Backlisted - Berg by Ann Quin

Episode Date: March 2, 2018

This week Andy and John are joined by Jennifer Hodgson, editor of 'The Unmapped Country', a collection of British experimental writer Ann Quin's lost work. They discuss Quin's debut novel, Berg, with its opening sentence: 'A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father. . . '. John also talks about Yorkshire: A Lyrical History of England's Greatest County by Richard Morris, and Andy has been reading Andrew Hankinson's You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat].Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)7'31 - Yorkshire: A Lyrical History of England's Greatest County by Richard Morris12'49 - You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life (You Are Raoul Moat) by Andrew Hankinson21'30 - Berg by Ann Quin* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. It's very exciting for us. So you like books, don't you? Who, me? Yeah. Do you like musical theatre or not?

No, I'm not a big musical theatre fan. I don't believe it, right? Matt wasn't a big fan of musical theatre. I'm constantly having to deal with people. Nicky doesn't like musical theatre and she's a vegetarian and she likes cycling. All of those things are very complementary. I like cycling. How do you feel about musical theatre,

John? I like musical theatre. There's a couple of musical theatre productions I like. I'm not as crazed about it as Andy. I quite like Joseph oh yeah the training brawler of musicals

yeah absolutely that's where I go yeah and what else Grease Rocky Horror yeah Grease is quite good Rocky Horror is awful yeah I mean

I like it for its shitness okay well you've got it's a bottomless apart from that I'm less interested right right remember that banging don't entertain me It's a bottomless... Apart from that, I'm less interested. Right.

Right, remember that banging? Don't bang the table. That's our producer's note. The new era begins with being told not to smack the table. It's cheering. For emphasis. Yeah. Shall we start then?

Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that brings new life to old books. Today, thanks to the generosity of our sponsors, Unbound, the website where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read, you find us bunked up in a grimy bedsit in Brighton, surrounded by wigs and hair tonic, looking out across a grey, wintry sea, the smell of stale cooking fat hanging heavy in the air. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound.

And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. I live by the sea, in fact, in remarkably similar circumstances to those pastiched by my friend John. Headlock, you say? Yes. And joining us today is the writer and critic Jennifer Hodgson. Hello, Jennifer. Hello. Or Jen, as I'm going to call you from here on in.

Jen, yeah, please, please do. Or the other side of the petitionson. Hello, Jennifer. Hello. Or Jen, as I'm going to call you from here on in. Jen, yeah, please, please do. Or the other side of the petition wall. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Jen has written for The Guardian, The New Statesman, The White Review, and was a research fellow with the Hearing the Voice project at Durham University and UK editor at Dorky Archive Press. And she's recently edited a volume called The Unmapped Country, which is a collection of unpublished stories and pieces by the 1960s radical writer Anne Quinn,

published by our friends at And Other Stories. And it's the first novel by the very same Anne Quinn, Berg, first published in 1964, which Jen is here to talk about with us today. Before we get on to that, there are two things I would like to mention. Housekeeping. If you are listening to this on Monday, March 5th, 2018. Back in the 21st century. On Wednesday, on the coming wednesday march the 7th there is an event at burley fisher books in dalston in north london devoted to david seabrook's book all the devils are here which

we featured on backlisted a couple of years ago and has just been reissued by our friends at books and appearing at that event will be um r Cook, who was our guest on that podcast, the writer Ian Sinclair, the filmmaker Paul Tickell, and most interestingly from our point of view, the book's editor, Neil Belton. I think this is the first occasion that Neil's ever talked publicly about what it was like working on All the Devils Are Here. That's going to be chaired by another former guest, Travis Elbra, and at least one of us will be there, and it'll probably be me.

I might come too. Well, clearly it's quite a thing for a book that came out 15 years ago, and this feeds into the book we're talking about today, to have a moment now, 15 years later, where people have discovered it and enough people are interested to make this kind of thing possible. Quite a lot of thematic crossover. Quite so, yes. Jen, what is it like having a book which superficially perhaps

one would think, well, that'll probably appeal to quite a niche group of people? The book that you edited, The Unmapped Country, these fragments of Anne Quinn's work, has been widely reviewed and talked about. And I feel that we here on Batlisted are joining a kind of moment of Quinn-mania. Welcome to Quinn-mania. You're very welcome.

Is that what you expected? Totally not. I mean, I've got to say i basically sat in a cupboard for seven years researching ann quinn so the fact that i'm allowed out into public to speak to other human beings about her now is still incredible to me no it's not at all what i expected although you know there's been a kind of low level of interest in quinn amongst kind of initiates and perverts for for some time but um like what we are we have both of them here but uh no I don't think I ever expected the kind of

enthusiasm and the kind of engagement that it's got from readers it's been ace it's brill and we should also say well done and other stories yeah for putting this book out there and also like you were saying to me, they've sold out their first print run in a fortnight. Yeah, in less than a fortnight, I should say. Yeah, absolutely. And that's really, really good. It just goes to show you,

while we're having these conversations or conversations are taking place about the crisis in literary fiction, which we talked about on this podcast before, we're treated with a degree of... Contempt. Yeah. Contempt.

It's all very well saying on one level clearly some appetite isn't there but on the other hand look at this this book's sold out in a fortnight and is available again now at the time speaking of course but um i think um the appetite's always been there i think it's been radically underestimated by publishers critics that kind of thing it has mainstream literary establishment have always had an issue with it yeah and there was perhaps a maybe talk about this further on in the podcast there was maybe a moment in the 60s when it was more acceptable reading the reviews of quinn from the 60s i would hazard that actually um it wasn't that acceptable back then the reviews are so hostile and so furious about experimental fiction.

