Science Fantasy: Thomas Burnett Swann

THOMAS BURNETT SWANN:

INTO THE WANDER-WOOD

ANDREW DARLINGTON travels to Crete to rediscover

the work and the lost world of an unfairly neglected

American fantasist whose stories first achieved prominence

in the British ‘Science Fantasy’ magazine

“Out in the dark blue sea lies a land

called Crete - a rich and lovely land, washed

by the waves on every side...”

(Homer ‘The Odyssey’)

I never quite understood what Homer meant about the ‘wine-dark seas’ of Crete. Until I came here and saw the setting Cretan sun flame the Aegean to something as richly intoxicating. Now – in the courtyard of the Palace of Knossos, just 5km from the Heraklion airstrip, I see Thomas Burnett Swann in new illuminations too. Knossos is Swann in stone. A fusion of myth and archaeology. This, the palace of King Minos, was discovered by Greek historian Minos Kalorairinos, and controversially reconstructed by Sir Arthur Evens. But its labyrinths were planned and executed by Daedalus. Here, in Swann’s 1964 ‘Science Fantasy’ serial “The Blue Monkeys”, mythology fights its last ‘War of the Beasts’ against the encroaching forces of human rationalism. Here the hybrid man-beast Eunostos, the last ‘Bull-that-walks-like-a-man’, unites with the beast-princess Thea, niece of King Minos, in a doomed attempt to resist the island’s Achaeon conquerors. Crete is a land of thirty-million olive trees. Home to the world’s oldest viniculture. Up from Piskopiano there’s the stark limestone moonscape of the Dikti cave – birthplace of Zeus. Suddenly, here, Swann’s elegiac stories becomes tangible and real.

I don’t know a great deal about Swann’s life. Little more than fragmentary glimpses salvaged from book jackets and magazine profiles. I know he was born in Florida in 1928. That he served in the US Navy during the Korean War, but that he was an academic by nature. To the editor of his greatest fictional home – the British ‘Science Fantasy’ magazine, Swann was a ‘putter-in’ who built ‘a phrase round a ‘boss-word’, a sentence round a key-phrase, forms paragraphs of carefully-matched sentences, and inlays them with epithets until their colour and texture is exactly what (he) envisages’ (see 32). I’m also a ‘putter-in’, and this sounds about right.

Swann’s education yields impressive qualifications including an A.B. from Duke University, a Master’s from the University of Tennessee and a Ph.D from the University of Florida, which enabled him to become a Professor of English Literature at the Florida Atlantic University, a position he used to authenticate the ‘framing’ sequence for his novelisation of the “The Blue Monkeys” as ‘The Day Of The Minotaur’ (1966), his most powerful eulogy to the power of dream. Through the medium of his narrator Swann commends ‘the accurate historical framework, the detailed descriptions of flora and fauna, the painstaking fidelity to fact in costume and custom’ (13) of his own work. Other writers used mythology before him. H Warner Munn took his lost Roman legion through remnants of Arthurian, Atlantean and Toltec quasi-history as early as the ‘Weird Tales’ serial forming the novel ‘King Of The World’s Edge’ (1939). But Swann’s vision is clearer. He is more closely attuned to the roots of all story-telling in dream and wonderment. He is a writer who retains ‘an ear for the well-turned phrase, the elegant (yes, even the flowery) epithet’. His ornate enigmas of the past are located where species divisions are fluid, where history dissolves and melts into myth. He deifies the natural world. And few have done it better.

It’s possible to argue Fantasy as the cranky eccentric inferior of its more rigorously disciplined neighbouring genre, Science Fiction. At its best – restrained by the laws of physics, SF has an ability to stimulate the imagination to a degree seldom achieved by any other form of popular fiction, whereas Fantasy’s effect on the imagination is more often than not soporific. Both can be viewed as escapist forms of literature, and – of course, Fantasy is part of an eternal Bardic tradition extending back beyond Homer (and one from which SF has itself evolved). Nevertheless, the trendy-mystic catch-all of Swords-&-Sorcery, Dragons, Boy Wizards, Teen-Vampires, psi-mutants, and endearing Diskworld Hobbit-facsimiles currently infesting bookshops is a depressing place to be. There are exceptions. Lovecraft’s elaborate and mesmeric Cthulhu mythos has a snaringly compulsive breadth of vision. The sheer poetic beauty and outlandish grotesquerie of Mervyn Peake gives his work a quality that defies any attempt at limited categorisation. Fantasists CS Lewis and Leigh Brackett must get special mention too, while the degree of fascination still exerted by Tolkien must make him a candidate for any list of honourable exceptions.

And I don’t want to imply that Thomas Burnett Swann automatically qualifies for inclusion in such an elevated pantheon of Fantasy writers. Merely that his tales are quaintly individualistic and imaginatively original enough to be afforded a degree of serious consideration I’d not readily extend to many of his contemporaries. Swann produced work for a number of years, in ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction’ and Ted White’s ‘Fantastic’, but most notably through the pages of the fondly remembered ‘Science Fantasy’, and later through his own slim novels. And in doing so he built up a unique stylistic identity. He used his awesomely imaginative bestiary of mythic characters as metaphors for wonderment. Michael Moorcock – himself no stranger to rich prose, recognises Swann’s “Where Is The Bird Of Fire?” as one work which ‘has shown uses to which Fantasy can be put’, one which ‘has done more than entertain on an escapist level’ (31). While even the ‘glittering adjectives’ of a much earlier story – “The Painter”, playfully animates the real into the wonderfully phantasmagoric. Here, the surreal monstrosities of Hieronymous Bosch’s ‘Garden Of Earthly Delights’ become a virtual intrusion into the artist’s actual life via hideous aliens – ‘demons exploring the sky in their fish’, amid opulently poetic prose where ‘apples glisten like Venetian goblets, twisting their fine-blown spheres to catch the moonlight’, and horror floods his body ‘like water invading a swimmer’.

The man Theodore Sturgeon describes as ‘a remarkable writer’, decided to drop academia in favour of the pen in the early 1960’s. From then on Swann lived as a poet, an essayist (publishing work on Christina Rossetti and the poet ‘HD’) and a fantasist. He died from cancer in 1976. To these bare bones of a life I add Kyril Bonfiglioli’s musings on his creative technique, ‘one could no more trim down his work without damaging it hopelessly than one could clip a few inches off the side of a good painting’ (32).

This sounds about right.

---- 2 ---

“In the tall green flame of the cypress, I see his

shadow, flickering with the swallows. In the

city that crowds the Palatine, where Fauns walk

with men and wolves are fed in the temple, I hear

the rush of his wings. But that is his shadow and

sound. The bird himself is gone. Always

his wings beat just beyond my hands, and the wind

possesses his cry. Where is the bird of fire?”

The way Tolkien plundered Anglo-Saxon mythology and language is well documented. At his best, Swann goes back further into the classical roots of mythology, to Virgil, Homer and beyond. He sculpts landscapes and texts redolent with the rural imagery of ‘the world’s great childhood before the Trojan War’, a time of ‘daffodil-whispering breeze’ and ‘leaf-cleansed air’, a time when even anger was poetic – it ‘clawed at (the) throat like an ice-encrusted branch’ (‘Green Phoenix’, 1972). A time when ‘wonders were as numerous as sparrow’s nests in spring’ (‘Will-O-The-Wisp’, 1976).

John Carnell describes Thomas Burnett Swann as an American ‘unhonoured and unsung in his own country’. But it was Carnell, as founding editor of the elegant ‘Science Fantasy’, who was largely responsible for building that first phase of Swann’s strange evolution. The earliest stories, published while Swann was still studying for his PhD, had yet to assume the enhanced mythological complexity that was to become his most hypnotically powerful form. “Viewpoints” for example (in rival ‘Nebula’, May 1959), has a contemporary setting and flirts with a kind of post-Chernobyl horror in which a radiation-blasted woman has skin of ‘weathered green brass’. But her choice to remain on the mutant’s reservation, accepting her role as part of a separate new race already anticipates Swann’s later preoccupation with a biodiversity of sentient species (there’s also, incidentally, a car called Ariel!). “The Dryad Tree” (‘Science Fantasy’, August 1960) – to Carnell, is ‘a light fantasy in a modern setting... that conjures nostalgic memories of the defunct ‘Unknown Worlds’.’ It envisages an unconventional trans-species menage-a-trois in which Cloe, an Italian Orange Tree, is jealous of John’s new wife Mari. Again, the resolution comes not with violent confrontation, but through gentle assimilation.

But it’s through the stories that follow that Thomas Burnett Swann discovers his style, and his audience. In the novel ‘Green Phoenix’ he chronicles items from the history of Aeneas’ arrival in Italy – incidents that classical Roman writer Virgil apparently forgets to mention. There are no Dryads or Fauns in Virgil’s ‘The Aeneid’ (and while Swann refers to the wandering Trojan’s son as Ascanius, his predecessor usually calls him Iulus), yet the framework of Swann’s novel can be placed without difficulty within a couple of the penultimate chapters of Virgil’s epic. Swann uses King Latinus, rescued intact from the text of ‘The Aeneid’, and also his daughter Lavinia, although her ‘Green Phoenix’ marriage to the hero of Troy is considerably more placid than in Virgil’s version. Swann omits Turnus to whom she was originally betrothed. But such nit-picking comparisons are misleading. Swann’s research is voluminous. Each of his tales come complete with a list of academic esoterica he’s consulted to aid its fabrication. But he merely uses Virgil, as he uses textbooks on Minoan or Etruscan history, as stepping stones to the creation of his own mythologies.

A qualification that can be applicable, however, relates to the exact delineation of his fantasy species, and the apparent confinement of the scope of their world. There are Dryads, Centaurs and Fauns – creatures elaborated from mythology, phantasms condensed out of superstitious rural imaginings, grown from shadow patterns across forest floors, the movement of random clusters of foliage, the rustle of leaves disturbing silence. They should be as inexact, insubstantial and as inconsistent of form as in the tales of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphosis’. Yet Swann veers close to making them endearing and decorative, defusing the elements of both mystery and menace. It’s like taking the beautifully complex draughtsmanship of a Pre-Raphaelite painting without also accepting the decadent fin-de-siecle element of evil omnipresent darkness. Anthologist and critic Judith Merril concurs. To her, Swann’s fictions are ‘a far cry from the earth-dark tragedies of such Ancient World chroniclers as the late Henry Treece, and the lighter approach inevitably diminishes the stature of the myth-figures. If, however, you prefer your blood-spilling flavoured with charm, rather than taken raw, then Swann blends these ingredients with considerable skill’ (33).

That sounds about right. But ‘Green Phoenix’ is just one element of something that should be considered as a whole. The novel was first published (in the USA) in 1972, and is a coming together of ideas Swann had been developing in short story form for a decade. Mellonia, Aeneas’ Dryad lover first appears in the 1962 short story “Where Is The Bird Of Fire?”. Written by a Faun with a reed pen, it tells of Mellonia’s relationship with Remus ‘the Wolf’, the founder of Rome, and how through him she makes good her promise to found a second Troy in Italy. The story, according to a contemporary blurb, ‘received more praise than any other in recent years’. “The Sudden Wings”, a voyage into painful beauty, follows its success. Set at the time of Roman expansion into the Eastern Mediterranean, it concerns the loneliness of the last member of a winged human species, Eros, the Dragonfly Boy. He is an ‘eternal’ who had gamed with a Princess of Ur and is ‘older than evil’. In “Dolphin And The Deep” the Etruscan Bear searches for lost Circe, while “The Murex” is set among Amazons and ant-like Myrmidons on the island of Aegina.

