by Laurence Byrne, Curator Printed Heritage Collections. The archive of B.S Johnson is available to consult in our Reading Rooms at Add MS 89001, as is the Eva Figes archive at Add MS 89050. All of the books listed here are available to consult, too. 

50 years ago, in 1969, B. S. Johnson published a novel about a sports writer assailed by memories of a deceased friend as he attempts to report on a football match. The Unfortunates was Johnson’s fourth novel and was not as well received as his previous work, getting a ‘fine clobbering’ in the press, according to Hugh Hebert’s sympathetic appraisal in the Guardian (13 March 1969). The novel comes in a box with 27 removable chapters of which only the first and last are marked – the reader must choose which in which order to read the 25 chapters in-between – and much of the criticism apparently centred on the novel’s formal experimentalism. Perhaps taking this criticism to heart, at some point, the first edition held by the Library had each chapter numbered in pencil by a librarian seeking to shelter readers from the novel’s aleatoric possibilities.

First edition of The Unfortunates (1969) by B.S Johnson with numbered annotations held at British Library shelfmark: Cup.900.b.8

Reprinted in 1999 with an introduction by Johnson’s biographer Jonathan Coe, the work found a more favourable audience. William Leith wrote: “In its way, this is brilliant - it is the best evocation of small- time misery I have ever read.” (The Daily Telegraph, 23 October 1999). Thanks to the efforts of supporters such as Coe, Johnson has since gone from being a largely forgotten (and out-of-print) author to occupying a central place in the history of British experimental (a term he regarded as ‘the dirtiest of words’) fiction, with The Unfortunates now regarded as a seminal achievement. In 2008, the British Library acquired a large archive of B. S. Johnson’s papers.

Although welcome, Johnson’s re-evaluation has been so comprehensive that his legacy now obscures somewhat the writers with whom he was once associated. Figures such as Christine Brooke-Rose, Alan Burns, Jeff Nutall, Stefan Themerson and Reyner Heppenstall are perhaps still amongst the better known experimental writers of the time, but during the late-1960s up until the mid-1970s a much wider range of authors than is commonly cited were producing novels which were experimental in different ways. *

Of course the definition of ‘experimental’ is of very much up-for-grabs, and many of the writers included here had a difficult relationship with the term. However, all of these works in some way foreground innovative techniques, both in terms of their form or narrative, and often both. Several of the authors mentioned contributed to the ‘group novel’ London Consequences [RF.2012.a.147] (which Johnson co-edited with Margaret Drabble). The fact that they were able to call on 18 contributors is further evidence that there was a keen interest in experimental writing in Britain during the period. Indeed, Drabble herself published arguably her most innovative work The Waterfall [Cup.410.g.596] in 1969.

cover for London Consequences published by Greater London Arts Association for the Festivals of London 1972

Eva Figes contributed to London Consequences and is perhaps one of the authors (along with Drabble) who is most familiar to readers today. The BL acquired an archive of drafts and working papers relating to Figes’s fourteen novels in 2009. In the same year as The Unfortunates, Figes published Konek Landing [Nov.14015] a work which, like Johnson’s, utilises intertextuality and temporal confusion to represent the trauma of memory – like Figes herself, the protagonist Stefan Konek is a holocaust survivor.

Another notable contributor to the group novel was Wilson Harris. In his writing during this period – and particularly the 1970 novel Ascent to Omai [Nov.14851] – Harris continually works to destabilise novelistic convention in order to subvert what he the “novel of persuasion” – that is a form of literature which makes use of common sense and “fashionable judgements” to both reflect and maintain a particular fixed perspective on the world. In Ascent to Omai, Harris employs unexpected combinations of words and ideas in order to allow for binary judgements to be dissolved and new associations to occur.

The malleability of time and space in Harris’s work brings to mind the genre of science fiction, or slipstream. Indeed, during this period, Brian Aldiss (Barefoot in the head, 1969 [Nov.14184]) Angela Carter (Heroes and villains, 1969 [Nov.14699]) and Anna Kavan published works which consciously utilised innovative literary techniques within a science fiction framework. The setting for Kavan’s Ice [Nov.10580] is an apocalyptic world encroached upon by a monolithic ice-shelf. It is an intensely experimental work which seeks to question the inevitability of patriarchal violence through repeated shifts in narrative perspective, leaving the reader to question the ‘reality’ of what is being described to us.

Published two years later, Passages (1969) [Nov.13283.] shares a number of similarities with Ice. Ann Quin’s third novel takes place in an unspecified country, apparently under the control of a violent military government, where the novel’s nameless protagonists (a man and a woman) seem to be searching for the woman’s missing brother. Quin’s writing is stark and elliptical and, like Kavan, the narrative often shifts perspective mid-paragraph – an experimental technique which conveys an intimate sense of disorientation and upheaval.

A similar sense of puzzlement pervades In Transit (1969) [Nov.14383], which finds the unreliable narrator trapped in an airport and in a state of uncertainty about their gender. Brigid Brophy employs a dense interior narrative, full of puns and language games (in several different languages) and formal experimentation – including multiple-choice sentences and pages divided into columns. The novel is an acerbic examination of the structures of both personal and political identity, where linguistic trickery works to disturb a number of assumptions and certainties on which these structures are founded.

Excerpts from In Transit (1969) by Bridgid Brophy, illustrating her textually experimental critique of conventional novelistc forms.

