Our Sacred Monsters

…

WHY THE ENGLISH HATE SURREALISM

the standards of virtue now prevalent are incompatible with the production of good poetry

 – Bertrand Russell

Britain has spawned several sacred monsters: acknowledged precursors of Surrealism – from the mysterious, disputed author of The Revenger’s Tragedy to the dream-works of Lewis Carroll (by way of Swift, Sterne, Blake, Coleridge, the Gothic novel, Emily Bronte, and the 'mirth and marvels' of Tom Ingoldsby) – but – paradoxically, Britain has engendered very few self-defined Surrealists, in the contemporary sense.

Notwithstanding an indigenous ‘tendency to irrationality’ and a trend of anarchic fantasy in English art, literature and popular culture (Lottie ‘Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay!’ Collins,  Fred Karno's Army, The Crazy Gang, The Whitehall Follies, Take it From Here, The Goons, Carry On films, St Trinian’s, Screaming Lord Sutch, Basil Brush, Gurney Slade, farcical sex scandals, Union Jack knickers, Madam Cyn) it is clearly the case that, if transposed to these shores, a movement such as Surrealism is quickly regarded as ‘foreign’ or out-of-place.

‘You know, it's just not cricket', says your true-born Englishman in his 'modern rustic' kitchen, his chintzy drawing room or eco-friendly conservatory somewhere in Middle England.

Victorian critics regarded artists or poets who found inspiration in Continental trends – like Swinburne, Wilde, Whistler or Beardsley, for example – as very dubious influences indeed: ‘cuckoos in the nest’ or, even, a dire threat to the moral order. This stance was exemplified by Robert Buchanan in his polemical pamphlet The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day (1872) where, in the course of a vitriolic attack on Baudelaire, he refers to Paris as 'the most debauched city of the world'.  

Like Baudelaire and the Cancan, Surrealism was always going to be seen as just another ‘un-British’ import perhaps reluctantly tolerated but actually seen as a sinister aberration. Most would prefer to deport it back to the sin cities of Europe, where such louche, ‘decadent’ or subversive japes rightfully belong – although all classes often displayed an ambivalent, even prurient, attraction to Le Cancan, ‘Gay Paree’ and bawdy European ‘naughtiness’ in general. Hence the popularity of Variety Show or Music Hall acts like the Tiller Girls (originally named Les Jolies Petites), or the Colonna Troupe of Amelia Newham from St John’s Wood (aka Mlle Colonna) whose high-kicking performances at The Alhambra, Leicester Square, could be relied upon to attract the attention of militant campaigners from the National Vigilance Association.

Likewise, when exhibited at the Grafton Gallery in London in 1893, Degas’ painting In the Café (L’Absinthe) (1875) was found to be a morally repulsive example of the flippant and vulgar artistic ideals of ‘new painters’, sparking a lengthy controversy in the Westminster Gazette; the same picture was loudly hissed by disgusted bidders when put up for auction at Christie’s. Numerous other examples could be mentioned. All of which tends to corroborate the opinion of Bertrand Russell when he said moral indignation ‘is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world’.

One thinks of the 'mad Frenchmen' gently parodied by Arthur Machen through the character of the worried father in his semi-autobiographical novel The Hill of Dreams (1907): 'The parson began to fear that his son was like some of those mad Frenchmen of whom he had read, young fellows who had a sort of fury of literature, and gave their whole lives to it, spending days over a page, and years over a book, pursuing art as Englishmen pursue money...'. Indeed, a regressive and venal Victorianism is still the dominant attitude today in most respectable circles which, even in the twenty-first century, remain resolutely insular in a supercilious, fog-in-the-Channel kind of way. One thinks of that moment in Through the Looking-Glass (1871) when passengers in a railway carriage utter a telepathic chorus of thoughts for Alice’s benefit. “Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!”

In an essay on ‘The Visual Poetics of British Surrealism’ (1996), Michel Remy (‘that most unlikely creature, a French enthusiast for English Surrealism’ to quote George Melly) probed this terrain and explained how the initial progress of Surrealism in England was impeded by an existing, well-established counter-movement defined as the ‘Bloomsbury Spirit’ and exemplified by the theories of Roger Fry and Clive Bell. The dominant character of ‘Bloomsburyism’ (and its subsequent ramifications in the work of Ben Nicholson and Duncan Grant, among others), emphasised the ‘visual centrality’ of clearly delineated conceptions of order, structure, integration and unification. This aesthetic was developed into a doctrine of ‘pure art’ characterised by a militant ‘exclusion of representation’, the pursuit of a metaphysical, ‘spiritual’, ideal of hyper-abstraction; a kind of ethereal, visual music. This viewpoint was later reinforced by other writers, such as critic Clement Greenberg, who – promoting Abstract Expressionism as the epitome of ‘superior culture’ and a counterforce against both Socialist Realism and commercial (capitalist) Kitsch – took a similar approach in the late 1930s. And, of course, the toleration of art only if it has a ‘spiritual purpose’ (i.e. devotional parables, theological propaganda or cautionary tales and righteous fables of renunciation and self-denial) is a typical Puritan strategy. Ideally – like Plato, the Church Fathers and the Iconoclasts– the out-and-out Puritan would banish idolatrous ‘graven images’ (art is idolatry) altogether, but social-cultural pressures are such that a ‘spiritual’ aesthetic of ‘pure art’ provides an expedient, opportunistic alternative to outright abolition. However, to cite Russell again, this ‘generally means that it is bad art.’ 

As recently as 1978, in ‘Alchemy of the Word’, an article on Surrealism for Harpers and Queen, novelist Angela Carter stated bluntly ‘the movement never travelled across the Channel, not even in the Thirties…’ The Dadas are more fashionable now she said, and claimed explicitly that:

‘Surrealist romanticism is at the opposite pole from classical modernism, but then, the Surrealists would never have given Pound or Eliot house room on strictly moral grounds. A Mussolini fan? A high Tory? They’d have moved noisily, but with dignity, to another café’

Consolidated just after the First World War, the stranglehold of moralistic Victorianism (‘The Bloomsbury Spirit’ in the visual arts, Anglo-American Classical Modernism, in the literary sphere) was/is almost total. Despite the limited success of the famous 1936 London exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, where Sheila Legge performed in an event entitled The Phantom of Sex Appeal, Surrealists will always be Outsiders, relegated to the cultural margins – perhaps no bad thing, it might be said.

A Surrealist Declaration of 1947 offered a diagnosis of the English anti-Surrealist ‘paradox’. Aside from immediate factional issues the Declaration identified wider concerns. These included the need to combat reactionary, jingoistic conformist attitudes and ‘diehard militarism’, which may be typical of other (apparently) democratic European societies. Scorning the notion that Surrealist revolt may be dismissed as a ‘sin of youth’ the authors identified the ‘decentralised structure of English society’ as a major problem and, further, highlighted an all-pervasive ‘moral pressure’ from Protestant Christianity as the real enemy. ‘An enemy which attacks Man from the inside… an enemy which is itself infinitely divided and superficially liberal.’

Here, Remy’s analysis of mainstream English abstractionists advancing a ‘teleological’ agenda, inherently reactionary and anti-Surreal in its concern with the moral-spiritual function of art, is telling. He detects a specifically English tendency at work. A ‘disembodied functioning of the spirit’, the legacy of Plato and Aristotle, an exclusive formalism, an ‘optical totalitarianism’, the ‘subordination of the emotion’, a puritanical mode of ‘aesthetic Quakerism’.

    This arises from the innate tendency of the English (in particular) to regard themselves as ‘more radical than the radicals’. Our Anglo-Saxons suffer from a deep conviction that ‘true’ radicalism is embodied in a home-grown tradition of religious non-conformity. This tendency is a political ethos; a pervasive subculture of anti-establishment, reformist dissent that dates back to the Civil War era, or, even earlier, to the Peasant’s Revolt. George Orwell, in his essay 'The Prevention of Literature' (1946) is among those who have defined the basis of English radicalism as the tradition of Milton's Areopagitica and Dissenter Protestantism, quoting a Revivalist hymn ('Dare to be Daniel...') to sum up his notion of the 'heretic' or ‘dissenter’ who 'refused to outrage his own conscience'.

It is undeniable that this heroic-dissident, semi-Calvinist tendency – derived from a Biblical 'we-are-all-sinners' mode of ersatz egalitarianism, is central to an indigenous, iconoclastic cultural formation, closer to Methodism than to Marx, owing allegiance to Geneva rather than to Rome. It is obviously hostile to pure or absolute Surrealism.

For, while the objectives of Surrealism may include, ‘the total liberation of the mind and of all that it resembles’ (Declaration of 27 January, 1925), or ‘the infinite expansion of reality’ (Balakian), or a return to ‘the sources of poetic imagination’ (Breton), it is also necessary to bear in mind that, as a doctrine of ‘absolute non-conformism’ (notre non-conformisme absolu), ‘total revolt’ or ‘complete insubordination’, Surrealism ('this tiny footbridge over the abyss' - Breton again) maintained an implacable stance of opposition to the ideology of family-country-religion, a complex seen as an apparatus of social conservatism, or as a ‘mechanism of oppression’; in fact the Three Fs of ‘traditional’ or ‘cornerstone’ conservatism: Faith, Flag and Family.

Furthermore, it is necessary to recognise that Surrealism was not some form of mysticism, or spiritual ‘heresy’ but, as Maurice Nadeau has said, is a state of mind understood as a tendency ‘not to transcend but to penetrate reality’.

It is still the case that, even in these wacky, Post-PoMo times, self-styled ‘innovative’ poets from these damp and misty isles are obsessed by language in a completely useless manner (academic-philosophical cult of Wittgenstein); they flirt with fake notions of ‘radical’ avant garde modernism and, furthermore, are crippled by a form of ‘ethical’ neo-Puritanism known as ‘political correctness’, or, more rarely, its mirror image; a cult of inverted virtue signalling, known nowadays as Anti-Woke. They may often affect a ‘progressive’ worldview, incorporating derivative, tokenistic, anti-establishment attitudes mixed up with pacifism and anti-capitalism into what is, in effect, a reactionary, conformist sweetness-and-light agenda that consciously or not works in collusion with fundamentalists and reactionaries everywhere.  Just as the hippie was an inverted bourgeois, so todays ‘radical’ is an inverted conservative – an inverted conservative camouflaged by inverted snobbery. This posture is justified by notions of ‘respect’, distorted by the Cultural Cringe, filtered through State Multiculturalism and energised by lip-service to no-nonsense Working Class Heroes, the North-South Divide and Family Values: a classic example of ‘repressive tolerance’ to use a phrase borrowed from Herbert Marcuse, or 'trahsion des clercs', as our French friends would say.

        In his pivotal text An Essay on Liberation (1969) Herbert Marcuse provided an incisive outline of the radical 'new sensibility' which, in pursuit of a primal form of freedom as biological necessity, must pass 'from Marx to Fourier... from realism to Surrealism'. In the aesthetic realm, Marcuse hailed the emergence of 'desublimated "lower" and destructive forms...  mixing the barricade and the dance floor.' This 'new sensibility', he claimed, was not only opposed to the traditional 'establishment' but also attacked the deadly esprit de serieux of the socialist camp: 'miniskirts against the apparatchiks, rock 'n' roll against Soviet Realism'. Perhaps this new, hedonistic, ‘permissive’ idolatrous, unholy zeitgeist, from Desmond Morris’s ICA exhibition Paintings by Chimpanzees (1957) to Kenneth Tynan’s ‘nudest show on Earth’, Oh! Calcutta! (Off Broadway, 1969, The Roundhouse, 1970) marked the final end of Victorianism and of the Bloomsbury Spirit. For a brief moment it looked as though Surrealism had finally found a home or some acceptance at least.

 Yet the force of this argument is somewhat diminished in the light of social facts underlying the so-called Permissive Society of the ‘Sixties, the ‘rebellious’ cultural backdrop to Marcuse’s text (which was as popular in the UK as it was in the USA).

To quote rock critic Robert Christgau: 'There was a sense of rebelliousness... but one of the ways it was rebellious was it wanted to enjoy having more pleasure than it was told it could have. This was much more important than the political element, numerically speaking.' These remarks apply to the US but the same principle applies to Britain, where hedonistic impulses were boosted by the affluence of 'You've Never Had It So Good' consumer boom affluence, greater social mobility, the availability of The Pill and the abolition of National Service. By 1967 this new hedonism had become a fully-fledged, jet-set, high-life of conspicuous consumption, as exemplified by the popular advertising slogan 'When you got it – flaunt it!'

Alan Parker later remarked: 'Images of Ursula Andress coming out of the water in Dr No were more appealing than a monk self-immolating in Saigon'.  Or as Andrew Loog Oldham succinctly put it: 'I didn't have any goals; it was all just a lark'.

Obviously this 'surprise-wave'  New Sensibility ‘Youthquake’ had little in common with any native British notion of alleged 'radicalism'; a tendency which cannot escape either its ascetic origin or the historical legacy of assorted puritanical Lollards, Diggers, Ranters, Levellers and troublesome, lefty clerics in the tradition of John Ball, 'the mad priest of Kent'. Although much diluted, this is a tradition still with us as exemplified by the ‘Anglican Priest and polemicist’ Giles ‘Loose Canon’ Fraser, whose radicalism means little more than attacking the superior attitudes of ‘metropolitan liberals in the media’.

  The New Sensibility was a cultural shift that helps to account for a wider resurgence of interest in Surrealism that surfaced in the ‘Sixties and early ‘Seventies.

In 1969, the University of Michigan published the Seaver & Lane first full length English translation of Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifestoes, (based on the definitive French edition of 1962) followed by the key anthology, Surrealists on Art (1970) from Prentice Hall, edited by activist and critic Lucy R. Lippard. Earlier translations from US sources included Breton’s 1924 semi-autobiographical quasi-novel Nadja (1960) and Maurice Nadeau’s 1964 overview The History of Surrealism (1965) both translated by Richard Howard.

In Britain at that time one might note a Surrealist influence (via Antonin Artaud) on experimental theatre, in, for example, the work of Lindsay Kemp with productions such as Flowers (1966), Salome (1974) and Cruel Garden (1977) that exemplified his unique dramatic style based on myth, ritual and trance states (‘we balance on a knife edge between the serious and the ridiculous’), radical feminist director and poet Jane Arden, Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz. It was Brook and Marowitz who staged a Theatre of Cruelty Season with the RSC Experimental Theatre Group at LAMDA in Jan-Feb 1964 while Brook directed the Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss at the Aldwych Theatre in August of the same year. Marowitz was the author the play Artaud at Rodez, and founded the Open Space Theatre (with Thelma Holt) in 1968.

It was J. G. Ballard who, in the ‘New Wave’ SF magazine New Worlds observed that ‘the images of Surrealism are the iconography of inner space’ (‘The Coming of the Unconscious’, New Worlds, July 1966) pointing to a general diffusion of Surrealism into wider popular culture. The term ‘surreal’ in various interpretations could be applied to social phenomena such as: the ‘underground scene’; to New Left politics and the Mass Media; to the ‘creative revolution’ of advertising and fashion, viewed through the lens of Pop Art, or to ‘cult’ TV shows like The Avengers (1961-1969) masterminded with inimitable panache for ABC Television by producer/story editor Brian Clemens. Discussing the Visual Pop design of record sleeves George Melly in his Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts 1966-1970 noted that ‘Surrealism has remained the most pervasive influence’.

Indeed it is tempting to see in the 1966 appointment of zoologist, socio-biologist and Surrealist , Desmond Morris, author of The Biology of Art (‘the picture-making behaviour of the Great Apes’) (1962) and controversial best-seller The Naked Ape (1967) , as director of the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts), a telling sign of the times. Significantly the ICA had been founded by English surrealists Roland Penrose and Herbert Read (among others) in an Oxford Street cinema basement in 1947. Then, the City of Exeter hosted an influential exhibition The Enchanted Domain at the Exeter City Gallery in 1967 organised by John Lyle with the participation of various significant personalities including Penrose, ELT Mesens, George Melly, Conroy Maddox and Robert Benayoun among others.

Here one might also mention novels by Angela Carter such as Heroes and Villains (1969), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) or The Passion of New Eve (1977). Doctor Hoffman was known in the US as The War of Dreams a title that evokes Carter’s particular style of scary surreality – a psychic locale from where we embark on ‘a desperate expedition to a destination at the heart of the dark in a nameless zone, where we would find the key to an unimaginable secret.’  

Although a purist approach may regard many such tendencies especially those in the advertising and the mass media, as symptomatic of a general dilution and commodification not to be welcomed. It may, on the other hand, seem that the Surrealist spirit, in tune with the New Sensibility of counter-cultural desublimation (symbolised for many in post-imperial Britain by the Profumo scandal), did indeed have the last laugh; gleefully cocking a snook at the strictures of aesthetic Quakerism; giving Mrs Grundy, malcontents of post-imperial humiliation (Peregrine Worsthorne), The Festival of Light and high-minded Leavisite critics from the ‘grammar school ethos’, a run for their money. At least it looked that way for a short while – before the Sixties spirit of ‘anarcho-libertarianism’ (Durgnat, see below), with its ‘swinging’ lifestyle, its subversive art schools and electroluminescent dresses, its 'kinky' PVC boots and jet-age flight attendants in shocking miniskirts, softly and suddenly vanished away during the wasted years of the Thatcher era.

The Turin exhibition, Le Muse Inquietanti (The Disquieting Muses, 1967-1968), organised by Luigi Carluccio, was covered by English mainstream art magazines such as Studio International and Art & Artists and there was considerable interest in the work of Max Ernst, who was the subject of a large illustrated book by John Russell published in 1968 (The spirit of Ernst haunts Annabel, the central character in Angela Carter's surrealist 'collage novel' Love, 1971). That same year the BBC Third Programme broadcast a feature-length tribute to Andre Breton, A Link Between The Worlds (20 March 1968), compiled by Barbara Bray, produced by Douglas Cleverdon .This programme included contributions from David Gascoyne, Jacques B Brunius, Philippe Soupault, S W Hayter and Eugene Ionesco among others, as well as a bizarre radiophonic-dramatic piece by Fernando Arrabal.

Also in 1968, Methuen published the Absurdist, proto-Surrealist Ubu Plays of Alfred Jarry, jointly translated by Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor (who had previously translated Marcel Jean’s The History of Surrealist Painting, 1960), while Jonathan Cape published The Selected Works of Alfred Jarry (edited and translated by Simon Watson Taylor with Roger Shattuck) in 1969.  The then head of BBC Radio Drama, Martin Esslin, had published The Theatre of The Absurd in 1962. This landmark study assimilated Surrealism into a broader panorama of Absurdist heritage (‘an inscape of the mind’) stretching back over a thousand years or more. The BBC had also broadcast Esslin’s adaptation of the Ubu Plays between 1965 and 1968. Along with Beardsley and Mucha, Jarry was subject to something of a revival, in fact George Melly said about The Goons ‘They are our effective surrealists, our democratic Pere Ubus, our sacred monsters’.

In 1970 Lykiard's acclaimed translation of Les Chants de Maldoror was published, while in the following year, 1971, Simon Watson Taylor’s translation of Aragon’s Paris Peasant, a key surrealist text, also appeared. This was followed by the Harper & Row edition of Surrealism and Painting, a compilation of Andre Breton’s writing on visual art which included not only the titular essay but numerous uncollected pieces culled from pamphlets and catalogues. Covering the period 1928 to 1965 this extensive survey (translation by Watson Taylor, again) amounted to ‘not so much a reissue as an original event’ according to an introductory note.

For the generation growing up in the 1960s and interested in film, a key semi-Surrealist influence was the prolific and contrarian critic Raymond Durgnat, chairman of the London Film-maker’s Co-op and advocate of ‘underground cinema’. ‘Fiercely anti-puritan and anti-censorship’ (Rayns), Durgnat was a regular contributor to Films & Filming, and also to the no-frills Motion magazine which emerged from the radical LSE student culture of 1961.

Durgnat contributed to Motion from 1962 and was responsible for the scandalous ‘Companion to Violence and Sadism in the Cinema’ and the anti-establishment polemic ‘Standing Up For Jesus’ (Motion No 6 Autumn 1963) which attacked both the highbrow literary sweetness-and-light critics of the Oxbridge conservative consensus (i.e. Sight & Sound) but also the chic poseurs of what was known as the Free Cinema movement. In April 1963, the ‘watershed year’ of the Summer of Scandal, Durgnat presided over an ICA event on violent cinema called ‘The Art of Scaring You to Death’ based on his Motion ‘Companion’, itself partly inspired by The Romantic Agony by Mario Praz, a key source of transgressive, proto-Surrealist ideas.

Approaching film from a basically Surrealist-Freudian viewpoint (‘images of the mind’), Durgnat held that ‘photography was not essentially realistic, and film not essentially photographic’ (Miller). He watched movies for their ‘poetic’ qualities. He advocated a poetry with ‘no intellectual protocol’; a poetry derived from ‘obvious’ symbols. It was a poetic dimension of the mass media and the commercial cinema; an erotic force, energising popular entertainment at a subliminal level. This obvious symbolism (of carnivals, derelict houses, fairgrounds, mechanical music and mirrors, extended to include railway stations, shop windows, statues, tape-recorders and underwater spaces…) maintained atavistic links to primal myths and fables, links that highbrow critics tend to ignore. In ‘The Angel of Poetry Hovering’ section of his book Films and Feelings (1967) Durgnat wrote how the ‘mute poetry’ of the mainstream blends ‘fact, drama, the ‘Surreal’, dream, magic, and the supernatural powers at their play.’ This ‘oneiric’ definition of popular entertainment and middle-of-the-road cinema is a classic Surrealist position, exemplified by directors like Franju, Bunuel and Jean Rollin, presided over by sexy screen goddesses like Barbarella, Mrs Emma Peel, Modesty Blaise or Lavinia the Black Witch of Greymarsh – as played in Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968) by ‘Scream Queen’ Barbara Steele, resplendent in green make-up.

Wider interest in Surrealism in Britain in the Sixties was further stimulated by independent publishers such as Calder & Boyars.

The Calder & Boyars ‘French Surrealism’ series included works by Breton (Nadja and Arcane 17), Picasso (Desire Caught by The Tail), Aragon (The Libertine), Arp (Collected French Writings) and Tristan Tzara’s Seven Dada Manifestos (translated by Barbara Wright) and in the eighties the Selected Poems of Paul Eluard. The Calder imprint remained for many years a catalytic force, publishing related authors like Burroughs, Beckett (veteran translator of Surrealist poets), Borges, Raymond Roussel, Fernando Arrabal, Georges Bataille (Eroticism, 1962, Literature And Evil, 1973) and Roger Vitrac. The diffusion of these texts in English translation – often for the first time – contributed to a climate in which Surrealism extended its appeal well beyond the sphere of literary and artistic cliques. That Calder regarded his publishing activities as conflicting with endemic anti-Surreal tendencies is evident from his criticism of British indifference to art history, hostility to both intellectual analysis and to any ‘investigation of the creative process.’ As explained in his ‘Introduction’ to A William Burroughs Reader (1982), he lays the blame squarely on British ‘insularity’ and the ‘pioneer Puritanism of the American psyche’, a stance basically the same as that of the Declaration of 1947 – and of Michel Remy in his 1996 essay.

The later history of Surrealism in the UK is limited to the vestigial activities of major figures from the early period and the Melmoth Group of 1979, which disbanded in 1981. One might make reference to the magazine Manticore/Surrealist Communication (1997-2006) published by the Leeds Surrealist Group founded with international links in 1994. He refers to various forms of ‘occultation’ maintaining a Surrealist presence at a subterranean cultural level, sharing a new spirit of gamesmanship infused with a semi-Situationist, semi-occult psycho-geography. This latter theme is also explored by the poet and novelist Iain Sinclair including his more recent work such as London Orbital: A Walk Round the M25 (2002).

In truth, the so-called ‘Permissive Society’, both here and elsewhere, was a minor skirmish in a wider culture war, a skirmish which has since passed into nostalgic obscurity. It was destined to become a faded, but hideous memory of ‘mass national debauch, the breakdown of all known moral standards, the collapse of Western civilization’, a sentiment attributed to Beverley Nichols when reporting on The Twist craze of 1962.

Looking back a decade or so later Christopher Booker echoed these sentiments, describing the ‘Swinging Sixties’ as a case of ‘general world-wide hysteria’.

Booker, a Christian convert and Thatcherite, saw the decade as an egregious example of the Golden Calf Syndrome; a nightmare time when ‘the rebellion of the early Romantics reached its peak’; when ‘the children of the Sixties sought to shake, deafen, blind and drug themselves into the ‘ultimate experience’ on a scale never before seen – until there was almost nowhere further to go.’  Of course, Mrs Whitehouse, Mrs Grundy and the mainstream moralists were victorious in this struggle for moral rectitude. Stigmatised by Tory politicians and their disciples in the media as ‘a time when it all went wrong’, the Sixties and the national debauch of the permissive New Hedonism, soon dwindled into the distance, fast fading in the rear-view mirror or mythologised as a cautionary tale, while Surrealism was seen as just another irresponsible fad.

Speaking for 'serious minded readers' in his Introduction (1979) to The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945-1980, D J Enright exemplified mainstream attitudes when he parenthetically dismissed any interest in Surrealism as a 'regressive' mode of 'internationalism', one of those tendencies 'which reached their modest apex several decades ago'. Enright held the view that ‘internationalism’ was just one of the fads and fancies of contemporary poetry, among which he includes 'free' fantasy, aesthetic narcissism, 'difficult' verse, formalism, Noble Savagery, Concrete Poetry, 'Doing-Your-Own-Thing', Violent Verse, Protest Poetry, the 'Struggle With Words' (language) schools and Confessionalism. He described the latter as 'one of the saddest epidemics of recent years'.

For Enright all of these sad poetic fads were consolatory activities arising from either the eclipse of faith or from trendy education. They represented the antithesis of his anti-surreal ideal; 'the poetry of civility, passion and order'. This sort of 'no-nonsense' talk passes for hard-nosed, trenchant criticism in certain circles, even today. But then – deep down – the English hate Surrealism.

Select Bibliography

Balakian, Anna, Surrealism: Road to the Absolute, Dutton, 1970.

Ballard, J G, A User’s Guide to the Millennium, Flamingo, 1997.

Barthes, Roland, The Language of Fashion, Berg, 2006.

Beer, Gillian, Alice in Space. The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll, University of Chicago, 2018

Booker, Christopher, The Seventies. Portrait of a Decade, Penguin Books, 1980

Breton, Andre, Manifestoes of Surrealism, University of Michigan, 2007.

Breton, Andre, Surrealism and Painting, Harper & Row, 1972

Buchanan, Robert, The Fleshly School of Poetry, Strahan & Co, 1872.

Calder, John (ed.), A William Burroughs Reader, Picador, 1982.

Carroll, Lewis, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Wordsworth Editions, 1993

Carter, Angela, Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings, Vintage, 1993.

Carter, Angela, The Passion of New Eve, Virago Press. 1982.

Clayton, Antony, Decadent London: Fin de Siecle City, Historical Publications, 2005

Cohn, Nick, Awopbobaloobop Alopbamboom, Pimlico/Vintage, 2004

Durgnat, Raymond, Films and Feelings, MIT Press, 1971.

Enright, D J (ed.) The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945-1980, OUP, 1980.

Fiddy, Dick, Brian Clemens, Auteur of The Avengers, BFI South Bank Guide, Jul 2010.

Fraser, Giles, Religious Belief Isn’t Boring, Radio Times 27 Jan-2 Feb 2018.

Innes, Christopher, Avant Garde Theatre 1892-1992, Routledge, 1993.

Levy, Silvano (ed.) Surrealism: Surrealist Visuality, Keele University, 1997.

Machen, Arthur, The Hill of Dreams, Corgi Books, 1967.

Marcuse, Herbert, An Essay On Liberation, Beacon Press, 1969.

Melly, George, Revolt Into Style The Pop Arts 1966-1970, Faber & Faber, 2008.

Melly, George, Don’t Tell Sybil, Atlas Press, 2013.

Miller, Henry K, Poetry in Motion, Sight & Sound, Sept 2014.

Morgan, Robin & Leve, Ariel, 1963: The Year of the Revolution, Dey Street, 2014.

Nadeau, Maurice, The History of Surrealism, Penguin Books, 1973

Orwell, George, Essays, Penguin Books, 2000.

Pavitt, Jane, Fear and Fashion in the Cold War, V&A Publishing, 2008.

Rayns, Tony, Adventures in the Screen Trade, Sight & Sound, Dec 2014.

Remy, Michel, Surrealism in Britain, Ashgate/Lund Humphries, 1999.

Remy, Michel (ed.), On the Thirteenth Stroke Of Midnight, Carcanet Press, 2013.

Robins, Anna Gruetzner/Thomson, Richard, Degas, Sickert & Toulouse-Lautrec. London and Paris 1870-1910. Tate Publishing, 2005

Russell, Bertrand, Sceptical Essays, Routledge, 2004.

Sage, Lorna, Angela Carter, Northcote House, 1994.

Sage, Lorna (ed.), Flesh and the Mirror. Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, Virago Press, 2007.

Waldberg, Patrick, Surrealism (The Paths of Surrealism), Thames & Hudson, 1965.

Worsthorne, Peregrine, Price of Profumo: Tories Smeared, Life Magazine, 21 June, 1963.

illus: Nothing is Sacred, 1976

‘It’s almost achievable….’

Stride’s Rupert M Loydell tells us why

THAT OTHER INTERVIEW

– Rupert M Loydell Talks to CygnusX

Rupert M Loydell is Senior Lecturer in English with Creative Writing at Falmouth University, and the editor of Stride and With magazines. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including the recent Ballads of the Alone and Wildlife (both from Shearsman), and Tower of Babel, an artist’s book-in-a-box from Like This Press. He edited Smartarse for Knives Forks & Spoons Press, From Hepworth's Garden Out: Poems About Painters and St. Ives for Shearsman, and Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh, an anthology of manifestos and unmanifestos, for Salt. He lives in a creekside village with his family and far too many CDs and books.

HELLO…RUPERT M LOYDELL AND WELCOME TO THAT OTHER INTERVIEW

Hello, CygnusX…

WHO ARE YOU?

Can you describe yourself in a few words?

Middle aged, middle class, middle of the road.

Poet, painter, editor, writer, lecturer, partner, father, son.

Was there a specific moment when you decided to be a writer/artist?

I’ve always enjoyed writing at school, but I upped my interest when I joined the poetry group at Twickenham College where I was doing an art foundation course.

What were your formative years like?

I grew up in the London suburbs, got a free place at Latymer Upper School – which was then a grammar school, swam, biked, skateboarded and went to gigs. I grew up surrounded by books, and became addicted to music as a teenager.

How did you learn to write or practice your art?

I read, read and read… then started writing for myself at 17. I learnt through example and then from tutors and fellow students on my creative arts degree. There was a big change later on when I took an MA and I was challenged with regard to ideas of form, confession and the nature of writing.

What are you working on at present?

Very little, truth be told. University work seems to have taken over right now. I have completed two collaborative poem sequences with Daniel Y Harris who is based in California, have a manuscript The Return of the Man Who Has Everything out looking for a publisher; otherwise I have been conducting interviews for Punk & Post-Punk Journal and writing about Brian Eno with a friend and colleague from work.

Do you sound like your true self in your work?

I’ve no idea what I sound like to others, so on one level this is hard to answer. I suspect the constantly changing subjects and tangential asides in my work probably sound like me. I’m definitely in my poems but they are not ‘confessional’ or ‘true’ in an autobiographical sense.

Do you keep a diary or journal?

Nope.

Of your works which is your personal favourite?

I think Wildlife and Ballads of the Alone are strong works or groups of work. I also have a soft spot, if that’s the right phrase, for the sequence I wrote when my dad died, although I don’t write in the same way at all now. I have some favourite paintings.

Do you still like your early work?

Not much. It’s of its time and the product of a young me. I don’t disown it, but I’ve moved on. I would probably think of The Museum of Light as where my mature work starts.

Who first supported you in your work?

Brian Louis Pearce was a friend of my father’s and a poet; he also ran the poetry group at Twickenham College. He was very important to me, not least because he took me and my work seriously. Then there have been an ongoing number of friends, collaborators and colleagues who have kept me going.

What was your first published/exhibited work?

Probably a poem in the local church magazine, otherwise a poem sequence about the Broad Street train line which won a prize and was published soon after.

Do you know your audience?

Some of them, but no, not all of them. I hate the word ‘networking’, but I’m quite good at that, although I can’t abide or cope with social media.

Do you read your work out loud in private?

Very rarely, although I often sound it out I my head.

Do you give readings of your work in public?

Sometimes, but not as much as I used to. I mainly write for the page, and try to only do readings where people who want to can come along; that is, I no longer, for instance, do open mikes or pub gigs where one competes for attention or has to be a comedian or rapper to win applause.

Do critical reactions concern you?

Yes, but the key word there is critical, that is informed and useful comment.

Do you read non-fiction?

More and more. I have written and currently teach a creative non-fiction module at university. I think there is a real buzz at the moment around this all-encompassing genre.

Do you have tribal instincts?

No, I’m too much of a loner. If I went tribal I probably wouldn’t join the tribes people would expect me to.

‘If I went tribal I probably wouldn’t join the tribes people would expect me to.’

How necessary is it to you that you are published & ‘known’?

I think publication is necessary, but that can be online. I definitely want the work ‘out there’, but poetry is perhaps fortunate that it has little in economic value so one can concentrate on cultural value. I’m egotistical enough to want to be known, realistic enough to know poetry has a small audience most of the time. But I have learnt to place my work beyond the poetry world, for instance on the Caught by the River and International Times websites, both of which have much bigger readerships than most poetry magazines.

Would you continue to work if you had no public outlet?

Probably, but I think I always will. Give me some paper, a pen, some glue and a photocopier and I can publish my work!

ARE YOU…?

Are you hip, with-it and bang up-to-date? No

Are you introspective? Yes

Are you outrageous? No

Are you a scholarly academic? Sometimes

Are you attracted by the mysterious and the marvellous? Yes

Are you attracted by the sinister and the macabre? Sometimes

Are you attracted by the strange and the bizarre? Yes

Are you attracted by exotica? No

Are you attracted to nature? Sometimes

Are you a Bohemian, arty type? I used to be

Are you a Romantic? Yes

Are you a Classicist? No

Are you a Realist? Only if I have to be

Are you an urbanite? Yes

Are you cosmopolitan? No but I like the cosmopolis

Are you a visionary? No

Are you an outsider? Yes

Are you a dropout? No

Are you a recluse? I wish

Are you an activist? In my own way, yes

Are you a radical? When required

Are you a dissenter? Yes

Are you a contrarian? No

Are you a pacifist? Yes

Are you anti-establishment? Yes

Are you an anarchist?

I believe in democratic anarchism, which means slowing the system down, not giving power to anyone, and making people responsible for their own actions

Are you a feminist?

Men can’t be feminists, but I support feminism. It’s regarded as an out-of-date term these days tho'. Things have moved on.

Are you an Existentialist?

Yes. The leap of doubt and the leap of faith both intrigue me.

Are you an internationalist? Yes

INFLUENCES

What are your literary tastes? Do they have an effect on your work?

The experimental and the intriguing. The hybridisation of the avant-garde and the narrative has interested me recently, as well as ekphrasis, processual and collaborative writing.

What are your tastes in the art world? Do they have an effect on your work?

Yes. I remain principally interested in modernist abstract painting, and often struggle with conceptual art and installation, because they seem to produce so much poor work around the more successful and accomplished work. Yes, of course they effect what I do.

Are there any contemporary writers/artists/musicians you admire?

How long have you got? Mark Anmerika, Barry Lopez and Brian Eno are current reading matter. Cole Swensen’s and John Taggart’s poetry. I often revisit the work of Robert Creeley, Ted Hughes, John Beryman, Charles Wright and Paul Blackburn. My study is piled high with books and CDs, which I voraciously consume when I get the chance. Julian Beck’s anarchist theatre writings are uncompromised and valuable.

I continue to admire the art of John Hoyland, Andrew Bick, Peter Lanyon, Ivon Hitchens, Richard Diebenkorn, David Smith and many others.

Are you affiliated with any contemporary schools, groups and/or movements?

No, although I collected together poems by a group of writers in the Smartarse anthology which I felt explored the notional of post-confessional narrative.

Do you feel any affinity with schools, groups and/or movements from history?

Not as groups per se, more as individuals. I admire the way groups can write about their own work and present a united [?] front to the world, but too many manifestos and rules soon seem to lead to argument and disarray, compromise and fighting.

What kind of art/poetry, or movements in art/poetry, do you dislike?

Oh anyone who claims to be the future of anything bores me, anyone who dismisses things they clearly don’t know about or understand. I personally dislike shaggy-dog type poems with neat little punchlines or epiphanies at the end and have little time for light verse or end-of-line rhymes.

‘anyone who claims to be the future of anything bores me’

I find the ideas that the subconscious is more valid than conscious thought absurd too, so am not a natural surrealist. I prefer the humour, wit and subversion of Dada.

Do ancient myths, folklore and legends influence you?

Sometimes. I investigated the Tower of Babel as I made my paintings on that theme.

Are you influenced by history and antiquity?

Not in those terms no.

Are you influenced by Eastern religions or mysticism?

I’m interested in some Buddhist philosophy, particularly where they intersect with more liberal Christianity – for instance in the later writings of Thomas Merton.

Are you influenced by Marx or Post-Marxism?

Only in that I see it as articulating capitalism which I think is an outdated and collapsing system.

Are you influenced by Freud and Psychoanalysis? Nope.

Are you influenced by Jung and Jungian Psychology? Nope.

I think Jung and Freud, along with others produced theories which can be useful tools to understand the world, but I’d prefer some more modern ideas such as the idea of the rhizome or Kenneth Goldsmith’s ideas of ‘uncreative writing’. Freud and Jung have never struck a chord.

Are you influenced by Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Language?

One can’t help but be if one has paid attention to the last 30 years of poetry (e.g. the Language Poets), postmodern theology or if you teach English at university. So yes.

Are you influenced by Marcel Duchamp? 

He’s on my radar, but only in terms of Readymades and as a possible cause of or inspirer of conceptual art.

Are you influenced by music?

Endlessly. I think unconsciously most of all – music as a facilitator of states of mind conducive to painting particularly, which is of great use when one has limited studio time, but also in ways of thinking about composition: the idea of remixing for instance is entering academic discourse as a challenge to accepted notions of academic writing and referencing quoted material.

Are you influenced by where you live?

Yes. I’ve made paintings about the creek, written poems about characters in and the dynamics of the village. I also spend a lot of time wishing I was back in London or a city.

Can there be good and bad influences?

Yes, but bad influences can be creative and produce change and better work.

‘…bad influences can be creative and produce change and better work.’

What would you say is your driving influence?

I don’t think I have any idea. It’s what I do and have now done for over 30 years.

WORK AND CREATIVITY

Could you tell me about your work?

I write poems and prose poems, reviews and papers; I conduct interviews; I edit a magazine and anthologies; I write collaboratively; I write academic papers; I paint small abstract paintings.

Can you tell me about your creative process? 

I write. I collage, I remix, I use translation engines, I distrust personal experience, I filter my experiences, reading and listening into texts.

What inspires you to start a new project, how do you start?

A phrase, a word, a commission, a concept, an idea. A friendship, a process or a need to articulate – or at least think about and explore – an idea.

How do you finish a work?

I look and read at my work endlessly until it no longer required changing. This usually takes several months

Do you have any working rituals or superstitions?

Not really.

When do you write?

Whenever I want. Today I wrote a first draft on paper in a validation board meeting. Sometimes I scribble in notebooks or blank pages in books.

Where do you write?

Anywhere, but I draft on my computer on the dining room table or in my study, depending on who else is in the house.

Do you use a typewriter or a computer?

I usually write a first draft longhand, then it’s onto computer.

Do you work in new and unusual media?

No.

Do you work across different media?

No.

Are you keen on computer graphics?

No.

Do you compose direct on the keyboard (typewriter/computer)?

Sometimes.

Do you work in silence or with background music?

Music, but I’m not sure it’s background.

Do you have any working rituals or superstitions?

Not really. I worry about repeating myself.

Does your writing relate very closely to your visual work?

No. Very rarely do they overlap.

Do you spend time on research?

Yes, mostly of the gathering information and ideas kind. More so with regard to my art than my writing.

Do you use photographs or other images as sources of inspiration?

Sometimes, yes.

Are you concerned about factual accuracy?

Not really, unless it is non-fiction.

Is there a role for humour/satire/parody in your work?

Yes, over the years there have been various pieces. Collaborations with Luke Kennard and Paul Sutton have actually been quite savage in their satirical intent.

Is there are role for argot, slang, bad language or jargon in your work?

I recently used jargon in a sequence, but feel I questioned the terminology by the way it was collaged into the poems. Slang and bad language occur sometimes, but they’re not the focus of my work. I mainly try to use the vocabulary and rhythms of everyday language.

Is there a role for unconventional syntax in your work?

Yes, disrupting syntax focuses attention on the words and phrases themselves. Having said that I often smooth over the results of collage or remix so the disruption is more subtle.

Is there a role for unconventional typography in your work?

Not in a regular sense. David Miller did publish a couple of typographic/concrete poems last year through his Kater Murr press, but they aren’t the focus of my writing.

Is your work PC (politically correct)?

Not always, but if it’s not being non-PC is there for politically correct reasons!

What do you understand by inspiration?

Taking an idea and running with it. Perhaps the original phrase or image that intrigues and makes me want to write or paint something. Certainly not any mystical process tied up with muses or any such romantic nonsense. I don’t believe in writer’s block.

What does creativity mean to you?

Making things, doing things.

What impressions/ideas do you wish to communicate?

See my work. I have no over-riding philosophy to communicate, though I’d be pleased if readers of my poems became aware of the dynamic plasticity of language and slippery nature of ideas.

How important in your work is improvisation?

Not very.

Are there a few basic or key ideas that are essential to your work?

No, I have more and more ideas and theories I can draw on as I get older. In fact I probably spend more time thinking about the work now than physically painting or revising with my pen in hand.

Have you ever used synaesthesia effects in your work?

I don’t think so.

Are there a variety of different voices in your work?

Yes. As my book titles says, A Conference of Voices. I’m interested in ideas of conversations and discourse, and also the idea of a different voice emerging in the gaps of this conference.

Are there paradoxes and contradictions in your work?

Yes. The contradictions of multiple narrators and voices, the contradictions of non-personal and ‘untrue’ (or appropriated) confessions in my work.

Can you see an evolutionary curve in your creative development?

Yes.

What are the elements that have contributed to your unique style?

I don’t think I have a unique style. I think the idea of a sole, original voice is rather archaic and not very useful.

Are there connections in your work between pieces in different forms and genres?

Yes.

What is your attitude to genres like Thrillers, Crime Stories, SF, Fantasy or Horror?

I’m not a fan of horror, but I read books in all these other genres. Texts is texts is texts: some are enjoyable, some aren’t; some are well written, some aren’t. Good writing transcends established genres and invents new ones.

Do you think there is a moral purpose to your work?

No, although my sense of morals clearly informs the work.

What character types interest you?

All characters who are useful to my poem. Those whose words I can borrow or steal, those who help me fill up the page.

Do you produce works in series and cycles?

Yes, pretty much always, although I may recognise this in retrospect, or only when I come to shape and order a book.

What role does narrative play in your work?

It’s a fictional device. I tend to think my work contains narratives or narrative possibilities rather than ‘a narrative’.

What role does anachronism play in your work?

Pass

What role does perspective play in your work?

In my painting its there as an established pictorial device, one way of presenting distance and a point-of-view. I am not sure how I would translate that kind of idea into my writing.

What role does rhythm play in your work?

I try to have a spoken rhythm in my poems, that is my personal sense of musicality. Rhythm clearly informs the marks and patterns in, the structures of, my visual work.

What role does chance play in your work?

A large part in some ways, but I am in control of what gets collaged or montaged, and always edit the outcomes. There’s no sense of randomness, just self-disrupting and facilitating processes to keep me on my toes.

What role does form and structure play in your work?

I often use syllabic or word counts; I’m often strict about visual order, and stanza length. My work feels ordered to me.

What role do found objects or texts play in your work?

Appropriating and collage are prime parts of my writing. Found visual stuff probably remains as source material for my painting and drawing, although I occasionally collage visual material too.

What role does mood, feeling or atmosphere play on your work?

Very little.  I get on with it.

Do you use any specific techniques or methods?

Cut up engines online, Babelfish, hard work, word count, line structures, game procedures, invented rules… but not all the time. These are ways to keep myself on the edge, disrupt any lazy attempts at confessional poems, twee narratives or diaristic work.

What physical process do you use in your work?

Writing and typing. Holding a paintbrush or pencil.

Do you sketch different versions of the same picture?

Yes, but usually after I’ve started or even finished the picture.

Do you draft different versions of the same poem or prose work?

Yes.

How long would one piece take on average?

Several months to finish, but a lot of the work is probably done in the first two weeks.

Have you ever decided to abandon a particular direction and start all over again?

Yes.

Why do you continue to create new work today?

Some self-inflicted need or delusion.

IS YOUR WORK…?

Is your work dystopian or utopian?  Both

Is your work pastoral and Arcadian? No

Is your work a type of protest? No

Is your work polemical? Definitely not

Is your work a performance? No

Is your work impersonal? No

Is your work naturalistic? No

Is your work obscure or difficult? No, though sometimes people think so.

Is your work scandalous? No

Is your work scary? No

Is your work flamboyant/dramatic/theatrical? No

Is your work autobiographical? In part

Is your work confessional? Sometimes. I’m in the mix

Is your work extreme? No

Is your work figurative or representational? Not often

Is your work abstract? Yes

Is your work symbolic or allegorical? No

Is your work open to the fantastic? Hmmmm

Is your work open to nonsense and the absurd? Yes

Is your work consciously Modern? No

Is your work expressionistic? No

Is your work edgy? No

Is your work ironic? Sometimes

Is your work violent? No

Is your work sexy? Probably not

Is your work nostalgic? Sometimes

Is your work primitive? No

Is your work political? Occasionally

Is your work spiritual/religious or is it secular?

Secular with spiritual undertones. Actually, no, I’m not sure work can be spiritual. It’s secular work made by someone who is in part spiritual/religious.

Does your work deal with cosmic themes? Nope

Is your work heading toward some ultimate goal? Nope

WORLDVIEW

Regarding present social trends and fashions, are you optimistic or pessimistic?

Pessimistic: I think Western capitalism is coming to an end, which is good, but will result in social and political upheaval. I also think there will be some kind of information or technology crash before too long, which will also result in severe disruption, upheaval and change.

Are you hostile to modern life?

Parts of it. I don’t like having to drive everywhere, I’m not convinced access to information is the same as understanding, and a lot of things seem to be revisiting the past at the moment rather than actually addressing the present or future.

Do we live in an age of decadence?

No. Most people I know are too busy struggling to survive.

Do you make a distinction of value between High and Popular culture?

No. It’s just culture in all its glory.

Do you differentiate between the mainstream and the alternative or ‘underground’?

Not anymore. The mainstream is shrinking, everything is accessible and up for grabs, networks mean small like-minded communities exist virtually.

Do you find the everyday more significant than the metaphysical?

Yes.

Do you see a conflict between art and entertainment?

Yes. Entertainment seems to me to currently be moving toward lowest-common-denominator with a lack of serious concern or artistic purpose.

‘Entertainment seems to me to currently be moving toward lowest-common-denominator with a lack of serious concern or artistic purpose.’

Do you approve or disapprove of the decorative and the ornate?

I’m not good on the ornate, but decorative is okay. I might question the idea that something’s main purpose is decoration.

Do you see a conflict between science and religion?

I think there’s a false conflict being touted at the moment. Both are tentative, I dislike fundamentalist approaches in either domain.

Do you see a conflict between art and science?

Not particularly. I think there are clearly theorized and conceptualized ideas about how the arts – in some form or other – are necessary to balanced and healthy lives. If this is denied by scientists we have problems, but I think – as someone who studied A Level Pure and Applied Maths – the sciences can be as creative and aesthetic as the arts. Without being woolly or New Age I think we need to be open to all ideas, then discuss and critique them.

How do you feel about the mass media and advertising?

I’m not sure. We like to think we’re savvy and understand it, but presumably advertising still works so therefore we are still being manipulated and told what to buy. Personally I’d like to see less competition and more community and localism.

Do you watch TV a lot?

Not if I can help it.  An hour of small screen and I’m bored, it physically doesn’t hold my attention. If I lived alone the dishwasher and the TV would be out the door, the stereo on all day, and more bookshelves moved into the lounge.

What do you think about cybernetics, cyberspace and virtual reality?

Interesting stuff that I pretty much don’t understand. The net is useful but not the be-all-and-end-all; in the end I think they are only communications tools. I was talking to the head of Illustration today and he was saying there is quite a revolt among designers and illustrators today against the computer: they are moving back to drawing and painting the original then scanning it in for manipulation and reproduction.

My friend Tim, who works with A.I., seems fairly convinced that thought is to do with complexity, and that if we could somehow link enough stuff together we would create a working brain (He argues that much better than my version suggests), but I am not so sure.

Again, we were discussing today the fact that our students aren’t as media savvy as we think they are and expect them to be. They’re good at what they do, but not at lateral thinking: sometimes they can’t think of the words that will produce a useful Google result for their research. For whatever reason I don’t think we yet have true digital natives in the world, and of course superseded mediums find their own place to survive, so radio, books, TV etc. will continue to exist for the foreseeable future.

Closer to home, I still have a paper archive of my work as well as hard drive back-ups. Poetry made up of zeroes and ones still seems not really there to me…

What do you think about fashion?

It doesn’t interest me.

What do you think about politics?

Power should never be given to those who want it.

Do you have a view on social class?

I think class is disappearing, but poverty is returning. The divide between the rich and poor is clearly growing and the current government want it that way.

Does democracy work?

Democracy can work, but democracy means 9 people in agreement, not 5 outvoting 4 and getting their own way.

Are you conservative?

Part of me is small c conservative; big C Conservative? No way! Tory scum.

Is your work intended to improve society and contribute to civilisation?

Only in the kind of terms I’ve mentioned above, that the arts contribute to social, mental and spiritual well-being. Not in any change-the-world manner, no.

DEEP STUFF

Do you have a view on the future direction of the arts?

No, although I hope they will move away from the flippant, jokey, conceptual and ephemeral. There’s clearly a return to the curated show at the moment, usually over curated IMHO.

Do you try to develop an individual aesthetic, poetic or philosophy?

No

Do you have any views on the ‘death of the author’ proposition?

I think this has been blown out of all proportion. Barthes is simply talking about the reader constructing and interpreting the text through the act of reading. It seems a truism to me.

Is art a vocation?

If you want it to be.

Is the artistic Muse and outmoded idea?

Yes.

Should art be ambiguous?

Yes and no.

Is artistic innovation still possible, or has everything worth saying already been said?

Innovation may involve revisitation, close focus, new angles or takes on things, as much as new mediums/media or avant-garde progression.

Are you concerned with artistic purity?

No.

Do you agree with the idea of ‘autonomous’ art or Art for Art’s Sake?

Yes, but it always has an audience, so art can’t finally live in splendid isolation.

What is the psychological function of art?

Articulation of thought? Provocation? Exploration? Who knows? Psychological response will be as varied as any other response.

Do you think your work reflects your early life experiences and memories?

To a certain extent it can’t fail to.

Can artistic creativity be defined as a quest or a journey?

If that’s a useful metaphor for anyone then yes. It seems a bit of a cliché to me.

Can artistic creativity be defined as a mode of discovery or exploration?

Ditto, but yes. If you know what you’re going to paint or write it doesn’t need writing. I like to surprise myself.

Does art expand consciousness?

Sometimes.

Can art be destructive?

Probably.

Can art be therapeutic?

Yes but it doesn’t have to be.

Is there a link between artistic creativity and mental disturbance?

Not always, no, but there can be. As you know various ideas of outside art and/or surrealist art, along with art therapy ideas would argue that there is.

Have you ever experienced a spiritual crisis? How has this affected your work?

Yes. It is clearly the subject of some of my poems, but not in any end-of-the-world life-or-death way.

Do you accept the existence of the unconscious mind?

No.

Do you use dreams in your work?

No.

What do you often dream about?

I really don’t remember my dreams.

Do you deliberately try to bypass the conscious mind when you work?

No.

To what degree do you control the content of your work?

Always. How can anybody not?

Are there levels of automatism in your work?

No

Do you have an artistic persona or alter ego?

No, I gather voices in my poems.

Do you see illustration as separate from fine art?

Only if the artist/illustrator decides that is the case.

Is your work avant-garde/experimental?

No.

Are you interested in non-linear narrative, collage and juxtaposition?

Yes

Are you interested in the arts of indigenous peoples?

Not especially.

Are you interested in visual distortions and Mannerist effects?

No.

Are you interested in optical effects?

No.

Are you didactic?

Probably.

How do you define style?

I don’t.

What is your idea of the ‘alien’?

Beings from other planets.

What do you understand by ‘otherness’?

 People who are out of the ordinary in some way, whether intended or not. Things or people that are strange or different, not what we expect, not the norm.

Do you see yourself as an alchemist searching for the Philosopher’s Stone?

Not at all.

Is it possible to be experimental in content but not experimental in form?

No.

Do you agree with the idea of an established canon or repertoire of Great Works?

No, it’s an outdated idea. One good thing that arose out of Postmodernism was the getting rid of lazy linear histories and the foregrounding of alternative versions.

Do you agree with the idea that abstraction can deal with inexpressible concepts?

No, we think in language, so although it sometimes hard we can talk about everything.

Should art disturb the status quo? Can there be such a thing as revolutionary art?

Art can provoke and unsettle, cause debate – we’ve seen it with the likes of Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin, so it can definitely disturb the status quo. I’m less convinced it can be revolutionary.

Is agitprop bad art?

Usually. I suspect if you want polemic and diatribe, or even a reasoned discussion there are better ways to facilitate that than issues-driven poetry or art.

Do you avoid cliché and ‘dead metaphor’?

It try to.

Why do people usually prefer the familiar to confrontation with the new (e.g. art)?

They are lazy and want to be entertained. They, for instance, think painting is about pictorial narrative, whereas if they are interested in painting they would also discuss the material object itself.

Is defamiliarization a good idea?

Yes.

Are you interested in cultural and critical theory?

Yes. Again, I can’t help but be as it informs teaching English.

What is your view on censorship?

In principal I am against censorship, but as a father I am also aware there may be times when content is clearly flagged up and thought is given to those who do not wish to engage or may be too young to be allowed to engage with it.

Is art about shared values?

No.

Do you conceive of a contemporary context, or are you working in isolation?

I work much of the time in isolation but I am in a contemporary context because I am alive now, talk to other people, publish my work now, etc.

What are your artistic aspirations?

To write and paint.

How do you place yourself historically?

I am not history yet!

‘I am not history yet!’

AND, FINALLY…

Do you believe in luck? No

Have you ever seen a UFO? No

Have you ever seen a ghost?

I saw something in an abandoned factory when I was 9, but I wouldn’t like to make a case for psychic energy or after-death memory. That’s a no.

Do you want to be famous? 
Not really. I’d like to sell more books.

Can you list ten favourite books?

Stone Junction, Jim Dodge; The Greater Trumps, Charles Williams; The Dog King, Christopher Ramsay; Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson; The City & The City, China Miéville; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, Haruki Murakami; The Map and the Territory, Michel Houellebecq; Chronicle in Stone, Ismail Kadare; The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin; Kensington Gardens, Rodrigo Fresan; My Revolutions, Hari Kunzru; The House of Rumour, Jake Arnott; Red Shift, Alan Garner; Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban.

That’s the fiction. Then there’d be Alan Halsey’s Robin Hood Book, Selected Poems by Paul Blackburn, Collected Poems by Robert Creeley, and other poetry books by Sheila Murphy, Charles Wright, Robert Duncan, Ted Hughes, Peter Redgrove, Jorie Graham, Allen Fisher, Cole Swensen and Dean Young.

Then I’d have to go and look at the art books….

Which book do you wish you had written?

I can’t narrow that to one.

Can you list ten favourite bands/musicians?

Cabaret Voltaire, Bruce Cockburn, Van der Graaf Generator, Yes,  Miles Davis, Eyeless in Gaza, King Crimson, Steely Dan, Anthony Braxton, Sun Ra

And lots more…

Can you list eight tracks for your ‘Desert Island Discs’?

‘Silver Bird is Heading for the Sun’, Terje Rypdal

‘Horse and Crow’, Peter Case

‘Mission: To Be Where I Am’, Jan Garbarek

‘Summing Elements’, Ekca Liena & Spheruleus

‘Slow Train’, Flanders & Swann

‘Verdi Cries’, June Tabor

‘All I Need is Everything’, Over the Rhine

‘Ostranenie’, Nurse with Wound

8 is impossible. 800 might be better.

Which authors/artists (past or present) would you invite to a dinner party?

Thomas Merton, Robert Creeley, David Toop, Fra Angelico, Charles Williams and Brian Louis Pearce.

Is life like a movie?

No, it’s more like the Pearl & Dean theme tune and then the adverts.

Which movie would you have liked to direct?

Apocalypse Now.

Can you list ten favourite movies?

Rollerball, Soylent Green, Steelyard Blues, The Last of England, Hobo, Don’t Look Now, The Wicker Man, The Jungle Book, London, Performance.

Can you name your favourite current movie?

No, I haven’t been to the cinema for yonks, apart from the odd kids’ movie.

Can you name your favourite film/TV/stage star? No. But Twin Peaks is the TV show. And Thunderbirds.

Can you list your ten pet hates?

Unpunctuality, messiness, disorder, hair in the bath, showers, rain, coaches, celery, mayonnaise, nationalism.

Which fictional character(s) would you imagine yourself to be?

 I played Young Pip in a musical adaptation of Great Expectations in London when I was 9. Perhaps Pip, whose sense of bewilderment and aspiration in life seems to stand him in good stead in many ways. I don’t really know. I always loved Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, perhaps one of those boys caught up in a carnival of time and death. Maybe that’s me anyway, always worrying about lack of time, always trying to put things in too much order. I’m not very good at living in the moment.

If you could go anywhere created from your imagination where would it be, what would it be like?

It would be a metropolis, full of art, music and fantastic bookshops. New York meets Glasgow meets London. My house would be clean, white and have plenty of space. Money and time would be no object, though ideally the former wouldn’t be required. My back garden would be Tuscany though. Perhaps my imagination doesn’t work so well these days? It’s almost achievable…. 

THANK YOU… AND GOODBYE!

You’re welcome. Goodbye.

Image: Rupert M Loydell, Irvin, oil on paper, 2013
'From a series of works on paper made
using homemade plastic scrapers. so kind of screenprinted without a
screen.'