Jack London's SF: 'The Scarlet Plague'

BEYOND THE 

SCARLET PLAGUE: 

JACK LONDON’S 

SCIENCE FICTION 

Most frequently considered a writer of hard-hitting 

stories of daring-do on the high seas, or the snows of 

Alaska through the enduring ‘The Call Of The Wild’, 

Jack London also wrote some fine pioneering early 

Science Fiction… now collected in 

three volumes by Leonaur Press

‘It was in the summer of 2013 that the Plague came…’ 

Before Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack London was the unschooled outsider writer. A man who wrote himself into literary history using only his creative energies, and the medium of the Pulp magazine explosion. London’s stories appeared in ‘The Black Cat’ magazine, ‘Overland Monthly’, ‘Colliers’ and ‘Pearson’s Magazine’ which all thrived, and were popular, before the term Science Fiction was even devised. There was no SF profession or career-structure to be initiated into, but many of the stories he contributed to those editions were proto-SF in all but name. “The Scarlet Plague” first appeared in the ‘London Magazine’ dated June 1912, a title owned by Cecil Harmsworth, and it was set exactly one-hundred years into the then-future. It was not the first story in which a rogue pandemic virus wipes out civilisation. It would not be the last.

Mary Shelley – creator of the Frankenstein myth, had written ‘The Last Man’ as early as 1826, in which her protagonist, Lionel Verney is the sole survivor of a global apocalypse, leaving him alone in the year 2100. The novel takes the form of manuscripts supposedly discovered aeons hence, describing the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries in archaic eighteenth-century terms. Another obvious precedent to Jack London’s tale is Edgar Allan Poe, even down to the chosen colour of his “The Mask Of The Red Death” (1842), in which a group of aristocrats hide within a sealed abbey in the hope of escaping a disease ravaging the countryside outside its confines. In London’s story Hare-Lip, one of the youths who have devolved to a simple tribal level, argues about his grandfather’s definition of ‘the Purple plague’ – arguing ‘why don’t you tell about the Red Death?’ Perhaps that’s a deliberate giveaway reference to Poe? Perhaps not.

But there have been many more treatments of the theme since, clear down to the TV adaptation of ‘The Walking Dead’ graphic novel in which a group of survivors flee across an America devastated by a zombie-plague. Cormac McCarthy’s bleak ‘The Road’ (2006) re-paces the same path. While midpoint in the century, not only does George R Stewart’s 1949 novel ‘Earth Abides’ expand the basic contours of London’s story, but even sets its location in the same San Francisco area. For his epic ‘The Stand’ (1978, revised 1990), in which germ-warfare virus ‘Project Blue’ escapes the lab to devastate the world, Stephen King openly acknowledges his debt to George R Stewart, which neatly loops the continuity all the way back to Jack London.

London’s story starts off with young Edwin and his Granser traipsing along the overgrown path of what was once a railway embankment. Previously James Howard Smith, Professor Of Literature at Berkeley, he is now ‘a dirty old man clad in goatskin’, joining his grandsons of the Santa Rosan tribe on the beach. The ‘filthy little skin-clad savages’ are mocking and sceptical, curious and doubting about the old man’s stories of a lost past. Before civilisation ‘lapsed like foam’ he claims there were eight-billion people alive on Earth in the 2010 census. For a fiction written in 1912, that’s a remarkably accurate guesstimate, but one that the innumerate Hoo-Hoo, Hare-Lip and Edwin can barely conceive. Patiently the old man relates his tale of how human hubris was brought low by the virus. How 400-survivors barricade themselves into the University Chemistry Building, imagining they are somehow safe, not unlike Poe’s aristos. But how only forty-seven escape from a city fragmenting into murderous riots and uncontrollable fires. He alone reaches Yosemite as the plague burns itself out. Re-emerging to become the nineteenth member of the Santa Rosan tribe. ‘I am the last man who was alive in the days of the plague and who knows the wonders of that far-off time’ he tells them. ‘We, who mastered the planet – its earth, and sea, and sky – and who were as very gods, now live in primitive savagery along the water courses of this California country.’

London wrote the story in the twentieth century’s first decade. The future he envisages is one in which airships once plied the skies, and the plague reverses a deeply polarised social order, so that a chauffeur now lords it over a Magnate’s daughter. There’s some philosophical musing about the cyclic nature of civilisation, rebuilding itself towards new wars and atrocity, only to collapse again into barbarity. The pride that comes before the fall. But there’s a poetic wistfulness too, as Granser and loyal Edwin watch a herd of wild horses prancing by the surf, perhaps driven down from the hills by mountain lions. A symbol of nature returning to reclaim what was fleetingly the human realm, returning America to its old pre-Columbian frontier state, a process repeating itself around the world. With a certain sense of the Earth renewed.

I first came across the story in a second-hand copy of ‘Strange Travels In Science Fiction’ (Grayson & Grayson, 1953), a hardback anthology edited by Groff Conklin, with luring cover-art showing a space-suited figure surveying a cratered lunar landscape. Inside, there was HP Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out Of Space”, Alan E Nourse, Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury, but it was London who left the greatest impression on my adolescent mind. Reviewing the book, ‘Authentic Science Fiction Monthly’ (no.44, April 1954) observes that ‘one very interesting point about it is that it contains a story by Jack London; few people outside the field of science fiction would have believed that this intensely sane lunatic and honoured writer had ever had anything to do with science fiction. Now they’ll know! This book should definitely be on your shelves.’

If science fiction is the genre that hauled itself up by its own disreputable bootstraps, these were its most representative pioneers. Edgar Rice Burroughs ‘A Princess Of Mars’ was published in 1917, a full decade after Jack London’s ‘Before Adam’ (1906) and ‘The Iron Heel’ (1907). Yet both were men who fought their way up to celebrity through the sheer power of their imaginations. Neither came from a literary or privileged background. Burroughs created ‘Tarzan’, one of great twentieth-century myth-figures, which made him wealthy. But Jack London was the better writer. And both wrote across a wide spectrum of themes, a necessary prerequisite of earning a living from the magazine scene of the time.

Jack’s single-parent mother – Flora Wellman, later married John London, and he took his stepfather’s name. He left school at fifteen to work in a cannery. At the time, acquisitive Corporations were laying legal claim to previously publically-owned oyster-beds, forcing those who lived off the Bay to become ‘pirates’. Jack joined them. Later, after a sealing expedition to the NW Pacific his socialist ideas were kindled by joining ‘Kelly’s Army’ – a kind of American Jarrow March, which resulted in him spending time in Eyrie County Penitentiary. As his earliest literary attempts were failing, he joined the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897, among rogues, cheats and charlatans, and while he found no gold, he happened upon veins of fiction-themes worth infinitely more. He stumbled across his niche writing rugged tales of dogs, wolves and the Alaskan frontier. All of his life-experience combining to razor his story-telling skills, so that on his return to California he sold “An Odyssey Of The North” (1899) to ‘Atlantic Monthly’. This was subsequently expanded into a story-collection – ‘The Son Of The Wolf’ (1900), after which, although his picaresque adventures continued, writing would remain his main source of income.

The dignified proprietors of the periodicals he contributed to may have been initially disturbed by the popularity of the occasional proto-SF stories they published as novelties, but they were quick to swallow their dismay and capitalise on their success. London’s novel ‘Before Adam’ started out as a serial in the popular ‘Everybody’s Magazine’ (1906-1907). Like HG Wells’ “A Story Of The Stone Age” – serialised in ‘The Idler’ during 1897, it was a trip into prehistory. Using the Race-Memory device of a city-boy dreaming himself into the consciousness of a hominid member of the Cave People, the story powerfully evokes the primeval mid-Pleistocene atmosphere of this ‘Younger World’. The character names – Lop-Ear the Swift One, Cross-Eyes or Red-Eye, even anticipate those of his future Santa Rosan tribe in their new savagery. Allying his vision with his Klondike experience, in “A Relic Of The Pliocene” (‘Collier’s Magazine’, January 1901) a Yukon gold prospector discovers a live Mastodon. The story was rescued and reprinted – as “The Angry Mammoth”, in ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction’ as late as May 1959. While his earliest tale with SF elements – “A Thousand Deaths” (in ‘The Black Cat’, May 1899), had sufficient strengths to also be reprinted by the same magazine (September 1967). It concerns a cold-hearted lone scientist who uses his own son in torture-like revivification experiments, until the son invents a superweapon that dematerialises the scientist, ‘puff! It was like the wind sighing among the pines. He was gone.’

And there was other if-onlying. HG Wells’ novella “The Invisible Man” was first serialised in 1897 in ‘Pearson’s Magazine’. Picking up on the concept, London’s “The Shadow And The Flash” followed in ‘The Bookman’ (June 1903), in which two of the narrator’s friends – Lloyd Inwood and Paul Tichlorne, have been fierce rivals since childhood. Both compete in the task of achieving invisibility. Paul succeeds in making his dog invisible, through injecting it with transparency reagents. Lloyd makes his entire laboratory disappear from view by painting it with absolute light-absorbing black. Then, brush-stroke by brush-stroke, bodily-member by bodily-member, he is himself painted and gradually vanishes from sight. The two men are so enraged by each other’s success that they fight – both invisible, and kill each other.

