Backlisted - Escape to an Autumn Pavement and Jamaica by Andrew Salkey

Episode Date: April 11, 2022

Our guests are both new to Backlisted: the legendary publisher, editor, writer Margaret Busby and the award-winning poet, Raymond Antrobus. They join us to discuss the work of the Caribbean writer, Andrew Salkey, in particular his 1960 Hampstead ‘bedsit novel’, Escape to An Autumn Pavement, and his epic poem Jamaica, which explores the historical foundations of Jamaican society and was first published in 1973 by the pioneering press, Bogle L’Ouverture. As you will discover, Salkey was a consummate live performer - as are both our guests – and the episode make a strong case for his work to be revisited. It also features Andy enjoying the graphic novel and memoir, All the Sad Songs by Summer Pierre, while John is blown away by Aftermath, Preti Taneja’s brave and uncompromising account of recovering from a public tragedy. Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length) 09:44 - All The Sad Songs by Summer Pierre. 15:36 - Aftermath by Preti Taneja. 22:16 - Escape to An Autumn Pavement & Jamaica by Andrew Salkey * 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. Well, here we are, Margaret. I've got a question. I know you have an illustrious career, important publisher that dealt with many fascinating

and culturally vital people. what i would like to ask you about is bex hill on sea because you went to school in bexhill didn't you i did i went to a very interesting international school called charters tower school for girls well they didn't have the poor girls but it was charters towers where and on hastings road on hastings road admittedly now listeners regular listeners we know we normally talk about Croydon but I'm I'm trying to annex Bexhill now into the backlisted canon and I because my family comes from that part of the world and so when I saw that you've been to school uh there so it was in Hastings Road and did you would you go to the would you go on outings to the Delaware Pavilion?

We certainly did go there. I think we had our annual speech day there and did our school plays there. Did you do school plays there? We had lectures from eminent people who went to there. What Brunowski did you say? Joseph Brunowski I think. People like that. Played the Delaware Pavilion. There's a thought. And did you, and was there a good library in Bexhill then? Or was there a good school library? I can't remember too much about libraries, but I can remember we certainly were provided with daily newspapers. I remember when it changed from the Daily Telegraph to the Guardian, daily newspapers. I remember when it changed from the Daily Telegraph to The Guardian. But I also had a way of discovering things in the local newsagents. And I found this wonderful literary magazine, literary journal called John of London's Weekly. And I used

to write them letters about all sorts of things. They didn't know they were dealing with a schoolgirl but i also i i one one week i i got an issue of it on which there was a a picture on the front cover of noni jababu the south african writer who was having her book reviewed in it and i think she also went on to to uh be an editor of uh journals like the strand but it was that image of an African woman on the front of a literary magazine that kind of gave me the inspiration that I could be part of the British literary field. So there you go.

And that was from a shop in Bexhill. That was from being at school in Bexhill, Charters Towers. Tiny acorns. We put Bexhill on Sea on the literary map. Hooray! And Sights on the Literary Map. That was smooth, wasn't it?

I happen to know that you have moved from Hackney to... where are you living at the moment? Bloomsbury. Fantasy Pants, Bloomsbury. That's very appropriate for a poet i mean yeah i i was actually going to move back to hatton i was looking for a place to rent and i saw that the uh because this was just at the very end of the pandemic and i was like oh wait the rents have all flattened

like it's the same incredible same to rent a place in hatton as it is to rent a place in bloomsbury hello at that point probably not now but like I kind of had a golden window there blue plaques everywhere oh man so yeah so I get to kind of walk my son through the literary landscape of Bloomsbury every day um which I can't wait I've already I've already written about it I've already already got stuff about Tagore and Virginia Woolf and all these poets. And is he a nursery? Is he in a Bloomsbury nursery? He's in a Bloomsbury daycare centre.

It's like Charleston Farmhouse. Let's start. We should. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. We should. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today, you find us downstairs in a West Indian nightclub in London's Oxford Circus in the late 50s. Sunday evening.

There's a table of GIs in the corner, petting and sweating. The lager and scotch is flowing and the scent of Old Spice and Wrigley's gum fills the air. Johnny, the tall barman, has an amused, detached look on his face. It's approaching 10.30 as he starts to call last orders. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, a platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and today we're joined by two guests making their backlisted debuts, Margaret Busby and Raymond Antrobus. Hello, Ray. Raymond Antrobus is a poet, writer, educator and investigator of misting sounds.

He is the author of To Sweet and Bitter, The Perseverance and most recently All the Names Given, published by Picador in the UK and Tin House in the US. In 2019, he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for Best Work of Literature in any genre other accolades include the Ted Hughes Award, PBS Winter Choice, a Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and the Guardian Poetry Book of the Year his debut children's book Can Bears Ski spoilers I reckon they can illustrated by Polly Dunbar was published last year in the UK by Walker Books and in the US and Canada by Candlewick Press.

His poems, Jamaican British, The Perseverance and Happy Birthday Moon were added to the UK's GCSE syllabus in 2019. So before you know it, your son will be studying your work with huge pleasure. Oh, I'm sure. It's amazing.

How do you get notified of that, right? How does that happen? One day you just checked your email and it's like, hi, you put your poems on the Jesse National Curriculum. Wow. Do you get a royalty? It's very small. But it's funny because I immediately thought of, who was it?

Was it Adrian Mitchell who said, oh, God, there's no way. That's the because I immediately thought of Who was it? Was it Adrian Mitchell? Who said, oh God, there's no way That's the last thing I want for my poetry You know, kids being, you know Forced Not more Roman entrepreneurs We're also joined today by Margaret Busby, CBE She's a legendary publisher, editor, writer, and broadcaster.

In 1967, she became Britain's youngest and first black female book publisher when she co-founded with Clive Allison the Soho-based publishing house, Allison and Busby, which she ran for 20 years, counting Bukti Emekta, Nuruddin Farah, C.L.R. James, Michael Moorcock, and Jill Murphy, among James, Michael Moorcock and Jill Murphy, among them all. Michael Moorcock and Jill Murphy have not offered the same sentence. I'd also got to thank

Margaret personally on the spot right now for changing my life by republishing my favourite book, Absolute Beginners by Colin McInnes, which you brought back into print in 1979 or 1980, along with McInnes, which you brought back into print in 1979 or 1980, along with McInnes' other London novels, and influenced me and I'm sure generations of young British readers.

