By Eleanor Casson, Archivist and Cataloguer of the Andrew Salkey Archive (Deposit 10310), working in collaboration with the Eccles Centre for American Studies and the British Library. The catalogue will be made available in Autumn 2020. The British Library, in collaboration with The Eccles Centre and Goldsmiths, University of London, are also planning a conference celebrating Andrew Salkey’s legacy and exploring the Caribbean diasporic networks of today. Details of this will be released soon. 

Andrew Salkey, who was born in Colón, Panama, brought up in Jamaica, and later relocated to both the United Kingdom and the United States, was instrumental in developing and refining a diasporic consciousness among Caribbean artists and intellectuals at home and abroad in the latter half of the twentieth century. As a novelist, poet, editor, broadcaster, academic, promoter and activist, he presented the BBC’s hugely important ‘Caribbean Voices’ program, where he was also writer-in-residence; he co-founded the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM); taught Creative Writing at Hampshire College in Amherst Massachusetts; and supported influential publishers Bogle L’Ouverture and New Beacon Books. His archive, acquired by the Library in 2005, sheds light on the sheer variety of these roles, and the characteristic intensity and humanity which he brought to each of them.

Photograph of Andrew Salkey, from the Andrew Salkey Archive, Deposit 10310. With kind permission of Jason Salkey.

The Archive is comprised of 158 boxes of correspondence, manuscripts, typescripts (including Salkey’s poem Jamaica), and ephemera from various events documenting the literary, academic, and political spheres of the Caribbean diaspora, as well as Salkey's important place within them. The diversity of Salkey's correspondence is striking. Notable inclusions range from political figures -- even world leaders like Michael Manley and Cheddi Jagan -- all the way to literary stars such as E.R. Braithwaite, C.L.R. James, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Beryl Gilroy to name a few. Throughout all of these conversations, though, we see how well respected and regarded Salkey was professionally and personally; as a founding member of the Caribbean Artists Movement, a leading academic, a literary figure, a friend and a mentor.

Storage of the Andrew Salkey Archive, Deposit 10310, showing the scale of the papers at the British Library. With the kind permission of Jason Salkey. 

A selection of archival material; typescript of ‘Jamaica’ poem by Andrew Salkey, manuscript of ‘Joey Tyson’ by Andrew Salkey and correspondence from the Andrew Salkey Archive, Deposit 10310. Reproduced with the kind permission of Jason Salkey.

A Friend

The largest body of correspondence in the collection comes from Austin Clarke [1934-2016] a Barbadian novelist, broadcaster, and academic who spent most of his career in Toronto, Canada. The long distance correspondence was so prolific that Clarke asked Salkey whether he could publish their letters together in 1976, referring to it affectionately as a “frivolous and comical correspondence between two writers who said things that the rest of the world did not feel disposed to know”. Clarke’s letters  to Salkey offer an insight in to his own working methods, his relationship with his publishers, and his opinions on Black Power movements around the world, but they are also notable for their evocation of the  the deep and personal friendship which the two men shared. “I want to apologise to you my great friend for depressing you with all my sensations and problems", Clarke writes after a characteristic outpouring "but there is no other with whom I can share these feelings. I value your undying friendship and love”. Similar currents run through Salkey's correspondence with other leading Caribbean writers and intellectuals, including George Lamming and Jan Carew, and Sam Selvon.

A letter written by Austin Clarke to Andrew Salkey 10 January 1976 from the Andrew Salkey Archive, Deposit 10310. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Estate of Austin Clarke.

 

A Founding Member of the Caribbean Artists Movement

Salkey played a key role in the community element of the Caribbean Artists Movement. He would respond to correspondence about CAM’s work and maintained contact with CAM members after the movement ended in 1972. He was known for his prompt and courteous replies to anyone that contacted him. He could nurture friendships through his letters and act as a buffer between opposing personalities. He stated in an interview to Anne Walmsley for her book on CAM that “I was the one that most of them got on with. I also made sure that I was of service to friendships.”[1] Many CAM members frequently appear in his general correspondence files including Marina Maxwell, Orlando and Nerys Patterson, and Horace Ové -- all of whom reminisce with Salkey about past CAM meetings and continue to exchange ideas and creative endeavours. Correspondents from the broader world of publishing are also present, perhaps most notably, Salkey maintained close links with John La Rose and Sarah White through his continued support of New Beacon Books. Salkey’s correspondence also includes a selection of letters with Kamau Brathwaite, one of the co-founders of CAM , which spans the period between 1965-1989. The early letters reveal a close professional and personal relationship between the two men, where Bajan forms and Standard English interact and blend in interesting ways: “For Christssake, man, they've got my TS [typescript]”, Braithwaite writes in one exemplary letter, ‘and I can't get a word out of them. Give them a lil ring fuh me, nuh man?’, blending the intimate and the professional, the formal and the informal.