While SF academic John Clute claims ‘The Iron Heel’ (1908) to be ‘the most vivid and important SF novel of the year’ it was ‘one of the many early-20th-century SF novels about conflict between Capital and Labour’, yet it is the only one of its time still to be read. The novel, in the form of the ‘Everhard Manuscript’ – discovered, and annotated, in the future, spans an arc of years. In 1912 (the story goes) the Socialists win the American elections, but are barred from taking office. ‘Revolution, chaos, and war ensue’ (in ‘Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia’, 1995). The future-history, telling how socialist revolutionaries struggle against a fascist-style ‘Oligarchy’ dictatorship, extends through until 2632.

London’s strangely-titled short story “The Dream Of Debs” – first published in the January 1909 edition of ‘The International Socialist Review’, covers similar terrain. Less a story – less a SF story even though it projects events into an alternative imagined future, it’s more a political tract charting the course of a working-class General Strike devised by a labour leader called Eugene V Debs, illustrating that real power lies with the supposedly powerless. An instructional warning showing the truth that in this labour-intensive era, social balance is precariously structured on inequality. As told by narrator Corf, at first the disruption caused by the Strike is a minor inconvenience for the ruling class – there are no olives for the cocktails, and the chauffeur is promptly dismissed for siding with the Chauffeurs Union. Oddly, Bertie Messener – who ‘had never done a tap of productive work in his life’, argues that there’s no real moral dimension to the Strike, that it’s simply a quid pro quo for the smashing of the American Federation of Labour and the various underhand manipulations that employers have used to break individual unions and union actions.

From a twenty-first century point of view – accustomed to instant global communications, it’s stranger that, without newspapers and with telegraph wires cut, there’s no awareness of conditions outside the immediate area. Isolated, as food shortages set in there’s a farcical trip into the countryside intent on killing a cow to obtain meat, which ends in a beating. Martial law is declared as the upper-classes flee beleaguered San Francisco, their servants deserting them on the way. Order collapses. The objective is nothing short of starving the ruling class into complete submission, as ‘millionaires and paupers fought side by side for the food’. With the total capitulation of the employers, order, of a kind, resumes. But now begins the tyranny of organised labour. The story closes with the first counter-revolutionary grumbles that ‘something must be done’.

“The Strength Of The Strong” (‘Hampton’s Magazine’, March 1911) is an even more thinly-disguised Socialist lesson, recycling the same narrative-structure London had used with “The Scarlet Plague”, in which an oldster – this time in prehistory, recites tales of past-times to sceptical youngsters. Long-Beard and Deer-Runner debate how the initially separate family groups of the valley discover their collective tribal strength only when faced by invasion, but how that unity is then corrupted by the growth of internal power-structures. Restoration of that initial clarity of vision remains a hope for the days to come. Almost a ludicrously simplified thumbnail social history, with its promise of a future should sanity prevail, it remains too message-heavy to be a convincing fiction.

Yet despite this vision, London is not entirely free of the prejudices of his time. It would be unrealistic to expect otherwise. His story “The Unparalleled Invasion” – which debuted in the July 1910 issue of ‘McClures’ magazine, is particularly disturbing. Regarding the Chinese, he writes ‘the fabric of their minds were woven from totally different stuffs. They were mental aliens.’ Yet ‘China was to be feared, not in war, but in commerce.’ According to the future history he plots, China is guided by Japan, until a 1922 war drives the Japanese home. In this strange alternate twentieth-century there is no Hiroshima, instead ‘exit Japan from the world drama. Thereafter she devoted herself to art, and her task became to please the world greatly with her creation of wonder and beauty.’ Well, there’s Honda, perhaps! There’s no Vietnam War either, instead – by 1970, with no Mao and no one-child-per-couple policy, China’s relentless population expansion under their Emperor takes them into French Indo-China, effortlessly brushing French resistance aside (although why French imperial power has any more moral right to be there is not questioned). The United Powers of The Great Truce are so concerned by China’s unchecked growth that they adopt a plan advanced by minor scientist Jacobus Laningdale in his Presidential audience of 19th September 1975. By the following May world fleets and armies converge to encircle China, which is bombed by tubes releasing ‘every virulent form of infectious death’ including smallpox, scarlet fever, Black Death plus the spontaneous hybridisation of new plague-germs. The obvious problem of containment is resolved by the naval and military blockade ensuring no-one escapes the continent-wide charnel-house that results.

It’s a nasty story, even though the 17 April 1987 Convention of Copenhagen subsequently bans the ‘laboratory methods of warfare they had employed in the invasion of China’. As a SF prediction of germ-warfare, it shows ‘old war was made a thing of laughter’, outmoded the by ultra-modern ‘war of the scientist and the laboratory.’ By London’s fictional 1982 the vast empty wastes of China are resettled by ‘a vast and happy intermingling of nationalities.’ Could that be possible following such appalling genocide? With the guilt-stain legacy of ethnic cleansing, Nazi exterminations, as well as Stalin and the Native American atrocities acting as scars on global conscience it’s difficult to see how ‘the splendid mechanical, intellectual and art output that followed’ could happen. But perhaps that’s to elevate the slight tale beyond its natural pulp origins.

And it’s not as if Jack London was alone in his warnings about the ‘Yellow Peril’. It was not an uncommon theme. MP Shiel’s popular ‘The Yellow Danger’ (1898) played upon the same racial fears. While Philip Francis Nowlan’s ‘Armageddon 2419AD’ (August 1928) – the story later adapted to introduce ‘Buck Rodgers’ into comic-strip legend, portrays a future-America conquered by the Chinese. London’s compensatory belief in a socialist future in which national and racial divisions cease to be as important as the global human family, serves to lift him above such accusations.

And there are at least two more mitigating examples. London’s “The Heathen” (‘Everybody’s Magazine’, August 1910) draws on his nautical experience – the narrator is a pearl buyer. He’s on board the over-laden ‘Petite Jeanne’, heavy with an excess of passengers, which runs foul of the advancing storm centre of a vividly described hurricane. For those in peril ‘they were not seas at all. They resembled no sea a man had ever seen.’ Then in a free conversational style, ‘no, it is beyond me’ he concedes, ‘it would have been better had I stuck to my original intention of not attempting a description.’ Shipwrecked, he’s thrown together with the only other survivor, Otoo, the Heathen, a native of Borabora. Becoming lifelong loyal friends, the two establish mutual respect to the extent of the ceremony of ‘exchanging names’. Tokenistic maybe, but Otoo is described in every way as an exceptionally admirable character. While London demonstrates command of the techniques and strategies of the thuggish fight-game, as Norman Mailer would, in “The Mexican” (‘Saturday Evening Post’, 19 August 1911). Danny Ward fights ‘for money and for the easy ways of life that money would bring,’ while plucky contender Rivera fought to raise finance for the socialist Mexican revolution, with all his ‘blazing and terrible visions’. London not only perfectly captures the calculated dialogue of the fight promoters, but the implacable mindset of the Mexican too, and the pure hatred of gringos – focused on his opponent in the ring, that powers his fight. Despite taking a terrible punishing beating, it is the heroic underdog who earns the reader’s sympathies. Both stories also demonstrate the range of Jack London’s fiction.

His third and last novel-length foray into Science-Fantasy, ‘The Star Rover’ (1915) is partly based on interviews with Ed Morrell, a real-life former Death Row convict in San Quentin whose pardon London actively campaigned for. Morrell claimed to have experienced a disassociation of mind from body in prison while enduring torture. In London’s version of the events it is Darrell Standing, a university professor, who is the victim of ‘the jacket’, a total sensory-deprivation device from which he escapes by entering a trance-state that allows him access to interstellar realms and partial incarnation into past lives. Through this fictional guise ‘I was bound on vast adventure, where, at the end, I would find all the cosmic formulae and have made clear to me the ultimate secret of the universe.’ It also allows him to inhabit a succession of separate sequences strung together along the common theme, including a French nobleman called Count Guillame de Sainte-Maure, Adam Strang – an Englishman in medieval Korea, and Ragnar Lodbrog, a Norseman journeying from Alexandria to Jerusalem at the time of Tiberius. It’s through the considerable power of these transmigrations through time that London achieves his elusive balance between fine fiction, and agitation for social justice. Morrell was released, and became an occasional guest at London’s ‘Beauty Ranch’ in Sonoma County. The place where John Griffith ‘Jack’ London died.

Although the imaginative writers of the time couldn’t have been aware of it, a new genre was coming into being all around them, taking a blowtorch to all the affectations and pretences of great literature, making the slippery divisions between genre and literary fiction ridiculous and arbitrary. During the new century’s first decade, Jules Verne died (1905) and Hugo Gernsback, recently emigrated from Luxembourg to America, launched ‘Modern Electrics’ magazine (in 1908), the pulp predecessor to ‘Amazing Stories’. The future was already being written. In a rapid succession of years HG Wells’ ‘When The Sleeper Wakes’ (1899), MP Shiel’s ‘The Purple Cloud’ (1901), Jules Verne’s ‘Master Of The World’ (1904), Edwin L Arnold’s ‘Gulliver Of Mars’ (1905), and EM Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909) were extending the themes of fiction into new worlds of the imagination. Jack London was part of this process. And if Orwell’s dystopias were anticipated by ‘The Iron Heel’, London’s freewheeling prose-travelogues also carry trace-elements to be picked up by Jack Kerouac’s Beat ‘On The Road’ (1957) style.