Beryl Gilroy’s Black Teacher (1976) [X.529/31034] is often considered a work of autobiographical writing. However, Sandra Courtman’s Discovering literature article argued that the work is “an experiment with an intermediary form – somewhere between fiction and autobiography, with a distinct non-linear structure.” Indeed, the narrator voice of the text moves between first and third-person at different moments, perhaps reflective of the way in which Gilroy’s own identity was formed and re-formed in the midst of the challenging circumstances she faced.

All of this is not to say that The Unfortunates does not deserve to be seen as a landmark of experimental writing in Britain, rather it is the case that Johnson was writing within a context in which experimental / innovative techniques were being more widely employed than ever before.

*Other works which for the sake of space could not be included were Bogies (1972), Rosalind Belben [Nov.18729]; Run, come see Jerusalem (1968), David Coxhead [Nov.12845]; Langrishe, go down (1996), Aidan Higgins [X.908/13486]; The Gasteropod (1968), Maggie Ross [Nov.12300]; All the usual hours of sleeping (1969) Penelope Shuttle [Nov.13304]; and Vacation (1972) Alan Sheridan [Nov.18928]

Further reading

Booth, Francis Amongst those left: the British experimental novel 1940-1980 (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2019). [Shelfmark forthcoming]

Friedman, Ellen G., and Miriam Fuchs, eds. Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction. (London: Princeton University Press, 1989). [YH.1990.b.128]

Jordan, Julia, and Ryle, Martin, eds. B.S. Johnson and Post-War Literature: Possibilities of the Avant-Garde (London: Palgrave, 2014). [YC.2014.a.11127]

by Naomi Oppenheim, AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Student, British Library and UCL. Researching Caribbean print cultures and the politics of history in post-war Britain. Follow her on Twitter @naomioppenheim. All materials mentioned here are available to consult, for free, in our Reading Rooms. This blog forms part of Banned Books Week.  Let us know what banned book you’ll be reading this week and keep an eye on the Library's Americas and European blogs for more.

Sitting on an aeroplane upon returning from Montreal where he attended a Congress of Black Writers, Dr. Walter Rodney was declared a persona non grata by the Jamaican government and denied entry into Jamaica. The Guyanese historian and Black Power activist was also dismissed from his post (lecturer in African history) at the University of the West Indies, Mona. In a ‘snap interview,’ on 15 October 1968, onboard the grounded aircraft that was he was prohibited from leaving, Rodney stated that ‘“This is no surprise to me. I have discovered that in Jamaica to be a black man is dangerous.”’

Daily Gleaner, 16 October 1968, p.1 MFM.MC381

Prime Minister, Hugh Shearer, accused Rodney of being ‘at the centre of plots and plans to promote a Castro-type revolution in Jamaica.’ In fact, Rodney was under surveillance by the Special Branch of the Jamaican police force months before he was banned. This was symptomatic of the Cold War politics that characterised this period. Jamaica’s new governing elite feared Rodney’s capacity to bridge academic and urban political thought and action. Not your typical lecturer, Rodney dedicated his intellectual energy towards Jamaica’s Rastafarians. Rodney would give ‘reasonings,’ in poor communities in Kingston and around the island. Known as ‘groundings’ within the Rastafarian community, they were informal discussions that would take place in gullies (where squatters lived), schools, churches, and trade union halls. Rodney would listen and talk about African history, Black Power, and the failings of the neocolonial class.

The banning of Rodney – physically and ideologically – was part a long history of banning radical texts, newspapers, people, and ideas in the Caribbean. In the early twentieth century, as nationalist politics developed across the region, censorship laws were put in place. In response to mounting workers’ resistance, the Trinidadian Seditious Acts and Publications Ordinance (1920) ‘banned a number of publications and created the offence of “disaffection” against the King, the Government and the Executive … with penalties of up to two years imprisonment and/or a fine of up to £1,000.’ In effect, the law prohibited the distribution of printed material that the state considered subversive; thus, threatening freedom of thought, the press, and society at large. One of the main targets of this act was Marcus Garvey’s popular and subversive newspaper, Negro World. Published in New York, from 1917-1933, it reached far corners of the Black Atlantic, often distributed surreptitiously, by seamen and travelers.

Kate Quinn (eds.), Black Power in the Caribbean (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014) YC.2014.a.16051

This culture of censorship was not just a hallmark of the colonial era, it persisted in newly-formed independent Caribbean nations. Speaking about the Jamaican government, Rupert Lewis – Black Power activist who was a student at Mona when the 1968 banning occurred – described the ‘banned list’ of books which the Jamaican government upheld in the Cold War context. It encompassed the ‘ban of all publications from Peking, Moscow, all Eastern European countries, Cuba,' as well as a ‘whole list of Black Panther newspapers, Malcolm X, and so on.’ Lewis who was a founding member of Abeng, a Black Power student newspaper which was established in the aftermath of the Rodney Affair, explains how ‘Abeng saw itself as providing space for the ideas that were being banned by the government.’ It was a powerful move in response to the government’s censorship of Black Power literature.

Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X with the assistance of Alex Haley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books by arrangement with Hutchinson, 1968)

Walter Rodney’s banning from Jamaica sparked an eruption of protests which travelled from the uptown Mona campus to downtown Kingston – it galvanised students, intellectuals, Rastafarians, the unemployed, and downtown ‘sufferers’ alike. Alongside this, the Daily Gleaner reported protests that were occurring across the region – at the Cave Hill (University of the West Indies) campus in Barbados, and in Georgetown, Guyana. In Kingston, the pro-government Daily Gleaner painted the uprising as ‘vandalism,’ with ‘hooligan gangs … looting, smashing, damaging, burning.’The article presented a politically-motivated distinct divide between ‘university students … faculty members’ and ‘gangs of men’ that were ‘anxious to take advantage of civil disorder [causing]…widespread destruction of property.’

