The Experimentalists: The Life and Times of the British Experimental Writers of the 1960s 9781350244399, 9781350244382, 9781350244429, 9781350244405

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The Experimentalists

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The Experimentalists The Life and Times of the British Experimental Writers of the 1960s

Joseph Darlington

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Joseph Darlington, 2022 Joseph Darlington has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. viii–ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Tjaša Krivec 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: 978-1-3502-4439-9 PB: 978-1-3502-4438-2 ePDF: 978-1-3502-4440-5 eBook: 978-1-3502-4441-2 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Glyn White, who got me into this mess in the first place.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements  viii

Introduction  1 1  Before 1960  5 2  1960 to 1963  31 3  1964 to 1965  75 4  1966 to 1967  105 5  1968 to 1969  131 6  1970 to 1973  167 7  1973 and after  207 Bibliography 237 Index 256

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research behind this book would not have been possible without the support of many people and institutions. My first thanks go to the University of Salford for supporting my studies. Glyn White was a tremendously supportive supervisor who always asked the right questions. Thanks are also due to Peter Buse, Kristin Ewins, Carson Bergstrom, Mark Yates, Stephen Dipnall and Jen Morgan for help along the way. Thank you to Futureworks Media School for employing me. Ken Lau and Mark Penman kept me sane, as did my students. The University of Texas at Austin awarded me a Harry Ransom Fellowship, which was critical in giving me access to papers now held in America. The International Anthony Burgess Foundation has also helped me a huge amount along the way. Andrew Biswell, Will Carr, Anna Edwards, Graham and Ian, you keep the flame burning. The Manchester Left Writers – Natalie Bradbury, Robert Dickinson, David Wilkinson and the legendary Steve Hanson – all helped me to hone a style and provided critical historical insights. My writers’ group too – Karen Kendrick and Hannah Farrelly – kept my prose tight. The manuscript was read by three anonymous reviewers, all of whom were extremely helpful even after I inflicted 350 A4 pages of draft on them. Next comes the real experts in the field, each of whom has added something to this book through their perspicacious research and analysis: Stephanie Jones, Natalie Ferris, Karen Zoaoui, Nonia Williams, Kaye Mitchell, David Mark Hucklesby, Glyn White (again), Andrew Hodgson, Jennifer Hodgson, Andrew Biswell (again), Jim Clarke, Rob Spence, Philip Tew, Melanie Seddon, Nuria Belastegui, Matthew Whittle, Sebastian Groes, Nick Rankin, Hannah Van Hove, Hilary White, Adam Guy, James Riley and so many others. The book would have been impossible to write without the hard work of archivists and librarians. These are the unsung heroes of academia. Thank you to the following institutions for their help: Manchester John Rylands, University of Salford Library, King’s College London Archives, the Harry Ransom Centre, the New York City Public Library, the British Library, University of East Anglia Archives, Indiana University Bloomington Library

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Archives, the Google Scholars and Ngrams Service, the National Archives, the British Security Services, the Department of Education Archives, the Working Class Movement Library, the Labour History Archive and Study Centre, IT Magazine Online Archive, the International Anthony Burgess Foundation Archives, the Archive at the University of the Arts London, the Library of Congress and the private library at Lawrence Sterne’s house. Thank you to the small number of people I interviewed and the far larger number of people who offered me information informally or via email. Finally, thank you to my family and friends for their love and support, and most of all for their patience. And thank you to Kinga Wawrzyniak, moja kolorowa kaczka.

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Introduction

It has taken me ten years to write this book. It is a history of experimental writing in Britain in the 1960s. But it represents more than that. It is about a particular group of writers. A group who, despite great differences in approach, technique and personality, nevertheless, worked together and influenced each other heavily. In cultural histories – whether these be artistic, musical or literary – such groups are often delineated by the term ‘movement’. Perhaps the experimentalists were a movement. But they are a movement that reject their own label. Their works, looked back on without the benefit of biographical research, have very little in common. When I began writing this book, it was generally presumed that each writer stood alone. A strange kind of movement, this. When I began the work, it was an academic study. I was convinced that there must have been some common element uniting these writers. Slowly, clues began to emerge. Then, as the writer’s archives came to be assembled, one by one, and to become publically available, the weight of evidence I needed appeared. I conducted interviews. I travelled to America. I founded a journal dedicated to the subject – all in pursuit of more information. But the hoped-for academic monograph failed to come to pass. So the writers were connected; this I discovered. But, in academia, this is not enough. Instead, it falls to the academic to tell us what this means. Why is it important? And I admit: I never did work out fully what the experimentalist writers of the 1960s really meant. Their works are so varied in their content that, for every formal trope you identify, there will always be more books that are exceptions than ones that fit the rule. In the canonical history of literature, the twentieth century is split into two, rather flabbily termed epochs: the modernist and the postmodern. Experimentalism does a bad job at both. Either it’s modernism done too late for scholars to care about or it’s postmodernism that’s come out of the oven early and has not yet risen. Academics have argued both of these things. Yet I, as a reader, couldn’t help but be drawn back again and again to these writers. I kept reading. I read every little scrap of every lesser writer and then every writer around them. There is something compelling about the experimentalists. It was as if they really, truly, authentically and with deep sincerity believed in their own mad projects. Often, the content of their beliefs was the stuff of half-baked postgraduate essays, or bar-room philosophy, but it wasn’t simply idle speculation. Tremendous efforts were

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exerted in the pursuit of these esoteric literary beliefs. For some of these writers, those efforts even led to their deaths. This is when I realized that an academic study is precisely not what is required to tell this story. For that is what it is: a story. The British experimentalist writers of the 1960s are quixotic heroes. They live lives of adventure, between triumph and despair. They chase their visions like Don Quixote does his Dulcinea. Their journeys bring them into contact with grand historical events, and they meet with the great figures of their literary age. They saw themselves as rebels and revolutionaries, rising up against the dread forces of the establishment. Their fellowship came together and then broke apart, only to reunite. Then, like all great tragic heroes, they failed. They failed just when it seemed that they would reach their goal. In doing so, they left behind just enough work for us to get a sense of their combined mission but never to truly understand where they were going next. What would a victory have looked like for them? What would their new literature really be? These kinds of questions are the stuff of great tales, but not of good academic studies. I can hear the examiner already: ‘so you’re saying that you don’t know.’ And no, after all of this time I don’t. But I do know that the journey of the experimentalists is a tale worth telling. Even in its partial telling, the resurgence of interest in B. S. Johnson, for instance, and more recently in Ann Quin, the story has captured many imaginations. I hope that what I have written – part history, part study, part biography – can give a sense of the whole picture. I have placed the story out front and let the details fall in after. As a result there will be emphases placed in this book which will no doubt baffle readers already familiar with these texts. Why give so much space to Maureen Duffy’s A Single Eye and mention Robert Nye only once, for example? Well first, as a story, this one has too many characters. Some writers simply had to be cut, or this book would be at risk of becoming simply a list of names.1 Instead, the structure has been dictated by the narrative. The chapters are chronological. They begin with an overview of events before 1960, then move forward in meaningful chunks of time, each one a recognizable era with its own trends and texture. Within these chapters, however, my chronology is looser. Some events from the end of 1963 might help to explain what happens in 1962, for example, and so are presented first. I draw attention to

A particular point of contention with one reviewer was the exclusion of Murial Spark. Spark was one of the Hampstead novelists, a friend to Brigid Brophy and rival to Anthony Burgess and Christine Brooke-Rose. Yet, having now read all of her novels, I am not convinced that she fits the term ‘experimental’. Inventive, yes, and often brilliant, but sadly a prime example of the kind of writer who must be excluded in the interests of space. 1

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this in the text so as not to lead to confusion, and I hope that the historical placement of the action is clear throughout. Finally, it should go without saying that I am tremendously thankful to a whole range of people, archives and institutions for helping me to conduct this research. Where possible I have cited textual documents, but much has come from interviews and conversations too. If some of the anecdotes herein appear inflated in the telling, then that is likely because they are. The experimentalists were the subject of many legendary stories from their friends and admirers, and as it is the spirit of their story that I hope to capture here, I have omitted only the irrelevant and the patently untrue. For the rest, I hope the spirit of admiration remains. The experimentalists were a unique movement in the history of English literature, and their tangled tale is one that more readers should know. Those readers who enjoy unusual novels, and even those that don’t, will no doubt find something in these writers.

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1 Before 1960

The war On the morning of 10 November 1938, a six-year-old Eva Figes was led by her mother down a pavement strewn with shattered glass.1 It was the morning after Kristalnacht. On the other side of town, Hitler was discussing a final solution to the Jewish question as the young Figes asked her mother about the destruction.2 ‘They are putting in new windows’, her mother told her, before hurrying her on to school.3 Nowhere was it openly said that one of the world’s most technologically advanced nations was heading down a path to genocide. Hitler himself spoke only in fearsome allusions. Should a new world war commence, he proclaimed, the Jews would ‘suffer appallingly’.4 Walking along the treelined path to her gleaming white schoolhouse, the young Figes had little sense of the danger surrounding her. She was a German girl like any other. Her family was wealthy, and had a gentile housekeeper, and a grandmother fond of telling the tales of the Brothers Grimm. Her school was the best in the area. Serving mostly the children of middle-class Jewry, it was nevertheless a secularized environment. On her first day, Figes was given the traditional German Schultüte, its golden cone bursting with sweeties and small toys.5 Of her childhood in Berlin it was the Grunewald that stuck in her mind. ‘I was born in a country where immense forest lay at the edge of everything’, she later wrote, ‘fringing the city, lurking on the verge of consciousness where sense and civilised living gave way to a dark worship of trees and

Eva Figes was born Eva Unger, but her writer’s name is used here for clarity. This convention is used throughout the book. 2 Robert Conot, Justice at Nuremberg (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), p. 161. 3 Eva Figes, Tales of Innocence and Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 93. 4 Lawrence Rees, The Holocaust (London: Viking, 2017), p. 148. 5 Figes 2004, p. 54. 1

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their mystery.’6 It was in these forests where she imagined Snow White to have met the sympathetic huntsman and the miserly dwarves. It was a place of secrets and danger, but also of magic. In March 1939, her father returned home from Dachau concentration camp. Anxious and emaciated, it was to these woods that he took her to hunt for chocolate eggs on Easter Sunday.7 Figes was never told where her father had gone. Nor was she aware of the desperate manoeuvres her parents made in order to be granted a travel pass by the Nazi bureaucracy. She was only told that her family was leaving Germany on the very morning they were set to fly. She returned home from school to find the house empty of furniture. ‘The living room looked so funny with no carpets or chairs’, she recalled, ‘I hardly looked at my father [who was] laughing and very pleased: We’re going to England’,8 he said. They would tell no one they were emigrating. They would fly to England, leaving behind Figes’ grandmother and grandfather. Two years later, these grandparents would be loaded onto the cattle carts and shipped away to be murdered. Figes’ mother would never find out where or how they died, despite working for an organization established after the war to trace the dead.9 Her silence on the matter drove a wedge between mother and daughter. ‘My mother turned ‘not knowing’ into an art form’,10 Figes would later write. Upon arriving in England, Figes and her mother moved to the countryside, and her father joined up with the allied military forces. At her new school, Figes found that the language of her childhood ‘had become the tongue of lunatics and maniacs’. The other children goose-stepped around the playground, chanting ‘Heil Hitler!’ and other phrases picked up from radio comedians.11 As the other children went to watch Charlie Chaplin as the Great Dictator, Figes’ mother kept her at home. ‘Hitler is not funny’,12 she was told. Eva Figes would come to call herself Jewish, so as to avoid the stain of being called German.13 The British education system replaced her German schooling, and the English tongue replaced her native German. Where the German forests had been places of danger and mystery, the English countryside was filled with adventure. Her friend, Zoë, showed her the difference between the beech and the oak, how to make tea from lime tree leaves, and together they hunted fluffy white angora rabbits in the fields beyond the town.14 Zoë never threw anything away, Figes observed; her

Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 78. 8 Ibid., p. 102. 9 Ibid., p. 87. 10 Ibid., p. 87. 11 Eva Figes, Little Eden (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), p. 54. 12 Ibid., p. 54. 13 Eva Figes, Journey to Nowhere (London: Granta, 2008), p. 82. 14 Figes 2008, p. 82. 6 7

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family used the leftovers from one meal to make the next, with the seeds going to the chickens and the bones to the pigs. Figes’ mother too found a place in the community, working for the Highways Committee. Women were employed to work on the roads freeing men up for war work. These women, performing the same strenuous tasks that men once did, came together to petition the government for equal pay.15 They didn’t win, but it was a sign of the times. ‘To countless women war brought bereavement’, Figes would later write, ‘but to others it brought adventure.’16 When she came to write a memoir about those first years in England, she called it Little Eden. But Eva Figes was not the only city dweller to have been moved out to the British countryside. It was 1939, and across the nation thousands of children were being loaded on to trains bound for the country. Included in the first wave of these evacuees was a young Bryan Stanley Johnson. He and his mother embarked for a farm outside Chobham almost as soon as the war was declared. Six years old at the time, Johnson’s first memory of the war was the khaki kitbag into which his things were loaded for evacuation. It had a single pocket on the outside, just large enough to house the Lyon’s fruit pie that would feed him on the journey.17 During those first months away from London, Johnson struggled to settle into a new school routine. He had travelled with his mother, who was working the land, and the son of the local pub landlord, called Timmie. Johnson and Timmie stuck together in their strange new surroundings, picking apples and running from the farmer’s slobbering pigs.18 But the Johnsons’ first evacuation wasn’t to last long. The period from the declaration of war in September 1939 until the invasion of Belgium in May 1940, now known as the Phoney War, was marked by a surprising lack of aggression. With a sense of anticlimax, the Johnsons cancelled their evacuation and headed back to London. In Johnson’s introduction to his edited collection of evacuation stories, The Evacuees (1968), he describes how ‘the return was evacuation all over again’.19 He returned to a changed London. Every man of military age, including his father, now wore some kind of uniform. Barricades and defences had been erected. Johnson had grown up in a riverside flat in Hammersmith. His parents had got it cheap after a high tide flooded it in the late 1930s. As he returned to his bare bedroom, his toys and books packed away, Johnson was still able to see the tidemark running along the walls where water had once submerged the room. If he looked out of his window now, gunboats patrolled the Thames.20 The apparent peace would not last long, and soon

Figes 1978, p. 107. Eva Figes, ‘Introduction.’, in Women’s Letters in Wartime, 1450–1945, ed. Eva Figes (London: Pandora, 1993), p. 16. 17 B. S. Johnson, Trawl [1966]. Omnibus (London: Picador, 2004), p. 43. 18 B. S. Johnson (ed.), The Evacuees (London: Gollancz, 1968), p. 151. 19 Ibid., p. 17. 20 B. S. Johnson, See the Old Lady Decently (London: Hutchinson, 1975), p. 78. 15 16

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Johnson was caught up in another evacuation, this time official. He would be lined up with hundreds of other children on Waterloo station platform, an identifying card around his neck, and was sent off again to the country. This time his mother, on whom he had so desperately relied last time, was to stay in London.21 This unresolved separation from his mother, it has been argued, established a pattern of overdependence on women that followed Johnson for the rest of his life.22 Johnson’s second evacuation came just in time. By July 1940, the Wermacht had reached the Channel and the Luftwaffe had started a campaign of systematic bombing aimed at softening up the South coast ready for invasion. The RAF, armed with their new invention, radar, struck back, and so began the Battle of Britain. Johnson sat out in the fields with the other evacuee children, watching the dogfights between Hurricane and Messerschmitt. Recalling that summer in Trawl (1966), he describes the British airman who wandered into the field beside their house, parachute balled under his arm. A Heinkel 111 bomber also crashed nearby. The police kept the children away from the wreckage but Johnson found a hunk of twisted metal which he kept as a souvenir. A week later, one of the Heinkel’s machine guns sat in the grocer’s window beside a tin collecting for the war effort.23 For children, during the war, machines that threatened terror and death one moment could become objects of wonder and fascination in another. The sight and sound of a Spitfire in action would live with Johnson longer than the effects of rationing and blackouts. One aspect of British life that double-evacuations did bring home to Johnson was the class system. It was something that proved to be as fundamental to his understanding of Englishness as Eva Figes’ evacuation was in understanding Jewishness. Before the Second World War, the British system of established privilege was just about clinging on. A generation of officer-class young men were butchered between 1914 and 1918, and now the advent of mechanized total war demanded a military hierarchy far more expansive and professional than the diminished aristocracy could provide. The wartime economy lay the foundations of post-war meritocracy.24 For Johnson, however, those last symbols of a rigid class society dominated his childhood imagination. During Johnson’s first evacuation, his mother was treated by the master of their billeting house as a servant, despite them paying rent. Their hosts’

B. S. Johnson, ‘Clean Living Is the Real Safeguard.’ In Statement against Corpses, ed. B. S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose (London: Constable, 1964), p. 17. 22 Nick Hubble. ‘“An Evacuee for Ever”: B.S. Johnson versus Ego Psychology.’ In Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, ed. Glyn White and Philip Tew (London: Palgrave, 2007), p. 145. 23 Johnson [1966] 2004, p. 47. 24 Joseph Darlington, ‘“A Kind of Waterfall”: Class and Authenticity in B.S. Johnson.’ BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal, Vol. 2. 21

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‘dislike of us, their bare toleration of us’25 extended to their son, Jack, and his treatment of Johnson. Their country schoolmaster considered city children to be a criminal influence. Back in London, by contrast, Johnson got into the respectable Brotton School. His school uniform marked him out as different from the other local boys, who hounded him ferociously. ‘I did not want to be better than them’, he later recalled, ‘but they forced it upon me’ ([1966] 2004, 58). In the country he was tormented for being part of an urban working class who, back in London, tormented him for aspiring to better things. Towards the very end of the war, Johnson went back to London again. As he sat in his school uniform watching American armaments flooding through Paddington station, not knowing whether he was one class or the other, he was told about his eleven-plus exam results. He’d failed.26 That settled it; from thereon in, B. S. Johnson was not to be a grammar school boy. But what exactly was it that they were teaching in these schools? Which were the books that introduced these future writers to the world of literature? Although this is long before a national curriculum, reading practices varied very little across the entire British school system. An indicative curriculum from the era recommends Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Water Babies to children between the ages of eight and ten. By eleven and thirteen begins a diet of Victorian realism: David Copperfield, Lorna Doone, Silas Marner and Great Expectations. After thirteen, the study of historical English supplements the great Victorian novelists, with The Faerie Queene, Milton and Chaucer sitting alongside Scott, Austen and yet more Dickens.27 Similar lists, according to David Shayler, could be found in every school, ‘remaining unchanged from 1910’.28 The schoolchild of the 1940s was imbued with a rigorous set of presumptions about what literature is. Fantasy, wonder and whimsy were associated with children’s books, while adult literature was concerned with the serious business of real life. Poetry was allowed more leeway when it came to mythical creatures, but was expected to be more rigidly structured than prose and was shaped by a corresponding classical tradition. Latin too was a fixture of British education at this time.29 Outside of school there was a range of children’s magazines available but these began to struggle after 1940. Coordinating the war effort took vast amounts of paper, and German U-boats were sinking hundreds of merchant navy resupply ships every month, causing a shortage. Newspapers

Johnson [1966] 2004, p. 51. Ibid., p. 73. 27 David Shayer, The Teaching of English in Schools, 1900–1970 (London: Routledge, 1972), p. 106. 28 Ibid., p. 107. 29 Ibid., p. 115. 25 26

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were limited to four pages each, books were printed without margins to save on space and font sizes were so small that they required a magnifying glass to read.30 As a result, children’s magazines became incredibly flimsy and text-heavy. Boy’s magazines like Triumph, Rover, Wizard and Hotspur had previously mixed colonial adventure stories with schoolyard capers.31 During the war, these narratives were translated into the contemporary context, with heroic soldiers fighting fascism and boys outwitting German spies after school. George Orwell dismissed these magazines, believing them to rely on stereotypes of ‘comic foreigners jabbering and gesticulating [while] the grim grey battleships of the British Fleet are steaming up the channel’.32 The stories were popular however and, perhaps owing to their scarcity, were treated as treasured possessions.33 Girl’s magazines such as Girl’s Crystal made a similar transition to wartime, with a traditional emphasis on friendship and good behaviour translating well into stories of evacuation. The girls in these stories supported each other while their parents were away. They made do and mended.34 Being structurally and tonally in keeping with the nostalgic tales they told before the war, the shift of the nation’s magazines towards a contemporary focus imbued the present conflict with its own peculiar nostalgia. The heroes and heroines of the past suddenly walked among us. Some of the novels that children read for pleasure followed this trend. Angela Brazil, author of First World War bestseller A Patriotic Schoolgirl (1918), released Five Jolly Schoolgirls in 1941: essentially a rewriting of her previous novel in an updated setting. Generally, however, children’s novels were less didactic than the magazines. This may be due to the scarcity of bound books under wartime conditions and the need to publish lasting, rereadable work. Book publication fell by 50 per cent between 1939 and 1941, with new fiction titles falling from 4,222 per year to a sparse 1,246, very few of which would be children’s imprints.35 J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit (1937) remained a popular adventure story, as was the Famous Five series by Enid Blyton. Both of these writers’ works could serve as either commentary on or escapism from the war, as required.36 Even the Biggles books by Capt W. E. Johns, a staple of patriotic British schoolboy reading since 1932, were less fervent in their depiction of the new war than they had been of colonial conflicts or biplane dogfights. Biggles Hunts Big Game (1948) featured a strong anti-war message and a condemnation

Steve Holland, The Mushroom Jungle (London: Zardoz Books, 1993), p. 10. Owen Dudley Edwards, British Children’s Fiction in the Second World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 6. 32 George Orwell, ‘Boy’s Weeklies.’ Horizon, No. 3, March 1940. 33 Edwards 2007, p. 181. 34 Ibid., p. 183. 35 Holland 1993, p. 12. 36 Edwards 2007, p. 19. 30 31

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of the ‘scientists’ who have ‘been so busy producing lethal weapons that they’ve forgotten how to do simple things – like providing food to feed the people’.37 The extra narrative space afforded by the novel form allowed for greater reflection than was possible for magazine writers. Allegorical writing could help children to transcend their current conditions, and adventure tales encouraged them to think of their evacuation as a type of holiday. Most importantly, books could pass the time during the long, uncertain wait for the resolution of the conflict. While the younger generation was reading about the war, those only slightly older were fighting it. Christine Brooke-Rose was twenty-two when the war broke out, studying literature at Sommerville College, Oxford. One day, after a particularly engaging seminar on Anglo-Saxon poetry, Brooke-Rose was held back by her lecturer and informed that the noted civil servant, physicist and author C. P. Snow would like to meet with her. Snow had been tasked with recruitment for a top-secret government project and had heard of the young, polyglot student through his network of academic talent spotters.38 Born in Geneva, brought up in Brussels and naturalized British, Brooke-Rose was fluent in French, Swiss French, Latin, German and some Italian as well as having a grasp of the English language sophisticated enough to study historical grammars at Oxford.39 She had a marked proficiency when working through the linguistic puzzles of Old and Middle English, although her real passion lay in the meaning of texts, their poetics. This ability to work with details while intuiting the bigger picture behind them was to become vital to her war work. It helped too that her sister had already been working as a trusted officer in the Postal Censorship for a year and a half, so the Brooke-Rose family had already been rigorously background checked.40 Newly enlisted, she put her education on hold, packed her bags and boarded a train for Bletchley Park. Bletchley Park was Britain’s top-secret codebreaking facility housed in a country house, an hour’s train journey from London. The work done there on cracking the German enigma codes was fundamental to the conduct of the war. Combining the intelligence provided by Bletchley Park and that from the new radar, Churchill’s war room could direct the Battle of Britain in real time with full access to the German side’s orders. The technologies developed at Bletchely by cryptographers, mathematicians and engineers went on, after the war, to found the new science of computing. It was one of these heroic figures, Alfred Dillwyn ‘Dilly’ Knox, who met Brooke-Rose

Capt W. E. Johns, Biggles Hunts Big Game (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1948), p. 14. Sinclair McKay, The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (London: Aurum, 2010), p. 161. 39 Maria del Sapio Garbero, ‘A Conversation with Christine Brooke-Rose’ [1991]. Festschrift Volume One: Christine Brooke-Rose (Singapore: Verbivoracious Press, 2014), p. 144. 40 Reference from Major G. J. Eastburn to Evelyn Brooke-Rose dated 9 June 1942. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre archives. 37 38

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upon her first arrival at the park. She and her fellow Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) officers, standing stiffly in their starched blue uniforms, lined up to sign the Official Secrets Act. From this point until 1977, Brooke-Rose would not be allowed to describe her war work. Such was the seriousness with which she took her vow of silence that she could never bring herself to describe it fully, even after declassification. Brooke-Rose worked in Hut 3: Air Force Intelligence.41 She did not work with the infamous enigma codes; rather, it was her job to take the decoded but often-illegible German sent from Hut 6 and translate it into usable, English language information.42 Alongside translation, Brooke-Rose had to navigate the ever-shifting index of cyphers and codewords used by German forces to refer to their various units and bases, as well as geographical locations and operations.43 The air of secrecy at the Park was all-consuming. Working in Hut 3, Brooke-Rose didn’t know what happened in any of the other Huts; even the workings of Hut 6, from whence she received her material, were unknown to her, and the penalty for asking was court martial. There were stories of Bletchley Park workers who would refuse necessary medical operations as they were worried about what they’d say under anaesthetic.44 Brooke-Rose, responsible for keeping track of the war, stopped reading newspapers or listening to the radio; partly to avoid mistaking government propaganda for the real situation, and partly so she didn’t have to keep track of what information was public and what wasn’t.45 ‘Everything that is known is secret’,46 became her motto. But not everything at Bletchley Park was as serious as its secrecy. In many ways the Park offered a unique experience for those working there. There was a Bletchley Park band, a chess club and even tennis courts that were built on special orders from Churchill. Young, female ‘Debs’ recruited from High Society mixed with grammar-schooled academics, gifted engineers from the industrial cities and messengers recruited from the local countryfolk.47 For a young woman raised in an overbearing middle-class household, Bletchley was positively thrilling. ‘I was collected by bus every day’, Brooke-Rose recollected, ‘surrounded by intellectuals.’48 The pleasure of this company would not leave her, and throughout her life Brooke-Rose positioned herself

Email from Oral History Officer Jonathan Bryce (Bletchley Park) to Joseph Darlington, 2012. It is worth noting that even the decoders in Hut 6 did not work with enigma machines. The nature of their work, even after the invention of codebreaking engines Bombe and Colossus, was closer to a linguistic puzzle than a feat of modern computing. Cf/ McKay 2010, p. 51. 43 Peter Calvacoressi, Top Secret Ultra (London: Cassel Military Paperbacks, 1980), p. 60. 44 McKay 2010, p. 216. 45 Christine Brooke-Rose, Remake (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), p. 108. 46 Ibid., p. 108. 47 McKay 2010, p. 64. 48 Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Interlude: Exsul.’ In Invisible Author: Last Essays (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2002), p. 125. 41 42

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in hubs of intellectual activity. Romance too bloomed in such an atmosphere. Fellow translator and cryptographer, Rodney Bax, worked alongside Brooke-Rose in Hut 3. Under these intense and sweltering conditions, joined in a shared secret mission, the two fell in love and were married. As with many relationships begun in a passionate moment, however, the marriage soon collapsed. The Americans, joining the war in 1941, also joined the intelligence effort at Bletchley. Brooke-Rose swiftly ditched her British beau for an American officer, as was the fashion at the time.49 The marriage was perhaps doomed to end anyway, especially as the war wound down and the reality of their thankless task began to settle upon them. In 1945, before the war had even ended, Bletchley Park was being converted into GCHQ. Its Colossus engines were destroyed, all Germany-related documentation was burned, and its sights were set on the new enemy: Soviet Russia. BrookeRose, without even a formal debrief, was parcelled on to an early morning train back to Oxford. There she would continue her studies as if nothing had happened.50 Anthony Burgess, sat on the end of the pier, beer in hand, stared up at the Rock of Gibraltar. He had been old enough to fight in this war, but had instead been posted to the Education Corps. He delivered classes on the British Way and Purpose to increasingly bolshie servicemen and wondered if the world’s largest conflict was a type of existential purgatory.51 Gibraltar, Britain’s Imperial fortress that gave the Royal Navy control of the Mediterranean, had ceased to be of tactical importance by the spring of 1944.52 Burgess had missed Gibraltar’s heroic defences and her clandestine intrigues, seeing only a cultureless, valueless, meaningless stopping point for ships heading out to the Empire.53 The war hadn’t been heroic for everyone. In fact, to use a phrase popular at the time, a lot of people were rather browned off. With Hitler defeated and Churchill pushing for a continuation of the conflict, fighting now against Stalin, a lot of people were starting to think that something must be done.

Aftermath On the morning of 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler, the Beast of Berlin, blew out his brains in a Berlin bunker. The city was falling to the Soviet Red Army and, on the western front, resistance to the allied forces was crumbling. By 8 May, victory had been declared in Europe. The conflict in the East would

Michael Smith, Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park (London: Pan, 2004), p. 145. McKay 2010, p. 285. 51 Anthony Burgess, A Vision of Battlements (New York: Ballatine Books, 1965), p. vii. 52 Nicholas Rankin, Defending the Rock (London: Faber and Faber, 2017), p. 575. 53 Burgess 1965, p. 50. 49 50

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continue on for another four months. It was during this time that an iron curtain would fall, separating the world and its people into two camps: democratic and communist. In Germany, the extent of Jews’ sufferings had been revealed to the world. Eva Figes, still only thirteen years old, was sent to the cinema to watch the newsreels alone.54 Her mother could not bear to watch. In total silence, crowds gathered across Britain to watch the footage from liberated Belsen. What should have been a glorious moment of victory became tainted by the horrors of the recent past and the terrors of the future. Before the world had time to catch its breath, atomic bombs fell on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Single bombs with the power to kill and poison millions. The new world rising from the ashes of this war would be a world that had lost its innocence. The dream of progress leading inexorably to peace and prosperity had been demonstrably shattered. Yet, the process of coming together that had won this war seemed, to many, to offer a new alternative. A return to the old, laissez-faire Britain seemed impossible. Instead, the power of the government to win the war was now being called upon to win the peace. In July 1945, the country went to the polls. The choice was between Churchill, the war hero with Moscow on his mind, and Attlee’s Labour Party which promised peace and welfare. The result was a landslide. The Conservatives lost 219 seats, and Labour gained 239: a massive majority.55 Anthony Burgess, drunk in Gibraltar, put the victory down to the service vote.56 Every ship, base, airfield and other military operation had installed polling stations, and each overwhelmingly voted Labour. Even Burgess himself, raised in a firmly working-class conservative tradition, found his classes on the British Way and Purpose had transformed into a series of enthusiastic daily debates about the coming socialist society.57 Christine Brooke-Rose, whose Belgian childhood was steeped in bourgeois Francophone republicanism, was eager to vote Labour, and found the majority of her Oxford peers doing the same.58 At Bletchley, the collision of classes had brought about a tight-knit camaraderie, and it was clear that the same had been happening in government-commandeered buildings across the country. Even the evacuees had an impact. The masses of urban children pouring into rural and seaside communities shook up established small-town hierarchies. The deprivation of the urban poor and the sophistication of the urban middle class both encouraged rural communities to think nationally as well as locally.59 The common practice of billeting brought young soldiers

Figes 2004, p. 93. ​BBC​.co​​.uk. ‘5th July 1945.’ Politics ’97. Web source. 56 Anthony Burgess, 1985 (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013), p. 16. 57 Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God (London: Vintage, 2012), p. 305. 58 Brooke-Rose 1996, p. 63. 59 Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–1951 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 21. 54 55

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into the houses of those past military age, uniting the generations as never before. Everywhere people were saying that things needed to change, and it was the Labour Party that provided a beacon for that hope. In the late summer of 1945 the Labour Party felt unstoppable. Its members were ecstatic; its leaders felt that they were walking with destiny.60 It acted decisively and its policies were dramatic. Inspired by the Beveridge Report of 1942 in which a British welfare state was first proposed, the Attlee Labour government nationalized healthcare, transport, utilities, education, the steel industry, the Bank of England and coal mining. They reformed unemployment insurance and expanded welfare, built council houses on an ever-expanding scale and pursued a Keynesian policy of full employment and strong trade unions. The central government bureaucracy, which had been mobilized to defeat Hitler, was expanded yet further, this time with the aim of providing support for British citizens from the cradle to the grave. Their achievements were heroic. Any impact was not immediate, however. Despite pulling the huge weight of British production in the direction of social provision, rationing would remain in place until 1954. Cities like Coventry, wrecked by the Blitz, would not be rebuild for decades, and bomb-damaged buildings were a common sight in every urban and industrial centre. Doris Lessing came to the UK in 1949, having been born in Iran and raised in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). At this time, a militant communist, Lessing, was impressed by the new social provisions available in London but shocked by the social conservatism that accompanied them. She describes the era of austerity as one of great dourness as the post-war promises seemed forever deferred: The London of the late 1940s, the early 1950s, has vanished, and now it is hard to believe it existed. It was unpainted, buildings were stained and cracked and dull and grey; it was war-damaged, some areas all ruins, and under them holes full of dirty water, once cellars, and it was subject to sudden dark fogs.61 The fogs themselves became a symbol of the new London. The cinema of the era depicts an eerie landscape of hard black brickwork shrouded in everpresent clouds.62 They reflected an atmosphere of ambiguity and uneasiness. Much like the tight-lipped formality of post-war manners, the fogs seem to

Roger Eatwell, The 1945–1951 Labour Governments (London: Batsford Academic, 1979), p. 54. 61 Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade (London: Flamingo, 1998), p. 4. 62 Lynda Nead, The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain (London: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 39. 60

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conceal the terrible events of the recent past, leaving the British to keep on muddling through, short-sighted, with no real sense of what was up ahead. For a younger generation, the end of the war didn’t even bring respite from conscription. In December 1948, just a few months after they had voted to create the NHS, Parliament passed the National Service Act. Young men of between eighteen and twenty-one were legally required to serve between six and eighteen months in the military. Conscientious objectors were imprisoned. Among the national servicemen were B. S. Johnson, Alan Burns, Jeff Nuttall and countless other writers and artists who would go on to make their names in the 1960s. Johnson in particular took exception to the requirement, believing it to be ‘tedious, belittling, coarsening, brutalising, unjust and possibly psychologically very harmful’.63 Enraged by the monotony of parades, the tedium of military technical education and the ever-present physical discipline, Johnson reacted with particular horror to combat training. The idea of puncturing a man’s belly with a bayonet rendered him physically nauseous, even when practising on sacks of straw.64 Alan Burns too found much to shock and appal him, writing his first novella, Buster (1961), about the experience.65 The requirement, he argued, was enacted merely to benefit the over-expanded arms industry and the Americans, whose weaponry and equipment the national servicemen continued to receive through lend lease.66 In protest, he became more and more outspoken in his rejection of military values. After a particularly virulent pro-communist outburst, Burns was taken to one side and threatened with court martial. It succeeded in silencing him for that moment but turned him into an enemy of all things official and governmental for the rest of his life.67 Not all national servicemen were as eloquent in their despondency, however. Jeff Nuttall, who, thanks to his grammar school education, was made a sergeant, protested his conscription by spending most of his time locked in his barrack room, drunk and dishevelled, with his books and paints. He later recalled the experience with a certain resentful nostalgia. At times, his enforced captivity was punctuated by moments of sublimity: In my room on the top floor of the mess I could watch thunderstorms advancing right across the county. I used to sit in an open window with a crate of beer and my clothes drenched, roaring with delight at any flash of lightning. . . . The other sergeants used to invade my room every so often

B. S. Johnson (ed.), All Bull: The National Servicemen (London: Quartet, 1973), p. 14. Johnson [1966] 2004. 65 Alan Burns quoted in B. S. Johnson (ed.) 1973, p. 181. 66 Alan Burns, ‘Buster.’ In New Writers 1 (London: John Calder, 1961), p. 99. 67 Burns 1961, p. 110. 63 64

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and stand perplexed. . . . They told me I was the worst fucking soldier they had ever seen.68 Nuttall kept in touch with his fellow conscripts after they had all been demobbed, meeting for occasional booze-ups in London pubs. This is perhaps closer to the average national serviceman’s experience than the trauma Johnson and Burns’ describe. It still remained a sticking point with even the best-tempered servicemen, however, and certainly played a role in cultivating resentments. Not only was the promise of the welfare state to be constantly deferred, but the lives of British people too were being placed on pause for long periods. For the young, these deferrals took the officially compelled form of national service, but for many demobbed servicemen like Anthony Burgess, there was also the unofficial compulsion to take their wartime skills to the Empire. After a spell of grammar school teaching, Burgess left for colonial Malaya (now Malaysia) in 1954, moving on to Brunei in 1958. The route into colonial service was one that had been taken by generations of British writers from George Orwell to Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling. The literature of the 1950s, however, demonstrates a keen sense of an Empire that was no longer expected to last forever.69 Certain former colonies, India and Pakistan chief among them, had already won independence. The rest of the Empire, it was commonly understood, was on borrowed time. Burgess, always an ideosyncratic figure, spent his time learning to speak local dialects and preferred to drink with the Malays than with the expats. The novels that he wrote about his experiences, The Malayan Trilogy (1956, 1958, 1959), are alive with a bustling cast of Hindus and Muslims, Chinese shopkeepers and British schoolteachers, and teenagers who grew up in the jungle that now dressed like James Dean. In the midst of the spice and song of the orient, Burgess’ Brits are cast adrift. Caught in a stifling formality of their own making, the adjuncts of the Empire perform their thankless Imperial duties as the years roll on, the monotony punctuated only by the occasional brutal murder by the communists in the jungle.70 Burgess’ protagonist, Crabbe, finds a certain abstract hope in the fate of the British Empire. At the end of the final novel, he sits by the river Klang ‘thinking about humanity, seeing the great abstractions move and wave in the fronds of the jungle over the river’.71 There is life and nobility in Burgess’ Malayan characters where his Brits seem most alive only in their frustrations and disappointments. It was time for the colonies to achieve their independence, and for Britain, too, to

Jeff Nuttall quotes in B. S. Johnson (ed.) 1973, p. 25. Matthew Whittle, Post-War Literature and the End of Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 70 Anthony Burgess, The Malayan Trilogy (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 566. 71 Burgess 2000, p. 552. 68 69

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discover what it could be after it had ceased trying to dominate the globe.72 It was perhaps for this reason that Burgess found Britain so unappealing upon his return. He had spent most of the 1950s away in the colonies, and while his homeland might have achieved a slow and painful economic recovery from war, its cultural landscape remained as sparse and austere as it had been in the 1940s. As J. W. Denham, the dyspeptic expat protagonist of his novel The Right to an Answer phrased it, Britain had turned into a nation of ‘good little people who, with their television, strikes, football pools and Daily Mirror, have everything they want except death’.73 Culturally, Britain in the 1950s was stuck. Literary fiction in particular struggled to find a direction. Great individual works occasionally appeared but it was difficult to ascertain any dominant national trend or temper. Even with the benefit of hindsight, literary academics have struggled to form categories. One of the latest, Kristen Bluemel’s concept of ‘intermodernism,’ relies heavily on authors better associated with earlier periods and manages to paint a cohesive picture only by using the very fracturedness of the literary scene as its starting point.74 Enough time had passed since the high point of modernism that writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot were largely considered historical figures.75 The committed left-wing writing of the 1930s had been made redundant firstly by the war and then by the welfare state. Great writers of the 1940s like Rex Warner had reached a comparatively small audience due to the paper shortage. The results of this identity crisis were visible on library shelves. After the war, as libraries across the country were in the process of being nationalized and unified into a single system, government studies found that there was already a surprising level of homogeneity in the books available.76 Each library contained the English classics – Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer – and a large range of popular nineteenth-century novels – Dickens, Hardy, Eliot, Austen. That these books were also the stuff of school syllabuses was no accident. Alongside these were the now canonical modernists – Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce – and a very small selection of contemporary novels, the titles varying widely between libraries.77 This homogeneity in libraries is made even more telling when one considers that Britain is not historically a bookbuying nation. Bookshops were almost unheard of outside of university towns, meaning the local library became the arbiter of literary taste for the

Anthony Burgess, ‘What Now in the Novel?’ In Urgent Copy: Literary Studies (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 171. 73 Anthony Burgess, The Right to an Answer (London: Hutchinson, 1960), p. 1. 74 Kristin Bluemel, ‘Introduction.’ In Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain, ed. Kristin Bluemel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 5. 75 Stuart Laing, ‘Novels and the Novel.’ In Society and Literature: 1945–1970, ed. Alan Sinfield (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 236–7. 76 Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968), p. 5. 77 Leavis 1968, p. 6. 72

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majority of communities in the country.78 Johnson, having struggled his way through a handful of Victorian tomes as a child before returning to magazines, later lamented the passing of the 1930s Left Book Club, the last attempt to encourage the purchase of literary fiction by everyday people prior to the rise of the Penguin Classic in the 1960s.79 The seeds of a literary revolution were quietly being sown, however. The first of these was the creation of comprehensive schools in 1944. Tasked with educating all of the children who, like B. S. Johnson, failed their elevenplus exams, the comps could not rely on the teaching methods honed in the better-behaved grammar schools. As a result, comprehensive school teachers were encouraged to scour the Victorians for exciting passages, the better to keep children’s attention. The high romance of Blackmore’s Lorna Doone was popular, as were the battles in Doyle’s Red Thread of Honour and the melodrama of Read’s Hard Cash. The chariot race in Ben Hur proved a huge success with struggling readers.80 The second driver of change was the new Arts Council, founded in 1946, which provided a centralized institution through which writers, dramatists and artists could apply for government funding. Sir Hugh Willatt, driving force behind the Council, attributed its founding to the realization, during the war, of just how much the average British person read. Soldiers at the front demanded huge numbers of books to keep them entertained. Sergeants even complained that the uniform pocket designed to hold an entrenching tool was instead used to carry books, it being the perfect size for a small hardback.81 The third ingredient of the forthcoming literary revolution was the invention of the paperback book. Printed on poor-quality ‘pulp’ paper during the shortage years, these mail-order books were a salacious craze, demand always outstripping supply.82 Novels about detectives, murderers, cowboys or soldiers, the pulps were heavy on sex and violence, and usually so poorly written that it was clear the writer had never read back over their own work. There were stories of pulp publishers locking writers in basements until they met quota – sometimes as high as a novel a week – while one publisher was arrested after breaking into a dairy and stealing the paper used to package butter, intending to turn it into books.83 Pulps didn’t last. Physically, they would decompose after three or four reads. As a

Leavis 1968, p. 4. B. S. Johnson quoted in Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet (eds.), The Imagination on Trial (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), p. 89. 80 Shayer, 1972, p. 109. 81 Sir Hugh Willatt, The Arts Council of Great Britain: The First 25 Years (London: Arts Council, 1971), p. 3. 82 Holland 1993, p. 86. 83 Holland 1993. 78 79

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trend, they depended on the paper shortage limiting competition. But better paperbacks would come, and they would thrive. Collectively, these three elements came together to reinvigorate the British literary industry. The comprehensives created a popular base of potential literary readers, the Arts Council provided funds to promote high-quality work and the pulp boom revolutionized print technology, marketing and dissemination. All that the literary scene lacked now was a sense of purpose. Not finding this in modernist experiment or political commitment, literary writers instead turned in on themselves and wrote about the literary industry itself. With most bookshops being in university towns and almost all writers being university educated, it followed that a high proportion of novels about campus life could be written and sold, and were. The more famous of these, such as Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954), at once indicate and obscure the trend. They give us a rose-tinted view of the quality and interest of the average book, most of which were far more dull than Amis’ celebrated offering. Christine Brooke-Rose had by now completed her undergraduate degree at Oxford and moved to University College, London, to pursue a PhD in poetics. In London she found herself moving in literary circles, meeting agents, writers and publishers at parties.84 She also encountered a large number of academics and writers now publishing novels about themselves and their friends, many of which she found poorly written and boring.85 Unimpressed with the genre, she began to write novels herself. The first, The Languages of Love (1957), was a campus novel about a young female PhD student entering the literary scene. The second, The Sycamore Tree (1958), was a novel about a case of literary libel set largely on a university campus. As Sarah Birch, Brooke-Rose’s biographer, wrote of the books: ‘they are, for the most part, light entertainments.’86 They are, however, more interesting than your average 1950s campus novel, and their prose is commendably light considering the prevalence of linguistic ornament at the time. The novels are also ripe with biographical details. Having divorced her first husband, Rodney Bax, after the incident with the American at Bletchley, Brooke-Rose struck up a second, equally short marriage with her colleague Claude Brooke.87 ‘It was just after the war in Germany’, the protagonist of Languages of Love, Julia Grampion, says of a similar relationship, ‘we had nothing in common but the Intercomm’.88 That novel begins with

‘Christine Brooke-Rose is Dead.’ PN Review, 22 March 2012. Garbero 2014, p. 146. 86 Sarah Birch, Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 19. 87 Confusingly, the Brooke in Brooke-Rose’s name preceded her marriage to Brooke, and she refused to take his name after marriage, meaning that the Brooke in Christine Brooke-Rose is from her mother, Evelyn, and not her husband Claude. 88 Christine Brooke-Rose, The Languages of Love (Singapore: Verbivoracious Press, 2014a), p. 40. 84 85

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Julia’s viva voce, where she returns to a wartime habit and keeps calling her examiner ‘sir’.89 Passing without corrections (which Brooke-Rose herself had yet to do),90 the young newly christened doctor hops onto the back of her examiner’s moped and heads off to a boozy lunch where she is invited to become a book reviewer. Book reviewing was the simplest way for a novelist to make a living during the period, and so it becomes clear that, despite her academic potential, Julia’s future seems set out in fiction. Brooke-Rose herself began reviewing towards the end of the 1950s and was not often pleased with what she read. Of the 101 novels she reviewed in her decadelong reviewing career, 99 contained at least one thing that irked her into negative comment.91 Collectively, the literary scene with all its egos and pretentions sickened her. She would later have the confidence to abandon it altogether but for now it sufficed to prick at it through satire. The small success of her first novel brought her into contact with Polish writer Jerzy Peterkiewicz. A well-respected poet, translator, novelist and critic, Jerzy would become Brooke-Rose’s third and longest-lasting husband. He introduced her to the wider world of European expat poets living in London, many of whom were exiles from the communist bloc. Brooke-Rose would find here a new sense of what was possible in literature, national cultures where modernism wasn’t considered old fashioned and political writing was more relevant than ever. Temperamentally averse to politics, Brooke-Rose would nevertheless find herself caught up in the fall out from the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. The killing of left-wing revolutionaries by communist forces caused a huge split in the British left, many of whom had been Communist Party members and fervently pro-Soviet. BrookeRose’s second novel, The Sycamore Tree, features a Hungarian exile, Zoltan, whose ‘mythical nationalism’ makes him a target of KGB agents on the one hand and a reject from the ‘new left’ on the other. He complains of this double exile with a withering sense of irony: They preferred to trust one-time collaborators who had been virtuously disillusioned by lack of advancement, threatened disfavour or sudden danger of arrest, ex-communists, half-hearted part-time communists, never-really communists, sad communists, muffled communists, genuine Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyites, Titoists shocked by the Soviet betrayal.92

Brooke-Rose 2014a, p. 0. Her PhD thesis is eventually published as Christine Brooke-Rose, A Grammar of Metaphor (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958). Notably, considering the impact of Leavis on the rest of our writers, Brooke-Rose’s thesis is a classical Aristotelian typology, extremely precise and inaccessible to the non-specialist reader. 91 Joseph Darlington, ‘The Composition of Christine Brooke-Rose’s Thru: An Afterlife of May ‘68’.’ Journal of European Studies, 45, no. 1 (2015): 51. 92 Christine Brooke-Rose, The Sycamore Tree (Singapore: Verbivoracious Press, 2014b), p. 88. 89 90

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Irony becomes the main mode through which Brooke-Rose engages with politics. The love of paradox and arcana that typify her linguistic studies displays itself in a fascination with the contradictions and denials typical of political ideologies. She positions herself on the edge of the circle looking in. Her relationship with Jerzy seemed based on this too, finding him fascinating for his deeply held superstitious beliefs and attempts at psychic thoughttransference.93 There is a large amount of Jerzy in the character of Zoltan. In the novel, she has him shoot dead the editor of a literary magazine in a fit of passion before committing suicide on the cathedral steps. In life she found his mad passions to be both baffling and erotic. Her correspondences with him are filled with breathless melodrama, while letters to her friends mention him in a tone of wry humour, surprise and disbelief.94 He was the type of different person who was hard to find in 1950s cocktail party circles.

University Back in the 1930s, Anthony Burgess had been an undergraduate at the University of Manchester. It was here that he first encountered modernist fiction and Leavisite criticism. The first of these was encapsulated in Joyce’s Work in Progress. The text, which would later be entitled Finnegans Wake, was released in a serialized form in the journal Transatlantic Review. Each addition was eagerly awaited by Burgess and a small group of like-minded Mancunian scholars, each of whom pored over the text seeking out its hidden meanings.95 The freshness of the text was captivating, its innovations exciting and astounding. For the young Burgess, cloistered away from a literary world that demanded social realism, it seemed like Joyce was lighting the way to a literature of the future. His lecturer, Lionel Charles Knights, agreed. Knights sat on the editorial board of Scrutiny, the journal founded by F. R. Leavis that was reinventing literary criticism. In his classes at Manchester, Knights encouraged his students to move beyond the cold application of Aristotelian categories and instead to really read the texts for themselves.96 The Leavisite emphasis on close reading as a methodology, taught by Knights, gave Burgess the tools he needed to dig yet further into his beloved Joyce. Leavisite method and modernist practice seemed perfectly suited to one another. The Leavisites, like the followers of Matthew Arnold before them, would see their methods adopted across the British higher education system over the following decades. F. R. Leavis, in his own writings, focused on the

Brooke-Rose 1996, p. 151. Cf/ the Brooke-Rose archive held in the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, Texas. 95 Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God (London: Heinemann, 1984), p. 170. 96 Andrew Biswell, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (London: Picador, 2005), p. 46. 93 94

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benefits of an education in the humanities.97 The critical study of literature, he argued, was far from being impractical. Analysis of language and its uses prepared a person for thinking critically about the world, allowing them to discern the core of an idea without being dazzled by the oratory cloaking it.98 The humanities, for the Leavisites, were a training ground for society. Great literature provides insight into character types, ethics, history and the common narratives of life. Whether a saint or a scoundrel, it’s unlikely that you could think of a ruse that hasn’t yet been covered by literature. After 1945, the Leavisite social mission became yet more relevant. The state was set for a rapid expansion and society demanded a leadership based on merit rather than class. What better way to prepare a grammar school boy from a poor background for a life of responsibility than by having him hone his ethical judgements through Dickens, Shakespeare or Defoe?99 The history of English literature was to be transformed into a repository for the national consciousness. It would be a bulwark against rapid social change and technological advance. For F. R. Leavis, literature was not merely a pleasurable pastime, it was the single most important means for maintaining a nation’s cultural continuity.100 To consolidate this view, it was essential that Leavis separate out the books which constituted great literature from the mass of new titles published every year. This he attempted in 1948’s The Great Tradition. A canon of great poets had long been established: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantics and so on; the list was well known. In correspondence with this list, Leavis created his own, this time focusing on the great novelists: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Each of these, he wrote, ‘are significant in terms of their human awareness of the possibilities of life’.101 Scrutiny, the journal of the Leavisites, expanded on Leavis’ list, arguing for the inclusion of earlier writers like Defoe and Sterne, and later modernists as well.102 The narrative of the great tradition of English literature, it was resolved, ended with Joyce, Lawrence and Woolf. The new, updated and revised lists of great novelists were consecrated in the 1950s as publishers brought out a large range of textbooks aimed at the ever-expanding student population. To take a sample: Walter Allen’s The English Novel (1954) starts

Richard Storer and Ian McKillop (eds.), F.R. Leavis: Essays and Documents (London: Bloomsbury, 1995). 98 F. R. Leavis, ‘Introduction.’ In Mill on Bentham and Coleridge (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971), p. 2. 99 F. R. Leavis, The Living Principle: ‘English’ as a Discipline of Thought (London: Chatto and Windus, 1977), p. 19. 100 F. R. Leavis, English Literature in Our Time and the University (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 58. 101 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 10. 102 Storer and McKillop 1995. 97

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on Defoe and ends on Joyce and Lawrence, Arnold Kettle’s An Introduction to the English Novel (1954) ends on George Eliot with an afterword about the modernists. John W. Aldridge’s Critiques and Essays on Modern Fiction, 1920-1951 (1952) is entirely about the high modernists, with a single essay devoted to Graham Greene and ‘the modernist legacy’.103 The Pelican Guide to English Literature would not include a writer writing after Joyce until the 1960s. The Leavisite method of close reading informed by tradition established the official narrative of the English novel: eighteenthcentury innovations lead to nineteenth-century realism, which leads to twentieth-century modernism.104 It is this model of literary history that the experimentalists would come to see themselves adding to; ‘picking up the baton’, as Johnson would later put it.105 Criticism in the 1950s was therefore caught between two poles: experiment or realism. As it turned out, many readers and writers had soured on literary experiment and sought a return to Victorian values.106 Publishers certainly took this side, knowing modernist fiction had always been a niche market at best. The successful writers of the 1950s embody a return to tradition. C. P. Snow, John Betjeman, Kingsley Amis, these were the most nostalgic of them. Yet even the Angry Young Men, who would shock readers at the end of the decade, nevertheless wrote in an unadorned, realist style. Anthony Burgess, whose first novel, A Vision of Battlements, was rejected numerous times for being too Joycean, struggled to reconcile his own education in the Leavisite method with the new neo-Victorianism. ‘The canon of English literature which [the Leavisites] adhered to was the one I had discovered alone while my mother picked her teeth and belched’,107 he wrote. Great literature was what lifted Burgess out of the Moss Side slum of his childhood and into the world of letters. To think that his great role model, Joyce, was now to be confined to the history books, filled him with a sense of horror and despair.108 Rather than move forward, Burgess saw a generation of writers raised on the great tradition turning back in pursuit of former glories. For Burgess, they had very much missed the point. It was into this uncertain atmosphere that B. S. Johnson went as he enrolled at King’s College London. Johnson’s route to university was more

Walter Allen, The English Novel (London: Pelican, 1954) / Arnold Kettle, An Introduction to the English Novel (London: Hutchinson’s, 1954) / John W. Aldridge (ed.), Critiques and Essays on Modern Fiction, 1920–1951 (New York: Ronald Press Co., 1952). 104 Michael Bell, F.R. Leavis (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 28. 105 B. S. Johnson, Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs (London: Hutchinson, 1973), p. 19. 106 Tracy Hargreaves and Alice Ferrebe, ‘Introduction: Literature of the 1950s and 1960s.’ In Yearbook of English Studies, no. 42 (2012): 12. 107 Burgess 1984, p. 173. 108 Anthony Burgess, ‘Ulysses: How Well Has It Worn?’ In Urgent Copy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), p. 84. 103

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laborious than that of the grammar school children. After school he took a course in accountancy, working for just over a year in bookkeeping. After gathering enough savings for a room of his own, he undertook a year-long foundation course that provided the minimum requirements for university entry. His days he spent writing poetry, and his evenings attending plays. He was particularly taken by the theatre of Beckett, Eliot and Pinter.109 Johnson’s enthusiasm and maturity would give him the required edge while passing his entrance exams and King’s College, where the study of English literature had first been introduced in 1828, accepted him onto its degree course in 1956.110 King’s literature course was predominantly made up of female students and focused largely on modern writers, both of which, Johnson remarked, suited him perfectly.111 As part of the first generation of students coming to university from nontraditional backgrounds, what Michael Young would come to call the ‘new meritocracy’, Johnson found himself butting heads with both faculty and fellow students throughout his academic career.112 Only two years earlier, Kingsley Amis had scored a huge success with Lucky Jim, a novel satirizing the grammar school boys.113 Now universities were admitting even those who had failed to get into grammar school. Richard Hoggart described these scholarship students as ‘anxious and uprooted – recognised primarily by their lack of poise, by their uncertainty’.114 He found in them a simultaneous desire to appear intellectual and a desire to smash down their pretentious peers.115 Johnson certainly exhibited this spikiness, but his extra years in the world of work had given him an external confidence. All the anxiety that Hoggart attributes to the scholarship student were channelled into Johnson’s burgeoning class consciousness. He wrote in his notebooks about how his time at university was ‘a unique experience which must NOT be generalised about, at all costs’.116 He believed himself to be a representative of the working class; a class he also resented for rejecting him.117 He had little time for the more abstract discussions that Leavisite scholarship aspired to. Words like ‘truth’, ‘soul’, ‘values’ or ‘the spirit’ would enrage him with their lack of specificity. He hated the tendency to abstraction, which he saw as middle-class navel gazing. He hated thought experiments and arguing for viewpoints that weren’t his own. All of this he saw as lying. He

B. S. Johnson. Notebook 1. Held in the British Library. [March 1954]. Alan Bacon, ‘English Literature becomes a University Subject: King’s College London as Pioneer.’ Victorian Studies, 29, no. 4 (Summer 1986): 600. 111 Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant (London: Picador, 2004), p. 74. 112 Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy (London: Transaction Publishers, 1958). 113 Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (London: Gollancz, 1954), pp. 204–5. 114 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Penguin, 1957), p. 291. 115 Hoggart 1957, p. 302. 116 B. S. Johnson, Notebook 5. Held in the British Library. [1959]. 117 B. S. Johnson, Notebook 4. Held in the British Library. [1959]. 109 110

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was also madly defensive of writers he liked. At a performance of Pinter’s The Caretaker, Johnson overheard an audience member comment, ‘oh no, another kitchen sink’, and proceeded to bawl them out of the theatre.118 Johnson’s bullishness may not have benefitted his grades (he left King’s with a 2:2), but it did make him an excellent figurehead for the university’s literary magazine, Lucifer. Johnson was elected as editor of the magazine within his first year, and immediately expanded its remit to include creative writing as well as essays and reviews.119 It was on the magazine that Johnson first honed his craft as a journalistic writer and an editor of other’s writing. It also saw him working closely with the university printers. He demanded to know the whole working of the printer mechanism and marvelled at the process of hot metal typesetting, inking and pressing which transformed his manuscript into a professional quality magazine. It was editing Lucifer that first brought Johnson into contact with Maureen Duffy. Duffy was a student in the same academic year as Johnson, also studying literature and also very serious about publishing her own writing. She had been raised in the East End, daughter of a single mother and an Irish absentee father. She had been one of the very last children to be evacuated and recalled the war with a feeling of abandonment. She was an eternal outsider at school120 and one of only two in her class to advance to university.121 Like Johnson, she refused to lose her working-class accent, and, also like Johnson, she believed that good writing needed to be ‘concrete and evocative’ over all else.122 The two did not so much become friends as compatriots. They shared a bolshie disdain for the ‘establishment’ and a passion for the modernists who it was now fashionable to disparage. They also both lusted after the same women on their course, and were equally awkward when it came to pursuing them. One of the short stories that Duffy published in Lucifer proved particularly popular with readers. It was called ‘That’s How it Was’ and described the working-class community of her childhood. Normally a writer of luscious symbolism and fantasy, this story instead utilized a ‘kind of neo-Jacobean’ prose based on precise observation and an authentic recreation of speech.123 A section of the story focused on her wartime childhood: No-one ever used the word ‘cripple’ on Cretia. She had a double dislocated hip and that was all. It was no different from having brown hair. Sometimes the other kids got a bit cross when she was slow, but

Ibid. Coe 2004, p. 82. 120 Maureen Duffy, That’s How It Was (London: Virago, 2002), p. viii. 121 Duffy 2002, p. 210. 122 Ibid., p. vi. 123 Ibid. 118 119

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no-one ever laughed or called her names. Mr Smith had kept a toy shop in London, which had been bombed, and the stock that was left had been passed on to Cretia. Most of all I envied her army of lead soldiers. I spent all my pocket money, threepence a week, two weeks to a soldier, but I could never catch up. Her prize piece was Kingy, who was bigger than the rest, made of some kind of plastic wood, and led the army on his charger. He could even come off and sit on a throne. Day after day, we sat in the shed at the back of Mrs Avery’s and waged miniature war.124 The clarity of the writing is exemplary, although it defied much of what passed for ‘good writing’ during the 1950s. Duffy writes in a loose grammar that relies on informal comma usage and a limited vocabulary. The result recreates the associative mentality of a child. Childlike too is the narrative voice’s innocence regarding the war which Duffy draws attention to only through the mutilated child, the bombed toyshop and the toy soldier game. Much of what the experimental writers of the 1960s aimed to do is here in miniature. Duffy’s prose is direct, it aims to grab and hold the reader, giving them very little leeway in terms of interpreting the content of the prose. She is, however, also reliant upon her readers comprehending the implications of this prose, which far transcend the scene described. In this case, we see children who are damaged by the war, nevertheless recreating it, internalizing the brutality of the conflict in their pursuit of power, as personified in Kingy the king. The success of this story encouraged Duffy to expand it to novel length. It was published in 1962 as That’s How it Was and was, by that point, received as social realism. It was considered an emulation of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) or Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958), despite the fact that it was first conceived as just one of a variety of experiments that Duffy was undertaking. On the morning of 10 April 1959, three months from Johnson and Duffy’s final exams, a letter fell into the Lucifer in-tray. It was one of many addressed to the magazine by a young poet, Zulfikar Ghose.125 Ghose was a student at Keele, had read Lucifer, been warned about its fiery editor and sought to propose a collaboration on a new magazine: Universities Poetry. UP, as he called it, would provide a forum for young poets from across the country and would give the Oxbridge toffs, who currently dominated the scene, a run for their money. It would foster, he wrote, ‘a new movement in poetry’.126 Johnson replied with enthusiasm. He had always seen himself as a poet, despite everyone preferring his prose, and he had a theory that he was desperate to discuss. He believed that the concept of poetic metre,

Ibid., p. 73. Coe 2004, p. 82. 126 Letter from Zulfikar Ghose to B. S. Johnson, 9 April 1959. Held in the British Library. 124 125

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measuring poetic lines by beats, was old fashioned and could be replaced by a numerical system based upon syllables. Ghose, diplomatically, neglected to comment upon this system in his reply, instead inviting Johnson and the Lucifer team down to an evening of readings by Alan Sillitoe, Richard Kell and himself.127 Impressed, Johnson, Duffy and a handful of other King’s writers headed out into the London night. Zulfikar Ghose had already published a number of poems in leading journals by the time he proposed setting up Universities Poetry. He had the confidence of a survivor and the militancy of an outsider. He came from a mixed family in Sialkot, part of the Indian subcontinent, half-Muslim and half-Hindu, as his hybrid name suggested.128 In 1947, when he was only twelve years old, the British Empire pulled out of the subcontinent, partitioning it into the two nations of Pakistan and India. The minor religious squabbles that Ghose had experienced as a child now turned murderous, with thousands of Muslims evacuating India for Pakistan and thousands of Hindus evacuating Pakistan for India. Bloody conflicts between the two communities resulted in over a million deaths. Moved to a new school in India, Ghose excelled at cricket and fell in love with Shakespeare. Having watched Olivier at a local cinema, and the swashbuckling Errol Flynn, Ghose and his friends set up their own theatre company. ‘The more films we saw, the more elaborate our act became’,129 he later wrote. Not quite being good enough to become a professional cricketer, the theatre became Ghose’s route out of India. Independence had been difficult, and over a decade later there was still considerable religious tension and incipient problems with corruption. Having won a place studying English literature at Keele, Ghose boarded a plane for London in 1956. He became one of the new ‘nativealiens’, subjects of the former colonies who were encouraged to come to Britain to remedy the labour shortage. As a university student, he would not suffer the racism that many of his fellow immigrants would, but England still remained a difficult place for the non-white, and the increase in immigration over the next decade made these tensions far worse. It was fellow student and poet Anthony Smith who had acted as Ghose’s closest literary companion so far. Smith desired a middle way between the provincialism of the English Movement poets and the mad excesses of the American Beats. Arriving at the poetry night, Johnson took a guarded liking to Smith, leaving Duffy and the other Lucifer writers behind to talk about UP. Smith would be the moderate voice on the editorial team and Johnson the workhorse. It would be Smith who lifted the ban on submissions from Oxbridge and Johnson who railed against him. Duffy was content to let the

Letter from Zulfikar Ghose to B. S. Johnson, 25 April 1959. Held in the British Library. Zulfikar Ghose, Confessions of a Native-Alien (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 6. 129 Ghose 1965, p. 40. 127 128

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masculine posturing go on without her. She had decided to try her hand at theatre, and far preferred prose to poetry anyway, so would not get involved in UP. Eva Figes, who had graduated from Queen Mary three years earlier and had lost all traces of her German accent, was also present at the reading. She had taken up an administrative position at the publisher Heinemann’s and attended readings partly for the pleasure of them and partly out of professional obligation. She wore a black turtleneck, smoked from a long cigarette holder and smiled seldom, aspiring to be taken for a Left Bank existentialist.130 The atmosphere buzzed with a quiet excitement. Sillitoe, it was well known, was in the process of turning his bestselling novel into a feature film. He was part of the ‘New Wave’. Before Sillitoe, however, there were the others to get through. Zulfikar Ghose was announced as the opening act. Calmly and quietly he walked to the stage. His childhood melodrama was long behind him, but he still had a gift for drawing an audience’s attention. His first poem, he announced, was about his first ever plane flight. As he took off, he watched his continent disappear below him into a patchwork of green and gold. As Ghose read, Johnson was captivated. Here was a poet unafraid of complex imagery, but unburdened by sentiment or the obscurity of allusion. His final stanza carefully built to a transcendent cadenza topped with a half-ironic rhyming couplet: Give me the purer air. The flat earth is awful. Give me height, height, with its cold perspective Of forms of the earth. Senseless now to dive Like eagles to the earth’s sparrows. The jungle’s Beasts are unseen from here. From these heights, One can almost believe in human rights.131 The applause was generous, but B. S. Johnson’s was far louder than all the rest. He stood up and raised his hands. Here, he thought, was something. Here was something you could sink your teeth into.

Figes 2004, p. 130. Zulfikar Ghose, ‘Flying Over India.’ In 50 Poems: 30 Selected, 20 New (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 3. 130 131

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2 1960 to 1963

1960: A new decade In the late 1950s, two terms came to sum up the state of the recovering nation: ‘establishment’ and ‘meritocracy’.1 The first, coined by A. J. P. Taylor, signified a network of privilege and power that sat at the heart of all British institutions. Public schools, elite universities and London clubs were the sole recruiting pools for the civil service, BBC, high finance and corporate boardrooms, according to Taylor. The sons of civil servants, broadcasters, financiers and businessmen were then, in a nasty bit of circular reasoning, considered the only children with sufficient breeding to attend the public schools and elite universities. Against this establishment were the forces of the new meritocracy: grammar school boys, graduates from redbrick universities, artists, celebrities and renegade entrepreneurs. Michael Young’s satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958), depicted the young meritocrats defeating the elderly establishment, their progressive attitudes trumping conservatism, before the relics of Victorian Britain are washed away in a new wave of science and technology.2 Such arguments tended towards caricature. Contained within them, however, was a certain poetical truth, especially regarding the literary establishment. The 1950s had been an age of austerity and consensus. The war had placed the publishing industry on hiatus for a significant time such that, once the printing presses started rolling again, there was some confusion as to what literary tastes and attitudes should be. Writers like C. P. Snow, Angus Wilson, and Kingsley Amis trod a path that Rubin Rabinovitz would later describe as ‘neo-Victorian’, realist novels about moral conflicts, usually involving an institution of the establishment such as universities or government

1 2

Peter Hennessy, Establishment and Meritocracy (London: Haus, 2014), p. 4. Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy (London: Transaction, 1958.