Jack London was the unschooled outsider writer. A man who wrote himself into literary history through only his creative and diverse energies. Yet his fiction is still being read. And it’s still worth reading.

JACK LONDON 

(12 January 1876 – 22 November 1916) 

Shortfiction 

1895 – Who Believes In Ghosts! (‘The (Oakland) High School Aegis’ 21 October 1895), Damon and George trade tall tales

1899 – An Odyssey Of The North (‘Atlantic Monthly’, 1899), a man of mixed white and Aleut ancestry

1899 – The White Silence (‘Overland Monthly’, February 1899)

1899 – A Thousand Deaths (‘The Black Cat’, May 1899, then ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction’, September 1967), his first story with SF elements, and his first sale for which he received $40

1899 – In A Far Country (‘Overland Monthly’, June 1899)

1899 – The Rejuvenation Of Major Rathbone (‘Conkey’s Home Journal’, November 1899), a story involving a ‘rejuvenator’ extracted from a ‘lymph compound’

1900 – Even Unto Death (‘The San Francisco Evening Post Magazine’, 28 July 1900)

1900 – The Man With The Gash (‘McClure’s Magazine’, September 1900)

1901 – The Law Of Life (‘McClure’s Magazine Vol.16’, March 1901), ageing Native American chief Kaskoosh is abandoned by his tribe, to die alone, he reflects on his life as predatory wolves circle

1901 – A Relic Of The Pliocene (‘Collier’s’, 12 January 1901), reprinted ‘The Angry Mammoth’ in ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction’, May 1959, and ‘Venture SF (UK)’ October 1964)

1901 – The God Of His Fathers (‘McClure’s’, May 1901)

1901 – The Minions Of Midas (‘Pearson’s Magazine’, May 1901)

1902 – The Death Of Ligoun (‘The Children Of The Frost’, Macmillan, 1902)

1902 – Bâtard (‘Cosmopolitan’, June 1902), also published as ‘Diable’, the story of a French-Canadian who brutalises his dog, which eventually retaliates and kills him

1902 – Moon-Face (‘The Argonaut’, 21 July 1902), the unnamed protagonist trains his dog to retrieve thrown sticks, then uses it to dynamite moon-faced John Claverhouse, the subject of his irrational hatred

1902 – In The Forests Of The North (‘Pearson’s Magazine’, September 1902)

1902 – Keesh, The Son Of Keesh (‘Ainslee’s Magazine’, September 1902, collected into Jack London’s ‘Thirteen Tales Of Terror’, Popular Library, July 1978)

1903 – The One Thousand Dozen (collected into ‘The Faith Of Men And Other Stories’ by Jack London, Macmillan and Co, 1904)

1903 – The Shadow And The Flash (‘The Bookman’, June 1903, reprinted in ‘Famous Fantastic Mysteries’, June 1948)

1903 – The Leopard Man’s Story (‘Leslie’s Magazine’, August 1903), the animal-trainer tells stories of death and jealousy in a tent-show

1905 – A Raid On The Oyster Pirates (‘The Youth’s Companion’, 16 March 1905 and ‘The Pall Mall Magazine’ Volume 35, 1905)

1906 – Planchette (‘Moon-Face And Other Stories’ by Jack London, The Macmillan Company)

1908 – To Build A Fire (‘The Century Magazine’, then ‘Some Things Weird And Wicked’ edited by Joan Kahn, Bantam Books), trailered by an earlier version published in ‘The Youth’s Companion’ in 1902, it is set in the Klondike where a newcomer ignores advice, travels alone, and falls into a frozen creek, so that his survival depends on his ability to light a warming fire

1908 – The Enemy Of All the World (‘The Red Book Magazine’, October1908), a lone genius invents a super-weapon and terrorises the world

1908 – Goliah (‘The Red Magazine’, December1908), a ‘scientific superman’ inaugurates a millennium of international socialism by mastering an ultimate energy-source called ‘energon’, which makes him master of the world’s fate

1908 – A Curious Fragment (‘Town Topics (New York)’ 10 December 1908), one of the ruling 28th-century oligarchs encounters a severed arm bearing a petition from his industrial slaves

1908 – Lost Face (‘New York Herald’ 13 December, reprinted in ‘A Treasury Of American Horror Stories’, Bonanza Books, 1985)

1909 – The Dream Of Debs (‘The International Socialist Review’, January 1909, then ‘The Strength Of The Strong’ Jack London collection, Mills & Boon 1917)

1909 – The Seed Of McCoy (‘Turning Point: Fourteen Great Tales of Daring and Decision’ edit by George Bennett, Dell Laurel-Leaf 1965)

1910 – The Unparalleled Invasion (‘McClures’ July 1910, then ‘Gamma no.11’ October 1966, and ‘The Science Fiction Stories Of Jack London’, Citadel Press 1993)

1910 – The Heathen (‘Everybody’s Magazine’, August 1910)

1910 – Winged Blackmail (in ‘The Night-Born’ by Jack London, Century Co, February 1913)

1910 – When The World Was Young (‘The Saturday Evening Post’, 10 September 1910), a ‘magnificent… yellow-haired’ savage shares the body of a successful California businessman

1911 – The “Francis Spaight” (‘When The God Laughs And Other Stories’ by Jack London, The Macmillan Company)

1911 – The Strength Of The Strong (‘Hampton’s Magazine’, March 1911)

1911 – The Eternity Of Forms (‘The Red Book Magazine’, March 1911)

1911 – The First Poet (‘Century Magazine’, June 1911)

1911 – War (‘The Nation’, 29 July 1911)

1911 – The Mexican (‘The Saturday Evening Post’, 19 August 1911)

1912 – The Scarlet Plague (‘London Magazine’ June 1912, reprinted in ‘Out Of This World’ May 1944, Penguin and elsewhere, including ‘The Science Fiction Of Jack London’ Gregg Press 1975, ‘Strange Travels In Science Fiction’ edited by Groff Conklin, Grayson & Grayson, 1953, and ‘Omnibus Of Science Fiction’ edited by Groff Conklin, Chatham River Press, 1984)

1918 – The Red One (‘Cosmopolitan’ October 1918), an isolated tribal society in Guadalcanal turns a mysterious outer space sphere into the centerpiece of a death cult, of which scientist Bassett falls victim. Based on London’s interest in the psychoanalytical ideas of Carl Gustav Jung

1959 – The Strange Love-Challenge Of Big-Girl Island (‘Man’s Conquest’ magazine, July 1959) cover-blurbed as ‘Never Before Published! Jack London's Lustiest True Adventure’

1967 – A Piece Of Steak (‘The Edge Of The Chair’ edit by Joan Kahn, Harper and Row), a boxing story

1983 – Im Jahre 33 (Published in German in ‘Der Feind Der Welt’ June 1983, extracted from a chapter of ‘The Star Rover’ as originally featured in ‘American Sunday Monthly Magazine’ July 1910)

1985 – Make Westing (‘Mysterious Sea Stories’, January 1985, edited by William Pattrick, WH Allen)

1998 – A Ghostly Duel (‘The Mammoth Book of 20th Century Ghost Stories’ edit by Peter Haining, Robinson Publ)

2003 – In Yeddo Bay (‘The National Review Treasury Of Classic Children’s Literature’ edit William F Buckley Jrn)

2003 – To Repel Boarders (‘The National Review Treasury Of Classic Children’s Literature’ edit William F Buckley Jrn)

 2005 – ‘The Collected Science Fiction And Fantasy Of Jack London 1: Before Adam And Other Stories’ (Leonaur, ISBN: 1846770084) with ‘The Scarlet Plague’, ‘A Relic Of The Pliocene’, ‘When The World Was Young’, ‘The Red One’, ‘Planchette’, ‘A Thousand Deaths, ‘Goliah’, ‘A Curious Fragment’, ‘The Rejuvenation Of Major Rathbone’

2005 – ‘The Collected Science Fiction And Fantasy Of Jack London 2: The Iron Heel And Other Stories’ (Leonaur, ISBN: 1846770041) with ‘The Enemy Of All The World’, ‘The Shadow And The Flash’, ‘The Strength Of The Strong’, ‘The Unparalleled Invasion’, ‘The Dream Of Debs’

2005 – ‘The Collected Science Fiction And Fantasy Of Jack London 3: The Star Rover And Other Stories’ (Leonaur, ISBN: 1846770067) with ‘The Minions Of Midas’, ‘The Eternity Of Forms’, ‘The Man With The Gash’

GINGER BAKER'S JAZZ CONFUSION: Live in Leeds

Gig Review of: 

GINGER BAKER’S 

JAZZ CONFUSION 

 at the ‘The Brudenell Social Club’, Leeds 

(29 June 2013)

 ‘I’m getting too old for this lark’ wheezes Ginger Baker. ‘No you’re not’ yells an audience voice. It’s the one time this night his stern visage cracks into a smile. His autobiography is on Amazon with a free-read section. In it, he explains how his pre-Rock roots lie in Bebop-drummer Max Roach and British jazzer Phil Seaman. How he’d nick jazz albums from local record shops. That’s before he joined Graham Bond, hooked up with Jack Bruce, went on into Cream and all the other stuff we know. Here in Leeds he’s spun it all back to where it began.