Let me tell you something about that, because we published that. I think it was 1980 we published those three London novels, Absolute Beginners, City of Spades and Mr. Love and Justice. And the books were out for a while. They had been reviewed, but they hadn't sold brilliantly. And then there was one review, I think it was in the NME, New Musical Express. And it was after that review, things took off. So that's one of the only times you could say, well, that one review had an influence. The film rights sold and so on and so on. You know I am an old so-and-so but I will say that if you grew up in the 1980s one of

the great lucky things you had was that books were covered everywhere. Totally. NME book reviews were really really important. Margaret edited the groundbreaking anthology Daughters of Africa in 1992 Everywhere. Totally. NME book reviews were really, really important. Margaret edited the groundbreaking anthology Daughters of Africa in 1992 and its follow-up New Daughters of Africa, published by Myriad Editions in 2019. A long-time campaigner for diversity in publishing, she is the recipient of many awards,

including the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature in 2017. And in 2020, she was voted one of the 100 Great Black Britons. And last year was awarded the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award. Amazing. I'm thrilled we're joined by Anthropos and Busby. That just has such a nice ring to it.

We love it. We love it. Okay. And the writer we're here to discuss is Andrew Salke, one of the major figures in late 20th century Caribbean writing and whose poetry was published by Margaret in the early 1980s. Raymond has chosen his second novel, Escape to an Autumn Pavement, as the main book for discussion.

It was first published by Hutchinson in 1960 and reissued in 2009 by the brilliant Peopletree Press. It concerns the attempts of the Jamaican Johnny Sobert to make his way in the London of the late 1950s, a city still reeling from the depredations of war. But we'll also be discussing Sulkey's poetry, much of it sadly now out of print, particularly the long poem Jamaica,

and also Sulkey's position among the remarkable group of Caribbean writers that arrived in London in the 1950s. But before we catch the number 13 bus to Soho, Andy, what have you been reading this week? Thank you. I'm going to talk about a book called All the Sad Songs by a writer and illustrator called Summer Pierre. And this was published in 2018 by Retrofit Comics and Big Planet Comics.

And it's a graphic memoir, not graphic in its explicitness. Using pictures. Yeah, not a graphic novel, but a graphic memoir. Summer Pierre is a former, I think, former musician and songwriter and she's the author of Paper Pencil Life and she had a thing in a wonderful thing in the New Yorker called Sylvia Plath's Last Plan which you can find online and I commend to you but this is a book I won't lie to you. But this is a book, I won't lie to you listeners, if you're a member of Generation X and were around in the 1990s and paying attention, then you're very much going to enjoy this memoir. It's about somebody talking about what music meant to them in their 20s

and initially it's about mixtapes, or as British 50-somethings know them, compilation tapes. Let history be clear, no one called them mixtapes back then. They didn't, did they? That wasn't a thing. They were called compilation tapes. Anyway, it's about compilation tapes or mixtapes. And okay, so I started reading it.

I thought, oh, this is good is good and you know the artwork is beautiful and uh it's quite poignant and she talks about lots of great records from that time but as the book goes on it becomes a book much more about the eternal triangle of creativity, response to creativity, and the anxiety which produces it. And actually, it's tremendously moving in terms of some of Pierre's account of her own breakdown and the role that being a creative person both played in that and helped her recover from and I was really struck by how unusual it is not so much to read that in a graphic format though I suppose it is but to read something of such emotional intelligence in relation to creativity and the creative impulse and so if you're interested in what it takes to write a book or write a song or paint a picture and what part of you that comes from and the relationship between your ego and your id, who wouldn't be interested in that relationship?

I think All the Sad Songs is a book that you would really, really enjoy. Anyway, I thought it was absolutely terrific. I'm just going to read a little bit, although you can't see the picture, so that's a bit strange, isn't it? But I'm going to read the... You're going to have to take it on trust that the pictures are very beautiful, expressive and funny. And this is the beginning of part six, which is called The Last Tape.

Summer Pierre is writing in the present here and she says, This morning I've been listening to clips on YouTube from the documentary Alive Inside of Alzheimer's patients listening to music. Therapists have discovered that otherwise unresponsive patients animate and recover some cognitive abilities listening to favourite music from when they were young. It's powerful and moving to watch and somehow it makes complete sense. Anyone who's been at a party or in a car when an unexpected favourite song comes on knows that there's a way music can awaken something in our bodies. I can remember being somewhere and hearing the psychedelic first song Pretty in Pink

and for a moment my body was no longer there but back in the summer of 1986 in the lobby of the island theater in coronado california about to see pretty in pink i could almost smell the popcorn it is this capacity for music to trigger memory in the body that can also ruin certain soundtracks i once knew a woman who couldn't listen to Exile in Guyville by Liz Phair because it reminded her of her boyfriend. And then there's a there's a light little picture of the woman saying he used to put that album on every time we had sex. Now that's all I can think of when I hear Liz Phair. And Summer Pierre is thinking to herself, oh, what a terrible album to have sex to. Anyway, it happens though, she writes on. You huddle around some song or album and gather an emotional light from it.

But then time goes on and the experience shifts or changes and so do the feelings and associations with that music. In Boston, I had used music so much to process pain that after a couple of years, my body started to associate that music with trauma and loss and listening to music could bring on horrific anxiety attacks so did playing guitar and attempting to write songs this has to work i tried to plow through it i was like a junkie that couldn't accept that the high of loss didn't work anymore so i just kept trying to force it and injuring myself more and finally there came a point when i'd run out of ways to start over and it seemed to me that it was all endings and there was nothing left but how broken i was so i ran i did the ultimate start over i packed up my car

i drained my bank account and i drove across the country to move back to California. That's great. So that is All the Sad Songs by Summer Pierre. You can either buy that as a book or she's got a Patreon, patreon.com forward slash Summer Pierre, which it's available there as well. She's absolutely terrific and I commend it to you all. John Mitchinson,

what have you been reading this week? Okay, so I've been reading Aftermath by Priti Tanager, who former guest, she was on the brilliant episode on Beloved by Toni Morrison. And this book is published by And Other Stories on the 7th of April. So when you're hearing this, it should be just published. And it is, I have to say, one of the most, I think, challenging, harrowing, brilliant books I've read in a long, long time. So the background to the story is that Priti taught on a program in prisons called Learning Together. And on November the 29th, 2019, there a an event at Fishmongers Hall in London near London Bridge to celebrate the five years of this program of creative writing in prisons and one of the people who attended there was a man called Usman Khan who had been a member of

the program when he was in prison he was now out out of prison. Anyway, the story is he came to the event and at the end of the event he went down to the toilet and he strapped two knives onto his hands, taped them to his wrists, put on a fake bomb gas, came out and killed two of the people. He injured, I think, five people, but two of them fatally, Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt, both of whom were part of the Learning Together programme.