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departments.3 Snow in particular stands out as a writer of his time. Novels like The Masters (1951), The New Men (1954) and Corridors of Power (1964) feature university dons and civil servants competing for influence, committees as their battlegrounds. Snow’s focus on morality and personality (preferably, for the civil service man, a cultivated lack of one) leaves even his struggles in Whitehall devoid of political elements. His characters are neither conservative nor liberal, Labour nor Tory. Contemporary critics praised his realism and the maturity of his narratives. One, Jerome Thale, suggested that Snow is ‘neither a new version of the liberal ideology nor one of its competitors but something fundamentally non-ideological – a tolerant, knowledgeable, worldly pragmatist’.4 Snow, chiefly among Rabinovitz’s ‘neo-Victorians’, is a writer perfectly suited to his time and place. From within, the network of committees and pragmatists he depicted was known as ‘consensus government’, from without it was ‘the establishment’. Yet, by 1960, a showdown between the establishment and the meritocratic youth was becoming inevitable. A group of writers loosely dubbed the Angry Young Men were straining at the edges of realism, combining neo-Victorian presentation with stories of working-class rebellion. On the stage John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) shocked critics with its depiction of the furious but directionless Jimmy Porter, while Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958) challenged the moral norms of the era with its depiction of interracial love, single motherhood and homosexuality. In the novel, Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners (1959) provoked similar controversies and clearly demonstrated the potential of angry realism to reach a new, young audience. To establishment critics, the new trend became known as ‘kitchen sink realism’, presumably as opposed to the ‘management committee realism’ preferred by Snow and his fellows. Both forms were nevertheless held the same underlying set of presumptions, however. Both realisms implicitly made the case that narratives should focus on social life, be concerned with morality, and be written in accessible prose. Moral preoccupations also took a legislative form. Two moral panics in the post-war years (one over the short-lived pulp fiction craze, another over American comics) prompted the creation of obscenity laws. The 1955 Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act initially addressed only material that was likely to appeal to minors, but in practice extended to any printed matter that was deemed a ‘corrupting influence’.5 By 1959, the act was officially extended into the Obscene Publications Act. The caveat regarding children was dropped, and prosecution was ruled possible

Rubin Rabinovitz, The Reaction Against Experiment in the English Novel 1950-1960 (London: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 11. 4 Jerome Thale, C.P. Snow (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1964), p. 18. 5 Paul O’Higgins, Censorship in Britain (London: Nelson, 1972), p. 26. 3

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for publishing any material ‘tending to deprave and corrupt’.6 The wording of the act was worryingly loose.7 It may be that Britain had come to expect government censorship after the war and the ubiquity of the Official Secrets Act, or perhaps the consensus era had created an implicit trust in lawmakers about civil servants’ use of restraint. Either way, this loose wording would be the pivot around which public understanding of literature would change. Literature as a public service would be faced with literature as transgressive art. Notably, the fight would take place over a modernist novel. D. H. Lawrence had released Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1928, using a private Italian publisher in order to avoid editorial interference. The affair between Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper explored the physical and spiritual aspects of love, the dependence of one upon the other, boundaries of class, expectations of gender and also used the words ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’. As such, it presented a categorical challenge: its depiction of sex may have placed it alongside John Cleland’s Fanny Hill as an example of highbrow porn, yet its thematic content is thoroughly in keeping with the rest of Lawrence’s oeuvre. Lawrence had since become one of the recognized names of high modernism. As much as the neo-Victorians might have considered literary experiment to be decadent, self-indulgent and ultimately anti-democratic, in the universities, the Leavisites had enshrined the likes of Joyce, Woolf, Eliot and Lawrence as the last phase of the great tradition.8 Lawrence was, as a result, now on reading lists in nearly every university in the country, and was even read in some schools. Every library featured a copy of Women in Love or Sons and Lovers next to its Dickenses and Austens. When Penguin announced in May 1960 that they intended to publish 200,000 copies of the banned book, the contradictions of the new moralism finally turned in on themselves. Penguin, a company which had become a post-war institution by publishing recognized English classics at affordable prices, were selling the book as part of The Complete Works: a scholarly undertaking if ever there was one. Helen Gardner, the commissioning editor of the series, defended Lawrence as ‘a writer of genius and complete integrity’.9 Lawrence was recognized as a dead genius, a great moral writer, and part of the great tradition and so on and for the very same reasons that he was also considered to deprave and corrupt. The Chatterley Trial of November 1960 was something of a farce, but it was an important farce. Mervyn-Griffiths Jones, the council for the prosecution, addressed the jury with the now infamous question, ‘is it a book you would

Ibid., p. 24. Donald Thomas, Freedom’s Frontier (London: John Murray, 2008), p. 213. 8 Rabinovitz 1967, p. 5. 9 Alan Travis, Bound and Gagged: A Secret History of Censorship in Britain (London: Profile Books, 2000). 6 7

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wish your wife or servants to read?’,10 and proceeded to read out the dirty bits in question with the prurient tones of a bad Malvolio. Meanwhile, the defence called seventy expert witnesses ranging from novelist E. M. Forster to poet Cecil Day Lewis to critic Richard Hoggart. Both Anthony Burgess and Christine Brooke-Rose were included on the longlist. Only thirty-five ended up being called to the stand, the judge conceding that these were more than enough to prove the defence’s case for the book’s literary merit.11 It took only three hours for the jury to return a verdict of not guilty, and within a year Penguin had sold over two million copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.12 Anthony Burgess wrote of the judgement that it proved publishers to be ‘better qualified for the exercise of censorship than jurymen who know nothing of literature’.13 Perhaps a little harsh on the jury, his overall conclusion was nevertheless widely held, that governments should not be in the business of policing moral choices, but only of protecting the public from harm. The publisher, for Burgess, was ultimately responsible for their list, and the judgement of morality should, like the judgement of quality and saleability, fall to commissioning editors. What Burgess hadn’t predicted was what this would open the door to. In fact, before the trial had even come to court, the assault on the old establishment had begun.14 A satire boom followed the Chatterley Trial decision, with this one defeat for the forces of moral conservatism emboldening others. The Edinburgh Festival of 1960 launched Beyond the Fringe, a wildly popular satirical review. The satirical magazine Private Eye, launched in 1961, filled cover to cover with material that pushed the boundaries of what could be considered libellous or corrupting. Peter Cook set up a club, the Establishment, which hosted satirical reviews the way that rock’n’roll venues hosted bands. Satirical comedy provided a crossing point by which a working-class popular culture formed around bands could meet with the bohemian world of New Wave cinema and experimental theatre. Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War (1963) drew on the satirical review for its mock-cabaret form, and the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (1964) relied on satirical attitudes for its unprecedented success.15 The BBFC, Britain’s film censorship board, officially liberalized its guidelines in 1961.16 The angry literature and drama of the late 1950s could then find a place on the big screen: A Taste of Honey (1961) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) forming part of the

Ibid. Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Anthony Burgess, ‘What Is Pornography?’ In Urgent Copy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), p. 257. 14 Anthony Aldgate, Censorship and the Permissive Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 147. 15 George Melly, Revolt into Style (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 77. 16 Aldgate 1995, p. 147. 10 11

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cinematic landscape.17 The final nail in the establishment’s coffin came in 1962 when the BBC, voice of the establishment, launched its own primetime satirical review, That Was the Week that Was. It was clear from this point that the 1960s were going to be an iconoclastic decade.18 Fresh from university, Maureen Duffy found the new satirical scene captivating. She had not been convinced by the circle forming around Universities Poetry. The group of young men, desperate to be taken seriously in their artistic rebellion, seemed to her rather anachronistic. Satire had shown that you could be clever and also be popular, while the runaway success of Shelagh Delaney showed that young working-class women could succeed in this game too. Duffy was sending her own novel of working-class life, That’s How It Was, out to publishers, and it would eventually appear in print in 1962. In the meantime, she would find a home in fringe theatre. Her plays combined satirical elements with a keen insight into workingclass life and the oft-thwarted aspirations of the young.19 Her play The Lay Off (1962), about youth unemployment, was awarded the Guildhall Drama Prize, establishing her as one of the new young writers to watch. With success came agents, magazine interviews and literary parties. It was at one of these parties that she first met an Irish writer, slightly older than she was, who introduced herself as Brigid Brophy. Brophy’s first success had been nearly a decade earlier with Hackenfeller’s Ape (1953). A campus novel featuring an undergraduate drawn away from his studies to commune with a fellow simian in a nearby zoo, the novel was highly praised for its stylish prose and original premise.20 It was also a testament to Brophy’s passion for animal rights, a passion Duffy shared. After being impressed by Brophy on first meeting her, Duffy borrowed a copy of Hackenfeller’s Ape and read it in one sitting. She was impressed by the depth of feeling it depicted between human and ape, and was taken by its linguistic sophistication. Her own plays and novels had aspired to the authentic representation of everyday speech. Brophy, by contrast, elevated speech to an art form. She was not a modernist. Not opaque or difficult. She had turned her cultivated vocabulary into a tool for wit and knowing humour. The young Maureen Duffy was very taken by her. Nearly a decade of seeing the London literary world from within had left Brophy sarcastic and disillusioned.21 Like Christine Brooke-Rose, she

Although the film of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was released in 1960, its major distribution occurred in 1961, the same year as A Taste of Honey. 18 Well, not exactly everyone. Jeff Nuttall later wrote of the satire boom that it ‘had nothing to say except that the public school / Oxbridge clan could now use ‘satire’ as an alternative career to the church, the army and broadcasting’ – Bomb Culture (London: Paladin, 1970), p. 107. 19 Maureen Duffy, The Single Eye (London: Hutchinson, 1964), p. iii. 20 D. J. Enright, ‘A Writer’s Fancy’. London Review of Books, 2, no. 3 (1980): 15. 21 Leslie Dock, ‘An Interview with Brigid Brophy’. Contemporary Literature, 17, no. 2 (1967): 152. 17

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wrote many reviews, and almost all of them were in some way critical. Unlike Brooke-Rose, however, who was often dismissive, Brophy turned negative critique into its own art form. She derived perverse pleasure from a perfectly worded sting, and cultivated a range of provocative opinions about classic writers who she thought to be terrible, including Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë.22 Such iconoclasm impressed Duffy, who had heard nothing so intellectually shocking in the satirical reviews. She found in Brophy a guide to the London literary world and a font of worldweary wisdom. Brophy, for her part, found the energy and enthusiasm of Duffy to be invigorating. The complacent atmosphere of the 1950s literary establishment may have moulded her into a sophisticate, but, in doing so, her creative spark had left her along with her social innocence. Duffy, a gauche young proletarian lesbian, had all the energy of youth and a foot in the popular world of satirical drama. In the following three years, Brigid Brophy wrote three new novels – Flesh (1962), The Finishing Touch (1963) and The Snow Ball (1964) – each with a satirical eye and a playful attitude to gender and homosexuality. Duffy also turned her experiences of literary London into a new novel, one that moved away from her established social realism and towards something more sophisticated and hip. The Single Eye (1963) is the story of a young male photographer with all of the talent of David Bailey but none of the celebrity connections. Out of touch in London, he heads to Italy to become a paparazzo, falls in love, then returns to teach in a London comprehensive school. Full of anti-establishment joie de vivre, he gets his students to photograph scenes from their own working-class lives and celebrates them as art. At the pupil’s end of year show, it becomes clear that the newspapers have been tipped off and turn up to question the photographer: ‘Are you a socialist, Mr Fannon?’ the reporter asked. I saw him mentally licking his pencil. ‘It’s a question of significance, not politics. This is an artistic statement, not a party one.’ ‘You don’t encourage the students to see things in a particular way?’ ‘Only in their own way.’ ‘But you selected the pictures?’ I saw I was caught.23

She would eventually publish these opinions alongside those of her friends Charles Osborne and Michael Levey in 50 Works of British and American Literature We Could Do Without (1967). Critics, ironically, tore the book to shreds, cf/ Martin Seymour-Smith, ‘One Awful Example We Could Do Without’. Spectator. 26 May 1967, p. 13. 23 Duffy 1963, p. 149. 22

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The photo​graph​er-cu​m-com​prehe​nsive​-scho​ol-te​acher​ is left at the end of the book in an uncertain limbo. Potentially a celebrity in his own right, or perhaps just another thwarted young creative; the reader is left to decide. One can tell from Fannon’s tone and his claims to non-party politics that he is part of the New Wave, the knowing, satirical and anti-establishment youth. And yet his globetrotting, and his claims to photography being a new, popular art form also tie him to the high-class popular culture of the era. London was not yet the ‘swinging’ capital of cool and commerce, but The Single Eye was already capturing an attitude and atmosphere that would come to define the new, classless and moneyed youth. It may be that her protagonist’s day job, comprehensive school teacher, was inspired by the fate of her old Universities Poetry friends. The poetry world had not been immediately receptive to what B. S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose had to say. The decision for their journal to reject all poems from Oxbridge students had been walked back after a disappointing number of submissions were received. As a result, Universities Poetry had been forced into a position where it not only published the Oxbridge student poets who the editorial team had set up the journal to get away from, but along with them came the current Oxbridge fad for the Movement poets.24 The poetry of Larkin, Wain and Thom Gunn was, for Ghose especially, hopelessly parochial, lacking in romanticism and horribly dull. It was also the most fashionable style, especially among Oxford’s undergrads, where Larkin, Wain and the rest, had first met.25 ‘The secret aim’ of Universities Poetry, Ghose later admitted, was to prove that ‘we were far superior to the horrid bores of the Movement’.26 But the recognition of their talents, although it was coming, was coming only slowly and partially. The journal was set to run at a loss for the foreseeable future, and the young editors were in need of work. Johnson, resentful about the slow uptake for Universities Poetry, did not hang around for long. After graduating in 1959, he took a trip to Dublin, the birthplace of his heroes James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Hitchhiking to Holyhead, Johnson was given a lift by the owner of a Welsh holiday retreat. He offered Johnson a job working behind the bar at his resort. Johnson would take him up on his offer on the return journey. He would spend the summer serving drunken holidaymakers, businessmen he described as ‘hooray Henrys’, falling in love, and generally becoming inspired.27 In contrast, returning to London brought rejection letters, bills and the grim realities of post-university life. There was the option of returning

Randall Stevenson, The Last of England? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Zachary Leader, ‘Introduction’, in The Movement Reconsidered, ed. Zachary Leader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xxi. 26 Zulfikar Ghose, ‘Bryan’. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5, no. 2 (1984): 23. 27 B. S. Johnson, Travelling People [1963] (London: Corgi, 1964), p. 135. 24 25

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to bookkeeping, but that seemed too much of a step back. He had left accountancy work to study literature; it seemed a waste to return, especially now that he had developed a burning passion for the literary. His friend, and subject of a later novel, Tony Tillinghast, had continued on to postgraduate study, but Johnson had never really been willing to play the academic game.28 He had very firm ideas about what was good and what wasn’t. He thoroughly rejected the view that universities fostered good writers, and when Ghose suggested that Universities Poetry hold a conference to debate the issue Johnson dismissed it out of hand.29 Feeling his own education to be complete, Johnson turned to supply teaching as a way to make ends meet. In 1960, he enrolled on Surrey County Council’s supply teacher registry and took his first jobs teaching maths and religious instruction to teenagers at a secondary modern. His teaching would later expand to include basketmaking, current affairs and, finally, English.30 Zulfikar Ghose had not yet renounced his claim to be the next great English language poet, and by 1960 he was finally starting to get his work into national publications. The Spectator took some of the shorter poems, and The Listener surprised him by taking a more difficult poem ‘First Nephew’. In his excitement he wrote a consoling letter to his friend Johnson, imploring him to keep submitting poems, writing, ‘I am now convinced that editors are pretty favourable to reasonably good small poems by unknown poets like us; and that they reject reasonably good long poems because they are long [rather] than on literary grounds’.31 He had also recently met a Brazilian poet, Helena de la Fontaine, whose work and person he admired and who, in turn, admired him. They would soon move in together, Ghose writing to Johnson that children might soon be on the way.32 All this enthusiasm sustained Ghose as a penniless full-time writer. By 1963, however, he too would crack under the financial strain and join Johnson working the comprehensive school beat. A supply teacher in the Greater London area, Ghose at least had the honour of teaching English immediately rather than working his way up to it through arts and crafts. What sustained Johnson and Ghose in these meagre years was the humour of the new satire boom. They went to see Beyond the Fringe during its sellout run at the Fortune Theatre in London. The schoolboy humour, very close to their own despite their artistic pretences, allowed them to approach their penniless existence with a caustic wit and a sense of the absurd. Johnson filled his notebook with overheard jokes, satirical observations and ideas

B. S. Johnson, The Unfortunates [1969] (London: Picador, 2004). Letter from Zulfikar Ghose to B. S. Johnson, 14 December 1961. Held in the British Library. 30 Coe, 2004, p. 92. 31 Letter from Zulfikar Ghose to B. S. Johnson, 7 December 1959. Held in the British Library. 32 Letter from Zulfikar Ghose to B. S. Johnson, 7 March 1963. Held in the British Library. 28 29

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for comedy sketches. A bon mot – ‘I may be square, but I’ve been around’33 – sits just a few pages from a cod-music hall song about the buy-out of the London newspaper, the News Chronicle: Come all you working journalists And listen to my story: It’s of a chocolate millionaire A big land owning Tory.34 Johnson’s humour was a little too anti-establishment, compared with the cheeky iconoclasm of the Fringe boys or TW3’s David Frost. Johnson’s resentments weren’t merely against establishment complacency but against the very existence of an establishment class. His satirical imagery was also notably more violent than what was on offer down at Peter Cook’s Establishment Club, including a sketch about a ‘Father Joe type who goes mad and starts blowing up slums’.35 Bombing as a punchline would stick with Johnson, eventually finding a home in the TV play ‘What is the Right Thing and am I Doing it?’36 and the novel Christie Malry’s Own DoubleEntry (1973). Johnson’s in-depth knowledge of Jonathan Swift and Tobias Smollett’s scatological satires, plus his adoration of Samuel Johnson’s brusque witticisms, no doubt justified these contraventions of polite taste, at least in his own stubborn mind. Ghose, by contrast, was far less violent in his humour, although he was equally infatuated by the new satire craze. He wrote a series of sketches which he sent to Johnson in letter format, including one satirizing the Soviet leadership in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis. The characters Kitchenev and Mouse-tongue have their phones tapped by the KGB. Discovering this, they engage on a desperate bid to out-criticize each other using the Marxist jargon of the era: You’re not a Marxist-Leninist, [Kitchenev argues], but a neo-Imperialist Revisionist Reactionist Divisionist Terrorist Pugilist Pessimist Abolitionist Nihilist Stalinist Defectionist Sentimentalist Rationalist Sadist.37 The KGB spies then turn out to be CIA agents in disguise, turning the antiSoviet satire against the Americans too.

B. S. Johnson, Notebook 5, dated 3 June 1960, p. 74. Ibid., p. 66. 35 Ibid., p. 169. 36 Jonathan Coe, Philip Tew and Julia Jordan (eds.), Well Done God!: Selected Prose and Drama of B.S. Johnson (London: Picador, 2013), p. 255. 37 Letter from Zulfikar Ghose to B. S. Johnson, 10 January 1963. Held in the British Library. 33 34

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The two writers, finding each other’s material funny, decided in 1960 to collaborate on a satirical novel. The manuscript, entitled Prepar-a-Tory, was to be a satire of elite preparatory schools and the establishment class they produced. The humour was that of the new satirical reviews, albeit with a more partisan flavour. A typical joke runs: A recent publication by the Arts Council has come to my hands, in which I read that the Arts Council receives a state grant equivalent to what it costs to build four miles of the M1 motorway. It just goes to show why we have bad roads.38 The joke is typical in that it doesn’t quite work. Is the joke at the expense of the Arts Council or the roads? With correct delivery the line would be parsable and, with an enthusiastic crowd, would probably get a lot of laughs. In its written form, however, this satire doesn’t quite work so effectively. Popular satire was a live form, not one that transferred well to paper. Publishers shied away from it. Some pointed out that written satire of this sort had none of the immediacy and freshness of its equivalents on stage. Other publishers compared the book unfavourably with the more sophisticated satirical novels of the late 1950s: the typical fayre of Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy and Muriel Spark.39 The novel was never published and probably never will be. Johnson and Ghose would continue in their respective poverties for a while, more contemptuous of the literary establishment than ever. Meanwhile, Christine Brooke-Rose was tiring of the satirical form. Her first two novels, Languages of Love (1957) and The Sycamore Tree (1958) met with reasonable acclaim and her PhD thesis, in which she proposed a classification system for poetic metaphor, had also been released commercially as A Grammar of Metaphor (1958). Neither the academic nor the literary worlds appealed to her, however. Drawing an income from a regular reviewing job, she had time to try something new. She would combine the two practices of research and creative writing in the creation of a biographical novel. The subject was to be her father, Alfred Northbrook Rose, who was a dissolute intellectual adventurer whose first arrest occurred in 1897 at the age of twenty-two. He had stolen twenty-two books from a church canon in Brighton. He then jumped directly on a train to London, fencing them to booksellers in Covent Garden on the very same morning like a latter-day Dick Turpin.40 The case was stranger than this, however, and as Brooke-Rose tracked down old friends and colleagues of her father, she

Zulfikar Ghose and B. S. Johnson, Prepar-a-Tory. Manuscript, 1960. Held in Harry Ransom Centre, Austin TX, p. 47. 39 Vanessa Guignery (ed.), The B.S. Johnson – Zulfikar Ghose Correspondence (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), p. 109. 40 The Times, 15 February 1980, p. 10. 38

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discovered this simple story of theft to be part of a wider ring of intrigues, sabotage and church politics. Her father, some said, had been acting as an agent provocateur set on exposing ‘Romanist activities’ at the heart of the Church of England.41 ‘Narration’, Sarah Birch writes, ‘is the original and persistent obstacle to truth because the process of constructing a story inevitably leads to falsification.’42 In The Dear Deceit, Brooke-Rose shows herself to be obsessed with stories and their inversion. It is arranged as a reverse bildungsroman, starting at the end of the protagonist’s life and then moving backwards chronologically, ending with him as a young child. Alfred Northcliff Rose, renamed Alfred Northbrook Hayley, is seen first defacing his company accounts with religious ‘notes to posterity’43 before burning them. We are then taken back to his days intriguing within the church, his student days pretending to be a postgrad scholar and then finally his youth, where he is shown as a boy prone to fantasy and acting out.44 The final image of the book is lifted verbatim from a letter Brooke-Rose received from one of her father’s childhood friends. Ninety years old at time of writing, he told her the following story: There is another amusing incident, I remember, and I hope you won’t be shocked. . . . Quite a lot of girls and boys were playing close to the church yard gates and near the house in which the Roses lived, when our attention was drawn to the bedroom window. Here was Northcliff, standing in the windowsill with his nightshirt pulled right up to his chin and showing all he had got (which was considerable) to the laughing crowd below . . . we all had a good laugh. I can see him now, he was a very handsome youngster and it was indeed a living statue, framed in the window.45 The ‘living statue’ image, along with its obscene context, work well as a conclusion to Brooke-Rose’s biography-in-reverse. Rather than end on the paranoid, washed-up and friendless Alfred, Brooke-Rose gives us an ironical-heroic vision of youth defying social convention. The timelessness of the ‘statue’, the vitality suggested in ‘living’, provide a playful resolution that shows Alfred’s misadventures in a Quixotic light. Concerns were raised about The Dear Deceit by Brooke-Rose’s publishers at Secker and Warburg, but it was not its subject matter or unusual narrative

Letter from Peter Anson to George Chambers, 3 September 1957. Held in the Brooke-Rose Archives at the Harry Ransom Centre. 42 Birch, 2002, p. 36. 43 Christine Brooke-Rose, The Dear Deceit (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960), p. 31. 44 Ibid., p. 295. 45 Letter from Francis G. Walton to Christine Brooke-Rose, 28 August 1957. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre. 41

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structure that irked them. It was her inclusion of real people. Literature, she argued, must always in some way be inspired by life. Literary historians make their living by such suppositions, after all. Plus, Alfred Northcliff Rose was dead and left no descendants other than Christine and her sister.46 Still, her publishers replied, if there were any individuals still living who knew her father, they could theoretically sue for libel if they recognized themselves in the book. Under British law, intention was not considered an important factor when judging a libel case, so a complainant could potentially see themselves in a minor character, sue, and have the book withdrawn, even if the character was not based on them at all. It merely had to be mistakable for them. Brooke-Rose was well aware of this. After all, a libel suit based on coincidence was at the heart of her 1958 novel The Sycamore Tree. To placate her editors, she wrote out a long list of the novel’s characters, each with their own real-life inspiration and a note as to whether or not that person would be likely to sue: Muriel: real, story true, real name Muriel Rose. Now dead. The mother: everything real throughout novel, ditto the Bertrand family is the Brooke family. Vernon Manning = Rev. George Chambers, wld recognise himself, but wouldn’t mind. Miss Florence Moss comes out very well in novel, wouldn’t mind at all gave me lots of information.47 The final touch was the excision of her father’s childhood address. The house where Alfred Northcliff Rose grew up, and the window from which he displayed his privates, was in fact Shakespeare’s birthplace. Brooke-Rose’s grandmother had been the custodian and was a respected Shakespeare scholar in her own right; her work mostly involved sifting fact from fiction regarding the authorship of his works. She strongly denied the claim that Francis Bacon was the ‘real Shakespeare’.48 Although it might have pushed the believability of the story a little too far, having Alfred the storyteller grow up in Shakespeare’s house, being punished by a mother obsessed with finding the truth behind stories, would have been a great counterpoint to the novel’s opening, wherein a fictionalized Brooke-Rose sets out to find the truth hidden beneath the stories told about her father. The Brooke-Roses come out of that story as a family where generations of storytellers and truth-seekers

Letter from Christine Brooke-Rose to Secker and Warburg, 3 April 1960. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre. 47 Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Notes on Fiction vs. Fact’ [1960]. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre. 48 Letter from Liam Fox to Christine Brooke-Rose, 14 November 1957. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre. 46

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interchange, fathers telling romantic stories, daughters sifting the truth from them. The growth of satire, however, had resulted in a corresponding growth in libel suits. Mentioning the birthplace was too risky as the current custodians may have read it as a story about themselves, and sued. It turned out that Secker and Warburg’s caution was well advised. Upon publication, The Dear Deceit prompted letters from a number of Alfred Northcliff Rose’s former friends and colleagues. Thankfully, all were very positive about the book. A friend of the church canon who Alfred robbed wrote to Brooke-Rose, calling her work ‘SO true, but SO haughty!’,49 while another former business partner wrote, recognizing himself and asking which character his secretary was in the book.50 The book was fairly well received, although the unconventional narrative structure seemed to annoy many reviewers. Where Brooke-Rose had sought to use her family history as a satirical foil to poke fun at romantic heroes and inflated egos, she ended up writing an encoded biography. This, at least, was how many readers received the book. Many churchmen in London had known her father, and word about the novel spread around the clubs and cliques of the city. Her next novel, The Middlemen: A Satire (1961), would be even more obviously satirical, and would for the first time contain no biographical elements. The book opens with a scornful passage: Nowadays everyone wants to be a middleman, which used to be rather disreputable. The class is becoming larger and larger, like the middle class, pushing its own extremities out of existence, and few people are producing more than a small part of something. The age of giants has vanished.51 The novel continues in this tone, telling the tale of two sisters – one smart, one popular – who have a series of encounters with caricatures of bureaucrats and businessmen, before flying out to a tropical island where, seemingly out of spite, Brooke-Rose sets off a volcano that kills them all. The tone of the novel surpasses withering and, without a sympathetic character, ends up feeling mean spirited. It is notably as the last traditional novel that BrookeRose writes, and her disdain for social satire as a form is palpable. Many of her ‘middlemen’ characters and the bland boardrooms they inhabit seem to intentionally mimic the characters in C. P. Snow’s novels. Snow, who had recruited Brooke-Rose to Bletchley Park back in the war, had now come to represent everything she hated about boring, stuffy, ‘neo-Victorian’ novels.

Letter from Peter F. Anson to Christine Brooke-Rose, 22 October 1960. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre. 50 Letter from Ivan F. B. Parker to Christine Brooke-Rose, 5 February 1961. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre. 51 Christine Brooke-Rose, The Middlemen: A Satire (London: Secker and Warburg, 1961), p. 5. 49

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Anthony Burgess, no fan of C. P. Snow himself, praised The Middlemen extremely highly in his role as reviewer for the Yorkshire Post. ‘Crammed with wit and intelligence’, he beamed, praising the book’s protagonist who ‘at least wants to make something, do something’. He then praised BrookeRose herself who, he said, wrote with an ‘unflagging freshness’.52 It may have been The Middlemen’s self-destructive, nihilistic, satire-on-satires that appealed to Burgess. In 1961, when Brooke-Rose’s novel came out, Burgess was caught in a libel suit of his own. Never cautious, Burgess routinely smattered his satirical early novels with characters inspired by real people he had met. This was a practice that had suited him well so far, and one picked up from Somerset Maugham, whose Malayan stories Burgess’ work was often compared with. His The Malayan Trilogy is filled with characters like Nabby Adams, based upon a real colonial sergeant he had known, and other characters who were composites; the children in the protagonist’s school, for example, were composites of Burgess’ own pupils. It is the realism that results from this method that makes The Malayan Trilogy an important documentary record of its time. It also avoids the kinds of exotic cliché to which other colonial writers too often resorted. It was one thing to publish books about the colonies from the safe distance of England, however. When it came to satirizing England itself, Burgess’ methods were not met with the same leniency. Burgess’ cavalier attitude was inspired by the ‘death sentence’ he received in 1960.53 Suffering a series of blackouts in Malaya, he eventually experienced a severe mental breakdown that brought him back to the UK. His atypical symptoms meant he was quarantined in a unit for tropical diseases. Finding nothing, the doctors then released him and scheduled further tests. Brain scans eventually showed that aberrant neurological behaviours were in fact present, and so Burgess admitted himself to hospital, convinced he had a brain tumour. Although his symptoms may have been caused by a psychological, rather than a physical, breakdown, Burgess believed it to be cancer, and would not be contradicted. In his 1987 memoirs, he still wrote of being given ‘a year’ to live; ‘in that year I had to earn for my prospective widow. No one would give me a job [now I had cancer]. I would have to turn myself into a professional writer.’54 Whether or not Burgess’ ‘tumour’ was merely an excuse to write, the impetus nevertheless worked. In the first three years after his self-diagnosis, Burgess published nine novels, became a regular reviewer for both the Yorkshire Post and The Observer, and all the while kept up a heroic number of public appearances, guest lectures and late-night drinking sessions in London literary pubs.

Anthony Burgess, ‘Wars and Wedded Love’. Yorkshire Post, 7 September 1961, p. 4. Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God (London: Heinemann, 1987), p. 448. 54 Ibid., p. 448. 52 53

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Some of Burgess’ post-breakdown novels retained colonial or travel elements – Devil of a State (1961), One Hand Clapping (1961) and Honey for the Bears (1963), in particular – but the new dominant mode in Burgess’ writing was satirical. Returning from colonial service to find Britain simultaneously more prosperous and less culturally rich than he had left it, his novels would prick at the pomposity of the new, provincially minded Little England.55 Some reviewers welcomed Burgess’ social satires as evidence of a colonial writer developing a mainstream appeal. Others, like Brooke-Rose, condemned Burgess’ efforts, who she believed was ‘trying hard to be merely provincial’.56 The Right to an Answer (1960), for example, pitted a white Englishman, returned from the colonies, against his Pakistani lodger. The former colonizer is now sickened by England, while the formerly colonized embraces it. At their best, Burgess’ satires relish the ironies and inversions of a post-colonial, post-war Britain still stuck between prosperity and austerity. The weaker ones threaten to replicate the very complacency they set out to send up. The Worm and the Ring (1961) was one of these weaker satires. Burgess based the novel on his experiences teaching at Banbury grammar school in the 1950s. Names were changed, events were jumbled around and a narrative structure borrowed from Wagner was laid over the top. The story centres around a jaded English teacher and his brief affair with the French mistress while away on a school trip. By the end of the novel, the protagonist has been fired, the dull and bureaucratic faculty are triumphant and the grammar school is converted into a comprehensive (the first comprehensive school to appear in a British novel, in fact).57 The novel, as one might imagine, caused quite a stir at the real-life Banbury Grammar. It was passed around the parents, teachers and anyone else involved with the school. Like BrookeRose’s The Dear Deceit, many readers took it to be a factual account and sought out characters who might potentially be themselves or people they knew. Among these readers was a very unimpressed former school secretary, Gwendoline Bustin, who had since entered politics and was now the Mayor of Banbury.58 The cavalier Burgess had satirically transformed the school secretary into an embodiment of puritanical, hectoring, schoolmarmish petty authority. A very minor character, she was nevertheless described by Burgess as an ‘incubus’, ‘deranged’, ‘just pitiable’, ‘suppressing an old maid’s excitement’ and ‘definitely unbalanced, the sort who might shout out dirty words under an anaesthetic’.59 Miss Bustin was understandably

Andrew Biswell, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (London: Picador, 2005), p. 224. Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Right off the Map’. The Observer, 5 November 1961, p. 8. 57 L. Spolton, ‘The Secondary School in Post-War Fiction’. British Journal of Educational Studies, 11, no. 2 (1963): 135. 58 Theodore Ziolkowski, Music into Fiction: Composers Writing, Compositions Imitated (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2017), p. 117. 59 Alison Flood, ‘Rare Copy of Anthony Burgess Novel that Prompted Lawsuit up for Sale’. The Guardian, 16 May 2016. Web. 55 56

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unimpressed. Burgess, for his part, seemed unaware of libel law and struggled to comprehend what he was being sued for.60 Surely satire was all about the exaggeration of the everyday? Didn’t young comedians do the same thing every night down at the Establishment Club? The suit was launched in 1961 and took nearly a year to reach a final resolution. Burgess’ defence rested on the claim that he never intended to refer to Miss Bustin and that any unfortunate similarities were merely coincidental.61 Already a spurious claim in itself, Burgess should also have known from reading Brooke-Rose’s The Sycamore Tree that intention plays no part in English libel law, and so his personal pleading was redundant anyway. Burgess was found guilty. Heinemann, who had published the novel, were charged £157 in damages and had to withdraw and pulp the book.62 Burgess was to make a formal apology and be charged £31 by Heinemann for legal fees.63 The novel would return in 1970 with the offending material removed, but it was a limited run, and, as the satire craze had long passed, its appeal was largely historical, limited to rare book collectors and Burgess fanatics. Burgess, unrepentant, wrote in his memoirs, published in 1990; ‘my reference was neutral enough. Mistress Bustin was merely a cheese-chewing Banbury Puritan’.64 Thankfully, under British law, it is impossible to libel the dead. Lessons were learned, however, and Burgess’ run-in with the law would change the way he thought about literature. A lover of modernism and all things linguistically loquacious, he took Joyce as his model when it came to translating real-life events into a form of higher art. Satire had seemed like a perfect opportunity for him to popularize his style, and to attack the forces of complacency while he was at it. The establishment very soon lost their complacency, however, and fought back. Heinemann had Burgess locked into a contract, but were in no mood for salacious or potentially libellous material. They’d lost two libel cases in the year of The Worm and the Ring trial, seen the bestselling The Image and the Search by Walter Baxter charged with obscenity and had just been forced to decline Nabokov’s Lolita on advice from their lawyers.65 Heinemann needed more novels from Burgess, and the author was still convinced of his need to publish more before succumbing to brain cancer. His answer would lie in the love of modernism

Travis 2000, p. 47. Times Law Report, 25 October 1962. 62 ‘Statement to be Made in Open Court, 15 October 1962’. Oswald Hickson Collier and Co. internal papers. Held in the Heinemann Archives, Penguin Random House. 63 Internal memo from Rosanna Hill to Elizabeth Anderson, 5 January 1970. Held in the Heinemann Archives, Penguin Random House. 64 Anthony Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time (London: Heinemann, 1990), p. 55. 65 Andrew Biswell quoted in Jonathan Owen, ‘How Burgess Classic A Clockwork Orange was Tagged “Enormous Flop”’. The Independent, 3 September 2012. Web. 60 61

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instilled by his Leavisite education, alongside the international perspective that his years of travel had given him. Burgess was obsessed with the seemingly new phenomenon of youth violence. Young men had always been violent to an extent, but now they moved in gangs, dressed in the best clothes and seemed to inhabit a twilight world of strange music and Jacobean, blade-swirling street fights. They were a contradiction born of prosperity; stability had inspired violence. But more than this, for the Catholic Burgess these street toughs represented eternal forces, ‘a constant war between the chaotic and the aesthetic [where] the individual must fight to assert his own authority’.66 He had seen them in the press and heard about them on the radio, and even out in Malaya there were signs of the new youth. The Malayan Trilogy features a gang of knifewielding young Malays who pool their money and buy one stylish Italian suit between themselves. Sometimes they take turns wearing the full suit, and sometimes they go out with one wearing the trousers, the other the jacket, and the next the shirt and shoes.67 On a cultural exchange trip to Moscow in the summer of 1961, Burgess noted that similar youths could even be found at the heart of the Soviet empire.68 The stilyagi, or style boys, paused in the middle of a vicious bar brawl to escort Burgess and his wife safely out of the premises.69 There was something aristocratic, or at least noble, about these new gangs, and it stuck in Burgess’ mind. With the libel suit still ongoing, Burgess sat down to write his next novel, A Clockwork Orange (1962). Written at the same furious pace as the rest of his cancer-scare pieces, it used a series of elaborate distancing techniques to at once express his concerns about the state of post-war Britain, and explore new and international philosophical dilemmas. His settings – a claustrophobic parental flat, a decrepit urban landscape, a record shop, a progressive brainwashing facility – all evoke post-war government with its austerity, social engineering and disenfranchised youth. But the novel also explored what it is to be human, and to be free. The droogs affect mannerisms from a more decadent and dangerous past, speak as if language is itself a pleasure and accompany their most violent acts with literary allusions: Real horrorshow groodies they were that then exhibited their pink glazzies, O my brothers, while I untrussed and got ready for the plunge. Plunging, I could slooshy cries of agony and this writer bleeding veck that Georgie and Pete held on to nearly got loose howling bezoomny with

Anthony Burgess, ‘Excerpt from an Interview’, in A Clockwork Orange: The Restored Edition, ed. Andrew Biswell (London: Heinemann, 2012), p. 256. 67 Anthony Burgess, The Malayan Trilogy (London: Random House, 2017), p. 278. 68 Anthony Burgess quoted in David Arkell, ‘O My Brothers, He’s a Clever Malchick’. Held in the International Anthony Burgess Foundation Archive, Manchester. N.d. 69 Anthony Burgess, Honey for the Bears (New York: Norton, 2013), p. 252. 66

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the filthiest of slovos that I already knew and others he was making up. Then after me it was right old Dim should have his turn, which he did in a beasty snorty howly sort of way with his Peebee Shelley maskie taking no notice, while I held on to her.70 Neologisms and imports from foreign languages sit comfortably within Alex’s narrative voice, immersing the reader in the droog dialect. Violence, as Alex tells it, and presumably experiences it, is stylized. It has redemptive aesthetic qualities that place it alongside Beethoven and ‘Peebee’ Shelley. Equally, the high arts are felt through Alex’s descriptions to hold monstrous energies within their artistic pleasures. Destruction and creation are fused by Alex into a unified state of Dionysian vitality.71 It would take Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of A Clockwork Orange to transform the novel into the worldwide classic it is considered today. Sales were good but not tremendous upon its first 1962 release. Reviewers were generally positive in their praise, although the more traditional among them pointed to the novel’s linguistic innovation as an unwelcome difficulty. For some readers however, the novel was a revelation. Burgess received floods of letters from young men and women who sympathized with Alex.72 Established innovators like Samuel Beckett praised Burgess’ daring, while British writers interested in breaking with tradition – among them Johnson, Ghose, Brooke-Rose and Duffy – saw the book’s publication as offering new promise for the potential of getting an experimental book signed in conservative Britain.73 It was not the very first experimental novel to be published in Britain in the 1960s, however. By the time of A Clockwork Orange’s appearance, there had already been a number of important inciting moments.

1961: The island opens up The year 1961 is a critical year in terms of influences. Three important literary movements come to Britain, each demonstrating in its own way that experiment could still be a vital force in the post-war world. They came from the Caribbean, France and America. The first of these movements, however, is also perhaps a British movement. Its Caribbean-born, British-

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 20. Jim Clarke, The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess: Fire of Words (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 108. 72 Joseph Darlington, ‘A Clockwork Orange: The Art of Moral Panic’. Cambridge Quarterly, 5, no. 6 (2016). 73 William Burroughs, Letter to Anthony Burgess, undated. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, Texas. 70 71

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dwelling writers are perhaps the first post-war British experimentalists.74 These included writers of experimental novels like Andrew Salkey and Denis Williams, future Nobel Prize winners V. S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, and a new generation of academics including C. L. R. James and Stuart Hall. One in particular, Wilson Harris, would go on to be a full-fledged member of the experimentalist movement, appearing in their collections, going to their parties and melding their philosophies with his own. Wilson Harris travelled to Britain in 1959 from his native Guyana. Part of the Windrush generation, he had been raised with a vision of Britain as the mother country, at once a site of colonial domination and a centre of culture and civilized values. An engineer by training, Harris’ literary education nevertheless drew upon the same list of established classics (Chaucer, Shakespeare, George Eliot, T. S. Eliot) as it would have in England.75 On library shelves, the same names predominated in Georgetown as in London. It was the modernists in particular who inspired Harris. The stream of consciousness perfected by Virginia Woolf, the neologisms and vernacular of James Joyce, the symbolism of Eliot and Pound, each demonstrated the necessity for language itself to change if it was to describe new sensations and alternate states of being. Modernism also confirmed Harris’ suspicions about language and its role in imposing order on the world. ‘Civilisation is habituated’, he wrote, ‘to perceive the ground it seizes, the landscapes it manipulates, as passive or unconscious.’76 In other words, language has a colonizing role. Harris the engineer understood the stability and order that such civilization brings, but Harris the writer was also conscious of the interior landscapes and mystical experiences that such order suppressed. The modernist method promised a route back to the pre-civilized world of visions through the very language which had rendered that world unconscious. Arriving in Britain in 1959, Harris also had the benefit of missing postwar austerity. The knee-jerk conservatism that dominated the British literary establishment of the 1950s had passed him by and so, freshly arrived in London, Harris decided to send his work to the most recent great publisher he could think of: Faber and Faber. From its high point in the 1920s and 1930s, Faber and Faber had calcified somewhat into the last bastion of respectable high modernism. It mostly served university libraries and other elite spaces where the study of modernism as a historical movement was undertaken. It was here that Harris sent his first novel, Palace of the Peacock, where it was read personally by the company’s director, T. S. Eliot.77 Eliot was astounded by the work and called Harris in for an interview. He found

Adam Guy, The Nouveau Roman and Writing in Britain after Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 75 J. Dillon Brown, Migrant Modernism (London: University of Virginia Press, 2013), p. 2. 76 Charles H. Rowell, ‘An Interview with Wilson Harris’. Callaloo, 18, no. 1 (1995): 190. 77 Michael Gilkes, ‘Sir Wilson Harris: An Interview’. The Arts Journal, 6, no. 2 (2011): 28. 74

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him tremendously erudite, well-spoken and in possession of a personal philosophy of writing that transformed his Guyanese experience into a thing of world significance. Unlike earlier British Caribbean writers, George Lamming and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, for example, who depicted immigrant experience through social realist forms, the early 1960s writers would adopt an explicit affiliation with literary modernism.78 Eliot knew of these writers, and could see their importance in reviving the modernist mission. After meeting with Harris, he was captivated and soon signed him up. Harris was now a chosen one, one of the Faber greats, with a gift for evangelizing literary innovation. The Palace of the Peacock came out in the winter of 1960 and was the first of four short novels constituting The Guyana Quartet (1960–3). It drew on Harris’ experiences as a government surveyor, mapping the Guyanese interior.79 During the long, humid journeys downriver, he would think about the great efforts he and his team were making in order to translate this wild country into a mathematically precise OS map.80 His empiricist training called this process ‘observation’, but he found it to be better described as ‘overcoming the obstacle of appearances’.81 In the novel, a surveying team journey into the interior and find themselves caught between the captain’s relentless commitment to measurement on the one hand and alluring visions from the jungle on the other. The language moulds to their collective experience–not so much stream-of-consciousness as a physical stream-oftransformation–as the crew’s behaviour becomes more erratic, their speech more fractured and allusive: All the restless spirits of all the aeons are returning to roost in our blood. And we have to start all over again where they began to explore. We’ve got to pick up the seeds again where they left off. It’s no use worshipping the rottenest tacouba and tree-trunk in the historical topsoil. There’s a whole world of branches and sensation we’ve missed.82 His writing technique is one of densely packed and often mixed metaphors. The piling of metaphor upon metaphor results in an overburdening of language’s signifying properties. The reader gives up on following the metaphors as if they were simple replacements and allows them to become transformations in themselves. The ‘world of branches and sensation’ refers not only to the real branches of the jungle but also to the branches grown

Brown 2013, p. 6. Jean-Pierre Durix, ‘The Visionary Art of Wilson Harris’. World Literature Today, 58, no. 1 (1984): 19. 80 Wilson Harris, ‘Tradition and the West Indian Novel’. Tradition, The Writer and Society: Critical Essays (London: New Beacon Publications, 1967), p. 30. 81 Ibid., p. 21. 82 Wilson Harris, The Guyana Quartet (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), p. 334. 78 79

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from the ‘seeds’ planted in ‘historical topsoil’. Presumably, these branches are also the roosting posts for the ‘restless spirits of all the aeons’ that are in the blood, but they might also be something to be worshipped, a sort of holy tree. As his hero Da Silva would later say in The Secret Ladder (1963), ‘he shivered with the visionary tattoo of every branch and constellation, conscious of the threads which bound him to their enormous loom.’83 This is language beating on the door of experience, tearing its own literality apart the better to poetically express. Of equal importance to his novel-writing were Harris’ many public readings, talks and essays. A natural public speaker who could describe his method without hesitation and with great clarity and confidence, Harris’ own appearances did much to spread the good news of modernism resurgent. ‘If the imagination itself is on trial’, Harris later said to Alan Burns, ‘then I don’t see why imaginative writers . . . should not speak occasionally, rather than run away.’84 Harris’ defences of the imagination sprung with a righteous vigour for life in all its immediate intensity. To write without imagination, as he described social realism, was simply to confirm life’s banality or, at best, to defer ‘promises of splendour and virtuosity’ to a later time. Perhaps, according to religion, a time after death.85 Instead, he argued, writing should offer ‘authentic rhythms within the gloomy paradox of the world’.86 It should operate on the reader in a transformative capacity. Reading could be a ritual. Language could carve a route back, through itself, to a preliterate zone of unmediated and immersive life experience; ‘continuously transforming inner and outer formal categories of experience’.87 The claims he was making were perhaps wild and outlandish, but they were delivered in a tone of authority, as one who had been there and seen it for himself. He was comprehensive and consistent. He lived the work. There was something in this that was new and daring, but also something timeless, and all of it was stamped with the Faber seal of approval. The impact of Harris on British literature was considerable, although his reviews were mixed. C. L .R James came to a spirited defence of Harris’ expressionistic language in a number of academic publications, as well as contributing introductions to collections of his essays.88 B. S. Johnson wrote admiringly of him in letters to Zulfikar Ghose, adamantly supporting his

Ibid., p. 432. Alan Burns, ‘Wilson Harris’, in The Imagination on Trial, ed. Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet. (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), p. 53. 85 Wilson Harris, ‘The Question of Form and Realism in the West Indian Artist’, in Tradition, The Writer and Society: Critical Essays (London: New Beacon Publications, 1967b), p. 15. 86 Ibid., p. 15. 87 Harris 1967a, p. 32. 88 C. L. R James, ‘Introduction to Tradition and the West Indian Novel’, in Tradition, The Writer and Society: Critical Essays (London: New Beacon Publications, 1967b), p. 70. 83 84

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methods in comparison to V. S. Naipaul, who he considered a fraud.89 Ghose, for his part, was so struck with the new possibilities of commonwealth writing that he decided to return to his home countries of India and Pakistan, covering the 1961 England cricket tour for The Observer.90 He had hoped to experience a Harris-like immersion in preliterate life, but in fact found himself alienated and paranoid, a person set apart.91 The trip would go on to inspire his first memoir, Confessions of a Native-Alien (1965). The book was also written in response to the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, an act designed to block off the legal route through which many commonwealth citizens, writers, artists and otherwise, came to Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s. It is worth remembering that Harris’ critics were not only those opposed to the return of modernist methods, but the entrenched forces of establishment racism as well. Perhaps Harris’ biggest fan and advocate in the press was Anthony Burgess. At the height of his reviewing prolificacy in 1961, he used his columns in The Listener, The Observer and The Yorkshire Post to praise Harris’ work.92 In 1963, he praised Harris as a writer ‘poking up far above the others’ among the Windrush generation, his ‘range is amazing, his control is masterly, his compression is near miraculous’.93 Harris’ language spoke to Burgess’ post-Clockwork Orange obsession with stylistic innovation, and Burgess believed the themes of Harris’ novels mapped roughly onto his own. The ‘confrontation of the conscious and the instinctual, jungle dark and liberal light’ brought into conflict gave Harris’ work an almost-Catholic feel according to the impassioned Burgess.94 Burgess would continue to praise Harris’ novels throughout his lifetime, describing him as ‘one of the finest Caribbean novelists’ in 1967’s The Novel Now, and featuring Heartlands (1964) as one of his top Ninety-Nine Novels in 1985.95 There was something unique in Harris’ work, and something of great promise. He was the first sign for British writers that not only was modernism not dead, but it was more vital and alive than anything being offered by the realist writers, whether establishment or ‘angry’. Harris’ writing was new and complex, esoteric and deeply imaginative, and all of this in the service of truth. He took for granted that language was a construct and that to use it without thought or alteration was to submit to its presuppositions, and to its complacent attitudes. Furthermore, the old charges of elitism

Letter from B. S. Johnson to Zulfikar Ghose, 26 December 1961. Held in the British Library. Zulfikar Ghose, Confessions of a Native-Alien (London: Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 125. 91 Ibid., p. 139. 92 Andrew Biswell, ‘Anthony Burgess in The Yorkshire Post’ [unpublished]. Held in the International Anthony Burgess Foundation Archive. 93 Anthony Burgess, ‘Prose for the Jungle’. The Observer, 10 February 1963, p. 18. 94 Ibid., p. 18. 95 Anthony Burgess, The Novel Now (London: Faber, 1967), p. 165; and Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels (London: Allison and Busby, 1984). 89 90

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and snobbery that had tarnished experimentalism would no longer serve to silence this man who stood so clearly against an establishment tradition, and sought to write differently precisely in order to escape from imposed forms. Harris, along with other less experimental but equally invigorating Windrush writers, would be a tremendous catalysing force within the British literature of the 1960s. At the same moment that the Windrush writers were crossing the Atlantic with their new works, an equally influential set of writers were preparing to set sail across the Channel. The French nouveaux romanciers rose to fame, or perhaps infamy, in Paris during the later 1950s. Their work was philosophically driven. They wrote rather short but very dense novels that sought to remove elements they considered ‘artificial’. These included plot, character, chronological narrative and dramatic action. These elements were outdated, according to the nouveaux romanciers, or ‘new novelists’, and were suited only to life as it was lived a hundred years ago.96 The modern novel should aim at ‘perfect objectivity’,97 and would do so through a rigid commitment to replicating perspective. All writing in a novel should represent a character’s viewpoint, with novels often consisting of two contrasting viewpoints or else a single, unreliable viewpoint such as a character with memory loss, or a stranger in a strange town or a voyeur in a peak of ecstasy.98 As a result, the novels often suffered from repetitive prose, inconsistent narrative and the sense that the writers were privy to information that the readers weren’t. By throwing out ‘artifice’, one could be forgiven for thinking that the nouveaux romanciers had also thrown out everything that makes novels enjoyable. There is very little drama in the French new novels. Their interest is largely philosophical. Yet the world of Parisian literature is very different from that of literary London. Where London publishers ultimately desired sales and so avoided difficulty, Parisian publishers courted public opinion through a far more developed culture of criticism. Difficulty can often attract critics, and so, in Paris, it could also drive sales. These were the lessons being learned by a young John Calder as he travelled to Paris in the late 1950s. Inheriting a small fortune based on distilleries, forestry and lumber, Calder graduated from Edinburgh with a first in literature only to spend the next three years supervising a lumber yard. His austere Scottish parents believed he should work his way up from the very bottom if he was to one day take over the company.99 Calder kept his head down, learned bookkeeping and

Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1986), p. 135. 97 Ibid., p. 134. 98 Ann Jefferson, The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 113. 99 John Calder, Pursuit (London: Calder Publications, 2001), p. 47. 96

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enough mechanics to suggest a labour-saving improvement to the line. Pleased with his progress, his parents granted him some small measure of extra freedom by making him a sales agent. Calder immediately headed to Paris. There, using his salesman’s gift of the gab, he befriended Ionesco and Beckett, secured English translation rights from Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute (the new stars of the nouveau roman), discovered a love for the opera and lent large amounts of money to renegade publisher Maurice Gerodias.100 The authors that Calder would meet through Girodias will be of importance later in this chapter, but for now it is worth foreshadowing the importance of John Calder himself by emphasizing that his publishing company, Calder and Boyars, never turned a profit in his lifetime and yet were responsible for publishing twenty-two Nobel Prize winners. As he would later summarize his mission: I feel my responsibility as a publisher does not consist solely in putting out books and trying to make as much money as possible. . . . I don’t say that I haven’t made bestsellers, but the books with which I prefer to be associated are those designed to create a better world and to make people think a little bit better about the world in which they live.101 In Paris in 1961, this desire was taking a shape that corresponded with the philosophies of the nouveau roman. Over drinks with Beckett, Calder would emphasize the importance of literature and the arts in progressing society. The traditional novel, a thing of the Victorian era, needed to be replaced with new, more pertinent styles and forms. The ‘next stage in the evolution of society as a whole’, as he put it, depended on literature.102 The Parisian mood was ideal for Calder himself, but he still felt a responsibility to his native Britain. He would, after all, want to publish in English, and to do that in 1961 demanded one operate from either New York or London. London was easier to break into as a market, and Calder had already made inroads by picking up expat American writers, blacklisted during the McCarthy red scare, and publishing their novels in London at discount prices. Such tactics might have been innovative, but they were still commercially driven. What Calder needed was an event to launch himself to the top of respectable literary circles, something to break into literary London. With this in mind he approached the nouveau roman writers for whom he had commissioned English translations: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute. Having been a cause célèbre between 1957 and 1959, their stars had already begun to wane in Paris,

Ibid., p. 127. John Calder, ‘The Novel’, in The Arts in a Permissive Society, ed. Christopher Macy (London: Pemberton Books, 1970), p. 41. 102 Ibid., p. 45. 100 101

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and they had started to look elsewhere for opportunities. In late 1960, they agreed to come to Britain. Calder would fly Sarraute and Duras over to London in the New Year, and the aerophobic Robbe-Grillet would come on the ferry. They would be housed by the French Embassy and taken on a tour of Britain’s universities and literary quarters.103 Calder immediately began badgering the British press for coverage. The press weren’t exactly sure how to respond. Neo-Victorian values predominated in literary review circles and were held to be common sense by the majority of the public. Some presumed the French writers were setting out to belittle the great tradition of English literature, while others were merely bemused. Only a small number of voices stepped forward to champion the forthcoming visit as one of historical importance. Rayner Heppenstall, editor of the BBC’s highbrow Third Programme and a published late modernist himself, devoted air time to readings from nouveau roman novels in the lead up to the first London event.104 These are ‘highly doctrinaire, experimental writers’ he announced in a radio essay, ‘the main plank in their platform is that we must avoid all complicity with things, thingness and not attempt to humanize them’.105 Christine Brooke-Rose too appeared on the radio, defending the coming writers’ apparently anti-Victorian stance by stating that ‘it’s up to the novelist to reflect reality as he sees it and not as others have depicted it’.106 They were, as she wrote in her Observer column, ‘at least trying to save the novel from its ‘representational’ impasse’.107 The closest that B. S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose had to a media presence at this time was a weekly football report and a cricket column, respectively. Still, Johnson wrote to Ghose of his excitement at the arrival. He had read RobbeGrillet’s essays with enthusiasm, especially ‘Towards a New Novel’, but found the group’s actual novels to be arid and unreadable.108 Ghose, never so outspokenly critical as Johnson, nevertheless agreed. The importance of the nouveaux romanciers’ visit was being decided for them before they had even set foot in London. They represented everything anti-Victorian and anti-establishment. They were exactly what the neo-Victorians hated: overintellectual, difficult-to-read writers who let theory dictate practice rather than the other way around. Defending them was to renounce, de facto, the values of the 1950s: readability, respectability, maturity and a democratic austerity of style. Calder was ecstatic. His friendly cultural exchange had

Calder 2001, pp. 176–8. Rayner Heppenstall, Portrait of the Artist as a Professional Man (London: Peter Owen, 1969), p. 97. 105 Rayner Heppenstall, The Fourfold Tradition (London: Barrie and Rockcliff, 1961), p. 191. 106 Christine Brooke-Rose radio interview quoted in Heather Reyes, ‘The British and Their “Fixions”, the French and their Factions’, in Utterly Other Discourse, ed. Ellen J. Friedman and Richard Martin (New York: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), p. 57. 107 Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘The Vanishing Author’. The Observer, 12 February 1961. 108 Letter from B. S. Johnson to Zulfikar Ghose, 26 December 1961. Held in the British Library. 103 104

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become a confrontation: the old British neo-Victorians versus the French New Novel. By the night of the first London event, tickets had sold out. The room was packed, in spite of all the major publishers and reviewers refusing to attend. Instead, it was students, young people, artists and small press publishers who flocked to hear about the new novel.109 Alain Robbe-Grillet opened the event, speaking in loud, clear French, projecting out across the audience, pausing between sentences as Calder translated. His third novel, Jealousy, recently translated into English by Calder, had been attacked mercilessly in the French press. Authors, he protested, should be permitted to have opinions concerning their own profession.110 The crowd responded well, clapping for this writer who, it appeared, had fled French philistinism and was seeking solace in this highbrow English crowd. Robbe-Grillet then read from In the Labyrinth (1959) in the original French, ignoring Calder’s attempts to keep up in English: When the outline is precise enough for the shape to be definitely identified the original object can be easily found not far away. Thus the circular shape has obviously been left by a glass ashtray now placed just beside it. Similarly, away on its own, the square in the far left-hand corner: a square-base about an inch high, topped by a disc of the same thickness bearing at its centre a fluted column.111 The page’s long, mathematically precise description of a tabletop, delivered in Robbe-Grillet’s trademark monotone, met with a mixed reception from the audience. Johnson, who could not speak French, simply waited for the next translated section. Brooke-Rose, by contrast, was hypnotized. Something in this style – dry on the surface but absolutely, perhaps obsessively precise – reached out to her. She would later publish a translation of In the Labyrinth with Calder, winning a series of awards and translation prizes as a result. For tonight, however, it was her own style she was thinking of. So immensely bored of social satires, all the knowingness and the irony, here was something absolutely other. The style itself was like an idea, like a political commitment. Nathalie Sarraute spoke next. Born in Russia and holding a dual FrenchSoviet passport, Sarraute was multilingual and was confident enough in her English to speak directly. Her speech was delivered slowly, but very carefully, giving the impression that it was meticulously prepared despite being

Calder 2001, p. 182. Robbe-Grillet 1986, p. 11. 111 Alain Robbe-Grillet, In the Labyrinth [1959], trans. Christine Brooke-Rose (London: John Calder Publications, 1967), p. 8. 109 110

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unscripted.112 She defended the nouveau roman style not only as a break from outdated novelistic tradition but also, critically, as a political gesture. Outdated novels weren’t simply outdated because of their anachronistic depictions of life and love, but because they carried the presumptions of old morality with them too. The British audience responded to Sarraute’s words with applause. The British 1950s had been remarkably sexually repressed compared to the promiscuous war years, and the relationships depicted in campus novels and social satires often seemed sexless and unreal.113 The Angries had done much to shift this, but in terms of presentation, they too seemed wrapped in the same puritan morality. Shelagh Delaney, perhaps the most liberated of the current young British writers, still subjected her misbehaving characters to punishments befitting their moral crimes. As if pulling back a great blanket, Sarraute then read from The Planetarium (1959), choosing a section about a spoiled young man and his mocking lover engaged in some spiteful verbal jousting: That contemptuous smile of his, that sneer when she had said to him as they passed in front of the College du France. . . . ‘Who knows? Perhaps one day you will go in through that door and give your lectures. . . .’ He had drawn away from her, the better to see her, his lip had curled in that contemptuous expression he can have. . . . ‘What do little girls dream of? So that’s what you have in mind. . . . What a joyful prospect to see me one day, bald and rotund, go and mumble a lecture before a lot of idiotic society women, tramps. . . . No, really, you disappoint me’.114 Compared to Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute’s language approached orthodoxy, with only the repetition of ‘contemptuous’ and the use of ellipses to show that there was something unusual going on. Instead it was the attitudes of the characters. The young man, whose spitefulness the girl seemed to be sexualizing, was cruel, immoral and contemptuous of his lecturers. Often lightly mocked, professors were still idolized in British campus novels. To depict authority itself as idiocy, and sex as cruelty, would strike even the most iconoclastic of the young Establishment Club satirists as immoral. But it rang true. Johnson nodded his head. Very true indeed. The final speaker, Marguerite Duras, felt the tension in the room and panicked. She spoke rapidly in a dialectical French that Calder couldn’t understand. He tried to translate her statements but she kept forgetting to pause, and so Calder was left with far too much to say and not much clarity on the exact meaning of the original. Thankfully, Duras’ reading passed

Calder 2001, p. 182. Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade (London: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 147. 114 Nathalie Sarraute, The Planetarium [1959], trans. Maria Jolas (London: John Calder Publications, 1961), p. 50. 112 113

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quickly and they moved on to the Q&A. After a minute or so of silence, no one offering a question, one young man raised his hand. ‘You seem to write to make us sad’, he said, ‘why don’t you write to make us happy?’ The panel sat in silence. Robbe-Grillet offered an extravagant shrug of his shoulders. ‘Is no one going to answer?’ Calder asked. Getting no response, he turned to the young man and answered the question himself, ‘the purpose of literature is not to entertain. It is to help you to understand yourself and your life’.115 The event was to cause a minor stir in the literary press, but its importance for British literature overall would not become apparent for a number of years. Just as Wilson Harris was showing that modernism could be relevant in the post-war era, the nouveau roman had shown that there was a social urgency to the cause of creating new forms. They may have seemed ‘highly doctrinaire and experimental’ to the English, but for some British writers it was precisely this extremism that made them appealing. The contrast with the British literary scene was unmistakable. Christine Brooke-Rose in particular was astounded by the nouveaux romanciers, considering their visit to London to be Britain’s introduction to a ‘scientific, documentary and philosophical revolution’.116 The novel had a critical role to play in remaking language so that we might better reflect and understand the world as it truly is. The nouveau roman, she wrote, is part of the twentieth century crisis in communication, deriving ultimately from the revolution in physics, the breakthrough to a non-Artistotelian, non-Euclidean way of thinking, which has indirectly affected semantics, philosophy and the arts. Only the novel lags behind.117 This statement was made nearly a decade after that critical night, after Brooke-Rose had found the scientific language in which she would come to couch her own experimental writing project. The start of this experimental journey began when the writers of the nouveau roman came to visit; when Brooke-Rose and many others in the room, including Heppenstall, Johnson and Ghose, Calder and the British writers he was wooing, all realized that new writing was not only possible, but necessary. The English language too was now in search of a new novel. For Calder, this search would take him back to Paris. Although British literature tended to do quite poorly in France, especially in the post-war

Calder 2001, p. 182. Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘The Nouveau Roman’. Times Literary Supplement, 7 August 1969, Issue 3519, p. 881. 117 Ibid., p. 881. 115 116

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era, the French were not averse to English language writing as such. Where English provincial realism bored Parisians, the American Beat writers were received warmly and with intellectual enthusiasm. The Beats had entered the public eye in the 1950s, but, with the exception of Kerouac, would not gain their reputation as a literary force of nature for another few years. In the meantime, Burroughs and Ginsberg travelled to Paris. There they joined the same highbrow circles that Calder had broken into, lunching with Ionesco and having dinner with Beckett, all the while introducing these figures to the starving, hysterical and naked slum dwellers of whom they were in awe. They established ‘The Beat Hotel’, filling a run-down establishment at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter with poets, musicians, artists and drug addicts.118 The majority of those staying at the hotel were desperately antisocial, and would play their instruments at competing volumes all through the night, vandalize the already-decrepit rooms and generally ooze a sense of total social degeneration. Young Parisian intellectuals loved it. The night club around the corner began a regular night, ‘les soirees existentialistes’.119 It was on a visit to this infamous hotel that Calder first met Alexander Trocchi. Trocchi, like Calder, was a Scot. Other than that, he was about as far from the whisky estate heir as could be imagined. Trocchi grew up in the rough end of Glasgow, a city largely comprised of rough ends during the 1930s, and was part of the scorned Catholic minority.120 Often running away from an abusive home life, it was here that Trocchi was introduced to the heroin and prostitution rackets that would dominate his life.121 During the war, he was old enough to be drafted, so joined the Navy. He would spend the war hiding in the ship’s toilets, holding a mop and hoping that no one would ask him why he was there.122 After the war ended and Trocchi was freed from his Beckett-like lavatorial existence, he travelled to France where he began a career as a writer for hire. He wrote a large number of novels in Paris, mostly pornographic in nature, before moving to America. In New York, he sank his savings into a barge and lived by hauling industrial materials in and out of the port. He married and sent his wife out on the game. Between his income from haulage and his wife’s prostitution earnings, Trocchi earned enough to subsist as a junky for a number of years, writing in between fixes.

Barry Miles, The Beat Hotel (New York: Atlantic, 2001), p. 63. Alexander Trocchi, ‘Letter to Alex’, in Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds: A Trocchi Reader, ed. Andrew Murray Scott (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1991), p. 72. 120 Alexander Trocchi, ‘Pages of an Autobiography’, in Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds: A Trocchi Reader, ed. Andrew Murray Scott (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1991), p. 17. 121 Andrew Murray Scott, Alexander Trocchi: The Making of the Monster (Edinburgh: Kenny and Boyd, 1992), p. 42. 122 Alexander Trocchi, Cain’s Book (London: John Calder Productions, 1998), p. 132. 118 119

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Eventually, however, the law caught up with him, and by 1961 he had fled America, a warrant out for his arrest and his wife languishing in prison.123 Trocchi was one of the many addicts and petty criminals who transformed the Beat Hotel but were then, in turn, transformed by it. Trocchi’s ability to write lucidly and at great length while under the influence of opiates drew him into contact with Maurice Girodias. As founder of Olympia Press, Girodias built a reputation on printing underground masterpieces alongside a large amount of pornography. Future classics like Last Exit to Brooklyn and Tropic of Cancer were first published with Olympia; Beckett published Watt with them; Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Nabokov’s Lolita all ran for the first time in the same series. Great writers whose work contained obscene passages found in Girodias a sympathetic publisher, albeit one likely to steal their earnings.124 His typical excuse was that he needed the money to fight the constant obscenity lawsuits that Olympia was threatened by, although he was also notorious for high living, and kept a stable of writers on a regular wage to turn out his pornographic novels. Trocchi was one of these pornographers for hire, although he was also respected by writers like Burroughs for the elegance of his prose.125 Novels like Helen and Desire (1954) and Young Adam (1954) were arguably of high literary quality throughout, while more standard erotica such as School for Sin (1960) and Sappho of Lesbos (1960) contained many redemptive and elevating passages. Stimulated by this newfound respect among the Beats, Trocchi launched the magazine Merlin, featuring contributions from a wide range of Anglophone Beats and their Parisian counterparts.126 He financed the printing with help from Girodias, offering in return to keep angry writers off his back. Trocchi had already done as much back in the 1950s, keeping Beckett from pursuing the 85,000 francs Girodias made from selling on Watt to a large publisher.127 The culmination of Trocchi’s erratic and amoral life can be found in the novel Cain’s Book (1960). Celebrated upon its New York small press release, Calder would buy the rights and release it in Britain in 1963 where it was immediately confiscated and burned for gross obscenity.128 The book is broadly autobiographical, depicting an antisocial Scottish junky aboard his Hudson River ‘scow’, hustling for heroin and reflecting on life. The style of the book is in fact surprisingly realist, considering its Beat influences. Trocchi writes in short, neat sentences, albeit ones scattered with expletives. It is filled throughout with drug addict nihilism masquerading as philosophy.

Richard Seaver, ‘Introduction’, in Cain’s Book (London: John Calder, 1998), p. xix. Calder 2001, p. 187. 125 Greil Marcus, ‘Foreword’, in Cain’s Book (London: John Calder, 1998), p. viii. 126 James Campbell, Exiled in Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 146. 127 Letter from Alexander Trocchi to Samuel Beckett, 30 August 1954. Held in the Calder Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana. 128 Marcus 1998, p. viii. 123 124

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If it wasn’t for the setting and the occasional extended passages of reflection, Cain’s Book could fairly be classified as an extension of the Angry Young Men phenomenon, only on heroin. The reflective passages do contain a certain experimental interest, however, especially those which engage with language and classification. It is clear that Trocchi is on the verge of ideas also expressed by the nouveaux romanciers and Wilson Harris: For centuries we in the West have been dominated by the Aristotelian impulse to classify. It is no doubt because conventional classifications become part of the prevailing economic structure that all real revolt is hastily fixed like a bright butterfly on a classificatory pin.129 Trocchi’s ruminations on the nature of classification fuse his generalized contempt for society, a typical addict mentality, with the libertarian ideas promoted in a variety of forms by the American Beats, and add to these a Marxist infatuation with economic structures drawn from the Glasgow shipyards of his youth. His characters are uniformly crooked and untrustworthy, but the book contains moments of solidarity too, usually in the brief aftermath of shooting up. It is perhaps for this reason that Cain’s Book is so much more off-putting than Burroughs’ equivalent novel, Junky (1953), on which it is modelled. In Burroughs’ world, everyone is rock hard and impenetrable. Only junk itself retains humanlike elements, the ability to move people, to inspire desire, to initiate action.130 The rest of Burroughs’ world is mechanical, or insect-like, driven only by mindless antagonism. Trocchi, by never quite reaching such an extremity of nihilism, ends up revealing a pettiness behind his words. He appears partial where Burroughs, due to the totality of his extreme vision, achieves a kind of impartiality. Trocchi is redeemed by association with Burroughs, and it is for this reason that Calder hatched his next plan for unsettling complacent Britain. If mainstream critics had shunned his French intellectual writers in 1961, what would they make of his American drug addicts in 1962?