Openers Quack Quack are a powered-up Prog-improv Nice-style trio. Midpoint into a piece that might have been called “Phonehenge” or “Bird Parliament” Richard ‘Moz’ Morris, who runs a three-minute mile while playing keyboard, sets a single continuous drone-note, then joins drummer Neil Turpin in a furious percussive fusillade, while Stuart Bannister crouches against the amps coaxing controlled distortion from his tortured bass. Their ‘Slow As An Eyeball’ CD sells briskly at the merchandising desk where promoter John Keenan presides.

Ginger Baker. He might look like the kind of lag who once ran with the Krays and now sells his story to sleazy tabloids, his once-flaming hair now an ice-grey slickback, but his music-soul burns. Drums are the core of Jazz Confusion. Ginger in specs and open-neck shirt, and to his right, his Ghanaian percussionist right-hand man Abass Dodoo who alternates sticks with palms on congas in a unison drum clinic of startling intensity. Michael, dapper bassist in pork pie hat is fluent stand-in, depping for Alec Dankworth. And a seated Alfred ‘Pee Wee’ Ellis, former James Brown/Van Morrison saxist, his sweet-toned tenor expressively delineating Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints”. As fleshed as Ginger is fleshless, after solos Pee Wee sits, gazes inquisitively down into the audience, and breathes.

A buzz of distortion provokes a withering ‘thank you soundman. DON’T do it again!’ in Ginger’s whiplash wheeze. The second of two half-hour sets, after a twenty-minute break, opens with the second Pee Wee original. Then Ron Miles “Ginger Spice” – ‘he’d never heard of the Spice Girls’ rasps Ginger, his shirt off now. It’s been part of his set at least since the 1999 trio ‘Coward Of The County’ album, with busy drum dialogue and Pee Wee igniting oozing groans and sighs from his horn. There’s Thelonius Monk, and Sonny Rollins “St Thomas”, but the finest moment is Ginger’s own tribute to “Cyril Davies” with eloquently narrative sax underpinned by steady time-signature, emotive, but with swing. Ginger Baker throws a drumstick in the air. Catches it. But when he stands, he almost stumbles. Too old? Not yet!

Dave Lee Travis & Radio One in the 1970's

DAVE LEE TRAVIS: 

‘THE HAIRY CORNFLAKE’

There was a time when 

Radio One DJ’s were celebrity stars in their own right. 

Tony Blackburn and Dave Lee Travis were national figures. 

But back then, in radio terms, there was nowhere else to go.

The ‘Hairy Cornflake’. In Peter Kay’s catchphrase... what’s all that about? What IS it all about? Radio One DJ Dave Lee Travis used to broadcast to peak audience figures around the time listeners were enjoying their breakfast. He has a beard. We all know that ‘cos we’ve seen him on ‘Top Of The Pops’. Hence he was consumed alongside of, and as part of the daily national diet. Hairy DJ. Cornflakes. No? Not funny. Perhaps it wasn’t even particularly funny then. Quack-Quack Oops! Or maybe that needs explaining too…?

The 1970’s was less a decade, than a bridge between the sixties and the eighties. It opens with the overhang of the Harold Wilson-Edward Heath mixed-economy consensus that had navigated Britain from post-war austerity to the Swinging London boom. And endures long enough for the patchwork decade to close with the advent of Margaret Thatcher inaugurating a less compassionate more acquisitive future. When the nostalgia-industry seizes upon the seventies it fumbles for trashy Glam and Glitter. A distant planet on which the media was narrower, to the point of monolithic. There were three television channels, ITV, BBC1 and BBC2. There was no network of commercial radio. There was very little by way of regional BBC radio stations.

But if the 1960’s had evolved the global template for Pop Music, the 1970’s formatised and fine-tuned its delivery system. In the previous decade when time and cash was tight, shiny black vinyl constituted a considered and thought-out purchase. Suddenly, with more disposable teen-cash than ever before, singles were treated like Frisbees, bought on a whim, and dumped as quickly. In the 1960’s the writing-production team of Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley blueprinted a Pop production-line using the likes of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky and Tich to front their songs. It guaranteed a string of hits. Now Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn took up the model and honed it into a Hit Factory that dominated the new decade, just as Stock-Aitken-Waterman would do for the eighties.

Dave Lee Travis – aka David Patrick Griffin (born 25 May 1945) had worked on Radio Caroline from September 1965 onwards. It was the biggest of the Pirate Radio stations that briefly challenged the BBC dominance of British airwaves, and showed up its output as dull, formal and old-fashioned. You catch a distorted glimpse of what it was like in Richard Curtis’ ‘The Ship That Rocked’ (2009). As a sop to the outlawing of off-shore stations the BBC rejigged its corporate structure, relabeling its old Light Programme as Radio One. Radio Two continued the old snooze for an ageing demographic that could safely be ignored. Radios Three and Four were for talk-radio and classical output. You want Pop, you listen to Radio One. There’s nowhere else to go.

Dave Lee Travis joined Radio One to present ‘Pop North’ and to do weekend spots. By 1971 he’d been promoted to the national weekday lunchtime slot. In 1976 he assumed the teatime show, rebranding it ‘It’s DLT OK!’ – 4:30 to 5:45, before finally unseating Noel Edmonds at the coveted Breakfast Show in May 1978. The ‘Hairy Cornflake’ phase. Needless to say, there was no Breakfast TV. DJ’s were pilots of the airwaves who might play your request. The bright good-morning voice, playing all the hits for you. Even John Peel comments about how, when you wake up in the morning and turn on the radio, the first song you hear stays with you all day. No matter how trite, you find yourself humming it inside your head.

DLT, for that is how he refers to himself, now talks with bitter pride of the massive audiences his shows reached, with an authenticated ten-million listeners. It’s hardly surprising. In the monoculture of the 1970’s they had a monopoly. He and Tony Blackburn had national star-profiles that dwarfed many of the so-called music star names on the 45rpm singles they spun. ‘Top Of The Pops’ had launched at the height of the Beat-Boom on New Year’s Day 1964. By the seventies it was a must-see fixture that not only reflected, but fashioned the charts it was based around. It was a neat conspiracy. The ‘heavy’ groups playing the various strands of underground music grown out of the counter-culture, the Blues-based experimental improvisational music, was catered for by the late-night John Peel shows. Day-time radio had its golden oldie spots, but it created and defined what the charts looked and sounded like.

Sweet are a good example. They’d enjoyed a modest run of catchy lightweight hits. But then Chinn-Chapman used them to hit overdrive. “Blockbuster” became the group’s first no.1 in January 1973, based around a commercialised variant of the Who’s high-energy attack. And for its ‘Top Of The Pops’ presentation they assumed a Glam guise, with the token gender-bending member (bassist Steve Priest) who would become obligatory for the others who followed. The tie-in was a perfect storm. Radio One would play the new Chinn-Chapman record. As the station became attuned to the brand, radio-plays became routine. Once a foothold in the lower region of the chart qualified the record for ‘Top Of The Pops’ inclusion, there was a 2.30-minute TV-slot there to ram that record further into national awareness. How could that most efficiently be achieved? By visual overload. Time was tight. They were miming to a set soundtrack. The flexible-element lay in garb. Hence the need to maximise its impact so kids talked excitedly about you in the schoolyard the following day, while effectively defining the necessary generational gulf by provoking ‘what the hell is THAT?!?!’ from Dad in the corner, with deliciously conflated outrage at every fluttering eye-linered eyelash and camp flourish (because there was still just one family TV, as the font-room focal-point).

Glam, as an element of the UK Pop machine, was fashioned by the immaculate elision of Radio One and ‘Top Of The Pops’. At first it was T Rex and Slade alternating at the top slot. Then Sweet and Gary Glitter. The irony being that although Paul Raven had been around, and recording since 1959, it was with Mike Leander that he devised the ‘Gary Glitter’ persona. Yet the breakthrough single happened with the throwaway instrumental B-side of “Rock ‘n’ Roll”. Resulting in him debuting on ‘Top Of The Pops’ without a singing role! Yet the monstrously camp bacofoil-vision he presented ensured the vocal follow-up charted, until his “I’m The Leader Of The Gang (I Am)” took him finally to no.1, roaring on-stage astride a Harley with an outrageously pantomime repertoire of shocked stares, raised eyebrows, and a huge laugh-out-loud false quiff. Alvin Stardust who’d already enjoyed a 1960’s career as Shane Fenton, returned as a gross 1950’s pastiche in black leather so tightly enveloping he was scarce able to move, merely weaving a ring-encrusted finger at the camera lens (in a manner reminiscent of Dave Berry). The appalling Bay City Rollers and bland Osmonds devolved and devalued Pop further, with their Pavlovian teen-audiences acting-out their learned function. Girls screamed at Sinatra and Elvis. They screamed at the Beatles and the Stones. This is what you do. So they scream. With no clear idea why.