You see it as a kind of like absolute existential threat, as a kind of like French flu that's come over here to like harm our way of life with its intellectual decadence. And that attitude has sort of, to a greater or lesser extent, has persisted. But not amongst readers. You're exactly right that the readers, the readers have never had a problem with this. The problem is publishers finding a way

to economically get those books into the hands of those readers. And that's been the challenge. So we should commend And Other Stories for that. We should also commend And Other Stories for what they're doing this year, which is they're publishing only books by female writers yeah which is amazing great yeah you know so um well we'll come back to in a moment but first john i have to ask you i have to ask you you can ask me well i don't know

what do you think do you want to should i do mine first yeah yeah john what have you been reading this i have been reading this week a book which will not sound perhaps as good as it is I it's a book the Weidenfeld press office I think I heard a shot go on

it's called Yorkshire a lyrical history of England's greatest county if I didn't know the author of this book as well as I do, I wouldn't go near it in a minute. It just sort of isn't what I, it's not what I want really. It sort of has that, it has that horrible feeling. It's quite a nice jacket, it's Grosbeow topping. But Richard Morris is a polymath and a genius

and is somebody I've known for 20 years. He is an archaeologist. He led the archaeological digs on York Minster, some of which he talks about in this book. But he is also a composer, and he's one of those people who is just unfailingly interesting about almost anything he writes about. This book is not what it says on the cover, really. It's a strange, mysterious collection of family stories. I mean, I don't want to oversell it. He's not Sebald, you know, but he is a working archaeologist

in his ability to read and look at the long history. For me, perhaps with my kind of QI hat on, it's just full of wonderful insights. The idea that Yorkshire started 500 million years ago, 3,000 miles south of the equator you want to say suck on that jeffrey you know and it's just full of wonderful different ways of looking at he's very good on writers there's a there's a classic little sort of insight is that the reason that so many houses in Yorkshire are called Windy Ridge, and there are lots of them, is that there was a 1911 massive bestseller by a writer called William Riley called Windy Ridge, which went on to sell over half a million copies. And it became

a kind of a cult. It was about a photographer who leaves the sallow, depressing streets of London and discovers the glories of Yorkshire. It's very unlike what you would expect. It's not a standard county history. There's masses of archaeology in it. He's got this brilliant ability to make you see things differently. He talks a lot about mining. He makes the point early on in the book. Mining communities never last very long.

Because by the 1950s, most of the Yorkshire coal field had already been exhausted. makes the point early on in the book mining communities never last very long because you know by the 1950s most of the yorkshire coal field had already been exhausted and it's just that ability to sort of focus paul and move you in and give you sort of good news for fans of future bat listed episodes windy ridge is in print from i've just looked it up on my phone it's in print from northern heritage publications of course of course it is there's a lot there's an amazing I've just looked it up on my phone it's in print from Northern Heritage publications of course it is there's an amazing chapter about Whitby

which he says people from Yorkshire always like Whitby he said Whitby wasn't so keen on the rest of Yorkshire he said there's an interesting thing about the coast people from Whitby were much closer to Edinburgh or London because the moors behind they were really difficult to get across. So there's no structure to it.

He dips in and out. But the Yorkshire, the Yorkshire-arty, as you might call it, Blake Morrison and Andrew Martin have both given it fantastic, positive reviews. I read Andrew Martin's review. I must say, Andrew's review was terrific, made it sound really interesting book. I'll give you just one little paragraph. This is the end, from's review was terrific, made it sound like a really interesting book.

I'll give you just one little paragraph. This is from the end of that, where he's done this sort of collapsing of perspective. And says that, so it was, because he's very good also on the fact that, you know, multi-ethnic Yorkshire now is a very different place. And he doesn't make any big, he just says, this is what Yorkshire is now, it's changing, it's always changed.

The Roman Empire was run from York at one point, it's hard for us to imagine that now. So it was that after 2,000 years of looking east and north from Yorkshire, the world on that rainy Saturday, this is a rainy Saturday when a reconnaissance aircraft in 1963, the Cuban

missile crisis was shot down. On that rainy Saturday was one phone call away from a time when rocks and stones shall strike together and short-eared owls will come to roost in the ruins of Bautry Hall. But the telephone did not ring, and the prick of conscience window in All Saints North Street is still there, performing its original duty of alerting visitors to what will happen at the end of time. Go and look. Go while you can. So that's the lyrical bit. He's like a sort of 21st century Thomas Brown, Sir Thomas Brown. He's just a collector.

He collects his family stories. He collects amazing bits of forgotten lore and weaves them together into what I think I would have called this. I would have published this in a different way. It seems it's already number one in the in its category on Amazon. So I was almost certainly would have been almost certainly wrong. But I just think for those of those people who would walk past a book called Yorkshire. What he brings to the story of Yorkshire is, I think nobody else could do it in quite this way.

