My Verse Novel ELLE is excerpted in Shuddhashar 37: Surrealist Poetry edition

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. Watch it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvA1MSk3K2A

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.

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

 Falling from grace | The Argus

 https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/10458357.falling-from-grace/

 Crime Murder Christine Holford April 1963 Her husband Harvey Holford their baby and Heather Thatcher taken the summer before she died Stock Photo - Alamy

https://www.shutterstock.com/editorial/image-editorial/peter-corvell-manager-of-the-blue-gardenia-club-brighton-owned-by-harvey-holford-holford-is-charged-with-the-murder-of-his-wife-christine-which-was-reduced-to-a-verdict-of-manslaughter-box-760-530051713-ajpg-9130220a

 Memories of 1950s Brighton | 1950s personal memories | My Brighton and Hove

 https://www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk/topics/1950s/1950s-personal-memories/where-to-go-for-a-good-time

https://www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk/places/clubs/clubs-3) 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.  

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