Then there were the groups who didn’t actually exist. Those one-off singles that were studio-fabricated by professional writer-producer teams using a core of slick session-players. When such a single entered the lower region of the chart it became necessary to recruit a group of appropriately telegenic boys to become that group for promotional purposes. Although Tony Burrows sings lead on “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” (no.1 in January 1970) – and was also the voice on hits by the Pipkins, White Plains and First Class, he was never actually a member of Edison Lighthouse. While the startling falsetto on “Sugar Baby Love” (no.1 in May 1974) was performed by Paul da Vinci, although he was never a member of the Rubettes. If they were fortunate – like the Rubettes, the subsequently hastily-assembled group actually got to play on their own follow-up singles, unlike Edison Lighthouse for whom there was to be no future career. This practice was hardly unprecedented. For Phil Spector’s 1960’s hits the Crystals and the Ronettes heard on the vinyl was not necessarily the Crystals and Ronettes you saw on tour or on your TV. But the unique configuration of early-1970’s UK Pop made it ideally suited to such playful scams.

Alvin Stardust’s hits, incidentally, were released on the tiny Magnet label. Although there were a few pioneering Indie labels they were still a minority. The acceleration of the Indie sector would not gain momentum until post-Punk. The majors still controlled who made records, and who didn’t. The record shops stocked those records. Kids went into town to buy them. The marketing and in-house PR agents were targeting a music press and radio network in a closed-circuit cosy synergy.

Trash-Pop belonged to the Radio One DJ’s. Because there was nowhere else to go. Dave Lee Travis and cheery Tony Blackburn were radio-faces. There was also ‘Diddy’ David Hamilton, Simon Bates, Bruno Brookes, Emperor Rosko, and Annie Nightingale. Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman played his ‘Pick Of The Pops’, climbing his way up the Top Thirty every Sunday, Pop-Pickers. There was also Jimmy Savile, Kenny Everett, and the rest. Chances are that whoever’s backsides warmed those DJ-chairs would become established as names and faces. It just happened to be these names and faces. They were not yet self-styled as presenters, they were disc-jockeys who burbled between the hits. It was fun, it was silly. It was daft. But it was a frivolous decade.

They did listener phone-in’s and played jingles, an incorrect answer to the bizarre concept of ‘Give Us A Break’ – Davis Lee Travis’ ‘Snooker On The Radio’, earned the listener a Quack-Quack Oops! in novelty-synthesiser voice. Was it good? Not really. It was just… there. You turn on the radio, and it’s there. A background gibberish between snatched half-heard music. It seeps in like a sludge of tepid chip-fat to congeal around your brain. I heard it, almost without realising it, without conscious effort. You did too, don’t try to deny it. They were amiable buffoons. They were non-threatening jesters, friends at the turn of a dial. Programming was rigidly structured. With the breakfast slot catering to commuters, kids setting out for school, with regular time-checks to synchronise leaving for the bus. The morning show targets housewives – as they still were, or the factories where Radio One was relayed over speakers. “Blockbuster” itself was criticised because its siren-effect confused factory-workers who mistook it for the fire alarm.

Punk could be effectively ignored, or restricted to John Peel. Daytime radio waited until it became a safer New Wave, and more radio-friendly groups such as Jam or the Police came along. In the meantime it played its cosy diet of Carpenters, Abba and the New Seekers. And the latest Chinn-Chapman creation, from Mud to Smokie to Suzi Quatro. If the old Light Programme had wallowed in its self-satisfied complacency, its new Radio One-One-One-derful replacement soon eased itself into the same tired run-out groove. As insubstantial as tinsel, controversy not only discouraged, but ruthlessly eradicated. When DLT had the temerity to suggest listeners support a petition to outlaw the seal-cull clubbing, he was swiftly censured. When he later voiced his bitterness about the Smashie & Nicey caricature as perpetrated by Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, it was largely because their sketches were so accurately barbed. When Elvis Costello voiced his frustrations about radio being ‘in the hands of such a lot of fools, tryin’ to anaesthetise the way that you feel’, they played that too because the catchy satirical chorus goes ‘wonderful radio, marvellous radio, wonderful radio, Radio Radio, Radio Radio’.

The ‘Radio One Roadshow’ was an annual exercise in populism, devised by controller Johnny Beerling, as a way of getting it out of studio-confines and taking it to the people. Alan Freeman hosted the first one, broadcast live from Newquay’s North Fistral Beach on 23 July 1973, then trundling on to perform from the drizzling car-parks and windy promenades of Britain’s other seaside resorts. Kid Jensen and Paul Burnett did it. DLT did Torquay in 1976 with guests, merchandising, games, and navigator ‘Smiley Miley’ (Tony Miles). It was grim fun in a cheerful ‘Hi-de-Hi!’ kind of way. A good time was had by all, in which the DJ’s got to mingle and entertain and do their thing to a largely-responsive and appreciative live crowd.

In some cases the DJ’s actually became the records they played. Jimmy Savile started in 1962 with a Decca single “Ahab The Arab”. Although Tony Blackburn’s run of singles failed to chart – “So Much Love” reached no higher than no.31 in January 1968, a contrivance masquerading as Laurie Lingo And The Dipsticks actually hit no.7 in April 1976 with an anglicised version of CW McCall’s citizen-band hit “Convoy”. It was an atrocity committed by Dave Lee Travis and Paul Burnett. Mildly amusing at best, its Top Ten status had more to do with the familiarity of its participants than its quality. While, although the rota of ‘Top Of The Pops’ provided a visibility window, the transition to television represented a career move on and up. Kenny Everett, an innovative and experimental radio DJ who took the cut-up style pioneered by Jack Jackson (interspersing his own voice with clips of Tony Hancock and others), then remade himself into a dubious TV figure with his over-the-top comedy shows. Noel Edmonds, who got his radio-break replacing Everett when Kenny was first fired from Radio 1, used his radio-tenure as an up-gear stepping-stone to a long-term TV career. Jimmy Savile did ‘Jim’ll Fix It’, creepily teasing sniggering little girls with ‘are you married?’, then scoring lucrative TV-ad contracts for ‘Klunk-Klik’ and ‘The Age Of The Train’. Alan Freeman did voice-over ads for ‘Brentford Nylons’. Even Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart transitioned his ‘Junior Choice’ radio-status across to front ‘Crackerjack’ on TV, despite having no discernible rapport with children.

Dave Lee Travis never quite achieved that transition. He guested on the ‘Celebrity Squares’ game-show with Bonnie Langford and Little & Large, and revenged himself on Noel Edmonds for a practical-joke phone-in by ‘gunging’ him on ‘Noel’s House Party’. His most determined shot came when video became the weapon of choice in Pop promotion, and he inaugurated ‘The Golden Oldie Picture Show’ (from 9 January 1985), a BBC1 series in which videos were devised around old pre-video hits, some of which were mildly amusing, but without the active participation of the artist, they largely failed to ignite, and the show was dropped. Video didn’t kill the radio star. But it didn’t help his career either.

The neat tie-in would not outlast the time-frame. Christopher Chataway, Minister of Post and Telecommunications, announced his intention to introduce airwave competition. And as early as 1973 licences were granted for the first commercial radio stations, LBC and Capital Radio, with a broadcasting range restricted to London. Although temporarily halted by a suspicious Labour government in 1976, the return of a Conservative administration in 1979 led to a rapid expansion of the ILP network into the Eighties. This process was shadowed by the growth of local BBC stations. Yet Radio One retained its potency. During the 1979 election campaign Labour leader Michael Foot hoofed up and down Britain addressing and haranguing every meeting and assembly. Mrs Thatcher appeared on the Jimmy Young Radio Show once, spoke about running the economy as her father had run his corner-shop in Grantham, and the gross simplification made such sense to the mass radio audience that she had to do no more.

Radio One itself began to adjust to the changes. Kenny Everett caught a new mood, ‘I hate DJs who just say ‘that was Ricky Twinge and The Midwives, the time is now 10:15 on your groovy platter station, Radio 1, and now a great big biggy from a really outasite band “You’re Too Much” by the Stoatcatchers.’ As Radio Two audience-figures grew proportionally to the shifting demographic, Radio One lost its on-air supremacy, and through the initiative of controllers Johnny Beerling and Matthew Banister, began a deliberate policy of repositioning itself towards targeting a more youthful listenership. By the time Dave Lee Travis delivered his on-air resignation – 8 August 1993, there was a plethora of alternatives in which to continue a radio career. But the audience-figures of the 1970’s were gone forever. DJ’s had evolved into double-deck club superstars. Zoo-radio presenters had studio posses to laugh appropriately at their scripted gags. Chris Evans and Chris Moyles rode the ‘Breakfast Show’ into new decades. Ask the majority of people in your local mall today who presents the Radio One Breakfast Show, or who has the current no.1 single, and they shrug. Who cares…? While Dave Lee Travis is accused of being a serial sex-offender. Following in Jimmy Savile’s squalid wake. Regardless of the truth behind the allegations, it’s a sad postscript to a shoddy decade. At their very best, they seemed eccentrically harmless. The novelty fridge-magnets that remind you of the frivolous holiday you spent at the tacky seaside resort. Now they’re not even that.

Poem: 'SNOWFLAKES FALLING ON THE INTERNATIONAL DATELINE'

SNOWFLAKES FALLING 

ON THE INTERNATIONAL 

DATELINE / 

UNDER A LOVER’S MOON (26.5.89) 

and 

Cathy says 

‘you’re so quiet, 

is something wrong?’ 

on TV 

people move 

in mysterious tides 

through Tiananmen Square 

ads 

dislocate 

into each other 

seals shimmer 

across sandpits 

towards the Wash 

and I’m 

screaming inside 

Cathy says 

‘you’re so quiet, 

is something wrong?’

I want to say 

it’s over, finally 

it’s over,         a 

beautiful lover 

is gone and I’m 

sick with pain, 

I can’t staunch the 

pictures in my head 

and I can’t stand 

their tenderness 

but Cathy says 

‘you’re so quiet, 

is something wrong?’ 

while on TV 

people scatter 

like human shrapnel 

through Tiananmen Square 

and seals split waves 

into shimmering ice 

and I say 

‘no, I’m fine, 

just a little 

tired’ 

 Published in:- ‘IRON No.61’ (UK – June 1990)

Cabaret Voltaire: Live In Leeds, And Manchester

NAG, NAG, NAG, NAG,

NAG, NAG, NAG

CABARET VOLTAIRE 

at ‘Leeds University’, West Yorkshire

For almost a second, something’s vaguely disturbing here. There’s a long dark hall of glass and concrete. A mass of people in the drab greys and blacks of functional industrial wear. The occasional bright burst of hair outvoted by long coats and intense expressions. Heads are uniformly up-tilted at 45-degrees, obsessively fixed on a stage stripped bare but for silver mike-stand, cluster of drums and cable coils, to where the giant video screen fast-scrambles images of Test Department’s exhortative paeans to work and sweat. From outside it’s a ritual shot-through with Fritz Lang-ian ‘Metropolis’ stills, or (yawn) Orwellian intimations of populace-programming. The unease gets dispelled as soon as it’s firmed though, by Pete Hope aggressively pamphleting a Cabaret Voltaire biography, and John Keenan leafleting the Troggs appearance at the local Bierkeller. ‘I put the Cabs on in… um – 1978, with Joy Division supporting’ he recalls conversationally, ‘they’re better in a smaller venue, more intimate.’ Perhaps you shouldn’t try for intimacy with the Cabs? Perhaps that’s not part of their scenario…?

But such disquisition gets effectively stomped on by the sheer autowreck physicality of the “Sensoria” play-in. With the two Micro-Phonies positioned around the nagging hypnotic sound-repetitions and the flickering visuals of the Cabaret Voltaire total environment syndrome. Stephen ‘Mal’ Mallinder is in a bulky flak jacket. He seems looser, almost twitch-dancing, but it remains a private ceremony in which the audience are incidental. Richard H Kirk is in leathers, feeding the synth-lines and guitar breaks with his back to the mass, in pure Bebop. This year’s physical drummer is Mark Tattersall. Spectrums run along Mal’s fret. Layers of ear-shredding electronic sound builds and ebbs, ducks and weaves, attacks and decays on a loose-time schedule. Voice emerges through it in tantalising fragments. Song-titles are punctuations denoting rhythmic shifts.

There are very obvious developments of the strategy first fielded on last year’s ‘The Crackdown’ album (August 1983), and even if “Sensoria” IS their most cunningly assembled single-shot to date, it still segments seamlessly and effortlessly into what the band was always about. Extending and over-extending timelessly to the very edge of ad nauseam. A digital mantra. An alchemical chant aimed at the post-Machine Age, not the charts for the Teen-Age. The rhythms this time seem more pure, more stark and emphatic, more total, like they’re stealth-borrowing some of the brutal primitivism (but none of the methodology) from the metal-bashing avant garde. And even the rapid-run video cut-ups behind them are more austere – no sex or cartoons now, just hard industrial shots and totalitarian footage.

On the screen they’re peeling a face back from a skull. It’s “Just Fascination” circling and pulsing. Hitler’s caught in a time-loop. Mao Zedong (Tse-Tung) smiles beatifically. Hitler/ Mao/ Mussolini/ Thatcher/ Kennedy – the cult of personality is contrasted with the Cab’s cult of un-personality. With the figures on stage reduced down to near silhouettes against the screen. And their sound to part of a huge process of sounds. They use faces like Warhol silk-screens faces, reducing them down and pointing them up as the mere brain-furniture they are. Media spawn pouring with the fast-forward permanently depressed. Kennedy, Thatcher, Mussolini. Mark pores studiously over congas, drum-kit and snares, the top of his cropped-head a round ‘O’. A long autobahn shifts behind him, at warp factor ten. Massive rhythms fall hard and denser… white-noise and tape voices spray, effectively drowning out the possibility of applause between each long number, an amber light pulsing on a sound hook-in, spots breaking out across the walls and ceiling.

Why Hitler? Why swastikas and marching men? A fierce altercation in the dressing room. ‘They’re clips from Leni Riefenstahl art-movies. So you can’t say ‘they’re Nazis’, ‘cos they’re not. They’re ANTI-Nazis!’ But that’s not the point. We’re talking communications technology. We’re talking medium not message, talking Global Village, talking ‘Cult of Personality’, and that transcends the party line. Cabaret Voltaire is vivid, is stunning, is multi-sensory. Even when they’re gone and it’s obvious there’s no truck with contrived encores, the speakers still keep spitting out treated chants and noise-garbage, and the heads still stay of forty-five degrees, obsessively fixed on a stage stripped bare…

(The single “Sensoria” is taken from the album ‘Micro-Phonies’ (Some Bizarre/Virgin, November 1984). The video directed by Peter Care)

AND THEN, SOMEONE,

SOMETIMES, CRACKSDOWN!!!

CABARET VOLTAIRE 

at ‘The Hacienda Club’, Manchester 

Pete Hope, singist with Box, sits catatonic with concentration. Razored bald but for a tyre-tread shading up the back and a truncated quiff at the front, he’s hunched forward, impassive, watching…

For a start there’s Double-Vision, triple-screened…

Two videos on closed circuit relay overhead, suspended between light-booms and girders, and one more screen panning across the back-stage backdrop. They’re synchronised, if not always exactly to the same colour-setting or degree of focal blur, into a festive junk-food for the eyes/ears, a funfair Coney Island of the mind. A Skinhead gets naked in a bare concrete yard, wraps himself in gasoline-soaked blanket and torches himself. William Burroughs crosses a city street all wasted and cadaver-thin, enters a phone-booth, lights a cigarette beneath a ripped collage of French-language ad hoardings. Riot Police (as on the ‘Voice Of America’ sleeve (Rough Trade, July 1980), or some Kent State University documentary) advance through tear-gas FX with nightsticks erect. There’s TV-ad ‘Jungle Burger’ out-takes with galloping penises. Poorly-animated UFO’s from some lost monochrome ‘Outer Limits’ episode. Geisha Boys And Temple Girls. Aerial shots of Tokyo, sodium streetlights, an auto factory, Capitalism + Electronics. The power of technology + the technology of power. “Toyota City” – you get the picture? Yes, we see.

And all the while ‘someone, sometimes, CRACKSDOWN!!!’

An insistently solid pagan repetition of Funk bass strips Western Music back to its primal roots. The natural-magic triggers of race-consciousness. Stephen Mallinder mouths lyrics that are vocal rhythms in chant. His white guitar, brown C&A sweatshirt and red neckerchief concede no flash or show-bizzy projection-pretentions, yet Cabaret Voltaire is all around you. I’ve heard the current ‘Crackdown’ (1983) set on domestic sound-centre, seen the Doublevision-label video on small-screen, met the persona dramatis at Western Works, yet experienced en masse, collectively, in toto, it’s stunning. A multi-sensory circus for all senses – and then some. An organic unity only glimpsed at when its constituent elements are ingested in plural forms. Live, with added perspective-effect and depth-of-field, it’s an incomparable spectacle. The only remotely suitable analogy I can come up with is the magnificent Clock DVA stage ritual.

Richard H Kirk chain-smokes throughout. He’s in leopard-skin top, leather pants, hennaed (?) hair shimmering and slip-slithering over his forehead. He feeds in squiffs of synth, some silver metallic sax passages, some guitar as required by whim or premeditation. He sequences the infiltration of taped voices burbling beneath the mix and filling the twixt-number silences. Alan Fish squats behind a Berlin Wall barrage of Perspex drums, hexagon synth-drums, and percussion, meticulously laying down anchor-chains of beat around which all else swirls. He’s in red, a single aquatic-turquoise ear-stud, a frontal bush of scrupulously clean hair black against the shifting colour-filtered videos.

‘Twenty-four, – twenty-four, – twenty-four hours a day’ intones Mal into a web of sound dense enough to make neutrons dance in different formations. Real notes, real solid drop-beat riffs and kicks plentifully jived up by a grafting of taped voices that decode all those messages programmed into the conventional syntax of ‘conventional’ musics. Normal service may never be resumed.

Cabaret Voltaire is about as old as Atari Electronics Inc – but it’s getting younger every day. You’ll see nothing quite like this on any British stage this year.

Pete Hope, singist with Box, is sat hunched in introverted isolation, scarcely blinking. Impassive. Watching…

PHILIP ROTH'S 'PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT'

‘WHEN YOU’RE 

YOUNG, GIFTED 

…AND HORNY’

Book Review of:

‘PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT’

by PHILIP ROTH 

(Jonathan Cape, 1969, then Penguin Books, 

1986 ISBN: 0-14-005521-5)

‘seeing as I had no choice, 

I became honest…’

What is this thing called Portnoy’s Complaint? The title suggests a kind of medical condition. An exotic ailment with highly specific symptoms and side-effects. And the novel takes the form of analysis divulged to a psychiatrist who is sometimes addressed in pleading tones of frustrated incomprehension as ‘Doctor’ Spielvogel. But a complaint is also a protest against perceived injustice. You take your flawed purchases along to the Complaints Department and list your grievances in expectation of a refund or at least a sympathetic hearing. And the novel is that too. A long howl of protest against the condition of being Alexander Portnoy in his time, place and body. We read sympathetically, up to a point, but no – there will be no refund.

The key to its text is ‘the key to what determined my character, what causes me to be living in this predicament.’ It’s not chronological. It leaps around in time as the narrative accumulates, like a string of anecdotes or routines running chaotically into each other, triggered by theme rather than sequentially. Showing the long shadow that childhood and confused infant sexuality casts across adult behaviour, so that ‘my right mind is simply that inheritance of terror I bring with me out of my ridiculous past.’

It’s a beautifully written novel, with exactly the correct leavening of coarseness and truth (‘I pledge my allegiance to the twat of the United States of America’). There are literary and cultural references, to ‘Joseph K’ – Kafka, to Jack Benny and Tom Paine, but most of all to Freud. I first read ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ many years ago, when, due to the illegitimate circumstances of my birth I also considered myself something of the social outsider. I, too, had the secret that must never be uttered. Is that the same as Portnoy’s ‘whining edge of permanent disgruntlement and grievance’? No – obviously not, but sufficient to chime. Close enough for resonance. At least it seemed that way, to me.

I remembered the sex-humour of this self-confessed ‘Raskolnikov of jerking off’ well. The bathroom masturbation scene where the arcing spurt of jism hits the light-bulb, where it sizzles and bubbles. As well as the comic scenario of excess that anticipates by some decades the scurrilously-iconic scene in the movie ‘American Pie’ (1999), featuring the sexual assault on the apple pie. Here, Alex discovers some raw liver in the family fridge on arriving home from school. It was ‘rolled round my cock in the bathroom at three-thirty – and then had again on the end of a fork, at five-thirty, along with the other members of that poor innocent family of mine.’ Yet although Alex’s masturbatory high-jinks take on dimensions of Jewish guilt, they’re also universal enough to be instantly recognisably true. Yes, that’s how it is. Exactly. This book should be a compulsory primer for every pubescent female, as a glimpse into the way the male psyche really works, as a corrective to all the soapy Rom-Com TV movie-stuff, and all the sensitive metro-sexual New Man posturing. Here, read this!

In what purports to be a confessional psychoanalytical monologue there’s an obligation to a core of truth, even if it’s a variety of fictionalised truth. Even if it’s a sometime’s squeamish kind of veracity, as in the uncomfortably disturbing truths of… say, Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ (1959). Something that pokes at areas of the psyche that provoke unsettling responses. And the tale Roth tells is recognisably part of human experience, and hence a valid ingredient for narrative portrayal. Yet the fact that Roth kicked off a seismic controversy on its first publication, was due not only to its pruriently detailed wank-sequences, as much as its irreverent depiction of Jewish identity. I remembered those sex scene, I’d forgotten, or failed to pick up on the Jewish presence. Suddenly, now, I know more about ‘shikses’ and ‘goyim’ than I ever need to know.

There are many ethnic communities making up the greater New York melting pot. From Italian and Afro-American to Hispanic and Puerto-Rican. Jewish is but one. And Philip Roth captures every nuance of its distinctiveness to perfection. Even ‘the terror bred into my bones’, the fear and guilt, particular to the Jewish family, is readily accessible and empathic. Isn’t Catholicism based around original-sin guilt? The moral policeman inserted into the back of the brain monitoring behaviour. But then again, if those two great and opposing religions both inculcate guilt, isn’t that also preying upon the essential good conscience that’s common to all humans? If there was no conscience, there would be no guilt. Which is not to claim that Jewish guilt is in any way comparable to Catholic guilt, or any other brand of guilt.

Philip Milton Roth was born 19th March 1933, and grew up in Newark, New Jersey. As he later documents in an ‘Observer’ item promoting his novel ‘I Married A Communist’ (1998), ‘I was eight when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour… twelve when Germany surrendered… and Japan surrendered on 14 August 1945’. In 1941 the fictional Portnoy family move from Jersey City – because of anti-Semitism, to Newark. Making the ‘Schnoz’ Portnoy a ‘child of the forties, of network radio and World War Two.’ Hiroshima and Nagasaki ‘went up in a puff, one week when I was twelve.’ The autobiographical parallels scarcely need underlining. But more personally significant, young Alex sees himself as one of ‘the sad and watery-eyed sons of Jewish parents, sick to the gills from rolling through these heaving seas of guilt.’ His parents, Sophie and Jack, are ‘the outstanding producers and packagers of guilt in our time!’ A double-act subtly eroding him, their parental manipulation game expertly charted.

His insurance salesman father’s constipation makes him ‘the patron saint of self-sacrifice’, with ‘his intestinal tract in the hands of the firm of Worry, Fear and Frustration.’ Yet he’s more dominated by his mother’s supernatural ubiquity, ‘scolding, correcting, reproving, criticising, fault-finding without end.’ She plots her loving blackmail, poopie-dramas and inquisitions, as well as supervising the correction of Alex’s undescended testicle in a world ‘dripping with germs fraught with peril.’ Roth’s transcription of their push-pull dialogue that conspires towards trapping him inescapably is both recognisably true, and laugh-out-loud funny. A confusion of desires. As a result ‘I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions.’

The narrative ranges across the full breadth of his life up to now, that now being 1966. The Civil Rights struggle and the Sexual Revolution are said to be happening all around him. And he’s opportunistically ready to take personal advantage of both. His adult sexual conquistadoring – ‘another gentile heart broken’, with the ‘unsullied thrill of sadism’ is part of his revenge. A manifest symptom of his ‘complaint’ against the world. He’s ‘the tantrum kid’, and what he’s doing with the girls he refers to as The Pumpkin, The Pilgrim or The Monkey, is ‘I don’t seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds.’ They are scores to settle, ‘having your goy, and eating one too’. It’s his self-serving manipulation of these women under the guise of the new morality that, to me, is more offensive than his honesty about adolescent tossing-off.

There’s some doubt about the girlfriend he calls ‘The Monkey’ – Mary Jane Reed, who he picks up on Lexington Avenue. She seems to be the epitome of, and answer to, every teenage boy’s wank-fantasy. Can she really be true? He suggests that she’s been emotionally damaged by her dysfunctional West Virginian family background, she is ‘this brutalised woman, this coarse, tormented, self-loathing, bewildered, lost, identity-less’ woman. Suggesting all families can be equally toxic, in their own way. That her rapacious sexual appetite, even if it’s not faked, is in part a device to lure him into commitment, into marriage. A move he is determinedly not about to make. That he is commitment-phobic is both a result of, and a reaction against his infant moral programming. His fight against the claustrophobic restrictions of his boyhood.

When he declares himself an atheist, his father’s response is charged with deliberate insinuation, ‘what do you know about the history of the Jewish people, that you have the right to call their religion, that’s been good enough for people a lot smarter than you and a lot older than you for two-thousand years – that you can call all that suffering and heartache a lie!’ And his sister Hannah articulately refutes his need to be seen as not just Jewish, but human – ‘you could have screamed all you wanted that you were not a Jew, that you were a human and had nothing whatever to do with their stupid suffering heritage’ but in Nazi Europe ‘you would have been taken away to be disposed of…’ In spite of which he rehearses chat-up lines in which he introduces himself as ‘Alton Peterson – totally goy’.

He spends a weekend in Davenport, Iowa, with the blonde girl he calls The Pumpkin. The experience delineates his separation, his alienation as part of a community within – but different from the world he knows. It is November 1950. He is seventeen years old. And on an Elm Street that might have been painted by Norman Rockwell, he – the insurance salesman’s son, can’t believe he’s in the same America. ‘Why then can’t I believe I am eating my dinner in America, that America is where I am, instead of some other place.’ It’s here he discovers ‘conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at.’ That the English language can be a form of interactive conversation, in which words can be ‘little gifts, containing meanings.’

The long howl of protest against the condition of being Alex Portnoy finally comes together in escape to Israel, where – with post-modern awareness, Naomi skewers the core of the novel, ‘everything you say is somehow always twisted, some way or another, to come out ‘funny’… in some little way or other, everything is ironical, or self-deprecating. Self mockery.’ This is Philip Roth laying out the ‘key’ of the novel exactly as it is, where ‘self-laceration is never more than a memory away.’

In his final desperation he attempts to sexually force himself on Naomi – and there’s no way rape can ever be passed off as humour, except in the irony that Portnoy, ever-priapic in the American diaspora of blonde ‘shikses’, fails to achieve erection in the supposed heart of the promised Jewish homeland. Leaving him stricken with impotence.