Priti had taught Usman Khan. Jack Merritt had overseen the programme that she was teaching on. And as I said, the book really is an attempt to come to terms, to unpack the horror of what happened on that day. And I have to say, you know, there's so many difficulties around this. She writes, this short book is about how a specific act of terrorist violence can shatter, rearrange and refocus us on what we've always known, what we think we know, and what we choose to believe, and what narrative rushes into those gaps. I think, given the difficulty of the material, people have died, the trauma that

she went through, the difficulty of even thinking about writing and the effect that writing has on people's lives, whether things could have happened differently. Amazingly, what comes out of it is a kind of a hybrid. I wouldn't call it exactly a memoir. I wouldn't call it an analysis, although it has deep, profound dimensions of political analysis and personal memoir in it. It's a kind of extraordinary... The difficulty that she's faced with means that she's almost created

i think a new kind of non-fiction it's full of quotes from other people from other writers from poets from uh from novelists i mean it really is an extraordinary book and it's come with amazing quotes from nikesh shukla and max porter and mona ashi i'm just going to read a really small bit to give you a flavour of the prose and then maybe just a couple of sentences of pretty herself saying what she thinks the book is to do. So this is from somewhere near the beginning, the first half of the book anyway. This is not a confession. This is not a testimony. this is the moment before the frame is exposed, this is a lament, not for one but for many not yet born. Still, there will always be a prison workshop where she taught story making, inside that room. He, British Asian, Pakistani, stroke other, he shared his literary

knowledge in class. He worked at his writing. He said he read canonical novels. He said he had plans for work, for writing, for life after release. People saw his creative writing as a sign of rehabilitation even of possible de-radicalization it was simply that like many he valued the form a conduit for control and self-expression the art of convincing others a version of his extreme drug now she doubts. Does making art, wanting to be an art maker, make anyone less likely to harm? It is possible to teach craft and yet to know that making art signifies nothing, except the human imperative to express a life force and to say, this is what I imagine. I know. I was there. Now we are here. Jack is dead and Saskia. And what comes now? Maybe he always meant everything he said and did and thought, all of it and all of the time, and at the same time until he made

his final choice. Time is the worst punishment we can give, where death is not for us to inflict. Now we are left with it. Well, I taught him the effect of writing fiction. For example, without full stops. There is only silence, only loss. In the recognition of a history of splitting, there is radical shame, say doubt.

The verdict is he always knew and always lied, which means his greatest skill was passing. He was a product of the state. That we can be both alive and dead at the same time, and while we are breathing, do we even know which is which? It's an amazing book. And she says this towards the end, which I think is, she said it's about radical doubt and radical hope, especially in the dark, as Rebecca Solnit calls it. And finally, about the fluid, shining faith,

not in a god or in the edicts of any organised religion or institution, but in the necessary fiction we rest our contingent lives on, which in English we call trust. I mean, it's devastating in its analysis of the prison system and what prison does to people. It's also devastating in its account of how on earth do you begin to put your life back together when you've been implicated in an act of terrorism, that violent and that unlikely and appalling. So hugely recommended.

Not an easy read, but brilliant, I think. Tell us what it's called. It's called Aftermath and it's by Pretty Teenager. It's published by And Other Stories. We'll be back in just a sec this is how she start A lot of restrictions to break your heart After ten o'clock

Tenants must know my front door is locked And on the wall she stick up her notice No lady friends, not even a princess And if you disagree Out you go immediately And every Monday Mr. Give me a rant Okay, she now ain't got a cent She telling me Mr. Give me a rant Well, you never believe what's happened, listeners. Thanks to the magical power of Lord Kitchener

and singing my landlady, we travel forward in time by week and we're all in the same room together. Say something, everybody. We're all here. We're all here together. We're're all in the same room together say something everybody we're all here we're all here to go all here in the same place it's a small room and we're all in it we were so far away and then the internet broke and so we decided to reconvene together so we're talking about andrew sulky and we're talking about his novel Escape to an Autumn Pavement and his poetry and we're going to talk about his long poem Jamaica but I think Margaret I would like to ask you first

when did you can you remember when you met Andrew Selke or the first time you heard his voice because he was a he was a real cultural presence, wasn't he? He certainly was. I can remember I first met him in 1966, in December, because he interviewed me for a programme on the BBC World Service. I can't remember the name of the programme. It was something like London Echo. Because I had just had an article published

in the New Statesman, and I was in the Evening Standard London's diary. I was some sort of freakish African woman writing. Let's have a picture of her. Anyway, Andrew. It's a fabulously glamorous photo it wasn't my car they made me sit on

you're literally sitting on a car we'll try and put it on the website it's got Margaret sitting on the bonnet of an E-Type or something equally 60's-ish so that was when I first met Andrew and it was also the sort of era in which I was beginning to set up a publishing

company, Alison and Busby, and you know we stayed in touch from then on and we had friends in common. For example in 1966 actually that was when the first black publishing company, New Beacon Books, was started by John LaRose and Alison and Busby published the first titles in 1967. So we all became friends. In 1969, Jessica Huntley's Bogle Louverture started publishing. So there was this little enclave of black-led publishers, let's put it that way, and we all became friends and Andrew connected with us all.

And I think that was a connection that was very strong between Andrew and Vogel Louverture. But he really was a support to everybody in that group. And he, together with John LaRose, was very instrumental in starting the Caribbean artists movement. Yeah, yeah. So that was, you know, my meeting Andrew dates back to, as far as I can remember, 1966.