1962: Burroughs arrives So far in my narrative I have presumed that you, my readers, are aware of who William Burroughs is. By the end of his life he was a certified rock star, having appeared on the cover of Sgt Peppers; he performed alongside David Bowie, Tom Waits, Patti Smith and Kurt Cobain, and even appeared in a U2

Trocchi 1998, p. 59. Timothy Melley, ‘A Terminal Case: William Burroughs and the Logic of Addiction’, in High Anxieties, ed. Janet Farrell Brodie and Marc Redfield (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), p. 43. 129 130

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music video. Widely credited as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, he nevertheless retains a reputation as a dangerous and forbidden writer, perhaps the last of the Beats still to hold a rebel mystique. To the British reading public of 1960, however, he was still a relative unknown. His debut novel, Junky (1953), had never been published in the UK, nor had his more recent masterpiece Naked Lunch (1958), although reviewers had raised a storm of hysteria after Olympia began selling mailorder copies. Burgess was one of a small hardcore of British reviewers who believed Naked Lunch to be a genuinely revolutionary novel, and made his feelings heard in print.131 He considered Burroughs’ depictions of pederasty, perverse drug use, ultraviolence and cosmic nihilism to be satirical in the Swiftian manner, a great purgative force, as is suggested in the title, A Naked Lunch, where ‘everyone really sees what is on the end of the fork’.132 Copies of the novel had travelled in Beat circles for years, and those close to Burroughs knew much of the material from his letters, and his penchant for acting out the funniest parts. It was in Paris where the connections were finally made that would start translating Burroughs’ vision into something with a worldwide influence. Burroughs had been on the road since the early 1950s. In 1951, he shot his wife through the head while playing a drunken game of William Tell, a regular routine of theirs, and narrowly escaped prosecution. The shame and trauma of the incident would hang over him for the rest of his life. After 1953’s Junky, he undertook a series of travels. He sought the mystical psychedelic drug yage in the amazon rainforest, becoming the first nontribesman to record the mix of roots that created it.133 He travelled to Tangier’s international zone, the infamous ‘interzone’ of his writings, and mixed with the world’s dissolute expatriate high society. In 1957, he met with Maurice Girodias on the urging of Allen Ginsberg (the poet had also been responsible for getting Junky published), and worked out a deal for the publication of Naked Lunch.134 Its publication in France came under a loophole, one regularly exploited by Girodias, which meant that works in English did not fall under the same obscenity laws as those published in French. Olympia was under constant threat from the government. They knew exactly how Girodias was using the loophole to publish pornography and extreme material, and moral campaigners were forever pressuring the courts to do something. Burroughs, in defence of his new publisher, joined a letter-writing campaign against French government censorship and donated a portion of his royalties to Girodias, who suggested they were to be used to

Anthony Burgess, ‘On the End of Every Fork’. The Guardian, 20 November 1964. Frank D. McConnell, ‘William Burroughs and the Literature of Addiction’. The Massachusetts Review, 8 (August 1967): 670. 133 A. J. Lees, Mentored by a Madman (London: Notting Hill Editions, 2016), p. 107. 134 Calder 2001, p. 199. 131 132

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fight legal battles.135 Meanwhile, Naked Lunch was in the process of being banned around the world. Britain banned it. Belgium, Germany and Canada followed. The final blow for Burroughs came in 1962, when Boston led the charge against the book in America, banning it from the city and moving the federal government towards suing Burroughs and Girodias for publishing obscene material.136 Removing himself to the Beat Hotel after a brief stretch getting clean in a London apomorphine clinic, Burroughs set out to discover new ways of writing.137 He sought to break the conditioning of society that he believed was conducted through the regimentation of language. He wanted to purge himself of his own writing style, to decentralize the communication system that he had built up within himself over the past decades, to break his own word habits using a mix of cutting edge technology and magical thinking.138 The British jazz trumpeter, painter and performance artist Jeff Nuttall encountered Burroughs in 1960. Britain’s underground scene was relatively tiny in 1960, especially compared to the heights it would reach by the end of the decade, but this small size amplified its importance for those connected to it. Nuttall was connected to the radical political fringe through his CND activism, the music world through his trumpet playing and the rest of hip London through the drug and poetry scenes. It was on the urging of Michael Horovitz (the closest to a Beat laureate, a Lawrence Ferlinghetti, that Britain had) that Nuttall read Naked Lunch. Astounded, Nuttall transformed his own writing style, believing Burroughs to have shown ‘not only society but Nature itself to be a confidence trick, a chronic imposition’.139 When Burroughs visited London, Nuttall accosted him, demanding more material. Burroughs obligingly offered two new pieces; ‘Minutes to Go’ and ‘The Exterminator’. Nuttall had recently started an underground magazine, My Own Mag, funded by his earnings as a teacher and entirely written, illustrated, printed, bound and distributed by himself.140 Reaching only those who knew Nuttall, or knew someone who knew him, My Own Mag was the first British publication of Burroughs’ material and the first ever publication of what would become known as the ‘cut-ups’. John Calder was certainly not an underground figure. He wore a threepiece suit and spent his evenings in London travelling between his private

Letter from William S. Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg, 5 September 1959. The Letters of William Burroughs, 1949–1959, ed. Oliver Harris (London: Picador, 1993), p. 423. 136 Jamie Lee Hamann, ‘The Obscenity Trial over the Publication of Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs’. Owlcation, 22 February 2018. 137 David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 1977), p. 115. 138 William S. Burroughs interviewed by Jeff Shiro, ‘Revolt!’ in Burroughs Live 1960–1997, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001), p. 97. 139 Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (London: Paladin, 1970), p. 100. 140 Nuttall 1970, p. 142. 135

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club and the opera. He was nevertheless well aware of Nuttall, and, in the same patrician manner that led him to the nouveau roman, he considered the nascent underground to be fascinating. In the spring of 1962, fresh from the success of his nouveaux romanciers tour, Calder was looking for another smash literary hit. Ideally, one just as controversial as the French writers had been, if not moreso. His native Edinburgh had hosted an arts festival every summer since 1947. It was there, in 1960, that Beyond the Fringe had first been performed, kickstarting the satire boom. Calder decided to contribute his own strand to the festival, a literary one that would bring big names from across the Anglophone world to discuss big issues. The topics of discussion were: ‘Difference of Approach’, ‘Scottish Writing Today’, ‘Commitment’, ‘Censorship’ and, of course, ‘The Future of the Novel’. He had already recruited the underground publisher Jeff Haynes to help with promoting the event and Sonia Orwell, wife of the late George, to organize and run it.141 He had arranged with Rayner Heppenstall for the BBC to broadcast the entire event on the Third Programme (possibly in return for Heppenstall himself talking on one of the panels).142 All Calder needed now were some literary fireworks; something to get his conference out of the reviews section and on to the front page. After coming across My Own Mag, Calder realized that Burroughs was onto something perhaps even more shocking than the mugwump sex and talking assholes of Naked Lunch. He called Girodias, who was already coming to the Edinburgh event, and convinced him to bring Burroughs along too.143 The summer came and Calder had sold out all 2,300 seats of McEwan Hall. Big names like Norman Mailer and Stephen Spender were part of the draw. A cunning campaign of placing ads in underground news outlets, including music magazines, also helped to draw a younger, not-necessarily bookish crowd. Thanks to some careful scheduling, the stage was set for some tremendous literary punch-ups. The first falling out came on the ‘Scottish Writing Today’ panel. Calder had given Hugh MacDairmid a prominent place on the panel, a writer whose communist beliefs made him an enemy to most Scottish traditionalists, but who had also been expelled from the Communist Party of Great Britain for his fervent Scottish nationalism. He strode on to the stage in a kilt and proceeded to sing the praises of Scottish austerity and stalwartness as ultimately working-class values. The eccentric Scotsman seemed to embody the neo-Victorian philosophy of democratic plain-spokenness taken to a rather unusual, or at least niche, extreme. He attacked everything English as

Eleanor Bell, ‘Experiment and Nation in the 1960s’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. Glenda Norquay (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 122. 142 Calder 2001, p. 197. 143 Ibid., p. 199. 141

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bourgeois, decadent and elitist, while defending the same commonsensical, write-for-the-reader dogma common to the London literary establishment.144 On the same panel, Calder had placed Alexander Trocchi, who had come dressed in a striped sailor’s shirt and jeans, half American Beat and half French bohemian. High on heroin, or ‘imperturbable’ as he put it in Cain’s Book, Trocchi argued that Scotland should look outwards. Scottish nationalism was a provincial inward turn within an already-provincial and inward-turned Great Britain. Everyone should look outwards, think internationally and avoid uniformity at all costs. ‘No uniformity’, he said, looking to MacDairmid, ‘not even a kilt’.145 MacDairmid, infuriated, lashed out at Trocchi as ‘cosmopolitan scum’ and a criminal, whose writing should be banned.146 The BBC cut out some of the more vociferous attacks, but the electric energy of the debate came through. The stage was set for more controversy to come. The next dangerous figure to mount the stage would be William Burroughs. Rather than place him on the ‘Censorship’ panel, where one might expect a writer whose most recent book was being banned around the world, Calder held his appearance back until the final discussion on the ‘Future of the Novel’. It was on this last afternoon when the British public first got to see Burroughs in the flesh. They were surprised. Far from the wild Beatnik they’d heard about in press coverage, Burroughs was conservatively dressed in a grey three-piece suit, wore a close cropped haircut and spoke with a creaking but careful and considered voice.147 Instead of reading from Naked Lunch, Burroughs opened the session with a polemical reading, a defence of the cut-up as the logical next step in literature creation. One takes writing, one’s own or that of others, cuts it, folds it and otherwise mangles it, before mixing it in with itself and other pieces. Such a technique, Burroughs argued, ‘only makes explicit a psychosensory process that is going on all the time anyway’. Reading in ‘the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and a sentence at a time’ has only ever been an aspiration, and one aimed at rigidly controlling the mind to adhere to linear thought.148 By constructing linear verbal chains, ‘linked poems’, and networks of common imagery, writers have been complicit in establishing ‘the organic and ideological connections on which the privileges [of the elite] were founded’.149 He then intended to read from The Soft Machine, the first of his cut-up trilogy, released only a few months before:

Ibid., 203. Ibid., 204. 146 Andrew Murray Scott, ‘Introduction’, in Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds (London: Polygon, 1991), p. vii. 147 Morgan 1991, p. 341. 148 William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, ‘The Cut-Up Method’ [1962], in The Third Mind (London: John Calder, 1979), pp. 4–5. 149 Ibid., p. 10. 144 145

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Casual adolescent of urinals and evening gone when I woke up – Age flakes fall through the pissoir – ran into my old friend Jones – so badly off – forgotten coughing in 1920 movie – Vaudeville voices hustle on bed service – I nearly suffocated trying on the boy’s breath – That’s Panama – Brain-receiving set – sad hand turned out the stale urine of Panama ‘I am dying, Meester? – forgotten coughing in 1920 street?’.150 Clearance was not given for the reading, however, especially as the BBC were recording. Still, the very suggestion of cutting up books provided subject matter enough for the rest of the panel discussion. In fact, lacking the final product of Burroughs’ cut-ups may have helped to provoke more outrage. Rather than the garbled yet hypnotic, jagged yet poetic, banal at times, majestic in others, poetry of Burroughs’ final cut-up pieces, offended writers imagined widespread plagiarism or Nazi-like vandalism. Those defending Burroughs also took up the wrong end of the stick rather often, defending cut-ups as a form of quotation, or T. S. Eliot style mosaic. Norman Mailer asked whether Burroughs could demonstrate the technique live on stage for the panel, to which he replied that ‘it really is not as arbitrary as it sounds, and I really can’t demonstrate it properly without a typewriter’.151 The mystery around the technique would remain, but its implications were to dominate discussions long after the festival had ended. Speakers from across the event were split as to whether or not they condoned Burroughs’ iconoclastic technique. Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Trocchi and Henry Miller all spoke up for Burroughs, believing the cut-up to hold great new potential for literature as an art form. The loudest voices against them were the critic Malcolm Muggeridge, poet Stephen Spender, Rayner Heppenstall and the writer Colin MacInnes whose career had been built on writing about youth culture.152 The underground, he argued, was nowhere near synonymous with youthful rebellion in the way that its proponents often said it was. In 1962, Britain had yet to really experience pop music. Burroughs was operating in an avant-garde space, and one that a writer like MacInnes would condemn as elitist, just as MacDairmid would, and establishment critics like Muggeridge would too. The day after the talk The Scotsman ran a piece entitled ‘Writer’s Conference Goes into Orbit’, featuring a long description of the cut-up technique. They appeared to have taken it from pamphlets which Jeff Nuttall had been selling to coincide with Burroughs’ appearance. He’d cut the pieces ‘Minutes to Go’ and ‘The Exterminator’ out of My Own Mag, added to them Burroughs’ description of the process, ‘The Cut-Up Method’, and sold

William Burroughs, The Soft Machine [1961] (New York: Grove Press, 1980), p. 123. Morgan 1991, p. 341. 152 Ibid. 150 151

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them as a single pamphlet. Anyone at the conference with sympathy for, or at least interest in, what Burroughs was doing could walk away with their very own instruction manual.153 In the coming weeks, the controversy would spread to The Times and Books and Bookmen, with The Observer’s letters section featuring weeks of angry commentary for and against Burroughs’ right to desecrate the classics.154 Never one to let an opportunity go to waste, Calder commissioned Burroughs to put out a book with him, Dead Fingers Talk (1963). A remixing of sections from Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded, all cut-up into each other with added linking material, the book received a vicious review from the Times Literary Supplement, which, in turn, provoked a fourteen-week correspondence often running up to four pages per issue.155 Arguably, the arrival of Burroughs in Edinburgh was the moment when the issue of experimentalism, the belief that innovation in form is necessary for the advancement of literature, finally returned to the literary mainstream. Like it or loathe it, everyone was now talking about it. It was very much real. It could no longer simply be dismissed. Charles Sugnet, studying for a degree in literature at the time of the conference, described the Burroughs phenomenon as ‘fitting right into our native landscape’.156 Whether the smoggy industrial towns of the North or the cramped urban sprawl of London, British life was growing too excessive and surreal to be captured in plain prose. In the world of art, the collage form was becoming increasingly popular as a way of depicting a society caught between post-war austerity and a new consumer-driven boom economy. An artist committed to this form, Ian Breakwell, defended Burroughs’ cut-ups as ‘a collage using words instead of images’,157 applying his medium’s same logic of non-linearity and creative repurposing to justify Burroughs’ literary borrowings. Brooke-Rose defended him, albeit rather meekly, and Johnson’s notebooks suggest an interest in Burroughs’ work at this time, with Dead Fingers Talk appearing alongside a list of books to buy that also included Tobias Smollett and the plays of T. S. Eliot.158 Not everyone embraced Burroughs’ technique, however. Samuel Beckett, a writer whose temperament was as far from neo-Victorian as it was possible

Nuttall 1970, p. 100. Bill Well, ‘Calder vs the Old Boys’, in In Defence of Literature (London: Mosaic Press, 1999), p. 64. 155 Sylvere Lotringer, ‘Exterminating’, in Burroughs Live 1960–1997, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001), p. 54. 156 Charles Sugnet, ‘Introduction’, in The Imagination on Trial, ed. Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), p. 2. 157 Ian Breakwell, ‘Fine Cut: Alan Burn’s Collage Prose’. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 17, no. 2 (1997): 184. 158 B. S. Johnson, Notebook 5, dated 3 June 1960. 153 154

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to be, nevertheless took exception to Burroughs’ use of other writers’ work. In a restaurant back in Paris, Beckett confronted him: ‘You’re using other writer’s words?’ ‘Words don’t have brands on them the way cattle do.’ ‘You can’t do that!’ Beckett howled accusingly, ‘You can’t take my writing and mix it up with newspapers!’ ‘Well I’ve done it.’ Burroughs asserted. Already a cantankerous personality, Burroughs’ brief time at the centre of British literary controversy had made him even more stoic in the face of accusations. Beckett, realizing this was an argument he couldn’t win, slunk back in his chair and folded his arms: ‘That’s not writing’, he grumbled, ‘that’s plumbing’.159 Anthony Burgess also questioned Burroughs’ new method and whether it would truly lead to new writing, or whether it would simply hide Burroughs’ satire behind a layer of semantic obscurity. Burroughs had already had to heal a rift with Burgess after Burgess found one of his cut-ups included the phrase ‘fucking Cathilics’. Burroughs wrote to Burgess, deeply apologetic, saying that he himself was well-disposed to Catholicism – ‘Why one of my best friends is a priest’ – and, although he didn’t remember that line, it was the likely to be the voice of a character.160 Perhaps still peeved at Burroughs’ blasphemy, Burgess contributed articles on the cut-up controversy to The Guardian and the New York Times. In the first he described the cut-ups as producing ‘loose collages in which the news is always the same’,161 while in the second he suggested that, rather than give a ‘new look to language’, the cut-ups merely ‘give this new look to their author’.162 The criticism was well-meant, however, and the two authors maintained friendly relations for many more years. In the mid-1960s, on a holiday in Tangier, Burgess’ wife fell sick, and Burroughs, who shared with her a deep passion for the works of Jane Austen, would spend the next few sweltering North African days reading Pride and Prejudice at her bedside163 (if you have ever listened to recordings of Burroughs reading, then you can imagine this gesture may not have been as soothing as Burroughs intended it to be). Both writers would continue to recommend each other’s books, despite each disagreeing with the other’s direction of literary travel. Burgess loved the Burroughs of Naked Lunch, a Burroughs that Burroughs himself was keen to move away from. Burroughs, for his part, adored A Clockwork Orange, a novel that Burgess came to resent.

Morgan 1991, p. 323. Letter from William Burroughs to Anthony Burgess, undated. Held in the Anthony Burgess archive, Harry Ransom Centre, Austin TX. 161 Anthony Burgess, ‘Yards and Yards of Entrails’. The Observer, 13 February 1966, p. 27. 162 Anthony Burgess, ‘The Seventeenth Novel’. New York Times, 21 August 1966. 163 Anthony Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time (London: Heinemann, 1990), p. 70. 159 160

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1963: The journey begins By the start of 1963, there were signs that the British literary world was starting to become aware of its own provinciality. American literature had long been written off as foreign, a cultural form that, in spite of sharing a language with its British counterpart, had nothing to say to it. The same went for Anglophone writers from other places, and went double for foreign-language writers. The impact of the Windrush writers, however, and the visits from the nouveaux romanciers and the contention around Burroughs, had all contributed to shaking up some of the old complacencies. Reviewers could no longer take realist value judgements for granted. The modernist experiment that they had declared over was suddenly back and was inspiring new writing. Simply dismissing it was not an option; reviewers had to either embrace it or resist it wholeheartedly. Publishers, although largely unperturbed, were beginning to sense competition from the likes of Calder and the resurgent Faber. It was a good time for new talent. What was missing was something specifically British in origin which could signal the resurgence of British experiment. B. S. Johnson was still a supply teacher, though his friend Zulfikar Ghose’s connections at the BBC had also landed him some work doing football coverage. Ghose himself had found that writing about cricket got him into places that poetry simply couldn’t. His tour around the Indian subcontinent at The Observer’s expense had fuelled his creative energies, and his enthusiasm was contagious. Johnson had spent a less glamorous six months working at a club in Wales.164 The location suited him, however, as did the silent superiority he wore as a barman. Where Ghose’s poetry spans continents and epic-scale histories, Johnson’s prose is rooted in mundanity. It was the very specific specifics of his Welsh summer job that Johnson was trying to capture while he scribbled away in the autumn of 1962. He wanted to capture the essence of his experience, fresh out of a literature degree and suddenly surrounded by the rather grotty quotidian. He found that, to explain his feelings, his existence at that time, he couldn’t simply make do with the traditional novel form. Certainly the realist form wouldn’t do, but none of the new experimental forms he had encountered suited him either. Instead, he found that he could only write his new novel, for that was what he knew it would be, by enlisting the whole history of English literature as it had been taught to him at university. Yes, much of it was pastiche, but it was pastiche in service to a larger mission. As he struggled with the page, transforming his Welsh adventure into something recognizable as literature,

Nick Hubble, ‘Sex, Lies and Autobiografication: Travelling People and the Persistence of Modernism’, in B.S. Johnson and Post-War Literature, ed. Julia Jordan and Martin Ryle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 168. 164

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Johnson was also transforming his Leavisite education, the great tradition, into his own personal tradition, one that he could keep alive and add to. The novel centres on a character, Henry Henry, whose implausible name draws attention to his own fictional status. Henry, as much as he is anything, is a version of Johnson.165 We are introduced to him hitchhiking to the Holyhead ferry on his way to Dublin where he meets Trevor, the owner of the Stromboli Club, going the same way. Cut to a few months later and Henry is back in London, washed out and penniless after graduating from university. He decides to take up Trevor’s offer of a bar job. He spends the summer in Wales, is wooed by the boss’ promiscuous young mistress, argues with the other staff and ultimately ends his career as a barman by rounding up local Welsh nationalists and staging a raid on the Stromboli, scaring off the English patrons and ransacking the bar. The story itself is humorous and well paced, with residues of Johnson’s satirical Prepar-a-Tory writing still visible. ‘Of one of my friends, it was said that he would go far’, Henry tells his wooer, Kim, ‘of me, it was said that I would go too far’.166 There is also a recurrent theme of anti-establishment griping, with Henry taking any opportunity to attack the ‘Oxbridge domination’ of jobs in the civil service, broadcasting and the arts.167 There are some scenes which, stripped of Johnson’s literary prose, could be borrowed from a Carry On movie: the boss, Trevor, dying during some too-rigorous sex with Kim, for example, or Henry spending a week cutting a path through brambles to reach a swimming lake, only to find that it’s actually a cesspit. There are even comic asides from the omniscient narrator, as he finds himself running from one scene to another and getting caught in the rain.168 Yet the humour of Travelling People is only one element of Johnson’s literary intention, and one that is now used knowingly rather than with a desperate eagerness to please, as was the case with Prepar-a-Tory. Johnson uses humour in counterpoint to ruminations on the nature of love and writing which, stood alone, may be too mawkish or maudlin. Humour also makes likeable the character of Henry Henry, who, taken on his own merits, is actually rather dour. Each section of the novel is presented as a pastiche of historical literary forms. Each chapter brings a new mode of presentation: Johnson, as voice of the author, interjects between chapters in the manner of Fielding in Tom Jones; letters draw epistolary inspiration from Richardson, as diary pages do from Defoe; Henry’s journey through London draws on the Aeolus scene from Joyce’s Ulysses; Trevor’s heart attack moves from a Woolfean stream-of-consciousness to a Sternean black page; witty banter is

Philip Tew, B.S. Johnson: A Critical Reading (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 20. 166 B. S. Johnson, Travelling People [1963] (London: Corgi, 1964), p. 101. 167 Ibid., p. 179. 168 Ibid., p. 252. 165

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written like a TV script, and the rest – thankfully in traditional third person – still enlists the fictional tradition through a careful realist eye for character development. Transitioning between forms gives a pleasing variation to the book’s style and pacing, while Johnson’s colloquial humour does much to alleviate the suspicion that it is all merely a pretentious game of allusion. Johnson also achieves a heroic consistency of character, with each of his numerous ensemble cast members being instantly recognizable. In spite of his mobilization of literary history, Travelling People feels distinctly modern. The reader isn’t given the sensation of moving through time. Rather, the formal shifts seem to connect to the character of Henry Henry, the recent literature graduate with high opinions of himself, and subtly suggest that he sees his own life as one of great literary importance. Who hasn’t thought, during a particularly funny moment of workplace banter, that this would all make for great TV comedy? In Travelling People, Johnson shows that moment in script format. Form, content and character are all in alignment. Travelling People also contains Johnson’s first published rumination on truth. During university, Johnson had been endlessly frustrated by what he considered the middle-class hypocrisy of comparing and contrasting opposed arguments. There was only one truth, Johnson argued, and although each person might experience it differently, it is not the same as moral relativism. Truth was truth. Johnson would state this ever more bluntly as the years went by. Its presentation in Travelling People, in the mouth of the philosophically inclined Henry, is interesting: Diagrammatically, Henry’s idea of truth was a sphere, perfect, inviolate, in which he existed: his recent travelling had shown him that this sphere existed in space, in another element which was limitless, not truth itself, but not antithetical to it either. He still retained his original conception unaltered, but now he had a context in which to place it.169 Rather than the militant slogan it would become later, truth is conceived here as a sort of Leibnizian monad, an indivisible unity that contains, in miniature, the sum of human experiences and natural laws. Whether we should take this as Johnson’s own philosophy of truth or merely his character Henry’s is uncertain. We are given no indication of whether the ‘idea’ is literal or metaphorical either. While writing the novel, Johnson had become obsessed with truth; the experience of writing, far from being a simple act of translating plan to page, presented him at every point with moral dilemmas. He sought to describe the holiday as it was, as it truly was, the better to extract from that true experience some larger truths. Yet, in the interests of readability,

Ibid., p. 279.

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characterization, consistency or pacing, Johnson was having to make concessions to the fictionalizing process. Rather than telling his story, he felt that he was telling stories; and, as any child can tell you, ‘telling stories’ means telling lies. He became uncomfortable with his own writing and would send works-in-progress to any of his friends who were willing to read them. He became desperately thin-skinned and hung on his friends’ criticisms and praise as if to gospel truths.170 Large sections were rewritten, jostled around and cut. By the time it came to submit to publishers, Johnson had worked for a total of two and a half years on the novel.171 He was exhausted, nearly broken and had already developed plans for two more novels that he’d much rather be working on than Travelling People. However, when a publication offer finally came, from the medium-sized publishing firm Constable, it came with a caveat: work with an editor and accept another batch of changes and cuts or the deal was off. ‘Every change was agony’, Johnson recalled, but each was made.172 Johnson would later declare that the changes were necessary and that they improved the novel, but towards the end of his life he disinherited Travelling People and demanded that it never be reprinted. It remains out of print to this day. On first release, Travelling People was a considerable success. Constable marketed Johnson as the great new hope for British experimental writing. The quote, ‘a writer in the mould of Joyce and Sterne’, featured prominently on the novel’s cover, alongside a swathe of positive lines from respected review outlets. Zulfikar Ghose was of critical importance to Johnson at this time. Ghose had managed to get his foot in the media’s door in a way that had eluded Johnson, and he was to use his minor power as an influencer to bring Travelling People to the attention of reviewers. For Ghose, this was a natural next step in their creation of a new movement. With the book launch nearing and Johnson trepidatious, Ghose wrote to remind him of their mission; ‘the novels, the poems, the plays . . . the whole bloody corpus of literature isn’t going to be the same when we’ve done what we intend to do.’173 Ghose himself wrote a long review of Travelling People, one that he could send to other reviewers to help explain what Johnson was doing and why it was so important. Where Constable’s press release described the novel as an original spin on a comic romance, Ghose touted Johnson’s work as a revolution in literary form: About four thousand novels are published in Britain every year and during the course of the year, the novel form suffers some four thousand deaths.

Coe 2004, p. 92. Alan Burns, ‘B.S. Johnson’, In The Imagination on Trial, ed. Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), p. 85. 172 Coe 2004, p. 87. 173 Letter from Zulikar Ghose to B. S. Johnson, 20 May 1963. Held in the British Library. 170 171

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It is the task of the serious novelist to revitalise the form, to recreate it for himself and thus to re-establish the literary worth of the form by demonstrating historical progress.174 The letter worked. Almost every paper carrying a reviews section took note of Travelling People, with many praising its ‘interesting’ form. Anthony Burgess, reviewing for the Yorkshire Post, was enthusiastic about the novel, and especially about its potential. ‘Mr Johnson has a fine set of instruments’, he wrote, adding the caveat, ‘he must now set about making something with them.’175 The critique was echoed by many literary figures. Johnson was on to something, they were sure, but he wasn’t quite there yet. Although disheartening for Johnson himself, these reviews did much to drive readers to the novel, hoping to read something new and exciting. The first edition sold out within a few months and Johnson signed a deal with Corgi for a 1964 paperback edition. The interest of Corgi is notable, for Corgi was one of the largest publishers of paperbacks for the mass market. They were the opposite of publishers like Calder or Faber, who reached small audiences but won large prizes. Corgi books were barely considered literature, but they had a vast reach. Johnson would specialize in these literary coups, reaching audiences far larger than a highbrow novelist could normally expect, all while receiving reviews that took him seriously as a literary innovator (albeit, at this stage, an immature one). The publication of Travelling People in 1963 represented a moment of arrival. Energies that had lain dormant since before the war had been shaken up by the appearance of foreign avant-gardes on British shores. Travelling People sounded the charge for a return of Britain’s own spirit of innovation and invention. It showed that a native experimentalism was possible, that the story of English literature that Leavis had concluded with D. H. Lawrence could still be continued and developed, and that the products of this literary attitude could reach mass audiences, and sell well. The stage was set for the start of a new movement.

Untitled letter/review by Zulfikar Ghose, 9 April 1963. Held in the British Library. Anthony Burgess, ‘Poetry for a Tiny Room’. Yorkshire Post. 16 May 1963, p. 4.

174 175

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The scientific 1960s There is a question hanging over us which has so far gone unanswered. What exactly is so ‘experimental’ about experimental writing? The question is one that each writer dealt with in their own way. Many spurned the label as meaningless, while some embraced it in the hope that their own definition of the term might explain something of their writing and their philosophical intentions. The term, as it was applied at the time, refers broadly to literature that breaks from the traditional forms first laid down in the eighteenth century and then perfected in the nineteenth. As we have also seen, such a distinction is as much about the writers’ attitudes to each other as it is about the texts themselves. Some neo-Victorians, like Kingsley Amis for example, offer considerable stylistic innovations while remaining committed to traditional novel form, while arch-experimentalist B. S. Johnson nevertheless retains an eye for character and plot throughout his writing career.1 The conflict between tradition and experiment is one driven by the writers’ attitudes and the critics’ desire to contrast and categorize. When it came to anything unusual, ‘experimental’ was the critic’s preferred descriptor.2 Earlier eras have adopted similar terms. In the modernist period, critics preferred the military descriptor avant-garde, the forward guard who would seize new territories in advance of the main body of troops. The nineteenth century saw the racial category ‘bohemian’ serve a similar function, although it was more often used to describe alternative lifestyles than alternative

Even his later metafictions like Christie Malry contain, in spite of themselves, compelling characters and pacy plots. 2 Statistical and documentary evidence for the popularity of the term ‘experimental writing’ can be found in Joseph Darlington, Contextualising the British Experimental Novelists of the Long Sixties. PhD Thesis: University of Salford, 2014. 1

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literary styles. Back in 1711, while the novel form was still in its infancy, the great essayist Joseph Addison had already distinguished the ‘false wit’ that gives pleasure through presentation from the ‘true wit’ that gives pleasure purely through the words themselves.3 Even the words which I myself am using – ‘innovative’ and ‘traditional’, which I hope strike the reader as objective and unbiased – still rely upon some familiarity on the reader’s part with a range of different novel forms. Whether accurate labelling is even possible in such a diverse medium is questionable, but for our history it is sufficient to know that one term did exist – ‘experimental’ – and that its adherents might, without too much of a stretch, be designated by a suffixed term: ‘experimentalists’. It is a term derived from the physical sciences: one that evokes intellectual endeavour, exploration of the unknown and the possibility of progress. At the peak of its popularity during the 1960s, scientific progress was central to Britain’s ideas about its own modernity, and so it made sense that the literary jargon of the era would be inspired by the physical sciences too. In 1959, C. P. Snow had published a bestselling treatise on the relationship between science and the literary arts: The Two Cultures. In it, he argued that the British education system favoured the humanities over the sciences and that, as a result, the most intelligent and highly educated people in the country lacked sufficient knowledge to define even basic concepts like mass and acceleration.4 British literature was, therefore, he argued, hopelessly romantic and the culture surrounding it riddled with luddite tendencies. However, by focusing upon writers’ lack of practical knowledge, Snow had failed to realize the potential science held for inspiring writers on a conceptual level. This was happening far away from the education system that Snow was criticizing, in the still-peripheral world of science fiction. In Britain, the early 1960s had been a critical moment for sci-fi. The post-war magazine boom had included sci-fi periodicals alongside its other tales of adventure, espionage, war and romance. They tended towards the fantastic and the cheesy, space operas in which heroic space explorers battled with alien antagonists. The 1950s saw the magazine New Worlds emerge as the premier outlet for science fiction writing in Britain, and in 1964 its appointment of a new editor, Michael Moorcock, signified sci-fi’s transition into an experimental form.5 It was a long way from what C. P. Snow had advocated, but here was a group of writers willing to grapple with the real problems of modern science in an imaginative medium.

Joseph Addison, ‘Essay 60, Wednesday 9th May 1711’, in Critical Essays from the Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 9. 4 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (London: Canto, 2012), p. 309. 5 Michael Ashley, Transformations: The Story of Science-Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 236. 3

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Moorcock’s editorship was the culmination of many years of in-fighting within the science fiction community. On one side were the established figures of the 1950s whose focus on space adventure and technological specifics – ‘hard s.f.’, as it was known – was accompanied by traditionalist views about women and the family, and a belief in science as a civilizing force. The other side, dubbed the New Wave, cared more for psychological exploration than for space exploration, questioned whether science was inherently a force for good, and adopted values aligned with the developing sexual revolution.6 By appointing Michael Moorcock, outspoken member of the New Wave, as editor, New Worlds was signalling that the age of the space opera was over.7 Instead, the magazine now explored themes like gender fluidity, ecological catastrophe, psychic communication and the central question of cybernetics: Wherein lies the difference between man and machine? They also drew heavily on the experimental techniques of William Burroughs, finding in his apocalyptic word collages a suitably expressive form for depicting the end of the world and the electronic fragmentation of human consciousness.8 One writer deeply inspired by Burroughs was J. G. Ballard. Ballard began contributing stories to New Worlds in the early 1960s, and became one of its leading contributors after Moorcock took over as editor.9 He was a keen advocate of experimental technique and dogged in his rejection of space opera tropes. In a 1962 essay, ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’, he went further than many New Wave writers in arguing that sci-fi should abandon outer space as a subject entirely. ‘The only truly alien planet’, he argued, ‘is Earth’.10 His first novels, the Drowned World series (1961–6), used the landscape of a post-apocalyptic planet to explore humanity’s reliance on technology and the fragility of the civilized mindset. Where the space explorers of hard s.f. could encounter new worlds and creatures, confident in themselves and their mission, Ballard’s characters can barely negotiate their own planet without risk of existential crisis. It was his story, ‘The Terminal Beach’, published in New Worlds in 1964, that saw Ballard fully embrace experimental writing techniques. A man, distraught at the death of his wife, travels to a nuclear test site where his mind slowly degenerates and his body decays.11 After writing this story, Ballard committed fully to exploring new ways of writing, adopting and extending Burroughs’ methods.12 Like C. P. Snow, Ballard

Andrew M. Butler, Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), p. 106. 7 Ibid., 25. 8 Francis Booth, Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel, 1940–1980 (London: Lulu, 2012), p. 659. 9 Michael Delville, J.G. Ballard (Plymouth: Northcoat House Press, 1991), p. 11. 10 J. G. Ballard, ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’. New Worlds, 40, no. 118 (May 1962). 11 J. G. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’, in The Terminal Beach: Short Stories (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964). 12 Peter Brigg, J.G. Ballard (Berkeley: Borgo Press, 1985), p. 56. 6

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recognized that the British education system played a critical role in shaping British culture. Yet, unlike Snow, Ballard didn’t believe this situation to call for a pragmatic turn, but rather that the technological revolution would itself dismantle the Leavisite great tradition, if it had not done so already: The main underpinning of English culture for the last couple of centuries has been English literature. It has provided not only the literal vocabulary but also the yardsticks by which one’s whole intelligent response to life is made. This applies not only to literary people but to anybody who is merely literate. Now this underpinning has completely gone.13 Ballard’s personal dismantling of the tradition took the form of cutting up his own writing and rearranging it, and then using it to cultivate a range of bizarre erotic fixations. These would not emerge in published form until The Atrocity Exhibition in 1970, yet his experiments play an important role in tying science fiction to larger trends in experimental writing. Burroughs, for his part, recognized this, responding to the work of Ballard and New Worlds more generally by claiming science fiction to be the ideal literature not only of the future, but of the technologically advanced present.14 In 1969, John Calder organized a conference in Harrogate, Yorkshire, with the objective of bringing the emergent experimental writers into direct conversation with the sci-fi New Wave. The event was a minor success, with Michael Moorcock, Norman Spinrad and Brian Aldiss meeting and trading opinions with Johnson, Burns, Figes and Nuttall, although no major collaborations would end up emerging.15 The influence of the New Wave on British experimentalism would occur much earlier. Ever since completing her satirical novel, The Middlemen (1961), Christine Brooke-Rose had been searching for new fictional forms. She struggled to say anything of value, she felt, when writing traditional novels. It was a sedative, she believed, that clouded the confusing realities of the contemporary world or else dismissed them with a bon mot. In the traditional novel, causes result in predictable effects, misunderstandings are revealed and resolved, and every loose end is tied up. The nouveau roman had convinced Brooke-Rose that another mode of writing was possible. Nathalie Sarraute certainly did not resolve all of her characters’ narrative dilemmas, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novels barely featured characters to begin with. Reviewing regularly, attending literary launch parties and occasionally appearing on the BBC’s Third Programme, she could find nothing among

Alan Burns, ‘An Interview with J.G. Ballard’, in The Imagination on Trial, ed. Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), p. 16. 14 William Burroughs, ‘Preface’, in The Atrocity Exhibition, ed. J. G. Ballard (London: Harper Perennial, 2006), p. vi. 15 John Calder, Pursuit (London: John Calder Publications, 2001), p. 312. 13

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her fellow British writers amounting to the exciting potential of their French and American compatriots. She, like C. P. Snow, attributed this to a lack of scientific curiosity within British culture. And yet, to Brooke-Rose’s perpetual consternation, C. P. Snow was one of the most vocal defenders of the Victorian tradition. ‘It is perhaps ironic’, she wrote, ‘that the very people who lament the gulf between science and the arts should also be those who have most resisted the experimental literature which, in effect, tries to narrow that gulf.’16 For Christine Brooke-Rose, experimental writing was not only inspired by, but was part of the scientific revolution, and it was not only part of it, but an essential part of it. In developing her experimentalist philosophy Brooke-Rose was inspired by science fiction writers, J. G. Ballard in particular, although her arguments outstripped even his in their radicalism.17 In 1964, Ballard and the New Wave were arguing about what was the most fitting subject matter for science fiction writing. Brooke-Rose, by contrast, believed that the evolution of an entirely new system of writing – both a literary form and a new type of everyday syntax – was absolutely essential. The continuation of Victorian writing practices in a world aware of relativity, quantum electrodynamics and cybernetics would inevitably ‘produce more and more semantic blockages in our nervous systems, more breakdowns in communication, more mental disturbances, and we would not be equipped to survive the evolutionary process’.18 If humans don’t ‘evolve a language that corresponds structurally to what we know of empirical reality today’,19 then the cognitive dissonance of living in the modern world would produce a catastrophic social and mental breakdown. The problem was not, as C. P. Snow asserted, that the country was being run by Luddites, but that the scientists too were Luddites, failed by a culture that refused to evolve alongside them. Physicists now knew that the world was governed by probabilities, but the cause and effect of a Dickensian plot was still strictly mechanical. Relativity and cybernetics combine to debunk the notion of a purely objective reality, obtainable by a rational human consciousness; and yet novels still defaulted to the third person, with an omniscient and objective narrator. In the modern, scientific world, the novel had a very specific role to play, according to Brooke-Rose. It would replicate ‘the activities of consciousness in such a way as to communicate them in full to another’s consciousness’.20 Novels shouldn’t simply entertain; they should prepare human consciousness for its technological future.

Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Dynamic Gradient’. London Magazine, March 1965, p. 1. Judy Little, The Experimental Self (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), p. 123. 18 Ibid., p. 4. 19 Ibid., p. 5. 20 Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘The Nouveau Roman’. Times Literary Supplement, 7 August 1969, Issue 3519, p. 881. 16 17

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The question remained as to how Brooke-Rose would go about constructing this novel of the future. Which techniques would be suitable, and which unsuited? Which formal aspects could be adapted, and which should be resigned to history? The answer, for Brooke-Rose, lay in experimentation. ‘For Zola’, she argued, ‘“the experimental novel” meant a novel that had been carefully researched and backed by “experience” (of slaughterhouses, mines, peasant life, etc.), what we now call “documentary”’.21 First-hand experience was important, she agreed, but the experience she required was not social but scientific. She began attending Royal Society lectures and seeking out books on astrophysics and relativity. She mobilized her knowledge of the classics and researched into mythical cosmology the better to understand how people had historically aligned their scientific and cultural understandings of the world. She also began writing. She would adopt a technique in one place, strip it out completely in another. Certain aspects worked, others didn’t. The results, she found, were mixed. They were also taking her a long way away from her previous writings, and away from anything else that had ever been written. There were touches of inspiration here and there: Ballardian elements in the content and a RobbeGrillet-inspired fixated gaze when it came to description. The general sense, however, was one of true experiments: testing out theories at the limits of her understanding, ‘not knowing where you’re going, or what you’re discovering’.22 The final ingredient in Brooke-Rose’s experimental stew came unexpectedly, in the form of a quite serious illness. Hospitalized and in severe pain, she was diagnosed with kidney failure and had to have one of the offending organs removed. Her convalescence was long and laborious. She was bedridden for a number of months. Her husband Jerzy prepared her meals and kept her on track with a strict regimen of painkillers. Unable to write and dosed up on opiates, stuck in bed and unable to move without great pain, Brooke-Rose found herself falling into trancelike states. These trances would last for increasingly extended periods of time as the treatment wore on, and would increasingly be accompanied by an uncanny, somnolescent flow of inner monologue. The theories that had obsessed her before her illness, those found during her research and explored in her many experiments, found an organic voice. Before she was even well enough to walk, she had begun work on her new novel.23 The novel would be called Out, and it would be unlike anything she had written before. To anyone who

Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Illiterations’, in Breaking the Sequence, ed. Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 63. 22 Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs, ‘A Conversation with Christine Brooke-Rose’, in Utterly Other Discourse, ed. Ellen G. Friedman and Richard Martin (New York: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), p. 31. 23 Ibid., p. 30. 21

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asked her to describe this new type of writing, she called it ‘an experimental novel’.24 A large number of innovations came together simultaneously in Out (1964). First, the removal of speech marks removed the formal barrier between speech and thought, while the refusal to use past tense narration placed a character’s speech and thought, and their external description, on the same footing, one indistinguishable from another.25 Characters are, as a result, hard to differentiate, and their subjective selves often contrast or overlap with others’ subjective impressions of them. Selves, in Out, are not stable, and nor is the world they inhabit, being clearly a product of faulty perceptions.26 The novel opens with two flies mating on a character’s knee: A fly straddles another fly on the faded denim stretched over a knee. Sooner or later, the knee will have to make a move, but now it is immobilized by the two flies, the lower of which is so still that it seems dead. The fly on top is on the contrary quite agitated, jerking tremendously, then convulsively, putting out its left foreleg to whip, or maybe to stroke some sort of reaction out of the fly beneath, which, however, remains so still that it seems dead. A microscope might perhaps reveal animal ecstasy in its innumerable eyes, but only to the human mind behind the microscope, and beside, the fetching and rigging up the microscope, if one were available, would interrupt the flies.27 The minute detail of the flies exists at once as scenery – the novel takes place in Africa after a nuclear war, the irradiated white survivors reliant upon medical centres and the work exchange, where the novel opens – and also as character development. The indigent labourer watching two flies mating on his work overalls was once a particle physicist; his close attention is framed in scientific language but is ultimately the act of a sick and shiftless man. The novel takes place between the houses of rich black families where white evacuees clean, cook and garden, and the various processing centres where the white are treated and helped to integrate into society. The objective scientific language of the protagonist has grown metaphorical, and his descriptions fuse jargon with poetry: There is murmuring in the hall. The puny man with ginger hair shuffles past the row of sitting thighs and their belonging feet. His face is oxidised copper. Oxidating metabolism is a more efficient source of adenosine

Boswell, ‘Writer Out on a Limb’. The Scotsman, 17 August 1965. Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Invisible Author’, in Invisible Author: Last Essays (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2002), p. 2. 26 Little 1996, p. 124. 27 Christine Brooke-Rose, Out. In Omnibus (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), p. 11. 24 25

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triphosphate than is fermentation. The greenish colour, however, is due to over-production in the gall-bladder, and gall-stones are the tomb-stones of bacteria.28 Brooke-Rose’s metaphor use is notable for its range and variety. Having written her PhD thesis on metaphor, Brooke-Rose was aware of the many types of metaphor available to the English language writer. Among these, she identifies the verb metaphor as the least-used form and the combination of animate and inanimate objects as the most potent subject matter.29 In Out, she combines these two elements with her use of scientific terms to create a wide range of images, each subtly suggesting that technology has its own motive force and animal consciousness; The green thermoplastic snake lies along the inside of the right-hand flower-bed, about twenty centimetres away from the cypress hedge, quite straight, and very long, leading towards the glossy black door in the white wall. The green thermoplastic snake comes to an end by a laurel-bush, pointing its brass nozzle-holder at the stem, without the spray-nozzle attachment. There is no water coming out of the hose.30 Combined, these elements result in a fluid integration of consciousness with description.31 Metaphor and scientific understanding overlap in her imagery, while the scenes themselves cannot be perceived distinct from the characters who are perceiving them. On a narrative level, it is also suggested that the white characters’ mental and physical degeneration is due to their incapacity to align their technology with their culture, while the black characters’ language is flexible enough to evolve alongside scientific breakthroughs. ‘We were whited sepulchres and never came to terms with our dark interior’, the protagonist declares as he confronts his employer, ‘is that why you are afraid, afraid of our white sickness?’32 The novel offers no easy resolution to these issues, preferring to leave them unresolved and incomplete. BrookeRose may have believed that experimental writing could save the world, but her novel is more of a warning than a ray of hope. A sense of what a redemptive experimental culture might look like would have to wait for her next novel. In the meantime, however, Brooke-Rose had to deal with the press. She would be the first established British writer to come out as wholeheartedly experimentalist.

Ibid., p. 47. Christine Brooke-Rose, A Grammar of Metaphor (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), p. 15. 30 Brooke-Rose 1986, p. 39. 31 Birch, 2002, p. 52. 32 Brooke-Rose 1986, p. 85. 28 29

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The press response was mixed which, in the context of the times, could be considered as something of a victory. Published by Michael Joseph, a respectable mid-tier publishing house, and written by a writer somewhat famous for her social satires, reviewers did not have the option to ignore the book in the same way they ignored science fiction or the stranger things coming out of John Calder’s press. Most, in fact, found the work an impressive and commendable endeavour. There were, however, many caveats included alongside these words of praise. ‘This is a brilliant book’, claimed Bryan Colm of the Yorkshire Post, ‘I humbly wish I could even dimly understand what it is about.’33 Praising Brooke-Rose on her ‘possibly satirical’ use of scientific terms, the reviewer for The Times described how the book ‘always commands respect, though it cannot altogether command understanding’.34 The New Statesman wrote the book off as irredeemably trendy, suggesting that ‘there is some voguish ballast in the cargoes of enthusiasm that come from Paris via John Calder’35 and that this book, presumably, added to that dead weight. This isn’t to say that the book was entirely negatively reviewed, however, and many of these peevish comments were typical jibes with which reviewers of the era peppered even their most positive reviews. Brooke-Rose herself was guilty of this practice. One could say, therefore, that these reviews were fair and, arguably, that their putdowns might have had a positive effect. The kind of reader who sought out difficult or innovative works of fiction may in fact be drawn by a novel that a critic dismissed as too clever. This was surely preferable to the glowing review given in The Rochdale Observer that praised the book for its ‘brave’ and ‘clinical’ depiction of a world where ‘us poor whites’ were ruled over by ‘coloured men’.36 Having presented Brooke-Rose’s anti-racist fable as a call for more racism, it is uncertain how many xenophobic Rochdaleans went out to buy themselves a copy. Either way, the book sold enough for a second run. What was perhaps more galling for Brooke-Rose was the social fallout from her turn to experimentalism. The invites she once received to launches and parties from big publishers dried up, to be replaced by enthusiastic invitations from the Calder circle, whom she had so far been avoiding. The science fiction community that had provided the inspiration for the novel effectively snubbed her by refusing to even mention it in New Worlds. The review section on the month of its release featured twenty-three books from a wide variety of publishers, but no Brooke-Rose.37 Someone had made a judgement call, and Out, in spite of its post-apocalyptic setting, was

Bryan Colm, ‘Gobbledegook in Oxford’. Yorkshire Post, 26 November 1964. Anon. ‘New Fiction’. The Times, 12 November 1964. 35 Anon, ‘Novelties’. The New Statesman, 13 November 1964. 36 Anon. ‘New Novels’. The Rochdale Observer, 13 February 1965. 37 James Colvin, ‘Books’. New Worlds, 48, no. 145 (1964): 119–21. 33 34

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designated as non-sci-fi. Brooke-Rose was out in the literary hinterlands. She had not been abandoned by everyone, however, and a chance meeting in Ealing Hospital brought her into contact with Anthony Burgess. Burgess was visiting his wife, Lynne, who had been suffering from stomach complaints, as had Brooke-Rose’s husband Jerzy.38 Burgess thanked Brooke-Rose for the extensive analysis of A Clockwork Orange, which she’d published in a French literary review.39 The French audience seemed to appreciate the philosophy, he reflected, where the Brits just saw sex and gore. As for himself, he’d found Out to be a revelation. He had published his own science fiction novel two years earlier, The Wanting Seed, and appreciated the medium’s capacity to express ideas not amenable to mainstream fiction. Once Jerzy and Lynne were out of hospital, they arranged to visit each other’s homes for dinner. Burgess was impressed with Brooke-Rose’s Hampstead flat as, in spite of his prolific number of publications, the Burgesses’ residence was a rather more shabby affair. Brooke-Rose was entertained to discover that, upon hearing her name, Burgess’ dog went into fits of hysterics. It transpired that, having learned to recognize the word ‘out’ and associate it with walkies, Burgess had tried to outwit the animal by replacing ‘out’ with the author of Out, Christine Brooke-Rose. Being a particularly astute dog, it soon cracked the code and now associated the words ‘Christine Brooke-Rose’ with its afternoon walk.40 What it made of the actual Christine Brooke-Rose is unknown.

Experimentalism becomes a movement While Brooke-Rose was carving out her own path towards experiment, B. S. Johnson was already on the offensive. By all accounts a tremendously dynamic man in spite of his large size, Johnson tirelessly defended his stylistic approach. He became an evangelist for experimentalism. He defended his own work with a bullish zeal and championed other writers that he felt were part of his experimental mission, a cause that Alan Burns would later describe as his ‘campaign for the good stuff’.41 The campaign was waged where possible in the public eye, with Johnson appearing on BBC discussion panels, writing columns and giving readings. Between these public appearances, Johnson continued the campaign behind the scenes too.42 Any reviewer who criticized Johnson could expect a sternly worded letter soon

Anthony Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time (London: Heinemann, 1990), p. 154. Ibid., p. 261. 40 Ibid., p. 18. 41 Coe, 2004, p. 404. 42 Matthew Harle, Can I Come in and Talk about These and Other Ideas? (Berlin: Text und Töne, 2020). 38 39

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after – and in the case of fellow working-class writers like Angus Young, these letters could stretch to pages – while Johnson became infamous on the London literary party circuit for his brusque manner and the inevitability of his starting a fight.43 Anthony Burgess, whose praise for Travelling People had so far kept him safe from Johnson’s harangues, stated bluntly, ‘I don’t want to talk to Bryan about the novel: he has views about it.’44 Yet the opprobrium wasn’t entirely one way. Johnson’s outspoken attitudes and generalized disdain for the literary establishment provoked, and in turn was provoked by, a steady stream of dismissal emanating from mainstream authors and critics. The word ‘experimental’ that Brooke-Rose had found so conducive to expressing her intentions became an albatross hanging around Johnson’s neck. He came to loathe and resent the word, claiming that although ‘I make experiments, the unsuccessful ones are quietly hidden away’.45 To him, the word suggested that his work was somehow provisional. It was an easy and smug mode of dismissal. Being labelled ‘experimental’ most often implied that a novel was (1) not as clever as it thought it was and (2) that nobody wanted to read clever novels anyway. From this perspective, the bolshie Johnson was a perfect embodiment of everything wrong with this new way of writing. To his enemies he was dogmatic, abrasive and totally lacking in the social graces that a grammar school education would have instilled in him.46 He was a more conspicuous target than someone like Christine Brooke-Rose, who, in her own patrician way, grew to resent Johnson for typifying the experimental/Victorianist divide as a class struggle. The drab working-class settings of his novels, she worried, threatened to make experimentalism into an extension of late1950s social realism.47 It was this mundanity that Brooke-Rose had sought to break from. Johnson, on the other hand, was fervent in his belief that neo-Victorian writing was the writing of the ruling classes and that experimentalism, by breaking with this tradition, was a radical force. His notebooks and letters reveal an obsession with class and a self-consciousness about pursuing the middle-class trade of writing that, if anything, just made him more defensive about his working-class roots.48 For Johnson, literature was an

Coe 2004, p. 221. Alan Burns, ‘Interview with B.S. Johnson’, in Imagination on Trial, ed. Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), p. 93. 45 B. S. Johnson, Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs (London: Hutchinson, 1973), p. 19. 46 Glyn White, Reading the Graphic Surface (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 121. 47 Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski and Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘The Texterminator’. The Independent on Sunday. March 2005, p. 28. 48 Joseph Darlington, ‘A Kind of Waterfall: Class, Anxiety and Authenticity in B.S. Johnson’. BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal, no. 1 (2014): 73. 43 44

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expression of truth. To write in a Victorian style outside the conditions of Victorian England was to fictionalize the present. This, for Johnson, was tantamount to lying, and it was the kind of lying that benefitted a ruling class who, it followed, would prefer a return to Victorian social conditions too. For Johnson, the Leavisite great tradition formalized in schools and universities was not only a history but a process of evolution. The last great experimenters, the modernists, didn’t innovate for its own sake, but to show how literature needed to develop in the future, this future being a world where storytelling was primarily to be delivered in other mediums. Joyce knew this, he argued, and opened the first cinema in Dublin at the same time as writing Ulysses.49 By 1964, over three-quarters of the country had a television set at home, and if all people wanted were stories, then shows like Coronation Street were beaming them into the nation’s living rooms every night.50 In an age of mass televisual fiction, Johnson saw literary experiment as a way back to the truth.51 By going back to the fundamental questions of what a book was, how readers engaged with them and how stories worked, Johnson sought to achieve new modes of verisimilitude that were capable of speaking truth directly, unimpeded by cliché and dead tradition.52 It would give the book a reason to continue in the age of TV. The most immediately visible of Johnson’s innovations were his experiments with the graphic surface. These had already made an appearance in Travelling People in the form of theatrically presented dialogue and the black page borrowed from Laurence Sterne. In compiling his next novel, he carried these devices further, rethinking the book as an object in need of uncoding rather than a simple container for stories. Readers already went through a decoding process when they opened a book, Johnson realized, with most flipping straight past the publication details, acknowledgements and title page to get straight to the story where, thanks to established graphical signifiers like paragraphs, indentation and punctuation marks, some impatient readers could skip description and scene-setting too, jumping straight to the dialogue. Such practices were so embedded in adult readers as to be unconscious, but as a substitute teacher Johnson was very much aware that such habits were not innate. The young learner had first to engage with the book as a foreign object. To get to the story, you have to first learn what the particulars of its presentation mean. By introducing new ways of presenting text on a page, Johnson demanded that the reader make conscious their unconscious reading processes. By upsetting old

Johnson 1973, p. 12. Some calculate ownership to be as high as 83% (‘Television Ownership in Private Domestic Households’. Closer: The Home of Longitudinal Research, 1 January 2021). 51 Johnson 1973, p. 14. 52 Philip Tew, B.S. Johnson: A Critical Reading (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 11. 49 50

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habits, Johnson’s graphic devices challenge the reader the find new layers of meaning in the presentation of text. These extra meanings are sometimes metaphorical, sometimes directly representational.53 As with the rest of Johnson’s experimental techniques, their ultimate goal was to bring the reader closer to truth.54 By May 1964, Johnson had distilled his new approach into a second novel, Albert Angelo. At the time, Johnson considered Albert Angelo to be a continuation of Travelling People – ‘a logical progression . . . that is, subjectmatter and function are allowed organically to determine form and content’ – but he would later go further and consider his second novel a supersession of his first.55 After Albert Angelo, Johnson would not condone the printing of further editions of Travelling People. As a text, Albert Angelo’s originality, concision and polemical urgency gave it a unity of purpose that his first novel lacked. It was as if, after already establishing himself as a vocal defender of experimental writing, Johnson had finally created the novel that would demonstrate what he was so passionate about. Where Travelling People was a familiar narrative interestingly presented, Albert Angelo was a step into the unknown. The novel tells the story of Albert Albert, an architect who designs imaginary buildings and who works as a substitute teacher to support himself. He lives in a shared house with other young men. They don’t understand his strange calling but are happy to go out boozing with him nevertheless. Their banter is initially presented as Shakespearian dialogue before moving into a colloquial realism reminiscent of Alan Sillitoe or Colin MacInnes. Johnson’s voice is brash and unsophisticated, even during Albert’s many philosophical ruminations, resulting in the main character who, we feel, tells it like it is. Through run-ins with pupils and painful memories of lost love – the two presented alongside each other in parallel columns – we come to feel Albert’s pain, and his inner turmoil at having to wear the face of authority to his pupils while sharing their plight on the inside. Eventually, the weight of Albert’s contradictions drag him down to the point of disintegration. In ‘an almighty aposiopesis’, we are faced with a voice, recognizably Johnson’s own, bellowing in capitals: ‘FUCK ALL THIS LYING LOOK WHAT IM REALLY TRYING TO WRITE ABOUT IS WRITING NOT ALL THIS STUFF ABOUT ARCHITECTURE.’56 Pages follow in which Johnson rails at the reader. ‘Telling stories is telling lies’,57 he declares, ‘tell me a story, tell me a story. The infants’.58 The reader is faced with the terminal point of

Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1987), p. 184. Glyn White and Philip Tew, ‘Introduction’, in Re-Reading B.S. Johnson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 7. 55 Coe 2004, p. 156. 56 B. S. Johnson, Albert Angelo. In Omnibus (London: Picador, 2004), p. 167. 57 Ibid., p. 167. 58 Ibid., p. 169. 53 54

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allegory, its disintegration into the author belligerently lecturing his readers, the mask of fiction fallen away. Much of the novel up to this point has been gesturing towards a great unveiling. Albert’s third-year classes to whom he teaches literature are unanimously opposed to reading. ‘One boy says he can read the racing’, Albert despairs, ‘and that that’s enough for him’.59 Literature, to these schoolboys, is functionless and so without worth. As a result, Johnson shows how they are not only left without sufficient English skills for functional purposes (they are unquestionably destined for manual labour and other unskilled work) but that they are also limited in their expression to the most banal of clichés. At one point in the narrative, Albert sets the students a task to describe him, to write about their teacher. Johnson here introduces into the text real essays written by his own pupils, comprising of pieces like the following: He is orable for one thing for a nother he is a nosens His face is like a back of a bus He is to big for his boots He walks like a firy elephant He has got hire like a goly-wog All his clouth he wears are from the rag shop [. . .] His diner is to big for his stomoc He is related to a elephant I think [. . .] Every time he gets on the scals the scals say one at a time Or no elephant alowd.60 Albert’s pupils are effectively caught between a formalized expression for which they can see no purpose, and an inexpressive range of jokes and clichés. Albert, who is very literally designing castles in the sky with his fantasy architecture, is himself limited to functionless expression, playing with forms that never make contact with the material realm. Johnson’s frustration with this takes the form of a protracted rant by an authorfigure whose own broken and fragmented utterances bear witness to his total exasperation. The frustrations climax with Mr Albert’s murder. He is stabbed by the schoolchildren, who send his body floating down the canal (a violent death that is foreshadowed by a brutal description of Christopher Marlowe’s stabbing, given pages earlier in one of Albert’s own lectures). This trite resolution is mimicked by an equally trite comment from one of the schoolchildren who went to Mr Albert’s funeral and who, drawing on the clichéd language of football punditry, calls the service ‘just a gerate

Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., p. 160.

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wast of time and all that work fore relley nothing. Just a shocking display of funeralisation on behaf of the furm that was called in.’61 The narrative is one of despair and hopelessness, yet in its graphical innovations and its righteous anger is a spark of hope. The book itself, as an object to be read, or a puzzle to be worked out, offers itself as a solution to the problems it delineates. An engaged and creative readership, it implies, are necessary if we are to grasp the full meanings that can lie in literature, and the truths that great literature can reveal about the world. There is urgency in this mission, and a deep sincerity that leaps from the pages of Albert Angelo and co-opts the reader into Johnson’s own personal campaign for the good stuff. Johnson’s oldest ally in his campaigning was Zulfikar Ghose. Ghose, now a respected poet with columns in the broadsheets, regular invitations to read at universities and a wife and children to support, continued to admire Johnson but found his increasing belligerence unsettling. Success was supposed to soften writers, but it just appeared to give Johnson more people to fight. Ghose would be shocked to find Johnson at parties cornering critics, editors or publishers from Oxbridge backgrounds, rounding off discussions about the merits of experimentalism with lines such as, ‘you know what you are? You’re a cunt!’.62 Johnson was a totalitarian, he realized, with no respect for literary pluralism, who saw every disagreement as a sign of a heresy in need of stamping out.63 At the same time, Johnson would then express a deep astonishment that papers like The Observer and The Listener did not approach him to write for them. Ghose, in an effort to bring Johnson closer to respectability, helped him to find editors who would accept his poems and stories. One journal, The Transatlantic Review, even took Johnson on as poetry editor. Ghose and Johnson then collaborated on a short story collection, Statement Against Corpses (1964), which appeared shortly after Albert Angelo and attempted to demonstrate the experimental approach within the short story form. Ghose, like Johnson, disliked the term ‘experimental’,64 and the short critical essay that opens the collection saw the pair adopting a wide range of synonyms to explain experimentalism without using the dreaded ‘e’ word. ‘In each of these stories, great attention is paid to form’, we are told.65 Adapting the conventions of the short story to the modern era demanded ‘an impressive variety of techniques’, combined with a willingness to break with tradition, innovate and ‘match exactly style with subject in each case’.66 The resulting stories are a curious mix which, despite the bold claims of the book’s title and opening essay, are more often than not conventional in their

Ibid., p. 180. Ghose, 1985, p. 26. 63 Ibid., 26. 64 Zulfikar Ghose, Letter to B. S. Johnson, 7 March 1973. Held in the British Library. 65 B. S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose, Statement against Corpses (London: Constable, 1964), p. iii. 66 Ibid., p. iii. 61 62

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subject matter and presentation. Johnson’s best stories, ‘Clean Living is the Real Safeguard’ and ‘Sheela-na-gig’, are a childhood tale and a ghost story, respectively, with the most experimental piece, ‘Broad Thoughts from a Home’, owing its unusual presentation more to eighteenth-century pastiche than to the contemporary. In it, a Smollettesque set of grotesques argue about digestion in a Swiftean faux-scholarly manner. Ghose too seems to concentrate more upon solid storytelling than formal exploration. His story ‘Godbert’ contains the uncanny description of a shellshock survivor ‘looking at his freckled son, at the bullet holes of his eyes, and the gaping trench of his mouth’ before sending him away to Eton.67 Such rhetorical fireworks are rare, however, and Ghose’s extended character pieces, like Johnson’s short plot-driven stories, are better enjoyed as well-told tales than they are as examples of a new approach. Other than the introduction, there is also very little communication between the Ghose and Johnson stories in the collection. As well as being structurally different – Johnson focusing on plot, Ghose on character – the prose also contrasts, with Johnson favouring an internal, emotive voice while Ghose’s ear is more attuned to nuances of speech and social convention. These contrasting voices reflected the increasing divergence between the two close friends as they moved away from their shared undergraduate dream and into the market-driven realities of the literary industry. Letters between the two increase from this period, reflecting a corresponding reduction in face-to-face meetings. Johnson was increasingly to be found in smoky pubs with journos and BBC people during the day, and at Hampstead house parties with the bohemian Calder set at night. Ghose found the crowd at these parties to be a mix of emotional instability and political piety, an atmosphere he quickly found tiresome.68 Johnson, for his part, became increasingly suspicious of Ghose’s sophisticated friends and their easy manner that struck him as louche. In his private notebooks, he peevishly predicted that in thirty years’ time Ghose would end up a ‘smiling, bald member of the establishment’, graced with an OBE for services to poetry.69 The pair nevertheless remained close friends. Their frustrations with each other were those of healthy concern, not disdain. It was among the Hampstead house party circles where the hard core of the experimentalist movement began to emerge. Johnson found much common ground with Calder, and, in spite of Calder’s aristocratic background, Johnson saw in him a fellow crusader for innovation. There was talk of Johnson jumping ship to Calder Publications, but as Albert Angelo continued to sell in large numbers, the move to a small art house publisher would have been far too reckless. It also didn’t help that Calder consistently referred to

Ibid., p. 112. Zulfikar Ghose, Letter to B. S. Johnson, 16 September 1973. Held in the British Library. 69 B. S. Johnson, Notebook 7. Held in the British Library [1969–73]. 67 68

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Bryan as B. S. Johnstone.70 Instead, Calder championed the equally bolshie young writer Alan Burns as a potential leader for what he called the ‘British nouveau roman’.71 Alan Burns and his wife, Carol, were at the centre of the house party circuit, with Alan holding court on matters experimental late into the night while Carol, a respected painter, contributed perspectives from the fine arts. Eva Figes was a spirited contributor to these discussions, on the rare occasion she could find time to attend. Figes’ marriage had broken down, and between divorce proceedings, caring for her children, working nearly full-time as an editorial assistant and working on her own novel, she found the company of writers like the Burnses tremendously refreshing. They spoke as if literature was the meaning of life, and took its inherent value for granted without ever considering its commercial implications. Johnson gave this circle the kick that it needed. He was commercially successful and a militant experimentalist. He could not abide their academic abstractions and deconstructions, demanding concrete explanations and a total commitment to ‘telling the truth and not lying’ in a way that Alan Burns and Eva Figes found in equal parts exasperating and compelling.72 Johnson would drag them out of the salon and down to the pub where, being an eighteen-stone veteran boozer, he’d drink them all under the table.73 The only thing Johnson would put his pint down for would be a round of table football or a game of pinball, of which he was something of a master.74 Between games he would return to the conversational fray. He was ‘a propagandist [. . .], a purist, almost a puritan’,75 according to Figes. But he was their propagandist. In the summer of 1964, Johnson’s campaign for the good stuff found an army in Calder’s crack team of budding experimentalists. Alan Burns, for his part, found Johnson’s attitude to be the missing bridge between politics and writing that he and the writers around him had been looking for. ‘I was struck by his intelligence, his eloquence and his lack of pomposity’, Burns would later describe, ‘his downrightness’ leant him a certainty which, despite its lack of sophistication, was absolutely authentic.76 It was the question of authenticity that Burns had struggled with his entire life. He had been a pupil at the prestigious Merchant Taylor’s School, one of the few places in the country where his middle-class background made him comparatively underprivileged. He went through national service not as an officer but a non-commissioned officer (NCO), putting him above the average soldier but below the commissioned officers at whom he sneered.