The novel ends with a long five-line scream. And a punchline.

PHILIP ROTHOGRAPHY 

‘GOODBYE COLUMBUS’ (Houghton Miffin, 1959) the title novella, originally published in ‘The Paris Review’ (and filmed in 1969, with Ali MacGraw as ‘Brenda Patimkin’, and Richard Benjamin as ‘Neil Klugman’), plus five short stories, ‘The Conversion Of The Jews’, ‘Defender Of The Faith’, ‘Epstein’, ‘Eli, The Fanatic’ and ‘You Can’t Tell A Man By The Song He Sings’

‘LETTING GO’ (Random House. 1962) a novel in seven sections, charting Gabe Wallach’s attempts to find ‘the world of feeling’

‘PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT’ (Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1969, Penguin Books, 1986)

‘WHEN SHE WAS GOOD’ (Random House, 1967) Roth’s only novel with a female protagonist, Lucy Nelson, a Midwestern girl in the 1940’s wounded by life and wild with righteousness, she sets out to make the men of her world do their duty by their wives and children. ‘With unerring fidelity, Roth records the flat surface of provincial American life, the look and feel and sound of it, and then penetrates it to the cesspool of its invisible dynamism’ (‘Newsweek’)

‘OUR GANG’ (Random House, 1971) a political satire about ‘Trick E Dixon’, a thinly disguised ‘Tricky’ Richard Nixon

‘THE BREAST’ (Houghton Miffin, 1972) the first of Roth’s three ‘Kapesh’ novels (the other two being ‘The Professor Of Desire’ and ‘The Dying Animal’ in 2001), which – in deliberate reference to Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ and Gogol’s ‘The Nose’, a man turns into a 155-pound female breast. It ‘picks up where ‘Portnoy’ left off and carries the main issue to an imaginary extreme that turns out to be the far edge of certain human realities, including some unanalysable ones, such as the reality of strangeness… the best example yet of Roth’s astonishing prowess when he is at the top of his talent and control’ (Ted Solotaroff, ‘Esquire’) ‘Roth’s prose is, as ever, elegant and intelligent, delicate even when at its most crude. It sent me… back to Kafka – a brave thing to do, but he stands the comparison well’ (Margaret Drabble, ‘The Listener’)

‘THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL’ (Holt, Rinehart And Winston, 1973) Baseball as a slapstick symbol of America, the adventures of the ‘Patriots’ – the only homeless big-league team in American history – hilarious, bizarre, and strangely poignant. ‘A comic extravaganza… parody, burlesque, and verbal ingenuity’ (‘The times Literary Supplement’). ‘Genuinely Rabelaisian, word-rich, in the great tradition, and it is gloriously funny, moving, revealing about what twentieth-century life is all about’ (Anthony Burgess)

‘MY LIFE AS A MAN’ (1974) the savage, sometimes lurid story of the all-out battle waged between the young writer Peter Tarnopol and the wife who is his nemesis, his demon and his muse. In this novel, Roth comes to grips with the wild inconsistencies of life and art, and exposes them to his relentless comic touch and electric prose. ‘One of the most fiercely engaged, incisive, funny and tormented American novelists… has told it like it was – like it is – for him, and it makes his book a scalding, unique addition to the lasting literature about men and women’ (Seymour Krim, ‘Newsday’)

‘READING MYSELF AND OTHERS’ (1975) a collection of essays

‘THE PROFESSOR OF DESIRE’ (1977) the story of David Kepesh, an adventurous man of intelligence and feeling who makes his way through a world of sensual possibilities as he tries to find both pleasure and dignity. ‘Philip Roth is a great historian of modern eroticism. After the lyrical exultation of sexuality that we know from such as Henry Miller, Roth speaks of a sexuality that questions itself; it is still hedonism, but it is problematic, wounded, ironic hedonism. His is the uncommon union of confession and irony. Infinitely vulnerable in his sincerity and infinitely elusive in his irony’ (Milan Kundera, ‘Le Monde’). ‘A thoughtful, even gentle, stylistically elegant novel… a fine display of literary skills’ (‘The New York Times Book Review’)

‘THE GHOST WRITER’ (1979) the first of Roth’s four ‘Zuckerman’ novels (with ‘Zuckerman Unbound’, ‘The Anatomy Lesson’, and ‘The Prague Orgy’), a celebrated blend of sympathy and pitilessness were the trademarks of EI Lonoff’s work. And it was to this great American-Jewish writer that Nathan Zuckerman turned for support and inspiration. Only to find, when he visited Lonoff’s rural retreat, that the disturbing presence of an enigmatic house-guest haunted his imagination. It has seemed impossible that America’s most famous literary ascetic should keep a mistress. But there she was. The beautiful, gifted, desirable Amy Bellette… or was she Anne Frank? ‘it all adds up to a beautifully written story, admirably terse and restrained’ (‘Sunday Telegraph’)

‘A PHILIP ROTH READER’ (1980)

‘ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND’ (1981) hero of ‘The Ghost Writer’ Nathan Zuckerman is now the author of his own bestselling novel. The comic-erotic masterpiece ‘Carnovsky’ has rocketed him onto the cover of ‘Life’ magazine – and into the arms of the great American public. Now Zuckerman can’t even get on a bus without being recognised, he’s hounded by gossip columnists and ominous phone calls and, worst of all, by Alvin Pepler, would-be novelist and one-time celebrity on the TV-quiz ‘Smart Money’… fame, fortune or fiction? Something seems to be dealing the death-blow to Zuckerman’s marriage, his family and his former life. ‘A rollicking read’ (Martin Amis, ‘Observer’). ‘Crammed with good jokes and penetrating observations of life and fiction’ (Francis King, ‘Spectator’)

‘THE ANATOMY LESSON’ (1983) the hilarious tale of Zuckerman, now a famous forty-year-old writer, who decides to give it all up and become a doctor – and a pornographer, instead. ‘The finest, boldest and funniest piece of fiction which Philip Roth has yet produced’ (‘Spectator’). ‘The old story of low, piggish, real life undermining high ideals. This is daring, first-rate stuff’ (‘Punch’). ‘The Anatomy Lesson shows Roth at his peak. The book is possessed by an exuberant desperation. Scorchingly funny, gravely discomforting’ (Harold Pinter, ‘Observer Books Of The Year’)

‘THE PRAGUE ORGY’ (1985)

‘THE COUNTER-LIFE’ (1986)

‘THE FACTS: A NOVELIST’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY’ (1988)

‘DECEPTION’ (1990)

‘SABBATH’S THEATRE’ (1995)

‘AMERICAN PASTORAL’ (Houghton Miffin, 1997) critic Bernice Rubens calls it ‘a classical novel in the sense that it can be read over and over again, and promises to enrich the reader anew. It has many layers, domestic, political, psychological, and each layer magically merges into the other. I must not omit the industrial layer which concern a glove factory (dysfunctional family business) and its details of sewing, cutting, shaping of various fabrics. This layer of the novel is as seductive as any other. On the domestic and political front, the novel concerns itself with (Seymour ‘Swede Levov)’s daughter, a ‘weatherman’ of the sixties, who, pursued by the police, goes underground. Her family have lost sight of her for years; it is the father’s search for his daughter, dogged by his own guilt, his rage, and his heartbreak, that forms the core of this wonderful novel’ (in ‘Guardian’, 17 October 1998)

‘I MARRIED A COMMUNIST’ (Cape, 1998) as told to Nathan Zuckerman by Ira’s brother, Murray, Tim Adams explains, this is ‘the concluding part of a trilogy that began with ‘Sabbath’s Theatre’ (1995) and continued with ‘American Pastoral’ (1997). Taken together, these three books are likely to stand as the significant fictional achievement of our decade. Each of the novels explores as its tragedy the ways in which a formidable American soul is broken on a particular historical moment. The soul in question here belongs to Ira Ringold – aka Iron Rinn, giant of Newark, New Jersey; miner turned radio-star; Abe Lincoln impersonator, charismatic communist. The events that overwhelm him are the McCarthy trials of the Fifties, to which he is indicted by his film-star wife’ (‘Observer, 18 October 1998). He adds that ‘one reading of the novel’ could be seen as ‘nothing more than a badly concealed account of Roth’s own ‘betrayal’ by his partner of twenty years, the actress Claire Bloom, whose brutal memoir of her life with the writer ‘Leaving A Doll’s House’ was published last year’ In the book she is ‘Eve Frame’. But as Linda Grant points out Roth ‘has always deliberately muddled the distinction between the true and the false to dazzle and entertain’ (‘Guardian’ 3 October 1998)

‘THE HUMAN STAIN’ (2000) Zuckerman observes retired Professor of Classics Coleman Silk – played by Anthony Hopkins in the 2003 movie, with Nicole Kidman


‘THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA’ (2004)

‘EVERYMAN’ (2006)

‘INDIGNATION’ (2008)

‘THE HUMBLING’ (2009)

‘NEMESIS’ (Houghton Miffin, 2010) Roth told an interviewer that this account of a polio epidemic in Summer 1944's Newark – his thirty-first novel, would be his last. We shall see...!