And Raymond, when did you first read either Escape to an Autumn Pavement or Jamaica? So, to be honest, the first kind of presence of Andrew's work was as the book Jamaica an epic poem my parents separated when I was really young and they lived separately so they had separate bookshelves but there were a handful of books in which they had the same copy of a book you know in their different shelves and Andrew Sulky's Jamaica was one of those books and so the kind of presence that the book had just as an object was like it was like a family photo you know it had that kind of presence about it I didn't read it until I was you know for another 20 years it was just there as but you knew that you sort of knew the spine it was part of your part of your childhood kind of right yeah yeah i knew the cover even the cover even is like a kind of golden golden sand color that color is exactly

the same my dad had this huge uh like carved um sculpture of africa and it and so the book is exactly the same color as this sculpture so So I have all of this kind of emotional, I suppose, resonance just with the object of Andrew Sulky's books. But then when I read the book, finally, I was overwhelmed, actually, because I didn't know what to make of it at first. It kind of goes between different times. It's like a history telling, and it's also a kind of folklore,

and it's also a kind of witnessing and an account of, you know, of the island of Jamaica. It's not lyric poetry. It's like, it's loads of things at the same time in terms of genre. I know that it took him, I think, Eric Huntley recently told me i think he

said 10 years to write you're kind of writing it piece by piece but you know i reread it recently and i happened to to read to read it alongside a uh ursula legrin short story what it made me realize is made me think of andrew sulky as a kind of wizard you know as a kind of person who's trying to connect with like it's ecological it is historical it is like um anti-colonial and in the same way that i think as lilla grin is you know yeah it's brilliant about connecting to the land to to your people, to your culture, to your history, to your language. All of that simultaneously is happening throughout the entirety of the poem. We're going to hear Andrew Sulkey himself now talking to Henry Lyman in 1994 about, I think, one of the things that you're just talking about there, Raymond.

You know, I haven't been there for years and years and years, but I hear those sounds all the time. You know, when I lived in England, now that I live in the States, I hear those noises over and over again. And sometimes when it's very noisy where I am, I still hear those noises. In the way that we are all the information we take in, the mixture of thoughts and ideas that weigh in on us as individuals. And these things are forever in motion.

And you know why I tend to do this? Because it's the only way of what I would call filling in the distances, you see, from this point to that point, from the house that I used to live in, you know, to the sea that I ultimately had to cross, from those nurturing, old, beautiful voices of the early formation of myself as a human being to these very new voices in exile. Yeah, that's great. What a voice. The other thing is, Margaret, now that is a man who is used to broadcasting, more used to than we are.

It's lovely to hear his voice. He was such a wonderful broadcaster. And he worked for the BBC a lot, didn't he? He did, yeah. So his Caribbean Voices is his programme, right? And he supported a lot of writers who came through Caribbean Voices, whether it's V.S. Naipaul or Sam Selvon. He was really a key character.

There's an interesting bit. One of the other writers of that period, George Lamming, says this thing which hadn't really struck me. This is an essay of his called The Pleasures of Exile, which was published in 1960. He says, the historical fact is that the emergence of a dozen or so

novelists in the British Caribbean with some 50 books to their credit or disgrace and all published between 1948 and 1958, is in the nature of a phenomenon. There has been no comparable event in culture anywhere in the British Commonwealth during that period. And you suddenly got that feeling of excitement.

This is something that's happening in the novel. I just wondered, Margaret, you were kind of there at the time. Did you feel that excitement that Solke and Roger Mace and Sam Sowen and George Lambert, that there was this incredible kind of explosion of Wilson Harris, explosion of Caribbean writing? I was there, though I was much younger than most of the people who were writing or even the other publishers who were there.

So it was something that, I suppose, seeped into my consciousness. But also one of the things that I remember from that era is that most of these writers from the West Indies were being published in the educational series of the British publishing world. So they were really not being published for the British market. Heinemann African Writers Series. Heinemann, Macmillan, all those imprints had an educational bit,

which was really for the colonies, I suppose. And also a lot of them, the books that were published, went out of print. For example, you mentioned George Lamming. I republished a lot of those books in the 70s and 80s. C.L.R. James was another writer from that era who was out of print completely. So they were there, and the excitement was there, and we knew, those of us who were interested,

knew that they were there and they should be read. But it took a while, I think, for it to seep out into general consciousness. I mean, I borrowed a copy of The Emigrants by Lamming from the library last year, and I can't believe that that isn't in print. I mean, I know we talk about things that should be in print. That really should be in print as a historical, cultural art. We're going to be saying that, I'm telling you, about Jamaica,

because it's insane that a poem of this quality isn't in print. Well, Escape to an Autumn Pavement, which is the novel that we're talking about, I'll read you the blurb in a second, but it's very much in the tradition of the Hampstead Bedsitter. Not the Hampstead novel, the Hampstead Bedsitter. Not the Hampstead novel, the Hampstead Bedsitter novel. That's a very different category of society. And here, in fact, we've got a clip of George Lamming

talking to Hugh Weldon on Monitor in 1960 about that very topic. George Lamming, 33 years old, the life of a big city, suits his temperament, argumentative, engrossed by ideas. He's at home in London and enjoys the company of what he calls the Hampstead think-talkers. The terror of not knowing and of not even daring to call upon a single soul among the hundred who surround him.

I think that is the initial experience of the West Indian arriving. However tough he is, for the first time in his whole experience, he is alone. But one of the things that one must establish is that this world of isolation is not only different, it's strange. is that this world of isolation is not only different, it's strange. Because what he realises is that this attitude towards him is an attitude which the English themselves share towards each other. Yes. This business of leaving each other on their own is a national characteristic, as dancing is.

Yes. Or laughing. And quite different from anything that happens in the West Indies. This is why it is so different. Yes. You get settled and then you too become part of the strangeness. Today, for example, I really don't like being spoken to when I'm travelling in a train.

Well, to be fair, who does? So I'll just read the blurb from the original Hutchinson edition of Escape to an Autumn Pavement and then maybe we could say a little bit about that book about our experience of reading that novel now 60 years after it was published so this is Margaret what you were saying about how were these books published here is the and I will ask you as a publisher to pass judgment on this blurb. Andrew Salke's powerful first novel was published by New Authors Limited.

Escape to an Autumn Pavement, his second book, deals with the impact of London life on a middle-class Jamaican, Johnny Sobert. Johnny has been encouraged to believe that London is, quote, that big cinema of a city where trees are banks and money plus freedom is as easy to come by as leaves on an autumn pavement. He rents an attic room in a Hampstead boarding

house, in an Hampstead boarding house, very correct, where he soon discovers that he has exchanged one middle class miasma for another. Miasma, miasma everyone, we love him. So fast, top top. Johnny rebels. In his struggle, he encounters the suffocating

lust of Fiona. That suffocating lust. And the subtler, disturbing attraction of Dick. Mr Salke is a highly original writer. His characters are astringent and refreshing, and he has a shrewd grasp of the amorphous English

snobberies. It is stimulating to find a West Indian fiction hero wrestling with a problem like his own sexuality instead of being buried exclusively in the problems of his colour and his exile. What did we think? I think the Blob writers worked very hard at that. I think that's pretty forward-thinking.

