Spotlight on … Ann Quin Passages (1969)

‘Heir to Virginia Woolf and Anna Kavan, Quin was one of the few British women writing in the 1960s to be recognized by her contemporaries as a major formal innovator. In her fiction, reality and fantasy leak into one another, selfhood is depicted as fractured and transitory, and style and technique serve as a catalyst to propel the reader into an affective encounter with the text.

‘Quin is almost unknown in the United States. She was born in 1936 and raised by her mother, her father having left soon after her birth. She was educated in a convent (though she was never Catholic), which she described as “A ritualistic culture that gave me a conscience. A death wish and a sense of sin. Also a great lust to find out, experience what evil really was.”

‘In her teens she grew interested in drama, joining a theatre company for a short-lived stint as an assistant stage manager. She applied to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but experienced severe stage fright when faced with the prospect of auditioning and soon gave up any hopes for the stage, though dramatic performance and ritual inform most of her novels in terms of both form and content.

‘After leaving school, Quin began to write, poetry at first, later fiction. While employed at a series of secretarial posts, she wrote a novel which was quickly rejected by several publishers. She set it aside to write a second novel, also rejected by publishers. While trying to juggle her writing with working for a living, she experienced her first nervous breakdown. Unable to get out of bed, she found herself subject to severe hallucinations.

‘After visits to a psychiatrist she pulled herself together sufficiently to become functional, for “the loneliness of going over the edge was worse than the absurdity of coping with day-to-day living.” Like Virginia Woolf, Quin struggled with mental illness for most of her adult life, and many speculate that her death, seemingly a suicide, was motivated by a belief that another breakdown was coming.

‘Quin’s first published novel, Berg (1964), won her the University of New Mexico’s D. H. Lawrence Fellowship as well as a Harkness Fellowship, a three-year award given to a promising UK artist under the age of thirty. Both this novel and Three are more grounded than Quin’s two later novels, Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972). Though the plot and characters of Berg are ritualized, narrative progression is central. The development of that narrative is gradual and not always linear, but story is still critical and one reads on largely to see how that story will resolve itself.

‘In Three as well, narrative progression remains crucial. The characters are more realistic than in Berg, though in the place of a single narrative thread Three offers a third-person narrative which is impinged upon by other first-person voices from the past. In Passages, narrative progression is attenuated, other voices taking the place of a developing narrative in a way that encourages a confusion of character and identity, a swapping of voice and personality. Indeed, Passages offers more stylistic variation, a much more aggressive exploration of the technical possibilities of prose.’ — Brian Evenson

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Further

Ann Quin @ Facebook
‘Passages’ @ goodreads
Ann Quin’s Passages @ Vertigo
This year, I’ve excelled myself.
Paranoia of the inner voyeur
Ann Quin: Understated, Tragic Innovator of the British Novel
MY CERTAINTY SHALL BE THEIR CONFUSION
THE LOVE AFFAIR(S) OF ANN QUIN
The Brilliance of Ann Quin
Quin is one of the best kept secrets of British contemporary experimental writing
ANN QUIN AT THE LOST AND FOUND
‘Designing its own shadow’ – Reading Ann Quin
Who cares about Ann Quin?
This is a story of depression and annihilation and co-dependence and/but it’s very beautiful.
Accidental Subjects, or Ann Quin’s Literature of Possibility
Ann Quin’s Stalled Talkers
Visuality and Fragmentation in Ann Quin’s Passages
Sixties secretary turned avant-gardist
THE SUFFOCATION OF A BAD AFFAIR
The free-wheeling life and wild, weird fiction of the cult 1960s author Ann Quin
Ann Quin’s novel Passages collapses hierarchies of center and margin
Buy ‘Passages’ here

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Typist

Ann Quin worked for Blind Veterans UK briefly as a short-hand typist

Unpublished fragment

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Extras

Stewart Home & Chloe Aridjis On Ann Quin

Daniele Corradi interviews Larry Goodell about Ann Quin January 2022

The Speaking Machine

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from is it lovely yet?
an essay by Hannah Van Hove

It is the summer of 2014 and I’m at the Olin Library at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. I am researching three novelists for my PhD. One of them, Ann Quin, doesn’t have her own archive. I locate papers of hers, scattered around, in the archives of ex-lovers, friends, her publisher’s, in a Carmelite Friary near London. Here in the Olin Library I find a letter, written in 1966 to her then-lover, in which she writes:

Quin:
In future I’m going to ask publishers not to put ‘a novel’ on the title page; I’d much rather let it stand as a ‘piece of writing’ or ‘a work’. And the way I seem to be going now it seems the writing is v. far removed from the novel. I’m really excited about it for the first time since I started the book at the Colony. The moving towards words & then from them, v. much like jazz (The Macdowell Colony was where Quin had started work on what would become her third ‘novel’ Passages.)

Made the unfortunate mistake of showing Don Hutter at Scribners that 1st part of novel [sic] – & like he just didn’t have an inkling of wot I’m up to – spent whole fucking lunch hour talking about it – with him saying things like: ‘but it hasn’t any sustaining thing, no characterisation like in Three one was right there with that couple and as for the style why use just periods when these could be commas. The whole thing frankly Ann spells Experimental in caps.’ My only answer to this was to say ‘Well if it turns out a ghastly failure it really doesn’t matter as it’s something I’ve just got to do.’

In an anonymous reader’s report of Quin’s first unpublished novel A Slice of Moon (since presumably destroyed) for Chatto & Windus, the reader thought Quin ‘showed a lot of promise’, but that the novel lacked finish and failed to be completely convinced by it, writing that ‘[f]or a woman to make her novel the first-person narrative of a man is always a problem, and I don’t think Ann Quin quite brings it off’.

Quin:
And Passages isn’t doing well: turned down by Gallimard, Inset at first said yes but translator said too difficult. No one in the States will touch it. So. Reviews here very few, and only one that conveyed anything in the TLS (wondered if it was Martin Seymour Smith?!) and obviously whoever wrote that had taken the time/space to read the damned book. Well so it goes and what the hell, one goes on with some kind of conviction and/or just the sheer need to find out what is there.

What the poets are doing is something I wish the novelists would turn to, and this is: to senses of form, to the literal nature of living in a given place, and to a world momently informed by what energies inhabit it.

But the sun shines and it’s good to be typing again, and writing – mainly snatches of dialogue.

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Book

Ann Quin Passages
And Other Stories

‘Ann Quin’s third novel Passages – an instant classic when published in 1969 – is perhaps her most harrowing investigation of the limits of identity and desire, as well as the possibilities of fiction. It is the story of a woman, accompanied by her lover, searching for her lost brother, who may have been a revolutionary, and who may have been tortured, imprisoned or killed. Roving a Mediterranean landscape, they live out their entangled existences, reluctant to give up, yet afraid of where their search will lead.

‘In ‘passages’ that alternate between the two protagonists’ perspectives, taking the form of diary excerpts, annotations and Burroughsian cut-ups, this fractured tale builds an intricate, musical system of theme and repetition. ‘All seasons passed through before the pattern formed, collected in parts.’

‘Erotic and terrifying by turns, Quin’s third novel allowed her writing freer rein than ever before, blazing a trail still being followed by such authors as Eimear McBride, Chris Kraus and Anna Burns. It stands as Quin’s most beguiling, poetic, and mysterious work.’ — And Other Stories

Excerpt

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thank you. I’m glad my filtering skills were functioning properly. Oh, I think one could make a case for the word ‘lovely’ regarding Thunderpussy, but I am weird. Mm, I actually really disliked ‘Crazy for Vincent’. I found it very bourgeois and condescending or something. But almost everybody I know disagrees, so who knows. If you liked it, that’s the only ticket. Yes, in your version of ‘Cujo’ I imagine there would be a armed truck or tank in which you would be safely protected with amazing air-conditioning and a state of the art sound system. So I guess calling it ‘Cujo 2’ is a bit of a misnomer. Can you imagine a no limits world? Wow. I’ll take it. And obviously the slave version, not the Putin version. Love making the snow that’s currently falling in Paris (!!!) stick to the ground and pile up because so far it’s melting into boring water immediately on arrival, G. ** Misanthrope, You keep saying that. Why, do you look eternally like one precise version of you in every photo? Actually, I think I do, so maybe you’re onto something. It’s snowing here! Not hard enough and not solidly enough to whiten the ground, but still! By this weekend? You’re fast, man, or at least diligent. ** _Black_Acrylic, I hope Thunderpussy found true love. Fat chance? Oh, wow, that’s quite a cool print. Nicely drawn and colored and so on. Not bad, man. ** Florian-Ayala Fauna, Hi, F! Thanks, and I’m sure the posts are always happy to see you too. Me? Lots going on. Zac and I are busily getting things together to shoot our new film in hopefully September. I’m writing the text for the new Gisele Vienne piece. Zac and I are working on a kind of radio play-like audio book novella that we’ll record immediately post-film finishing. And I’m working on some fiction. Yes, I saw a couple of beautiful paintings by you on FB. Kudos! And I didn’t know about the new album! I’ll go get that. Great to see you, pal. ** Steve Erickson, I’d watch that channel. Maybe we should start a petition. I mean, it is technically possible that King could write so damned much even now, but, on the other hand, would anybody even notice if he used ghostwriters? Hm. ** Bill, It’s true. I would be into starting a Gofundme to realise one of Boulle’s unrealised tombs as the resting place for corrosive-love, although I guess he’s probably in some wild animal’s tomb-like stomach by now. I’m the same: greatly admiring of King’s concepts/ideas, not able to read his prose, except maybe briefly when it’s at its most hyperactive and clunky, just for fun. ** Right. I haven’t turned the blog’s spotlight onto the great Ann Quin in a couple years, so I thought I would, this time to illuminate her very highly recommended novel ‘Passages’. Give it chance, please. See you tomorrow.