THE CONCEPT OF WORK IN POST-WAR BRITISH EXPERIMENTAL FICTION Christopher Webb Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at University College London Supervised by Dr Julia Jordan September 2018 1 DECLARATION I, Christopher Webb, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. Signed: 2 ABSTRACT Despite the emergence of a wide gamut of British experimental writing from the late-1950s through to the mid-1970s, there was a consensus that this particular type of writing constituted a ‘“useless” activity’. This was the conclusion not only amongst the various newspaper critics who frequently criticised the Arts Council for supporting ‘hippy art’, but amongst experimental writers themselves, such as Eva Figes (whose remark this was, used when she described her occupation as a novelist in the Guardian in 1968). The experimental writing of this period is fraught with an anxiety about its own uselessness. This thesis argues that this was symptomatic of a unique period in British literary history when traditional notions about work—and what ‘worked’ in terms of literature—were radically scrutinised and reassessed. The Concept of Work in Post-war British Experimental Writing proposes that only with an understanding of the British avant-garde’s engagement with the idea of work and its various corollaries can we fully appreciate the contribution to the development of the modern British novel during the mid-twentieth-century made by these writers, and to probe some of the reasons for their move away from realism. The thesis begins by examining the historical context in which these writers were working and the influence of Samuel Beckett’s work on the British avant-garde before moving on to analyse in detail the works of Alexander Trocchi, B. S. Johnson and Eva Figes, whose preoccupations with concepts related to work, such as leisure, public debt, and forms of neglected labour, allow us to think about late-modernism’s relation to realism in a new way and, more broadly, what they might tell us about avant-gardism in general. 3 IMPACT STATEMENT As described in the preceding abstract, this thesis looks to benefit future scholarship and further knowledge in the field of literary studies, particularly within the sub-field of British modernist studies. It is unlikely to engage with public policy makers, public service delivery practitioners, influencing ministers, or, for that matter, many other individuals, communities or organisations outside the remit of academia. However, by drawing on recent historical controversies concerning the value and worth of minor forms of art and literature, it does have something to say about the production of work within the arts and humanities and hopes to go some way towards making a persuasive argument for the continued validity and importance of those subjects often considered “useless”. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), which, through the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP), funded this project. It was the LAHP that granted me the opportunity to visit Washington University, St. Louis (WUSTL) so that I was able to consult the Alexander Trocchi Papers. Without that opportunity this thesis would have turned out to be significantly different. I’d like to thank all the staff at WUSTL who accommodated me during my stay and to Mariana Parisca. I would like to thank the UCL English department: all the academic staff and all the administrative staff, who ever since I arrived to do my MA, which feels like a very long time ago, made Foster Court a special place and something of a sanctuary within the city. I’d like to thank Eric Langley, Michael Sayeau, Nick Shepley and Hugh Stevens especially. I also want to thank my friends, a number of whom read through various passages and chapters of the thesis, and some who were there to discuss the thesis more broadly and ideas to related to it, which, of course, was just as helpful. I am grateful because you each provided me at one point or another a number of illuminating and genuinely insightful responses, which were then incorporated into the thesis. So, thank you David Anderson, Eoin Bentick, Jess Cotton, Orlando Edmonds, Ellen Evans, Simon Hammond, Matthew Holman, Matthew Ingleby, David Isaacs, Lia Martin, George Potts, Fred Pritchard, Zac Seager, and Jan-Peter Westad. But most of all I wish to thank my friend and supervisor Julia Jordan, who since the very beginning of my university days has been an unerring source of support and inspiration to me. Finally, I want to express my deepest gratitude to Diana and Tim Webb, whose love has been the catalyst to this project: this is for you! 5 CONTENTS I. Introduction 7 II. Alexander Trocchi: Man at Leisure 37 III. B.S. Johnson: The Professional Viewpoint 86 IV. Eva Figes 130 V. Coda: Towards a Working Definition of the British Avant-Garde 195 Bibliography 212 6 I INTRODUCTION Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions. Mark Twain.1 ‘Work’, Herbert Applebaum writes in his monumental study on the subject, ‘is like the spine which structures the way people live’.2 Most studies that focus on work, no matter the discipline, attempt to establish two facts about it right away: its cultural significance and the semantic difficulties it presents. ‘No definition is satisfactory because work relates to all human activities’, Applebaum observes, ‘one would have to exhaust all such activities to exhaust the provinces of work’.3 Raymond Williams gestures to the word’s diffuseness when he mentions that work, simply put, is the ‘most general word for doing something’.4 Yet, in spite of its capaciousness, everyone possesses their own understanding of the term, as Andrea Komlosy explains: [w]ork is a familiar, everyday word; everyone knows what it means. Upon closer inspection, however, work proves to be quite the linguistic chameleon: everyone has their own, nuanced definitions, which themselves are in constant flux. Older ideas continue to resonate even as new concepts of work emerge, leading to coexisting, distinct concepts of, as well as attitudes towards, work.5 Might this, then, have something to do with the common suggestion that work is only ever rarely represented in fiction? Michael Denning points out that it has become a ‘commonplace to note our reluctance to represent work in our popular stories’, a commonplace, it should be added, he 1 See the Mark Twain exhibition webpage of the Bancroft library (University of California, Berkeley): http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/Exhibits/mtatplay/workandplay.html. Accessed on 14 June 2018. 2 Herbert Applebaum, The Concept of Work: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), ix. 3 Ibid., x. 4 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fourth Estate, 2014), 330. 5 Andrea Komlosy, Work: The Last 1,000 Years, trans. Jacob K. Watson with Loren Balhorn (London: Verso, 2018), 7. 7 does little to dispute: in the same essay, he imagines that ‘a Martian who hijacked the stock of the average video store’ might ‘reasonably conclude humans spent far more of their time engaged in sex than in work.’6 Denning’s point is amusing because it seems to suggest something puzzling about western culture and its peculiar tendency to distort and misrepresent the realities of everyday life. After all, work is central to human life; for most of us, we work—and spend our lives working—in order to live. It is through gainful employment that we can continue to sustain ourselves and our families. So why does it seem to interest us so little? Writing for the Guardian, Judith Flanders poses a similar question, though one related specifically to literature: ‘[w]hy don’t novels “do” work?’7 She begins the article by praising Allegra Goodman’s novel Intuition (2006), which had been shortlisted for the 2009 Orange Prize: [g]reat news, because it’s a good book; and great news, because it’s a good book about a rare subject: work. We spend most of our lives at work, talk about it when we’re not there, socialise with, date and even marry people we meet there. So why do so few novels deal with it?8 By her own admission, she finds it hard to answer but suggests it might have something to do with the division of labour most modern workplaces tend to impose, which in turn makes it a difficult subject for the novelist to manage: [m]ost workplaces resemble a production line: each worker adds his or her little section of value to the product, whatever that might be, but it is a rare worker who sees a job all the way through from inception to finished product—and aesthetically, that’s not particularly satisfying. A falling in love with B over the photocopier is a 6 Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), 91-92. 7 Judith Flanders, ‘Why don’t novels “do” work?’, Guardian, 30 March 2009. Accessed at https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/mar/30/work-novels-fiction-flanders on 14 October 2017. Flanders and Denning both write about the representation of work in popular culture. See, for instance, Judith Flanders, The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed (London: HarperCollins, 2003). In her study, she references a range of Victorian writers who, in their descriptions of the Victorian household as a site of domestic labour, address the subject of work in great detail. Denning has written about the relationship between work and popular American culture in Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1987) and, more recently, The Cultural Front: the Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996).