John Calder, Pursuit (London: John Calder, 2001), p. 275. Ibid., p. 178. 72 Eva Figes, ‘B.S. Johnson’. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5, no. 2 (1985): 71. 73 Alan Burns, ‘Two Chapters from a Book Provisionally Entitles: HUMAN LIKE THE REST OF US, a life of B.S. Johnson’. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5, no. 2 (1985): 159. 74 Ghose 1985, p. 30. 75 Figes 1985, p. 71. 76 Coe 2004, p. 389. 70 71

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He then studied law, was called to the bar and acted as libel lawyer for the Daily Express for a number of years before deciding to write full-time.77 His first novel, Buster, he submitted to Calder in 1960, where it was received warmly as an innovative reworking of Angry Young Men tropes, and was published as one of three novellas in Calder’s New Writers 1 (1961). When Calder first met Burns, he was still clearly struggling with his class identity. ‘The new arrivals, the angries, were ambitious, pugnacious, left-wing, angry, and usually misogynistic about their newly acquired middle class girlfriends and wives’, Calder later wrote, ‘all this reasonably well describes Alan Burns when I met him’.78 It would take Burns a number of years to really settle in to the notion of being an experimental writer. Critical opinion in the 1950s had, after all, come to associate political writing with realism by default, and anything avant-garde was automatically defined as being apolitical, potentially reactionary. By the time Johnson entered the Calder circle, Burns was finding routes out of the political/aesthetic dichotomy through other mediums. His wife Carol, a visual artist, was a considerable influence on him, convincing Alan of surrealism’s potential for simultaneous political and aesthetic radicalism. Burroughs’ cut-ups had also opened his mind to the possibilities of physically manipulating text.79 Burns had tried similar experiments, including the pasting of an essay he wrote when he was ten years old into the body of Buster. He was now hypothesizing about using computers to write algorithmic novels, was writing poetry by rolling dice, and was questioning the best ways of accessing the unconscious creative mind through altered states and sensory deprivation. Throughout the decade Burns built up two large bodies of unpublished writing alongside his novels: a dream diary amounting to hundreds of pages of psychosexual transformations, and Accident in Art, his unfinished plan for an academic monograph. This latter project was made up of an ever-expanding collection of quotes from artists, writers, scientists and public figures. In it, he praises Marlon Brando as the primary practitioner of aleatoric art in the post-war era: His acting has the poetry of free association, in that state of mind between sleeping and waking, at the same time clear and confused . . . he moved at the pace of the semi-somnambulist. And, as it is said that sleepwalkers instinctively avoid bumping into furniture or falling out of widows, so Brando never comes to grief. The intellect is dulled but ‘something else

Charles Sugnet, ‘Interview with Alan Burns’, in The Imagination on Trial, eds. Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), p. 161. 78 John Calder, ‘Through that Tunnel’. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 17, no. 2 (1997): 178. 79 David W. Madden, ‘Alan Burns: An Introduction’. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 17, no. 2 (1991): 110. 77

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takes control’ – some uncomplicated emotional response linked to prenatal memory, infantile and innocent, [thus he] uncovers many beauties and insights that were never expressed in the medium before.80 The rugged masculinity of Brando also appealed to Burns. The figures he fixates upon in Accident in Art are almost entirely either outspoken radicals or from working-class backgrounds. From this collection of influences, Burns could reconceptualize experiment as something vital, alive and popular.81 Against this he now believed the earnest working-class realists of the 1950s to have succumbed to the old Methodist appeal of upright living and orderliness in pursuit of class goals, a philosophy that sacrificed the very liberation it sought in the name of discipline and righteousness. Experimentalism, by contrast, was anarchist. It demanded that every writer search for the truth by committing to their own individual journey. It was essential, Burns argued, that the artist also be willing to commit some iconoclasm along the way. It was for this reason that Burns was even more impressed by Johnson when, still riding the wave of success following Albert Angelo, he packed his bags and headed off to the North Sea. Johnson had recently purchased a two-volume edition of Defoe’s Tour Through England and Wales, and was convinced of a writer’s need to physically experience the places they want to write about.82 Johnson had, a few years earlier, had the idea for an autobiographical novel framed by a trip on a deep-sea fishing trawler. As the boat plumbed the depths of the dark ocean, trawling for elusive shoals of herring, so he would search his memory for the repressed traumas that formed him. Such a journey, he insisted, could not simply exist as fictional allegory. The trip must really happen. Johnson’s seventh notebook contains twelve pages of densely packed writing planning out the trip. He included everything from costings to sailor’s slang to vital statistics about navigation, types of net and average yearly fishing yields.83 In actuality, Johnson would spend the majority of the journey throwing up. He was desperately seasick, the ship stank of rotting fish and the crew relentlessly teased him, calling him ‘pleasuretripper’. For the Calder circle, however, Johnson’s North Sea odyssey was nothing short of heroic, and a practical lesson in the importance of total commitment to the cause. Johnson was away when the Burnses received a phone call from Marion Boyars. Boyars was Calder’s main investor and was soon to become codirector of the renamed Calder and Boyars Publications. She told the Burnses

Alan Burns, Accident in Art: An Outline, 1969. Unpublished. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 81 Alan Burns, Letter to Marion Boyars, 11 October 1966. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 82 B. S. Johnson, Notebook 6, 1963-1964. Held in the British Library, p. 22. 83 B. S. Johnson, Notebook 7, 1964. Held in the British Library, pp. 35–47. 80

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of a young writer by the name of Ann Quin. Her first novel, Berg, had been picked up by Calder, and was something of a miniature masterpiece. Quin herself was broke and in need of accommodation in London so that she might start her new career as a professional experimental writer. The Burnses were happy to have her, and, a few days later, she moved in to their spare room. When Quin arrived, it became clear that the circumstances were far more dramatic than Boyars had let on. Quin was not only penniless, but was caught in a tricky financial situation where her previous employers, Chelsea School of Art, owed her months of back-pay that they were withholding, and as a result of missed payments, she was being chased for back-rent on her previous London flat. In the midst of these wrangles, she had contracted tuberculosis, and arrived on the Burnses’ doorstep fresh from a glandremoval surgery.84 Weakened such that she was often bedridden, Quin spent her days writing letters to Marion Boyars, impatient for her novel’s release.85 As a house guest, Quin could be trying at times, but with the bohemian Burnses she fitted in perfectly. She quickly struck up a friendship with Alan and proposed a series of readings together to take place once her book was finally released. For Burns, always over-intellectualizing, the friendship of a writer who created intuitively – generating radical, experimental ideas as if from nowhere – was a moment of great excitement. Part of what made Quin so original was her distance from the Leavisite great tradition. Older writers like Burgess and Brooke-Rose had met with the established canon at university, while the likes of Johnson, Burns and Figes received Leavisite narratives at school. Quin, by contrast, grew up as the daughter of an impoverished B&B-owning single mother in Brighton, and was schooled by nuns at the local Roman Catholic school.86 The nuns kept a strict watch on reading material and children were caned for reading the kinds of literature that Leavis praised, such as D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy. Instead, Quin’s writing talents were directed in the most pragmatic direction possible: grammar, notetaking and clear handwriting. Leaving school at sixteen, these skills got her a place at a secretarial school where she learned typing and shorthand, leading to a series of jobs, including secretary at the Chelsea School of Art and typist at Hutchinson’s the publishers.87 Her time at Hutchinson’s overlapped with Eva Figes’, although in these early years Quin was more obsessed with the worlds of art and drama than she was with writing. Where the slightly older Figes would leave the office on a Friday and head to a literary launch party, Quin was more interested in the

Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Lobbenberg, 13 May 1963. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. Ann Quin. Letter to Marion Lobbenberg, 15 May 1963. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 86 Ann Quin, ‘Leaving School – XI’, in The Unmapped Country, ed. Jennifer Hodgson (Sheffield: And Other Stories, 2018a), p. 15. 87 Robert Buckeye, Re: Quin (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013), p. 11. 84 85

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possibilities of angry new theatre and the R&B music scene. Eventually she decided that she would become an actress herself; I tried to get into RADA. I learned two pieces for the audition. I expected a stage, even a platform, instead a smallish room, brightly lit; ten or twelve people faced me. I began, froze, asked to start again, but was struck dumb, and rushed out, silently screaming down Gower Street. I would be a writer.88 Quin’s bout of performance anxiety came just at a moment when a retreat from London seemed sensible anyway. Financially, the city was a tough prospect for a girl on a typist’s salary and the distractions of the emerging pop scene were not conducive to the sorts of long-form novel-writing that Quin had planned. So she packed her bags and headed back to her mother’s B&B. Here she could earn her keep with minor housekeeping chores and made some extra pennies by walking blind men home from the pub.89 Quin had attempted to start her novel on a number of occasions, each time coming up against barriers that stopped her achieving the effects she set out to create. This time she would focus purely on tone to the expense of all else: ‘that’s the most important part of it all: the tone.’90 By pursuing tone over all other considerations, Quin began to find the voice that would distinguish her novels from anything previously written in the English language. Like Brooke-Rose and the nouveaux romanciers, Quin abandoned quotation marks. Berg rang with believable dialogue nevertheless, all embedded within paragraphs such that it was formally indistinguishable from description. Formal grammar too gave way to strings of comma-filled run-on sentences, shifting focus mid-clause, or else transforming from a spoken statement to an interior vision. The final effect of this unconventional prose is to immerse the reader in a scene warped by consciousness. As Berg visits his father’s girlfriend Judith, a fellow-lodger, we are engulfed by his existential claustrophobia: He sat once more on the velvet-covered couch, with its lumps of cat’s fur still clinging round the sides. A waiting room can hardly compare, a corner of a room her smile, the blue orange fangs of the gas fire, the flickering of the television. His hands fumbling down the sides of the couch. His shoulder’s hunched. I’ve got cramp in my right knee, Oh

Quin 2018a, p. 19. Ibid., p. 21. 90 Ann Quin, ‘One Day in the Life of a Writer’, in The Unmapped Country, ed. Jennifer Hodgson (Sheffield: And Other Stories, 2018b), p. 210. 88 89

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dear, no it’s all right stay where you are Mr Greb, it often gets me, bad circulation is all.91 The transfixing quality of her prose is not simply reducible to a set of techniques, however, unless one is to consider Quin’s training of her own consciousness as a technique. Quin spoke on many occasions of her writing existing somewhere between a purely psychic space and the space inhabited by words.92 Through the cultivation of a particular writerly consciousness, Quin gained access to what she called the ‘spaces between words’. In this space she could feel the direction that the novel wanted to develop, and her skill was then to align the right words in such a way as to bring this about.93 It was not automatic writing, as this suggests a severing of the conscious mind from the activity of unconscious production. Instead, Quin compared it to ‘having musical themes in mind, and setting out not knowing how they’re going to develop’.94 She did no chance experiments to find a form, as Burns did, nor did she seek out alternative forms consciously like Johnson. Rather, Quin’s formal experimentation was merely a by-product of her wider literary vision: ‘if the emotion is in there, the energy takes over, and the form and content follow.’95 Arguably, this makes Quin the only true genius among the experimentalists. She was the only writer among them for whom experiment came unbidden, not a choice, but merely a descriptor for a unique and powerful literary vision. Berg was completed in 1962, and it took two years for it to be accepted, revised, revised again and finally printed and released by Calder and Boyars.96 Its story can be neatly summarized by its first sentence, perhaps one of the greatest establishing lines in literature: ‘A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father.’97 The narrative combines bleak moments comparable to Greene’s Brighton Rock, with Freudian psychosexual trauma and a stirring of grotesque farce. Berg, now Greb, discovers that his father has become a ventriloquist and, unable to kill him straight away, becomes sexually involved with his girlfriend. When Berg finally does attempt to kill his father, it is his father’s dummy that he stoves in with a hammer, wraps in a blanket and then throws into the sea. The dummy takes on the role of a Lacanian phallus over which the two men are struggling. By the novel’s end, Berg is humiliated and his father dejected, and we are left with the image of a seaweed-wrapped dummy

Ann Quin, Berg (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001), p. 41. Loraine Morley, ‘The Love Affair(s) of Ann Quin’. Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 5, no. 2 (1999), p. 127. 93 Giles Gordon, Letter to Marion Boyars, 14 March 1974. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 94 John Hall, ‘The Mighty Quin’. Arts Guardian, April 1972, p. 9. 95 Ibid., p. 8. 96 John Calder, Letter to Ann Quin, 11 January 1963. Held in Lilly Library, Indiana. 97 Quin 2001, p. xv. 91 92

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floating back to shore like a terrible return of the repressed. The novel then, if it is structured at all, is structured by symbolism and symbolic exchange between characters. This underlying symbolic structure will come to act as Quin’s only structural guide throughout her subsequent writing, but in Berg there is still a surprising amount of kitchen-sink realism, assuring that, for her first novel at least, Quin remains recognizably within some contemporary genre. It is the grease-stained, sordid atmosphere of Quin’s Brighton that allows her writing to be at once experimental and familiar: He leaned against the boat, his eyes closed, feeling the salt from the spray already in his mouth, and a few grains of sand in his eyes. Smell of seaweed together with oil and tar drifted by him [. . .] the huddled shapes of tramps moulded into their lumps of rags and newspaper, twirling and squirming under the pier.98 Whatever it was, Berg was a hit with reviewers; comparisons were made with Beckett and Nathalie Sarraute.99 Soon Quin’s royalty checks would be arriving, and she’d be out of the Burnses’ back bedroom and into her own place again.100 But Quin’s time living independently in London would not last long. Having experienced so little of the world during her austere childhood, Quin sought to use her newfound income as a means to travel the globe. In fact, desperate to make use of her royalties, Quin made an unorthodox arrangement with Calder and Boyars to borrow money on the understanding that this loan would be repaid out of her future earnings. She used this money to visit Ireland where she sampled poteen, danced with gypsies and ‘saw my first genuine leprechaun!’101 Now, with her novel out, Quin had returned the money for the Ireland trip and was already planning future adventures. Invited by John Calder to a reading with Nathalie Sarraute, Quin learned from the eminent nouveau romancier that Calder would, on occasion, rent out cottages on his Scottish ancestral estate to writers in need of seclusion. Quin wanted in.102 Calder, perhaps in the interests of keeping her out of his cottage, proposed that he put Quin forward for a Harkness Fellowship instead. The fellowship would allow Quin to travel in the United States for up to twenty-one months, or as long as her fellowship grant lasted. Quin was ecstatic, and pushed Calder to submit her application straight away

Ibid., p. 44. Andrew Hodgson, The Post-War Experimental Novel: British and French Fiction, 1945-75 (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 100 Marion Boyars, ‘Introduction to Ann Quin’, in Beyond the Words, ed. Giles Gordon (London: Hutchinson, 1973), p. 252. 101 Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Lobbenberg, 13 August 1963. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 102 Ann Quin, Letter to John Calder, 13 November 1964. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 98 99

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alongside his letter of recommendation.103 In the meantime, Quin borrowed more money from Calder and Boyars on top of her royalties in order to travel to Turkey and take a trip around the Greek islands.104 Here she would begin the work that would make up her third novel, Passages, in between sun-drenched holiday romances, visiting ancient Grecian ruins and writing panicky postcards back to Britain when she once again ran out of money. One postcard from Istanbul simply read ‘S.O.S. £.S.d. needed – desperate. Ann Quin.’105 Quin’s life after publication was, like her writing, to become a perhaps brave, perhaps foolhardy quest for new experiences. Her poetic vision, already highly evolved while writing Berg, could now expand to the epic scales that world travel would permit. Like the Romantic poets before her, Quin was set on conducting her own personal grand tour in pursuit of ecstatic visions. Meanwhile, Burns too was collecting tourist guides to Europe. He was not planning a trip, however. Instead, Burns’ books on Eastern Bloc holiday destinations formed part of a wide range of documents collected in preparation for his next novel. It would be a war novel, but one unlike any war novel written before. Rather than any particular conflict, Burns would seek to depict the brutality of conflict through a bloody mosaic, partcontemporary and partly set in the Second World War. The book would take the title of Max Ernst’s surrealist painting, Europe After the Rain, and its composition would mimic the painterly technique of arranging materials on a mood board, squinting at them for a long time and then seeing what emerges.106 Taking out his trusty scissors and glue, Burns collaged together photos of dusty Soviet streets, sunny Balkans resorts, Italian towns liberated in 1943 and a collection of weaponry and uniforms that were both modern, wartime and dating from the late 1950s when he himself did national service. The resulting fictional landscape depicts an uncanny middle ground, both the memory of a former (now very much idealized) conflict and the shape that future conflict might take should the Cold War turn hot. The sky was usually grey, yet I could see the road for miles, every object was distinct: piles of stones, gravel, a steam roller, axes in use, logs, small bridges. We drove along red roads, between trees sunk into soaking fields.107

John Calder, Letter to the Warden of Harkness House, 19 November 1964. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 104 Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Lobbenberg, 7 August 1964. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 105 Ann Quin, Postcard to John Calder, 30 July 1964. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 106 Sugnet 1981, p. 163. 107 Alan Burns, Europe after the Rain (London: John Calder, 1965), p. 37. 103

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The conflict, like its location, is never explained in Europe After the Rain. The tragicomic bumbling of soldiers who have been given no more information than is necessary for them to fight was something that Burns remembered with disdain from his national service days. The early 1960s had seen a multitude of war novels published, mostly heroic in tone, and war movies were becoming a staple of British cinema. Burns was keen to correct some of the sanitized, patriotic visions popularized in these movies and did so through the brutal objectivity of his narrative voice. The novel is a first-person account from a some-time soldier, some-time deserter who is categorically not of officer class. Third-person narrators in war novels, Burns argued, are really the voice of the general; they impose a tactical macronarrative over the soldier’s actions when, from Burns’ experience, and the experience of soldiers he interviewed, such explanations only emerged for them long after the conflict itself had ended. In the novel this takes the form of ‘squads of soldiers marching the streets in rapid time, drilled, disciplined, yet at moments, where the road divided, uncertain of which way to march’.108 They are confused and filled with dark humour, ‘talked of bandits and mass slaughter . . . it was the new human mind’.109 The smashed world of Europe After the Rain is a reflection of a deeper, existential conflict in which respect for law and human life has been lost but there appears to be no formal value system waiting to take its place. The soldiers not only have no orders, they also have no ideology or nation with which to ally themselves beyond the abstract notion of war and their current unit. The protagonist becomes embroiled with a female soldier involved in some aspect of secret service work. She moves between sides, a double-agent who is often doubly fugitive as well. Early in the novel he loses her, and her rescue gives some vague shape to an otherwise wandering and surreal narrative journey. They had lists. She was one of those taken away by lorry. I should have stayed and searched for her, but I was not sure how long they would allow me to remain. The main thing was that I should not lose contact with her. Everything was stolen, mirrors shot to pieces, the paintings ripped with knives, plates and glasses smashed, all with the utmost indifference. They telephoned for more lorries.110 The ominous details of lists and lorries carries undertones of the Holocaust and of Stalinist terror. These were two subjects not much discussed in polite society after the war, the wounds being too fresh, and only returned to public consciousness with the trial of Eichmann and the Khrushchev reforms. For

Ibid., p. 107. Ibid., p. 37. 110 Ibid., p. 25. 108 109

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Burns, such tactical forgetting was a product of emotional repression. He intended for his novel to be ‘concerned with brutality and physical extremity but not with pain’.111 The physical numbness of his soldiers is a physical manifestation of their emotional death. We empathize with characters in pain, whereas violence and gore is simply scenery. The lack of pain within the novel, combined with shifting allegiances and the seemingly endless destruction surrounding the protagonist, results in a disorienting reading experience. Like the protagonist, you lose track of where you are and who is fighting who. You give up on trying to understand why things are happening and, like the protagonist, become wary of any encounter, automatically presuming other characters to be nefarious. The adoption of experimentalist methods ultimately allowed Burns to capture the sensation of total war in a way that a realist plot, clearly exposited, simply couldn’t. Appearing in early 1965, Europe After the Rain was celebrated by reviewers as the crest of a new wave.112 Its launch party was a who’s who of writers and critics; many now allied to the experimentalist cause. BrookeRose, Johnson and Eva Figes were there, and Ann Quin fresh from Greece. Third Programme producer and nouveau romancier Rayner Heppenstall made an appearance, as did outlaw poet and friend of Burroughs, Michael Horovitz. Calder himself was of course there, and even the Cuban ambassador attended, keen to promote revolutionary culture.113 Photos from the night show Quin cornering a panicked-looking Elspeth Davie, Alan and Carol Burns haranguing Rayner Heppenstall, Brooke-Rose looking lost, Alan Burns whispering a joke to Eva Figes at what seems to be Calder’s expense and a circle of men in suits being lectured at by an elaborately gesticulating man with unkempt hair, very likely Anthony Burgess.114 Zulfikar Ghose was invited but, dreading the exact type of excitable, tipsy pontificating depicted in the night’s photos, declined to attend. The party was a celebration not only of Burns’ novel, but of experimentalism’s arrival as a full-fledged literary movement. It was a movement with a distinct shape. It primarily concerned the novel, not theatre or poetry or even, despite Johnson and Ghose’s best attempts, the short story. It broke with realism, not out of wilful obscurity or in pursuit of novelty, but in search of a more direct mimesis. Their novels would be relevant to current readers in the current moment, finding a new fictional language to convey directly the experience of twentieth-century living and twentieth-century consciousness. Planning a series of lectures to explain the movement, Burns and Quin settled on the motto ‘Instant Image’

Alan Burns, ‘Essay’, in Beyond the Words, ed. Giles Gordon (London: Hutchinson, 1973), p. 65. 112 Calder 1997, p. 179. 113 Press release, 19 June 1965. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 114 Mick Taylor, Photographs of Alan Burns launch party, numbers 982–1014, 1965. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 111

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as a way of summing up the new style.115 Each writer got there their own way, they agreed, but the final result was always a synchronization of subject matter, style and form, communicating instantly a total image of the world. Or so was the intention. During these breakthrough years of 1964 and 1965, it also became clear that the experimentalist movement was to exist both as a formal inclination and as an actual grouping. As the decade progressed, more and more writers would orient their work in an experimental direction. Some, like John Fowles, had little-to-no contact with the Calder circle, and pursued literary experiments with very different objectives in mind. Rightly or not, however, the Calder circle were considered the core for this movement. The benefit of having a hard core of self-identified experimentalists was, firstly, that they broke the taboo against experiment, pointing to an alternate path and, second, that they acted as a clear target, absorbing critic’s ire.116 In the few short years between the publication of A Clockwork Orange and Europe After the Rain, the typical dismissive response had moved from ‘experiment is a thing of the past’ to ‘experiment has gone too far’. By embodying the writers who ‘go too far’, Quin, Burns, Johnson and Figes were making space for other writers to start experimenting in less outspoken ways. Burgess and Brooke-Rose are both figures who engage in these manoeuvres. Burgess was quick to dismiss any experiment that dispensed with character,117 and would often hark back to Johnson’s Travelling People as the quintessence of clumsy and artificial formal innovation.118 Brooke-Rose, on the other hand, was quite happy to dispense with character; the nouveau roman had dispensed with it, after all. Her own critical swipes were targeted at the legacy of social realism, which she still held to be a powerful force in the ‘worthy’ writing of B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo119 and the ‘sleazy atmosphere’ of Quin’s Berg.120 Where Burgess feared that the experimental turn might descend into shallow typographical tricks, Brooke-Rose was more concerned that ‘behind the tricks [might lie] the old personal documentary of the peeved young man or woman’.121 Arguably, Brooke-Rose and Burgess had published experimental fiction before the Calder circle adopted that cause as being manifestly their own. Now that they found themselves on the outside of that circle, looking in while a group of younger, less-successful writers created a self-glorifying mythos, the temptation to try and teach them some lessons must have been very strong indeed. Burgess and Brooke-Rose had actually

Ann Quin, Letter to John Calder, 25 January 1965. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. Figes 1985, p. 70. 117 Anthony Burgess, ‘The Seventeenth Novel’. The New York Times, 21 August 1966, p. 30. 118 Anthony Burgess, The Novel Now (London: Faber, 1967), p. 23. 119 Boncza-Tomaszewski and Brooke-Rose 2005, p. 28. 120 Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Out of the Past’. The Spectator, 12 June 1964, p. 802. 121 Brooke-Rose 1969, p. 881. 115 116

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been part of the stultifying 1950s literary scene after all, while these younger writers merely complained about it after the fact. The fourth and final member of the core experimental circle, Eva Figes, had not yet published her work. In 1965, she left Heinemann to become a junior editor at Secker and Warburg, and her marriage, now collapsing, nevertheless connected her to the experimental German writers, Gruppe 47.122 She had been working in publishing since leaving university in the late 1950s and was quite well connected. Years of reviewing submitted manuscripts had left her better read in contemporary literature than any other writer she met. ‘The literary establishment exists’, she would often remind people; she worked within it and ‘it is not a mythical Aunt Sally’.123 Her philosophy of experiment, by contrast, called for the construction of a ‘new grid’. The editorial search for a bestseller was grounded in the belief that certain set formulas resulted in commercial success, and, as a result, the only manuscripts that made it to print were those with formulaic plots and hackneyed prose. That some of these became successful resulted in a self-fulfilling prophecy: the formula worked this time, so it must be sought out again in the future. Meanwhile, alternative works were never presented to the public on the grounds of unsaleability, and so had no chance to sell, confirming their unsaleability. More than just creatively stultifying, Figes argued that such a practice promoted the illusion of totality; fiction, taken as a mass, imposed a grid over existence whereby people must measure their lives against the expectations of traditional narrative. Experimental writing, by contrast, sought to impose a different grid.124 She believed wholeheartedly in Johnson’s axioms about truth, and was influenced by Burns’ and Quin’s attempts to reach it through exterior textual manipulations and interior explorations of mental states.125 For Figes, her journey involved a deep interrogation of her own fractured memories. German, Jewish, English: it was difficult for her to place her childhood, and as her extended family moved on to America and Israel, or back to Germany, she searched for a voice that might ‘make new connections, create new networks. . . . I am writing a different grid, which I first have to construct by a painful process of trial and error’.126 A fluent English speaker, she never dreamed in English, yet when she did recall childhood memories from Nazi Germany, they were now without language at all.127 Her mental stumbling over words is reflected in her writing of the time:

John Calder, Letter to Eva Figes, 1 March 1967. Held in the British Library. Eva Figes, ‘The Interior Landscape’. Unpublished, ~1968/1969. 124 Eva Figes, ‘Essay’. Beyond the Words, ed. Giles Gordon (London: Hutchinson, 1973), p. 113. 125 Eva Figes, ‘Unaccustomed as I am to Public Speaking’. New Humanist, February 1973, p. 5. 126 Figes 1973, p. 114. 127 Eva Figes, Letter to Ian Allen, 3 February 1971. Held in the British Library. 122 123

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Silence. Words wandering around my head, one or two at a time, without direction. The sun on my arm is warm. B blood warm. Tr treeee. B bl blue. Bones and blood blossom.128 She developed a prose style that was slow and cautious. Each of her words is carefully chosen, and the reader is compelled to take their time over them, to give them the sorts of consideration and attention that one might give to poetry. Figes wrote slowly and found a style that demanded to be read slowly. It was difficult work, conducted in snatched moments between other obligations, but the language she needed to form her new grid finally came to her. Now she needed a form and subject matter, and it was this that she struggled with the most. Her breakthrough came after a twenty-four-hour mental and emotional collapse, provoked by her husband finally walking out of the house for good. She was in her late twenties, had no savings, two small children and a house she could no longer afford to keep. Lying in bed, feeling broken and with no sense of a way out, she realized that in order to survive and keep on going she needed to concentrate purely on the practical, on the bare forms of life, and trust that the underlying emotions would resolve themselves.129 Resolute, she got out of bed and began her new life. For five years she had been working on a manuscript, Lights, which she now abandoned. Instead, she began work on a novel that would be as rigorously structured as her own existence now needed to be. Equinox presented a year in the life of a woman going through a divorce, from the heart-wrenching moments of love, hate and cruelty, to the mundane details of getting children ready for school and inviting mother over for tea. The novel takes the form of a diary, but not the reflective, private diary form that has been a staple of the English novel since the eighteenth century. Instead, Figes uses the modern weekly planner as a basis for her prose. Her reflections come second to the practical requirements of planning ahead. Any emotional resolution is provided merely by the continuation of these many small daily efforts, and no grand conclusion is ever reached. Moments of high tragedy too, Figes shows, must have their place in a schedule. The dramatic breakdown of the tragic heroine, if it ever did exist, has now been contained by a fundamental pragmatism. We continue to live, and, in small moments of respite, the most fragile of sentiments can sometimes break through. It took a number of months for Figes to convince her employers at Secker and Warburg to take a risk on Equinox, but upon its initial reception any hesitancy soon disappeared. Its unusual mix of domestic drama and linguistic philosophy gave it a huge appeal for what Figes described as ‘post-war Spock babies’. After the war, women returned to the home after years of work and

Eva Figes, Equinox (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 177. Eva Figes, ‘Woman Alone’. Observer Review, 24 October 1971, p. 31.

128 129

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military service, and the new advice given to young mothers, most famously in Dr Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care (1946), was to spend as much time with babies and children as possible. The result, Figes felt, was a generation of young women cheated of their careers, many of whom were highly ambitious and had proven their capability during the war.130 These young women found a voice in Figes’ often painfully honest prose. In pursuit of the unspoken truths of motherhood, Figes’ protagonist is shown to be deeply frustrated with, and alienated by her own children throughout the novel: 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 seem to learn anything just because they conceive, they don’t 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.131 The second wave of feminism had not yet begun, but Figes was already evoking a world where women were captured by the social structure. Their freedom, limited to a particular grid of existence: an imposed framework that survived through the illusion of being instinctual. Her concerns about gender politics found a voice in the experimentalist discourse surrounding narrative and language. Her concern for language’s deep structures, expressed in Equinox, demonstrates how women’s experience correlated with the same questions of language and civilization that the experimentalists had been interrogating in the wake of Wilson Harris. As she is left with a moment to herself, the protagonist considers language’s capacity to both enstructure and enclose experience: Meaning grows out of the word itself, unfolds like a seed and sprouts in all directions, bearing strange-tasting fruit. And we feed on it, hungry for meaning or just new flavours. Mankind is a breed of small monkeys swinging through a gigantic tropical forest grown out of the seeds of their words. They never see the sky, the foliage is so dense and high. But then who wants to see the sky? Perhaps they actually grew the forest of words to hide the horrible, empty sky, vacant and grey and always the same.132 The character writes in her kitchen, the imagery of seeds and fruits reflects her surroundings, as the small monkeys reflect her children. The forest of words is there too: her diary; words filling up pages with ephemeral appointments. What appears like an abstract rumination is structured by the protagonist’s experience and reflected in its formal presentation.

Eva Figes, ‘Women and Society’, in Britannica Book of the Year (London: Britannica, 1971), p. 10. 131 Figes 1966, p. 159. 132 Ibid., p. 92. 130

4 1966 to 1967

Swinging Sixties Between 1944 and 1947, there was a 30 per cent increase in births in the UK; the war was over and the boom times, many assumed, were on their way.1 They took a lot longer than expected, but by 1966 they had finally arrived. Those born in the aftermath of war, it turned out, would come of age at just the right time to enjoy the fruits of economic recovery. The ‘Baby Boomers’, as they were known, constituted, by some estimates, nearly 40 per cent of the UK population.2 By 1966, all of these young people with disposable incomes had remade London. Once the Heart of Empire, then synonymous with the Blitz; in 1966, Time magazine coined the city a new moniker that stuck: ‘London: The Swinging City’.3 The Swinging City was the centrepiece of a new British culture. Its hallmarks were informality, a loosening of social conventions, a reduction in adult responsibilities and an increased emphasis on pleasure-seeking.4 The older generation referred to this as the ‘permissive society’, and many old liberals joined its ranks in pushing back against the censorship of art, literature and drama.5 The BBC, formerly a bastion of the British establishment, now reflected these changes. Under radical director general Sir Hugh Greene, the corporation began to include youth-oriented material alongside its more cultivated fare, and alongside the clipped pronunciation of the regulation ‘BBC accent’ there now appeared a second type of voice, the ‘mid-Atlantic man’, whose Americanisms and dropped-aitches signified a

‘Vital Statistics: Population and Health Reference Tables’. Office for National Statistics. ‘Twenty-Five and Under’. Time Magazine, 6 January 1967. 3 ‘London: The Swinging City’. Time Magazine, 15 April 1966. 4 Sebastian Groes, British Fictions of the Sixties: The Making of the Swinging Decade (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 5 Roger Manvell, ‘Cinema and Television’, in The Arts in a Permissive Society, ed. Christopher Macy (London: Permberton Books, 1971), p. 57. 1 2

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more casual approach to culture.6 These new attitudes promised much, and there was a genuine hope that the struggles and bitterness of the first half of the twentieth century were now firmly in the past. Eva Figes, appearing on a radio discussion at the height of Swinging London, summed up the thoughts of many when she suggested, ‘perhaps our much vaunted permissive society is the answer to all our ills.’7 In London, the new pop culture displayed itself in a range of exclusive salons, boutiques, restaurants and discos where the rich and famous – actors, pop stars, models – would encourage the perception of a certain democratic spirit.8 Movies like Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) brought Swinging London to life on screen, while the duelling fashion visions of the fun, fresh Mary Quant and the psychedelic Granny Takes a Trip gave the mid-decade a distinct visual identity.9 To add to the fun, the England team won the World Cup in a nail-biting final at Wembley stadium. British bands, meanwhile, topped the charts across both Europe and America. The new style was all about independence, candour and youth.10 The cult of youth drew the ire of many in London’s cultural scene, anyone over thirty now appearing positively geriatric. Young, brilliant artists and photographers dominated the visual arts to such an extent that it gave rise to what George Melly called ‘the cult of instant success; the belief that if you didn’t make it straight from art school into a fashionable gallery you might as well give up’.11 Despite the Beatles scoring a hit in 1966 with the single ‘Paperback Writer’, inspired by the now-omnipresent orange-covered Penguin paperbacks, young people were far more attracted by the direct communication of music, film and photographs than literature.12 The most popular reading materials were the new glossy magazines. These were largely driven by sex advice, fashion, music and advertising in a direct reflection of the Swinging City’s core obsessions.13 Popular culture, impossible to avoid in London in 1966, was a distinctly unliterary affair. When the young did appear in British literary fiction, their depiction usually took the realist, almost documentary form pioneered by Colin

Philip Abrams, ‘Radio and Television’, in Discrimination and Popular Culture, ed. Denys Thompson (London: Pelican, 1965), p. 54. 7 Eva Figes, ‘Views’. Notes for a Radio Interview. Unpublished [1966]. Held in the British Library. 8 Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat (London: Abacus, 2006), p. 225. 9 Paula Reed, Fifty Fashion Looks that Changed the 1960s (London: Conran Octopus, 2012), p. 74. 10 Marwick 1998, p. 404. 11 George Melly, Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts in Britain (London: Penguin, 1970), p. 134. 12 Melanie Seddon, Philip Tew and James Riley, ‘Surfing the Sixties: Critical Introduction’, in The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, ed. Seddon, Tew and Riley (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 7. 13 David Holbrook, ‘Magazines’, in Discrimination and Popular Culture, ed. Denys Thompson (London: Pelican, 1965), p. 143. 6

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MacInnes, or else were inflated into monsters, as in Burgess’ highly successful A Clockwork Orange and B. S. Johnson’s not-at-all-successful ‘Perhaps its These Hormones’.14 The hip novel was really an American invention. The Beats led the way, followed by a wave of pulp exploitation novels like Roland Vane’s Vice Rackets of Soho, Don Elliot’s Beatnik Wanton and Lou Morgan’s Hangout for Queers.15 It was against these American novels that Angela Carter wrote when she began her literary career in the mid-1960s. Carter, unlike the generation of experimental novelists only four or five years her senior, grew up in the right time and place to be fully immersed in the youth scene. She had been a baby in the war, born in 1940, so her childhood reminiscences were not those of spitfires overhead, air raid shelters and unexploded bombs but of the often rather kitchy entertainment of postwar austerity: Punch and Judy shows, wind-up toys, music halls and zany radio programmes. When she moved to Bristol in 1962, studying English Literature at the university, she found the string of boutiques, discos and cafes that made up the youth culture of the city to be a natural home for her.16 The ‘constant sense of fear and excitement’ that dominated her life in the hip scene provided the setting for her first novels.17 Carter finished her first novel, Shadow Dance, in 1964 while still a student. It appeared in print in 1966, making a small splash among hip reviewers but not enough to secure it a second edition (it would not appear in print again until 1993).18 As a novel, however, it is important both as an indication of the experimental trajectory that Carter’s work would soon take and as a meeting point between the fashionable American Beats and a more British approach to depicting youth culture. Certain aspects of the novel are clearly inspired by the Beats. The Struldbrugs, for example, creatures who run the local café, ‘once women [. . .] but now withered away, their sex ground down by the stubbed-out cigarettes of years’, are an inelegant lift from Burroughs’ mugwumps.19 Other aspects of the novel are particularly British, for example the two main characters’ shared business of antique dealing. Only four years earlier, Brigid Brophy used her protagonist’s job as an antiques dealer in Flesh (1962) to signify a deep connection to history and a highly cultivated taste. Carter, by contrast, recognizes in the antiques dealer the kitsch sensibility, affected eccentricity and love of shopping particular to the new British boutique culture. Her protagonist is an artist

B. S. Johnson, ‘Perhaps its These Hormones’, in Statement against Corpses, ed. B. S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose (London: Constable, 1964), p. 30. 15 Steve Holland, The Mushroom Jungle (London: Zeon Books, 1993). 16 Sarah Gamble, Angela Carter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 44. 17 Angela Carter, ‘Truly, It Felt Like Year One’, in Very Heaven: Looking Back at the Sixties, ed. Sara Maitland (London: Verso, 1988), p. 22. 18 Linden Peach, Angela Carter (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 29. 19 Angela Carter, Shadow Dance (London: Virago, 1995), p. 30.

14

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who can’t paint, while the rest of her characters have even less in the way of employable skills. The novel centres around a young party girl, Ghislaine, whose face has been disfigured by knife-wielding social butterfly Honeybuzzard. Morris, the protagonist, is Honeybuzzard’s business partner and watches with curiosity as his friend keeps on seducing women and collecting toys with no concern for the girl whose face he has left viciously scarred. Morris eventually falls for Honeybuzzard’s icy lover Emily, losing his own emotionally distant wife to a local jewellery maker as a result, before the book ends with the bloody and unexpected murder of Ghislaine by Honeybuzzard. Thematically, the book reflects its characters’ emotional states through a meandering plot; youth culture is depicted as a zone of shallow affect. Love is reduced to the momentary joy of possession, followed by boredom. Personality is largely derived from physical appearance – attractive bodies and eccentric dress – that random acts of violence are shown to quickly dispel. The atmosphere is that reported by Tom Wolfe when he visited London in 1966, teenagers opting for drugs rather than drink in order to save money for clothes, carrying the feeling of a nightclub with them everywhere, living in a sort of ‘noonday underground’.20 The two female love interests, Ghislaine and Emily, are perfect examples of the two types of girl Wolfe saw embodying the scene. Ghislaine, who Carter describes as aiming to ‘shock and distress [. . .] she would describe her menstrual pains and then she would giggle her little giggle’,21 was the typical Dolly bird. Always at a party, dressed in the fun-chic Mary Quant style, the Dollies ‘started going classless – or at least breaking the rules the Heathfields had always imposed’.22 The Heathfields, more sophisticated, snobbier, were drawn to vintage and read Queen magazine.23 Carter’s Heathfield, the enigmatic Emily, is shown to achieve her sophisticate status through obsessive cleanliness: She liked her clothes always to be clean, always fresh: if she found a stain on her skirt or sweater, off it would come at once and be plunged into suds . . . three times a day she lathered and rinsed her face with her hands . . . she always had the faintly anti-septic spice of soap around her.24 Carter’s recurrent use of bodily imagery – Ghislaine laughs about her menstruation while Emily regularly rubs at her privates with a washcloth – foreshadows the carnivalesque explosion of the body that would take place in her later work. Carter’s psychedelic fantasies are only just emerging here;

Tom Wolfe, The Mid-Atlantic Man (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), p. 105. Carter 1998, p. 10. 22 Wolfe 1968, p. 233. 23 Ibid., p. 233. 24 Carter 1995, p. 100. 20 21

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when they are visible, they read as reflections of a life without responsibilities. The new life of the Swinging City. The characters scarcely ever seem to work, their marriages are all transitory and all pregnancies not prevented by the pill are rapidly dealt with by the abortionist. The latent sadism that underlies every relationship in the book reflects the otherwise impermeable nature of these characters. The knife-wielding madness of Honeybuzzard is the only action in the novel with real consequences. Carter’s idiosyncratic style can, therefore, be seen as a response to the impossibility of drama in a secure and prosperous situation. Eva Figes wrote that tragedy was rendered impossible once we knew that thunder was made by electricity rather than gods. Carter’s sadism seems to confirm this and respond by a desperate overflowing of action.25 It was from experimental writers that Carter’s work was first praised, although Shadow Dance arguably owes a close debt to the Hampstead novels of the later 1950s too. Anthony Burgess reviewed the book before release, and his glowing words appeared right in the centre of the front cover: ‘Angela Carter has remarkable descriptive gifts, a powerful imagination, and [. . .] a capacity for looking at the mess of contemporary life without flinching.’26 Burgess became close friends with Carter.27 They shared an agent, Deborah Rogers, a publisher in Heinemann, and Burgess provided a series of references for the novelist when she applied for lectureships.28 It was through these connections that Carter was introduced to the London literary scene and, by extension, the London youth culture, which eclipsed Bristol’s.29 She was invited to readings with Calder authors and, in the literary press, found her work was more happily received by experimental-leaning reviewers than traditionalists. All of this no doubt had an influence upon her second novel, The Magic Toyshop (1967). The novel is an exploration of theatricality and female sexuality that incorporates a subtle critique of literary tradition. The Leavisite canon, Carter suggests, tongue-in-cheek, is surely just a vehicle for male wish-fulfilment? Anthony Burgess’ copy was burned by Maltese censors, so he never reviewed the work.30 It was this second novel that convinced B. S. Johnson of Carter’s value to the cause of innovative writing. She is listed, alongside far more outspoken experimentalists, in his list of those ‘writing as though it mattered’: ‘Samuel Beckett (of course), John

Eva Figes, Tragedy and Social Evolution (London: John Calder, 1976), p. 138. Angela Carter, Shadow Dance (London: Heinemann, 1966). 27 Angela Carter, Postcard to Anthony Burgess, 15 September 1973. Held in the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester. 28 Angela Carter, Letter to Anthony Burgess, 29 May 1972. Held in the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester. 29 Edmund Gordon, The Invention of Angela Carter (London: Chatto and Windus, 2016), p. 198. 30 Andrew Biswell, ‘The Context of Obscenity and the Arts’. Obscenity & the Arts: Anthony Burgess (Manchester: Pariah Press, 2018), p. 16. 25 26

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Berger, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Angela Carter, Eva Figes, Giles Gordon, Wilson Harris, Rayner Heppenstall, even hasty, muddled Robert Nye, Ann Quin.’31 Of all the writers on that list, Carter was the only one who really understood what was happening with the youth in the mid-decade. She was certainly the only one who qualified for Melly’s ‘cult of instant success’. The next youngest, Ann Quin, had left a sheltered life in Brighton, been run off her feet with secretarial work, and then missed out on the nascent youth culture of the 1960s by spending her time pursuing a failed career in the theatre. The rest, by 1966, were all in their thirties and forties, hopelessly past it by the standards of the 1960s youth cult. Despite the exclusivity of pop culture’s social circles, the actual content of pop culture was democratically minded. The art scene, for example, was notoriously difficult to break in to, and yet the work it produced was more public-facing than any art movement since antiquity. Whether it was the commercial incentive or the spirit of the age, 1960s art was aimed at the sort of fun-seeking, unpretentious audience that also typified the ideal consumer of fashion, music and magazines. The most popular art movements of the decade, minimalism, pop art, kinetic art and op art, all replace the highbrow pleasures of allusion and technique with more direct, bodily pleasures.32 These may be the disorienting, fun-house pleasures of op art, the kitsch humour of pop, the interactivity of kinetic sculpture, or the immersive simplicity of minimalism. Each form, although very different from the rest, aims in its own way to involve the spectator in the experience of the object. Art was no longer a separate world contained within a picture frame; it was something that you feel when you view it.33 Not only did this reflect the aesthetic philosophies of many experimental writers who sought to make the novel more interactive. Artists sought to create artistic environments that directly influenced the spectator, effects that novelists could so far only dream of. The influence of interactive arts on the experimental novel was slow to arise, however. The art scene and the literary scene were distinct entities in the mid-1960s, encountering each other only when a concerted effort was made to seek the other out. John Calder, for example, regularly invited Jeff Nuttall to display work and perform at his shop Better Books, although even this was an outlier as Nuttall was as much a writer and musician as an artist. Instead, the experimental writers tended to stick to Hampstead in north London, while the artists and photographers stuck to west London,

B. S. Johnson, Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (London: Hutchinson, 1973), p. 29. 32 Joe Houston, Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s (New York: Merrell, 2007), p. 13. 33 John Lancaster, Introducing Op Art (London: B.T. Batsford, 1973), p. 25. 31

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particularly Notting Hill and Kensington.34 Carol Burns, a painter herself, found the new self-appointed arbiters of cool to be a largely unpleasant lot, overprivileged and irresponsible. In response she wrote a novel, The Narcissist, featuring an unbearable young female artist called Hannah Gluckmann, who, from the first line of the novel, is seen to flit through life in a haze of baby talk and neediness: ‘We do love each other don’t we? Love me one bit? Love me as a person? Do you love the real Hannah Gluckmann? Darling, kiss kiss.’35 We see the Gluckmanns’ out-of-control children wandering around their house parties, screaming, while Hannah’s nebbish husband disappears on business and Hannah sleeps around in a way that would be recklessly impulsive were there ever any consequences to her actions. Published by Calder, the book contains some experimental elements such as the second person direct speech quoted earlier. Mostly, however, it’s a satire similar to Brooke-Rose’s The Middlemen or Alan Burns’ Buster, writing that has a very clear target, in this case the art world, and a desire to puncture that target’s inflated ego. By contrast, the art scene filled Maureen Duffy with a sense of excitement. After leaving her university classmates Johnson and Ghose to pursue their own experimental campaign back in the late 1950s, Duffy had befriended the iconoclastic writer and critic Brigid Brophy, and together the two had produced a number of plays and some scripts for radio. She’d already written a fairly successful novel about the cult of youth creativity, The Single Eye (1964), mentioned earlier. It came a few years in advance of the media hype about celebrity photographers. Like Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), the narrative was loosely based on David Bailey, the photographerturned celebrity who represented the quintessence of pop success. Duffy’s third novel, The Microcosm (1966), was far stranger than her prior work, wedding experimental technique with a story of young artists on the margins. The dialogue is everywhere rife with allusions to art and art theory. One character, Stag, comments to another, Matt, as they prepare for a party, ‘you know the theory behind the use of masks of course: that the mask, once you’ve seen yourself in it, works inwards upon the personality until in fact you become what you see yourself as; I think it’s the same with clothes.’36 Where Carter presented her young people as louche, free from the hang-ups of theory and Freud, Duffy’s young people demonstrate a quasi-sophistication, never quite bringing themselves to name a thinker or quote a text, but always on the verge of complex ideas. This may in fact be the influence of Brophy, whose own characters in Flesh (1962), The Finishing Touch (1963) and The Snow Ball (1964) make constant reference to artists, composers and psychoanalysts in their conversations. Between

David Mellor, The Sixties Art Scene in London (London: Phaidon, 1993), p. 46. Carol Burns, The Narcissist (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967), p. 5. 36 Maureen Duffy, The Microcosm (London: Virago, 1989), p. 215. 34 35

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these conversations, Duffy introduces a variety of scene-setting devices. Some are literary pastiches, including a section in Middle English, and some are linguistic hybrids, like the following section depicting the voice of the countryside in mock-primitive dialect: But one full day come the lightime we stand up all together and go walk away too out of the stickwall and not sorry leave our thatches all fall down. Come to the city and man and woman, friends altogether, speak out loud along the tall houses and our young people sharp as knives put hands on brother’s shoulder, say, ‘This too our people’.37 The final effect of these contrasting styles within The Microcosm is such that the conversational material, more traditionally presented and thus more stable, is forever being threatened by the imposition of varied, non-traditional styles of writing. Each new style reorientates the reader’s perspective, sometimes dramatically, until the stable world of the young and louche seems itself to float against a background of instability. The novel doesn’t offer interpretations easily, to the extent that it can sometimes appear clumsy or confused, yet it is always in earnest about the value of experimental writing. This earnestness provides an unusual accompaniment to its more typical narrative of young people coming together, falling out, falling in love and finding themselves. The more opaque qualities of The Microcosm can be attributed to Duffy’s attempts to enter the art world, an effort that overlapped with the process of writing. Working in collaboration with Brigid Brophy, Duffy spent the years from 1966 through to 1968 developing a type of conceptual art they described as ‘Prop Art’. In their unpublished manifesto for the art movement, Brophy and Duffy describe the work as ‘a visual form of literature and a literary form of the visual arts’.38 The artworks drew upon Duchamps’ concept of the ready-made, being ‘composed of props (from the property cupboards of toyshops, chainstores, etc) being propped-up’, with an added dose of Freudianism and inspiration from African mask ceremonies.39 The artworks took two forms: heads and boxes. The heads were mask-like constructions with punning names: Headmaster, Madenhead, Godhead, Egghead, Blockhead, Hedda.40 The punning names reflected a Freudian recuperation of the word as a manipulable ready-made: ‘PROP ART puns because dreams pun’, as the manifesto puts it.41 The boxes were yet

Ibid., p. 22. Maureen Duffy and Brigid Brophy, Manifesto for Prop Art, 1968. Held in the King’s College London Archives, p. 1. 39 Ibid., p. 1. 40 Maureen Duffy and Brigid Brophy, ‘Heads and Boxes: Items of PROP ART’. Catalogue, 1967. Held in the King’s College London Archives. 41 Duffy and Brophy 1968, p. 6. 37 38

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more literary, being arrangements of found objects – ‘the material can be manipulated but not wrought’42 – presented theatrically within perspex in the style of dioramas or ‘tableaux non-vivants’.43 The boxes, with titles like Rape and Pornbroker, focused more heavily upon sexual politics than the heads, with collages of pornography, advertising, classical figurines and consumer goods acting as an implicit critique of the commodification of sex. The work finally appeared in a gallery show in 1968, by which point both Duffy and Brophy had become immersed in pop art, prop art’s closest aesthetic influence. They used this artistic dialogue to more deeply embed Freudian and primitivist modes of thought within their writings. The pop art collage, an incongruous amalgamation of contrasting styles into a unified work, finds a parallel in the objects of prop art and, arguably, in the mixing of genre and style evident in The Microcosm. In fact, the collage style was to make a return within a number of experimental writer’s works between 1966 and 1967. Burroughs had always credited the collage artist Bryon Gysin with the invention of the cut-up, despite it being his own appearance at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival that made the technique famous.44 By the time of Swinging London, however, collage had moved beyond the Dadaist principles of anti-art and chance art. It had been taken up by a younger generation of pop artists in a far more conscious way. Collage artists working in pop used chance only sparingly, preferring to seek out their found materials and arrange them with particular effects in mind. Duffy and Brophy’s collision of pornography and advertising is an example of this, as are the collages of Peter Blake. Perhaps the foremost practitioner of the British pop collage style, Blake famously constructed a set for the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band out of waxworks, novelty objects, magazine portraits and photographic blowups.45 Blake also made use of paint-over in his work, taking advertising images and altering them by hand. His image ‘Beatles, 1962’, for example, features the Fab Four coloured in with a rough approximation of blackface, so rough, in fact, as to have blotted out George Harrison’s eyes, with uncanny results. It was also during this time that Tom Phillips began work on his book A Humument. Based on similar pop collage principles to Blake’s work, Phillips ‘treated’ W. H. Mallock’s novel A Human Document (1892) – a forgotten novel only to be found among the assorted Victoriana of hip antique shops – by drawing in it, painting over it, pasting new images into it, circling some words and cutting-up others. Started around 1967, the book could be viewed in Phillips’ studio by curious patrons and was to appear as commercially released official reproductions in 1970, 1986, 1998, 2004,

Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 3. 44 William Burroughs and Bryon Gysin, The Third Mind (London: John Calder, 1979), p. 13. 45 Bradford R. Collins, Pop Art (London: Phaidon, 2012), p. 268. 42 43

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2012 and 2016. The project was continuous, forever developing, changing shape and being rewritten. A typical page, number 54 in the 1970 version, features an array of shapes cut out from a background of green, with coloured-in paper laid over the original page. Four bubbles emerge from the collage, held together by a single black line running through them. These contain words from the original page, showing through from beneath layers of collage to read: ‘modernise / England, / structure The rain / unEurope me’.46 A full-stop has been scratched out between ‘structure’ and ‘The’, while the ‘me’ is very clearly the start of a different word, cut short by Phillips’ scissors. Such a page is typical for its mix of quirky humour, anti-establishment politics and a desire to incorporate some of the original novel’s words in the same location on the page as they first appeared in the earlier Victorian edition. Unlike the Burroughsian cut-up or fold-in, two methods used to fragment and distort the original work (or ‘jam their communications’,47 as Burroughs put it), Phillips’ novel is more cheeky and upbeat. He seems to take an irreverent pleasure in bringing this dusty old book into the modern era, treating its antiquated words like those of an eccentric uncle. The book invites the reader to join in with the joke. It has that quintessential pop art feeling of fun. It is a joy to interact with. Alan Burns had been interested in the possibilities of collage writing even before Burroughs unveiled the cut-ups in 1962. Burroughs’ success convinced him of the techniques’ validity, and subsequent viewings of collage art and Phillips’ in-progress Humument encouraged him to construct his own collage novel.48 He was already familiar with the collage process, having included found materials in Buster (1961) and having generated the imaginary landscapes of Europe After the Rain (1965) by assembling snippets from history books, travel guides and photographs on mood boards. For his 1967 novel, Celebrations, he would go yet further and start to assemble his prose entirely through methods of cut-up, fold-in, collage and the incorporation of found material. The resulting novel is a family saga about a wealthy industrialist, a self-made man, whose sons struggle over the family business and the affections of their father’s young mistress. The narrative is structured around ceremonies; the ‘celebrations’ of the title. It begins with a funeral and develops through births, promotions, graduations, marriages and, eventually, yet more funerals. The prose bears the scars of its cut-up origins but is never incomprehensible in the way that Burroughs’ more extreme work can be. Instead, its rhythms become hypnotic. Here the family patriarch describes the success of his first engineering project:

Tom Phillips, A Humument (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), p. 54. William S. Burroughs interviewed by Jeff Shiro, ‘Revolt!’ in Burroughs Live 1960-1997, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001), p. 97. 48 Sugnet, 1981, p. 164. 46 47

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I knew the value of my own invention, I liked it, I tried it, I had good fortune. The first factory was built by the river where the vessels came from the north. They came to me for a design that had strength, I showed them the frame, I eliminated dangerous bends and projections. Harness in front, unconscious analysis behind. The single stroke from door to floor. I placed a mirror to satisfy the vanity the image was upside-down, corrected by a suitable lens. I would not have my customers moved sharply, I protected them like eggs, I strapped them in flexible shelves that folded upwards.49 His description is unusual. On close inspection the stranger aspects of the prose emerge from a mixing of the informal, verbal register with a register more befitting instruction manuals and industrial patents. Phrases like ‘flexible shelves that folded upwards’, ‘corrected by a suitable lens’ or ‘dangerous bends and projections’ were borrowed from technical manuals, cut out by Burns and introduced into the flow of his own writing. His surrealist predilections enter the word assemblage in images like ‘unconscious analysis behind’ and ‘protected them like eggs’. These could have been found anywhere, overheard in conversation or taken from Burns’ dream diary. Unlike Brophy and Duffy in their prop art, Burns was quite happy to see his material ‘wrought’ as well as simply ‘manipulated’; the act of assembly was a guide for inspiration, not a substitute for it. As a result, Celebrations is perhaps the best example of Burns’ work that both pushes the boundaries of innovative technique and remains an enjoyable read. By integrating the actual language of industrial work into this industrial narrative, Burns presents a unique fictional mode for the interrogation of class and power dynamics in industrialized Britain. Human relationships and desires are mediated by machinery. This is nowhere clearer than in the sons’ jockeying over the heart of their father’s ‘hydraulic nymphette’.50 Celebrations demonstrates how Burroughs’ cut-ups are in some ways limited by their fetishizing of chance procedure. The consciously constructed collages of the pop art movement offered Burns a way out of this impasse. Arguably, one can even see the collage style as a factor in the biggest commercial success to come out of British 1960s experimental writing: John Fowles’ The Magus. First published in 1965, the novel became a sleeper hit. Sales grew at an unprecedented rate, and it topped the Bookseller’s sales figures charts on and off all the way through 1966, 1967 and 1968. Fowles was not a natural Londoner, and only resided in the city for brief periods, preferring a country existence in Essex, Dorset or the Greek islands. As such, he had little contact with the social circles that constituted Swinging London. Nevertheless, the tremendous success of The Magus can be

Alan Burns, Celebrations (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967), p. 39. Ibid., p. 89.

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attributed to its accessible presentation of philosophies fashionable among young people and intellectuals at the time. After all, the novel’s narrative cannot truly explain its success. Urfe, the novel’s young protagonist, visits the Greek island of Phraxos only to be taken in by the enigmatic Conchis, a man ‘trying to recreate some kind of lost world of his own’. Through a series of theatrical reversals known as the ‘godgame’,51 Conchis succeeds in breaking down Urfe’s identity and psychologically freeing him from his mental restraints and unconscious presumptions.52 In depicting this ‘godgame’, Fowles intentionally makes his characters wildly inconsistent, his storyline unpredictable and his emotional beats awkward and jarring. For a very long book, it gets away with a surprising amount of unresolved and irresolvable action. The common explanation of the text is Fowles’ own, that its structure reflects French existential philosophy and the positions put forward by Camus and Sartre. Human identity, he argued, is merely an adaptation of people to their environment.53 As Fowles described the philosophy in his non-fiction book The Aristos: to accept one’s limited freedom, to accept one’s isolation, to accept this responsibility, to learn one’s particular powers, and then with them to humanise the whole: that is the best for this situation.54 The inconsistencies in The Magus, it follows, are there to confuse the reader as much as they do Urfe. As we read a character acting entirely differently in one scene than they did in the scene before we are drawn to question their identity, our own identity as a reader and perhaps the construction of identity as a whole. Yet I would argue that the success of The Magus is also a reflection of Fowles’ magpie approach to philosophizing. As Mahmoud Salami describes in his book-length study of the author, ‘Conchis’ godgame comprises an amalgamation of texts such as classical mythology, biology, Marxist ideas on society, theories of drama and role-playing, fiction-making, psychology, and existentialist philosophy.’55 Fowles’ poetry and non-fiction writing combine the same elements. He writes the way that a Brigid Brophy character might talk, moving seamlessly between one highbrow reference point and another, pursuing a patchwork or collage approach to development. Where Duffy found objects, Burns found words, and the characters in Carter’s early novels

This was also the original title of the novel. John Fowles, The Magus (London: Triad/Panther, 1977), p. 192. 53 Michelle Phillips Buchberger, ‘The 1960s Existential Fiction of John Fowles’, in The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, ed. Melanie Seddon, Philip Tew and James Riley (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 177. 54 John Fowles, The Aristos (New York: Triad Grafton, 1981), p. 202. 55 Mahmoud Salami, John Fowles’ Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992), p. 87. 51 52

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found antiques, toys and trinkets, Fowles instead became an impulsive shopper in the realm of ideas. A pinch of Freud here, a dab of Marx there; the philosophy of The Magus is not consistent in the way of Fowles’ French existentialist inspirations. Instead, it constructs the appearance of unity through its aesthetics of assemblage. Like a pop art collage, one is wilfully missing out on half the fun if one ignores the found materials from which it is made. Despite attempts to frame Fowles’ novel as a work of philosophical explication similar to Camus’ The Outsider or Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, its runaway success is instead attributable to its lack of philosophical consistency. Where most of the experimental writers contained in this book expended great energies in carving out a consistent personal philosophy of writing, often at the expense of confusing and alienating their readers, Fowles gives his readers a collage, every philosophy at once, and produces one of the most unexpected bestsellers of all time.