Daily Gleaner, 17 October 1968, p.1

Daily Gleaner, 17 October 1968, p.24

Walter Rodney’s trials and tribulations also reverberated in Britain. Protests were held outside the Jamaican Tourist Board in London, where Rodney’s comrades and friends, Richard Small, Jessica Huntley, Eric Huntley, Andrew Salkey, John La Rose, Selma James, and many others protested the banning. Out of these transatlantic political struggles and protests came a series of documents, written by Rodney, that were related to the work he had been doing in Jamaica. Rodney handed them to a group in London (many of whom had been present at the protest).Regrouping and discussing Rodney’s papers at 110 Windemere Road, Ealing – the home of Eric and Jessica Huntley – these documents came to be the basis of the seminal Black Power text The Groundings with My Brothers.

 

Walter Rodney, The Groundings with my Brothers (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1969) Andrew Salkey Archive Dep 10310, box 6)

Formed out of the ‘groundings’ that Rodney gave in poor urban communities across Kingston, Groundings is a landmark text that critically explored the history and permeating effects of race, colonialism, and slavery on Caribbean society, passing comment on the continued struggles in the supposedly post-colonial Caribbean. Rodney called out the Government of Jamaica as serving the ‘interests of a foreign, white capitalist system’ whilst also upholding ‘a social structure which ensures that the black man resides at the bottom of the social ladder.’ Rodney was calling for anti-capitalist and global Black Power.

The publication of Rodney’s documents marked the birth of Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications. One of the first black publishers in Britain, Bogle-L’Ouverture would continue to publish and promote political, cultural, and literary texts, that were written by black and for black people. They also promoted black artists on book covers (Errol Lloyd did the artwork for Groundings), alongside selling greetings cards in their bookshop, which was renamed the Walter Rodney Bookshop in 1980, following his assassination. The publisher was founded on the premise of creating channels of dissemination for ideas and books that challenged the status quo and were hence marginalised, or censored, in the case of Walter Rodney.

Suggested further reading:

• Andrews, Margaret, Doing nothing is not an option. The Radical Lives of Eric and Jessica Huntley (Middlesex: Krik Krak, 2014)
• Lewis, Rupert, ‘Walter Rodney: 1968 Revisited’, Social and Economic Studies, 43 (1994), 7-56.
• Quinn, Kate (eds.), Black Power in the Caribbean, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014)
• Rodney, Walter, The Groundings with my Brothers (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1969)
• West, Michael O., ‘Seeing Darkly: Guyana, Black Power, and Walter Rodney’s Expulsion from Jamaica’, Small Axe, 25 (2008), 93-104

 

 

 

by Jodie Collins, a CDP student working on American Political Pamphlets within the Collections Division of the British Library. Follow Jodie on Twitter, @jodc92, and read more about her case-studies here. Let us know what banned book you’ll be reading this week and keep an eye on the Library's Americas and European blogs for more on Banned Books Week. 

“Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States … shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment of not more than twenty years.”
— The United States Sedition Act of 1918

In 1917, shortly after joining the Allied Powers in the First World War, the United States introduced controversial legislation which meant that Americans could be prosecuted for criticising the war. This was known as the Espionage Act. Not long after, in 1918, the Act was expanded by the Sedition Act, which forbade “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.”

The introduction of these acts coincided with what was known as the first ‘Red Scare’—an increasingly widespread fear of radicalism—which would reach its peak in 1919-20. The 1917 Russian Revolution and the increase in labor activity in the U. S. convinced many that communist revolution was an imminent threat.

Radical publishers such as Charles Kerr & Company now found it much more difficult to distribute their books and pamphlets, especially as the U. S. Post Office gained authority to withhold delivery of any material it deemed seditious. The Masses, the most prominent socialist magazine at the time, was forced out of print by the new Act, when its editors were prosecuted under the Act.

 

The Masses Vol. 9, No. 12 (October 1917) The penultimate issue of the magazine before its demise. [BL General Reference Collection LOU.A93]. 

Over 1,500 radicals and conscious objectors were jailed or deported for writing and distributing material that was critical of the government or the war. Members of the labour union, Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), were particularly hard hit.

Even after the war had ended, literature continued to be closely monitored. Many years later, pamphlets that had been used as evidence in Espionage Act trials could creep back up on those who wrote—or even read—them. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a Communist, recalled in her memoirs how a pamphlet she wrote in 1917 was ‘dug up’ over 40 years later:

“It has bobbed up like a bad penny from time to time, even in the Subversive Activities Control Board hearing in July 1952, when I was a defense witness for the Communist Party. …  Any stick serves in a witch hunt, even a tattered and torn pamphlet, long since out of print, dug up by some sleuth in a secondhand bookstore, nearly 40 years after its publication. … A few years ago when Michael Quill, the head of the Transport Workers Union in New York City, threatened the company with a strict enforcement of the Book of Rules, he was accused of having read this obscure pamphlet of mine, of which he had undoubtedly never heard.”

            —- Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Rebel Girl (New York: International Publishers, 1955)

 

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Sabotage: The Conscious Withdrawal of the Workers' Industrial Efficiency (Cleveland, OH: IWW Publishing Bureau, 1917) [BL General Reference Collection Wq4/9726]

Nevertheless, groups like the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB) were active in fighting against these laws and helping to defend those prosecuted. But the work of the NCLB was hindered by the legislation. Just like those whom the group was trying to defend, the distribution of the NCLB’s publications was impeded by the Post Office department. As such, the organisation struggled to raise money and publicise its case. The NCBL went on to become the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920.

