressing the difficulty of integration and the improbability of social advancement for these students. The campus novel may well have been on the rise from the 1950s onwards, but all too often such accounts are written by exgrammar school boys who had painfully distanced themselves from their home communities – the ‘meritocrats’ of whom David Kynaston writes. In addition, female working-class forays into higher education are nowhere to be found, questioning the notion of opportunity for all. The report’s proposals would take some time to be instigated, its ethos somewhat delayed in being implemented, and accepted, by the general populace. This is not to suggest a lack of working-class aspiration, but rather the stubborn persistence of deep-rooted obstacles. David Storey’s Flight into Camden (1960) is fundamentally a love story played out against the backdrop of a Northern mining town and yet its sub-plot is the sharply growing frustration of a whole generation trying to break away from limited opportunity defined by class. Michael is an exception – a university lecturer – who at the opening of the novel is attending his grandfather’s burial. Michael is now uncomfortable among the men in his family with whom he has come to have little in common, despite their reassurances that he has taken a better path in life: ‘ “if thy’s got any brains in yr body, you won’t work like us,” Jack said. “Me and you dad – we were wukking six days a week at fourteen” ’ (11). Storey’s text is littered with binary opposites – the lofty university tower rises up high over the humble colliery town whose fortunes are to be found deep underground. While the novel opens with Michael’s disquiet in his domestic setting, the main narrator is his sister Margaret, whose opportunities have sharply bifurcated in relation to those of her two brothers. The siblings are intellectual equals, but Margaret is confined by her sex as much as her class. Although she attended grammar school, her subsequent options are limited: secretarial school or motherhood, of which she says, ‘ “Being a mother – it’s just the end of everything . . . it makes nothing of me” ’ (55). Michael does not approve of his sister’s enthusiasm to ‘make something’ of herself and, in spite

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of his own education, declares, ‘ “it’d be a waste of time and money educating a woman. At least beyond grammar school” ’ (52). When Margaret defies social norms and embarks on an affair with a married man, the pair flee the North for the attractions of the capital and the chance to negotiate a new life. Their break for freedom fails, and Margaret is brought back to her rightful place by her disapproving elder brother. Storey’s novel is a study in unconscious resistance, with ordinary individuals caught in the tight grip of a (at times self-perpetuated) class trap. Legislative barriers may have been lifted, but Storey’s individuals find it impossible, and thus ultimately undesirable, to climb the social strata. Education looms large as the great disruptor of traditional working-class identity that threatens to leave a sector of society adrift without a strong sense of self. As Dominic Head remarks of the novel, ‘the characters on the cusp of change seem uncertain of their desires’ (59). The social levelling sought by the politics of the time was unexpectedly encountering opposition both among the very people it sought to ‘better’ and those employed to instigate the change. In Storey’s later and rather gothic novel Radcliffe (1963) the effete eponym is moved from a private school to a local school hemmed in by rough housing estates. Radcliffe is bullied by the local children whose destiny has long since been determined by their social class. The class teacher is helpless, or ill-disposed, to fix this situation but challenges the class bully: ‘Perhaps there’s no room for Victor to think at all. We already know where he’s going don’t we?’ She gestured at the factory chimneys outside about which Radcliffe had already been so articulate. ‘There are places waiting for him out there already.’ (9)

The disdain between pupil and educator is often mutual. The son of a Welsh railway worker, Raymond Williams looks to his own youth in his early novels Border Country (1960) and Second Generation (1964). Like Williams, Border Country’s Matthew Price leaves his Welsh community to study at Cambridge and the novel details his identity crisis on returning to his politically-charged home environment where he is only known as his father’s son. Second Generation more explicitly reflects the stark divisions facing working-class students in its opening scene where postgraduate student Peter Owen surveys his surroundings: If you stand in between Towns Road, you can see either way, west to the spires and the towers of the cathedral and college; east to the yards and shed of the

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The 1960s motor works. You see different worlds, but there is no frontier between them, there is only the movement and traffic of a single city. (9)

Although there is no concrete ‘frontier’ between the two sectors, Owens’ home town is effectively divided in two. He has moved between the two thanks to a scholarship; as a grammar-school boy the eleven-plus has been his escape route. His passage has been a lonely one; others in his community have not been afforded the same opportunity, his father and uncle are factory workers and the women in his life all left school for gainful employment or marriage in spite of their considerable abilities. Peter’s mother finds an intellectual outlet in the essays and exercises she ghost writes for her husband’s correspondence course, and a physical outlet in her affair with an academic. Peter’s fiancée leaves grammar school for a position in a bureau de change and patiently waits for marriage. For those in the community not able to pass grammar school exams, the choices are even more limited; as Williams describes, their fate depicted in the very fabric of their allocated institution, ‘a new school, at the edge of these houses [which] has the clear functional shape of the factory building and even a reproduction, in bricks, of the funnel shape of the ventilators’ (12). In spite of his gifted opportunity, Peter is unhappy and feels at odds in both of the worlds he now straddles. His continuing education has seemingly infantilized leaving him little hope of professional security or personal fulfilment. Still living at home, the eternal student is forced to meet his fiancée in a children’s playground for privacy; he declares, ‘“what they call extended opportunities has just turned out just an extended adolescence”’ (12). His succession to the middle-class domain of higher education has required the negotiation of the clashing discourses and norms of two worlds. Robert Lane, his academic supervisor, is habitually late and moves with no great urgency through life, whereas ‘two minutes late for [Peter’s] father was fifteen minutes pay’ (69). Lane, a sociologist and the designated voice of authority, fails to see the clash and warns against an elision of the personal and the political: ‘“what strikes the most, and what we’d do well to admit, is that there’s no longer much difference in the way people live”’ (84). He accuses Peter of ‘projecting [his] own tension as a national difference’ (84). Having departed from his own community’s norms, Peter can find no solace in a retreat to the path that had always been expected of him: a steady job and marriage. Education has brought him to the position of questioning ‘the ordinary image of a better life’, whose essential inevitability ‘he now radically doubted’ (137). David Lodge is perhaps the British author most associated with the university or campus novel, and first attempted to capture academic life in The British

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Museum is Falling Down (1965), which focused on a classic grammar schooleducated meritocrat. Lodge’s later Campus Trilogy, which opened with Changing Places (1975), was published after the plate-glass universities were well established. Lodge’s novels of the 1960s and 1970s are therefore guided by the fortunes of the century’s youth; his debut The Picturegoers centres on the humdrum daily life of inner-city ‘ordinary folk’ in the early twentieth century, while Ginger You’re Barmy depicts the rigours and injustices of National Service (discussed previously). The British Museum is Falling Down concerns the struggles of Adam Appleby, an impoverished, liberal, postgraduate student who, unlike Williams’ Peter Owen, has married and is now researching the modernist novel with a wife and three children for whom he should provide. While Peter Owen struggles with the traditions and expectations of his home community, Appleby’s battle is with the Church. As a Catholic, he is bound to follow the doctrine of Rome in all areas of his private life, but as an educated metropolitan liberal he questions the wisdom of bringing yet another child into the world when the possibility of his wife’s fourth pregnancy looms large. His religious beliefs suddenly seem at odds with the infolding modern world. Mitras comments: Appleby’s story is one of moving in and out of the church, of forays into the world [. . .] but returns always to the observance of Catholic moral teaching, be it the Rhythm Method or sexual fidelity. The Church and the City are conceived as two separate worlds, the twain do not meet, and Appleby who traverses both worlds is a sort of secret agent. (73)

Mitras relies here on the figure of the interloper to position Appleby in this text; indeed the individual with a double life becomes the key trope for those writers aiming to relay the experience of those permitted opportunity in this time of change. While Adam struggles with this disjunct between faith and modern urban living, his education allows him to intellectualize and explore that process in a safe space. This is mirrored in Lodge’s prose which rejects prosaic social realism and dabbles in the intellectual play of modernist fracture and pastiche. Postgraduate study provided valuable time and inspiration for aesthetic and creative growth, but only for those of the correct sex and class. Maureen Duffy notes that for working-class women such as her, undergraduate education inevitably resulted in ‘an elevation to the teaching class’ (viii) at the very best. Records show that few female postgraduates would be able to replicate Lodge and Appleby’s experience and experimentation. In 1960 2,994 men were enrolled on higher degrees in the UK compared to 279 women. Even by 1970 the ratio remained the same.13

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Female voices Glamorous ‘youthquaker’ Shena Mackay burst onto the London literary scene as a cause célèbre in the early part of the Sixties. Although from an affluent background, Mackay was forced by family circumstances to move from her provincial grammar school to a Blackheath comprehensive at the age of fifteen. In an interview with writer Helen Brown she recalls the difficulty of the transition: It was a large comprehensive. All the other girls had known each other for a long time and there was an underlying resentment among pupils, and even some staff, that I had come from a grammar. And things were difficult at home. My parents had an unhappy marriage. So I used to play truant. If we had the money we would catch the train into central London and wander around Soho.14

She eventually gave up in formal education and left school at the age of 16 after winning a poetry competition in the Daily Mirror. Mackay threw herself determinately into bohemian life, becoming an independent young earner with a flat-share in seedy Earl’s Court and friends in the fast crowd. Mackay’s first book, twinned novellas Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumburger and Toddler on the Run (1964), was published when she was twenty, although she had written it some years before. Eugene opens at Christmas time with the eponym surveying the aftermath of a party in the house where he rents a bedsitting room. The festivity of the season is contrasted with the poverty of his surroundings; thirtyyear-old Eugene’s home is cold and festooned with broken china, litter and bicycle parts rather than Christmas decorations. The houseguests are faceless, prostrate and sick. Eugene has no work or purpose in life but is nonetheless dangerously attractive to Catholic schoolgirl Abigail who, with her long auburn hair and cat's eyes, is easily read as a vision of 1960s loveliness, an analogue of her creator. Part of Eugene’s appeal is the ease with which he evades social constraints; he steals cars without remorse and assists Abigail in playing hooky from her strict single-sex school. Once more the Church is portrayed as incompatible with the modern world – the faith school is a rigid, joyless place, and the girls casually cruel. Any challenge to respectability is beyond the pale, any transgression of social niceties unacceptable. Chastising the girls for a cat fight that has broken out, their teacher emphasizes that ‘in addition to this bestiality, not one of these girls was wearing a beret’ (11). The hatless girls are condemned as ‘guttersnipes’ who ‘shall be dealt with as such’ (11). Abigail craves liberation, but cannot achieve it on her own – posing as her uncle, Eugene removes her from school and treats

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her to coffee and spins in his car through Soho. Eugene is no shining knight; he has little investment in their relationship and sees other girls as he pleases. One of his other girlfriends is presented by Mackay as the epitome of 1950s domestic perfection: ‘Florence tied an apron round her pleated waist, rolled the sleeves of her floral blouse up her white arms and set to work, the electric light sparkling on her newly-set hair’ (56). However, as the scene progresses, Flo is revealed as a lonely Sixties girl who lives in a bedsit and cooks fish fingers and tinned soup. Undefeated in spirit, she tries to convince him that she’s a modern sophisticate with real prospects: ‘I know you think I’m a bit of a square, but I’ve has quite a bit of experience, you know. I was at university.’ ‘You don’t meet real people at University. You’ve got to go out into the world to meet real people.’ ‘I was at Durham University’. (39)

Flo’s modern life is no improvement on the 1950s model, yet is still the best that Abigail can aspire to through education. She unhesitatingly opts for the fast life of crime instead, and like Arthur, her plans are thwarted. Divine intervention sees that Eugene ends up in prison and later loses his life. At the close it is revealed that Abigail still firmly believes her fate to be tied up with that of her man – although the title of the novel alludes to the Eugene’s life being cut short, in Abigail’s mind the dust of the tomb falls on them both: Eugene was in a far off hell and she was here. Around her forever stretched the black eternity. The howling and eating of fists had achieved nothing, neither would this. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I will learn shorthand and typing,’ because she was already dead. (66)

Yet, in the ‘Preface’ to Dunn’s Talking to Women, she writes about the artists, writers and ‘ordinary working women’ whom she interviewed, saying, ‘If these girls have anything in common it is a belief in personal fulfilment – that a woman’s life should not solely be the struggle to make men happy but more than that a progress towards the development of one’s own body and soul’ (ix). On Eugene’s death, this is the lesson that Abigail needs to grasp, but Mackay’s debut ends before any modernist epiphany can take place. Mackay’s debut novellas were swiftly followed by Music Upstairs (1965), which also captured the humdrum existence of a young single woman trapped in a bedsit furnished with what is described in an ‘Afterword’ to the 1988 edition

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as ‘grubby candlewick bedspreads, suitcases on the tops of wardrobes, slotmeters for the old-style gas.’ In Mackay’s work one encounters the negative of Marwick’s technicolour young earners; her youths struggle to enjoy a comfortable standard of living in the city. For uneducated, working-class women, the reality was even bleaker. Writer Nell Dunn received a similar convent education to Mackay’s Abigail; born into an elite family she – like most girls in the 1950s – left school at fourteen. By 1959 she had left home and begun to fend for herself in run-down Battersea, taking a job in a sweet factory and finding friendship and inspiration in the impoverished community. Her experiences, and those of the women she encountered, were recorded in the highly celebrated and shocking novels Up the Junction (1963) and Poor Cow (1967). Mackay and Dunn were welcomed by the London literary scene with open arms thanks to their talent, good looks and racy writing. Their often outré prose is peppered with profanities and an unconstrained female sexuality that was deemed deliciously scandalous at the time, in stark contrast to the male desire of earlier social realism. Both writers might be easily dismissed as privileged girls with a penchant for ‘slumming it’, but neither enjoyed the alleged benefits of an extended or higher education. Both wrote from personal experience of the communities in which they made their home. In the Preface to Poor Cow, Dunn writes fondly of the real Joy who partly inspired the protagonist of a novel that ‘was more a mixture of what happened to her, and also what happened to me’ (xi). Margaret Drabble too writes in Dunn’s defence, positioning her texts as ‘artless, sympathetic, participatory [. . .] first-hand’ (xiv). In Poor Cow the narrative explores the limited opportunity that was available to ill-educated, working-class women in the 1960s: the traditional roles of wife and mother or a succession of menial or degrading jobs. Joy is forced to live on social assistance and move in with her Aunt Emm when her husband is imprisoned for robbery and she is left literally holding the baby. Her aunt is clear that Joy can only expect a replication of her own dreary existence: ‘ “That’s all I’ve ever done – clean. I’ve bin cleaning since I was sixteen [. . .] Blokes and cleaning, you’d think that’s all there was in life” ’ (22). These patterns are engrained deeply in working-class life and curtail female aspiration. Reflecting on her mother’s tales of the 1920s, Maureen Duffy impassively relates her mother’s initiation into the world of work: ‘my mother was fourteen and out to her first job. It lasted exactly a fortnight. Each night she came home and cried with the misery and fatigue’ (30). The very title of Duffy’s debut, That’s How it Was (1962), emphasizes how such a fate was stoically accepted and her early dramatic work, the plays Josie (1961) and The Lay Off (1962), are rooted in the realities of the

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female-dominated world of factory production-line work. Working-class girls of the 1960s may well have been keen to escape this fate, but alternatives were very limited. Poor Cow’s Aunty Emm offers advice, ‘ “there’s not much money in sex nowadays, too many people are doing it” ’ (15), but her niece Joy is seduced by the consumer goods and freedom that society now promises her. Eating cottage pie in a café her eye is caught by an advertising board designed to ignite a latent sense of entitlement: ‘COME ALIVE . YOU ’RE IN THE PEPSI GENERATION !’ (2). Joy’s response, ‘ “Fuck that” ’, reveals a steely determination to make her own way, rather than follow the patterns that have been determined by social convention or the burgeoning consumer society. It is this same raw drive that permeates Joy’s letters to the imprisoned Dave. These communications are as poorly spelt and constructed as they are impassioned and expressive; Joy reveals that she needs only two things: hard cash to bring up her son and uninhibited sex for her own pleasure, but she is thwarted in both by the dual bind of class and social convention. Having briefly sampled the traditional delights of monogamy and keeping house, Joy despairs: I can’t bear the thought of all these women in the flats around me – all doing the same things – mopping down the lino, washing their husband’s shirts, changing their babies, doing the shopping, it’s all gone bent on me – the everyday life – the sight of a shopping basket almost turns my guts. (132)

In spite of Aunt Emm’s warnings, Joy finds that her best option as a single mother is to exploit her youth and sexuality, to flirt with customers at the bar, to pose for glamour shots and indulge in occasional, casual prostitution. Like the interviewees in Talking to Women, Joy takes pleasure in her body and gains strength from her fleeting power over men and yet her situation in life never much improves. Again, Dunn claims in her introduction to Poor Cow that in communities such as Joy’s, ‘women really ruled the roost in those days’ (x), but her protagonist’s survival is wholly precarious and solely dependent on the inconstant desires of men. Rather than possessing a clear sense of self and destiny she is racked with confusion and uncertainty: I’d just like to be secure. You know, something out of life that everybody else’s got. [. . .] I wish I had a career. I need one more than anything. I regret getting married, In one sense I do, and in another sense I don’t. [. . .] Then if I hadn’t got married then I’d have been an ordinary person in fact I might have been worse than I am now. [. . .] And sex, it’s killing me every day. If I don’t have it, let’s face it, I’m only human . . . (23–4)

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What is certain is that her class indelibly shapes her destiny, no matter how hard she tries to disguise it. In a letter to Dave, she jokes, Did I tell you in September I’m going to evening classes. You never guess what for? Aleycustion lesson, how to walk propelye. [. . .] Oh Dave I going to realy try, your see my letters will sound right, and I’ll talk all possh ha ha. (52)

Of course, the elocution lessons never happen. Joy is aware that her class is as unshakeable as her sex, both seemingly mere facts of life. She grimaces, ‘I always get ballsed up talking to the upper classes. Whoever heard of a girl like me making it?’ (133) Joy’s world is very different from that of Margaret Drabble’s Sarah, the narrator of A Summer Bird-Cage (1963) who is first introduced to the reader eating a garlic-laced ham roll on the ferry returning home from France. Sarah is unmistakably middle-class, having recently taken a first-class degree at Oxford; she is travelling to her sister’s society wedding to a successful and brilliant writer. Women like Sarah would seem to have all of the opportunity that eludes Joy and yet feel even more despairing of their situation. Education and social position have fleetingly opened up the world only for it narrow to only very specific paths ahead: ‘What are all your friends doing?’ said Louise. ‘Oh don’t ask. They’re all making as atrocious a mess of it as me. Wandering around America or the Continent wishing they had something better to do, or married and bored, or teaching in secondary moderns – God you can take the lot for me.’ (183)

Sarah’s sister Louise has wisely decided to take the traditional route – marriage to a rich man which, although unappealing to Sarah, ‘seemed to be one way of escaping the secretarial course–coffee bar degradation that had been creeping up on her ever since, two years ago, she too had left the esoteric paradise of Oxford’ (8). In Drabble’s novel, women such as Sarah might be granted the benefits of education but cannot escape the weight of social expectations. At best, academic accolades are followed by office jobs which pay lip-service to the notion of a career, or at worst, teaching, the positions that remain after the male graduates have taken their pick, constituting a stop-gap before such women inevitably fulfil their biological and social destiny. In Drabble’s novel, female undergraduates prepare for their weddings in their final year of study and a good marriage still remains the most reliable route to economic comfort and social acceptance. Louise warns against marrying for love:

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Bill lectures at the Polytechnic, and Stella goes mad with that baby [. . .] I went to see them when she was expecting her second – it was too terrible, the baby was sitting on its pot and screaming, and the loo was littered with wet nappies, and everywhere smelt of babies. (205)

Educated Stella’s life is revealed as no more fulfilling or comfortable than that of Dunn’s Joy or William’s Kate, who advises bitterly that ‘ “then comes the time, as your husband’s work settles, as your son moves away, when you know you can’t live for ever through others” ’ (205). Educational reform had failed to provide opportunity of any magnitude for women across the classes whose destiny was always already informed and shaped by the men in their lives. A growing awareness of gender inequality is woven into the novels of the 1960s, but the feminist agenda is generally presented as one problem among many; a fundamentally personal issue that has yet to become political. Feminine discontent might be felt throughout these texts, but sisterly solidarity has yet to become a force for change. Groes notes the token efforts in Up the Junction which opens with a symbolic vignette: ‘We stand the three of us, me, Sylvie and Rube, pressed up against the saloon door, brown ales in our hands’ (13). Dunn’s women (the heiress narrator and her working-class friends) are portrayed as united in their experience of the world, having more in common than the class system would have one believe. Yet Groes presents Dunn’s vision as a ruse rather than reflective of any socio-political reality: In Nell Dunn’s writing, class and ethnic identities are subsumed, transcended and legitimized by the importance of the genderedness of the subject, and the question is whether we accept this rather demanding premise. (23)

He suggests that gender is cleverly foregrounded by the author to disguise her uninvited voicing of working-class subalterns – a card she carries to gain the trust of those she studies. Dunn’s heiress is no feminist pioneer. As a figure predating feminism’s second wave she is informed by the contemporary practices of social and cultural ethnography that evolved in the mid-century. Dunn’s novels, considered with their self-reflexive peritexts, work as valuable emic observations – auto-fictions written from within a specific cultural group and its habitat. Her reports bear witness to unpalatable truths that would not be selected for public consumption on London60sweek. Each vignette becomes an individual study: the death of an old crone who has had no choice but to be a ‘scrubber’ all her life (93); an observation of the young who roam wastelands and river banks, and teachers ‘out on strike and troops of children [who] trudge the streets with sticks’ (109). Half-feral, the youngest only pause to throw stolen goods into the Thames,

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boasting of their sexual adventures, while the heiress observes, transcribing their exchanges: ‘Did you let him take your drawers down?’ ‘No, of course I didn’t. I took them down meself,’ says ten-year-old Moraine, indignant. (110)

These fictions bear witness to the post-war youth ‘problem’, the author becoming ‘participant observer’, in a case study of inner-city deprivation. This chapter has suggested common threads which are woven into the fictions of the 1960s: a concern for the demotic, a consideration of identity that would fuel the production of literary auto-fictions that blurred boundaries between the literary and the biographical. Many of the texts are written by the young because, as Duffy explains, ‘a book is written not in a vacuum but at a precise historical moment which will affect not only the stylistic dress in which it is clothed but its moral and political underpinnings’ (xi). Sixties youth was emboldened by the promise of new freedoms and opportunities to write; they were, after all, heralded as youthquakers, the successfully reformed feral youth. Yet their words do not fully subscribe to the dream, and incorporate and assess, instead, the fears and obstacles that still blocked their way. The communities highlighted in their ethnographic texts of the 1960s are precisely ones that are on the brink of great change; like the landscape that houses them they morph under the pull of both the future and the past. Ultimately it is the pull of the future that will win – subsequent adaptations of the novels would often transform the knock-kneed, under-fed urchins of the waste grounds with a good lick of 1960s gloss into a spectacle of the Swinging Sixties that was slickly produced for the future archive. These images were, and continue to be, foregrounded for the common good, creating a flawless performative imaginary that is socially acceptable and seductively commercial, and in this way interpolating citizens then, and now, to believe that the long Sixties was truly the time when, echoing MacMillan’s slogan from the 1950s, they’d never had it so good.

Notes 1 See http://london60sweek.co.uk/timeline1968.html 2 Highmore (324) references Barthes’ 1979 idea of l’imaginaire here, the psychosemiotic archive of deeply embedded cultural gestures made up of text and image. 3 Julienne Ford argues that the push to re-examine the eleven-plus exam was not driven by the popular rejection of discrimination by ability but because the examination could

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not be relied on to discriminate efficiently and accurately enough (1). Children of many middle-class parents were failing to gain a place at grammar school due to the post-war ‘bulge’ in birth-rate and no increase in the overall number of grammar school places available. 4 See www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/robbins/robbins1963.html for full text of the report. 5 In Social Class and the Comprehensive School, Ford notes that during the Sixties, ‘the connection between comprehensive education and the “Fairer Society” is nowhere made clear, in fact it is often taken to be self-evident, and the connection is considered to be so obvious that no explanation is required’ (5–6). 6 Little and Westergaard’s 1964 study of class differentials in educational opportunity identified a reduction in social inequalities in education, resulting from a long-term gradual trend rather than a new phenomenon prompted by post-war legislation and comprehensive schooling. In fact they noted that The general increase of grammar school places has benefitted children of all social classes, but working class children proportionately more than others. [. . .] Certainly, the overall expansion of educational facilities has been of greater significance than any redistribution of opportunities. (312) 7 See www.britisharmedforces.org/ns/nat_history.htm 8 Full text available at www.sochealth.co.uk/national-health-service/public-healthand-wellbeing/beveridge-report/ 9 Ford notes, Since the majority of secondary modern school children have always been from working-class homes and their low educational status, and consequent low anticipations of occupational status, have been quite in accord with their parents’ occupational prestige, we would not expect them or their parents to define their circumstances as unjust. (4) 10 For the full report see: www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/robbins/robbins1963. html#01 11 As the report made clear, the evidence considered was extensive, including numerous visits: We have made a number of visits to universities, Colleges of Advanced Technology, technical colleges and training colleges in Great Britain. We have also paid short visits to France, the Federal German Republic, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland and longer visits to the United States and the Soviet Union. 12 See http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/22802/1/SN 00620.pdf

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13 The figures for 1970 are: 11,186 male postgraduate students and 1,715 female. Higher Education Statistics Agency, http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/ documents/SN 04252/SN 04252.pdf 14 www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3609559/A-writers-life-Shena-Mackay.html

Works cited Aitken, Jonathan. The Young Meteors. London: Secker & Warburg, 1967. Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Jonathan Cape, 1979. Beesley, T., V. Brierley and S. Griffiths. ‘The First Lady of Fashion’. Concrete. 2005. Berg, Leila. Look at Kids. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Blishen, Edward. Roaring Boys: A Headmaster’s Agony. London: Thames and Hudson, 1955. ———. Right Soft Lot. London: Thames and Hudson, 1969. Bolton, Paul. ‘Education and Social Class.’ Ed. Statistics, Social and General 2010 of Standard Notes. Braithwaite, E.R. To Sir, with Love. London: Bodley Head, 1959. Brown, Helen. ‘A Writer’s Life: Shena Mackay.’ The Telegraph. 4 January 2004. Web. www. telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3609559/A-writers-life-Shena-Mackay.html Burlingham, Dorothy and Anna Freud. Young Children in War-Time: A Year’s Work in a Residential War Nursery. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1942. Donnelly, Mark. Sixties Britain: Culture, Society and Politics. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005. Drabble, Margaret. A Summer Bird-Cage. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973 [1963]. Duffy, Maureen. That’s How it Was. London: Virago, 1983 [1962]. Dunn, Nell. Up the Junction. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1963. ———. Talking to Women. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965. ———. Poor Cow. Virago: London, 2013 [1967]. Ford, Julienne. Social Class and the Comprehensive School. London: Routledge, 2006. Groes, Sebastian. British Fictions of the Sixties. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Head, Dominic. The Cambridge Guide to Modern British Fiction 1950–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Highmore, Ben. ‘Playgrounds and Bombsites: Postwar Britain’s Ruined Landscapes.’ Cultural Politics. 9.3, 2013: 323–36. Johnson, B.S. Albert Angelo. Omnibus. London: Picador, 2004 [1964]. ———. Trawl. Omnibus. London: Picador, 2004 [1966]. ———. ed. All Bull: The National Servicemen. London: Quartet, 1973. Kynaston, David. Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957–59. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Little, Alan and John Westergaard. ‘The Trend of Class Differentials in Educational Opportunity in England and Wales.’ The British Journal of Sociology. 15(4) December 1964: 301–16.

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Lodge, David. Ginger, You’re Barmy. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962. ———. The British Museum is Falling Down. London: Vintage, 2011 [1965]. London60sWeek. Web. 22 March 2016. http://london60sweek.co.uk/. Mackay, Shena. Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumburger / Toddler on the Run. London: Vintage, 1998 [1964]. ———. Music Upstairs. London: Virago, 1989 [1965]. Marwick, Arthur. The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958–c.1974. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Mitras, Luis R. ‘Postmodern or Post-Catholic? A Study of British Catholic Writers and Their Fictions in a Postmodern and Post-conciliar World’. University of South Africa, 1997. Royle, Trevor. National Service: The Best Years of Their Lives. London: André Deutsch, 2002. Sampson, Anthony. Anatomy of Britain Today. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965. Sandbrook, Dominic. Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles. London: Little, Brown, 2005. Seddon, Melanie. ‘Giving Feeling Form: B.S. Johnson’s Literary Project’. Unpublished Thesis, University of Portsmouth, 2016. https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/portal/en/ theses/giving-feeling-form(2ed5f0ba-e2bb-4f45-a3d8–28363905079e).html Sinclair, Andrew. The Breaking of Bumbo. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. Storey, David. Flight into Camden. London: Longman, 1960. ———. Radcliffe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Thomas, Leslie. The Virgin Soldiers. London: Constable, 1966. Vinen, Richard. National Service: Conscription in Britain 1945–1963. London: Allen Lane, 2014. Vreeland, Diane. ‘Editorial.’ Vogue. January 1965. Williams, Raymond. Border Country. London: Chatto and Windus, 1960. ———. Second Generation. London: Chatto and Windus, 1978 [1964]. Young, Michael. The Rise of the Meritocracy. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1973.

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The Housewife and the Single Girl as Archetypes in Satirical Novels of the 1960s Joseph Darlington

This chapter concerns 1960s fiction and its relations with women, both in terms of characters and authors, as well as ways in which associated writing can be seen to mediate many of the predominant myths of the era about women; most especially those regarding the sexual revolution and the breakdown of traditional marriage structures. A brief introduction will clarify the reality behind such myths and how, in Britain at least, the supposed new ‘permissiveness’ was more of a fashionable pose than a social reality. The first section will then unpack two archetypical figures about which 1960s debates were obsessed, the Housewife and the Single Girl, and how novels about ‘modern’ marriage, Eva Figes’ Equinox (1966) and Anthony Burgess’ One Hand Clapping (1961), reveal these figures to define each other as dialectically unified by their opposition. The second section traces the debate around singleness, marriage and motherhood back to Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958) and its critical reception which, in spite of taking place in 1958, can be seen as the genesis of much that follows. Her drama, which was initially intended to be a novel, was transferred from the Theatre Royal Stratford East where it premiered in 1958 to Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End on 10 February 1959 and was in 1961 adapted into an award-winning film. The third section engages with five different social satires which are united by a common trope: the emotionally shallow woman as figure of satirical fun. This is finally tied back to the historical context of the 1960s and the unprecedented boom in sales of women’s literature against which all these texts can be read as indicative of a distinct post-war moment of simultaneous prosperity and an overall decrease in women’s autonomy. It is to this historical context that the focus now turns.

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Women in the 1960s: Writing and written Widely considered to be the decade in which women gained greater autonomy, in the 1960s traditional gender roles in industrialized society were starting to be questioned and a new, modern set of attitudes was emerging.1 The classic description of this process concerns the ‘sexual revolution’ taking place on both sides of the Atlantic and, although the accompanying women’s liberation movement would have to wait until 1970 to truly take hold in Britain, voices like Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan heralded the political debates to come.2 The contraceptive pill was available on the NHS by 1961 – as Linda Grant indicates albeit only for married couples (149) – which was widely considered indicative of a broadening liberality concerning sexual matters, while lifestyle magazines and books like Helen Gurley Brown’s bestselling Sex and the Single Girl (1962) claimed that ‘far from being a creature to be pitied and patronised, [the Single Girl] is emerging as the newest glamour girl of our times’ (5). The emergence of a ‘Swinging’ London scene, celebrated on Time Magazine’s infamous April 1966 cover was typified by Vidal Sassoon’s sleek and economical new hair styles, what Paula Reed reports as Mary Quant’s fashion mission to ‘increase the availability of fun to everyone’ (74) and hip cinematic capers like Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966).3 The image of the Single Girl was at the heart of how the era saw itself, right down to new dance crazes like the twist, which for the first time in Britain negated the traditional necessity for a dance partner. Literature is certainly not exempt from this fetishization of swinging singledom. As will be seen in this chapter, even novels concerning marriage and child-rearing in the 1960s have liberalization of sexual attitudes at their core. The shifts in culture and sexual norms that took place in the 1960s were framed as reflective of a wider ‘permissiveness’ (to use the term of the era). Writing in The Sixties (1998), Arthur Marwick quotes a study from the mid1960s which claimed that: In a survey of [48] working-class wives and [48] middle-class wives. . . it emerged that 62% of the middle-class wives felt they gave their children much greater freedom than their mothers had given them, while 69% of the working-class mothers felt they were bringing up their children differently from the way in which they had been brought up, which in 80% of cases meant ‘less restriction and more understanding’. (383)

As with most attitude shifts there were considerable socio-economic developments underlying the changes too. Post-war reconstruction, typified by a welfare state

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and a Keynesian emphasis on full employment produced a consumer boom and a democratization of purchasing choices summarized by the neologism ‘lifestyle’. Doris Lessing describes London negatively: ‘no cafes. No good restaurants. Clothes were still “austerity” from the war, dismal and ugly. Everyone was indoors by ten, and the streets were empty’ (4). This was replaced with an urban centre to compete with the cosmopolitan cities of the US , as well as with Paris and Rome on the continent. The spirit of the age celebrated freedom through leisure; a freedom possible for more people than ever before, although arguably still exaggerated through marketing and lifestyle journalism, and what David Holbrook describes as ‘the light distractions of the megalopolis’ which ‘define their content’ (147). In terms of demographics, the extent of this revolutionary change in society was questionable and indeed, was questioned in the early 1970s. Ann Oakley’s Housewife (1974) makes a clear case for ‘the extent of the change [being] often overestimated’ and that marriage and employment statistics ‘reveal the persistence of traditional ideas about “a woman’s place” ’ (59). Although the number of working women rose, Oakley points out that the percentage in full-time positions actually fell during this period and marriage rates remained roughly equivalent to pre-war standards. One might, like Oakley, conclude the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ was an experience particular to London elites and, beyond this small circle, was largely illusory. One might also consider Marwick’s analysis, however, that during the 1960s ‘the main agents in establishing new patterns of consumer sales and new standards of taste, particularly in Europe, were young, and not quite so young, married couples [with] wives taking the initiative’ (44). Eric Hobsbawm notes that women were paid much less than their male co-workers; hence even a typical middle class woman’s income ‘rarely made much of an addition to the family income’ (318).Yet they could no longer be seen as long-suffering housewives struggling under austerity conditions. This chapter argues that experiences of the ‘sexual revolution’, although not reflected statistically in an increase in single women living independently, did offer limited liberation from traditional roles and therefore increased choice. Women were determining tastes and the ‘Single Girl’ was the poster-child for this liberation, reflecting women’s autonomy in stark contrast to the equally pervasive image of the obedient ‘Housewife’. It terms of women’s independence being culturally celebrated and foregrounded this chapter seeks to analyse women’s literature of the 1960s and unpack the experiences of increased agency (or otherwise) that are reflected. The recurrent tone taken by writers engaging with the ‘new permissiveness’ is one I characterize as ‘sophistication’; an often transparent pose of cultivated shallow affect, an emotional impermeability seemingly won through long engagement

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with the ways of the world. The blasé quality of these narratives is arguably a reflection of the new autonomy in an idealized, projective form. The tensions unpacked in the first two sections of this chapter, regarding marriage and the lack of marriage respectively, are here replaced by an easy and aloof atmosphere, liberating in its confident lack of care. To pose this theoretically, we might think of the concept of interpassivity as outlined by Slavoj Žižek in his 2016 essay of the same name: I am active through the Other, ie. I can remain passive, while the Other does it for me; in the case of interpassivity I am passive through the Other, ie. I accede to the Other the passive aspect (of enjoying), while I can remain actively engaged. This allows us to propose the notion of false activity; you think you are active, while your true position, as it is embodied in the fetish, is passive. (N.Pag.)

In other words, there is a pleasure to be gained in having one enjoy for you. Only, in this case, the other-supposed-to-enjoy is not ‘enjoying’ either (passively or actively) but is taking the entire experience of motherhood, singledom and – eventually – marriage, in a manner of total, no doubt liberating, unconcern. Consider too in the context of the 1960s literary industry, which as Hugh Willatt reminds us in The Arts Council of Great Britain (1971), benefited from the buoyancy of the paperback industry. The turn of the decade saw over 60,000 new titles printed a year compared to the average of 20,000 printed annually, virtually unchanging from the Victorian period to the 1950s (28). The unprecedented freedom of married women in terms of both free time and consumption power can be tied directly to the major success of novels like Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (1965) and even the appearance of more far experimental novels like Figes’ Equinox that could nevertheless find sufficient market to turn a profit for their respective publishers. By the 1970s the successful feminist press Virago would publish a wide range of highbrow, experimental and literary titles to large sales. Each text discussed in this chapter implies a large accompanying readership who were reflecting on society and their place within it through unprecedented access to such cultural production and, perhaps more importantly, cultural enjoyment.

The Housewife and the Single Girl: Marital breakdown in Equinox and One Hand Clapping The sense of excitement and awe which so often accompanied descriptions of the new species, the Single Girl, develops in dialogue with an increasingly

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diminutive, or at least dismissive, view of the Housewife.4 One can see this emerging in Betty Friedan’s descriptions of the American housewife in Feminine Mystique (1963); people who ‘seemed angry about something’ (52) in the midst of prosperity, a closed world where Friedan ‘never found a woman who actually fitted that “happy housewife” image’ (193). For Friedan, the Housewife was a social role that was achieved by post-war American prosperity but offered little fulfilment as a role in itself. By the end of the decade writers like Germaine Greer had transformed this lack of fulfilment into something resembling a gulag: The working girl who marries, works for a period after her marriage and retires to breed, is hardly equipped for the isolation of the nuclear household. Regardless of whether she enjoyed the menial work of typing or selling or waitressing or clerking, she at least had freedom of movement to a degree. Her horizon shrinks to the house, the shopping centre and the telly. (252)

Eva Figes is best known for her work, Patriarchal Attitudes (1970) – a text which Nigel Fountain notes was as much ‘a key influence’ (107) on British second wave feminism as Greer’s Female Eunuch. In Equinox (1966), however, her work has yet to take on the polemical qualities of her later writing (both political and fictional) and engages more personally with the married experience. Equinox’s narrative traces a year in the life of Elizabeth, trapped in a loveless marriage with her husband Martin, who slowly builds up sufficient willpower to leave him and, at the same time, break free of the role of long-suffering Housewife into which she has found herself unwittingly falling. Speaking in an interview with Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet, Figes described the novel as autobiographically based, but maintained, however, that ‘the husband was not my husband really, though he had certain characteristics of my husband; he was me. I split myself into several bits’ (34). Seen in such a light the novel incorporates two conflicting elements in a dialogue with the self: Elizabeth, a more rounded character, seeks independence; and Martin, the voice of social expectation, or patriarchal expectation, constantly leverages imagery of the ‘bourgeois little housewife’ (26) to both simultaneously entrap and dismiss Elizabeth. The novel conforms to Friedan’s testimonials from housewives without taking Friedan’s cautious academic approach and has all the bite of a Greer essay without falling into the alternative trap of casting housewives purely as victims of patriarchal domination. Its dialogical qualities outline dramatically the tensions inherent in performing ‘successful’ marriage within a single-wage household. Throughout Equinox traditional roles are in conflict with the desire for independence. Both are uncomfortably disrupted by existential questions of

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personal autonomy and societal expectation. The Single Girl might be celebrated as the embodiment of female autonomy, but is also so associated with the most vacuous of marketing campaigns that Figes’ characters cannot simply connect freedom of choice with autonomous action. Consumer society, appearing to Elizabeth as ‘straight uniform ugliness of the long manmade chasm’ (66) in Tottenham Court Road, offers false freedom, a superficial manipulation. Meanwhile, Figes also destabilizes the association of tradition with nature. The assertion that a housewife walks a time-worn path and can depend upon the lessons of the past for confirmation of her actions is revealed as no consolation whatsoever: I’d find myself speechless, quite unable to communicate in any way, quite unable to understand how it all happened or how I got here at all. What’s this bond supposed to be, anyway, how does it all keep going, this idea of maternal feeling and so on. People don’t learn anything just because they conceive, they don’t just suddenly understand how to feel because they give birth. Why should they? And then I was never really a child, always a woman in embryo, and because you failed to understand that in time, [mother], we’ve got nothing between us now. (159)

The unity of motherhood with the housewife role is revealed to Elizabeth as a choice only in retrospect, one which she made without realizing its totality or even necessarily that it was one she could make (independently of her husband, at least). The figure of her own mother hangs over all her ruminations upon the maternal experience; a woman who could potentially have liberated her, or at least informed her, but merely another voice confirming that every good mother is a housewife and every housewife a mother. Francis Booth has described how in Figes’ novels ‘the traps which women fall into repeat themselves exactly for generation after generation, and the women, even though they know this, cannot warn each other or alter the cycle’ (362). Figes returns to this theme in Days (1974) and The Seven Ages (1986), but in the specific context of the 1960s, Equinox establishes this unconscious repetition of life choices across generations in a complex dialectical arrangement with the Single Girl archetype. The Housewife is cast as the opposite of free-and-single and yet the alienation of Elizabeth from this position in her own marriage and family is found in her need to consciously reproduce in herself the role of Housewife every day – at home, in social gatherings, in her own imagination of herself and her potential – such that being the ‘long-suffering housewife’ is a choice she is constantly having to make for herself. Marriage and motherhood is no longer a process of conforming to expectation, the social revolution of the 1960s is ideologically transforming it into a choice. The problem with this choice is that Elizabeth has to make it and

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yet, by presenting it as a free choice, she must also take personal, individual responsibility for making that choice. One can’t simply ‘retire to breed’ and make an end of it like a character in Shakespearean comedy; Equinox is very clear in showing how both people in a marriage must constantly re-choose that marriage, and what that choice entails, and for which partner this new ‘permissiveness’ is ultimately more disruptive. As a counterpoint to Figes’ deep and brutally honest exploration of marriage in the 1960s it is useful also to consider how the traditional housewife appeared in comedy and farce. Anthony Burgess’ One Hand Clapping (1961) is an at times bizarre attempt to ventriloquize the stereotypical upwardly mobile workingclass housewife. Unlike Elizabeth in Equinox, Burgess presents his heroine Janet Shirley as a woman entirely contented in her time and place; that place being ‘Shortshawe Council Estate in North Bradcaster, Number 4 Cranmer Road off Whitgift Road which leads into town’ (3). Her first person narrative throughout assumes a high level of familiarity with the reader, from colloquialisms and friendly ‘oh, you know’s’ to a presumed shared suspicion regarding all things unfamiliar. Packed with Burgess’ typically eccentric characters, the narrative opens with Janet’s husband, Howard, discovering that he possesses a photographic memory. Using this to memorize an encyclopaedia, he wins a TV quiz show, the winnings allowing them to travel the world. Janet relays this experience through a thick fog of confusion, baffled by foreign cultural practices, made sick by alien food and generally finding little to appreciate. Having seen everything possible Howard realizes his photographic memory limits him, rendering him unable to appreciate anything beyond the superficial. He decides to kill first Janet and then himself, reasoning: there was nothing else missing, except the things that money can’t buy [. . .] things like knowledge and philosophy and music. I meant like being true to the great men who’ve gone before us and not spitting in their poor dead faces as we have been doing. Like that quiz. (165)

To this Janet predictably responds, ‘I understood just a bit but not all of what he was saying’ (165) before realizing the danger she faces, killing him before he can murder her. Over the corpse she addresses the reader directly, saying that ‘the best first thing to do, when you’ve got a dead body and it’s your husband’s on the kitchen floor and you don’t know what to do about it, is to make a good strong cup of tea’ (201). The narrative ultimately concerns the inability of the couple to ever breach topographical meaning. The husband is traumatized by this, feeling excluded from a deep tradition of historical meaning, disconnected from the

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lives of ‘great men who’ve gone before us’. Janet, by comparison, seems content to skim the surface of existence; even her statements are limited, vocalizing whatever comes to mind, disregarding formal grammatical arrangements in favour of spontaneity and momentum. She is a walking, talking embodiment of shallow affect, superficial in her experience to such an degree that her husband would rather kill her than allow her to carry on without the ‘missing’ depth that would make her truly human in his estimation. One might consider One Hand Clapping rather banal, a comedic contrast to Equinox’s deeply tragic sensibilities concerning the experience of the 1960s housewife. There are tempting parallels between the two, however, especially in terms of authorial intent. Burgess writes in his autobiography, You’ve Had Your Time (1990), that the novel sought to capture many of his own marriage’s failings after his return from colonial service. Certainly the novel contains autobiographical details, albeit overlapping with totally fictional elements. The main character, for example, ‘produces [Burgess’] wife’s barbiturate tablets’ as a murder weapon and ‘she runs off to France with her husband’s money and his body in the camphorwood chest Lynne and I [the real Burgess] had bought in Malaya’ (28). Like Figes, who found in her married characters an embodiment of two sides of herself, Burgess also seems to be channelling his own masculine fear of becoming-housewife into both Howard and Janet. Andrew Biswell has written of how ‘Burgess’ novels present marriage in terms of guilt and self-laceration’ (304). Just as Martin, Elizabeth’s husband in Equinox, might be seen as the voice of Figes’ simultaneous attraction and repulsion to seeing herself as a housewife, so Janet may be the voice Burgess fears and desires; the Housewife talking over the hen-pecked husband, stymieing aspiration but ultimately providing comfort. It is the voice that Burgess, and by extension the reader, wants to hear – which is why she is the first-person protagonist of the narrative – and yet its means of expression is so shallow as to appear as an insulting parody of the archetypical Housewife, or ‘her at home’. Ultimately, Burgess’ vision of the Housewife, although embodying much that is typical of the male gaze, shares common features with the same diminutive figure when she appears in other contexts.5 The voice in Elizabeth’s head in Figes’ Equinox, and the one so often chastising Howard, speaks with a similar voice; made all the more uncanny by emerging from a character unhappy with her domestic role. In Sex and the Single Girl a similar mother-hen figure retreats from the world into her own domestic bliss. Marriage is presented as a trap, albeit one into which the majority of women fall. Figes’ protagonist fears becoming the archetypical Housewife, Burgess’ protagonist is happy in her

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domestic naivety; both voices allude to this figurative character with a certain fear and contempt. By placing Figes’ and Burgess’ texts in contrast a reconfiguration of the Housewife/Single Girl dynamic emerges. Rather than a case of the shallow versus the deep, both Figes and Burgess depict the Housewife role as unbearable in its mundanity but also connected to a deep social fixity that is reproduced through time. Burgess’ Janet feels her role to be ‘a very funny thing, which perhaps only a woman can understand and even then not really understand’ (165), just as Figes’ Elizabeth feels betrayed by the generations of women before her who communicated only that her role was incommunicable. The Single Girl, by contrast, is at once carefree and unfixed socially, a character skimming the social surface like a butterfly, while also representing interest, excitement and even liberation. In the discursive construction of this 1960s Housewife/Single Girl binary, the surface invites interest where depth begets monotony.

The abject surface: Working-class single motherhood in A Taste of Honey and responses to it In order to place the mid-1960s Single Girl/Housewife binary in context one has to trace its cultural lineage back to an initial rupture point that occurred pre1960. In Marwick’s history of the long Sixties he argues that the cultural transitions which the term ‘Sixties’ is historical short-hand for can be seen to span the years 1958 to 1974. It is the first of these dates which is of interest for our current subject. While the ‘Angry Young Men’ phenomenon was popularizing the image of young working-class men rebelling against post-war austerity conditions and social conservatism, Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey (1958) – staged by Joan Littlewood in a bawdy, music hall style – captured the public imagination with scenes from a working-class woman’s perspective.6 Featuring the kinds of material upon which cinema would go on to build the British New Wave movement, at the time it was dismissively reviewed by critics like T.C. Worsley as a play ‘about a tart, a black boy giving a white girl a baby, a queer. The whole contemporary lot, in short’ (253). It was a phenomenon and, as Marwick writes, ‘one aspect of Delaney’s potential commercial appeal could be seen in the various nicknames she was given by the press: “teenager of the week”, “the Francois Sagan of Salford”, and (of course) “an angry young woman” ’ (137). The play follows a young Salford girl, Jo, as she argues with her rambunctious mother and her mother’s spiv boyfriend, falls in love with a sailor and becomes

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pregnant, then finally decides to raise her baby alone with help from her gay friend Geoffrey. Despite Worsley’s remark that this narrative contained ‘the whole contemporary lot’, the play in fact represents a distinct break from earlier depictions of single motherhood. Jo maintains a core of agency throughout, never falling into the stock roles of victim or fallen woman, and utilizes her sense of humour and individuality as a means of staving off the traditional dramatic implications of her ‘immoral’ behaviour. As such, A Taste of Honey arguably begins a new tradition of writing single mothers as independent characters, which has a considerable influence upon the formation of the Single Girl/ Housewife dichotomy seen in later 1960s writing. Delaney places her protagonist, Jo, in the same ‘line of motherhood’ which we have seen Figes use in Equinox; the withholding mother as the representative of an eternal recurrence of the marriage and motherhood ‘trap’. In A Taste of Honey this parental figure is revealed to also fail to uphold the Housewife role – enjoying going out drinking, dating and engaging in conspicuous consumption – and yet she still remains the voice of tradition within the play. Reacting to the news of Jo’s marriage plans she berates her for her lack of proper marital selflessness: You stupid little devil! What sort of a wife do you think you’d make? You’re useless. It takes you all your time to look after yourself. I suppose you think you’re in love. Anybody can fall in love, do you know that? But what do you know about the rest of it? (41)

Helen, Jo’s mother, expresses her anger at Jo’s decision to get married based upon a perceived superficiality in Jo’s attitude to marriage. A marriage, it is implied, should not be based purely on love, as ‘anybody can fall in love’, it must be based on a willingness to forego one’s own dreams and desire in order to look after someone else. Jo’s crime, in Helen’s eyes, is her inability to even ‘look after [her] self ’ in a sufficiently mature manner. Such words are, however, undermined by the dramatic structure of the play. Jo only reveals her marriage plans in response to Helen ignoring her and only thinking of her own marriage plans. Helen’s subsequent berating of Jo is therefore a transparently self-interested act; she is afraid that Jo’s engagement will draw attention away from her own. Her accusation of emotional immaturity is a clear projection onto Jo of the kinds of insults that could equally be levelled at herself. The play’s response to traditional conceptions of marriage and motherhood not only demonstrates the hypocrisy inherent in many corrective discourses but also inverts the supposedly deep and embedded qualities of marriage and motherhood through playfulness and camp. Jo and Geoffrey’s relationship in the

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latter half of the play mimics traditional marriage dynamics, albeit with gender roles often inverted (Geoffrey obsessively knitting baby clothes), and frames their responsibilities in a ludic manner: GEOF : You’ve got to buy all sorts of things for the baby. Clothes, a cot and a pram. Here, that teddy bear we won tonight’ll come in handy, won’t it? I can make things too, I’ll help . . . JO : Shut up! I’m not planning big plans for this baby or dreaming big dreams. You know what happens when you do things like that. The baby’ll be born dead or daft! GEOF : You’re feeling a bit depressed, Jo. JO : I’m feeling nothing. GEOF : You’ll be your usual self soon. JO : And what is my usual self? My usual self is a very unusual self, Geoffrey Ingram, and don’t you forget it. I’m an extraordinary person. There’s only one of me like there’s only one of you! (50)

The exposition of their plans is constantly side-tracked by jokes and wordplay, interrupted by nursery rhymes and songs (accompanied in Joan Littlewood’s original staging by music hall tunes). There is therefore a double effect conjured. Firstly, the traditional role of housewife is caricatured as a theatrical role, a played role which one adopts and performs, undermining the implications of deep, quasi-biological meaning implicit in the concept. Secondly, the playfulness of the characters’ expression serves to draw attention to the truly serious nature of Jo’s economic position in a world where little support is available to the single working-class mother. There are no serious ‘fixes’ to the situation in the form of a returning husband or benign charitable institution that can resolve the narrative positively; the positivity must emerge from Jo’s own character. Ultimately this is not just a play about single mothers but about women as individuals, distinct from the family unit. As a result of the knowing humour Delaney injects into the play, the abjection which grounds single motherhood in 1960s discourse is made palpable even though unspoken. It is a dissimulative technique similar to the actions of the writer’s superego which Julia Kristeva, in Powers of Horror (1982) has described as a cover for abjection. ‘A writing of this sort is necessarily implicated in the interspace,’ Kristeva writes, ‘it implies an ability to imagine the abject, that is, to see oneself in its place and to thrust it aside by means of displacements of verbal play’ (16). Delaney’s dark humour is at once gesturing to abjection and displacing it, indicating abjection’s power by its absence. Abjection stands here as the unspoken

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condition of bare existence that continues in spite of its erasure in discourse. This is of particular interest when we consider the Housewife and Single Girl archetypes as social constructs; figures framed by dreamlike aspiration and often diametrically opposed to lived experience. The temptation to live inter-passively through these constructs presents the abject subject with recognized forms by which their experience can connect to discourse. The space between the act and its reality, however, is what confronts us with the unspoken implicated in its imperfections. Contextually, we can connect this to wider concerns regarding poverty which re-emerged after a decade’s welfare state-inspired complacency. In her study, The Politics of Poverty (1981) Susanne MacGregor describes how, in the 1960s, ‘the complacent view that the problems of poverty and insecurity had been solved dominated’ (24) but eventually proved unsustainable. Its return to public discourse, however, was then often couched in a concern for ‘moral issues’ (24). Jo’s abjection as a single mother of a mixed race child therefore breaks both sexual and racial taboos while also implicating society in a destitution it no longer consciously acknowledged. There is much that is unsaid in A Taste of Honey which would nevertheless be shockingly clear to its contemporary audience. The importance of this approach to women’s agency can be found in the ‘working classness’ of the play’s setting, Salford. Although the play was often written off by London-based theatre critics as being wilfully ‘kitchen sink’, Northern and provincial, its oppressively austere surroundings would be common to the vast majority of people in Britain. Popular images of the 1960s take ‘Swinging London’ as a thermometer of change but these images would bear no resemblance to cities such as Salford, Birmingham, Cardiff or Glasgow, in fact images of Carnaby Street and the West End would bear little resemblance even to the rest of London. There were vast municipal changes occurring in the 1960s, however. Very little of the Salford Delaney describes in A Taste of Honey remained at the time of the film adaptation in 1961 for as John Harding reports: ‘22,000 slum dwellings were cleared . . . and by the end of the 1960s it was reported that 44.3% of all homes in Salford had been built since 1944’ (86). The process of municipal modernization was encouraging working-class households to consider themselves ‘slum-dwellers’ and aspire to the new, clean and modern living promised by concrete tower blocks and council estates. ‘Nobody could live in a place like this’ (17), remarks Peter, Helen’s boyfriend, responding to the state of the old redbrick Salford housing. ‘Only about fifty thousand people’ (17), Jo retorts ironically. As much as the play evokes the ‘whole contemporary lot’ in terms of upsetting middle-class taste it also ties non-traditional living arrangements into a narrative of modernity replacing 1950s austerity with 1960s ‘permissiveness’

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(adopting the jargon of the era).7 Although bourgeois values had been the subject of theatrical criticism for centuries, Delaney and those following on from her were doing so from below and without any older moralizing tendencies. In terms of the discursive image of the Single Girl, however, Delaney’s play encourages a reading of the ‘sexual revolution’ as something that starts working class, but ultimately crosses all classes. However, the single mother protagonist of the early 1960s seen in Delaney’s writing is not that of the middle 1960s, with motherhood for the cosmopolitan single girl while rejecting the figure of the Housewife, as exemplified in The Millstone and other texts. In spite of later developments, the working-class single mother character remains ‘kitchen sink’ in the public perception. Delaney’s 1963 short story, ‘All About and To a Female Artist’, reveals the level of hatred targeting her after the play’s success, the most extreme being handwritten death threats: I trust that your new affluence will enable you to buy a bar of soap. By the way how are your Teddy Boy boyfriends. Do they carry flick knives? It would be rather fun if they jab their flick knives into you one night it might teach you to improve your tastes and company. (131)

Too easily written off as a spectacle or the writing of a delinquent – ‘sex, but it won’t sell’ (131) as one reviewer put it – the subtle dialogue between seriousness and silliness in A Taste of Honey goes on to inspire much more emulation of the former quality than the latter. The abjection at the heart of the play’s superficially shallow expression does not reveal itself to an audience unsympathetic to the real-life consequences of the subject at hand. The space between performance of a social script and the implied experiences behind, as described earlier in relation to Kristeva, can only be visible when the implication can be grasped in its entirety. In fact, the aggressive and dismissive responses to the play can be seen to emerge due to the same cognitive dissonance surrounding single motherhood in general. In her study Housewife (1974) Ann Oakley outlined these contradictory attitudes in relation to a survey conducted near the end of the decade in which she found that ‘despite the generally agreed poorer economic situation of women in modern society, more people interviewed believed that single mothers, as opposed to single fathers, could provide adequately for their children’ (69). Traditionally, the single mother was believed to be culpable for her own choices. The economic situation underlying the difficulties single mothers faced is not factored in to the situation when it is considered first and foremost in such moral terms. Similar social blindness prevailed. Prior to the 1968 strike at the Ford Car Plant in Dagenham the demand for equal pay for women remained a niche cause of

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dedicated political activists, for example. It could also be argued, however, that the romantic figure of Jo the irreverent ‘girl in trouble’ went on to inspire a whole series of single girl-type protagonists who, thanks to their middle-class backgrounds, could have all of Jo’s shallow affect without any of the underlying abjection. It is this light the next sections such protagonists through five satirical novels published in the decade following A Taste of Honey’s success.

Shallow affect and sophistication in five 1960s satires So far this chapter has concerned itself with individual texts, taking them as symbolic of wider literary and cultural trends. This section, concerning the trope of shallow affect as satirical target will focus instead on five texts simultaneously: Christine Brooke-Rose’s The Middlemen (1961), Margaret Forster’s Georgy Girl (1965), Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone, Carol Burns’ The Narcissist (1967), and Muriel Spark’s The Public Image (1968). The reason for this is that each of these texts contains a character which is structurally very similar in their representative role – these being Stella, Meredith, Rosamund, Annabel and Hannah in each novel respectively – these representing a distinct vision of a particular social type that very clearly appealed to 1960s women writers as a target of satire. The tone the writers take with the character ranges from Spark’s eminent enthusiasm for her ‘stupid’ (6) heroine to Burns’ seeming disgust at Liz’s baby talk to the sympathetic first person narration Drabble imparts to Rosamund in The Millstone. They all, however, hold in common both their shallowness of affect – an inability to feel deeply or ‘properly’ according to traditional narrative conventions – and a resulting incapacity to engage in meaningful relationships that is euphemistically described as ‘sophistication’. These characters fall into two categories, the bad mothers and the bad lovers. Both reflect the celebration of the Single Girl archetype over the Housewife and both imply the satirical conclusion that they are only capable of being this way thanks to modern prosperity and modern permissive attitudes. The most common trope that signifies the generational difference between these ‘thoroughly modern’ characters and the traditional housewives of the past is their seemingly total disregard for their children. In Carol Burns’ The Narcissist, the Single Girl and artist Hannah is terrified of her (equally ‘sophisticated’) friend Liz’s child. A spoiled child of spoiled parents, Burns paints the boy as positively bestial: ‘on tiptoe he tried to bite her chin. She set him on a chair. Arms folded, legs dangling, he puffed his cheeks, blew, played with his penis . . . wet himself, “Go sod yourself!” [he screamed] “Sod off sod off sod off!” ’ (13). The

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scene continues with Liz and Hannah becoming increasingly expansive in their descriptions of proposed parties and art projects while the child ransacks the house, causing chaos. Hannah’s sense of disgust at the thought of children is particularly striking. Were one to compare her to an earlier caricature of the disconnected mother in fiction, Daisy in The Great Gatsby (1925), it is striking how, compared to Daisy’s practiced unconcern born of great wealth, motherhood in The Narcissist is a genuine threat to female characters’ independence and as such is reacted to in a disgusted, bodily manner. Her disregard for children signifies an immaturity, or cultivates shallowness, which Burns emphasizes throughout her descriptions of the character: What was the ultimate goal of the body? Beauty. She relished drama. . . couldn’t bear to be misinterpreted, misunderstanding of intent agony. Needed men to like her personally and physically. Got enormously jealous, no good for work. Self-indulgent when it came to food, drink, clothes, men. Hyper-sensitive. (17)

Burns’ descriptions often verge on insults, placing the omniscient narrator in the position of nasty gossip; sharing the scandalous details of Hannah’s story with the reader through an ill-disguised contempt.8 Were this a novel simply about a young hedonistic woman then the much-maligned Hannah might have become sympathetic as a result. By making her a mother, however, her shallow personality is demonstrably harmful to her child and, therefore, can be condemned as a moral failing even in such a ‘permissive’ era. The theme of young, emotionally immature women as mothers is extended to novel length in Forster’s Georgy Girl, whose eponymous protagonist is the gawky and sensitive friend of the ‘sophisticated’ socialite Meredith. When Meredith becomes pregnant the power within the friendship shifts; Meredith proving totally incapable of motherhood while Georgy has all the inner depth of an ideal mother and, as a result, adopts Meredith’s child for her own. The nadir of Meredith’s journey into motherhood comes as she considers her new-born daughter: Oh God, she thought, this is where I have to feel all maternal and loving. I’ll have it adopted, immediately. She could hardly bring herself to look down at the thing which had given her such hell, and which she’d only seen as a messy, bloody ball held up at the end. With despair she leaned over and looked at it, then as quickly looked away. She was supposed to bathe and feed and clean it for years and years. She couldn’t do it. They would have to take it away. (87)

The lack of ‘maternal and loving’ feeling in Meredith is satirized via of free indirect speech, demonstrating only her superficial understanding. Liz’s child

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appears to Hannah as a chaotic object threatening her independence rather than a full subject; Meredith reduces her daughter to a ‘messy, bloody ball’ which she is expected to bathe, feed and clean. The imagery is bordering on monstrous and only serves as satire – rather than describing genuine post-natal depression, for example; a subject Eva Figes would go on to address in Days (1974) – because the section is bookended with Meredith’s relentlessly haughty mannerisms. Even in such an extreme context she resents that she ‘has to’ feel anything for her child and insists that ‘they’ – an amorphous ‘they’ at this point, whose identity is clearly below her concern – ‘take it away’; where they take it being, again, none of her concern, as long as she isn’t faced by it anymore. The stage is then set for Georgy to take over; a young woman who, in spite of her lack of social graces, or perhaps because of them, is emotionally deep enough to accept the responsibilities of motherhood. The use of surface imagery, disassociated from deeper meanings or emotional cadences, ties into a longer history of tying shallow affect to the superficial, the immediate, and the ultimately narcissistic. Against a reading drawn from Judith Butler’s work which would celebrate the performative quality of shimmering surfaces, Julia Kristeva describes, in New Maladies of the Soul (1998), shallow affect in terms of a sexual lack, or sex-without-sex; a hysterical sexuality: Hysterical sexuality is disavowed by sensualisation. The hysteric’s presumed aspiration to endless pleasures is not sexual but sensual – an unlimited sensory and emotional excitability. In reality, erotomaniac hysterics are sexual atheists, when they are not frigid. At the same time, they feign a devotion to their oversensitized bodies (73).9

Ultimately the pleasure of the sophisticate is found not so much in an attachment to superficial things, nor in a personality incapable of deeper affect, but in the image of oneself as capable of ‘unlimited sensory and emotional excitability’ and then ‘aspiring’ to it. Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl represents quintessential writing of this type; a book that aspires to a lifestyle which from the outside appears spontaneous and carefree but is in truth carefully planned and cannily carried out. Tom Wolfe’s typical description of the 1960s teenage London society girl ‘getting planked just to be sociable’ (226) is also characterized by its apparent effortlessness. One could presume that the satirical target of characters like Hannah, Liz and Meredith is the narcissist whose actions are selfish and, as a result, antisocial. One could even go further and see shallow affect itself as the target as these characters undermine their own chances at deeper happiness throughout the narrative through an obstinate refusal to engage beyond surfaces.

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Ultimately, however, I would argue that it is the apparent effortlessness of these characters’ existences that makes them the targets of satirical fun, and that is because effort is not just to do with sex, but to do with class. Christine Brooke-Rose’s The Middlemen is a morality tale about effort, sex and class. It follows the lives of twin sisters, Serena and Stella, who embody the principles of intellect, cultivation and hard work, and of shallow ‘sophisticated’ sex appeal respectively. As Serena battles her way into high cultural circles through writing an academic thesis and studying classical artworks, Stella travels the world on the arms of millionaires, CEO s and assorted dignitaries; often the self-same people that Serena must spend her life working her way up the ladder in order to meet. Brooke-Rose emphasizes how Stella’s appeal arises from her ordinariness: There was an element of blackmail in Stella’s originality [. . .] so that anyone who didn’t appreciate her extraordinariness felt guiltily ordinary. In fact, as Rusty was subtle enough to apprehend, if not in words, certainly in whiffs of uncertainty, Stella appealed most to very ordinary people, precisely for that reason [. . .] it seemed that Stella too, preferred to surround herself with the nice but dull, in order to feel more unusual. (13)

Brooke-Rose brackets Stella’s unusualness with the ordinariness of those who find it charming, implying shallowness in Stella’s performance, a sense that in spite of her apparent quirks her personality is not independent but adapts to please those around her. By making the characters identical twins, Brooke-Rose demonstrates to her readers how the appeal of Stella’s superficial charms is not to be found in genetic predispositions towards beauty but resides totally within the personality category of shallowness itself. Stella’s appeal is often outlined by Brooke-Rose in these very diminutive terms; her sexual appeal resides especially in being able mostly to ‘make [men] feel very ordinary’ (13). The structure and message of The Middlemen is an inverse mirror of Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness (1747) series; for women in the 1960s industry is punished, idleness rewarded, and the ‘ordinary’ is celebrated in such a way that, before the satirist’s pen, lofty heights of success and ambition within the ruling classes are revealed as banal, domestic, narrow-minded and without depth. It is on these terms, using the figure of the Single Girl to satirically attack the society that celebrates this archetype, that our two more positively inclined novels, The Public Image and The Millstone, find their warmth and their emotional cores. As said earlier, in the former Spark describes her protagonist affectionately as ‘stupid’ throughout the novel:

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The 1960s In those earlier times when she began to be in demand in English films, she had no means of knowing that she was, in fact, stupid, for, after all, it is the deep core of stupidity that it thrives on the absence of a looking glass. Her husband, when she was in his company with his men friends [. . .] tolerantly insinuated the fact of her stupidity, and she accepted this without resentment. (6)

Such a ‘deep core of stupidity’ allows her to survive as an Italian movie starlet, presenting a stylized ‘public image’ to the paparazzi of a ‘tiger woman’ who is at once sexually voracious and a dignified mother-to-be. Implicitly her intellectual vacuity permits cinematographic flexibility, a canvas upon which public relations agents and journalists could happily inscribe their fantasies without finding anything of substance to contradict them. She also survives as a fantasy ‘sex symbol’, however, through her real life avoidance of sex. Her husband, of whom she is mildly fond at best, is jealous of her fame and the attention she lavishes on their new child; he stages a party at her house and he kills himself to put ‘blood on her public image’ (69) – ‘tiger lady was too much’ (70) read the planned headlines – and yet ultimately he fails and is undermined by Annabel’s lack of passion and depth. As with Drabble’s protagonist who ‘was guilty of a . . . brand new, twentieth-century crime; [an] apprehensive terror of sex’ (13), Annabel is capable of constructing an image of the pure 1960s Single Girl archetype only through her secret subjective inner life that bears much more in common with the archetypical Housewife. Single motherhood itself is defined by self-sacrifice on behalf of (in this case) an (absent) father: I had thought, dimly, that after the birth, I would once more become interested in men, but nothing like this seemed to happen . . .]. The only person of whom I thought with any tenderness, apart from my small pliant daughter, was George [the father]. I still listened to his voice on the radio, comforted to know he was still so near, however pointlessly, and wondering what he was doing. Occasionally [. . .] I felt like ringing him up and telling him about her, but I never did; I fancied that I knew enough about human nature to know that no amount of charm could possible balance the quite unjustified sense of obligation, financial, personal and emotional [. . .] so I spared him and myself. (111)

Annabel here combines the archetype of the sophisticated single mother, not concerned by traditional family structure and refusing to be emotionally impacted by her experiences, with an intellectual reflexiveness which incorporates the father by distancing him. Drabble’s protagonist is perhaps the most sophisticated of the single mother protagonists written in the 1960s as she manages both to maintain her detachment while rationalizing her experience as

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normative throughout. The Millstone, studied in more depth elsewhere in this collection, is similar to Spark’s novel in its narrative ability to reveal the pleasurable qualities of performing shallow affect and sophistication. This may also account for its being the most popular and critically acclaimed of the novels covered in this chapter.

Conclusion: Interpassivity, readership and the coming insurrection In attempting to tie together the many and somewhat disparate trends in women’s writing that have been studied in this chapter, I return to Žižek’s concept of interpassivity as outlined in the introduction; of acceding ‘to the Other the passive aspect (or enjoying), while I can remain actively engaged. This allows us to propose the notion of false activity; you think you are active, while your true position, as it is embodied in the fetish, is passive’. There are aspects in each of the internal structures of the texts analysed which embody this principle of actively engaging from afar with another’s passive enjoyment, but it is first and foremost of interest when we return to women’s writing of the 1960s as an unprecedented mass market phenomenon. More books were in print than ever before, available more cheaply, and women took up reading as a pastime at an unprecedented rate.10 Such people were not, on the whole, living the life of the 1960s swinging singleton. The majority of young people still married before 25 and aspired to raise a family. However, by the 1970s, the internal contradictions of this situation would inspire the feminist movement’s return to action. One can still find in the mid- to late-1960s literature boom a quiet revolution inspired by interpassive enjoyment. People enjoyed reading about the adventures of single young women even if their best embodiments – Rosamund of The Millstone, for example – quietly acknowledged that few examples of the archetypical Single Girl really existed. Delaney brought the independent single mother who enjoyed her own agency into the public cultural consciousness with Jo, but as with Figes and Burgess’ texts whose environs feel oppressively domestic, it is only when the freedom of a middle-class income or background is implied that the British equivalent of Helen Gurley Brown’s Single Girl manifests itself as a literary phenomenon. These texts are not first and foremost novels of ideas, allegories or political interventions, they are pleasurable reads. If pleasure was the prime imperative of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ then it is to this form of culture, rather than the experimental, chic or transgressive, that scholars of 1960s fiction ought to turn their attention.

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Notes 1 For a review of associated literature see Marwick, The Sixties (80–94), Grant, Gough-Yates and Riley. All agree that the British women’s liberation movement founded in 1970 had important precursory foundations emerging during the 1960s. According to Marwick’s economic analysis general prosperity and labour saving white goods offered women time to organize politically; Grant recognizes the pill and a more sexually permissive counterculture as important enabling factors. Gough-Yates and Riley’s studies of women’s magazines consider women’s rights discourse permeating through popular media. 2 For analyses of the sexual revolution in the media see Gough-Yates (37–54) for a retrospective academic analysis of ‘the popularisation of progressive attitudes’ (38); Holbrook (123–51) considers progressive attitudes within the preferred term of the 1960s: ‘permissiveness.’ The discourse surrounding the ‘sexual revolution’ could be at times lurid, evoking promiscuity; equally it also referred to an increased sense of responsibility and sexual frankness among young people. In this chapter the term ‘sexual revolution’ signifies the assumptions underlying both of these positions. Certainly the 1960s is marked by more liberal responses to sex outside of marriage; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Germaine Greer’s articles in underground press magazines like Oz and IT link such attitudes to marriage and wider women’s rights issues. However, typical opinions focused solely on sexual matters as distinct from social and political issues. 3 Antonioni’s focus on the world of fashion photography is especially emblematic of the way ‘Swinging London’ framed itself as a populist media construct. As a medium photography required less technical skill than style and access to fashionable people. Maureen Duffy’s The Single Eye (1964) precedes Antonioni’s film in unpacking the mythologizing potential of fashion photography. 4 The terms Housewife and Single Girl are capitalized in this chapter to foreground their construction as a conceptual binary, which although common in 1960s literature, magazines and media remain constructs, dual archetypes which are more figurative than embodied, but against which women’s experiences would nevertheless. The capitalization aims to highlight their artificiality, interrogating their ultimate viability. 5 Anthony Burgess recycles the character of the superficial and philandering wife (usually to a sensitive and aesthetically-minded cuckolded husband) with sufficient consistency as to appear compulsive. In his 1960s novels alone cheating wives or lovers appear in nine of his novels. Burgess depicts his first wife, Lynne, in much the same way in his two autobiographies, encapsulating perhaps his underlying resentment. 6 Although Iris Murdoch is often named among them, the writers associated with the ‘Angry Young Men’ period of the late 1950s are, as one may expect, overwhelmingly

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8 9

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male. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) and Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954) were foundational texts of a movement including Alan Sillitoe, Arnold Wesker, Kenneth Tynan, John Wain, Harold Pinter, John Braine, Stan Barstow, John Arden and Bernard Kops. Although the work grouped under the phrase ‘Angry Young Men’ is in no sense monolithic and contains considerable variation between texts, the frustrated aspirations of upwardly-mobile young men undoubtedly predominate. See D.J. Stewart’s ‘Introduction’ in The Arts in a Permissive Society (1971) for a contemporaneous account of ‘the permissive society’ and its impact on a variety of media, whose reference to ‘permissiveness’ carries certain paternalist overtones. In fact the novel was subject to a libel action; see: John Calder’s Pursuit (280). Kristeva appears to refer to Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), although its arguments could equally stand against later works such as Undoing Gender (2004) and Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). Hugh Willatt outlines the quadrupling of new fiction titles published between 1945 and 1965 (28) and the economic base for this expansion; sociological evidence of women’s predominance in such increased readership is detailed in Oakley’s British case study (153); and Friedan offers similar evidence in America pre-1961 (146–9). Both studies link increased consumption of labour saving white goods to an overall reduction of time spent on housework, with a concomitant increase in cultural consumption of television, radio, magazines and – most interestingly for our purposes – literature.