Experimentalists on the road Ann Quin had missed the inauguration of London as ‘the Swinging City’. She passed by the Time magazine article on San Francisco news stands on her way between gigs and poetry readings. Her Harkness Fellowship had given her two years in the United States and a healthy grant. She was to act as an ‘emissary of English letters’.56 A keen traveller, Quin had jumped at the chance to explore this new, much televised continent. Her travels began in New York, a city in serious decline that would continue to get dirtier, angrier and more violent across the next decade. ‘It terrifies me’, she wrote in one of her many letters to Marion Boyars, ‘a whale’s mouth of a city – ugh!’.57 Quin’s letters detail, in depth, a shifting scenery of Americana. She seems keen to impress upon her publisher the importance of the trip. She writes in a tone far friendlier than is normally reserved for a professional author/ publisher relationship. Boyars had become one of her few touchpoints in an ever-shifting landscape of travel and adventure. Los Angeles, she reported, is ‘a vulgar exotic city where people are astonishingly ugly, apart from the beautiful boys who are all queer anyway, or else hulking men interested only in baseball!’.58 Eventually she landed in San Francisco, arriving at the dawn of Haight-Ashbury dropout culture, where she rented a ‘crazy yellow house on a barge’ and moored it beside the Golden Gate Bridge.59 From America she would read of the success of Berg, both critically and commercially,

Marion Boyars, Letter to Terence Kilmartin, 12 March 1965. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 57 Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 13 October 1965. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 58 Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 23 October 1965. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 59 Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 6 November 1965. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 56

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and draw her royalties as soon as they were calculated with no regard for the usual Calder and Boyars system of quarterly payments. The special dispensation made to Quin when she was first signed as a poverty-stricken writer had now become routine. Quin’s close relationship with Boyars eased this process, as did her habit of routinely overspending her grant money during her American Odyssey. Thankfully, the profits were there. Sales were high, and were soon to be supplemented by the sale of rights for adaptations, both stage60 and screen.61 In terms of her writing, Quin had put her Greek novel on hold, instead focusing her energies on a new novel about a love triangle. The difficulties of writing a novel on the road, however, led her to the short story as a form more amenable to writing in bursts. It also had the benefit of a quicker publication turnaround, meaning more money and exposure. One of her stories was even accepted by Vogue, although returned after Quin demanded more money. Her biggest success was with the Ambit prize. The Londonbased literary magazine was under the editorship of J. G. Ballard and Martin Bax, and their annual short story prize had as its prompt, ‘Writing on Drugs’. Accounts of Quin’s submission differ. Quin told Marion Boyars that the drugs in question were ‘coffee and cigarettes’.62 Bax and Ballard instead say that her story was labelled ‘writing on the pill’.63 Nevertheless, ‘Tripticks’, as the story was named, won first prize. The writing was a radical departure from the phantasmic social realism of Berg, and demonstrated how working in the short story format had allowed Quin a flexibility of style. She could now make more and more radical experiments without necessarily staking her entire reputation on them. The broken, stuttering and erotically charged prose of ‘Tripticks’ would struggle to find a home in a published novel in 1966, but it clearly appealed to the experimental imaginations of Ballard and Bax. The story is told, or rather muttered, by a sexually obsessed man tracking his former lover. His words sway between deeply disturbing and erotically potent: I the dwarf, she the Queen. She my sister. I was the President. She a Slave Prostitute Movie star Nymphet Lesbian And myself a Pimp Judge

John Coops, Letter to Ann Quin, 17 May 1967. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. Marion Boyars, Letter to Ann Quin, 23 May 1967. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 62 Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 12 March 1968. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 63 Thomas Frick, ‘J.G. Ballard. The Art of Fiction’. The Paris Review, no. 85 (Winter 1984): 94. 60 61

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Flagellist. We arrived at a point where even words were unnecessary.64 Sexual explicitness and the use of poetic line breaks would become a staple of Quin’s writing from this point onwards. The list-like presentation of signifiers reflects Quin’s belief in the mutual dependency of words and silence. The space between the words, she argued, evokes feeling and image to an equal, if not greater, extent than written description, acting as it does to provide space for the reader’s imagination. Words in space make a deeper impact than words bundled in paragraphs. The floating signifier is clearer to the mind’s eye than the same word locked into predictable syntactic forms. Good grammar pacifies meaning, while non-traditional modes of presentation shake the reader out of their complacency, setting meaning free. As Quin’s Harkness Fellowship came to an end, she hopped on a plane to Amsterdam, and there, surrounded by houseboats and the smell of marijuana, she put the finishing touches to her next novel, Three (1966).65 Whereas ‘Tripticks’ was unmistakably American in its settings and voices, Three would be a return to England, at least imaginatively. The novel is split between two voices: Ruth and Leonard, who speak in prose, and S, whose voice is transcribed as if from a tape recorder. Ruth and Leonard are the well-spoken middle-class owners of a house by the sea. The novel begins as they reminisce about their enigmatic boarder, S, and her disappearance, which they suspect to mean suicide. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that S was involved romantically with Leonard, and perhaps even with Ruth, although we can guess this only through euphemism and scenes, which may or may not be pure fantasy. S’s voice recordings tell us equally little. Their breathy, symbolic utterances are highly suggestive but never entirely descriptive: Under snow. Blowing faces. Hollows are eyes. Shirts Clothes. On the line above. Theirs. Three toothbrushes. Blowing bubbles. Glide over tiles. Split Against windows Glass. The sea Sea.66

Ann Quin, ‘Tripticks’, in The Unmapped Country, ed. Jennifer Hodgson (Sheffield: And Other Stories, 2018), p. 93. 65 Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 8 March 1965. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 66 Ann Quin, Three (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001), p. 17. 64

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The same technique as ‘Tripticks’ is deployed here to a far more gentle and beauteous effect. The same semi-conscious, mumbled monologue is represented, but instead of the ramblings of a sex-crazed obsessive, S’s words have a sensuous quality. She seems to take in the world and speak it back directly, with only symbolic images like the ‘three toothbrushes’ together by the sink to act as exposition. What Ruth and Leonard can’t say because their sense of decorum won’t permit it, S can only hint at as she is overwhelmed by the pure flow of existence. Then, as the narrative progresses, dark excesses of erotic fantasy burst in, overcompensating for the unspoken by an orgiastic excess of description: Arms stretched out, bodies arched, more submission demanded. And rolling over as in waves. With the waves. That later came. Kept coming. I want to fuck you on stairways, in telephone booths, in public places. Tie you up, and let them all see you, fuck you, do what they will, and whip you, lick you, and fuck you again. A whole line of us fucking, like a train rushing through the darkness. And he put spittle on my nipples, made me feel them as well – buds sticky with rain. We’d lie in a warm wetness, and all day the odour, his, mine, like water flowers have been taken out of.67 Obscenity plays a clear role in Three. It represents a steam valve being blown; an act of excess providing a kind of sadistic verbal catharsis. This was clear to Marion Boyars, who was willing to risk an obscenity prosecution to publish the book.68 Three would appear in 1966 to a mixed response. Some reviewers found it sordid, while others were excited by its innovations. The reviewer at Kirkus magazine managed to be both, saying that the atmosphere of the novel was ‘just as unpleasant as it is intended to be’.69 The release of Three did not run smoothly, however. In promoting the novel, Calder and Boyars had requested photographs of Quin which she obligingly provided. These photographs were then used on the book jacket as well as in press releases, eventually ending up in the Guardian review section. What neither Quin nor her publishers had realized was the changing status of photographers in the new world of Swinging London. Following on the heels of David Bailey, every young man with a camera now considered himself an artistic genius.70 The photographer who had taken Quin’s photograph, Timothy Rendell, considered Calder’s use of his images to be an infringement of copyright. Quin never paid for the photos,

Ibid., p. 71. Marion Boyars, Letter to Ann Quin, 29 October 1965. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 69 ‘Ann Quin’s Three’. Kirkus, 3 October 1966. 70 David Allan Mellor, ‘Realism, Satire, Blow-Ups: Photography and the Culture of Social Modernisation’, in Art and the Sixties, ed. Chris Stephens and Katharine Stout (London: Tate Britain, 2004), p. 69. 67 68

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he argued, and verbally agreed that they would only be used on the front cover of Three. For using them on the inner sleeve instead, and for sending them out in press releases, Rendell demanded £15 per photo, a huge sum for avant-garde publishers Calder and Boyars, who were used to their authors sourcing photographs for free.71 Calder refused to pay and wrote a sternly worded letter to Quin, now in Mexico, demanding an explanation.72 Quin, feeling ambushed, took on a literary agent who was based in London to argue her case for her.73 Eventually, Marion Boyars had to step in, reproaching Calder for his lack of courtesy and Quin for her lack of sense. Rendell, she insisted, was little more than a con artist latching on to the latest trend in pursuit of a quick buck. The company would pay his extortionate fees on this occasion, though it would come directly out of the marketing budget for Three, and, in future, Boyars swore, she would buy a camera and take all author photographs herself. ‘Although’, she wrote, ‘not a single one of our other authors has ever had the slightest difficulty understanding the process so far.’74 Everyone involved agreed to forgive and forget. The ugly incident of the gold-digging photographer was put behind them. In the long term, however, this incident may have had unforeseen repercussions. Three had much lower sales than Berg, perhaps due to its heightened experimentalism but no doubt also because of the significant cut which Timothy Rendell had taken from its marketing. Each subsequent novel would earn less than the one before, and, as Quin was now set on a life of international travel, she would always, from this point on, be spending more than she earned. She would constantly be writing to Marion Boyars for more money, most of which would come from projected rather than actual earnings. In effect, Quin was spending the earnings of books she hadn’t written yet. Perhaps, if Three had been properly marketed, this downward trajectory could have been averted. Quin finally returned to London in 1967. With her she brought a new lover, the American poet Robert Sward. Bob had introduced her to the exciting new world of American spoken word, and although Quin now planned to live in Britain permanently, she was already planning a series of trips back to the United States in which to perform her prose alongside Bob’s poems.75 In the meantime, Quin returned to the Calder circle. There she implanted the seeds of an idea, quickly taken up by Alan Burns and Eva Figes, for their own spoken-word group. They recruited B. S. Johnson, a man whose outspokenness made him a natural public speaker, if somewhat of an acquired taste. Johnson also had a van, which would be essential if

Timothy Rendell, Letter to John Calder, 30 June 1966. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. John Calder, Letter to Ann Quin, 28 June 1966. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 73 Ann Quin, Letter to John Calder, 7 July 1966. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 74 Marion Boyars, Letter to Ann Quin, 18 July 1966. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 75 Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 10 May 1967. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 71 72

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they were to start getting bookings outside of the capital. They christened the group ‘Writers Reading’, and in the summer of 1967 they began a series of performances aimed at bringing experimental literature to the people. The readings proved successful, with curious audiences far more likely to attend an evening of readings than to jump straight in to buying experimental novels. Beyond London, Calder books were still rare outside of university bookshops, so the appearance of these writers helped draw attention to their work in ways that print marketing simply couldn’t. Writers Reading also helped readers put names to faces. Blurbs are not known for providing insight into a writer’s actual personality, and much of the appeal to be found in these writer’s innovations comes from the personal element involved in their work. Newspaper and magazine profiles might help to give a sense of these writers as people, but a performance of Writers Reading could aptly summarize them and their approaches in the space of a ten-minute performance. A typical event would run like this: Burns would begin in a scholarly manner, calmly explaining to audiences how experimental methodologies might create new writing, and how these forms were hopefully more relevant to the modern reader than traditional methods. Burns and Quin had lectured together back in 1965, Quin finding even back then that Burns’ background as a Barrister translated quite easily into that of a professor.76 Burns would then move from his scripted opening to a reading – a section of Celebrations and a section of Europe After the Rain – while the audience listened politely. Burns then ceded the floor to Johnson and the entire mood would shift. Johnson spoke without notes, passionately denouncing the literary establishment, the scourge of neo-Victorian realism, and sometimes even chiding Burns for holding the wrong line. If the crowd were lucky, they would hear some of Albert Angelo or his latest biographical novel, Trawl (1966). If they were unlucky, they’d be treated to some of his mawkish ‘syllabic’ poems or, sometimes, no work at all, as he filled his time up with ranting. Figes would then do an impressive job of quietening the room, partly with her slow, quiet and rhythmical reading, partly by her delicate appearance. Rayner Heppenstall, attending a Writers Reading event, described her as ‘a thin creature with large eyes and hectic colouring, whom before the War one would have assumed was tubercular’. She was the physical opposite of the blustering Johnson, and her appearance on stage would help pacify the crowd and bring them back to the actual writing.77 Finally, they would bring on Quin. Quin had been expanding on her notion that writing was about the spaces between words and, encouraged by the off-the-wall performances

Marion Boyars, Letter to The Trout Bookshop, 12 February 1965. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 77 Rayner Heppenstall, The Master Eccentric: Journals 1969–1981, ed. Jonathan Goodman (London: Allison and Busby, 1986), p. 120. 76

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she’d witnessed in America, had developed this philosophy into her own experimental act.78 ‘She did her Quin thing’, as Alan Burns put it, that is to say that she came onto the stage and she just sat and looked at people, she wouldn’t say a goddamn word! She just stared. She either implied or she actually stated that we sort of ‘think-communicate’, we can communicate more in silence than with someone actually putting words across; which I was really quite intrigued by, it seemed sort of radical and provocative and interesting, whereas Bryan [Johnson] was simply pissed off. He was furious with her.79 Quin’s think communication may have been born of overconfidence in her own psychic abilities – she would later brag of her ability to read people’s minds – but taken purely as theatre it certainly made an impression.80 Where the other writers addressed the audience in their own unique ways, talking about the importance of non-traditional forms, Quin dropped the audience right in the middle of a happening. They had been told about writers upsetting audience expectations, now they were living it. It was divisive, but also electrifying. John Calder was a regular attender of Writers Reading events, or at least those that took place in London. Calder claimed to spend more on publicity per author than any other publisher in Britain, and was always on the lookout for promotional opportunities.81 Writers Reading, he decided, would make an excellent radio show. It just so happened that the producer of the BBC’s highbrow Third Programme, Rayner Heppenstall, was already a fan of Writers Reading and a committed experimentalist himself. A generation older than the Calder circle, Heppenstall had already met success with his modernist novel, The Blaze of Noon (1939), and had been so enthused by the nouveaux romanciers’ London visit of 1961 that in 1962 he released a comparative study of English and French literature in praise of the ‘new novel’ called The Fourfold Tradition, as well as two quasi-autobiographical novels, The Connecting Door and The Woodshed, both written in a nouveau roman-inspired style. Like most of the English modernists, Heppenstall was deeply conservative and disagreed with many of the experimentalists’ anti-establishment values, yet his embrace of new and innovative styles was sufficient to bridge the political divide. Calder wrote to Heppenstall, at first proposing he send a reporter to cover Writers Reading.82 This developed into a meal at Johnson’s house with Quin in attendance,

Giles Gordon, Letter to Marion Boyars, 14 March 1974. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. Coe, 2004, p. 405. 80 John Hall, ‘The Mighty Quin’. Arts Guardian, 29 April 1972, p. 8. 81 John Calder, Letter to Ann Quin, 11 May 1965. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 82 John Calder, Letter to Ann Quin, 14 March 1968. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 78 79

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the three then joining Calder at his shop, Better Books, for a reading by Nathalie Sarraute.83 Heppenstall was finally asked to join Writers Reading himself, joining alongside another older experimentalist, Stefan Themerson, and adding his nouveau roman-flavoured prose to an ever-growing mix of non-traditional styles on display.84 Heppenstall was particularly taken by Johnson. The two would drink late into the night, berating each other for their opposing political opinions and class backgrounds. ‘There is something about him which I enormously like’, Heppenstall wrote in his diary, ‘an easy man he is not, but then perhaps neither am I.’85 The Johnson charm was working elsewhere too. Publisher and literary agent Giles Gordon had been introduced to Johnson by Eva Figes, the two having been colleagues at Secker and Warburg. In 1967, Gordon was made editorial director of Gollancz, one of the largest publishers in the country, and was elected to sit on the Arts Council’s relatively new literature advisory panel (introduced in 1964). Gordon had deep sympathies with the experimentalist cause and harboured aspirations of writing himself. In pursuit of this, Gordon took up a part-time position as theatre reviewer for the Transatlantic Review, and would routinely leave plays at the halftime interval, file his not-too-specific copy, then join the rest of the journal’s editors, including poetry editor B. S. Johnson, for drinks. Over a ‘heroic’ number of beers and whiskies, Johnson would convince Gordon to take up experimental writing himself and to use his influence on the Arts Council to push experimentalists over realist writers.86 Successful writers, the argument went, didn’t need government money; they made enough from their earnings. Realism was a commercial form, and so propping up unsuccessful realist writers was merely funding mediocrity. Experimental novels, on the other hand, were a vital modernizing force and were helping British letters to break out from their provincialism and catch up with the likes of France and America. They were a public good, the argument went, and so deserved the subsidy of the Arts Council in the same way that classical music and community theatre did. Sure enough, the grants came, with Johnson and Figes receiving one, Quin receiving two or three, Brooke-Rose receiving one for her novels and one for her translation work, and Gordon eventually winning one himself in the 1970s. Zulfikar Ghose was awarded £1,200 in 1967. His letter of congratulations listed B. S. Johnson as sponsor.87 The award was for his first novel, The Contradictions (1966), a study of an Anglo-Indian family moving between

Heppenstall 1986, p. 120. Ibid., p. 26. 85 Ibid., p. 88. 86 Giles Gordon, Aren’t We Due a Royalty Statement? (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), p. 60. 87 Nigel J Abercrombie, Letter to Zulfikar Ghose, 25 October 1967. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, Texas. 83 84

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continents much in the style of ‘The Zoo People’, a story from Statement Against Corpses (1964). Ghose would use the funds to complete The Murder of Aziz Khan (1967), a now-neglected masterpiece about the modernization of Pakistan. The corrupt Shah family wants to buy out the subsistence farming Khans’ family land, but the Khans aren’t selling. The twisting tale of love, betrayal and dynastic politics is a potent mix of symbolism and drama, comparable to the works of Thomas Hardy. In fact, were Johnson to appraise his old friend’s work with unbiased eyes, he might have noticed that Ghose was now unashamedly adopting Victorian forms. For his part, Ghose shunned Johnson’s new experimentalist friends. ‘I keep remembering Burns’, Ghose wrote in response to Johnson’s praise, ‘I will read him one of these days’.88 He of course had no such intention. Ghose was by now cutting an independent path. Eva Figes was glad of anything that the Arts Council could give her. Following upon the success of Equinox, she had decided that it was time to turn her writing into a full-time career. The transition to living off one’s writing was difficult at the best of times, but for a single mother caught between childcare, writing and now speaking commitments, the decision was tremendously brave, if not quixotic. She began reviewing and writing pieces for women’s magazines alongside occasional appearances on radio discussion programmes. She was a powerful advocate for women and the economic difficulties they faced, a topic largely sidelined by discussions of sexual permissiveness and the general mid-1960s sense of optimism. Figes would argue that, for many women, the dreams of charming young things on the King’s Road were irrelevant. The styles of the 1960s were unsuited to anyone over thirty, while the Swinging London lifestyle was incompatible with single parenthood. Figes barely scraped by. But she was not the only one in such a position, and it was Figes’ precarious existence at the heart of an important literary movement, still on the outskirts of society, that inspired her second novel. She decided to write a book about the elderly. She was moved by elderly people, those with a clear sense of the past, and who could see what was happening in the modern world but ‘whose faculties weren’t a hundred per cent’ when it came to actually understanding and taking part in modern life.89 Figes identified with the older generation. She felt their aches and pains, and appreciated their pecuniary struggles. The sense of navigating an evershifting landscape was familiar to her. ‘The conflict between the generations, like that between the sexes, is a very difficult one which may always only be open to a partial solution’, she wrote in a Guardian commentary piece,

Zulfikar Ghose, Letter to B. S. Johnson, 13 November 1967. Held in the British Library. Alan Burns, ‘Interview with Eva Figes’, in The Imagination on Trial, ed. Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), p. 34. 88 89

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‘we try to be fair in a situation that is basically unfair and unequal’.90 Figes had never really known her own grandparents. Three were murdered in the gas chambers while the fourth, her maternal grandmother, was harried to death while navigating the Nazi bureaucracy, dying of heart failure while still hoping to be granted emigration documents. As a result, Figes’ experiences of the elderly were largely third-hand, or else mediated through her troubled relationship with her mother.91 Her novel would therefore be an act of empathic imagination rather than documentary. Figes adopted Alan Burns’ mood board approach for her research, taking inspiration from material conceptually related to age and ageing as her starting point. This led her to the seasons, and old age as the winter of life. Winter too made deprivation all the more excruciating, with the ever-present cold, the threat of sickness and falling, and empty streets emphasizing the old man’s isolation and loneliness. She was set on her protagonist being male, perhaps to better divorce the character from herself. She filled her desk with medical textbooks on old age, geographical magazines featuring ice floes and arctic geology, and historical studies including a well-thumbed account of Scott’s doomed journey to the pole. Eventually she came across Schubert’s Die Winterreise. She had never heard the suite of songs before, and, upon first listen, she realized that it gave a poetic structure her research.92 The suite’s structure would determine the novel’s narrative arc, and its feeling would be reflected in its rhythm. ‘I wanted to make a direct emotional impact through prose’, Figes later recalled, ‘to break through the rational prose structures.’ This was something she felt could only be done through interior monologue; the closest literary analogy to music that she could think of. Her speaker, shrouded in the white of the snowy landscape and his own fading vision, navigates his local environment, caught between an urge to carry on and the habit of memory. Particularly vivid are his memories of the country in wartime: We who lived to tell the tale. None of us thought that we would, freezing on the unlit platform, waiting for the cancelled train. Death blossomed in the sky, swung in on the heaving backs of sirens, was detailed in lists read out on parade, pinned on green baize boards, numbered on envelopes destination secret. And passed by, leaving the sky clear, a few empty craters and barbed wire rusting on deserted beaches. The walls close in and get terribly familiar, the place near the corner of your left eye where the plaster is cracked, a piece of sellotape left behind from something, a

Eva Figes, ‘The Generational War’. The Guardian, 14 October 1968. Eva Figes, Little Eden (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), p. 128. 92 Burns 1981, p. 35. 90 91

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broken cobweb swinging without hold in invisible currents. Keep moving, have to keep moving, once you stop there’s no hope left.93 The station platforms and noticeboards of his memory overlap with his current journey through the city. The bomb craters too are still existent, although some are now filled in. Even by the late 1960s, there were vacant lots in many cities where houses once stood before the Blitz and had never been rebuilt. Her protagonist’s movement between past and present simultaneously was inspired by ‘the indirectness of music, its capacity to hint at things, to say more than one thing at once’. Figes sought to capture the fluid mix of nostalgia and melancholia present in Schubert’s songs.94 Sometimes her images would break down into mere fragments: ‘A train hoots. In the black. No sea at all. Where is the line? I am going somewhere. Where was it? I forget.’95 While at other times, her sentences are long, rambling and tangled. Of all the experimentalists, Figes was the undisputed master of pacing. She believed that, with sufficient effort expended on perfecting her prose, she could directly influence the reader and set their pace of reading. The old man’s journey, though short, could be made to feel like an epic struggle. In honour of Schubert, she called the novel Winter Journey, and despite the vast tundras of sensation contained within its pages, the final manuscript came in at only 30,000 words. As a result of this low word count, Figes’ former employers, the publishers of Equinox, Secker and Warburg, dismissed it out of hand. A novel should be 75,000 words, the argument went, as that’s what readers expect. Figes sent it out to a number of other publishers, with the normally supportive Calder even expressing some reticence, wanting to publish it bundled in a New Writers collection rather than as a self-contained novel. Eventually Figes got it to the readers at Faber and Faber, who, unable to make up their minds, called in Anthony Burgess. Burgess, himself a master stylist whose novel The Eve of St Venus (1964) had come in under 40,000 words, immediately understood what Figes was attempting. He gave a glowing review of the manuscript and warmly encouraged its publication, convincing Faber to take it.96 A publication with Faber meant that reviewers were now required to take Figes and her work seriously. Glowing reviews followed, albeit with the usual griping about difficulty, and the novel was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize for 1967. Figes’ risk, quitting her editorial job to pursue her writing, was paying off. The same could not be said for Christine Brooke-Rose. Her move into experimental writing with Out (1964) had alienated her from the established

Eva Figes, Winter Journey (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), p. 109. Burns 1981, p. 35. 95 Figes 1967, p. 11. 96 Burns 1981, p. 34. 93 94

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literary circles where she had once been welcome. Even if the whole scene had bored her, it was at least something. The Calder parties she had been to struck her as uninspiring and cliquey. Review copies piled up in her flat, and yet she could find no British writing that interested her. One of BrookeRose’s key complaints was the shift in experimental writing away from the hard sciences. She had always believed that the relationship between the experimental novel and experimental science was paramount. The whole point of experimental writing, for Brooke-Rose, was to investigate semantics. Semantics, she argued, should be considered as the linguistic apparatus that translates the observable universe into comprehensible narrative. Semantics was therefore the bridge between science and literature. An experimental literature should ‘force us to re-examine, like scientists, the validity of the signs through which we express our observation of phenomena’.97 In pursuing this version of the experimental mission, BrookeRose began attending lectures on astrophysics, astronomy and space flight. She developed her own shorthand for the better to record the complex ideas she was hearing, and turn them into material useful for stories and linguistic experiments. She then mixed these ideas with the cosmological beliefs of the past. The religious and folkloric origins of the universe represented humanity’s first development of a semantic system that was capable of containing the idea of a whole world (or even a whole universe) with a beginning, a middle and an end. It did not help that she was once again sick, and this time very seriously, with a number of conditions. Between attending lectures, researching ancient cosmological myths and doing her reviewing work, Brooke-Rose spent a great amount of time in hospital. The doctors slowly became convinced that she needed a hysterectomy. Although BrookeRose fervently denied any biographical inspiration behind her experimental work, the fusion of her research with her sickness no doubt had an effect upon the writing of her second experimental novel. Such would appear in 1966, and was far more successful than its predecessor, Out. The narrative takes place during a three-minute heart massage. The protagonist is a psychiatrist who works in a lab with astrophysicists. He is tasked with keeping them mentally stable while they spend their days investigating the mind-bending problems of quantum physics and black holes, although his exposure to their ideas becomes too much for him and he suffers a heart attack. Such is the mental journey of this man, beginning as his heart is first massaged back into life and ending three minutes later when he wakes up. It takes place in a shifting landscape that is partly memories from the lab, partly jazz clubs and partly the vastest reaches of outer space. There is a running theme of watching: ‘on the monitor the world cocks its giant radio telescope and I watch myself watching the

Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Dynamic Gradient’. London Magazine, March 1965, p. 1.

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psychotic handwriting of distant nebulae on the round screen.’98 The act of seeing brings about transformations, in a manner reminiscent of quantumlevel experiments, while characters seem to orbit the protagonist in the manner of planets around the sun. His closest orbiter, Girl-Spy or Starchild, is cast first as an enigmatic lover and then as a mother figure, introducing six planet-like children named after jazz tunes. After the protagonist has collected his lost children back to himself, he experiences a moment of perfect unity with the universe before being dragged back into consciousness: We love like ancient innocents with a million years of indifference and despair within us that revolve like galaxies on a narrow shaft of light where hangs the terror in her eyes as the life drains away from bloodvessels, nerve cells, muscle spindles, bones, flesh and such, once and for all in a spasm from the attitudes, the created situations and the circular gestures, with the little individual flan already dead in her meridians, out of the story of a death and amazing recovery and into the unfinished unfinishable story of Dippermouth, Gut Bucket Blues, my sweet Potato Head, Tin Roof, Really, Something and me.99 After getting to know these unusual non-speaking, object-like children and their ever-present mother, the conclusion of this unconscious journey is deeply affecting. There is also a clue to the novel’s unusual title in the phrase ‘bones, flesh and such’. The ‘such’, this ending suggests, refers to the nonmaterial component of human existence, whether a soul or a consciousness or a series of semantic arrangements. The universe depicted in the novel is, therefore, a human internalization of the universe, empirically inspired, narratively structured and inhabited by the timeless archetypes passed down from the first human cosmologies. By journeying through this landscape, Brooke-Rose is herself searching for a method of storytelling that can contain the complexities of modern scientific understanding while also satisfying the narrative requirements of human imagination. Such would win the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for best science fiction novel in 1966, despite Brooke-Rose’s emphatic declaration that the novel was merely ‘fiction inspired by science’ and not science fiction. BrookeRose at least accepted the prize. The 1967 winner, another former social satirist-turned experimental novelist, Anna Kavan, would refuse it altogether, prompting Brian Aldiss to pay her an emergency visit and beg her to accept the fact that she was, against her best intentions, an excellent science fiction writer.100 The status of science fiction would not emerge from the shadow of pulp for a number of decades, despite the fact that respected authors like

Christine Brooke-Rose, Such. In Omnibus (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), p. 224. Ibid., p. 390. 100 Booth, 2012, p. 97. 98 99

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Anthony Burgess and Doris Lessing were now making widespread use of its tropes in their literary works. Brooke-Rose complained that sci-fi readers had missed the point entirely. As a result, she would not return to a science theme until the 1980s. The success of her novel led to a commission from the BBC. Rayner Heppenstall was looking to create a new type of programming which fused sound, music and spoken word. The half-hour slot, provisionally entitled ‘New Writing for Sound’, would encourage writers to incorporate music and sound into their works in a more organic way than typically happened in radio plays, where sound was used purely as an accompaniment.101 BrookeRose obliged, but instead of the experimental science fiction soundscape that Heppenstall had been hoping for, she wrote a script focusing on a séance. Four Anglo-Saxon scholars raise the ghost of Beowulf’s author in the hope of learning more about him, only to find themselves berating him for the cultural inaccuracies that the Old English author put into his tale about a Danish hero.102 The humour was highly academic to an extent that even the elite Third Programme thought it a bit highbrow. Heppenstall was on the fence about it. Finally, the decision was made for him when the Musician’s Union decided that they would not play unless an entire orchestra was present. The use of pre-recorded sounds alongside live musicians was tantamount to scabbing, they argued, and if Heppenstall continued with his plan, they would declare a boycott.103 The radio play was cancelled. Feeling misunderstood even in the midst of praise, Brooke-Rose decided to return to academic pursuits.

Rayner Heppenstall, Portrait of the Artist as a Professional Man (London: Peter Owen, 1969), p. 81. 102 Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Radio Play’. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, Texas. 103 Heppenstall 1969, p. 81. 101

5 1968 to 1969

The events in Paris Until 1968 it was theoretically possible to ignore the many cultural shifts of the 1960s. Many would write them off as a product of excitable youth or self-indulgent urban bohemia. The events in Paris proved this complacency wrong. Over the course of four weeks in May, Paris was besieged by sustained rioting, barricades, occupations and demonstrations. It began with the closing down of the University of Paris, Nanterre, on 2 May by protesting students, and ended on 29 May with President Charles de Gaulle fleeing Paris, leaving his prime minister, Georges Pompidou, to dissolve the government and spark new elections. France was on the precipice of revolution. The uprising in Paris was unusual for many reasons, not least because it seemed to be a revolt in response to prosperity rather than poverty. The graffiti that accompanied the barricades favoured the fantastic, the utopian and the ironic: ‘Be realistic – Demand the Impossible!’, ‘Under the Paving Stones, the Beach!’ and ‘I’m a Marxist – of the Groucho Tendency’ were all common tags.1 They expressed young people’s frustration with the stable post-war world. This flamboyant disaffection gave the French Left a libertine flavour not normally associated with militant anti-capitalist politics.2 The French Communist Party hated the protestors, dubbing them Gauchistes, or ultra-leftists, bent on pursuing revolution as a cheap thrill. Nevertheless, these Gauchistes surprised everyone by forming alliances in unexpected places. Protesting the war in Vietnam had long been a cause uniting both radicals and liberals, but to this the Paris protestors added the anti-imperialist critique of France’s dealings in Algeria, labelling the North

Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 187. Daniel Singer, Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1970), p. 54. 1 2

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African country ‘France’s Vietnam’.3 This brought Paris’ large colonial and immigrant populations into the uprising. A concerted effort was also made to unite the unions with the students (an uncomfortable marriage) by hosting films, talks and rock shows promoting a message of workplace democracy and the right to a life beyond work.4 Once the workers joined the barricades, the Parisian police force realized it was out of its depth and called in the militarized national police force, the gendarmerie. The brutality of the gendarmes transformed the events in Paris from a spate of good-natured protests into running street battles between armed police and radicals. The radicals themselves were soon armed with petrol bombs, table legs and, on one notable occasion, canisters of tear gas made by chemistry undergrads.5 The international news filled with dramatic images and stories of violent rebellion. The universities were entirely shut down. Lecture theatres were turned into training centres for anti-capitalist revolution, and historical halls were turned into communes. The gendarmes would patrol the streets of Paris looking for students to harass; on one infamous occasion, beating up an old man because the pile of books he was carrying made him suspicious.6 The conflict between wartime and post-war generations, a common talking point in every country across Europe and America, seemed to have finally boiled over on the streets of Paris. Depending on your outlook, it could either be exhilarating or terrifying. Speculation as to the meaning of May fell to the professors, the artists and the intellectuals. On one side were the poststructuralists, a generation young enough to have taken part in the events and whose philosophies were built upon the structuralizing work of prominent Parisian lecturers like Louis Althusser, a Marxist and Jacques Lacan, a Freudian. Writers like Derrida, Foucault, Cixous, Deleuze and Guattari, whose ideas have come to dominate the modern academy, all took their deconstructional inspiration from that moment of rebellion. Against the poststructuralists were a more informal grouping of writers, artists and filmmakers known as the Situationists. Rather than deconstruct structures intellectually, these thinkers sought to use art as a means to explode systematic consciousness. They were the more popular thinkers among writers of the time; their number included Alexander Trocchi, for example, and William Burroughs was also interested in their work. Their popularity would wane far faster than that of the poststructuralists, but their politicized aesthetic would put an end to the nouveau roman before they went. Guy Debord, the foremost writer of the Situationist movement, declared the non-political experiments of the nouveau roman to be the ‘ideological counterpart’ to the government’s

Ross 2002, p. 69. Ibid., p. 33. 5 Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 608. 6 Marwick 1998, p. 609. 3 4

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philosophy of scientific management.7 These writers, he argued, were trying to create a new language to fit with the structured world that scientists, physical and political, were trying to create. This had been Christine Brooke-Rose’s philosophy all along. Experimental writing’s job, she argued, was to make a new language befitting a scientific present. Her philosophy was never properly understood by her British colleagues. British writing, even at its most experimental, was a pragmatic affair that tolerated intellectual theories only insofar as they could inspire new work. The Paris literary scene, by contrast, was endlessly fascinated by theoretical questions, sometimes to the detriment of the novels themselves. To find her heroes, the nouveaux romanciers, slandered as bourgeois scientists might have offended Brooke-Rose, but at least the French understood them enough to comment. In the spring of 1968, Brooke-Rose was at her lowest point. The publication of Out and Such had alienated her from mainstream literary circles. The people who were passionate about her new work, the Calder circle and the sci-fi New Wave, she found to be overenthusiastic and lacking in sophistication. No one seemed to understand her theory of scientific experimentalism. Her marriage to Polish poet Jerzy Peterkiewicz was as good as ended, the two moving into separate apartments and communicating only by telephone and the occasional letter. She worked tirelessly at a new novel which she had very little confidence in. It fitted no recognized genre and contained multiple languages. Eventually, something snapped. Once again she found herself in hospital. What had seemed to be a case of recurrent pneumonia or bronchitis was found to have far more extensive implications.8 She would lie in the hospital for over a month as a variety of treatments were attempted. Under heavy dosages she would continue the novel as much as possible but, unlike the sicknesses that had preceded Out and Such, this one seemed to offer little in the way of inspiration. Instead, she felt isolated and abandoned. What kept her going was not visits from friends and loved ones, of whom there were few left in England, but Mary de Rachewiltz and Eva Hesse, two fellow Pound scholars, with whom she traded long letters about the aged modernist’s work. She drew some solace from the fact that Pound was in a similar position, undergoing treatment for his ongoing mental struggles at a clinic in Geneva.9 Her two friends also sought out escape routes for her. They began with a scheme of renting a house in the Italian countryside, far

Margaret Atack, May ’68 in French Fiction and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 19. 8 Mary de Rachewiltz, Letter to Christine Brooke-Rose, 23 May 1968. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, Texas. 9 Eva Hesse, Letter to Christine Brooke-Rose, 20 October 1967. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, Texas. 7

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from the world of cliques and critics. The plan changed when they realized that much of the Italian countryside was yet to install indoor plumbing and electricity. Instead, they wrote to universities and their friends who worked at universities. Upon returning from hospital to her flat in Hampstead, Brooke-Rose found a letter waiting for her. It was from the famed French feminist Hélène Cixous. She was, she wrote, an admirer of Brooke-Rose’s novels and believed that, despite all the good work she was doing in Britain, she would only ever truly be appreciated in the academies of Paris. A new university was being set up, in the militant Parisian district of Vincennes, and Cixous would sponsor Brooke-Rose should she apply for a lectureship. Brooke-Rose wrote the application that night.10 Brooke-Rose’s application was accepted unanimously by the board, extremely unusual for Vincennes. What Brooke-Rose was yet to realize was that this new university, set up by President de Gaulle as a concession following May (events that Brooke-Rose slept through, being sedated in hospital), was now in a state of civil war. It was to be a ‘radical’ university, encouraging non-traditional teaching methods, and open to anyone regardless of age or exam grades. As a result, it was now being fought over by the Leninists of the Communist Party and the Gauchistes of the May days. Local anarchists also took deep offence to the whole operation and routinely ran through the campus smashing windows, snapping trees, burning cars and painting slogans.11 Being unaligned, Brooke-Rose was acceptable to both communists and Gauchiste alike. Other appointments resulted in day-long arguments with mobs of Leftist and Gauchiste professors packing the room to either denounce or laud the applicant in question. After a short recovery period, Brooke-Rose found a new flat in Paris, loaded her possessions into a moving van, said a brief but not-too-tearful goodbye to Jerzy and headed for the continent. There she would find a world unlike anything she’d come across in London. Cixous invited her out for dinner, talking long into the night about the theory of writing, language and women’s liberation. She took her to parties where similar questions were debated by her friends Gilles Deleuze, Gérard Genette and, occasionally, an ageing Sartre.12 Brooke-Rose began reading up on all the theory she’d missed out on in London. Lacan’s Ecrits made a particularly strong impact on her. But Brooke-Rose’s high opinion of French intellectuals would soon be tested. Before classes even started, she found the campus to be in total

Christine Brooke-Rose, Remake (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996a), p. 163. W. E. Hall, ‘A University of Freedom – and Its Time of Trial’. The Birmingham Post, 15 March 1969. 12 Natalie Ferris, ‘Manna in Mid-Wilderness’, in Christine Brooke-Rose Festschrift, ed. G. N. Forester and M. J. Nicholls (Singapore: Verbivoracious Press, 2014), p. 284. 10 11

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disorder and the faculty to be more concerned with tearing each other to pieces verbally than planning syllabuses. In her memoirs she recalls: Bewilderment at first, the endless meetings, the astonishing rudeness and chaos among colleagues, followed by friendly lunches, la bouffe rated higher than ideology. Every pedagogic problem politicised in a blind fanaticism of Gauchistes and Communists, everyone having to speak.13 Among her colleagues she found a fellow English writer, John Wain, who, despite his reputation as an ‘Angry Young Man’, was as equally overwhelmed by his youthful anger as she was. After Brooke-Rose’s first lecture was invaded by a student mob, protesting the bourgeois notion that poetry could be taught, she and Wain decided to team up and teach together.14 They would sit outside, between smashed glass, torn posters, graffiti, trampled pamphlets and a burned-out car. The car had become as much of an ornament in the Vincennes grounds as the pond was, a pond that was now dry and painted with hammers and sickles. In these insalubrious surroundings, they would discuss contemporary poetry, often with groups of less than five students, taking a break halfway through a two-hour class to open a bottle of champagne and share a baguette.15 After three months of teaching, Brooke-Rose faced another problem. Amid endless arguments, Vincennes had not yet been able to establish a functioning finance department. She was going broke, and the constant warring and dinner parties of her new friendship group were already trying her patience. Her friend Eva Hesse wrote to assure her that, yes, ‘the excitable nature of the French may prove a little trying at times . . . to be sure they talk and talk, but it’s not all talk as it is in London’.16 Her husband too began panicking, begging her to return home.17 The temptation was considerable, especially as currency restrictions meant that the income from her new novel Between (a multilingual story about a UN translator) was withheld from her and could not be transferred into francs for at least a year. To add insult to injury, John Calder had put her forward for an Arts Council award for her translation of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s In the Labyrinth. She won, perhaps thanks to B. S. Johnson’s continued infiltration of the Council, and was required to travel back to London to collect her £500 prize.18 Far from a

Brooke-Rose 1996a, p. 166. Eva Hesse, Letter to Christine Brooke-Rose, 5 February 1969. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, Texas. 15 Peggy Ducros, ‘Elections Held Amid Civil War’. Times Educational Supplement, 4 July 1969. 16 Eva Hesse, Letter to Christine Brooke-Rose, 18 April 1969. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, Texas. 17 Jerzy Peterkiewicz, Letter to Christine Brooke-Rose, 15 January 1969. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, Texas. 18 Oliver Pritchett, ‘Authoress Shares £1000 Prize’. The Guardian, 4 March 1969. 13 14

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lifesaver, the prize would go the same way as her withheld Between earnings, sitting for a year in a London bank account, waiting for conversion into francs. She had spent the last of her money on collecting the prize and had to borrow from her husband to afford the ferry back to Calais. After less than a year in her new home, Brooke-Rose was just as tired and cynical about her Parisian colleagues as she had been with those in London. She was sceptical of the ideological underpinnings that drove the Parisian obsession with theory. Her personal radicalism had stretched as far as voting Labour in 1945, a move that shocked her conservative family, but she had very little time for talk of revolution. For all the experimental fervour in Paris, she was disappointed to discover that the legacy of the nouveau roman had practically burned out. The successful novels of the late 1960s were now ‘every bit as completely banal as their English equivalents’.19 She began a rather peevish ‘Viewpoints’ column for the Times Literary Supplement in which she poked fun at the new craze for theory. ‘A public lecture by Barthes or Kristeva will fill a hall the size of a cinema’, she wrote, rolling her eyes.20 After a dizzying first few months, she was once again getting bored of it all. She stopped going to parties, distanced herself from Cixous and did what she always did when she was feeling outcast; she studied the poetry of Ezra Pound.21

The underground in London Watching the events in Paris from across the channel, British radicals were still waiting for their own revolution. The ingredients were there – frustrated youth, radical trade unions, anti-Vietnam-war sentiment and persecuted immigrant communities – but whereas the situation in Paris united the disaffected under a common cause, these elements remained disparate within the UK. The emergence of what became known as a ‘counterculture’ at the heart of, but in rebellion against, the ‘affluent society’ was due more to a constellation of niche interests than a united movement. Areas with large immigrant populations like Brixton developed their own antiracist initiatives, with only fringe workers organizations like Tariq Ali’s International Marxist Group actively seeking to collaborate with them. The unions were tied up with the Labour Party, which had been committed to scientific management ever since Wilson’s ‘White Heat’ speech. A younger generation of Cambridge scholars who had abandoned the Communist

Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘French Fiction: The Long Revolution’. The Times, 3 August 1968. Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Viewpoint’. Times Literary Supplement, Issue 3717, 1 June 1973, p. 614. 21 Eva Hesse, Letter to Christine Brooke-Rose, 4 December 1969. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, Texas. 19 20

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Party in 1956 offered a radical alternative to the mainstream Labour view in their May Day Manifesto 1968, seeking to extend nationalization to areas like the press and the service industries.22 This ‘New Left’ also drew strength from libertarian movements like anti-psychiatry and the followers of the philosopher Marcuse, who came together for a fifteen-day summit in 1967 called The Dialectics of Liberation. By inviting figures like Allen Ginsberg and R. D. Laing, it was the libertarian wing of this leftist assortment that came closest to making a cultural impact, although the potential for these ideas to move beyond the small bohemian enclaves from which they arose is questionable. Swinging London, for better or worse, was a haven for pop, not politics. London’s closest approximation of a mass political event in 1968 was a 10,000-strong anti-Vietnam War rally that took place in March. Tariq Ali led the protest and was joined by actress and movie star Vanessa Redgrave. Their stated intention was to march to the American embassy in Grosvenor Square and deliver a letter condemning the country’s military aggression. As a proud Trotskyist, however, Ali would no doubt have predicted the real results of the march well in advance. The police could not allow 10,000 protestors to reach the embassy and so lined up to prevent them, eventually resorting to a mounted horse charge. The protestors responded by throwing marbles, toppling a number of horses and injuring their riders. The police staged a baton charge to break up the scrabbling protestors, and the whole square turned into a riot.23 Fifty people were hospitalized, 25 police and 25 protestors, while 200 were arrested. An undisclosed number were charged with affray.24 Among the protestors were Alan and Carol Burns, B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin and Eva Figes. Johnson had previously posted an open letter in The Times stating his opposition to the Vietnam War; Anthony Burgess and Brigid Brophy were included among the signatories.25 Now, the group were taking to the streets. They had considered appearing at the march under a Writers Reading banner, but ultimately decided instead against it. Something had shifted in their collective consciousness that had made marching a necessity for them. Although their experimentalist ideals had contained political emphases before, they found themselves increasingly defined by their political stances. The counterculture, taken in its most undefined form as an anti-systematic sentiment, ultimately aligned with the experimentalist mission. For more than five years now, the writers had each been searching

Raymond Williams, ed. May Day Manifesto 1968 (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 38. Tariq Ali, Street Fighting Years (London: Collins, 1987), p. 180. 24 ‘Anti-Vietnam Demo Turns Violent’. BBC News, 17 March 1968. Featured on BBC News website: http:​/​/new​​s​.bbc​​.co​.u​​k​/ont​​hisda​​y​/hi/​​dates​​/stor​​ies​/m​​arch/​​17​/ne​​wsid_​​28​180​​00​/28​​18967​​ .stm 25 ‘American Policies in Vietnam’. The Times, 31 January 1968. 22 23

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for ways of disrupting traditional forms. They had argued that breaking with existing aesthetic forms would, in turn, result in a liberatory break from existing political and social forms too. For Burns in particular, the connotations were now obvious: these were ‘High Days and Holidays! It was a time to be alive!’. The experimentalist mission was finally arriving, ‘things were happening’, they were ‘part of the general upsurge [and] we were going to win!’.26 Eva Figes was ecstatic too. For her, the emphasis on social change was finally moving radicals in a feminist direction. As they marched against Vietnam, she noted that some placards also supported the women of the Ford Dagenham car plant, currently striking for fair treatment and equal pay.27 Never previously an advocate for revolution, she now wondered aloud in her newspaper articles whether ‘total revolution is not the only way to bring about real changes for the female sex’.28 Something had changed. The personal had become political and, more importantly, so had the aesthetic. Only two years earlier the experimental writers had struggled to conceive of literature as a medium that could speak to other creative mediums like music or art. The social divides between the pop world and themselves seemed unbridgeable. Now, in the heat of protest, many voices came together, and they were all saying similar things. The relevance of the experimentalists’ campaign beyond the small internecine struggles of London literary life now seemed obvious in a way that only months earlier it hadn’t. Which isn’t to say that there had been no contact at all between the counterculture and the experimentalists before this point. In fact, a consistent point of reference between both countercultural and Calder writers could be found in the jazz musician, writer, artist and avant-garde playwright Jeff Nuttall, who, like Anthony Burgess, had a knack for giving compelling TV and radio interviews. As a result, he had been a trusted talking head, commenting on the outer peripheries of culture since the early 1960s. In the 1950s, he had been one of the earliest British followers of Charlie Parker’s improvisational jazz. He had been highly visible in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), playing his trumpet all along the famous march to Aldermaston. He had celebrated obscene art and the underground, defended pop as a legitimate musical culture and, in early 1968, was the best-known practitioner of the ‘happening’ in the UK. An American term (Nuttall preferred the term ‘performance art’), happenings tended to take place either in abandoned or in loaned spaces like coffee houses, church halls and rooms above shops, or else out in public

David W. Madden, ‘An Interview with Alan Burns’. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 17, no. 2 (1997): 128. 27 Eva Figes, ‘The Half-Hearted Revolution’. Guardian, 5 August 1968. 28 Eva Figes, ‘Opinion’. The Daily Telegraph Magazine, 11 June 1968. 26

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where passers-by could be roped into the action.29 They were reminiscent of plays in as much as scenes were written and actors had roles; however, their delivery was usually either totally natural (so as to fool audiences into thinking what was happening was real) or totally overblown and schlocky (having fun with the stagedness of the performance). Despite their resemblance to drama, the first happenings were devised by artists and sculptors.30 A wider underground theatre, with professional actors and directors involved, would develop from this within mere months. Jeff Nuttall’s troupe, The People Show, would eventually take up a residency in the prestigious London Arts Lab, but this would only come after happenings had broken out and gained mainstream recognition.31 Nuttall’s start was made possible thanks to John Calder’s takeover of Better Books. A nineteenth-century West End bookshop, Better Books, was one of the first independent bookstores to promote Calder and Boyars books as a unique entity. They had even erected a ‘Calder Corner’ where readers interested in all things experimental could peruse the company’s whole catalogue. It was the prominence of corners that led the shop towards bankruptcy. Its warrenlike Victorian interior made it impossible for the owner to keep an eye on his customers, and it gained a reputation as the easiest place in London to steal books from. The shop haemorrhaged money and was just about to close when John Calder himself personally stepped in and took it over. Better Books would become another of Calder’s expensive sacrifices in the name of literature (Calder and Boyars still rarely turned a profit). It became the first book shop in London with a focus on events. It held readings, book launches, wine receptions, late-night read-ins and, in the dusty basement, fringe theatre.32 After Calder had bought Better Books, the experimentalists’ launch parties moved out of the Calder and Boyars offices and into this venue. From late 1966, Jeff Nuttall followed. Nuttall had known Calder since the 1962 Edinburgh Festival; both of them had welcomed William Burroughs as he arrived in Britain the year before. It could even have been Nuttall’s penchant for public pranks that inspired Calder to roll a naked woman around the 1964 Festival in a wheelbarrow.33 From 1966 onwards, Calder gave Nuttall and The People Show free use of the Better Books basement to try out their new type of performed art. The result was a series of shows – Strawberry Jam, A Quiet

Robert J. Schroeder, ‘Introduction’, in The New Underground Theatre (New York: Bantam, 1968), p. vii. 30 Michael Kirby, Happenings (New York: Durron, 1966), p. 11. 31 Peter Ansorge, Disrupting the Spectacle: Five Years of Experimental and Fringe Theatre in Britain (London: Pitman, 1975), p. 25. 32 Victor Herbert, ‘John Calder and Better Books’, in In Defence of Literature (New York: Mosaic Press, 1999), p. 129. 33 Bill Webb, ‘Calder vs the Old Boys’, in In Defence of Literature. New York: Mosaic Press, 1999), p. 64. 29

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Night, Golden Slumbers, The Cultural Re-Orientation of the Working Class, Tennis and others – each of which was performed only once and grew more and more shocking and less and less consciously planned as they went. The 1967 show Lay By, also known as ‘The Pig Show’, lived on in infamy after the actors dismantled a pig carcass live on stage. ‘It was a messy affair’, Calder later recalled, ‘with pieces of raw organ meat thrown around the room, but the point, which I have forgotten, was well put-over.’34 Alan Burns remembered more of the event; he recalled that the pig carcass was initially treated dearly, sentimentally even, before a series of arguments between actors provoked a sadistic gore-fest. Other experimental writers in attendance, including Johnson and Figes, were unimpressed by the idea. The play, typical of Nuttall’s, featured one of his young male students (he was an art school lecturer at this time) and an attractive young woman, scantily clad, who sang as the two men tore apart the pig: I gotta million smiles I got crabs and piles I gotta get up and live I gotta big quim to give.35 Nuttall’s shows were not known for their subtlety, nor even for their political messages, which would often get lost in all the obscenity. He staged his plays like obscene rituals, direct attacks on his audience. Nuttall did not trust easy messages, nor did he believe that countercultural radicals were morally superior to the system they were critiquing. If anything, he believed the hippies to be worse than what they sought to replace. The People Show’s performances were therefore pained endeavours, involving the actor’s personal degradation, thrashing between self-abasement and sadistic pleasure. Nuttall described how: It was certainly a razor’s edge between public ritual and private ceremony. At that time we were never quite sure whether what we were doing in happenings was demonstration or personal therapy. Frequently a savagery that began as satire, depicting, say, a politician engaged in some fantastic foulness, changed midway to sadistic participation on the part of the artist, as he expressed himself in the mood of the piece. This was always happening to Lenny Bruce.36

John Calder, Pursuit (London: John Calder, 2001), p. 277. Jeff Nuttall, ‘The Pig Show’, in Performance Art: Scripts, Vol. 2. London: John Calder, 1979), p. 128. 36 Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (London: Paladin, 1970), p. 129. 34 35

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The intensity of the performances would lead to Nuttall abandoning the capital in 1969 and travelling north to take up a lectureship at Leeds Polytechnic. Back in his Yorkshire home, Nuttal was soon to be found subjecting the unsuspecting residents of Todmorden to one-off People Show performances.37 Back in 1968, however, Nuttall had spent a full two years building up a repertoire of extreme performance techniques, and had gained a small-buthardcore following for The People Show. Nuttall planned to take the show to the streets, and 1968 was the perfect year to do this. With revolution in the air and a sense that great change was possible, The People Show began the year with a series of sadomasochistic acts conducted beside the Thames. Nuttall, dressed as a banker, was whipped by a Carry On-style nurse while a man dressed in studded-leather bondage gear harangued the crowd from a loudhailer. The scene was visible from Tower Bridge, resulting in a large number of tourists taking photographs. This led to considerable press coverage. Nuttall also published his controversial reflections, Bomb Culture, in 1968. In it, he explained that his work was the product of a generation united by the threat of nuclear war. The CND, he claimed, was just the start. The affluent society was in fact the live-today-for-tomorrow-we-die society, and the ever-present threat of nuclear apocalypse could be found in every pop cultural phenomenon from William Burroughs to the Rolling Stones.38 The book became a surprising bestseller and was debated in Parliament. Nuttall was even more in demand as a talking head, and Calder hatched numerous schemes to get the Better Books happenings recorded for BBC Radio, although none ended up making it to air.39 The question, according to one of Nuttall’s co-performers Mike Kurstow, was no longer how to create the perfect happening but ‘how to find those situations in which your event GETS INSERTED INTO EVERYDAY LIFE’.40 The People Show sought to unleash a kind of psychic guerrilla warfare upon London. They created a broadsheet, the Moving Times, which included cut-ups, erotica, poetry and collage art. This they stuck up on public noticeboards, over adverts on the tube, or else on awkward-to-reach spots on walls and pavements. They hired a red double-decker bus and turned it into an obstacle course, driving it around a regular route and encouraging commuters to turn their journey to work into a playground. They even applied to the Arts Council for funding to buy a medieval cart. They planned to perform miracle plays around the

Steve Hanson, Jeff Nuttall and the Yorkshire Counterculture (Bradford: Nowt Press, 2013), p. 9. 38 Nuttall 1970, p. 114. 39 George MacBeth, Letter to Jeff Nuttall, 19 January 1967. Held in the John Rylands Archives, Manchester. 40 Mike Kurstow, Letter to Jeff Nuttall, 9 November 1967. Held in the John Rylands Archives, Manchester. 37

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city. Sadly, as the experimentalists had merely infiltrated the literature section of the Council, the more conservative theatre section turned down the bid. During this time, Nuttall took on an unofficial role at the request of John Calder. He was to act as a minder for the Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi. Trocchi had published nothing since his autobiographical novel, Cain’s Book, which had been ruled obscene and pulped back in 1962. At one time, Calder believed Trocchi to be a worthy British inheritor of the William Burroughs style, but by 1968 he was simply concerned with keeping him out of trouble. Trocchi was heavily addicted to heroin and sent his wife out onto the streets of Soho to get him money for fixes. His connection to the Beats gave him a renegade glamour that allowed him to occasionally publish short, unlyrical poems in I.T., or in performance poetry collections like Michael Horovitz’s Children of Albion.41 He had also used his connections in Paris, made during the Beat Hotel days, to have himself recognized as the only official British member of the Situationist International. It was with these connections in mind that he launched on his ill-fated Project Sigma programme. Project Sigma, he argued, would take literally William Burroughs’ call to ‘seize the communications’. An intellectual vanguard, or ‘invisible insurrection’, or ‘spontaneous university’, would come together in a non-hierarchical, non-structured, totally organic and hybrid way and, in doing so, create a blueprint for the future of the world.42 Trocchi sent a letter to Calder, which included a copy of Trocchi’s ‘Tactical Blueprint’ and a request for money. It was this that led Calder to hire Nuttall as a semiprofessional Trocchi-watcher. Project Sigma began innocently enough. Trocchi moved fairly regularly between Edinburgh and London, and these became the first two networks through which he sought to operate. The growth of the counterculture as a response to Swinging London meant Trocchi always had another party to go to and a new group of artists, musicians or students to introduce to his ideas. His original Tactical Blueprint had called for books, conferences, pamphlets, plays, pirate radio stations and all sorts of grandiose endeavours, all of which sounded good but were beyond the capacities of a lone junky and his friends to carry out. Instead, the focus fell on a passage referring to Project Sigma as An international index: The first essential for those whose purpose it is to link mind with mind in a supernational (transcategorical) process, in some kind of efficient expanding index, an international ‘who’s who’.43

Michael Horovitz (ed.), Children of Albion (London: Penguin, 1969). Alexander Trocchi, ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’, in Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds: A Trocchi Reader, ed. Andrew Murray Scott (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1991a), p. 178. 43 Alexander Trocchi, ‘Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint’, in Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds: A Trocchi Reader, ed. Andrew Murray Scott (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1991b), p. 196. 41 42

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It was this idea of a free and unmanaged network that would form the core of the first Sigma. Drawn from Situationist theorizing, the actual shape and form that this network would take was undecided. Trocchi began writing letters. He drew up a list of Sigma Collaborators and managed to enlist some high-profile figures. He started with Situationist Guy Debord and Beat legend William Burroughs; their fame providing him with leverage. He then sought out the legitimacy of public intellectuals, bringing in frontier psychiatrists Timothy Leary and R. D. Laing.44 Finally, he targeted writers and publishers, bringing Michael Horovitz on board and Lawrence Ferlinghetti from City Lights, the world-famous Beat book shop in San Francisco. The renowned author Doris Lessing added her name to the list, believing it to be some kind of new left-wing organization, and Anthony Burgess somehow ended up with his name on the list too, perhaps simply out of a keenness to oblige and a refusal to ever turn down work.45 Notable in their absence are any Calder writers or those from the wider Writers Reading circle of experimentalists. The experimentalists may have accepted some countercultural ideas around 1968, but they retained an intellectualism that distinguished them from the often squalid hippie dropouts. Only Nuttall could bridge the gap between them. Luckily, Nuttall was in his element among the parties and happenings of the counterculture. He would ironically adopt a revolutionary persona when in the presence of Trocchi, and created his own faux-revolutionary organization: Project sTigma. All radicals must join the sTigma, he would announce, withdrawing a little red book from his pocket. This usually happened just as the party was reaching a booze and drug-fuelled peak. Initiates must pledge to always follow the sTigma, he demanded, ‘at risk of life, limb and clothing’, then sign their name in his book and pay him a shilling.46 Nuttall was far less picky than Trocchi when it came to applicants and his book was soon filled with hundreds of names. Many of these, being written under heavy intoxication, are totally illegible, while others, like ‘Keith Richard [sic] and Mick Jagger’, were clearly written in as a joke. The only notable names that did, in fact, end up in Project sTigma, were those of Jake Prescott and Ian Purdie, two prominent members of the far-left terrorist group, the Angry Brigade. Purdie and Prescott would be arrested three years later following a string of bombings and shootings. The crowds that Nuttall and Trocchi were reaching could be quite insalubrious, even downright dangerous.

Nuttall 1970, p. 210. Alexander Trocchi, ‘List of Sigma Collaborators’. Held in the Jeff Nuttall Archive, John Rylands Manchester. 46 Jeff Nuttall, Project sTigma Notebook. Held in the Jeff Nuttall Archive, John Rylands Manchester. 44 45

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Trocchi did not stop at a sign-up sheet, however. Once he felt he had enough professional clout, he took his list and his Tactical Blueprint down to the shop Indica. Owned by Barry Miles, editor of the underground newspaper The International Times, the store now housed a printing press, with editorial offices in the rooms above and an experimental theatre in the basement below. Here, where eccentric director Charles Marowitz was conducting his first happening-inspired plays, Trocchi decided to set up his base of operations. After a long speech in which Trocchi described his plan for an ‘intergalactic switchboard of insurrection’, Miles agreed to lend Trocchi a room.47 For a few months, Project Sigma took on its second incarnation. From a mailing list, it had now grown into a call centre. The intergalactic switchboard involved a number of telephones lined up along desks, manned largely by stoned volunteers. Advertised in I.T., hippies who read Miles’ paper could ring up and ask for information on any subject, legal or otherwise, or just have a chat. Trocchi bought the team an encyclopaedia in case any callers asked awkward technical questions and then, after a few days hanging around the offices, proceeded to leave and never return. Instead, he had become obsessed with the idea of a ‘spontaneous university’. It would take the form of a ‘cultural jam session’ in a vacant country house.48 The spontaneous university would provide An organisation whose structure and mechanisms are infinitely elastic; we see it as the gradual crystallisation of a regenerative cultural force, a perceptual brainwave, creative intelligence everywhere recognising and affirming its own involvement.49 An acquaintance of R. D. Laing eventually found them a house, and Trocchi headed down there, Nuttall in tow. Upon arrival, the attendees of Sigma’s third incarnation, the spontaneous university, proceeded to do what university students do best and threw a massive party. Jazz, blues and rock records filled the air with noise and Nuttall unpacked his trumpet, turning the cultural jam session into a jam session proper. A lot of discussions were held about what they might do, but very little was achieved by way of practical planning. R. D. Laing, once world renowned for his sympathetic treatment of schizophrenics in The Divided Self (1955), was now an advocate of schizophrenia as a preferable way of life to that imposed by the one-dimensional existence of consumer society. LSD, universally advocated among the counterculture, was taken in large quantities at the Sigma party. This resulted in poets and artists wandering around the manor so stoned

Nigel Fountain, Underground: The London Alterative Press, 1966–1974 (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 23. 48 Trocchi 1991a, p. 186. 49 Ibid., p. 189. 47

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that they were incapable of holding conversations, never mind plotting an insurrection. Trocchi, who had promised finance for the plans they made, locked himself in a bedroom for the whole weekend, shooting up and yelling through the door, ‘The money is no problem! I’ve got the fucking money!’ Nuttall eventually tired of the madness and led the remaining nondrugged Sigmaites down the road to the pub.50 The third incarnation of Sigma, the spontaneous university, had proven as elusive as the first two. Trocchi’s theoretical insurrection, which sounded so convincing on paper, was revealed to lack any distinct form at all. As a result, people reverted to the forms they recognized. In the counterculture’s case, this was largely taking drugs and listening to music while complaining about the system. Nuttall, despite being a prominent mouthpiece for the counterculture, was growing deeply sceptical of its promises. After having a bad time on speed back in the mod era, he refrained from drugs even when acid, cocaine and heroin were glorified and marijuana was omnipresent. As a result, he watched with horror as close friends and promising artists were arrested, hospitalized and mentally destroyed by drugs.51 On returning from the failed Sigma retreat, Nuttall went straight to one of John Calder’s parties, got totally smashed on expensive wine and ended up humiliating himself.52 Enough, he felt, was enough. After pioneering the happening, and arguing passionately in Bomb Culture for the implicit connection of pop music, art and politics, Nuttall now decided that the glorious 1968 revolution had already failed: ‘the revolution I mean is the one that sprang directly out of poetic vision. I think it failed because its links were faulty. The link between spiritual awareness and dialectical materialism primarily.’53 Nuttall saw, long before anyone else, that the counterculture’s obsession with destroying structures and hierarchies contained both a poetic/aesthetic element (of the type that the experimentalists were pursuing) and a militant political element which, as time went on, would degrade into the old puritanical dogmas of the hard left. Sigma had failed because it was no longer creative. It had sought a new type of arrangement: a kind of scientific un-management to counter the trend for scientific management. But it had very little idea what it would do with this new arrangement, outside of staging a revolution. For Nuttall, it was the creation that mattered. The politics they could work out later. For a short period between dropping out of dropout culture and being offered a lectureship at Leeds Polytechnic, Nuttall devoted all of his energies to the written word. Writing, he felt, could make his points more clearly

Nuttall 1970, pp. 214–15. Jeff Nuttall, Letter to Harry Fairlight, 11 March 1975. Held in the Jeff Nuttall Archive, John Rylands Manchester. 52 Nuttall 1970, p. 229. 53 Jeff Nuttall, Man, Not Man (Carmarthen: Unicorn, 1975), p. iii. 50 51

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now than drama. It was, after all, Nuttall’s homemade periodical My Own Mag, which had published William Burroughs’ first cut-ups. He knew what a change the written word could make. Nuttall had worked on the Mag on and off throughout the 1960s and kept up his collaboration with Burroughs, publishing twenty-one of his word collages between 1964 and 1966.54 Nuttall had also been an outspoken defender of Naked Lunch, for which Burroughs was grateful.55 As a result, when Nuttall decided to start putting out his own novels in tiny runs of only seventy-five copies each, Burroughs returned the favour by providing Nuttall with forewords and promoting him among his friends and followers.56 The novels themselves, The Case of Isabel and the Bleeding Foetus (1967), Pig (1969) and Mr Watkins Got Drunk and Had to Be Carried Home (1969), are a mix of cut-ups, hip talk, eroticism and extreme grotesquery. They offer few literary pleasures but do make a profound impact. They are to novels what happenings were to plays, an artist hijacking the medium to cause maximum impact, regardless of what that impact might be. Isabel, for example, contains a three-breasted monstrosity whose body warps and mutates as she sings, her name shifting between Vera Lung, Vera Gland, Vera Lint, Vera Sling, Vera Quim and ‘the Darling of Civil Defence’, a clear parody of wartime singer Vera Lynn.57 What begins as parody, albeit one with ill-defined targets, becomes a monstrous refrain. Vera’s mutations had been caused by contact with atomic weapons while she was singing for the military. The erotic power she holds over characters as diverse as the Phallic Ghost, Ian Brady and The Immovable can only be explained by Nuttall’s own obsession with the horrific kernel of excessive lust. In Pig, we hear the suffering narrator scream out ‘don’t love me with your legs, your mellow arms, don’t drown me in the buttocks of your chest, don’t lip me with your either end, keep me dry yes dry of your emotive fluids!’58 The sexual revolution, and the counterculture in general, was not aptly summarized for Nuttall in the psychedelic collages of I.T.; rather, it could only truly be depicted in the style of Francis Bacon or Ralph Steadman. Nuttall’s obscenity proved too much for the experimentalists congregating around the Writers Reading group. Their most extreme challenges to the audience – Quin’s ‘think-communication’ or Johnson’s prologued harangues – were at least an honest attempt to get across their ideas. Nuttall’s happenings were shocking, but what his novels revealed was their lack of consideration. Alan Burns took to condemning Nuttall and the new theatre on these

Booth, 2012, p. 438. John Calder, Letter to Jeff Nuttall, 19 July 1965. Held in the Jeff Nuttall Archive, John Rylands Manchester. 56 William Burroughs, ‘Preface’, in Pig (London: Fulcrum Press, 1969), p. 5. 57 Jeff Nuttall, The Case of Isabel and the Bleeding Foetus (London: Turret Books, 1967), p. 6. 58 Jeff Nuttall, Pig (London: Fulcrum Press, 1969), p. 77. 54 55

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grounds. Burns used spontaneity, but it was a structured spontaneity that integrated chance elements for the purpose of idea generation. He did not simply step to the page unprepared and see what happened. Countercultural writing, he believed, fetishized the unprepared but brilliant individual in the same way that the mainstream popular culture celebrated a cult of youth. Allen Ginsberg may appear to be overflowing with spontaneous poetry, but all of his long and complex lines were carefully crafted and memorized in advance. Burns saw no evidence of this craftsmanship in any of the counterculture’s new poetry or theatrical happenings. He said so too, publically, at numerous Writers Reading events. It was at one of these in 1968 when Charles Marowitz, avant-garde theatre director, stood up and lambasted Burns right back. Burns fetishized the written word, he argued, and only showed his own ignorance when he claimed that the new theatre was unstructured. Just because it lacked a script, Marowitz argued, didn’t make it unplanned. And just because some of the happenings that Burns had attended had not been good, Marowitz added, it did not mean that the form itself was compromised. It was, after all, a form that welcomed amateurs and outsiders, and in a way that experimental writing didn’t. Johnson was ready to tear into the theatrical interloper, but instead Burns, who was not a confrontational sort, asked Marowitz what he thought they should do. Write a play yourself, Marowitz suggested, and see how hard it is. Burns, with typical cordiality, took him up on the offer.59 Marowitz, unlike Nuttall and the other creators of happenings, had a background in respectable theatre. He was classically trained, and had appeared on television and in many West End productions including a run of Shakespeare plays. After witnessing a happening, he decided to make the change from acting to directing, and, after getting his start in the basement of Indica, won sufficient Arts Council funding and charitable donations to build the Open Space theatre. The Open Space was London’s only theatre built specifically to house experimental plays. Marowitz had consciously adopted the word ‘experimental’ to distinguish his work from the informal ‘happenings’. He argued that ‘experiment, either in science or art, is predicated on continuity’, and so a truly experimental theatre must have its own space, plus a permanent company and director in order to learn from each show and improve.60 Marowitz began his experimental theatre with a series of Shakespearean ‘cut-ups’: A Macbeth, An Othello, Shrew and Variations on the Merchant of Venice.61 He then dabbled in Artaudian theatre-of-cruelty, producing the mime play Artaud at Rodez by working

David W. Madden, ‘Alan Burns: an Introduction’. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 11, no. 2 (1997): 114. 60 Charles Marowitz, ‘Reply to Hobson’. Sunday Times, 28 July 1968. 61 Jinnie Schiele, Off-Centre Stages (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005), p. 15. 59

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without a script and building up scenes using improvisational workshops.62 At the time of Marowitz’s challenge to Burns, he was in fact seeking out a professional writer who might help him to create something new. So far Marowitz’s projects had been aimed at the theatrical establishment. By producing versions of Shakespeare and a biographical study of Artaud, he was signifying to the traditional theatre audience that these strange techniques drawn from the counterculture were relevant to them too. Now he wanted to bring his experimental theatre to the counterculture itself. Burns, whose adoption of countercultural values had not extended much further than growing a beard, nevertheless felt that he was in sympathy with the young radicals. He returned to Marowitz with a suitably revolutionary play: Palach. It was to tell the story of the Czech student Jan Palach’s selfimmolation. It was the act that launched the Prague Spring and brought the spirit of 1968 East of the wall. Rehearsals began in earnest, new sets and speaker systems were installed, and the play was made ready for launch in 1969. Palach was to make use of every one of Marowitz’s experimental techniques, with a large number of innovations added by Burns. As with the protagonist of Europe After the Rain, Burns wrote Jan Palach as an unheroic everyman. It’s the world around him that drives Palach to his desperate act, and it’s that which the play focuses on.63 As the audience entered the Open Space theatre (situated below street level, giving the feel of entering a dirty basement), they found that they were to be seated in the middle of the floor. There, they were surrounded by four stages, each displaying simultaneous action.64 The intention was to recreate the suffocating conditions of suburban mediocrity through many overlapping strands of action. These all occurred simultaneously and with clashing sounds.65 Five forms of ‘Words’ were read out, overcutting each other. These were both invented (‘Medieval disputation explores the mythical and historical aspects of sacrifice’, ‘Poetic evocation of the martyrdom, spoken as dramatic monologue’), drawn from real statements (‘Jan Palach’s last letter’, ‘Scientific treatise on selfburning’, ‘Memories of Palach’s suicide by witnesses’, ‘news coverage’) and, in the case of the ‘Communist Party communiqués’, made up on the spur of the moment by the actors every night. As these ‘Words’ are read, actors took part in simultaneous smaller scenes with titles like ‘Lovers’, ‘Art’, ‘Knockabout’ and ‘Money’, which parodied daily life. Actors also provided a live criticism of the play itself. One actor would read out a financial analysis of the evening’s performance, for example, while others bitched about their

Schiele 2005, p. 38. Alan Burns, ‘Essay’. Beyond the Words, ed. Giles Gordon (London: Hutchinson, 1975), p. 67. 64 Madden 1997, p. 114. 65 Alan Burns, ‘Remember Palach’. Letter to Charles Marowitz, 26 November 1969a. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana), p. 1. 62 63

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colleagues’ acting.66 These confusing, immersive moments then gave way to quiet domestic scenes. Jan sits at the breakfast table while his parents speak: DAD [reads newspaper]: paper, paper, paper, paper, paper . . . MUM [washes dishes]: dishes, dishes, dishes, dishes, dishes . . .67 The play would then return to cacophony, with further unpredictable aspects added in the form of tape-recorded playbacks. These boomed out of speakers placed all around the room. Interviews with the audience were conducted prior to the show and played back to them. Randomly selected recordings from Calder’s 1962 Edinburgh Writer’s Conference were played alongside them. These included the creaking, unmistakable voice of Burroughs as he described the cut-up technique. There was even a plan to set off the fire alarms, although it was abandoned for reasons of health and safety.68 Once the character of Palach seems totally overwhelmed, they return to his living room. The theatre once again goes silent as his parents repeat advertising slogans to each other: MUM: What makes a shy girl get intimate? DAD: What we want is Watney’s MUM: Don’t say brown, say Hovis DAD: Bovril puts beef into you MUM: Bovril puts beef into you DAD: Bovril puts beef into you.69 Palach then storms out, and all the different strands of noise and action start occurring at once, twice as loud and twice as fast. A wave of noise crashed over the audience, simulating both the historical Noise of Prague, when, on the first anniversary of the Soviet invasion, the population expressed its independence by filling the streets with a barrage of noise, and also the intensity of Palach’s own self-immolation.70 At this point, the low-budget audio equipment would begin to produce tremendous feedback and distortion, aurally replicating the crackling sound of burning cut through with highpitched screaming and wails.71 The audience left the play with ears ringing, shell-shocked by the intensity of the past hour. Burns was tremendously happy with the play. It seemed to have bridged that final gap between reader and text that the experimentalists had so long sought to cross with their

Burns 1969a, p. 2. Schiele 2005, p. 51. 68 Burns 1969a, p. 3. 69 Schiele 2005, p. 51. 70 Burns 1969, p. 3. 71 Joseph Darlington, Contextualising British Experimental Novelists in the Long Sixties, PhD Thesis, Salford, 2014. 66 67

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books. Here was a form of words that would leave the audience physically shaken by their impact. The Marowitz method of creation seemed to offer a non-hierarchical alternative to the rigid roles of mainstream theatre. At the Open Space, ideas were contributed by everyone from director and writer to actor, stagehand and sound engineer. For Burns, his experience making Palach would be fondly remembered. It was a foretaste, he thought, of what culture would be like after the revolution.

Writing round the world By spring 1968, Ann Quin was travelling again. Her journeys had taken her back to the Greek islands. There she planned to finish off her novel Passages (1969), before setting off again, across Europe and the United States, in pursuit of the new counterculture. Started back in the mid-1960s, Passages took a long time to finish and then, much to Quin’s frustration, had taken another fourteen months to finally appear in print. It used a double-columned presentation for sections that were intended to represent the protagonist’s diary. Personal reflections, often highly intimate, filled the right-hand column, while, on the left, a psychedelic mix of ancient myth and dream imagery – some lifted, collage style, from Jane Harrison’s Prolegomina to the Study of Greek Religion72 – contrasted with the everyday thoughts. As in Three, Quin had also used a system of broken and indented lines to control the pace of reading. The resulting manuscript became very difficult for printers to reproduce using the hot metal typesetting then available.73 Phototypesetting had been invented but was still prohibitively expensive. It would allow her next book, Tripticks (1972), to be arranged freely, with text appearing wherever Quin wanted it, and images even being incorporated on the same page as text. For Passages, however, Quin had to put up with the limitations of physical typesetting – limitations she was already thinking well beyond. Her two-column arrangement borrowed from the typesetting of scholarly texts, with the left-hand mystical column being in a slightly smaller font than the right-hand diary column. This gave the unexpected effect of the mystical writing appearing to annotate the diary writing. The following diary section, for example, in which the young, adventurous female protagonist complains about her older lover, reads on the right-hand column: He was tired. She said he was jealous. He repeated he was very tired. Very well let me stay on, she said. No you would only feel abandoned.