Political Prisoners in Federal Military Prisons (New York: National Civil Liberties Bureau, 1918) [BL General Reference Collection YD.2007.a.7915]

 

The Espionage Act of 1917 is, in fact, still intact, and used to this very day. But it has faced many legal challenges throughout its 100 years of existence on the basis of Freedom of Speech and its adherence to the U.S. Constitution. It was, and remains, just one example of the long and complicated history of the United States relationship with radicalism and free speech.

Further Reading:

Maik, Thomas, The Masses 1911-1917 (London: Garland Publishing, 1994)

Martinek, Jason D., Socialism and Print Culture in America, 1897–1920 (New York: Pickering & Chatto, 2012)

Preston Jr., William, Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903—1933 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994)

Schmidt, Roger, Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919-1943 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000)

by guest blogger Di Beddow, PhD student at Queen Mary, University of London, researching Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in Cambridge. The notebook containing the Hughes poem 'Cambridge Was Our Courtship' (Add MS 88918/1/2) is currently on display in the Library's Treasures Gallery, and available to view -- in part -- through our Discovering Literature site. 

Ted Hughes by Fay Godwin, Copyright British Library Board 

Ted Hughes omitted from Birthday Letters the poem simply known as “X” ^[1] which can be found in a notebook in the British Library.  It begins -

Cambridge was our courtship.
Not the colleges, or such precincts,
But everything from the Millbridge
Towards Grantchester.

The Cambridge of Plath and Hughes, as pictured in Birthday Letters (Hughes’s award winning 1998 poetry collection) is a place where the university and the academic life of the city are all but absent.  The landscapes of Hughes’s earlier poetry are also largely missing. No untamed Ireland, primitive or rural Devon; no ancient Elmet here, indeed, when such landscapes do make an appearance they tend to be used as a backdrop only for the central player on stage, who like Godot, never arrives. Sylvia Plath, Hughes’s first wife is however very much present in the poetry. Erica Wagner recounts in Ariel’s Gift ^[2] that Hughes in writing the work was not consciously writing poems, but the process was essentially about trying to, “evoke (her) presence to myself, and to feel her there listening.” ^[3] The collection travels from Spain to America, home to Devon and to Yorkshire, but when looking at the importance of Cambridge in Hughes’s work, the poem “X” has offered an entirely new and different pathway through the university city of the two poets and through Birthday Letters itself.

“Cambridge was our Courtship”, was brought to light by an article in The Times on Friday October 17 2008 (p.18) entitled “Rough-hewn genius of Hughes laid bare in unfinished verses”.  Jamie Andrews from The British Library is quoted at the time, as saying the poem was probably omitted from the final selection to balance the poems between earlier and later life.  We remember though as well that Hughes said the writing of the poems over the years was done with no view of publication and indeed in a letter to Keith Sagar, he reflects that, Hughes writes:

'I wrote them, months often years apart, never thinking of them as parts of a whole - just as opportunities to write in a simple, unguarded, intimate way - to release something!  Nor can I recall how I came to shuffle them into that order - following chronology of subject matter was the only rule, I think. ^[4]

It is important to note that this poem -- 'X' --  has no amendments, but is simply written out as though from dictation. The other poems in the exercise book bear the scars of much reworking, so this one was surely not omitted from Birthday Letters for lack of quality; it would seem that this significant poem is left out of the collection because it is so localised, too personal and specific.  Unless you live or had lived in Cambridge, this area of the city and its boundaries would not be known or be of any real importance to you.

From the Millbridge the Cam flows through Coe Fen on the left bank, a green grazing area with small tributaries and sluices, rough pasture and meadow vegetation. On the right, as you walk away from the city, the meadows open out into Sheep’s Green and the old course of the Cam, underneath Fen Causeway and across to Lammas Land; the river then strikes out to skirt around Newnham and then on to Grantchester Meadows.  Hughes describes this area as:

Ornamented with willows, and green level,
Full drooping willows and rushes, and mallard and swans,
Or stumpy pollard willows and the dank silence
Of the slippery lapsing Cam.  That was our place.

Three maps showing the topography and layout of Cambridge, and especially the districts recorded in Hughes's poem, much as he and Plath would have known it. Copyright Jeremy Bays - awspublishing. 

The absolute alliteration of “willows” and the sibilance throughout the poem describes the Cam as a slow and natural river, with a wildlife that takes us away from the hard consonants of “Cambridge … courtship” and “colleges” which seem alien to the pair. Instead, Hughes focuses on the wildlife of the meadows; the three part description of the willows, for example, is significant: first they ornament the fen and one is reminded of Plath’s description in “Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows” : “It is a country on a nursery plate.” ^[5]  There is something quaint and unreal about the picture of river, willows and cows.  Then the second set of willows here are “Full drooping” almost Pre-Raphaelite in their evocation of sadness and elegiac fecundity.  Finally in the set of three, the willows have become, “stumpy pollard” and cut back much like the archaic symbolism of rebirth that enthralled Hughes, for example in his description of Shamanism in “Regenerations” in Winter Pollen:

'a magical death, then dismemberment…From this nadir, the shaman is resurrected, with new insides, a new body created for him by the spirits. ^[6]

This tone chimes with the “dank silence” of this environment, which suggests dark, dampness and decay, not an appropriate place for courtship and love one would have thought. The poets appear to have chosen this as their Cambridge because it was, “Not spoiled by precedent, for either of us.”  In this landscape they do not need to match expectations of the past, or of academia, but instead they indulged their love “In the watery weedy dream” which as Hughes describes, is metaphorically, “An aquarium”. In this watery world Hughes, as ever, knows his geography, that Cambridge rises only slightly above sea-level with much of the fens to the north, falling below sea-level:

Waltzing figures, among glimpses
Of crumbling parapets, a horizon
Sinking below sea level.

Flat and low-lying, Cambridge is depicted by Hughes as a water land from a dream, with other people beyond the couple merely performing a dance across the set.  The scenery and the horizon for Hughes is like an ancient monument of ruins, which has little relevance to him and his lover, indeed there is a nightmarish and chthonic quality to the vision. He weaves a spell of this scene with a perpetual repetition of “w” showing that their place was “willows…watery weedy dream…Waltzing figures…world…we…what…when…were,” and “wings.”  The poem finishes with a final rhetorical question:

We did not know what wings felt like.
Were what we felt wings?

But this is the final question of several; Hughes asks the ghost of Plath if she can recall what they talked about; if they were actually going somewhere: if they were “exploring” or if they were actually:

… talking away
Bewilderment, or trying word shapes
To make hopes visible.

The “word shapes” they made here, particularly Plath’s, concentrate on this piece of land and its nature. She uses the meadows in “Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows” to show how the idyllic university vision of Cambridge also bears the threat of the owl hunting the rat; it is here that Hughes suggests she hides “The Earthenware Head” which she narrates in 1959 and he uses again in Birthday Letters citing the spot where they placed it:

… Just past where the field
Broadens and the path strays up to the right
To lose the river and puzzle for Grantchester,
A chosen willow leaned towards the water. ^[7]

Again in “Chaucer” Hughes celebrates Plath’s performance of The Canterbury Tales to the cows in the Meadows.  He admits that they were enthralled, “twenty cows stayed with you hypnotised.” ^[8] Hughes recognised that Plath was very different to the history of the Cambridge colleges:

The Colleges lifted their heads.  It did seem
You disturbed something just perfected” ^[9]

Hughes contends that both poets started to formulate their futures, there, along the Cam and across the meadows. In Birthday Letters he returns to this place to settle in himself his responsibility for the vision of a shared future,that like the university in the poem, becomes, “crumbling parapets” and sunken horizons.  Poem “X” omitted from the collection, for me, conjures up the Cambridge of arguably English Literature’s most famous couple.  In a languid flow of the Cam’s willows and a “watery weedy dream” we find a landscape as personal and compelling as any that Hughes wrote of in earlier works.

^[1]Ted Hughes “X” in notebook of the Hughes collection, labelled “18 Rugby Street” (Add. MS 88918/1/6 in the British Library) and published in an article in The Times  p.18 “Rough-hewn genius of Hughes laid bare in unfinished verses” Friday October 17 2008

^[2] Erica Wagner Ariel’s Gift (Faber London 2000) 2001 paperback edition page numbers follow, hence forward abbreviated to AG

^[3] AG p.22

^[4] Ted Hughes to Keith Sagar 22 June 1998 The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (The British Library London 2012) p. 267

^[5] Sylvia Plath “Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows” in Collected Poems (Faber London 1981) pp. 111-112

^[6] Ted Hughes “Regenerations” in Winter Pollen (Faber London 1994) p. 57

^[7] Ted Hughes “The Earthenware Head” Birthday Letters (Faber London 1998) Hence forward abbreviated to BL

^[8] Ted Hughes “Chaucer” BL  p.51

^[9] Ted Hughes “God Help the Wolf after Whom the Dogs Do Not Bark” BL p. 26

 

by Kate Owen, Kings College, London and Stephen Noble, Cataloguer Modern Archives and Manuscripts. Falmouth Art Gallery’s ‘Stuff and Nonsense’ is a family friendly, free exhibition open from the 22nd June to 7th September 2019, 10am-5pm.

The British Library is proud to be a part of Falmouth Art Gallery’s ‘Stuff and Nonsense’ exhibition, open until 7th September 2019. The exhibition celebrates the nonsensical and fantastical, and features art, automata and works by Quentin Blake, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. The British Library has loaned a number of objects to the exhibition, including a diary written by Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear’s History of the families of the Lake Pipplepopple.

Page from Lewis Carroll's diary on which he names Alice in Wonderland. Add MS 54343, f. 14r.

Charles Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, kept this diary from 1862 to 1864 and within its pages we can find details of the origins of the much loved classic, Alice in Wonderland. The volume includes a number of references to ‘Alice’s Adventures Underground’, including Carroll’s first telling of the story to Alice, Lorina and Edith Liddell on a boat trip in July 1862. The diary also documents Alice in Wonderland’s move from manuscript to print. Carroll writes of his difficulty finishing the illustrations for the manuscript copy written for Alice Liddell and notes that his friends have encouraged him to publish the work. In April 1864, Dodgson writes in his diary that artist John Tenniel has agreed to illustrate the published text.

Manuscript illustration for History of the Seven Families of the Lake Pipplepopple by Edward Lear, 1865, pen and black ink, Add MS 47462, f. 37r. First published in Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets, 1871.

Edward Lear wrote History of the Families of the Lake Pipplepopple in 1865 and the manuscript, along with his illustrations, was gifted to the children of William, 6th Earl Fitzwilliam. History of the Families of the Lake Pipplepopple is a charming yet macabre story of the demise of the young animals of Lake Pipplepopple who ignore their parents’ advice. The seven young guinea pigs, for example, are warned to eat lettuce ‘not greedily but calmly’ but the young guinea pigs rush at the lettuce ‘with such extreme force’ that they bang their heads against the stalk and die of concussion.

