On a hot August Bank holiday weekend in 1973, aged
37, the British Writer Ann Quin walked along the beach, took off her clothes
and walked into the sea off the coast at Brighton. She then swam far out, with slow, deliberate
strokes, and drowned. Was she seeing
visions? Being called by the mystical
voice of the ocean? Was she echoing one
of her literary influences, Virginia Woolf?
Did she commit suicide? Was it
all a horrible accident? Who was Quin anyway,
and why should we care about her life and want to read her writing?
I think it was that first term of my ‘Studies in
Fiction MA’ at the University of East Anglia, in September 2007, that I first came across Quin’s first
book, Berg (1964). An experimental British writer from the
sixties; a macabre, strange, funny, lyrical, vehemently experimental female British writer from the sixties.
Berg is a bed-trick, schlock
Brighton tale about, as its opening proclaims, ‘A man called Berg, who changed
his name to Greb, [who] /came to a seaside town intending to kill his father. .
. .’ As some of its reviewers and
readers have noted, these first lines are designed to, and do, grab us, hook us
in. And, in the narrative that follows,
the protagonist, a man called Alistair Berg but posing as one named Greb, does indeed
go to a seaside town supposedly intending to find and kill his father,
Nathaniel. Of course – spoiler alert –
he fails, and in fact in some weird way kind of becomes his father in the end.
The plot and story are farcical and the prose style is slippery and strange,
often bordering on the grotesque. I
became obsessed with the treatment of domestic pets in the book – in increasingly
bizarre scenes Berg kills his father’s budgie, Bertie, and father’s (and own)
lover’s beloved cat, Seby. The seemingly
domestic was a dark and nightmarish place in Berg, and I was fascinated.
But when I tried to read up on Quin – What else had she written? What
did other writers and critics think of her writing? – there was very little to
be found, and so, sure there must be more to say, I decided to take on the
project of researching her life and writing for myself.
What I found was that Quin was an ordinary,
working class woman who had worked as a secretary at Art Schools in London and embraced
the ideas of the sixties counter-culture: she was an experimental writer,
traveller, drinker, peyote taker, bisexual lover, good time girl; she had also
slightly ‘missed the boat’ – coming from a single parent background and leaving
school at 17, she hadn’t been to university and wasn’t quite young enough,
middle-class or educated enough to enjoy the sixties to the full. She was also, as her obituary in The Times
notes, plagued by ‘a fatal streak of melancholia in her preoccupations, which
is present in all her work, and which was sadly prophetic of both the manner
and the circumstances of her death’. She
had her first breakdown at the age of 19, and despite the early promise of her
writing – Berg was awarded
fellowships that enabled her to live and write in America in 1964 – Quin’s
later life and prose were plagued by increasingly desperate, erratic behaviour
and bouts of severe mental ill-health. In
1971 Quin was found semi-naked and freezing in a snowdrift in Sweden. She had, she said, been fleeing red agents,
plagued by the signs all around her. She
was taken to a mental hospital in Stockholm, diagnosed with schizophrenia,
forcibly sedated and given ECT. The treatment
and sedation, she said, silenced her angels as well as her demons and she found
she couldn’t write at all.
Over the next couple of blog posts this autumn I’d
like to share some of my research about Quin – I hope that you’ll be as drawn
in as I was. In the meantime, if you’d
like to find out more, do check out annquin.com
Nonnie
Williams Korteling: Between 2008 and 2012 I was researching and writing a PhD
on Quin at UEA. The project, called 'Designing its own shadow' - Reading Ann Quin,
ended up as a combination of critical readings of Quin's work and
biographical vignettes. I now teach at UEA and am particularly interested in
twentieth-century literature, women's experimental writing, life-writing, and
the essay form. My current writing projects include reflections from the
classroom, a life-writing project reflecting on the women who made me, and a
book on British Avant Garde Fiction
of the 1960s.
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