Nonia Williams-Korteling, ‘Designing its own shadow’ – Reading Ann Quin. Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2013, p. 29. 73 Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 2 January 1968. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 72

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She was drunk and dizzy with alcohol and music. Her feet and body, it seemed, had no sense of gravity. He remained rigid, pale amid shapes and shadows of columns and people. Why don’t you join in – ah you and your middle-class Jewish upbringing – even if you get drunk you watch yourself never step out of place that’s your trouble. Later, much later, two days afterwards he forced her body to dance under him.74 It is written in Quin’s signature, free-flowing style. She embraces digression and allows the spoken voice to come through unfiltered, even if that involves neglecting formal grammar. Next to this, presented in the manner of an annotation, are two sentences: The Centaurs used to be cloud-demons. They next became mountain torrents, the off-spring of the cloud that settles on the mountain top.75 The placement of this statement so as to elucidate the aforementioned passage has a double effect. On the level of allusion, it evokes the fight between the Centaurs and the Lapiths at the marriage of Pirithous. The protagonist’s lover is cast as either a jealous king or a rapist Centaur. On a poetic level it also conjures a sense of magic and mystery; her Centaur lover is a cloud-demon or a mountain spring, not a violent monster. The sex and violence that is ever present in Passages is softened by the appearance of fantasy. It is this unnerving fusion of magic and real danger that makes Passages perhaps Quin’s finest work. Far more opaque than Berg or Three, it nevertheless provides a total immersion in the Quin consciousness. It has moments of exquisite linguistic beauty and the most effective use of the ‘spaces between words’ in any of her writing. Passages is also notable for its biographical inspiration. Quin had fallen in love. The middle-class Jewish lover described earlier was Robert Sward, a thirty-five-year-old American performance poet who Quin met during her first Harkness-funded travels in America. His first collection, Uncle Dog (1962), had been a poignant mix of homely Americana and light, humorous invention. The poems were funny and charming, as was the poet, who was on his third marriage by the time he became romantically involved with Quin. Contact with the counterculture had made Sward’s poems less funny and more strange, with political elements appearing in the awkward, namechecking way that was popular on American campuses at the time: ‘The John Birch Society – Vietnam – Ronald Reagan reading Homer’, reads one of his stanzas.76 Quin was in awe of him. She took him back to England

Ann Quin, Passages (New York: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), p. 89. Quin 2003, p. 89. 76 Robert Sward, ‘In Mexico’, in The Collected Poems, 1957–2004 (Windsor: Black Moss Press, 2004a), p. 65. 74 75

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where he performed with Writers Reading, a very different audience than he was used to, before the couple left again, touring the Med and then flying out to Mexico. The plan had been to hire a house on the edge of the desert and achieve some sort of peace. As they passed through American customs, however, the scene that met them gave her a premonition. ‘What a grim nightmare that was’, Quin wrote afterwards to Marion Boyars, ‘the terminal seemed as if it held the whole vicious, violent scene of the country there – and any moment one felt a riot would break out.’77 They had problems getting Sward’s typewriter over the border. For a moment it seemed as if they’d end up alongside a group of Mexicans who were being led away in handcuffs. Eventually, after much begging and pleading, they were allowed to board. The sense of lingering threat would not leave Quin, however, and unlike in the Mediterranean where she was forever exploring and cavorting with the locals, she would spend her time in Mexico barely stepping foot outside of their rented house and garden. Her world narrowed considerably. Within their rented home, however, things were for the moment idyllic. They adopted a stray black cat which they called Gandalf and played with their neighbour’s dogs.78 Quin was entranced by the scorpions that would scuttle around after the rain, although when it came to tarantulas, she left it to Sward to shoo them out.79 They also stumbled upon a number of hippies who had come from California and who introduced them to peyote. The hallucinogenic became a favourite of Quin’s, and she later recalled how its effects seemed to elevate the kinds of consciousness she’d been developing in her work: Taking peyote was particularly beautiful taken in such a fantastic landscape, with all that vast space. Maybe if I’d stayed in England and not taken drugs, it would have taken me 10 to 15 years to reach the particular stage I reached then. I just found that when I did write, it all seemed to tie up.80 The writing that she was concentrating on was no longer the flowing prose of Passages, but a kind of fusion poetry inspired by Sward. Sward himself was writing a long poem, ‘In Mexico’, which he envisioned as a hundredpage broadsheet to be performed by fifty voices.81 In it, he mixed American politics, rock lyrics and comic-strip characters, alongside occasional personal reflections in lines like:

Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 17 April 1968. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 22 July 1968. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 79 Robert Sward, Letter to John Calder, 18 May 1968. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 80 John Hall, ‘The Mighty Quin’. Arts Guardian, 29 April 1972, pp. 8–9. 81 Robert Sward, ‘Foreword to Horgortom Stringbottom / I am Yours / You are History, 1970’, in The Collected Poems, 1957–2004 (Windsor: Black Moss Press, 2004b), p. 219. 77 78

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Your letters rankle, I love them, They are like newspapers, I say. They set my teeth on edge. We correspond, Send love notes, X-rays, news clippings, Copies of the Congressional Record.82 The correspondent in question was his wife, who was in the process of moving to Canada and was now hoping that Sward would come back and join her. Quin was either unaware of this or chose to ignore it. Her own work, so full of illicit sexual thrills and love triangles, gave her little grounds to complain about Sward’s own poetic allusions. Instead, they collaborated on a cut-up prose poem. Entitled ‘Living in the Present’, it attempted to integrate Sward and Quin’s distinctive voices alongside clippings from newspaper articles. The cut-ups weren’t edited or polished afterwards in the way that Burns and Burroughs’ were, and the results lacked rhythm as well as sense: Only the forestry commission, first female crush, breasts prominent but not outrageous, the conventional Irish types. But what the British Government must avoid, and this bare statement ‘forced since childhood into victim’s patter’. The Miss K can write as well as this makes the book’s central failings all the more.83 Quin’s beautiful, phantasmagoric linguistic flow is barely perceptible after the cut-up treatment, and the introduction of newspaper article prose proves awkward and jarring. Contrast this with Alan Burns’ Celebrations and you get the clear sense that Quin and Sward are dabbling in a form that is alien to them. Clearly, Quin’s experimental techniques were not transferable. Her genius lay in her ability to commune with language and the silence behind it. The physical manipulation of text implied the existence of words as physical objects. This is something which contradicted Quin’s prior belief in thought communication. Psychic writing presumed that words exist in more than their written forms. The written word is, according to her psychic vision, only one element of a wider psychic movement of consciousness. The poem struggled to find a publisher, and John Calder politely turned down the rights to Sward’s ‘In Mexico’.84 As much as Quin felt that her life and her writing were finally starting to align, her publishers back in England were

Sward 2004a, p. 66. Ann Quin and Robert Sward, ‘Living in the Present’, in The Unmapped Country, ed. Jennifer Hodgson (Sheffield: And Other Stories, 2018), p. 75. 84 Robert Sward, Letter to John Calder, 7 March 1968. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana.

82 83

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sceptical. The life was beginning to outpace the writing, and Quin’s constant requests for money meant that much of her future income from Passages had already been spent well in advance of its publication. In July, Sward left Quin in Mexico as he travelled back to the United States. He told her he was going back to initiate divorce proceedings. Quin hung around for a number of weeks, feeling trapped in the house but comforted by Gandalf and the dogs. She tried out a new macrobiotic diet that involved large amounts of brown rice and vegetables, and worked on a new novel.85 It was to be an adaptation and extension of the story ‘Tripticks’, for which she had won the Ambit prize. The novelized Tripticks would be written with the aid of chemicals more potent than the coffee, cigarettes and contraceptive pill to which her Ambit story had been attributed. Quin aimed to conjure a nightmarish vision of America, pieced together from comic strips, tabloid papers, pulp detective novels and her own unique brand of sexual menace. Its antagonist, Nightripper, was a countercultural libertine who preyed on naïve young women. Its protagonist, a voyeuristic private eye, would travel the world in search of his No. 1 X-Wife. It was totally unlike Quin’s other books, bearing the stylistic marks of everything she’d picked up in her four months with Sward. She was making solid progress with the manuscript when she finally received the call. Sward had reconciled with his wife and was moving to Canada. He had received a lectureship at the University of Victoria, and, thanks to his military record as a veteran of the Korean War, he and his wife’s visas had been fast-tracked. He was to arrive there in January 1969 and begin his new life.86 In the meantime, Quin was distraught. She abandoned her poetry, packed a suitcase and returned to England.87 She moved back in to the Burnses’ house while she waited for her Calder and Boyars royalties to come. In the meantime she’d appear with Writers Reading and attend the second march on Grosvenor Square, where this time over 25,000 people marched against the Vietnam War. The Burnses, Figes and Quin were among them, but not B. S. Johnson. The events of 1968 had inspired Johnson. His writing had always been, in his mind, inherently political. His ‘campaign for the good stuff’ was aimed at dismantling the old literary establishment and replacing them with his experimentalist comrades. Together, the experimentalists would drag the novel kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. There had always been voices raised against him, though. Some of the loudest were those of the late 1950s Angry Young Men and their political equivalents in the New Left. For these militant socialists, the novel was either realist or bourgeois. As the modernists had largely been middle class and conservative, it followed

Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 22 July 1968. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. Jack Foley, ‘Uncle Dog Becomes a Bodhisattva’, in The Collected Poems, 1957–2004 (Windsor: Black Moss Press, 2004), p. 17. 87 Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 20 September 1968. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 85 86

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that any avant-garde art was therefore suspect.88 Johnson’s novels did not speak to the people; they argued. Instead, following the philosopher György Lukács’ line of argument, British left-wing writers believed that socialist realism was historically destined to replace bourgeois experiment, just as the proletariat was destined to destroy the bourgeoisie. The German student’s movement, motivated by the same puritanical commitment to socialist realism as the British New Left, had heckled, booed and thrown things at the screen when Johnson’s experimental film Paradigm was shown at a German film festival.89 In response to this, Johnson was split. He may have been a working-class writer committed to overthrowing the establishment, but he was still wholeheartedly committed to experimentalism. As much as he himself could be dogmatic and bolshie in arguments, he much preferred the company of artists and intellectuals to trade unionists and politicians. In late 1968, he decided to step back from politics and bury himself in a new novel project. Johnson had been impressed by Burns’ integration of chance elements into his works. Celebrations in particular was a highlight, as was the now critically acclaimed Palach. However, Johnson felt that Burns’ new novel, Babel (1969), had finally stepped over the line into indecipherability. Burns had removed the key element, character, that had driven his previous works. He had replaced it with grand themes like politics and religion. This meant that the book overall, despite some well-crafted lines, ceased to hang together. Speaking to Burns, Johnson praised the novel for its investigation of chaos: ‘you don’t reflect chaos, you use a metaphor for chaos, because you create a new order, in a fixed pattern. . . . Like many of your things, I’m glad you wrote it because it saved me having to do so.’90 In his private notebooks, however, he was far more dismissive: ‘BABEL, it needed to be done, the way clear, now no one else need to do it – valuable function.’91 The fusion of politics and cut-ups in Babel was, admittedly, inelegantly done, and reading the novel now feels that both readers of experimental novels and political radicals would leave the experience feeling unsatisfied. The novel had neither the poetry and humanity of Burns’ earlier works, nor did it work as an effective slogan or satire. Johnson, in a move typical of his stubborn personal vision, decided that he would adopt some of Burns’ aleatoric techniques but instead of focusing on the spectacle of sudden revolutionary uprisings, he would instead deal with a deeply private personal matter, the death of his close friend Tony Tillinghast. Tony had been an undergraduate

Raymond Williams, ‘The Politics of the Avant Garde’, in Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 2007), p. 62. 89 Coe 2004, p. 264. 90 Alan Burns, ‘Interview with B.S. Johnson’, in Imagination on Trial, ed. Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), p. 92. 91 B. S. Johnson, Notebook 8, started 1 May 1969, p. 16. Held in the British Library. 88

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at the same time as Johnson and had worked alongside Johnson, Duffy and Ghose on Universities Poetry. Unlike the rest, however, Tony had decided to stay on in academia and became a lecturer in English Literature. Johnson had long teased him about his job, which he laughing described as being a vulture on the corpse of literature. ‘Let the dead live with the dead!’, he’d once shouted at him. But Johnson nevertheless respected Tony’s efforts, fighting to uphold literature’s value in the world. He was one of the few people Johnson ever let edit his work.92 The novel that Johnson would produce about Tony’s death, The Unfortunates, was published in 1969. It took the form of a ‘book in a box’. The reader opened the box to find twenty-seven unbound sections: twentyfive were unnumbered and two were marked ‘FIRST’ and ‘LAST’. The reader was encouraged to shuffle the twenty-five loose sections and read them in whatever order they liked. The result was not total chaos, as many of the sections had a definite chronological relationship with each other, but instead the shuffle acted as a negotiation between order and chaos.93 The shuffling was intended to represent both the cancer cell mutations that finally killed Tony and the patchy memory of Johnson as he tries to piece together his reminiscences. He confuses visits to the dying Tony with a Nottingham Forest game he had reviewed for the papers, which took place nearby.94 As Johnson pieces together the memories, his first-person recollections are a mix of the humorous, the banal, the bad taste, and the sudden tragic. The chance element involved in shuffling the papers means that the reader can be faced with Tony’s death at any time. The section in which his death is described is shorter than all the others. It is a single paragraph of text, plainly written. It describes the last moments in which ‘Tony’s mind had come back and [he and his wife June] had talked very seriously about everything, for the first time had talked about death’.95 As Glyn White points out, when the reader meets this point of finality, they are left holding a single, almost entirely white piece of paper, as frail and delicate as Tony must have been in his last moments.96 Johnson’s concern was to use every technique in his arsenal to grab the reader and drag them into the specificities of his own emotions. He wanted to honestly convey his own particular and visceral experience of Tony’s death. ‘Generalisation is to lie, to tell lies’, he writes at the close of the novel, insisting that ‘only the fact

B. S. Johnson, ‘Then he was doing research…’, in The Unfortunates (London: Picador, 1999), p. 4. 93 Sebastian Jenner, ‘B.S. Johnson and the Aleatoric Novel’, in B.S. Johnson and Post-War Literature, ed. Julia Jordan and Martin Ryle (London: Palgrave, 2014), p. 72. 94 B. S. Johnson, Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs (London: Hutchinson, 1973), p. 25. 95 B. S. Johnson, ‘Julie rang…’, in The Unfortunates (London: Picador, 1999), p. 1. 96 Glyn White, Reading the Graphic Surface (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 116. 92

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that he did die, he is dead, is important: the loss to me, to us’.97 The novel was a personal exorcism. It was an attempt, as with Trawl, to tell the truth in a way that impresses itself upon the reader and shakes them free from their complacency and their romanticism.98 As a response to the political bandwagon-jumping that Johnson saw happening all around him, the novel was a stark reminder of the importance of the individual. The Unfortunates was very well received and, like all Johnson’s novels, shifted far more copies than the average experimental novel. A few pints with Rayner Heppenstall gained him radio time in which to discuss the novel and read extracts. The Arts Council also decided to reward him, with his mole Giles Gordon signing off on a cheque for £2,000 (Johnson had signed off on a cheque of equal value to Alan Burns, in the same year, for his work on Babel).99 With his coffers refreshed and his name in the papers, Johnson decided to take up an offer from the Hungarian government. Much to the chagrin of New Left writers, still boycotting Hungary after the Soviet invasion of 1956, Johnson left on a cultural exchange programme. The trip would prove hugely successful. Johnson managed to sell stories from Statement Against Corpses to the prestigious Hungarian literary journal Nagy Vilàg, and optioned Albert Angelo for publication in Hungarian.100 A translator was assigned to produce a Hungarian edition of The Unfortunates, which, thanks to the impatience of the printers’ union, was bound as a normal book.101 Connections were made that would last a lifetime, and Johnson’s work is still highly regarded in Hungary to this day, with Hungarians numbering among the leading academic scholars currently writing about Johnson’s novels. But the trip was not merely about Johnson selling his wares. It was also about Johnson seeking a new way of life, and new approaches to writing. On a personal and political level, what Johnson found in Hungary was liberating. Unlike the puritanical leftists back in England, Johnson found that Hungarian radicals naturally associated political resistance and avantgarde art. They also celebrated good living in a way that Johnson found deeply refreshing.102 His movie Paradigm received a standing ovation from Hungarian students; and after a few Hungarian lagers, Johnson even declared himself a proud communist, if only in the sense that the Hungarian anti-Soviets were proud communists too.103 Upon returning from Hungary, Johnson was ready and eager to get back into the experimentalist fight. The counterculture may not have been for him, nor the moral righteousness

B. S. Johnson, ‘Last’, in The Unfortunates (London: Picador, 1999), p. 6. Burns 1981, p. 85. 99 Pritchett 1969. 100 Coe 2004, p. 276. 101 Ibid., p. 279. 102 Ibid., p. 282. 103 Ibid., p. 264. 97 98

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of the New Left, but over in the Eastern Bloc they understood him. His campaign for the good stuff would continue. And a campaign it would have to become. The forces of the establishment, grown impatient after nearly a decade of being jeered at, prodded and painted as criminals, had started to rally. The events in Paris had shown that the counterculture was not just another fad; it had dangerous revolutionary potential. The government was well aware of the damage that tiny fringe groups could cause, having watched them drag northern Ireland from a relatively stable, if underdeveloped, region into a terrifying warzone in little over a year. As such, police and politician alike were keen to shut down the counterculture before it could do any lasting damage. Drug use was seen as a major threat, with some hard-line police chiefs like Manchester’s John Anderton shutting down music venues in the city in pursuit of users.104 Nothing so draconian was imposed on London clubs, although prosecutors were under heavy pressure to bring charges of obscene libel. As such, they fervently sought out and prosecuted any written or visual material that they considered corrupting. Sir Hugh Greene, the progressive director general of the BBC, who had brought so many of the 1960s’ cultural changes into the public eye, was ousted in 1969 after a concerted campaign of letter writing from Mary Whitehouse’s Clean-Up TV movement. The same year, the leading underground press magazine Oz was charged with obscenity after they let schoolchildren edit a copy of the magazine. One child stuck Rupert the Bear’s head onto a pornographic Robert Crumb cartoon. ‘It left you with an ugly taste in your mouth’, the prosecutor declared in his summation, ‘let me seek to analyse what that taste was; it’s the very epitome, is it not, of the so-called permissive society’.105 After years of slinging mud at those in power, the forces of the establishment had begun slinging mud right back, and unlike the rough coalition of experimentalists, counterculturalists, radicals and intellectuals that they faced, the establishment had the law behind them. Calder was a veteran in the war against censorship. He made his first splash in the 1950s, publishing blacklisted American writers in Britain. He had helped mount the defence for the Chatterley Trial back in 1960 and had fought, and lost, two cases in defence of Burroughs’ masterpiece Naked Lunch. In the mid-1960s, the publishing world had perhaps become complacent. After Chatterley, it was felt that anything reasonable could be published, and obscenity trials were considered the purview of pornographers and the underground. Calder still insisted on pushing those boundaries, however, and in 1966 had published Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn; an unflinching look at the violence and degradation of life in one of New York’s roughest areas. The book featured gang-rapes at knifepoint, endless

C.P. Lee, Shake Rattle and Rain (Devon: Harding Simpole, 2002), p. 94. Tony Palmer, The Trials of Oz (London: Blond and Briggs, 1971), p. 193.

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reference to drug use, a sympathetic portrayal of the queer underworld, and a claustrophobic atmosphere that left the reader in no doubt that the people of Brooklyn were in hell. The book was charged with obscenity late in 1967. Arguably, Calder had helped inspire the case. His connections in the Liberal Party (for whom he would later stand as an MP) told him that a prominent Conservative backbencher had been spotted with a copy of the book. Not known for having a taste for transgressive literature, it was suspected that he was mounting a case for the book’s prosecution, and was planning to announce his distaste for it in Parliament. Getting ahead of him, Calder took out an advertisement for the book in the Sunday Times. It listed glowing quotes from famous reviewers and, at the bottom, the insistence of the Conservative MP in question that the book would deprave and corrupt its readers.106 If the MP was tentative about pressing charges, Calder had now forced his hand. Last Exit to Brooklyn lost the case and was banned. In 1968, Calder prepared to take the fight back to the establishment. He appealed the ban on Last Exit to Brooklyn and held a gala, ‘An Evening Concerning Depravity and Corruption’, to raise funds for the defence. With a title like that, Calder attracted famous faces from across the counterculture. There was even a rumour that a Beatle was in attendance, although as Calder’s musical taste had never wavered from his beloved operas, he would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between a John and a Ringo. The influential countercultural illustrator Alan Aldridge designed Calder a poster for the event which featured a coiled snake with two heads giving birth to a naked man and woman. Not only were the posters declared obscene, but Calder himself was arrested, flyposting them at 3.45 am.107 When the trial finally began, Calder had the backing of writers, academics and intellectuals from a broad range of backgrounds and with a wide range of opinions about what constituted obscenity. None of the experimentalists from Calder’s own publishing house were called for fear of conflict of interest, although Quin mounted a psychic defence from where she was in Mexico.108 Anthony Burgess was called to the stand, and he made a cautious defence of the book as a force for moral good. The foreword for the 1968 edition, released after the jury unanimously decided in favour of Calder, was written by Burgess and argued that ‘Last Exit presents social horrors out of reformist zeal, not out of a desire to titillate or corrupt. Those who found the book capable of debauching its readers were evidently most debauchable’.109 Calder’s victory was hard fought, but it would not be the last battle he would have to fight. British culture had come a long

Calder 2001, p. 315. ‘Mr Calder Takes a Civil Liberty’. Londoner’s Diary, March 1968. 108 Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 7 November 1967. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 109 Anthony Burgess, ‘Introduction to 1968 Calder edition of Last Exit to Brooklyn’, in The Ink Trade, ed. Will Carr (Manchester: Carcanet, 2018), p. 52. 106 107

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way since Beyond the Fringe back in 1961. There were now officers in the Metropolitan Police whose full-time job was hunting down and prosecuting any publisher who overstepped the (very ill-defined) line. Anthony Burgess was already growing tired of England long before its culture split into revolutionary youth on the one hand and puritanical counter-revolution on the other. Burgess, as an idiosyncratic blend of liberal and Catholic, had mixed sympathies. He was fervently anti-censorship but sceptical of what the counterculture did with its freedoms. His own novels, of which he now had seventeen in print, had managed to avoid obscenity charges, with the libel case over The Worm and the Ring being an outlier. British parochialism tired him, however. Especially as his many years of travel, his wartime experiences and his colonial service had all shown him that other types of life were possible. Britain, he felt, was small-minded and petty. The Swinging London phenomenon had struck him only as silly and garish. ‘I wanted to escape the sixties’, he later wrote. Part of it was no doubt due to his wife Lynne’s chronic illness that, in 1968, was finally to get the better of her.110 Burgess would spend a lot of time sitting by his wife’s bedside in a squalid NHS hospital. This, he thought begrudgingly, his taxes had helped pay for. And he was paying a lot of taxes. Harold Wilson’s government had brought in a 98 per cent supertax on incomes over a certain threshold, a confiscation that Burgess could see on the horizon. He was due to receive a one-off lumpsum payment for the film rights to A Clockwork Orange. This would be the only large payment he would receive for his work during his lifetime, and he’d be damned if he’d see it all go to the government. All of these influences combined in his mind to create an image of a decaying England, one he was better to be rid of. As he watched Lynne slip into her final coma and pass away quietly, he headed home for some rest: I would have to return to the hospital in the true morning to collect her rings and death certificate. I found a minicab to take me home. Its radio played loud music, redolent of life, screwing, miniskirts. When a singing group called the Grateful Dead was announced I demanded that it be switched off. The driver demurred, saying that he had his sodding rights. The Grateful Dead sang me home.111 The event perfectly summarized for Burgess his experience of the new, liberated Britain. Wilfully obnoxious hippies celebrated their mindless desires on the radio as a cosseted working class griped about their rights. He’d already seen the 1970s on their way.

Anthony Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time (London: Heinemann, 1990), p. 139. Burgess 1990, p. 153.

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After months of mourning, Burgess decided he needed to escape. He had become romantically involved with his Italian translator, Liana Macellari, who he would later marry, and, together with their son, Paulo Andrea, they loaded up Burgess’ van and headed for the continent. Their trip was rather meandering, and not too eventful, and provided the sense of adventure that Burgess needed. After reaching the Med, it was decided that they would hop a ferry over to Malta. For Burgess, Malta seemed ideal. It had a taste of the exotic, being largely Arabic speaking, and a 2.5 per cent tax rate that would allow him to actually enjoy some of the money he earned. It also had a reputation for deeply conservative Catholicism, which appealed to Burgess. Burgess had never really forgiven the Vatican for abolishing the Latin mass. Malta promised a new Eden. He was soon disillusioned. Upon first reaching the island, his blasé attitude to paperwork led to his van being impounded. Then, after a hardfought battle with Maltese officials to get it back, he found that his library had been confiscated. Malta, it turned out, had one of the strictest systems of censorship in all of Europe.112 So extensive that the censorship office had given up listing all of its banned books and merely confiscated anything that looked suspect. Forty-one of Burgess’ books were burned. These ranged from literary classics like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to psychological textbooks with entries on homosexuality, to some admittedly quite smutty books like Keep it Kinky and Seduce and Destroy, although arguably they were more cheeky than obscene. The listless system resulted in arbitrary decisions being made. Burgess’ own novel, Tremor of Intent, was burned under its raunchy French title but roundly celebrated under its Catholic-sounding Dutch title, ‘Martyr’s Blood’.113 Burgess, shocked and appalled, conducted a series of interviews with the Maltese press, outraged at his treatment and at the system in general. His first six months on the island were spent in letter writing and campaigning against censorship, all culminating in a standingroom-only lecture entitled ‘Obscenity and the Arts’ delivered at the town hall in Valetta. Despite this activism, Burgess eventually had to give in to the censorship. He stopped reviewing contemporary literature as there was no guarantee of review copies making it through customs, and returned to writing essays on the modernists that he’d admired at university and undertaking screenwriting projects.114 These paid better than novels, but very few were ever made.115

Andrew Biswell, ‘The Context of Obscenity and the Arts’, in Obscenity and the Arts (Manchester: Pariah Press, 2018), p. 14. 113 Marie Said, ‘Interview with Anthony Burgess’ [1970], in Obscenity and the Arts (Manchester: Pariah Press, 2018), p. 40. 114 Ibid., p. 40. 115 Andrew Biswell, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (London: Picador, 2005), p. 339. 112

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By the end of 1968, the experimentalists had been scattered to the four winds. Some, like Johnson and Burns, had merely taken breaks from their usual existences. Burns would return from the world of theatre as refreshed and invigorated as was Johnson from Hungary. Ann Quin went back to America for a short while, and planned a trip across Eastern Europe inspired by Johnson’s travels. Nuttall escaped to the North where he was beyond the reach of the increasingly drug-wracked counterculture. Angela Carter went to live in Japan and traded letters with Anthony Burgess. They both planned to remain in exile and cultivate international readerships alongside their primarily British market. Christine Brooke-Rose, in spite of her new home in Paris, remained set on publishing her novels in Britain. She was working simultaneously on a campus novel and a study of Pound’s poetry, both written in English. But one writer was left behind by this flurry of movement: Eva Figes. Figes was still in financial trouble, despite having won awards for her novels. She published reviews and commentary in both the Guardian and the Times. The cheques were coming in, but not fast enough. One particularly galling incident occurred at one of Calder’s launch parties. The Calder and Boyars offices were subject to a bust, the police presuming that at least one of the assorted hippies would be in possession of illicit substances. They forced each attendee to empty their pockets, and women had to tip out their handbags. Eva Figes, who was just about to leave as the raid happened, emptied her bag to reveal neatly wrapped cakes and sausage rolls. She had taken them from the buffet as a treat for her children at home.116 Humiliated, Figes would avoid Calder parties until the return of Burns and Johnson. She wrote long articles criticizing the British literary culture that so disliked intellectual endeavour. ‘The review columns and the bestseller lists still confirm the cosily middlebrow’, she despaired, ‘British people expect novelists and playwrights to entertain, not to tax their thinking powers overmuch.’117 Meanwhile, Figes was reading the works of the German Group 47, admiring the soon-to-beNobel-Prize-winner Heinrich Böll and the humanistic, intellectual brilliance of Günter Grass, of whom John Calder was a close friend.118 If the Germans could produce intellectually rigorous bestsellers, Figes wondered, then why couldn’t the British? As a writer of German Jewish descent, the thought began to occur to her that perhaps her own liminal space within the British literary scene was in some way connected to her Germanic roots. The British story of the Second World War had been honed through films, comics, novels and public memory into a simple and heroic morality tale, one of plucky little islanders coming together in their time of trial and overcoming an evil enemy. For Figes, the story had a definite appeal.

Calder 2001, p. 275. Eva Figes, ‘The Writer’s Dilemma’. Guardian, 17 June 1968. 118 John Calder, Letter to Eva Figes, 1 March 1967. Held in the British Library. 116 117

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She remembered the footage of the camps played at the local cinema in 1941. In 1961, she devoured Raul Hilberg’s comprehensive history of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews, which she had since reread numerous times.119 The Germans, she had told herself, were truly evil. More evil than even the British war movies could do justice to.120 And yet, in this new generation of German novelists, she found sentiments of such elevation mixed with true regret that her own attitudes started to shift. She doubted the English could ever achieve anything like it. Silence seemed to predominate in England, especially around the Holocaust. Figes began to re-learn the German that had been drilled out of her in childhood; the ‘tongue of lunatics and maniacs’.121 Her mother, with whom she hadn’t the warmest relationship, nevertheless spoke to Figes about her work. She was employed at a bureau dedicated to tracing the remains of the dead, the unidentified missing, the lost children and the dispersed survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. Many were still turning up twenty-five years later, and most of them would never be found.122 Many children, it turned out, had been taken in by German families and raised German, only discovering their Jewishness as their adoptive parents reached old age. Figes dug out the old photos of her first day at school in Berlin, golden Schültute in hand, when she looked as German as could be.123 Then, in the midst of this doubt and soul searching, she began to receive letters from an old family friend, a fellow exile who moved to the newly formed state of Israel. In her letters she described the prejudice she had faced as a German Ashkenazi Jew in a country dominated by Middle Eastern ‘sabras’ and North African Sephardis. People at the kibbutz she lived on called her a ‘Hitler Zionist’ (someone forced to be there rather than brought by choice) and a ‘yekke’, taken from the German word for ‘jacket’: jacke (a stereotype about German Jews: that they were so posh they wore three-piece suits while farming).124 Even in Israel, it seemed, German Jews could not escape prejudice. Figes, staying home on a Friday night and watching her tiny television, found herself caught up in a terribly written television series about a stateless seaman. She began to sympathize with this seaman. The idea of a stateless man wandering a hostile European wasteland returned to her again and again. It imposed on her dreams. By early 1969, it was clear that this would become her next novel.125

Eva Figes, Journey to Nowhere (London: Granta, 2008), p. 141. Ibid., p. 82. 121 Eva Figes, Little Eden (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), p. 54. 122 Eva Figes, Tales of Innocence and Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 87. 123 Ibid., p. 54. 124 Figes 2008, p. 125. 125 Alan Burns, ‘Interview with Eva Figes’, in The Imagination on Trial, ed. Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), p. 36. 119 120

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Konek Landing was published late in 1969, conceived, written, edited and published in a six-month frenzy of activity. Figes committed herself wholeheartedly to its writing, later recalling the process as one of ecstatic inspiration, an enormous and all-consuming excitement.126 The story, which never really changed throughout her planning, was that of a stateless young man, Stefan Konek, trapped in a war-torn Europe through which he has to move, surreptitiously, being a member of a hunted minority. Although Figes was clearly inspired by Jewish experience under the Nazis, she wanted the paranoia to be universal, and so, mimicking techniques used by Burns in Europe After the Rain, she made locations, ethnicities and spoken languages non-specific throughout.127 She also found her typical prose style to be too historical, too empirical to really capture the feelings she needed. The very act of working out what happened in the Holocaust had limited the historians she studied to writing about facts, figures, dates and horrifying statistics. Figes caught herself mimicking this historical, objective style of writing. This, she realized, would not work. Instead, what she sought was a language of unconscious imagery and symbol that could underpin her narrative and drag her prose in the direction of myth. She would rewrite paragraphs two, three, sometimes five or six times in search of the right effects. She became obsessed with syllables, particularly vowels. Vowels would appear to her in dreams, and she would mumble them under her breath as she went about her day. The deep, Germanic sounds of rounded vowels contested with her clipped English tones, and these fused with strange sounds from Old English and the intonations of Yiddish and Hebrew.128 These vowels seemed to form the notation of her prose, the rhythm of which became ever more fluid the more she rewrote and rewrote. Her belief in language’s ability to reach out and hold the reader, to drag them into its own rhythms and to show them the world through a whole new ‘grid’ of understanding were here brought to a polished pinnacle. Konek Landing, in its final published form, is the finest of Figes’ novels and perhaps the best experimental novel of the era. The scale of the narrative is immense. Figes sought to place the madness of a war-torn Europe into perspective not only within human history but within the geological history of the world. The novel opens with an invocation of the seashore at the first emergence of life on Earth: It began where the tide ran, the water rocking, air and water and air; there, you might say, the cradle of life. Weight of water ran and sank and ran, advanced and retreated, left small circles, air enclosed in liquid, which glistened in the bright hot sun. . . . The jellied particles clung tighter, grew tentacles, suckers. Anything merely adrift on shore was washed out, lost

Ibid., p. 37. Figes, 1976, p. 12. 128 Burns 1981, p. 36. 126 127

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and merged in the mucky liquid. Clouds gathered and moved overhead above the headland, watered the grass and washed more minerals into the sea. Seed blew inland on the wind.129 Time appears to pass both on a human level, where the sun rises and the shore moves from lifeless dark to busy and bright life, and also on the level of aeons, on that of epochal time, where globs of cells eventually gather into jelly-like organisms and become grasses, trees and animals. Like Ann Quin, Figes breaks the rules of formal grammar the better to reappropriate them for her own needs. Yet, whereas Quin’s informal grammar gives a rushed, immersive, confused or colloquial tone to her writing, Figes’ writing has a musical, lyrical quality. It was as if she had generated a new set of formal purposes to which she could put grammatical devices like commas and semicolons. Her grammar seems defined by her imaginative flow rather than strict meaning. Even the fastest of skim-readers are forced to enter into the pacing set by Figes. She achieves a phenomenal level of control even in these first moments. A few pages more and Konek appears, the figure of a stateless refugee whose emergence from his hiding place has all the appearance of ancient man: Driven by hunger, disturbed sleep, the man dropped out of the tree and stood on the night shore watching the edge of moonlight on water, listened to the water whispering in hollow spaces . . . dragging the fallen trunk of a dead tree he had hollowed out using the edge of stone, pushed off with a broken branch.130 His journey downriver begins, introducing us to suspicious farmers, sympathetic villagers and, soon enough, military forces that chase and harass him. Konek is caught up in a series of disguises, none of which truly work, and his identity becomes lost and confused. Throughout he is stateless in the ultimate sense; he has nowhere to escape to, only places to escape from. He moves from one threat to another, mimicking a hero’s journey, albeit with no task or destination, only pure survival. Finally, in keeping with Figes’ mythic structures, Konek finally steals aboard a ship headed for Africa, and it is here, in the place of humanity’s first emerging, where he finally meets a tribe willing to take him in. Even here, in the dying moments of the novel, however, we are left with a deep uncertainty. Has Konek found rest, or has he finally become the sacred sacrifice he has threatened to become all along? The tribe are anonymous, stripped back to purest elements, an embodiment of human society at its closest and most communal. They are the life that Konek is trying to enter:

Eva Figes, Konek Landing (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 9. Ibid., p. 11.

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Shaved heads, elongated dark shanks and black ribcages exposed . . . dark looks flitted, curious and eager, only small moon parings as focus changed, already crossed with lines. All had something, all looked, stared, pointed.131 The fate of Stefan Konek is left unresolved at the end of the novel, with the final scene, his joining the tribe, offering two possible alternatives: descent into brutality as he is ritually sacrificed or a hopeful reconciliation as he joins this new community. It is an uncomfortable ending, but then Konek Landing is not a book that seeks to pacify its readers or offer simple solutions to complex situations. By withdrawing from the revolutionary passions of 1968 into her own personal struggles with German Jewish identity, Figes manages to capture more of humanity’s beautiful, flawed complexity than do any of the urgent activist writers of the time. In the aftermath of one of the worst horrors in human history, Figes nevertheless depicts hope, kindness and even the promise of a far better future. The year 1968 lacked this sense of darkness, and in many ways can appear historically naïve as a result. What would follow, however, was a decade steeped in nastiness and paranoia, where the glimpses of hope offered in Konek Landing would be much in demand and very hard to find.

Ibid., p. 148.

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The wave breaks As the decade came to an end, experimentalism was a recognized mode. Many established writers were trying their hands at an experimental novel. The world of serious literature, defined by hardback books and literary prizes, was no longer dominated by the neo-Victorians, and was instead caught in a struggle between realist and experimentalist, with most authors falling somewhere in the middle. But respectable literature is only one part of the story (and a part with a relatively small market share). A look at Bookseller sales lists revealed a similar split in the bestseller markets too. The individual books that sold most, the ‘blockbusters’, tended towards neo-Victorianism. However, the most profitable publishing houses were those specializing in sci-fi. Sci-fi, by 1970, could be considered the populist wing of experimentalism. Science fiction had turned away from the hopeful space exploration of the mid-1960s and the psychedelic explorations of the late 1960s. By 1970, stories were dominated by ‘shattered protagonists’: those whose grasp of reality fell apart when faced with environmental apocalypse, societal collapse and the covert presence of malign forces. Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, Harry Harrison and J. G. Ballard were foremost among these writers. The shift was reflected in Michael Moorcock’s decision, in 1971, to rename New Worlds to New Worlds Quarterly. The change reflected both the magazine’s literaryjournal pretentions and also its much-reduced publication rate.1 Alongside its shattered protagonists and affectless writing the journal also became a mouthpiece for radical politics. The editors favoured tales of sexual identity, race, socialist politics and environmentalism while dismissing the previous generation of science fiction writers as a crowd of sexist imperialists.

1

Andrew M. Butler, Solar Flares (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), p. 24.

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J. G. Ballard, whose work in New Worlds had been at the forefront of the new experimental sci-fi, had withdrawn from the short story form during the early 1970s. He set his sights on the novel. He had become very interested in the work of the Calder circle, particularly Alan Burns, and it was to their techniques, alongside the ever-increasing influence of Burroughs, to which he turned when constructing his next book. He began by assembling his Burnsesque mass of raw material. In this case, a ‘library of extreme metaphors’ drawn from media clippings and details from scientific journals. These, he believed, demonstrated a ‘pornography of science’, research drawn ‘not from nature, but from the deviant curiosity of the scientists’.2 He would combine these elements in various arrangements, inspired in his aesthetic by the depthlessness of pop art.3 The result was Ballard’s most experimental work, and one that focused on language as an obsessional element.4 It was presented as a series of stand-alone paragraphs, each with their own title. It tells the story of the perverse Dr Nathan and his accomplice Catherine Austin, who conduct experiments into the sexual power of violent imagery. Their intention is to use this power for marketing purposes. Ballard fuses cut-up and nouveau roman styles, scientific jargon and his own inimitable brand of action adventure writing: But isn’t Kennedy already dead? Captain Webster studied the documents laid out on Dr Nathan’s demonstration table. These were: 1) a spectroheliogram of the sun; 2) tarmac and take-off checks for the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay; 3) electroencephalogram of Albert Einstein; 4) transverse section through a pre-Cambrian trilobite, 5) photograph taken at noon, August 7th, 1945, of the sand-sea Qattara depression; 6) Max Ernst’s ‘Garden Airplane Traps’. He turned to Dr Nathan. ‘You say these constitute an assassination weapon?’5 The book, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), seems less like a sci-fi novel than an experimentalist journey through an alternative consciousness. It bears a lot in common with Alan Burns’ novels. Ballard knew Burns personally and would later unburden himself in a tape-recorded interview with him about The Atrocity Exhibition’s lack of commercial success. ‘I’m constantly getting people who say; “Atrocity Exhibition, oh, I couldn’t understand it, couldn’t read it, impossible to read”’, he told Burns, ‘I don’t think it’s a very difficult book. It’s written in a very easy and open style.’6

J. G. Ballard, The Kindness of Women (London: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 185. Michel Delville, J.G. Ballard (London: Northcoat House, 1998), p. 24. 4 Peter Brigg, J.G. Ballard (San Bernadino: The Borgo Press, 1985), p. 56. 5 J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (London: Harper Perennial, 2006), p. 47. 6 Alan Burns, ‘Interview with J.G. Ballard’, in The Imagination on Trial, ed. Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), p. 250. 2 3

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Yet in spite of the simplicity of Ballard’s prose on a syntactic level, his ideas remained wildly ahead of their time on the level of meaning. Two years later, many of the same themes would appear in Crash (1973). In particular, it featured a common element in the character’s sexual fixation with car crashes. Presented in a realist mode, Ballard’s ideas came through more strongly and his novel proved a hit. It was certainly not the paranoia and cynicism of Ballard’s tale that proved unpopular with audiences. In the 1970s, these qualities would dominate public discourse. Ballard was an early adopter of an apocalyptic mindset that would, in a matter of two or three years, come to be found in every newspaper column, every film and record, and in thousands upon thousands of novels, both popular and literary. Instead, the problem with The Atrocity Exhibition was its presentation. Experimentalism, in the moment of its highest peaking, its greatest popularity and critical acclaim, had also become boring. People were tired of it. Even New Worlds Quarterly, the leading journal advocating for an experimental New Wave, found Ballard’s novel trying. The novelty of the experiment had worn off, and people were impatient to get to the meaning. Perhaps this came as the result of politically charged times. Perhaps the ascendancy of experimental aesthetics had dented its outsider status. Either way, the wave had crested and now, it seemed, it was set to break. Ann Quin was a living testimony to the stress that newfound success had created. It had only been five years since Berg, and in this time she had become something of a cult phenomenon. She had received many large cheques from the Arts Council as well as considerable sums lent by Calder and Boyars to be deducted from future earnings. With that money she had travelled the world, fallen in love and explored the far reaches of psychedelic consciousness. By 1969, she was burned out. She returned to London, still reeling from her break-up with Bob, and moved back in to the Burnses’ spare room. Passages launched in April with a huge party at Better Books. In attendance were her old friends Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson and the Burnses. John Calder and Marion Boyars were there and working hard to push Quin onto BBC producers and screenwriters, while big names William Burroughs and Anthony Burgess, in the country on publicity tours, dropped in to congratulate her on the work.7 The wave of familiar faces was too much for the exhausted Quin and, following a frenzied couple of hours making small talk and necking champagne, she grew faint and collapsed. Partygoers attributed the collapse to alcohol, emotional strain and general fatigue. The semiconscious Quin was bundled into a taxi by the Burnses and driven home. The next morning she had not recovered. Nor had she recovered the morning after that. On the third day, they called for a doctor, and Quin was

Calder and Boyars, Attendance list for Passages Book Launch, 2 April 1969. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 7

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diagnosed with a severe bronchitis. She wouldn’t get out of bed for another two weeks.8 Partying herself into sickness was new for Quin. Her resilience had never failed her before, even in the heady San Francisco days during the summer of love. The strain was finally reaching her. But sickness would not stop Ann Quin. If anything, it made her more anxious to travel, to see the world beyond the Burnses’ back bedroom. She wrote to Marion Boyars, her de facto literary agent and mother figure as well as her publisher, and enquired about writing a travel column. Zulfikar Ghose’s 1961 trip around India had stuck in her mind, and she was fixated on the possibility of an Indian odyssey.9 Boyars pursued this and other avenues too but found no magazine or newspaper that would be willing to pay. They would take her short stories but would not take the risk on nonfiction. Journalism was a form that Quin had no prior experience with. But Quin was not in the mood for fiction writing. Instead, after some behind-the-scenes wrangling from Giles Gordon, the Arts Council came forward with a £2,000 grant in recognition of Passages. This was the ejector seat that Quin was after. Packing her things, she went straight to the bank and cashed the cheque. By the next afternoon she was drinking in Dublin pubs and, a week or so later, had boarded a flight to Amsterdam, leaving no forwarding address or telephone number. Quin would disappear. The Arts Council grant meant that she no longer needed to write to Boyars demanding payment (which was probably for the best as Passages was a very small seller, and Quin had already spent half of its royalties prior to publication). Messages from acquaintances suggested that she’d made her way to Eastern Europe at some point, and had also made a return trip to Greece. Finally, she turned up in Stockholm. She had gone wandering through the snow and been caught in a sudden snowstorm. Halffrozen and delirious, she was taken into a Swedish hospital. The hospital staff contacted her mother, who, desperate, rang John Calder.10 Calder, who blamed Quin’s actions squarely on the Arts Council and its lavish prizes, gave Boyars enough money to pay for her flight back to London, and, when it became clear that Quin was in the middle of a nervous breakdown, had her checked in to Atkinson Morley’s Psychiatric Hospital in Wimbledon. Quin was placed under the care of physician Dr Härnjd, a man with a proven record of treating creative types and bringing those of delicate constitutions back to health. He began by piecing together Quin’s life and thoughts up to the point of her illness. Marion Boyars was appealed to as the one figure Quin had always kept in touch with, no matter where she was. As Quin’s primary moneylender, Boyars’ testimony didn’t paint Quin

Ann Quin, Letter to John Calder, 4 April 1969. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 9 May 1969. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 10 John Calder, Pursuit (London: John Calder, 2001), p. 272. 8 9

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in a responsible light.11 Boyars was also caught up at this time in paying off Quin’s many debts accrued around London, including a flat that she had rented and made little use of and a series of outstanding gas and electricity bills. Carol Burns brought Quin the few possessions she’d left with them and some items from her mother’s.12 Dr Härnjd became obsessed with Quin’s writing. Its increasingly fragmented presentation, its obsession with sex and its use of obscure imagery designed to communicate ‘between the words’ all suggested a diagnosis of schizophrenia. A full set of Quin’s writing was requested from Calder and Boyars for use by the hospital.13 Boyars complied with the request enthusiastically, agreeing that ‘these books will tell you a lot about Ann since she tried to work out many of her problems in her writing’, and that ‘PASSAGES is, I think, an attempt at a record of her relationship with this poet’, meaning Robert Sward, who, presumably, broke her heart and led her into madness.14 In Dr Härnjd’s hands, the strange, beautiful and enigmatic writing of Ann Quin was reduced to a series of symptoms. Her intention, that humans could be brought to understand their non-linguistic consciousnesses through fractured writing, was now simply the mania of a woman with emotional problems. Quin’s writing was experimental in that it offered an alternative mode of perception, a new way of seeing the world, a purer way perhaps, that was instigated by, rather than contained within her writing. Once she fell ill, however, her books simply became a means of diagnosis. Alan Burns was shocked by Quin’s hospitalization. Her intuitive method had always been the counterpoint to his own more technical explorations. They had been reading together since the early 1960s. It had arguably been the dynamic between Burns and Quin that had inspired them to found Writers Reading and to add more voices to their already-effective pairing. Now, as Carol took care of Quin’s things and comforted her worried mother, Burns buried himself in a wave of new experimental possibilities. Andre Breton’s automatic writing was now on his mind. He attempted to replicate the effect externally, using truth tables, algebraic constructions and rolls of the dice. He became obsessed with the possibility of using computer programmes to generate poetry, and even attempted to write code, despite having no access to the machines themselves.15 New print technologies also fascinated him. Only a couple of years earlier a writer was limited to either hot metal typesetting, which produced highly standardized book pages by using physical printing blocks, or else the offset-litho and mimeograph printing

Marion Boyars, Letter to Dr Härnjd, 23 January 1970. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. Marion Boyars, Letter to Mr Graham, 21 January 1970. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 13 David Toms (registrar), Letter to Marion Boyars, 11 March 1970. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 14 Marion Boyars, Letter to Dr Härnjd, 23 January 1970. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 15 Alan Burns, Notes for Accident in Art, 1969. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 11 12

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forms which were too expensive to use for anything but full-colour images. Now, the digital revolution was beginning. Xerox had released machines capable of designing a page of text before it was set (phototypesetting) and of placing images next to text, using text as an image (photocopying). B. S. Johnson made extensive use of phototypesetting in his novel House Mother Normal (1971). In this novel the page was used as a canvas upon which to paint words, each quadrant representing an hour in an old person’s day. These built up to tell the story of a retirement home. Eight resident’s days are shown followed by that of the dreaded House Mother. Burns admired the book greatly, especially its printing. ‘The book is so good to have’, he wrote to Johnson, ‘paper, binding, colours – beautiful production’.16 He sought new ways of presenting his own experiments that might make use of all of these new technologies, and finally fixated on America, the land that, he believed, had turned Quin’s head. Dreamerika! A Surrealist Fantasy (1972) was Alan Burns’ response to the overwhelming stream of information that was taking over not only his own life but, he argued, the entire twentieth century. The book was entirely photoduplicated, with every page being a collage of image and text. Like The Atrocity Exhibition, the text progresses through individual passages, each with their own title. Instead of emboldened titles, however, Burns exclusively used newspaper and magazine headlines torn from a variety of sources. These were sometimes collaged with images from magazines and overlaid with cut-up text. The text told the garbled story of the Kennedy dynasty.17 Beginning with Father Joe, who bought America for a million dollars, the story follows John from election to assassination, Ted’s drunken car crash in which he left a woman to drown, before ending with the whirlwind romance of Jackie O and her new husband. The headlines often present an ironical, or saccharine commentary on the story as it progresses, as here with John: HEY! YOU WITH THE CAR! Shaking hands across the street, every girl requested the pleasure, fifteen thousand votes in gowns. When the inspiration of women demanded formal dress, Jack dressed in white in the park, the marshmallow extended through the hotel lobby. The candidate remained sweet, with a note of pleasure in his voice. SATISFIED CUSTOMERS.18 The use of the Kennedy family allowed Burns to keep a hold on his narrative in a way that had eluded him in Babel, and the work was visually impressive in a way that few books had managed to be before this time. Thanks to

Alan Burns, Letter to B. S. Johnson, 25 May 1971. Held in the British Library. Burns, 1975, p. 67. 18 Alan Burns, Dreamerika! (London: Calder and Boyars, 1972), p. 19. 16 17

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xerography, it was only marginally more expensive than a normal novel too. Yet, in the pursuit of ironies and witticisms, it also seemed as if the emotional content of Burns’ earlier writing had been watered down. Dreamerika! bears a resemblance to the ‘shattered narrator’ of Europe After the Rain in its lack of psychological affect. However, with the traumatic content of the earlier work having been replaced by glitzy showbiz magazines, there is nothing for this depthlessness to poetically contrast with. The final result is entertaining and highly satirical, but not moving. Quin too had been struggling with depth and depthlessness prior to her breakdown. She was still trying to extend her short story ‘Tripticks’ to novel length. To emphasize the cartoonish nature of the story, Quin added her own doodles to the manuscript which were to be intermingled with cut-up pages from pulp detective comics. The original text was added to and fleshed out with more scenes of sexual experiment and, increasingly, sexual exploitation, with the adventurousness of earlier Quin characters being transformed into a melange of joyless fucking. The results were more reminiscent of hardcore pornography than free love.19 Still, Calder and Boyars felt the novel would sell, and with the American setting, they hoped to break into the much larger American market too. They had it edited, prepared and typeset, ready for printing, and were just waiting on Quin’s sign-off when she was hospitalized. With that, Tripticks was put on hold. Yet, to Marion Boyars’ great frustration, once Quin had been released from Atkinson Morley’s and sent back to her mother’s to recuperate, she still would not sign off on the release of the novel. Boyars wrote numerous letters, prodding and poking at Quin, promising more money as soon as she signed. She tried calling but Quin refused to answer or even to take a message. Boyars was desperate. ‘Not only has a fair amount of time, money and effort been spent on it’, she wrote, exasperated, ‘but every extra day that the script lies around this office, it gets dirtier and thus more difficult to reproduce from.’20 The pressure to publish was mounting. It didn’t help that Quin owed Calder and Boyars a considerable sum: Passages had made far less than expected, and she was now refusing to renew the lucrative film rights for Berg. Eventually, Quin wrote back to Boyars, explaining in shaky hand that ‘I have been very ill lately and frankly been unable to even write a letter let alone sign a contract’. She explained that she was applying for unemployment benefit and needed evidence of her earnings as a writer. She requested that Boyars send this evidence and not ask any more about publishing contracts or movie rights. ‘I realise now’, she signed off, ‘that no one can help me but myself.’21

Ann Quin, Tripticks (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), p. 40. Marion Boyars, Letter to Ann Quin, 30 September 1971. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 21 Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 5 November 1971. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 19 20

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Boyars was growing desperate. Quin had barely written anything new for two years, and, according to Dr Härnjd, had destroyed the manuscript for a new novel during her breakdown. Quin later suggested that this was only forty pages of exploratory material but, as no new work appeared to be forthcoming from her, the news was nevertheless devastating.22 Eventually, Boyars decided to call on the Burnses. As Quin’s closest friends, or at least her most responsible ones, they were tasked with bringing her back around to the Calder fold. Her bed was made back up in their spare room, and the hunt was on to find a flat suitable for a woman that, by now, should have been considered a respected member of the literary establishment. During a trip to Brighton, Alan Burns persuaded her to sign off on Tripticks. They would celebrate with a double launch party; Tripticks and Dreamerika! would be released on the very same day.23 Both novels about America, both featuring cut-ups and experimental approaches and both innovating in the combination of word and image; Calder and Boyars had quite cleverly packaged the novels together in such a way that reviewers could be impressed by both. Their questions could then be directed to Alan Burns as a spokesman for both writers. The gambit worked, and the double release won considerable critical coverage. Experimental fiction, it was confirmed, now shared the spotlight with the traditional novel in terms of newspaper review columns. Alan Burns even appeared on the prime time news show World Tonight to discuss the novels with a very young Giles Brandreth.24 B. S. Johnson helped by pulling some strings at the BBC Overseas Service. Taking a microphone and portable tape recorder around to Quin’s flat, Johnson recorded a long interview with her which would eventually make it to air across Europe and the Americas.25 Anthony Burgess would hear the interview broadcast in his new home in Italy, and wrote a short telegram to the writer congratulating her on the book’s success. The comparisons between Quin’s novel and Burgess’ linguistically innovative tale of sex, drugs and sadism published a decade earlier were easy to draw. Burgess didn’t himself draw them, but reviewers knew they were there. It helped also that Burgess’ own little experiment that got out of control, A Clockwork Orange, was now being released in cinemas around the world. Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was released in 1972. At the time, Burgess was still in his Maltese hideaway, having occasional disputes with the censorship bureau but otherwise living a quiet life. The Hollywood buzz around Kubrick’s film had allowed Burgess to wriggle his way into the precarious world of screenwriting. Kubrick had already commissioned him

Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 19 September 1972. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. Calder and Boyars, Invitation to the launch of Tripticks and Dreamerika!, 25 April 1972. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 24 Alan Burns, Telegram to B. S, Johnson, 2 September 1972. Held in the British Library. 25 Agnes Rook, Letter to Ann Quin, 18 February 1972. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 22 23

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to write a biopic of Napoleon, and, over the next couple of years, similar projects would land on his desk about Moses and Jesus, a musical about Trotsky, a play about Freud, a film about Merlin and a new translation of Oedipus Rex. As well paid and ego-boosting as this work was, Burgess would soon learn that a commissioned script was no guarantee that the final movie would go into production. Of all of his scripts, none made it to the big screen.26 His success rate in TV was better, but paid far less. Ultimately, the success of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange script lay in its almost direct mirroring of the novel. Asked to adapt it himself, Burgess added scenes of Alex speaking directly to the viewer and even threatened to introduce some musical numbers.27 In the end, Kubrick pretty much just used the book verbatim. There are even stories of him carrying the novel around the set in place of a script. When the film finally did come out, A Clockwork Orange caused much controversy. In Britain, it instigated a full-blown moral panic. The strange thing about this reaction, however, was the time that it took to build up momentum. The book had been fairly well received upon first publication in 1962, with decent sales and positive reviews. No one had any impression that its contents might inspire violence. There was never any threat made to censor the work for obscenity. In fact, its moral messages were all too clear. Despite the increased shock of the visual, the first release of the 1972 film was met with a similar reception. ‘More than just important: it’s a necessity’, was the verdict of a reviewer in Show: ‘if only premonition of disaster can swerve us from an accustomed rut, then this vision should be shown free of charge.’28 The broadsheets largely followed this editorial line, warning the reader of the movie’s violence, but justifying it in the name of moral lessons. While Burgess’s old Catholic sentiments, his love of bloody Passion plays and renaissance tragedies, were busy being enraptured by the incense and icons of the Maltese Church, the British press were discovering a similar love for dirt and gore in Burgess’ futuristic vision. Even The Sun found a lot to like in the movie. The week before its release they printed a doublepage spread featuring every breast on show in the movie and close-ups from the rape scenes, with the provocative question overlaid: ‘Do we now accept rape, murder and beatings as screen fare?’29 The answer, delivered the following week, was seemingly in the affirmative. ‘Brilliant’, one of their panel of prurient puritans declared, ‘but sickening.’30 The moral messages

Clarke 2018, p. 126. Anthony Burgess, ‘A Clockwork Orange: Script’, n.d. Held in the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester. 28 Lewis Archibald, ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Show, March 1972, p. 50. 29 ‘The Film Shocker to End Them All’. The Sun, 6 January 1972, p. 17. 30 ‘Your Verdict on the Most Controversial Film of the Year’. The Sun, 14 January 1972, p. 5. 26 27

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were clearly understood, and even The Sun was, at the movie’s first release, happy to condone it as an effective emetic. The only paper not to give entirely glowing reviews was The Daily Mail. Interestingly, the Mail made use of the same group of interviewees as The Sun and the Daily Mirror when gathering quotes. The three papers had gathered a panel consisting of members of the public and had asked them to provide their responses. The Mail went further, however, and also included an interview with a ‘man on the street’. This man begrudgingly recognized the film’s moral messages but added the caveat that it ‘could start off an “Orange” cult that would eventually lead to Fascism’.31 Whether this viewer was an invention or just an extremely convenient find cannot be ascertained, but what is certain is that this line about cults and fascism would make a return. It would do so over a year later, when the film was at the end of its run. The panic came when the movie was finally picked up by small, provincial cinemas. Such were British licensing laws during the early 1970s that provincial cinemas were controlled by local councils. It was here where a movie could most effectively provoke political debate. The metropolitan mood may have been against obscenity prosecutions, but local councils still had the power to ban movies in their own catchments. With this in mind, the tabloids began campaigning against the film in the spring of 1973. This time, they came prepared with evidence.32 In January 1973, a gang of eighteen-year-old boys, reportedly dressed as droogs, kicked a homeless man to death beneath a bridge in what the judge described as a direct re-enactment of the movie.33 Another judge would then blame a case of breaking and entering upon the influence of Kubrick’s film, and, most infamously, a horrendous gang-rape of a nun was blamed on A Clockwork Orange even though the perpetrators testified under oath that they had never seen or even heard of the movie before.34 Shocked by the coverage and the spate of local council bans that followed it, Kubrick decided that the film had already earned enough money in the UK and withdrew it. This led to the widespread belief that the film had been banned outright. The ‘ban’ stirred more controversy, and British news sources were hungry for word from Kubrick. Kubrick, ever cautious, shunned them. It was at this point that Anthony Burgess started receiving phone calls. In lieu of Kubrick, the press was now asking for his opinion on the fiasco. Burgess’ role in the film had been downplayed until then; promotional posters read, ‘Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange’. When mentioned at

Leo Clancy, ‘Clockwork Orange – What They Think’. Daily Mail, 14 January 1972, p. 5. Peter Krämer, A Clockwork Orange (London: Palgrave, 2011), p. 100. 33 ‘“Bloody Judges”: What Angry Clockwork Orange Author Calls His Sternest Critics’. Daily Mirror, 6 August 1973, p. 7. 34 Krämer 2011, p. 101. 31 32

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all, Burgess appeared in very small text among the other credits. The British tabloid press of 1973 soon discovered in Burgess a useful peg to hang their dubious assertions on, however, and soon ‘Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange’ was sharing the spotlight with ‘Anthony Burgess, Author of A Clockwork Orange’. Burgess was used to saying what he thought, and had been paid well in the past for his often obtuse opinions on contentious topics. His first response to the moral panic was, true to form, an unusual one. He decided, instead of commenting on the film, to attack the judges who had linked the real-life violence to the violence on the screen. In a phone interview with a journalist from The Times, Burgess blasted: ‘we are now evidently in for a period of massive restraint and the sooner those bloody officials start telling us what we are going to be allowed to write and what we can’t the better [. . .] at least then we shall know what we are supposed to be doing!’35 The Times then pursued the judges for comment, resulting in a stern rebuttal. The judges warned the author not to conflate the makers of the law with those who upheld it.36 The implication of their comments, extrapolated at length by The Times, was that Burgess, a malign and fascistic folk devil, was seeking to overturn common law in the name of his cult of violence. Burgess was shocked and appalled. Meanwhile, Warner Bros were quietly appreciative of the extra coverage that Burgess’ PR missteps were generating. Rather than have him seethe with rage in Malta, they bought him first-class plane tickets back to London so he might seethe with rage in front of the national press instead Before he had even landed, the press had begun its campaign. ‘I have not read Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, nor have I seen the motion picture’, one letter in The Sun read, but if ‘Burgess would not have required Adolf Hitler to undergo aversion therapy’, then one must conclude him to be a Nazi.37 Burgess agreed to an interview with the paper in response. ‘Why do you return to England now?’ the journalist asked him. The editor then added a description of the infamous rape and murder cases before presenting Burgess’ response: ‘I feel bitter because of attacks in my absence. The attacks have been coming for a year now.’38 Burgess’ bitterness about the press’ unfair attacks was made to look like frustration at having missed all the violence. Undeterred, Burgess went back on the record describing his own personal philosophy of free will and original sin. It was a philosophy that had always played well on culture shows where presenters welcomed a touch of the esoteric. For the tabloids, however, Burgess’ ruminations on free will were yet further evidence of his evil nature. In a particularly

Sheridan Morely, ‘Anthony Burgess Answers Back’. The Times, 6 August 1973. Marcel Berlins, ‘Lawyers Reject Author’s Attack’. The Times, 7 August 1973. 37 Joseph Conway, ‘Aversion Therapy for Burgess’. The Sun, 20 August 1973. 38 ‘Author Slams Gentle Orange Film’. The Sun, 6 August 1973. 35 36

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perverse article, the Evening News added descriptions befitting a cartoon villain around Burgess’ own words: Today Anthony Burgess, riding the crest of the shockwaves of controversy over the film, was unrepentant and unashamed. Will it incite teenage louts into orgies of rape and destruction? ‘It’s better to do wrong of your own free will than to do right because the state ordains it.’ His dark eyes vanished beneath their lids in a mixture of wrath and amusement. He’d seen the film and liked it.39 Burgess, it seemed, just couldn’t win. Any attempt he made to justify the book was thrown back at him as evidence of his depravity. Any willingness to concede that the film might in fact be too violent – it lacked, Burgess admitted, the baroque linguistic drapery that clothed the violence of the book – was again taken as confirmation that the film as irredeemable. It was ‘a movie so appalling even its author cannot watch it’.40 After many interviews, on chat shows, radio shows and speaking directly with journalists, Burgess decided to retreat to Malta. He later wrote a letter to William Burroughs, his friend with whom he now shared the experience of international infamy, and asked him whether he regretted writing his books to the same extent that Burgess now regretted writing A Clockwork Orange. Burroughs’ response was his typical mix of wry humour and pessimism: Sorry to hear you regret The Clock Work Orange. If one starts to regret there is no end to it. At a recent press conference in Toronto a press reporter asked me if there is anything in my life I regret? Regaining power of speech, I answered that I am lucky if I get through a day without something I regret. . . . A life time? Well about 99%. The same applied to my writing . . . a few good passages here and there . . . a few surfaces scratched.41 Yet Burroughs truly was a literary outlaw. He gave the impression of caring nothing for prizes, awards, critics, fans, enemies or even the goodwill of his friends. Burgess was not such a character. A wit and raconteur, the centre of attention at any party, the darling of TV interviewers, Anthony Burgess was not made for public shaming. He was a man of peace. And yet, on his return to Malta, he was met with yet more calumny. Whether as a result of his anti-censorship campaigning or his newfound

William Hall, ‘Clockwork Orange Gang Killed My Wife’. Evening News, 28 January 1972 [reprinted August 1973]. 40 The Sun, 6 August 1973. 41 William Burroughs, Letter to Anthony Burgess, n.d. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, Texas. [1981?]. 39

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status as a folk devil, Burgess found himself on the wrong side of the Maltese authorities. Burgess had never been good at keeping up with bureaucracy, and, as a result, the Maltese authorities had found some error in his paperwork that allowed them to confiscate his family home.42 Shocked and appalled, Burgess took his new wife Liana and son Paulo Andrea and headed to Rome. Italy was Liana’s home country, and Rome was the city that Catholic Anthony had dreamed of since childhood. Rome would give them a new base of operations. From there, they would coordinate a defence against the Clockwork Orange backlash and campaign for the return of their house in Malta. They settled in a picturesque fifteenth-century villa on the shores of Lake Bracciano, with a castle perched above them and views out across the waters.43 Although the house’s stone walls were now old and crumbling, the scenery would provide enough tranquillity to keep his literary output flowing. The irony of the Clockwork Orange moral panic, from the perspective of Burgess’ own writing career, was that Burgess himself had, only a year earlier, sought an encounter with what he considered the most radical tendencies of experimentalist writing by thrashing his ideas out in a philosophical novel. Burgess was no partisan cheerleader when it came to experiment. While the rest of the London literary scene embraced avant-garde writing in 1968, Burgess was busy parodying it. His novel Enderby Outside (1968) featured a tribe of drug-addled Beat poets in Morocco, snapping their fingers while scrawling obscene imagery like ‘comings in the skull’, ‘braingoose’ and ‘rape of lesion’ on a blackboard.44 Despite his passionate support for the experimental writers that he considered important, he was quick to dismiss experiments that he felt abandoned the essential literary elements of character, narrative and sound prose.45 For his own work, innovative as it might be, he sought a middle way. He wanted something that would provide classical substance beneath the esoteric trappings of style. In search of structure, Burgess turned his attentions to the new philosophical theories that were spreading out of Paris with ever-growing momentum. Brooke-Rose was, in part, responsible for bringing him into contact with these theories, being now a marginal member of the Parisian philosophical salon herself. Yet it was not the linguistic theories that appealed to Burgess, but the new school of structuralist anthropology whose major proponent was Claude Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss had released a slim volume entitled The Scope of Anthropology, the transcript of a lecture that appeared in English in 1967. In it, he argued that every society exists as a ‘ready-made experiment’ in human organization, and that by contrasting

Andrew Biswell, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (London: Picador, 2005), p. 343. Ibid., p. 343. 44 Anthony Burgess, Enderby Outside (London: Heinemann, 1968), p. 147. 45 Anthony Burgess, ‘The Seventeenth Novel’. New York Times, 21 August 1966. 42 43

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these experiments the anthropologist might uncover the universal codes that structure human consciousness.46 This search for structure was, of course, the same search being undertaken by the experimentalists at the exact same time, and they too argued that a more perfect form might emerge out of a plurality of experiments. The difference with Levi-Strauss, however, at least according to Burgess, was that his scientific methods demonstrated an almost uncanny ability to diagnose and explain human stories across hundreds of disparate cultures. ‘This Levi-Strauss is no fool. I feel now somehow that I’ve been manipulated by him’, Burgess wrote in a glowing review of Levi-Strauss’ book, ‘He doesn’t need confirmation. He knows’.47 The scientific sheen of structuralism gave Burgess the confidence that literary experimentalism alone could not. It struck him that to write a novel based on Levi-Strauss’s principles, or at least in dialogue with them, might provide a useful middle ground between the excesses of experiment and the universal appeal of character, narrative, story and symbol. The part of Levi-Strauss’ writing that most captivated Burgess was his exploration of incest myths. The Oedipus myth, declared by Freud to be the central myth of all humankind, did have equivalents in other cultures, and yet, according to Levi-Strauss, it was not the tyrannical father and seductive mother that all these myths had in common but, instead, the solving of riddles set by magical animals. Oedipus, after all, solves the riddle of the sphynx, just as the Algonquin Indian’s Oedipus-equivalent solves a riddle set by a talking owl before accidentally committing incest.48 Burgess compared this to the Gordian knot, the breaking of which spelled Alexander the Great’s simultaneous success and downfall: To the ‘primitive’ mind, the puzzle and the sexual taboo have an essential factor in common – the knot that it is dangerous to untie since, untying it, you are magically untying the knot that holds the natural order together.49 Burgess would consider his encounter with Levi-Strauss’ work, specifically the anthropologist’s writing about riddles and incest, to be one of the three greatest revelations in his life (the others being the architect Gaudi and the poet Belli).50 The resulting novel, M/F, was also, of his many novels, the one of which he was most proud.51

Claude Levi-Strauss, The Scope of Anthropology, trans. Sherry Ortner Paul and Robert A. Paul (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), p. 25. 47 Anthony Burgess, ‘If Oedipus Had Read His Levi-Strauss’, in Urgent Copy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), p. 261. 48 Anthony Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time (London: Heinemann, 1990), p. 209. 49 Burgess 1968, p. 259. 50 Burgess 1990, p. 208. 51 Ibid., p. 210. 46

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M/F tells the story of the college dropout Miles Faber, who, finding himself kicked out of university for having sex in public, decides to track down the mysterious poet Sib Legeru, a writer who had achieved the rare feat of being so experimental and obscure that there was no way for even the most diehard academic to find any meaning in his work. Following Sib Legeru, Faber believes, would give him the ability to ‘be wholly free. Free even of the grumbling and nagging of my body.’52 In telling the tale, Burgess himself wraps every sentence in layer upon layer of riddle and symbol. Some are comprehensible, others entirely obscure. Some read only like strange poetry, although one trusts that Burgess always has something else in mind. Miles Faber travels to a tropical island, becomes entrapped by a bird woman, seduced by a cupcake-munching nymphet, harangued by a low-IQ doppelgänger and, finally, encounters his long lost uncle, Zoon Fonanta (or ‘Talking Animal’ in Latin), who reveals that Sib Legeru was a fabrication all along. In fact, the very attempt to reach Sib Legeru was an act of transgression. The nymphet he slept with turned out to be his sister, and ‘Sib Legeru’ is revealed as an Anglo-Saxon term for sibling incest: Consider the first name. In a famous sermon delivered by Bishop Wulfstan at the end of the first Christian millennium, a time when Antichrist in the shape of the Danes seemed likely to corrupt, rend and liquidate AngloSaxon civilisation, the word siblegeru appears. It means legging or ligging or lying with one’s own sib, it means incest.53 There follows a lecture from Zoon Fontanta on the foolishness of seeking freedom from tradition. ‘You think of freedom of artistic expression as being wonderfully incarnated in these works, no doubt’, he chides Miles, ‘No doubt, no doubt, you are young.’54 Burgess, the elder statesman, seems to be talking directly to the angry young experimentalists here. The experimentalists were now at the crest of their wave, and, if they were to survive as writers, they would soon need to find new methods, Burgess warned, beyond pure abstraction, in order to keep their writing relevant. Burgess also seems to be fighting a conflict within himself. The obscure, the esoteric and the baroque were all huge influences on Burgess’ writings. Here, in his most experimental novel, he seems to be chiding himself for embracing this will to disorder and chaos. Experiment, he says, in a highly experimental manner, is little more than aesthetic incest unless it respects the old universals and the lessons of tradition. M/F, which could stand for Miles Faber, or Mother/Father or Male/Female, was later confirmed by Burgess to be a reference to author William Conrad, who had suggested

Anthony Burgess, M/F (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 51. Ibid., p. 199. 54 Ibid., p. 199. 52 53

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that someone update Oedipus and call it ‘Motherfucker’.55 In his own obscure way, Burgess was delivering an encoded message to experimental writers. You have fought to be recognized and now are recognized. In fact, everybody is now trying their hand at experiment. Whether this sustains will depends upon the original intention – what are you experimenting for? In its moment of success, experimental writing would either fulfil its promises or be revealed as an incestuous obscenity, degrading the tradition from which it arose.

Politics and protest By 1970, Eva Figes was beginning to feel the strain of juggling motherhood, a career in journalism and her calling as a novel writer. Despite the awards she had won for Winter Journey and Konek Landing, her income was still dependent upon having articles commissioned by newspapers. The pitch process was deeply frustrating, especially as she couldn’t just travel down to Fleet Street any time she had an idea. No, with her many family commitments, ideas had to be pitched by post. This meant considerable delays between the initial idea and the final publication. Much time was spent writing pitches only for responses to come back negative a week later. As to actual book writing, this would take place in small windows of opportunity between taking her children to school, taking care of her many chores, dealing with correspondences and then picking the children back up and taking care of them for the evening. At most, she estimated, she only ever had an hour a day to work. Most days it was less than an hour.56 Throughout the 1960s, Figes had always had a critical eye trained on issues of gender. Her early exploration of experimental writing was intended as a way to create new ‘grids’, the better to capture and convey the experience of marginalized figures. Her interest was in women in particular, but she also expressed concern for the elderly and ethnic minorities, particularly Jews. Yet, in spite of her work’s success, she still found herself in the same difficult position that had led to her writing Equinox back in 1964. The 1968 uprisings had filled her with a real sense of hope. But now, two years later, little seemed to have improved and, in terms of political entrenchment and a growing feeling of resentment across the country, things had arguably got a whole lot worse. Figes’ hope was replaced by resentment. She resented the inflation that was dragging down the value of her earnings. She resented the unions for their endless strikes and their sexist backlash against the campaign for equal pay. She resented the permissive culture for turning

Biswell 2005, p. 339. Alan Burns, ‘Interview with Eva Figes’, in The Imagination on Trial, ed. Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), p. 39. 55 56

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sexual liberation into an excuse to ogle breasts. And, most of all, she resented the idealized role of motherhood. ‘If there is one experience which is liable to turn a meek, submissive, thoroughly “feminine” woman into an angry virago [. . .] it is the experience of being a deserted wife with young children to support’, she wrote, ‘because she has played the game by the rules, and discovered to her cost that the dice were loaded against her right from the beginning.’57 The Pill, she thought, should have provided women with the ability to control their own destinies, and yet she, like many other women of her generation, had found herself trapped in a motherhood role identical to her mother’s before her. Only now, unlike her mother, she was without the support of a husband. Sexual liberation, it appeared, was just another social advantage that men had over women.58 In 1970, Figes put her creative writing on hold. She turned to the political. The political situation in the aftermath of 1968 had filled the bookstalls with political tracts of every colour and faction, but she could find little that spoke specifically to women’s issues. With this in mind she decided to write a non-fiction book. Something polemical yet scholarly, which would allow her to translate her own experiences, resentments and observations into an academic thesis. For her central theme she settled upon a word that had existed in underground circles for a while, an American import with no fixed referent but a powerful sound: ‘patriarchy’. The word summed up, for Figes, the kind of structural biases that she had been exploring in her fiction. Her experimental search for new grids and her condemnation of the neo-Victorians’ worn-out structures all translated well into these political– economic terms. Over the next six months, she would gather evidence, both historical and literary, to build a case for men’s systematic domination of women. Western culture, from the ancient Greeks to the modern era, is rife with sexism, she argued. The book would be released in the autumn of 1970 as Patriarchal Attitudes. The book sought a wholesale shift in social perceptions. The ‘grid’ of values that constituted the patriarchy needed to be shifted: Sexual permissiveness is only one factor in the story. As far as the other factors are concerned, the fact that women do not always appear to make as much use of social and political freedom as they might is taken as proof of the fact that they are ‘naturally’ domesticated and uncompetitive. To me it suggests that the emancipation is only superficial, and that a few changes in the law, conceded only after a long fight, cannot change old engrained attitudes overnight.59

Eva Figes, ‘Left Holding the Baby’. Draft article, 1971. Held in the British Library. Eva Figes, ‘The Changing Role of Women’. Man and Woman, June 1971. 59 Eva Figes, Patriarchal Attitudes (London: Virago, 1978), p. 168. 57 58

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Certainly, Figes’ own experience demonstrated how much this ‘natural’ inclination was in fact compelled by the social and economic position in which she found herself. Women were routinely paid less for the same work, a fact she had noted in her time as an editorial assistant, and had very little access to childcare and crèches to ease the burdens of motherhood. Hers was a position that was little talked about in the media. Both Swinging London and the hippy counterculture were routinely depicted as havens for the young, free and single. In reality, however, the majority of women still married before the age of twenty-six.60 There were, in fact, far more women in Eva Figes’ position, or at least in similar positions, than there were in the much-lauded ‘liberated’ youth. Patriarchal Attitudes soon became a bestseller. Without realizing it, Figes had been one of many women all thinking the same thing: All this change, but where’s my revolution? In the same year that Figes’ book came out, the outspoken underground writer Germaine Greer released The Female Eunuch, academic Kate Millet brought out Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone wrote The Dialectic of Sex, bestselling essay collections Sisterhood is Powerful and Leslie Tanner’s journalistic Voices from Women’s Liberation also hit the bestseller lists, and, from being an almost unheard of word only a year ago, ‘patriarchy’ now started appearing even in mainstream establishment newspapers.61 The political organization of the women’s liberation movement followed. Seventy local discussion groups came together in 1970 at Ruskin College, Oxford. Their conference received support from across the country. The first national Women’s Liberation Workshop drew 600 delegates. Each would return to their small groups of fellow feminists with a plan for rapid expansion.62 The result was an explosion of women’s liberation groups, and the battering of Parliament with petition after petition, protests and lobbies, all demanding new laws aimed at reshaping society and countering systemic bias (biases summed up by the phrase ‘patriarchal attitudes’).63 Changes to divorce law, an equal rights act including the right to equal pay, an end to gender-based discrimination in hiring, abortion reform and state-run crèches were among the many demands that had seemed immensely radical in 1970 but would pass into law within the decade. The political landscape totally shifted within a few frenzied months, and Eva Figes found herself right at the centre of it. But despite the new income that the runaway success of Patriarchal Attitudes brought her, Figes was still in need of regular work, and despite

Ann Oakley, Housewife (London: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 59. Valerie Bryson, Feminist Political Theory (London: Palgrave, 2016), p. 158. 62 Pat Thane, ‘Towards Equal Opportunities? Women in Britain since 1945’, in Britain since 1945, ed. Terry Gouvish and Alan O’Day (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 204. 63 Nigel Fountain, Underground (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 107. 60 61

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her great excitement at the rapidly growing movement, she would have to turn down almost all invitations to speak in order to take care of her children. Thankfully, her article pitches were meeting with acceptance far more often. Among numerous pieces in the Guardian, Times, New Statesman and Listener, Figes contributed a series entitled ‘What are Women Fighting For?’ to Good Housekeeping and became a regular talking head on BBC’s Woman’s Hour.64 The show even commissioned a number of comedy sketches from her, inspired by feminist critique, including one called ‘Womb Envy’ about a female psychologist discovering a lost essay of Freud’s.65 Figes was commissioned to write the ‘special report’ that opened the Britannica Book of the Year 1970; Britannica declared 1970 the year of feminism.66 In her introduction, Figes pointed to women’s role in the Second World War and how factories, farms and even military intelligence had been largely run by women. The post-war austerity that saw women return to the home and brought about the ‘baby boom’ was, Figes argued, a betrayal of the wartime promise of men and women working side by side. Women were waking up to this, both the middle aged and the young, and they were starting to get angry.67 When a new far-left terrorist group, the Angry Brigade, bombed an ITV television van during the 1970 Miss World Pageant, Figes received telephone calls from every national newspaper and broadcaster, asking her to provide the voice of feminism. Any violence is undoubtedly wrong, she declared, but Miss World was a cattle market degrading to women, and one that should have been shut down years ago, in the name of common decency.68 As the frenzy of 1970 rolled on into 1971, it became clear that Figes’ inability to appear at rallies was reducing her political capital. Germaine Greer and Kate Millet, by comparison, were natural provocateurs and had a knack for drawing the media spotlight. Figes simply couldn’t contend. Still a naturally shy and softly spoken woman, she was pushed out of the spotlight by younger, bolshier women. She found that she now had to compete for column inches with a new generation of feminist academics. Soon Patriarchal Attitudes was left behind as feminist theory was taken to radical new places. It remained a constant seller, running through many editions throughout the 1970s, but Figes herself became a marginal commentator within the movement. When the feminist periodical Spare Rib was founded in 1972, she wrote to the editors to request a column, only to be told that her work

Eva Figes, Letter to the Editor of Good Housekeeping, 6 November 1971. Held in the British Library. 65 Eva Figes, ‘Womb Envy’. Letter to Lyn Macdonald, 12 November 1971. Held in the British Library. 66 J. E, Davis, Letter to Eva Figes, 30 June 1970. Held in the British Library. 67 Eva Figes, ‘Women in Society’, in Britannica Book of the Year (London: Britannica, 1971), p. 10. 68 Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 689. 64

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would be accepted only on a piece-by-piece basis.69 The effort that it took to remain at the forefront of a political movement was something Eva Figes just couldn’t commit to. In early 1972, Figes returned to experimental writing. She would, in her typical manner, go against the grain of expectation. Her new novel was called B, and it would describe a man’s experience of divorce and his relationship with a more masculine, bullish writer to whom he looks for support. Having written about her own divorce, she now wanted to write about the experience from the male perspective. If the patriarchy was, as she argued, a grid imposed upon society, then what better way to threaten the perceived innateness of this grid than by having a woman writer perfectly recreating masculine experience? ‘A woman writer who is worth anything would present an image of men’, she later argued, ‘which, devastatingly, does not fit in with the male consensus on what men and women are really like.’70 Figes’ novel depicts the slow disintegration of her protagonist’s marriage to his delicate wife Judith. They live in a small cottage in the country, growing increasingly resentful of the quiet acts of emotional distancing that keep them apart. The protagonist becomes nostalgic about his old writer friend B. B is a writer capable of creating great beauty on the page, while being an obnoxious drunk in real life. It is also revealed that he had killed himself some time before the novel began, although the narrative shifts in time, and he often appears in the present tense. It is only in the final act where we, as readers, get to meet B, and despite the exaggerated nature of his often misogynistic ranting, it would be clear to readers familiar with Figes’ circle that B is based on B. S. Johnson. B’s latest book, ‘the best thing you’ve written so far’, is called Oceanography, and shares the same premise as Johnson’s soul-searching epic Trawl.71 The voice of B too is highly Johnsonesque, raising the question of whether Figes had tape-recorded Johnson’s conversations for use in the book (a technique used by Alan Burns, who by 1970 was constantly taping everyone he met). ‘That’s the trouble with you’, B drunkenly prods at the novel’s protagonist, ‘You’re too damn detached for my liking. I can’t be!’72 As Judith leaves the protagonist, exhausted by his constant demand for ‘space to write’, he remembers the words of B the last time he saw him. The pair were drinking whisky on his sofa the night before B went back to London and committed suicide: Everything I do in life is stupid, [B declared,] I’m a blundering oaf. It’s only in words that I can create something of logic and beauty. . . . I’m not

Ibid., p. 692. Figes, 1976, p. 99. 71 Eva Figes, B (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 108. 72 Ibid., p. 107. 69 70

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a scientist, but in so far as I understand how molecules work, they hold together in the same state of tension.73 The character of B that haunts the novel embodies the great duality of masculine existence. In his everyday existence he is a fat, heavy-drinking man’s man with little time for women and zero time for politeness. Yet, inside, the place from whence his writing springs, he is a hopeless romantic, vulnerable and wanting to be loved. In this, B is simply a more exaggerated version of the buttoned-up, unnamed protagonist: a man trapped by his own dignity, to the extent that he would let his wife leave him rather than open himself up to her emotionally. Writing, in B, symbolizes man’s submerged emotional core. It is the dangerous feminine, and it inhabits B, the most misogynist of men, more than anyone. As if to confirm Figes’ suspicions, Johnson adored the book, and especially his own depiction in it. Alongside a glowing letter wishing ‘best wishes for your work!’, Johnson included a glowing two-page review, soon to be published in the Evening Standard. He praised the novel’s ‘basic honesty’ and ‘the truly contemporary novelist’s dialogue [. . .] with her material, life itself’.74 The end of his letter he signed ‘Bryan (B.?)’, and he joked that he would also sign the review as ‘B’; ‘I usually sign myself – but not this time!’75 Johnson, it seemed, was quite happy to play the role of Figes’ exaggerated misogynist writer. He was happy to offer his services to the cause, even if his services entailed being depicted as a frightful ogre. Johnson was, at this time, experiencing something of a crisis himself. His oldest ally in his ‘campaign for the good stuff’, Zulfikar Ghose, had taken up a lectureship at the University of Texas in the late 1960s, leaving the country just as the revolutionary fever of 1968 was reaching a peak. Ghose may have moved away from the experimentalism of his early years, but he was still a close personal friend of Johnson’s and a staunch ally in the face of what they both still saw as an entrenched literary establishment.76 Johnson’s new friends in the Calder circle were preoccupied too; the Burnses with Quin’s breakdown and Calder himself with a new spate of obscenity cases. As a result, Johnson took to drinking. It was a habit he had always indulged in, but by now, he was becoming morose with it. Day-long binges with friends had become day-long binges with acquaintances. His heroic capacity for toleration meant that he would never become paralytic, as was the case with many writers, but instead could continue on his adventures for days, if not whole weeks, at a time.77

Ibid., p. 105. B. S. Johnson, ‘Review of B’. Letter to Eva Figes, 23 March 1972. Held in the British Library. 75 B. S. Johnson, Letter to Eva Figes, 23 March 1972. Held in the British Library. 76 Coe, 2004, p. 352. 77 Ibid., p. 403. 73 74

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And he had much to talk about. All of London was awash with a new despair. A sense of doom hung in the air, and, in response, the many wild and hopeful creative movements that filled the city were becoming political.78 The art world, synonymous only a few years earlier with carefree youth and playfulness, had turned almost uniformly militant.79 The unions were on the march, with strikes rising from a national average of four days a year in 1969 to fourteen days in 1972. Not only was there, by some calculations, an almost tenfold rise in the number of strikes, but they were longer and more bitterly fought than at any time since the 1930s.80 Many activists, such as the Trotskyist Tariq Ali, leader of the 1968 anti-Vietnam War march, now blamed the lack of success in bringing about a political revolution squarely upon the counterculture and its associated experimentalism: ‘the New Left upsurge was an important component of the radicalisation of youth’, Ali wrote in his ominously titled The Coming British Insurrection, ‘it was, however, a victim of its own diversity and proved incapable of giving even an ideological head to the movement’.81 The pluralistic attitude (whether experimentalism in the arts, or the counterculture in society) was, to the totalitarian gaze of the hard left, merely a failed revolutionary line. The popular question was no longer ‘how might we do things differently?’, but the old Leninist prompt, ‘What is to be done?’. In the midst of such beery debates in London pubs, Johnson began to feel his old sense of inadequacy creeping up on him. ‘What happened to the Labour Party?’ Ghose would write in response to Johnson’s despair, ‘the dark ages are approaching, mate’.82 It was a sentiment that Johnson recognized. The problem was that Johnson was still militantly opposed to the Stalinist line on socialist realism. The line still held sway in most left-wing literary circles. Stalin may have been denounced, but any worthwhile political writing was still automatically presumed to be realist in leftist literary criticism. Johnson’s experience in Hungary had profoundly changed him. His understanding of what it meant to be a political writer was far more nuanced than that of the New Left realists. ‘I disagree with socialist realism’, he told Burns, ‘not because I’m not a socialist but because I am.’83 For Johnson, both the fight against capitalist oppression and the fight against communist oppression, as he’d witnessed it in Hungary, were dependent upon the free individual fully committed to the pursuit of their own truth. Telling stories was still telling lies, even if those stories encouraged people to

James Riley, The Bad Trip (London: Icon Books, 2019), p. 217. John A. Walker, Left Shift: Radical Art in 1970s Britain (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), p. 8. 80 Richard Hayman, Strikes (London: Collins, 1972), p. 175. 81 Tariq Ali, The Coming British Insurrection (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), p. 105. 82 Zulfikar Ghose, Letter to B. S. Johnson, 23 June 1970. Held in the British Library. 83 Alan Burns, ‘Interview with B.S. Johnson’, in The Imagination on Trial, ed. Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet (London: Allison and Busby, 1981), p. 89. 78 79

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vote Labour. Bigger matters were at stake, including the future of the very medium in which he was working. It was with this in mind that Johnson reread the dramatic theories of Berthold Brecht, and began to speculate about a type of propagandist filmmaking that would owe less to realism and more to the comedy sketches and news footage that were on television. Johnson hoped to remake these popular forms with a socialist message communicated not implicitly, but in an outspoken, totally explicit way. He contacted Alan Burns about it and began to make connections in the world of independent film, as well as pitching ideas to ACTT: Britain’s union for TV, film and broadcast workers. The resulting project, entitled Freeprop, would produce two films, March! (1970) and Unfair! (1970), both of which focused on the government’s proposed Industrial Relations Act and the outrageous fines it sought to impose for unofficial strikes.84 In a Marowitz-inspired touch, the films were designed to be projected onto factory walls during tea breaks, treating the workers to some provocative anti-management cinema in the middle of their shifts. Artistically, the films weren’t particularly developed. The second, Unfair!, starred Bill Owen, later to be known for playing Compo in Last of the Summer Wine, but who in 1970 was a veteran of Liverpool’s leftwing Everyman theatre. The effort involved in making the films encouraged Johnson and Burns that they were at least doing something. The pair’s efforts were part of a national campaign led by the unions to mobilize workers against the impending Industrial Relations Act vote. The campaign was to culminate with a mass demonstration in the streets of London, for which the unions were hoping to draw an even larger crowd than the anti-Vietnam War marches of previous years. It was on the cold and frosty morning of 12 January 1971 when Burns and Johnson joined the thronging crowds. Eva Figes pled a prior engagement, being snowed under with commissions, while Burns’ wife Carol was busy with Quin. The two solitary men began their grim walk, Johnson carrying a placard and the overdressed Burns thumbing the tape recorder in his pocket, wondering whether or not to take recordings of chants. The march was slow and long, and when the tedious speeches were finally over, Johnson was glad of a chance to hit the nearest pub and debate their chances of success over a large number of pints. That night on television, however, the news was not about a peaceful mass demonstration. Instead, as Johnson discovered, having stumbled home after closing time, the news showed dramatic footage of a bombing. The Angry Brigade, the far-left terrorist group responsible for bombing Miss World in 1970, had used the opportunity presented by the march to set off a bomb. The explosion happened outside the home of Robert Carr, the secretary of state for employment. His wife was injured by

Burns 1981, p. 89.

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the blast and his children were left temporarily deafened, and completely traumatized.85 Johnson watched as smoke rolled from the windows of the minister’s suburban home, and was at once shocked, appalled, furious and then, finally, struck down with guilt. His films had helped stoke the flames of anger around the Industrial Relations Act. He himself had been filled with a righteous fury only that afternoon. But had he really wanted violence? He lay awake all night, his head swirling with booze and paranoia, only to wake up, dazed and confused, convinced that mysterious government forces were out to get him. He kept his curtains pulled tight. He suspected every car and van on the street. He wrote an article and sent it to the ACTT union newspaper, Film and Television Technician, in which he complained about his telephones being tapped. His name, he was certain, was on a list of union activists leaked to MI5 in the aftermath of the bombing.86 The real terrorists behind the bombing of Carr’s house, the Angry Brigade, were themselves entirely unrepentant. Through a series of proxies, they issued their fourth ‘Communique’: ‘Robert Carr got it tonight. We’re Getting Closer’.87 The organization themselves, if such a ragged group of misfits and acid casualties could be called an organization, were ostensibly a libertarian communist group who were opposed to any attempt to build parties or engage with Parliament, and instead sought to inspire a sleeping population to ‘wake up’ through their campaign of violence.88 A childish pastiche of the Italian Red Brigades, Japanese Red Army and German Baader-Meinhof Group, the Angries identified themselves as urban guerrillas. A popular model for leftist terrorism in the 1970s, urban guerrillas attempted to combine the guerrilla warfare theories of Che Guavara and Mao Tse-Tung with a countercultural lifestyle of drugs, squatting and petty crime. As a tactic, it was tremendously unsuccessful, but it had a dangerous appeal. It was a philosophy that basically stated that anyone could become a revolutionary hero; they only needed a bomb and a gun. Political education and organization were, they argued, inherently fascist, and a revolutionary simply needed to act in a dramatic (ideally violent) way in order to shake people out of their mass delusions.89 The horror of groups like the Angry Brigade was their philosophy’s proximity to experimental and countercultural aesthetic theories. The Angries made reference to ‘Spectacles’ in their first communique, referencing the Situationist philosopher Guy Debord.90 Two of its members, Ian Purdie and Jake Prescott, even signed Jeff Nuttall’s

Gordon Carr, The Angry Brigade (Oakland: PM Press, 2010), p. 1. B. S. Johnson, ‘Soho Square’. Film and Television Technician, January 1973. Appearing in Well Done God! The Selected Prose and Drama of B.S. Johnson, ed. Jonathan Coe, Philip Tew and Julia Jordan (London: Picador, 2013), p. 457. 87 Carr 2010, p. 239. 88 Ibid., p. 43. 89 Joseph Darlington, British Terrorist Novelists of the 1970s (London: Palgrave, 2018), p. 18. 90 Carr 2010, p. 238. 85 86

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Project sTigma during a house party in 1969.91 They seemed to think of their bombings as a type of political performance art, and a continuation of experimental theatre in a more radical political direction.92 Their reach even extended to editing underground magazines and newspapers. The Mancunian Mole Express was guest-edited by the terrorist group between the arrest of their first members in October 1971 and their final round-up in May 1972.93 Their pseudonymous coverage included articles like ‘None of us is Free while our Brothers and Sisters are in Jail’, and described the Angry Brigade as anti-capitalist martyrs being unjustly imprisoned. They were forced to endure beatings, interrogation and ‘water torture’, according to Mole.94 Despite their violence and apparent contempt for human life, the coverage the Angries produced for themselves in Mole Express was only marginally more supportive than the coverage provided by the rest of the underground press. In the apocalyptic, paranoid politics of the disillusioned post-1968 underground, the Angry Brigade could just about be presented as champions of the oppressed, if you squinted. The Angry Brigade, especially after their arrest, would become a lightning rod for radical artists and writers. Their lack of any traditional Leninist party organization meant that they were not associated with the endless bureaucratic wrangling of other hard-left groups and instead stood for disillusioned and dangerous youth on a more symbolic level. That their actual beliefs were little more than garbled far-left slogans made it easy for outsiders to impose whatever interpretation they liked on them. Howard Brenton brought out a play, Magnificence (1973), portraying the group as naïve innocents, driven to an extreme place but not knowing what to do once they got there. Jeff Nuttall, by contrast, took them entirely seriously, believing them to be the other side of the 1968 dream. Where he had abandoned politics for experimental art, the Angries represented the sacrifice of art for politics. They feature prominently in his novel Snipe’s Spinster (1975) about a hippy-turned-killer who is out to assassinate the embodiment of the establishment, the Man, only to be dogged by his inner spinster, his moral guide. Snipe enthuses: The Angry Brigade remind me now of those many jazz combos called the All-Stars. Drawn from wildly varying persuasions and directions, AllStars took name and status that seemed to indicate some permanence and

Jeff Nuttall, Project sTigma Notebook, n.d. Held in the John Rylands Library, Manchester. Joseph Darlington, ‘Cell of One: B.S. Johnson, Christie Malry and the Angry Brigade’, in B.S. Johnson and Post-War Literature, ed. Julia Jordan and Martin Ryle (London: Palgrave, 2014), p. 96. 93 Robert Dickinson, Imprinting the Sticks: The Alternative Press Beyond London (Aldershot: Arena, 1987), p. 69. 94 Mole Express, no. 27, December 1971, p. 12. Held in the Working Class Movement Library, Salford. 91 92

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common purpose. Having done that and laid down a few performances that were marred only by warring virtuousity, they then dispersed back to the fertile ground from whence they came.95 For Snipe, the ‘middle class revulsion that led us to recoil from H-bombs and napalm was the same token that made us ineffectual’: a reference back to the CND marches that, according to Bomb Culture, were where the 1960s began.96 Nuttall was using Snipe, and by extension the Angry Brigade itself, as a cypher for one of his own possible alternative lives. Where might he have ended up, the book is asking, had he reached the post-1968 fork in the road and chosen politics instead of art? For Johnson and Burns, the Angry Brigade raised questions about the future of experimental writing too. The experimentalists had never expanded their political thinking to the level of Nuttall. They had, until that point, believed that their campaign was political in itself, and that they could bring about dramatic political changes purely through formal innovation. Their various understandings about what experimental writing meant – anti-establishment, truthful writing, scientifically modern, imposing new grids, feeling between the words, seizing the communications – all implied revolutionary change as a consequence of form. However, as experimentalism became recognized within the mainstream and politics grew more militant and serious, it seemed to Burns and Johnson that the experimental novel now needed to take a more outspokenly political direction. Figes, after all, was already leading the way with her feminist experiments. Burns credited his own shift in attitude to a speech by German writer Heinrich Böll who, upon receiving the Novel Prize for Literature, derided intellectuals for their inability to write in a language that everyone could understand.97 At the time, Böll too was writing a book about left-wing terrorists, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974), which did for the Baader-Meinhof Group what Burns wanted to do for the Angry Brigade. ‘I had a natural sympathy for the group’s aims’, Burns would later admit, and ‘wanted to correct this version of red-baiting [in the media], by showing the true process of radicalisation’.98 As a result, Burns and Johnson would regularly attend the Angry Brigade’s trial, sitting in the public gallery and taking notes as the group veered wildly between defending themselves and attacking the system. The trial would last from May through to December 1972, making it the longest criminal trial in British history, and it set many precedents of historical significance.99

Jeff Nuttall, Snipe’s Spinster (London: Calder and Boyars, 1975), p. 52. Ibid., p. 103. 97 Sugnet, 1981, 164. 98 David W. Madden, ‘Alan Burns: An Introduction’. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 17, no. 2 (1997): 115. 99 Carr 2010, p. 3. 95 96

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The two writers also sourced a variety of illegal urban guerrilla training manuals. They took note when books were presented as evidence against the Angries and subsequently tracked down their own illegal copies through countercultural booksellers. Among these was the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla by Carlos Marighella; the bible of urban guerrilla groups, in which Marighella makes a case for random violence and crime as a moral good.100 Johnson managed to source a copy and passed it on to Burns, who, in a hastily written telegram, thanked him ‘for the subversive lit – is very useful and others may come in handy – though I still don’t know how to make a BOMB!’.101 The Anarchist’s Cookbook (1971) was swiftly appended to Johnson’s shopping list. The main source of Burns’ raw material was not to come from the trial, the guerrilla handbooks, or even the Angries themselves. Instead, he sought to utilize the mountain of tape-recorded conversation he’d amassed over the past couple of years. For Burns, these tapes held the secret to creating Böll’s ‘writing of the people’. Hours spent transcribing tapes and marking off potentially useful passages would provide Burns with a conversational style in a very literal sense.102 The result was The Angry Brigade (1973), a novel presented as a transcript. It included six voices, each telling the tale of the group from radicalization, to a bombing campaign, to a final showdown with police in which they take the minister for Housing captive. The tape-recording technique was tremendously successful in creating realistic dialogue. The problem was that Burns soon gave up on telling the actual story of the Angry Brigade, and instead created a new narrative about an entirely fictional group. This fictional terrorist group just happened to commit acts similar to, but legally distinguishable from, the actual Angries, and were called the Angry Brigade. To make things worse, Burns gave the book a subtitle: ‘A Documentary Novel’. By ‘documentary novel’, he meant that the novel was a work of fiction (a ‘novel’) constructed out of different documents (ergo, ‘documentary’). As he later explained: The ‘interviews’ were mainly conducted with my friends on topics quite other to those discussed by the characters in the book. To give a rather curious example: I had a friend, a young woman, who had to visit the dentist on a number of occasions. This dismal experience was made worse by the fact that as she sat there the dentist and his nurse, between whom there seemed to be something cooking, would gossip away one to the

Richard Clutterbuck, Protest and the Urban Guerrilla (New York: Abalard-Schuman, 1974), p. 255. 101 Alan Burns, Telegram to B. S. Johnson, n.d. [1972]. Held in the British Library. 102 David W. Madden, ‘Interview with Alan Burns’, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 17, no. 2 (1997): 135. 100

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other, excluding the patient, apart from giving her mouth the occasional prod.103 This friend, who was in fact the slowly recovering Ann Quin, was transformed in the novel into a girl only half-accepted into the Brigade and who gets the horrible feeling that things are being discussed without her. Many other quotes from Burns’ friends creep in too, including a line from Marowitz: ‘What we want is a fantastic leap of the imagination, something that will make people jump right out of their skins, like King Kong walking down Oxford Street, or a space ship landing on St Paul’s.’104 Many of Johnson’s bitter reminiscences of childhood would end up in the mouth of the book’s working-class hero, Dave, while Situationist ideas would be attributed to the group’s university dropout leader, Ivor. These may well have been statements from Burns himself. The group also mimic Burns’ experimentalism by making pamphlets to give out on the tube. Entering a carriage, they would tear the pamphlets in half and encourage strangers to get together and read them. The tactic is described in the novel as ‘like a Happening’.105 Giving out radical literature during a ‘happening’ on the tube could also be a reference to Nuttall’s The Moving Times. In other words, it seemed that all of the experimentalist movement had some kind of input into The Angry Brigade, other than the Angry Brigade themselves. The novel was, as a result, savaged in the underground press as a kind of black propaganda aimed at smearing the group. Stuart Christie, an anarchist who was himself connected to the group but never charged, went as far as calling for Burns to be outed as a ‘pig in disguise’. The book nevertheless sold well and entered a second and a third edition, although the blowback may have tempered Burns’ radical passions for a while. As Burns worked on The Angry Brigade, B. S. Johnson contributed his own novel to the ever-increasing amount of material being published about urban guerrilla terrorism. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973) tells the story of Christie, ‘a simple man’, who decides to apply the doubleentry bookkeeping system he learned at accountancy school to the more dicey world of politics and morality.106 He writes up an account book, ‘Christie Malry in account with THEM’, and proceeds to charge society for the unfairnesses it does him. He then seeks to pay THEM back for these unfairnesses by enacting violence and destruction upon society at large, ideally to an equal fiscal amount, in order to balance his books. The first of his gripes, for example, shows the ‘unpleasantness of bank manager’ priced at £1, while Christie’s refusal to pay the undertaker for his mother’s funeral

Sugnet 1981, p. 164. Alan Burns, The Angry Brigade (London: Quartet, 1973), p. 156. 105 Ibid., p. 61. 106 B. S. Johnson, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (London: Picador, 2001), p. 11. 103 104

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expenses credits him £1.71.107 Early on it seems as if Christie may be able to balance the books. Overall, however, society still owes Christie £8.67 at the end of his first quarter. The farcical nature of the novel lies in this system’s immediate descent into extremes. By Christie’s fourth ‘Reckoning’, he has poisoned a London reservoir and caused the death of 20,479 innocent west Londoners, crediting £26,622.70, ‘calculated at the rate of £1.30 each, being an allowance for the commercial value of the chemicals contained therein’.108 This massacre, however, comes nowhere near balancing the debit of £311,398 owed to Christie for the reason, ‘socialism not given a chance’.109 In the end, Christie’s campaign of terror is cut short by a sudden bout of cancer; the narrator refuses to inform his readers whether or not the final bomb under Parliament goes off, and £352,392 is written off as bad debt.110 The novel concludes with Christie dying of cancer, being left alone in an NHS ward as everyone around him slowly leaves, including the narrator himself, who appears within the text as an otherwise omniscient presence. Johnson’s novel is perhaps the only one out of all the literary and dramatic works inspired by the Angry Brigade to actually transcend its subject matter and become something more. The Angries appear in the book as passing references; the police say that Christie’s terrorist acts ‘feel like the anarchists again [as] their jowls shook in silent laughter’, while the name ‘Christie’ may have been a reference to suspected Brigade member Stuart Christie.111 The protagonist had in fact been called ‘Xtie’ throughout the writing process, perhaps in reference to Malcolm X, and it was only after a manuscript was sent to Anthony Burgess for feedback that the change to ‘Christie’ was recommended. The name change granted Christie an ironic Christ-like nomenclature, in keeping with Burgess’ Catholic preoccupations.112 Yet, alongside the Christ allegory, Christie also takes on the existential burden of being a self-aware character. He knows that he is the creation of a text and is bound by his author as much as he is bound by his terroristical bookkeeping system. In the very moment of his greatest success, poisoning 20,000 Londoners with cyanide, we are reminded that ‘this was the first figure that came to hand as it is roughly the number of words of which the novel consists so far’, and that we, as readers, can rest assured that ‘there are not many more, neither deaths nor words’.113 Through his infatuation with the Angry Brigade, Johnson succeeds in touching something far deeper. His novel is about what it is to exist in a world without God, where a man

Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., p. 119. 109 Ibid., p. 151. 110 Darlington 2018, p. 110. 111 Johnson 2001, p. 82. 112 B. S. Johnson, Xtie Malry Manuscript annotated by Burgess, 1973. Held in the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester. 113 Johnson 2001, p. 147. 107 108

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must write his own meaning, and whether this meaning has any chance of changing the world for the better. Christie chooses his bookkeeping system as the simplest method he can think of for expressing the unfairness of the world in numerical terms, and even this fails to make an impact. He is undermined at every critical moment of his success. The novel absorbs influences from all across Johnson’s life to reach this darkly comical conclusion. Johnson himself had been a double-entry bookkeeper. He suffered through this painstaking work in order to pay for evening classes, pass his exams and qualify for university. The book’s darkest jokes, like a bomb-carrying blackbird and a toy train pulling C4 through an underground tunnel to blow up the tax office, appear earlier in his notebooks as flights of fancy, most likely made up in the pub. All the way back in 1963, as he is working on Albert Angelo, Johnson has the idea for a novel about a working-class ‘Father Joe type who goes mad and starts blowing up slums’.114 All of Johnson’s life, his personal frustrations and setbacks, his class anxiety and anti-establishment anger, his often morbid sense of humour, his metafictional approach to writing as a personal truth, and now his political anger, all of it is distilled in Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, giving it the feeling of a magnum opus, albeit an incredibly short one. Of all of Johnson’s novels, it is the one that bears the most rereading. Upon the release of Christie Malry, Johnson immediately began a furious marketing drive, pushing the book as hard as possible in every direction. Like all of Johnson’s novels, it sold in surprisingly large numbers. In a year where many established novelists were also trying their hands at the experiment, Johnson’s novel stood out for its mastery, rather than its experimental strangeness. He appeared on television and radio a number of times, sometimes sending Alan Burns in his place.115 He even, to the surprise of the whole literary world, convinced Radio London to broadcast two full read-throughs of the book during their evening radio slots. Arguing that he was essentially giving his book away for free and that Radio London really should be paying him, Johnson managed this advertising coup without having to pay the station a penny.116 On the back of his success, he was commissioned to write two new TV shows: one for BBC 2’s Thirty Minute Theatre and the other for ATV’s Armchair Theatre.117 The second of these, ATV, was a specialist Londonregion independent channel. It was looking for controversial material to entice viewers away from the national broadcaster. Obligingly, Johnson wrote What is the Right Thing and Am I Doing It?, the story of a Welsh

B. S. Johnson, ‘Interview with Father Joe’, 6 May 1963. Notebook 5, 1960. Held in the British Library. 115 Alan Burns, Letter to B. S. Johnson, 31 January 1973. Held in the British Library. 116 Heppenstall, 1986, p. 108. 117 Coe 2004, p. 318. 114

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nationalist bomber freshly released from prison. He is now dogged by the police and buttonholed by his former comrades, and must decide whether or not to return to terrorism. The story ends with a suitcase being flung from a window, whether or not it contains a bomb is never revealed, although Ghent, the protagonist, makes plenty of stirring speeches throughout the show, which would have convinced many viewers that it did.118 Johnson’s television drama is much closer to the Angry Brigade-inspired works of Burns, Nuttall and Brenton, in that it lacks the transcendent qualities of Christie Malry. It also relies heavily on exposition in a similar way to Burns and Johnson’s ACTT films, suggesting that Johnson, like many writers of the period, still did not understand television as a primarily visual medium. The show was a soapbox for Johnson’s own opinions rather than a space for exploration.

Campaigning for the good stuff Maureen Duffy and Brigid Brophy had, by the early 1970s, returned to writing novels. Duffy’s plays had done well but were now being swamped by the wave of experimental theatre troupes and happenings sweeping London. Both of these types of performances shunned writers in favour of collective workshopping, leaving Duffy, the playwright, without a job. Brophy’s sardonic wit was also in reduced demand after the publication of her book Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without (1968). Seeking to puncture the old Leavisite bubble of the great tradition, Brophy and her co-authors ended up offending the majority of readers with their dismissive snark, bashing Wuthering Heights, Thomas Hardy, Woolf and the ‘garrulous bore’ Walt Whitman without offering much in the way of actual critique. As a result, the two close friends found themselves in need of a literary comeback. Luckily, in the time since they abandoned the novel, the concerted efforts of their experimental colleagues had shifted the literary mood in their direction. What had previously been a hard sell was now a recognized mode. Brigid Brophy adapted the haughty style of her late 1950s novels into something more suitable for the post-1968 reader. The result, In Transit (1969), tells the story of a gender-swapping hero/heroine as she traverses a sci-fi-tinged airport in search of a missing connection. On the way, she encounters ragtag groups of student revolutionaries and asks questions befitting a reader of the new French philosophy: ‘but if you are continually communicating, how do you ever find the time to think about what to

B. S. Johnson, ‘What Is the Right Thing and Am I Doing It?’ in Well Done God! The Selected Prose and Drama of B.S. Johnson, ed. Jonathan Coe, Philip Tew and Julia Jordan (London: Picador, 2013), p. 457. 118

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communicate?’119 The resulting novel is an intriguing mix of psychedelic contortions and the banality of airports and trading estates, like Alice in Wonderland taking place in Slough. Individual lines stand out like polished gems – ‘Twentieth-century hotels have carpeting, not carpets, and lighting, not lights. Their entrance halls are dark as a plush-lined pistol-case’ – although the overall flow of the writing can get bogged down in its own cleverness.120 As Brophy was embracing the experimental, Duffy, by contrast, was moving in the direction of radical politics. The political upheaval of the early 1970s left her with a deep longing to visit the Soviet Union. Unlike Johnson, whose working-class upbringing had been relatively apolitical, Duffy was a product of East End socialism and had residual respect for the communist dictatorship as a result.121 The desire would never manifest in an actual trip, however, but would instead transmogrify into an Angry Brigade-inspired novel about animal rights terrorists called I Want to Go to Moscow (1973). In it, Duffy proposes animal welfare as the next cause in need of the liberating power of violence. Her fictional terrorist group, ‘All of Heaven in a Rage’, are presented as the inheritors of a legacy passed down by the ‘1920s IRA, the Spanish republicans, the Free French, the Spies for Peace, and the hippies’.122 Her protagonist, Chuff, is an ex-con who translates his hatred of prison into sympathy for caged animals. Their cries ‘reminded Chuff of the fits of banging that overtook the nick at moments of communal despair, anger or delight’.123 Eventually, they burn down a meat processing plant, and the government promises new regulations, signalling a victory. Both of these books sold well and ran into second and third editions, with Duffy’s novel even being picked up as a Penguin paperback later in the decade. Their novels placed them back among the recognized names of British experimental writing, though by 1973, they were already well known by the general public, albeit not for something either of them had written. Early in 1972, Brophy and Duffy were in conversation with three friends including the editor Victoria Bonham-Carter, who raised the issue of writer’s pay and the fact that, taking inflation into account, it had surely frozen in place over the past ten years, if not declined. Meanwhile, publishers were posting record profits and national book sales were reaching unprecedented heights. The reason, Brophy suggested, was that British readers preferred to borrow books from libraries rather than purchase their own personal copies. Publishers sold many different types of book to libraries, some never to be read at all or only looked at for reference. A fiction title, by contrast, might

Brigid Brophy, In Transit (London: MacDonald, 1969), p. 189. Ibid., p. 21. 121 Giles Gordon, Letter to Maureen Duffy, n.d. [1972]. Held in the Kings College London Archives. 122 Maureen Duffy, I Want to Go to Moscow (London: Penguin, 1978), p. 149. 123 Ibid., p. 83. 119 120

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be read by ten, twenty or even a hundred people based upon a single library sale. The French, Brophy added, were a nation of book buyers, not book lenders, and so could support an intellectual class, on an economic level, in a way that the British never could. A solution, Duffy suggested, might be found in the Scandinavian system of Public Lending Right (PLR). Under PLR, she explained, authors received a small sum from the government every time their books were borrowed from a public library. The system was still free for the lender, and the sums were small enough to be paid from local council funds without causing a problem. For the individual writer, however, the total income could be considerable. The five friends were intrigued by the idea and set themselves the task of researching it. Finding it to be as rational and unobtrusive as Duffy had first suggested, they decided to bring the idea to Britain’s representative body for writers, the Society of Authors, with the intention of having them launch a campaign.124 The Society, unimpressed with what it considered to be meddling by outside authors, flatly refused to look into the group’s suggestion. Brophy, outraged, wrote a series of letters to the Society’s representatives and threatened to raise the issue at the next Annual General Meeting. In response, the Society conceded that there might be something in PLR, and so, in return for withdrawing her motion from the AGM, they agreed to convene a special panel to look into the matter, with Brigid Brophy acting as chair.125 It was here where Brophy and Duffy began to realize the power of British institutional procedures. The special panel was dogged by endless roadblocks and setbacks. Members were elected to it with conflicting schedules such that no time could ever be found for meetings. Flummoxed and frustrated, and every day growing better read on the subject of PLR, Duffy and Brophy decided it was time to form their own organization. The Writers’ Action Group (WAG) was signed into being in July 1972. Its first membership list included Brophy, Duffy, Bonham-Carter and twenty of their close friends. Anthony Burgess, more of a rival to Brophy than an ally, was nevertheless one of the first outside figures to sign up for the cause, having heard about it on the World Service.126 Shocked by the cliquish nature of the Society of Authors, and guyed up by support from other writers, Brophy and Duffy decided to commit their full energies to WAG and campaigning for PLR. Brophy was the figurehead of the group, representing them to the Society of Authors and writing seventeen different newspaper articles on PLR during the summer of 1972 alone.127 Duffy, meanwhile, took on the

Victoria Bonham-Carter, Letter to Brigid Brophy and Michael Lang, 12 July 1972. Held in the Kings College London Archives. 125 Victoria Bonham-Carter. Memo to the Society of Authors Secretariat, 27 July 1972. Held in the Kings College London Archives. 126 WAG Membership List, 24 July 1972. Held in the Kings College London Archives. 127 Maureen Duffy, Notes, unlabelled, 1972. Held in the Kings College London Archives. 124

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less-glamorous but far-more-time-consuming job of WAG secretary. She responded to endless correspondences from friends and enemies, oversaw membership lists, coordinated letter-writing campaigns, and prepared fact sheets outlining their proposals for PLR and countering popular objections. The result was a wave of enthusiasm from writers and a corresponding panic and siege mentality from the Society of Authors. Rather than adopt some of WAG’s platform and begin the work of convincing the government, it became clear that the Society of Authors would become the main battleground over which the PLR battle would be fought. Compared to the old establishment writers who controlled the Society, winning over MPs would be easy. The campaign to win over the Society of Authors spread out into the letters pages of the national papers. There it transformed from a disagreement over policy into a battle for control over the Society itself. Writing anonymously in the Guardian, a leading member of the Society described PLR as a front for WAG: an ‘extremist’ organization.128 Duffy and Brophy struck back with in-depth letters of their own, increasingly supported by the hard facts. In response to a Society letter arguing that the British simply don’t buy books, Duffy and Brophy conceded that ‘truly we don’t as a nation buy books. But we do read them: 13 a year every woman, baby, manjack of us, free from the public library’.129 Indeed, as Duffy explained in a private letter to a fellow writer, fiction accounted for 73 per cent of all library borrowing across the country, and yet putting out new novels remained the riskiest prospect for publishers due to the lack of compensation for these borrowings.130 Duffy, as secretary, received a wave of correspondence in reply. The membership lists grew at a rapid rate. Soon Duffy’s old university colleague B. S. Johnson was on board, bringing Eva Figes with him, while notables like Iris Murdoch and Basil Boothroyd added weight of legitimacy to WAG’s campaigning.131 B. S. Johnson had always been obsessed with money, and could quickly become as belligerent and outspoken on the subject as he was about experimental literature.132 As a result of his working-class upbringing, he had never quite got his head around the idea of being paid per book. Instead, he believed that writers should be paid a wage and that this wage should be sufficient to keep them in a manner of life that would be amenable to writing novels. In one of his great coups, Johnson even convinced his publisher at Secker and Warburg to pay him a record-breaking advance of £1,200 on a two-book deal. This was more than some bestselling authors could expect. He did so by arguing that it would take him two years to write two books,

‘Public Lending Right’. The Times, 9 November 1973. Maureen Duffy and Brigid Brophy, Letter to the Editor at The Daily Mail, 9 March 1973. Held in the Kings College London Archives. 130 Maureen Duffy, Letter to O.S. Thompson, 22 October 1973. Held in the Kings College London Archives. 131 ‘Lending Rights and Wrongs’ Guardian, 21 November 1972. 132 Eva Figes, ‘B.S. Johnson’. The Review of Contemporary Literature, 5, no. 2 (1985): 71. 128 129

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and, as Fred Warburg’s secretary’s salary was just over £800 a year, Johnson could reasonably expect to be paid an equivalent to her. Having appealed to Fred’s sense of fair play, he signed the deal.133 The WAG proved to be a perfect draw for him. It combined his passion for literature with his equally passionate beliefs about payment, and channelled all of these energies in a campaigning direction. At public meetings on the subject of PLR, he could be found flinging paper darts into the audience, or bellowing ‘shame!’ at any Society dignitaries who turned up to speak for the other side.134 It was through Johnson that WAG gained its most influential convert in 1972: Giles Gordon. Gordon was editorial director at Gollancz, one of the largest fiction publishers in the country, and had been drinking buddies with Johnson since the late 1960s. He had encountered Johnson’s work early, reading with pleasure the short editorial pieces that Johnson had put out during his stint as poetry editor at Transatlantic Review.135 Gordon had kept notebooks for years, collecting snippets of conversation, intriguing images and wry observations that he hoped, someday, to turn into literary works of his own.136 When he first began drinking with Johnson, a man he described as looking ‘a bit like an upended elephant without its trunk’, it was to these notebooks that their conversations would often turn after a few pints.137 In the early days, Johnson sought to convince Gordon of the value and necessity of experimentalism in order that the cause might have at least one champion high up at the publishing houses. Gordon was also a chair of the Arts Council literature panel, and so would prove essential to gaining the experimentalists their steady stream of awards and bursaries. So effective was Johnson’s badgering that Gordon not only actively supported experimental writers in his own publishing endeavours and at the Arts Council but, come 1971, he even began his own career as an experimental writer. ‘I aspire to a writing that combines and mingles the sensuous, elusive beauty of music and the precision of words’, Gordon would later write, and, arguably, he managed this with his short, nouveau roman-inspired novels The Umbrella Man (1971) and Girl with Red Hair (1974).138 His big success came with About a Marriage (1972), a semi-autobiographical novel about the early years of his marriage, from the excitement of courtship to the heartbreak of the first arguments, and some gratuitous sex scenes in between. It ran into numerous editions and was picked up by Penguin

Rayner Heppenstall, The Master Eccentric, ed. Jonathan Goodman (London: Allison and Busby, 1986), p. 108. 134 Figes 1985, p. 71. 135 Gordon, 1993, p. 114. 136 Giles Gordon, ‘Portrait of the Author as Editor’, in Beyond the Words, ed. Giles Gordon (London: Hitchinson, 1975), p. 130. 137 Gordon 1993, p. 150. 138 Gordon 1975, p. 131. 133

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paperbacks where, perhaps helped by the nude woman on the cover, it continued to sell well for over a decade. It was just as this novel was taking off and proving a big hit in libraries that Gordon decided to join forces with WAG. Together, Gordon, Duffy, Brophy and Johnson wrote a collective letter to MPs seeking out their support on the matter of PLR, with an eye to outflanking the Society of Authors and raising it in Parliament without them.139 Sadly, this did not work. Within six months of starting the campaign, WAG could now claim 235 writer-members and over 40 associate members.140 The organization grew so large that Duffy could no longer act as sole secretary, and so regional divisions were formed, each with a regional secretary and a broad remit to campaign for PLR in whatever way the writer-members thought most appropriate. The East Anglian WAG division, for example, became a hotbed of Cambridge Marxists, with prominent members including Jack Lindsay, David Holbrook and Raymond Williams.141 These writers, unsurprisingly, saw the campaign as a step along the road to socialism, with Lindsay writing in a letter to The Times that WAG would ‘keep on rocking the boat in the hope that the right persons will fall overboard’.142 Other divisions focused on using PLR as a means to increase funding for libraries, or to create new markets within the borrowing system, while some were more author-focused. The South West Division, for example, was dominated by crime writers who pointed out that at least 50 per cent of their kind lived on less than £1,500 a year and that, if it weren’t for foreign sales, the great British detective novel would die out.143 Crime was one of the most highly borrowed genres from local libraries and so, with PLR, these writers stood to potentially double their incomes. WAG Divisions were popping up everywhere. Notably, they all agreed that authors should be recompensed for loaning their books in libraries, yet there was a broad diversity of opinion on how this system should be implemented and what exactly such a system would mean politically. Brophy and Duffy had based their initial proposals upon the Scandinavian system and would continue to push this line, but with the influx of new members came new opinions. These ranged from hardcore socialists to free marketeers. WAG associate membership lists even included librarians themselves, many of whom had noted the discrepancy between what proved popular with borrowers and what appeared in the reviews columns. The only body that

William Harding M. P., Giles Gordon, B. S. Johnson, Maureen Duffy and Brigid Brophy. Letter to the Editor at The Times, 30 March 1973. Held in the Kings College London Archives. 140 Brigid Brophy, Letter to John Wingate, 20 June 1973. Held in the Kings College London Archives. 141 East Anglian Division of WAG Membership List, 16 October 1973. Held in the Kings College London Archives. 142 Jack Lindsay, ‘Letter’. The Times, 18 August 1973. 143 ‘Crime Writing Does Not Pay, Say Authors’. Daily Telegraph, 21 May 1973. 139

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seemed immovable in its opposition to PLR was the Society of Authors. The Society still considered WAG an imposition, and it would continue to fight them regardless of the public approval that was slowly mounting in their favour. If anything, this simply lent credence to their claims that WAG were staging a populist coup. The tensions between WAG and the Society of Authors came to a head in August 1973. It all began with an article in the Society’s own newsletter, The Author, by radical writer Gordon Williams. Williams had been permitted to make WAG’s case within the newsletter in the belief that this might help mend the rift between WAG and the old guard. The opposite happened. Williams rallied the hard economic data that Brophy and Duffy had amassed and made a convincing case that, due to the excessively high inflation rate of 63.4 per cent between 1966 and 1974, the average writer’s earnings not only had frozen but had, in fact, declined to only a quarter of what they earned in 1965.144 Writers were being ripped off, Williams argued, and he lay the blame for this squarely at the foot of the complacent Society of Authors and the fading establishment that controlled it. The article caused uproar. Meetings were called in every WAG district and tempers flared. At the London branch meeting, chaired by Maureen Duffy, discussions descended into a shouting match, and Duffy only just dissuaded a raging group of authors from storming the local library and defacing the books.145 The decision was reached instead that WAG would stage an uprising against the Society of Authors by piling en masse into their next AGM. Nicholas Wollaston, a popular travel writer who had recently joined the Society, was elected to push WAG’s demands onto the AGM agenda.146 Duffy proposed an immediate ballot on PLR. Brophy added to this the demand that four WAG candidates be elected onto the Society’s Committee of Management. Giles Gordon, to cheers from the London Division membership, then added the demand for a ballot transforming the Society from the status of a private member’s club into a national trade union.147 This final agenda item, as rapturously as it was received by the WAG membership, was exactly the kind of proposal that the Society had always feared. Once a place where elderly writers could come for a cup of tea and a chat about books, the Society was on the verge of transforming into a militant union. Johnson, overjoyed, went on a recruitment spree, dragging Alan and Carol Burns, Jeff Nuttall and even John Calder into

Coe 2004, p. 348. Margaret Yorke, Letter to Maureen Duffy, 30 January 1973. Held in the Kings College London Archives. 146 Nicholas Wollaston, Letter to Society of Authors, 4 July 1973. Held in the Kings College London Archives. 147 Maureen Duffy. Letter to Nicholas Wollaston, 3 July 1973. Held in the Kings College London Archives. 144 145

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Society memberships with the promise of storming the AGM and a final showdown between the forces of experimentalism and the old guard.148 The day of the AGM came and the Society meeting rooms were a scene of total chaos. WAG had dragged in members from all over to pack the ballot in favour of their radical proposals, only to find that the Society grandees had had the exact same idea. The AGM was full to bursting and the air soon filled with jeers and heckles; paper darts were thrown by Johnson as Eva Figes chuckled to herself in her seat beside him. The meeting was slow to start, with order taking a good five minutes to finally settle. The atmosphere was electric. Then, for the first twenty minutes, the AGM proceeded upon its usual business with all the dullness of a normal meeting. The treasurer ran through the takings, the secretary commented on the state of the membership lists and catering on Society premises was discussed at length as if the room weren’t packed with furious authors all spoiling for a fight. Finally, when WAG’s proposals did reach the point of being read and voted upon, the results were heartbreaking. Clearly, WAG hadn’t brought sufficient numbers. First, the central issue, PLR, was voted down. Then, on the motion to elect WAG members to the Committee of Management, the vote itself was postponed as the proposal was judged to be in breach of Society protocol. Finally, on the question of unionizing, the vote was a resounding negative.149 The room each time exploded to shouts and jeers from the WAG side, only to be matched by an equally disdainful noise from the Society supporters. It seemed like all was lost, and the heroic charge had ended in a defeat. But then, finally, as the chair reached the ‘any other business’ section of the proceedings, it was revealed that Giles Gordon and B. S. Johnson had slipped in a last-minute proposal of their own to be voted on. Through a poorly concealed grimace, the chair read out the proposal: that the entire Committee of Management resign instantly for their poor handling of the issue of PLR.150 The whole room rose to their feet with a roar. The vote had no chance of passing, but it provided the kind of cathartic conclusion that many WAG members were grateful for. Eva Figes remembered stumbling out of the AGM in hysterics as Johnson continued to harangue the ‘Society Tories’, yelling at the top of his voice all the way down the road to the pub. In the aftermath of the AGM coup, the Society agreed to set up a subcommittee to discuss further the issues raised.151 Despite this being their most considerable effort towards building bridges, Johnson and Gordon, along with many of the WAG hardcore, were now sick of the Society and

Alan Burns, Telegram to B. S. Johnson, 1 July 1973. Held in the British Library. Maureen Duffy, Letter to Giles Gordon, 8 August 1973. Held in the Kings College London Archives. 150 Eva Figes 1985, p. 71. 151 Michael Holroyd, Letter to B. S. Johnson, 18 October 1973 Held in the Kings College London Archives. 148 149

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wanted nothing to do with them. Gordon floated the idea of WAG authors joining the printer’s union, Sogat, to align the writers of books with those who made them.152 Yet, as Maureen Duffy pointed out, even if every WAG member joined Sogat simultaneously, they would still be outnumbered eighty-to-one by Sogat’s existing membership. With an executive consisting of thirty-two elected members, WAG would not have enough clout to elect even a single representative onto their leadership. It was, Duffy realized, the Society or nothing.153 For Johnson and Gordon, that meant choosing nothing. Although neither ever resigned their WAG membership, they no longer attended meetings and left the campaigning to Duffy, Brophy and the increasingly enthusiastic Eva Figes. ‘I think he found it quite difficult,’ Duffy would later say of Johnson’s time in WAG, ‘that it was basically being run by a coven of women.’154 Yet the campaign would continue, and they would eventually win over the Society of Authors, if only after a long and tiresome process of committee meetings and concessions. The Public Lending Right Act finally passed on 31 January 1975.155 Since that day, every book loan from the British public library system has resulted in a tiny but meaningful payment going to the author of that book. It may not, for most authors, mean more than a couple of pounds a year in terms of income, but it is a recognition that a book is not simply a commodity to be bought and sold and passed around, but is the result of an author’s own journey. It is a part of themselves that they have contributed to the world. Of all the experimental novelists’ attempts to change the world, the campaign for PLR was perhaps the least glamorous. Yet, in terms of legacy, it may end up being their most lasting contribution.

Giles Gordon, Letter to Maureen Duffy, Brigid Brophy and B. S. Johnson, 6 August 1973. Held in Kings College London Archives. 153 Maureen Duffy, Letter to Giles Gordon, 8 August 1973. Held in the Kings College London Archives. 154 Melanie Seddon, ‘B.S. Johnson and Maureen Duffy: A Conversation with Maureen Duffy’. BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal, no. 1 (2014): 140. 155 Maureen Duffy and Brigid Brophy, Press Invitation, 31 January 1974. 152

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Two deaths She walked the grounds and made paintings with her footprints in the snow. A solitary bird, a hooded midget nun, on a bare branch looked down and seemed to wink. Once she had understood the language of birds, now no longer, it took all her time to understand her own language, and that of those who attempted communication. Once there had been the subterranean language with the underground forces. If speech at all then it was the spaces between words, and the echoes the words left, or what might be really meant under the surface. She knew, had known. No longer knew. Only remembered.1 Ann Quin returned to her own flat in London just after Christmas in 1972. After her breakdown in 1970, she had undergone a series of intensive therapies, including electroconvulsion therapy and a programme of forcefeeding.2 Upon her return from Stockholm, she had moved in with the Burnses for a while, avoiding company and doing next to no reading or writing. Her own flat had been sublet, and, when she was finally capable of moving back into it, she found the subtenant had been keeping three cats locked within its four small rooms. All of her furniture was torn to pieces, knocked over, pawned or otherwise destroyed. The smell of cat waste would never come out.3 For a month she would try and piece her apartment back together. She spoke to no one and did not respond to letters. Marion Boyars, her publisher, who now also bordered on being Quin’s personal guardian, would have to speak to her in person if any business decision needed to

Ann Quin, ‘The Unmapped Country’, in The Unmapped Country, ed. Jennifer Hodgson (Sheffield: And Other Stories, 2018), p.167. 2 John Hall, ‘The Mighty Quin’. Arts Guardian, 29 April 1972, p. 9. 3 Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 6 May 1973. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 1

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be made. Boyars was keen for Quin to start writing again. Every slip of written material that Quin had ever sent to Boyars had been published and republished again. Other than the occasional deal on film rights for her first novel, Berg, there was very little left for Boyars to sell. Quin’s new novel, the one that would follow from Tripticks, had been forty pages long by the time of her breakdown, at which point she burned the manuscript.4 Quin’s next project would be a visceral first-hand account of her illness and recovery, depicting the often brutal and alienating conditions of the Stockholm clinic. Unlike Tripticks, it was a steam-of-consciousness piece. She would eschew the cut-ups and fold-ins, the automatic writing and the drug visions that had marked her work after Robert Sward. She would return to a Johnsonian truth of her truth, an impressionistic description of sectioned life, caught between the bizarre poetry of her visions and the harsh reality of the institution. This, at least, was the plan. It was not a plan that she had communicated to many people. She was communicating with people less now anyway, but on top of this she also found herself riddled with selfdoubt. The manuscript, as she worked on it, revealed her frustrations to her. The voice she once had, that flowed through her and, at its most powerful, felt like she was channelling consciousness itself, had now abandoned her. Between fleeting, unfurnished descriptions of other patients and nurses, there were laments for this new uncertainty and lack of direction: Right at the very beginning – but there was no beginning. Vague notes for a basis of shape. The first section interrupted by the last. No continuous movement. A starting point somewhere. Chords superimposed on chords. The pendulum swinging back.5 At the climax of her former reveries, she had abandoned the written word entirely. ‘My vision of God was so much more purposeful’, she said, that only music could approach some approximation of her experiences.6 Now, by contrast, she struggled even to rally the words that might recreate some former connections. She had been left stagnant by her treatments, sceptical of her own gifts. Dr Härnjd had gone through her work line by line. He’d quoted it back to her, asking her to recognize the seeds of her current illness in the writing. Not only in the contents, the sex and drugs and uprooted living, but in the form itself. Her experiments, he implied, had simply been madness waiting to come out. To try and recapture her old sublimity now would take a tremendous act of will. It was not one that she felt capable of any longer. Her writer friends, the Burnses, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson, had

Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 19 September 1972. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. Ann Quin, ‘The Unmapped Country’, in Beyond the Words, ed. Giles Gordon (London: Heinemann, 1975). 6 Hall 1972, p. 8. 4 5

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none of their old hope and energy. Their campaigning spirit was burned out. Each were fighting their own political battles, and felt they were losing. The future of experimental writing itself was now being questioned even by its staunchest advocates. Had it meant what they thought it had meant? What precisely was it that they had thought? Her confidence now at its lowest point, Quin enrolled herself in college. A writer with numerous awards to her name, winner of six Arts Council grants, with four published novels to her name and considered among many of her colleagues to be the voice of a generation, Quin was nevertheless desperately uncertain about her own grasp of literature and the English language. She had never made consistent use of proper grammar, for example, and had pieced together her understanding of literature from friend’s recommendations and the things she found in libraries. When other Calder writers spoke of tradition, they had a clear image in mind: the Leavisite canon they’d had drilled into them at university. Even Johnson, an outspoken workingclass writer from a comprehensive school, had nevertheless gone through King’s. Having run away from the nuns at her Catholic school and headed to London at sixteen, Quin had no formal qualifications. Even now, at the age of thirty-six, this held her back. After expressing a desire to return to education, Marion Boyars told her that, novelist or not, Quin would have to take a foundation course before being allowed to apply for university. Undaunted, Quin signed up at Hillcroft College.7 In spite of her initial trepidation, she found the course enervating. ‘I thought the literary syllabus might be somewhat stuffy’, she wrote to Boyars after her first week, ‘but no they do at least include Beckett and Pinter and Joyce!’.8 Not only had literature changed since the late 1950s, but education about literature had as well. It was now recognized, in some circles at least, that innovative writing may have continued after the supposed death of modernism in the 1930s. Quin’s time at Hillcroft went a long way towards her recuperation. Reading the novels that preceded the experimental works she and her friends had written gave her a renewed sense of value in what she had accomplished. Her psychiatry-inspired scepticism about her own work was giving way to a new enthusiasm for creation. At the same time, however, she was now living hand to mouth on money from Calder and Boyars. She had already spent all of her earnings and was so far into her next advance that Calder doubted they would ever see a return on the money advanced.9 A concerted effort to win her an Arts Council grant for 1973 had failed.10 There was then the question of universities, scholarships and bursaries which, despite offering hope for a new source of income, also meant that time Quin could

Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 16 February 1973. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 19 September 1972. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 9 Marion Boyars, Letter to Ann Quin, 8 February 1973. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 10 Marion Boyars, Letter to Ann Quin, 30 March 1973. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 7 8

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have spent writing ended up being used on attending open days, application letters and sourcing references.11 She was hopeful about attending university and saw it as a chance to start again. It didn’t seem to bother her that she was applying to institutions where she herself had once given lectures back in 1965 and 1966.12 If her treatment had taught her one lesson, it was humility. She was prepared to start all the way from scratch if it meant she could return stronger and better equipped for what she needed to write. But the hope would not last. By February, she had outright rejections from Reading, London University and Bristol. Only Sussex and the University of East Anglia offered her interviews.13 Both of these she attended, dressed in the new smart outfits she’d bought in preparation for studenthood, only to find that these too ended up rejecting her. ‘So it very much looks like I’ll be back in London after I end my course in July’, Quin wrote to Boyars from the common room at Hillcroft, ‘and I’m wondering if you can help me financially.’14 The sad fact was that Boyars couldn’t. She floated the idea of Quin taking on administrative work, but Quin’s continuing mental fragility and proven history of poor recordkeeping meant there was little room for her at the small Calder office. Instead, she returned to her mother’s bed and breakfast in Brighton. The place where it all began. Here she earned her keep the way she had when she was fourteen. The grotty clientele that had been the inspiration for Berg were now the people whose sheets she cleaned, whose breakfast she cooked and for whom she must always wear a smile. In August 1973, Ann Quin walked down onto Brighton beach, stripped off her clothes and swam out to sea. She swam past the Palace Pier and out into the powerful currents of the English Channel.15 From here, the water carried her away. Her body was found by a group of fisherman, washed up down the coast, a week after she entered the water.16 The news of Quin’s death travelled fast. The police interviewed her mother, and, learning of her recent breakdown, attributed the cause of death to suicide. Quin’s mother rang Marion Boyars, who rang John Calder, who told the Burnses and then the press. ‘A waste of great talent’, was all that Calder could bring himself to say, although by saying it he helped to satiate the press’ hunger for commentary, and so helped to shield Quin’s other friends and colleagues from the intrusions of reporters.17 Burns, Quin’s oldest ally in literary experiment and one of her closest friends, called on

Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 19 January 1973. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. Marion Boyars, Letter to The Trout Bookshop, 12 February 1965. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 13 Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 10 February 1973. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 14 Ann Quin, Letter to Marion Boyars, 6 May 1973. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 15 Jennifer Hodgson, ‘Introduction’, in The Unmapped Country (Sheffield: And Other Stories, 2018), p. 10. 16 John Calder, Pursuit (London: John Calder, 2001), p. 272. 17 Ibid., p. 273. 11 12

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Johnson for condolence.18 Johnson, as obtuse and stubborn as ever, refused to feel sorry for Quin. Instead, he declared, he admired her. Better to end your life altogether, he said, than to live it dishonestly. She wanted to die, and so she died.19 As unsettling as Johnson’s reaction was, Burns had little time, and even less patience, with which to deal with it. Instead, he and Marion Boyars were left to organize her funeral, collect her papers and tie up years of unresolved financial dealings that Quin had left behind. The paper trail stretched across continents. Among these was a £200 debt that Quin owed to Calder and Boyars for moneys lent and never repaid. This was written off as unrecoupable.20 Johnson too, it appeared, was in ever-increasing amounts of debt. His strange reaction to Quin’s suicide had been written off as just another one of Bryan’s idiosyncrasies, if a rather tasteless one. It was an attitude that, considering the situation, his friends preferred to ignore rather than humour. Yet his ever-intensifying trade unionist passions, his open sympathy for the Angry Brigade and his outspoken attacks on the Society of Authors all served to mask a man whose mental state was veering wildly out of control. The economic crash was hammering his residuals at a time when his wife was attempting to raise their children on a single, very precarious, writer’s income. Arguments between the two were growing cataclysmic, and he was drinking too much. He was convinced that MI5 were tapping his phone and reading his post. The figure of death had already begun to loom large for him prior to Quin’s suicide. His letters to his best friend Zulfikar Ghose, now a faculty member at the University of Texas, grew wild with capital letters, exclamation points and underlinings. In response to Ghose’s description of the literature course he taught on, Johnson blared back: No-one is much good anyway, what’s the point, etc? EH? WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT? And don’t give me all the old cock. There is no point: it is understanding this that is the point. You can (anyone can, the academics can) verbiage on about what’s in it: but what’s in it is DEATH, nothing more, and they can’t admit to that because that would cost them their living.21 Ghose considered this belligerent nihilism to be just another of Johnson’s militant poses. It was, he suspected, merely a more extreme version of the bluster that the writer was famous for. This was not to prove the case, however.