The manuscript also contains Lear’s illustrations for his nonsense alphabet, and his illustrated version of the nursery rhyme 'Highdiddle-diddle'.

Manuscript illustration for 'Highdiddle-diddle' by Edward Lear, undated, pen and black ink, Add MS 47462, f. 35r. First published, in facsimile, by Constance, Lady Strachie, in Query Leary Nonsense, 1911.

Also on loan from the British Library is A Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear. This book, first published in 1846, was adapted from limericks Lear told to the children of Lord Stanley while staying with the family. The book popularised the limerick from of poetry and nonsense verse has been closely associated with children’s books ever since. This edition from 1861 was enlarged with ‘42 new & enchanting subjects’ and was the first to credit Edward Lear as the author.

Edward Lear, A Book of Nonsense ... Third edition, with many new pictures and verses, London: Routledge, Warne & Routledge, [1861] C.116.b.29.

by Sarah Ellis, Archivist and Cataloguer of the Penelope Fitzgerald Archive (Add MS 89289). The archive is now available to consult, for free, in our Reading Rooms.

In 2017, the British Library acquired the archive of Penelope Fitzgerald (née Knox), English novelist, biographer and essayist (1916-2000). Her 1979 novel, Offshore, won the Booker Prize and the work acclaimed as her masterpiece, The Blue Flower, secured a National Book Critics Circle Award in the USA in 1997.

Penelope Fitzgerald, by Jane Bown: copyright of Jane Bown Estate

Audiences loved Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels for the worlds they conjured into being; drawn – at least at first – from her own life experiences. Her biographical writing is similarly grounded. In one revealing note in her papers she outlines the necessary preconditions for beginning a work of biography: "if it's not possible to have had personal contact with the subject”, she writes, “then at least I need contact with someone who once knew him or her, however long ago." [1] Such an emphasis on personal connection was no doubt informed by the varied social contexts which make up Fitzgerald’s own biography. (A houseboat community at Chelsea Reach; the BBC during the Second World War; and a Southwold bookshop, to name but a few.) The archive reveals an artistry fuelled by human connection but informed and supported by wider documentary evidence gathered during intensive periods of research. As the two approaches collide, we can see how the rich worlds of her fiction and the sensitive portraits in her biographical writing become possible.

Behind the Silence

One of the qualities most frequently ascribed to Fitzgerald is that of 'reticence'. Terence Dooley, in his introduction to Fitzgerald’s posthumously published letters, tells how she could convey what she wanted in letters in a way she didn’t feel able to in person [2]. If the written word was where Fitzgerald’s communicative gifts lay, then her archive represents a relative wellspring of expressive power. Far from displaying reticence, Fitzgerald’s personal writings – from her earliest letters written to her parents from Wycombe Abbey School, to diary entries in her later years – reveal a voice free from constraint. Hers was a growing, industrious and expansive mind, constantly observing, recording and expressing itself through the written word, rather than through speech.

Add MS 89289/2/17 ‘My China Diary’ and ‘Small Memo Book’
© With kind permission of Penelope Fitzgerald’s Literary Estate

However expansive the archive might seem, though, Fitzgerald’s papers are fragmentary: the largest part is at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas and the British Library holds a smaller but significant portion (170 files). Tragically, some material was lost when her houseboat sank in the 1960s. The extant parts being dispersed in this way has resulted not only in a physical but also an intellectual disunity – but what we have here in London is both delightful and revealing. As with any archive, partial or not, Fitzgerald’s papers are mere glimpses of the author and her work – never a complete picture but perhaps as close as it’s possible for us to get.

Add MS 89289/6/2 Fitzgerald’s Silver Reed typewriter operating instructions &
Add MS 89289/1/11 Review of A N Wilson’s biography of C S Lewis (verso)
© With kind permission of Penelope Fitzgerald’s Literary Estate.

So, What's in This Archive?

The archive covers the period of 1865-2012, extending beyond Fitzgerald’s lifetime and including materials captured posthumously by her children and Literary Estate. The contents of the archive include research, draft and proof materials for a number of her works, 26 of her notebooks, correspondence (business and personal), her annotated library and collected writings about her life and literary endeavours.

In addition to illustrating aspects of her professional life and working practices as an author, the archive provides insights into her personal life, relationships, interests and other involvements outside, or predating, her writing career. For instance, Fitzgerald involved herself with literary societies and campaigned to support the local library in the face of funding cuts, channelling energy not just into her creative output but also into her local community.  

Further to the many facets of Fitzgerald’s personal and professional life, her papers reflect a selective cross-section of Knox family history in various documentary forms. Knox family members whose stories feature prominently are the subjects of the group biography which she composed about her father, ‘Evoe’, and his three brothers, published in 1977. Remarkable in their own rights, papers once belonging to those individuals now sit integrated with Fitzgerald’s papers, much gathered in research for The Knox Brothers. Another notable component of the archive is the material relating to Fitzgerald’s first novel, The Golden Child (1977), in her original notebooks. Initially called ‘The Golden Opinion’, the work was extensively cut by Duckworth Publishers.

Add MS 89289/2/1, Knox Book 1, from Fitzgerald’s notebooks.
© With kind permission of Penelope Fitzgerald’s Literary Estate

So much in the archive holds the potential for researchers to garner rich insights about the working practices, creative processes and day-to-day engagements of Penelope Fitzgerald during the period when she was a published author. These are complemented by items pre-dating that period which show the vital preparation building up to it, such as her committed studies of literature and art or copious notes relating to her teaching work.

