Claire Walsh in 1968.
refused to award me a grant, on the surprising grounds that my application was frivolous. This disappointed me, as I was completely serious, and the Arts Council awarded tens of thousands of pounds to fund activities that, unconsciously or not, were clearly jokes – Ambit itself could fall into that category, along with the London Magazine, the New Review and countless poetry magazines and little presses.
The funds disbursed by the Arts Council over the decades have created a dependent client class of poets, novelists and weekend publishers whose chief mission in life is to get their grants renewed, as anyone attending a poetry magazine’s parties will quickly learn from the nearby conversations. Why the taxes of people on modest incomes (the source of most taxes today) should pay for the agreeable hobby of a north London children’s doctor, or a self-important Soho idler like the late editor of the New Review, is something I have never understood. I assume that the patronage of the arts by the state serves a political role by performing a castration ceremony, neutering any revolutionary impulse and reducing the ‘arts community’ to a docile herd. They are allowed to bleat, but are too enfeebled to ever paw the ground.
Still, what the Arts Council saw as a prank at least put Claire’s beautiful face into the Evening Standard.
And, last but not least, she introduced me to the magic of cats.
20
New Sculpture (1969)
If The Atrocity Ehibition was a firework display in a charnel house, Crash was a thousand-bomber raid on reality, though English critics at the time thought that I had lost my bearings and made myself into the most vulnerable target. The Atrocity Exhibition was published in 1970, and was my attempt to make sense of the sixties, a decade when so much seemed to change for the better. Hope, youth and freedom were more than slogans; for the first time since 1939 people were no longer fearful of the future. The print-dominated past had given way to an electronic present, a realm where instantaneity ruled.
At the same time, darker currents were flowing a little too close to the surface. The viciousness of the Vietnam War, lingering public guilt over the Kennedy assassination, the casualties of the hard drug scene, the determined effort by the entertainment culture to infantilise us – all these had begun to get between us and the new dawn. Youth began to seem rather old hat and, anyway, what could we do with all that hope and freedom? Instantaneity allowed too many things to happen at once. Sexual fantasies fused with science, politics and celebrity while truth and reason were shouldered towards the door. We watched the Mondo Cane ‘documentaries’ where it was impossible to tell the fake newsreel footage of atrocities and executions from the real.
And we rather liked it that way. Our willing complicity in this blurring of truth and reality in the Mondo Cane films alone made them possible, and was taken up by the entire media landscape, by politicians and churchmen. Celebrity was all that counted. If denying God made a bishop famous, what choice was there? We liked mood music, promises that were never kept, slogans that were meaningless. Our darkest fantasies were pushing at a half-open bathroom door as Marilyn Monroe lay drugged among the fading bubbles.
All this I tried to grapple with in The Atrocity Exhibition. What if the everyday environment was itself a huge mental breakdown: how could we know if we were sane or psychotic? Were there any rituals we could perform, deranged sacraments assembled from a kit of desperate fears and phobias, that would conjure up a more meaningful world?
Writing The Atrocity Exhibition, I adopted an approach as fragmented as the world it described. Most readers found it difficult to grasp, expecting a conventional A+B+C narrative, and were put off by the isolated paragraphs and the rather obsessive sexual fantasies about the prominent figures of the day. But the book has remained in print in Britain, Europe and the USA, and has been reissued many times.
In New York it was published by Doubleday, but the editor, an enthusiastic supporter, made the mistake of adding an advance copy to the trolley filled with new titles that was sent up to the president’s office. There Nelson Doubleday broke the cardinal rule of all American publishers: never read one of your own books. He leafed idly through The Atrocity Exhibition and his eye lit upon a piece entitled ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’. The then governor of California was a close friend, and within minutes the order had gone out to pulp the entire edition. The book was later published by Grove Press, home to William Burroughs and other prominent avant-garde writers, and since the 1990s by the very lively and adventurous Re/Search firm in San Francisco, one of the most remarkable publishing houses I have come across, specialists in urban anthropology of the most bizarre kind.
In the last few years The Atrocity Exhibition seems to be emerging from the dark, and I wonder if the widespread use of the internet has made my experimental novel a great deal more accessible. The short paragraphs and discontinuities of the morning’s emails, the overlapping texts and the need to switch one’s focus between unrelated topics, together create a fragmentary world very like the text of The Atrocity Exhibition.
* * *
By the time that The Atrocity Exhibition was published in 1970 I was already looking ahead to what would be my first ‘conventional’ novel for five years. I thought hard about the cluster of ideas that later made up Crash, many of them explored in The Atrocity Exhibition, where to some extent they were disguised within the fragmentary narrative. Crash would be a head-on charge into the arena, an open attack on all the conventional assumptions about our dislike of violence in general and sexual violence in particular. Human beings, I was sure, had far darker imaginations than we liked to believe. We were ruled by reason and self-interest, but only when it suited us to be rational, and much of the time we chose to be entertained by films, novels and comic strips that deployed horrific levels of cruelty and violence.
In Crash I would openly propose a strong connection between sexuality and the car crash, a fusion largely driven by the cult of celebrity. It seemed obvious that the deaths of famous people in car crashes resonated far more deeply than their deaths in plane crashes or hotel fires, as one could see from Kennedy’s death in his Dallas motorcade (a special kind of car crash), to the grim and ghastly death of Princess Diana in the Paris underpass.
Crash would clearly be a challenge, and I was still not completely convinced by my deviant thesis. Then in 1970 someone at the New Arts Laboratory in London contacted me and asked if there was anything I would like to do there. The large building, a disused pharmaceutical warehouse, contained a theatre, a cinema and an art gallery (there were also a number of flues, intended to draw off any dangerous chemical fumes and useful, so I was told, for venting away any cannabis smoke in the event of a police raid.