Works cited Antonioni, Michelangelo (dir.). Blow-Up. Hollywood: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1966. Birch, Sarah. Christine Brook-Rose and Contemporary Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Biswell, Andrew. The Real Life of Anthony Burgess. London: Picador, 2006. Booth, Francis. Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940–1980. Lulu: Francis Booth, 2012. Brooke-Rose, Christine. The Middlemen. London: Secker and Warburg, 1961. Brown, Helen Gurley. Sex and the Single Girl. New Jersey: Barricade, 2003 [1962]. Burgess, Anthony. One Hand Clapping. New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1961. ———. You’ve Had Your Time. London: Heinemann, 1990. Burns, Carol. The Narcissist. London: Calder and Boyars, 1967. Calder, John. Pursuit: The Uncensored Memoirs of John Calder. Richmond, London: Alma Books, 2016. Delaney, Shelagh. ‘All About and To a Female Artist.’ In Sweetly Sings the Donkey. New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 1963. ———. A Taste of Honey. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

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Drabble, Margaret. The Millstone. London: Penguin, 2010. Figes, Eva. Equinox. London: Secker and Warburg, 1966. ———. ‘Interview.’ In The Imagination on Trial. Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet (eds.). London: Allison and Busby, 1981. Forster, Margaret. Georgy Girl. London: Vintage, 2005. Fountain, Nigel. Underground: The London Alternative Press, 1966–1974. London: Comedia, 1988. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin Classics, 2010. Gough-Yates, Anna. Understanding Women’s Magazines. London: Psychology Press, 2003. Grant, Linda. Sexing the Millennium. New York: Avalon, 1995. Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch. London: Harper Perennial, 2006. Harding, John. Sweetly Sings Delaney: A Study of Shelagh Delaney’s Work 1958–1968. London: Greenwich Exchange, 2014. Hobsbawm, Eric. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. London: Abacus, 1994. Holbrook, David. ‘Magazines.’ In Discrimination and Popular Culture. Denys Thompson (ed.). London: Pelican, 1965. 123–51. Kristeva, Julia. New Maladies of the Soul. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. ———. Powers of Horror. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lessing, Doris. Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of my Autobiography, 1949–1962. London: Flamingo, 1998. MacGregor, Susanne. The Politics of Poverty. Harlow : Longman, 1981. Marwick, Arthur. The Sixties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Oakley, Ann. Housewife. London: Penguin Books, 1974. ———. Sex, Gender and Society. London: Temple Smith, 1972. Reed, Paula. Fifty Fashion Looks that Changed the 1960s. London: Conran Octopus, 2015. Riley, Sam G. (ed.). Consumer Magazines of the British Isles. London: Greenwood Press, 1993. Spark, Muriel. The Public Image. London: Virago, 2014. Stewart, D.J. ‘Introduction and Historical Perspective.’ In The Arts in a Permissive Society. Christopher Macy (ed.). London: Pemberton Books, 1971. 7–12. Willatt, Hugh (Sir). The Arts Council of Great Britain: The First 25 Years. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1971. Wolfe, Tom. ‘The Life and Times of a Teenage London Society Girl.’ In The Mid-Atlantic Man and Other New Breeds in England and America. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969. 233–44. Worsley, T.C. ‘Reviews’. New Statesman. 21 February 1959: 253–4. Žižek, Slavoj. ‘The Interpassive Object.’ The European Graduate School website, 2016. www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-interpassive-subject/

3

British Women’s Fiction of the 1960s Tracy Hargreaves

The task of focusing on the literature of a single decade, even when pared back to (mainly) British women’s fiction, can feel like looking at an aerial overview of a road traffic interchange with its bisecting lines, roundabouts and slip roads – Edna O’Brien, A.S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Nell Dunn, Margaret Forster, Fay Weldon, Angela Carter, Ann Quin, Eva Figes, P.D. James, Jennifer Dawson, Beryl Bainbridge, Maureen Duffy, Bernice Rubens join ongoing traffic – Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Penelope Mortimer, Brigid Brophy, Christine Brooke-Rose, Elizabeth Jane Howard – while a few excursions can be seen heading towards the exit – Jean Rhys, Nancy Mitford, Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor, Ivy Compton-Burnett. There is a moment in Margaret Drabble’s fifth novel of the decade, The Waterfall (1969), when Jane Gray plans an illicit holiday with her lover: she ‘found a better-looking road on the map, a green road called the M1, but James said it wasn’t completed and that it was dangerous [. . .]’ (177–8). Reading that exchange, half a century after the novel’s publication, reminds us that what we might take for granted now was still very much work in progress then, and that new choices for direction of travel were beginning to open up. My aerial overview of women writers in the 1960s is, if richly varied, also indubitably incomplete, but it does give a snapshot of something that is clearly on the move, calling to mind Lorna Sage’s observation in Women in the House of Fiction, that ‘[t]here’s no one way of placing the woman novelist – or even of displacing her’ (x–xi), and that there is not, to borrow from Judith Butler, a ‘single or abiding ground’ (5) either for women’s fiction published in the 1960s or for ‘the 1960s’ itself. This chapter considers several writers, first across a prefatory overview and then in a series of closer readings. Included in this chapter (either nominally or in more detail) are Beryl Bainbridge, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Nell Dunn, Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, Ann Quin and Muriel Spark. Between them, in 81

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essays, interviews, and in their fiction, their writing provides different entry points for considering the diversity of British women’s fiction in the decade, including how writers reaped (to borrow from Patricia Waugh) the harvests of their own literary and historical pasts from the nineteenth century to modernism and the ‘Angry Young Men’ of the 1950s, from World War to Cold War. It considers the status of women’s fiction as a topic within women’s writing and examines the responses to the consequential social and legislative changes across the decade, explores the zeitgeist of the Swinging Sixties and the counterculture, and it considers the innovations in women’s writing where form is as preoccupying as (or inseparable from) its content. This was the decade of the Chatterley Trial (1960), the decade in which the contraceptive pill became available on the NHS (1961), and the decade in which significant liberal reforms were passed, among them the Family Planning Act, the Abortion Act (both granted Royal Assent in 1967) and the Divorce Act in 1969. Having access to ‘more or less 100 per cent effective methods of birth control, combined with the relaxation of manners that may have derived from this technological innovation [. . .] changed, well, everything’ according to Angela Carter, who described the flowering of the counterculture towards the end of the decade as marking the beginning of ‘Year One’ both sexually (214) and intellectually (46). If new candour and personal freedoms were promised by potentially far-reaching changes, British women’s fiction across the 1960s spoke as much to the complexity of awkwardly and abjectly felt embodiment as much as it did to radically transformed experiences, recording the felt reality of incremental rather than immediate change.1 In a candid interview with Nell Dunn in Talking to Women (1965) – a collection of interviews with nine young women (including Pauline Boty and Edna O’Brien) – Ann Quin captured a sense of transitional changes in the mid-1960s when she discussed the hypocrisy and constraints of marriage, whether or not she would raise a child out of marriage, choosing not to have children, not regretting an abortion, the ‘difficult’ business of contraception, as she questioned the naturalized assumptions about the trajectory of a woman’s life in terms of what was or was not right for her as both a woman and as a writer (108–29). Right across the 1960s, women’s fiction examined particular and particularly intimate encounters from managing (or failing to manage) ill-fitting contraceptive devices,2 to unplanned pregnancies and single motherhood, notably in Lynne Reid Bank’s The L-Shaped Room (1960) and Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (1965), to abortion, both legal (on the grounds of being psychologically ‘unfit’) and illegal.3 In characterizing ‘British women’s fiction of the 1960s’ we might, then, see some of that writing as both

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shaped by and in turn shaping defining personal and political issues as women wrote to – and against – a sense of limit: of what the law will permit, of choice, of knowledge about and vocabulary to describe the reproductive body. In an interview with Olga Kenyon and looking back on the 1960s, Margaret Drabble defined ‘the women’s novel of the sixties’ (in Britain) as distinctive and revolutionary, something that ‘just arose spontaneously’ (28) from feelings of anger and the frustrations of an emerging generation of women writers whose freedoms (college, career, work, marriage, children) produced a sense of constraint, exclusion and inequity. In this account, ‘the women’s novel’ in the 1960s takes on a precise and political charge in its attention to newly combined pressures of professional, domestic, social and sexual life. In her introduction to a reissue of her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun (1964), A.S. Byatt recalled the challenges of setting out as a writer in the early 1960s as two-fold: ‘human and literary’ (viii). The ‘human’ problems related to what she termed ‘the English version of the world of Betty Friedan’s feminine mystique’ (vii). Byatt’s recognition that she needed to resist the fate and frustrations of her mother’s universityeducated and housebound generation (ix) percolates through her own fiction in the decade. But the charge of the ‘sixties women’s novel’ arguably lies not just in its articulation of particular frustrations or of its political or cultural critiques since a conscious consideration is given to the status of ‘women’s writing’ as a distinctive mode of writing within women’s fiction itself. The ‘literary’ challenges that Byatt identified alongside the ‘social’ ones in her introduction to The Shadow of the Sun4 related partly to a rejection of recent and contemporary literary styles of modernism and the early post-war period, and partly to the influence of F.R. Leavis and the ‘Great Tradition’ of the English novel. Byatt disliked the ‘sensibility’ of her ‘available models’, Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster (xi) and disliked even more ‘the joky social comedy of [Kingsley] Amis and [John] Wain’ (xi). In a way, by invoking the earnest sensitivity of modernist ‘sensibility’ and the levity of 1950s ‘social comedy’ she was echoing a figure who was influential for her. In an essay first published in 1961, ‘Against Dryness’, Iris Murdoch cautioned against a differently conceived but not completely unrelated set of polarities, the ‘crystalline or journalistic’ trends in the twentieth-century novel, in an effort to apprehend ‘real people and images [. . .] and a truer picture of freedom’ (291), almost precisely the parameters of the fictional model Byatt would pursue.5 The influence of F.R. Leavis’ ‘moral ferocity’ and his dismissal of ‘all literature but the greatest, which was great for moral reasons’ (x) as Byatt describes it in that introduction, informs The Shadow of the Sun when the adolescent Anna sees

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herself in the shadow of her great novelist father, Henry Severell: ‘But when it came to the writing itself he was crushing. He presented a standard that it was already impossible for her to attain’ (16). Under Leavis’ tutelage, Byatt observed, great literature was less something one might write oneself, more a subject you might teach, ‘in order to make the world better, more just, more discriminating’ (x). Those lessons were not insignificant, as I will go on to discuss, in the Chatterley Trial of 1960, one of the watershed events that helped to inaugurate and define the tenor of the decade in Britain. Byatt’s argument with particular strains of literary tradition across English modernism, the ‘Great Tradition’ and elements of 1950s writing represents one element in 1960s writing in Britain; Angela Carter’s countercultural ‘Year One’ is another. Byatt encountered Angela Carter at a poetry reading given by Stevie Smith towards the end of the 1960s. In a Paris Review interview with Philip Hensher, Byatt recalled ‘On the way out this very disagreeable woman’ informing her that ‘the sort of thing you’re doing is no good at all [. . .] that’s not where literature is going’. (N.Pag). Although they later found more genial common ground in a shared interest in the fairy tale. Byatt’s navigation of the legacies of her 1950s Cambridge education stands in stark contrast to Carter’s experiences: ‘Some [working-class kids] were even permitted to go to Oxford and Cambridge. (Not me)’ she said, commenting on the impact of the 1944 Education Act in ‘Truly, It Felt Like Year One’ (210). Carter read English Literature at Bristol as a mature student and rather than looking back to modernism, Leavis, or the 1950s, she cited the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, the Vietnam War, the ‘unrestrained and irreverent frivolity’ underlining the ‘swinging sixties’, the ‘sexual revolution’, the psychiatrist R.D. Laing and his first book, The Divided Self (1960) as among the key indices shaping her and the decade’s zeitgeist. Her unceremonious discarding of Leavis alongside Jane Austen’s ‘moral universe’ in an undergraduate student’s essay in her third novel, Several Perceptions (1968) leaves him, we might infer, in his place. We were not, she said in an essay on Jean-Luc Godard, ‘the children of F.R. Leavis and the Welfare State but, in Godard’s famous definition, children of “Marx and Coca-Cola”’ (464). In moving to a series of closer readings, I will move back from Carter and the late 1960s to the beginning of the decade, to look at how that proximity between the end of the war and the beginning of the decade helped to shape a sense of a new and distinctive period for British women’s fiction. Doris Lessing’s In Pursuit of the English (1960) is an ethnographic study that, Lessing later reflected in the second volume of her autobiography, ‘is more like a novel [. . .] too well shaped for life’ (4). It was published in 1960, although it is historically located in 1949, four

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years after the end of the Second World War, and the year that Lessing arrived in London with her two-year old son and the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing, published just a year later. The temporal location between an end (1949) and a beginning (1960) positions this woman writer at a precisely and strategically delineated threshold that is both historical and cultural. Doris Lessing was a wellestablished writer by 1960. She had been prolific across the 1950s, publishing another four novels after The Grass is Singing, two volumes of short stories, a play as well as essays and reviews. But in 1960, she broke off from writing the ‘Children of Violence’ sequence to write two works in quick succession. The Golden Notebook (1962) one of the most significant novels of the decade was preceded by the shorter, less formally ambitious In Pursuit of the English, a documentary account of her first year in London when she lived among the English working class in a boarding house in Notting Hill, the kind later captured by Bryan Forbes in his 1962 screen adaptation of Lynne Reid Banks’ novel The L-Shaped Room, published just two years earlier in 1960. The boarding houses in both these works contain shifting and diverse communities (across class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity) and offer a pointed contrast to the kind of mono-cultural and naturalized representations of a stable and uniform family and home; if such representations tended to symbolize the stability and moral ethos of the nation they also confirmed women’s circumscribed place within it (a matter that Edna O’Brien also took up with regard to Ireland and Irish womanhood in The Country Girls in 1960). One of the ‘well shaped’ and novelistic aspects of Lessing’s writing is evident in her account of finding a room. She pointedly declines to rent rooms in the houses of a soured, infirm old woman or that of a superannuated Colonel in a clear rejection of the insular and atrophying remains of Victorian and Imperial Britain. The Colonel’s house resembled, she tells us, ‘the England I had read about in novels’ (73) and as he warms to his memories of fighting in ‘[t]hat Bulawayo campaign’ over drinks in the pub, the landlord announces ‘[c]losing time, sir’ (75) as Lessing calls time on the fictions of England and Empire. Earlier in her narrative, en route to inspecting rooms in another boarding house with her new friend, Rose, Doris (as she is familiarly named in the text) has a significant encounter when she first hears and then sees a man typing, sitting on a ‘tidy pile of rubble’ with ‘clean white paper fluttering’ from his typewriter (49). This image is overlaid by the suffusion of her imagination and memories as the tapping keys in the post-war city uniquely recall the South African crickets chirping ‘with quiet persistence in the sun-warmed grasses in the veld’ (49). This resonant image is usually read in relation to post-war shifts

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across Imperial margins and its disintegrating centre where, as John McLeod argues, ‘what is “foreign” can manifest itself at the heart of Empire’ (80–1). Gender is important here, too. Doris leaves the male writer – ostensibly on the cusp of the 1950s – tapping away at the typewriter (typing rather than writing) as a suggestively new narrative emerges by (and about) a woman writer who, literally and figuratively, has arrived with an already completed manuscript (by implication The Grass is Singing which brings the veld into 1950s British literature). The unnamed work in progress that Doris is writing while she lives in the boarding house is, presumably, Martha Quest (1952) the first novel of the five-volume ‘Children of Violence’ series, an account of the coming-of-age of a young woman of British parentage living in the veld before moving to Salisbury (now Harare) and on to a new and radical political and sexual awakening. Lessing would eventually re-work some of the consequential failures and challenges of that political and sexual optimism in The Golden Notebook which placed, among other things, the political and psychological legacies of the Second World War (European, American, South African and Asian) into the domestic spaces of British women’s fiction. In the kitchen, Anna and Molly discuss the ramifications of World War, Cold War and segregationist politics; the ramifications of all those politics (still dominant in the patriarchal international order of the 1960s) are then recalibrated across the registers of Anna’s sexual, emotional and political consciousness in the black, red, yellow and blue notebooks that fracture the constraints of the conventional realist novel. Although there is critical disagreement about whether Lessing occludes or acknowledges immigration and prejudice in the 1950s by locating events at the point of her arrival in 1949,6 she was certainly revising dominant versions of a familiar nexus of women, maternity, family, home and nation that had been deployed throughout the 1950s in Britain and underpinned by popular representations of the new Queen, Elizabeth II , not just as Monarch but also as wife and mother. Women at the heart of home and nation was a popular trope in post-war Britain’s new Elizabethan era; Diana Wallace has described the ‘family unit centred around an almost mystical conception of modern woman as a happy housewife who had chosen to find fulfilment through her family’ (102). When Doris takes a room in Rose’s boarding house she acquires an intimate set of insights into a supposedly stable but actually shifting community of women and family life; into this sacred space and in this new decade, into the Colonel’s derided ‘nation of old women’ (75), Lessing asked her reader to listen to (Doris hears but does not see) incidences of marital sexual coercion, self-administered abortion, and forms of prostitution that are practiced both explicitly by single

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women but also ostensibly by married women with the implication that marriage itself is a form of legal prostitution. The travails of two women strike a particular and prescient note of dissent: the landlady, Flo, locked in internecine combat with her small daughter, and Mrs Skeffington, husband of Ron, mother of a baby daughter, Rosemary. Never identified by her first name, Mrs Skeffington is an objectified figure we overhear but rarely see, stuck as she is in relentless servitude to the sexual demands of her husband and the requirements of her small child: ‘Soon’, says Doris, ‘we heard her plead: ‘Oh, not tonight, not tonight Ron. I’m so tired. I was up with Rosemary all last night [. . .]’ (86). Experiences similar to these (if not as explicitly told) would emerge in feminist sociological studies published later in the decade such as Hannah Gavron’s The Captive Wife (1966), which documented the frustrations, boredom and loneliness of working-class wives and mothers in London in the 1960s, one poignantly ‘haunted by a sense of wasted time’, another declaring ‘the suggestion that bored mothers can find the interests and intellectual stimulus they lack whilst knee deep in young children is arrant nonsense’ (115). Flo’s outburst in In Pursuit would not be out of place in that study: ‘I’d like to have [the woman from Welfare] shut up here seven days a week with a saucepan in her hand and a brat driving her mad with not eating, and a husband at her day and night’ (126). Clearly some women aspired to more. In a short Preface to Talking to Women, Nell Dunn writes: ‘If these girls have anything in common it is a belief in personal fulfilment – that a woman’s life should not solely be the struggle to make men happy but more than that a progress toward the development of one’s body and soul’. The maternal figures in Lessing’s narrative, Mrs Skeffington, Flo (and indeed Doris herself) already complicate what Carolyn Steedman has referred to as the ‘psychological simplicity’ (7) found in Richard Hoggart’s stalwart ‘our mam’ in the Uses of Literacy (1957) or that other stalwart figure, the ‘Bethnal Green mum’ in Peter Willmott and Michael Young’s Family and Kinship in East London (1957). By putting the turn of one decade into proximate relation with another and in a documentary form that she thought worked more like a novel, Lessing subjected the literal-figurative house-nation to a scrutiny that revealed and encouraged us to imagine often inadmissible realities and difficult truths. The ambiguous form of In Pursuit of the English, the creative shaping of factual observations, underlines another kind of instability as the private, domestic space is made inseparable from and integral to a scrutiny of national identity and cultural values; private life (marriage, sexual consent, abortion, prostitution) is thus cast as inextricably political and what is most concealed is here as visibly exposed as the interiors of houses bombed in the war-time Blitzes.

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The idea that ‘morality [was] essential to the well-being of a nation’ (229) was a view reiterated by Mr Justice Byrne, the presiding Judge in the case of ‘Regina v. Penguin Books Limited’ – better known as the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.7 In his closing speech for the defence, Gerald Gardiner reminded the jury of the expert witnesses’ views of the reverence, integrity, spirituality and morality of sexual relationships: the sacred or sacramental nature of sex was repeatedly affirmed (185–6) as was ‘the redemption of the individual, and hence of society’ (188) and the ‘underlying morality of the book’ (197). The timing of the Chatterley Trial in October 1960 affords it a legendary status as one of the inaugurating events of the decade, the jury’s acquittal of Penguin Books ‘hailed in retrospect as the harbinger of a more enlightened decade’ as Geoffrey Robertson QC writes in his foreword to the published transcript of the trial (xiv). In Harvest of the Sixties, Patricia Waugh suggested that the trial revealed ‘the axiomatic values of English culture’ as still being ‘those of traditional liberal individualism: honesty, conscience, choice, fulfilment, commitment, dignity, and freedom’, and that the informing ethos of F.R. Leavis and Matthew Arnold still buttressed a faith in literature’s capacity for illuminating and guiding moral values (49–50). Writing about the defence of the morality of Lawrence’s writing in the trial, Waugh summarized: ‘So long as there was unanimity that Lady Chatterley’s sexual activities with the gamekeeper Mellors were presented as sacraments rather than pleasures, there could be no disagreement about the merits and high seriousness of the book’ (50). A.S. Byatt’s navigation of the legacies of her own 1950s Cambridge education informed her early fiction which she has described (in her introduction to Passions of the Mind) as ‘a sort of questioning quarrel with Leavis’ vision and values [. . .]’ (xiv). She described something of the weight of Leavis’ ‘Great Tradition’ and his dismissal of ‘all literature but the greatest, which was great for moral reasons’ (x) in the introduction to the reissue of The Shadow of the Sun when the adolescent Anna feels defeated by her great novelist father even before she makes any start on her own first tentative efforts at writing. In The Shadow of the Sun, the several relationships of Anna, Henry, Caroline, his ‘sacrificially devoted wife’ (7), Oliver, a literary critic with a Cambridge PhD and his wife Margaret, a ‘well-ordered classical beauty with not a hair out of place’ (23), are variously entwined around the respectively visionary and bounded literary and critical imaginations of Henry and Oliver. The blank page of Anna’s youthful identity is open to a rather forbidding inscription by any of this quartet, partly in relation to creativity and critical training or how she might write or read; she lives in the shadow of her ‘genius’ father, and Oliver’s private tutorials begin with

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a study of Matthew Arnold (56) as he begins to shape how she should read. When she does get to Cambridge she discovers (to her dismay) that ‘[t]hey go to D.H. Lawrence like the Ten Commandments to show them how to live’ (157). The two other possible influences on Anna belong to the domestic and sacrificial world of her mother, who thinks that ‘men’s work came first’ (7), and to the ‘feminine mystique’ of the glamorous Margaret who offers to take her to parties and buy her clothes (111). In delineating the unhappy marriage of Oliver and Margaret, Byatt pitches two distinctive strands of 1960s culture against each other and they might be related to the ‘human and literary’ challenges that she said she faced when she began writing in the 1960s; one, the weight of Leavis’ ‘Great Tradition’, the other, living in ‘the English world of Betty Friedan’s feminine mystique’. It this strange marriage of the Leavisite critic and the feminine mystique in the post-Chatterley moment that I want to consider next. One scene in the novel considers the sacredness of sex literally when Oliver encounters Margaret in a church during a picnic outing with the Severells. Ascribing her evident misery to ‘that time of the month’ (131), he then insinuates that he would like to have sex in situ: ‘I didn’t marry you only to talk to you’ (131). She protests, ‘Oh no, Oliver, not in a church’ (131), only to be rescued by Anna’s timely arrival. If a defence of the sacred morality of sex was one element of the Chatterley Trial, another significant element was about language: Rod Mengham suggests that ‘[t]he single most decisive issue of the trial involved the battle over the use of four-letter words’ (6). Both the sacredness of sex and the defence of ‘four-letter words’ are treated with a degree of irony in that scene. At the Chatterley Trial, the distinguished scholar Helen Gardner argued that Lawrence’s ‘intention was to make us feel that the sexual act was not shameful, and the word [“fuck”] used in its original sense therefore was not shameful either’ (60); in the sacred space of Oliver and Margaret’s encounter, the vocabulary of sex is deliberately clichéd and evasive, and the euphemisms that enable Oliver and Margaret to work with the gist rather than the pith of sex suggests a particular and distinctive turning away from those affirmations about the sacredness of sex and language. When Oliver eventually shifts his amorous attentions to Anna, Margaret’s meticulously sculpted femininity, animated by the approval of her husband’s legitimizing gaze, goes horribly awry. In what sounds like a parody of the sacrament, she goes through a daily ritual of cleansing before consuming a Bloody Mary, some Twiglets and a copy of Vogue (180) which she scrutinizes with a forensic eye, checking grotesque distortions in the supposed perfection of its photographic images. Like Oliver, she believes in reading too, but one issue in Byatt’s novel is the acknowledged difficulty for women of finding a vocabulary to

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discuss sex or anatomy with any candour at all: ‘Love exposes one so, [Margaret] thought, one is so dependent on it, and maybe one will never be intimate enough not to care if anything – she didn’t specify – goes a bit wrong’ (45–6). Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) was an influential sociological study about the fate of stifled, college-educated, white, suburban middle-class American women and it had a considerable purchase with British women writers in the decade. These women’s testaments, Friedan said, articulated the problem without a name as she interviewed American women who knew they had adhered to a cultural script but felt dissatisfied, empty and bored with the supposed rewards for their compliance: ‘[e]xperts told them how to catch a man and keep him [. . .] how to dress, how to look and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting [. . .]’ (13). When Henry Severell goes to visit the increasingly desperate Margaret he notes: ‘She was messy and the place was dirty, and everything smelt’ (203). Her unkempt appearance signals the failure of the ‘feminine mystique’ which is here indexed to or projected onto the external disarray of the domestic space, a trope that is reiterated over and again in other novels of the 1960s. One encounters a version of it, for example in Margaret Drabble’s fourth novel, Jerusalem the Golden (1967): the ‘neurotic fastidiousness’ of Philippa which conceals her private misery ‘in no way overflowed into her care for the house, which she left to its own squalor’ (142); or in Drabble’s The Waterfall (1969): ‘[. . .] Jane for the thousandth time wondered whether she ought to comment on the state of her kitchen, to apologize, to show that she suspected the extent of her own failure [. . .]’ (40). That sense of English literary-cultural values underlined by the 1960 Chatterley Trial and through the strain of a particular literary-critical ethos is queried through Byatt’s ambivalent representation of a literary-scholarly-marital nexus of relationships where, at least in his own marriage, the critic who most adheres to those values cannot maintain or abide by them. Even his transfer of affections to Anna doesn’t uphold the integrity of sex: when she loses her virginity to Oliver, ‘[s]he lay down again, her face in the stuffy pillow, and thought well, that’s that’ (164). If anything, the domestic space that Oliver shares with his wife is built on the foundation of the magazines that Margaret reads, ‘an alien but comfortable world, full of bright little hints for improving one’s “home” or appearance [. . .]’ (22) which turns out to be (and how could it?) the basis for no foundation at all. In Edna O’Brien’s Girl with Green Eyes (1962) Cait reads Tender is the Night with anxious impatience: ‘because I wanted to know if the man would leave the woman or not’ (1). In A.S. Byatt's second novel, The Game (1967), the man does just that, and the perfectly concocted image of married life and

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of the feminine mystique is rapidly and easily unmade when the plot that cannot be admitted into its ideological construction finally intrudes, leaving Margaret very much not at home in her home and those ‘axiomatic English values’ under question. Byatt rehearsed elements of the ‘feminine mystique’ in The Game (1967) when a young woman, Sylvia Redman, a former Oxford undergraduate now married to an Oxford don, approaches Julia Corbett, a popular writer of the ‘woman’s novel’: I – I like your books. They – they deal with a real problem, one nobody thinks anything ought to be done about. That is – women, intelligent women, who are suddenly plunged into being at home all day. The – real boredom. I – I love my babies – I’ve got two – very much. But some days I just sit down and cry out of a – a knowledge of waste. Waste. The indignity and waste of being a woman. I know. I’m much less interesting than I was as an undergraduate. And I can’t say I don’t mind. (115)

In the introduction to this chapter, I referred to Margaret Drabble’s identification of the ‘women’s novel of the sixties’ as something that ‘just arose spontaneously’ (28) from a specific set of frustrations: ‘When we left college we had babies, fed the family, did a day’s work, served Cordon Bleu meals by candlelight and were free to have intellectual conversations all evening. [. . .] the freedom was a mockery because we were all overloaded, exhausted’ (27). Drabble’s first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage (1963) explores one summer in the lives of the Bennett sisters, Sarah and Louise. At one point, Sarah, the ingénue first-person narrator, makes a self-conscious observation about her own narration – ‘such a female love-love-love-story as this’ (189) – aware of both the predictability of social as well as literary conventions while trying to resist their inevitability and to break with that kind of plot. Marriage is a career and an alternative to any of the undemanding jobs that are open to these middle-class university graduates (secretarial filing, working in a department store), their degrees taken, in any case, ‘in a faute-de-mieux middle class way’ (7) as Sarah insouciantly puts it. If this seems like affected ennui, it also speaks to a gnawing unease as Sarah sees the future ‘narrowing before me like a tunnel’ if she fails to marry while staving off its probability by persuading her boyfriend to take up a Harvard scholarship. A Summer Bird-Cage also peels back fictions about the surface and glossy perfections of both femininity and marriage, of what Angela Carter described as ‘the supreme icon of woman as a sexual thing’ in ‘Notes for a Theory of Sixties Style’ (135). Sarah’s sister, Louise, is the experienced, polished ‘grande dame’ against which, Sarah is just the inexperienced ‘jeune fille’; but where the elder

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sister is publicly self-possessed and accomplished she is also privately disordered; the night before her marriage Sarah observes Louise dropping ash and drinking whisky (22), she wears ‘a bra that is actually dirty’ beneath a demurely high necked wedding dress (27) and she later tramples the dress to pieces, leaving it ‘all heaped on the floor’ (51). Pregnancy is seen as a ‘crowning insult’ resolved by illegal abortion for one character, Gill, who is swiftly disillusioned by an objectification reinforced by artistic representation as well as domestic expectations: and then he was painting all the time and he seemed to think that I ought to be happy just sitting around in the nude and letting him paint me, and cooking him the odd meal. And it got so bloody cold, posing, especially when they cut the electricity off and the fire wouldn’t work. Oh it was awful. I wanted to do things too, I didn’t like just waiting on him. (39)

It is these crude objectifications, of cultural representation on the one hand and domestic life on the other, that Drabble excavates. She has spoken about the ‘informal first-person narrative voice’ of her first novel as both taking her ‘by surprise’ and as a liberation ‘from the neutral critical prose of the university essay’ and in a sense, Sarah moves from one kind of knowledge to another when, as a new university graduate, she weighs in the balance spinsterhood, career, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, abortion, infidelity, separation, and divorce as she casts her wary narrative eye across the fate of her own family members and of recentlygraduated friends. The issue of how women’s identities or experiences might be shaped, controlled or constrained by what they read and how they are asked or expected to read is a recurring topic in women’s fiction in the 1960s, from examinations of the literary canon (Jane Eyre is ubiquitous) to the often devalued status of ‘women’s writing’ and the consequential influence of women’s mass market magazines. Writing in 1980 and in critical response to an argument that all women’s writing was de facto feminist, Rosalind Coward argued for the need to examine ‘institutional practices which determine how we come to read a piece of writing in a particular way [. . .] how certain pieces of writing are designated “literature” or “potboiler,” making distinctions on the basis of nebulous notions like “quality” ’ (226). Assumptions about reading practices and the marketization and reception of ‘women’s writing’ are examined in A.S. Byatt’s The Game and more extensively in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, both of which look at critical issues through the figure of the woman writer and the fiction that she writes: Byatt’s Julia Corbett’s domestic fiction and Lessing’s Anna Wulf ’s politically motivated realism. Anna’s ambitious claim to embody ‘the position of women in our time’

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(505) might, for very different reasons, extend to Julia Corbett, too. In both texts, the moral and cultural issues arising from women’s writing as genre fiction and its specific appeals to the woman reader as a designated market are framed (if not overwhelmed) by the powerful literary and formal ambitions of Byatt and Lessing’s work. If ‘women’s fiction’ is reinforced as a distinctive category within their fiction, it is also interrogated by the searching questions that each writer asks about the form and the function of literature. Byatt’s The Game examines the relationship between Julia, a writer of popular domestic novels, her sister Cassandra, an Oxford don, and Simon Moffitt, an estranged friend but once the object of their peculiarly rivalrous and adolescent attentions in the 1940s. The Game is a richly layered novel and is in many ways an instructive one in relation to British women’s fiction in the 1960s because it incorporates so many concerns explored by other writers in the decade, about the legacies of the Second World War in relation to the moral uncertainties of the present, about the status of ‘the woman’s novel’, about the woman writer’s relationship to literary histories and about the need to find an appropriate form to address this spectrum of concerns. Byatt’s novel variously considers good, evil, redemption, reconciliation, morality, fear, free will, personal responsibility, and the necessary balance between reality and the imagination, not as distinct entities but as mutually informing kinds of knowledge, ways of apprehending the self and of finding a way to understand or ameliorate legacies of betrayal, loss, and disaster experienced during the 1940s and that trickle through the ensuing decades. The relatively bounded world of Julia’s domestic fiction is one part of the novel’s textual landscape and although we never read anything from it, we read about it through reviews and, as mentioned earlier, through one of its readers. The Game’s narration is far less bounded than that in Julia’s novel. Critical reception of Julia’s work varies; when she returns to Northumberland to visit her dying father the vicar offers the faintest praise, telling her that her novels are ‘[v]ery evocative’ and that she speaks ‘for a generation, or so the girls in the village tell me . . .’ (30). Her daughter is considerably less pleased to be spoken for, since family life is simply ‘copy’ for Julia’s writing which itself seems to endlessly rehearse her resentment at making the domestic choices that she has made. Her writing began as therapy for a breakdown following the birth of her daughter and her subsequent and similar novels suggest that she never moves on, as though her recourse to domestic fiction is an incomplete or unresolved mourning for an irrecoverable loss of freedom and an arrested phase of development. Her novels are categorized by supercilious reviewers who regard

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Julia as ‘probably the best of that increasing number of women writers who explore in loving detail the lives of those trapped in comfort by washing machines and small children [. . ..]’ (47). The milieu described by Byatt in this novel (artsy, academic) is clearly not rehearsing the kind of domestic misery recorded, for example, in The Golden Notebook when Anna canvasses for the Communist Party and finds the country ‘full of women going mad all by themselves’ (161) or when Anna’s fictional counterpart ‘Ella’ writes ‘sensitive and feminine’ short stories and responds, as a kind of ‘agony aunt’ to women writing letters that reveal them ‘simmering away in misery’, asking for medication to treat emotional distress and loneliness. If Julia is ever trapped by ‘washing machines and small children’ it is because her Quaker husband needs to actively live rather than preach acts of social charity by inviting London’s homeless to live in their family home and where the smells of their convenience food and the stench of their children’s nappies soaking in buckets of water produces, for Julia, an alienating sense of abjection into her otherwise decorous and ordered middle-class household. Gayle Greene reminds us in Changing the Story that ‘[f]eminist fiction is not the same as “women’s fiction” or fiction by women: not all women writers are “women’s writers,” and not all women’s writers are feminist writers [. . .]’ (2). By writing about the woman novelist, Byatt puts ‘the women’s novel’ in its place as an instrumental rather than imaginative mode of writing; in doing this, she observes a difference between ‘the sixties women’s novel’ as responsive to the constraints of a given cultural moment and set of experiences on the one hand, and a broader imaginative landscape that examines how the present is shaped by the legacies of its historical and literary past, on the other. Byatt deploys different modes of narration and cultural form – individual points of view are filtered through letters, journal entries, television documentaries on natural science and on the arts alongside intertextual allusions or direct reference to nineteenth-century literature: Tennyson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lewis Carroll, Emily and Charlotte Brontë – among others – recur through a relentless examination of how the arts and the literary imagination are put to different institutional usages. The seeds of her later work, not least Possession (1990), were being sown in this early novel, but since all these narrative modes are embedded within an otherwise conventionally realized narration it was this, presumably, that made Angela Carter tell A.S. Byatt that this was ‘not where literature is going’. Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook was one of the most ambitious, selfconscious examinations of the woman writer and women’s writing in the 1960s. Lessing added a preface to her novel in 1971, almost a decade after its publication.

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At times testy in tone, she wanted to be clear that her book was centrally about ‘breakdown’ as a necessary prelude to self-healing and not exclusively about ‘the sex war’ (8). Although she wrote with revelatory candour about states of social, emotional and sexual impasse and the intensity and waning of sexual and emotional affect, the real revolution of the time could not be siphoned off to one just between ‘women and men’ as one embedded fictional character suggests in the ‘Yellow Notebook’ (198). There seemed no end to Lessing’s bold ambitions in the novel: revolution was inseparably sexual as well as political, she wanted to give ‘the ideological feel of our mid-century’ (11) and she wanted to offer comment ‘about the conventional novel’ (13). Indeed, the structure of the novel is so indissociably linked to its content that it cannot not be read through it. The Golden Notebook is made up of four coloured notebooks which we read in four separate instalments: black, red, yellow and blue. These are punctuated by four instalments of a conventionally realist novel, Free Women which is both about and by Anna Wulf, an English novelist who is suffering from a ‘dissolution of the self ’ and an attendant writer’s block. The realist novel explores the more complex interrogations of the notebooks through a series of conversations between Anna and her best friend, an actress called Molly, Tommy (Molly’s son), a troubled young man called Michael and Molly’s ex-husband, Richard, briefly a Communist but now a highly successful businessman, remarried and with three children; his wife, Marion, forms an unlikely alliance with Tommy to generate tokenistic political affiliations with the British working class and with southern African politics, the insipidity (or complacency) as much a comment on the kind of conventional form and structure of the embedded realist fiction that Lessing wants to move away from. Each of the notebooks has a specific function: the Black Notebook addresses Anna’s relationship to her first novel, Frontiers of War, which is set in Central Africa during the Second World War; the Red Notebook contains Anna’s feelings about her relationship to the Communist Party following the denunciation of Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Congress in 1956; the Yellow Notebook is made up of drafts of short stories and a novel, The Shadow of the Third, written by a fictional character called Ella, clearly modelled on Anna, in which material found in the other notebooks is reworked; and the Blue Notebook is primarily a journal. Although Anna separates the notebooks in order to compartmentalize the elements of her life, strands of one notebook inevitably creep into others and she admonishes herself several times: ‘. . . but this kind of observation belongs to the blue notebook’ (137) as diarized observations – ‘real life’ – intrude into storytelling impulses. The Golden Notebook thus contains three embedded realist or ‘conventional’ novels: Anna’s Frontiers of War;

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The Shadow of the Third – a fiction within a fiction written by ‘Ella’, and Free Women, a framing narrative that sits alongside Anna’s revisions, interruptions and meditations on the form and function of the contemporary novel. Such repetitions and variations seek out different ways to make private and public, psychic and political life insistently connected across domestic and global spaces. This is an ambitious undertaking in terms of the novel’s formal ambitions as well as in relation to its holistic embrace of interrelated global and personal, social and psychological fractures. These ambitions might also be seen as redressing what Lessing saw as a provincial insularity that characterized elements of British fiction in the 1950s. The first Black Notebook is a lengthy account of Anna’s experiences in Central Africa during the Second World War. In Anna’s journal account of that time, she reconsiders the events that made up the substance of her novel, Frontiers of War, and interspersed with the recollections of that history are observations about the contemporary conventional novel in its limited but also potentially capacious relationship to humanity, culture, knowledge, history, archetypes, and the unconscious in all their interconnected social and global contexts, from Western to Eastern Europe, Asia, America and Africa. What Anna wants is to ‘create a new way of looking at life’ through ‘a new imaginative comprehension’ (76). The solemnity of Anna’s meditations on her novel and on the contemporary novel itself are examined in the subsequent instalments of the Black Notebook. In its second instalment, Anna separately meets a British television producer, Reginal Tarbrucke, and an American film editor, Edwina Wright, each of whom want to adapt Frontiers of War for UK and American television audiences. As Anna recalls her own authorial sense of Frontiers of War, it emerges as a novel that engages with racial segregation in Africa, interracial relationships, homosexuality, sibling incest, illegitimacy, European Communism, British Socialism, English Colonial identity, and the British class system. Reginald Tarbrucke wants to turn her novel into a version of Brief Encounter: ‘The two lovers must separate. And at the end we have this marvelous scene on the railway station [. . .]’ (259). Edwina Wright suggests adapting it for the musical stage: ‘You can get away with a serious message in a musical that you can’t in a straight story’ (265). Later, Edwina baulks at the prospect of the project when she learns that Anna was a member of the Communist Party and later writes to inform Anna that her company censors ‘screenplays dealing with religion, race, politics or extra-marital sex’ (263). Both overtures threaten to reorient and significantly rewrite the focus of Anna’s interrogation of precisely those topics to that of a thwarted love affair or to no love affair at all, moving it from the demands of a writerly text which generates

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interpretation and new configurations of writing and reading to a ‘readerly’ one which imposes presumably ‘correct’ meaning by censoring others. The denigration of television as a kind of cultural rot was common in British literature and film of the 1950s and 1960s. In the Black Notebooks, Anna implies that the banality of British and American television culture ditches literary commitment for commercial interest and masks the realities of racism under the illusions of romance as the text repeatedly turns on questions of cultural and political authenticity and integrity and the necessity of the writer’s small, personal voice to speak against the amplifications of commercial interest. The British television producer’s pitch for Frontiers of War is to anglicise the novel by turning it into a version of Brief Encounter. Post-war British cinema was not short of a ‘marvellous scene on the railway station’; thwarted lovers had parted or met in recent and popular cinematic adaptations of ‘Angry Young Men’ fiction such as John Braine's Room at the Top (1959) (itself seen as a more candid version of Brief Encounter). Railway scenes were added to Tony Richardson's screen adaptation of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1959) and in a comically deflated version of an increasingly over-worked trope in Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar (1963), Billy manages to get on the train but gets off for fear that he might be committing himself to action rather than preserving the imaginary and insular world in which he prefers to rehearse his identity. Lessing had welcomed the ‘Angry Young Men’ for their ‘injection of vitality into the withered arm of British literature’ (22) in her essay ‘The Small Personal Voice’, published in Tom Maschler’s Declaration (1957). However, she had also castigated the limited provincialism of their vision and indulgence in ‘the pleasurable luxury of despair’ (20). In Anna’s encounters with both Reginald Tarbrucke and Edwina Wright there are niggling but strategically insistent background noises that edge into the narrative and insist on being seen and heard: a newspaper seller, possibly battle scarred with ‘no face. No nose [. . .] his eyes [. . .] sunk in scar tissue’ (260) yells the day’s headlines, ‘War in Quemoy’; Anna will be prohibited from entering the States because of her affiliations with the Communist Party. In In Pursuit of the English, as I suggested earlier, Lessing’s (or Doris’) recollection of walking past a man typing in the post-Blitz rubble in 1949 might be literal but it is also suggestively figurative and the timing of the publication of that ‘documentary essay’ in 1960 followed by the publication of The Golden Notebook suggests a strategic moving on from 1950s typing to 1960s writing, from sitting in the ruins of the Second World War to engaging with the reaches of its Cold War aftermath. Like A.S. Byatt and Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark invoked ‘the angry young man’ as indicative of a tendency in 1950s writing that had become stale: ‘[The novel]

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was getting very dull around the time of the Angry Young Man’ she said in interview with Martin McQuillan, and she wanted to ‘shake it up’ by introducing ‘another dimension’ (210). Spark’s Peckham in The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) is ostensibly constituted by the familiar landscapes and cultures of the English novel in the 1950s: factories, pubs, television, youth culture, obsession with marriage, with gradations of social class, with infidelity rather than divorce, with the pieties, hypocrisies and miseries of social conformity. Although Spark resisted categorization as a postmodern writer – ‘They say postmodernist, mostly, whatever that means’, she said in her interview with McQuillan (216) – the narrative’s repetitions, use of telephone conversations, metafictional notes about the novel’s plotting, play with genres, authorship, authority, stories as the everexchanging basis of knowledge (or information) reveals the pleasurable and provocative instabilities of language and representation. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of Slender Means (1963) and The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) all read the present moment of the 1960s in relation to the historical past, though. Martin Stannard has suggested that historical events in The Girls of Slender Means are both ‘lightly sketched’ and ‘ingenious’ (295): Victory in Europe, the landslide Labour victory in the General Election of 1945, and Victory in Japan. The narrative’s trajectory is thus punctuated by three moments of profoundly decisive historical change, from the inauguration of the post-war Welfare State on the one hand, to the shift from World War to the atomic age on the other. Across the landscapes of Spark’s early 1960s fiction, figures seem either impervious to the moral weight of their own historical circumstance or they are acutely and painfully aware of it. When the May of Teck Club, home to the eponymous girls of slender means, is shattered by a bomb that has lain dormant during the war, the beautiful (and slender) Selina chooses to save a Schiaparelli evening dress while her fellow (less slender) residents are trapped, unable to get through a narrow skylight to safety. Nicholas ‘involuntarily signed himself with the cross’ (126) when he sees Selina and realizes that she has rescued a dress and not a person as he originally thought. Earlier in the narrative, an omniscient narrator alerts us to this moment and to what Nicholas will do, as though his actions are already predetermined or predestined: ‘[. . .] he had not yet witnessed that action of savagery so extreme that it forced him involuntarily to make an entirely unaccustomed gesture, the signing of the cross upon himself ’ (60). If this observation is partly theological, it is also concerned with authorial control and storytelling. Part of Spark’s story is the quest for a story in the present day 1960s: Jane Wright, a ‘woman columnist’ (9) is in pursuit of ‘a good story’ (19) after she learns from ‘a paragraph’ about the death

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of Nicholas who has been killed in Haiti. Yet Nicholas is also described as a character ‘still feeling his way in the world of books’ (37). He is the author of an unpublished manuscript, The Sabbath Notebooks, and one of his marginal observations – ‘a vision of evil may be as effective to conversion as a vision of good’ (140) – illuminates a knowledge gleaned by observing actions voided of moral value: Selena’s choice of saving a dress over saving people, random acts of unpunishable violence during VJ celebrations; the only figure who seems capable of observing incomprehensible acts of good and evil is, then, killed off. The narrative’s move between war-time past and present breaks the chronological frame of that consequential four-month period in 1945 through a series of abbreviated telephone calls in the present day which reveal both the instability of memory but also the self-absorption of the individual, each one distracted by the transient interruptions of everyday life. On hearing about Nicholas’ death, one character’s recovery is revealed thus: ‘I’m shattered. I’ve got heaps to tell you’ (10). Reflecting on the final words of The Girls of Slender Means in her essay ‘Fathers’ made A.S. Byatt think of the early 1960s as ‘the world [. . .] made by the mixed energies’ released by Spark’s description of the VJ celebrations when Nicholas observes the random murder of a woman, British and American servicemen fighting each other and Jane ‘sturdy and bare-legged on the grass, occupied with her hair’ as she fiddles with a hair-pin and claims, ‘Well, I wouldn’t have missed it, really’ (142). The apparent incommensurability of quotidian preoccupation alongside the enormity of moral certainties and uncertainties generated by the war circulate in Spark’s narrative as though there are two stories to make sense of in the 1960s: the smallness of the individual and the importance of the everyday against the magnitude of the recent past. Spark defines that magnitude through VE and VJ Day and the beginning of the post-war Welfare State; Carter contextualizes the decade of Vietnam within the century of Hiroshima and Buchenwald in ‘Notes for a Theory of Sixties Style’; ‘[i]t is small wonder,’ she said, ‘that so many people are taking the dandy’s way of asking unanswerable questions’ (134). But such incommensurability is, too, an animating force for the novel and our attention is drawn as much to narrative construction and resonant issues of fragmentation as it is to the moral, theological and everyday concerns outlined in such writing. ‘[M]ixed energies’ are at play in Angela Carter’s first novel, Shadow Dance (1966) and in Beryl Bainbridge’s second novel, Another Part of the Wood (1968) where the counterculture in Carter’s novel and the ‘swinging sixties’ in Bainbridge’s are defined in relation to the Second World War, that ‘long ago in 1945’ as Spark puts it. Bainbridge’s novel also explores the commonplace against

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events of historical moment as she considers cultural change between the end of the war and the late 1960s, the end of empire and decolonization. The novel is set in the Nant McFarley Camp in Wales during an ill-fated weekend; May arrives at the campsite in a Mini driven by her husband Lionel, a veteran of the Second World War. She is dressed in gingham (made fashionable by ‘Biba’) and in one conversation she defiantly invokes the paraphernalia of ‘swinging London’ as evidence of a buoyant and contemporary patriotism: ‘He’d gone on long enough deploring the loss of Empire or something, and he couldn’t see just how Britishmad everyone was now, what with clothes and pop songs and the King’s Road on a Saturday morning. Everyone she knew was dreadfully patriotic, and especially if you came from Liverpool’ (100). Patriotism, Britishness, ‘was the thing’ and you can buy the image of the British flag on matchboxes, tea towels, handkerchiefs, mugs and ‘a shirt if you went to Carnaby Street – anything if you wanted it’ (101). Noticeably, ‘the thing’ moves along the conveyor belt of that sentence to ‘anything’ as the origin (nation) goes adrift in the tide of proliferating reproductions and incarnations to become ‘anything if you wanted it’, from something to wipe up with (the dishes, eyes, a runny nose) to this season’s style. Lionel’s present-day failures are shored up against his fantasies of authority, gravitas, power and place conferred by Churchill and the allied victory. He spins meretricious stories about his experiences of meeting Churchill at Malta in 1945 while a totemic coin he claims was taken from the neck of a German Officer in Italy was, in reality (if courageously) fished out of a urinal in Scarborough. War-time past and post-war present seem as incomparable as Lionel and May are incompatible, his desire to talk about the ‘Great Powers’ deflated by her weak riposte: ‘I only know Tyrone Power’ (101). If Lionel and May, the Second World War and the Swinging Sixties, are configured as antagonistic or estranged (‘He didn’t even know her and she couldn’t explain herself how she had come to marry this stranger with the thinning hair’ (55)) they are, nonetheless, insistently paired to measure gain and loss around national identity, place, authority, authenticity and moral value. In ‘Notes for a Theory of Sixties Style’, Carter applauded ‘the startling dandyism of the newly emancipated young’ for revealing ‘a kind of logic of whizzing entropy’ (132), a description which might well be applied to the junk/antiques shop run by Honeybuzzard and Morris in Shadow Dance. Its disordered milieu is determined in part by an enduring childhood trauma experienced by Morris after he hears his mother ‘coupling’ and which he associates with an aerial bombardment in the Second World War. This bombardment might have happened (and so he is burdened by history) or it might be a way of imaginatively

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describing the force of his trauma: ‘I was on my own and the world had fallen on my head’ (147). Honeybuzzard, on the other hand, is a self-fashioned creature responsive only to the moment. Between them, they might speak to depth and surface models of the self, a melancholy attachment to the past and a commitment to its dismantling; we might see them as separate figures or as symbolizing a conflicted self as Honeybuzzard appears to accomplish Morris’ most violent and transgressive desires. Both figures are oppressively and sinisterly entangled with the other and their relationship is often at its most intense and intimate when they are rifling through the ‘dead flotsam’ (24) of other people’s past in the ‘deserted, condemned old houses’ that they break into. They deal in depersonalization, the ‘odd disjointed fragments of other people’s lives’ (25) and the cost is catastrophic. In ‘Notes for a Theory of Sixties Style’, Carter celebrated the ‘eclectic fragments’ of sartorial style which, ‘robbed of their symbolic content, fall together to form a new whole’ (132). If this is potentially reinvigorating (‘the discovery of maybe new unsuspected selves’ (132), it is also potentially troubling, ‘a real dissociation from society’ (134). When Morris asks Honeybuzzard why he has apparently frightened an old woman to death, it is because ‘I wanted to see what would happen’ (136). His violently ludic antics become increasingly transgressive but also ultimately self-defeating: ‘[t]he pursuit of magnificence starts as play and ends as nihilism’ Carter went on to write in ‘Notes for a Theory of Sixties Style’ a year after the publication of her first novel. Honeybuzzard disappears into a derelict house to fulfil his blasphemous, misogynist fantasies and Morris follows him, vanishing ‘into the shadows’ (182). Houses, for Morris, are always unhomely spaces, at times ‘evil and malignant’ (94). His mother’s disappearance is linked to the destruction of his hotel room in the Second World War; the house he breaks into with Honeybuzzard (and to which he finally retreats) stinks ‘of damp, of rot, of excrement [. . .] of age, of hopelessness, of uncleanness, of decaying stone, of crumbling wood [. . .] of the physical human corruption of old houses, all mingled together in one gigantic overwhelming stench’ (133). That ‘stench’ is aligned not just with the rottenness of the past but with the body: its ‘raw wood [. . .] had the quality of untreated wounds’ (135) and that body is gendered: ‘Someone lives here who is female’ (134). When Morris vanishes into the shadow of that house to save his countercultural alter ego/friend it is into a ‘new dimension outside both time and space’ in which he ‘could be truly heroic’ (181). But it is a heroism that appears to be predicated on surrender and retreat into a house/past that is rotten, decayed and hopeless. If there is any ordering force in this sacrilegious and entropic world, it comes in the form of a young woman called Emily who, significantly, has no

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memories of the war (147), who cleans and sweetens the kitchen above the shop (74–5), righteously destroys the contents of Honeybuzzard’s room (163–4), calls the police to restore law and accountability, and chooses to keep her unborn child, a token, perhaps, of a more optimistic, less burdened future. Critical readings of Carter’s first novel have noted its surrealist and fragmented style, 1960s cinematic influences (particularly Godard), and her critical examination of psychosis and alienation.8 These descriptions (exchanging Resnais, Antonioni or Fellini for Godard) might be applied, although they work to a different intensity, in Ann Quin’s second novel, Three (1966); as with The Golden Notebook, how we read the book is at least as preoccupying as what we read. The verbal echoes in Three produce a sense of déjà vu and invite us to turn pages back as well as forwards as linear progress, logic or causality is superseded by attention to linguistic repetitions, different versions of the same event and to the instability of a single or authoritative point of view. The process of reading Three (even on a first or only reading) is thus also a re-reading as the text insistently re-uses its images, motifs, and phrases. Three explores the relationship between a childless, married couple, Leonard (referred to as Leon) and Ruth, and a young woman named only as ‘S’ who lives with them for a short time and who, we learn at the beginning, has possibly committed suicide. That speculation is later thrown into question when a murdered body is recovered, but although clues indicate that this is possibly S, the matter, like much in the novel, is never resolved. The narrative consists of four prose sections which focus on Leon and Ruth’s interactions with which each other. These sections are interspersed with another four sections of impressionistic, often elliptical prose and are the audio tapes that S has left behind; our reading of them equates to Leon and Ruth’s listening to them and their highly selective responses to what they have heard is inevitably measured against what we have read as the extent of their unwillingness to confront their own failings and failures is exposed. Two sections of S’s journal entries complete the narrative and these often flesh out context or else re-tell events that are invoked more surreally in the tape sections.9 Quin both observes but also discards punctuation; this is strikingly evident in the tape sections which both look and read like free verse: ‘Reflections. A train window. Ploughed fields. Across / Pullman seats / Crows / stalk / their own shadows’ (22). She also partially disregards punctuation in the prose sections, revealing uncertainty as we see in this early exchange about S’s suicide: ‘No one can be blamed Ruth we must understand that least of all ourselves’ (1). Such uncertainty (of all people they should not be blamed – or – of all people they understand the least)

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percolates through this intriguing narrative. At another point, Ruth observes ‘Funny how she observed us quite honestly I would never have recognised ourselves from her descriptions’ (117) – S’s observations are either more or less honest and so Ruth gains insight – or – they are funny-strange and therefore not really accurate as Ruth refuses to listen to what the tapes and journal reveal. In the final prose section, Ruth listens to an audio recording made by Leon and he reads one of Ruth’s own journal entries, both of which reveal the particular quality of each other’s profound unhappiness both as a married couple and individually. For Leon, identity is about becoming habituated to a social role (122) and Ruth feels objectified within her marriage: ‘This morning he came to me, without looking, my body felt a slab of meat under his hands’ (124). The cultural and historical landscape of Three is both recognizable and obscure. A cutting from a newspaper excerpt from a trial, probably the 1961 Eichmann Trial, is included in S’s journal. At the very beginning of the narrative we learn that Leon was interned and kept in solitary confinement in a war, but neither the trial nor the war are identified by name. In the trial excerpt, the camp adjutant is asked about the ‘black cross’ marked against names on lists (59); later, S notes the ‘little black crosses’ in Leon’s diaries, which she reads surreptitiously and ‘which seem to be some kind of code’ (65); Ruth confronts him directly, ‘what are these little black marks for’ (42) to be told that they are ‘top secret’ but which presumably refer to his sexual activities. The reiteration and coincidence of the ‘black crosses’ or ‘black marks’ across quite different contexts links them at the level of verbal repetition but they also underpin and connect broader issues in the narrative which is attentive to doubling (mirrors, statues/people, shadows), threshold or liminal spaces (windows, beaches, sea, walls), to obscurity and clarity of vision (mist, surveillance). If this suggests a kind of insularity where the textuality of the text is the preoccupying concern, these repetitions circulate around issues of guilt, complicity, accountability, suspicion, betrayal, and forms of power from war-time punishment and atrocity to the often brutal intimacies of sex in both fantasy and reality. Quin is usually linked to avant-garde writers and writing in the 1960s, not to ‘the sixties women’s novel’ as Margaret Drabble described the sub-genre, although the woman’s relationship to her body in its reproductive, sexual and social capacities percolates through the text and might well be read in the context of other British women’s fiction of the decade where women’s experiences are foregrounded. S’s tape describes her experience of pregnancy and, since she is not married and wants an abortion, she also describes ensuing meetings with psychiatrists who try to persuade her to give her child up for adoption: ‘Wouldn’t

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you like to help a childless couple then?’ (37). She chooses abortion, but in a sense does play out what the psychiatrist suggests in helping a childless couple to realize if not fully understand their habituated imprisonment within ritualistic role play that passes for social and intimate life. Ruth recalls her passivity as a younger woman when she was first married; like Mrs Armitage in Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater, she is beset with insecurity and jealousy about her husband’s possible infidelity. Ruth undergoes plastic surgery in order to better ‘perfect’ her appearance; she struggles to conceive a child but also continually rebuts her husband’s sexual advances; where Lessing and Drabble – for example in The Garrick Year (63) – alluded or referred to instances of sexual coercion or reluctant acquiescence to marital sex, Quin describes an act of marital rape in explicit detail in Three. Ruth’s uncertainties are exacerbated by the insulated, slightly surreal topography of Three and are compounded by the organization of the narrative itself, so that we cannot always be certain how to distinguish between what really happened, what is fantasized, what is re-enacted on the basis of listening to S’s tapes or reading S’s journal but as with the writing of Lessing, Spark and Carter, its ambiguities demand that we read for all those possibilities rather than choosing one at the expense of another. I began this chapter with an aerial overview of British women writing in the 1960s; I want to end at a junction. Doris Lessing claimed that both the English and the working class were elusive entities in In Pursuit of the English and that her factual account was really shaped more like a novel. Nell Dunn went to Battersea and did find the English (and African and West Indian) working class. This, too, was a world of ‘mixed energies’: a conversation about sex at the back of a bomb-site (37) is followed by one about advice in the event of an H-bomb (39). In her Preface to Up the Junction, Nell Dunn recalled the remains of bomb sites, predominantly matriarchal communities and the voices and experiences of different generations of women, claiming that ‘[m]ost of what I wrote in Up the Junction I heard [. . .]’ (ix). This gives her text far less of a novelistic or structured feel and more of an observational documentary one, from noting the random details of the ‘nylon film panties one-and-three-pegged between the tinned peas and plastic toys’ in the corner shop (11) to the ‘smell of Sunday cooking [floating] up the stairs’ while Rube is ‘bent up tight with pain’ in a labour-induced abortion (74–5). The narrator observes and records, usually without comment, but when she does make observations, they are pointed and work to undermine and expose the ostensible confidence and authority of the speaker. The penultimate episode, ‘The Tally Man’, reiterates some of the conversations heard in the first episode, ‘Out with the Girls’; Fred, the ‘Indian gink’ (5) is recalled (115), as is

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Sylvie’s anecdote about not wearing ‘drawers’ (5, 115), as are stories or fantasies about fast cars (2, 117). In ‘Out with the Girls’, Sylvie’s ‘laugh rips the night’ (5); in ‘Sunday Morning’, set in a home for unmarried pregnant women, a young black woman’s ‘screams ripped across the smug Sunday quiet’ as she gives birth, alone, to a child that ‘slipped out with a soft thud onto the stone floor’ (47); in each instant, the irreverent banter of one is paired against a set of more ominous or troubling views and events. As with Ann Quin’s Three, these textual echoes remind us to look back to where and how we first heard them. ‘The Tally Man’ episode is the longest in Up the Junction and it moves from the familiarly cramped, flirtatious settings of the pub to the funeral of an old woman, Mrs Hardy, denoting the passing of a way of life and values, and on to the narrator’s trip with the tally man, through Brixton. Through the tally man’s sustained flow of sexist and racist comments the narrator’s observations point up the cheapness of his suit and tie pin, the banter of his Imperial fantasy – ‘I’m like the white hunter [. . .]’ (123) – his gangster imitation – ‘He sticks out his lower lip curling it over the top like James Cagney playing a Chicago gangster’ (127) – and the improbability of his story about his encounter with a near naked woman just out of her bath: a not dissimilar story has already done the rounds of the narrative twice (28, 103). The narrator’s middle class status – her ‘decency’ – marks her out as different from the other women and is remarked upon twice, the second time by the predatory, unscrupulous tally man: ‘[. . .] it’s the decent girls like you I prefer. If you keep on comin’ down here you won’t stay decent’ (119). Her class difference is noted much more hesitantly by a character unidentified by name at first but who is later revealed as Dave: ‘I don’t know what to say to a decent girl’ (6) and then, in a reversal of conventional positions, he asks her to seduce him. Both Up the Junction (1963) and Nell Dunn’s second novel, Poor Cow (1967) have been described as texts made possible by the Chatterley Trial; in her introduction to Poor Cow, Margaret Drabble praised Up the Junction as ‘one of the first post-Chatterley books to speak out, to treat women’s sexuality as though it were entirely natural, as natural as a man’s’ (xvii) and Rod Mengham focuses on the political morality of the uses of literacy and language in Poor Cow where women define their own moral code: ‘Every bloke I’ve been with has bin very, very clean that’s my main interest – if someone doesn’t look clean I won’t have anything to do with him – well I’ll give him a wank, I’m not that selfish’, Beryl tells Joy (58). Although Dunn also said of Up the Junction that ‘some of it I made up’ (ix), it is never altogether clear which bits. The last paragraph of ‘The Deserted House’ is particularly striking, though.

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The narrator walks, with Dave, ‘across a chaos of grass and rubble to a row of deserted houses’ (32). The deserted house, listed for slum clearance, is Dave’s old family home, his family moved out to ‘lousy Roehampton’ (43) as once familiar communities are literally broken up. They sit and he talks, ranging over stories that touch on tragedy, desire, death. She notes the grass and rubble, the tangled grass and trees, the dawn sliding over the gasworks, slipping ‘over the rubble through the window’ (33). ‘At five in the morning,’ she says, ‘a bird sang a complicated song’ (34). Dave identifies it: ‘ “That’s a thrush,” he says’ (34) and he follows his statement with an apparent non-sequitur: ‘I don’t love my wife because I wasn’t her first – she went with another bloke when she was sixteen’ (34). In ‘Home Thoughts, from Abroad’, Robert Browning’s ‘wise thrush [. . .] sings each song twice over, / Lest you should think he never could recapture / The first fine careless rapture!’. Rod Mengham describes Nell Dunn’s London as ‘resolutely miscellaneous and dishevelled, a heaping together of unravelling and neglected projects, a series of in-between places where meaning and coherence remain in a state of suspense’ (21). Reading across the echoes of Up the Junction, there is no ‘wise’ thrush here, no repetition possible for a ‘first fine careless rapture’; even the dawn is precarious as it slips and slides, no leaning and scattering of blossom as Browning imagined what ‘whoever wakes in England’ might see. It is indeed a complicated song.

Notes With grateful thanks to Helen Iball, Jack Head, and John McLeod. 1 Mary Eagleton reminds us, for example, that the availability of the pill was restricted to married women and even then on health grounds until the late 1960s (105). 2 For example in Margaret Drabble’s Jerusalem the Golden (142), The Waterfall (100) and Angela Carter’s Shadow Dance (46). 3 Abortions are mentioned or referred to in Doris Lessing’s In Pursuit of the English (1960), Muriel Spark’s The Bachelors (1960), Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room (1960), Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head (1961) and The Italian Girl (1964), Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater (1962), Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction (1963), Margaret Drabble’s A Summer Bird-Cage (1963) and The Millstone (1965), A.S. Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun (1964), Margaret Forster’s Georgy Girl (1965), Angela Carter’s Shadow Dance (1966), Ann Quin’s Three (1966), Nell Dunn’s Poor Cow (1968). Discussions about being ‘psychologically unfit’ occur in The L-Shaped Room (34), The Millstone (59) and in The Pumpkin Eater; Mrs Armitage’s pregnancy is terminated on those grounds.

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4 Byatt has also written about them in her ‘Introduction’ to Passions of the Mind and in one of the essays in that collection, ‘People in Paper Houses: Attitudes to “Realism” and “Experiment” in English Post-war Fiction’. 5 In ‘Against Dryness’, Murdoch defined the ‘crystalline and journalistic’ as ‘either a small quasi-allegorical object portraying the human condition and not containing ‘characters’ in the nineteenth-century sense, or else it is a large shapeless quasidocumentary object [. . .] telling, with pale conventional characters, some straightforward story enlivened with empirical facts’ (291). 6 See: Louise Yelin, who suggests that ‘Both the trajectory of Doris and the inquiry into “Englishness” [. . .] need to be set alongside a history of race and immigration that In Pursuit of the English largely ignores’ (60); and John McLeod, who argues that Lessing ‘offers reserved yet firm disapproval of the increasingly racialized rhetoric of the postwar years’ (75). 7 Mr Justice Byrne was quoting the words of Mr Justice Devlin in his summing up. 8 See: Anna Watz (117), Sarah Gamble (46), and Maggie Tonkin (368). 9 The order is a prose section (1–16), S’s tape sequence (17–39), a prose section (40–52), S’s journal entries (53–75), another prose section (76–90), S’s tape sequence (91–115), a further prose section (116–131) and the final set of S’s journal entries (132–143).

Works cited Antonioni, Michelangelo (dir.). Blow-up. Hollywood: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1966. Bainbridge, Beryl. Another Part of the Wood. London: Virago, 2012 [1968]. Braine, John. Room at the Top. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1957. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, 1999. Byatt, A.S.The Shadow of the Sun. London: Vintage, 1991 [1964]. ———. The Game. London: Vintage, 1992 [1967]. ———. Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings. New York: Vintage International, 1993. ———. ‘Fathers’. In On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays. London: Vintage, 2001. 9–35. Carter, Angela. ‘Truly, It Felt Like Year One.’ In Very Heaven: Looking Back at the 1960s. Sarah Maitland (ed.). London: Virago, 1988. 209–16. ———. ‘Notes for a Theory of Sixties Style.’ In Shaking a Leg. Jenny Uglow (ed.). London: Vintage, 2013. 105–8. ———. ‘Notes from the Front Line.’ In Shaking a Leg. Jenny Uglow (ed.). London: Vintage, 2013. 45–53. ———. ‘Jean-Luc Godard.’ In Shaking a Leg. Jenny Uglow (ed.). London: Vintage, 2013. 464–6. ———. Shadow Dance. London: Virago, 2014 [1966]. ———. Several Perceptions. London: Virago. 1995 [1968].

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Coward, Rosalind. ‘Are Women’s Novels Feminist Novels?’ In The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. Elaine Showalter (ed.). London: Virago, 1986. 225–40. Drabble, Margaret. ‘The Millstone by Margaret Drabble.’ The Guardian. 19 March 2011: N.Pag.; www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/19/book-club-margaret-drabblemillstone ———. A Summer Bird-Cage. London: Penguin, 1983 [1963]. ———. The Millstone. London: Penguin, 2010 [1965]. ———. Jerusalem the Golden. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970 [1967]. ———. The Waterfall. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980 [1969]. Dunn, Nell. Up the Junction. London: Virago, 2013 [1963]. ———. Talking to Women. Pan: London, 1966 [1965]. ———. Poor Cow. London: Virago, 2013 [1967]. Eagleton, Mary. ‘The Anxious Lives of Clever Girls: The University Novels of Margaret Drabble, A.S. Byatt, and Hilary Mantel.’ Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. 33:2, 2014: 103–21. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin, 1992. Gamble, Sarah. ‘Something Sacred: Angela Carter, Jean-Luc Godard and the Sixties.’ In Re-visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts. Rebecca Munford (ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006. 42–63. Gavron, Hannah. The Captive Wife: Conflicts of Housebound Mothers. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. Greene, Gayle. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. Hensher, Phillip. ‘A. S. Byatt, The Art of Fiction No. 168’. The Paris Review. 43 (159) Fall 2001: [38–77] N.Pag.; http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/481/a-s-byatt-theart-of-fiction-no-168-a-s-byatt Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957. Kenyon, Olga. Women Writers Talk: Interviews with 10 Women Writers. Oxford: Lennard, 1982. Lessing, Doris. The Grass is Singing. London: Michael Joseph, 1950. ———. ‘The Small Personal Voice’. In Declaration. Tom Maschler (ed.). London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1957. 12–27. ———. In Pursuit of the English: A Documentary. London: Panther, 1980 [1960]. ———. The Golden Notebook. London: Flamingo, 1993 [1962]. McLeod, John. Postcolonial London. London: Routledge, 2004. McQuillan, Martin. ‘The Same Informed Air’: An Interview with Muriel Spark’. In Theorizing Muriel Spark: Gender, Race, Deconstruction. Martin McQuillan (ed.). London: Macmillan, 2002. 210–229. Maitland, Sara (ed.) Very Heaven: Looking Back at the 1960s. London: Virago, 1988. Mengham, Rod. ‘Bollocks to Respectability: British Fiction after the Trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1960–1970)’. In Prudes on the Prowl: Fiction and Obscenity in

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England, 1850 to the Present Day. David Bradshaw and Rachel Potter (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 159–78. Mortimer, Penelope. The Pumpkin Eater. London: Penguin, 2015 [1962]. Murdoch, Iris. A Severed Head. London: Chatto and Windus, 1961. ———. The Italian Girl. London: Chatto and Windus, 1964. ———. ‘Against Dryness’. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. London: Penguin, 1997. 287–95. O’Brien, Edna. The Country Girls. London: Phoenix, 2007 [1960]. ———. Girl with Green Eyes. London: Phoenix, 2007 [1962]. Osborne, John. Look Back in Anger. Quin, Ann. Three. Dalkey Archive Press, 2001 [1966]. Reid Banks, Lynne. The L-Shaped Room. London: Vintage, 2004 [1960]. Rolph, C.H. (ed.) The Trial of Lady Chatterley: Regina v. Penguin Books Limited. London: Penguin, 1990 [1961]. Richardson, Tony (Dir.). Look Back in Anger. London: Orion and Woodfall Film Productions ABPC, 1959. Sage, Lorna. Women in the House of Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992. Spark, Muriel. The Ballad of Peckham Rye. London: Macmillan, 1960. ———. The Bachelors, London: Macmillan, 1960. ———. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, London: Macmillan, 1961. ———. The Girls of Slender Means, London: Macmillan, 1963. ———. The Mandelbaum Gate, London: Macmillan, 1965. Stannard, Martin. Muriel Spark: The Biography. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009. Steedman, Carolyn. Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. London: Virago, 1986. Tonkin, Maggie. ‘ “The Time of the Loony”: Psychosis, Alienation, and R.D. Laing in the Fictions of Muriel Spark and Angela Carter.’ Contemporary Women’s Writing. 9(3) 2015: 366–84. Wallace, Diana. The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers 1900–2000. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005. Waterhouse, Keith. Billy Liar. London: Michael Joseph, 1959. Watz, Anna. ‘The Surrealist Uncanny in Shadow Dance.’ In Angela Carter: New Critical Readings. Sonya Andermahr and Lawrence Phillips (eds.). London: Continuum, 2012. 117–29. Waugh, Patricia. The Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and Its Background 1960–1990. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Willmott, Peter and Michael Young. Family and Kinship in East London. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957. Yelin, Louise. From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998.

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Certain Circles: Gay Fiction and Cultural Attitudes of the 1960s Yvonne Salmon

And when he met Austin for the first time – two weeks ago – he thought he’d seen him somewhere. He didn’t tell me at the time, but he made enquires . . . Yes. . . . and found that Austin is quite well known in certain circles that are . . . known to the police. Criminals? Oh no! Irritated into impatience, Sorme said bluntly: You mean homosexuals? She said weakly: Yes. (188–9)

The exchange above, from Colin Wilson’s Ritual in the Dark (1960) illustrates the spectrum of attitudinal forces that would maintain homosexuality as a transgressive subject position during the 1960s. On the basis of certain highprofile cultural and legal shifts, one might wish to imagine the decade as a period of sexual liberation. Penguin’s publication of the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) in 1960, the availability of the contraceptive pill from 1961 onwards, the passing of the Abortion Act in 1967 and the abolition of theatre censorship in 1968 collectively point to Britain’s liberal turn away from what could be generally understood as ‘Victorian’ values. However, this familiar narrative of reform did not result in a ground level shift in the dynamics of sexual equality nor did it negate sexual exploitation. One could easily argue that the net effect was quite the opposite. As Arthur Marwick suggests in British Society Since 1945 (1982), with an unfortunate tone of both condescension and understatement, liberation symbolized by way of the mini-skirt ‘might well mainly mean a picnic for men’ (120). More precisely, beyond this Carry On version of the so-called 111

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‘Permissive Society’, the fact remains that in both a social and a cultural sense the British Sixties gave very little permission to same-sex relationships. In Ritual in the Dark ‘Austin’ denotes Austin Nunne, a gay ballet critic cut very much from the ‘outsider’ mould: cerebral, cultured and physically (read: sexually) at odds with dominant social norms. In the extract above Nunne is discussed by the novel’s protagonist, the writer Gerard Sorme and Nunne’s aunt, Gertrude Quincey. For Quincey, Nunne’s homosexuality is, in sequence, a matter of illegality, a potentially curable form of psychosis and a form of behaviour that is sinful because ‘The Bible forbids it’ (190). In response, Sorme defends Nunne on the basis of a liberal pragmatism. His sexuality has nothing to do with ‘moral turpitude’ (190) and is deemed deviant only in relation to existing laws that determine social bonds. Sorme argues that the discourse of sin surrounding ‘fornication’ is neutralized by marriage, an overtly heteronormative institution: ‘men and women can get married and legalise it. Homosexuals can’t’ (190). Whatever forms of behaviour may be determined by both Church and State, such ideological frames do not correlate with the reality of ‘things that go on all the time’ (190). Sorme adds, ‘Many homosexuals lead quite ordinary lives [. . .] there’s nothing very strange about two men sharing a flat’ (190). Appearing three years after Sir John (later Lord) Wolfenden’s The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution of 1957 Sorme’s position in Ritual in the Dark tallies with two of the report’s primary recommendations. First it observed that homosexuality was not a disease nor was it within the remit of the law to interfere in private matters of sexual behaviour between consenting men. The report was progressive insofar as it paved the way (a decade later) for the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which partially decriminalized homosexuality in England and Wales.1 However, as Patrick Higgins argues in Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male Homosexuality in Postwar Britain (1996), in addition to its narrowly gendered scope, the report was marked by an inability (or unwillingness) to ‘understand or appreciate’ homosexuality in terms of a gay subculture (89). Homosexuality was handled as a matter of legality rather than equality and, despite its findings, the committee appeared to regard its subject as somewhat indecent. Drawing on the name of the biscuit firm Huntley & Palmers, the two names were used by the committee during its initial meetings as code words for homosexuals and prostitutes. It considered that by adopting this nomenclature the committee would be able to avoid undue blushing or offence.2 Ritual also registers a similar lacuna, a similar inability to speak of that which it represents. Quincey is only able to refer to Nunne’s sexuality indirectly.

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Unspoken, but also registered via her ‘blushing’ (189) and conversational hesitations, the concept is to her as vague and yet as potent as the ‘something’ (236) Dorian Gray writes on notepaper to blackmail his friend Alan Campbell. It is Sorme who fills in these prompted gaps using ‘homosexual’ throughout the novel. Elsewhere in the text ‘queer’ is used but mainly as a derogatory term, Sorme offering early on that he disapproves of ‘the queer mentality’ (32). For all his apparent liberalism, Sorme’s interest in Nunne is residually paraphilic. It is Nunne’s status as an outsider that is the focus of Sorme’s attention. Such a framing is taken further in the novel’s provocative central gambit that sees Nunne unveiled as a murderer. The outlook of Ritual in the Dark is far from intolerant but it nevertheless manages to reflect normative social attitudes even in the process of attempting to challenge them through the valorization of an ‘outsider’ position. At the start of a period in which sex and sexuality were progressively normalized, Ritual in the Dark moves in the opposite direction, positioning homosexuality as a form of deviance and a factor that informs further criminal behaviour. Towards the end of the decade it is possible to see attempts to consolidate the advances of the Sexual Offences Act by way of an increasingly organized wave of gay rights activism. The Campaign for Homosexual Equality was founded in 1969 following on from the work of the North West Homosexual Law Reform Committee.3 In 1970, the Gay Liberation Front was also established, partly in response to events at New York’s Stonewall Inn during June 1969.4 Twelve years after Wolfenden then, one could point to these developments as evidence of the emergence of a gay culture, a specific subject position and lifestyle that eclipsed the conceptualization of homosexuality as an isolated, policed and pathologized sexual proclivity. However, reflecting on the early days of the Gay Liberation Front, founder Andrew Lumsden points to the way that it foregrounded differences in American and British attitudes to identity politics. Interviewed by Jonathan Green for the oral history of the 1960s ‘underground’, Days in the Life (1988), Lumsden stated that gay activism emerged out of ‘the ethnic melting pot of New York and Los Angeles, where people identify themselves as Italian Americans, Chinese Americans, Jewish Americans and so on’. He claims that it was ‘not much of a jump to say “I’m a gay American” ’ (321). However, such confidence seemed to founder in the face of British reserve, ‘we didn’t and we don’t think like that’ (321). Compounding this internal reticence was what Lumsden refers to as a ‘terrible resistance’ in the media and the alternative press, a distinct unwillingness ‘to run gay stories or columns or pages’ (322).

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As such then, although it was possible by the late-1960s to learn everything you always wanted to know about sex, it was a version of sex that was largely delimited by the cultural territory charted in Philip Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (1967): the contents of Lady Chatterley and Please Please Me (1963) by The Beatles. By contrast, when it came to gay sex and sexuality one might claim that sectors of the British Sixties were not just ‘afraid to ask’ but were actively unable to articulate it. For Lumsden, as he explained to Green, the solution to this discursive lack was the establishment of Gay News in November 1971, a ‘real newspaper’ that ‘didn’t just give out propaganda’ (380–1). In this account, Gay News emerges as a singular point of articulation; the only visible forum for those previously denied ‘gay stories’. It is a narrative of writing that not only appears somewhat closeted before 1967 and suddenly ‘out’ afterwards, but which also focuses on only one mode of textual production: activist journalism. Little attention is given to other forms of writing and authorship. The shift from the Wolfenden Report to Gay News does plot an arc of the British Sixties and its sexual politics which counters that typically instigated by Chatterley. However, other writers and ‘stories’ might be brought into play to map out the intervening years. If D.H. Lawrence’s novel is so often cited as the symbolic gateway to the (hetero) sexual liberalism of the 1960s which novels, we might ask, shed light on the literary history of homosexuality during the decade? This is the focus of the present chapter. Leading on from the representations in Ritual, the work of other novelists including Gillian Freeman, Christopher Isherwood, Martyn Goff and Maureen Duffy will be considered. The discussion will shadow the decade’s social and legal shifts to ask: how did fiction ‘think’ about homosexuality and gay culture during the 1960s?