Really interesting book. But now, Andy, the big one. The big one. Your best book of the year so far. Well, my best book of the year so far, yes. So I read this last week in about three or four hours, and it's a cliche to say i couldn't put it down i couldn't put it down that's a literally factually accurate thing once i started

reading it i couldn't stop reading it until i finished it it's called you could do something amazing with your life open brackets you are rowell mo Brackets. It's by a writer called Andrew Hankinson. This is his first book. And it won CWA Nonfiction Dagger Award. It's the story of Raoul Moat, who in 2010 shot three people and after a long standoff was in turn himself shot by police i saw the writer melissa harrison talking about it and on twitter she said she'd been moving some books about and she found her copy of this book and she'd just been reminded about what an

incredible book it is and i thought oh i've got that to read i think i'll read that it was one of those wonderful moments john niven those wonderful moments of spontaneity, of thinking, I wonder what this is like. And then four hours later, putting it down, going, wow. What Andrew Hankinson does is tell you Raoul Moat's story from the point of view, as far as it can be reconstructed, of Raoul Moat. from the point of view, as far as it can be reconstructed, of Raoul Moat. And he does it in a way which I would have thought, as a writer myself,

was very high risk, which is he, first of all, creates an internal monologue, some of the time. Second of all, he structures it as a countdown, an eight-day countdown of the last eight days of Raoul Moat's life. And I'm just going to read you the opening because this will give you... You'll see why I couldn't put this down. Page one. couldn't put this down. Page one. A questionnaire arrives from the regional department of psychotherapy.

There are 17 pages of questions. They want you to complete your answers and send it back before your first appointment with a psychologist. It's 2008. You sit in the house and write your surname, first name, date of birth, address, age and telephone number. On the next page you describe your symptoms. I feel tired, anxious, isolated, helpless, angry. I find it difficult to sleep or relax. It asks how these symptoms affect your life. You write, they stop my life from progressing constructively. I am aggressive and violent outside the home if provoked. It asks why you think this happens. You write about the bad parts of your childhood, police harassment, having no family support, worrying about your children's future and feeling alone.

On the next page it says it would help us to know something of your background. Could you tell us something about your childhood and family including any changes or separations that you experienced? Were any relationships especially important to you for example with brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts or uncles? You write look I'm now really pissed off because these questions should be discussed in person away from my missus and kids so they don't have to see me wound up about things i choose not to think about i can express myself better in person and see this as totally dismissive and uncaring and was about to chuck these forms in the bin but wrote this because i need the help

it's going to take an effort for me to do all this, so contact me and I'll discuss whatever you want. I do not wish to discuss my life with paper. You turn the page. It asks you how you expect the treatment to help and what form you imagine it taking. I have no idea. Knowing my luck, it will be all straight jackets, electricity to the head and a cage. The final page asks for any other information. You leave it blank. You send the questionnaire back to them. A few days later a letter arrives. You've got an appointment with a trainee clinical psychologist on April the 29th 2008. You don't attend. Another letter arrives. It says they don't normally reschedule appointments but they know this is hard for you,

so they're offering you another appointment. It's on May 13, 2008. You don't attend. You are discharged from the waiting list. Two years later, you shoot three people and shoot yourself. You will be called a monster. You will be called evil. The Prime Minister, David Cameron, will stand up in Parliament and say you were a callous murderer.

End of story. You have nine days and your whole life to prove you are more than a callous murderer. Go. I read that to you. I have goosebumps on the back of my hands as I read it because I know what's going to happen. In a sense, you know what's going to happen because you sort of will remember the story. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It manages to do that thing of taking a story that you think you might know, presenting it to you in a different way,

humanising somebody that all manner of people sought not to humanize while he was alive it's been controversial because even that act is seen as being disrespectful to the the the people that he shot there is a strong implication of police collusion towards the end of the book stroke the standoff with raoul Moat, I also have subsequently found out that this book hasn't perhaps had the attention it deserves, it hasn't perhaps sold in the quantity it deserves.

I strongly, I use this platform for good, and I urge you to read this book. It's published by Scribe. Correcting publishing's wrong. Well, I don't know, you have this rare i think it's a real privilege to be able to just enthuse about stuff that we love and i i found reading this such an exciting experience so it's called you could do something amazing with your life you are raoul moat it's by andrew hankinson there you go brilliant it seems

remarkable to me that that the raoul moat incident has produced two, I think, and again, in its own way, quite experimental in the way that it deals with the tragedy of those nine days and the aftermath, obviously, for David Rathbun, who ended up taking his own life, the policeman who was blinded by motor. The thing about this book I just want to add is that Andrew Hankinson does, fundamentally, he does two very brave things.

The first thing is, you know, setting the book up in the way that I've just described and then pulling it off, right? That is a brave artistic achievement. But the second thing that he does that is worth saying is he also makes a moral judgment near the end of the book. Interesting. Which he wouldn't necessarily have to do.

Does he keep in the third person throughout the book? Is that...? Kind of. Well, the thing that really makes the book, although I was gripped by it, is... And this isn't a spoiler, really. The story... We know how it ends.

The story... But it doesn't end there. OK. He does a really brilliant final chapter where he tells Raoul Moat what happened to him after he died, reputationally and physically. It's such a good book. Has he written before? You know what it slightly reminds me of? You know, the Alexander Masters, Stuart, A Life Lived Backwards.

Another wonderful book. And the other one we did about the diary. That book's incredible as well which is it's just that thing of doing something formally audacious in order to unlock the material which is i have to say pretty germane to what we're about to talk about what has he written anything else no no he's a he's journalist this is his first book wow it has that feeling of yeah i may or may not do this again, so I'm putting everything into this book. Which is a pretty good segue into... Let's do that again.