An Invitation

“How does she do it?” asked Julian Barnes over a decade ago [3], about Fitzgerald’s ability to paint the vivid and entirely believable worlds of her novels, so succinctly. Come and see for yourself – the archive is now available for consultation in the Manuscripts Reading Room.

[1] Penelope Fitzgerald, Writing about Human Beings (London, British Library, Add MS 89289/1/15, undated; 1993?).

[2] Terence Dooley (ed.), So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), p. xiv.

[3] Julian Barnes, 'How did she do it?', Guardian, 26 July 2008, Culture - Books Section <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jul/26/fiction> [accessed 5 July 2019].

by Callum McKean, Curator of Contemporary Literary Archives and Manuscripts. To learn more about LGBT works and issues in the Library's collections, take a look at our web space, LBTQ Histories. To learn more about E.M Forster's gay fiction, click here. All British Library items are available to view, for free, in our Reading Rooms. 

After the success A Passage to India (1924), it appeared to almost everyone that E.M Forster had stopped writing. In fact, he had merely stopped publishing. From 1913 onwards Forster had been working on a manuscript about same-sex love – sparked by a titillating encounter with the poet Edward Carpenter, who secretly touched Forster on the backside at a party. Forster showed typescripts of his novel, Maurice, to close friends, including Christopher Isherwood, who implored him to find a publisher. But Forster – convinced that attitudes towards homosexuality had shifted only from ‘ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt’ – was reluctant to publish: on the cover of a typescript draft found in a drawer after his death, Forster famously scrawled in pen, writing to himself or to the world, ‘Publishable – but is it worth it?’

This tension between the public and private realms – between what belongs to the world at large and what belongs to a small, highly controlled audience – runs throughout Maurice. Images of darkness abound: Maurice’s desire for his classmate Clive Durham leads him to grope his way down unlit college corridors to find his room; his first night alone with the under-gamekeeper Alec Scudder takes place at night, secretly, away from the main house, with the two lovers fumbling their way across a dark field. Similarly, the tight societal gaze which Maurice feels all around him is punctuated by fantasies of a life outside it – France, Italy, where the rules persecuting same-sex relationships are more lax – or self-exile to some imagined place outside of society, outside of a world which Forster increasingly felt, as he wrote in a post-script to the same draft, offered ‘no forest or fell to escape to […], no cave in which to curl up’.

Typescript of the 1932 version of Maurice by E M Forster, with autograph manuscript alterations and additions made c. 1959 © The Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge and The Society of Authors as the E.M. Forster Estate. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. Please credit the copyright holder when reusing this work. Shelfmark: vol. 4/1

But fiction, unlike life, can offer respite, and it is precisely to this kind of impossible place of escape that Forster sends his two lovers; to live out a rural secluded existence as woodcutters. ‘A happy ending was imperative’, Forster writes, ‘I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood’. Sarah Ahmed, in Shame and Its Sisters (1995) describes the peculiar allure of this turning away from society into seclusion as a reaction to traumatic shame: ‘The individuation of shame — the way it turns the self against and towards the self’, Ahmed writes, ‘can be linked precisely to the inter-corporeality and sociality of shame experiences. The “apartness” of the subject is intensified in the return of the gaze; apartness is felt in the moment of exposure to others, an exposure that is wounding’. But Forster’s ‘greenwood’ –  like all utopias – exists in the shadow of its own limits. Forster’s original ending sees Maurice and Alec pursued by Kitty, Maurice’s hateful sister. In its final scene they discuss moving on from the home they have built in order to avoid being seen and discovered by her, echoing Ahmed’s formulation. Suddenly this world outside of 'the world' is revealed to be something else entirely: a marginal fantasy teetering on the edge of catastrophic collapse at the hands of a hostile host culture. That such a fantasy could approach the upper limit of what Forster could imagine as a ‘happy ending’ is unsurprising given the violent homophobia of the time and place that he lived, but nevertheless this apartness – at least now, for us – becomes untenable; it is a shame deferred, rather than transcended.

And it has a long history.  Early modern manuscript culture also sought refuge against the vulgarity of the printing press and the public view by valourising certain kinds of apartness, by distributing sensitive manuscripts amongst their enlightened peers. The poetry of John Donne, perhaps the most famous example of a writer in this mould, returns again and again to images of clandestine mixing in the interstices of his host culture: the body of his famous Flea ("It sucked me first, and now sucks thee/And in this flea our two bloods mingled be") is precisely this kind of space – a parasitic, almost invisible chamber where the vital fluids of ambiguously gendered speaker and addressee can mix in undisturbed, fluid freedom, even whilst the the human beings themselves remain at an ‘appropriate’  distance from one another.  

Shakespeare’s ‘Fair Youth’ sonnets were similarly addressed directly to the object of the speaker’s desire, a handsome young man, and although they were written in the 1590s they weren’t published until 1609 (perhaps, it has been argued, without the author’s permission). Oscar Wilde’s employment of these Sonnets at his public trial – as an example of a kind of same-sex love which was permissible and even instructive – failed to persuade the public, though, and this most famous of literary figures was himself forced into a brutal and violent exile in Reading Gaol, as Forster – then just sixteen years old – watched on in horror. Wilde’s letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, which would become De Profundis (1897), was a literary work composed under enforced isolation. Wilde's guard offered him three sheets of paper at a time to write a letter which he was not allowed to send, as a kind of therapeutic exercise which could contribute to his ‘rehabilitation’. Our image of Wilde – one of the most public of public figures – consigned to Reading Gaol, writing a letter to himself ‘from the depths’ about a ‘love which dare not speak its name’ provides a shadowy counterpoint to the ‘apartness’ of Forster’s idyllic ‘greenwood’, where Maurice and Alec live out their isolated lives. For both the gaol and the idyll, it is the logic of shame, secrecy and a life apart from the world that are the driving force.

