Short and sharp

Like A Fiery Elephant, my biography of the experimental novelist B.S. Johnson, contains one particularly careless sentence: the one where I described Johnson as ‘Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde of the 1960s’. It was a silly thing to write, partly because it wasn’t true, but also because it was easily the most quotable line in the book and so every journalist and reviewer was bound to pick it up and repeat it. And so it proved.

But Johnson was not Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde. The 1960s saw a significant flowering of what we might (for shorthand) call experimental writing in this country. They saw the emergence of writers such as Nicholas Mosley, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy and Robert Nye, while around Johnson himself clustered a small group of like-minded novelists, bound together by prickly friendship and, if not a shared aesthetic exactly, then at least a shared opposition to what they saw as the prevailing aesthetic (neo-Victorian realism). These writers included Alan Burns, Eva Figes and Ann Quin.

Quin was born in Brighton in 1936, and died in 1973, walking out to sea off Brighton beach in an act which shockingly prefigured Johnson’s own suicide a few weeks later. In her short writing life she produced four unconventional novels — Three, Passages, Tripticks and, perhaps most famously, her debut Berg, published in 1964 and filmed in the late 1980s as Killing Dad. She has never been widely read, but Stewart Home has written that ‘despite ongoing rumours of a B.S. Johnson revival, I feel our attention could be more usefully directed towards Ann Quin’; and the appearance of this collection of short prose — some of it previously unpublished — might mark the beginning of her rise to a new eminence.