It's good. It's good, isn't it? Yeah, that's good. It's a terrific book and gets to the heart of why this book is interesting because I think that most of the books, to some degree or other, of that generation do deal with issues of exile and race, but sexuality is less obvious. Ray, what did you make of Escapes in an Autumn Pavement when you read it?

Oh, man. You know, there did you make of Escapes in an Autumn Pavement when you read it? Oh, man. There's, you know, there's a lot I loved about the book. I could clearly see that it was written by a poet. You know, I could, the voice, the conciseness. I felt like there were, in some ways, like this genre of of poetry sorry of literature is a is again a personal one for me in the sense that Andrew Sulkey is around the same age that my dad was and my dad wasn't someone who was very forthcoming and so I feel like I got to know so much about him through actually the literature of

people like Andrew Sulky and George Lamming and C.L.R. James because my dad would have read the same books that Andrew Sulky read he would have had the same references he would have had the same um even like similar transgressions you know so so even that is in the book. I loved that I came back to the UK and I happened to be sitting on Tottenham Court Road. And when I read the first half of the book, and I'm seeing some of the references, you know, the roads, oh wait, it's around the corner from where I am right now.

You know, I get a real kind of buzz and joy from being in a literary landscape becomes a real real one and so this book escape to an autumn pavement you know really places me in in some of my own personal history i think that the issue of like i suppose fiona and johnny and that kind of thing is is is like, I don't think Fiona is actually a person. I think Fiona is a projection from Johnny as a colonial subject. Interesting. And I think that's, you know, in a way that's dehumanizing obviously of the woman in, in, in this, but I don't think, I just don't think it's um yeah i don't think she's there

actually as a character in her own right i feel like she's she's a projection and there's a lot of projections throughout the book and and a lot of kind of internalized pain and hatred and and discomfort you know everyone seems to have it and i'm projecting it all over the place in the novel and so i mean i think there's a real complexity in this novel and uh absolutely which doesn't really get resolved no exactly it doesn't it's it's it's it's not it's not a masterpiece but it is really interesting yes yeah that's fair i mean i i'm i'm gonna say the two things my two observations were apart from how much i enjoyed it because this is very much in my um wheelhouse 60s bed sit that's my that's my are you so personal connection that's

my personal interest i love that element of it and margaret it reminded me of a book that we've already mentioned because you published it it so reminded me of absolute beginners by we've already mentioned because you published it. It so reminded me of Absolute Beginners by Colin McInnes. And it seems to me clearly, John, it felt like it had been written fast. Yeah. Not much revision, I reckon, in this novel. True.

I think, get it down. True. Do you think, Ray? Yeah, that totally is true. And it smokes off the page, the anger and the... I mean, as you say, it's the dialogue. It's not really dialogue because Fiona just gets to say, give it to me, I love you, give me more.

But he is, in his head, he's this roiling kind of... We'll read some bits from it just to give people a flavour. But, boy, it's an exciting book. It's an exciting book to read, I think. Margaret, Andrew could write in many different registers, couldn't he? He was a prolific writer, full stop. I mean, he must have written three dozen books

in so many different genres. Kids' books. Children's books, as you say, poetry, novels, travelogues. Books on communism as well. We have nonfiction books about the missile crisis, Cuban missile crisis. And he was an anthologist. He was an editor.

He collected other people's writings. So he obviously did write fast. He had to write fast to have produced so much. And I think that, well, I connect as well with that personal thing and the localities because when I was at university in the 60s, I lived in a hostel in Hampstead. Did you? And that crossover between sort of Bohemia

and the sort of Colin McInnes type thing and the Caribbean community, which also happened in West London. And I lived in Notting Hill after I graduated. And Andrew was just around the corner. He lived in Moscow, wrote. And I remember that same connection when I first read, for example, The Lonely Londoners by Samuel Selvon

and seeing a reference to where I lived in that book, Linden Garden. So it's very powerful when you can make those personal connections, isn't it, Ray, and sort of identify with some of the environment as well as the people who Andrew has created as projections or real people. But he was a brilliant writer. I feel like I followed in your footsteps from like Bexhill to Hanson

if you asked him, silly question really but if you asked him what are you are you a broadcaster, are you a poet, are you a novelist what is he most likely to have said because as you say he was very prolific and

working in all sorts of areas, journalism, the radio, children's books. I've got one of them here, which I read, called Hurricane, which was still in print from Puffin into the 70s and 80s. It was terrific. And nothing like Escape to an Autumn Pavement and nothing like Jamaica. And Autumn Pavement's nothing like his first novel,

A Question of Violence, which is set in Jamaica and is historical and very different style. And that may be one of the reasons why he's not better known, that he was not, you know, you couldn't pigeonhole him. An enigma. And I'm not sure that he would have, what label he would have put on himself, but he was a very supportive person.

He supported other people as writers, as publishers. As I said, he interviewed me. And he went on to become an academic, a teacher of creative writing and so on. So he was working on so many different levels in so many different ways. And he was always meticulous in everything he did. Even his handwriting was meticulous. I used to think, I didn't see him doing it, but maybe he wrote with a ruler underneath.

Look, this is... Oh, yeah, look. So neat, his handwriting. We're looking at an inscribed copy of his book of poems, Away, which Margaret published. Can I read this out, Margaret? It is Margaret's copy of Away, poems poems away which can i read this out margaret it is margaret's copy of away poems by andrew selke which she published for admirable margaret with love andrew

the poet's choice of word there but it's so neat isn't it beautiful i think we should hear from andrew himself again what i found very interesting about that blurb that we read out was the idea that they wanted to say he's in exile, but he doesn't only write about exile. And clearly Jamaica is of a piece with that. So let's hear his thoughts on that topic. We are exiled. Most of us are. I mean, I think that the state of being born is exile, you know.

As soon as you leave the mother and the father, you leave that state of babyhood, you really do find yourself at sea. The alienation that I sense in what has happened to us West Indians in terms of our economics and our politics and so on. I find that it's essentially a part of that alienation, spiritual desolation. It's not a very happy state to be in, really.

You know, we're saying that the writing has different types of energy depending what it is but actually there's a sort of vein of melancholy running through it i think melancholy and agriculture i think are two things that run through everything he writes he's always writing about the land and and weather actually like it's a lot of conditions like a natural element so I mean I think I think he's actually an ecological writer ecological thinker which is another reason why I think he deserves more time in uh in the sun and hard to pigeonhole again totally totally and totally. And I think to this day, black writers, marginalized writers have to fight this kind of, you know,

this idea that if we're writing in a way that can be sociological, therefore it's not serious. You know, there's a real, I keep noticing that, even in some ways that I've seen my own work spoken about like oh it's interesting it there's a recognition of i guess sociological value but not of literary

merit you know or not of like literature capital l literature and um i think andrew sulky must have been someone who resisted even um needing that kind of validation yeah and just no like a visionary in that sense it was like okay i'm just gonna be open to the energy and write the books which i need to write and that energy is going to come from me that's what you were talking about margaret in terms of how these books were published as well. So they're okay off in their little ghetto, but how do we break them out into the mainstream of literature? And it's an ongoing process. I'd like to know, actually, I'm not meant to be asking the question. I'd like to know how Andrew has influenced you, Ray, in terms of what you write. Yeah, great question. Yeah, I mean, Andrew Sulky's work has given me great permission.

He has given me a path to not compartmentalize my interests and my passions. So I am interested in, obviously, history and travel. I am interested in language and the Caribbean and Europe. I am interested in socialism and humanitarianism and social justice. And clearly Andrew Sulky's work did not stop on the page. It has manifested itself in such a powerful way that when I got my, I did my first fellowship, no, my second fellowship as a poet in the U S in Pittsburgh university. And my mentor was an American poet called Robin Coast Lewis, a genius poet. And, uh, you know, we're talking, we're talking, we're talking. And talking we're talking and i casually mentioned something about andrew sulky and she said oh that was my teacher and then i came back to the uk and i happened to you know

as you do like talking with linton quizzy johnson and it's in quizzy johnson as well it's like oh yeah he was my first teacher it's like what you know then one of my favorite poets martin espada a puerto rican poet love his work martin espada was a uh immigration lawyer as well as a poet i suppose and um i was reading something about him completely randomly and he just kind of said yes andrew sulky was my teacher my mentor he's he's everywhere he's incredible out there you know and the fact that he is even part of the journeys of the poets who you know who who inspire me is is is mysticism to me paul mendez in his essay on radio 4 which you can hear on the iplayer says that he first encountered Sulky in an exhibition. He was in a photo, a very symbolic photo with Horace Ove and a couple of other writers.

And Mendes was going, but who's that guy? He's in all these photos. And that's kind of Sulky's blessing and curse, maybe. Let's talk a little bit about the poetry. We'll kick off by hearing Sulky himself reading one of his poems. This is called Drifting. For whom do I speak now, so far away from home? For whom do I write now, so far away from myself?

I speak for the experience of the flux I've become. I write for the concrete to fill in the distances from the house on the road I lived on, from the warm home on the sea I crossed, from old voices to the new. And I suppose that's true, to some extent, of shipping oneself far away from port, finding oneself while drifting.

As I say, first the first-rate poem delivered by a first-rate broadcaster who knew how to use the microphone. That's so good! Margaret, do you have a favourite from the collection that you published? That was in the collection that I published. But every time I reread any of the poems, there's always something new.

And there are many of them that resonate still. I don't know where to start. What would I choose? Okay, it opens at the page with this poem. Oh, this isn't appropriate. This is a poem called Looking Back, and it's for Jessica Huntley. Jessica was the co-founder of Bogle Louverture, who published Andrew's work, and Andrew was the director of the company.

He was just so supportive of Jessica and the company. So I can understand why he dedicated this poem to her. I can't understand why we beat the sea with our island pain and aspiration. I can't understand why we deny ourselves our sea-locked gold reserves, stacked high in the hills, plaited deep in the land. The truth is, I'm beginning to know why all the eyes in our mirror are turned north and

northeast. Isn't it really because we haven't looked at the art of our lives in the cloud and curve of our breath prints. That was the poem, Looking Back. I'm not a very good reader, but... Oh, come on, for shame. It's beautiful. Not as good as Andrew, that's for sure. It's beautiful. Yeah, I just want to reiterate those last lines.

We haven't looked at the arc of our lives in the cloud and curve of our breath prints. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, going back to your question, Andy. It feels to me that, I mean, maybe I'm kind of biased, but he was a poet. I mean, in his deepest kind of core, I think he was a poet. And that's what makes Jamaica so exciting to me,

because he's doing something in that's what makes Jamaica so exciting to me because he's doing something in that book which seems incredibly ambitious which is to tell the story of the Caribbean not in as I say that there are some he's a beautiful lyric poet and many of the poems in a way are great but this is a kind of public almost almost sort of telling of folklore, mythological, historical, and a huge ambition, I think. An incredible technique. Well, we're going to get Ray to read us a bit of Jamaica in a minute. But I'm going to read what I consider to be a poem from Escape to an Autumn Pavement. And I'd like to cross-reference this.

Escape to an Autumn Pavement. And I'd like to cross-reference this, listeners. Go back to our Absolute Beginners episode and find the passage that I read from Absolute Beginners, which is a late-night scene in Soho, which is one of the most beautiful bits of writing. And here's Sulky's version of something very similar from early on in Escape to an Autumn Pavement. 10.30 in Oxford Street with its squeaking silences under shutters.

Wonderland beacons continue their ogling unashamedly with the traffic lights. Sticky biscuit sweets, soggy lovers huddle together in a make-believe which excludes mom and pop. Can feel the presence of cash registers along the street. Mania for presences. But this is different. The moment is magic. The weightiness is different. It's haunting. Metallic Buddha kind of weightiness. Plump and couchant in a way. A threat. Hundreds of presences on both sides of the street. Yet it's always a joy to know that they're out of action and are unable at the moment to make it off you. To suck you in and spit you out minus your bus fare.

Doesn't really matter, does it? They'll catch you early Monday morning just the same. Catch you with their pre-national service male attendants and pimply sales girls. Their thin, grubby, late-night collars and cigarette-stained forefingers. They'll catch you with brisk American-style sales patters salted intermittently with brash cockney aplomb. And who doesn't really want to be gurgling inside when you say, look at this, my dear. Selfridges for 9 and 11 would have had to pay anything up to 12 and 6 along Regent Street

And of course, you've already docked 2 and 7 off the 12 and 6 merely to feel nice and warm inside, haven't you? That's beautiful, actually you know what, that steps up a level when you read it aloud That's very interesting

That, um Isn't it, doesn't it it isn't that isn't that rich you can hear the internal rhythms much more clearly well we're going to hear from andrew selkie again talking about uh in a minute talking about some of his poetry but i think we should move on to jamaica in earnest right what is this poem stroke book about so it's a gotcha got me you know any any any that question posed at any worthwhile poetry is it's gonna be it's like the woody allen thing about war and peace it's about it's about russia yeah i mean i see as a kind of channel it's a kind of sustained emotional meditation by a sooth saying timeless wizard. I love that. That does answer my question.