A Mentor

Salkey’s role in CAM often extended to that of a mentor, especially to the younger members of the movement, including people like Michael Anthony.[2] “I would like to take this opportunity to say how grateful I am for all that you have done for me" Linton Kewsi Johnson writes in one letter,  “you have been of tremendous help to me and I couldn't have done without your encouragement”. Salkey was naturally fitted to the more pastoral aspects of his role as Professor of Creative Writing at Hampshire College, then, as he advised students taking credits in creative writing, particularly poetry. Through his role as an advisor, Salkey was able to foster great friendships through his personal encouragement and professional criticism. In one of his letters to a friend, he called teaching “a sacred profession, akin to the priesthood.” His correspondence illustrates how encouraging Salkey was with the students on his courses, particularly women. This was because he knew that women writers faced greater obstacles getting their work noticed and he wanted to help. Paule Marshall thanked him in a letter for “his encouragement, help and general all around prime-movership.” Toni Morrison thanked him in one of her letters for his praise of her novel “I am so pleased about your pleasure. Particularly because several men…have had hard things to say about it.” His students’ opinions of him illustrate a nurturing spirit and indicate the depth of trust he created in his friendships, one student wrote in a letter “your love and encouragement have really nurtured the poet in me”.

[1] Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966-1972: A Literary & Cultural History, (London: New Beacon Books, 1992), p.44

[2] Ibid, p.44

 

by Laurence Byrne, Curator Printed Heritage Collections. The archive of B.S Johnson is available to consult in our Reading Rooms at Add MS 89001, as is the Eva Figes archive at Add MS 89050. All of the books listed here are available to consult, too. 

50 years ago, in 1969, B. S. Johnson published a novel about a sports writer assailed by memories of a deceased friend as he attempts to report on a football match. The Unfortunates was Johnson’s fourth novel and was not as well received as his previous work, getting a ‘fine clobbering’ in the press, according to Hugh Hebert’s sympathetic appraisal in the Guardian (13 March 1969). The novel comes in a box with 27 removable chapters of which only the first and last are marked – the reader must choose which in which order to read the 25 chapters in-between – and much of the criticism apparently centred on the novel’s formal experimentalism. Perhaps taking this criticism to heart, at some point, the first edition held by the Library had each chapter numbered in pencil by a librarian seeking to shelter readers from the novel’s aleatoric possibilities.

First edition of The Unfortunates (1969) by B.S Johnson with numbered annotations held at British Library shelfmark: Cup.900.b.8

Reprinted in 1999 with an introduction by Johnson’s biographer Jonathan Coe, the work found a more favourable audience. William Leith wrote: “In its way, this is brilliant - it is the best evocation of small- time misery I have ever read.” (The Daily Telegraph, 23 October 1999). Thanks to the efforts of supporters such as Coe, Johnson has since gone from being a largely forgotten (and out-of-print) author to occupying a central place in the history of British experimental (a term he regarded as ‘the dirtiest of words’) fiction, with The Unfortunates now regarded as a seminal achievement. In 2008, the British Library acquired a large archive of B. S. Johnson’s papers.

Although welcome, Johnson’s re-evaluation has been so comprehensive that his legacy now obscures somewhat the writers with whom he was once associated. Figures such as Christine Brooke-Rose, Alan Burns, Jeff Nutall, Stefan Themerson and Reyner Heppenstall are perhaps still amongst the better known experimental writers of the time, but during the late-1960s up until the mid-1970s a much wider range of authors than is commonly cited were producing novels which were experimental in different ways. *

Of course the definition of ‘experimental’ is of very much up-for-grabs, and many of the writers included here had a difficult relationship with the term. However, all of these works in some way foreground innovative techniques, both in terms of their form or narrative, and often both. Several of the authors mentioned contributed to the ‘group novel’ London Consequences [RF.2012.a.147] (which Johnson co-edited with Margaret Drabble). The fact that they were able to call on 18 contributors is further evidence that there was a keen interest in experimental writing in Britain during the period. Indeed, Drabble herself published arguably her most innovative work The Waterfall [Cup.410.g.596] in 1969.

cover for London Consequences published by Greater London Arts Association for the Festivals of London 1972

Eva Figes contributed to London Consequences and is perhaps one of the authors (along with Drabble) who is most familiar to readers today. The BL acquired an archive of drafts and working papers relating to Figes’s fourteen novels in 2009. In the same year as The Unfortunates, Figes published Konek Landing [Nov.14015] a work which, like Johnson’s, utilises intertextuality and temporal confusion to represent the trauma of memory – like Figes herself, the protagonist Stefan Konek is a holocaust survivor.