Let's pick this up again shortly. So, we've comprehensively covered what we've been reading. We haven't just been reading those things. We've also been reading, thanks to Jennifer, our guest, we've comprehensively covered what we've been reading. We haven't just been reading those things. We've also been reading, thanks to Jennifer, our guest, we've been reading Anne Quinn. Heartfelt thanks, by the way, because, I mean, I hadn't read any Anne Quinn, and now I've read, well, I've read a third of the novels

that she published, and I've read quite a few of the stories, but what a revelation. Why is this not... That's the sort of theme tune. That's the backlisted theme tune. How do we get back for a photo? Yeah, that's been lots of people's responses, though. They've been taking photographs of pages with their phones

and posting them on Twitter and saying, like, how do people not know that this person exists? It's the question we always ask. Well, yeah. Yeah. How did you... Ah, nice segue. ...Anne Quinn's representative here in the physical realm,

when did you first encounter her work? Do you know what? Anne Quinn was on the syllabus at my university. I studied her as part of my university degree. I trow that that was neither oxford nor cambridge no it was uh uea it was uea so um uea was great in the sense that i um i really got into that mid-century moment of uh those weird mildewy sorts of novels by people like patrick hamilton elizabeth bowen muriel spark people like like that and yeah and so I came across Berg, Berg is

usually everyone's gateway drug into Quinn except for now the stories but yeah I started reading Berg and I was just really ripe for it you know for me like as long as I'd been interested in books I'd also always had the sense that somehow they weren't really for me that this wasn't really my culture and I I read Berg and you know as a weird girl from Hull I thought this is a bit of me this this is a bit of me yeah it really uh spoke to me in a way that lots of other things hadn't it's it's interesting you say that because I did feel like it's every the seaside town possibly Brighton but it's every seaside town every that liminal sort of sense

of it being I mean yeah careful there I mean strictly speaking Hull is an estuarine city rather than a seaside town is it

yeah it's on the Humber estuary however lots of good Richard Morris very good on Hull yeah being from Hull

was actually why I kind of pulled a face when you showed me that book because you know there's a certain kind of antipathy between Hull and the rest of Yorkshire because of Humberside, et cetera. Anyway, back to the point in hand.

I'm from the North East. But part of my interest in Berg was to do with the seaside, in fact, because I spent a lot of time when I was growing up in a 12-foot Torah caravan with all the rest of my family. So for the entire summer holidays holidays we'd just be free range on a campsite on the east coast so the seaside has always been something that i've just been totally compelled and fascinated by and seeing a book like this that was sort of weird and grimy and about the seaside and was was by a writer who's you know a fairly singular figure a woman

an experimental writer working class brit, British, who else? Who else is there? Who else is there? You do feel like a massive set of boxes being brilliantly ticked. Now, so we normally ask, you know, as we say, where did you first encounter this writer? Where did you first encounter this book? We were going to be joined today by the novelist Lee Rourke,

and he was unable to join us in the end because he couldn't escape from Southend but I hope Lee has listened to this and he he has been a long time champion of Berg and of Anguin and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to read um we really wanted to have Lee's voice here as part of this particular podcast he wrote a piece for the independent eight years ago in their book of a lifetime slot and i'm just going to read what he says about it because i think it sets up the book that we're going to talk about and also and quinn and and it answers the question where did you first encounter this book? So Lee writes, I first came to read Anne Quinn's Mesmerizing Berg by accident in 2001. I was browsing a favorite bookshop in Brighton

looking for rare editions of Blaise Sondra. When I asked the bookseller if he stocked anything by Sondra, he simply shook his head and held up a Calder edition of Quinn's Berg. Have you ever read Anne Quinn, he asked me. No, who's Anne Quinn, I answered. I had only to read the first line to become hooked. A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father. I took the book home with me that night and by the end of the month I had read everything Anne Quinn had written, which in those days was quite a difficult task as Calder editions were hard to find. Jen is nodding wildly. Berg

1964 is one of Quinn's four novels the others are three 1966, Passages 1969 and Triptychs 1972. I like all of them but I guess it's Berg that has had the longest lasting influence on me as a writer. Berg is a sumptuous novel that cuts to the heart of things. It's a debut that still feels as modern as anything published today. And although it's clearly Quinn's own pin to the nouveau roman novelist she loved and admired, it still manages to contain its own unique and quintessentially British voice that is both recognisable and hauntingly peculiar. Berg is a wintry seaside novel that is Freudian, Oedipal and steeped in Greek tragedy, but also a heady mix of the postmodern grotesque and the macabre,

in which a ventriloquist dummy is brutally mutilated and the British novel is subtly unravelled. Well, Lee, that's so nice. And put together again amid an ethereal tale of loss and displacement. I've often thought that the modern novel wastes far too much time crafting a reality it can never attain. Even the new wave of realist novels, which cleverly mess around and turn inside out the same reality they desperately cling to often stall and create nothing new as a result. Berg simply eschews the superfluous dilly-dallying of our established humanistic tradition and cuts straight to place, movement and time, creating a mode of fiction that slices into its reader's psyche like a scalpel into the heart. The prose of Berg is intense, off-key, and sometimes odd, but also effortless and free of

baggage. It takes the reader to places most novelists could only dream of, both quicker and with surgeon-like precision to boot. I truly feel that it's one of the great British novels, eerily depicting a seamier side of Brighton. Quinn lived and died there, swimming out to sea and never coming back in 1973, that can still be felt today, especially on cold, dark, wintry nights, the sea crashing onto the pebbles just below the ageing esplanade.

Berg should be read by everyone if only to give us a glimpse of what the contemporary british novel could be like now among amidst this what a terrific that's the end of the podcast because i think that's lee has taken care of it for us but actually that he sort of says at the end there, that thing that he says about giving a glimpse of what a contemporary British novel could be like, sort of goes back to what we were talking about earlier. You know, the success of your book, of Quinn's writing, and the sense that there is a moment now

of people discovering things that had lain fallow for 50 years is because people sort of want this writing now you know and they can get it in a way that perhaps they haven't been able to there's something in the water at the moment you know there's so many writers around now who i think must have read quinn they must kind of recognize her as one of their predecessors and they they haven't people like claire louise bennett um or emmaon McBride, people like that. Also, you know, Deborah Lever,

who's also been a kind of champion of Quinn's work. But sometimes they haven't read her. They haven't read her and it seems unthinkable. Jessie Greengrass, I think, you know. It's so interesting to me because it's, I mean, thinking,

I mean, one, like I said, I mean, it's so great to have, to read a book, a proper, fully formed masterpiece which you haven't read. And I think this book is all, it has, as Lee said, everything it takes to be that. But it also seems to me, it's a strain of fiction that I think, you go back to Murphy, Beckett's Murphy, that there is a kind of, that strain think, you go back to Murphy, Beckett's Murphy, that there is a kind of

that strain of experimentalism in, I mean, I always think of Murphy as an English novel because it was sort of set in London, it was written but it's also, it's brilliant, it's Camus as well, isn't it? It's that sort of internalised you know, the plotting to kill the

father, it carries all of the symbolic weight incredibly lightly. Mostly when I think about the book, having recently finished it, is those two rooms that have got a partition between them. And we'll talk a little bit. I mean, the plot of the novel is, I mean, I think Lee's kind of, yeah, it's about a man trying to kill his father without giving too many spoilers away.

Jen, do you want to read us something so we can hear the voice? Sure. What I'll do is I'll read you, well, I'll provide a kind of introduction to Alistair Berg slash Greb to give you an idea. Ali, to give you a kind of a notion of what this dissolute hair tonic salesman's like. Okay. Berg slowly dressed, each item of soiled clothing chain mailing his limbs part by part until at last his head sprouted

out a hedgehog with eyes that darted from left to right alistair berg alias greb commercial traveler seller of wigs hair tonic paranoiac param paramour. Do you plead guilty? Yes. Guilty of all things the human condition brings. Guilty of being too committed. Guilty of defending myself, of defrauding others. Guilty of love, loving too much or not enough. Guilty of parochial actions, of universal wish fulfilments, of conscious martyrdom, of unconscious masochism. Idle hours, fingers that meddle.

Alistair Charles Humphrey Greb, alias Berg, you are condemned to life imprisonment until such time you may prove yourself worthy of death. Maybe before, but yes, definitely before entering this place, perhaps even prior to that fateful day when seeing the photograph of the old man it had started, the staring of the insect between throat and heart. But what precisely are you proposing to do now? Yes, you, a pauper who will soon be living off national assistance,

digging purple turs into threadbare rugs, eyes avoiding the streaks of grease around the gas ring, the dust on the bottles, the chest of drawers, the cracked enamel pot, the crack that runs from one corner to another where the wallpaper ends in a map of Italy. Did these surroundings add up to anything? Had they a separate existence? Say I decided to leave, would they mean nothing, absolutely nothing? If I could completely wipe out the man of yesterday, what did others do to eradicate the past? But then he had hardly been on intimate enough terms with anyone to know what they might or might not do in a similar situation. Besides, hadn't he always taken himself for granted, creatures of habit, chained to environment, hereditary complaints and complexes? Had the convolution he was now in merely been transferred, destined to rotate the same way?

He sat by the window, the sun now hidden by fistfuls of clouds. I relate myself to that. The dismembered trees, half-broken walls, roofs with slates ready to fall off, and the people below with their masks of indifference. And yet I am aware of an urge to break through them all. That's pretty hardcore, that bit. The thing is, the intensity of it is truly not overwhelming. That's not the right word. You have to read it slowly.

Yeah. Really intense book. And it gets more intense. That was one of the things that struck me rereading it over the last week to come on here. I'd almost forgotten quite what a kind of cacophony it is towards the end. And after the kind of middle section with the... Sorry, spoilers. No, it doesn't matter. No. There's of middle section with the sorry spoilers no no there's a middle section with a kind of classic party scene a kind of like world upside down

fireworks party where everything kind of goes and he's not the creeping tendrils yeah that's that's the other um passage i had marked to read the kind of tendrils and the hot house and the claustrophobia and then it just swirls and swirls and swirls and has this incredible momentum towards the end and i've forgotten quite how dynamic it was in that in that respect i mean it's it's you know it goes without saying it's a book you're not going to get you're not going to get an eighth of it i think on in terms of the the kind of the patterning of it's it's it's it strikes me as an astonishing first novel yeah um well it wasn't her first see no it wasn't her first, see? No, it wasn't.

No, she wrote two others, but she burnt them. She wrote one called Oscar and one called A Slice of the Moon, and she burnt them almost immediately. And she was living hand to mouth as well. Yeah. While she was writing Berg, she was working as a secretary at the Royal College of Art for the head of painting there. So she would sit in her bed sit at a typewriter until two in the morning and just type it out

yeah i mean there's a it's like yes in the unmet country that she wrote about her about her life i mean yeah i mean the intensity and the the sort of the that kind of commitment to art and to to self-expression which is incredibly powerful as soon as the money came in for Berg, the advances, she got herself a fellowship. She buggered off to the States. She did, right? Yeah, so she heads off to the States, doesn't she? Yeah, and she, like in the States,

she was kind of embraced as kind of an American language poet, right? So she thought of herself as a poet. She didn't think of herself as a... She had a friend, Robert Creeley. She did, and one with Robert Sward as well. I mean, she comes across as obviously incredibly intense, but fantastically impressive human being. But you're left at the end of your collection thinking,

God, it's just a shame that she didn't live longer to write more. Before we go back to Berg, I'd like to go back to Berg in a minute. I just want to ask you, the process of putting together the unmapped country which you very deliberately subtitle stories and fragments how long did it take you to put it together and was it all sitting in a kind of in a box file somewhere or did you have to pull it in from was it heck did you have to put an advert in the exchange in mart saying does anyone have any and quinn stuff yeah i mean i wasn't working on it full time for seven years because that would be mental but i was working on it off and on for seven years because the thing is right and quinn hasn't got an

archive as yet if anyone wants to contact me about putting together an and quinn archive please do this is amazing but she hasn't got an archive so her letters are with the calderon boyers archive over in the states uh her letters between her and her publisher everything else was scattered between here the us and new zealand right so i had to just kind of cold call ex-boyfriends old mates she also had a confidant called father brockhard sewell who was a carmelite friar in east finchley he was very very much involved with the countercultural demi-mond in the 60s he you know he was a confidant to people involved in the christine keeler stuff and and he had a bunch of stuff unfortunately he died a few years back but the archivist at the

friary gave me some stuff there were her old mates from the commune she lived on in New Mexico, Larry Goodall, who's been very active in keeping her legacy alive. He provided me with stuff. It came from all over the place. It was kind of detective work. It was someone mentions someone who mentions someone, and then I write to them or I phone them out of the blue and I say, hey, you remember your mate from 50 years ago?

I don't suppose you've got anything hanging around. I think the thing about the book which you deserve huge credit for is given how diffuse the material was physically you know but also how it pulls in all different types of writing I suspect one of the things that I and John both felt about reading the finished book is it really feels like a book yeah it really hangs together you feel you are being taken through a very deliberate series of stages of someone's artistic development was that really that must have been very exciting as an editor when you realized that the book was coming together as a book rather than as just a kind of repository of pieces of stuff

yeah i've always been adamant while working on the project that this wasn't just off cuts this isn't just like the sort of you know the stuff that wouldn't go anywhere else quinn's entire body of work is completely fragmentary her novels are made up of fragments it wasn't that difficult to sort of follow her line of development you know she started off very much a kind of British noir kind of kind of mode of writing and she moved through to kind of the French experimentation and by the end you know she's doing the the crazy Burroughs stuff and then she what's interesting with it is in the the last piece which is called the unmapped country she kind of goes back to realism and she produces this sort of trenchant critique of mental health

care which she herself had experience of so her own writing life followed an arc that i just traced really it was quite easy to to build a kind of collection with the i found i found that at the the unmapped country itself i found that quite a hard read quite distressing yeah read artistically very you know focused yeah that's not what i mean i mean just clearly because you're feeding into some knowledge about what what became she's gone back to a more naturalistic style to tell that story and she writes i mean she again she writes brilliantly about depression i think yeah um should we listen to, you mentioned Larry Goodall, the poet. So a couple of years ago, Larry Goodall put up on Bandcamp this recording of Anne Quinn reading from Three,

which is her second novel. Yeah. This was done in the late 1960s. Larry Goodall says that he recorded this on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was in Placitas, New Mexico, where i lived and where she was staying and all i want to say before we play this gen is you referred to uh quinn as a working class writer let's just have a listen to that clip now okay he stood in the archway of white on one side the paint unpeeled in thin layers ran into yellow crevices. He fondled

a statue, the hands of heavy quarry stone, with his fists, ran his finger down, between, up again, from one to another until he reached the summer house. Shutting the glass door carefully, he leaned there, sighing, and looked round. In front of the television she turned pages of a magazine her hand bound by a handkerchief she slid her feet out of mules brought them up under a cushion look now and then at the screen her mouth puckered eyes red which she rubbed cleaned her spectacles breathed on slowly held to the light reach for a cigarette the pistol lighter the metal shiny part she stroked put down and jumped up opened the door switched on all the lights in every ground floor

room opened all the doors moved from room to room switched off all the lights left the doors open and crouched in front of the television the cat cur curled at her feet, she caressed him with her toes. The authentic voice of the working class there. You saw RP in those days. Yeah, I mean, she does write about it in the first piece in the collection. She was sent to a convent school so she could talk proper. Learn to talk proper. Yeah.

One of the things that I was struck by in Berg and in the pieces in The Unmapped Country is her willingness to find a way of writing about what she wanted to write about in an era when women writing about some of those subjects was extremely unusual. So there's a strong sexual element to her work there's also kind of um yeah but also a kind of fluidity but there's a fluidity to it yeah where the sexuality flows

from character to character in quite an unusual way for a room to the other in there yeah yeah but in a male or female writer you know if you if you read, and we're going to talk about some of these other writers, but if you talk about B.S. Johnson, who is often mentioned in The Same Breath as Quinn, B.S. Johnson is much more buttoned up. That kind of definition

is often a negative definition because, I mean, they were all writing experimentally in the 60s, but they were, it was extremely varied, what they did. I know, and it's...

Think of something like Christine Brooke Rose and Quinn, you know. Well, we, I'm just going to read this jennifer you were on a very interesting discussion program with jonathan co and juliet jakes where you were talking about this famous list this accidental canon that bs johnson created when he was writing the forward to his collection are you rather young to be writing your memoirs? Yeah. I'd quite like to look at this list of authors.

He says, Only when one has some contact with a continental European tradition of the avant-garde does one realise just how stultifyingly Philistine is the general book culture of this country. Compared with the writers of romances, thrillers and the bent but so-called straight novel, there are not many who are writing as though it mattered, as though they meant it, as though they meant it to matter. Perhaps I should

nod here to Samuel Beckett, of course, John Berger, Christine Brooke Rose, Bridget Brophy, Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Angela Carter, Eva Figes, Giles Gordon, Wilson Harris, Raina Heppenstall, even hasty muddled Robert Nye. Cheers, says Robert Nye. And Quinn, Penelope Shuttle. Have you read anything by Penelope Shuttle? That's the name of the spring. No. Me neither. Charles Gordon.

Alan Sillito, for his last book only. Raw material indeed. Stefan Thomason and Cumming John Huiwei, Stand By and If Only Heathcote Williams Would Write a Novel. Anyone who imagines himself or herself slighted by not being included above can fill in his or her name here it would be a courtesy however to let me know his or her qualifications for so imagining you know i mean bs johnson's trying to artificially construct a british avant-garde right

that was never going to happen that was basically a list of writers that he liked and and in fairness some of them were his mates as well and and in fairness, you know, they all shared this kind of experimental spirit. But as we've said, their methods and their strategies were so diverse. And besides which, there was never going to be a British avant-garde in the way that there was a French avant-garde, you know, around the same time. That wasn't going to happen here. Why? Why?

Because this cuts to the heart of it, I think. It does cut to the heart of it. It does cut to the heart of it. It does cut to the heart of it. No, Nouveau Roman, Rob Griez style. No. There was, Helen Sissou wrote about this tendency as a kind of agglomeration, as a grouping, and kind of called it the British Nouveau Roman, you know.

Why didn't it happen here? I don't know. I've been thinking about that question for like as long as I've been interested in these chaps. When you were talking about this jen and that idea of why in the 60s pop culture is what's happening so so pop music is exploding and film is exploding and poetry and poetry is that we can think of more poetry than we can think of fiction and then i thought wait a minute now i seem to remember i about a year and a half ago i read revolt into style by by George Milley, the great Revolt into Style.

And there's only a short chapter about what he called pop literature. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was thinking something rang about and it's just this phrase really stuck in my mind. Although pop culture tends to despise the printed word, recognising it quite correctly as the centre stone of the arch of traditional culture, there is nevertheless a growing body of work related to pop, and although most of this has been already mentioned in context somewhere in this book, it would be illogical to ignore it here.

And he talks about, and here are the books for the backlisted episodes, let's rack them up if we haven't done them already absolute beginners by colin mckinnis sean hignett's a picture to hang on the wall anyone heard of that no never read that tom key's all night stand no and then he talks about jeff nuttall and bomb culture now bomb culture is a massive book, utterly forgotten now. But that idea of literature as something that self-consciously, experimental literature allied itself with Europe, with France, despised America to some extent, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What pop music does and pop art and film does,

literature is very reluctant to engage with. But that doesn't matter now. That's the point I'm making. 50 years on, we're looking at these people and thinking, okay, well, they have a different kind of integrity from that period. But do you know what? None of this is about why... These aren't arguments to do with why they didn't form an avant-garde.

These are arguments to do with how they've been perceived since and at the time, right? Because there are reasons why they didn't have as much-garde. These are arguments to do with how they've been perceived since and at the time, right? Because there are reasons why they didn't have as much of a legacy, right? To do with, I think, I would say, the particular ways in which the kind of role that the novel performs in British culture, right? It's a kind of soft nationalism.

We ask that the novel does soft nationalism for us, right? I would say. That's what we ask of our fiction. And they're not doing that. Unless it's genre, isn't it? Exactly. That's where you're allowed to get away with the good stuff. It's like Robin Cook, you know, writes sort of, you know,

and then he turns into Derek Raymond and can write kind of, he can get away with writing avant-garde French novels by making them detective stories. Yeah, but think of Gigi Ballard. Yeah. Again. But what we ask for in our literary fiction is a form of soft nationalism, which these guys aren't doing.

They're cosmopolitan. They're outward looking. They're strange. They're weird. And that's the reason for the perception. But that's not the same thing as why these writers didn't band together as a united avant-garde. That is a different and slightly more difficult question

that I've never quite got to the bottom of. And yet, at the same time with Berg, one of the things I really liked about Berg is it does take the seedy boarding house novel of Patrick Hamilton or Graham Greene, chop it up into bits and put it back together in a totally different shape, right? Yeah. That it has the Brighton connection as well. Graham Greene, he said of Patrick Hamilton that Hangover Square was the best novel about Brighton. I think it's Hangover Square, isn't it?

Help me out, somebody. Yes, it is Hangover Square. It's no accident that Quinn found herself writing about the seaside, right? Quinn's novels are so often to do with the kind of desperate and always sort of, in the end, never going to happen, search for freedom.

The limits of human freedom. They're always fuelled by a kind of dissatisfaction with everyday life, with the quotidian, with the everyday. And the way that the seaside functions in British culture, it's where we cast off our inhibitions. It's where we have a little bit of what we fancy for a minute. But only a minute.

But only a minute, of course, because we're British. It's good to just read. You set yourself the task of taking a character out of a room and having them walk across a park. This is not the showiest. Just if you're trying to teach people, how do you take a situation which is, and I'm always, you know, I love that. Martin Amis needs to have more, as Kingsley said, he needs to have more sentences like they finished their drinks and left

this is far away this is Berg leaving Judith who is his father's lover and his own lover Judith straightened up wiping her hands on the plastic apron with its large printed roses smoothed her dress down that met the knees

which like swollen suns swivelled around the dimples that were knotted mouths behind their twisted stocking seams he closed the door before she could say anything more and for a time he remained on the landing breathing deeply as though he had just emerged from a wide but shallow pool crossing the park a subterranean world surreptitiously risen here a million starfish pinned on the forelocks of a hundred unicorns driven by furious witches, a transformation that held itself occasionally in suspense. But for how long would it be like this? Even as Berg made his way, the

wind shifted the snow between the trees, leaving divisions as in a map. At times, the snow came practically up to his knees, compelling him to clutch the branches in order to gain higher ground. At one point a light flashed through the semi-darkness straight into his eyes, then out again as though a photograph had been taken. He stopped, anticipating its reappearance. Maybe only a space between the trees, perhaps even the sun. Another flash, then out, fixed, developed for all time, imprinted on newspapers, magazines, condemned, judged, or worse, dismissed. This was the man.

Read all about the strange life of one who never returned. Yeah, that's an amazing passage, that one. I just think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's one of those ones. That's an amazing passage, that one. I just think... Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's one of those ones you...

Yeah, well, it's an amazement to me that it's taken until now, maybe, for the full power of her work to be recognised. But also, in the unlikely history of the neglect of the novel Berg, Berg was made into a film. This is from The Sublime to the Ridiculous now. It was made into a film. This is from The Sublime to the Ridiculous now. It was made into a film in 1989.

Janice Bralwither, the film toy in edition. Yeah, I'm now displaying it. So it was made into a film called Killing Dad, which I remember that film coming out. Killing Dad, starring Richard E. Grant, Denim Elliot and Julie Walters. And I tried to find a copy in advance of this. I could not find a copy to watch.

Jen, you were saying to me you've never seen it. I don't dare watch it. I can't watch it. I won't watch it. So I was looking up about this film, John, and I found this thing, right, which has made me laugh so much. I was looking on Amazon and there's several reviews and there's a one-star review from a Mr. J. Ford,

spelt F-F-O-R-D-E. And I was thinking, J. Ford? It's an unusual name. Is it not Jasper Ford? Is it the best-selling novelist Jasper Ford? So I looked up the Wikipedia page of the best-selling novelist Jasper Ford? So I looked up the Wikipedia page of the best-selling novelist Jasper Ford, and it is Jasper Ford. Jasper Ford left a one-star review of the film Killing Dad,

and I'm going to read it to you. I don't know him. If he ever hears this, he probably won't want to be outed. It's worth a look, though, for some of his other reviews. Hi, Jasper. Yeah reviews hi jasper yeah hi jasper anyway this is what he says about the film killing dad the adaptation of berg quote i worked on this film as a focus puller in 1989 my twin daughters had just been born and i was very tired so the shooting was a sleep deprived habrived haze. I bought the video to see how it all turned out. If you want to dissuade someone from moving to Southend,

show them this film. That's amazing. Other reviewers are more generous than that. During her life, Quinn's books were optioned by Roman Polanski and people like that. At the time, there was an interest in it. It never quite came off. But she sold, didn't she?

She sold foreign editions. Berg was published in French and I think German. And Dutch as well, I think, yeah. Is it hard to tell now, if you try and reconstruct this, how popular or respected she was in her lifetime or towards the end of her life. I mean, I don't have much sense of that. If she was, you know, the fact that she's in a list of names

in the year of her death by B.S. Johnson. If you go back and read the reviews that were appearing at the time, so you get a sense of someone whose star kind of rose with the publication of Berg, and there was, you know, a fair amount of interest in the literary press and in the broadsheets. And then it gradually sort of dipped and then went away, the kind of critical interest in her fell away.

But in fairness, she was in the States. She was gallivanting around, living in communes and under the bridge in San Francisco. And she was having a fantastic time, but she wasn't engaged with literary culture here. She was going to the Berkeley Poetry Congress. Right. I mean, my question, having looked at all this,

is that surely Anne Quinn needs a biography. I mean, it's a really interesting life. Yeah, it's a fully interesting life. Surely, surely, Jen, you are the person to write that life. Well, thank you very much for saying that, John. As a matter of fact, that happens to be the next project i have planned i would like to to write the biography i think it's a it's a fascinating life let's talk later okay great well we could we could go on um and probably will after this but uh we have to stop now um now we've got a new innovation

at the end of this episode which which I'm going to do quickly. The idea is that I'm going to pick an unbound project to commend to you, backlisted listeners, at the end of each podcast. So the one I'm going to commend this week is The Hidden Matrix, Myth and the Human Mind by Neil Phillip. Neil's one of our leading historians of myth. It's a huge, very ambitious book. He's like a kind of modern Cazbe on writing the key to all mythologies his argument is that far from being redundant myth is in fact the factory preset of human consciousness and you don't need to trust me on it philip pullman says i can hardly think of anything more important so if you want to pledge for that or any of the other 354

unbound pod projects currently live on the site, you can, dear listeners, get a free postage on your pledge. Just put in the code when you check out QUINN, Q-U-I-N. Amazing. There you go. That's what she might have wanted.

Just what she'd have wanted. I'm sure. Free postage. Thank you, John. Thank you to Jennifer Hodgson and to our new producer, Cycling Mickey Perch. Thank you, Mickey. And you can get in touch with us on Twitter,

at BacklistedPod, on Facebook, at BacklistedPodcast, and on Unbound's online magazine, Boundless, at unbound.com forward slash boundless. Also, if you felt like rating us on iTunes with the appropriate number of stars for life, we'd be modestly pleased if you did that. Thank you for listening.

We'll be back with another show in a fortnight. Until then, good night. And I have to add that Penelope Shuttle is alive and well and living in Falmouth you can choose to listen to Batlisted with or without adverts if you prefer to listen to itlisted with or without adverts. If you prefer to listen to it without adverts,

you can join us on our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash backlisted, where you also get bonus content of two episodes of Locklisted, the podcast where we talk about the books and films and music that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks.