* (restored)
‘Ann Quin gives the lie – should it still need to be given, and it’s ridiculous that it does, but it apparently does – to the idea that any kind of avant-garde fiction is going to be bloodless, dull and tediously cerebral. The passion of her work makes a mockery of that. The prejudice is absurd and bespeaks a terrible literary parochialism, but it still has traction. Which is what makes Quin’s sublation of experimentation and sheer verve – not ‘effortless’ but energetic, enthusiastic, and urgent – not just exciting, but genuinely moving.’ — China Miéville
‘In 1964 the British novelist Ann Quin gave an extended interview about work, sex, relationships, men, and patriarchy to playwright and fellow Brit Nell Dunn for Dunn’s collection of interviews, Talking to Women. Quin and Dunn were in their late 20s and were struggling with the stodginess of respectable society. Dunn, who was married with children, admitted to wishing she lived like Quin, saying, “I feel a sort of envy for your freedom, this freedom of having a place and having time and space.” To which Quin, who lived alone in a lodging house, replied, “But is it freedom?”
‘Quin said she regretted nothing on her journey to becoming a writer but found it difficult to live outside the conservative social norms of mid-20th-century England. She even confessed to feeling self-destructive at times. Whenever this happened, a child’s smile on a street corner could save her. “What we all want is some contact to make us feel that we do exist, because beyond that, there is a complete sort of void,” she said. Despite living a free life, Quin, who died by suicide in 1973, said she often felt she was living in that void.
‘Published in 1964 and now rereleased by And Other Stories, Quin’s first novel, Berg, blends tropes and techniques of crime fiction, vaudeville, and modernist literature to explore the weight of this void. Her protagonist, Alistair Berg, lives a lonely life without meaningful human contact and feels related to “the dismembered trees, half-broken walls, roofs with slates ready to fall off.” Wanting to change this, Alistair believes he “must first annihilate,” or in other words, the world as he knows it must be destroyed for some undefined new one to come. But what happens when, for whatever reason, annihilation cannot be achieved? What happens when you cannot escape respectable society, the social structures of patriarchy that you were born into? The remainder of Berg dramatizes this problem in dense, lyrical prose.
‘And it is this prose that makes Quin’s novel so dazzling 55 years later. The language of her book lurches in unexpected directions, fishtailing wildly from the dark to the erotic to the violent to the insanely funny. It feels barely in control, but willfully so. In insisting on this dicey means of narrative movement for the majority of the novel, she can make even simple actions feel berserk: “Crossing the park: a subterranean world surreptitiously risen; here a million star-fish pinned on the forelocks of a hundred unicorns driven by furious witches.” In describing what should be quotidian, she instead confronts the reader with a moment of demonic weirdness. And just as the psychedelia of her prose sets in, the narrative skates along, leaving behind one chaotic situation for another. Reading Quin is a marvelously frustrating experience that works according to diffraction. The light of the novel comes into contact with some interference and then creates new patterns that bump against other interferences to create new patterns.
‘One sees this already in the first three sentences of the book. While the first sentence tackles the problem of fathers and ridding oneself of patriarchy quite clearly—“A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father”—the following two create a kaleidoscopic portrait of Alistair and the setting:
Window blurred by out of season spray. Above the sea, overlooking the town, a body rolls upon a creaking bed: fish without fins, flat-headed, white-scaled, bound by a corridor room—dimensions rarely touched by the sun—Alistair Berg, hair-restorer, curled web toes, strung between heart and clock, nibbles in the half light, and laughter from the dance hall opposite.
‘Here and elsewhere, Quin works with dashes, giving just enough information to work affectively. Even when she takes the opposite approach and creates a baroque monument out of the infinitely small, the effect is the same. Everything feels frayed, dangerous—but also exciting. More than anything, her prose feels like an exploration of Virginia Woolf’s assessment in the essay “Craftsmanship” that the task of the writer is “to see what we can do with the English language as it is.” Or, as Alistair’s mother puts it in the novel, “It’s not the material but the manner in which the article’s sold that counts.”’ — Shane Anderson
Further
Who cares about Ann Quin?
Welcome reissue of Ann Quin’s gloriously twisted debut Berg
The Comic Tragedy of a Narrator with No Sense of Self
The Quin thing
Her Body or the Sea
Sixties secretary turned avant-gardist
Narcissist or Voyeur: On Ann Quin
Ann Quin’s Berg by Dan Shurley
Ann Quin by Brian Evenson & Joanna Howard
ann quin: a peculiar fish without fins (blurring, filth, and smut. or, what ann quin means to me)
Book Of A Lifetime: Berg, By Ann Quin
“Settle For Nothing Less”: On Ann Quin By The Authors She Has Influenced
An avant-garde seaside farce: Berg by Ann Quin
ANN QUIN AND ME: AN APPRECIATION BY DEBORAH LEVY
‘The foremost female novelist of her generation’: Ann Quin remembered
The Voice as an Object of Desire in the Work of Ann Quin
Ann Quin’s experimental debut novel has a runaway, off-kilter style all of its own
Sinister Shapes Emerge
‘Berg’, by Andrew Gallix
Pay It Forward: Ann Quin
Buy ‘Berg’
Extras
TMR 18.10: “Looks Like a Lump of Shit to Me” [Ann Quin]
Stewart Home & Chloe Aridjis On Ann Quin
Scott Manley Hadley visits the death sites of Malcolm Lowry, Virginia Woolf, Ann Quin and BS Johnson
Manuscripts & Mail
Interview
from The Quietus
The cult author Ann Quin still seems scandalously under-read and underloved, considering her unique voice as a working class, female, British, radical experimental writer. She lived with mental health problems and committed suicide in 1973 by walking into the sea by Brighton Palace Pier. She was only 37 and had published four books at that point (Berg (1965), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972) yet has still managed to leave behind an underground legacy of modern, anti-patriarchal, anti-bourgeois, proto-queer, peripatetic, progressive writing.
Jennifer Hodgson, who edited and introduced The Unmapped Country, which covers pretty much Quin’s entire career, is currently researching a new book about Ann Quin’s life, and spent most of July in New Mexico, to follow the Ann Quin trail and begin making some notes. Claire Sawers caught up with her, during and briefly after her trip, to let her explain a bit more about what she wanted to get out of the semi-pilgrimage.
What’s the trip about?
Ha – good question. I have no idea how to write a biography. I mean, I’m not even sure what one is, but I know that one way that people go at it is to follow in their subject’s wake, to go to the places they went and through that try to commune with them in some way. Now, I have to admit, I find all of that a bit suspect. Whenever I’m in a place some eminent person, or a person I admire, has been, for sure I get a little charged feeling of proximity, but it’s a proximity that’s all about distance, about the impossibility of collapsing time and overlaying the scene with you in it with the scene with them in it. When I go to places with blue plaques, which I don’t very often, I find myself sort of morbidly more interested in what’s left of the person’s body than in traces of their consciousness, more interested in who the dust and the greasy smudges belong to.
Writing (and reading, and thinking, and being, for that matter) are such private, self-enclosed acts, I’m not sure how you extrude “real” flesh-and-blood people and places from any of them, and vice versa. But I think that might be what’s most interesting about the project. Quin was so concerned with trying to lay herself bare, trying to struggle out of her own skin and find a way to communicate directly, with all the difficulties of knowing other people and yourself – and any book about her life and work should reflect this most of all, I think.
So I came to New Mexico not so much to try to commune with Quin, but to commune with the same things she did. Her connection with this place has always amazed me, the idea that mid-way through the sixties she jacked in the secretary-ing and the London bedsits and upped sticks to reinvent herself as an American poet and maraud around the States. She rented a little house in the village of Placitas, nearish to Albuquerque for several years, but she travelled around a lot: to New York, San Francisco, Iowa, Maine, the Bahamas.
I visited the house the other day, I was in a kind of trespass-y mood, full of bravado, but there was an electric fence and two Dobermans guarding it – probably not for its blue plaque status. It’s a tiny little adobe bungalow. Adobe doesn’t look solid, somehow, like it’s been poured out rather than built, it’s like royal icing. Anyway, it’s a wreck now, there’s no roof and no windows and these shrubs crawling up the insides and through the windows and teeming out of the hole where the roof was. The plot is flytipped to shit, full of old sofas, fridges, chests of drawers.
I had no sense of what New Mexico actually was – I’d seen a single episode of Breaking Bad and had to switch it off part-way because I found it unbearably bleak. So I decided I’d come and see. She doesn’t write about New Mexico directly very much, but you can feel it in more oblique ways: in her attraction to merciless landscapes and arid climates and the sense of self-exile and alienation. Somehow those things have always done it for me too. I like the almost-but-not-quite intolerable heat here, it makes the air around you seem somehow solid, like you’re sort of gently encased. If you were looking for a place to escape your own skin and turn vaporous, I can see why you’d choose here.
In more practical terms, a few of her old pals and peers from that time are still around, still writing. Larry and Lenore Goodell, friends of Quin’s and very much the custodians of that scene, live just up the road from Quin’s old place. I wanted to meet them, and get a sense, in person, of what it was like to know Quin and to be here during that time.
I was quite adamant that this thing wasn’t going to have any of me in it, that after all these years it didn’t feel right to insert my own fairly unremarkable disconsolateness into this story – but I’m coming to realise, kind of reluctantly, now what a daft notion that was.
Do you have a route you’re following?
Well, I don’t drive, never learned, so this trip is kind of an exercise in constraint. Public transport is kind of minimal, and Uber often doesn’t reach out here, and if there are pavements at all, they’re often ornamental. So, I’ve found myself spending hours and hours walking along highways – friends I’ve met here think this is quite crazy, but I have to admit I rather enjoy it. I knew I wanted to spend time in Placitas, and I knew I had in the end to make it up to Santa Cruz, in Northern California, to interview Quin’s friend, the poet Robert Sward, who lives up there. I also wanted to go to Taos, where Quin stayed in the Lawrence Ranch when she was D.H. Lawrence fellow. I didn’t manage this last bit – first the area was closed because of forest fires and then the two Uber drivers who work the Taos beat seemed to be indisposed and it was a seven hour walk, and even I am not as dogged as all that.
In between those two points it’s been a bit, well, freeform. I went to Santa Fe, because it seemed like a kind of regional cultural centre, but when I got there, my impression of it was that it is the place where New Mexico shills a genteel version of itself to tourists – Pendleton blankets and misshaped linen mumus and extremely expensive cowboy boots, so I sacked that off and went to a sauna in the mountains (I’m sure I’m doing Santa Fe an incredible disservice here). I went to Las Vegas too, absolutely nothing whatever to do with Quin (I mean, probably), but I was an overnight bus ride away and I wanted to see it, since I was there.
What are you hoping for?
Just enough of a perspective shift to mess with me a bit, but not enough that I totally lose it, I think.
Book
Ann Quin Berg
And Other Stories
‘‘A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father . . .’
‘So begins Ann Quin’s madcap frolic with sinister undertones, a debut ‘so staggeringly superior to most you’ll never forget it’ (The Guardian). Alistair Berg hears where his father, who has been absent from his life since his infancy, is living. Without revealing his identity, Berg takes a room next to the one where his father and father’s mistress are lodging and he starts to plot his father’s elimination. Seduction and violence follow, though not quite as Berg intends, with Quin lending the proceedings a delightful absurdist humour.
‘Anarchic, heady, dark, Berg is Quin’s masterpiece, a classic of post-war avant-garde British writing, and now finally back in print after much demand.’ — AOS
Excerpt
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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hey!!! Cool. Well, when the script is finished, then we have to find a producer for the film and try to figure out where we’re going to shoot it. I would really like to shoot it in English, ideally in the US, but that might be unfeasible, we’ll see. Otherwise we’ll probably shoot it in French here and possibly with the producer who did ‘PGL’ and wound up being the main producer of ‘RT’ after we rid ourselves of the monster producer. But finding out how and where we can shoot it will be the next step. If/when something or someone triggers my obsessive side, I’ll give you a tip. Haha, nice last line. I promise not to swipe it. Love making sure No Kings Day is a game changer, G. ** Misanthrope, Ah, a downer guy, yeah. There’s a lot of them. I’ve always been an upper guy. Relaxing is boring. Thanks, pal, and big luck with the neck specialist today. Maybe a nice little chiropractic adjustment would do the trick? ** _Black_Acrylic, I’m glad your body swiftly rejected the poorly-ness. I never got to see FG myself. One of those ‘one of these days’ days that never came. ** Uday, I think I did a ‘Night’ once before, but I don’t remember for what or whom, so don’t quote me. I love rubber cement, but it is the opposite of archival. I made all of my George Miles Cycle scrapbooks with rubber cement, and now they’re falling apart like crazy. Tricky with your writer friend, yes. You don’t want to lie, but you don’t want to hurt them. I guess my suggestion is something like ‘one of the things I really like/admire about your writing is (fill in the blank), and I don’t feel like that’s happening in this new piece, for me at least’. Basically concentrate on praising their writing in general and then try to make the conversation a discussion about what it might be in the new piece that’s problematic for you. Something like that. Try to make it a constructive back and forth rather than you making an unpleasant pronouncement, if that makes sense? I’m lucky because my name doesn’t appear anywhere here, I don’t think (?), so love freely, Dennis. ** Sypha, Hey, J. Ah, it does make sense that you would like his stuff. Very happy about the alignment. Thanks, buddy. ** pancakeIan, Yeah, the ‘lumberjack’ thing and the ‘dead parrot’ thing especially. I’m surprised I don’t know those routines by heart. People also used to launch into routines from John Waters films constantly, but those I didn’t mind so much. One of my closest friends has been frequently launching into the ‘roadhouse whiskey’ monologue from ‘Carrie’ unbidden for twenty years. I think Tower Records used to sell ‘XY’. I guess it was the slightly edgier of the two monolithic record outlets. Oh, god, I can only imagine the Florida mosquitos. So sorry. I think it is the Seine. I live uncomfortably (and comfortably when it’s not summer) close to it. ** Carsten, I use the biggest patch you can get, which I think is 23? It does get me through the flight in one piece. No, I can’t sleep on a plane. I can’t even take naps at home unless I have severe jet lag. Well, you can pay more for a ‘leg room’ seat, but the ‘room’ isn’t salvation. I always insist on an aisle seat, which helps except that you have to keep getting up when your seat mates need to pee. ** Bill, What’s up with your internet? I’m writing to you today to hopefully sort out an SF meet. Trip prep is its usual self, more daunting in theory than it actually is. ** Måns BT, Hey, Måns! I’m good, up to speed, I think. Gosh, I hope your friend has chilled out. Surely he has. I can’t imagine you being all that offensive. Obviously I hope you do get back to your filmmaking on the short. New collaborator? Possible? Berlin, awesome! I don’t know, I think of Berlin as being pretty loose, but it is Germany. What you want in Berlin is Sudanese Falafel, not the normal falafel. There are a bunch of places. I think my favorite is Basmah if you’re near there. But there are others. Oh, Pelicula … they followed me, and I looked at them, and they seemed highly followable, so I did. I didn’t realise you’re involved. What a bonus. You being here reminds me that I need to write to the Stockholm film people today about the ‘RT’ screening. I think we’re hoping they’d be ok to do it in November because our producer is getting us all tied up before then. Hopefully that’ll be ok. Excellent to see you! Have major fun in Berlin if I don’t speak with you before. xo. ** Hugo, Hi. I’m fully confident you’ll sort out the ideal, original and, hey, maybe definitive depiction of oral sex. I (and my agent) have been trying to get Grove to reissue the Cycle books either in an omnibus or at least with new covers that don’t look like 80s/90s relics for a long time, but no bite from them so far. I guess the books still make Grove money even in their current form, and that’s all they care about, apparently. I’m probably going to have to die first or something. Oh, shit, about the escalation in your friends’ problem. Maybe it just needs to kind of explode before it loses importance? Sorry. Thank you, and I suspect the two week hiatus will just fly by, and we’ll have even more to catch up on after. ** Steve, That sounds exciting, and, sure, a bit nerve-wracking, but more exciting by far. Unfortunately, blockbusters usually have to be a little old to get on the planes’ playlists. Ideally I’d get to see, let’s see, ‘Sinners’, ‘Thunderbolts’, the new ‘Mission Impossible’, I guess maybe ‘Minecraft’? I’m pretty non-picky on in-flight blockbusters. As long they’re lengthy and eat time and have a lot of action/CGI/etc., I’ll watch them. ** Steeqhen, That move was kind of interestingly very challenging until it gave me bronchitis. New room sounds very nice. Thanks for testing out FG and finding a degree of virtue there. Doubt that ‘Silent Hill’ remake will wind up on a Nintendo system and, thus, in my eyes and ears and at my fingertips, but how nice for you and much of the rest of the world. ** HaRpEr //, Didn’t know that about the Guyotat book. Wow! And from NYRB even. Great about the ‘Puritan’ screening and surrounding experience. I like Charles Atlas’s work in general, but I do think that’s his masterpiece. Very happy to have been able to put FG in your company for the first time. Lucky break. ** jay, That musical era/genre isn’t my cup of tea either, but there were excellent exceptions where that sound and look was fascinatingly distorted or misused, Mr. Gadget included. The accidentally spectacular is the best. How great. Sounds really curious and inspiring. Well, part of interest to me is trying to parse the ‘overreaction’ aspects in porn, like are they actually felt but just exaggerated and to what degree, and are they for the other performer or for the camera/audience, or can they be real and just unleashed by the context and cathartic, etc.? I mean, there are people who are pretty noisy and expressive during sex, at least in my experience, unless of course they were faking it or partly faking it. Happy things seem to be tracking well with your friend. Whew. Thanks, pal. I hope your great day yesterday is lingering. ** Alice, I’m a giant fan of Paris, so if I can facilitate a crush on the place, I will. I’ve traveled a fair bit, especially in the last 10, 15 years. Absolute highlight travel locations for me would be Antarctica (yes, I actually went there, and it’s unbelievable), Iceland, and Japan in general. Those are my peaks so far. I was hoping HK would host a screening of ‘Aggro Drift’ in Paris, but he never did. Korine is easily one of my very favorite filmmakers. I love all of his films except for ‘The Beach Bum’, which was shockingly bad, I thought. That ‘youthful engagement’ area, absolutely. I’ve been trying to work in/with that idea ever since I was young enough to not have any distance on that viewpoint. All the luck with the money needs, ugh, and the personal things. Hopefully I’ll get to see you tomorrow before I split. ** lotuseatermachine, Hey! Really glad you came back. I never check back for comments on posts once they’ve been launched, so I miss comments a lot, I fear. Thanks about ‘Flunker; and our films. ‘RT’ is currently submitted to two festivals in Australia, one in Melbourne and one in New South Wales, and we’re hoping we’ll get lucky. If not, we’ll figure out another way to show the film there. I like Johanna Hedva too, but I haven’t read her novel yet. I need to. Cool that you’re submitting to SCAB and have appeared there already! Thank you for the link. I’ll go over there and have a close look as soon as I can. Everyone, I highly recommend that you go explore the works of lotuseatermachine by clicking this. Thanks a lot. Take care, and see you again soon, I hope. ** Malik, You’re welcome to it! Awesome. About your return to poetry and why. I haven’t written a poem in, like, a decade or even more. I need to find a similar inspiration like you did. Okay, thank you for noting your acting preparation. That makes sense. Letting the language organise you physically or something like that? ** horatio, Hey! Cool Fad Gadget stuff/stories. ‘Digitally xeroxed’: nice. Wow. There are a bunch of pretty good seeming queer experimental festivals, as we’re finding out via seeing ‘RT’ around. There’s MIX NYC, which I think is currently accepting submissions, but that might be early for you? We’re waiting to see if we get into the Tokyo Horror Film Festival, but I don’t think we’re horror enough, I’m guessing. Thanks for the influences list. I can see them being influences, although your work doesn’t have anything but your own earmarks on it that I can see. Cool, thanks, have a memorable Friday. ** Joe, Hi, Joe! Is ‘The Sluts’ out of print? People seem to keep buying it all the time, so I didn’t know it was if it is. I’ll look into it. Yeah, Blake’s piece was great and a total surprise. I can definitely do a ‘Heat Death 2’ post, yes, I would dearly love to. I and the blog will be back on July 1st, so that’s not too far away. Would be great! Thank you, maestro! ** Okay. I haven’t spotlit a book by the seriously great Ann Quin in quite a while, so I thought I would restore the spotlight that once fell upon arguably her greatest novel, ‘Berg’. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 