JG Ballard: 'The Crystal World'

‘THE LIGHT TOUCHES EVERYTHING

WITH DIAMONDS AND SAPPHIRES’:

JG BALLARD’S ‘THE CRYSTAL WORLD’

‘THE CRYSTAL WORLD’ by JG BALLARD

(Jonathan Cape Ltd hardback 1966

Panther Paperback 1968 ISBN 586-02419-0-2 – 6/- 30p)

Oddly, some of the scenes for the Zoltan Korda movie ‘Sanders Of The River’ (1935), supposedly featuring Nigeria, were filmed at Shepperton, Surrey, a location that figures highly in JG Ballard’s personal life-mythology. He lived in a small semi-detached house in Shepperton for close on half a century, from 1960 until his death in 2009. The Korda film, taken from an Edgar Wallace story, features RG Sanders, a British colonial district official played by Leslie Banks. In ‘The Crystal World’ JG Ballard’s central character is Dr Edward Sanders, a name that is surely more than just coincidental. He interacts with apostate priest Father Balthus, who seems to take his name from the Polish/French artist whose fetishistic eroticism bears a disturbingly surreal edge. ‘The Crystal World’ (1966) was JG Ballard’s fourth novel, and the last of his ‘quiet apocalypse’ quartet, following ‘The Wind From Nowhere’ (1961), ‘The Drowned World’ (1962) and ‘The Burning World’ (1964) – and on the brink of his New Wave experimental work commencing with ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ (1969). As such, it contains elements of both literary phases, although interestingly, Chapter Six ‘The Crash’ anticipates the title of his most controversial 1973 novel.

Dr Sanders voyages up the African Matarre River into ‘the affected zone’ towards Mont Royal, in answer to a mysterious letter from Suzanne & Max Clair, friends from the Fort Isabella leper hospital. He’s lured by the distant presence of Suzanne – with whom he’d had an unresolved affair. Her presence hanging ‘like a baleful planet over the jungle’, like the luminous Echo satellite he sees in the night sky. His journey is hindered by vague official obstruction, deliberate obfuscation, and rumours of either a strange virus or political instability. While he is accompanied by the devious white-suited Ventress, who contrasts with the black garb of Father Balthus, in much the way that white bandages contrast on black bodies, in the ‘fundamental distinction between light and dark’. What passes for the SF content doesn’t kick in properly until at least page.66 of the Panther edition, with its talk of ‘distant galaxies efflorescent’ and Sanders entering ‘a world where the normal laws of the physical universe were suspended’. So is this a disaster novel? Of sorts. In so far as the African rain-forest is undergoing a process of transformation, with allusions to areas of the Florida Everglades and the Pripet Marshes in the USSR also crystallising. But this is only part of it.

A bewildering array of highly-imaginative disasters have been visited upon the world since the earliest days of the genre. There’s little new about that. As long ago as 1826 Mary Shelley wrote about the Last Man in a desolate plague-ravaged world. In 1913 Arthur Conan Doyle envisaged atmospheric poisoning as the Earth passed through a Purple cosmic dust-cloud. And that’s long before you even get to novels of lunar disintegration, the death of grass, universal blindness or blockbuster movies about extinction-level asteroids. Where Ballard was breaking new ground was that previous writers had focused on the heroic resistance to disaster, or the ingenuity of its stoic survivors. If you want that kind of tidy adventure plot, you won’t find it here. What defines Ballard is that his protagonists appear to conspire with the disasters overwhelming their world, rather than fighting against them. Elsewhere he approvingly quotes Joseph Conrad’s challenge ‘immerse yourself in the most destructive element – and swim!’ (introduction to the chapter on ‘Cataclysms And Dooms’ in Brian Ash’s ‘The Visual Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction’). Ballard later wrote a book about Salvador Dali, an artist who also liquefies reality into strangely disturbing mutations. And, as Ballard’s Sanders Of The River travels into his heart of darkness, finding a drowned man with a crystallised arm, and continuing in an amphibious craft, towards the Clair’s hospital with its absent patients, he is also entering a Symbolist painting, a visual transfiguration of Africa into literary surrealism. Into a recognisably Ballardian landscape of dislocations, ruined plantation houses, sudden reversals, and unsettling perversity. A photoshopping distortion of the virtual world by cutting-up and juxtaposing its elements. There are hints that Sanders’ reasons for serving in the leper hospital were not entirely humanitarian, but that ‘he might be more attracted to the idea of leprosy, and whatever it unconsciously represented’, again prefiguring the perverse ‘Crash’ preoccupation with mutilation. Ballard even alludes to Arnold Bocklin’s ‘Island Of The Dead’ as if to underscore the painterly quality of his literary vision. While another character, the speedboat owner Aragon, shares his name with surrealist poet Louis.

Lost in the magical terrain, with Ventress cat-and-mousing with Thorensen the mine-owner, competing for a languidly tubercular porcelain beauty called Serena, the soft detonations happen as much in Sanders’ head as they do in the external world he passes through. There’s some token rationalisation, about the foliage extracting minerals from the soil. Later, more explicitly, the crystalising phenomenon is said to be caused by ‘an actual proliferation of the sub-atomic identity of all matter’. Techno-babble of a kind? Yes – ‘it’s as if a sequence of displaced but identical images of the same object were being produced by refraction through a prism, but with the element of time replacing the role of light’. Closer. Eventually, the culprit is identified as the ‘Hubble Effect’, an aspect of the theory of anti-matter. The mutual annihilation of colliding positively and negatively charged galaxies in deep space results in a depletion of the universal time-store, a leaking of anti-time, as there is of anti-matter. So that explains it, then? But in simpler terms, the vitrifying forest is a kind of slow cancerous metamorphosis into static dreamscapes of crystalline beauty. A landscape without time. Not so much a literal or pseudo-scientific phenomenon, as an artistic one. A game of prose. After all, both forms – art and fiction, have the potential to mess with perception and preconceptions. And Ballard’s intention seems to be to induce a sense of post-traumatic trance, a smooth Guernica of the mind. When Sanders encounters a bizarre tableau of frozen bodies fused into one another and into the jewelled forest, embalmed in a glacier of crystal, it’s an image of pure visual surrealism. As much as the crystallised crocodile in its ‘armour of light’ with its ‘mouth choked with jewels’.
For Balthus, his confused faith sees the world ‘transfigured and illuminated, joined together in the last marriage of space and time’, the immense jewelled cross in his empty church anticipating the process, yet the unique quality of diamonds also arresting and countering it. The image is enforced by the blunt symbolism of Sanders carrying the jewelled cross before him through the transmogrified forest, melting and healing its elements. Until finally, having extricated himself from the ‘zone’, he considers a future in which a third of the world’s cities will be petrified within the coming decade, as Miami has already become. Then the process extending out into the solar system, halting the sun and planets in their courses. He opts to return into the crystallised forest and become a part of it.

The ambiguities of ‘The Crystal World’ set up contradictions that predict Ballard’s sixties ‘non-linear’ work for ‘Ambit’ and ‘New Worlds’. It is less a novel constructed of such familiar elements as plot, character motivation, and resolution, instead his art-prose runs like wild mercury, with quivers of bright undulation that shimmer and ripple. Like Father Balthus himself, the fiction is ‘entirely genuine, whatever that term meant and whatever its limits’.

Poem: Aerodynamics Of Desire

AERODYNAMICS OF DESIRE

/ TECHNOIR

I was listening to,

I think it was Seamus Heaney

being interviewed on Radio 4,

he was saying really poetic things

about how he relates to the

real things of the earth,

like trees,

the oak, birch, sycamore,

and willow

and I got to thinking

about the names of

things in my life

that I most readily

identify with,

Sanyo, Toshiba, Honda,

Mitsubishi, and Sony

these

also, are poems

Published in:
‘FLESH-MOUTH no.3’ (UK – April 1991)
‘PEACE AND FREEDOM Vol.7 no.3 – Winter issue’ (UK – Dec 1991)
plus collections:
‘THE MAN WHO DRANK THE MOON’
edit Pete Presford (UK – March 1994)
‘JINGLES FOR DISCORD’ (Bound-into ‘MINOTAUR no.42 vol.9 no.3’)
(USA – September 2004)

CD: 'A Life Eroding' by Songdog

Album Review of:

‘A LIFE ERODING’ by SONGDOG

(One Little Indian TPLP1057CDP)

www.songdog.co.uk

Not Slumdog, or Sundog. But Songdog, the alias used by South Wales singer / songwriter Lyndon Morgan. And you could call this CD a fragmented eleven-track novel from the Beat Hotel, or maybe a Tales of Ordinary Madness short story anthology. Added to Lyndon's rasp of clinker voice, there's Karl Woodward (electric guitar) and Dave Paterson (drums & keyboards). This is their album three from One Little Indian, and whereas ‘The Time Of Summer Lightning’ (2005) and ‘A Wretched Sinner’s Song’ (2008) define the landscape, these new songs show an impressive growth in confidence and technique. Anyone who titles a song “I Got Drunk And I Wrote You A Poem” is fine in my book. Wish I’d thought of that title first. In fact, I probably will. But there’s also “Gene Autry’s Ghost” giving his nudge to precedents a macabre edge, with a girl at the Open Mike night who brags about giving pretty good head. Melodic and impeccably well-mannered it ebbs and flows opaquely around his well-worn vocals. Sure, there are false steps. The painfully earnest ‘why is there so much sorrow in the world’ opener is over-heavy with the weight of the whirling planet, flavoured with melancholy violin. Yes, life can be a bummer. Next! – “Obediah” is all black Jacques Brel doomed gaiety, with diseased sexual jealousy set to the drunken sway of a Gallic squeeze-box, all fed through a vocal distortion. And the rest is sometimes too over-decorous with prissy strings. But persist, and there’s great stuff to come. Weaving ‘dreams in overdrive’, with smart lines in rhyme – try ‘love breaks hearts like a kid squashing flies’ (“3:30am”), or ‘you always did like a pretty face… to sit on’. These are low-life Boho tales of bars and debaucherous frolics with available girls, drizzle and regret, paracetamols, old manifestos, widows and whores, a bedroll full of books, and getting drunk on Rioja at Karl Marx’ tomb while wearing paisley shirts. The literate narrative “Smalltalk” runs on convincingly expletive-flecked playwright lived-in dialogue. While “It’s Raining On The Old Cat’s Grave” admits ‘you were drunk, asleep under heavy bedclothes / your cough’s getting worse, I took what you had in your purse’. Cult stuff. Well-wired into precedents where ‘old vinyl will never let you down’. Maybe. The idea of being a minority taste probably sounds good to Slumdog…, Sundog, no – Songdog. After all, cult is a comfortable place to be creative in.

Bizarre History Of 'Love-Stories In Pictures'

“IS SHE

REALLY

GOING OUT

WITH HIM…?”

: THE BIZARRE HISTORY OF

TRUE ROMANCE IN PICTURES

Just how far should a girl go?

As far as the local newsagents!

There, for some thirty years from the late 1940’s

into the 1970’s, the ‘Love-Stories-In-Pictures’

magazines purvey their breathless weekly heartaches.

Here is the lost world of ‘MIRABELLE’, ‘VALENTINE’,

‘MARILYN’, ‘ROXY’ and ‘MARTY’. Weekly doses of

‘All-Picture-Romances’ inspired by Pop Songs of the day

sung by Elvis Presley, or Billy Fury, the Beatles or the Searchers.

Unthreatened by such looming concepts as gender equality,

life-style choices, contraception, abortion, or the

‘Sex And The City’ etiquette of how to administer the

perfect blow-job, this is a genre with plenty o

‘Wining and Dining’, but strictly NO Sixty-Nining…

They were best-sellers in their day. Now they’re gone, and

only the most dedicated collectors bother to hunt them out.

Andrew Darlington tries to make sense of it all...

‘TEEN QUEENS MEET TEENAGE DIRTBAGS’

“By the way, where’d you meet him?”

“I met him in the Candy Store. He turned around

and looked at me, you get the picture?”

“Yes, we see.”

(Dialogue from ‘Leader Of The Pack” by the Shangri-Las)

He was a Boy. She was a Girl. Do I have to make it any more obvious?

A supernaturally huge moon hangs over a suburban garden-gate. A kiss. He is taller than she is. He has a sharp jacket and a sharper quiff. She, reaching up to receive his kiss, has a flared skirt and elaborate coiffure. And her thought-bubbles tell it all, ‘the moment our lips met I knew he’d keep his promise… I knew that this was the love I’d been yearning for… TRUE love…’
Just how far should a girl go? In his ‘International Book Of Comics’ writer and archivist Denis Gifford supplies the easy answer, ‘as far as the nearest news-stand.’ There, for some thirty years from the late 1940’s and on into the 70’s, ‘Love-Stories-In-Pictures’ comics purveyed their breathless heartaches in eagerly-anticipated weekly instalments. This is the world of ‘Mirabelle’, ‘Valentine’, ‘Marilyn’, ‘Roxy’ and ‘Marty’. Magazines of ‘All-Picture-Romances’ inspired by Pop Songs of the day sung by Elvis Presley, or Billy Fury, the Beatles or the Searchers. They were best-sellers in their day. Now they’re gone, and only the most dedicated collectors bother to hunt them out.

Turn back time. Long before Britney and Lady GaGa there was Helen Shapiro and Susan Maughan. And their biggest chart hits define the opposing attitudes to dating in 1962. Helen’s defiant individualism – ‘gonna be my own adviser, / ‘cos my mind’s my own’, contrasting with Susan’s supine ‘when people ask of me / what do I want to be / now that I’m not a kid anymore’ she answers right away, without delay – ‘I wanna be Bobby’s Girl’. For the most part, it is the latter option that wins out. The most vital acquisition in life is not career, financial independence, or gender equality, but that most desirable of status symbols, the Boyfriend...

‘TRUE ROMANCE: HOW FAR SHOULD A GIRL GO…?’

“met him on a Monday and my heart stood still,

Da-Doo Ron-Ron-Ron Da-Doo RonRon,

somebody told me that his name as Bill,

Da-Doo Ron-Ron-Ron Da-Doo RonRon”

(“Then He Kissed Me” by The Crystals)

The whole ‘Love-Stories-In-Pictures’ phenomena came emerging up out of post-war austerity and rationing, growing with the spread of TV’s and ‘dream kitchens’ with their melamine and formica work-surfaces and ‘labour-saving appliances’. They document the changing times and fads from Beatniks and Skiffle, through ‘Look Back In Anger’, and Rock ‘n’ Roll, into the Twist, the ‘Swinging Sixties’, and the revolutions beyond. ‘Mirabelle’ – launched in September 1956 was the longest-running title, closely followed by ‘Valentine’ from January 1957. Eventually merged, the titles managed to survive far into the 1970’s. But even before ‘Mirabelle’, at the very dawn of the post-war decade, teenage girls were thrilling to the ‘sensational romances’ and ‘pulsating love dramas’ featured in such low-prestige periodicals as ‘The Miracle’ and ‘The Oracle’, which contain just one token romantic story in picture-strip form per issue. Of course, before and during all this, there were American imports, and UK reprints of American originals of the ‘Young Love’, ‘True Confessions’, ‘True Sweetheart Secrets’ and Charlton’s ‘Summer Love’ variety. Because, inevitably, the Americans had got there first. In fact, Denis Gifford claims the creative team responsible for caped super-hero ‘Captain America’ – Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, were jointly responsible for the first-ever romance comic-book title – ‘My Date’ as long ago and far away as July 1947.

But ‘Mirabelle’ and its ilk was a wholly British phenomenon. Girls tended to graduate into it with the onset of puberty, after growing out of ‘Girl’s Crystal’, ‘Schoolfriend’, or the parentally approved ‘Girl’ (every Friday from 2nd November 1951, with its upwardly aspirational strips like Roy Bailey’s ‘Kitty Hawke & Her All-Girl Aircrew’). And they tended to stay with it through the years between those first awkward blushes of adolescence and teen-angst, but before they matured, and settled down into the comfortably Mumsy ‘Woman’s Realm’ or ‘Woman’s Own’ with their recipes, knitting-patterns for ‘figure-flattering cardigans’, child-rearing features and corset-ads.

In those ‘Love-Stories-In-Pictures’ magazines they would find humorous strips with quirkily caricatured art to match. But at their most striking the panels glow with the perfect stylised beauty of Pop Art. The quintessential ‘Only The Lonely’ tear-drop captured in its descending arc from the fringe of immaculately executed eyelashes. The yearning of impossible teenage dreams reflected in her eyes, and on her moistly pursed lips. And there are perceptively observed cameos meticulously recording the fine detail of passing fashion, miniskirts, PVC caps, eyeliners, back-combed coiffure, page-boy bobs, or piled-high bouffant, all incidentally glimpsed as she alights from the bus, or sips frothy Expresso coffee from a shallow Duralex cup. Male sartorial style, never as precisely articulated, nevertheless graduates from the poised tidal-wave quiff, into the Beatles fringe, into Mod fashion, centre-partings, hipster slacks, and ruff-front shirts, as Pop Star role-models of choice evolve from Tommy Steele, Elvis Presley and Ricky Nelson, to Cliff Richard, Adam Faith and Bobby Vee, to Paul McCartney, Billy J. Kramer and Gene Pitney.

In keeping with the policy of the time, ruthlessly enforced by the notoriously secretive D.C. Thomson, but common to other publishers too, the scripters and illustrators remained uncredited. This deliberate strategy has been explained as a way to avoid readers identifying favourites, so that loyal fan-followings were unable to develop around creator-names, which could otherwise have been used by them to negotiate better rates of pay. And unlike the dedicated comic-book archaeologists who uncovered the lost identities responsible for the Science Fiction strips or the ‘Beano’ and ‘Dandy’ characters, the ‘Love-Story-In-Pictures’ have never been subjected to the same level of dedicated research, hence many of the names behind the scripts and art remain unknown. Yet there was the gently comic art of Robert MacGillivray and the more romantic-realist Michael Hubbard at Fleetway, plus Roland Davies at Amalgamated Press. There was Andrew Wilson over at IPC, and D.C. Thomson’s Giorgio Letteri, Ron Smith, Geoff Jones, and ‘Badia’. Names that, even now, remain little more than names. But the magazine-titles for which they produced their best work were loved. They remained adornments to the newsagent’s counter across the late 1950’s, through the 60’s, and well into the 70’s, with enviable circulation figures. And are remembered – if secretly, guiltily, with real affection.

For the best part of its first twelve years ‘Valentine’ prospered under the editorial guidance of Leslie ‘Wilkie’ Wilkinson. Born in 1908 he was already a veteran of ‘juvenile publishing’ for Amalgamated Press, with experience of working on ‘Tiger Tim’s Weekly’ and ‘Playbox’ as well as ‘Radio Fun’. But, returning from active war service, he found himself kicking his heels, discontent with his position on the monthly ‘Sexton Blake Library’ until Percival Haydon, director of the publisher’s comics division, shoved the mocked-up dummy of a projected picture-paper aimed at the teenage girl’s market across the table to him, and asked for his opinion. When ‘Wilkie’ admitted he found the stories charming, Haydon promptly moved him across to the new title, where he would remain on the editorial and scripting side of ‘Valentine’ until his retirement in 1969.

One of the stories selected under his benevolent regime was a Gothic-flavoured ‘Poignant & Unforgettable Picture Drama’ (‘Valentine’ 25th September 1965) ‘inspired’ by the Yardbirds hit “Heartful Of Soul” (written by Graham Gouldman), with a moody photo of the group – Jeff Beck to the fore, in the title-panel. As the story opens Eve is suffering from haunting dreams, and ‘those seconds of terror whenever I woke from the nightmare were always the worst’. She lies awake in her black lace nightdress. Her dark hair dishevelled across the pillow. Perfect lips poised. Dark oval eyes pleading. ‘David! Oh David, please forgive me, David, watch out!’ Soon after, dark dishy David comes home to her from a course in London, and that very same day he takes her for an outing to Castle Hogarth, and the romantic reader can already sense the inexorable drama unfolding. The bleak castle is haunted by Lady Vera who ‘pushed her Lover from these walls when she thought he had been untrue to her’ – and then ‘threw herself down after him’ when she found out she was mistaken. ‘Typical woman!’ snorts David. But ‘Eve knew that she could not resist the tragic haunting call of the castle walls’, looking out from the battlement over the perilous drop. For Eve has already jealously doubted David’s constancy. And the doomed-lovers cycle is about to be repeated – but this time with a happy outcome. No-one dies. This is ‘Valentine’, after all. David forgives her for ever doubting him. They kiss in the final panel. Their love tested and true.

Meanwhile, the rival title – ‘Mirabelle’, had already announced itself as ‘PAGE AFTER PAGE OF ALL-PICTURE ROMANCE’ for just four-&-a-half pence. Here, there’s the glamour of Pop Star Features (“What It’s Like To Be Loved By Johnnie Ray” – Sylvia Drew Explains), clear through to the Back-To-Reality Kitchen Sink back-page ad for ‘Surf’ (“Hold It Up To The Light, Not A Stain – And Shining White”). Then ‘Roxy’ launched itself with a splash (15 March 1958). The no.1 issue featured a free guitar-shaped broach gift – while announcing ‘This Story Is Told By Tommy Steele Himself’. The skyline in the opening cover-picture pans out across London dockland. Beneath the street-lamp, a guitar-toting figure, a stand-in for Britain’s first-ever Rocking ‘n’ Rolling Pop Star – and former seaman, Tommy Steele himself, waves up to her. This was a Pop connection that would continue across the following years, with ‘See inside – THE DISCLAND LOW-DOWN by Marty Wilde’ (30th April 1960), plus a cover ‘U-Star Story’. This was an experimental picture-love strip in which YOU play the central part. ‘See Cliff Richard as the Boy in this story, YOU are the Girl!!!’ This gimmicky idea – a 1960 version of print-interactivity, actually comes down to little more than a switch in the grammatical structure.

Elsewhere, ‘I wash my hands of all women!’ declares the handsome guy in the ‘Sundale Holiday Camp’ in the garish opening frame of a ‘Marilyn’ cover story. She watches him from the corner of her perfectly oval eyes, her dark shoulder-length hair held in place by an Alice-band, her handbag clutched in her white-gloved hands. You just know, by the end of this ‘complete love story’, she will have changed his mind. Exotic locations? Who needs them. Like a missing episode from TV’s ‘Hi-De-Hi’, all this one needs is a Butlin’s chalet. And for just five-pence you get all this, as well as a ‘Tommy Steele Disc Offer’. True, over at ‘Romeo’ they’re featuring the more grown-up possibilities of “Cruise to Romance”, where ‘falling in love with Steve Simpson was like a wonderful dream. But what was the mystery surrounding him?’ And wonderful Steve is the Third Mate on a Mills & Boon-style luxury liner. Well – all the nice girls do love a sailor.
Then there is ‘TV Fan’, a short-lived title that survived for just twenty-one issues before being merged with ‘Valentine’. The opening story of the second issue is ‘inspired’ by Billy Fury’s “First Love”, lavishly illustrated by Arthur Martin’s most florid art, as a couple sit on a fallen tree-branch, about to kiss in an impossibly idealistic rural setting, horses pulling wagons laden high with freshly-mown hay behind them. Perhaps it’s all just a little too twee, she’s a little too sensible, her hem-line safely below the knee. He wears a sensible tie. The text-box gushes ‘in the time of roses when romance and music filled the air, I found my first love.’ Over the top? The local High Street is the genre’s more usual territory, belisha beacons, coffee bars, the hair salon, the newsagents, and single-screen flea-pit cinemas called ‘The Gaumont’, ‘The Astoria’, or ‘The Roxy’. Identifiable places, where love might be awaiting around every corner. Locations that are just as equally spaced from escapist Mills & Boon fantasy-land, as they are from high-powered Independent Career-women, or gritty inner cities. The central characters still live with Mum & Dad in comfortable suburban semi-detached. They catch the bus to work. Which might be the department store, the hair-dressers… or the library if she wears specs. In other words, they live the lives of their target demographic. They wear headscarves tied beneath the chin, and sometimes they wear curlers beneath. When they go dancing on Saturday night they get dressed up, mini-skirts and heavy eye-make-up. Smart and stylish, but never posh or tarty.
The boys they meet move in the same circles. Invariably they are good-looking, but seldom fabulously rich. Sometimes, in a kind of fantasy-fulfilment scenario, the boy might be on the brink of Pop Stardom, but forsakes that promise of stardom for love. Or maybe she sacrifices her love for his career. Biting back the tears. But more often the boy works at the local garage. And there is usually a mid-story crisis. She sees her new boyfriend in the coffee-bar with another girl. But the crisis is resolved when she discovers it is his sister. Sometimes the boy rides a motor-bike. But, like James Dean in ‘Rebel Without A Cause’, or ‘Danny Fisher’ in Elvis’ ‘King Creole’, he is more misunderstood than juvenile delinquent. Like the Shangri-Las’ ‘Jimmy’ in “Leader Of The Pack” he’s ‘good-bad, but not evil’, or like the Crystal’s “He’s A Rebel” ‘he is always good to me, always treats me tenderly, / he’s not a rebel no-no, he’s not a rebel no-on, to me’. So if the boy is angry, and if her parents disapprove of him, that’s because he’s misunderstood, and by the time the story closes he has earned their respect. But there’s grit too, with occasional more-adult themes. Esme is a girl caught up in an intensely possessive relationship (in ‘Roxy’ 30 April 1960). ‘You were at the bottom of it’ he accuses her, ‘some Dame always is’, as ‘the Dance-Hall Bouncer was throwing her out’. Esme ‘felt like a kitten against a mastiff. ‘Why pick on ME?’ she protests, ‘I didn’t start the rough-house’. Or there are teasing tag-lines, such as “Unknown Lover” (in ‘Serenade’ 22nd Sep 1962) – ‘if I’m going to marry you, perhaps I’d better know your name…’ Sometimes there’s a ‘Powerful Passionate All-Picture Drama’ such as “Black Heart” (in ‘Marilyn’ 19th March 1955) in which Clara Gorley is acquitted of the murder of her husband ‘without a stain on your character’, but the gossip persists.

‘Boyfriend’, in the meantime, sticks with the more important issues, Pop and Boys, with ‘This Week’s Boyfriend: Frankie Vaughan’. ‘Boyfriend’ was launched in the Spring of 1959. It was the first girls’ magazine to truly put music first. Each week there would be a new ‘Boyfriend’ – Russ Conway, Johnny Mathis, Lonnie Donegan – telling his true-life story and, to prove that he had a softer side, introducing his favourite romantic story. You could also meet ‘The Girl Behind the Boy’, the star’s secret girlfriend. It’s not certain whether this was so the reader could emulate her, or a case of ‘know your enemy’ so she could steal her Star boyfriend if the opportunity arose. ‘Boyfriend’ really came into its own when the sixties began to swing and it gave itself over to modern pop. As early as February 1963 – before their first album was out, ‘Boyfriend’ was describing the Beatles as ‘even more modern than modern’.

As a male adolescent I should logically have been excluded from such an extreme feminised world. But friends have sisters who leave them lying around. My mother sometimes had a stash of back-issues passed on to her by Auntie Jean, who wasn’t a real Auntie, but who lived up the lane. And I was the kind of kid who read everything. The lure of a photo-exclusive from the next Elvis Presley film – ‘Flaming Star’ or ‘Wild In The Country’, or an interview fan-feature on the Shadows, would offer a legitimising excuse to browse. And, after all, the stories held out the promise of an access-route into the strange geography of the female romantic psyche. And what I discovered was that, as the 1950’s leaked over into the 1960’s, this white heterosexual world of claustrophobically-safe life-restrictions remained undisturbed by the imminent social changes on the horizon. The characters in the picture-stories were unthreatened by such looming concepts as gender equality, life-style choices, contraception, abortion, or the ‘Sex And The City’ etiquette of how to administer the perfect blow-job. There was not even any ‘Heavy Petting’. For this was a genre with plenty of ‘Wining and Dining’, but strictly NO Sixty-Nining. These were magazines designed to bridge the gap between school, and marital domesticity, although they tended to overlap at either end. They provide Pop pin-ups for the teenage bedroom wall. Make-up and fashion tips for the newly-wed… because, of course, the married state is the logical aspiration. In its own sweet way, women’s publishing, rather than challenging this hermetically-sealed conformity, preferred to support the status quo. A problem page conducted by Evelyn Home from ‘Woman’ in 1951 sedates the correspondent’s anxieties with ‘it is safe to say that most women, once they have a family, are more contented and doing better work in the home than they could find outside it’. So, contentious issues seldom extended beyond choosing the most appropriate shade of nail-varnish or the correct brand of blusher. Feminism, like Hot-Pants and decimal currency, would come later.

‘WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE

TEENAGE DREAM ?: THIS INTRIGUING

SONG-TITLE INSPIRES THIS FASCINATING

AND UNUSUAL PICTURE ROMANCE…’

January 1961. The front page of ‘Valentine’ was given over to “Doll House”, a ‘fascinating and unusual picture-romance’ inspired by a single from the relentlessly unfashionable King Brothers. The song had recently peaked no higher than no.21 on the chart. Like many of its type the story is narrated in the intimacy of first-person, but this one has an air of nostalgic regret. ‘I never thought when I came to the house that I’d meet… HIM’. ‘I’ve just come to collect some things’ she explains to him. ‘Take what you want. After all, we’re not getting married, now’ he replies bitterly. ‘How could I tell him I couldn’t keep away from the house… the house that might once have been ours’ she reflects sadly. ‘It wasn’t this way when we started. We didn’t hate each other then…’ Where did their love go? She begins to reminisce, telling their story in flashback sequences. Through to this sad and defensive meeting in the doll house.

So where did they go? These magazines. These ‘Love-Stories-In-Pictures’. These doomed cartoon romances conjured out of the world of Shangri-Las Pop-lyrics. And does their extinction mean the equivalent readership today is less romantic, harder, smarter, more realistic, less naïve, more materialistic, less idealistic, less gullible, less starry-eyed, less supine, more sexually precocious…? None – or all of the above?

Trash? Of course they were trash. But sometimes the things you remember most fondly are trash – the music, the movies, the TV programmes… the magazines. Long before Britney and Christina Aguilera, long before Lady GaGa and Katie Perry, there was Helen Shapiro and Susan Maughan. They defined the opposing attitudes to dating in 1962. But by the mid-to-late sixties those ‘Love-Stories-In-Pictures’ were still betraying something of a fifties aroma, the whiff of Brylcreme in time of Patouchi oil. And one by one they were either being absorbed into each other, or they were vanishing. Hunting a winning formula ‘Romeo’ experimented with the comic exploits of chirpy Cockney ‘Sandie’, illustrated by Guido Buzzelli from 1970-74. When fusty old Dad objects to revealing glimpses of the ‘Popsie Peepers’ she wears under her miniskirt she simply shoves a maxiskirt over them, and promptly takes it off again as soon as she gets to the dance. She’s gonna be her own adviser ‘cos her mind’s her own’. Soon after, ‘Romeo’ merged with ‘Debbie’ – which effectively skipped its target audience down from teenage to tweenage. The first combined issue (21 September 1974) extends its plot-lines into TV flat-share ‘Man About The House’ territory with ‘Jo And Co’, illustrated by Brian Delaney’s quirky and distinctive art. This ‘Super New Series’ even features a black girl called Haze, who – alongside Jo and Mary, and kid sister Mitzi, are ‘three crazy girls’ who ‘never had a dull moment’ throughout their two-year run. Meanwhile ‘Debbie’, following on from where ‘Marty’ had left off, by busily specialising in a new wave of photo-love strips, which nevertheless failed to achieve the broad-based popularity here that they’ve always enjoyed in other European markets.

Instead, the way ahead was already being charted by ‘Jackie’ ‘FOR GO-AHEAD TEENS’. It came from D.C. Thomson, the people who bring you ‘Beano’, and from its launch on 11th January 1964 it interviewed bands, ran comic strips and photo-love stories, and although aimed at a slightly lower age-group, proved to be more responsive to both its readers’ interests, and to the growth in celebrity entertainment culture and its more consumer-focused mentality. Yet its dominance of the market was itself challenged in the late-1970’s by an even newer, more explicit breed of titles – ‘Oh Boy!’, ‘My Guy’, ‘Mates’, and ‘Love Affair’ a group of periodicals soon boasting a total audited circulation of some two-million copies a week, through a strategy of being far more up-front ‘Grab-A-Guy’ about sexual matters. Not content with the chaste no-tongues kiss, Sharon – in one typical tale, determines to teach her love-slouch boyfriend Jeff a lesson for spending far too much time sensibly revising for exams while not devoting nearly enough time to more important matters – like satisfying her. So she makes a rendezvous in the garden shed with love-rival Dave, another boy from her class. And her expectations are far from disappointed, ‘he was far more physical than Jeff, and so randy…!’

Soon the readership has moved yet further, and it prefers the Pop ‘n’ Soap-star celebrity mix of ‘Cosmo Girl’, ‘Smash Hits’, or ‘It’s Hot!’. But what was no longer to be found on the newsagent’s counter was already making it big in the Art World. New York Pop-Art Superstar Roy Leichtenstein made a career out of isolating and expanding individual frames from the ‘Love-Story-In-Pictures’ magazines. He blew them up until the separate screen-stipples stand out in neat grids, then took them to prominence in the Galleries. While ironically, the over-worked studio art-hacks who originated those same image were forever doomed to stay with low prestige, virtual anonymity, and meagre monthly salary cheques.

Elsewhere, the plots were picked up by Phil Oakey, especially for the bus-station coffee-bar re-union story-line of Human League’s “Louise”. Or the ‘you saw him first but I got him in the end’ narrative of Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi (Skater Boy)”, or her pretentious role-playing boy-friend in “Complicated”. Love? Don’t you just love it?

“And the moment our lips met I knew he’d keep his promise…

knew that this was the love I’d been yearning for…

TRUE love… THE END”

(‘Valentine’)

With thanks and acknowledgements to Barbara Griggs “TODAY’S THRILLS’ (‘SUNDAY TIMES’ 28 June 1981), Denis Gifford’s ‘ENCYCLOPEDIA OF COMIC CHARACTERS’ (Longman Press, 1987), and many other names lost or neglected…

‘TRUE SWEETHEART SECRETS:

ROMANCE IN PICTURES’

‘BLUE JEANS’ (D.C. Thomson) From no.1 - 22nd Jan 1977. 15p. Spin-offs include ‘Blue Jeans Photo Novels’ from 10 Jun 1980.

‘BOYFRIEND’ (City Magazines, editorial office 168 Regent Street – 4d, every Friday) Editor: R Taylor. No.1 – 16 May 1959 with ‘Going-Steady Ring: Great Offer Inside’. Issue dated 13th July 1963 publishes the first pictures from the Beatles ‘Euston Road’ photo-shoot, later used as the cover for their ‘Twist & Shout’ EP. A ‘Meet a Beatle’ competition was won by readers Karen, Vicki, Anne and Susan. Issue dated 3rd July 1965 (9d) of ‘The Young Romantic & Fashion Magazine’ announces lead-story ‘Love In The Launderette’ - ‘it’s amazing the things that happen in the least likely places!, plus ‘It’s Rolling Stones Month: First Of Five Spectacular Colour Portraits’. It survived for 351 issues until 12th May 1966 when it became ‘Trend & Boyfriend’, then ‘Boyfriend & Trend’ to 2 Sept 1967, when it was finally absorbed into ‘Petticoat’ magazine.

‘CHERIE’ ‘EXCITING LOVE STORIES IN PICTURES’ (D.C. Thomson) From no.1 – 1st October 1960, it survives 160 issues through until 19th October 1963.

‘CONFESSIONS LIBRARY’ (Associated Press – monthly) Complete 68page pocket editions from no.1 Feb 1959 – ‘Men Could Not Resist Me’, to Dec 1960, when it becomes ‘Romantic Confessions Picture Library’.

‘HONEY’ ‘BECOME THE GIRL YOU WANT TO BE WITH HONEY’ (every month - seventeen-&-half-pence) The May 1974 issue includes features such as ‘Become the Girl with the Show-Off Legs’ or ‘Become the Girl With Grace in Lace’ – ‘looking great is no effort when you have Easy Elegance… or even a touch of Lazy Lady Blues (Summer’s colour in cool cottons and denims)’.

‘LOVE STORY PICTURE LIBRARY’ (Amalgamated Press, Fleetway, then IPC) 68-page monthly pocket editions from no.1 August 1952 ‘Dancing Heart’.

‘MARILYN’ ‘THE GREAT ALL-PICTURE LOVE STORY WEEKLY’ (Amalgamated Press – every Thursday) Editor: R.A. Lewis. The first of the ‘Love-Stories-In-Pictures’ weeklies. No.1 -19 March 1955 with Free Gift: Lucky Persian Love Ring’ 3d – 547 issues until 18 Sept 1965 when it merges with ‘Valentine’.

‘MARTY’ ‘FIRST-EVER PHOTO-ROMANCE WEEKLY’ (C. Arthur Pearson Press) No.1 - 23 Jan 1960 including Photo-strips, and runs for 162 issues until 23 Feb 1963. Incorporates ‘Silver Star’ from 29 Oct 1960, and is itself absorbed into ‘Mirabelle’.

‘MIRABELLE’ ‘PAGE AFTER PAGE OF ALL-PICTURE ROMANCE’ (C. Arthur Pearsons, then IPC). No.1 -10 Sept 1956. 4-&-a-half pence, with ‘Extra! David Whitfield’s Star Song Book’ inside. 25 May 1963-Beatles cover. 3 Aug 1963-Beatles cover. 5 Jun 1965-Beatles cover + Free Poster. In 1965 it publishes poem-fragments by Donovan. Incorporates ‘New Glamour’ from 7 Oct 1958, ‘Marty’ from 2 Feb 1963, and ‘Valentine’ from 16 Nov 1974. Becomes ‘New Mirabelle’ from 19 Feb 1977. Lasts for 1009 issues until it merges with ‘Pink’ 22 Oct 1977.

‘MY GUY’ (IPC) no.1 - 4 March 1978, designed to be a more racy rival for ‘Jackie’ it consists of Photo-strips featuring future-star models Hugh Grant (in ‘The Go-Between’), Julian Sands (‘Chris wanted a holiday to remember – he found a girl he’d never forget…’), George Michael, and Tony Hadley. At its peak it sells 300,000 a week. Incorporates ‘Heartbeat’ 17 April 1982, and ‘Oh Boy’ 19th January 1985. A ‘The Best Of My Guy’ compendium published for Xmas 2006 plunders its finest moments and reproduces a pin-up poster of Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell.

‘NEW GLAMOUR’ (Pearson Press) Woman’s comic, no.1 -16 Oct 1956, lasts for 102 issues until it merges into ‘Mirabelle’ 30 Sep 1958.

‘OH BOY’ (IPC) From 23 Oct 1976, 428 issues until 12 Jan 1985. Incorporates ‘Mates’ from 5 Sept 1981, and ‘Photo-Love’ from 5 Feb 1982, before it is absorbed into ‘My Guy’.

‘PHOTO LOVE’ (IPC) 197 issues from 31 Mar 1979 to 29 Jan 1983 when it merges into ‘Oh Boy’.

‘PICTURE ROMANCE LIBRARY’ (Pearson) 68-page monthly pocket-book series from Oct 1956, ‘Her Forgotten Past’.

‘PINK’ (IPC) 377 issues from 24 Mar 1973 to 14 Jun 1980. Incorporates ‘New Mirabelle’ from 29 Oct 1977, until it is absorbed into ‘Mates’.

‘ROMEO’ ‘NEW, EXCITING, ALL PICTURES’ (D.C. Thomson – Every Tuesday) no.1 - 31 August 1957 with ‘Great Free Gift: The Rock ‘n’ Roll Wishing Ring’ 4d. 887 issues, until it is absorbed by ‘Diana’ 21 Sept 1974.

‘ROXY’ (Amalgamated Press, then Fleetway- every Monday) Numbered issues from no.1 (15 March 1958 4d) to no.62 (1959), then cover-dated from 6th June 1959. May 1959-Craig Douglas cover. May 1959-Vince Eager cover. 30 April 1960, now 5d. Lasts 235 issues until 14 Sep 1963 when it merges with ‘Valentine’.

‘SERENADE’ ‘IT’S NEW, IT’S GREAT, IT’S SWINGING’ (Fleetway – every Monday- 6d) no.1 - 22 Sept 1962 with ‘Free Inside: A Disc From Cliff, His Personal Message To You’ with cover story ‘Unknown Lover’ (‘If I’m going to marry you, perhaps I’d better know your name…’). Survives for only twenty-five issues, until it merges with ‘Valentine’ from 9 Feb 1963.

‘TV FAN’ ‘ROMANCE IN PICTURES’ (Fleetway -Every Monday) 4d. From 12 Sep 1959 - for 21 issues to 30 Jan 1960 when it is merged with ‘Valentine’. 19 Sep 1959-Billy Fury cover + Arthur Martin art, and a ‘Full-Page Photo of Frankie Vaughan’ inside.

‘VALENTINE’ ‘BRINGS YOU LOVE STORIES IN PICTURES’ (Amalgamated Press, then Fleetway) Editor: A.A. Lewis. From 19 Jan 1957, for 927 issues until 9 Nov 1974. no.1 (19 Jan 1957 priced four-&-a-half pence) Free Gift within ‘Cyril Stapleton’s ALL-STAR Songbook’ + ‘£150 VHF Tele-Radio-Gram for you! – see simple contest within’ Cover story Elvis Presley sings ‘Blue Moon’ (‘I’ll never forget tonight – never, as long as I live…’, ‘I’ meet an American painter living in Paris – ‘it’s beautiful, like the Spring, - soft and warm, and alive’) no.69 – Elvis cover, Buddy Holly pin-up. 1 Oct 1960 – Cliff Richard Poster. 22 Sep 1962 – Richard Chamberlain Portrait. 8 June 1963 – photo-feature of Beatles at the University of London Union swimming pool, frolicking with ‘Valerie’ and ‘Valentine’ tea-boy Clancy T Smith. 15 May 1965 (6d) ‘It’s Not Unusual’ Tom Jones cover story (“That’s the worst of Fred. I never know what he’s thinking!” Impenetrable, that’s the word I’m looking for’), The Searchers: Extra-Big New Portrait, The New World of Donovan. Later features a music column written by ‘Mersey Beat’-founder Bill Harry (who also contributes to ‘Marilyn’). Incorporates ‘T.V. Fan’ from 6 Feb 1960, ‘Serenade’ from 16 Feb 1963, ‘Roxy’ from 21 Sept 1963, ‘Marilyn’ from 25 Sep 1965, until it is itself swallowed up by ‘Mirabelle’.

Ode To An iPod

ODE TO AN iPOD

FOR STEVE JOBS

VIA JOHN KEATS

shuffled heard tracks are sweet

but those anticipated are sweeter yet,

the quietness of time expressed in rhyme,

techno-historian, thou canst shape

a smooth glissando, shiny shiny

i would beg to express thee beauty,

O digital lifestyle, deeper than retail,

autotuned in curlicues of sound,

collapsing time pressured into and

recontextualised into a single frame

with each emotional chord striking

the line between past and present

unregulated by any measurable chronology,

only the unbroken line of rhythm connecting,

i think that i shall never see

a thing as lovely as thy symmetry

until the next generation technology

iPod, therefore i am

A literary journalist in ‘The Observer’ was musing thus, about how Poets once wrote odes to things of beauty, but how they no longer do so. John Keats wrote ‘Ode To A Grecian Urn’ he asserts, but no current poet has written an ‘Ode To An iPod’… well, that was a challenge I just couldn’t wimp out of…!!!

'SHE' by H Rider Haggard

‘IN EARTH AND SKIE AND SEA,

STRANGE THYNGES THER BE’:

H RIDER HAGGARD – ‘SHE’,

ECHOES AND FANTASTIC VISIONS

‘SHE’ by H RIDER HAGGARD

(First published 1887, this edition Coronet paperback,

Hodder & Stoughton 1980 ISBN 0-340-15100-5)

‘SHE Who Must Be Obeyed!…

SHE who must be loved!…SHE who must be possessed!’

(Hammer films movie poster)

This is an adventure that defines the term ‘fabulous’. A mythic exploit into weird fantasy that resonates beyond its pages, endures through its movie reincarnations, and has passed into an everywhere awareness. An epic foray across unexplored wilderness on a generational revenge quest. The lost city of an extinct race four-thousand years dead. An eternal heroine as beautiful as she is terrible. Hazards. Conflict. Horror and brutality, with a macabre gothic edge. Yet there’s a deliberately baffled history to this novel, a provenance that both authenticates, and distances us, from its truth. The introduction to ‘She’ is narrated by an ‘editor’ who first questions the veracity of the manuscript that follows. Is this ‘some gigantic allegory?’ he muses. Before expressing his belief that no, ‘to me the story seems to bear the stamp of truth upon its face’. But ultimately he defers the question for the reader to decide. He goes on to explain how the document first came into his possession. How, after briefly being introduced to the godlike Leo Vincey and the hirsute ugliness of Leo’s stepfather L Horace Holly, on the streets of Cambridge, the latter entrusts the manuscript to him, to do with as he pleases, as the mismatched pair are leaving to seek ‘wisdom’ in ‘Thibet’. Yet even these scant details, the editor acknowledges, have been deliberately amended to disguise the true identities of the protagonists, according to their instruction. Hence there are layers of imprecision to both establish the back-story of the supposed manuscript, while allowing the possibility that this is more than mere fiction, indeed, that it documents ‘the most wonderful and mysterious experiences ever undergone by mortal men’. This fictional framing device, seldom if ever thought necessary now… when the most outrageous fictions require no justification, was more usual when ‘She’ was first published in 1887. Then it was used to add gravitas to fantasy, to dignify something essentially frivolous, by investing it with quasi-academic credentials. Henry Rider Haggard uses exactly the same technique with ‘Alan Quatermain’ (1887), published the same year, supposedly written by Quatermain himself, with Haggard simply acting as ‘editor’. As if the creation of wonderful and enduring mythic archetypes is not achievement enough.
The cover of the 1980 Hodder & Stoughton paperback edition of ‘She’ is obviously intended to bring the Ursula Andress portrayal of Ayesha to mind, as she appears in the Hammer movie version of what the blurb not unreasonably claims to be ‘one of the greatest, most unforgettable stories of all time’. Although the actress had yet to be born when H Rider Haggard wrote of the ‘wonderful and awful loveliness’ of ‘She’. At the time of writing, large areas of Africa were yet to be explored. Indeed, it was a pivotal period in the quest for the source of the Nile. A time of Richard Burton and John Speake’s 1857 expedition from east Africa to Lake Victoria, of Speake’s second expedition with James Grant in 1862, the husband-&-wife team of Samuel White & Lady Florence Baker who discovered Lake Albert Nyanza in 1864, Stanley meeting Livingstone in 1871, and Stanley reaching the Mountains Of The Moon in 1887 after trekking up the Congo. After such wonders, surely it was not entirely unconceivable that the vast continent could harbour other secrets, hidden civilisations, or the lost remnants of ancient cultures? His six years of colonial service in South Africa had fuelled Rider Haggard’s imagination, providing source material for his fiction while enabling convincingly accurate detail to back it up. ‘A country like Africa is sure to be full of the relics of long-dead and forgotten civilisations’ claims Haggard, ‘nobody knows the age of the Egyptian civilisation, and very likely it had offshoots. Then there were the Babylonians and the Phoenicians, and other peoples.’ To add weight to his argument he specifically cites Persian ruins found near Kilwa on the east African coast, south of Zanzibar, close to ‘She’ terrain.

The West’s fascination with the ancient mysteries of Egyptology had first been stirred by Napoleon’s campaigns on the Nile in 1798. It would receive a further jolt in 1922 through Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhaten’s tomb, leading to the Universal cycle of ‘The Mummy’ films, replicated by Hammer, and then by the exploits of Indiana Jones. Rider Haggard anticipated much of this, capturing all the enduring mystery and menace of the Pharonic age pretty much intact, requiring little by the way of updating for the Ursula Andress movie. There had already been earlier attempts to film the novel, from a silent black-&-white venture with James Cruze in 1911, to 1925 with Carlyle Blackwell, and then again in 1935 with Randolph Scott. But with both Peter Cushing (as Holly) and Christopher Lee (as Billali), and Leo’s part taken by blonde John Richardson (who would appear with Raquel Welch in ‘One Million Years BC’ a year later) the April 1965 version of ‘She’ was one of Hammer’s most ambitious projects. What plot-inaccuracies there are have more to do with David T Chantler’s screenplay compression, and the assumed need to introduce the bumbling comic-element of Bernard Cribbins than with any inadequacies on Haggard’s part. Cribbins plays Job, the ‘respectable round-faced’ Retainer appointed by Holly when he first accepts the responsibility of the five-year-old orphan Leo.

Unlike Peter Cushing’s celluloid portrayal, Ludwig Horace Holly’s physical appearance, as he describes himself in the novel, is enough to convert one woman to ‘the monkey theory’ – Darwin’s recently published evolutionary ‘Origin Of The Species’. Yet the solitary misogynist is made Vincey’s guardian upon his father’s mysterious and apparently suicidal death. Holly is also given a sealed iron chest to be opened on his ward’s twenty-fifth birthday. The sealed box provides evidence of the Vincey bloodline and details the ancient revenge quest the child is to undertake. It explains how the family can be traced back to the Egypt of 339BC, and to Kallikrates, a priest of Isis, of Greek extraction. Fleeing with a princess, the lovers were shipwrecked somewhere along the African coast, where they encountered a powerful white queen of a savage people. It was She who was responsible for Kallikrates’ death. The name Vincey, it seems, passed down from the escaping princess, is a corruption of Vindex – ‘Avenger’, and pledges Leo to seek the revenge that earlier family members had failed to fulfil across the centuries since. Documents are reproduced in pictograms, in uncial and cursive Greek, as well as in Latin and Medieval texts, and a ‘facsimile of the Sherd of Amenartas’. A degree of creative research far more impressive than – say, Dan Brown’s tepidly reheated Papal heresies.
Science Fiction did not exist as a genre when Haggard was writing ‘She’. But many elements of it were already present. Although he was writing adventure fiction Haggard was well-aware of ‘how many things happen in this world that the common sense of the average man would set down as so improbable as to be absolutely impossible…’ Haggard is rightly regarded as a pioneer of Lost Worlds Romance, because back then, it was not necessary to leave the Earth to seek out new worlds. In the years following ‘She’, Conan Doyle would create his ‘Lost World’ of dinosaurs on a South American plateau, then Edgar Rice Burroughs would acknowledge his debt when populating hidden corners of Africa with innumerable strange cultures for Tarzan to adventure into – as well as Lost Civilisations on Mars, Venus and at the World’s Core. With Alan Quatermain, Haggard created his own ‘Indiana Jones’ action hero, and it’s Quatermain who encounters the first of the writer’s lost races – the Umslopogaas, the noblest of savages in the 1887 novel that bears his name. There would be other Haggard lost races, including ‘The People Of The Mist’ (1894). Just as there were also fictional cross-overs, bringing the strands of his mythos together, with ‘She And Allan’ (1921). He wrote straight historical fictions too, but as Science Fiction developed into its own separate literature-form, Alan Quatermain found himself a participant in the emerging genre by being thrown back in time after using a new race-memory drug, to inhabit the body of a palaeolithic man. More Science Fantasy than SF, it was subsequently run in the pulp magazine ‘Famous Fantastic Mysteries’ (April 1947) with fine Virgil Finlay line-art. Haggard also wrote the posthumously published ‘When The World Shook’ (1919) with collaborative assistance from Rudyard Kipling. It envisages the survivors of a prehistoric civilisation 250,000-years ago who awake from the same form of suspended animation described by Billali in ‘She’ as ‘the whole mountain is peopled with dead, and nearly all of them perfect’.

It was Quatermain’s explosive debut in Haggard’s fourth book – ‘King Solomon’s Mines’, which catapulted him to fame. Preceding ‘She’ by two years, it in many ways establishes the pattern. It too begins with a quest based on historical data. There is also a hazardous trek across African terrain to make initial contact with a hidden tribe, through which they progress to the final secret. ‘She’ takes that same structure, expands it, and escalates the fantasy-element. Its publication was announced by a serialisation in ‘The Graphic’ (between October 1886 and January 1887) which aroused anticipations. And it has never been out of print since. Unlike many mainstream novels of the period, it still reads compulsively easy. There is more moralising and philosophical discussion between She and Holly than a modern novel would carry. And there’s antiquated language too, in the ‘dost thou wonder’ style, although that can be excused by Ayesha’s own antiquity. The prose is also powered by the archaic charm of its descriptive prose, after a sleepless night ‘we might both of us have given away all the sleep we won that night and not have been much the poorer’. In the novel, despite Holly’s misgivings, Leo intends to fulfil the family obligation. Holly regards the prospect of good hunting – and killing a buffalo, as rich compensation for what he considers a foolhardy quest. Leo is also soon ‘thirsting for the blood of big game’. Attitudes repugnant to the modern reader. Haggard’s story-telling skill is capable of a sometimes haunting vigour, and in a curiously poetic passage he spies a ‘beautiful buck… limned upon a background of ruddy sky’. Haggard has the narrator rhapsodise on the magical fascination of the moment – after which he abruptly murders the creature! There are similarly visceral descriptions of nature red in tooth and claw, as when a lion is locked in a death-struggle with a crocodile.

On the voyage to Zanzibar the traveller’s dhow is shipwrecked in a violent squall, coincidentally allowing them to happen upon a distinctively shaped promontory mentioned in the manuscript. Described in the unflattering mildly-racist language which was the common usage of the time, the outcrop has been artificially reshaped into the devilish ‘fiery and demoniacal’ face of an Ethiopian. Haggard uses a similar device to identify the location of ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ as his protagonists struggle across the desert towards a mountain formation termed ‘Sheba’s breasts’. The adventurers, with Mohamed, the only other survivor of the storm, find themselves trapped on a dry spit of land surrounded by boundless crocodile and mosquito-infested marshes, but discover traces of ancient stonework there. Through the swampy remains of what they take to be an ancient canal they endure days of discomfort before being captured by the Amahagger, tall natives in leopard-skins. These ‘People of the Rocks’ – ‘Ama’ from the Zulu for people, ‘Hagger’ from the Arabic from stone, are led by the bearded Billali. They carry the team in ‘palanquin’ sedan chairs into the fertile crater of an extinct volcano, and into its artificial cave complex. The tribe are a matriarchal lost race, surrounded by and hidden from the world beyond by the impassable marshlands. But Holly’s suspicion of their captors is confirmed when the feast they are invited to participate in turns cannibalistic. Mohamed – the intended victim of a particularly vicious form of ‘hot-pot’, is killed in the ensuing skirmish. Until Billali intervenes to halt the slaughter.

At last the three – ‘the lion, the baboon and the pig’ (Leo, Holly and Job) reach the towering volcanic mass at the centre of what had been the ancient city of Kôr, and are led blindfold into the bowels of the mountain, through into the crater of another yet vaster volcano and the mighty cave complex hewn into it. These catacombs are the ‘dead old shadows of the dead’, the extinct prehistoric race ‘old before the Egyptians’ who had created Kôr. With Leo wounded in the fight and fevered from the long trek through the marshlands, but tended by the beautiful Ustane who has ‘claimed’ him, Holly goes on to meet She alone. The plot-escalation is well-paced, with a rising momentum of dread and a macabre gothic edge, expressed in the severed foot that Billali had retrieved from the burning corpse of his dead love. But leavened with humour too. Holly strides to meet ‘She’ while Billali crawls on all fours ‘after the fashion of an Irishman driving a pig to market’.

‘She’ is both terrible, and beautiful, the ‘Eternal Female’ inspiring awe and devotion in equal measure. A force ‘absolutely unshackled by a moral sense of right and wrong’. Leo’s life is forever changed by their liaison. On the point of his death from fever, Ayesha first glimpses him, and recognises him as the reincarnation of her long-dead lover, Killikrates. Her drugs cure him. Holly also admits his unworthy love for her. ‘She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed’ explains that ‘there is no such thing as Death, although there be a thing called Change’. In a poetic metaphor, ‘death is but life’s night, but out of the night is the morrow born anew’. Although essentially a figure of fantasy, she pointedly denies superstitious elements in favour of a kind of science. ‘There is no such thing as magic’ she declares, ‘though there is such a thing as knowledge of the hidden ways of Nature’. Later, Haggard takes the character of Ayesha, and develops her mythos through ‘Ayesha: The Return Of She’ (1905), placing her origins in a Greek colony planted by Alexander the Great in central Asia. Then he traces her Egyptian origins further in ‘Wisdom’s Daughter’ (1923). Another novel, written with his friend Andrew Lang – ‘The World’s Desire’ (1890), also draws on the pseudo-sciences of spiritualism and reincarnation. Partly a lyrical fantasy sequel to Homer, it tells of Odysseus’ final voyage to seek Helen in Egypt, only to discover that she is an avatar of Ayesha. Haggard’s innovatory ideas would be carried over into subsequent fantasy, sometimes directly attributed, as when Neil R Jones writes in his “The Jameson Satellite” (‘Amazing Stories’, July 1931) about H Rider Haggard ‘who depicted the wondrous embalming practices of the ancient nation of Kôr in his immortal novel ‘She’ wherein Holly, under the escort of the incomparable Ayesha, looked upon the magnificent, lifelike masterpieces of embalming by the long-dead peoples of Kôr’. While reincarnations in media-forms unknown to Haggard were to assure Ayesha of a different kind of immortality. She’s real now, in ways that Haggard would not recognise, through comic-book editions, and movies. Elsewhere the phrase ‘She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed’ enters conversations with no regard to its origins, something maybe picked up from TV’s ‘Rumpole Of The Bailey’? Although Rumpole’s creator, John Mortimer, was certainly familiar with H Rider Haggard’s work.

With a vivid cinematic sense of spectacle a savage Amahagger dance is illuminated by the ‘awful and hideous grandeur’ of torches made of burning human corpses, where the rivalry between Ustane and Ayesha climaxes. Ustane defies She. In a mental battle of wills She kills her, with little more than a pointed finger. In a powerful sense of recurring cycles of time this reflects how She originally murdered Killikrates, jealous of his love for Amenartas. The Egyptian princess who is Leo’s distant ancestor. Despite his affection for the loyal Ustane, Leo is irresistibly drawn by Ayesha’s sorcery, ‘as a needle follows a magnet’. She takes him to see the identical body of the dead Killikrates in the chamber where She has slept beside the body of her murdered love for two-thousand years. She plans to make Leo ‘not immortal, indeed, for that I am not, but so cased and hardened against the attacks of Time that his arrows shall glance from the armour of thy vigorous life as the sunbeams glance from water’. She offers Holly this form of immortality too. Initially he refuses, fearfully falling back on a Christian mythology he’s already denied. Flesh, no matter how long it survives, will eventually die, he argues. But the spirit survives for eternity. At the last moment, however, he’s poised on the brink of giving way to the temptation of living forever.

To achieve her desire, so that she and an immortal Leo can return to, and rule Britain, they journey together across the floor of the crater, through the desolate ruins of the ten-thousand year-old city, into the shafts of a tunnel and across a precarious rift into the bowels of the volcano itself. The Hammer movie diverges from the novel in a number of ways. For them, the lost city is called ‘Kuma’, perhaps to avoid Sid James-style mispronunciations of ‘Kôr’? Haumeid (André Morel), the father of poor murdered Ustane, leads the vengeful Amahagger to attack Ayesha’s loyalists in a climactic battle. Then Leo fights Christopher Lee’s Billali – her fanatical priest, who seeks immortality for himself. But Ayesha kills him too! Yet the final death-scene, in which She steps naked into the Spirit of the Flame of Life, only for it to destroy her, remains intact in all forms of the story. And to SF historian David Kyle the ending of Haggard’s story ‘when the immortal heroine withers amidst the strange, previously revitalising cold flame and has her beauty transformed into hideousness, is one of the unforgettable high moments in fiction’ (‘A Pictorial History Of Science Fiction’, Hamlyn 1976). To Holly, her demise, caused by her re-immersion in the flame, is ‘worse than a thousand natural deaths’. So intense that Job dies of shock. After that climatic moment, the ‘wily old barbarian’ Billali assists their escape from Kôr, across the marsh barrier to eventually reach the Zambesi and home. Their lives irrevocably altered by their experiences. At the close of an adventure that defines the term ‘fabulous’, Holly wonders if ‘She’ will return? He’s inclined to believe that she will, ‘a story that began more than two-thousand years ago may stretch a long way into the dim and distant future…’

SHE: THE HIDDEN CODE

References:
‘King Solomon’s Mines’ (1885)
‘She’ (1887) – serialised in ‘The Graphic’ issues October 1886 to January 1887
‘Allan Quatermain’ (1887)
‘The World’s Desire’ (1890)
‘The People Of The Mist’ (1894)
‘Ayesha: The Return Of She’ (1905)
‘When The World Shook’ (1919)
‘She And Allan’ (1921) - prequel
‘Wisdom’s Daughter’ (1923)

Movies:
‘King Solomon’s Mines’ (1950) with Stewart Granger
‘King Solomon’s Mines’ (1985) in a lively version directed by J Lee Thompson, with Richard Chamberlain taking foxy damsel-in-distress Sharon Stone to seek the fabled diamond mine and help her search for her missing father.
‘She’ (1911) black-&-white venture with James Cruze
‘She’ (1925) silent film with Betty Blythe and Carlyle Blackwell, made with the active participation of H Rider Haggard
‘She’ (1935) with Randolph Scott, Nigel Bruce and Helen Gahagan, an oddity in that it’s not set in Africa – but in the Arctic!
‘She’ (1965) with Ursula Andress, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee

Marty Wilde: Live In Skegness

‘BORN TO ROCK ‘N’ ROLL…

MARTY WILDE’

Impressions of an evening with MARTY WILDE

Live at ‘The Embassy Centre’, Skegness

A blur of 1950’s Radio voices fading in through the speakers. Ghosts lost in time, swarming frequencies jostling and colliding into each other through imaginary tunings. Jimmy Edwards. ‘Music While You Work’. Radio Luxembourg. Jimmy Clitheroe. ‘Top Of The Form’. The BBC Light Programme… then come the quiffed glaciers of Brylcremed slick-overs jolting this most somnambulistic of decades out of neutral! With Marty Wilde there at its British inception! He’s tall. He was always tall. A full 6’3”. His presence dominates the stage tonight. “Born To Rock ‘n’ Roll” is a semi-autobiographical song that defines the life, and the show’s theme. But there were other pre-Rock influences at work as a young Reginald Smith hit adolescence in those first years of post-War England. The macho western songs of Frankie Laine. As ‘Marty Wilde’, Reg would later have a hit with his rocked-up version of Laine’s “Jezabel” recorded as a deliberate reference. Then – unlikely though it now seems, there was high-kicking Frankie Vaughan. A superstar in his day. And the smoothly swinging Deano Martin. “Volare” is on the chart as Marty himself makes his debut foray up the lists with his doomily macabre “Endless Sleep” in August 1958. Critic Jon Savage says it ‘totally kicked ass… a monster guitar riff, a fantastically quivering vocal, and ambient back-up murmurs all add up to a classic of teenage melodrama’ (‘Mojo’).

But it all really begins with Elvis. He is the ‘guiding light’. Under the age of legal consent, it’s his parents who have to sign on the line when the Man With The Big Cigar – Larry Parnes‘-Shillings-&-Pence’ comes to call, at least – that’s how he tells the story. ‘I think Lionel Bart saw me (perform at ‘The Two I’s’ coffee-bar). I will never truly know, because nobody actually came forward to me. No-one approached me at all, and I went home on the Saturday. I had finished my work there, and the following Sunday it was mind-boggling to come home from Sunday-school – which I did, believe it or not, and there was a chap at my house with a contract with my name on – which was quite incredible. And it was Larry Parnes, the world’s biggest manager in my eyes. He still is. The most incredible signing-up process...’ And although the hits don’t start immediately (I still have a 78rpm copy of his version of Bob Merrills’ “Honeycomb” b/w the Marty Wilde & Lionel Bart song “Wild Cat” on Philips PB750), when they do come they happen huge. Marty Wilde is the face of 1958. The first face of ‘Oh Boy’. Jack Good, who knew Marty when they worked together on ‘6:5 Special’, introduced him to Jody Reynold’s “Endless Sleep”, the dark suicide drama which became Marty’s debut Top.5 hit. Stolen, but then if Marty hadn’t taken it, it would probably never have been heard here anyway. It was on the chart the week the ‘Oh Boy’ show began. He sang Leiber-&-Stoller’s “Baby I Don’t Care”, Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool” and Buddy Knox’s “Somebody Touched Me” on that very first show. Tonight, he talks about Jack Good’s spontaneous direction technique – ‘one take, learn the words, hit the mark’ (and later ‘he was our guru, he could see things in us we couldn’t see in ourselves’). And he sings Bobby Darin’s interpretation of Brecht / Weill’s “Mack The Knife” pretty much as he once did on those long-ago monochrome Saturday nights.

Marty was there on the thirty-eighth, and final ‘Oh Boy’ broadcast 30th May 1959, closing the show by duetting the Cliff Richard. He jokes about another of that show’s vital ingredients, Joe Brown. Joe Brown jokes about him too. It’s a long-standing association. They’re both survivors. Both still here, both still doing it. On another occasion, in conversation with Joe, I recalled how Marty had dominated British Rock ‘n’ Roll for some eighteen months, but that when he watched Cliff Richard debuting on ‘Oh Boy’ he must have realised that status was over. ‘I don’t think that’s true, actually,’ argues Joe. ‘I just think it went off in a different direction. I mean, I’d have thought that Marty would’ve made a great actor. We did a film together once, called ‘What A Crazy World’, and he was good in it. I thought he was great in it. But no – Marty’s a good bloke. He’s got the heart… and everything.’ That movie opens with Marty (as hoodlum Herbie) shoplifting from the local street-market. Still a ‘bad boy’, the man behind the counter swears “bleeding kids!” Later, as a record company executive in the David Essex movie ‘Stardust’ he gets to yell ‘are you listening… hey?’ to a dumbstruck Keith Moon. Not many managed that feat. Marty did.

Marty does a Rock ‘n’ Roll medley of full-fat high-caffeine non-organic maximum-strength beats, all the while ranging to both wings of the stage, an oddly compelling presence. Still. One that physically embodies the latent power of the music, revelling in the reactions he’s provoking. He sweats. He gyrates effectively with gently self-mocking asides, sharing each part of the experience with his audience – from the undeniable joy, to the inevitable song’s-end breathlessless. Drawing them in. They shared this when it was new, “so free and so wild / and so full of living”. They share it again now. A self-contained time-capsule poignantly defiant against the years. ‘Film Fun’ magazine dated 23rd January 1960 offered its readers fabulous ‘Free-Gift 3D Spectacles, with a 3D Gift Book to view them with. It features photos of Alma Cogan, radio ventriloquist Peter Brough and his mischievous dummy ‘Archie Andrews’. And Marty Wilde. Now the gold lame comes off. He’s engagingly self-deprecating about his own version of “Rubber Ball” in its chart-battle with Bobby Vee’s U.S. original. But it’s an Orlowski-&-Schroeder song open to artistic interpretation. Who’s to say which is the better? Marty did manage to invest it with an intensity beneath its bubble-gum sugar-coating. And Bobby Vee does tell an amusing story-line about it in his own live show as well (about how it wound up as a TV-ad – ‘my bouncy-bouncy!!!’).

But then, once things take a dive career-wise Marty finds himself able to concentrate on writing his own songs. Buddy Holly showed him the way. Now he does “Peggy Sue Got Married” with the Wildcats providing perfect sound-alike back-up. His own first self-penned hit – “Bad Boy”, happens by accident. He relates how the intended ‘A’-side – “It’s Been Nice”, gets downgraded imperfect for ‘technical reasons’, and the dark blue Philips-label disc is fortuitously flipped to provide one of Marty’s most enduring hits. ‘Well you see now, I got a girl, and we stay out late, almost ev’ry night, / the people just stare and they declare ‘well, well – it just ain’t right’’. He jokes about how daughter Kim laughs at its moral naivette. But this was real. This was December 1959. It was like that then. Until – writing through a pseudonym-of-convenience, in league with lyricist Ronnie Scott, he’s well into a second career scoring chart-hits for a new generation of bands – and to audiences, who’d have sneered had they known. Giving him great satisfaction to watch those bands in their hippie regalia on all those ‘Top Of The Pops’ shows performing the songs he’s written. He does one of the biggest – “Jesamine”. A massive ‘butterfly-child’ hit for the Casuals. He does it with impressive tenderness. He also did several songs for Status Quo’s first album, “Elizabeth Dreams”, “Paradise Flats” – and their second Top Ten entry “Ice In The Sun”. And Lulu. Long before she discovered Take That or Ronan Keating she was benefiting from her association with this Marty Wilde, performing here tonight in Skegness.

In the plush red foyer there’s a stand merchandising his ‘Born To Rock ‘n’ Roll’ video priced at just £15. His ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Fifties’ brochure for £3. A ‘Solid Gold 1997’ tour T-shirt for £4. And CD’s ‘It’s Been Nice’, ‘Solid Gold’ and ‘Born To Rock ‘n’ Roll’. People browse. Some of them buy. Some of them probably bought his first album – ‘Wilde About Marty’ when it first emerged all those years ago. These loyalties have a tendency to last.

www.martywilde.com