Another notable contributor to the group novel was Wilson Harris. In his writing during this period – and particularly the 1970 novel Ascent to Omai [Nov.14851] – Harris continually works to destabilise novelistic convention in order to subvert what he the “novel of persuasion” – that is a form of literature which makes use of common sense and “fashionable judgements” to both reflect and maintain a particular fixed perspective on the world. In Ascent to Omai, Harris employs unexpected combinations of words and ideas in order to allow for binary judgements to be dissolved and new associations to occur.

The malleability of time and space in Harris’s work brings to mind the genre of science fiction, or slipstream. Indeed, during this period, Brian Aldiss (Barefoot in the head, 1969 [Nov.14184]) Angela Carter (Heroes and villains, 1969 [Nov.14699]) and Anna Kavan published works which consciously utilised innovative literary techniques within a science fiction framework. The setting for Kavan’s Ice [Nov.10580] is an apocalyptic world encroached upon by a monolithic ice-shelf. It is an intensely experimental work which seeks to question the inevitability of patriarchal violence through repeated shifts in narrative perspective, leaving the reader to question the ‘reality’ of what is being described to us.

Published two years later, Passages (1969) [Nov.13283.] shares a number of similarities with Ice. Ann Quin’s third novel takes place in an unspecified country, apparently under the control of a violent military government, where the novel’s nameless protagonists (a man and a woman) seem to be searching for the woman’s missing brother. Quin’s writing is stark and elliptical and, like Kavan, the narrative often shifts perspective mid-paragraph – an experimental technique which conveys an intimate sense of disorientation and upheaval.

A similar sense of puzzlement pervades In Transit (1969) [Nov.14383], which finds the unreliable narrator trapped in an airport and in a state of uncertainty about their gender. Brigid Brophy employs a dense interior narrative, full of puns and language games (in several different languages) and formal experimentation – including multiple-choice sentences and pages divided into columns. The novel is an acerbic examination of the structures of both personal and political identity, where linguistic trickery works to disturb a number of assumptions and certainties on which these structures are founded.

Excerpts from In Transit (1969) by Bridgid Brophy, illustrating her textually experimental critique of conventional novelistc forms.

Beryl Gilroy’s Black Teacher (1976) [X.529/31034] is often considered a work of autobiographical writing. However, Sandra Courtman’s Discovering literature article argued that the work is “an experiment with an intermediary form – somewhere between fiction and autobiography, with a distinct non-linear structure.” Indeed, the narrator voice of the text moves between first and third-person at different moments, perhaps reflective of the way in which Gilroy’s own identity was formed and re-formed in the midst of the challenging circumstances she faced.

All of this is not to say that The Unfortunates does not deserve to be seen as a landmark of experimental writing in Britain, rather it is the case that Johnson was writing within a context in which experimental / innovative techniques were being more widely employed than ever before.

*Other works which for the sake of space could not be included were Bogies (1972), Rosalind Belben [Nov.18729]; Run, come see Jerusalem (1968), David Coxhead [Nov.12845]; Langrishe, go down (1996), Aidan Higgins [X.908/13486]; The Gasteropod (1968), Maggie Ross [Nov.12300]; All the usual hours of sleeping (1969) Penelope Shuttle [Nov.13304]; and Vacation (1972) Alan Sheridan [Nov.18928]

Further reading

Booth, Francis Amongst those left: the British experimental novel 1940-1980 (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2019). [Shelfmark forthcoming]

Friedman, Ellen G., and Miriam Fuchs, eds. Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction. (London: Princeton University Press, 1989). [YH.1990.b.128]

Jordan, Julia, and Ryle, Martin, eds. B.S. Johnson and Post-War Literature: Possibilities of the Avant-Garde (London: Palgrave, 2014). [YC.2014.a.11127]