A 50-year obsession with the white stuff: Milk, by Peter Blegvad, reviewed

It’s been a while since I read a good cento, from the Latin and derived from the Greek, I need not remind Spectator readers, meaning ‘patchwork’, and thus a literary work composed of quotations from other writers, the earliest known example being Hosidius Geta’s Medea, consisting entirely of lines from Virgil and which is almost as good as it sounds. Contemporary literary centos, or cento-like creations, include a lot of very bad found poems but also Graham Rawle’s simply incredible Woman’s World (2005), a novel collaged from cut-up lines from women’s magazines, and David Shields’s profoundly plagiaristic work of literary criticism, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010). 

Peter Blegvad’s Milk: Through a Glass Darkly, as one might perhaps expect, is something different. Blegvad is truly unclassifiable: a writer, artist and musician perhaps best known for his work with the 1970s avant-garde bands Slapp Happy and Henry Cow. Or perhaps he’s best known for his long-running cartoon strip in the Independent, Leviathan, which was the thinking man’s Calvin and Hobbes? Or for the indescribable ‘eartoons’ that he used to produce for BBC Radio 3’s The Verb? Maybe ‘best known’ is overstating it: Blegvad is truly one of those writer’s writers, an artist’s artist and a musician’s musician. He’s also a long-standing member, apparently, of the London Institute of ’Pataphysics, inspired by the work of Alfred Jarry, with whom Blegvad might justifiably be compared. He’s one of those people who just makes and does very strange and beautiful and interesting things.

Milk is very interesting: for Blegvad, it’s been an obsession. As he explains in his Q-and-A-style introduction, this is a work that’s been 50 years in the making. He started collecting material when he was 20: ‘I’d just read about Alfred Hitchcock putting a light in a glass of milk and the image seemed portentous, freighted with meaning.