I know Aegina too, walking where the Doric Temple of Aphaea overlooks the Saronic Gulf – perhaps this is the ‘Bay of Coral’ where Swann’s naked Amazons dive for scarlet and lavender sponges? It’s on this island that Daphne and Loxo track a band of Myrmidon ant-boys from the walled town back towards their nest, half for gain (‘like the fabulous ants of Arabia, they were said to horde (sic) gold and emeralds, electrum and lapis lazuli’), and half for sport (‘you have the mind of a wolf’ jokes Loxo). As they stalk their prey, the ilex and linden trees are alive with spirit-presence, the sensual land haunted with stories, redolent of thyme and passed time. The Amazons are rationalised as a kind of proto-Feminist collective of abused or deserted women in revolt against patriarchy. Daphne herself was exposed to die as a baby, saved and reared by Amazon leader Gorgo. Yet their tribe had also fought Centaurs and driven them from the island. Now Gorgo leads her Amazons to raid the nest, only to become lost in its mushroom chambers and tunnels, and forced to retreat, defeated by the ant-boy’s cunning. Separated from her group, Amazon Daphne warily befriends winged Myrmidon Tychon. Together they ride a hippocampus, a giant sea-horse. Like the arm of the sea and the corner of the land, the two meet ‘in sweet apartness’, his unsettling golden-skinned maleness calling ‘a stranger out of the deeps of me, as a necromancer whistles the white-faced spirits of the tide.’ Their liaison is interrupted by returning Amazons. Punished for their transgression, despite her protests, Tychon is thrown to Orion, the great chained bear. Then the remaining Myrmidons affect a rescue, ‘they seemed to step from the sunbeams of the late afternoon; to walk with light through the green woods; to walk as light’. Daphne realises that ‘the same moon controlled our tides’ and she joins the ant-boys in polyandrous marriage, as their new queen.

There’s a strange gentleness to such stories, and little violence. ‘Most of the world’s harm, it seemed, was done by ignorant, essentially decent men’ (‘Will-O-The-Wisp’). There is much talk of love, a love that not only tames wild bears and, helped by the correct alchemaic catalyst enables mortals to sprout ‘Sudden Wings’. A love that seduces Amazons into strange marriages. A love that is romantic, maternal, paternal, or the love of comrade for comrade, or sometimes even a love with ill-defined incestuous or homosexual aspects like that of Eros and Mark (6), or Herrick and Nicholas (‘what makes a man a god is people to worship him. Even one person if he worships enough’ (26)). There’s a pleasingly androgynous ‘Satyricon’-esque ambivalence of blurred sexual identities. Rather, a feeling of universal sensuality devoid of the need for imposed gender divisions. ‘I understand’ comments Amazon Daphne ‘that men could be manly in tenderness’. The ambiguity of sexual roles, as this quote indicates, is extended to include the leading protagonists of the stories. Heroes who are not only heroic, but live up to every outmoded definition of the term. The poet Herrick for example has ‘bare legs splendid in the sun, his bare arms like those of a blacksmith, the archangel hair.’ These heroes also tend to possess a childlike youthfulness, and are given to displays of emotion and even tears that more contemporary modes – unlike those of Homer’s time, find unmanish. Probably such decompartmentalisation of roles reflects more on the sickness of our own society than upon those created by Swann. Heroines are similarly beautiful, yet complex. Matriarchal societies and ‘covens’ abound – the Amazon society is dominated by Gorgo, just as Judith, the charismatic leader of the Gubbings, and Volumna, leader of the Dryads, are her direct counterparts.

There are no villains.

---- 3 ---

“Before Romulus, the entire Mediterranean world had

abounded in Satyrs and Centaurs, Tritons had played in

the sea-pools, and even the air, it was said, had throbbed

with sudden wings as boys and girls had tumbled through

the clouds. But now, thanks to the depredations of man,

such creatures were almost extinct...” (6)

Following the eventual demise of ‘Science Fantasy’, and the publication of ‘Green Phoenix’ came further novels including ‘The Lady Of The Bees’ (1976) drawn from the same mythic sources, ‘The Day Of The Minotaur’ expanded and rewritten from “The Blue Monkeys”, and ‘The Tournament Of Thorns’ (1976). ‘Moondust’ (1968) even enters the fractured Jewish crypto-history of The Torah and ‘finds fairies in the foundations at the battle of Jericho’ (34). Swann describes the Biblical city infiltrated by the non-human wizardry of sciences older than history, with an attendant subterranean realm called Honey Heart, populated with winged females and intelligent foxes.

Thomas Burnett Swann had by now become the centre of a minor cult which climaxed with the 1976 appearance of ‘Will-O-The-Wisp’, a novel set in ‘post-Elizabethan England’. Here, the underlying sensuality of the earlier fantasies remain, but its wondering, somehow chaste innocence is a little more knowing. The sense of menace a little more fully realised. Swann writes that ‘when God had come to England with the Romans, the Pagan Gods had scuttled from field and fen, and the Devil, who gave them asylum in Hell, appeared to be permanently routed and tidily exiled.’ But the element of Puritan guilt gives evil a Freudian psychological basis, validating the mutterings of dark submerged sexuality. The attributes of sensuality are even extended to embrace the inanimate. Dartmoor, under ‘the first light of dawn had begun to flush the tors. Usually they resembled huge jagged tombstones, but now they were what they had been to her ancestors before the fall, unabashedly phallic, earth’s virility yearning to the fruitful sky.’ This is an essentially Pagan vision of the world, of Sky-Mother/Earth-Father as in virile pre-christian belief. Yet the novel lies well within the tradition of Swann’s mythos. Robert Herrick the poet, in pursuing and being captured by the remnants of a supernatural race living on Dartmoor, does for the novel what Virgil had done for ‘Green Phoenix’ (while not only Virgil but also Dryads and Satyrs are alluded to in the later work). There are other points of cross-reference that serve merely to update the outer limits of Swann’s terrain by a fistful of centuries. The research and settings are meticulously exacting, detail from Herrick’s own life, to the Devonshire Folklore of the persecuted ‘Gubbings’, to lists of furnishings and materials described in archaic or unfamiliar terminology. A list of research source material is credited.

The Gubbings, like the Myrmidons, and the Dragonfly Boy, are winged.

In “The Night Of The Unicorn” (12), written for a 1975 Arkham House Press anthology – ‘Nameless Places’ edited by Gerald W Page, Swann finally brings his location back into the twentieth century. It tells of a Mexican village which awaits the appearance of a Unicorn, an ex-whore anticipating that, although the creature will not approach her, a single glimpse will make the wait worth while. Thomas Burnett Swann is the teller of gentle mythologies in which duels are fought in ‘Trials Of Verse’. In which beautiful women of strange hybrid species woo human lovers, Mellonia is torn between her allegiance to the Dryads and to Aeneas, just as Stella is torn between Gubbings and Herrick, or Daphne between Amazons and her former prey, the Myrmidons. He uses poetic imagery to create an internal world to consistently encapsulate his vision – the moon is described as a ‘bird of fire’, the Gubbings’ diminutive wings are ‘thwarted flames’, tents are ‘grounded birds yearning for flight’ and the forest is ‘so dark that the sun was a dim constellation in the night of foliage above them.’ In Swann’s stories a youthful world of childlike innocence and purity is receding in time to be replaced by a more dour and world-weary maturity. His tales speak of a world, and of life-styles that are in harmony with the earth. A world, and a value-system that have somehow subsequently been misplaced, that simultaneously dissolve like childhood with the first pubic hair of maturity, to be destroyed by the intimations of evil that adulthood brings. An analogy perhaps, with the Judeo-Christian Fall alluded to by Swann in ‘Will-O-The-Wisp’, in which wisdom again creates the knowledge of evil. Or then again, perhaps the Eden myth itself is just a parable of lost childhood?

It’s as if he’s writing a symbolic paean to childhood and the childhood of the world. There’s ‘a great sadness, for what I had lost and more, for what I must lose, stirring in me like the grey moth of autumn. I felt the wings and a chilling dust of snow...’ (8). Perhaps he’s writing parables of the despoilation of nature by human technological pollution, for the theme of species nearing extinction recurs – the last fugitive Gubbings, the last Dragonfly Boy, the last Centaur. Or maybe he’s just writing magical tales with their own internal logics. Swann’s fiction, like the simile of the tents, yearn for flight.

Whatever the motives he weaves oddly compelling, strangely individualistic tales that even those with a bias against pure Fantasy can find charming.

The images that reach us from Minoan Crete – the bull-dancers, the ‘Prince with Lilies’, the ‘Blue Ladies’, have been painstakingly reconstructed by historians from an incomplete jigsaw of mosaic fragments found in the ruins of the Knossos Palace, their gaps imaginatively fleshed out. Splinters of what is known from the deep past, elaborated into what is conjectured. Thomas Burnett Swann worked in that way. Knossos is Swann in stone. He was here – in Crete, to research ‘Day Of The Minotaur’. Its scroll of papyrus, inscribed with its ancient manuscript, was supposedly excavated from a cave near the ‘ancient town of Phaestus’ – modern Phaistos adjacent to the Roman archaeological site of Gortys. Here there are still ‘oak trees older than Saturn’. Swann stood beneath ‘hills terraced with olive trees and vineyards, which climb gradually into the Range of Ida and the Country of the Beast’. I recognise the first. I can now believe the second. From these shores, into the wine-dark seas of Crete, the Beauty-and-the-Beast story of the Minotaur ends as Eunostos sets sail to find the Isles of the Blest, leaving Crete to human occupation.

The loss, here, is almost tangible.