I think you should have read the blurb of the first edition. Can you read this, the blurb on the first edition, Margaret? Oh, I'll read it. Yeah, please. This says, this is a poem about Jamaica, about the experience of the slave trade and of colonization and about a struggle for freedom and for identity, which still rages today

among Caribbean peoples. It deals with political issues but is not simply a political poem. Rather it conjures up the swirling colours, the music, the moods, the atmosphere of a bustling, suffering, vital island community. Jamaica has been 20 years in the writing and is the very first poem of its kind published by a Jamaican writer. That was in 1973. Wow. And it has that thing, doesn't it, where time, that's what I love about it, is all these time periods are coexisting.

It does that, which you kind of can only do with poetry it would be difficult to make this into fiction um so there are leaps through time from section to section in the poem ray i found it a fascinating mixture of challenging and compulsive that i really struggled with some of the early sections yeah but i kept being pulled through it and feeling that he he needed me to get somewhere with him there's a real urgency to it yeah i don't know if you if you pick that up or whether your your reading experience was different the first yeah no no it did pick it up because the one of the in terms of the structure all the way through um short line high kind of energy high lyric

so you're compelled to just keep reading because the language it tumbles over itself and it even goes in and out of dialect and conversation like Like he brings in his family, he talks to his aunt, he talks to, you know, his neighbors and, and then it goes into like what almost textbook history language when it comes out of that into patois and it's quite dated in, in, in some of those ways, some of, some, some of the patois, you know, even that probably wouldn't be recognisable to modern day Jamaican society. Some of it, you know, which I know goes back

to that thing I was saying about how this book to me, as well as an incredible, compelling poem, was just as an object. It survived. It's sustained. It's here.

It's out of print, but I feel like I really want to be one of the people to bring it back who knows but i a bit like we were saying about the emigrants by george lamming i read this and thought well this this should be in print there's a literary and societal need for this to be available for people to read. Just with my publishing head on, you know, Monique Roffey's Mermaid of Black Conch, which is, I think, a great novel and it's a massive bestseller. And you think, if you want to put some context

from the culture that this is coming from, this is one of the... That's true. It feels to me like one of the great texts of... I mean, I'm not an expert on Caribbean poetry, but it's the fact that this isn't available and talked about. I think it tells you something about the publishing climate and why things are allowed to go out of print

and why they're brought back into print. Well, I did want to ask you the question, Margaret. When you were starting Alison and Busby, I mean, did you have a clear mission to want to try and spring, because you published all kinds of books that you didn't want to, to be publishing into a ghetto, you wanted to spring, you know, black writers into the mainstream. It wasn't anything as conscious as that. We were publishing what we thought were interesting. Brilliant. It should be in print.

That's why, you know, George Lamming is out of print. Okay, let's reprint George Lamming. Let's reprint C.L.R. James. Let's reprint Colin McInnes. Let's reprint American writers. It was... Taste, really taste, by taste and quality. It was naivety, perhaps.

Or idealism, but it was not based on any sort of convention or any... You were making up your own rules, I think. Exactly, exactly. Well, because four of the rare surviving copies of Jamaica are gathered in this room with us.

I think what I like is about the fact that I think this must be Andrew's copy because it's got annotations. It's got some very neat annotations in hand writing. Oh wow. Look at that. Okay, I'm going to need to see that. Isn't that incredible?

Wow. It's different from our edition, Ray. Yours has got the corrected line. We've got the corrected, yeah. So because people can't easily get hold of this, Ray, would you share a passage that you feel is it's hard isn't it representative is hard but yeah i'll just do like part of the journey what i'll do is i'll read this and just you know this is i'm just dropping you in to uh the moment and the momentum of this epic poem. There was that spark that moved the land, that rumbling, shifting, accustomed response

while you, knowledgeable, patient, watched the pelican rip breast to belly. Ex-maker, provident, paradoxical, poor child of a thousand loves Carabia Leaping levitator Muscle to prise up the granite structure Out of our weaker streams Elegant Maternal Instead of making us burn in the dry lands of failure Day after day

Instead of that alternative Lose the peak deep inside you Carabia Victim of careless systems, absorber of blows, hear the cry from Diablo's bedrock, from the brutally shaved heads crowding our festering tenements soon to be planned for, soon to be bulldozed, Carabia, prepare a path. Soon your scorpion times will be sucked in by someone's passing interests or other than spat out again a step nearer another banner's stab, the breaking of newer milestones. Soon names like Penn and Venables would be with the new course of conquest, run rivers everywhere through your shell-marked yards. So, you know, I'm saying it now.

What we've got to do is we've got to fund you doing an audio version of the whole thing. I'd do it. I mean, honestly. Great idea. Because suddenly, as you said earlier, Andy, suddenly you see what this poem, that really just, it catches fire. Yeah, yeah, suddenly you see what this poem... That really just... It catches fire. Yeah.

Can you give us another bit? Another bit? Oh, cool. You've got an encore. Do the hurricane bit if you want to do that. I mean, I'm not reading from it now, I can tell you that. I mean...

No way. I know my limitations. Okay. I'll try this one. I haven't really practiced this one out But yeah, okay So this is a little section And it's called Hurricane 1951 I remember the night

Black with slack rain Flaccid when it first began But with brick drops Beating later on Like jump poco drum thumps beating back the coming morning beating with purpose routine rhythm and ritual beating like the bounce of batter hide hide battered or a shoemaker's block batter hide hide battered pains shattered shattered pain batter hide pain shattered through to dawn.

One bad sneaking breeze blow take time and creep up on Jojo life and tear him shirt tail like bud feather, brock him one room in two like true stick, kill him common law wife, kill him fart for goat, kill him lying, kill him lying lying lying in them and go away soft soft like teeth like it wasn't causing no bothers instead the land at all at all so what you're happening what's happening in this is so even um concrete so you can see the shape of the poem is also like a hurricane it's amazing you know it's all this stuff so you know what we shape of the poem is also like a hurricane. It is concrete. It's amazing. You know, it's all this stuff.

