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  Travelling People (published 1963) had an explanatory prelude which summed up much of my thinking on the novel at that point, as follows :

  “Seated comfortably in a wood and wickerwork chair of eighteenth-century Chinese manufacture, I began seriously to meditate upon the form of my allegedly full-time literary sublimations. Rapidly, I recalled the conclusions reached in previous meditations on the same subject : my rejection of stage-drama as having too many limitations, of verse as being unacceptable at the present time on the scale I wished to attempt, and of radio and television as requiring too many entrepreneurs between the writer and the audience ; and my resultant choice of the novel as the form possessing fewest limitations, and closest contact with the greatest audience.

  But, now, what kind of novel ? After comparatively little consideration, I decided that one style for one novel was a convention that I resented most strongly : it was perhaps comparable to eating a meal in which each course had been cooked in the same manner. The style of each chapter should spring naturally from its subject matter. Furthermore, I meditated, at ease in far eastern luxury, Dr. Johnson’s remarks about each member of an audience always being aware that he is in a theatre could with complete relevance be applied also to the novel reader, who surely always knows that he is reading a book and not, for instance, taking part in a punitive raid on the curiously-shaped inhabitants of another planet. From this I concluded that it was not only permissible to expose the mechanism of a novel, but by so doing I should come nearer to reality and truth : adapting to refute, in fact, the ancients :

  Artis est monstrare artem

  Pursuing this thought, I realised that it would be desirable to have interludes between my chapters in which I could stand back, so to speak, from my novel, and talk about it with the reader, or with those parts of myself which might hold differing opinions, if necessary ; and in which technical questions could be considered, and quotations from other writers included, where relevant, without any question of destroying the reader’s suspension of disbelief, since such suspension was not to be attempted.

  I should be determined not to lead my reader into believing that he was doing anything but reading a novel, having noted with abhorrence the shabby chicanery practised on their readers by many novelists, particularly of the popular class. This applied especially to digression, where the reader is led, wilfully and wantonly, astray ; my novel would have clear notice, one way or another, of digressions, so that the reader might have complete freedom of choice in whether or not he would read them. Thus, having decided in a general way upon the construction of my novel I thought about actually rising to commence its composition ; but persuaded by oriental comfort that I was nearer the Good Life engaged in meditation, I turned my mind to the deep consideration of such other matters as I deemed worthy of my attention, and, after a short while thus engaged, fell asleep.”

  Travelling People employed eight separate styles or conventions for nine chapters ; the first and last chapters sharing one style in order to give the book cyclical unity within the motif announced by its title and epigraph. These styles included interior monologue, a letter, extracts from a journal, and a film script. This latter illustrates the method of the novel typically. The subject-matter was a gala evening at a country club, with a large number of characters involved both individually and in small groups. A film technique, cutting quickly from group to group and incidentally counterpointing the stagey artificiality of the occasion, seemed natural and apt. It is not, of course, a film ; but the way it is written is intended to evoke what the reader knows as film technique.

  The passage quoted above was deliberately a pastiche of eighteenth-century English, for I had found that it was necessary to return to the very beginnings of the novel in England in order to try to re-think it and re-justify it for myself. Most obvious of my debts was to the black pages of Tristram Shandy, but I extended the device beyond Sterne’s simple use of it to indicate a character’s death. The section concerned is the interior monologue of an old man prone to heart attacks ; when he becomes unconscious he obviously cannot indicate this in words representing thought, but a modified form of Sterne’s black pages solves the problem. First I used random-pattern grey to indicate unconsciousness after a heart attack, then a regular-pattern grey to indicate sleep or recuperative unconsciousness ; and subsequently black when he dies.

  Since Travelling People is part truth and part fiction it now embarrasses me and I will not allow it to be reprinted ; though I am still pleased that its devices work. And I learnt a certain amount through it ; not least that there was a lot of the writing I could do in my head without having to amass a pile of paper three feet high to see if something worked.

  But I really discovered what I should be doing with Albert Angelo (1964) where I broke through the English disease of the objective correlative to speak truth directly if solipsistically in the novel form, and heard my own small voice. And again there were devices used to solve problems which I felt could not be dealt with in other ways. Thus a specially-designed type-character draws attention to physical descriptions which I believe tend to be skipped, do not usually penetrate. To convey what a particular lesson is like, the thoughts of a teacher are given on the righthand side of a page in italic, with his and his pupils’ speech on the left in roman, so that, though the reader obviously cannot read both at once, when he has read both he will have seen that they are simultaneous and have enacted such simultaneity for himself. When Albert finds a fortuneteller’s card in the street it is further from the truth to describe it than simply to reproduce it. And when a future event must be revealed, I could (and can ; can you ?) think of no way nearer to the truth and more effective than to cut a section through those pages intervening so that the event may be read in its place but before the reader reaches that place.

  Trawl (1966) is all interior monologue, a representation of the inside of my mind but at one stage removed ; the closest one can come in writing. The only real technical problem was the representation of breaks in the mind’s workings ; I finally decided on a stylized scheme of 3 em, 6 em and 9 em spaces. In order not to have a break which ran-on at the end of a line looking like a paragraph, these spaces were punctuated by dots at decimal point level. I now doubt whether these dots were necessary. To make up for the absence of those paragraph breaks which give the reader’s eye rest and location on the page, the line length was deliberately shortened ; this gave the book a long, narrow format.

  The rhythms of the language of Trawl attempted to parallel those of the sea, while much use was made of the trawl itself as a metaphor for the way the subconscious mind may appear to work.

  With each of my novels there has always been a certain point when what has been until then just a mass of subject-matter, the material of living, of my life, comes to have a shape, a form that I recognise as a novel. This crucial interaction between the material and myself has always been reduced to a single point in time : obviously a very exciting moment for me, and a moment of great relief, too, that I am able to write another novel.

  The moment at which The Unfortunates (1969) occurred was on the main railway station at Nottingham. I had been sent there to report a soccer match for the Observer, a quite routine League match, nothing special. I had hardly thought about where I was going, specifically : when you are going away to report soccer in a different city each Saturday you get the mechanics of travelling to and finding your way about in a strange place to an almost automatic state. But when I came up the stairs from the platform into the entrance hall, it hit me : I knew this city, I knew it very well. It was the city in which a very great friend of mine, one who had helped me with my work when no one else was interested, had lived until his tragic early death from cancer some two years before.

  It was the first time I had been back since his death, and all the afternoon I was there the things we had done together kept coming back to me as I was going about this routine job of reporting a soccer match : the dead pa
st and the living present interacted and transposed themselves in my mind. I realised that afternoon that I had to write a novel about this man, Tony, and his tragic and pointless death and its effect on me and the other people who knew him and whom he had left behind. The following passage from The Unfortunates explains his importance to me :

  “To Tony, the criticism of literature was a study, a pursuit, a discipline of the highest kind in itself : to me, I told him, the only use of criticism was if it helped people to write better books. This he took as a challenge, this he accepted. Or perhaps I made the challenge, said that I would show him the novel as I wrote it, the novel I had in mind or was writing : and that he would therefore have a chance of influencing, of making better, a piece of what set out to be literature, for the sake of argument, rather than expend himself on dead men’s work.”

  The main technical problem with The Unfortunates was the randomness of the material. That is, the memories of Tony and the routine football reporting, the past and the present, interwove in a completely random manner, without chronology. This is the way the mind works, my mind anyway, and for reasons given the novel was to be as nearly as possible a re-created transcript of how my mind worked during eight hours on this particular Saturday.

  This randomness was directly in conflict with the technological fact of the bound book : for the bound book imposes an order, a fixed page order, on the material. I think I went some way towards solving this problem by writing the book in sections and having those sections not bound together but loose in a box. The sections are of different lengths, of course : some are only a third of a page long, others are as long as twelve pages. The longer ones were bound in themselves as sections, or signatures, as printers call them.

  The point of this device was that, apart from the first and last sections which were marked as such, the other sections arrived in the reader’s hands in a random order : he could read them in any order he liked. And if he imagined the printer, or some previous reader, had selected a special order, then he could shuffle them about and achieve his own random order. In this way the whole novel reflected the randomness of the material : it was itself a physical tangible metaphor for randomness and the nature of cancer.

  Now I did not think then, and do not think now, that this solved the problem completely. The lengths of the sections were really arbitrary again ; even separate sentences or separate words would be arbitrary in the same sense. But I continue to believe that my solution was nearer ; and even if it was only marginally nearer, then it was still a better solution to the problem of conveying the mind’s randomness than the imposed order of a bound book.

  What matters most to me about The Unfortunates is that I have on recall as accurately as possible what happened, that I do not have to carry it around in my mind any more, that I have done Tony as much justice as I could at the time ; that the need to communicate with myself then, and with such older selves as I might be allowed, on something about which I cared and care deeply may also mean that the novel will communicate that experience to readers, too.

  I shall return shortly to readers and communicating with them. But first there are two other novels, and they represent a change (again !) of direction, an elbow joint in the arm, still part of the same but perhaps going another way. Perhaps I shall come to the body, sooner or later. The ideas for both House Mother Normal (1971) and Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973) came to me whilst writing Travelling People (indeed, I discussed them with Tony) but the subsequent three personal novels interposed themselves, demanded to be written first. I also balked at House Mother Normal since it seemed technically so difficult. What I wanted to do was to take an evening in an old people’s home, and see a single set of events through the eyes of not less than eight old people. Due to the various deformities and deficiencies of the inmates, these events would seem to be progressively ‘abnormal’ to the reader. At the end, there would be the viewpoint of the House Mother, an apparently ‘normal’ person, and the events themselves would then be seen to be so bizarre that everything that had come before would seem ‘normal’ by comparison. The idea was to say something about the things we call ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ and the technical difficulty was to make the same thing interesting nine times over since that was the number of times the events would have to be described. By 1970 I thought that if I did not attempt the idea soon then I never would ; and so sat down to it. I was relieved to find that the novel did work, on its own terms, while not asking it to do anything it clearly should not be trying to do. Each of the old people was allotted a space of twenty-one pages, and each line on each page represented the same moment in each of the other accounts ; this meant an unjustified right-hand margin and led more than one reviewer to imagine the book was in verse. House Mother’s account has an extra page in which she is shown to be

  the puppet or concoction of a writer (you

  always knew there was a writer behind it all ?

  Ah, there’s no fooling you readers !)

  Nor should there be.

  The reader is made very much aware that he is reading a book and being addressed by the author in Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, too. The idea was that a young man who had learned the double-entry system of book-keeping started applying his knowledge to society and life ; when society did him down, he did society down in order to balance the books. Form following function, the book is divided into five parts each ended by a page of accounts in which Christie attempts to draw a balance with life.

  I do not really relish any more description of my work ; it is there to be read, and in writing so much about technique and form I am diverting you from what the novels are about, what they are trying to say, and things like the nature of the language used, and the fact that all of them have something comic in them and three are intended to be very funny indeed. When I depart from what may mistakenly be extracted from the above as rigid principles it is invariably for the sake of the comic, for I find Sterne’s reasons all-persuasive :

  “. . . ’tis wrote, an’ please your worships, against the spleen ! in order, by a more frequent and a more convulsive elevation and depression of the diaphragm, and the succussations of the inter-costal and abdominal muscles in laughter, to drive the gall and other bitter juices from the gall-bladder, liver, and sweet-bread of his majesty’s subjects, with all the inimicitious passions which belong to them, down into their duodenums.”

  For readers it is often said that they will go on reading the novel because it enables them, unlike film or television, to exercise their imaginations, that that is one of its chief attractions for them, that they may imagine the characters and so on for themselves. Not with my novels ; it follows from what I have said earlier that I want my ideas to be expressed so precisely that the very minimum of room for interpretation is left. Indeed I would go further and say that to the extent that a reader can impose his own imagination on my words, then that piece of writing is a failure. I want him to see my (vision), not something conjured out of his own imagination. How is he supposed to grow unless he will admit others’ ideas ? If he wants to impose his imagination, let him write his own books. That may be thought to be anti-reader ; but think a little further, and what I am really doing is challenging the reader to prove his own existence as palpably as I am proving mine by the act of writing.

  Language, admittedly, is an imprecise tool with which to try to achieve precision ; the same word will have slightly different meanings for every person. But that is outside me ; I cannot control it. I can only use words to mean something to me, and there is simply the hope (not even the expectation) that they will mean the same thing to anyone else.

  Which brings us to the question of for whom I write. I am always sceptical about writers who claim to be writing for an identifiable public. How many letters and phone calls do they receive from this public that they can know it so well as to write for it ? Precious few, in my experience, when I have questioned them about it. I think I (after publishing some
dozen books) have personally had about five letters from ‘ordinary readers’, people I did not know already that is ; and three of those upbraided me viciously because I had just published the book that they were going to have written.

  No, apart from the disaster of Travelling People, I write perforce for myself, and the satisfaction has to be almost all for myself ; and I can only hope there are some few people like me who will see what I am doing, and understand what I am saying, and use it for their own devious purposes.

  Yet it should not have to be so. I think I do have a right to expect that most readers should be open to new work, that there should be an audience in this country willing to try to understand and be sympathetic to what those few writers not shackled by tradition are trying to do and are doing. 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, Brigid Brophy, Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Angela Carter, Eva Figes, Giles Gordon, Wilson Harris, Rayner Heppenstall, even hasty, muddled Robert Nye, Ann Quin, Penelope Shuttle, Alan Sillitoe (for his last book only, Raw Material indeed), Stefan Themerson, and (coming) John Wheway ; (stand by) : and if only Heathcote Williams would write a novel. . . .