'De Profundis', the letter addressed by Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas from Reading Gaol Add MS 50141 A

Contemporary popular culture and literature has worked to transcend this logic in its representations of same-sex love. Pride as a proper noun, beginning in the mid-twentieth century and gaining momentum ever since, has become a worldwide phenomenon. If E.M Forster’s adolescence was marked by Oscar Wilde’s trial and imprisonment, today’s adolescents – in some of the world at least – watch thousands of brightly dressed and exuberant people march in their name; delighting at being seen. This is not to say that work is done, far from it, only that the move from ‘Shame’ to ‘Pride’ – however partial -- has been hard won and should be celebrated. In researching this blog, I became curious about the kinds of narratives which LGBT adolescents are exposed to today, and so stumbled across a Young Adult anthology – out this year from Stripes Publishing and compiled by Juno Dawson – which was recently taken into the Library through Legal Deposit, titled Proud (2019).

Cover image for Proud, from Stripes Publishing compiled by Juno Dawson. 

The anthology is peppered with 'coming out' stories which detail the turmoil and anxiety which can arise, even in relatively ‘progressive’ households for children of mostly well-meaning parents. One such story is ‘Penguins’ by Simon James Green, in which the protagonist, Cameron, has his attempts to come out overshadowed by a public furore around a pair of gay penguins at the local zoo. Cameron reluctantly visits the penguins’ enclosure with his friends and winces at the spectacle which surrounds them, regretting that something like this still represents an ‘event’ at all. A parallel plot follows his budding crush on a schoolmate as they approach their end of year prom, and both plot lines converge in a secret kiss inside the now-private penguin enclosure (with the gay penguins having been placed out of the way to avoid adding to their stress as they attempt to raise an abandoned egg together). At this moment some readers may expect a quick closure, with both same-sex loves safely contained within their enclosure, hidden from the world. But it is Green’s willingness to push beyond this moment of apartness, perhaps more than anything else, which marks the story as of our particular historical moment. After the revelation that Cameron’s feelings are shared by his crush, and their first kiss, the couple emerge from the sealed enclosure and return – holding hands – into the most public of teenage arenas, the prom. The prevalence and importance of these motifs are clearly related to our networked, public lives, where privacy is increasingly eroded in favour of display, revelation and performance. But technological contingencies aside, it is difficult -- especially in this context -- not to feel this story as heartening; to feel the relief and release of shame transcended and not deferred; and to feel that to have stories like these in the hands and minds of young people is a step in the right direction.

 

 

Gill Partington, host of last week’s sell out Artists’ Books Now: Writing evening, shares some of her thoughts on the event the works and the artist in this guest blog

Artist Sam Winston describing an example of asemic writing from his recent work Reading Closed Books.

Making Your Mark, the British Library’s current exhibition, is all about writing, its long history and the many varied techniques, systems and conventions that have evolved around it.  The latest event in the ‘Artists Book Now’ series on the 13th May approached writing from a different angle, however. It was all about forms of work that stretch these systems and conventions in unusual ways, pushing writing to its limits and beyond. The four artists presenting their work showed us some varieties of writing that sometimes looked very unfamiliar indeed.

Dia Batal uses a range of media to create Sculptures based on Arabic script.

Dia Batal’s work is as much sculpture as writing, rendering Arabic script physical and three dimensional in metalwork and other media. The letters may be ornate but the materials have a strength and presence, perhaps because the force and impact of writing are her primary concern, dealing in text that details harrowing stories of conflict and displacement. Sam Winston creates work that hovers on the boundaries of drawing and writing, in durational performances that often take place in the dark, gradually covering the page surface in an intricate, unreadable filigree of pencil lines. Stevie Ronnie turned writing into a series of incongruous, witty objects: an ‘audiobook’, for instance, comprising a rope woven from strips of text.  Wound around a metal winch, it unravels, translating text into metallic clinks. Joumana Medlej created delicate folded paper forms adorned with the Kufic script, an Arabic calligraphy not meant to be read, but which instead has a symbolic potency, an aura rather than a literal meaning. These were diagrams and cosmological charts as much as texts.

 
Stevie Ronnie’s infectious enthusiasm as he describes how employs a range of objects in the creation of an artists’ book.

In their various ways, these were all forms of ‘asemic’ writing:  that which can’t be read. The work seemed to ask the question of how writing communicates in other ways, and whether it needs to communicate at all. Does writing need a reader? The other major theme that emerged from the evening was that of discipline, and where exactly writing belongs. Maria Fusco, Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University talked about what happens when writing becomes an art practice rather than a literary one. She read from her new book, Nine QWERTY Bells: Fiction for Live Voice in which she puts art objects in strange kinds of dialogue with one another.

 

Book artist and calligrapher Joumana Medlej opens her Book of Love.

The particular piece she chose focused on Ignacio Uriarte’s
The History of the Typewriter Recited by Michael Winslow a video artwork in which the sounds of vintage typewriters are recreated orally, with uncanny accuracy. Maria’s reading was all about tracing this complicated network of crossed wires between voice, writing and object. Her aim is not to write about art, but rather to write through it, she explained. She described writing moving backwards through the gallery space and ‘bumping into things’. This collision between writing and objects - and the conjunctions that result from it - seemed to be what the evening was all about. Writing, we learned, can be stranger than you think.

Gill Partington in conversation Maria Fusco.