You know what? We've done very well keeping Batlister going for the last two years doing it on the internet. But I can tell you now there is nothing more spine-tingling

than sitting in a room with someone reading one of their favourite things with just the level of commitment you just did there, Ray. What a beautiful moment thank you oh wow well it seems right that we uh hear from the man himself again this is a poem that i couldn't find anywhere which i think is called the tourists so it may have been written later in his career.

And he gives it a little introduction here, which I found very illuminating. This is Andrew Sulkey talking about and then reading The Tourist. My island has always, for me, been a tourist island. I used to find it difficult to take holidays. Don't know why, but somehow I resented the holiday that we offered to others and not to ourselves. As a child, I would see lots of cameras and shorts and pretty shirts and so on. You know, people wanting to take a picture,

want to manage you, however briefly, they want to arrange you and prettify you and so on. The trees were thin and scarred. February field-ike had knocked them about. They seemed on the teeter of disappearing before spring. they seemed on the teeter of disappearing before spring. The family, who stood in front of the split bark of the ravaged trees,

was battered and tired of making do on stale air and stone promises from the bullies in the capital city. They, in turn, had lashed themselves to northern prongs and were themselves bullied in return. The tourists took photographs while talking trees and weather and rocks to the family. They talked high-fluting and the family stood on the slant, gaunt, loose-limbed. It was talk that was accurately space-filling. It was slippery, swerving away from politesse into condescension.

It was something like Punic faith that the tourists had offered the family, and no doubt the tourists felt like traitors to ordinary human concern. They clicked away fiercely, as though they had deadlines, as though the family and the trees and the weather and the rocks were assigned cemetery property. were assigned cemetery property. I found this episode totally fascinating to prepare, Margaret, because I thought we were going to talk about one set of things and the presence of the work and the presence of his voice has led us to talk about a different set of things,

which is a really lovely, spontaneous moment. a different set of things which is really lovely spontaneous moment i mean if you if you were to recommend a good starting point to andrew sulky or his work is there one strand of it that you prefer or should you just kind of throw yourself in? I think perhaps I resonate mostly with his poetry, but I think he was such a good writer of every kind. So he's written books that were excellent travelogues, Havana Journal. So I would say any time you can find a book by Andrew Sorge, read it, and you'll find something that will inspire you, nurture you, help you keep going.

In fact, one of the phrases I always associate with Andrew, he used to sign his letters off, was keep on keeping on. And his work, to me, helps me do just that. Well, People Tree Press have got quite a few of his books in print. I've actually got one at home which I didn't bring with me called Riot. Have you got that? So that's another children's book. And clearly the his four children's books are based on things that happened to him growing up. The hurricane, the riots. So I'm really looking forward to reading that ray what's the best way to get hold of his work at the moment i mean um coming around your house and

coming by my house and sitting on my sofa and yeah be patient while i dig them all out um you know i really value libraries and our libraries. So I did actually look up on a couple of library catalogs just out of curiosity to see if they stock his books. Senate House had a few copies. So here's the thing, right? I was talking about bookshops and access. So my parents got Andrew Sulkey's books in a shop,

which is no longer there, a black radical bookshop, which was in Hackney called Centerprise. And this bookshop, you know, as a kid, they would walk in and they might see Gene Bintabree and they might see George Lamin, or they might see, I don't know, someone traveling, coming in. They might see, you know, Margaret Busby, you know, we might see anyone there, Eric and Jessica Huntley, like it was like a home, it was like a hub. And I've got a few memories of, you know, standing in that shop and just people, you know, just walking in and out and the conversations that were happening and spaces like that weren't protected. They're gone. Some libraries are stocking them,

but I think we just need more demand. People don't know what they're missing. No, I think that's the thing, isn't it? And that's the thing about the... You're saying about books going out of print, Margaret. When they go and they disappear, it needs publishers to bring them back. So congratulations to People Tree for doing that with us.

Oh, brilliantly. No use you complain You're wasting your time, you're talking in vain Because when she get her fees She couldn't care less if you vex her, please And the rent is all on the level Four guineas for single or double Boys, that lad lady bad

She was the landlord from Trinidad And every Monday All that. Gepmeran. All that I've tried, I cannot revenge, she telling me. Mr. Gepmeran. So thanks so much for joining us today, Margaret. Is there anything, is there any message you would like to leave people with that we didn't say about Andrew or Andrew's work or him as a person? I am just so thrilled that he was a part of my publishing career

as well as a friend. Here we are in Soho and I can remember my office was round the corner for 20 years, and Andrew came to visit us there. So we sat, we gathered together in a room, and we've read his work, and we've celebrated his life. It feels very good, doesn't it? That feels like a good thing to have done to this point.

Very much so. Ray, is there anything left for you that you would like to say about Andrew? About Andrew, I just want to say thank you. You know, give thanks. I'm very much part of his you know lineage uh I feel blessed to have got to spend time with his work you know and and to share share that on Backlisted I just want to say that Backlisted has a has a bit of a soft spot with me because um when I when I discovered it um you were talking about so many books that were on

my mom's very obscure bookshelf you know and I wasn't part like growing up even though both my parents you know they were fairly literary but outside of the household I didn't really have much kind of literary culture I suppose so I'll be reading all of these books kind of in private and it wasn't until finding your podcast backlisted podcast I was able to kind of revisit and rethink and re-feel actually about um so many different of those books that I pulled off my mum's bookshelf from you know Malcolm Lowry I'd you know um um Ian Fleming and uh beryl gilroy and robert m piercing and herman hess um it's just countless it's actually pretty again another kind of mysticism to me how much of your books that you've covered and spoke about on this podcast on my mom's bookshelf so so i just want to say

thank you thank you and we want and we want to say thank you. Thank you. And we want to thank her. Thanks to Ray's mum. It's amazing. The books that last. The books that last. Thanks very much, Ray. Thanks, Margaret. And we are going to leave you with our theme music.

And then it seems only right that the last voice you'll hear will be Andrew Salke's reading his poem, After Reading There Is A Truth More Ancient Than Eden. So see you next time, everybody. And thanks, guys. Thanks so much. Thanks. I like your way of seeing the flux and rush of everything as a sure way of seeing clearly everything there is to see.

I really do. As a flood man myself, born just below your house, in a house like yours, I'm sure you know I understand your way. It's mine too. But my thing's been rushed off centre, by living years away from home, by seeing everything in bits and pieces, not as the whole you know you see yours as, flooding along the freeway in name only, making it all seem logically yours and bearable. I do know your way. I think I know it well. Like the inevitable downpour from the hills.

The yes and no of everything we live through. I like your way of seeing it. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call locklisted,

which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.