Romeo and Romeo: The Leather Boys Ritual in the Dark opens with Gerard Sorme emerging out of the ‘Underground at Hyde Park Corner with his head lowered’ (7). Wilson has him greet the crowds and the spectacle of the city with a ‘hatred’ (7) that is misogynistic if not misanthropic. The ‘half-clothed forms that advertised women’s corsets’ bring ‘a burning sensation to his throat, an instantaneous shock, like throwing a match against a petrol-soaked rag’ (7). With its ‘thin brown drizzle’ that falls ‘steadily’ and ‘the passing traffic’ that sprays ‘muddy water’ (7) the metropolitan ambience seems to reciprocate Sorme’s hostility. In the scene that follows, Sorme meets Austin Nunne at an exhibition intended to represent Diaghilev curated by

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Richard Buckle for Forbes House in 1954. Their encounter resembles the classic pick-up: initial glances are established across a crowded room before a casual conversation leads to an invitation for drinks. Sorme’s interior monologue, mediated by way of Wilson’s free indirect discourse, frames the meeting as a recognition of stereotypes. Sorme identifies Nunne based on an indeterminate but immediately categorizable quality: ‘Something in the man’s voice told him instantly he was a homosexual. It was a cool, slightly drawling voice’ (10, emphasis added). Similarly, Sorme feels subject to a gaze which embodies the tonality of Nunne’s voice and which also causes a strange internalization: ‘The eyes rested on him detachedly; he had the air of a Regency buck studying a horse. Sorme thought: Damn, he thinks I’m queer too’ (10). To adopt Stephen M. Whitehead’s formulation offered in Men and Masculinities (2002), Nunne conforms to Sorme’s understanding ‘of how a gay man might position himself as an embodied presence in the world’ (198). However, it is this recognition (rather than Sorme’s modification of this stance, as Whitehead would argue) which results in ‘the power of the gaze being reconverted on the gazer’ (198). It is as if Sorme becomes a de facto ‘queer’ because of the affective quality of this momentary encounter, by virtue of him both looking and being looked at. Within this dynamic, Wilson connects the reception of Nunne’s voice and gaze via a shared semantics of aesthetic distance: they are equally ‘cool’ and rest ‘detachedly’. Such a sense of superiority, coupled with the aristocratic implications of ‘Regency buck’ and the concomitant objectification of this figure ‘studying a horse’ recalls what Jeffrey Weeks terms the ‘ideology of the upper classes’ that has historically pervaded the homosexual subculture (273). Following the logic of Sorme’s metaphor, he places himself as the inverse to this position, as possible chattel, or, more connotatively, as ‘trade’, thus highlighting the additional axis that according to Weeks one typically finds in the upper class homosexual milieu: ‘the desire for a relationship across class lines’ (273). That this encounter plays out in the confines of a London gallery – among images of ballet and talk of Nunne’s ‘slim volume on Nijinsky’ (11) and after Sorme’s expression of an ‘uncontrollable’ hatred of the metropolitan crowd (7) – characterizes this homosexual economy as somewhat Wildean. Nunne, who carries the ‘graceful walk of a dancer’ (12) mirrors what Lyn Pykett in Engendering Fictions (1995) calls ‘the self-display of the decadents’ (19). This display pertains to an overt ‘aestheticism (“art for art’s sake”)’ a ‘rejection of the purposive, and also of the commodification of culture, and of the mechanised mass culture of the modern epoch’ (19). Understood within the ‘Wildean project’, Pykett connects this artistic stance to homosexuality

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as a ‘ “decorative idleness”, a rejection of natural masculinity [. . .] contrary to mainstream notions of “productive” or “purposive sexuality” ’ (19). Seen as part of a ‘tradition’ of homosexuality Ritual in the Dark might be read as marking the maintenance of a certain historical continuum as the 1960s begin. However, it is better seen as something of a departure point. Certain novels dealing with gay themes, ones that immediately followed Wilson’s novel, supervene its manner of representation. In the case of Gillian Freeman’s The Leather Boys (1961) her depiction of a homosexual subculture has less to do with the chapels of culture than with the ‘petrol-soaked’ rags, ‘passing traffic’ and sprays of ‘muddy water’ (7) that Ritual in the Dark variously abhors. The Leather Boys is set among the early 1960s biker subculture. It was composed at the request of its first publisher Anthony Blond who commissioned a ‘Romeo and Romeo in the South London suburbs’. As Drewey Wayne Gunn outlines in Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth 1881–1981 (2014) Blond ‘knew of no book which told the story of love between two “working class” boys’ (120). In offering the novel as his ‘prescription’ to counter this perceived gap in the market, Blond was levelling the hierarchy that is immediately established at the start of Ritual in the Dark, the top-down verticality of what could be termed the Wildean mode. Published the same year as Basil Dearden’s film Victim (1961), The Leather Boys does more to offer a post-Wolfenden vindication of gay identity than this more famous cinematic counterpart. Victim, although notable for bringing the word ‘homosexual’ to British screens, ultimately functions as a drama of compromise. Melville Carr, the married barrister at the centre of the narrative oscillates between loyalty and love for the deceased Jack Barrett and the same sentiment for his wife Laura Hankin. Following the resolution of the film’s blackmail plot, Carr is able to maintain a heterosexual persona: there will be no legally implicating, career-damaging exposure of his sexuality. As Gunn observes: ‘Heterosexuality has won out on a personal level’, but because of the film’s sympathetic portrayal ‘homosexuals have been vindicated’ (120). However, within the context of the film, this vindication takes the form of permission to remain invisible. By contrast, The Leather Boys eschews this repressive structure. Freeman does not codify biker culture as inherently homosexual, but instead presents the relationship between the central protagonists Reggie and Dick as the logical development of the ‘belonging’ (17) they find there. Preferring their mutual company to that of the girls they had unenthusiastically ‘paired off ’ with (57) during a day-out to Brighton, Freeman describes their movement into a sexual relationship as a reciprocal shift. They move easily from the comradeship of shared interest to the affection of physical intimacy:

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Dick was getting rather drowsy, then deliberately, as if they had been walking along the promenade together, Reggie turned towards him and stretched out his arm, only now they weren’t walking side by side, they were lying face to face. Dick moved too, spontaneously reacting to Reggie’s affectionate movement. Each felt the other’s breath against his face, the other’s arm around him. Quite without deliberation, without intention, without thought, they held each other closely and then they kissed. (62–3)

In this extract, ‘kissed’ functions as the dominant point of focus because it concludes the action described and functions as an important hinge-point for the narrative to come. However, of greater significance to the dynamic represented is Freeman’s repeated use of the personal plural pronoun ‘they’. Its repeated deployment works to suggest a shared agency rather than having the ‘kiss’ as an action that either Dick or Reggie do to the other. As the doubling of ‘Romeo and Romeo’ implies there is indeterminacy to the emotional and physical action that momentarily renders the characters as a single, nonhierarchical unit. Freeman’s discourse of intimacy foreshadows that used by Christopher Isherwood in A Single Man (1964), which is set within an affluent middle-class milieu. Departing from the relationship preliminaries of The Leather Boys, A Single Man depicts George, a British academic in Los Angeles, who is mourning the death of Jim, his partner of fifteen years. Although the two novels clearly mark out a considerable demographic difference, Isherwood’s framing of domestic memory is shot through with a parallel sense of unitary companionship: Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in this small space, standing elbow to elbow cooking at the same small stove, squeezing past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same small bathroom mirror, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping against each other’s bodies by mistake or on purpose, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly, impatiently, in rage or in love – think what deep invisible tracks they must leave, everywhere behind them! (3–4)

Isherwood’s accumulation of present continuous verbs works on one level as part of the mournful tone of the novel. Read as part of George’s memories of life with Jim, they convey a resonant sense of ongoing action in the face of physical absence. But beyond this thematic poignancy, Isherwood also communicates a palpable sense of the habitual within the domestic scene conjured. From the range of emotions covered to the quotidian nature of the activities described, the deep psychic ‘tracks’ result from the repetition of these actions ‘day after day, year

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after year’. Crucially though, as in The Leather Boys, the agency connected to these activities is shared. Within the analogy of the ‘two people’ the verbs relate to that which is done ‘together’ and to ‘each other’ (3–4). Such equality encapsulates what in ‘Bringing the Boy Back Home’ Martin Dines describes as the persistent aim of a number of post-war queer novels (particularly those which demonstrate a metropolitan backdrop) to set ‘domestic queer relationships centre stage’ (3).5 In the pursuit of a post-Wolfenden agenda, Dines argues that novels such as Martyn Goff ’s The Youngest Director (1961) ‘more or less explicitly made the case for the decriminalization of homosexuality’ by presenting ‘homosexual unions as analogous to heterosexual ones’ (3). They situated ‘their homosexual protagonists firmly within bourgeois domesticity’ to show that ‘homosexual men could live respectable and productive lives just like the rest of society if only they were freed from the debilitating effects of punitive laws and misconceived prejudice’ (3). The Youngest Director will be discussed more fully in the following section. At this stage though, it is worth considering the conceptual problems that Dines highlights as destabilizing the egalitarian representation of ‘queer domesticity’ (6). Because ‘narratives of queer domestic life of the post-war period were so often shot through with differentials of power relating to age, class and wealth, even while they strove to depict egalitarian relationships’ (6), this ‘distinctly queer configuration of the man and boy lover’ stood in tension with the ‘principle model for such domestic arrangements [. . .] the middle-class heterosexual companionate marriage’ (6). Such tension helps to bring the success of The Leather Boys into greater relief. Although its narrative trajectory is ultimately as terminal and as foreshortened as A Single Man, by virtue of its departure from the stereotypical class dynamics of homosexual representation, the novel manages to offer its central relationship as horizontally egalitarian. Having said this, it is worth noting the implicit tone of negation which colours Freeman’s description of Dick and Reggie’s dawning intimacy: ‘Quite without deliberation, without intention, without thought, they held each other closely and then they kissed’ (62–3, emphasis added). Although the movement into an embrace is presented as occurring ‘deliberately’, the repetition of ‘without’ undoes this sense of decisiveness. Freeman narrates a physical movement but only by way of describing what that movement lacks. It is a simultaneous description of action and non-action. On one level, to kiss without ‘intention’ and ‘thought’ could be interpreted in terms of the romantic cliché of emotional transport, of transcendence, of being taken over by a powerful feeling. However, Freeman’s ‘without’ also speaks of an action which remains undefined or is otherwise

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indefinable. Seen within the context of the wider novel, such indeterminacy signposts what comes to be revealed as a primary theme of the text: the conceptual difficulty experienced by Dick and Reggie when they attempt to define their sexual identity. Soon after the scene in which they kiss, Freeman offers the following awkward conversation: ‘When you kiss me and that,’ he said at last, nervously, ‘you don’t pretend I’m a girl or anything?’ ‘Don’t be daft,’ Reggie said. ‘ ’Ow could I pretend you was a girl? You’re the wrong shape.’ [. . .] ‘I don’t want to pretend you’re a girl, neither,’ Reggie said suddenly, his voice far louder than before. ‘I don’t think you are either,’ Dick said. ‘I mean I know you aren’t but I wouldn’t want you to be. I love you as you are.’ After a while he added, ‘It’s funny, isn’t it? I mean we don’t want to put on lipstick or anything like that do we?’ (70)

Dick speaks of his ‘love’ for Reggie without hesitation, but this is a confidence that seems to be built on a distinct sense of anxiety and even bewilderment as to the definitional consequences of such a feeling for his wider sense of self. The rhetorical gravitation towards the negative in which both Dick and Reggie variously express what they ‘don’t’ wish to do, pretend and think, indicates that when faced with the challenge of self-definition, language fails them. They do not posit or even claim a subject position such as homosexual, gay or queer. Later in the novel Freeman has Dick actively distance himself from such definition, stating that he ‘had never thought of his relationship with Reggie as being homosexual, he hadn’t labelled or questioned it’ (100). A Single Man similarly sees George refusing to let his neighbour Mr Stuck ‘nail him down with a word. Queer, he [Mr Stuck] doubtless growls’ (15, emphasis in original). But whereas Isherwood has George assertively claim the role of the socially determined ‘unspeakable [. . .] right in [the] very midst’ (17) of Mr and Mrs Stuck, this is an ironized awareness of a generalized perception held by those external to the relationship. Dick and Reggie, however, wrestle with the aporia of having internalized a set of negative perceptions about a mode of behaviour they suddenly find themselves enacting. As John D’Emilio notes in Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1998) homosexuality was conceived in the popular imagination at the time as feminized behaviour and as such within the associated heteronormativity of a patriarchal society, coded as inferior behaviour: a ‘pitiable flight from life’ (138). This understanding of homosexuality is maintained by

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Dick’s claim that they ‘don’t want to put on lipstick’. In a confusion of gender and sexuality, and in the apparent absence of a satisfactory term to think about ‘his relationship with Reggie’ (100) Dick assumes that masculinity and homosexuality are incompatible. Contemporaneous texts demonstrate the pervasiveness of this attitude. One finds it expressed in novels that do not ostensibly deal with gay themes. In John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) Alec Leamas has little time for Ashe ‘with an “E” ’ (50). With his feminine name ending this covert recruiter is automatically labelled a ‘cissy’ (66). But for Dick and Reggie to hold onto the seemingly correct masculinized ‘shape’, to refuse ‘lipstick’, to vanquish the image of the ‘girl’ (70) from their couplings would not be enough vitiate the label of ‘homosexual’ as a means of determining their relationship. This is because the gendered and largely derogatory equation of homosexuality with feminity is of course neither secure nor consistent within the history of the word. As Pykett explains, ‘ “homosexual” was coined in 1869, by Karoly Benkert [. . .] and became part of the English debate on sexual pathology and sexual identity with the translation of Kraft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis in 1892’ (18). Within this discourse, the homosexual stood as a paradoxical figure ‘who traversed and disrupted traditional gender boundaries, but also as one in whom “normal” gender categories were polarized’ (18). The ‘homosexual was represented as “effeminate” or feminized, or alternately as hypermasculine, the Whitmanesque manly comrade, admirer of, or admired for, virility’ (18). Pykett adds that: This apparent contradiction became an integral part of the discourse on homosexuality which emerged in England in the 1890s. On the one hand, Edward Carpenter, Henry Havelock Ellis, and John Addington Symonds [. . .] saw the homosexual as a sexual invert, and hence, incidentally saw homosexuality as an innate condition. On the other hand, the homosexual was represented, not as a ‘gender bender’, in whom masculine and feminine characteristics combine to form a third, or intermediate sex, but as the epitome of gender differentiation, embodying the most highly developed form of masculinity. (18)

If one wished to find epitomized images of masculinity during the 1960s, the biker subculture depicted in The Leather Boys would have formed a key point of attention. Certainly, when New English Library re-published the text in 1969 they were keen to evoke a propulsive, purposive heterosexuality, claiming the novel was about ‘Britain’s “Wild Ones” – the motorcycle cowboys who live for fast machines and faster girls’. However, thanks to the iconicity of Marlon Brando’s performance in László Benedek’s The Wild One (1953), and its further

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mediation through Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) the biker had at the same time assumed codification as a distinctly homoerotic figure of hypermasculinity. The language of a classified advertisement from International Times, dated 19 January 1968, is illustrative here: an ‘Ex-rocker 26, still with big hairy motor-bike but also of hippy outlook’ explains that he would like to meet a ‘Mod boy who’s feeling lonesome too’ (6). As a marker of homoeroticism, the stereotypical, often exaggerated gay biker can be seen to express something of a ‘camp’ sensibility. In Susan Sontag’s variously discussed and disputed essay ‘Notes on “Camp” ’ (1964) the camp aesthetic is one that ‘responds particularly to the markedly attenuated and to the strongly exaggerated’ (518). Sontag argues that ‘The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility’ (518) and furthermore adds that: Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one’s sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine . . . Allied to the Camp taste for the androgynous is something that seems quite different but isn’t: a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms. (519)

As examples, she offers ‘movie stars’ including ‘The corny flamboyant femaleness of Jayne Mansfield, Gina Lollobrigida, Jane Russell, Virginia Mayo’ as well as ‘the exaggerated he-man-ness of Steve Reeves, Victor Mature’ (519). Although Sontag concedes that camp is not specifically ‘homosexual taste’ she notes that there is a ‘peculiar affinity and overlap’ (529). Add this ‘love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration’ (515) to the role of camp as ‘something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques’ (515) and one has the constituent parts and overall sensibility that characterizes the art of Touko Laaksonen (better known as Tom of Finland): fetishized beefcake bikers and leathermen of ‘exaggerated he-man-ness’ (519).6 In Dick and Reggie’s hesitancy and inarticulation, The Leather Boys does not present a self-demonizing discourse of repression but, more specifically, a desire to move away from the overt performativity of camp. In this respect there is a two-fold subversion at work in the novel in which Freeman writes against longestablished class-based gay stereotypes as well as the representational language of what was emerging as more of a queered, subcultural appropriation of the masculine biker figure. Dick, we are told, is ‘a straightforward bloke’ (62); neither he nor Reggie occupies polarized positions at either end of a gendered spectrum.

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This becomes acutely clear towards the end of the novel when they seek passage on a ship bound for Australia. Dick expresses a feeling of horror at the thought of sharing such a voyage with the novel’s most amplified stereotypes, a gaggle of effeminate sailors: ‘My name’s Dick,’ Dick said. The men gave a chorus of giggles and shrieks and the one next to him said, ‘’Ow camp!’ [. . .] ‘You’ll ’ave to put Dick on the list, won’t you?’ said the man with the rings. ‘Listen to Mother.’ ‘What list?’ asked Dick. ‘The queers list, dear. Mother keeps it in ’er cabin.’ [. . .] Dick thought of the ugly, middle-aged powdered faces. He had never seen homosexuals like them before. (100)

One can readily agree with Dick that he ‘had never seen homosexuals like [this] before’, because here in Freeman’s rendering they are pure simulacra, stereotypes exaggerated to a level of carnivalesque grotesquerie. Read from a contemporary perspective there is much that one could criticize in this scene, from the pantomimic representation to the palpable sense of disgust expressed on the part of Dick. However, as regards the internal logic of the novel, this is the point at which Dick speculates upon the inadequacy of ‘homosexual’ as a means to define his relationship with Reggie: ‘They would never be like these men’ (100). Freeman’s recourse to such negativity is again problematic as it gives the novel an undertow of resistance, the narrative seeming, like the members of the Wolfenden Committee, to find any such topic of discussion inherently distasteful. However, the objection raised at this point in the novel is towards a position of overt performance. If this standpoint is seen once again in relation to the framing of intimacy between Dick and Reggie what is revealed is, by comparison, a level of sincerity. In her figuring of desire between the two men, Freeman’s narrative voice describes Dick’s feeling of satisfaction ‘in the contact with somebody with whom he felt friendship’ (62). This recalls another set of classifieds in the International Times that unwittingly presented a notable binary. In the issue dated 19 January 1968, one finds an ad offering ‘Gayest Physique and Glamour Movies’ next to an announcement from a ‘Gay young man’ who is seeking the ‘same for permanent friendship’ (6). ‘Permanent friendship’ is that which George mourns in A Single Man, and mirrors the durée of long-term companionship which Isherwood describes as an

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experience of shared time and shared space (both physical and organic): ‘Breakfast with Jim used to be one of the best times of their day [. . .] They talked about everything that came into their heads’ (5–6). What is notable about The Leather Boys is that it valorizes this position while simultaneously exhibiting the same silences that rendered homosexuality as the cultural ‘unthinkable’ in texts such as Ritual in the Dark. Rather than using such silences as indicators of moral transgression, Freeman’s characters occupy a position of personal priority at their points of undefinition. Ultimately, Dick and Reggie’s intimacy is reflective of the uncategorical exceptionalism evident in A Single Man. In excess of stereotypes and ‘pop psychology’ George reflects that ‘Jim wasn’t a substitute for anything. And there is no substitute for Jim [. . .] anywhere’ (17).

Doubtful company: The Youngest Director Friendship is similarly deployed as a key theme in Goff ’s The Youngest Director but as a concept that carries a greater degree of ambiguity. The novel focuses on the relationship between the title character, Leonard Blissel, a corporate executive at the Colorado Trading Company, and John Cramer, a receptionist at a Kensington hotel. The turning point comes when Cramer accepts Blissel’s invitation to live with him in what Goff introduces as the latter’s ‘narrow Chelsea house’ (9). Prior to this, Blissel takes care to stage-manage the perception of his relationship with the younger man in relation to his wider circle: his family, his colleagues and his ‘daily help’ (105), Mrs Bean: ‘When she comes in’ Leonard instructs John after he has spent the night, ‘just tell her you’re a friend of mine’ (105). Here ‘friend’ is used to mask the intimacy of the relationship and John’s role as Leonard’s ‘partner’ with whom he intends to ‘settle down just as if I was married, sharing all my life from getting up to going to bed’ (31). Elsewhere in the novel, Blissel receives unwanted counsel from his work rival, the closeted Frederick Wise, and in this instance, the idea of Cramer as a ‘friend’ is used to connote a very different kind of relationship: ‘I don’t know anything about the –’ he searched the walls for the right word [. . .] ‘– you know, the sex side of the business. But that boy isn’t your class. He’s probably a nice boy, I don’t know.’ His voice rose for the first time, carrying an overtone of five hundred years of class and intellectual snobbery. ‘But you haven’t a single thing in common, not one.’ He paused, then turned to Leonard. ‘By all means carry on a friendship with him, but don’t for heaven’s sake compromise all you’ve struggled for by having him live here with you.’ (97)

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Whereas Blissel advises Cramer to use ‘friend’ to signify a non-sexual relationship, Wise’s use of ‘friendship’ seems to euphemistically stand in for his missing language, ‘the sex side of the business’. This ambivalence continues, with Blissel surmising ‘that Wise was jealous of his friendship with John’ (98), an idea that speaks of sexual interest in a sexual relationship because it connects to Blissel’s ‘older suspicion’, that ‘Wise was “queer” after all’ (98) [original emphasis]. Similarly, just before Cramer contemplates the use of ‘friend’ as a disguise, he uses an associated term to speak openly about his relationship with Blissel. He is the latter’s ‘special friend’ (100). In Men and Masculinities, Whitehead defines friendship as a category of intimacy that ‘speaks of unities but with a subtext of difference, individuality and individualism’ (159) as opposed to the ‘deeper commitment [. . .] constant engagement and effort’ that is required by the relationship (159). However, despite the flexibility of friendships as the conceptual opposite to ‘coupledom’ (161) Whitehead adds that ‘In so far as men’s same-sex friendships are concerned, they are also surrounded by conflicting tensions over sexuality’ (159). It is this tension that circulates in The Youngest Director. The category of ‘friend’ far exceeds the binaristic lines of difference mapped by Whitehead. In the novel Goff ’s use of ‘friend’ simultaneously denotes intimacy and non-intimacy, platonic individualism and sexual coupling. As a result, the novel reiterates what The Leather Boys and A Single Man have already highlighted, that there is something rather queer about men being friends. This is not to suggest that Goff furnishes his characters with a subversive selfconsciousness in which the ambiguity of ‘friend’ is used to question the possibility of its binary reflection of ‘partner’. Rather, the polysemy carried by the word throughout the novel indicates the text’s wider concerns. In contrast to the struggle for appropriate articulation in The Leather Boys, The Youngest Director presents Blissel as aware of his sexuality but at the same time unwilling to openly articulate it. ‘I like men not women’ he says succinctly at one point but only as part of ‘an almost daily fantasy’ (31) of coming-out within an otherwise complicated system of obfuscation and ‘bad lie[s]’ (43). For Blissel, this is an existential rather than epistemological issue. It is connected to the novel’s central conflict, the triangulation of sexuality, private life and public expectation in which the latter is characterized by what Whitehead terms the ‘power effects’ of a societal tendency towards ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (163). Such a paradigm operates vociferously in the infrastructure of the Colorado Trading Company. As a young, rising executive, Blissel receives continual pressure to marry from both his peers and the company management. The

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explanation is that ‘The married executive is the contented executive and the contented executive works the hardest’ (109), which cyclical logic ties personal satisfaction directly to productivity. In addition to assuming that an employee will obediently capitalize their emotional energy via an investment in labour, the requirement to marry also instrumentalizes the role of the wife. According to Wise, his wife Gilda is a valuable asset to his own career, she ‘frees [him] from all the petty details of life’ and acts as ‘someone [. . .] to turn to when things don’t go right – and when they do’ (38) [original emphasis]. In co-opting the woman as a silent partner into the operation of the workplace, the ‘principle’ of requiring ‘every executive to be married’ (188) allows the company to extend its reach into the private sphere of the employee. Blissel troubles this system. His nonparticipation in marriage potentially weakens the chain of heteronormative hegemony that Colorado Trading perpetuates. More implicitly, it marks out his unwillingness to merge his private life with the architecture of the company. In presenting this conflict between Blissel’s ‘need for a more personal and emotional love’ (127) and the problem of ‘corporation pressures’ (128), Goff offers a tyrannical portrait of managerial influence. However, as Blissel outlines in a moment of polemical introspection, the ‘problem’ was bigger than Colorado Trading. It relates to a set of macro-issues pertaining to sexuality, prejudice and marginalization: [T]he homosexual must live in an alien world, a world that fears or laughs at him, that will mock him or hound him but almost never allow him to have the security of occupying a place like any other man. (128)

This represents a call for equality, and it highlights what Dines calls the ‘liberal impulse’ of the novel (3). The Youngest Director has often been read as an attempt to actively advocate for the decriminalization of homosexuality and as Goff described in his 1983 ‘Introduction’ to the text Angus Wilson claimed that it ‘helped to make the Wolfenden volte-face possible’ (vi). Equally though, the analogy suggested by the ‘like’ of Goff ’s comparative simile also speaks of the ‘security’ of this desired-for ‘place’ (128). It speaks of a hermeticism that is expressed more forcefully by Blissel’s homosexually discreet friend Tom Newman. Describing the ‘trouble with “gay” people’, Newman disparagingly generalizes and distances himself from what could approximate a gay culture, a mode of public and private behaviour that involves ‘dress [ing]’ ‘like teenagers’ ‘in the street’ and putting on ‘ “drag” at home’ (63). However much Goff can be seen to demonstrate Dines’ point regarding ‘the full equivalence of homosexual and heterosexual partnerships’ (5), what Blissel ultimately appears to call for is a

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sphere of private homosexuality somewhat removed from the cultural concepts that Newman ring fences in his language. The desire is for an accessible space of separation from the ‘alien world’ where it would be possible for Blissel and Cramer to ‘lose themselves in their forbidden sex’ (128). As Blissel asks, fruitlessly, by way of defending this separation at the point of his dismissal, ‘What has my private life got to do with Colorado?’ (189). The notion of privacy formed the crux of the Wolfenden Report and the subsequent Sexual Offences Act. The recommendation regarding decriminalization related to ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private’. For Dines, such specificity informed the valorization of egalitarian domesticity within The Youngest Director. Drawing on Matt Houlbrook’s Queer London (2005), Dines argues that ‘domestic privacy provided a crucial resource for queer men in an often hostile city’ (1). One gets the sense of this metropolitan ‘hostility’ in Goff ’s earlier novel, The Plaster Fabric (1957) in which the bookseller Laurie Kingston’s libidinous, desirous pursuit of the guardsman Tom Beeson carries a noticeable undertow of paranoia. Sitting with Beeson in an empty bar, a space that legally would be considered just as public as the street, Laurie speaks ‘softly because of the barmaid’ (10). In the face of this public expanse, Dines states that ‘domestic, stable companionate relationships’ enabled ‘queer men, particularly those hailing from the middle classes’, to ‘maintain a sense of respectability and self-worth’ (1). Cramer’s entrapment-style arrest in The Youngest Director for ‘making approaches to various people’ (146) in the London Underground validates the strategic importance of this domestic ‘resource’, but Blissel had already made the point clear in his rehearsed coming-out speech: ‘I’m not a pansy or a criminal and I don’t misbehave publicly’ (31). Preempting concerns from his imagined audience regarding effeminacy and legality, Blissel offers his homosexuality as non-threatening because, above all, it does not take place in public. This critical and narrative emphasis on the domestic sphere recalls Gerard Sorme’s confident assertion that ‘there’s nothing very strange about two men sharing a flat’ (190). But in the same way that the conceptual ambiguity of ‘friendship’ may indeed frame two men sharing a flat as‘strange’,‘Many homosexuals’ were precisely not able to ‘lead quite ordinary lives’ (190) due to the fluidity that surrounded the understanding of private space during the 1960s. Certainly with regard to state definitions of space, a curious double bind was at play at the time. Houlbrook points out in Queer London that, prior to 1967, in matters of surveillance and state intrusion, ‘residential space was only legally private if it were domestic space’ (110). Thus, for Blissel, the sub-divided accommodation of Denis ‘The “gay”

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lift-boy at the hotel’ (78) would be problematic because his shared, residential facilities would not constitute a domestic occupancy. However, at the same time the Law Society noted that ‘male persons living together do not constitute “domestic life”’.7 For Dines it is a two-fold problem that complicates the attempt of Blissel and Cramer to establish a household of queer domesticity: their non-egalitarian differentials of class, age and wealth and the physical and ideological permeability of the home itself (21). There is a definite entanglement between Blissel’s job, the retention of his home and the enforcement of a heterosexual partnership. Goff maps this out clearly when Mr. Kelly, the Chairman of the Colorado Company, visits Blissel almost unannounced early in the morning to issue a warning about Blissel’s ‘very doubtful company’ (125). However, this tension is not solely a matter of a queer household coming into conflict with a surrounding context of heteronormativity. The permeability of Blissel’s domestic sphere is replicated across the other spaces charted by the novel, both public and private. Emerging from a context in which queer domesticity was rendered legally impossible, Goff appears to add to this a general scepticism towards the category of privacy itself. From the work days spent in ‘conference’ to the work-related cocktail parties in the evening and the presence of bosses at Sunday lunch with the family, Goff ’s professional landscape is one that extends itself into the zones where one would expect to maintain a degree of interiority. Variously no space including the office, the parental home or the companionate domestic space is fully private. As a reflection of this perspective, Goff has Blissel exit – perhaps abandon – his house at the end of the novel. Driving away to the ‘defiant’ (237) sound of the engine, the closing sense is that to ultimately ‘manage something’ (236) with Cramer, Blissel will have to leave behind the novel’s possible models of domesticity and go somewhere very much other.

Of other spaces: The Microcosm The impossibility of private space in The Youngest Director does not preclude the desire for such a location. A Single Man is shot through with a similar degree of imaginative investment. Isherwood writes that George and Jim had ‘fallen in love with [their] house’ (9) because ‘you could only get to it by the bridge across the creek’ and thus it represented an ‘island’ (9). At the same time this ideal of isolation is regarded as somewhat illusory, ‘their utopian dream’ (8) an ‘original bohemian dream’ (8). Such an interconnection between space, desire and some form of escape – imaginative or otherwise – recurs elsewhere in the

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literary milieu considered thus far. At the conclusion of Goff ’s own The Plaster Fabric, Laurie returns to Marble Arch, the site of his first meeting with Tom Beeson. The combination of the ‘fog and the people and the tall Guardsmen in compact groups’ is said to have ‘brought on a mood of nostalgia for the past that lasted for the whole of the rest of the week’ (188). The intended trajectory of The Leather Boys is for Dick and Reggie to ‘be at sea’, a place where they could be left ‘alone’ (100). E.M. Forster, writing in the ‘Terminal Note’ to the 1960 revision of Maurice (1971) encapsulates this intention, claiming that the novel ‘belongs to an England where it was still possible to get lost. It belongs to the last moment of the greenwood’ (221). Here ‘greenwood’ signifies a protean space within Forster’s imagination, at once rural and nationally specific while at the same time constituting a hypothetical refuge, somewhere for the mind to project itself to. Whether through nostalgia or fantasies of escape, these texts collectively respond to the barring of public space for homosexual experience and the positioning of private space as a ‘no-place’: utopian in the simultaneous sense of a desired and/or idealized space and a space that is physically non-existent. Read together, these narratives make it clear that ‘other’ spaces were necessary which were amenable to gay identity. In the face of this conceptual gap, it is productive to consider Michel Foucault’s oft-cited concept of the ‘heterotopia’. Foucault first introduced the concept textually in The Order of Things (1966) before exploring it further in ‘Heterotopias’ (1966) a radio broadcast for the series Utopia and Literature. In 1967 Foucault expanded the idea in a lecture delivered at the Conférence au Cercle d’études architecturales, the text of which was only published shortly before his death, as ‘Des Espaces Autres’ (‘Of Other Spaces’). Delivered in March 1967, Foucault begins by defining utopias as essentially unreal, occupying ‘no real place’ (24), but to this he adds: There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places—places that do exist [. . .] which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. (24)

Expressed in this manner, heterotopias thus appear as non-conformist spaces that potentially offer a zone of resistance to escape repression, affirm difference

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and celebrate individuality. As one would expect of such potentiality, in The Order of Things the heterotopia is denoted as a contradictory ‘unthinkable space’ (xvii). This conceptualization of a space that is both real and unreal, locatable and also ‘unthinkable’ has gained a level of purchase across numerous sectors of cultural and literary studies. In particular, contemporary discussions of queer identity have made use of the image as a discursive device. For example, in her article ‘Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness’ (2009) Angela Jones argues that ‘queer heterotopias are places where individuals can challenge the heteronormative regime and are “free” to perform their gender and sexuality without fear of being qualified, marginalized, or punished’ (1). This, it seems is the ideal variously expressed by Goff, Freeman, Forster and Isherwood fully theorized. Yet given the extent to which the spaces remain in the texts as the product of nostalgia or an idealized locale that is projected beyond the point of narrative closure, the novels considered thus far make manifest their utopian impulse very much in terms of the preliminary points made by Foucault: the spaces desired remain unreal or unrealized. In contrast, Maureen Duffy’s The Microcosm (1966) could be read as a corrective to this lack. Published just as Foucault began to explore heterotopia, the novel shares a number of representational and structural synchronicities with the concept particularly as regards its central image. The ‘microcosm’ describes the House of Shades, a space which Duffy terms ‘the gay world as a universe in little’ (286). In British Fiction of the Sixties (2016), Sebastian Groes outlines the House of Shades as: a place consciously harking back to Radclyffe Hall’s descriptions of lesbian bars and salons in The Well of Loneliness (1928). We follow the story of a multiplicity of seemingly disparate characters [. . .] All of them are, in their own way, outsiders; in different ways they are all traumatized by a mainstream society from which they are excluded. The novel becomes an investigation of what Duffy calls ‘all the symptoms of the outcast’. (116)

Such ‘symptoms’ are made clear in the instances of violence and disapproval that pepper the text. Homosexual women did not face the same express legislative prohibitions as men during the period. However, Duffy’s descriptions of Tony’s beating at the hands of ‘a gang of teds’ (21) and the inability of Carol/Carl’s partner to identify her body following her suicide, because ‘They sent for one of her own family’ (13) describe the incipient physical and symbolic prejudices that nevertheless coloured lesbian experience. These are the instances that ‘[bring] it home [. . .] just how outside we are’ (13).

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Duffy uses this marginalization as the basis for a distinct sense of separation when describing the House of Shades itself. As expressed in the opening pages, entry to the microcosm necessitates a slow transformation that due to the use of the past continuous tense is described as an ongoing process: ‘adjusting your mask; a nod at the bottom for madame. Push through into the cloakroom and unwind the wrappings that hid you in the world outside’ (7). Such a metamorphosis segues into a sense of community in which the result of unwinding social ‘wrappings’ permits the individual to ‘Become like everyone else, part of the darkness, a shade’ (9). As in Foucault’s conceptualization of heterotopia as a ‘counter site’ of difference, Duffy locates the microcosm as both spatially and temporally distinct. It is a displaced subterranean zone which functions as a type of underworld. This realm of the dead contains ‘shadows’ that are ‘echoes of the world above’ (5). As with Foucault’s description of the cemetery as ‘a strange heterotopia’ (25), a space which ‘came to constitute, no longer the sacred and immortal heart of the city, but the ‘other city,’ where each family possesses its dark resting place’ (25), the House of Shades similarly acts as a cultural repository, a ‘mesh of memory’: ‘a web of remembered sounds that unites the present and past’ (8). In an interview with Dulan Barber published in The Transatlantic Review in 1973, Duffy clarifies this attempt to evoke a differential underworld, claiming that she was ‘fascinated by the whole queer club métier, and by the Dantesque atmosphere of the “underground”, as it were’ (7). In fact, the House of Shades was based on the Gateways Club, a London cellar club which ran from 1931 to 1985. The Microcosm was originally conceived as a non-fiction book of interviews to document the experiences of gay women, with this context as a backdrop. As Duffy explained in her ‘Afterword’ (1989) to the novel, she ‘took a tape recorder to a number of women forming a grid of age, class, occupation and geographical spread’ to collect interviews about ‘female homosexuality which would delineate the state of the heart in the early sixties when we were presumably in the middle of a sexual revolution towards a more open society’ (289). In her interview with Barber, Duffy recounts how she ‘built it up from there, incorporating lots of characters I had interviewed, and others I knew personally. I fitted bits of characters together so that I could get as full a range as possible, in the Dantesque sense, so that you go through it as if you were going through an inferno journey’ (7). According to Duffy, the use of a multiplicity of voices is testament to the power of individual experience, and is intended to challenge simplistic uniform stereotypes to represent some of the ‘dozens of ways of being queer’ (273).

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Duffy’s compositional ‘grid’ of ‘age, class, occupation’, mirrors the image of the ‘mesh’ used when formulating the intersecting atmosphere of the House of Shades in the novel. This overlap of form and content is instructive when speculating upon what might be termed a heterotopian politics. Foucault’s thinking offers an attractive image for determining a model of a contemporary utopia. By extension it also provides a means of conceptualizing diffuse spaces as represented within cultural and literary works. However, it is a different question when asking where such spaces might be located, or rather how a text may do more than engage with the notion on a purely imagistic level. When considering the link between Foucault and Duffy it is particularly worth keeping the latter point in mind because the heterotopia was equally offered as a linguistic, if not textualized device. This is made clear in the preface to The Order of Things in which Foucault notes that heterotopias secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’. (xviii)

This aptly describes how Duffy’s text operates. Rather than continuing to posit the desire for as yet unrealized (and ultimately unrealizable) space, it is the surface of the text that constitutes that space itself. If one were to call The Microcosm heterotopic, this becomes a description not just of what it seeks to represent but also the function of its manner of representation. As Duffy describes in her afterword to the novel, the polyphonic, multi-perspective and multi-genre style allowed her to ‘include not only a geographical spread but also historical reconstruction, pastiche’ (291). For Jill Gardiner writing in From the Closet to the Screen (2003) such an approach permitted Duffy to extend ‘the boundaries of what it was felt to be possible to say about lesbians in serious literature’ (106). Like Goff with The Plaster Fabric in 1957, in her ‘Afterword’ Duffy admits being explicitly aware that she had ‘a subject calculated then to make any publisher nervous’ (291), but rather than relying on the hope of sympathetic reviews and the redeeming attention of a sensitive readership, she invested this disturbance into the text by way of, in her terms, ‘an equivalent style and structure’ (291). The operation of this approach is evident from the outset of the novel. Duffy presents the reader with a cacophony of disembodied voices: ‘Who are you in my eyes?’ ‘I am the captain with pipe and blazer.’

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‘I am the rake. I’ll stab you in the heart with my pointed shoes and cut your pretty throat on the blades of my sleek trousers.’ ‘I am the boy next door.’ ‘I’m beautiful. Say I’m beautiful.’ ‘I loved my mother. Mother?’ ‘I love myself.’ (7)

There is little in the way of a reference point here to provide sufficient interpretative anchorage and as the novel continues, Duffy’s accumulation of internal monologues, nameless dialogues and context-less announcements disturb narrative clarity. Individual sentences such as: ‘The silly bitch has cut her wrists in the lavatory. Sometimes I think we’re not worth saving’ (15) are interpretable as isolated phrases but seem to issue forth in the absence of an anticipated expository framework. At the time of the novel’s publication, these techniques met with a confused reception. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement Marigold Johnson predicted that ‘many readers, bewildered by the exertion of trying to work out in the first fifty pages not only the sex but the identity of all these urgent voices, may well find they lack the energy to go farther’ (469). As if responding, Duffy notes in her afterword that she deployed a ‘mosaic style that would break the tyranny of linear narrative, and that consciously harked back to Joyce’ (290). Johnson’s TLS review presents Duffy as aping male writers: not only James Joyce, but also Colin Wilson. By contrast, Groes contends that Duffy ‘acknowledges Joyce’s mastery but appropriates his formal innovations to queer him: rather than having the white heterosexual male determining the rules of representation, here both form and content are used for representing marginalized subjects’ (117). Specifically, Duffy employs this approach to both test and trouble gendered preconceptions. One of the novel’s key narrative strands takes the form of a historical pastiche in which a fictional eighteenth century female author documents the adventures of Charlotte/Charles, a cross-dressing aristocrat. For Johnson, the use of this mode was judged as ‘totally irrelevant’ (469). However, with its invented, archaic (mis)spellings, the section works as part of the linguistic dérive that Duffy takes on the way to the curious heterotopic ‘present’ of the novel. It is an invented history that informs the consistent use of the masculine pronoun when naming key characters such as Matt, the closest the novel comes to a guiding narratorial presence. Through deploying in Johnson’s terms such a ‘bewildering’ obfuscation of the identity and crucially the sex of ‘all those urgent voices’ Duffy enunciates rather than labels them (469). This is the aversion to categorization seen in The Leather Boys developed into a form of

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discourse: a polyphonic experimentalism that moves away from gender specificity and accommodates plural identity. Having said this, although the novel places emphasis on alternative forms of identity, this opposition is somewhat polarized. The novel outlines a set of subject positions that remain variously bound to the social roles they attempt to reject. This is the point raised by Christoph Bode in ‘Maureen Duffy: The Polyphonic Novel as a Subversion of Realism’ (2001). He argues that in The Microcosm many of the characters ‘cannot help but reproduce [. . .] the role models, patterns and styles that govern the outside world of “normal” heterosexuality’ (92). This becomes evident in the text but as part of a self-consciously expressed concern for the recuperative, ideological problems of self-institutionalization or even self-ghettoization. Matt’s closing speech specifically rejects the strange shadow world in which Dantesque cycles are re-enacted: There’s no such thing as a microcosm [. . .] it’s only part of the whole [. . .] We’re part of society [. . .] and we have to learn to live in the world and the world has to live with us, not as scapegoats [. . .] but as who we are [. . .]. Some people would say I’m running away, refuse to acknowledge the facts of our life [. . .]. I’m not running. I’m just taking up my whole personality and walking quietly out into the world with it. (287–8)

In his essay ‘Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Fiction in English’ (2014), Hugh Stevens reads this decision to enter society and ‘see what happens’ as ‘typical of a pre-Stonewall political formation – the politics of the homophile movement – in which the task of the lesbian or gay man is to adapt to the world, while working to make the world a more tolerant place’ (629). It is true to say that, as with the other novels considered in this chapter, Duffy does not articulate a political platform that could be explicitly aligned with the discourse of such postStonewall initiatives as the Gay Liberation Front. However, Duffy, along with Freeman, Goff and Isherwood, all occupy something of an interregnum between the Wolfenden Report and the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. Between the period of 1960 and 1966 they were writing at a time when ‘homosexuality’ was socially and legally in dispute and both gay and queer had not fully synthesized with the identity politics that would characterize the movement of the decade into the 1970s. Within such a sphere, the possession of a ‘whole personality’ which is moveable and fluid, and able to occupy a multiplicity of spaces, constitutes a subject position resistant to heteronormative forces. Elsewhere in his analysis Stevens discusses Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony (1997). Here the narrator explains that in the late 1960s, the men he picked up would recount

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‘their stories, as though the main pressure behind cruising were narrative rather than sexual. [. . .] The silence imposed on homosexuals had finally been broken, and we were all talking at once’ (628). The fiction that leads up to this breaking point speaks strategically out of the silence itself.

Notes 1 The Act reflected the recommendations of the Report: decriminalizing private homosexual acts between men over twenty-one, while introducing heavier penalties for homosexual activity in public spaces. 2 For more details on the operation of the Wolfenden Committee, see Leslie Moran (49). 3 For an overview, see the history of the committee: www.c-h-e.org.uk/history.shtml (accessed June 2016). 4 The Stonewall Inn is a gay bar located in Greenwich Village; in the early hours of 28 June 1969 it was subject to a police raid that resulted in a riot, which led to the formation of the Gay Liberation Front. See: David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution (2004). 5 Martin Dines, ‘Bringing the Boy Back Home: Queer Domesticity and Egalitarian Relationships in Postwar London Novels’; being online and non-paginated citations refer to the paragraph numbers used. 6 See F. Valentine Hooven III , Tom of Finland: His Life and Times. 7 Public Records Office, Home Office 345/8, CHP 61: Memorandum of the Council of the Law Society, June 1955; submitted by the Law Society to the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution.

Works cited Anger, Kenneth (dir.). Scorpio Rising. New York: Puck Film Productions, 1963. Anon. PRO, HO 345/8, CHP 61: Memorandum of the Council of the Law Society. June 1955. Anon. ‘Classifieds.’ International Times. 19 January–1 February 1968: 6. Bode, Christoph. ‘Maureen Duffy: The Polyphonic Novel as a Subversion of Realism’. In Engendering Realism and Postmodernism: Contemporary Women Writers in Britain. Beate Neumeier (ed.). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. 87–103. Burgess, Anthony. The Wanting Seed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996 [1962]. Carter, David. Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004. D’Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

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Dearden, Basil. Victim. London: Rank, 1961. Dines, Martin. ‘Bringing the Boy Back Home: Queer Domesticity and Egalitarian Relationships in Postwar London Novels.’ The Literary London Journal. 10 (2) Autumn 2013: N.Pag.; www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/autumn2013/dines. html (accessed 9 April 2017). Duffy, Maureen. The Microcosm. London: Virago, 1989 [1966]. ———. ‘Talking to Dulan Barber’. The Transatlantic Review. 45, Spring 1973: 5–16. Forster, E.M. Maurice. London: Edward Arnold, 1971. ———. The Life to Come and Other Stories. New York: Norton, 1972. Foucault, Michel. ‘Of Other Spaces’. Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics. 16 (1) 1986: 22–7. ———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994 [1966]. Freeman, Gillian. The Leather Boys. London: New English Library, 1969 [1961]. Gardiner, Jill. From the Closet to the Screen: Women at the Gateways Club 1945–1985. Michigan: Pandora, 2003. Green, Jonathan. Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground. London: Heinemann, 1988. Goff, Martyn. The Youngest Director. Wellingborough: Brilliance Books, 1983 [1961]. ———. The Plaster Fabric. Richmond, Virginia: Valancourt Books, 2014 [1957]. Groes, Sebastian. British Fiction of the Sixties. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Gunn, Drewey Wayne. Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth 1881–1981. Jefferson, NC : McFarland, 2014. Higgins, Patrick. Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male Homosexuality in Postwar Britain. London: Fourth Estate, 1996. Hooven, Valentine F. Tom of Finland: His Life and Times. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Houlbrook, Matt. Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957. Chicago: University of Chicago of Press, 2005. Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man. London: Vintage, 2010 [1964]. Johnson, Marigold. ‘In the House of Shades.’ Times Literary Supplement. 26 May 1966: 469. Jones, Angela. ‘Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness.’ Interalia. 4, 2009: 1–20. Larkin, Philip. High Windows. London: Faber, 1974. le Carré, John. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2011 [1963]. Marwick, Arthur. British Society Since 1945. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003 [1982]. Moran, Leslie. The Homosexual(ity) of Law. London: Routledge, 1996. Pykett, Lyn. Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century. London: Edward Arnold, 1995. Reuben, David. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). New York: McKay, 1969.

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Stevens, Hugh. ‘Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Fiction in English’. In The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature. E. McCallum and M. Tuhkanen (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 626–42. Sontag, Susan. ‘Notes on “Camp”.’ Partisan Review. 31 (4) 1964: 515–30. Weeks, Jeffery. ‘Inverts, Perverts, and Mary-Annes’. In The Subcultures Reader. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (eds.). London: Routledge, 1997. 268–81. Whitehead, Stephen M. Men and Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1992 [1891].

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Ways of Staying, Ways of Saying: From Black Writing in Britain to Black British Writing Graham K. Riach

To understand the global forces shaping writing in Britain in the 1960s, it is useful to look from the outside in, both geographically and in terms of certain events that impact upon this turbulent decade. Under colonial rule in the early part of the twentieth century, nationals of Britain’s overseas possessions held the status of British subjects, but a cluster of events – including the drive to rebuild Britain’s post-war economy, the 1946 Canadian Citizenship Act, Indian independence in 1947, and the 1947 Commonwealth conference in London – led to the 1948 Nationality Act, which marked a change in status from ‘subject’ to ‘citizen’ of Britain for those born in the former colonies and the self-governing countries of the Commonwealth. In practice, this meant that people born in Britain’s onetime possessions now had the right to live and work in Britain as full UK citizens. One immediate result was the arrival in 1948 of the Empire Windrush, which sailed from the Caribbean to Tilbury docks in Essex, bringing 492 migrants and one stowaway, and in the process becoming a powerful symbol in the history of British multiculturalism.1 While the Windrush by no means signalled the beginning of migration to Britain, it did mark the start of an influx that far exceeded in volume anything the country had previously experienced. Ceri Peach estimates that between 1951 and 1961 the number of people in Britain born in the Caribbean grew from 15,000 to 172,000, and had risen to 304,000 by 1971 (65). Among these Caribbean arrivals were many workers who found employment with British Rail, the London Underground and the NHS . For South Asian migrants, employment was mainly found in the factories of the West Midlands, the North of England, and in London.2 This period of immigration also brought an important group of authors, artists and intellectuals who came to write, create and teach, and in so doing dramatically shaped British cultural life in the latter half of the twentieth century. In this chapter, I chart the literary and critical responses that were 137

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prompted by this period of migration to Britain, and analyse the infrastructural developments that accompanied writing by black authors in the 1960s. Migration in the post-war period played a pivotal role in making today’s multicultural Britain, with arrivals from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and beyond, bringing, in Deirdre Osborne’s words, ‘diasporic sensibilities and literary heritages that have profoundly transformed British national culture, leading to a more complex and inclusive sense of its past’ (1). For many, these demographic changes are seen to have enriched British society and culture, not least by means of a body of novels, poems and plays that have altered the course of post-war British literature. However, the scale of these migrations and the societal changes they led to were not always well received. Just prior to the 1960s, racial tensions in the UK had escalated. In the late 1950s, Notting Hill was home to a large number of members of Oswald Mosley’s right-wing Union Movement and Colin Jordan’s more bluntly racist White Defence League, and in the summer of 1958, gangs of white Teddy Boys in Notting Hill harassed black individuals and caused damage to Caribbean cafés. Race relations in the country were already strained, leading to large-scale unrest in Nottingham on 23 August, and soon after, riots erupted in Notting Hill, with hundreds of white youths chasing and attacking Caribbean residents, as well as incidents of petrol bombs and glass bottles being thrown at houses and businesses. In 1959, Kelso Cochrane, an Antiguan living in Notting Hill, was fatally stabbed outside his house by six white youths. To the outrage of the local community, the police did not recognise the attack as being racially motivated.3 The British public was shocked by the violence, leading to debates on the scale of immigration and the possibility of racial tolerance.4 The violent reactions provoked by immigration cannot be traced to any one source in isolation, being rather informed by a poisonous cocktail of racism, labour precarity and anxieties over Britain’s decline as a global power. The 1950s and 1960s saw a spate of independence movements across the globe, including in Britain’s former colonies in Africa and across the Caribbean, and the empowerment of the former colonies also constituted a waning of Britain’s empire. This process is epitomized by the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the United Kingdom was forced into a withdrawal from an attempt to control the Suez Canal under political pressure from America, the Soviet Union and the United Nations. Britain’s dwindling position on the international stage was, on the one hand, a geopolitical phenomenon, but for some critics at the time this diminution was also visible in the literary sphere, resulting in a widespread post-imperial cultural malaise. As Gail Low notes in ‘Publishing Commonwealth: The Case of West Indian Writing, 1950–65’, contemporary literary critics such as Alan Pryce-Jones

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and Francis Wyndham saw writing from Britain’s former colonies as offering ‘new bloodlines for an exhausted and tired [British literary] culture’ (79), as Britain dragged its heels in an anaemic post-war slump. In the logic of this corporeal metaphor, British literature is depicted as the beating heart of the literary body politic, with other literatures in English its arteries, veins and capillaries. While such a model does grant that these distant territories were doing something vital and necessary, the suggestion is that the main purpose of these developments was to revive a flagging British literature, rather than to rival it. In Low’s words: The insistence is on the centrality of English, seen in the tropic emphasis on English Literature’s origin, its parent or root status; it becomes a way of containing centrifugal forces in anglophone writing. (79)

However appealing this vision of literature in English might have appeared to some critics, the reality was quite different. The 1950s and 1960s bore witness to a radical reorientation of anglophone literary culture which was every bit as dramatic as Britain’s political decentring. Not only did writing produced in Britain’s former colonies spin off in new and unexpected directions, the putative stability of British literary culture was irrevocably changed by the new arrivals. While this chapter focuses on the work of black writers in Britain, I question throughout the sustainability of bracketing this category of writing either as separate from, or as an autonomous subgroup of, British literature more broadly conceived. Descriptions of black writing in Britain in the 1950s often paint the decade as one of wild exuberance and portray the 1970s as having a bleaker outlook and a more strident political tenor. On the one hand, this characterization of the 1950s underestimates the political intent of authors in the 1950s and before, with such texts constituting, in James Procter’s words in Writing Black Britain, ‘a much earlier politics of organization and resistance’ (15) than is usually accorded to them. On the other, such an account underplays the diverse aesthetic projects of writers in the 1970s.5 From the critical literature, however, the character of the 1960s seems harder to discern. The decade is often split in two, with the first half affixed to the end of the 1950s, and the latter standing as a prefix to the 1970s.6 Generalizations about literary periods should be treated with great caution, particularly as they pertain to any such arbitrary temporal periodizations, but there are good reasons to consider the 1960s as a transitional decade for black writing in Britain, in which important aesthetic and infrastructural developments catalysed the emergence of ‘black British’ as a political and literary category. This process is in part a question of shifting authorial concerns, as some writers negotiated the

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politics of staying in Britain long term, but it is also one rooted in the material realities of implementing a more consolidated literary infrastructure. Infrastructure is a prerequisite for political activism, and in that infrastructure’s absence, its implementation becomes that activism’s goal. As Judith Butler argues, a [political] movement may be galvanized for the very purpose of establishing adequate infrastructure, or keeping adequate infrastructure from being destroyed. [. . .] Sometimes a mobilization happens precisely in order to create or keep the platform for political expression itself. The material conditions for speech and assembly are part of what we are speaking and assembling about. (13)

Her comments here are taken from a discussion of physical infrastructure in cities, but they are pertinent to the conditions that pertained in publishing for black authors in the 1960s. There was a boom in Caribbean fiction in Britain in the 1950s, supported by the BBC ’s radio programme Caribbean Voices and regular – if occasionally patronizing – reviews in the British press,7 but with the end of Caribbean Voices in 1958, and reviews becoming fewer and farther between, the bubble was fast deflating by the mid-1960s. As black authors and other public figures became less visible as the decade progressed, it became necessary to establish ‘material conditions for speech and assembly’ in the form of publishing houses, bookshops, and the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM ). This infrastructural development bridged the chronological and intergenerational gap between what Osborne calls ‘migratory’ and ‘settler’ periods of black writing in Britain,8 and so laid the groundwork for the emergence of ‘black British writing’. The terminological debate around what to call writing by black authors in Britain is challenging, and in the 1960s the issue posed some specific problems. Many of the black authors writing in Britain at this time fit uncomfortably under the rubrics of ‘colonial and postcolonial’, ‘Commonwealth’, ‘migrant’, ‘exilic’, or ‘black British’. If the first category is used, the focus on Britain as a site of production or setting is blurred, and the works are situated in a political framework far more pertinent to some authors than others. ‘Commonwealth Literature’ has a contested critical heritage – Salman Rushdie has famously asserted that ‘Commonwealth literature does not exist’, claiming it to be so ‘narrow’ and ‘segregationist’ as to be unhelpful (63) – and is again not specific to writing produced in or even about Britain. Further, the category struggles to include authors such as Waguih Ghali and Tayeb Salih, whose nationalities (Egyptian and Sudanese) make them former colonial subjects, but not members of the Commonwealth. ‘Migrant’ and ‘exile’ are accurate to some degree, as some of the black authors from outside Britain who were writing in the UK in the 1960s stayed only temporarily, or engaged with the

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questions of migrant and exilic subjectivity in their writing. Both Ghali and Salih are examples of this, as are, to varying degrees, Samuel Selvon, who moved to Canada in the late 1970s, and Kamau Brathwaite, who travelled between Britain, the Caribbean and Africa throughout the 1960s and 1970s. However, these terms also cause a number of problems. Not only did these authors contribute to the formation of a body of writing that came to be called ‘black British’, these terms also underplay the decisive effect these authors had on the development of British literature. ‘Black British’ has much to recommend it as a descriptor, including its insistence on these arrivals’ place in Britain, its integration into a history of black and other ethnic minority writing, and its complex critical history, in which many of these issues have been discussed at length.9 However, as John McLeod points out in ‘Black British Culture and Fiction in the 1970s’, the ‘emergence of a distinctly black British Literature is indebted to the conditions of possibility which obtained in the 1970s, where the term “black British” accrued particular significance and currency’ (98). As I describe below, the shift towards ‘black British’ as a politicized category might be traced back even further, to the latter half of the 1960s, a periodization confirmed by Avtar Brah in Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, who notes that ‘black British’ came into circulation in the late 1960s and early 1970s through its use by African-Caribbean and South Asian organizations who used it as a uniting slogan for ‘constituting a political subject inscribing politics of resistance against colored-centered racisms’ (97). However, even with this extended chronology, the term feels anachronistic when applied to the early 1960s. Further, ‘black British’ risks privileging the experiences of some migrants over those of others on the basis of degrees of melanization. Procter has convincingly argued in Writing Black Britain that while the term ‘black British’ was useful in uniting Britain’s various migrant communities, this did not always translate into equal representation for each of the migrant groups that became aligned under its banner (5). And even if one is prepared to accept the political expediency of grouping Caribbean, South-East Asian, Asian and other writers born elsewhere than Britain together, might this not ghettoise these writers from British literature as much as providing a means to greater understanding? This strategy presents a dilemma, as incorporating these writers as British writers risks their not being discussed at all, while to discuss them as black British writers ensures their visibility but at the possible expense of their marginalization. Rather than settle on one of the categories considered above, this chapter will adopt the term ‘black writing in Britain’ to signify the work of black authors resident in Britain for some or all of the 1960s, which will hopefully serve

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as a marker of the dilemma described above. Furthermore, I suggest both that this decade saw the consolidation of a literary infrastructure that would lead to the emergence of ‘black British’ as a category, and that this happened in a mutually shaping dialogue with other literary production in Britain in the 1960s. It is my contention that during the 1960s, authors, publishers, readers and critics found themselves at an important juncture as regards determining how black writing in Britain should be conceived, and this was leveraged to various ends by each of these groups. Graham Huggan, in The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001), and Sarah Brouillette, in Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), offer examples of how various agents have mobilized the cultural positioning of postcolonial authors, and a similar process was at work in black writing in Britain in the 1960s. As Kwame Dawes notes, It did not take writers like Samuel Selvon, Andrew Salkey, VS Naipaul, George Lamming and Kamau Brathwaite long to recognise that revealing their West Indianness was a useful and profitable approach to being black writers in Britain. (19)

Such an approach might have facilitated a strategic authorial positioning which allowed, at least in the first half of the decade, a certain market advantage on the tail-end of the 1950s boom in Caribbean fiction, but by the same token this positioning can also be read as revelatory of the difficulties of accessing an uncontested British identity for those born in Britain’s former colonies. As Dawes goes on to describe, even though V.S. Naipaul became famous for publicly refusing the moniker of ‘West Indian’, he ‘remained unquestionably unsuccessful in claiming a British identity’ (19). It was, in part, the impediments to an unchallenged British identity that led to the increasing politicization of black writing in Britain in the latter half of the decade. Earlier post-war black authors were by no means, in Procter’s words in Writing Black Britain,‘ “pre-political” ’(15), but the political urgency of black writing in Britain intensified across the decade, leading to the formation of political and cultural organizations that further intensified this process. The use of the term ‘black’ also needs some clarification, as in this chapter it is deployed in the sense Lord Kitchener wittily elaborates in his calypso, ‘If You’re Not White, You’re Black’ (1958). In this hit song, the complex intersections of skin tone, class and cultural prestige imported from the Caribbean and elsewhere are shown to be starkly flattened and reduced to binaries on arrival in Britain, at least in the ways the arrivals were treated by many white Britons. In Kennetta Hammond Perry’s words, while ‘stratifications associated with skin colour [. . .]

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may have been more fluid [. . .] [in] defining the parameters of Blackness in Caribbean societies, alternatively in Britain, the markers of Blackness were less fungible and oftentimes more rigid and impermeable’ (81). Perry’s book, London Is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (2015), offers a considered and extended analysis of the contradictions caused by this flattening and of how individuals negotiated it, and this process is also present in the work of some of the authors I discuss below. These writers come in the main from different Caribbean islands, but also from Egypt, Pakistan and elsewhere, and these different roots will inevitably have influenced their experience of living in Britain. While grouping these authors under the category of ‘black’ is, from one perspective, logically unsustainable and risks reproducing the binarization Kitchener describes, my purpose is to use it as both a historical reminder of that flattening, and as a site of resistance to that process. ‘Black’, then as now, is a contested identity, and the 1960s was an important decade for the term’s accretion of meaning. While black writing in Britain in the 1960s was influenced by the social and historical conditions pertaining to Britain in its global context, it is important to remember that literary texts are not empiricist accounts. The kinds of claim they make are unfalsifiable to the extent that checking them against historical reality can neither prove nor disprove their value. As J.M. Coetzee argues in his essay ‘The Novel Today’ (1988), one should not consider literary texts as a subsidiary form of discourse to history, with the novel treated like an exercise sheet to be checked against it, as if marked by a censorious schoolmistress (2–3). Such a tendency is not uncommon in the treatment of black British writing, or in that of postcolonial writing more broadly. As Proctor has described in Dwelling Places (2003), various historical, political and sociological studies of post-war black Britain have used Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) as ‘ “evidence” in the substantiation or validation of a black British past. His black London is granted a quasi-empirical status in this context, as an uncontestable “source” that is somehow able to transcend its own textuality’ (47). It is certainly important to recognize that literary texts are written and consumed in specific historical circumstances, and that various forces shape texts to greater and lesser extents, from key historical events to the role of an author’s biographical experience, from the intervention of editors and publishing houses to the effects of market forces. However, it is equally important to remember that texts are as much about other books as they are about the era in which they were written, and further, as acts of the imagination, they are not entirely determined by material circumstances. While the engagements with authors presented below all consider texts published

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in the 1960s, they are not all of the 1960s in the same way, and this chapter works through some of these complications. This requires moving between literary and extra-literary concerns, to show that these authors are as concerned with ways of saying, the aesthetic strategies they adopt in their texts, as with ways of staying, whether temporarily or permanently, and on what terms. The experience of migrants, and the aesthetic strategies they develop in their works, are influenced by their cultures of provenance. The majority of black writers in Britain in the 1960s were from the Caribbean, and these writers are so prominent that authors from elsewhere are often overlooked, meaning that only a portion of the decade’s literary output is discussed. While this chapter is weighted towards Caribbean authors, I also make reference to a number of writers from other regions to help redress this imbalance. In parallel with recognizing this geographical bias, it is also worth considering that the majority of writers who rose to prominence in this period were men, and that I only discuss works by men in this chapter. This is in part a result of the male-dominated migrations from the ‘New Commonwealth’, but the clubby atmosphere between male authors in the 1950s and 1960s may also have stifled the voices of women authors. Louise Bennett, Joyce Gladwell, Sylvia Wynter, Beryl Gilroy and Lucille Iremonger offer rare examples of black women writing in Britain in the decade, a topic treated admirably by Sandra Courtman.10 As well as the authors I examine in detail, a number of other well-known and less well-known authors were also writing in Britain at the time. Trinidadian Samuel Selvon published his hit novel The Lonely Londoners in 1956, followed by I Hear Thunder in 1963 and The Housing Lark in 1965. I Hear Thunder moved away from Selvon’s fêted use of dialect, and was less well received than The Housing Lark, a picaresque comedy that brings back characters from The Lonely Londoners as they struggle with housing problems in London. Fellow Trinidadian Michael Anthony was prolific in the decade, writing three novels – The Games Were Coming (1963), The Year in San Fernando (1965), and Green Days by the River (1967) – as well as a collection of short stories, titled Tales for Young and Old (1967). Barbadian George Lamming, in his novel Season of Adventure (1960), explores the intersection of politics and identity, a concern continued in his first collection of essays, The Pleasures of Exile (1960). Orlando Paterson, born in Jamaica, published two novels, The Children of Sisyphus (1964) and An Absence of Ruins (1967), the first of which describes in stark terms the story of Dinah, a prostitute struggling to escape the misery of her life in the poorest Jamaican slum, with the second shifting focus from societal analysis to that of the psyche, as sociologist Alexander Blackman deals with existential dread on his return to Jamaica from London.

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Jamaican Lindsay Barrett was only in Britain sporadically during the 1960s, but his 1967 Song for Mumu deserves mention due to its unique formal experimentation which blends prose, poetry and orature, and for what Anne Walmsley describes as its warm reception by the Caribbean Artists’ Movement (126, 196), a cultural organization I discuss later in the chapter. Also associated with the CAM was Wilson Harris, who published some nine novels in the 1960s. The first, Palace of the Peacock (1960) became the first part of his Guyana Quartet, along with The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962) and The Secret Ladder (1963). Harris’ work is dense, sometimes stretching the limits of comprehension, with linked chains of metaphor that weave sinuously across his paragraphs and pages. His novels are mostly set in his native Guyana, and explore in highly mediated ways how the histories and legacies of colonialism on its landscapes, and the psyches of those that live there are woven together.11 Fellow Guyanese author E.R. Braithwaite is perhaps best known for his 1959 novel To Sir, With Love, later adapted into a film with Sidney Poitier, but while at times his later novel, Choice of Straws (1965), is somewhat heavy-handed, it merits attention for its unflinching exploration of racial hatred in London. While the best-known black writing in 1960s Britain was linked to the Caribbean, the prominence of these texts has obscured the contributions of authors from elsewhere. The decade also saw arrivals from all corners of Britain’s former empire and beyond, and many of them came with literary ambitions.12 Zulfikar Ghose was born in 1935 in what is now Pakistan, but moved to Britain in 1952, and stayed there until 1969, when he left permanently for Texas. Ghose’s first published works were a collection of poetry, The Loss of India (1964), which reflects nostalgically on the contradictions of an identity split between East and West, and Statement Against Corpses (1964), a collection of short stories co-published with B.S. Johnson, his friend, correspondent and collaborator. The collaborative edition, split between the work of both authors, materially instantiates both the proximity and the distance between the categories of British writing and black writing in Britain. The collaboration with Johnson also points towards the experimental direction of Ghose’s later work, although in the 1960s his writing remained almost entirely realist. Ghose’s first novel, The Contradictions (1966), describes the experience of a married English couple in British India as they face various personal and familial setbacks. It was closely followed by an autobiography, Confessions of a Native-Alien (1965), which explores similar themes to his poetry. While The Contradictions is often slow moving and abstract, The Murder of Aziz Khan (1967) is tightly-plotted, refracting the internal conflicts of post-independence Pakistan through a land dispute between traditionalist

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Aziz Khan and the modernizing Shah brothers. In the same year, he also published his second poetry collection, Jets from Orange (1967), a more sentimental take on the themes of The Loss of India. Another such arrival was Waguih Ghali, an Egyptian Coptic Christian, whose 1964 novel Beer in the Snooker Club is one of the best under-read novels of the decade. Perhaps suitably for a novel of unsettled belonging, Beer in the Snooker Club was composed in exile, begun in Stockholm, continued in London, and finished in West Germany, two years before Ghali’s return to London. The novel is set in the 1950s, and describes in drily comic terms the experience of Ram, who, like Ghali, is an Egyptian Copt with little money but wealthy connections. Through his involvement in political protests against the British presence in the Suez Canal, Ram and his friend Font meet Edna, a Jewish Communist from an elite tranche of Cairo society. Ram and Edna become romantically entangled, and she provides money for Ram and Font to go to London, where she eventually joins them. Ram lives in England for four years, an experience that profoundly marks him, but his time there is cut short by the 1956 Suez Crisis, and he returns to Egypt. On his return, Ram is disappointed by what the Nasser regime has achieved: Cairo’s cosmopolitan character has been undermined by the persecution of minorities and the peasant farmers, or ‘fellaheen’, remain as oppressed as ever. Ram is rudderless, and finds himself caught between his love of Egypt and the reality he sees in the country, his love of London and his hatred of colonialism. As is probably clear from the eclecticism of even this partial survey, there is unlikely to be any single defining characteristic that binds all black writing in Britain in the 1960s together. At best, there might be a set of overlapping shared traits, or family resemblances, that occur in some texts but not in others. Another way to come to some understanding of the decade is to look in more detail at the work of particular authors, and how it responds to, and develops in, the 1960s. In what follows, I offer the examples of V.S. Naipaul, Andrew Salkey and Denis Williams to see what such an analysis offers, before moving to a discussion of the literary infrastructure that was established towards the end of the decade.

Caribbean connections During the 1960s, a number of Caribbean authors who established their careers in the 1950s continued to write, and some prolifically so. Naipaul began publishing in earnest with The Mystic Masseur in 1957, and completed three novels, three travelogues, and a collection of short stories in the space of eight

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years between 1961 and 1969. As with Salkey’s work in the 1960s, which I discuss below, Naipaul’s novels oscillate between the Caribbean and Britain, beginning with A House for Mr. Biswas in 1961, and ending with his last novel of the decade, The Mimic Men (1967), a book he began shortly after finishing A Flag on the Island (1967), a collection of short stories. As Rob Nixon reminds us, A House for Mr. Biswas is widely recognised as Naipaul’s ‘most remarkable work’ (3). It is a large-scale history of the unravelling of a Trinidadian family of Hindu peasants and small shopkeepers, pulled apart by the internal contradictions of Trinidadian society and the effects of Americanization. The Mimic Men explores the paradoxes of exile experienced by a West Indian former politician living and writing his memoirs in London. Both of these novels have been discussed at some length in criticism by the likes of Bruce King, Rob Nixon and Ajay K. Chaubey, but less attention has been given to his 1963 novel Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion, the first of his novels to be set in London, and perhaps his most puzzling book of the decade. The narrative concerns Mr Stone, a bachelor approaching retirement from the London headquarters of Excal, a large firm. Faced with the banality of his day-to-day life – regular run-ins with his neighbour’s cat provide the main source of drama – he devises a plan by which recently retired Excal employees, known as ‘Knights Companion’, will visit their more aged predecessors, to restore some energy and comradeship into their lives. Stone’s bosses embrace the idea, and the programme is a great success, but Stone feels the project to be an imperfect instantiation of his imagined ideal, and so ends the book dejected that ‘other people had made his idea their property’, thinking that, ‘[n]othing that was pure ought to be exposed [. . .]. All action, all creation was a betrayal of feeling and truth’ (149). On the one hand, the book is a reflection on ageing, and on the twinned necessity and futility of seeking purpose in a meaningless world that ageing makes us feel more acutely. Stone’s attempt to find meaning through a personal quest is parodied in the Arthurian overtones of ‘Excal’ and ‘Knights Companion’. On the other hand, Naipaul’s exploration of this existential paradox is integrated into a meta-commentary about the role of such processes and impulses in the creation of art. As the passage quoted above suggests, this is as much a book about the pollution of pure ideas when made into actually existing artworks, to be consumed by ‘other people’, as it is a reflection on the banality of suburban British life. While a number of Naipaul’s Caribbean contemporaries saw their projects in increasingly politicized terms in the 1960s, in this novel, Naipaul portrays both ‘action’ and ‘creation’ as betraying ‘feeling and truth’. Not only is socially oriented action, such as Stone’s efforts to help the ageing, shown

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to lead to little satisfaction (despite its seeming success), the very fact of bringing an idea to material fruition is shown to sully it. Stone’s name, both unfeeling lump and unsculpted matter, suggests his suspicious attitude towards political action and artistic creation, but Naipaul’s own position is harder to place. Ideas, when translated into political or artistic praxis, may always fall short of their ideal forms, but Naipaul continues to make art nonetheless, and his fiction writing is, in mediated ways, invested in effecting change. Mr. Stone is far from a piece of political sloganeering, but in its processing of the relationship between art and politics, it demands of the reader to consider that even though art is almost sure to fall short in its attempts to bring about an ideal society, its failure still bears witness to the need for that transformation to come about. Political impetus may be submerged in Naipaul’s novels, but it is more visible in his non-fiction. Naipaul gave over much of the decade to writing travelogues, in which he traces various routes back through the history of indentured East Indian workers in Trinidad, a history which is also, to some degree, his own. These books were not always well received by his contemporaries, due to their frank (and sometimes performatively so) depictions of corruption in newly postcolonial nations. His description in The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French, and Dutch – in the West Indies and South America (1962) of Trinidad as an ‘unimportant, uncreative, cynical’ (255) place, noting that ‘[r]eality is always separate from the ideal; but in Trinidad this fantasy is a form of masochism’ (74) is but one example of this. The book as a whole weaves together Naipaul’s one-year trip to the Caribbean in 1961 with reflections on the accounts of previous travellers to Trinidad, British Guiana, Suriname, Martinique and Jamaica. If A House for Mr. Biswas paints life in the Caribbean with some affection, albeit with ironic distance, then The Middle Passage marks a hardening in Naipaul’s perception of the region, and of other postcolonial countries. His next travelogue, An Area of Darkness (1964), is a deeply personal and critical take on Naipaul’s first trip to India, having grown up in Trinidad with an idealized image of the subcontinent. As might be expected from the Conradian echoes of the title, Naipaul denigrates the local people, language and culture, although his motivations for doing so are not always clear-cut. In one characteristic passage, he attacks, although not without reason, the caste system: An eastern conception of dignity and function, reposing on symbolic action: this is the dangerous, decayed pragmatism of caste. Symbolic dress, symbolic food, symbolic worship: India deals in symbols, inaction. Inaction arising out of proclaimed function, function out of caste. Untouchability is not the most

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important effect of the system; a Western conception of dignity alone has made it so. But at the heart of the system lies the degradation of the latrine cleaner, and that casual defecation in a veranda which Gandhi observed in 1901. (80)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book was banned in India immediately after its publication, due to its critical perspective on Indian life and mores. It is tempting to read this passage as depicting an unwaveringly snobbish assumption of Western superiority, but as with Conrad, while this characteristic is certainly present, it is unclear whether Naipaul’s position can be determined with any degree of assurance. This is further complicated in that the boundary between fiction and non-fiction becomes increasingly unclear in Naipaul’s work from this point onwards, with subjective experience and putatively objective analysis increasingly hard to distinguish. Naipaul’s last work of the decade, The Loss of El Dorado (1969), is a deeply original historical work focusing mainly on Trinidad, which is structured around two episodes in the history of the island. Firstly, there is its use as a base for the attempted discovery of the mythical El Dorado by conquistador Antonio de Berrio in the late 1500s and Sir Walter Raleigh’s subsequent investment in the El Dorado myth. Secondly, there is the complicated series of events beginning in 1797, when the English captured the island and so made it a British crown colony with a francophone population and Spanish laws. This is perhaps the book that marks Naipaul’s move from a self-portrayal as an exilic outsider to that of cosmopolitan, equally at home everywhere and nowhere. In Landeg White’s words, his assumed identity was that of a ‘Brahmin-cum-Englishman in Trinidad, a European in India, an Indian in London’ (228), a persona he would project in much of his later work. While, for some black authors in Britain, the 1960s meant finding a place in Britain through creating a space in which to belong, Naipaul’s strategy was to create one in which belonging was only ever partial. However, it is unclear if this was an active preference, or came about as a result of British society’s resistance to accepting its latest arrivals’ claims to British identity. Naipaul chose to stay in Britain, and was even knighted there in 1990, but for other authors, their time in Britain was more temporary. One such author is Andrew Salkey, who was born in Panama and grew up in Jamaica, before leaving the island to attend university in London in 1952. On finishing his degree, he took up a job as a secondary school teacher in south-east London, and became involved with Henry Swanzy’s Caribbean Voices as a contributor and as a reader and advisor. As Stuart Hall notes, Salkey became ‘the key figure, the main presenter and writer-in-residence in the Caribbean section of the BBC World

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Service at Bush House’, and ‘quickly took his place at the centre of a small but outstanding circle of Caribbean writers and intellectuals’ (N.Pag.). Salkey’s programmes with the BBC provided a crucial space for authors from the Caribbean to hear about each other, meet one another, and so establish important networks both in Britain and between Britain and the Caribbean. Among the authors who appeared on Caribbean Voices were such luminaries as Naipaul, Selvon, Lamming and Edgar Mittelholzer. Salkey was also instrumental in mentoring Caribbean authors, for example by establishing the first connection between Naipaul and the publisher André Deutsch. The early 1960s, like the 1950s, was a lively period for Caribbean writing in the United Kingdom, and Salkey was a prolific writer, producing not only four novels between 1959 and 1969, but also publishing and editing six books for children, and editing a highly influential short story collection, West Indian Stories (1960). This collection established his name internationally and brought a host of little-known Caribbean writers to the public’s attention, including Harris, whose Palace of the Peacock was published in part thanks to Salkey’s recommendation. Salkey’s novels from the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s oscillate between narratives set in Jamaica and those in London, a fitting analogue of the literary commerce between these two sites during the decade. As Low shows in ‘Finding the Centre’, Salkey formed one part of a network of writers and institutions that stitched together these locations in the 1950s and 1960s (31). His first book of the decade, Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960), was published just one year after his début A Quality of Violence (1959), and while this first novel is set in Jamaica, Escape to an Autumn Pavement is a novel of exile, set in London. This exile is, on the one hand, that of Johnnie Sobert from his native Jamaica, but it also an existential one, with Johnny’s identity torn between his middle-class background and his menial job in a Soho nightclub, his desire for white women – which results in a number of unsatisfactory encounters – and his ambiguous cohabitation with his gay friend, Dick. The novel ends with Johnny adrift, wandering through London: up Whitcomb Street. Into Leicester Square. Up Charing Cross Road. Up to Cambridge Circus [. . .] And down towards Green Park [. . .] I knew I had to wait. For the truth about Dick, about Fiona, about myself. About my next move. That and only that was worth waiting for: the truth about myself, and the courage and ability to recognize it when it came. (211–12)

For much of the book, Johnny’s walking around the city serves as a source of freedom from the confines of his home and work, and as a means of inscribing a black presence on the streets of England’s capital, what Procter in Dwelling Places

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calls ‘an emancipatory negotiation of the city, a dynamic pedestrian rhetoric’ (98). This passage’s incantatory recitation of London’s streets invokes these spaces as being available for occupation by those born outside Britain’s shores, but its detailed literary cartography also foregrounds the need to insist on this right, rather than simply take it for granted. While Escape to an Autumn Pavement is clearly informed by the conflicted experience of Caribbean arrivals to Britain in this period, it is by no means reducible to these concerns, and the epigraphs for Salkey’s book point to some of its other affiliations. Like many of Salkey’s books, Escape is rich with intertextual references, and the novel seems highly aware of its own literary and temporal positioning. The narrative opens with three epigraphs, from Max Beerbohm’s essay ‘1880’ (1895), T.S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’ in Four Quartets (1936), and David Jones’s The Anathema (1952). Each of these, from Beerbohm’s ‘[t]here is always something rather absurd about the past’ (283) to Eliot’s ‘[t]ime present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past’ (117) and Jones’ ‘I do not know what time is at’ (170), positions Escape in relation to different literary histories. This is a curious selection of authors, in that while all were writing in the first half of the twentieth century, Beerbohm is best positioned as a late Victorian or Edwardian writer, while Eliot and Jones are distinctively modernist. Further, while all three were important figures in the development of English literature, none had a wholly straightforward English identity: Beerbohm was born in London to a Lithuanian father; Eliot was an anglophile American who became a naturalized Briton; and Jones’ father was Welsh. If it is a step too far to claim that Salkey is consciously positioning his book in a history of English literature that is both temporally and geographically out of joint, it can at least be said that this formation of authors, seemingly assembled for their shared concern for temporality, also reveals the geographical and autochthonous paradoxes that have always inhered in English Literature. Salkey’s next novel, The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968), returns to a Jamaican setting – this time the epigraphs are taken from Derek Walcott and Jamaican novelist Roger Mais, suggesting a stronger literary affiliation with the Caribbean – and is a deeply pessimistic book about the potential for change on the island. Jerry Stover is a recent recruit to the Jamaican Civil Service, in a time ‘when to be a civil servant [. . .] was clearly to be on the winning side’ (1), but he resists the norms of middle class life: he is sexually involved with the family maid, and comes to live a life of excess, frequently drinking himself into a stupor with the Termites, his drinking buddies. He resigns from his post in order to live with a group of Rastafarians who live on ‘the Dung’ll’ (90), or rubbish dump, with

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the intention of helping them escape their poverty and social exclusion from mainstream Jamaican society, eventually leading to a large street protest, which is ignored by the government. Even worse, the Termites, along with two Rastafarians, are killed in a landslide caused by an earthquake on the way home from a night of drinking. The only survivors are Jerry and Caroline, Jerry’s American girlfriend, who has been trying to set up a new literary magazine. As in Salkey’s first novel, A Quality of Violence, in which a drought results in violence, death and self-destruction, the natural world here offers scant comfort, and neither politics nor religion offers a route to salvation. The book is set entirely in Jamaica, but when read with its publication in 1960s Britain in mind, some aspects of the book are pulled into sharper focus. A seemingly innocuous subplot in which the struggling local literary magazine is threatened by a new magazine founded by Caroline, a recent arrival from America, points to the importance of little magazines such as Bim in sustaining writing in the Caribbean both locally and abroad.13 However, when considered in light of literary culture in 1960s Britain, it also hints at the debates around the contested role of foreign outlets such as Caribbean Voices and their influence on shaping aesthetic practices and publishing opportunities in the Caribbean.14 It is even possible to understand the structure of the book, which moves from picaresque indoor drinking to politicized street protest, as a literary analogue of the shift in writing by black authors in Britain proposed by Procter in Dwelling Places, from ‘[p]rivate, domestic territory’ in the 1950s and early 1960s to ‘the city’s public venues: its pavements, clubs, cafés, and shop floors’ (74) in the more stridently politicized tenor of the late 1960s and 1970s. Salkey’s last novel of the decade, The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969), returns to swinging London, where Catullus – his first name perhaps suggesting a greater concern for the personal and the erotic than the explicitly political, in line with the poetry of his classical namesake – has a series of sexual encounters with white women. Catullus returns to Jamaica, where he ends up in a state of visionary madness. As in his previous books, the outlook for the future Salkey offers in this novel is bleak, whether it entails a return to the Caribbean or a decision to make a life in Britain. London provides the focus of much writing by Caribbean authors in Britain in this period, which is understandable, given that the majority of writers both lived and wrote in the metropolis. In the 1960s, as arguably remains the case today, London enjoyed the status of the cultural centre of black Britain. It is crucial, however, not to take the work of these authors as speaking for the experience of all black people in London, or, moreover, for the experience of black people in Britain as a whole. There has been some work to remedy the

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London focus of much criticism of black British literature, such as sections of Procter’s Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British Writing (2003), or Lynne Pearce, Corinne Fowler and Robert Crawshaw’s Postcolonial Manchester (2013). However, such books are greatly outweighed by those with a London-centric focus, such as John Clement Ball’s Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis, John McLeod’s Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis, and Sukhdev Sandhu’s London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City, all of which were published in the space of two years between 2003 and 2004. As Procter reminds us in Dwelling Places, there has been a tendency in studies of the early post-war black British period to ‘homogeniz[e] [. . .] the narration of the black British past’ (13), by underplaying that black Britain was a ‘culturally and economically uneven landscape’ (163). In an effort to add some contour to this flattened landscape, I now move to a reading of Guyanese author Denis Williams’ experimental novel, The Third Temptation, first published in 1968, and written mostly during his time living in North Wales. Vibert C. Cambridge, in ‘Denis Williams and the New Novel: The Status of The Third Temptation’ makes a strong case for this book as a ‘West Indian Novel’ (111), a claim I have no reason to refute. However, as I propose in my discussion of Salkey’s works, novels can occupy multiple competing and complementary positions, and Williams’ book can also be understood as both an important contribution to British experimental fiction and as a unique example of black writing in Britain during the transitional decade of the 1960s. These roles are not mutually exclusive, rather offering different optics through which the text might be understood. The Third Temptation is an anomaly in the decade for at least three reasons. Firstly, the action takes place entirely in the fictional Welsh seaside town of Caedmon, making it the only 1960s book-length text by a black author that is set, and mostly written, in Wales. The town’s name does, however, perform some work in crossing between English and Welsh literary history, being both the name of the earliest named English poet, and that of the record company that effectively created the audiobook thanks to a successful recording of Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales (1952). Secondly, the novel’s concerns are quite different from those that appear in writing by many Caribbean authors in the 1950s and 1960s. In ‘Kaleidoscope Man’, a review essay that includes reference to Williams’ novel, Malachi McIntosh observes that ‘the themes that have come to be associated with the Caribbean novel – such as identity, community, rural versus urban, home versus abroad – are entirely missing here’ (N.Pag.). Rather, the novel circles obsessively around adultery, love and loss, and shifting relations of power. Thirdly, The Third Temptation is a stylistic experiment quite unlike

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anything else undertaken by a black author writing in Britain in the period. It is not so much the fact of experimentation, which is present in any number of authors, but the mode of experimentation that makes it stand out. Williams’ novel has less in common with his Caribbean contemporaries than it does with the 1950s nouveau roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon and Marguerite Duras, in which traditional features of the novel such as plot, character and narrative development are downplayed in favour of fractured timelines, and in which repetitive descriptions of objects are used to explore, in highly mediated ways, the psychologies of the book’s protagonists. A more local point of comparison in the 1960s can be found in one British manifestation of the nouveau roman, Ann Quin’s Berg, first published in 1964. Like Berg, The Third Temptation is wildly experimental, set in a seaside town, and is fascinated with mortality. The novel loops and wheels around a man’s death in a traffic accident, although this event proves to have no more resonance than the novel’s other scattered incidents. It serves rather as a means to explore a complicated romantic relationship between Lho, an artist, Bid, his wife, and Joss, Lho’s former boss. Joss has had an affair with Bid, and when Lho discovers his wife is pregnant by him he hangs himself. This suicide is described in the book’s opening pages, however, before any of the backstory is established: The woods rattled with the pebbly sound of raindrops falling on the sodden carpet underfoot. Beneath a halo of fresh glistening cobweb Lho, alternately centre or edge or limit of this sound, hung in a dreadful stillness. (24)

To compound the confusion of this jumbled chronology, Lho reappears later in the book as a revenant, his ‘face in the slanting sunlight seems lilac, of a chalky texture’ (32). Lho’s suspended ontological state, flickering between ‘centre or edge or limit’ of the living world, is an apt figure for the structure of Williams’ novel, with events and characters swimming into the foreground only to be relegated to background obscurity a few sentences later. Other contrapuntal narratives run in parallel with the story of Joss, Lho and Bid, including that of Joss’ non-committal attempts to seduce the attractive Chloë, and an elliptical conversation Joss has with Sean, a man who has recently broken up with his girlfriend and who is also contemplating suicide. However, these characters are barely developed, rather occupying a similar plane of the novel as the objects it describes. As Cambridge details, the pages are littered with [b]anana peel, flower boxes, torn postcards, a brown paper bag that once contained boiled shrimp, crumpled wrapping paper, a large billboard advertising

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motorcar tyres and declaring IT IS UP TO YOU !, a portrait of Christ, and a balled-up sheet of blue paper. (117)

Some of these objects serve as means of linking different characters together, while others have no discernible bearing on anything outside their own existence. When reading the novel, there is a sense of arbitrariness, but one mediated by the paranoia of missed messages, or symbolic codes that elude all attempts at decryption. For example, the car tyre advert, ‘IT ’S UP TO YOU !’, seems to point to Williams’, and the nouveau roman’s, debts to existentialism, both in the Sartrean resonances it creates in relation to Lho’s suicide, and in its depiction of a world in which we have the freedom to choose our actions, but are condemned to this freedom by the same stroke. However, it is hard to reconcile this philosophical perspective with the cheapened sloganizing of existential thought in a capitalized advert, particularly when coupled with this advert’s mythologization of the car as a commodified form of liberty. The irony of linking cars with freedom and life is particularly acute in that one of the book’s central episodes concerns a young man’s death in a traffic accident. The slogan’s meaning in the text is also doubled by its metatextual function as an instruction on how to read the text, with the author passing the burden of making meaning onto the reader. The meaning of the text, as it were, is up to you. This authorial disempowerment works in tandem with the Christian moral framework suggested by the book’s title, the third temptation of Christ being his refusal to accept power over the world when tempted to do so by Satan. However, if the logic of this is followed through, Williams’ rescindment of authorial power aligns him with Christ, an act of hubris that contradicts the modesty implicit in the gesture of authorial withdrawal. If the ‘central concern’ of this book, as Victor J. Ramraj argues in his excellent introduction to the Peepal Tree edition, is ‘the nature of power and the powerful’ (7), then Williams’ own positioning in the dynamic of power between writer and reader remains ambiguous. While black writing in Britain was often perceived as offering unmediated access to the lived reality of migrants, The Third Temptation resists this process both formally and stylistically, and so undoes the power differential implicit in a model by which literature can be easily rendered into information.

Institutions and infrastructures As the 1960s progressed, the visibility of black writers, artists and thinkers in Britain diminished. Partly in response to this development, Kamau (then

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Edward) Brathwaite, together with Andrew Salkey and John La Rose, set up the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM ) in 1966, and over the course of many meetings across London they created a space in which to discuss a wide range of pressing issues: the existence or otherwise of a unifying Caribbean aesthetic; publishing opportunities for Caribbean and other global writers; and, more broadly, how to bring together Caribbean cultural production – in English, French and Spanish – including folklore, literature, oral forms, social history and the visual arts. In Brathwaite’s words, writing in the Caribbean Quarterly in 1968: [s]ince 1950, nearly every West Indian novelist worth the name had come to London and more than a hundred books had come from their typewriters and pens. But despite this the British public didn’t seem to be very much aware of the nature and value of this contribution. [. . .] [In the 1960s] I didn’t see any West Indian writers, painters and only a very few actors (and these in stereotyped parts) on British Television, either. [. . .] This was a remarkable change from the 50s when West Indian writing was the ‘new thing’ and had been warmly and perhaps somewhat uncritically welcomed as such. [. . .] This situation, it seemed to me, was something to be deplored. The isolation of West Indian writers from each other and from the society in which they lived could eventually only stultify development and could do nothing to contribute to perhaps the most important problem of our times – the problem of the future of race relations in Britain. (57)

As is clear from Brathwaite’s description, his motivations for establishing the CAM were wide ranging, in the first instance to do with concerns over the diminishing visibility of Caribbean writers, artists and actors in the 1960s, but also, and in fact by extension, because he felt that this compromised cultural position would have a direct effect on worsening British race relations. In the years directly preceding the establishment of the CAM , racist political campaigning by Conservative politician Peter Griffiths had led to the defeat of Labour candidate Patrick Gordon Walker in the constituency of Smethwick in 1964, in a campaign described by Harold Wilson in a Commons Debate as ‘utterly squalid’ (c71). This was soon followed by Enoch Powell’s notorious intervention into the 1967 Kenyan Asian debate and his 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, both of which strongly criticized government immigration policy, and set the tone for the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which added additional restrictions to the existing act from 1962.15 While the 1948 Nationality Act had created what James Procter in Dwelling Places calls a ‘temporarily porous nation-space between 1948 and 1962’ (25), the 1968 act drastically curbed these freedoms, limiting citizenship to those born in Britain, or who had at least one parent or grandparent born there. The climate for race relations was, in short,

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increasingly toxic, and Brathwaite felt that the decreased visibility of Caribbean cultural production was both a symptom and a cause of these conditions. In this challenging context, the CAM sought, in part, to give black writers more visibility, by organizing meetings, conferences, exhibitions, and by maintaining a regular newsletter. The organization was made up of a diverse group of writers, critics, visual artists and intellectuals, and was a highly politicized space, interested both in the Caribbean and in bringing together all ‘Third World’ peoples, whether resident in Britain or elsewhere. The organization was energized by the spate of independence movements in the colonies during the 1960s, with the writings of Frantz Fanon and the American Civil Rights and Black Power movements serving as theoretical touchstones. This often led to, in Louis James’s words, ‘heated sessions’ that left speakers ‘soothing their wounded ego with Red Stripe beers, or something stronger’ in the smoky bar of the West Indian Student Centre (95). The efforts of the CAM led to two large conferences at the University of Kent in 1977 and 1978, and, as Low points out in ‘Publishing Commonwealth’, to the further stitching together of British and Caribbean literary cultures, connecting ‘London and particularly Kingston, Port of Spain and Georgetown’ (84). This was true not only during the active years of the CAM in Britain, from 1966–1972, but also after 1972, when Brathwaite returned to Jamaica but continued to advocate for the kinds of enquiry into Caribbean cultural production that had animated the movement. Perhaps the most important legacy left by the CAM was their involvement in establishing journals, publishing houses and book shops that focused on writing from the authors whose absence from British cultural life Brathwaite bemoaned. The CAM’s activities led to the creation of two influential literary magazines – Savacou and Artrage – the first of which was published in Jamaica, the second in London. Further, John La Rose and Sarah White set up New Beacon publishers in 1966, and opened the New Beacon bookshop in Finsbury Park a year later, with La Rose’s Foundations (1966) its first published title. Among the mainstream publishers at this time, only Longman and Heinemann were publishing African and Caribbean texts in any great volume, a history deftly explored by Low in Publishing the Postcolonial: Anglophone West African and Caribbean Writing in the UK 1948–1968 (2011). New Beacon was Britain’s first bookshop that specialized in writing by Caribbean, African and Asian writers, and became something of an institution. Or rather, it helped institute black British writing, by providing the infrastructural support for black authors living in Britain, among them Wilson Harris, Erna Brodber, Kamau Brathwaite and many more. Although separate from the CAM , Clive Allison and Margaret Busby’s Allison & Busby, formed in 1967,

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is also worth mentioning here. An article on the George Padmore Institute website titled ‘Allison & Busby’ suggests that Busby resists the publishing house being thought of as a ‘black publisher’, but the press was nevertheless responsible for publishing such luminaries as Buchi Emecheta and C.L.R. James (N.Pag.). A year later, in 1968, Jessica and Eric Huntley opened Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, which specialized in books by black authors, or that were concerned with black culture in some way. It was, at least in its early stages, more overtly political than New Beacon: its first publication was an edition of Guyanese writer Walter Rodney’s speeches, a project devised after Rodney’s political campaigning for the poor in Jamaica led to rioting, and Rodney being declared persona non grata by the Jamaican government. In 1974, the Huntleys opened the Bogle L’Ouverture bookshop, later renamed the Walter Rodney bookshop after his assassination in 1981. This shop remained open, latterly as a performance space, until 1992, while New Beacon lasted for some fifty years, until its closure was announced in December of 2016, on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary. This decision was reversed only months later, as a fundraising drive raised over £10,000, allowing the shop to remain open. The establishment of these publishing houses, journals and bookshops, as well as the activities of the CAM , allowed black authors and artists a level of visibility and structural support that they were increasingly denied across the 1960s, and so were important steps in catalysing the institutional formation of black British writing.

Conclusion: From black writing in Britain to black British writing The relationship cultural production has to the historical conditions in which it is created is a highly mediated one; works will never simply reflect back the world in which they are produced. This being said, texts are no more decoupled from their historical contexts than they are bound to them, and there are some empirical factors that had a demonstrable effect on literary production in the 1960s. The British government’s laissez-faire immigration policy and the effect of market novelty were major drivers of Caribbean fiction in the 1950s and early 1960s. While the 1950s were not simply a decade of easy integration, writers did benefit from the warm reception their fictions received from reviewers, and the general public. Across the 1960s, the hardening of immigration policy and an increasingly fickle market contributed to this fiction’s waning popularity. In the selection of novels I have examined, there is also a broad trend of formal

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experimentation, which developed both as part of 1960s British writing and in dialogue with it. This was accompanied by a gradual shift, as the Caribbean boom petered out, towards a greater degree of political organization in the latter half of the decade. As the 1960s progressed, racial tensions escalated, prompting a phase of organization in which authors, artists and thinkers from the Caribbean and beyond gathered to thrash out a new form of societal and literary politics. This was symbolically represented, for Walmsley, by the establishment of the CAM , which led to ‘the transformation of Britain’s West Indian community from one of exiles and immigrants to black British’ (22). The institutions – publishing houses, magazines and bookshops – that came out of these meetings, or emerged in parallel with them, provided a bedrock that held firm when authors faced what McLeod in ‘Black British Culture and Fiction in the 1970s’ calls the ‘grimness, loneliness, and pessimism of trying to reckon with and live within an increasingly racist and prejudicial environment’ (96). As black writers in Britain negotiated what it would mean to stay in a country that seemed to be turning against them, they mobilized in response to these difficulties, and laid the foundations of what would become black British writing.

Notes 1 See: Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain (1998). 2 By far the largest group of foreign-born UK residents in the 1950s, and indeed until the 2000s, were the Irish, of whom according to the 1961 UK Census, four times as many lived in the UK as Indians, who at that point constituted the second largest migrant group. Although I do not cover this important group of migrant writers, for a good analysis of Irish writing in London since the end of the Second World War see: Tony Murray’s London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity (2012). 3 For more, see James Whitfield’s Unhappy Dialogue: The Metropolitan Police and Black Londoners in Post-war Britain (50, 116). 4 For a useful discussion of race relations in Britain, see Kenetta Hammond Perry’s London Is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race, particularly Chapter 3, ‘ “Race Riots” and the Mystique of British Anti-Racism’ (89–125). Such incidents have become emblematic of racial disharmony in Britain, but such antagonism did not begin in the 1950s. As James Procter points out in Writing Black Britain (2000), public unrest over immigration predates the disturbances of the late 1950s, with riots in Liverpool breaking out just weeks after

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the Windrush’s arrival in 1948, not to mention the even larger disturbances of 1919 at a number of Britain’s major seaports (3). John McLeod, in ‘Black British Culture and Fiction in the 1970s’, cites the diverse projects of Buchi Emecheta, Sam Selvon, Wilson Harris, Timothy Mo, Salman Rushdie and others (96). Low’s ‘Finding the Centre’, Sarah Lawson-Welsh’s ‘New Wine in New Bottles: The Critical Reception of West Indian Writing in Britain in the 1950s and Early 1960s’, and Procter’s Writing Black Britain offer three examples of this splitting tendency; Low’s article spans 1950–1965, Lawson-Welsh’s stops in the early 1960s, and Procter’s book divides the decade into ‘early’ and ‘late’ 1960s. Lawson-Welsh collates various such reviews in ‘New Wine in New Bottles’, noting their tendency towards exoticism, and criticizing their ‘hasty, ill-informed, occasionally even malicious pronouncements’ (261). Osborne dates these periods as 1940s–1960s and 1970s–1980s respectively, with the ‘indigene’ period spanning the 1990s–2000s (3). For useful discussions of these debates, see: Osborne’s ‘Introduction’ to The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature, Shusheila Nasta’s ‘Writing in Britain: Shifting Geographies’, and Fred D’Aguiar’s ‘Against Black British Literature’. See Courtman’s ‘Not Good Enough or Not Man Enough? Beryl Gilroy as the Anomaly in the Evolving Black British Canon’, a chapter titled ‘ “Lost Years”: The Occlusion of West Indian Women Writers in the Early Canon of Black British Writing’, and her introduction to Gladwell’s autobiography Brown Face, Big Master (1963), in which she outlines a number of institutional reasons impeding black women authors from being published. In ‘Lost Years’ Courtman cites Gilroy’s suspicion that ‘her manuscripts “couldn’t get past the readers who were opinionated West Indian males playing the Gender Game” ’ (63). Perhaps the best introductory guide to this author’s work is Hena Maes-Jelinek’s The Labyrinth of Universality: Wilson Harris’s Visionary Art of Fiction (2006). Susheila Nasta draws attention to Dom Moraes, Markandaya and Farrukh Dhondy, Nirad Chaudhuri, Lauretta Ngcobo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, Abdulrazak Gurnah and several others (28–9). Bim is a Caribbean literary magazine, published in Barbados, first appearing in December 1942 and central to the development of Caribbean literature. For discussion of such concerns in relation to Caribbean Voices see: Philip Nanton, ‘What Does Mr. Swanzy Want – Shaping or Reflecting? An Assessment of Henry Swanzy’s Contribution to the Development of Caribbean Literature’. The ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech attacked British policy on immigration and antidiscrimination in highly charged rhetoric, illustrated with examples of racial disharmony taken from Powell’s work as an MP. He advocated subsidies to encourage migrants to return to their home countries, foreseeing violence if levels of

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immigration were not reduced. See Bill Schwartz, The White Man’s World (2011), in particular (33–52).

Works cited Anon. ‘Allison & Busby.’ George Padmore Institute. www.georgepadmoreinstitute.org. Accessed December 2016. www.georgepadmoreinstitute.org/the-pioneering-years /new-beacon-books-early-history/towards-radical-black-publishing-space/allison Anthony, Michael. The Games Were Coming. London: David & Charles, 1963. ———. The Year in San Fernando. London: Heinemann, 1965. ———. Green Days by the River. London: Heinemann, 1967. ———. Tales for Young and Old. Ilfracombe: Stockwell, 1967. Ball, John Clement. Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Barrett, Lindsay. Song for Mumu. London: Longman, 1967. Beerbohm, Max. ‘1880.’ The Yellow Book (1895): 275–83. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996. Braithwaite, E.R. To Sir with Love. London: Bodley Head, 1959. ———. Choice of Straws. London: Bodley Head, 1965. Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Butler, Judith. ‘Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance.’ In Vulnerability in Resistance. Zeynep Gambetti, Leticia Sabsay and Judith Butler (eds.). Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 12–27. Cambridge, Vibert C. ‘Denis Williams and the New Novel: The Status of The Third Temptation.’ In Denis Williams, a Life in Works: New and Collected Essays. Charlotte Williams and Evelyn A. Williams (ed.). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. 111–24. Chaubey, Ajay K. (ed.) V.S. Naipaul: An Anthology of 21st Century Criticism. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2015. Coetzee, J.M. ‘The Novel Today.’ Upstream. 6 (1) 1988: 2–5. Courtman, Sandra. ‘ Introduction.’ In Joyce Gladwell. Brown Face, Big Master. London: Macmillan, 2003 [1969]. 1–40. ———. ‘ “Lost Years”: The Occlusion of West Indian Women Writers in the Early Canon of Black British Writing.’ In Diasporic Literature and Theory – Where Now? Mark Shackleton (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. 57–85. D’Aguiar, Fred. ‘Against Black British Literature.’ In Tibisiri: Caribbean Writers and Critics. Maggie Butcher (ed.). Sydney : Dangaroo. 106–14. Dawes, Kwame. ‘Negotiating the Ship on the Head: Black British Fiction.’ Wasafiri. 14 (29) 1999: 18–24. Eliot, T. S. Complete Poems and Plays: 1909–1950. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1952.

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Ghali, Waguih. Beer in the Snooker Club. London: André Deutsch, 1964. Ghose, Zulfikar. The Loss of India. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. ———. Confessions of a Native-Alien. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965. ———. The Contradictions. London: Macmillan, 1966. ———. Jets from Orange. Chester Springs: Dufour Editions, 1967. ———. The Murder of Aziz Khan. London: Macmillan, 1967. Harris, Wilson. The Palace of the Peacock. London: Faber & Faber, 1960. ———. The Far Journey of Oudin. London: Faber & Faber, 1961. ———. The Whole Armour. London: Faber & Faber, 1962. ———. The Secret Ladder. London: Faber & Faber, 1963. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge, 2001. James, Louis. Caribbean Literature in English. London: Routledge, 2014. Jenkinson, Jacqueline. Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Imperial Britain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009. Johnson, B.S. and Zulfikar Ghose. Statement Against Corpses: Short Stories. London: Constable, 1964. Jones, David. The Anathemata. London: Faber & Faber, 1952. King, Bruce. V.S. Naipaul. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. La Rose, John. Foundations. London: New Beacon, 1966. Lamming, George. Season of Adventure. London: Allison and Busby, 1960. ———. The Pleasures of Exile. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960. Lawson-Welsh, Sarah. ‘New Wine in New Bottles: The Critical Reception of West Indian Writing in Britain in the 1950s and Early 1960s.’ In The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson-Welsh (eds.). London: Routledge, 1996. Low, Gail. ‘ “Finding the Centre?” Publishing Commonwealth Writing in London: The Case of Anglophone Caribbean Writing 1950–65.’ The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 37 (2) 2002: 21–38. ———. ‘Publishing Commonwealth: The Case of West Indian Writing, 1950–65.’ EnterText. 2 (1) 2002: 71–93. ———. Publishing the Postcolonial: Anglophone West African and Caribbean Writing in the UK 1948–1968. London: Routledge, 2012. Maes-Jelinek, Hena. The Labyrinth of Universality: Wilson Harris’s Visionary Art of Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. McIntosh, Malachi. ‘Kaleidoscope Man.’ The Caribbean Review of Books. 2010. 9 January 2017: N.Pag. McLeod, John. ‘Black British Culture and Fiction in the 1970s.’ In The 1970s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction. Nick Hubble, John McLeod and Philip Tew (eds.). London: Bloomsbury, 2014. ———. Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis. London: Routledge, 2004. Murray, Tony. London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012.

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Naipaul, V.S. A House for Mr. Biswas. London: André Deutsch, 1961. ———. The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French, and Dutch – in the West Indies and South America. London: André Deutsch, 1962. ———. Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion. London: André Deutsch, 1963. ———. An Area of Darkness. London: André Deutsch, 1964. ———. A Flag on the Island. London: André Deutsch, 1967. ———. The Mimic Men. London: André Deutsch, 1967. Nanton, Philip. ‘What Does Mr. Swanzy Want – Shaping or Reflecting? An Assessment of Henry Swanzy’s Contribution to the Development of Caribbean Literature.’ Caribbean Quarterly. 46 (1) 2000: 61–72. Nasta, Susheila. ‘Writing in Britain: Shifting Geographies.’ Wasafiri. 17 (36) 2002: 3–4. Nixon, Rob. London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Osborne, Deirdre. ‘Introduction.’ In The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature. Deirdre Osborne (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 1–20. Paterson, Orlando. The Children of Sisyphus. London: Heinemann, 1964. ———. An Absence of Ruins. London: Hutchinson, 1967. Peach, Ceri. ‘Patterns of Afro-Caribbean Migration and Settlement in Great Britain: 1945–1981.’ In The Caribbean in Europe: Aspects of the West Indies Experience in Britain, France and the Netherlands. Colin Brock (ed.). London: Frank Cass, 1986. 62–84. Pearce, Lynne, Corinne Fowler and Robert Crawshaw (eds.) Postcolonial Manchester: Diaspora Space and the Devolution of Literary Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Perry, Kennetta Hammond. London Is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Phillips, Mike and Trevor Phillips. Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain. London: HarperCollins, 1998. Procter, James. Writing Black Britain 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. ———. Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British Writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Quin, Ann. Berg. London: John Calder, 1964. Ramraj, Victor J. ‘Introduction.’ In The Third Temptation. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2010. 5–19. Rushdie, Salman. ‘Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist.’ In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Vintage, 1991. 63–70. Salkey, Andrew. A Quality of Violence. London: Hutchinson, 1959. ———. (ed.). West Indian Stories. London: Faber & Faber, 1960. ———. The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover. London: Hutchinson, 1968. ———. Escape to an Autumn Pavement. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2009 [1960].

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Sandhu, Sukhdev. London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. London: HarperCollins, 2004. Schwarz, Bill. The White Man’s World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Selvon, Samuel. The Lonely Londoners. London: Longman, 1956. ———. I Hear Thunder. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1963. ———. The Housing Lark. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1965. Walmsley, Anne. The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History. London and Port of Spain: New Beacon Books, 1992. White, Landeg. ‘Review of V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction.’ Books Abroad. 50 (1) 1976: 228–9. Whitfield, James. Unhappy Dialogue: The Metropolitan Police and Black Londoners in Post-War Britain. Cullompton: Willan, 2004. Williams, Denis. The Third Temptation. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2010 [1968]. Wilson, Harold. Hansard. London: Houses of Parliament, 3 November 1964. Vol. 701: c71.

6

The 1960s Existential Fiction of John Fowles Michelle Phillips Buchberger

The existentialist movement and its leading proponent, Jean-Paul Sartre, reached their respective zeniths of influence and dominance over intellectual thought in the years following the Second World War. Also at this time, the English novelist, John Fowles, began his writing career; his first published novel, The Collector appeared in 1963 and his collection of philosophical pensées, The Aristos, a year later. These publications heralded a decade that would also see the publication of The Magus (1965) and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). Existentialist ideas saturate these works. However, the novels are not only explorations of existential ideas; instead, I suggest, existentialism, and specifically its preoccupation with new conceptions of the thinking subject and the primacy of individual freedom, contributes significantly to the innovations in narrative fiction and the novel form itself presaged in Fowles’ works of the 1960s. Fowles’ own interest in existentialism is clearly documented in interviews and in The Aristos, as are his thoughts about the state of the novel form and the pressing need for its revitalization. In an interview conducted in 1964 with Roy Newquist appearing in a collection edited by Dianne L. Vipond, Fowles stated his belief that existentialism was ‘the twentieth century individual’s answer to the evil pressures of both capitalism and communism’ (8). A decade later, he maintained in an interview with James Campbell that ‘Sartre and Camus’ were among his main influences (459), and according to William Palmer that these writers ‘have been trying to lead us, in their fashion, to a Victorian seriousness of purpose and moral sensitivity’ (78). In the Campbell interview, he also made it clear that he was particularly interested in ‘the side of existentialism which deals with freedom: the business of whether we do have free will, to what extent you can change your life, choose yourself, and all the rest of it. Most of my major characters have been involved in this Sartrean concept of authenticity and inauthenticity’ (466). An 165

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examination of Fowles’ works of the 1960s reveals not only an engagement with the idea of freedom and authenticity and their associated existentialist themes, but also with human experience and how it is apprehended and articulated in the novel form. Fowles’ innovative artistic decisions may be traced in part to his engagement with the existentialist movement, and his novels a metafictional and intertextual interrogation of the restrictive nature of realist fiction. In the early 1960s, new ideas to help reinvigorate the novel form were as welcome as they were rare. The novel was ailing. In 1967, John Barth famously declared the novel form ‘exhausted’ (29). B.S. Johnson observed that the role of the storyteller appeared to have been taken up by the cinema (140). As late as 1979, Bill Buford, in an introduction to the literary magazine, Granta, pessimistically summarized the state of the British novel as: [. . .] neither remarkable nor remarkably interesting [. . . it] does not startle, does not surprise, is not the source of controversy or contention . . . British fiction of the 50s, 60s and even most of the 70s variously appears as a monotonously protracted, realistically rendered monologue. It lacks excitement, wants drive, provides comforts not challenges. (1)

Fowles remarked, in an unpublished essay originally intended to accompany his collection of short stories, The Ebony Tower (1974): ‘Never in history has the novelist been less likely to be read, more probably faced with public failure’ (N.Pag.), but despite this pessimistic outlook, by the end of his writing career, Fowles’ contribution to the revitalization of the novel would be beyond doubt. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize;1 his works widely praised and acknowledged as having anticipated the magical realism of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), the reinterpretation of the historic as seen in Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985) and Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), and the blurring of history and fiction in A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) and Bruce Chatwin’s Utz (1985). Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman was hailed as a watershed in the emergence of postmodernism, meriting a chapter in Bertens and Natoli’s Postmodernism: The Key Figures (2002) and multiple key entries in both Linda Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (2003) and Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (2003). The seeds to Fowles’ contribution to the revival of the novel form lie in his work of the 1960s and, I suggest, are inextricably linked to the author’s engagement with existentialist ideas. Fowles’ own philosophical pensées, The Aristos, are a helpful starting point when considering the influence of existentialist thought on his novels, particularly because the author dedicates a whole section to existentialism. For

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Fowles, existentialism was ‘the revolt of the individual against all those systems of thought, theories of psychology, and social and political pressures that attempt to rob him of his individuality’ (115). He believed this movement might encourage an individual to learn the ‘value of anxiety as an antidote to intellectual complacency (petrifaction), and a realization of the need he has to learn to choose and control his own life’ (116). Such an ability to control one’s own life, to cast off the strictures of quotidian norms and conventions is equally applicable to the ailing novelist tradition, and Fowles clearly grapples with his artistic inheritance, specifically, the English realist tradition in all three novels of this decade. However, rather than embracing the extremes of experimentation emergent particularly in France at this time, instead, Fowles’ novels of the 1960s subtly undermine the ‘rules’ and readerly expectations associated with the novel. Subsequently, readers are increasingly confronted with works that confound expectations regarding the romance, the crime novel, and the Bildungsroman. Similarly, his characters also confront quotidian social norms, expectations of behaviour, concepts such as ‘duty’ and ‘tradition’, and they interrogate their own identities as exposed by their interaction with others, who force them to ‘see’ themselves as in a mirror. Variously, Fowles plays with our expectations regarding the author as creator of worlds. The relationship between the author and his text is problematized by the implied absence of any narrator in The Collector. There is an implied autobiographical account from an unreliable protagonist in The Magus, and finally a vertiginous overturning of all narratival expectations in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which uses abrupt intrusions directly into the text and multiple endings, despite seeming to adhere to traditional Victorian narrative conventions. This parallels the central character’s seeming adherence to conventional modes of behaviour only as a way of engineering a drastic escape from them. These novels increasingly present readers with analogies of the novelist’s struggle with the restrictive expectations of the form; presenting the individual’s struggle to attain authenticity, rejecting the seductive lure of patterns, traditional roles, and masks (metanarratives) as a refuge from anguish and instead plunging every day anew into the (re)construction of an authentic self. As an artistic project too, this seems to be Fowles’ goal: the interrogation and, often, rejection of quotidian expectations and traditions as part of an intense self-reflection. Similarly, his work is an acknowledgement that the novel form, like the authentic self, must be constantly created anew if it is to be relevant and meaningful. These considerations may be traced directly to the existentialist movement.

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Fowles’ relationship with religion, and therefore the concept of the author as God, is more complex than Sartre’s. Sartre simply and openly identified as an atheist. However, Fowles writes in The Aristos, ‘I do not consider myself an atheist, yet this concept of “God” and our necessary masterlessness obliges me to behave in all public matters as if I were’ (27). While rejecting belief in any ‘amenable god’ (28), Fowles yet subscribes to a belief in a ‘living balance, a rippling tension, an enormous yet mysterious simplicity [. . .]. I must exist in hazard but that the whole is not in hazard. Seeing and knowing this is being conscious; accepting it is being human’ (28). This difference is important because it paves the way for Fowles’ characters’ navigation of a disinterested and yet, unlike Sartre’s, not a completely random universe. This difference manifests itself in Fowles’ frequent incorporation of allusions to games, with the accompanying suggestion that although the players may be ignorant of their participation, there is a game, there are rules, and there may even be a referee. In The Collector, for example, one of the protagonists, Frederick Clegg, repeatedly refers to his being (unwillingly) part of a ‘game’:2 additionally, the central events on the fictional island of Phraxos in The Magus are described severally as being part of ‘The Godgame’, which was also an alternative title for the novel itself;3 and in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the author famously intrudes into the fiction itself to ponder whether the novel as a whole is ‘only a game’, with the ‘novelist stand[ing] next to God’ (85). Fowles, therefore, does not reject there being some kind of order in the universe, but he does assert our ignorance of how this order is orchestrated. This ambivalence towards atheism being said, the influence of Sartrean existentialism on the novels of the 1960s is extensive, and this manifests itself in the novels’ engagement with three of its key concepts: specifically, human consciousness; authenticity (and its opposite, bad faith); and freedom. Since all three of these concepts are really dependent products of the first, a brief gloss of Sartre’s approach to human consciousness is germane here. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) introduces his approach to human consciousness by expanding upon Husserl’s phenomenology which, Sartre states, aimed to ‘overcome a certain number of dualisms which have embarrassed philosophy and to replace them by the monism of the phenomenon’ (41). Such ‘dualism’ is the binary concept of the Cartesian ‘inside’ (rationalism) and Humean (empiricism) or ‘outside’. Husserl’s phenomenology sought to move beyond this dualism by proposing a philosophy of existence. In this philosophy, there is no inside or outside, only existence. Extending Husserl’s concept of phenomenology, Sartre proposed that human reality is comprised of the ‘presence of two human ekstases: the ekstasis which throws us into being-in-itself and the ekstasis which

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engages us in non-being’ (106). ‘Being’ for Sartre is the ‘in itself ’, everything that is outside of consciousness or the ‘object’. ‘Nothingness’ is consciousness, the ‘for itself ’ that is engaged in creating itself by making choices: it is the ‘subject’. Consciousness is constantly under pressure to make choices that gradually and cumulatively form an individual’s essence. However, the pressure to make these choices and the awareness of the abyss that exists between the individual and her or his essence is a source of great anguish. Sartre describes this anguish as ‘the manifestation of freedom in the face of self [. . .] man is always separated by a nothingness from his essence’ (35). This anguish, he suggests, might be assuaged by, for example, assuming the role of a completely formed self so that no further decisions need be made. This is an example of living in ‘bad faith’, and Sartre illustrates this state in his description of the perfect waiter: an individual who has chosen to adopt a fully-formed essence rather than confront the abyss of innumerable choices: All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe. There is nothing there to surprise us. The game is a kind of marking out and investigation. The child plays with his body in order to explore it, to take inventory of it; the waiter in the cafe plays with his condition in order to realize it. This obligation is not different from that which is imposed on all tradesmen. Their condition is wholly one of ceremony. (120)

The suppression of anguish by living in bad faith is a means of temporarily denying the nothingness of our own conscious being. In Sartre’s words, ‘I can make myself guilty of bad faith while apprehending the anguish which I am, and this bad faith, intended to fill up the nothingness which I am in my relation to myself, precisely implies the nothingness which it suppresses’ (106). Authenticity, therefore, involves the rejection of bad faith and the acknowledgement that the abyss of nothingness must be confronted, and that the self must be forged by continual decisions and acts, for, as Sartre explains, Authenticity and individuality have to be earned: I shall be my own authenticity only if under the influence of the call of conscience (Ruf des Gewissens) I launch out toward death with a resolute-decision (Entschlossenheit) as toward my own most peculiar possibility. At this moment I reveal myself to myself in authenticity, and I raise others along with myself toward the authentic. (246)

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For Sartre, freedom is inseparable from human reality because without complete freedom, the individual may not choose freely and enact the decisions that create his essence. As Sartre says, Human freedom precedes essence in man and makes it possible; the essence of the human being is suspended in his freedom. What we call freedom is impossible to distinguish from the being of ‘human reality.’ Man does not exist first in order to be free subsequently; there is no difference between the being of man and his being-free. (25)

These three foundational concepts of existentialism, human consciousness, authenticity (appearance and reality) and freedom, lend themselves perfectly to fictional exploration, as Sartre himself would prove in his own seminal works, such as the novel, Nausea (1948), and the plays The Flies (1943) and No Exit (1944). These works explore the challenges faced by individuals as they must choose to live authentically or, alternatively, be condemned to a life of artifice or bad faith. Fowles’ novels are similarly infused with such characters who must make this choice. Significantly, Fowles chooses many of Sartre’s metaphors and allusions in his work. Fowles’ novels of the 1960s present characters who adopt roles; they wear and remove masks, pretending to be other than they are, and, most predominantly, they see themselves either as a reflection in, or acting as, a mirror. As each of the novels progresses, however, Fowles engages as much with the nature of the novel form itself as with the characters within them. He examines the relationships between author and the reader, and between author and characters. He considers, and forces the reader to question, the degree to which the characters in a novel are free to create their own essence. This question is openly postulated in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and as a result, the form seems to strain to contain the enormity of the proposition, ultimately fracturing along multiple ontological seams and into four possible endings. For Fowles, existentialism is not only a means of examining the human condition, it is also a means for interrogating the novel form. In this regard, existential philosophy may be seen in part as a reaction by Fowles against the then dominant, positivist preference for limiting the knowable to what can be quantified or known by sense experience or rationalizing perception. What Fowles and many of his contemporaries began to explore was the effect of injecting the knowing, personal subject into scientific explorations of phenomena; adding a human dimension to explorations of such new ideas such as space and time. Although objective reflection leads to the objective truth, it also disregards

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the subject. Indeed, objective, scientific truth is defined and validated by the fact that it disregards the subjective. As Kierkegaard observed, ‘The way of objective reflection leads to abstract thought, to mathematics, to historical knowledge of different kinds; and always it leads away from the subject, whose existence or non-existence, and rightly so, becomes infinitely indifferent’ (173). Traditional mimetic realism has more in common with this apparently objective perception of reality; i.e., the experience of reality from an empirical, positivist perspective depicted by following an accepted series of narratological conventions and a shared understanding of what can be known and described. By contrast, the world-view advocated by existentialism is predicated on a more subjective, symbolic order rather than that of the scientific, objective notion of reality, and the former is essentially in at least an implicit fashion intersubjective. This is the direction Fowles follows, tentatively at first in The Collector, but subsequently does so with rapidly gathering pace and confidence.

The Collector The Collector, Fowles’ first published novel, is a case study in all three of the key existential concepts identified above: human consciousness, authenticity and freedom. The novel also interrogates several traditional narratological conventions, by first advancing them, (for example, the diary form, the ‘crime’ novel, and the romance), before destabilizing respective readerly expectations. This interrogation exposes the patterns we expect in such narrative modes, and presents this as a flaw; an impediment to creative freedom, especially when considered alongside the existential journey of its characters. In this novel, Frederick Clegg, an irredeemably inauthentic government clerk, comes by the means of kidnapping the object of his desire, Miranda Grey, after he wins a substantial amount of money on the football pools, with which he constructs an elaborate prison in the cellar of a house. He does so for the sole purpose of keeping Miranda until, he believes, she has time to fall in love with him. Clegg’s name, a corruption of the French ‘clef ’ or key, immediately connotes his character, suggestive of a predisposition to acquiesce to expectations associated with his name in addition to other societal expectations. On a literal level, he is the holder of the key that keeps Miranda prisoner. His need to reduce, to own and to confine is also implied in his role as imprisoner and extended in his obsession with catching and collecting butterflies, reducing their complexity to names in his drawers of specimens. His windfall is also spent in a myopic

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and reductive way. Rather than seeking to expand his self-knowledge and experience, he mundanely purchases photography equipment, another form of capturing and reducing (especially when he ultimately takes pornographic pictures of Miranda). The house in which he imprisons Miranda, once a chapel, is also now commodified, reduced from the sacred, with connotations that greatly exceed its physical existence, to an everyday dwelling. Clegg’s very presence implies reduction, claustrophobia, and small mindedness, which is echoed in the language he uses, showing a poverty of linguistic ability, especially when contrasted with Miranda. Clegg is a case study in bad faith, a fact that is established early in the novel, when the reader encounters what appears to be some kind of confessional firstperson memoir concerning his background and psychologically impoverished upbringing. What is interesting to note in Clegg’s recollections is that they correlate directly with Sartre’s description of bad faith or mauvaise foi, a phrase, which, though commonly used today in consideration of existentialism, demands further explanation. In Being and Nothingness Sartre describes his concept of an individual as having a ‘double property’: that a human being is ‘at once a facticity and a transcendence’ (56). One’s facticity might be described in terms of the labels that might be applied to an individual by a third person. These labels might include one’s social and economic class, gender, education level, etc. However, as Sartre explains, it is possible for the individual to transcend this facticity; to exceed the labels generated by the circumstances into which we are born. Transcendence, then, might be described as how one reaches beyond this facticity; to meet, exceed or confound the expectations that might be generated by our facticity. However, when a person surrenders to facticity, or fashions from this facticity his or her own identity as a role, this is bad faith. As Sartre explains: ‘showing our transcendence changed into facticity, is the source of an infinity of excuses for our failures or our weaknesses’ (57). Clegg constantly portrays himself as a direct, and, we should deduce, passive, product of his upbringing and social class. More than this, he constantly apportions blame for his behaviour on his past. For example, he identifies himself as a product of his upbringing in the hands of a domineering aunt, whom he rarely questions or opposes, after the death of his father and the departure of his alcoholic mother: My father was killed driving. I was two. That was in 1937. He was drunk, but Aunt Annie always said it was my mother that drove him to drink. They never told me what really happened, but she went off soon after and left me with Aunt

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Annie, she only wanted an easy time. My cousin Mabel once told me (when we were kids, in a quarrel) she was a woman of the streets who went off with a foreigner. I was stupid, I went straight and asked Aunt Annie and if there was any covering-up to do, of course she did it. I don’t care now, if she is still alive, I don’t want to meet her, I’ve got no interest. Aunt Annie’s always said good riddance in so many words, and I agree. (11)

Clegg alludes to himself as being not only a product of his circumstances but also a passive experiencer of events. He recalls, for example, that he should have forgotten all about his obsession with Miranda, whom he has stalked for several months before the football pools win, but he contends that the act of forgetting is not a conscious act requiring agency, but rather something that just happens, and if it doesn’t happen, it is not the fault of the individual. As he reflects, ‘forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me’ (13). He maintains that Miranda’s abduction was stumbled upon accidentally rather than being premeditated: ‘What I’m trying to say is that having her as my guest happened suddenly, it wasn’t something I planned’ (16). Similarly, he puts his ineptitude with women down to genetics; something over which he has no control: ‘some crude animal thing I was born without’ (13). He describes his being conditioned by the English class system; looked down upon by ‘posh’ people. He blames his social class for his inability to rise beyond the position of lowly clerk: ‘London’s all arranged for the people who can act like public schoolboys, and you don’t get anywhere if you don’t have the manner born and the right la-di-da voice’ (14). Even winning the pools cannot help him to exceed his facticity, or the way he is perceived by others. For example, when he takes his aunt and cousin out to a ‘posh’ restaurant, he cannot escape ‘the way people looked at us and the way the slimy foreign waiters and everybody treated us, and how everything in the room seemed to look down at us because we weren’t brought up their way’ (14). Even Miranda, his prisoner, seems ready to apportion much of the blame for Clegg’s behaviour to his facticity: I know it’s pathetic, I know he’s a victim of a miserable nonconformist suburban world and a miserable social class, the horrid timid copycatting genteel inbetween class. I used to think D and M’s class the worst. All golf and gin and bridge and cars and the right accent and the right money and having been to the right school and hating the arts (the theatre being a pantomime at Christmas and ‘Hay Fever’ by the Town Rep – Picasso and Bartók dirty words unless you wanted to get a laugh). Well, that is foul. But Caliban’s England is fouler. (161)

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Despite Clegg’s protestations that he has lacked any agency in what has occurred in the events leading to Miranda’s death, Fowles constantly supplies his readers details that remind them that Clegg has chosen to abdicate this agency. For example, Clegg’s domineering aunt is, ironically, a ‘Nonconformist’ in her religious views, yet despite stating his rejection of any form of religion, Clegg passively adopts the patterns and rites of religion when confronted with Miranda’s death: ‘Anyway she looked very peaceful. Then I knelt and said a prayer, the only one I knew was Our Father, so I said some of that and God rest her soul, not that I believe in religion, but it seemed right’ (274). Clegg allows his facticity to determine his essence, thus freeing him from transcending his facticity and making choices. He has abdicated control, surrendered his freedom, and adopted a life of bad faith. Fowles uses the same device in The Collector as Sartre does in No Exit: having characters locked in close contact with each other (Sartre uses three characters, rather than two and the characters are deceased and in hell). In this confined space, Sartre’s characters act as inescapable mirrors to each other so that they might see how they are perceived as objects from another consciousness, exposing their facticity. Similarly, Miranda and Clegg are presented to the reader as mirror images of each other. Both had alcoholic mothers and absent fathers, although Miranda’s father is described by her as being ‘weak’ rather than being literally absent – deceased – in Clegg’s case. Both subscribe slavishly to the social quotidian norms of behaviour in which they are brought up. Miranda is a virgin, despite her emancipated feminism: ‘All this Vestal Virgin talk about “saving yourself up” for the right man. I’ve always despised it. Yet I’ve always held back. I’m mean with my body’ (237). By establishing the similarity between the central characters early in the novel, both being the products of their own facticity, this makes the lack of progress in Clegg towards authenticity more pronounced. In contrast, Miranda, seeing herself through Clegg’s eyes and through her own self-reflection, begins to recognize what she characterizes as her ‘feyness’ (143): her artificiality, a construct of expected quotidian behaviours rather than the sum of innumerable individual choices. As her self-awareness grows, Miranda also attempts to liberate Clegg from his bad faith. She urges him to escape from the burden of his assumed, expected behaviour, imploring him to ‘to shake off the past. You’ve got to kill your aunt and the house you lived in and the people you lived with. You’ve got to be a new human being’ (76). Ironically Miranda’s failure to secure this transformation in Clegg ultimately condemns her to death. She becomes ill, and Clegg, paralyzed by indecision, allows her to succumb to pneumonia.

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In The Collector, Fowles not only interrogates individual identity, he also destabilizes other structures, challenging such ritualized stabilities, until they are subverted. An example of a myth deconstructed in The Collector is the princesse lointaine (the distant princess). Miranda is specifically referred to as une princesse lointaine (177), when the artist, and Miranda’s mentor and, it is implied, wouldbe lover, G.P., dedicates one of his pictures to her. However, many aspects of the princesse lointaine myth are subverted. Miranda is not imprisoned by Clegg in a tower, but instead, beneath the earth in a tomb-like cellar. Her jailor and potential liberating white knight is one and the same person, and ultimately, the princesse lointaine is not rescued, but instead dies after her virtue is debased as a result of her desperate attempt to seduce her captor and win her freedom. In The Collector, Fowles draws the reader’s attention to the nature of the contemporary world: its complexity, its implausible superficial division between good and evil, and its equally implausible division between the classes. The Collector is thus is an example of literary discourse which has the capacity, as Tew describes, to ‘reveal while veiling, or to produce a de-realizing “reality effect” ’ (xi), which allows one to look beyond the novel to the social and psychological condition of the individual and the society in which it was produced. By destabilizing the narrative structure and traditional mythical patterns on which it draws, the novel self-consciously exposes its own limitations. As Peter Conradi suggests, therefore, the novel can best be read as in pursuit of the particular integrity of its own incompleteness, which is to say as braving a new kind of fictional logic by which to foreground, however inconclusively, its necessary inauthenticities. (22)

The Collector exemplifies and anticipates the development of a successor to realism in British fiction in which the relationship between textuality and reality is explored. Although all of Fowles’ novels can be described as realistic in their inclusion of detail and observation, Fowles presents the reader with the sense of difficulty inherent in this attempt to reconcile reality and fiction. ‘The difficulty of [this] task,’ as Lodge writes, ‘[is] his subject’: The reality principle is never really allowed to lapse entirely – indeed, it is often invoked . . . to expose the artificiality of conventional realistic illusion . . . The kind of novelist I am talking about [Fowles] retains a loyalty to both [reality and fiction], but lacks the orthodox novelist’s confidence in the possibility of reconciling them. (105)

The Collector investigates the possibilities of realism in a manner that relinquishes and rejects the lineage of the dominant realistic narrative, and as such, is part

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of a continuum in Fowles’ work which shows a movement away from the traditionally realistic – evidenced by a problematization of rationalism, empiricism, mimetic representation and surface realism – towards alternative modes of interpreting and conveying reality such as the mythic and the historiographic, and through the intertextual relationships created between other works of fiction and the experience conveyed in the resulting interstices. This movement is, as I have suggested, in part fuelled by his interest in exploring the authenticity of individual characters in his novels, and the freedom or otherwise that they wield, as authors of their own essence. This level of innovation can be seen in a more developed system in Fowles’ next published novel, The Magus.

The Magus Unlike The Collector, which Fowles completed in only three months, by contrast The Magus was a ten-year project, first published in 1965 and then finally in a revised form in 1977. Such a prolonged creative commitment indicates the significance of this artistic project to Fowles. The Magus develops many of the key existentialist ideas identified in The Collector, including human consciousness, authenticity and freedom, and again accompanies these themes with departures from accepted norms associated with traditional realism. Like this predecessor The Magus uses the first person narrative to draw in the reader directly, with a seemingly authentic account of the life of protagonist, Nicholas Urfe, which is recalled and reflected upon retrospectively by a now more knowing and selfaware protagonist. His older self is painfully cognizant of the selfish narcissism he brandished in his early twenties at a point where the novel begins. Like Clegg, Urfe describes himself as a product of his socioeconomic and educational background, but unlike Clegg, Urfe has evidently become aware of his own inauthenticity and is less apt to use this as an excuse for his inauthentic behaviour. I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. I was sent to public school, I wasted two years doing my national service, I went to Oxford; and there I began to discover I was not the person I wanted to be. (15)

Not only a product of his education, Urfe is also a product of two world wars, and although Urfe tells us he was ‘eighteen when Hitler was dead’ (16), the spectre

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of both wars hangs over the novel, with specific events being woven directly into the narrative. The unconscious sense of a world disrupted is strong, along with the notion that culturally, events have undermined both collective stabilities and individual certainties. And yet among the actions of the young, one senses Fowles recognizes that by the 1960s the immediacy of these horrors have become diluted as he indicates by Urfe’s chilling ambivalence towards some of the events of both wars. Narcissism and the demands of the quotidian have conspired to offer a banal account of reality, a loss of depth and empathy. Urfe, like many of his contemporaries, has become desensitized. His experience of history has been mediated: through books, movie images, and newsreels. Although educated, he has no sense of the fundamental brutality and horror of war. Urfe suddenly confronts the artificiality of such a detached reaction after receiving the shocking news of his ex-girlfriend Alison Kelly’s suicide. Stunned by this loss, Urfe reflects that he has lived as if he were a character in a novel: [. . .] all my life I had tried to turn life into fiction, to hold reality away; always I had acted as if a third person was watching and listening and giving me marks for good or bad behaviour – a god like a novelist, to whom I turned, like a character with the power to please, the sensitivity to feel slighted, the ability to adapt himself to whatever he believed the novelist-god wanted. (539)

Like many events in the novel, Alison’s suicide turns out to be fake, another event orchestrated to bring about Urfe’s journey towards authenticity. However, the inauthentic nature that Urfe identifies in his own behaviour and inaction also offer an implicit criticism of the novel form itself, since it is described as a totalizing and oppressive force. The inauthenticity of both is scrutinized, deconstructed and ultimately reassembled. The novel traces Urfe’s psychological destruction and reassembly in the hands of Maurice Conchis, whom he meets on the Greek island of Phraxos. Urfe takes a teaching position there to escape a love affair with Alison, which Urfe believes has begun to place too much of an emotional burden upon him. However, his inauthenticity is a form of self-deception, and he constantly misinterprets his own emotions – significantly, the fact that he is in love with Alison. Typically dismissing any relevance to his feelings beyond animal lust, he recollects a past experience before their split: I suddenly had a feeling that we were one body, one person, even there; that if she had disappeared it would have been as if I had lost half of myself. A terrible deathlike feeling, which anyone less cerebral and self-absorbed than I was then

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would have realized was simply love. I thought it was desire. I drove her straight home and tore her clothes off. (35)

This insincerity manifests itself in Urfe’s numerous adopted guises, one of which is, ironically, the guise of ‘existentialist’, which is described in the opening pages of the novel. Urfe recalls the artificiality of his life before his experiences at Conchis’s home, Bourani. He describes membership of a club, ‘Les Hommes Révoltés’, at Oxford, which was based upon a crass misinterpretation of existentialism. Initiates of the club, he recalls,‘argued about being and nothingness and called a certain kind of inconsequential behaviour “existentialist”. Less enlightened people would have called it capricious or just plain selfish’ (17). Significantly, Urfe recalls that he and his fellow club members also misinterpreted the complex ‘metaphorical descriptions of complex modes of feeling for straightforward prescriptions of behaviour’ (17), indicating an inability for Urfe and many of his contemporaries to differentiate metaphor from mimetic representation. Nuance and subtlety have also become casualties of two world wars. Urfe’s propensity for taking the surface or literal meaning instead of seeking one that is more transcendent or at least more complete will be challenged, along with his own artificial existence, as soon as he enters Bourani. The mysterious Maurice Conchis choreographs magical masques into which Urfe is plunged, and as a result, Urfe is forced to re-examine his past and his inauthentic self in order to progress towards a more authentic future. Like Miranda and Clegg who act as mirrors for each other as Sartre’s characters did in No Exit, so too is Urfe confronted by such a mirror. But this time, the mirror is provided not by individuals, but by the entirety of his current surroundings. As Conchis warns Urfe prophetically on their first meeting at Bourani, ‘Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn [. . .]. To live. With what you are’ (99). Gradually, Urfe is confronted with the way in which he has artificially constructed his own life, casting himself and others in roles, and punishing them when they do not act as he desires. His insincerity and callousness is epitomized by the letter he leaves for Alison when he leaves for Greece. Urfe recalls that the letter ‘was supposed to sound spontaneous, but I had been composing it on and off for days’ (48), suggestive of a propensity for manipulating events and people, rather like an author. Even more reprehensible is his counterfeit sadness at his parting from Alison, a fiction he can only maintain until he disappears from Alison’s view. He reflects, with a remorse obviously kindled over time, that ‘The thing I felt most clearly, when the first corner was turned, was that I had

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escaped [. . .] I went towards Victoria as a hungry man goes towards a good dinner after a couple of glasses of Manzanilla. I began to hum, and it was not a brave attempt to hide my grief, but a revoltingly unclouded desire to celebrate my release’ (48). Urfe’s inauthenticity is exposed, ironically, by his interaction with other weavers of fictions. Maurice Conchis is the author of Urfe’s series of staged experiences, but Alison also turns out to have been complicit. The denouement of these events is Urfe’s shaming before a mock trial and his being cast out from the Edenic Bourani. The experiences all seek to heighten Urfe’s desensitized reaction to the suffering of others. One of the most significant interactions engineered by Conchis is Urfe’s interaction with Julie Holmes and her twin sister, June. Julie is cast by Conchis as love interest for Urfe. She inexplicably appears at Bourani as Conchis’ fiancée – an impossibility since forty years has passed since Conchis and she became engaged, and she remains at the age when they would have met. This implausibility forces Urfe first to doubt Conchis’ sanity and then his own, as there begins a vertiginous overturning of all that he believes to be true. First Julie pretends she is Conchis’ fiancée, then an actress paid by Conchis to act the part of his fiancée, then a victim of schizophrenia who is receiving treatment for this ailment under Conchis’ supervision. Then she claims to be under the control of Conchis against her will – forced to continue this charade and, she maintains, now in love with Urfe. Finally, she appears as Dr Vanessa Maxwell, who offers ‘evidence’ in Urfe’s ‘trial’. The stream of roles mirror Urfe’s own artificiality, adopting roles as a chameleon adopts pigmentation to suit its environment. The trial finds Urfe guilty of a multitude of transgressions, but it is not until later, after his banishment from Bourani, that he learns the true lesson of his experiences there, and it is a lesson closely bound to a fuller understanding of existentialism. After returning to England, he meets a very vulnerable woman, Jojo, whom the old Urfe would have exploited without hesitation, but his experiences have led him to make a different choice. His reflections also demonstrate a more sophisticated interpretation of existentialist authenticity than those expressed by Les Hommes Révoltés at Oxford, drawing not only from Sartre, but also from Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Elements of Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism (1946) are also evident in Urfe’s reflection, which is based on a lecture Sartre gave to defend his ideas against attacks from social and political groups that existentialism was merely selfish bourgeois contemplation, lacking social ethics. It expands the implications of individual human choice to imply a universal significance: ‘In fashioning myself I fashion

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man’ (30), and its appearance in the novel marks one of the major turning points for Urfe in the novel. Urfe reflects: [. . .] somewhere I knew I had to choose it, and every day afresh, even though I went on failing to keep it. Conchis had talked of points of fulcrum, moments when one met one’s future. I also knew it was all bound up with Alison, with choosing Alison, and having to go on choosing her every day. Adulthood was like a mountain, and I stood at the foot of this cliff of ice, this impossible and unclimbable: Thou shalt not inflict unnecessary pain. (641) [Emphasis in original]

Freedom, and more specifically, the freedom to choose one’s own response in any given situation, is at the heart of this novel, and it is exemplified by the most significant of the experiences orchestrated by Conchis. It is the thematic and physical heart of the novel: the only chapter in The Magus given its own title: Ελευθερια, or eleutheria, meaning ‘freedom’. In this climax of the experiences created for Urfe, Conchis re-enacts an event that supposedly occurred during the German occupation of Greece during the Second World War. Conchis, Urfe has learned, is condemned by some on the island as a collaborator, and Urfe receives various pieces of information to reconstruct this implied past, including the recollections of Mitford, one of Urfe’s predecessors at the school. Mitford describes Conchis as a ‘collaborator’ (44), while Demetriades, a fellow master at the school, tells Urfe that Conchis ‘worked for the Germans in the war. He never comes to the village. The villagers would kill him with stones. So would I, if I saw him’ (72). Urfe must reconcile these with Conchis’ own account, reconstructing a version of the past. This reconstruction is enhanced by the re-enactment in which he, Urfe, is cast as Conchis’ character, so he experiences the events viscerally rather than as he has led his life in the past, as detached, insulated observer. Initially, Urfe remains characteristically impressed by the metatheatre and unaffected by its narrative, perhaps because of his sense of the hierophantic possibilities of Conchis. He focuses instead on comprehending the practical logistics needed to stage this re-enactment: I calculated: thirteen men, at least half of whom were German. Cost of getting them to Greece, from Athens to the island. Equipment. Training-rehearsing. Cost of getting them off the island, back to Germany. It couldn’t be done for less than five hundred pounds. And for what? To frighten – or perhaps to impress – one unimportant person. At the same time, now that the first adrenaline panic had subsided, I felt my attitude changed. This scene was so well organized, so

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elaborate. I fell under the spell of Conchis the magician again. Frightened, but fascinated; and then there were more footsteps. (376)

As the masque progresses, Urfe realizes that he is playing the role of Conchis. Urfe is able to deduce that this is part of Conchis’ use of meta-theatre to ‘allow the participants to see through their first roles in it . . . to see through the roles we give ourselves in ordinary life’ (409). There is a direct parallel again here with the Sartrean concept of the mirror: forcing the individual to confront the inauthenticity of his own existence by revealing the roles she or he is playing. In a narrative sense, the meta-theatre has a metafictional, reflexive function, encouraging Urfe to examine the role he is assuming as well as the role he has created for himself. After the masque has concluded, Conchis tells Urfe of the decision he was required to take as mayor of the town, and of how the events that followed his decision could be interpreted in several ways; the most obvious one being that he was a collaborator. But as Urfe is now increasingly aware, surface appearance is misleading. Conchis tells Urfe about his leadership of the town as mayor, first under the innocuous Lieutenant Anton Kluber, and subsequently the vicious Colonel Wimmel. The latter personifies the ultimate terminus of the logical and the rational; he had ‘eyes like razors [. . .] without a grain of sympathy. Nothing but assessment and calculation [. . .]. They were the eyes of a machine’ (419). Wimmel’s characteristics are Urfe’s in extremis. He is detached, a calculator of risk and benefit, neither a feeler nor an empathizer. Urfe relives Conchis’ memories of being taken to the torture room, where the Greek guerrillas have been horrifically mutilated and tortured, and is coerced into encouraging one guerrilla to betray his contacts. The guerrilla’s dramatic refusal is encapsulated in one word: ‘eleutheria’ (428). In the climax of the meta-theatre, the Germans suggest Conchis might gain a reprieve for the hostages – he must kill the guerrillas in front of the Greek hostages in the village square. Conchis is handed a gun but discovers that it is not loaded. Horrified, he realizes he is expected to club the guerrillas to death. This moment represents for Conchis an existential choice, the point at which he realizes the true meaning of the guerrilla’s cry that transcends reason. Fowles’ choice of words in the following passage is significant because it repeatedly draws upon Sartre’s key vocabulary in Being and Nothingness: It was eleutheria: freedom. He was the immalleable, the essence, the beyond reason, beyond logic, beyond civilization, beyond history. He was not God, because there is no God we can know. But he was proof that there is a God that we can

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never know. He was the final right to deny. To be free to choose. He, or whatever manifested itself through him, even included the insane Wimmel, the despicable German and Austrian troops. He was every freedom, from the very worst to the very best. The freedom to desert on the battlefield at Neuve Chapelle. [. . .] The freedom to disembowel peasant girls and castrate with wire-cutters. He was something that passed beyond morality but sprang out of the very essence of things – that comprehended all, and stood against only one thing – the prohibition not to do all. (434, emphasis added)

Conchis refuses to kill the guerrillas. The hostages are executed, and he is shot and badly wounded; the stigma of having collaborated with the Germans remaining with him for the rest of his life. The centrality of human perception, both of others and of the self; of authenticity and freedom are the animating notions of this novel, and these preoccupations affect the construction of the novel, suggestive of possibilities for its development and renewal. The conclusion of The Magus offers an indication of the direction in which Fowles believed the novel should evolve. In the final paragraphs, the narrative abruptly shifts to the present tense – the fictionality of the text is exposed and foregrounded. As Urfe turns to leave Alison, the freezeframe description of action is suspended in an unresolved pause: She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense. All waits, suspended. Suspend the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people. A blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves. (656)

Through Fowles’ change in tense at the end of the novel, he may be introducing an element of indeterminacy indicative of what Mikhail Bakhtin identifies as the primary artistic and creative force of the novel and one that distinguishes it completely from other genres. Novelization, he says, ‘inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with the unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality (the openended present)’ (7). As such, The Magus epitomizes this very force. Importantly, this is not a matter of a linguistic economy for Bakhtin, but instead part of seeking an ontological knowledge through the very formulations and depictions allowed by such narrative. In allowing such a radicalizing, creative force precisely in the context of historical possibility, Fowles anticipates a central concern of the postwar British novel: the intense existential examination of the relationship between

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reality and fiction. Fowles attempts to capture for the reader, as Conchis tries to do for Urfe, a sense of the unexplained and intense nature of comprehending events beyond oneself and one’s control, illuminating a full ontological depth that defies a contracted, rationalizing language. In the original 1965 version of the novel, Urfe abandons Alison in Regent’s Park, denying any likelihood of a reunion. Alison’s attempt to change Urfe’s perspective and behaviour cannot overcome his hurt pride and anger. In the revised version of the novel, however, Fowles adds the metaphor of the cinematic freeze-frame (as quoted above) in which Alison fails to respond to Urfe’s entreaties to come back to him, and the reader must decide whether or not the two characters will reunite. This change is significant, since it indicates Fowles’ dissatisfaction with one of the conventions of traditional realistic narrative: a conclusive and unambiguous ending (the romantic reconciliation or the lament of parting). In his attempt to render a more ‘truthful’ version of contemporary experience, Fowles recognizes the inappropriateness of any such traditional ending or resolution. The innovations of The Magus evolve as a natural extension of its central preoccupation with freedom and an attempt to authentically depict the human experience and the challenges of individual authenticity. The novel was wellreceived commercially, and Malcolm Bradbury’s assessment is representative of a positive critical reception: ‘a spectacularly inventive book – not nakedly experimental, but imaginatively bold and also imaginatively self-analytical’ (28). However, Fowles’ next novel expands both the integration of Sartrean existentialism and the innovation and rejuvenation of the novel farther than any of his works.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman In The French Lieutenant’s Woman Fowles creates his most disruptively innovative and, not coincidentally, his most explicitly existential novel. The central characters in this purportedly Victorian novel are Charles Smithson, an aristocrat and amateur palaeontologist, engaged to the daughter of the aptlynamed Mr Freeman, a member of the ascendant middle class. The novel is set in 1867, when the aristocratic classes began to see an erosion in their power as they were eclipsed in number and importance by the upper middle classes. Additionally, the reader encounters emergent unrest in the servant classes, epitomized by the aspiring Sam Farrow, Smithson’s manservant. Like the novel form itself, Smithson is endangered, and he must evolve if he is to survive.

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Charles’ life is on a predictable trajectory at the beginning of the narrative, but he meets and falls in love with Sarah Woodruff, a character who epitomizes freedom. She has created her own narrative, confounding the limitations of what would have beset a woman of her class and education. In one of the novel’s historical character epigraphs, the reader is told that Sarah is a victim of a shortage of men, restricting any aspirations she might have to marry and have children of her own: In that year (1851) there were some 8,155,000 females of the age of ten upwards in the British population, as compared with 7,600,000 males. Already it will be clear that if the accepted destiny of the Victorian girl was to become a wife and mother, it was unlikely that there would be enough men to go round. E. ROYSTON PIKE , Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age. (10)

The inclusion of such historical documentation has two functions. First, it provides an anchor of realism, a façade of verisimilitude that encourages the reader to accept the accounts of the characters as authentic. This strategy supports Fowles’ intention of presenting narrative norms only to subvert and confound them. In addition to the historical information pertinent to Sarah’s predicament, the epigram also serves as a reminder of Sarah’s existential facticity; the very situation that might prevent her from realizing her authentic self, if she fails to transcend it. Sarah’s circumstances might potentially imprison her: she is poor and female, and as such, there are significant restrictions on her behaviour if she is to remain socially acceptable. The epigrams outlining the historical facts of her situation, and of those born into similar circumstances, form physical boundaries around the narrative, just as Clegg’s narrative encloses Miranda, stressing the claustrophobic nature of such quotidian norms of behaviour in which Sarah and Charles interact. Such strict codes which are transgressed quite innocently at first with an accidental meeting between Sarah and Charles will present significant risk of impropriety for both. Unlike Charles, it is obvious that Sarah has clearly chosen to exceed the boundaries of her facticity, and as such, she is the existential hero of the novel. Sarah has constructed her own narrative. She has embroidered upon an event in her past when, serving as a governess, she helped nurse a French sailor back to health. The story retold by the gossips of Lyme Regis, initiated by Sarah herself, is that the sailor, Varguennes, promised to marry her, lured her to Exeter on a false pretext, seduced her, and then abandoned her. This would be morally suspect and makes of her a social pariah, but as Charles later discovers, the account is untrue since she is a virgin before their first and final sexual union.

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However, Sarah, in creating this narrative, has also opened up a level of freedom that would otherwise have been denied a single woman with no prospects of marriage. As she tells Charles, she almost pities the inhabitants of Lyme Regis, because, ‘I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame, can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant’s Whore’ (153). Sarah’s final desperate act is to seduce Charles and conceive his child, therefore securing a family of her own. She engineers their meeting, taking a room at Endicotte’s Family Hotel and feigning a sprained ankle, forcing Charles to visit her alone in her room. She flouts all norms of respectability and doing so makes his seduction easier to accomplish. Sarah’s note to Charles, sharing with him her location at the hotel, presents Charles with his existential choice, and Fowles describes it in those terms, replete with the anguish that accompanies such awareness: But above all it seemed to set Charles a choice; and while one part of him hated having to choose, we come near the secret of his state on that journey west when we know that another part of him felt intolerably excited by the proximity of the moment of choice. He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was really a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom – that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror. (296)

Charles’ sexual union with Sarah, in which he becomes aware that she was in fact a virgin, signals a new phase where the veils are repeatedly stripped from his eyes and propels Charles into a series of actions. Charles’ reluctance to embrace this choice, his delay in informing Sarah of his decision to break off his engagement to Ernestina and marry her, is the flaw that ultimately dooms their relationship. Charles’ sense of disquiet at his own existence is only gradually introduced to the reader and to Charles himself. His unease is described in terms that stress Charles’s facticity and his own sense of being an inevitable ‘victim’ of that reality. For example, Charles describes a meeting with his future father-in-law, to whom he feels socially superior, yet he leaves feeling ‘like a badly stitched sample napkin, in all ways a victim of evolution. Those old doubts about the futility of his existence were only too easily reawakened’ (250). In an attempt to subvert his disquiet, Smithson, rather than analysing the root of this anxiety, flees into the arms of a prostitute, to whom he is attracted because of her resemblance to Sarah. A combination of anxiety and too much alcohol conspire to bring about

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another existential crisis, described again in those terms, although Fowles’ informs us that ‘Charles’s was the very opposite of the Sartrean experience’ (278), the reader assumes because of the impoverished nature of the prostitute’s room compared to the Sartrean bourgeois life, that he has not transcended his despair. When Charles learns that the prostitute’s name is also Sarah, it brings about a physical collapse, and he flees the room, determined to bury his unhappiness by embracing his predestined future with Ernestina. Sarah, he believes, simply represents another path not taken, and he is ready to cast those choices away. Using numerous allusions to his facticity, to ‘fossilization’, and being trapped in an existent pattern of behaviour, Charles appears to abdicate control of his life, quite literally, as he chooses inaction – sleep – over any attempt to engage with the choices he has before him: [. . .] she was merely the symbol around which had accreted all his lost possibilities, his extinct freedoms, his never-to-be-taken journeys. He had to say farewell to something; she was merely and conveniently both close and receding. There was no doubt. He was one of life’s victims, one more ammonite caught in the vast movements of history, stranded now for eternity, a potential turned to a fossil. After a while he committed the ultimate weakness: he fell asleep. (289)

After this event, the novel and Charles’ own journey specifically take a precipitous series of twists and turns. Fowles confounds readerly expectations by providing four possible endings to the novel. The first sees Charles reunited with Ernestina, where they ‘did not live happily ever after; but they lived together’ (292). This ‘happy ending’ is rejected by the implied author as Charles simply musing about his own possible future, which he supposedly declines to follow in favour of one of several optional futures. These are described in the subsequent chapters of the novel, emphasizing the thematic significance of choices, which are available not only to the characters but also, it is suggested, to the reader. Fowles equates Charles’ actions with ours, as readers. Like Charles, we too muse about our own possible futures as a way of determining which choice to make; in other words, he suggests that the human experience is fraught with options that we must negotiate every day. Injecting himself again into the narrative, Fowles reminds the reader that: [. . .] so are we all novelists, that is, we have a habit of writing fictional futures for ourselves [. . .]. We screen in our minds hypotheses about how we might behave, about what might happen to us; and these novelistic or cinematic hypotheses often have very much more effect on how we actually do behave, when the real future becomes the present, than we generally allow. (295)

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Charles’ ultimate choice is to reject Ernestina and pursue Sarah. His confrontation of his inauthentic self is an unravelling, which is described using images and vocabulary familiar to the Sartrean reader. Specifically, the image of the mirror recurs. As in No Exit, this allows Charles to be seen as if by another perceiving subject. The mirror has appeared earlier in the novel, after his first meeting with Sarah, when Charles is as yet only dimly aware of his own inauthenticity which manifests itself as a vague disquiet. He catches sight of himself in the mirror when he returns to his rooms: Back in his rooms at the White Lion after lunch Charles stared at his face in the mirror. His thoughts were too vague to be described. But they comprehended mysterious elements; a sentiment of obscure defeat not in any way related to the incident on the Cobb, but to certain trivial things he had said at Aunt Tranter’s lunch, to certain characteristic evasions he had made; to whether his interest in palaeontology was a sufficient use for his natural abilities; to whether Ernestina would ever really understand him as well as he understood her; to a general sentiment of dislocated purpose originating perhaps in no more – as he finally concluded – than the threat of a long and now wet afternoon to pass. After all, it was only 1867. He was only thirty-two years old. And he had always asked life too many questions. (15)

Significantly, Charles dismisses this disquiet as boredom, which recalls Roquentin’s boredom in Nausea. The latter’s boredom, however, is so extreme that it is described as ‘the profound heart of existence, the very matter I am made of ’ (Nausea, 157), but the boredom, in both cases, obscures the nausea provoked by an encounter with freedom and its innumerable choices. After his sole sexual encounter with Sarah, Charles’ identity becomes fractured beyond all repair or denial. He storms from the hotel room and to a church where he is horrified by his inability to talk to God. His agnosticism, a necessary consequence of his belief in Darwin and Lyall, has severed this path towards this form of abdication of responsibility for the choices that confront him. In the absence of an interlocutor, his ‘dialogue began to form, between his better and his worse self – or perhaps between him and that spreadeagled figure in the shadows at the church’s end’ (312); Fowles’ thus emphasizes the schism that has occurred as the self acknowledges and confronts the inauthentic. In the church after this dialogue, the reality of Charles existence confronts him in what might be read as the emotional and dramatic climax of the novel. Here, Charles realizes that his life up to this point has been inauthentic, devoid of freedom. He has been fossilized; an apt metaphor that reflects his imprisonment

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in the time he inhabits, or in Sartrean parlance, his life has been trapped by his facticity. Again Fowles’ description is rich with Sartrean allusions (italics are mine) and the dominant concluding emotion is one of encountering an abyss, nothingness: He seemed as he stood there to see all his age, its tumultuous life, its iron certainties and rigid conventions, its repressed emotion and facetious humour, its cautious science and incautious religion, its corrupt politics and immutable castes, as the great hidden enemy of all his deepest yearnings. That was what had deceived him; and it was totally without love or freedom . . . but also without thought, without intention, without malice, because the deception was in its very nature; and it was not human, but a machine. That was the vicious circle that haunted him; that was the failure, the weakness, the cancer, the vital flaw that had brought him to what he was: more an indecision than a reality, more a dream than a man, more a silence than a word, a bone than an action. And fossils! He had become, while still alive, as if dead. It was like coming to a bottomless brink. (315)

The schism is exacerbated when he confronts Ernestina, having decided that he must break off their engagement. The mirrored reflection that he sees after this event is not only the Sartrean vehicle of objective perception, but also the physical manifestation of the rupture between his authentic and artificial self. Such is the rupture, he can perceive himself as if in two separate worlds; most disturbing to Charles is that the reflection in the mirror, the one he is now able to see as perceiving subject, is the authentic one: He caught sight of himself in a mirror; and the man in the mirror, Charles in another world, seemed the true self. The one in the room was what she said, an impostor; had always been, in his relations with Ernestina, an impostor, an observed other. (330)

As if to confirm the inauthenticity that his age perpetuates by virtue of its suffocating rules, traditions and conventions, Ernestina also reacts to the broken engagement in a predictable, Victorian female fashion: she slumps with studied artificiality into a delicate heap, horrifying Charles in her falsehood, her ‘catatonia of convention’ (331). She epitomizes the culturally conditioned construct that Charles has rejected. Charles’ fractured state, which is rendered physically in the schism described above, his feeling of being alienated by his time and culture as a result of his decision to reject duty and tradition in order to marry Ernestina, is augmented in the novel by Fowles’ blurring of orders of being in the novel and his

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disorientating inclusion of multiple endings. These disruptive strategies replicate for the reader a vicarious experience of Charles’ ontological confusion. The blurring between the two orders of being, the fictive and the real world (i.e., the lived world of the author) is accomplished severally throughout the novel, but increasingly as the novel progresses in three specific ways: first by including epigrams from historical sources as discussed above, which draws the historical into the fictive; second by anchoring fictional characters to the historically real, as he does by insisting an (impossible) historical link between the life of the author and characters in the novel. For example, Fowles claims that Mary, Sam Farrow’s future wife in the novel, has a ‘great-great-granddaughter, who is twenty-two years old this month I write in, [who] much resembles her ancestor; and her face is known over the entire world, for she is one of the more celebrated younger English film actresses’ (68). And third, by direct intertextual linking, including characters in his novel derived from another work of fiction, almost contemporaneous with the setting of his novel. Specifically here I am referring to Sam Farrow, whose namesake, Sam Weller, originates in The Pickwick Papers. The effect is compounded further because it is suggested that Sam’s character is supposedly aware of his fictive origins, obscuring these ontological divisions still further: Of course to us any Cockney servant called Sam evokes immediately the immortal Weller; and it was certainly from that background that this Sam had emerged. But thirty years had passed since Pickwick Papers first coruscated into the world. Sam’s love of the equine was not really very deep. He was more like some modern working-class man who thinks a keen knowledge of cars a sign of his social progress. He even knew of Sam Weller, not from the book, but from a stage version of it; and knew the times had changed. (41)

Making the ontological connection between the fictional world and the real world initially has the conventionally accepted effect (establishing plausibility via adopting the convention of historical realism – assertion, objective, factual proof or scientific evidence) but in this fictional context, it simply highlights the distance between the two worlds. Finally, complementing the state of confusion faced by Charles as he wrestles with his existential choices, the reader too is faced with a choice. The often-cited multiple endings to The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which strongly suggest, if synthesized, concurrent possibilities rather than end-states, can be interpreted to imply Fowles’ rejection of a narrow mimesis. The implied author transcends even this previous intrusion to facilitate the second and third endings, by writing himself into the narrative, and taking a watch from his pocket, supposedly to

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adjust his watch backward to accommodate a reversal of time so that alternative plot variants might be explored. The implied author accepts that he is flouting a ‘time-proven rule of the novelist’s craft’ (394) in introducing this new character (i.e., himself) at such a late stage in the novel, drawing attention to the very fact that adhering to conventions of narrative fiction are not of primary concern, and nor are any attempts at preserving a façade of realism for the reader: He makes a small adjustment to the time. It seems . . . that he was running a quarter of an hour fast. It is doubly strange for there is no visible clock by which he could have discovered the error in his own timepiece. (394)

The second ending sees Charles introduced by Sarah to his daughter, Lalage, and suggests that the two lovers might well be reconciled. Rewinding fifteen minutes, there is a third ending: Charles’ realization, in the closing words of the novel that the mythic Sarah is beyond the restrictive bounds of convention, given that she can be regarded as: not a symbol, is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice; but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into the city’s iron heart, endured. And out again, upon the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea. (399)

In these three novels of the 1960s, John Fowles explores the ways in which individuals navigate an increasingly complex world. His central characters either actively make choices in a pattern of self-construction or passively surrender to their respective circumstances, respectively the Sartrean models of authenticity or bad faith. However, Fowles also attempts to make artistic choices that undermine narrative conventions, extending the Sartrean metaphor to encompass the creative process itself. Freedom is explored in his novels, both in terms of the ways in which we engage directly and repeatedly with the decisions that confront us and also in the ways in which we navigate accepted artistic patterns. This concept not only animates his characters but also, ultimately, leads to a radical reinvention of narrative fiction.

Notes 1 The Nobel Prize nomination occurred in 1999; the letter containing the proposal is held at the Harry Ransom Centre for the Humanities in Austin, Texas, in the Ray Roberts Collection (Box 15, folder 3).

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2 There are nineteen uses of the word ‘game’ in Clegg’s account of his imprisonment of Miranda Grey, all used in a context of the game he perceives she is playing to attempt to escape. 3 Fowles’ discussion of this alternative title occurs in the introduction to the revised version of The Magus (10).

Works cited Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Michael Holquist (ed.). Trans. by Caryl Emerson. University of Texas Press Slavic Series: No. 1. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Barth, John. ‘The Literature of Exhaustion.’ The Atlantic Monthly. 220 (2) 1967: 29–34. Bradbury, Malcolm. ‘John Fowles’ “The Magus.” ’ In Sense and Sensibility in TwentiethCentury Writing: A Gathering in Memory of Willia Van O’Connor. Brom Weber (ed.). Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques. Carbondale, IL : Southern Illinois University Press, 1970. Buford, Bill. ‘Editorial.’ Granta, September 1979: 1. Campbell, James. ‘An Interview with John Fowles.’ Contemporary Literature. 17 (4) 1976: 455–69. Conradi, Peter. John Fowles. Contemporary Writers. London: New York: Methuen, 1982. Fowles, John. The Collector. London: Jonathan Cape, 1986 [1963]. ———. The Aristos. London: Triad/Granada, 1981 [1964]. ———. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. London: Triad/Granada, 1985 [1969]. ———. The Magus: A Revised Version. London: Triad Grafton, 1985 [1977]. Kierkegaard, Soren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie. 3rd edn. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1974. Lodge, David. ‘The Novelist at the Crossroads.’ Critical Quarterly. 11, 1969: 105–32. Palmer, William. The Fiction of John Fowles: Tradition, Art, and the Loneliness of Selfhood. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions, 1964. ———. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1966. ———. ‘Existentialism and Humanism.’ In Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings. Stephen Priest (ed.). London: Routledge, 2000. 25–46. Tew, Philip. The Contemporary British Novel. London and New York: Continuum, 2007. Vipond, Dianne L. ‘John Fowles: Roy Newquist/1963.’ In Conversations with John Fowles. Literary Conversations Series. Jackson, MI : University Press of Mississippi, 1999. 1–8.

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Experimental British Fiction of the Sixties: Five Meta-modern Novelists Philip Tew

Writing in The Fourfold Tradition (1961) as the 1960s began, Rayner Heppenstall commented upon the parochialism characterizing many British writers: ‘In this country, there has been a strong reaction against all varieties of interiormonologue, stream-of-consciousness writing’ (157).1 In such a vein in 1962, William van O’Connor contrasted modernism with newer writing, stating confidently: ‘English fiction in the years since World War II has produced a new kind of protagonist. He is a rather seedy young man and suspicious of all pretentions’ (168).2 After 1945 the literary establishment trumpeted modernism’s decline. William Cooper dismissed such ‘superannuated art’ (32), declaring ‘We meant to write a different kind of novel from that of the thirties and we saw that the thirties novel, the Experimental Novel, had got to be brushed out of the way [. . .]’ (29).3 Bernard Bergonzi felt modernism by 1930 ‘had largely exhausted itself, and the possibilities of the realistic novel had been fully exploited’ (20). Alan Sinfield notes ‘the political impetus of British anti-Modernism in the 1950s [. . .]’ (184).4 In Postwar British Fiction: New Accents and Attitudes (1962) James Gindin claims of the novel between the High Modernists and the fifties ‘the genre lost energy’ (7); in the fifties the Movement rediscovered what James Clements calls ‘an attempted return to realism’ (6). Sinfield indicates this fundamentally Leavisite group ‘acknowledged an allegiance to the Scrutiny school’ (183) generally opposing experimental writing.5 Such simplistic, fallacious accounts of literary avant-gardism’s decline are misleading, yet were embraced contemporaneously by most scholars in university English departments. In 2007 in ‘Introduction: British Fiction After Modernism’ Lyndsey Stonebridge and Marina MacKay parody such once unquestioned post-war assumptions (1). Instead, they offer a nuanced sketch of how much experimental writing persisted (3), when ‘late modernism continues 193

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to splinter into the gritty concerns of mid-century writing’ (2). However, they describe how post-war critics such as Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge created antinomies of experimentalism and realism, with the latter in ascendance (3–4), adding: ‘Modernism exhausted the form, Bernard Bergonzi argued in 1970: “the post-war novelist has inherited a form whose principal characteristic is novelty, or stylistic dynamism, and yet nearly everything possible to be achieved has already been done” ’ (4). However, by 1970 even Bergonzi in The Situation of the Novel identifies hesitantly a new cadre of authors creating reflexive fiction influenced by eighteenth-century predecessors (including Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne), his chapter equivocally entitled ‘Beyond Fiction’ (188–213). By 1977 Bradbury admitted ‘However, it now seems more important to stress that many of the best English writers of the 1950s were not intrinsically anti-experimental; more often they were simply defined as such by the critics who read them’ (17). This chapter considers five 1960s experimental novelists further illustrating and interrogating the brief critical cartography above, closely analysing key novels published by Wilson Harris, Rayner Heppenstall, B.S. Johnson, Ann Quin and Muriel Spark in that decade. All drew upon fiction produced by Britishbased avant-gardists of the 1940s and 1950s, largely marginalized writers such as Anna Kavan, Heppenstall, Philip Toynbee and Stefan Themerson. A key figure across post-war avant-garde circles, importantly Heppenstall became de facto mentor for a coterie of younger experimentalists led from around 1960 by B.S. Johnson. Unlike Andrzej Gasiorek I do not classify such experimental post-war novelists as proto-postmodernists, regarding their bridging texts instead as representing a materialist meta-modernism, explicitly extending and radicalizing modernist techniques (drawing variously on James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, in particular). Such work intensifies an externalized hyper-realism, shifting attitudinal patterns away from the intensely personal to a more spatialized social consciousness, expressed through shifting ideological and class perspectives. In 1959 in ‘Realism and the Contemporary Novel’ Raymond Williams concludes of Virginia Woolf ’s elitism specifically (by implication also including other Modernist writers): ‘this is not only social exclusiveness or snobbery, though it can be diagnosed in such ways, but also a failure to realize the nature of the general social element in their own lives’ (207) [emphasis in original]. As explored in the textual analysis that follows, meta-modernist fiction foregrounds five radically different orientations: first, commonplace settings, focusing on the minutiae of utterly mundane lives; second, aesthetic self-consciousness

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(expressed implicitly or explicitly) concerning relations between authorship, narration and society; third, challenges to privileged class structures, a perspective alien to most Modernists;6 and fourth an ironic (often almost abbreviated) style drawn from 1950s comic realism, as identified by Clements, which ‘gave the neorealist novel a dry and documentary tone [. . .]’ (6). In determining a period beyond the one defined in terms of modernism – which as Andreas Huyssen argues in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986) is characterized by ‘a volatile relationship between high art and mass culture. [. . .] Modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and mass culture’ (vii) – Fredric Jameson identifies a fifth aspect: I think that it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism. (16)7

Such democratizing meta-modern voices not only reject deference and previously held social norms (associated with elitism), but sustain an underlying concept of potential ideological authenticity. Johnson says of the contemporary writer in his ‘Introduction’ to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs (1973): ‘If he is serious, he will be making a statement which attempts to change society toward a condition he conceives to be better, and he will be making at least implicitly a statement of faith in the evolution of the form in which he is working’ (16). Like avant-garde contemporaries, the fiction of Harris, Heppenstall, Johnson, Quin and Spark synthesizes class-consciousness with a residual fundamentally anti-elite and therefore anti-Arnoldian notion of the redemptive and radicalizing capacity of fiction for enhancing social and political consciousness.8 Unlike modernist authors meta-modern writers attitudinally regard writing as primarily a material, social practice, where concretion prevails, for as Williams observes: ‘Most description is still realistic, in the sense that describing the object as it actually appears is a principle few novelists would dissent from’ (202). In contrast, Sinfield describes a Modernist view where regarding ‘ “Art” and “Literature” [. . .]: they are believed to be the product of mysterious forces working through a creative genius whose vision soars above material conditions, society, politics’ (28). Such idealism was parodied by B.S. Johnson, in Albert Angelo (1964) whose protagonist, Albert Albert, aspires to be an architect, admitting ‘Of course, I would really like to be designing a Gothic cathedral, all crockets and finials and flying buttresses, but I must be of my time, ahead of my time, rather, using the materials of my time [. . .]’ (107). In Muriel

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Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) whose eponymous protagonist – based closely on Spark’s teacher Christine Kay – while pretending to teach tenyear-old pupils English grammar, offers her own artistic predilections as universal verities to value:9 ‘Meantime I will tell you about my last summer holiday in Egypt . . . I will tell you about care of the skin, and of the hands . . . about the Frenchman I met in the train to Biarritz . . . and I must tell you about the Italian paintings I saw. Who is the greatest Italian painter?’ ‘Leonardo da Vinci, Miss Brodie.’ ‘That is incorrect. The answer is Giotto, he is my favourite.’ (11)

At one level through Spark's use of parody Brodie banalizes the artistic preferences expressed emphatically by the Bloomsbury Group, whose world-view incorporated a creative, questioning sexualized self, which Jesse Wolfe summarizes: their sense that the burden of a meaningfully lived life falls largely on its romantic and sexual partnerships. Because moderns felt their milieu in transformation, they were compelled to redefine, rather than inherit, their roles as friends, lovers, and spouses. (2)10

Brodie exudes self-indulgence and wilful rebellion, emphasizing aloofness, mirroring Williams’ commentary recorded in ‘The Bloomsbury Faction’ (published in 1980) identifying ‘not only the cliquishness of the self-conscious advanced group. The frankness could modulate into tones of quite extraordinary rudeness about, and to, the “hopeless” ’ (154). Below I will consider the fiction of the meta-modern writers according to their age, oldest first, Heppenstall followed by Spark, Harris, Johnson and Quin (born 1911, 1918, 1921, 1933 and 1936, so respectively forty-nine, forty-two, thirty-nine, twenty-seven and twenty-four in 1960). Heppenstall’s The Connecting Door (1962) and The Woodshed (1962) are darkly autobiographical narratives, spatially precise, yet each protagonist’s memories sometimes rendering characters and events vague. Present consciousness is vertiginous, the protagonists compelled to account for the past, while facing both the inscrutability of the future and the inevitability of death. The Connecting Door concerns successive visits to an unnamed city (clearly Strasbourg, where Heppenstall studied as a student) on the Rhine in Alsace by protagonist Harold Atha, aged nineteen in 1931, referred to as ‘Harold’. Later called ‘Atha’ combined with various pejorative descriptors aged twenty-four in 1936, by 1948 remaining an unnamed narrator aged thirty-six. This last brief journalistic trip contains

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retrospective, episodic reminiscences of the other two visits. All three become singular, moments randomly conjoined, as if the three selves co-exist, seemingly interacting. Cumulative, overlapping meanings emerge. A layered aural cityscape dominates the opening: successive pealing bells, tram noises, and the murmurings of by-passers. Restored as French territory after the Second World War, the city’s German identity diminishes. Children’s voices negotiate the change: ‘They sing French folk-songs. Because their nursery background has not been French, they are learning the familiar ones’ (10), emphasizing not only cultural transition, but the evident aftermath of the recent conflict. The focus shifts to young Harold’s initial journey, his juvenile flirtations: On the boat, he took up with a girl who was going to Switzerland as a children’s nurse. It was a night crossing. In adjacent deck-chairs, the two snuggled together under one hired rug, their foreheads and noses tormented by the same smuts. On the Bâle express, they had breakfast and luncheon together. At lunch they shared a bottle of sweet Muscat. Afterwards, they went on embracing in the compartment. (18)

Such intense, brief intimacy evokes libidinous youth and inexperience. Atha searches for traces of Annelies, another lost love who later married an older man. Certain descriptions are imbued with clarity, such as his view from a Pullman carriage. ‘A narrow road ran parallel with the railway. Along it moved an ox-cart. No doubt it creaked or rumbled, but, to me, shut in with the train noises, it was silent. The bullocks were long-horned, cream or pale buff, silky’ (13). The author mixes elegy and nostalgia with self-censure, an unusual synthesis. He is sympathetic towards Harold, finding Atha muddled, negative: I do not like him as well as I like young Harold, though Harold is a bit sorrowful at the moment. This is because of Annelies, the girl in the Orangerie. Atha’s bad circumstances were financial, amatory and religious. His London address is a rather old-fashioned Bohemian one. When I get back, I ought to inspect it. He is supposed to be in love with a dancer, a ballerina. His handwriting is pretty but illegible. One at first thought that he was in love ‘with a ballista.’ This seemed odd. One hoped that it was not a tergo. It is not. (47)

Despite his verbal playfulness, Atha’s trauma is centripetal, linked to experiences ascending the roof of the Minster, a symbol of existential fear and desire, its chiming, thunderous bell reminiscent of death (77): ‘That morning’s Atha did not count the steps. He made angry fun of me for counting them this morning. It was, he gave me to understand, the kind of thing that only a journalist would

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do. As a matter of fact, he is right’ (67). Atop a third time he recollects two previous vertiginous encounters, peering down from the cathedral’s south tower, a view familiar to Goethe, whose observations concerning his own explicit fears are footnoted. You can’t climb beyond this point. There is an iron grating, how recent I don’t know. Neither young Harold nor cold-weather Atha remembers it, but perhaps that isn’t strange. In my journalist’s rôle, I have a note here which clearly indicates that it wasn’t here a hundred and fourteen years ago. (70–71)

In all three visits personal, political and historical dimensions intersect, coalescing, disturbingly surreal. The narrator interrogates young Harold about Annelies (79–80), echoing his inner debate about past motivations. Other memories erupt vividly into the present consciousness from sleep: There were the pale-cream, silky oxen along the road, the houses, the crops and the Minster spire, the grey station, the two of them there to meet me, young Harold and not-so-young Atha, then Anton Walbrook, my room, Jeanne, breakfast, the parallel sheets of light through the white iron blinds, the sounds from the next room, the telephones in the small hours. At whatever time I awake, bells are ringing. (97)

The repeated motifs of oxen and bells, the rapidly accumulating details synthesize visual and auditory images, mirroring a reflexive, retrospective, impressionistic writerly consciousness. His mind appears jumbled, confused, but attentive readers reconstruct the central romance and other key interactions with friends and acquaintances. At the enigmatic ending, the very forces of history might either drive characters apart or draw them together. Later events featured more fully in The Woodshed are briefly prefigured: ‘A thing which the near future held in store for me was that my father died’ (133). Atha anticipates his encounter with a woman in her train compartment (mirroring his arrival, another apparent symmetry), but remains uncertain whether the occupant is Annelies or Madame Zix, who resemble each other. He concludes pleasure is possible, not romance: ‘That is all. I shall be granted no revelation about the long significance of my own life. No imaginative creation will be finished’ (163). So teasingly, the narrative ends abruptly, Atha poised to open the door, the occupant’s identity unrevealed. The Woodshed is reflexive, incorporating a quasi-autobiographical stream of consciousness within a multi-chronic structure. Harold Atha describes returning from Wales to industrial Hinderholme in Yorkshire, to visit his dying father. Ironically he later reveals: ‘He had been dead four hours when I got my sister’s telegram this morning’ (34). His recollections are replete with everyday life’s

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minutiae, detailing his tortuous path through education and conflictual familial relations, retrospectively mapping his estrangement. Although non-linear, his current experience is focused, over four days in 1948, Thursday to Sunday. Atha traces his father’s failures, exploring the pair’s inability to communicate, evoking his parent’s many inadequacies, even while imagining his death. ‘[F]ailure, not a boggart, gibbers down onto his turning head. In every direction, his life stretches aridly about him’ (29). Initially random, overlaying Atha’s memories are his various reflections, first, on sharing a carriage with holidaymakers returning to Birmingham and, second, related to the borrowed seaside cottage shared with his family. His various fancies, projections and observations include some about the owner’s art: Poor Gwladys. It is, I am sure, a good thing that her pottery fetches a high price in Chelsea and Wigmore Street. As to her pictures, it is simply that, once we had closed the door on Gwaelod, I, at least, would rather have had done for the day with lobster-pots, seagulls, lighthouses, upturned boats and drying nest. Those high-pitched colours and disarticulated forms suddenly gain intensity under an artificial light. (13)

His objections offer an ironic sense of location. His subsequent focus concerns an ironic, quasi-comic account of fiction, subtly subverting his own method as a writer: In a train, your consciousness streams like a cold. Mr A. regrets. Mr. A. is confined to his carriage with a streaming consciousness. If I had a secretary sitting opposite with a shorthand notebook, or a dictaphone, I could just talk like this. They reckon about ten thousand words to the hour. In a journey of eight hours, you could finish a book. Change the names, and you’d have a stream-ofconsciousness novel. A man travelling somewhere for a purpose. What had led up to it, hopes and fears, retrospect and apprehension mingling, things noted as the landscape slid by. At the end, some kind of pay-off. (18)

Flippant self-parody allows Heppenstall to undercut both his narrative intentions and authorial status, while introducing a wry self-consciousness, which echo Nathalie Sarraute’s observations in 1950 of the novel in ‘The Age of Suspicion’: not only has the novelist ceased to believe in his characters, but the reader, too, is unable to believe in them; with the result that the characters, having lost the twofold support that the novelist’s and the reader’s faith afforded them, and which permitted them to stand upright with the burden of the entire story resting on their broad shoulders, may now seem to vacillate and fall apart. (55)

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Heppenstall’s holidaymakers remain stereotypes, not individuals: ‘The men with their clean, open-necked, white shirts, the women in freshly ironed cotton frocks, one of the women really very handsome in a big, opulent way that reminded me of Auntie Ada, all of them lobster-pink and smelling of sun and sea’ (10). Comic and darker episodes are interpolated, including returning from a student trip to the Rhineland (recently revisited), requiring money to return from Brussels, a fellow student applying to Atha’s father for funds on his son’s behalf, much to Atha’s embarrassment and annoyance.11 On arrival Atha retells his family history, its long association through work with the local Co-op, exploring photographs, detailing their contexts and his sensations at the funeral.12 A series of intimacies, traumas, disappointments, misunderstandings, many related to death and physical injury contribute to a negative or anti-Bildungsroman. He explores homosexual fixation on him by another pupil at school, Peter Holmes, ‘quiet, petal-skinned, unbroken-voiced, not good at games, lacking in physical boldness’ (154) and his own infatuation with ‘Connie, a rosy, big-bosomed girl whose reputation was somewhat blown on, because she had been observed to go out driving with the son of the head of the engineering works, at which she worked as a clerk or secretary’ (159–60). In June 1927 Atha recollects glimpsing from the woodshed in his newlymarried cousin’s yard her husband, Gordon, seemingly enraged, later revealed to be hanging himself from a meat hook. He didn’t shout at me, but clearly he was sending me away. In fact he seemed in a towering rage. He glared. His eyes almost popped with fury. His face was more darkly congested than ever. (177)

Another death follows when ‘on a hot afternoon, the Rev. Mr Allendale went down from the school-house to the Armoury and shot himself with one of the cavalry carbines we’d used for drilling with in the O.T.C.’ (179). Atha reflects whether ‘if I had not so quickly been driven away by what I took for so improbable a bit of mere face-pulling’ (181) he might have saved the man. A homosexual scandal related to the local football team is implicated. The novel ends with a ‘Coda’ (185) where Atha returns to Hinderholme, considering whether to return more frequently: ‘My roots were there, after all. Roots. Another dead metaphor. Men are not plants’ (187). His mother moves, severing his connection. ‘And so I suppose I have finished with Hinderholme. It won’t matter. This is not the centre of my life’ (188). Heppenstall’s memorial novel ends not with the aftermath of death. Having successively rejected metaphors concerning the act of writing, he concludes with another striking one for memory:

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If consciousness streams, it is backward. Or, rather, it is like the slack tide in an estuary. As I approach London, no doubt new urgencies will begin. At present, it is almost as though I were out at sea, glossily calm. If I again let down the deep trawl of memory, I should bring up dabs and elvers by the ton. The catch would be to throw back. (189)

Mourning has compelled Atha to suspend normal life, and, unwillingly immerse himself in his past, finally an aesthetically fruitful, if painful process, mirrored in Johnson’s Trawl (1966). Muriel Spark’s novels published early in the 1960s – The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), and The Girls of Slender Means (1963) – foreground the apparent trivialities of life; yet one senses a cumulative importance of such minutiae. Spark’s experimental or avant-garde qualities lie largely in narrative intensity, a deceptive lightness of style detailing dark themes, and self-consciousness of form.13 Brian W. Shaffer notes, ‘Spark’s novels possess the linguistic compression and subtlety of poetry’ (89). Such lyricism is mirrored by structural subtleties; images and vocabulary are repeated. Episodes overlap, each informing the others, past, present and future coalescing, creating both inevitability and poignancy. Early revelations deny suspense. Spark reinforces the obsessions and inexperience of youth through various colloquial, gossipy and demotic, phrases, recirculated, brief description mixed with pithy dialogue. Characters might be focused on the moment, yet Spark offers a universality through the narrators’ knowing revelation of outcomes in advance, synthesizing the exaggerations and grotesqueries of life to achieve what Roger Kimball calls ‘Gothic realism [. . .]’ (N.Pag.). The Ballad of Peckham Rye’s opening is dynamic, impressionistic. An initially unnamed youth, Humphrey Place, hammers on a front door, seeking Dixie unsuccessfully. Refused entry by her mother he drives to the Rye Hotel, where a regular comments ‘He was that fellow that walked out on his wedding a few weeks ago’ (7). The controversy continues in the Harbinger pub: ‘ “It wouldn’t have happened if Dougal Douglas hadn’t come here,” a woman remarked’ (7) and Humphrey is ejected by a barmaid for tussling with Trevor Lomas, his best man. The action contrasts starkly what Jan Gorak describes as the novel’s ‘insipid milieu. [. . .] A drab south London dormitory suburb [. . .]’ (29). The narrator retrospectively describes the wedding day, and Dixie’s responses to Humphrey’s visit and that of Trevor. Feelings are implicit, subsumed into action. Trevor gave a short laugh. ‘We’ll run him out of Peckham like we run Dougal Douglas.’

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Gossip prevails, centred largely on Meadows, Meade & Grindley, a textile factory, such events part of an urban myth. As Gorak says ‘the space of Peckham, bland as it may appear, contains a latent disruptive reserve’ (30) of negative emotions; he affirms that the use of ballad in Spark’s title refers to ‘a stranger universe of unchallengeable requests and inexplicable journeys, where the distinctions between life and death have narrowed and unpredictable violence perpetually invades’ (31). Gorak also indicates the long history of violence of pre-urban Peckham Rye (33). In the second chapter Dougal is interviewed by the firm’s Managing Director, Mr Druce, revealed as having a long-term affair with his secretary, Miss Coverdale. She opines her fate to Dougal, who remains disinterested, exploiting her. Spark negates suspense, a major dynamic of traditional fiction – which strategy recurs in both The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means – focusing instead on cause, effect and morality. Nevertheless in The Ballad of Peckham Rye the narrator reveals without anticipation the appalling result of Druce’s jealousy, responding to Miss Coverdale paying attention to Dougal: ‘What else was between you and him?’ he said, raising his voice above the roar of the television. He came toward her with the corkscrew and stabbed it into her long neck nine times, and killed her. Then he took his hat and went home to his wife. (136)

Spark ironizes suspense, for this unexpected, jealous rage is not climactic, reduced by her matter-of-fact style to a mundane, passing event.14 Spark subverts what Williams describes in ‘Realism and the Contemporary Novel’ as ‘the old static realism of the passive observer [which] is merely a hardened convention’ (212). Central to the text is Dougal’s allusion to two humps on his scalp, residual signs horns supposedly removed in his youth, emphasizing his devilish nature, prone to meddling, stirring situations and evoking transgression. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie images of fascism recur. Brodie has a ‘picture of Mussolini’s marching troops’ (31), and the narrative reflects ‘Mussolini stood on a platform like a gym teacher or a Guides mistress and watched them’ (31). Sandy ponders ‘Perhaps the Guides were too much a rival fascisti, and Miss Brodie could not bear it’ (32). She betrays her mentor’s beliefs to the headmistress (125), although later as a nun she ironically encounters rabid extremism: ‘By now she had entered the Catholic Church, in whose ranks she had found quite a

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number of Fascists much less agreeable than Miss Brodie’ (125). As Judy Suh says of Brodie’s manipulations ‘Miss Brodie’s overt control is most visible in her predictions concerning the girls’ futures. As players in the teacher’s vision and vice versa, the students’ lives are dictated for them’ (88). Suh adds of Sandy’s covert and vicarious resistance of her mentor: Spark highlights fascism’s modes of consensus-building rather than its more readily visible authoritarian qualities. This critical perspective is discomforting since it requires the reader’s departure from the moralistic critique of fascism (eventually embodied by Sandy), not to mention a momentary eradication of critical distance from the fascist subject. (89)

Spark’s analogies are suggestive, for they represent one of several narrative strategies that allow her to imply larger unnarrated textual implications. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie employs strands of prolepsis, including several references to Sandy’s transformation: ‘Sister Helena had too much to bear from the world since she had published her psychological book which was so unexpectedly famed’ (35). The future permeates the schoolgirl past, evoking its retrospection. Spark incorporates into that adolescence what Shaffer labels ‘fantasy-digressions’ (91), where the girl’s life and literary fantasies blend, particularly with Sandy, a fantasist. What Shaffer calls ‘a dramatic juxtaposition’ (88) renders certain values and beliefs as multi-chronic, ironizing certain key pre- and post-war perspectives: Miss Brodie telephoned for Sandy to come to see her early in September. She had returned from Germany and Austria which were now magnificently organised. After the war Miss Brodie admitted to Sandy, as they sat in the Braid Hills Hotel, ‘Hitler was rather naughty,’ but at this time she was full of her travels and quite sure the new regime would save the world. Sandy was bored, it did not seem necessary that the world should be saved [. . .]. Miss Brodie said there would be no war. Sandy never had thought so, anyway. (122–3)

Importantly both characters misread the geopolitical situation, their very certainties revealing blinkeredness. By overlapping periods Spark highlights contradictions and yet emphasizes continued affinities of the pair, even after Brodie’s death. Brodie is encountered either through Sandy’s partial, juvenile perspective, or when ‘Her name and memory, after her death, flitted from mouth to mouth like swallows in the summer, and in winter they were gone’ (127). Sandy’s visitors evoke Brodie as an influence she cannot escape, forever complicit in sustaining the Brodie set. Sandy emerges as an ambivalent figure. In adolescence ‘The outsides of old Edinburgh churches frightened her, they were

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of such dark stone, like presences almost the colour of the Castle rock, and were built so warningly with their upraised fingers’ (35), anthropomorphized symbols of Brodie’s Calvinism she rejects. Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means commences with a parody of a fairy-story opening, an analeptic recollection of an alien, subsequently improbable past: Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions. The streets of the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bomb-sites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity. Some bomb-ripped buildings looked like the ruins of ancient castles [. . .]. [. . .] All the nice people were poor; at least, that was a general axiom, the best of the rich being poor in spirit. (7)

Through such whimsy, Spark deforms her readers’ expectations. Yet the dental simile conveys effectively pain and disruption in apprehensible, personal terms, evoking widespread destruction. Through telephone conversations journalist Jane Wright recalls Nicholas Farringdon, martyred for his faith in Tahiti, once a habitual visitor to the May of Teck Club, an anachronistic Edwardian hostel for unmarried women, struggling financially while working in the capital without family support.15 The building ‘had been three times window-shattered since 1940, but never directly hit’ (8). Although drawn largely by amoral Selina Redwood’s beauty, other inhabitants offer Nicholas a sense of virtue and survival. Regressing to 1945, the ambivalently nostalgic narrative describes VE Day from two weeks later: ‘The bells pealed. Greggie observed that it was something between a wedding and a funeral on a world scale’ (17). Textually later, but chronologically far earlier, Nicholas notices a Schiaparelli dress worn by mad Pauline Fox supposedly for a dinner date: He said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen such as gorgeous dress.’ ‘Schiaparelli,’ she said. He said, ‘Is it the one you swap amongst your selves?’ ‘Who told you that?’ ‘You look beautiful,’ he replied. She picked up the rustling skirt and floated away up the staircase. Oh, girls of slender means! (89)

In the girls’ plight Nicholas identifies stoical adaptation symbolized by the shared dress, a utopian image of ‘the beautiful heedless poverty of a Golden Age’ (65). Its exoticism amid austerity encapsulates Nicholas’ unconscious desires, his propensity to idealize beautiful young women. For Rodney Edgecombe the dress

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represents ‘another displacement of reality by romance’ (52). Nicholas’ sentimentality is dispelled finally when a buried bomb explodes; Selina retrieves the dress rather than help others trapped, unable to pass through a narrow lavatory window onto a roof, which ‘aperture was seven inches wide by fourteen inches long. It opened casement-wise’ (32). Ironically the opening was previously used by Selina and others to sunbathe naked, a sexually provocative image negated by disaster. Spark’s novel purveys moral symbolism and incorporates certain self-conscious elements. First, episodes from the past run parallel to Jane’s attempt to write about Nicholas’ conversion to Catholicism, her material gathered while ringing others who shared those distant experiences. Second, in preparing The Sabbath Notebooks – a book later published by Jane’s employer – Nicholas considers Joanna, a resident offering elocution lessons, his thoughts echoed by Spark’s narrator reflexively: Nicholas almost said, ‘She is orgiastical in her feeling for poetry. I can hear it in her voice,’ but refrained in case the Colonel should say, ‘Really?’ and he would go on to say, ‘Poetry takes the place for sex for her, I think.’ ‘Really? She looked sexually fine to me.’ Which conversation did not take place, and Nicholas kept it for his notebooks. (80)

Selina remains indifferent to both the guilt of her American lover, Colonel Gareth Dobell, anticipating the arrival of his suspicious wife. As Edgecombe says ‘This abjectness is something that Selina, for whom poise is self-sufficiency, cannot understand, although it is proof at least of a sense of sin. Selina’s poise is utterly amoral and utterly self-absorbed’ (50). As he indicates Nicholas ‘tries to fill the vacant symbol of the girl with the significance he feels she ought to have’ (54), but this future priest fails. Selina stands in stark contrast to Joanna, the latter physically larger, full of religiosity, her voice permeating the club. She dies, a victim, transformed into a martyr, helping others with her faith until the end, the antithesis of Selina. In contrast to Spark’s populist rendering of avant-gardism, Wilson Harris offers a radically different focus, with two experimental novels published in the mid-1960s, The Eye of the Scarecrow (1965) and The Waiting Room (1967). Both are profoundly enigmatic, even down to the level of each sentence, their narratives intentionally difficult, fragmentary, highly impressionistic, and confusing. Unsurprising, since in 1998 in ‘The Music of Living Landscapes’ Harris ponders ‘Is there a language akin to music threaded into space and time which is prior to human discourse?’ (40). His fiction seems predicated on such interconnections, combining as A.J.M. Bundy suggests:

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a highly individual fusion of hidden traditions of the imagination, native cosmogonies, alchemy, dreams, quantum physics; parables of man in the living landscapes; the aboriginal religions and cultures of Central and South America; the great Western tradition; fables of history and society; Jungian archetypes; hypotheses on time and space, and much else. (1)

Michel Butor sees: ‘Not only the creation but also the reading of a novel as a kind of waking dream’ (51), a perspective The Eye of the Scarecrow incorporates with its extreme reflexivity, reflecting upon the processes and meanings of writing, including fiction. Harris’ novel concerns the past and present of an unnamed narrator in Guiana (Guyana) and his relationship with the unnamed L———, a childhood friend. Harris explores new ways of experiencing, challenging convention, what Bundy describes as Harris judging that ‘the picture we hold of reality, and its reification in the conventional novel, were unacceptably static [. . .]’ (2). Nathaniel MacKey reflects concerning the development of an aspect of Harris’ previous fiction, ‘In The Eye of the Scarecrow, however, this “confession of weakness” and its attendant journey into unconventionally pertain more explicitly to artistic conventions’ (634), adding that it ‘is a novel which exasperates conventional expectations as to plot and characterization. In fact its plot, if it can be said to have one, revolves around the collapse of the materialist assumption on which traditionally linear, mimetic narration is based’ (635). The events and reflections featured are far too numerous, dense and opaque to summarize. The book mimics a diary or journal, but as an ‘Author’s Note’ to a later paperback edition attests, the narrative stretches from the early 1920s until ‘the year 1964 when the novel ends and the movement towards political independence in Guyana had virtually come to a head’ (8). The narrative opens ‘25th–26th December 1963. This year in the autumn I visited the ancient city of Edinburgh, travelled across the rim of the windswept Pentlands and descended to the steelgrey Firth of Forth. . . .’ (13). The narrator sets out his intentions, outlining his aesthetic purpose approaching 1948 belatedly: Nevertheless – late as it seems – I am hoping it may prove the first reasonable attempt (my Journals in the past were subject to the close tyranny and prejudice of circumstance) at an open dialogue within which a free construction of events will emerge in the medium of phenomenal associations all expanding into a mental distinction and life of their own. The question arises – who or what indeed is this medium of capacity, this rift uncovering a stranger animation one senses within the cycle of time and the hub of another state of apparent unawareness? . . . (13–14)

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From the abstract the narrative shifts to ‘Nineteen forty-eight, the year of the Guiana strike, uncertain forerunner of private upheaval and public change in the decades which followed [. . .]’ (14) and an impressionistic description of his friend’s face, a passing fancy ‘. . . The incredible image of a scarecrow vanished, as if in passing it had never existed [. . .]’ (14). Self-evident autobiographical elements indicate the author’s affinity to his narrator. Ephemerality and memory are foci for Harris, images of the past spectral, devoid of original context. Facing a void he seeks to avoid ‘the dead tide of self-indulgent realism’ (15). Amid such transience, he explores fragments, mixing childhood and later recollections, including the burial of paupers. ‘I was stricken by the devouring faces of the two men, the hearse-riders, sitting high in front, laughing and joking, totally oblivious to my frenzied countenance [. . .]’ (2), which episode is followed by a dream concerning the rooms of those since dead, where he is followed by: the shadow of the woman who nursed me in the earliest years I could remember. Her name was Cromwell or Crumbwell or the crumb (of reality) – WHICH – MAKES – WELL . I was grateful for her attention and for the opportunity to explain to her why I had left the company in such haste; and I persuaded her to watch for the arrival of my hypothetical employers. . . . (22)

Following the dialectic of dispersal and coalescence, the illogic of dreams prevails, mixing the potentially mythic, symbolic, allegorical or nonsensical in curious adjacencies. Nevertheless a purpose emerges, for as Mackey suggests, ‘The novel’s plotlessness, its inability or refusal to represent experience in an acceptably reductionist, realistic way, proceeds from something like a gnostic estrangement from the world realism tries to portray’ (635–6). The cumulative effect is one of fragmentation and challenge, where meaning is not simply elusive, but its expression paradoxical given ‘the visionary truth of nature [. . .]’ (97). Although many ruminations reach for concretion or objectivity, this appears unrealizable ‘For language because of its untrappable source transforms – in a terrifying wellnigh unendurable perspective – every subjective block and fixture of capacity. In my Father’s house are many mansions’ (96). This concurs with the narrator’s sense of himself, signing off a letter to L———with ‘IDIOT NAMELESS’ (86). However, certain experiences are retained, foregrounded for their emphatic trauma. At the age of eleven – in the year 1932 – I spent a month in Public Hospital during which I underwent a serious operation. Chloroform. Sickle-sweet smell one never gets rid of, the half-smell of life and of death. The garden of disgust. Bewildering and nauseating fantasy akin to the strangest recollection of riding out of the womb. (23)

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Harris captures elements of the bizarre and esoteric nature of being, rendered exotic yet paradoxically utterly familiar. In The Waiting Room (1967) as Aldon Lynn Nielsen indicates Harris ‘draws its first epigraph from a letter John Keats wrote to Richard Woodhouse in October of 1818 in which Keats avers: “. . . it is a very truth that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature – how can it, when I have no nature?” ’ (126). Harris explores a multiplicity of being, what Nielsen calls ‘a psychology of multiplicities and nomadic personae’ (126). The text opens with an author’s note indicating his role as the editor of diaries of Susan Forrestal – as Nathaniel Hawthorne does with his ‘The Custom-House Introductory to “The Scarlet Letter” ’ which prefaces The Scarlet Letter16 – a blind woman who has died with her second husband in an explosion at their home. The log book survived, though certain sections were half-obliterated. . . . But this – while apparently depleting continuity – only served to enhance the essential composition of the manuscript that involved accidental deletions or deliberate erasures, reappraisals, marginal notes, dissociations of likely material (as well as associations of unlikely material) to confirm, and blend into, a natural medium of invocation in its own right. (10)

The diary form features within the text itself, which as Jean-Pierre Durix observes, ‘renews one of the original genres which gave birth to the novel’ (22). Harris’ disjointedness is central to his aesthetics and, the ventriloquized framework undermines any apparent authenticity. The end of addendum is signed by ‘W.H.’ (11), indicating the narrator’s close affinity with the author, while the former adds: ‘Postscript: In the following I have used inverted commas around “he” to emphasize that the lover in Susan’s memory was indeed sheer phenomenon of sensibility rather than identical character in the conventional sense’ (11). This manoeuvre in effect both creates and abjures characterization and concretion. The former lover seemingly inhabits Susan in some way: The sun fell on the slumbering brickwork of her flesh. Through the blind or curtained window where ‘he’ sat and watched FROM WITHIN HER SKULL , the tops of vehicles could be seen as they passed, and still beyond – upon the pavement at the opposite side of the street – passersby were reflected in a shop window. (15)

Nielsen suggests Susan’s consciousness is central, claiming ‘The waiting room is the text in which we find Susan Forrestal’ (128); yet throughout ambivalence defines ‘his’ response to Susan and hers to ‘him,’ which uncertainties both animate

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and complicate the narrative. Harris abstracts such derangements, the physical and visceral in unresolved antitheses, a recondite setting: Thief. The cry itself again but the vapour of longing in each dying accent to appropriate (or steal) new breath, impulse, was everywhere in the grip of hollow memory. [. . .] One had tripped and been robbed of senseless sight and sound it seemed. Thief. Thief. One found oneself repeating the mechanical outcry as if one stood perhaps within true measure of overwhelming catastrophe. . . . (22)

In ‘The Music of Living Landscapes’ Harris recollects 1960s London where ‘at such times when the future is grave and uncertain and one is a stranger in a great city one is visited by archetypal and troubling dreams’ (42). As Durix notes (21), Harris includes ‘visual effects’, such as a swirling line with words where the letters are deranged (70). Intensely impressionistic the narrative circles key elements such as the street outside, the idea of bonding and severance, trauma and terror, inner and outer, and ‘Tension of the “dead” in the living, and of the “living” in the dead, as a consequence of which there glided a shadow of complexity (Susan knew), an intangible cloud or fiction, rain and drought’ (64). Finally, perhaps Harris’ coverall effect is to resist any recuperation of specific meaning, dispersing ideas of realist commonality, sustaining only the unmediated fragments of existence, momentary aspects of suffering, with the pregnancy (62) no more informing than the pain of the failed operation (44), or the ‘unpretentious obscurity’ (61) of her husband. B.S. Johnson’s overall aesthetic ambition might be best positioned through an observation by Michel Butor: ‘Formal invention in the novel, far from being opposed to realism as shortsighted critics often assume, is the sine qua non of a greater realism’ (50). Johnson’s Albert Angelo (1963) consists of five sections or movements, the first two – ‘Prologue’ and ‘Exposition’ – which offer a psychogeographical exploration sketching the experiences of the would-be architect manqué, Albert, a supply teacher, whimsically marks out the despairing quality of his emotional condition, viewed via his responses to life in north London. He moves through streets, locations conveyed through episodic vignettes, narrated variously in first, second and third person. The mundanity of Albert’s new flat, a visit to his parents, and his work in several schools, allow reflections on the human condition. Significantly he asks one class: ‘Is there any reason why she should not be a bad God, for instance, an evil God, if he made all the evil things in the world too?’ (55). His reflections also detail recurrently the immediacy of a failed relationship with Jenny, an ex-fiancée who abandoned him, while facing career uncertainty and the vicissitudes of supply teaching. He recalls their first

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meeting and final trip to Balgy in Ireland where he finds gneiss which he treasures as a memento. Nevertheless, he concedes, ‘Well before they had reached London they had both known that they had passed the pitch of their loving’ (60). Johnson deploys various schematic representations of the chaotic irreducibility of lived experience. The third section opens with brief, semi-literate essays of Albert’s pupils, recording the last day of the previous term, their holidays and the new term, a fragmented, ungrammatical perspective contrasting Albert’s previous fluent account. One pupil outlines an ongoing feud: ‘I was sent to Mr. Harrison and he made us be friends and from that day on we were friends. Next day we had a friendly fight and I busted is nose. FIN ’ (63). In another account entitled ‘The Killer Master’, a different pupil records: Suddenly the boy behind me says something to the boy next to him. The Master in a deadly rage got hold of the boy by the hair and dragged him to the front of the class where he brutally hit him the boy fell to the floor moaning then the master kicked him, the class by then were shouting their heads off. With that he walked out of the class and that was the last we ever saw of him. (65–6)

His predecessor’s violence mirrors the subsequent degradation of Albert’s patient and humanistic values. In a later class Johnson records his protagonist’s thoughts in one italicized column, and verbal and physical interactions in another. The graphic surface spatializes utterance and exchange; noticeably Albert’s consciousness, which occupies an entire column, is dominant, and yet charts his growing desperation, his loss of control. Finally, Albert resorts to violence himself. Ironically the student essays describe this conflict, highlighting the failings of Albert’s previous rational approach, his frustration expressed finally in his text’s ‘almighty aposiopesis’ (167), prefaced by: Part of the trouble, he thought, was that he lived and loved to live in an area of absolute architectural rightness, which inhibited his own originality, and resulted in him being – – – OH , FUCK ALL THIS LYING ! (163)

In the following section ‘Disintegration’, Johnson – revealed as would-be and failed poet – emerges into the narrative frame to expound upon his previous (mis)representation at length. His insistent voice harangues his reader angrily concerning his aesthetic frustrations: – – – fuck all this lying look what im really trying to write about is writing not all this stuff about architecture trying to say something about writing about my writing im my hero though what a useless appellation my first character then im

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trying to say something about me through him albert an architect when whats the point in covering up covering up covering over pretending pretending I can say anything through him that is anything that I would be interested in saying – – – so an almighty aposiopesis. (167)

Integrated into his complaints Johnson secretes a comic, scatological element: – Faced with the enormity of life, all I can do is to present a paradigm of truth to reality as I see it: and there’s the difficulty: for Albert defecates for instance only once during the whole of the book: what sort of paradigm of the truth is that? (170)

Punctuation, initially abandoned, is reasserted, as is stylistic control. Yet paradoxically the interconnection of truth to reality remains, however problematized, as the narrative’s chief commitment. Johnson insists: ‘Looking back and imposing a pattern to come to terms with the past must be avoided. Lies, lies, lies. Secondbest at best, for other writers, to do them a favour . . .’ (170). Even his admission of an incapacity to include certain events, which appears to subvert the form, undermining its correlation to lived reality, becomes ironically referential, whimsical: – And oh but what other material is not now to be worked in! The visit to Zulf, for instance, who lives overlooking a cemetery and diverts Albert with detailed descriptions of the Week’s burials; the teacher who sleeps in the woodwork shed and cooks over the gluepot gasring; Albert playing the identities game at St. Pancras station [. . .]. (173)

By supposedly dismissing such potential narratives – located in experience, implicitly recollected during the writing process – Johnson does assert them, albeit in contracted form. He even returns enigmatically in a brief final ‘Coda’ to Albert, killed by his unruly pupils, tossing him into the Regent’s Canal at the Angel (179). This episode is related by a pupil in a poorly written essay, mirroring the earlier ones quoted in the third section. Such dark whimsy re-emphasizes the preceding themes of violence, despair, existential solitude and the conflictual nature of the inner city. The hesitant opening to Johnson’s Trawl is visually striking, yet focused on the dangers inherent in narrative of solipsism: I · · always with I · · one starts from · · one and I share the same character · · are one · · · · · one always starts with I · · one · · · · · alone · · · · · · · sole · · · · · · · · · · · single · · · · · · · · · · I (7)

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This Bildungsroman’s narrator commits himself to radical self-scrutiny, as did Johnson during a three-week voyage to the Barents Sea from 14 October 1963 aboard the trawler Northern Jewel, a preparation for writing Trawl. Johnson’s severely seasick narrative persona reviews obsessively his life’s hurt, nauseous but sifting random memories of betrayals and failures. He realizes eventually he travels ‘to give substantial yet symbolic form to an isolation I have felt most of my life by isolating myself, by enacting the isolation in an extreme form, by cutting myself off as far as possible from everything I had ever known before’ (105). He asserts unequivocally that in childhood I became aware of class distinction, [. . .] aware in fact of the class war, which is not an outdated concept, as those of the upper classes who are not completely dim would con everyone else into believing it is. The class war is being fought as viciously and destructively of human spirit as it has ever been in England; I was born on my side, and I cannot and will not desert [. . .]. (53)

The narrative’s sexual explicitness and focus on youth are emphatic. Johnson evokes explicitly his younger self ’s fear of entrapment, drawn into visions of domesticity by Dorothy, a lower middle-class girlfriend. He rejects both her and banking, despising ‘the work, the people, the atmosphere. [. . .] I could not think of anything I would like to be, except the impossible things, like a writer, or a film director, or just rich’ (140). He desires a different set of values, a more meaningful life than a dull suburban existence: And all the others, the way they did it, totally involved in all that was going on [. . .] the treatment of sex and love as enormously important, so rightly for me, as I wanted to be so involved in everything, in all of it, who was a bank clerk at the time and engaged to the bourgeois Dorothy. (164)

Seeking more meaning he recalls: ‘Went round the London jazz clubs, then, in search of this life, disappointed, of course [. . .]’ (165). Johnson’s narrator/persona struggles with guilt over past relationships with women, apprehending his sexual exploitation, an unusual admission for this period. ‘There, something to start me, from nowhere: Joan, her name was, Joan, it’s not a name I like, Joan, no, plain, untimely, out of its times, not a name I at all cared for, no [. . . ]’ (9). He recollects sex with a prostitute, overcoming his formerly suppressed memory. The episode haunts him: ‘Though she wanted to leave as quickly as possible she was yet an honest tradeswoman, wanted to give value for her . . . two pounds, I think it was [. . .]’ (153). The encounter epitomizes his selfloathing, his emotional void. His interrogative voice sifts the momentariness of

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events, overwhelmed by the chaotic and unstable nature of the past, any interpretation defied by the cacophony of details: What bloody relevance has a sodding lardy-cake to me now? I’ve had enough of High Wycombe and being evacuated: surely I must have exhausted it by now, the pain must be exorcised, the tedium of interest, of making myself regurgitate all this: for what? Think, then, analyse, then, this estrangement from home, from London, parents, younger self. . . . Blank. . . . What use are analyses, reasons, causes? All I am left with are just things, happenings: things as they are, happenings as they have happened and go on happening through the unreliable filter of my memory. But try. What else is there to do? (93–4)

Finally he reveals the intense self-examination is to enable a new relationship with his fiancée, a renewal: ‘[T]his is the best thing she has done for me, Ginnie, that I am more natural now, whatever nature is, but I know what I mean, and for any of the earlier ones, others, I would not have felt this, she releases me, Ginnie’ (169). In The Unfortunates Johnson further problematizes the traditional novel form through another dimension, with boxed, shuffleable chapters, apart from the first and last, which ‘resented compromise’ (749), as Julia Jordan indicates in ‘ “For Recuperation”: Elegy, Form, and the Aleatory in B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates’, was demanded by an anxious publisher (749). Johnson’s focus is again the underlying struggle for meaning and truth, countered by a tendency to identify generic meanings: The difficulty is to understand without generalization, to see each piece of received truth, or generalization, as true only if it is true for me, solipsism again, I come back to it again, and for no other reason. In general, generalization is to lie, to tell lies. (‘LAST ’)

A chance visit to a city to report a football match evokes a cascade of memories concerning Tony Tillinghast, a friend who had died of cancer, yet, as Jordan says his ‘essaying of grief denies consolation even at a phrasal level [. . .]’ (750). Rather Johnson’s narrator, his alter-ego, cannot avoid foregrounding his own earlier personal pain: To arrive at their place, Tony and June’s, smothering my misery, which must have been because of her, now I come to define it, because of Wendy’s treachery, since we had come to this city together, ah, perhaps the time before, perhaps the last time I came had been with Wendy, that must have been it [. . .]. (‘FIRST ’, 2)

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Such subjectivity haunts human understanding. The protagonist admits his dead friend’s influence on his early fiction: ‘. . . it had passed the scrutiny of someone whose opinion I respected, whose judgement was based on academic standards which, even more than my own, were given some sort of objective, or at least collective-subjective, value’ (‘Again the house’, 1). Such equivocation conveys much about the nature of such valuations, intersubjective, yet elusive, highlighting a fluidity in memory and therefore narrative itself. Yet Johnson resists any solipsistic, collective-subjective values. Johnson’s narrator recollects a lecture delivered to Tony’s summer students: Afterwards we went to a pub on the front, several of us, drinking, Tony and Patrick, and June as well, yes, she must have joined us, then, in the evening. And some of the students, too, blond Scandinavians, handsome women. Yet I could see he was very ill at ease, in his mind, He no longer concentrated on ideas, thoughts, arguments with the same dedication. (‘That short occasion [. . .]’, 1–2)

Cancer is changing his friend. Finally Johnson’s narrator admits at the end ‘Not how he died, not what he died of, even less why he died, are of concern, to me, only the fact that he did die, he is dead, is important: the loss to me, to us’ (‘LAST ’, 6). The unavoidability of death is one central narrative thread, another is truthfully recording the pain of the living while memorializing the past. Ann Quin, as a new decade approached, worked from 9 October 1959 as a parttime secretary at the Royal College of Art and Painting for Professor Carel Weight (1908–1997). In Ann Quin’s Night-time Ink: A Postscript Alice Butler explains Quin was recommended by fellow struggling writer, Paddy Kitchen, whom she met in 1958. Butler notes Quin’s mental health problems: ‘Within Quin’s employee records there are doctors’ notes scattered throughout: the flimsy ephemera of illness, scrawled “evidence” of her numerous mental breakdowns’ (7). Quin worked on two novels, both rejected. Although dispirited, at night she wrote her third, Berg. Kitchen quotes from a letter sent by Quin: ‘Citysick; Bergsick; R.C.A. sick; bellyache; this bloody English weather ‘cos I’m sure that’s why I feel so low – ugh – WANTED kind, understanding publisher / benefactor / lover / father / brother / friend [. . .]’ (57). In 1964 aged twenty-eight Quin had a brief affair with 68-year-old author Henry Williamson. Brocard Sewell records the pair attending ‘a literary conference at Spode House, in the grounds of Hawkesyard Priory, in Staffordshire’ (183–4). A Lawrences Auctioneers 2011 catalogue quotes a letter sent by Quin from Ilfracombe (presumably to Sewell) in June 1964 which refers to their relationship, ‘Henry is anyway so different when out walking and being with him is a joy . . . I do so want to “help” him as he does me – but

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fundamentally I feel I cannot be more than a good friend – I think he does hope for more – i.e. for me to eventually be with him in Devon.’ (32)

As Francis Booth suggests Rayner Heppenstall ‘confirms the relationship with Williamson’ (487); Heppenstall wrote in The Master Eccentric (1986): ‘Henry Williamson [. . .] had fallen heavily for Ann and did a great deal for her, arranging, for instance, an American tour for which she was not yet ready, intellectually or temperamentally’ (120n1). Oedipal revenge drawn from classical tragedy serves as a framework for Berg, which opens with an unpaginated page with two lines set out epigrammatically, outside of Quin’s main narrative: A MAN called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, Came to a seaside town intending to kill his father . . . (N.Pag.)

The inversion of the protagonist’s name, and the use of the original for Quin’s title, serves to convey a sense of oppositional forces, of negation, and naturally of subterfuge. Greb – the name used for the protagonist throughout the novel – is sterile although not impotent. Despite anger at his father, Greb still rejects the ‘martyred airs’ of and longed-for respectability desired by his abandoned mother, Edith. Greb seeks revenge for her humiliation, and his own emotional wounding as a child. However, his mother Edith considers his underlying ‘perversity’ shameful: ‘You discovered: dormitory pleasures, what is considered a pretty boy at age of nine, to be taken advantage of ’ (10). Riven by self-doubt, Greb projects his hatred, transforming his encompassing negativity into desire for his father’s woman, Judith. He detests and subsequently seduces her, a substitute for oedipal longing. Greb’s rivalry is also projected onto his father’s ventriloquist doll, a totem of sorts, damaged in a thwarted attempt at patricide. Despite Greb’s antipathy, the pair are twinned by degraded masculinity, their objectification of women, regarding them as weak, demeaned by sexuality availability, seen as malleable. The father says of Judith: She’s not bad Greb, really, I’ve known her on and off for quite a few years now, she accepts my shortcomings, enjoys certain things I like doing, you know what I mean, and one doesn’t come across that sort of woman every day, she’d be all right if it wasn’t for her rather selfish ways [. . .] perhaps she ought to have children, that usually calms ’em down. (53)

Greb nurses what Michael Feldman describes clinically as ‘a persistent sense of grievance’ and an ‘underlying oedipal configuration’ (743) concerning his father.

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In an uncanny moment in a telephone kiosk ‘The close resemblance to the old man made him nearly drop the telephone; the shape of eyes, mouth undoubtedly the same’ (23). Quin’s narrative captures the minutiae of the post-war struggle for survival in rented rooms, into which humdrum existences at times irreality erupts. For Greb ‘as he approached the house everything appeared almost without concrete formation; the dance hall, church, houses all flat shapes’ (31). Judith’s tears draw him erotically, becoming ‘aware of her half-exposed breasts, the nipples, tiny, deliciously hard’ (124). Greb snoops around his drunken father’s room (after aiding him in walking back to their lodgings), and kills the girlfriend’s cat. Greb exhibits symptomatic characteristics of what Feldman identifies as ‘obsessional disorders, addictions and perversions [. . .]’ (743) with ‘hostile, perverse gratification derived from the repetitive ruminations with which the grievance is nurtured’ (744). Hence, Greb cannot despatch his father at the first opportunity, rather prevaricating like Hamlet. But like a love affair, it seemed too easy, therefore, the preliminaries must be prolonged; flirt a little with the opportunities. There he was lurching in the doorway, go now, take him by the arm, pull him down, cut out the mole, split the hair, smash the brain, smother him. It’s your son, do you hear, yes remember a woman you once saw and fancied, got into trouble, as they say, condescended to marry, and afterwards . . . (12)

Glorying in pathological preoccupations, Greb creates a murderous fantasy, shadowing his father, yet ironically sustaining his existence. Later he even appropriates paternal coordinates by seducing Judith, and subsequently a perverse triangulated status quo is suggested when near the end of the narrative the landlady hints that the new tenant for her vacant room is Greb’s father, emphasizing the narrative’s curious Oedipal circularity. Quin’s second novel, Three (1966) is threaded with self-doubt, both implicitly and explicitly, focusing largely on the notes and diaries of a young woman (who has subsequently disappeared, presumed dead) known as simply ‘S.’ A determinedly middle-class couple, Leon(ard) and Ruth, describe her stay, having accompanied them to a coastal summer home. Sewell quotes another letter from Quin concerning Three’s composition: ‘I don’t know about the book I’m on at the moment as being in another vein, expressing more truly myself. I think it will take many years before I strip off the layers of “spectres” in my own nightmarish way.’ (183)

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Quin received an unexpected visit in London from Robert Creeley with whom – according to Ekbert Faas’ biography of the American poet (302) – she had an affair in 1964, the poet ten years older, perhaps a model for Leon(ard). Certainly she dedicated the novel to Creeley and his wife: ‘For Bob and Bobbie’ (N.Pag.). Faas records: Ann’s relation with Bob and Bobbie unfolded in less novelistic fashion than those between S, Leonard and Ruth. However, they seem to have initiated the break-up of a marriage that deteriorated rapidly from then on. For Bob, there were some happy, even idyllic moments with Ann [. . .]. But otherwise her visit to New Mexico brought him little of the fulfilment he had experienced with her back in England. (303)17

Quin’s narrative is retrospective, a grim elegy, polarized between the intense and yet mostly unspoken conflict between Leon(ard) and Ruth. The latter obsesses about S’s diaries, tapes and films. Drawn by jealousy to destroy them, she cannot, hoping to finding evidence of Leon(ard)’s infidelity, intimated repeatedly, yet never confirmed. Such rivalries have culminated in S’s apparent death, presumed by drowning, although suicide, accident or even murder is sustained as a possibility. As Brian Evenson and Joanna Howard explain ‘All that is firmly known about S’s death is that her boat capsized and her coat was found with a suicide note in the pocket’ (59). Enigmatic S responds to the barren marriage she encounters, her only prelude before arrival a possible abortion, doubly ironic given Ruth’s thwarted conception. Ruth insists ‘she was happy with us Leon at least at the beginning when coming to convalesce’ (2). However, S challenges the dynamic of their conventional marriage. Leon(ard) evokes the child Ruth desires, remembering a party where Ruth declined to drink alcohol: But you. . . . That’s right, but it wasn’t usual false alarm. Yet you seemed pretty certain hadn’t you missed one period? I never said that – never. Sorry thought you had. He cut two slices of lemon, poked them around in the cup. (3)

The tension palpable, pervasive, and Leon(ard)’s disappearances are highly suggestive, his motivations left open. Given Ruth’s suspicious nature, their childless home becomes constricted, sterile, which S confirms in impressionistic notes, her contractions indicating a longer, intended narrative: Rooms soundproofed. Paintings not hung too small. Not small enough. But still-lifes that she used to do.

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Burglar-proofed. China plates on the wall. Glass doors. Concealed lighting. White curtains transparent. Nursery done in egg-shell blue. Empty. A special place for the cat. Never used. Visitors. Change of linen. Every other day. Existence bound by habit. Hope. Theirs. Nothing to contend with. The worst effort not to contradict their next movement At first. (20–21)

S’s lost presence remains pivotal, her words a residue of her disruptions. Their jaded lives are reflected in the house’s sterility, its libidinal emptiness conveyed by that single assertion, ‘Empty’, which stands for the couple’s suspended existence, memorializing Ruth’s unfulfilled desire, the nursery symbolizing her frustration. Leon(ard) detests Ruth’s adored substitute, the cat Bobo. Through its suggestive, yet radically incomplete narrative, Three embraces ambiguity, clues implying various possibilities. One senses strongly Leon(ard)’s desire, his erotic interplay with S, yet, as Booth concludes: ‘we know little more about S at the end of the book than we did at the beginning’ (506). Although a body might have been found, this hint is uncertain, only the fact of an abandoned coat remaining. Passages: A Novel (1969) concerns two travellers visiting various cities and islands (clearly those of Greece) where a right-wing military junta rules, deploying extreme violence (and by implication torture) against its ideological opponents. With her Jewish male lover an unnamed woman seeks her brother: ‘Not that I’ve discussed the possibility my brother is dead. We have discussed what is possible, what is not. They say there’s every chance. No chance at all’ (5). The implied triadic relationship remains incomplete, any potential ending performative, merely ritual, confirmed in the lover’s diary entry regarding her motivations: She is in her middle thirties, appears younger, at times older. Has the air of a woman who knows her way about. On occasion acts like a child, knows that men are delighted with this image. She’s playing at Antigone. This eccentricity she cultivates, wants those she meets to court this. (34)

The sibling exists entirely in absentia. The male lover’s preoccupation with sacrifice stresses such filial ties, and for Jacques Derrida in The Gift of Death sacrifice concerns ‘the paradox constituting the concept of duty’ (66) which

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impulse, and her filial bond, animates their search. Her dominating need imbues every movement; each episode becomes a curious act obligation, another sacrifice. The couple’s renunciation of self-determination has its parallel in the ideological martyrdom the brother suffered, his sacrifice redolent of the fate of Isaac whom an unhesitating Abraham brought to Mount Moriah to die. Instead a scapegoat is offered to a relenting God, what René Girard in Violence and the Sacred calls a ‘sacrificial substitution’ (5), a reversal mirrored in Jacob’s later substitution of himself (covered with the skins of goats) for Esau. Girard also describes ‘the original object’ and ‘the act of transference from that object to the surrogate victim’ (5), which segue occurs between the sacrificial brother and the male lover, of whom the woman comments, ‘He often sees himself as the scapegoat’ (62). The lover alludes to this figure explicitly, first in passing (38), and subsequently in more detail: AZAZEL : In biblical times, a mysterious desert creature to whom, on the Day of Atonement, a goat was sent ‘bearing the iniquities’ of Israel. In post-biblical times this name was understood as applying to one of the fallen angels. (96)

Throughout the perspective shifts frequently as the pair travel through an often hostile landscape, defined by intense heat. Faces of officials. My own for them. No I don’t belong to the Party, my brother might have done – I don’t know. We were followed. We knew they were there in hotel lobbies, restaurants, cinemas, parks, cafes. Quite by accident I am involved. The cab driver watched us in the rear mirror. (10)

Even such paranoia cannot dispel the rootlessness and anonymity: ‘Another city. Some hotel. She would pace the rooms. He’d continue with his notes’ (83). The lover warns of the increasing likelihood of detention, of the authorities ‘deporting us to that island – many are apparently held there indefinitely’ (64). Even without hostility, the potential for surveillance is intimated throughout, and on occasion danger. The male lover notes intensifications: ‘The security police are everywhere, even in the carnival they mingled with those who were masked’ (98). Other scenes evoke intense personal and literal interiority, imprisoning hotel rooms, terse exchanges, heat and tension, impressionistically, yet precisely rendered: Water splashing. Sliding of bodies. Contact of marble against her back. A stone wall studded with bullet holes. Area barricaded off, near the watch-tower. He held his breath, head raised. Knuckles rubbed against each other, as he waited for the water to shoot out. (76)

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The male lover records: ‘It is the climate they resist – this climate of tragedy’ (85). Each oblique allusion to violence offers glimpses of loss, bleak encounters, for as Girard says ‘[t]ragedy envelops all human relationships in a single tragic antagonism’ (68). The key event occurs prior to their search; such belated allusions are rendered as mise en abyme, evoking broader narratives of conflict and oppression, curious, poignant juxtapositions, of leisure and tourism, stark, remnants of recent violence, and executions. And as Lucien Dällenbach explains of this device (first employed by painters): ‘the optical illusion sought in all these pictures, which is their main attraction, lies in bringing into the painting items that (fictively) are outside it [. . .]. At the frontier between interior and exterior, they are a way of taking two-dimensionality to its limits’ (12). After his bizarre sexual encounter at a party with two women, which involved ‘whipping the girl’ (59), the lover confesses: ‘I guess I only wish to dominate, he continued, do you think I’m mad – have I killed someone – is there someone dead – I feel I am your brother’ (66), reconfirming Girard’s ‘sacrificial substitution’ (5), and ‘a similarity between both parties’ (41). Hence a spectral fraternal presence permeates Quin’s visceral objectivities, which are so starkly rendered as to be subtly interrogated. In conclusion, consider what characterizes the work of these five metamodernists apart from emphatically spatializing conflictual relationships and the violence (implicit or explicit, and sometimes associated with emotional or physical pain) which underpinned much 1960s culture with its generational and ideological struggles. Regarding such writers, whom he considers postmodernists, Richard Bradford claims: ‘At the top of their agenda is the apparently unsteady relationship between linguistic representation and actuality, what goes on within the text and what exists outside it’ (7). However far more essential, as avant-garde novelists such writers also foreground the ‘general social element’ of lives and art which Williams identified, synthesizing what he labelled ‘the “social” novel and the “personal” novel’ (204). Retrospectively I would suggest they be regarded as underrated, authentic voices of the Sixties, offering selfhood as intersubjective, uncertain, yet potentiating. As seen above, to achieve their goals they embedded narratives of self-exploration variously within a range of thematic and structural elements that accentuates meta-modern subjectivities, including: innovative formal or technical devices highlighting reflexivity, including the book as physical artefact; shifting, often contrasting narrative perspectives with multichronic episodes; and an intense, dark and ironic humour combined with a demotic style concerned with the everyday. Although their fiction deploys playfulness and satiric energy, as well as challenges to social authority, they also invoke social awareness, even empathy. Rather than experimental fiction being

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superseded post-1945, as so many suggested around 1960, in the following decade it flourished, albeit on the margins, creating a tradition and aesthetic practices which would influence many subsequent writers.18

Notes 1 Avid Francophile Heppenstall was regarded by many, including Hélène Cixous writing in Le Monde in May 1967, as the founding-father of the French nouveau roman. He knew key figures of the French avant-garde scene personally. As Jonathan Goodman notes in The Master Eccentric, Butor ‘had occasionally dined at the Heppenstalls’ (72n2); in Rayner Heppenstall: A Critical Study, G.J. Buckell describes first Heppenstall’s meeting Robbe-Grillet (58), and in ‘Rayner Heppenstall’ details his friendship with Nathalie ‘Sarraute (who was impressed with Heppenstall’s The Greater Infortune)’ (N.Pag.). 2 This view is also reflected by Gindin: ‘this kind of hero, the intelligent and irreverent young man from the lower or middle classes, educated by scholarship but let loose in a society still permeated by class distinction and respect for breeding, has been fixed by many journals and reviews as a contemporary phenomenon’ (2). Gindin finds echoes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with ‘Richardson and Fielding [ . . . ] and a century later, Dickens, Trollope, and then Hardy [ . . .]’ (3). Andrzej Gasiorek notes that ‘Until the 1970s it was thought that with few exceptions postwar British novelists had rejected modernism’s literary experimentation and were bent on returning to conventional realism’ (192–3); Gasiorek proceeds to counter this erroneous view. 3 More specifically he condemned the ‘imbecility’ (30) of Michel Butor and described Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur as ‘tedious and arid’ (30) and his aesthetic ideas ‘metaphysical gobbledegook’ (35). 4 However, as Sinfield explores at some length the modernist impulse continued and thrived in the US (185–92). 5 The underlying belief was that literature could improve culture and morality, an Arnoldian axiom purveyed by F.R. Leavis. Members of the Movement were notably Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, John Wain and Elizabeth Jennings; later most were associated with the ‘Angry Young Men’ which included writers of realist fiction such as John Wain, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe and Stan Barstow. 6 Gindin says of the modernist period (ignoring one presumes the habitually marginalized Dorothy Richardson): And when novels of this period did deal with class, novels such as E.M. Forster’s Howards End or Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, they tended to view class issues from the perspective of the vanishing intellectual aristocracy. (4)

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7 I question Jameson’s general thesis on postmodernism, and whether any such period can be sustained critically. However, his symptomatic analyses are intriguing; I would regards any such a shift as not deriving primarily from any ‘waning of affect’ (16) where ‘postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial coordinates’ (48), rather as associated with the shift away from natural rhythms (seasons, time, epochs) toward a preoccupation with presentism, an obsessional selfhood captivated by embodiment and ownership (symbolic, ideological and literal) which are essentially territorial (and narcissistic) and utterly concerned with objective concepts of space. 8 As Georg Lukács indicates in a pre-revolutionary, capitalist society radical class consciousness lies in the ability ‘to grasp the [dialectical] contradictions in its own social order [that of the bourgeoisie]’ (62) and move to an understanding that ‘the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are mutually interdependent’ (68) and reach ‘the point where a proletarian class consciousness arises’ (68). 9 Kay was born in 1878, so in 1929 was a year older than Vanessa Stephen, two years older than Virginia Woolf. See anonymous entry, Undiscovered Scotland website. In the novel Spark implies that Brodie is forty-three in 1933 (89), so slightly younger, born in 1890, ironically confirmed earlier with an advanced report of her death: ‘But this, the year after the war, was in fact Miss Brodie’s last and fifty-sixth year’ (56). 10 Spark clearly evokes aspects of the Bloomsbury Group and Modernism: one example is in a class: ‘Mr Lloyd showed his pictures from an exhibition of Italian art in London. He had a pointer with which he indicated the design of the picture in accompaniment to his hoarse voice’ (49). Such detail recalls Walter Sickert’s caricature of Roger Fry, which as Wendy Baron explains incorporates ‘The conceit of portraying Fry looming out of the darkness of the lecture hall, pointer in hand, the light from the lectern highlighting his unruly hair [. . .]’ (484). Lloyd’s almost obsessive formal focus and procedure mirror Fry’s critical approach, and significantly he challenges traditional sexual mores, having affairs with his pupils, proxies for Brodie. 11 Such an intense cascade of intercalated quotidian and domestic memories would prove influential technically for younger writers such as B.S. Johnson and Ann Quin. 12 B.S. Johnson consciously and reflexively mirrors this approach in his final, posthumously published novel, See the Old Lady Decently (1976). 13 Such fictional avant-gardism involved what Julia Jordan describes as ‘an exciting new experimentalism (2) where form, perspective, ideological consciousness and humour are deployed in innovative ways to reveal (at times unpleasant) underlying contradictions in and truths about variously identities, society, human behaviour and fiction itself, the avant-garde being intrinsically part of what in 1981 Andreas Huyssen called ‘the embodiment of anti-tradition’ (24). 14 Quin manages a similar stylistic and thematic juxtaposition in all her 1960s novels considered below; violence and negativity seem embedded, even unremarkable; similar strategies also characterize the fiction of Harris, Heppenstall and Johnson.

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15 As Kimball records of Spark: ‘She stayed at the Helena Club, founded by a daughter of Queen Victoria for “Ladies from Good Families of Modest Means who are Obliged to Pursue an Occupation in London.” ’ 16 Hawthorne says ironically he ‘has a certain propriety, of a kind always recognised in literature, as explaining how a large portion of the following pages came into my possession, and as offering proofs of the authenticity of a narrative therein contained’ (1). 17 In a letter sent to Larry Goodall dated 25 September 1969, Quin details further contact with the poet: Creeley suddenly arrived on my doorstep one early a.m. absolutely stoned out of his mind! [ . . . ] [I]t was pretty much a Creeley monologue, an [sic] somehow I wanted desperately to talk to him re my work, etc., Couldn’t get thru, so finally it all seemed to fall flat and felt sad by the time he left. (N.Pag.) 18 This group were not alone, for similar or associated approaches were developed in various contemporary works by Paul Abelman, J.G. Ballard, John Berger, Christine Brooke-Rose, Alan Burns, David Caute, Eva Figes, Tom Harris, Gabriel Josipovici, Jeff Nuttall, Tom Phillips and Alexander Trocchi, among others.

Works cited Anon. ‘Christine Kay.’ Undiscovered Scotland website. N.d.: N.Pag.; www.undiscovered scotland.co.uk/usbiography/k/christinakay.html Anon. ‘Lot: 3437.’ Books, Maps & Manuscripts Catalogue. Lawrences Auctioneers, Crewkerne, Somerset [Catalogue for Scheduled Auction] 21 July 2011: 32. https://s3.amazonaws.com/ukauctioneers/pdf_catalogues/2323_no_images.pdf; www.auction-net.co.uk/viewAuction.php?id=1243&offset=400&PHPSESSID= be750cd0edd8afe303106eb0bcb1d8ef Baron, Wendy and Walter Sickert. Sickert: Paintings and Drawings. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006. Bergonzi, Bernard. The Situation of the Novel. London: Macmillan, 1970. Booth, Francis. Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940–1980. Raleigh, NC : Lulu Press, 2012. Bradbury, Malcolm. ‘Introduction.’ In The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction. Malcolm Bradbury (ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977. 7–22. Bradford, Richard. The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Buckell, G.J. ‘Rayner Heppenstall.’ Context No 18. Dalkey Archive Press Website. Undated: www.dalkeyarchive.com/rayner-heppenstall/

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———. Rayner Heppenstall: A Critical Study. Champaign, IL and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007. Bundy, A.J.M. ‘Introduction.’ In Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination. A.J.M. Bundy (ed.). London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 48–69. Butler, Alice. Ann Quin’s Night-time Ink: A Postscript. London: Royal College of Art Graduation Show 2013. June 2013; www.alicebutler.org.uk/essays/ann-quins-nighttime-ink-a-postscript-3/ Butor, Michel. ‘The Novel as Research.’ In The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction. Malcolm Bradbury (ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977. 48–22. Cixous, Hélène. ‘Langage et regard dans le roman experimental: Grand-Bretagne.’ Le Monde. 18 May 1967: 16. Clements, James. Mysticism and the Mid-Century Novel. Houndsmill, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Cooper, William. ‘Reflections on Some Aspects of the Experimental Novel.’ In International Literary Annual No 2. John Wain (ed.) New York: Criterion Books/ John Calder, 1959. 29–36. Dällenbach, Lucien. The Mirror in the Text. Trans. Jeremy Whiteley with Emma Hughes. Cambridge: Polity for University of Chicago Press, 1989 [1977]. Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995 [1992]. Durix, Jean-Pierre. ‘The Visionary Art of Wilson Harris.’ World Literature Today. Varia Issue. 58 (1) Winter, 1984: 19–23. Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. Vocation and Identity in the Fiction of Muriel Spark. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990. Evenson, Brian and Joanna Howard. ‘Ann Quin.’ The Review of Contemporary Fiction. 13 (2) Summer [June] 2003: 50–75. Faas, Ekbert, with Maria Trombacco. Robert Creeley: A Biography. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2001. Feldman, Michael. ‘Grievance: The Underlying Oedipal Configuration.’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 89, 2008: 743–58. Forster, E.M. Howards End. London: Edward Arnold, 1973 [1910]. Gasiorek, Andrzej. ‘Postmodernisms of English Fiction.’ In The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel. Robert Caserio (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 192–209. Gindin, James Jack. Postwar British Fiction: New Accents and Attitudes. London: Cambridge University Press, 1962. Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. London and New York: Continuum, 2005 [1972]. Gorak, Jan. ‘Angels, Dancers, Mermaids: The Hidden History of Peckham in Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye.’ Scottish Literary Review. 6 (1) 2014: 29–46.

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Harris, Wilson. The Eye of the Scarecrow. London: Faber and Faber, 1965. ———. The Waiting Room. London: Faber and Faber, 1967. ———. ‘The Music of Living Landscapes.’ In Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the imagination. A.J.M. Bundy (ed.). London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 40–46. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. London: Global Grey E-Books, 2015 [1850]; www.globalgreyebooks.com/Pages/scarlet-letter.html Heppenstall, Rayner. The Fourfold Tradition. London: Barrie and Rockliffe, 1961. ———. The Connecting Door. London: Barrie and Rockliffe, 1962. ———. The Woodshed. London: Barrie and Rockliffe, 1962. ———. The Intellectual Part: An Autobiography. London: Barrie & Rockcliff, 1963. ———. The Master Eccentric: The Journals of Rayner Heppenstall 1969–1981. Jonathan Goodman (ed.). London and New York: Allison and Busby, 1986. Huyssen, Andreas. ‘The Search for Tradition: Avant-garde and postmodernism in the 1970s.’ New German Critique. 22, 1981: 23–40. ———. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Johnson, B.S. Albert Angelo. London: Constable, 1964. ———. Trawl. London: Secker & Warburg, 1966. ———. The Unfortunates. London: Picador in association with Secker & Warburg, 1969. ———. ‘Introduction’. In Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? London: Hutchison, 1973. ———. See the Old Lady Decently. London: Hutchison, 1975. Jordan, Julia. ‘ “For Recuperation”: Elegy, Form, and the Aleatory in B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates.’ Textual Practice. 28 (5) 2014: 745–61. ———. ‘Introduction: Avant-Garde Possibilities – B.S. Johnson and the Sixties Generation.’ In B.S. Johnson and Post-War Literature: Possibilities of the Avant-Garde. Julia Jordan and Martin Ryle (eds.). London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 1–13. Kimball, Roger. ‘The First Half of Muriel Spark.’ The New Criterion. 11 (8) April 1993: 9; www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-first-half-of-Muriel-Spark-4732 Kitchen, Paddy. ‘Catherine Wheel: Recollections of Ann Quin.’ London Magazine. 19 (3) June 1979: 50–57. Lukács, Georg [György]. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Merlin Press, 1971 [1923 in German]. MacKey, Nathaniel. ‘The Unruly Pivot: Wilson Harris’ The Eye of the Scarecrow.’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 20 (4) Winter 1978: 633–59. Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. ‘ “Hieroglyphics of Space”: Wilson Harris in The Waiting Room.’ Callaloo. 18 (1) Winter 1995: 125–31.

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Quin, Ann. Letter dated Ilfracombe 10th June 1964. Lawrence Auctioneers ‘Books, Maps & Manuscripts’ Online Catalogue [Re: withdrawn lot 3437] 21 July 2011: 15; www. lawrences.co.uk/Catalogues/FS210711/page15.html ———. Berg. London: Calder and Boyars, 1964. ———. Three. London: Calder and Boyars, 1966. ———. Letter [Unpublished Typed] to Larry Goodell [copy from recipient]. Franked 25 September 1969; N.Pag. ———. Passages: A Novel. London: Calder and Boyars, 1969. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. The Voyeur. New York: Grove, 1986 [1955]. Sarraute, Nathalie. ‘The Age of Suspicion – 1950.’ In The Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel. New York: George Braziller, 1963. Sewell, Fr. Brocard. Like Black Swans: Some People and Themes. Padstow: Tabb House, 1982. Shaffer, Brian W. Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Sinfield, Alan. Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain. London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ : Athlone Press, 1997. Spark, Muriel. The Ballad of Peckham Rye. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963 [1960]. ———. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. London: Penguin, 2000 [1961]. ———. The Girls of Slender Means. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966 [1963]. Stonebridge, Lyndsey and Marina MacKay. ‘Introduction: British Fiction After Modernism.’ In British Fiction After Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century. Lyndsey Stonebridge and Marina MacKay (eds.). Houndsmill, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 1–16. Suh, Judy. ‘The Familiar Attractions of Fascism in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.’ Journal of Modern Literature. 30 (2) Winter 2007: 86–102. Van O’Connor, William. ‘Two Types of “Heroes” in Post-War British Fiction.’ PMLA. 77 (1) 1962: 168–74. Williams, Raymond. ‘Realism and the Contemporary Novel.’ Partisan Review. 26 (2) Spring 1959: 200–213. ———. ‘The Bloomsbury Faction.’ In Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays. London and New York: Verso, 2005 [1980]. 148–69. Wolfe, Jesse. Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. London: Hogarth Press, 1927.

8

Inner Space Odyssey: Suburban Spacemen and the Cults of Catastrophe James Reich

A sunken dream . . . is there life on Mars? It seemed to me that psychological space, what I termed ‘inner space’ was where science fiction should be heading. J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton (192) Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was predominantly concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning. Along with indifference to space there went an even more complete indifference to time. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (20)

In ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’ (1962) J.G. Ballard predicted: ‘The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer that needs to be explored. The only true alien planet is Earth’ (103). During the 1960s, the avant-garde of British science fiction turned inward. This was a belated response to earlier modernism, an exploration of the unconscious and permissiveness, and a response to the hard realities of space exploration. NASA’s fly-by Mariner probes were launched toward Venus in 1962 and Mars in 1964. The Soviet Venera IV reported the hellish properties of the Venusian atmosphere before succumbing to those violent conditions in October 1967. From Apollo 11 and the Eagle module, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made heroic prints in the grey, aseptic lunar surface in the early hours of 21 July 1969. Not two years later, Alan Shepard of Apollo 14 would demonstrate that golf could even be a good moon walk spoiled. The tourism of Arthur C. Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust (1961) presented a view of the Moon that would soon feel as antique as Jules Verne: 227

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It was a sea of dust, not of water, and therefore it was alien to all the experience of men – therefore, also, it fascinated and attracted them. Fine as talcum powder, drier in this vacuum than the parched sands of the Sahara, it flowed as easily and effortlessly as any liquid. A heavy object dropped into it would disappear instantly, without a splash, leaving no scar to mark its passage. Nothing could move upon its treacherous surface except the small, two-man dust-skis – and Selene herself, an improbable combination of sledge and bus, not unlike the sno-cats that had opened up the Antarctic a lifetime ago. (7)

In 1972, Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt drove the Lunar Rover on a dune buggy trip over the vacant landscape, and no one has returned to the Moon since. The most extravagant romances with, and domestications of our solar system, from the absurdism of Lucian of Samosata’s second-century True History, to Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), to Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950), collided with empiricism, photography, hard science and presence. There were no mudmen, no princesses, no bikini-clad Venusians, no shaggy vampiric Martians in empirically explored space. Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip with its canals and ‘praying mantis types of bugs, as large as donkeys’ (24) was published by Ballantine in April 1964, little more than six months prior to the Mariner’s fly-by of its haunted topography. In 1968, Brian Aldiss edited a pulpy collection entitled All About Venus: A Revelation in Fact and Fiction that struggled with these contradictions, and that admitted that Venus was, finally, a brutal disappointment to science fiction writers. The planet, Aldiss conceded, ‘just has not come up to expectations’ (10). The science fiction imaginary, because it had been shaped by reactionary forces, was overtaken by the real. Ambiguous Martian ‘canals’, described by Italian astronomers Secchi and Schiaparelli in the mid- and later-nineteenth century, the basis of a rational – albeit lost-in-translation – Martian ecology in science fiction, evaporated under intimate instrumental scrutiny. Much of the genre’s speculative space collapsed. These voyages, by cool unsentimental technologies, leading to the Moon landing, presented a crisis for what had been science fiction’s Golden Age. Curiously, the most important and paradoxical revolution in science fiction occurred within the decade when science fiction’s assumptions became unsustainable, and the coup was mounted by Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and a contingent of swinging avant-gardists around The Swan pub in Knightsbridge, London. By 1964, Moorcock had assumed the editorship of New Worlds magazine and the currents of what would become the British New Wave of science fiction garnered power, and their aesthetic influence came to represent another mode of transatlantic British invasion. Further, the energy of British science fiction in the

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1960s is a result of the conflation of its postponed or missing modernist literary period with the New Wave’s controversial embrace of postmodernism. In ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ (1967) John Barth wrote that the works of Jorge Luis Borges ‘suggest the view that intellectual and literary history [. . .] has pretty well exhausted the possibilities of novelty’ (81). Barth’s solution to this condition of the ‘used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities’ (70) was an embrace of virtuosity. Virtuosity in science fiction required greater formal experimentation, and transgressions of the genre’s most calcified colonial, positivist humanist assumptions. Science fiction in the permissive 1960s would finally address sex and altered states of consciousness where non-genre ‘literary’ authors had gone more boldly, before, in the decades before the Second World War. This self-conscious avant-garde wave of science fiction would fuse sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, Marxism, Freudianism, a lurid quick-fire media landscape, Pop Art, the ambivalent violence of youth subcultures, the postcolonial consciousness of global student movements, fragmentation, intertextuality, irony and obscenity to reorient and revivify its form. The essential benefit to science fiction of embracing the postmodern condition was that the boundaries between science fiction and ‘literary’ fiction became porous for the first time in a prolonged and sustained fashion. This was also the case for detective and crime fiction. The turning inward toward Ballard’s ‘inner space’ also represents a reaction against the material and financial profligacy of the space race. During the 1960s, even if he wore the space man’s uniform, the cosmic astronaut was made suddenly anachronistic by the hip, existential cybernaut who emerged in the wake of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1956). The colonial exterior was secondary to the philosophical psychopathologies of the interior. Countercultural conditions on the ground and conditions of relative boredom in orbit and beyond, which would lead to further psychopathology and psychedelicnarcotic oblivions, demanded nothing less. Just as with the Grand Tour and encounters with the arabesque and oriental informed the Romantic writers of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic period, the colonial and postcolonial limits of the British Empire informed writers (re)encountering England after more bureaucratic or military postings. The dissonance between Anthony Burgess’ Malayan posting, Brian Aldiss’ service with the Royal Signals in Burma, J.G. Ballard’s dislocation from his childhood in Shanghai, Arthur C. Clarke’s relocation to Sri Lanka, and post-war Britain had profound effects on the nation’s science fiction. Colonialism and an explicitly and implicitly white, Western individualism and a sense of technologized manifest destiny had underpinned science fiction during its Golden Age. Heroic,

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escapist science fiction provided an important, if naïve, counterpoint to the Great Depression. Both the end of the Second World War in 1945 and of the Raj in 1947 represent two key factors that contributed to a more introspective SF in Britain.1 Unlike Britain and much of Europe, the United States had not been bombed, with the exception of Pearl Harbor, and the not widely documented deaths of six Oregonians who chanced upon a single Japanese balloon bomb. British cities were cratered and disfigured by the Blitz, and wartime rationing that had included food, clothing and fuel, persisted until 1954. The twilight and decline of Empire had been addressed by non-genre writers of the 1950s, notably by the ‘Angry Young Men’, and existential, hedonistic, conscientious, agitated and revolutionary youth cultures from the mid-fifties forward would render a blandly positivist colonial SF retrograde and unconscionable. By the late 1960s, the era of the Vietnam War, with the riots of the Parisian soixante-huitards, and a climate in which European and American youths of all ethnicities were expressing increasing solidarity and continuity with the so-called ‘Third World’, science fiction’s interventionist tendencies would require revision. If the genre was to survive, it would have to negotiate with challenging empirical realities, pop cultural, socio-political, environmental and technological revolutions. The offices and pub meetings of the New Worlds magazine contingent and the permissive and experimental New Wave of science fiction curated and defined by Michael Moorcock, Ballard and others, would usurp the conservative Golden Age defined by the American magazines under Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell, and not a moment too soon. It is not an exaggeration to say that, to avoid permanent juvenilia, science fiction had some catching up to do, and – to borrow from George Orwell – some unpleasant facts to face. In the subsequent decade, in July and September of 1976, NASA’s Viking landers reached the Martian surface.

Why so conservative? Behold the Man and the apostasy of British SF In the opening chapters of The Time Machine (1895), H.G. Wells’ Time Traveller summons a group of witnesses to the exposition, experiment and execution of his flash forward to the year 802,701 AD. They are drawn predominantly from Wells’ cast of middle-class and professional archetypes that would be re-employed dialectically, as witnesses, advocates and victims in his definitive quartet of scientific romances between 1895 and 1899, including also The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau and The War of the Worlds. They exist to be confounded,

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these doctors, psychologists, provincial politicians, newspaper editors and clergy. Critically, however, it is this last ecclesiastical category that is absent from The Time Machine: a Darwinian anxiety regarding the potential blasphemies of the text determines this lack. The speculation between the Medical Man, the Psychologist and the Very Young Man regarding travelling back into history is perfunctory. They discuss only the possibility, ‘One might travel back and verify the accepted account of the Battle of Hastings’, or that ‘One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato’ (7). Even with Greek being the language of the New Testament, abruptly, the Very Young Man turns his attention to the future. The absence among the Time Traveller’s witnesses of some equivalent of the Curate who advocates a Christian perspective in The War of the Worlds, for example, means that, arguably, the most tantalizing ‘experimental verification’ of all – witnessing the historical passion of Jesus of Nazareth to verify the Christ of faith – goes untested. It is, for a man of Wells’ imaginative power, perhaps a sin of omission. Given the anti-Christianity of The Island of Doctor Moreau (which of the other three 1890s novels The Time Machine resembles most thematically), and the follies of the Curate faced with satanic Martians, it is difficult to believe that the thought did not occur to him. The narrative hastens into futurity, avoiding the thorns of the issue. Still, the cohort is vague, permitting an interpretation of unconscious Christian admonition in the tripartite arrangement of the Time Traveller, the Very Young Man, and the mysterious Silent Man, as an unresolved and unconscious holy trinity watching the novel. The Dadaist Jacques Rigaut exploited time travel’s latent blasphemy implicit in Wells’ experimental verification in his short story ‘A Brilliant Individual’ (1925), in which his time traveller Skullhead, ‘after wandering the province of Judea for six months, stumbles across a child who is Jesus of Nazareth asleep under an olive tree: he injects potassium cyanide into the child’s veins’ (28). Yet, it was Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man (1969), expanded from his Nebula Award-winning novella first published in New Worlds magazine in 1966, that finally exploited the silence in The Time Machine. Moorcock, born in London in December 1939, shortly after the death of Sigmund Freud and the beginning of the Second World War, remains one of Britain’s most prolific science fiction and fantasy authors, and has a claim to being their most original editor. Where much of Moorcock’s fiction is an intertextual multiverse, his most radical work stands (almost) alone within his oeuvre. Behold the Man, its title derived both from Pontius Pilate’s apprehension of Jesus in the Gospel of John 19.5, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce homo: Wie man wird, was man ist (1908), furthers The Time Machine’s Marxism and sets it within a plexus of Freudian, Jungian and

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Nietzschean theory. Neitzsche’s subtitle, How One Becomes What One Is, represents Moorcock’s ironic tautology as his time Traveller, Karl Glogauer finds himself replacing the ‘congenital imbecile’ Jesus to accomplish the passion narrative that has survived by this impersonation until 1970 which is the novel’s ‘present’. Wells recounts, So that it was the Psychologist who himself sent forth the model Time Machine on its interminable voyage. (9)

In his 1993 introduction to The Time Machine, collected in London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction (2012) Moorcock reminds readers that Wells’ work was ‘to have an effect on the popular imagination not unlike the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) some seventy years later. It established a public vision of the future, a powerful myth in which human beings evolved into something alien’ (267). Yet Moorcock’s novel presents canny and uncanny deformations of Wells’. The prophetic use of quartz and ivory for the earlier machine are replaced with the amniotic fluid and eggshell qualities of Moorcock’s machine, an immaculately false womb, which delivers Glogauer to ancient Palestine. Behold the Man first presents itself as two parallel narratives, yet these resolve into a vanishing point or singularity. Glogauer, in his simultaneous existences, contemporary and ancient, embodies mystic messianic and rational suicidal tendencies which result in his martyrdom. His trajectory is self-fulfilling in more than one ironic sense. Where The Time Machine is an adventure story in physics and pre-Revolutionary communist allegory, Moorcock takes Wells’ almost disposable line about the launch of the machine by the Psychologist as its premise. Before taking his trip, Glogauer is informed by the machine’s creator, Sir James Headington, that ‘[t]ime is nothing to do with space – it is to do with the psyche’ (72). Glogauer is cast as Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), as cited in Moorcock’s novel: We Protestants must sooner or later face this question: Are we to understand the ‘imitation of Christ’ in the sense that we should copy his life, and if I may use the expression, ape his stigmata: or in the deeper sense that we are to live our own proper lives as truly as he lived his in all its implications? It is no easy matter to live a life that is modelled on Christ’s, but it is unspeakably harder to live one’s own life as truly as Christ lived his. Anyone who did this would . . . be misjudged, derided, tortured and crucified. . . . A neurosis is a dissociation of personality. (81)

Unlike Jung’s modern man, Moorcock’s protagonist is not a Protestant, and in his oscillations between contemporary London with its anti-Semitic Teddy Boys, and his Palestinian passion narrative, Karl is absorbed, ambivalently, into the myth of

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the Wandering Jew: ‘To be Jewish is to be immortal [. . .]. To be Jewish is to be a martyr’ (59). Karl’s Judaism in Behold the Man is both necessary to the fulfilment of Karl as Christ’s passion, and the signifier of anachronism, of time out of joint. The unusual Glogauer name is likely derived from glogau, a German spelling related to the Polish word głóg which in English is hawthorn, of which Christ’s crown of thorns was constructed in myth. Karl, as ‘psychiatrist manqué’ (36) speaks with Sigmund Freud’s Austrian accent, Karl Marx’s secular communism, and, after one of his half-hearted attempts at suicide by gassing himself with his kitchen stove, as a ‘Belsen victim’ (94). As a sexually abused boy, compulsive masturbator, closet homosexual, a Jewish scapegoat, he is, in Julia Kristeva’s sense, an abject figure. It is not without irony then that in his simultaneous imitation and deconstruction of Christ, Moorcock draws on another Nietzsche text, The Gay Science (1882), particularly in Chapter Two of Part Three of the novel where Karl becomes ‘the Madman’ animating Nietzsche’s parable of the Madman and the death of God that Karl represents. Although Karl is the time Traveller, he is not, as in Wells’ novel, also the inventor of the time machine. It is after inheriting his father’s Mandala Bookshop in London that he encounters the inventor Headington while hosting a Jungian discussion group above the store. The mandala is, of course, the central symbol in Jung’s Flying Saucers (1959). Headington, wealthy physicist, heroic military man, maintains the aristocratic aspect of Wells’ protagonist, yet is from middleclass parents. His lab is sited in the grounds of a rectory outside Banbury, Oxfordshire. The rest of the Jungian study group, who are not present for the experiment unlike Wells’ archetypes, are sundry hippie types interested in flying saucers, witchcraft and the fate of the Lemurians. In Jung’s Flying Saucers, the UFO s are neurotic manifestations of the psyche; they are interventions. Karl’s time travel is a determinist intervention, a psychotic fulfilment. This kind of futurist intervention was in the zeitgeist of the 1960s, and informs Clarke and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the pop atavism of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? (1968).2 When ‘Behold, the Man’ first appeared in a shorter form (and with its comma intact) in New Worlds SF, Volume 50, Number 166, in 1966 – the issue that also contained J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ and Brian Aldiss’ ‘Another Little Boy’ – it was contextualized by an editorial essay by Moorcock entitled ‘Why So Conservative?’. In it, Moorcock asks, Why should science fiction have been for so long a restricted medium, selfcensoring, never dealing realistically with certain aspects of our lives? Long after

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Lawrence and Joyce had been accepted, the editors of the sf magazines felt anything but hints about sex were too strong for their readers, that any story likely to offend a certain section of the public could not be published, no matter what its merits were, and so on. (2)

The invocation of D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce recognizes that British SF writers like Moorcock and Ballard, now in the early postmodern period influenced by William S. Burroughs’ incisions into SF, The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket that Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964), French deconstruction, psychedelia, psychoanalysis and sexual permissiveness, had ‘missed’ modernism; or rather, the modernist period of science fiction was of a different nature that had not turned inward, into the unconscious, eroticism and blasphemy. Moorcock and Ballard were indebted to Burroughs and Burroughs returned their admiration. In 1963, Moorcock, along with Anthony Burgess, advocated for Burroughs in the Times Literary Supplement during the infamous ‘Ugh’ correspondence, a three-month spat over the scatalogical qualities of Burroughs’ fiction. In Moorcock’s first editorial for New Worlds SF, issue 142, Moorcock published Ballard’s ‘Myth Maker of the Twentieth Century’ (1964). In this issue that also features Brian Aldiss and John Brunner, Ballard writes: Whatever his reservations about some aspects of the mid-twentieth century, Burroughs accepts that it can be fully described only in terms of its own language, idioms and verbal lore. Dozens of different argots are now in common currency; most people speak at least three or four separate languages, and a verbal relativity exists as important as any of time and space. (126) For science fiction the lesson of Burroughs’ work is plain. It is now nearly forty years since the first Buck Rogers comic strip, and only two less than a century since the birth of science fiction’s greatest practitioner, H.G. Wells, yet the genre is still dominated by largely the same set of conventions, the same repertory of ideas, and, worst of all, by the assumption that it is still possible to write accounts of interplanetary voyages in which the appeal is to realism rather than to fantasy. (129)

This liberation of language and the inversion of outer space toward Ballard’s ‘inner space’, while radical in terms of science fiction, was belated in the wider context of literary avant-gardes. George Orwell, who, almost certainly, every British science fiction writer of the 1960s had read, had championed Henry Miller in ‘Inside the Whale’ in 1940, long before nailing the mediated dystopian panopticon in Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of science fiction’s blueprints. In ‘Why So Conservative?’ Moorcock comes close to identifying the root of science

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fiction’s traditional aversion to what Orwell said were Miller’s ‘unpublishable words’. He does not, however, go so far as to cite the prudishness of Hugo Gernsback – after whom the Hugo Award is named – and his editorial proscriptions as the determining factor. The magazine that began the Golden Age of science fiction was Gernsback’s Amazing Stories: The Magazine of Scientifiction, first published in April 1926. In ‘Why So Conservative?’ Moorcock discusses the idea that the pulp magazines of the early twentieth century had ‘no literary standards’ (2), where Gernsback’s moral standards were, in fact, what set Amazing Stories apart from other pulps. Amazing Stories was not strictly a pulp magazine. It was printed monthly on heavier paper than the wood pulp stock that identified the ‘pulps’, was of a larger format, and at 25 cents was more expensive than the weeklies. In production values, Gernsback’s magazine was something between a pulp and a ‘slick’. In his first Amazing Stories editorial, Gernsback was at pains to make a distinction: ‘There is the usual fiction magazine, the love story, the sex-appeal type of magazine [. . .] but a magazine of “Scientifiction” is a pioneer in its field in America’ (3). This is where the segregation of sex and science fiction began. In his second editorial for Amazing Stories, in its first volume in May 1926, Gernsback went further, apparently inspired by a reader correspondence that may or may not have occurred as he suggests: And it was with a feeling of gratification that we noted the almost unanimous condemnation of the so-called ‘sex-appeal’ type of story that seems so much in vogue in this country now. Most of our correspondents seemed to heave a great sigh of relief in at last finding a literature that appeals to the imagination, rather than carrying a sensational appeal to the emotions. It is that which justifies our new venture – our expenditure of time and money. (99)

Although it was undoubtedly pioneering in many ways, the inaugural issue of Amazing Stories, which featured work by Jules Verne (‘Off on a Comet – or Hector Servadac’, 1911), H.G. Wells (‘The New Accelerator’, 1901) and Edgar Allan Poe (‘The Facts in the Case of Mr. (sic) Valdemar’, 1845) contained only one story written in the year of its publication. In August 1928, Amazing Stories, again alongside work by Wells, introduced space opera as it is understood even into the twenty-first century with Edward Elmer Smith’s ‘The Skylark of Space’ and Philip Francis Nowlan’s ‘Armageddon 2419 A.D.’ , the first appearance of Anthony ‘Buck’ Rogers. Yet, in February 1929, Gernsback abandoned Amazing Stories, a series of failed speculations in radio and television technology forcing him into bankruptcy. The magazine continued under the editorship of Thomas

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O’Conor Sloane, who was in his late seventies. Gernsback re-emerged months later with a new magazine, Science Wonder Stories. Here, Gernsback refined ‘scientifiction’ into ‘science fiction’, the genre title he coined in his June 1929 editorial of the first issue. Here also, he was critical of ‘the ascendancy of “sexy” literature’. Science fiction, as published in science wonder stories , is a tremendous new force in America. They are the stories that are discussed by inventors, by scientists, and in the classroom. Teachers insist that pupils read them, because they widen the young man’s horizon, as nothing else can. Wise parents, too, let their children read this type of story, because they know that it keeps them abreast of the times, educates them and supplants the vicious and debasing sex story. science wonder stories are clean, clean from beginning to end. They stimulate only one thing – imagination . Where is the reader who can remain phlegmatic when you take him to distant planets, into the far flung future 10,000 years hence, or on a trip into the fourth dimension? No wonder these readers or fans, if you please, look upon science fiction with a sort of reverence. (5)

It was the hysteria of Gernsback’s editorials that neutered science fiction, separated it from modernist literary tendencies. The younger writers of the Sixties New Wave, effectively inaugurated under Moorcock’s editorship of New Worlds, were compelled to address this conservatism, and, arguably, to revivify the form. As Ballard put matters in Speculation (1969): ‘The trouble with the Heinlein-Asimov type of Science Fiction is that it’s completely synthetic. Freud also said that synthetic activities are a sign of immaturity, and I think that’s where classical Science Fiction falls down’ (111). Behold the Man’s most transgressive individual moment does not appear in the earlier New Worlds iteration of the story. Yet, if New Wave science fiction was to reject Gernsback’s sexual conservatism, to catch up with modernist psychology, and the secularization of myth, Moorcock understood that his extended novella could fuse both in the Oedipus complex. Karl Glogauer’s encounter with Jesus is an uncanny split between the Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History, where the Jesus of History has a ‘hunched back and a cast in its left eye’. The face of Jesus is ‘vacant and foolish. There was a little spittle on the lips’ (108). Since he is to be a substitute for Jesus, Karl’s encounter with his counterpart in the home of Mary and Joseph takes place, in a sense, in his home. The recognition is then unheimlich in Freud’s sense of the uncanny as the ‘unhomely’. Not only does Karl meet Jesus and become Jesus as Nietzsche’s annihilating madman, but he also emerges as Freud’s Oedipal son returning to his sexually repressed and frustrated mother.

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He gasped and drew up her skirt, driving his fingers into her, rocking against her, rolling her over onto the floor, hastily pushing her legs apart. She moaned, screamed, snarled, jerked and clawed, then lay still as he continued to thrust into her. But the lust went and he could not finish. He sighed, glancing up suddenly. The idiot stood in the doorway looking at them, spittle hanging from his chin, a vacant grin on his face. (113)

This terse, primal scene of incest is the resolution of Karl’s near-immaculate emergence from the womb of the time machine and the fulfilment of the precipitating gesture of Wells’ psychologist; and anxiety-potential in all time travel narratives is the implicit, unconscious fear of incest, and the other articulations of the family romance, mourning and melancholia. Moorcock’s incest scene made present the lack of modernist psychosexual theory in postmodernist science fiction in its most potent configuration. It is also a return to the ‘immemorial violence’ (10) of birth that in Kristeva’s later analysis separates the I from the (m)other, and forms the ego. The return, in incest, represents the paradoxical loss and discovery of the self that Karl undergoes. His loss of lust recapitulates the abjection of the mother. Hugo Gernsback died in August 1967, between the iterations of Behold the Man.

Nadsat and the Hipcrime Vocab I foresaw that the Queen’s Peace was going to be greatly disrupted by the aimless energy of these new young, well-fed with money in their pockets. [. . .] I finally decided to be prophetic, positing a near-future – 1970, say – in which youthful aggression reached such a frightful pitch that the government would try to burn it out with Pavlovian techniques of negative reinforcement. Anthony Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time (26)

There are revealing passages in the second volume of Anthony Burgess’ memoirs, You’ve Had Your Time (1990), that underline the reactionary origins of his most notorious novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). Arguably, the science fiction qualities of Burgess’ ‘space-age hooligans’ and their British dystopia are located in the disordered relationship between neologism, subcultural violence, statism, postmodernity, lapsed classicism, and the saturated quality of its narrative. It is a retro-futurist novel, employing – as is common within the genre – SF ’s speculative tendencies to describe present anxieties. A Clockwork Orange presages elements of cyberpunk, but without the latter’s valorization of what Burgess regarded as essentially deviant subcultures.3 For what informs the

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novel’s havoc is Burgess’ distaste for the scenes he discovered as a postcolonial writer, returning to England after working as a teacher in Malaya. The teenagers that informed Burgess are present in the photographs taken by filmmaker Ken Russell in 1955 of Edwardian or Teddy Boys and [Teddy] girls, duelling and posing over waterlogged bomb craters and between buildings destroyed by the Blitz, and their improvized bricolage of fashion and violence. The work is, specifically, a condemnation of British, the cult of the ‘angry young man’ that emerged in the summer of 1956 or, to evoke the Americanization of which Burgess was suspicious, the postures and attitudes of Norman Mailer’s alienated, introspective, hedonistic and violent ‘hipster’ or ‘the philosophical psychopath’ described in ‘The White Negro’ (1957). Present, also, are the melancholy and lethal yearning of Rebel Without a Cause, both Richard Lindner’s psychological study of the 1940s and the Nicholas Ray/James Dean movie of 1955 which borrowed its title. Burgess sees violence and degeneracy: Lynn and I had come home to a new British phenomenon – the violence of teenage gangs. We had on our leaves of 1957 and 1958 seen teddy boys in coffee bars. These were youths dressed very smartly in neo-Edwardian suits with heavy-soled boots and distinctive coiffures. [. . .] They were the personification of the Zeitgeist in that they seemed to express a brutal disappointment with Britain’s post-war decline [. . .]. Now, in 1960, they had been superseded by hooligans more casually dressed. The Mods and Rockers were so called because the first group wore modern clothes, whatever they were, and the other had leather jackets with rockers or parking prongs [. . .]. Lynn and I saw Mods and Rockers knocking hell out of each other when we made a trip to Hastings. (26)

A Clockwork Orange presents a psychogeographical overlay of London, with Burgess’ mapping and indictment of the cultural context in which his teenagers negotiate their wasteland. A group of Burgess’ young thugs of the near-future follow narrator Alex who lives in Municipal Flatblock 18A, between Kingsley Avenue and Wilsonsway. Here, for example, Burgess deliberately positions Alex as the angry young man: evoking Kingsley Amis, hard-drinking icon of bloke-lit since the publication of Lucky Jim (1954), and Colin Wilson, author of The Outsider, which along with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was identified as one of the flashpoints for the angry young man in the summer of 1956. The pub, the Duke of New York, is on Amis Avenue. Amis had published a collection of essays on science fiction two years earlier, entitled New Maps of Hell, and that is what Burgess is making via his inside references. Burgess was suspicious of

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Americanization, and viewed Colin Wilson as a dubious conduit between the volatile youth of both cultures. Burgess said of Wilson, that he was ‘likeable’ but made ‘embarrassing statements’. In You’ve Had Your Time, Burgess writes: ‘His presence among the impressionable American young was perhaps dangerous because they were only too ready to throw over the rational’ (200). Therefore, Wilsonsway describes not only a place, but a way of life, Wilson’s existential and psychological views. Wilsonsway also puns Harold Wilson who, at the time of the novel’s publication, was rising towards becoming leader of the Labour Party then in opposition. But Alex is, in a sense, born in that summer of 1956 when J.B. Priestly coined the phrase ‘the angry young man’ in The New Statesman – Priestly Place is also one of A Clockwork Orange’s allusory locations. Other prominent locations on Burgess’ tour include Atlee Avenue, after Clement Atlee, Britain’s Labour Prime Minister between 1945 and 1951 who was both preceded and succeeded by the Conservative leader Winston Churchill. Burgess’ novel indicts liberal reforms and state aid. Marghanita Boulevard is named after Marghanita Laski. Laski was a prolific contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, but furthermore, was part of a family of leading Jewish socialists and intellectuals, including her uncle Harold Laski who was chair of the Labour Party in the mid1940s. Burgess’ reason for interpolating her was almost certainly to implicate her novel Tory Heaven, or Thunder on the Right in his treatment of socialist utopian thinking turned dystopian. Laski had used a supposedly conservative utopia for satirical, anti-conservative purposes. By drawing Laski into his topography, Burgess suggests his book is a mirror to her intent. The public library or Biblio is located on Boothby Avenue, after the Baronet Sir Brooke Boothby who, importantly for the framing of A Clockwork Orange, was a friend of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the English translator in 1780 of Rousseau’s Confessions. Alex’s confessional narrative is shaped by Rousseau’s earlier text, most especially its candour regarding his hedonism, and the rationalization of his petty criminality. A continual repetition of ill treatment rendered me callous; it seemed a kind of composition for my crimes, which authorized me to continue them, and, instead of looking back at the punishment, I looked forward to revenge. Being beat like a slave, I judged I had a right to all the vices of one. [. . .] I applied myself to thieving with great tranquility, and whenever this interrogatory occurred to my mind, ‘What will be the consequence?’ the reply was ready, ‘I know the worst, I shall be beat; no matter, I was made for it.’ (32)

Further drawn in through the Public Biblio on Boothby Avenue are Rousseau’s Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique (1762) with its interrogation of

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will, law, monarchy, man in a state of nature, his freedoms, and perhaps also Rousseau’s Émile, ou de l’éducation of the same year. Here, Rousseau states, The noblest work in education is to make a reasoning man, and we expect to train a young child by making him reason! This is beginning at the end; this is making an instrument of a result. If children understood how to reason they would not need to be educated. (52)

The socio-political ironies inherent in Burgess’ psychogeographical overlay are obscure to readers, arguably lost within the vivid polyglossia of Alex’s voice: ‘The Russian suffix for – teen was nadsat, and that would be the name of the teenage dialect, spoken by drugi or droogs or friends in violence’ (38). Nadsat is also derived from Cockney rhyming slang, intentional echoes of Roma language, demotic cant, Yiddish, and homosexual Polari. It is, then, for a conservative author like Burgess, an abject language. For all its tonal brilliance and quotable codes, it is the language of future teens devised from already marginalized cultures for the purposes of a, finally, reactionary satire, despite its iconic status, and sustained currency in avant-garde and youth subcultures since publication. The fashions are that backward glance taken by futurists, as is the reference to Ivan Pavlov in Burgess’ Ludovico technique, as is Alex’s faith in Beethoven. Alex and his droogs evoke the bricolage of aesthetics and fashion later catalogued by Dick Hebdige in Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) and conform to the tabloid notion of the folk devil described in Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (1972). Alex possesses the notionally ‘queer’ (‘as a clockwork orange’) dandyism, obsession with cleanliness, and aestheticism and latent violence of the Mods of the 1960s, even if his fashion is something of a fantasy or influenced by Russell’s bombsite portraits of teens in the 1950s. Arguably, as raconteur and dandy, Alex cuts a Wildean figure, filled with paradox. If Alex is sympathetic as a narrator it is for a certain vulnerability, the same quality that can be identified in Graham Greene’s delinquent gangster Pinkie in Brighton Rock (1938), and in the three Jims that established the critical concept propounding the figure of the angry young man: Amis’ Jim Dixon, Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, and Jimmy Cooper from, to return to Brighton and Mods and Rockers, The Who’s rock opera Quadrophenia (1973), in cinemas in 1979. A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962, the same year as Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which, and in his subsequent work, Understanding Media (1964), McLuhan proposes language and media as technologies that through their acceleration and interplay affect and dictate the

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parameters of consciousness. This eclectic mosaic finally rings the earth via electronic media. On the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television show The Summer Way in 1968, McLuhan (‘prophet of the media’) was in conversation with Norman Mailer (‘prophet of hip’): Whenever a new environment goes around an old one there’s always new terror. We live in a time when we have put a man-made satellite environment around the planet. The planet is no longer nature; it’s no longer the external world. It’s now the content of an artwork. Nature has ceased to exist. [. . .] [W]hen you put a man-made environment around the planet, you have in a sense abolished nature. Nature, from now on, has to be programmed.

Alex’s existential crisis lies between Rousseau and McLuhan, between Nature and Programming. It is inadvertently voiced by his victims, notably the alcoholic Irish derelict who complains, before his beating by the gang, that the earth is ringed by satellites, signals of transcendental progress while barbarism persists on the surface of the planet. McLuhan says on ‘The Summer Way’ that the dissonance is ‘psychedelic. When you step up the environment to those speeds, you create the psychedelic thrill. The whole world becomes kaleidoscopic, and you go inward [. . .]. It’s an inner trip, not an outer trip’. Drugs, alcohol, psychedelics, narcotics, are fused with the velocity of the technological experience. So, the protagonists of late-1960s SF in Britain and America owe more to Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954), Syd Barrett (see J.G. Ballard’s visionary and vanishing suburbanites4), Timothy Leary, William Burroughs or Jim Morrison than conventionally heroic SF /colonial archetypes like Phillip Francis Nowlan’s Buck Rogers or Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter. 1968 saw the publication of another of the masterpieces of British SF, John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. Brunner had by the time turned away from the space opera of his earlier career towards what he referred to on this broadcast as ‘close focus science fiction’, which projected changes as far into the future with only speculations that Brunner believed he might reasonably be expected to live and bear witness to. On the BBC television programme, ‘Time Out of Mind’, broadcast in 1979, John Brunner stated: With the passage of the years, I became more and more cynical about the possibilities of contemporary technology. Back in the 1930s and 40s, the big questions were things like can we liberate nuclear energy; can we send a rocket to the Moon? And subsequently, of course, after we had done these things, the central question became: if we’re so clever, why aren’t we smart? In other words, if we can do these marvelous things, why can’t we live together in a sane society?

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Just as a drunken Irish tramp elucidates the McLuhanized world to Alex and his tribe, so does another drunken Irish-American tramp describe this ambivalent world in Brunner’s novel. Posing as a vagrant, the lexicographer and prophet of hip in Stand on Zanzibar, Chad Mulligan, is an alcoholic whose works of leftist polemic philosophy form part of the mosaic of the novel, along with his postBeat devil’s dictionary known as the Hipcrime Vocab. Mulligan’s theories and hipster redefinitions shape the argot of Brunner’s sprawling post-McLuhan world, his global village with its technologically mediated tribalism. His books have made Mulligan rich, even as he slums his way through a rotten New York. Brunner saw America as a failed future, as reflected upon in the novel by Elihu Masters, US ambassador to Beninia. Rumour said that he was dead by his own hand. Indeed, the despair that breathed through his mocking definitions reminded Elihu of nothing so much as Wells’s The Mind at the End of its Tether, that grim epitaph for human aspiration, and suggested that the rumour might be right. (85)

The Mind at the End of its Tether (1945) was written at the end of H.G. Wells’ life, and was a formative influence (as was Wells’ 1904 story ‘The Country of the Blind’) on Colin Wilson’s philosophy and his angry young man treatise The Outsider. Chad Mulligan then, is a continuation of the existential type that Burgess found objectionable. Wilson states, ‘Wells has gone the whole distance, and landed us on the doorstep of the Existentialist problem: Must thought negate life?’ (19). The medium of thought is language. It was more difficult to say in 1968, but in our posthuman condition we may observe the linguistic or textual expressions that flatten differences in genetics, between wetware, software and hardware, between animal, human and machine. Thought becoming language, becoming social and psychic conditioning, becoming atomic bombs, does ‘negate’ life, at least as it was understood by Wells and Wilson, where progress is towards extinction though expressions of total bureaucracy, and total war. Similar concerns feature in Stand on Zanzibar. Mulligan is a Wilson-esque figure, seeking to avert catastrophe by deforming the structure of language, being fundamentally a deconstructionist, much like Burroughs. Brunner’s novel imitates the fragmented form of McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, which text is quoted in Brunner’s opening contextual chapter, a section where McLuhan describes the methodology of his colleague, Harold Innes: When he [Innes] interrelates the development of the steam press with ‘the consolidation of vernaculars’ and the rise of nationalism and revolution he is not reporting anybody’s point of view, least of all his own. He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight. (N.Pag.)

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This ‘consolidation of vernaculars’ is part of the compression of SF s ‘missing’ modernist period into its New Wave. Stand on Zanzibar is simultaneously Joycean and, to use McLuhan’s term, ‘surfs’ on postmodern French and American cultural and literary theory. The novel embodies simultaneity itself. The saturation in Brunner’s technique is taken up by later writers like William Gibson, but in 1968 it was literary in ways and intentions that Arthur C. Clarke’s bestseller of the same year, the novel(ization) 2001: A Space Odyssey simply was not, even with the benefit of Stanley Kubrick’s psychedelia. Neither Clarke’s nor Burgess’ novels are as trippy as their visualization by Kubrick. Stand on Zanzibar earned a Hugo Award in 1968, and the inaugural British Science Fiction Association Award the following year. Evidently, the New Worlds contingent, to which Brunner was peripheral, had succeeded in dragging some British SF out of the positivist humanist gravity of the Golden Age. They achieved this by aligning SF in form and content with the 1960s zeitgeist, and getting hip. In doing so, they saved the genre from irrelevance, particularly in the face of empirical data from exploration of the solar system that rendered the romances of the Golden Age still more anachronistic. In his introduction to Stand on Zanzibar, Bruce Sterling says of Brunner: Brunner was older and wiser than the hippie sci-fi kids clustered around London’s New Worlds magazine, the tie-dyed global focus of the New Wave. Through no fault of his own, Brunner had arrived at a roaring, out-of-control hashish party at somewhat the wrong time. Brunner was no longer young enough to be authentically spontaneous, naïve, flipped-out, and psychedelic. He had too much seasoned erudition and street smarts. He chose to jam all that into a paisley New Wave package – a package that split at the seams. (vii)

The media landscape of Stand on Zanzibar is by turns hip and banal. One of Brunner’s conceits is the transcribed data picked up by the Scanalyzer, permitting chapters and sections of the novel to appear as dislocated fragments, idiomatic blips and bites of electronically captured media. The Scanalyzer, like the radial tuner of a 1960s radio develops the schizophrenic and paranoid psychology of the novel, the permeability and ambiguity of bodies and identities formed increasingly by their relation to mass media, news reports, propaganda, advertising speak and celebrity. In essence his apparent breakthrough already existed and as Brunner admitted in ‘Time Out of Mind’ on BBC 2, ‘I could steal it wholesale from Jon Dos Passos’. Dos Passos had used newsreel and biographical interruptions in The 42nd Parallel (1930); 1919 (1932); and The Big Money (1936). Another of Brunner’s satirical elements is the television show Mr. and

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Mrs. Everywhere, which interpolates its viewers, making them actors; a postmodern touch not unfamiliar to readers of Philip K. Dick, for example. The antipathy toward the Americanization of the future, or the present, is palpable in the underlying philosophies and architectures of A Clockwork Orange and Stand on Zanzibar. Brunner’s work, most obviously in its setting, is prepared to engage these anxieties more directly. Brunner’s version of Burgess’ gangs are the muckers, a mash-up of the droogs and the Black Panthers, and a continuity shot that finds fulfilment in the Mod/Panther collective the Panther Moderns in Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). Stand on Zanzibar is also reminiscent of American SF author Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (1966), as a novel concerned with overpopulation, dystopian New York, rioting, eugenics, yet it goes further in its schizophrenic forms of mass media and the consequences of human cleverness. The central protagonists of Brunner’s novel, the Muslim Afram (African American) junior vice-president of General Technics, Norman House, and his roommate Donald Hogan, who is a spy, share a similar domestic half-room space to Sol the engineer and Rauch the detective in Harrison’s book. Arguably, what sets the works apart is that Stand on Zanzibar is a meta-text, a hypertext, whose avant-garde form tested seams between SF and ‘literary fiction’, something that is now relatively routine among genre and non-genre writers who have, after postmodernism, come to SF deliberately and/or ironically, as they have done for crime and detective fiction. It is a work of extremism: religious, technological, sexual, military and colonial; all structures maintained, at least in 1960s poststructural theory by language, and its effects on consciousness, identity and freedom. It is at least as misogynistic and misanthropic as A Clockwork Orange, but Brunner has deliberately stripped Stand on Zanzibar of residual charm. Again, as Bruce Sterling notes: ‘The characters are remarkably unpleasant people. They are native products of a difficult world, and many of them come to bad ends. They are always under stress and are often violent, yet the book’s true emotional storminess is almost all in the exposition’ (ix).

Annihilating all that’s made: Chaos and countryside As the sun’s output of radiation increased towards that day, no longer so far distant when it would turn nova, so the growth of vegetation had increased to undisputed supremacy, overwhelming all other kinds of life, driving them either to extinction or to the twilight zone. The traversers, great spider-like monsters of

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vegetable origin that sometimes grew to a mile in length, were the culmination of the might of the kingdom of plants. Hard radiation had become a necessity for them. The first vegetable astronauts of the hothouse world, they travelled between Earth and Moon long after man had rolled up his noisy affairs and retired to the trees from whence he came.

Brian Aldiss, Hothouse (257)

In After London: or, Wild England, Richard Jefferies’ catastrophe novel of 1885, the pastoral author and solitary walker depicts the uncanny return and ascendency of Nature and barbarism over the English countryside. The ‘countryside’ is paradoxically unnatural, a rationalization of Nature. This cultivation, the cultural use of the landscape was, in part, defined in the cultural imagination by artists like John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough. Much as later Romanticism gave primacy to a gothic sublime, early-modernist Joseph Conrad’s Marlow suggested of his Turner-esque vision of London and the Thames in Heart of Darkness: ‘And this also [. . .] has been one of the dark places of the earth’ (7). The ordering of the land, industrialization, an interior colonization and organization, together repress darkness, wildness. There is a perversity to allotments, country gardens, estates, at least insofar as the riot and return of stewardless, husbandless, wilderness is deployed. The countryside is a neurotic construct to be overthrown. In Jefferies’ post-apocalyptic narrative, domesticated and cultivated animals and plants are wiped out by their exposure to the encroaching wilderness. Man returns to medievalism.5 With the image of Wells’ Martian red weed in The War of the Worlds (1897) and John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), this wilderness catastrophe is an important precursor of both Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse and J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, both published in 1962. Lucian of Samosata’s True History (circa 140–180 CE ), a second-century space opera, is an epic fulfilment of the promise of lying. As he states in his preface, ‘So, I am writing about things I neither saw nor experienced, nor heard about from others, which moreover don’t exist, and in any case could not exist’ (204). Of the warring solar system he writes: Spiders in that region are numerous and very large – each of them much bigger than the Cyclades islands. These were ordered by Endymion to cover with a web the air between the moon and the Morning Star. (208)

Lucian’s work concerns interplanetary conflict between the forces of Endymion whose kingdom is the Moon and those of Phaeton whose kingdom is the Sun. The conflict arises from the desire of Endymion to establish a colony on Lucifer or the Morning Star, what later astronomers would name Venus. The war is witnessed

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by Lucian after taking off to sea on Earth, going beyond the limits established by Hercules and Bacchus, and becoming intoxicated by the winelands, rivers of wine filled with fish that taste of wine. His ship is swept from the ocean and into space by a storm. The interplanetary war is waged by the inhabitants of the Moon and Sun who ride gigantic six-headed vultures, ants and gnats a mile long and battles are commenced by the trumpeting of lines of braying asses. The warriors fight with weapons made from giant radishes, asparagus spears, mushroom shields and so forth. Lucian’s story references Egyptian mythology – the dog-headed inhabitants of Sirius – and classical myth in the form of Centaurs, and winged horses. He describes the inhabitants of the Moon in a manner consistent with science fiction writers of the twentieth century, up until the point where the Big Lie collided with the disillusionment of Big Science: they are hairless, possess marsupial stomachs, removable and exchangeable eyes, and wear clothes made of soft glass. In New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960), Kingsley Amis remarked that Lucian’s satirical absurdity had the effect of making True History appear like ‘a joke at the expense of nearly all early-modern science fiction, that written between, say, 1910 and 1940’ (11). Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse uses the almost identical image of gigantic spiders having woven a web connecting the Earth to the Moon. Though this has tended to go unnoticed, Hothouse owes as much to the extravagance of Lucian as it does to the nonsense verse of Lewis Carroll and Jonathan Swift. It could be said that in the debate regarding the place of Lucian in the history of SF, Aldiss finally incorporates him by homage. Hothouse is also clearly indebted to the unsettling sixteenth-century vegetable art of Guiseppe Archimboldo, and Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, with its weird plant, animal and insect life; and further there is its ‘exterior’ when the panels of the painting are closed to show the Earth in mid-creation, a surreal state where only sea and bizarre arbours exist. Of course, this is also what remains when the Garden of Earthly Delights is closed to humanity. It is simultaneously pre- and post-Edenic. Aldiss’ novel, which had earned him a Hugo Award when it first appeared in serial form in American Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, is also an exorcism. Aldiss explains, The England to which I returned in the early fifties was a great disappointment. Whereas I had adjusted to the squalor and poverty of India, I hated the squalor and poverty, allied to the depressing climate, of my homeland. I had no connections. No money. I resolved to forget the East – ‘the splendor and havoc of the East’, as William Kinglake nobly calls it. There seemed to be no other way to come to terms with my new life. Yet the outrageous sub-continent of India, the pagodas and hardships of Burma, the broken-down beauty of Sumatra and its people, the cleanliness of Singapore, the swarming delights of Hong Kong, and all

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those warm rivers and seas in which my friends and I had swum – and that Dalilike Banyan – remained ineradicably in my mind. Exorcism was required. (270)

Like Burgess, Aldiss’ struggled with disappointment on returning, albeit with different causes. Where Burgess witnessed improvisatory youth culture, brimming with violence, Aldiss saw dreariness. Without doubting the sincerity of Aldiss’ admiration, there is, in this orientalism, the colonial imagination’s fascination with the ‘natural’ penury of the other. This is, in a sense, accepted where the hardships of post-Raj England, the long afternoons of the end of Empire, pass before the author without romance. Exotic colonial outposts are replaced by the blitzed and dreary city, the demob suit and rationing. The outposts may have had their squalor, but at least it was colourful squalor, and one could go home to the Queen’s Peace. Not so. The vivid jungle superimposed itself on Aldiss, and the English countryside and the grey street could not compete. His solution, his exorcism, in Hothouse was a catastrophe novel of profound ambivalence. Under a dying sun, and the influence of hard radiation, life on Earth has undergone mutation. What remains of humanity are physically and intellectually diminished arboreal tribes, unaware that they are part of a devolutionary process – actually, a wheel – in which the plant and vegetable world is inexorably reasserting itself, but that will, in turn, perish, but not before its spores blow deeper into the universe. In his introduction, Neil Gaiman calls Hothouse ‘the only science fiction novel I can think of that celebrates the process of composting’ (ix). Hothouse is a frenetic odyssey where scarcely a page is turned without an encounter with hostile vegetable, insect or mutated vegetable-animal chimeras. Initially, the novel’s protagonist Gren is a Homeric figure of action like his instinct-driven companions. The passions and griefs of Aldiss diminished humans are brief and inconsequential, as life requires continual action from them. What Gren and the other human remnants lack is a psyche. Each carries their ‘soul’ in a totem object. Aldiss’ premise is – like Bosch’s horrific vision that accompanies his ante- and anti-Eden – a posthuman apocalypse, collapsing the Enlightenment humanist version of man as distinct and autonomous from the rest of nature. Crucially, Gren becomes conscious and introspective through the intervention of what might be referred to as a magic mushroom. This brain-like fungal entity attaches itself to Gren, penetrates his nascent consciousness, and establishes a dialogue with its host. ‘You are human,’ said a voice. It was the ghost of a voice, an unspoken voice, a voice that had no business with vocal chords. Like a dusty harp, it seemed to twang in some lost attic of his head. (87)

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The fungus, Aldiss puns, is called the morel – it is both mushroom and morality, of a sort. This symbiotic or parasitic consciousness that will lead Gren into cruelty is not native to humanity. It is also cancerous, and must be excised. It is finally tricked away from Gren’s scalp following an interlude reminiscent of both Homer’s Odyssey, and The Fifth Voyage of Sinbad, where Gren is forced to carry the bizarre pseudo-prophet Sodal Ye, Aldiss’ reworking of the Old Man of the Sea. In terms of the British New Wave of science fiction, Hothouse is an edge text, due to its relative lack of interiority. The riot of action and the naïve ‘Lewis Carroll-like portmanteau names’ (berrywhisks, crocksocks, leapycreepers, suckerbirds, etc.) that, in Gaiman’s introduction, ‘feel as if they were created by clever children’ (x) and even the insufferable chorus of tummy-bellies who Aldiss thought of as comic relief, are part of the emotional distance that the book maintains from the reader. It is a relentless yarn of acts and surfaces. What signals it as precursor, perhaps, is that within that context, when the narrative might rest upon the assumptions and positivism of Golden Age SF, with the absence of a humanist interior accepted, Aldiss turns away. The morel explains: All of us have by accident been swept aside from the main stream of devolution. We live in a world where each generation becomes less, and less defined. All life is tending toward the mindless, the infinitesimal: the embryonic speck. So will be fulfilled the processes of the universe. [. . .] Under steadily increasing heat, devolutionary processes accelerate. (267)

Hothouse is, at its end, a rigorously pessimistic novel. The acceptance of catastrophe and its (d)evolutionary and transcendent possibilities is reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s anti-hero Robert Kerans in The Drowned World, published the same year. Soon it would be too hot. Looking out from the hotel balcony shortly after eight o’clock, Kerans watched the sun rise behind the dense grove of gymnosperms crowding over the roofs of the abandoned department stores four hundred yards away on the east side of the lagoon. Even through the massive olive-green fronds the relentless power of the sun was plainly tangible. (7)

Although he began publishing in the science fiction magazines in 1956, it was the advent of the Sixties when he settled in the bourgeois suburb of Shepperton that saw J.G. Ballard’s breakthroughs as a writer, as editor of Ambit and a cardinal member of the New Worlds contingent. With these, he established the plexus of surrealism, psychopathology, sexuality, technology, architecture, consumerism, abandonment, mediation and catastrophe that are encompassed in the term ‘Ballardian’. His

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relationship to painting is essential to reading the unconscious of Ballard’s oeuvre. Fine art frequently does the work of writing the interior of Ballard’s neurotic characters. Ballard transcribes canvases into his work, thematically and as specific objects. Ballard’s early engagement with the communications landscape, of the latent and blatant power of images was low-tech, a recapitulation of the art of the modernist period into nascent postmodernity. It is notable that in addition to the surrealist works that are referenced in Ballard’s earlier catastrophe novels, he was also interested in pop art. Andy Warhol’s series of Death and Disaster paintings (1962–64), his Marilyn and Liz Taylor silkscreens coincide with this period of Ballard’s development, as do James Rosenquist’s I Love You with My Ford, President Elect, Car Touch and Modern Wife, which in particular align with the mid-to-late 1960s texts that would comprise The Atrocity Exhibition at the end of the decade, and Crash (1973). Coincidentally, perhaps not, Warhol’s Green Car Crash was painted in 1963, the year in which Ballard’s wife Mary died, and was until 2007, the most valuable of all Warhol’s works. A prolific short story writer, during the early to mid 1960s Ballard’s longer works were catastrophe novels: The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought/The Burning World (1964) and The Crystal World (1966). These are in the surreal mode of Yves Tanguy’s Palace of the Windowed Rocks (1942) and Max Ernst’s Europe After the Rain (1940–42), where disastrous elements of the landscape suggest mutations and vanishings into entropy. The Drowned World was Ballard’s first success as a science fiction novelist. In premise, The Drowned World resembles Hothouse: The terminal condition of the sun results in climate change, the melting of the polar ice caps, rising sea levels, and the re-emergence of repressed or extinct flora and fauna. The lagoons, giant iguanas, the return of primordial forms to the drowned and uncanny city – ‘had it once been Berlin, Paris, or London? Kerans asked himself ’ (9) – have their psychic effect upon the survivors at the Ritz and the biological testing station. This is what separates Ballard’s Conradian narrative from Aldiss’: the presence of the inscape, of the unconscious, the inexorable shift towards the new psychology of inner space. As Dr Bodkin explains to Kerans, But I’m really thinking of something else. Is it only the external landscape that is altering? How often recently have most of us had the feeling of déjà vu, of having seen all this before, in fact remembering these swamps and lagoons only too well? [. . .] Everywhere in nature one sees evidence of innate releasing mechanisms literally millions of years old [. . .]. Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged into the archaeopsychic past [. . .]. (43)

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The innate releasing mechanisms (IRM s) are responsible for Kerans’ psychic descent down his own spine, retreating through his central nervous system. In Bodkin’s theory of Neuronics, the central nervous system retains repressed transubstantiated data of biological, evolutionary trauma. The transit of the psychology back through spinal time is synchronized with the geophysical alterations in the landscape. These repressed iterations of the unconscious are released, ‘each with a distinct geological terrain, its own flora and fauna, as recognisable to anyone else as they would be to a traveller in a Wellsian time machine. Except that this is no scenic railway, but a total reorganization of the personality’ (44). The Drowned World maintains a pulpy aspect – pirates riding alligators, voodoo, burlesque, dynamite – through all of this. Yet, Ballard pours the lost material of science fiction’s missed modernist period (replaced by the positivism and ingenuity of the Golden Age and its anti-sex editorials) into his disasters. His technique of invoking or transcribing modernist art,6 riffing on recontextualized Shakespeare, particularly The Tempest, which interrupts The Drought and is restaged in Concrete Island (1974), for example, evidence a Freudian intertextuality. Ballard leans on the Caliban–Prospero relationship. The Drowned World is a novel of ‘sea-change’ transformation, dictated by dreams and the unconscious. It pulls at the threads of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Death by Water’ section from The Waste Land (1922), invokes Dali directly by name and in the Dantean figure of Beatrice Dahl. Beatrice’s apartment at the Ritz is decorated with Paul Delvaux’s The Sleeping Venus (1944); Ballard describes the painting, but does not name it. There is also a Max Ernst that ‘screams silently to itself, like the sump of some insane unconscious’ (29). Parts of the city read like transcriptions of Giorgio de Chirico paintings: ‘From the alley-way they emerged into a small square, where a group of sedate 19th-century municipal buildings looked down on an ornate fountain. [. . .] Next to the courthouse with the faceless clock tower was a second colonnaded building, a library or a museum, its white pillars gleaming in the sunlight like a row of huge bleached bones’ (66). It is the Ernst that inspires Kerans and suggests his transformation: For a few moments Kerans stared quietly at the dim yellow annulus of Ernst’s sun glowering through the exotic vegetation, a curious feeling of memory and recognition signaling through his brain. Far more potent than the Beethoven, the image of the archaic sun burned against his mind, illuminating the fleeting shadows that darted fitfully through its profoundest deeps. (29)

In the chapter entitled ‘The Pool of Thanatos’ Kerans is compelled by the pirate Strangman into an interiorized version of a space-walk. In a diving suit with an

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oxygen line, he is made to penetrate the womb-like bulb of a submerged planetarium. In this inversion and simulacra of the cosmos, Kerans experiences a uterine return, an instant of Lacanian apprehension when he catches his reflection in a mirror inside the untouched planetarium, and near drowning when he goes too far: ‘It suits you Kerans, you look like a man from inner space. [. . .] But don’t try to reach the Unconscious, Kerans; remember, it isn’t equipped to go down that far’ (103). There is an ambivalence to Kerans’ near death by water: was it sabotage to the suit or oxygen line by Strangman, or did Kerans seek his own annihilation? Robert Kerans is preoccupied with the mysterious disappearance of Lieutenant Hardman, a helicopter pilot whose psychopathology Kerans recognizes as a more advanced stage of his own. As conditions deteriorate, the sun growing more menacing, Kerans turns away from the northward journey and travels south in search of Hardman. Hardman, finally a Conradian, Kurtz-like figure, has journeyed back down his central nervous system, into spinal time, primordial layers or archaeopsychic existence, and has an appointment with oblivion. He is a Ballardian archetype, the charismatic suicide, like Vaughan in Crash, into whose psychopathology Ballard’s protagonists and narrators are frequently drawn. In the case of The Drowned World, it is Kerans who will go further, and overtake Hardman on the southern journey into the lethal tropics. Kerans, like Aldiss’ Gren, is not interested in escape, or a rational humanist future where the novel might espouse his survival instincts, and where man can once more sublimate Nature under Countryside. In Ballard, the catastrophe of Nature, the false dawn of a new Eden represents a terminal stage, a vast impersonality to which to submit.

Alien interventions: Psychedelia and family romance Seldom recalled consciously, but nearly always demonstrable through psychoanalysis, is the next stage in the development in the incipient estrangement from the parents which may be described as the family romances of neurotics. P[. . .] At about this time, the child’s imagination is occupied with ridding himself of his parents, of whom he has a low opinion, and replacing them by others, usually of superior social standing [. . .] which finds expression in a fantasy that replaces both parents by others who are grander. The technique used in developing such fantasies, which at this period are of course conscious, depends upon the child’s ingenuity and the material he has at his disposal. [. . .] This stage is reached at a time when the child still lacks any knowledge of the sexual determinants of procreation’. Sigmund Freud, ‘Family Romances’ (38)

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In 1968, two narratives exerted a profound influence on science fiction as a literary genre, and the appearance of science fiction and Space Age technology as a speculative, comparative, to borrow from Ballard ‘archaeopsychic’ phenomena in even disinterested spectators. One was the collaboration between Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, developing two of Clarke’s short fictions, ‘The Sentinel’7 (1951) and ‘Encounter in the Dawn’ (1953) into the simultaneous novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The other was Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? that posited alien intervention in humanity’s ancient development, evident von Däniken proposed, in the Old Testament, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Incan Nazca lines, the resemblance of figures in Mayan reliefs to contemporary astronauts, and in hitherto unexplained anachronistic technologies like galvanic batteries, optical lenses, discovered by archaeologists. Setting aside the specifics of von Däniken’s most absurd flights,8 one is left with the persistent ancient aliens theory that informs new age wish fulfilment and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012). What in 1968 appealed about these narratives is equally relevant to contemporary readers: they are projections of millenarian anxiety, and work to absolve colonial guilt by presenting Earth as a colony itself, presenting an intergalactic sublime before which humanity is prostrate. They also appeal to the neuroses that Sigmund Freud described in ‘Family Romances’ (1909), the fantasy that our ‘parents’ are not our real parents, that real parents, our origins are elsewhere and grander. Consequently, they are pre-sexual, either bypassing procreation as Clarke does in the conception of the Star Child in its glittering womb, or by using alien technologies to recapitulate Old Testament holocausts against sex. Such thinking also has roots in Emanuel Swedenborg’s Life on Other Planets (1758), which conflates the alien and the angelic. The Swedenborgian experience in science fiction is a psychic, catalytic communication from an abstract incorporeal angelic or godlike entity or intelligence, a pseudo-spiritual or gnostic interplanetary message.9 In 2001, when the monolith first appears, and is discovered by the man-apes of the African veldt, it is a transparent crystal, retaining the appearance of the alien beacon found by the lunar survey team in ‘The Sentinel’. It produces the first rhythm, ‘the first time – and the last for three million years – the sound of drumming was heard in Africa’ (20). Under the somnambulistic influence of the rhythm, the man-apes approach the monolith as it loses transparency and fixes these nascent men with psychedelic patterns. Faster and faster spun the wheels of light, and the throbbing of the drums accelerated with them. Now utterly hypnotized, the man-apes could only stare slack-jawed into this astonishing display of pyrotechnics. [. . .]

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Fantastic, fleeting geometrical patterns flickered in and out of existence as the glowing grids meshed and unmeshed; and the man-apes watched, mesmerized captives of the shining crystal. They could never guess that their minds were being probed, their bodies mapped, their reactions studied, their potentials evaluated. (21)

The sinister monolith, as opposed to Ballard’s innate releasing mechanisms, is an extrinsic releasing mechanism working, most successfully, on the man-ape MoonWatcher’s dormant facilities, ‘while his brain lay open to its still uncertain manipulations. Often he felt nausea, but always he felt hunger; and from time to time his hands clenched unconsciously in the patterns that would determine his new way of life’ (26). Under the influence of the monolith, Moon-Watcher develops a psyche and mastery of his plain. The rest is well-known. In the novel’s second part, where a black monolith is exhumed on the Moon and David Bowman, Frank Poole and HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence that runs the spaceship Discovery, are sent on their enigmatic mission to Jupiter (in fact, a mission to Japetus, a moon of Saturn where Mission Control suspect another monolith exists). HAL murders Poole, and disables cryogenic support to the rest of the slumbering crew. Bowman deactivates HAL , a virtual murder, at least of HAL’s psyche. Bowman removes blocks of ego-reinforcement and the computer regresses into a false childhood where he recalls his first instructor, the father of his consciousness, Dr Chandra. HAL is motherless. Women in Clarke’s narrative of space have not achieved higher status beyond that of flight stewardesses, and simply provide the names given to the space pods Anna, Betty and Clara: ‘They were usually christened with feminine names, perhaps in recognition of the fact that their personalities were sometimes slightly unpredictable’ (124). Ironically, it is HAL who may be, as he confesses in rhyme, ‘half-crazy’ (156). Summarized in Clarke’s novel, but played out in Kubrick’s film, is a chess game between Dave Bowman and HAL . Bowman controls the white pieces, and HAL the black. The penultimate scenes of both the film and book show Dave Bowman, who has passed in his space pod through the monolith’s psychedelic inferno, the Star Gate, to rest ‘on the polished floor of an elegant, anonymous hotel suite that might have been on any large city on Earth’ (208). The hotel suite, a simulacrum, is also a recapitulation of Bowman’s memories and, vividly in Kubrick’s realization, of his chess game with HAL . Kubrick’s hotel floor is a grid, like a blanked or imperfectly realized chessboard, but the pieces – Bowman’s white space pod and the black monolith – finish their game there. HAL’s artificial intelligence (AI ) has colluded with the Swedenborgian monolith.

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Now, at last, the headlong regression was slackening; the wells of memory were nearly dry. Time flowed more sluggishly, approaching the moment of stasis – as a swinging pendulum at the limit of its arc, seems frozen for one eternal instant, before the next cycle begins. The timeless instant passed; the pendulum reversed its swing. In an empty room, floating amid the fires of a double star twenty-thousand light years from Earth, a baby opened its eyes and began to cry. (217)

Bowman is, at last, transformed into the foetal Star Child, a regression doubling HAL’s, back into artificial birth. Finally returned to orbit around Earth, the Star Child intervenes to prevent a nuclear holocaust. Both the film and novel close with the Star Child in its spectral amniotic transit. Piers Anthony’s Hugonominated epic Macroscope (1969) constellates similar motifs: ‘What now, of Earth? Mankind was a child-culture with adolescent technology; were they to present it with a devastating adult technology? Or would it be better to stay clear and allow natural selection to occur as it did elsewhere in the galaxy?’ (480). Clarke’s transcendental Star Child, like Moon-Watcher, ‘though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. He would think of something’ (221). What’s it going to be then, eh? In 1969, David Bowman was followed by David Bowie, the sometime Mod, now suburban spaceman, a cybernaut of the zeitgeist, whose ‘Space Oddity’ was a hit single. Bowie’s disappearing astronaut, later revealed to be a junkie in ‘Ashes to Ashes’ (1970) follows both the Bowman and the New Wave type, vanishing in ambivalence, into padded cells, submerged planetariums and abandoned hotels, following ambiguous cults of catastrophe.

Notes 1 SF is used here, as opposed to Forrest J. Ackerman’s accidental 1954 coinage ‘sci-fi’ that, in usage, tends to emphasize science fiction’s most generic qualities. New Worlds SF magazine would, by the end of the 1960s, exemplify its avant-garde possibilities. 2 Ancient contact theories were also articulated by Iosif Shklovsky and Carl Sagan in Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966) and John Michell in The Flying Saucer Mystery (1967). 3 See variously William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Pat Cadigan for the alignment of gangs, popular culture, media, fashion and technology in cyberpunk. 4 In his 1960s catastrophe novels, notably The Drowned World (1962) and The Burning World/The Drought (1964/65) Ballard’s protagonists experience eco-psychopathy resulting in modes of ‘disappearance’. Ballard developed this theme in his 1970s novels, Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), High Rise (1975) and The Unlimited Dream

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Company (1979) where a triangulated area of London, including Heathrow, the Westway and Shepperton, suburbanize this same environmental, inner space crisis. Keith Roberts’ first novel The Furies (1966) was a catastrophe novel featuring giant wasps. Pavane (1968) sets medievalism, feudalism and Catholic supremacy within an alternative 1960s. Roberts was also an illustrator for New Worlds, painting the cover for the original publication of Moorcock’s Behold the Man. Angela Carter’s post-apocalyptic novel Heroes and Villains (1969) not only employs surrealist medievalism, and the feminist anti-archetypal philosophy detailed in her manifesto The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (1978), but sets the framework for the Freudian and transsexual Mad Max-isms of The Passion of New Eve (1977). Understanding this technique, David Cronenberg restaged Salvador Dali’s Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity (1954) in his 1996 film of Crash, with all automobile puns intended. First published as ‘The Sentinel at Dawn’. ‘Let us imagine that imagine that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed according to plan, i.e., deliberately, by a nuclear explosion. Perhaps – let us speculate a little further – the “angels” simply wanted to destroy some fissionable material and at the same time to make sure of wiping out a human brood they found unpleasant’ (36). John Wyndham’s Chocky (novella 1963, novel 1968) fits this category, even if Chocky’s intervention with eleven-year-old Matthew Gore is a transgression. The alien entity that insinuates herself into the boy is parthenogenetic.

Works cited Aldiss, Brian W. (ed.). All About Venus. New York: Dell, 1968. ———. Hothouse. London: Penguin, 2008. Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell. London: Penguin, 2012. Anthony, Piers. Macroscope. New York: Avon, 1969 Ballard, J.G. The Drowned World. London: Indigo, 1997 [1962]. ———. ‘Myth Maker of the Twentieth Century.’ In A User’s Guide to the Millennium. New York: Picador, 1996. 126–30. ———. Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, an Autobiography. London: Fourth Estate, 2008. ———. ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’ In Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings. Rob Latham (ed.). New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. 101–3. Barth, John. ‘The Literature of Exhaustion.’ In The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers of Modern Fiction. Malcolm Bradbury (ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977. 70–83. Bradbury, Malcolm. The Martian Chronicles [orig. as The Silver Locusts]. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1951.

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Brunner, John. Stand on Zanzibar. New York: Orb, 2011 [1968]. ———. ‘Time Out of Mind’. BBC 2, 1979. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIjGgC9qBP4 Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. London: Penguin, 1962. ———. You’ve Had Your Time: The Second Part of the Confessions. New York: Grove, 1990. Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. New York: Signet, 1968. ———. A Fall of Moondust. London: Gollancz, 2002. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin, 1981. Dick, Philip K. Martian Time-Slip. London: Gollancz, 1990. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Family Romances.’ In The Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock. London: Penguin, 2003. 36–41. ———. ‘The Uncanny.’ In The Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock. London: Penguin, 2003. 121–139. Gaiman, Neil. ‘Introduction’. In Brian Aldiss. Hothouse. London: Penguin, 2008. i–xiv. Gernsback, Hugo. Editorial. Amazing Stories. April 1926: 3. ———. Editorial. Amazing Stories. May 1926: 99. ———. Editorial. Science Wonder Stories. June 1929: 5. Gibson, William. Necromancer. New York: Ace, 1984. Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Jung, Carl G. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. Princton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1979 [1959]. ———. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Abingdon: Routledge, 2001 [1933]. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lindner, Robert M. Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath. New York: Grune & Stratton 1944. Lucien. Selected Dialogues. Trans. C.D.N. Costa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. McLuhan, Marshall and Norman Mailer. The Summer Way. Canadian Broadcasting Company, November 1968. www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtrJntaTlic Moorcock, Michael. ‘Behold, the Man’. In New Worlds SF. Michael Moorcock (ed.). 50 (166) September 1966: 4–58. ———. ‘Why So Conservative’. In New Worlds SF. Michael Moorcock (ed.). 50 (166) September 1966: 2–3, 156. ———. Behold the Man. New York: Avon, 1970. ———. London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction. Oakland: PM Press, 2012. Rigaut, Jacques. Lord Patchogue and Other Texts. London: Atlas Press, 1993. Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Emile, Or, Concerning Education. Boston: D.C. Heath, 1888. ———. The Confessions. London: Gibbings, 1907. Von Däniken, Erich. Chariots of the Gods? New York: Bantam, 1971. Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. London: Penguin, 2005. Wilson, Colin. The Outsider. New York: Penguin, 1982.

9

Terminal Data: J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock and the Fiction of the Decade’s End James Riley

The end of the road In April 1970, London’s New Arts Laboratory staged ‘Crashed Cars’, an exhibition curated by J.G. Ballard that featured the crumpled remains of three automobiles: a front-ended Pontiac, a wheelless Austin Cambridge and a ruined Mini. ‘Crashed Cars’ followed the publication of Ballard’s experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). As its title suggests, in addition to its extreme subject matter, The Atrocity Exhibition drew heavily upon the taxonomic language and structural principles of the catalogue. The novel is an archive of pathologies, medical evidence and documentation out of which Ballard generates expressive effect by way of compression, juxtaposition and permutation. One of its constituent texts ‘Crash!’, written in 1968, deals with the ‘latent sexual content of the automobile crash’ (153). Ballard describes focus groups devising ‘the optimum auto-disaster’ and the ‘strong religious and sexual overtones’ which feed into such conceptualizing (155). In so doing he outlines much of the programme for ‘Crashed Cars’. Placed in the reified atmosphere of the gallery alongside the questionable inclusion of a semi-nude model on opening night, the show attempted to frame the wrecked car as an object that was both iconic and erotic.1 The ‘conceptual auto-disaster’ (155) remained an abiding concern for Ballard. With Harley Cokeliss he went on to make the short film Crash! (1971) and then in 1973 published the novel Crash. According to a note Ballard added to The Atrocity Exhibition in 1990, the novel took inspiration from the adverse reactions to the ‘Crashed Cars’ show; the way the gallery visitors (allegedly) ‘broke windows, tore off wing mirrors and splashed [the cars] with white paint’ (39). For Sebastian Groes, writing in British Fiction of the Sixties (2016), this chain of work stands in 257

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sync with several other late 1960s and early 1970s texts that ‘problematize various philosophical issues in which the car plays a central role’: Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall (1969), Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat (1970) and J. G. Ballard’s cult novel Crash (1973) all think through the sociopsychological changes that society went through in the sixties. In these novels, the motor car and various crashes are used as metaphors for understanding the transformation that individuals had lived through. These novels are interested in and obsessed with the dangerous power of the imagination spawned by the revolution of the motor car as the pre-eminent sign of modernity, and its impact on the way we conceive endings. (160–61)

Understood as endings, Ballard’s crashes are resolutely terminal; not points of termination but points of connection that ignite other impulses, experiences and modes of behaviour.2 While the car crashes offered by Drabble and Spark work as narrative end points, Ballard sees the crash as that which generates further narration because it is ‘a fertilizing rather than a destructive’ event (157). For Ballard, this residual futurism goes hand in hand with the celebrity culture of the post-war period. The car crash has the effect of amplifying the spectacular status of such high-profile participants as ‘J.F. Kennedy, Jayne Mansfield and James Dean’ (157). As he argues in both ‘Crash!’ and the programme notes for ‘Crashed Cars’, the autodisaster is a ‘[. . .] a liberation of sexual and machine libido, mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an erotic intensity impossible in any other form’ (157).3 While ‘Crashed Cars’ was clearly an important bridge in Ballard’s development as a novelist, it also generates another line of symbolism connected to its context of display. The New Arts Lab was closely allied with the Institute for Research in Art and Technology, founded by John Lifton in October 1969. Both were offshoots of the Arts Laboratory established in Covent Garden by Jim Haynes in 1967.4 Haynes was one of the prime movers behind the ‘underground’ newspaper International Times (1966–1973). Along with the mid-1960s incarnation of Better Books, the Indica Bookshop and Gallery (1965–1970; 1966–1967) and the night club UFO (1966–1967) run by John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins and Joe Boyd, the Arts Laboratory was intended as a space conducive to the creative activities reported upon and promoted by International Times. Although short-lived, closing in autumn 1969, the Arts Lab became and has since remained one of the ‘quintessential’ markers of London’s ‘Summer of Love’, inevitably associated with stories of ‘happenings’, hippies and free sex.5 This is a mythic but nonetheless resonant perspective which underpins the popular view of London’s ‘counterculture’. As Jonathan Green describes in the

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introduction to his Days in the Life (1988), the counterculture is to be understood as ‘a cultural subset of the era’, a movement that sprang from ‘an eclectic fusion of beats, mods, the New Left, black music and white teenagers’ (x). He continues: ‘It flourished in its most visible manifestation from the Albert Hall poetry reading of June 1965 to the Oz trial of July 1971’ and achieved ‘its most powerful period between 1966 and 1969’ (x). For this ‘brief but influential period’ young people attempted ‘to step outside the bounds of established society and exist within a world whose only limits were of their own definition’ (x). Put more poetically, as Robert Hewison does in Too Much (1987), the counterculture saw ‘normality’ as an absurd fiction, one that necessitated the development of a false self to cope with its demands. In response, the aim of the counterculture was ‘recover the “visionary splendor” of life by dissolving that false self ’ (83). By contrast, the New Arts Lab was harder-edged, more critical and community focused. Aligned with the London Film-makers’ Co-operative, its activism was a far-cry from the ego-focused inner space of psychedelia that characterized UFO’s branding.6 At the same time groups such as the Situationist splinter faction King Mob and the far-Left collective the Angry Brigade were beginning increasingly violent guerilla campaigns in and around London.7 Similarly, in their ‘Open Letter to the Underground’ (1969), the London Street Commune castigated ‘the so-called Flower Children and their ideology of love’ on the basis of their ‘narcissism’ and lack of social consciousness (10). Claiming that the editorial control of International Times (in which the letter was first published) should be turned over to them, the group argued that the ‘underground’ should be understood as a source of resistance rather than pacificism (11). If the catalyst for the International Times, Indica and the Arts Lab was the success of the International Poetry Incarnation, a large-scale poetry reading held at the Albert Hall in 1965, then the defining image of this creative impetus can be drawn from Wholly Communion (1965), Peter Whitehead’s documentary of the event. Partway through one sees a young woman ecstatically dancing to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, an image of lyricism and individuality which seems to bear witness to the momentary dissolution of Hewison’s ‘false self ’. When a corresponding snapshot is sought for the New Arts Lab, one finds a grainy video still taken by Hopkins during the ‘Crashed Cars’ opening night. A young, naked and seemingly uncomfortable woman is flanked by men holding drinks.8 It is an image of menace, intimidation and incipient violence. Add to this the spectacle of a smashed Mini, a key image of the economic confidence experienced by Britain during the 1960s, and one gets a sense of the negative atmosphere at the decade’s end.9 ‘Crashed Cars’ proleptically anticipates the disastrous conclusions

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of both Easy Rider (1969) and Vanishing Point (1971). In so doing it crystallizes their metaphors: the late Sixties come into focus as a cultural car crash.

The end of the Sixties Iain Sinclair makes this point when he speaks about the overlap between The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, dubbing the latter ‘one of the cultural markers that signalled the end of the 60s’ (8). Here, Sinclair is making an expansive, metonymic claim for Crash. The novel is offered as part of a plural field of ‘cultural markers’ which announce the end of an entire period. The focus is not so much upon the Ballardian oeuvre, but is instead placed upon a specific interpretation of the late 1960s, one in which the movement into the 1970s is not a transition but the point at which a very particular epoch comes to a close. Beyond the symbolism of its title and central concept, certain elements of the text substantiate this reading. The narrative trajectory of Crash is centred upon James Ballard’s increasing entanglement with Robert Vaughan the ‘nightmare angel of the expressways’ (71). At one point Ballard recounts an evening spent at ‘the stock car races in the stadium at Northholt’ (71). As part of the programme, the event includes ‘The Recreation of a Spectacular Road Accident’, a section choreographed by Vaughan featuring the stunt man Seagrave (71). Within the novel, this event is offered as a rehearsal for Vaughan’s main ‘project’, a thanoteric car collision with Elizabeth Taylor. Vaughan’s Northolt event is described as a ‘re-enactment of [an] accident – a multiple pile-up in which seven people had died on the North Circular Road during the previous summer’ (72). The fidelity of its re-staging is a failure as Seagrave merely collides with one other saloon car rather than being ‘cannonaded into the path of four oncoming vehicles’ (72). However, the recreation is nonetheless exceptional within the programme of events James Ballard refers to. It hovers ambiguously between stunt, performance and accident with Seagrave’s eventual injury as a key part of the ‘morbid spectacle’ (72). It is a simulacral representation of the ‘source’ accident that generates similar trauma. Throughout Vaughan occupies the role of ‘film director’ who attempts to outline a ‘new choreography of violence and collision’ (72). Taken as a performance format, the novel’s staged car crash also echoes the violence embraced by contemporaneous artists such as Hermann Nitsch of the Vienna Actionists, Ralph Oritz of the Destructivists and Gustav Metzger of the Destruction in Art Symposium. For Jeff Nuttall, writing in Bomb Culture (1968), this type of extreme, corporeal and often traumatic work was characteristic of

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artistic endeavour within a ‘post-Hiroshima, napalm scorched world’ (161). Nuttall argues that within this context, the main artistic predicament is ‘the realienation of the artist in far more stringent circumstances than of the nineteenth century’ (161). While the artists of the previous century were faced with ‘the collapse of Christianity and the end of Hellenism’, the artist of the late twentieth century is ‘faced with the end of man’ (161). In Nuttall’s view the intensity of this mode of contemporary art is due to the failure of CND and civil disobedience to effect political action regarding the nuclear issue. Considering the essential redundancy of these characteristic markers of the 1960s counterculture, Nuttall argues that society must embrace the contemporary proximity of art to ‘its violent, orgiastic roots’ (161) and turn to affectivity as a motor of cultural change. Although concerned more with psychopathology than the nuclear context, Ballard uses Crash to deal with a similar impetus. In his ‘Introduction’ to the novel’s 1974 French edition, he describes a world suffused with ‘the death of affect’ (5). The behaviour of the novel’s core characters is both symptomatic of this stasis and a reaction against it. Vaughan exists in the latter camp. As the novel’s ‘hoodlum scientist’ (15), he comes closest to Nuttall’s conception of the post-nuclear artist, a figure who combines ‘the leftist element in the young middle class’ with ‘the delinquent in the young working class’ in a ‘reaffirmation of life by orgy and violence’ (161). A ‘cultural marker’ comparable to Crash can be found in the form of Michael Moorcock’s The Final Programme (1969). Just as The Atrocity Exhibition puts into proliferating circulation a series of proper nouns – including Vaughan – so too does Moorcock in the ‘first’ of his Cornelius Quartet offer Jerry Cornelius as a protean protagonist. The extent to which he moves towards ambivalence and transformation make the phrase ‘central character’ something of a misnomer. First published in the UK in 1969 it was released as a film by Robert Fuest in October 1973, four months after the appearance of Crash. Carrying the tagline ‘the future is cancelled’ the film maintains the novel’s evocation of a terminal sensibility comparable to the corporeal and machinic disintegrations of Ballard. More specifically, there is some shared imagery. At one point in The Final Programme Cornelius glances at a ‘newssheet’ and sees ‘a photo covering the whole side: a mass car smash with corpses everywhere’ (103). In Fuest’s film this becomes a tower of ruined cars that fills up the street of a slowly disintegrating London. But in contrast to Ballard, Moorcock’s crash is a marginal detail within a much wider landscape of collapse. The Final Programme is ostensibly set in 1969, a world of geopolitical crisis, overpopulation and nuclear anxiety. Moorcock offers these fissures as symptoms

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of a macro-historical shift, the conclusion of a millennial cycle which is to inaugurate a period of ‘great physical and psychological upheavals’ (27). A range of references are brought into play to diagnose the context, including astrology, Norse myth and Hindu philosophy but ultimately the dominant explanatory concept is entropy, ‘the heat death of the universe’ (29). Moorcock intends for this to be understood as a thermodynamic idea – that which describes the physical state of the world he depicts – as well as a social and cultural concept. The world of the novel, one ruled by ‘the gun, the guitar, and the needle’ (99) appears locked within a slow, inexorable decline into chaos. Moorcock used similar themes as the basis for The Black Corridor (1969), a novel about cosmic isolation. But where that text posited planetary evacuation as the necessary response to global discord, in The Final Programme the same circumstances motivate Cornelius towards a cycle of decadent behaviour. Scientist, rock star, hedonist and secret agent: Jerry Cornelius exists as a combination of Dorian Gray and James Bond. With access to seemingly vast resources and situated at ‘the hot bubbling core of the city’ (99), Cornelius lives out the escalating crisis ensconced in parties that last for months, not days. Occasional glimpses of the external world creep in to this hermetic zone but Cornelius, his guests and by extension the reader, remain largely oblivious to the novel’s thinly sketched political backdrop: What had happened to the country? The coalition government seemed ineffectual, unable to deal with anything at all. For a while it was a talking point, and then the party settled down again in July. (167)

The ‘final’ programme of the title works as an extension of the excessive and exceptional position occupied by Cornelius. He is co-opted into a project to create an ‘all purpose’, self-regenerating human being, a ‘human being equipped with total knowledge’ (215), that exists as an hermaphroditic synthesis of Cornelius and his antagonist in the novel, Catherine Brunner. Presented by Brunner as a project ideal for the ‘conditions in modern Europe’, the ‘god’ (215) figure emerges as an apocalyptic entity. The appearance of ‘Cornelius Brunner’ generates little in the way of deliverance but instead initiates an exacerbation of the world’s chaos as they move ‘across the continent’, leaving ‘whole cities abandoned and the land crushed’ (219). Cornelius Brunner is not a stabilizing presence but an active agent of entropy, a role ‘they’ take great delight in as the novel closes. As a work of pastiche that self-consciously draws upon genre fiction and popular media, The Final Programme exhibits a substantial tonal difference from

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the clinical, textbook-like precision of The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash. However, as Colin Greenland argues in his study The Entropy Exhibition (1983), Ballard and Moorcock both offer ‘the degeneration of energy as a fit image for the disintegration of society and the individual consciousness’ (12). In particular, Greenland reads The Final Programme as contextually specific, with Moorcock establishing a contemporaneous point of reference. Where Sinclair sees a symbolic value in Ballard’s cars, Moorcock’s novel is seemingly transparent in its [. . .] clear appreciation of the self-destructive trend of the riotous counterculture. This death-orgasm of insurrection, technology and sex is Cornelius and Miss Brunner’s cataclysmic resolution of the creeping decline they detect beneath the apparent exuberance of the decade. (145)

This analysis works as part of the suggestion that New Worlds provided a riposte to the counterculture as represented by International Times. Greenland sees Brian Aldiss’ ‘Acid Head Wars’ as emblematic of this perspective. Serialized in New Worlds during 1967 and published as Barefoot in the Head in 1969, it charts the aftermath of a global conflict that involved the extensive use of a weaponized hallucinogen. Moorcock used a similar device in The Final Programme when describing Cornelius’ attempt to infiltrate his father’s heavily fortified château. Nerve gas debilitates the assailants causing them to jerk ‘limply, mouths in rictus grins, eyes full of tears, muscles and limbs contorted’ (69). In contrast to this description of the bodily effects of a nerve agent, Aldiss creates a type of hallucinogenic narration for his central character Colin Charteris. These ‘godlike’ visions ‘from the drug’ (24) are interpreted by his eventual followers as a potentially prophetic discourse. Despite the exuberance of its experimentalism, Barefoot in the Head connects psychedelic drugs not to epiphanic insight but to geopolitical violence and a form of visionary rhetoric which is ultimately unable to develop into an active revolutionary impetus. On this basis, Greenland argues that the novel provides ‘a perceptive chronicle of the hippies themselves, from the brilliant, ecstatic sunlight of the first summer of love to the confused moral chiaroscuro at the end of the decade’ (12). It is this connection between the counterculture (broadly understood), the year 1969 and an interpretative narrative of collapse that is generally signified by the phrase ‘the end of the Sixties’. Writers such as Rob Kirkpatrick and Zachery Lazar have narrativized the decade as a downturn that gives rise to a spectacular denouement, one which reverses if not erases the alleged achievements accumulated up until 1969.10 It has become a critical truism to make a distinction between the 1960s and ‘the Sixties’, but within this difference between historical

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actuality and cultural memory, there is an additional tendency to chart the chronological movement towards the turn of the decade in specifically catastrophic terms. The other, more common markers of this katabatic narrative are the events that have come to designate 1969 as an annus horribilis: the murders associated with Charles Manson and his ‘Family’ and the Rolling Stones Concert at the Altamont Speedway. Both are routinely framed in terms comparable to those applied to Ballard and Moorcock. In ‘The White Album’ (1968–1978) Joan Didion posits 9 August 1969, ‘the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive travelled like bushfire through the community’ (47) as the abrupt end of the Sixties. For Didion, the violent death of a pregnant Sharon Tate and her house guests at the hands of Manson’s followers validated a growing sense of paranoia among such previously open and welcoming communities as LA’s Benedict and Laurel Canyons and, by extension, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. The Altamont concert of 15 December 1969 was a badly organized ‘free festival’, in which the Stones’ management had unwisely hired the Oakland Chapter of the Hells Angels as security. Hostile and antagonistic, they eventually beat to death an audience member, Meredith Hunter, as the Rolling Stones played on stage. For this and other reasons, not least the desolate setting of a speedway littered with crashed cars, Altamont is taken as a symbol of the structural instability underpinning the claims of the post-war demographic regarding their autonomy and progressive cultural impetus. Stephen Barber cements this reading with his assessment of Altamont via the documentary film of the event, Gimme Shelter (1970). In Abandoned Images: Film and Film’s End (2010) he argues that it depicts the shift of ‘American pacifistic revolutionary ideals’ into ‘terminal violence’ (95). In so doing he cites Fuest’s version of The Final Programme, claiming that ‘at the decade’s end, the envisaged future has been cancelled’ (95). Despite the sense of universal collapse that underpins the gravitas of this language, the proliferation of retrospective and largely elegiac, if not hagiographic, commentary speaks of a very specific ‘failure’. The repeated descriptions of these events depict in microcosm the hypothetical end of the American Sixties: the decline of the protest movement and the apparent eclipse of the type of self-sufficient responses to the ‘technocratic’ hegemony privileged in The Making of a Counterculture (1969) by Theodore Roszak (30). Despite the popular traction of this narrative, its panoramic approach is somewhat problematic, as has been noted by a wide range of writers including Arthur Marwick, Julie Stephens and Jonathan Green. In The Sixties (1999) Marwick states that what lay at the heart of the counterculture was an essentially fallacious notion of social change and ‘revolution’:

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There was never any possibility of a revolution; there was never any possibility of a ‘counterculture’ replacing ‘bourgeois’ culture. Modern society is highly complex with respect to the distribution of power, authority, and influence. Just as it was not formed by the simple overthrow of the aristocracy by the bourgeoisie, so, in its contemporary form, it does not consist simply of a bourgeois ruling class and a proletariat. (9)

He goes on to state that the recognizable social transformations evident in the Sixties were not due ‘solely to countercultural protest’ but ‘to a conjunction of developments, including economic, demographic, and technological ones, and, critically, to the existence in positions of authority of men and women of traditional and enlightened outlook who respond flexibly and tolerantly to countercultural demands’ (9). The point, then, to be made about the ‘failure’ of the counterculture is that the concept masks what was at work during the decade: a complex evolution of multiple social forces. As Green’s label of ‘cultural subset’ implies, the activism that constituted the counterculture represented only one form of discourse within this matrix. It could also be argued that what we see with the Sixties is a particularly resonant and pronounced manifestation of an essentially Oedipal drive that has been in action prior to the decade and has since carried on either marginally or in a different form. That is to say, the history of the twentieth century is in part the history of successive subcultures, from Dada to Technopaganism and beyond. The notion of the ‘end of the Sixties’ steps away from this continuum in favour of an exceptional position, one that presumes the decade’s activities were unique and hermetically sealed within a single historical sphere. The ‘end of the Sixties’ is thus something of a fiction which should then raise interpretative questions pertaining to the fictions that can initially be seen to exemplify and reflect it. Given the specificity and problematic nature of this narrative is it appropriate, or even useful, to evaluate Moorcock, Ballard and others within its frame of reference? Certainly attempts have been made in terms much stronger than Iain Sinclair and Colin Greenland. For example, in his essay ‘Flatline Constructs’ (1999) Mark Fisher reads The Atrocity Exhibition precisely in terms of the ‘cultural markers’ highlighted by Didion et al.: In a sense, the phrase ‘atrocity exhibition’ is a strictly literal description of [the] media landscape as it emerged in the early 1960s, populated by images of Vietnam, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The novel deals with the violence that haemorrhaged in the 1969 in which it was published: Manson, Altamont, war across the USA .11

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Vietnam and John F. Kennedy certainly have their place in The Atrocity Exhibition but there is no reference to either Manson or Altamont. Although Ballard would praise Manson as a prose stylist in some of his later interviews, it was not until Hello America (1981) that he made specific reference to him in his writing. Here Ballard uses ‘Manson’ to briefly evoke a largely forgotten America, the culture that in the novel’s temporality lies some 120 years in the past. The point is, despite its suggestiveness as regards the popular resonance of 1969, any attempt to contextualize The Atrocity Exhibition should take into consideration its elongated composition. Although published in 1970, the texts that constitute the novel were written and published between 1966 and 1969. The earliest, ‘You and Me and the Continuum’ appeared in March 1966 with the latest, ‘Tolerances of the Human Face’ appearing in September 1969. More than half of the material appeared between 1966 and 1967 thus linking The Atrocity Exhibition more to the middle of the decade than to the end. Much the same can be said of The Final Programme. Although it is tempting to view Jerry Cornelius as a channelling of Mick Jagger’s Turner Purple from Performance (1970), The Final Programme is another middecade text. It was written over the course of ten days in January 1965. Offering the texts as paradigmatic of the symbolic value that currently surrounds 1969, erases the particularity of these compositional contexts. By extension, it places them in an isomorphic position with their frame of reference. As the preceding discussion has shown, there is a great temptation to take ostensible plot details and surface content as evidence of the novels performing an essentially mimetic role as regards the socio-political context of the late Sixties. In using these texts as ‘captions’ one loses sight of the writerly investment on the part of both Ballard and Moorcock. Texts like The Final Programme and The Atrocity Exhibition are thematically consistent, but they are the result of very different writing strategies. For the purposes of analysis and evaluation then, there is a need to bring the text into focus rather than aligning the novels with a pervasive interpretative trope. To do this, it is necessary to reorient text and context. The link between ‘the end of the Sixties’ and notions of the counterculture needs to be unpacked to bring into relief, by way of distinction, the technical and formal specificity of Ballard and Moorcock’s work.

Counterculture One narrative of the Sixties is that it marked a decade of post-war prosperity: full-employment, personal affluence, jobs for life, high standards of largely

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destratified education (at a secondary level, at least).12 The flipside of these material gains were the psychological, if not existential consequences of life within a mass industrial, increasingly administrative economic culture. As Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg put it in Protest (1962): What did this new generation of Englishmen want? In one sense they wished what the Socialists had led them to expect: the opportunities from which the class structure of England had excluded their ancestors for centuries. Up to a point, the Welfare State had given them these opportunities; but in the main areas of life where they desired the chance at personal advancement, they found themselves on treadmills heading nowhere. Although they were not required to give up the positive advantages which had been made available to them, they could not escape the sordid triviality that had become the substance of their lives. (15)

One might turn to Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) as a literary exemplification of this situation, but a more potent engagement can be found in Colin Wilson’s Adrift in Soho (1961). Whereas Sillitoe’s text ends with Arthur Seaton confronting his seemingly ‘inconsequential’ future, Wilson’s Harry Preston switches to ‘another railway line’ (17) at the very start of the novel. Preston – another Nottingham habitué – has recently left the RAF. A voracious reader, a would-be writer and a consummate over-thinker, he leaves his job in the local stone-yard and travels to London in search of its bohemian subculture. That Adrift in Soho essentially begins where Saturday Night ends speaks volumes about the different demographics charted by each novel; despite their tendency to be grouped under the umbrella term ‘Angry Young Men’. Wilson shares much territory with Laura Del-Rivo’s novel The Furnished Room (1961), another novel featuring a young man attempting to find himself socially and intellectually in London. Both characterize their protagonists as working through an existential if not nihilistic outlook. Early on in his novel Wilson has Preston announce: ‘[. . .] there is nothing to get excited about because there is nothing to be gained and nothing lost.’ Aware of the fundamental indifference of the world Preston concludes that ‘nothing matters’ (16). Del-Rivo’s Joe Beckett keeps a notebook that features similar sentiments, ‘his disbelief in God and everything’ (16). As a ‘declaration of spiritual bankruptcy’ (16) it is more extreme than Preston’s view but in each case, the characters express the ‘nakedness of mind, and ultimately of soul’ (222) that John Clellon Holmes offers as a hallmark of the Beat Generation. However, this arrival at the ‘bedrock of consciousness’ (222) provides a departure point for Wilson and Del-Rivo; one that prompts the desire

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to articulate modes of behaviour alternative to the ‘oppressive’ (16) contexts that surround the characters. Such attempts to revive ‘lost’ meaning mirrors the impetus that Roszak would chart as a growing concern over the course of the Sixties and would define as specifically countercultural. Writing in ‘Youth and the Great Refusal’, a March 1968 article for The Nation, Roszak described the counterculture as: the embryonic cultural base of New Left politics, the effort to discover new types of community, new family patterns, new sexual mores, new kinds of livelihood, new aesthetic forms, new personal identities on the far side of power politics, the bourgeois home, and the Protestant work ethic. (400)

The stereotypical example of this ‘effort’, from an American perspective at least, is the extremely loosely defined ‘Hippie’ ‘movement’. In a July 1967 article for Time magazine, ‘Hippie: The Philosophy of a Subculture’ Robert Jones described ‘the cult of hippiedom’, stating that: Its disciples are mostly young and generally thoughtful Americans who are unable to reconcile themselves to the stated values and implicit contradictions of contemporary Western society, and have become internal émigrés seeking individual liberation through means as various as drug use, total withdrawal from the economy and the quest for individual identity. (23)

Jones’ emphasis upon ‘withdrawal’ and ‘individual identity’ is broadly analogous to Roszak’s emphasis upon the idea of the ‘new’. In both cases what is registered is a visible demographic shift. Both writers are suggesting that at some point in the early to mid-Sixties, a significant proportion of America’s ‘youthquake’, its burgeoning under-twenty-five age group, morphed into a sector recognizably different in its aims, intentions and characteristics from so-called ‘mainstream’ society. In contrast, Roszak’s use of counterculture, particularly in the title of his 1969 book, The Making of a Counterculture, makes a very different claim. Looking back over the decade, particularly in the wake of the protest-led events of 1968, Roszak recognized that the kind of activities documented by Time were not indicative of a ‘phase’ of youthful rebellion but instead represented the strategic adoption of an alternative lifestyle. A lifestyle that was not just existing in parallel with, but was at odds with the normative conditions that underpin the culture. Here ‘culture’ is to be read in terms of its modern iteration as outlined by Raymond Williams in Keywords (1976) – the taste, the manners, the artistic and intellectual values, the maintained conventions – of the dominant socio-political

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milieu (65). For Roszak and other commentators such as Joseph Berke, a key factor informing this observation was that the activities under discussion were not limited to America’s East and West coasts. Between 1965 and 1969, parallel behaviour could be seen on an international scale, in London, Liverpool, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin and Tokyo: all urban centres with high concentrations of educated, creative, disaffected young people. As Berke stated in Counterculture: The Creation of an Alternative Society (1969), what lay behind the stoned stereotypes was a widespread series of youth-led movements away from ‘the parental stem’ (24). This was meant literally in terms of the nuclear family and metaphorically in terms of the governmental, economic and psychological structures of ‘Western’ (i.e. white middle class) society. It is at this level of protest, agitation and critique that the counterculture made itself manifest. As a group of practices rather than a coherent movement, it attempted to foreground the residual inequality, problematic foreign policy and economic exploitation that informed a climate of relative prosperity. On one hand, this critical activity took the form of an intentional solipsism. By ‘droppingout’, refusing that which is deemed problematic and encouraging others to do the same, activities and interests could be practiced undisturbed. On the other, it marshalled its opposition into a more confrontational form as was seen with the protest movement, anti-nuclear, anti-Vietnam activism, and elements of ecological activism. One could also point to the production of symbolic activity: writing, art and performance that expressed and expanded upon the ideas of the former categories. Roszak’s reference to the ‘New Left’ refers to the reconceptualization that occurred within Marxian socialism and communism towards the end of the 1950s. The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 was followed by Nikita Khrushchev’s secret denunciation of his ‘cult of personality’ and an attempt to dismantle Stalinism through a relatively radical process of party decentralization. In parallel, Western Marxist theory was extensively recalibrated in the light of the post-war social and political climate. Daniel Bell’s much-criticized book The End of Ideology (1960) claimed that advanced capitalism and the fusion of administrative and technical expertise within the emergent corporate society had effectively negated the need for a revolutionary politics. In Bell’s view, the dominance of white-collar industry, relative post-war affluence and a materialist, consumer-led economy had ‘met all the objections of the nineteenth century and the Thirties’ (58). Left-wing theorists such as C. Wright Mills, author of The White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951) were of course critical of this plateau vision, but nonetheless capitulated on the point that the industrial

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working class no longer stood as ‘the historic agency’ (120). In the face of a ‘massive assimilation of industry and technology’ it was, according to Mills, necessary to move away from the ‘labour metaphysic’ of ‘Victorian Marxism’ (120) in order to accommodate within the image of the workforce the role of students and the university sector. Groups such as the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee and the Students for Democratic Society (SDS ) put this stance into practice by extending the sphere of activism to areas other than the conditions of the industrial workforce: identity politics, equality, civil rights, anti-war protest. The SDS remained active throughout the decade in various manifestations. The group assumed a main role in the student occupation of Columbia University in 1968 before morphing into the much more extreme Weather Underground at the decade’s end. A comparable level of activism and critique could also be seen in the work of parallel groups operating between 1965 and 1970 such as the Women’s Liberation Movement, the Gay Liberation Front, Red Power, the White Panther Party and The London Free City Committee. Each of these groups was obviously protest based but also carried with them symbolic aspects: writings, manifestos, creative activities and protest graphics.13 Despite the wide range of concerns, a general set of overlapping targets could be identified, a desire for: independence and self-sufficiency, psychological and subjective advancement (whether this be through the use of drugs or via civil rights activism), social and political change at a material level (housing, representation, acquisition of ‘community’ spaces). As stated, while the counterculture cannot be taken as a totalizing symbol for the Sixties, it is a signifier of a microcosm of largely left-wing critical activity that operated within a wider period of material development. In essence, Roszak’s argument was even when involved in specific, material issues, working by example or direct action, the counterculture was engaged in an essentially hegemonic struggle: it was positioning itself in opposition to that which was seen as an ineffective liberal ideology and the structures that maintained it. One finds embryonic glimpses of this activity at the margins of Adrift in Soho and The Furnished Room. As part of Joe Beckett’s search for intellectual anchorage, he visits his friend, the left-wing novelist Reg Wainwright. Wainwright organizes his home as a kind of radical collective in which work and domesticity, political commitment and private space are intertwined in an atmosphere of self-sufficient autonomy: The furniture was pushed against the walls, giving the effect of a Youth Hostel common room. There was a large table, covered by a blanket, on which was Wainwright’s typewriter, a bottle of glue, a bottle of milk, back numbers of The

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Humanist Quarterly, and a screwdriver. The noticeboard on the wall displayed newspaper cuttings, a notice for a meeting on Colonial Freedom, and a typed-up washing rota. (119)

Del-Rivo’s syntactic handling of detail creates the sense of an intellectualized space that is both inward and outward looking. The bottle of milk sits in-between the typewriter, the glue and The Humanist Quarterly. Details of the meeting on ‘Colonial Freedom’ sit equally alongside the washing rota. Quotidian elements are thus privileged as much as macro-political concerns and the effect created is of a fully functioning, committed household that exists outside of the normative contexts of employment and social hierarchies. A ‘washing rota’ is indicative of a non-gendered allocation of domestic chores and note also the pivotal reference to the ‘screwdriver’ at the end of the second sentence: Wainwright’s home is his workspace and that workspace is self-maintaining. Preston aspires to a similar zone of self-sufficiency, but his intentions are significantly more idealized. Once in-situ in his dilapidated Soho lodgings, he holds forth on one of his ‘favourite ideas’: a community of artists and writers who would use their wits to support each other and avoid the necessity of being employed by other people. [. . .] If only enough kindred spirits could be found they could buy an old house cheap, and turn it into a kind of monastery for artists. Some of them would make furniture, others would grow vegetables or keep chickens. The work would be divided equally and they could devote all day to writing books or painting pictures. (63)

In contrast to Del-Rivo’s image of applied practice, Preston speaks in terms of desire: ‘If only.’ Accordingly, the description of his artistic ‘monastery’ is one that eschews the material reality that such a project would require. As he puts it, buying an ‘old house cheap’ is something of a peripheral matter in contrast to the main, intended focus on creative pursuits. This conceptual separation of employment and art – the key functional intersection operating in Wainright’s social sphere – is announced more explicitly by way of the curiously self-negating reference to an equal division of ‘work’. Despite the obvious need to provide adequate food and ‘furniture’, Preston’s ‘scheme’ also permits an all-day ‘devotional’ emphasis on ‘books’ and ‘painting’. It is a fantasy of spatial autonomy, supraeconomic subsistence and impossibly elongated time. Similar features form the conceptual basis of Christopher Priest’s ‘The Interrogator’ (1969), a novella he later extended into Indoctrinaire (1970). As a work of science fiction emerging from the New Worlds stable, Priest’s text

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ostensibly shares little with Adrift in Soho, and The Furnished Room. However, it establishes something of an unconscious dialogue with Wilson insofar as it plays out, to an extreme extent, the logic of Preston’s ‘favourite idea’. Set for the most part in Brazil’s Planalto District, Priest describes the existence as an anomalous zone, a ‘displacement field’ that appears as a vast ‘plain of mown stubble’ in ‘the centre of one of the densest jungles in the world’ (20). Walking across the plain results in a process of transportation ‘two hundred years into the future’ (21). ‘The Interrogator’ and Indoctrinaire both focus on the experiences of Elias Wentik, a scientist taken to the Planalto District by Musgrove and Astourde, two government officials whose motivations remain obscure. Once there, Wentik is subject to repeated interrogation sessions and comes to regard himself as a prisoner in the district’s only discernible compound. Priest’s focus on an idiosyncratic locale that operates as a prison without walls recalls the Village from Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, originally broadcast between 1967 and 1968. Both spaces are isolated and are marked out by boundaries which, while not involving physical barriers, are nonetheless strictly delimited. The effect of this enclosure is a profound sense of spatial and temporal distortion. McGoohan’s Village stands in an anonymous landscape; it works according to its own calendar and contains a labyrinthine network of control rooms. Priest’s district is a perfect circle bordered by the edges of its time ‘disturbance’, it contains buildings of impossible dimensions and as is made clear in Indoctrinaire, ‘exists’ across two temporalities: 1989 and 2189. To this, Priest adds a degree of aesthetic neutrality that equals the district’s bleak topography. The compound exhibits a ‘barrenness of design and colour’ (25); it is a ‘huge black and grey cube standing in dereliction on the lonely, windswept plain’ (25). In this respect it becomes the perfect utopia, a literal ‘nowhere’, out of place and out of time. Here is the logic of Wainright’s communal project played out to its most extreme extent. Here also is the full realization of Preston’s desire for an autonomous space. Flat and dislocated, removed from all normative economic, material and physical parameters, the district exists as a zone of stasis. In the absence of any familiar co-ordinates, Wentik is for the most part unable to generate any meaningful form of progression. Although speculative, the idea that Wilson and Priest offer, at opposite ends of the decade, mirrored images of the Sixties ‘project’ is a view that is borne out by texts published in parallel to ‘The Interrogator’ and Indoctrinaire. In 1969 Jenny Fabian and Johnny Byrne published Groupie, a semi-autobiographical account of the former’s sexual experiences in and around the nightclubs UFO and Middle Earth. Because of this contextual specificity, Groupie is often read as a roman à clef

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notable for its ‘authentic’ underground lexicon, a register that includes ‘freak’ (7), ‘groover’ (8), ‘face’ (9), ‘fuzz’ (10) and ‘plating’ (11). However, beyond its claims to veracity, the novel also carries thematic and tonal significance. Although frank in its depictions, the writing seeks neither to titillate the reader nor condemn the narrator. For Katie, the novel’s ‘19-year old groover’ (8), ‘pulling’ (9) musicians and maintaining a distinctly fluid identity regarding work and residence carries no moral implications or consequences. It is merely the accepted behavioural mode of the social circle she willingly enters. In this respect, Groupie exemplifies what could be termed the ‘biopolitics’ of the counterculture: sexual exploration as an appropriate analogue to the psychological exploration promised by psychedelic culture. Groupie provides a further instance of a distinct youth sector drifting away from the sexual mores, familial structures and work patterns of the preceding generation. More specifically, one could view Katie as occupying the liberalized subject position determined by the phase of sexual and personal legislation that came into operation between 1967 and 1969. Thanks to the ‘measured judgement’ of Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, the latter part of the decade saw a significant easing of the limitations regarding homosexuality, abortion, contraception, divorce and theatre censorship.14 For Fabian, the novel’s emphasis on choice and affirmation reflects the subjective effects of this political agenda: a valorization of personal experience in excess of normative cultural expectations. For Germaine Greer writing in The Female Eunuch (1970), however, Fabian’s apparent retention of ‘the essential romantic stereotype [. . .] the masterful [male] Lover’ (188) blunts the ability of the novel to develop a viable feminist perspective. Although the novel posits an ego-led ideology of ‘freedom’ and non-responsibility, the depiction of Katie as the submissive partner in her relationships operates as a ‘sterile self-deception’ (188). There is no ‘female liberation’ in the novel, merely a recapitulation of existing gender roles under the auspices of individualistic activity. Greer’s is a reasonable objection but to be fair to Fabian, Groupie does foreground the inadequacy of its own liberal claims. Despite Katie gravitating towards the ‘pop’ world as an alternative to working with ‘squares’ and ‘straight people’, the sphere proves to be just as hierarchical as the offices she leaves behind (14). Although ‘senior groupies’ such as Roxanna appear neither to have nor to require ‘jobs’, life within the libidinal economy of the Other Kingdom is described as a ‘full time occupation’ (9), complete with the expected set of exhausting and ultimately dehumanizing effects: ‘it was a shock to see her now, pale and holloweyed wearing nondescript clothes’ (18). Fabian develops this theme much further

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in her sequel, A Chemical Romance (1971), in which Katie is replaced by ‘Tiptree’, ‘the girl who wrote Groupie’ (1). Her experiences of drugs and further sexual experiment result in a sense of virtual self-negation and powerful corresponding desire for a level of anchorage, a ‘spot’ or ‘cocoon’ (154). Just as Priest undercuts the type of fantasies that govern the utopic projections of Adrift in Soho, so too does Fabian question the modes of behaviour associated with such thinking. In these fictions, the uncoupling of oneself from the co-ordinates of the familiar – ideological, material, sexual or otherwise – results in either a recapitulation of the structures initially rejected or the negation of a previously secure identity. When placed alongside texts that coincide with the opening of the decade, the primary imagery of these fictions mirror the generally accepted cultural narrative. From progressive hopes to confused outcomes, the decade appears to yield no large-scale recalibration of the dominant political economy. In among such short-lived and transient projects as the Free University, Fabian and Priest help to cement a particular paradigm, that of the ‘the end of the Sixties’ as signifying the failure of emancipatory left-wing radicalism as well as what Julie Stephens calls the wider ‘possibility of grand social transformation’ (25). Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains (1969) crystallizes the perspective. A post-apocalyptic narrative that depicts the remains of society divided into encampments of ‘Professors’ and ‘Barbarians’, both perceive the other in stark binaristic terms. As such, both require the other to legitimate and determine their community boundaries. Within the novel’s ground-zero context neither emerges as a viable ‘alternative’ society.

The hidden logic of the decade Although suggestive, this collective reading of Del-Rivo, Wilson, Priest, Fabian and Carter (ostensibly very different writers) only makes sense in relation to a long-view appreciation of 1960s literary and social culture. It is very much an a priori reading of ‘the Sixties’ in which texts are arranged vertically, and are made to illustrate a retrospectively constructed framework. In this regard the assumed operating mode of the writing in question is either a discourse of realism that is resolutely mimetic, reflective of a particular historical period or the result of a metaphoric, substitutive approach in which the estrangement of science fiction is made to stand in for the same socio-political context. The potency of Ballard and Moorcock’s imagery initially appears suited to this interpretative model.

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However, not only do their compositional histories create dissonance within this frame, but their shared modus operandi as writers also signals a different operational logic. When Moorcock assumed the reins of New Worlds in 1964, he used his first editorial to promote science fiction as a ‘new literature of the space age’ (2). In the mid-1960s ‘space age’ was not as futurological a term as what it might first appear. From the launch of Sputnik in 1957 to the Apollo 11 landing on the moon in 1969, the space-race was very much a contemporary concern. In this light, Moorcock viewed science fiction as a proximate literary form, one suited to and expressive of the characteristic concerns of the post-war period: ‘it is highly readable, combines satire with splendid imagery, discusses the philosophy of science, has insight into human experience, uses advanced literary techniques’ (2). In his essay in the same issue ‘Myth-Maker of the 20th Century’ Ballard took this evaluation further. He argued that the great merit of science fiction was ‘its ability to assimilate rapidly the materials of the immediate present and future’ (121). The same note of contemporary relevance is made here but Ballard also introduces a formalistic point. Science fiction is not merely a medium of social reflection but a responsive discourse that draws the matter of the contemporary into what he called in his 1966 article, ‘Terminal Documents’, a ‘prospective narrative fiction’ (46). What is proposed in each case is a horizontal connection to the surrounding context. One finds a metonymic rather than a metaphorical point of linkage in which a relationship of association takes precedence over that of substitution. For Moorcock, as he explained in his essay ‘New Worlds: Jerry Cornelius’ (1977), The Final Programme was an attempt to engage with ‘the “hot” subject matter of [his] own time – stuff associated with scientific advance, social change, the mythology of the mid-twentieth century’ (196). ‘Mythology’ is the key phrase here. It suggests that while clothed in the recognizable trappings of the 1960s, The Final Programme was not aiming towards the type of figurative clarity suggested by Greenland, but was using the discernible imagery of ‘the riotous counterculture’ (145) to carry out a wider, diagnostic role. As Moorcock describes, when he came to draft the novel in 1965, he saw it as a re-writing of two earlier texts, the heroic fantasies ‘The Dreaming City’ (1961) and ‘When the Gods Laugh’ (1962), both published as The Stealer of Souls in 1963. These novellas featured another of Moorcock’s characters, the albino sorcerer and warrior Elric of Melniboné. ‘The Dreaming City’ focuses on that most archetypal of narratives, the rescue of a princess. In this case, Elric endeavours to deliver his cousin Cymoril from the clutches of her brother, the magician Yyrkoon. After fighting his way into an

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inner chamber, Elric finds Cymoril asleep, a trance ‘induced not by natural weariness but by her own brother’s evil sorcery’: The girl did not stir, her breathing remained shallow and her eyes remained shut. Elric’s white features twisted and his red eyes blazed as he shook in terrible and passionate rage. He gripped the hand, so limp and nerveless, like the hand of a corpse; gripped it until he had to stop himself for fear that he would crush the delicate fingers. (21)

In The Final Programme this encounter is recast as Jerry Cornelius’ attempt to rescue his sister Catherine from the influence of their bother, Frank. The familial connections are just as fraught as in ‘The Dreaming City’ and, save for the use of a more informal register, Moorcock offers a scene that is structurally identical: She didn’t move. Jerry was crying now. His body trembled. He tried to control the trembling and failed. He gripped her hand, and it was like holding hands with a corpse. He tightened his grip, as if hoping pain would wake her. Then he dropped it and stood up. (48)

However, Catherine Cornelius’ sleep is not a matter of enchantment but is chemically induced. We are told that ‘On her dressing table there were no cosmetics, only bottles of drugs and several hypodermics’ (48). The bottles belong to Frank and indicate that he ‘had been experimenting’ (48). In re-writing the ‘evil sorcery’ of ‘The Dreaming City’ as the ‘bottles of drugs’ in The Final Programme Moorcock was moving from an abstract noun phrase to one that was significantly more concrete. This transition initially appears to evidence his intention to use the novel to update the ‘first’ Elric stories, to write them in ‘twentieth century terms’ (196). However, this intention is offered on the basis that Elric functions as a ‘myth’ character. Moorcock seeks to define a corresponding, twentieth-century mytheme rather than to create a demystified analogue of Elric and ‘The Dreaming City’ within the distinctly non-magical world of modernity. Although its appearance is brief within the text the grammatical use of ‘bottles of drugs’ points to this design. The phrase occupies the same narratological role as ‘evil sorcery’. As the specified causes of the sleep states experienced by both Cymoril and Catherine, ‘sorcery’ and ‘drugs’ act as narrative units that carry out what Roland Barthes would term a ‘cardinal functionality’, they form part of the hinge-points in each text (93). The wider scenarios of both ‘The Dreaming City’ and The Final Programme reverberate from the consequences of these induced states, particularly as regards the subsequent conflicts between Elric and Yyrkoon, Jerry and Frank. The respective

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actions of enchantment and drugging are thus equally necessary to these parallel outcomes. When seen as indices, units that carry implicit, thematic significance in excess of the immediate narrative context, the congruence continues. In the essay ‘The Secret Life of Elric of Melniboné’ (1964) Moorcock speaks of ‘The Dreaming City’ as being ‘packed with personal symbols’, particularly those that: ‘symbolized my own and others [sic] tendency to rely on mental and physical crutches rather than cure the weakness at source’ (84). ‘Sorcery’ and ‘drugs’ signify two such crutches. Both are superficially associated with wisdom, insight and elevated consciousness but are deployed in pivotal narrative moments that pertain to the opposite ideas of stasis and catatonia. When speaking of his fiction in the same text, Moorcock is clear that he wishes it to be read allegorically. However, the allegoresis he invites is intended to be ‘intrinsic within a conventional narrative’ (82). He aims for ‘familiar objects’ (82) to carry symbolic resonance rather than be reliant upon narrative structures such as the quest form to communicate the weight of the significance. By the time he came to the Elric stories with their central image of the semi-autonomous sword ‘Stormbringer’ Moorcock was able to invest this object, intrinsic to the plot and indigenous to the world represented in the text, with the necessary symbolic currency. It was meant to represent his frequently repeated theme ‘how mankind’s wish-fantasies can often bring about the destruction of [. . .] part of mankind’ (88). In The Final Programme Jerry Cornelius’ needle gun communicates a comparable message. It combines the tool of the soldier with that of the surgeon and the suggestion of anaesthesia with that of bodily damage and pain. What has the potential to cure can also destroy or be made to destroy; an apt condensation of the novel’s wider theme (again consistent with Elric) of the collapse of moral polarities. This intertextual dialogue between different sectors of Moorcock’s writing has the effect of connecting Elric and Cornelius within something of an archetypal cycle. Although The Final Programme draws heavily upon the language and imagery of its immediate cultural context, this material is put to use not as a means of diagnosing the Sixties from the decade’s mid-point but in order to construct a contemporary iteration of the mythic figure that inhabits Moorcock’s fictional system, a trope he refers to as his ‘Eternal Champion’. Orienting Moorcock’s fiction in this light removes it from the extrinsic, metaphorical extrapolation it initially appears to invite. Ballard operates on a similar level with The Atrocity Exhibition. According to Moorcock, just as The Final Programme provided him with a distinctive model, the use of popular fiction to speak of ‘serious’ literary questions, so too did the parallel composition of The Atrocity Exhibition furnish Ballard with his own signature style. Following

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on from the use of largely self-contained paragraphs in ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964), Ballard conceived The Atrocity Exhibition as a series of ‘condensed novels’. Each of the individually titled texts that constitute the novel’s chapters is further divided into sections of around three to five hundred words each. In his 2001 ‘Author’s Note’ to The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard designates these sections as ‘paragraphs’ (vi), but with the addition of separate headings such as ‘Internal Landscapes’, they are paragraphs which lack the linear connectivity one might expect of narrative prose. The ‘routines’ of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959) come to mind as does the phrase ‘prose poetry’, although Ballard’s is a form of poetry that draws its dominant register from medical and psychiatric textbooks. This is established in the first of the novel’s disorientating lists: Keeping his back to the window behind his desk, he assembled the terminal documents he had collected with so much effort the previous months: (1) Spectro-heliogram of the sun; (2) Front elevation of balcony units, Hilton Hotel, London; (3) Transverse section through a pre-Cambrian trilobite; (4) ‘Chronograms,’ by E.J. Marey; (5) Photograph taken at noon, August 7th, 1945, of the sand sea, Qattara Depression, Egypt; (6) Reproduction of Max Ernst’s ‘Garden Airplane Traps’; (7) Fusing sequences for ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Boy’, Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-Bombs. (2)

Representative of vastly different subject matter, the documents carry little in the way of an overt sequential connection: one wonders why these items have been placed in this order. Differing levels of magnitude could form one aspect of patternation. Compared to the ‘balcony units’ of the Hilton, the solar spectroheliogram and the trilobite transverse section constitute images of extreme magnification. Along with the ‘Chronograms’, they also act as material manifestations of temporal movement. However, in offering these themes as potential ‘keys’ to the sequence, one loses sight of the associative logic Ballard points to when presenting the ‘terminal documents’ as a list. The challenge issued by the sequence is to accept the information as it appears; to think metonymically about the sequence in terms of its suggested associations rather than to neutralize its imaginative links by way of a clarifying metaphorical substitution. This is the logic that Ballard encourages as a model of reading. As he explains in the ‘Author’s Note’ rather than ‘starting at the beginning of each chapter, as in a conventional novel’, one should ‘simply turn the pages until something catches [the] eye’ (iv). From here, the advice is to follow the line of resonance to surrounding paragraphs, a rhizomic approach that according to Ballard will permit the novel’s ‘underlying narrative to reveal itself ’ (iv).

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Ballard’s model is productive because the design of The Atrocity Exhibition contains sufficient permutation of its primary imagery so as to accommodate such a speculative navigation. For example, reading further on in the first chapter from the initial reference to the balcony units of the Hilton, one soon finds the same image modified. It appears as the site of Elizabeth Taylor’s hypothetical death: The Atrocity Exhibition. Entering the exhibition, Travis sees the atrocities of Vietnam and the Congo mimetized in the ‘alternate’ death of Elizabeth Taylor; he tends the dying film star, eroticising her punctured bronchus in the overventilated verandas of the London Hilton; he dreams of Max Ernst, superior of the birds; ‘Europe after the Rain’; the human race – Caliban asleep across a mirror smeared with vomit. (12)

The ‘exhibition’ relates not only to the novel’s title but also to the event highlighted in ‘Apocalypse’, the paragraph that opens the text. This is an annual exhibition of ‘bizarre images’ mounted in a ‘converted gymnasium’ by the ‘long incarcerated patients’ of an undefined psychiatric institution (1). The paintings are described as representing the theme of ‘world cataclysm’ by way of a synthesis of images: ‘Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor’ (1). This mix of violence, pleasure and a level of destruction that is itself surreal in its material implications works as a conceptual mission statement for the novel as a whole. For Ballard, post-1945 culture is marked by an elision of manifest and latent content, essentially an inversion of the orders Freud mapped in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Global violence and the psychological implications of such a state render the external world as strange as the internal to the extent that the boundaries of inner and outer space become indistinct. This porosity is clearly demonstrated in Travis’ entry to the exhibition. He first ‘sees’ the atrocities which are then ‘mimetized’ by way of Elizabeth Taylor and which then prompt ‘dreams’ of Max Ernst. The shift from sight to mimesis to dreaming is a trajectory that leads from perception to reproduction and then to psychological mediation. Within the paragraph’s single sentence, Ballard grammatically brings these different zones into proximity through the use of semi-colons. However, there is little diegetic distinction at play to mark out the boundaries of each ‘space’. Travis’ dreams seem to take place simultaneously with his entry into the exhibition. By citing celebrities such as Taylor, Ballard places at the centre of his novel’s indistinct literary space figures that exemplify this contemporary ontology. He sees post-war media, particularly film and television as a sphere that explicitly

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triangulates his key co-ordinates of violence, eroticism and desire. Particularly in the section headed ‘The Enormous Face’, Taylor is presented not just as a fetish object, reflective of public fantasies, but as a ‘presiding deity’, a conduit or rather icon in the religious sense who mediates the intersection of personal subjectivity with media images, what Ballard terms the fusion of ‘personal myths’ with ‘commercial cosmologies’ (13). ‘Fuse’ is the operative verb in ‘Apocalypse’ that describes the merger of images in the institutional exhibition. Following the etymological logic of ‘Apocalypse’, it is this process of fusion that Ballard uses the novel to ‘reveal’. Hence, in addition to the likes of Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, Ballard also places emphasis on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, its aftermath and its documentation by way of the Zapruder film. It is this transition from corporeal violence to recorded image which then becomes the site of the obsessions and speculations that constitute for Ballard ‘the hidden logic’ of the decade (139). This correlates with Mark Fisher’s reading of the text in ‘Flatline Constructs’, in which 1969 is the presumed point of reference: [. . .] for Ballard, the events of 1969 are merely the culmination of a decade whose guiding logic has been one of violence; a mediatized violence where ‘mediatization’ is a profoundly ambiguous term which doesn’t necessarily imply a disintensification. As they begin to achieve the instantaneous speed [Paul] Virilio thinks characteristic of postmodern communication, media (paradoxically) immediatize trauma, making it instantly available even as they pre-package it into what will become increasingly pre-programmed stimulusresponse circuitries.15

Fisher is accurate as regards the systems that Ballard attends to. However, The Atrocity Exhibition is neither reflective of 1969 nor proleptic of its events. Instead, the novel outlines the principles involved in the cultivation of contemporary myths, precisely the type that have subsequently come to surround the year. The transformation of Altamont into Gimme Shelter and the accumulation of this symbol into the wider, retrospectively applied narrative of ‘the end of the Sixties’ shows in operation the spectacular mechanisms that Ballard outlines. However, as a writing act, The Atrocity Exhibition remains, like The Final Programme, metonymically wedded to its immediate context. The novels carry synchronic significance in terms of their language, structure and design in excess of what they may have to say when inserted into a diachronic, long view approach to the Sixties. As is suggested by the likes of Iain Sinclair writing about this trope in 1999, ‘the end of the Sixties’ is very much a millennial viewpoint. When we look

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to Ballard and Moorcock, two writers whose work seemingly validates this narrative trajectory we see that the fiction of the end of decade is not the same as the fiction that the decade ends.

Notes 1 See Simon Ford, ‘A Psychopathic Hymn: J.G. Ballard’s Crashed Cars Exhibition of 1970’, /seconds 1.1, November 2005. Online at http://slashseconds.org/ issues/001/001/articles/13_sford/index.php (accessed April 2016). 2 Ballard’s perspective recalls Eduardo Paolozzi’s screen-print ‘Automobile Head’ (1954–1962). See www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/paolozzi-automobile-head-p04746 (accessed December 2016). 3 Ballard’s exhibition notes are quoted in Ford’s ‘A Psychopathic Hymn’. 4 See James Harding’s brief overview article: www.luxonline.org.uk/ histories/1960–1969/drury_lane_arts_lab.html (accessed March 2016). 5 See: Jonathan Green, Days in the Life (1988). 6 The London Film-makers’ Co-operative (LFMC ) was established on 13 October 1966. See James Harding: www.luxonline.org.uk/histories/1960–1969/london_filmmakers_co-op.html (accessed March 2016). 7 See: Gordon Carr, The Angry Brigade (2010) and Joseph Darlington, ‘Cell of One: B.S. Johnson, Christie Malry and the Angry Brigade’. 8 For image see Andrew Frost, ‘Crash and the Aesthetics of Disappearance’. See www. ballardian.com/crash-and-the-aesthetics-of-disappearance (accessed March 2016). 9 In his article, ‘A Psychopathic Hymn’, Ford argues that the ‘Mini symbolised the fun-loving mobility of the swinging sixties’. 10 Rob Kirkpatrick, 1969: The Year Everything Changed (2009), and Zachery Lazar, Sway (2008). 11 Mark Fisher, ‘Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic TheoryFiction’. Online essay, 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/20101224015635/ http://cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Fisher/FCcontents.htm (accessed March 2015). 12 See the ‘Surfing the Sixties Critical Introduction’ in this volume for further commentary on tripartite education in the United Kingdom. 13 See: Peter Stansill and David Zane Mariowitz, BAMN (By Any Means Necessary): Outlaw Graphics and Ephemera (1971). 14 This key claim underpins Green’s All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture (1999). 15 Mark Fisher, ‘Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic TheoryFiction’; online essay, 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/20101224015635/ http://cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Fisher/FCcontents.htm (accessed March 2015).

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Works cited Aldiss, Brian. Barefoot in the Head. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. Ballard, J.G. ‘William Burroughs: Myth-Maker of the 20th Century.’ New Worlds. 142, May–June 1964: 121–8. ———. ‘Terminal Documents’. Ambit. 27, Spring 1966: 46–8. ———. The Atrocity Exhibition. London: Harper, 2006 [1970]. ———. Crash St. Albans: Granada, 1975 [1973]. ———. ‘Introduction to the French Edition of Crash (1974).’ Crash. London: Triad/ Panther, 1985: 5–9. ———. Hello America. London: Jonathon Cape, 1981. Barber, Stephen. Abandoned Images: Film and Film’s End. London: Reaktion, 2010. Barthes, Roland. ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’. In Image-MusicText. Stephen Heath (ed.). London: Fontana, 1977. 79–125. Berke, Joseph. Counterculture: The Creation of an Alternative Society. London: Fire, 1969. Bell, Daniel. The End of Ideology. New York: Free Press, 1960. Carr, Gordon. The Angry Brigade. Oakland: PM Press, 2010. Carter, Angela. Heroes and Villains. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981 [1969]. Clellon Holmes, John. ‘This is the Beat Generation’. In Beat Down to Your Soul: What was the Beat Generation? Ann Charters (ed.). New York: Penguin, 2001: 222–8. Dalton, David. ‘Altamont: The End of the Sixties’. Gadfly. November/December 1999: www.gadflyonline.com/home/archive/NovDec99/archive-altamont.html Darlington, Joseph. ‘Cell of One: B.S. Johnson, Christie Malry and the Angry Brigade.’ In B.S. Johnson and Post War Literature: Possibilities of the Avant-Garde. Julia Jordan and Martin Ryle (eds.). London: Palgrave, 2014. 87–102. Didion, Joan. ‘The White Album’. In The White Album. Great Britain: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1979. 11–51. Del-Rivo, Laura. The Furnished Room. Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2011 [1961]. Fabian, Jenny and Johnny Byrne. Groupie. London: Mayflower, 1971 [1969]. Fabian, Jenny. A Chemical Romance. London: Do-Not Press, 1998 [1971]. Feldman, Gene and Max Gartenberg. Protest. London: Panther, 1962. Fisher, Mark. ‘Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction’. Online essay, 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/20101224015635/http://cinestatic. com/trans-mat/Fisher/FCcontents.htm Ford, Simon. ‘A Psychopathic Hymn: J.G. Ballard’s Crashed Cars Exhibition of 1970.’ /seconds. 1.1, November 2005: http://slashseconds.org/issues/001/001/articles/ 13_sford/index.php Frost, Andrew. ‘Crash and the Aesthetics of Disappearance’. Ballardian. October 2013: www.ballardian.com/crash-and-the-aesthetics-of-disappearance Fuest, Robert (dir.). The Final Programme. London: Goodtimes Enterprises/Gladiole Films, 1973.

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Green, Jonathan. Days in the Life. London: Heinemann, 1988. ———. All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture. London: Pimlico, 1999. Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch. Great Britain: MacGibbon and Kee, 1970. Greenland, Colin. The Entropy Exhibition. London: Routledge, 1983. Groes, Sebastian. British Fiction of the Sixties. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Hewison, Robert. Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties, 1960–1975. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Jones, Robert. ‘Hippie: The Philosophy of a Subculture.’ Time. 90.1, July 1967: 20–30. Kirkpatrick, Rob. 1969: The Year Everything Changed. New York: Skyhorse, 2009. Lazar, Zachery. Sway. London: Vintage, 2008. Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man. New York: Beacon Press, 1964. Marwick, Arthur. The Sixties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Mills, C. Wright. The White Collar: The American Middle Classes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951. Moorcock, Michael. ‘A New Literature for the Space Age.’ New Worlds. 142 May–June 1964: 2–4. ———. ‘The Secret Life of Elric of Melniboné’. In Elric at the End of Time. London: Panther, 1985 [1964]. 82–91. ———. The Stealer of Souls. London: Granada, 1968 [1963]. ———. The Final Programme. London: Fontana, 1979 [1969]. ———. ‘New Worlds – Jerry Cornelius’. In Elric at the End of Time. London: Panther, 1985 [1977]. 109–202. Nuttall, Jeff. Bomb Culture. London: Paladin, 1968. Priest, Christopher. ‘The Interrogator.’ In New Writings in SF–15. John Carnell (ed.). London: Corgi, 1969: 45–79. ———. Indoctrinaire. London: Gollancz, 2014 [1970]. Roszak, Theodore. ‘Youth and the Great Refusal.’ The Nation. March 1968: 400–406. ———. The Making of a Counterculture. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1969. Sillitoe, Alan. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London: W. H. Alan, 1958. Sinclair, Iain. Crash. London: BFI , 1999. Stansill, Peter and David Zane Mariowitz. BAMN (By Any Means Necessary): Outlaw Graphics and Ephemera. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Stephens, Julie, Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Williams, Dave and Ron Bailey. ‘An Open Letter to the Underground from the London Street Commune.’ International Times. 10 October 1969: 10–11. Williams, Raymond. Keywords. London: Fontana, 1976. Wilson, Colin. Adrift in Soho. London: Pan, 1964 [1961].

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Timeline of Works 1960 Kingsley Amis New Maps of Hell Arthur C. Clarke A Fall of Moondust Doris Lessing In Pursuit of the English: A Documentary Edna O’Brien The Country Girls Wilson Harris The Palace of the Peacock George Lamming Season of Adventure George Lamming The Pleasures of Exile Lynne Reid Banks The L-Shaped Room Andrew Salkey Escape to an Autumn Pavement Andrew Salkey (ed.) West Indian Stories Muriel Spark The Ballad of Peckham Rye David Storey Flight into Camden Raymond Williams Border Country

1961 Christine Brooke-Rose The Middlemen Anthony Burgess One Hand Clapping Basil Dearden Victim Laura Del Rivo The Furnished Room Gillian Freeman The Leather Boys Martyn Goff The Youngest Director Wilson Harris The Far Journey of Oudin Rayner Heppenstall The Fourfold Tradition V.S. Naipaul A House for Mr. Biswas Andrew Sinclair The Breaking of Bumbo Muriel Spark The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Colin Wilson Adrift in Soho

1962 Brian W. Aldiss Hothouse J.G. Ballard The Drowned World

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Anthony Burgess The Wanting Seed Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange Len Deighton The IPCRESS File Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (eds.) Protest Helen Gurley Brown Sex and the Single Girl Wilson Harris The Whole Armour Rayner Heppenstall The Connecting Door Rayner Heppenstall The Woodshed Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook David Lodge Ginger, You’re Barmy Penelope Mortimer The Pumpkin Eater V.S. Naipaul The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French, and Dutch – in the West Indies and South America

1963 Michael Anthony The Games Were Coming Shelagh Delaney Sweetly Sings the Donkey Margaret Drabble A Summer Bird-Cage Nell Dunn Up the Junction John Fowles The Collector Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique Wilson Harris The Secret Ladder Rayner Heppenstall The Intellectual Part: An Autobiography John le Carré The Spy Who Came in From the Cold V. S. Naipaul Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar Samuel Selvon I Hear Thunder Muriel Spark The Girls of Slender Means

1964 A.S. Byatt The Shadow of the Sun John Fowles The Aristos Waguih Ghali Beer in the Snooker Club Zulfikar Ghose The Loss of India Christopher Isherwood A Single Man B.S. Johnson Albert Angelo B.S.Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose Statement Against Corpses: Short Stories Shena Mackay Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumburger / Toddler on the Run Orlando Paterson The Children of Sisyphus

Timeline of Works Ann Quin Berg V.S. Naipaul An Area of Darkness Raymond Williams Second Generation

1965 Michael Anthony The Year in San Fernando E.R. Braithwaite Choice of Straws Margaret Drabble The Millstone Nell Dunn Talking to Women Margaret Forster Georgy Girl John Fowles The Magus Zulfikar Ghose Confessions of a Native-Alien Wilson Harris The Eye of the Scarecrow David Lodge The British Museum is Falling Down Shena Mackay Music Upstairs Samuel Selvon The Housing Lark David Storey Radcliffe

1966 Angela Carter Shadow Dance Maureen Duffy The Microcosm Eva Figes Equinox Hannah Gavron The Captive Wife: Conflicts of Housebound Mothers Zulfikar Ghose The Contradictions B.S. Johnson Trawl John La Rose Foundations Ann Quin Three

1967 Michael Anthony Green Days by the River Michael Anthony Tales for Young and Old Lindsay Barrett Song for Mumu Carol Burns The Narcissist A.S. Byatt The Game Margaret Drabble Jerusalem the Golden Nell Dunn Poor Cow Zulfikar Ghose Jets from Orange Zulfikar Ghose The Murder of Aziz Khan

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Wilson Harris The Waiting Room V.S. Naipaul A Flag on the Island V.S. Naipaul The Mimic Men Orlando Paterson An Absence of Ruins

1968 Brian W. Aldiss (ed.) All About Venus Beryl Bainbridge Another Part of the Wood John Brunner Stand on Zanzibar Angela Carter Several Perceptions Arthur C. Clarke 2001: A Space Odyssey Jeff Nuttall Bomb Culture Andrew Salkey The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover Muriel Spark The Public Image Denis Williams The Third Temptation

1969 Brian W. Aldiss Barefoot in the Head Piers Anthony Macroscope Edward Blishen Right Soft Lot Angela Carter Heroes and Villains Margaret Drabble The Waterfall Jenny Fabian and Johnny Byrne Groupie John Fowles The French Lieutenant’s Woman B.S. Johnson The Unfortunates Michael Moorcock The Final Programme Ann Quin Passages: A Novel

Timeline of National Events 1960 Jan

10 – Macmillan’s ‘wind of change’ speech in Accra Gold Coast (Ghana); largely ignored Feb 3 – Macmillan repeats ‘Winds of Change’ speech in South Africa April 14 – Britain cancels Blue Streak missile 16 – The Times replaces term ‘Imperial and Foreign News’ with ‘Overseas News’ May 6 – Princess Margaret marries Anthony Armstrong-Jones July 27 – Cabinet reshuffle: Selwyn Lloyd Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Home Foreign Secretary Oct 21 – Queen launches Britain’s first nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought, at Barrow-in-Furness 29 – Trial of Penguin Books for publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover Nov 2 – Jury clears Penguin Books of obscenity 10 – Lady Chatterley’s Lover sells 2000,000 copies in one day 23 – Lord Stansgate dies and son Anthony Benn inherits the title preventing him from entering the House of Commons Dec 9 – First episode of Coronation Street broadcast 31 – End of National Service in Britain

1961 Jan

7 – The Avengers television series first screened on ITV 8 – Special Branch break the Portland spy ring Feb 5 – Sunday Telegraph first published Mar 13 – Five members of the Portland spy ring go on trial at the Old Bailey accused of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union April 3 – Jaguar E-Type sports car launched 17 – Tottenham Hotspur win the Football League First Division for the second successive occasion May 1 – Betting and Gaming Act – betting shops introduced to UK 6 – Tottenham Hotspur win FA Cup, first football team in twentieth century to achieve league and cup ‘double’ 31 – South Africa leaves the Commonwealth July 1 – British troops defend Kuwait against Iraqi attack

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Sep Oct Dec

Timeline of National Events 10 – Britain applies for membership of the Common Market (EEC ) 23 – Police launch manhunt for A6 murderer, who killed Michael Gregsten and paralysed Valerie Storie 3 – UK and US call for nuclear atmospheric test ban 17 – Violence at anti-nuclear demonstrations at Trafalgar Square 25 – First issue of Private Eye published in London 4 – Contraceptive Pill becomes available on NHS

1962 Feb

4 – The Sunday Times prints first colour supplement 17 – James Hanratty found guilty of A6 murder 20 – Six British anti-nuclear protestors jailed Mar 15 – Liberal candidate Eric Lubbock overturns huge Conservative majority in Orpington by-election April 4 – James Hanratty hanged at Bedford Gaol, protesting his innocence 18 – Commonwealth Immigrants Act in the United Kingdom removes free immigration from citizens of states of the Commonwealth 30 – Peter Cook funds Private Eye satirical magazine as fully professional publication May 10 – Conservatives suffer heavy losses in council elections June 6 – The Beatles’ first session at Abbey Road Studios. July 1 – Commonwealth Immigrants Act comes into effect 11 – Telstar enables first transatlantic live TV link 13 – Harold Macmillan sacks a third of his cabinet after by-election losses in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ 31 – Mosley leads Blackshirts in a demonstration in the East End – violence flares Aug 6 – Jamaica becomes independent Sep 2 – Fascist marches provoke more violence in East End of London Oct 5 – Dr No, first James Bond film, premiered at the London Pavilion ‘Love Me Do’, first Beatles single, released by Parlophone Nov 24 – First edition of That Was the Week that Was satirical BBC TV programme Dec 10 – David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia released 21 – Britain purchases UGM –27 Polaris missile from US

1963 Jan Feb Mar

14 – De Gaulle rebuffs Britain’s application to join the Common Market 14 – Harold Wilson elected leader of the Labour Party 14 – First kidney transplant takes place at Leeds General Hospital 3 – Kim Philby (Cambridge Fives spy ring) defects to USSR 15 – The Daily Express claims that John Profumo is seeking to resign as Secretary of State for War due to ‘personal reasons’

Timeline of National Events

291

22 – Profumo scandal breaks; War Minister denies ‘impropriety’ with Christine Keeler April 15 – 70,000 marchers arrive in London from Aldermarston demonstrating against nuclear weapons. May 2 – The Beatles reach #1 in singles chart for first time with ‘From Me To You’ 15 – Tottenham Hotspur first British European trophy victory, beating Atlético Madrid 5–1 in European Cup Winners’ Cup 25 – Manchester United beat Leicester City 3–1 in FA Cup final, first trophy post-Munich air disaster June 5 – John Profumo admits misleading Parliament and resigns over affair with Christine Keeler July 1 – Kim Philby named as ‘Third Man’ in Burgess and Maclean spy ring 31 – Peerage Act passes into law; Tony Benn renounces title of Viscount Stansgate Sep 23 – Robbins Report published 26 – Denning Report into Profumo scandal Oct 10 – Macmillan resigns 18 – Lord Home elected leader of Conservatives 23 – Lord Home renounces earldom and associated peerages 24 – Robbins Report on Higher Education accepted by UK government Nov 8 – Home elected to House of Commons in by-election Dec 6 – Christine Keeler jailed for nine months 12 – Kenya gains independence from UK

1964 Feb

6 – British and French governments agree construction of Channel Tunnel 10 – Fanny Hill (1750) deemed offence to public morals and copies confiscated from Mayflower Books destroyed 19 – British troops sent to Cyprus Mar 16 – Government plans for three overspill new towns in south-east England, one at Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire village 28 – Radio Caroline begins pirate broadcasts from North Sea 20 – Mods and Rockers clash in Clacton April 15 – Ronnie Biggs found guilty of Great Train Robbery offences 21 – BBC 2 begins broadcasting May 3 – British troops sent to Aden 6 – Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane premieres at New Arts Theatre, London 11 – Terence Conran opens first Habitat store on Fulham Road 18 – Mods and Rockers clash in Clacton, Margate, Southend and Bournemouth July 28 – Sir Winston Churchill leaves the House of Commons Aug 2 – Mods and Rockers clash in Hastings Sep 15 – Home calls general election

292 Oct Nov Dec

Timeline of National Events 16 – Labour wins general election 9 – House of Commons votes to abolish death penalty 21 – House of Commons abolishes the death penalty

1965 Jan

1 – Stanley Matthews becomes the first footballer to be knighted 7 – Kray brothers arrested for running a protection racket 25 – Death of Sir Winston Churchill Feb 5 – TV cigarette advertising banned in UK Mar 9 – Kray brothers trial begins April 6 – Kray brothers cleared May British police first issued with CS or ‘tear’ gas June 18 – Blood alcohol limit for drivers July 27 – Edward Heath becomes Tory leader Aug 12 – First British female judge appointed Oct 28 – Ian Brady and Myra Hindley arrested for ‘Moors Murders’ 29 –Wilson flies to Rhodesia to prevent Universal Declaration of Independence (UDI ) Nov 16 – Britain imposes economic sanctions on Rhodesia Dec 17 – Britain calls for oil embargo on Rhodesia

1966 Feb Mar

8 – Freddie Laker sets up independent airline 3 – BBC broadcasts in colour starts 4 – John Lennon’s ‘Beatles bigger than Jesus’ remark 20 – World Cup stolen in London: recovered on 27th April 1 – Labour win majority in general election 5 – Oil discovered in North Sea 15 – Time magazine declares London ‘City of the Decade’ May 1 – Last live UK concert by The Beatles 6 – Brady and Hindley jailed for life 12 – Henry Cooper fights Muhammed Ali in world heavyweight boxing bout June 10 – Mary Quant awarded OBE 29 – First British credit card launched July 3 – Anti-Vietnam protest at American Embassy, Grovesnor Square 30 – England win World Cup, beating West Germany 4–2 Sep 27 – British Motor Company makes 7,000 workers redundant Nov 9 – John Lennon meets Yoko Ono 16 – The BBC television ‘docudrama’, Cathy Come Home, broadcast on BBC 1 Dec 22 – Rhodesia leaves the Commonwealth

Timeline of National Events

293

1967 Jan

4 – Donald Campbell dies in Bluebird on Coniston Water 31 – Students protest and demand resignation of head of LSE – Walter Adams – due to Rhodesian sympathies; one fatality Feb 7 – The British National Front founded by A.K. Chesterton April 3 – Last Exit to Brooklyn obscenity trial, London May 21 – Anti-Vietnam peace rally, London 25 – Celtic win the European Cup June 1 – The Beatles release Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 4 – Stockport Air Disaster 25 – World’s first live satellite broadcast 27 – Barclays Bank opens world’s first cash machine in Enfield 29 – Mick Jagger and Keith Richards jailed on drugs charges July 7 – The Beatles release ‘All You Need is Love’ 14 – Abortion Bill passed 27 – Sexual Offences Act decriminalized sex in private between men Aug 9 – Playwright Joe Orton murdered by lover Keith Halliwell 14 – British offshore pirate radio stations shut down Sep 20 – QE2 launched 29 – First episode of The Prisoner cult television series 30 – BBC Radio 1 goes on the air Oct 9 – Breathalyser for motorists used for the first time in Britain 25 – The Abortion Act passed in Parliament (with effect from 1968) Nov 5 – Hither Green rail disaster 19 – Britain devalues the pound 23 – Last Exit to Brooklyn ruled ‘obscene’ 27 – De Gaulle vetoes British entry to Common Market Dec 11 – Prototype ‘Concorde’ airliner rolled out

1968 Mar 17 – Violence at anti-Vietnam protest outside US embassy in Grosvenor Square April 21 – Enoch Powell makes ‘rivers of blood’ speech at meeting at the Birmingham Conservative Political Centre 23 – Britain moves to decimal currency 27 – Abortion is legalized in Britain May 16 – Ronan Point housing block collapses in London 29 – Manchester United win European Cup June 7 – Ford sewing machinists strike at Dagenham assembly plant for equal pay for women July 31 – Last Exit to Brooklyn acquitted of obscenity at Old Bailey

294 Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

Timeline of National Events 31 – First Isle of Wight Festival 4 – The Beatles record last TV appearance 26 – Theatre censorship abolished in UK 6 – RUC attacks Catholic civil rights march in Londonderry 22 – The Beatles release The White Album 26 – The Race Relations Act passed 17 – Mary Bell found guilty

1969 Jan

3 – Catholic riots in Londonderry 12 – Police clash with anti-racist demonstrators in London 24 – Student demonstration at LSE 27 – Student sit-in at LSE Feb 3 – LSE closed down Mar 2 – Inaugural Concorde flight 5 – Kray twins jailed for life at Old Bailey 7 – Victoria Line opens in London 12 – Paul McCartney marries Linda Eastman 25 – John Lennon marries Yoko Ono April 9 – Sikh public transport workers in Birmingham win right to wear turbans on duty 24 – British Leyland launches Austin Maxi May 2 – Liner the QE2 sets out on maiden voyage to New York June 24 – Rhodesian referendum on becoming a republic; diplomatic links with Britain cut July 1 – Princes of Wales invested with title 3 – Death of Keith Moon of the Rolling Stones Aug 16 – British troops begin patrolling areas of Belfast Oct 5 – First edition of Monty Python’s Flying Circus televised 17 – Divorce Reform Bill Nov 5, 15 – Anti-apartheid protestors clash with police during South African rugby tour of UK 25 – John Lennon returns OBE over British involvement in Biafra Dec 5 – Hundreds of anti-apartheid protestors arrested 18 – Death penalty abolished

Timeline of International Events 1960 Jan Feb Mar

Kenyan state of emergency lifted: Mau Mau uprising officially over 7 – Discovery of Dead Sea Scrolls 21 – Sharpeville massacre in South Africa 30 – State of emergency declared in South Africa April 7 – Race riots in Durban May 5 – U-2 spy-plane scandal June 22 – Sino-Soviet Communist split becomes official 26 – Madagascar becomes independent July 12 – Khrushchev supports Cuba in ousting US forces from Guantanamo naval base 12 – French Congo, Chad and Central African Republic become independent 13 – John F. Kennedy wins Democratic nomination 15 – UN send troops to Congo Aug 7 – Castro nationalizes American-owned property in Cuba 31 – East Germany closes border with West Germany Sep 5 – Cassius Clay wins Olympic light heavyweight boxing gold medal Oct 1 – Nigeria independent Nov 9 – Kennedy elected president of US Dec 13 – French extremists riot in Algeria

1961 Jan Feb Mar April

May June July

3 – US breaks diplomatic relations with Cuba 3 – UN troops fight pro-Lumumba forces in Congo 1 – Kennedy forms Peace Corps of international volunteers 12 – Yuri Gagarin first man in space 19 – Bay of Pigs invasion fails 20 – Portuguese colonists massacred in Angola 31 – South Africa leaves the Commonwealth 25 – Iraq lays claim to Kuwait 5 – French troops kill 80 Arabs during tensions in Algiers

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296 Aug Sep

Oct Nov Dec

Timeline of International Events 13 – East Germany closes Berlin border 20 – Berlin Wall construction commences 11 – World Wildlife Fund founded 14 – Turkish military government sentences fifteen members of previous administration to death; Prime Minister Adnan Menderes hanged three days later 18 – Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of United Nation, dies in plane crash 17 – Krushchev expels Albania from Soviet bloc 25 – Allied and Soviet tank confrontation at Berlin border 14 – US increases military advisers in South Vietnam 11 – In Israel Adolf Eichmann found guilty of crimes against the Jewish people and humanity 11 – US War in Vietnam begins officially 16 – African National Congress begins bombing campaign in South Africa

1962 Jan Feb Mar

4 – Kennedy increases military aid to South Vietnam 3 – US trade embargo on Cuban exports 2 – Coup d’état in Burma (later Myanmar) led by General Ne Win and Burmese army April 24 – US resumes atmospheric nuclear testing May 10 – US marines sent to Laos to defend against Communist incursion June 18 – Scorpius X-1, first cosmic x-ray source, discovered by physicist Riccardo Giacconi’s team at White Sands, New Mexico July 1 – Rwanda and Burundi become independent 3 – Algeria becomes independent 10 – Martin Luther King jailed for an illegal march in Albany, Georgia Aug 13 – 20 West Berliners riot at the Berlin Wall. Sep 5 – Cedar Hills, Frederick Douglass’ home in Washington, DC, acquired by US National Park Service for ‘first black national historic site’ 20 – African American James Meredith attempts to enrol at University of Mississippi, blocked personally by Governor Barnett 30 – Riots ensue at University of Mississippi, two killed by unknown assailant Oct 15 – Amnesty International founded 22 – Kennedy blockades Cuba in missile crisis 28 – Krushchev backs down over Cuban Missile crisis Nov 2 – Cuban missile bases in Cuba dismantled 7 – ANC leader Nelson Mandela jailed Dec 14 – US spacecraft Mariner 2 first probe to successfully transmit data from another planet, flying by Venus

Timeline of International Events

297

1963 Jan

2 – Viet Cong shoots down 5 US helicopters in Mekong Delta 14 – De Gaulle rebuffs Britain’s attempts to enter Common Market Feb 8 – Military coup in Iraq Mar 13 – Soviet Union announces Nikita Khrushchev invited to visit Beijing by People’s Republic of China Chairman, Mao Zedong April 12 – Martin Luther King arrested for leading civil rights march in Birmingham, Alabama May 5 – 5,000 civil rights marchers arrested in Alabama 18 – Kennedy sends troops to control race riots in the southern states June 15 – Further race riots in American south after civil rights leader Medgar Evers is shot Aug 28 – 200,000 march for civil rights in Washington. Martin Luther addresses the crowds Sep 30 – Mass arrest of black civil rights protestors in Alabama Oct 11 – Pope John XXIII opens Vatican II Nov 22 – President Kennedy assassinated in Dallas, Texas 24 – Jack Ruby shoots Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV

1964 Jan Mar June

July Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

29 – Military coup in South Vietnam 2 – Congo President Joseph Kasavubu suspends parliament indefinitely 2 – Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO ) established 11 – Martin Luther King jailed in Florida 14 – Nelson Mandela receives life sentence for treason 2 – US President Johnson signs Civil Rights Act 12 – Viet Cong inflicted significant losses on Southern Vietnam 5 – US retaliates against North Vietnam 10 – Turkey and Greece accept UN ceasefire in Cyprus 3 – State of Emergency declared in Malaysia 15 – Krushchev ousted in USSR , succeeded by Brezhnev 19 – South Vietnam opens major offensive against Viet Cong 10 – Martin Luther King awarded Nobel Peace Prize

1965 Jan Feb

12 – Indonesia leaves the UN 1 – Martin Luther King arrested in Selma, Alabama 11 – US warplanes bomb North Korea 21 – Malcolm X assassinated in New York

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Mar 18 – Alexei Leonov makes first spacewalk April 27 – Anti-Vietnam protests in Paris 30 – Right-wing junta seizes power in Dominican Republic May 7 – White nationalist Rhodesian Front party win election 26 – Guyana gains independence 28 – State of emergency declared in Rhodesia June 29 – First offensive against Viet Cong, east of Saigon July 28 – Johnson sends 50,000 more troops to Vietnam Aug 5 – India and Pakistan clash over Kashmir Sep 5 – Term ‘hippie’ first used by San Francisco Examiner reporter Michael Fallon, writing about Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood 6 – Second front opens in Punjab province in the Indo-Pakistan War Oct 15 – Mikhail Sholokhov, Soviet author of And Quiet Flows the Don, wins Nobel Prize for Literature Nov 11 – Rhodesia declares UDI 16 – Britain enforces economic sanctions on Rhodesia Dec 19 – Charles de Gaulle re-elected French President 24 – Christmas truce in Vietnam

1966 Jan Feb May June July Aug Oct Nov Dec

16 – Military coup in Nigeria 19 – Indira Ghandi becomes Prime Minister of India 24 – Military coup topples Nkrumah in Ghana Chairman Mao launches cultural revolution against bourgeois elements (resulting by 1976 in between 750,000 and 1.5 million being killed) 7 – Ronald Reagan wins Republican nomination for California governorship 30 – US planes bomb Hanoi and Haiphong 11 – End of war between Malaysia and Indonesia 3 – Outbreak of civil war in Nigeria 15 – Black Panther party founded in Oakland, California 1 – Viet Cong shell Saigon 22 – Rhodesia leaves the Commonwealth

1967 Jan Feb Mar

9 – Rebellion against Mao in Shanghai 26 – American forces attack Ho Chi Minh trail on Cambodian border 2 – President Lyndon Johnson announces Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin to discuss limiting offensive and defensive nuclear missiles April 21 – Military coup d’état in Greece: Regime of the Colonels until 1974 May 30 – Biafra secedes from Nigeria

Timeline of International Events June July Sep Oct Nov Dec

299

5–10 – Israel defeats Arab coalition in Six-Day War 7 – Nigerian troops enter Biafra: war ensues until 15 January 1970 9 – Series of summits commences between Greek and Turkish Prime Ministers, Konstantinos Kollias and Süleyman Demirel regarding Cyprus 4 – Nigerian army takes the Biafran capital, Enugu 4–6 – Anti-draft demonstrations in New York 27 – Charles De Gaulle vetoes British entry into Common Market 26 – North Vietnam attacks Laos

1968 Jan

5 – Prague Spring in Communist Czechoslovakia with election of reformist Alexander Dubček as First Secretary 30 – Viet Cong launch Tet offensive Feb 24 – American and South Vietnamese recapture Hue from Viet Cong Mar 8–12 – Anti-Communist riots in Poland 16 – My Lai massacre, Vietnam April 4 – Martin Luther King assassinated in Memphis May 3–30 – French students uprising: Sorbonne closed, 1,000 injured 9 – Soviet armies gather on Czech borders June 5 – Bobby Kennedy assassinated in Los Angeles July 1 – Signing of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Aug 21–23 Warsaw Pact forces invade Czechoslovakia: communists re-impose totalitarian regime Sep Political repression in Czechoslovakia: thousands arrested Oct 28 – Mass protests in Prague against Soviet occupation Nov 1 – Johnson orders cessation of bombing in North Vietnam 6 – Richard Nixon elected president of US 7 – Anti-Soviet riot in Prague Dec 24–26 – Apollo 8 orbits moon

1969 Jan

1 – Kenya revokes Asian trading licenses: 15,000 emigrate to UK 16 – Self-immolation in Prague by student Jan Palach protesting Soviet invasion: dies three days later Feb 4 – Yasser Arafat becomes leader of PLO Mar 2 – Chinese and Russian troops clash at border 17 – Golda Meir elected premier of Israel April 1 – France withdraws from NATO 28 – De Gaulle resigns after defeat May 18–26 – Apollo 10 orbits moon

300

Timeline of International Events

June

8 – Spain closes Gibraltar border 15 – Georges Pompidou elected President of France 27 – Stonewall riots, New York: launch of Gay Liberation movement 20 – Neil Armstrong walks on moon: Buzz Aldrin follows on 21st 15 – Woodstock Festival begins 21 – Soviet tanks enter Prague to stifle protests 1 – Colonel Muammar Gaddafi coup in Libya 3 – Death of Ho Chi Minh 21 – Willi Brandt becomes German chancellor 29 – First email sent from UCLA to Stanford 14–24 – Apollo 12 moon mission 13 – US Supreme Court orders the end of racial segregation in the South

July Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

Biographies of Writers Brian Aldiss was born in 1925. He began writing as a child and published his first novel, The Brightfount Diaries with Faber in 1955. He contributed stories to John Carnell’s periodical Science Fantasy before publishing Earthworks (1965) and Barefoot in the Head (1969). From 1968 to 1973 Aldiss edited with Harry Harrison the annual anthology, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and his updated history of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, co-authored with David Wingrove, appeared in 1986. Aldiss’ short story ‘Super-Toys Last All Summer Long’ (1969) formed the basis for A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), a film developed by Stanley Kubrick and completed by Steven Spielberg. Beryl Bainbridge was nominated for the Booker Prize five times. Her first novel, A Weekend with Claude (1967) was followed by Another Part of the Wood (1968). Bainbridge often drew upon historical events, for instance her Whitbread Award winning account of the Titanic disaster, Everyman for Himself (1996). In 2010 when she died, Bainbridge was working on The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, fictionalizing the assassination of Robert Kennedy, published posthumously in 2016. Bainbridge was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000. J.G. Ballard was born in 1932. His early exposure to death and violence while interned by the Japanese in Lunghua Camp from 1943–45 shaped the apocalyptic tone of much of his fiction, even though he admitted being ‘largely happy’ in this environment. Such experiences are fictionalized in the semi-autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), and he documented them again in his autobiography, Miracles of Life (2008). Ballard’s first stories appeared in 1956, instigating a relationship with New Worlds magazine. His work transformed science fiction by turning towards the ‘inner space’ of psychological trauma and urban psychosis. In 1960, he moved to the London suburb of Shepperton, remaining in residence for the rest of his life. After a series of novels including The Drowned World (1962), he produced the controversial The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). Ballard also wrote a series of novels – Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975) – that established ‘Ballardian’ as a synonym for bleak, entropic urbanity. He died in 2009. Edward Blishen was born in 1920. An author and broadcaster, he is best known for the first of his two children’s novels based on Greek mythology The God Beneath the Sea which won the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association in 1970. After failing exams at his grammar school, he left to work on a local newspaper. Later, he taught for three years in a Hampstead prep school, before a secondary modern school in north London, where he wrote his best-selling first book, Roaring Boys (1955). Following its success, he

301

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Biographies of Writers

gave up teaching in 1959. Its sequel, This Right Soft Lot, appeared in 1969. Other autobiographical books followed, including A Cack-Handed War (1972), which described being a conscientious objector in the Second World War. The concluding volume of his autobiographical sequence, Mind How You Go, was published posthumously in 1997. Eustace Edward Ricardo Braithwaite was born in 1912 in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana). He attended the elite Queen’s College Guyana and the City College of New York. He volunteered for RAF service in 1940 and after the war he studied at Cambridge, leaving with a master’s degree in physics in 1949. Braithwaite was unprepared for the intense racism he would encounter and after being rejected for jobs in engineering, reluctantly he took up a teaching post in the East End of London in 1951. His experience inspired his first book, To Sir, With Love (1959). His later novel, Reluctant Neighbours (1972), reflects upon racism in both America and Britain. Recognition led to a number of important positions: in 1962 education consultant to UNESCO in Paris; Permanent Representative of Guyana to the United Nations in New York from 1967 to 1969; and subsequently Guyana’s Ambassador to Venezuela. Braithwaite held academic positions at New York University, Florida State University and Howard University. He died in 2016. Christine Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1923. Following her parents’ divorce she moved with her mother to London in 1936, joining the WAAF in 1940. Transferred to military intelligence because of fluency in English, German and French, she spent time at Bletchley Park working in codebreaking. Later she received an undergraduate degree from Somerville College, Oxford and doctorate from University College, London, later published as A Grammar of Metaphor (1958). A writer of experimental novels and social satires, and, a respected literary critic and poststructuralist linguist, Brooke-Rose worked alongside Hélène Cixous at University of Paris 8, Vincennes, between 1968 and 1988. She won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her novel Such (1966). Her monograph A ZBC of Ezra Pound (1971) remains a primary text in Pound scholarship. Brooke-Rose died in 2012; her archive is held in the Manchester John Rylands Library and in the Harry Ransom Centre in Austin, Texas. Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917. He graduated from Manchester University in 1940, marrying his first wife, Lynne Jones, in 1942. He taught during his military service in Gibraltar, and later in a private college in Banbury upon his return to England, before going to Malaya (1954–1955) and Brunei (1958–1959) teaching for the Colonial Service. His Malayan experience translated into his first successful novel trilogy, Time for a Tiger (1956), The Enemy in the Blanket (1958) and Beds in the East (1959). Upon repatriation Burgess became a prolific and well-known writer. His best-known novel, A Clockwork Orange (1962) was adapted to film by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. Translated into many languages, it also became a cult text in the illegal Soviet Union samizdat community. He was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He died in London 1993. The International Anthony Burgess Foundation maintains an archive and cultural centre located in Manchester.

Biographies of Writers

303

Carol Burns studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL , and was for many years a successful painter. Carol married the writer Alan Burns, author of Europe After the Rain (1965) and Celebrations (1967) alongside whom she formed part of a circle of experimental writers that included Eva Figes, Ann Quin and B.S. Johnson. She contributed the novella The Infatuation to Calder and Boyars’ New Writers 7 (1967) and the novel The Narcissist (1967) in the same year. Burns is currently retired and living in London. Angela Carter was born in 1940. She spent the war years in Yorkshire, and after the war moved with her family to Balham in South London. Her father apprenticed her to the Croydon Advertiser where she first acquired her journalistic skills. In 1960 she married Paul Carter, an industrial chemist, and followed him to Bristol University the next year. While studying for a degree in English, specializing in the medieval period, she wrote her first novel, Shadow Dance (1966). Her second, The Magic Toyshop (1967) won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and her third, Several Perceptions (1968), the Somerset Maugham Prize. Her newfound feminism found expression in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), a highly anti-realist novel which received a lukewarm reception but gained a cult readership. In 1977 she published The Passion of New Eve (1977), followed by The Sadeian Woman (1978), a polemical essay defending the Marquis de Sade which offended many feminists. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) retold various European fairy stories from a feminist perspective, restoring the sexual content removed by earlier writers. Her last two novels were Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991). Carter died in 1992. Shelagh Delaney was born in Salford, Lancashire in 1938 as Sheila Delaney, subsequently revising her name to reflect Irish roots. Daughter of a bus conductor, she left education at fifteen years old with five O-Levels. Aged eighteen she wrote A Taste of Honey, first performed in 1958, directed by Joan Littlewood. Its film adaptation was an important part of the British New Wave, directed by Tony Richardson, released in 1961. Delaney wrote screenplays for The White Bus (1967), Charlie Bubbles (1967) and Dance with a Stranger (1985), and a short story collection, Sweetly Sings the Donkey (1963). She continued to write and produce at the BBC until her death in 2010. Laura Del-Rivo was born in Surrey in 1934, moving to London in her teens, encountering other young writers such as Colin Wilson and Bill Hopkins. She came to prominence in 1961 with her first novel The Furnished Room (1961) which was filmed as West 11 by Michael Winner in 1963. She has been a dealer in antiques and vintage clothes on London’s Portobello Road market for many years. In 2004 she published Speedy and Queen Kong. He most recent collection of short stories Where is my Mask of an Honest Man? (2013) was published by Holland Park Press. Margaret Drabble was born in 1939 in Sheffield. Her elder sister is the novelist A.S. Byatt. Her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, was published in 1963. Other novels include The Needle’s Eye (1972), The Realms of Gold (1975), The Ice Age (1977), The Middle Ground (1980), The Radiant Way (1987), A Natural Curiosity (1989), The Gates of Ivory (1991), The

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Biographies of Writers

Witch of Exmoor (1996), The Peppered Moth (2001), The Seven Sisters (2002), The Red Queen (2004) and The Sea Lady (2006). In 1972 she co-edited the experimental collective novel London Consequences (1972) with B.S. Johnson. Maureen Duffy was born in Worthing, Sussex in 1933. After a tough childhood she graduated with a degree in English from King’s College London where she started to write poetry. Employed initially as a teacher, her first novel, That’s How It Was (1962), received immediate acclaim. After an openly lesbian novel, The Microcosm (1966), Duffy was actively involved in debates around homosexual law reform at the time. Later she published The Ballad of the Blasphemy Trial (1977), a broadside against the trial of the Gay News newspaper for blasphemous libel. Duffy was regarded as Britain’s first lesbian to ‘come out’ in public. Many novels followed: including Gor Saga (1981), Londoners (1983), Change (1987), and Occam’s Razor (1993). She still considers herself to be primarily a poet and her Collected Poems, 1949–84 appeared in 1985. Non-fiction books include The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn, 1640–89 (1977) and Men and Beasts: Animal Rights Handbook (1984). Also a celebrated playwright, she is co-founder of the Writers’ Action Group, Vice-President of the European Writers’ Congress, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Nell Dunn, daughter of Sir Philip Dunn, was born in London in 1936, receiving a convent education which she terminated aged fourteen. In 1959 she moved to Battersea and made friends in the neighborhood where she worked in a sweet factory. These experiences inspired Up the Junction (1963), a series of interlinked stories set in South London. Adapted for television by Dunn, it appeared in The Wednesday Play series, directed by Ken Loach and broadcast in November 1965. A film version followed in 1968. A collection of interviews, Talking to Women (1965), preceded her first novel Poor Cow (1967). A film version starred Carol White and Terence Stamp, also under Loach’s direction. Later novels include Grandmothers (1991) and My Silver Shoes (1996). Her play Steaming was produced in 1981 and a television film, Every Breath You Take, transmitted in 1987. Buchi Emecheta was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1944 and orphaned at nine years old. The following year she attended the Methodist Girls’ School, leaving at sixteen. The same year she married a student, Sylvester Onwordi, her fiancé from age eleven, following him to London in 1962. Emecheta and her husband had five children together, and separated in 1966. Her early novels reflect upon an unhappy, sometimes violent marriage. She later studied at the University of London, while working as a library officer at the British Museum, graduating with a BS c in sociology in 1972. Emecheta’s first two novels, In The Ditch (1972) and Second Class Citizen (1974) drew on her life and struggles as a single mother. She has published an autobiography, Head Above Water (1986), eleven more novels, plays for television, children and young adult fiction, and non-fiction on women’s experiences in Nigeria. From 1982 to 1983 Buchi Emecheta, together with her son Sylvester, ran the Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company. She was awarded an OBE in 2005.

Biographies of Writers

305

Eva Figes was born in Berlin in 1932 as Eva Unger. Aged seven her Jewish family fled Nazi Germany for London; she was evacuated to Cirencester. Graduating from Queen Mary College in London with BA honours in 1953, she worked in publishing until 1967 when she became a full-time writer of fiction, memoirs and works of social criticism, the best known being her bestselling feminist work Patriarchal Attitudes (1970). She completed thirteen novels between 1966 and 1996 including Winter Journey (1967), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize. Her memoir Journey to Nowhere (2008) incited controversy for its depiction of prejudice in Israeli society. She had two children: the writer Kate Figes and the academic Orlando Figes. She died in August 2012; her papers are currently being catalogued by the British Library. Margaret Forster was born in Carlisle in 1938 to Arthur Forster, a mechanic, and Lilian Hind, a secretary. After attending grammar school she was awarded a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, where she graduated in history in 1960. She worked as a teacher until her first novel, Dames’ Delight (1964), was published, after which time she wrote full time. Best known for Georgy Girl (1965) which inspired the song by The Seekers, a film adaptation appeared in 1966 and a Broadway musical, Georgy, in 1970. She has also been a memoirist, broadcaster, historian and biographer. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1975, Forster died in 2016. John Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex in 1926. A scholarship pupil at Bedford School he left aged eighteen, completing a course at Edinburgh University in preparation for a commission in the Royal Marines. Completing national service in 1947, he began studies in French and German at New College, Oxford. His novels include The Collector (1963), The Magus (1965, rev. 1977), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982) and A Maggot (1985). He also published philosophical pensées, The Aristos (1964) and The Ebony Tower (1974) a collection of stories, including the same-named novella. As well as poetry collections, he published non-fiction works such as The Tree (1979). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. Novels adapted for the film and television include: The Collector starring Terence Stamp; The Magus with Michael Caine; The French Lieutenant’s Woman, awarded five Academy Award nominations (including Best Actress for Meryl Streep); and The Ebony Tower on television in 1984, with a late performance by Sir Lawrence Olivier. Fowles died in 2005. Gillian Freeman wrote The Leather Boys (1961) under the pseudonym Eliot George, clearly referencing another famous pseudonymous author, George Eliot. Freeman’s book was a groundbreaking depiction of a gay relationship amongst the British biker subculture. She completed the screenplay for Sidney J. Furie’s 1964 film adaptation. Her non-fiction text The Undergrowth of Literature (1967) was a challenging analysis of pornography. Her first novel was The Liberty Man in 1955. Her book Nazi Lady (1979) purported to be the genuine war diaries of ‘a young wife and mother on the fringes of the Nazi hierarchy’. Born in 1929, Freeman’s archives are held at the University of Reading.

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Biographies of Writers

Waguih Ghali was an Egyptian novelist and journalist, best known for his only completed novel, Beer in the Snooker Club (1964). Cornell University has digitized his archive, including diaries and work towards a second book, the ‘Ashl novel’. He is believed to have been born in the 1920s and died in 1969. Zulfikar Ghose was born in 1935 in what became Pakistan. He was close friends with B.S. Johnson. He has written eleven novels, two short story collections, and several volumes of non-fiction and poetry, and is best known for the trilogy The Incredible Brazilian (1972–1978). Ghose currently teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. Martyn Goff was born in 1923. Best known from 1973 as the main administrator of the Man Booker Prize, he raised its profile and increased associated book sales, cultivating the public appetite for contemporary fiction. As a writer Goff worked both on fiction and non-fiction. He completed nine novels; the first, The Plaster Fabric (1957), featured a gay man as its protagonist, as did three more, notably The Youngest Director (1961). He died in 2015 aged 91. Wilson Harris, born 24 March 1921 in New Amsterdam, is a Guyanese writer, who has been based in Britain since 1959. After study at Queen’s College, Georgetown, he worked as a government surveyor, obtaining detailed knowledge of the country’s savannas and rain forests, which landscapes feature in much of his fiction. His first novel Palace of the Peacock (1960) initiated The Guyana Quartet, with three additional fictions: The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962) and The Secret Ladder (1963). He subsequently completed the Carnival trilogy: Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990). His innovative and allegorical work foregrounds themes such as conquest, colonization, creolization and the struggles of colonized people. He conveys emotions such as abandonment, despair and longing. A more recent novel, Jonestown (1996), narrates the mass-suicide of followers of cult leader Jim Jones. Harris was knighted in June 2010. Rayner Heppenstall was born on 27 July 1911 in Huddersfield and studied English and Modern Languages at the University of Leeds graduating in 1932. After a brief teaching career, in Dagenham, in 1935 he worked as a cook at John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi commune at ‘The Oaks’, and was sent to meet Dylan Thomas by Sir Richard Rees of the Adelphi magazine. A friend of Eric Gill and George Orwell, in the 1930s Heppenstall converted to Catholicism and married, becoming a BBC radio producer while writing fiction, poetry and diaries. Hélène Cixous named him as anticipating the French nouveau roman by writing his pre-war ‘anti-novel’, The Blaze of Noon (1939). Conscripted for war service in December 1940, Heppenstall served in the Royal Artillery and Pay Corps in Yorkshire and Northern Ireland. Originally left-wing, from the 1960s he became a far more conservative stance. Knowing personally figures such as Michel Butor, Alain RobbeGrillet and Natalie Sarraute, Heppenstall’s interconnection with the post-war French scene and his own ongoing complex, experimental fiction – which would include The Woodshed (1962), The Connecting Door (1962), The Shearers (1969), Two Moons (1977)

Biographies of Writers

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and posthumously The Pier (1986) – influenced a younger generation of post-war writers, including B.S. Johnson, Eva Figes, Angela Carter, Ann Quin and Alan Burns among others. Heppenstall died in Kent on 23 May 1981. Christopher Isherwood was born in 1904. Along with his friend and fellow writer Edward Upward, Isherwood developed a series of stories set in the imaginative otherworld of Mortmere during their time at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge where Isherwood rebelliously failed his tripos exams. After Cambridge Isherwood went onto develop close associations with W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and E.M. Forster. His experiences in Berlin are reflected in Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). After travelling through Europe Isherwood left for America in 1939, settling in California and becoming an American citizen in 1946, befriending Aldous Huxley. Key publications included The World in the Evening (1954), Down There on a Visit (1962) and perhaps his finest achievement, A Single Man (1964). Isherwood died in 1986. B.S. Johnson was born in 1933 in London to a working-class family. He graduated from King’s College, London. His identity informs his experimental fiction and his novels include Travelling People (1963), Albert Angelo (1964), Trawl (1966), The Unfortunates (1969) and House Mother Normal (1971). In 1973, aged 40, he committed suicide, his last novel, See the Old Lady Decently (1975), being published posthumously. Doris Lessing was born in Persia (now Iran) in 1919 to British parents and grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). She left her convent school at the age of fourteen, becoming a nursemaid. Moving to Salisbury (now Harare) in 1937 to work as a telephone operator, she married and had two children. Her first marriage ended in divorce in 1943; she became involved in communist politics and at the Left Book Club met her second husband Gottfried Lessing. After a second divorce, in 1949 she moved to Britain. Lessing’s first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950) dealt with racial politics in Rhodesia and had immediate impact. The Golden Notebook (1962) marks an important moment in the postwar rise of feminist consciousness. In the 1970s, influenced by R.D. Laing she chose to focus on ‘inner space’ in novels such as Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and Memoirs of a Survivor (1977). She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. David Lodge was born in 1935. He is an English author and academic. He completed his PhD at Birmingham University where he worked for twenty-seven years before retiring to concentrate fully on writing. Well known for his campus novels, including Changing Places (1975) and Nice Work (1988), Lodge has published sixteen novels and a variety of non-fiction. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize on two occasions and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Shena Mackay was born in Edinburgh in 1944 but spent her childhood in London and the south-east of England. Leaving school aged sixteen after winning a poetry competition in the Daily Mirror, she mixed with a bohemian set in Soho while working in an art gallery. Her first book written as a teenager consists of two novellas, Dust Falls on Eugene

308

Biographies of Writers

Schlumburger and Toddler on the Run (1964). Her first novel, Music Upstairs (1965), is set in the London she experienced in the early 1960s. An Advent Calendar (1971), marriage and motherhood, and the collection Babies in Rhinestones and Other Stories (1983) followed. Mackay holds a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature and is also Honorary Visiting Professor at Middlesex University. Michael Moorcock was born in London in 1939. Aged seventeen he became the editor of Tarzan Adventures. He was subsequently the editor of New Worlds, between 1964 and 1971 and again between 1976 and 1996. The magazine was responsible during the 1960s for developing the ‘New Wave’ in science fiction, publishing writers such as J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss. Moorcock’s first novel, The Stealer of Souls (1963), was the first in his Elric Saga series. He has produced and published nearly a hundred works of fiction and non-fiction. In the 1980s he concentrated on more traditional writing, completing Mother London (1988) which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. In the 1990s Moorcock moved to the US . In 2002 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. V.S. Naipaul, born in Chaguanas, Trinidad, in 1932, is arguably the Caribbean’s most internationally celebrated author. In 1939, Naipaul’s family moved to the capital where he attended the illustrious Queen’s Royal College and, upon graduation, won a scholarship to Oxford University. In 1954, he moved to London and became a presenter for the BBC ’s Caribbean Voices radio programme. His first novel, Miguel Street (1959), depicts characters from Naipaul’s childhood in a series of interrelated vignettes. The Mystic Masseur (1957) follows a frustrated writer’s rise to political power via his career as a mystic. A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) drew elements from his father’s life to analyse Trinidad’s gradual decolonization and gained Naipaul worldwide acclaim. A controversial figure criticized the likes of Edward Said and George Lamming, Naipaul has won numerous awards, including the 1971 Booker Prize for In a Free State and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. He was knighted in 1989 and currently lives in Wiltshire, England. Christopher Priest was born in 1943. Growing up in Cheshire, he left school at sixteen when his family relocated to Essex. Priest began writing in the mid-1960s and published his first novel Indoctrinaire in 1970. Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972), Inverted World (1974), The Space Machine (1976), A Dream of Wessex (1977) and The Affirmation (1981) followed before his inclusion among ‘The Best of Young British Novelists 1983’. Priest’s ninth novel The Prestige (1995), winner of both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the World Fantasy Award, was filmed by Christopher Nolan in 2006. The Separation (2002) won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His most recent work includes The Islanders (2011) and The Adjacent (2013). Ann Quin was born in Brighton on 17 March 1936, and raised by her mother. Despite not being Catholic she was educated at Brighton’s Convent of the Blessed Sacrament School. On leaving she worked in a local solicitor’s office, later at a Soho publishing company and the Royal College of Art. In London she started writing fiction and was part of a loosely interconnected group of ‘experimental’ writers influenced by Rayner Heppenstall and led

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by B.S. Johnson. In adult life Quin suffered severe mental health problems, at times becoming catatonic; she was treated with electro-shock therapy. In spring 1963 she read William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch after submitting her first published novel to John Calder and Marion Boyars, the oedipal Berg (1964). Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972) followed; all three explore feminist perspectives informed by the perversities of life and triangulated passions. Drowned off Brighton Palace Pier after swimming into the sea in August 1973, her body washed up in Shoreham Harbour. Quin is presumed to have committed suicide, although the coroner recorded an open verdict. Andrew Salkey was born in Panama in 1928 and raised in Jamaica. He was the author of more than twenty novels, children’s books, short story collections, and non-fiction works. He is best known for his anthology of Caribbean short fiction, West Indian Stories (1960) although his second novel, Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960) was also very well received. Hampshire College established the Andrew Salkey Memorial Scholarship for gifted creative writing students. Salkey died in 1995. Andrew Sinclair was born in Oxford in 1935. He is a British novelist, historian, biographer, critic and filmmaker. Sinclair undertook his National Service with the Coldstream Guards and wrote a novel based on the experience, entitled The Breaking of Bumbo (1959), followed by a screenplay. Sinclair directed the film of Under Milk Wood (1972) featuring the voices of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. His book The Better Half: The Emancipation of the American Woman (1965) won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1967. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1972. David Storey was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire in 1933. Attending the Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School, an independent boys’ public school, he continued his education at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. This Sporting Life (1960) won the Macmillan Fiction Award and was adapted by the author for Lindsay Anderson’s 1963 film. The pair collaborated on a film version of Storey’s play In Celebration, and Home and Early Days became television films. Storey’s other works include the novels Flight into Camden (1963) which won both the Somerset Maugham Award and John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Saville won the 1976 Booker Prize. Muriel Spark (née Camberg) was born in Edinburgh in 1918. She was educated in that city at the James Gillespie’s School for Girls, which experience informed The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), featuring an anti-establishment, middle-aged teacher with a penchant for fascism and eccentricity. In September 1937 she married Sidney Oswald Spark and followed her subsequently violent husband to Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). She returned in early 1944, six years after her son Robin was born. The Helena Club where she stayed in London inspired the May of Teck Club in The Girls of Slender Means (1963). She worked on black information for British intelligence, a world tangentially featuring in the novel. After the war she was editor of Poetry Review at the Poetry Society. In later life she lived in New York, Rome and Tuscany. Much of her archive is deposited at National Library of Scotland. She died in Florence on 13 April 2006.

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Biographies of Writers

Denis Williams was born in 1923. He was a British Guyanese writer, painter, and archaeologist. In addition to his fiction, including The Third Temptation (1968), he was a prolific painter. He was appointed director of the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology in Georgetown in 1974, and in 1989 he was awarded both the Guyana Cacique Crown of Honour and an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies. He died in 1998. Raymond Williams was born near Abergavenny in 1921. He attended the local grammar school and went to Cambridge at the outbreak of the Second World War. Military duties interrupted his studies. Williams served as a tank commander in Normandy. Completing his degree post-war, he worked in adult education, while writing the cultural criticism which would make him famous: Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961). His first novel Border Country (1960) was followed by a sequel, Second Generation (1964). Williams lectured at Cambridge, was associated with the ‘New Left’, and was a chief contributor to the May Day Manifesto (1968). He produced other critical works such as The Country and the City (1971) and Marxism and Literature (1977), and novels such as The Volunteers (1978), The Fight for Manod (1979) and Loyalties (1985). Williams died in 1988. His unfinished novel, People of the Black Mountains, was published posthumously in two volumes in 1989 and 1990. Colin Wilson became a literary celebrity aged twenty-four following the publication of The Outsider (1956). Novels such as Ritual in the Dark (1960) and Adrift in Soho (1961) continued the outsider theme in fictional form, but his further studies of philosophy, psychology and literature, including Religion and the Rebel (1957) and The Strength to Dream (1962) outlined his ‘New Existentialism’. Associated with the ‘Angry Young Men’, Wilson’s work became distinctive through his prolific output. Such non-fiction as The Occult: A History (1971), The Unexplained (1975) and Mysteries (1978) dealt with the paranormal. Wilson published an autobiography, Dreaming to Some Purpose (2004). He died in 2013 aged eighty-one.

Index 1950s ix, 4, 5, 9–10, 14, 16, 18, 19, 28, 29, 36, 44, 49, 50, 54, 62, 70, 78–79, 82, 83, 84–5, 86, 88, 96–8, 138, 139–40, 142, 144, 146, 150, 152, 153, 154, 158–59, 160, 193–95, 221, 230, 240, 246, 269 Angry Young Men 230 British anti-Modernism 193–94 dullness ix Elizabeth II , new queen 86 immigration and prejudice 86, 138, 159 Movement, the 193, 221 nouveau roman 154 1960s international order, patriarchal 86 the long Sixties 29 segregationist politics 86 Sex War 95 younger experimentalists, coterie led by B.S. Johnson 194, 222, 303, 307 de facto mentor, Rayner Heppenstall 194, 307 1960s women’s novel 81–107 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), Stanley Kubrick (dir.) 232, 233, 243, 252, 288 7/7 ix 9/11 ix Abelman, Paul 223 abortion 82, 86, 87, 92, 103–104, 106, 111, 217, 273, 293 illegal 82, 86, 87, 92 legal 82 Abortion Act, 1967 82, 111, 293 aesthetic self-consciousness 16, 54, 91, 94–95, 124, 133, 175, 181, 194–96, 196, 198, 199, 201, 205, 210–211, 222, 229, 262–63 AIA Gallery 9

Aitken, Jonathan 28–29 The Young Meteors (1967) 29 Aldermaston marches 13 Aldiss, Brian 17, 228, 229, 234, 245–48, 249, 251, 263, 285, 288, 301, 308 All About Venus: A Revelation in Fact and Fiction (1968) 228, 288 ‘Another Little Boy’ (1966) 223 Barefoot in the Head (1969) 263, 288 The Brightfount Diaries (1955) 301 Earthworks (1965) 301 Hothouse (1962) 244–45, 246, 247–48, 249, 285 new wave 234 New Worlds (periodical) 233, 234, 263 ‘Super-Toys Last All Summer Long’ (1969) 301 Trillion Year Spree (1986), with David Wingrove 301 The Year’s Best Science Fiction, editor 301 alienation 64, 102, 261 Allen, Marjory, Lady Allen of Hurtwood 30 Allison, Clive 157–58 Ambit 248 America x, 2, 9, 14, 16, 19–20, 22–23, 28, 52, 79, 86, 96, 138, 152, 235, 236, 241, 242, 266 American art 9 American Civil Rights Movement 22–23, 157, 257, 270, 297 American housewife 63, 90 Americanization 147, 238–39, 244 American postmodern culture 243 America’s ‘youthquake’ 268 fiction 16 North America x, 19 West Coast 2

311

312 Amis, Kingsley 79, 83, 221, 2238, 240, 246, 285 Lucky Jim (1954) 79, 238, 240 New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960) Anger, Kenneth (dir.) Scorpio Rising (1963) 121 Angry Brigade 259, 281 Angry Young Man/Men 67, 78–79, 82, 97–98, 221, 230, 238–239, 240, 242, 267, 310. See also Wilson, Colin anti-Bildungsroman 200 Antonioni, Michelangelo (dir.) Blow-Up (1966) 60, 78, 102 Anthony, Michael The Games Were Coming (1963) 144, 286 Green Days by the River (1967) 144, 287 Tales for Young and Old (1967) 144, 287 The Year in San Fernando (1965) 144, 287 aposiopesis 210–211 Archigram 11, 22 Architectural Review (periodical) 10 Arnold, Matthew 88–89, 195, 221 Arnoldian axiom 221 anti-Arnoldian view 195 Asimov, Isaac 236 Atlee, Clement 239 Auden, W.H. 307 Austen, Jane 84 autofiction 14, 33, 43 avant-garde 4, 13, 234 1940s British 194 1950s British 154, 193, 194 1960s British 16–17, 20, 22, 103–4, 193–223, 227, 229, 240, 244, 254 European 4 French, post-war 4, 154, 155, 221, 306 baby-boomer/baby-boomers 18, 33 bad faith (mauvaise foi) 168–69, 170, 172, 174, 190 Baker, Brian 6, 9 Baker, Rob 9

Index Bainbridge, Beryl 81, 99–100, 288 Another Part of the Wood (1968) 99–100, 301 A Weekend with Claude (1967) 301 Ballard, J.G. 17, 223, 228–229, 234, 236, 241, 248–249, 252, 253 ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ (1966) 233 The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) 4, 17, 256–7 The Burning World/The Drought (1964) 249, 255 Concrete Island (1974) 255 Crash (1973) 255, 257 ‘Crashed Cars’ (exhibition) 257–58 The Crystal World (1966) 249 death of wife, Mary 249 The Drowned World (1962) 245, 248, 249–251, 255 Empire of the Sun (1984) 301 Hello America (1981) 266 High-Rise (1975) 255 Lunghua Camp 301 Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton (2008) 227 ‘Myth-Maker of the 20th Century’ (1964) 234 New Wave of science fiction 230 New Worlds (periodical) 248 Shepperton 248, 255, 301 ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) 278 ‘Terminal Documents’ (1966) 275, 278, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) 255–56 Vermillion Sands (1971) 11 ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ (1962) 11 ‘Which Way to Inner Space’ (1962) 227 The Wind from Nowhere (1961) 249 Banham, Reyner 10, 22 Barber, Dulan 130 Barber, Stephen 264 Barents Sea 212 Baron, Wendy 222 Barr, John Derelict Britain (1969) 4 Barrett, Lindsay Song for Mumu (1967) 145, 287 Barrett, Syd 241 Barstow, Stan 79, 221

Index Barth, John ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ (1967) 166, 229 Barthes, Roland 54, 276 Bartie, Angela ‘1962 International Writers’ Conference, Edinburgh: An Edited History’ 1 Battersea 8, 50, 104, 304 BBC see British Broadcasting Corporation BBC Radio 4 13 Beach Boys, The 2 Beatles, The 2,5, 7, 9, 21, 27. 114, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294 Beatlemania 7 George Martin, producer of 27 ‘Paperback Writer’ 5, 7, 21 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) 293 Bell, Daniel The End of Ideology (1960) 269 Bell, Eleanor see Bartie, Angela Berger, John 223 bedsit (bedsitting room) 48, 49 Beesley, T. (et al.) 32 Benedek, László (dir.) The Wild One (1953) 120 Berg, Leila Look at Kids (1972) 29, Bergonzi, Bernard ‘Beyond Fiction’ chapter 194 The Situation of the Novel (1970) 193–94 Berke, Joseph Counterculture: The Creation of an Alternative Society (1969) 269 Betjeman, John 9 Better Books 258 Beveridge, Lord 42 Biba 100 Bildungsroman 167, 212 Billy Liar (film, 1963), John Schlesinger (dir.) 97 Birmingham 70, 199, 293, 294 Bull Ring Market development 4 Birmingham, Alabama 297 Blackwall tunnel 12

313

‘Blake, Boty, Porter, Reeve’ Exhibition 9 Blake, Peter 9 Blishen, Edward 14, 33, 40–41, 42, 288, 301–302 A Cack-Handed War (1972) 302 The God Beneath the Sea (1970) 301 Mind How You Go (1997) 302 This Right Soft Lot (1969) 41, 288, 302 Roaring Boys: A Headmaster’s Agony (1955) 40–41, 42, 301 Blitz, the 13, 87, 230 Aftermath of 29, 97, 238, 247 Blond, Anthony 116 Bloomsbury Group 196, 222 elitism of 196 Bode, Christoph ‘Maureen Duffy: The Polyphonic Novel as a Subversion of Realism’ (2001) 133 Bolton, Paul 18, 44 Booker, Christopher 4, 6, 18 Booth, Francis 64, 215, 218 Boothby, Baronet Sir, Brooke 239 Borges, Jorge Luis 229 Bosch, Hieronymus 246, 247 Boty, Pauline 8–9, 22, 82 Bowen, Elizabeth 15, 81, 83 Bowie, David ‘Ashes to Ashes’ (1970) 254 ‘Space Oddity’ (1969) 254 Boyars, Marion 4, 303, 309 Boyd, Joe 258 Bradbury, Malcolm 183, 194 The Martian Chronicles (1950) 228 Bradford, Richard 220 Braine, John 79, 221 Room at the Top (1959) 97 Braithwaite, E.R. (Eustace Edward Ricardo) 14, 33, 302 Choice of Straws (1965) 145, 287 Guyana 302 RAF 302 Reluctant Neighbours (1972) 302 To Sir, With Love (1959) 14, 33, 39–40, 41, 42, 145, 302 Venezuela, Guyanese ambassador to 302

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Index

Brathwaite, Kamau (orig. Edward) 141, 142, 155–157 Brief Encounter (film, 1945), David Lean (dir.) 96,97 Brigade of Guards 34, 35 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC ) 12, 13, 140, 149–50, 241, 243, 290, 291, 292, 293, 303, 306, 308 British ‘invasion’ of US musical groups, by 2, 7 science fiction, by 228 British New Wave cinema 67 British ‘New Wave’ science fiction 17, 228–230, 236, 243, 249, 254, 308 British post-war cinema 97 British women’s fiction 59–79, 81–107, 129–133, 201–205, 214–220 diversity of 15, 82 Brodber, Erna 157 Brontë, Charlotte 94 Brontë, Emily 94 Brooke-Rose, Christine 15, 72, 75, 81, 223, 302 Bletchley Park 302 A Grammar of Metaphor (1958) 302 The Middlemen (1961) 15, 72, 75, 285 Such (1966) 302 A ZBC of Ezra Pound (1971) 302 Brophy, Brigid 15, 81 Brown, Helen 48 Brown, Helen Gurley Sex and the Single Girl (1962) 60, 66, 74, 286 Brownjohn, Alan 10 Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW ) 8–9 Brunner, John 17, 234, 241–244 Stand on Zanzibar (1968) 241–244, 288 Buck Rogers 234, 235, 241 Buchenwald 99 Buckell, G.J. ‘Rayner Heppenstall’ 221 Rayner Heppenstall: A Critical Study (2007) 221 Bull Ring Market, Birmingham 4 Bundy, A.J.M. 205–206

Burgess, Anthony 15, 17, 59, 65, 66–67, 77, 78, 229, 234, 237–241, 242, 243, 244, 247,. 285, 286, 302 Beds in the East (1959) Brunei 302 A Clockwork Orange (1962) 237–241, 302 The Enemy in the Blanket (1958) 302 Gibraltar 302 Malaya 229, 302 One Hand Clapping (1961) 15, 59, 65, 285 Time for a Tiger (1956) 302 You’ve Had Your Time (1990) 66, 237 Burlingham, Dorothy 30, 39 Burns, Alan 5, 63, 223, 303, 307 Celebrations (1967) 303 Europe After the Rain (1965) 303 Burns, Carol 15, 72–73, 287, 303, The Infatuation (1967) 287, 303 The Narcissist (1967) 15, 72–73, 287, 303 Burroughs, Edgar Rice 241 Burroughs, William 1, 10, 234, 241, 242, 278, 309 Naked Lunch (1959) 278, 309 Nova Express (1964) 234 The Soft Machine (1961) 234 The Ticket that Exploded (1962) 234 Busby, Margaret 157–158 Butler Education Act, 1944 34 Butler, Alice Ann Quin’s Night-time Ink: A Postscript (2013) 214 Butler, Judith 74, 79, 81, 140 Gender Trouble (1999) 79 Butor, Michel 206, 209, 221, 306 Byatt, A.S. 15, 81, 84–84, 88–91, 92–94, 98, 99, 107, 166, 286, 287, 303 Cambridge education, 1950s 84, 88 ‘Fathers’ 99 The Game (1967) 92–94, 287 Passions of the Mind (1992) ‘ “Experiment” in English Post-war Fiction’ 107 ‘People in Paper Houses: Attitudes to “Realism” ’ 107 Possession (1990) 166

Index The Shadow of the Sun (1964) 83, 106, 286 Introduction 83–84, 88 Byrne, Johnny Groupie 272, 288 Byrne, Mr Justice 88, 107 Cadbury-Brown, H.T. (Henry Thomas) 9 Caine, Michael 305 Calder and Boyars (publishers) 4–5, 309 m John Calder 4–5, 79, 303 New Writers (periodical) 303 Calvinism 204 Cambridge University 23, 45, 84, 88–9, 290, 302, 307, 310 Cambridge, Vibert C. 153, 154–5 Campaign for Homosexual Equality 113 Campbell, Alan 1 Campbell, James 2, 165, 166 Campbell, John W. 230 campus novel 36, 44, 46–7, 307 Campus Trilogy, David Lodge 36, 47, 307 Camus, Albert 165, 179 Myth of Sisyphus (1942) 179 Carnell, John Science Fantasy (periodical) 301 Caribbean 16, 137–38, 140 –145, 146–149, 150, 151–159, 160, 164, 308, 309 Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM ) 140–141, 145, 155–158, 159 Caribbean Voices, BBC Radio 140, 149–50, 152, 160, 308. See also Naipaul, V.S. Carroll, Lewis 246, 248 Carter, Angela 15, 81, 82, 84, 91, 94, 99–102, 104, 255, 287, 288, 303, 307 The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) 303 Bristol University, studied English 84 Godard, influence 84, 102 Heroes and Villains (1969) 255, 274, 288 The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) 303 Nights at the Circus (1984) 303

315

‘Notes for a Theory of Sixties Style’ (1967) 91, 99, 100–101 The Passion of New Eve (1977) 255, 303 The Sadeian Woman (1978) 255, 303 Marquis de Sade 303 Several Perceptions (1968) 84, 288, 303 Shadow Dance (1966) 99–102, 106, 287 The Magic Toyshop (1967) 303 ‘Truly, It Felt Like Year One’ (1988) 84 Carter, David 134 Casson, Sir Hugh 9 Catholic Church 47, 202, 255 Caute, David 233 censorship 1, 5, 96–7, 111, 273 self-censorship, science fiction writers 233–34 theatre, abolition of 294 Charlesworth, George A History of British Motorways (1984) 3–4 China Town, London 9 Churchill, Sir Winston 23, 100, 239, 291, 292 coalition government 12 Malta 1945 100 citizenship 15, 156 Cixous, Hélène 221, 302, 306 Claridge, John 7, 28, 38 Clarke, Arthur C. 17, 227–228, 229, 233, 243, 252–54, 285, 288 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (novel) 233, 243, 252–54, 288 A Fall of Moondust (1961) 227–228 class 6, 8, 14, 19–20, 31, 33–7, 39–42, 44–47, 50–55, 60–61, 67–75, 84–5, 90–92, 94, 95–96, 98, 105, 116–118, 121, 123, 127, 130–31, 142, 172, 184, 173, 175, 183–84, 194–95, 212–213. See also consciousness class conflict/war 34–35, 45–46, 212 middle-class 6, 8, 19–20, 28, 34, 35–36, 46–47, 52–53, 55, 60–62, 70–72, 77, 150, 151, 176, 183–84, 212, 216, 221, 230, 233, 261, 265, 269–70

316

Index

structures determined by privilege 195, 269–70 upper-classes 6, 30, 35–37, 52, 75, 112, 183, 212, 265 working-class 8, 19–20, 33–34, 39, 40–42, 44, 45–52, 53–55, 65–71, 84–85, 87, 90–92, 95, 104, 116, 118, 123, 126, 189, 221, 222, 261, 265, 270, 307 classlessness 7–8 class system, English/British 96, 267 Clements, James 193, 195 Cockney rhyming slang 240 Coetzee, J.M . ‘The Novel Today’ (1988) coffee shops/bars 27, 49, 52, 238 Cohen, Stanley Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (1972) 240 Cokeliss, Harley 257 Cold War 13, 18, 82, 86, 97 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 94 Colomina, Beatriz 11 colonialism 145, 146, 229 Communist Party 94, 95, 96, 97 Communists 1, 95, 146 comprehensive school/s 3, 31, 37–38, 39, 40, 48, 55 Compton-Burnett, Ivy 81 Conrad, Joseph 149 Conradian 148, 249, 251 Heart of Darkness (1902) 245, 251 Conradi, Peter 175 consciousness 14, 16, 20, 27, 77, 168–69, 170, 171, 174, 194, 195, 196, 198, 222, 229, 259, 307. See also aesthetic selfconsciousness; stream of consciousness altered states 229 class 20, 195, 222 global 14, 27, 229 political 86, 195, 307 Sartrean, existential 168–69, 170, 171, 174 social 16, 27, 77, 194, 195, 259 vertiginous 196, 198

Conscientious objection 302 conscription, military (National Service) 34–37 Conservative government 3, 22, 239 contraception 82, 273 contraceptive pill, on NHS , 1961 22, 60, 82, 111, 290 ill-fitting devices 82 Cool Britannia 9 Cooper, Henry 292 Cooper, William 193 Corso, Gregory 10 council housing 10, 12 counterculture 14, 17, 19–20, 84, 99, 101, 128, 229, 263–275, 281 Coward, Rosalind 92 Creeley, Robert see Quin, Ann Bobbie Creeley, wife of Robert Creeley 217 Crosland, Tony 3 Susan, wife 3 Cuban Missile Crisis, 16–28 October 1962 13, 22, 296 cyberpunk 237, 254 D’Emilio, John Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1998) 119 Daily Mail 11 Daily Mirror 48, 307 Dali, Salvador 247, 250 Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity (1954) 255 Dällenbach, Lucien 220 Darwin, Charles 187 Darwinian anxiety 231 Davie, Elspeth 5 Davies, Cyril 5 Dawson, Jennifer 15 de Kooning, Willem 9 Dean, James 238, 258 Dearden, Basil (dir.) Victim (1961) 116, 285 deconstruction 233, 234, 242 Deighton, Len 21 Action Cook Book (1965) 6 Billion Dollar Brain (1966) 6 Funeral in Berlin (1964) 6

Index The IPCRESS File (1962) 6, 21, 286 Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy (1976) 21 Delaney, Shelagh 77, 286, 303 ‘All About and To a Female Artist’ (1963) A Taste of Honey (1958) 15, 59, 67–71 Charlie Bubbles (1967) 303 Salford 70–71, 303 Sweetly Sings the Donkey (1963) The White Bus (1967) 303 Del-Rivo, Laura 274, 303 The Furnished Room (1961) 267–68, 270–271 Speedy and Queen Kong (2004) 303 Where is my Mask of an Honest Man? (2013) 303 demotic 14, 16, 33, 54, 201, 220, 240 Denning Report, 1963 3, 291 Denny, Robyn 9 Derrida, Jacques The Gift of Death (1992) 218–219 Dick, Philip K. 244 Martian Time-Slip (1964) 228 Dickens, Charles 221 Didion, Joan 264, 265 Dines, Martin 118, 125–126, 127, 134 Diski, Jenny 18, 20 Divorce Act, 1969 82 Donnelly, Mark 8, 19, 32 Douglas-Home, Sir Alex 3 Drabble, Margaret 14, 15, 33, 56, 81, 91–92, 103, 104, 105, 258, 3903–304 The Garrick Year (1964) 104 The Ice Age (1977) 303 Jerusalem the Golden (1967) 90, 106, 287 London Consequences (1972) 304 The Millstone (1965) 15, 62, 71–72, 75–77, 82–83, 106, 287 The Needle’s Eye (1972) 303 A Summer Bird-Cage (1963) 33, 52–53, 91–92, 286, 303 The Waterfall (1969) 81, 90, 106, 258, 288 drugs 22, 229, 241, 263, 270, 274, 276–277, 293 Duffy, Maureen 14, 16, 32–33, 47, 54, 81, 114, 304

317

The Ballad of the Blasphemy Trial (1977) 304 ‘Interview, with Dulan Barber’ 130 Josie (1961) 50–51 The Lay Off (1962) 50–51 The Microcosm (1966) 129–133, 287 The Single Eye (1964) 78 That’s How It Was (1962) 31–32, 50 Writers’ Action Group 304 Dunn, Nell 14, 15, 33, 50, 81, 104, 304 Dunn, Sir Philip, father 304 Poor Cow (1967) 50–52, 105, 287 Talking to Women (1965) 8, 82, 87, 287 Up the Junction (1963) 50, 104–106, 286 ‘Preface’ 104 Duras, Marguerite 4, 154 Durrell, Lawrence 2 Durix, Jean-Pierre disjointed aesthetics, of Wilson Harris 208 ventriloquized framework, of Wilson Harris 208 dystopia 234, 237, 239, 244 Eagleton, Mary 106 Easy Rider, film, 1969, Dennis Hopper (dir.) 260 economic power, of youth 7 Economist building 10 Edgecombe, Rodney Vocation and Identity in the Fiction of Muriel Spark (1990) 204–205, Edinburgh 204–205, 206, 305, 307, 309 Edinburgh Festival’s Writers’ Conference 1–2, 21 Education Act, 1944 34, 41, 84 educational reform of schools and universities 14, 30, 39–40, 41, 43–44, 47, 53, 239 Edwardian 151, 204, Egypt 140, 143, 146, 196, 246, 278, 306 Eichmann, Adolf, trial, 1961 22, 103, 296 eighteenth-century novelists 194, 221, 229 elementary school 39–40 eleven-plus exam 31, 37, 42–43, 46, 54–55 Eliot, George 305

318 Eliot, T.S. 151, 250 The Waste Land (1922) 250 Emecheta, Buchi 158, 160, 304 Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company 304 empire 10, 17, 86, 105, 145, 229 centre, disintegrating 35, 85, 138, 247 loss of, decline 14, 35, 85–86, 100, 138, 230, 247, 289 margins 86 Empire Windrush 16, 137 England 3, 8, 21, 85, 106, 112, 120, 128, 146, 151–152, 173, 179, 204, 212, 217, 229, 238, 245, 246–247, 267, 292, 302, 308 North of 45, 137 south-east 291, 307 Enlightenment, the 247 Epic of Gilgamesh 252 Ernst, Max 250, 278, 279 Europe After the Rain (1940–42) 249, 279 ethnography 20, 53, 54, 84 evacuee 42 Evenson, Brian and Joanna Howard, ‘Ann Quin’ (2003) 217 existentialism/existential/existentialist 16, 19, 43, 63–64, 124, 144, 147, 150, 155, 165–190, 197, 211, 229, 230, 239, 241–242, 267, 310 experimental fiction 4, 62, 103, 153, 193–223, 227, 229, 234, 244, 257, 302 avant-garde qualities 201 multi-chronic structure 198, 203, 220 experimentalism 11, 16, 133, 194, 222, 263 Faas, Ekbert Robert Creeley: A Biography (2001) 217 Fabian, Jenny 272–273 A Chemical Romance (1971) 273–274 Groupie (1969), with Johnny Byrne 272–273, 288 facticity 13, 17, 87, 104, 172, 173–174, 184–186, 188, 189, 214 Faithfull, Marianne 27 Family Planning Act, 1967 82

Index Fanon, Frantz 157 fascists/fascisti 41, 202–203, 290, 309 Feldman, Gene editor, Protest (1962) 267, 286 Feldman, Michael 215–216 Fellini, Frederico 102 feminism 53, 62, 63, 77, 87, 92, 94, 174, 255, 273, 303, 305, 307, 309 feral child 29, 39, 54–55 Fifth Voyage of Sinbad, The 248 Figes, Eva 15, 59, 66, 77, 81, 223, 303, 305, 307 Berlin 305 Days (1974) 74 Equinox (1966) 15, 59, 62, 63–65, 66–67, 68, 287 Patriarchal Attitudes (1970) 63, 305 Winter Journey (1967) 305 Fielding, Henry 194, 221 Fisher, Mark 226, 280, 281 Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby (1925) 73 Fleming, Ian 6, 21 Ford, Julienne 54–55 Ford, Simon 281 Forbes, Bryan (dir.) The L-Shaped Room (1962), screen adaptation 85 See also Banks, Lynne Reid Forster, E.M. 83, 128, 129, 307 Howards End (1910) 221 Maurice (1971) 128 Forster, Margaret 15, 18, 305 Dames’ Delight (1964) 305 Georgy Girl (1965) 15, 72, 73, 106, 287, 305 Foucault, Michel 128–129, 130, 131 ‘Heterotopias’ (1966) 128–129, 130, 131 The Order of Things (1966) 128, 131 Fountain, Nigel 63 Fowles, John The Aristos (1964) 16, 165–6, 168 The Collector (1963) 16, 165, 171–6 The Ebony Tower (1974) 166 The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) 16, 165, 166, 170, 183–5, 189 The Magus (1965, rev. 1977) 16, 165, 167, 168, 176–83

Index Fraser, Robert, Gallery, Carnaby Street 14 freedom 14–15, 19, 33, 45, 51, 54, 60, 61–64, 77, 83, 88, 91, 94, 150, 155, 156, 165–166, 168–171, 174–176, 180–188, 190, 240, 244, 273 freedoms, new 14–15, 33, 54, 82, 83 candour 82 intellectual 91 sexual 111 Freeman, Gillian 16, 114, 133, 305 The Leather Boys (1961) 116–120, 121–123, 129, 285, 305. See also Eliot George The Liberty Man (1955) 305 The Undergrowth of Literature (1967) 305 Freud, Anna see Burlingham, Dorothy Freud, Sigmund 229, 231–232, 233, 236, 250, 251, 255, 279 ‘Family Romances’ (1909) 251, 252 The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) 279 ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) 236 Friedan, Betty 60, 63, 79, 83, 89, 90, 286 feminine mystique 83, 89 The Feminine Mystique (1963) 63, 78, 79, 90, 286 Fry, Roger 222 Fuest, Robert 261, 264 Fuller, Buckminster 10 Gaiman, Neil 248 Gamble, Sarah 107n8 gangs 138, 238, 244, 254 Gardiner, Gerald 88 Gardiner, Jill 131 Gardner, Helen 89 Gartenberg, Max editor, Protest (1962) 267, 286 Gasiorek, Andrzej 194 ‘Postmodernisms of English Fiction’ (2009) 221 Gavron, Hannah The Captive Wife (1966) 87, 287 Gay Liberation Front 113, 133, 134, 270 Gay News 114, 304 gay rights activism 113

319

gender 10, 14–15, 34, 53, 60, 69, 79, 85–86, 101, 112, 120, 121–122, 129, 132–133, 160, 172, 271, 273 gendered voice 15, 79 inequality 53 traditional roles 60, 112, 132, 160, 273 General Certificate of Education (GCE ) 42, General Election 1945 31 landslide Labour victory 98 Germany 6, 21, 146, 180, 203, 292, 295, 296, 305 Gernsback, Hugo 230, 235–236, 237 Gibson, William 243, 254 Neuromancer 244 Gimme Shelter (1970), Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin (dirs.) 264, 280 Ghali, Waguih 140–141, 146, 286, 306 Beer in the Snooker Club (1964) 146, 286 Ghose, Zulfikar 145–147, 306 Confessions of a Native-Alien (1965) 145, 287 The Contradictions (1966) 145, 287 Jets from Orange (1967) 146, 287 The Loss of India (1964) 145–146, 286 The Murder of Aziz Khan (1967) 145–146, 287 Pakistan 146, 306 Ghose, Zulfikar and B.S. Johnson, Statement Against Corpses (1964) 145, 286. See also B.S. Johnson Gill, Eric 306 Gilroy, Beryl 144, 160 Gindin, James intellectual aristocracy, vanishing 221 Postwar British Fiction: New Accents and Attitudes (1962) 193, 221 Giotto 196 Girard, René ‘sacrificial substitution’ 219 Violence and the Sacred (1972) 219, 220 Gladwell, Joyce 144, 160 Godard, Jean-Luc 84, 102 ‘Marx and Coca-Cola’ 84

320 Goff, Martyn 114, 118, 123–127, 128, 129, 132, 133, 306 Booker Prize 306 The Plaster Fabric (1957) 126, 128, 132, 306 The Youngest Director (1961) 118, 123–127, 285, 306 Golden Age of Science Fiction 235 Goodall, Larry 223 Gooden, Robert 9 Goodman, Jonathan editor, The Master Eccentric (1986) Gorak, Jan ‘Angels, Dancers, Mermaids: The Hidden History of Peckham in Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye’ (2014) 201–202 Gothic 45, 195, 201, 229, 245, 281 Realism 201 grammar schools 3, 34, 36, 39, 42–47, 48, 55, 301, 305, 310 Grant, Linda Sexing the Millenium (1998) 60, 78 Granta 166 Great Depression, the 230 Green, Jonathan 113–114, 258–259, 264, 265, 281 Greene, Gayle Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition (1991) 94 Greene, Graham Brighton Rock (1938) 240 Greenland, Colin 263, 265, 275 Greer, Germaine 60, 63, 78, 273 The Female Eunuch (1970) 63, 273 Groes, Sebastian 33, 53, 127, 132, 257–258 Gunn, Drewey Wayne 116 Guyana 145, 148, 206, 298, 302, 306, 310. See also Harris, Wilson Denis Williams 310 H-bomb 104 Hamlet 216 Harding, John 281 Sweetly Sings Delaney (2014) 70 Hardy, Thomas 221 Harris, Tom 223

Index Harris, Wilson The Eye of the Scarecrow (1963) 205–208, 287 Edinburgh 206 Guiana (Guyana) strike 207 political independence, Guyana 1964 206, 298 The Far Journey of Oudin (1961) 145, 285, 306 ‘The Music of Living Landscapes’ (1998) 205–206, 209 Palace of the Peacock (1960) 145, 150, 285, 306 The Secret Ladder (1963) 145, 286, 306 The Waiting Room (1967) 205, 208–209, 288 ‘Postscript’ 208 The Whole Armour (1962) 145, 286, 306 Harrison, Harry 301 Make Room! Make Room! (1966) 244 Hawkey, Raymond 6 Hawthorne, Nathaniel ‘The Custom-House Introductory to “The Scarlet Letter” ’ 208, 223 The Scarlet Letter (1850) 208 Haynes, Jim 258 Head, Dominic 28, 33–34. 45 Hebdige, Dick Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) 240 Heinlein, Robert 236 Helena Club, London 223, 309 Hendrix, Jimi 27 Hensher, Philip 84 Heppenstall, Rayner 1, 16–17, 193, 196–201, 215, 221, 222, 286, 306–307. See also stream of consciousness Adelphi (periodical) 306 The Blaze of Noon (1939) 306 Butor, Michel, dines with 221 The Connecting Door (1962) 196–198, 286, 306 Strasbourg 196 founding-father, French nouveau roman 221 The Fourfold Tradition (1961) 193 The Greater Infortune (1960) 221

Index The Master Eccentric, The Journals of Rayner Heppenstall, 1969–1981 (1986) 215, 221 The Shearers (1969) 306 Two Moons (1977) 306 The Woodshed (1962) 196, 198–201, 286, 306 Hewison, Robert 259 Higgins, Aidan 5 Higgins, Patrick 112 Highmore, Ben 29–30, 54 hippies 7–8, 19–20, 121, 258, 263 hipster 238, 242 Hiroshima 99, 261, 278 Hitler, Adolf 176, 203 Hobsbawm, Eric 61 Hockney, David 10 Hogarth, William Industry and Idleness (1747) 75 Holbrook, David 61, 78 Homer 231, 247, 248 The Odyssey 248 Holmes, John Clellon 267 homosexuality 15–16, 96, 111–134, 273, 293, 304 homosexual law reform 15–16, 112, 113, 114, 122, 125, 126, 133, 134, 293, 304 Hopkins, Bill 303 Hopkins, John ‘Hoppy’ 258, 259 Horovitz, Michael 10 Children of Albion (1969) 11 Houlbrook, Matt 126 House of the Future, exhibit 11 Howard, Elizabeth Jane 15, 81 Howard, Joanna see Evenson, Brian Hughes, Ted 10 Humanism 179 Huntley, Jessica and Eric 158 Husserl, Edmund. Huxley, Aldous 227, 229, 241, 307 The Doors of Perception (1954) 227, 229, 241 Huyssen, Andreas 195, 222 ‘anti-tradition’ 222 Ideal Home exhibition 11 Ilfracombe 214 Image-repertoire 29–30

321

immigration 16, 86, 107, 137–138, 144, 156, 158, 159, 160–161, 290 Independent Group 10, 22 India 145–146, 148–149, 246–247, 286, 298 Indica Bookshop and Gallery 258–259 inner space 227, 229, 234, 249–250, 251, 255, 301, 307. See also Ballard, J.G. Innes, Harold 242 Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA ) 9–10, 11, 22 Institute for Research in Art and Technology 258 International Poetry Incarnation see Peter Whitehead International Situationism 10 International Times (IT) 78, 121, 122, 258–259, 263 intertextuality 94, 151, 166, 176, 189, 229, 231, 250, 277 Iremonger, Lucille 144 irony ix, 3, 19, 20, 89, 148, 155, 174, 178, 179, 195, 198, 199, 202, 205, 210, 211, 216, 217, 220, 222, 223, 229, 232, 233, 244, 253 Isherwood, Christopher 114, 117–118, 119, 122–123, 127–128, 129, 133, 307 Down There on a Visit (1962) 307 Goodbye to Berlin (1939) 307 Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) 307 A Single Man (1964) 117–118, 119, 122–123, 127–128, 286 Jagger, Mick 27, 266, 293 Jamaica 144–145, 148, 149, 150, 151–152, 157–158, 290, 309 James, C.L.R. 158 James, P.D. 81 Jameson, Fredric 5 Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 195, 222 Jefferies, Richard After London: or, Wild England (1885) 245 Jenkins, Roy 273 Jennings, Elizabeth 221 Jesus 231–232, 236, 292

322

Index

Johns, Jasper 10 Johnson, B.S. 11, 12, 14, 17, 33, 40, 41–43, 146, 166, 194, 196, 201, 209–211, 303, 304, 306, 307, 309 Albert Angelo (1964) 40, 41–43, 195, 307 aposiopesis 211 Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs (1973) ‘Introduction’ 195 House Mother Normal (1971) 307 London Consequences (1972) 304 See the Old Lady Decently (1975) 222, 307 Statement Against Corpses (1964) 146, 286. See also Ghose, Zulfikar Travelling People (1963) 307 Trawl (1966) 201, 211–213, 287, 307 sexual explicitness 212 solipsism 211 Johnson, Marigold 132 Jones, Angela 129 Jones, Brian 27 Jones, David 151 Jones, Robert 268 Jordan, Colin 138 Jordan, Julia ‘Introduction: Avant-Garde Possibilities – B.S. Johnson and the Sixties Generation’ (2014) 222 ‘ “For Recuperation”: Elegy, form, and the aleatory in B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates’ (2014) 213 Josipovici, Gabriel 223 Joyce, James 132, 194, 234, 243 Judaism 233 Jung, Carl 206, 232, 233, 256 Flying Saucers (1959) 233 Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) 232 Kavan, Anna 194 Kay, Christine, Muriel Spark’s teacher 196, 222 Keats, John 208 Kenedy, R.C. 5

Kennedy, John F. 18, 258, 265, 266, 280, 295, 296, 297 assassination of 18, 280, 297 Kennedy, Robert 265, 299, 301 assassination of 299, 301 Kensington Olympia Hall 11 Kenyon, Olga 83 Kermode, Frank The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967) 9 Kierkegaard, Søren 171 Kimball, Roger 201, 223 Gothic realism 201 King Mob 259 Kirkpatrick, Rob 263 Kitchen, Paddy 214 Kitchener, Herbert, Lord ‘If You’re Not White, You’re Black’ (1958) 142 Klein, Yves 9 Kristeva, Julia 69, 71, 79, 253, 233 New Maladies of the Soul (1998) 74, 79 Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982) 69, 233, 237 Kubrick, Stanley 233, 243, 252–253, 301, 302 Clockwork Orange (1971) 302 Kynaston, David 44 Labour Party 2, 3, 7, 8, 31, 98, 156, 239, 273, 290, 292 Lacan, Jacques 251 Lady Chatterley Trial (‘Regina v. Penguin Books Limited’) October 1960, 21, 82, 84, 88, 89, 90, 105, 289 acquittal by jury 88 Byrne, Mr Justice, presiding judge 88, 107 Devlin, Mr Justice, quoted by Byrne 107n7 Gardiner, Gerald, barrister for defense 88 Robertson, Geoffrey, QC Foreword, published transcript 88 Laing, R.D. 14, 22, 84, 307 The Divided Self (1960) 14, 22, 84 Lamming, George 142, 144, 150, 308

Index The Pleasures of Exile (1960) 144, 285 Season of Adventure (1960) 144, 285 La Rose, John 156, 157, Foundations (1966) 157, 287 Larkin, Philip 221 ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (1967) 114 Laski, Harold 239 Laski, Marghanita 239 Tory Heaven, or Thunder on the Right (1948) 239 Lawrence, D.H. 5, 89, 114, 234 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) 5, 89, 114 vocabulary of sex, clichéd 89 Lawrences Auctioneers 214–215 Law Society 127, 134, Lazar, Zachery 263, le Carré, John The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) 120, 286 Leary, Timothy 241 Leavis, F.R. 83–84, 88–89, 221 ‘Great Tradition’, the 83–84, 88–89, 221 Leavisite 89, 193 Lennon, John 27, 292, 294 Lessing, Doris 15, 61, 81, 82, 84–87, 92–93, 94–97, 104, 106, 107, 285, 286, 307 Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) 307 ‘Children of Violence’ sequence 85, 86 The Golden Notebook (1962) 85, 86, 92–3, 94–97, 102, 286, 307 The Grass is Singing (1950) 85, 86, 307 In Pursuit of the English (1960) 84, 85–87, 104, 106, 107, 285 Iran, born in 307 Lessing, Gottfried, second husband 307 Martha Quest (1952) 86 Nobel Prize for Literature, 2007 307 Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), grew up 307 Veld, the 86 ‘The Small Personal Voice’ (1957) 97 Lichtenstein, Roy 10 Lindner, Richard Rebel Without a Cause (1944) 238

323

literary prizes James Tait Black Memorial Prize 302, 308 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 303, 309 Macmillan Fiction Award 309 Man Booker 301, 306, 307, 308, 309 Nobel Prize for Literature 166, 190, 298, 305, 307, 308 Somerset Maugham Prize 303, 309, Whitbread Award 301, 308 Littlewood, Joan 67, 69, 303 Living City, exhibition 11 Loach, Ken (dir.) Poor Cow, screen adaptation of 304. See also Dunn, Nell Lodge, David 14, 33, 36–37, 46–47, 175, 194, 287, 307 The British Museum is Falling Down (1965) 46–47, 287 Changing Places (1975) 47, 307 Ginger You’re Barmy (1962) 36–37, 47, 286 The Picturegoers (1960) 47 London 8, 19, 27, 45, 150–151, 204, 245, 308 1960s London 28, 29, 39, 209 Carnaby Street 14, 70, 100 Chelsea 27, 35, 123, 199 China Town 9 Earl’s Court 48 East End 13, 39, 41, 290, 302 ‘London: The Swinging City’, Time 14, 18, 60, 292. See also Carnaby Street; Swinging Sixties jazz clubs 18, 212 King’s Road 35, 100 Notting Hill 85, 138 Peckham 98, 201–202 Poplar 10 Portobello Road 303 Regent’s Canal 41, 211 Slade School of Fine Art 303, 309 Soho 6, 27, 48, 49, 150, 267–268, 270–271, 272, 274, 285, 308, 310. See also Wilson, Colin Tottenham Court Road 27, 64 Wellington barracks 35 Wigmore Street 199 London Film-makers’ Co-Operative 281

324 London Free City Committee 270 London Street Commune 259 Lucian of Samosata True History (140–180 CE ) 228, 245, 246 Lukács, Georg (György) 222 Lumsden, Andrew 113–114 Lykiard, Alexis The Summer Ghosts (1964) 5, 21 M1 (motorway) 81 MacDiarmid, Hugh 1–2 MacDonald, Ian 7, 20 MacGregor, Susanne The Politics of Poverty (1981) 70 Mackay, Shena 14, 33, 48–50, 56, 286, 307–308 An Advent Calendar (1971) 308 Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumburger (1964) 48–49, 286, 307–308 Music Upstairs (1965) 49–50, 287 Toddler on the Run (1964) 48, 49, 286, 308 MacKay, Marina see Stonebridge, Lyndsey MacKey, Nathaniel 206 Macmillan, Harold 3, 27, 54, 289, 290, 291 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 246 Mailer, Norman 238, 241 ‘The White Negro’ (1957) 238 Mais, Roger 151 Malaya 66, 229, 238, 302 Man Booker Prize 301, 306, 307, 308, 309 Manson, Charles 264, 265–266 marginalized writers 194, 221 marriage 35, 46, 48, 52, 59, 60–69, 78, 82–83, 87, 89–92, 98, 103, 112, 118, 125, 185, 217, 304, 307–308 Martin, George 27 Marwick, Arthur British Society Since 1945 (1982) 111 The Sixties (1999) 8, 18, 28–29, 37, 50, 60, 61, 67, 78, 264–265 Marx, Karl 233 Marxism 84, 229, 231–232, 233, 269–270, 310

Index Maschler, Tom Declaration (1957) 97 mass culture 6, 115, 195 materialist meta-modernism 16–17, 193–221 McCartney, Paul 7, 21, 27, 294 McHale, Brian Postmodernist Fiction (2003) 166 McHale, John 9 McLeod, John ‘Black British Culture and Fiction in the 1970s’ (2014) 141, 159, 160 Postcolonial London (2004) 86, 106, 107, 153 McLuhan, Marshall 10, 242, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) 240–241, 242–243 The Summer Way (television appearance) 241 Understanding Media (1964) 240 Méliès, Georges Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) 228 Melville, Robert 10 Mengham, Rod 89, 105, 106 Mercer, Ben 5 Mercer, David 5 meritocratic values 33 meta-modernist fiction 16–17, 193–221 Metzger, Gustav 260 middle-class see class migration see immigration Miller, Henry 234–235 Mills, C. Wright The White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951) 269–270 miners’ strike, 1984–85 9 Mini, car 100, 257, 259, 281 mini-skirt 27, 39, 111 mise en abyme 220 Mitford, Nancy 81 Mitras, Luis R. 47, Mittelholzer, Edgar 47 modernism x, xi, 1, 10, 16, 17, 47, 49, 82, 83–84, 151, 193–195, 221, 222, 227, 229, 232, 234, 236, 237 English 84 high modernism 193

Index late modernism 193–194 modernist techniques, extended and radicalized 194 See also meta-modernism modernity 1, 2, 4, 70–71, 258, 276 Mods 238, 240, 259, 291 Monroe, Marilyn 23, 280 Moorcock, Michael 17, 228, 230, 231–237, 255, 261–266, 281, 288, 308 Behold the Man (1970) 231–233, 236–237, 255 ‘Behold, the Man’ (novella) (1966) 231, 233–234, 237 The Black Corridor (1969) 262 ‘The Dreaming City’ (1961) 275–276 The Final Programme (1969) 17, 261–263, 264, 266, 275–277, 280, 288 London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction (2012) 232 ‘New Wave’ 230 New Worlds (periodical) 228, 234, 275 ‘New Worlds: Jerry Cornelius’ (1977) 275 ‘The Secret Life of Elric of Melniboné’ (1964) 277 The Stealer of Souls (1963) 308 ‘When the Gods Laugh’ (1962) 275 ‘Why So Conservative?’ (1966) 234–235 Morris, Desmond 10, 22 Morrison, Jim 241 Mortimer, Penelope 15, 81, 104, 106, 286 The Pumpkin Eater (1962) 104, 106, 286 motherhood, single 14–15, 51, 67–72, 76–77, 82, 304 Mount, Ferdinand ‘The Doctrine of Unripe Time’ (2006) ix Murdoch, Iris 15, 78–79, 81, 83, 106 ‘Against Dryness’ (1961) 83, 107 The Italian Girl (1964) 106 A Severed Head (1961) 106 Movement, the 193, 221 Mussolini, Benito 202

325

Naipaul, V.S. 142, 146–149, 150, 285, 286, 288, 308 An Area of Darkness (1964) 148–149, 286 Caribbean Voices (BBC Radio) see Caribbean Voices (BBC Radio) A Flag on the Island (1967) 147, 288 A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) 147, 148, 285, 308 In a Free State (1971) 308 The Loss of El Dorado (1969) 149 The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French, and Dutch – in the West Indies and South America (1962) 148, 286 Miguel Street (1959) 308 The Mimic Men (1967) 146–147, 288 Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion (1963) 147–148, 286 The Mystic Masseur (1957) 146, 308 narcissism 176, 177, 259 narrative intensity 201 national identity 4, 87, 100 cultural values 4, 87 National Service 14, 30, 33, 34–39, 47, 176, 289, 305, 309 Nebula Award 231 Neuromancer (1984) see Gibson, William New Arts Laboratory 257 New Brutalism/Brutalists 10–11 New English Library 120 New Left 20, 259, 268, 269, 310 Newsom Report, the 30, 37 New Statesman 239 New Testament 231 new towns 4, 12, 291 New Towns Act, 1946 12 New wave (science fiction) 17, 227–254, 308. See also Aldiss, Brian; Ballard, J.G.; Moorcock, Michael; Priest, Christopher New Worlds (periodical) 17, 228, 230, 231, 233–235, 236, 243–244, 248, 254, 255, 263, 271–272, 275, 301, 308 Nicholson, Viv 8, 22 Nielsen, Aldon Lynn 208

326 Nietzsche, Friedrich 232–233, 236 Ecce homo 232 The Gay Science 233 ‘The Madman’ 233, 236 Nitsch, Hermann 13, 260 North West Homosexual Law Reform Committee 112 nouveau roman 4, 154–155, 221, 306 Nowlan, Philip Francis ‘Armageddon 2419 A.D.’ (1928) 235, 2r41 Nuttall, Jeff 223 Bomb Culture (1968) 13–14, 260–261, 288 O’Brien, Edna 15, 81, 82, 85, 90, 285 The Country Girls (1960) 85, 285 Girl with Green Eyes (1962) 90 Oakley, Ann Housewife (1976) 61, 71, 79 objet trouvé 33 Oedipus complex 215–216, 236–237, 265, 309 Old Testament 252 Oldenburg, Claes 10 Olivier, Sir Lawrence 305 Olympic Sound Studio 27 Oritz, Ralph 260 Orwell, George 230, 234–235, 306 ‘Inside the Whale’ (1940) 234 Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) 234 Osborne, Deidre 138, 140, 160 Osborne, John Look Back in Anger (1956) 79, 97, 238, 240 overspill estates 12 Oxford English Dictionary 239 Oxford University 52, 84, 91, 93, 176, 178, 179, 302, 305, 308, 309 Oz 78, 259 Panama 149, 309 Paneth, Marie 30 Paolozzi, Eduardo 10, 22, 281 paperback books 5, 7, 21, 62, 206 Parallel of Art and Life, exhibition 10 Parker Morris Committee 11–12 Parker Morris standards 12

Index Passos, John Dos 1919 (1932) 243 The Big Money (1936) 243 The 42nd Parallel (1930) 243 pastoral 245 Paterson, Orlando 144, 286, 288 The Children of Sisyphus (1964) 144, 286 An Absence of Ruins (1967) 144, 288 Penguin Books 5, 7, 21, 88, 111, 289 Performance (1970), Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg (dirs.) 266 permissive society 79, 112 Phillips, Mike 159 Phillips, Tom 223 Phillips, Trevor 159 Plath, Sylvia 10, 286 Poe, Edgar Allan ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (1845) 235 Pollock, Jackson 9 Pop Art 8–10, 229, 249 post-apocalyptic 245, 255, 274 postcolonial x, 137–161 postmodernism/postmodern x, 3, 17, 98, 166, 194, 195, 220, 222, 229, 234, 237, 243, 244, 249, 280 post-war, new era 86 Powell, Enoch ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, 1968 156, 160–161, 293 Power, Tyrone 100 pre-fabs 12, 31 pregnancy 22, 47, 68, 73, 82, 92, 103, 105, 106, 154, 209, 264 Unplanned 82 Pym, Barbara 15, 81 Priest, Christopher 271–272, 274, 308 A Dream of Wessex (1977) 308 Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972) 308 Indoctrinaire (1970) 271–272 ‘The Interrogator’ (1969) 271–272 The Inverted World (1974) 308 The Space Machine (1976) 308 Priestly, J.B. 239 Prisoner, The, television series 272, 293

Index private life 87 abortion 82, 86, 87, 92, 103–104, 106, 111, 217, 273, 293 illegal 82, 86, 87, 92 legal 82 marriage 35, 46, 48, 52, 59, 60–69, 78, 82–83, 87, 89–92, 98, 103, 112, 118, 125, 185, 217, 304, 307–308 prostitution 15, 51, 86–87, 112, 144, 185, 186, 212 sexual consent 87 Profumo Affair 2–3, 290–291 property boom 4 proto-postmodernists 194 Pryce-Jones, Alan, and Wyndham, Francis 138–139 psychedelia/psychedelic 8, 229, 234, 241, 243, 251, 252, 253, 259, 273 psychoanalysis 234, 249, 251 psychopathology 229, 248, 251 psychosis 102, 112, 301 public schools 6, 30, 34, 35, 36, 45, 173, 176, 309 publishing 4, 7, 62, 116, 131, 140, 142, 143, 150, 152, 156, 157–158, 159, 213, 214, 304, 308 pulp magazines 235 pulpy 228, 250 Pykett, Lyn 115–116, 120 Quant, Mary 27, 32, 33, 60, 292 Quin, Ann 5, 15, 17, 81, 82, 102–104, 106, 154, 194–195, 196, 214–220, 223, 287, 288, 307, 308–309 American tour 215, 217 Berg (1964) 154, 214, 215–216, 287 Oedipal revenge 215–216, 309 pathological preoccupations, Greb/ Berg 216 Creeley, Robert, lover of 217, 223 Dunn, Nell, interview with 82 mental health problems 309 New Mexico 217 Passages: A Novel (1969) 218–220, 288 Antigone 218

327 Greece, right-wing military junta 218, 219 sacrifice 218–219, 220 scapegoat figure 219 Three (1966) 102–104, 106, 216–218, 287 dedication to Bob and Bobbie 217 Tripticks (1972) 309

racism 97, 105, 138, 156, 159, 302 Raj, the 230, 247 rationing, wartime 3, 230, 247 Rauschenberg, Robert 10 Ray, Nicholas (dir.) Rebel Without a Cause, film (1955) 238 realism 4–5, 6, 17, 20, 47, 50, 92, 107, 133, 166, 171, 175–176, 184, 189, 190, 193–194, 202, 207, 209, 221, 234, 274, ascendance in 1950s 193–194, 221 comic realism, 1950s 195 gothic realism 201 hyper-realism 16, 194 magical 166 neo-realist novel 195 realist fiction, exhausted 166, 229 social 47, 50 Rebel Without a Cause, film (1955) see Ray, Nicholas Red Power 270 Rees, Sir Richard 306 reflexivity 53, 76, 181, 194, 198, 205, 206, 220, 222 ‘Regina v. Penguin Books Limited’ see Lady Chatterley Trial Reid Banks, Lynne The L-Shaped Room (1960) 82, 85, 106, 285 screen adaptation, Bryan Forbes, 1962 85 Resnais, Alain 102 Rhys, Jean 81 Richardson, Dorothy 221 Richardson, Samuel 194, 221 Richardson, Tony (dir.) A Taste of Honey (1958), screen adaptation of 97, 303. See also Shelagh Delany

328

Index

Rigaut, Jacques ‘A Brilliant Individual’ (1925) 231 Riley, Bridget 9 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 4, 154, 221, 306 The Voyeur (1955) 221 Robin Hood Gardens, estate 10, 12 Rockers 238, 240, 291 Rodney, Walter 158 Rolph, C.H. The Trial of Lady Chatterley (1961) 5, 88 Romanticism 94, 229, 245 Room at the Top (1959), film, Jack Clayton (dir.) 97 Rosenquist, James 249 ROSLA see school leaving age Roszak, Theodore 264, 268–269, 270 The Making of a Counterculture (1969) 264, 268–269 ‘Youth and the Great Refusal’ (1968) 268 Rothko, Mark 9 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 239–240, 241 Confessions (1782) 239 Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique (1762) 239–240 Émile (1762) 240 Royal Albert Hall, the 8, 259 Royal College of Art and Painting (RCA 8, 9, 214, 308 Royale, Trevor 34 Rubens, Bernice 81 Russell, Ken 238, 240 Said, Edward 308 Sage, Lorna Women in the House of Fiction (1992) 81 Salih, Tayeb 140–141 Salisbury (Harare) 86, 307 Salkey, Andrew 142, 146, 147, 149–152, 153, 156, 285, 288, 309 The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969) 152 Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960) 150–151, 285, 309 The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968) 151–152, 288

West Indian Stories (1960) 150, 285, 309 Sampson, Anthony 31, 37–38, 39, 43 Sandbrook, Dominic 3 Sarraute, Nathalie 4, 199, 221, 306 ‘The Age of Suspicion’ (1963) 199 Sartre, Jean-Paul 165, 166, 168–170, 172, 174, 178, 179, 181–183, 187 authenticity/authentic 16, 165–166, 167, 168, 169–170, 171, 174, 176–177, 179, 182, 183, 195 bad faith (mauvaise foi) 168, 169–170, 172, 174, 190 Being and Nothingness (1943) 168, 172, 178, 181–182 Existentialism is a Humanism (1946) 179–180 The Flies (1943) 170 inauthenticity 16, 165–166, 177, 179, 181, 187, 188, 190 Nausea (1938) 170, 187 No Exit (1944) 170, 174, 178 Sartrean 155, 165, 168, 186, 187, 188, 190 Sassoon, Vidal 60 scholarship, educational grant or fee waiver 32, 46, 91, 221, 305, 308, 309 school leaving age, raising of (ROSLA 30, 31, 39, 40 science fiction (SF ) 17, 227–255 Science Wonder Stories 236 Scott, Ridley (dir.), Prometheus, film 252 Scrutiny 193 Second World War 18, 82, 85, 86, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100–101, 159, 165, 176, 180, 193, 197, 229, 230, 231, 302, 310 Blitz, aftermath of 13, 97, 230, 238, 247 secondary modern schools 10, 31, 39, 41, 52, 55, 301 Seekers, The 305 Sexual Offences Act, 1967 112, 113, 126, 133, 293 Sexual Offences Bill, 1967 15 Sexual Revolution 5, 59, 60, 61, 71, 78, 84, 130 self-parody 199

Index Selvon, Samuel 141, 142, 150, 160, 286, 287 I Hear Thunder (1963) 286 The Housing Lark (1965) 287 The Lonely Londoners (1956) 143–144 Sewell, Fr. Brocard 214 Shaffer, Brian W. 201, 203 ‘dramatic juxtaposition’ 203 ‘fantasy-digressions’ 203 Shakespeare, William 65, 250 Shakespearean 65 The Tempest (1610–11) 250 Shanghai 227, 229, 298 Shepperton 227, 248, 255, 301 Sickert, Walter 222 Sillitoe, Alan 34, 79, 221, Key to the Door (1961) 34 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) 267 Simon, Claude 154 Sinclair, Andrew 14, 33, 34–35, 36, 285, 309 The Better Half: The Emancipation of the American Woman (1965) 309 The Breaking of Bumbo (1959) 34–35, 36, 285, 309 Sinclair, Iain 260, 263, 265, 280 Sinfield, Alan 193, 195, 221 Sloane, Thomas O’Conor 235–236 slum clearance 13, 29, 106 Smith, Edward Elmer ‘The Skylark of Space’ (1928) 235 Smith, Richard 9 Smithson, Alison 10–13, 22 Smithson, Peter 10–13, 22 Hunstanton Secondary Modern School 10 social change 29, 32, 36, 264–265, 275 social imaginary 29 social season 35 Soixante-huitards 230 solipsism, in narrative 211, 213–214, 269 Sontag, Susan ‘Notes on “Camp” ’ (1964) 121 Soviet Union/Soviet 138, 227, 289, 295, 296, 297, 298, 300, 302 space, categories of 195

329

space opera 235, 241, 245 Space Race 23, 229, 275 Spark, Muriel 2, 15, 17, 72, 75–76, 77, 81, 82, 98–99, 104, 106, 194, 195–196, 201–205, 222, 223, 258, 309 The Bachelors (1960) 106 The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) 98, 201–202, 285 The Girls of Slender Means (1963) 98–99, 201–202, 204–205, 286, 309 The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) 98 Martin McQuillan, interview with 98 National Library of Scotland 309 parodying Bloomsbury 196, 222 Poetry Society 309 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) 98, 195–196, 201, 202, 203–205, 286, 309. See also Kay, Christine The Public Image (1968) 75–76, Spender, Stephen 1,2, 307 Spielberg, Steven 301 Spode House, Hawkesyard Priory, Staffordshire 214 Stalin, Joseph 95, 269 denunciation of crimes, Twentieth Congress 1956 95 Stannard, Martin 98 Steedman, Carolyn 87 Sterling, Bruce 243, 244 Stevens, Hugh 133 Still, Clyfford 9 Stephen, Vanessa (later Bell) 222 Stephens, Julie 264 Sterne, Laurence 194 Stonebridge, Lyndsey and Marina MacKay ‘Introduction: British Fiction After Modernism’ (2007) 193–194 Storey, David 14, 33, 44–45, 285, 287, 309 Flight into Camden (1961) 33, 44–45, 285, 309 Radcliffe (1963) 45, 287 stream of consciousness 193, 198–199, 201, 210–211 parodied, by Heppenstall 199

330

Index

student movements, global 229 Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee 270 Students for a Democratic Society 270 subculture 15, 18, 28, 112, 115, 116, 120, 121, 229, 237, 238, 240, 265, 267, 268, 305 Sugnet, Charles 63 Suh, Judy 203 Sumatra 246 Summer of Love, 1967 7–8, 22, 258, 263 Summer Way, The, television show 241 Swedenborg, Emanuel 252, 253 Life on Other Planets (1758) 252 Swift, Graham Waterland (1983) 166 Swift, Jonathan 246 Swinging London see London Swinging Sixties, the 33, 39, 54, 77, 82, 84, 99, 100, 281. See also Sexual Revolution counterculture 14, 17, 19–20, 84, 99, 101, 128, 229, 263–275, 281 zeitgeist of 9, 5, 82, 84, 233, 238, 249, 254 Swanzy, Henry 149, 160 Taylor, D.J. 21 Taylor, Elizabeth, actress 249, 260, 279–280, 309 Taylor, Elizabeth, writer 81 Team 10 10 technical schools 31 Teddy Boys 18, 129, 138, 232, 238 Teddy Girls 238 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 95 Tew, Philip 175 Thames 53–54, 245 theatre censorship, abolition of see censorship Themerson, Stefan 194 ‘Theo Crosby, Sculpture. Peter Blake, Objects. John Latham, Libraries’ (exhibition) 9 Thomas, Dylan 153, 306 A Childs Christmas in Wales (1952), recording of 153 Thomas, Leslie The Virgin Soldiers (1966) 34 Time (periodical) 14, 18, 60, 268, 292

Time Out of Mind, BBC 241, 243 Time travel 231–232, 233, 237 Times Literary Supplement (TLS) 2, 4–5, 132, 234 Tingueley, Jean 10 Tonkin, Maggie 107 Toynbee, Philip 194 Trinidad/Trindadian 147, 148–149, 208 tripartite system, education 31, 39 Trollope, Anthony 221 Trocchi, Alexander 1–2, 4–5, 21, 223 Cain’s Book (1960) 1 Young Adam (1954) 1 Turnbull, William 9, 22 Twiggy 27 UFO s 233 UFO, night club 258 ‘Ugh’ correspondence 234 unconscious, the 4, 45, 64, 96, 177, 204–205, 227, 231, 234, 237, 249–250, 253, 272 United States 18, 22, 55, 61, 221, 230, 242, 266, 308. See also America university, English departments 193 urban planning 4 utopia 128, 151, 239, 272 utopian 4, 11, 13, 20, 33, 127, 128, 129, 204, 239 Vanishing Point (1971), film, Richard C. Safafian (dir.) 260 van O’Connor, William 193 Verne, Jules 227, 235 ‘Off on a Comet – or Hector Servadac’ (1911) 235 Vesuvio Club 27 VE Day 99, 204 Vietnam War 22, 84, 99, 230, 265, 266, 269, 279, 292, 293, 296, 297, 298, 299 activism/protests 269, 292, 293, 298, 299 Vinen, Richard 30 VJ Day 99 Vogue 28, 89 Von Däniken, Erich 233, 252 Chariots of the Gods? (1968) 233, 252 Vreeland, Diana

Index Wain, John 79, 83, 221 Walcott, Derek 151 Wallace, Diana 86 War Game, The (1965), film see Watkins, Peter Warhol, Andy 10, Death and Disaster (1962–64), paintings 249 Green Car Crash (1963) 249 waste-ground 29–30 Waterhouse, Keith Billy Liar (1959) 97 Watkins, Peter (dir.) The War Game (1965) 14 Watz, Anna 107 Waugh, Patricia Harvest of the Sixties (1995) 82, 88 Weather Underground 270 Weeks, Jeffrey 115, Weight, Professor Carel 214 Weldon, Fay 15, 81 Welfare State 42, 60–61, 70, 84, 98, 99, 267 post-Welfare State 98, 99 Wells, H.G. 230–235, 242, 245, 250 ‘The Country of the Blind’ (1904) 242 The Invisible Man (1897) 230 The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) 230–231 The Mind at the End of its Tether (1945) 242 ‘The New Accelerator’ (1901) 235 The Time Machine (1895) 230 –232, 233, 250 The War of the Worlds (1897) 230, 245 white-collar economy 6 White, Edmund The Farewell Symphony (1997) 133–134 White, Sarah 157 Whitehead, Peter 259 Whitehead, Stephen M. 115, 124, Who, The Quadrophenia (1973) 240 Wilde, Oscar 115, 113, 116, 240, 262 The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) 113, 262 Willat, Hugh The Arts Council of Great Britain (1971) 62, 79

331

Williams, Denis 146, 153–155, 288, 310 Guyana 310 The Third Temptation (1968) 153–155, 288, 310 Williams, Raymond 14, 45–46, 194, 195, 196, 202, 220, 268–269, 285, 310 ‘The Bloomsbury Faction’ (1980) 196 Border Country (1960) 45–46, 285 The Country and the City (1971) 310 Culture and Society (1958) 310 Keywords (1976) 268–269 The Long Revolution (1961) 310 May Day Manifesto (1968) 310 ‘ “personal” novel’, concept of 220 ‘Realism and the Contemporary Novel’ (1959) 194, 195, 202, 220 Second Generation (1964) 45–46, 287 ‘ “social” novel’, concept of 220 Williamson, Henry 214–215, 215 Willmott, Peter and Michael Young Family and Kinship in East London (1957) 87 Wilson, Angus 125 Late Call (1964) 4 Wilson, Colin 111–117, 132, 238–239, 242, 272, 274, 303, 310 Adrift in Soho (1961) 267–268, 285 The Occult: A History (1971) 310 The Outsider (1956) 238–239, 242, 310 Religion and the Rebel (1957) 310 Ritual in the Dark (1960) 111–117, 310 The Strength to Dream (1962) 310 Wilson, Harold 2, 156, 238, 239 Whitehead, Peter 259 Whitehead, Stephen M. 115, 124 White Panther Party 270 Wolfe, Jesse 196 Wolfe, Tom 20 Wolfenden, Sir John The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (1957) (Wolfenden Report) 16, 112, 113, 114, 122, 125, 126, 133, 134 post-Wolfenden 116, 118

332 Women’s Liberation Movement 270 Woodhouse, Richard 208 Woolf, Virginia 83, 194, 222 To the Lighthouse (1927) 222 Wordsworth, William 94 World Cup Final, 1966 21 World War Two see Second World War Worsley, T.C. 67, 68 Wyndham, Francis see Pryce-Jones, Alan Wyndham, John Chocky (1963/1968) 255 The Day of the Triffids (1951) 245 Wynter, Sylvia 144

Index Yelin, Louise 107 Yorkshire 198, 303, 306, 307 ‘Young Contemporaries’, exhibition 9 Young Earners 37, 50 Young, Michael see Willmott, Peter youth culture 8, 28, 98, 230, 247 youthquake/r 28, 48, 54, 268 Zimbabwe 307, 309 Žižek, Slavoj 62, 77

333

334

335

336