I am
pleased to say that guest editor David Spittle has selected some work of mine
for the special ‘Surrealist’ edition of the Bangladeshi magazine Shuddhashar. Or is it called FreeVoice - one word, like that?
Explore
this issue, number 37 in full: Surrealist
Poetry. Or follow
the links below.
It is a
long time since I’ve thought about surrealism, but then again it isn’t. By
that, I mean that, although I haven’t pronounced on the subject much, it’s
never gone away. (Not quite true either, see Poetics, Robert Sheppard (lincolnreview.org) In any case, it came back with a mighty thud, when I started to
write Elle.
Anyway,
the first four chapters of Elle may be read HERE: Elle: a
verse novel
The whole is due for publication by Broken Sleep in November 2025.
Other
contributors include a brief description of their allegiance/connection to
surrealism and I thought that my ‘introduction’ to my excerpt (it’s a long
excerpt) which I’d sent would suffice (it is a long introduction!). It’s
not there on the magazine. In fact, it is the intended ‘afterward’ of the verse-novel.
Here’s a shortened version of it:
‘Sharp gas lips under her flesh
suddenly white in the hallway
Watching
the early films of Jeff Keen, see Jeff
Keen aka Dr Gaz | Jeff Keen. I noted the repeated appearance of what I
thought of as ‘the pink auto’; I had read somewhere that this Pontiac
Parisienne belonged to a nightclub owner in Brighton in the UK. Keen continued
to use footage of this automobile throughout the 1960s, though I think he only
borrowed its gangsterish gleam for an afternoon’s shoot, to make the 11-minute
black and white silent 8 mm film Breakout (1962). (This isn’t it, but is a useful sample of Keen's approach:
Jeff Keen: Instant Cinema
(1962/2007) - YouTube
)The
incongruity of seeing this mammoth American car on film squeezing past the
familiar Clock Tower in Brighton (my local South Coast city as I remember it
vaguely from the early 1960s) was most impressive, if uncanny. It was not until
I read Richard Davenport Hines’ An English Affair (2013), about the
nefarious goings-on of cabinet minister John Profumo, that I linked the car,
which was mentioned in passing, and the films of Jeff Keen, which I knew, with
a precursor scandal of the Profumo debacle, and its Brighton setting. It was a
sordid story concerning a Conservative MP and washing machine importer, John
Bloom, and Christine Holford, the wife of the nightclub and Pontiac owner. The
result was that, in 1963, a jealous and taunted Harvey Holford murdered
Christine Holford, spitefully shooting her in the genitals. The subsequent
trial and the minimal sentence Holford received – before an all-male jury –
leaves a bad taste in any aesthetic appetite that desires to utilise this
material.
But I did
want to utilise this material and I did want to make the link to the
extraordinary films made by Jeff Keen, who I met on a couple of occasions, even
visiting his Brighton flat with Lee Harwood; I remember a column – no other
word for it, it reached the high ceiling – of Marvel comics, which he used as
raw material in his later Blatz! movies. I felt that my raw
material would have to include Keen’s work, the car, its murderous owner, his
victim wife, as well as a favourite and iconic film of the era, Luis Buñuel’s Belle
de Jour (1967), presented here in visual summary, as it were:
Belle de Jour - official
rerelease trailer (youtube.com) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnYA6mj9hDU
Notably,
this surrealist masterpiece of the sixties is based upon realist pulp from
1928: Buñuel hated Joseph Kessel’s moralistic and misogynist novel of that
title, in which a woman is condemned for her secret sexual desires (as was
Christine Holford with her more public affairs and flirtations). The film is
not a parody or pastiche of its model; it’s perversely faithful to its twisted
but conventional morality. The novel was perfect material for post-surrealist
transformation. In 1969, an English translation by Geoffrey Wagner from 1962
was rushed into a second paperback edition with a picture of a simpering
Catherine Deneuve on the cover, a 75p charity shop purchase.
Uncertain
how I would approach and proceed with these materials, I decided to work on my
copy of the novel with an analogous disrespect to that shown by Buñuel: I
treated Belle de Jour using the technique I have always called ‘Tom
Phillipsing’, finding new linguistic content in this old novel, as Phillips had
with A Human Monument, as he transformed it into the bubble texts of The
Humument (ignoring for a moment the brilliant visual side of the work!).
There is something of gentle gathering, enclosing, about the method, which is
absent from the tearing violations of the superficially similar cut-up
technique. Both are versions of collage, or montage, of course. 'Here's the book, and here's the method,' as I say on this 5 second video!
At some
point during this slow process (one page Tom Phillipsed a day, 140 pages), I
watched Daniel Farson’s British ATV television programme Living for Kicks (1960)
which partly took as its theme the teenage clientele of the Whiskey a Go-Go
milk bar (such pre-Clockwork Orange innocence!) near The Clock Tower in
Brighton. It was available for a short while on You Tube, but is no longer!
I already
knew that this establishment was part of the entertainment complex run by
Harvey Holford: upstairs lay the more exclusive Blue Gardenia and Calypso clubs
(where alcohol was served). Farson’s documentary (the old Soho soak feigns
shock at teenagers snogging and disdaining marriage) features an intelligent
and knowing interview with a proto-Beat poet called Royston Ellis, whose name
was familiar to me, but not from my knowledge of British underground
poetry of the 1960s, which I’d foolishly thought comprehensive. In fact, the
name was literally floating before me in Ye Cracke pub where, after lockdown, I
regularly met a group of Liverpool friends (the informal 1955 Committee). On
the mirror under which we often sat is an engraved commemoration of a joint
poetry-music gig by Royston Ellis and John Lennon in Liverpool in 1960. [Note November 20205: I write more about Ellis here: Pages: More on the British Poetry Revival, Royston Ellis, and news of a forthcoming book, from a more academic point of view and with more information than I had when I posted this post.]
One
afternoon I suddenly noticed the memorial to this performance, seen above. (It's disputed whether Ellis is the 'Paperback Writer' of the song, but he did write books on pre-Beatles music.) Something was
happening here, I felt, to speed this project along; I conceived of
superimposing the shadowy Brighton reality upon my distorted version of
Buñuel’s Ur-text. Both narratives involve a jealous murderer. I replaced
Kessel’s names, Buñuel’s dramatis personae, with the names of the
participants in the Brighton tragedy: acquaintances and lovers of the fatal
couple (Thatcher, Hatcher, Bloom, Cresteef), and employees and habitués of the
night clubs (Corvell and Bubbles and Squeak), with the addition of the artist
figures Jeff Keen and Royston Ellis, and a few necessary others. (Not all of
them appear in this first extract, of course.) ‘Elle’ was the Tom Phillipsed ‘Belle’
persona of Kessel’s anti-heroine, the titular haunting (but who is
‘she’?). I transposed place names from Paris to Brighton without irony. The text passed through many stages of transformation (‘states’ an
engraver might have called them), both mechanical – I made use of the ‘dictate’
and ‘read as’ functions on my laptop – and deliberative: my choices were quite
conscious, though guided by procedure. The process was my old friend, the stochastic.
Then I revised the text in an intuitive way, unrecognisable in this latest (and
perhaps not yet completed) form on Shuddhashar.
I did not
want to repeat the grim and ghastly scenarios that documentary sources had laid
before me; (e.g www.pulpinternational.com/pulp/entry/Cover-of-the-National-Insider-with-Harvey-and-Christine-Holford.html)
I sought to introduce the main actors into a drama not quite theirs,
and not quite mine, either. I wished to liberate them, albeit imaginatively,
from history. I like to think that Keen and Ellis become the positive creative
energies to transform this loathsome narrative towards different endings – or
none. Those transformations are not just a matter of form, but of a forming of
its matters, its matters of fact, and its matters of fiction.
The turn
to the ‘verse-novel’, however ironical, reflects yet another, late, act of
transformation, the sudden switch to ‘verse’, a term I seldom use…’
So back to today. Just as
Bunuel hated Kessel’s work I think I disapprove of the ‘verse-novel' – and,
like Bunuel using Kessel, that’s just why I’ve 'written' one. I was somewhat relieved, when I witnessed
Jen Calleja reading Vehicle: a verse novel to discover that it wasn’t,
in fact, a ‘verse-novel’. (I did enjoy, though, Bernadine Evaristo’s The
Emperor’s Babe, so maybe it’s the idea of the verse-novel that trips me up;
I don’t like the term ‘prose-poetry’ either, but I'm a big fan of Ian Seed!).
Here’s a full
list of the articles/poems/prose/images in this wonderful edition, with links to each:
1.Note from Guest Editor Note from
Guest Editor
2.Simon Perril Sun Deck Set Cogitation
3.Lisa Samuels lodge in
the zing of
4.Ali Graham My
appetite wears metallic facepaint
5.James Byrne Apparitions
6.Geraldine Monk Let fly
the unquiet tongue
7.Will Alexander The Sand
Genie
8.Aase Berg Monday in
the Mariana Trench
9.Tom Jenks Broccoli
and chunky relish
10.Julia Rose Lewis through
and through and through and through
11.Harry Man The
Airborne Gooseberry Boy
12.Sascha Akther Anatomy of
a Car Crash
13.Robert Sheppard: from Elle: a
verse novel
14.SJ Fowler The Parts
of the Body that Stink
15.Lila Matsumoto the saws
and hammers
16.Aaron Kent It is the
most natural thing in the world to leave
17.David Spittle from
HALLUCIGENIA
18.Stephen Sunderland Notes for
a Revolution
19.James Knight Disappearing
Subject
20.Joseph Turrnt In the
fifteenth year I bought you crystals
21.Vik Shirley https://shuddhashar.com/hmm-sweetie/
22.W.N. Herbert A Dream of
Vending Machines
23.David Spittle Seeing the
Unseen: The Occult and Surrealism
Thanks to
David and thanks to all at Shuddhashar. Shuddhashar is an exiled
Bangladeshi publishing house with this magazine, and is currently based in
Norway. Shuddhashar received the 2016 Jeri Laber International Freedom to
Publish Award, given to publishers outside the United States who demonstrate
courage despite restrictions on freedom of expression. They are brave people
indeed, if you follow their publishing history, which is really a testament to their activism.
*
Locating Robert Sheppard: books: Pages: Robert Sheppard: seeing what's in print and
what's not!; email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com; website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter
(or X): Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter ; latest
blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com