B. S. Johnson, Letter to Zulfikar Ghose, 6 September 1973. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, Texas. 19 Coe, 2004, p. 372. 20 Marion Boyars, Letter to Messrs Selwood, Leathers and Hooper, 29 October 1973. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 21 B. S. Johnson, Letter to Zulfikar Ghose, 13 August 1972. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, Texas. 18

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Johnson obsessed over death. Death and pointlessness. His notebooks, once filled with a stream of ideas, observations and jokes, were now primarily a channel for his most antisocial thoughts. ‘Down with intelligence. Long Live Death’, he wrote in the last pages of his final notebook, the line a ‘Spanish Fascist Slogan’.22 He was nevertheless busier than ever, editing two books of essays, writing a new novel, turning out screenplays and putting together an experimentalist manifesto. The news of Quin’s death, the subsequent funeral and grieving, drove death yet further to the forefront of Johnson’s mind. He was reading Tristram Shandy again, a book he first encountered at university, and which had opened his eyes to the possibilities of the novel form. Now, however, it was the story that struck him. The sickly Tristram, in trying to write his life story, gets caught in endless digressions, contracts a fatal illness that sends him fleeing to France, only to bring his novel to a close before reaching the moment of his own birth. In the final scene, Tristram recalls Yorick, a character who we see die earlier in the text, telling the story of a cock and a bull. Life, and by implication Tristram’s attempt to tell it, is shown to be just another cock and bull story. In the early winter of 1973, Johnson received a call from Harlech Television. They wanted to commission a documentary, and they didn’t mind what it was about, as long as it was situated in Wales. It was the country that Johnson had idolized in his first novel, Travelling People, and to which he’d returned many times since. Johnson agreed, and decided to use the forty-minute running time to create his own cock and bull story, a mess of jokes, reminiscences, folktales and, tying it all together, reflections on death. The result would be called, in a rare act of humorous self-abasement, Fat Man on a Beach. It was a very strange programme, especially considering that there were only three television channels in Britain at the time, and so, for one evening only, viewers had a choice between a soap opera, a game show and B. S. Johnson. Against the backdrop of Harlech beach, he told jokes, read poems about death, cut to a close-up of bananas and ended by walking out into the sea as the camera crew flew off in a helicopter without him. Depending on the viewer, the results were either deeply moving, funny or perhaps just strange and sad. To Johnson’s friends, those who had been close to Quin, the sight of him wandering out to sea was deeply unsettling, if not downright distasteful. Behind the scenes, Fat Man on a Beach had been both a zenith and a nadir for Johnson. On the upside, here was Johnson given free rein: no brief, no limits on budget, no editorial oversight. The whole team would pile into the Welsh pub where they were staying and consume vast rivers of alcohol every night, writing, acting out and inventing scenes that they’d

B. S. Johnson, Notebook 8, 1969–1973. Held in the British Library.

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shoot the next day. So colossal was the drinks bill that the producer had to hide it under ‘Hire of Boat’.23 At the end of each night, as every other crew member staggered drunkenly to bed, Johnson would carry a bottle of wine up to his room and work through until the early hours, generating a script for the next day based upon the best ideas of the night. The crew would remember it as an entirely joyful experience, a joy that is captured in the final piece. For Johnson himself, however, the fun was tinged with deep despair. Just before he left for Wales, his wife had run away from him, taking the children, hiding out with friends in Great Tew, afraid of the excesses to which Johnson’s drunken rage had led him.24 Now his drunkenness seemed perpetual. He drank in the mornings now too, something he had avoided even in his most excessive binges of earlier years. Such behaviour was not entirely unusual in the 1970s, however, especially among TV and literary people, and so it passed uncommented upon. Returning from Wales, Johnson was distraught. He felt he had nothing left, that there was no point all. After staying over at friends’ houses for a couple of nights, all of whom attributed his sadness to his wife leaving him and a natural inclination to melodrama, he finally returned home on the night of 12 November. There he got outrageously drunk and began ringing people. He made meetings for the next morning. He had ideas for new projects. Finally, he rang István Bart, a writer friend he had met during his trip to Hungary, and announced his intention to kill himself. Bart, hearing his drunkenness, did not believe the threat to be real, and so sought to calm Johnson down.25 Book a plane, he told him, and get to Hungary as soon as possible. He would always have a home among the dissidents. But in the end the conversation merely settled Johnson’s nerves. Next to an empty bottle on his writing desk, Johnson left a suitably self-referential suicide note: ‘this is my last . . . word.’26 He then climbed into the bath and opened his wrists in the manner of the Roman poet Petronius.27 He was found the next day. His wife, Virginia, sent a family friend around after she had received no answer to her phone calls. Johnson’s beloved mother had died only a year earlier, and, hearing the news of his son’s death, his father too passed away within a few weeks. This second suicide rocked the London literary world even harder than Quin’s had three months earlier. Johnson’s funeral took place overlooking the Thames, the great river down which he’d watched the British and American naval vessels move as a boy.

Alan Burns, ‘Human Like the Rest of Us: A Life of B.S. Johnson’. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 17, no. 2 (1997): 162. 24 Coe 2004, p. 385. 25 Ibid., p. 385. 26 Burns 1997, p. 178. 27 Coe 2004, p. 385. 23

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The church was packed, with 300 people in attendance, friends and admirers from across the literary world, TV people and journalists, alongside old university friends and the working-class drinking buddies with whom he’d increasingly surrounded himself towards the end.28 There was no ceremony. No one had thought to prepare anything. Instead, the crowd sat in silence, letting the memory of the man linger, before carrying his coffin out to the grave, watching it sink into the ground and then, uncertain on what to do, but not wanting to leave, they simply stood there, not speaking.29 The news had come as a total surprise to most.30 Only his closest friends had realized something was wrong, and even they had not expected it when it came. The big man of the experimentalist movement, the campaigner for the good stuff, B. S. Johnson, was dead. But behind him he left a huge legacy. Not only in the books he had already produced, but in the substantial amount of writing he left behind. His most fraught and emotionally turbulent final years had, it transpired, also been the most prolific of his entire career. Foremost among these projects was a work that he had come to call the Matrix Trilogy. Started very soon after his mother’s death in 1971, the trilogy was to tell the story of his mother’s life in three parts.31 Only the first of these was in any real state of completion, and covered everything from the meeting of his mother and father to his own birth. In another Sternean parallel, Johnson left the story incomplete. It fell to his editors at Heinemann to piece together a working text out of what was left, guided along by Giles Gordon and Alan Burns with whom Johnson had discussed his plans for the work. The resulting novel, See the Old Lady Decently (1975), was published posthumously and took, out of necessity, a collage form. Snippets of Emily’s life, that being Johnson’s mother, are punctuated by moments of his own, especially childhood reminiscences. These are interweaved with reflections upon life, love and, Johnson’s last great obsession, death. The novel begins and ends with the image of a ‘Great Round, uroboros, container of opposites, within which we war, laugh and are silent’.32 Set against the ever-present backcloth of death, the novel’s fleeting images take on the quality of a deathbed reverie: life flashing before the eyes. An extra poignancy is added by the author’s own death, placing him alongside his mother as one who is now only memory.33 Graphic devices, one of Johnson’s most notable recurring techniques, are used sparingly here. This may be a product of the book being finished

Giles Gordon, ‘Alpha’, in Beyond the Words, ed. Giles Gordon (London: Heinemann, 1975), p. 132. 29 Ibid., p. 138. 30 Heppenstall, 1986, p. 122. 31 Burns 1997, p. 167. 32 B. S. Johnson, See the Old Lady Decently (New York: Viking Press, 1975), p. 17. 33 Rod Mengham, ‘Antepostdated Johnson’, in B.S. Johnson and Post-War Literature, ed. Julia Jordan and Martin Ryle (London: Palgrave, 2014), p. 134. 28

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by others. Johnson normally worked out the formal arrangements of his books after already being far into their writing. Nevertheless, the apparent restraint that this lends to See the Old Lady Decently makes its utterances more solemn, like statements made in silence, and re-emphasizes the power of his graphic innovations when he does use them. As the novel comes to a close, the uroboros turning another Great Round, we are presented with the birth of baby Bryan: They gave her no drugs, just a whiff of chloroform towards the latter stages Which were over by about half past one in the morning So: it began with the Great Round, everything to follow:

From them From Em

From embryo to embryan from Em Me.34 The end is a suitable one for Johnson’s fiction. Its simplicity verges dangerously on the trite, as with so many of his innovations. Yet with a sympathetic reading the moment is touching, even powerful. The separation of Em from Bryan moves through the stages of embryo (the two beings as one whole – ‘o’), to embryan (two entities in one body), to the final separation of Em and Me (the two now distinct, but mirroring each other). A series of simple statements that are nevertheless capable of inviting profound thoughts. The same could be said of everything good in Johnson’s work. The novel, despite being unfinished, did a good job of laying him to rest. Reviewers agreed, seeing the book for what it was, a rough diamond that, no longer able to be cut and polished, was nevertheless captivating in its imperfection.35 Without its author’s energy, it did not sell as well as Johnson’s previous novels, but still managed the peculiar Johnsonian feat of reaching a mass market with experimental material. The rest of Johnson’s unpublished works took the form of essays, short stories and edited collections. You Always Remember the First Time (1975), for example, was a collection of short reminiscences by writers about their first sexual experiences: some funny, some romantic, some tragic. All Bull (1973) did the same thing but for writers’ experience of national service.

Ibid., p. 139. Richard Leigh Harris, ‘“From Embryo to Embryan”; See the Old Lady Decently – A Problematic Birth’, in Re-Reading B.S. Johnson, ed. Glyn White and Philip Tew (London: Palgrave, 2007), p. 75. 34 35

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Foremost among his posthumous collections, however, was a selection of stories and essays gathered from across Johnson’s career that would be released as Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973). Stories were reprinted from Ghose and Johnson’s early collaboration, Statement Against Corpses (1964), alongside stories from later years and some previously unpublished work. A particularly ghoulish story, ‘Everybody Knows Somebody Who’s Dead’, was among the last papers that Johnson left on his desk before leaving for the Fat Man trip. Written originally in 1972, it concerned a mid-level businessman called Charles, who, tired of his mundane life, ‘employed the good services of the North Thames Gas Board’ and commits suicide.36 The story is told by an old acquaintance of Charles’ who only finds out about the death long after the funeral has passed. All he can do is reflect on Charles’ death and carry on. The story ends with him finding Charles’ obituary and noting that all it says of him regarding notable accomplishments was the fact that he arranged a lunch club to promote networking among local businessmen. ‘There was more than that’, Charles’ old friend tells us, ‘but that is all it said, all there was to say, his life summed up, the obituary, full point.’37 Short stories were not Johnson’s strong point, and so it takes a while to reach this conclusion, with a number of digressive incidences along the way. When the conclusion finally comes, however, it strikes home. Especially when set against the collection’s militant introduction. The experimentalist manifesto that Johnson started writing in 1973, but had essentially been preparing all his adult life, was used as the introductory essay to Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? and was the piece from which the title was lifted. ‘Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?’ stands as the most complete written exposition of Johnson’s experimental mission. It is littered with his mottos and mantras: ‘telling stories is telling lies’ (first appearing in Albert Angelo [1964]) and ‘literature is a relay race, the baton of innovation passing from one generation to another. . . . British novelists have dropped the baton’ (a line lifted from Nathalie Sarraute:38 Johnson and Ann Quin had attended her 1962 talk together).39 Only a small handful of writers, he argued, were among those that were carrying the baton of innovation forward. These were his chosen ones, those ‘writing as though it mattered, as though they meant it, as though they meant it to matter’, and around whom he had built his decade-long

B. S. Johnson, ‘Everybody Knows Somebody Who’s Dead’, in Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? (London: Hutchinson, 1973a), p. 139. 37 Ibid., p. 140. 38 B. S. Johnson, ‘Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?’ in Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? (London: Hutchinson, 1973b), p. 30. 39 Heppenstall 1986, p. 120. 36

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‘campaign for the good stuff’.40 The list he provides reads as a who’s who of experimentalists from the British 1960s: Samuel Beckett (of course), John Berger, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Angela Carter, Eva Figes, Giles Gordon, Wilson Harris, Rayner Heppenstall, even hasty, muddled Robert Nye, Ann Quin.41 There are a couple of names missing, however. Maureen Duffy is one, J. G. Ballard another. But the most surprising missing name is that of Zulfikar Ghose. Ghose had been Johnson’s experimental ally from the very start. The two of them had made huge plans and, in a way, even managed to accomplish them. They remained in close correspondence right until the end, although their working relationship had begun to slip away as early as 1964. Ghose, it became clear, was a traditional writer who merely longed for new stories, whereas Johnson sought to tear apart the entire conceptual fabric of what we consider a story to be. From his office on campus at the University of Texas, Ghose traded letter after letter with Johnson, patiently defending academics, librarians, reviewers, publishers, editors or anyone else that Johnson flew into capital-lettered rages at, all while engaging him in meaningful discussions about the future of literature. As he read an early draft of ‘Aren’t You Rather . . .’, he could hear Johnson’s voice in it, sounding exactly as it had back in London. He could feel Johnson’s presence. ‘The polemical, belligerent tone of the piece, the posture of deliberately provoking offence’ were quintessential Johnson, as were ‘the suggestions that the writer is in exclusive possession of the truth and the reader contemptibly stupid if he does not accept that truth’. As he read, he could almost hear ‘the voice rising, getting more irritated and excited’.42 Johnson, for Ghose, had always been this way. He was the same at university, and the years had not mellowed him. They had been close. Tremendously close. It was for this reason that Virginia, Johnson’s widow, sent a telegraph to Ghose the day after the news came. ‘BRYAN DIED SUICIDE’ was all that it read.43 Ghose was astounded, heartbroken, but most of all, he was angry. ‘Fuck you Bryan!’ was all he could think, for months afterwards. He made no effort to attend the funeral, no effort to console Virginia, choosing to avoid her when he came to London on business. He gave away every letter, every scrap of Johnson’s writing to the university archives. For ten years all he could think was, ‘Fuck you Bryan’. The pointlessness of his suicide, the sheer waste of it, and selfishness,

Johnson 1973, p. 29. Ibid. 42 Ghose, 1985, p. 27. 43 Ibid., p. 31. 40 41

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haunted him. It took him over a decade to recover. Only then could he bring himself to write his reminiscences, and only then could he allow himself to mourn.44

Experiment to theory In Paris, the revolution had failed. May 1968, when people of all walks of life came together – students and factory workers, migrants and artists – gave way to an endless splitting up of interests, mutual suspicion and attribution of blame. In the universities, particularly the more radical campuses like Vincennes, the result was a retreat into elaborate intellectual systematizing. From a campus ablaze with protest and parties, Christine Brooke-Rose’s institution had transformed into a centre for the new poststructuralist thought. A broad range of thought had existed before 1968, admittedly all of it the far left. In the shadow of the revolution, this diversity was to be subsumed and formalized into a new, unified language. The material world was to be displaced by its signifiers.45 For Brooke-Rose, no radical herself, the transformation was initially to be welcomed. The firebrands who used to rouse students and lead mobs through the streets now expended their energies in furious private arguments over the minor details of the new esoteric theory. They reminded Brooke-Rose of medieval theologians, berating each other over metaphysical nuances of doctrine.46 As a former scholar of Middle English and Anglo-Saxon, her comparison with cloistered monks was a positive one, albeit a little tongue-in-cheek. The new poststructuralist theories were, after all, overwhelmingly popular. Poststructuralist writers and thinkers were selling out lecture halls and theatres across Paris. A Barthes or a Kristeva could draw the same numbers as a rock band. Their fans were even more fervent in their idolization. When Roman Jakobson came to speak at the College de France, the line for seats stretched across two blocks, with students taking their places at 8.00 am for the 7.00 pm talk.47 Poststructuralist theory, for those who understood it, or at least pretended to, would sublimate the tremendous energies unleashed by 1968 and channel them into a potent mix of abstract structuralizing and self-criticism. Poststructuralism offered an explanation as to exactly why the revolution failed, and it was no longer the same old reheated Marxist bogeymen of the state and the capitalists. The revolution failed, they argued,

Ibid., p. 34. E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (London: Merlin Press, 1978), p. 211. 46 Lorna Sage, ‘Interview with Christine Brooke-Rose’, in Invisible Author: Last Essays, ed. Christine Brooke-Rose (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), p. 180. 47 Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Viewpoint’. Times Literary Supplement, No. 3717, 1 June 1973, p. 614. 44 45

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because of language itself. The very words that we use in order to think were polluted almost irrecoverably by the all-pervasive middle class, the dreaded bourgeoisie. Going out into the streets failed, the radicals were told, because they themselves were already structured by bourgeois language. Better to deconstruct this language than to continue a fight that was bound to lose. Fatigued and disillusioned, without hope of victory, radicals young and old embraced this new occultism.48 By an accident of her personal friendships, the apolitical Brooke-Rose found herself in the inner circle of the most radical group of poststructuralists, those who published the journal Tel Quel. Helene Cixous, an early admirer of Brooke-Rose’s, who won her the job at Vincennes, had introduced her to Kristeva, Sollers and Todorov, three of the leading writers at Tel Quel. These, in turn, invited her to dinner parties with the likes of Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida.49 The underlying philosophy to which all of BrookeRose’s Parisian friendship circle ascribed was that, provided sufficient close reading and analytical work was done, radicals could theoretically liberate themselves from the restraints of bourgeois society.50 ‘And all of this without even needing a revolution’, Brooke-Rose once joked at a Tel Quel party. Offended, Philippe Sollers responded, ‘No, Christine, the is the revolution.’51 In spite of the ardent seriousness with which her colleagues pursued their theorizing, Brooke-Rose found something rather silly about the whole thing. Yes, she was impressed. Listening to the state of literary debates on the BBC, she believed London to be at least ten years behind Paris.52 Nevertheless, the Parisian obsession with language above all else, and the subsuming of all other debates under linguistic concerns, struck her as unintentionally ludic.53 ‘There is a very curious feeling that it is all a beautiful, theoretical game’, she wrote in the Times Literary Supplement in 1973, ‘and one that they themselves don’t perhaps believe in.’54 In the same article, she depicts the poststructuralist theories of her colleagues as tiny universes unto themselves: ‘the Levi-Strauss Palace, the Derrida Daedalus, the Lacan Labyrinth, the Kristeva Construct, the Barthes Pavilion, the Planetarium showing the Sollers System.’55 ‘They are impressive’, she warns, ‘but there is a temporary feeling about them.’56

Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (London: Blackwell, 1997), p. 25. Natalie Ferris, ‘Manna in Mid-Wilderness’, in The Christine Brooke-Rose Festschrift (Singapore: Verbivoracious, 2014), p. 284. 50 Birch, 2002, p. 207. 51 Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Ganging Up’. The Spectator, 27 March 1976, p. 26. 52 Ian Hamilton, host. ‘Programme 16: The Yorkshire Ripper, Melvyn Bragg, Christine Brooke-Rose’. Bookmark BBC2, 7 May 1986. 53 Birch 2002, p. 209. 54 Brooke-Rose 1973, p. 614. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 48 49

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Despite the ludic nature of poststructuralism, or perhaps because of it, Brooke-Rose found herself sucked in to the new world of signs and signifiers in a way that she had never quite experienced before with academia. The theories, she found, were so beautifully complete in themselves that they almost entirely enclosed the texts they were supposed to be interpreting. Reading the work of psychoanalyst-turned-poststructuralist Lacan, she felt as if every one of her experimental intuitions had already been reached and then surpassed in his writing. It was there, laid out before her, in a more complete and systematic form than her own literary mind had been capable of.57 The seriousness and certainty of Parisian theory made her British experimentalism seem puerile by comparison. She even wrote a short story in which a fatuous celebrity called Queenie brought out a book called Spirals, ‘a ghosted collection of her metaphysical telly-aphorisms selling like hot electricity on account of her game and thinness’.58 Brooke-Rose’s own deeply held beliefs of only a few years before are here presented as the products of an airheaded, fundamentally unlikable TV star. Queenie describes Brooke-Rose’s own scientific experimentalism using terms nearly identical to Brooke-Rose, only now the intention is that we laugh at her: ‘everything is a spiral she said, the galaxies, the thread of life, the history of knowledge and the neurological system.’59 This theory, that the universe consisted of endless spirals or vortexes, was one she had taken from her hero, Pound, and had inspired her to write Such. Despite her stark originality, independentmindedness and her true conviction that literature could and should be different in the modern era, all Brooke-Rose now saw in her previous work was a poor, unread Brit ten years behind her intellectual superiors in Paris. Indeed, in Paris itself the very notion of an author was becoming grossly unfashionable. Every fashionable magazine and television show across the land was now celebrating their death. The death of the author meant different things for different people. For writers like Foucault, authors were mere baubles, names attached to texts as a result of property relations. The true function of the literary industry was to provide revolutionaries with a body of bourgeois ideology to be critiqued and deconstructed.60 Meanwhile, for Roland Barthes, the author needed to die in order that readers could be free to make their own interpretations of texts. Readers must be liberated from the controlling hand of the original writer’s intentions.61 The idea that

Christine Brooke-Rose, Lecture notes entitled ‘Remaking’, 1996. Held in John Rylands Archive, Manchester. 58 Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Queenie Fat and Thin’, in Go When You See the Green Man Walking (Singapore: Verbivoracious, 2014), p. 134. 59 Ibid., p. 127. 60 Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader, trans. and ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 103. 61 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), p. 148. 57

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a writer’s opinion of their own work might help us to form our own opinion was not something that was countenanced by the poststructuralists. It was an either/or question. Either authors were sole arbiters of what a text means or its meaning was entirely defined by societal power structures embedded in language. For a creative writer like Brooke-Rose who was deeply involved with poststructuralist theorizing, the psychological contradictions were stultifying. How do you write a novel while not believing in authorship? She had a number of ideas, all of which she tried, and all of which she abandoned. Her new novels, when compared with the serious theory she was reading in Tel Quel, seemed frivolous and, as much as she hated to phrase it that way, potentially bourgeois. Instead, she settled on the idea of writing a novel in theory. The novel, provisionally called Textermination, was to be ‘a novel about the theory of the novel . . . a text about intertextuality, a fiction about fictionality’. It was to ‘send up structuralist jargon’, but also ‘use it as poetry’.62 The work began in 1971 and continued throughout the process of poststructuralism’s rise to fame. By the mid-decade, theory had colonized the entire French academy.63 The journey to poststructuralism’s takeover was not an entirely smooth one, however. Ideas aren’t simply adopted in academia; the displacement of one set of theories with another usually involves the mass displacement of professors, deans and department heads in favour of new figures willing to tow the new lines. In Brooke-Rose’s case, this meant the all-important control of the humanities department at Vincennes. Since its first inception, the post-1968 university had been a battleground fought over by members of the Communist Party and the even more left-wing Gauchistes. Within Brooke-Rose’s school, the line was drawn between Brooke-Rose’s own American Literature Section, dominated by communists, and their rival Linguistics Section, dominated by the Gauchistes. Brooke-Rose, despite doing her best to keep her head down and remain apolitical, and in spite of her many close friends in the Gauchiste Tel Quel, was nevertheless counted within Vincennes’ internal politics as one of the communists. To her, none of this mattered. It was merely another part of the poststructuralist game. The often absurd posturing at departmental lunches was, as far as she was concerned, just more material for Textermination. Yet, in 1974, the situation suddenly turned serious. In order to remain in the country and hold her position at Vincennes, Brooke-Rose had to commit to the European process of titularization. Essentially an extra step beyond PhD, European academics are awarded professorships once a suitable chair is made available to them at their institution and following the submission of a professorial thesis. For Brooke-Rose, working hard and staying out

Friedman and Fuchs, 1995, p. 36. Frank Kermode, Letter to Christine Brooke-Rose, 16 August 1971. Held in the Harry Ransom Archive, Austin, Texas. 62 63

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of politics, the awarding of her title was long overdue by 1974. But, just as it seemed as if it was about to go ahead, the Gauchistes in the rival Linguistics Section stepped in. For the price of Brooke-Rose’s chair, they argued, a young and brilliant PhD student could be given a full bursary. It just so happened that they had one in hand: Jacqueline Gueron. Gueron was a fluent poststructuralist and the leader of a tiny Maoist sect that had formed during the 1968 events.64 Against this attempted coup, the American Literature department mobilized the full force of its Communist Party allies across the institution. The Gauchistes, in response, mobilized theirs. Soon a new civil war was brewing at Vincennes, and this time Christine BrookeRose couldn’t hide. She was subjected to the most shocking and degrading harangues from colleagues and students, denounced as bourgeois and as a Stalinist stooge. Ultimately, she was presented as a mortal enemy of the young Gueron, a young woman for whom she had no bad feelings, and to whom she tried writing on numerous occasions to explain her position. Despite apologizing to Gueron for the uproar, her letters were spurned.65 There was nothing to be done. The Gauchistes were in the ascendant, and so trampled Brooke-Rose’s hopes of titularization into the dust. In despair, she turned to her estranged husband, Jerzy Peterkiewicz. Still an active expatriate poet in London, Peterkiewicz sought help from friends and colleagues, especially those within academia. Within a week he had discovered a visiting professorship being offered by a university in America, SUNY-Buffalo.66 Anthony Burgess had just returned from a short stint of lecturing at CCNY, a college across town from SUNY, and highly recommended it. Brooke-Rose applied and in a short time was accepted. After the chaos of the titularization affair, Vincennes were quite happy to sign off on a semester’s sabbatical for Brooke-Rose. The most dignified thing to do, they felt, was for her to take some time away and return once things had calmed down. Her reception at SUNY-Buffalo, by contrast, was warm and genial. The university paper ran a half-page article celebrating the arrival of their new, ‘internationally celebrated’ scholar and touting the close relations between Buffalo and the ‘world leading’ Vincennes.67 The Americans, it seemed, were desperate to learn about poststructuralism. Having experienced their own hopeful 1960s moment coming to an end, the promise of a radical future in the esoteric systems of French theorists held a huge appeal. Unlike the French universities, however, where poststructuralist posturing brought chaos and infighting, American campus

Christine Brooke-Rose, Letter to Jerzy Peterkiewicz, 23 June 1974. Held in the Harry Ransom Archive, Austin, Texas. 65 Christine Brooke-Rose, Letter to Jacqueline Gueron, 4 December 1975. Held in the Harry Ransom Archive, Austin, Texas. 66 Jerzy Peterkiewicz, Letter to Christine Brooke-Rose, 29 June 1974. Held in the Harry Ransom Archive, Austin, Texas. 67 ‘Mrs Brooke-Rose is Butler Prof’. State University of Buffalo, 31 October 1974, p. 43. 64

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life was a haven of peace and tranquillity.68 Here, Brooke-Rose could explain the core concepts of poststructuralism calmly and precisely, while the students listened either enthralled or, at the very least, sitting quietly in the hope of getting a good grade. In her spare time she returned to Textermination; only now she stripped the book of any radical undertones it might have had. From a radical exploration, it transitioned into a pure parody of poststructuralism and university politics.69 She also turned her hand to codebreaking, becoming pleasantly obsessed with the codes that Thomas Jefferson used in his communications during the war of American independence. XTZBK49HT, she worked out, definitely meant ‘revolution’.70 This gave her a cypher, and, as she knew from her days in Bletchley Park, a one-word cypher was often all you needed to crack the rest. Whether the love of codes, instilled into her during the war, had helped to draw her into poststructuralism was an intriguing question. Both were intensely cerebral linguistical puzzles, played at like games. Both claimed to be fighting fascism. The big difference being that, of the two, the French academics took it far more seriously. Brooke-Rose returned to Vincennes in the January of 1975, making the last changes to the Textermination manuscript during her flight back. All positive references to revolution had been stripped out, leaving the text as an entirely self-deconstructing labyrinth of poststructuralist theory. Its characters, aware that they are characters, nevertheless argue about literary theory in long, free-flowing sentences. Poststructuralist jargon folds into an experimentalist melange of imagery similar to that of Such. Where Such offers a way out of the dream; however, the new novel reiterates the unsettling message that as everything is a text, there is nothing beyond the novel. The world is only a collection of images deconstructing themselves. For example, we find our class enveloped in a ‘blue lacuna of learning’: Unlearning a text within a text passed on from generation to generation of an increasing vastness that nevertheless dwindles to an elite initiated to a text no one else read by means of the flick of a switch for the overhead projector diagrams drawn into a boxed screen to the right of the desk with a spirit-loaded pen thus not losing eye contact.71 The deconstruction of the text, which we are reminded is only part of the text-in-general, or ‘society’, is taking place in the same run-on sentence

David Hayman, Letter to Christine Brooke-Rose, 5 September 1974. Held in the Harry Ransom Archive, Austin, Texas. 69 Christine Brooke-Rose, Thru Manuscript No. 3, Notebook 4, 1973. Held in the Harry Ransom Archive, Austin, Texas. 70 Eva Hesse, Letter to Christine Brooke-Rose, 17 July 1974. Held in the Harry Ransom Archive, Austin, Texas. 71 Christine Brooke-Rose, Thru. In Omnibus (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), p. 585. 68

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wherein we are introduced to our students preparing for deconstruction. The description eventually gives way to a story at once spoken by, lived in and analysed by the class. Moments that are considered too patriarchal or insufficiently revolutionary are corrected. The flow of text is broken up by diagrams and charts, as well as a series of abstracted graphic devices. These graphical innovations were a first for Brooke-Rose, suggesting the influence of the late B. S. Johnson. Eventually, the reader is overwhelmed and dazzled by the crashing waves of ontological breaks. Characters are revealed to be constructs as they deconstruct the character revealing them, and the reader is left with only one conclusion to draw: that the novel is nothing but text, pure text, without referent. Brooke-Rose, directing the reader towards this conclusion from the start, opens the novel with a pair of eyes looking in a car’s rear-view mirror, or ‘retrovisor’. The road behind them is made, we are told, of text. Two lights are reflected there. All they reflect is text.72 By the end, these eyes are revealed as ‘I’s, the implied position of the reader, and the road they drive on is the novel itself. Brooke-Rose achieves a unique feat in the history of the novel and writes a book that analyses itself out of existence before the reader can even get near it. Her publishers were baffled but were willing to take a risk on what amounted to her most elaborate experiment to date. They requested only a single change. ‘Textermination’, they argued, was far too close to Burroughs.73 His book Exterminator! came out in 1973. Obligingly, Brooke-Rose produced a new title: Thru. As Brooke-Rose sent reader’s copies of the novel out to her long-time friends and collaborators, she was already foreseeing trouble. As enclosed as she was by the strange world of poststructuralist theory, outside of Paris the philosophy had little to no presence, even among intellectuals. Thru was an English language novel (when it wasn’t in French, German, Ancient Greek or Latin), and was still to be released only in Britain. Even among the best read of London’s literati, poststructuralism was considered a bizarre French fad, and only a small proportion of the philosophers that BrookeRose’s novel parodied had appeared in translation. In a letter accompanying the novel, Brooke-Rose explained to her friends that they needn’t be overwhelmed by the difficulty. The novel was totally mimetic, she argued, a direct representation of how we really think and speak.74 It was only difficult because readers expected to find certain formal elements inherited from the nineteenth century, and she hadn’t provided them. Not wanting to seem stupid, her friends replied with a hesitant enthusiasm. Eva Hesse praised the innovative design of the book and promised she would read

Ibid., p. 742. Raleigh Trevelyan, Letter to Christine Brooke-Rose, 26 March 1975. Held in the Harry Ransom Archive, Austin, Texas. 74 Brooke-Rose 1996, p. 4. 72 73

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it soon, ‘though I suppose I’ll have to take a few brain pills in advance’.75 Mary de Rachewiltz didn’t even mention the book’s contents, preferring to praise Brooke-Rose for all the hard work that must have gone into it.76 Finally, Jerzy, her semi-estranged husband, praised the printers for doing an excellent job and swore, deeply and surely, that one day he would indeed get around to reading it.77 Her friends’ reactions were indications of what was to come. The novel finally appeared on the shelves in July 1975. To its credit, the initial buzz was sufficient to move a thousand copies: a solid figure for an experimental work and more than the majority of Calder imprints sold on launch.78 Many of these sales can be attributed to the capital that BrookeRose had built up with her experimental novels of the 1960s. However, once her British audience set about actually reading the book, sales dropped off sharply. Reviews came pouring in, all looking for a chance to bash the Frenchified experimental interloper. ‘There is no concession to anything like a common reader’, wrote Valentine Cunningham in the New Statesman, ‘it’s the sense of a closed shop that irks’.79 The Times and The Spectator blasted it too. Lorna Sage, an ardent defender of Brooke-Rose’s earlier novels, sadly admitted that ‘the associations she produces seem to belong entirely to the front of one’s mind rather than remoter or more mysterious regions’.80 The difficult surface of the text was commented upon jokingly as something resembling a crossword puzzle. ‘Punsters and crossword-puzzle addicts are her audience I think’, said the Telegraph, while the Scotsman recommended the novel as ‘an excellent holiday alternative to the crossword puzzle’.81, 82 Throughout the entire country, Brooke-Rose’s Thru had become a byword for literary experimentation gone too far. Widely accepted to be impenetrable, elitist and without emotion or story, it served to mark the end of a movement that was already burned out and broken. Readers no longer had patience with experimentalism, and society as a whole had lost faith in the idea of a new literature, or perhaps a new anything. The audacity of literary experiment belonged to a former era, an era of hope and change. Brooke-Rose’s insular, ironic and self-defeating novel received only one positive review and that was from the Financial Times. They

Eva Hesse, Letter to Christine Brooke-Rose, 3 August 1974. Held in the Harry Ransom Archive, Austin, Texas. 76 Mary de Rachewiltz, Letter to Christine Brooke-Rose, 10 November 1974. Held in the Harry Ransom Archive, Austin, Texas. 77 Jerzy Peterkiewicz, Letter to Christine Brooke-Rose, 29 June 1975. Held in the Harry Ransom Archive, Austin, Texas. 78 Raleigh Trevelyan, Letter to Christine Brooke-Rose, 15 July 1975. Held in the Harry Ransom Archive, Austin, Texas. 79 Valentine Cunningham, ‘Text Appeal’. New Statesman, 25 July 1975. 80 Lorna Sage, ‘Black Bugs on a Page’. The Observer, 11 July 1975. 81 ‘Reviews’. Daily Telegraph, 14 July 1975. 82 James Allan Ford, ‘The Heights of Summer’. Weekend Scotsman, 12 July 1975. 75

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rightly recognized Thru as an indicator of things to come. The wave of poststructuralism would eventually hit British universities, they realized, as it was already showing signs of popularity in America. The smart, Europefacing businessman would do well to read Thru, they recommended.83 Distraught at the failure of her novel, Brooke-Rose left Paris again as soon as the semester ended. She drove to Munich and stayed with her old friend Eva Hesse. By this time Hesse was a convinced Maoist and would continually badger Brooke-Rose over her apolitical stance on writing.84 Hesse’s arguments were what Brooke-Rose had come to expect after her time at Vincennes, and, in the light of Britain’s total refusal of her work, were in fact now welcome and, in their way, nostalgic. After Eva Hesse, she would head south. She went to Italy and stayed with the Burgesses. Anthony Burgess was, by now, an active member of the Roman literati and brought Brooke-Rose up to speed on his many run-ins, particularly those with Muriel Spark, whom he loathed, and the director Federico Fellini, to whom he was indifferent. He consoled her on her fall from grace, regaling her with tales of woe from his time defending A Clockwork Orange. ‘I suppose each writer gets a different “bit” (and bit is all it is) of success’, she later wrote to Burgess by way of a thank you, ‘and what seems like success from outside isn’t so to the writer, who always has something to grumble about.’85 Brooke-Rose, for her part, would not write creatively again for nine years. She returned to Vincennes and embraced the high-intensity world of poststructuralist argumentation, carving out her own small niche in the labyrinth of literary theory. When she did return to novel writing in 1984, the world was ready for her. Poststructuralism was everywhere; its theories were expounded even by British presses. Gone was her ironic take on poststructuralism; instead, she was to become a leading popularizer of the form, especially among earnest young Anglophone literature students. When she did finally come to write her story in her 1996 ‘anti-biography’, Remake, the final section of the manuscript, dealing with her time at Vincennes, was crossed out in red pen. The publisher’s lawyer considered it unpublishable. To any outside readership, the vicious world of ultraleftist bickering would be deeply scandalous. Her former colleagues, now giants of world academia, would no doubt sue.86 As a result, the story remained untold. That the death of experimentalism and the birth of poststructuralism happened at the very same moment is a phenomenon of great importance. The true importance of poststructuralism in the history

Isabel Quigley, ‘Vanishing Points Through the Mirror’. Financial Times, 10 July 1975. Christine Brooke-Rose, Early Drafts of Remake: typescript, p. 41. Held in Harry Ransom Archive, Austin, Texas. 85 Christine Brooke-Rose, Letter to Anthony Burgess, 10 August 1977. Held in the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester. 86 Christine Brooke-Rose, Prepenultimate Version of Remake, 1995. Held in Harry Ransom Archive, Austin, Texas. 83 84

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of literature and ideas, however, would be incomplete without a final conceptual ingredient. This idea would come from America, and it would be called postmodernism.

End of an era New Year’s Day 1974 was a desolate time for Alan Burns. He had lost two of his closest friends within three months of each other. Eva Figes, the fourth member of the original Writer’s Reading group alongside Quin and Johnson, shared in his sorrows. They met and reflected on their losses. Yet, somehow, there was no connection. The weight of their grief was such that they could only bear it alone. The two quiet, considerate experimentalists retreated into their own private worlds. For Burns, this retreat spelled the end for his marriage too. Although he never divorced his wife, Carol, the fractures that had been emerging in their relationship since the late 1960s finally cracked, and they decided to separate. Burns’ novels weren’t selling, and he was faced with no clear direction. His resolution that New Year’s Eve was to leave Britain and, ideally, never return. He had seen travel change his friends and colleagues, and he was well aware that other countries welcomed their writers in a way that Britain didn’t. So he set off. He travelled Europe first, but soon found that being alone in countries that spoke foreign languages was a profoundly alienating experience. In search of wilderness, he instead travelled to Australia. His trip to the southern continent reignited his passion for collecting raw material. Almost unconsciously he began amassing newspaper clippings, flyers and tourist guidebooks, collecting them all in a portable trunk that held more detritus and fewer clothes and toiletries as the weeks went by.87 As 1974 gave way to 1975, then 1975 to 1976, he found himself in America. He survived on travel writing and the occasional cheque from Calder. He began trading letters with American writers and academics, and called in on Robert Sward in Canada. He added his correspondence with writer friends to his collection of raw material. Then to the letters he added tapes, taped interviews with British writers travelling in the United States, or even interviews conducted over the phone. The materials filled the trunk. There were soon boxes and boxes of raw transcripts.88 Among these were interviews with Eva Figes, Alan Sillitoe, J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock and Wilson Harris. These sat alongside older tapes that included conversations with Johnson and Quin. Without meaning to, he was amassing the materials he needed for a new

Sugnet, 1981, p. 165. Ibid.

87 88

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book.89 Yet, still reeling from the tragic events of 1973, he could not bring himself to write it. In 1977, Burns broke into in American academia, getting a lectureship at the University of Minnesota. Here, despite his experimentalist credentials, he taught the history of literature in the old Leavisite manner. The creative writing workshops that he led focused exclusively on traditional, what he would formerly have called ‘neo-Victorian’ conventions. His students never knew he was an experimentalist; they had presumed him to be an oldfashioned English writer. Few were ever tempted to hunt down his books.90 On the radicalized campuses of the United States, tradition was out. What was in, at least among the most switched-on young lecturers and postgrads, was the new theory of postmodernism. French radical theory, smuggled into the United States under its new, esoteric guise as poststructuralism, was combined with the democratizing impulse of American popular culture.91 The result was a new attitude to the creative arts, one suspicious of good taste, judgement and earnestness. Instead, postmodernism adopted deconstruction as a way of pricking pomposity, celebrating kitsch and ushering in a detached, all-pervasive irony. In literary studies, intellectuals touted not so much the death of the author as the death of literature itself. In books like Raymond Federman’s Surfiction (1975), literature was denounced as an elitist artifice. Better to gather together writing and images found scattered around the city and read these as literature, or to use fiction to undermine the foundational concepts of its own construction. Character, plot, verisimilitude, all these were lies. The new self-reflective surfiction, Federman suggested, would surpass and surmount fiction, ‘not because surfiction imitates reality, but because it exposes the fictionality of reality’.92 What had begun in Paris as an attempt to deny the reality of the bourgeois world view, was transformed in America into a resurgence of Berkeleyan idealism. The world was a fiction, and fiction could expose this.93 This philosophy, popularized by the American academy, would come to dominate Western academia for the rest of the twentieth century. At the University of Minnesota, Burns found a new ally in his young colleague Charles Sugnet. Sugnet had been impressed by Burns’ grasp of tradition and sought out his books, only to be astounded by the experimental techniques he found there. For Sugnet, a recent convert to postmodernism, Burns’ novels represented a bridge between the radical left-wing politics he had pursued as a postgraduate and the new, seemingly apolitical, or

Alan Burns, ‘Preface’, in The Imagination on Trial, ed. Charles Sugnet and Alan Burns (New York: Allison and Busby, 1981), p. 1. 90 Charles Sugnet, ‘Burns’ Aleatoric Celebrations: Smashing Hegemony at the Sentence Level’. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 17, no. 2 (1997): 163. 91 Simon Choat, Marx through Post-Structuralism (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 17. 92 Raymond Federman, Surfiction (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975), p. 7. 93 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 146. 89

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rather ‘post-political’ philosophy of postmodernism. For Sugnet, the selfdismantling aesthetic of postmodernism suggested a dismantling of politics as well, but here were books like Celebrations and Dreamerika! that were, he wrote, ‘uncompromisingly political and uncompromisingly avant-garde at the same time’.94 Sugnet was even more astounded by this discovery as, prior to meeting Burns, his only contact with contemporary British writing had come from conservative professors who made a point of reading British writing specifically for its anachronistic charms. ‘Kingsley Amis, Margaret Drabble, and even C.P. Snow’ were favourites of these professors, he recalled, ‘the more sophisticated of whom admitted that [these novels] were genre escapism, like the detective story’.95 British literature, as far as these American professors were concerned, was a nostalgic world of untroubled neo-Victorianism. When Sugnet spoke to Burns about this, confessing a love for Burns’ outrageous and seemingly unique novels, Burns found himself attempting to explain the experimentalist movement, the things it accomplished and why, five years earlier, it had all come to a crashing halt. The two academics became friends, and, eventually, Burns introduced Sugnet to the mountain of raw material he had amassed since 1974. For Sugnet, the boxes were a treasure trove. Some writers, like Eva Figes and B. S. Johnson, he had never heard of, but was enthralled by their philosophies, seeming as they did to predict postmodernism by at least a decade. Others, like J. G. Ballard, were international figures, and ones that he had no idea were connected to a larger British movement of literary experiment. Burns, he insisted, had to put out a book of interviews. Burns eventually agreed, although he could not bring himself to write an introduction. He had already attempted to write a biography of B. S. Johnson and had failed miserably. Writing so soon after Bryan and Ann’s deaths had sent him into a deep depression. Sugnet, undeterred, conducted his own series of interviews with up-and-coming American postmodernists like Ishmael Reed and John Gardiner, before writing an introduction that claimed these British writers as proto-postmodernists.96 The book appeared as The Imagination on Trial in 1981. The title was a quotation from Wilson Harris, a writer who had done so much to inspire British experimentalism and who was still actively innovating, even into the 1980s. The book would be an important catalogue of experimentalist voices, albeit one packaged largely as a curiosity for a disinterested American market. In Britain, the ranks had closed on experimentalism. The deaths of Johnson and Quin had scattered the Calder circle to the four winds, and without this hardcore of experimentalists, it became the accepted wisdom that literary experiment was simply a late 1960s phase that the country

Sugnet 1997, p. 163. Sugnet, 1981, p. 3. 96 Burns 1981, p. 1. 94 95

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had grown out of, like Beatles haircuts and scientific socialism. Its legacy, as B. S. Johnson had warned in his parting manifesto, would be decided in the universities; and these were the natural home of his nemeses, the neoVictorians: Imagine the reception of someone producing a nineteenth-century symphony or a Pre-Raphaelite painting today! The avant garde ten years ago is now accepted in music and painting, is the establishment in these arts in some cases. But today the neo-Dickensian novel not only receives great praise, review space and sales but also acts as a qualification to elevate its authors to chairs at universities.97 Johnson’s paranoia about the establishment had never left him. Since the early satires of Prepar-a-Tory to the final battles over Public Lending Right, Johnson considered the odds to be stacked entirely against experiment. In many cases, he was right. The majority of literary academics would continue to ignore the existence of experimental writers in the same way they’d ignored them while the movement was active. For those traditionalists who could be drawn into commenting upon experimental writing, the work of these writers was largely dismissed as an aping of the earlier modernist movement. ‘The hankering for experiment still dies hard’, as Kingsley Amis put it, dismissing Nabokov’s Lolita as an overwritten, over-cerebral rehashing of D. H. Lawrence.98 C. P. Snow made similar comments, claiming that experiment was an old-fashioned type of charlatanism. Meanwhile, his own novels were being abandoned by readers in droves. The argument stuck, however, and even twenty years later, after a new generation of British writers claimed to have reinvented literary innovation once again, this time at the prompting of an imported American postmodernism, critics like Andrzej Gasiorek would still write off the British experimentalists of the 1960s as a ‘rarefied version of the earlier [modernist] shock tactics’ and the ‘fag-end of a dying tradition’.99 Ideally, most British academics would deny that experimentalism even existed, but if pushed, they would lament that modernism had been allowed to continue for so long. That the neoVictorians were from Oxbridge and the experimentalists unequivocally weren’t, no doubt contributed to British academia’s view of them as illegitimate usurpers. There were lone voices in the wilderness. Rubin Rabinovitz, an American academic working at Columbia University, published The Reaction

Johnson 1973b, p. 15. Kingley Amis, ‘She Was a Child and I Was a Child’, in Writing in England Today (London: Penguin, 1968). 99 Andrzej Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London: Edward Arnold, 1995), p. 19. 97 98

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Against Experiment in the English Novel in 1967. A book-length polemic against the artificiality and provincialism of neo-Victorian writers (in particular C. P. Snow, Kingsley Amis and Angus Wilson). Rabinovitz never explicitly mentions British experimental writers by name, but his rigorous deconstruction of the traditionalist’s underlying presumptions indicated a close sympathy with the experimentalists’ cause.100 Giles Gordon too sought to defend the experimentalists’ legacy in academia. A late arrival to the movement, Gordon had nevertheless wholeheartedly embraced the ideas that Johnson had introduced him to during their afternoon drinking sessions. His psychedelic murder mystery novel, Girl with Red Hair (1974), was one of the last British-authored experimental works put out by Calder and Boyars, and he had been instrumental, alongside Alan Burns, in bringing a number of B. S. Johnson’s unfinished manuscripts into print. Late in 1974, he contacted King’s College London, the alma mater of Johnson and Maureen Duffy and the place where the movement had started, and offered to deliver a lecture series on the experimentalists of the previous decade. He would talk about who they were, what they did and why their work was so important. The head of English begrudgingly accepted.101 Gordon, recently ousted from his editorial directorship at Gollancz, took up the lectureship with his usual vigour. He wrote a series of in-depth lectures mourning the loss of an important movement and offering a hopeful prediction that experimentalism would rise again. Sadly, only four or five students ever turned up to hear these lectures. It turned out that the head of English, perhaps out of malice, perhaps merely incompetent, had scheduled Gordon’s lectures at the exact same time as those of Professor Eric Mottram’s. Attendance at Mottram’s lectures was mandatory. If students wanted to pass their degree, they theoretically had to attend every one.102 At the time, that audience of five students had been tragic. In retrospect, Gordon was impressed that these five had chosen to risk their education in order to hear him talk. The desire for innovation was still there, albeit within a niche of a niche. But what drove Gordon to despair even more than his poorly attended lectures was the increasing popularity of a Penguin book first published in 1968. Writing in England Today, edited by Karl Miller, was marketed as an exhaustive overview of the many different types of writing present in England from the years 1953 to 1968. It held up the Oxbridge Movement poets as the founders of the modern era, before counting through the Angry Young Men, the colonial writers Chinua Achebe and V. S. Naipaul,

Rubin Rabinovitz, The Reaction Against Experiment in the English Novel, 1950–1960 (London: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 31. 101 Giles Gordon, Aren’t We Due a Royalty Statement? (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997), p. 146. 102 Ibid., p. 147. 100

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the spy novels of Fleming, the drama of Pinter, and the 1960s novels of Brigid Brophy, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing and Anthony Burgess.103 It painted a convincing portrait of post-war austerity giving way to 1960s social satire. The end of the British Empire was identified as the core concern of the period. The picture Miller paints is convincing and in many ways thorough, although what riled Gordon was Miller’s conscious excision of all experimental writing. The Penguin book came to stand in the eyes of many undergraduates as a continuation of the Pelican History of Literature: the central text on their reading list. Miller, of course, knew of the literary experiment, but chose to exclude it, and made no mention of its existence, as if there was no alternative to the narrative he created. Burgess was no stranger to experiment, and Brophy, Spark and Lessing had all produced experimental novels in their time, but Miller chose from their work only the most conventional passages pulled from the most conventional of their books. B. S. Johnson, upon first encountering the collection, remarked to Gordon that although he was against burning books, Karl Miller had succeeded in tempting him.104 In response to Miller’s collection, Johnson had proposed to Gordon that they collaborate on a counter-anthology. It was to contain the best experimentalist writing from the last decade. It would include writers entirely committed to experimentalism and a small selection of popular writers whose dabbling in an experiment was welcomed by Johnson.105 Figes and Burns were immediately on board. They were followed by figures like the artist Maggie Ross, creator of collage-novel The Gasteropod (1968), and the poet Robert Nye, who had briefly joined Calder’s stable with his stream-ofconsciousness novel Doubtfire (1967). The project had been loosely formed before Johnson’s death, more like a pipe dream among drinking buddies than a real plan. Johnson’s death changed all that.106 The contract for the book had been batted around different publishers for three years before Hutchinson finally decided to make an offer on it. Charles Clarke, their commissioning editor, rang Gordon, who in turn rang Johnson. Johnson never picked up. Gordon rang back at half-hour intervals all day, giving up in the evening as he had tickets for the theatre. The next morning he was told the news, Johnson had committed suicide two nights earlier. His body had been lying in the bath, as yet undiscovered, as Gordon rang with the good news.107 At first, this horrified Gordon. Yet, as the weeks went by and the grieving process eased, Gordon decided that completing the anthology would be his own personal way of commemorating Johnson.

Karl Miller, ‘Introduction’, in Writing in England Today (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 14. Gordon 1997, p. 153. 105 Gordon 1997, p. 154. 106 Booth, 2012, p. 651. 107 Gordon 1997, p. 154. 103 104

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He would complete the book as an act of remembrance.108 Johnson’s other unpublished work was being pieced together for publication in Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? and See the Old Lady Decently, so Gordon retrospectively included the script from Fat Man on a Beach as Johnson’s contribution to the collection. It sat alongside a short note from the director, Michael Bakewell, who remembered the shoot as a happy occasion.109 Gordon himself contributed a short story about Johnson’s funeral.110 The collection was also dedicated to Ann Quin, a writer who Gordon met only a few times in person, but for whom each of his collaborators and correspondents expressed great sympathy. Gordon contacted Marion Boyars, desperate for unpublished material, only to find that Boyars herself had been conducting a similar search, unsuccessfully, for the past six months. Eventually, he convinced her to let him go through Quin’s papers. Calder and Boyars had taken control of them after her death.111 Here he found sections of the unfinished autobiographical novel The Unmapped Country. Boyars had considered these too unpolished for posthumous publication, and, as one of Quin’s closest living confidants, she was all too aware of how much the fragmentary quality of the writing reflected Quin’s real psychological fragmentation. Nevertheless, Gordon won Boyars over, and a fragment of The Unmapped Country would appear in the collection. Unlike the rest of the creative pieces, Quin’s work was not accompanied by a critical essay. It was as if, having spent the last years of her life being dissected, analysed and probed for symptoms of delusion, Quin’s work was now finally allowed to speak for itself. Gordon wanted to name the collection after one of Quin’s favourite phrases, one that makes its fullest appearance in The Unmapped Country, the idea of ‘spaces between words’. That words have special cadences, palpable but unclassifiable, was something to which Quin, of all the experimental writers, was most attuned. By breaking with traditional forms, she believed, writers could liberate these spaces and make human communication more free, intuitive and easy. In the end Hutchinson didn’t like the title, and so it was slightly changed to become Beyond the Words. This, Gordon shrugged, would suit almost as well.112 A notable absence from the collection is Christine Brooke-Rose, although this wasn’t for lack of trying. Brooke-Rose proposed including material from Thru, still, at that time, a work-in-progress, but her publishers refused.113

Giles Gordon, ‘Portrait of the Editor as Author’, in Beyond the Words, ed. Giles Gordon (London: Heinemann, 1975), p. 131. 109 Michael Bakewell, ‘Note’, in Beyond the Words, ed. Giles Gordon (London: Heinemann, 1975), p. 147. 110 Gordon 1997, p. 155. 111 Giles Gordon. Letter to Marion Boyars, 23 February 1974. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 112 Giles Gordon, Letter to Marion Boyars, 14 March 1974. Held in the Lilly Library, Indiana. 113 Giles Gordon, Letter to Christine Brooke-Rose, 30 March 1974. Held in the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, Texas. 108

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In place of Brooke-Rose, Gordon sought out Anthony Burgess. A ‘father figure’ to the experimentalist movement, Burgess submitted a number of chapters from his forthcoming children’s book, A Long Trip to Tea Time.114 Alongside these he sent a short essay describing how he ‘greatly admired the books of B. S. Johnson and Ann Quin – not only for their willingness to try new things but also for their firmly traditional values’.115 Burgess’ numerous digs at experimental writers were, he clarified, not aimed at these two writers, both of whom tread the delicate line between innovation and self-indulgence in an effortless and elegant manner. Johnson in particular, Burgess argued, could have opted for mainstream success. He had all the required talent. Instead, to his credit, ‘he preferred to play some part in the development of the novel’.116 The curse of Johnson and Quin, Burgess lamented from his villa outside Rome, was that they were born in England, and the English do not care for their writers, especially not their innovative ones. With an American audience, or better, a European one, the two writers would have met with success, awards, literary prizes and perhaps even a film adaptation or two.117 As it was, two great writers who sought to keep the English novel alive were now themselves dead.118 Burgess’ writing would sit alongside that of Johnson, Quin, Burns and Figes in Gordon’s Beyond the Words,; a testimony to the reach and impact that the experimentalists had upon British writers. Burgess, by now an international bestseller, high in demand with Hollywood and winner of many European literary prizes, was the only writer of such high standing that recognized the experimentalists’ mission. He even counted himself among them on occasion. It is without a doubt that many other successful writers were influenced by them too, perhaps even more so than the idiosyncratic Burgess. Burgess was one of the few who were willing to own up to it. The great irony of Beyond the Words, subtitled ‘eleven writers in search of a new fiction’, was that, by the time of its release in 1975, the idea of a new British fiction no longer appealed to many British writers. The most audacious British writers of the next generation would take American postmodernism as their model.119 Authors like Ishiguro, Fowles and Julian Barnes would, admittedly, draw some inspiration from their 1960s predecessors, but their work is as much a reaction against movement experimentalism as a continuation of it. Gordon’s short tenure as a lecturer at King’s came to an end, and he moved back into publishing, concentrating now on more financially

Gordon 1993, p. 155. Anthony Burgess, ‘Introduction’, in Beyond the Words, ed. Giles Gordon (London: Heinemann, 1975), p. 19. 116 Ibid., p. 19. 117 Ibid., p. 20. 118 Ibid., p. 21. 119 Bernard Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 17. 114 115

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rewarding crime novels and, famously, he published the personal writings of Prince Charles. Johnson and Quin were dead. Brooke-Rose and Burgess were in Europe. Ghose and Burns were in America. Even trusty Jeff Nuttall had fled into the wilds of the North, shunning the London literary scene in its entirety. The only one left was Eva Figes. Figes, the quiet one; the sensitive one whose financial struggles, raising two children alone, had made her the only writer never to have left the country, never to have taken a break. Where the other experimentalists had experienced all the highs and lows of the turbulent 1960s and truculent 1970s, Figes had survived. She was a survivor, the last one left. But she was not invulnerable. The loss of her friends had shaken her to the core, and when Alan Burns left for America, it had broken her heart. She became entirely solitary, bereft of friendship, merely writing and raising her children.120 Even John Calder, the figurehead around whom the group had formed, shunned Figes. In the aftermath of Johnson’s funeral, feelings running high, Calder had berated Figes for not taking enough care of Johnson and Quin. Calder had always resented Figes’ choice to publish with Faber instead of with him, and, full of whisky and grief, he took this out on her in the most hurtful way possible. Calder was having something of a breakdown himself at this point. He considered the experimentalists to be his writers, and as he saw them fall apart, he became more and more despondent. Calder and Boyars had never turned a profit in his entire time running the company, although it had brought so many revolutionary new books into the public eye. Bankruptcy on the horizon, Marion Boyars split with the company, taking many of Calder’s writers with her, and initiating what would be a very messy corporate divorce. Calder would eventually drop out of publishing altogether and focus on politics. He ran for election in Fife as a Liberal, and lost twice, before setting up and chairing the Defence of Literature and Arts Society.121 Eventually, two years after his row with Figes, he wrote a letter expressing his deep regret and seeking forgiveness.122 Figes did forgive him, if only perhaps because there were so few people left to forgive. Eva Figes would keep writing. Her next novel, Days (1975), was an attempt to forgive her mother for the traumas of her early years. It is written as an experimental fusing of mother and daughter into a single voice, a pure flow of language, a new grid.123 She even got around to writing a book for Calder, albeit a historical study rather than an experimental novel. Tragedy and Social Evolution (1976) fused Figes’ personal experimental philosophy with an interrogation of the history of tragedy, all underpinned

Figes, 1985, p. 70. Richard Beith, ‘John Calder: Scottish Impresario and Scottish Liberal Politician’, in In Defence of Literature, ed. Jim Haynes (London: Mosaic Press, 1999), p. 69; Calder, 1970, p. 52. 122 John Calder, Letter to Eva Figes, 6 December 1975. Held in the British Library. 123 Eva Figes, Days (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), p. 96. 120 121

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by the feminist critique she had pioneered in Patriarchal Attitudes. It opens with a telling sentence: ‘I doubt whether it has ever been easy to be anything, let alone to write. However, individual genius is not necessarily enough, and it is important to be born at the right time.’124 Time will tell whether experimentalism was born at the right time. For Eva Figes, its last practitioner, working late into the night, her children asleep, and the cupboards near empty, it must have felt like the wrong time entirely. In retrospect, the experimentalists were certainly of their time, deeply engaged with their current moment, and the history and traditions that had brought them to it. For all we know, their impact could have been huge; there are traces of experimentalist influence all across the late 1960s and far beyond. But influence is a difficult thing to prove. As a writer, one writing as though it matters, as though you mean it to matter, you must make an implicit statement of faith. Faith in the future of your medium. Faith in the future of your words, and of the word itself. In the dark of a December night, Eva Figes set down her pen. She would pick it up again tomorrow night, and the night after that. Hers was always the last light visible from the street outside. The rest was dark. She would get into bed, and she would think about sentence structures, about symbols, about form and then, with her next page clear in her mind, she would turn out the light.

Figes, 1976, p. 7.

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Well, Bill. ‘Calder vs the Old Boys’. In Defence of Literature. London: Mosaic Press, 1999. White, Glyn. Reading the Graphic Surface. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. White, Glyn and Philip Tew. ‘Introduction’. Re-Reading B.S. Johnson. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Whittle, Matthew. Post-War Literature and the End of Empire. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Willatt, Sir Hugh. The Arts Council of Great Britain: The First 25 Years. London: Arts Council, 1971. Williams, Raymond. ‘The Politics of the Avant Garde’. Politics of Modernism. London: Verso, 2007. Williams, Raymond (ed.). May Day Manifesto 1968. London: Penguin, 1968. Williams-Korteling, Nonia. ‘Designing its own shadow’ – Reading Ann Quin. Thesis: University of East Anglia, 2013. Wolfe, Tom. The Mid-Atlantic Man. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968. Wollaston, Nicholas. Letter to Society of Authors, 4 July 1973. Held in Kings College London Archives. Writer’s Action Guild. East Anglian Division of WAG Membership List, 16 October 1973. Held in Kings College London Archives. Writer’s Action Guild. WAG Membership List, 24 July 1972. Held in Kings College London Archives. Yorke, Margaret. Letter to Maureen Duffy, 30 January 1973. Held in Kings College London Archives. Young, Michael. The Rise of the Meritocracy. London: Transaction Publishers, 1958. ‘Your Verdict on the Most Controversial Film of the Year’. The Sun, 14 January 1972. Ziolkowski, Theodore. Music into Fiction: Composers Writing, Compositions Imitated. London: Boydell & Brewer, 2017.

INDEX

Ali, Tariq  136–7, 188 Amis, Kingsley  20, 24, 25, 31, 75, 229–31 Angry Brigade  143, 185, 189–98, 211 Arts Council  19, 20, 40, 124–5, 135, 141, 147, 157, 169–70, 201, 209 Austen, Jane  23, 68 Ballard, J. G.  77–80, 118, 167–9, 217, 227, 229 BBC  31, 35, 55, 64–6, 69, 78, 84, 90, 106, 123, 130, 141, 158, 169, 174, 185, 196, 219 Beats, the  28, 59–62, 107, 142 Beckett, Samuel  25, 37, 48, 54, 59–60, 67–8, 97, 109, 209, 217 Better Books  110, 124, 139–41, 169 Böll, Heinrich  162, 192 Brooke-Rose, Christine Between  135–6 The Dear Deceit  41–5 The Languages of Love  120 The Middlemen  43–4, 78, 111 Out  81–4, 127, 133 Such  128–30, 133 The Sycamore Tree  20–1, 40–2, 46 Thru [inc. Textermination]  221–6, 233 Brophy, Brigid  35–6, 40, 107, 110–12, 116, 137, 197–200, 202, 205 Burgess, Anthony A Clockwork Orange  47–8, 52, 68, 84, 101, 107, 160, 174–9, 226 Enderby Outside  179 The Eve of St Venus  127

The Malayan Trilogy  17, 44, 47 M/F  180–1 The Right to an Answer  18, 45 A Vision of Battlements  13, 24 The Wanting Seed  84 The Worm and the Ring  45–6, 160 Burns, Alan Accident in Art  92–3, 171 The Angry Brigade  193–4 Babel  155 Buster  16, 92, 111, 114 Celebrations  114–15, 122, 153, 155, 229 Dreamerika!  172–4, 229 Europe After the Rain  98–101, 114, 122, 148, 164, 173 Palach  148–50, 155 Burns, Carol  100, 111, 137, 171, 203 Burroughs, William  59–69, 77–8, 92, 100, 107, 113–15, 132, 139, 141–3, 146, 149, 153, 158, 168, 169, 178, 224 Calder, John  53–4, 63, 78, 83, 97, 110, 123, 135, 139, 142, 145, 153, 162, 169–70, 203, 210, 235 Carter, Angela  107–10, 162, 217 Cixous, Hélène  132–6, 219 Communist Party  21, 64, 131, 134, 148, 221–2 Debord, Guy  132, 143, 190 Delaney, Shelagh  27, 32, 35, 57 Dickens, Charles  9, 18, 23, 33, 36, 79, 230 Duffy, Maureen  26–8, 35–7, 111–13, 197–205 Duras, Marguerite  54–5, 57

Index

Edinburgh Festival  34, 64–6, 113, 139 Eliot, T. S.  18, 25, 33, 49–50, 66–7 Figes, Eva Equinox  103–4, 125, 127, 182 Konek Landing  162–6, 182 Patriarchal Attitudes  182–5, 236 Winter Journey  125–7, 182 Fowles, John  101, 115–17, 234

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Leavis, F. R. [inc. “Leavisite”]  22–5, 33, 47, 70, 73, 78, 86, 94, 109, 209, 228 Lessing, Doris  15, 130, 143, 232 Levi-Strauss, Claude  179–80, 219 MacInnes, Colin  32, 66, 87, 107 Marowitz, Charles  144, 147–50, 189, 194 Miller, Karl  231–2 Moorcock, Michael  76–8, 167, 227

Ghose, Zulfikar  27–9, 37–40, 48, 51–2, 55, 58, 69, 72, 89–90, 100, 111, 124–5, 156, 170, 187–8, 211, 216–17, 235 Girodias, Maurice  54, 60, 62–4 Gordon, Giles  124, 157, 170, 201–5, 214, 217, 231–4 Greene, Graham  24, 96 Greene, Sir Hugh  105, 158

New Worlds  76–8, 83, 167–9 Nouveau roman  54–8, 64, 78, 91, 97, 100, 101, 123–4, 131–3, 136, 168, 201 Nuttall, Jeff  16, 63, 66, 110, 138–46, 190–2, 203, 235

Harris, Wilson  49–53, 58, 61, 104, 110, 217, 227, 229 Heppenstall, Rayner  55, 58, 64, 66, 100, 110, 122–4, 130, 157, 217 Horovitz, Michael  63, 100, 142–3

Peterkiewicz, Jerzy  21–2, 80, 84, 133–4, 222, 225 Phillips, Tom  113–14 Pound, Ezra  49, 133, 136, 162, 205, 220

Johnson, B. S. Albert Angelo  87–90, 93, 101, 122, 157, 196, 216 Christie Malry’s Own DoubleEntry  139, 194–7 Fat Man on a Beach  212, 233 Paradigm  155, 157 See the Old Lady Decently  214–15, 233 Travelling People  69–73, 85–7, 101, 212 Trawl  8, 93, 122, 157, 186 The Unfortunates  156–7 Joyce, James  18, 22–4, 33, 37, 46, 49, 70, 72, 86

Quin, Ann Berg  94–8, 101, 117–18, 121, 173, 208, 210 Passages  98, 150–2, 154, 169–73 Three  119–21, 150 Tripticks [inc. “Tripticks”]  118–20, 150–4, 173, 174, 208 “The Unmapped Country”  233

King’s College London  24–8, 209, 231, 234 Lacan, Jacques  96, 132, 134, 219–20 Laing, R. D.  137, 143–4 Lawrence, D. H.  18, 23–4, 33, 63, 73, 94, 230

Rabinovitz, Rubin  31–2, 230–1 Robbe-Grillet, Alain  54–8, 78, 135 Sarraute, Nathalie  54–7, 78, 97, 124, 216 Shakespeare, William  18, 23, 28, 42, 49, 147–8 Sillitoe, Alan  27–9, 32, 87, 227 Smollett, Tobias  39, 67, 90 Snow, C. P.  11, 24, 31–2, 43–4, 76–9, 229–31 Spark, Muriel  2, 40, 226, 232 Sterne, Laurence  23, 70, 72, 86, 214

258

Index

Sugnet, Charles  67, 228–9 Sward, Robert  121, 151–4, 171, 208, 227

Vincennes [inc. University of Paris VIII]  134–5, 218–23, 226

Tillinghast, Tony  38, 155 Trocchi, Alexander  59–61, 65–6, 132, 142–5

Woolf, Virginia  18, 23, 33, 49, 70, 197 Writers’ Action Group [inc. “WAG”]  199–205 Writers Reading  122–4, 137, 143, 146–7, 152, 154, 171

Universities Poetry  27–8, 35, 37–8, 156

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