“Hide it if you must, deep as the deepest

trireme crusted with coral, but beauty will

burn into light” - old Dolphin proverb

THOMAS BURNETT SWANN

(12 October 1928 – 5 May 1976)

RESEARCH SOURCES FOR

THIS ARTICLE: SHORT STORIES

(1) “Winged Victory” (‘FANTASTIC UNIVERSE’ - July 1958)
(2) “Viewpoint” (‘NEBULA no.40’ - May 1959)
(3) “The Dryad Tree” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no. 42’ - August 1960)
(4) “The Painter” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no. 44’ - December 1960)
(5) “Where Is The Bird Of Fire?” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no.52’ - April 1962/ then as novel ‘LADY OF THE BEES’ 1976)
(6) “The Sudden Wings” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no.55’ - October 1962)
(7) “The Dolphin And The Deep” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no.60’ - August 1963/ then as novel 1968) (8) “The Murex” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no.63’ - February 1964)
(9) “The Blue Monkeys” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY nos.67/68/69’ - Sept 1964/Dec 1964/Jan 1965)/ then rewritten as the novel ‘DAY OF THE MINOTAUR’ (1966)
(10) “Vashti” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no.72’ - May 1965)
(11) “The Weirwoods” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY nos.77/78’ - Oct/Nov 1965)
(12) “The Night Of The Unicorn” (‘NAMELESS PLACES’ edited by Gerald W Page, Arkham House Press, 1975, collected into ‘THE YEARS BEST FANTASY STORIES vol.2’ edited by Lin Carter - Daw 1976)

NOVELS

(13) ‘DAY OF THE MINOTAUR’ (Ace 1966 USA/Mayflower 1975 UK - a ‘slightly different’ version of “The Blue Monkeys” serial)
(14) ‘THE WEIRWOODS’ (Ace - 1967 USA)
(15) ‘MOONDUST’ (Ace - 1968 USA)
(16) ‘THE DOLPHIN AND THE DEEP’ (Ace - 1968, three short novellas, ‘The Dolphin And The Deep’, ‘The Murex’ and ‘The Manor Of The Roses’ from ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction’ November 1966 from his ‘John And Stephen’ series which also includes ‘The Stalking Trees’ in the January 1973 issue)
(17) ‘WHERE IS THE BIRD OF FIRE?’ (Ace - 1970 Collection, includes ‘Where Is The Bird Of Fire (The Latium Trilogy)’, ‘Vashti’ and previously unpublished ‘Bear’)
(18) ‘THE GOAT WITHOUT HORNS’ (Ballantine - 1971)
(19) ‘FOREST OF FOREVER’ (Ace - 1971 USA/Mayflower 1975 UK
(20) ‘GREEN PHOENIX: THE LAST STAND OF THE PREHUMANS’ (Daw SF - 1972 USA) (21) ‘WOLFWINTER’ (1972)
(22) ‘HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN’ (Daw - 1974)
(23) ‘THE NOT-WORLD’ (Daw - 1975)
(24) ‘THE LADY OF THE BEES’ (Daw - 1976/ sequel to ‘GREEN PHOENIX’)
(25) ‘THE TOURNAMENT OF THE THORNS’ (Daw 1976/ from ‘MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SF’ stories 1966/1973)
(26) ‘WILL-O-THE-WISP’ (Corgi Science Fantasy - 1976 UK)
(27) ‘THE GODS ABIDE’ (Daw -1976)
(28) ‘THE MINIKINS OF YAM’ (Daw - 1976)
(29) ‘CRY SILVER BELLS’ (Daw - 1977)
(30) ‘QUEENS WALK IN THE DUSK’ (Heritage Press - 1977)

OTHER SOURCES

(31) ‘ASPECTS OF FANTASY Part 3’ by Michael Moorcock (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no.63’ - February 1964’)
(32) Editorial by Kyril Bonfiglioli (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no.69’ - January 1965)
(33) Book review by Judith Merril (‘NEW WORLDS no.170’ - January 1967)
(34) Book review by James Cawthorn (‘NEW WORLDS no.189’ - April 1969)

There are also poems published in the ‘NORTH CAROLINA QUARTERLY’ and ‘CORNUCOPIA’ magazines, poetry collections - ‘WOMBATS AND MOONDUST’ and ‘ALAS, IN LILLIPUT’, as well as books of Literary Scholarship - ‘THE CLASSICAL WORLD OF H.D.’ and ‘CHARLES SORLEY: POET OF WORLD WAR I’
A poem (by HD?) supplies the titles for “Where Is The Bird Of Fire?” and “Only Night Heals Again”. 


The original version of this article was published in:
‘THE MENTOR no.94’ (Australia - June 1999)

CD: Paul Revere & The Raiders

Album Review of:

‘HERE THEY COME’ & 

‘MIDNIGHT RIDE’

by

  PAUL REVERE

& THE RAIDERS

(SPV 306232-CD – www.spv.de)

In the history books of the American War of Independence, ‘Paul Revere’ is immortalised as the patriot who made the famous ride announcing ‘The British are coming!’ During the mid-sixties his namesake was performing the same function in Rock ‘n’ Roll. Like – say, Tommy James & The Shondells, they scored a string of massive American hit singles, while unlike Tommy James, not one of them made the slightest impression in the UK. Yet they were fun opportunistic populists with a sure sense of catchy riffs. Their first hit “Like, Long Hair” happened as early as 1961, but as the English invasion exploded they were perceptive enough to angle their sound accordingly. They supposedly did the original cut of “Louie, Louie”, but lost out to the Kingsmen version on the chart, although both were done in the same ‘Northwest Recorders’ studio in Portland, Oregon. It’s included on their third album – ‘Here They Come’, produced with Terry Melcher in 1964, amid a patchy grab-bag of covers associated with English-invasion bands, some done ‘live’, although technically “Do You Love Me”, “Time Is On My Side” and “Money” were not British at all, but American R&B sides. Only “Something” is a shameless stand-out, a magnificently cheesy teeny-bop power-ballad as immaculately targeted as it is irresistibly effective.

Later, recorded with what is considered their ‘classic’ line-up, their fifth album – ‘Midnight Ride’ in 1966, up-powers into “Kicks” which is trash garage-punk at its finest, a Mann & Weil anti-drugs infotainment fuelled on the artificial energies of Byrds guitar-twang, rattling tambourine and driving chorus. They add surf-harmonies to “Little Girl In The Fourth Row” which stokes romantic audience-fantasies that pony-tailed vocalist Mark Lindsay is serenading directly at them, a ploy as cynical as McFly or the Jonas Bros would ever get. Then they set the template of Boyce & Hart’s “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone” for the Monkees, then the Flies, Sex Pistols – and even Ant & Dec to replicate. Finally tipping the album over into the voice-over kitch of “Melody For An Unknown Girl”, measure for measure, everything you most love about sixties pych-beat is here.

Although they seldom got better than this, the hits went on. I’d personally rate “The Great Airplane Strike” (US no.20, October 1966), “Ups And Downs” (US no.22, March 1967) and “Him Or Me, What’s It Gonna Be?” (US no.5, May 1967) as up there with the best sixties Pop-Rock singles ever. Their regular slapstick antics on Dick Clark’s ‘Where The Action Is’ – and its sequels ‘Happening ‘68’ and ‘It’s Happening’ also helped maintain their high-profile visibility. “Indian Reservation (The Lament Of The Cherokee Indian)” eventually provided their only no.1 as late as May 1971, despite it having started out as a Mark Lindsay solo project and despite it being nicked from an earlier UK hit by Don Fardon. By then changing tastes, and changing personnel had rendered them unfashionable. Beatles’ PR-man Derek Taylor who also handled the Raiders’ press admitted that although they had become ‘irrelevancies’ there were still some ‘nervous citizens (who) felt reassured some good safe things never changed.’ They filled that role as headliners through the rest of the seventies, well into the eighties, and survived comfortably into the decades beyond.

Live: 'The Who... A Quick One In Hull (1967)'

A QUICK ONE…

WITH THE WHO

THE WHO at The Hull

University Students Union

(4 December 1967)

I swear this is the way it happens. Ask him now, Daltrey will probably deny it. But I was there, and every word is true. The Students Union building sits in amongst the manicured lawns of the Hull University, Cottingham Road campus. Not a big venue, as venues go. But the student circuit is key to promoting new albums. Exposure to the sharp young decision-makers you need onside if you’re to elevate from the casual Pop-fiend followers of a quirky little singles band into the serious album thing. And the Who have ‘A Quick One’ to market. But it’s not quite working out that way.

There’s a disturbance from the start. Opener “I Can’t Explain” is a jarring earful of volume that shudders and vibrates in piercing jabs of over-amplified Stratocaster stabs. Short. Sharp. Staccato. Incendiary. In the uncanny hush that descends after its lurching juddering close there’s a cluster of guys at the back of the standing crowd who start into yelling and laughing. I mean, who pays the ticket price if all you’re going to do it harass and catcall the group? Unless it’s some kind of ‘hey, look at me’ thing. The Who go into “Substitute” and “Pictures Of Lily” but the irritation gets increasingly obvious. The yelled insults, taunts and laughter getting louder and more obnoxious.

So Daltrey sorts the situation. Hung on the mike-stand he peers out into the audience, searching out the offender. Then delves into his back pocket to produce a fist-fold of folding money. ‘OK, don’t spoil this for other people’ he appeals reasonably, ‘if you don’t like what we’re doing, fine, come up here, come on stage, I’ll give you your money back, I’ll refund your ticket-price, OK?’ Eyes are on the provocateur. Less than a moment’s hesitation. The guy starts up towards the stage, the crowd parting to form a path for him. He’s swaggering. The centre of attention. Which is the intention. He shifts right to the short climb of steps up onto the stage, jumping them two at a time. Now he’s on stage. Moving towards the centre where Daltrey steps forward to meet him. Wide grin, left hand extended with the offered notes. Yes, it’s working out. Daltrey is not a big guy. But in one swift vicious arc his right hand balls into a fist and lashes out perfectly targeted, WHAP, the blow to the face takes him by surprise. The heckler lurches back, stunned, keels back over the stage-edge into an accidental audience-dive.

In the blitzed silence that follows Pete promptly strikes up the frantic intro play-in to “Run Run Run”, and they pick up as though nothing has happened. I swear this is true. Although ask him now, Daltrey would probably deny it. Meantime, listen to the Who’s compressed hyper-charged energies. When it comes to aggression, attack, vehemence, violence and arrogant hatred there’s nothing that Punk ever did that the Who hadn’t done first. They harbour a grudge against the world, retaliating though a series of angry abrasive going-for-the jugular singles. And they did it on acceleration. The ‘My Generation’ album (December 1965) encompasses their entire All Mod Cons covers-and-anthems phase. It’s all there, impacted into those twelve revelationary spasms. The upfront Brunswick-label singles – “I Can’t Explain”, “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” and the distorted feedback of “My Generation”, form an immaculately bratty trinity. Shel Talmy’s other client-group – the Kinks, had a head start. The Who have urgent time to make up. No time to waste.

Of all the sixties groups – and there were plenty, the Who had the greatest interdependent synergy. As in the hydra-headed advert-art for “Happy Jack” – four long-necked heads on one body, each member is as vital as each other. Still in jacket and Mod-preened hair, Roger Daltrey is a bruiser with attitude, the perfect front-man vocalist. His voice a muscular half-shouting onslaught, equally adept at leading half-tricksy sun-kissed harmonies. But although he’d later try various other projects with varying degrees of success, without Townshend’s writing he’s merely a voice-for-hire. Townshend is a damaged personality who casts as many darkly-violent shadows as he produces blinding flashes of brilliance. He contributes solo vocal bits on stage and sings occasional tracks on LP’s, while the later albums issued under his own name are not without their moments, but his writing needs Daltrey’s bombast and projection to give them their life. Keith Moon was never going to be content just to sit behind his drum-kit to the rear on the stage, his enthusiasms bring surf-harmonies into the Who, and his explosive seriously-deranged stage-presence makes him a vital visual group component. His ferocious drum-style intimidatingly upfront yet never less that appropriately precise. While the solid deep-throat low-slung bass-lines pouring from ‘The Ox’, either in cahoots with Keith as rhythm section, or providing separate song-feed through the likes of “Boris The Spider”, makes it impossible to imagine the Who without John Entwhistle.

Some recent writers have sampled their well-thumbed ‘Guinness Book Of Hit Singles’, noted that two subsequent Who 45rpms – “A Legal Matter” and “The Kids Are Alright” only reached no.32 (in March 1966) and no.41 (September 1966) respectively, and misguidedly assume this indicates loss of traction. Not so. By then they’d jumped labels. Brunswick belatedly lift those singles off the album to milk their cashflow. Everybody who wants those tracks, already has them. And by album two – ‘A Quick One’ (December 1966) they’ve already lurched on, striving into an entirely new phase. “Substitute” (‘I look bloody young but I’m just backdated’) and “Happy Jack” take a lyrical shift into a novel weirdness unlike anything else in Rock, before or since. Odes to oddity in their every twisted couplet. Transmuting the pure adrenalin gone before into a furious set of contradictions where north is south, black is white and lies are fact. “Pictures Of Lily” is about masturbation, and for anyone who missed the point, Keith plasters his kit with vintage pin-up porn. While whatever the hell the percussive “Happy Jack” is about is still anyone’s guess. But it works, like fish-hooks barbing the inner lining of the cranium, they refuse to work loose. Hits pinging, flying and scoring like shiny balls in a pinball machine. The harmonies tighter, smoother, the subversion more crafted. And despite hyperbole, it is subversion. Subverting and reinventing what a Pop 45rpm can do, testing its limits. Distorting it into new configurations, but still charting into the Top Ten.

This night they find space to do “Summertime Blues”, indicating the roots of teen insurrection, the viral link between Eddie Cochran and Sid Vicious. With John doing the deep-voice ‘No dice son, you gotta work late’ insert. Just as their “Shakin’ All Over” provides the bridge between Johnny Kidd’s pioneering Brit-Rock and Guess Who’s US Top Tenner (as done on the Who’s ‘Live At Leeds’?). While “Young Man’s Blues” (also done live at Leeds) has all the full-on power and attack that Led Zeppelin will later claim. Although the album deliberately spreads writer-credits across the four, with Entwhistle’s creepy-crawly “Boris The Spider” as solidly unsettling as anything by Pete, and Keith’s manic soundtrack “Cobwebs And Strange” a long-term stand-out weirdy, it’s still integrated around Townshend’s damaged cerebral SatNav tuned into the moons of bedlam.

Next up, “A Quick One, While He’s Away” might be a clumsy unwieldy concoction of unlikely bits welded together into a muddled 9:10-minute sequence. It’s ambition greater than the six-linked sum of its ability. But, although we can’t know it at the time, the seeds of ‘Tommy’ and ‘Quadrophenia’ are here. It’s a fumbled try-out for what’s to come. The tale of infidelity with a letchy old perv as archly comic as it is ludicrously absurd. A Girl Guide ‘fornicates’ with a Music-Hall caricature-villain. Entwhistle sings the clip-clop clip-clop ‘my name is Ivor, I’m an engine driver’. ‘Randy old bastard’ yells Keith. ‘Social Comment’ deadpans Pete. But this night Townshend, in particular, uses its repetitive ‘you are forgiven, you are forgiven’ redemption climax as a message targeting the unruly audience-elements, reaching out and pointing, the arc he’s indicating draws us all into that reconciling forgiveness. Maybe, just maybe, these kids are alright after all?

Vindicated, they close with an extended “My Generation”, Roger whirling the mike around his head, so it smashes into the cymbals riding atop Keith’s kit in a spray of sparks, as Moon detonates speed-fusillades bam-bam-bam rat-atat-tat with truly scary physical intensity. It’s not just solid walls of volume – but that too, interspersed by rippling light and shellshock shade, an intimidating noise-density from just three players, provoking shrieks of feedback-protest from the speakers. It’s more. Helen Shapiro made her 1961 ‘gonna be my own adviser, ‘cos my mind’s my own’ manifesto. The Who razor it down to the incoherent stutter ‘why don’t you all f-f-f-fade away?’ Cliff Richard did the 1962 ‘’cos we may not be the Young Ones very long’. The Who razor it down to the iconic ‘hope I die before I get old’.

I swear this is the way it happened. They’d played Hull before, in 16 June 1966. But the next time they play Hull it will be the bigger-capacity ‘City Hall’. And the Who will continue after Keith Moon. They will continue after John Entwhistle. In fact, they’re still performing as The Who. And I guess they have every moral right to do so. But to me, The Who ended the day Keith Moon died.

Poem: "Swimming To Ithaca"

SWIMMING

TO ITHACA

Sometimes, I don’t like the poems I write.
But they write themselves anyway.
This one is about mortality. About death.
And about choosing the moment…

wetness

beach of shingle

old. alone now

forgetful. time slip away

cell by cell. in flakes of skin

this is where it began. with homer

this is where it ends. now

this is how i intend it

swim from this point

from this fókis beach

towards ithaca

until you swim no more

and the waters of lethe

soothe it all away

except

it’s colder. darker

there’s panic. terror

and then wetness again

on this beach of shingle

this not how i intended.

poetry is unreliable.

a poor guide

and the sun

is still warm…

Live: U2's ZOOROPA tour in Leeds

ZOOROPA AT

ROUNDHAY PARK:

NO DRY ICE

OR FLYING PIGS

(12th October 1993)

U2’s ‘Zooropa’ tour reaches Leeds to play to

their largest-ever audience, Leeds becomes gridlocked,

and Susan of Morley wins a book and an album

The local radio station has declared U2 Day, with outside-broadcasts direct from Roundhay Park. ‘This is another chance to be a RADIO AIRE U2 WINNER! Do YOU know what year “When Love Comes To Town” was a hit? Ring 0532-344963 and YOU can win the ‘Zooropa’ album and copies of the U2 book ‘Burning Desire’…!’ Simultaneously an ad-plane spirals overhead, zigzagging the blue sky trailering a red ‘U2 GO TO THE BIG APPLE BAR DINER, LEEDS’ streamer. Do they? Do they really?

While this ragamuffin in a beaded pixie-hood is trying to black-market tickets at me, and won’t take no for an answer. Already the IPM (Images Per Minute) count is high. It’s as though Marshall McLuhan never happened.

‘This is the largest PAYING crowd we’ve ever played to’ proclaims Bono. ‘This makes Wembley Stadium look like a Bowling Green’, while behind him it subtitles ‘ROCK ‘N’ ROLL IS ENTERTAINMENT: SERVICE CHARGE NOT INCLUDED’.

‘1988?’ suggests the first caller uncertainly, so chicken Colonel Sanders could market him.

You know this. You know they open with “Zoo Station”, Bono appearing halfway up the gantry framed by the screens. You’ve seen it, read it, done it. You know he goose-steps across the screens doing the Peter Sellers ‘Doctor Strangelove’ salute beneath the suspended autos wreathed in vapour trails of cigarette smoke. But ‘EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG’, or at least an approximation that can’t quite measure up to the REAL thing. And THIS IS (STILL) NOT A REHEARSAL.

We sit behind Gordon Strachan. Leeds United drew this season’s first match 1-1 to Manchester City. He has footballer’s immaculately false hair-styling, and he grins as he signs autographs. Behind us there’s a Vegeburger stall, official ZOOROPA merchandising, and the Amnesty International stand.

Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra’ (the ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ music) booms from the towers. A smoking hole opens up in the audience epicentre, it storms into whirlpools out of which magics a huge caricature ‘Bono’ in inflated Frank Sidebottom artificial head, waving and cavorting. He’s followed by a ludicrous monochrome ‘Edge’, ‘Clayton’ and ‘Mullen’. Roadies who look like Victor Mature in ‘Samson And Delilah’ (1949) attempt to stuff them back into the magician’s box from which they emerge, and drag them towards the stage. ‘Bono’ retreats back in last, waving royally, as if on clockwork.

 “The Fly” comes second. Dense and distorted. ‘GUILT IS NOT OF gOD’. But “Even Better Than The Real Thing” is pin-sharp and digitally balanced. Then “(She Moves In) Mysterious Ways”, and the audience smoke-hole regurgitates a harem dancer whirling bumping and grinding towards the stage, teasing and flirting as Bono sneaks an ‘ah, love to love you Baby’ into the fade. In the audience a life-size plastic sex-doll passes dumbly over people’s heads, pinkly naked. Mouth a perfect sexually-accessible ‘O’.

Bono channel-hops a visual slipstream of Euro-TV with the remote control. ‘It makes more sense when you DON’T speak the language.’ Welcome to the global village. The medium is the message, and the massage. Televisual lobotomy comes via the crystal bucket, an image saturation from the glass teat, with William Burroughs taken on as script-consultant. Fields of sunflowers. Prowls of buffalo. EGY. BIR. OKAN. ONE. UNE. NYE. “One” is dedicated to Sarajevo. Simultaneously St James Hospital one-&-three-quarter miles down the Harehills Road prepares a ward to accept the first of John Major’s ‘clutching-at-PR-straws’ OPERATION IRMA casualties (airlifting the wounded from the Sarajevo siege).

‘1990?’ queries the next caller tentatively. The outside broadcasts break for a traffic update. There’s gridlock clear through Leeds backing up on the M1 beyond Exit 46. The ‘T’-shirts say ‘Brian May’, ‘ZOOROPA’, ‘Big Country’, ‘ZOOROPA’, ‘R.E.M.’, ZOOROPA’, ‘Barbara Cartland’ (!) and ‘STOP SELLAFIELD: U2’. Adam Clayton is in all-over blue. The Edge in an orange jacket. We are trapped in the United States Of Unconsciousness where Central America means Kansas.

Bono does “Unchained Melody”. A nuclear strike of missiles launch from Cold War silos. As he gets to ‘speed your love to me’ they detonate in a holocaust of exploding cars from every Arnold Schwarzenegger movie at once. “Until The End Of The World”, and Bono moves out along a platform into the audience, wetly and open-mouthed kissing the video camera so his incredibly magnified lips near-devour us all from the screens. The sun goes down like a slow Hiroshima in reverse. A blitz of lights strobe up. “New Year’s Day” gets the night’s first mass roar of approval, green and red lights turn the scaffolding into an industrial oil refinery. Lighters spark held high in constellations across the crushed human undulations.

‘80,000 people and counting’ says Radio Aire. £22 a ticket. That’s £1,760,000. There’s a specially-constructed viewing platform to take sixty wheelchairs. A girl from Morley called Susan wins the album and the Sam Goodman book for correctly identifying April 1989 as the date when “When Loves Comes To Town” (with BB King) got to no.6 on the chart.

ZOOROPA is stunning. But spectacle on this scale ain’t as innovatory as the overkill postmodernists-on-legs claim. BELIEVE THE HYPE. Pink Floyd’s ‘Animals’ (1977) tour had flotillas of helium pigs and Spitfire fly-pasts over the stadia. Even Jefferson Airplane had big movie backdrops at the Fillmore’s which explains the dialogue from the 1933 ‘King Kong’ (‘it was beauty that killed the beast’) that closes their ‘Bless Its Pointed Little Head’ (1969) live album. TV’s and on-stage fast-cut SEGA-MEGA-TV type home videos ain’t new either. Every early eighties industrial-dance Club outfit studded their set with synchronised screens of sub-Warhol handhelds or pseudo-Godard cut-ups. So Leonardo Da Vinci designed the parachute three centuries before the first aircraft? He also blueprinted the helicopter principle. It’s said he went on to invent Betamax – hell, no-one’s perfect. Not even genius. Where U2 DO innovate – and it’s a breathtaking conceptual osmosis, is to autowreck it all together. Electrifying the tired old corpse of ‘y’all right!!!’ Stadium Rock with mainline techno upgrading. Despite its spectacular incandescence ZOOROPA reduces down to human dimensions. The event never eclipses the players. U2 never lose the focal point. Yet despite the sound-and-vision accuracy, it’s a mass experience. Images overlap into each other, an animated sensory wrap-around of frantic speeded-up activity and solarised slo-mo video prattle that traps the retina as the sound hits the ear.

I’ve seen nothing like it. It’s still tattooed indelibly into the back of my head. It’s as if we’ve been given the magic cinema ticket and step into the ‘Close Encounters’ (1977) end-game as the alien Mothership descends through waves of ethereal light into all that sublime Spielbergian spine-shivering transfiguration.

‘…old stuff’s been repeated too many times’ drones the speakers.

“Numb” is covered up by ZOOROPA static. Machines and Soldiers. The Edge’s voice so flat Pizza-hut could cover it with red peppers and black olives and stick it in the plastic menu-holders.

For “Baby Face” Bono writhes on his back while a girl from the audience operates the camera. ‘Never pick on a Liverpool girl’ he gasps, chastened by her ardour. Then enquires ‘these new songs OK?’

They traipse into the audience for a skiffle session. The ‘Elvis 1968 TV Special’ jam. “Stay”, “Angel Of Harlem”. “When Love Comes To Town” (as a nudge to Radio Aire listeners?). “Satellite Of Love” is a three-way duet, Bono, the Edge, and the giant magisterial Lou Reed on the screens, the vocals glop together supernaturally. And Bono is singing ‘…if I could, you know I would…’ ZOOROPA: forget the theory, feel the beat.

He begins “All I Want Is You” starkly acoustic. One verse in and it erupts blindingly into “Bullet The Blue Sky”. Raging guitar solo. Everything burns loop-brained red. Blazing crosses ascend. Then they twist themselves into swastikas. ‘Don’t let it happen again.’ The sequence is awe-inspiring on all levels, visually, sonically and politically.

‘Gary Graham is due for execution by poison injection on a Texas death row. DON’T LET HIM DIE.’ They name-check it to Amnesty International. You can join at the stand behind us. This is an information-station with pinko liberal tendencies. The continuity of conscience is impressive (although, despite it all, Gary Graham – ‘Shaka Sankofa’ is executed by lethal injection at 08:49, Thursday 22 June 2000).

After “Running To A Standstill” Bono is swallowed by dry-ice clouds, emerging crouched playing harmonica. “Where The Streets Have No Name”. Gordon Strachan dances like a footballer dances. Slightly off the beat.

But despite the acceleration into modernity that shoves U2 head hands and feet above every other arena band on the planet, already the nostalgia quotient is at work. The older songs – “Pride (In The Name Of Love)”, get the most intimidatingly spontaneous responses. The charismatic Martin Luther King presiding above immaculately choreographed audience handclaps like a regimented Queen video.

Intermission. Tropical fish drift across giant screens. Access Zoo TV: faces sampled from the audience flash up to confess or proclaim. ‘I had a shit on the roof of my neighbour’s car.’ ‘Well, I didn’t vote for them, so who the fuck did?’ A skinny girl in a body-stocking says ‘I just want to get something off my chest,’ and she flips out a pretty nipple. This is ZOOROPA À LA MODE. As an encore device it’s unnecessary, but acts as a bridge to Ego MacPhisto – Bono in gold lamé and horns persona. AKKERS. DRACHMA. DOLLARS. SPONDULÉ. “Desire” is lascivious with greed and lust, drenched in explosions of cash. And “Moon River”, ‘I love that one. Do you love that one?’ he smarms. ‘I love the people of the north, too. You’re so… generous. They send you the nuclear waste of the world. And you accept it all. How very generous of you. I think I should ‘phone Environment Secretary John Selwyn Gummer to express our gratitude.’ He counts out the ex-Directory number as he punches the buttons so everyone can hear.

Gummer, predictably, is not home. ‘I’m afraid he’s not in at the moment.’

‘You’re sure he’s not asleep?’ No, he’s not asleep. Just unavailable.

‘So can I leave a message…?’ And MacPhisto leads the community singing of Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called To Say I Love You”.

Then ‘Ultra-Violet Light “My Way”’. “Love Is Blindness”.

And “Can’t Help Falling In Love” – waltzing in close with a girl from the audience. A falsetto so high it threatens to leave the range of human senses altogether, to become audible only to dogs. Until Elvis himself, from the ‘Blue Hawaii’ (1961) soundtrack, takes over.

Lights extinguish. ‘Thank you and Goodbye,’ with a final announcement that ‘ELVIS IS STILL IN THE BUILDING’. Which, in a sense, he is.

‘Radio Aire’ continues its bulletins into Sunday’s early hours as gridlocks unravel slowly through Leeds and beyond. U2 catch the last flight south from Leeds/Bradford airport, and Gordon Strachan returns to the reality of the new season’s struggle in Premier Division football.

Full ZOOROPA Set List:

(1) “Zoo Station”, (2) “The Fly”, (3) “Even Better Than The Real Thing”, (4) “Mysterious Ways”, (5) “One” with snippet of “Unchained Melody”, (6) “Until The End Of The World”, (7) “New Year’s Day”, (8) “Numb”, (9) “Baby Face”, (10) “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)”, (11) “Angel Of Harlem”, (12) “When Love Comes To Town”, (13) “Satellite Of Love”, (14) “Bad” with snippets of “Fool To Cry” and “All I Want Is You”, (15) “Bullet The Blue Sky”, (16) “Running To Stand Still” with excerpt of “The End”, (17) “Where The Streets Have No Name”, (18) “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” – Then Encores (19) “Desire” with snippets from “You Make Me Feel So Young”, “Solid Gold Easy Action” and “My Way”, (20) “Love Is Blindness”, (21) “Can’t Help Falling In Love”

Book & DVD: 'LORD OF THE FLIES' by William Golding

ISLAND OF DARKNESS:

‘LORD OF THE FLIES’

Review of:

‘LORD OF THE FLIES’

Director: Peter Brook. With James Aubrey,

Tom Chapin, Hugh Edwards

(British Lion, 1963, DVD Second Sight Films, 2007)

Anthony Burgess was always slightly peeved that, although in his opinion he’d written much better, more mature works, the novel he’d always be recognised for was one he regarded as a piece of minor playful hackery – ‘A Clockwork Orange’. There’s something similar about William Golding and ‘Lord Of The Flies’, a superficially simple story about a group of schoolkids trapped on a tropical island devolving into tribal savagery. He subsequently wrote highly-regarded and critically well-received literary work, but it’s that first novel his name will always be associated with. It has been twice-filmed, first by Peter Brook in 1963 – ‘an honest but slightly plodding and ‘literary’ rendition of a work that is much greater in book form’ according to John Brosnan (in ‘The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction’ edited by Peter Nicholls, 1979), then again in a lesser 1990 version, with director Harry Hook transposing the action to American themes and settings. And, although there have been far more explicitly violent films since, with greater more gratuitous levels of gore, it persists as a strangely unique and uniquely unsettling fiction. The corrupted innocence of children gives it a continuing potential to disturb, one that gnaws away at our self-image and our concept of ourselves as a rational and reasonable species.

First, there’s Ralph, aged twelve and a few months. As the novel opens he’s being trailed along the beach by protesting fat-kid Piggy. The only other sound is the buzzing of insects. Piggy is an asthma-prone (‘ass-mar prone’) orphan brought up by his over-protective Auntie. He later tells the little ‘uns that Camberley is his home. He’s given no other name than Piggy. Ralph’s parents have separated, although he claims his father is a Naval Commander. He’s the only character given anything resembling a back-story – sketched out by his ‘daydream’ of his parents still together in a snow-bound cottage on the edge of Dartmoor. As the chapter proceeds, other child-survivors emerge, and the cast assembles. Boys who hadn’t previously known each other, they’re from different schools, apart from the complete choir in their black cloaks, which arrives as a group.

In the novel, a plane has deposited them on a remote Pacific island via its passenger tube, then it flew on with ‘flames coming out of it’. Elsewhere it’s suggested the plane was ‘shot down in flames’. The details, as understood by the boys themselves, are muddled, and the ambivalence lingers. There’s a passing reference to ‘before the evacuation’. So they were being evacuated? If so, from what? The experience of the wartime evacuee was still current at the time of the book’s first publication. It seems there was an earlier chapter filling in the background, subsequently edited out, explaining the situation in greater detail. As it is, the undisclosed military danger, is left tantalisingly vague. The Peter Brook film economically intersperses the opening credits with a series of story-setting stills matched to a slow percussion-only soundtrack, of stately public schools, choirboys, cricket, then sudden flash-frames of missiles and warfare. An evacuation notice on a classroom chalkboard. Dark clouds gathering. A Pacific map… and a plane downed in a lagoon.

‘Didn’t you hear what the pilot said?’ comments Piggy, ‘about the bomb? They’re all dead’. So it’s a post nuclear-apocalypse scenario? Although this means it’s set in the near future, it’s still their future, which is decidedly our past. Does that make it Science Fiction? No, but it does place it on the periphery of fantasy. As it is, only the enabling frame of the book has this Science Fiction element. It’s not essential. The American movie dispenses with such a context entirely. All that’s necessary for the tale is that the boys are removed from parental control. As in much children’s fiction, adults are conspicuous by their absence. Something to be first experienced as a liberating freedom, enabling unsupervised adventures. Until that reassuring protection is needed. ‘I bet it’s gone tea-time’ complains Piggy ruefully. Without the ‘protection of parents and school and policemen and the law’, with two exceptions, the boys quickly revert to the savagery of Devlish Angels, a process that results in brutal murder. A premise clumsily undermined by Harry Hook shifting the marooned children into military school cadets, who seem anything but innocent, with a discipline-structure and weapons-training already in place. Prematurely overdosed on world-weary cynicism, the cadets bring the barbarism with them to the island. Hook’s intention seems to have been to present the tale as a diatribe against war/militarism, which grossly over-simplifies Golding’s complexity.

Nevertheless, the story’s theme, in book and film, can be interpreted in several ways, as a replay-enactment of original sin, as a variant of HG Wells theme of civilisation as a skin-deep veneer masking what Golding calls ‘the darkness of man’s heart’, a complex utterance about the survival-struggle in an unremittingly savage society, and the shapes our nature assumes when ‘free’ to do as it pleases. As if the boys’ descent into savagery is intended to mirror the mass-atrocity techno-barbarism of World War III which is presumably taking place beyond their island enclave. Or maybe it’s simply an indictment of the British public-school system. The 1950’s period detail is precise. Their clothes mark them out as the product of the safe formalised middle-class Home Counties school system, clear down to the ‘snake-clasp on his belt’ of their knee-length shorts, the differently badged caps, striped ties, grey shirt and the school uniform they wear. They say things like ‘Whee-oh’, ‘Wacco’, ‘Bong’, ‘Wizzoh’, and ‘Doink’. There is even a Billy Bunterish ‘Yaroo you Rotters’ moment when the boys seize Piggy’s glasses to use the lens to light the fire. So perhaps it works best as a metaphor? A refutation of the sentimental idealisation of childhood innocence, as typified by the soon-come flower-power late-sixties? It’s been multiply interpreted in ways that even Golding himself might not recognise.

First, Ralph is voted chief. He uses a conch-shell to summon assembly, and so it assumes mystical status. As a symbol of governance. The choir, led by arrogant red-headed Jack Merridew, forms a rival power-base. They are designated hunters, although their first attempt to slaughter a wild piglet fails. ‘Next time, there would be no mercy’ he promises with dark prescience. Just as the mock play-killing with Robert as the game-victim also rehearses what is to come. While Ralph (played in the first film by James Aubrey) struggles with the complexities of leadership dilemmas, with what is and is not possible. ‘The trouble was, if you were a chief, you had to think, you had to be wise’ he reasons with uncertain resolve. But he’s resented for his attempts to impose some kind of moral order. For trying to think ‘like a grown-up’. Their first collective project, a signal fire, gets out of control and ignites half the island. Then, when a ship is detected on the horizon (a jet-plane in Peter Brook’s film), the signal fire has been neglected. While the plaintive Piggy – perfectly embodied by young actor Hugh Edwards, watches events owlishly, squinting myopically through the single lens of his specs. He functions as Ralph’s wise back-up counsel. Lacking charisma or authority himself he acts as adviser, Piggy could think, Piggy – ‘for all his ludicrous body, has brains’. There’s mutual respect, despite Ralph betraying Piggy’s reluctant confidence and divulging his nickname to the group. ‘You told ‘em’ he accuses, ‘after what I said’. Ralph does not back down or apologise. ‘Better Piggy than Fatty’ he offers, ‘with the directness of genuine leadership’.

Peter Brook’s film is a rough and ready adaptation of the novel, filmed in locations on the Puerto Rican Isla de Vieques and its El Yunque National Forest, on a budget that would now barely cover the cost of a boat-cruise around the island. Although part-improvised by a cast of schoolboys who’d never acted before, it stays remarkably close to the source novel, with chunks of dialogue lifted intact. And there’s a technical rawness about its black-and-white authenticity that still packs a punch far more effectively than the 1990 remake. As they explore, the boys discover that the island is roughly boat-shaped, humped at one end. While their days are one long playtime, spent bathing in ‘a wetness warmer than blood’, nights are scary. It’s the twins who become Sam-‘n’-Eric, ampersanded together as Samaneric, then Samneric who are first to see ‘the Beast’ during night watch. The group’s sense of control is eroding, they’re supernaturally afraid of rumours of a Snake-Thing, a Beastie. A giant squid? A ghost? Despite Ralph’s most earnest intentions, ‘the world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away’. Even he finds himself afraid of these unknown unknowns.

William Gerald Golding was born 19 September 1911 and brought up in the Wiltshire market-town of Marlborough as the son of Alec Golding, an socialist-atheist science-teacher. After taking his BA (Hons) Second Class at Brasenose, Oxford, he wrote a book of ‘Poems’ (1934), but despite such early evidence of literary aspirations, he found himself frittering time away as a creatively-frustrated schoolmaster. A forty-a-day smoker caught up in the fusty habits of homework and cricket at Salisbury’s ‘Bishop Wordsworth’s’ school. His last desperate throw as author was hand-scripted during 1952-‘53 in Stephens ink in standard-issue school exercise books, then typed up on foolscap pages with a manual typewriter. He was already forty-three at the time of the unlikely publication of ‘Lord Of The Flies’ (1954). And it’s not difficult to understand why this weird tropical dystopia was rejected by some twenty potential publishers before finally finding a home with Faber. Discovered and rescued from the slush-pile by publisher’s reader Charles Monteith, the first-draft manuscript then called ‘Strangers From Within’, had verdicts from previous readers scrawled on it – ‘absurd and uninteresting fantasy… rubbish’. On first impressions Monteith was inclined to agree. Until gradually the power of the text made itself apparent. Yet he insisted on substantial rewriting before it could be unleashed upon the literary world. Because realistically, it’s a strange hybrid of a novel in which there are no adult characters, and yet its bleakness determines it is not an obvious kid’s book either (although it’s since become something of a set-text for school English classes).

In form, it’s essentially a twentieth-century reworking of the Victorian boys adventure story, in which the protagonists are all English schoolboys, so there are no mature relationships. The oldest boys are aged around puberty, and ‘littluns’ – like Johnny, as young as six. There are no female characters. Yet despite much casual nudity there’s no sex either (something surely untypical of the British public-school system?). Superficially it’s a traditional castaway tale, familiar in literature at least since Daniel Defoe. Maybe intended as a riposte to the cosy moral lessons of ‘The Swiss Family Robinson’ (by Johnann David Wyss, 1812) in which virtue triumphs and civilised standards are maintained. A repudiation of the schoolboy heroism of RM Ballantyne’s ‘The Coral Island’ (1858), in which there is also a Jack and a Ralph. In fact Golding lists his own reference-points as the marooned boys point out that their situation is ‘like in a book!’ ‘Treasure Island’, ‘Swallows & Amazons’, ‘Coral Island’.

But where high-brow critics point to the ‘Robinson Crusoe’ literary tradition, further down the scale of respectability, the infant Tarzan was shipwrecked and raised by the Apes, only to rise above them to become ‘King Of The Jungle’, the very personification of the Noble Savage. And it was an idea rife in popular culture. Dudley Watkins’ ‘The Shipwrecked Circus’ started out as a text-serial in ‘The Beano’ (1943-1947), later revived as a picture-strip (1951-1958). It’s tempting to see Golding – as a schoolmaster fighting his corner for serious literature, competing for his pupil’s attention against this kind of junk culture. Maybe confiscating a copy of the comic, and idly flipping through the stories. ‘The Kings Of Castaway Island’ portrays another nice middle-class nuclear-family on the pages of ‘The Beezer’, marooned around a similar premise, the survivors of a plane-wreck prospering in adversity, erecting pleasant shacks and overcoming a variety of problems. It was Golding’s novel that draws attention to the flaws in these charming aspirational group-jeopardy tales. Golding who saw beyond the triumph of the human spirit, to the darker psychological hooligan tendencies on its other side, to what he terms ‘a disharmony in our natures’.

If ‘Lord Of The Flies’ uses a microcosm of Prep-school boys to illustrate the fable of the ‘Fall’, Golding’s second novel ‘The Inheritors’ (1955) ventures back into prehistory to view the same process happening on a species-level, with the morally ambiguous triumph of the Cro-Magnon ‘bold hunters and magicians’. The arrival of these ‘new people’ is seen through the eyes of a doomed Neanderthal called Lok. Although sensitive to the external world, because they lack the capacity for imagination the Neanderthals live in a prelapsarian world without awareness of good or evil.

Yet Golding’s increasing preoccupation was with the ‘beauty, monstrosity and mystery of the sea’. He sailed his own converted oyster-smack named ‘Wild Rose’, describing himself as ‘a storyteller and a sailor’. The theme resurfaces in the next novel. ‘Pincher Martin’ (1956), is an experimental hallucinatory account of Christopher Hadley ‘Pincher’ Martin, a torpedoed naval lieutenant thrown up on a tiny isolated rocky islet in the middle of the north Atlantic, one that appears ‘only on weather charts’ and is much the same shape as a diseased tooth he touches constantly with his tongue. Even more radically isolated than the boys of ‘Lord Of The Flies’, his desperate survival struggle seems defiantly hopeful, until the denouement suggests that no, as in Ambrose Bierce’s shock-ending to “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge” with which it has been compared, all that has happened is merely ‘a dream of a life’ experienced by a dying consciousness. As Golding later clarified, Pincher Martin dies on page two.

Golding’s closest direct brush with the fantasy genre is “Envoy Extraordinary”, a long tale that places him alongside John Wyndham and Mervyn Peake in the ‘Sometime, Never’ anthology (1956), a tale about an Alexandrian Greek scientist called Phanocles who attempts to interest the Roman Emperor in a variety of extravagant inventions – a steam-engine, gun-powder, a pressure-cooker and a printing-press. In anticipating the social consequences of these innovations, and refusing to accept them, the Emperor proves to be philosophically the wiser of the two. Subsequently adapted as a play called ‘The Brass Butterfly’ (1958), the story also appears in Golding’s ‘The Scorpion God’ collection (1971), along with two other fantasies. Elsewhere, ‘The Spire’ (1964) is an elaborate historical novel about the construction of a 400-foot spire on a medieval church – based on Salisbury Cathedral, a ‘stone bible’ ‘laying its hand on the whole landscape’, which shrugged ‘itself obediently into a new shape’ around it. Its detailed construction involves a good deal of largely improvised proto-science, while the human element evokes the dangers, hubris and joy of undertaking such an ambitious ‘apocalypse in stone’ in the face of its author’s ambiguous sense of divinity. But if Golding had a strange relationship with reality, compounded by his difficulty in separating the imaginative world from the real one (‘it is fiction which is rockhard and history which is a dream or a nightmare’), his concept of the sea as ‘our unconscious’ and the place of our species aquatic evolutionary origins, returns in his epic ‘To The Ends Of The Earth: A Sea Trilogy’ (1980, 1987 & 1989). Less metaphorical, less allegorical, his preferred term was ‘mythic’.

Meanwhile, the marooned party on the darkening island has split into two factions, with Jack leading his tribe of war-painted ‘hunters’ to a new ‘Castle Rock’ cave fortress. In a charged confrontation Jack strikes Piggy and shatters one lens of his glasses. ‘We’re not savages’ insists Ralph uncertainly, ‘we’re English’. While Piggy tut-tuts that they’re behaving ‘like a crowd of kids’. Yet dissident Jack shrugs off all responsibility and disrespects the authority of the conch. ‘The rules are the only things we’ve got’ reasons a conciliatory Ralph. ‘Bollocks to the rules’ retorts Jack. To Ralph the rules are a defence against barbarism, to Jack – with his praetorian guard of hunters, they are a convenient excuse to beat those who transgress. In the Peter Brook film Jack watches regally – ‘like an idol’, as a naked boy (named as Wilfred in the novel) is thrashed for such a trespass. Yet the factions unite in a joint expedition to hunt and destroy the unnameable ‘Beast’. They miscalculate distance so that it’s darkening as hey ramble, with Jack and Roger advancing into ‘a kind of dentist’s chair unreality’. They see suggestions of terror, and flee in panic. Instead, in the crude symbolism of a gathering storm, with tribal drums sound-tracking the pig-hunt, Jack’s whooping hunters kill a sow, and set its head impaled on a stake – ‘The Lord Of The Flies’ itself, left as an offering to the beast. Jack’s power-grab coup is complete. He’s both the provider of meat, and his group’s protector from the menace of the Beast.

Innocent blonde Simon is the mystic of the group, a visionary prone to epileptic fits (‘one of his times was coming on’), the only one who dares suggest that ‘maybe if there is a beast, maybe it’s only us…?’ It’s this ‘Simon pure’ who seeks solitude, approaching the fly-crawled pig’s head in a kind of reverent curiosity, only to hallucinate that it is talking to him with the ‘voice of the beast’. It’s also Simon who solves the mystery of the Beast by climbing alone to the island’s highest point, to face it in its lair. In the American movie ‘The Beast’ is Captain Benson, pilot of the original plane, who is then accidentally killed by ‘Larry’, one of the boys unmentioned in any other version. In the novel, and the original film, the ‘creature that bulged’ is an unidentified dead parachutist with ‘the ruin of a face’. Simon hurries back to tell the group, who are partying and feasting on pigmeat around a huge beach bonfire with all ‘the liberation into savagery that the concealing paint brought’. As he stumbles into the bacchanalia Simon is himself mistaken for the beast, and it is he who is set upon and killed. The stark monochrome night, ripped by whirling torches in jittery ‘Blair Witch’ impressionism, adds to the realistic blood-lust frenzy with their chant ‘Kill The Beast! Cut His Throat! Spill His Blood!’ beating like a steady pulse. ‘With the throb and stomp of a single organism’ driven by hysterical fear, as thunder roars and lightning strobes ‘there were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws’.

With morning, Ralph and Piggy are alone again, with only the Samneric-twins still loyal. Was last night’s terrible event an act of murder, or accident? They daren’t even phrase the question for fear of making it real. And Jack’s tribe come hunting for Piggy’s specs. Ralph calls assembly at Jack’s Castle Rock stronghold in a final attempt at reason, with Piggy carrying the iconic conch. But it only leads to Jack and Ralph fighting. Piggy calls for them all to be ‘sensible’. Beseeching ‘which is better, to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill?’ Instead, they loose a rock – as earlier they’d loosed a rock down a ravine in play, this time it falls to smash Piggy. His body is washed into the tide. In the same impact ‘the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist’, their last symbol of rationalism gone. Ralph turns and runs.

Press-ganged into joining Jack’s savages, Samneric manage to message Ralph that their new chief has sharpened a stick at both ends. Ralph’s head is set to join the pig’s head, impaled on a stake. Yelling their ‘Kill The Beast! Cut His Throat! Spill His Blood!’ war-cries the group begin hunting the outcast down. Part menacing game, part pack instinct, part cruel bullying blood-sport, they use fires to burn him out. The island itself burns in a vision of hell. Fleeing in terror Ralph stumbles onto the beach, only to fall on his knees at the feet of a Naval Officer. In Peter Brook’s final sequence the newcomer, with a cutter and two ratings, wears starched tropical white uniforms, with efficient binoculars. Harry Hook’s American version replaces the rescuer with a Rambo-esque marine (played by Bob Peck). Ironically – as was Ralph’s plan all along, the smoke has attracted them. The smoke from the ‘burning wreckage of the island’, from Jack’s fire ignited to flush Ralph out. It’s left to Golding’s novel to add the final damning indictment, as the officer sniffily chides ‘I should have thought that a pack of British boys, you’re all British aren’t you? would have been able to put up a better show than that, I mean –’. And the gathering savages revert to being nothing more than a ‘circle of little boys, their bodies streaked with coloured clay, sharp sticks in their hands’. And Ralph cries with a mix of relief, shame and ‘for the end of innocence’.

A tormented, dissatisfied man, despite the Booker and even the Nobel Prize, unsettled and haunted by horrific wartime experiences, Golding remained something of a troubled outsider. His novels selecting the most unlikely subject-matter, too fantastic or too experimental to fit comfortably into the polite literary mainstream. It could be argued that his tangential relation to fantasy is just as uncertain as his relation to conventional mainstream novels, or conversely that he treads an uneasy line between allegory and narrative with astonishingly fruitful results. He mused that ‘there are authors who can see their work numbered by the hundred. Mine are so few! I have just totted them up on my fingers and the grand total is sixteen – not much, you would say, for a man of seventy-eight’. The ‘locusts have eaten’ his years, and he died 19 June 1993. And yes, he wrote many other highly-regarded and critically well-received literary works, but he will be remembered for ‘Lord Of The Flies’. And that’s more than enough.

‘LORD OF THE FLIES’

‘Fortunately for me, I belong among the natural storytellers

in whose gentle mouths the truth is not to be distinguished

from the white lies of fiction’

(William Golding, ‘The Observer’, 30 October 1994)

‘LORD OF THE FLIES’ (1963, Janus Films/ British Lion, Allen-Hodgson Production & Two Arts ) Producer: ‘Lewis M Allen & Dana Hodgdon present…’. Director: Peter Brook. Screenplay by Peter Brook based on the novel ‘Lord Of The Flies’ by William Golding. With James Aubrey (as Ralph, Aubrey later appears in TV’s ‘Bouquet Of Barbed Wire’), Tom Chapin (as Jack), Hugh Edwards (as Piggy), Roger Elwin (as Roger), Tom Gaman (as Simon), David & Simon Surtees ‘The Surtees Twins’ (as Sam & Eric), Roger Allan (as Piers), David Brunjes (as Donald), Peter Davy (as Peter), Kent Fletcher (as Percival Wemys Madison), Nicholas Hammond, Christopher Harris, Alan & Jonathan Heaps. Filmed on location at Puerto Rico at El Yunque & the island of Vieques. Music by Raymond Leppard (with song by Kyrie Eleison). 92-minutes (Premiered at the Cannes Festival, May 1963, DVD Second Sight Films, July 2007)

‘LORD OF THE FLIES’ (Columbia Pictures, March 1990) Inferior American remake directed by Harry Hook, produced by Lewis M Allen, from a screeplay by Sarah Schiff from the William Golding novel, with Balthazar Getty, Chris Furrh, Danuel Pipoly, James Badge Dale, Andrew & Edward Taft. 90-minutes. (DVD, Twentieth Century Fox, 2003)

‘LORD OF THE FLIES’ (2011) Nigel Williams theatrical adaptation staged at Regent Park’s ‘Open Air Theatre’, directed by Timothy Shader

‘LORD OF THE FLIES’ (1954, Faber, ISBN 0-571-08483-4) novel. Republished in 1962 in a movie tie-in edition with black-&-white photo-stills insert section. The 1973 paperback has a Peter Brook movie-still cover. The 1979 26th Faber impression has a Michael Ayrton Pig’s Head design. The 1984 reprint cover is by Paul Hogarth. The 2011 cover is by Neil Gower, with a new introduction by Stephen King.

WILLIAM GOLDING:

OTHER WORK…

‘POEMS’ published as by WG Golding (1934, Macmillan’s Contemporary Poets) 33-page softback

‘THE INHERITORS’ (1955, Faber) novel, distinctive cover-art by Anthony Gross. A novel described by Arthur Koestler as ‘an earthquake in the petrified forests’ of English literature.

‘PINCHER MARTIN’ (1956, Faber, US title ‘The Two Deaths Of Pincher Martin’ by Harcourt Brace) novel

‘SOMETIME, NEVER: THREE TALES OF IMAGINATION’ (1956, Eyre & Spottiswoode) three tales with Golding’s novella “Envoy Extraordinary”, Mervyn Peake’s “Boy In Darkness” & John Wyndham’s “Consider Her Ways”)

‘THE BRASS BUTTERFLY’ (1958, Faber) ‘A Play In Three Acts’ adapted from “Envoy Extraordinary”, produced in April 1958 at the London ‘Strand Threatre’ with Alastair Sim and George Cole

‘FREE FALL’ (1959, Faber) novel, cover by Anthony Gross. Samuel Mountjoy is an artist, a POW in WWII Germany, isolated and awaiting possible torture, retrospecting his life in hallucinatory flashbacks

‘JOHN BULL’S SCHOOLDAYS’ Edited by Brian Inglis (1961, Hutchinson) includes Golding’s essay “Billy The Kid” about his childhood

‘THE LADDER & THE TREE’ (1961, Marlborough College Press) pamphlet, short story

‘THE SPIRE’ (1964, Faber) novel. Its poor critical reception led Golding to a profound personal and artistic crisis. He also began his private ‘Dream Diaries’ which he would continue writing for the next twenty years and run to some two-million words

‘THE HOT GATES & OTHER OCCASIONAL PIECES’ (1965, Faber) essays ‘and other occasional pieces’, including a reprinted “Billy The Kid” from 1961

‘THE PYRAMID’ (1967, Faber) novel

‘THE SCORPION GOD’ (1971, Faber) ‘Three Short Novels’ including novella “Envoy Extraordinary”

‘DARKNESS VISIBLE’ (1979, Faber) novel. Saintly boy Matty in the World War II blitz

‘RITES OF PASSAGE’ (1980, Faber) First volume of ‘To The Ends Of The Earth: A Sea Trilogy’, covering an eventful voyage from Tilbury to Sydney. Cover artwork by Cathie Felstead

‘A MOVING TARGET’ (1982, Faber) essays

‘NOBEL LECTURE’ (1983, Sixth Chamber Press)

‘THE PAPER MEN’ (1984, Faber) novel

‘AN EGYPTIAN JOURNEY’ (1985, Faber) travel

‘CLOSE QUARTERS’ (1987, Faber) second volume of ‘To The Ends Of The Earth: A Sea Trilogy’. Cover watercolour art by Paul Hogarth

‘FIRE DOWN BELOW’ (1989, Faber) third volume of ‘To The Ends Of The Earth: A Sea Trilogy’. Cover watercolour art by Paul Hogarth (the three volumes published in a single edition by Faber in 1991

‘THE DOUBLE TONGUE’ (June 1995, Faber ISBN0571175260) an extraordinary short novel, left in ‘penultimate draft’-form at the time of Golding’s death on 19 June 1993, and discovered by his executor and Faber editor John Bodley. It is set in Greece under Roman rule. As Arieka, the local girl chosen to be prophetess, grows old in the surreal confines of Delphi, she looks back over her life as the ‘double tongue’ voice of the Delphic Oracle god Apollo. She becomes aware of the Oracle’s other ambiguity – its political function in an enslaved land, and the real terror of religion. To reviewer Tobias Hill ‘Golding’s last unfinished work is like a found fragment of ancient Greek pottery – clean-lined, patterned and incomplete’ (‘Observer’ 18 August 1996)

WILLIAM GOLDING:

THE CRITICAL STUFF…

BBC-TV ‘MONITOR’ (25th October 1959) Golding interviewed shortly after the publication of fourth novel, ‘Free Fall’, while still working as a teacher at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. He talks about the process of writing and the painstaking craftsmanship that he brings to his work, his interest in archaeology and his love of sailing and the sea, all subjects that have found an outlet in his books, and explains his fascination with exploring what lies behind the surface of everyday life (17:16minutes). It can be viewed at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/12203.shtml

‘THE SOUTH BANK SHOW’ William Golding was twice profiled by Melvyn Bragg’s TV arts-showcase, first 16 November 1980 (Season 4:2) and again 15 July 1993

‘ARENA: THE DREAMS OF WILLIAM GOLDING’ (BBC2, 7 March 2012) Director Adam Low’s portrait of Golding, balanced, intimate and calmly illuminating. Reviewer Mike Bradley writes ‘most importantly, this is a programme which is likely to inspire many viewers to read lesser known novels such as ‘The Spire’, ‘The Inheritors’ and ‘Pincher Martin’. Unmissable’ (‘Observer’, 11 March 2012). Novel extracts read by Bendict Cumberbatch (who appeared in BBC2 three-part dramatisation of ‘To The Ends Of The Earth’ (May-June 2005)

‘THE ART OF WILLIAM GOLDING’ (1965) by Bernard S Oldsey & Stanley Weintraub

‘WILLIAM GOLDING: A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY’ (Faber & Faber) by Mark Kinkead-Weekes & Ian Gregor. The 1967 edition covers Golding’s first five novels. The 1984 revision includes the next three novels. Although Gregor died in 1995 the third edition in 2002 brings the work up to do date

‘WILLIAM GOLDING: A BIBLIOGRAPHY’ (1993, André Deutsch) by RA Gekoski & David Hughes

‘THE CHILDREN OF LOVERS’ (June 2011, Faber) by Judy Golding. A personal memoir by Golding’s daughter of her ‘very pretty’ mother, the fear of the dark she shared with her father, her own breakdown and her brother’s episodes of mental illness.

Career retrospects in ‘Book & Magazine Collector Magazine’ by Katharine Gunn (issue no.24) and by Crispin Jackson (no.114, September 1993). Jackson writes ‘if the modern English novel has largely been able to break free of its obsession with social niceties and love affairs, then much of the credit must go to Golding’

Live: PENTANGLE in Hull, 1969

LIVE PENTANGLING IN HULL

Gig Review of:

PENTANGLE

at Hull City Hall (22 June 1969)

You see the cover-photo of the ‘Basket Of Light’ (1969) album? That’s the way it was. That is the formation they assume. Jacqui McShee seated centre, and to the front. Bert Jansch and John Renbourn seated to her left and right. The imposing Danny Thompson standing adjacent to his double-bass at a slight left-tangent behind them. And Terry Cox centre-rear at the drum-kit. Of course, the album-art was taken at the Royal Albert Hall, not the chill marble environs of Hull’s City Hall, but apart from that it’s pretty much identical. Open up the LP gatefold and it proudly announces ‘All The Instruments Played On This Album Are Acoustic’ – as though that’s some signifier of authenticity. As though that makes it more real, less contrived. But perhaps a little more electricity would have helped in Hull this night. Jacqui sits a space from the mike. Too much space. So that her slight, but pellucid voice gets lost in the huge emptiness of the hall.

People in the rows of seated audience whisper about not hearing her. About her inaudible voice. Even from Seat J38 (which cost all of 10/-). Comments are made to the venue staff. At the intermission – yes, there’s an intermission, a uniformed attendant appears on stage and rearranges the furniture, to a mild ripple of applause. He moves her stool a clear pace closer to the mike-stand. But when the musicians file back on and take their places Jacqui takes pains to gently ease her stool back into its original position, away from the mike. Things are NOT going to get better! Which is disappointing. Pentangle is a big deal. And this tour is undeniably the highest point of their career-trajectory.

Yet the songs cascade like soft rain around us. When they do “Sally Go Round The Roses” it is a dancing interaction between bass and guitars. A complex simplicity. Her voice so ethereal it’s barely there at all, she sings it with hands chastely on her knees, long curtains of hair cascading in around her face. She rarely smiles. Yet the song has the catchy circular quality of a kid’s schoolyard rhyme, or a ‘round’, although it actually originates with the Jaynetts, a Bronx girl-group whose version hit a US no.2 in September 1963 on Tuff Records. A luring combination of strange things seeming familiar, and familiar things suddenly becoming strange.

Then they do a dazzling “Light Flight”. Around this time, ‘Take Three Girls’ was a BBC1 flat-share comedy-drama with Liza Goddard, Susan Jameson and Angela Down as trendy singletons loose in a still-Swinging London (it lasted two seasons from 24 December 1969). There was less ‘Sex In The City’ back then, maybe, but Pentangle score “Light Flight” as its theme-song, which subsequently makes a chart showing – as high as no.43, as a result. Untypical Pop fare, its time signature darts between 5/8 and 7/8, then with nimble agility into 6/4 in the mid-section. None of which breaks the track’s perfect surface. It managed three rungs higher than its predecessor, the group’s first single “Once I Had A Sweetheart”, which harks back to Carolyn Hester, and reached no.46 in May 1969. Performed faultlessly live, this song of sorrowing loss for a faithless lover, ‘my eyes like some fountain with tears overflowed’, chimes with aching precision. But this is a time when Fairport Convention were upsetting the scene with innovatory Folk-Rock variations, taking their “Si Tu Dois Partir” up to no.21 during July 1969, with Steeleye Span and the underrated Eclection waiting in the wings. Pentangle were always a cut above. A Folk super-group.

I’d known Bert Jansch and John Renbourn since their first solo and duo albums. Gazing through the storefront glass of Hallgate Electricals in Cottingham at the album covers on display, not yet quite able to afford the Transatlantic ‘Bert And John’ (TRA144, 1966) album with its chequer-board playing cover (they’re actually playing Wei-Pi-Ki – or ‘Go’), and its enticingly risqué “Soho” ‘come watch the naked dance, that spins before your very eyes, naked like the sun’. Well, it seemed risqué to me at the time. Or the intricately baroque “Angie” and stark junkie “Needle Of Death” on his 1965 debut ‘Bert Jansch’ (TRA125) set. And John snapped sitting intensely playing acoustic Gibson J-50 guitar on a cold flight of steps on the ‘Another Monday’ (1967) sleeve. This was around the time Jansch and Renbourn were flat-sharing and conspiring together, opening the ‘Horseshoe Club’ in Tottenham Court Road, Bert recalling to ‘Q’ how ‘the ‘Les Cousins Club’ was down the road, where people like Paul Simon and Al Stewart went, but we wanted something a bit more experimental’ (May 1991). Their Pentangling grew out of that intention.

Whereas Danny Thompson – who amongst us does NOT know and respect his cv? If only from touring with Donovan and John Martyn, or backing up Tim Buckley for his Queen Elizabeth Hall ‘Live In London 1968’ LP, even before you get to his multiple other virtuoso jazz and Folk incarnations. Adding Charlie Mingus to Pentangle’’s already extensive repertoire resources. An awesome figure. And we know jazz-blues drummer Terry Cox as part of the Michael Garrick Quartet before playing alongside Thompson in Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, replacing Charlie Watts in the drum-chair. With Jacqui, as Pentangle’s fifth instrument. Her recording debut was dueting with Renbourn on three tracks on his second album ‘Another Monday’, including the ragtimey “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”.

Next up, their “Lyke-Wake Dirge” is done in a chilling wrap-around of eerie harmonies, as it was when I heard the Watersons doing it unaccompanied even earlier at the ‘Blue Bell’ club, or the Young Tradition’s skeletal arrangement from their 1965 debut album. Its deep roots are supposedly pre-Christian, but overlaid and adapted to chronicle the starkly austere journey of the soul after death, through the ‘fire and fleet and candle-ligte’ of purgatory until ‘Christe receive thy saule’. In much the same way, there are many variations of the Child-ballad “The Daemon Lover” before Pentangle retool it into the dark narrative “House Carpenter” unfolding on stage this night. Variously done by Joan Baez, Ewan MacColl, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Peter Bellamy to name but several, but that’s the way traditional music operates, by adaptation and reinterpretation. Jacqui’s soprano weaves with icicle clarity in alternating verses with Jansch’s less polished voice. Telling a chastening tale designed to enforce marital fidelity, warning of a wayward wife seduced away from her solidly reliable carpenter husband and baby son by a charming lover who turns out to be the Devil in Disguise. He sails her away to eternal damnation in the island of Hades.

Then, many years later, Kristin Hersh seems suitably surprised when I tell her that “The Cuckoo” – a track on her solo album ‘Hips And Makers’ (1994), had been done decades before by Pentangle on ‘Basket Of Light’. Bert Jansch learned this ‘Somerset’ song from his neighbour’s children, contrasting the perceived fidelity of the cuckoo with yet another false lover, ‘the meeting was a pleasure, though the parting was a woe’. To Kristin it was a traditional Appalachian Folk-ballad. But that’s the way traditional music operates. In Hull it dances and flies, guitar interplay underpinned by resonant double-bass, its lilting melodic trajectory renewed. A flame passed on.

This initial phase of Pentangle cut five albums between 1968 and 1971, with – for the most part, Jansch and Renbourn playing acoustic guitars directly into the studio microphones, although a muted electric guitar was introduced for ‘Cruel Sister’ (1970). Jansch also adds banjo to “House Carpenter”, while Renbourn plays sitar on “Once I Had A Sweetheart”. They switch up from the cult Transatlantic stable to join the more mainstream Reprise in time for ‘Solomon’ Seal’ (1972), but that would be their final album, until the reformations and reunions began some time later. Meanwhile, despite the flaws and failings of acoustic technology Pentangle live is a mesmerising experience.

PENTANGLE: THE

‘BASKET OF LIGHT’ SINGLES

“Once I Had A Sweetheart” c/w “I Saw An Angel” (Transatlantic Big T 124) ‘Record Mirror’ said ‘there is a quiet air of confidence about this traditional and nicely-revived number. Exquisitely sung by Jacqui McShee, it has both charm and feel to it and there is no disputing the group’s tremendous pull in concert. It could miss out, of course, because it is a rather specialist sound, but it’s very good. Flip: Change of pace and style. CHART POSSIBILITY.’ ‘New Musical Express’ said ‘An absolutely stunning little record that cannot be faulted in any department. A traditional folk song arranged by the multi-talented group, the backing is unobtrusive but inventive behind Jacquee McShee’s (sic) oh-so-beautiful vocals. Towards the end the instrumentalists take over and intensify use of sitar and tribal drum rhythms. If I had my way this would be no.1. Available in stereo, though I received only mono for reviewing.’

“Light Flight” c/w “Cold Mountain” (Big T 128) ‘Melody Maker’ said ‘quite a lively performance, compared to their normal concert appearance. A bit of the old jazz and folk mixture, it sounds rather BBC2. Nice though.’ While ‘New Musical Express’ said ‘this is the theme from BBC-TV’ forthcoming drama series ‘Take Three Girls’, written by the Pentangle itself. A fascinating disc, typical of the group’s highly individual concept of contemporary music. The girl lead singer is supported by contrapuntal harmonies and strumming acoustic guitars, and the deft fusion of old and new ideas makes it sound like a jazz-influenced madrigal. One for the connoisseur.’