The Experimentalists

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

Dr Joseph Darlington

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350244382
• eBook ISBN: 9781350244412
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Experimentalists is a collective biography, capturing the life and times of the British experimental writers of the swinging 1960s. A decade of research, including as-yet unopened archives and interviews with the writers' colleagues, is brought together to produce a comprehensive history of this ill-starred group of renegade writers. Whether the bolshie B.S. Johnson, the globetrotting Ann Quin, the cerebral Christine Brooke-Rose, or the omnipresent Anthony Burgess, these writers each brought their own unique contributions to literature at a time uniquely open to their iconoclastic message. The journey connects historical moments from Bletchley Park, to Paris May '68, to terrorist groups of the 1970s. A tale of love, loss, friendship and a shared vision, this book is a fascinating insight into a bold, provocative and influential group of writers whose collective story has gone untold, until now.

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 tree-lined 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 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 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 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’ ‘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 differen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Before 1960
• 2 1960 to 1963
• 3 1964 to 1965
• 4 1966 to 1967
• 5 1968 to 1969
• 6 1970 to 1973
• 7 1973 and after
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright